8 May 1984

To James Laughlin
NEW DIRECTIONS PUBLISHERS
80 Eighth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10011
U.S.A.

Dear JL,

Thanks for your letter. Briefly, I would like to say some more about myself and about The Banks of the Sea, and about writing.

I dedicated The Banks of the Sea to the memory of my cousin Frank, whom I was very close to. He was a Navy combat photographer with the Marines in Korea.

There is a feeling of cataclysm in The Banks of the Sea, throughout the novel and permeating the action, people living in a ruin, the ruins of Angkor Wat, a civilization crumbling and falling down around your ears. A civilization abandoned because of a clogged drain.

I lived in New York from 1970-1974, most of the time in an apartment on the sixth floor (# 9) at 31 Avenue B on the corner of East 3rd St., while I was writing the draft of The Banks of the Sea. I spent three winters and four summers in that apartment, the building a firetrap in any season, an inhuman place, abandoned dogs tied on the roof and left to devour the garbage thrown there. In winter the furnace would break down sometimes for weeks, and in summer there was no water. I hoarded water in plastic cider jugs. Watched TV with the cockroaches. Of course the TV got ripped off. The apartment was constantly being broken into and ransacked. I kept the manuscript in a safe deposit box in the Chase Manhattan Bank in the basement of the World Trade Center, a draft which accumulated to some four hundred typewritten pages. My typewriter was the one Carol finds in the chapter "Watercatch." I have large quantities of journals and notes from that time. Of course I was alone most of the time; not many girls came there. Some did, however.

It was after one such blessed visit that I wrote Ellen's poem in "The Blind Clarinettist of St Marks Place." She was a girl I met at Remington's, a restaurant on Waverly Place which had reproductions of Frederick Remington paintings on the walls, and she was going to NYU. I liked to go to Remington's when I got off work at midnight, buy a carafel of red wine and sit by the fireplace and write or chat. One night I discovered that the bar had Norwegian akvavit. Well...

The Banks of the Sea is a historical novel, an exposition of the time when the cargo cult of Aquarius was being promoted in the media and in the streets. The events in the novel are for the most part quasi-historical -- the burning of the Cooper Union Library, the assassination of the Mayor of Newark, the attack on the President of the Mormon Church, and of course the flamethrower attack by the blacks on Little Italy which is obviously a "picture quote" from the Polish film Kanal -- integral elements of atmosphere and action but also staged for the purpose of elucidating certain mechanisms behind corresponding events in real life, however, such as the "white devils" doing their thing in East Virginia or at the commune in Newark, or the nest of voodoo Haitians in the Albert Hotel, even the hippie dog burial at the beginning of the novel. It is hoped the reader will wonder whether the latter had anything to do with, or was perhaps instrumental in bringing about the meeting of Carol and Ellen in the abandoned tenement. They are, after all, The Love Generation in flower. And of course Aquarius is in Bellevue, like Napoleon, or he is a guy you happen to fall into conversation with at a bar. The novel is a spoof, a tradition in American writing, but it succeeds in imparting a realism that is convincing. A few years ago I saw a performance of Hamlet in the courtyard of Kronborg Castle in Elsinore, with the mist and fog in the right places and the lighthouse in the tower flashing its beacon -- an experience of being transported by the story being acted out on the stage, all of it fiction but as real as actual history. I am fascinated by the idea of another reality in fiction and the philosophical implications of this. The Banks of the Sea plays with these concepts, but at the same time it is authentic. But then there are many kinds of authenticity. For one: there really was a girl like Yvetot. Another: the sleeping cars of the Amtrack train Fredegonde rides are actually part of the Ringling Bros., Barnum & Baily circus train, they were formerly cars of the 20th Century Limited. I found out this amazing fact when the circus was in Fresno, California, in 1970.

When I returned to the States in 1968 I traveled across the country from New York to California to be with my family in Fresno. I went by Greyhound bus. Of course it was a tremendous experience after having lived abroad for eleven years. I suppose I looked like a foreigner, with my beard and my Danish clothes. I remember we were driving across the Nebraska prairie when an old man, he must have been in his eighties, got up from his seat and came down the aisle of the moving bus and stood beside me. He smiled and said, "Can I ask you a question?" I said of course. He said, "Tell me, the young people of today and what they are doing, are they going to do any good for the world?" I regard The Banks of the Sea, with everything the novel implies, as my answer to that man's question.

10 May

American poets like Carol Gamewell exist only in a memory of another America. Exuberant, clean-limbed, earthy as the soil they sprang from. The Beats certainly didn't fit the description. And what do you see when you look in the pages of established poetry magazines nowadays? I imagine Carol Gamewell as nothing less than a Robinson Jeffers of the city.

The poet as hero. They want him to be their assassin. Instead he saves the American princess, gives her a baby too.

I knew other writers in New York, "keeping hearth and high hopes, responsible to the universe," on the Lower East Side, at the Albert. There was a poet from Minnesota. A girl novelist from Michigan. They weren't Westbeth artists. There was a Canadian girl at the factory where I worked, in Long Island City. One day on the subway she showed me her poetry...

One night at Remington's I was sitting writing and a girl sat down and we started talking, when a guy went amok. He was white, in his late twenties. He snatched a couple of knives from the kitchen and started slashing the guests. Panic resulted and all of the guests, including the girl I was talking with, rushed out of the restaurant and up the stairs to the street. The guy was knocking over the furniture and I sat there putting my notebook in my pocket. He came over to me and stuck the point of a sixteen-inch butcher knife against my Adam's apple and said, "Now that you've written it all down you're going to get it." I was mad as hell. I grabbed his wrist and turned the table over on him, walked him halfway across the room and took the knife away from him. He still had a steak knife, though. But I had the sword. We circled around each other until the police got there. He was arraigned, and a month or two later I had to journey down from the Mac Dowell Colony in order to testify before a grand jury. I got a lot of free drinks at Remington's after that. There were three Kens there then: the bartender, the manager, and me. The manager was Ken Brown, who wrote The Brig for The Living Theater.

11 May

A lot of research went into The Banks of the Sea, obviousy. An example is the names Yvetot and Fredegonde. Yvetot is a legendary or semi-mythical kingdom in the region of France now covered by Normandy. It was a matter of reading 18th-century French sources at the New York Public Library.

The theme of the King of Yvetot was very popular in France in the 19th century and gave rise to at least two operas, one of them by the composer Adolphe Adam. Fredegonde is a character from one of the Yvetot legends, a woman who murders a bishop named Praetextus. There is a painting by Alma Tadema titled Fredegonde at the Bed of Praetextus which I saw at the Metropolitan Museum. This research also involved reading old operatic scores at the Lincoln Center Library.

One day I went to the Red Cross blood bank on Amsterdam Avenue and donated a pint of blood. Then I spent the afternoon at the Lincon Center Library. It was in October 1973. On the way home that evening I did my shopping at the supermarket on the corner of Avenue A and East 4th. Walked home along East 3rd, crossed B and went inside my building. Halfway up the stairs I heard somebody enter from the street. I turned around and saw a black guy bounding up at me. He pulled out a knife. I dropped my shopping bags, I guess it was on the 5th floor landing. He said, "Now you're going to get it, whitey!" and lunged with the knife. I kicked him in the balls. We tussled there on the landing. I fought him off, tore his windbreaker, which had a Black Power emblem sewn on it, as he ran down the stairs.

My mother's brother owned a bar in Bogalusa, Louisiana. He had red hair, was half Dutch and half Irish, and used to be a prize fighter in the Marines. I think he was a welterweight or a light heavyweight. Uncle Fred. His name was Ferdinand, but he wouldn't let anybody call him that. He got discharged from the Marines for fighting outside the ring.

I still have a jacket I got married in in Denmark. Irish tweed. I like to show it to people. There are slashes on the front and on a shoulder from when that spade tried to knife me on the stairs in New York.

Hairy stories. There was the time a black SCUM woman tried to knife me on 8th Street. I was standing studying the menu in the window of the Wienerwald when I heard somebody tell me to move. I looked at her. She crouched. She had a knife taped to her ankle. Butch haircut. Turned out she was from Washington D.C.

I think I spent too much time in police stations and courtrooms in New York. Interesting, though. Part of the adventure. Not only was there the constant danger of being physically attacked, there were other spices to writing in that city. I needed to read in Robert Briffault's The Mothers, in volume three where he describes female circumcision. I went to the NYPL and to my astonishment discovered that in all three or four sets the library possessed volume three was missing. I found the work at the Columbia University Library, and again volume three was missing, and the same with the NYU library and the Newark Public Library. I finally found it intact at the Brooklyn Public Library. But what a runaround!

Memories of Second Avenue. The egg cream man beside the Andersen Theater. What was his name? He liked to show you pictures of his family. Was it Mr. Halpern? I believe it was...

New York 8 May, 1968. She walked away from me down the street and the morning was on her legs. There's not even a designation for a place like that. They don't call it anything, it's just there. Two phone booths in back. Buy a Popular Mekanix, a cup of coffee and a raisin cupcake. Two dealers occupied the booths for half an hour with a backlog of three more stirring their cups and staring over the inventory. One of them looked at his watch and left. Places to make a phone call on Second Avenue.

The old man on the Greyhound bus... I am thinking of Richard Avedon's photograph of Ezra Pound with his eyes closed, smiling, getting dressed to leave St. Elizabeth's.

Best wishes,

-- Kenneth Tindall

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