A Wedding Cake in the Rain: Notes on Auden's Face

"If that's his face, what must his scrotum look like?" asked the painter David Hockney after first meeting W.H. Auden.  For my money, it's the best, and cruelest, comment made about Auden's face in the last two decades of his life.  Other contenders include Auden's own remark "My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain" and Hannah Arendt's rather grandiose claim that "life itself had delineated a kind of face-scape" on Auden "to make manifest the heart's invisible furies." James Merrill's description of the face as "runneled and seamed" and Christopher Isherwood's claim that such a face "really belonged in the British Museum" are weak entries in the field, especially coming from such talented writers.  Perhaps their admiration for the poet held their tongues in check.

I'd long wondered just what had happened to Auden's face, which was pale and smooth in his youth.  Indeed, I'd developed a number of theories over my many years of reading Auden.

1.  Cigarettes and Benzedrine

Auden was, by any standard, an epic smoker.  Indeed, I've often suspected that a play he co-wrote with Christopher Isherwood, The Ascent of F6, names its fictional mountain after a German cigarette brand.  And for many years he took a daily dose of amphetamines (it may well have been the secret behind his Stakhanovite literary productivity, as it was for Sartre and Ayn Rand).  Could these have been the culprits behind Auden's sad decline into scrotum-facedness?

An English physician, Douglas Model, shown a photo of Auden, offered a diagnosis of "smoker's face."  It is certainly true that smoking can have deleterious effects on one's skin, but Auden's seems to be a special case.  No similar condition afflicted his many smoking friends.

2.  Pale Skin in Ischia

In his later years, Auden took to spending a good portion of every year on the Italian island of Ischia, where the sun beats mercilessly down on the near-white sand of the beaches.  Auden, who took pride in his Scandinavian heritage, was not equipped for such a climate, and his friends reported with alarm his bleached hair and perpetually peeling skin.  Could this lie behind the wedding cake face?  It seemed plausible to me for some time, although the lack of a similar effect on Chester Kallman, Auden's unswarthy companion of many years, raises questions.

3. Squalor

No friend of Auden could go without noting the filth and squalor in which he lived.  Edmund Wilson devotes paragraphs to it in his journals; Stephen Spender (perhaps wishing to score points off the man in whose shadow he lived and wrote) composes prose arias to the abject state of Auden's surroundings, and Igor Stravinsky's housekeeper was appalled at Auden's refusal to bathe or shower when he visited the composer while working on the libretto to The Rake's Progress. I'm no dermatologist, but I have found myself speculating about Auden hosting a vast population of mites or other parasites of the sort that thrive (one imagines) on the unbathed skin of the more bohemian literati.

4. The Truth

As it turns out, none of my theories was correct.  Indeed, inasmuch as they all blame Auden for his condition, they turn out to be not only incorrect, but vaguely puritanical.  It is to Richard Davenport-Hines that the world owes a true explanation of Auden's imposing—nay, geological facial folds and fissures.  He writes, in his biography of the poet

Auden had apparently been suffering since early manhood from Touraine-Solente-Gole syndrome in which the skin of the forehead, face, scalp, hands and feet becomes thick and furrowed and peripheral periostitis in the bones reduces the patient's capacity for activity.  There was no therapy for the syndrome, which does not affect either life expectancy or mental status, but which accounted for Auden's striking appearance of grave, lined melancholy.

The condition is inherited rather than contagious, and quite rare.  So it seems most of us, regardless of any smoking, ill-advised beach exposure, or squalor, will be saved from inciting such questions as that asked by Mr. Hockney.


**UPDATE**

Marcel Inhoff, head fact-checker at Samizdat Blog's German Research Bureau, has just sent in, by urgent telex, fax, and pneumatic tube message canister, the following important observation: "As a former citizen of the GDR I can confirm that F6 is actually a post-1950s brand of shitty socialist cigarette.  The name itself stands for 'filter cigarettes of the 1960s.'"  Thus dies all speculation about the tobacco-oriented subtext of The Ascent of F6.

Emancipation of the Dissonance!

"The Emancipation of the Dissonance," my retrospective review of C.S. Giscombe's career in poetry, has been republished by The Volta, and is online in its entirety — have a look!

The Last Habsburg Poet: Marjorie Perloff on Paul Celan

Richard Strier was already a few minutes into his introduction when I & my colleague Josh Corey stumbled into a packed room in the University of Chicago's new Logan Center to hear Marjorie Perloff talk about Paul Celan yesterday afternoon.  We slipped into the very last seats, just behind Michael Anania, Simone Muench, and Garin Cycholl, and next to Ray Bianchi.  Chicu Reddy was perched across the aisle.  Just as I cracked open my notebook and took in the large map of the Habsburg empire, Marjorie began her talk.

At first, I was a little surprised by the direction she took: I'd been expecting Big Ideas, but what we were getting was a mixture of biography and geography.  Marjorie talked about Celan's birth in Czernowitz, an outpost of the West far, far from the German or French spheres, more oriented toward the Ottoman Empire than Paris or London, and about the polyglot, multiethnic nature of the place: Romanian but not Romanian, Christian, Jewish, with an endless number of languages, including a German quite different from the German of Berlin.  She then talked in great detail about Celan's poetry, but not the poetry most known to American readers.  She described his early Surrealist poems, his Romanian poems, and, above all, his love poetry—something he wrote for many years, and used in his role as expert seducer, often presenting the same poems to different women, with generally successful results.

I wasn't at all sure where this was all leading, but when Marjorie said it was a version of material that would form the epilogue to a book on Austro-Modernism it all began to come into focus.  And, indeed, it all began to seem part of a very Big Idea indeed, and a good one.  This wasn't just a ramble in poetic biography: the point of all of the context and focus on Celan's particular brand of Austrian German language was to recontextualize Celan entirely, and, in so doing, to propose not just a new way of understanding Celan, but a new way of understanding a whole branch of modern European literature.

We tend to see Celan almost exclusively in the context of Holocaust writing, with John Felstiner's Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew as the great explanatory text.  Celan certainly is a Holocaust poet—plausibly the greatest of Holocaust poets—but we are wrong to think that this exhausts his meaning and the range of his achievement.  In focusing on Celan's early life and his love poetry (which he continued to write after the war) Perloff showed us a fuller, less iconic, more humanized figure, a Celan who wasn't just a Survivor, but a man, with all the foibles and idiosyncrasies one might expect in a somewhat coddled aesthete raised by adoring and indulgent parents (Jean Daive has been working on something along these humanizing lines as well).

Not only did Perloff reveal this Celan to us: in stressing the differences between his German and the German spoken in Frankfurt or Berlin (and, indeed, in stressing the vast geographic removal of Czernowitz from Germany proper) she showed us Celan as a representative of a culture quite distinct from that of Germany: the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the traditionally Habsburg (alternately Hapsburg) lands.  The Empire's German was distinct, and Marjorie was quite convincing in demonstrating that many of the legendary 'difficulties' of Celan's poems are actually quite clear, at least to one hearing "with an Austrian ear."  And the Empire was by no means an Empire of German:  it was a polyglot culture of many languages, and no one spoke just one.  Indeed, the multicultural Imperial identity, in which many peoples felt equally enfranchised, was utterly different from German identity, and it showed in the culture: "There is no way Wittgenstein could have been a German writer," Marjorie said, "and no way Heidegger could have been an Austro-Hungarian one."

Celan the product of this multicultural and polyglot sphere, to which belong the works of Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Sigmund Freud, Karl Kraus, Joseph Roth, and Franz Kafka—but he was the product of this world in a special way, because he was the product of that world's dissolution.  Born just two years after the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he came of age in the penumbra of loss, with a sense of the ghostliness of his own multicultural and polyglot identity.

In the end, Marjorie wasn't just telling us that we would do well to think of Celan in the broad context of the dying Habsburg culture: she was telling us that we have a great deal of work ahead of us in reconstructing the lost Empire as a cultural field, and in finding the meaning of its writers not in some generalized Germanic tradition, but in the shadows and fragments of a dying polyglot state.  We would be as wrong to discuss Musil or Kafka or Celan outside this context as we would to discuss William Carlos Williams without reference to his Americanness.  This, I thought, is a big idea—it proposes not just a new understanding of Celan, but a new field of literary study.

The room in the Logan center was full of bright looking young graduate students.  If they had their ears open, they now know they've got their work cut out for them.

The Haunting of Jorge Luis Borges, or: Borges in the Kantian Tradition

Jorge Luis Borges, lauded everywhere as one of the greats of short fiction, rarely gets his due as an essayist.  But his essays can be every bit as intriguing as his stories—and, in fact, are haunted by the same suspicion that haunts his fiction: the suspicion that there is an order of some kind just beyond our reach, and an elusive significance always on the verge of manifestation.  Both of these suspicions emerge in the wake of Kantian and post-Kantian thought on the meaning of the beautiful.

Consider “The Wall and the Books,” in which Borges speculates about the motives of the Chinese emperor Shih Huang Ti in ordering the building of the Great Wall and decreeing the burning of all books. Borges is, of course, aware of simple historical explanations for the phenomena.  “Historically,” writes Borges, “there is no mystery in the two measures…. he built the wall because walls were defenses; he burned the books because the opposition invoked them in order to extol former emperors.”  But that’s just too plodding and dull for a mind like that of Borges, who soon turns to questions about a larger meaning for the emperor’s actions.  Noting that those who were found preserving books were sentenced to work on the wall, Borges begins speculating:

Perhaps the wall was a metaphor, maybe Shih Huang Ti condemned those who worshipped the past to a work just as vast as the past, as stupid and useless. Perhaps the wall was a challenge and Shih Huang Ti thought: “Men love the past and I can do nothing against this love, nor can my executioners, but some time there will be a man who feels as I do, and he will destroy my wall, as I destroyed the books, and will erase my memory and will be my shadow and my mirror and will not be aware of it.” Perhaps Shih Huang Ti walled in the empire because he knew it was fragile and he destroyed the books because he understood they were sacred books, or rather books that taught that which the entire universe teaches or the consciousness of every man.

That’s a pretty freestyle set of hermeneutic principles Borges is employing, isn’t it?  “Perhaps it means this, perhaps that…”  But Borges isn’t much interested in precise or authoritative interpretation, here.  Rather, as he says a little later, he thinks it is likely that the grand idea of the wall and the burning of the books “touches us by, over and above, the conjectures it allows.”  The wall and the books are valuable to Borges precisely because they conjure possible interpretations: they seem meaningful, but render up no precise meaning.

Indeed, thinking about the wall and the books in this way leads Borges to conjecture that “we could infer that all practices have their virtue in themselves and not in some conjectural ‘content’” and that this emphasis on the form or pattern that hints, but only hints, at significance would be in accord with the thinking of Walter Pater, who “contended that all the arts aspire to the condition of music, which is nothing but form.”  Music, after all, is like mythology, or “certain twilights,” in that all of these things “try to tell us something… or want to tell us something.”  For Borges, this is an “imminence of a revelation, which does not happen” and “is, perhaps, the aesthetic act.”

The idea of a pure form that does not connect to utility—the wall as metaphor, rather than as defense—haunts Borges, and pushes into his mind despite his grasp of simpler, more material explanations for the wall.  And the haunting is specific to the Kantian and post-Kantian eras, in that it was Kant who told us that the aesthetic experience involves a sense of “purposiveness without purpose”—of form with no necessary connection to function.  Moreover, it was Kant who spoke of genius as a capacity for creating images that function exactly like the wall and the books in Borges’ essay.  Here’s the relevant passage from Kant’s Critique of Judgment:

Genius is, in short, the faculty of presenting aesthetical Ideas; an aesthetical Idea being an intuition of the Imagination, to which no concept is adequate. And it is by the excitation of such ineffable Ideas that a great work of art affects us.

For Kant, the products of genius cannot be reduced to any single concept or meaning.  Rather, they give rise to a plethora of possible significances.  Both the notion of purposiveness without purpose and the notion of genius irreducible to concept lie behind Borges’ speculations about the wall and the books: Borges is fascinated by the possibility of something that can be “nothing but form,” and by the notion that a formal pattern “hints, but only hints, at significance.”  Borges mentions Benedetto Croce and Walter Pater in his essay—and neither figure would exist in recognizable form without Kant.  But another figure derived from the German Idealist tradition comes to mind in connection with Borges’ idea of the “imminence of a revelation, which does not happen” as central to aesthetics: Carl Gustav Jung.  Jung, in his great essay “On the Relation of Analytic Psychology to Poetry,” argues that the most significant forms of art give us not specific meanings per se, but  “a language pregnant with meanings, and images that are true symbols because they are ... bridges thrown out towards an unseen shore.”  Meaningfulness without meaning, we might say, is the gist of Jung’s theory, here: and it is certainly a theory in accord with Borges’ fascinations.

Borges' concern with pure form and “imminence of a revelation, which does not happen” informs his best-loved fiction every bit as much as it informs his essayistic thinking.  Consider “The Lottery of Babylon, ” in which all of the arbitrariness in the world just might be the result of a secret, carefully administered lottery—a pattern or form behind the apparent randomness of life, a purpose or meaning we can almost detect.  Or consider the famous “Library of Babel,” in which a vast library of books, each unique, combine to present all possible combinations of letters.  In this strange universe, men seek not only the revelation of meaning, but absolution through that revelation:

When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness…. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proferred dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad ... The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary)…

The imminence of these most personal of revelations, though, never really manifests: “the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man's finding his Vindication, ” we read, “can be computed as zero. ”

“The Garden of Forking Paths,” is perhaps the best example of Borgesian fiction haunted by Kantian aesthetics.  It is in this story that we see our protagonist escape from the anxieties of his situation—he is in a hostile country, pursued by an implacable foe—by contemplating a labyrinth created by an ancestor:

I have some understanding of labyrinths: not for nothing am I the great grandson of that Ts’ui Pên who was governor of Yunnan and who renounced worldly power in order to write a novel that might be even more populous than the Hung Lu Meng and to construct a labyrinth in which all men would become lost. Thirteen years he dedicated to these heterogeneous tasks, but the hand of a stranger murdered him—and his novel was incoherent and no one found the labyrinth. Beneath English trees I meditated on that lost maze: I imagined it inviolate and perfect at the secret crest of a mountain; I imagined it erased by rice fields or beneath the water; I imagined it infinite, no longer composed of octagonal kiosks and returning paths, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms . . . I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars. Absorbed in these illusory images, I forgot my destiny of one pursued.

The labyrinth, a structure purposive but without purpose, is an object of contemplation that lifts him above his self-protective anxieties, and takes him into a different state of mind.  Indeed, it takes him into something like disinterest, the condition in which we contemplate without thought of our ourselves and our needs—the very state Kant says we enter with aesthetic contemplation.

As it turns out, the labyrinth is not a physical maze, but a book—a seemingly incoherent book that, in fact, has a pattern to it.  But the pattern is infinite, and the full meaning of the book can never be made manifest: it is a text pregnant with meanings, a bridge thrown out to an unseen shore.

The ghost of pure form, of a purposiveness beyond purpose; and the haunting sense of a meaningfulness that refuses to resolve into definite meaning—these are the specters behind many of the lines Borges wrote, fiction and nonfiction alike.  They are, I think, the central principles of his aesthetics—and the product of a long tradition in Western philosophy.

Fallon McPhael: Biographical Notes and The Previously Unpublished Condom Poems!

Hot news, people!  An independent scholar living in Whiting, Indiana, has assembled biographical notes on the life of Fallon McPhael, whose wake we are to observe one week from today (7:00 pm at The Charnel House in Chicago, 3421 West Fullerton) with tributes from Chicago poets & writers, music, drink, and—as specified in McPhael's final will and testament—burlesque.  Not only has our scholar put together a biographical sketch, he has managed to bring before us previously unpublished poetic works from the great man's final years.  Behold, and be enlightened:

Some Notes on the Life and Times of Fallon McPhael     

Fallon McPhael (Fáelán Máel Ó Secnaill) was born 1919, 1920 or 1922 (his own reportss differ) in Inniskeen, County Monaghan, Ireland.  There is very little reliable information about McPhael’s parentage or his childhood circumstances.  By one of his accounts, he was fathered by George William Russell, the Irish poet, artist and mystic known as AE, during a walking tour of Monaghan in 1919.  In another McPhael story his father was an Ulster Catholic his mother found hiding in a hay rick. McPhael briefly attended Kednaminsha National School, and his name is on the 1935 student registry of the O’Connell School in Dublin.  By his own account, though no one else’s, he studied at University College Dublin, where he is said to have said that he was a member of the Literary and Historical Society and editor of Comhthrom Féinne (Fair Play), the College literary journal.  The name, Fallon McPhael, never appears in the journal, though there are several instances of a Gaelic pen name that bears some similarity to his own, Fáolán, the Wolf, and the reviews published with that by-line show early signs of the bitter, reproachful tone of McPhael’s later literary journalism.

We have only McPhael’s often contradictory stories to account for his life in Dublin after the time he claims he left University College.  He was, by his own lights, a motorman, professional sparring partner, gun runner, publican, procurer, counter-tenor and bookie.  The novelist, Flann O’Brien, writes in a 1949 letter that he had come across McPhael working in the Brown and Nolan Bookstore in Dublin.  “There was McPhael, the caustic scribbler, behind the counter at B & N, a fictional writer employed in an invented establishment. “  We do know that for a time McPhael lived with the poet, Eugene Watters (Eoglian Ó Tuairisc), and his wife near Cork.  The arrangement apparently ended in a domestic dispute during which Watters shot McPhael in the foot.  “Now,” McPhael said of the ensuing limp, “I’m Oedipus without a complex.” In later years McPhael spoke with nostalgia of Watters and his wife.  “Eoglian treated me well, don’t you know, as Dermott in his poem, “Dermott and Grace.”

McPhael came to the United States sometime between 1950 and 1953.  Apparently, he lived in New York for a year or so before going to Boston, where he was arrested in 1955 for public drunkenness and lewd behavior.  During his arraignment he convinced the magistrate that he was the illegitimate child of Joseph P. Kennedy, and the charges were dropped.  About the episode, Kennedy is said to have said, “These fools will believe anything pronounced in a deep enough brogue,” though he was obviously concerned enough to give McPhael “a princely sum” and send him to Chicago, where he was given a job as a ghost night watchman at the Merchandise Mart. 

McPhael’s literary life in Chicago is well documented—his frequent quarrels with Algren (“as Irish as a Jewish Swede can be,” he wrote), the drinking bout with Mike Royko and his time as the stand-in accordionist at Riccardo’s.  There is no evidence at all that he ever fought Norman Mailer, in the ring or out.  The one fight he is credited, or rather discredited, with was against the Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh, in 1964.  Kavanagh was in Chicago for an appearance at Northwestern, and somebody named Fink decided it would be a good idea to bring the two great Irish writers together.  After a considerable amount of drink, Harp (McPhael’s ale of choice) followed by Jameson’s, the two began reciting poetry in Gaelic. Their argument was either over grammar or cadence; no one could tell which.  Challenges were made, and a fight was arranged.  Someone pointed out to McPhael that Kavanagh had only one lung.  McPhael replied, “And don’t I know that,” pushing a pencil stub into one nostril, “fair’s fair.”  Descriptions of the fight vary wildly, though Studs Terkel, who was there, said that there was more wheezing than punching.  It ended with both Irishman vomiting on the shoes and pant legs of the crowd around them and a boisterous verse or two of “Arrayed for Bridal.” McPhael’s literary reputation in Chicago seems to have been based, almost entirely, on his ethnicity, ceaseless bad behavior and energetic litigiousness.  “As far as I can tell, “Don Rose once wrote, “all of McPhael’s published books were the result of out-of-court settlements of his endless law suits.” 

In the mid 1960s McPhael had a position as Advisor to the Irish Collections at the Southern Illinois University Library in Carbondale, a job he got through the Irish barrister and genealogist, Eoin O’Mahony, who was a Visiting Professor in Irish Studies there.  O’Mahony was fascinated by McPhael’s undetermined lineage and had, based on sentiment alone, filed a number of law suits on McPhael’s behalf.   Shortly after O’Mahony returned to Ireland to mount an unsuccessful campaign for Prime Minister, McPhael was fired from the University.  The official cause for dismissal was that in his time in the library he never recommended a single book he had not himself written, though stories persist that having taken over O’Mahony’s class in Gaelic, he taught the students that Gaelic could only be pronounced when half clothed and through a pallet tempered by Jameson’s.

There is no evidence that McPhael ever married, though he “kept company” for at least twenty years with the Irish-Australian playwright and actress, Kathleen O’Houghlihan, “the Countess Kathleen,” as he called her.  She is the editor of his last, and as yet unpublished, collection of poems, In Excited Reverie. According to O’Houghlihan these poems were written in rhyming tetrameter on condoms she brought to him in St. Bridget’s Home, where he spent his last years.  “He wrote them out with a red felt pen on the stretched out condoms, then rolled them up again and put them back in their wrappers.  ‘It’s how poems ought to be written,’ he told me, ‘in excited reverie.’” His plan was to have Kathleen put the condoms back on the drug store shelves, so that they would be discovered and read, as he put it, “in extremis.”  “I couldn’t bring myself to put them back, you know, and lose the poems forever.  And then, he claimed that he wore them for the writing, so it didn’t seem right.”   The verses are varied in quality and sentiment.  Here, with Ms. O’Houghlihan’s kind permission, are a few of the more decorous examples;

‘Twas Yeats’ ghost took Paddy’s lung
For every plowman’s song he’d sung
And Joyce that made poor Flann a drunk,
The curate pouring for the monk.

* * *

On the Armagh Road I met a lass
And by St. Agnes’ pinched her ass.

 * * *
A. Norman’s gone from Leeds, a prince,
With poems to make all Hades wince.

 * * *
A laureate, then, this Heaney or Hiney,
A man of parts, Eeney, Meeny and Miney,
 Ulster man, more green than orange,
As tuneful as a rusted doorhinge.

 * * *
 
Irish poets learn your trade;
A rhyme can often catch a maid
And if there are no maids about,
A carp’s as tasty as a trout,
Which is to say, you drop your line
And judge whoever takes it, fine.

 * * *
Billy, the Golden Dawn entreats
From wet and chilling yellow sheets
And the Celtic Twilight glows
From pustules on my numbing toes.

 * * *
Notes to the poems:

Yeats’ ghost:  Eoin O’Mahony (see above) said that the ghost William Butler Yeats’, Irish poet (1865-1939), was “about in the world” and had for various slights and misdeeds killed several people, among them Thomas Hone’s son and AE’s secretary. Kavanagh’s poems ennobling farm labor could be seen as offending Yeats’ view of Romantic Ireland.

Paddy:  Patrick Kavanagh, Irish poet (1904-1967), lost a lung to cancer in 1954. (see above)

Flann:  Flann O’Brien (Brien O’Nolan), Irish novelist and follower of James Joyce, called Joyce “The Curate.” 

The monk:   One of O’Brien’s many pseudonyms was Brother Barnabus.

Armagh Road:  In Dublin the Armagh Road ends at the Church of St. Agnes.  The couplet was probably meant to recall Patrick Kavanagh’s romantic poem, “On Raglan Road.”

A.Norman: A. Norman Jeffares, Irish scholar (1920-2005) was Chair of English at Leeds University.

With poems:  Jeffares edited a volume of Irish Love Poetry.

Heaney:  Seamus Heaney, Irish poet and Nobel Laureate (1939--).

Hiney:  One of the many variants of the Anglo-Irish surname, Heaney.

Eeney, Meeny and Miney:  This counting rhyme may suggest Heaney’s family’s history as cattle traders, though it may refer as well to the channel islands and Druidic sacrifices on the Isle of Mona.

An Ulster man:  Heaney was born in Northern Ireland to a Catholic family, hence “more green than orange.”

Rusted doorhinge:  May well allude to the “rusted gate” passage in Yeats’, The Celtic Twilight, or to the unused door through which in Celtic mythology  Cuchulain threw the stone that killed the Hound of Ulster ( see Yeats’ play, On Baile’s Strand (1904).

“Irish poets learn your trade”: from Yeats’ poem, “Under Ben Bulben.”

Billy:  William Butler Yeats.

Golden Dawn”:  A Hermetic mystical order in England in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  Both Yeats and Maude Gonne were active members of the Order.

The Celtic Twilight:  An 1891 book of essays by W.B. Yeats.  The ‘twilight,” Yeats thought, would give rise to a Celtic revival, led by poetry and the arts.

toes:  A reference to the Celtic fairies,  about whom Yeats’ says in The Celtic Twilight, “their feet never tired.”

The Mysterious Life & Fabulous Wake of Fallon McPhael, Greatest Writer in the History of Chicago

Who, you ask, was Fallon McPhael?  What murky details have emerged about his scandal-riddern life in literature?  Is it true what they say about his fight with Norman Mailer, or his numerous affairs?  What of his alleged public indecency on the site of Chicago's famous Picasso sculpture?

Details about the life of mythical (that is to say, fictitious) writer whose wake will take place at The Charnel House in Chicago on May 4th at 7:00 pm are hard to come by, and, indeed, unverifiable by any respectable standard.  Nevertheless, researchers have made available the index to Raskolnikov P. Firefly's unpublished and unauthorized biography of McPhael.  Reading between the lines, one begins to sense the shape of the life of the author of many of the most important nonexistent literary works of our time.  Here, for your delectation, is the document in its present, incomplete state.  Any further information regarding McPhael that you may be privy to would be much appreciated by McPhael's executors, whom I represent.

Index to the Unauthorized Biography of Fallon McPhael

Allergies

            To Australians (claimed)      366

            Peanut                                                110, 114, 298, 301, 333

            M.S.G.                                      298, 377-8

Anania, Michael                                 191

Ammons, A.R.                                     115, 118, 120-122, 403

            Negative review of                121

Barbarella, cameo in                          191

Bernstein, Charles                             406-11

            Physical altercation with      407

Berrigan, Ted                                     110-112

Bohemianism                                     10

Boxing                                                            9-12, 33-34, 177, 407

Breton, Andre                                    34-39, 46, 60-64

            And founding of Villanesque Quarterly

                                                            40

Canadian citizenship (rumored)     101, 130-6, 400

Chicago Sun-Times                             121, 180, 200, 299-301, 333

Coast Guard                                       13-18, 22, 66, 291, 400

Creeley, Robert                                  89, 98, 103-106

Curling                                               101, 130-6, 400

Democratic National Convention, 1968

                                                            41-45

Dick Cavett Show                              220-221

Dune buggies                                                44, 47, 55, 59-60, 88, 101-2, 187-188
           Lack of skill in driving                     88, 101

Ethnopoetics                                      250-255, 278, 310-312

            Tragic misunderstanding regarding           310-311

Farrell, James T.                                 220-221

Gems Spa                                           see Berrigan, Ted

Ghosts, belief in                                 11, 29, 88, 101, 104, 362

            Of Frank O’Hara                    88, 101, 362

            Of Rasputin                            31

            Of Yeats                                  360-363

Ginsberg, Allen                                  139, 407-8

Greektown (neighborhood) 151, 154-159

Green Integer (publisher)               166, 213

            Lawsuit against                     170-193 passim, 281, 316, 429

Green Mill Tavern                             59-61, 173, 230

Harper & Row (publisher)               66, 131

             Lawsuit against                              131

Hemingway, Ernest                           34, 37, 348-50

Hospitalizations                                 202-203, 221, 407-8

Fonda, Jane                                        190-194, 233, 237, 252, 408

Iowa Writers Workshop                   80-84, 89, 104, 221, 230, 232-5, 301-2
            Lawsuit against                      233-5

Kenyon Review, conspiracy against  112-113, 410

Lake Forest Literary Festival            398-9
          Lawsuit against                           398

Laroux, Leslie                                     101

Levertov, Denise                                166

Loyola University (Chicago)             45-59, 60, 322

Lycanthropy                                      103, 355, 357

MacArthur Genius Grant                  3, 6, 199-201

            Refusal of                               200-1

McSweeney, Joyelle
            Alleged paternity of             334
            Plagiarism from works by  367

Mailer, Norman                                 177, 219-220

Mexico                                                60-63, 99-100, 366

            Piñata incident                      103                

            Prison in                                 104

Motorcycles                                        60-3, 187-188, 202-203

New Directions (publisher)             235-237, 440

            Lawsuit against                     239

Nickname                                           11, 44, 67-69, 145, 406-407

            Alleged origin of                    68

            Altercation regarding           407

O’Brien, Edna                                    47, 88

            Drink thrown at                    47
            Revenge sought by                88

O’Hara, Frank                                                44, 47, 88, 101

Papacy, opinions on                          103, 355, 357-359

Pentagon, levitation of                      139

Paris                                                   60-72, 167, 406-408

Perloff, Marjorie                                407

Phobias                                              44, 104 190, 199, 235, 277-80, 345, 347, 399

Picasso, Pablo                                                66, 131, 156, 209

Poetry Magazine                              68, 120-3, 390
            Editorship (refusal of) (claimed) 122
            Lawsuit against                   123
 
Postmodernism, flirtation with        340-1

            Regrets                                   366-7, 370

Psilocybin                                           99-100, 156, 209

Public sculpture                                66, 131, 156, 209

Public nudity (charged)                   66, 131

Public urination (charged)              66, 131, 156, 209, 235-237

Ragdale Artist’s Colony                     98-101, 234-5

            Fire at                                     99-100

Rosset, Barney                                   200-240 passim

            And I am Curious, Yellow      213-217

Snyder, Gary                                      30, 33, 39, 99-100

Stephens, M.G.                                   17-23

Suitcases (collection)                        10, 30-3, 100, 223-9, 300, 348-50

Star Wars                                           77, 79, 213-230 passim, 409

Steinbeck, John                                  21-24, 33, 50, 55, 61, 420

Steinbrenner, George                       371-372

Suppressed works                            415-417

Terkel, Studs                                      56, 97-100

            Admiration of                                    97

            Actively disliked by               98

“Tupelo Honey” (song)                    145, 361-366, 422, 424, 426

University of Chicago Press             1, 411

            Lawsuit against                     81-89, 409

University of Notre Dame                290-291, 365, 370

            First Sophomore literary festival

                                                            290

Van Morrison collaboration             422, 424, 426

Vendler, Helen                                   232-235, 300, 303, 306

            Alleged affair with                300

            Negatively reviewed by        303, 306, 309, 312, 340, 345, 347, 390

Villanesque Quarterly, editorship      40-55, 307, 400;

            Founding                                40

            in France                                60-72

            Rejection of                            400

Vitkauskas, Lina Ramona

            Alleged paternity of              323

Wayne State University                    7, 277

Whistles, tin                                       88, 104, 145, 407-8, 422, 44, 426

Yaddo residency                               300, 303

Yeats, W.B.                                          90-94, 100, 145-50, 170, 201, 234, 260-5

Zyzzyva (journal)

            Lawsuit against                     399

Selected Works of Fallon McPhael

Criticism

            Come Here and Say That: Essays and Reviews

Poetry

            The Wheel and the Barrow

            South Shore Lines

            Three Words and Nine Sketches of Lemons

            L=A=R=R=Y

            The Droids You’re Looking For

            Gorilla Warfare

            My Only Regret

Journalism/Memoir

            In the Ring with Mailer

Novels

            The Last Bar in Bridgeport

            The Existing Disorder

**

We do hope you'll join the mourners, the writers, and the burlesque dancers at the Wake of Fallon McPhael — details below: