the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt fifteen)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

The Guggenheim is just the most noticeable part of the plan to change Bilbao. As befitting a Bilbao museum, it has an industrial setting on the Nervión. But the container-loading rail yard next door is slated to be moved elsewhere. The city’s problems and the solutions that are being found are very much like those of other nineteenth-century industrial cities, such as Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Except that Clevelanders are not trying to build a country.

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt fourteen)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

How Bilbao ended up with a Guggenheim museum, paid for by Basque taxpayers, was a demonstration of the inner workings of the Basque Nationalist Party, the PNV. The project was a party dream, with nationalist motives that involved almost every imaginable calculation other than art. Josu Ortuando, mayor of Bilbao, said, “We were able to win out over Salzburg and other cities because city hall, parliament, and the Basque government could act as one.” Though it is not clear that the other cities wanted to win, what the mayor was referring to was the fact that all three levels of government were controlled by the PNV.

The Guggenheim Foundation, in financial difficulty, was shopping for a site to build a new Guggenheim, one that would not cost the foundation anything and in fact would generate revenue for it. Tokyo, Osaka, Moscow, Vienna, Graz, and Salzburg were among the cities that had already turned down this financially dubious proposition when the foundation director, Thomas Krens, heard of this curious thing—a Basque government. In the end, the Basque parliament, led by the Basque Nationalist Party, but in coalition with Socialists, approved the project. It was not so much the Basque government of the Basque legislature that was drawn to it as the Basque Nationalist Party. The key figure behind the scenes in the negotiations, the man whose thumb up or down was critical but who held no elected office, was Xabier Arzalluz, the Basque Nationalist Party boss.

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt thirteen)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

For years, nationalists struggled with this class image of Euskera as the language of peasants. The lower-class status of the language was often more image than reality. Many educated people spoke Euskera, and in some towns, notably the metal-working center of Eibar, Euskera was the language of both workers and management, a prerequisite for working in a factory even for an inmigrante from Andalusia.

Like Atxaga, Saizarbitoria found his inspiration in the invention of Batua and the works of Gabriel Aresti. Published in 1969, Saizarbitoria’s first novel, Egunero hasten delako (Because It Begins Every Day), was about abortion, which was legal in the rest of Europe but banned in Spain. The book’s subject and lean, carefully crafted prose launched a new genre in Eureskera literature—the modern social novel.

His second novel was published after Franco’s death, in 1976. Titled 100 metro, 100 Meter, it relates the thoughts of an ETA suspect in the last moments of his life, chased a final 100 meters, before being shot to death.

Saizarbitoria was never an ETA activist, but he was a sympathizer he said, “like almost everyone.” He has remained resolutely political. “I want to defend my culture and my identity, and sometimes nationalism is the only possibility. When I am with nationalist I am against them, but when I am with others I am a nationalist.”

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt twelve)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

Teaching Euskera was not allowed, but the Basque Nationalist Party and ETA offered “cultural events” that amounted to courses in Batua. Joseba’s teacher was a Basque Nationalist Party activist who, in between cultural events, more than once helped take over the radio station.

Joseba, who had always wanted to be a writer, at first found it difficult to imagine working in the secret language of his parents. That began to change when he met an infirm poet, old before his time, named Gabriel Aresti. Born in Bilbao in 1933, Aresti did not grow up speaking Euskera and was one of the first Euskaldunberri, literally, “new Basque speaker,” a non-Euskera speaker who learned the language through adult education. He went on to become one of the most influential writers of the new language. Although not a nationalist in the political sense—he was closer to the Spanish Communist Party than the nationalists—he was a passionate lover of Basqueness. His 1964 collection of poems, Harri eta Herri (Rock and People), earned him the affection of nationalists and a summons before a disapproving tribunal. But he also greatly expanded the language through such projects as translating the poetry of T. S. Eliot.

Joseba began writing poems and short stories and publishing them in underground magazines, using the name Bernando Atxaga to protect his true identity. Aresti, having read some of the stories, sent a note telling him that there were only five real writers in Euskera. “If you keep away from the purists you could be the sixth.”

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt eleven)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

Franco always had contempt for the impact of culture and so frequently neglected to repress writing and art intended as a protest against him. In 1957, José Luis was able to get his first novel published in Euskera under the pseudonym Txillardegi. The name came from the San Sebastián neighborhood where he grew up. Txillardegi writes in a seductively lyrical style that seems to burst uncontrollably into free verse from time to time.

The novel Leturiaren egunkari ezkutua (The Secret Diary of Leturia), was a milestone in Basque literature, presenting the first Basque antihero. Until then, literature in Euskera has been about Basque history and Basque tradition, about the great deeds of Basques. But Txillardegi’s novel was about the human condition—about love, grief, and suicide—a novel in Basque rather than a “Basque novel.”

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt ten)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

To the French, British, and Americans, Franco’s Spain was a pariah nation. Despite constant overtures by Franco, it was to be excluded from the United Nations, NATO, the Marshall Plan, and later, the European Economic Community. In effect, it was shut out of the postwar Western world. But it was not invaded. Spain was not to be liberated. The policy of President Franklin Roosevelt, stated in 1945, was that the United States would not interfere in Spain as long as it was not a threat to world peace. On the other hand, he said, “I can see no place in the community of nations for governments founded on fascist principles.” Ostracism but not intervention. In 1946, a Polish diplomat tried to make the case that Franco was “a threat to world peace” because German Nazis in Spain were building an atom bomb. This might have led to an invasion, except that the diplomat had no evidence to support his charge.

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt nine)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

The two met on October 23, 1940, at the train station in Hendaye, which is about 100 yards from the border, the St. Jacques Bridge over the Bidasoa. The meeting resembled a comic encounter from Charlie Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator, which was made the same year. Hitler and the German command were kept waiting, stiffly pacing in the train station. Franco’s slow chugging train arrived, depending on whose version is believed, either eight minutes or one hour late. There were rumors of an attempt on Franco’s life by grenade-throwing Spanish anarchists. No such attack took place, though a plot may have existed. Franco, mortified at being late, fumed and ranted., threatening to fire the officer responsible for his travel arrangements, but recovered in time to step down on the Hendaye platform, tears of joy glistening in his eyes. The Caudillo, as Hitler addressed Franco, was evidently overcome at the moment of meeting the man he addressed as the Führer.

Franco made his case for entering the war. Hitler talked of his war problems. Franco talked of his supply needs to ready for war. The two conversations rarely intersected. Hitler began to grow irritated. Franco, to show a knowledge of war strategy, suggested, as an aide had told him, that once England was defeated, the British would still fight on from Canada. The Führer did not find this an interesting point and, hopping to his feet, announced with notable agitation that it would be pointless to continue the conversation.

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt eight)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

The Germans and Italians had unveiled their new modern air force with the market in Guernica as its only target. The bombers dropped an unusual payload, splinter and incendiary bombs, a cocktail of shrapnel and flame personally selected by Richthofen for maximum destruction to buildings. As people fled, the fighters came in low and chased them down with heavy-caliber machine guns.

At 7:45 the planes disappeared, leaving the blackened forms of the few remaining walls silhouetted against the bursting flames, which glowed into the night sky.

The cratered streets were cluttered with the entrails of bombed out buildings—blackened bricks and twisted wires and pipes. In the rubble were the charred corpses of people, sheep, and oxen. The Basque government estimated that 1,645 people were killed in the three-hour attack. Guernica’s population was only 7,000, though between refugees and the market, there may have been another 3,000 people in town that afternoon. The only ones who had a chance to accurately count casualties were Franco’s troops, who occupied the town three days later. Records of what they found have never been released. At first they said it never happened. Later, they admitted to possibly two hundred casualties. But given the intensity of the attack and the population of the town, the number of dead must have been far higher than the 258 deaths in the much briefer bombing of Durango.

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt seven)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

Of the twenty-one major-generals on active service in the Spanish military, Franco was one of only four who were not loyal to the Republic. A squeaky-voiced, insecure little man, forty-four years old, Franco had an ability to lead and inspire that is hard to explain. Perhaps it was his confidence, his almost naïve belief in his ability to prevail. Among his few admirable qualities, he had demonstrated great physical courage as a young officer in the endless Moroccan war. With a keen sense of the power of terror and little knowledge of modern warfare, he loved bayonet charges, because they were frightening. He was both ruthless and heartless, using fear as his favorite weapon. As a field officer, leading charges, mounted on a white horse, he was known for brutality both in Morocco and, in 1917, when he was in command of one of the units putting down a miners’ strike in Asturias.

Franco had cunning rather than analytic intelligence, and an instinct for self-preservation rather than an ideology. He was capable of the most dramatic reversals, if they served his needs, fawning over Hitler when he thought Germany would win and then becoming pro-American to save himself. Acutely sensitive to symbolism, he wore clothes that reflected complex alliances and fantasies. When in the north, he often wore the red beret of Carlism, with the black shirt of fascism, and sometimes added a white admiral’s jacket.

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt six)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

The Spanish-American War, the Disaster, the Cuban War of Independence—it was a different war for different people. But only the United States won. Though the war’s boosters in America had promoted it as the war to rescue poor Cuba in its noble struggle against Spanish tyranny, once the new territories of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Phillipines were taken by military force, the United States had little interest in setting any of them free. In fact, the United States granted Puerto Rico and Cuba less self-government than the Spanish had offered. The new territories were, to the Americans, delicious war booty. Books with titles such as Our New Possessions excitedly introduced these prizes to the American public. Meanwhile, the Spanish public had to adapt to suddenly being without these places, the last of the empire that they had known for four centuries. Spain had lost the lands won by Columbus, Magellan, Elcano, and all the other great men reproduced in stone and bronze. The places with which they traded, the places to which a Spaniard went to seek a fortune or adventure, the places to go when things went wrong in Spain, the places that were Spain’s claim to being a world power, were gone.

This disaster produced the greatest flow of literature Spain had seen since the period from the mid-fifteenth century to the late sixteenth century known in Spanish literature as the golden age. The new turn-of-the-century writers and artists were called “the generation of ’98,” a group who responded to El Desastre by seeking to analyze and redefine the newly diminished Spain. Through paintings, novels, poems, and essays, they searched for the essence of Spain in Castilian landscape, in the history of the golden age, in critical examinations of classic literature such as Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha. The pivotal question was: How can Spain undergo a regeneration?

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt five)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

Nothing so illustrates the romance of the Carlist cause as their hat, the Carlist trademark, a large red beret. The Carlists brought the beret into fashion in Europe, and it has never since gone out of style. Although the first known used of the word beret dates to a 1461 text in Landes, and through Gascognes and others in the region had worn this hat of unknown origin, there has been a long-standing association between Basques and berets. Jesuit novices wore a birette, and a bas-relief in Tolosa dated 1600 shows berets. The Carlists wore it in red, the color traditionally worn on Basque holidays, and made it their own. La Boina, “the beret,” was the name of a Carlist newspaper, and it was during the First Carlist War that the French began referring to the hat, as they still do, as le beret Basque. Since the First Carlist War, the hat not only has become a central symbol of Basqueness but has also gained international popularity and is generally associated with the political left. Argentine leftist revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara saw no contradiction in using the image of the beret, because it is the hat of the underdog fighting the establishment.

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt four)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

The Carlists often seemed fanatically right-wing. They opposed an elected representative parliament as a foreign concept. They opposed universal male suffrage because it dismantled the privilege of rural landowners. Freedom of religion was objectionable because it diminished the power of the Catholic Church, and they were infuriated by the long overdue abolition of the Inquisition even though it had persecuted Basque peasants.

Freemasonry, a nonsectarian religious movement, was singled out by Carlists as a particularly odious enemy that, according to the bishop of Urgel, chaplain of the Carlist army, “has been robbing Europe and the new world of its beliefs and Christian morality.” Mystifyingly, Freemasons, by virtue of their lack of Church affiliation, have always been a target of denunciation, but especially in the nineteenth century. In the United States, the Anti-Masonic Party of 1827 was the first third party.

Though today Carlism seems extremist, in the volatile nineteenth century, Carlists were often seen as romantic figures. They were the underdogs, the brave and hardworking people of the countryside, fighting the powerful. Curiously, the great anti-cleric voice of the nineteenth-century industrial masses, Karl Marx, praised the Carlists and not the anti-Church Liberals: “The traditional Carlist has the genuinely mass national base of peasants, lower aristocracy and clergy, while the so-called Liberals derived their base from the military, the capitalists, latifundist artistocracy, and secular interests.”

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt three)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

The drink that Cortés brought back also quickly became popular in Spain, and when both Louis XIII and Louis XIV married Spanish princesses, their brides brought the drink to the French court. Louis XIV’s bride, María Theresa, the same bride who was served macaroons at her St.-Jean-de-Luz wedding, did little to dispel the belief that chocolate was a toxic and evil addiction. She could not stop drinking chocolate every day, and this was thought to be the reason that she lost all of her teeth.

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt two)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

In the early years of Christianity, hermetism was a common phenomenon, not only in the Basque region but throughout northern Iberia. Devout men lived harsh, ascetic existences alone in mountain huts. In the year 800, one such hermit in the northwestern Galicia region of Iberia saw a shaft of brilliant light. Following this beam, he came upon a Roman cemetery. Under the shaft of light he found a small mausoleum concealed by overgrown vines, weeds, and shrubs. Since beams of celestial light don’t lead to just anyone’s grave, he concluded that this must have been the burial place of Saint James, Santiago, brother of John the Divine. The cemetery became known as Campus Stellae, the star field, and later Compostela.

According to legend, James, one of the first disciples chosen by Jesus, after the crucifixion went off to a distant land, sometimes specified as Iberia, to find converts. Having failed, he returned to Jerusalem, where he was beheaded by Herod, who refused to allow his burial. Christians gathered up his remains at night, placing them in a marble sepulchre, which they sent to sea aboard an unmanned boat. According to early Christian legend, the ship was guided by an angel to the kingdom of the Asturians, which is an area between Basqueland and Galicia.

The Church confirmed the hermit’s finding in Galicia and had a church built over the spot. As the legend grew, an outbreak of miracles and visions was reported from Compostela. Sometimes Saint James was portrayed as a pilgrim and sometimes as a Moor-slaying knight. It was the age of Moor slaying, and many of the miracles and legends had to do with the triumph of Christianity over Islam. Much evidence even suggests that the French had fabricated the legends about Santiago, or his body, going off to Galicia, because they wanted to rally Christendom to defend northern Spain. One legend from the time claimed that Charlemagne himself, the great anti-Moorish warrior who died in 814, had found the body of Santiago in Galicia.

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt one)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

On August 15, 1534, Iñigo and his group of seven founded their new order, the Society of Jesus, otherwise known as the Jesuits. The founding ceremony, typically Jesuit and, perhaps, typically Basque, took place by a crypt in Montmartre, a subterranean site beneath the hill north of Paris, said to be of pagan significance. The Jesuits, whose vows were simply chastity, poverty, and a pilgraimage to Jerusalem, would become known for a tendency toward the occult but also for their strict discipline. They shunned the wearing of habits and renounced loyalty to local Church hierarchy. But they were fiercely loyal to the pope, leading the orthodox Counter-Reformation that tried to reclaim Protestant populations. True to the traditions of the Loyola family, the head of the order bears the title of general.

Ignatius was one of the Catholic Church’s great mystics, given to visions and trances. His eyes would run with tears for hours as he tried to recite prayers. The Jesuits became the first worldwide order, accomplishing more than Queen Isabella’s knights ever had to carry out her dream of spreading Catholicism to the new global Spanish Empire. In his battle against the Reformation, Ignatius made Jesuits in the tradition of medieval romance, knights who went forth in the world to conquer lands for the Church. Francisco, known as Francis Xavier, was his leading knight. Once the handsome and gregarious Francis, still only thirty-four, sailed from Lisbon for Asia in 1541, Ignatius would never see him again. Francis was a missionary in Japan, the Molucca Island, and Malaysia, and died in 1552 en route to China. He is remembered as the patron saint of missionaries. After his death, other Jesuits went to Africa, to the Caribbean, and to the Americas.

In 1556 Ignatius fell ill, this time deteriorating so quickly that he died without receiving last rites. At the time there were 1,000 Jesuits.

the last book I ever read (Train Dreams: A Novella by Denis Johnson, excerpt seven)

from Train Dreams: A Novella by Denis Johnson:

Over on Second Street, the Methodist congregation was singing. The town of Bonners made no other sound. Grainier still went to services some rare times, when a trip to town coincided. People spoke nicely to him there, people recognized him from the days when he’d attended almost regularly with Gladys, but he generally regretted going. He very often wept in church. Living up the Moyea with plenty of small chores to distract him, he forgot he was a sad man. When the hymns began, he remembered.

the last book I ever read (Train Dreams: A Novella by Denis Johnson, excerpt six)

from Train Dreams: A Novella by Denis Johnson:

“God needs the hermit in the woods as much as He needs the man in the pulpit. Did you ever think about that?”

“I don’t believe I am a hermit,” Grainier replied, but when the day was over, he went off asking himself, Am I a hermit? Is this what a hermit is?

the last book I ever read (Train Dreams: A Novella by Denis Johnson, excerpt five)

from Train Dreams: A Novella by Denis Johnson:

“Terrence Naples has took a run at Mrs. Widow,” he told Grainier, standing at attention in his starched pants and speaking strangely so as not to disturb the plaster dabs on his facial wounds, “but I told old Terrence it’s going to be my chance now with the lady, or I’ll knock him around the country on the twenty-four-hour plan. That’s right, I had to threaten him. But it’s no idle boast. I’ll thrub him till his bags bust. I’m too horrible for the young ones, and she’s the only go—unless I’d like a Kootenai gal, or I migrate down to Spokane, or go crawling over to Wallace.” Wallace, Idaho, was famous for its brothels and for its whores, and occasional one of whom could be had for keeping house with on her retirement. “And I knew old Claire first, before Terrence ever did,” he said. “Yes, in my teens I had a short, miserable spell of religion and taught the Sunday-school class tots before services, and she was one of them tots. I think so, anyway. I seem to remember, anyway.”

the last book I ever read (Train Dreams: A Novella by Denis Johnson, excerpt four)

from Train Dreams: A Novella by Denis Johnson:

Grainier had seen people dead, but he’d never seen anybody die. He didn’t know what to say or do. He felt he should leave, and he felt he shouldn’t leave.

the last book I ever read (Train Dreams: A Novella by Denis Johnson, excerpt three)

from Train Dreams: A Novella by Denis Johnson:

He lived through the summer off dried morel mushrooms and fresh trout cooked up together in butter he bought at the store in Meadow Creek. After a while a dog came along, a little red-haired female. The dog stayed with him, and he stopped talking to himself because he was ashamed to have the animal catch him at it. He bought a canvas tarp and some rope in Meadow Creek, and later he bought a nanny goat and walked her back to his camp, the dog wary and following this newcomer at a distance. He picketed the nanny near his lean-to.

the last book I ever read (Train Dreams: A Novella by Denis Johnson, excerpt two)

from Train Dreams: A Novella by Denis Johnson:

Grainier thought he must be very nearly the only creature in this sterile region. But standing in his old homesite, talking out loud, he heard himself answered by wolves on the peaks in the distance, these answered in turn by others, until the whole valley was singing. There were birds about, too, not foraging, maybe, but lighting to rest briefly as they headed across the burn.

the last book I ever read (Train Dreams: A Novella by Denis Johnson, excerpt one)

from Train Dreams: A Novella by Denis Johnson:

He climbed to their cabin site and saw no hint, no sign at all of his former life, only a patch of dark ground surrounded by the black spikes of spruce. The cabin was cinders, burned so completely that its ashes were mixed in with a common layer all about and then been tamped down by the snows and washed and dissolved by the thaw.

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt sixteen)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

When Tom spoke to Jimmy in the morning, he seemed much as he had the evening before. Tom was still worried, however, especially after he called him again later in the day and got no answer. At around 3:00 in the afternoon Tom went up to the room. He found Jimmy sprawled on his bed, unresponsive and unable to talk, almost unconscious. He had wet himself and everything in his room was knocked about. When Tom asked what was going on, Jimmy could only laugh and make ambiguous hand gestures. Tom then called Raymond Foye, who came down from his apartment. They called an ambulance, but while Raymond was out in the hall meeting the medics, Jimmy had a seizure and flung himself to the floor. When Jimmy had finally been loaded into the ambulance and it had begun to pull out from the front of the hotel, a car ran into it, and the first ambulance had to wait at the accident scene while another one was sent for. Finally Jimmy made it to St. Vincent’s, where he was admitted to the intensive care unit. A CT scan and other tests showed that Jimmy had had a stroke and a heart attack, but the heart attack had been more than twenty-four hours earlier. That evening, he remained unconscious and was on a respirator.

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt fifteen)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

Jimmy had already decided that he wanted to write a long, book-length poem of about a hundred pages during the visit. Two or three days after arriving in East Aurora, he sat down at the typewriter to begin. To himself he designated that morning as “the morning of the poem,” and that became the title. From that point on, he spent most of his mornings at the typewriter.

As he had done in writing “The Crystal Lithium” and “Hymn to Life,” he began by setting the margins of the typewriter as wide as they would go, and typed each line more or less to the end of the page. He soon recalled, however, that in setting the two earlier poems in type for their original publication, many of the lines had had to be broken and anything from one to four words at the end were dropped to an indented line below. It made a strong visual and rhythmic effect, and although it was not his original intention, Jimmy came to like the syncopation of the alternating longer and shorter lines. Although “The Morning of the Poem” was also begun in long unbroken lines, early on Jimmy decided to preempt the typesetter and retype the poem, making his own secondary line breaks and indenting the shorter lines. While the first part of each original line retains its initial capital letter, the second, indented part is not capitalized, a deliberate move “to indicate that it was all one line.”

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt fourteen)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

Jimmy’s first months at 250 East Thirty-fifth Street were quiet and lonely. A kind of anticlimax set in, and he found himself unable to write: “I sit down at the typewriter, and a big fat nothing happens,” he complained to Clark Coolidge. Jimmy was also conscious of getting older: “This Friday I’ll be fifty, a fact totally unreal to me. I never thought about getting to be fifty.”

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt thirteen)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

That summer, the Porters were again on Great Spruce Head Island, leaving the Southampton house in Jimmy’s care. Not wanting to leave him alone again, Fairfield and Anne tried to think of someone who could share the house and its responsibilities with him. After approaching several of Jimmy’s friends, they finally came up with Ruth Kligman.

Kligman was famous as the girlfriend of Jackson Pollock, who had been with him in 1956 when he drove, drunk, into a tree in Springs, New York, killing himself and a friend of Ruth’s who was with them. Frank O’Hara cruelly dubbed her “Death Car Girl.” A beautiful, vivacious, and sensual woman, she was attracted to famous and successful painters and writers, and they to her. Anne Dunn recalled meeting her around this time at Jane Freilicher and Joe Hazan’s New York apartment, where she was wearing a dress of white broderie anglaise, and thinking she was “staggeringly beautiful.” To Harry Mathews, who had a brief but intense fling with her, she was “the greatest courtesan of our times.”

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt twelve)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

When the doctor again tried to persuade Jimmy to come with them to the hospital, Jimmy turned to his friends and asked, “What do you think I should do?” It was Joe, according to Kenward’s recollection, who “took command” and was finally able to persuade Jimmy to get into the police car. John rode to the hospital with Jimmy, acutely uncomfortable, and struck by the pathos of the situation, which reminded him of the last scene of A Streetcar Named Desire, when Blanche DuBois is finally persuaded by “the kindness of strangers” to go off to a mental institution. During the drive Jimmy turned to him and said, “John, you do believe that I’m the Resurrection and the Life, don’t you?” “Sure,” said John.

For Kenward, the breakdown, “horrible” as it was, was also in a way “an enormous relief” after his tense anticipation of it for the preceding two weeks. Writing shortly afterward to Ron Padgett, Kenward admitted, “This has been an ‘awful’ happening … that kind of intensity is demonic, and one can’t survive with it. Not for long. Or unless one has incredible experience & training, to get one accustomed to it.”

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt eleven)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

By this time, Jimmy was moving slowly toward a manic period. Although he was still in “denial” about the Porters having asked him to leave, and there was no open reference to it in his letters or poems, his anxiety found outlet in increased activity. For the time being this energy was channeled constructively into poetry. Unable to sleep one winter night in Southampton, he picked up a facsimile edition of Whitman’s original Leaves of Grass. He started reading the poem, hoping it would help put him to sleep, but “of course it was the wrong hour to do it because it is an incredibly stimulating work,” he recalled. Obviously, he had read Whitman before this, but confronted anew with “Song of Myself,” it came as a fresh revelation. Within a few days he was inspired to try to write something “like it,” and he began “The Crystal Lithium.”

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt ten)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

C, which Berrigan began as a way to publish his and his friends’ work, was one of the earliest “mimeo” magazines, assembled of mimeographed sheets stapled together, a quick, unfussy form of publishing that would become a hallmark of the growing activity around the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York’s East Village. Most of the magazine’s run of thirteen regular issues (ending in 1966), plus two special issues of C Comics, had cover art or illustrations by Brainard, lending the publication a distinctive visual identity. The magazine’s involvement with the earlier generation of the New York School began with issue number 4, which included a large selection of Edwin Denby’s poems. It was Denby who advocated for publishing Schuyler in C, whetting Berrigan’s interest with a group of unpublished early poems and prose works. After “The Infant Jesus of Prague” appeared in 1963, Berrigan asked permission to publish Schuyler’s story “The Home Book,” as well as some of the poems Edwin had shown him. Jimmy agreed, and they appeared in February 1964, along with Unpacking the Black Trunk, a short play he had written in collaboration with Kenward Elmslie.

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt nine)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

“Jimmy came for the weekend and stayed eleven years.” By the early 1970s, when Schuyler had been living with the Porter family for about a decade, this was Anne Porter’s well-worn reply to puzzled acquaintances who, observing the unusual situation, would hesitantly ask, “Is Mr. Schuyler a relative of yours?” Delivered in a voice no louder than a whisper, her answer was nonetheless pointed and, in a manner typical of the woman Jimmy once called “the wittiest person I know,” deflected into wry humor a situation that started casually and warmly, but would gradually turn awkward, then painful, then traumatic over the course of those eleven or twelve years.

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt eight)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

Frank O’Hara came out for one memorable weekend, and a group decided to drive out to Coney Island for the day. Jimmy was scared and miserable on the famous roller coaster there, but Frank, typically, was exhilarated by it. Driving back, Frank was still somewhat punch-drunk from the park and sped up as he came into the driveway, pretending he was about to run into Fizdale and several others standing there, but stopped just in time. Fizdale and Gold were frightened and angry at this recklessness, and Jimmy assumed that this would be the last time Frank would be invited out to Snedens Landing. On the contrary. At breakfast the next morning, Fizdale sidled up to Schuyler and said, “I very much like your friend, Frank O’Hara!” Later that day, when Jimmy walked into Fizdale’s bathroom, he was surprised to find Bobby and Frank in the tub, happily taking a bath together. For the rest of the summer, to Jimmy’s great delight, Arthur Weinstein was off the scene and O’Hara and Fizdale enjoyed what would turn out to be a summer romance. There was a witty symmetry to the arrangement, noted with amusement at the time: the two poet-roommates having simultaneous affairs with the two duo-piano partners. The tandem love affairs had the incidental effect of bringing Jimmy and Frank closer together, emphasizing a sort of brotherly feeling that they seemed to have shared, particularly around this time.

Frank was an excellent pianist himself, having studied piano and composition in college. When the pair of professionals were not at their instruments, he often played for long periods. Fizdale was astonished one day to hear from the other room “some Rachmaninoff or Liszt piece being dashed off at the piano” and assumed that Gold was playing, only to come in to find that it was Frank, who he hadn’t even realized could play. This summer was the period of Frank’s life when he came closest to reconnecting with his early musical interests, and it shows in some of the references to musical forms, and to piano music in particular, in poems he wrote at the time. Living with the pianists had an influence on Jimmy’s work as well, giving him not just a greater familiarity with the literature of the piano, seen in later poems such as “Hoboken,” “Scriabin,” “Grand Duo,” and others, but also an insider’s view into the workaday practice of pianists, particularly the intimate collaboration, almost amounting to mindreading, required of duo pianists—insights somewhat applicable to his ongoing collaboration with John Ashbery on A Nest of Ninnies.

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt seven)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

On December 1, a night train brought them across France and through the Alps, and they woke to find themselves in Italy. When Bill and Jimmy emerged from Santa Maria Novella station in Florence, they discovered the center of the Renaissance city largely in ruins. Three years previously, on the night of August 3, 1944, hoping to slow the advance of American and British armies, the Germans blew up five of the city’s six bridges, sparing only the Ponte Vecchio. They compensated for that omission by dynamiting all the streets leading up to the bridge on either side of the river. In 1947, most of this damage had yet to be repaired, although temporary Bailey bridges had been erected in place of the Ponte Santa Trinità and the Ponte alla Carraia.

Despite the ruinous state of the city, and the exhaustion of the people after war and hardship, preceded by years of Fascist rule, there was a mood of optimism in the air. “Early post-war Italy was glorious,” wrote the novelist Sybille Bedford. “One embraced the people for whom the springs of life were flowing again; they were at one with the staggering beauty of what there was to see, everywhere, dawdling in the sun, the sweet air, the new near quiet. Petrol was scarce, the Vespas and rattling trams were joyful toys, their noise another attribute of being alive.”

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt six)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

During the nine-or ten-day crossing, Jimmy went on deck and watched the water churning in the ship’s wake, feeling the sense of occasion. His ambition, which he hoped to realize in Italy, was to write fiction—short stories and a novel. He had no thoughts yet of writing poetry. Meanwhile, his change in name held tremendous significance, and not only because “It’s good to / have your own name,” as he later deadpanned in “A few days.” By resuming the name he had been born with, he transformed with a single stroke his unhappy high school years, aimless college years, and the trauma and disgrace of his navy expulsion, into a life lived by another person.

Bill’s self-transformation had begun with his entering Columbia in 1944, graduating in 1947. While in Europe, he was planning to conduct research for two separate books: one on the theory and tactics of guerrilla warfare, the other a general history of Spain and the Mediterranean. Although Auden doubted Bill’s ability to see either of his book projects through, telling him, “You’re never going to write that book,” he helped with practical suggestions and contacts, giving him the name of a Professor Passonatti of Yale, who suggested he work in Florence and gave him a list of possible contacts there. Following this advice, the pair settled on Florence as their destination, but they would stop in Amsterdam and Paris on the way.

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt five)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

The idea of leaving New York and going to live in Italy began to take shape in the summer of 1947, when Jimmy learned that the farm he had inherited ten years previously was finally able to be sold. It brought $6,000, with Jimmy keeping $ 4,000, and his mother, for some reason, getting the remaining $2,000. What better use for the windfall than going off to Europe, where living was cheap and they could “goof off and be somewhere beautiful,” as Jimmy later claimed, for as long as the money held out? Also, more seriously, there Jimmy could pursue his writing and Bill conduct research for the history of Spain he hoped to write.

When they went to apply for passports in June, both Bill and Jimmy had issues in determining what names to use. Bill’s old passport for Spain had used his birth name, William Aalstrom. However, his new one was issued in the name Aalto, which had become his legal name when his mother’s husband Otto Aalto adopted him as a boy. Jimmy, on the other hand, found, or claimed, that his name had never in fact been legally changed to Ridenour when his mother married Berton. Whether or not this was true, he submitted only his birth certificate to the State Department, giving his name as James Schuyler, taking this opportunity to cast off his stepfather’s name. It felt like a rebirth.

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt four)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

Jimmy was sent to the temporary U.S. Navy prison, or brig, on Hart Island. The 101-acre Hart Island, situated in Long Island Sound a few miles north and east of Manhattan, has a checkered history. At the end of the Civil War, it was briefly a federal prison camp for Confederate soldiers. In 1868, it was purchased by the City of New York for use as a potter’s field, which it still is, with burials there carried out by prisoners from neighboring Rikers Island. At different times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it also housed a tuberculosis hospital, an insane asylum, a boys’ reformatory, a women’s prison, a drug abuse center, a shoe factory, and a Cold War intercontinental missile base.

During World War II, the greater New York City area was a busy navy harbor, teeming with thousands of sailors on shore leave in the city. Disciplinary problems were inevitable, and beginning in April 1943, and until to the end of the war, a portion of Hart Island was requisitioned by the navy as a disciplinary barracks. During its wartime use as a prison camp, the island held about sixty buildings of various kinds, including a mess hall, heating plant, firehouse, butcher, commissary, laundry, garbage disposal plant, hospital, visitors’ house, theater, officers’ quarters, kennels, and two churches. Remnants of many of these buildings stand today as crumbling brick ruins, overgrown with foliage.

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt three)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

Schuyler credited Smeltzer with opening “windows for me on / flowering fields and bays where the water greenly danced, / Knifed into waves by wind: the day he disclosed William Carlos / Williams to us, writing a short and seemingly / Senseless poem on the blackboard.” Smeltzer also piqued Jimmy’s interest with a mention of James Joyce’s Ulysses. However, when Jimmy asked after class for more information about Ulysses, which had been banned in this country as obscene until 1933, Smeltzer chuckled and said, “When you’re in college it will be time enough.” Annoyed by Smeltzer’s coy hypocrisy, Jimmy went to Buffalo and, as he related in “The Morning of the Poem,” bought a copy of the book from Otto Ulrich’s bookshop, where John Bernard Myers, later a prominent figure in the New York art and poetry world, then worked as a salesclerk. Jimmy recalled him as a “big white whale” who loomed over him one day as he was reading in a corner of the shop, and said “You look like an interesting boy,” and gave him a copy of his magazine, Upstate. Jimmy’s rumored possession of Ulysses lent him unwonted status in the eyes of the high school jocks, normally oblivious to his very existence. He managed to get the book into the house, past his suspicious stepfather, by telling Berton it was a socially conscious book “about poor people in Ireland.”

Despite Smeltzer’s introducing him to William Carlos Williams’s poetry, Jimmy did not read him in earnest until he was in college, when he especially loved the “complete freedom” in his work. Through anthologies he also discovered Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, D. H. Lawrence, and other modernist poets. Lawrence and Stevens had probably the most impact, and over the next few years he came to feel he had memorized Harmonium and The Man with the Blue Guitar and Ideas of Order.

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt two)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

For a boy of fifteen living in suburban upstate New York, Jimmy’s reading was both worldly and idiosyncratic. Wilde, Saki, Maugham, Nicholson, Green, Logan Pearsall Smith—in fact, with the possible exception of Evelyn Waugh, all of the male prose writers he and Oshei mention reading in high school were gay. The queer slant of Jimmy’s early reading did not escape his mother’s sophisticated eyes. When, at an unknown age, Jimmy informed Margaret that he was gay, her response was “Just because you like Oscar Wilde, it doesn’t mean you have to do all those things.” Most of his favorite writers were English and wrote with a careful attention to their prose style, which tended to be clear and elegant, if sometimes mannered. Once Jimmy had decided to be a writer (of prose), he consciously modeled his prose on that of his heroes, and his heroes’ heroes. For example, he said, “I was very affected by reading Somerset Maugham’s Summing Up in my teens. In that book he describes how he really tried to learn by copying out long passages of Dryden’s prose. I did the same thing, only I chose Walter de la Mare and Cardinal Newman.” He also traced his habit of stitching together sentences with colons, often in evidence in his long poems of the 1970s, to his high school reading of Harold Nicholson’s Some People.

One afternoon when he was about fifteen or sixteen years old, while lying in his backyard tent and reading Logan Pearsall Smith’s memoir Unforgotten Years, Jimmy experienced a life-changing epiphany. In the first part of the twentieth century, Smith was a well-known literary figure, famous for a book of rather precious short prose sketches called Trivia. Unforgotten Years, published in 1939, tells how when Smith was a young man growing up outside Philadelphia in the early 1880s, he and his family became friends with the aged Walt Whitman, who used to travel from his home in Camden, New Jersey, to stay with them, and how through his friendship with Whitman, the youthful Smith became aware of his own vocation as a writer. While reading this in his backyard tent, as Jimmy later recalled, “I looked up and the whole landscape shimmered, and I said, ‘Yes, that’s it.’” In that moment, he realized that, “rather than an architect, I wanted to be a writer and would be one.”

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt one)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

The name Schuyler (pronounced “SKY-ler”) is of Dutch origin. The Schuyler family were early seventeenth-century settlers of New Netherland, and prominent in New York State before, during, and after the Revolutionary War, lending their name to a number of localities and geographical features. New York State alone has a town of Schuyler, a Schuyler County, Schuyler Lake, and Schuylerville, and there are other Schuyler place-names in the Midwest.

The history of the Schuylers in America begins with two brothers, Philip (1628–1683) and David Pieterse Schuyler (1636–1690), who immigrated from the Netherlands sometime before 1650. After landing in New Amsterdam, they both moved up the Hudson River, became fur traders, and helped establish the city of Albany. By the mid-eighteenth century, the descendants of both Schuyler brothers were wealthy landowners who in some cases exercised almost feudal manorial rights over their extensive properties. The famous General Philip Schuyler (1733–1804), the Revolutionary War hero and member of the Constitutional Congress and one of New York State’s first senators, was a descendant of the older brother, Philip. His daughters, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton and Angelica Schuyler Church, were celebrated for their beauty, wit, and style. Elizabeth married Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury, while Angelica married a member of the British Parliament and was close to Franklin, Jefferson, and Lafayette. These historic family associations stirred James Schuyler’s imagination, especially during his difficult adolescence, despite the fact that (as he may or may not have realized) he was descended not from Philip but his younger brother.

the last book I ever read (Olga Ravn's The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century, excerpt thirteen)

from The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken:

STATEMENT 153

Yesterday I saw Cadet 21, a humanoid, standing on her own among the objects in the recreation room. Her eyes were closed. I watched her for a long time. A human being contemplating its creation. She stood quite still, in deep concentration. Eventually, she opened her eyes and looked at me, and her eyes were full of tears. I got the strong feeling that we have failed, and that our time is over.

the last book I ever read (Olga Ravn's The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century, excerpt twelve)

from The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken:

STATEMENT 138

I dream that I’m cooking my dress. I won’t be wearing my uniform today. The dress is covered with blue and silver sequins, and I drop it into a saucepan. By the time I remember it, it’s already burnt. The sequins have turned into fish eggs the size of peppercorns. Some of the eggs are black and shiny, others are the color of egg white, and transparent. The straps of the dress are thin and insubstantial, like warm glue. The dress can no longer be word, but it’s become an item of great beauty. You inform me that together with a handful of selected human employees I have now been tasked with dismantling the humanoid section of the crew via the mainframe in the engine room. I have no hesitation in taking on such a task. It shouldn’t be any problem. The dress in my dream carried with it the knowledge that my former sweetheart on Earth now has three children and has lost his hair, and that he has started wearing a yellow uniform jacket. And that I am here.

the last book I ever read (Olga Ravn's The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century, excerpt eleven)

from The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken:

STATEMENT 099

I heard Dr. Lund made one exactly like a child. But apparently its development went wrong, it killed a lot of chickens and smeared the blood all over its face. No, it does sound a bit exaggerated. I haven’t seen blood in a long time. What I do see are the white walls, the orange floors and the gray floors. I see my coworkers, and I see my keyboard, my joystick and my helmet. Through the outlet, I see the green earth I’ve never known. There are pilots who go out there, and they’re laughing as they exit. How they’ve got the courage is beyond me. It’s not because of orders that they do it. I think they do it just so they can be on their own. I mean, they’re not finding any more objects out there. I’m that humanoid child too, with the chicken blood on its face. I feel ashamed and sit quietly at my controls. Some of us are made to connect with each other, others with no one. If you look at things in the right perspective, all of us here on the Six Thousand Ship are Dr. Lund’s children. Why am I telling you this? I thought it might interest you that they go out there on their own.

the last book I ever read (Olga Ravn's The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century, excerpt ten)

from The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken:

STATEMENT 089

Sometimes the humanoids are very quiet. They’ve started sitting at the same tables together in the canteen. They sit in a row and take in their nourishment. It’s as if without a word being said between them they’ve somehow agreed to be silent. Only a fool should believe that silence is consent. Their keeping quiet seems more like a conspiracy than a willingness to serve. Yes, that’s correct, I’m nervous about it.

the last book I ever read (Olga Ravn's The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century, excerpt nine)

from The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken:

STATEMENT 068

Why should I work with someone I don’t like? What good could possibly come from socializing with them? Why have you made them so human to look at? I completely forget sometimes that they’re not like us. Standing in line in the canteen I sometimes suddenly realize that I feel a kind of tenderness for Cadet 14. She’s a redhead. Or maybe you developed them like that intentionally, so that we’d feel this sympathy for their bodies and the beings they are, if you can call them that, and make working with them easier. Yes. Only now you want me to, you want to change the nature of my assignment? So what you’re asking me to do is supervise Cadet 14’s movements about the ship, without her cottoning on? Because we share a bunk room together. Is it because she won’t talk to you? I’m not very comfortable with it, obviously. What you’re asking me to do is the same as surveillance, isn’t it? I don’t like her, but I still think about her all the time. So in that sense I suppose I’m the right person for the job. I try to understand her, who she is. She’s not just an embodiment of the program. There’s more to her than that. Is that the kind of thing you want? In the report? Whether she speaks to any of the other humanoids, and what they say to her? All right, I’ll keep an eye out. How I’d characterize her? Cadet 14 is humanoid, fifth generation, female, a well-liked employee. Does her work impeccably. A rather meek and docile version, like many of the fifth generation. She’s fond of the freckles on her nose. She looks at herself in the mirror in the bunk room before going to bed, and puts her finger to her freckles. How human, she says. To think they gave me freckles. What more could someone like me wish for? I think I love her. I need to work that out of my system, obviously. No, you don’t have to transfer her to another bunk, I’ve already told you, I’ll keep an eye on her for you. Isn’t that it? Isn’t that what you want? If I’m to be perfectly honest, if that’s where we’re at, I can say she’s a much better worker than me, we all know it’s the truth. What have I got left other than a few recollections of a lost earth? I live in the past. I don’t know what I’m doing on this ship. I carry out my work with complete apathy, sometimes even contempt. I’m not saying this to provoke you. Perhaps it’s more of a cry for help. I know we won’t get away from here in my lifetime. Cadet 14 hasn’t got a lifetime, or rather hers spans such a gigantic stretch of time it’s beyond my comprehension. She’s got a future ahead of her. So now you’re saying my job’s changed? That now I’m to watch her? I think this might save my life.

the last book I ever read (Olga Ravn's The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century, excerpt eight)

from The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken:

STATEMENT 057

One of the objects, I’d say it was about the size of a small dog, is shiny like a maggot from a different world, but also like a talisman I used to wear on a chain around my neck when I was a child and would put in my mouth and suck. Whenever I see it there in the room I feel the same urge to put it in my mouth, though it’s far too big for me to be able to do so. Still, I want to be in contact with it through my mouth, to understand it with my mouth. Loving it like loving a body part detached from the body. Not mutilated, just a part, detached and alive, an adornment. In me, the object is at once as small as the egg of a titmouse and as big as the room, or bigger, like a museum building or a monument. A secure and pleasant vessel, carrying inside a disaster retold.