by John Skoyles
The home economics classes held a fashion show amid the tables of tomato soup and hot dogs. Each time I tried to answer a question, I was interrupted by female students turning and dipping, showing feathery shawls, sundresses and ruffled gowns. At the end of lunch, Megan pointed to the old man who had taken our meal cards with trembling hands. He’d been an air traffic controller at O’Hare for fifty years, had just moved to Dallas and gone back to school. She asked if I could handle such a student, but before I could respond, a huge football player banged his thigh against our table, showing off his handmade kilt.
Jack Myers ate lunch with me every day at Kuby’s delicatessen. A poet, Jack was married with two young boys. Ridge’s offer of a tenure-track position freed Jack from his job selling roofs in Boston. Jack and I traded poems—his about his unhappy marriage, and mine about my unhappy loneliness. At the end of two weeks, he returned to his brown-bag sandwiches. I realized lunch at a restaurant was something he could ill afford, but he was generously orienting me to the alien culture.
Along with my poetry workshop was a composition course called The Idea of America. Fraternity boys in blazers and coiffed, manicured sorority girls comprised the class. They saw me for what I was: the English teacher who alternated two sport coats. Brad Oberding, a football player, wrote a paper arguing that he didn’t plan to see any black people after graduation, so why should he see any now. Ted Shaver said he wanted to graduate to get a Lincoln Mark IV, which had been his brother’s reward. Jorge Garza, a rare minority student, came from a fine local prep school where he had been completely neglected. No one had bothered to teach him to capitalize the days of the week. Two girls wrote about the difficulty of hiring trustworthy domestic help. Imran Manzoor, from Iran, was also rich but isolated by his dark skin.
The text contained a section of bad poetry. One piece described cuddling on a winter night, and used the phrase “the spoon position.” The class turned to me for an explanation. I said “It’s not necessarily sexual. . . . But the two people are holding each other. . . . One grasping the other from behind. . . .” Finally, I went to the board and, to their delight, I drew a reclining couple, back to belly.
We read an excerpt from Dos Passos’s “The Body of an American,” an account of the remains of John Doe killed in France. Dos Passos had written:
Make sure he aint a dinge, boys,
make sure he aint a guinea or a kike.
No one understood it, so I defined the ethnic slurs, and after class, I sat in my office asking myself what I had done.
In the Advanced Poetry Workshop, I kept confusing Anne with Brenda, and Brenda with Anne. After the second week of repeatedly calling on the wrong girl, the students rolled their eyes at my mixing up the two blondes whose large breasts promenaded above the seminar table. I found I could recite hundreds of lines, which I knew by heart without realizing it. I urged the class to read great books, quoting Stephen Spender’s “I Think Continually of Those who were Truly Great”:
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.
Born of the sun, they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.
A student raised his hand and asked, “Who’s Spender?”
The two best poets were bitter rivals. Gary Beattie’s father made a fortune selling handmade cowboy boots. Gary was wiry and frenetic. When a poem of his was praised, he spun from his chair, crossed his arms, squatted and spurted into a Russian dance, showing off boots of ostrich or elephant skin. Jim Miller, handsome and staid, came from a family of Arkansas farmers. He had no money, but he got the girls. One night we critiqued Jim’s sonnet about making love during a heat wave. Gary mocked it mercilessly, laughing and blaming his uncontrollable hysteria on the poem. His final, breathless verdict was, “It just sucks!” Jim, stone-faced, said, “No, you suck!” Gary replied that Jim sucked and as Jim reaffirmed his opinion of Gary, the class wondered what I would do, something I was wondering myself. I ordered them to my office. They followed me through the hall and down the stairs. When I told them to sit, they looked around. There were only two chairs: mine behind the desk, which Gary took, and one for a visitor. Gary faced Jim while I, displaced, leaned against the wall, my elbow on the file cabinet. That I did not deserve the job was roundly apparent and, as they looked at me, I wished I had stayed on the Cape working with Phyllis Sherwood. I wished I were walking around New York. I wished I had taught somewhere before so I would know what to do. I wished for class to be over so I could have a drink. At this last wish I remembered a fifth of Jack Daniel’s in my desk drawer, and I handed it to Gary.
“Take a swig,” I said.
Gary gulped and made a face. I gave the bottle to Jim who also drank. I took the bottle and held it, gazing at them authoritatively, as if this were a significant component of a wise pedagogy. While they stared at each other, I downed as much as I could. We walked back in silence, the three of us chastened and confused.
Holding office hours on Friday afternoon was Ridge’s idea. He said no one would come by. He was right, but I would have welcomed the company. When I left for the weekend, I didn’t speak again until Monday. Occasionally, I went for a beer with Jack, but his family life consumed him. I spent those Friday afternoons playing checkers with Betty and, several weeks into the term, she asked me to join her at a Wellesley Book Club luncheon featuring Forrest Carter and Barbara Tuchman. Colonel Rutherford, a retired literature teacher, bought the tickets, but didn’t eat lunch, just drank Enfamil baby formula. Forrest Carter took the stage drunk and referred to his autobiography The Education of Little Tree, about his Native American upbringing, as “a kind of Roots thing for Indians.” He called Barbara Tuchman a “good ol’ Jew girl,” which made her laugh, and he invited everyone to his ranch, giving extended directions. I asked the colonel if he could help me find the ranch, but he said Carter was not a worthy associate. He was right. Years later it turned out that Little Tree’s real name was Asa Carter, a member of the Ku Klux Klan. When Carter’s true identity was discovered, his book jumped from the Times’ nonfiction best-seller list to the fiction. I drove Betty home, and she told me she was retiring. Over the years she had occasionally taught composition, until displaced entirely by those from Yale. She stared glassy-eyed out the window and quoted Gogol on his stint as a university professor with words that scorched themselves into my brain—“Unrecognized I mounted the rostrum, and unrecognized I descended from it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
MERNEY,NERNEY, NU—MAPLE SHERROD—YADDO—SIGHT TO INSIGHT—THE POETRY GUESSING GAME—WHY AM I LOST?—AN EXCITABLE DOG
A middle-aged businessman stopped by my office to talk about poetry. I had just collated the student poems for the following week and when he asked to see them, I had no hesitation in handing them over. He put on his glasses, turned page after page thoughtfully, then flung the manuscript across my desk so hard it almost landed in my lap.
“I’m after something deeper than that,” he said.
He opened his briefcase, removed a piece of thick bond and read his poem aloud.
THE UNSETTLED STATE OF AFFAIRS TODAY
The time has come when few must host the many.
When love and friendship merney, nerney, nu.
When the family life of the living loses its turny, burny, fu,
And freedom and liberty for autobotta slu.
But with the birth of liberty and autobotta slu,
A whole new world was open for mendla, kendla, tu.
For man became his own masterdoner wu,
And freedom and liberty for autobotta slu.
Ah yes merney nerney nu, turny burny fu,
For autobotta slu and mendla, kendla tu,
With masterdoner wu because,
The time has come when few must host the many.
“Would you call me after you’ve spent some time with it?” he asked, and gave me the poem an
d his card. Lincoln Jenkins was a lobbyist for Shell Oil with addresses in Dallas and Washington, DC.
Something about his interest in poetry in this poetry vacuum touched me, and I escorted him out as if he were an esteemed guest or maybe a discharged patient. He had parked in the handicapped spot in front of the building and a note on his windshield excoriated his thoughtlessness. It said, “Because of you, I’ll have to wheel all across campus and be late for my exam.”
“I didn’t think I’d be here this long,” he said, looking at the paper. Crushed by the anger of the writer and by his own inconsideration, he got into his car without saying good-bye. As he drove off, I noticed a sign in magic marker taped to his bumper: “My mother raised me to be a faggot.”
I returned to my office where Jack Myers waited with Maple Sherrod, an undergraduate and daughter of an oilman. Jack’s poems mentioned divorce and, though he was not yet separated, this was the evidence. We went to four bars, all owned by a friend of Maple’s, where drinks were on the house. Obsessed with Lily Langtry, the owner had named each after her—Lily Langtry’s, The Jersey Lily, and the anagrams, Really Tingle and Illegal Entry. I became friends with Maple, and went to her father’s mansion for Thanksgiving dinner, which was attended by more than a hundred people. I overheard one of her uncles say, “What’s Maple doing with the professor?” After dinner, we met Jack at The Texas Teahouse where the band played behind chicken wire. Jack said that when I was in the men’s room, one of the cowboys asked Maple, “What’re you doing with the bookworm?” She answered, “He’s a professor of poetry at the university.” The cowboy said, “I coulda guessed that!” Maple traveled the world and I did not see her again, but she called me from a Joe Cocker concert in London, saying she would fly me over to meet the singer. Another time she phoned from Peter Sellers’s Rolls in Paris saying they were hunting for a rare wine.
Stanley Kunitz recommended me to Yaddo, the artist colony in Saratoga Springs, and I was accepted for the month of August. I called Stanley to thank him, and he said he had been there, but only for one night. A tapping noise on the window of his room in the mansion’s tower kept him awake. When he switched on the lamp, it stopped. When he turned the light off, the ticking began again, with such intensity he thought the glass would break. He was sure it was the ghost of one of the two Trask children who died in the room where he now slept. They had contracted diphtheria from their mother, whose family founded the art colony. He left the next morning.
I spent the term providing hundreds of pages of handouts to my students, overdoing it in fear of not doing enough. I wrote in the early mornings and spent the evenings watching The Porter Wagoner Show and Marty Robbins Spotlight on a tiny black and white TV. Toward the end of the semester, Betty urged me to a Friday afternoon soiree at Norbert Lane’s. I pleaded my office hours but she insisted. I knew his name, the author of Sight to Insight, a best-selling poetry primer. Jack had told me department members got drunk sitting around an old Victrola while Norbert conducted a guessing game: name the poet on the record. Jack said Norbert had called on him again and again, and he did so poorly that his reputation with his colleagues suffered, something he feared would hurt his case for tenure. He warned me not to go, but I couldn’t deny Betty.
Lane’s enormous house was built on Sight to Insight. Acres of lawn tended by Chicano gardeners surrounded the massive stucco adobe. Four faculty members held glasses in the living room. I recognized Binky Spillane, a heavy woman who taught modernism. And Wes Glazer, the Victorian. Granville Bonner, in his eighties, the most debonair man in the department, wore a straw hat and seersucker suit. He had been a dean, but was demoted in a scandal involving a sorority girl, from which he recovered by marrying a Dallas dowager. He never attended department meetings, refused to serve on committees, gave every student an A, and zipped around campus in a pink Cadillac. I was glad to see Ricky Marsden, a fiction writer, the only person my age.
Lane, a small man with a kind face, whose hands shook from Parkinson’s, sat next to the couch in a tiny chair of wood and straw. This made him both large and small—like a child, yet perched on this miniature seat, he seemed huge. His wife brought me a glass of sherry. Granville, very much at home, dashed into the kitchen, yelling over his shoulder, “I’m making a martini, if anyone’s interested.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the Victrola.
“How’s your wife, Ricky?” Lane asked. Lane petted a big German shepherd named Browning.
“She wished she could make it, Norbert, but she’s giving lessons.” Ricky explained that his wife was a violinist who wanted to be a conductor, but she couldn’t practice because she didn’t have an orchestra. I sat on the couch next to Binky.
“Why are you here?” she said. “You don’t have to be, you know.”
“Betty invited me,” I said, and Binky shrugged. In the kitchen, Granville held a stemmed glass to the sun.
“I’m coming up for promotion,” Binky said. “If I get it, you’ll never see me here again.”
When everyone was settled, Norbert said, “Although he has just a few weeks left, let’s welcome John!” And the group chimed in with greetings.
“I’m sure you’ll put us all to shame,” Norbert added.
Glazer said, “You know, I read something the other day I hadn’t realized—all poetry was once contemporary poetry.” “Poetry” left his lips with a hefty plosive, so he lauded the word and spat it at the same time. Betty was quickly tipsy from her second sherry and joined Binky and me on the couch. She said, “I wish you’d stay here instead of that egomaniac Ridge!”
“Come, come, Betty,” Norbert said. “Ridge knows poetry. He does know his poetry.” When he said “poetry,” it sounded so much like “putri,” that for a moment I wasn’t sure what he meant.
“Yes, Ridge knows the field,” I said. The old Victrola grew larger each time poetry was mentioned.
Mrs. Lane went around the room with a tray, showing us her husband’s bonsai plants, their roots bound with wire. Granville was stirring a steel shaker in the kitchen. Betty retrieved the crystal decanter, refilling glasses, and helping herself liberally. Ricky suddenly spoke to Norbert, but so loud that everyone heard. “The truth is that Fran and I split up. When I came home the other day, she was in the kitchen with this guy in our building. She told me she was helping him balance his checkbook.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Norbert said.
Ricky recovered and said to me, “Hey, you’re single. Come over to my place sometime. I’ll invite a few girlfriends of Fran’s, get a bottle of wine and take out my guitar. Bring one of those bundles of wood they sell at Piggly Wiggly, and we can have a fire.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll have to see.”
“Oh go ahead, that sounds like fun!” Betty said, fully enthused and starting to slur.
“The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking,” Norbert crooned from his little chair. “Do you know who wrote that?”
“Stanley Kunitz,” I said. I had heard Stanley read the line in Provincetown the year before.
Norbert smiled. “Stanley Jasspon Kunitz,” he said.
“Not bad,” Binky said. “You’re a lot better than Myers. Maybe you should be here instead of Jack.”
Norbert rolled the Victrola to the center of the room and placed his little chair next to it. Betty refilled her glass from the sideboard. My third glass of sherry made me feel worse. In the kitchen, Granville leaned over the counter, paging through the newspaper and feeding treats to Browning. Norbert’s shaky hands removed a record from a built-in bookshelf holding what seemed like thousands. He pulled the disk from its sleeve and placed it on the turntable. A voice retched from the speaker:
For three years out of key with his time.
Glazer’s hand leapt, and he yelled, “Pound! Old Ez!”
“Right you are,” Lane said, “but that was an easy one.” He played more of the poem, and mentioned he had a recording of Pound at Harvard banging a drum. Betty’s eyes closed a
nd she listed to one side, leaning on my shoulder. I nudged her gently, but couldn’t wake her. Mrs. Lane came around with a bowl of peanuts and Wheat Chex. None of us guessed the next voice, which turned out to be Eliot reading from “The Four Quartets.” When Norbert gave us the answer, he tilted his head and rubbed the tips of his index fingers at me. I gave Betty a good shove, which woke her so she jumped to her feet, extending her right hand and yelling, “We’ve been introduced before!” Then she crumpled into the couch.
I had no idea who the next reader was, but Betty perked up and named the poet, Dame Edith Sitwell.
“She always rises to her favorite,” Mrs. Lane said.
“And also to her brother Osbert,” Glazer added.
Betty opened her eyes, but stared at the floor, repeating Dame Edith’s words exactly as they had shuddered from the record:
Why did the cock crow,
Why am I lost,
Down the endless road to Infinity toss’d?
Binky asked me if I knew Betty’s past. “Her only son shot himself on Mother’s Day, and Betty found him in a chair with a pair of her white gloves in his lap.” It was as if another poem had been played and I was absorbing it when I realized Norbert was calling my name.