Meaning a Life

by Mary Oppen

  We called on Aunt Elsie and Uncle Tracy, both of whom were very kind and good to us. Aunt Elsie took me to buy some New York clothes; in 1928 a black coat with a large light fur collar, a hat that pulled down over the ears, high-heeled shoes, and a dress loose above and tight around the hips made nearly a uniform on Fifth Avenue. For men the style was equally rigid: a black hat or Derby, a black overcoat with a velvet collar, and black shoes with a dark suit.

  Old friends of George’s father and mother invited us to dinner parties, where we were accepted and treated with respect, as young adults who knew what they wanted and knew what they thought. We were exhilarated by New York City, which was the cultural center of our country—not a political-cultural center as Paris was to France, but for us the center where young people congregated to exchange ideas in writing, painting, sculpture, all the arts. In New York City standards were set and professional levels were achieved; if talent was recognized in New York, the rest of the country at some time also gave recognition. We had not felt in San Francisco that we knew the people who were writing and thinking and searching for what was new, and we went to New York searching for those people, for a circle of peers. We had the conviction that the works of artists and writers had to be new, or there was no point to the effort. We were undoubtedly lucky, for we found almost at once, and seemingly without impediment, friends who had these concerns too, and who understood us and accepted us as friends.

  Uncle Tracy took us to the theater, but theater was past its day of greatness and the ideas were not fresh. Moreover, our western childhood contained almost nothing of the tradition of the legitimate stage. We didn’t respect it as did those who were closer to their European background, nor did we like opera; but we saw the Ballet Jooss troupe dance “The Green Table,” a political satire, and found it brilliant and clever.

  We found an apartment in Minetta Lane in Greenwich Village, but it turned out to be a dark hole, and noisy—bottles were thrown down our entry-way at night, which disturbed our sleep. We spent the rest of the winter in the Madison Square Hotel, taking our meals in the surrounding Syrian, Armenian, and Lebanese restaurants.

  George had a letter of recommendation to the editor of the New York Sun, and on the first day after we had found a room and clothed ourselves conventionally, he took the letter and went to ask the editor for a job. The editor was kind and interested, and said, “Suppose I call my advertising manager and ask him to take you with him on his rounds—perhaps you will see something of his work and you will know better what job you want.”

  George set out with the advertising manager; they took the subway, which was crowded, and at Sixty-eighth Street, where there are two stairway exits from the subway, the advertising manager took one stairway and George took the other. George finally gave up trying to find his man in the crowd and came home. “I can’t go back, I’d feel too foolish,” he said. Instead he took a job as a switchboard operator in the brokerage house in which Uncle Rob was interested. George disconnected customers, made wrong connections, and caused general consternation the first day on his job, but he soon got the hang of it. It was also his job to run out for coffee and sandwiches, and he was soon being asked for tips on the stock market. These were the days just before the stock-market crash of 1929; stenographers were asking for tips from elevator boys, and George, being from inside the office, presumably had much hotter tips.

  I was reading Marcel Proust, sinking deep into his memories and awakening to intuitive knowledge of my own; more than I had known before I read him and learned to trust my intuitions. As I read Proust and Henry James I became conscious of Europe and of a cultured life in a society I had not glimpsed from my western childhood. I found that my understanding increased as I read, and that I had my own knowing ways. If I knew how to exercise them, I knew more about the people around me, and I brought to this intellectual life of New York my background, with knowledge of people in a small town, intimately known. I found that upon entering a room, if I were observant and made myself sensitive to the people in that room, I could know almost at once more than I had thought possible without spending a long time with them accumulating the knowledge. Henry James opened the world around me by making the life of Europe and his society an example for me of a way to think and analyze; to find meaning in the social world around, to penetrate and understand it and to value the contribution of the U.S.

  I also discovered Virginia Woolf’s novels, just appearing in 1928; her writing meant to me the flash of insight while a leaf falls, the knowledge of complex relations that comes in a moment of understanding. Her feminine mind was close to mine—my thought too brought me sudden realizations of life being lived in complexity while a moment of time passes. Her novels are always about what life is, about how death coming in life to a loved friend is impossible to separate from one’s own life. I learned that love does not die with death, “that love is simple but people are not simple.” Virginia herself found in her writing what life meant to her, and reading her works I found a little more of what life meant to me.

  Once, invited to a party to which we had to walk the length of Manhattan because we had no money, we paused at a bookshop and leafed through more books of poetry than we had ever found in one place before. This was the Gotham Book Mart, and George was reading Pound’s Exile 3, which had the first section of “Poem beginning ‘The,’” by Louis Zukofsky. At the party Mary Wright said to George, “Oh, you are a poet, you must meet our friend Zukofsky.”

  George said, “He wrote ‘Poem beginning “The.”’”

  Mary said, “You are the only one in the world who knows it.”

  Louis introduced us to Charles Reznikoff’s poetry, and then to Reznikoff himself, whom we returned to visit often. Charles’ job was writing definitions for a law-book company, and across the table from him every day sat another man trained in law who also worked there. Every day they faced each other, and beginning with A they worked through all the definitions of law until they came to Z, keeping the definitions up to date. The company was at the Brooklyn end of Manhattan Bridge, and often we met Charles after work to go for a walk with him. Along the way we stopped to eat; Charles was a connoisseur of cafeterias, and we ate the best muffins in town at one cafeteria, walked further to find the best chicken, and ate Beecake at the Automat. Or we met Charles at the President Cafeteria near Grand Central Station, and after supper we walked as far as George and I felt like walking.

  One day when we were in her house, Charles’ wife Marie Syrkin told of her teaching at Textile High School in Manhattan. Marie was very fond of Shelley’s “Indian Serenade,” but she was afraid of the reception a love poem would have among the teenage boys from the poor districts of Manhattan. She decided to read it nevertheless, and as she stood there before the class reading the poem, a hand in the back row began waving as she finished the lines, “Oh lift me from the grass / I die! I faint! I fail!” She raised her eyes, and still affected by the poem, she said to the boy, “Yes?”

  “What’s wrong with that Indian?” he wanted to know.

  Charles walked all the way home most evenings. We went to his apartment on Friday evenings—I don’t remember that he invited us, maybe he found us knocking at his door week after week and took us in. While we were visiting Charles ran out to fetch ice cream and cream soda. Years later, when we called on Charles, I asked, “Charles, why don’t you buy us ice cream and cream soda as you always did when we were young and came to call?”

  “It’s strange,” said Charles, “I never had cream soda before that, nor since!”

  Charles was a hard man to compliment. He outmaneuvered our attempts to tell him what his poetry meant to us, and countered with anecdotes about his father’s millinery business or how he, when he lived at his sister’s house which was identical to all the others on the street in Brooklyn, couldn’t find the house because she had removed the rocking chair by which he identified it. He had walked all the way back to
the corner store and telephoned her, and she put the rocker back on the porch so Charles could find his way home. Such stories belittled Charles, and many times they were ironic. In later years George said to Charles, “Your poems have been with me through the war, during all my adult life.”

  Charles replied, “George, I’m sure we all do the best we can and George, I think that’s all any of us can do.”

  In the basement of his sister’s house Charles kept his printing press. It was a small press, and yet it was a big, very heavy piece of machinery. He set a few lines of type each evening, just as he tried to write at least a line or two of poetry at the end of his day of work. He was generous with the books he printed—if we showed interest he immediately gave us a copy.

  We were riding along in our car one day, Charles in the front seat with George, and we stopped at a light somewhere in Brooklyn. When a passerby stepped forward to ask directions, Charles thought a moment and said, “You go . . . no, not that way, first you go down this street as far as where the statue used to be—” The light had changed, and the cars behind us were honking their horns, so we moved off, wondering if the passerby ever found his destination. For Charles, each street carried memories; he had lived only briefly in other places, and New York and Brooklyn were his home. In his sixties some thirty years later, when he was ill, Charles went to the doctor, who said as he was recovering, “Do you get enough exercise?”

  “I walk,” said Charles.

  “Well, I think you should be sure you walk enough to get adequate exercise. How far do you walk?”

  “Oh, ten to twenty miles a day,” answered Charles.

  We went exploring New York with our friends Mary and Russel Wright, through the East Side of the city where lines of drying clothes festooned the area-ways and backyards of the tenements. Fruit stands and vegetable stands and wagons drawn by horses were piled with heaps of color created by oranges, lettuce, tomatoes, and watermelons. Russel wept at the color. Women leaned with their elbows on pillows at their window sills, idly gazing at the street scene, or shouting at children in the street, or engaging in conversation with a next-door neighbor, window to window. Everything seemed to be going on at once; men hurried across streets pushing loaded racks of clothing, and boys carried bundles of cut cloth to be sewed at home for bosses, who sent out the cut pieces and later collected the finished garments. Sweatshops in every block hummed with their machines, and small industry crowded in among the workers in the neighborhoods where they lived.

  At Coney Island we went into the hall of mirrors and laughed at ourselves, then as we stepped out onto the promenade, a blast of air raised Mary’s skirts above her head; her arms went up too, and she was a pretty flower, a half-naked shrieking girl. We rode the giant Ferris Wheel which lifted us up above the city and the sea, and when our car reached the top, high above the surrounding city, a system of rails started the car in a slide of its own as the rest of the wheels stood still, and rocked us in a violent pendulum motion before it came to an abrupt stop. Russel bellowed, and we screamed; Russel’s voice rose above the noise of the holiday makers, “GET US OUT OF HERE!” The Ferris Wheel made a half-revolution, without any stops, brought us to the platform and let us out.

  We took Mary and Russel sailing on the Hudson before we laid our cat-boat up for the winter, and we found that our boat, so roomy for two during the previous summer, was crowded with four. On our return to the mooring, I lost my balance in excitement and misjudgment, and in what seemed to be slow-motion comedy I fell in a forward somersault into the water. I seemed to see myself fall, and I clambered out in chagrin. There was no way to be adequately myself while, soaking wet in a new red sweater and skirt, I entered the hotel lobby and dripped up in the elevator to change clothes. Zukofsky went with us to strip our boat for laying her up at the end of summer. I took off the sail and tied it into a bundle, Louis continuing to talk. I started up the steel stairway to Riverside Drive, with Louis right behind me; George followed with his burden, up the stairs, across the tracks, and up the next flight of stairs. Louis gallantly protested, “Mary, let me carry it, Mary please.” Near the top I turned and handed him the sail—he staggered and went down a few steps before he landed against the railing to recover himself. I gathered the bundle again in my arms and dragged it to the top of the stairs.

  George and I were western kids. Although there was much that New Yorkers knew which we did not know of the arts, the theater, Europe, and the ins and outs of their city, they did not know the forests of Montana or of Oregon, the swift flowing rivers and the mountains. Nor did they know the life of hitchhiking and of sailing across half the country with almost no money. We had our own strengths and knowledge, and I think in our friendships the differences were part of our fascination for each other. Mary Wright’s family had been friends of George’s parents from their time in New York as a young couple; aunts, cousins, and friends formed a closely knit and intermarried group, from which Mary was the first and George the second to have married outside the tight circle.

  In Aunt Helen’s drawing room during that winter, directly before the elections, I remember a discussion; I would be old enough to vote the following year, but I was not interested in their talk. The election that year was between the Californian, Herbert Hoover, and Al Smith, the Tammany Hall man who was then mayor of New York City, a colorful man with what seemed to me to be no substance, no ideas, and no indication that he was anything but a Tammany Hall man. Herbert Hoover represented the most conservative views possible on running the country, and in that election year the issues were vital; the country was threatened by depression, and neither Hoover’s ideas nor Smith’s ideas seemed to consider the people or the needs of the country as we had observed them in our hitchhiking. But we held ourselves aloof and did not enter the conversation at Aunt Helen’s party. Afterwards, as always, we burst into talk with each other as soon as we left her house, but preferred our other concerns, and left politics until later.

  Aunt Elsie took me to lunch one day to ask me if we intended to have children. I thought it was none of her affair and said no, but I did not have any kind of birth control and we had gotten no advice from doctors we had asked. She took me to the birth control clinic the next day, and I never had to have another abortion. I wrote to Nellie and to my sister-in-law Julia, who had so many children, and told them they must find birth control clinics at once. Nellie replied in high glee, with cartoons, but Julia could not arrange getting from Oregon wilderness to a San Francisco birth control clinic, and she had one more child. At that time there were only eleven states that allowed even doctors to give birth control information.

  Snow in Central Park in December seemed a return to my Montana childhood; it drifted down in a silence in which we walked in a white world with lit-up Manhattan instead of the Rocky Mountains meeting my eyes when I raised them. But we felt trapped in the tightly-built city as the winter wore on. We lived in a steam-heated room, warmer than any room in the west, and the air was a strange dry heated air which smelled the same in every building when one stepped inside out of the cold of the streets. We didn’t yet know the subway system, and we got off at stations at random just to see what was above ground. Once we stuck our heads out into a cemetery, another time we were on clay fields with standing pools of water, and once we were among gigantic identical apartment buildings in the Bronx, block after block. When I walked in neighborhoods near our hotel on Twenty-fourth Street in Manhattan, each direction took me to a neighborhood intact in its national origins, with corner stores and markets reflecting the culture of the people and the country from which they came. Most of these people did not know the United States beyond the subway system. It was strange to be looking on at this tense New York City life, which was just as American as was life in Montana or Oregon or San Francisco.

  In the following months we met more friends through Mary and Russel Wright and Louis Zukofsky—writers, musicians, poets, composers. One of them, T
ibor Serly, was custodian of Bartok’s papers and music. Serly, who played with the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, tried to interest the conductor, Stokowski, in both Bartok’s music and his own. Stokowski was reluctant, but we did hear one piece by Bartok performed in Philadelphia, performed over the objections of the musicians, who found this music of our times too difficult, too new.