The Zig-Zag
from the Afterward to The Motel En Route to Life Out There: A Selection from the Rider Quintet
On reflection, the “zigzag” that
Alice Attie referred
to in her introduction
to my reading from Provoked
in Venice at
Barnard, may stem
from the bizarre
zigzagging in my
childhood and adolescence. From
age zero to one I
was an undivided
Manhattan scoundrel;
from one to five
my childhood is divided
between New York
City and Los Angeles. After
my mother married
Sidney Strome, whom
I affectionately
dubbed “the
little Rabbi,” my
focal point for the
next seven years
was Illinois and
environs. We lived
in Chicago Heights
for two years, Chicago
for two years, and
the mythic hick town
of Kankakee for three
years— chronicled
exhaustively in my
books. But
there wasn’t
a week when I wasn’t
in Chicago. Then
came the traumatic
moment that I dramatized
in “Autokinetic
Heartbreak” in Sundays
on the Phone.
AUTOKINETIC HEARTBREAK
1
Afternoon Nap
at Camp Wayne
It was just beginning
to drizzle when our
mail arrived. Can
promptness be oppressive,
undesirable?
A fat envelope contained
a long hand-written
letter from Mom—an
expert typist—crammed
with the usual “uneventful
news” before
she interjected,
masterfully, with
no shift of emphasis,
that the Rabbi had
taken a pulpit in
Salt Lake City, we
were moving further
west again.
. . .
3
Mom had mastered
the dark art of dropping
bad news lightly,
and threw in the
place-name, Utah,
altitudinous outpost,
the way E.M. Forster
in The Longest
Journey disposes
of Gerald with one
auspicious, dry,
uninflected sentence: “Gerald
died on Tuesday.” Not
a word as to how
I might react to
yet another move
when I was so happily
immersed in life. Her
wavelike cursive
did not lesson the
impact of phrases
like “clean
air,” “clean-minded,” and “healthy
environment.” I
shook. First
the lines disappeared,
then the letter,
and now an infra-red
boulder pressed against
my chest; my ribcage
would have cracked
had my rage not risen
to push the attacker
off and roll onto
the floor—lucky
that my slant-eyed
comrade Mikey Freedom
wasn’t there
to remind me that
since the space between
our cots had been
declared molten lava
I was dead.
That pretty much
says it. Alien-nation. I
wished I’d
been wrong in one
detail! When my friend
since the age of
twenty-two, the poet
Mei Mei Bersenbrugge,
said she was probably
the most alienated
person she knew,
I bit my tongue;
and after all being
half Dutch half Chinese
isn’t the same
as having multiple
last names, and multiple
identities in many
places, which didn’t
faze me much until
the whole thing,
whatever it was,
came crashing down,
and I couldn’t
take being one of
about three Jewish
kids in a high school
of over two thousand
kids most of whom
were Mormons. This
was made
all the more intolerable
after the
eventful years I
spent at toughest
elementary school
in Chicago, Kenwood,
where the students
were almost all Black
and a few Hispanic
and poor (recounted
in a section of Realm of Unknowing called “My
Best Friend”). After
my parents who paid
no attention to my
comings and goings,
discovered that I’d
been absent most
of my sophomore year
at Highland High
School in Salt Lake
City, my father intervened. That
spring set up a meeting
with the headmaster
of a “prestigious” Eastern
prep school. After
an hour he made me
an offer: “We
are prepared to admit
you, but you will
have to repeat your
sophomore year.” “I’d
rather die. At
least give me the
chance to see if
I can do the work.” “I’m
sorry. Those
are our conditions.” Not
long after my mother
came across an ad
in the Sunday New
York Times Magazine
for Judson, a school
near Scottsdale,
known as “Rideaway” in
my books. And
where better
for an asthmatic
than the desert.
During vacations
when he had custody,
my father took me
to Florida and Nassau
and Hawaii and Mexico
on his expense account,
mostly during the
winter. By
the time I was ten
I felt that I could
have parachuted into
Chicago and survived
on my own, like a
Dickens character. A
fantasy no doubt,
but perhaps truer
than I would like
it to be. Then
I migrated East “to
get to know [my father]
me,” as my
Dad had said a hundred
times. But
apart from a few
occasions, which
mostly occurred in
water, he fled, he
hid, threw up smokescreens,
and worked on convincing
me that the only
thing that would
save me was “psychiatry.” As
the erstwhile President
of the Klein Institute
for Aptitude Testing,
he had a vested interest
in the powers of
psychology. Meanwhile,
my beloved Sidney
had become enough
of an alcoholic to
be fired from his
pulpit in Salt Lake
City, which I didn’t
learn until many
years later; became
depressed; and began
acting very touchily
with me as if I had
abandoned him for “bloody
Charles.” My
father imagined my
mother inherited
money, since my grandfather
lived on Park Avenue
and “knew everyone,” and
scoffed contemptuously
when I told him he’d
spent it and that
if he’d lived
much longer he would’ve
sold everything,
even the farm in
Suffern I wish they
hadn’t sold! My
mother and stepfather
imagined my father
was rolling high,
but that’s
why I inserted the
word “expense
account,” earlier
in this paragraph;
having refused to
buy into the family
business out of pride,
he was essentially
out of an important
job at the age of
sixty-four, after
which he became manic,
then Manic, then MANIC! ,
to where one of my
greatest dreads was
that he would show
up at one of my poetry
readings in New York. Sidney
then got cancer. My
mother became a slave
to his illness. Out
of gratitude he treated
her like shit. “A
pox on all your houses!” My
mother’s brother,
the film director
Herbert I. Leeds,
had committed suicide
in 1954 and it was
at that time she
vowed to get me away
from her father who
she intuited, mostly
correctly, had “done
this to him in the
way he spoiled him.” We
lived on the Rabbi’s
income. My
complaints were few. I
wanted money to buy
records and didn’t
want to wear horrible
clothes bought “at
a discount” from
his congregants. My
several requests
to go to private
schools were all,
until my leap to
Rideway, based on
survival; physical
survival in Chicago;
mental survival in
Salt Lake City. As
an only child caught
between these tortured,
selfish, gifted,
unfulfilled, unselfknowing
adults, I slipped
invisibly through
almost every net,
and my advice to
teenage boys who
want to meet girls
would be: go to Friday
night services. My
mother had just about
every known nonterminal
disease, mostly brought
on by stress. My
father’s mania
vanished and he became
terminally depressed
and on November 12,
1986, having been
pushed out of his
apartment in Manhattan
at his wife’s
behest, (“we
can’t afford
to live here!”),
he set a chair against
the railing of his
brother in law’s
apartment in Miami
and jumped. (It’s
been pointed out
to me that all my
poems since the first
one I plan to include
in my Selected Poems
employ images of
falling.) My
mother’s response: “aha!
I knew he’s
get around to it
someday!” Sidney’s
response: “well
I always called him ‘bloody
Charles’”. My
response is in my
body, soul, and writing,
and continues to
evolve. I think
I have only had one
period of genuinely,
or clinically, “severe,” depression,
which I chronicled
in my essay “Reading
T.S. Eliot on My
Uncle’s Farm
in the Gatineau.” There
is one person missing
from this narrative,
my father’s
second wife, Merrill. The
reader should take
this as a good sign. I
doubt I would have
maintained a love
affair with the same
woman since I was
twenty-two if I hadn’t
seen the easy intimacy
she and my father
shared in the good
years they were allotted. But,
same story, I bitterly
resented negative
comments she made
about my stepfather;
and despite the trap
she was in, living
with a madman, I
think her insistence
that they “move
to Miami, Early Bird
Special, All You
Can Eat, $3.99!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!,” sent
my father over the
edge. His last
words to me were
the same as Van Gogh’s
to his brother: “I
want to come home…now.”
Mark
Rudmans
first
full-length
book of
poetry,
By Contraries:
Selected
Poems,
included
the first
of his
long poems, By
Contraries.
Leslie
Ullman,
writing
in the
New York
Times,
found
them complex,
despairing,
seeking
to confront
the contradictions
offered
up by
contemporary
urban
life,
and to
achieve
reconciliation
with them.
Roger
Mitchell,
sounding
a prophetic
note in
The American
Book Review,
said:
Here is
poetry
that has
a chance
of seeing
the world
. . .
here,
happily,
is the
public
poetry
of a private
person,
inheritor
but radical
transmutor
of the
legacies
of so
diverse
a pair
as Walt
Whitman
and Robert
Lowell,
words
that uncannily
predict
the series
of dialogic
and diasporal
poems
that begin
with the
appearance
of the spectral
inquisitor in
Rider.
Rudman’s
trilogy
has been
seen as
a twentieth
century
The Prelude;
he has
remarked
that his
early
reading
of Marcel
Proust
was decisive
with regard
to the
conception
and composition
of his
long poems.
While
Rider
received
The National
Book Critics
Circle
Award
for poetry
and some
critics
felt that
it was “a
tough
act to
follow”, The
Millennium
Hotel,
as The
Village
Voice
wrote
when choosing
it as
one of
the 25
Best Books
of the
Year in
1996, “delivers
if anything
more bravura,
wildness,
originality.” The
Australian
poet John
Kinsella
sees Rudman’s
work as “set
apart
from other
innovators” in
its “compilation
of larger
forms
over long
periods
of time
. . .
hybrid
. . .
but also
developing
a new
kind of
narrative/lyrical
accumulation.” The
diasporic
element
of these
books
mingling
aphorism,
dialogue,
lyric,
and narrative
refers
not just
to Jews
but to
the modern
human
condition,
a motif
that is
further
developed
in Provoked
in Venice,
his essays,
and his
translations
of such
poets
as Bohdan
Boychuk,
Johannes
Bobrowski,
Rene Char,
Osip Mandelstam,
Pierre
Reverdy,
and Boris
Pasternak
(he was
awarded
the Columbia
Translation
Center’s
Max Hayward
Award
for his
translation
of My
Sister
- Life)
and emphatically
his adaptation
of Euripides
Daughters
of Troy
(University
of Pennsylvania
Press)which
portrays
the unspeakable
genocide
of a metropolis.
His translations
appear
in numerous
anthologies
including
Twentieth
Century
French
Poetry,
ed. by
Paul Auster
(Random
House),
and World
Poetry,
ed. by
Katherine
Washburn
(Norton).
One of
the most
widely
published
poets
of his
generation,
he has
received
awards
from the
Ingram
Merrill
Foundation,
The Guggenheim
Foundation,
and The
National
Endowment
of the
Arts.
His poetry
has appeared
in most
of the
major
English
language
journals
in the
world,
including
The American
Poetry
Review,
The Atlantic
Monthly,
Harper’s,
Grand
Street,
The London
Review,
The New
Yorker,
The New
Republic,
The Paris
Review,
The Partisan
Review,
and The
Threepenny
Review.
He is
among
the few
poets to
be represented
in both
The Best
American
Poetry and
The Best
American
Essays.
After contributing
to After
Ovid, ed.
by Michael
Hoffman
and James
Lasdun (Farrar,
Straus,
and Giroux),
he embarked
on highly
regarded
versions
and palimpsests
of Horace
(“Role
Play”, “The
Desert of
Empire”)
and Ovid
(“Phaeton’s
Dream: Driving
Lessons
in the Desert”, “Aesacus
the Diver”);
several
new ones
appear in
The Couple.
As poetry
editor and
then editor-in-chief
of the international
literary
journal,
Pequod,
he was awarded
two Editor’s
Fellowships
from CCLM.
He also
guest edited
TriQuarterly
106: Classics
and Contemporaries.
He was Poet-In-Residence
at the Walt
Whitman
Birthplace
Association
for 1998.
He has been
the poetry
critic for
The London
Review of
Books, The
Nation,
and Amazon.Com.
He recently
published
introductions
to Malcolm
Lowry’s
Ultramarine
(Penguin)
and Cesare
Pavese’s
The Moon
and the
Bonfires
(The New
York Review
of Books
Classics). Rudman
has been
celebrated
for his
far-reaching
scope: his
essays on
such world
poets as
Yehuda Amichai,
Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Homer, Czeslaw
Milosz,
Osip Mandelstam,
Cesare Pavese,
and Tomas
Transtromer,
appeared
in such
journals
as The American
Poetry Review,
Ironwood,
The Nation,
and Raritan,
and were
collected
in Diverse
Voices:
Poets on
Poetry. In
her anthology
of Best
American
Essays of
the 20th
Century,
Joyce Carol
Oates cited
Realm of
Unknowing
as among
the most
significant
works of
nonfiction.
He is
currently
assembling
Tropic
Winter,
and finishing
Identification
of a Woman.
The Motel
En Route
to Life
Out There:
A Selection
From the
Rider
Quintet,
will appear
in 2008.
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