A Gateway to Obsession

LOGOS A Gateway to Obsession

Jack Matthews

Jack Matthews is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus of Ohio University, Athens, where he lives with his wife Barbara. Matthews’s latest books are The Gam- bler’s Nephew, a novel with The Etruscan Press, and A Worker’s Writebook, an ebook on writing, published by The Personville Press, which is also publishing a new edi- tion of his novel, Hanger Stout, Awake! and an MP3 audio of his one-act play, An Interview With The Sphinx.

Email: [email protected]

Interesting people are interesting be- de Montemayor in Thornton Wilder’s The cause they are interested, and the utmost Bridge Of San Luis Rey … and then there’s of being interested is obsession. As there Gulley Jimson, the protagonist of Joyce are many degrees of obsession, there Cary’s novel, The Horse’s Mouth. Gulley are many sorts, such as preoccupations Jimson is a lying, conniving, cheating with sex, golf, poker, baseball, the stock and thoroughly disreputable cad, and market … and so on, to the limits of the yet, as a painter, he is obsessed with see- imagination, and even beyond. The gate- ing—which transforms him into some- ways to these realms of obsession are thing of a hero. many and various, and are fascinating to It is evident that personal memoirs oc- contemplate. Most are beyond the under- cupy a special place in these obsessions, standing of those who have not gained for by definition a memoirist stands with entrance, because it is hard for outsiders one leg in both literature and life. And to see what all the interior fuss is about. when it is the memoirist who is obsessed, Obsessed characters in literature as well as intimately aware of the obses- are plentiful, and unsurprisingly they sion, the result can be uniquely powerful. are often at work empowering the great A splendid example of this is a recently classics. Obvious examples are Captain published memoir titled In the Suicide’s Ahab, Lady Macbeth, Balzac’s Père Library.1 The author is Tim Bowling, a Goriot and Eugénie Grandet (being poet and bibliophile, who is about as ob- one himself, Balzac had a rare insight sessed as a human can manage. His book into obsessives), Hamlet, Dostoevsky’s bears the sort of subtitle popular in the Raskolnikov, Heathcliff, the Marquesa 18th century, even to the capitalization of

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Substantive Words, as follows: been the dead poet’s private copy, which after his final disappearance had somehow found its unlikely way Being an Adventure through Twentieth-Century onto the shelf of a university library in western Canada. American Poetry, Mid-life & Bibliomania Sparked In this seemingly trivial coincidence there is the by the Coincidental Discovery of a Book of Poems by convergence of three poets—all significantly differ- Wallace Stevens, Signed by Weldon Kees, & Left Out ent from one another, although suddenly connected in the Stacks of a University Library. in mysteriously intimate ways that Bowling tirelessly explores, like a spelunker groping his way through the That about says it all, you might suppose; but you mind’s darker grottoes. would be wrong, for the book is widely and richly The implications of this chance convergence are evocative, revealing its author as not just obsessed, but richly rewarding, especially as Bowling speculates passionately and terminally bewitched. Being a poet, upon them. At the time of their strange meeting, he was Bowling is also blessed with a remarkable capacity of course the only one of the three still alive, in that for making connections that the fascinated reader is sense being the youngest. Conversely, the oldest in both happy to follow. Of course my reference is not to just age and years was Wallace Stevens—venerable enough, any reader, because much of Bowling’s fervour would we are told, to have been one of the pathetically small be incomprehensible to those not afflicted with some gathering at the funeral of a poet named Stephen Crane sort of bibliomania. The ideal reader, therefore, would in 1900. be a bibliophile for whom this author’s infatuations are Crane as the fourth poet might be added to that tri- never just that and nothing more. ad, which would seem to complicate things still further But you should know more about the book than that but, as I recall, Bowling doesn’t make much of it, which provided by its antiquated subtitle. You should know is only sensible. As for Kees and Stevens, they were vir- that Tim Bowling is a Canadian in his mid-40s (being tual opposites: Kees a bitter and frustrated rebel and ‘middle-aged’ often preoccupies him in his account), Stevens a comfortable insurance executive who was and for many years he has been fascinated by the po- mostly at peace with the United States that came close etry and life of Weldon Kees, who disappeared in two to driving Kees mad. things: San Francisco and 1955. Since Kees has not been Bowling’s memoir is a relentless tale of obsession, heard from since that day and since his abandoned car during the course of which we are given insights into was found near the Golden Gate Bridge, the natural what most people might dismiss as the grotesque intri- assumption is that he committed suicide by hurling cacies of collecting rare books. Of course, poetry is also himself from the bridge and plummeted 260 feet to his judged to be irrelevant to the great issues of modern death in the water below. life, so we are not surprised when we are told that not only is the poet Tim Bowling a passionate book collector, but Wallace Stevens was himself a collector of fine In this seemingly trivial books, as was Kees; although information about Kees’ coincidence there is the convergence collecting is somewhat fragmentary. The central issue and dilemma of Bowling’s Memoir of three poets ... is the agonizing conflict between his honesty and his immediate, passionate need to possess this particular book, written and published by Wallace Stevens—a Then, roughly half a century after his disappearance, poet he especially admires—and signed by Weldon Tim Bowling was in the university library of Edmonton, Kees, whose poetry and life have both come to haunt Alberta, where he plucked Wallace Stevens’ book of po- him. The fact that Bowling was one of the small minor- ems, Ideas Of Order, from a shelf and, upon opening it, ity who could recognize Kees’ name and signature, and was astonished to see Weldon Kees’ own signature— one of that even smaller minority who could sense its an event that changed his life. Evidently, this had once significance in this book, might suggest that in a mysti-

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