Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Like A Spiral Staircase In The Heart


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 piƱatas, 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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