a stub that will increment but not be
completed until the Heartache: (B.U.A.)
Breakup under Analysis & Revolutionary Road sections of Darlings
& Monsters Spiral & the New York memoir, Always the Wrong People are completed, in about three years!
Moi: Michael, reading Screen Memories brings to mind the question “will there be a
sequel?”
MêME: The Postscript,
not completed, indicates as much. There will be two sequels, one for the 25
years in publishing and theater in New York City, and a third and last for the
subsequent years back on the West Coast, in earth-quake country, chiefly in Seattle.
I have the opening for Part II which allows me to link up with the problematics
indicated in Part I, it is called Always the Wrong People.
Moi: What do you mean by “problematics”?
MêME: The
childhood trauma, the effect of the abandonment at age 9 months and that weird
imprisonment by the governess that was so debilitating while yet
over-protective, and has resulted in a life-long need to be as free as
possible, aversion to being helped, the fortunately only occasional unhappy
relationship with a denigrating father, which produced insecurities & disorientations of all
kinds, the dithering I note retrospectively, say in the Oakwood section of S.M.
persisted in New York; and nonchalance which derives from having my grandfather
Werner von A. as a model, both its fortunate derivative, that I can or used to
be easy-going, but also that I become involved with all kinds of people that it
would have been better of not to, a lack of discretion I call it, and that
though I was brought up as though I would have money, which I then didn’t, I
didn’t learn the importance of greed in this culture. Nonchalance again. That
led to a series of menial jobs in adolescence – S.M. cites them - and
the only good thing to be said for them was that they Americanized me and
taught me the spoken language, which came in handy in translation work, taught
me the common touch. I continue to feel positive about the general run of
Americans, as I did as a German kid about American G.I.s. post 45 to 1950 when
I shipped out of Bremerhaven on the USS Maurice Rose.
Lack of necessary obsession
with money – this has to be instinctive as it is with every real New Yorker –
but for the children of the upper class -
and understanding the need
for it, characterized stretches in my
life in publishing, and had consequences.
I can see where the trauma
effected some of my decisions later in life, and in a deleterious way. As
indicated in S.M. and also on-line at
though I imagine having
someone like Wieland Schulz
for a partner is scarcely
typical, one of the two major, the second of the seriously “wrong people” in my
NY City life, and I blame myself for letting Schulz get to me for a stretch and
to frazzle me as did so many others, for not going to a lawyer sooner, this is
something that ought to have been done on principle as soon as I got wind of
what he was up to! There are certain
chances that you don’t get twice. Not as bad as my grand-dad Werner von
Alvensleben not poisoning Hitler when he had the chance, but the matter will
gnaw at me until my dying breath. At least I caught on eventually and as it
says in Handke’s Walk About the Villlages “freed a bit of blue sky”, at
least in New York. If I’d know what a great and deep shit detector Handke had
at the time that he communicated to me
how dark he felt Schulz was….b but I didn’t, took it too lightly.
MOI: What do you mean, by Always the Wrong People?
MêME: This
only changed once I had done the psychoanalysis. And I did not take psychoanalysis
non-chalantly at all! And you won’t be really be able to conduct the interview
until I have completed part II or have taken a look at the Urizen & Schulz
matters & some other matters that are online, about Roger Straus, about the
restaurant Elaines, but see below I have the opening of Part II, and
define what I mean by the “wrong people”, and also ran in a few of them in
Seattle.
Moi: Overall, it sounds as if you regret coming
to the U.S. as a kid?
MêME: I would
not come a second time. But I was seduced by the Americans that then surrounded
us, that OSS/CIC troupe that protected the anti-Nazi villa where they could
party, but chiefly by The Declaration of Independence. I would visit & at length, but check out
other options around 1949/50 where to go. Canada would have been preferable, it
is not an imperialist country, but is also a new country, which is what I
wanted. I wanted not just out of Germany at the time, but out of a forever
warring Europe. The reading of Karl May’s 70 novels of course introduced a lot
of geographics into the romantic adventurous imagination. No Baluchistan, but
certain South American countries, Mexico, Argentina, the Pampas, would have
come under more serious consideration. Mexico I came to love being in later in
life, and felt much more at home at than I ever did in the U.S., although
toward the last decade of my life in Seattle I would not have minded living in
Paris, or London, or Madrid or Lisbon. I started to feel very European and
missed being there. The lack of a past in the U.S. began to bother me. The same
same of so much of it. On the other hand, the sudden prospect of the U.S.
turning socialist, in 2016, gives me optimistic pause.
Moi: But haven’t you become quite American in all these
years?
MêME: I suppose so.
But I still don’t chew gum or flounce about. On a more serious note: a few years ago I had a a moment when I
realized how American I was. A song by Al Greene came on, a gentle r & b
soul, might also have been by a few other folks, Otis Redding, and it hit a
spot that said, “you are an American”, I
too sing the blues, for childhood’s sake, and thus identify with American
Blacks more than with any other folk, I heard that music first in 1945, in
Spring, AFN Bremen. I am hooked on a few other utterly American matters,
Baseball which initially was the substitute for childhood soccer, Brooklyn
Dodgers, the Boys of Summer instead of Werder Bremen. American literature, a
lot of it. But I think I have far more aversions than attachments. The
landscape yes, of course, nature, but that was never linked to a nation for
me, Alaska was a major experience, so
was the South West. The people are friendly, as I experienced them as G.I.s,
it’s just that only at the rarest of moments have I felt to be an American. The
disappointment set in not just in Sour Orange as that first American
Chapter of S.M. is called, and which was a shock that I often felt I never got
over, but continued to, politically, at Oakwood when I got a good whiff of the
McCarthy Hearings, of American paranoia; by the Bay of Pigs in 1961 I was ready
to be an insurrectionist. By 1968 I wanted to find a troupe for the insurrection.
All this was seen very much through the eyes of a descendant of 20th
of July opponents of Hitler’s, through what I learned of the failed opposition.
And Revolutionary Road (Sentimental Journey # 3! the second novel part
of the Darlings & Monsters Spiral project is about someone a bit
like myself who believes “the revolution” must break out at any moment and who
lives and behaves like that and does all kinds of things to further such a
happening, it catches the mood of the period until it devolves into the
absolute impossibility of anything of the kind, although, as in The Man with
the White Suit the “revolution” keeps ticking away, somewhere underground.
.
Moi: But you have no regrets about leaving
Germany?
MêME: No,
none at all.
Moi: In that case, why a life-long preoccupation
with German literature?
MêME: Disappointed
in the U.S., as you can read in Screen Memories, I decided to check out
where I had come from with that 1956-57 Junior Year Abroad, and but for theater
and literature was once again disappointed in Germany, the country still
spooked me as it had as a kid. I tell myself that if I had stayed in Germany I
would one way or the other have had something to do with German literature, as
an editor, perhaps as a writer. I might easily have become part of a theater,
more easily than in the U.S. Back in the U.S. I sought to stay attached to what
I liked in what I had left behind, to import it, make it part of my life, to
stay whole.
Moi: And in that respect you pretty well
succeeded, no?
MêME: Halfway
I suppose. http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2015/12/provisional-obituary-on-reaching-eighty.html
I got lucky with a few
things, especially Handke, what came as a surprise, at least until I realized again
what a garbage heap of a culture this is, that what had been created could so
quickly disappear and that there was no continuity. That has to do with the
institutions, the Cult of the New, and the people that manage the culture
industry, certain matters persist at the universities, but the universities are
divorced from the culture at large, are their own special world.
Moi:
MêME:
=======================
“ALWAYS THE WRONG PEOPLE…” is what I said, it slipped out,
when the firm went under in the early 1980s, said to someone whom I regarded as
“the great fondness”, though, I imagine, I might have confided as much to a few
other people I was close to; the realization had evidently been building up for
some time, yet the statement begged quite a few questions.
For one, who might have been the right people? Did the even
exist? Actually, I had met a few, more than a few, I wasn’t misanthropic, it
just so happened I didn’t have sufficient truck with them, but ended up in bed,
also literally, with a lot of the wrong people.
That that might be the case the
overly, fantastically optimistic part of me could truly not have known,
imagined, or been able to assess at the time that I took my headlong plunge, in
Alaska, at a McCabe & Mrs. Miller’s type orgy on Chena Ridge, outside
Fairbanks, in November 1960. The current into which I
dove in New York, where I gradually oriented myself, did not appear egregiously
wrong, not until you took a close look. But that I had not done as I would in
the future for indigenous pests & illnesses when setting out on a trip to a
third world country, take a close enough look at the individuals, as I did as
of the mid-80s, and still made some mistakes, who, after all, withstands a
truly hard close look, the messes you found there. Experience would teach me,
it did teach, at the end of college I realized that I needed American
experience, and I certainly have it now, the darkest past of New York, and in
the early 80s I seemed to have sufficient experience to reach the conclusion
that it was always the wrong people, or had been so far, or at crucial moments.
At
least I now had experience, I told myself, which I knew I had not when I
stopped writing stories during my senior year in college, bruised now, an aging
Tom-Cat with a nip bit out of each ear, and a split lip. Is that what I had
wanted? A lot of experience of all kind? Yes, it must have been. You had to take your chances, or - I don’t know - become a
quietist, work for the post office. I could even see myself doing that if
settled with a brood. On reflection I began to doubt whether the
“great fondness” had been the right woman for that confession (see anon for
justified reservations), although “great fondness” was, I concluded, a stronger
foundation if permanence I wanted than passion. Passion blinded and subsided.
“Great fondness” was a rare position in a firmament where love was meant to win
the day but never did, which left me heart-broken or which I elided at the last
moment, apparently not wanting to be permanently bound. What did I really want?
I
wanted to toss these thoughts, they seemed garbage, out with the day’s garbage
and go have a drink at the Raccoon Lodge, and perhaps Happy Hank would be there
and he and I could hook up and hold the pool table against all comers, as we
had the last time that I had I had been in my preferred “happy go lucky” state
of mind. The only
excuse, or excuses I had for myself, could come up with - no stopping these
thoughts it seemed - was that however wrong these people had turned out to be I
had had not the faintest. Well, but that was not entirely true either. I had
had warnings, inklings. However, I had not necessarily have a choice… but to
hold my nose? There were times that there was very little choice indeed. Thus, the “wrong person,” so it occurred to me, might even
be myself, in which case the over-all equation became absurd: how does the only
halfway right person, (I allowed my vanity to accord that much to myself!) then
venture forth with others who turned out to be the wrong persons.” I had had
some warning, and not only from mutual acquaintances. Even my own senses had
been alerted, but I had chosen to ignore the advice of the acquaintances and of
my eyes and nose. In a few cases there had been no choice. It had been as on
wintry river where you quick-stepped from one ice floe to the other. Thus the
“great fondness’s” reply to my statement that always the wrong people was
“destiny” was an assessment that applied even more generally than to me: it was
wrong all around, was it, a fool’s ship? I had mounted a fool’s ship with
blazingly optimistic eyes. I was the super fool. It was foolish to try to live
the “right life” in the wrong life, as I recalled I was not the first person to
conclude.
If the “great fondness” had really
been also the “great confidante” we might have sat down and examined the
specifics of the matter, the dirty half dozen most eeegregious – oh how I love
that word whose eees screamed -
as I did with a confidante who, however, was not the great fondness but
a former lover with whom I secretly hoped to re-align as we examined night
after night the evil carnivorous spider web which entangled her firm. The
half dozen really wrong people with whom I had become involved, what qualities,
if any, did they share in common was one way of approaching the problem to make
it less abstract. Each and every one of them had been immediately physically
ugly, and since I did not, could not ignore as much I decided to look past that physical ugliness, it
wasn’t denial, I congratulated myself on not being unduly, as I put it, influenced
by physiognomies. Eventually I learned that such physical ugliness was an expression
of something inside these people, however it had got there or developed I
said “wrong people” in some puzzlement and unhappiness for so much effort
having been spent on such a great venture, such a cause; and the “great
fondness”, actually I had only had one other, who was not entirely ignorant of
some of the people I had become involved with, thought my predicament “fated.” She
might have been analytic, descriptive, enumerative as I will be, as indicated,
if she had also been my confidante. Fated since when? I thought back on my
childhood and earlier life than coming to the big city. Indeed, there were a few of the “wrong
people,” perhaps it was the mark they had left on me that had destined me to
encounter, to be at the mercy, of that half dozen that had left their mark on
my life now? However, being born stupidly preternaturally optimistic, not
fatalistic, and unreflective in these terms, I can’t say that I had been
apprehensive that I might meet some “wrong people” or, on being warned, imagine
how “wrong” they could be. What a concept after all! What if all the
“wrong people” held a convention how many of them would there be, what would
they do to each other, how had they become “the wrong people” (WPs… wropeapes) In what respect where they
wrong? Were they wrong to all people who encountered them? In the case of the
half dozen I am thinking off, the answer is actually yes, they left an ill
odor, a mark on each and every one they harmed, but they were not monstrous
criminals were they? Criminals yes, to one degree of another. They were not
gangsters, they had intentions, they were unusually selfish, they were unusually, preternaturally… greedy aside being unusually physically ugly,
those were the chief features that each shared, that marks them, and yet: each
of them, nearly, must not have been ugly as children? They had become ugly,
something ugly in them had started to manifest itself in them physiognomically
- I had to stiff upper lip in their presence, look past their ugliness, to
ignore that feature. I had one friend who just about vomited each time he had
met them, and by chance he had met each and every one of them, if only briefly,
and if I had not suppressed that impulse… the thought completes itself. How
could you allow the impulse to vomit free reign, wouldn’t you vomit out your
intestines during your first week in the big city? Yes, physically ugly, not beautifully
ugly like Popeye the high-rise steel worker whose face was the first to
introduce that category into my mind, a man whose face had become pockmarked by
flying bits of molten steel, rivets flying about as he worked building high
rises. Question became whether “the great fondness” herself had been a
“wrong person”, the most severe of the delusions, of self-deceptions? After
all, there had scarcely been an inkling of a warning about her, yet a few
people had made negative noises - “all that schmoozing”, - and I
had not inquired further., after all, there were far too many positives, the
reasons for the fondness outweighed the doubts.
“Not inquired further,” was a
commonality, a refrain in my relationship with them on hearing negative
comments. “R. screwed me on that deal.” “S. is very dark!” Really? “At least
very German.” German dark might be bad
news indeed. I however had not noticed anything of the kind. I was taking
chances, perhaps I was an adventurer? I had little choice. If I did not take a
chance I would have to leave the city and fend in less dangerous quarters.
Perhaps I secretly meant to get hurt? A friend suggested that being adventurous
implied fundamental masochism. But I detested pain, all kinds, I plained, I
could suffer it, but not gladly. Yet the thought nagged. I decided to take a close
look at how I’d gotten into that fix of “always the wrong people” and what I
might be able to do to cheat fate. Another novel!!! 
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