Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

by Paul Monette

  I wish my bones were with theirs …

  … why should I wait ten years yet, having lived sixty-seven, ten years more or less,

  Before I crawl out on a ledge of rock and die, snapping, like a wolf

  Who has lost his mate?—I am bound by my own thirty-year-old decision: who drinks the wine

  Should take the dregs; even in the bitter lees and sediment

  New discovery may lie. The deer in that beautiful place lay down their bones: I must wear mine.11

  It’s more than a bleak refusal to kill himself. It’s that trapped detachment that goes with being human and dying alone. As if I were looking at Molera Beach, the place that has always stopped my heart, from behind a wall of glass. As if I were looking at the memory of it and not the thing itself, all the while wearing my bones like a straitjacket.

  Next day we recovered our equilibrium at Tor House in Carmel, the house that Jeffers built with his own hands, boulder by boulder from the shore below. A site I hadn’t visited in ten years, and then with Roger. So: one of those rare second chances. A shipshape house like a captain’s quarters, with the bed by the window that JefFers had chosen to die in from the beginning. (Otherwise used as the guest room, its true purpose withheld from the guests for pohteness.) Out in the garden, the housedog’s grave: Haig, an English bulldog.

  But more impressive than anything else, the tower at the foot of the garden—Una’s tower, built for his wife as a private retreat. A tower out of a Viking saga, or from the Irish cliffs of Moher. Not thirty feet high but grander than any watch-tower, and built forever, its sea-smooth boulders more massive than even the house stone. With a secret stair inside, besides the main one spiraling up the outer wall to Una’s dayroom. A unicorn’s lair, with a narrow double window looking out over the bay—where JefFers swore he saw a merman once, in the turbulent winter tide, breaching the white-capped swell for a moment’s look at man’s estate, then diving down again.

  And the final climb to the parapet, with only a swaying chain for a railing, a hawk’s perch where the wind blows through you. Mythic in a word, but a myth whose gods were profoundly mortal, a man and a woman in love. No mixup here: Winston and I had found our way to a monument that was in feeling equal to the twining of our two hearts. A place of inexpressible human permanence. You come away with the understanding that Jeffers’s work is twofold—the poems and the tower—like the source of two rivers.

  Then coming back to L.A., and still so restless. Some part of me long since finished voyaging, yet compelled by a near atavistic urge to be a moving target, to make Death have to run and catch me. The crisis of it came upon me unawares, unbidden. Winston had made plans, months before, to attend the annual gathering in the wild of a group of radical faeries. Nine days at the start of August, and the only time in the year when we were apart. I had no right to ask him to forgo it, in part because I wasn’t sick in bed, but more because it was something he’d still have when I was gone.

  This isn’t to say I wasn’t terrified to be left to my own devices—a late relapse of the Tintern Abbey panic and its progeny, the helpless waiting for Roger and Steve to die. Except in my case now the waiting was for me. There was nothing for it but to stay in motion.

  So I asked Victor, who’d fled to Europe with me after Steve died (sniffling our way through cathedrals), and again last summer to Big Sur when Winston was off in the woods. Left it to Victor, my last best friend, to check out the availability of Alaska, a cruise along the so-called “Route of the Glaciers.” Only to find that every ship was booked to the gills. For Alaska was suddenly terribly in, the prudent alternative to IRA bombs in London, tour buses strafed in Cairo, the hijacked Mediterranean.

  We had to settle for a waiting list, then a cabin the size of solitary confinement in the bowels of the M/S Sagajjord. But you won’t be spending time in your room, the travel mavens assured me. Oh yes I will, I thought, nearly all of it in fact. My role model being Simone Signoret in Ship of Fools, overripe with her own mortality, who didn’t quite speak anyone else’s language, returning home to certain imprisonment. No question about it, I needed the cabin more than the ship.

  Then at the last moment there was a cancellation on the Officers’ Deck at the top of the ship: somebody must’ve punched his ticket early, keeling over into his Samsonite even as he packed his woolens. We left for Vancouver on the 28th of July, Winston having packed me for every eventuality, practically sewing my name in my socks. With a vast pharmacopoeia of medicine in tow, an igloo just for the IV bags, steeled for a grilling at the border. Mr. Monette, could you tell us why you’re traveling with forty syringes?

  But Victor and I squeaked through without a hitch, and in any case I had a letter from my doctor listing all my meds though omitting to mention AIDS. This medical report had been required by Cunard regulations, to be turned over to the ship’s doctor on embarkation. We were still surveying our cabin, with its own private terrace above the lifeboats, bags not yet delivered, when the doctor himself appeared. A Swede who seemed to sport a permanent curl of distaste beneath his weedy mustache, who pointedly avoided shaking my hand. He’d clearly been clued in about the “A” word, and was most concerned that our ship’s insurance would cover evacuation by chopper.

  “These little ports we visit,” he said amiably, “they’ve never heard of these drugs you’re taking. They’re not equipped for …” Words failed him, but not that curl of distaste.

  So he left us to our lepers’ quarters. Never having caught Ship of Fools, apparently, or he would have had Oskar Werner for his role model. With his steely blue eyes and stiff-spine air of melancholy, who ended up in a shipboard liaison with the Countess (Signoret) because they shared a sense of last chances, the common tongue of irreversible fate. I did not expect our Doctor Strindberg to be slipping into our cabin for a little mid-ocean action.

  But at all events, that is how it happens that I am still on the road to Ithaka, having long since learned what Ithakas mean. A landscape more staggering every day: hundreds of miles of forest right to the water’s edge, lighthouses blinking time, range on range of snowy crags. And the glaciers themselves—forbidding, unyielding, cracking like rifle fire, calving icebergs into the floe-strewn bays. Not to take anything away from such exaltedness, but the main characteristic of Alaska—at least to us in Cabin 141—is the blankness. Rather like that blankness of a day’s hike, nothing else in your head, nature over mind—desirelessness, with or without the Zen.

  Thus we abjure all shore excursions, lacking the team spirit, and in eight days have managed to meet not one of our fellow passengers. I have seen one eagle perched in a treetop, and the barest wave of a humpback’s tail as it dove back under. No mermen of course, but these are not times that lend themselves to heroic sightings. I feel no abiding curiosity about the people or their history, having had my fill of Manifest Destiny and the tribes that have perished beneath its wheels. At least I won’t get the facts wrong. No, the blankness will do just fine.

  The rest is the force of memory, with its tricks and elisions, but all my own till my lights start winking out. My various fifteen-minute epiphanies have been in the nature of chance encounters, revealing things I didn’t know I was searching for. Strung together, they provide a kind of window into what endures, even as it melts or shakes to bits in a quake or falls to Huns and marauders. That is how I see it anyway, the trail of a single traveler. Certainly no one is going to follow my peculiar progress as if it’s a useful guidebook from A to B, let alone Z. My fact-free cultural map is harmless enough, no threat to the vast theoretics of ethnographers and linguists, art scholars, all those patient diggers.

  My own map is freely drawn in sand, and the tide is coming in. I am unencumbered of any grand thesis, mostly ignorant of antithesis, but achieving a private synthesis all the same, though I can’t really put it in words. No tablets left behind to be deciphered. Only this: the cost of a one-way fare is life.

  Not that my random journey is going to help me die any
easier, except insofar as I don’t feel cheated, not of the world out there anyway. My hoard of destinations suffices to let me imagine the rest. Srinagar, Cuzco, Persepolis: name it and something nickers, like and not like somewhere in your head, a paradox yes, but devoutly wished.

  And I will not give up a scrap of it without a fight. For years I used to save postcards, dozens of them from everywhere, because they did a better job of freezing time than my poor blind-spotted camera. Eventually they filled the secretary in my bedroom, a jumble of disorder, potsherds from a myriad of civilizations. Last year I started to use them for notecards, filling three or four at a time and tucking them into envelopes, my only real correspondence anymore.

  I don’t usually choose my views with any forethought: someone will get the Piero frescoes in Arezzo or a silversword cactus from Haleakala, House of the Sun. I linger a little before parting with anything Greek, however, directing these more pointedly to friends who might get a flicker of their own. I understand I am spending my loose change, scattering it to the four winds, but careful not to lighten my ballast so much that I will float away.

  No, I am only sending out announcements of my last stand. When I will be taken kicking and screaming from this phenomenal world, intractable to the last, ferocious in surrender:

  With all my might

  My door shall be barred.

  I shall put up a fight,

  I shall take it hard.

  With his hand on my mouth

  He shall drag me forth,

  Shrieking to the south

  And clutching at the north.12

  Big talk, but what do I know? I may go yet like Jeffers in the bed by the window,

  When the patient daemon behind the screen of searock and sky

  Thumps with his staff, and calls thrice: “Come, Jeffers.”13

  About three months ago the consummate traveler, Freya Stark, died at the age of one hundred. “The first Westerner to journey through many regions of the Middle East,”14 voluminous writer and scholar and wit. Spoke Turkish and Arabic before she hit puberty. Sometimes rode for weeks by camel and donkey. Fierce anti-fascist, and hardly a country she didn’t write about.

  In her ninety-third year, a reporter asked her about that final port of call. She was busily on her way to Spain, but stopped to give it some thought, for Death was doubtless the ultimate foreign country. “I feel about it,” she said at last, “as about the first ball, or the first meet of hounds, anxious as to whether one will get it right, and timid and inexperienced—all the feelings of youth.”15

  Exactly. When no amount of intrepidness will see you through, nor the globe in your study that fairly bristles with pins. You are suddenly in the clutch of a new adolescence, watching your helpless body change before your eyes, hating every blemish, waiting with dread to see where you will next put your foot in it. The no-way trip. Be glad, I suppose, if your morphine dreams at the end are a slide show of your voyages, superimposed on the shining faces of all your beloved companions who’ve matched their steps with yours. No telling, since that final Northwest Passage is all one-way. Postcards not available; or else they get lost in the mail.

  Meanwhile, incredibly, there are miles to cover yet. Just now we are cruising the Kenai Fjords, a starfall of scattered islands worthy of The Odyssey, the lairs of giants and the call of Circe, the flashing sun on the water leaving us muzzy as the Lotos-Eaters. Tomorrow we land in Anchorage. Long past journey’s end, however you look at it. But the road isn’t done till it’s done, and so you go on till Death catches up. Soon enough. But you wouldn’t have missed these islands, surely, even if they’re the last. Oh, especially if they’re the last.

  1. Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984), page iii.

  2. Stewart Perone, Hadrian, New York: W. W. Norton, 1960. Frankly I hate to proffer the footnote, given the rank homophobia that permeates the discussion.

  3. Howatson, Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, page 258.

  4. Ibid., page 498.

  5. Noel Coward, Three Plays (New York: Grove Press, 1979), page 209.

  6. C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), pages 35-36.

  7. Ford Madox Ford, Provence (New York: The Ecco Press, 1979), page 88. A reissue of Ford’s text, first published in 1935.

  8. William Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), page 110.

  9. 1771–1845, founder of The Edinburgh Review.

  10. Cavafy, Poems, page 36.

  11. Robinson Jeffers, Selected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), pages 100–101.

  12. Edna St. Vincent Milky, Collected Poems (New York: Harper and Row, 1956), pages 206–207. Lines from “Moriturus.”

  13. Robinson Jeffers, Poems, page 54.

  14. “Dame Freya Stark, Travel Writer, Is Dead at 100,” New York Times, 11 May 1993.

  15. Ibid.

  GETTING COVERED

  I

  THERE’S THIS TO BE SAID for being marginalized as an artist, laboring in obscurity, year after unsung year—you get to develop a voice of your own, unfiltered by fawning overpraise or the exigencies of the marketplace. It doesn’t mean you don’t want it all: your name in lights on Forty-fifth and Broadway, a window display at Rizzoli, a GAP full-page in tee-shirt and baggy pants. But when it doesn’t happen and doesn’t happen, you begin to see you’ve got nothing to lose. This is a good place to start taking more and more risks with your work, assuming you don’t fall into bitterness and envy of the overpraised, thus chewing your own spleen like a raven. And even then you might write something true, bile being as good as ink. But mostly you will have avoided being smothered by what Gore Vidal calls “bookchat.”

  When I was a kid we used to have a conundrum in the schoolyard, an early warning of the Hobson’s choices life would set in your path. Would you rather eat one bowl of Eisenhower’s snots, we would ask the unsuspecting, or two bowls with as much sugar on top as you like? There was no right answer of course, but our schoolmates, ever prudent, would usually opt for the second choice. Thus in later years would they find themselves ready for bookchat.

  During the years when I was writing poems exclusively, there was no bookchat for miles in any direction. Budding poets would fob themselves off on one another with reams of Xerox copies. If recognition was to be courted at all—nothing so vulgar as fame—it was by way of being elevated to the Pantheon, with Frost and Auden and Lowell and the Misses Moore and Bishop. Otherwise one masticated the crumbs as best one could. Especially a penciled scribble at the bottom of a New Yorker rejection slip: nice work or, even better, send more. One dared not hope that the unsigned bit of reassurance had come from Howard Moss himself, the poetry wizard of that particular Oz.

  Still less did one dare to dream of an actual acceptance: a poem in the magazine, interleaved between the pages of an Isaac Singer story, with a Booth cartoon on the facing page. One could only imagine reaching that height of cosmopolitan splendor.

  It was very rare to see a poet interviewed in print, except in the littlest magazines of the trade. No poet ever sat for a radio call-in or, heaven forbid, a television appearance. If you were really well connected in the poetry biz—a poetician as it were—you could aspire someday to the Paris Review, the series called Writers at Work. But that was about as far as one could go, publicity-wise. One’s ambition and competition were on a higher plain entirely: tilting at the windmill of anthologies, holding out for a place among the centuries, rubbing shoulders with Keats and Emily Dickinson.

  Poets weren’t part of the gossip at large. Remember, this was a time when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, before the invention of People. Yet even without a central clearing-house for personal trivia, poets knew all the gossip about one another, almost by osmosis. The status of various rocky marriages; who was on lithium, who was not; how drunk they were for their reading at the Y. A viper’s tongue was part of your po
etical equipment.

  At twenty-eight I executed a U-turn and made for the ranks of the novelists. Only to be marginalized ever more pointedly, because I published a novel populated almost exclusively by gay men. It didn’t feel like such a revolutionary move, and I was supremely unaware of being part of a vaster historic thrust to create a literature on the margin. Of course my novel was largely ignored by those poisoned malarial waters that constituted the mainstream. But I did fall into the babbling brook of the gay alternative press, whose own gathering presence announced the arrival on the scene of a wave of gay and lesbian writers and artists. Out writers and artists, which distinguished us from our forebears and all their brave euphemisms to keep from being labeled queer. With all proper deference to Whitman and Proust and Genet and James Baldwin. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we were the first generation post-Stonewall to be out and proud in our work, no apologies. But who knew that we were a whole new literary movement?

  The alternative press practiced a kind of anything-goes journalism, vital and irreverent. There was the Gay Community News in Boston, the Blade in Washington, the Bay Area Reporter in San Francisco. These and several more were at the urban core of our presence in cities across the country; and The Advocate still in its youth but fighting to be a truly national voice.

  Cub reporters would call, and you could hear them typing furiously to get it all down, or covering the receiver to bellow for silence in some noisy downtown loft. Gay news was a palpable thing, its presses running on overtime. The questions they asked were political and frivolous by turns, but in any case the opposite of the turgid academics of the Saturday Review of Literature and its ilk. Because my central character was a thinly disguised portrait of Dietrich, the interviewer could give it a nice camp spin, asking me to theorize as to what made an icon gay. They wanted to know my sun sign, and whether I’d ever been to Fire Island. Who was my boyfriend, and did I believe in monogamy? And my favorite color? Green, with purple a very close second.