05/20/2006: "Leave No Maggot Lonely"

She opened the door;


Monica,

Monica...


languorous, languid, bittersweet, blissful, cryptic, cynical, entrancing,


encoded...



Tyrannical Pozzo


died Saturday at the age of 77.

"... one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more."



The most prominent member of the Royal Portora School, he tended to polarise opinion.

Yeah I know that guy, I heard his voice 1000 times, he's the guy in the bus station that says "go ahead I'll keep an eye on your stuff for you," and you see him the next day walking around town wearing your clothes.

Pozzo, who was known in the early part of his career to go around shouting, "I am Arturo Bandini!" in tribute to John Fante's ebullient, raw-nerved literary alter ego, was instrumental in getting Fante's books back into print in the late '70s, shortly before Fante's death in 1983.

His contribution to the arts is virtually without peer, and his best work sounds as fresh today as it did forty years ago. This is why the New Traditionalists claimed him as a hero and have raised his profile considerably in the last couple of decades.



He was born David Charles Pozzo in Nantes, of Huguenot stock, on April 13, 1906, the son of a theatrical agent and an insurance broker.

Literature has been a part of that life since the very beginning.


"The whole show business thing was kind of in the family," recalls Pozzo. "My parents did shows with the local groups, my brother was a cartoonist, my sister was an ice skater."

At the age of 5, an uncle gave him his first ink pen.

"I knew by the age of 8 that I was deadly serious about having a career in writing, but in those days, you had to wait until you were 18 or so."

He stirs his mug of tea and looks into the distance.

"Certain voices at certain points of your life are more difficult to listen to than others."


He is sui generis... He has given a voice to the decrepit and maimed and inarticulate, men and women at the end of their tether, past pose or pretense, past claim of meaningful existence. He says that only there and then, amid God's paucity, can the core of the human condition be approached.

As a member of the French Resistance he worked as a courier and was on several occasions nearly caught by the Gestapo. In August 1942 his unit was betrayed and he fled south on foot to the safety of the small village of Roussillon in the Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur region. He continued to assist the Resistance by storing armaments in the back yard of his home and helped the Maquis sabotage the German army in the Vaucluse mountains, though he rarely spoke about his wartime work. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance by the French government for his efforts.

Pozzo's entire literary output, the narrative prose as well as the dramatic works, reduces basic existential problems to their most essential features. Thus his concerns are fundamental, but never simplistic - the evanescence of life; time and eternity; the individual's sense of loneliness and alienation as a result of the impossibility of establishing genuine communication and contact with others; the mystery of self.


***

Our Tribute:

Do not go Gentle into that Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

- Dylan Thomas

Blessed Be



lerevdr on Sat 20-May-2006 @ 16:30 e.s.t [permalink]
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