This Old Writer
We suffer the tyranny of the young—the five best under 30, etc., and even more from our universal addiction to looking young, dyeing our hair, tucking in our bellies . . . But when the pandemic began my old writer’s world of reference and mode of feeling abruptly acquired an unexpected relevance and even (sorry) “relatability.” Death suddenly became, was felt to be, imminent even for the very young. And, famously, death is creative—that is, it invites the kind of writing I love best, which is hard to classify, which violates genres, which is personal and universal at once. Upshot: This Old Writer.
Last Orders at the Gay Hussar
from Salmagundi Fall-Winter 2023-24
He wasn’t exactly an effervescent man, gloomy would put it better, his humor often mordant—but he could be very funny—and you couldn’t forget Schwermer, whom you could spot a mile away anywhere because he dressed as though he’d walked off the stage of The Cherry Orchard, a man without a job or apparent source of income who lived like a king on the odd review and the promise of a novel. There was some vague connection to his father-in-law’s businesses, about which Schwermer himself never seemed very clear, and about which I didn’t really enquire. A kept man—I’d never encountered such a person. Of course no one ever said that, and then again, was it that? Because he adored her, he adored her from the very start, and he adored her as fervently, as blindly, as heedlessly when, not that many years after they’d married, she declared he was too impractical to live with, and left him. Or anyway set in motion the legal process that, after Schwermer’s endless dithering and delays, was finally concluded a great many years later. Because he adored her; and because, it has to be said, he was terrified of running out of money. But of course although they ceased living together, true, they nevertheless spoke on the phone each day, they had lunch, they talked, they went on outings, they went on holidays. He adored her, and in the following decades, when he would have to drop everything—but then, what else did he have to do?—and fetch her from Algiers or wherever she had got herself to to flee the aliens with whom she was battling, life or death, her tragic affliction, he adored her just as fervently as before. Oh, make no mistake, he was not in the least venal; no, no: he adored her, he always adored her.
Never Again
October 15, 2023
Mounted on the wall next to my desk is a large (24’’X18’’) formal black-and-white photo of me in a gilded frame, aged maybe three. When the news of the Hamas invasion of Israel, and of the Israeli response, first broke, it was this old photo that immediately came to my mind.
I am standing on a bench covered by a white animal skin; I am wearing a black velvet suit, with short pants and white tights, and elegant two-toned lace-up leather boots. I am facing directly and unself-consciously at the camera, as children do. Not long after this photo was taken, my mother, my father, and I fled to a hamlet in the Little Carpathian Mountains, for it was no longer possible for a Jewish family to remain in our home town, over-run by German soldiers and fascists.
There’s a War in the Ukraine
Among the mysteries of being an old writer is what you remember, in particular what you remember of the many, many lines of verse and prose that you have read. These snatches of words, that you can’t account for but that of course are not at all random, form a kind of parallel unconscious, not the blood-red slabs of childhood memories or of unrecalled “experience” but rather an anthology of the lived self, the unchosen aesthetic of who you are. And like the commodities of that other unconscious, these words can flare into consciousness at what often seem unlikely occasions, such as when I am buying mustard or when I am dreaming of something banal, like automobile tires.
Cooking, Eating, Writing
It is a cool, clear late afternoon on the north shore of Long Island, a few weeks into the Covid-19 lockdown. A good time to start. The water of the Sound, a little choppy, is a brilliant blue, like the sky, and almost blinding because of the sunshine. But I am inside, and, like half the stricken planet, I am cooking.
Calamity
My father and I were both born in middle of a world war, I the Second and he the First. And so we both were boys and then young men in eras of exuberance and delight. He was born in a backwater of the creaky, backward-looking Austro-Hungarian Empire but grew up in the up-to-date Czechoslovakia that Woodrow Wilson dreamed up. And I, born in that same backwater, grew up in Manhattan, at the time the vivacious epicenter of human experience, a place, moreover, where you could be forgiven for believing that most things good were Jewish, such as Kosher delis and Broadway musicals.
Now (On Bread and Longinus)
January 2021. Almost a year in quarantine. I am still alive. Although something hard to name though pervasive has occurred to the experience—of being alive—subtle in the sense that there are moments when it hardly seems anything has happened—the birds swirl noisily in the bushes, just as before—and yet absolutely every pulse of light has changed, even when I couldn’t say how. Most of all I suffer from a kind of double vision—attached to each bite of pizza, each step, each thought and emotion is the presence of its vanishing and pointlessness.
On Being a Rootless Cosmopolitan
The most beautiful book I have read during the pandemic is N. Scott Momaday’s Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land (2020). It is a brief book (67 pages) of brief passages, really chants or parables, organized into two sections: “The Dawn” and “The Dusk,” a book about origins and endings. Standing at trail’s end, Momaday, who is 87, binds his awakening into knowledge as a child and young Kiowa boy and the awakening into language, into story and community of the human group, at dawn; and then, at dusk, he records what we have done, and what in light of what we have done we can pass along to our children, and grandchildren, what against all the odds abides. And so it is a particularly poignant, telling, and authoritative statement of understanding. “When I think about my life and the lives of my ancestors,” Momaday writes in the “Author’s Note” that opens his book, “I am inevitably led to the conviction that I, and they, belong to the American land [his emphasis]. This [book] is a declaration of belonging. And it is an offering to the earth.”