Marvin Cohen - We cooked our meals by rubbing our bodies together while holding the raw meat and vegetables. It was amazingly effective. Animal heat, as yet unexploited, contains unlimited possibilities as a source of energy. We thought of selling ourselves to the government: But that would be prostitution

Marvin Cohen, Others, Including Morstive Sternbump: 40th Anniversary Edition, Tough Poets Press, 2016.


www.marvincohen.net/


This new paperback edition of Others, Including Morstive Sternbump has been completely reformatted and contains the full text of the original version published in 1976. In addition, it includes the transcript of the 23-minute December 24, 1976 Reader's Almanac interview with Marvin Cohen conducted by Walter James Miller courtesy of New York Public Radio (WNYC 93.9 FM), as well as a new brief introduction by the author.


"[Like] something out of the brain of a poetic trash compactor fed on ten years' accumulation of The New York Review of Books and As the World Turns. Cohen is bewitched by the novelty of the novel. He uses plot and language not to tell a story, but to discover and utilize all the lavish possibilities and pleasures these provide. This book is a writer's lark, yet also a benign ramble through the Disneyland of a literary man's literature." - Soho Weekly News

"[Cohen] has put his sophisticated hand into the wiring of the language and twisted it impishly. ... The reward for your attention is that you hear a new voice and a new kind of surreal music." - The New York Times Book Review
Marvin Cohen, now 85, was one of the most innovative voices in American literature during the 1960s and 1970s. He authored 9 books, two of them published by New Directions, and his short fiction and essays appeared in more than 80 publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Nation, Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Fiction, The Hudson Review, Quarterly Review of Literature, Transatlantic Review, and New Directions annuals. Staged readings of his 1980 play, The Don Juan and the Non-Don Juan, featured such actors as Richard Dreyfuss, Keith Carradine, Jill Eikenberry, and Wallace Shawn.
During Cohen's heyday, his writing was praised for its originality, sincerity, and humor. Here's what the New York Times Book Review had to say about his 1967 debut, The Self-Devoted Friend
"It is rare these days -- perhaps, any days -- to come across a work that not only reveals a striking, fresh talent, but stands outside current literary preoccupations. What Mr. Cohen has is his own: a joy in language, and an eye, at once innocent and shrewd, for the paradoxes inherent in the human condition. He puts both language and people through their paces, stands them on their heads, and hugs them to his heart in what amounts as a tour de force of serio-comedy, a sort of superb clowning in which pathos and absurdity intertwine as they do in a Charlie Chaplin film."




Marvin Cohen, How to Outthink a Wall: An Anthology, Verbivoracious Press, 2016.


Who is Marvin Cohen? Brooklyn-born New Yorker Marvin Cohen published numerous surreal and whimsical fictions in books and magazines from 1967 to 1982. This anthology showcases the two modes of Cohen’s writing: short ‘dialogues’ operating in the manner of an Ionesco or Beckett script by inverting language with an eschatological hopelessness while revelling, rather than despairing, in life’s absurdity, and longer stories displaying Cohen’s unique style and knack for shaping language in novel ways: his repetitions, random exclamations, and bestowing on abstract nouns abstract qualities. Cohen has an ear for the music of the absurd on a par with Donald Barthelme, mixing the flip whimsy, astute and wry observation, and verbal heft, with a fondness for paradoxes and intellectual riddles. His incessant probing of the weird crevices of existence makes reading Cohen a perpetual pleasure. This anthology collects Cohen’s four volumes of short fiction.

“His stories are bursting with inventiveness, and have a way of posing awkward questions—this, when most of the world’s story writers are content with dry observation, or mere character assassination.” — The Times Literary Supplement

This newly-released anthology collects the following volumes of Cohen’s short fiction: The Monday Rhetoric of the Love Club and Other Parables, Fables at Life’s Expense, The Inconvenience of Living, How the Snake Emerged from the Bamboo Pole but Man Emerged from Both, and Aesthetics in Life and Art. It also includes approximately 40 pages of new work.


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“It is rare these days — perhaps, any days — to come across a work that not only reveals a striking, fresh talent, but stands outside current literary preoccupations. What Mr. Cohen has is his own: a joy in language, and an eye, at once innocent and shrewd, for the paradoxes inherent in the human condition. He puts both language and people through their paces, stands them on their heads, and hugs them to his heart in what amounts as a tour de force of serio-comedy, a sort of superb clowning in which pathos and absurdity intertwine as they do in a Charlie Chaplin film.” — Alice S. Morris


“Cohen surrealistically juxtaposes ideas, seeks irrational and fantastic links, but for the high purposes of verbal comedy and linguistic entertainment.” — The New Statesman


“Marvin Cohen’s wacky humor has something of Thurber, something of Steinberg, Buster Keaton, the surrealists, the pataphysicians. The Self-Devoted Friend is a book that should be read immediately by all who gladly recognize themselves to be half crazy.” — Thomas Merton


“Such discontinuous fictions as Finnegans Wake or Naked Lunch or Marvin Cohen’s The Self-Devoted Friend would store more suitably than nineteenth-century novels.”  — Richard Kostelanetz








“Marvin Cohen is a virtual original. He is at his best in his dialogues, excellent theater of the absurd — zany, witty, progressing by disrupting and revealing pun to open up new areas of insight. There is an exuberance about his work which shows in his delight of words: many phrases are sheer delight. Cohen is also a satirist of thrust, touching upon many matters — sex, love, religion — but some of his most moving pieces deal with loneliness. Even here, however, his vitality and vigor encompass the emptiness of his subject and enable us to see the human situation in context. He is never dwarfed by his material, nor does he sentimentalize it. His touch illuminates and moves on. Perhaps this book will create for him the following he deserves.” — Library Journal


“His stories are bursting with inventiveness, and have a way of posing awkward questions — this, when most of the world’s story writers are content with dry observations, or mere character assassination.” — The Times Literary Supplement


“Cohen thinks all our lives shade very close to surrealism and, set down, his observations are often wildly funny. Add his wonderful facility with words and you have one of the most delightful books of the season.” — Newsday





“For his first non-fiction book, [Cohen] chose his lifelong love. Baseball the Beautiful is unlike any book on baseball that you have ever read. He compares baseball to life, death, time, space. Frequent references are made to Tolstoy, Aristotle, Moliere, Greek tragedy. It is beautifully written, but perhaps in a manner that only another writer will admire and envy.” — Verne Boutner


“Cohen’s essays on the sport never become trapped in sentimentality or overblown analysis — as pleasing as a perfect game with two out in the ninth.” — Penthouse


“Cohen approaches baseball as the artist does a great work of art — it contains, for him, the metaphysical, the holy, the myth, that which lives beyond us, love. Seeing baseball as the supreme art, we are drawn into the book, and close to whatever art we are involved in, close to life.” — Rochelle Ratner


“Probably the most sympathetic book ever written about the game.” — Vic Ziegel





“The narrator in Cohen’s typical fable purposely locks himself into a logic that must lead to frustration and failure. Instead of despairing, however, he then revels in the irony of the situation and finds consolation in the triumph of art (the fable) over life. He reaches rare and dizzying heights of metaphorical perfection in describing paradoxical emotional states. For serious collections of contemporary experimental fiction.” — Library Journal


“Verbal and situational fun. Attractive comic fantasia. Cohen writes in a style that pulses with energy.” — Publishers Weekly



“[Like] something out of the brain of a poetic trash compactor fed on ten years’ accumulation of The New York Review of Books and As the World Turns. Cohen is bewitched by the novelty of the novel. He uses plot and language not to tell a story, but to discover and utilize all the lavish possibilities and pleasures these provide. This book is a writer’s lark, yet also a benign ramble through the Disneyland of a literary man’s literature.” — Ron Whyte


“[Cohen] has put his sophisticated hand into the wiring of the language and twisted it impishly. ... The reward for your attention is that you hear a new voice and a new kind of surreal music.”
— Raymond Sokolov


“An appeal that lingers beyond the final page. ... A brilliantly interpretive mind.” — Houston Chronicle





“With sage and quiet humor Cohen whittles at the ludicrous dimensions of human folly and cuts us to the quick with his fables, parables, dialogues, and other delightful departures from the conventions of fiction It’s always a pleasure to come across Cohen in a magazine piece; here, too, he again proves to be an antidote to the inconvenience of living.”  — Publishers Weekly






The Don Juan and the Non-Don Juan (1980)


Based on two unpublished episodic novels by Marvin Cohen, (Women, and Tom Gervasi and Inside the World: As Al Lehman), The Don Juan and the Non-Don Juan was was first performed at the New York Shakespeare Festival as part of the Poets at the Public Series. Staged readings featured Richard Dreyfuss, Keith Carradine, Mimi Kennedy, Wallace Shawn, and Jill Eikenberry, with a full production in London.
        “Two different separate men who never even heard of each other are alternately displayed as having to do in comparative parallel contrast of ways with, in various forms, women. One of the men is the latest in the line of the Don Juans, from the lengthy literary tradition as depicted by Byron, Shaw, Moliere, and Mozart/Da Ponte. The other man would also like to be a Don Juan: his attempts on that score demonstrate that he’s not.
        “Among the hordes of women encountered by these unmutual men are an office secretary who gets one of them fired; a nunhood-renouncing nun; a monthly duo named May and June; a rich gangster’s smitten wife; a flowery trio named Iris, Rose, & Lila; women at parties; women at dinners; women in bed; women in the rain.
        “Plenty of conflicts abound. To settle one of them, God puts in a majesterial appearance.
        “At the end of this theater presentation, there’s no loss of conclusions that an audience member may (or for that matter may not) arrive at. Among the theatrical approaches to the Don Juan legend or the failure thereof, the comic gets treatment. Other devices help out, just in case.”  — Marvin Cohen



Necessary Ends involves two couples who tangle in a philosophical farce about love, language, sex, time, and death. A collaboration with the director James Milton, it was privately auditioned to producer Joseph Papp, with Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory, Angela Pietropinto, and Gretchen Van Riper in the four roles.
“The term ‘character’ was coined with Marvin Cohen in mind. A gentle observer of the unpredictable and slightly absurd, Marvin has a fondness for mankind that is unmistakably his own. Sometimes I think of him as a comedian-chronicler standing at the center, his head turned slightly toward your line of speaking to accomodate his hearing aid. Necessary Ends is the sum of these parts, as Marvin positions and repositions people within relationships, that ever-aimed ear to the pun and odd bits of conversation, as though he’s walking slowly through a cocktail party. The strength of his writing stems from his baroque sense of humor and his ability to see both the world and himself as wonderfully delightful miscreaants.” — Joseph Papp



When Marvin Cohen was offered space for this website biography, he confessed: “I’ve risen from a lower class background to a lower class foreground.”
Described as a poet, humorist, surrealist, essayist, etc., he has published nine books. His play The Don Juan and the Non-Don Juan has been acted in by Richard Dreyfuss, Keith Carradine, and Wallace Shawn, plus actors in England, and translated for German TV. His shorter writings — stories, parables, allegories, essays — have appeared in more than 80 publications, including anthologies from New Directions and other major publishers, plus The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Nation, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue. He’s given loads of readings in New York and London, often assisted by dialogue partners who acted like actors and sometimes even were.
Despite very little college education, he taught creative writing at the New School, the City College of New York, C.W. Post of Long Island University, and Adelphi. He was never imitated by years of students, much to their credit.

1960s (Photo: Jean Shrimpton)

Born in Brooklyn in 1931 during the recession, Cohen took art classes at Cooper Union, but oils and canvas cost too much and writing cost very little. Reduced to 35% hearing from infantile disease, he lived in a cold-water flat starting at $31 a month in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He notoriously crashed a lot of parties and receptions for extra food, drink, and free socializing not to mention flirting (harmless, of course). His odd jobs included messengering, mink farming, children’s camp counselor, market research, post office temp, proofreader, ineffectual gardener, and merchant seaman on oil tanker to Cuba; but he was fired virtually more frequently than hired, if at all possible.

His first published piece appeared in The Beat Scene (Corinth Books, 1960) along with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso:
Prose Poem
        I woke up feeling too good to be true. That was my first mistake.
        I yawned, and with powerful ease of breath blew the ceiling away from my bedroom, until the lady upstairs fell on me with violent curiosity of desire.
        I married her the next day to facilitate our growing friendship. It was a marriage of convenience, since she was intolerably wealthy and I was sufficiently poor.
        She made me move upstairs. We cooked our meals by rubbing our bodies together while holding the raw meat and vegetables. It was amazingly effective. Animal heat, as yet unexploited, contains unlimited possibilities as a source of energy. We thought of selling ourselves to the government: But that would be prostitution.
        This story ends, though, sadly: We loved each other to extinction. Even our graves are invisible.

Cohen lives in New York City with his wife, a retired paperback editor. He enjoys good health and still plays softball regularly, but now is courteously run for starting at home plate, but he plays and makes errors all by himself at first base, mainly in Central Park, in all seasons on Sundays. He identifies himself as a Yankee fan in his book Baseball the Beautiful, title-changed by the publisher from the original Baseball as Metaphysics for commercial feasibility and to bring in the lumbering lowbrow audience.

With the exception of The Monday Rhetoric of the Love Club and Other Parables, (New Directions), Cohen languishes out of print. However, a resurgence of popularity may be imminent, as Boston-area independent publisher Tough Poets Press is currently working on a 40th anniversary edition of Others, Including Morstive Sternbump, a novel if you call it that. Plans are also underway for Cohen’s resurgence at Verbivoracious Press in Glasgow and Singapore for an omnibus of his earlier work compiled laboriously to benefit the subject of this website, which heralds Cohen’s entry into the electronic world as an experiment in modernity.

“Perhaps half or a third of the books I ever read have influenced my own work; especially James Joyce, Kafka, Henry James, some of the French surrealists like Henri Michaux, William Faulkner, and the 18th-Century English prose style; many unconscious influences have been at work, too.

“My work has been influenced by such personal factors as my rather isolated Brooklyn childhood, my semi-deafness from the age of three; my interests in Major League baseball, art, and music; early abortive love life, poverty, the cosmos of New York City, travelings and tattered abundance of jobs, and idlenesses. However, my work hardly ever touches literally on events, being rather surrealistically abstract.”  - www.marvincohen.net/