When I read fiction or poetry that I admire, the kind of work that slows you down because you don’t want it to end, I wonder what the words sounded like in the writer’s mind. Not the sound of the writer’s voice, really, but the cadence, the hesitations, the emphasis, maybe even the chuckles. How did the writer savor his or her own words? Reader Views, an exciting new web service that captures the passion of writing, letting you hear writers themselves, has recorded me reading a crucial segment of Saraceno. You’ll hear Irene Watson, the managing editor, telling you a little about me and the book. I urge you to listen. I think you’ll enjoy the experience. Click here now.

—DM

I’ve hired quite a few young journalists and helped to train even more, so I guess it’s not surprising that in my hectic old age I should be advising them. That’s what I’m doing in a series of podcasts for The Student Operated Press radio service called Hot Copy. I also correspond with students, offering advice and discussing stories.

More than 50 years ago I’d whip my apron off at the cigar store and dash around the corner to bring Mr. Berman his daily egg cream soda and five-dollar Cuban cigar. It was usually 6:30 p.m., just before I was beseiged with newspaper buyers. Mr. Berman sat all day long in a wheelchair in a dark room in Hell’s Kitchen.

I always made his egg cream extra rich, and I pinched his fabulously expensive cigar to make sure it was fresh. This was, after all, the highlight of Mr. Berman’s day. It took me a few weeks to figure out I was the highlight of his day. I talked to him. I ran his clothes down the block to the laundry. He wanted to know what I was studying. Did I like Columbia? I told him it scared me to death. Too bad I didn’t hear myself say it, because in my third year it scared me right out of there.

I still wake up worrying about Mr. Berman. I remember his gloomy room better than I remember my years at Columbia. There was a kind of significance to his routine that I envied. I didn’t have a clue as to what my life was about, but his was about that egg cream soda and green cigar. He didn’t read newspapers. I don’t remember a radio. But he read books, and he wanted to know what I thought, which is more than I could say of myself or my professors.

Selling newspapers and cigars and sodas at 46th Street and Eighth Avenue was the most important job I ever had. Sure, I did okay in the Navy. I did okay in the newspaper industry, too, but I had real responsibilities in that job where Hell’s Kitchen and the Theater District connect. There was Mr. Berman. There was the grumbling bag lady who stopped by around midnight. She knew that as I wheeled my handtruck down from the old Madison Square Garden (inset) I’d stop in at the deli and buy a corned beef sandwich and a root beer for her, and I’d have them in a bag behind me as I stood outside selling 360 Daily News, 340 Mirrors, 50 Times and 40 copies of the late great Herald Tribune.

There were quite a few people like her and Mr. Berman who needed me to be there, and I’ve never been able to rub out the sob in my chest that lodged there when I abandoned them and moved on. There were people who had things to tell me, who needed me to be there to hear them. There were people who just needed me to greet them and sell them a paper. We depended on each other. That’s how New York can be. You can get unspeakably lonely and be dependent on strangers. No job ever felt like a life to me, except that one, working for the Goldberg brothers, those quintessentially decent young men. It could have been any kid standing there selling papers, but I believed it had to be me, and I knew there were others who shared that view. But it didn’t have to be me in the Navy or on all those newspapers. In a way I was always still back there on the corner of 46th and Eighth Avenue, because at that moment in their lives there were all those people who needed me, and I knew it. And I thought about them all day while I tried to smarten up at Columbia.

I never have smartened up, and nobody who ever thanked me for anything meant quite as much as the bag lady who never thanked me. We both knew that sandwich was my duty.

And when I finally broke down at Columbia and couldn’t think my way through it, couldn’t even figure out what to do with my books, I was still okay, still functioning down there in Hell’s Kitchen. I put my books on a bench and left them there at 116th Street. I never looked back. I couldn’t, because I’d abandoned a broken boy, a broken dream, and it was too shameful to contemplate. But I was still okay behind my handtruck, still okay in my blue New York Daily News change apron, still okay listening to whatever all those wounded survivors had to tell me. I didn’t even know I was broken. I didn’t know I’d had what they used to call a nervous breakdown and now call a psychotic break. I just thought I’d dropped the ball and wasn’t bona fide anymore. Still, I had a home, right there on the street. Not my room on 70th and West End Avenue, but right there with all those haunted faces: prize fighters who punched out windshields, Holocaust survivors, pickpockets, thugs, bums, and cracked dropouts like me.

There were celebrities too. Frank Costello gave me a fiver every night for the three-penny News. The breathtaking Gwen Verdon tousled my hair in front of the Garden. Vivian Blaine and Robert Alda shushed up in their limo and gave me a fiver for the Times. Six-foot showgirls blew me kisses. Mike Todd drove me crazy taking his time picking a cigar from the humidor. Joan Diener ( playing Lalume in Kismet) winked at me. Richard Kiley asked me how’s it goin’. Cab Calloway danced a little jig for me when he saw I recognized him. Sugar Ray Robinson drove up in his fuschia pink Cadillac with beautiful girls of every hue and shot me with his forefinger. What the hell did I need to be whole and sane for?

I know there’s something wrong with my clock, always has been. But when I wake up worrying about my friends in Hell’s Kitchen I have to wonder about the nature of time itself. Sure, the mind plays tricks, and I’d write it off as just that if I didn’t know that I’m still living a life in East Anglia in 1946, a very full and detailed life. And then there’s that garden in medieval al-Andalus that I’m always waking up in at dawn among the roses. So what do we know about time? I can’t imagine Mr. Berman not being there. I wonder if anyone can’t imagine me not being there. Or here.

(Note: If I have conveyed any feeling at all for midtown Manhattan in the 1950s you may find it recaptured in my novel, Saraceno, for this is the setting in which I met the novel’s central character, the hit man called Billy Salviati.)

Something is exquisitely compatible about sailing and Marcus Aurelius’s admonition to perform each act as if it were your last.

The Stoic emperor of Rome is one of the few thinkers I hear. I hear the sorrow and decency in his meditations. I think I could have made him smile talking about sailing. I would have said the fragility of things pervades a sailor’s marrow. The boom swings and cracks your head. A rogue wind shreds your sail. A steering cable snaps you rudderless. A tang pops out and your rigging plops. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. Mishap follows mishap; it’s the law.Sailors of every stripe know this.

That’s why the intrepid solitary sailor Tristan Jones said memorably, Show me a man who calls himself a sailor and I’ll show you a goddam fool. My wife, Marilyn, and I lived on a 37-foot sloop for ten years, but we never called ourselves sailors. On good days we sailed, but mostly we bumbled.

There’s a big difference between people who live on sailing vessels and people who race them. What they have in common, beside a glossary, is that they know the frailty of their enterprise. But the racing sailor throws money at his problems and his ambitions, while the liveaboard hopes to hell he won’t run out of money. Both of them would agree with the old chesnut that a boat is a hole in the water into which money is tossed.

The racer runs his race and goes home to champagne shampoos, but the liveaboard remains amid the day’s wreckage, listening to the boat’s complaints, moaning and groaning with the planks, lines crying in their their cleats, halyards slapping the mast, fishes grazing the hull. The liveaboard knows his vessel intimately. He doesn’t want to push her too hard or deal her any indignities. The racer, the liveaboard and the boat are married, but the racer has a prenuptial agreement up his sleeve.

Marcus Aurelius knew only tubby galleys driven by their squaresails and rowed by slaves using long ashwood oars. The Romans called this latter propulsion ash wind. The galleys needed the wind behind them or quartering over their shoulders. So did the Vikings centuries later. It was the Arabs who gave us the familiar lateen rig (inset) we use today, enabling boats to sail “on” the wind. The Romans have a reputation for being mediocre or indifferent sailors, but recent marine archaeological researches at Skerki Bank off Sicily are proving this a bum rap.

With the elegant lateen rig came a certain complexity and the vulnerabilities that come with it. Galley sailing was stolid. But lateen sailing is breathtaking and fragile. A towering mast and boggling yards of Dacron or Kevlar or Mylar require mastery of intricacies and readiness to instantly meet emergencies. This kind of sailing is one long emergency.

Accordingly, Tristan Jones’ kind of sailor, the sailor reluctant to call himself one, performs each act as if it’s his last and cheerfully calls himself an ignoramus, because he knows the sea is a vast locker of tricks and last laughs. He knows he doesn’t know enough to be out there in his precarious frivolity. No sailor knows enough. Never sail with one who thinks he does.

Marcus the Stoic would like such contemplations. When his generals told him they worried about the Christians he told them that what worried him was that he had generals who were worried by the Christians. His stoic’s sense of proportion was perfect. He ruled like a pitch-perfect musician. I thought a great deal about him when I lived on our modest sloop, Sunsail. Slowly, as I dealt with each breakdown, each calamity, each unforeseen squall, I became a Stoic. I knew nothing, and the sea’s reward for my humility was that she didn’t kill me. She didn’t even take our boat.

But there’s no such thing as safe passage. I thought myself lucky to maneuver safely in a marina fairway. Danger comes out of nowhere fast, and the best you can hope for is to have your wits about you. But don’t count on it. Doing something foolish is always likely.

Now what if our leaders confessed as much?

I read The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass more than twenty years after it was published in 1959, because I had read a lot about it. In 2000, forty years after it was published, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Now, on the eve of publishing his autobiography, Peeling the Onion, at age 78 he has revealed that in the closing stages of World War II at age 17 he joined the infamous Waffen SS, the brutal political soldiers who carried out Nazi Germany’s Final Solution.

His official biography for sixty years has stated he served as an anti-aircraft gunner in the Luftwaffe, was wounded by the Russians in 1944 and held for several months by Americans as a military prisoner. He has been a leading critic of Germany’s behavior under Nazi rule, of neo-Nazism, and even of German reunification because he feared it would revive irredentist fervor.His shocking revelation to a newspaper has given rise to calls for him to give up his Nobel prize. Some have even called on him to give up all his literary prizes both on the grounds that he’s a hypocrite and that he wouldn’t have received them had his SS history been known.

The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), set in his native Danzig, now Polish Gdansk, moved me profoundly. I had been reading Vladimir Nabokov about the same time I read it, so my mind set the bar high for other writers’ work. I thought Grass’s parodic style—he had Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship in mind—opened new possibilities for the novel, and by the early 1980s it was easy to see that it had done just that. Its liberties with time line and conventional narrative put exciting new tools in the hands of writers.

Now Lech Walesa, former Polish president and founder of the labor movement Solidarity and a Gdansk native, is demanding that the great seaport city revoke the honorary citizenship it gave Grass.

I don’t subscribe to the idea that the 17-year-old Grass should be seen as an innocent misled by Nazi propaganda, no matter how seductive it might have been. (Anyone who has ever seen Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will knows how magnetic Nazism could be.) I think society can’t afford to make such handsome gestures, and yet I recognize that this position is inconsistent with what I’m about to say, namely that it’s altogether commendable that an old man should confess and repent such an heinous past.

There aren’t any excuses for waiting sixty years to admit this squalid lie. Would worldwide acclaim have been allowed a veteran of the SS 10th Armored Division? Probably not, and Grass knew it. But he had art, illuminations, in him that he knew were worth sharing with us. This in itself doesn’t distinguish him from other writers, but the fact that he was right, that he did have a rare light within him to illuminate our lives, does. Should we accordingly forgive him? Of course; forgiveness is always in order. We should also lament the very human course of inaction he took. But the one thing we should not do is get all huffy and high and mighty about it.

There may be something as important—at this point anyway—to lament: that this agonized confession certainly won’t hurt book sales. Controversy is the best publicity a book can get; a $75,000 publicity budget wouldn’t get Peeling the Onion (and all his books, for that matter) as much attention. Besides, the SS is like the Mafia; we’re always up for hearing more about it. Its dread fascination is like staring at a raised cobra. And Grass knows this too.

So let him have his cake and eat it. He’s a great writer. Nothing will change that. Just as nothing changes the fact that when we watch marching armies the jack-booted Nazis are always top drawer, while the rubber-soled American liberators and the donkey-cart Russians are a sorry rabble by comparison. The Nazis even in full retreat looked splendid. We know that, and so do Gunter Grass and his publicists.

And when all that’s said it’s nonetheless admirable that he didn’t want to go to his grave, taking all his laurels, without confessiing, didn’t want to go on deceiving us. Maybe some document would have eventually shown us the truth. Maybe not. But, like the great writer he is, he showed us the truth, however belatedly, because it’s his chosen profession to do so.
Does his vehement anti-Nazism all these years now ring hollow? Not to me. We blunder, we fall, sometimes we dissemble, and we mend our souls and soldier on. I’m sad, perhaps miffed, but I’m not willing to throw a single stone. A society that allows itself to get apoplectic about Grass’s hypocrisy likes being in high dudgeon too much and is as prone to hypocrisy as Grass himself. He’s ashamed of himself, he says, and his critics should be ashamed of themselves, because most of us hear damned well the skeletons rattling in our own closets.

I think our inner censor spiffs up our mindspeak to where we’re apt to become divorced from it. In making it presentable not only to society but to ourselves an estrangement darkens our faces; sometimes we’re not even sure the faces are our own.Poets must strive to hear the true demeanor of their mind’s speech, its discourse. Otherwise their words fall theatrically and the poets fail themselves, no matter how much recognition the world allots them. There’s a unique pithiness to this secret parlance of the mind, a craziness even, and poets doll it up at their peril.

The speaker who comes to me in my morning shower, having slipped past the sleepy censor, is an idiot, a blithering, rhyming idiot. But he is not unkind, he is not judgmental. I like him, but I’m not sure he should be let out without adult supervision. And therein’s the problem: who’s the adult?

Good morning, Djelloul, I say to the idiot in the mirror. Jeh-ghoul, call me Jeh-ghoul. Okay, so whuddya think, Jeh-ghoul? I don’t, because when I think I stink.

And so it goes morning after morning, the mock-sedate 72-year-old gentleman bantering with his idiot, occasionally hearing words of great beauty, even an elegant idea or two, amid the lunacies, hoping for the savant, more often entertaining the fool.

In this way I elude the canny censor to hear what little cockeyed wisdom I can eke from my tumultuous passage through time. Jeh-ghoul is an idiot; he gets no argument from me, but ghoul isn’t just a rhyme—and neither are those Cockney rhymes—so I have to think about that. Why does he blithely call himself a hollowed-out revenant? (The poet Charles Baudelaire had something eerie to say of revenants).

What if we knew the uncensored mindspeak of our president or Iran’s or our preacher’s or lover’s? What if the inner censor went on holiday or overslept? Would it be a momentarily better world? Or worse? Perhaps much worse.

The inner censor has his place, but when his exertions break out all over our faces perhaps it’s time to set down a few rules for him. Perhaps he is censoring out the clues by which we learn to trust each other. Perhaps his heavy editing is polarizing us.

The bestiaries behind our official faces, the flamers in clerics’ clothes, represent our consensus that truth must be rationed and sold for extortionary prices. But every once in a while a poet like James Joyce or Hart Crane lets the cat out of the bag and we find ourselves in a withering Dadaist world where the mind finds its way around the censor and scares us half to death with the possibilities of the feat.

Either we listen to the naked inner nut or we go with well-dressed nuts to hell.

(Note: Inset is the French realist Gustav Courbet’s Desperate Man).

Islamists in Somalia claim God is telling them to kill Ethiopians. Hezbollah thinks it has God’s embellished license to rain rockets down on Haifa and Nazareth. President Bush assures us God is whispering in his ear. Evangelicals think global warming, conflagration in the Middle East and despoiling the earth are part of God’s plan to bring on the Rapture, so who cares about all those hair-raising headlines?

God is taking the rap for a lot of bad news these days, and I think it more than passing strange God isn’t making headlines telling us to kiss a fool or feed the hungry or stop genocide in Darfur or maybe just get a grip. I have a hunch She’s telling us such things every day and can’t get past our iPods, because the Apocalypse, after all, is a blockbuster, and aren’t blockbusters what we like?

It’s a convenient blockbuster, unlike Al Gore’s inconvenient truth. After all, if we’re living in the End Time why should we worry about oil spills,
polluted watersheds, rising oceans, starving babies, species extinction? Why should we worry about the poor or about the unbridled greed of the predator economy? I see a selfish and convenient leer behind the apocalypticism that applauds Israel’s rampage in Lebanon and every other act of violence because they’re harbingers of the Rapture.

Nor are cracked Christians, reading the Bible and the Gospels as they damned well please, the only despoilers of the planet. I hold Islam’s and Judaism’s feckless fruitcakes equally responsible. And oh yes, I’ve not forgotten Hindu whackos on killing sprees, either.

The God I was brought up to worship is far more likely to nudge me to give the poor guy on the corner a few bucks even when I know he’s going to buy more trouble with it. She has mercifully never told me to kill anyone or to encourage mayhem and pilferage in the name of some greater idea. She has merely told me to keep quiet and do good. I think I’m doing some good, but I’m having trouble keeping quiet.

I don’t trust these Apocalypse-drunks. I think they’re high on meanness disguised in religiosity. And if I were an Israeli, even a right-wing, land-grabbing, simpleminded Israeli, I wouldn’t trust my newfound Christian evangelical pals around the corner, because they don’t give a damn about the Jews or the Arabs or anyone else who doesn’t share their conviction that this is it, folks, turn out the lights, glory hallelujah, we’re gonna sock it to ya, go to hell, y’all.

Anybody set on turning the environment on its head for a lousy buck is bound to love the rapturists because their message is, Bring the end on, hoo-yi-yay! Hence the rapturists and their bibliomantic ilk are good for business, good for imperialism, good for genocidal maniacs, good for raping the planet, good for turning a blind eye on every kind of evil. Rapturists make poor leaders because they prefer hullabaloo to reason and calm reflection. Societies that follow uproar-junkies end up in ruins.

I don’t experience God as a talker. If She sounded like Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, I’d turn up the woofer. I experience God as calmness in the wake of a decent act. In fact, I think I’m closest to Her when I hear the least about Her, because I don’t think either one of us cottons to all that blather titillating the rapturists.I’m surely not the exegete Ralph Reed is, but I don’t see why it can’t all come to an end in a great burst of compassion for one another, an immense festival celebrating the beauty of the earth we’ve been given to steward. But what do I know? I’ve been misreading things all my life, and the President sure does sound as if that’s God confiding in him. And maybe he and Ralph and all the other apocalypticos have all the Bible’s contradictions worked out neatly in their heads.

I fear we’re running out of humility a lot faster than we’re running out of oil. I’ve never known exactly what to do about anything, but I sure have listened hard for clues, and over the years one of the small graces I’ve acquired is the willingness to hear people out. So when the evangelicals act like they know exactly what it’s all about, I get the willies. My life has largely been about savoring how much I don’t know, and I’d trust the evangelicals a lot more if they were a tad more humble about what they haven’t figured out.

As for tickets to heaven, well, I don’t have one, but if I do get in I suspect it will be for some small thing I did and forgot, not for dancing up and down with joy because Israel is hastening the end of time.

I like Nigerian banking and British lottery scams more than the political horseplop and feel-good whoppers that slather me from cyberspace. I also enjoy all those botched-English warnings I get from banks, credit unions and Internet providers trying to wheedle data out of me. They’re so much more honest than the meadow muffins people send me in their zeal to reposition me somewhere right of Ghengis Khan (inset).

The scamsters and their skirmishes with the language are just trying to steal my money, but folks like the swift boat smearistas are trying to relieve me of my country, which I value a great deal more than my money.I’m thinking about giving up on referring polemicists and their feckless patsies to Snopes Urban Legends because it’s pretty clear to me people who circulate this kind of shmeer prefer the lies to the truth. Nobody’s ever thanked me for referring them to Snopes. Lies and sound bites are like sugar, evilly addictive. But like most addictions they lead to organ failure, in this case our body politic.It’s really the difference between greed and smarm. Greed disguises greed, but smarm has all sorts of malodorous agendas. Ayn Rand said greed is good and, in case you hadn’t heard, she’s running the country from the great beyond where, if God is merciful, she’s learning how to write.

What puzzles me about all these sleazy little anecdotes I receive suggesting that Bushland has something remotely to do with the country the founders envisioned is their self-righteous down-home friendliness. They sound as if Kenneth Copeland, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson knocked these brain-dead doozies out in an airplane after a few drinks.

I hear about the immigrant threat, the terrorist threat, the abominations of stem cell research and abortion, but where does the Christian Right stand on the dark Randian society Alan Greenspan and his cohorts have been foisting on this church-going nation of ours? Where does it stand on greed, one of the
seven deadlies, a list from which their other apoplexies are conspicuously missing?

Presumably conservatives on the Internet are being similarly swarmed by smarmy progressive email. If so, my heart goes out to them. I’ll bet they prefer Nigerian scams too.

—DM

Ten words on any matter is enough.

After that the cargo lists, the helm wanders,

and the rats eat the cat.

The most important thing a poet can do is shut up. The next best thing is to cultivate the cruelty to strangle a bad line before it stands up in its crib.

There’s an adage that newspaper training is good for a writer. But if it’s good for a poet, the poet better live a long life, because learning to write newspaper style might just tighten his line to the point of cryptology.At least that’s what happened to me. I got the idea that terse and verse weren’t just rhyming cousins. You can pursue a notion to the point of madness. I started writing poetry when I was thirteen and by the time I was thirty-five I was teetering on the brink of the idea that nothing is worth saying. And, as we know, the back wards of mental institutions are filled with people who toppled off that brink.

Nobody’s going to pin a medal on me for it, but by the time I was forty (I’m a slow learner) I figured out the immense vanity of what I’d concluded in my thirty-five-year-old adolescence: it wasn’t that nothing is worth saying, it was rather that I didn’t want to be caught saying what I meant or meaning what I said. You hear the same thing every day in Washington or the United Nations. It actually passes for news. When you give up obscurantism you have to put your cards on the table—the very thing a politician and many a poet would rather die than do.

(I’m not talking about poets like John Ashbery, who doesn’t worry about your not getting him. He has his own language and it comes to me when I let it, when I’m not being a smart ass).

I still think taciturnity is a good thing in poetry, but you have to listen to the madman in the attic and the hit man in the cellar, the faerie in the garden and the poor damned child you left in the burning house just so you could strut around like a grownup. You have to listen, listen, listen, and then maybe, if you’re still alive and not too tired, you might pinch out a few true lines. (And then some critic will wonder aloud if you can do it again.)

We’ve all encountered the blighty soul raring at the bit to get his two cents in. His impatience to be heard has already deafened us to him. And we’ve met the poor soul we ourselves are keen to interrupt or ignore. I’ve met them both in me. I’ve outgrown the former, and the latter’s not in my hands, except as poet. In that role I can show this poor soul some respect.

William Logan, writing about the selected poems of Lawrence Durrell (inset) in the July 28 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, has some elegant things to say about reticence. “Faulkner and Joyce would never have been great poets,” Logan writes, “not just because they were not talented enough, but because they loved the lushness of language too well.” (By the way, on the same page there’s a poem, Andante Favori, by Ashbery.)

Later in his essay, writing about Durrell’s early, wordy and often obscure poems, Logan writes, “It’s not that a little of this goes a long way, but that a lot of this goes such a little way.” I think that neatly sums up what I’m trying to say about reticence.

There’s a certain inevitability to the best works of art, Titian’s green, for example. Once you’ve seen it it enters your glossary and you think it always existed. Once you’ve seen a great work of art your world is no longer imaginable without it. Great works couldn’t have been executed any other way. Their reticences and shadows are perfect, and they shape the rest of your life. What you feel for their makers is beyond gratitude or admiration—they are angels; they have illuminated your footstep.