It was the great French poet, essayist and aphorist Paul Valéry who wanted some relief from filling his journal every morning, rain or shine. Fed up, he wrote, “Having dedicated those hours to the life of the mind, I thereby earn the right to be stupid for the rest of the day.”

Reading Jack Kohl’s new stories of unrequited love, I could feel Valéry’s struggle and his need to set aside work for a period of rest. For Kohl’s decision to tell his melancholy, confessional tales in his new book Have You Seen the Elephant? (The Pauktaug Press)  must not have been that easy. 

His technique would discourage any aspiring writer. He scribbles thoughts and observations in a pocket notebook, creating what he calls his journals, now totaling 24 volumes – an estimated million words. These pages can be used as a “savings bank” for later development into essays. Step two: he edits and transcribes this raw material into a proper journal form late at night or at daybreak, depending his energy or a whim.  

Valéry has also shared the detail of his technique. Writer Joseph Epstein found this in one of Valéry’s “Notebooks”:

“Valéry began each day, arising between 5 and 6 a.m., aided by coffee and cigarettes, in the act of cerebration, writing out … thoughts that he felt were worth preserving. Ultimately, these came to a body of work of 26,000 pages, constituting 29 volumes.”

Kohl’s writing life is not that different. Slowly and unpredictably some of the journals morph into fully formed essays, modeled on his favorite New England thinkers: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. His three collections of essays are Acoustic Shadows,Windows of Diligence and  Bone over Ivory. More coming, no doubt.

He distinguishes his journal writing from the essay form. The journal entry, he writes, catches from the ether something that is in an intuitive form. Then in his essays he applies a conscious ordering, but at the same time seeks to retain the intuitive form of the original passages.

Kohl is an extraordinary intellectual force, having earned a PhD in piano performance while establishing a name for himself in novels and collections of essays. Piano? I have heard him play the brutally difficult Concord Sonata by Charles Ives. One critic described what faces the pianist who sits down to tackle it. “Its very look on the page is alarming.” Jack Kohl mastered every note.

Diaries, journals, fragments of thoughts have long been a favorite escape hatch for compulsive writers.  But Kohl has some way to go before exceeding the output of Edward Robb Ellis, once the winner in this inky marathon. At 22 million words, he was once considered author of the longest diary in American letters. Until, that is, 1994 when writer Robert Shields’ daily thoughts and acts were discovered, at an estimated at 37.5 million words.

Kohl’s touch for humor and for the whirl of one’s love life make for adventurous reading. The pursuit of women brings out the lyrical writing talent as we follow him from affair to affair. In one essay after describing a long intimate dinner, he writes, sadly, “I never heard from her again.”

Kohl remembers every detail of his romantic encounters, referring to his trusty pocket-size notebooks for authenticity. “Her hair was short and blonde and thick, a busy and enlivened bob, a beautiful tangle by design—a dense sphere … Her legs were slender columns realised after some perfect plan, yet made (more) perfect by some fractional addition of feminine excess flesh augmenting the plan as it reverse-tapered from ankles to thighs and hips.”

Kohl steps back from his pages of  daydreams and inner monologue to assess what he is collecting. “Perhaps praise is due here for the human art of elevating form by containment — of applying containment to achieve the artful from the raw materials of nature.”

One of his more colourful pursuits involved a  Russian-born dentist. Over dinner one night, “she suddenly asked to see my teeth. ‘I’m not showing you my teeth!’ I replied, and I laughed it off. Yet somehow, reaching across the linen and the breadbasket, “she soon had her hand on my jaw and was checking me like a horse at a state fair. She asked if I flossed.”

He says he felt an increased sense of romantic warmth for this woman, and when they parted he did not think it odd that the conversation had turned to the future and to the idea that she was observed by aliens. That night, before he left, he told her to imagine that “any aliens on her lawn were merely bunnies having a tea party”. The next day she forwarded some drawings of rabbits that she was considering framing. After a few more experiences that led to promising beginnings and quick endings, he says he began to retreat.

Kohl was aware that some women expressed fear of his journal and other writing. He asked one of his dates, “If what I am writing down is only to document how beautiful I have found you and how exquisite I have found our time together (and in the hope that it may be everlasting, for I do not seek to write a journal of incipits), how do you fear such material could ever be misused?” There was never a reply to this. 

I hope they feel, in reading this book, that even their now-realised fears also reassure them at the same  time that I knew how much they did to protect me.

“I am afraid you are using me for material,” one of his shy romantics said. His reply: “I reveal nothing as a writer of what they had to hide but only of what I had hoped they would be.”

So what if a woman fears that he is studying her for material? Was she like a protective older veteran of the Civil War who did not wish me “to see the elephant,” as combat was called in the War Between the States. That expression inevitably became the title of his new book. 

Jack Kohl writes with a self-deprecating undertone as he reveals he has lived a “charmed life”, has enjoyed such great good fortune that almost never a day goes by that he doesn’t feel an obligation … to make note, to bear witness, to as much of it as he can. “I’ve been so happy to be here that I feel bound to leave a record,” he tells me.

It will be interesting to see where Jack Kohl goes from here.

Have you Seen the Elephant? : Dating Tales and Other Essays by Jack Kohl is available from Amazon.

Review by Michael Johnson