Marvin Cohen — The Monday Rhetoric of the Love Club and Other Parables [1973]

Où est Marvin Cohen? A tousle-haired New Yorker who from a period spanning 1967 and 1978 penned surreal and whimsical fictions, many in the form of ‘dialogues’ between two unnamed interlocutors, and found himself published in prestigious magazines along the lines of Ambit and The Transatlantic Review. Several collections appeared in hardback from famous outfits such as New Directions and André Deutsch (US & UK publication), and one novel was released from a lesser-known press. It seems this Marvin Cohen was a notable scribbler for one fleeting period. His minor star has turned to a black molten lump scorching the contents of a Brazilian favela and little information as to his whereabouts and fate can be found, although he appears to still be alive and kicking and a PEN member. This assemblage of short fiction represents the two modes of Cohen’s writing: short ‘dialogues’ with titles such as ‘On the Clock’s Business and the Cloud’s Nature’ and ‘The World is Cluttered With Objects’ which operate in the manner of an Ionesco or Beckett script, turning language on itself with an eschatological hopelessness, revelling in the absurdity, rather than despairing. The longer stories such as ‘Saving Art for Tourism in One Tragic Lesson’ and ‘Love by Proxy of Solitude’ fare less well on the reader’s patience: Cohen’s knack for bending language into new shapes frustrates as one encounters his strange tics: his repetitions, random exclamations, and taking abstract nouns and bestowing them with abstract qualities (“Open to whisper of love’s quiet reason, cooling rampage of love’s sour fever?” / “Bugles blared out the creeping closer of danger’s crawling demon.”) His focus on creating abstractions locks the reader from the content and pulls the focus to Cohen’s dancing prose, pirouetting on each page into unique variations, often humorous, never beautiful. The strongest of the long pieces is the title one: the ‘Love Club’ is where a series of eloquent men congregate to make lyrical orations on love, rated by applause by the members: this sort of self-conscious winking at literature’s state of exhaustion is mingled with a sincere and surprising celebration of capital L-O-V-E love.The nearest (or most obvious) comparison point is Donald Barthelme, particularly in stories like ‘Listening to Herman’, mixing the flip whimsy, astute and wry observation, and verbal heft of that long-gone short fiction master. That particular piece features a line that seems to pass a verdict on Cohen’s own work: “Severing themselves from meaning, they floated in vocal clusters, sound hazy in vapors of dull abstraction.” Minus the ‘dull’, of course. The strongest material here showcases Cohen’s fondness for paradoxes and intellectual riddles. Time for a retrospective, methinks.

Editions:

Hardback, 1973, New Directions.

Hardback, 1973, Rapp and Whiting.

Paperback, 1973, New Directions.

Bibliography:

Short Fiction:

The Self-Devoted Friend, 1967, New Directions.

Dialogues, 1967, Turret Books.

The Monday Rhetoric of the Love Club and Other Parables, 1973, New Directions.

Fables at Life’s Expense, 1975, Serendipity Books.

The Inconvenience of Living, and Other Acts of Folly, 1977, Urizen Books.

How the Snake Emerged from the Bamboo Pole, But Man Emerged from Both, 1978, Oasis Books.

Novels:

Others, Including Morstive Sternbump, 1976, Bobbs Merrill.