John the Posthumous
“Haunting, original prose by a writer unlike any other on the planet. Jason Schwartz is a master.” —BEN MARCUS
“[Schwartz] is complete, as genius agonizingly is.” —GORDON LISH
JOHN THE POSTHUMOUS exists in between fiction and poetry, elegy and history: a kind of novella in objects, it is an anatomy of marriage and adultery, an interlocking set of fictional histories, and the staccato telling of a murder, perhaps two murders. Knives, old iron gates, antique houses in flames; Biblical citations, blood and a history of the American bed: the unsettling, half-perceived images, and their precise but alien manipulation by a master of the language will stay with readers. Its themes are familiar—violence, betrayal, failure—its depiction of these utterly original and hauntingly beautiful.
JASON SCHWARTZ was born in New York and lives in Florida. The author of
A German Picturesque
, his work has appeared in
American Letters & Commentary, Antioch Review, Conjunctions, New York Tyrant, The Quarterly, StoryQuarterly, Unsaid,
and other publications.
P
RAISE
FOR
JASON SCHWARTZ
JOHN THE POSTHUMOUS
“Do I not, in speaking as I sense I must, exploit, for my own purpose, the uncanny beauty another man has made? They’re spangled feathers—the lives, the achievements, the properties of others. Who among us does not have a nest to keep stewarded with all the
glitter gatherable in reach? Let me tell you something: if the act of the
profiteer is what we are talking about, then living better, for my part, couldn’t be any better than my having lived long enough for me to enrich myself by dint of realizing the least proximity to the insuperably forged sentences of Jason Schwartz. As for the author, this mandarin heretofore hidden among us, there is positively nothing I can usefully say to you for him or of him or to him. He is complete, as genius agonizingly is. Can there be a more ghastly occupation? It is no guess that it had to have been terrible for Schwartz to have contained
John
the
Posthumous
and its equally uncontainable antecedent, the 1998 collection of sinuosities brought out as
A German Picturesque.
How reckless of Jason Schwartz for him to have recommended himself for the test of turning a totalized form of attention over to such a quality of suffering. Yes, the folly of it, declares your opportunistic intercessor. Oh, but how lucky the
forerunner is!—how thrillingly, how terrifically, how unimprovably
lucky.”
—GORDON LISH
A GERMAN PICTURESQUE
“Grandly intrepid … In story after story, his cool language
scrutinizes the world; behind this smooth prose seethe the violence and confusion of many lives, many acts … Unlike much so-called experimental fiction, Schwartz’s work contains genuine passion and invention.”
—
N
EW
Y
ORK
T
IMES
“A careful construct of repeated words, phrases and description lends the book a steady, subtle pulse which belies a guiding inner logic that is entirely its own … Those whose idea of a good-time read is a literary Rubik’s Cube have a colorful new toy on their hands.”
—
D
ETROIT
F
REE
P
RESS
“An extraordinary, associative, allusive artist whose stories in
scope, innuendo, subtlety are like reading T.S. Eliot in prose …
Schwartz’s pieces can keep a reader mystified in almost every way who, why, what, where but never in the perfect logic of sentences moving forward one after another: what comes next, comes next,
most often brilliantly and sometimes breathtakingly … His vast
but miniaturist genius is for seeing the enormous in the tiny, the significant in the silent, the horror-filled in the mute, the voicelessly poetic in almost everything.”
—
K
IRKUS
R
EVIEWS
ALSO BY JASON SCHWARTZ
A German Picturesque
© 2013 Jason Schwartz
Portions of this book first appeared in
American Letters & Commentary, The American Reader, The Antioch Review, failbetter, Green Mountains Review, H_NGM_N, New York Tyrant, Salt Hill, Unsaid,
and
Web Conjunctions.
Published by OR Books, New York and London
Visit our website at
www.orbooks.com
First printing 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes.
Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN
978-1-939293-21-3
paperback
ISBN 978-1-939293-22-0 e-book
Typeset by Lapiz Digital, Chennai, India.
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SUSAN POLLARD
1943–1998
HORNBOOK
ONE
T
he maiden name—and then a list of the sisters.
Eleanor, the youngest, is first. From afar—the distance between the fencepost and the road, say, or between you and the house—she appears to fall into a well. In fact, she vanishes in the bracken. Audrey is smallest. Fire irons and a brown wall, a skirt with a nailhead pattern. Drawn curtains are rather less charming than a drowning—as the mother has it. While the bedsheets, according to that old saying, are the knives of the bed. Blanche, the eldest, is last. They imagine her struggling along, arriving at the wrong house. Or returning to the staircase, now more amply rouged.
The mother sits upright, apart from the father.
Whose brother—Edward, or perhaps Edmond—suffers quite elaborately. His humiliations, then—at a Western elevation, or as a boy, or one day in the fall. They part on a boulevard, at the far end, near a park. Or near a harbor the following summer. And so on, as it rains into the front room. Where his daughter—you
might observe, from above, the route of her departure—sits without a suitor. Her name—Gertrude, in blue ink—fails to account for the portrait of horses, the lampshade
in the fireplace, the hour.
The grandmother, on the father’s side, weeps in the greenery.
Her sister—Esther—lives on a finer street, east of here, near the river. She addresses herself to the brass doorstop—it is a rat in the purse, it turns out, and not a mouse—and then to her husband’s ruined shoes. The husband—William, in cursive—is bedridden, or seems unwell, ill, if somewhat better now, curiously so, especially in the evening. On the huntboard is a hand of pork, garnished with black olives—though he prefers green. His plate resembles a gray face, the knife covering the eyes.
The grandfather, on the father’s side, points the blade this way.
His brother—the name is gone—returns at nine o’clock. Ten o’clock, as they imagine it—a train station and a lawn, a mishap on a bridge. Or a burnt hat-rack and a metal hook, his wife attired in a gown of some kind. The wife—Anne, or perhaps Anna—stands rather as your sister does, facing the drapery. Her possessions, then—on the windowsill, on the dressing table, in the bureau drawer. The bedpost, from a more sensible angle, might obscure a portion of the wardrobe, and divide the room in two.
TWO
I
.
C
orinthians begins with the salutation, and not, as I had thought, a description of locusts on a hilltop. Or even beetles in a forest, a woods, a copse—on pine trees, for instance, as behind our house. Chapter two cites “decline”—“I came before you in weakness, trembling”—though this offers little about a burning town. I imagine axles and a wagon wheel, somehow, and then an animal—its shriek, I should think, rather like the sound a child makes, crying out at night. Chapter three cites “fire”—in Romans, by contrast, a “wooden throat” follows a “page of flesh,” or vice versa—beside “the tower” and “the house” and “the road.” Silver, in a later passage, is placed at a wall or
at a gate, despite the color of the jackals. Chapter four
cites “rags,” which, displayed thus, may remind you of
certain birds, such as those lost at the falls. They were
blinded, were they not? Or perhaps they died of fright. It was smoke or fog, according to that story—a great
gray arrangement. The plumage was blue, yes, but I am
partial to the rabbits in the bracken. Chapter five cites “Satan,” even if, on occasion, the body is a boy’s. The organs and the bones, anyway—though these are soon replaced with hay and straw. The latter is black—I hate to admit how this still gives my heart a start—and the garment white. Chapter six cites “thieves” and “adulterers”—rather than, as in Timothy, a “list of widows.” The terms differ somewhat in the Egyptian conception, where demons accompany each affliction. Here, the canopy signifies—in one of the less extravagant descriptions—a crown. When the canopy depicts figures of the victim, or victims, the cords are red to indicate places of contagion. The sackcloth vanishes, I gather, from the other houses, north along the road.
Chapter seven contains the phrase in question.
I
n the Authorized Version (1611), the Common Version (1833), the English Revised Version (1881–1885), and the American Standard Version (1901), as well as Wesley’s New Testament (1755), Young’s Literal (1862), and the Darby (1890): “It is better to marry than to burn.”
S
atan appears to the left of every phrase. So goes one old notion. Or, in some texts, to the left of every letter. On occasion, Satan appears to the right of—or, more rarely, behind—the number nine. And then he carries away the son’s bones.
Various medieval diseases were named for the Devil—but then, so were doorframes of an especially peculiar design. When dead men appear as scorched walls, rather than within them—this was once thought evidence of the Devil. The Devil was once thought a bird in the blood. The variations, from section to section, would depend upon the configuration of limbs.
In several accounts, the Devil appears as a mute at a funeral.
T
he Wycliffe (1388)—“It is better to be wedded than to be burned”—is the translation by John Wycliffe, or Wiclif, whose corpse, according to one history, was
exhumed, painted black, dismembered, and then
presented in a wooden cage. Or, according to another
history, exhumed, beheaded, and then burned in a
churchyard, the ashes thrown into a river.
T
he Devil’s animal, in the storybooks, is found at the father’s house, sometimes composed of white rope. Brown cats, rather than black, are thrown at prisoners en route to the tower. The remains are green, or seem so—while a table hobbles in the next town.
Satan places the tablecloth, as they used to say. And
then he slices through the parson’s eye. The alderman’s
walk is set aside for the more prominent guests. A rabbit
is brought out on its haunches, broiled, the ears having been removed at the roots.
A certain dog—often a dying one—is thought to recall a blue noose or a torn quilt at the foot of the bed.
T
he Douay-Rheims (1582)—“It is better to marry than to be burned”—was begun in Douay, or Douai, and completed in Rheims, or Reims. The translation—by
Gregory Martin, a consumptive—was revised by, among
others, Thomas Worthington and William Allen.
The former, incidentally, married the latter’s niece. The Weymouth (1903)—“For marriage is better than the fever of passion”—is the translation by Richard Francis Weymouth, who died outside Essex in 1902.
T
imothy sometimes appears as a sword or a dagger.
Paul sometimes appears as a dog with horns.
It was once customary to list all the names, the names of the saints and their afflictions, and the family names, and then the names of the places, in order, one end to the other—after the fashion of objects arranged on a gray table, or gray objects arranged in the countryside.
I
I.
I
n Leviticus, the adulterer and the adulteress are “put to death.” Or, more precisely, they “must be” or “surely shall be”—depending upon the version of the text. The man who “lieth with his father’s wife,” furthermore, “hath uncovered his father’s nakedness.” Or, translated another way, “shame”—even if we prefer the simpler notion of folds or creases in a coat. They vanish, alas—or die, as the ancients might have phrased it—while you set the blanket aside. Numbers presents the wife, defiled or otherwise, and the jealous husband. The act is “secret,” “without witness,” “hidden from his eyes.” The ordeal, in turn, calls for a burnt offering and bitter water, the recitation of an oath. In Deuteronomy, the father sets out the daughter’s bedsheet. “Blood,” however, has been omitted. Perhaps you imagine a circle, instead—a small circle—and then something worse. If a girl is betrothed, but lies with another man, and if she “cries not”—then “ye shall stone them,” the girl and the man, at the city gate. Or at the town gate, if the girl is found in a town, as in a later version of the text. Hosea presents the marriage as unhappy—“I shall close the
road with thorns”; “I shall ravage the vines.” Garments—
“the wool and the flax”—are found in a woods, we may suppose, rather than animals, blind and dying.
I
am troubled by Susanna, as this was my mother’s name. In my childhood Bible, I now recall, I scratched out the name in three places.
M
atthew refers to a “lustful eye.” This—or, more precisely, “your right eye”—should be “torn out,” “cut out,” “excised.” In Peter—if we may break, for the moment, from the proper sequence—“they commit adultery with their eyes.” Or, translated another way, their eyes are “full of adultery” and “cannot cease from sin.” In John, the woman is brought to the temple in the morning. She stands “in the middle” or “in their midst,” true, or “before them all”—but her attire is never described. The act is “the very act”—even later on, when you imagine the houses as faces, for instance, or as coffins. In Romans—as in Mark and Luke, most notably—“adultery” occurs first. Now fold back the bedsheet, this way, and you have a handsome old scene. The blanket, however, gathered at the throat—this is best thought a separate matter. Galatians refers to “works of the flesh.” The phrase neglects the curtain, rent and burnt—as well as the hornets sewn into the daughter’s gown. In Revelation, “I cast the adulteress onto a bed.” Or—more elaborately—a “sickbed” or a “bed of suffering.” The men “weep and mourn,” watching the body burn.
I
II.
C
orinthians concludes in far happier fashion, without further discussion of rupture, partition, divorce. There is, nevertheless, a list of cities and towns, towns and cities—afire, as I recall, in five lines. I need not mention the trees—or, for that matter, the flowerpots outside our house, along the path, near the back door, which was painted gray one year and red another. Romans cites the Psalms—“Their throats are open tombs”; “They are strangers”—but this has little to do with sticks or branches, with embers or cinders, or with wives hiding in an arbor. A forest, by contrast, the description of a forest, as discovered in a handbook, a miscellany, an annual—this implies a romance of some kind, does it not? Galatians cites “the custody of law,” though the words in the dirt—if this is any of our concern—may refer to murder. Or to thievery, more likely, with ash in place of hair and—on the occasion of a Jewish union—a pile of reeds. The garments darken in certain places, at least as I understand it—the throat, or the wrists and the throat, the seams appearing to bleed. Ephesians cites “children,” which may explain a blot in the margin, say, if not the formation of horses on a shoreline. The birds at the falls, for their part—these were waterfowl of an ordinary variety, the sadder examples crippled or maimed. It was a lavish drowning, according to that story—a gentleman, or some other lonely figure, early in the morning, a thicket and a hilltop in the distance. Philippians cites “mutilation” and, elsewhere, “the book of life”—from which, in Exodus and the Psalms, the names of the dead are stricken, taken away, or otherwise excised.
I
n Deuteronomy and Isaiah: the husband writes the wife a “letter of divorce.” Or a “certificate of divorce,” a “bill of divorce,” a “statement of divorce”—and then he sends her “from his home.” In Jeremiah: the Lord writes
Israel a “divorce notice”—with which, He says, “I put her
away.”
T
he mourner’s concordance, so-called, lists the Devil first. This is for the letter A. But also second, for the letter B. And so on. Satan is often shown without a right hand—or with the letter X in its stead. The Devil is often shown without ears or a mouth.
The Devil was said to collect slights in a jar, quaint as that now sounds. His emblem is the split crow—a bird in two parts—on a field of red. In folklore, he sometimes assumes the face of a sad man. Satan waits inside a certain word—or with a family on a staircase.
The Devil, in the old pattern books, is a segment of black thread, one stitch below the throat.
I
n Esther: the king divorces the queen. In Ezra: one hundred husbands—among them, Elijah, Ishmael, Nethanel, Judah, Eliezer, Zechariah, Sheal, Adna, Simeon, Benjamin, Malluch, Amram, Nathan, Shallum, and Joseph—divorce their wives. Priests in the line of Joshua, furthermore, offer a ram in sacrifice.
W
olves and jackals, in the storybooks, are funeral
animals. The sparrows are often drawn without claws.
On Sundays—when the horses fall in the morning, or when the hunt is a fire hunt—the descriptions are less than generous.
The Devil arrives in due course, hidden behind the children.
Sexton beetles bury carrion—birds and rodents, for
the most part. One superstition concerns the deacon’s cat, which drowns in the rain. Another concerns the decapitation of oxen. Various other animals—such as those slaughtered on the town green—are named for Satan.
I
n our family Bible: the flyleaf is inscribed in blue ink, in a narrow hand. From husband to wife—followed by a month, a slash, a year. There is a curious break in the number eight. And a mark of sorts, a smudge—a tiny form in the corner of the page.
M
atthew addresses the husbands and sons, now at some great distance from the river, from the plain, from the town.
Paul is all alone.
It was once customary to remove—with a table knife or a razor blade—the pages displaying the names of the wives. And for the forsaken—or the bereaved—to spell out the beloved’s name on a white bedsheet, set the bedsheet afire, and then swallow the ashes.