 |
 |
INTERVIEWER
After Final Solutions came out in 1963, the next book was Sunrise, seventeen years later. What happened in between?
SEIDEL
By the time Final Solutions was published, I was living in New York. I wrote a few poems that felt dislocated—I didn’t know how to proceed without repeating myself. I tried. I even went so far as to rent an office in a building downtown, near Foley Square. Frank Conroy and Norman Mailer and I each rented one, in this building occupied otherwise by bondsmen and private eyes. Our names appeared in the building directory as “Frank Conroy, Writer”; “Norman Mailer, Writer”; “Frederick Seidel, Writer.” It didn’t work. I pretty much stopped writing. New York offered diversions. I dare say there was desperation in this.
INTERVIEWER
You also wrote a poem about your hangout at that time, Elaine’s.
SEIDEL
Elaine’s opened in 1967. Very quickly I started spending many nights a week there—sometimes every night. It was my club. Nelson Aldrich and I brought in our friends, who actually made the place famous. Mailer, Plimpton, David Halberstam, Tom Wolfe, lots of movie people.
INTERVIEWER
Pretty girls?
SEIDEL
Lots.
INTERVIEWER
So you’d spend the evening there, gabbing, drinking . . .
SEIDEL
The doors would be shut at whatever hour was the legal closing time; three, I think it was during the week. Four o’clock Saturday, I recall. And Elaine would keep the place open. There was a jukebox. People would dance. We drank. We did enormous amounts of drinking.
INTERVIEWER
What got you writing again?
SEIDEL
Getting to a place after many years where it seemed to me that if I didn’t write, I would disappear. The diversions, because that’s what they were, no longer diverted. I was left with myself and had to do the one thing I could to survive. I knew it would be difficult to write, very difficult, but I set about doing it.
INTERVIEWER
Because it would be even harder not to, you mean?
SEIDEL
I had just moved out of the house where I had been living with my wife and children to an apartment not so many blocks away but in a rough neighborhood. A stark apartment with practically no furniture. The bareness of this apartment was a help, an intensification and a simplifying. What I wrote was forced out of me, under great pressure, even if it took enormous effort to let the words out. Those poems, which ended up in Sunrise, were written very slowly, and endlessly polished. The first poems were the set of three poems that begins with Antonioni in the desert: “Antonioni walks through the desert shooting/Zabriskie Point.” That was it. I was writing again.
|
|
|
|
|
|
