Sheeper

by Irving Rosenthal, Philippe Aronson (Translator)

" Ma mère me fouettait avec un cintre en bois ou à mains nues, ce que je préférais, parce que cela signifiait qu'elle partageait un peu ma douleur. Ses mains étaient douces et dodues, comme celles d'un bébé, avec une peau fine et transparente. Mes doigts sont longs, sombres, et à moitié recouverts d'eczéma. J'ai sur le petit doigt gauche une cicatrice provenant d'un ouvre-bouteille qu'un jour elle jeta sur moi. Debout, je regardais le sang surgir de la coupure et couler par terre. (...) "

Genres: Fiction

316 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Irving Rosenthal was born in San Francisco on October 9, 1930. He attended Pomona College and then the University of Chicago, where he did graduate work in human development.

In the late 1950s, Rosenthal became editor of The Chicago Review and succeeded in publishing poetry by Jack Kerouac, prose by Edward Dahlberg, and the first parts of William Burroughs's Naked Lunch before the University of Chicago censored his editorial practice. After resigning from The Chicago Review, he moved to New York and started Big Table magazine with the help of a colleague. Its first issue included the entire contents of the suppressed 1959 winter edition of The Chicago Review. Although Big Table survived only briefly, its few issues strengthened Rosenthal's connection to both the Dahlberg circle and the Beats.

Living in New York, Rosenthal developed particularly close relationships with Allen Ginsberg, Hubert Huncke, and other figures in the Beat movement. He subsequently visited Burroughs and Paul Bowles in Tangier and lived there from 1962 to 1964. During this period he also began work on a novel, Sheeper, which was later published by Grove Press in 1967. Returning to New York, Rosenthal was drawn into the orbit of the experimental film maker, Jack Smith, and appeared in Flaming Creatures and No President.

In 1967 Rosenthal moved back to San Francisco with George Harris, founder of the Cockettes, to start the Kaliflower commune, which continues to exist and where he still lives.

For more information, including author photos, go to http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blog...

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

A novel, a memoir, an analysis of Herman Melville, an expose, a cri de coeur. Nothing like it in the entire history of literature. Irving wrote nothing more. He didn't have to. He got it right the first time. Studded with portraits of Allen Gisnberg, William Burroughs (referred to as "Professor X") plus an entire chapter about Alexander Trocchi and his circle. With a cover photo of irving by Jack Smith.

It's far more than you deserve.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are times I am incapable of carrying one idea through two sentences, and I am surrounded by a flock of independent thoughts, like birds in a private aviary, some sentenced, some half-sentenced, sometimes words without thoughts -- and I am tempted to catch them and write them as they hop from one side of my mind to the other -- or there are times when I see these thoughts in a more collected from of mind (small birds asleep on their perches) and I am tempted to lay them out in order like cigarette papers when several joints are being rolled at once, like gummed leaves, gummed because they must be capable of being stuck to one another in some way, they are all from the same Mind.

Here Oriental Piglins were to pelt eccentric Hakuin with baby octopi. Here Pericles was to be persecuted with the arrest of his architects. Here Allen was to be begged not to let food fall on this page, grains of tobacco, even in the oldest books dusty patches of black and white back at the fold blooms of mold ashes from the pipe of a man settled down to read away an evening. Here Sheeper was to pose in vain for his portrait as a leaf gum artist. Here Sheeper was to spare you a digression on his cock. (He wrote one and dumped it. It was to go right here -- the principle being not to let any hold parenthetical or otherwise slip by without stuffing it. O learn from the Arabs!) Here Allen was to yap and yell at you to cut out all your conceits. O let me keep one page or preteritions -- as Helioglabus pled before the whole Roman army to be left just a single queer love.

Here Franco, standing in his bathroom, was to shave the black hairs from his fingers. Here David, standing naked in the stall shower of his family's master bedroom, was to have a fourth go at his wrists, and the last pair of scars not yet blanched. In my dreams his hands come down on me like parachutes. Here Piglin, having come out too pretty, was to suffer a little-finger pile or chronic ass-itch, or a sprinkling of big warts on his hands. Piglin and David have the same complexion, and there is a pig-sticking quality to the fog of suicide which surrounds David.

Professor X complains I have no loyalty to my characters and neglect to tell what finally happens to them all. But this is an English ship on the Spanish main, my dear Professor, a gold-hound with a very short ganglplank.

Professor X complains that sex as I describe it is all itches, that I don't trust any human emotion enough to carry it beneath the skin. But I do trust the news before 1910, assigning such reportorial boners as the great Throne Room griffon hatching eggs (when the point was the first chiaroscuro in Western art) to the pedantical drone of Sir Arthur Evans. And I trust all early advertisements and directions, for example for Fitting Eyeglasses, printed on the inside of a box cover along about 1868 or 1869. As far as human emotions go, I fabricate them like a boxful of old-fashioned eyeglasses -- no matter how deep in the box you go the emotion is like a pair of spectacles, with gold wire frames at that, or a pince-nez. I see a farmer's wife with just such a pair of spectacles, sticking a pig. In the farmhouse a light wind is blowing thin flowered curtains.

Professor X complains that my book is about style, and that's all it's about. He is right. All you reading rate controller addicts and skimmers, all you commuters who want some meat in a novel, leave mine alone. (Fuck the rhetoric, he is wrong. This book is about a mental shift.) But the style of this memoir is the style of my life as I lived it, the style of my skin disease. I do not attempt to represent the style of my life by the style of my writing, the styles are the same, they are identical. I am indifferent to whether I have intercourse with words or feelings or people, the One Style encrusts and encompasses them all. And, making allowances for goodness and badness, it is the same type of style which insects manifest and which fashion designers employ. Take any male fashion designer who loves to be fucked in the ass, or any queer copywriter or advertising artist. The style of their work, in all its corruption, is the same as the style of this memoir. Is it Good? Who knows. I have to employ it until the itch stops.

Professor X complains that my style too obtrudes and names ten writers who have rubbed out their own. But for them the margins of a page are a window frame. They are window cleaners who want to show you life, they wash away the lines of print. I have writers who put their tongue to this use. "It is the perfection of art to conceal art" makes me shudder. I want the printed line to intrude constantly, I want the reader's focus to shift continually, I want each image broken and complemented by a word or sound and fixed by the spike of style the way a cucumber is spoiled and preserved by pickling or a snapshot held on the wall by a ten-penny nail. And besides, I want to express no thought which is not involuted, no idea which is not intertwined like garlands with literal print on the literal page. Everything is itch and scratch, skin, surface, and advertising copy. Everything is sensation, there is no tenderness here, there are mirrors. You want a telescope? Shoeblack on the rim. For, you buy a parrot on the U.S. black market (come down with psittacosis two weeks later), bring it home, pluck it screaming and squawking ("What you doing to that goddamn bird, I'll call the police, sex maniac, go pull out your own feathers" -- how the fuck she can hear the bird above her soap operas blasting all day long) -- that's what writing a sentence is, and all you fans of Henry James, prose bungler and polysyllabizer, open your eyes. Here everything shimmers, shatters, shivers, or gleams falsely, unattainably, like gold. Or everything is the SWEET dull first pale break of gold (Piglin crushes his wedding band).

I am a light wind blowing thin flowered curtains, and boys where they want to go, while prose is a tiny candle flame flickering, and the wind makes a curtain bottom creep on the sill like a spider.


Franco, I worship your style, I am a Fascist. The death of the Jews, the wraiths of Lidice or Alcubierre, the Plaza de Catalunya, rats apanic at each other, your Spanish Moroccans, maricones, brown soldiers with a bundle of rods -- Franco your mausoleum, your Dali, the black church of Spain, valley of the fallen, Infanta, the kiss of hemophilia. Franco you black flower, I want your hand in soft places (Whitman, old man, turn in your sleep). The pinch of steel kisses. Franco you worship Death and know Death and marble and black Catholic cities. Franco, generalissimo, stab me (Ethiopian), Baudelaire of Spanish rumbling, black Iberia, the glacier of Pericles, thin blue flower. Back to crematory smoke. Pirate, your flat sad arrogant face, sweet hands. The lace and lisp of the Infanta are in your face, Franco. Franco, Hadrian, the death you spread over Spain like wildflowers.

[Tcunniff]

Another forgotten jewel from the Beat era.