For me, reading’s been better than ever this year. It’s helped me and many others find a means of accepting, even understanding, the anxieties caused by pandemic. It’s been an alternative to the battles over truth that have forced their ways into our political souls via journalism and the social media.
Much of what’s been best has come from our elders, or those exploring new ways to plumb the depths of ancient literary art forms. These past years have seen a rise in the profile of older folks, those in their late seventies or deep into their eighties. Authors who have found new ways to sum up their journeys, they’ve provided us new works perfect for the gift-giving season. Their wisdom is appreciated in these difficult times. And their efforts have been more than supported by younger pioneers exploring new ways of capturing the moment in fresh literary forms.
Renato!, by Eugene Mirabelli (from Kingston’s literary stalwart, McPherson & Co.), pulls together three previous works narrated by the same fictional character, the Boston-based painter of Sicilan background Renato Stillamare. The first part charts the background of the Cavallu clan into which the protagonist gets adopted. The writing displays a penchant for the sorts of magical realism that gives its first-person storytelling verisimilitude and added punch later on.
The second part captures Stillamare in his early seventies, bedded down in his painter’s studio across the Charles River from his wife (and love of his life) Alba, giving his all to one last stab to land a gallery show that will make his life’s dedication to art meaningful. On the side, he takes in a stray woman and her child, beds the woman (with guilt), and tries to make sense of his life’s twists and turns.
The final section provides a stunning evocation of a creative man’s efforts to re-instill direction to his life in its twilight years. Mirabelli has pulled together this sprawl using subtle interludes from Renato, his protagonist and narrator, now several years older,and wiser in his resignations and embrace of all that the oft-misused idea of “family” entails. This adds several deeper tones to Renato’s tale.
The result is operatic in a classic Verdian way, far beyond the pop elements of a Puccini, or the buffa comedy overtones so many lump the form with. Themes rollick, take their time, deepen, recur.
Mirabelli is a great fan of the Roman philosopher Lucretius, and takes many of his ideas from the author’s On The Nature of Things.
“Lucretius is more than a physicist; he’s a moral philosopher who wants us to know we’re free from such things as fate or destiny,” writes Mirabelli through the voice of Renato. “And he announces early on that he’s writing this book about the nature of things to liberate us readers from fear of the gods, fear of death and the afterlife, for as people are shown that the gods have no part in the creation or management of things, and once they see that all creation, including their own living body, is composed of atoms and nothing more, they’ll understand that there is no life after death, no afterlife in which to suffer and fear. You, your body and your soul are that collection of atoms and when they disperse there’s no you — it’s as simple as that.”
The early Cavallu history rushes with the emotional impact of a great Russian novel, or the first chapters of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow. We get hooked, learn to understand what makes our narrator who he is, and identify with him, even in his inconsistencies.
Everyone meets at coffee shops for conversation and sustenance; friendships, and love affairs, linger for decades. Family gathers and disperses, inherently knows how to be there for each other at the right moments, to share grand meals that always allow others at the long tables, usually placed outdoors under high New England skies.
Fire in the Straw, by longtime Woodstocker Nick Lyons (Arcade), is a memoir of a busy life filled with literature, publishing, love, art and family, He’s had a long journey from a lonely, pit-in-the-stomach childhood to calm acceptance and gratitude for what life can toss one’s way … as well as the pleasures that fishing and books bring. It’s the summation of this writer and editor’s life with artistic ambition, with the struggles of a life buoyed by rhe constant need for money.
It’s one of the most beautifully conjured and rendered pieces of writing I’ve read. A true summation.
Before being adopted by the cold man whose last name he took and passed on, Nicki, as Lyons was known as a boy, gets thrust out of a large Jewish family into a parochial boarding school, endures a high school and college education that leaves him feeling unworthy of any ambition. He discovers books during a stint with the Army during our war-less 1950s, and embarks on a new life in literature that takes him back to college (at Bard, no less) in his mid-20s, an eventual doctorate in English from the University of Michigan, and a long-held teaching gig at Hunter College. He marries his college sweetheart, the painter Mari Lyons, has four kids, and takes on added jobs in publishing (as an executive editor) and ghost-writing. Becoming known for his own writing about fly fishing, he handles the worries of life.
He understands early that nothing comes to him easily. He struggles to find his own voice. He learns to love art, but takes a life to understand the market-less beauty of his wife’s dedication to painting. He realizes not only the various metaphors that his love for fishing implies, but also the simple lessons in simply doing things over and over. Fire in the Straw is an evocative summation, with lessons for all of us.
“I read and remember less, perhaps understand a bit more. Mostly these past years I have tried to cobble together bits of my fractured days, looking for hints of the pattern, the arc of it all,” Nick Lyons writes towards the end of his work.
I think of these well-earned and written evocations of older men’s understanding as I also read two new works I highly recommend this holiday season from Station Hill Press, in Barrytown: Sam Truitt’s Tokyoatoto and Michael Ruby’s The Star-Spangled Banner, books of ostentatiously pioneering lyric forms that remind me of such heroes of poetry past as John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. As well as the serious art the two octogenarians, Mirabelli and Lyons, have heralded in their writing. Art that pushes boundaries and inner glimpses into the artist’s soul while also fully embracing a life exemplified in giant rowdy meals and long friendships. Tokyoatoto, which juxtaposes the pages of a full notebook filled during a trip to China and Japan over a week last Thanksgiving with a typed version of those pages broken into more pronounced poetic form, balances a Beat stream-of-conscious truth-telling, of the moment, with more personal themes. It’s mesmerizing, a capturing of several worlds all at once, while also emotionally fruitful. It pioneers a new way to engage the complexities of our ever-complex world in new poetics beyond what we get taught, or read, from the past these days.
The same is true for Ruby’s The Star-Spangled Banner, which breaks any easy read into a slurry of patterns while repeating its conceit – the hidden words of our national anthem – into bits and pieces of heard conversations, road signage, and what feel like diary entries into a potent simulacrum of the ways in which our very thought patterns, as Americans and literate persons, have been broken in recent years by both a savage politics and a shattered attention span ruled by phones and advertising.
Truitt and Ruby publish new works in new styles every year or two. I imagine them as younger versions of Nick Lyons, made new by all he read and experienced, or Stillamare’s Renato, driven forward by ego and a wish to capture all he can on a canvas and recognizing the deepest beauty of what he’s created only when he becomes weakened by age.
Join the family! 
