Philip SchultzThe Idea of California
Yiddish is the language of children wandering for a thousand years in a nightmare, assimilating languages to no avail.
In Memory of Leonard Michaels
I liked the music of his propulsive rage, his crazy decapitated metaphors that lived one inside the other like savage scroungers. I liked his wild hunger to smash the world hidden inside each spat out word. Most of all I liked the rage, and wrote him a fan letter after I read his first book. He invited me to lunch in Berkeley, where he taught Byron, of all people. Why was he, someone who spoke not one word of English until he was six, a nervous child of Yiddish speaking immigrants, who grew up in a tenement on the Lower East Side, teaching an English fancy pants? "Dreams do divide our being... tyranny of pleasure and of pain; they make us what we were not..." he sang. We had a lot in common and therefore little to say. Asked to read together in a town south of San Francisco seventeen years later, we roared along the ocean in his blood-red Alfa Romeo, under foggy mountains and a glinting sky, yelling over the wind. "Byron would've loved the idea of California, not the place," he screamed. He was writing movies, not fiction, he said. Why? "Because writing fiction makes me happy." Didn't he want to be? "Sometimes it's more tyranny than I can tolerate." Was that the idea of California, to be happy? Around us tiny explosions of clouds, ebullient sapphire light, wounded curves, and the sunken emerald ocean. "Byron would've thought so," he said. At the reading we read love stories, our only subject, we agreed. Later, in a bar, after margaritas and all that opulent light, we wrote a poem, he one line, I the next. He was seventy when he died in Rome, ancient when we first met, but not today as I sit looking at his photo in the Times, his black eyes daring me to write a last line. Our poem, I remember, was about the pain and pleasure of being divided by what we were not, of wandering endlessly in the language of children.
Philip Schultz's most recent books are Living in the Past, The Holy Worm of Praise, and a new collection, Failure (Harcourt, 2007). He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005 and directs The Writers Studio, a private writing school in New York City.
