.

Michael March:  Dada?

Walter Abish:  True.

 

MM:  How true?

WA:  As true as anything else. 

 

MM:  What is your take on Dada?

WA:  You catch me by surprise. What’s my take on Dada? I really have to think about it for a while. So I’ll tell you tomorrow.

 

MM:  That’s infinite. 

WA:  I don’t have an immediate take on Dada. I don’t have a ready answer. I don’t have a ready answer. 

 

MM:  Not ready-made?  

WA:  No, not ready-made.  I have fewer answers than even before. I had more answers in the past.

 

MM:  Do you have the feeling that Dada is useful? 

WA:  I would think not. I would hope it’s not useful. Useful things are, you know, motor cars and oil pumps and special machines.

 

MM:  They’re becoming extinct.

WA:  To be replaced by other useful things and explanations.  Dada didn’t offer explanations, did it? Or at least the explanations it offered were not useful.

 

MM:  Often, destruction is useful. Ezra Pound said, “War is the destruction of good restaurants.”

WA:  [laughing] When did he say that exactly?

MM:  Over the radio in Rome. That’s why he wasn’t condemned to death.

WA:  Did he like Italian food, I wonder?  Did he like food in fact?

MM:  Absolutely.  With a pinch of Dionysian humor.

WA:  Except in his speeches.

MM:  His only paid work.

WA:  [laughing] In Italy, of all places.

MM:  He had left Idaho. He had left Philadelphia.

WA:  He had even left Paris!

MM:  He came to Italy.

WA:  Where was he? In Rome?

MM:  He came to Rome for the broadcasts. 

WA:  But he lived outside of Rome?

MM:  Yes. He admired Mussolini. He admired order. 

WA:  Had he met him?

MM:  Once. But Mussolini was rather confused.

WA:  [laughing] Who interviewed whom?

MM:  Throw in Charlie Chaplin, and everyone would be happy. Mussolini couldn’t really understand what Ezra Pound was doing.  But Pound was seeing Mussolini in the context of Confucius. To make order.  To expel the usurer. He tried to “make it cohere”, tried to “make paradiso terrestre”. In the end, he understood his anti-Semitism as an absolute disaster. But he was anti-Semitic.

WA:  Who was?

MM:  Pound.

WA:  Yes, of course.

.

MM:  The old problem of political agitation. In Central Europe you can’t exist separately from politics. Here, you sit at Starbucks apolitically. You don’t have to wash the dishes in Starbucks, or in New York. Everything is paper. You throw it away.

WA:  You don’t wash the dishes in New York?

MM:  But there are no dishes!

WA:  Where?

MM:  New York is only paper.  What dishes?  Dishes could start an epidemic.  You would have to pay minimum wage with dishes.

WA:  We do indeed pay minimum wage.

MM:  What about Antonín Liehm, who said, “Whatever you say about America is true.” 

WA: [laughing] I can’t even respond to that.  Don’t ask me to respond to that!

MM:  Okay, what about, “Everything in America is clean”?

WA:  You’re not talking to Wittgenstein.

MM:  Wittgenstein was silence. 

WA:  No, I don’t think so. I don’t think Wittgenstein was silence at all. 

MM: Wittgenstein helped Trakl. He gave him loads of with money without understanding his poems. He thought Trakl was a genius. 

WA:  Who rejected money?  Who couldn’t dare to accept the money?

MM:  Trakl accepted the money. 

WA:  Did he accept? 

MM:  He did and gave the money to Rilke.

WA:  I can’t see Rilke ever accepting.

MM:  The money ended up in London. Do you miss London at all?

WA:  I miss it. If I miss it greatly, I go back. My in-laws lived there.

MM:  You don’t visit your old home in Vienna?

WA:  I haven’t, not for a long time. I visit places I’m very fond of, such as Italy.  I was in Greece recently, and I was in Turkey. And in Sicily. I loved Sicily. I spent some time in Naples.

MM:  What do you love?

WA:  Naples? 

MM:  Yes.

WA:  Well, the churches in Naples are amazing. They’re just astonishing. I love the food. I love that it’s sort of being neglected or slightly disparaged. I went there intentionally to explore that part of Italy. I had never been all the way south.  And also, of course, to visit the Greek ruins, the temples. 

.

MM:  Going back to Central Europe, is there a special psychology, a special memory?

WA:  Central Europe?

MM:  Central Europe. The psychology of Vienna. The psychology of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. 

WA:  I wouldn’t know the psychology. I just know people who escaped from it.  I lived in China, I lived in a community of twenty thousand German and Austrian Jews.

MM:  Describe that experience.

WA:  [laughing] I have to be going very shortly.  I’m going to see a show of Eva Hesse.

MM:  Where?

WA:  It’s at the Jewish Museum. I knew her in the sixties.  She died, I think, in the sixties. Very young.

.

MM:  One last thing. When I spoke to Danilo Kiš in Ljubljana, he said, “don’t ask about Central Europe. It doesn’t exist. With the extermination of the Jews, there’s no such thing as Central Europe.”

WA:  I don’t believe that. I don’t think so. I don’t think Jews define anything. I couldn’t give you any sort of quick answer, because I have to think about it.  When I was in Vienna, people would say, “Well, since the Jews are gone, Vienna is a different city”.  Everything is different.

MM:  You can breathe easier.

WA: [laughing] I don’t know. New York is not the city it was. Obviously, it’s changing. And so, things change. And the Jews of that period, they’re gone.  They’ve disappeared. They no longer exist. 

 

MM:  Aharon Appelfeld saw the Jews as the motor of Europe, the intellectual motor of Europe. Deluded and gone. Do you think that’s true?

WA:  I can’t answer that. I can’t answer that. Do you have the answer? 

MM:  Who can answer? 

WA:  They probably would have vanished in any event. With Jews, without Jews. They would have vanished.

MM:  We need some genies, more genies. 

WA:  Populism. Yeah.

MM:  I thought populism had vanished.

WA:  No, I don’t think so. 

MM:  Is populism a form of democracy? 

WA:  Oh, I’m not going to define populism. Please. 

MM:  How about the “Age of Self-Admiration.”

WA:  That too. Self-admiration?

MM:  Yes, narcissism.  

WA:  Narcissism? 

MM:  Joseph Roth noticed that “the individual is always defeated in the end”. Rather antithetical to American psychology, which lauds the individual. 

WA:  Clearly, yes.  

MM:  But there’s a tremendous conformity in America.

WA:  Well, that’s hardly new. Incidentally, that’s not a new discovery.

MM:  But it’s lasting. 

WA:  Do you want me to confirm everything you believe?

MM:  Be my guest. No one believes me in Prague. 

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Vlasta March:  What is crazy in America is the submission of identity to names.

WA:  Oh, labels you mean?

MM:  Brands.

VM:  Yeah.

WA:  Yeah, but you know, it’s so difficult to speak of America as Americans. I hesitate to do that. It’s a vast country. It’s a very complex society. I think it’s underestimated. America does not appreciate its own complexities. We’re going through a terrible period. And it’s a disaster. So I hesitate to talk about America right now.

MM:  Don’t worry, Enzensberger believes that “America corrects itself”.

WA:  What?

MM:  Self-correcting. Without the military interceding. Without a fascist regime. 

WA:  We hope.

MM:  Do you think that’s true?

WA:  It has in the past.

MM:  Do you think it will continue?

WA:  Well, I live in New York. And New York is a world apart. When I lived downtown, that seemed a world apart. [laughing] I’d rarely go above Seventeenth Street.  Right now, I’m going up to Ninetieth!

 

 

New York,  August 2006