& j New Grleans Review Fall /Winter 1995 Volume 21, Numbers 3 & 4 Photograph of Roddy Doyle, page 112, by Coumor Horgan. Back cover: photograph by Lowell Handler. New Orleans Review is published quarterly by Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana 70118, United States. Copyright © 1995 by Loyola University. New Orleans Review accepts submissions of poetry, short fiction, essays, and black and white artwork or photography. Translations are also welcome but must be accompanied by the work in its original language. All submissions must be accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope. Although rea- sonable care is taken, NOR assumes no responsibility for the loss of unsolicit- ed material. Send submissions and individual subscriptions to: New Orleans Review, Box 195, Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana 70118. Institutional subscribers contact Faxon (800-289-7740) or your subscription service. Subscription rates: Individuals: $18.00 Institutions: $21 .00 Foreign: $32.00 Back Issues: $9.00 each Contents listed in the PMLA Bibliography and the Index of American Periodical Verse. US ISSN 0028-6400 New Orleans Review is distributed to booksellers by: Ingram Periodicals-1226 Heil Quaker Blvd., LaVergne, TN 37086-7000 1-800-627-6247 DeBoer-113 East Centre St., Nutley, N] 07110 1-800-667-9300 Loyola University is a charter member of the Association of Iesuit University Presses (AIUP). Editor Associate Editors Ralph Adamo Sophia Stone Michelle Fredette Art Editor Douglas MacCash Book Review Editor Copy Editor Mary A. McCay T.R. Mooney Typogrdplier William Lavender Advisory/Contributing Editors Iohn Biguenet Bruce Henricksen William Lavender Peggy McCormack Marcus Smith Founding Editor Miller Williams Thanks to Susan Barker Adamo, Paulette Manley, Dan Vilmure and to the Loyola Publications Office. CoNTENTs Steve Stern from My Boy Nachman 7 Doug MacCash An Interview with Walter Rutkowski 24 Walter Ratkowski Tin Men 28, 39, 51, 79, 84, 93, 107, 121, 130, 151 Rodney Iones On Censorship 29 Hunger 32 ]a1nes Sallis Dawn 34 Boston 35 Happy Endings 36 What Pavese Said 37 Recovery 38 Louis Gallo from The Secret Survivor 41 Iohn Wood The Gates of the Elect Kingdom 53 Norman German How Do These Things Happen? 80 Iohn Dollis Butterfly Effect 85 The Four of ]uly [Made in China] 88 Lecture 89 Enid Shomer Painter's Whites 90 Ieanne M. Leiby Viking Burial 91 William Trowbridge Coat of Arms Stephen March Sharks Trayce Diskin And Then I Thought I Heard Him Speak Susan Gebhardt Movie Music French Rolled Hems Dieter Weslowski Xavier Niarn McArdle An Interview With Roddy Doyle Gitta Deutsch Three Poems Richard Katrooas The Search Party Douglas G. Power Green Doll Ellen Gandt The Medicine Go Down Books Contributors Q a (3 Ri if 5 5§ <1 2 2 5; 5 fi v J \: § 3. 5% 5 5 E wi § za 5 ¥ 5 2 a teve Stern MY BUY NACHMAN from the novel in progress My son Nachman, as you know, was reared in Paradise. I left him there, or rather here, to be brought up by his dead mother, the laugh- ing Hannaleh, who was murdered and worse by Khmelnitzki’s butchers in 1648. This was in the market town of Lutsk along the pea green River Styr in what was then the Polish Ukraine. That’s when I decided the earth was no place to raise a kid, so I made my way back to the Celestial Academy where Hannah was waiting. It was some dreadful journey even then, I can tell you, though in those days my wings were in better shape, and the distance, if I’m not mistaken, wasn’t quite as far. Of course I couldn’t stay nor did I feel especially welcome; I guess I’d picked up too many bad habits below. Saying so long to Hannaleh and heaven a second time, I left for the world again, arriving near the end of the nineteenth century on the Lower East Side of New York. There, in reduced circumstances, I was even- tually reunited with my son, who like his father in his own youth had grown restless in the kingdom of the blessed. Understand that in olden times you had more traffic between here and there, so there were more temptations for a young angel. Naturally I’d heard all the cautionary tales from our august arch- seraphim, a severe and unbending not to say humorless lot. Always they insisted on a strict separation of the races: above should go with above, below with below. They liked to harp back sanctimoniously to their original censure of God’s creation of man, ”I told you so" being their favorite refrain. It was a criticism the Lord Himself had not dis- puted, having since retired into his mansion, which looked when you scaled the walls to spy on it like some nightmare abbey shuttered up and overgrown with snaky vines. What they schooled us in in our angelic cheder was the wisdom we were supposed to impart to unborn souls. If anyone had asked, I’d have told them this was a pointless operation, since why would you fill a vessel with learning in one world only to pour it out in another? It was a cruel and unusual process, which made your immortal souls reluctant to assume their mortality, just as later, hav- ing forgotten on earth what they’d learned in heaven, they were unwilling to return to paradise. The whole setup was enough to make you wonder: Why heaven and earth in the first place? Why life? What was so remarkable about the lower world that the upper should be mindful of it, and vice-versa? With regard to such questions the archangels became uneasy, and once I heard Gabriel mutter that, if 8 New Orleans Review God had only left well enough alone, heaven and earth would have been the same place to this day. Anyway when we Weren’t getting educated, we were getting indoctrinated, admonished not to follow the bad examples of our fall- en ancestors. These were the Nefilim, the first to have succumbed to temptation, who bred monsters off the daughters of men in the time before the Flood. Then there were Uzzah and Azazel, the Weber and Fields of fallen hosts, who’d shed their splendor for the sake of a cou- ple of designing females. Of course they came to unfortunate ends (as did their idiot offspring), Azazel reduced to peddling pornographic jewelry in the streets of Neshiah, a city said to be inhabited by nose- less dwarfs, Uzzah hanging himself after his common-law wife plucked his wings. There were others, like the rebel Samael with as many noms de guerre as Big ]ack Zelig, none of which we were allowed to pronounce in Kingdom Come. But all such tales, tired as they were and told with so little conviction, only whetted my appetite for more. You'll say I didn’t know when I was well off, and you’d no doubt be right, but where rapture and ecstatic devotion were the order of the day--a day in heaven being equal in length to scores on earth- you're likely to long for something less rarefied. Sure,»there were a number of things to keep us amused in those ethereal reaches; I don’t mean to ‘suggest I had an unhappy childhood. But I was content to let others report on their baiting of fabulous beasts: the ziz-shaddai whose broad pinions are responsible for turning day to night, the re'em that in its indolence shtups only once every seventy years, the phoenix, the barnacle goose--all of which remain rumors to me still. It was the same with the fabled cellars of smoke, the magazines of storms; the various heavenly industries (which I understand are no longer in operation), such as the mill for grinding manna and the quarry of souls. I never saw the Bird's Nest wherein Messiah waits for the optimum moment to come forth and redeem us. ("What's wrong with now?" I hear you say and do heartily concur.) Reports on such phenomena only served to oppress me; their prodigality deep- ened my yearning for more haimesheh haunts, a desire that led me to the precincts of the mortal dead. I hung around their muddy streets and untended arbors, the out- door minyans where they spent eternity studying Torah. Or pretend- ed to_ study; because they took every opportunity to digress from the Steve Stern 9 text at hand. In fact, Holy Writ often functioned as nothing more than a mnemonic device to put them in mind of exemplary tales about earth. So how was I supposed to know that the stories, forgive me, were lies? Call it weakness, put it down to too much time on my hands, but for as long as I can remember I was hungry for news of the world. A born kibbitzer, I neglected my chores to spend more time in the yarn- spinning sessions of the celestial landsmanshaftn. There I collected the crumbs that my son would also gather in his own early years. I became a familiar figure in that part of the Garden that had been allowed to go to seed-the part reserved for the formerly tellurian, where places on earth were duplicated in their heavenly versions. Thatch-roofed shtetl villages, as dilapidated as their originals though purged of want and fear (items about which I was particularly inter- ested), huddled under the boughs of a titanic shade tree, which some call the Tree of Life. Since the Tree also served as a ladder between the upper and lower worlds, there was considerable coming and going, and sometimes you had a situation where, out of the traffic in the lower branches, the odd living human would tumble.