But this is not the meaning of looking for Indian arrowheads. That will, I hope, elude me forever. Its importance has, in maturity, become more and more apparent — an education that shaped me with a surer and finer hand than any classroom, an experience that gave me a sense of the earth, of autumn afternoons, of all the seasons, a connoisseur’s sense of things for their own sake. I was with grown-ups, so it wasn’t play. There was no lecture, so it wasn’t school. All effort was willing, so it wasn’t work. No ideal compelled us, so it wasn’t idealism or worship or philosophy.
Yet it was the seeding of all sorts of things, of scholarship, of a stoic sense of pleasure (I think we were all bored and ill at ease when we went on official vacations to the mountains or the shore, whereas out arrowhead-looking we were content and easy), and most of all of foraging, that prehistoric urge still not bred out of man. There was also the sense of going out together but with each of us acting alone. You never look for Indian arrows in pairs. You fan out. But you shout discoveries and comments (“No Indian was ever around here!”) across fields. It was, come to think of it, a humanistic kind of hunt. My father never hunted animals, and I don’t think he ever killed anything in his life. All his brothers were keen huntsmen; I don’t know why he wasn’t. And, conversely, none of my uncles would have been caught dead doing anything so silly as looking for hours and hours for an incised rim of pottery or a Cherokee pipe.
I know that my sense of place, of occasion, even of doing anything at all, was shaped by those afternoons. It took a while for me to realize that people can grow up without being taught to see, to search surfaces for all the details, to check out a whole landscape for what it has to offer. My father became so good at spotting arrowheads that on roads with likely gullies he would find them from the car. Or give a commentary on what we might pick up were we to stop: “A nice spearhead back there by a maypop, but with the tip broken off.”
And it is all folded away in an irrevocable past. Most of our fields are now the bottom of a vast lake. Farmers now post their land and fence it with barbed wire. Arrowhead collecting has become something of a minor hobby, and shops for the tourist trade make them in a back room and sell them to people from New Jersey. Everything is like that nowadays. I cherish those afternoons, knowing that I will never understand all that they taught me. As we grew up, we began not to go on the expeditions. Not the last, but one of the last, afternoons found us toward sunset, findings in hand, ending up for the day with one of our rituals, a Coca-Cola from the icebox of a crossroads store. “They tell over the radio,” the proprietor said, “that a bunch of Japanese airplanes have blowed up the whole island of Hawaii.”
Ralph Eugene Meatyard
WHEN I MOVED TO LEXINGTON IN I964 THE POET JONATHAN Williams wrote me that there was a photographer here who took pictures of children and American flags in attics. His name was Ralph Eugene Meatyard. He was, Jonathan insisted, strange. I had learned to trust Jonathan’s judgments. When he said strange he meant strange.
The next time Jonathan was in town, on one of his reading and slide-showing tours around the Republic in his Volkswagen, The Blue Rider, with its football decal on a window saying THE POETS (the football team of some Sidney Lanier High School in the pine fastnesses of Georgia), he and Ronald Johnson, Stan Brakhage and his six-year-old daughter Crystal, Bonnie Jean Cox and I set out to visit the Meatyards. The address was 418 Kingsway. We all piled out at 418 Queensway, and to this day I don’t know the startled citizens who opened their door to find such a collection of people on the steps. Jonathan was got up as a Methodist minister in a three-piece suit, Stan was in his period of looking like a Pony Express scout out of Frederic Remington, and Bonnie Jean and Crystal were both gazing innocently up out from under bangs.
We fitted in well enough at the Meatyards’ when we got there, a place where you were liable to find anything at all. There was an original drawing of Andy Gump crying “Oh, Min!” from a toilet stool: he has no paper. There were Merzbilden, paintings by the children, found objects, cats and dogs, books jammed into every conceivable space.
Gene Meatyard was a smiling, affable man of middle age and height. His wife Madelyn, Scandinavian in her beauty, had a full measure of Midwestern hospitality to make us feel comfortable. My own welcome was assured when we heard, as Melissa, the youngest Meatyard, showed her agemate Crystal Brakhage the kitchen, a little girl’s piping voice saying, “Guy Davenport has ants and bugs in his kitchen.” This gave me a chance to explain that I kept a saucer of sugar water for the wasps, hornets and ants that I liked to see in the house. To the Meatyards it meant that I couldn’t be all bad.
Photographs were handed around. We talked about them. But not Gene. For nine years I would see the new pictures as they were printed and mounted, always in complete silence from Gene. He never instructed one how to see, or how to interpret the pictures, or what he might have intended. The room was full of keen eyes: Jonathan’s lyric, bawdy eye; Ronald’s eye for mystery; Stan’s cinematic eye (a bit impatient with still images, as Gene was impatient with Stan’s films — he never went to the movies, but would watch television if the program were sufficiently absurd); Bonnie Jean’s stubborn, no-nonsense eye.
I did not know until after his death that he brought me the pictures to cheer himself up. “Guy knows what to say,” he told Madelyn. I only said what the pictures drew out. I think he liked my having to fall back on analogies: that this print had a touch of Kafka, this a passage as if by Cézanne, this echoed de Chirico. In his last period he was fascinated by Cézanne and the cubists, by the verbal collages of William Carlos Williams.
We saw a wealth of pictures that evening. I remember thinking that here was a photographer who might illustrate the ghost stories of Henry James, a photographer who got many of his best effects by introducing exactly the right touch of the unusual into an authentically banal American usualness. So much of Gene’s work requires the deeper attention which shows you that in a quite handsome picture of lawns and trees there are bricks floating in the air (they have been tied to branches to make them grow level; you cannot see the wires).
Light as it falls from the sun onto our random world defines everything perceptible to the eye by constant accident, relentlessly changing. A splendid spot of light on a fence is gone in a matter of seconds. A tone of light is frailer in essence than a whiff of roses. I have watched Gene all of a day wandering around in the ruined Whitehall photographing as diligently as if he were a newsreel cameraman in a battle. The old house was as quiet and still as eternity itself; to Gene it was as ephemeral in its shift of light and shade as a fitful moth.
He developed his film only once a year; he didn’t want to be tyrannized by impatience, and I suspect that he didn’t like being cooped up in the darkroom. He was a lens grinder by profession, which meant he was short of free time. His evenings were apt to be taken up with teaching, lecturing, arranging shows, and he longed to read more and more. There were books in his automobile, by his equipment in his office. He had more hobbies than could be kept up with, especially those that involved his family: hiking, cooking, collecting the poetic trash that served as props for his pictures. One could usually find the Meatyards up to something rich and strange: making violet jam (or some other sufficiently unlikely flavor), model ships, fanciful book covers; listening to a superb collection of antique jazz, or to recordings which Gene seemed to dream up and then command the existence of, like the Andrews sisters singing Poe’s “Raven” (“Ulalume” on the flip side, both in close harmony). He had a recording of the wedding of Sister Rosetta Tharp. He had a loose-leaf notebook of thousands of grotesque and absurd names. He was a living encyclopedia of bizarre accidents and Kentucky locutions. One evening he turned up to tell with delight of hearing an old man say of the moving pictures these days that by God you can see the actors’ genitrotties.
And there was nothing behind him, nothing at all that one could make out. He had invented himself, with his family’s full cooperation. One knew that he
had been born in Normal, Illinois, because of the name. He had a brother, an artist, but it took forever to find this out. He had been to Williams. Williams! Surely this was an invention. Like hearing Harpo Marx had a degree from the Sorbonne. For whereas Gene seemed to read German, he pronounced French like Dr. Johnson — as if it were English. Greek nor Latin had he, though he once figured out with a modern Greek dictionary that a lyric of Sappho (which he had set out to read as his first excursion into the classics) had something to do with a truck crossing a bridge. Yet, by golly, he had been to Williams College. He was there with the Navy V-12 program. One even learned that he used to play golf. But he had no past. His own past had no interest whatever for him. Tomorrow morning was his great interest.
There was the London telephone book to be read (the scholar Tom Stroup sent him one), new books of poetry to read between customers at the eyeglasses shop. He was an unfailing follower-up, which is why I think of him as the best educated man I have ever known. As a professor I must work with people for whom indifference is both a creed and a defense of their fanatic narrowness of mind, but Gene knew nothing of this. When he met Louis and Celia Zukofsky at my house, he went away and read Zukofsky. Not that he was an enthusiast. He simply had a curiosity that went all the way, and a deep sense of courtesy whereby if a man were a writer he would read what he had written, if a man were a painter he would look at his paintings.
Gene’s extraordinary difference from any type sometimes puzzled people when they first met him. One evening the Montaigne scholar Marcel Gutwirth was in town, and he and Gene and I had a marvelous evening of talk while watching a new litter of kittens spring around the living room. When I walked Professor Gutwirth back to his hotel afterwards, he asked who this Monsieur Meatyard might be.
“Oh, Gene’s wonderful,” I said. “He knows more about modern literature than anyone at the university, but he’s never read the Odyssey.”
“But, ah!” Marcel Gutwirth said. “What a reading the Odyssey will have when he gets around to it!”
Gene took up photography in 1954 and began to love it enough to submit to the demands it was making. He must have seen the difference between a photographer and an artist whose medium is photography. After a heart attack in 1961, he gave himself ten years to master his art. He was a great photographer well before that decade was up.
My first experience of Gene at work came when I asked him to do some pictures of me for the covers of a book. I had already selected a rich picture of his that I wanted for the front cover (the book was Flowers and Leaves), and we needed a portrait for the back. Gene drove me over to Interstate Highway 75 on a Sunday afternoon and put me out in the middle of traffic. He parked on the shoulder and began to photograph me trying to dodge a Greyhound bus and other dashing objects. I have never seen these pictures. Then he took me to an old churchyard and photographed me among the headstones. Finally, he drove to a house gutted by fire, and here he made the picture which we used. He never explained any of these settings. I only knew that he was after essence, not fact.
Usually he photographed people in so casual a manner that one did not know he was at work. I can remember three wonderful conversations with Thomas Merton, one of Gene’s closest friends, which were recorded in this way. Gene never dropped out of the talk to find an angle, never asked anyone to pose. The camera was simply there. And, afterwards, the pictures.
He was rare among American artists in that he was not obsessed with his own image in the world. He could therefore live in perfect privacy in a rotting Kentucky town. He was forever sending off shows, he kept up with everything, he encouraged everybody. He was a quiet, diffident, charming person on the surface, a known ruse of the American genius (William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore). This modesty amounted to there being at least two distinct Gene Meatyards in the world: an invisible Lexington businessman and a genius who achieved one of the most beautiful styles in twentieth-century art.
His death, heroic and tragic, proved to be the occasion for recognizing the two Gene Meatyards. For two funerals were required. The first was Protestant and, despite the distinguished people who came from all over the United States, thoroughly dull. I felt, as Cocteau had at another such obsequy, that Gene had not cared to attend. It was so formulaic and uninspired that I had to go and stand with my hands flat against the coffin to assure myself that I was at a funeral at all.
But there was another funeral, a true Meatyard funeral, one at which the rites were made up out of the family fund of inventiveness. A small group of us, Madelyn, the children (Mike with his wife and child, Christopher and Melissa), Joy Little, Bob May, Jonathan Greene, Bonnie Jean and I, went into the Red River Gorge which Gene had explored and photographed and tried to save from the ravagements of politics and greed. It was a fine spring Sunday. We climbed to an eminence that Gene had liked, a place as remote and quiet as any forest that has not yet heard the buzz saw and the bulldozer. Here we drank a wine that Gene had brewed. I read aloud a poem that Christopher had written, Mike emptied the canister that held all that could die and be burnt of Gene over the ledge of a high rock — a few dry bones which sifted into the tall treetops below. Melissa cast after them a bagful of flower petals.
Then we walked to another part of the forest and ate a feast, picnic fare of the outrageously copious and toothsome and rich kind which Gene fancied for a proper outing. Had Homer been a Sybarite, he would have described such a meal: chilled wines and cold chicken, crisp vinegary salads and homemade bread. I cannot describe it for I don’t think I got to see it all, the choices were so great. I remember that when we could eat no more there were still plums swimming in port passed around in small round glasses.
And this funeral Gene attended.
Hobbitry
IN THE SAD LIST OF THINGS THAT WILL ALWAYS BE BEYOND ME, philology is toward the top, up with my inability to drive an automobile or pronounce the word “mirroring.” The well-meant efforts of two universities to teach me to read (and in a recurring nightmare, to write and speak) Old English, or Anglo-Saxon as they sometimes called it, I have no intention of forgiving. Some grudges are permanent. On Judgment Day I shall proudly and stubbornly begrudge learning how to abandon a sinking ship, how to crawl under live machine-gun fire, and Anglo-Saxon.
The first professor to harrow me with the syntax and morphology of Old English had a speech impediment, wandered in his remarks, and seemed to think that we, his baffled scholars, were well up in Gothic, Erse, and Welsh, the grammar of which he freely alluded to. How was I to know that he had one day written on the back of one of our examination papers, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”?
Not until years later could I know that this vague and incomprehensible lecturer, having poked around on a page of the dread “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” for an hour, muttering place names and chuckling over variant readings, biked out to Sandfield Road in Headington and moved Frodo and Sam toward Mordor.
Even when I came to read The Lord of the Rings I had trouble, as I still do, realizing that it was written by the mumbling and pedantic Prof. J. R. R. Tolkien.
Nor have I had much luck in blending the professor and the author in my mind. I’ve spent a delicious afternoon in Tolkien’s rose garden talking with his son, and from this conversation there kept emerging a fond father who never quite noticed that his children had grown up, and who, as I gathered, came and went between the real world and a world of his own invention. I remembered that Sir Walter Scott’s son grew up in ignorance that his father was a novelist, and remarked as a lad in his teens when he was among men discussing Scott’s genius, “Aye, it’s commonly him is first to see the hare.”
Nor, talking with his bosom friend H. V. G. (“Hugo”) Dyson, could I get any sense of the Tolkien who invented hobbits and the most wonderful adventures since Ariosto and Boiardo. “Dear Ronald,” Dyson said, “writing all those silly books with three introductions and ten appendixes. His was not a true imagination, you know: He made it all up.” I have tried fo
r fifteen years to figure out what Dyson meant by that remark.
The closest I have ever gotten to the secret and inner Tolkien was in a casual conversation on a snowy day in Shelbyville, Kentucky. I forget how in the world we came to talk of Tolkien at all, but I began plying questions as soon as I knew that I was talking to a man who had been at Oxford as a classmate of Ronald Tolkien’s. He was a history teacher, Allen Barnett. He had never read The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, he was astonished and pleased to know that his friend of so many years ago had made a name for himself as a writer.
“Imagine that! You know, he used to have the most extraordinary interest in the people here in Kentucky. He could never get enough of my tales of Kentucky folk. He used to make me repeat family names like Barefoot and Boffin and Baggins and good country names like that.”
And out the window I could see tobacco barns. The charming anachronism of the hobbits’ pipes suddenly made sense in a new way. The Shire and its settled manners and shy hobbits have many antecedents in folklore and in reality — I remember the fun recently of looking out of an English bus and seeing a roadsign pointing to Butterbur. Kentucky, seems, contributed its share.
Practically all the names of Tolkien’s hobbits are listed in my Lexington phone book, and those that aren’t can be found over in Shelbyville. Like as not, they grow and cure pipe-weed for a living. Talk with them, and their turns of phrase are pure hobbit: “I hear tell,” “right agin,” “so Mr. Frodo is his first and second cousin, once removed either way,” “this very month as is.” These are English locutions, of course, but ones that are heard oftener now in Kentucky than in England.
The Guy Davenport Reader Page 28