The fifteenth century visionary Margery Kempe is notable for many things, including authorship of what’s said to be the first English-language autobiography—or should we call it, in present-day terms, autofiction? Like a number of the present-day works that walk the line between memory and invention, Kempe’s is told in the third person—as if in accord with Rimbaud’s assertion: “Je est un autre.” Kempe did not in the most literal sense write her book at all, but dictated it to a scribe. She needed an audience. Her ecstasies were theatrical and took place in public, but perhaps her true audience was herself. She was certainly most moved by her performances of devotion and was known for her constant and relentless weeping. As her book affirms,
Her dalyawns was so swet, so holy, and so devowt that this creatur myt not oftyntymes beryn it but fel down and wrestyd wyth hir body and mad wondyrful cher and contenawns wyth boystows sobbyngys and gret plenté of terys, sumtyme seyng “Jhesu, mercy,” sumtyme “I dey.” And therfor mech pepyl slawndryd hir, not levyng it was the werke of God but that sum evyl spyrit vexid hir in hir body er ellys that sche had sum bodyly sekenesse.
Or as Robert Glück writes in his 1994 novel Margery Kempe, recently republished by New York Review Books, “it’s not pain or joy until wept out as fiery tears…. When I finish crying I’m empty, exalted, Withdraw my tears and I do not enjoy food, drink, or talk; there is no flavor until I weep again.” She is also the eponymous Cry Baby Mystic is Daniel Tiffany’s new book-length poem of that title. How strange that two male-authored reimaginings of this strange figure should come along at almost the same time! Tiffany’s is by far the more oblique. It’s written entirely (except for a few paragraphs of prose that crop up here and there) as a series of cinquains—the five-line haikulike form invented by the American proto-imagist Adelaide Crapsey. Transforming the cinquain from a closed form to a stanza that can be linked together in sequences, Tiffany achieves a surprising rhythmic variety-within-pattern that kept me focused and on the linguistic alert for nearly a hundred pages even without the help of structured narrative, didactic argument, or developed character (Margery herself disappears from the scene for pages at a time), and with constant cross-cutting between history and the present. The woozy feeling the poem induces is hard to convey in a brief quotation—rarely has so much parataxis been so hypnotic—but here’s an example anyway:
Since no one lives there she thought to herself why not say hi to my monster he spits the gum
out of his mouth just a head stuck on a body I have a rule against blue eyes but still
she can’t find him. Too bad. He dropped his Game Boy like lamp cords don’t just drop from the sky when he
hears the cornfield rattling in his forehead! True, this conversation went on, but how far on.
Glück’s Margery Kempe, by reputation a canonical work of the New Narrative movement that began bubbling up in the late 1970s, would seem almost conventional by comparison with Cry Baby Mystic. Looking back on it in 2000, Glück asserted, “I did not want Margery to be an historical novel,” but you can imagine an editor’s cut that would turn it into just that: Three-quarters of the book is pure historical reconstruction, gorgeously written, albeit with a bent toward transgression that now already seems historical in itself:
She pushes her finger into his asshole as though he’s a pie. She encounters shit—well, it’s Jesus’s shit; she just slides it out of the way. She nudges his prostate while pressing down on his groin with her palm, mixing the inside and outside. This makes Jesus moan though Margery isn’t sure if he’s responding to the sensation or the idea.
A secondary theme is set in the present, with the middle-aged writer Bob obsessing over a narcissistic young man, L. Only rarely do these two juxtaposed sets of material shade into each other. “A failed saint turns to autobiography.” Is that Margery or Bob? Or is it just a definition of who it takes to write the self?
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Robert Glück, Margery Kempe, introduction by Colm Tóibín, is published by New York Review Books, New York, 2020.
Daniel Tiffany, Cry Baby Mystic, is published by Parlor Press, Anderson, SC, 2020.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.