The next row of books was so disappointing — for example, three volumes of the works of that impossible poet they tried persuading GD to translate into English, the novelettes of Herman Wouk, Vicki Baum, Hans Fallada — he felt he had to check if the “treasure” he had under his sleeve was really the book he thought it was. He looked at the timeworn, almost non-existent binding, the near-extinguished glow [like the liminal glow around a flame: his reason for taking it]. It was old, but at least it was the right book. Then Gabriel Donovan suddenly thought he was too hasty in judging the row of books disappointing, for while flashing his eyes along the upper shelves, past some old gazettes and anthologies of English poetry compiled by Patrick Gannon, he happened upon the very paperback copy of Henry Williamson he needed to complete his collection. Then he found a copy of And the Name of the Star by Oliver Stonor, and that hard-to-find French bibelot — which French booksellers gloated was actually impossible-to-find, a claim he not only disputed but which he vowed to confute—La muse demi mondaine et les antibiotiques, the first and last work of Luc Crespin — a kind of Radiguet figure to Lucien Rebatet’s Cocteau; that’s to say, a last intimate acquaintance [but we must specify what we mean by “intimate” lest it be understood with the same unscrupulous literality the French scandal-mongers derived from perusing their Littré].
And in another tray he found [the works of Swindon listed before and …] Then he suddenly got the impression he was in his own library and was afraid he was no longer in the place he thought he was …
Because whoever arranged or mixed up the books would never have thought to do so in the following order: [unrealistic books, Sebastian Knight, Herbert Quain …]
An ordering that inexplicably corresponded with his own — with Donovan’s — personal, interior, library
Time, air, and substance, aspects of the real we take for granted, but which seemed unreal in that single volume initialed [prepared by] HQ [Herbert Quain] containing both April March and The God of the Labyrinth. When his fingers found the well-worn edge of a copy of The Prismatic Bezel, he lost his breath, and his heart skipped a beat … with a sense of foreboding aptness, there was a copy of The Tragedy of S. K., by John Goodman, lacking a jacket and balanced precariously on a shelf’s edge.
And then, slowly, with a characteristic swaying back and forth, which his best friends had detected when they accompanied him on his bookish excursions, [on their way to Esmé’s] Gabriel Donovan was fading away from, crumbling out of the dream he’d been dreaming. When he found himself again …, he realized he’d arrived, as if by magic, in his own house …
He hadn’t regained his calm after the return journey, which he made believing himself laden with treasure, a journey that felt like a swift descent; nor had he lost sight of those images of private devotion from which he was so rudely awakened …
#??? He was found dead: a happy suppression of consciousness and all conjecture, passively accepted in every tribal dialect [the following day]. [Circumstantial data] No one believed, etc.
No one wanted to believe.
While others — puffed with bombast — appear
To lash the sea’s shoulders, skirt the poles
Though blustering of all things tropical;
They lantern the moon, lend Apollo a taper
Worse than the lady of my mind, my Earth,
Who, once baptized, foreswore her place of birth.
These you will see depicting battle scenes
Full of gorgons, griffins, and centipedes
Invoking Scylla, their runaway harlot.
Lope, “Epistle to Barrionuevo”
With a grammar book signed by T. Anlunle in which were copied the following lines [from the second sestina]:
Because it was the touch of a distant stream
That made his visible [palpable], broke its surface
As a body falling in the concave glass of night,
As dreams mirror the last day’s wayward steps
Leading to a false awakening [dawning],
To the icy sting of awakening without him
A kind of parody or burlesque of Elizabethan writing
Inquiry about the Progresse of Sickness[e] and the Behavior of Death. Elizabeth, [Jean-Marie] Maurice Schérer, Gallimard, 1946.
Lord Swindon: Early Fiction (André Deutsch, 1964).
Lady Centipede, Religious Matters, The Game and the Solitude, Before & After Firbank, Auday & Ainchil,
Dreams that money can buy
“Disney contra the metaphysicians …” Perri
The Referent
By Nicasio Urlihrt
Followed by notes and commentary
By Oliverio Lester and Ema Teodelina Wuhl
Epilogue by Luis Chitarroni
Ema Wuhl
Magritte
Apple: western communism
After visiting the pathologist
Inscribe Miss Gee’s verses in a Gideon Bible. See original draft of “The Old Bachelor”
In February 1971, the French journal, Alusif / Imposture, launched a short-story competition. Instead of using a panel of judges to arbitrate on their suspiciously nepotistic, allegedly venal, and indisputably subjective standards of taste, winners were chosen for their ability to fulfill two very special criteria. The first was quantitative: whoever managed to adulterate their story with the most references and allusions would win. A key to these allusions should be sent as well, in a separate envelope and signed with a pseudonym (or, if the story was submitted under a pseudonym, a different pseudonym), specifying for each allusion or reference the title of the work in question, its author, and, where possible, the appropriate page number, chapter, publisher, and year of publication.
Considering the literary atmosphere of the time — the days of Tel Quel, Barth’s “Literature of Exhaustion,” and the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle … the era stretching from The Waste Land to Ada (which latter would have been published right around the same time the contest took place?); not to mention that of Finnegans Wake—the second criterion was a patriotic one: French literature might have felt a little depleted, not quite the [roll call] starry firmament it had presented in previous centuries. Why weren’t these great precursors more appropriated [drawn upon]?