`The Value of a Ray of Sun'

Among living writers I can think of a few I would look forward to meeting, and with whom I might anticipate pleasurable conversation. Foremost is Geoffrey Hill, our Donne, a forbidding poet and man, seemingly incapable of engaging in or indulging trivial matters -- rare qualities in any age but never so worthy of respect as today. Les Murray is another, the Australian poet who celebrates the natural world, suffers no fools and dedicates each of his books “To the Glory of God.” I would enjoy a chat with our own Marilynne Robinson, even if just to thank her.

The writer who breaks the pattern set by the first three is Aldo Buzzi, the difficult-to-describe Italian essayist who turns 98 on Aug. 10. For Buzzi, writing is digression. Even his first and last sentences are digressions. Think of him as a gifted proto-blogger, a discursive raconteur of the sentence and collector of curious information from gastronomy, literature and his own storied life. For English-language readers, the place to start is Journey to the Land of the Flies, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein and published by Random House in 1996. A stranger in Seattle, I’m rereading him for the comfort of the familiar, like a difficult uncle who tells reliably amusing stories.

In “First Travels” from that collection, Buzzi relates an anecdote about the German aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, then sets off down a different path:

“To understand something it is necessary to have lived a long time, perhaps to die...and to live again. A dead man coming out of the tomb would be the best master of life. Seated on his own name incised in the granite slab as shiny as a mirror, and turned toward the sun that has warmed the stone – now finally, he understands the value of a ray of sun, and he could, I believe, make us understand it.”

Typically, Buzzi drops this fancy, almost at random, into a slot between digressions on iguanas (among other things) and a blind man he sees sitting on the sidewalk. Buzzi’s essays resemble Emerson’s in their motley. This may resemble bricolage, but not in a trendy postmodern sense. In Emerson and Buzzi, the next sentence may contain anything, and the result is a sustained sense of anticipation and delight, not confusion or pretentiousness – a characteristically American aesthetic. Moby-Dick is a novel in which almost any matter might be inserted, and it would fit. Buzzi might have picked it up from his longtime friend, Saul Steinberg. His dead man’s epiphany reminded me first of Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle,” in which John Marcher visits the grave of May Bartram and for the first time awakens to his “arid end” and perceives “the sounded void of his life.” James’ story shares Buzzi’s template, but is written in a radically different key:

“The autumn day was dire for him as none had recently been, and he rested with a heaviness he had not yet known on the low stone table that bore Mary Bartram’s name. He rested without power to move, as if some spring in him, some spell vouchsafed, had suddenly been broken forever. If he could have done that moment as he wanted he would simply have stretched himself on the slab that was ready to take him, treating it as a place prepared to receive his last sleep. What in all the wise world had he now to keep awake for?”

Buzzi also reminds me of Samuel Beckett’s grave in the Cimetière de Montparnasse – a slab of polished black granite resembling a low Japanese table. Chiselled into its face is “Samuel Beckett 1906-1989,” beneath his wife’s name and dates. The day I visited in April 1999, a desiccated red rose lay on Beckett’s name.