novelists-from-new-york-state

"When I was a child I saw the sea burn. How often I have thought that sentence but with no page to set it on, no place to make it mine. As I sit and write, my words fly off the page. I think of geese lumbering into the wind. Or paper kites men have held in their hands, stretched taut over wind, over water, lit by the half darkness. But the darkness turns into barbed wire. In reaching for the past I am forced to crawl through it."

"It seems to me that in its rhythms the poem, the artwork, can incorporate scansion of the actual, the broken steps, the pauses, the blunt silences, the brutal explosions. So that what is pieced together is a work that exists as an object in the world but also, in its fearful consonance, its shimmering stretch, allows the world entry. I think of it as a recasting that permits our lives to be given back to us, fragile, precarious."

"In concrete imagery and intellectual passion, Alexander is full of surprises. These are haunting texts of hybrid America."

"The act of writing, it seems to me, makes up a shelter, allows space to what would otherwise be hidden, crossed out, mutilated. Sometimes writing can work toward a reparation, making a sheltering space for the mind. Yet it feeds off ruptures, tears in what might otherwise seem a seamless, oppressive fabric. more?? (from "Piecemeal Shelters")"

"Through speech, the entanglement of thoughts and feelings might be unwound, the truth permitted to shine, however fitfully. (beginning of "Erupting Words")"

"Meena Alexander's acute poetic sensibility makes this memoir a joy to read. At the same time, the writing is grounded enough to evoke the earthier loam of violence and reality."

"How can I make a durable past in art, a past that is not merely nostalgic, but stands in vibrant relation to the present? This is the question that haunts me. (beginning of "A Durable Past")"

"As the condition of migration and cultural displacement comes to be seen as a metaphor of our times, Meena Alexander's poignant and perceptive book is a welcome addition. Here, the postcolonial condition is addressed in its variety and its particularity: as fiction, criticism, personal reflection. This is a compelling, subtly crafted performance."

"Meena Alexander has written a fierce new complexity into questions of identity, diaspora, tradition, language, and community. This is a powerful fusion of poetic vision and critical thinking."

"Meena Alexander sings of countries, foreign and familiar places where the heart and spirit live, and places for which one needs a passport and visas. Her voice guides us far away and back home. The reader sees her visions and remembers and is uplifted."

"Migrancy, a central theme for many of us in this shifting world, forces a recasting of how the body is grasped, how language works. Then, too, at the heart of what happens in these sometimes jagged reflections of mine, is the question of postcolonial memory. ("Overture: Another Voice")"

"At once violent, erotic, and somber, Manhattan Music is infused with the power of myth and poetry and the inner life, the electric intersection of characters who illuminate for the reader both the Old World and the New."

"If women had wives to keep house for them, to stay home with vomiting children, to get the car fixed, fight with the painters, run to the supermarket, reconcile the bank statements, listen to everyone’s problems, cater the dinner parties, and nourish the spirit each night, just imagine the possibilities for expansion — the number of books that would be written, companies started, professorships filled, political offices that would be held, by women."

"Creativity could be described as letting go of certainties."

"Would that there were an award for people who come to understand the concept of enough. Good enough. Successful enough. Thin enough. Rich enough. Socially responsible enough. When you have self-respect, you have enough; and when you have enough, you have self-respect."

"The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity."

"Ah, mastery ... what a profoundly satisfying feeling when one finally gets on top of a new set of skills ... and then sees the light under the new door those skills can open, even as another door is closing."

"Mike Gold's initiation into the radical movement occurred in 1914 when he blundered into an unemployment demonstration in Union Square, listened to the "rebel girl" Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and bought a copy of The Masses. Between 1915, when he contributed his first poem to Eastman's magazine, and 1921, when he joined the editorial staff of The Liberator, Gold lived the wandering and exciting life of the Bohemian-anarchist artist. He wrote three one-act plays for the Provincetown Players and spent a summer with the happy and hard-drinking group at the Cape. In New York, after attending rehearsals at the Provincetown Playhouse, he would join Eugene O'Neill and anarchist friends at a saloon on the corner of Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, the "Hell Hole," and listen to O'Neill recite "The Hound of Heaven." Dorothy Day, a "rebel girl" of the Village and, later, the much-admired and selfless editor of the Catholic Worker, remembers at this time that she and Gold were reading Tolstoy together. "He used to make fun of my religious spirit," she wrote later, "but he himself was in sympathy with the Christianity expressed by Tolstoi, a religion without churches or a priesthood. Mike had a religious upbringing in his home on the East Side and liked to sing Yiddish folksongs and Hebrew hymns.""

"Gold is important to recover because he is one of dozens, hundreds of writers whose legacy and output was silenced by the Red Scare and Cold War. Gold’s project was to create a working-class literature written for, by, and about working-class people, and Gold understood that a working-class literature would also have to be a radical literature, and a racial literature. And he understood that such a project required conflict with a literary establishment. It would mean a literary class war."

"It has become necessary now in America to fight against this great fascist lie. Recently, groups of anti-Semitic demagogues have appeared in this country. They are like Hitler, telling the hungry American people that capitalism is Jewish, and that an attack on the Jews is the best way of restoring prosperity. What folly! What criminal deception and bloody fraud! And there are signs that this oldest of swindles will grow in America. The defense of the Jewish race against these fascist liars and butchers has become one of the most necessary tasks for every liberal and radical. This is not only a problem for Jews to meet; it has become the problem of the workers and farmers whose hunger the fascists try to appease with the empty husk of anti-Semitism."

"There will be another World War soon. Everything we think and do in the next decade will fall within that shadow, as Walt Whitman's generation fell under the Civil War. There is no escape; there is no alternative for the writer as for other men, but struggle or suicide. One will be forced into an attitude. I prefer life. It is life that has created the Communist movement, with a philosophy so tragic and honest that it can face the thought of the next world war, prepare for it, and go on building. No prayers, or pieties, or hocus-pocus of Fascist rhetoric but the habit of facing every day the hardest facts of life; building with them, seeing beyond them, using them for a great new objective. That is the way to write well, and it is Communism."

"The dark ages had returned; modern thought was again burning in the flames of a new inquisition, the Jews again afflicted with the yellow badge of shame."

"War may have depended at times in the feudal past on the whim of emperors and kings. Today it is a respectable part of Big Business. It is as premeditated as a selling campaign by a large corporation. It is the last resort of national salesmanship."

"Hitler is a demagogue who has falsified history. He succeeds because his followers are too ignorant to know that he lies. The great mass of Jews in the world today are not millionaire bankers, but paupers and workers. I have told in my book a tale of Jewish poverty in one ghetto, that of New York. The same story can be told of a hundred other ghettoes scattered over all the world. For centuries the Jew has lived in this universal ghetto. Yiddish literature is saturated with the ghetto melancholy and poverty. And Jewish bankers are fascists everywhere. Hitler has received their support, both with money and ideas. Some of his most important secret conferences were held in the home of a Jewish banker. They gave large sums to his party before he came to power. Hitler's whole program is to save the banking and profiteering capitalist system. The attack on the Jews is merely a piece of demagogy, to throw the hungry German masses off the trail of their real enemy. No, every Jew is not a millionaire. The majority of Jews belongs to the working-class and to the bankrupt lower middle class. It is natural that in the present hour so many of them are to be found in the Socialist, Communist and trade union ranks. Jewish bankers are fascists; Jewish workers are radicals; the historic class division is true among the Jews as with any other race."

"This bourgeois form of art for art's sake is no longerworthy of one's comment or attack. It has only one useful purpose that I can still see: it numbs the minds of the exploiters. Let them continue to support it and be stultified."

"If Hitler consolidates his power we will see a world reaction infinitely worse than that which followed the events of 1848. Every sign of the faintest liberalism amongst the middle class intellectuals will be drowned in blood. The workers will be massacred, terrorized, forced into a medieval serfdom. It is war-time. We must close ranks or be annihilated. Hitlerism will spread over Europe and sweep America. Unless we unite. Unless there is a united front of all the workingclass parties and liberal groups. The Socialists and liberals may form such a front, leaving out the Communists. They may piously ignore the massacre of Communists, deeming themselves more respectable and hence safer. But this is a form of suicide, for Mr. Villard will find himself consigned to the hangman by an American Hitler as swiftly as any Communist. Every anti-fascist is needed in this united front. There must be no base factional quarrels. Leaders who stand in the way of a united front should be swept aside by the rank and file. We are faced with the death of the whole workingclass movement. We cannot waste time. We cannot quibble. How can anyone underestimate this thing? But I feel an apathy in America, a failure to react to the events in Germany that is appalling. Forward to the united front! There need be no hypocrisy or ignoring of basic differences. Each party and each group can retain its individuality. But at once! Let us unite to fling back Hitlerism and crush it forever!"

"We are entering a new period in the history of the American melting pot. Immigration has stopped, for one thing, and assimilation has begun. A bigger factor, however, is the great social change going on in America, a process that inevitably lines up the poor against the money-bags, the trade unionists against the exploiters, the men who battle for human rights against those who fight for property rights. Race lines vanish in such a conflict; the class issue cuts through everything. Even the Negro question is affected and will finally be settled as this fight goes on; and this question is surely the touchstone of all racial problems in America."

"I have chosen the Communist discipline. Because Communism projects into the future, and not into the past, as does Fascismo, which is only a defense corps trying to save the rottenness of the past."

"The idea of money is so dominant in this country that anyone not part of money is made to feel ashamed."

"Without an understanding of the economic basis of war, no one can be its determined or effective opponent. Sentimental appeals will not hold back a nation inflamed by patriotic lies. Only the man who understands clearly that he is being asked to die for J. P. Morgan's investments abroad, or the markets of the oil and machinery trusts, will be immune to the customary lies about small nations, enemy atrocities, or democracy. That is why it is so necessary to spread a knowledge of Marxian economies; that is why it is so necessary to maintain a clear-cut Marxian platform in politics, based on the realities of the class war. Prepare for the next war! Prepare by studying Marx and Lenin, by studying the Russian Revolution. Prepare to fight Wall Street, instead of dying to protect its wealth. Inoculate yourself against the liberals who will want to lead you into another capitalist war for whatever holy and subtle reason. Prepare against the Walter Lippmanns, the Rabbi Stephen Wises, the Woodrow Wilsons, Spargoes, Bohns, Scheidemanns, Eberts, Kropotkins, Albert Thomases, Arthur Hendersons, of the next war. They are in your midst now; ask them what they will do, SPECIFICALLY, when the nation is mobilized. Prepare."

"Bart, the hairdresser, sassed the customers when he wasnt clowning or reciting brash tales about his private life. The customers seemed to enjoy it."

"Mrs. H., the seamstress, and her mysterious husband whom nobody had everseen, it was assumed that he was bedridden, since the dressmaker frequently would excuse herself, saying, "Would you mind if I just take a look in at Mr. H?" There really was no Mr. H. The backroom contained nothing but a bed, and a chiffonier, on whose flat top stood a decanter, bearing the inscription "Gin" and wearing around it's neck a tag, "Henry Hanse." No one and nothing else occupied the room but an easel; on it reposed a portrait of a youngish man wearing a very tall collar and a large stickpin in his tie."

"No one would suppose that they were mother and daughter and few really knew. Sometimes her mother introduced her as her sister; more often, as a young friend."

"More women than men came down the gang-plank, many of them wearing trousers with ill-fitting overcoats buttoned around them. In the harsh noon light, they appeared to have a curious kinship. They all looked as though something had been chilled inside of them and then hollowed out. Although some were shouting, like the men and women on the pier, although some were hysterical, like the men and women crowding around the plank, although some were dazed, there was a difference between them and the persons who awaited them. Some cheerful, recognizable human quality had been subtracted from them. They were the second group of survivors from the Matrix, the pleasure ship that had gone to the bottom before it had even reached Caribbean waters. (beginning of "To Be Alive")"

"The two men, leaning against the billboard in the vacant corner lot, had not spoken for the past fifteen minutes. Victor Hoge was gouging splinters out of a wooden stick with seamed and cracked hands that had not become accustomed to idleness. Jean Boileau, younger, had learned in the last few months, in his cell, in the courtroom and now in his liberty pending appeal, how to remain immobile. Yet it was he who spoke first."

""God-damn! keep your trap shut," he said and blew a suffocating plume of corn whiskey breath into the minister's face. "They ain't nobody going to hear you except us who are going to teach you that whites in the South are not allowed to wallow with niggers and hogs." Shoemaker made no reply. He recrossed his arms, pressing them tight against his chest, thinking: I didn't know men could be so mean. (Chapter 13, 258)"

"The rush of cold air and the buzz of voices woke Pop from his doze. "What's that, what's that?" he said testily, leaning forward in the Morris chair that he would not let Joanna sell. (first lines of "King Lear in Evansville")"

"...she stayed behind in the vestibule of the train, leaning against the wall in an effort to knit together her nerves before she faced the others. (Chapter seven, p107)"

""Why don't you marry me?" "Because I don't want to. I don't want to marry any one." She felt stifled and ill, and she pushed him away, saying irritably: "Anyway, you're a Fascist, too." (Chapter 6, p106)"

"He warned himself: the one luxury you can't afford is to lose your temper, understand? (Chapter Ten, p169)"

"Every day he expected to find in his mail an anonymous letter, beginning "It may interest you to know that your wife...""

"Throughout the afternoon, the woman's voice had been seldom heard. With her pale clean hands curved around the rolled papers on her lap, she sat on a folding chair beside the dusty filing cabinets. More frequently than she spoke, she uttered a succession of dry sounds, clearing her throat. Behind the desk, the red-haired man in shirt sleeves, with tie and collar loosened, was reading aloud in a voice that matched his imperturbable expression. He looked up from his letters only when the man sitting on the window sill interrupted him with an explosive comment. (first lines)"

"he thought: this is it. I heard about it; read about it; now I am seeing it. For us, perhaps, there may be only the threat of the men outside. For the others, the threat has become the act. The sequence is manifest, he thought: first, the handful of deputies, next, the organized band of vigilantes, and, finally, the uniformed army of storm troopers. As it happened in Italy, as it happened in Germany, as it is happening in Spain. Now I have had the unclean thing flung into my face. Did I love my own land so much that I thought it could remain undefiled? Did the signs before me in my part of the country appear so faint that I hoped they could easily be washed away? Very well. Now I know; and never will forget and never will stop fighting it. They won't let us have our way of salvation, will they? The corners of his jaw muscles bulged out. While we try to bring it about through love and cooperation, they crush us. They are the law-breakers. They don't give a hang for man-made laws. They never heard of our Father's law that we live together as His children. They use their money and their power, he thought, to degrade other men, like those poor hirelings riding outside, bought by the pro-consuls of the steel and textile corporations. I say that they are making monsters of one set of men in order to crush another set of men. Laws will not stop them, now I know, or reform them, since they admit no laws. We must stop them. Submission won't stop them, he told himself; that's what they want. Jesus didn't teach submission; He taught a morality of initiative. Jesus would have known at once that their violence can be defeated only by action. Very well. Now I know. (Chapter 13, p241)"

"Never mind that they ought to know better by now. They're reviewing the money again and not the book. This time it's...a knowing, muscular, many charactered, and—what's worse—absolutely readable New York folk-tale about the Mafia. Granted, The Godfather does ask for it in a way, with almost $500,000 in advance from hardcover, paperback and movie rights; consider what book reviews usually pay and you'll see why a book like this so easily brings out the worst sort of moral indignation in so many critics... He's got to be just another literary crapshooter who's made the Big Killing overnight. The trouble with all that, of course, is that "overnight" happened to be 20 years. During that time, Puzo wrote three books in which he painstakingly and shrewdly set his wit to mastering about as much as a man needs to know about the craft of writing fiction. With his second novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, he had, in fact, nailed down a solid name for himself as a good but little known (and therefore uncorrupted, right?) chronicler of Italian-American life. Now Puzo is making money from his writing. So naturally he's only writing in order to make money. You don't have to be a Sicilian to enjoy a vendetta."

"Puzo performs a neat trick; he makes Don Vito a sympathetic, rather appealing character... The deep strength of the narrative comes from...a conviction that street justice is more equal and more honest than the justice preached in the courts."

"[Puzo] was clearly a writer of unusual talent and one looked forward to what he might come up with next... The Godfather is a brutal disappointment. It is quite simply, a package for bestsellerdom: huge, vulgar and sensational, it has all the formula requirements."

"[The Godfather is] bound to be hugely successful, and not simply because the Mafia is in the news. Mr. Puzo's novel is a voyeur's dream, a skillful fantasy of violent personal power without consequences. The victims of the Corleone 'family' are hoods, or corrupt cops—nobody you or I would actually want to know. Just business, as Don Vito would say, not personal. You never glimpse regular people in the book, let alone meet them, so there is no opportunity to sympathize with anyone but the old patriarch, as he makes the world safe for his beloved 'family'."

"Even though I am hurt that Mario Puzo had to write a novel as potentially defaming to Italian Americans as The Godfather, I admit that every page of it touches me in a way that Tom Sawyer could never do. While I can find much to identify with in Mark Twain's writings, Puzo's characters are so real to me that I am almost embarrassed to read about them."

"Here is all the classic material of Mafia mythology, which is exactly how Puzo treats his story. As an author he is the epitome of omniscience, narrating his tale like an old man telling stories of the "good old days" around a Sicilian hearth, in clear, simple prose... Right up to the end, it seems, Puzo never lost his sneaking desire to believe in a pastoral paradise governed by harsh but fair feudal robber barons – as realistic a myth as any."

"There is brutality in abundance, but there is also a sickening justification and glorification of a detestable regime. Everything is brutal. Sex is abundant; it is not love, just animality, except in a few instances."