Sleeping in the apartment the first night was strange. Neither of us could remember where we were when we woke at our usual early hour. Sybil remembered first, shot out of bed, dressed, and went for the papers (‘Imagine,’ she gloated, ‘having the Post and the New York Times at seven o’clock on the same day they appear!’) and what she calls etwas and coffee from Bread and Chocolate on the corner.
The pleasure of cities—das gewisse, that certain something—cannot be denied. Thus far I have been able to identify five: reunions with friends we have reluctantly left behind; the presence of a physician, Amiel Segal, whom I admire and trust; the morning newspapers; buttery scones from the bakery across the street; and daily Mass at St. James, five blocks away. Try as I might, I can think of no others.
Oh yes, one other: the flea market on our block, every Sunday morning. Last week we bought a photograph of the sculpture at Hain’s Point. Jim Culhane took the picture of Charles Johnson’s remarkable work. A furious prophet lies half buried in the ground; only his arm, one leg, and his John Brown—like head can be seen. The photographer says there is talk of removing the wonderful piece and replacing it with a park. So I bought his photograph in case the sculpture disappears. This morning we decide we will hang it in Maine near the woodstove in the living room and not far from the nineteenth-century colored drawing of the Capitol.
Graffiti spotted on a fence at Dartmouth College during a visit to Hanover:
‘Why worry about tomorrow when today is so far off?’
Jane calls to say she is still having her unpleasant health problems, although Valium continues to help. Her appointment with her neurologist is not far off. I am anxious for that to take place, although she seems quite sure nothing is really wrong. Her confidence calms me. I notice how willing I am to accept reassurance for my worry, as though I am glad to be rid of it, no matter how flimsy the grounds for its dismissal.
A rainy, windy, misty Sunday. I worry about driving across the bridge to church in Stonington, and even more about a power failure (as common as weeds in this area. Sometimes a cloud passing overhead seems to cause the power to go off) while I am using the computer. So I abandon both enterprises, put on my heavy jacket and gloves, take the ash cane that Richard Lucas, my friend who died of AIDS, sent me in the last month of his life, and walk across to the bookstore.
Sybil has a fire going in the woodstove, and is happily selling books to a dealer from away, and to our favorite customer, the potter Charlie Hance, who lives and works on Deer Isle, and is a serious (and yes, avid) collector of editions of modern poets. Sybil says he makes her feel secure in her business, because there is always a stack of his books ‘on hold’ on the shelf, almost as if he were investing in Wayward Books’ future. A few days after we first arrived to take up residence in Maine, Sybil showed her books at a fair in Bucksport. She had one customer, Charlie, who bought a first edition of Wallace Stevens, I think it was. After that, she says, she felt reassured about the future of Wayward Books Down East.
Next day: Ed Kessler writes from Washington (and American University) that End Zone struck him as ‘a sea-level book, a stoical book.’ He says he senses no rage against the dying of the light and asks: ‘has the Hound of Heaven lost your scent?’ and sends me a poem by William Carlos Williams called ‘To Waken an Old Lady.’ I’ve never read it before:
Old age is
a flight of small
cheeping birds
skimming
bare trees
above a snow glaze.
Gaining and failing
they are buffeted
by a dark wind—
But what?
On harsh weedstalks
the flock has rested,
the snow
is covered with broken
seedhusks
and the wind tempered
by a shrill
piping of plenty.
Ed advises me: ‘Don’t be too resigned; keep some shrillness in your piping of plenty.’
The postscript to Ed’s letter is a scene he witnessed in his bank the other morning. A large black lady waited at the front of the line before the cashier’s station. Further back on the line stood a man with a little boy. The black lady’s beeper went off, and the boy said to his father: ‘Is she backing up?’
Another correspondent, Dagmar Miller, a woman of about my age, I surmise, delineates the many similarities between her life and mine that she noted in my book. She too loves the water. For her, too, it serves as a recuperative element. She grew up in New York City, ‘in the Washington Heights area and remember its good days,’ was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, had a photographic memory, was going to join the WAVES but ‘the War ended too soon,’ worked in Washington as a journalist, spent time at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, knew my friends Howard Simons and Jim Boatwright, both now dead, one of cancer, the other of AIDS.
In her youth, she memorized the same astronomical facts as I did.
‘Every so often I, too, silently recite the names of the planets. But over the years, Pluto has become Plato.’
She liked my book, she writes, and I enjoy reading her praise. My pleasure reminds me of Mark Twain’s remark: ‘Oh, I do love compliments—we all do, humorists, congressmen, burglars—all of us in the trade.’
Yesterday I heard of an old lady who was driving out the Main Line after an afternoon concert of the Philadelphia Orchestra. A young driver, under the influence, crossed the median line and crashed into her. She died instantly, while her head was still filled with fine music. Or so I imagine. From that single point of view, I consider her a lucky woman.
A book Sybil picks up at a sale: an intriguing history, published in 1971 by Robert Reisner, of graffiti. It contains a photograph of drawings found on the wall of a cave in a prehistoric Egyptian tomb (they can be read) and advances through time to the present. It is full of quotations. I liked two modern graffiti found on walls in universities.
—At Cornell University: ‘I think I exist, therefore I exist, I think.’
—At the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor: ‘It often shows a fine command of the English language to say nothing.’
Norman Mailer wanted us to believe that graffiti were an important form of popular culture. This book at hand, by exploring their history, takes the phenomena very seriously, turning them into literary art. Anytime now I expect to see a graduate thesis that connects subway scrawls and graffiti with the mainstream culture of our time.
Mailer saw in graffiti the desperate expression of disenfranchised young persons putting their mark on cities. For our time this may be true. I always feel a pang of sorrow when I pass a great rock formation at the edge of a city and see painted on it something like ROB LOVES LUCY. JUNE 1953. Did they marry? If they did, does he love her still? I think (with my usual misanthropy), probably not. If they didn’t, and if Rob is still alive, does he look back with longing to that June graduation night almost forty years ago when, full of beer and high spirits, he climbed a steep cliff and immortalized himself and his high school sweetheart with red paint on white rock? However it all turned out, there is always an unexplainable grief for me in the sight of such graffiti.
People stop me in Blue Hill to say they too are planning to write their memoirs. Some write to say they have led a truly fascinating life, and surely I would like to hear about it and then commit it to writing for them.
Of course, it is true: everyone who has lived for a while has within them wonderful memories, events that only they are privy to. But often the expressed desire is followed by the sentence: ‘I would write it myself, if only I had the time.’ To them, the writer is someone who is not doing something more important, like them, and therefore has the time.
Simon & Schuster sends me its new catalogue. Dutifully I read through all such mailings to see if there is something of interest to me that I should watch for in the months ahead. I am stopped halfway through the announcements of new hardback books by a title: A Look Back from the End
Zone. This turns out to be a genuine sports memoir about fathers and sons, football and competition, a book that didn’t borrow the idea for a metaphor, the way I did.
November
The time on either side of now stands fast.
—Maxine Kumin
Rain today, and a light coating of frost over everything. The Cove has taken on the look of steady menace. Blue water is gone, turned to grey, and no longer extends a shining welcome to the visits of birds, boats, or swimmers. At six this morning when it was fifty-eight degrees in my study, I had trouble starting a fire in the woodstove. After much futile paper-shredding and smoke I gave up, and resignedly turned on the furnace. It caught with a roar, echoing my own fury at having to burn expensive oil.
Failure with the stove repeats itself at the clipboard. There I am working on a novel which I have called, as a convenient joke (after the title in the contract), Unnamed. Nothing comes. I go to the computer on which I edit the work of yesterday, for this memoir. Nothing works. I walk aimlessly about the house, stowing things which do not need putting away in already jammed kitchen cabinets. Desperate, I decide to change the location of pictures on the walls.
I am of the opinion that doing this brings them back to life. They are dissolving into oblivion, I reason, when they stay too long on one wall, in one place. They seem to sink into it. Changed, replaced, they rise up and out, demanding that ‘attention must be paid,’ as Willy Loman’s wife required for her husband.
So I put The Prophet where Three Sirens on a Rocking Horse hung. The Sirens are a pen-drawing acquisition from New Orleans last winter. Funny and startling as the three nude ladies are, especially astride the horse and stared at by a lascivious, mustachioed gentleman in the bushes, I have not really seen them for a long time. Perhaps, in their new location …
I go back to my study (now warmed), sit at my desk, and stare out at a red squirrel busily engaged in digging up the bulbs we have just planted in the rock garden. By now, too indolent to consider going onto the cold deck to chase him, I dial Helen Yglesias’s number, feeling guilty because this is Helen’s writing time too. There is no answer. Then I remember why: Helen is not answering her phone because she is in New York for the month.
I decide I am hungry. It is ten o’clock. I cannot be hungry. I’ve eaten a good breakfast.
But of course I know what is wrong with me. My affliction is creative drought, another oxymoron. Today I am a dry well, a milkless breast. Diagnosis: an aridity of words, an absence of ideas, a lack of verbal vigor. Nothing for it but to water the indoor plants that, by now, are as needy of moisture as I, put a CD of Frederica von Stade on the player, and, when that is over, go out and shout at the marauding red squirrel if he, at least, is still at work.
I had planned to revise the first, sticky section of Unnamed. ‘Nothing doing,’ as we used to say. I give up. For some reason, Paul Valery’s dictum comes into my head: ‘A poem is never finished, it is abandoned.’ Equally true of a novel.
Sybil comes back from the bookstore for lunch, bringing the mail and the newspapers. A welcome distraction. She is very cheerful and tells me of her profitable morning. She priced books, vacuumed the store, rearranged the remainder table, sold a book via the telephone. Barren and unproductive, I say nothing. When she leaves, to return, presumably, to a profitable afternoon, I go through the Simon & Schuster catalogue again, and am amused to see that it is publishing The Birdcage Book. Birdcages, the copy reads, are the ‘new, new, popular collectible of the ’90s.’ I ought to send for it so I can shelve it with another absurd volume I have kept precisely because it is so ludicrous: Robert Gottlieb’s big, glossy book on plastic handbags.
I go upstairs to take a nap.
Next day: The sun, at long last. True, it is a pale cast of itself, somewhat sickly. But it lights up the faces of the few pansies still clinging to life in the round flower bed, and illuminates our white rowboat lying upside down in the rough field, looking as though it is huddled, like the green canoe nearby, against the cold.
Feeling mentally alive once more after the sterile disaster of yesterday, I settle down to work, and then waste good time searching in the manuscript for my lost place where I stopped correcting the day before yesterday. Losing things … Elizabeth Bishop has a poem about that:
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Bishop catalogues all the things she has lost—door keys, places, names, her mother’s watch, houses, cities, a beloved person—and ends with a fine couplet:
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
L’envoi: Working well again is the process of finding what one thought one had lost. It is discovery of what one did not know one knew. The sun, thin as it is, shines indoors, on the words that emanate from my clipboard, on the screen of the display. Warmth rises from the unlit woodstove, and all seems well with the world in my head.
In today’s mail, I find three more adjectives to take careful note of. Alan Cheuse, critic and acquaintance from National Public Radio and Washington, writes to say he liked the book all right but found it a little ‘testy’ here and there. Good friend Joseph Caldwell, filling in at Yaddo for the director while the board tries to find a new one, and putting the finishing touches on his novel The Uncle from Rome, thought it ‘melancholy.’ And Joyce Thompson, a student at Florida’s Atlantic Center for the Arts a few years ago, author of two published novels, says it is good, if somewhat ‘bleak,’ company.
Next day: After some desultory shopping in Bangor, one of Maine’s three large cities and the nearest one to our peninsula, we lunch at Olsen’s, a favorite restaurant for natives in the Brewer area (Brewer is on the edge of Bangor). It is the habit of many retired persons to have their big meal of the day here, around noon. The waitress informs us, with a genuinely pleasant smile, as though we had been waiting a long time for this news, ‘We have turnips today.’ We look blank. She goes on, as if to enlighten us further:
‘With white-meat turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, salad, and coffee. Five ninety-five, and a senior-citizen discount.’
I decide to settle for a tuna-fish sandwich. But Sybil loves this kind of food and decides not to disappoint the expectant waitress. Looking around, we see that almost every couple and single diner has turkey, with turnips heaped up beside the thick white slices, mounds of mashed potatoes covered with thick brown gravy, and little white fluted paper cups of cranberry sauce. I gulp and look away.
Sybil grins and says to the waitress:
‘I’ll have the turkey. Could I have dark meat, please?’
‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘We only serve white meat.’
Sybil looks startled. She asks: ‘What do you do with the dark meat?’
The waitress has grown noticeably cooler. ‘I have no idea,’ she says, and leaves.
While we were in Bangor we looked into a bookstore to see if it had copies of End Zone. The clerk said they had none. In fact, she had not heard of it. Should she order it for us? We hasten to say no, and depart quickly. Outside, I tell Sybil that Nadine Gordimer once said: ‘The best way to be read is posthumously.’ There is some cold comfort in thinking that might happen to me.
Today I manned (wrong word now. Personed? Terrible-sounding. Womaned? Worse. Staffed? Well, maybe) the store while Sybil went to a book sale. A bearded young man with a knapsack came in, not to buy a book or even to look around, but to ask me about getting his novel published. Where could he find an agent? Did he need one, actually? Who are the good, stable publishers? I told him I had no answers to his questions. I have been on the fringes of the publishing world for a long time, I said.
Then he wanted to know about my writing methods. I told him enough, clearly, to make him decide I must be a very dull, untypical, orderly writer. I wanted to add that I was of the quill-pen generation, but he rushed on.
I refrained from pointing out that ‘irregular habits’ was an oxymoron, and went back to the book I was reading. He made a little show of fingering a book on the remainder table, and then, clearly disappointed by me, he left. I could hear the disgusted roar of his motorcycle as he turned onto the main road.
I have been receiving advice in the mail about ridding our garden and deck boxes of red squirrels, from persons who read of my failure in the afterwords to End Zone. One woman says to put cayenne pepper on the flowers in the boxes. A man advises placing mothballs around the roots. A longtime gardener says that drops of cooking fat will rid us of the little pests if they are applied in melted form: Squirrels don’t like the odor.
Perhaps aware, through intuition, that I am now receiving good advice aimed at their discouragement, the little red fellows have vanished before I had a chance to try out these various schemes.
Tracy, our carpenter and friend, is almost finished shingling the back side of our house. Now it has that new, raw, unweathered look that I hope will turn grey before long. She lunches with us on the screened porch she built last year. We use it in all seasons since we put up both plastic curtains and Plexiglas panels. The sun cooperates by providing solar warmth in the middle of the day. We feel privileged to have acquired, at moderate cost, a new room.
When she goes off to Bangor (she has decided that carpentry will not sustain her as she grows older and less fit so she has gone back to the university to get her degree) Tracy leaves behind her copy of the Bangor Daily News. The front page has a story about the fight between the merchants of Ellsworth, who oppose the use of the old, abandoned Federal Building, and a group of nuns who wish to shelter homeless persons there. One forthright city council member refers to these persons as ‘dirty bums’ who will desecrate, by their very presence, the fine Main Street of the city where the building stands.
Extra Innings Page 6