A
Piece of Cake, by Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh
Station
Hill Press, 2020
A
Piece of Cake is a dark chocolate, multilayered
interfusion with alternating layers of companionship and valium, sex and
toothaches, parents and friends and beach chairs. It is the record of a time
and place chronicled by two people, Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh, who
agreed to keep a journal for the period of one month – August, 1976 – while
occupying a one-bedroom in Lenox, Massachusetts with their eight-month old
baby, Marie Ray Warsh. “I’d been a journal writer all my life,” writes Lewis,
“so the idea made complete sense….There was much to write about, all the tiny
details of daily life, plus all the flashbacks to the past, and everything that
had led up to this moment.”
“Lenox,
Massachusetts, is a very privileged town,” Bernadette Mayer writes in the
Introduction. “In the 1920s rich people from New York City and Boston built
their summer castles there. Now there’s Tanglewood where people go to concerts
of mostly classical music on a big lawn, vying (in a dignified way) about who
has the best wine. I liked it because Hawthorne lived there, though his house
burned down and the replica they had built belonged to Tanglewood.”
The
contrast between these two writers is easily apparent. Lewis writes in a
carefully thought out, highly detailed-oriented prose in sentences so
gracefully constructed they have the feel of freshly varnished wood, or swans
on a woodland pond. There is often a feeling of melancholy seasoned with the
rhythms of a reflective mind, idyllic and charmed, fascinated by everything.
His appetite to record the most subtle, most nuanced mannerism or vocal
inflection, particularly when writing about people he’s close to, is evident in
his candor and astute sensitivity. The way he writes about being with his
father, for example, is quite touching. It’s easy to sense the bond between the
two, and – having had those awkward visits with my father in my late 20s when
it was obvious I was too far-gone on the road of poetry to begin seeking more
lucrative options, and he would discreetly offer financial help – I appreciate
the naturalness and skill with which Lewis deploys these moments in prose. “You
have a lot of machines,”
…my father says,
indicating the television, record player…camera, binoculars, dishwasher. No
beach chair, however. Bernadette and my mother return to the Village Inn, while
my father and I drive down the road to the shopping center. Alas, there are no
beach chairs at Kings. My father is a connoisseur of razor blades and other
drugstore items (sundries) as well, and we check out the Wilkinson rack to
discover that some blades are three packs for a dollar, others 59¢ each. “Let
me buy a few of these for you,” he says. We don’t want to return home
empty-handed so we decide to drive to the center of Pittsfield with the hopeful
thought that there’s bound to be a beach chair somewhere in the Berkshires. I
sense my father enjoys driving around and looking out the window and asking an
occasional question about what he’s seeing.
Bernadette
writes with great energy, concentrating on details while simultaneously seeking
to raise levels of expressivity and word experimentation. She tries to get as
much spontaneity into the writing as possible, sometimes tape recording herself
in monologues or conversations with Lewis and friends in a manner similar to
the use of a record player in Jack Kerouac’s Visions of Cody. Quirks and
idiosyncrasies abound. If Lewis’s writing is like swans, hers is more like
those thick flocks of starlings spiraling and looping around the sky in crazily
spontaneous formations, or the supple acrobatics of crows. Her sentences burst
like piñatas, sounds and signs and peppermint tea tumbling out like candy. Her
mind is nimble and – like Lewis – completely honest in her evaluations, attuned
to the mysteries of being like Gertrude Stein’s amazing dynamism in The
Making of Americans.
Bernadette
writes about her fascination with Nathaniel Hawthorne, revealing, as she does
so, qualities she values as a writer and reader:
It’s impossible to
explain why a writer is any good and it does seem ordinary to be so influenced
by this one who’s neither esoteric nor read seriously anymore, as if just his
name and the titles of some books had entered the language. In Hawthorne’s own
time, the popular thing to say about him was, “He writes as well as the English
novelists.” But there are at least three things I can say about his work that
connect it to my own, I hope, seeming too overblown: it’s American; it has the
rhythm of poetry and the clarity of Latin construction; and it exhibits almost
a sorcerer’s access to the unconscious and exercise of the imagination.
Hawthorne is the only writer I can think of who knows what imagination is, in
the sense of thinking up things, or dreaming them up. He himself mostly thought
he was in the grip of demons while he wrote, the shadows of his ancestors
watching with disapproval. A story-teller. Finally though, when I read his
works, nothing can distract me.
And
then there’s the matter of the baby, Marie. The hardships of economic sparsity
are thorny all on their own, especially when you’re trying to keep a marriage
afloat. I’ve been there. I know what it’s like. I know the appeal of rum and
valium. But to undergo simultaneously the challenges inherent in caring for an
infant is really tough. I’m amazed at how patiently they budgeted for groceries
(they were able to get food stamps) and dealt with all the other problems life
can throw at you. Their love for Marie and the joy they take in caring for
her is a buoy amidst this stormy sea.
The
entire time they assume tenancy of the one-bedroom apartment, they have to
endure the outrageously erratic and irresponsible actions of the landlord. He
hadn’t officially purchased the building into which they were slated to move
and so had to postpone the moving date several times. And then when they moved
in, there was still a lot of work to be done in the place, wiring, plumbing,
painting, etc. I go ballistic if a neighbor fires up a chain saw or hires a
work crew to do a major remodeling job. Working out a schedule that allows the
workers to do their job with the minimal amount of inconvenience to the people
living in the building or neighborhood is crucial. But this guy kept showing up
erratically and working late. His crew seemed to be made up of high school
students. Lewis and Bernadette tried pleading for some respect and sensitivity
to their right to peace, and the importance of routine for Marie and her
ability to sleep. In one ear, out the other. I’m amazed they didn’t murder this
jerk.
I
felt at home in this book. The circumstances – apart from the pivotal inclusion
of Marie and the playful interactions and responsibilities of caring for an infant – were all very familiar to me. I took some voyeuristic pleasure in
watching how they dealt with these conflicts.
But
let’s not lose sight of the cake. It’s an important cake. It’s a pain cake iced
with the lightness of thought. “I eat pain up and drag it out like ice cream,”
writes Bernadette on August 24th in one of the longer passages of
the book,
…or saving the icing,
enough left to accommodate each piece of cake. It’s a piece of cake, it’s just
a voice I hear, always some memory with a sound along with it, working up to
consciousness, and later, self-consciousness. You only begin again when you’ve
ended up, put something in your mouth, and bent or stood on your head to get a
heightened sense of color, this time it’s the lines of the window frame, a
white frame in three tiers, receding onto the outside with a certain very plain
Ionic grace, which must’ve given joy to the coachman and his wife, and
lightness to their thoughts of Schermerhorn’s horses. I fly out every night
over the post office spotlight and beyond the flat red long garage, heading
east, to check things. Why did Dr. Raskin want so much to be a woman?
There’s
a bit of irony in the use of that phrase, “piece of cake,” since this journal
is in many ways writing about writing, the journaling being a writing prompt, I
enjoy the deft manner in which Lewis focuses attention on that while simultaneously
providing details about the apartment, the attending circumstances (the workmen
off-schedule once again) and the ambiance, the mood, the backdrop, the context.
Writing is rarely a piece of cake. Sometimes it is, moments of tremendous
excitement when the subject at hand and the words fly out of your hands to
greet it, describe it, amplify it, roll it across the paper like a golden
carriage of insights and semantic endeavor, and ah that feels good. Most of the
time though, it’s a bit of a struggle. Writing about one’s life makes things a
whole lot easier. “Write what you know,” serves as the general maxim. It’s
easier to write what you know – the stuff going on in your head, the stuff
going on around your head – but there are problems here, too. The trick is to
develop the ability to stand back, get outside of yourself and the usual habits
and ways of seeing things, and consider yourself an art project, an ongoing
development that you’re chronicling at the same time you’re inventing yourself.
But I’m in the weeds now. What does Lewis say?
That
summer I gave my first poetry reading at The Folklore Center with Anne. I
hadn’t begun to write about myself yet, my poems were still dense language
games dotted with occasional moments of true feeling, but within the year I was
able to see how by just putting down what I did and who I saw every day I could
never be at a loss for something to write about.
For
a long time I couldn’t believe the past was dead or could die. I saw each
experience as a “still life” somehow preserved in time. Cauterized. What had
happened in the past was still going on and I was a memory, as well, in your
life, as you were in mine. “I’ll keep it with mine” was a favorite song. The
moment, each individual moment, extended towards infinity, like a spiral
staircase inside the heart.
I
felt as if my heart, not to use the language of popular songs, was like a
broken mirror, split into a hundred pieces, fragments of feelings, faces of
lovers and friends. So much emotional residue, associations, thoughts, hours
spent just sitting back, cigarette in hand, staring into space while the
memories flowed through me, until all I could do to snap out of it was shrug,
admonish myself, get off my ass and do something else. Though memory continued
like some ancient ticker tape the effect of the past lessened (and began to
feel indulgent) as the present became more intense. There was not time to look
away from what was happening right in front of you. The past would always be
there, like an old friend, whether I liked it or not.
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