The Empty Mirror

July is looking like the cruelest month.

On July 4, Thomas M. Disch, the under-recognized author of the visionary science fiction classics Camp Concentration and 334, committed suicide in his Manhattan apartment. He was 68. Book Review contributor Edward Champion -- or his alter ego Bat Segundo -- did the last in person interview with Disch. You can link to a podcast here. In this Sunday's Book Review, James Sallis, an old friend of Disch's, remembers both the writer and the human being.

Yet Disch wasn't the only writer to die on July 4: Janwillem Van de Wetering died at age 77 at his home in Maine. Van de Wetering is known primarily as a mystery novelist, but I remember him for two nonfiction books he wrote in the 1970s, The Empty Mirror: Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery and A Glimpse of Nothingness: Experiences in an American Zen Community.

I read those books back-to-back the summer after my freshman year in college, along with a lot of other stuff -- Black Elk Speaks, The Teachings of Don Juan -- that, I hoped, would give me some kind of mystical insight. Mostly, it didn't -- or perhaps it's more accurate to say that I was looking for answers that no book can provide. But Van de Wetering's two memoirs opened up another kind of insight, making accessible the notion of Zen-like acceptance, an ideal to which I continue (in my better moments) to aspire.

I never read Van de Wetering's mysteries, never wanted to, never felt the need.

But I still carry around my copies of "The Empty Mirror" and "A Glimpse of Nothingness," to remind me of who I once was and who I may yet someday be.

David L. Ulin

Writing is a business

In his 1891 novel, "New Grub Street," English writer George Gissing dissects the jaded cynicism of the publishing world as deftly as any novelist ever has. And yet, if you're a writer, to read the book is oddly self-revealing, as if looking at a dusty old mirror and discovering "The Picture of Dorian Gray."

Here's a taste:

"People have got that ancient prejudice so firmly rooted in their heads -- that one mustn't write save at the dictation of the Holy Spirit. I tell you, writing is a business. Get together half a dozen fair specimens of the Sunday-school prize; study them; discover the essential points of such composition; hit upon new attractions; then go to work methodically, so many pages a day. There's no question of the divine afflatus; that belongs to another sphere of life. We talk of literature as a trade, not of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. If I could only get that into poor Reardon's head. He thinks me a gross beast, often enough. What the devil -- I mean what on earth is there in typography to make everything it deals with sacred? I don't advocate the propogation of vicious literature; I only speak of good, coarse, marketable stuff for the world's vulgar. You just give it a thought, Maud; talk it over with Dora."

He resumed presently:

"I maintain that we people of brains are justified in supplying the mob with the food it likes. We are not geniuses, and if we sit down in a spirit of long-eared gravity we shall produce only commonplace stuff. Let us use our wits to earn money, and make the best we can of our lives. If only I had the skill, I would produce novels out-trashing the trashiest that ever sold fifty thousand copies. But it needs skill, mind you; and to deny it is a gross error of the literary pedants. To please the vulgar you must, one way or another, incarnate the genius of vulgarity. For my own part, I shan't be able to address the bulkiest multitude; my talent doesn't lend itself to that form. I shall write for the upper-middle class of intellect, the people who like to feel that what they are reading has some special cleverness, but who can't distinguish between stones and paste. That's why I'm so slow in warming to the work. Every month I feel surer of myself, however. That last thing of mine in 'The West End' distinctly hit the mark; it wasn't too flashy, it wasn't too solid. I heard fellows speak of it in the train."

David L. Ulin

Safe passage, Robert Fagles

Classics scholar Robert Fagles' bestselling translations from the Greek and Latin reminded us, as Seamus Heaney did with his "Beowulf," of the continuing power and appeal of epic poems. We may feel sorry to lose so important a translator as Fagles, who died March 26 at age 74. Yet one can't help but see his passing in the context of his career-long preoccupation, in "The Odyssey" and "The Aeneid," with the necessity of journeys.

Good wishes and safe passage on your new travels, Mr. Fagles. Below are some words from a fellow student of Virgil that I think you'd appreciate.

The days that are past
And the others to come
Gathered, in the present.

For years and through the centuries
A surprise at every moment
In the knowledge we are still in life,
That living ever flows, always flowing,
Unexpected gift and pain
In the continuous whirl
of empty change.

Such in keeping with our fate
Is this journey I continue,
In the flash of an instant
Unearthing and inventing
Time from first to last,
Refugee like all the others
Who have been, who are, who are to come.

           Giuseppe Ungaretti  (translated by Andrew Frisardi)

Nick Owchar