Even This, Even All of It, You Must Love: A Review of Micheline Aharonian Marcom's A Brief Hisory of Yes

A love story told backward, the end of it. August to August. Dry, bloodless heat.

A Brief History of Yes by Micheline Aharonian Marcom tells the story of the end of an affair. He is a blond, blue-eyed American man and she is dark-haired, Portuguese-born. In her, she carries the memory of the city where she was born, near the Targus River in her native land; and of her father, full of rage and violence. And of her marriage to a man with whom she had a son. She left him, in the end. But now it is she who is left.

“Maria, you are not right for me,” he says.

“We were not good for each other,” is what he said. The first man who broke my heart. He had taken the train down to my apartment. He had slept in my narrow bed while I sat up awake all night.

This was long after it had ended. He was trying to make me understand something I did not.

I did not ask him anything more. I nodded as if the logic was clear, as though even a child would understand.

“It’s not that I didn’t love you,” he said as we climbed the stairs to the train station platform. “It was never that.”

And then he was gone.

My mother was born to Portuguese parents, her father from Lisbon, her mother an island girl – San Miguel in the North Atlantic Sea.

For a year, I took lessons in Portuguese language, the rounded guttural sounds gravelly and heavy on my tongue.

I remember those months as a kind of weight pressing down on me. A dimly-lit classroom in the afternoon. Fluorescent light. Struggling with unfamiliar phrases that carried nothing of my own history, Korean-born adoptee that I was.

But dutiful. Obedient. Well-trained. I waited for my mother on the concrete steps in front of the school building. In the car, I would recite the day’s lesson. Haltingly I might say in Portuguese: “In summer, the ships leave port. In winter, the men return.

“Let me tell you a story,” Maria says to him, “of a girl a boy who meet up on the California coast where the girl dreamed him up, dreamed him up.” “You dreamed me?” he asks. “Yes. I called to you, first to the full moon on the bluffs at Salt Point where I sometimes go when I am sad and sit there, then to you, and you arrived.”

There is a Portuguese musical tradition called Fado. It is steeped in sadness. My mother took me to a restaurant one evening when she thought I was old enough.

Dark room. Velvet drapes. A low stage where a woman stood at a microphone while a man sat to her left, playing guitar. She wore a red blossom in her hair. Her voice was warm and low and filled the room with its vibrations. Old men sat at tables near the stage. Some wiped their eyes.

I sat across the table from my mother. Her hair long and brown. Her face turned to the stage.

On the ride home, she said: “I thought I loved your father. Maybe I did. I thought I knew. I thought if love was real, I would know.” And then she was quiet.

I had not yet met the man who would first break my heart. I was a blank sheet of paper on which the vagaries of love had yet to be written.

Maria has an old friend she speaks to on the telephone. After her divorce, he tells her, “Maria, you most open your heart. . . . There is no joy otherwise.”

Later, she asks him, “How do you tell, how can you, the truth of love from the illusions of it?”

When I met him, the sun was shining. It was summer. We were cast in the same play, a production of West Side Story. Although his hair was dark, he was fair-skinned. He was a “Jet.” And me, dark-haired, dark-skinned, I was a “Shark.” A dancing girl. Night after night, I painted my lips red, thrust my hips out and danced.

In the hallways of the empty school where we rehearsed. In the wings behind the stage. In the parking lot late into the night.

When it is over, Maria drives north to Salt Point where she walks the rocky cliffs and imagines, fleetingly, throwing herself against the rocks, or diving into the sea below:

Hello despair, she does not say (only the next day when others ask her of her holiday and she begins to weep).

Hello sea, air, sky, and black cormorants.

There is nothing good today in my heart. All is lost, all forsaken. My son with his father and the horsy faced girl. Me on these bluffs one-hundred-and-fifty miles from a city which is not my natal city, Pai gone, my uncles aunts cousins across the Atlantic in an old small inconsequential country where my old memories were made. I loved a tall, blond, blue-eyed American man; eventually he did not love me back. Looks again at the sea. Looks again at the sky. Lies next to the bush and would like to be the bush, the sky, the sea, seaweed, and cold autumn air.

It stretched on for years. There were others, between. But he was like a place I remembered from my youth and returned to again and again, recognizable. He was the path behind my childhood home that led to a broad ancient oak. He was the cool Atlantic waters that rose to meet me in long summer days. Something in him familiar and knowable to something in me. The way you might know that you will love someone even though you have only just met. And that it will not matter how long they love you, or how well. You know they will enter you, take root. That they will reside there, graft themselves onto your heart.

When it ended, it was in autumn. He was moving to New York. I did not yet know that this would be the end. I did not yet know that he would choose the dark-skinned, dark-haired woman he had loved for years. The woman alongside whom I had loved him in parallel. I did not yet know that he would take her with him to the rocky California coast. That would come later.

We spent the afternoon in his bed, the windows thrown open, the cool breeze chilling us. The leaves were turning and falling. In the distance, the wide Charles River flowed past. As night fell, I rode the bus home.

My mother’s mother was engaged to be married to an island boy who worked the sea. My mother’s father came to the island from the city and “the next thing anyone knew,” my mother would say, “they were coming to New Bedford.” City boy and island girl.

When she died, after fifty years of marriage, he followed soon after. As the story goes he said, “What is my life without my love?”

Her lover has a wound across his chest. A concavity where the bones did not form properly.

“It’s what you don’t understand,” she tells him, “how the wounds can be an opening.”

“In Portuguese, we have a word: saudade. In English you don’t have this word, and there is no accurate translation of it. Is it nostalgia? Or yearning for the absent one? Or the love that remains after the beloved has gone? All of this could be saudade.”

But he does not want to speak of love or yearning. He wants to go out. He tells her there is something playing at the cinema. And shouldn’t they go out. And she says Yes.

—

When it ended, I thought I could not bear it. That surely, the weight of his absence was enough in itself to crush the life from me, to break me, starting with my fragile heart.

But didn’t my stubborn heart surprise me with its resilience? Even as I lie there in my bed, willing it to stop beating?

I did not yet understand that love contains its end as life does. I did not yet know.

the absence created by the end of a love affair is another form of presence. And memory sings it, and singing it the blond blue-eyed lover returns. “Hello,” Maria says to him, “estou com saudades tuas.” And he, “Hello, Maria, I am here,” while he arrives departs arrives again until all things eventually arrive at their end.

And I did not yet know that a wound can be an opening. And that if one is to love life (and what is there to do but to love it?) one must also love these wounds, these openings, unbearable though we bear them.

Even watching as the train pulls away from the station. Even the rocky cliffs that lead down to the cold sea. Even the dying leaves of trees. Even one’s own stupid heart that knows no better than to keep beating, even as it is breaking. Ever breaking.

Even this, even all of it, you must love.

Strange Ballet On the Page

All show, no tell. That’s the best way I can think to describe Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s work. Terrence Malick adapting Beckett. Extreme minimalism. Delicate maximalism. Strange ballet on the page.

I’m recommending Reticence here, but all show, no tell could easily be said of the Parisian Belgian’s work as a whole. Reticence, published in France in 1991 and just now being issued in English by Dalkey Archive, doesn’t stray greatly from the more recently notable Running Away and The Truth About Marie. Like those works, the prose is more pacing than plot, more action than emotion, more supposition than exposition. Drop a Toussaint novel into a writing workshop and show your students how to crack a table into rational and emotional halves.

The “story” of Reticence is quite simple. Our narrator and his young son (still sleeps in a crib, no language or mother) spend a few nights in a small fishing village, the idea being to visit a writer friend named Biaggi, who keeps a house there. Something holds our hero back, though. An “initial reticence” takes over, so consuming he can’t sleep, and in the midst of this reticence he becomes convinced Biaggi knows he’s in town. In fact, he’s convinced Biaggi is following him, even having him watched by the proprietor of the hotel.

By nights, our hero sneaks about the village, leaving his son to sleep alone. Struggling with misgivings about seeing a friend is apparently a greater motivator than fear of leaving his infant son. In one of his first insomniac outings, our hero spies in the night water a dead cat floating with a piece of fishing line out its mouth:

“The way it was floating it was impossible to see its face, and it was only when the current caused its body to pivot slightly that I saw it had a fish head in its mouth, from which a broken bit of fishing line protruded a couple of inches. And it was precisely this piece of line that made me think later in the evening — at the time I’d just looked at it without giving it too much thought — that the cat had been murdered.”

So much depends upon a murdered cat. With our hero full of questions, the answers he accepts are never quite waterproof enough for us readers to accept. So cycles of crisis-conflict-climax repeat again and again and again, and suspense piles and piles and piles, no dramatic beat ever completely resolved:

“How else to explain the fragment of fishing line in its mouth? How could such a tough and resistant bit of line be cut by the animal itself? And how, supposing it had indeed managed to cut the line, to explain the presence of a trolling line just a few feet from the side of the pier when it should have been out at sea anywhere from thirty to sixty feet underwater? Why, above all, was the end of the line cut so cleanly, as if with a knife, if it’s not because once the cat had been caught in the trap that Biaggi had set the night before — because Biaggi was in the village, I was now sure of it. . . .”

The human mind is only half rational. Why not visit his friend? Because he doesn’t feel like it. Why doesn’t he feel like it? Because he’s reticent. Why is he reticent? I don’t know, but here’s a book about what reticence can drive a man to do. And this makes Reticence, like all of Toussaint’s books, beautifully unsettling, and happily irrational. Running into a friend may as well be a life and death affair. And really, “giving it too much thought” can make anything a matter of life and death. Six degrees of separation from fishing line to murder.

If this were a book of Envy or Sexual Attraction or True Love, no reader would question the rationality or motives behind the narrator (although the better parents in us might judge him for the nighttime walks). What Toussaint shows us in each of his books — showing again and again and again, cinematically — is that nothing need happen for drama still to exist. A literary Malick, Beckett with a bigger prop department. Nothing needs to be told for a reader to want to listen. Great writing does not need a story.

The Last Novelist: On David Markson's "Notecard Quartet"

I am considering abandoning this review of David Markson’s “Notecard Quartet.”

It’s rare that I get to review a book I would much rather just hand you, rarer still I’d have to hand it off while admitting, I have no idea why this works, it should fall apart, but it’s beautiful. As a writer, I need to understand how fiction is made, so I can steal from it. And as a critic, I need to intellectualize and make myself feel superior to the text, especially a text I admire, by being able to say, I see what you did there. So when a book comes along — in this case, four of them — that seems to’ve invented its own reason to exist, its own set of rules, and that seems so simply conceived and executed you wonder why no one has done it before, even as you realize that the work is inimitable, the result is a kind of ecstasy, a simultaneous lifting of spirit and sublimation of the skeptical mind that would tell you, This shouldn’t succeed, and of course you can’t explain ecstasy to anyone who hasn’t felt it for themselves without looking like a madman from the mountaintop.

Nevertheless, that’s where we are with Markson’s Reader’s Block,  This Is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point and The Last Novel — a quartet arranged as a series of seemingly disconnected facts, anecdotes, and minutiae on famous artists’ lives, their financial troubles, their affairs and illegitimate children. Biographical notes, unattributed quotations, literary allusions. Philosophy, history, metaphysics. Stays in debtor’s prisons, hospitals, madhouses.

And artists’ deaths. Let’s not forget that. Lots and lots of artists’ deaths.

These facts or vignettes, culled from the pages of Markson’s extensive personal library — in notes and checkmarks, scribbled questions and underlined quotations, talkback — he would copy onto index cards which he kept in shoebox tops, and when he’d filled a certain number of these, he had a new manuscript.

And why do I say arranged, several lines up, instead of structured?

Dinnerplates are arranged.  Wooden blocks are arranged.  Novels are structured.

Are these not novels?

Of course they are, though I’m not certain I can tell you why.

Emily Dickinson’s refusal to sit for a photographer.

Kant almost certainly died a virgin.

Sure I posed.  I was hungry.

William Faulkner once allowed himself to be interviewed on radio during a University of Virginia football game.

And was introduced as the winner of the Mobil Prize.

Tennessee Williams choked to death on the plastic cap of a nasal spray.

The above excerpts, just to illustrate, have been pulled from not one but all four of the books, and put together via good old cut and paste. Or, not “good old” cut and paste, which would imply scissors and glue, which is how Markson would have managed — working on a typewriter up to his death in the untypewriterly year 2010, copying vignettes onto index cards longhand, marginalia from the actual margins of actual books, rather than a simple search of the Google. Upon Markson’s death this personal library, half-marked with annotations toward a fifth notecard novel, was donated to his beloved Strand bookstore, a purveyor of new and used books.

Which promptly put the books out on the shelves, among the other used books, and sold them off, one slashed coverprice at a time. [1]

How Marksonian.

Salvador Dali’s perception of Jackson Pollock. Fish soup.

Roland Barthes died after being hit by a laundry truck.

Nobody comes. Nobody calls.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Said Stravinsky.

Thomas Mann’s definition of a writer.  Someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

The likelihood that Anne Hathaway could not read.

How these books take on a form and subject which don’t automatically scream novel at all, prompting Reviewer to consider such questionably non-specific terms as novelness — i.e., “the essential novelness of these books” — which I admit makes my eyes roll back in my head and I’m the one who typed it. Fiction or non-fiction? Personal essay? Lyric essay? No characters, no plot, yet clearly novels, because they evoke that feeling within me. Only, made up of non-fiction . . . and I don’t mean in the sense of the “non-fiction novel,” a term hardly anyone uses anymore, and which I suspect was invented just so Norman Mailer could refer to himself in the third person.

Prepared to re-abandon this review upon typing novelness.

Adding novelness to my laptop dictionary with shame.

How Markson’s life and work seem inseparable here, a fallacy of some sort, one would think, with his narrator someone the reader associates with the never-named character of David Markson, though the narrator is never called that, and is actually referred to differently in each book — in Reader’s Block, Reader; in This Is Not a Novel, Writer; in Vanishing Point, Author; The Last Novel, Novelist. But it is undeniably narrator-as-Markson, or the reverse, even in the narrator’s attempt to find a form that would give us the very book we hold in our hands, and which places the narrator’s artistic trials within the context of those famous artists’ struggles which make up the text. Almost as if the whole of art were a single continuous unbroken act, the drive toward creation, of finding a new way to say it, passed on from previous generations back to the beginning of art, passed on to us, and then by us to the next . . . and, at a precise moment within the continuum, aware of it and taking a long look around, Markson’s quartet. But these books also suggest and exemplify how art need not be bound within tradition to be part of it, needs no proscribed form or approval, no recognition or monetary award (the anecdotes bear this out faithfully, bleakly) nor any more justification to exist than the simple fact that it exists.

As in:

Writer is sick unto death of making up stories.

A lament of Schopenhauer’s:

Over how frequently the mere purchase of a book is mistaken for the appropriation of its contents.

A novel with no intimation of story whatsoever, Writer would like to conceive.

Raymond Chandler lived with his mother until her death when he was thirty-five. And then almost immediately married a woman seventeen years older than he was.

Plotless. Characterless.

This is even an epic poem, if Writer says so.

Requiring no one’s corroboration.

What is a novel, anyway?

What makes Markson’s “Notecard Quartet” remarkable as a work of experimental fiction is not that it points to novelistic conventions in order to “free” the novel of them, the approach of countless well-intentioned and ultimately antiseptic literary exercises. There is no linear (or nonlinear) sequence of events to exploit with a wink-nudge because there is no novelistic time employed at all, no events that would require such sequencing. The novels don’t merely attempt to reveal their own construction while being constructed, pointing to the trap doors or mirrors or invisible wires that make the trick work, never mind that looking at invisible wires is about as thrilling as looking at an invisible naked person.

Instead Markson frees the novel of its conventions by freeing the novel of its conventions. And the voila of the trick is in the revelation that a novel is less about what it’s made up of than about its particular effect upon a reader (which the conventions only exist, really, to produce) — the rise and fall of emotion, the continual rise, release, and re-rise of tension, moments sped up or sped past and moments where the reader stops to consider the relationship of what she’s just read to her own experience. These are novels in no easily definable sense except that they’re experienced as if they are, they linger in your imagination as if they are, and they reveal a deep resonance, as all good novels do, between the lives explored on the page and our own.

*

[1]  The wonderful website Reading Markson Reading — which popularized the term “Notecard Quartet,” sparing us the alien-sounding tetralogy — has set itself a mission of finding, scanning, and sharing annotated pages from Markson’s sold-off book collection, and offering insightful commentary along the way. Well worth your time.

“The false wall resounded with arpeggios of curses and shrieked bitches.”

Rediscovery is an odd compliment. When somebody says, “Dalkey Archive Press has rediscovered a forgotten Modernist with their new release Stories and Essays of Mina Loy”, what they’re really saying is that Mina Loy was forgotten for many years, but now a dedicated team of literary detectives has unearthed her from obscurity. This sounds good and adds some life to an important book, but Loy was never forgotten. There has never been a time since 1920 that groups, however small, haven’t flocked to Loy for sustenance. But we like to feel like we’re doing Loy a solid, so the bookish world pats itself on the back by proclaiming we’ve found treasure. So. . . .

Dalkey Archive Press has rediscovered a forgotten Modernist with their new release Stories and Essays of Mina Loy. Never before published in this form, this collection of narrative work contains fiction, theatre, and critical essays that range from meditations on Gertrude Stein, fairy tales, tawdry interludes, early 20th century feminist thought, and a ballet. Loy is known primarily as a poet, Lunar Baedecker is and will be her most read work, but with this collection we can see that she was an incredibly diverse and prolific writer. A writer’s writer, she is not to be taken lightly. A pure High Modernist, Loy’s writing, although colloquial and familiar even to a contemporary reader, is particularly concerned, and interested in itself as Art. By that I mean that trickery abounds.

Her tricks show up as a didactic, pragmatic style that lulls you into a false sense of security, and then the text sucker punches you with an impossibly subtle complexity. Muhammad Ali once said that he could never be knocked out by a punch he could see coming. Faulkner, Auster, or Milton, couldn’t knock out Ali, but Loy would have him down and out in the first round. She’s the punch you don’t see coming.

With over 400 pages and 37 separate pieces, the collection can seem a bit daunting and is difficult to define in anything but the most-broad terms. I’ve provided the broad look above. But books don’t come to me on broad terms, they come to me in sentences. Mina Loy’s sentences are wonderful. In a hilarious and disjointed short story (it’s actually the first piece in the collection) “The Agony of the Partition” Loy writes: “The false wall resounded with arpeggios of curses and shrieked bitches.” Has there ever been a more wonderful sentence? I say, no. Well, maybe, but today it’s my favorite. This mixture of High (arpeggios) and Low (false wall) creates a natural friction that could only be described as “shrieked bitches.” Everything that Modernism set out to be, Loy accomplishes in this one sentence. Even after considering the failures of so much early twentieth century literature, we can still point to a couple truths and say Pound was a grand teacher, Stein a deft guide, Joyce was the bold mistake that changed everything, and Eliot was the talent, but this most wonderful sentence came from Mina Loy, and it shows why she belongs, too.

Reading this novel, you get the feeling this is what Ozzy Osbourne might have documented as “going off the rails in a Crazy Train"

One of the most famous Kōans goes something like: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Before you get all worked up and run to the Zen section of your newly-purchased IKEA bookshelf (dare I say, that is one handsome bibliopegy!), relax: Bart Simpson has already figured it out. But now dig this: what is the sound of the last human being left on earth, slowly going insane? Or, rather, what do her thoughts sound like in our heads?

David Markson shows us in Wittgenstein’s Mistress in the form of quick, shifting, one-sentence paragraphs, which Kate, our singular, lone remaining animal on this planet, furiously types out in a beach house on Long Island. Kate’s musings are all over the maps of Western history, arts, and the physical world itself. The novel’s inspiration comes from Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus,” a series of short propositions presented in a logical sequence, culminating in the final decree: “What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence.”

Pretty heavy, yeah? But don’t despair; Markson gives Kate -- a one-time artist -- this magnificent ability to jumble information about places, people, works of art, into dozens of strange, wonderful, laugh-out-loud amalgams; a brilliant, historical mash-up one almost wishes were visual; worthy of residing eternally within YouTube annals.

For example, there’s the Candid Camera-like story that Rembrandt’s students sheepishly painted images of gold coins on his studio floor, which the Maestro would stoop to pick up no matter how often the trick was repeated. This line of thought continues with Rembrandt’s eventual financial bankruptcy. Kate then riffs off these two anecdotes with the fact that Rembrandt lived in Amsterdam as a contemporary of the philosopher Spinoza, to produce an imagined conversation between the two famous men in a retail establishment: “Oh . . . hi Rembrandt, how’s the bankruptcy going?” “Fine, Spinoza. How’s the excommunication?”

See, this sort of thing isn’t necessarily new; for example, I’ve often imagined a scenario in which Johann Sebastian Bach coincidentally meets up with Sebastian Bach, lead singer of Skid Row, in a roadside diner outside Tucumcari, New Mexico -- both men road tripping through the United States in search of those melancholic times when Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady sped down Route 66, lighting joints and wreaking general havoc.

Only Markson is a brilliant writer who masterfully weaves this barrage of philosophical references and European history into truly funny scenarios, while I . . . have a day job. By the novel’s end, Markson elegantly presents Kate’s immersion in a world that is the embodiment of Wittgenstein’s final proposition.

Reading this novel, you get the feeling this is what Ozzy Osbourne might have documented as “going off the rails in a Crazy Train,” had Sharon advised him to go to University and get an English Literature degree. I know, it’s not fair to the great Oz, but coincidentally he himself is going through his personal version of decay and deterioration. It’s just that his answer involves coloring children’s books whilst mumbling something about a beef burrito at Chipotle.