re. Woolf's Guide to New York

Sandra Braman

 

The manuscript from which this selection is drawn, as yet unpublished
in full book form, was the last prose work completed by Douglas Woolf
before his death.  It was written in Oregon, first in the mountains of
Eastern Oregon and then in Portland, from about 1978-1980.  Woolf used
his period as a messenger in New York during the early 1970s as a focus
for exploring interactions between his own life and that of the City as
they had unfolded over the many different phases of his life, from
childhood on.
Much of Woolf's work is autobiographical -- he was indeed the ice
cream man, the penniless novelist struggling through snowdrifts to see
his daughter, the fellow selling hot dogs at the ballpark, the window
washer, and the gardener.  This is the only book, however, explicitly
described as such.  At times ambivalent about revealing so much
personal detail, there were iterations of the manuscript that
"expurgated" some material; finally, however, the decision was to leave
the manuscript as it was originally, in full "unexpurgated" form.
The messenger was also the novelist, and so this selection describes
just what it was like to move from carrying packages for others to
negotiations with one's literary agent, all while malnourished and, in
the selection here, coming down with a fever.  One of the figures who
shows up repeatedly in Woolf's Guide to New York is a one-legged man
who lives in the alley near the Gramercy.  When Woolf received the
first American Book Award for fiction but was unable to cross the
country to attend the event, he asked Ed Dorn to read a letter of
acceptance -- and also asked that the award itself be given to this
one-legged man.  The point, of course, is that the real heros about
which Woolf wrote were those who simply manage to survive in the face
of the machinations and inhumanities of the contemporary human world.

Sandra Braman
March 13, 2004
 

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