HE SHALL BE NAMELESS Fair Copy 1

Resource added
Fair copy of Le Barry end Toulouse poem, 11 May 1979, American Library, Toulouse, with changes, 3:12— 3:35 HE SHALL BE NAMELESS His afterdinner smoke ring, widening toward me over brandies, oval-framed his thrusting cheeks, his cornstalk hair just when her portion of the tabletalk snapped his picture through this lens, this whisper: "He was at Auschwitz." Her definition, like a faultless signature richening under museum glass, flared into oblivion all surroundings--her perfumed self, the flavored snifters, the glittering debris of chiseled phrases piling up consensus new line 21.5.79 to table "The Holocaust" as TV's laggard motion to color-tag survivors--till atmosphere hung featureless, a strangely scented drifting to soundlessness around that gentle face suspended nameless. Weeks afterward, his portrait hung for me on any wall it chose; one day the eyes greened back, full gingering the hair, and generosity of lips poked through a honeysuckle veil tried on within a privacy of hedge beyond a country road; next moment, angled shelterless between two ancient wagon wheels, the smoke-ringed face was dangling near a barn. Today I shined my city sunlight on him, imagined him mysteriously dead to bloody up, officialize, my public warrant for the facts: his father's whooping cough, his mother's teenage crying, foods he found abominations, pages heresy. His dinnertable friends dried up my pen with these, hovering mouth-to-mouth to pose before the temporary badge that hid my heart and loudened when I asked their images "His name? His name?" Unblinking, they recited to their own reflections, "He was at Auschwitz."

Full description

Copy poem written by Emanuel in 1979, typed with written annotations, about a nameless man who experienced the Holocaust in Auschwitz (Page 1)

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  • type
    Image
  • created on
  • file format
    jpg
  • file size
    741 kB
  • container title
    James A. Emanuel Papers
  • creator
    James A. Emanuel
  • issue
    BOX 4 FOLDER 22 Chisel in the Dark, draft, n.d.
  • rights
    James A. Emanuel Estate
  • rights holder
    James A. Emanuel Estate
  • version
    5/11/1979