Brother Dumb

Sky Gilbert

Description

?Brother Dumb is the memoir of a reclusive American literary icon. Brother Dumb is a how-to manual for meaningful critical engagement with the real world. Brother Dumb is a celebration of innocence, youth, and altruism. Brother Dumb is a true story of self-imposed exile. . . . Brother Dumb is also a work of fiction. Brother Dumb begins in the mid-40s, but spans decades, delving deep into the five tortured relationships that have shaped one writer s psycho-sexual history but it also details his bitter literary decline and withdrawal from public life. Brother Dumb is a

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781554902910
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

BROTHER DUMB
BROTHER DUMB

SKY GILBERT
Copyright Sky Gilbert, 2007
Published by ECW PRESS , 2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M 4 E 1 E 2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process - electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise - without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW PRESS .
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Gilbert, Sky Brother Dumb / Sky Gilbert.
ISBN -13: 978-1-55022-768-0 ISBN -10: 1-55022-768-8
I. Title.
PS 8563.14743 B 76 2007 C 813 .54 C 2006-906637- X
Editor for the press: Michael Holmes Production: Mary Bowness Author Photo: David Hawe Printing: Friesens
The publication of Brother Dumb has been generously supported by the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.

DISTRIBUTION CANADA : Jaguar Book Group, 100 Armstrong Ave., Georgetown, ON , L 7 G 5 S 4
PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA
for Ian
The unexamined life is not worth living.
- SOCRATES

If I’m going to tell you about it, I have to start back in 1951, with the black apartment and the black sheets. At the time I was being melodramatic, but for good reason. Like Masha in The Three Sisters I was in mourning for my life. Or perhaps I should say I was in mourning for someone else’s life, for the life of the main character in my first novel.
It was strange, the way I wrote the damn thing. I started it, or at least started writing about the character, before I went off to war, and then wrote some of it while the war was on, and then some after. Around the time I got the black apartment I was coming to terms with the fact that the novel was going to be over, and there wasn’t going to be anything more for me to write about the character. That is, I’d written the character out. Or perhaps that isn’t an accurate thing to say. The feeling wasn’t exactly that I had written the character out, because the guy had become much more real to me than that. I had the feeling he was my best friend, the best friend I’d never had, and I was having real trouble saying goodbye. I was certain that he had another life after the novel, a life that he was continuing to live — only I wasn’t invited to participate. I know it’s a concept that’s pretty hard to get your mind around, but if you’re a writer you might understand.
I don’t think it’s completely crazy to think that characters in novels have lives of their own. If you want some intellectual justification for the concept all you have to do is go back to old Scaligero, a medieval scholar who was a great classifier — he was even worse than Aristotle in that respect — really into naming things, into ordering the universe. Strangely enough, for such an anal-retentive guy, he was also really sensitive to great literature. At one point when talking about what reality is and is not, he suggested that the characters the poet Virgil had created were actually real, that they actually lived. He said, anyway, that they were more real than reality itself, because they were so beautiful.
Now, I’m not saying the character I created was that beautiful, but what I am saying is that he was beautiful to me. Actually, talking about it like this feels a little strange. I begin to sound like a flit. I guess the best way to describe it would be to say that the character was like the brother I never had. He thought like I did, and generally behaved like I did, liked the things I liked, hated the things I hated. Except, naturally, he wasn’t me. The punishment for having created a character that is so alive for you, and such a great pal, is that when you have to say goodbye, you don’t want to. Ultimately you can’t believe he’s gone. It’s not like you can go back to your own book and read it again, like other people can, and get reacquainted. It’s just not possible. The experience of creating a character is not the same as reading about him. If you read about characters in a book, when you get lonely for them you can read the book again. But no experience can ever compare to giving birth to a character. That’s what it’s like, giving birth. It’s the closest you’ll ever get to another human being, real or not.
All this was clear to me at the time, crystal clear. I was like a parent saying goodbye to a child, or a lover breaking up with a beautiful girl. Jesus, I’ve been in that situation too many times. The worst thing about saying goodbye to a beautiful girl is thinking about some other guy with her. No matter how much you hate her, how she drives you nuts, and even if you think she’s stupid and you want to throttle her, when it’s over you only remember the good times — like when she was eating some crazy food like sardines, or she made you french fries that were really tasty, or the way she said “I love you” when you asked her to, on cue, and it always came out right. And then you imagine her eating sardines in front of some creepy guy, some fat jerk — or worse, some skinny little critic with glasses, some guy who thinks your writing is fundamentally flawed or even “quixotic.” Maybe you imagine him kissing her neck — assuming she had a fabulous neck — and you want to die, the feeling is so bad.
This was the state I was in. I had this feeling in the pit of my stomach like someone had punched me, all because this character wasn’t going to be my friend anymore. It wasn’t something I could go to a psychiatrist about. Really, what would I say? I have to say goodbye to a character who’s going to go on living his life without me? I think they’d figure I was certifiable for sure. Guys have been put away for less. Anyway, there was no one I could go to, no one I could talk to about this because it was so wacky.
On top of it, I wasn’t really trying to get rid of the hurt. This, again, is how it was similar to ending an affair. There are times after you break up with someone — or are broken up with — when you definitely should be forgetting about the whole thing and moving on, but, on purpose, you’re not. You’re doing exactly what you shouldn’t be doing; you’re nurturing all the pain, all the hurt. Why? Because you know that when the hurt goes away, then the last connection you have with that loved person is gone too.
The whole situation was made a lot worse by jazz. I know it sounds strange, but this time in my life probably pretty well accounts for my lifelong aversion to the style. Okay, that’s not really true. What irritates me is the concept of jazz. But I don’t like even talking about words like “style” and “concept” when I think of jazz because they don’t apply. Forgive me if you’re a jazz fan, but I really do think the whole thing is bogus.
Now there are two different kinds of jazz. There’s the kind of jazz that isn’t jazz — which is okay, I guess — but it’s not jazz. And then there’s jazz itself, which is pretentious, and lousy, and generally stupid. I should explain. The jazz that is not jazz is when a guy plays some tune on the piano, a tune he didn’t even write, a tune in the public domain, and then adds some little doodads and gee-jobs here and there, some trills, and scales, and whatever else tickles his goddamn fancy. In other words, it involves playing around and so-called improvising with what is already written. The only problem is that the only thing good about this type of so-called jazz is the tune itself, the tune somebody else wrote. What you are doing, listening to the so-called jazz musician, is straining to hear the tune you can barely hear because the guy is fooling around with it like crazy and ruining your experience of the tune — because all you’d like to do is just hear it for Christ’s sake. So this type of so-called jazz is manipulative. It fools you into thinking you like it when all you like is something that the musician isn’t doing.
Then there’s the second type of jazz. It’s much worse, and has pretty much taken over these days, because the first type of jazz is now considered old-fashioned. This second kind is epitomized by Miles Davis. And yeah, I guess they can call it jazz if they want to, because it is, essentially, unlistenable. You can go on all you want to about Miles Davis — what a genius he is, how nobody can match him — but wake up and smell the coffee. It just sounds like noise. There is no tune, no music, nothing. It’s as bad as modern, avant-garde classical music — which is why the eggheads like it. God help you if you try to hum it — hummable would be too commercial. Anyway, this Miles Davis type of jazz is unbelievably pretentious, and people like to sit around for hours with their eyes closed snapping their fingers saying, “Oh yeah, this part, you’ve got to listen to this part, it’s so fabulous, so perfect, so beautiful.” And you listen to it and it’s just noise. It makes perfect sense that this kind of jazz came along. It’s perfect for all the pseudo artists. They can become experts at it. It doesn’t require taste or discernment — all you have to do is memorize the names of all the gods of jazz and then go on about the recordings, like the one by Miles Davis called Awake in Spain or something. Anyway, it’s about Spain — except it isn’t. All you have to do is go on and on about these records and you become an instant expert. Pretentious people love it.
And these jazz clubs, they are the worst. Just a bunch of people sitting around congratulating themselves on how music