A Special Vision

...Single copy__________35* 100 copies_________$27 50 New Leader Reprint Department 212 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010 Please send me__________ copies of LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM CITY JAIL I enclose $_______________ (Organizations and institutions can be billed) Name __________________ Address ________________ City ___________________ State______Zip Code_____ honest people on earth, and 1917 destroyed a national treasure of candor "French ennui only gets a full treatment through reaction to it (A Re-bours ) Andre Gide said he wrote pour me desennuyer le matin—as I am learning to do, in distinction from other impulses with the same result In other words, boredom didn't suit him, he took measures against it, would not have liked to be known a la Russe as the Man Who Was Bored No Frenchman in his right mind would Only pre-Lemn Russians made it a regular category m the human laundry list, and if I'm not mistaken it was only a male type at that Loads of women were undoubtedly just as bored but didn't go around saying so, it wasn't their generally accepted designation ' Clark is perhaps at her best, though, when she takes an individual consciousness and relates it to the deepest concerns of her own time "Memo am not lonely, penniless, in pain, alcoholic or even overweight Might be all of these some day, and totally blind or deaf too Many people are, not just m old age, all or more of their lives But then why and therein lies the basis of all religions However, a clergyman who loves fishing is quoted as saying 'There is no clear line between trout-fishing and religion ' Protestant, of course It's really strange what people are willing to bear Why7 What's the point7 They must ask themselves every day and never get an answer, yet they go on with it A taboo—is that all7 Or just the little physical fear of turning on the gas or the jump or the razor blade Hope can't spring eternal, we know it doesn't And, in fact, speaking of the USA I wouldn't be surprised if the will to live were at its lowest ever in human history Suicide rate no indication—a lot of people keep living who would prefer not to, crime figures tell more " Prose poet Literary historian and raconteur Political analyst Cultural diagnostician of the sorry state of her fellow Americans Eleanor Clark is all of these, as she dissects and rebuilds her own will to live in some of the most searching writing we have been given in our time...

...Liuliogram, words take on a palpable guise and thought becomes word-play This is most evident where Clark reacts to another writer Rimbaud she swallows whole, wonderfully rendering his perverse nostalgia "O saisons, 6 chateaux' Did I ever abuse the heart's wild intake of certain joy and wonder, a counterradiance, in all that white-gold splendor as we glide heavenwards, God's grandeur in shook foil around us past the screen of obscenities—woods and packed slope of such different handling in the brilliance, as unlike as hawk-skilled skiers swooping are from the brute crashers-down or the simply cautious or inexperienced who make their turns like ferryboats—did I let love, of motion and bright air, be more than was fitting, for it to lead to this far swifter shadowing in7 Not quite the passing over, the trepas, Rimbaud brought his bonheur to, not just yet, but such a squeeze and slowing And not to ride again through the sky with heroes, their minds racing even in vacation week toward their marvelous plums and Iliums Visions of booty—gold bathroom fixtures, call-girls—give Mercury's wings to their expensive yellow boots on the way down When she mixes the Russian, American and French mentalities, it is as if we were back in Andre Gide's journals, guided by a finer mind "That next phase, though, of time-kilhng, that might be more borderline On this subject, the Iliad's no help, none 1 can think of at the moment Dead Souls is better—have been hearing installments of that, too 19th Century Russian in general has a good deal to offer in that department, only unfortunately the characters vou could learn from are usually rich and suffering from the explicit disease of boredom They go on and on about it, it's the ne\t-to-pnme topic, atter Mother Russia herself kinetic and middle-class as we are, even the most trulv bored among us \\ ould no more think ot putting il that \\a\ than ot discussing Mothei \meru.a No other nation I know ot has gone in loi it as a gLiicial Iran which might mean the Russians ol that time weic the onlORDER NOW Letter from Birmingham City Jail MARTIN LUTHER KING JR...

...A Special Vision_ Eyes, Etc.: A Memoir By Eleanor Clark Pantheon 175 pp $7 95 Reviewed by Alex Szogyi Professor of French literature, Hunter College Over the last 25 years, novelist Eleanor Clark has given the world two noncategonzable books The first, Rome and a Villa (1952, reprinted in 1975), is one of the finest resurrections of a civilization past and present, the second, The Oysters of Locmariaquer, among the rare authentic portraits of the provincial French, won the National Book Award in 1965 In those volumes she found her particular style, reminiscent of Montaigne in his essays It explores a theme through a series of suggestive and meaningful fragments whose sum is always greater than the parts Now, we have a third volume of this kind, the author, a victim of an eye disease, has floated deep within and beyond her experience and produced an intransigent, pungent memoir of a woman whose vision has been acutely heightened by a loss of sight Like a painter forced into a new techmque, Clark wrote her evocations with a magic marker on huge pads, rapidly sketching scene after scene, unable to look back The method allowed her to maintain the two sides of her nature the seismographically sensitive pudeur (dignity, modesty, everything decent that untranslatable French word suggests), and the easily exacerbated fightei, enamored of the world's natural beauties and outraged at their erosion The work has kept its rough edges, its heady essence of a lite lived vibranlly in a multitude ot baek-diops—New Yoik, Connecticut, Vci-mont, Fiance, and Italy Ironic accents counterpoint the narrative The blind poet, Homer, is read aloud by various members of her family, the sensuous episodes of the epics reach her in new visualizations, and bits and pieces of her past come to haunt her She notes, too, the ludi-crousness of lives lived without vision in her bailiwick, the simple outrage provoked by the inadvertent cruelty of unthinking people, their funny banalities, the great danger of refusing to live, and the silly daily reaffirmations "This is your Hell Keep it happy " One episode, depicting an archetypal New England family known as the Tidies, is the last word on the subject of those whose lives are spent cleaning up, resisting the ever-encroaching but inevitable chaos Eleanor Clark's intelligent prose has not been sufficiently celebrated (few styles are at the time of their conception) There is a touch of Stendhal's probity in the wiry, ornenly witty quality of her writing, an ongoing intense dialogue with her various momentary selves as she intuits them In the same way that she swims freely m the backwaters of Dante, Homer and Rimbaud, so with linguistic awareness, zany humor and unself-con-scious clear-sightedness, she plumbs the depths of her own psyche "Must remember to get back to time-killing That was a terrible adventure, for several months Haven't yet got a perfect grasp of the subject Or it might just be too unpleasant to dive into You could get the bends So we continue, the grey and white cat and I, to dree our weirds (Looked that up the other day, I mean somebody did for me "Weird" OK, meaning of course fate, as in adj weird sisters In dictionaries at hand no "dree It could be crooning or weaving or just counting as with beads Do wish I'd spent my time better when times were better, when there was time—and all that the most boring human wait But 1 mean it modestly Just wish I had memorized a big du_-tionaiy )" The mind's leaps aie delineated in a psM.hu...