They stationed him close to home. For two years, he was the caretaker of an isolated radio base in Heptonstall, his “communications” bent in school put to its proper use. He spent much of his time pondering the hills and climbing to the ridgetops in order to listen to the cadenzas of the wind, and to contemplate the rhythmus of language amid the roaring silence. And later the States. He had met an American girl, a Fulbright scholar no less, at a Cambridge Saint Botolph’s Review party. The girl took a long, unblinking look at Ted with his hair uncombed, the continent of a grass stain across the front of his pale turtleneck from an impromptu rugby session on the grounds, and his big jaw clenched as though he had just bitten off an opponent’s foot. The American girl said to herself, aloud, “So, that’s who I am, aren’t I?”
Ted and Sylvia lived in America from ’57 to ’59. She catechized at Smith and he gave classes at UMass at Amherst. Sylvia stressed that Northampton, Massachusetts, the town where they were quartered, was a college hamlet and that Ted would be protected from the endemic American ignorance. This was untrue and beside the point. It wasn’t the ignorance that put him off, coming as he did from the English countryside where they stoned the crows to keep the Devil from the door, so much as it was the disorienting excess. Take for instance the meat annex of the local supermart, where obese women rolled teeming caissons along the aisles and flesh that he could not recognize the veracity of lay in little plastic cubes under cling wrap, and with undue stage lighting overhead. The woodsman in him was galled by the long, winding rows of sterile mutilation. It was as though the wilderness, his wilderness, was pouring forth, neutered and prepackaged, from a faucet. “Who kills all of this?” he asked his wife and, even now, he feels a power surge of fondness when he recalls the gush of her smile, the big front teeth, not bucked but wafered and tusk white, starlet white, spilling from between her lips, barricading her laughter for the eternity of a stage beat. The smile was juxtaposed with the abrasion on her cheek, that third-degree burn upon the rose.
“The U.S. Department of Auschwitz,” she giggled.
He listened and then he heard it. The blade in her laughter. The same blade that was so unaccountably blunted in her poetry. The blade that, once honed, would consummate their marriage. Ted hoped.
The open-air galleries of the American parking lots unsettled him as well. The sun flaring in the swim fins of those Apollonian brass buggies. The aligned autos looked, from the distance of the outlying road, like overbred ammo, awaiting an imminent battle between land leviathans. Perpetually imminent. There was talk in the saloons of the inevitability of war with the Soviet Union. The offhand acceptance of destruction of the world entire, but for picaresque cells of foragers and deep dirt husbanders, only the strong who had somehow managed to survive, afforded Ted a clearer meaning of the term Cold War. Reason had been frozen over. America was a land of savage metal art and compulsory conformity. The States, in the end, terrified Ted and bored him.
4.
Sylvia
Abdiel had given her the stone bust of the veiled woman to ward her away. She could give him back a gift in kind. She could write a chilling poem that would turn him from himself. Perhaps even toward her, the long way around. She no longer wanted him as much as she wanted him to want her, if only once. She took up her pen. The cold had gotten into her folio as it had bided there on the tidied marbletop. The page had grown pure and reflective. She stared, fretfully virginal of mind. Her breath was smoking, light as a vapor. Light as a vapor, she could hear the purring of the swastika under the marble surface of the table, the littlest wheel working, the tiniest circular saw buzzing. She put down her pen. She looked at the veiled woman through the yoke of her fingers. Here was an instance of the past informing the present. This was well and good, but she had covered all that in rhyming verse back when poetry was something so secret that she only allowed herself to read or write it in the tent of the bedcovers. In the bane of hindsight, she would have to admit that she had nothing genuine to say to herself, and by extension to the entire world, in those evenings of her ninth and tenth years on the planet, either. What she did have back then was the conviction that something genuine needed to be said. And that someone, some enlightened proxy of the human race, would hear with encoded clarity precisely what she was attempting and failing to say. This individual would realize that he or she might have said the same, but said it better. Above all, poetry taught her that harmony lay in collective isolation.
Sylvia went back into the bathroom. She put her head into the roulette basin of the medicine cabinet. She’d forgotten which capsules were for sleep and which were only for the temperament of sleep. It hardly mattered since the line between the two was rapidly dissolving. Her fingers were distended and itchy. They held in them the memory of luxurious, purple-bellied sumac. The bottle cap on the arbitrary medicine bottle proved an ordeal. The monogrammed, totem-faced microbes spilled onto the saffron-tinged ivory of the sink. Their rubrics formed a chance tetragrammaton. Here was God, going down the drain. Frantic, she swathed the pills away from the sink hole, working with her dead hands. The tiny pellets rained the linoleum, whispering like fireflies. Moments later, she saw herself fissured in her children’s vigilant eyes as they stood in the bathroom doorway—her children whom she knew full well were not awake at the moment, and, anyway, only one of them had thus far showed an inclination to crawl—contemplating her on her knees, arse over teakettle on the floor, retrieving calcified vermin from the tiles. She shrank from their piccolo laughter. She receded partly into the icy womb of the glazed wall, where she would have been content to stay had it not been for the harassment of a waterfall. She stood up. She looked into the cabinet mirror to stake her rightful claim to herself, elder, mother, and above all someone who would never stand by and be unfairly judged from the perspective of innocence. The face that she saw in the glass was a sullen replica of the stone bust in the other room, torpid and postbattle. Her right eye was veiled by the sleepy lid of a dope fiend.
Her own children sneaking in to spy on her in their sleep. She had been put into the position of nurturing them until they were too big to fit back into the central bank of her body. They would soon be as unreclaimable as Ted. She made a mental note. This was the sort of thing that she must remember to tell the psych nurse when she came in the morning. She must remember to put her resentments flat upon the table as a gesture of good faith, if she wanted to promote trust and to keep her drug prescriptions.
That voice wanted to kick in. That nightly ham-radio voice, confident, assured, and with a block chord grammar. Holding back the voice was like trying to control the tide with a stopper. De Born had that sort of voice, at the same time eloquent and bilious. Etienne de Born was the editor of her recently published novel The Bell Jar. He was an elderly man. He used to come by early in the A.M. It flattered Sylvia to think that she was the worm that he was set on catching. Always, he wore the same black topcoat with the matching homburg and the black brolly, no matter the weather. She knew little about him, other than he had served in both pertinent wars and, like many men of broken conscience, he had turned from the world at an absolute right angle to put his faith in the anchorage of books. Thousands of men were suddenly commanded to hold their fire. Naturally, some of them looked to books to continue to feed the internal furnace.
She hadn’t liked her novel, once it was finished and edited. She hadn’t meant it anymore. It was a girls’ book. A minor psychological study of the rot beneath pink taffeta. She began it, dreaming of the opportunity to tell Ted that he could not purchase their marriage contract out from under her, if it came to that. It had come to that. Noncommittal reviews have rendered the book somewhat less than profitable. Ted and his current whore could indeed have their freedom once all the pretty ducats have been squeezed from the spousal purse. Also, she wouldn’t mind a mea culpa from each of them. And how about a kiss goodbye?
De Born rang up last week. In that voice, he asked if she were working on something new. The bo
ok that Sylvia had been working on these last months had always seemed a valedictory. She told the old man that she was working on something final.
5.
Ted
He had gotten through Cambridge without solving the riddle of the typewriter. He did his papers and his poems in india ink calligraphy. The grand old men who mentored and loved him couldn’t help but be indulgent. Then in Northampton, Sylvia would type out his verses in the evenings after she had planned a lecture or graded a batch of essays. The sound of her Smith Corona’s marksmanship reminded Ted of the Morse code intro of the BBC’s nightly break-in bulletins during the London Blitz. “This is London,” Ed Murrow’s staccato voice would say (on loan from the sleeping lion across the sea), echoing the telegraph simulation in the background. This would be followed by descriptive, alternately ceremonious and hard-boiled testimony as to what was ablaze and what was smoldering amid the delirious illumination of the searchlights. The Luftwaffe sometimes displayed the coyness of swains at the contradance, sidling up to the ranks along the wall and then edging off at the initial moment of eye contact, their hesitancy only a flirtatious promise of return. If there had been no bombing attendant to the sirens that evening, the ballroom music would play on for a unscheduled hour or so before giving way to the theater of local color, with repeated descriptions of autos trolling by with knitwear muffs draining the glow from their head and taillights, and accounts of the yellow gas-detection paint layered over the tops of the postal bins that would turn a noxious brown in the event of an emergency, and thereby give a chap the opportunity to reconcile his soul with his maker, or simply to steel himself against the wretching and writhing death that he could by no means escape, but could dare to defy as befitting an Englishman with a knuckle for an upper lip. Ed would never fail to mention the newborns. Over and over again, the narrative would work its way around to the infants being passed hand-to-hand down or up the rungs of the bomb shelter stairwells before or immediately after the fray, their entire bodies immured within leather-and-steel gas masks like larval rouse locusts from outer space. Murrow, or rather Murrow’s prosaic scriptwriter, would say that these babies lie protected in their “wombs of war.”
As for the unlucky dead, they were amorphous, congenial losers who went without transition from being alive and negligible to being dead and constitutive of the meaning of life and war, sadly without any means to communicate the fullness of their revelations. The survivors were much less distinguished and much more exceptional. They were like inadvertent partygoers warming to the festivities despite themselves. Interviews were transcribed from the cramped and steaming wedges in the earth wherein citizens might be singing songs, darning socks, forecasting the weather, playing bridge, or arguing politics or about which of them had broken wind. Ted remembered the cockney who wanted to thank “Adeloff Hitler” for making a rubble pyramid out of the shoe factory that had employed three generations just like him. He told greater England not to worry; there should be plenty of work about for a man who owned his own spade. Also, there was the charwoman who wanted restitution for her broken dishes. She petitioned for the loan of the Windsors’ private stock. The royal family surely had crockery to spare.
The London funerals were sub-rosa affairs, or at least that’s how Ed Murrow made it seem. Public mourning wouldn’t do with the bombing being ongoing, the German invasion, or so everyone assumed, being imminent, and an entire generation of young men being sent to sea with the warranty that not one of them would return whole. Lamentation and its by-product of guilt were the prodigal parents of Ted’s generation; prodigal in the sense that they were always coming, always rounding the corner, and always ambling up the way with their bills of lading in hand. They never seemed to arrive, that’s all. This is why the war, in one sense, had never really ended for Ted’s generation. It was the most formidable event of their formative years. The times were much more appealing when people lived as though they were about to die and did not give one damn.
Dad would drive Ted down on Sundays. They would slip under the cordons of the bomb sites. Wardens in yellow slickers would shoo them off by throwing handfuls of pebbles. London was teeming, squalid, philistine, and farcical, a towering machine-age variation on the Yorkshire wilderness. He had not loved London as a boy. But he loved it, in memory, in America.
There were riots, he had heard, in Notting Hill in ’58. “Teddy Boys” squaring off against the inner-city “Immies.” Acrimonious labor strikes were becoming common. Ted was one for tolerance but not at the price of lethargy, and the news from London heartened him. The 1950s heretofore had remained war years in Britain, rife with shortages and sacrifice. The kvetching common man remained functionally anesthetized by the voices of Churchill and his proxies, and the Grand Man’s retirement, promised and put off, now seemed the seminal factor that his leadership once had been. But near the decade’s end, the picture brightened considerably. Faber and Faber brought out Ted’s Hawk in the Rain in ’57. Eliot and Auden announced the arrival of the standard-bearer, albeit in absentia, of a new generation. He and his wife often made mention of this at Smith or Amherst staff parties. The response from the male professors would either be a terse “So I’ve heard,” or a flustered “Oh?” The ladies of the faculty did not seem to care what sort of poems Ted may have written (none of them ever asked for a copy of the volume); they were preoccupied with the fact that such a hulking fellow wrote poetry at all. How Brontë sisters that seemed. Ted was anxious for his due reception. Sylvia was equally desirous for him to have it. She wanted, in part, to know what it would be like in anticipation of her own foreordained due reception. The English women could not be any worse, or shall we say more rapacious, than the Americans, Sylvia reasoned. If it were any indication, one girl she roomed with at Cambridge had once tried to use Sylvia’s diaphragm, gathering dust in a drawer, as a thermal demitasse dome when Sylvia was suddenly called away to the telephone.
Ted and Sylvia junked their prospects for tenured faculty positions and returned to England as the anomalous decade was drawing to a close. They had heard the all-clear sounding.
There was an afternoon opera on the BBC daily. Wagner’s Nibelung cycle was a great favorite and one interminable annoyance, subtly goading at the twilight of the empire and doing so in the language of the recent enemy. Had they won the war only to learn the adversary’s song? Ted found himself straying from the writing desk into the sanctum of Sylvia’s occultish, candlelit loo to look at the willow’s reeds that he had hung upon the wall and to get a breath of the lavender soap that smelled like a grande dame’s knitting circle. Oh, that intricate widow’s weave of the feminine grapevine. Sylvia disdained feminine friendship, for the most part. She was neither a borrower nor a lender, and she didn’t much like having her clothes critiqued. All the same, did Ted hold a smile or a handclasp too lingeringly, or so much as leave the house with his top trouser button undimpled, one or another of the neighbor ladies would report him promptly to his wife. Sylvia kept a log in her journal. The dirty laundry ladies had him screwing behind flowerpots. They had birds bending over in the gutter. This was fiction, for the most part. Not that there weren’t trysts, especially once he got on the radio. War-bred romantic that he was, Ted had married for love and not compatibility, and love was all very well while the marriage’s mystery held. Sylvia affected a fetching lilt to her speech. It had an almost flawless Camden Town meter to it. It grated on his nerves terribly when she began speaking to her own mother across the Atlantic and even coochie-cooing to the babies in that voice. Where he wanted mystery, she was providing artifice. When she smiled, there were so many teeth. American dentistry was a lupine burlesque. When they argued, her teeth simply got in the way, masticating Ted into a tight corner.
He was home again. He was married to a talented, midlevel poet for whom he had great affection and prodigious hopes. Nightly, she made up their bed in the first-floor room that they were using for a nursery. The demarcations, you see, were written in rock once those
babies were born. It was strange because most poets experience the claustrophobia of blockage only when they are without a set of imperatives and limitations, whereas, in Ted’s mind, circumspection was simply not a perspective that a true poet could work from. Here he was in a psychological lockup. And married to the jailer. Naturally, the only thing that could emancipate him was love as well. New love. That was when he met Assia.
6.
Sylvia
When Sylvia went back into the front room, she saw that the walls were filled with crawling data. Celtic majuscule shimmering on the plaster. W. B. Yeats, the house’s onetime occupant, egging her on from his ghost pulpit. The readout brought more light, more crepuscular light, into the room. She thought of how it is only in the discipline of modern poetry that brightness and merriment are considered evidence of sterility. She picked up her pen. She took a measured glance at her stone companion on its perch upon the marble-topped table. Etched in relief onto the rock were the features of her father. Bee King Otto.
She suspected that he must have spoken to her when she was a child. Else how could she have come to love him enough to repeatedly attempt to kill herself following his death? How, other than from him, could she have learned of the laborious miracle of honey making, hence her reverence for the stuff and her reluctance to butter her own children’s biscuits with it, as though it held the properties of morphia? But in memory, he proclaimed whatever it was that he proclaimed through the perforated domino of his bee man’s helmet. She couldn’t be sure of the main thrust of his instruction, but she attributed to Otto the side note admonishment tutoring her never to anticipate fulfillment, no matter what knowledge that she might master, and no matter what friends, or marital alliances, or offspring that she might win for herself. Who but him? She knew that his voice was fitful and Germanic in any of the several languages that he could speak, but she could not in memory hear that voice. Not for the love of him. Not for the life of her.
Little Fugue Page 3