LETTERS: 1984: 37 - 40

LETTERS: 1984: 37-40

37.

                                                                                                January  27,  1984

Dear R.K. Singh, 

After several day’s delay and considerable thought, I decided to take your suggestion to write Dr. V. Rai about my black literature manuscript.  I would have no objection, in fact would welcome it, if Dr Misra is able to have my book published at Allied Publishers.  My only frustration, as I told you, was having so much time pass with no report on his negotiations.  I am writing Dr. Rai today telling him this.  I would not do anything to interfere with a bona fide offer for publication, if Misra is able to get one. 

You had every right, after reading the last paragraph of my last letter, to intercede in my behalf,  yet on reflection, I realize that to withdraw the manuscript—if Misra does succeed in getting a favorable reception—would cancel out my own effort to have the manuscript Xeroxed and sent to Misra in the first place.  If he can get a publisher for it, that is what I intended. 

Please do not continue to press me to review your book.  I will be happy to have a copy if you  send it, but I cannot review it. Reviewing is an art that should be practiced from strength, and I have no strength as a reviewer.  Nor any prestige or claim to authority when it comes to judging Sri Aurobindo.  I realize this more and more as I read what you write about him.

I never had reviews for my books except rarely—one for ORCHARD PARK AND ISTANBUL in the Buffalo newspaper, and another in a review at the University; none at all for YOU TOO, VD, and THE DERVISHES; and two for TWO CONTINENTS.  None in influential publications.  My  feeling is that if ever my work achieves sufficient substance to merit wide recognition, it may get it.  Or may not.  There is a lot of luck in such matters.  But my main job is to promote my writing by writing.  Let the reviews come as they   may from people who have enough interest  to do the reviewing without prompting from me.  I have been surprised, always, and of course  delighted to get recognition, like your thesis, which came as a great surprise when I heard what you were engaged in.  I was flattered and pleased, but I would never have suggested to Pandeya that he encourage one of his graduate students to write a thesis on my poetry.

Speaking  of Dr. Pandeya, you haven’t mentioned him in your letter.  Was he there when you visited Varanasi?  The last you wrote me was disturbing, how his students had repudiated him and his chairmanship was in danger of being revoked.  That seems such a miscarriage of justice, for from all that I know of him, he is one of the best teachers and most thorough scholars I met when I was in India.  And I considered him my good friend. Yet, except for your unhappy news, I have heard nothing from him in three years.

I continue to write anti-Reagan, and hope there is chance that he will not succeed in being  re-elected, but many Americans like him for his militarism, believing that he is making the US strong and respected as a great Power.  After being an Independent for 50 years, I am now on the Bennington County Democratic Committee, working to defeat Reagan, but I do not underestimate his cleverness and the greed and skill of his cronies.

                                                                                                                      

                                                                                                                   Yours,

                                                                                                                Lyle Glazier

38.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        April 16,  1984

Dear R.K. Singh,

I have had a letter from your publisher that two copies of your book are being sent me.  I will read them with interest, and if there is somewhere I can review, I will.  I have just renewed my subscription to  BOSTON REVIEW, thinking that perhaps that magazine would be interested in your work.  I have no doubt of the excellence of your interpretation. If the copies come by overseas nonairmail it may be some time before I see them.  It is a good book.  You must be happy at the thought of its being in print.  I hope your reviews will reflect your long and serious efforts, giving you the credit you deserve.  And, as I say, I will do what I can for you here.

As for your own reviewing, I think you are doing just right.  You learn by reviewing, particularly as a young scholar this is important.  Only old fogeys like me can reach a point where they can afford to be choosy, not wishing to get up another new subject in order to review it.  But in your case, I do feel different, because, for one thing, you have been educating me on SAVITRI for a long time, and took the trouble to send me a copy of the epic.

I become more and more disturbed at the thought of what may have happened to Dr. Pandeya, an intelligent and humane scholar if ever I knew one.  I cannot comprehend what has happened. I do not ever hear from him now, although I have written  to him a number of times, only last February to recommend a colleague of mine who was traveling from Buffalo to Banaras to read poetry there.  He wrote that he was unable to find Dr. Pandeya.  Let me ask you this. When I was at Sana’a University teaching American literature, Dr. Pandeya attended my classes.  I illustrated the American imperical method of teaching, insisting that my students read the poems and stories we were discussing.  Every day I began with their criticisms before branching out from what they said to what I myself had to say.  Dr. Pandeya seemed much struck with the method.  Do you think there is a chance he tried to introduce that method at BHU and his students  revolted?  I know that in Turkey it was new for my students to have to read what was being lectured on.  I carried enough books so that everybody had  a copy.

I am sure that at ISM you have the same problem scholars have all over India, especially at the smaller institutions. There may be only one library in all India, where, say all the novels of Thomas Hardy can be found.  So the director of a thesis, for example, may have to travel to that library if he wishes to keep up with his student.  Your choice of Aurobindo and of your method proved to be excellent, because your chief resource was the epic itself. Not that you didn’t work hard to cover secondary research.  But like me, your interest was chiefly in your own first hand examination of a text.  I doubt if research of that kind will ever go out of style.

Yes, I am strongly anti-Reagan, for I think he believes that the rest of the world ought to bow down and worship American business enterprise, and that American ought chiefly to protect their own interests.  He has no idea that Hindus are people, or Moslems people, or Central Americans are people in their own right, and deserving of their own privileges without the assistance of US military force. Right now I am organizing supporters of Jesse Jackson for our Vermont Caucus.  Jackson is interested in people, people of all ethnic backgrounds, all nationalities, rich and poor, particularly poor and underprivileged.  The US is not at the mercy of Republicans only.  Too many Democrats support the upper class privileges. We are far from being democracy except in our political structure, which has the trapping of democracy without always having the spirit of sharing. 

I always enjoy your poems, and enjoy the two in your last letter.

I understand #1941 without agreeing with it, except possibly with your privilege of describing a particular homosexual couple, and understanding that not all homosexual unions need be sterile.  Though they will not have children, homosexual lovers may be creative, as, for example, the union of Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle was  creative if it produced some of the beautiful love poems of Whitman. I myself am critical of exclusive homosexuals when they are only dilettantes, when they produce nothing.  But I would not—as you do—measure them on whether  they will get to heaven.  I have never yet read a description of Heaven (Christian, Moslem, Buddhist, Hindu) that makes me want to go to such an exclusive, prestigious gathering.  I like better the thought of melting back into the soil and becoming part of it.

                                What I remember

                                of the teenager

                                who seduced the

                                five year old

                                in the double bed

                                of the little chamber

                                at Gram’s

                                                --eager,

                                and afterwards tyrannical

                                “Don’t you  tell your Gram!”

                                Was fear for himself only?

                                next spring

                                he was gone to his mother,

                                I spent hours

                                traveling roads

                                into woods

                                hoping to find anybody

                                anybody like him

                                ten years

                                until I was a teenager,

                                mind full of his phallos,

                                lept at the thought of him

                                readying for him

                                                                                                                    Yrs.

                                                                                                                Lyle G

39.

                                                                                                     July 5, 1984

Dear friend, R.K. Singh, 

I apologize for not writing sooner.  You can’t imagine how busy I’ve been. I excused myself with the poor excuse that I had not received the copies of your book promised in a letter from Prakash Book Depot, dated 3.4.84, and returned to them for more postage.  I begin to think they must have sent the package by sea mail, and that can take forever.

I got involved in the Jesse Jackson campaign in the presidential election, and finally  became the author of a proposal by which Vermont became the first state to grant him the delegates he has earned for the national convention at San Francisco next week.  Last summer Mondale and his supporters, knowing they were the only candidate to have an organization in every state, persuaded the Democratic National Rules Committee to pass a rule that a candidate must receive at least 20% of the votes in a state primary in order to win delegates to the national convention.  I circulated a petition for a rules change in Vermont, writing to every prominent democrat in the state, and then making a speech at our state convention, resulting in our changing the rule so that Jackson got 3 out of 17 delegates.  A lot of other people worked for it, so I don’t deserve too much credit, but I am happy with the outcome of my first year as a Party member, after 50 years of being an Independent.  It’s not that I think Jackson should be President, he has given up hope for that, but I want him to have firm support for influencing the Convention to a more liberal stand on platform issues, and for his excursions into international diplomacy.  He is doing well.  For the first time I begin to hope that there is a chance Reagan can be defeated.

The second thing that has taken my time has been trying  to work on my poem AZUBAH NYE, which will now appear in ORIGIN magazine in early fall. I will try to send you a copy.  I gave a reading last June 21  at the little schoolhouse in Massachusetts, where the events of the poem took place.  All my relatives were present as well as  other friends I hadn’t seen in 50 years.

Right now I’m getting prepared to go back to teaching next fall—to teach a course in Richard Wright, the great Black American novelist, who spent his last years in Paris.  In organizing Bennington delegates for Jackson, I got acquainted with students at a small college here, and learned that there were no  course sin Black authors at their school, and offered to give one, and perhaps finish the book on Wright and Melville I started when I taught a graduate course in those two authors in Buffalo in summer 1974.

On May 1, our youngest daughter Alis came back from Jamaica, West Indies, where she had been teaching since December, and stayed with us while preparing the introduction to her thesis on problems of teaching English to Creole-speaking Jamaican children.  On last Sunday she left to return for a year.

She’s 35 years old, still very beautiful, intelligent, but lonely.  She wants to find a good man to marry.  Men take advantage of her. I’m afraid she will take chances with one of the handsome dark skinned men who will make trouble for her.  You know, that dark skin does not trouble me, but poverty can drive a man to take chances in order to get money from a woman, and loneliness can make a good woman his prey.  Neither at fault.

I was really pleased to have a copy of POETRY TIME with my translation of Baudelaire’s invocation to the Reader for his book Les Fleurs du Mal. The editor of a small magazine here has also written about his interest in having these translations but I am happy to have the sign of an interest there, also.

It was a special pleasure to share space in the issue where your good poem appeared, so that we are collaborators in the magazine.

By now your news in your April letter is so far back that you will have covered it over with better news, I hope.  It was painful to read how  you had to go through that arduous time of forced abortion.  I hope that Bulli has fully recovered, and that the children are both now in good health.  I know what it is to have an unexpected pregnancy, for besides our three daughters, Amy carried one child to term (born dead) and another into several months before miscarriage.  Such things are difficult to endure.

This morning is the first I have had to begin to clear up a large backlog of letters that have piled up since April.  Yours is one of the first.

If your book does not arrive soon, I have thought of looking back over the chapters you sent me to see whether there is enough there to furnish a clue.  I would rather see the whole, of course,  before deciding whether I know enough to review it.

Not one word from Dr. Pandeya.  I fear he has suffered a great blow.   I respect him more than any other professor I met in India in the time I was there (1970, ’71).  I cannot imagine what happened.

                                                                                                Cordial greetings,

                                                                                                Lyle Glazier             

40.

                                                                                                August 30, 1984

Dear friend R.K. Singh,

After wracking my brains for a long time I have come up with a review of sorts, thanks to your thesis, which for the first time made it possible for me to follow the thread of the narrative and the theme.  I am afraid that you will find my review  very simple and innocent of insights.  I am not satisfied, but rather surprised that I was able to get this much done.

I have sent a copy under separate cover, mailed this morning.  As you will see, I felt that Americans would need a double review of both the epic (and the letters on the epic) and your thesis.  I hope that you won’t be disappointed and that for you my admiration of your work will come through.

Yesterday I had an acceptance from a very good critic Donald Hall for the Country Journal,  which liked the lyric “Sugaring off.”  Also I’ve been invited to State University of New York at Buffalo on October 2 to read my “folk epic” (as I call it) Azubah Nye. They pay air flight & $200, not great but good. Donald Hall’s magazine pays $50, enough for me to rent a car while in Buffalo. 

Please write me what you think about the review.

                                                                                                Yrs.

                                                                                                Lyle Glazier