During the Vietnam War, Kay stood on the steps of the Federal Building in San Francisco (with Joan Baez’s mother, her good friend) and burned the draft cards of the young men in the crowd. When she came down, she met Tillie, standing on the edge of the gathering, who said: ‘Oh Kay, I so admire you for what you are doing. How I wish I were doing it.’
Kay’s response: ‘Why don’t you, Tillie?’
Writers’ blocks are real and terrible afflictions. I know that. But at times they are the excuse for not wanting to finish the task at hand, or for the discovery that one has nothing more to say, or the result of having wasted the initial, vital energy that began the enterprise, with talk.
So it was with Katherine Anne Porter. Late in her life I went to have tea with her in her apartment in College Park, Maryland. She looked quite wonderful, her white hair beautifully coiffed, her neck decorated with her fine emeralds. I told her I wondered about the fate of her book on Cotton Mather. I had come upon an old catalogue issued by Horace Liveright which advertised a volume by her called The Devil and Cotton Mather to appear in the fall of 1927. It read: ‘… Miss Porter has given us an astounding picture of religious ecstasy and righteousness.… as a study of a pious and bigoted figure, this book … is an important document.’
Apparently all that Liveright had in hand when he issued his catalogue was a sketch for the book. He gave Katherine Anne Porter three hundred dollars to complete the research and deliver the ms. Her biographer, Joan Givner, told me Porter had done some research in Salem on the subject she had chosen, under the mistaken notion that Mather was a witch-burner. She was disappointed to find nothing to substantiate her belief. She became aware of the vastness of the already well-documented material; at the same time she discovered that what she had preconceived to be a villainous character was not so. From Bermuda she wrote to Liveright for more money, saying she had by now read more than four hundred books for background on the subject.
She did write three error-ridden chapters that she sent to the publisher, and which appeared in print in small magazines in the forties. Again the same notice of the book appeared in Boni & Liveright’s catalogue for 1928. But in 1929 the chapters stopped coming to Liveright. He wrote. She replied four months later, asking him to stop announcing the book. She could not finish it, she said, because of the demands of other work.
In 1934, Robert MacAlmon (Kay Boyle’s beloved friend) wrote that Porter was secluded in Paris writing a biography of Cotton Mather. That was the last she was heard from on the subject.
Her reply to my question was angry. She no longer smiled in her wide Southern-belle way. ‘The past is past,’ she said, ‘and I’m glad of it. Half of my work is still undone. Actually I’ve written ten chapters of that book. I’ve given up trying to do it, until all the rest of it can be done at once. I had to stop because the Sacco-Vanzetti case came up and I needed to be active in that.
‘But no one realizes, when they talk of my not doing this or finishing that, that I always had to earn a living as a writer, speaking, journalism, teaching. I wasn’t free to finish the book. Sometime I will, of course.’
I believe the truth is that she ran out of interest in the subject, very early in the research. Givner agrees, saying she never wanted to write about anything if she could not shape the facts to her way of thinking. All the rest, the excuses, the fifty-year delay, the good intentions, are what a writer uses when the truth is not suitable.
Some writers are encouraged by advances and race on to finish the book. But there are those for whom it is fatal to discuss a work-in-progress or to accept an advance before it is finished. Like my father, for whom promises were always a more than adequate substitute for fulfillment of them.
Over here in the carriage house, alone with my packed possessions and covered, silent computer, I see the light go on in the kitchen in the house, and know that Sybil is home and beginning to fix dinner. I realize I have been here since seven-thirty in the morning and it is now seven-thirty again, time to go through the list of things I must check before I leave this peaceful den. And at the end, a new entry, caused by the visual requirements of the computer’s monitor: Change glasses.
What I need to remember is to go through the list carefully, or else I may well burn down this overelectrified little house before I have a chance to move out of it. I do this, nod goodbye to the space I love, go downstairs and across the garden, abandoning my twelve hours of silence. In an old notebook that I put into the box for the University of Virginia this morning I found a sentence by Rainer Maria Rilke: ‘Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and touch, and greet each other.’
I climb the stairs to the deck, open the kitchen door, and greet Sybil.
All evening we pack books from the dining-room walls. I find a volume I haven’t looked at in fifty years, a thin, blue-cloth-covered little book entitled Notes on a Half Century of United States Naval Ordnance. One of my commanding officers, Captain Wilbur R. Van Auken, handed it to me when I left his station in Washington, D.C., to go to the Twelfth Naval District in San Francisco. It is warmly inscribed, with the identifying letters ‘WAVES, USNR’ after my name, and the date, June 1944. Beyond that, I have no memory of him at all. Tonight I tried to read it and found I was able to get only as far as most of the first sentence of his book: ‘This year 1880 in ordnance, under Commodore Jeffers, is selected as it marks the beginning of the manufacture of the first hooped steel, high-powered rifled guns …’ I decided to pack the book for the tie to the past it represented. Then I sat down to rest and thought about another commanding officer I reported to after my assignment to the Bureau of Ordnance in Washington.
He too was a captain, retired, and called back to serve in a noncombatant role in the Navy. I cannot remember his name, but I can see his face clearly: fat, puffy, ruddy, a nose that was stippled, suggesting long, heavy drinking. I never saw him smile. I think he must have resented his relatively inactive job and most of all the number of commissioned women (women! In the United States Navy!) under his command.
Our station was in an office building on New Montgomery Street in San Francisco. The day I reported for duty, spic and span in a freshly pressed uniform, my transfer papers stowed in a neat blue folder, was bright and shining with the yellow light I have only seen in that beautiful city on its seven hills. I took the elevator to the sixth floor, taking off my warm hat and gloves, hating to come in out of the lovely day. I was directed to the cubicle of the ‘officer of the deck.’ His title, solemnly engraved over his door, was my first hint of the nature of things to come. The deck?
He was a straight-faced, thin, young lieutenant senior grade. He told me to sit down, and then informed me of the rules of the station and the ritual I was to follow when I reported to the captain. He said the captain called the sixth floor of the office building the ‘ship.’
Sighing, I set off to find the captain’s quarters. As I had been instructed, I put on my shining new officer’s hat and white gloves and knocked once on the captain’s door.
‘Enter,’ he said.
Standing as erect as I could, I approached his desk and put my papers down in the in-box as I had been told to do. I saluted and said:
‘Ensign Grumbach reporting for duty, sir.’
The captain stood up, put on his hat with its assemblage of gold braid on the visor, and said:
‘Welcome aboard, ensign.’
And I, as instructed, replied:
‘Glad to be aboard, sir.’
This was to be a year of absurd naval etiquette. The captain was not to be denied his right to command a ship even on New Montgomery Street. Before every shift we served we rode the elevator to the sixth floor, took two steps out of the cage, turned slightly toward the large American flag mounted on a platform down the hall, and saluted the poop deck at the stern of the ship. If the officer of the deck was anywhere around, we were required to ask permission to come aboard, sir.
If a goodly number of naval personnel were aboard t
he elevator, it would take a little time to complete this operation before the elevator, carrying irritated civilians on their way to their jobs on the upper floors, could be emptied. But respect to the poop deck was not to be denied our captain.
Regularly, we had white-glove inspections, to see that our desks and cubicles were shipshape. Sometimes the captain, in full uniform, held an unannounced tour of inspection. He ran his finger over the tops of our Royal typewriters to assure himself they were not gathering dust. On occasion, bells would ring throughout the floor, and we would line up before the elevator doors. This was termed, seriously, ‘abandon ship drill.’ We would ride down to the lobby and stand around in congenial little groups to await the call to come aboard again. So it went.
I remember that, near the end of my time there, the captain seemed to feel that the rules of the Navy were not reaching far enough. The order went out that the block on which the building stood, and the street across from it, were now constituted decks of the ship. On those streets enlisted men were to salute officers, and officers were to return the salute. Now you must know that in those years, San Francisco was a Navy town, with naval personnel of every rank and rate cramming its streets. To salute every officer one passed, especially women officers, was an absurdity to the hundreds of enlisted men and women on our street. So they would step down into the gutter and walk along the edge of the traffic to avoid saluting on the sidewalk. They were on the water, they claimed, and gutter travel came to be known as the Jesus walk.
On second thought, I removed the little book on naval ordnance from the packing carton and put it into one marked ‘Giveaway.’
For review, the letters of Stephen Crane arrived today. Last week I browsed through a volume of Henry James’s letters to Edmund Gosse. Crane’s letters are very fragmentary, very few of them of any real consequence. James’s to Gosse are extremely short, and many of them dwell on appointments they had with each other, or their illnesses.
In the great rush to publish every word put down by respected writers of the past and the present, too often we are given books of largely worthless letters, collections of stray papers that should have been destroyed by the author, journals not intended to reach any reader’s eyes. Juvenilia better left to the trash sometimes is published as an ‘important’ volume of ‘discoveries’ or ‘significant’ work of an earlier period.
But I started to talk about the letters of Crane and James/Gosse. I am comforted to see that occasionally these letters resemble my own in quality, significance, content. So often I write to a friend, then read over the empty prose and wish I had striven for more elegant, memorable expression. Now I feel relieved that I have precedents for my ordinariness and quotidian subject matter. I can only hope no recipient is saving them with the intention of committing them to print.
Two items from a 1977 notebook in the pile awaiting pickup by the librarian of the University of Virginia:
• Piece of a Louise Bogan poem called ‘Women’:
Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead,
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread.
‘No wilderness in them.’ Reminiscent of Joyce’s admonition to the young would-be novelist who, Joyce thought, did not have enough chaos in him to be a writer.
• Visiting a friend, Edward Kessler, on Clark’s Island off the coast of Duxbury in Massachusetts. Ed tells me about the island’s oldest inhabitant. Every year on her birthday, now well into her nineties, very arthritic, and walking with two canes, she climbs painfully into her boat and rows twice around the island.
Out of the same notebook falls an almost transparent piece of paper which, at first, I cannot identify. I spread out the three square sheets, which are connected to each other by perforations, and read at the bottom of each in pale-blue ink: GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. Then I remember. The paper comes from rolls serving the toilets in the bathroom of the British Museum. I remember being delighted to find, when I was working on the Mary McCarthy biography years ago in the lovely reading room of that library, that every sheet of toilet paper in public buildings was similarly inscribed.
Sybil and I continue to disagree about what should go to Maine, what should remain in Washington in the apartment we have taken on the Hill to afford us a retreat in the cold months in Maine, and what should be sent to storage. I want everything I value to go to the new house, she wants much of what she cares about to stay here in the apartment. We are divided by what we most cherish and where we most wish to be. It may work out: I may lose my preference for the isolated life by the sea and want to return to the city, she may wear out her long-held ties to crowds, theaters, and her bustling bookshop, and settle for the quiet life beside the cove. If we are still at odds, we will have to find a middle ground on which to combine our passions.
Her requirements always seem unimportant to me, and mine, I’m sure, to her. I worry that she will perceive how selfish my motives are for where I wish to be. I remember Ford Madox Ford writing in The Good Soldier: ‘For it is intolerable to live constantly with one human being who perceives one’s small meannesses.’
Sybil and I go to Rudy von Abele’s apartment to see his books. We are alone among his possessions: some pictures, bookcases, a few pieces of furniture, compact disks, records, and a large collection of books. The dust that lies over everything suggests the particles of his person, as well as the manner of his bachelor existence. This was a man who loved and taught the great modern Irish writers. We look eagerly at the volumes of early Joyce and Beckett and find first editions among them. But they turn out to be working copies of the books, full of heavy marginal notes and incomprehensible numbers, much of his notation in ink. An interesting scholar’s library, but unfortunately not many volumes salable as pristine first editions.
I am intrigued by the 125 compact disks of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, and a few moderns like Stravinsky. When Sybil makes an offer for most of Rudy’s books—first editions or not, they are interesting, useful books for a general bookstore—I ask the executor if I could buy the disks. Now, ready to hand, in one swoop, I have another collection of music which, in its technology, supersedes all my old records and newer cassettes. I suppose the day will come when all recorded music will be reduced to tiny thimbles of superb quality, and these extraordinary disks will be outmoded. Now our old record player stands idle, the cassette player will be used only occasionally, and the new compact disk player, which Sybil bought as her share of the disk expense, will serve us. All this change in less than thirty years, after generations of the beloved Victrola, for which I remember sharpening reed needles. My big, black, shining, breakable 78s, badly scratched and inaccurate, are now collectors’ items, beloved to me as old furniture and ancestral tintypes, but not very valuable for listening pleasure.
Sybil is away for the end of the week, doing a book fair. I am here alone in this almost-packed-up house, enjoying the solitude. Packing a volume of Susan Sontag, I impede my progress, as usual, by stopping to read. She quotes Cesare Pavese on love: ‘What one takes to be an attachment to another person, is unmasked as one more dance of the solitary ego.’ So it is, I think, true at least in part. In modern cliché, the buck stops at the egocentric self, even when it appears to be love of the other.
Sybil comes home; I am glad to have my solitude ended. We go to see an exhibit of David Smith sculpture. Next to me, two matronly ladies discuss a black, linear, wrought-iron horse and buggy.
One: ‘Now, what do you think about that?’
Long pause. Then, the other: ‘Well, a lot of work must have gone into it.’
Sign in front of a Presbyterian church on Capitol Hill: CHURCH-GOING FAMILIES ARE HAPPIER. How can the pastor know? Would it were always so.
I buy a loaf of rye bread from the bakery in the Eastern Market. I cut a piece and find the bread is stale. I remember Harry Grumbach, my father-in-law, telling me that in real Jewish bakeries, the lady who sells the brea
d digs her long fingernail into the crust to prove its freshness.
March
Key West: I speak at a seminar on the short story, with John Edgar Wideman and Jane Smiley. We are put up in an opulent hotel that looks out on the Gulf. My suite has a sauna, two enormous rooms, a fully equipped kitchen, and sweeping balconies. For what I have to say on the subject, the housing seems excessive. The first morning, after breakfast, I take a walk to the pool area (there does not seem to be a beach) and come upon two very old, fat women who are identical twins. They walk arm in arm, matching their tiny steps, their sausage arms embracing each other behind their backs. Both wear bright new Nike sneakers, powder-blue raincoats tightly belted about their middles (they have no waists), the same top button undone under each flabby throat, and light polyester slacks stretched over their heavy legs. They appear to be outlandish caricatures, female Tweedledee and Tweedledum, almost obscene human figures. I wonder: Why do they dress alike? Because all their lives they have? Because they like the attention identical twins receive? Because they love themselves in each other, even in their present weighty state?
I take a small motorboat out to a reef to snorkel, on the advice of a Key Westerner at the conference. The boat is very old and shakes curiously. I distract myself from what appears to me to be the threat of the boat’s flying apart at any moment by trying to remember the word I learned recently (the British use it frequently) for vibrating violently: to judder. By the time my personal computer has retrieved the word, the boat arrives, still juddering, at the reef. The reef is disappointing, lacking both fish and interesting coral.
Coming into the End Zone Page 16