After James

by Michael Helm

  That last line now embarrasses me. I don’t sound like myself, even myself in prose. Dominic chose not to call me on the brattiness of the tone, or the generalization I’d made about academics, though he was a better and more soulful reader than I. He read Durant’s letter of invitation, looked in on Three Sheets, and pointed out that I was entertaining a solicitation from someone unstable or at least very likely in one of the categories of thin readers that I’d attacked.

  “If you need the money, though, you can always tell yourself that this Durant must concur with your reading of the Poet, and so taking his money might not be ignoble. And anyway, it’s not just money, it’s Rome!”

  It was more than Rome, in the end, but in Rome it began.

  —

  The next week I handed over my room and caretaking duties to a former classmate and flew off, anticipating disaster. Dominic had gifted me a few nights in a budget residenza in Trastevere. I had been to Rome once before, with no money, and seen the sights, sipped the coffee at Tazza d’Oro, felt the black cobblestones in the soles of my feet, in my throat, under my eyelids when the last stranger home turned out the light in the room for males in a hostel near Termini Station. I’d been alone then, in my early twenties, and now eight years later was alone again. Being always in silence had left me without a means for any human gesture toward comprehension, and the traffic and murmuring tourists only sharpened for me the silence of the buildings and stones, and cast me, in some faux-Romantic sense, with the dead.

  In my small room I consulted my laptop to see what was happening at Three Sheets. There had been no new posts in a week, an unusual but not unprecedented quiet. When the site went still for a time I imagined the Poet entirely unplugged, reading old books, then wandering on a farm or in village streets somewhere temperate. He/she lived in a moderate climate, I deduced, but came from an extreme one, which was why the “runt days” with their “uncentered bubble of light”—winter days, surely—seemed to her/him “a native, wet element.” Only a nonnative would feel a damp cold as “native.” Of course the Poet might have been imagining the damp, or remembering a place where she (let’s say) no longer lived, but the description had appeared in February, with a topical reference to fires then ravaging Australia (“an outback town in cinders”).

  Durant’s email notes had been short, not unfriendly but neither giving anything away. Before accepting his offer I’d found him on a faculty page at a private school in California I’d never heard of, Larunda College. The page had no photo and only a brief professional biography. August Durant had studied genetics at Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, and had taught at the University of Michigan for twelve years before moving to Larunda, where, it seemed, he taught very little. He was affiliated with universities in France, Holland, and England. The linked CV gave me a sense of his age—judging from when he finished his graduate work, he’d now be in his early sixties—and listed dozens of publications, the titles of which meant nothing to me except one on the American poets Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery. It was odd that he’d written an academic paper on poetry, and odder still that he’d listed it among all the articles on evolutionary biology and DNA transference on his CV, where it would mean nothing to his professional standing. He must have been proud.

  The CV hadn’t been updated in three years. What had he been doing recently? I used Dominic’s access to online academic searches to learn that Durant had coauthored a successful and sizeable research grant on something called “molluscan phylogeny” (I couldn’t remember what phylogeny meant and could have sworn there was a k at the end of mollusc). He’d published a single paper, back in the first months of the grant, but nothing since. A distracted program assistant at the biosciences department told me that Durant was on leave. I said I was considering an application to Larunda, and she offered that Durant’s leave was “indefinite.” He was not available to supervise research. “Is he retired?” I asked. “You can think of him that way,” she said.

  Apart from his professional life, there was scant evidence to read of him. Surely he knew even less about me, yet he seemed to have great confidence that I was his man, whether or not I knew it. “You can ask me whatever you like,” he wrote. “The plane ticket would have proven to most that I’m serious. All it really proves is that I have enough money to play my hunch, and anyway, even once you realize I’m serious, you still have to decide if I’m someone you can work for.” He was right, but now that I’d used the ticket, my concern wasn’t that he’d deceived me but that he’d learn I was a less talented reader-detective than he’d imagined. There’s a degree of cowardice or fraudulence in every reader who feels the need, upon closing a book, to open his mouth.

  I cleared my throat and dialled his number. The voice that answered, in English, was certainly his—I could tell somehow by the vigorous, uninterrogative “hello.” As we spoke I could picture him, strong, sharp-eyed, square. He sounded like John Huston in Chinatown. The call was brief. We arranged to meet the next afternoon on a patio bar on Piazza Campo de’ Fiori. The presumption that had led him to send me the ticket was there now too, even in his attempt to reassure me.

  “Anyone my age and with my way of seeing the world is bound to be a little complicated. You’ll need confidence for this work, James. I like boldness. So tomorrow check out of your hotel and bring your bags with you. You’ll know right away you can trust me, and you’ll like me, if that matters to you, which it does. Then we’ll begin our work.”

  After the call I allowed myself to admit further doubts. Not just that my talents were less than he imagined but that the enterprise was absurd. I looked up absurd on my phone. It’s from the Latin absurdus, meaning “dissonant” or “out of tune.” Couldn’t Durant hear the notes? Because he presumed to know me well from a letter I’d posted online, I decided that his judgment was suspect. He was a truster of appearances. No one is transparent, though they may evidently be mostly joyful or not, mostly good or not, and so on. There’s always more to the story. To allow myself one generalization, people who express presumed certainties to strangers are often, at some level, fools.

  My doubts made me miss the Londoner, so full of purpose, clear of mind. She’d studied mathematics and told wild tales about string theory to rewrap with fine gold any loose thought I’d strung with poetical catgut. Upon learning from her that forty is the only semiperfect number in English whose letters fall alphabetically, I thought I might say it to myself in times of confusion as a sort of mantric assertion of linear clarity. But then I started seeing it everywhere—it leapt from screen texts and formed in the fragments of sound broken off from the noise of the day—so that “forty” represented for me everything from the number of horses in the last five Grand National races to the percentage of my country’s commissioned soldiers listed as casualties in the First World War to the number of light-years from Earth to the planet 55 Cancri e to the number of days and nights of rain it takes to float an ark. I retain facts pointlessly—the Londoner thought I was “on the spectrum,” I told her the internet was to blame—but now and then, as if of their own accord, the facts try to arrange themselves into meaning. These little flights of free association, these high-lateral cha-chas, as I thought of them, came unbidden like a kind of seizure, and I had no choice but to wait them out. The more duress I felt, the longer they lasted. Maybe they cleansed the carbon buildup in the brain’s exhaust system, but they contained unlikely, surprising linkings, and in their wake I experienced a sudden clarity that could last for several minutes. The clarity didn’t always feel good.

  —

  Except for a few flower stalls, the market at Campo de’ Fiori had closed for the day by the time I arrived. The rich light on the buildings was as I remembered it. Durant had told me to look for the most crowded patio at the northwest corner of the piazza, the one the tour books listed. He’d be sitting in the otherwise identical neighbouring patio, likely the sole occupant, and that was, in fact, how I found him. He spotted me firs
t or at least was looking right at me as I approached and picked him out, a man even larger than I’d imagined, standing to greet me, with full, light-brown, combed hair—I wondered if he was one of those late-middle-aged men who are proud of their hair—wearing black plastic old-style glasses over blue-grey eyes. Striking eyes, wolfen. He would know their effect. His clothes were casual, coarse cotton. He was smiling.

  “You knew me by the duffle bag,” I said, shaking his considerable hand. We sat.

  “And you don’t look Italian, or walk Italian. There’s also a picture of you on the internet. You must know the one.” It was a group photo. The Londoner and I met the other six when we were detained together by Parisian police as part of a mass roundup of climate change protesters at a meeting of big oil executives. We decided to gather again in Amsterdam a month later to join an alternative energy march. That’s where the picture had been taken, before we really got to know each other, which is to say, before the Londoner and I split from the others and moved to Madrid. I never thought anymore of those temporary friends, except the Londoner. I’d chatted with her briefly one Paris afternoon and in all of ten minutes she made a marching activist of me.

  Through our first shared drink the conversation with Durant had no shape. I learned in passing that the room I’d have in his nearby apartment had a great street view, that he’d been in Rome for nine weeks and planned to stay several more, that his feet were suffering from a new pair of shoes, that he hoped, when his time in the city was over, never to hear another underpowered motorcycle. I nursed a beer, he a glass of Madeira. There was something more to these preliminary exchanges than simply to put each other at ease. It was understood that we were each gauging the other, each allowing time to find what would serve as an acceptable, reproducible version of ourselves that we could then play at length. I was fully aware that, against my will, I was constructing a persona—one that would not disappoint Durant, that seemed up to the job he’d offered me, but that too seemed authentic for being slightly peculiarized, as in my unwillingness to fill all silences with speech or ask the obvious questions—and that he must have been doing the same, though I couldn’t detect anything in him but a genuine interest in me, in my carry bag, which I’d picked up in Madrid from a Moroccan, and in the city around us. That I couldn’t detect a forced interest meant that he was older and more practised at the art of false presentation, or that he was less self-aware than I hoped, and didn’t know that we are only being true to human nature to fashion outward selves far removed from whoever we are when alone in the dark.

  All this travelling I’d done—Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid—what had I learned about myself, he asked. I said I was neither searching for nor escaping anything. I just wanted to know what places were like, at least while I was standing in them. I didn’t say, as I might have, that I’d been unlocated since my parents died in a car accident.

  “Your posting argues that the poems at Three Sheets are all directed toward a single, fixed mystery. It suggests you see beauty in the idea of a search. You’re looking for a direction. I have one for you.”

  What had I written about a search? My little online piece had tumbled off the top of my head. I’d tangled myself up in Dante, the canto about Ulysses’s last voyage from The Inferno. The old sailor gathers his men and sets off for “the world beyond the sun,” meaning the west, where the sun sets, the unknowable distant point where things end, the day, the light, life itself. Was this the direction Durant had planned for me?

  “Why bring me here? Why couldn’t I work for you from Canada?”

  “Because the best discoveries are sometimes made when we’re not working, when we’re relaxing, talking about life and love, and I’m paying you for those conversations, too.”

  We looked out at the passersby, the rooftop gardens on the buildings across the piazza. Several young Romans sat on the base of the statue of Giordano Bruno. Harmless teenagers, smoking, playing cool, feigning boredom. The light was clean. Durant waited me out. I finally asked him how he became interested in Three Sheets and the Poet.

  “I discovered the site in a sidebar. I forget what I was reading online, likely something about Wallace Stevens or Elizabeth Bishop, and a fragment of poetry popped up and caught my eye. And so I looked at the site and the more I read, the more the work got hold of me.”

  “The site’s gotten hold of a whole lot of people. Does it bother you that you might be part of a virtual cult?” My ground had been marked out by the online post, but now I stood on it, chin raised. I already knew that Durant liked this image of me.

  “Let’s face it, the Poet’s work is at best uneven and pretty elusive. Half of it doesn’t even make sense. My relation to him—he’s a man, let’s agree—is more personal.” He measured my expression, which I tried to keep neutral. “I know how that sounds.”

  He said that I could lay claim to “the sharpest post” on SHEPMETSOR. And I had no institutional affiliations that might skew my readings, no publishers to protect, no tenure to win. As far as he could tell from his internet searches, I was a perfect co-reader, and he needed a reader. He said not his life but “the makings” of his life were, as it were, “at stake.” I wondered if he’d introduced “the sharpest post” and “stake” intentionally.

  “The Poet’s work has started to feel directed at me. Either I’m lost to delusion, and you might be able to help free me of it, or there really is a connection, and you can confirm that what I’m seeing in the poems is valid.” He took me in unblinking as he spoke, never once looked away. “Of course, you wonder what I’m seeing. And of course I can’t tell you or I’ll have planted the reading in your mind. I can only ask you to tell me what you see, though even this is an interference.”

  If he wanted me as a measuring instrument, then already the needle was in the red. Superstitious readers project more meanings onto pages than they find in them. It is possible to see anything in language if you look with a particular slant and intensity like the one he was now levelling at me. Whole interpretive fiefdoms are built upon professors seeing gods in their porridge.

  He looked off to the square. A young, hairy-legged couple in shorts had bolted from the neighbouring patio and run out to flag down a dark-skinned man in a blue summer suit. There was surprise and delight all around.

  Durant’s hand fell off his glass, as if to make a gesture, but he changed his mind and simply took hold of it again.

  “You must have some questions for me,” I said.

  “No. But I do ask something of you. If you’re still considering this job.” Before I realized the question had been sprung, I answered, “I am.” Why I said this I still don’t know. If anything, I was inclined at that point not to become involved in the man’s suspect enthusiasms. Maybe I was just intrigued. Or maybe I didn’t want to walk away from the money.

  He said that he’d pay my first installment regardless but wouldn’t hire me until he’d seen me read. He meant this literally. He needed to physically see me read a poem and then listen to my response, without aid of commentaries or search engines, and without the time to revise.

  “You mean right now?”

  “Yes.”

  In Dominic’s Contemporary World Poetry graduate course, he’d made the class perform spot readings and then graded our discussions. Among students and his colleagues he was quietly denounced for the practice, but it was in those sessions that I learned to focus, to find meaning and test it, to find a way of seeing and a language for saying what I saw. But sometimes I saw badly, or not at all.

  Durant produced a paper from his pants pocket and unfolded it, passed it to me. I recognized the poem, “The Art of Memory.” It had appeared in the late winter on Three Sheets. It hadn’t made much sense to me at the time, and it wasn’t my kind of poem, but I performed the trick I’d learned of faking to myself a silent enthusiasm, which sometimes triggered an actual one, which made me read better. What did I see? A simple rhyme scheme. The speaker addressing an absent lover, a woman who mayb
e knows something of the sciences (“The world, its laws slipped / into you like light through a lens to a point / of resolve”). He remembers them standing with a guidebook in the shadow of a bronze statue, and she says, “The sun winks and we play blind.” The ending:

  Who wrongs

  us when the body, its own authority, is undone?

  Who made the laws of art that the bronze

  of the burned man should be shaped by fire?

  We spent our day here burning down, drawn

  to drink as if to douse the very pyre

  here remembered, then to lose our calendared days,

  our lined and numbered cosmos, the entire

  thing. You were leaving, and left. I remain.

  I read it again, then began. I said I could see why the Poet didn’t often write in fixed forms. Even this loose terza rima wasn’t handled very well. He’d chosen it presumably because the poem was partly about forms (the statue, the body, the poem), and forms breaking down, someone burned at the stake, commemorated in bronze, and the lovers’ bodies no longer answering the laws they once did. The iambic pentameter of the first tercet falters in the second. I talked of the kink in the rhyme scheme.

  Durant barely nodded. He was waiting to see if I could reach beyond the undergraduate-level answer I’d offered him. I continued.

  “The lover being addressed seems to love science. The speaker has a weaker eye for science, and questions art. There are a few tired conceits at work. Fire as a principle of both destruction and creation, of lovers’ passion, etcetera. There’s an ambiguity in the ‘pyre/here remembered’—is ‘here’ the statue, commemorating a death by fire, or is ‘here’ in fact the poem itself, commemorating their lost passion? The meanings coexist. And we get the full sense of that by noting the title. ‘The Art of Memory’ alludes to the art advanced by the man represented in a bronze statue in the very place he was burned at the stake. Giordano Bruno. The poem is set here, in Campo de’ Fiori.”