Mary McCarthy

by Thomas Mallon

  Howard Furness, smiling, got up to propose that the poet might read some of his famous poems, which were already known to the students through the college record library. But the old man was disinclined; on his stiff, thin legs he moved out of the limelight and sank into a chair at the back of the stage, where he sat, chafing his hands. The audience began to clap in unison for his return; it was felt that he had been offended, and there was a general friendly desire to pay him homage for poems that had given pleasure in the past and that remained, even now, in the modernist canon, preserved, like his fresh complexion. When the old man continued to refuse, the poet who had been dubbed by Ellison the poet of the masses, a middle-aged, heavy-set man with a scarred prominent jaw, wearing a red flannel shirt and heavy boots, stood up suddenly in his place, at the very end of the bench, and declared that he would read them. There was a movement of incredulity among the poets; it was not supposed, obviously, that this person, smelling of beer and doubtless of sweat—for he boasted of having been seven days on the hoof—was familiar with the old man’s frail, difficult poems, which had emerged from the Imagist movement, convoluted and pale, like sea-shells. Throughout the whole audience, in fact, there was a feeling of alarm as the red-shirted poet, without waiting for an answer, made straight for the lectern, like a worker resolutely moving to seize the power-switch in a factory. It was feared that he would read his own poems or somehow do the old man outrage. But to everyone’s surprise, when the old man’s books were not forthcoming and a student was sent out to look in Furness’ office, the proletarian poet began to recite from memory those forty-year-old verses written in the counting-house, on the backs of checks and deposit-slips, celebrating merchant princes and their ladies and the life of the summer hotel. To these crabbed and yet fastidious verses, the proletarian poet’s delivery added something uproarious and revivalistic, hell-and-damnation thunder lit up with a certain social savagery and wide-open bohemianism, which suggested a good deal of the atmosphere of The Outcasts of Poker Flat. “Preserve us from our admirers,” whispered a young poet, sardonically, to his ally. Yet an obscurity in the old man’s poems, or rather the uncertainty as to how he had meant them hit upon by the student, Gertrude, made this dramatic interpretation possible, and though the old man sat picking at his buttons throughout the recitation, it was a manifest success with the students, the boys in particular, who stamped on the floor and called out for more, until Mulcahy, at a cue from Ellison, whispered to Alma to put a stop to the reading. The poets, it seemed, were displeased.

  This did not arise, as might have been thought, from professional jealousy, but from a deeper feeling, the natural antagonism between the poet and his audience that now began to be exhibited at the Jocelyn poetry conference. It was a profound, suspicious, almost animal antagonism, without necessary basis in outward circumstance but arising, as it were, from the skin, from a bristling of the hair on the nape of the neck, and the proof that the proletarian poet was not really a poet was the fact that he did not appear to feel it. The true poet, unlike the prose-writer, explained Howard Furness in lowered tones to the President, does not care to be admired or even to be read, except by a few chosen fellow-poets; a taste for public admiration in a poet is already, as he himself knows, the fatal sign of his deterioration; he has ceased to be proud, protective, and fiercely possessive of his work. Hence—he airily continued, while the President listened, aghast—all attempts, on the part of well-meaning academics, to persuade the poet that he is loved are futile and self-defeating, for the poet does not wish to be loved and flocks to symposia on the Contemporary Neglect of Poetry to be reassured that he is not. And the spontaneous applause, just now, accorded the proletarian poet’s rousing reading of the old man’s work, was, from the point of view of the poets on the platform, an unmitigated disgrace and catastrophe. Even Domna Rejnev—he pointed out, guiding the President’s attention to where she stood in the front of the hall, nervously talking to the proletarian poet, whom everybody else was shunning—was finding her libertarian principles sorely put to the test; and, in fact, as they watched, she slipped away from the poet and took neutral refuge with Alma Fortune, who was chatting with Miss Mansell. The President was shocked. “Why, it’s like the old Greek ostracism,” he commented, reaching into his pocket for his pipe.

  An impulse of hospitality led him to start through the emptying hall to where the proletarian poet was standing, alone and conspicuously abandoned, scratching his jaw. Senior girl-students were passing punch and cookies; the poet took a cookie from the tray and made some remark to the girl, who blushed and hurried on with her duties; this particular student, as the President recalled from her advisers, was unfortunately very shy. Before the President could get to him, however, the poet, with his mouth full of cookie, suddenly reached out and seized the arm of Henry Mulcahy, which was hovering over the refreshment tray. Mulcahy, observed the President, was in very good form this evening; the continuation of his appointment seemed to have put a little weight on him; the fixed, precise smile had lost its baneful character, and he diffused an air of good fellowship. Up on the platform, Cathy, accompanied by Ellison, was the center of a little group; her rich laugh rang out. The poet grasped her husband’s hand and shook it. “Hello, old friend, don’t you know me?” Mulcahy paled under his freckles; he peered at the poet mistrustfully and endeavored to withdraw his hand. “I don’t believe so,” he said coldly. “I know your work, of course.” He started to veer away and caught the President’s eye, in full rebuke, resting on him. “At Brooklyn College in the old days,” reminded the poet. “In the old John Reed Club. I was using my Party name, then.” Furness, who had caught up with Maynard, threw the President a quick look of interrogation and wonder. Both men, by common consent, moved closer. A pair of curious physics students, noticing this, nudged each other and edged up; Alma Fortune’s attention was caught; Miss Mansell’s body slowly turned. “And what was your Party name?” inquired Henry, with a faint smile of derision. “John Marshall,” chuckled the poet. “Now do you remember?” Henry bit his white underlip. “Indistinctly,” he admitted. “I’ve changed,” conceded the poet, with a sudden note of bitterness and significance. “In more ways than one.” He touched his chin. “I got that in a San Francisco dock-strike. With the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific. That was after I broke with the Party.” He laid a finger on his broad, thick-flanged nose. “When I broke with the Party, they broke that for me. Twice. When I was laid up in the hospital, my new life began. New name. New ideas. I began to do some reading. I went into the hospital a Trotskyite and came out an anarchist, thanks to an old Wobbly working-stiff who used to bring me books.”

  By this time, half the room was listening. The tall young girls put down their trays on the empty benches and came nearer. Several attenuated young poets and the red-faced, white-haired poet who had slapped his knee and was noted for his dynamic Americanism and metrical intransigency now pushed purposefully forward. The old poet had left, accompanied by two of his cohorts, and, with his departure, a desire to make some gesture of solidarity with the proletarian poet had overtaken the poets remaining, who felt a certain human compunction and also curiosity. The proletarian poet, moreover, was unobjectionable to them as a man of action; indeed, they found him picturesque, as did the students crowding around him, with talkative wonder, as though he were an historical remain, a chipped statue in a square. Everybody, it seemed, had expected him to be much younger; and the explanation, which he himself cheerfully volunteered, lay in his rebirth. His poetry, he explained, with citations, was youthful, direct, and sensuous, celebrating free relations with women, red-wine parties, bull sessions, hitchhiking; as a poet, in short, he was the same age as the Jocelyn literary set, while as a man he was forty-five years old. But it was as a man, sad to say, that he interested the students, who in their turn quickly explained to him that their own literary age was about fifty, thanks to the Jocelyn system of individual instruction, which had made them old before their time. Much later that
night, in one of the social rooms, a girl Philosophy major showed him that he had paid the price of a robust and time-conscious nature, that is, that he was dated, that he embodied a militant yesterday, which seemed farther from today than the pyramids; and it was precisely this fact that drew the students to him and permitted Dr. Mulcahy to hurry out of the room, unnoticed, while the poet continued to talk of frays with the Bridges union, mutiny on a banana boat off New Orleans, the strike at Ohrbach’s, the old John Reed Club. When the poet finally looked for him, he was gone, like a spectral vapor.

  In the moonlight, on the chapel steps, the President and Furness turned to face each other. “Who would have guessed it?” exclaimed the President. Furness shook his smooth head. “Not I,” he disclaimed. “I still wouldn’t credit it if I hadn’t seen Hen turn tail and run.” They took a few steps into the reviving mountain air, on the gravel of the circular driveway. “It puts him in a better light, you know,” remarked Furness, finally, in a tone of apologetics. Their feet crunched as they walked. “For us, Howard,” distinguished Maynard. “But we must look at the whole picture. How many students, would you say, got in on the beginning of it? Oh, my God!” he cried, suddenly, as the whole picture smote him afresh. Furness regarded him with a certain amused tenderness. “Two or three,” he hazarded. “But there’s a fifty-fifty chance, Maynard, that they didn’t take in the meaning of it. The kids here aren’t very political these days; you can’t seem to get that through your noodle.” The President shook his curly head. “There’s no such animal, Howard. If the kids aren’t political, as you call it, it means that they’ve given in to the forces of conformity and reaction.” His handsome face tightened. “If this thing gets out, I’ll have the trustees on my back again.” They rounded the drive again. “Poor devil, poor hunted devil,” he mused, “he was perjured, apparently, before the legislature.” He lit his pipe and spoke through clamped teeth, indistinctly; a terrible new thought had occurred to him. “Howard, you don’t think . . . ?” Furness looked at him sharply; his strong, active face was ravaged in the moonlight. “That he’s still in it?” supplied Furness. The President sorrowfully nodded; he looked eagerly into Furness’ face, with a consciousness of his own pathos—was he once, twice, or thrice deceived? Furness shrugged. “I should doubt it,” he replied. “But am I a competent judge?” He grinned. “I would have sworn, I would have sworn,” he insisted, “before a legislature, that it was all a blague.” They walked for a time in silence. “Who knows most about all this?” said the President, suddenly. “Domna,” replied Furness. “She’s the only one he told directly.” “We’d better get her,” resolved Maynard. “Right away. Tonight.” “What about the poetesses?” objected Furness. “She’s supposed to be driving them home, to my house.” “You do it,” said the President. “Take them to Domna’s. And then come back. I want you to be there.” Furness made a deprecatory gesture. “I was planning to serve a little whiskey,” he said. The President blew up. “For God’s sake, Howard!” he said bluntly. “My whole career is at stake. We’ve got to cover this thing up, as soon as we can find out what to cover. This is no moment for a drinking-party. Is there any way, do you think, that we could call off this damned conference and send them about their business?” Furness laughed. “We could abduct the poet of the masses. That’s what his former comrades would do.” “Stop using that silly name,” exclaimed the President. “What is the fellow’s name, for that matter? I rather liked him,” he added, to soften the effect of his outburst. “Vincent Keogh,” said Furness. “My God,” cried the President. “Another Irishman!” Furness made a final protest. “Maynard,” he warned, “Domna and Mulcahy aren’t on good terms at present.” “What does it matter?” cried Maynard. “The girl’s honest, isn’t she?” Furness raised a nonchalant shoulder. “But north-northwest, like the rest of us. She can tell a hawk from a handsaw.” He waved and hurried off to his car.

  CHAPTER XIII

  A Tygres Heart Wrapt in a Player’s Hyde

  HENCE IT HAPPENED that the President, Furness, Domna Rejnev, and the two lady poets were among the few people connected with the poetry conference not to have a hangover on Saturday morning. Furness’ house, according to the brigade of students who came to clean it up, must have been the scene of revels; he himself, coming downstairs in the morning, renamed it the Mermaid Tavern. The informal ten o’clock session, held in Barnes Social around a table, was sluggish; the psychology student with the tape-recorder, who was stationed under the table with the poets’ permission, was able to pick up several new hangover recipes and to witness exchanges of No-Doz and benzedrine. By a forced agreement with the Psychology department, this recording was later destroyed, at the price of Dr. Grünthal’s resignation and the loss of the Rockefeller grant.

  Young Mrs. Giolini, a pretty heiress with a black spit-curl, thought to be very stupid, read a paper on the mock-epic, which, according to the tape-recording, everybody believed she had had help with. She was in the habit of subsidizing upstart magazines of verse with typographical eccentricities, and already among the older poets the word was passing that she ought not to have been invited. One choleric little poet in middle life, with sideburns and short jutting whiskers, considered that they had each, every man-jack of them, been personally insulted by being asked to sit down at the round table with her; at the same time, he held that the college had showed a shocking discourtesy in leaving the two women to pass the previous night uncompanioned. This ill-feeling grew during the morning, as the inevitable publishers’ representatives began to arrive, in very hairy tweeds, and to drop onto the floor, cross-legged; they too, in most cases, had hangovers and had driven all the way over from Bucks County on the remote chance that another John Brown’s Body or a novel might be picked up at this conference. It was felt by the older poets, most of whom held academic jobs, that this conference, like every other one, was going to be shot through with commercialism; the younger poets were less incorruptible, and Herbert Ellison’s two friends immediately struck up an alliance, considered very questionable by the majority, with the youngest of the New York publishers, whom they pronounced “very intelligent.” And the worst fears of the majority were realized almost at once. Consy Van Tour, who was chairing the session, had the idiocy to call on the publishers to say a few words on the subject of modern poetry as it looked to them. They did not need to be asked twice. They all, it turned out, had strong identical opinions on the subject of modern verse, which they did not read much, they conceded (Translator’s note—“Not at all”), but which nevertheless they felt qualified to judge by virtue of their position: “This is the way it looks to the man behind the desk.” And to the man behind the desk, it did not communicate. The poets around the table indicated by their tight lips and wearied eyebrows that communication with these persons and their salesmen was the last thing they desired; but they did not have the rudeness to say so. And their restraint had the result of making the publishers more confident. Emboldened by an intuition of their own solid mediocrity, they became convinced that each of them, individually, was the audience that every author aimed and yearned to reach, and that if he did not reach them, well, manifestly, he failed. Having pronounced this sentence, they would calmly get up, stretch, stroll over to the window, like expert consultants whose part is done when the fault is pointed out, the execution being left to others.

  The poets then took the joint hazard of asserting that their verse, all modern verse, was intelligible to any person who would take the trouble to read it—a perilous contention which was easily put to rout by the devilish kind of senior male student who had spent four years in college drilling holes in his teachers’ logic. Such a tall, large-eared Mephistopheles suavely rose from his place and read aloud a passage by one of the poets present and asked for a show of hands of those who understood it. A few hands hesitantly went up all around the room, but to everybody’s surprise but the poets’, who had been through this all before, there were several hands at the table itself that simply refuse
d to go up. And one handsome young poet rose and gravely tried to explain that understanding of a given poem and respect for it were not necessarily identical, that he himself was not certain of the meaning of all the details in the disputed passage, but, even while the Literature faculty nodded in approval, he was interrupted by a fresh member of the Art department, who popped up like a jack-in-the-box to demand, “Why don’t you ask the author?”

  At this instant, Consy Van Tour received a sharp poke in the ribs and a whole collection of scribbled notes, ordering him to call for the next question, but the students now were echoing the popinjay art teacher’s question, though more in a tone of entreaty. “That question is inevitably broached by an audience if the chairman doesn’t know his business,” observed the choleric poet to his neighbor, taking care that Consy heard him. “No,” they all semaphored sternly, as the wilting, plump Consy hesitated. “To ask a poet for an explanation of his poem is a violation of professional ethics, like asking a doctor to prescribe for you when you meet him at a friend’s house at dinner,” said the whiskered little poet, a formalist and neo-traditionalist, to Consy, when the meeting had been adjourned—he was a specialist in poetic etiquette, or rather in the correct forms to be observed with poets. He had already checked off several violations in the manners prevailing at Jocelyn, and his eye now followed with acerbity the student crawling out from under the table. “Where is Mr. Furness?” he sharply inquired, cocking an eyebrow at Consy. Consy did not know; he only knew, he protested, that Furness had telephoned him very early to ask him to take over this morning’s session. In reply, the poet took out his pocket-watch.