70
PARTISAN REVIEW
an artist colony. The shack had no windows. You could sense the mag–
nificent luxuriance and vitality outside, the trees, the weather, the light,
the ocean.
In
the other room of the shack, there were three men. One of
them coughed all night. He had AIDS and so did several other men at
the colony. The wall between our rooms was a thin sheet of wood. Lis–
tening
to
him cough, and knowing my girlfriend would leave me, are
elements in the journal entry, and a reader might get a sense of them
from other entries, but they aren't emphasized. I don't say that her
youth didn't make me feel young, but rather the opposite, and I don't
say that the coughing all night was heartbreaking and that it intensified
the heartbreak I'd begun
to
feel, knowing I was much closer
to
the end
than my girlfriend and knowing she would soon leave me. I don't say
that in the beginning of our love affair she said she would never leave
me. I don't say that I didn't pity myself. I felt an overwhelming melan–
choly. I don't know a word for it in Eng li sh.
In
German, I think it is
called
Weltschmerz.
I say only that the birdcalls and the trees were like
names. I watched the trees emerging in the mist, and I listened
to
the
birdcalls. I was struck by the repetition of things and by the pathos there
is in the way individual being is always emerging and calling its name as
if
to
distinguish itse lf amid the mindless proliferation and density of life
in general. I don't say much of this in the journal. When writing about
myself, I find that I am interested in the expressive value of form and its
relation
to
the personal more than I am interestecl in particular revela–
tions of my individual life.
Geoffrey Hartman:
We heard Socrates's definition of writing as the
record of an absence. We are very happy that we have a presence here
and that we can ask questions of them. So, since Stanley Crouch has not
yet arrived, I open the session
to
questions.
Jeffrey Meyers:
The last section of Lenny's talk seemed
to
be an aes–
thetic statement about how much could be gained by leaving out, rather
than putting in. Could you say more about that?
Leonard Michaels:
What is gained is access
to
what I call a form. The
more I put in, the less access I have
to
the form, and the more my sen–
tences move in the clirection of the novelistic. I am not instinctively a
novelist, and what happens when I begin
to
elaborate and begin to accu–
mulate a lot of details is that I begin
to
hear my own voice as if I were
talking, rather than writing, and as soon as
1
hear the sound of talk in
my own writing, I find it very discouraging. It's not what I should be
