Bloomerang
"Let's get to the business at hand. I'm old, and I may collapse at any minute!" So says the critic Harold Bloom, settling into his chair with a portmanteau majesty. The very last event of the 2011 PEN World Voices Festival begins. I feel as if I've gotten lost on the set of a Woody Allen movie.
Maybe that's because the people seated in the Celeste Bartos Forum of the New York Public Library are well wedded to the word, and to their very own words. Also, everyone here appears to be a person of importance to themselves. Except for me. Silent and self-skeptical, I am busy writing a letter. My letter is addressed to--but wait a little. We'll see . . . .
To the right of the dais stands the tall poet Star Black, camera-toting, honey-maned, Diane Keaton-esque. Pictures have been taken. Pictures of Mr. Bloom being kissed by various shawled ladies. Pictures of Mr. Bloom flanked by rugged younger guys, barbered, gallantly rumpled, full of juicy smiles. Star Black wears black, as well she might.
When does literature begin to feel imaginary?
Mr. Bloom's interlocutor this afternoon is Paul Holdengrabber, a staff lion of the library whose booming tones vibrate with a French and German sanctity. At times, Mr. Holdengrabber seems to want to sing--in harmony with Mr. Bloom. More often than you'd think, they raise their voices at the same time.
Harold Bloom: Were you sent here to analyze me?
Paul Holdengrabber: I was not.
Laughter.
All right. But in the midst of this I am, after all, writing a letter.
I'm writing a letter to Kafka.
Mr. Bloom once wrote, "I ponder the letters that I receive from strangers these last seven or eight years, and generally I am too moved to reply." Were those feelings and words Kafka's, he would have meant them ironically.
I don't expect Kafka to write back to me. If I thought he would, I'd never write to him. Conversation: a dastardly thought. Having to impress. Sounding all the words. Following a logic, or foregoing it.
Mr. B. and Mr. H. are doing some of that. Their audience wants quips, regaling, a wit that can pierce. Basso this, basso that. And so the two conversationalists touch on things. On Walt Whitman. Samuel Johnson. Hart Crane. T. S. Eliot. Henri Cole.
And they touch on wounds. Says Mr. Bloom, "Any poet who wounds you with wonder gives you an immortal wound." Am I meant to survive that? Would I rather not? How do I invite the wound or ready myself for it? When I receive it, is there something to regret? No one asks these questions. Since I can't answer them, I don't ask them, either.
Mr. Bloom remarks, "I don't know what would have become of me without the Bronx Public Library."
Mr. Bloom believes, still, in falling in love with a book. He is unashamed.
Mr. Bloom has written, "Reading well is best pursued as an implicit discipline; finally there is no method but yourself . . . ."
Mr. Bloom has written, "The pleasures of reading indeed are selfish rather than social."
When asked "Do you feel reading is a dying art?" by Mr. H., Mr. B. answers, "Oh, no."
Which leads me to my letter:
Dear Kafka,
You're the pal of all confinement, the count of those small spaces, an imp of ordure scampering all contrite within the obscure, rattling outhouse. Can I ever write small enough to please you? I doubt it. But I love you just the same, and always will.
This love is strange. Remind me, Kafka: how close now to me are you? Why don't I feel squeamish?
The subtle pall, absent redeemer, that bad twilight, the distance of the "generous" world; livid, threadbare, restless solitude of an indoor, immured soloist--I know the walls you chose and what they urge. Yet I don't love those walls myself. Instead I love you.
You love the walls. You do. They form your wily sentences, contracting for the tale. I scarcely spy the sentences, for they are contracting all the while.
Little wonder that your smallest stories move me more. I feel their skin. The merest muscle flickers in them near enough for me to grab. I do. And their sinew is forbidding, too--forbidding in autocracy, elan. I'm wooed. Smitten in this luge with Kafka, rhythm all around me, I don't mind. Feeling good is not the plan.
Think of how contraction plays in looming snippets of your parables, "The Next Village," "The Sudden Walk," and "The Bucket Rider." The three agree: at most they must consist of almost nothing.
"Village" is sixty-six words long in the English translation of Willa and Edwin Muir. Story folds up around itself as hard and fierce as glass. I can see it all, and I see through.
It can see far more of me than I'd care to show, or know.
The rare confinement of this prose is a place of pause in which to crouch or pray.
"Walk," a little bigger, is two sentences.
"Bucket Rider"? Epic by your standards, although minute by others. Things take place. People gather. Fifteen paragraphs proceed beyond two pages. But it bolts to writhe, pulling inward in a way I love.
To myself I mutter: Consider what the bucket rider starts to say.
Coal all spent; the bucket empty; the shovel useless; the stove breathing out cold; the room freezing; the trees outside the window rigid, covered with rime; the sky a silver shield against anyone who looks for help from it. I must have coal; I cannot freeze to death; behind me is the pitiless stove, before me the pitiless sky; so I must ride out between them and on my journey seek aid from the coal-dealer.
No other writer would have seized upon the semi-colons. Yet they lend a practical resistance to the cold. And they rout the narrator from his keep, the little place where he either cannot live or cannot leave. Beginning thus, the story expels this abject one who will soon begin bounding like a horseback rider on a bucket up to the sky (and down) just to find a bit of coal, to seek the only human who, he hopes, will give something to him.
"A Sudden Walk" gives me a would-be bolt. Is that better? Movement's riding alone in a mind. So the walk lives on. It's like the music in a soul about to dread to free itself.
I read this:
When it looks as if you had made up your mind finally to be at home for the evening, when you have put on your house jacket and sat down after supper with a light on the table to the piece of work or the game that usually precedes your going to bed, when . . . .
The story takes shape as a vast speculative sentence, with 217 words in it, and eighteen binding commas. I chase a running fluency in the flowing clauses--clauses making fear of action feel more musical than action.
And the closing:
All this is still heightened if at such a late hour in the evening you look up a friend to see how he is getting on.
It's an anti-climax. And the narrator knows it. He will never walk. Door eases shut on a roarding quiet. He hears it.
I know the walls you chose and what they urge. Smitten in the luge with Kafka, I love you.
Sincerely,
Me
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All right.
