The Review of Contemporary Fiction
From Quarry Road: Uncollected Essays and Reviews of Paul Metcalf, by Paul Metcalf, edited by Robert Buckeyereviewed by Eckhard Gerdes
Paul Metcalf. From Quarry Road: Uncollected Essays and Reviews of Paul Metcalf. Ed. and intro. Robert Buckeye. Preface Jonathan Williams. Amandla (Box 431, East Middlebury, VT 05740), 2002. 100 pages. $20.00.
Metcalf lived on Quarry Road (in Chester, Massachusetts), and the name seems to have suited him well. In pursuit of literary game and during the mining of his subjects, he reveals himself to have been both quarrelsome and querulous. His query for quarry led him to his great-grandfather Herman Melville, to Dickinson, Reznikoff, Lucien Freud, Pound, Olson, Williams, Dahlberg (there is much about Dahlberg, who bagged one of his ex-wives, says Metcalf, “by convincing her that he was the reincarnation of Herman Melville, and she must marry him to save American literature”), and to Todd Moore, a poet Metcalf seems to have great affinity for. Actually, what most of these writers have in common is the fact that they were all notorious cranks. Even more appealing than the astuteness of observation in Metcalf’s essays and reviews is the underlying crankiness that pervades them: “Gil [Sorrentino] is a fine critic . . . but I just can’t read his own work. Zukovsky I don’t have the patience for . . . I find it very dull. I’ve seen fragments of [Douglas] Woolf’s novel . . . sounds to me like he’s not really growing . . . I used to like Bronk, but he begins to wear thin . . . As I get older and crankier, I find myself with diminishing tolerance for people who play games with language.” His crankiness is amusing. It was an inspired wellspring for Metcalf, who retired from Cambridge, moved to the Berkshires, and became a farmer. His death in 1999 has left us with one less literary crank whose turn was not really up. I am glad that Robert Buckeye has mined Metcalf’s reviews and letters for this material—it really provides an endearing introduction to Metcalf the crank, Metcalf the critic who nonetheless comes across with affection for his subjects, Metcalf the crotchety old farmer-poet whom one just can’t help but embrace.