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About
The Labor details the events of my life from 1989 through 1992, when I left my home town of 57 years to venture to New York City. Free, white, and sixty-one. This book, part of a series I call The Gates of Hell, follows the first four, The Descent, and The Task, Parts 1, 2, and 3, which covered my years after college in 1954.
The series and book titles derive from The Aeneid:
The Gates of Hell stand open night and day;
Smooth The Descent, and easy is the way;
But to return, and view The Cheerful Skies,
In this The Task and mighty labor lies.
Virgil, trans. Dryden
I hope my readers appreciate how I've recreated the joys and accomplishments of these sixty-some years. However, a dark thread runs through them. Only dimly aware of it, a relentless psychological disorder, a powerful neurosis, N.P.D, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, gripped me in it jaws.
And the Leader, who beheld me so attent,
Exclaimed: "Within the fires the spirits are;
Each swathes himself with that wherewith he burns."
Dante, trans. Longfellow
When I sought help, many professionals refused to take me on. I finally entered psychoanalytic therapy in New York City. Slowly the treatment began to take effect, and you may see the results for yourself in my out-of-sequence book, The Cheerful Skies — Book 1.
A former friend asked, 'What are you trying to be — the Great American Knausgård?'
My writing style? Maybe a combination of rambling memoire and diary, with discourses.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Robert Lowell
The series and book titles derive from The Aeneid:
The Gates of Hell stand open night and day;
Smooth The Descent, and easy is the way;
But to return, and view The Cheerful Skies,
In this The Task and mighty labor lies.
Virgil, trans. Dryden
I hope my readers appreciate how I've recreated the joys and accomplishments of these sixty-some years. However, a dark thread runs through them. Only dimly aware of it, a relentless psychological disorder, a powerful neurosis, N.P.D, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, gripped me in it jaws.
And the Leader, who beheld me so attent,
Exclaimed: "Within the fires the spirits are;
Each swathes himself with that wherewith he burns."
Dante, trans. Longfellow
When I sought help, many professionals refused to take me on. I finally entered psychoanalytic therapy in New York City. Slowly the treatment began to take effect, and you may see the results for yourself in my out-of-sequence book, The Cheerful Skies — Book 1.
A former friend asked, 'What are you trying to be — the Great American Knausgård?'
My writing style? Maybe a combination of rambling memoire and diary, with discourses.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Robert Lowell