Eyes wide open
August Kleinzahler’s new prose collection opens, fittingly enough, in the San Francisco fog, where “deepening night is best with the wind up and the cold, damp smoke blowing in off the sea at twenty knots.”
Aficionados of this esteemed San Francisco writer’s work know him, perhaps primarily, as a poet gifted with a lean but luxuriant language of place. As if to affirm it, Farrar, Straus and Giroux has just issued, along with “Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and SendOffs: Selected Prose 2000-2016,” a double volume of Kleinzahler’s piercingly evocative “Hollyhocks in the Fog: Selected San Francisco Poems” and “Before Dawn on Bluff Road: Selected New Jersey Poems.” You can’t read this writer without knowing exactly where he is and where he’s been.
The pleasures and gratifications of his prose are by no means merely geographical. With his pellucid style, which seems at once expansive and tightly wrought, patiently intuitive and purposeful, Kleinzahler is exceptionally good at tracking not only his own often adamant thoughts and abundant enthusiasms — which include Richmond District Chinese food, shooting baskets on a Corona Heights court, the late San Francisco poet Thom Gunn and the febrile short stories of Lucia Berlin — but at registering the felt life of the world and people around him.
In the second of “Two San Francisco Feuilletons,” the peculiar sound of a neighbor’s French horn practice methods leads, somehow inevitably, to reflections on gardening, rent control, serial romance, and the glories of young people drinking and smoking in the afternoon. It all happens, with this writer’s characteristically ambling but efficient grace, in five pages.
Kleinzahler is also, and certainly not incidentally, a fine critic. He wrote on music for many years for the San Diego Reader.
One detailed but lightfooted piece accounts, albeit elliptically, for how that ancillary career came to be. Another provides a gripping example of criticism tightly bound to biographical narrative, topped with a devastating last line.
It’s on other writers, mostly poets, that Kleinzahler trains the dominant share of his attention here. Sixteen of the 24 pieces in “Sallies” are literary essays, appreciations and reconsiderations. The approach and tone vary from one subject to another. On Gunn and the late novelist and screenwriter Leonard Michaels, both of whom he knew, Kleinzahler is affectionate, attentive, keenly appreciative and often funny.
Here he is on Michaels, who “dwelt in the atmosphere of perpetual vexation. It was part of his appeal. That evening, which I still remember vividly, Lenny talked, I drank. What flowed from him was a monologue about his adventures, frustrations, amours, ailments, his storied basketball career at NYU, the condition of the Jew in the universe, mambo lessons, vendettas, of which he had not a few going, movie scripts, movies, movie directors, movie producers, movie dolls.” His virtues and vanities given fair measure, Michaels comes fully alive in the piece.
So, in a different way, does Allen Ginsberg, in a recollection of Kleinzahler’s 1989 meeting with the compulsively fame-seeking poet. “Lunching With Ginsberg,” which also appears in Kleinzahler’s prismatic 2004 memoir “Cutty, One Rock,” is a portrait rendered with equal parts identification (both writers grew up on the same “benzene fumes” of northern New Jersey) and bemused distance: “There was a fair bit of the doting auntie in Allen Ginsberg.” The piece ends in a drily bittersweet decrescendo, with Kleinzahler overhearing one after another of Ginsberg’s fractious phone calls.
A deeper sense of mordancy informs a piece on Richard Brautigan (“Trout Fishing in America”), whose “lightness of touch, gorgeous timing, and delicious offhandedness” charmed Kleinzahler before time devalued it to “precious, self-indulgent fluff.” As he concedes his own change of heart, Kleinzahler opens Brautigan’s sorry chambers of a bitter childhood, alcoholism, diminishing returns on his modest talent and a woeful end.
For some readers, this one included, the book will provide appetizing introductions to such writers as the critic Kenneth Cox and poet Roy Fisher, both of whom Kleinzahler regards as unjustly neglected. The Cox essay might have benefited from more examples of his published criticism, but in a letter to Kleinzahler, we get this telling observation not about the sound of language per se but “its taste, in the mouth, harsh sweet pungent, produced by the movement of sound.” Kleinzahler’s own metaphorical muscle comes into play in his essay on Fisher, whose verse he compares both to the composer György Ligeti’s tone clusters and “a camera jerking and swiveling on an unstable tripod.”
Pieces on the poets Lorine Niedecker, Basil Bunting and Louis Zukofsky set off an internal conversation. Their names and those of Cox, Guy Davenport and others keep turning up. It can get to sound a bit like a graduate seminar on a certain kind of daunting 20th century poetry and poetics.
But whether he’s making the case for a writer he admires or going after the L=A=N= G=U=A=G=E poets, “wrapped in self-justifying, crudely fashioned, poststructuralist commentary,” Kleinzahler is enormously good company on the page. We know him, by the end of these diverse “Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs,” not because of any breast-baring confessions or self-inflated arguments. Instead, in his acuity of thought and feeling, there’s the unmistakable vitality of a man standing squarely where he is and trying to understand whatever’s there to seize and occupy his full attention.