Robert Glück on His Books, Frank O'Hara, and Dreams

In this episode of Private Life, Robert Glück joins Jarrett Earnest for a conversation about his books, the characters that shaped his stories, and Geoffrey O’Brien’s essay “The Mayakovsky of MacDougal Street” (published in the Review’s December 2, 1993, issue) on the poet and writer Frank O’Hara. They discuss Glück’s work of postmodern fiction Jack the Modernist (1985), his experimental novel Margery Kempe (1994), and his genre blending book About Ed (2023), all of which were published by New York Review Books.  

Robert Glück is a poet, fiction writer, and editor who cofounded the literary movement New Narrative alongside Bruce Boone in the 1970s. Glück’s books of poetry include La Fontaine (1981) with Bruce Boone, and Reader (1989). His other works include the story collection Denny Smith (2003) and the essay collection Communal Nude (2016). He was the director of San Francisco State’s Poetry Center, served as codirector of Small Press Traffic, and was an associate editor at Lapis Press. 

You can find Robert Glück’s books at nyrb.com or at your favorite bookseller. Read Geoffrey O’Brien’s “The Mayakovsky of MacDougal Street” with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website. 

Creators and Guests

Host

Jarrett Earnest

Jarrett Earnest has contributed essays to the New York Review of Books on artists ranging from Tom of Finland to Jack Whitten. He is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018) and Valid Until Sunset (2023) and has edited several collections of criticism, including volumes of Dave Hickey and Peter Schjeldahl as well as artist's writings by Nayland Blake and Jesse Murry. His curatorial projects include the acclaimed 2019 exhibition "The Young and Evil" at David Zwirner gallery, New York.

What is Private Life: A New York Review Podcast?

Private Life is a podcast from The New York Review, hosted by contributor Jarrett Earnest. Each episode offers intimate, in-depth conversations with distinguished voices from across the literary landscape—about their lives, their work, and the ideas that shape both. Along the way, they revisit pieces from the The New York Review of Books's robust sixty-year archive (some episodes of the podcast will feature newly recorded readings of these classic essays) to situate arguments within contemporary culture. The show also includes discussions of titles from our book publishing arm, New York Review Books, featuring talks with translator Mark Polizzotti on Andre Breton's surrealist masterpiece Nadja and musician Richard Hell on the re-issue of his novel Godlike. Other early episodes find Joyce Carol Oates ruminating on true crime, while Darryl Pinckney opens up about the perils of memoir and his formative friendship with essayist Elizabeth Hardwick. 

Private Life is a personable, expansive invitation for longtime subscribers and a new generation of readers alike to connect with the past, present and future of The New York Review. 

Jarrett Earnest This is Private Life, a New York review podcast. I'm Jarrett Earnest, and today I'm talking with Robert Glück. Robert Glück is one of the co-founders of the New Narrative Movement. His experimental, sexy, and often very funny books, Jack the Modernist, from 1985, and Marjorie Kemp, from 1994, have been republished as NYRB classics. His most recent book, titled About Ed, which grapples with the loss of his partner to AIDS, the painter Ed Aurlich Sugai, was also published by NYRB in 2023.

Jarrett Earnest In the piece that you wrote that has become kind of a famous text now about New Narrative, the movement that you co-founded with Bruce Boone, the long note on New Narrative, you mentioned that you immediately connected about how you were both obsessed with Frank O'Hara.

Robert Glück True.

Jarrett Earnest And Bruce also goes on to get a PhD on O'Hara and his milieu.

Robert Glück That's right.

Jarrett Earnest And when I asked you to choose something from the archive, you said you wanted to talk about this O'Hara Essay by Geoffrey O'Brien that is a review of the Brad Gooch biography City Poet. So could we just maybe start by talking about why O'Hara emerged as such an important ancestor or guiding light to these three books and New Narrative in general.

Robert Glück Okay, when I was later in college, I found the Donald Allen anthology, The New American Poets. It's an anthology actually that O'Hara helped create, and it was the Bible of my generation. And at that time, learning to be a writer and learning to a gay man were almost the same thing, at least for me. And it would be hard to overestimate the effect of that anthology on young queer writers struggling with finding an identity in the 60s. Imagine in one book coming out of a place where a poet on campus was called a living poet, you know, coming from that kind of dead place having a book that had Jack Spicer, Frank O'Hara, Robert Duncan, Robin Blazer. I mean, imagine having them in one fell swoop. So that That was my Bible, the Bible of many other young queer writers or queer want to be writers. So when I was sort of at a lost as what to do with my life, I happened to be living on a commune in the Sierras in 1969. And finally I thought, I've got to start my life. And what I did was get a U drive car to New York, just to be in the radiance of where Frank O'Hara had been. Had been dead for three years. I started taking Ted Berrigan's writing workshops at St. Mark's and that was really the beginning of my writing life. So it was really propelled by Frank O'Hara and a lot of moments in my life after that had some kind of element of Frank O'hara in it. So when I say he's part of the hard drive, he's also part of engine as well. Well, I also came out and fell in love. And that was disastrous. And so then as young people do, I, I solved the problem by moving. So I moved to San Francisco and that's where I met Bruce and we bonded instantly over our love of Frank O'Hara. We just met by accident. And so that really changed.

Jarrett Earnest The course of my life. I appreciate that story partly because, as Geoffrey O'Brien mentions in this piece, because O'Hara has had such an extraordinary influence on what we think of as poetry, it's sometimes hard to reconstruct how singular that voice was at a certain moment and and what it portended.

Robert Glück Homosexuality was still a disease and a crime. And that's what it was in the larger culture. That's what you were looking at, a disease or a crime, and then to have these voices for whom being a queer was not even an issue, that's liberation.

Jarrett Earnest There's this wonderful moment near the end of this essay that I sort of want to read because it feels like in some ways it opens into some of the formal and conceptual moves that you make, but also that are generally now associated with new narrative. Geoffrey O'Brien talks about how O'Hara just dragged everything in the world into it, into the poem. Yes. And it had to compete with, you know, the poem is aware that it's competing with like. Having sex and watching a movie and like doing other things you really want to do. Yes. And then he concludes in this beautiful way by saying the paradox at the heart of his writing is a sort of disinterested self-absorption. He does not so much transcend the graspings of desire as inhabit them so fully that he achieves an affectionate parody of a petulant and on we ridden egoism quote, I'm the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love. How many times have I said that in my fucking life? And he quotes from a poem and continues, the graph of this self-absorption becomes, in a brilliant poetic sleight of hand, the mirror of a world. In the solitude in which he is never alone, O'Hara turns his mind into a theater where the criss-crossing dialogs never end. Everything talks back to him, even the sun. The least hermetic of poets, he can afford to look in the mirror because he sees everything reflected there anyway.

Robert Glück Yeah, it's a lovely passage. And I also was going to bring that up. I like that phrase very much, the disinterested self-absorption. People sometimes forget about the dis-interested part, but I think that's lovely. That bringing together intimacy and abstraction is absolutely part of his work.

Jarrett Earnest I love the attempt to bring in everything. How can a poem hold it all? And that kind of permission is very much implicit in what I hear you saying about encountering O'Hara as a young person, that it was this kind of permission to put in anything you want.

Robert Glück In a way, we wanted to break down the difference between a self and the rest of the world, and he moved in that direction. And there's a phrase that kind of had many changes in the critical thinking in that time, which is it starts off as a myth is the imaginary resolution of real contradictions. But the way I used it, all ideology including the self is an imaginary resolution of real contradictions. Once you put it on that plane, a personality is not that, it's like a found, it's a ready-made, like a Duchampian ready-maid. You come across it, you use it as part of the collage. It may be a depth in which your being is, but it is also a surface, just a shallow thing.

Jarrett Earnest Well, and then comes in the pesky business of art, which is I think one of the reasons why we tire of the role that O'Hara has played in a certain kind of permission or poetry is permission for people to make really bad art, you know? Or like he had, O'hara himself had this incredible ear and a relationship to form.

Robert Glück Well, in Duende as well, he was a Catholic poet and there was a lot of death in O'Hara that people sometimes he lied over. Sex and death, what else is there? He's a poet of French.

Jarrett Earnest To friendship and death. So one of the things I wanted to focus on when we talk about these three amazing books that the New York Review books have brought back into the moment has a lot to do with form and how some of these ideas that we're talking about that might seem quite abstract, like actually live in the reading experience, the writing experience of the books. And maybe just to start, how do you see the relationship between these three books and maybe we should rehearse like the moment of their appearance like when they were originally published and then they were

Robert Glück Right, right. Republication. Well, now that About Ed has been published, there are three novels and they really mark three ages of my life. The Jack is really a young man's book and I don't know, the word cock appears 58 times. It is. Only? It's very excited, Bob is excited and lonely, keeps getting repeated. But it's young and In other ways, too, it set a moment when gay identity was in its heroic period, and by that I mean it sort of understood its own constructedness, and gay community was. It was still being ferociously built. There was suddenly a gay voting bloc. There was a gay radical politics. There was the gay outfit, so the world knew you were gay. There was gay readership, gay presses. All that came into being. During the heedless 70s and a lot else. So tremendous amount of work was being done to construct this community and this identity. And Jack is really a love letter to that and very aware of that. Here I am stepping onto the stage of history and a new historical subject. And so I think of Jack as that book. Marjorie on the other hand is a middle-aged man's book.

Jarrett Earnest It's your midlife crisis.

Robert Glück Is my midlife crisis, is it ever. And yeah, you know, when I read these books after decades, it is an amazing experience reading Marjorie after 25 years. Could you describe it? Well, I was a bit shocked actually. And also I called up L and apologized, who's my young lover in that book who I really put through the mill. Wait, you apologized because you thought your behavior was outrageous. Well, the book is a bit outrageous and unhinged. Well, that's the idea. My attraction to Marjorie was just how unhinge she was, and I felt she would be a good repository for my story. Sort of a, she's having her own midlife crisis. Yeah, but her midlife crises is devoted to Jesus. Yes, while mine was devoted to this young man. Hahaha! So of course the two stories get all mixed up. It's also a book about, well, the beginning of the modern self and the end of the modern self. It's a book About Marjorie's time of plague and my time of Plague. So there's a lot else going on. Often in my writing I borrowed a narrative and made other kinds of collaborative attempts in my books. Marjories is a good example. And I think... Of the self as a collaboration. And so to portray the self, I want there to be always a collaborative element in my books, and there is. In Marjorie, I invited I think 15 men and 15 women to give me kind of a nuggets of experience of their relation to their bodies. And so then I layered these nuggets. Into my kind of shadowy medieval characters, you know, so the Miller's wife can't have an orgasm unless somebody's looking or someone sees his own death approaching and relates the experience of that. It's almost as though I've summoned a community to watch my devastating love affair into the book. So the people I know are in the book in a substantial way, but it's also a collaborative thing. I actually list all the people who gave me bits of their lives to use in the book. So you can sort of figure out which is Tom Gunn. He's the guy who has sex with somebody who just ate a lot of pepper and finds it very stimulating. Okay, and then on to about Ed. I started that book in I think 2003, and I didn't, you can see it wasn't published. It was 20 years in them. In the making. And I think I needed to wait until I got older to finish it.

Jarrett Earnest All right, so you started in 2003 and it comes out 20 years later.

Robert Glück Yes, I did other things meanwhile, but it was a book I was working on and thinking about and couldn't seem to finish. I think I couldn't let go of our relationship. It was a way of being in relation to Ed. But I think, I also had to wait till I got older and make it that book, that is the book of an old man. Speaking of collaboration. Ed gave me journal pages, he gave me his voices in the book in several places, his partner gave me dream journals, which I constructed the last part of the book out of. So again, I'm bringing someone else's voice into the book, there's a lot of collaboration. At the beginning, in my first book, Elements, my first prose book, which was published by Don Allen, which was quite a Proustian. To get to know all these people, I just told you about all these poets was a kind of Proustian journey. I thought I would give people the option of giving them the final edit on their own, my descriptions of them, which worked out pretty well for a while. They would say, no, I don't talk like that. Here's how I would say it. And my book got better. But then someone decided that he needed to correct other parts of the story because it wasn't a dignified enough setting for him. So I gave people the option of changing their name. And there's actually a chapter in Jack in which I bring that into the story and we discuss changing his name. I think my tendency as a writer, if I have a problem, I tend not to solve it. I tend to just incorporate it and articulate it in the book. But I think all my books have been problems for me, and I'm not really interested in writing them until they become too great a problem for me to solve. And I really have to be a different person in order to write them, and that is my process. I don't start very confident, I start weak and uncertain.

Jarrett Earnest And having lived with the book about Ed for so long, how is it something that you were always working on or needing to work on or was in formation now that it lives in the world outside of you, how do you regard it?

Robert Glück It's quite different. It really is a shift for me. But one of the things that's also happened, just in this moment, is that Ed's artwork is getting a lot of attention. So there is a way that he's living in the world in some way that he hadn't been before. A lot of it is thanks to his last partner, Daniel Ostro, and we've done things together as well. And maybe this book help. But he's been in museum shows, his archive is going to a good place, museums have taken his work. So his posthumous life has taken a change, just as my life has taking a change regarding him. He's not mine anymore. He was mine. I felt he belonged to me. And this was not accurate, of course, and as usual, a bit insane. Yes, I felt he was mine while I was working on the book.

Jarrett Earnest Mm-hmm. How do you, I mean, the three books, even though they were written over a long span of time, Jack the Modernist comes out in 85, Marjorie Kemp in 94, and then Ed in 2023. They all cover basically the same historical moment, or they're all kind of set in the same place and with the same characters. And I'm one, and there's a huge amount of overlap in terms of scene and objects and actions. And I'm wondering how you think of them in relation to each other. Do they fit together like a puzzle? Are they their own separate things that happen to be in a sequence? Or is it too integrated into your own experience?

Robert Glück Yeah, I think it's, when I went back to read these books after such a long time, and you could include elements to my first book of stories and Denny Smith, which was published around 2003, I believe. So there were other, but same, same cast of characters. When I go back to them, I believe I know them by heart. I feel I know them by heart. Lord knows I worked hard on them and I assume that I know them by, by heart, so I'm I've been quite surprised that I didn't actually, but I think that's how I experienced them as just part of my memories. I'm not sure it would be a good idea to see them as a jigsaw puzzle that fits together.

Jarrett Earnest My experience of reading them all together was that the recurrence of certain images or objects is very productive. Yeah, like even like in Jack the Modernist, there's this discussion that you have with Jack about letting him read what you've written and him saying, I don't have a chenille bed spread. Like that's not right. And then in about Ed, there is the chenil bed spread, but it's yours and I'm like, Oh, that's such an interesting. Connection because I think so much about form relates to the unconscious. And so when you get to, to read them together, there is more of a feeling of that you probably have a better.

Robert Glück Idea than I do. But there are things that go through the books. There's a white glass cup that appears often. It's a kind of window into another world or another way of looking at the world. My pine table, there's my cedar bed. They are there, the house on Clipper Street. It is my hope that focusing on particular things with enough energy, enough pressure on form, pressure on language makes them kind of generally applicable. I don't worry at all about the size of my life or whether the content of my writing can be read by everyone. I do not care in the slightest. I think the consolation of art is that no matter what it's saying, if there is a pressure on language and a pressure of form and intensity, it tells us that our lives have meaning, even if it's the opposite. Remind me that it's a it's actually a rather small palette, but that's fine with me. Well

Jarrett Earnest In one sense, yes, but on the other sense, it then gives you an armature for all this crazy language that can come from anywhere. There's a quote of John Ashbery in the O'Brien piece on O'Hara where he says, you don't need to know who Grace and Jane and Edwin or whomever are. In fact, it's sort of more charming that you don't know. And in your novels, you do get this repeating invocation of, of friends. And so, you know, Cathy appears and it's like, you don't have to know it's Cathy Acker, but it's interesting if you do it just like, it's interesting if, you it's Grace Hartigan. Yeah.

Robert Glück Fred Jameson is in there. People worry about that kind of thing needlessly. Look at Shakespeare, how many local references are in Shakespeare. It's endless. You would never get to the bottom of it. But these people, I suppose you get to know them after a few books. Yeah, it seems like Cathy is always giving you bad advice. Well, we did. She was the perfect, she was the best friend if you were unhappy in love, If you were miserable There was no romantic brews that was too small to go over and we could go over it all night. So it wasn't just going over it, we could spend hours and she was the best girlfriend for that. One New Year's Eve, she always had a kind of grand style and we went to this kind of dive really and she ordered a bottle of champagne and then we spent New Year Eve into the morning, just hanging out and drinking the champagne that should. She had ordered.

Jarrett Earnest Was great. I was thinking in reading these books and thinking of talking with you how much pleasure there is in reading and the sense of you as a reader as the who is the writer but as somebody who loves the experience of reading and is inviting that in and I think about that with the aqir 2 like well that is the heart of appropriation really

Robert Glück you become a reader as well as a writer.

Jarrett Earnest You open that up a little bit? Just mostly because I think that reading, it's not necessarily a given that people know what we're talking about in terms of what reading means in that sense. Well...

Robert Glück Let's look at the politics of reading. As a writer, you colonize somebody's psychic life. You stage your story inside their psychic life, they have allowed you to do that. That is a power relationship. And in Cathy's case, and I hope in my case, you also invite them into a kind of performance where risk occurs, and that performance cannot occur without the reader. The reader is a complicit part of that performance. It wouldn't happen without them. And you want to make something irreversible happen on the page. So that's part of it. But to go back to appropriation, when we read, we're invited to put ourselves into the story. In some way, it wouldn't work otherwise. We enter the story, appropriation is just doing that. You're saying, Okay, I'm in this story. Hello, I am Don Quixote. It's really just an elaboration of the process of reading.

Jarrett Earnest Well, I also think that it acknowledges how real our experience of reading is in our psychic and emotional life, and it becomes part of our life. Yes. Like, I remember reading, sort of recently I was reading In Memoriam to Identity, that Kathy Acker novel, and getting to the part where she just dives into being Faulkner, like just end. I was like electrified. I know Faulkner very well. And suddenly I'm like, I knew exactly what was happening, but with no warning. It's just the language itself, because when you read in a deeper way, you are leaving your consciousness or you're blending your consciousness with someone else's through language, but outside of yourself. And so it almost felt like when you, your, she and I were meeting in the place where Faulkne was as readers. Made that place for you.

Robert Glück Was so powerful. Well, it also invites into the work different modes of discourse, which is really also at the heart of new narrative. We want to have in the same work essay, lyric, narrative, and different registers of tone and vocabulary, and appropriation is one of those modes. So, that is another way.

Jarrett Earnest To look at it. One of the pleasures of your writing that unites these three books, in Jack the Modernist there are a number of illustrations and you describe visual things whether it's an episode of Charlie's Angels or it's the cover of a porn magazine in a way that the image functions very interestingly within the writing. There's a kind of ekphrastic mechanism that happens. And then it happens differently in different moments, different kinds of images. So to talk about the cover of porn magazine or to talk about a film or something on television, they're all bringing in these different kinds of images and I would like to know more how you think of your writing relating to images. I thought I was

Robert Glück to be a visual artist. I went to art school somewhere along the line. I switched horses and became a writer, but I was always doing art along with it and continue. So, I don't know, you could say my books are the books of a potter. There's always something spherical about them. I had a year-long seminar on Conrad at the University of Edinburgh, And at one point he says about Nostromo He saw it as a globe. And this lit up something for me. And it is how I think about my books. I think of them as spherical. I can enter it at any place. I can work on it in any part of it. And there's usually something revolving that revolves at the end. And even at the beginnings, I kind of stole something from Georges Bataille. This kind of beginning that starts with three different topic sentences. Instead of starting the book with one, it's three that go in very different directions. So I tend to know how they're gonna appear on the page. I'm involved with them as an object. I had a small press and made the books in the days when you actually made them by hand and laid them out by hand and I did the covers and so on. So I've always had my hand in that part of bookmaking. Well, I don't necessarily mean image strictly in a visual sense, but I think in images at any rate. I don t think in language, I think images.

Jarrett Earnest Just because I myself am a Von Sternberg Dietrich fanatic.

Robert Glück There is too.

Jarrett Earnest There is a chapter in about Ed.

Robert Glück Of my favorites. I love the suppression of figure and ground in his books. I have a riff on The Devil is a Woman in About Ed. Yes.

Jarrett Earnest Ed and I attended Joseph on Sternberg retrospective in 1972 at a theater on 18th street in the Castro that disappeared long ago. That's the title of the section. And there's this amazing evocation of this particular film, the last film that they made together, The Devil is a Woman, that's braided together with your experience of Ed and also your experience in remembering and of writing. And I didn't know if you'd be willing to read a little stretch of it. For us to talk about. I mean, for whatever reason, I have marked the last kind of two pages, but you could read whatever you like. I'm just desperate to hear your Dietrich impersonation.

Robert Glück I'm afraid that's going to be disappointing. Last night I had this dream. I call to my friends, hey look, there's Hitler, let's kill him. They say, oh yeah, Hitler, he's looking good. Guys, I protest, it's Hitler. Come on, we've got to kill him! They say he's in good shape. Yeah, he looks okay. I am Bob and what does Bob know about killing someone? Hey, guys, let's kill Hitler. Besides, the worst had already happened. So what was the point? That was Dietrich's stance, the Weimar expression. The worst already happened." I pick up a rock and throw. It lands a few feet away from me. Hitler isn't even upset. That's what Dietrich skull face was saying. Universal ruin already occurred. That's why we did not understand her in the early 70s. She brought mourning into the sexual realm, which was, it seemed to us, founded on hope. The skull was already laughing. Concha. Good morning, good morning. Well, this is Dietrich talking. Good morning. Good morning! I came to see if you were dead. If you had loved me enough, you would have killed yourself last night. Bad. Not made properly, I make much better chocolate. Your lover takes an interest in your death since she is dead. You are left with nothing to grasp, nothing to believe, nothing to understand. True sadness does not know what it has lost. Here it is, the real grief, without self-interest, without story or loyalty or language or scale or measure. Oh, Ed. Can I find my way back to you through this fucked up image, the black parasol, the light weeping down a thousand strings? Is finding you my goal? To make love last forever? You have been gone 25 years and I will die before long. To put experience into words is something like love and something like revenge, my unrequited love for the world. I break a promise to myself. I promised I would not speak to Ed in the second person as though language could float me over to him. More resolution than esthetic protocol. Do I talk to his photo or his image in my mind? Not to the Ed I last saw, but to a younger Ed. Do I mourn my lack of access to his beauty, the glory of my own youth, arousal? And glycerin tears, Ed in life and death, a wall to beat my head against. Sometimes I say, oh Ed, if I could unpack that sigh, maybe I am not prepared to talk to Ed in public. I'll make myself naked when company comes, but I am reluctant to talk Ed in your presence. And how does a corpse speak? In a voiceover from the future about events leading to his death.

Jarrett Earnest So even in that little passage, which for some reason, this might not be true, but this section felt like a turning point in the attitude of the book. And so you have these images that open into other images. It starts by talking about the film and you talk about this beautiful thing where von Sternberg who was a painter has these drops of glycerin going down these little filaments. So the whole screen is

Robert Glück bangled. It's amazing. It is one of the great images in film history.

Jarrett Earnest And the other thing about those particular films, but also Dietrich as an image, is its radical surface. Yes, absolutely.

Robert Glück Absolutely. It's a suppression of figure and ground and he does that in a lot of different movies. It's both a suppression a figure and a ground and yet it's conveys a sexual meaning. And well, they're just amazing.

Jarrett Earnest The other one thing that Sternberg is not afraid to do that I love in film language, which is a cross fade in which an image fades into another image, because instead of moving across an image like a sequence, like you would read, it feels like you move through them. And in this particular passage, you present these different images of you and Ed at different times, but through the image of the film. And then photographs, evoking a photograph of, of him at different times, and then evoking the presence of him as a ghost. And it just kind of keeps unfolding in this, in this way that it made me think, well, when you say that you think in images, I wanted you to read that because it really illustrated it.

Robert Glück Well, and then there's the last part of the book, which is just 50 pages of image replacing image.

Jarrett Earnest Yes before that

Robert Glück It's like running backwards. Yes, it goes back as though it were living his life in the last moment of it, except it's his dream life going back to the beginning. That comes from a, well, one of the things I was thinking about in that sequence, there is a passage of the Thomas Gospel, one the Gnostic Gospels, which has kind of beguiled me for decades and I'll tell you what it is. So Jesus is walking along with his disciples and they come to a nursing woman, woman nursing her child, and the disciples say, Master, is that what heaven is going to look like? Which is a pretty great question. And Jesus says, no, not really. But I like the idea of the breakdown of ego boundaries between a mother and a nursing child. And for that kind of collapse of ego boundaries to be part of the question of what heaven looks like. And then he tells them what it looks like, and he says a long list of binaries, which he collapses. So he says, when up is down and down is up, and when the inside is the outside and the outside is the inside, and when hand is the foot and the foot is the hand, and win. The male is the female and the female is the male. So he has this list of binaries that he collapses. But then he does something different. He says, and when image replaces image, then you will be in heaven. And I've always loved that. And the idea of heaven being not a static thing like in Dante, where you arrive at the end and there is the story of your life set. But instead it's just an complete eternal unfolding of images. That is something that has been in my mind for forever.

Jarrett Earnest Just by reading that, that last section, which is called inside, which goes on for maybe 50 pages.

Robert Glück Pages. Yes, writing that I had all of Ed's dream journals and I it was really the hardest thing I ever wrote. I think I copied out about 270 pages of dreams and from there I whittled it down and I put pressure on the writing and I brought it down to that size and I just couldn't get it down any farther. I was quite worried about it. And I'm sure some readers don't make it all the way through, or perhaps they don't. I don't know. But it's really giving Eds a lot of inspiration.

Jarrett Earnest Word. What is so interesting about the experience of it is it's much like I was saying the experience of turning the page in Cathay Acker and being like, oh, I'm in Faulkner is there's no just explanation of what's happening. There's no preparation aside from having read the entire preceding book. Well, there are a few of Ed's dreams peppered through the book. Right. So that they're always treated differently. Yes, that's true. And so when you get to this, you start reading it. And you understand that it's the voice of Ed, and then you understand that they're the dreams, and then, you understand that they are unfurling backwards. Backward, backward, backward. And it is image after image, but the way that they sutured together is that they all say, well, before that, and before that. Yes, that's right. And it's extremely effective. And- Oh, good, good to hear. But, and there are so many- It was the risk of this book, really.

Robert Glück Preparing the ground for that? Well, but the risk of it was, you know, I always used to tell my students, don't use dreams. I wondered about the role of dreams. And well, I wanted them to be Ed's dreams. And that's how we treated them when we were together was like a commons producing images. So in a sense, they were public. I borrowed images from Ed's dreams when I was writing poetry in the 70s. Drew me and, you know, we were artists together. But we didn't see them as keys to our psychic life. We saw them as gifts, as gifts of strong images and to use.

Jarrett Earnest Public comments. Well in a way I mean I have a hearty skepticism around psycho analysis outside of it being very beautiful metaphors but according to Freud dreams only exist in images and they only become language when we stitch them. That's right. And so in a way the relationship of the written dream is the relationship that just enacted by describing the Dietrich film. It's like... This thing doesn't exist in words. They're very powerful images and then you have to suture them together in language.

Robert Glück I, I,

Jarrett Earnest that idea. Thank you. Can I just tell you my favorite image in the dream sequence? Absolutely. Before that, the cosmos begins. I'm a voluptuous angel in a black bikini. I drape a diamond shawl over my shoulders and dance midair for the others, spreading my legs, curling like an embryo, a pose for every aspect of life. I mean, could I ask Jesus if that's heaven? But there's something I wanted to say when you talked about this collapse of boundaries, which is there is something that happens in this section. It is a attempt at something that permeates the other books, which is this dynamic between self and other and trying to the limitation of knowing, you know, it's like that song like how will you know if he really loves you like it's, like, you don't know.

Robert Glück You don't know. Yes.

Jarrett Earnest In his kiss, but in this, there's this thing which it's like, what's the closest that you could know the interior life of someone? And they said, well, they're the dreams. And so there's a way in which the inhabiting of the dream in the first person, both as the reader experiences it, but also that you as the writer are, I don't want to say usurping, but inhabiting. That really feels like it's about, not necessarily a resolution of that, but a kind of pushing it together as close as it could come. Interesting.

Robert Glück Well, I wanted to install Ed in the reader. That was a goal in the book, and I felt moving through his psychic life for decades would might be a way of doing that. All goals in writing are not possible, but one of my goals in this book was to install and psychic life in the Reader. By that, I mean, you can't write with perfect clarity. You can't write with perfect naturalism. That just doesn't exist. You can write with transparency. Words don't turn into objects, lose their meaning. None of these things actually work. They're just goals. Yeah, but doesn't stop you from wanting them. Right, or you can't make something irreversible happen on the page, perhaps for an audience. That may not be possible, but It is a goal.

Jarrett Earnest There's something about Marjorie Kemp, one of the most amazing things about the book of Marjories Kemp. So the early 15th century spoken autobiography.

Robert Glück About 1430, I think. Yeah.

Jarrett Earnest Is that it was unknown for 400 years. She did me the favor of.

Robert Glück Disappearing until the 20th century.

Jarrett Earnest There's something about the fact, first of all, the fact of her desire to try and record her experience in a book is already interesting because you have to think, well, what is this for? And, Oh, I think she had a clear goal, uh, to be a saint. I, I, in a, I guess I'm thinking about the book as a form in a deeper way, which brought me back to this disappearance of Marjorie Kemp for her reappearance 400 years later. In that when I was reading about Ed, I thought all books are books of the dead. That's their destiny. They're written for a time, we're putting everything we can into this form for when everybody who knew anything about them are dead, but then there's this thing. Yes. It made me very fond of books. But thinking about that, relationship between form and death or form and transients. I don't know, how do you think about that now that this is a thing in the world that someone else can hold in their hand? Well, it's so much in...

Robert Glück Involved with my own death. It seems like it might be Ed's tombstone, but also my own and That's really how

Jarrett Earnest conceived. Well there's a thing in this where you talk about your astonishment of Ed's ability to plan his funeral and to create this little installation in the columbarium and you say, like so amazing you can do that. I couldn't do that, but it sounds like okay well you did that.

Robert Glück So now what? Right, well, I've constructed our tomb. But you're right, I hadn't thought of it that way. Yes, I was, well this was in the 90s, a kind of futureless time in our society, actually. Our government was operating from a position of greed and a speculator kind of attitude where there's like, let's get rich, there's no tomorrow. That was the mood of the 90s. So Ed constructing this tomb, which I mean, you think of tombs as looking at the past, but really they look at the future, they're future oriented. And so I was, I questioned it, you know, like he was using materials. This was going to, this one, if I use this, it will last 200 years. If I use, this it will ask 600 years. And I'm going, my thinking is once you're gone, what difference does it make? But Ed had the ability to think past his own life into a kind of communal future. And that was instructive for me. The other character in the book who dies is Mack, and he also has this ability to see past himself. It's like a change in scale. You keep the details, but your frame of reference broadens out to include people after you've gone. And so that was me learning something from Ed. Good.

Jarrett Earnest When you talk about a re-engagement with Ed's visual art and giving it another life, that's predicated on it being a physical thing, you know, like that he like made something. Yes, indeed. And I think that it means embedded in it is this kind of optimistic futurity that there's a place where someone might love this thing or value it in the future.

Robert Glück Yeah. Although I would say mainly these are records of a kind of engagement with material, with form, with objects, with color, with shape, words. So in the first place, they're not a message to the future. In the first place, they're a record of one's engagement with the medium. Well, I don't think it's...

Jarrett Earnest But it's not. It's not either or. One thing is applied in the other. I think there's a kind of pleasure and formal adventurousness that it's so nice for people to reconnect with as like, okay, well, this is also possible. And one of the things that remains a kind of provocation in some ways is the relationship between it being called a novel or an autobiography or a memoir or fiction. Or yes.

Robert Glück Call it what you will.

Jarrett Earnest Well, I wanna know what is meaningful to you in those descriptive things. What are the implications?

Robert Glück I use the term novel because it means that I don't really have to tell the truth. I'm not going to be denounced. And you really can call almost anything a novel. And that is my definition of a novel I do write short fiction. I don't like the term short stories because there is a tradition of that. And I think I'm writing more from a kind of a French tradition like. Blanchot and his stories, his tales. But, well, I think I've done my part to break down those genre imperatives. I think as long as we live in a world that has a large component of fiction, and while we are fictions ourselves that we are endlessly constructing, that it really doesn't matter. The truth, the authenticity of a story doesn't. Really lie in the, you know, it might be more interesting, the authenticity might be more interesting as a record of the breakdown of these conventions than supporting them. There's a great deal of pleasure to be gained from genre writing, and we know that, and it's really about, often it's about pleasure of one kind or another, but the kinds of expectations that a kind of novelist has. Is part of a chain of regulation that you may not want to participate in, that goes from the top to the bottom. It really is telling the world who you are, what the world is, and the world may not really look like that to you if you allow yourself, give yourself the permission.

Jarrett Earnest To see it in other ways. As you said, the protagonist of Marjorie Kemp goes by L. In Jack the Modernist, there's a discussion about, with the character of Jack, about you changing his name to Jack in the book. Is it different in About Ed, that all the names are there and that it's as true as you can?

Robert Glück That important distinction between them. It is, and that was, for me, one of the problems of the book. How to be respectful and still how that would look. What does respect look like in this context? For Ed, who is really a wild child, it does not mean cleaning up his act. That would not have been respectful. But at the same time, it's true. You're writing, you're writing about someone who who you are in some way responsible for, and it carries over from our relationship. When I was responsible for him in different ways, he was often sick, I was often caring for him, even before HIV. So that, surely that relationship is expressed in the novel itself, in my attitude towards him and what I allow myself to say and what don't. So I had to concoct a way of being tactful. But that didn't mean leaving out the extravagances of his life, which was quite an extravagant life.

Jarrett Earnest Next week's episode will be a reading of Geoffrey O'Brien's 1993 essay, The Mayakovsky of McDougal Street, about the poet Frank O'Hara. You can also read that essay now with a subscription to the New York Review of Books, which, in addition to 20 issues a year, grants full access to our complete archive since 1963, searchable on our website. Subscribe for a discount today at nybooks.com slash PLSUB. You can also buy copies of Gluck's books, Jack the Modernist, Marjorie Kemp, and About Ed from nyrb.com or from your favorite bookseller. Private Life is hosted and produced by me, Jarrett Earnest, along with associate producer Luna Hayes-Dean. The audio is edited and produced by Tyler Hill. The music is by Matthew Aucoin, and it is a production of the New York Review.