How Proust Ruined My Life & Other Essays by Gloria Frym
How Proust Ruined My Life & Other Essays by Gloria Frym (BlazeVOX [books] 2020)
Cover Art: Lezley Saar, “A redemption that smelled of mirrors,” paper
collage, 2019.
For frequent readers of this blog, I apologize for always talking about autodidacticism—but since it is so formative of and central to my aesthetic and political affinities as a reader, I once again find myself pledging my allegiance to independent reading and everything that aids and abets it. My abbreviated narrative, for any newcomers: although I somehow eventually ended up with a master’s degree, I identify as an autodidact. Solitary study and informal pedagogical configurations at (above? below? beyond?) the margins of academia are where I feel at home. As such, I have always been grateful for open texts. As Lyn Hejinian describes in “The Rejection of Closure,”
The “open text,” by definition, is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies. It speaks for writing that is generative rather than directive. The writer relinquishes total control and challenges authority as a principle and control as a motive. The “open text” often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers, and thus resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material and turn it into a product; that is, it resists reduction and commodification.
Although Hejinian seems to be writing more about the aesthetic choices of Language writers, or writers beloved of Language writers, one of the most generous ways to invite readers in is to show your work, and the work of any writer worth her salt involves serious reading. If the training of a writer often begins with imitative work, what is to be imitated must needs be a teacher’s reading as well as her writing.
Gloria Frym’s How Proust Ruined My Life does this quite well, for anyone who wants to become a student of it. Frym writes about: Flaubert, Proust, Niedecker, Whitman, the many practitioners of the prose poem, Chekhov, Toomer, Creeley, Meltzer, Ginsberg, Berlin, and more. She tracks not only the book or author, but the context and experience of her reading, which is quite often her teaching (whether in the San Francisco County Jails or at New College or CCA).
Books are different at different ages. Reading it at 37 reawakens the fires of my ardor for many of the writers Frym discusses. I was running around my apartment pulling down Lorine Niedecker’s Collected, and Emily Dickinson’s, too. My late teens/early twenties self, miserable and wayward as she was, is a strong presence within me. If she were reading this book, she would either be encountering many of these writers for the first time, or would be encountering them elsewhere (in Hoa Nguyen’s workshops or Phillip Trussell’s art studio) but these essay would clear away some of the opacity that many writers can have in the eyes of a younger reader. Or this younger reader, anyway.
As such, How Proust Ruined My Life is a valuable addition to a catalogue of books that in my younger years included: Pound’s ABC of Reading (yes, he was a fascist; yes, this book was useful), Delany’s About Writing, Cixous’s Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, and Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination.
The first essay in Frym’s collection, “Glass Breaking Boy: Teaching Poetry Inside,” talks about her experiences teaching in the SF County Jails (Brodsky, Proust, and Shklovsky make an appearance). One of the most interesting parts of this essay, for me, was the section, How Poetry Lost a Home in the SF County Jail, which reflects in retrospect on the singularity of the era (the 1980s) in which Frym was teaching in this context. The defunding of the arts, the massive increase in the prison population, and the professionalization of poetry come together.
In terms of tone and sense of humor, How Proust Ruined My Life reminded me of the reminisces and cultural commentary of Dubravka Ugrešić, sympathetic to, perhaps even exalting that dear Bartlebian fellow, the reader. The figure of the Reader is led to that of the Writer by her creative intuition (taste).
The last piece of the collection, “Poetics After the Millennium,” is a short stirring manifesto:
Poets, like any other citizen, have to resist amnesia and corporatism, which is sameness in the end, in spite of the many products it appears to offer. Poets also have to resist the fatigue that ensues from such resistance. Capital loves everything, even us, and will try to buy and sell us, even though we are no other use to it, wait and see. We must not succumb to the “managed care” model of reality, managed by whom, we might ask? We have fingerprints, we must continue to leave them.
Two paragraphs later, in a passage reminiscent of S.D. Chrostowska’s reflection that utopian dreaming must, at times, drop anchor in the reality of the phenomenal world, Frym writes:
There is little retreat possible from the real. A writer must create artifice from it and throw the artificial back into the actual. The actual is an old pond, but the artificial is a new frog. The task is always to speak of and against and beyond the time, to embrace and resist simultaneously—the greatest writers say this and going deeply into them will give you particular clues to their strategies of containment and resistance.
For longtime reader-writers / embracer-resisters, How Proust Ruined My Life will have a restorative feeling—a homecoming. For readers still in the early stages of the process of following their creative intuition towards creative incarnation, this book, and its rich multifarious bibliography, make a lovely guide.