Genoa

by Paul Metcalf

  I protested that Carl was already quiet, that there was no need for it, but it made no difference—his name was on the list. He was cowed, his shoulders caving, as they led him away.

  A news item from Honolulu—1854:

  “Our readers will doubtless recollect the narrative published in the year 1851, respecting the whale ship ‘Ann Alexander,’ Capt. Dublois, being stove by a sperm whale in the Pacific ocean. Recently Capt. D. visited Honolulu . . . We learned from him many striking and remarkable circumstances respecting the attack . . . Without repeating the story we would state, that about five months subsequently, the same whale was taken by the ‘Rebecca Sims,’ Capt. Jernegan. Two harpoons were discovered in the whale, marked ‘Ann Alexander.’ The whale’s head was found seriously injured, and contained pieces of the ship’s timbers. He had lost his wildness and ferocity, being very much diseased . . .”

  Later, walking down the corridor, I heard the hollering and shrieking of the inmates as the hoses were turned on them—and I recognized, above the others, the vast, bellowing tones of Carl, urging out of his lungs, in defiance of the water streams, hollow vowels . . .

  EIGHT

  There was talk, in Carl’s case, of performing a frontal lobotomy—cutting into the frontothalamic fibers (the white matter) of the frontal lobes of the brain . . . but, in correspondence with the doctors, I was able to discourage it . . .

  Instead, he was given different forms of convulsion therapy—electroshock when either violent or calm, and metrazol, when in deep melancholy . . .

  I thought of Moby-Dick, and Pierre . . . of a man sinking, pulling down and over him his family, his parents and ancestors—the mutations of all evolution—

  struggling convulsively, even in drowning, to re-form himself, to grow or discover a new center . . .

  as an epileptic, or in syncope: to fight out of the wrong center and into the right,

  or to the left of it . . .

  and I thought of the doctors, with electronics and drugs—one remove from his own, self-determined spasms of epilepsy—trying to force Carl

  to create a new source and origin of motion . . .

  NINE

  Right after the First World War, when Carl and I were both small children, my father, encouraged by the Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916, added heavily to his holdings, paying exorbitant figures, assuming large mortgages, for adjacent farm land. We already had more than we could manage . . . but he wouldn’t be stopped. In 1921, the bubble burst . . . our land dropped in value to less than half what we had paid for it, what we were committed to in mortgages. The prosperous Twenties, enjoyed by the rest of the nation, never existed for the farmer . . .

  We were forced to sell—or, we thought at the time that we had sold. Father, in a state of despair and confusion, turned the affairs over to Mother, and she somehow managed, without telling the rest of us, to hang onto the house and enough of the land to be rented (the income to be applied against mortgages and debts) . . .

  (clinging to the land, as Columbus struggled, and failed, to hold the Indes . . .

  . . . so that today, after the years of poverty, I and my family may enjoy once again the old house—a rural island, all but swallowed into the city . . .

  We left Indianapolis, moved to Terre Haute—“high ground”—center of the Indiana coal mines,

  birthplace of Theodore Dreiser, and Eugene V. Debs . . .

  Down payment was put on a mean, one-story house, in a crowded part of the city. Failing to scrape a living out of the earth as a farmer, Father wanted to dig under the surface: he took a job in the mines . . .

  Work was part-time at first . . . we skimped, saved, and mended. In 1922, just when he went on full shift and the job became steady, the miners were called out on strike: Father was idle for nine bitter months . . .

  Theodore Dreiser: born, Terre Haute, 1871, twenty years before Melville died, and a thousand miles deeper in the land . . . so that he was full grown by the time Melville put down his pen . . .

  The house on Ninth Street in Terre Haute, where Paul and Sarah Dreiser lived, was infested with spirits and night-striders. On the night of Theodore’s birth, “Three maidens, brightly garbed, with flowers in their hair, danced into Sarah’s room and out again, to disappear seemingly into the air; and when afterward the boy himself proved perilously puny and sickly, inimical forces seemed to be in command.”

  The family was poor . . . Theodore was sent home from school one winter, because it was too cold to be without shoes. He was ashamed to be seen carrying the laundry his mother took in, or stealing coal, lump by lump, from between the railroad tracks. When an old watchman died—a man he had known and who had been kind to him—he went to stare at the remains, saw the two coins on the eyelids, and reached for them . . .

  and there was the father, Paul Dreiser: a transient, a failure, moving from house to house, one jump ahead of the mortgage . . .

  I recall my own father: he had become interested in Socialism, talked about the life and work of Eugene Debs:

  born, Terre Haute, 1855, when the ripples had scarcely ceased lapping, or the water become smooth, over the sinking of the Pequod . . . organized first industrial union (1893), led the Pullman strike (’94) . . . helped organize, 1900, the Socialist Party, polled nearly a million votes for President (1920), campaigning from prison against Harding, and, at the time of the coal strike—1922—was still living . . .

  I recall Father, during the strike, sitting at the kitchen table (in different kitchens, of different houses, each meaner than the one before), his face bland, naive, confident—no longer the man who had worked twelve, fourteen hours a day on the farm, who, with his own main strength, had held the house together during a tornado—replying, now, to most any question with a remark about Debs: he had faith in Gene, old Gene would help us, would take care of us . . . while Mother got a meal for a family of four out of a loaf of stale bread (sold, for a few pennies, at the back door of the bakery), and a jar of the precious, guarded, hoarded tomatoes—treasured above all other possessions—that she had put up years back, on the farm . . .

  young Dreiser, taking refuge from his troubles, would get up early in the morning, walk into the country with his dog, to study the spider webs and morning glories, the wrens and swallows . . .

  (as, in the Gulf of Paria, Columbus observed the tiny oysters clinging to the mangrove roots: the oyster shells open, to catch from the leaves above, dewdrops that engender pearls . . .

  The strike finally over, Father went back to work, his confidence in some measure restored. Mother had somehow managed to hold the family together . . .

  and Dreiser, his mother dead, his father become impossible to live with, moved—1891, the year of Melville’s death—to Chicago, to the slums: the smell of sour beer, sewer gas, and uric acid . . .

  took to writing, produced a novel: SISTER CARRIE, written during the years 1899 and 1900, and standing therefore at the entrance, the beginning of the 20th Century . . .

  Theodore Dreiser: gate-keeper, janitor to the century, presiding over the entrance upon and beginning of things,

  (and Debs, 1900, formed the Socialist

  Party . . .

  Dreiser had his troubles getting the thing published: signed a contract with a publisher—but the publisher’s wife objected strenuously (Carrie was not moral), and they pulled a fast one: published, according to contract (minimum edition)—and stored the books in the basement . . .

  PIERRE, dealing with incest, was produced without question—but that was earlier, the pioneer days . . . by now—1900—Progress had become Serious Business: adulterous CARRIE was stuffed in the cellar . . .

  and in both books we have the spectacle of a man sacrificing and ruining himself . . . Pierre and Isabel, in the classic tragedy, end as suicides, whereas, in Dreiser’s work, Hurstwood vanishes a derelict, and Carrie is left idle, floating into the new century:

  “In your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you ma
y never feel.”

  As the failure of MOBY-DICK and PIERRE broke Melville’s health, so CARRIE’s failure broke Dreiser’s. Living in New York, bankrupt, alone, he suffered hallucinations, his eyes itched and stung, his left eye became weaker, lost its power of accommodation . . . sitting or standing, he found himself compelled to turn around, to go in a circle, to bring himself into alignment with something . . . he nearly jumped into the East River . . .

  (when he had first come to New York, first approached the ocean, he felt small and trivial . . .

  (the vast ocean, into which Hart Crane leaped . . .

  (where Melville had been so much at home . . .

  SISTER CARRIE: “She also marvelled at the whistles of the hundreds of vessels in the harbor—the long, low cries of the Sound steamers and ferryboats when fog was on. The mere fact that these things spoke from the sea made them wonderful. She looked much at what she could see of the Hudson from her west windows and of the great city building up rapidly on either hand. It was much to ponder over . . .”

  From Terre Haute, Father and Mother, Carl and I moved to Sullivan, where the job in the mines was steady, and the pay better . . .

  (this being another of the towns where Dreiser had lived, as a child . . .

  and my hand reaches across the desk for the clipping, yellowed with age, from the 1925 newspaper: Mother saved and passed it on to me, and I cannot bring myself to dispose of it:

  FIFTY-ONE ARE

  KILLED IN BIG

  MINE EXPLOSION

  Greatest Disaster in History

  of Indiana

  Coal Fields.

  ALL TRAPPED ARE

  BELIEVED KILLED

  More Than Hundred Men

  in Mine at the Time

  of Blast.

  (BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS)

  SULLIVAN, Ind., Feb. 20—Fifty-one men are believed to have been killed almost instantly today in an explosion of gas in the City Coal Company mine on the outskirts of the city, that wrought the greatest mine disaster in the history of the Indiana Coal Fields.

  There were 121 miners in the mine at the time of the explosion which occurred in the third and fourth entries North where most of the men killed were at work.

  (Melville, in the cave of Sybil: “What in God’s name were such places made for, & why? Surely man is a strange animal. Diving into the bowels of the earth rather than building up towards the sky. How clear an indication that he sought darkness . . .”

  The work of bringing out the dead proceeded slowly, the bodies being brought singly. Rescue workers were handicapped by gas fumes which flooded the mine immediately after the explosion.

  Tremendous crowds thronged the scene soon after word of the disaster spread . . .

  Wives and children of miners employed in the shaft crowded about, seeking information, and groups of waiting, sobbing women and children clustered about as the news was broken that 51 of the men were known to be dead.

  I recall standing beside Mother—Carl on the other side, a hand of hers reaching to each of us—waiting, hour after hour, not moving . . . and when the body was brought up, the faces of the others turned toward us—curiosity locked in compassion—Mother waiting (Carl and I looking to her, even though it be disaster, wanting to be sure), waiting until the body were brought before her—and, as she recognized him, Father, her hand clutching, tightening . . .

  Most authentic reports of the accident were that the explosion occurred when miners either cut into abandoned workings or a slight cave-in opened old entries in which gas had collected, the miners’ lamps setting off the pocket of gas . . .

  Men who had been in the mine said the explosion seemed to go in gusts, some being suffocated, others horribly burned, while others were but slightly burned. Many were hurled about rooms and entries . . .

  Rope lines established by local authorities and miners failed to check the rush of hundreds who flocked to the mine.

  (. . . rushing, eddying to the disaster . . .

  there was the long period of waiting, and discovery—the knowledge, in the pit of my stomach, that something had happened, the excitement, the image of his face, as Carl and Mother and I saw it before us, his body—waiting for the realization, the understanding of it to burst upon me . . .

  like a holiday: the normal, daily laws of living abrogated—waiting to discover what it was, what it meant, that Father was dead . . .

  . . . followed by disappointment, as there was no discovery, no bursting upon me, but only dullness, a slow seepage of understanding . . . and the poverty doubled in, feeding upon itself, as we lived now, a family of three, on the compensation—$13.20 a week—allowed by the law . . .

  with the numbness: the absence of Father, who, even in failure, had provided a dimension that was now gone . . .

  Where Melville dove, Dreiser floated . . . a great mass of pity, cut off . . .

  Hurstwood, in SISTER CARRIE, as Dreiser’s father, sitting alone, apathetic in his rocker:

  “Hurstwood saw her depart with some faint feelings of shame, which were the expression of a manhood rapidly becoming stultifed.”

  and the drear, the cold, wint’ry drear of Hurstwood, struggling to reclaim himself as a $2-a-day scab in the Brooklyn trolley strike . . .

  Dreiser, who was sterile—terminating his sons before their conception, giving them, therefore, shorter lives, shorter agonies than Melville’s sons—nevertheless took the trouble, on a trip to Europe, to hunt out his father’s birthplace . . .

  searching the sources, the roots, the blasted paternity . . . Theodore Dreiser, Indiana-born, doorkeeper of the century . . .

  (in ancient Rome, the double barbican gate in the Forum—dedicated to Janus, supreme janitor—was closed during times of peace, open only in war . . .

  BUD

  ONE

  AFTER MOBY-DICK, the sinking, Melville, with pseudonyms and anonyms, kept trying to die, as PIERRE . . .

  “. . . death-milk for thee and me!”

  BENITO CERENO . . .

  “seguid vuestro jefe”

  and BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER . . .

  opening lines, written when he was 34: “I am a rather elderly man.”

  and like Columbus, in search of death, he turned to the Holy Land, Sodom, the Dead Sea . . .

  “. . . foam on beach & pebbles like slaver of mad dog—smarting bitter of the water,—carried the bitter in my mouth all day—bitterness of life—thought of all bitter things—Bitter is it to be poor & Bitter, to be reviled, & Oh bitter are these waters of Death, thought I.—Old boughs tossed up by water—relics of pick-nick—nought to eat but bitumen & ashes with dessert of Sodom apples washed down with water of Dead Sea.— . . .”

  and Columbus, following the 3rd voyage, liberated from his chains by the Sovereigns,

  (as Melville had been liberated, temporarily, from the chains of poverty, by Judge Shaw,

  turned inland

  (as Melville turned inland, in PIERRE,

  to another scheme: the liberation of Jerusalem . . .

  retiring to the convent of Las Cuevas, he began work on the BOOK OF PROPHECIES:

  “St. Augustine says that the end of this world is to come in the seventh millenary of years from its creation . . . there are only lacking 155 years to complete the 7000, in which year the world must end.”

  “The greatest part of the prophecies and Sacred Writing is already finished.”

  thus foreclosing on the future of the hemisphere he had discovered,

  . . . condoning and justifying all brutalities against the Indians, as extreme haste must be made to convert the heathen . . .

  Melville:

  “With wrecks in a garret I’m stranded . . .”

  and

  “Pleased, not appeased, by myriad wrecks in me.”

  Columbus, on Jamaica:

  “Solitary in my trouble, sick, and in daily expectation of death . . .”

  and back in Spain, 1504, still trying to get to the Court to present his claims an
d grievances—too weak and ill to make the trip on foot or on horseback—requests the loan of a funeral bier from the Cathedral of Seville:

  “This day, their Worships ordered that there should be loaned to the Admiral Columbus the mortuary bier in which was carried the body of the Lord Cardinal Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, whom may God have in his keeping, in order that he may go to the Court, and a guarantee was taken from Francisco Pinelo which assured the return of the said bier to this church in safety.”

  . . . to be carried out of his disaster like Ishmael, on the floating coffin . . .

  TWO

  But Melville, after trying through the long middle years to die, put out a late, late bloom . . .

  (scores & underscores, in a volume of Thomas Hood: “. . . the full extent of that poetical vigour which seemed to advance just in proportion as his physical health declined.”

  . . . in his sixties and seventies, came to life:

  “We the Lilies whose palor is passion . . .”

  “. . . the winged blaze that sweeps my soul

  Like prairie fires . . .”

  “To flout pale years of cloistral life

  And flush me in this sensuous strife.”

  “The innocent bare-foot! young, so young!”

  “The plain lone bramble thrills with Spring”

  “The patient root, the vernal sense

  Surviving hard experience . . .”

  In a volume, transparently dedicated to Lizzie.

  “. . . white nun, that seemly dress

  Of purity pale passionless,

  A May-snow is; for fleeting term,

  Custodian of love’s slumbering germ . . .”

  “I came unto my roses late.

  What then? these gray hairs but disguise,

  Since down in heart youth never dies . . .”

  “Time, Amigo, does but masque us—

  Boys in gray wigs, young . . .”

  and elsewhere:

  “Could I remake me! or set free

  This sexless bound in sex, then plunge