Thomas Murphy

by Roger Rosenblatt

  MY HEAD HURTS, Oona. Too much TV, even in the daytime. Daytime TV. And not just TCM, either. Everything. Quiz shows. Would you believe it? I’m a gamer. I’m a goner. Yesterday morning, I watched Let’s Make a Deal, followed by a movie with Ronald Colman. I don’t mean I watched it in the company of Ronald Colman. He’s dead, as you know. (Do you miss my uproarious wit?) The movie—it had harvest in the title—was about a World War I doughboy (Colman), who lost his memory in a battle, and was put in a mental hospital, from which he escapes. He wanders into the nearby town and meets Greer Garson, who loves him on the spot, memory or no memory. They marry and live in a typical woolly little English cottage, where he becomes a writer. Have you noticed, Oona, how fucking easy it is to become a writer, according to fiction? You just sit down and scribble with some music playing behind you, and presto, you’re Wallace Stevens. So, naturally, Colman is great at it off the bat, and he sells his first piece to a magazine in Liverpool. The editor summons him to Liverpool to praise his work and give him more assignments. As if an editor would ever do something nice like that. Anyway, as he is crossing a street in Liverpool, he’s hit by a car, and at once his memory is restored. Turns out that he’s landed gentry. Now having no memory of Greer Garson or the woolly cottage, he returns to his ancestral home, where he is much loved and a real big shot. His picture appears in the papers, and is seen by Greer, who goes to him but does not tell him she’s his wife, or anything of their former life together. Instead she takes the position of his secretary, and serves nobly. Well, wouldn’t you know it? One day Colman finds himself in Liverpool again, and he is disturbed by vague recollections. I can’t remember exactly how he and Greer wind up at their old wooly cottage, but they do, and when everything floods back to Colman, and Greer is assured that he remembers her at last, and loves her, they embrace. The End. Jesus, Oona. Can you lose your memory just like that? Tell you one thing, darlin’. I’d never forget I loved you. You wouldn’t let me. You’d hit me with a car first. Anyway, that was that. Máire called to check on me, as she always does. A Jameson and a good weep, and so to bed.

  AT TWO in the morning, I appear on Let’s Make a Deal. The host is Wallace Stevens. And here he is, says the offstage announcer. The Manecdote of the Anecdote, the Caviar of the Clavier, the Emperor of Ex Tempore . . . The curtain parts and there’s old Stevens in his tweeds and stripes. He scans the studio audience like a sniper. I try to hide under the humongous sombrero they gave me before the show. Maybe he’ll just see the hat and ignore me. No such luck. Who’s there, under that handsome sombrero? he asks no one in particular. Is that you, Señor Murphy? The audience shrieks and applauds. Stevens drags me to the stage.

  Standing beside him, I look like an orange mushroom. Thomas Murphy! says Stevens, presenting me to the crowd. There is much cheering. Thomas Murphy, ladies and gentlemen! So, what’s it to be, Murph? He points to stage left, where a redhead in a silver dress is posing first before a barrel, then a curtain, and finally a huge black box, a seven- or eight-foot cube. Stevens drapes his tweedy arm over my shoulder. The barrel, the curtain, or the box?

  Box! Box! Box! yells the audience. I’ll take the box, I say, meekly. More wild cheering. Murph, says Stevens, what would you say if I told you that there is one million dollars in that barrel. Will you still take the box? Box! Box! Box! Louder than ever. I repeat, Box. Murph, says Stevens, what would you say if I told you that behind that curtain is a new hot tub (cheers), a new barbecue (cheers), a new car (more cheers), and it’s all for you to enjoy in your new home, the Isle of Capri? And I don’t mean on the Isle of Capri, Murph. I mean, the whole isle. It’s yours! If the price is right. Oh no, that’s a different show. The audience howls. So, what do you say, Thomas Murphy? The curtain or the box? Before the crowd can yell Box Box Box again, I say Box, and everyone starts clapping rhythmically.

  Well, says Stevens, you’ve said no to the barrel and a million dollars. And no to the curtain and the Isle of Capri. So, let’s see what’s in the box. He opens the front wall like a door, and there is nothing in the huge black container. Now the crowd is hysterical with pleasure, and Stevens smiles and thwacks me on the shoulder. You’ve done it, Murph, he says. You’ve chosen the prize of prizes, the best deal we’ve ever offered. But the box is empty, I say, sounding like a disappointed little boy. Empty? says Stevens. Empty? Why, Thomas Murphy, where are your eyes, man? The box is full! Full of you! And with that he shoves me inside, and closes the box. The audience has gone silent. Inside the box, it is black as pitch, and I’m suffused with the odor of turf. Then I hear a noise. Stevens is slipping me a note through the mail slot in the wall. It reads, And your poetry is shit, too.

  TU FU (A.D. 712–770), Chinese poet, wrote of his lack of recognition in his own lifetime. Other poets praised his talent, but he lived in a humble house, hungry, his clothing one notch above tatters. Servants, he said, treated him with disdain. His fellow poets, too, lived this way. They knew one another’s work, but their fame went no further than their small circle. I read a translation of “To Pi Ssu Yao,” the poem on which this information about Tu Fu’s life is given, and I cannot tell if the poet means to lament or boast. Closer to a boast, I think, an expression of satisfaction that the quality of his work and that of his contemporaries will be sufficient recompense for him. That his poems will be handed down to “descendants” consoles him. What then did I, neither hungry, poor, nor ill-clothed, who lives in eleven rooms, and is well known enough to win a reading here and a prize there—what did I make of that?

  In the back of the taxi I go over my acceptance speech, delighting in its wit and flow, its mixing of sincerity and self-effacement, the warming anecdote, the dip into a pun, the soar into high seriousness here and there, a splash of poetry, a flash of skin. Then I crumple the pages, and leave them on the taxi floor. Here’s what I want: When they announce my name, I want to approach the podium in concentration camp stripes, and tell them nothing. Not even my serial number. But in reality, of course, when the time comes, I rise from my ballroom chair, curtsy left and right, and smile like a baby. The master of ceremonies pats me on the head, powders my bottom, changes me, and sends me back to my chair. About prizes? Blake never won one.

  WHEREAS TODAY I WALK the city with my head dug in like a plough, mired. I hate these moods, their selfishness, grotesque. Around me march my beautiful New Yorkers with their cowled faces, flayed by the wind, fresh from their vile mills. They hear the drumming of real graves, while I, fancy me, indulge myself in a pastime. Greenberg would have ribbed me without mercy. Oona too. Me too. Snap out of it, Murph. In a day, an hour, I will be on a high again, thrilled to the bone to be permitted life and poetry, thrilled to have Máire with me and to be able to read William to sleep twice a week—while they, my beautiful New Yorkers, have not the luxury of mood swings. Or of moods at all, for Chrissake. Courage with resignation. That’s their bloody mood. One mood forever. How I adore them, though I would not tell them so, lest I sound patronizing, as if I were accepting them, when the opposite is true. They accept me. Me, the freakish exception to the rules of their existence. What one must do as a poet, before placing the right words in the right order, before wandering lonely as a cloud or summoning a second coming, is to recognize the precious gift of one’s perch, and then walk with one’s fellow citizens and feel their powerless power. I push my body into my beautiful New Yorkers, and vanish with them in the brown, humiliating earth.

  TO WIT. On my way to an interview at a newspaper the following morning, I stopped to talk with a woman on a stoop on Seventy-seventh Street. I took her for my ma. She asked where I was going, and when I told her, she said I must be an important person. No, I said. Just a poet. Oh, she said. Me, too. But I have yet to write my poems down, she said. They’re all in my head. A fine place to be, I offered, and she smiled a toothless smile. She told me she’d been a singer in a nightclub, a chantoosie at the Copa. Do you know “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” I asked her. She started to sing it in a cigarette
voice. Naturally, I joined in. We chatted on. She had a daughter somewhere, who had been taken from her in the hospital in Baltimore where she’d given birth as a teenager. Many years ago, she had traced the girl to Albany, but never caught up with her. The woman was married once, to a no-good cornet player, she said. Lasted less than a year. How do you manage to live? I said. I work nights at a tollbooth on the Staten Island side of the Verrazano Bridge, she said. Do people ever talk to you, or do they just pay the toll and go? Sometimes they talk, she said. About the weather, or the traffic. Once in a while they ask directions. I gave her some money and sat with her a while longer, and could no longer recall where I had originally been headed. To an interview at a newspaper, she reminded me.

  MY MA, black cookie jar, hauls potatoes on her back, holding the twisted end of the sack in her fist and letting the weight of the potatoes fall below her shoulders. Sitting flat on her head is the kind of straw hat they put on horses for a joke, with the ears sticking out of holes in the brim. Ma does not smile. Her big eyes greet her tasks. The black jacket, the black skirt, down to the black-laced shoes. I never see her in fancy dress. The closest she comes is Sunday mass, when she and the other women sit in church on one side, while my da and the men sit on the other. The women are broader than the men, broader shoulders. Like rakes and pitchforks, they are built for the work they do. On that day only, Ma wears the red plaid shawl her mother wore. Otherwise, black. I have a grainy photo taken in the 1930s before I was born, by a Kodak Klito box camera, a plate-changing model. Ma is standing with a neighbor’s child, holding her hand, the girl looking at the camera, Ma studying the ground. Once in a while, I’d catch her looking at my da, with nothing in her look. No love. No question. Your ma’s as strong as a horse, Mickey Dailey said to me in the schoolyard. I popped him in the nose.

  REGRETS? ASKS THE KID from the newspaper. In your long distinguished career, Mr. Murphy, do you have any regrets? To which I reply, beguiling as ever, Sonny, I’m going to travel inside you for a while, and let you feel the gravel I shovel in your blood, and the bulge and beat I cause in your pulse, as I run amok among your tissues, go at your muscles with a paring knife, your every inner town and village unbulwarked against my assaults. I shall practice debauchery in the caves of your lymph nodes, terrorism in your viscera, barbarism in your glands. I shall scrape out your spleen, plough snow around your kidneys, and invite the monkey on your back to brachiate from vein to vein, all in an effort to cause as much pain as you can endure, more in fact. I shall assail your entrails, cause tumors on your humors, sup on your heart, and fling my empty oyster shells smack against your brain, which I then will toss out into the street for lack of payment of rent. When I have done all that to give you a taste of how the real world suffers, then see if you have the nerve to ask me: Regrets?

  UNTITLED

  for Oona

  (draft)

  Or is it the wood I am thinking of,

  And only transform it into the bright bird

  Because I dread the wood?

  The mind does that—tipped and bent

  From its fears, it whistles past the graveyard

  Toward the field. My dynasties are vague,

  Old Irishmen and their tillable lives,

  Tilting over ploughs. Rust. Broken blades

  In the furrows. Them.

  I know little of their language, nothing

  Of their haunts. But something of their terrors—

  The genome has bequeathed me that.

  In your cupped hand I rest

  For a spell, until I lapse from

  The theology of love, remember the wood,

  And reach for the bright bird.

  WOULD THAT I could dream up a new style of writing that would effect a new style of living. I mean, we so-called creative writers do not actually create anything. We simply respond to that which already has been created. But if we could create something, I’d like to do it through style. A new style, never tried before, the style of the world’s not that merely by its own existence, by the statement of itself, made religions obsolete, and nations as well, and everything else that has gummed up the works since the works began. Everything we think of now as normally stupid and lethal, would be made old hat in a sweep by a different arrangement of words. The orderly powers of government giving way to accidental lilies. A different rhythm. Like jazz. Like Sonny Rollins at the Williamsburg Bridge. The words themselves wouldn’t cut it, not beautiful words any more than beautiful music or beautiful art, which have the staying power of butterflies. Goebbels in tears at Wagner. Wagner in tears at himself. But a style of writing so revolutionary that it insists upon horses mixing with their own shadows and the shingles of the sea, gray and blue, sudsing up at the base of the Freedom Tower, with no comment, no announcement, with nothing justified or explained, well, that would be something. Too much to ask? I think not, my liege. We stumble upon improvement, from time to time.

  I recall the night Jesus was born. I was tending sheep in the Belnord, and the wolves were pacing back and forth and licking their chops. Were it not for a new style of behavior in the air, they would have trussed up the pint-size Savior and gulped him down for lunch—blood, body, and all. Instead they murmured something about a new style of behavior and trotted on. You were there. You know it’s true. We have started out badly, but who knows.

  Poetry is the product of an effort to invent a world appreciably better than the one we live in. Its essence is not the representation of the facts, but the deliberate concealment and denial of the facts.

  —H. L. Mencken, in Thomas Murphy’s

  Book of Dandy Quotations

  SOMETIMES I FORGET what a delightfully curious fellow I am. And then I do something that reminds me. This morning, for instance, I took down every one of my poetry books—others’ books, not my own—from the floor-to-ceiling bookcase reserved for poetry, in the front hall. I took them down one at a time and I opened each to a random page. There must be seven or eight hundred books on my shelf—from old Tu Fu to Yiddish poems to the work of Phillis Wheatley, Edgar Guest, Julie Sheehan, William Empson, Daniel Halpern, Marianne Moore, and others. I have ’em all. I laid all the open books on the floor of the hallway, with a foot or two between the rows, so that I could patrol the lot of them and read a line or two on each open page. Sometimes I happened to open a book to a complete poem, sometimes to isolated stanzas. I read the lines aloud, as if the entire haphazard arrangement on the floor constituted one very long organized poem.

  So, I read some lines of Shakespeare, then moved on to Carl Philips, thence to Poe, thence to Countee Cullen, and Billy Collins, and Emily Dickinson and Frost and Southey, and Galway Kinnell, and on and on. There were no connections among the passages, and nothing made continuous sense. But the accumulation of the total work had an effect, nonetheless—like a collection of all the comments one might hear from a crowd viewing a monument, Lenin’s Tomb, for instance, or coming upon an amazing natural sight, say, Niagara Falls. All the various things visitors ever said to one another when expressing appreciation of Niagara Falls, rising in and filling my front hall from floor to ceiling.

  I shouted “the wound is open” from Anne Sexton. I shouted “the mad in absolute power” from X. J. Kennedy. I shouted “it was not a heart, beating” from Sylvia Plath, and “I remember these things I still remember them” from Apollinaire, and “some things are truly lost” from Richard Wilbur, and “went you to conquer?” from Donne. I shouted “what is articulated strengthens itself” from Miłosz. I loved that so much, I shouted it twice. The exercise occupied most of the morning, if you include the time I used in taking down the books and putting them back. Afterward, I sat in the kitchen, with my toast and coffee, pleased with myself, I don’t know why. I can’t recall thinking about the poets’ lines I’d read. I was not studying them, and they certainly were not studying me. Principally, I was more aware of the sound the accumulated lines made, senseless, illogical, beautiful. What is articulated strengthens itsel
f. We simply had been keeping company with one another, comforting one another, me and my fellow poets, in the morning, in the front hall.

  “WHAT OLD MEN dream / Is pure restatement of the original theme, / A sense of rootedness, a source held near and dear.” My C. Day-Lewis shout.

  WHEN THE SICKNESS was devouring Oona as she lay like a queen in our palatial bedroom—devouring her at such a rate that you could see the body wither as you sat with her—I asked did she recall the time of her past good health. She said she could no more recall being robust than she could, in health, recall the pain and lassitude of illness. If we were able to return to the past in body as well as in mind, she said, that would be grand. But it is part of nature’s unfairness that we can remember that we were healthy at an earlier time, without feeling any of it. It is like a story someone read to us a long long time ago. All the days before this blight, she said, are a throng of lights on a shore at night. And I am a boat borne out.

  IF GREEN-WOOD was good enough for Henry Ward Beecher, Louis Tiffany, Leonard Bernstein, Boss Tweed, and the Wizard of Oz (Frank Morgan to you), it was good enough for Oona. So we buried her there among the swells, where she lay, the swellest of the lot. In the nineteenth century, they said it was the ambition of every New Yorker to live on Fifth Avenue, take “airings” in Central Park, and sleep in Green-Wood, in Brooklyn. At least we’d satisfied the airings part, and when we stood around her fresh grave—Máire, William, Greenberg, and me—Greenberg noted that the place was so beautiful, with its fabric hills and old trees and justly self-satisfied Victorian monuments, it looked as if Oona was in heaven already.