After the Depression and the divorce and all that followed, my cousin Irma disappeared into an apartment on the Lower East Side. She had been an artist for the WPA – sketcher, etcher, photographer, painter – but no one in the family had heard from her for decades. When she passed away, by a quirk of fate having to do with living in Manhattan, I got the job of going to her apartment to help clear the place for the next tenant.
I had no idea what I would find there in the digs of a reclusive artist but what I found was that the apartment had hardly any furniture, no electronics, no conveniences at all. Not even a decent toaster oven. Instead it was filled – and I mean loon squad filled – with paper, knee deep. If not an ocean of it then at least a decent sea. My first thought was to burn it all in place but that would have taken the building with it. My second idea was to get a shovel and a bin. But as I waded through, I realized that this was not just a collection of random scraps.
On closer inspection these turned out to be thousands of samples of her work. Brushstroke gestures, frenzied concoctions of colors, crude figures as from Ice Age walls, symbols from some alien planet, portraits in schizo detail, jittery scribblings…like crank collages all mushed and mussed across the pages. Holding just one of them in my hand, I could feel the fanatical passion that had driven her but also the mold creeping and I quickly decided that it was more trash than art – just the visible ramblings of a smitten mind – and had to go.
Then I turned one over and in a flash all that craziness filling the apartment suddenly made a kind of lunatic sense. What I found was that there was a page of text taped to the back of each piece. These were torn from a printed book with key sections circled in marker. From the paper and the typeface I could see that they were all from the same book and it took me – with my fancy college education – only a few seconds to recognize which book it was. And once I did, everything was explained, if not clear.
My late ex-cousin had spent most of her life alone in that room illustrating Finnegans Wake, the famously impenetrable book by James Joyce.
I knew Finnegans Wake or at least knew of it. I tried reading it a few times back in school and was defeated every time. I even took a course in it from that professor with the thatched hair and the round glasses, but that only made things worse by convincing me that the book was easy to understand if only I – poor shlep of an undergrad – could tap into some glint of intelligence, imagination, and grit.
I could not.
But now at least the heap of scraps I was standing in cohered into an island of an idea. In fact, it was an idea so impressive and impossible that it charmed the insanity all around. Irma had created an endless, frontless, bottomless, edgeless task that could consume her passion before it ate her alive. It was brilliant actually.
So here in hand was a combination photo/collage/painting/scribble for the following passage from the book: “Nuvoletta in her lightdress, spun of sisteen shimmers, was looking down on them, leaning over the bannistars and listening all she childishly could.”
And here was an etching/drawing/assemblage for: “Maleesh! He would bare to untired world of Leimuncononnulstria (and what a strip poker globbtrottel they pairs would looks!) how wholefallows, his guffer, the sabbatarian (might faction split his beard!), he had a great big oh…”
And so on throughout every scrap at every level in every room everywhere.
The words whirled, the images swirled; it was a monumental mission. Take a look at any single page of the book and you tell me what to pick out and show? Where does one begin and where does one end? Which string of wordmixes and letterslams were worthy of an illustration and which not? Yet somehow Irma was able to decide all that in a move that struck me as akin in drowning on dry land but who was I to judge her?
“Mudnight and mellican, all throwsy in tinted punks,” comes to mind as an example but of what exactly I could not say.
In a sense, her lifelong project had been her apartment, not as a place to live but as a canvas to fill with sputterings and madhattering, a funhouse maybe or an insane installation, or maybe just an escape from the dread of nothing to do.
I was impressed by that and began to gather all the scraps and organize them, sort them into piles, order and neaten them, arrange them in the best possible way. I read every entry, considered every image, immersed myself in the task. Don't judge me too harshly; at a certain point I could not have opened the door to leave even if I wanted to. Yet I soon saw that I was undermining her vision and the sense of immersion so key to it, so I began to rescatter everything. Then, plunked like a castaway on this busy isle, I began to take new pages from the book and blank sheets from the closet and make my own images for them. For all she had done, she had missed so much! Years passed by or decades, I had no idea. There was too much to do to even stop to buy a decent toaster oven.
How can I explain it? I cannot.
Joyce, no doubt, said it best in the book itself when he wrote: “this backblocks boor bruskly put out his langwedge and quite quit the paleologic scene…”
Gendermensch of the jewry, I risk my craze.
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