Sheldon Guterson and Pinchus Fleisher Compared
By Ben Guterson
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Nine weeks after the death of my cousin, Sheldon Guterson, whose literary fabrications earned him brief notoriety in 1998 and, thereafter, persuaded him to embrace seclusion for nearly two decades, I discovered the following handwritten note in a twine-bound Reebok shoebox he bequeathed me:
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Dear Ben,
You will know that I experienced untold shame at the disclosure of my act of literary deceit and my ensuing professional and financial crash. I don’t believe you are familiar with the entirety of the inciting events, however, and I’m positive you are unaware of their aftermath. Allow me to share. In 1997 I wrote My Year of Theft, allegedly an account of my accepting a wager to steal items—to shoplift—from 365 unique establishments each day of the calendar year from June of 1995 through May of 1996. I published under a pseudonym (“Dan Ungo”), of course, and fabricated the entire tale, a compendium of chapters detailing my purported acquisitions and the attendant slide into dissolution and mania. The work, structured as a diary and including ostensibly evidentiary documentation of each act, sold reasonably well and received decent, if equivocal, notice. It was denounced by some as not merely narcissistic but affronting, a pathological and insulting caricature of kleptomania (The Post-Intelligencer: “dreck of the lowest order, a ten-year-old’s inane fantasy”); alternately it was lionized for its unfettered libertinism, for celebrating an amorality beyond the simple polarities of right-and-wrong that, not so incidentally, exposed the incoherence of consumer culture (The Times: “humane and deeply affecting—navigates the darker regions of obsession”). The book’s success blindsided me; when I was exposed as a fraud over the work’s abundant inconsistencies, I was unable to cope with the fallout. I was lambasted. I was loathed. I retreated from public view and terminated all contact with family and friends. I added thirty pounds to my already considerable frame and spent half of each day watching television and web-surfing. I smoked, I drank, I took pills. After two months of wallowing in my humiliation, I became interested in studying my literary kin, fellow creators of fake memoirs or literary forgeries. I spent hours online each day reading about these works—the nun in Nineteenth-Century Utrecht who discovered (and then misplaced) duplicates of codices eventually found at Nag Hammadi; General George Custer’s detailing of his love affair with a Lakota woman; the man who received Howard Hughes’s will; the prisoner who escaped a Siberian Gulag camp and walked to Burma, where he became a cheese exporter; the woman brought up in a cult dedicated to the worship of a deity from Alpha Centauri. I read these books; I studied the accounts. I was fascinated by the speculation and scorn and bafflement. And the story I found most absorbing was that of Pinchus Fleisher, plagiarizer supreme. An excerpt from Fleisher’s Wikipedia entry: Pinchus Fleisher (1915-1968) was a reclusive American poet who worked as a hospital cafeteria chef in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He first became famous for his posthumously published ‘Paradelle for Edie Schlifmann,’ a poem that has been heavily anthologized and describes a cryptic interior landscape. A subsequent collection of Fleisher’s poetry, The Collator’s Lament, won wide readership and has generated considerable popular and scholarly interest, particularly with the discovery that nearly all of Fleisher’s compositions were re-workings of existing, if obscure, poems. Although Fleisher failed to publish a single poem professionally in his lifetime, he self-published seventeen collections (titles include My Ennui—and Yours; A Light for the Sun; Descents #48; Bris and Hubris) and is now identified as an early practitioner of “Interventionist Writing,” which endorses plagiarism as legitimate artistic expression. Fleisher hanged himself from a “Golden Arches” display outside a McDonald’s in Raleigh, North Carolina, following a late-night game of volleyball with friends. “Paradelle for Edie Schlifmann” For readers unfamiliar with the subtype, American poet Billy Collins has described it admirably: “The paradelle is one of the more demanding French fixed forms, first appearing in the langue d'oc love poetry of the eleventh century. It is a poem of four six-line stanzas in which the first and second lines, as well as the third and fourth lines of the first three stanzas, must be identical. The fifth and sixth lines, which traditionally resolve these stanzas, must use all the words from the preceding lines and only those words. Similarly, the final stanza must use every word from all the preceding stanzas and only these words." Fleisher’s paradelle in its entirety: The window, wide, beckons stone gods The window, wide, beckons stone gods We forge the silence of grace, the solace of meditation We forge the silence of grace, the solace of meditation Wide silence beckons the grace of the gods Meditation: the window of the stone. We forge solace I, along with you, hear nothing, await the season I, along with you, hear nothing, await the season The clear heavens, faces skewed, a sound that never begins The clear heavens, faces skewed, a sound that never begins Nothing clear, I await, the skewed heavens never hear you Along with the season, faces, a sound that begins Rain falls, a curtain of silver, obscuring the plain Rain falls, a curtain of silver, obscuring the plain I watch and wait: nothingness, an absence of the divine I watch and wait: nothingness, an absence of the divine A curtain falls, obscuring the divine—I wait and watch An absence of rain, the plain silver of: nothingness We wait, forge nothing, meditation begins, a window falls The solace of rain beckons the divine The silver stone obscuring the heavens I await the clear faces of the gods, an absence of a curtain of sound Skewed grace—I watch and never hear you The wide plain, that season, along with nothingness: the silence I began reading everything I could find about Pinchus Fleisher. The material I found most compelling was a blog dedicated to the proposition that his suicide was the ultimate artistic gesture, that this masterful “poet of un-writing” had engaged in a final act of performance art so sublime and subtle, most observers misinterpreted it as the desperate self-negation of a humiliated drunkard—who, incidentally, had quarreled with the teller at the now infamous McDonald’s regarding the price of a Quarter-Pounder three hours before his death. The blogger noted that over the fifteen years preceding his suicide, Fleisher had participated in several “happenings” or performance incidents, including: having an archer shoot him in the right leg with an arrow from a distance of twenty yards; allowing himself to be shackled naked to the roof of a VW van during an Amboy Dukes show; and removing from his mouth a thin, wadded cord and then “reading” from it—again, naked—in a piece he called “Oral Scroll.” The blogger noted: “Death beneath the Golden Arches—themselves symbols of transcendent if vacuous power—was hardly an aimless act by Fleisher. It was, rather, calculated to maximize what Klivest has termed ‘the defiance of negation,’ or, as I think of it, the potency of the absurd. In death, Fleisher sought redemption through self-abasement. How meaningless it must seem to die upon a McDonald’s sign. And thus in absurdity do we find meaning.” Regarding Fleisher’s notorious, profligate appropriation of others’ works, I found myself fixated by this sentence in an online appreciation: “Harrison, alone among reviewers, has suggested that Fleisher’s motives were hidden even from himself, and that, similar to Irina Ustinov in the notorious episode in which she unknowingly recreated a tale she’d read in childhood, Fleisher was a naïf, suffered from the (disputed) malady known as cryptomnesia, or unconscious plagiarism--the belief that a thought is novel when in fact it is a memory.” (Emphasis mine.) I was unfamiliar with cryptomnesia, but apparently authors as diverse as Nietzsche, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Umberto Eco have—without any conscious design or awareness—produced written passages that replicated, even word for word, works they had read as much as decades’ previously, while believing they had created the pieces entirely themselves. That a handful of writers might have transplanted a passage from books long-since forgotten seemed plausible. But that Pinchus Fleisher could have composed scores of poems with only a few words altered here and there strained credulity. One, he would have had to own a near-photographic memory; two, he would have had to have possessed a very selective photographic memory, one that ushered specific poems deep into his unconscious while shoving all conscious recall of this maneuver aside; and, three, he would have had to have had some mechanism at play in which, while he wrote his poems, no twinge of recognition came over him, no guilty pause. But then again, that’s assuming the entire project wasn’t intentional, and pathologically so. Most everything I read indicated Fleisher was either an outright fabricator or some sort of modernist trickster who deliberately stole words and wove them together as part of his deconstructionist act. So how to uncover the truth? Is a person lying if he doesn’t know he’s lying? Was Pinchus Fleisher crazy-false or crazy-logical? A pretender or a lunatic? I understood there was no way for me to determine this, roughly thirty years after his death. But he did have existing family, as I discovered in a submission to the French philosophical journal, Revue de métaphysique et de morale, by an academic named Pe Trensic “…I am attracted to the notion of Fleisher as a figure who haunts our culture, as Jim Frey noted in his critical study. While my doctoral thesis, The Appropriator’s Pen: Pinchus Fleisher and the Modality of the Stolen, focused on the transgressive art at the core of Fleisher’s poetry, my latest work, Pinchus Fleisher: A Mensch in Goy’s Clothing, details a year in Fleisher’s life, drawing on interviews with Fleisher’s son, Morrie Fleisher.” A quick online search allowed me to discover Morrie Fleisher’s email address, and I reached out to him. We struck up an amiable online correspondence as I explained my interest in his father. Morrie was gracious throughout, seemed both intrigued and pleased by my inquiries; he claimed he recalled hearing something of my humiliation. He was familiar with the criticisms levelled at his father but, of course, sided with the admirers, the extollers, those who—he believed—recognized Pinchus’s work for the artistry it was, the post-modern critique of poetic form, the ironic deconstruction of “originality.” “My father was ahead of his time,” Morrie told me. “He has already outmaneuvered those who denounce him. Their inability to understand his work is precisely what informs his genius.” We realized quickly that, by a remarkable coincidence, we lived three hours apart. I asked Morrie if we could meet for lunch. Five days later, we found ourselves sitting across the table from each other at a Denny’s 90 minutes north of my apartment. He was overweight, like me—but unlike me he had suffered no professional setbacks, was married, had three daughters, attended shul with regularity, seemed happy in all ways. He ordered a Reuben; I had the chicken fried steak. He told me he’d seen my book but did not offer an opinion on it; and in that I became convinced—in a way I hadn’t allowed myself to conceive during our online chats—that Morrie Fleisher disdained me, that he considered me of an order much inferior to his father. I was a liar, his father was an artist. I told silly tales, his father critiqued an entire form. Morrie and I spoke for 45 minutes, wound our way through the expected territory. But what I wanted most—to discover if his father was conscious of his appropriations—Morrie could not provide, would not provide, so wedded was he to the notion of Pinchus as a literary god. I should have expected this. I felt hopeless, foolish. I watched self-satisfied Morrie Fleisher eat his Reuben, watched him lap up his sauerkraut and Russian dressing. He exuded so much smug satisfaction, I felt overcome by bitterness, then rage. He showed me a picture of his wife and daughters; he took a call from a friend 30 minutes into our lunch, a jovial exchange where Morrie alluded to some investment he and his pal had going. It was all much, much more than I could bear. A notion came to me, something unbidden, redemptive, and impulsive: I could expunge my shame through Morrie’s death. I was, in fact, overcome by the notion that I could cast off my disgrace by killing Pinchus Fleisher’s son. When Morrie excused himself to use the bathroom, I followed two minutes later and, surprising him in his stall, strangled him. Fondly, Cousin Sheldon |
Sheldon’s account ended there. And while it’s true my cousin published My Year of Theft in 1998, with denunciation following immediately; and while the Fleisher Wikipedia excerpt in Sheldon’s note had been reproduced essentially intact, the murder of Morrie Fleisher is pure concoction. A brief web search confirmed that Morrie Fleisher, a practicing podiatrist in Allegheny, is, indeed, the only son of Pinchus Fleisher and is still very much alive. What had led my cousin to spin this fantasy and share it with me, a cousin he’d met on only two occasions?
I confess I’d never heard of Pinchus Fleisher or his work, and so, after puzzling briefly over Sheldon’s message, I reviewed Fleisher’s complete Wikipedia entry and, in the “References” section, was led to an online article from the March 2002 edition of The Pacific Monthly entitled “The Plagiarist at Rest” by Cliff Irving. The piece began as follows:
I confess I’d never heard of Pinchus Fleisher or his work, and so, after puzzling briefly over Sheldon’s message, I reviewed Fleisher’s complete Wikipedia entry and, in the “References” section, was led to an online article from the March 2002 edition of The Pacific Monthly entitled “The Plagiarist at Rest” by Cliff Irving. The piece began as follows:
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Early in 1989, Matthew McCarthy read a poem in the journal Liber X that carried with it a bouquet of familiarity—at first faint, and then strong, stronger, strongest. The poem, Pinchus Fleisher's "With Ocelot," began like this:
I'm slinging in an ocelot this time. I won't mention that bruised down-and-out beside the tunnel, the frown he gives as day turns into night, the purple sky. It's all been done and like you said, it's kind of overplayed. I need an ocelot with a dust-shagged mane and sooted snout. I'll have him wander gracefully through the empty white page. McCarthy was struck by the resemblance of this poem to his own "With Horse," published in C-Onan a couple of years before. You be the judge: This time I'm slinging in a horse. I won't mention that bruised down-and-out beside the bridge, the smile he gives as day turns into night, the orange sky. It's all been done and like you said, it's kind of overplayed. I need a horse with a dust-shagged mane and sooted snout. I'll have him wander graceful through the page. Beyond the title and a few altered words in the first five lines, one is hard pressed to find differences. Fleisher makes two additional changes in the final line of this stanza, both terrible: the elongation of “graceful” to the adverb louses up both the rhythm and the charm, and the insertion of “empty white" is a fool's amendment. As revisionist, Fleisher is bungling; as plagiarist, immensely successful. Whatever the quality of his changes, the remarkable fact is that he makes hardly any. After altering the title and the first line, doubtless to escape detection by way of searches, Fleisher simply fiddles with the line breaks and every so often slaps down a synonym. McCarthy had the dizzying sense of looking into a mirror only to behold Pinchus Fleisher. Still reeling, he soon caught up with Fleisher, again and repeatedly, in a growing number of respectable poetry journals: Fleisher’s "Ocelot Slinging," "My Ornery Ocelot," and "Ocelot’s Orneriness,” for instance, were identical to "With Ocelot," which, you will recall, was just about identical to McCarthy’s "With Horse." Fleisher was, as it were, plagiarizing himself plagiarizing McCarthy. Looking in other journals, McCarthy found Fleisher’s "Kneecap, 1964," "That Old ’64 Kneecap," and "1964: A Kneecap for Mary" all copies of a poem by McCarthy entitled “Bones of the Season." Fleisher—deceased by then, his work published posthumously by his estate—turns out to have been something of a blazing human Xerox machine, this despite the fame of his best-known work, “Paradelle for Edie Schlifmann”: The widow, wise, beckons stone dogs The widow, wise, beckons stone dogs We forget the silence of grace, the solace of mediation We forget the silence of grace, the solace of mediation Wise silence beckons the grace of the dogs Mediation: the widow of the stone. We forget solace I, alone with you, fear nothing, await the reason I, alone with you, fear nothing, await the reason The clean heavens, facts skewed, a sound that never begins The clean heavens, facts skewed, a sound that never begins Nothing clean, I await, the skewed heavens never fear you Alone with the reason, facts, a sound that begins Pain falls, a curtain of silver, obscuring the plain Pain falls, a curtain of silver, obscuring the plain I watch and wait: nothingness, an absence of the divide I watch and wait: nothingness, an absence of the divide A curtain falls, obscuring the divide—I wait and watch An absence of pain, the plain silver of: nothingness We wait, forget nothing, mediation begins, a widow falls The solace of pain beckons the divide The silver stone obscuring the heavens I await the clean facts of the dogs, an absence of a curtain of sound Skewed grace—I watch and never fear you The wise plain, that reason, alone with nothingness: the silence |
I removed my gaze from my computer screen at this point, overcome by a novel strain of bewilderment: Every line of this poem, I realized, differed from the poem I’d read in my cousin’s note and on the Fleisher Wikipedia page.
I examined the rest of the Pacific article—which glided into considerations of plagiarism in general—but I mostly just skimmed after the paradelle. The alternate version of the poem it offered was, in fact, even more nonsensical than the original—if original that other was. I await the clean facts of the dogs? What did that mean? What did any of it mean, for that matter? The widow, wise, beckons stone dogs?
I continued my online search on Fleisher’s paradelle and found the two contending versions of it strewn across various sites. There was, in fact, a vigorous debate among bloggers and various posters regarding the primacy of the versions, some stating “the Wikipedia version” (as I’ll call it) was the authentic Fleisher-penned poem, while others offered evidence that Irving’s Pacific version was the true one (detractors indicated an inattentive typesetter was responsible for the magazine’s error-riddled alternate version). A handful of commentators even claimed Irving’s article was itself a plagiarism of a James Kincaid article that appeared in The New Yorker in 1997 and that featured another poet completely.
A fact was slowly clarifying for me. In all the online back-and-forth I’d worked through, “Paradelle” was the one poem of Pinchus Fleisher’s no one was able to connect to a source. In the entire Fleisher body of work, “Paradelle” stood out as the sole original (maybe) creation of the poet himself, the one piece he had not (perhaps) in some way stolen and reworked. There was plenty of speculation on this, with some commentators supposing the source poem simply remained undiscovered, was still out there waiting to be found. Others guessed Fleisher had simply stolen the poem outright from someone who never came forward, and so it was in fact the ultimate plagiaristic act in that it was a wholesale theft. It was apparent to me, though, across even a cursory examination of commentary on “Paradelle,” that it was unique in style, the most un-Fleisher-like of all his poems; though, given the nature of Fleisher’s artistry, founded on fabrication and pilfering, it was hard to know what his unique style was or if he had one. Fleisher’s only “style,” it seemed, was imitation, and whether this was irony on Fleisher’s part or commentary or mental imbalance remain open questions. Whatever the case, there were two versions of his famous poem, and no one seemed to know which one was “real.”
I continued to dig, eventually discovering a .pdf of Fleisher’s poem that purported to be an authentic copy of the handwritten original and that aligned with the Wikipedia version. At the bottom of the document was a watermark-ish imprint: “summapathologica.com.” I navigated to the site and found a blog with over 80 entries (and no seeming connection to the Fleisher document), all of which, inexplicably, followed St. Thomas’s template—three objections, a counter-statement, the argument, and then rebuttals to the objections—and none of which had any attribution or identifying features. The site was simply 82 entries in the Summa Theologica vein authored over two-and-a-half years, with no additional information or context. An entry from mid-2006 cast me into an even more disorienting rabbit’s hole:
I examined the rest of the Pacific article—which glided into considerations of plagiarism in general—but I mostly just skimmed after the paradelle. The alternate version of the poem it offered was, in fact, even more nonsensical than the original—if original that other was. I await the clean facts of the dogs? What did that mean? What did any of it mean, for that matter? The widow, wise, beckons stone dogs?
I continued my online search on Fleisher’s paradelle and found the two contending versions of it strewn across various sites. There was, in fact, a vigorous debate among bloggers and various posters regarding the primacy of the versions, some stating “the Wikipedia version” (as I’ll call it) was the authentic Fleisher-penned poem, while others offered evidence that Irving’s Pacific version was the true one (detractors indicated an inattentive typesetter was responsible for the magazine’s error-riddled alternate version). A handful of commentators even claimed Irving’s article was itself a plagiarism of a James Kincaid article that appeared in The New Yorker in 1997 and that featured another poet completely.
A fact was slowly clarifying for me. In all the online back-and-forth I’d worked through, “Paradelle” was the one poem of Pinchus Fleisher’s no one was able to connect to a source. In the entire Fleisher body of work, “Paradelle” stood out as the sole original (maybe) creation of the poet himself, the one piece he had not (perhaps) in some way stolen and reworked. There was plenty of speculation on this, with some commentators supposing the source poem simply remained undiscovered, was still out there waiting to be found. Others guessed Fleisher had simply stolen the poem outright from someone who never came forward, and so it was in fact the ultimate plagiaristic act in that it was a wholesale theft. It was apparent to me, though, across even a cursory examination of commentary on “Paradelle,” that it was unique in style, the most un-Fleisher-like of all his poems; though, given the nature of Fleisher’s artistry, founded on fabrication and pilfering, it was hard to know what his unique style was or if he had one. Fleisher’s only “style,” it seemed, was imitation, and whether this was irony on Fleisher’s part or commentary or mental imbalance remain open questions. Whatever the case, there were two versions of his famous poem, and no one seemed to know which one was “real.”
I continued to dig, eventually discovering a .pdf of Fleisher’s poem that purported to be an authentic copy of the handwritten original and that aligned with the Wikipedia version. At the bottom of the document was a watermark-ish imprint: “summapathologica.com.” I navigated to the site and found a blog with over 80 entries (and no seeming connection to the Fleisher document), all of which, inexplicably, followed St. Thomas’s template—three objections, a counter-statement, the argument, and then rebuttals to the objections—and none of which had any attribution or identifying features. The site was simply 82 entries in the Summa Theologica vein authored over two-and-a-half years, with no additional information or context. An entry from mid-2006 cast me into an even more disorienting rabbit’s hole:
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#79
Whether it matters that My Year of Theft is a fabrication? Objection 1. It would seem that it’s a big deal that My Year of Theft is a fabrication, because when the news broke that the author actually made the whole thing up and none of it had really happened, people said they felt lied to because the book had been billed as non-fiction. Objection 2. Further, if a book is supposed to recount real events, then someone reading it expects that everything in the book happened in real life, because “non-fiction” means the writer is simply reporting the objective facts as they actually occurred. Objection 3. Further, if a writer describes something and claims he lived through it, it means the world works a certain way; but if the whole thing is made up, then the world really doesn’t work that way, so the possibilities for reality maybe aren’t what the writer made them seem. On the contrary, It has been said, “Fiction’s about what it is to be a human being,” so maybe the most important truths are in fiction rather than non-fiction, and so even if someone makes something up and tries to pass it off as “real,” it can still contain truths that might be more valid than something found in a work of non-fiction. I answer that, Non-fiction generally tries to present itself as “the way things actually happened,” but when you think about how flawed and selective our memories are, it’s impossible that anyone could write something “objective” or “actual” in any way. It’s more likely they’re just presenting an imaginative version of an experience (and saying more about their own ego or their desire to present themselves in a certain way). When someone writes a memoir with a bunch of details from when they were ten years old—like what their father said or how a room was decorated or what a summer day felt like—I’m convinced it’s all fabricated aside from a kernel of memory. The rest is made up—but because it’s from “memory” we call it credible and actual and label it “non-fiction.” I’m positive most of it is imaginary. Reply to Objection 1. See my note just above—everyone lies when they write, and the biggest liars are the people who call their work “real,” and then delude themselves and their readers with that claim. Reply to Objection 2. If a reader thinks what they’re reading in a work of non-fiction is real, the joke is on them and they deserve to be duped. Reply to Objection 3. Fiction and imagination open up broader possibilities. You might have only a narrow set of experiences in your real life, but when you read about something fictional—something that never happened—it creates a path for you to follow. And I’m eternally grateful I came across Aaron Schlifmann’s My Year of Theft, because it has opened so many new paths for me. |
I was, at this point, completely disoriented. My Year of Theft was written by my cousin Sheldon Guterson, not Aaron Schlifmann—a person not so incidentally bearing the same last name as the woman to whom Pinchus Fleisher dedicated his famous poem, the one I’d spent a good part of my day investigating.
I initiated the inevitable search on Aaron Schlifmann and discovered little beyond compact biographical details attached to listings for his books, one of which was entitled, as it turned out, My Fear of Heft. All came into focus: there had been a transcription error at some point, and this accounted for a confusion that had somehow overlapped with the story of Pinchus Fleisher. Aaron Schlifmann drew my interest, though, as I learned he’d been one of the dimmest stars in the literary firmament across the thirty-plus years of a career that petered out in the mid-1990s. Of his five works, only My Fear of Heft seemed to have gained much traction among readers; a few copies were available on Amazon, whereas his other books appeared to have dropped almost out of existence. I examined the Amazon listing for the out-of-print My Fear of Heft; it was ranked in the low seven-millions, was published in 1986, and had earned zero customer reviews. It featured only a single unattributed editorial appraisal, as follows:
I initiated the inevitable search on Aaron Schlifmann and discovered little beyond compact biographical details attached to listings for his books, one of which was entitled, as it turned out, My Fear of Heft. All came into focus: there had been a transcription error at some point, and this accounted for a confusion that had somehow overlapped with the story of Pinchus Fleisher. Aaron Schlifmann drew my interest, though, as I learned he’d been one of the dimmest stars in the literary firmament across the thirty-plus years of a career that petered out in the mid-1990s. Of his five works, only My Fear of Heft seemed to have gained much traction among readers; a few copies were available on Amazon, whereas his other books appeared to have dropped almost out of existence. I examined the Amazon listing for the out-of-print My Fear of Heft; it was ranked in the low seven-millions, was published in 1986, and had earned zero customer reviews. It featured only a single unattributed editorial appraisal, as follows:
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A collection of twelve uneven stories depicting dramatic moral crises, from the author of such disturbing novels as The Juggler’s Trachea (1975) and Implant #21 (1981). “Without God, the universe makes as much sense as the Ramanga’s intestines,” intones a peripheral character in the titular leading story, a tale about a mythical king’s attendant whose duty it is to consume every product of the royal’s body. Imagine John Waters concocting the plot of The Magus, and you'll have some idea of how Schlifmann’s inchoate constructions tease the mind. “The Last Brunch,” for example, alludes mockingly to Jonathan Livingston Seagull while presenting an alcoholic photographer’s final meal with the members of a witches’ coven. “The Spanking of Ronnie Fernstrom” patiently constructs a superb characterization of an incompetent public defender redeemed by his defense of a ruthless Venezuelan pimp, only to throw it all away in a double surprise ending that falls completely flat. At his best, Schlifmann stuns the reader with powerful conceptions fleshed out in meticulous, reverberant detail. “The Poltergeist Tormenting Mrs. Marley’s Maiden Aunt” describes the mission of a bounty hunter in Siberia, assigned to locate the killer of a former nun, who becomes the subject of a poem that reveals the sources of his own psychosomatic ailments. And “Five Pigeons in a Well” ingeniously juxtaposes a Chicago baker’s heroic effort to thwart his café’s sale to a donut chain with the ordeal of his 18th-century Lebanese ancestor, a casualty of a syphilis epidemic. Despite occasional misfires, this is a rich, exciting book and an impressive further step in the career of Aaron Schlifmann, who now firmly seizes the literary mantle from his father, the prolific iconoclast, Irving Schlifmann.
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A quick search turned up almost nothing about pater Schlifmann, but I clicked on the most promising result—an entry in the online “Aquinas College Encyclopedia of Philosophy”—and landed on the following:
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Irving Schlifmann (April 2, 1901 to September 23, 1981) was a minor figure in the Parisian psychoanalytic community during the first half of the twentieth century before turning against the Freudian school to promote an early method of anti-psychiatry. A proponent of free love and sexual libertinism, Schlifmann was greatly influenced by the philosophies of Max Stirner, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Henri Bergson and the political theories of Mikhail Bakunin. Before emigrating to the United States at the outbreak of World War Two, he developed a nihilistic strain of depth psychology, constructed a “libertine studio” at the utopian Ascona community, and adopted the proto-feminist theories of Johann Jakob Bachofen. The last two decades of his life were spent primarily in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he became a follower of a neo-Zoroastrian movement begun by messianic claimant Preston Crevalle while pursuing increasingly controversial experiments with psychotropic drugs, vegan-based diets, and group chanting. A persistent rumor connects Schlifmann with author and philosopher Vera Bund during a period in the late-1940s when both were associated with Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and his development of so-called “orgone accumulators.” Schlifmann was gradually ostracized from the wider scientific community and became a voluminous self-publisher; he died penniless.
His writings, marked by a challenging rhetorical style and often criticized for their heavy reliance on plagiarized material, explore the damaging significance of Freud's research into the unconscious, the matriarchal foundations of primitive societies, the so-called “hierarchy of digestion,” and the efficacy of “Biodynamic Therapy” in the relief of constipation. Particularly for those interested in the philosophical dimensions of anarchist social-sexual therapeutic modalities, Schlifmann’s oeuvre is invaluable. His best-known books include Entropic Digestion: Concerning Specific Forms of Anal-Retention (1933), Eternity, Repression, and the Science of Neuralgia: Genitality in Swedenborgian-Influenced Gestalt Therapy (1938) and Listen, Flaccid Man! (1962). Contents 1 Early life 1.1 Childhood 1.2 Suicide of parents 2 1918–1939: Paris 2.1 Undergraduate studies 2.2 Introduction to Freud 2.3 First marriage, graduation 2.4 Gonad replacement studies 2.5 Rest cure in Switzerland 2.6 Sex-Union movement 2.7 Rest cure in Portugal 2.8 “The Promise of a Libertine Utopia” 2.9 Visit to Soviet Union 3 1939–1948: Boston 3.1 Spermatology and Neurosis: Studies in Bion Physics 3.2 Character Analysis 3.3 Rest cure in Palm Springs 3.4 End of first marriage 3.5 Veganism 4 1948–1961: Albany 4.1 Wilhelm Reich; orgonomy 4.2 Rest cure in Tucson 4.3 Albert Einstein, restraining order 4.4 Holon experiments 4.5 Opposition to his ideas 4.6 Personal life 5 1961–1981: Milwaukee 5.1 Teaching, second marriage 5.2 Zoroastrianism, conversion 5.3 Experiments with “aurora borealis disruptor” 5.4 Rest cure in Salt Lake City 5.5 Primal Therapy 5.6 Literary circle 5.7 Arrest and imprisonment 6 1948–1981: Legal controversies 6.1 Theft article, FDA 6.2 Holon Infant Research Center 6.3 Divorce 6.4 Hurricane-chasing 6.4 Injunction 6.5 UFO “tourism” 6.6 Contempt of court 6.7 Book burning 6.8 Imprisonment 6.9 Death 7 Reception and legacy 7.1 Psychotherapy 7.2 Humanities 7.3 Popular culture 7.4 Science 8 Works 9 See also 10 Sources 10.1 Notes 10.2 Citations 10.3 Bibliography 10.4 Further reading |
I skimmed the article—which was much briefer than its colorful outline suggests—and clicked on Schlifmann’s bibliography. This took me to the following list, whose contents seemed disconnected from the biography I’d just studied and referenced another author altogether:
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Major Books and Articles by Harold Schlifmann
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Aaron Schlifmann, Irving Schlifmann, and now Harold Schlifmann, the latter of whom was a black hole, I discovered, until I backtracked a bit and ran a search on the so-called “messianic claimant Preston Crevalle” mentioned in the article on Irving Schlifmann and found the following—once again in the online Aquinas College encyclopedia:
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Preston Crevalle (January 19, 1919? to October 26, 1981) ran a de facto salon in his Milwaukee apartment from roughly 1949 through 1981, delivering occasional Zoroastrian-themed lectures, hosting “beer tastings” after Braves and Brewers games, coordinating poker competitions among his friends, and providing open-ended stays to several itinerant literary mavericks, including postmodern author Harold Schlifmann and experimental poet Pinchus Fleisher, who together translated A Hundred Authors Against Einstein into English at Crevalle’s request, an effort completed in 1959.
Schlifmann initially indicated enthusiasm for the translation; out of a curious intersection with Einstein a decade earlier, Schlifmann retained an interest in undermining him given Einstein’s lack of interest for his research into “the effects of Holon Therapy on pre-adolescents.” The two men had met in 1946 at Einstein’s Princeton home, and Schlifmann had attempted to convince him of the potential military benefits of his findings. Shortly thereafter, Einstein terminated all communication with Schlifmann, a professional insult Schlifmann described in his essay “The Physicist as Chronic Onanist: Albert Einstein and the Psychopathology of Envy-Neurosis.” As a tantalizing side-note, Pinchus Fleisher was, by all accounts, obsessed with Crevalle’s “Hamantaschen Sermons: My Purim Memories” series. |
I ran a search on “Hamantaschen Sermons: My Purim Memories” and landed on a 55-page document that appeared to be a transcribed collection of addresses by Preston Crevalle, identified as the Second Protector of the Neo-Zoroastrian movement. I examined Crevalle’s transcripts and allowed my eyes to skate—and on page 43 of this chloroforming, semi-coherent album I noticed the following:
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And in my dream, this is what I told that godless unbeliever, Emmanuel Bernstein: That his widow was wise to reckon the stolen dogs were forgotten in the alliance of the race. It was the sole remediation of my dialogue! Win few! Fear nothing! Wait for treason! The dear heavens, aces hewn, a round that ever sings: “Maine calls!” A dirt-road, a sliver, not fearing the pain. Eyes watch, wait: nothingness, a sense to deride.
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With slight mental jiggling, I realized the primary lines of Pinchus Fleisher’s masterwork were derivable from this atrocity. In a single day, without intending, I’d uncovered Fleisher’s source material in an obscure diatribe by a pseudo-religion’s forgotten guru. I might have stopped there. Who, though, was Emmanuel Bernstein, the apparent audience for Crevalle’s ravings? This was the connection I needed to understand.
An online search turned up a single work by Bernstein entitled Unclear, Bereft: A Memoir (the words jangled in my head: My Year of Theft; My Fear of Heft; Unclear, Bereft) and found a reference to the volume in the collections of a handful of libraries in seemingly random locations: Porto, Utrecht, Santiago, Cincinnati, and Tiruchirappalli. I navigated to the WorldCat site and found that the book was missing from the first four libraries on my list; the only public institution in the world, apparently, where Emmanuel Bernstein’s memoir existed was in the collection of Tiruchirappalli’s St. Joseph’s College 200 miles south of Chennai. I clicked to their site, found a handy “Digital Library” menu, and located Bernstein’s book within seconds. To my amazement, the entire thing appeared to have been scanned and was available for online viewing: I could read Unclear, Bereft.
Within five minutes I realized I had no hope of getting through the work. A typical sentence: “My father, let all who might object (and these are legion, as my only uncle, my father’s brother Chaim, informed me—this upon consuming his fill of my vodka) note, and note well, had completed his compulsory service with honor (it is the “with honor” that must be noted!) before I had reached my third year (of life), and so it seems most likely to me that on the day in question he had donned his regalia—sash, medallions, peaked cap, shiny and very squeaky boots (I recall well the squeak they gave off)—in jest or in remembrance or perhaps simply to annoy my mother, with whom he bickered ceaselessly until the fateful incident with the potato peeler (of which, more to come).”
I wondered how even one copy of this book had come into existence.
I skimmed, clicking ahead at a good clip to see if anything interesting turned up; my eyes scanned each passing page but essentially dodged the mess of incidents Bernstein narrated: his career as a lawyer, his interest in games and puzzles, his contributions to mathematics, his obsession with the chess-like Grant Acedrex. Bernstein skated over the parts I’d guess would be compelling—his war experiences, his reinvention as a successful businessman and game creator—relegating these to passing pronouncements (“I escaped danger in miraculous fashion, as has been related elsewhere.”; “And so, sparing the details, I became a millionaire as if by miracle.”; “Miraculously, I created Stratix, as others have documented; it was a miracle.”). The book was a fiasco—uninteresting and unilluminating. Until I came to page 243, roughly four-fifths in. There I found, essentially disconnected from the preceding narrative, the following:
An online search turned up a single work by Bernstein entitled Unclear, Bereft: A Memoir (the words jangled in my head: My Year of Theft; My Fear of Heft; Unclear, Bereft) and found a reference to the volume in the collections of a handful of libraries in seemingly random locations: Porto, Utrecht, Santiago, Cincinnati, and Tiruchirappalli. I navigated to the WorldCat site and found that the book was missing from the first four libraries on my list; the only public institution in the world, apparently, where Emmanuel Bernstein’s memoir existed was in the collection of Tiruchirappalli’s St. Joseph’s College 200 miles south of Chennai. I clicked to their site, found a handy “Digital Library” menu, and located Bernstein’s book within seconds. To my amazement, the entire thing appeared to have been scanned and was available for online viewing: I could read Unclear, Bereft.
Within five minutes I realized I had no hope of getting through the work. A typical sentence: “My father, let all who might object (and these are legion, as my only uncle, my father’s brother Chaim, informed me—this upon consuming his fill of my vodka) note, and note well, had completed his compulsory service with honor (it is the “with honor” that must be noted!) before I had reached my third year (of life), and so it seems most likely to me that on the day in question he had donned his regalia—sash, medallions, peaked cap, shiny and very squeaky boots (I recall well the squeak they gave off)—in jest or in remembrance or perhaps simply to annoy my mother, with whom he bickered ceaselessly until the fateful incident with the potato peeler (of which, more to come).”
I wondered how even one copy of this book had come into existence.
I skimmed, clicking ahead at a good clip to see if anything interesting turned up; my eyes scanned each passing page but essentially dodged the mess of incidents Bernstein narrated: his career as a lawyer, his interest in games and puzzles, his contributions to mathematics, his obsession with the chess-like Grant Acedrex. Bernstein skated over the parts I’d guess would be compelling—his war experiences, his reinvention as a successful businessman and game creator—relegating these to passing pronouncements (“I escaped danger in miraculous fashion, as has been related elsewhere.”; “And so, sparing the details, I became a millionaire as if by miracle.”; “Miraculously, I created Stratix, as others have documented; it was a miracle.”). The book was a fiasco—uninteresting and unilluminating. Until I came to page 243, roughly four-fifths in. There I found, essentially disconnected from the preceding narrative, the following:
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It was in 1963 that I received a letter from Pinchus Fleisher regarding his visit to the American Southwest. The entire text of the letter I reproduce here:
August 26, 1963 Dear Emmanuel, I want to explain the incident in Colorado in mid-June I alluded to last week when we spoke over dinner. Here are the events. I had been driving for six hours—since before noon—when I turned onto an aspen-lined spur to Lodeville, got out of my car for what I expected would be two minutes, and spotted The Swimmer. I think of him that way—“The Swimmer"—because "The Man Treading Water” is inelegant. I had a roadside history with me, and in that book I learned that Lodeville (current population seven) had, sixty years before, been a boomtown of five brothels, four blocks of boardwalk, three hotels, and nine eateries. I've always been intrigued, even heartened, by grandeur lost—I’m reassured by such evidence of scales balanced because it confirms that success is never sustained, and, more to the purpose, failure never eternal. Permanence frightens me—it looms too inert, too brutal. Lodeville seemed like a reasonably compelling late-afternoon detour. Ten miles up the road, having encountered not a single other vehicle, I pulled over and allowed my Impala to tick away while I relieved myself in a tangle of willows. I was shooing the mosquitoes from my face when I spotted, a half-mile to the east and through a mesh of aspen, a pond set like a bare quarter of blue earth amidst the surrounding pale grass. It nestled in a modest depression, a dip undergirded by an arm of the basalt outcropping behind, as though some rocky bowl lay buried beneath the accumulated topsoil. The pond was, clearly, deep. More to the point, though, there was someone treading water at its center. I stared; a head—a man's, with dark and matted hair—bobbed languidly, like a buoy riding low waves. Something in this—the thought of an isolate rancher, some solitary cattle-man taking in a cooling late-afternoon swim—made me glad. The day was plenty warm still—this area of southern Colorado was merciless—hot and wide and windless, full of a smooth hush and the calm of remote places. I envied that man his simple exercise, his pleasure in that patch of water on his plot as I watched, hidden and distant. Five minutes later I was still watching. He hadn't moved from the center of the pond. I cut the engine and continued to gaze, certain The Swimmer would, at any moment, incline toward a side and kick his way over. This didn’t happen, even after fifteen minutes. My mind ran to speculation on his motives. Exercise? Relief of joint ache? I was puzzled by the scene, intrigued. I got behind the wheel of my car and began to drive slowly, scanning for the first turnoff; and when I found it, I steered down the rutted lane and toward the pond. A ten-wide that had been obscured by trees from my vantage on the road sat on a low bluff south of the pond; as I approached—rousing a mist of dust—I studied the trailer for signs of habitation. I stopped twenty yards from the pond, pulled the key from the ignition, and waited. No one came out of the house. I opened my door and stood before my car. The Swimmer continued to tread water, his face turned away from me in unintentional defiance, silent rebuff. And then I considered that maybe it wasn’t accidental at all, that he was deliberately communicating his solitariness, his obstinacy, his inaccessible isolation. From my overlook on the road he'd been little more than a distant curiosity, a fragment of the environment, like an eagle spied through binoculars. Now he was before me but willfully separate, intent on showing me the back of his head. His arms were two yellowish and rippling spokes caressing the dark water just below the surface. But his face was hidden. I was discomfited—How often do you encounter someone who resolutely turns his back on you? I added this in with the duration of his swim—at least twenty minutes from the moment I'd first seen him—and decided something was wrong. "Good afternoon," I called, raising a hand in greeting, as though expecting the man to turn around. Nothing. He continued as before, treading silently. "You all right?" I stood, waited for some sign of acknowledgement, some recognition of my presence. Still, nothing. I looked at the trailer, noticed how bad off it was: rust leaching from its rivets, spongy skirting, tattered window-screens. I walked to the pond—it was maybe forty yards in diameter—and paced its edge, moving unhurriedly, watching The Swimmer. As I came within range of his peripheral vision, he flicked his arms and jerked his head so that his back was to me again. I stopped. He didn’t want me to see his face, a realization that struck me with the force of absolute rejection. I'd entertained, briefly, the notion that he was deaf, that he'd not heard me, that his averted face was only a coincidence. But now I understood he wanted to avoid me—or, rather, have me avoid him—that his swimming, his presence, his existence should be beyond my purview: I was an encroacher. "You all right?" I called again, wishing to signal my benignity, confirm the selflessness of my interest, emphasize that I was a Good Samaritan. Nothing. Twilight was still hours away, but the sun was lowering and the light was golden and gentle, fired the fringe of aspen with an outline of clear yellow. The shadows were just beginning to grasp; the air was glassy and still. I watched The Swimmer; his hands broke the surface a couple of times with a hollow noise that was unbearably lonely. The water rippled gently. I walked to the edge of the pond. "Hello," I said softly, thought to communicate with my tone that I was attempting a new approach. He simply continued treading water, kept his back to me. I told him my name, explained that I'd seen him from the road. I told him I'd driven down just to make sure he was all right. Still nothing. He was unreachable. He couldn't really be treading water, I thought. All this time? I guessed he must be touching bottom. His hands slid across the surface, pressed down. “My name is Mendel Guterson,” he said softly, his voice a monotone. “What?” I said. He flicked at the water, kept his face averted. “Mendel Guterson,” he repeated. “I write poetry. Do you like to read poems?” What to say? “I do.” And then: “What sort of poems do you write?” “Ones written by other poets.” “I’m not following.” I glanced around pointedly, hoping The Swimmer might register this speculative surveying in his peripheral vision. “Maybe you could come out and explain?” “I refashion,” he said. “Hubris. Appropriation. Theft.” “I don’t understand.” The Swimmer said nothing. In fact, he drifted a few feet closer to the far shore, and in this I understood he was dismissing me. An even deeper silence descended. Burnt grass, frayed fence-lines, outcroppings, the dilapidated trailer: all seemed fixed in somnolent afternoon heat. “I don’t understand,” I repeated, but he remained silent a long while until I said, “I’d better get going.” With that, I left The Swimmer to himself and approached the trailer. There was no sound from inside, no motion. I waited for two or three minutes and then got in my car. After I started it, I waited a moment, thinking the sound of my engine might arouse The Swimmer’s interest. Nothing. He remained in his pond. I drove up to the main road and stopped at Lodeville for fifteen minutes, which proved a waste of time—I may as well have swung by the block of condemned homes north of my place in Milwaukee, as interesting as it was. I camped at Pine Grove that evening, as planned, and the next day I continued on, reaching Los Angeles two days later. Please share this with Sheldon someday. --Pinchus |
I moved ahead in Emmanuel Bernstein’s book, but there appeared to be no additional mention of Pinchus Fleisher’s letter or, indeed, of Pinchus Fleisher himself. Or Mendel Guterson (no record of whom exists). Or Sheldon Guterson, for that matter. The letter stood out so obviously, I felt certain it was a clue, a note dropped at the scene of the crime, a challenge to the reader. To me.
What does any of this tell me about Sheldon? I don’t know; there’s no certainty there. But I had followed the path—the entire day, in fact. I had moved forward on the trail. I’d discovered things. What I realized, however, was that my motivations for making the effort remained opaque—to myself, that is. Which must be obvious. Who else might know?
What does any of this tell me about Sheldon? I don’t know; there’s no certainty there. But I had followed the path—the entire day, in fact. I had moved forward on the trail. I’d discovered things. What I realized, however, was that my motivations for making the effort remained opaque—to myself, that is. Which must be obvious. Who else might know?
Ben Guterson's writing includes the Edgar Award-nominated middle-grade novel Winterhouse (Holt/Macmillan) and the New York Times bestseller The World-Famous Nine (Little, Brown/Hachette). His stories have appeared in several literary journals, including Burningword, BlazeVOX, Superpresent, Funicular, and SORTES.
