It Was (1961)
4 Aug.
1941, rev. 19 March 1954
Commentary
Twitchell-Waas, Jeffrey. “Louis Zukofsky.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 22.3
(Fall 2002): 20-23.
This
story was begun 4 August 1941 and initially finished later the same year; in
1954 LZ revised the work, giving a final date of 19 March. The first
publication was in Nomad (Winter-Spring 1960) and then in the volume It Was (Kyoto, Japan: Origin Press,
1961).
Note
on Text: There are two distinct printings of the Dalkey
Archive edition of Collected Fiction
(1990), which effects some of the pagination, although there is no indication
of the difference in the later reset printing. In both editions, Little is photostatted
from the original Grossman publication (1970), while the additional stories
collected as It Was were set in a
different and somewhat unsightly type, which apparently is why the latter was
reset to make a more uniform looking volume in 1997. As a result, the
pagination is the same for Little, but different for the other stories. In the notes I
have referred to the most recent (1997) printing. In the paperback editions,
the earlier printing has an all-white cover with a full front cover photo of
LZ, while the 1997 printing has a mostly black cover with a reduced and cropped
photo of LZ on the front.
181 We lived then opposite the park…: at the time this story was
written, the Zukofskys lived at 1088 East 180th
Street in the Bronx, facing the southern end of the Bronx Park, next to the
Bronx River that runs through the park—the river forms an impressive gorge with
cascade as LZ describes. Also as LZ mentions, the Bronx Zoo inside the park was
one of the first in the US to introduce a non-cage concept with the opening of
African Plains in 1941. The Parks Commissioner New York from 1933-1960 was
Robert Moses (1888-1981), who during LZ’s lifetime
radically and controversially changed the face of greater New York City.
183 stereoscope: an
optical instrument with two eyepieces used to create a three-dimensional effect
to two photographs of the same scene taken at slightly different angles (AHD).
See “A”-13.298.21.
184 white cotton print hand-blocked in blue…:
also mentioned at “A”-12.239.14 and “All of December Toward
New Year’s” 3 (CSP 144). LZ did research on “Cotton Historical Prints” for the Index of American Design (see A Useful Art 211-224).
