by W. S. Merwin
Blackmur became an altogether different figure in my life. He seemed much older, though he was only in his forties. In conversation, and in the series of long evening lectures that he gave in Whig Clio Hall on Joyce, Flaubert, and Mann, I felt I was listening to a literary intelligence of immense originality, authenticity, and subtlety. The play and the horizons of his mind, his basic sense that a critic, and so a reader, was a “house waiting to be haunted,” were exhilarating, and particular insights of his about poetry and literature remained with me as illuminations. I am sure he recognized and valued Berryman’s creed of poetry as an absolute for which nothing was ever adequate, but his nature turned it to the light rather differently. Art, literature, the creations of the imagination, as he saw them, were inexhaustible, but not greater than the whole of life that they represented. He was troubled, finally, by his sense that Yeats and Mann, whom he admired passionately, suggested that art, and the art of words, might be an end in itself, greater than the life they came from. He might quote Saint Augustine to the effect that the work of the imagination is an increment to the divine creation, but he remained reassured by the thought that “the best order [as I recall the sentence] is the higglety-pigglety we know, but that we do not dare—only God does.” Sometimes his sentences, like that one, were knotty and enigmatic, which no doubt was the way he wanted them to be. In later years, those few whom I have met or read who were impatient with his talk or his writing have objected to the difficulty of some of what he said or wrote, assuming that his gnostic “obscurity” was deliberate and even perverse. I soon came to revere him, and it seemed to me that his idiosyncratic, intricate phrases conveyed perceptions whose complexity could not be presented in any other way, and that they required, indeed, a close and sympathetic—and patient—attention.
Richard Blackmur’s awareness of me and of my own aspirations was something that I knew of, for the most part, indirectly and by chance, but I learned eventually that he had championed me when my own deviations as a student had aggravated some members of the faculty. I heard later, from a young professor, that at one faculty gathering he had asked a dean whether he had ever heard of Don so-and-so from Oxford. The dean said he had not. “Well, that’s not surprising,” Blackmur had said. “Almost the only thing he’s remembered for now is that it was he who had Shelley thrown out of Oxford.” Blackmur, more than anyone, was responsible for my remaining at Princeton, graduating, and going on to graduate school in Romance languages. “A good education,” he said to me once, “won’t do you any harm.” And he, like Berryman, opened the work of writer after writer to me like a new country.
After my parents, those two, Berryman and, above all, Blackmur, probably had more to do with forming my outlook, by the time I left for Europe, than anyone I had known.
8
A number of my older friends, particularly the returning veterans, were married, some of them living in ramshackle one-room apartments off campus. On weekdays we tended to gather at the Student Center to pick up our mail and sit around talking while we read it. The idea of having a woman partner living in one’s own room was a tantalizing notion. It would be years before Princeton admitted women as students, and there were very few young women around. One day when the subject of marriage came up I said, not seriously, that I supposed I would have to get married too, whereupon my friends turned on me as one, telling me that I was much too young for that. I had been told again and again that I was too young for something or other, and in a rush of impatience I said, “We’ll see about that,” and went out to the pay phone in the hall and called the Physics Department where Dorothy Ferry, my girlfriend at the time, was the secretary, and I proposed getting married.
Dorothy and I had met a few months before that. She had been walking across the campus with a friend, another secretary in the Physics Department, and I was on my way across it with a student friend. In the days before women were admitted to Princeton as students, young feminine figures on the campus stood out like primary colors. My friend knew Dorothy’s companion. We stopped to talk. Dorothy was pretty and pleasant and somehow I arranged to see her later, and we began to spend time together, on walks and then in my room.
Dorothy was living with her family in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, across the Delaware River from Trenton. It was a short bus ride from Princeton, and before long I went down with Dorothy and met her mother, Jenny, who worked as a travelling representative for Lerners Shops and between trips liked to spend her time at home. Dorothy’s father, Daniel, turned up. He was a big, burly, red-faced second-generation Irishman who had been a Golden Gloves boxing champion, or so he claimed and we all believed it. He was also a fairly regular drinker, bad tempered when in his cups, and he went in for bouts of staggering drunkenness fairly regularly, at the end of which he usually managed to drag himself home through the back streets, though sometimes he rested in the gutter on the way, and occasionally he woke up with his wallet missing. And I met Dorothy’s sister, Gloria, who had a job and a boyfriend but came home for weekends.
Jenny had come from a family of fervent Christian Scientists on Long Island and had found the pious atmosphere of her childhood so suffocating that she had sworn, in adolescence, that she would marry the first man who would take her away from there. By then she had a job in a Kushman’s Bakery. Dan had come in one day, tall, young, stalwart, and handsome, and had fallen for her, and apparently she had fallen for him—at least she had fallen far enough so that when he proposed to her, in circumstances that neither of them mentioned, she had accepted, although his means of livelihood had not been discussed and they had had little by way of general conversation. Dan repeated that because he had met Jenny in a Kushman’s Bakery he took off his hat every time he saw another shop in the chain, and they had had to leave Long Island because there were too many Kushman Bakeries there and he was catching cold.
The house was a tiny, low-ceilinged dwelling along the towpath of the derelict canal threaded behind the river towns between Philadelphia and Easton, a relic of the days before steam and rails. Jenny had found the house and bought it, and it was hers. The building may have been there before Washington crossed the Delaware, a few miles upriver. There were two small rooms in front, facing the small street, and a kitchen behind one of them, looking out toward the canal. A narrow boxed-in flight of stairs led up between the two front rooms, and another narrow, boxed-in flight led from the kitchen to the upstairs back bedroom. Small though it was, the house may have lodged two families in its early days. There had once been a big fireplace between the front rooms. The brick chimney was still part of the wall. But the fireplace was gone and had been replaced by a bulking kerosene stove, the only source of heat in the house.
The whole family, from Jenny to the aged police dog named Queenie, took me in at once, and Jenny and I got along like old friends. She loved books, had read widely all her life, and she was funny, irreverent, independent, and kind, with an adventurous streak that had helped her to make her own way to a life that she liked. There was still something between her and Daniel, though she made it clear that she was quite independent of him. But she was content to come home with him there, and share the back bedroom. She loved the house itself, and she kept Dan in his place, scolding him for his drinking, but giving him somewhere to hang his hat. He would have a few drinks, most evenings, on his way back from the foundry where he worked, and more if he had been out with the boys on a Saturday afternoon. He would open the door with a kind of lurch, and come in smelling of drink, and Jenny would say, “Dan, you’ve been drinking,” and he would deny it and sit down and pretend to read the paper.
Later we would all sit at the round table in the kitchen and eat Jenny’s goulash. He would have two heaping plates, eating with his face down over his dish, breathing hard, looking up grinning, and then he would push the plate away and say, “You know I hate goulash,” and mean it.
Sometimes after dinner we would play cards, usually Rummy, and sometimes we would cheat Dan, but in any case
he usually lost, and when he did he would get angry and stomp up the stairs to the bedroom. The string to turn the light on up there hung in the middle of the room, and we would hear him stumbling against the furniture until he caught it.
Dan had come from a family that Jenny referred to as “shanty Irish,” a couple of train stops down toward Philadelphia. She said that when she met Dan his family had never heard of any way of cooking potatoes except boiling them. Dan told stories about them, or made glancing references to them, and Jenny told versions that were more coherent. Dan’s boxing career must have been a brief glory for them, and she had met Dan when he was still riding the wake of that wave. He boasted of Irish parties taking a whole trolley car to a beach park, with a washtub of beer on the front platform and one of the Ferry boys taking the tops off with his teeth. Dan’s Irish-born father, often sustained by drink, had still stumbled along at a relatively advanced age, earning a living as a gandy dancer on the railroad, walking along the tracks with a sledge hammer, looking for spikes that had started to work loose out of ties, and whacking them back in with his maul. According to the account that had entered the family legend, the old man, as a result of fatigue or refreshment, had missed the spike with his mallet one day a few years back, and had brought the sledge down on his foot instead. He had lain writhing on the tracks for some time before he was found, and when they took him to the hospital he died on the operating table.
Shortly after I met Dan, someone at the foundry gave him a fireman’s three-section extension ladder and had it delivered to the house. It was, Dan said, a very valuable ladder, and he leaned it up in front of the house, where even without being extended at all it rose above the roof toward the big trees that had grown tall along the canal. He climbed up and crept around the roof looking for damaged shingles, which he had never thought to do before that, and then he moved the ladder around to the back of the house and checked the other side, and cleaned out the gutters carefully, crawling along the edges, and then he came down and tried to decide what to do with the ladder.
He did not want to leave it leaning up against the house, of course, away up above the chimney, as though there was work going on there that hadn’t been finished. He said it would be very useful if ever they needed to paint the house, but the house had been covered with white-enameled aluminum shingles, which he called alunium, and according to the guarantee it would never need to be painted. But he said the ladder would come in handy if they painted the upstairs window frames. If it was left leaning against the house, though, it would give burglars an idea about getting in that way.
So he laid the ladder down, three sections thick, across the front of the house, but burglars could see it there just the same, and it made it impossible to go in or out through the front door without stepping over it. Besides, Queenie, the old police dog who was so swaybacked that her belly nearly touched the ground, could not go in or out with it there. Burglars would be discouraged by how heavy it was, he said as he moved it around to the side of the house and laid it against the house there, but it was so long that it stuck out past the front and back corners, so that it was hard to walk around the house without falling over it. He moved it around to the back of the house and laid it to rest under the eaves, but then the back door could not be opened at all, and besides, Dan said, it would be too easy for someone to steal it from back there along the canal. For a while he considered laying it flat on the roof, but there was no way to fasten it up there, and what if it fell off in a high wind or something, and besides, once it was up there how could you get up there to take it down again if you wanted it?
He kept saying what a valuable ladder it was, though, and finally after days and weeks of deliberation and unsuccess he was visited by an idea, and opened one of the windows in the back bedroom, where Jenny and he slept, heaved the ladder up over the window frame, with some wear and tear on the sill, and went up inside the house, opened the door between the back room and the one in front of it, and dragged the ladder through. If it was angled right the ladder occupied the floor all the way from the front wall to the back window, where it stuck out toward the canal, but well out of reach of burglars. It was not ideal, but he felt it was a solution and believed he could angle it better so that it would lie on the floor and the window could close. He finally managed that, by moving the bed farther across the room into the corner, and running the ladder at a smart rake through the doorway.
But after that, in the evenings when he had lost at cards again and stormed up the back stairs to the bedroom, we would sit waiting, listening for him to find the string for the light, out in the middle of the room, and once the ladder was in place up there we could count the footsteps until we heard a terrible crash as he fell over the ladder in the dark. It happened regularly until one night we heard him limp cautiously back down the stairs, until he stood at the foot staring at us and said, “God damned booby trap.” And to Jennie he said, “Dearie, that ladder. It’s a valuable piece of equipment if we ever need it. I won’t lend it to nobody. I won’t give it away. I won’t sell it to nobody. I got nowhere to put it. I hate it.” Then he went back up the stairs cautiously as though he hoped to get past it without waking it.
His drinking habits got worse during Jennie’s trips away for Lerner’s, which he resented but grudgingly accepted because he knew he had to. The ladder too may have weighed on his mind. One morning after Dan had been out late, Jenny came downstairs early and found a pool of vomit inside the front door, on the carpet. She waited for Dan to come down, and confronted him with it. “Dan, you were drunk last night. Look at that. It’s disgusting.”
Dan said, “Queenie done it.”
Jenny said, “Are those Queenie’s teeth in the middle of it?”
The household certainly was unlike any other that I had ever been part of, though it recalled houses of school friends of mine where I had been welcome as a child, in which I had never been allowed to spend as much time as I would have liked. There had been several families who lived up the back alley behind our house in Scranton, for instance. Billy Mulligan’s, with his friendly, good-humored father who occasionally was seen coming home on his hands and knees, and his happy, retarded sister, Mary. And the Genoveses, the sexton’s family with their Italian doughnuts and their sewing machines in every room, which they taught me to use. Jenny had escaped to this backyard from the stifling respectability of Long Island, and her parents seemed to relish the life she had made for herself, to take a kind of vicarious pleasure in her escape, whatever they may have made of Dan. Jenny was the freewheeling soul of the house into which I was adopted without raising a ripple, and where I was taken for granted. Gloria, too, came and went with her boyfriend. There was no talk about plans, and I still had none when I went out to telephone Dorothy, two hundred yards away in the Physics Department, to suggest that we get married.
Dorothy was agreeable, equable, and attractive. She was a little older than I was, and had had one affair, for several years, with an older man. She liked to treat herself, several times a year, to trips to New York, with a woman friend, to the ballet, and her room was hung with reproductions of Degas paintings. To me, surrounded by married friends, having a regular girlfriend, on a campus where young women were rarely seen, seemed a slightly improbable, pleasantly disreputable gift of fortune.
When I proposed marriage, on the phone, she accepted, as though I had suggested going out for lunch, and I went back in and told the boys, and for once enjoyed their fussing about my youth. When I told my mother, she too, tried to discourage the idea, but when I spoke to my father, fresh out of his chaplain’s uniform, and the army, and asked him to marry us, he came and performed the ceremony, before a few witnesses, in the huge empty Gothic Princeton chapel, although he surely had his misgivings too.
By the time I met Alain Prévost, some four years after his father’s death, I had graduated, defiantly wearing a small beard like Ezra Pound’s (and then shaved it off). The uniforms had almost all gone from the Princeton ca
mpus by then, and the civilian students, including returning veterans, were filling it again. Dorothy and I were living in a single room on Bank Street, a one-block dead end, and we soon moved into the newly built Harrison Street Project, a development of small houses for married students, built from army barrack sections and arranged like an army base on the overgrown pastures where Bobby and I had ridden a few years before. The eating clubs were open again, and the social stratifications of Princeton social life had also returned, yet all of that seemed to be behind me. But Alain, as I came to know him, was a tenuous link to the traditional country-club Princeton of the twenties, the era of raccoon coats and Stutz Bearcats, of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s side of paradise, which had formed in Alain’s mind before he ever left France, and which was represented for him, and in part for me, by what he knew of Alan Stuyvesant and Alan’s older brother Louis. It was Alan Stuyvesant who had brought Jean Prévost’s son Alain to the States after the war and managed to enroll him at Princeton.