A Moveable Famine

by John Skoyles

  The next day I was too dehydrated to do anything but walk to the A&P for a can of soup. I met Kurt in the juice aisle where he had regained his human shape. He held a piece of tailpipe in one hand and a can of V8 in the other, hoping to find the right circumference to patch his exhaust system. I called Hester from the pay phone in the vegetable section.

  “You missed a good time last night,” I said.

  “How was the reading?” she asked. “I was erstwhile occupied.”

  “Great,” I said. “And so was the party.”

  “What can I do for you, John?”

  I said I just wanted to tell her about the reading and we said good-bye. Over the next weeks, I saw Hester walking into Dave’s Clockhead, a gay bar with a wall of cuckoo clocks; knocking on Zoe’s door at the Work Center; strolling with Synchro, the owner of Café Blase, and sometimes with his business partner, Arnie, and sometimes arm in arm with both. A car passed me, and a man with a condom over his head poked it out the passenger side window. Hester was driving. I saw her with the transvestite Musty Chiffon and the puppeteer Wayland Flowers.

  She was not going to be my girl.

  Stanley was leaving for New York in mid-November, and Porter advised me to make an appointment with him. He had told me Stanley’s life story, his father killing himself when his mother was pregnant with him, that he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard but was denied the teaching post automatically granted to those with that honor because he was Jewish. I sorted through my best poems from a year ago and in doing so realized that Stanley’s presence, his faith in all of us, had intimidated me into editing myself before I even began to write. As Post-Elliot had become an author of titles alone, I was a one-line wonder. I saw myself years later, next to him on a bar stool, our collected works amounting to a few inches of text.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  NOT MANY BUT MUCH—PO-BIZ IN THE GARDEN—THE ART SPIRIT—PIPE STEMS—NEW FRIENDS

  I’d been circumnavigating The Fo’c’sle’s beckoning beer mugs and rocks glasses by cutting over to Bradford Street until I was beyond it, then walking back to Commercial, making a circuitous box of a path. I went that way to see Stanley, who lived near land’s end. I opened the metal gate to tiers of flowers and herbs that curled over the timber edging their beds. Oriental cherry trees and weeping birches added privacy. Bluestone squares led to a porch where, to my surprise, Stanley sat with a large man in suspenders and a straw fedora. Chet Cunningham directed the Poetry Society of America and, when I shook his hand, he nodded to the rolled-up poems I carried and asked if I had come to see the oracle. Stanley explained I was a fellow. I took a seat next to them, our three chairs facing the garden. Stanley looked at me over those enormous bags under his eyes and said, “We’re talking po-biz,” and chuckled.

  “Make all the connections you can while you’re here,” Cunningham said.

  Stanley seemed embarrassed. “I don’t know about that,” he said.

  “Sure!” Cunningham said. “Visiting poets tell editors who they met. Stanley, I wouldn’t mind giving a reading and spending a few days in P’town.”

  “I think Porter already has the list,” Stanley said, “but we’ll see.”

  “If someone cancels, I’m here!” he said, poking his palm with his index finger. “Tell Porter. He’s in charge, right?”

  “That’s right,” Stanley said in his singsong way.

  “Where have you published?” Cunningham asked.

  “Not many places,” I said. “A few quarterlies.”

  “Keep sending your stuff out,” he said. “Reputations are made by quantity.”

  “The Italians have a saying, Not many but much. I think that’s a better way,” Stanley said.

  “Why not both?” Cunningham said. “Swing for the fences! By the way, Stanley, did you see that the governor asked Rod McKuen to that group he invited to Albany? There are a hundred better poets. I would have gone!”

  Stanley’s wince was not enough to stop Cunningham.

  “Don’t you think I’m right Stanley, it’s a disgrace?”

  “He’s no worse than many who were invited,” Stanley said.

  “I know you don’t mean that, Stanley,” Cunningham said. “You just can’t mean that.”

  “Let me show you the garden,” Stanley said.

  “Love it,” Cunningham said.

  We followed Stanley as he passed each specimen, concerned over some, joyful at others, like the Montauk daisies. We reached a stretch of herbs. Cunningham took me aside and asked me to tell Porter he’d like to be a visiting poet, as he felt Stanley might forget. Stanley bent down, tore off a few green curly leaves, and brought the cluster close to Cunningham’s face. “What’s this?” Stanley asked.

  “I don’t know,” Cunningham said.

  “Catmint,” Stanley said. We took a few more steps, and Stanley pinched another clump. “And this?” He pushed it under the big man’s nose.

  “Not sure, Stanley.”

  “Thyme.”

  “I don’t know herbs, Stanley,” Cunningham said.

  “Um hmm,” Stanley said, bending again and repeating the same gesture.

  Cunningham didn’t answer.

  “Calendula,” Stanley said. He did the same with comfrey and wormwood. Cunningham put his hands in his pockets and said, “I should be going.” Stanley poked another sprig at him. This time, he didn’t wait for an answer. He looked Cunningham in the eye and said, “Chive.”

  Stanley turned, and Cunningham touched his shoulder to get his attention, saying loudly that he was leaving, but Stanley kept walking and raised the back of his hand in farewell.

  “Good to meet you,” he said to me, and left.

  Stanley pointed out a darkened basement window next to a rank pile of compost. I looked into his study—a desk and chair, two bookcases. The room was smaller than mine at the Bull Ring. We entered the house from the back, walking through the kitchen to a round coffee table near the porch.

  “Isn’t he awful?” Stanley said, shrugging and laughing. “He’s making a mess of the poetry society, everyone’s quitting. He wanted my advice.”

  I told Stanley how much I liked his last book, particularly, “An Old Cracked Tune.” He said that when he was a boy, he was taunted in his neighborhood with the anti-Semitic jingle, “My name is Solomon Levi! My name is Solomon Levi!” He made a poem of the ridicule:

  AN OLD CRACKED TUNE

  My name is Solomon Levi,

  the desert is my home,

  my mother’s breast was thorny,

  and father I had none.

  The sands whispered, Be separate,

  the stones taught me, Be hard.

  I dance, for the joy of surviving,

  on the edge of the road.

  Stanley put on his glasses and read my poems while I browsed through stacks of new books. The mailman placed packages in the basket on the door, but Stanley did not break his concentration. When he finished reading, he spread them across the table, saying I should work on texture, and to pay attention to my endings, which he said “came thudding to a close.” I agreed with the texture. Flat language was a weakness. But the endings! I worked so hard on my endings! Stanley said the poems were just getting interesting when they circled back to the first lines. Worst of all, I was not realizing my whole self and soul.

  “In these poems, you’re only halfway down the well,” he said. “You must rake the bottom slime.” I couldn’t resist quoting the edict that drove my lines across the page like battalions on a forced march. “What about Yeats saying that a poem should close with a click like the lid on a box?”

  “The ending should be a door and a window,” he said. “It should close, but you should be able to look through it.”

  I followed him into the kitchen where he made martinis. We took our glasses to the porch. Stanley’s neighbor, Jack Tworkov, entered the garden. He sat with us and praised the flowers, asking Stanley how he found the time. Stanley said he did a lot of his work there, it
was meditative, and he didn’t like to be interrupted. He said Rothko never forgave him for not inviting him in when he passed by, but Stanley considered the garden his real study.

  Jack said he had just wiped away most of a big painting he had worked on for weeks. He crushed his bald head with the palms of his hands, but his gesture of angst had more than a bit of hope in it. He was eager to get back to the studio. Stanley said I had just shown him some poems. Jack said he gave a crit to a fellow but it went badly. He wondered if he had been too harsh.

  “When you point out someone’s flaws,” Stanley said, “they sometimes resent you for it. But when a mirror reflects our ugliness, we call it a good mirror.” He peeked over at me, chuckling.

  “How’s your fellowship going?” Jack asked.

  I went into a long monologue mentioning my sliding typewriter, the Bull Ring’s noise, the temptations of the bars and female fellows, my doubting my ability, my writing only first lines—in general, the answer of an idiot.

  Jack said, “You can draw a dream with a number two pencil if you’re open to the dream.” Stanley walked him to the gate then hopped to his study, returning with an old paperback of Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit that he said I could keep.

  “You’ll see why,” he said.

  In my motel room, I opened Henri’s book to the sentence, “A man must be master of himself and master of his word to achieve the full realization of himself as an artist.” Stanley had written about perishing into work and, at our first meeting, Dugan pointed out that we were at the Fine Arts Work Center. He lent me Rilke’s book on Rodin, whose first sentence read, “Rodin was solitary before he became famous, and he was more solitary after he became famous, for what is fame, but the accumulation of misunderstandings that surrounds a name.” I had brought Pavese’s Lavorare Stanca, or Hard Labor with me, but Pavese meant the labor of everyday life. Here I was free of that, and yet everywhere I turned I saw work I wasn’t doing. The New Yorker took a poem by Ted Page and we were all thrilled. At Iowa, the news would have sent students and teachers running with their heads in their hands. Stanley said, “Live in the layers/not on the litter,” and poetry business, gossip and envy were all consigned to the litter. That there were larger issues than craft had escaped me, issues that could be addressed in a dank study near a compost heap, or with a humble nub of lead.

  Jeanne invited me to dinner, for the promised carbonara. I walked across the parking lot with a bottle of wine and we talked about life in the Bull Ring. Spooner had been taken to the hospital for breaking one of her beautiful ankles at a polka lesson. Jeanne asked if the noisy weekend visitors bothered me and I said no, but the truth was that on Saturdays and Sundays I heard the sounds of hetero sex on one side, gay sex on the other, and most mornings, the artist Jackson Lambert above me purging the previous night’s binge. I saw the table set for two and asked about Wayne. They had separated. She thought he had crossed from eccentricity into madness. She went in the other room and returned with a cigar box containing hundreds of tiny white twigs.

  “They’re clay-pipe stems. Wayne’s obsession. He finds them on the beach. From early Dutch settlers.”

  “That seems harmless enough,” I said.

  “He has about twenty boxes like this,” she said, and sighed. “He combs the flats at every low tide.”

  Jeanne’s managerial duties took a lot of time, particularly on weekends when she checked in guests. I helped her by painting rooms and sanding and staining railings. She wrote from six until nine every morning, and whenever I spent the night there, I left at dawn after a cup of coffee. In the evenings we compared what we had done.

  Jeanne’s job put her in touch with the town. One night in her study I asked about the tall Infant of Prague statue wearing his many slips and ornate gown. She said it was a gift from the owner of the Glorified Grocer who told her that if she kept a penny under it, she’d never go broke. I admired the friends and acquaintances she’d made in such a short time. I told her about my first weeks, spent unwisely but with an accomplished writer like Vince.

  “Have you read Vince’s books?” she asked.

  “No, I’ve been meaning to.”

  She went to her shelf. “He’s a friend of Wayne,” she said, handing me The Complete Guide to Wood Finishes; How to Turn an Orange Crate into an End Table and Tips from a Flea Market Maven.

  “That’s not what I expected,” I said.

  She walked over to the infant, lifted his dress, and said, “I just realized maybe I’ll never go broke because I’ll always have the penny.”

  I read Stanley’s suggestions—Hopkins, Pasternak, Akhmatova, and unknowns like Hyam Plutzik. From Dugan, I got Oppen and Cavafy. I sent my new poems to Ridge and he said I had forgotten the importance of craft. His being a finalist for the National Book Award made his criticism sting even more. I applied for a second year, wondering what outside judges would think.

  The painter Janet Fish gave a slide show of her elaborately colored water glasses set on mirrors, work that had made her reputation. Then she showed paintings of packaged apples, tomatoes and oranges, complete with green corrugation and plastic wrap. She said her gallery disapproved of this new take on the still life, formerly favorable critics panned her, and she even lost friends. But she said she found another gallery, different critics, new friends.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  NEAR THE HOPPER HOUSE—STALIN’S SPERM—PAJAMAS—THE WORK—ASK ME IF I’M A DOCTOR—THREE IDS—TIME TO LEAVE

  In March, Porter asked me to accompany him to pick up Stanley at the airport. The writing committee was convening to choose the fellows for the coming year. We had dinner at the Mayflower. Stanley mentioned a favorite applicant from Columbia, a former student like Hester, who was about to have a great breakthrough. He said he found one manuscript that had a passion like a “burning wheel.” When we asked what he meant, he said, “They’re angry poems, and angry poets are best.”

  “What’s his name?” I asked.

  “Let’s see,” Stanley said, taking out a notebook. “Number seventy-three. Barkhausen.” Stanley’s blessing of Barkhausen made me wonder if I had him wrong. I wished I had kept copies of La Huerta. Barkhausen wasn’t on Porter’s list. I was pulling for Artie, always interesting to be around, to get another look at his work.

  Page and I were chosen for the second year. Hankard did not want to return and sneered whenever we were in the same room. I spent most nights with Jeanne and we rued the coming of May, when my stay ended. I would have no choice but to return to Queens. We weren’t ready to move in together, so I was happy to get a call on the Bull Ring’s pay phone from a local writer I had seen at openings and readings. I didn’t recognize the name, but when Jeanne handed me the receiver, I recognized the voice of Phyllis Sherwood by her heavy lisp. She was a sixty-year-old writer who needed an assistant for the summer to help her with a new project. She had a spare room in her Truro house for the right person, and invited me to dinner to discuss it. Phyllis had recently discovered she was part Iroquois and had given a talk about it at the Wellfleet library. Posters showed her in full Native American dress, a white leather blouse and skirt, beads and a headband. Her gray hair was done in a pageboy, popular in the fifties, and revived in the sixties by English rock groups, putting Phyllis twice behind the times.

  I took the bus and she met me at the grocery store and post office that comprised downtown Truro, eight miles from P’town. Her place was near Edward Hopper’s and overlooked the bay. She told me the other guests would be Arturo Vivante, the Italian fiction writer who was a member of the writing committee; his wife, Nancy, and J. D. Harrell, the translator of Lorca whose work she knew I admired. I also admired Arturo, a big, gentle man with a large soul who seemed to walk through life as through a dream, wistfully gazing at the beauty around him, especially when that beauty took the form of women. He had published nearly a hundred stories in the New Yorker and was well outside the Wellfleet circle of psychiatrists and remittance men who on weekend
s traded their expensive suits for frayed shirts and drawstring pants. Stanley called them cases of arrested development. Porter called them upper crustaceans. Dugan called them the white wine swillers.

  I had to duck under the doorframe to enter the antique house, which opened into a kitchen with a cast-iron gas stove surrounded by heavy oak hutches. Phyllis showed me the view of rolling hills of bayberry and bearberry and her path to the beach. I stared at the landscape and at the house where Hopper had painted, but my reverie was broken by Phyllis, who spun through the kitchen and started toward a flight of stairs, unbuttoning her blouse and saying over her shoulder, “I’m getting changed. If they arrive, fix them a drink!” As I looked at the bottles of gin, Scotch, and vodka, I felt transformed into an intimate or a houseboy, I couldn’t tell which. I called for a jigger. She yelled from the landing that I would have to estimate. I had failed my first test for the summer position, and walked around the dining room’s wall-to-wall bookshelves. I found her novels and her recent book of nonfiction, The Heirs of Stalin, which contained clippings of rave reviews from the New York Times and the New York Review of Books. She had tracked the lives of the dictator’s children. I could hear water running upstairs and her stepping across the floorboards. A few minutes later, she descended the stairs exuding Shalimar, my mother’s scent. She removed a large pot from the oven, stirred it and asked me to take the pie off the stove. I stood above the burners, facing a deep dish of berries, and said, “What pie?”