No Stopping Train. Les Plesko

by desire and fate. He was alert to the strange eddies of romantic entanglement, the way lovers test one another, the way they create a private world in which desire and rebellion and privacy form the rooms they live in, and language both magnetizes and repels at the very same time.

      • • •

      Then there’s that sound. How do I describe the sound of a Les Plesko sentence? It’s a very particular cadence, a certain number of beats—I hear it in my own writing sometimes, that subtle music, a certain choice of vocabulary and a characteristic stress pattern. I hear it in the writing of others who knew him, people who worked with him, who read him. That unmistakable, addictive, lyrical Les Plesko line—it always makes me smile. He had it back in those early workshop days, and he had it to the end. Read a paragraph out loud, you’ll hear it:

       Now I can’t forget the good parts, even under this afternoon light that absolves what remains. The name of this place moving past which means small bloody earth. The man with one arm by the blinking switchbox feeds small nervous birds, and I think how before the war, he might have tried cupping their tight beating hearts in both fists.

      To say he was a careful writer only begins to address his precision. Les Plesko worked like a man crawling under barbed wire, moving from word to word, feeling his way, refusing to continue until each sentence offered up its full potential of fragrance and emotion. And then in a few days or weeks, more than likely he might throw it all out. For him “less is more” wasn’t just a saying, it was religion.

      • • •

      Once No Stopping Train was finished, Plesko began the search for a major publisher willing to accept it. Every year for fifteen years, he sent it out. But the consolidation of publishing houses worked against him. Consolidation meant that novels were far more likely than ever to be judged for “reader friendliness” and potential for commercial success than for invention and strangeness and beauty. A work like No Stopping Train had an ever-decreasing chance in such a market—and Les would have recoiled even from the use of such terms as “market” or “marketplace” when referencing literature. The repulsive necessity of reducing creative works to a unit of commerce. It was one of the great sorrows of his life that this, his best book, could not manage to hack its way through the thicket of obstacles growing ever more dense on the road to a wider reading public.

      Yet at the same time, he refused to consider casual publication for this novel. His subsequent books, his desert novel Slow Lie Detector and the tender love story Who I Was, were both published by his friend Michael Deyermond in loving editions in Venice Beach (Equator Books and MDMH Books, repectively). But Les was adamant; he wanted No Stopping Train to reach beyond the small, appreciative literary circles of Southern California. He knew that a broader readership existed for this book, but it would require a more experienced literary house to connect to them.

      A man is not a book, and Les Plesko was more than his work, though he shared many attributes with his fiction. Like his fiction, he was quixotic, a romantic, a gentle cynic, an intellectual and also an anti-intellectual, and a Chaplinesque little tramp cycling along on a wobbly bicycle. He was nonjudgmental, in a wry, European, pessimistic way. He didn’t even curse. “Oh, brother,” was the worst it got—usually said in response to some display of sentimentality or self-importance.

      He was Hungarian, he lived steps from the sand in Venice Beach, he didn’t have two socks that matched. He lived in a single room. Students who loved him offered swankier sublets and he’d go, but found he couldn’t sleep in these more elegant digs. “Too much,” he’d say. He never left his Venice Beach room very long. Once, after he’d lost it during a sublet, he rented the room next door until his own was free again. He drew a map of it for his young nephews, as if it were a kingdom. I think it was the very simplicity of his circumstances which allowed him to live completely in the life of his romantic, Beat imagination.

      But he was far from impoverished. Though living in one room, the breadth and depth of all Western civilization was his. A short glance at his list of recommended books, preserved by his most devoted students, reveals just how rich that life had been. The list is viewable on their tribute website www.pleskoism.wordpress.com.

      • • •

      Hungary, 1956. A Soviet invasion to stifle a growing movement for independence, this moment can be viewed in many ways as the precursor to The Unbearable Lightness of Being’s Czechoslovakia. The collision had its roots in the Second World War, where Hungary fought on the side of the Axis and experienced great hardship in defeat. In the division of Europe, Hungary fell on the Soviet side, so scores were being settled as people tried to survive, a situation Plesko brilliantly illuminates in his novel. No Stopping Train starts with the war and its aftermath, the girl Margit and her embittered mother, her love affair and eventual marriage to the document forger Sandor, and their involvement with the fearsome, magnetic redheaded Erzhebet, whom he’d once saved from the camps. In the years leading to the Hungarian Revolution, love and alliances will shift repeatedly, as each character struggles with his or her own level of hope and despair.

      Plesko specifically chose his homeland as the setting for his magnum opus. Born in 1954 Budapest, Laszlo Sandor was the child of a love affair between a pretty young blonde, Zsuzsa, and a man whose identity Les would not know until he returned to Hungary years later, when he discovered his father had been a famous actor. Said longtime colleague, the writer Julianne Cohen, “He brought home a head shot. The resemblance, uncanny. And a story of how the actor had leapt from a building to his death.” A terrible prefiguration of Les’s suicide in the fall of 2013.

      In 1956, his mother fled across the border with a new husband, Gyorgy Pleszko, making her way to America and leaving two-year-old Laszlo behind with her elderly parents who struggled with the realities of the revolution. She sent for him at the age of seven. He arrived in Boston, speaking only Hungarian, to meet his mother, a glamorous near-stranger, and his new family, which now included a baby half-brother. A new name. And a new language.

      His encounter with English began a love affair that continued for the rest of his life. “Immediately, he was in school, and nobody spoke Hungarian, so he listened in from the back until sounds took shape and made a kind of music,” said Cohen. “He listened to the radio, watched TV and listened to his mother and stepfather, who never spoke Hungarian, fiddled with a reel-to-reel tape recorder until the music became word. At some point he lost his fluency in Hungarian, gave it up for new and interesting things, all that America had to offer a boy in the ’60s. Les was in love with language and in love with love and fell in love with the music all around him.”

      But the ’60s in America had their pitfalls: “He made friends with people who were going places. San Francisco, Santa Cruz,” she recalled. “He tried college but he fell in love with heroin and dropped out. When you read The Last Bongo Sunset you’ll come to know how he broke his own heart. But the tenacious [side of himself] quit using and thought maybe he could be an artist, a musician. He recognized he possessed a feel for word and deed and an eye for beauty. So he hit the road, taking jobs along the way, searching. Fell in love with an older married woman as a hand on her ranch in the desert. It ended badly, broken hearts and incipient violence. Made his way back to Los Angeles: flag man for crop dusters, country-western DJ. He took a sales job. He had a compelling voice; it roped you in and kept you there. Laced with smoke, sorrow, and an unbeliever’s faith in resurrection, he told the truth and you could trust that.”

      I’ve seen those pictures of Les as a young man, a businessman with a phone to his ear, in ’70s wide lapels. They astonished me, for I knew him only after these formational years, the years that gave the raw edge to his first novel, in new sobriety in the Braverman workshop, writing the book in which he found his unique voice, his tone as an artist, and a moment of accolades. About The Last Bongo Sunset (reviewed just ahead of A Void by Georges Perec) The New Yorker said, “For the narrator of such extravagant, ravaging prose, it would be impossible to commit a cliché.”

      But now that book is long out of print, and Les’s last two novels reached only the circles already aware of his work. What would ever