Murder

by David Adams Richards

But by now they have discovered I am not so easy to defeat;

  The slightest move against me will make me stop and fight

  Rear-guard action, blowing dams and bridges,

  Before continuing on.

  Again there is this noise of evening,

  The baggage picked up at the airport

  Is like shouldering the weight of the thousand lost promises;

  But now with my little son in my arms, we are in Amsterdam or Madrid,

  And I think perhaps here is where

  It is all going to be better.

  NETWORKING

  My brother-in-law needs a new piece

  For his crankshaft and is sending it

  From the Maritimes to Ontario,

  By his brother who works in Brantford

  Who will keep it for a day

  And give it over to his ex-wife’s husband

  Who has a cousin who works in Kitchener

  And can get the part from his friend

  Who works in the junkyard near the highway,

  And who has said:

  “If you get it here by August

  The boss is on vacation,

  I can rifle through the whole yard after work,

  Won’t cost a goddamn thing.”

  OLD POETS ARE DOGS

  (For Milton Acorn)

  Old poets are dogs, Milton,

  Or at least are torn apart by them,

  Like Euripides;

  Instructed to take poison,

  Socrates;

  Chased into a cellar

  And put under arrest,

  Ben Jonson;

  Or cornered like Marlowe

  Drink of wine in hand,

  Never to understand the last moment

  Any more than little Chatterton,

  Chatting on about betrayal,

  While searching the attic for arsenic—

  Goldsmith mocked by lesser men,

  Johnson himself

  Left out in the end,

  Or Dostoyevsky

  Half mad and running from creditors,

  On and on it goes, Dickinson, and Plath

  Poets Keats or Poe, until we come to Canada

  And in the blinding, blinded snow see

  Lowry, Nowlan, Buckler, Lane and Layton.

  You’d think, Milton, like you

  They’d all have been treated,

  Somewhat

  Better.

  BETRAYAL

  Knowing that you who

  I once loved

  Kept a hidden document on me

  I think that

  Betrayal, in Dante’s mind,

  Was found our greatest sin,

  Worse—very much,

  Than the cauldron he put his sinners in.

  THE MAN WHO LOVES MY CHILDREN

  My friend does not have children,

  But in his books he does have them—

  Saves them from ice floes

  Or bad things that happen,

  Takes them to New York

  Where he is of course instrumental,

  Has never adopted children

  Or really wanted to

  Put that much weight upon his shoulders,

  But in his books he does adopt

  Cares for, tends to always,

  For that’s real compassion.

  My friend was never on a city street

  At night with a child in his arms,

  The shutters locked and the lights snuffed out

  Searching for medicine in a country

  Where he doesn’t know the language;

  Not once, alone without money trying to buy milk

  For his youngest, pockets of dust blowing against the darkness

  But in his books I swear he has done it somewhere

  Someplace, always where he should be,

  Understanding, poignant,

  And all that jazz;

  My friend was never harsh with a son, no not he,

  Nor ever put his life on the line for the son he never had,

  Or sat up all night holding medicine

  Watching his sick child sleep, praying that

  The morning comes without pain,

  Yet in his books he contrives to do just that

  To prove he’s done the same.

  I cannot help but think of him

  A village priest

  Filled with impotent anger,

  Wagging a sanctimonious finger at exhausted parents

  Before going home to a beef stew dinner.

  Still, my children know exactly who he is,

  Ignores them on the street when passing,

  Failed egoist he needs you to believe

  What little we ever achieved,

  Should simply be his for the asking.

  WHEN YOU GET BACK FROM SICILY

  Dad, when you get back from Sicily

  We’ll go out to the park

  There is a hydrant near the elm

  A swing chair in the dark

  I remember the times we went there

  But it won’t be as much fun

  For when you get back from Sicily

  Autumn will have come.

  They’ve taken the slides away now

  The swing chair in the dark

  Where Anton played last summer,

  Has been mostly taken down

  From the sad swinging pendulum

  To the rusted iron bars

  Or the dried-up naked gutter

  Underneath the cooling stars.

  LOVE

  My son John has the sand of the world

  In his dark-brown hair

  Has travelled over the oceans at three

  Holding his passport in his hand,

  A small bowtie in his breast pocket.

  Each day we have to pack

  And go away,

  His mother helps him straighten up his suit

  Jacket, telling him of circuses to see and

  Games to play.

  He has become then the casualty of my bitter

  War,

  For he knows airports as well as me,

  Knows how trips begin and never end,

  And when he thinks I’m not looking

  At certain moments in the sun,

  His mirror-grey eyes search the wide

  Blue sky for friends.

  EMPEROR AND POET

  Talk of me having it easy

  Never being on my own

  Taking on a real man’s work

  Since the time that I’ve been grown.

  While you have gone to steady job

  In white hat and company car,

  Sniffed at those beneath you

  Cringed at those above

  Counted on a pension

  And took your wife

  To church on Sunday afternoon.

  I am telling you:

  Chaos creates the universe,

  Invites emperor or poet in:

  But each must expect no mercy, no quarter

  And no helping hand.

  This is the violent secret in such a fierce place

  White hat or union boy

  Has seldom had to face.

  We all must take our poison in the end

  Such is the destiny of Hannibal or Poe,

  This axiom only the wisest know:

  Any poet who goes back

  To those who mocked him on the street<
br />
  (Even if his children starve)

  Is no better than teary Nero,

  Pissing himself that last moment

  In front of the disgusted centurion

  He entreats.

  THE GREATER TESTAMENT

  (Written in honour of François Villon’s Grand Testament of the year of our Lord 1460)

  To the boys who drank with me

  All day, when I was twenty-one

  Only to leave when

  Night came on, in my student years

  In a house without heat,

  In a town at the very end of the year

  Knowing my wife had left in worry and fear

  And I still had a book to write

  Finally by God’s awful grace got sober

  Such a career as mine is humbly dedicated.

  To the girl

  Who also left—She might know

  By the empty student hall and turned to go

  The other way, down beneath the stairs

  It’s now been forty years

  Such a career as mine is humbly dedicated.

  To the boys in Spain,

  Who mocked me forty days (one is always

  Mocked by lesser men)

  Boys whose arms

  I put down in ten seconds

  Their clever girlfriends’ eyes suddenly playing

  Dice with excuses

  Such a career as mine is humbly dedicated.

  To those who came to rob me in the night

  Sent out by their murderous cousins

  They who ran back into the street

  When I came to meet them on the stairs

  Such a career as mine is humbly—

  Dedicated.

  To the literati long ago

  From my river—To that literati

  Long ago—from my river—

  To the wanderers in London

  The New Yorker gone to Spain

  The chic Europeans in Paris at the bar

  The young fresh-faced

  Tattooed Austrian Nazis on the train

  Going nowhere

  Or at any rate to Munich,

  The prostitutes in Sydney, Australia, standing in the rain

  Who smiling patted John Thomas on the head,

  Or to those in the days of my youth who

  Died, Emerson and the rest

  So all the intervening years seem

  Monstrous farce, mixed with grievous blame

  Such a career as mine is humbly dedicated.

  But to you two most of all—

  Who dismissed our friendship; spoke out against us

  Smeared my name, who pissed in our face

  And called it rain.

  As if betrayal was a thing on which you could take pride,

  Be known,

  When my wife and children and I were most alone,

  To you two most of all,

  Such a career as mine is humbly dedicated.

  PLAYING THE INSIDE OUT

  I WILL SPEAK A BIT TODAY OF THE INNER CIRCLES IN WHICH literary matters are discussed, and literary reputations made or broken. I will also speak of an idea that was prevalent when I was young and, in some ways, still is: that to be a writer, one must take on the conventional and, in doing so, be a renegade.

  From the first moment I became aware of this ideal, I was also aware of the pretense often involved in assuming this, or assuming what the conventional was or wasn’t, or should or shouldn’t be. And that, in most ways, the real writers among us, or at least the writers I most admired, were outsiders, because they were not considered trendy or radical; that is, they had no talent to play the game of outsider and therefore most often were.

  I am an old man, so I can say what I want.

  Which addresses my opening point.

  If people wait until they are old men or women to say what they want, then it is probably a good assumption that they have never said what they wanted to say before and, in the end, they will not. Those who cannot give their opinion as young men and women, in spite of the consequences, will never do so as old men and women, for fear of the consequences.

  So many grab on to each new bit of knowledge as real knowledge and, like Anna Scherer in War and Peace, are predictably in vogue at all times.

  Predictably is the word.

  This necessity to always be in fashion—to be au courant or avant-garde—is what dooms writers and their writing to the prevalent and the superficial. It is, to paraphrase Matthew Arnold, a truth for the moment, rather than a truth for all time. The truth for all time is different—much harder to arrive at because it almost always needs to be retold with each passing generation—and is almost never in fashion when it is. We must, as Robert Browning suggests, fight against the misapprehension of the age.

  No age has had more misapprehension than this one. No age has been more certain of itself in ways that blind itself and its more susceptible writers to what is simply current or fashionable.

  Some of the finest people I know, who think for themselves, have never once acted outrageous or rebellious or joined in the sometimes bogus urgency for empowerment. Unfortunately many writers and academics I have known feel that this idea of a character’s empowerment is the one prerequisite to showing independence against some despotic identity. This might be fine if they treated the idea of empowerment with the actual dignity it deserves.

  An episode in the popular hospital television series House is specific on this. A young intern, certain that the eccentric Dr. House will accept him because he has long hair and a tattoo (so therefore must be an individual fighting against the system), is told by the doctor, “If you want an example of people who really don’t care what others think, look at the Asian student who studies at the library for fourteen hours a day—that is real rebellion.” Although this is an easy truism and is arguable, it still has something relevant to say about the larger issue of people thinking inside the box while claiming to be outsiders and blaming all “convention” on others.

  When I was a boy, it was embarrassing to listen to older people suddenly waxing enthused about the ideas and intentions of the young—fifty-five-year-old men suddenly growing their hair (the fashion of kids when I was eighteen), wearing love beads and talking in the language of youth to show how they were now independent of ideas that had once inhibited them. This is what Princess Hélène, the unfaithful, overindulged wife in War and Peace, has her husband, Pierre, do in 1812, convincing him to grow his sideburns, though the poor man looks ridiculous. This sounds trite. But being in vogue as a writer can be every bit as trite as Princess Hélène, and it took Pierre, a man with a great, great soul, half the novel to break free.

  When I was a young man starting my career, the transparency and false courage of adopting a supposed radical ideology was often, but not always, lost on those succumbing to it. The poetry journals published in my youth are filled with this kind of painful self-indulgence that comes from a notional idea of the world, rather than life experience. What is most arresting is the fact that within these journals, the real poets stand out amid all this angst-filled quasi-radicalism with true poetical perception and force.

  Alden Nowlan once mentioned the poet Brian Bartlett, whose writing appeared in one of these journals long ago: “I knew he was for real,” Nowlan told me, “because he was a kid of sixteen and was the only one perceptive enough to write about being one.” That is, by being himself and knowing it, he didn’t have to join. Or, more tragically, perhaps he couldn’t.

  The great thing about Bart Simpson is his ability to reveal to us the scandal of popular sycophancy, while using Homer as the unassuming foil for modern ambivalence. I will paraphrase a certain sce
ne:

  “Dad,” Bart says in the episode where, to fit in, he saws the head off the statue of Jeb Springfield, “what should we do to fit in and be liked by popular people?”

  Homer reflects: “Son, we should do everything we can—for the most important thing, no matter what, is to be popular.”

  Then he adds suspiciously, “You haven’t murdered anyone, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Good—anything else is fine.”

  Exaggeration makes the point. It is safer, of course, not to take a stand alone: to be perceived as different while the whole notion of our joining in promotes our inclusion. This is, of course, the one real slavery—the kind C. S. Lewis warned about in his essay “The Inner Ring”—the kind of inner circle that Solzhenitsyn wrote about in his novel The First Circle. It was exposed by Tolstoy in War and Peace. The idea of the inner circle is with us always—men and women striving to belong to the most significant group and often, sometimes in very overt ways, giving up their own ideals and even humanity along the way, in order to make this happen. The group itself is irrelevant; we have all been tempted to give up at least a part of ourselves in order to belong. It doesn’t matter whether we are a mechanic, a surgeon or an artist.

  The significant commonality is the willingness to accommodate our values in order to belong to a group of others who might object to the values we hold, while hoping for a time in the future when we may say our piece without fear of retribution from those to whom we now belong. If writers do this—and many of my generation do—sooner or later it will damage their art (and it often does), even if it promotes their career. It will damage their art in ways so subtle it may not be known right away. But it will be seen over time.

  Any false statement provoked not in error but by a willingness to forgo our own sense of truth in order to bond with a group truth that is socially prevalent or powerful will be known sooner or later. We witness it at dinner parties and ignore it, this conceit in spouting the current wisdom, whether we believe in it or not. To see it in a book is glaring.

  What is more glaring, as the philosopher René Girard writes, is whom we manage to scapegoat in order to hold on to prevalent wisdom. And this, I suppose—the scapegoating of those who cannot for one reason or another join—is the graver and deeper sin. It is the only thing that I have ever tried to warn young people, who want to write, against. It is a very hard thing to warn against, for the idea that one should comply with strong and socially accepted views weighs heavily upon the young. Especially when such views come from the learned at university and are seen, by people one admires, as being necessarily far-reaching.