by John Skoyles
“Your turn,” he said, though there had been no taking of turns. It was Archibald MacLeish saying a poem should not mean but be.
“Isn’t that Cary Grant’s real name?” Binky asked.
Although I got MacLeish right, Lane said to me, “Try again.” This time I had no idea whose voice was on the record.
“It’s Tolkien!” Norbert said. “The first chapter of The Sil-mar-ill-ion. Aren’t you familiar with The Legend-ar-ium?”
“A paean to the imagination!” Glazer seconded.
“Unfair!” Binky said in my defense. “That’s not poetry!” In the silence that followed, we noticed that Ricky had retreated to a corner where he could be heard weeping.
“Poetry can do this,” Norbert said.
Binky whispered to me, “And so can finding your wife balancing another guy’s checkbook,” and she started to laugh, shaking her big shoulders.
“Let’s call it a day,” Norbert said.
As we got up to go, I saw Granville struggling to leave the kitchen. I thought he must have been really blasted from the gin, dragging himself with difficulty out of the doorway, but then I saw that Browning had attached himself to Granville’s shin and was humping away. The dapper professor could not shake him, so they entered the living room together, Lane rising from his seat to swat the excited dog from his colleague’s leg.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
A THANK YOU CAKE—PENDEMONIUM—TUTORING ALEX—MY OWN MONT BLANC—TELEPATHY—WEE MARIE—A MOCKINGBIRD SHOWS THE WAY
At our final department meeting of the year, Dr. Ramsey asked, “What do we do with someone like Pope?” His question was answered with a familiar question. “Is Pope an age or a man?”
I handed in my grades in mid-December, my appointment over. If I ever got another job, I could name a place I’d taught. With nowhere to go, and my lease running through the summer, I decided to stay in Dallas, reading and writing, until August when I’d leave for Yaddo.
In late spring I sat in my apartment ordering my poems into a book, surprised at just noticing most were love poems, or really, anti-love poems, as forced as Holly’s anti-jingle bells—they protested too much. I went into despair, the despair of being blind to my longings and shortcomings as well as recognizing its “Johnny One Note” quality. I looked into the courtyard at the magnolia tree that stayed green all winter, thinking I should throw out the manuscript and start over. A loud siren pierced the walls and windows. I opened my door and saw an extension cord running from the door of the apartment across the hall and down the stairs to the outside. I guessed the racket was caused by my neighbor attaching a powerful vacuum to his car. To get away from my book, I went for a drive. Lemmon Avenue was empty, the sky a greenish dark. A cruiser pulled next to me at a stoplight and the policeman yelled out his window, asking why I was ignoring the sirens, a tornado warning, and he ordered me home. I sat at my desk, feeling like neither a man nor an age, waiting for a tornado that never reached ground.
On one of my walks through the city, I found a stationery store called Pendemonium. Behind the counter was Mary Murray, a student from my Idea of America class, whose parents owned the shop. She was an atypical McGuire undergraduate, apart from privilege and prejudice. On the last day of class, I was presented with a sheet cake, and I felt she was behind the gift. It said, “Thanks for the knowledge, especially about slurs and spoons.” Two things I had successfully taught: ethnic derision and a coupling act. Mary introduced me to her mother and father and, since I didn’t want to leave empty-handed, I bought a padded envelope and a notebook, the cheapest things in the shop. The next day Mary’s mother called. She needed help for her son, Alex, a high school junior at risk of dropping out. He wrote poems and songs, but was disillusioned with school. She asked me to tutor him, and said she would pay the going rate.
Alex came to my apartment, his long hair flowing over a baseball jersey on which he had scrawled the name “Dock Ellis,” a pitcher famous for throwing a no-hitter under the influence of LSD. He handed me a dozen envelopes. We sat in my living room and we talked about Ellis. I had gotten a kick out of Ellis’s recent shenanigans—he had worn hair curlers in the locker room—and Alex seemed pleased that I knew he had just been traded to the Texas Rangers. He read me a poem and a song. He told me that he liked literature but that everything else in school was irrelevant. I told him he was probably right, that most everything was irrelevant. I suggested he do what he loved and live with the rest. Alex came every Sunday for an hour. I refused payment and looked forward to the meetings. He was angry at his school because he had been impeached as class vice president for forgetting to string leprechauns across the basketball court for the Saint Patrick’s Day dance. He didn’t plan to go to college, his mother’s concern. I said that since he was writing poems anyway, why not hand them in and get credit. Since he was reading, why not write about it. I told him he would meet some boring teachers, but some great ones too, and we both laughed at the question of whether Shakespeare was an age or a man.
We went to a Ranger game and Alex spotted Dock Ellis leaning over the bullpen railing, talking to a girl in the stands, and spitting long streams of tobacco juice onto the field. The girl’s date kept winding around her to get in on the conversation, but Ellis looked straight ahead, talking and spitting. The boyfriend began spitting onto the field as well, but without tobacco, the poor guy strained to muster any juice.
“They’re dogs marking territory,” Alex said.
“Aristotle believed the sign of a poet is the ability to make metaphors,” I said.
“Then maybe I’m a poet,” he said.
I told him I was sure of it.
The week before I left, at the end of July, Mrs. Murray called and thanked me, saying that Alex seemed happier, and had decided to go to college. She said, “No one ever told him school is really bullshit.”
“Is that what I said?”
“Yes!” she laughed, “and now that he knows, he can deal with it.”
A few days later, I received a package from Mrs. Murray. The box contained a giant black fountain pen, a Mont Blanc 149, just like the one Jay Hankard displayed in the Fo’c’sle.
Mont Blanc. I pronounced it out loud. It was hard to say the name without honking like a goose. Mont Blanc.
I packed my few belongings, discarding student poems, handouts and syllabi, and found the poem by the lobbyist. I had brought it home and forgotten it. I sat on the couch and read, The time has come when few must host the many . . . The lines seemed meaningful, all the more because I had let him down. I was reading the poem again when the phone rang.
It was him, it was Lincoln Jenkins.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said, “but someone just phoned and hung up and it sounded like your voice.”
I said it wasn’t me and we said goodnight. Some telepathy had taken place, which Stanley once told me was the real beginning of poetry. I felt not only guilty, but convicted by his call. I had not been the host he needed.
I mopped the floors and was wiping the counters when the phone rang again. I answered with a whisper. It was Jack saying he had a feeling I was alone and wanted company. We went to Lily Langtree’s where I told him about Lincoln.
“That’s weird because I had an intuition about you too,” Jack said. “That’s why I called. You’re sending out signals of some kind.” He said he wished he could make the trip with me to New York, especially because I was stopping by Iowa City.
When the bar closed, I said good-bye to Jack and made the unwise decision to leave town immediately instead of waiting for morning. I carried my suitcase, boxes and typewriter to the car and drove off. After a few blocks, I felt the car tilting to the left, as if I had gotten two flats on the driver’s side. I stopped and saw I had been driving with my two right tires on the curb. I couldn’t find Mockingbird Lane, my route to the highway. I blared the radio to the Open Road Show where Bill Mack played an hour of Ernest Tubb. His sidekick, Wee Marie, spoke in squeaky, almost inaudib
le monosyllables. Straining to hear her kept me awake. A squirrel cut in front of my car, attacked by a mockingbird, and followed the center of the road, followed by the bird, followed by me, driving very slowly, listening for Wee Marie. The squirrel turned left onto Mockingbird Lane and the bird and I followed him out of town.
I spent the night in Lawrence, Kansas, at the Navajo Motel where the shower ran into a hole in the floor and the worn sheets were thin as tissue. I ate breakfast at the counter of the diner next door. The middle-aged waitress asked me where I was going and I said Iowa City. She said that many poets lived there, and I said that was true. She asked if I knew William Stafford.
“I don’t know him,” I said, “but I’ve heard him read.”
“He was born here, you know, in Lawrence.”
I said I knew.
“He’s a pacifist,” she said. She leaned over, looking at me, her hand on her chin.
“Yes,” I said. “I like his poems.”
“He went out with my girlfriend,” she said. “For a long time.”
She left to get more coffee for another customer. When she came back, she said, “Yeah, he went out with her for a long time. Never married her though.”
I couldn’t tell if she was hurt for her girlfriend, or had been interested in Stafford herself. She said she guessed he loved poetry more. Although she did not sing the sentence in Stanley’s lilt, I heard his voice.
CHAPTER THIRTY
GOLD STARS AND BUTTERBALLS—M’EDITOR—A COUNTDOWN AT EIGHTY—THE NEXT HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE WORLD—A RUMP MAN MEETS A COCK WOMAN—A BAT COMES TO THE PARTY—SARAH LAWRENCE—BOOK NEWS—GOOD-BYE TO YADDO
I drove through Yaddo’s tall iron gates and onto the four hundred acre estate once owned by the Trask family. I passed the mansion and arrived at the office. A staff member showed me to West House, formerly servant quarters. I had a bedroom with two desks, and a study with two more desks. He told me quiet hours were from nine to four, and overnight guests forbidden. On my way to dinner that evening, I met an old man tending a patch of tuberous begonias. George Vincent, the retired gardener, had worked at Yaddo all his life. He walked me toward the mansion, and described Elizabeth Ames, the first director, praising her sense of decorum. She wouldn’t allow politics to be discussed at dinner after James T. Farrell had started so many arguments forty years ago. George was devoted to Yaddo as well as to Mrs. Trask.
“When Miss Ames died,” he said, “I was the only one who knew where she wanted to be buried.”
I asked where that was.
“Ten feet from the madam,” he said. He pointed in the direction of their graves and said good-bye.
Everyone entered the dining room from having cocktails on the terrace. I stood in line for a napkin ring labeled with my name, along with a glass of iced tea and fresh mint. I took a tall-backed chair between the composer, Ned Rorem, and Tobias Schneebaum, a writer. Three visual artists joined us. We were served roast chicken, new potatoes and string beans while Rorem conducted the conversation as if it were a salon. He asked me what I wrote about, as he passed me a bowl of small grooved yellow globes.
“I have a hard time answering that question,” I said, wondering at the little balls before handing them to the artist next to me.
“Then,” he nodded, “you should learn to answer.”
Turning to a sculptor, Rorem asked, “What are your subjects?”
“Love and death,” he said, biting a drumstick. He had learned to answer.
Schneebaum said, “I hope everyone will come to my studio tonight. I’m showing slides about both.” He took a piece of bread, dabbed his knife into the mysterious bowl and spread one of the balls of butter across the crust.
When melon was served for dessert, Rorem said, “I’m going to lodge a complaint.” He stared at the pale slice. “Fruit every night. I need a dark pleasure like chocolate. I have no lover. I don’t use foul language. I don’t drink or smoke. I wait all day for dessert and then it’s melon.”
“Yes, and I hear these can play the devil with your foreskin,” Schneebaum said.
After dinner, the composers took turns at the piano in the chapel, while Rorem walked up and down the hallway on his hands. He was a trim fifty-year-old, his full head of dark hair giving him the look of a much younger man.
That night I went to Schneebaum’s studio. His thick eyebrows pointed down like two deep diacritical marks accentuating a big twisted nose, large eyes and ears. He had made a name for himself as an unconventional anthropologist for his book about living with cannibals, Keep the River on Your Right.
When everyone was seated, Tobias showed slides of the headhunters in the Amazon whom he met as he walked naked through the jungle. He hinted he had sex with several of the men and also ate human flesh, including heart. He described tribesmen carving a canoe in a hut, scoring the likenesses of their ancestors into the bark. When they finished, he said, four men held each side of the craft, but, as they moved toward the door, the canoe made a great whooshing sound, a sound like a strong wind, and it pushed them back. This happened several times, until they finally rushed it out with a noise like a slamming wave. Tobias spoke gently as he told his stories, and we left in awe of our adventurous colleague who seemed anything but the adventurer in appearance and manner.
As I lay in bed that night, I heard a strange sound, a constant hum. I peered into the West House yard, which was brightened by floodlights. Bats circled the treetops. The noise continued and I recalled the windowpane of Stanley’s room, and Tobias’s canoe, and I tried to ignore both by reading Ned Rorem’s The Later Diaries, borrowed from the mansion library. To my horror, I found he had rated his Yaddo dinner companions. He gave “silver stars” to Donald Justice and Mark Strand, and a “gold star” to David Del Tredici, one of the composers who played after dinner. The sound grew louder and I traced it to the hall, to the half-open door of Larry Dalton, the artist with whom I shared a bath. Four hairdryers, clamped on the backs of chairs, were aimed at a girl in a bikini made of something resembling seaweed, who stood before a large paper fan shaped like a clamshell. Her hair was flat from the heat. I recognized the waitress who served us at dinner. Dalton was taking photos, and comparing her to Venus.
Back in bed, I opened Rorem’s diaries and found a portrait of Frank O’Hara, written three weeks after his death. I admired the line, “Frank O’Hara died in the middle of a sentence,” and fell asleep.
The next morning I learned the breakfast routine: walk through the dining room, open the door to the kitchen, and state your order.
“Two poached, Beverly,” the woman in front of me said. Beverly, dressed in white, sat at a table, which held a tub of butter. She placed a spoonful in a bowl of ice water, then molded it into a sphere. She rolled it between two grooved paddles, making the “butterballs” which had confounded me the night before.
I joined a table but when I introduced myself, everyone burrowed deeper into their books and papers. This was the “silent table.” But because no one spoke, no one told me.
On my way out, I passed a guest and said good morning.
“I don’t talk before breakfast,” he said.
Mail delivery was the highlight of the day, everyone surrounding the letters, packages and cards on a desk in the lounge. I had received several envelopes from my mother containing rejections of my book, A Little Faith. I had resigned myself to the fact that I’d written a collection of love poems, and the editors complained about the book’s small orbit. One asked, “Isn’t sincerity the biggest con of all?” Porter sent On the Cod, his book of barroom monologues. His letter said he had walked nervously into the Fo’c’sle, terrified of meeting his contributors. He had quoted their binges, betrayals and thefts. To Porter’s astonishment, no one recognized himself. He guessed they had been either too drunk or lying. He mentioned that Vince’s publisher rejected the draft of his Pancho Villa book and he owed a chunk of the advance. He took an advertising job in Boston, but after a month he returned to the F
o’c’sle, fired for his copy for a jewelry store that said, “We’ll give you the ring, if you give us the finger.” A postscript said that Barkhausen won a contest for his first book, The Birthday Suit. I loved that poem, an account of his father presenting him with a three-piece on his thirteenth birthday, but had advised against using it for the book since it also meant to be naked. Still, I preferred it to his original title, Eating Out the Angel of Death. Barkhausen’s neologisms began to make sense. As cockeyed and impetuous as they were in conversation, they charged his poetry with an askew and often mad language. My teachers had seen it, Stanley saw it, and I came to believe in it—it was poetry—the thing that no one could define, the thing about which it could be said that no one really knows what it is.
There were readings and slide shows every week and an eighty-three-year-old poet with a long gray beard, Henry Chapin, read one night with Spear, a San Francisco poet. She performed her poems, flinging her arms in the air, snorting, growling and inhaling gruffly between phrases like the musician Roland Kirk. She introduced her final piece saying, “This summer, I fulfilled one of my lifelong dreams. I did something I always wanted to do.” She paused. “I went to my favorite Chinese restaurant and tried something from everyone’s plate.”
The crowd laughed.
“It’s not funny,” she said. “I’ll tell you when it’s funny.”
Her poem began as an homage to the delicacies and their origins and then veered into a litany of the injustices endured by those who brought them to our tables. With the final line about the fiery rashes of those who peel shrimp, she stormed off the stage and rickety Henry ascended, using a cane. He wore a heavy tweed jacket despite the heat.
“Spear,” he said, “I feel you’ve thrown a lot of confetti into the air and it’s still coming down.”
“Those are serious issues, Henry,” Spear yelled back. Henry said he was sure they were, and then introduced himself. He had gone to Princeton with Edmund Wilson, whom he called “Bunny.” He said Bunny hated his poetry. Many years later he contacted Wilson, saying, “You were right to avoid my poetry when we were young, because I was a very bad poet, but now I’m a very good poet and would like to give you my books.” Wilson was famous for the postcard he sent to those who made requests from him. Henry had one with him and read it: