I ordered two photographs and went home and wrote him a long letter in answer to the questions he had raised in my mind. Later, when I knew Clarence well and became his friend, I would drive him to the Lafayette Station post office to pick up his mail, boxes of fan mail from all over the world. I suppose when I wrote him I thought I was the only one who did.
Anyway, I mailed off the letter, not expecting or even particularly wanting a reply, and in a few days he called me. There was his rough, exciting, enormously civilized voice on the phone, inviting me down to the Pontalba to see his books.
At that time he had a huge apartment in the Pontalba overlooking Jackson Square. It contained a library of almost two hundred thousand volumes. They were the most incredible books I had ever seen. Clarence slept on a small bed in the midst of those bookshelves. He could put his finger on any book without consulting a catalog. But then, he only got out the ones he was interested in. You could ask all night but he would not produce a book he didn’t want to talk about.
As soon as I arrived that first night we went right to work. Clarence got out some books and began my education. “Look,” he would say, “look at this. You must understand this. Listen to what I’m telling you.” Leonor Fini, the French surrealist poets, Balthus, Klimt, Lafcadio Hearn, British illustrators, Italian cartoonists, the lists of things I must learn and “be exposed to” went on and on.
Oil interests in the gulf, people destroying the wetlands, plastic cups, undisciplined children, women smokers, unlettered so-called writers, Mayor Moon’s attempts to bring a sound and light show into Jackson Square, the list of things he hated and warred against was also long.
“But, Clarence,” I would say finally, “I want to see your photographs. I came to see your photographs. Please show them to me.” Then, grumbling, he would get out a stack of prints and begin to tell me how they were created. Created they were. Planned and executed with the care an architect takes with a building. Only Clarence was the planner and the builder and the carpenter and the plumber and the one that cut the trees down to get the lumber.
It wasn’t easy being his friend. You had to be able to move fast. Clarence was full of ideas and he feared nothing except having his knee give out or his books cut up by greedy dealers. He was haunted by the idea that someone would get hold of his treasured art books and cut them up and sell the pages.
At the height of my friendship with Clarence he had me in a car one spring day driving down to Terrebone Parish with four surrealists from Chicago in the back seat. We were going to see the cemeteries. I was driving my small blue Datsun. The surrealists were huddled together in the back seat. Clarence was riding shotgun, telling me how to drive and reading the map and lecturing about Cajun cults of death and black silk funeral flowers and enamel photographs of the dead and carvings on tombstones and surrealism in general and the bad state of the arts.
He turned to me suddenly, as if he had just remembered something important. “I’ve been meaning to tell you that whenever you have time we can start our diction lessons,” he said.
“What?” I answered, for this was new to me.
“I’ve decided to teach you to speak properly,” he said. “So that people will take you seriously.” The surrealists looked down at their hands, embarrassed for me.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll just stay like I am.”
“Of course not,” he said, and went back to the map. “It took me a long time to learn to speak correctly but I learned. You will learn too.” Alas, we never had time for our lessons.
I learned of his death by reading of it in Time magazine. It was a cold wet winter evening. I was at a newsstand on the corner of Third Avenue and 73rd Street in New York City. I bought the magazine and stuck it in my pocket and walked outside and stood on the street thinking about the last time I had seen him, the night he showed me his new darkroom in the library he built onto the back of his wife Elizabeth’s house in Gentilly. Then I thought about the last month he spent in the Pontalba, about how bad his knee had become and how he cursed it. About the hundreds of boxes of books he had packed and the pulley system and cardboard chute he invented to lower the boxes down the three flights of narrow rickety Pontalba stairs. I thought about the expression on our faces as Clarence outlined his plan to sail the boxes down from floor to floor.
That night I had a dream. In the morning I began to develop it into one of my Journal Entries for National Public Radio. The dream appeared to be about Picasso but as I developed it I saw it was really about Clarence. In such a way the mind gives up its secrets. I call it magic. Clarence called it art. Here then is the dream and its unfolding.
Journal entry, January 18, 1985,
New York City, New York
I dreamed last night of Picasso. We were driving through the Delta looking for a house for him to use as a studio. We were in my little blue Toyota. I was driving. Picasso was in the jump seat. “They gave me everything I wanted,” Picasso said. “Money and fame and beautiful lovers.”
“They let you paint your chairs,” I said. “That was the good part.”
“I painted what they wanted,” he said. “The more ridiculous it was the more they liked it.”
“You were a genius at fourteen,” I said. “What else could you do? You had to find ways to make it more amusing.”
“I needed blue,” he said. “I wanted a blue made of ground-up sapphires. If I had had the right blue. It really made me mad not to find that blue.”
“You did all right,” I said. “You did just fine.”
“Guernica,” he said. “They all wanted Guernica. Look at the drawings, I told them. Look at the eyes on the women. Look at the love scenes. Guernica, they demanded. Show us war.”
“It was wild,” I said and we laughed together at that. Two artists out for a drive in the country. It was a bright spring day in the Delta. The sun made mirages on the asphalt road.
“I was always afraid of running out of water in the desert,” Picasso said. “I was afraid I would end up chasing mirages.”
“That’s deep,” I said. “That’s very deep.”
“I know,” he said and settled down into the jump seat. “But who can bear to live on the surface?”
In real life I also hang out with painters and potters and photographers. They are the best friends a writer has. They teach you to use your eyes.
Clarence Laughlin was my first artist friend after I started writing, a wonderful, outlandish, completely original man. He gave me the cover for my first book of poems. Just gave it to me. A beautiful photograph of a Welsh actress. One night Clarence came to my house to take me to a double feature art film. Siddhartha and Steppenwolf. My husband came home as Clarence and I were leaving and asked politely if I would make him a sandwich before I left. Clarence hit the ceiling. We are going to see art, he said, drawing himself up on his walking stick. You can eat anytime.
My husband apologized, grabbed a piece of cold bread, and the three of us rushed off to the movies.
I WAS OUT WALKING on the mountain with a friend named Kathy last week. She had just returned from a visit to Seattle, and was full of descriptions of the mountains and the forests and the wildflowers. She told me she had run into an old friend named Greg who said he was driving to work one day last February and heard me say on the radio that we should all learn from two-year-olds and go to work by different routes and take all our books off the shelves and throw them on the floor and play with them.
So that afternoon he went out and bought a red motorcycle and named it for me and now he goes to work in a different way.
“Oh, no,” I said to Kathy. “I’m scared to death of motorcycles.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “He’s a responsible person. He’ll be careful and not get hurt.”
It was the first cool day. We walked awhile in silence. I kept thinking about all the ruts I’ve let myself get into lately and how I can talk a good game but where is the action and so forth. Kathy turned off on Spring Str
eet and I walked on home and went into my house and started pulling all the books off my bookshelves and piling them up on the living-room floor. Pretty soon I had a carpet of books. It looked great. I found a set of charcoals behind the books and drew a picture of myself and then one of a tree and then I found an old Japanese fan I bought years ago in New Orleans. Then I sat down to read. I found Loren Eiseley’s The Star Thrower and my book of Karsh’s photographs and I marveled over the photographs of Tennessee Williams and the mystical one of Martin Luther King.
I am here to report that my advice about taking down those books was sound. Not only was it a good idea but it was the beginning of one of the best weekends I’ve ever had. I picked up Judy Dater’s book of photographs with the wonderful cover photograph of Imogen Cunningham standing by a tree in her long black dress with her camera strap embroidered with peace signs and went downtown to show it to someone. I wandered into the Restaurant on the Corner and found the jazz pianist, Leland Tamboulian, and he wanted to see the books so he came up and played the piano while the sun went down and some more people came over and someone found The Rubāiyāt of Omar Khayyám and had to read it out loud and one thing led to another and the whole weekend was infused with a wonderful sense of fun and good humor all thanks to Greg Simon of Seattle, Washington, who reminded me of something I must have known for a while in February but had forgotten in the dog days of August.
Work
HOLLYWOOD AND the writer: so the first thing that happened was I had this successful book of short stories called In the Land of Dreamy Dreams. That same year the twenty-five-year-old daughter of a friend in Jackson, Mississippi, won a Pulitzer Prize for a play. She was out in Hollywood turning down offers as fast as she could answer the phone, so she told one of the producers at Twentieth Century Fox to call and offer one of the deals to me. Deals, that’s what they call them out there. It reminds me of my brother and me matching nickels with our lunch money in the sixth grade.
I was in my kitchen in Fayetteville, Arkansas, one afternoon in 1980 and the phone rang. It was a businesslike voice calling from Hollywood and offering to give me sixty-five thousand dollars to rewrite the Italian film Wife-mistress and set it in New Orleans. You’ve got to be kidding, I said. Why on earth would you want to do something like that?
That was before I knew you are supposed to say, Oh, yes, what a marvelous idea. How did you ever think up something so wonderful? That is the proper response to a Hollywood producer. Oh, my, what a wonderful brilliant idea. Gee, I’m honored you called me in on that. Besides, I didn’t know anything about publishing or movies at the time and I thought sixty-five thousand dollars must be some magic number of dollars they gave away right and left. I had just been offered almost exactly that amount of money for something else someone thought up for me to do. I didn’t know yet that all you got to begin with — up front, they call it — was a very small amount of money and you had to work for months or years even and then it was highly unlikely that they would ever give you the rest of the money. Also they make you feel like it’s you who has failed, never that it was they that couldn’t pull the deal off — Hollywood is really as sleazy as it’s reported to be. It chews up writers and spits them out. It wastes their time and their dreams.
I didn’t know any of this yet. “Well, listen,” I told this producer, trying to make her feel better about coming up with such a dumb idea, “I’ve got a lot better ideas than that for making movies.” Oh, she said, tell me. So I told her the entire plots of about three movies and even called her back on my own money to finish one I had to interrupt to go to the door. So she wrote that all down and I never heard from her again.
I found all of that very interesting. Later I had some more offers of about the same kind — I just kept turning them down. I am saving myself for something I can believe in — that’s how crazy I am.
UNIVERSITIES are always after me to give them my papers (by which they mean my letters and notes and worksheets). Whenever that happens I go out to the shed and get a sack of them and burn them up in the wood stove. I hate the idea of some poor graduate student down in a marble basement somewhere going through my notes and letters and wild imaginings. These pieces of paper are meaningful to me because any time I look at one of them it reminds me of what I was doing when I wrote it. But why should some stranger waste his time on my worksheets?
A poet told me a good one the other day. She said academics have a new name for a writer’s worksheets. They call them repressed papers. Here are some of my repressed papers. I found this notebook on the floor by the piano this morning. It’s been there for months.
To comprehend the major blueprints. An event occurs in three dimensions of space and one of time, or motion?
A four dimensional space time continuum. Is time motion? Yes, it seems so.
The simpler the premises the wider the area of applicability.
The heuristic view that light can be both wave and particle.
The questioning of causality. Always we have taken for granted the idea that every event could be explained by its antecedent conditions.
What is random?
DO THE LAWS OF CAUSE AND EFFECT GIVE WAY TO THE LAWS OF CHANCE AT THE ATOMIC LEVEL?
The equivalence of all inertial systems in regard to light.
Inertia. The tendency of a body to resist acceleration. Light is composed of discrete packets or quanta which move without subdividing and which are absorbed and emitted only as units.
Light is composed of quanta.
The study of the very small is quantum physics and the study of the vast realms of space is relativity.
I will name the new book Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle. In memory of Everything That Rises Must Converge. Remember how that title haunted me and how hard I tried to know what it meant? Yes, Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle.
“Wave and particle?” my editor said and shook his head. “Why not, it suits me if it suits you.”
MORE REPRESSED PAPERS:
I would still be a writer whether or not I had ever been
in psychoanalysis but I would be a different writer,
more driven, frightened, wild and unsure, a poet hiding
behind the mask of poetry, talking in riddles,
obsessed for days with words like riddles,
caught in traps of language,
unable to understand the sources of language or my own
subconscious motivations and drives.
I would not know as much, maybe.
Maybe I found out as much writing as I did talking.
Psychoanalysis is the impossible profession. The terrible paradox is that the knowledge gained by psychoanalysis is not of much use in the real world. No, that’s not true. It’s of use to a writer. The terrible problem is that the knowledge is not transferable.
My Freudian said I was not in analysis. I would never lie down on the couch. I sat cross-legged on the floor looking at his shoes. He would never let me touch his shoes. Anyway, I think I am funnier and wiser and more balanced because of it. I like myself more and trust myself more. Of course, I might have been that way because I got older. Or maybe it’s just because I’ve gotten up every day for eight years and done my work and am still doing it. Maybe my work healed me of the small amount of civilizing I was exposed to. Guilt is too high a price to pay for civilization. There’s got to be a better way.
I was sitting on a bed in a New York apartment arguing with my cousin about God.
“Who made you?” she demanded.
“I don’t know.”
“You think you’re so powerful you made yourself?”
“I didn’t say that, Baby Gwen, you said that, don’t put words in my mouth.”
“Then what do you believe? Even you have to believe in something.”
“I believe that man takes his own goodness and sets that intelligence outside of himself and calls it God and worships it. And then he takes his natural ability to transmit thoughts and he calls that the powe
r of prayer. It’s all semantics. It’s all words.”
“You have to make the leap of faith. Someday you’ll do it.”
“I will not.”
“It’s all faith. It’s faith and grace.”
“It’s twelve o’clock, Baby Gwen, and we’ve been arguing this for thirty-seven years. I’m going home.”
We get up from our mutual great-great-grandfather’s bed which my cousin keeps in an apartment in New York. We hug and kiss and go our separate ways.
I walk out into the streets of New York City at night. Lights that man invented and made out of his greatness are all over the place on the streets and above. Through a crack in the skyscrapers are other lights, wildly, crazily dependable somehow or other in case it is true that the earth is round and moving on its axis among the stars.
I KNOW a lot of two-year-olds that have genius. They are terribly observant, absolutely curious, willing to take risks. They will pay endless attention to detail, will return over and over again to a problem until it’s solved. Suddenly, they make the final move, the cap is off the bottle, the cabinet is open, the door is unlatched. My children were escape artists. They ran away to have adventures. I have chased them through the streets a million times, in my nightgown or in the rain. The oldest one was the best at it. When I found him he would be sitting in some stranger’s house eating cookies. He knew how to pick his victims. They would usually be people about the age I am now. Do you remember how marvelous a stranger’s house smelled when you were small? That’s another mark of genius, the senses are keen and finely tuned.
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