All during the first six months of that last school year, he felt as if he had been trapped inside a stranger’s body and could no longer recognize himself when he looked at his face in the mirror, which was also true of the thoughts he was thinking whenever he looked inside his head, since they were mostly the thoughts of a stranger as welclass="underline" cynical thoughts, splenetic thoughts, disgusted thoughts that had nothing to do with the person he had once been. Eventually, a man would come down from the north and help cure him of his bitterness, but that didn’t happen until the first day of spring, and the fall and winter were hard on Ferguson, so hard that his body broke down and he wound up in the emergency room.
If he wasn’t going to be a journalist anymore, then it made no sense to go on reporting for the Spectator. For the first time in years, he would be able to crawl out of his glass monastery and rub shoulders with the world again, not as a chronicler of other people’s actions but as the hero of his own life, however troubled and confused that life might have been. No more reporting, but nothing so drastic as a total break, since he loved the people he worked with there (if he respected any journalists in America now, it was Friedman and the other Spectator boys), so rather than cut all ties to the paper, he relinquished his spot as an associate member of the board and turned himself into an occasional reviewer of books and films, which meant that he handed in about one longish piece every month, speculations on such divergent topics as the posthumous poems of Christopher Smart and Godard’s newest film, Weekend, which Ferguson argued was the first instance on record of what he called public Surrealism, as opposed to the private Surrealism of Breton and his followers, for the two and a half days from Friday afternoon to Sunday night, commonly referred to as the weekend, made up approximately one-third of the week in industrial and post-industrial societies such as France and America, just as the seven or eight hours an individual spent in bed every night constituted about one-third of that person’s life, the dreamtime of private men and women in parallel to the dreamtime of the society they lived in, and Godard’s anarchic, blood-spattered film of smashed-up cars and cannibalistic sex was nothing if not the exploration of a mass nightmare, which was just the sort of thing that spoke most deeply to Ferguson now.
Hilton Obenzinger and Dan Quinn were appointed the new editors in chief of the Columbia Review, David Zimmer and Jim Freeman were the new associate editors, and Ferguson became one of nine on the literary board. Two issues per year as in the past, but now money had been raised to set up something called the Columbia Review Press, which would allow them to publish four small books in addition to the two issues. When the thirteen gathered for their inaugural meeting at Ferris Booth Hall in mid-September, there was little argument about the first three titles on the list. Poems by Zimmer, poems by Quinn, and a collection of stories by Billy Best, an ex — Columbia student who had dropped out five years earlier but was still in touch with various members of the Review. The fourth book posed a problem. Jim and Hilton both begged off, saying they didn’t have enough strong work to fill sixty-four pages, perhaps not even forty-eight pages, and then, during a pause in the discussion, Hilton unwrapped a one-pound package of ground beef, bunched it up in his hands, rose from his chair, and flung it with great force against a wall, shouting the word Meat! as it smacked against the surface and stuck there for a few seconds before it slid down to the floor. Such was Hilton’s brave Dada spirit, and such was the spirit of that year, when the best minds on campus understood that the most important questions could be answered only by off-the-wall non sequiturs, in contrast to the up-against-the-wall tactics of the previous spring, and once everyone had applauded Hilton for his lesson on the finer points of logic, Jim Freeman looked at Ferguson and said, What about your translations, Archie? Do you have enough of them to make a book?
Not quite, Ferguson said, but I did a lot of work over the summer. Can we wait until the spring?
By unanimous vote it was decided that a small anthology of Ferguson’s twentieth-century French poets would be the fourth and final book published that year. When Ferguson reminded them that it was illegal to publish translations without buying the rights to the originals, no one seemed to care. Quinn pointed out that the edition would be limited to five hundred copies, most of which would be given away for free, and if a French publisher happened to come to New York and stumble across Ferguson’s book on a shelf in the Gotham Book Mart, what could he do about it? They would all be gone by then, scattered far and wide across the country and no doubt across other countries as well, and why would anyone bother to go after them for a couple of hundred dollars?
I’m with Dan, Zimmer said. Fuck money.
For the first time in what must have been weeks, if not months, Ferguson laughed.
Then they voted again, just to make it official, and one by one all thirteen members of the Columbia Review board repeated Zimmer’s words: Fuck money.
Jim and Hilton set a cutoff date of April first for handing in the finished manuscript, which would give them enough time to print the book before they all graduated in June, and as the months pushed on, Ferguson often wondered what would have happened to him if Jim Freeman hadn’t asked his question, for with each month that passed, it was becoming more and more clear to him that the deadline was saving his life.
Those poems were his refuge, the one small island of sanity where he didn’t feel estranged from himself or at odds with Everything That Was, and even though he had finished many more translations than he had let on at the meeting, no fewer than a hundred pages so far, perhaps a hundred and twenty, he forged on with his versions of Apollinaire, Desnos, Cendrars, Éluard, Reverdy, Tzara, and the others, wanting to accumulate an abundance of material to work with when the time came to pare down the selection to the fifty or sixty pages the press could afford to publish, a dissonant book that would dart around from the brokenhearted cries of The Pretty Redhead to the mad, musical tumbling act of Tzara’s Approximate Man, from the discursive rhythms of Cendrars’s Easter in New York to the lyric grace of Paul Éluard:
Do we reach the sea with clocks
In our pockets, with the noise of the sea
In the sea, or are we the carriers
Of a purer and more silent water?
The water rubbing against our hands sharpens knives.
The warriors have found their weapons in the waves
And the sound of their blows is like
The rocks that smash the boats at night.
It is the storm and the thunder. Why not the silence
Of the flood, for we have dreamt within us
Space for the greatest silence and we breathe