Collecte Works

by Lorine Niedecker

  He said, “You read.”

  Beethoven: “It is impossible to say to people, ‘I am deaf’.” But I said it:

  I have an eye handicap.

  “I wonder if you should…we have a switchboard opening. You might try it.”

  I went in. Lights, polished glass, blond satin finished desks, glossy haired and bald-headed efficiency. Shine. Lamps to be produced. Lamps to be sold. The antique sweatshop base with a new shine. You'll never have to polish this brass, a lacquering process, won't tarnish. This is the lust that will never rust.

  The shade by the door, the grey parchment face, cracked in a half smile. Shall I appear alive or let myself be carried along? I suppose man is, the most sensitive physical part of him, an electrical apparatus, switches, wires, etc…. How much do I give to Wade lamps? It takes 1028 human bodies to build a star. Purely business.

  The girl at the switchboard shouted, “Come in—if you can—it's my birthday, you know. Once a year and at Christmas this happens—nylons, table lamps, candy, help yourself. The bosses, the old honeypots, must like me a little bit, anyhow. Sit down. Let me tell you what goes. They're all good enough guys, family men, church, golf, they're after the business, they'll lay on you, of course.”

  You see in a place of this kind, she said, the switchboard girl is one of their outlets. They do a great deal of their sweating thru you. You'll make the contact and in haste, also they relax thru you. You're a part of it when their bags are full and you jazz em when they're down.

  “Get me the Howard Hotel, a single.”

  “Good, I like to sleep close.”

  That was Mendau, the burnt-out fuse in the beautiful suit who still thinks he's got something to sell.

  “Give me Philadelphia.” Give me Europe. I'm waiting, operator, for the Paris pick-up. I'm on wartime Montparnasse, gas mask, phosphorescent heels, illuminated brooch. “What's that?” What does it look like? There they call it what it is.

  The Japs: We had neither hens nor eggs. We went requisitioning. A miserable village. On the way back we began to look for Chinese girls.

  They don't make em as sensitive as geiger counters.

  “Goddamit what the hell happened to that call to Lethal Steel? Sleeping at the switchboard?”

  “I reported to you, sir, that Dan Blaine will talk.”

  “Christ if you can't get anybody but Dead-End Daniel—”

  “What was the name they wanted?” Somebody by the name of Christ.

  Please pass the blood. Human matériel is obsolescing.

  As for the work itself, she plays an intricate chess. You gamble with the red and the white and the green, without benefit of spa.

  I lost. “No natural aptitude.”

  Dante? Yes, go ahead.

  The evening's automobiles, men from work, shot silently through green lights. Encased motors give man the swift, shining precision that his mind as he drives can't give him. Well, he makes his get-away in beauty. He passes gleaming. And somewhere along the speedway for men with motors is home, woman.

  I must have been aglow myself as I stood there—I was a banner headline in running lights: YOUNG MAN GOES HOME—after twenty years as newspaper printer. Although mid-twentieth century of the middle ages continued had brought me the printing press, I'd found that Wm. James was right: “The sensational press is the organ of a state of mind which means a new ‘dark’ ages that may last more centuries than the first one. Then illiteracy was brutal and dumb and power was rapacious without disguise. Now illiteracy has an enormous literary organization and power is sophistical,” and this organization, as good an avenue for plunder as any business is, protects and is protected by that other and still more expensive organization, war. I'd found that a job does not necessarily sustain life. Grime, guts, gloom, the crash and roar of the big presses, speed, overtime speed, reason jarred. Throw the forms away for the last time, I was away to my childhood home in the country.

  Benj glided up to the curb in his own silent, white tired speed-gleam. I recalled my sister's remark on a certain small red beauty in the neighborhood, “They've bought a hummingbird—you can't haul anything with it.”

  “But why do you do it,” shrieked Benj, “It's lunacy!—alone, isolated, when everybody else is gearing himself for the fight for survival.”

  “Are men afraid of their own selves? Give us peace and we'll survive.”

  “But nobody to talk with!”

  “Talk, these days, is dangerous. My friend the poet says ‘Talk is a form of love’. Maybe I'll find that form in the millennium after the next.”

  “And what about Norma? Aren't you marrying her in June?”

  “Why is it that women about to be married need a mineralogical fulfillment—silver, diamond?”

  “You'll find a flood. In that lowland in the spring it won't take a forked stick to find water. What do you expect to find?”

  “The ancient present. In me the years are flowing together.”

  I awoke the next morning to twitterings out of leaves on every side, mixed with a marsh hush that I must have known soon after I'd known life in this world. The river had risen in the back land to within six feet of the house. Here in the lush wash, you go back to the exuberant source and start over. My mother, not too happily married, lived on her nerves on this stream, hunted and fished, grew flowers as big as plates in the Nile-like silt and said—how often she said it—“I've got a new pain.”

  The goddam dragon flies mating all over hell, said Jackie from my office, once long ago, and Jackie was a lady, unintellectual but enlightened, one to whom diamonds held no lure.

  No lady is the other office woman by her own insistence, weak-voiced and slight of build though she is. She is the proof reader, Francie Canoye who sits in her monastic, windowless cell, abhorrent of anything approaching profanity, but who manages to domineer over some sixteen men—printers, editors, bosses—with a desperate, old maid, bitter, obscene purity.

  Francie's impeccably penciled initials in the corner of her galleys soon stood among us men for Finance Capitalism. This small piece of steel flesh with a bad heart and spleen, a military bearing which was her only patrimony, maintains a deadly hatred of labor unions despite a ready acceptance of holiday pay. Two weeks paid vacation she never gets because she refuses it on the grounds that there is no one to whom she can trust her job.

  This is the woman who carries her portable possessions to and from work with her every day in a big bag resembling an enormous, pendulous, inverted bladder, never trusting their safety with her landlady. Sometimes the bag contains empty milk bottles—her own serious admission—to protect herself against landlady and landlord should the situation arise. Actually, she has nothing. A brother who died of leukemia had thereby depleted his and her own savings. Poor old thing, she marches along the street under the heavy weight of nothing. If she'd had money, she'd have quit—no, more likely as the self-appointed carrier of civilization she'd have gone on suffocating at her post. It's generally agreed that Francie knows her gothics and her futuras, but day after day of stepped-up tensions, dead lines, the whole deadly, competitive madness, have left their mark. And natural that sheer noise should affect her as she grows older. Not that she would complain to the owners. She looked belligerent, one particularly distressing day, when even her young copyholder shouted in near delirium, “Can't hear the stars, too close to the big press.”

  Through an age of violence and sudden death such as ours, a culture that hardly distinguishes between credulity and superstition, a culture that forever oscillates between a search for a movie with a Holy Grail theme and a search for the next meal, proof reader Francie Canoye guides her once sharp mind by sheer force of will.

  “Triskaidekaphobia thought they'd stump me on that one they didn't get me on Capuchin and bailiwick either Christ was a Jew they say—impossible! take it back to the editors I'm afraid of Frank Dane's bull neck the linotype boys are late today and sloppy we need a Hitler over here to make things move the moon changes tom
orrow so we'll get different weather do you pray?” And when Francie runs on thus the ads in the night's paper loom up with tender lions for tender loins, or grease-free ginghams for crease-free ginghams or unconditional surrender (on tires) instead of unconditional guarantee. So she loses her night's sleep and starts the morning of the next day by laying into the men who had failed to make the corrections which if marked hadn't been changed because the proofs had come back too late from the proof reader's desk. At such a time her grey figure stood before you like the sandpiper's out at my yard's “shore line,” a clam shell on long, thin legs with nervous-nodding head. Once a child came along, asked what kind of a bird that was and “What does it kill?” The truth was that often in her “brute goodness,” her only laxative from tight-bound days and too many candy bars, was to let an error fly where it would among the stench along her own close-confined portion of beach.

  But now I—at least I—was home. I looked toward the water's edge where lay milk bottle, electric light bulb, whiskey flask. China's great blue heron, Poor Joe, look at him go. A knock at the door-who in hell? I hung from a cold cigarette. A woman, her hair burning in the morning sun.

  “Parachute?”

  “No, I'm one of the last of my line—legs.” She stood there with more than one range of intensity and a basket of chicken and salad. It was Marion Dollman from the hill.

  “Come in.” We sat at table. Five feet from us on the other side of the window a yellow warbler was busy at her compact nest, three eggs of her own and a cowbird's. The birds building in the bush under my nose!

  The girl passed the salt. “You look at me as though you expected to find something of a world…” The world, we said, will come from scientists on the tail of their terror-literature, if it comes. Still, we'd make our own.

  “Tell me,” she said, “What do you know to be true? Not merely that roughly radiation dies away according to the formula r equals one over time.”

  “Not roughly. Knowing goes best with the quietest touch. Otherwise it's somebody else's stuff. Even so I can only indicate.”

  Her tender-spoken “No terror here.” And “With all deference to what we could be together, no two persons can ever become one, each must be free to desire what the other has indicated. At least we'd make it a point, wouldn't we, never to be familiar no matter how close we got?”

  “And together, isolated from a great portion of humanity, as all with feeling are, these days…while the flood recedes and the grass starts fast to mow me in my prime.”

  “Isn't it glorious? Let's trim green thought in one place and let it grow wild in another.”

  The lovely greenery—I hadn't too much of it in my pocket or in any bank. But we don't need a third of the things, the sheer, literal litter that people do in our savage cities.

  Let's sit here in the long afternoon and last.

  AS I LAY DYING

  radio adaptation of William Faulkner's novel

  DOC PEABODY as narrator

  Anse Bundren's wife Addie was dying. When Anse finally sent for me of his own accord I said: He has wore her out at last. And when it got far enough into the day for me to read weather signs I knew it couldn't have been anybody but Anse that sent. I knew that nobody but a luckless man could ever need a doctor in the face of a cyclone. And I knew that if it had finally occurred to Anse himself that he needed a doctor, it was already too late. Their cotton and corn farm lay on top a steep hill. My team couldn't make the last several yards up the steep but Anse got me up there—my 250 pounds—with the help of a rope. “What the hell does your wife mean,” I say, “taking sick on top of a durn mountain?”

  ANSE (thick, gentle voice)

  I'm right sorry, Doc.

  PEABODY

  Well, let's go in.

  Sound of footsteps, door closing.

  PEABODY as narrator

  The girl Dewey Dell was standing by the bed fanning her. Addie turns her head. She's been dead these ten days. I suppose it's having been a part of Anse for so long that she cannot even make that change, if change it be. I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind—and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end, the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town. Beneath the quilt she is no more than a bundle of sticks. I turned to Anse standing there with his arms dangling, the hair pushed and matted upon his head like a dipped rooster.

  PEABODY

  Why didn't you send for me sooner?

  ANSE

  Hit was jest one thing and then another. That ere corn me and the boys was aimin to get up with, and Dewey Dell a-takin such good keer of her, till I jest thought…

  PEABODY

  Damn the money. Did you ever hear of me worrying a fellow before he was ready to pay?

  ANSE (low-voiced, concerned)

  She's goin, is she?

  Silence

  ANSE

  I knowed it. Her mind was sot on it. She laid down on her bed. She says:

  I'm tired.

  PEABODY

  And a damn good thing.

  PEABODY as narrator

  Suddenly Addie looks at me. Her eyes like lamps blazing up just before the oil is gone. She probably wants me to get out and everybody else. I've seen it before in women. Seen them drive from the room them coming with sympathy and pity, with actual help, and clinging to some trifling animal to whom they never were more than pack-horses. That's what they mean by the love that passeth understanding: that pride, that furious desire to hide that abject nakedness which we bring here with us, carry with us into operating rooms, carry stubbornly and furiously with us into the earth again.

  ADDIE (rather loud)

  Cash. You, Cash! I want the boy. (weaker) Anse, Jewel, Darl?

  ANSE (kindly and close in)

  The boys went for another load, Ma. Them three dollars, you know.

  They thought you'd wait.

  ADDIE (weakly but clearly)

  I smell wet leaves and earth (fade to background during next two speeches) geese flying north…

  PEABODY

  She seems to be talking to herself.

  ANSE

  I'll go out and see if them boys are coming. (door closing)

  ADDIE (stronger, closer in)

  I was young then. I was teaching school. One day in early spring a man appeared, turning his hat round and round in his hands and I said, “If you've got any womenfolks, why in the world don't they make you get your hair cut?” He said, “I ain't got none.” And that was Anse and I took him. And when I knew I had my child, Cash, I knew that living was terrible and that words are no good; words don't ever fit even what they are trying to say at. We had to use each other by words but most of all by blood, blood coursing, boiling, whipping—only by something like the whip could my blood and their blood unite in one stream. I loved Anse but my aloneness was violated. When I found I had Darl I saw only one thing—Anse had tricked me. But no, I had been tricked by words older than Anse or love and the same words had tricked Anse too. And when Darl was born I asked Anse to promise to take me back to Jefferson when I died. Father had said that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead for a long time. I knew that father had been right, even when he couldn't have known he was right any more than I could have known I was wrong. Anse was dead and didn't know it. Anse was dead. (Falters, weaker, then suddenly tries to raise up and call): Is Anse dead?

  PEABODY

  Calm yourself, Addie.

  ADDIE

  As I lay in the nights I heard the words that are the deeds, and the other words that are not deeds, and that are just the gaps in people's lacks, coming down like the cries of the geese out of the wild darkness. But I found it—the reason for life was the duty to the alive, to the terrible blood, the red bitter blood boiling through the land. My children were of the wild blood of me and of al
l that lived, of none and of all. Then I found that I had Jewel—when Jewel was two months gone. Then Dewey Dell, then Vardaman. And then I could get ready to die.

  PEABODY as narrator

  So she died. The child Vardaman, was somewhere about. Dewey Dell sat motionless awhile, then Anse reminded her to get supper.

  ANSE

  We got to keep our strength up. And Cash'll need to eat quick and get back to work so he can finish the coffin in time.

  PEABODY as narrator

  I stepped out into the twilight, Dewey Dell behind me. I could feel the 17-year-old girl's big dark eyes boring a hole through my back.

  DEWEY DELL (low, rich voice)

  I'll have to look for Vardaman. (Lower, fuller, more intimate—she always speaks from the depths but now as though to herself alone): You, Doc Peabody, could do so much for me if you just would and if you just would then I could tell you and then nobody'd have to know it except you and me and Darl and Lafe. You could help me if you would.

  Sound of door

  ANSE

  God's will be done. (sighs) Now I can get them teeth I been needin for so long.

  DEWEY DELL (off some distance, voice raised)

  Vardaman. (Louder): You, Vardaman. Bring that fish for supper. Come now, right away.

  VARDAMAN

  (little child's voice, always tiny, distinctive, thin, “talking to himself like a cricket in the grass,” Faulkner says, “a little one”): Here I am right here by the porch. Yuh, I've got a fish, my fish, hey, where's my fish? I cut his guts out but Dewey Dell wants to cut him up for supper. (Starts crying): And that man—he came and kilt my Maw. He came and kilt my Maw.