And they had seen how death could bring out the very worst in an individual. How the helplessness of the sick had the same narcissistic authority as the helplessness of infancy. How quickly all of life’s practical lessons could be disregarded at the approach of death. How the dying shamed themselves with their ignorance since the unexamined death is not worth the bother of dying and self-grieving is not the same as self-examination. How the dying would refuse to understand that birth and life are mortal and transient states of affairs, but that death itself is intransigent and immortal. How they could not see that death, more than any phenomenon that life has to offer, is a vehicle for the ultimate act of self-creation in the sense that a dying person may be granted a significantly more protean life in the memories of his survivors than he ever enjoyed in the flesh. The nurses knew this because, unlike most of the rest of us, they had not lived with the luxury of disregarding death.
The ward was quiet, the wallpaper was muted, the volume control of the TV/VCR in the lounge that always seemed to be playing an Eddie Murphy movie was strictly regulated by the attending nurses. If the laughter in the lounge grew too raucous, it was an easy thing for one of them to step in front of the set with hand on hip and one upraised and disparaging eyebrow. The viewers would stultify like a cowed classroom. You heard the lip smacking of tennis shoes, the static of the two-way radios, the clinking of meal and medicinal carts on their casters, and the remote din of traffic. It was, all told, no more uproarious than your average spa facility, and it was the ideal place to allow your spare forty winks to turn to seventy-two permanent inches. Still, the patients could not or would not sleep and some of them resisted, despite their infirmities, the horse’s doses of pentobarbital that were meant to keep them anchored in through the night. There were twin rings, outer and inner, to the central promenade that circumnavigated the brightly lit nurses’ station, and the nurses acquiesced to the nightly parade, like the evening paseo of the Spanish village, in which the infirm on their canes, their crutches, their walkers, and on their two flattened feet went round and round the inner track at a toddler’s pace. And the comparatively hale, towing along their IV trees, or else in their motorized swifties with those oxygen tanks strapped to the backs that closely resembled rockets in their launch packs, would take the outer circlet. My term of quarantine was done away with when my sputum came up taintless in clinical analysis. They removed me from my VIP quarters with the view of the GW Bridge, and put me in a double room with a revolving cast of characters. They allowed me the full freedom to walk around the ward. I felt like Aschenbach in Death in Venice. Plague had come to paradise, the lethean waters only fostering the pestilence. Aschenbach, to save his life plus his immortal soul, could not bring himself to issue a cry of warning. Sylvia Plath had died pen in hand and with an anathema smoking upon her lips and irrevocably burned onto the pages of her final notebook. Instead of taking up her standard, I had fallen in love not so much with her, but with the affliction that had killed her. Busy running metaphoric circles around her grave until I had almost burrowed into her coffin with her, I had neglected to become the writer that I might have been. I had issued no warning to the ones who would follow me.
I think that this was the moment when I first caught the spark of writing a book about Sylvia. The last word on the subject of Sylvia could never be said, simply because Sylvia herself had not deigned to issue it. For as much as she had told us about herself, her message, if indeed she ever had a core message, had gone undelivered.
They discharged me with a methadone referral, curt looks, and no farewell. I walked my way downtown with the same six dollars and change that had accompanied me from Washington Market. “I thought you died,” Blind Isaac said, seeing me from the high chair in his cage.
I still had my VCR and my video store membership. My habit had forced me to discard all other luxuries, but even the reverie of heroin does not moderate loneliness in the way that a good film does. I rented a copy of Visconti’s version of Death in Venice and, in what I thought might be my last significant living act, I secured blankets over the windows and nailed the door shut from within. I lay down upon a mattress on the floor with a vase of tap water. I turned on the television. The somber white-on-black titles were followed by the faded burgundies, the salmon pinks, and the pastel blues and oranges of the Venetian shoreline. Aschenbach, as played by the English actor Dirk Bogarde, arrives on the jetty, cold, fussing, scolding, and resisting the reanimating forces of the uncommonness of the light and the sirocco’s canticle. Enter Tadzio. He is a Botticelli-faced youth with aureate ringlets and the androgyny that is often adolescence’s response to encroaching manhood. Tadzio is not a god, but a god in incipiency. He is a Polish boy, traveling with his family, and when they pronounce his name in their dialect, it has the ring of ada-gio. He is an abstract Apollo; an Apollo sieved through the mesh of romantic memory. Hermes, as embodied in the character of Aschenbach, projects onto him the idyllic reflection of a sibling, and falls in envious and incestuous love with him. Hat in hand and prettied up in belle époque fashion, Aschenbach approaches the boy time and again in the hotel parlor or out on its expansive sea-view balcony, but he cannot deliver the missive of his adoration because the youth’s unique beauty and singular lithesomeness manifest all the fragility of mortality. He fears that this love will hasten death.
Asiatic cholera intervenes. Gray Hermes, keeper of the secret of plague, is haunted by visions of young Apollo’s death and the ancillary blood that such a demise would paint upon his own hands. He longs to tell the boy and his family to set sail. Still, these tidings of death have lain there all along, bundled in the boy Apollo’s quiver. Clearly, Aschenbach would do better to enact rather than impart the news. Here, the messenger must become the message. Hermes, to redeem the life that he has led, must become Apollo’s arrow.
Aschenbach chooses as his deathbed a wooden folding chair upon the sands of the Venetian beach. Up to his knees in the flood of the tide, Tadzio points upward to the decay of the sun’s cycle. His message is received, sight unseen. Aschenbach dies behind dark glasses. The guests from the Lido hotel start toward his body and then recoil the other way.
I played the film all through the course of my withdrawal agony. On the fourth or fifth day, I took a shower and dressed for the street. I didn’t have the strength to pry the nails from the door. I climbed down the fire escape.
4.
Ted
In his private dressing room, there was a crystal tea set, a Ceylon variant of pekoe, Senior Service cigarettes, wax flowers, and spurious fan mail, some of the letters written in argent ink. He asked the staff members— they came in a gaggle, idling at the door, and they had one collective personality—what Mr. Griffin’s claim to fame might be. They looked at each other.
“Oh, so it’s fame?” Ted said. “He’s famous because he is perceived to be famous? Is that what it is?”
The genuine item himself happened by in a little under half an hour. Merv was good looking but too diminutive to play the leading man. He had square shoulders, though, and the two-handed handshake of a clean-and-jerk specialist. He clung so tightly upon the initial handclasp that Ted thought a stealthy jujitsu move might follow. He had heard much of the eccentric habits of these Hollywood types. Merv, notwithstanding his Jaws of Life handshake, spoke in a hushed voice, and his manner seemed artificially overawed, like a minor prelate bucking for a promotion with his earthly pride kept partway in his pocket. Ted lost track of how many times the man tapped him on the knee and then brought his hand back to his own mouth to simulate overwhelming dismay.
He spoke of taking his crew on location to London a few years back and being ennobled with the presence of none other than Bertrand Arthur William, Third Earl Russell, on his show. Russell, livid over Vietnam, had ignored Merv and had spoken directly into the lead camera, wagging his finger, fluttering his jowls, and, in general, lecturing the American public. The price of the unprecedented American affluence, the great thinker put
forth, was the application of unprecedented coercion. Russell had wanted Americans to stop paying their taxes and purchasing big-ticket items in protest over what their government was doing so blatantly in their names and upon their nightly news programs. He warned that the development of the mass media would superannuate the blanket plea of national ignorance that had saved the Germans from the conglomerate gallows following the Second World War. He called upon all Americans of good faith to tighten their belts, salve their psyches, and cleanse their hands.
Merv was biting at the tips of his fingers as he finished the story. Ted thought about informing him that this same political locus had served as the pivot point of Lord Russell’s after-dinner discourse for many years now. Merv had had to return to LA and to face down Nabisco afterward. Hadn’t Russell, by all accounts one of the most supple minds of the century, ever had any economic training?
“On the debit side, perhaps,” Ted said. “His entire class, you know, has preceded him in death. When you think about it, it’s little wonder that he’s cozying up to the Vietnamese. He finds himself running out of friends.”
“Well, I don’t want to say that he made an enemy of me, but he did leave me up the other end of the pond without a paddle. So, speaking of ponds,” Merv asked, “how deep do you want to go?”
“How’s that?”
“With the Sylvia thing? Sylvia Plath.”
Ted looked at him.
Merv put his palm in the air to tell Ted to stand his thoughts still, to hold his cerebral horses for just a moment. “Hear me out, Hughes, I’ve had some girlfriends and I could tell you some stories. I used to go around with Zsa Zsa Gabor.” He said this as though he thought it a surefire sympathy getter.
“Give me room, all right?” Ted said. “I’m going to feel things out and then I’m going to say what I have to say.”
Merv caught his eye, giving him a half-cautionary and half-supportive look. “You’re sure, now?”
“Yes.”
“Well, okay by me, buddy,” Merv said, “but from what I’ve heard, woo-oof.” He pursed his lips and made a sound that was in part a whistle and in part a puffing noise. “You’re like a bone in certain women’s throats that gets sharper with every swallow, do you dig?”
“Just introduce me and let me take it from there.”
“Will do,” he said, tapping at Ted’s knee. “You lead and I’ll be right behind you, pal. Did any of my assistants bother to tell you about the theme?”
“What do you mean, the theme?”
“Ted, have you ever noticed how unstructured American television is? No wonder the kids are turning out the way they are; it’s anarchy on the airwaves, my friend. As much as possible, I like to tie things in with a topic. Tonight, we’re doing poetic survivors.”
“Poetic survivors of what?”
Merv heard the edge in Ted’s voice. “Now, just a minute, no one’s saying that you’re not a great poet in your own right, but are you going to sit there and say to me that all great poets aren’t survivors of someone or something or other? And are you going to deny me my moderator’s prerogative to broaden the scope of the debate?”
“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, Mr. Griffin.”
“I’m talking about putting your story in a suitable context for public inspection, Ted. I’m talking about having you on my show along with the surviving widows of Randall Jarrell and Dylan Thomas.”
“What? Those guys killed themselves.”
“No, Ted, Dylan was only a drinker. That part of the isles, boy, oh, boy, do they drink for dear life. Listen, this theme thing, it’s a frame of reference, that’s all it is. Someone should have told you, but here I am, in person, right here, right now, laying it all on the table. It’s a way to broaden the context and to allow the audience to make their connection with you.”
“It’s a burlesque,” Ted said. “What you’re proposing is a burlesque.”
“You’re being very British, my friend.”
“It’s the suicide squad follies you’re planning here.”
“Is that going to be your last word?”
“What?” Ted asked.
Merv said, “Is that going to be your last word on the matter, mister?”
“Goddamn right.”
“Well, then, you can have my final word,” Merv said. “I didn’t get to go to Cambridge and you won’t ever be coming to visit me in the wall at Westminster, but I’ve been reading poetry for close to twenty-five years now. I mean deep stuff, not just A Few Figs from Thistles, either. Do you know what I’m going to say to you?”
“No.”
Merv lowered his voice. “I’m going to say to you that, for a poet, any old death is a natural death. And anything natural is fair game for discussion. You can get out there under the lights and you can put your mouth where your money belt is, or, buddy boy, you can get the hell out of this town.”
Okay. It could hardly be the worst format to at last present Sylvia’s side of the story. Possibly to present her side of the story sans her own selfmythologizing. To test out the chemistry of placing her ghost in juxtaposition with Dylan Thomas’s and Randall Jarrell’s. He’d have to play it by ear once he got out on the panel, but being the extemporizer that he was, that shouldn’t present any great challenge. His basic thesis was that Sylvia’s true killer was her final persona. The stranger in the house. Dylan, come to think of it, died in the glare, on tour in New York City. Friends said that they hardly knew him in the end. He was a moth attending the flame. That’s the legend anyway. Would it be such a horrible idea to use one legend to dispel another? How? How then? Sylvia’s “Daddy” and Dylan’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” both lament the fall of both father and child. These were both late poems, and they both express the churlish wish to be haunted by their progenitors even unto their own graves. Now, this is what Ted would designate as the apex of persona slaying, catching both poets expressing their last wish to die in a state of original sin and archetypal torment. The difference between the two of them is that Dylan’s death and his contention with his ancestors is legitimately in character—from the purview of the cradle, he viewed the grave as a legitimate means of self-expression. Ted never met Dylan Thomas and never truly lamented the oversight. The truth is that every serious poet going has spent serious time hunkering in Dylan’s shadow, and never having met him hadn’t altered the experience of knowing him all too well. The difference between Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath is that Dylan commenced his suicide note upon his first poetic offering. Sylvia, as a fatality, was nothing less than a late bloomer, and as such she remains a much more transmutable figure than Dylan. Ted’s favorite of Dylan’s poems is “Should Lanterns Shine.” He admired most the insidiousness of the final couplet. “The ball I threw while playing in the park/Has not yet reached the ground.” Thomas, the lyrical raconteur as usual, was turning false cards faceup. The ball that he threw began and has ended in the ground. Sylvia’s has taken on its own unforeseeable orbit.
How is he ever going to get the immensity of his mission across in one fifteen- to twenty-minute segment while contending with American Merv’s philistinism, Caitlin Thomas’s notorious derangement, the wild card of Widow Jarrell, and the auditing wraiths of all three dead poets? Why didn’t the fates ever concede him less burdensome tasks? Like dying, for instance.
He debated with himself throughout the makeup ritual, and he was still giving himself a time of it as he strolled into the green room with the skin of his face itching and his nasal passages tickled beyond all reasonable toleration. He thought of all of the manifold ways in which the Caesars were poisoned. There was something mitigatingly uncowardly about envenoming a foe from the skin of his face first. Ted thought that every conscionable assassin should take it upon himself to do the mortician’s office as well. That’s sort of what Sylvia had done to him, was it not? But her full-frontal attack was diversionary. While he was not looking, she craftily embalmed his heart.
In
the green room, Caitlin Thomas and her Sicilian lover Giuseppe Fazio, more famous in poetry circles by his nom de boudoir the Sheik, were seated together in a single sedilia, drinking champagne. In unison they looked away from the blank monitor in the center of the room and toward Ted. In unison once more they looked back at the monitor, and they did this in the flawless sync of two show setters briefly regarding a chained mutt as they trolled by on a parade float. The Sheik wore a razor-brimmed Borsalino, its broad shadow reflecting down to his jawline. Caitlin, to Ted’s astonishment, had grown old. Her hair had turned white, her body had thickened, and she had the reddened, wind-cured face of Calypso left to decay upon the rocks. The bride that you saw in the bio photos now wore the tonnage of the years, and yet her eyes remained the siren’s shade of briny blue. She was right not to speak to him. Words would only be superfluous. Like Merv had said, true poets are survivors of their muses. If you extend the logic, you must come to the simple conclusion that living muses must be survivors of themselves.
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