Sunday, July 23, 2000

A Postcard Memoir

By Lawrence Sutin

Graywolf Press, St. Paul

ISBN 1555973-43

reviewed by Michael Finley

Copyright © 2000 by Michael Finley

I must begin by saying that Larry Sutin paid me the nicest complement I ever got, and he did it in the very moment we met.

His family was staying in a cabin not far from our cabin at a YMCA camp way up north. I saw his name, and remembered it, sort of, from my mental database of "other writers" in the Twin Cities. I imagine this is somewhat like the list of "strange gods" that Jehovah maintains -- a matter more of professional interest than collegiality. So I wanted to meet him. When I introduced myself, he said, "Michael Finley the poet?"

Friends, you cannot imagine how it felt for someone not only to know me that way, but to put it first among all the other ways there are to know me -- Michael Finley the interstate fugitive, Michael Finley the plagiarist, etc. My deepest hope is that everyone would know me first this way, even my wife. But so far, Larry's it.

I loved this man immediately. And what a strange man, and a strange love, it has been. Larry has an interesting life problem -- he's the son of Holocaust survivors. His mom and dad met behind enemy lines in Poland, hiding from the Nazis -- a remarkable story he details in his tribute to their experience, Jack and Rochelle. He reveres and loves his parents, but their experience has had the effect of throwing his life into a sort of unheroic (by comparison) shadow.

Yet he has soldiered on. Larry is a gnostic by nature (whereas I almost always vote Democratic). By this I mean to say that Larry is, as near as I can tell, very brilliant, with a special knack for tackling arcane topics.

He wrote a celebrated analysis of speculative fiction writer Philip K. Dick a decade ago , and has followed that up with something even more Byzantine, a full-fledged biography of Aleister Crowley (Do What Thou Wilt, A Life of Aleister Crowley.

But in the meantime, he took time to create a perfectly wonderful mini-autobiography called A Postcard Memoir . It is a series of portraits from his life, thumbnails of people who have touched him, along with a few philosophical observations. The "gimmick" or hook that these 400-word wonders hang on is that each is accompanied by an antique picture postcard, which Graywolf Press has lovingly reproduced.

It is a gimmick which works smashingly. First, it is a natural one -- Larry collects postcards, and uses favorite cards as reverie objects, staring into them until the faces and places he doesn’t know and hasn’t visited spur a personal association inside him. A postcard labeled "Smartly Dressed Young Man" depicts "a young man of angular but easy good looks, earnestness and wit, [and] a taste for faintly wicked pranks." The picture bears an eerie resemblance to Larry's friend Bob, who can be charged with those same defects. So Larry's essay describes his friendship with Bob, how they met as young writers (though "his subject matter was the borderlines of clarity and mine the chasm of chaos") concluding with the realization that "the best friends of my life were people who would let me be in their company and somewhat copy them."

If that sounds like not the latest word in high self-esteem, you are the kind of reader this book cries out for. In one essaylet after another, Sutin is unstintingly honest about what he takes to be his own defects -- an obscurity of thought, a painful bashfulness, and a feeling of not being quite right for this world -- feelings alien to all but himself.

I have only scratched the surface of his concerns. He writes about his parents, lost loves, his beloved children, his wife Mab, who from these writings appears to have been FedExed to Larry overnight from heaven, about jobs and opportunities, places that are real, and places that exist only in dreams.

It is a book of tremendous intimacy because we get to look at Larry's life in all its pimply everydayness -- but it is magical, too, because the pictures are so beautiful, and transport us into our own unspoken memoirs. It's a wonderful gift from a talented writer.

 

Order Larry Sutin's A Postcard Memoir

Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Finley