The thing
about family life that’s amazing is you can’t keep anything, is that it’s
chaotic and you can’t keep anything in order so you begin to go crazy because
you can’t keep anything in order so you begin to go crazy because you can’t
keep your own separate life in order. It’s probably the reason why more than
one child is about ten times as chaotic as two children, I mean, as one child,
you see what I mean? No children seems very orderly to me at the moment, as if
you could place something somewhere inside your house and one month later it
would still be there. I remember while I was pregnant still being able to know
where my things were and to know what I was doing and even to be able to keep
the kitchen in some kind of order when I wanted to—now there’s no chance of
that and you must get used to a certain amount of chaos (I remember when I lived
alone what a pleasure my little meager dishes piling up in the sink for days
without getting in the faucet’s way gave me, as if I were being modest); I’ve
always believed that one should be able to bear a lot of chaos but chaos has to
have its rewards and this kind of chaos often seems gratuitous and with no
beginning and no end. It’s interesting to have lived a life where you always
knew your life could suddenly change; overnight you could be in another
country, either rich or poor. And though this sensation could still persist,
theoretically, the presence of Marie and our desire to be a little bit rooted
makes life seem quite timeless and change of that sort a matter of indifference.
So we must use the kitchen almost continuously. It would be good to have a
mother’s helper, or a mother to help us. When Marie begins to talk everything
will seem less chaotic, I know it, and even now, everything changes
approximately every two weeks. But when she doesn’t talk she seems to me more
of an object (keys banging) and certainly then an object of care. (Bernadette
Mayer, “August 10”)
Working
my way through a chapbook by
Brooklyn poet Anna Gurton-Wachter recently [
see my review of such here], part of my response included making my way to the
internet and ordering an edition of
American poet Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter
Day (Turtle Island Foundation, 1982; New Directions Publishing, 1999), as
well as a copy of
Piece of Cake (Barrytown NY: Station Hill Press,
2020), a book composed in August, 1976 by
Mayer and her then-husband, the poet
and editor
Lewis Warsh (November 9, 1944-November 15, 2020). For whatever
reason, it was
Piece of Cake that first caught my attention when the two
books arrived: a book composed in first-person prose on alternate days, said to
be “arguably the first significant male-female collaboration in 20th-century
American poetry.” Mayer and Warsh each write alternate sections throughout the
entirety of a single month from the relative isolation of a rental house in Lenox,
Massachusetts, as they attempt to write and read, taking alternate days with
their infant daughter, Marie, so the other could focus on writing. For whatever
reason, this is a manuscript that was composed and completed, but lay fallow
for some forty years, until prompted by the “determined efforts” of their now-grown
eldest daughter.
The
writing and the interplay between the two writers, including family moments, literary
gossip and recollected stories are entirely compelling (the further one reads,
the further one gets hooked), but I find it more interesting, in certain ways, the
absolute pleasure knowing that Marie Warsh would have such access to an intimate,
open and detailed paired document by both of her parents during her own
infancy. I can’t imagine too many people who would deny that for any one of us,
such a document, from either of their parents, let alone both, would be an incredible
and uniquely rare gift. Originally moving in together in the spring of 1975,
the couple would spend ten years together and have two children after Marie
before they went their separate ways, and onto new relationships (the children,
as what I can tell from online sources, remained with Mayer). As Mayer writes
as part of her introduction:
I had been reading the Swedish mystery novels of Maj Sjöwall
and Per Wahlöö in which they wrote alternating chapters without knowing what
the other had said. In our book we also decided that when we mentioned a name,
like Clark, we would describe a bit who that person is, a little about her or
him.
It was in this neighborhood that Hawthorne said that the
weather was always too hot or too cold. It was in the local Lilac Park that we
had endless discussions about communes with Bob and Eileen Callahan. We were
planning to buy an old resort in the Catskills to relive The Blithedale Romance,
yet we didn’t, but books were written, this one and maybe others of which we
can only find mouse-bitten remains.
In
his introduction (dated December 24, 2018), Warsh offers:
I don’t know who had the idea to write the month-long
journal that became this book, but my guess is it was Bernadette, who had
already written a month-long book on her own called Memory. I’d been a
journal writer all my life, so the idea made complete sense. Most days we were
content to simply walk around the block, carrying Marie in a backpack. There was
much to write about, all the tiny details of daily life, plus all the
flashbacks to the past, and everything that had led up to this moment.
Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart (1913-1986) began to keep diaries at an early age, and throughout
the whole of her life, most of which exist as straight journal entries, but
also include scraps of writing-in-progress, including the beginnings of her
infamous novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept; and her
journals have been published in various volumes over the years (I keep hoping
someone might take on working to get more into print). There have certainly
been other examples of compelling personal journals or diaries of writers and artists
that have been worked into print—off the top of my head, I can think of Canadian
writer Frank Davey’s devastating How Linda Died (Toronto ON: ECW Press,
2002), as well as the two volumes by painter Barbara Caruso [see my review of the second volume here]—all of which exist as entirely worthy reads, but this is very much
writing produced as literary writing, and not as (despite the four decades of
distance between composition and publication) a writer’s private exercise. From
what I am aware of Mayer’s work, at least, hers does work through gestures of
private and the domestic as equally-important subject matter for literary work.
Her Midwinter Day, for example, is a book-length composition around a
single day on the calendar, and working through the material that was so often
dismissed as “women’s writing,” and not worthy of actual literary merit. They take
turns, and the back and forth is part of what provides this volume its heft; initially
I found Mayer’s writing to be more striking: writing on more intimate details
of the day with Marie, and more abstract considerations, including family history
and contemplations around her reading of literature and theory (there is a
lengthy stretch writing on Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, who also composed
a book in the area), with Warsh’s prose a bit more external: stories around
publishing, and of other writers, friends and hitchhiking memories:
Another hitchhiking
story, really a story about other things, takes me back to Christmas Eve, 1969,
when I was stranded in San Francisco after a party at Margot and John Doss’s
house with no way of getting back to Bolinas, the small town an hour north
where I was living. Bill Berkson was visiting me then, I’d driven down to the city
with him in his car, he’d met someone at the party and had taken off with her
and the only available ride was with Joanne Kyger and her husband Jack Boyce,
but that didn’t seem like a good idea, Joanne and I had fallen in love, and I told
them to leave without me. I’d taken LSD earlier that evening and wandered down
Lombard Street trying to locate the motel where I stayed with my parents on our
first West Coast visit in 1958. The string of beads I was wearing around my
neck, which Joanne had made for me, was a charm, or at least I hoped,
protecting me from whatever the rest of the night had to offer. No one would hurt
me as long as I wore the beads. Don’t hide who you are, the voice said. Be open.
That’s the only protection. If you act suspicious or afraid a wild dog will
bite you. (Lewis Warsh, “August 9”)
Both
sides, really, focus on the immediate, with lengthy asides depending on where
the mind might go, and include visits to the store, interacting with friends
and what the other might be doing that day, all of which culminates in a visit
by a group of friends near the end of the month (with his excitement building,
and her excitement mixed with a bit of anxiety). For those interested in literary
biography and connection, there are interesting interactions and stories around
Tom Clark, Susan and Clark Coolidge and multiple others, and it is interesting
to note the connections and overlaps, the ways in which circles interact with
circles. This is a charming and compelling volume, especially when one
considers just how young these since-literary heavyweights were at the time
(she was thirty-three to his thirty-one), and attempting to live a combined
literary life while raising a family.
I’ve
written before in how I’ve long been interested in how couples, both of whom
are writers, might interact on or around the page, especially since Christine
and I began our own collaborative and as-yet-untitled project of back-and-forth
poems (produced so far through two chapbooks), a half-completed manuscript temporarily
put aside around the time our Rose was born in 2013. There are plenty of other examples
of (Canadian, at least) poets who have interacted, whether in direct collaboration or as separate
texts existing in conversation, whether Victoria, British Columbia poets Patrick
Lane and Lorna Crozier’s No Longer Two People (Turnstone Press, 1978) or
Roo Borson and Kim Maltman’s The Transparence of November / Snow (Quarry
Press, 1985). Apparently Toronto poets Stephen Cain and Sharon Harris did a
small collaboration that might have appeared as a chapbook, but I haven’t yet
seen it. There was Smaro Kamboureli’s poetic travelogue about being away, in
the second person (Longspoon Press, 1985), and Robert Kroetsch’s poetic
work-from-home about Kamboureli being away, his Letters to Salonika
(Grand Union Press, 1983), and even break-up responses made between Roy K.
Kiyooka via his Pear Tree Pomes (Coach House Press, 1987) and Daphne
Marlatt’s Our Lives (Truck Press, 1975; Oolichan Press, 1980). There is
the direct collaboration and the texts that exist, separately, in conversation;
somehow Mayer and Warsh, despite not reading each other’s entries during their
process, manage, somehow, to simultaneously exist as both.
It
took a while for me to realize where I’d heard or seen Warsh’s name previously,
and it was through The Angel Hair Anthology (New York NY: Granary Books,
2001), an anthology edited by Warsh and his first wife, Anne Waldman, selected
from materials from Angel Hair magazine and Angel Hair Books edited and published
by the two from 1966 to 1978. The anthology had sparked an array of further
reading after it first landed at my doorstep, but not as much as perhaps it
could, or should, so this is really the first of Warsh’s work I’ve spent any
time with. Really, prior to this, I knew little of her work, but at least something,
aware of her name for some time, and having gone through her more recent
collections Works and Days (New Directions, 2017) and Memory
(Siglio Press, 2020), some of which I suspect I’ll revisit, soon.
