Light while there is light : an American history

139 Pages·2013·1.79 MB·English

by  Keith, Waldrop

LIGHT WHILE
THERE IS LIGHT
An American History
Keith Waldrop
Introduction by Jaimy Gordon
Dedication
For Elaine
Epigraph
The overtakelessness of those
Who have accomplished death...
—EMILY DICKINSON
Work, for the night is coming....
—OLD HYMN
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
A Pilgrimage
Tibet
Discerning of Spirits
The Call Asserts Nothing
About the Author
Copyright
Selected Other Works by Keith Waldrop
Introduction
I always knew I was not going to measure up as a literary giant, so from the start
I put my hopes on making myself a name as a literary pygmy, that is, on writing
one great but undoubtedly odd, sui generis, irreplaceable, one of a kind,
modestly immortal book. The book I had in mind would be a novel along the
lines of Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica, or Sybille Bedford’s A
Legacy, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, Walter Abish’s How
German Is It, Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke, J. R. Ackerley’s We Think the
World of You, or Harry Mathews’s Tlooth. True, each of these novels being by
its nature unlike any other, they reveal nothing in common to the aspiring
imitator, besides being the one book by their various authors (some prolific,
most not) that one really couldn’t live without. Oh yes, and I first heard of all of
them from Keith Waldrop, the best person I know to talk about books with—
whatever it is, he’s read it, has an opinion on it, and has it in his library on
Elmgrove Avenue in Providence, in the next room, or just upstairs.
Therefore it’s both fitting and something of an impertinence that Keith
Waldrop would end up writing such a novel himself. Beautiful, funny, wise, sad,
endearingly economical in size, guaranteed one of a kind in voice and subject
matter, inimitable, universally admired by that small percentage of the human
race that has read it, Light While There is Light, which first appeared from Sun
& Moon in 1993, was an instant eccentric classic. In protest I step out of the line
where the would-be writers of one great but peculiar novel are waiting, to write
this introduction. I will be brief.
Where was the need? Keith Waldrop is a poet with some fifteen volumes in
that other genre to his credit. Both his first, A Windmill Near Calvary (1968),
and his latest, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, were nominated for the
National Book Award, which he won in 2009. He is the translator of another ten
or twelve books, including an important, illuminating prose version of Les
Fleurs du mal. As co-editor and publisher, along with his wife Rosmarie
Waldrop, of Burning Deck Press since 1961, he has been a major influence on
two or three generations of innovative writing in America, and was even
knighted by the Republic of France in the year 2000—named Chevalier des arts
et des lettres—for his contributions. In short, Keith Waldrop is a fully arrived
international person of letters, a literary giant, there you have it, and a brilliant
visual artist besides. So where was the need to toss off a great small novel like
no other?
Light While There is Light, though surely a work of imaginative fiction in
design, is a bit shifty about its genre. It calls itself, not a novel, but An American
History. A bookish, patient, witty, gently melancholic, ruminative narrator with
the same name as the author and a rare gift for anecdote recalls his bizarre but
profoundly American and Midwestern family, not from without—and this is the
special art of the book—but from within, as a member, lifelong, like it or not,
willy-nilly.
“All my family, and Julian is our type in this, have a streak of the unworldly,”
the narrator tells us. Long before Keith is born, just after the birth of the oldest of
his three half siblings, Mother—possibly in reaction to an offhand remark from
that handsome wastrel, her first husband—gets religion and passes it on as a
lifelong quest to her young family, which, despite many obstacles, hard travels,
and theological and financial gyrations, never entirely loses it again. The book’s
long opening chapter, which takes up almost half the novel, is entitled “A
Pilgrimage”; in due course we realize that Mother’s long search, at first with her
one marriageable daughter in tow, for a church sufficiently homelike, unworldly,
and doctrinally pure, will never end, not even when she comes to rest, in her last
days, in a rented garage in Champaign, Illinois.
The terrible truth that haunts the family and the novel is that the world might
simply be dull and meaningless: The history of my mother’s religious opinions
should be told as the record of a pilgrimage. As I imagine most pilgrimages, it
was less the struggle toward a given end than a continual flight from
disappointment and unhappiness. Neither the joys of heaven nor hell’s worst
prospects provide as forceful a motive as the mere emptiness of the world.
It takes an eccentric, Waldropian sort of genius to see a weak attachment to
the world-as-it-is as the common thread between Mother’s wounded and wary
fundamentalism, sister Elaine’s cheerful obedience, brother Charles and brother
Julian’s talent (talent is not quite the word) for flimflam and otherwise illegal
solutions to all of life’s problems, and the narrator’s troubled spirit: “I was often
afraid in those days, more than a little sometimes: afraid that there was no truth,
or that there was one truth, only one, and that I had it.” His faith wavers and
slowly blinks out, becomes one of the book’s many shadows of an absence.
Light While There is Light takes its title from the Gospel of John, 12:35-36:
“Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he that walketh
in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth. While ye have light, believe in the
light, that ye may be the children of light.”
At rhythmic intervals—in this respect as much like music as collage—the
novel revisits the theme of the narrator’s own relations with light, in brief,
image-rich variations throughout the text, each floating in its own shining white
space. Is this the light of the title? The light of God? Of revealed truth about a
God we once thought to grasp with our senses? Maybe it is just—light. The
physiological phenomenon of light, its perception and attendant sensations, is a
subject of deep interest to Keith Waldrop the poet. Passages about it, images of
it, are scattered all over his work. But in Light While There is Light, it is both
itself—light—and the leitmotif for the origin and end of faith: what precedes it,
what survives it.
I remember, for some reason, a film I once saw, in which sequences
resembling old, contrasty photographs faded, not into darkness like the usual
fade, but into a bright white empty screen, so that the story seemed sketched
in elaborate shadows against a field of perpetual light—shining now through
the pictures, illuminating them, and now supplanting them, shining on its
own.
The odd balance of pleasures in a small, perfect, one-of-a-kind novel can be
inventoried better than it can be explained. Some of its delights may sound like
suffering when lifted out of the book for closer examination: for example, Light
While There is Light is an exemplary Midwestern novel (though a substantial
chunk of it unfolds at an unaccredited Bible College in Sharon, South Carolina)
in its understanding of space as a baffling, featureless surplus—what is a pair of
towns like Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, doing in the so-called real world at all?
And yet, only because Keith once tried, briefly, to go to university there, a good
many family members get stuck in the homely sister cities seemingly for life—
even after the family used car lot is no more (see chapter three, “Discerning of
Spirits”). I hate to accuse the narrator Keith Waldrop of anything as banal as a
Midwestern trait, but what else, pray (I still live in the Midwest) is that polite
hopelessness in the face of an ever receding normal that one eventually
concludes was never there in the first place?
The narrator’s voice in Light While There is Light, though it sometimes recalls
that of Keith Waldrop the poet, is unlike any other in fiction, and likewise the
character for whom it speaks. Always preserving its uniquely Waldropian
distance, a sort of Olympian bemusement, quietly affectionate and without the
slightest temptation to judge, what it tells, first of all, is the story of a family as it
travels through place and time. In a tragicomic way, they are rather a close
family—they keep scattering and coming together again, like globules of stale
milk in a cup of hot coffee. “Pilgrimage” yields to “Tibet”—though no one in
the family goes anywhere near Tibet—as those travels grow stranger and
stranger. In a compressed, musically segmented, anecdotal style of his own
invention, but with all the building power of narrative, the author recounts each
family member’s religious experiences, flights from the law, nuptial pairings,
and economic woes. His own troubles fade into the background, once he is an
academic with a stable job and a place to live. But we can make out all the same
what their youngest member begins to look like to the rest of the family: at once
their salvation and their deserter, the one who flew the coop.
Is it wrong for me to love madly and even wish to elope with his one slender
novel, more than the entire sagging shelf of his poetical works? Remarkably,
1
Keith Waldrop himself told an interviewer in 2008: “I never wanted to be
known as a poet. I’m in some ways more interested in writing prose than verse
although verse is much easier. . . . Prose rhythm to me is very difficult and it’s
something I love. I like Henry James better than any poetry I can think of.”
He went on to air another startling idea in that three-way conversation (Keith
Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop, Jared Demick), as one sometimes hears oneself do,
in a live interview, to one’s own consternation. Even Rosmarie was taken aback:
Keith: I think of my one novel as my major work. Out of all my work, that’s the
one I . . .
Rosmarie: Really?
Keith: . . . put at the top.
Rosmarie: I’m surprised.
Perhaps it was what he had been reading, or eating, that week, but—having
talked about books with Keith Waldrop for forty years, I’m inclined to believe
he meant what he said. (He may have changed his mind later: There is
something about winning the National Book Award, as he did, in poetry, the
following year, that warms a writer to the work in question, whatever the genre.)
I, however, was not completely astonished to hear Keith Waldrop speak of Light
While There is Light as the best, or most lasting, thing he’s done, for another
reason: I have always thought that the soul of Keith Waldrop’s verse, too, is,
2
oddly enough, prose. Much as I admire them, I read his books of poetry as
something like the collected marginalia of an ageless scribe, somewhat loopy on
the fumes of decomposing paper and fermented printer’s ink, who lives in the
bottomless vault of a library. Keith Waldrop is, even in so-called real life, a poet
who likes to say that he would rather read than write, and most of the books in
the Waldrops’ actual library—of which belles lettres constitute only a part—are
works of prose. History, archaeology, architecture; epistemology and
metaphysics, theology and religion; music; geology, botany, vulcanology;
psychology, neurophysiology, the study of the brain and the senses—these are
some of the subjects that are well represented on those crammed shelves. They
are also a fair sampling of the kinds of books—whether antiquarian, crank or
scholarly—whose ghost prose echoes in the poetry.
From his earliest book, A Windmill Near Calvary, which could almost pass for
a conventional collection, to his latest, Transcendental Studies, whose avowed
modus operandi was collage, Keith Waldrop’s poems often seem to be built of
sentences quarried out of faraway prose matrices—used sentences from lost,
antique, dog-eared, half-remembered tomes; sentences missing a piece here and
there, logical edges not quite flush, patched and interpolated, but never quite
losing the character of distant prose—ghost prose, so to speak. Their prose
origins linger in part because the poet makes us heavily aware of their periods—
not periods in the Ciceronian sense, but in the straightforward, punctuational
sense of a full stop. In a Keith Waldrop poem, we hear the sentences as
sentences (even when they’re incomplete) because they so definitely end. One
ends, and without transition another, probably from some other area of humane
inquiry, begins. Medical advice, curious superstitions, Biblical exegesis,
aphorism, architectural description, the crusty residue of an anecdote—any of
these might get its ghostly sentence in the poem. They lie like cantilevered
architraves on top of one another, because that’s how poems are shaped, but still
they feel like prose.
This is from “Beauty,” a poem in A Windmill Near Calvary: According to a
newspaper account, maybe distorted in my remembering (told me, come to think
of it, by my brother, who sometimes lies), a man carrying a shotgun down Main
Street in some town or other
explained to a policeman that an hour before, on the same block, another man,
a total stranger, spit in his eye and told him it was raining. It is
possible to look, neither at surfaces nor beneath them, but geometrically,