[sic]

by Joshua Cody

  To each other?

  No, not to each other! I assume they have been introduced to each other.

  Chapter 23:

  The Difficulty Of Fitting Little Dee (d)

  Finding clothes to fit Little Dee (d) is difficult, because he is so small. He is less than a quark in size. He is about the size of a subquark, but because a sub-quark can’t be seen (and hence measured), it is hard to know how big Little Dee (d) is or his dimensions. So it’s hard to find clothes for him. It’s hard to find him. Therefore Little Dee (d) is allowed to run around in his altogether. Or it is thought he does.

  A quark is so small it can hardly be seen with the most powerful microscope—one so powerful that your eye, seen from the other way, looks like the sky—and a subquark is smaller than that! A subquark is so small it can only be theorized. And Little Dee (d) was smaller than that!

  Nevertheless, Little Dee (d) existed. Of course, he was difficult to find. Difficult to see. There was no point in looking for him, since you couldn’t see him anyway.

  Relative to Little Dee (d), Kinto was quite large. But of course, anything would be. (Relative to Little Dee (d), even a subquark was large.)

  However, Little Dee (d) packs a wallop. Just ask Kinto.

  Little Dee (d) lived with Kinto, and that was why he always returned to Kinto. No matter how bad Kinto was—how stupid, how bumbling, how dull—he was loyal, and most of all, he was a known quantity, and, most of all, safe. Kinto was home. Little Dee (d) may not have had anything else, but at least he had Kinto, & that was something.

  Little Dee (d) observed that there were many people in the world. He & Kinto were just two. There was no need for them—Little Dee (d) observed that; there were plenty of people (if that was what was wanted), and plenty to do whatever there was to be done. So there was no real need for them at all. Nevertheless, they existed, and so they had to make do as best they could, carving out a life for themselves, and such pleasures as they could find, or create, within that life; and trying to stay out of trouble.

  Little Dee (d) liked to make trouble now & then, deliberately. Kinto made trouble accidentally.

  •

  SO YOU CAN see how fun it was for my brother and me to grow up with my parents in that house that used to be on a farm owned by a brewer named Pabst; and my mom would sometimes become exasperated with my father, and it was still fun.

  My father would write for fun. He had other jobs. I gave him the Waste Land book in 1992, and then I finished high school, and went to college, and his marriage dissolved; and he moved to the desert, and I moved to Paris, and then I came back and he died. My brother and I went through the stuff, and one interesting thing we found (among the stuff that we had time to go through, there’s tens of thousands of pages) is this, a very funny little thing he put together when I’d given him the Waste Land book. It’s basically a folder in which he filed junk mail, but he added commentary—so obviously it’s a parody of Eliot, as can be seen from the cover, with Wyndham Lewis’s famous portrait of the poet framed in the tacky notebook window. Old Possum does not look happy, that’s for sure.

  The thing begins with almost random jottings—is talk cheap?

  I am not a Shaw fan:

  It goes on in this lighthearted vein for about a dozen or so pages, and then the tone begins to change. Notes on Shelley’s madness; notes on the linkage between writing and guilt, between writing and obscenity (that Byron, “too, like me, + most good, genuine writers” wrote “dirty”).

  Now: I am not a poet. I is nothing—yet the I remains of interest.

  To think that this whole time I was reading and asking him about literature, everything I read I’d ask him about—I talked to him for weeks about my frustration with Wallace Stevens before he finally admitted he couldn’t stand him either, and I was so relieved—and to learn that he’d destroyed a 350-page novel:

  There’s a lot of midwestern humor in there, but who is this editor, this woman who wanted to see his novel? What novel?

  Interesting that he was reading Rushdie, I wonder which one. And the final page:

  Not long after he finished writing this notebook, my parents did separate. I was living in Europe. My brother decided to go to college in Los Angeles. My father asked him if he wanted a ride. Sure, my brother said. So one fall morning they got up early and threw some luggage in the car and climbed in and pulled out of the driveway, and my brother asked my father if he’d said good-bye to our mother, and he didn’t respond, and off they drove to California; and my parents never saw one another again. My father lived in various places out West—for a while, in a motel on Route 66; for a time in a really tiny town somewhere called Lodi (not the one in California); for a while on the banks of Lake Powell, a stunning reservoir on the Utah/Arizona border. The dust was bad for his lungs; he wasn’t eating well; he smoked and drank coffee and wrote nonstop. He said he didn’t commit himself to writing as a youth because he felt he hadn’t accumulated enough experiences; but that by the time he tried to catch up, he had accumulated too much experience. He wrote mainly poetry, but also plays and essays, including an essay on the question of pain, also a theme, obviously, of this thing I’ve been writing. I only visited him once there. We had a great time, doing nothing, really, but talking. He rarely drank. For some reason he had a good bottle of Riesling sitting there, but he didn’t have a corkscrew, so we opened the bottle with the aid of a hammer and an awl. We sipped the wine outside, watching the desert turn itself from a desert in the daytime to a desert in the nighttime.

  Was this when I was living in Paris? I guess. I forget the chronology—it gets confusing, because I took a year off from college to go live in Paris, and then I came back to finish college, and it was during part of that year that my dad came back to Chicago and we shared an apartment. Even then, my parents didn’t see each other—just ninety miles away. And then I moved back to Paris, so I guess it was then that he moved to Los Angeles, not that it really matters.

  There’s a story about a famous filmmaker I heard or read somewhere, and I don’t know if it’s true. He sat his wife and family down and explained to them that he loved them very much, but he also loved film, and if it ever became a conflict, he would have to choose film, and he loved them and therefore wanted them to know that. And my dad would often quote Yeats’s quote about the choice between “perfection of the art and perfection of the life.” To me, my father was one of the most emotionally well-balanced people I’ve ever known—not that he didn’t have his moods, obviously—but overall he was one of the happiest people I’ve known. My brother, however, thinks that he was profoundly unhappy because he felt creatively unfulfilled. Certainly the question of whether to publish was on his mind—the strength of this preoccupation, as evident in the notebook which purports to be about junk mail but swiftly turns into a meditation on this subject, was a surprise to me. We didn’t spend a lot of time talking about the problem of balancing life and art, whether or not to publish, to submit stuff; whether it’s important to publish, to be recognized, et cetera. We spent most of the time talking about actual books. (We talked about philosophy sometimes too, especially when I was flirting with getting seriously into philosophy for a period of time in college that lasted maybe eight months. He was excited intellectually by philosophy but it wouldn’t stick, he said; the words had no “weight.”)

  I had been talking before about the task of properly positioning the self that suffers within the other selves; Klee had wondered if he’d given the proper weight to eroticism in his work, as a whole. I guess one of the things that comes up when I think about my father is, what’s the proper position of art within a life?

  A lifelong smoker, he acquired emphysema, and this mixed with other ailments that come up with aging. He loved Los Angeles, which might seem paradoxical since he might seem like he was an irascible aesthete, but he really wasn’t. Then there were health crises off and on in varying degrees of seriousness, but things always seemed to resolve themselves. But then one da
y I called him and—for some reason—I transcribed part of the conversation, and it turned out to be the last time we spoke. I’ve already quoted a part of this but it bears repeating.

  [My father:] I’m just sitting on the edges of the ends of life, feeling no pressure to do anything, just the visual beauty of nature without worrying about what’s going on inside. The real mystery is in the science and the physics; that’s the mystery of life, in my opinion. The DNA and the molecular and the chemistry and the biology is just absolutely extraordinary, the intricacy of it just blows me away; the way it evolved.

  [Me:] What about art?

  [My father:] Art, I think, is an attempt of man’s conscious mind to make his own design, and he tries it in engineering, to see if it will work, and I mean he makes a rocket ship that will fly? Well, what the hell, the katydid does that with one arm tied behind his back and does it with painting and so on, nature is so good at that there’s simply no comparison. Ransom* said that there’s no reason, there’s no way we can improve it, except maybe a little with our arts, but I don’t know if there’s much of an improvement. I mean, the most scoffed-at remark in all of literature, Joyce Killmer’s—“I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree”—is the most profound thing ever said about art, because that is absolutely true. From any point of view, whether interior or exterior. And the thing is all built in. It just happens. You know how hard most of the time we have to work for anything good at all in our stuff, right? Meanwhile nature’s just throwing this stuff out.

  [Me:] That’s a very good approach, it’s being intellectually honest, yet . . . It’s honest in both ways. Envious, astonished by the whole thing, and yet somewhat skeptical, wondering if it’s a virtue or not.

  [My father:] I find your writing also often takes some very interesting self-saving turns! (Laughs.)

  [Me:] Have you read David Foster Wallace’s essay on tennis? He played when he was younger. He said Stefan Edberg’s hobby, apparently, is staring at walls.

  [My father:] Gee, that’s great. He’s my kind of guy.

  He meant Edberg, not Wallace. He never read Wallace. And funny that he mentioned my “writing,” because I hadn’t written. I wonder what he was talking about. When we had that conversation I had already bought a ticket for LA, was due to leave in a couple of weeks; a few days later my brother—who was living out there—called and said—hmm, this looks kinda bad. And I said—should I fly out now? And he said—well, wait. And then an hour later my brother called back, and he was gone.

  We cleaned up the apartment, pretty much spotless, an oxygen tank, nothing on the walls except for the poster of Favre, and books and reams and reams of paper, poems endlessly redone, hundreds of versions of the same poem (that was his problem, maybe—didn’t have the need to finish), and the manuscript in the typewriter, midsentence, paused, like Welles. My brother and I split up the books and the manuscripts and my gift to him—the Waste Land facsimile—was returned to me with an inscription on the frontispiece that reads thusly:

  This book was given to me by my son Joshua. That is why I value it. Eliot is important to me (and important, not just to me) but more important is this book because it was given to me by my son Joshua, who is more important to me than Eliot.

  Eliot is a great poet (I think) but Joshua is a great son and it is greater to have him as a son than to have Eliot, great poet tho’ he is.

  I don’t, in fact, quite know what to make of Eliot—is he genuine or not? Something spurious about him, devious and/or at least elusive, but I have no doubt about my son Joshua, absolutely genuine.

  So while my mind goes back & forth on Eliot, it doesn’t on Josh; my love for him and his for me is firm and committed.

  Eliot has a world of admirers who love him (and hate him) with varying degrees, so that my admiration for him is not special and unique. But no one loves Joshua more than I do. I have a claim on him no one can equal. What a great boy. What a great son. What a great man to be.

  Thanks a lot for the book, this Eliot, Joshua. This makes Eliot’s value to me, at times uncertain, often fluctuating, more certain, because you gave it to me.

  7/92

  P.S. I agree with you: Pound took out some good stuff.

  He’s referring to a few passages we had talked about. He annotated the book, so we have the urtext and Eliot’s corrections and Pound’s corrections and comments and my dad’s comments. “My thoughts in a tangled bunch of heads and tails”: Pound took it out but my father wrote “great—exact.” Pound excised a Prufrockian parenthetical “Perhaps it does not come to very much” on grounds that it was “Georgian” and my dad wrote, “Why take out just because Georgian?” And in the fourth chapter, the one that Pound radically truncated, we have a section Eliot called “The Death of a Saint Narcissus,” but obviously a description of Saint Sebastian:

  So he became a dancer to God.

  Because his flesh was in love with the burning arrows

  He danced on the hot sand

  Until the arrows came.

  As he embraced them his white skin surrendered itself to the redness of blood, and satisfied him.

  Now is he green, dry and stained

  With the shadow in his mouth.30

  And my father writes in pencil next to this, “an extremely fine poem, extremely erotic.” And obviously discovering this beautiful letter to me, after he had died, was very moving, and the letter tells us another thing about positioning: the positioning of art in life.

  A very generous thing to do, to write that letter. Since his death, he’s appeared in three dreams, all related to my diagnosis. (Jeez, dreams again. Maine-born Carroll Terrell, that late, eminent Ezra Pound/Stephen King scholar, wrote that Yeats’s “whole work, early and late, is so filled with dreams that assigning a specific source can only be idle speculation.”)31 When I felt the thing in my neck, I taught my music history class at Columbia and then went over to health services in John Jay Hall, where Lorca had lived when he was the poet in New York. A male nurse checked it out and said don’t worry about it, it’s just a virus, and for some reason I didn’t think so; I asked for a second opinion. So another white coat came in, a woman this time, and said, yeah, you should get that checked out right now, so I went directly across town, to the East Side, where an ear-throat-nose guy stuck a needle right into my neck. (He said, don’t worry, it’s so tiny it’s painless, and he was absolutely right, and that was kind of cool, to know that; Caroline was into needle play and occasionally that would freak me out a little, so it normalized that side of things.) And he said, come back in a week, we’ll have the results. So I knew the room. And the night before the next appointment I had a vivid dream in which I was sitting in the room with my father, and the door was half open, and the doctor guy passed by and glanced in and smiled, and kept going, and I felt a rush of relief: my father and I felt a rush of relief: but then the doctor actually came in and said that the tumor was malignant, and my father broke down in tears, in agony, and that was the worst part of the whole thing, seeing him like that.

  And oddly enough the next day, I was sitting in the same room—not with my father, obviously, but with my brother, Matthew—and the door was half open, and I knew what was going to happen. And I kid you not—the doctor guy passed by and glanced in and smiled, and kept going, and then I knew what the deal was. It was the dream, exactly: played out on my retina, like a dream. And then the doctor really did come in and say that the tumor was malignant, and my brother and I, stunned, took a weird walk through Central Park, silent.

  I told Matthew about the dream. It meant that I was dying. Obviously my father knew I was going to die, and that’s why he cried in the dream.

  Matthew: “No, no, I don’t think so.” (Matthew knows much more about dreams, and Jung, and really everything, than I do.) The dream, obviously a vision, meant that I would survive; the tears of the father were tears of joy: that I, a writer, needed to feel terrific pain before releasing my subject, but that I would release my
subject: that I was transforming from the “man to be” to a “man”: that I was assuming his place.

  In retrospect, those words from my brother formed the first ray of hope. In the second dream, after I had started chemo, I was having a conversation with my father, we were strolling somewhere, I think in Central Park (in film, this is called a “walk and talk”). I can’t remember the subject of our conversation, but his body parts were disappearing, one by one, and neither of us made any reference to that fact.

  The third occurred after I learned the chemo didn’t work, before the transplant. This really seemed like a visitation: it was obvious that my father was in the underworld: here I was Ulysses, speaking with Achilles. We were making small talk, avoiding the elephant in the room: the fact that my father was dead.

  Finally I asked him, so what was death like, anyway? He averted his eyes: my query was a faux pas, a breach of some metaphysical protocol.

  But I knew him better than that. Come on, I said. What was it like?

  He paused, then answered. “Fiery,” he allowed. “But totally unlike what you would imagine. And actually, not so bad.”

  I haven’t talked with him since.

  * * *

  * I mean you can look it up online, but this was the kind of bookshop where the owner started a James Joyce society and the first guy to join was T. S. Eliot. And the comedian Woody Allen said that the Gotham Book Mart was “everyone’s fantasy of what the ideal bookshop is.” And if the store had once safeguarded and distributed banned books by Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, and if your girlfriend is somewhat intrigued by Anaïs Nin, and if you’re both so young (too young, was the problem partly, what on earth can one do about that?) and enjoying conversations and flying into Manhattan, and if the Gotham Book Mart is a few thousand feet below, and if you’re holding her laughter loving hand, and she’s wearing black knit stockings, then you might understand why Woody Allen uses the words “fantasy” and “ideal.”