PERHAPS IT IS FINALLY the fact that some people lead interesting lives, but to me the consummate need has been their ability to speak of those lives, to give them an articulate voice and presence. When young, I longed for someone who would talk to me and, often as not, that person was found in a book. Voices as distinct as any physically present really were there—Lawrence’s intensity, Conrad’s curious particularizations, Stendhal’s endlessly relieving humour, all were my dependably familiar company. Long after I lost the literal memory of just what he had said, I still heard Henry Miller talking, displacing all usual discretion, demanding intimacy with his listener.
Just so then is the writer I now think of, given the question of a “lost classic,” which, in this case, seems never to have been quite found. David Rattray’s book is still in print, though sadly he died in 1993, still with much in mind to do, still decisively able—as his last collection, Opening the Eyelid (1990), makes very clear. He is probably best known as the translator of Antonin Artaud, having done, as he says in this present book, “roughly two-thirds” of Jack Hirschman’s edition of Artaud’s work, Anthology, published in the mid-sixties. (I see now that another instance of his authority as a translator, Black Mirror: The Selected Poems of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, was published posthumously in 1996.)
Rattray’s collection of reflections, memoirs and essays, How I Became One of the Invisible, published in 1992 by Semiotext(e), is that rare instance of a book in which the writer speaks of the proverbial “many things” of a life, all in a manner which is in no way defined as a professional habit, an authority, an identity given him or her by some public use. Stendhal has such a voice, Montaigne also in a curious way—and Whitman, in his journals especially, or Borges in his fictions. It is as though the writer were attending his or her own experience in company with the reader, were not, that is, explaining or directing, but coming again to the same terms, place and time, as the reader begins then to enter. Robert Duncan was a master of this possibility as were other very different writers, Robert Louis Stevenson, for example, or Francis Parkman. Defoe is its great practitioner in Robinson Crusoe. Such address can say anything, go anywhere, and be there so specifically in its own compelling interest that all, the reader included, then follows.
Essays are otherwise a bore, trials, labours, persuasions. The tender homage Rattray writes to his college friend, Alden Van Buskirk, becomes an extraordinary record of the time itself, the last of the fifties, with all its characteristic wandering and hopes.Nothing I’ve read ever placed it in mind so clearly, or knew to begin with what it had all been about. Just so is the ranging diversity of all this book engaged, whether the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–1984) or “a certain ancient type of music which the musicologist Denis Stevens refers to as ‘that once mysterious melange of plainsong and polyphony, the “In Nomine” …’ ” One reads of Holderlin, of Rene Crevel, of Rattray’s brother’s death from cancer (which was to be the cause of Rattray’s death as well), of Artaud and “the cane’s loss of power”—of Emile Nelligan, whom Edmund Wilson called “the Rimbaud and Nerval of French Canada.” The final piece, “How I Became One of the Invisible,” opens with this paragraph:
In order to become one of the invisible, I had to go through an ordeal technically known as throwing oneself in the arms of God. This consisted of going out in the empty desert with nothing but the clothes that one was wearing and a bag containing certain things. Some of us stayed there for months, others years, many forever.
Rattray and I were writing to one another at the end of his life. He had hoped to be able to come up to Buffalo for a reading but his health in the last months prevented it. We talked on the phone from time to time, and I knew in a small way what he was having to deal with. This book I so value told me the rest. It was unexpected counsel for a great deal I myself had come to and would one day have to accept. He sent me a sweet poem dated March 2, 1993:
Whatever books there have been or will be, it seems to me now that there must be in them a presence such as his was, however it speaks or feels. Who touches this book touches a man, Whitman says—who feels the world, who keeps the faith, who shares with us.