'I Had My Wish'

Among the acknowledgments in Boris Dralyuk’s My Hollywood and Other Poems (Paul Dry Books, 2022) I noticed the name Oscar Mandel. Could this be the author of The Book of Elaborations (New Directions, 1985)? These essays are old favorites, blurbed on the cover by Guy Davenport, which is the reason I bought the book thirty-seven years ago. When I reviewed Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters in 2007 for the Philadelphia Inquirer, I discovered this in a 1984 letter from Davenport to the founding publisher of New Directions: 

“O nobody knows Oscar Mandel. He writes scholarship as well as anybody (except that he writes it humanly, with jokes and brassy opinions); he writes poems that remind me of yours (poetry as a civilized skill rather than a wind from the infinite and the absolute); and he writes some of the best prose in the Republic.”

 

Later I read Mandel’s The Cheerfulness of Dutch Art: A Rescue Operation, published in 1996 by Davaco, a Dutch publisher. It’s another book no one else seems to have read. Boris confirmed his Oscar Mandel is mine. He’s ninety-five years old and a professor emeritus of literature from the California Institute of Technology. Boris supplied me with an email address, I wrote and Oscar replied:

 

“This was a most pleasant surprise! You must tell me more, much more, about yourself, since I don't suppose that doing a blog exhausts your life.”

 

And this: “I never met Mr. Davenport, but I have his postcards about my work, and also one or two long hand-written letters concerning the Book of Elaborations by Laughlin himself. They were all very enthusiastic about the BoE at New Directions but it flopped anyway. As is true of everything I’ve published since. I’m amazed that someone has actually read my little book on Dutch art, which had been rejected by every American publisher of Art History.”

 

We’ve exchanged more notes, filling in some of the blanks in our respective histories. He was born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1926, fled with his family from the Germans in 1940 and settled in the United States. He describes himself as “in good health, with clear wits and as busy as ever.” Oscar has sent me a copy of his Otherwise Poems (Prospect Park Books, 2015), which he signs “with high greetings.” It collects more than sixty years’ worth of his poems. This is from the book’s foreword:

 

“. . . I have always hoped to be intelligible to the intelligent; a hope nourished by the cheerful expectation that admirable poems that speak and sing nakedly will continue to live at peace alongside those others, dominant today, in which fragments of speech, private allusions, enigmatic gaps, mysterious collages, pregnant spaces between words or lines and other cunning operations bring about their own wonderful results, but which mask the limpid thought-filled intelligibility.”

 

Mandel’s poems come in assorted forms and tones. Some of them may or may not be light verse. The fifth section, “Tenebrae,” comes with a note: “Many of these poems of old age and extinction were written long before senescence set in. The young often feel old; the old seldom feel young.” Here is “One Day, After Lunch”:

 

“Coming downstairs

I saw that my wife, before driving to her yoga,

had sweetly left lunch on the counter for me.

There was a bit of fish left over from last night,

not bad if not exciting, the dwarf tomatoes

that made a near-bruschetta on my bread,

and radishes, because she knows I like them

with my toast and butter. The Pavoni, recently repaired,

made me a nice espresso, not far beneath

the famous coffee from the Tazza d’Oro.

Done, I stretched on the sofa in the den

for my customary doze, and here I slid,

snug, into my death: no doctors, no hospitals.

 

“I had my wish.”