Joseph McElroy - Ancient History: A Paraphase

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Some of the stories in this volume originally appeared in the NEW AMERICAN REVIEW, the QUARTERLY REVIEW OF LITERATURE, EVERGREEN REVIEW, PLAYBOY, ESQUIRE, CAVALIER, and OLYMPIA.

Copyright 1971, text by Joseph McElroy.
Introduction copyright 2013 by Jonathan Lethem.

Book design by Steven Seighman

ISBN: 978-1-4804-4471-3

This project is supported in part by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs.

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In memory of

DAVID SEGAL

Remarks Perhaps Of Some Assistance To the Reader Of Joseph McElroys ANCIENT HISTORY: A PARAPHASE

1. At the center of Henry James writings, forming a sort of hinge in James shelf, perhaps, stand a handful of tales in which someone contemplates and abides with the mysterious and supervalent absence of a dead or dying writer: The Lesson of the Master, The Figure In The Carpet, The Aspern Papers, The Middle Years. Joseph McElroys shelf is double-hinged (at least), with two narratives that resonate with this archetypal plot, in The Letter Left To Me and Ancient History: A Paraphase. In Letter, as in the examples from James, the narrator/ protagonist is a vulnerable recipient, a would-be interpreter or medium, left to contend with an opaque address from the dark side. Ancient History reverses these charges. It takes the form of an eloquent, garrulous, obsessionally digressive, tender and yet rebuking address to a dead genius.

2. Ive just heaved out my effort at categorical descriptiona reverse-engineered Jamesian address to the deadat great cost. For, like mostall?of McElroys fiction, Ancient History stymies the categorical impulse to an extreme degree. McElroys prose, coming on less like a street-gang than like a storm-cloud of evocations, intimations, and signifiers, robs the reader of his guidebook and compass. McElroy doesnt shirk clarity, or particularity; hes a great bestower of intensely clear descriptive and conceptual moments. His writing consists of almost nothing else. But there are few writers less interested in standing to one side, in the role of ringmaster or stage manager, to interject with comparisons, framing remarks, or encompassing descriptions. For a reader hungry for announcements as to what he or she is experiencing, before, during or after the experience of it (and we are all this reader, sometimes, most especially at the fraught start of a new relationship to what fiction can do, the kind a first encounter with a master necessarily entails), a plunge into McElroy can be vertiginous.

3. It is worth it.

4. Another Advertisement for McElroy, while Im risking those: like most writers who throw up such explosive challenges to ordinary narrative sense, McElroys at heart an adamant realist. A realist, that is, in the sense that his discontinuities generate, it seems to me, from a single pure impulse: to sort out what consciousnessour interval as minds trapped inside bodies on planet earthreally feels like, when pushed through the strange machine of language. Like this, damn it, not like youve been told before! It is with such self-appointments, rather than any desire to innovate in narrative or language per se, that a writer like McElroy sets out on a lifes work. And that, in turn, is what makes it (see #3, above) worth it: McElroy is demanding that his machine of language think, with each sentence it sets down, about what life on earth really consists of (hint: it can be vertiginous).

5. Anyone seeking further such general encouragement ought to consult, as I have, Garth Risk Halbergs eloquent The Lost Postmodernist (on Women And Men), and the invaluable McElroy festschrifts in both Electronic Literature and Golden Handcuffs Reviewperhaps most especially Mike Heppners defiant envoi The Courage of Joseph McElroy, which itself gives a reader courage, too.

6. Ancient History consists of an address, thento whom? The famous dead writer, a suicide, bears a striking resemblance to Norman Mailer (in as much as he gives speeches in put-on accents, runs for office, writes about outer space, divorces spectacularly, punches and bleeds in public, etc.). The narrator, Cy, lives in the same New York apartment building as the Great Dead Man; hes snuck into the famous writers rooms during the police investigation, there to deliver the text as a monologue both written and spoken, with a brief interruption during which he hides, like Hamlet, behind a curtain. Monologue consisting of what? Of centrifugal meditations on Cys coming of age in the company of two friends, onelike the narratora native of Brooklyn Heights, a city boy. The other, a friend from summers spent fleeing the city, a country boy. The two friends have never met, but may be on the verge of doing so; this possibility is for the narrator strangely destabilizing, and supercharged. So: two sets of men in erratic conjunction. Around them: women, children, careers, fame, public events, the world, outer space. McElroy is a specialist in matters of spatial relation: neighbors upstairs and down, passersby on the street, the eerie distances contained inside nuclear familiesgenerally, he makes a subject of the power of adjacency and proximity in our intimate lives. Yet why should the Mailer-like writer be made to listenif the dead can listento Cys stories of his two friends? The answer is that for all the intellectual and political force of the addressees public careerand these forces are respected by Cy as considerable in themselvesthis monologuist may be seen to believe that the addressee has missed something. Missed something of life as it is actually lived, missed a thing as elusive as it is essential. It might even be supposed that it is this absence, this oversight, which has driven the addressee to his suicide. You thought only the thirsty media cared for you, Domto drink you down and piss you out: the meteoric you at San Gennaro taking a flap in the face from one of those flag-exposing twin guinea hens who run Empire Hardware while yours truly watched through the fence with Joseph and Mary and their boy behind me; or you not quite upstaging sweet Seeger on the Hudson babbling huskily over your bourbon to a black news-chick while the skipper and his banjo sang us down the stinking tide; you bleeding right onto a hand-mike a raincollared TV reporter darted to you like an electric prod, against a field of dark Barrio stone the edge of live gunshots one summer night when you were supposed to be not in Spanish Harlem but giving a big birthday party for Dot in Edinburgh; you getting mugged all alone on Brooklyn Bridge a month ago by three kids who it turned out didnt know who you were then or even by name later in some station house; you vomiting on a TV talk show, pointing at the eggy pool and calling it Magma, and after mopping your mouth and tongue-tip, answering the hosts original question straight and mild. And those excuses posted in the kitchen for any and all callers? And what about EARTH = SPACECRAFT? That addendum hardly seems an excuse for anything. Would you use it to put off a media representative? Or is it a hot-line excuse for the President of the United States to whom if he phone you to congratulate you on being you you could say, Sorry, cant talk now: the earth is a spacecraft. Im losing you, Dom