All Prose Selected Essays and Reviews
© 2001 by William Corbett
ISBN 978-1-40396-43-9
First Pressed Wafer Edition 2018
Pressed Wafer, Brooklyn, NY 11226
REVIEW BY WENDELL SMITH
REVIEW BY WENDELL SMITH
This delightful collection of
essay, criticism and memoir arrived with a grim announcement by Michael Russem
who is Pressed Wafer’s design and production department, “I'm not sure I know
the Pressed Wafer origin story. Unfortunately, I do know how it will end: with
lawyers and accountants and courts and the IRS – and without Bill Corbett
showing us how to plow ahead by force of will, ignoring the lawyers and
accountants now, but trusting them to take care of the courts and IRS later.”
All
Prose was a perfect choice for the concluding volume of Bill Corbett’s eclectic,
idiosyncratic, unique and chocolate ice cream with Tabasco sauce list of
publications that he selected for Pressed Wafer over its18 years of life. Annual
subscribers to the press would receive a variety of postcards, novels, nonfiction
and poetry, which often would make you go, “Oh! Yes!” but sometimes go, “!!?” The
list was sprinkled with book length monographs on artists (illustrated as if they
were miniature catalogs for a shows at the MFA) and best selling, by Pressed
Wafer standards, compendia of the lucid political essays of George Scialabba
(they ought to have also been best selling by the standards of the NYT.)
The 99 essays of All Prose, arranged in three sections (Arts
& Artists; Books & Writers; and Memoir, Movies, Music) make a perfect memorial
volume for Pressed Wafer and William Corbett. All Prose displays an expanse of curiosity, imagination, and subject
that makes it a doppelgänger to the spirit of Bill’s press.
He writes with an ambling
conversational prose as in these lines on Fanny Howe's Selected Poems:
The geography of her poems is
Boston and, over the long selection from O'clock
that closes this book, Ireland, her mother's homeland. But Howe’s poems are no
more about these places than Dickinson’s are about Amherst. The place from
which they emanate is the spirit. (p. 233)
or in this paragraph on a photography exhibit at the
DeCordova Museum:
And from here on because of the
show’s size – 231 photographs by sixty photographers – I offer my own guided
tour. A step back first. Marie Cosindas’ color portrait Bruce Pecheur (1965) demonstrates an Old Master command of
exquisite, masculine browns. She has contrived such a volume in the photographs
(5 by 7 inches) that the image is more powerful in the mind's eye than its
actual size suggests. Now on to the Edgerton room. (p. 146)
Many of the essays display a dry
wit that fairly drips with pleasure. I know; I know; “drips dry” makes sense
but “dry drips?” Here is the first paragraph of his movie review “Pablo Picasso
Asshole,” which provoked that mixture of metaphors:
If, as the song says, “no one ever
called Pablo Picasso an asshole,” that is no longer the case. Not that the
vulgar Surviving Picasso does the
deed. It doesn't have the nerve. Instead Merchant Ivory and their screenwriter
Ruth Prawer J. Jhabvala create situations to which the viewer can respond only
with, “Who does that asshole Picasso think he is?” or, “How can those women put
up with that asshole Picasso?” Neither of which gets answered, and that is only
part of the problem. (p.380)
I found Corbett’s integrity, which
gives all of his prose its substance, most simply revealed in “Senator Eugene
McCarthy,” a succinct essay of 30 lines. He begins this memoir about his three
meetings with the senator, “He rounded the corner of a friend's house in
Vermont. It was 1974. I was 31 and as eager to impress as I was to be
impressed.” (p.361) And it ends as Corbett describes their third meeting with an
honesty of self-examination that brings Montaigne to mind:
“He remained charming and polished
as only politicians (I have now met two or three) can be, but he was making
hollow noises. As I judged him harshly I began to see how hollow I had been,
how quick to put on airs, most readily the air of attention, from the moment we
met. Now, 10 years after our last dinner, it seems like a three act play in
which I played a role I am somewhat ashamed to know I had in me.” (p. 362)
The
book left me regretting that I hadn't found out about this prose of his earlier;
I could have (Zoland Books published a first edition in 2001.) This regret was
evoked by his review of “We Are the Real Countries: The English Patient.” when he wrote, “The few poorly staged scenes
– Hana’s friend’s jeep blowing sky high and the death of the sapper Kip’s
sergeant hardly mattered.” (p. 385) As I read that, I wanted to set off and
find Bill and tell him why the friend’s death is the scene from the movie that
I have held most vividly in my memory. The exuberance of that spring day and of
Hana’s friend as she jumps out and back into the Jeep with the money for the
evening’s wine—all of that vivacity naïvely ignoring the line of infantry beside
which the Jeep speeds to the explosion that kills her. Her death, in the words
of a poet, Ramon Guthrie, who knew much about death in war, “like a puppy’s
lunge parting a frayed leash.”[i] That
conversation with Bill would have been fun to have. What he tells us about The English Patient, he learned because
he acted on a felt need to see it a second time. It makes me think I need see
it again myself, and ask as he does, “What did I miss the first time?”
That question “What did I miss the first time?” which
Bill asks or implies in other essays, such as “Senator Eugene McCarthy,” and in
the review “Das Boot,” which I recommend, is, I think, a key to the substance
of this work. He renders to us opinion not theory nor artistic ideology but that
one question, which implies another, “What do you think?” With that implicit question
he includes us in a conversation with a spirit, the same he brought to our
attention in his remarks on Fanny Howe’s poems.
Although
I won’t have Bill around reminding me to look and then to look again, I will
have the 90 or so remaining essays (averaging 4.02040816 pages apiece) in
length, which is, I think, a good one for a good read to wake up your mind and
relax it at the same time. Perfect to put by your night table, or beside your
desk for a quick pick me up when your mind has gone stale, so you can return to
your task with a fresh perspective you will have osmoticly absorbed from Bill.
A final note on the book’s quality, All Prose is bound in signatures, the
spine is not merely the edges of loose pages dipped in glue. So, because I
suspect the paperback it comes in will get worn from much picking up and
putting down, I may take it to the bindery for a sturdy hardcover or, who knows,
give it the dignity of leather it deserves.
In closing I give you Michael Russem’s appeal that arrived
with my copy of All Prose, as a reminder
to not forget Pressed Wafer:
In an effort to appease the aforementioned lawyers and
accountants, the courts and the IRS, the remaining stock of Pressed Wafer books
must be sold off as soon as possible. To that end, all books published in 2017
or earlier are now available for 75 percent off the retail price. Visit
pressedwafer.com to order more recent titles held in our warehouse. Or visit
spdbooks.org and search Pressed Wafer to order new, old, and rare titles
directly from the distributor. And then ask your
friends to do the same.
As we were posting this review we got this update from Michael Russem: By the end of this week pressedwafer.com will go offline and all Wafers will be removed from the distributor’s site. How people will get these books short of visiting the basement at 375 Parkside in Brooklyn I do not know. The Harvard Bookstore picked up twenty copies of All Prose the other day, though—and they dropped off all the other old books (which were then put out on my stoop and picked up for free by pedestrians).
[i]
“Dead, How to Become It,” Maximum
Security Ward and other Poems, Persea Books, New York, New York, 1984, p. 7
