Leaving Ledig House

A little backtracking. As described in the previous blog, the procedure at Ledig House is for residents’ arrival and departure to be staggered. So Amy Waldman and David Machado left, and after that, Christian Haller, and Dy Plambeck. But then new people came: Rob Schouten, a poet and critic from the Netherlands; Kaspar Schnetzler, a novelist from Switzerland; Alex Halberstadt, a writer of non-fiction who was a class member in a poetry course I taught in the Graduate Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia, I think about ten years ago. And just a few days after, Chloe Aridjis left, and Joanne Wang arrived. Joanne, originally from Beijing, is now living in New York and working as a translator. Xu Xiaobing, the Chinese novelist whom Joanne recently translated, was scheduled to arrive at the same time but, finally, was denied permission to travel, which is too bad.

The international character of Ledig House sharpens your perspective on what it means to be a writer outside the U.S.A. in the 21st century. Among the short-term visitors to L. House was Taslima Nasrin, who had to leave Bangladesh fifteen years ago because of her controversial publications about the difficulties women have to face in Bangladesh. Since then Taslima has lived the life of an exile in Sweden, Germany, France, India, and now New York, where she has a fellowship from N.Y. U. to do her work. But she would like to return to Bangladesh, her home, and the place where she feels there is a lot of work to do. That same weekend we had the fiction writer Ma Thida, on a fellowship at Brown this year, but expecting to return to Myanmar at the completion of her stay. She was imprisoned there for six years on the sole basis of her publications. I found both women (who have medical degrees, incidentally) formidable in their courage and commitment to basic freedoms that Americans take for granted. I mentioned Abiye Teklemariam in the earlier blog. He received the news that several people he knew in Addis Ababa have been arrested, and that the outlook isn’t good—which raises questions about his own return to his homeland. All of this can make being a writer working in modern Western-style democracies seem very easy indeed, with our freedom to say anything we like (and be unread or ignored), our comfy teaching posts, our well-paid reading tours, and (blush) our subsidized stays in artists’ colonies. But of course we know that there are things we can do to help others in countries where circumstances are riskier.

Other weekend visitors have included Binyavanga Wainaina, a Kenyan, who now directs Bard’s Chinua Achebe Center for African Culture. Before doing that he founded a literary magazine in Kenya called Kwani?, which was innovative in several ways. For example, it published what is probably the first short story by a Kenyan dealing with gay themes. Also up from Bard that same evening was Gabi Ngcobo, South African, who is doing a graduate degree there in curatorial studies. We had a lively conversation about contemporary South Africa (whose post-apartheid constitution guarantees gay civil rights, by the way), and the recent inauguration of Jacob Zuma, about whose government-in-formation there is a lot of discussion.

We also had visitors from the publishing world: Jill Schoolman, who is the publisher of Archipelago Books. Almost everything Archipelago brings out is translated from other language traditions, which of course sets them apart from the bulk of contemporary American publishing. Jill is extraordinarily nice, and it’s instantly clear how dedicated she is to getting important foreign-language works to an American readership, which tends to fall behind in this area. We had one literary agent, Jen Auh, who works at the Andrew Wylie agency and happens to represent Alex Halberstadt. Finally, a night's visit from Anna Moschovakis and Matvei Yankelevich, who run the Ugly Duckling Presse [sic] in Brooklyn, also mainly concerned with translated work, poetry in particular.


As for the writing, my main reason for being here, it went sailing along, with only a few days when the anchor dragged. I’ve written several new poems, done some translation, and gone through the ms. of a new collection of poems and unmistakably improved it, adding, dropping, rearranging. And, finally, I have a draft of my two-act play about Robert Lowell.

Weather was unusually changeable. Though we had sun most days during the latter part of April, days were on the chilly side. And then mid-month the temperature suddenly jumped to the high eighties, a heat not recorded locally for April since the 1920s. It rushed up the flowering of the apple trees and the lilacs, but also their leafing, so the blossoms were quickly crowded out by foliage. Then things got cooler, and back we went to the expected cloudy, damp springs of the Hudson Valley.

I gave a reading in Hudson at Carrie Haddad Gallery, an event that was arranged by Bill Sullivan. My co-reader was Star Black, who came up from New York just for the day. We were both still upset at the news that our friend Darragh Park, whom I hadn’t been in contact with for a long time, had died by his own hand a few days earlier. Darragh was a painter, whom I met more than thirty years ago through John Ashbery. I used a painting of his for the cover of my second book, a New York cityscape, and among the best of those he did in that decade. Apparently he’d lost his eyesight and had become dependent on others. His death is understandable, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t regrettable. Star dedicated her reading to him, which seemed right. Other friends in the audience were the poet/art-critic Carter Ratcliff and his wife Phyllis, Karen Clark and Jonathan Bernstein, who drove up from New York, and Brooks Peters, who now lives across the river in Athens and whom I first met when he was a Yale undergrad back in the 70s.

It’s been a spring with a lot of sad news, beginning with deaths from the H1N1 flu, both here and abroad. And then, the poet Deborah Digges. Though I wouldn’t claim a friendship, I did meet her once, just after her first book came out, and liked her. Opinions differ on whether her death was a suicide, but in either case, a terrible thing. Equally hard to come to terms with was the death of Craig Arnold, whom I didn’t know but whose poems I’ve read. Exploring a volcanic island off the coast of mainland Japan, he fell into a deep ravine, a shock his family and friends haven’t yet recovered from.

Finally, I had an email post from Langdon Hammer the first week of the month saying that my friend Eleanor Perényi had died, at the age of 91. (In the blog describing my visit to Budapest last June, I speak of our friendship.) The immediate cause was a brain hemorrhage, and at least things went very quickly. A sad event that had an effect on my last week at L. House. We won’t see Eleanor’s like again.

I’m beginning to feel that television has been following the same track as this blog. Last June, when I was in Warsaw, I wrote here about the heroic figure Irena Sendler, a nurse who rescued 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto. One evening during my residency, I turned on the TV and there was her story on something called “The Hallmark Hall of Fame.” Well done, gripping, and at moments hard to watch. And then, this past February when I was in New York, I wrote about seeing Andrzej Wajda’s film Katyn, a story based on the Soviet slaughter of more than two thousand Polish officers shortly after Soviet troops occupied Poland. Another night I randomly went through several channels and happened on a documentary about the period following the Nazi-Soviet pact, which once again told this terrifying story.

I realize the above paragraphs are shadowed with sadness, but I don’t want that to alter the fact that I had a stimulating and productive month at Ledig House, with the non-negligible bonus of making several new friends. Let me close with a brief mention of a dinner the painter Stephanie Rose gave in Hudson during my last week. Guests were the novelist and poet Jaime Manrique, Bill Sullivan, Carter and Phyllis Ratcliff, and Al Roberts, who collects paintings and curates shows for the Albany Institute of History and Art. I spoke of a commission from the Gulbenkian Foundation to translate fado (Portuguese popular song), something that my friend Mimi Khalvati arranged. So Stephanie played a disc of Amalia Rodrigues, the classic performer of fado, while we had our meal. Raised glasses, jokes, eye catching an eye, laughter, quiet moments of reflection, warm goodbyes.

Tomorrow I fly to London.

From Pest to Buda by the Szechenyi Bridge

My hotel is in Pest, which is the business side of this tandem national capital, but I did cross over to Buda yesterday in search, could we say, of the enlightenment to be found there. And how did I cross? With the Szèchenyi Bridge, another in the series of suspension bridges this blog has mentioned over the past month. It was constructed in 1849 and uses the same method and materials as in Brunel’s design for the chain bridge in Bristol. But the massive stone piers have neither Brunel’s parabola arch in them, nor Brooklyn Bridge’s ogive, but instead a nicely proportioned Roman arch. Also, the stonework bears some traditional ornament, as neither of those bridges does. And I begin to get the feeling that for Hungarian sensibility, ornament is necessary for any object or building that wants to be regarded with interest. It’s quite clear that the Magyars are an artistic people, I mean, the majority. And the difficulty they face is that they are isolated from the rest of the world by a difficult language, neither Germanic nor Slavic nor Romance. I admit I was daunted by the prospect of trying to get along as a traveler who doesn’t know a word of the local lingo. But anyone in an official position here knows enough English (the world’s current lingua franca) to answer your questions, and willy-nilly you do begin to learn a few words of Hungarian.

I tried out a phrase or two yesterday when I called my friend Eleanor Perènyi, who at the ripe age of ninety years lives in Stonington Connecticut. I met her there in the early seventies and count myself lucky to have known her and learned from her over the years. She has a fierce intelligence and knows more history and literature than is at all plausible for someone without a university degree—anyway, more than I do, even though having one. Her deep education comes from travel, reading, attending performances and getting to know the thinkers and artists she encountered over her long life. In the late thirties she traveled to Budapest with her mother and met a young Hungarian baron at a dinner party, a man whom she not long after married. She settled down in a part of Hungary then known as Ruthenia, where there seems to have been something like a baronial castle. My geography is a little shaky but I believe Ruthenia was parceled away after war and no longer belongs to Hungary. Eleanor had come back to the States with her young son during the fighting, and she was never reunited with her husband, who lived a couple of decades into the Communist period. She has written a fascinating memoir about her experiences titled More Was Lost. She also wrote a brilliant biography of Liszt and his circle. And to top it off, a best-selling garden book titled Green Thoughts. How many pleasant evenings I remember sitting on her back porch over drinks and looking out at the charming garden she had made. “Pleasant” in this case doesn’t mean placid, because discussions were always sharp and energized by liberal politics. Part of Eleanor’s identity comes as a heritage from her ancestor Robert Owen, the Welsh social theorist who came to America and founded a utopian community called New Harmony in what’s now the state of Indiana. So it was heartwarming to put in a telephone call from a city that was once a capital for her.

And quite a city it is, mega-scale in so many ways. The Parliament Building is larger than London’s, also neo-Gothic, but with a huge baroque dome added for good measure. All of the palaces and public buildings seem crushingly monumental, and even the city’s stretch of the Danube is very broad. I began to understand why Liszt’s music is as grand as it is. And some of the churches are very large, too. (Brought up as a Protestant, I was surprised to see not one but two old Lutheran churches in this very Catholic country. But apparently there has always been a German-speaking community here, and not all of it drawn from Catholic Austria.) I’m told also that the Budapest synagogue is the largest in Europe, and it certainly seems to be—a huge brick structure with paired towers and an interior cemetery shaded by plane trees.

Which brings me to another connection to Hungary. In the early seventies, I lived with the architect Walter Brown in New York and, during our five years together, got to know a lot about his Hungarian ancestry. His mother was born in Hungary but had died before I first met Walter. I did meet his grandmother Pepi, who, unlike her husband, survived transport and imprisonment at Auschwitz. After the war she came to America and made her living as a cook in Catskill hotels that needed kosher meals; she also taught Walter some traditional Hungarian recipes. Her family had been prosperous farmers somewhere in the country, I don’t know where exactly. Their being well-liked and respected by their neighbors didn’t prevent them from being transported, however. I recall listening as she told stories about that unsummarizable era. Walter has only ever been to Hungary once, and his mother and grandmother refused ever to come back.

A strange thing: when I went to the Hungarian National Gallery, I saw a painting by the 17th c. artist Gerrit Dou, purportedly of Rembrandt’s mother. I’ve always had a soft spot for Dou, and paid close attention this time as wel. Then it struck me that the sitter looked exactly like grandmother Pepi. She died many years ago, but it was as though I’d rediscovered her here.

The core of the gallery was the Esterhazy collection, donated to the state more than a hundred years ago. There are quite a few surprises in it, including yet another large Pieter Brueghel, titled John the Baptist Preaching in the Wilderness. Even without a proper cleaning I can see that it is a brilliant painting, filled with characteristic touches. Equally moving were the El Greco canvases, including a very atypical portrait of the Magdalene. So atypical as not to seem by El Greco at all; but the label says it is, so I bow to superior scholarship.

And some powerful Courbets, including a large-scale picture of two wrestlers I’ve never seen even in reproduction. It was not included in the Courbet show in New York I mentioned back in March. Another surprise was a Gauguin snowscape, not at all a characteristic subject for the great painter of the South Seas. And the brushstrokes looked wispy and feathery like Renoir’s. But then real artists always have a surprise or two up their sleeves, and the signature was the GAUGUIN we’d all recognize.

There was also a temporary show of photography involving human subjects, a huge grab-bag of well known and less well known photographers. Among familiar names like Stieglitz and Cartier-Bresson and Dorothea Lange were others I’d never heard of, several of them Hungarian. The show also gave Brassaï’s real Hungarian name (Gyula Halasz), before now unknown to me, just as I hadn’t known he was Hungarian. Kertesz of course I already knew about, but it was tonic to see so many of his works again. A huge gathering of images, as I said, and all to do with human subjects. Which inevitably involved social tragedy and politics in some of the works. Not that I automatically approve of atrocities being photographed. It is a kind of exploitation, and the only justification for it is the possibility that it might contribute to the will to change the way things are. It can also degenerate into a detached, voyeuristic form of thrill seeking. You certainly don’t want to fall into thoughts like, “Oh, I’m such an ethical person since I execrate events like those represented here.” Viewing depictions of the disasters of war is not intended to make us feel good about ourselves. But there’s no getting around the impact of the photographic record as compared to a journalistic account, and some people have speculated that the photograph taken during the Vietnam war that showed a naked little girl fleeing an attack shortened the war by a year.

This blog is jumping from thing to thing, but then my visit here has been sort of improvised and ad hoc, and the results are what they are. I have more to say, more things to report, but they can wait. Just glad I have this means of telling about the trip to my dozens of friends, whom it's impossible to write as often as I'd like,