TONY TANNER
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men embracing a mystical past. In 'Dorchester, Home and Garden,'
a thirty-year-old adol escent, Maishe, returns to a burnt-out Jewish
district on Blue Hill Avenue. He is swept up by angels and dropped
among the bums of the Boston Common, in a city through which
Isaiah and the Greek philosophers wander. 'Onan's Child' recasts this
narrator as the biblical Onan, who refused to sleep with his wife,
Tamar.
It
is a tale of a kabbalistic world where angels go astray and the
clay of the earth, still warm, cries out for human seed." That is an
exactly precise, noninflationary description of the book and it depends
on how you react to the densely kabbalistic atmosphere evoked by the
prose, which is full of biblical formulations ("And it came to pass" and
so on) and is written in that sort of self-enrapturing incantatory style
not uncommon in mystical writings. It is what might be called a
cornucopian style: "... ferns lashing our posteriors, the courtyard
seething like a Shawmut Ave. back lot in July, tropical undergrowth
crosses with the seedings of the Library matrons, Indian vines wind
about us, her breasts sprout into long yellow squash, her behind into a
grand orange pumpkin, and my stick is gold, crimson, black, and blue,
a pole of colored corn. Barbara, all Boston is coming to fruit!" The first
novella certainly does convey all kinds of childhood panics and
anxieties and sadnesses and intensities along with the bewilderment of
it all, and there is in both novellas a strong sense of the root mystery of
generation and the figures of the mother and the father which,
respectively, terminate the two stories. The retelling of the story of
Onan is intermittently quite powerful as it explores the solipsisms and
disconnections involved in the failure of desire. "Better blood than seed
on your hands-better to cut the throat an(l taste life bubbling in than
know the sad separations of dream and its dross. " I think it is probably
the high saturation of kabbalism which gives me trouble, along with
those angels and philosophers on the loose. I take it that we all, to
varying degrees, like the kind of spilt lyricism of Chagall's paintings,
but the lyricism of Mirsky's book seemed at times to have had a bomb
explode inside it. It is a book I read with respect but with a certain sense
of exclusion and confusion.
It
is a book full of secrets and perhaps it
keeps too many of them.
o
In Ronald Sukenick's 98.6 we are again engaged in some of the
multiple aspects of language and desire, or one might say, some of the
related problems generated by linguicity and lubricity. "He wants to
write lyrics without words that presents a tough problem for a
songwriter because he knows we live in words words are the water we
swim in he wants to move to the subverbs is the way he puts it and he
