of his friends from the old Braverman group wondered what would be done with his papers, especially the famously unpublished Hungarian novel No Stopping Train. It had been born in wisps and curls of smoke, and grew denser and more layered over a period of six years—though never less mysterious. It was the finest example of the unique process of addition and especially erasure, which was the essence of Plesko at work.
The tragedy of Les, as well as his greatest virtue, lay in his absolutely uncompromising stance on art and life. Unfashionably, he recoiled from any hint of commercialism. He fought against any sort of pandering to the reader, “smoothing out the bumps,” planting “helpful” directional arrows, catering to the American preference for the shout over the whisper. He instinctively moved to the edges, deserts, marginal people. Suggestion, nuance, abraded surfaces were his métier, and he had confidence in readers who could walk through the doors he had opened. He required a certain sort of skilled reader who could bring his or her own sensitivities to the task, a reader able to enter his elusive work and let it unfold on its own terms.
One cannot read quickly through a Les Plesko book—don’t even try. It’s not meant for speed-reading. A reader who wants to “cut to the chase” will find it vaporizing in his hands. But be patient, reader, and this book will unlock itself for you.
Les wrote for those of us who can hear a confession, who know how to hear behind halting words to the depths of a soul revealing itself. Reading Les Plesko is like listening to a broadcast late at night, an urgent communication textured by distance and static. It’s a lover’s reception of an intimate call in the middle of the night. You hold your breath for the cadence, wait for the meaning to unfold.
His imagination has a certain texture—like overexposed film, a Polaroid taken at noontime in a desert in the 1970s. Light and sanded glass and desperate romance, these are Les’s signatures. As a man, Les was the ultimate romantic, always in love with someone, and there seemed to be no shortage of women ready to be entranced by his rumpled, Beat self.
Love was his subject, forever complicated, not so much by the conventional external obstacles—family, money, even the dire obstacles of history—as by the contradictory personalities of the lovers themselves and the messy interlocking relationships created 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
