What Can I Do?
What can any of us do now that the age-old poetic quest for beauty and meaning among the diffuse remains of past cultures has been eclipsed by worldwide crises we face each day, leaving our lives besieged by the explosive and often ugly changes they beget? What fragments are left to us to shore against our ruins in a culture more absorbed in itself and its self-image than in piecing back together the broken relics of past civilizations to reflect elements of our present life in a mirror of memory? Or has the mirror been forgotten or worse, replaced with a cheap facsimile, a narcissistic, or hedonistic, replica of a reality that was and no more exists? And has Hieronymo gone mad again?
These oblique allusions to the work of two poets of voluntary exile, Eliot and Pound, who faced intense conflicts as a result of historical and artistic changes, resonated in my mind as I remembered the dominant theme of many phone calls I received from John Ash in the years before he reluctantly forsook his beloved Istanbul for Manchester, the home he had left behind as a youth to seek a more agreeable milieu in New York in the company of poets he felt more at home with than those in the island of his birth. John’s new life in New York City had lasted for eleven years, during which time he built up his reputation with the help of such notable fellow poets as John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, with whom he formed close friendships.
The circumstances surrounding John’s move from NYC to Istanbul are rather murky, but must have been related to his five-week tour of Turkey in the early 90s, accompanied by a photographer, recounted in A Byzantine Journey. This beautifully written book exhibits John’s life-long passion for the subject matter and his deep insights into the controversies and mysteries underlying it. Published by I. B. Tauris and Random House in 1995, the book has already become a classic in the field of travel writing, along with the work of Gertrude Bell, Freya Stark, and others John admired and saw as forerunners and guides in his own journeys into the figurative and literal realms he explored as an amateur Byzantinist and uniquely gifted poet.
The question I heard John speak into my ear again and again during his last years in Istanbul, “What can I do?,” has echoed quizzically in my mind for the last decade, ever since our friendship dissolved as a result of John’s dissolution from alcoholism, which led to his increasingly irrational behavior and alienation from his circle of friends. It was a question that didn’t conduce to any sort of straightforward, practical answer relating to the real and ever more desperate circumstances John faced as the money he’d received from the sale of his apartment drained away and the buyer, who had agreed to allow John to remain for a time as a tenant, grew more and more irate as John obstinately refused to move out while the place fell into disrepair and the rent payments at last became contingent on John’s ability to borrow money from friends, who saved him from utter insolvency until they too left him to his apparently unavoidable fate.
John’s question, rather, was a more existential inquiry into his life as a poet and author who had arrived at an impasse in a world that seemed to be growing steadily more indifferent to the core values and concerns that gave his work its vitality and his life its essential raison d’être. I simply felt that I was listening to an earnest plea by a friend facing a serious dilemma in his life, and felt helpless to offer any viable answer or sensible solution, but only to say yes, I know what you mean and feel the same way. I did to some degree identify with John’s conflict but not as intensely as I might have were I as deeply and passionately involved in the interests that enlivened John’s imagination and gave his life its essential meaning. Or if those involvements were further complicated by my homosexuality and its ramifications in a highly traditional society that showed good-humored acceptance of it at best and religious condemnation toward it at worst.
While John loved Istanbul for its charm and historical aura, and while he did have a number of close friends and admirers of his writings, he lived a largely solitary life immersed in listening to cds of the music he loved and reading and rereading Turkish and Byzantine history. And, more and more, drinking, and less and less, writing. As he says in the first lines of the title poem of his final book In the Wake of the Day, “I want to get drunk to write so much that / I no longer know what I’m thinking and fall darkly asleep.” To those who knew John well and valued his friendship and his writing, it had become evident that the getting drunk part was triumphing over the writing part. And no one was able to shake his stubborn resolve to tread this destructive path to its seemingly preordained end.
These oblique allusions to the work of two poets of voluntary exile, Eliot and Pound, who faced intense conflicts as a result of historical and artistic changes, resonated in my mind as I remembered the dominant theme of many phone calls I received from John Ash in the years before he reluctantly forsook his beloved Istanbul for Manchester, the home he had left behind as a youth to seek a more agreeable milieu in New York in the company of poets he felt more at home with than those in the island of his birth. John’s new life in New York City had lasted for eleven years, during which time he built up his reputation with the help of such notable fellow poets as John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, with whom he formed close friendships.
The circumstances surrounding John’s move from NYC to Istanbul are rather murky, but must have been related to his five-week tour of Turkey in the early 90s, accompanied by a photographer, recounted in A Byzantine Journey. This beautifully written book exhibits John’s life-long passion for the subject matter and his deep insights into the controversies and mysteries underlying it. Published by I. B. Tauris and Random House in 1995, the book has already become a classic in the field of travel writing, along with the work of Gertrude Bell, Freya Stark, and others John admired and saw as forerunners and guides in his own journeys into the figurative and literal realms he explored as an amateur Byzantinist and uniquely gifted poet.
The question I heard John speak into my ear again and again during his last years in Istanbul, “What can I do?,” has echoed quizzically in my mind for the last decade, ever since our friendship dissolved as a result of John’s dissolution from alcoholism, which led to his increasingly irrational behavior and alienation from his circle of friends. It was a question that didn’t conduce to any sort of straightforward, practical answer relating to the real and ever more desperate circumstances John faced as the money he’d received from the sale of his apartment drained away and the buyer, who had agreed to allow John to remain for a time as a tenant, grew more and more irate as John obstinately refused to move out while the place fell into disrepair and the rent payments at last became contingent on John’s ability to borrow money from friends, who saved him from utter insolvency until they too left him to his apparently unavoidable fate.
John’s question, rather, was a more existential inquiry into his life as a poet and author who had arrived at an impasse in a world that seemed to be growing steadily more indifferent to the core values and concerns that gave his work its vitality and his life its essential raison d’être. I simply felt that I was listening to an earnest plea by a friend facing a serious dilemma in his life, and felt helpless to offer any viable answer or sensible solution, but only to say yes, I know what you mean and feel the same way. I did to some degree identify with John’s conflict but not as intensely as I might have were I as deeply and passionately involved in the interests that enlivened John’s imagination and gave his life its essential meaning. Or if those involvements were further complicated by my homosexuality and its ramifications in a highly traditional society that showed good-humored acceptance of it at best and religious condemnation toward it at worst.
While John loved Istanbul for its charm and historical aura, and while he did have a number of close friends and admirers of his writings, he lived a largely solitary life immersed in listening to cds of the music he loved and reading and rereading Turkish and Byzantine history. And, more and more, drinking, and less and less, writing. As he says in the first lines of the title poem of his final book In the Wake of the Day, “I want to get drunk to write so much that / I no longer know what I’m thinking and fall darkly asleep.” To those who knew John well and valued his friendship and his writing, it had become evident that the getting drunk part was triumphing over the writing part. And no one was able to shake his stubborn resolve to tread this destructive path to its seemingly preordained end.
*
John and I met in Istanbul in 1996 following a lecture he gave for the Archeometry Society at Boğaziçi University, and we began meeting regularly for dinner or drinks, or both, as he struggled to make ends meet while teaching part-time at Boğaziçi University, a position he lost as a result of a clash with the director of the English preparatory school. Not long after we met he gave me a copy of his first “Istanbul poem,” which would become the title poem of The Anatolikon, published in 1999 by Yapı Kredi Yayınları (Yapı Kredi Publishers), where he had been offered a job as a consultant. He held this position for several years, during which time his living expenses were underwritten by YKY and John traveled to lesser-known archaeological sites around Western and Southern Turkey (with me as his chauffeur since John had never learned to drive) doing research for a guide book commissioned by YKY, published in 2001 as Turkey: the Other Guide / Western and Southern Anatolia.
The seemingly charmed life John lived sheltered under the wing of admirers in Yapı Kredi’s cultural affairs office ended abruptly when he returned from a visa-renewal trip to England to discover that the book had been published without his knowledge, and moreover with 40 or so pages of text missing as a result of an editorial misunderstanding. When John notified his long-time friend Michael Schmidt, who headed Carcanet, John’s principal British publisher, of this miscarriage of literary justice, a fiery brouhaha between the British and Turkish publishers ensued which need not be detailed here except to say that it led to John’s definitive break from YKY. This fall from grace was cushioned by a couple of family inheritances John received, which allowed him to buy an apartment of his own in Galata and to live in it comfortably for some time, until those wells ran dry too as a result of John’s drinking and inability to support himself by other means. The unsustainable remuneration from his part-time work teaching at Kadir Has University and editing at Wordsmith — positions gained through friendly connections — ended as a result of a combination of John’s slow descent into the depths of alcoholism and Turkey’s economic crisis that dried up the editorial work. Previously John had relied solely on his work as a poet and writer to get by, freelancing for lucrative media sources such as the New York Times Travel Section and receiving grants and awards for his writing. He prided himself on not deigning to be identified as anything other than a writer, since he didn’t consider writing so declasse as to be called “work”; it was rather a higher calling integral to his personality and character. Therefore, when someone mentioned retirement, he often smiled smugly and replied that he’d always been retired.
*
While Istanbul does contain a great wealth of historical artifacts and retains its enchantment as an imperial capital, it has less to offer one devoted to keeping up with cutting-edge artistic developments and attending performances of works by modern composers. However, John’s love of Turkey and Istanbul that captivated him for almost two decades was rooted in his lifelong study of Byzantine history and culture and his love of the careless — verging on chaotic — aspect of Turkish society, reflected in the negligence it showed toward many of its ancient ruins, letting them lie in place as they had done for thousands of years rather than turning the city into a well planned and orderly open-air museum. This atmosphere of neglect and decay, conflated with his memory cache of highly selective and abstruse knowledge, served John and his writing well, and the poems he began to produce after his move to Istanbul testify to the artistic gains he reaped at the expense of more practical aspects of his life, which had always been at odds with his single-minded devotion to art and the vagaries of its various forms in which he had schooled himself and habitually wove as ciphers and leitmotifs through his own poems. His first book drawing on his life in Turkey, The Anatolikon, is a masterfully designed edition of a powerful series of poems focused on mourning the death of a sister and reconciling himself to it, accompanied by a series of mixed-media plates by Peter Hristoff that seem to relate symbiotically to the poems. It displays the trademark traits of his earlier work yet raises his writing to a new level, revealing the artistic maturity of the poet finally “coming into his own.” It also sets the stage for the three collections of poems relating mainly to Turkey and Istanbul that followed it and ended with In the Wake of the Day.
The title In the Wake of the Day is not only evocative of the sort of gloomy melancholia that John loved in Turkish music and saw as a commendable hallmark of the Turkish character, but also prescient in that it might be seen as a formal valediction foretelling the end of John’s “day” in Istanbul, during which he composed his best poems and then retired to “fall darkly asleep,” as he would actually do sometimes at the parties he occasionally hosted — disappearing into the bedroom of his flat while his guests continued to enjoy themselves and finally wandered off alone or in groups into the Beyoğlu night, where music from Roma, Rembetiko and Arabesque groups drifted from the windows and doorways of countless bars through the alleys and back streets of The City that John had paid homage to in the title and poems of a previous book.
The title In the Wake of the Day is not only evocative of the sort of gloomy melancholia that John loved in Turkish music and saw as a commendable hallmark of the Turkish character, but also prescient in that it might be seen as a formal valediction foretelling the end of John’s “day” in Istanbul, during which he composed his best poems and then retired to “fall darkly asleep,” as he would actually do sometimes at the parties he occasionally hosted — disappearing into the bedroom of his flat while his guests continued to enjoy themselves and finally wandered off alone or in groups into the Beyoğlu night, where music from Roma, Rembetiko and Arabesque groups drifted from the windows and doorways of countless bars through the alleys and back streets of The City that John had paid homage to in the title and poems of a previous book.
*
And yet I don’t believe that John’s question is entirely indicative of surrender to his alcoholism or the gloom and melancholy of his situation and environment. Remarks he made to his friends and acquaintances as he neared the end of his Istanbul sojourn indicate that he felt the depletion of his creative energy deeply and was, literally, at a loss for words — or that he lacked the means or desire to describe his feelings and his present state of mind. One evening when a group of us including a couple of foreign poets visiting Istanbul met at a restaurant near Galata, one asked if John was writing, and he spoke only to declare resolutely that he’d given up writing poetry before falling silent again. And on his birthday, which he and I had usually celebrated by going out to eat, he not only refused to speak but refused to touch the food he’d ordered, leaving us to cut the evening short as he stumbled shakily down the stairs and I escorted him back down the steep street leading to his apartment. Another long-time friend of John’s who visited him in his apartment, with its non-functioning toilet, broken floorboards and layers of dust, said that John had told him frankly that he intended to drink himself to death. Perhaps he realized that any further attempts to continue living the only life he knew how to live — as a writer — were no longer worth pursuing in a world that he felt had given up on him, and so he gave up on it as well. As his mental condition worsened, he refused to ride public transport or, finally, to step out of his neighborhood of Galata. To solve his and his landlord’s predicament a friend of many years persuaded him to return to England, bought him a ticket, and ushered him through immigration, a tricky few minutes since John’s residence permit was long-expired, resulting in paperwork and a fine that was presumably paid by his kind-hearted friend, who sadly watched him shuffle off toward his departure gate.
*
Any conclusions regarding John’s shambolic retreat from reality would have to be speculative, as John, in common with many other highly gifted individuals with complex personalities remained, in the end, unreadable, as much a paradox or cipher as he sometimes saw himself. As I thought again of the question that perplexed John, “What can I do?,” I remembered another poem from In the Wake of the Day in which he himself touched on a response to it. Here it is in part:
Partial Explanation
What do I do? I look out the window
At the windows opposite and admire their keystones,
Which are adorned with fronds and scrolls, but am
Disappointed to observe that they are painted
An ugly shade of oxblood red. I sit in cafés
And read newspapers, giving them attention
I should probably expend on Homer, Shakespeare
Or the Upanishads. I am increasingly enamoured
Of my ignorance. I go to bookstores,
But most times find nothing I wish to purchase.
…
…When
a north wind blows I go south to a town called
“Eyebrow” because of the outline of a peninsula…
But it is also pleasant to return to my home
In this imperial city without empire, a place of paradox
And immemorial ambiguities where I work and sleep,
And here my chief duty is to care for the cat that came in
From the street, beloved creature, that speaks to me
With more than human eloquence, without complaint.
Another poet, publisher and longtime friend of John and admirer of his work once remarked to me with sly amusement that John was “the last aesthete.” John was never averse to confessing his sin of boredom, and when he wasn’t exploring ruins, writing about them, or debunking the unjust view of the Byzantine Empire as an effete world of decadence, his writing often took the form of world-weary eulogies, similar in some ways to those of the Decadents and Aesthetes, yet with their own distinctive salute to the postmodernist absurdism of the New York poets he loved and whose poetry he fed on to create a body of work with its own droll, British slant. Perhaps he could not, or need not, have done more.
Partial Explanation
What do I do? I look out the window
At the windows opposite and admire their keystones,
Which are adorned with fronds and scrolls, but am
Disappointed to observe that they are painted
An ugly shade of oxblood red. I sit in cafés
And read newspapers, giving them attention
I should probably expend on Homer, Shakespeare
Or the Upanishads. I am increasingly enamoured
Of my ignorance. I go to bookstores,
But most times find nothing I wish to purchase.
…
…When
a north wind blows I go south to a town called
“Eyebrow” because of the outline of a peninsula…
But it is also pleasant to return to my home
In this imperial city without empire, a place of paradox
And immemorial ambiguities where I work and sleep,
And here my chief duty is to care for the cat that came in
From the street, beloved creature, that speaks to me
With more than human eloquence, without complaint.
Another poet, publisher and longtime friend of John and admirer of his work once remarked to me with sly amusement that John was “the last aesthete.” John was never averse to confessing his sin of boredom, and when he wasn’t exploring ruins, writing about them, or debunking the unjust view of the Byzantine Empire as an effete world of decadence, his writing often took the form of world-weary eulogies, similar in some ways to those of the Decadents and Aesthetes, yet with their own distinctive salute to the postmodernist absurdism of the New York poets he loved and whose poetry he fed on to create a body of work with its own droll, British slant. Perhaps he could not, or need not, have done more.
- Mel Kenne