Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory

Content: j.ctt13x00br.1 Front Matter i j.ctt13x00br.2 Table of Contents v j.ctt13x00br.3 PROLOGUE vii 
This is not a dead object but an underground explosion whose seismic, personal, and literary consequences still continue to make themselves felt.
 
Just how difficult it is to speak of it as book in the rubble you shall see.
 
This explosion, mental maybe and cultural, takes place in 1965 in the rare manuscript collections of the libraries of Yale, Buffalo, and Columbia universities, and in Manhattan’s enchanted locations, in Central Park, around the Statue of Liberty.
 
These places have powers of fascination, herein termed “omnipotence-others,” for, as far as New York’s history and physiognomy are concerned, they are exactly like
 j.ctt13x00br.4 CERTES A SACRIFICE 1 
I didn’t want to go to Certes and there I was on my way side by side with my brother I’m forever doing what I didn’t want to do I thought I am in a state of sin it is Easter the first day of passing over instead of passing over to my side I pass to the other—looklook how beautiful it is my brother was saying I looked
 
the boats on their sides in the silted up channel slack time the sea has withdrawn we make our way between hundreds of tipped hulls I see them as dead
 j.ctt13x00br.5 THE EYE-PATCH 23 
Hence the “hidden eye.”
 
On April 6, 2001, the eye thing flashes back again exactly as I saw it on January 1, 1965. This was in the room on the top floor of the King’s Crown Hotel where I turned up in fear and trembling, almost devoid as I was of hope, sure I’d never make it, the plane in which I’d been holding my life’s breath until it touched down in New York not having touched down in New York but been swept off in the night of a snowstorm until it let itself drop all but broken on
 j.ctt13x00br.6 A YELLOW FOLDER 35 
Went missing in New York in 1965. Then got replaced. But very slowly. For The Tale is just beginning to fall into place.
 
Innumerable sloughed skins of The Tale from more or less bygone eras repose inThe Yellow Folder. A file into which I’ve been tossing vestiges, debris, scraps, hangnails, flakes, prints, chips of defeat for decades.
 
Stuck to the back of it a flesh-pink post-it. (The color, disposition, shape of the letters, all the concrete details of these notes bespeak surprise, haste, above all the anguish of loss: a state less anxiety-ridden I’d have jotted in a notebook.)
 j.ctt13x00br.7 I WILL NOT WRITE THIS BOOK 41 
I stop: at that moment any inborn tendency toward happiness snuffs out. I must not, that is, I cannot write this book, such exhaustion takes hold of me from the very first pages.
 
But the very moment I write these few lines (still April 6th) my gaze
 
falls on a wretched notebook page, dated 1998, on which the following phrases—sobs without the rustling of paper—have cast up in choppy, irregular lines:
 
—I will not write this book. [Great white spaces come between the words as if they’d been caught up in the sands of a struggle.]
 
—Why does 
 j.ctt13x00br.8 THE EVIDENCE 53 
—I’m describing circles around Certes I see myself 
 
—You are looking for detours, you are looking for me says the Book 
 
—I don’t want to find you I say, that’s all I dream of, of fleeing you, and this for years and years, I never stop starting to flee you all over again, I describe circles around your circles, detours around your detours, every year, every notebook, another try. 
 
 The most frightening I never stop wanting to say, the most frightening won’t let itself be said, or taken, or approached, or forgotten. What a lot of time it gobbles up, 
 j.ctt13x00br.9 I LOVED ABOVE ALL LITERATURE 59 
 I loved above all literatureever since the death of my father my being had a definition of quite extraordinary precision that kept me and it from anything that was not literature, now this is the life I thought at dawn I would crack open a book by Stendhal and “the light” darted out
 “the light” is this sudden, colorless switching on, all inner fire which, in principle, takes place whenever I get close to a sheet of paper book or notebook page, providing the condition of solitude is fulfilled. I open a book, the light is, right away the
 j.ctt13x00br.10 THE NECROPOLIS 71 
“Like those with but a few months left to live. Like those with but a few months—how young they are.” He was saying. “That’s how I speak to you: like those with only a few months left to them.”
 
What was that supposed to mean? I read the sentence two ways: (1) those who have only a few months left to live save time, thus avoid detours, unnecessary frills, expressions of courtesy, segmented syntax, hypotaxis. They cut short, they go straight. Style sober naked plain and at the same time equivocal, amphibological. Brief. (2) and conversely: having all the
 j.ctt13x00br.11 MORE AND MORE NOTEBOOKS 83 
 More and more notebooks, I am now writing on a dozen notebooks whose dis/superposition on my desk, due to my convulsive movements, now coming alongside, now nervously pushing off again—(but I don’t throw out, I push off) depicts my state of panic—I write in skirmishes. Big notebooks, as against my normal fidelity to small notebooks. In fits and starts followed by brusque abandons. A big broad brand new white notebook seems to evoke the spirit of initiative. But in the end I get lost among these wounded, rejected tablets. At which point I go in search of myself. 
 j.ctt13x00br.12 I AM NAKED 95 
So I took the plane for New York, without arguing with myself. Maybe it was the train. A letter that offends one side of me. The side closest to my heart, which takes after my mother and father for its prudishness or modesty. At home we may go around naked. But nobodysays: “This morning I am naked on my deck chair.” Crude, the letter, on the one hand, cruel on the other—which to my horror landed on me, and what’s more, I’d been read.
 
Scrunched into the narrow seat of the American machine I think of the giant
 j.ctt13x00br.13 THE CHARM OF THE MALADY 103 
—Was theresomething specialabout him? my brother auscultates me.
 
I wanted to explain to my medical brother what had taken place in the way of mental illness on the ward of my psyche. (Setting for this consultation: the world beach sporting the colors of grandiose old age brightened by the genius of youth the beach white gray cloudy immortal as aging gods, this is the spot I chose to anchor April to the mast my brother.)
 
—Good-looking? calls my brother between the flaps of wind.
 
—Literary, I cry in the direction of my brother’s mossy ear I try “good-looking”
 j.ctt13x00br.14 FOLLY USA 115 
I’m forever using this crazy word. After the end I went to see my friend Jacques Lacan, am I crazy I asked himsuis-je follewe sat side by side at his desk and he was leafing through the Letters, what do you think I say am I crazy yes, yes,donne donnegive give me those letters he says, give he takes. Right away I get up off the desk chair. But as I was leaving I thought about the crazy wordfouits meaning going swish-swishfroufrouoverhead between the tall windows of the street narrow as Wall
 j.ctt13x00br.15 DONNE IS DONE 125 
He talks to me like a kind of old age like a drought. With the harshness of Jesus Christ of whom I have no direct experience, a severity I’d never heard speak. Did I love him? I think I thought I did, he made me think aboutmewhom I didn’t know, I’d never looked my image in the face not in my heart nor in the bathroom mirror
 
—Look at me. Remember me.Here take my picture. Here you see a man who’s not afraid of figures, nor of reality. In London in 1961 there was me and Otto
 j.ctt13x00br.16 ROOM 91 133 
He wasn’t called Gregor. He was called Gregor. Speaking of the person who waswasnot him, he said he called him called himself Gregor. I try to follow the thread of the improper proper noun, it is very difficult
 
all the same calling him I thought I called him himself and each time I called him it was Gregor I called and he who wasn’t him turned up quickly to answer for him, to interpret and be him.
 
Thus he lived one life according to the law of the name he had given himself in place of his given name and
 j.ctt13x00br.17 THE VROOM VROOM PERIOD 147 
My mother is filing checking account statements bills receipts invoices in the Mephisto shoebox and saying:
 
“I thought you’d met a great guy, how was I supposed to know he was good for the loony bin for starters a Jew an American. Then I realized the things he was promising never materialized. That fur coat, never, totally superfluous and into the bargain inexistent. Never turned up, doesn’t bother you.
 
All those phone calls cost me an arm and a leg.
 
Always calling and reversing the charges doesn’t surprise you.
 
What surprises me is it went on for so long. When
 j.ctt13x00br.18 ELPENOR’S DREAM 161 
—I’ve never wanted to be Kafka, or Stendhal, I tell myself and I make a list of all the people whom I might out of love have wished to be, practically all writers I noted, letting the faces of those who greatly please me come to mind, first of all I invoked Montaigne, then all the ones I love whom I could never have wished to be, Freud, for instance, I’ve never wanted to be Rousseau
 I set aside Rimbaud
 I’ve never wanted to be those without whom I don’t exist, and with whom I maintain a kind of complicity
 j.ctt13x00br.19 AFTER THE END 177 
I had such love for Literature, therefore for him I thought, thirty-five years after Gregor’s exit, the idea comes to me of the suffering he had sown for himself, I loved literature and believed he was it, whereas he knew he had borrowed it, he knew I didn’t know my love wasn’t love for him, I feared his death as the end of Literature, he knew that my love would outlive his poor borrowed persona, I’d never loved him, he knew, the idea comes to me only after having been able to delight in the fruit of his textual pillages
 j.ctt13x00br.20 TRANSLATOR’S NOTES 185