by James Greer
I had flipped through these same pages countless times, so many that my borrowed paperbacks (the paperback edition was in two volumes, as opposed to the three-volume hardcover) had come unleaved in several spots—one entire chapter had fallen out of the first volume, still glued together and discrete, but freed from its mooring. For a few weeks I carried around just the separate chapter, which was 22 of Volume One in the paperback set, which corresponds to Chapter 1 of Volume Two in the hardcover edition. O’Hanlon did not title the chapters of this book, so those few who still read him had developed a shorthand method of making sure we were on the same page, which was simply a form of notation: HC V. 1, 14, for instance, or PB V. 2, 6.
PB V. 1, 22 was the chapter that started, “In sweller days, on taller nights, Farrell conceded that his life had uneclipsed its genesis …” and because so much of it dealt with things I knew or felt I knew firsthand—rites of adolescent passage, but writ huge, on mythic scale—it became for a while my favorite chapter. Rarely did O’Hanlon’s chapters follow coherent themes through to anything like completion, but PB V. 1, 22 came as close as he or I could ever come (because he was dead, and I was dumb) to dialogue.
O’Hanlon’s deal, in brief: He was born in Galway in 1893, third son in a family with four sons and two daughters, both younger. He studied biology at University College Dublin, then went off to America in 1913 to seek his fortune, at the insistence of his mother. His father had vanished two years earlier down a crevasse in Norway. He published a book of short stories, Hunting Accidents, in 1920, which did not sell well. His first novel, Reverse Chronological Order, came out in 1927, sold even worse, and in addition was attacked by the Council for Decency and the American Family as being generally opposed to both, although to modern minds (as with most controversial novels of the time, Chatterly and Ulysses et al.), the subject matter—a crosscountry trip by railroad with an unnamed narrator and a department-store mannequin he calls Lailah, or at other times Dalailah, and which comes to life toward the end of the trip (or maybe it’s a delusion of the narrator—we never know for sure)—seems tame. The two are married in San Francisco at the end of their journey by an eccentric pastor who may or may not be Mark Twain. With any O’Hanlon book, though, the plot’s just a peg from which he hangs his versicolored sentences. Disappointed with the commercial and critical reception of his two books, O’Hanlon returned to Ireland just before the Second World War, in 1938. His timing was fortuitous, as of course Ireland remained neutral during that conflict and he was able to write unhindered. The result, his second novel, published in 1948, is widely regarded by those few who remember him today as his chef-d’oeuvre. Miserogeny purportedly records the Atlantic crossing O’Hanlon made (or rather his fictive alter-ego, Thomas Farrell) on the steamer Erato back to Ireland from New York City, but there’s little of the diarist’s accretion of mundane details in this soaring, hymnic novel. Actually, I take that back—there’s an insane accumulation of detail, and among these you’ll find copious references to weather patterns and tidal flow, but these might as well be weather patterns on Venus and tidal flow at the center of the earth. The narrative thrust of Miserogeny is in the oceanic rhythm of the prose itself—its “inhuman music,” to quote a contemporary reviewer—rather than the threads of sense that intertwine and tangle over the course of the two (or three) volumes. It’s not impenetrable in the sense that Finnegans Wake or later Beckett is impenetrable—in other words, the language is recognizably English, and there are spiraling stories within stories within stories, but all recognizable, enfin, as stories. Nor is it curlicued and immense in the way Proust can be; O’Hanlon’s muse (signified, possibly, by the name he gives to the steamer in his book, which I have not been able to find in any shipping registry, ancient or modern, available to me) was lyric and concise, and worked, by repetition of themes and phrases, a fugal magic.
That this magic seems to affect only a select few does not, for me, lessen its impact. I first found Miserogeny while plowing through middle-of-the-last-century Irish literature (Flann O’Brien, Donleavy). I came across a footnote in A.B. Marconi’s admirable overview, The Uncreated Conscience, referring to “the eccentric autodidact Sean O’Hanlon, whose Miserogeny, a diffusely prolix meditation on death and dying, is too little read these days,” which quoted the passage from the first chapter that begins, “High above the piling waves …” and something gave way inside me. I tracked down the two-volume paperback in a library in Columbus, after first exhausting the “resources” of the Dayton area, as well as the libraries of Cincinnati and Yellow Springs. My reaction—such a limp word for such a profound event—to the first read-through was immediate and permanent. I have never been so deeply affected by anyone or anything in my life. The books seemed to contain everything I had ever thought but lacked the skill to express, filtered through the perceptions of a mind so subtle, and so finely pitched, that the resultant prose seemed as close as I would ever get in mortal guise to the Divine.
After publishing Miserogeny (which again failed to find the audience it deserved, or maybe found exactly the audience it deserved, depending which side of the elitist razor you choose to straddle), O’Hanlon himself turned silent. He lived until his death in the mid-’60s in a stone cottage on the northern coast of Ireland, refusing visitors, much less interviews, and producing nothing. Some said he was still writing, some said he had renounced writing and had turned his full attention to a study of the Eleusinian mysteries, some said simply that he had gone mad. I don’t think any of these options are unlikely, nor do I think any cancels any other out.
No, that’s not true. It’s true that I don’t think that any of these options cancels any other out, but it’s not true that he turned silent after retreating to the northern coast of Ireland. In fact, he did simply go insane: He began first by trying to reissue his previous writing under the pen name James Joyb, on the theory that a careless browser might be tricked into buying what he thought was a book by Joyce, whose work would be shelved right next to his. The ruse didn’t work, naturally, as no respectable publisher was willing to serve as accomplice. After that, his descent into madness quickened: He began self-publishing crudely anti-Semitic and racist tracts with titles like: Let’s Go Fly a Kike! and To Hell with the Negro, and others even more depressing, if possible. At the end of his life, he took to wandering the streets of his rural village, muttering dark curses to anyone careless enough to pause for a moment in his vicinity, until one night a gang of drunk kids leaving the local pub beat him to death with rocks.
As I turned the books over in my hand and examined the title pages and flipped through the prose I had nearly memorized, resisting the urge to quote one or another of my favorite passages to Kurt, my initial shock at his generosity transformed itself into a growing excitement, which in turn morphed into a feeling of the deepest, purest affection I had ever experienced. In that instant, I was possessed by a sense of true love. Which is what led directly to my blunder—because unharnessed true love requires, I’ve come to believe, an analogous and mitigating mistake; otherwise the world might blow apart from the stress of a billion overflowing hearts.
I’ll allow that the flavor of the hurried present may color the memory of that slow moment, but I imagine—I see, as if it were happening right now, as if that precise piece of time had been woven forever on some minutely detailed tapestry that I could examine at leisure—that I jumped out of my chair with possibly frightening speed, though Kurt did not look scared. I bent or sprawled over him, and hugged him for the first and only time. His body went rigid, and he did not move his arms, but I was too drunk and flush with gratitude to notice. I hung on too long, as a result, and breathed wine-flavored endearments into Kurt’s ear. When I let go and stumbled back to my seat, he looked pale and seemed to be making an effort to control his emotions. I didn’t say anything for a while. I guessed that Kurt was embarrassed by my effusiveness, but that his usual equilibrium would soon reassert itself. Honestly, I didn’t care either way. I had
never received so perfect, so precious a gift, and would have reacted the same no matter the giver. The fact—unexpected yet impossible to imagine otherwise—that Kurt was the one to do such a thing, was particularly pleasant. For such a man to recognize the worth not just of books in general but this specific book to me, and to go to Lord knows what lengths to find such a rare and valuable copy (valuable not in monetary terms, though certainly there’s that, but in the sense of its lineage, and its direct connection to the author), was all the more touching.
But Kurt’s reaction troubled me. He got up from his chair, walked out of the room without saying anything, went straight up to I presume his bedroom. I was left with my expansive emotions and no one with whom to share them. I picked up my gift, cradling the volumes together under my arm, put on my coat, and went out into the silent, snowy streets. The mile-orso walk to my apartment seemed to take five minutes, and I cannot tell you now if the weather was bitterly cold or merely cold, because I didn’t notice anything. I walked automatically, as one does when thoroughly preoccupied, the way certain mathematicians are said to become when obsessed with an unsolvable proof. I remember sitting down on my bed and setting Kurt’s present next to the pillow. I remember turning the pages of Miserogeny reverently, the way you should never turn pages in a book. I wasn’t reading: I was caressing. And the thought did occur to me, as I dropped off by degrees into uneasy sleep, that I was not caressing the book.
Of the brown bubble of time surrounding Christmas I remember little else. For the past couple of years, I’d tried not to notice the holiday season because I was reminded that I had no close friends and no lovers except the ones I summoned when I read. Also for another, more definite reason.
My mother’s unexpectedly swift death by cancer two years ago, when I was a sophomore at Antioch, had drained the surrounding days of color and light, until everything had the hue of Joyce’s Dubliners—a paralytic yellow, clotted with dun-colored leaves in the gray slush on the side our gray street. She died on Christmas Day. I had gone to bed after midnight, having read her to sleep with A Child’s Christmas in Wales, which was a favorite of ours both, which was rare. When I went to her room to wake her the next morning, she had acquired a delicate jacaranda-flower color, and her skin was unresponsive and cold like close friends or lovers in books. Birth of Christ, death of Mom, was the unreal first thought to plop unwanted into my brainpan, where it rattled around uneventfully for a while. I did not fall apart. I did the opposite of fall apart. I drew together very, very tight. Every strand of my being twisted itself around a central core of rigid awareness. I would not break; I would not even bend. I pulled aside the curtains, light green with a spiraling pattern of blackbirds, to admit the sun. I remember puzzling over the cerulean sky and dazzling light—Mom’s bedroom window was oriented eastward, if that’s not redundant—before walking carefully, so’s not to wake her, down to the kitchen where I put on some coffee and started making the necessary calls.
She had not allowed herself the fallacy of medical treatment. She had refused even medication to lessen the pain, and so she died in pain, as she had lived in pain for many months. For a long time she would not let on that anything was wrong, but during one of my infrequent weekend visits that fall, her uncharacteristic languor and evident difficulty with basic tasks—walking, talking—disclosed what I had already begun to suspect, but had not wanted to believe, from our phone conversations. I knew better than to suggest a visit to the doctor, and I knew, further, that her mother had died in a similar way, refusing any treatment except that of the Christian Science practitioner, or nurse-practitioner, as these brave unmedical souls variously billed themselves. You cannot intervene in matters of faith, even when your one living connection to the world is threatened. Even when the deep and abiding love you hold, on some subsumed level, for all people and all life is focused and directed onto one human body, and that body is dying. My mother’s faith never wavered. Where I saw passive suicide, she saw righteous affirmation of her lifelong principles. Death was a test she was determined to pass, and in the end she did pass.
Was I being selfish? Of course. Is selfishness a defining characteristic of human beings? Okay, sure. Everything fades, fails, falls. Everyone leaves. I’ve always known that—everyone has always known that, every infant even, who experiences a tiny death when his father leaves the house, when his mother leaves the room. The periodic reminders fate had conspired to present me of this central fact served the useful purpose of detaching me from myself, so that I might at least survive, so that I could live. This detachment, in turn, inspires selfishness—requires it, even. So I am selfish, and sad, and cut off from the people I love by an impermeable wall of mortal flesh. Just like you.
Around this time Kurt started to vanish. Literally: We wouldn’t see him for a while, and then he would reappear and act as if nothing had happened. Someone would see him shuffling down Brown toward the grocery store or the laundry or the coffee shop, or, more often, he’d simply show up at his usual table at the Hive or The Pearl, or both, and without preamble, as usual, pick up the thread of some dismembered conversation. He would not discuss where he’d been nor even acknowledge that he’d been anywhere at all, so that if we were drunk enough, we would start to unbelieve our former conviction that he hadn’t been around. I think most of us knew the truth, but it took a number of these disappearances before we were convinced that a pattern was forming. Not that his whereabouts were any of our business, but his refusal even to admit that he’d been gone split the regulars into two distinct camps: one who believed that Kurt was simply vacationing, pursuing one or another of his imagined-by-us hobbies, although the various theories advanced regarding these ranged from the ridiculous (“He’s a closet bird watcher”) to the even more ridiculous (“He’s moonlighting as a train conductor”); and the other, who assumed he was off on music-related business, possibly touring some far-flung patch of earth in support of some record his band had released, despite the fact that we never saw or heard from any other members of his band, and despite the fact that Kurt himself never made reference to any kind of music-related activity. I only once saw him with a guitar at Albion, though I’m sure that somewhere in its recesses he must have had one, or a hundred. There were also quite a few of us who simply didn’t care. Some of my friends asked me in a knowing tone, assuming that I was privy to Kurt secrets; even if I had been, I would not have vouch-safed them, and they took my shrugging silence as a complicit yes to whatever guess they’d made.
Kurt would leave for days at a time—the longest stretch I remember was five days, the average was probably three—and when he came back he was tired and disheveled and didn’t come out at night and refused all visitors. Or at least me—he refused to see me, even when I came by at 3 or 4 in the morning, drunk with the gift of a bottle of Sangre del Toro, a very cheap Spanish wine you could buy at closing time from the Hive for eight dollars. I usually bought two. He would not answer the door, though. I shouted up to the dark windows of Albion that it was me, Fiat, and that I had brought red wine, and that I knew he didn’t drink much but I certainly did. I was trying my best to be charming. My best was not well-received by shamming Kurt. Or maybe he really was asleep, impenetrably asleep, maybe he slept more deeply than I ever have in my life, no matter what quantity of alcohol I have drunk, no matter what combination of prescription medications I have swallowed. On my gravestone it will read, Here Lies Fiat Lux, Asleep at Last.
When dawn comes, and I shut my eyes in anticipation of a few sweet verses of semi-slumber, I experience the only real moments of happiness and peace I’ve ever been able to count on. The half-life of my prolonged drowse seems to last a good few hours, but probably’s considerably shorter. Time stretches as you fall asleep. Fragments of thought expand to hallucinatory size, assuming sometimes the shape of inspiration, and since I’ve never had any purpose to which to put inspiration, it serves me instead as an effective soporific—infusing my subsequent dreams with a hopeful tinge, so tha
t I’m almost always disappointed on waking up and seeping back to real life. The shapes outside my bedroom windows, usually dendriform, shed meaning and acquire form in daylight, much in the way most writing seems to do.
Now that my former life’s forever gone, I miss my thin mattress wrapped in flannel sheets, creaking on its uneasy frame. I miss the ragged shank of carpet covering up the badly stained and warped floorboards of my apartment. I miss the insulating properties of the bricks outside, and the heat vent close to my bed that buffets me with super-dry hot air no matter where I set the thermostat. I miss the small, scarred desk with its ancient lamp at which I would sit, in a chair too solid to be real, and read books I had brought home from the library. No more reading for me. What I do is hide, and write. When I’m done writing, I’ll be done hiding.
What words are: cancellation marks on the stamp of infinite space. Proof, I think, for those who lack faith. When I leave here, if I manage to leave, I’m gone for good. You will never find me. I do not want to be found. All that’s left to signify my existence will be words.
Notebook Thirteen
What crimes we have committed in whose name? I excoriate us, humanity, and our numb thumbwrestling, left hand versus right, pointless and pointlessly harmful. What is the world coming to, and when? When! I haven’t lost my mind, but I haven’t come up with anything in the way of a plan yet, and so all this writing is stalling, and though I suppose you could say that all writing is stalling, this is graduate-level stalling. Stalling grad. O Jack Christ.
By the end of winter, just before the time of no reply, we no longer used Albion with any frequency, mainly because Kurt was so often gone on his walkabouts. And when he was there, and we did go, the atmosphere was different. A new seriousness had replaced our formerly carefree attitude, a darkness had descended—gloom supplanting gloam, if you like—and I did not then and I do not now understand why.