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Introduction

I always knew I was not going to measure up as a literary giant, so from the start I put my hopes on making myself a name as a literary pygmy, that is, on writing one great but undoubtedly odd, sui generis, irreplaceable, one of a kind, modestly immortal book. The book I had in mind would be a novel along the lines of Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica, or Sybille Bedford’s A Legacy, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, Walter Abish’s How German Is It, Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke, J. R. Ackerley’s We Think the World of You, or Harry Mathews’s Tlooth. True, each of these novels being by its nature unlike any other, they reveal nothing in common to the aspiring imitator, besides being the one book by their various authors (some prolific, most not) that one really couldn’t live without. Oh yes, and I first heard of all of them from Keith Waldrop, the best person I know to talk about books with—whatever it is, he’s read it, has an opinion on it, and has it in his library on Elmgrove Avenue in Providence, in the next room, or just upstairs.

Therefore it’s both fitting and something of an impertinence that Keith Waldrop would end up writing such a novel himself. Beautiful, funny, wise, sad, endearingly economical in size, guaranteed one of a kind in voice and subject matter, inimitable, universally admired by that small percentage of the human race that has read it, Light While There is Light, which first appeared from Sun & Moon in 1993, was an instant eccentric classic. In protest I step out of the line where the would-be writers of one great but peculiar novel are waiting, to write this introduction. I will be brief.

Where was the need? Keith Waldrop is a poet with some fifteen volumes in that other genre to his credit. Both his first, A Windmill Near Calvary (1968), and his latest, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, were nominated for the National Book Award, which he won in 2009. He is the translator of another ten or twelve books, including an important, illuminating prose version of Les Fleurs du mal. As co-editor and publisher, along with his wife Rosmarie Waldrop, of Burning Deck Press since 1961, he has been a major influence on two or three generations of innovative writing in America, and was even knighted by the Republic of France in the year 2000—named Chevalier des arts et des lettres—for his contributions. In short, Keith Waldrop is a fully arrived international person of letters, a literary giant, there you have it, and a brilliant visual artist besides. So where was the need to toss off a great small novel like no other?

Light While There is Light, though surely a work of imaginative fiction in design, is a bit shifty about its genre. It calls itself, not a novel, but An American History. A bookish, patient, witty, gently melancholic, ruminative narrator with the same name as the author and a rare gift for anecdote recalls his bizarre but profoundly American and Midwestern family, not from without—and this is the special art of the book—but from within, as a member, lifelong, like it or not, willy-nilly.

“All my family, and Julian is our type in this, have a streak of the unworldly,” the narrator tells us. Long before Keith is born, just after the birth of the oldest of his three half siblings, Mother—possibly in reaction to an offhand remark from that handsome wastrel, her first husband—gets religion and passes it on as a lifelong quest to her young family, which, despite many obstacles, hard travels, and theological and financial gyrations, never entirely loses it again. The book’s long opening chapter, which takes up almost half the novel, is entitled “A Pilgrimage”; in due course we realize that Mother’s long search, at first with her one marriageable daughter in tow, for a church sufficiently homelike, unworldly, and doctrinally pure, will never end, not even when she comes to rest, in her last days, in a rented garage in Champaign, Illinois.

The terrible truth that haunts the family and the novel is that the world might simply be dull and meaningless:

The history of my mother’s religious opinions should be told as the record of a pilgrimage. As I imagine most pilgrimages, it was less the struggle toward a given end than a continual flight from disappointment and unhappiness. Neither the joys of heaven nor hell’s worst prospects provide as forceful a motive as the mere emptiness of the world.

It takes an eccentric, Waldropian sort of genius to see a weak attachment to the world-as-it-is as the common thread between Mother’s wounded and wary fundamentalism, sister Elaine’s cheerful obedience, brother Charles and brother Julian’s talent (talent is not quite the word) for flimflam and otherwise illegal solutions to all of life’s problems, and the narrator’s troubled spirit: “I was often afraid in those days, more than a little sometimes: afraid that there was no truth, or that there was one truth, only one, and that I had it.” His faith wavers and slowly blinks out, becomes one of the book’s many shadows of an absence.

Light While There is Light takes its title from the Gospel of John, 12:35-36: “Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth. While ye have light, believe in the light, that ye may be the children of light.”

At rhythmic intervals—in this respect as much like music as collage—the novel revisits the theme of the narrator’s own relations with light, in brief, image-rich variations throughout the text, each floating in its own shining white space. Is this the light of the title? The light of God? Of revealed truth about a God we once thought to grasp with our senses? Maybe it is just—light. The physiological phenomenon of light, its perception and attendant sensations, is a subject of deep interest to Keith Waldrop the poet. Passages about it, images of it, are scattered all over his work. But in Light While There is Light, it is both itself—light—and the leitmotif for the origin and end of faith: what precedes it, what survives it.

I remember, for some reason, a film I once saw, in which sequences resembling old, contrasty photographs faded, not into darkness like the usual fade, but into a bright white empty screen, so that the story seemed sketched in elaborate shadows against a field of perpetual light—shining now through the pictures, illuminating them, and now supplanting them, shining on its own.

The odd balance of pleasures in a small, perfect, one-of-a-kind novel can be inventoried better than it can be explained. Some of its delights may sound like suffering when lifted out of the book for closer examination: for example, Light While There is Light is an exemplary Midwestern novel (though a substantial chunk of it unfolds at an unaccredited Bible College in Sharon, South Carolina) in its understanding of space as a baffling, featureless surplus—what is a pair of towns like Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, doing in the so-called real world at all? And yet, only because Keith once tried, briefly, to go to university there, a good many family members get stuck in the homely sister cities seemingly for life—even after the family used car lot is no more (see chapter three, “Discerning of Spirits”). I hate to accuse the narrator Keith Waldrop of anything as banal as a Midwestern trait, but what else, pray (I still live in the Midwest) is that polite hopelessness in the face of an ever receding normal that one eventually concludes was never there in the first place?

The narrator’s voice in Light While There is Light, though it sometimes recalls that of Keith Waldrop the poet, is unlike any other in fiction, and likewise the character for whom it speaks. Always preserving its uniquely Waldropian distance, a sort of Olympian bemusement, quietly affectionate and without the slightest temptation to judge, what it tells, first of all, is the story of a family as it travels through place and time. In a tragicomic way, they are rather a close family—they keep scattering and coming together again, like globules of stale milk in a cup of hot coffee. “Pilgrimage” yields to “Tibet”—though no one in the family goes anywhere near Tibet—as those travels grow stranger and stranger. In a compressed, musically segmented, anecdotal style of his own invention, but with all the building power of narrative, the author recounts each family member’s religious experiences, flights from the law, nuptial pairings, and economic woes. His own troubles fade into the background, once he is an academic with a stable job and a place to live. But we can make out all the same what their youngest member begins to look like to the rest of the family: at once their salvation and their deserter, the one who flew the coop.

Is it wrong for me to love madly and even wish to elope with his one slender novel, more than the entire sagging shelf of his poetical works? Remarkably, Keith Waldrop himself told an interviewer¹ in 2008: “I never wanted to be known as a poet. I’m in some ways more interested in writing prose than verse although verse is much easier. . . . Prose rhythm to me is very difficult and it’s something I love. I like Henry James better than any poetry I can think of.”

He went on to air another startling idea in that three-way conversation (Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop, Jared Demick), as one sometimes hears oneself do, in a live interview, to one’s own consternation. Even Rosmarie was taken aback:

Keith: I think of my one novel as my major work. Out of all my work, that’s the one I . . .

Rosmarie: Really?

Keith: . . . put at the top.

Rosmarie: I’m surprised.

Perhaps it was what he had been reading, or eating, that week, but—having talked about books with Keith Waldrop for forty years, I’m inclined to believe he meant what he said. (He may have changed his mind later: There is something about winning the National Book Award, as he did, in poetry, the following year, that warms a writer to the work in question, whatever the genre.)

I, however, was not completely astonished to hear Keith Waldrop speak of Light While There is Light as the best, or most lasting, thing he’s done, for another reason: I have always thought that the soul of Keith Waldrop’s verse, too, is, oddly enough, prose.² Much as I admire them, I read his books of poetry as something like the collected marginalia of an ageless scribe, somewhat loopy on the fumes of decomposing paper and fermented printer’s ink, who lives in the bottomless vault of a library. Keith Waldrop is, even in so-called real life, a poet who likes to say that he would rather read than write, and most of the books in the Waldrops’ actual library—of which belles lettres constitute only a part—are works of prose. History, archaeology, architecture; epistemology and metaphysics, theology and religion; music; geology, botany, vulcanology; psychology, neurophysiology, the study of the brain and the senses—these are some of the subjects that are well represented on those crammed shelves. They are also a fair sampling of the kinds of books—whether antiquarian, crank or scholarly—whose ghost prose echoes in the poetry.

From his earliest book, A Windmill Near Calvary, which could almost pass for a conventional collection, to his latest, Transcendental Studies, whose avowed modus operandi was collage, Keith Waldrop’s poems often seem to be built of sentences quarried out of faraway prose matrices—used sentences from lost, antique, dog-eared, half-remembered tomes; sentences missing a piece here and there, logical edges not quite flush, patched and interpolated, but never quite losing the character of distant prose—ghost prose, so to speak. Their prose origins linger in part because the poet makes us heavily aware of their periods—not periods in the Ciceronian sense, but in the straightforward, punctuational sense of a full stop. In a Keith Waldrop poem, we hear the sentences as sentences (even when they’re incomplete) because they so definitely end. One ends, and without transition another, probably from some other area of humane inquiry, begins. Medical advice, curious superstitions, Biblical exegesis, aphorism, architectural description, the crusty residue of an anecdote—any of these might get its ghostly sentence in the poem. They lie like cantilevered architraves on top of one another, because that’s how poems are shaped, but still they feel like prose.

This is from “Beauty,” a poem in A Windmill Near Calvary:

According to a newspaper account, maybe distorted

in my remembering (told me, come to think of it, by my

brother, who sometimes lies), a man carrying a shotgun

down Main Street in some town or other

explained to a policeman that an hour before, on the

same block, another man, a total stranger,

spit in his eye and told him it was raining. It is

possible to look, neither at surfaces nor beneath them,

but geometrically, squinting slightly to accommodate

things to our net of vision, robbing raw objects

of their atrocity.

Or, here is “Real Motion,” from Falling in Love Through a Description, the second book of Transcendental Studies:

Keep well in mind that it is strangely possible

for us to oppose ourselves. An illustration: competing

visual fields. The projection room dark. The blue of the

sky would not move us, were it a foot or so above

our heads. Fear drives the body, looking for itself.

Someone lying in the roadway. About pain, we are

all more or less agreed, but reflection is

necessary for such functions as urination, walking,

writing, sexual intercourse. A single, unified

judgment establishes the matter as undecided.

Sweeps of the eye traverse and surmount

something, the traversing and surmounting of which

might, in another way, be a matter of time, toil,

danger—its very height suggesting the

violence of a fall. I am myself, but I develop.

Even before (I think) Keith Waldrop began to identify himself as an artist in collage, his standard operating procedure was juxtaposition, the plane of the page holding, in experimental relation to one another, images or words from provenances many and mysterious. All of his work feels haunted—haunted by shadows, silhouettes, moving veils; by the outline of absence as much as by actual specters, as he says again and again; haunted, you might say, by a literally sensational uncertainty, by a shaky sense of what’s real that often finds its embodiment in tropes of shadow and light. A lot, perhaps most, of his sentences suggest unease (e.g., from “Night Soil,” in Falling in Love Through a Description: “I’m in a bad mood, forever.”³ ) And yet the prevailing temperament of his work—all of his work, including Light While There is Light—is pensive and calm, melancholic yet peculiarly tuneful—I even want to say harmonious, in a haunted sort of way. It’s easy for collage to be about grotesque juxtaposition itself—to be no more than clowning in an attic full of junk. But Keith Waldrop’s verbal and visual collages are, above all, eerily beautiful.

Keith Waldrop has said in a number of places, among them this book, that he has little imagination. He must mean that his organ of fantasy, i.e., of invention of something out of nothing, out of the void, is undeveloped, for what could be more creative than his power of uncovering, by juxtaposition and combination, the secret properties of things? He also says that he throws nothing away, that, having no imagination, he is stuck with memory—he has only memory, or maybe memory has him. Thus one of the novel’s finest passages:

My imagination is poor. In my dreams, for instance—where one would suppose wishes can be fulfilled without hindrance—if I dream the events this account describes, they are not usually changed, but in what should be a world nearer to the heart’s desire, they play again, just as I tell them here, exactly as already experienced. It is as if despairing, even of imaginary improvement, I contrive instead to set my affection on the damned world, this very world, as it was and as it is.

I too put Light While There is Light at “the top” of Keith Waldrop’s work—but then, I’m a sucker for narrative, its willing slave. On the particulate level the novel has the richness of the poetry—the ghost-laden sentences; the juxtapositional ironies, moody beauty and sly jokes, of beautifully made collage; and also, since Keith Waldrop made it, there is everywhere that sense that a vast library is dissolved in the ballast water and is somehow stabilizing (or unstabilizing) the vessel. But what Light While There is Light has that the rest of Keith Waldrop’s work does not attempt is, simply, extended narrative. Poetry (this is my defect, I admit) I can pick up and put down. What I can’t escape, once I am pulled into its clutches by sufficiently interesting prose, is narrative. Light While There is Light is a vehicle carrying human cargo that moves achingly through time, taking me with it—and I want to be taken, I want to be entertained, in the raw etymological sense of that word, lifted out of my time into the novel’s time, until it kicks me out in the end, because I need to understand what happens to these characters. Chief among them even as he hides among them, unique, irreplaceable, and one of a kind, is the narrator Keith Waldrop himself.

Jaimy Gordon, 2012

¹ “Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop Interview,” Jivin Ladybug, online at mysite. verizon.net/vze8911e/jivinladybug/id53.html

² Of course, some books listed under poetry in Keith Waldrop’s bibliography feel like prose because they are prose, discontinuous, floating in pieces, framed in white space, but formatted as prose nevertheless—like about four-fifths of the charming Silhouette of the Bridge (Memory Stand-Ins), 1997.

³ From the second book of Transcendental Studies.