But by that time it just didn’t matter that much. There comes a time when your destiny confronts you and if you don’t accept it, you don’t begin to work in accord with that destiny, well then you’re just a fool. I wasn’t going to be president in 1940. I wasn’t even going to be vice president by the end of that year; I had been sucked in and served my little purposes and now I was going to be frozen out. The Kingfish had gobbled me up, just a medium-sized fish in the tank. I would be dumped and Huey would run again, maybe win, maybe lose to Franklin this time, but that was going to be the end of it. And by 1940, it was going to be a changed situation anyway. I just didn’t give a damn; I wanted to get back on the ranch, I wanted to see the old times out with as much dignity and as little whiskey as I could manage and the hell with the rest of it. So my accommodation was to simply hang on and go on my way. Huey was going to stay out of local statehouses and he had some pretty good protection. Even Capone or Legs Diamond would have had a hell of a time nailing the Kingfish by that time. No fortunate accidents were going to catapult me to any place that I hadn’t already been.
But then, just when it seemed settled, it wasn’t settled. After Munich, after he gobbled up the rest of Czechoslovakia, Adolf had Goring pass the word direct to Harry Hopkins. He wanted to take up Huey’s invitation. He wanted to come over, explore a few things, do a little business.
Peace in our time, Huey said. He’s looking for that now, right? Why should the son of a bitch take us up on this now? He’s cleaning out the country, he’s ready for war. What the hell does he have in mind?
Why are you asking me? I said. I haven’t been in here twice in nine months, Huey, I got nothing to tell you.
Don’t sulk, Big John, Huey said. I got you in mind all the time, it’s just that I’ve been preoccupied. This is a big country, you know, and there are lots of problems. Maybe we’ll get that redistribution working, maybe all of this stuff will come out in the long run, but it isn’t going to be nearly as fast as I thought when I was a young man. Got to cultivate patience, that’s all.
I have lots of patience, I said, I had it a long time ago. You were the one who was going to turn things around, make it all different by 1940, remember? I didn’t say that it was going to happen.
Huey said, you’re taking this too hard, John. You’re taking it personally. Sit back and help me through this. I want you to meet the guy when he comes off the boat in New York, I want you to escort him around. The Statue of Liberty, maybe Liberty Square in Philadelphia on a day trip. Then you can bring him here and I’ll meet him at the White House and we’ll talk over things. But I need your support here, I don’t want to go trotting out for him, it doesn’t suit my purposes.
I’m not a messenger boy, I said. I’m the Vice President. You got to take the office seriously even if you got no use for me.
Ah, nonsense, John, the Kingfish said. You’ve said yourself what you think of this job and you were right, all the time. I got a crazy plan, John. I think we’re going to save the world twenty years of agony and maybe a few million lives. I think we’re going to arrange to plug this guy, if not at the dock then maybe when he’s walking down Pennsylvania Avenue. We’ll have an accident arranged for him.
That’s crazy, I said. Our own lives won’t be worth shit. A head of state killed in our protection? They’ll go to war the next day.
Goring and Himmler? Goebbels? You think these guys want war? They just want what we have, John, they just want their part of it, that’s all. They won’t do a goddamned thing. They’ll be relieved, they think this guy is crazy too. Every synagogue in the country will have the lights on all night the day he dies. Even Chamberlain will thank us. We’ll be treated like heroes. I think the world will fall down and give us everything we want, we get the deed done. That’s what I think and your own part is clear. You’re going to help me, John, and that’s the end of it.
And then what? I said. It’s a crazy plan, Huey. And even if it works, can we deal with the consequences?
Well sure, Huey said. I’ve been dealing with consequences all my life. I love consequences, they’re all we got. We don’t know what causes, we only know what happens, you understand? I love these talks, I want you to know that. Just the two of us in a room with a bottle, beautiful, I don’t know what I would have done if we hadn’t had that. Have a drink, John, it’s too late.
Too late for what?
Too late not to have a drink, the Kingfish said. So set them up.
So what was there to say? The rest seems very fast in memory although of course it was agonizingly slow in the development, waiting all through it in a suspended anguish, waiting for that heavy thud that would ejaculate us into the latter part of the century. Meeting the prancing, dancing little dictator and his company right off the boat, doing the ceremonial thing, then whirling them through Jimmy Walker’s glittering, poisonous city. The Staten Island Ferry, Radio City Music Hall. Two Rockettes flanked Hitler, put their arms around him at my direction, mimed kissing his cheekbones. He glowed, seemed to expand. There was supposed to be a mistress but there was no woman in the party, no woman close to him. Just Himmler, Goring and the impossibly fat Streicher who always seemed to be confiding something to the Fuhrer. We had a private dinner at the Waldorf, talked through the interpreters of cattle and of conditions in Austria during the World War and of the shadows in Europe. Grover Whalen poured wine. I mentioned the Sudetenland, just to have it on record, but the interpreter frowned and I could see that there was no translation. Later, the dictator wanted to see Harlem at midnight. We drove there quickly in covered cars, then back to the Waldorf. At the corner where Father Divine had embraced the Kingfish, women looked at us indolently, poking knees through their skirts. The Fuhrer rumbled in the car but said nothing. We wheeled down Fifth Avenue until the lights glowed softly again, then back into the underground garage. I felt something like a blow at the back of my neck and the thought Like the Statehouse. These were the conditions. If it was going to happen, the place would be here. It would be now.
Seated next to the dictator I leaned over to whisper — what? What would he have understood? I had no German. Nor did I know what I would have said. Dead Jews, Gypsies, burning bodies in their graves, the awful aspects of war. I thought of this and leaned back. There was nothing to say. We stopped, the door came open. I got out first and then the guard in the jump seat and then Streicher from the front, panting in sweat, and then Hitler. Hitler came last of all, straightened, looked at me with those strange, focused eyes, that face like a claw. Raus, he said in a high voice, raus —
His head exploded. One eye seemed to expectorate, fall to the stones of the garage, then fragments of him were cast upward. In the heavy embrace of someone I could not see, I stumbled back. The grasp was enormous, absolutely enfolding, it felt like swaddling, like death, like ascension. The dictator was floating. The dictator, in pieces, was floating in the air.
Now we can begin the business of living, I thought I heard Huey say, his voice enormous in my head. Except of course, that there was no Huey there, only that stricken embrace, and then the broken screams in the garage, the sound of gabbled German, hysteria —
Hitler sifted over me in the sudden darkness.
Under the silt of Hitler, I fell.
The Kingfish sent shocked condolences and offered to accompany the body back to Berlin. But the party and their coffin were already on their way before the announcement at the press conference and then in the dawn, the first reports came of the attacks upon the Embassy. The declaration of war followed by noon.
Chamberlain was furious with us.
But the Kingfish was at the top of his mood, the happiest I had ever seen him.
I always wanted to be a war president, he said. I guess that this was what I was aiming for from the start. We’re going to save them, John, he said excitedly, we’re going to get them out, we’re going to stop the machine. We’re going to save them all, Huey said. We’re going to save them all.
Salvatio
n from the parish.
Morning Light
SELL She-Us: Dark my light and darker my desire. Roethke wrote that, I think. Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), mentor to a lot of slightly younger poets who did it to themselves by way of ovens, candlelight, bridges, walkways, or the more civilized spaces of furnished rooms and alcohol. For Ted it was a heart attack but who is to say, who is to calculate the etiology? But my desire is not dark, it is light, light as night, full as flight, plumes of breath drifting upward into the cold and preservative spaces as slowly, slowly I enter into the quiescent, embalmed spaces of my beloved. Live and learn. Look and listen.
At the heart’s stubborn zero, on the bed where all connection is borne. Think of it, Frances, think what it could have been like, the two of us on those mild and quiescent shores of passage, the two of us locked and linked to the essentialities of the spirit. Of course, you had other ideas, Frances, which is what has led to these more difficult and sullen choices. Enraptured, enthralled, I nonetheless roll and roll toward that stubborn zero on these frozen sheets, looking for the still heart of desire. A generation of sunken poets would have approved. Desolate, those inner spaces of yours and yet, five miles from desolation in the Vegas desert is the dazzling sun of the Strip itself. One must counsel patience then in any direction.
Centigrade: “Excuse me,” Randall Jarrell says. His eyes twinkle with introspection, with secrets which could stop a world were he only to divulge them. Some years later he will take that stroll down the highway and make fast calculations as headlights reach toward those secretladen eyes. “What do you think you’re doing? Shouldn’t you put on the heat? It’s awful1n this room, at least you should have a blanket. And look at your partner. She’s absolutely blue.”
“Blue is true,” I agree. “She’s cooperating now, though. There’s something about real cold that brings them around, haven’t you noticed?”
Randall Jarrell shrugs. Carrying original sin and the lost forests of childhood within him, considering this history (and the barren aspect of grown-up life) leaves him little room for dialogue, for the rigors of eschatology . “I wouldn’t know,” he says, “I wouldn’t know what brings any of them around. “ He removes his coat, tosses it. “Here,” he says, “place it on the lady, if you won’t protect yourself, at least be a gentleman. Even a bear cares. “
“Don’t tell me what to do,” I say. Nonetheless, I hold the cloak at arm’s length, then toss it atop Frances. The folds conform to her limbs, she looks both smaller and more sufficient on the bed. A small arc of steam seems to come from beneath the coat, clouds the space above. “Well, thanks anyway,” I say, “thanks a lot.”
“Fifty-one American poets,” Randall Jarrell says. He seems almost happy, now that Frances has been cloaked. “Fifty-two disasters. I am talking of a generation here. But don’t let it bother you, it’s not your destiny. It’s the ball-turret gunner we must fear.” He dematerializes, glides through a wall. “See you,” he says, “in just a little while. Down the highways and byways of life.” His stride is heavy, resonant in the new emptiness, I imagine that I can see his little bearded form speeding toward resolution. But that of course is surely not mine to say.
“We had plans, didn’t we, Frances?” I say. “Big plans, large outcome.” As usual, she says nothing. She has said nothing for a long time. Sometimes I feel culpability, other times sorrow, now and then the perverse need to enter her even in this diminished state and place the crystals of my being deep within her but more or less, more and more I try to control myself, keeping the example of my mentors and possessors before me.
Absolute Zero: Sylvia Plath is shivering. Upstairs her children sleep on and on, wrapped in their midday doze, unavailing, unrepresentative of her condition, but in the kitchen. Sylvia grasps herself, hugs herself, gasps. “I’ll never get warm,” she says. She bites her lips until little premonitory flecks of blood appear. “Oh Daddy,” she says, “oh Daddy you bastard.” Her gaze sweeps the room, she looks at me with interest. “It’s not you,” she says, “you’re not Daddy.”
“No I’m not.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m an observer,” I say, “a watcher in the glade of life. Fifty-one dead American poets keep me busy with their adumbrations. Are you very cold?”
“So cold unto death,” Sylvia says. She looks longingly at the oven. “In there I can get warm,” she says. ‘’I’ll just put it on, have a spot of tea. “
“You must consider this carefully,” I say. “Absolute zero is no foundation, it is only a possibility. “
“Why fifty-one?” Sylvia says. She turns a switch, we listen to the ooze of released gases. “Why not forty-nine or fifty-four? Why are you so precise?”
“I was accused of that,” I say. “Precision is all that stands between me and the void. You too. Most of us. Rigor, circumstance, ritualized versions of ourselves. You’ll never get warm, not even there. Just a falling, a falling and then a cold you cannot conceive. I know.”
“How do you know?”
“Don’t ask,” I say. I think of telling her about Frances, but it is a superfluity. Sylvia has enough on her mind; all of her compassion is reserved for herself. Not even the kiddies upstairs can distract her. She opens the grate of the oven, kneels. “I know it’s different in there.”
“Not necessarily.”
“I’m looking for a way out,” she says. She leans forward, puts her head inside, sniffs. “Yes,” she says, “it’s warm.” She inhales deeply. “Aah,” she says, “this is warmth.” Her respiration levels, keens, I hear the sound of her panting. “Ariel,” she says, “a-real, a-real. “
It is time to take my leave. Rounds are necessary, perhaps, call it a survey course, but they are also depressing. So much disaster! So many dead poets, damned poets, dying poets, self-loathing poets, self-mocking poets. So much copulation, fornication, inebriation, alcoholism, imbibition. So much adultery, fondle and putter in the small groves of academia, uptilted breasts like chalices, small groans as if from the vestry of self, distinguished heads leaning over the cusp of toilet bowls in their soon-enough remorse. It is more than one can bear, for penance or research.
Sylvia takes one shuddering breath and is still as I pad out of the English countryside, as deft and invisible at this moment as Jarrell. “Frances,” I say, “it is unfortunate that you have driven me to this.” I reach out, find myself on the accustomed bed, place her splendid and icy fingers on the back of my neck. Now at last the momentary soothing of embrace. I huddle with her under the blanket which Randall has so wisely suggested to us and ponder all of the circumstances of this difficult odyssey.
In the Ice House: Full fathom five Delmore Schwartz lies, crumpled in the corridor of the Times Square hotel where, so recently, he has incurred a fatal attack. His blood cools toward the risible, his eyes are already frozen in contemplation of that constancy he has for so long sought. “Genesis,” I say, as if the sound of his own work will speed him toward a milder fate. “The world is a wedding of successful love.” Delmore has no response to this; unlike the chatty Randall or the chilled Sylvia, he has taken a determined step toward the next phase of his career.
Considering him, considering the detritus within Delmore’s room, the shambles of which I can clearly see through the open door, I think of the strange and shared fate of these postwar poets, some of whose work will even discuss the pity of their situation. If I were to look carefully enough, use the periscope of accommodation, I would — it seems to me — probably find underneath the orange rinds and incoherent handwritten manuscripts, the unreadable poems and the whiskey bottles heaped on the bed, the perfect and molded form of Frances, still hiding out in yet another poet’s room, waiting for the line that will vault her into some kind of understanding of her life (and therefore mine) but I dare not look. Frances got around, Frances had a real understanding of modem poetry but only by proxy. In the sheets I would quote and sometimes lecture, promise her further insights but I would not escort her to the
world. Humping toward the flower of her being, immersed in the cold and arching speech of the poets the century had bestowed upon me, I committed a rigorous and insistent research.
Falling to the Abscissa: On the high cliff, Berryman waves to me, measures himself for the leap. “What say, Henry?” he calls. “Are you ready for that great jump, are you ready for the dark? Soon there will be none of us, once there are two.” He waves again. “It’s cold in the river,” he says, “and my bones are steaming. The river will put out the fire. “
“Don’t do it!” I say. The intensity of this confrontation, so soon after the dialogue with Sylvia, the vision of Delmore, has quite undone me. “Always the eternal cold, past the fire. You’ll never warm again, the river will sink your bones. “
“I hope so,” Berryman says, “I’ve had enough, Henry, I’ve had enough.” His grip is perilous, he sways, his glasses flash in the spectrum and tumble from his face. The arc of his lunge seems foreshadowed by desperate swaying. “Join me, Henry,” he says, “we’ll find the ice together.”
“No!” I say. Unwillingly, desperately, I scramble on the rocks, reach out, assault the blank space of the wall with hopeless tread. “Suffer the warmth, stay with us, stay with us — ”
“I think not,” John Berryman says, “the late century condition is going to be even more hideous, the millennium is unattainable.” So saying, he lets go, waves jauntily, falls like a shot tern into the river. There is nothing to be done, I scramble on the pebbles and watch him hit the stones, fall away. It is, as John undoubtedly planned, an unanswerable, in fact an insuperable, statement.
The Ice Age: “You see what I mean, then?” Robert Lowell says. He leans hugely over Frances and myself, his New England features rocklike and magnified by their accusation. “There’s no way out, not at all.” He touches my shoulder, that connection huge in the room, then withdraws. “Absolute silence is absolute darkness,” he says, “but you’ll have to find your own way in the canon.”
The Very Best of Barry N Malzberg Page 39