Break Every Rule Read online

  And if I could only help you now. Somehow. I want to very much.

  Elissa and Annabelle and Anatole. Dale and Julie and Suzanne and Marilyn and Monica and the French Carole and Diana Chapmann she’s called.

  Judith.

  Urgent. My darling Zenka passed away this morning. She was in the nursing home. Please call. Love, Judith

  Letting love to have a mother. Letting love to have letting love to have a mother letting love to have.

  In plenty of time.

  Rose. The first word, the first world I know.

  Thank you in every possible way.

  Preparing a novel and paving the way.

  Catherine, Caroline, Charlotte, and Celestine.

  In the place of no one not yet.

  Miss miss miss miss miss and gossip

  When they cannot stop it altogether when they cannot stop it altogether.

  Come and kiss me when you want to because if you do you have more than done that which is a satisfaction to have been most awfully obliged to have as a delight and more than that.

  Thank you.

  Very much very much and as much and as much and then markets, markets are open in the morning and except on Monday.

  Do you think we should follow the sign for Perugia?

  very much

  Chapters of magic near the beginning and end (interchangeable)

  Puccini is striped like the campanile but it’s all right.

  Sage grows.

  Very content followed by five bells.

  We are very well fish.

  Sage grows so let it.

  Children grow.

  Let them.

  Ideas.

  Notions of the novel

  So let them.

  Wild capers grow everywhere.

  A tribute to Gertrude Stein and a travel diary so let it.

  Roses and rosemary everywhere

  For my

  beautiful mother

  Rose

  Marie

  Maso

  the one word

  of my world my father calling across the green

  Rose

  Chapter Always

  These days thinking of you, always, always.

  Chapter Alice

  who named her Rose in hope, as the century turned 31

  Grandma Alice very much

  If they say and it is an established fact if they say that he has gone away is there anybody to ask about it. It is so very easy to change a novel a novel can be a novel and it can be a story of the departure of Dr. Johnston it can be the story of the discovery of how after they went away nobody was as much rested as they hoped to be.

  Everything that will be said will have a connection with paper and amethysts with writing and silver with buttons and books.

  I am a simple girl in some ways do not want the Isle of Capri the Lago Giacomo Puccini will do. If not this time then next. Looking all over Florence for the cross that got lost.

  Consider whether they would be at all interested.

  It can be easily seen that a novel of elegance leaves something to be desired.

  Repeat. It can be easily seen that a novel of elegance leaves something to be desired. She knew in about the middle of it. Time to write.

  Let me say it here. Everything I loved or wanted or feared.

  Accuse me if you like one more time of overreaching. I miss you. Love you. Want.

  And time to write.

  This spa water is only for drinking. And the woman makes a breaststroke through the air, for swimming Bagno Vignoni, 30 kilometers away let’s go.

  In the green Fiat. Have to finish Gertrude Stein, have to finish Traveling Light—and the hills and the cypresses. Cypress, cypress, cypress, pine. Ava Klein turn over on your side.

  There is never any altogether the easiest way is to leave out anything.

  The whole chapter is thinking about the courage you afford and thinking out loud and the flowers and so not to be afraid. There is music in the head so sing continuously.

  Chapter Rose

  Who named you Carole Alice at mid-century. Thank you in every possible way.

  Song of joy

  And say what you need and like and want. Pleasure. A novel and you out loud. When she has been satisfied when she has been satisfied.

  Begin again.

  She may be coming in any moment darling.

  Begin again.

  Fanny irresistible.

  Jenny recalled.

  Henrietta as much as that.

  Claribel by and by

  Rose as plainly seen

  Hilda for that time

  Ida as not famous.

  Katherine as it should have it in preference

  Caroline and by this time

  Maria by this arrangement Esther who can be thought of

  Charlotte and finally.

  She rolls the rosy aureole and pearl the world around and round. Sea pearl to pearl with her and lip she shudders honey gold and conjures—this must be Paradise—or maybe Paris. She came to be happier than anybody else who was alive then. Gorgeous lilting rosy pearl. She rides the women world syntactic. Sings Paris Paris Paris Paris. And they walk the poodle Basket.

  Thank you.

  The way it looks exactly like it.

  The way you can get it to look exactly like you see and feel.

  Almost exactly. Thank you most of all for that.

  Who in this world is luckier than I?

  A very valentine—for Gertrude Stein.

  Little by little and more and more I begin to understand you very much.

  A novel and the future of the novel and the rest and the rest is diamonds.

  Father calling to Mother, Rose across the world first word. Repeated again and again rose rose rose rose rose rose rose.

  A novel of thank you and not about it.

  It might be allowed

  With thanks to Nicole Cooley, Keith Waldrop, John O’Brien, Catherine Stimpson.

  Someone named Rose at mid-century named her.

  In hope. 5 joyful 5 sorrowful mysteries.

  Thank you in every possible way

  Once more I thank you.

  An arrangement of their being there and never having been more glad than before.

  A list of addresses and who went to see them.

  Bruschetta, crostoni, lentils with pasta, grilled lamb, tiramisu.

  Spaghetti with clam sauce.

  Corne and kiss me when you want to.

  We are very well fish

  Lavishly well fish

  And Alice Babette, petite crevette. On the rue Christine after the war. Adore. Picking flowers gentle. Rose is a rose is a rose eternal and I am I because my little dog knows me.

  She wanders gorgeous key syntactic. Violet-breasted. Poodle

  Basket.

  Third religion

  Where.

  Fourth religion

  Where they grow vegetables so plentifully.

  Fourth religion

  If you courtesy.

  Second religion

  If you hold a hat on your head.

  Third religion

  If they are not told.

  Fourth religion

  Across to me.

  Fourth religion

  She walked across to me.

  Third religion

  And what did she see.

  Second religion

  What did she say to me.

  First religion

  When she walked across to me.

  I found myself plunged into a vortex of words, burning words, cleansing words, liberating words, and the words were all ours and it was enough that we held them in our hands…

  I shall not speak for anybody. I shall do my duty, I shall establish that mile. I shall choose wonder. Be blest.

  Footnotes

  Our Walks

  Often in the evening we would walk together; I greeted at the door of 5 rue Christine by Gertrude’s staunch presence, pleasant touch of hand, well-rounded voice a
lways ready to chuckle. Our talks and walks led us far from war paths. For generally having no ax to grind nor anyone to execute with it, we felt detached and free to wander in our own quarter where, while exercising her poodle, Basket, we naturally fell into thought and step. Basket, unleashed, ran ahead, a white blur, the ghost of a dog in the moonlit side streets:

  Where ghosts and shadows mingle—

  As lovers, lost when single.

  The night’s enchantment made our conversation as light, iridescent and bouncing as soap bubbles, but as easily exploded when touched upon—so I’ll touch on none of them for you, that a bubble may remain a bubble! And perhaps we never said d’imperissables choses.—Nathalie Barney

  Sweetnotes

  Their Cakes

  The discovery of cakes had always been a peacetime pursuit of Gertrude and Alice. Meeting them by chance at Aix-le-Bains, I enquired why they happened to be on the opposite bank of the Lac du Bourget, and was informed of a new sort of cake created in one of the villages on a mountain beyond. But first obliged to go on errands, they descended from the lofty seat of their old Ford car—Alice bejeweled as an idol and Gertrude with the air of an Indian divinity.

  She accepted her fame as a tribute, long on the way but due, and enjoyed it thoroughly. Only once, in Paris—and indeed the last time I saw her—did the recognition of a cameraman displease her, for he waylaid her just as we were entering Rumpelmayer’s patisserie. In order to satisfy the need for cake, and the photographer’s wish, she was photographed by him, through the plate-glass window, eating the chosen one.

  Her meals—continued

  Melon and prosciutto, artichoke risotto, grilled sausages, another tiramisu. Ravioli with truffles, fish stew, panecotta, and so forth.

  Please another Piero della Francesca.

  And so forth

  I am not striving at all but only gradually growing and becoming steadily more aware of the way things can be felt and known in words, and perhaps if I feel them and know them myself in the new ways it is enough, and if I know fully enough there will be a note of sureness and confidence that will make others know too. And when one has discovered and evolved a new form it is not the form but the fact that you are the form that is important.

  I find you young writers worrying about losing your integrity and it is well you should, but a man who really loses his integrity does not know that it is gone, and nobody can wrest it from you if you really have it.

  Hemingway you have a small income; you will not starve; you can work without worry and you can grow and keep this thing and it will grow with you. But he did not wish to grow that way, he wished to grow violently.

  Everybody’s life is full of stories; your life is full of stories; my life is full of stories. They are very occupying, but they are not very interesting. What is interesting is the way everyone tells their stories.

  Thornton Wilder: The fundamental occupation of Miss Stein’s life was not the work of art but the shaping of a theory of knowledge, a theory of time, and a theory of the passions…the formalization of a metaphysics.

  Mina Loy: She swept the literary circus clear for future performances.

  For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.

  Wassily Kandinsky, 1910: The apt use of a word (in its poetical sense), its repetition, twice, three times, or even more frequently, according to the need of the poem, will not only tend to intensify the internal structure but also bring out unsuspected spiritual properties in the word itself. Further, frequent repetition of a word (a favorite game of children, forgotten in later life) deprives the word of its external reference. Similarly, the symbolic reference of a designated object tends to be forgotten and only the sound is retained. We hear the pure sound, unconsciously perhaps, in relation to the concrete or immaterial object. But in the latter case pure sound exercises a direct impression on the soul. The soul attains to an objectless vibration, even more complicated, I might say more transcendent, than the reverberations released by the sound of a bell, a stringed instrument or a fallen board. In this direction lie the great possibilities for literature of the future.

  Martin Ryerson: If you realized that she worked insistently, every day, to be published the first time by a real publisher, publishing house after she was sixty. But I wonder who will do that, who will have the insistence, you understand the obsession, the surety the purity of insistence to do that. No concessions. She used to tell me, Don’t you ever dare to make a concession. Then one walks down, down, down. There’s no end of walking down.

  Acts

  Curtain

  Characters

  Characters

  Curtain

  Acts

  There is no one and one

  Nobody has met anyone.

  Curtain Can Come.

  (for Zenka Bartek 1912–1997)

  Curtain.

  And this is

  what bliss

  is and

  this and

  this is

  what

  bliss is.

  very much

  White lights lead to red lights which indicate the exit.

  Spaghetti arrabiata, spaghetti bolognese, polenta, grilled pork, escarole, spinach, ricotta, tiramisu…

  Saint Francis hundreds of times, Saint Sebastian certainly,

  Saint Simon, Saint Clare is a big one, the head of Saint

  Catherine, Saint Francis is a very big one, Saint Peter and Saint

  John of course. Saint Bliss.

  Preparing a novel prepared to stay.

  And paving the way.

  Thank you very much.

  Chapter Rose

  Even then I was loving you

  very much.

  End in singing.

  Who goes away tonight. They all do. And so they do.

  Richter, the Enigma

  WHAT IS THE LIMIT OF SNOW?

  NOT A NOTE OF MUSIC in his parent’s house. An apprenticeship in silence.

  The Fourth Violin Concerto (1984) has a cadenza which is to be seriously mimed by the soloist without making a sound. A tribute to the house of his birth.

  He wore those fingerless gloves even as a toddler, before he became anything like a musical prodigy.

  He remains to this day (15 October 1999) almost totally unknown outside of musical circles.

  The dissonant Soviet avant-garde persona he loved to put on at parties. Richter, born in that less-than-restless New Jersey suburb, Upper Montclair, to American parents and given the unlikely name: Gustave Richter.

  Once in high school Richter and I sitting on the curb, happily singing Frank Zappa songs. Call any Vegetable, Saint Alphonzo’s Pancake Breakfast, etc.

  Celebrating Edgar Varèse Day. We were despised by the other students. Of course.

  Of course we were.

  Density 21.5 performed in its entirety.

  Composed for his graduation from the Julliard School of Music: Uncle Pehrs’s Life in Music. 1978.

  Richter walking through snow and Schoenberg.

  Richter walking through the kind of snow you just don’t see anymore. Into music.

  BACH (B flat) The letters of Bach’s name appearing as a motif in much of his work.

  “History is plundered, irony is rampant, pastiche becomes the only coherence.”

  The critic says, “He takes the style that mocks the very idea of genius and turns it into an affirmation of genius.”

  He is a master of modern melancholy and sarcasm. Yes he is.

  Irony is a temptation, never a solution.

  “Everything which causes disharmony in the world, all that is monstrous, inexplicable, and dreadful is an intrinsic part of the world’s order. Disharmony and cacophony, ‘the world’s evil,’ is knit into what is harmonious and beautiful.” Richter in an interview last year.

  His last piece: For the Two Million Armenian Martyrs
.

  What Richter loved:

  the limits of perpetual snow.

  Uncle Pehrs.

  What concerned him was music, purely music and nothing else, yet there he is adjusting the shutter.

  Hello!

  Jean Sibelius’s Uncle Pehrs hanging above his desk to this day.

  A birthday party in Spain, that sort of documentation: I, tipsy hope to find him in the frame, champagne. The neck cut off with a knife. Richter grinning.

  No one is commissioning Richter for anything. Money is, as always, a problem. Richter’s assistant is despondent, etc. We walk around Central Park. Richter doing a lot of shrugging.

  “…the profound and the absurd…is the tangible personal struggle that appears embedded in each piece.” That’s my friend Richter all right.

  Richter in motion—where are you going?

  The little Super 8 I bought him as a gift. He aims it in every which direction. We both lament that we do not have the temperament to participate in what is indisputably the most important art form of the century. You’ve got to admit…

  It doesn’t stop him from trying…in his spare time. Because, as he likes to explain to me, composers have a lot of spare time.

  Set up on a tripod. 25 reels of Richter exist.

  Happy New Year!

  The Age of Discovery. The urge to solve the problem of recreating life in motion was tremendous. The motion picture was truly a child of its time. It was one of many problems solved, concepts realized, and inventions perfected.

  Music for film: the sound of one woman weeping. Accompanied by a shimmering chorus of boys.

  Richter and I sit and ponder Antonioni’s Eclipse. 58 shots that last 7 minutes each. Richter says we are going to play these numbers in the lottery and that we are going to be rich. And we will publish all my unpublishable novels as they are written and we will have all his work performed in the great concert halls for the first time anywhere in this order: 1) Adventures in a Perambulator, 2) For Bianca and Ulrich Love on the Occasion of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, 3) For Irina Wherever You May Be, 4) Uncle Pehrs’s Life in Music, 5) One Chance in a Million, 6) That Which Does Not Kill Me, Makes Me Stronger, 7) Tango For Endurance Dancers, 8) Themes Heard on the Evening of Good Friday: for the Two Million Armenian Martyrs, 9) The White Island, 10) etc.