Ceci n'est pas Keith, Ceci n'est pas Rosmarie Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop 93 pp. Available from Powell's Books.

Hüsker Dü also helped me here. The Flip Your Wig days took me from black pants and black shirts to a reversal of my watch-me-fail mentality. Its words ("Sell yourself short / But you're walking so tall / Makes no sense at all") can sound preachy on paper, and that's fine. They were the Gospel in My Book of Ambition, the boldfaced lyrics that made me care. Later, when I translated Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, his Latin seemed to be saying that people give good effort after following a lyric or two all the way. How true, I thought, and I incorporated lyrics from "Riot Act" and "Makes No Sense at All" into his text as examples.

In my life, it's mostly been books -- not songs or Dorf or Forrest Gump -- that feed me longings for greater intellect. If you are in love with language, and eager to exercise your mind from lethargy, I am certain that Ceci n'est pas Keith, Ceci n'est pas Rosmarie will be an effortlessly inspiring work. It is beautiful storytelling that you can't help but envy, a joint autobiography that stands as defiant rebuttal to our American culture. Ceci n'est pas Keith, Ceci n'est pas Rosmarie does not squash intelligence, or make it seem lifeless and cold. You read this book with such pleasure that you leave it unwillingly; then, you want to read everything else by the Waldrops, and their friends, and you want to gobble up their recipes, too. You want to eat like them. After I read this book, and then read my favorite bits over again, I was genuinely angry that I didn't know more languages. I wanted to learn French, German and anything else that could pull me closer to their lives. I started growing Keith's long beard, and I bought Rosmarie's book recommendations (like Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge's The Heat Bird).

Keith's often hilarious anecdotes confirm that knowledge contains the ingredients you can shape into richer laughs, and deeper, more fulfilling loves. It's a book that makes authors cool, and the Waldrops' approach to this autobiography makes fragments seem like the only way to make reality lucid. After I read Keith's section, I did not go straight to Rosmarie's section; instead, I stretched out on my bed and daydreamed. I imagined the wonderful movie the book could become if the cinema embraced intelligence as a positive attribute.

In Ceci n'est pas Keith, Ceci n'est pas Rosmarie, the married couple have written an autobiography in which each covers a few decades of their youth. Keith goes first, then Rosmarie, with Keith detailing the inspiration behind his own approach:

I know in songs, how important the words are, how the melody is -- in some sense -- dependent on the words. And yet I almost always listen to, for instance, Schubert (or whomever) without taking the text into account, without in some cases any idea of what the song is about.
It seems generally -- this partial experience of the song -- totally adequate.
I was born on Sunday.

Since Rosmarie is the primary translator of Edmund Jabes, the major French Poet of Tormented Doubt, it's impossible not to see the Waldrops' own aesthetic as largely inspired by the books they've translated, read and lived with, such as Georges Perec's W, or Memory of Childhood (which dealt with Perec's own autobiography in bits and pieces). Their style is not revolutionary, then, but it's appropriate in a very perfect sense. It is also more emotionally effective than the unique Light Travels, an earlier chapbook-length poem of similarly volleying verse.

But it's silly to go on about the book's style, because my love for it is more basic than that. Its content enthralled me. Every phrase was a joy to read, and return to.

Having already exalted Keith's section beyond my ability to fairly praise it, let's start with Rosmarie's more somber latter section, in which I was especially fascinated by her account of life in Germany as a child during WW2. After turning ten in the fall of 1945, she escaped indoctrination into the Nazi regime by only a few months. Her writing on the period is smart, precise, and trimmed of hyperbole. She notes that, immediately after the war, "Brecht's Galileo was helpful. Heroism is the exception; most human beings are not cut out for it. It helped us to accept our parents who, even if they had not been active in the horror, had made it possible by going along, conforming, Mitlaufer, fellow travelers "(67).

The pains of a precocious child are also wonderfully expressed. She is instructed toward inferiority ("You are very bright, but if you were really bright you would not show it" (68)), a story shared by other girls of her era, and she goes sick over Adorno's popular comments ("Poetry is not possible after Auschwitz"). Could Adorno's words strike her if she rebelled from them?

She met Keith while he was on a military tour of duty, and eventually went to America with him as his wife. Her own poetry and tale-telling gave way to mostly translation and the Burning Deck. What began as the Waldrops' poetry magazine soon became a full-fledged printing press. Initial books were made the old-fashioned way -- where Rosmarie set type by hand, etc -- and she describes this laborious process as a great way to become "extremely aware of any excess 'fat' in writing" (77).

Her section is that of a person in love with books, and the whole writing process. She peppers her section with bookcases of worthy epigraphs. In a short space, she throws out thoughts from Montaigne (who saw "writing, studying as an apprenticeship of death"), discussions of her own work, and tributes to her own uniquely German loves (like Karl May, whose books seem far closer to Germans' collective hearts than, say, Goethe). Her part of the book ends with short, almost shockingly brief statements about her breast cancer, and Keith's gangrenous gall bladder.

It brings me to one personal reason why I may have loved this book: I read it on the weekend my dad was in the hospital, getting his own gangrenous gall bladder removed. I had picked the book up as a simple diversion, yet found great warmth in Keith's section. I was floored by Keith's humor, the hearty laughter you can hear in his retelling of college days, of animal houses painted as haikus.

There are three priceless, anecdotal stories that he relates, most of which show him to be a genuinely merry prankster. I cannot do them justice here, but can say that they include a time when he and his pals fooled a Michigan student body into thinking they were radical Beat poets, and an occasion on which they presented a tribute to Dada. Aside from the extravagance and outrageousness of the presentations, his telling of his friends' bit parts utterly crack me up. For example, after Keith Waldrop finished his own part in the Dada celebration, he asked his friend Frank Reeve to get up, "read a paragraph of something, anything -- and follow it with, 'Do you have anything to say to that?'."

Frank obliged. After Keith asked, "Are there any questions?", he jumped to his feet, and read "at top speed, in French, what seemed to me pages" (41). Then Frank asked, "Have you got anything to say to that?"

I think of myself in the audience, witnessing this event, and just start peeing. God, I wish I were a bilingual person, so I could do that in the line at the bank. All the group's elaborate gags were in the spirit of the great things Andy Kaufman would later do, and this caused one professor to tell Keith, "You have not too little, not too much -- just the right amount -- of contempt for your audience" (37).

Though Keith's section is not all horseplay, he comes across as a guy who's had brilliant fun, who's used his passions to make life more enjoyable for himself and his friends. As Herodotus would no doubt have told him, Keith has preserved from decay the remembrance of what some neat people did as kids.

For example, when Keith and wife Rosmarie had no other place than the kitchen or bathroom to put books, they moved to the bathroom all books with "something in title or author to suggest that locus" (19). Among these: Gone With the Wind, Howard's End, The Golden Bowl.

It is ridiculous for me to have left this book almost proud that my dad's recent health troubles paralleled Keith Waldrop's, but I loved his story, his way with a few decades of anecdotes. I have had the good fortune of hearing a few poets (James Tate, Gerald Stern) who created whole new worlds into which I wanted to leap, and this is yet another occasion. Keith and his wife Rosmarie are beautiful.

-- Theodore Defosse

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