SUNY Plattsburgh professor emeritus publishes new books

Dec. 13—SCHUYLER FALLS — Dr. Alexis Levitin may have retired from SUNY Plattsburgh, but he's still publishing. Definitely not perishing.

His new titles are:

The Last Ruy Lopez: Tales from the Royal Game (Russell Enterprises), a collection of 34 chess stories occurring around the world (and one of them even off-planet), all written during the pandemic.

W.H. Auden at Work: The Craft of Revision (Lexington Books), an academic study, Levitin's dissertation, written in 1971, finally in print thanks to the efforts of a young creative writing teacher, Joshua Kulseth, who discovered Levitin's study in the archives at Columbia University.

BACK STORY

Levitin's creative sojourn begins in Brazil when the COVID-19 Pandemic hit the Western world.

The city where Levitin was shuttered.

"Everything closed down," he said.

"You couldn't even find a restaurant. There was nowhere to eat. There was nothing. My hotel said to me, 'We are not going to throw you out on the street, but we can't feed you.' So at that point, I figured I better get home. I called up United Airlines and within 24 hours they got me home on a special flight. It was like a special pandemic flight. There were only 36 of us on a big super jet. The plane was practically empty. It was a flight to evacuate Americans during COVID, seriously. Unbelievable."

COVID CREATIVE

When Levitin landed in the United States, COVID was rampant.

"Everybody in New York City was dying, as you remember," he said.

"This was in the beginning. I came back March 20, 2020. So, I went shopping at midnight at Grand Union. I did my shopping when no one else was there, and I just holed up in my house for two years. Basically, I didn't see anybody for a couple of years. I figured I was going to die because I was old. If you get COVID when you're my age, your statistics are against you. and so I thought what can I do about dying? I thought, why don't I start to write. and all of sudden, these stories started coming out of me. Unbelievable."

Levitin can testify that the myth of the Muse is no myth.

"I'm not good enough to have written these stories," he said.

"I don't know where that voice came from. I can't believe it. They came out of nowhere. That's what it seemed like to me. I am just sitting there at the keyboard for two years. I wrote 102 stories. It was effortless. Absolutely effortless. It was as if somebody else was writing them. But, I'm not a mystic. I'm not. Now, I know why people have always spoken about the Muse. It was as if somebody else was producing those stories. Unbelievable.

"For two years I did nothing but write stories, and that's how I got through the pandemic."

SURPRISE RECEPTION

Half of the stories have already been published in 20 different magazines, several even in Europe.

"It was really lucky and very exciting for me," Levitin said.

"Not all of the 102 stories are about chess, 34, one third of the stories exactly were about chess. Even the chess stories, of course, are about being a human being. They are not just about chess. They are about the relationship of chess and real life.

"The dialectic between playing a good chess player, but seeing a beautiful woman at the next table reading her celebrity magazine and looking over the magazine at me as she reads it.

"There is a conflict between real life, and the emotions of real life, and the elegant purity, in a way, of the world of chess, and the conflict between those. It appears in several of the stories."

BLURRED LINES

Many of the book's stories are completely true, and a number are completely invented.

"But, I call the whole book a fiction," he said.

"I call it a collection of short stories, even though many of them are based entirely on reality. Since I travel all the time, it's also a travel book. For instance, one of the stories is called 'Chess on Naxos.' Naxos is a wonderful Greek Island.

"Another story is called 'Power Outage in Playas.' Playas is a beach town in Ecuador. I was playing a game online, and I was about to win the game when the electricity went out. It went out, and for 10 minutes I am sitting there in utter darkness. Then, it comes on again, and my computer screen says, 'We see that you have resigned. Would you like to play another game?'

"I was furious because I was about to win the game. That story is an ironic story about my bad character, and how it took me weeks to recover from my outrage at losing a game because of a power outage. But, that occurs in Ecuador."

Three stories occur at a beach in southern Portugal, and another one in the mountains of Spain.

AUDEN REVISITED

Levitin received an email from a total stranger, Joshua Kulseth, a graduate student at Texas Tech teaching creative writing, a poet.

"He loved W. H. Auden, and he thought that his students didn't understand how important revision is in writing great poetry," Levitin said.

"He said Auden is a great reviser, and I wrote my PhD dissertation on Auden's revisions. He went to the archives at Columbia University, dug out my old dissertation from 1971, and he was enamored of it.

"He said, 'You have to publish this. and I said, 'Listen, man, I'm very flattered, but listen. I'm 80 years old (at the time I was 79), I'm 80 years old. I retired five years ago. I wrote that dissertation half a century ago. I'm glad you liked it, but I'm not very excited about trying to publish it now. But if you're so excited, why don't you get it published? If you do all that work of getting it published, I'll put your name on the cover with me. and he said, 'great.'

"And, he actually found a legitimate publisher, Lexington Books, which is a subsidiary of Rowman & Littlefield. He found this publisher. He made the proposal. He did all the dirty work of getting it done, and they gave me the contract. and the book says, Alexis Levitin with Joshua Kulseth.

"Now, he's teaching at Clemson, but at the time he wasn't even teaching. He was just a graduate teaching assistant at Texas Tech. and now, he's got a job. Probably getting his name on this book helped him get the job. I'm very happy for him, but you know, I've never met him."

Levitin was very touched by Kulseth's enthusiasm to track down his dissertation and retrieve it from Columbia University's archives.

"He read it, and he was blown away," he said.

"But there was no way I was going to fight to get the book published because my career is over anyway. I'm retired."

The book's title, "W. H. Auden at Work: The Craft of Revision" is deliberate on Levitin's part.

"This was an important decision whether to call it the art of revision or the craft of revision," he said.

"I love the word craft. Dylan Thomas in his famous poem about writing used both words. He used the word craft and art in the same poem. So, I had to choose. I decided on craft because Auden was very meticulous. Auden was dry in his attitude toward poetry. He was, by choice, an anti-romantic.

"He described himself as a classic. He didn't mean I'm a classic like you should read me because I am as great as Cervantes or Shakespeare. He didn't mean that. He meant that he believed in the classical virtues of order, form, control, balance, an intellect.

"And that he was suspicious of wild enthusiasms. He was suspicious of the Dionysian. Let's put it that way."

Levitin personally knew Auden.

"Auden was a friend of my mom and of my stepfather, and he was the one who gave me the topic," he said.

Email: rcaudell@pressrepublican.com

Twitter@RobinCaudell