NONFICTION Czeslaw Milosz A Poetic State - Columbia: A Journal ...

Yannis Ritsos
(Trans, by Edmund Keeley)
Ron Lieber
Carole Oles
Peter Klappert
Daniel Simko
Bruce Beasley
Mark Craver
Robert Hass
John Lane
Sam Hamill
Tim McNulty
David Romtvedt
Nancy Schoenberger
Cathy Song
Sharon Olds
William Matthews
Kirsten Dehner
Italo Calvino
John Harney
Linda Gregg
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Three Poems
NONFICTION
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Two Poems
City of the Holy Flesh
Three Poems
Dust
Two Poems
Against Funerals
The Apple Trees at Olema
Two Poems
Two Poems
Three Poems
Farm Accident
Spring Maddens Animals
A Mehinaku Girl in Seclusion
The Man-Child
from A Happy Childhood
Jorge Luis Borges on
Leaves of Grass
Italo Calvino on Invisible Cities
Interview with Jack Gilbert
About Jack Gilbert
Czeslaw Milosz
A Poetic State
Translated by the author & Robert Hass
As if I were given a reversed telescope instead of eyes, the world
moves away and everything grows smaller, people, streets, trees,
but they do not lose their distinctness, are condensed.
In the past I had such moments writing poems, so I know distance,
disinterested contemplation, putting on an T, which is not T, but
now it is like that constantly and I ask myself what it means,
whether I have entered a permanent poetic state.
Things once difficult are easy, but I feel no strong need to communicate
them in writing.
Now I am in good health, where before I was sick because time
galloped and I was tortured by fear of what would happen next.
Every minute the spectacle of the world astonishes me; it is so
comic that I cannot understand how literature could expect to cope
with it.
Sensing affliction every minute, in my flesh, by my touch, I tame it
and do not ask God to avert it, for why should He avert it from me
if He does not avert it from others?

Milosz
I dreamt that I found myself on a narrow ledge over the water
where large sea fish were moving. I was afraid I would fall if I looked
down, so I turned, gripped with my fingers at the roughness of the
stone wall, and moving slowly, with my back to the sea, I reached
a safe place.
I was impatient and easily irritated by time lost on trifles among
which I ranked cleaning and cooking. Now, attentively, I cut
onions, squeeze lemons and prepare various kinds of sauces.
Berkeley, 1977
Arlene Plevin
Letters
The Atlantic Ocean knocked yearly on our doors, slipping its
debris under the stoop. Grandmother said the debris was letters
from the deep, the waters around Long Island, and the
only answers to her letters to the dead.
A certain time of the year I would find her, pencil gripped in
hand and creamy notepaper spread on the lace tablecloth, writing.
She was sending her thoughts upward, she said, letting her loved
ones know that she thought of them. She would stamp and address
them, as if by that act they would gain a sort of legitimacy. Then
' she'd burn them by the Sabbath candles, their ashes graying the
sideboard. Sometimes I'd find them temporarily abandoned and
read them:
Dear Husband,
It has been ten years now and I still light the Yartzite.
I have polished your trunk and reframed the portrait of
our youngest. It will be Passover again and each year I
feel you will be with us again.
These letters coincided with the ocean's rampage: the beginning
of hurricane season. The few memories I have of my father
come from this season, before this time. All the loose shutters
received a nail and a whack, to keep them from banging and waking
the women, he said.
He was a big man, his stomach soft and his hands impossibly
huge to me. He would have me carry the bucket of nails.
"How about here?" he'd ask.
"No, Dad, a little lower."
"Well, you know best." He smiled.

Plevin
Mother removed all the little objects from the porch. She moved
inside the begonias that lasted through the ocean's salt and sand
laden air. From my window, the red begonias were mouths against
the ocean. Mother fastened down the porch swings and cushions,
going through the yearly debate of whether or not she should take
them in all together. Father perched on the porch rail, bourbon in
hand, and watched Mother and Grandmother testing everything.
They rocked the rail slats, tapped the shutters, and pushed on the
steps to see what was loose or likely to blow away.
"David," Mother said, "surely the gutter will blow away this
year!"
He laughed. "No, you say that every time. It will be here when
we are all dead and buried."
"Not in front of the child," Grandmother said.
"Who's the child?" I'd always say.
"You, pumpkin," Dad said, ruffling my hair and gazing out
over the yard to the sea.
"But, Dad, when will we all be dead and buried?"
Grandmother clucked and Dad just gripped my hand, saying,
"Not for a long, long time . . . not until you have children of your
own. "See, David," my Grandmother said. "She's too young to even
think about that." She sighed and went into the house.
I went to check on my shallow bowls of starfish arms. I found
them in tidal pools some mornings and was trying to see if I could
get them to grow a body. Some of the bowls had fresh water with
liquid vitamins, others had salt water. I had swiped some of my
father's medicine and put the crushed pills in one bowl. But nothing
had happened, so I put more water in all of them, talking to them
softly the way Mother talked to her plants.
Grandmother had only come to live with us when we moved
by the ocean. She fussed over the moving of her possesions, carrying
the glass bowls and china animals in her shawls, wrapped
securely and next to her chest. On the day she moved in, I was sitting
on her bed, its corners piled with folded clothes and stacks of
photographs. She unbuttoned her lace blouse, smoothing her skirt.
Her skin seemed so loose, like an unironed dress. She dropped a
piece of cloth and I got off the bed to retrieve it. It smelled like her,
Letters
like pine sachet and dust. "See," she said, "that's the handkerchief I
put next to me, everyday. It's the scent your grandfather loved. But
you don't remember him well, do you, dear?"
"I remember his beard, Grandma, and he gave me money on
Passover, even though I didn't find the matzoh."
I never found anything. The smallest of the cousins, I lost the
most mittens, mislaid all of my collections, and could never find
the hiding place of the matzoh though Grandfather sometimes
secretly winked at me as if I was getting warmer. I would ruffle the
pillows listening for its telltale crack and peek behind the curtains,
behind pictures.
The grownups laughed and pretended cowardice before our
energetic search, as we created temporary destruction in the order
of the house. It seemed as if my older cousins always found it. They
would laugh at me, holding the flat bread aloft, shrieking, "I got it!
I got it!" I was once again consoled, with an embrace from Mother
and a "you'll find it next year." But next year found me always
smaller than they and always mystified about its location.
Our table for Passover was different from others. We had
several empty place settings. Father said it was pagan, but Grandmother
set a place for Grandfather, Elijah the Prophet, and for a
long dead brother. I'd open the door for Elijah and wonder who
would come in. Mother muttered that the ceremony felt like a
seance with all the plates grouped like hands touching. Secretly,
under the table, I moved my leg next to Father's and touched his
knee. He smiled, told me what a young lady I was, and let me have
the first sip of wine.
It was raining when I first got drunk. Now, whenever I drink,
the liquor is never as sweet or as heavy as it was that first wet Friday
night. My first glass was presided over by Mother, Grandmother,
the cousins, and Father. It was he who filled the slenderstemmed
glass high, ignoring Mother's glare and the tsk-tsk of
Grandmother.
'That glass came with me all the way from Poland. It is a
child's glass meant for a child's portion," she reprimanded. I already
had my finger on the glass, dipping into the liquid.
"Not so fast," Mother said.
"Oh, Mother, I won't," I groaned.

Plevin
Father lifted my hand, the wine glass in it. His hand held his
large glass filled to the top. The stem of his glass had two horses,
magnificent with thighs bulging out from the glass. Two bearded
men roped the horses' necks as they pawed the air.
"Come now," Father said, beckoning to everyone around the
table. "Let us all toast." Around the table the glasses lifted. Each
face looked at my father. Father's brother, his bad eye hidden by a
patch, tilted back his chair. Mother leaned forward, elbows on the
table, intent on Father as if this were a wedding ceremony. Grandmother
adjusted her position and a few drops of wine spotted her
lace collar. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched my two elder
cousins, their faces somber in this circle, their limbs unmoving,
rigid, as if that strictness was what it meant to be an adult. From
the last of the sun, the chandelier shone faintly red. The huge
decanter of wine caught a reflected gleam and glowed with an inner
heat.
My father cleared his throat. His words filled the room like the
low heavy thunder of summer. He still held my hand which held
my glass. Raising the wine upward, he intoned the blessing.
Beyond the faces, the corners seemed dimmer, as if mist was
creeping from them. The circle of faces were a small fire, fed by
things I had no names for yet.
Father wished our goodness would triumph and please God.
He felt the veins in my hand gently and asked that our health be
good, that our limbs grow and mature like this wine. At the blessing's
end, we bowed our heads. Father released my hand. I peeked
up. Grandmother was crying. Mother was looking at Father, expecting
no one to see her. She started to frown at me, then smiled,
lowering her eyes. After the silence of our breaths and small
movements, we looked up. Father said, "Amen, let us begin." And
the water pitcher, at Grandmother's insistence, made the rounds
first. Then the food got passed.
Grandmother believed in the goodness of all water. I had to
drink a glass of spring water before each meal. 'The ocean is a
tonic," from years back I hear her saying, "medicine better than
those doctors. What is new is not always good."
She encouraged my swimming in the grey sea, yelling,
"Breathe! Breathe!" and enjoyed the sight of my friends and me
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stroking over the whitecaps. And yet, with the threat of rain,
Grandmother scolded me in advance. She'd send me out with galoshes
like anchors: rubber guardians against the weather and the
dirt that thronged the sea's debris in wait for me.
Once two friends and I walking along the beach found the
washed up body of a sea gull. Afraid to touch it, we poked at its
feathers and feet with sticks. Finally one of us knocked it over and
we all ran back a few steps, squealing. The underside was squirming
with iridescent bugs. Grandmother came along at that moment,
yelling at us to leave the poor bird alone.
When I woke her this morning, early, her face loomed above
the sheets. "What are you doing awake?" she asked me.
"Oh, nothing. I just thought it was going to rain."
"Well, come and lay beside me for awhile."
The curtains fluttered above the window sill. Beyond the window's
edge, the air hung like clothing from the dryer, thick and
electric. Under the covers I was warm. Grandmother smiled and
put her arm around me, and the rain began to fall softly. Soon it intensified,
surrounding the house. It sounded like voices murmuring
regrets, the syllables indistinct but washing down the air, the
ocean, the house, until all I could hear was Grandmother's throaty
breathing and the speech of the rain.
Tonight Grandmother calls Mother for her bowl of beans to
snap. I watch them on the porch, snapping beans against this evening's
slight hunger. Tomorrow is the yearly anniversary. I have
been told I can accompany them to the grave. Offer my contribution.
I go upstairs and prepare for bed.
If I have grown up, I have not grown away. The lifelines of my
palm grow toward the sea, they seem long to me. In dreams I imagine
a desert stretches between us. My father has the water. He tries
not to sweat, the liquid is within him. From the desert's far end, I
struggle; I am dry, thirsty, but I will survive. The sand blows
against me, into my eyes. Still I see this figure moving towards me.
He is still moving, hands outstretched, when I wake.
Below me, Mother's heels tap the linoleum. The tern's cries
break the prison of leisure sounds; I rise from the bed. Downstairs,
Mother is attempting to be quiet.
"Grandmother is sleeping," she says.

Plevin
"Is she all right?"
"Well," Mother hesitates. "She was a little tired last night."
"Should she see a doctor7"
"No, she wouldn't anyway," Mother says to the window, then
turns to me. She is crying; I am surprised, moving towards her. She
puts up a hand as if to ward me off then drops it around my neck,
rubbing the skin next to my ears. Smiling, she says, "You're growing
up so fast. Soon you'll leave."
"No, I won't. I won't."
"Shh," she hugs me. "It will be time. I won't mind."
Jorge Luis Borges on Leaves of Grass
The following is an excerpt taken from a seminar given by Jorge
Luis Borges to the students in the Graduate Writing Division at
Columbia University on September 30, 1982.
In 1855 two epic poems were written: one altogether forgotten
is Longfellow's Hiawatha, and the other of course, is Leaves of
Grass. I think that of all literary experiments Leaves of Grass is the
most successful and far more daring than the others, for example
Joyce's Ulysses or even Finnegan's Wake, but the success has been
so great that nobody thinks of it as being experimental and nobody
has attempted the same thing.
Mr. Walt Whitman began by the idea of democracy and also
by the wish, by the will to write an epic poem. Now all epic poetry
has had a central hero. For example, we have in The Iliad the hero
who was supposed to be Achilles but was really Hector. That
doesn't matter, there's always a central hero: Roland in the Song of
Roland, Beowulf in Beowulf, the old English epic, in The Cid in
Spain and so forth. But Mr. Whitman thought in terms of democracy
there should be no central hero, because that stood for
what he called feudal poetry, and when he spoke of feudal poetry
he would think of Tennyson for example. Mr. Whitman thought,
"No, this, it won't do," and so he set out to write an epic.
We always think of Leaves of Grass as being a series of short
poems, but I don't think he intended that to be our reading of them.
He wanted the whole thing to be read as an epic poem. A proof
may be found in the fact that he kept on republishing the book,
enlarging it, and always calling it Leaves of Grass. He thought of
the whole thing as a single poem.
Now, since the epic had to be an epic of democracy, of course,
the easiest thing would have been to say, "O Democracy . . ." and
then go on, a kind of allegory, but that did not suit him. He said,
"No, since this is an epic of democracy, the hero must be

Borges
everybody, including the reader." A very strange idea. I think that
Walt Whitman's results have been copied all over the world,
Neruda told me that he thought of himself as being a minor South
American Mr. Whitman, and we have very fine poets, Edgar Lee
Masters and Carl Sandburg, who are evidently begotten by Whitman.
What Whitman did was to create a trinity. We have Mr.
Walter Whitman, a Brooklyn journalist who wrote quite bad
verses. Then we also have Walt Whitman who seems to be a glorified
Walter Whitman, who, if you read the "Song of Myself" or
whatever you like, you find that he's born all over America. He
speaks of 'Texas, in my early youth;" he was from Long Island. Or,
"As I have walk'd in Alabama, my morning walk." He never got to
Alabama, but he wanted to be born all over America. Walt Whitman,
of course, is better liked than Walter Whitman:
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,
A divine vagabond was not at all the sort of man Whitman was. He
was a rather shy man, an unhappy man, but thought it his duty to
be happy; he thought it an American duty. And then he also added,
very consciously, a third character, and that character was his
reader, present or future. When we read the book we are partly
Walt Whitman and we even address Walt Whitman. For example,
in a poem called "Salut au Monde!", it begins by saying "O take my
hand Walt Whitman," and then later says, "What do you hear Walt
Whitman?" and "What do you see Walt Whitman?". It's supposed
to be written or intoned by the reader and addressed to the writer.
So really, when we speak of Walt Whitman we are not talking of a
real individual, but of a hero of an epic and that hero is a trinity.
But besides that very strange intention of being a trinity, he
was a very real poet, a true poet, and I think that perhaps what is
private in his book is better than what is loud and public. For exam-
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Jorge Luis Borges on Leaves of Grass
pie, when he writes "camerado," that's very uncouth. I suppose he
meant "camerada," but he wrote "camerado":
Camerado, this is no book
Who touches this touches a man,
(Is it night? are we here together alone?)
It is I you hold and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms-decease calls me forth.
Then:
I love you, I depart from materials,
I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead.
Now such lines are wonderful, I should say. You see the words get
shorter, and then you get that hammerstroke, the last syllable, the
last lovely syllable.
Then there's also the case of verse. He wanted free verse and he
was, I suppose, the inventor of free verse, and that free verse is
something different from what has been done after him-far more
living. For example, poets pride themselves on being singular, as
did Baudelaire, but Whitman prided himself on being like everybody
else. That was democracy:
This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This is the common air that bathes the globe.
So instead of being like most poets today tend to be-that began
with Byron I suppose, then taken over by Baudelaire and so on—he
insisted on being quite commonplace, on being everybody.
I know little about Whitman. I read him many, many times
over, ever since I discovered him in Switzerland in 1917 or there-
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Borges
abouts. I was reading a German anthology and there in it I found a
poem translated — the German title was for "Alabama Morning"—
and then came the name "Whitman" that rang a bell. I thought,
"How absurd to be reading Walt Whitman in German," so I ordered
a copy of Leaves of Grass from London. Well, I was swept off my
feet. Since then I've gone on reading Walt Whitman, but I could
never attempt it —I don't know if anyone had attempted — the
strange idea of a book whose hero is a trinity, whose hero is a
private man, a glorified public man, let us say a kind of demi-god,
and also the reader. And the reader, of course, would be changing
since he spoke. He spoke much to his future readers, to those who
would read him when he was dead. He said to them, "How sorry
you must feel that I am dead, and yet perhaps here I am, next to
you in a ghostly way."
I have propounded a theory, maybe a new one, maybe an old
one, but I think it's a true theory concerning Walt Whitman, perhaps
one of the most important gifts America has contributed to
the world. Whitman, and Emerson. Emerson wrote a very generous
letter to him and he said that he rarely went to New York, but that
when he went he wanted to shake hands with "my benefactor," and
he said also that Leaves of Grass was perhaps the best piece of wit
and wisdom contributed by America. And Whitman was an
unknown journalist.
Now, the book began by being a rather thin volume; I think it
was only one hundred pages long. Then, in the third edition came
those poems devoted to sex. Emerson urged him not to publish
them, to leave them out, and Whitman answered, "If I leave sex
out, I leave the universe out," and I think he was right. So he indulged
in those poems of heterosexual and homosexual love. Well,
that kind of thing hardly matters. But when the Civil War came,
Whitman forgot what he said to the States: "Resist much, obey little,"
and he sided with the North which was unavoidable. In a sense
he betrayed Walt Whitman since he was born all over America,
since Whitman in the first edition stood for the South and for the
North.
Now as to the circumstances of the book, I know but little. I
know that he had been a very commonplace writer, quite a bad
writer. I think he wrote in favor of slavery and also against drunk-
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Jorge Luis Borges on Leaves of Grass
enness; those were mere tracts. He began a novel and then he wrote
articles for the Brooklyn Eagle, partly politics and that sort of thing.
Then he went to New Orleans and there he had an experience.
What that experience was nobody knows, but he speaks about it,
or he refers to it in a dim way — the experience of loving and being
loved; that wonderful experience that happens to most of us — the
idea that there is but one person in the world, and that she's the
other and you are that other person to her. I suppose Whitman had
that kind of experience, but biographies of Whitman are very
disappointing, because when we go to them we expect to find Walt
Whitman the hero of Leaves of Grass, but we don't, we find a
rather middling kind of life; we find him to be rather a sad man.
There is no happiness to be found in his life, but still happiness is
there for us and we'll go on. I think of Whitman as one of the great
gifts of America to the whole world, and I'm duly grateful to Walt
Whitman and to America, of course.
Transcribed & Edited by Kirsten Dehner
13

Deborah Gupta
Daljit Singh's Place
Pravinder stared aimlessly out of the dust stained window of
Daljit Singh's Place toward the purpling orchards where two
scraggly lines of people were trailing off in opposite directions.
It was sunset, the end of another work day, and the Mexicans were
filing to their part of town while the turbaned Punjabi Sikhs were
heading toward Daljit Singh's restaurant for tea.
Every evening for twenty-five years Pravinder and his fellow
Punjabi field workers had made the long trek through the flat farm
lands of Amernton in the San Joaquin Valley for a cup of tea in the
old Indian's restaurant. Inside the doors, small oak tables with
matching chairs were packed tightly within the refurbished farmhouse.
On the wall above the cash register was a large portrait of
Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. The kind, peaceful face
shone beneath the blue-grey turban. The restaurant looked just the
same as the day Daljit opened the doors in 1949.
Pravinder watched a tall, slender Punjabi youth who was nervously
bargaining for a room with Daljit. The old Sikh hunched
over his cash register and stroked his beard, which was tightly rolled
into a net that fit around his whiskers and gathered on top of his
head somewhere under his carefully wrapped maroon turban.
Pravinder remembered his first day in America when he stood
before Daljit Singh and bargained for a room. In those days,
Pravinder had also been lean and tall. Now his rolled beard was
fading to grey, his once light brown skin had turned muddy brown,
his eyes had lost their luster, and his shoulders were slightly
stooped. His turbans were not wrapped as carefully as he used to
wrap them. But one thing had not changed — Pravinder's fondness
for sitting in Daljit Singh's Place.
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The smell of old wood, curry and tea filled the air, along with
Daljit Singh's Place
the sounds of Indian men talking about their dreams of wealth and
status in their adopted home, America, and daring to believe that
within those walls their dreams could come true. It was these things
which pulled the Sikhs like a great magnet to the restaurant. No
matter how badly the day had gone, no matter how intense the heat
or how hard the work, life was made dignified again by a cup of tea
in Daljit Singh's Place. And beneath the overhead fan that swept
the aroma of steeping teas about the room, Pravinder sat dreaming —
not of the demanding fields of the San Joaquin Valley, but instead
of the green plains of his village along the Indus River Valley near
Lahore.
"Namashkar," cheered a familiar voice behind Pravinder.
Looking about, Pravinder saw the smiling face of Rajiv —a
squat Hindu who smelled of Old Spice cologne and an aromatic
after-dinner seed, sonf. Rajiv took the chair offered by Pravinder
and folded his hands upon his potbelly. Pravinder recalled when
Rajiv's stomach had been as flat and empty as any other Indian immigrant's.
But that was years ago. Since then, he had acquired an
almost unheard of position in the community — he was a rich Indian.
With the wealth had come his Americanization, and in the community
he called himself Roger instead of Rajiv. Rajiv was a real
estate speculator, buying one day from an Indian and selling to a
Mexican, and doing the opposite the next day. He cared little who
got the better deal so long as he made money, and he always did.
While Pravinder and Rajiv were little alike, they did both
come from Lahore and for this reason, Pravinder thought, Rajiv
often sought his company. Some men told Pravinder that Rajiv only
befriended him in the hope that some of Pravinder's fine moral
character and respectability might rub off on him. But Pravinder
did not care what the reason was. He was secretly pleased that such
a prosperous man should know him and want to buy him a cup of
tea.
"Ek cup chae!" ordered Rajiv, and a cup of steaming tea appeared
at their table almost as quickly as he began bragging of his
latest business success.
"Last week, I made big money off some land I bought from
some Mexicans," he boasted. Rajiv laughed and tapped an
American cigarette from the pack.
15

Gupta
The other Indians sitting near Rajiv and Pravinder lowered
their conversations to listen. For while they cared little for Rajiv, it
was always a good story when it involved hardship for a Mexican
and a gain for an Indian.
'These Mexicans," he continued. 'They have no idea of the
value of land. They don't know English. How can they expect to
make it in America?"
Rajiv's observation was as true of the Indians as it was of the
Mexicans, but no one seemed to notice. Rajiv continued talking
over the sounds of scraping stools and clattering cups.
"How is your life, Pravinder?"
"Very fine. No problems."
"But no excitement either," Rajiv laughed. He took another
puff on his cigarette, smoking it Indian-fashion with the butt held
between the third and fourth fingers and the smoke expelled
through the tunnel of his fist.
Pravinder turned from Rajiv and noticed Diego had just
entered. Diego leaned against the door to steady himself as he
brushed his curly, black hair from his forehead. He had the same
black hair, dark weathered skin, deep brown eyes, and sturdy build
as the other men in the room, but he stood out because he was a
Mexican. The only time Mexicans and Indians mixed was when
they had to in the fields or at school. Otherwise, they were expected
to hold to their own —their own people, their own churches
and temples, their own restaurants.
Diego was most certainly drunk or he never would have come.
Leaving Rajiv and his story, Pravinder approached Diego and
laying a kind hand on the young man's shoulder advised the Mexican
in his Punjabi accent to go home.
"Who are you to tell me where to go? I go where I want."
"Diego," said Pravinder. "It would be better."
He gestured to the sullen-faced Indian men —men getting their
second wind after a day in the fields, men embittered by the reality
of their lives, men who would fight.
"I want beer!" demanded Diego as he brushed past Pravinder,
bumped the young Indian aside, and leered at Daljit Singh. The old
man was not moved. He sold no beer and he knew he was well protected.
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Daljit Singh's Place
"Give me beer," Diego ordered.
Reaching over the cash register, he grabbed Daljit Singh by the
frail muslin cloth of his shirt and began to shake him. This breach
of respect — this dishonoring of an elder in his own home, left the
others stunned momentarily. Then Pravinder, who was still standing,
lunged at Diego's back, yanked him free from the old man, and
spun him out the door. Diego's shoe caught the doorsill and he
flipped head-over-heels onto the hard dusty ground. He gained his
feet and tried to hit Pravinder, but the Sikh dodged the windmill
blow and shoved him back to the ground. As Pravinder reentered
the restaurant he heard Diego call, "Pravinder — you have two
daughters, no?"
"Do you threaten my daughters?"
In three steps he was across the ground and pulling Diego to
his feet.
"Don't get mad." Diego smiled. "I was only asking. Just
asking."
"You do not speak of my daughters again —ever."
Pravinder shook Diego but the rage was fading, and the Indian
became aware of the spectacle he was presenting to his friends. He
grabbed his tiffin carrier and went home. On the way, he remembered
he had forgotten to apologize to Daljit Singh for the disturbance.
He would do so tomorrow.
Pravinder's wife, Darshna, had been sitting on the floor singing
a Punjabi song and grinding wheat for unleavened bread. But
when he entered the house, the song and the grinding stopped and
the complaints began.
"Your daughters — Rani and Subina — they refuse to go to the
gurdwara with me on Sunday. It is your fault," she said. "You do
not always go. You make a bad example. You must make them go."
"No one goes places with their parents anymore," Subina said.
" — not even the temple."
"The gurdwara," Pravinder corrected.
Always I am in the middle of their squabbles, Pravinder
thought as he watched the three women. Darshna was wearing her
native Punjabi clothes; the two girls wore dresses. Darshna was too
Indian and too unwilling to change. All she cared for was to scrape
together a few pennies for the new gurdwara. To be someone—in
17

Gupta
America — as Rajiv had become, that was beyond her. She knew no
English and would never learn any. Life in America, as far as she
was concerned, was a life in exile and she would never stop talking
of Lahore.
Subina was now 23; Rani was 21 and they knew nothing of
India. They had never worn Punjabi clothes and they rarely spoke
Punjabi. Their friends came before their family duties, such as going
to the gurdwara. If they acted this way in India, no decent man
would marry them. As it was, it would be difficult to find them
proper husbands.
Sometimes, Pravinder said to himself, it does not seem that we
are one family.
"I am tired!" Pravinder yelled. The women stopped arguing
and looked at him. Waving them away he left the room, thinking
life was nothing more than problems.
As the summer harvest drew near and the hours in the field
grew longer, Pravinder found it increasingly difficult to leave the
peaceful surroundings of Daljit Singh's Place and trudge home to a
too-brief night's sleep and another backbreaking day. The summer's
heat had done nothing to suppress the bickering among his
daughters and wife. One still warm evening as he turned the corner
leading to his home, he could hear them arguing above the chirping
crickets.
"Aye, aye," cried Darshna as he entered the room. "Do you
know what this life has come to? I am disgraced—humiliated. Never
can I hold my head up. Never can I go back to the gurdwara."
Pointing wildly at Rani she screamed, "She is evil! An evil girl!
And it is all your fault. You should have sent her to India when I
told you."
Pravinder's head began to ache. "What are you talking about?"
"I saw Rani with my own eyes," she said pointing to her eyes
with two fingers, "and she was with a boy. Together I saw them as I
was going to the gurdwara."
"Your eyes are mistaken," said Pravinder. "My girls are good
girls. They may not be like girls who have grown up in India but
they would not disobey my wishes."
18
Daljit Singh's Place
"Ha! You know nothing. You do not even remember what it is
to be an Indian," Darshna chided. "You have forgotten how hard it
is to raise daughters properly in a foreign land. You think she does
not keep the company of boys? In the park today I saw her. She
was holding his hand."
Pravinder's nostrils flared and his face turned red. "Who was
he? What man dares dishonor me?"
Subina and Rani cringed from him in fear. Subina had less to
fear than her sister, so she spoke first.
"Why are you so angry? Rani did not do anything wrong. She
was walking in the park with a boy. In America all the girls have
boyfriends."
Pravinder turned on her, his fists clenched. "And you too, I
suppose, have a boyfriend?"
"And what if I did?" she said. "Do you think we will have arranged
marriages as you did?"
Pravinder's strong hand smashed against her cheek and Subina
began to cry.
"I want to know who he is!" shrieked Pravinder.
Shaking Rani by the shoulders, he screamed and threatened,
but the girl struck dumb with terror refused to speak. Two smarting
backhanded blows across the mouth ended her silence, and the
girl shouted, "He loves me!"
"Love? What do you know of love? What kind of girl have I
raised? You will tell me who he is or I will beat you."
Darshna began wailing and begged Pravinder to stop.
"Stay out of this!" he threatened. Again he took the girl by the
shoulders and shook her violently. "You are a stupid girl."
From the back of the room Subina began to shout, "Stop it! It
was Diego!" Subina approached her father and began to say
something, but it was not Subina's words that Pravinder heard. All
he recalled was Diego sitting in the dust and asking, "You have two
daughters, don't you?"
Pravinder pushed his daughter away, and moaning with rage
and humiliation he drove his fist into the wooden door frame. The
blow whitened his knuckles momentarily until the blood began to
bubble through the shredded flesh. Holding his hand upright he
watched the blood trace the creases in his skin. Pravinder opened
19

Gupta
and closed his fist several times to make sure no bones were
broken. Then he pushed against the door and charged from the
house.
The events of the evening, like old and scratchy film, flipped
unevenly in his mind: Subina's loud cries, Darshna's hysteria, Rani's
dark and fearful eyes. Again and again, blurred by his anger, these
pictures spun through the cold reels of his recollection.
This time he would smash Diego as he should have that first
night.
The Mexican's shack was at the edge of the field, apart even
from his own people. The door was open, pressed against the outside
wall as if the building gasped for air that hot night. Pravinder
strode across the yard and leaped over the threshold.
Ten feet from the door, lighted by a small candle on the sink,
was Diego's body. There had been a fight. A chair was knocked
over, dishes and bottles had been thrown, and the tablecloth had
been pulled to the floor. Diego lay on his side, his body practically
wrapped around one of the table legs, a corner of the tablecloth in
his hand.
At first it looked no worse than a Saturday night brawl. A
bruise crested his cheekbone and blood flecked his teeth. But the
pool of pinkish fluid laced with dark, bloody streaks that gathered
like a sticky halo about his head told Pravinder the Mexican was
dead or dying.
Pravinder felt his own breathing come shallow, as a salty taste
of fear coated his mouth. His lower body seemed to have vanished,
and all he was aware of was the sound of the frogs outside and vicelike
silence around him. Suddenly he realized that he and Diego
were alone, that no one had seen him enter the house, and that he
must run.
Again, he was racing across the yard, past the orchards and
the neat rows of vegetables, away from the silence and the body of
Diego whose face and hands were paling to the shade of bleached
parchment. Away from these horrors Pravinder ran toward the
bright, cheerful sounds of Daljit Singh's Place. His heart pounded
loudly as he searched for the side entrance of the restaurant. He
slipped under the sign which in Punjabi read "Indian Food and
Rooms for Rent" and made his way to the back of the room where
20
Daljit Singh's Place
he quickly blended with the Sikhs in their blue denim overalls and
brilliant turbans. He managed to order a strong cup of Darjeeling
tea, milk, and cardamom which he hoped would soothe his nerves.
Rajiv, as usual, was in the room and joined him.
"It is very hot in here," said Rajiv. "Daljit Singh should break
down and buy an air conditioner instead of those old fans."
Pravinder, still sweating from his run and not wanting to talk
until he had collected his thoughts, merely nodded and sipped his
tea.
'The old ways were good enough in India, but a man will
never get rich in America if he refuses to shake off the baggage of
his past. I say if life was so good back there, why are we all here today?"
Rajiv asked.
Pravinder crouched over his third cup of tea and Rajiv was
muttering confidentially into his ear, when a uniformed policemen
entered the restaurant and made his way to the men's table.
'Is your name Pravinder Gil?" asked the policeman as he glanced
at his green notebook.
Pravinder held his cup tightly with his left hand and tried to
calm himself. Tell him only what he asks, no more, he kept reminding
himself. Then he will go away.
"I am Pravinder," he stammered.
"Where were you approximately two hours ago?"
'Two hours ago? Why I have been here for some time."
"Do you know Diego Rojas?"
"I have seen him."
"Seen him, Mr. Gil?" asked the officer. "Didn't you have a fight
with him a month ago right outside this restaurant?"
"He was drunk," said Pravinder. "I took him outside. There
was no fight."
"Do you know Rojas is dead?"
"Dead?" repeated Pravinder. "An accident?"
"Looks like murder, Mr. Gil."
"Gentlemen," interrupted Rajiv, "I assure you Mr. Gil has been
with me all night."
As Rajiv said this he reached into Pravinder's lap and clasped
the bloody knuckles of his right hand. Pravinder was surprised by
Rajiv's aid, yet comforted and reassured.
21

Gupta
"You understand Mr. Gil that because of the altercation last
month, you are a suspect in this crime," said the policeman. "I
would advise you to stay close to town and stay away from the
Mexican village."
Pravinder and Rajiv nodded and returned to their tea as the
policeman picked his way between the dimly lit tables and out of
Daljit Singh's Place.
"I think the police will not bother you again," said Rajiv,
giving Pravinder's wounded fist a final pat. "If he had anything
substantial he would have taken you directly to the police station
for questioning."
"I did not kill Diego."
"Of course you did not," assured Rajiv. "Are we not both from
Lahore? We were boys together. You are no killer, Pravinder."
Rajiv ordered more tea and suggested they think no more
about Diego. But Pravinder could think of nothing else. No matter
what Rajiv said, there would always be the suspicion and Rajiv
would always remember he had lied to protect a friend.
"You have saved me tonight, Rajiv. I cannot let this friendship
go unpaid."
"And buying me the next cup of tea will not do it?" Rajiv said.
"I think not."
"Well, Pravinder. I believe we Indians must stick together. But
if you feel you must repay me, I am not offended. There is one deal
you can help me with. A small favor and one whose rewards I will
gladly share with you."
"Is it legal?" said Pravinder. He could not stand another complication
in his life.
"But of course," said Rajiv. "All my dealings are legal or I could
not stay in business. I need you to sign some papers —to act as a
character witness in my behalf for a real estate deal."
"Why can't you do the business yourself?"
"It is a personal grudge. The client believes I cheated him
once —an untruth —and swears he will have no more to do with
me. Why the way he carries on," said Rajiv with a laugh, "you
would think I committed murder."
"Only my signature?"
"Only that, my friend."
22
Daljit Singh's Place
When Pravinder returned home, Darshna was waiting for
him, her fingers twisted about themselves, her face dirty from crying.
'The police," she said. "They were here. They say you killed
Diego."
With renewed terror Pravinder cried, "And what did you tell
them?"
"Nothing, nothing," said Darshna. "But when Rani heard
Diego was dead, she fainted. The police tried to make something of
it, but Subina told them Rani and Diego had been schoolmates
some years ago and nothing more."
"And Rani will tell them nothing more," he said. "I did not kill
Diego. He was dead when I got to his house."
Darshna nodded weakly as she lamented, " We are finished in
this community. We cannot hold our heads up."
"No more of that talk," said Pravinder.
"I told you America was not a proper place to raise girls," she
said. "It is your fault. They should be living in their own country."
"And what country is that? Pakistan?"
"Of course not!"
"But Lahore is no longer ours. Can't you understand that? Face
it, Darshna. It is gone."
Darshna wiped the tears away with her long chiffon scarf.
"You want to go back to something that no longer exists," he
continued. "Lahore is part of Pakistan now —not India. That's why
we left and that's why we must stay here in our new home,
America."
"Never will this be our home," she said. "All we have here is
trouble. Trouble with Mexicans. Trouble with boys. Trouble with
money."
Her list poured on and on as Pravinder left his house for the
second time that night. There was no reasoning with her. She lived
in the past.
Pravinder did not go to the fields the next morning. Instead he
went to Daljit Singh's Place where he was to meet Rajiv. Rajiv had
not yet arrived, and Daljit Singh was just opening the restaurant,
sweeping the floor, wiping down the tables and chairs, and dusting
the large pro trait of Guru Nanak. Although Pravinder and Daljit
23

Gupta
Singh had not talked much during these many years, Pravinder
often dreamed of the day when he too might have the honor ascribed
to the old Sikh — to be venerated by the community and to have his
own business in America. Daljit had managed to hold on to a little
part of old India, a part before the partition. All that was left of the
India, Pravinder recalled, and his wife longed for, was Daljit Singh
and his restaurant.
Pravinder was finishing his tea when Rajiv entered. He was
carrying a briefcase.
"I have the papers here," he said. The white sheaves were laid
before Pravinder, the bottom lines marked with X's for his
signature.
As Pravinder's pen scratched over the papers, Rajiv spoke.
"Did you hear? They caught Diego's killer."
The scratching sound stopped.
"It was a Mexican," he said. "Diego could get along with his
own people no better than with our own," said Rajiv with a laugh.
Pravinder hesitated momentarily, then remembered his promise
to Rajiv and continued signing, this time more slowly as if the hand
holding the pen had suddenly grown very tired.
Rajiv took the papers, checked the signature, and shook
Pravinder's hand. "This is a very good piece of land my friend,"
assured Rajiv. It belongs to a staunch Sikh with old ways. He lives
in India now. Prefers to do all his business through Sikhs. Only
trusts his own kind. That's why I needed your signature. Anyway,
it will be a gold mine. It will attract Mexicans and Indians alike. But
first, a cup of tea."
Rajiv beckoned Daljit Singh and the proud old man glided to
their table. Since there had been no formal greeting when he
entered, Pravinder stood, bowed slightly and said, "Sut sri akal."
Daljit served the tea and returned to his stool by the cash
register. As the two men settled into their routine of tea and conversation,
Pravinder said, "So, Rajiv, tell me more about this property.
Where is it located?"
"In a very prime spot. The person who is currently leasing the
business is doing very well. He is a good businessman, and I would
keep him on if he would like to stay. We'll talk more later,
Pravinder. I must attend to some business."
24
Daljit Singh's Place
Rajiv left in a rush. Pravinder remained seated. There were so
many thoughts going through his head: Diego's murderer was a
Mexican. That meant there would be no trouble between Indians
and Mexicans in the community. He was safe now. He had been
cleared of the murder and had repayed his debt to Rajiv. Darshna
would be happy to hear the news about Diego's killer.
Although the only place he felt safe and happy was in Daljit
Singh's restaurant, Pravinder decided he must return home because
there was still the question of how much Rani had disgraced the
family. Maybe Darshna is right, he thought. Perhaps we can never
hold our heads up in the community again. Pravinder stretched his
arms, yawned and walked out of the restaurant.
There have been many hard times in the past, he mumbled to
himself, but I always got through them and there is always Daljit
Singh's Place. Nothing can change that. I'll have to talk to Rajiv in
the morning. Maybe there will be a place for me in the new
business.
Pravinder wondered what place Rajiv had bought.
He said he bought it from an Indian Sikh who lived in India
and who was leasing it to an —
Pravinder stopped suddenly, realizing what Rajiv had done.
He held his breath as he turned to look at Daljit Singh's Place.
25

Melvin Jules Bukiet
The Virtuoso
Show me a Jewish home without a prodigy and 111 show you an
orphanage. So thought the great sage and musician of Proszowice,
me, as I made sounds like the slaughter of swine on
my new violin. My chest felt as hollow as the body of the instrument,
my head as awkwardly cocked as the scroll, my nerves
wound as tight as the strings. Yet worse was the offense to my
aesthetic sensibility, worst of all the fact that I produced it.
On the Saturday after Yom Kippur, we were strolling home
from temple, skirting the banks of the river, approaching my
favorite tree. Wild and shaggy, the willow's trunk was bare beneath
a gaping knothole. As always, I peered into the cavernous recess,
where I imagined forest sprites hidden the way one's other self hides
in a mirror. As always, I knocked, listening carefully for the faint,
woodsy echo.
My youngest brother tugged at my sidelocks, but I was too
mature to chase him. I walked ahead to where my parents were
chatting with neighbors. Mrs. Lopotkin, jealous perhaps of the
competition her three unmarried daughters faced, was badmouthing
Rebecca, "That hussy, she has the nerve to come to shul dressed like
some Venetian. It's outrageous." To which Issac the Millionaire
replied, "And the cantor's voice. It gets worse every week. I don't
know why we don't hire a substitute. Any croaker will do." My
parents nodded as one. I scooted ahead and was first .to arrive
home. I opened the closet door to put away my good blue jacket,
but the cat had been napping there during our absence. Awakened,
she jumped and disturbed the ancient violin case, which tottered
and fell.
26
The Virtuoso
Frayed at the edges, exhibiting a straw thatch beneath its nubby
black surface, the iron-maiden-shaped box had sat in our hall closet
for years. The instrument had been my father's and his father's
before him. Legend had it that it came from fifteenth century Spain,
where it played to the accompaniment of the Exile. It led the column
of Jews to the border, out and across Europe, adopting the rhythms
of the countries through which it passed, the minuette, waltz, and
mazurka, until it arrived here in the land of the final diaspora, the
home of the Yiddish lullaby.
Sometimes word of the outside world would penetrate our
closet, and the sleeping beast would stir, as if its strings were
vibrating within their dark, velvet confinement. This would happen
whenever another young Heifetz blossomed from the Pale. The
news, delayed two years in transit would cause a ripple of hungry
expectation among the local parents, and some unlucky youth
would be chosen as the sacrifical victim on the musical altar.
Because of the illustrious history of the instrument in our house, I
was always a candidate for this dubious honor. "Please, what I can
do with your son," implored Mrs. Hemtobble, teacher, keeper of
the archives, and high priestess of the monstrous harmonic rites.
The only thing that kept me from such a fate was my parents'
fear of the secular. Were I to evince a truly superior talent (and was
there any doubt?) I would have to continue my post-Hemtobble
studies in Cracow, that notorious cauldron of sin. It was well
known that I was susceptible to influence and to the vagaries of the
imagination.
You might think that for just this reason I would dive into the
mysteries of point and counterpoint, but fantasize as I would I
knew that I should never outlearn our matriarchal maestro. I was
not one to hum a tune or tap my feet, nor could I tell a sharp from a
flat to save my life. Not only would I never be a master, but I could
never be a good student. Lamentably, my family's faith in their son
was too great to be swayed by mere facts, and I grudgingly awaited
the consequences of my birth.
All this went through my mind as the violin box plummeted
through the dense closet air at my face. It was not a musical instinct,
I swear, that brought my arms up for the catch. It was strictly
self-preservation, but had I known the result of this gesture I would
27

Bukiet
willingly have accepted a bump on the head. Instead, my hands
automatically gripped the plunging instrument, one cradling it
underneath, the other on top, in a grim parody of the correct
posture.
My mother entered the front door and gasped.
I felt as if I had been caught in some perverse act of my imagination.
I stammered and blushed, and finally shoved the stupid
thing back on the shelf where it belonged, but the look of smitten
surprise never left my mother's face.
That night there were murmurs of intense discussion
emanating from the kitchen. I listened through the pipe which carried
winter heat from the stove.
"Did you see the way he held it?"
"But he's only a child."
"But did you see the way he held it?"
"Barely twelve, how could we send him away?"
"Next year he will be Bar Mitzvahed. He could study here until
then, and then . . ."
"I know, a man, legally a man," my father conceded. "It would
be a sin for us to restrain him, but still . . ."
"A veritable Heifetz," my mother whispered.
And so the odious thing was officially removed from its place
of storage. I felt as if I were at a disinterment. The dusty, moldy
box was set onto the kitchen table. I snapped open the rusty latch,
let escape the noxious vapors. The hinges creaked, and the velvet
skin unfolded to reveal the secret anatomy.
The ribs of the body showed through the taut, lacquered
tissue, which glistened and seemed to draw all of the light in the
room to it. The chest was perforated by twin vents, through which
it breathed. The neck culminated in the skull, from which the strings
descended like strands of silver hair.
"Your grandfather should have been here," my grandmother
said.
My mother looked at it as fondly as she would a newborn infant.
'Try, my darling," she said, and I wasn't sure whether she was
addressing me or the corpse. As if on cue, the rest of the family, including
the cat, inched back, leaving me alone at the table.
I should have known better, but I was weak and could not
28
The Virtuoso
resist. Made confident by my home, I felt invincible. I grasped the
violin firmly, my left hand curling around its spine to come up on
the jugular. I lifted it to my chin, smelling the chins of generations
of unfulfilled prodigies. I took the bow. I rapped the table. I slit its
throat.
The cat howled and bolted from the room.
My mother said, "A few lessons will work wonders."
Mrs. Hemtobble was coming; I was doomed. "Einz, Vei. Drei.
Feir," she would count, and ferociously recount, "Einz, Vei ..."
while bows tangled, strings burst, and melody flew like a fireplace
cinder to the winds. A number of my friends had been singed in this
method. They were recognizable a mile off, haggard, distracted,
muttering to themselves. They were, in fact, a lot like Mr. Hemtobble,
our shoemaker, who sat at his bench all day, tapping at his
leather with his wife's inflexible cadence.
Though she married the frail cobbler whose name she bore,
Mrs. Hemtobble's constitution was the same as her brother's, our
butcher, Cohen. Between the one with his bloodstained cleaver and
the other, they haunted our dreams. She was a big woman with
features like the chipped bark of the hollow tree and a club foot
which beat relentlessly in my brain for a week before my first
lesson. It therefore came as little surprise when my auditory premonition
slid over the boundary from nightmare to daylight. I ran
to open the door for the heavy, stumping terror, hoping that this
conciliatory gesture would somehow lessen my sentence. My appeal
was denied. She looked down on me like the army officer who
came to steal children for the Polish militia. "So you are the new
student."
"Yes, Ma'am," I answered humbly, wishing to fly.
"So, then where iss it?"
I pointed helplessly at the closet.
"Well then, so get. I am to teach you for an hour, and you have
already wasted thirty seconds . . . Hurry."
Exactly two minutes later she said, "To hold the instrument
properly. It is not a club," and reversed the natural bent that had so
fatally impressed my dear mother. Shoulders, elbows, wrists, and
29

Bukiet
other less movable joints were poked and prodded to conform to
the violin's technique. My fingers were stretched further than ever
the Lord intended. And of course the bow was set in the most uncomfortable
possible angle. How or why Amati invented such a
grotesque device, I will never know.
Then came the instructions, a pageful of lines, dots, and
strange designs that might just as well have been Babylonian. Notwithstanding
the qualms of reason, Mrs. Hemtobble was determined
to enlighten me. 'This," she said, "iss the E." She pointed to and
simultaneously plucked one of the strings. It had the sound of
crystal. "This," she said, "iss the A." It had the sound of ivory.
"This," she said, "iss the D." It had the sound of mahogany. "And
this," she said, "iss the G." It had the sound of gold. I felt like a commoner
being introduced to royalty.
I learned the stroke, down across and then back away from
their majesties in a smooth, steady wail. Most importantly, I learned
the Hemtobble trademark, the dreaded, "Einz. Vei." The martinet
drilled me in her system until I became a walking metronome.
Under her tutelage my very pulse deferred to the law of the beat.
"On the E now. Einz. Vei. Drei. Feir. Quickly try the A. Vei. Drei.
Feir. Elbow up. Drei. Feir . . . Einz . . ." and on and on, over and
over, so that after my first hour's lesson I felt as if I had been washed
in a tub of scalding hot water, rinsed, wrung, and hung out to dry.
Six afternoons a week, I would trudge the corridor past my
father's store and my mother's kitchen to the "music room." This
was a small, glassed-in porch or pantry full of the familiar odors of
onions, potatoes, and home canned vegetables, but to me it seemed
a hideous torture chamber beneath some medieval castle. The
music stand, like a rack, held an open sheet of the notes that I
would make scream.
Usually the mere sight of my long-toed crawl to the rear of the
house was enough to bring the cat running at breakneck speed. She
would circle the porch, as if testing its acoustical properties, and
then settle and gaze up at me with idiotic admiration. Likewise my
human following would hearken if I so much as crooked a pinky in
their direction. This, I think, was the most discouraging aspect of
my career. I was not modest. I was keenly aware of my better
qualities, and had the sounds I created been beautiful I would have
30
The Virtuoso
been the first to acknowledge them from a well-deserved pedestal.
The unfortunate truth was that despite many hours of diligent practice
my execution no more resembled melody than pigs. But I was
the dutiful son of loving parents, and so I continued to let the bow
whine its length along the four strings and back again, and my
family continued to ooh and to ahh, and the cat continued to attend
me with tone-deaf devotion, and I hated every second of it.
I tried to explain this to my parents, but even as the words left
my mouth I could see their failure to comprehend. My father may
have had intimations of the truth, but he was under the influence of
my mother's dreams. In her eyes our kitchen was transformed into
the theatre, and I was her personal Heifetz.
It was Heifetz to the left of me, Heifetz to the right. Did I know
that he was only three when he began to play? That he was seven
when he performed for the crown princes of Europe? That by my
age he had bought his parents a summer house in the Crimea? Did I
know? Heifetz!
And my grandmother mimed a sleepy fiddler.
I stood there glaring at my loving audience, humiliated by
their unwavering loyalty. I could have smashed the violin on the
hard edge of the kitchen table, but they still would not have believed
me.
"What do you mean you don't want to play? Didn't we see for
ourselves the way that you held it?"
"Can't you hear for yourselves the way that I play it?"
"You have a talent. You reached for the case."
"It fell down from the closet. The cat knocked it off."
"So now he blames the cat. Who next, the Baal Shem Tov?
Nonsense! The lessons will continue."
Every Monday and Thursday the Corporal would march up to
our front door, nod curtly to my father, and lead me to the back
room. Her lopsided step became as familiar as the cat's hushed
paw, but whereas the latter irritated me all out of proportion to the
sound it produced, the loud thumping deformity was oddly reassuring.
I began to look forward to Mrs. Hemtobble's lessons.
"For this I came . . . You did not practice two minutes, let
alone two hours . . . Since when does a third finger look like a dog
sleeping on a railroad track. You know what happens. Splat!"
31

Bukiet
Yes, indeed, splat, rasp, squawk, and the wolf tone, where the
note inexplicably jumped an octave, like my voice. What I created
was not music; it was noise, and I gave thanks that someone could
see this. I appreciated Mrs. Hemtobble's justified scorn as much as
my parents did my illegitimate art.
"Now we must begin from the beginning. Einz. Vei. Drei. Feir."
Always respectful, I strove to please. Make no mistake, I was
still bad, but maybe less awful. The pigs in the box now snuffled,
occasionally varying the pattern and pitch of their squeals.
Sometimes they were almost happy, rooting about the lower octaves,
grunting and rolling in the muddy sound until their farmer
grabbed one to boil for lard, at which signal the usual round of
squeals recommenced. In this fashion I progressed from scales to
ditties to ballads to a nearly discernible rendition of the national
anthem.
A growing boy, I was already too large for the adorable shoes
of the innumerable Jaschas, Mischas, and other diminutive Jews
packing them in at the concert halls of the capital. Still, I
persevered, training my fingers to scamper up and down the
musical ladder like a demented spider while my arms made graceless
figure eights in midair. I learned Rosetta from Odessa, The Little
Goat Boy, and a simplified version of Wanderlust. But if the
brutalization of my ears ceased, my heart was no less troubled. Between
the tolerable and the competent was a gap, between the competent
and the sublime a chasm. Aware of this, my parents
nonetheless expected the music of the spheres. Incredibly, they
heard it.
Only my teacher told me the truth. Her wattles of flesh quivered
with indignation, her lips with derision. "So who tells you
to exhale on high C. If it took you as long to breathe as it does to
think you'd be dead already. Now, we shall persist until you get it
right. Otherwise, I promise we shall never move on to The Spin Ink
Song."
Twice every session, Mrs. Hemtobble referred to The Spin Ink
Song. She held it over me like a carrot a horse. It was the prize all her
pupils received at the finish of their basic skills, after the scales,
after the simple-minded melodies, one step prior to music. At the
32
The Virtuoso
rate I was climbing, I would never see that elevated plateau, but I
was resigned to my clumsy, earthbound status.
Actually I was beginning to feel a measure of contentment
scraping to the harangues of my teacher when she too betrayed me.
It was during the inauspicious debut of My Red Rubber Ball that
she let slip her mask of contempt, beneath which lay expectations
of that worst of all heroes, Heifetz. Like the subject of my latest
piece, my bow jumped haphazardly across the four strings, my
fingers splayed out in desperate, ineffective reach. Even the cat's
dumb homage was uneasy, but my stern coach's thick-powdered
head swayed happily to the spastic rhythm. Her response: "Very
lively. It could have been neater, but all in all ... well . . . anyway.
Here is your next assignment." The sheaf of pages had a title,
a half-known banner that took a moment to sink in, The Spinning
Song. So this was the much touted, mispronounced opus. It was a
slap in the face.
"I don't think I'm ready."
"You must practice extra hard for the next week."
She might have said a day, or a minute for that matter. It
would take me at least two weeks to slog through the most
rudimentary number, let alone this imposing musical edifice.
Longer and more complex than anything I had yet tackled, it made
use of three bow and four finger movements, and, horrors, an Einz
and-a-half Drei change of tempo. But Mrs. Hemtobble was adamant,
and, most disconcertingly, for a reason. She thought I could
do it.
I clenched my teeth and set to work, but not without dreams of
the vengeance I would wreak on the devil who lead me astray. I
would use its own strings to tie it to the bow, which I would plant
as a stake, at which I would burn the seductive instrument. I would
use its smirking, curlicued holes to fill it with water to drown. I
would crush its proud shell with a stone, anything, I thought, as I
continued to practice, for I was a dutiful boy.
Alone, amidst the rotting, fermenting vegetables of the back
porch, with my right hand I guided the silken horsehairs over the
taut metal quartet, which my left hand dextrously fingered. I
repeated the intricate pattern so many times that I no longer needed
33

Bukiet
to look, that I hardly needed to listen. Like Daniel in the lions' den,
I made my peace with the beast from the hall closet, but at what
price? The more I knew, the more I knew I lacked. The sweeter the
sound, the deeper the wound, the closer to Heifetz, the larger he
loomed. I lost track of time, and my sunny atelier could have been
a coal mine or the inside of a hollow tree. I was exhausted. I wished
to surrender, but one look at my teacher told me there was no
chance. She was rapt in anaesthetic bliss, she and the cat. We were
all victims, lulled by the poisonous refrain of the ancient violin.
"Please," I begged.
"Einz more time," she said, "but," her expression brightened inanely,
"for you, a surprise ..." and she opened the door, behind
which my family stood in an awkward, eager bunch. They smiled
nervously and filed in with a shy respect I neither deserved nor
desired. This was to be my first official recital. "Hey," I wanted to
shake them. "This is me, your son, your brother. My name is not
Jascha!"
The same old battle between obligation and independence
waged with, I confess, the same result. Without the strength to
chastise myself, I lashed the piglets mercilessly. My arm was a blur
of such useless vigor that a string sprung back into a curly tail, and
the remaining little swine oinked their hearts out andante, allegro,
staccato, until the massacre finally came to its foregone crescendo.
The applause was deafening.
It was past my bedtime. My cheeks nuzzled the soft wood contours
of the body beside me, my hand sought its magic. I could not
stay memories of my pilgrimage from innocence to initiation to the
reaping of unjust rewards. Worse yet, I could augur but more of the
same. From my immediate family, my audience would widen to include
cousins, neighbors, and strangers, at which stage my own
runtish doubts were bound to be confirmed. I was as proud of our
racial predilection for beauty as Heifetz' mother, but the gift was
not mine. Love had stopped my loved ones' ears; only silence could
open them.
Best for all concerned, I slipped on my clothes and tiptoed
downstairs. To the right was the music room, to the left the kitchen,
34
The Virtuoso
the store, and the river. For a moment I hesitated, but the cat sped
through my legs in its rush rightward, and my decision was made. I
stepped leftward, wondering how my father, the shopkeeper, and
his father, the barber, had removed themselves from identical evil
prospects.
There was one person I could ask. Mrs. Hemtobble had been
misled by enthusiasm, but without the veil of blood, her misjudgement
was curable. As I walked to the Hemtobble place, I imagined
myself falling to my knees, begging release from my musical vows.
I brought the hoary black case to lay down before her like an unwanted
baby. I was approaching the small, whitewashed house
when I heard a violin. It occurred to me that for all her work with
me, I had never actually heard my teacher play. Hearing now, I
understood the fullness of her world in feir feir beat. I understood
why she did not have any children, why she did not need them. She
played the song of the Jews, of the remembered past and the
redeemable future.
Come as a supplicant, I became an eavesdropper, standing on
the porch, my eyes the height of the window pane. Oh, the perversities
of nature. That heavenly violin came from the same litter as
my infernal match. It had the same amber coloring, the same
bridge, fingerboard, and pegs, only its soul was different. It seemed
to hover before her, attached by an invisible fifth string to the bulging
Hemtobble chin. She was sitting in a chair, her bad foot stuck
straight out like a boot, the other bent modestly inward. Her arm
swept lazily back and forth.
Mr. Hemtobble lay flat on his back on the couch beside her.
His mouth was open and a rheumy discharge seeped from his eyes.
I could not tell whether he was awake, but his wife continued to
play. The gently woven air seemed to soothe him.
It was beautiful, more beautiful than anything I could imagine,
forget render, and it said to me, "You wretch. You ingrate. I give
you the chance to perform this aching beauty, and you dare to
refuse. With what then shall you fill the emptiness in your life?"
The melody, pitch, and meter varied, but the message stayed,
and I stood bound. Over the duration of the evening, however, the
music became languorous, exhausted. I thought that if I dozed off I
would not be able to rise for a hundred years, and fought to keep
35

Bukiet
my eyes open. I could see my instructor drooping perceptibly with
every imaginary "Einz. Vex." Then the sound, which had already
faded, finally ceased. There was a silence full of presence. It was the
quiet I had sought to give to my parents. Mrs. Hemtobble was
asleep in the formal position, her left elbow at rest on the arm of the
chair, supporting both her unwieldy bulk and the violin. Mr. Hemtobble
coughed and gestured helplessly, and the music resumed.
I played The Spinning Song that night as I had never played it
before. Alone, in the dark, my stroke was more fluid, my fingers
more nimble than lessons had taught me. I was attuned to the
strains of the individual notes and the whole that contained them.
For the elderly couple and my parents and the cat and all Proszowice,
brothers, cousins, neighbors, and strangers, I persevered
until dawn without a pause, without applause. I played the magical
instrument the way my forebears had envisioned, but when I saw
the first light it was time for me to retire.
I considered my parents' house. I could set the ancient violin
back upon the shelf in the closet andprogress with my studies as if
nothing had happened. I could allow myself to succumb to the lures
of my family's love, but I would never be better for them than I had
already been, and I would never be as good for myself as I just was.
The violin was simply not my instrument, except maybe for a
night. Even sons can have moments of genius.
I no longer had the heart for dramatic revenge. Burning was
too cruel a fate for the creator of beauty; neither would drowning
nor stoning do. I walked nonetheless toward the river, where I saw
the hollow tree. Wood to wood, awaiting the prodigy of the future,
I placed the violin into the narrow opening, into the hands of the
sprites for safekeeping.
36
Italo Calvino on Invisible Cities
The following is a lecture given by Italo Calvino to the students of
the Graduate Writing Division at Columbia University on March
29, 1983.
Invisible Cities does not deal with recognizable cities. These
cities are all inventions, and all bear women's names. The book is
made up of a number of short chapters, each of which is intended
to give rise to a reflection which holds good for all cities or for the
city in general.
The book was born a little at a time, with considerable intervals
between one piece and the next, rather as if I were writing
poems, one by one, following up varying inspirations. Indeed, in
my writing I tend to work in series: I keep a whole range of files in
which I put the pages I happen to write (following the ideas which
come into my head), or mere notes for things I would like to write
some day. In one file I put the odd individuals I bump into, in
another the heroes of myth; I have a file for the trades I would like
to have followed instead of being a writer, and another for the
books I would like to have written had they not already been written
by somebody else; in one file I collect pages on the towns and landscapes
of my own life, and in another imaginary cities, outside of
space and time. When one of these files begins to fill up, I start to
think of the book that I can work it into.
This is how I carried on the Invisible Cities book over the
years, writing a piece every now and then, passing through a
number of different phases. At one stage I could only write about
sad cities, and at another only about happy ones. There was one
period when I compared the cities to the starry sky, to the signs of
the zodiac; and another when I kept writing about the garbage
which spreads outside the city day by day.
In short, what emerged was a sort of diary which kept closely
to my moods and reflections: everything ended up being trans-
37

Calvino
formed into images of cities — the books I read, the art exhibitions I
visited, and discussions with friends.
And yet, all these pages put together did not make a book: for
a book (I think) is something which has a beginning and an end
(even if it's not a novel, in the strict sense of the word). It is a space
which the reader must enter, wander round, maybe lose his way in,
and then eventually find an exit, or perhaps even several exits, or
maybe a way of breaking out on his own. It may be objected that
this definition holds good for a novel with a plot, not for a book
such as mine, which is meant to be read as one would read a book
of poems, or essays, or at most short stories. But the point I am trying
to make is that a book of this sort, if it is to be a real book, must
have a structure of some kind. To put it another way, one must be
able to find a plot, a route, a "solution".
I have never written a book of poems, but I am no stranger to
books of short stories; and I can safely say that the ordering of the
various stories is always a brain-racking task. In this case, I set out
writing the title of a series at the top of each page: Cities and
Memory, Cities and Desire, Cities and Signs; there was also a
fourth category which I started off by calling Cities and Form; but
this title turned out to be too generic, and the pieces ended up under
other headings. For a while, as I carried on writing city after city, I
was not sure whether to step up the number of categories, to cut
them down to the bare minimum (the first two, Cities and Memory
and Cities and Desire, were fundamental), or to do away with them
altogether. There were many pieces which I was unable to classify —
which meant that I had to hunt for new definitions, new categories.
A number of cities, for example, were rather abstract, airy creations,
and in the end I grouped them as Thin Cities. Others could be
classified as Twofold Cities; but then I found it was better to
redistribute them among other groups. Other series, Trading
Cities, which were characterized by various kinds of exchange — of
memories, desires, routes, and destinies — and Cities and Eyes,
characterized by visual properties — I had not provided for to start
with. They sprang into being at the last moment, as the result of a
reallocation of pieces which I had previously assigned elsewhere,
especially under the headings of Memory and Desire. The Continuous
Cities and the Hidden Cities, on the other hand, were two
38
Italo Calvino on Invisible Cities
series which I wrote with a special purpose in mind, once I had
begun to see the form and the meaning which I wanted to give to
the book. I tried to work out the best structure on the basis of the
materials I had collected, as I wanted these series to alternate, to interlace
one another, while trying to keep fairly close to the
chronological order in which the various pieces had been written.
In the end I determined to write eleven series of five cities each,
grouped in chapters comprising pieces from different series which
had a common climate. The system of alternation is the simplest
possible, though some people have not found it so.
I still have not mentioned something which I should have
declared at the outset: Invisible Cities is in the form of a series of
verbal reports which the traveller Marco Polo makes to Kubla
Khan, Emperor of the Tartars. (In fact, the historical Kubla, a
descendant of Genghiz Khan, was Emperor of the Mongols; but in
his book Marco Polo referred to him as Great Khan of the Tartars,
and thus he has remained in literary tradition.) Not that I had any
intention of following the itinerary of the thirteenth century Venetian
merchant who travelled as far as China and who, as ambassador
for the Great Khan, visited much of the Far East. For the
Orient is nowadays a topic which is best left to experts; and I am
not one. But throughout the centuries there have been poets and
writers who have drawn their inspiration from // Milione, as an exotic
and fantastic stage setting: Coleridge in his famous poem,
Kafka in The Emperors Message, Dino Buzzati in his novel The
Desert of Tartars. Only the Thousand and One Nights can boast a
similar success —that of an imaginary continent in which other
literary works find space for their own particular worlds: continents
of the "elsewhere," now that there is no longer any
"elsewhere" in the world, and the whole world is becoming more
and more uniform (and for the worse).
In my Invisible Cities, Kubla Khan is a melancholy ruler who
realizes that his boundless power is of little worth because the
world is going rapidly downhill. Marco Polo is a visionary traveller
who tells the Khan tales of impossible cities—for example, a
cobweb-city suspended over the abyss, or a microscopic city which
gradually spreads out until one realizes that it is made up of lots
and lots of concentric cities which are all expanding. Each of the
39

Calvino ,
chapters which make up the book is preceded and followed by a
sort of commentary from Marco Polo and the Khan. In point of
fact, the first of these introductory episodes was written before I
started on the cities; and it was only later, as I went on with the
cities themselves, that I thought of writing some other short introductions
or epilogues for them. To be more precise, I had put a
lot of work into the first piece, and had a lot of material left over;
and as time went on I went ahead with some variants of these leftover
pieces (the languages of the ambassadors, Marco's gesticulations)
and found that new reflections were emerging. The more
cities I wrote about, the more I developed my thoughts on the work
in the form of comments from Marco and Kubla. Each of these
reflections tended to pull things in a particular direction; and I tried
to let them have their own way. Thus I ended up with another collection
of material which I tried to let run parallel to the rest (that
is, the cities proper). I did also a certain amount of cutting and
mounting work, in the sense that some of the conversations are interrupted
and then resumed. In short the book was discussing and
questioning itself at the same time as it was being composed.
I feel that the idea of the city which the book conjures up is not
outside time; there is also (at times implicit, at others explicit) a
discussion on the city in general. I have heard from a number of
friends in town planning that the book touches on some of the
questions that they are faced with in their work; and this is no coincidence,
as the background from which the book springs is the
same as theirs. And it is not only towards the end of the book that
the "big number" metropolis appears; for even the pieces which
seem to evoke ancient cities only make sense insofar as they have
been thought out and written with the city of today in mind.
What is the city today, for us? I believe that I have written
something like a last love poem addressed to the city, at a time
when it is becoming increasingly difficult to live there. It looks, indeed,
as if we are approaching a period of crisis in urban life; and
Invisible Cities is like a dream born out of the heart of the unlivable
cities we know. Nowadays people talk with equal insistence of the
destruction of the natural environment and of the fragility of the
large-scale technological systems (which may cause a sort of chain
reaction of breakdowns, paralyzing entire metropolises). The crisis
40
halo Calvino on Invisible Cities
of the overgrown city is the other side of the crisis of the natural
world. The image of "megalopolis" — the unending, undifferentiated
city which is steadily covering the surface of the earth — dominates
my book, too. But there are already numerous books which prophecy
catastrophes and apocalypses: to write another would be
superfluous, and anyway it would be contrary to my temperament.
The desire of my Marco Polo is to find the hidden reasons which
bring men to live in cities: reasons which remain valid over and
above any crisis. A city is a combination of many things: memory,
desires, signs of a language; it is a place of exchange, as any textbook
of economic history will tell you — only, these exchanges are
not just trade in goods, they also involve words, desires, and
memories. My book opens and closes with images of happy cities
which constantly take shape and then fade away, in the midst of
unhappy cities.
Almost all critics have stopped to comment on the closing
sentence of the book: "seek and learn to recognize who and what, in
the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, and make them endure,
give them space." For given that these are the last lines, everybody
has taken them as the conclusion, the "moral." But this is a manyfaceted
book, and there are conclusions throughout its length, on
each of the faces and along each of the edges; and there are others,
no less epigrammatic or epigraphic than the final one. Certainly, if
that sentence is to be found at the end of the book rather than
elsewhere, there is a reason; but we ought to begin by saying that
the last little chapter has a double conclusion, both parts of which
are equally necessary: on the Utopian city (which even if we do not
catch sight of it we cannot stop looking for); and on the infernal city.
And again; this is only the last bit of the section on the Great
Khan's atlases, which has been somewhat neglected by the critics,
and which from start to finish does nothing but propose various
possible "conclusions" to be drawn from the entire book. But there
is also the other thesis, which says that the meaning of a symmetrical
book should be sought in the middle: thus there are
psychoanalytical critics who have found the deep roots of the book
in Marco Polo's evocations of Venice, his native city, as a return to
the first archetypes of the memory; while scholars of structural
semiology maintain that one must seek at the very centre of the
41

Calvino
book-and by doing so have found an image of absence, the city
called Baucis. Here it becomes clear that the author's view no longer
counts: it is as if the book, as I have explained, wrote itself, and it
is only the text as it stands which can authorize or rule out this or
that reading of it. As one reader among others, I may say that in
chapter five, which in the heart of the book develops a theme of
lightness that is strangely associated with the theme of the city,
there are some of the pages I consider the best as visionary
evidence; and perhaps these more "slender" parts, the Thin Cities or
others, are the most luminous areas in the book. There is no more I
can say.
42
Robert Lemperly
Walking Through Denver
Living without fear had seemed to alter Freese's metabolism.
Lambertson staring at him under the screeching lights of the
7-11. At some incredible cost, Freese had come to wild and
mysterious terms with everything, you could see it all just in the
way he moved, those huge shoulders rolling towards you, the big
hands open, ready. One vicious motherfucker well on his way to
ultimate reconciliation and behind that mean grin nothing but two
hundred pounds of pure sizzling energy racing way, way off track.
Turning to kick in the faces of the girls on the violet Kotex boxes
then calling to Lambertson down the aisle: You want this gun or
not? Freese, stone cool, every cunt's worst nightmare right out
there in the open fuck you and you and you and what could you
say about power now, looking into that face? Christ he was swimming
in it, invincible: wired together so God damn tight you had to
wonder what was holding it but Freese was in control, he wouldn't
wig, not tonight, maybe not ever and that same arctic grin
swallowing up more than air, telling him to stay loose, there were
definitely options still open. Coming to the end of the line was only
the beginning. Just stay cool and watch the fun begin and — Spooky
out here on the edge, ain't it, Lambo? Har. Har. Lambertson nodding
back into it all oh yes, yeass, yes, cruising on an energy ride of
his own, flying on the Limbitrols and Dexedrine, jacked up to the
gills, feeling the words wooshing inside him now, echoing, and yes,
indeed the edge, the energy rushing back and forth across the store,
from one end to the other like wind only you could see it, Lambertson
watching it pass over the faceless customers, imagining them
thinking, Ahh, no fear . . .
He'd flown higher but couldn't quite remember when, running
along faster and faster like lightning passing through a rainless
43

Lemperly
night sky, Olson and the others getting completely out of hand,
grabbing things at random off the carefully ordered shelves, thumbing
for tit shots at the magazine rack, carrying case after case of
beer out to the battered Camaro: Freese standing in front of him,
not moving. Freese with veins popping out the sides of his neck, the
gun suddenly right there resting in his hand, steady as shit, only the
veins moving, in out, in out, the magic dancing in Freese's eyes
speaking of wonders and terror and privileges you got when your
life had gone to hell and Lambertson you can't possibly believe
there's any time left at all, you can't really think we've got time to
just stand here and watch them fuck us? The words ripping out into
the light poking through the last of his dreams I'm telling you that
even if you were still alive in ten years which you won't be, you
think you'd be able to pump like this at redline and still keep sane
for Chrissakes? — still have power enough to crank out honest to
God fire and stir up all kinds of horrible shit? The gun there, shiny,
almost new, a .22 automatic, trigger as sensitive as a bitch's clit,
almost anything set them off, patrons without eyes five feet away
stumbling by, no one ever saw, everyone he had ever known had
let him down oh Sweet Jesus he wanted this gun. Take it, Lambo,
Take it, take it, take it.
Their failures sealed forever the morning they lost Chinninski
to the cunts. They were just twenty then, that distant summer,
football practice to begin in three more weeks and he and Freese
had thumbed through those baking July afternoons all the way
from Denver to Florida to rescue their pal from the mental asylum
in Sarasota. Lambertson had been even bigger than Freese then he
could bench press three hundred pounds, they were going to blow
everybody's mind down there at the flip out farm and oh how it
hurt to think of the muscle he'd once had. The double sessions extra
tough that year because by the time that nurse led them to that
beige room at the end of the gleaming hallway, Chinninski was all
through. Ain't going to play no more God damn football, ain't going
to eat no more God damn pussy, ain't ever going back because
I'm not leaving this room again. Maybe he'd never had a chance to
begin with, eighteen inch biceps and the bastard was absolutely flying,
jet high on fear, a lost cause shooting straight up through the
clouds, gone forever ... A bitch when you couldn't save one of
44
Walking Through Denver
your own Freese saying the fucker'd been hit once too often, took
one too many chances maybe, Lambertson betting it was a cunt
that did it, write the faggot off, eighty to one he'd blown his brains
out on a warm April night just like this one or maybe he'd made it
out only Lambertson didn't think so, customers hovering much too
close Freese has had the gun out for hours, Chinninski's life had
been nothing but the signal of a foul end for all of them. They had
tried at least, all you could do, Freese waiting, waiting, nothing
finer than those spring nights in college escaping the bitches, climbing
out on the dorm roof pumping rifle shots at the stars shit it was
all going, nothing lasted, no one could help you, not a single cunt
worth remembering, you could see it all right down there in the
blinding linoleum floor and sure, I'm all right, he told Freese, give it
to me.
Hey who's going to pay for all this stuff the slut behind the
counter suddenly wanted to know. Twat grease like her was always
somehow throwing the lever down into high gear, one day she
would be run over and No one is they shouted at her, hatred flowing
like it was coming out of a hose. The four bucks an hour they
paid her wasn't going to be anyways near enough tonight, the twat
regretting being there already, six pissed off motherfuckers all their
heads in some weird vicious space but you had to pity her though,
to have us walk into your life your luck had to be completely gone.
Freese burning her through the forehead with one of his looks, just
a little bit of physics they never bothered to teach her in high
school. Lambertson getting the gun down underneath his belt,
watching the 7-11 girl writhing under the weight of perfect rage,
Freese nothing but two glowing eyes piercing through her fear. The
others shooting out the door, bang, bang, some sing song litany
bouncing in Lambertson's head that the harder you looked the
more you saw but the less there was and this bitch some variety of
insect, eighteen years old pushing forty, the only decent thing
about her job was that she got to read Modern Screen for free and
she was all zits and rotting tubes and funny odors she wasn't all
there was but Christ just about and of course time would just keep
racing back out across the fucking stars he could see it zooming off
this bitch's face like a laser and who were these guys anyway, just a
bunch of burned out jocks out on the town cutting loose only
45

Lemperly
Freese was standing there like no one he had ever seen before and
the others were all outside dancing around practically spraying the
insides of their jeans yelling about tight cunt and hard-assed cops
and Lez go for Chrissakes, we ain't got all night. All of them smirking
laughing dying to be anywhere but here spitting between their
teeth then Freese and Lambertson were running across the parking
lot towards them the sound of one of them revving up the Camaro
for Freese, Freese waving a handful of bills, laughing, screaming at
Lambertson, It ain't even started yet.
Shifting at redline, tires shrieking all the way out onto Coif ax.
From downtown to the Air Force base just one long streak of glowing
sodium. Lights splattering across the windshield from the strip
joints and the liquor stores. The brilliant hues spraying the street as
the sunset died it didn't matter whether you were rolling along eighteen
stories high or not the signs would just keep flashing and
flashing, puking out: GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! and COLD BEER!
COLD BEER! Freese driving oblivious, impregnable, swerving
from lane to lane between the rows of howling neon so what if
things were bad Freese didn't need anyone to come and hold his
hand everybody blowing out obscenities into the evening wind.
Beer tabs popping off like cap guns, the jack offs in the back seat
never letting up, the St. Louis Shitheads Lambertson called them,
their scratchy voices cracking, Man like really pull out the stops
tonight, go for it, go for it, really fuck some heads.
Outside the hopeless losers were monkey-walking past the
suicide bars and gas stations, everyone a nigger nowadays, slumpshouldered
sunken-chested fish-eyed, the losers would just keep on
taking it and taking it and taking it and taking it and the voices of
the shitheads kept roaring over him: Lambo watchoo guys doing
back there, pissing in that chick's mouth? Lambertson could feel the
lights outside growing heavier and heavier, Denver used to seem so
peaceful in the spring —I bet you guys were taking turns pissing
down her fucking throat, weren't yuh? Haw haw haw. Another
shithead jumping in, They was doing it too, the fucking scumbags.
Lately they been sinking to all manner degradation. Everybody cutting
up and Ha ha, I pissed on a bitch once, Christ you talk about
laughs. She swallow any? Shit yeah and You ever piss on a bitch,
Lambo? The shitheads all howling, yapping, poking Lambertson's
46
Walking Through Denver
shoulder. I can't remember, him calling back. Aw come on. Dja do
it? Dja do it? And on and on.
Lambertson watched the nigger scum peddling cunt. There
was nothing anywhere but colored hookers and cunt-maddened
dirtballs, everywhere the red and gold and green lights raining
down, pissing across all their lifeless faces. But had the drugs and
wildness delayed or advanced his inevitable suicide? Christ it sucked
that every time you tried to get away, tried to buy a little extra time
you ended up losing twice the ground, each day getting more and
more beautiful until he thought he could no longer stand it. Bright
morning suns and skies as perfect and haunting as the whores on
Vogue magazine covers and even though he walked all night, practically
every night, he could hardly sleep at all. Jump boots and
dungarees and a pocketful of pills straight west on Parker Avenue
past the condominiums all the way out to the foothills and back at
dawn, hit the Valium, try and crash. It couldn't go on too much
longer like this it was getting fucking outrageous and the lights
were coming in much too fast, a mistake had been made, Lambertson
trying to coax the chemical breakdown of Dexedrine out of
Olson, but Olson's head was doubly fucked, maybe even triply
fucked, he couldn't remember. The lights were just going to have to
come in at their own speed, he knew better than to expect miracles
no one was about to come and shut them all off it was just the same
old horror show, just one more night trying to sit back and hold on.
Take more than a little neon to trip Freese's ass though at one
time it might have taken a great deal less and Get some! Get some!
the St. Louis Shitheads shouted, Freese trawling them through the
heart of Whore Row. Greenish stars of sparkling chromium rebounding
off Freese's squinting face, Freese driving like it was
nothing Lambertson wanting to say Speed and adrenaline a funny
mix lights a thousand yards long cutting into my face like pastel
glass slivers, everything so far away. Freese's hand reaching
through the beams of light, flicking the radio dial over to coon
trash, pissing everyone off except Lambertson who knew Freese
just hated love songs. Flicking the dial his way of hinting the world
was something other than what the big name DJ.'s said it was; nigger
funk shitting out, the fat-lipped soul snatch whining to an
idiotic ugly beat, bitching about a lifetime of bad news fucks. Skirt
47

Lemperly
thrown up legs pulled apart the mindless twat had really gotten
hers; Freese laughing, driving on, the lights pounding down,
endless needles breaking the surface of Lambertson's skin, cutting
into his eyes. Like those two turquoise beams swirling in at them
from someplace out beyond the stars getting closer and closer until
they were ricochetting off the thirteen year old spic slut's face as she
glared at Lambertson by the lake in the middle of Denver City
Park.
A runaway from someone or some thing, one look and
Lambertson knew the spic hated him, it was resting there in her
eyes, Come on Lambo baby, hump my filthy spic cunt and I'll slit
your throat, rip off your cock, poke out your eyes. She sat there
next to Olson in the moonlight, the others dancing around wolfing
down reefer after reefer, kicking dead twigs, skimming dried dog
shit across the water. Delicate thin shoulders soft sepia skin like a
fucking nigger's almost, this spic slit a cock tease all her young life
moist tiny lips like razor blades dirty murky brown eyes skipping
rope taking their pulses letting everyone know the score. The little
bitch, she knew all about Dexedrine, turning her face with the
moon, letting streaks of light slam off the dark glass sheen of her
cheeks, rifling them faster and faster straight into Lambertson's
face. He sat there looking at her, his hand dropping to the butt of
the gun: violence the only cure. I will no longer be a victim,
Lambertson telling himself, wiping the sweat off his palm and
fingers. Olson grinning some 'Go eat shit in hell' grin as Lambertson
lifted up his shirt, exposing three inches of gun butt sticking out
from his belt. The spic's hideous glaring face cooking him with rats'
eyes the moonbeams slicing in deeper and deeper: I will aim where
the points of light begin at the upper corners of her cheekbones. It
thrilled him that even in despair you could still really fuck some
heads why all you needed was a weapon and a reason and he told
himself that he would blast her and blast her until she was nothing
but a three inch notice in the morning paper. Pulling the gun out
slowly, slowly, keeping his eyes on the spic and one of the
shitheads tackling Olson, laughing out, She's mine, she's mine, firing
off a mile a minute rap about how he was going to porp her
God damn head off and fistfuck her to death. Everyone laughing
and screaming, the girl racing across the park as fast as she could
48
Walking Through Denver
run, her footsteps growing fainter in the distance; Lambertson
wondering if she realized just how close she'd come to the flame.
You fine sisters digging this? Freese saying, pushing the sluts
along, leading everyone down the wailing white corridors of the
House of Pompeii Apartments. A fat ugly nigger and a fat ugly
spic. Black Fuck and Spic Hole. You had to hand it to Freese, he
could really pick the names. Yeah man, anything but the truth the
secret to anyone's getting laid and what a rap they had, all of them
loving it even more because it was wasted on pigs. Lambertson
remembering far off nights on Dilaudid and MDA, bullshitting
himself by thinking of beauty in terms of light and color and
energy, electrical purity and vibrating essences and wasn't that one
hell of a joke except they were about to plunder the other end of the
same scale and the colors were bright and their eyes were glowing
with light and the six of them were nothing but liquid energy
pushing the whores along. We have become beautiful in our sheer
raving insanity, Lambertson thought, but it was too late in the
game for that to count for very much, too bad, but what a ride out
it was going to be on this last wave of pure hate energy they were
all soaring on. Freese knew what he was doing, fly out from the
bottom and work their way back up to where they had once started
and then let it fly in their fucking faces and even that rotting slut at
7-11, stupid as shit who hadn't known anything but how to jerk off
a cash register eight hours a night, she had felt it: We have become
the things we feared.
Freese trying to impress them with descriptions of the
schmaltzy statues and the funky columns and the imitation urns
and the pool and the tennis courts. Two more weeks and they were
converting it all into condominiums—just one more place he'd
grown to like he'd be thrown out of. No sense whining about it.
Besides, like everything else, it wasn't any good anymore. Most of
the leases were up and each day more and more people moved out,
the place was rapidly becoming deserted, dead as shit, a mausoleum.
And it was just like some idiot dago to sell out to a couple of fat
jews. He'd seen the bastards walking around. The jewballs pointing
up to the balconies, letting everyone know they were big time,
sniffing out cracks in the tennis courts, crawling around looking for
flaws in the foundations, the pool, in the sidewalks, great hairy tits
49

Lemperly
bouncing underneath their shirts. Everywhere you went it was
hideous and ugly. Tits on men, these foul whores, Denver. No matter
what you did, no matter where you went, somebody was always
cramming it right in your face. Lambertson moving well behind
them, walking slowly and deliberately, watching Freese sending the
whores down. It was all a big joke, all of them laughing: Olson,
Freese, the St. Louis Shitheads, the snatch. Well let those bitches
laugh now, because soon they'd be taking on a little heat. He could
almost feel the pigs gagging as they smothered under the weight of
his disgust and he could almost feel his hands slipping around that
idiot dago's throat and he could just see himself standing big as life
in the jewballs' posh downtown office bouncing their soggy, pisssoaked
brains off the sparkling mahogany desk tops. And man!
could he see the look on the lime-lipped, big-titted jew secretaries as
he yanked up their Lord & Taylor dresses and fucked them so hard
in their assholes they'd cough up blood all over the two inch pile
carpeting and Hey Lambo, you forget how to walk? Come on
jagoff, party time. Inching along at a hundred miles an hour,
Lambertson grinned at the figures moving up the hallway.
Laughing smirking thinking, funny how different the world looked
when you were carrying live ammo.
Freese opened the door and shoved the whores through. The
rest slinking in, the shitheads goosing one another, firing joints,
Marlboros, cracking off locker room grins: We're really living now,
man. The whores walking into the living room—just like two sleaze
wagons to case a place for whatever they could steal. Har har har
and I think I'm in love! Olson yelling out, choking on a three mile
snarl. Not a single piece of furniture in either of the two rooms, the
holes staring at the garbage strewn everywhere their faces blank as
five a.m. television screens: Spic Hole's watery pink eyes the color
of an island moon drifting over Hawaii twelve and a half years ago.
Beer cans and soiled paper plates, upside down ashtrays scattered
around, a pile of mud-flecked sleeping bags stacked in the corner.
Not luxurious enough for you, prettyboy? Freese had asked him the
night he arrived. Welcome to the House of Pompeii.
What about one of them beeeeers? Spic Hole wanted to know.
Freese slammed her into his hip, bouncing her back toward Olson
who hooted and ran into the kitchen yelling Garcon! Garconl Spic
50
Walking Through Denver
Hole scratching her gut, Black Fuck's face nearly gray under the
harsh yellow lights her oily pitted-out face like wet ashes. Olson
running back out with a twelve pack, lobbing beers all over the living
room, the shitheads spraying as much foam as they could on
the holes, the holes laughing, ha ha ha, the most fun they'd ever
had. You're beautiful someone saying to no one the king of the
shitheads humping imaginary cunt in the middle of the living room
everyone spouting nonsense, trading smiles. Black Fuck opening
her beer a class act all the way her enormous mouth drooping lower
and lower with each swallow with each second like she was still trying
to figure out where exactly it was she missed the fucking boat.
- A radio flipped on in the kitchen and a shithead stepping up to the
fat nigger: Hey bitch, wanna dance?
Lambertson pushed past them straight to the corner and
started digging into his pack for a vial of gold Valium. What his
prob'em, he don' talk, Spic Hole asking Olson. He just doesn't like
women, Freese said, smirking, and What he like then, Spic Hole
. pushing it and these pigs will find out if they keep pressing it just a
little bit, Lambertson thinking, pouring out fifteen milligrams into
his shaking hand. Popping three pills into his mouth, remembering
to chew carefully for faster effect, collapsing against the packs and
sleeping bags, knowing there was nothing to do but sit tight and
wait to be brought down, ride it out. They could fill up the courtyard
outside with the thousands of morons who had thrown
mindless fucks into these two dogshit pigs Lambertson thinking
knowing that these holes had gone too far this time, ending up
here, the end of the line. They had even less time left than he and
Freese. Freese. was right maybe after all. Their end, their end was
our beginning..
.: He creepy, Black Fuck saying and Let's suck some cock, assface,
one of the shitheads calling over, Olson passing a joint, the
others squelching beers, trading off bongs, reloading, blowing out
smoke on the pigs. Freese eyeing the door* then flicking the radio to
nigger shit again, Black Fuck grinning like it was for her and
everyone smiling into her jungle stupidity, yeah yeah, we're just
joking you motherless sluts, can't you see what fun it all is? Freese
walked back to the glass sliding door and locked it, pulled the
blind, glancing over at Lambertson in the corner as if to say, Imag-
51

Lemperly
ine these shitqueens putting on airs like they were human beings or
something, it's fucking incredible.
Nothing's human, Lambertson telling himself, Hey Freese this
ain't no pahhty, Black Fuck announcing, pushing her destiny ahead
another few minutes, You said a pahhty goin' on here. The shitheads
gaping, snickering down into their beer cans, tapping their
feet, Olson scratching his crotch flashing a blinding faggot smile.
That's because the invitations got lost in the mail. My deepest and
most sincere apologies, my dear, Olson bowing, beaming like some
snatch doctor's cunt lamp. You crazy, Black Fuck saying and then
buying her and Spic Hole another sixty seconds with a high
screeching laugh, everyone going cold, freezing on the carpet. Cats
staring into Black Fuck's upturned bat face, looking at her huge
webbed gums and decaying teeth, Black Fuck showing off evidence
of her garbage life. Both her and Spic Hole dragged through the
mire their whole lives with no hand holds either, neither one with
even the brains to realize it. A few years ago, a lifetime away,
Lambertson or Olson or maybe even one of the shitheads would
have just laughed, some joke Freese, given the holes a couple of
joints, a few beers, slapped them both on the ass and sent them
back to the garbage pile. Only now their wisdom wasn't going to
allow them to let this dog shit off so easy. These pigs were just
emblems of their prettier counterparts, their dog shit faces just symbols
of the dog shit souls of every cunt every one of them had ever
known and —
I gotta call my boyfrand Spic Hole telling them and Heh heh
heh, what sense of humor she got: Spic Hole cutting for the phone
like a million dollar cock tease in a Fifties romance flick. Only
she was just a pig and deep inside enemy territory if there ever was
a someday maybe then they'd laugh, Lambertson thinking, Olson
yanking the spicface back into the living room. One of the shitheads
cursing as he flicked his lighter a hundred and fifty times trying
to get it going Black Fuck giggling as Freese handed her a bong.
That bong smells just like your dead snatch, the shithead letting her
know, only the nigger not listening everyone cutting up with Aw
shit mans, grinding out cigarettes on their heels. The nigger funk
still blaring out echoing in the barren rooms Spic Hole deciding
52
Walking Through Denver
that she was in some impossible way still free even though she
was inside the apartment pushing Olson and one of the shitheads
back. My boyfrand, I'm gonna call heeeeem! Wait a fucking minute
Spic Hole, the game completely over now things getting uglier and
uglier with each minute the room thick with it Lambertson laughing
thinking always funny when someone's limited options are pressed
upon them. But my boyfrand, Spic Hole insisting, he don' know
I'm heeeer. You ain't got shit but us, you filthy cunt, the Shithead
King explaining, proving himself a born communicator after all.
Everybody with prize-winning expressions of utter joy the spic
moving closer and closer to the phone, the shitheads grabbing
Black Fuck, Olson cutting off Spic Hole dropping his pants: Suck
this, you God damn shitfuck. My boyfrand. My boyfrand. I gotta
call heeeem! Yeah yeah yeah, Freese telling her. Let's pull that God
damn train.
Whirling back through the years. Some things just stayed with
you hung in the air never let you forget. Dreaming of junkies and
fabulous suicides off Manhattan rooftops Lambertson grew up on
deserted suburban streets under empty New York skies not one
bitch ever looking real. Remembering. Thinking shit like winter
vacations in Nassau and bright suns over Paradise Island, the time
he and his father stopped for cokes on a dirt road in Jamaica. Or
jive like blue water white sand green trees and Caribbean twilights
and Antiguan moons and blah blah blah, Lambertson wasn't about
to forget the long list of gorgeous ballbusters he had tangled with.
He remembered the drizzly midnight he went insane. You couldn't
let memories like those slip away, they were just too fucking
precious. Like the last chance cunt. Always there were the mean
last words the weightless fingers waving that final time the
unspoken 'byes' on all their lips. Pulling in the last breath after it
was over and you were alone again it was like death it wasn't really
but deep inside he knew it was the last chance cunt walking into
that party as if the world was never ever going to run out on her.
Everything wrong, Lambertson told himself it was okay, things
were just fine sitting at that crowded smoky party counting up the
53

Lemperly
exact minutes days weeks and months since he'd gone insane.
Standing up in slow motion walking over to the last chance cunt
neither of them smiling.
Leggo Freese, Leeemee lone you God dam sombitchesl
Full sad lips and dead green eyes, long black perfectly combed
hair he was only two hundred and thirteen days from the soundless
darkness when the last chance cunt had conned him into thinking
she was a human being. But oh what fun it had been telling her
about the joys of slow recovery, about the constant fear of slipping
back, how he rose each morning with it, went to bed with it each
night, the fear of insanity hanging over him the sum total of all the
other fears.
Stop it. Don' be jumpin' on me now!
Telling her about Chinninski, about all the sad desperate
moments, she listening blank, distant, unmoved. Kissing her in his
dark room. Kissing her even though she'd never been and never
would go insane, even though she had never once known the feeling
of seeing your life only in terms of asylums, therapy and
recovery.
Leggo you God damn muffuggers. Olson killin' me. My ass
sore you shitass sombitches.
He had gone through with it despite everything and oh yes indeed,
she had been the last chance at something.
You fuckin' me to death.
Hey Lambo! Get yourself some beefsteak, boy. The best cuts
in town. You couldn't do better with a fistful of fifties, motherfucker.
Omens and paranoia shooting back and forth through his life
like some intermittent illness, Lambertson thanked God there were
drugs you couldn't make it alone everything was ending. Ritalin
and Dexedrine to carry you up, Limbitrols and MDA and tea to
give you some kind of edge, downs to keep the whole thing from
slipping. Up down inside out backwards forwards any way but
straight and boy was it ever going now, was he ever going to go out
and let loose tonight. Fifty-three days cruising on a suicidal down
his head filled with nothing but ugly thoughts, he'd spent his whole
life dreaming about raking razor blades and switchblades across the
faces of a thousand different bitches, slitting their throats in a hun-
54
Walking Through Denver
dred different ways, slashing and carving them in a million different
positions and now his education was nearly complete. The
last chance cunt on a spacey bender of her own, five weeks' worth
of touchless chilling talks, candlelight dinners and all night discussions,
walls a mile thick between them until one night in a dimly lit
night club her arm had eerily slid around his waist, their bodies
touching for the very first time. Perhaps she had been the only person
to have ever touched him and what kind of cunt was that to
temporarily destroy his dreams of mutilation and murder?
Lambertson frozen in the corner staring at them fucking in the
middle of the living room floor. Suddenly realizing the gun was
dangling from his side, lying in his open palm. Olson was fucking
the nigger in the ass, the nigger blowing the Shithead King. Freese
was buried under a pile of bodies, flopping around with Spicjiole.
Olson giving an all star performance, one of the shitheads trying to
work it in Black Fuck's cunt; one big happy family but if you were
anything near alive then there could only be two voices, suicide in
one ear and madness in the other, you were bound to trip into a
whole lot of nasty scenes but this was going to be the final outrage,
that was one thing he was sure of. The shithead's knuckles white
with splotches of deep red as he grabbed the nigger's frizzy black
hair. The blow job of his life, the best he'd ever get, come on show
that pig some respect.
Black Fuck's mouth stretched wide open. Lock jaw, trench
mouth, blower's cramp, leprosy, TB. Two pigs to choose from, six
slots ready and waiting, six ways to score. Spic Hole rolling off
Freese, Freese rolling on top of her, sending it home, Spic Hole digging
it, moaning, the nastier the better, Freese giving out just one
more grudge fuck in a lifetime of grudge fucks and the other
shitheads flopping around, sticking their cocks where they could,
laughing, swilling beer, scarfing joints, Lambertson lazily aiming
the gun at Black Fuck's ribcage where he had often imagined
shooting himself. Aiming it, picturing it blasting away Hey Black
Fuck wham wham wham and you there Spic Hole, wham wham
wham. Grinning into their ugliness, smiling at the bad odors and
the fat chunky thighs. Freese rolling off to do a bong, one of the
shitheads rolling on, rutting Spic Hole like she was king feed. The
shithead's hulking face like a furious deeplined face on death row;
55

Lemperly
grunting, cursing, killing away another night, waiting for something
inside him to finally blow.
Life histories of pure hate whistling off the walls, the unknowing
pigs running out the clock on their lives doing all they'd ever
learned to do: grunting, writhing on their knees, or kicking their fat
thighs at the sky. Remembering the sad distant melody of a young
suicide's last song, Lambertson put the gun underneath his belt
thinking back back back. The muffled sobs and heavy breathing
filtering through his head like they were being played back over
a far-off tape recorder Lambertson remembering the death fuck
with the last chance cunt. The very last chance on the very last
night with the last chance cunt her long black hair flowing over the
bed like the dark gloom all the other cunts had left him with, their
gleaming smiles losing themselves in the sparkles of her hair and
what else to do but go absolutely wild into a life and death fuck.
Her perfect full lips some embodiment of sadness somehow it was
fitting she was on her period and she could even say that with
perfect femininity beads of sweat dropping off onto the bed veins
bulging, it was her eyes that had flashed when a car's headlights
flooded the hollow room. Soundlessly pressing against China blue
sheets lifting up her soft smooth ankle stretching out her leg licking
her bloody cunt then pushing driving yanking thrusting pulling going
for some ultimate broke reconciliation this close everything in
reach as he ran his hand over her cool motionless form. When she
walked out for good and ever there was just a bloody tampon to
remember her by. He carried it with him everywhere. There were a
whole lot of people who were really making it he wasn't one of
them no time left just a rock hard, soiled jam rag resting in his
pocket.
There were no more ties left now. It seemed impossible he had
ever felt anything for a soulless cunt like that. She was merely the
final manifestation of a long, aching lie. He could easily stick the
gun under his ribcage now; he could stick it in his mouth if he
wanted. But that could wait. Lambertson understood his options
perfectly now and God this was the feeling the man had when he
designed this little .22 automatic. Just a lonely wigged out motherfucker
who before he probably killed himself had imagined seeing
.22 automatics pouring fire out in living rooms, hotel rooms,
56
Walking Through Denver
balconies, theatres, streetcorners, under stairwells, imagined seeing
handsome bone^clean men sticking these little automatics up the
cunts and assholes of gorgeous bitches all over America the man
was definitely an American and I too have risen up in this land it
has given me nothing but this soiled tampon and this automatic. I
will go now and walk these streets of Denver.
Joining them in the hallway to the bathroom, the shitheads
kicking the soccer ball through the kitchen Lambertson whistling it
back, the Shithead King letting a bottle fly above the brick
fireplace. The soccer ball crashing into the refrigerator and flying
into the living room. Freese stepping over Olson and Spic Hole,
Black Fuck crawling toward her clothes, inching towards death, the
shitheads on her in an instant, Lambertson faking left and
manoeuvering the ball away from Freese and slamming it with all
his might into Spic Hole's head. Hey Sonbitch hit me. Spic Hole's
legs streaked with blood, Freese diving over Olson getting to the
ball, laughing, kicking another pass missing Black Fuck and creaming
one of the shitheads in the stomach, the shithead only laughing.
Lambertson digging into the bottom of his pack, filling up his
pockets with vials of pills and shiny plastic boxes of .22 cartridges.
That would keep him going. Freese standing over him. Hey where
you goin' man? Taking another trip?
Yeah, a trip. California, Hawaii, Antigua.
Get a piece of ass why dontcha. Everyone got laid but you.
Don't think so, man. Got some shit I want to do.
Olson yelling out that the slits were getting dry again You
motherfuckers better come blow another load up these pigs'
bumholes then spitting on Spic Hole's ass, rubbing it into her snatch
and asshole, laughing like mad. Lambertson walking out to the
balcony, Freese following.
Lambertson looked out across the glittering lawn at the night
sky. He knew the moon and the stars were just a con, there was
nothing out there. There was nothing on the other side of the apartments
but nothingness and nothingness and more nothingness and
Freese turning to him, saying, Lambo, those pigs aren't walking out
of here. I mean like I'm going to be wanting that gun there good
buddy. Freese smiling. I want that gun, Lambo.
Lambertson could smell rain. Tomorrow there were going to
57

Lemperly '
be thunderstorms. He knew he should go back inside and grab a
windbreaker but it seemed impossible for him to go back now. He
would go just like this over the cold metal railing across the lawn.
He tried to think of other April nights and the way the lawns would
shine in the darkness with the moon but hadn't it all just led him to
here? Lambertson looked back into Freese's eyes. They were equals
now, Freese's face just a mirror of his own. Take my hunting knife,
then, Lambertson said, It's in my pack. He tapped the gun underneath
his shirt making sure it was still there, that it was finally going
to be right, here at the end. I need this gun real bad, Freeser.
Both of them smiling their own half smiles. Real bad.
Freese nodding, checking out some point of light on the other
side of the apartments then holding up his fist hissing Get some!
Then disappearing back inside the party, locking the glass door
behind him.
Well, Lambertson thought, he had waited and waited and you
were only young so long and if there was nothing or you could find
nothing then that was simply it, then, because youth was all there
was. He wished he had time to stick around and watch these pigs
get butchered. Some real fire and some real shit. Like the last
chance cunt, -ft was amazing that she had gotten away alive. But
then, she had never been anything close to living to begin with.
He'd picked a cadaver for his final romance, a walking dead girl.
The dead daughter of a dead mother of a dead family, nothing but
death and deadness in every second of every hour of every day of
every one of their lives all the way back fifty generations and that
one arm sliding around his waist has been nothing but a death
twitch, not even hers, a fluke of dying nerves from some distant
mother of her mother's mother's mother's mother, an echo of a
death throe hundreds of years before her twitching down, tumbling
from generation to generation until her arm had twitched with it
and Lambertson had been fooled. No matter. He'd go out tonight
and infest the living. Lambertson boosted himself over the balcony
and ran across the shiny lawn to the northern archways of the
Pompeii Apartments.
58
THE LOST FICTION OF WELDON KEES
Edited by James Reidel & Timothy Nolan
For his wife
Ann Swan Kees
1915-1975
59

Reidel/Nolan
Weldon Kees in Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1949
(Courtesy of Fritz Bultman)
Bill Witt: Photographer
Introduction
Weldon Kees was born on February 24, 1914, in the town of
Beatrice, Nebraska. He was the only child of a prosperous hardware
manufacturer, John Kees, and his wife, Sarah. Weldon Kees
was educated at the University of Nebraska, the University of
Missouri, and the University of Chicago. In 1937, he married Ann
Swan and lived for a time in Hollywood among the expatriate
Nebraskans attracted by the success of native son Spongier Arlington
Brugh, better known as the actor Robert Taylor. From about
1939 to 1943, Kees and his wife lived in Denver, Colorado. There
he worked as a WPA librarian, overhauling the decrepit card
system of the public library.
With his literary fortunes on the rise, and with the publication
of his first book of poems, The Last Man (Colt Press, 1943), Kees
moved to New York City. For a short while Kees wrote for Time,
and later for Paramount News Service. He also made his living as
an assistant editor to Randall Jarrell at The Nation, free-lancing for
Partisan Review and playing jazz in piano bars. During his New
York years he began to paint in the style of the abstract expressionists.
He became intimate friends with Mark Rothko (from
whom he bought a used car which he christened "Taureseus"), Hans
Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and the other
painters who signed the Jrascibles manifesto. He had several oneman
shows and in 1949 succeeded Clement Greenberg at The Nation.
Kees continued to write one of the most influential columns in
the art world.
Regardless of his promising career in New York, Kees became
disgusted with the conceits of the art and literary establishment. He
and Ann left for the freer environment of San Francisco in 1950. He
continued to paint, compose and perform jazz, and write poetry.
He also took up filmmaking and assisted Dr. Jurgen Ruesch on the
60 61

Reidel/Nolan
pioneering study of social behavior, Nonverbal Communication,
for which he took many of the photographs that illustrate this
book. With other Bay Area artists, Kees founded and produced
"The Poets Follies," a vaudeville and burlesque show that featured a
stripper reading "The Four Quartets" and the young Phyllis Diller in
one-act existentialist plays. The subsequent "Follies" became the
first public platform for the Beats.
Kees disappeared on July 18, 1955. His car was found on one
of the approaches to the Golden Gate Bridge. He has not been seen
since. Despite an enormous forgetting, Kees's reputation as a poet
has survived, due in part to The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees
(University of Nebraska Press, 1975), a compilation of Kees's three
published books of poetry, edited by Donald Justice, and in part to
the more recent book New York Poems, edited by Howard Moss,
which features Kees's stunning "Robinson" poems.
However nowhere is neglect more apparent than in the fate of
Weldon Kees's fiction. Between 1934 and 1945, in that era of considerable
ferment in America's little magazines, Kees published
nearly forty short stories and sketches. His accomplishment was
further underscored by rating asterisks in the back of Edward
O'Brien's Best Short Stories anthologies, and in 1941, in the final
volume he edited, O'Brien dedicated the anthology to the young
Nebraskan and featured one of his stories. Also in 1941, Alfred A.
Knopf signed Kees on for a novel which remains unpublished.
Evident in Kees's fiction is a documentation of the Great
Depression. These stories of the Thirties and Forties not only represent
a world that is the past but, given today's real and hyped recession,
a world that is remarkably little different from our own.
There is a disruption of the commonplace and the expected in
Kees's stories that has been generated by a recidivistic response to
hard times. This is evident in the characters, the scenarios, the plots
and in the working method of the author. Kees's poetic metier is
developed in these stories. His writing is concise, numbing minimalism.
This is counterpointed by a remarkably apt naivete in the
storytelling and Kees's choice of Midwestern characters with their
unarticulated emotional baggage. Their stories are commonplace
dramas recast into black comedy, an off-celluloid film noir, convincingly
rendered by Kees's spare and sardonic voice.
62
Introduction
What is more striking, as is evident in the following selection
published together for the first time, is that the same qualities that
make Kees's stories so entertaining reveal in their author a disaffiliation
with a form, i.e. the short story. The characterizations, for
all their clarity, obliviate the need for characters, obliviate the need
to write stories with characters. Kees exhausted them, leaving in
the end Kees himself as the ultimate character: the poet.
J.R., T.N.
63

Do You Like the Mountains?
Trend, April 1942
It was beginning to get dark in the room. The two men sat in
large green chairs by the window and looked out at Vine Street.
Neither of them lived in the apartment, which was rented by
three acquaintances of theirs —a stand-in for an actor at Warner
Brothers, an extra who had not worked for several months, and
another young man whose family gave him a liberal allowance to
stay away from Sacramento. Across the street, a man was changing
the letters on the marquee of the theatre and people went in and out
of the vegetarian restaurant.
"I was out there on the desert for thirty-eight days, drawing
twenty-five a day," Bryan said. He was a very tan young man who
wore a white sweater, gray flannels, and rope-soled shoes. "Most of
the time we just laid around and played cards and drank beer.
Wonderful food. Then on the thirty-eighth day, Morgan decided to
shoot the scene I was in. I rode up on a big white horse, my hair all
mussed up, so dirty my own mother wouldn't have recognized me.
Just as I get up to Braggioni — he was the heavy — I fall off the horse,
panting like hell. They put a camera right over me and shoot from
above and I say, They're on their way now, Stockton. Get out
while you've —' Just that, see? Then I break off and fall over, a stiff.
Twenty-five a dayl The first take was good and the next day I came
back to Hollywood and sat on my tail for six months before my
agent found anything for me."
Magriel looked at his watch and said, "Let's go over there if
we're going." He was younger and had not been in Hollywood long
enough to have as good a tan as Bryan's
They took the elevator down. There was a tall, red-bearded
man in the elevator who had a parrot in a cage. The lobby was
64
Do You Like the Mountains?
empty except for a dwarf playing the pin-ball game in the corner.
They got Bryan's car at the garage and drove up Vine to
Hollywood, where they turned off to the left.
"You'll like Jimmy," Bryan said. "That guy has been just like a
father to me. Always thinking of the little things. Always
remembers my birthday, things like that. He and my father were
awfully thick. Maybe he can give you some tips. He knows everybody."
Bryan turned off the ignition as they coasted into a curving
driveway.
An individual who resembled a retired pugilist opened the
door for them and grinned loosely. 'You ain't around for some
time, Mr. Bryan."
"San Francisco."
"What were you doing up there, Mr. Bryan?"
"I was in a play."
"How was business?"
"Not bad. Jimmy around?"
"He's taking a shower. Go on down to the bar and I'll tell him
you're here."
Magriel followed Bryan downstairs. It was the longest bar he
had ever seen. Behind it was a mirror that extended the length of
the bar, and above the mirror was a mammoth painting of a very
pink nude being ogled by a satyr.
"Been away, haven't you, Mr. Bryan?" the bartender said, wiping
off the counter in front of them.
Bryan nodded. "You're looking fine, David."
"Never felt better. Been out of town?"
"Yes."
They gave him their orders. At the other end of the bar stood
two men, talking and looking at their images in the mirror. Their
faces seemed familiar to Magriel.
"You recognize those two?" Bryan said.
Magriel nodded. They were two comedians who had been
moderately successful before the advent of sound. He remembered
the tall, thin-faced one in tweeds particularly well, although he
seemed to have aged unduly. He had been splendid with the custard
pies in the silent days. The other, a short, dour man with a spotty
complexion, had dyed hair. Magriel didn't remember what he had
65

Kees
been good at. 'They're always down here every time I come in,
reminiscing about the old days or trying to figure out how to make
a killing on the horses. Bert is pretty funny on the reminiscenses
when he's drunk enough. Trouble is, it takes an awful lot to get him
that way these days." He turned around. "Here's Jimmy now. How
are you, Jim?"
Jimmy Farquar was a well-built man of about forty, conservatively
dressed. He had a good tan and his eyes squinted slightly.
He shook hands with Magriel, looking him over appraisingly, as
though sizing up a candidate for a job.
"I guess I forgot to tell you that Jimmy manages the club here,"
Bryan said.
"Mr. Bryan," the bartender said. 'Telephone."
When Bryan had gone to the other end of the room, Jimmy
Farquar continued to look at Magriel, still holding his hand.
"Like to see the place? Ill show you around, if you'd like."
"Good enough," said Magriel.
"I'm going to show your friend around," Farquar called.
"Go ahead," said Bryan. Til just stay here and see how tight I
can get before dinner."
They left him telephoning and went upstairs. Jimmy Farquar
showed Magriel the lounge, an immense room with hundreds of
photographs of actors on the walls. He pointed to several of them
and recalled incidents of their subjects' lives. They walked around
the room, looking at the pictures and the stone fireplace. On their
way to the second floor, they passed a famous leading man in evening
clothes. He was quite drunk and did not reply to Jimmy Farquar's
greeting.
Walking down the dark hall, Jimmy said, "Has Bob ever got a
load on tonight? Come in my room a minute while I get a handkerchief."
The room was richly furnished, with a tiger-skin rug on the
floor. The tiger's mouth was open and one of its teeth was missing.
Magriel sat on the bed and looked out of the window at the lights
on the hills while Jimmy Farquar got a handkerchief from the
dresser.
"Never saw Bob as drunk as he was tonight. He could hardly
make it down the stairs. He lives here now, you know. Broke up
66
Do You Like the Mountains?
with Tanya last month. Well, off-hand, I'd say it was the smartest
thing he ever did."
"Beautiful woman, though."
"You honestly mean that? Did you ever see her?"
"Not in the flesh."
Jimmy Farquar rubbed a finger across his forehead. "Up here,"
he said, "a big scar. She's growing a double chin. Her hair's six different
shades from being dyed so much. There are only about two
angles they can shoot her from anymore. She sags any way you
look at her. And temper! No, I mean it, the smartest thing Bob ever
did was to split up with her. There was no happiness for him there."
He went to the window and closed the Venetian blind a little too
casually.
"Known Bryan long?" he asked.
"No, not long."
"Great boy, Bryan."
"Yes," Magriel said. He was looking at a photograph on the
dresser of a young man with curly hair and dark eyes.
"That's Billy French," Farquar said. "He was a wonderful boy.
Died about a year ago. He was drowned, swimming one night up
the coast a ways. Got a cramp, the poor kid. I'm sure he would
have had a big future out here. They were very much interested in
him at Metro." Jimmy Farquar moistened his lips. "Yes, Billy, and I
used to go up to my place in the mountains and have wonderful
times together. That mountain air is marvelous. I simply have to
get away from here every so often, can't stand all the strain and
noise. I guess I wasn't made to be a city man. Billy and I used to go
up on weekends every chance we got and just lay around outdoors
in the raw, soaking up a lot of that marvelous sunshine."
Magriel lit a cigarette and studied the picture of Billy French.
He felt strangely uncomfortable.
"Are you working?" Jimmy Farquar asked.
"No. Not yet."
"You are an actor, aren't you?"
"Yes."
"I thought you were. How old are you?"
"Twenty-five."
'You look younger than that, you know."
67

Kees
"So they tell me."
"Probably not meeting the right people. This business of getting
work, I mean. And you won't meet them through Bryan. I
don't mean that the way it sounds — I've known Bryan ever since he
was a baby, but he is lazy and he's thrown away all kinds of
chances. Maybe there'll be some people at dinner tonight I can introduce
you to. Would you like that?"
"My agent keeps saying it's only a matter of time."
"Oh, agents!" said Jimmy Farquar with contempt.
He turned and picked up a cornflower from the dresser and put
it in his buttonhole. "Do you like the mountains?" he asked.
"Not much."
"Really?"
"My nose bleeds," Magriel said, getting up. He did not like being
alone with Jimmy Farquar. "Everytime I get very high up I get a
nosebleed. Hell of a thing, isn't it? Shall we see what Bryan is up
to?"
Farquar studied him in silence for several moments. "If you
like," he said. Turning, he glanced at his reflection in the mirror and
smoothed his hair. 'It's too bad you don't like the mountains. I was
sort of thinking about going up this weekend."
He turned off the lights in the room and they walked
downstairs. Jimmy Farquar nodded to a man in dark glasses who
had just come in.
"Poor Billy French," Farquar said, as they descended to the
bar. "You probably think it's silly, but there isn't a day goes by that
I don't think of him a dozen times. The cramp hit him all of a sudden
and nobody could get to him soon enough. It'll be just a year a
week from Thursday." He removed a piece of thread from Magriel's
sleeve. "It's a shame you can't go up to the mountains with me.
You'll think it over, though, won't you?"
Til think it over."
"We'd have a fine time up there," Jimmy Farquar said.
Bryan was sitting at a table reading the Reporter. He looked up
at them grinning. One of the ex-comedians was playing Liza on the
piano, badly and the other comedian was discussing horses with a
man who had come in.
Jimmy Farquar motioned to the bartender. "And now well
68
Do You Like the Mountains?
have a little drink, and then I think I can promise you a remarkably
good dinner." He smiled and felt of the cornflower. "You don't
know how glad I am that the two of you could come over. There's so
little real friendship in Hollywood these days. Well, I suppose there
never was very much. You have no idea, Bryan, how lonesome I
get. Not many people around any more like your father." His eyes
settled on Magriel and he let them rest there. "Scotch and soda for
you, Mr. Magriel. What is your first name? I feel like a fool calling
you Mr. Magriel."
"Eric."
"Eric. That's a good name. Eric Magriel." He wore a thoughtful
look. "Scotch and soda, Eric? Sure that's what you want? Bryan?
Good enough. Two scotch and sodas, David. Just some dry sherry
for me."
69

Escape in Autumn
Windsor Quarterly, Winter 1935
The man with the cancer on the side of his face sat in the park
and watched the children playing near the plot of waving
flowers. Every day he sat there, on the same green bench, his
head turned slightly to one side so that the red-purple hole on the
side of his face was not so noticeable to those who passed.
The man with the cancer was getting old. He spent much of his
time thinking about it. Fifty-seven, he thought. It doesn't seem like
such a long time.
He had learned how to shave without the use of a mirror; it
was unnecessary for him to look in the glass and see that foul dark
canyon of flesh. He had learned to disregard the thing as much
as he could. He often wished that he could forget about it entirely,
but he knew that was impossible.
The wind blew cool and light, curling softly through his hair.
His rough hands caressed the brim of the straw hat in his lap as he
watched the children pushing each other, shouting, laughing.
The man with the cancer on the side of his face had no friends.
He couldn't blame people for that; he knew it was unpleasant, even
disgusting, to look at him. The only ones he had any dealings with
were those who lived in the house where he had a room. He
couldn't blame them. He couldn't look in the mirror. . . .
Now the children were playing a new game. Hide-and-go-seek,
with new variations. It differed from their other games somewhat,
he thought.
The wind changed its course, and the grass trembled, alive,
lovely.
From near the fountain, where the three paths converged, the
man with the cancer heard the sound of a stick tapping on the
gravel. He moved slightly, unhurriedly, and saw a man dressed in a
rusty black suit approaching him. A little dog on a chain preceded
the man, its small body joyous, eager. The man wore dark glasses.
He was blind.
Escape in Autumn
The trees rustled in the wind.
The little dog looked back at its master, tail wagging, pink
tongue extended.
The blind man was almost to the bench.
"Come and sit down for a minute," said the man with the
cancer.
'Thank you," said the blind man.
The other stood and helped him to sit, while the dog watched
silently, jealously.
"Thanks very much," said the blind man. "It isn't often that
people do things like that for me."
The leaves ran after each other in furtive, circular races, The
children were quiet as they watched a squirrel perched in the crotch
of a large tree.
"It's a wonderful day, isn't it?" said the blind man. "A great day
to be alive."
"Yes," said the other. "A fine day."
The little dog sat near his master's feet. The two men were
silent for a while.
"What do you look like?" asked the blind man. "You are near
my age. I can tell from the sound of your voice."
The man with the cancer fumbled with his hat.
"I'm very proud of my complexion," he replied. "People are
always remarking how fine my skin is, and how pink my cheeks
are."
"And what else?" asked the blind man.
"That's about all that's distinctive. I don't want to bore you
with things that are commonplace."
"Go on," said the blind man. "Go on. So few will talk to me,
you know. Because I am a beggar, and because I am blind."
The children resumed their game and the sound of their voices
fused with the soft breathing of the wind.
"Hear those children?" said the man with the cancer
"Yes."
'They often come over and speak and play with me. They went
away to play games just before you came."
"I wish I could see them," said the blind man.
"I wish you could, too."
The man with the cancer was happy. He could not remember a
70 71

Kees
time when his happiness had been as great. And he began to speak
rapidly, telling the blind man of his adventures with the children,
and of his fine, smooth skin. The blind man listened, smiling, nodding.
"They feel my cheeks and tell me that my face is as beautiful as
a ripe apple," said the man with the cancer.
"I wish I could see the children and you together," said the
blind man.
They sat and talked in the park for several hours, enjoying
each other, neither of them conscious of the time. The dog soon fell
asleep between the legs of the two men.
When the post-office clock struck five, the blind man started.
"Pardon," he said. "Was that five o'clock?"
"Yes," said the other. "Do you have to go?"
"Guess I'd better. People will be going to dinner soon. I've got
to get downtown."
The dog awoke and began to show signs of impatience. He
rubbed his wet nose against his master's leg.
'There, there," said the blind man. "We're going now."
The man with the cancer on the side of his face stood and
reached for the other's hand.
"Will you come again tomorrow afternoon and sit and talk
with me?" he asked. "I've enjoyed this afternoon so much."
"Yes, I'd like to," said the blind man. "You know—I feel that I'd
know you if I could see you."
"Do you?" said the other eagerly. "Do you?"
The wind died away slowly; the leaves did not stir.
"Tomorrow about two, then?" asked the man with the cancer.
"Tomorrow at two."
"Goodbye."
"Goodbye," said the blind man.
The man with the cancer on the side of his face watched the
other walking down the path erectly, his cane tapping on the
gravel, the little dog tugging ahead of him.
He was very happy as he left the park, looking forward to the
next day. And he was pleased, too, that the children were no longer
playing near the flowerbed, and were not there to stare at the side
of his face as he passed.
72
A Walk Home
Frontier & Midland, Spring 1937
The grayish man and woman came close together, looked
into each other's eyes, smiled tenderly, kissed silently. The
music swelled out in full brasses, a triumphant major chord,
full of accomplishment and hope and promise for the future. Mr.
Chalmers hastily fitted his glass eye back into its socket before THE
END flashed on the screen. The orchestra rehashed eight measures
of the theme song and the house lights came on dimly.
Mr. Chalmers sat in the back row for a few minutes, watching
the people filing slowly up the aisle. He decided that he would wait
until everyone was out: then he wouldn't have to pack himself in
with the crowd that was shoving its way out of the lobby to the
street. He blinked his right eyelid a couple of times, just to make
sure. The glass eye was hurting him quite a good deal.
Finally Mr. Chalmers stood up. "Pardon me," he said to the
man on the aisle seat. It occurred to him that the man looked at him
somewhat strangely, and he wondered for a moment if the man had
seen him take his glass eye out. Well, what if he had, Mr. Chalmers
said to himself, what if he had? Still . . . He blinked his eyelid
again. Funny, a thing like this had never happened to him before:
this new eye was a terrible fit. And it hurt a good deal.
There were only a few people going through the lobby to the
street. Ahead of him one woman said to another, "I liked her better
in that last one she was in with Warner Baxter though." And the
other woman said, "I don't like the new way she's fixing her hair; it
just doesn't seem to suit her, do you think, Naomi?" Mr. Chalmers
shoved by them to the sidewalk.
It was a neighborhood theater not far from his room; he only
had seven blocks to go. Mr. Chalmers stuck out his flat chest and
73

Kees
took in a deep breath of the stale summer air. Not so good. It had
been better in the air-conditioned theater. He reflected that this airconditioning
was a great thing, all right. A great thing. And
somebody was making a barrel of money out of it, you bet. Yes sir.
He wished that he could get in a good thing like that, but it was
always the other fellow who got the breaks.
Thinking about the picture he had just been watching, going
over the good scenes, he walked along briskly, glancing now and
then at his reflection in the dark store windows. That scene where
the heroine—what was her name anyhow?—where she told the
banker where to get off, that was great, all right. Powerful acting.
Yessir, she was a great actress, and a goodlooker, too. Powerful
acting. He shook his head vigorously, then glanced around to see if
anyone had noticed him.
This damned eye I Tomorrow after work he'd go down and
give that oculist a piece of his mind, don't think he wouldn't.
Shearer didn't need to think that he could get by with a thing like
that! And it hadn't been the first time that he'd had trouble with
him. You just had to watch people every minute, that was all there
was to it. Mr. Chalmers frowned, picturing himself in the act of
telling Shearer where to get off.
Suddenly he felt a quick stabbing sensation in the region of his
eye. His face twisted in pain. He couldn't stand it any longer, not
by a long shot. Lord, what a pain. Stepping into a shadowed doorway,
he hastily removed the glass eye. He glanced up the street to
see if anyone had observed him. No: there was no one on the
sidestreet except a young couple about a half-block away, and they
weren't paying any attention to him. They were quarreling. He
could hear their voices rising angrily and then falling away into
silence.
Mr. Chalmers sighed with relief. The pain had stopped entirely.
He felt much better, a great deal better. He looked away from the
residence section towards the district he had just come from. No
one in sight. He sighed again. The pain was gone once and for all
now that the glass eye was out.
Standing there, he looked down at this feet, thinking of what
he would say to that Shearer. "Now you look here, you," he would
say. "If you think for a minute . . ." Yes, he would certainly tell
74
A Walk Home
him a thing or two, don't think he wouldn't. He'd walk into his
shop and say to him, "Just what do you think you're trying to get
away with, anyway?" The look on Shearer's face. Mr. Chalmers
would pound on the glass top of Shearer's counter until the displays
on it rattled. "Trying to put something over on me, eh?" he would
say.
It would be the last time Mr. Chalmers would throw any of his
trade Shearer's way; there were other places to patronize. He didn't
have to go there if he didn't want to, nobody was making him.
There were other places. Even if they did belong to the same lodge,
in the long run what did it amount to? There were some things a
man just couldn't put up with, and that was all there was to it.
It happened so quickly that later he was unable to remember
just how it had come about. One moment he was holding the glass
eye tightly, and the next moment it was out of his hand. He
waited, tense, cold all over his body, for the sound of it breaking
on the sidewalk. But instead he heard a queer metallic noise, then
complete silence. He felt panicky and glanced up the street, his
mouth open, searching in both directions for help. Not a soul. Only
the empty friendless street, the lights cold and white and hostile.
He felt in his pockets for a match and finally found one. He
struck it. Peering down below him, he could see what had happened.
The eye had slipped through a grating about a foot from where he
stood, and he was able to see it down there about four feet below
the street's level. It nestled among some crumpled newspapers and
didn't seem to be damaged in the least.
A terrible fear came over Mr. Chalmers. What would he do if
he couldn't get the eye out of there? He had to be at work at eight in
the morning, and there were no places open before then where he
could get another eye. His knees trembled a little. "Good God," Mr.
Chalmers said, "Good God."
He pictured himself showing up at the office in the morning
without his eye: the girls snickering, Mr. Waples staring fixedly at
the closed eye, everyone looking, pointing. Miss Alexander would
giggle loudly. "Christ," Mr. Chalmers said. Why did it have to happen
to me, he thought. To me? "Christ," he said again. He could feel
cold moist sweat under his arms, but his face was terribly hot. He
fumbled in his pockets for a cigarette.
75

Kees
He started a bit, hearing the sound of leather heels on the
sidewalk. A man came around the corner and turned in his direction.
I'll ask him to help me out, Mr. Chalmers thought. Maybe the
two of us can pry this grating off some way or other. The thought
of getting the eye out cheered him a good deal, he really felt much
better, and when the man came towards him Mr. Chalmers spoke
pleasantly.
"Say mister," he called out.
"No money for bums," the man said curtly. He was a large man
with broad shoulders. He walked on, not even glancing at Mr.
Chalmers.
"Just a minute!" Mr. Chalmers said. "I don't want any money. I
need some help over here. I —I lost my eye."
The man stopped and turned around. "You what?" he said.
"You did what?"
"My eye," Mr. Chalmers explained. "A glass eye. I wear it. It
went down there." He pointed.
"A glass eye?" the man said suspectingly. "You lost a glass
eye?"
"Yes, a glass eye. I wear it. You know, wear it. I took it out,
see, and it sort of slipped out of my hand and went down there."
He pointed to the grating again. "It just seemed to slip out of my
hand. I can't make out yet just how it happened."
"A glass eye," the man said. "Well, can you tie that!"
"I thought maybe you could help me lift this grating out and I
could get at it. I'm not very strong myself. I don't see yet how the
thing happened. I was just standing here."
"Well, 111 be damned," the man said. "I never heard of anything
like that happening before. It went down there, did it?" He came
over to the edge of the grating and looked down into the blackness.
"It just slipped out of your hand, huh?"
"Yeh, that's right," Mr. Chalmers said eagerly, "It just slipped
out of my hand. I can't figure out yet just how it could have happened.
I was just standing here. Maybe if you could help me lift
it. ..."
"Say, that's a funny thing, all right," the man said. "My wife'll
get a big kick out of this."
"If you could," Mr. Chalmers began.
A Walk Home
"When I tell her about it, I bet she won't even believe it," the
man said.
"If you could help me lift," Mr. Chalmers went on.
"Boy, I've heard of some damn funny things in my time, but I
never heard of anything like this before."
"If I don't get it out of there," Mr. Chalmers said.
"You got a match? Can you see it?" He stepped closer.
"It's down there, all right. I lit one and you can see it down
there just as plain. If we could lift up the grating. . . ."
"Light a match and let's have a look."
Mr. Chalmers struck a match and the two men stared down
through the grating. The eye, resting on the newspapers, stared
back at them. The match burned down to his fingers, and he threw
it down hastily.
"Let's try the grating," he said. "If I could just get down there."
"All right, buddy," the man said. "Listen, you take hold of this
end and 111 take hold of this one."
"All right," Mr. Chalmers said.
It came off easily. Mr. Chalmers reflected that he could have
done it by himself. Of course he hadn't known. That was the way
things went, though. They put the grating down out of their way
and dusted their hands.
"Well, that was no trick," the man said. "No trick at all."
Mr. Chalmers cleared his throat. "Now if you'll hold a match
for me, I'll get down there," he said.
"Sure. You got any matches?"
Mr. Chalmers gave him one. The man struck it on his shoe and
held it down low so that Mr. Chalmers could see to let himself into
the shallow pit.
"Can you make it all right?" the man asked.
"I can make it fine," Mr. Chalmers replied. He dropped down,
the newspapers and other rubbish crackling as his feet struck them.
He reached down and picked up the eye.
"Is it OK?" the man above him said. "It didn't get hurt none,
did it?"
"No," Mr. Chalmers said. He felt a warm pleasant glow all
over his body now that he had the eye in his hand again.
"Plenty lucky it didn't get hurt," the man said.
76 77

Kees
"You said it."
'Til give you a lift up," the man said.
When Mr. Chalmers was back on the sidewalk, the two men
replaced the grating. A man and a woman walked by on the other
side of the street and glanced curiously at them, then walked on
faster.
"I bet they wonder what we're up to," Mr. Chalmers said.
"Yeh."
"They probably don't know what to make of it."
"Yeh, I guess that's so, all right," the man said.
'They probably think it's pretty funny business."
"Who gives a damn what they think," the man said. "I don't
give a damn what they think."
"I don't either," Mr. Chalmers said.
He felt of the eye in his pocket with gratification. Well, that
certainly was a relief. What if they had been unable to get the
grating off, and he had had to go to the office in the morning without
the eye? He was still shaking a little.
'This certainly has been a big help," he said. " I don't know
how to thank you."
"Ahhhh, don't mention it, buddy," the man said gruffly.
"Forget it."
"Well, I just want you to know I appreciated it a lot."
"Ahhhh, forget it. Glad to help out."
The two men stood uncertainly for a moment or so, neither of
them able to think of anything to say.
"Well," the man said finally, "guess I better be getting along.
My old woman will wonder what's happened to me."
"Well, thanks again," Mr. Chalmers said, putting out his hand.
They shook.
"It wasn't nothing at all," the man said. "Forget it."
"Well, it was certainly a help."
"Well, goodnight," the man said.
"Goodnight," Mr. Chalmers said. "I hope your wife hasn't been
worried about you."
"Oh, her. Say, if she is, well, it won't be the first time, by a
long shot."
78
A Walk Home
"Well, thanks again," Mr. Chalmers said, caressing the eye in
his pocket.
"OK, buddy."
Mr. Chalmers watched the man for a moment, thinking that
he was a good sort. Then he turned and started up the street the
other way. At the corner there was a drinking fountain, and he
stopped and took a long drink, sloshing the cold water around in
his mouth. Then he took the eye from his pocket and washed it
carefully. A person just couldn't be too careful about sanitary
precautions, he said to himself.
He dried the eye on a clean white handkerchief which he took
from his breastpocket, and glanced around to make sure that no
one was near. He inserted the eye quickly. Then he threw his
shoulders back and walked erectly in the direction of his rooming
house. Tomorrow he would certainly tell that Shearer a thing or
two. Shearer had better not get the idea that he could get by with
that sort of stuff. Mr. Chalmers would certainly tell him where to
get off, don't think he wouldn't.
79

This Is Home
Manuscript, May/June 1936
Banning was glad to be free of the ship. It had been a long time
since he had felt the firmness of the land, the heat of the pavement
beneath his feet. It was good to see buildings surging
out of the earth, to see women and children and autos and the
messages of electric signs winking at him.
He felt very objective and apart from all that was around him.
On the ship everything that happened was somehow part of him,
and he was part of it; but here on the soil, on alien ground, he was
free to observe and know that the city was a thing separated from
him. He began to make a better distinction between the city and the
ship, but he soon lost interest in it, listening to the sound of his
heels on the sidewalk.
It was good to be alone. He hadn't realized how strange it was
to be away from all the voices and sounds that had been so close to
him for so many weeks. He knew now that they had been crowding
in on him, pushing him. He had already forgotten that there were
people who ran pushcarts and theatres and elevators and stores.
Where there's water all around you, he thought, you forget about
the land that supports it, holds it up.
His friends on the ship had asked him to go someplace with
them, but he had told them that he might look up someone he
knew. But that wasn't so; he didn't know anyone in the city. He
didn't know a soul.
The street was cooler now. There were trees along the curbing,
shady and green, and back of them the houses of men who chose to
live on land, have offices, drive cars.
The light on the corner turned from green to red. Banning
stopped beside a street lamp and lit a cigarette. He thought he heard
someone speaking to him, and turned toward the street.
80
This Is Home
It was a man seated in a car, a new cheap little car with green
wire wheels. He had on a straw hat, and was leaning out of the window,
his eyebrows raised a little.
"Hello, sailor," he said, and Banning knew that he was saying
it for the second, maybe the third time.
"Hello."
"What are you doing?"
"Nothing much."
"Come out and drink some beer?"
Banning, the sun in his eyes, wondered if he had ever seen the
man before. Maybe it was someone he had met once and forgotten.
"Say," Banning said, coming over to the car and resting one
foot on the running board, "do I know you or don't I? Just as a matter
of record?"
"I don't think so," the man said. He was young, the sailor could
see, about twenty-seven or eight. "Thought you might like to come
out to the house and see the wife and kid."
The thing Banning had been thinking went away when he said
"wife and kid." He shifted his feet.
"My brother's a sailor," the man said rather quickly. "I sort of
like to keep in touch with the Navy. . . . You'll be sort of a substitution."
He laughed nervously. "Say!" he said, "I know what you're
thinking — "
"No," lied Banning. "No, I wasn't."
"Come on and get in then. We'll be just in time for dinner."
"But won't your wife be sore? Bringing me home without saying
anything beforehand?"
"Sure not . . . Get in."
He opened the door, and Banning somewhat reluctantly stepped
inside the car. They had to wait a few seconds for the light to
change again, and then they were moving up the street.
"I guess you boys have a pretty good time of it, don't you?" the
man asked.
"Is that what your brother told you?"
"Well, yes . . . sure." He turned and smiled. "Yes, he said you
have pretty good times."
"It's better than staying all cooped up in a hot city."
'That's what I've always thought. It must be nice to get away
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Kees
where it's not so dusty and noisy." He brought the car to a stop at
an intersection and grinned weakly. "I guess you think it was crazy
of me to stop and speak to you like I did," he said.
"Not at all."
"Well," he said hesitantly, "I can imagine what you thought.
... I guess you run into all kinds of people going all over the
world, don't you?"
"Pretty much so," said Banning. He wanted to open the door
and get out. Still, perhaps the fellow was on the level. Maybe he
was lonesome for his brother. He was rather good-looking in a
weak sort of way, Banning decided. But he looked beaten, as if ...
"My wife's a good cook," he said. "A damned good cook. How
long's it been since you had a home-cooked meal?"
"Quite a while," said Banning. And then, suddenly, "Say,
listen, I don't think your wife's going to like this — you bringing me
home without saying anything to her."
The man leaned on the steering wheel and turned away from
town.
"You just let me worry about that," he said. "She won't care.
Why, lots of times —You just let me worry about it. She likes to
have me bring home company."
Banning took out his cigarettes, but his companion said,
"Here, have one of mine. Look." He pressed a button on the side of
the dashboard, and presently a lighted cigarette slid out of an opening.
Banning picked it up and looked at it before putting it in his
mouth.
"Say, that's pretty clever," he said.
"I sell 'em. Automobile accessories. That's my line."
"Plenty neat. I never saw one of them before."
"I don't smoke, myself," said the driver. 'That's sort of for
demonstration purposes. And, then, my wife smokes."
The street lights came on suddenly, and Banning was conscious
of the dusk, and that he was hungry.
"A home-cooked meal will taste pretty good," he said. "Pretty
damn good."
The man turned another corner and smiled at the sailor.
"My wife's a fine cook," he said.
82
This Is Home
He stopped the car in front of a small white house on a quiet street.
It looked exactly like all the other tiny houses in the same block.
"This is it," said the driver. 'This is home." He took the key
from the dash and put it in his pocket.
"Nice."
"Oh, I forgot . . . We don't know each other's names. Mine's
Harold Gail."
"And mine's Banning—Joe Banning."
They shook hands and got out of the automobile.
"You're sure your wife—" Banning began.
"Oh, now, for Lord's sake," said Gail, "didn't I tell you ..."
They had arrived at the porch.
Inside, Gail called out, "Eve! We have a guest for dinnerl"
Banning stood in the tiny hall, his cap held tightly in his hands.
He was conscious of appearing awkward, ill-at-ease. I wish to
Christ I hadn't come, he said to himself.
Gail spoke. "Here, let me take your cap. Sit down and take it
easy. My wife will be out in a minute."
Just then she came to the door. Banning saw a tall, dark,
beautiful woman looking at him. Most women that tall, he thought,
are built like rails, but not her.
She turned to her husband.
"This is Mr. Banning," he said. "My wife."
Tm glad Hal brought you along," she said. "You sit down and
dinner will be ready immediately." And she looked at her husband
quickly; approvingly Banning thought.
He couldn't help making a comparison of the two, the man and
his wife. He was almost frail by the side of her: she was warm,
beautiful, strong. Banning wanted to get up and run. There was
something in the house that frightened him. There was something
in the air, a thing he couldn't touch, couldn't find.
Gail was speaking to him.
"This is Jeanie," he was saying. "The kid."
The child had just come in from the kitchen and was standing
beside her mother. She was seven or eight years old. Banning looked
at the mother and her daughter.
"Hello there," he said to the child. He turned to her mother.
"Sure does look like you."
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Kees
"Yes, doesn't she?" She smiled. "Sit down and I'll have dinner in
a minute." She glanced at her husband and went into the kitchen,
the child followed her.
"Damn cute kid," said Banning.
"Yes."
They sat down. Gail picked up a magazine and began rubbing
his fingers over the edges of it. Banning tried to think of something
to say. Oh, yes. ...
"How long's your brother been at it?"
"At it? What? Oh . . . about four years now."
"Likes it, huh?"
"Very much."
"It's all right if you like it, I guess."
"Don't you?"
"Sure, I like it well enough. I'd just as soon do something else
that paid better, though. We can all use the money."
"I guess that's right."
"How's your business?"
"Oh, fair; nothing to get excited about."
She called them to dinner.
By the time dessert was served, Banning felt considerably more at
ease. Mrs. Gail had insisted that he call her Eve, her husband had
informed him that he was Hal to everyone, and both of them were
calling him Joe. In addition to being a good cook, Eve was able to
keep the conversation from falling into any painful ruts of silence.
During the meal Banning had again mentioned Jeanie's great
resemblance to her mother, and he noticed that when he had done
so Hal's face had become strained. He said no more about it. Eve
changed the subject.
They sat after dinner, talking; Eve listened attentively to Banning's
stories about the places he had been. Gail, though, was obviously
ill-at-ease. He found it difficult to sit still for long; he
twisted about in his chair restlessly. Whenever Banning glanced at
him, however, he'd manage a smile and a nod.
At nine o'clock, Eve announced that she was going to put
Jeanie to bed. They listened to her going up the stairs, the child
beside her.
84
This Is Home
"Come on out and well have some beer," said Gail, getting up.
"All right," Banning agreed.
In the kitchen, Gail opened a couple of bottles, and the two of
them sat and drank.
"Your wife is okay," said Banning.
Gail looked at him sharply, and then his face relaxed into a little
smile.
"I wouldn't be surprised if you were in love with her," Banning
continued.
"You're right." Gail bit his under-lip.
By the time six bottles had been opened and consumed, Banning
began to wonder about Eve. She had not returned.
"Eve — isn't she coming back down?"
Gail took the glass from his lips and said, "I don't know."
Then they began to talk about baseball — that is, Banning talked
about it and Gail listened. The sailor could feel the effect of the beer
a little. For the first time that evening, he was glad that he was in
the house. And then Eve called from upstairs.
The two men looked at each other. Gail set his glass down.
"Would you go see what my wife wants?" he said.
Banning didn't know what to say. What the hell was this?
"Why —sure, sure."
"If you would, please."
He caught a glimpse of Gail as he left the kitchen. He was sitting
far out on the edge of the chair, his eyes fixed spiritlessly on the
foam-flecked glass, his lean arms hanging loosely at his sides.
Banning climbed the stairs slowly, distractedly. He thought his
steps had never before made so much noise.
Her bedroom was at the top of the flight. He stood in the doorway.
In the half-darkness he could make out the outline of Eve's
body on the bed.
"Do you know why I called?" she asked.
"Jesus Christ," said Banning. "Your husband — "
'That doesn't make any difference," she said. "Close the door."
He moved from the doorway into the room.
It was some time later he stood at the head of the stairs again. He
felt a desire to put something around his heart —to muffle it —to
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Kees
stop the unceasing pounding that it made. Finally his legs began to
move.
Gail sat in the kitchen. It was as though he had not moved at
all since Banning had left him an hour or so before.
"Ill take you back to town," he said, only his lips moving.
"You haven't got any brother in the Navy," said Banning finally.
"Have you?"
"No," said Gail without rancor. "Does that make any difference?"
"Of course not."
"Want to go?"
"All right."
They walked in silence to the car.
"Where do you want to go?" asked Gail, and his voice trembled.
"Why not—where you picked me up?"
There were things that Banning wanted to say-words that he
wanted to use, and he tried to find them, frantically, confusedly,
but they would not come. His heart pounded louder and louder.
Just before the car came to the corner where the men had first
met, Banning looked at Gail for an instant. The man's mouth was
tight and frenzied, and his eyes were wet.
When they stopped, Banning said, "Do you want me to say
something?"
Gail said, "No, no don't!"
The sailor opened the door and got out.
"Goodbye," he said.
As Gail shifted the gears, Banning saw that he was crying—those
things the sailor wanted to say were all choked up
somehow with the other's tears.
"Goodbye," said Gail.
He stood on the corner and watched the little red blob of
taillight disappearing up the street, watching Gail going home.
"The poor devil," he said aloud. "The poor devil."
He could no longer see the car.
86
The Purcells
Circle, No. 5, 1945
The house was large, and white, with a vast veranda and surrounded
by rose bushes; it had an ordered, almost severe
air, and seemed only remotely related to the rooms that it
enclosed. Viewed from a distance among the neighboring houses —
red brick or gray stone, garnished with rusting ironwork — it gave
the impression of one of those homes which paint companies are so
fond of having photographed for reproduction in magazine advertisements.
And I remember the shock I had felt when, as a child, I
was first taken there, for the interior of the house gave a totally different
impression.
I remember most vividly the brilliantly-colored totem pole
that stood in the hall. It was the first thing one saw when the door
was opened by the Purcell's maid. Mr. Purcell had brought the
totem pole back from an Alaskan trip they had made, and finding it
too large to stand upright in any of the rooms, had cut it in two.
The largest section was given a commanding place in the hall,
directly in front of the door, while the rest of it, looking strangely
disembodied (Mr. Purcell had sawed through one of the faces)
lingered nearby. But these objects were only a preparation for other
surprises.
Behind the door was a wax figure of Martha Washington in a
soiled blue dress (someone had left a burn in the front of it with a
cigar), and close inspection revealed that its right eyelash had
become unglued, hanging spiderishly by one corner. There was an
umbrella-stand of hammered copper, with some sort of a crest on
one side, bearing a motto in Latin; it was crammed with umbrellas
and canes of an endless variety. In another corner was a stuffed
lioness, with bared teeth and a stiff tongue of dirty pink, and a tail
87

Kees
that swung when it was touched. The rug was straw; people were
always tripping over it.
Yet the hall gave less of an impression of clutter and general
disorder than did the livingroom, which, it was said, had cost more
to complete than any room in town. The room could have been
quite handsome, with its dark walls of paneled wood and its leaded
windowpanes, its great chandelier and oriental rugs; but these were
obscured by the scratched (and untuned) grand piano, covered by a
vast batik cloth of appalling hideousness, and in turn littered by
stacks of books (unread, and still in their dustjackets), bestsellers of
a few years back; dog-eared sheet music; piles of Christmas cards; a
glass ball that, when agitated, surrounded the little castle which it
enclosed with languid flurries of snow; bills and letters and purses;
vases filled with half-withered flowers and dried berries, some of
which had fallen off; plates of candy and cookies, which had been
there for a long time and had become hard and inedible; rubber
balls and other objects for the amusement of Mrs. Purcell's current
dog. (There were seven or eight of these through the years, all
Boston bulldogs, all female, all quite stupid, and all named "Betsy
Bobbitt," and all alike, so far as I could tell, except for one which
had had something wrong with one of its eyes.) At the windows
were green curtains of a heavy corded silk; these were drawn
together most of the time. The house smelled of incense and candles
and of Mr. Purcell's cigars; there were always cigar-ends lying
about. Most astonishing were the many chimes, or whatever it is
that they are called —those arrangements of glass rectangles like
laboratory slides, which dangle from pieces of string and are usually
found on porches, where they tinkle feebly in the wind. Mrs.
Purcell had the house filled with these devices, and it will give some
indication of the draughty nature of the house to set down the fact
that they were seldom quiet. There must have been thirty or forty
clocks; most of them had run down and had never been wound
again, and the others were hours off. They were constantly striking,
and no one paid any attention to them; I doubt if Mrs. Purcell
was conscious of time at all.
That first day, when I was taken there by my aunt, I was
presented to Mrs. Purcell, who kissed me wetly, said I was a lovely
little boy, and gave me a piece of stale candy from a plate on the
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The Purcells
piano. She smelled of face powder and I decided that I didn't like
her. She was very buxom and was wearing a dark dress with a
heavy beaded collar that looked as if the dressmaker had not yet
completed work on it. (I was to learn later that, although Mrs.
Purcell thought nothing of spending two or three hundred dollars
on an imported shawl, which she might never again look at after
acquiring it, she prided herself on the fact that most of her dresses
were picked up at sales for $13.95.)
My aunt told me, as she and Mrs. Purcell sat down, that I
should play with the dog, which was curled up on a hooked rug
before the fireplace. I understood that they did not wish me lurking
about as they talked, and I approached the dog, who opened one
eye as I knelt down by it, sniffed at me, and returned to its nap. I
had not liked the look of the piece of candy which had been given
me and still held it in the moist palm of my hand, where it had
begun to get unpleasantly sticky. I looked around for a place to
dispose of it and dropped it in a large Chinese vase, which rang like
. a gong; turning, I was relieved to discover that Mrs. Purcell and my
aunt were too engrossed in what they were saying to each other to
be aware of what I had done. I sat down on the floor and began to
look through some old copies of the Mentor, which were piled between
a luxuriant fern and a rounded glass inclosure containing a
number of stuffed birds.
'The genealogist I have working for me in Washington has
discovered another revolutionary ancestor of mine," Mrs. Purcell
was saying to my aunt in a pleased tone. "Isn't that lovely?"
"Oh, how lovely for you, Grace," said my aunt, who was
almost as interested in other persons' families as in her own.
Mrs. Purcell then went on to give an account of the prolonged
and untiring researches of her genealogist in the East, who had
unearthed the 'new' Revolutionary War ancestor from a hitherto
undiscovered branch of Mrs. Purcell's family, a branch which, it
appeared, opened up whole new vistas of investigation.
Mrs. Purcell had moved on to an account of the last meeting of
the D.A.R., which my aunt had been prevented from attending
because of a cold, when I heard a door open on the second floor
and the sound of rapid footsteps on the stair. Mr. Purcell burst into
the room, waving a sheet of paper. He was a tall, thin man with a
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Kees
sharp nose and cold gray eyes. "Grace, what in God's name have
you done to this thing?" he exclaimed. It was not until he had got
this out that he noticed that his wife had visitors. Even then he appeared
anything but embarrassed, and only grinned in a way that
seemed to invite us to share his irritation for something absurd that
his wife had done. He explained to my aunt, as an old friend, the
nature of Mrs. Purcell's error in filling out some kind of a blank he
had given her. He had an explosive manner of speech; and, as he
sat down, I had the feeling that he lived in a permanent state of tension,
while his wife, somehow bovine and not very intelligent, enjoyed
an existence of subnormal calm, which his outbursts ruffled
only faintly.
He had begun to talk of a new rosebush with which he had
been experimenting and grew quite excited about it, when my aunt
asked him about his friend, Charles Oakes, who had recently been
elected Governor of the State and whom everyone expected would
appoint Mr. Purcell to some important State office. But the maid
came in at that moment to inform Mr. Purcell that someone was
waiting to see him, and, after he had excused himself, my aunt
looked at her watch, exclaimed at the lateness of the hour and said
that we, too, must go.
After that I was taken many times to the Purcells and we saw
them frequently elsewhere. It was from my aunt that I learned that
Ernest Purcell had come from a poor Middlewestern family and had
grown up on a farm. He had worked his way through an
agricultural college, where he had stayed on as a graduate student,
writing a Master's thesis on some obscure aspect of crop rotation.
After teaching for a few years, he had been hired by D.G. Akers, a
wealthy farmer, who owned several counties of extremely fertile
farmland, as a sort of overseer and manager. Shortly after that he
had married Grace Akers, his employer's only child.
They had been married only a few months when his wife had
begun to suffer from some mysterious glandular disorder, by which
medical specialists confessed themselves baffled. She had been a
very pretty and slender girl at the time of their marriage, it was
said, but within six months she looked twice her age and had grown
puffy and swollen. Her weight had increased seventy or eighty
pounds. I saw a photograph of them taken before they left on their
90
The Purcells
honeymoon; he was slim and handsome and she seemed very attractive,
too, and I had difficulty in connecting her with the fat, eccentric
woman who was my aunt's friend.
Her father died not long after this peculiar ailment began, and
Grace Purcell inherited everything he owned, becoming thereby
one of the wealthiest women in the entire Middlewest. The summer
following her father's death, she and her husband had gone on a
world cruise, during the course of which they visited several European
specialists who they hoped might be able to throw some light
on the nature of Mrs. Purcell's state of health and do something
about it. Various attempts were made, but none of them had any
effect.
From that time on they traveled a good deal, mainly, I
gathered, at her insistence. Mr. Purcell himself was never happier
than when visiting his wife's farms, conferring with the tenants and
making suggestions to them in an excited tone of voice. I think he
was deeply disappointed when his friend, Charles Oakes, offered
-him only a minor political office, which he declined, considering it
beneath him. He and Mrs. Purcell went to California for a long
stay, and for once, I believe, he was glad to go.
Mrs. Purcell had various interests —in staying at large and expensive
hotels, in the knowledge that several of her ancestors had
taken part in the Revolutionary War, in certain small scale
charities, and particularly in the pleasure of buying, which she
gratified almost incessantly. She liked nothing better than to spend
whole days in department stores, accumulating anything that
caught her bizarre and undiscriminating fancy. She was particularly
given to a mania for shawls and bedspreads, and at the time of her
death she had over three hundred shawls and almost as many
bedspreads, many of which had never been unwrapped since she
had bought them. It was her usual practice to come home with the
back seat of the car filled with packages, which the chauffeur
would carry into Mrs. Purcell's bedroom, where they might remain
for days before she would have the maid put them in one of the
many guest rooms. Two of these were so crammed with unwrapped
packages that they had come to be regarded as storerooms and
were never heated. The craze for bedspreads and shawls remained
constant throughout her life; there were others that lasted
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Kees
anywhere from a month to a year —for Japanese prints, andirons,
china dolls, beaded bags, Victrola records, jewelry, clocks, Oriental
rugs.
Mr. Purcell was never able to become accustomed, let alone
resigned, to his wife's buying orgies, and during the Depression he
frequently complained to anyone who would listen that they were
headed straight for the poorhouse. I think he enjoyed nothing more
than painting a dark picture of a poverty-stricken end for both of
them; but Mrs. Purcell was quite unmoved by her husband's
forebodings. She knew very well that she could afford to be quite
as extravagant as she wished.
As they grew older, they both found difficulty in remaining
awake. The Purcells sat in front of us in church. Not long after the
sermon had begun, their heads would nod and they would soon fall
into a prolonged but, fortunately, quiet slumber. On the occasion,
Mr. Purcell, who was in the habit of putting his fingers into the
holes used for holding communion glasses, neglected to take them
out before falling asleep; when he was awakened by a blast from
the organ and the shrill voices of the choir, he discovered that his
fingers had become so swollen that he could not remove them. I
believe it was necessary, finally, to send for a carpenter before Mr.
Purcell was able to leave the church.
They also slept in theatres. Several times my aunt and I went
with them, and they always dozed, but never would either of them
admit that they had been anything else than wide awake. Coming
out of the theatre, both would comment on how enjoyable the picture
had been. They were quick to change the subject, however, if a
detailed discussion of the film arose.
Yet in spite of their few eccentricities, they led lives of the utmost
respectability — large contributors to the church, to civic and
patriotic and charitable organizations, voting the straight
Republican ticket, and, I think, well satisfied, on the whole, with
their existences.
When moving-picture cameras for home use became popular,
Mr. Purcell took to this branch of photography with a zest that he
had formerly displayed only for agriculture and for Henry Ford. (I
ought to mention here that Mr. Purcell carried the frequently-encountered
worship of the Detroit manufacturer further than I have
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The Purcells
ever observed it carried by anyone else. He had a large scrapbook
filled with clippings about Ford, and the only book I ever heard
him refer to —except for something of Sinclair Lewis's, which he
described to me as 'indescribable filth' and tried to get the Public
Library to burn — successfully, as 1 recall—was Ford's My Life and
Work, which he had bound in heavy tooled leather and which he
re-read constantly, wearing an expression of deep contentment.)
His moving-picture camera accompanied the Purcells on their trips,
and Mr. Purcell would always return with several large reels,
documenting, practically, their every move. He would exhibit these
to their friends in the darkened livingroom after dinner, his voice
high and nasal above the whirr of the projector: "That's Grace at
Annapolis, talking to Roscoe VanOrsdale, who is a cadet there and
a mighty fine young man. This is a picture of the cadets on parade;
it's not very clear because the light wasn't very good that day, and
it's sort of jerky right here because Betsy Bobbitt had got hold of my
trouser-leg and I was trying to shake her off while I was taking the
picture . . . This is one of Grace's cousins in her garden in
Philadelphia; that arm you see on the right side of the screen, waving
a water lily, belongs to a friend of hers; now she's coming into
the picture. She's a very good friend of Mrs. Dwight Morrow . . .
That's Betsy Bobbitt on the steps of Independence Hall; we'd given
her some saltwater taffy —that's what's making her chew that
way."
Mrs. Purcell seemed to find it less difficult to remain awake at
her husband's movies than at others, perhaps, it was said, because
of the interest she took in her own film personality. But she was not
always able to keep her eyes open, and it was at about this time
that her period of silent sleep gave way to a sleep characterized by
restlessness and snoring. There was one appalling evening when,
just as a view of some of Mr. Purcell's prize hogs, wallowing and
grunting in a muddy pen, was thrown on the screen for us to admire,
Mrs. Purcell, who had fallen asleep a few moments before,
began to snore in a ghastly animal fashion. Someone snickered. It
was a horrible moment, and for a while one scarcely dared to
breathe. When, at length, the lights were turned on, Mrs. Purcell
awakened and smiled brightly at her guests as though she had been
awake all the time.
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Kees
It was only a few months after this that her breath began to fail
and she was forced to spend more and more of her time in bed. She
was a fretful and unruly patient; with her buying expeditions,
travels and genealogical forays cut down, she had little to fall back
on for amusement. She was unable to keep her mind on anything to
read for more than ten or fifteen minutes, and she was not sufficiently
patient to sew. And the delicacies she most enjoyed —rich
puddings and pies and cakes—were now denied her. Yet she grew
fatter and fatter; her eyes, encased in heavy folds of skin, seemed to
sink more deeply into her face. She was allowed to get up and dress
now and then, but her clothes were much too small for her, though
she refused to recognize this fact and would not have them altered.
— After a while she was not permitted to leave her bed; it was said
she was dying.
In the meantime, news of the shame of Mr. Purcell's middle
age was spreading, and was late, I think, in reaching us. He had
become wildly infatuated with a young woman who worked at the
soda fountain of one of the downtown drugstores, and spent most
of his time there, eating a great deal of ice cream and talking to her.
Her name was Leona Higgins. She had previously been a chickenpicker
at a meat-packing plant, and had a husband, a sometime
barber who played drums occasionally with a local five-piece
danceband. When my aunt learned that Mr. Purcell was seeing this
woman constantly, she was outraged and disturbed; she saw Mrs.
Purcell almost daily and felt sure that sooner or later she was
bound to learn of her husband's monstrous fall from grace.
* Mr. Purcell no longer attended church and paid less and less
attention to his work. He visited his tenants infrequently and was
given to flying into inexplicable fits of temper. He was almost certain
to be found at the drugstore or at the apartment of the Higginses,
who lived over a second-hand furniture store not far from
the railroad tracks. He and Higgins seemed on the best of terms,
and the three of them were often to be observed driving around
town in Mr. Purcell's Cadillac. They spent many evenings sitting in
the Higgins' kitchen, matching nickles and drinking beer. When
Higgins had a dance job in some nearby town, Mr. Purcell would
drive the three of them over; sometimes he and Mrs. Higgins would
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The Purcells
dance, but usually they sat out in the Cadillac, listening to the
music.
I have never learned who it was that informed Mrs. Purcell;
some said that an anonymous letter was delivered to her. However
she did get the news, she went into a blind rage and neither her
maid nor her nurse were able to prevent her from getting out of bed
and dressing. She was huge: she put on an old white lace dress of
hers that split up the sides as she got into it, and when the nurse
tried to keep her from leaving, Mrs. Purcell struck her with her arm
and rushed from the house. She must have been headed for the
drugstore: she was within a block of it when she fell dead in the
street, in front of a poolhall.
It was a magnificant funeral, although the burial itself was
marred by a heavy rainstorm. Mr. Purcell came with the Higginses.
A great many of the Purcell's former friends refused to speak to
him. When we drove away in the rain back to town, I saw him
standing by the grave, talking to Higgins, a wiry little man with a
beaked nose.
He inherited everything of hers, of course. The Higginses moved
into the big house with Mr. Purcell; and, going by there, one might
often hear Higgins playing Chopsticks or Twelfth Street Rag on the
piano.
It was a month or so after Mrs. Purcell died that I paid my last
visit to their home. My aunt had found in our bookcase, a book
which she had borrowed some time before from Mrs. Purcell; when
she discovered Mr. Purcell's name written on the flyleaf, she
declared that she would not have it in the house and I offered to
return it. "Just leave it in the mailbox," my aunt said, but I had no
intention of doing so, for I was curious to discover in what manner
the life in that house had changed. The town was full of stories of
Mr. Purcell; of his reckless driving, his bloodshot eyes, and his unpredictable
changes in temper — one moment he would be talking to
you quite soberly and then suddenly would go off into a fit of
laughter or blind rage. —As I walked up the hill and turned down
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Kees
the long, tree-shaded street, I felt excited and a bit apprehensive
about my errand.
There was still a black wreath on the door, and, as I stood
ringing the bell, the last of the dogs known as Betsy Bobbitt raced
around the corner of the veranda, her jaws fastened on an open
newspaper, over which she tripped repeatedly as she went past me
and disappeared around the other side of the house.
The door was suddenly flung open, after I had rung a second
time, revealing Mrs. Higgins. She was wearing a fantastic Spanish
costume with spangles on it; she was violently made up and from
her ears long black earrings dangled. I realized that her dress was
surely one of those that Mrs. Purcell had brought back from one of
their world tours; and I could see that it had been amateurishly
altered.
"Is Mr. Purcell here?" I asked.
'Teh, Ernie's here," she said, running her tongue across her
teeth and looking at me appraisingly.
"I wonder if I might see him for a minute."
"Why not? Come on in."
There were no noticeable changes in the hall, but in the livingroom
I saw the piano for the first time denuded of its coverings.
The batik cloth and the rest of the objects making up that wild collection
were gone; there was only the bare, scratched top of the
piano, decorated by an empty beer bottle and an ashtray.
Mr. Purcell was stretched out in a chair, smoking a cigar and
engaged in conversation with Higgins. Both were in their shirtsleeves
and neither had shaved for several days. Higgins was eating
something unpleasant-looking from a bowl.
"Well, hello there," Mr. Purcell said, looking up as I came into
the room. He sounded a bit cool. "You haven't been around for
quite a little while."
I said that I was returning a book that belonged to him, and
laid it on the table.
"You know Bill Higgins here, I guess," Mr. Purcell said.
I had met him once and I greeted him.
"And that," Mr. Purcell said, "that right behind you is our little
Spanish girl, Mrs. Higgins. Leona. Yesterday she was a little Dutch
girl, wasn't she Bill? Huh?"
'That's a fact, Ernie," Higgins agreed, taking the spoon from
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his mouth. I noticed that Higgins' drums were set up near the piano.
The head of the bass drum was ornamented by an oil painting of a
moonlight lake scene.
"And the day before . . . I've forgotten what she was the day
before," Mr. Purcell said.
'That was the day we got so drunk and you run us in the
ditch," Mrs. Higgins said.
Mr. Purcell began to laugh. I had never seen him so amused.
Then the smile faded from his face and I became aware that he was
looking fixedly at me. "Yes, and you can stop spreading those dirty
stories about me and that girl out on the farm," he said to me.
I felt Mrs. Higgins tugging at my sleeve.
"Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about!" Mr.
Purcell said. "Don't kid me, you dirty little sneak."
Even as he said this, I saw that his attention was wandering,
that he had been distracted. He was looking at something beyond
me. I turned and saw the dog called Betsy Bobbitt standing in the
doorway. In her mouth was a dirty rubber ball.
"Who let that goddamn dog in here?" Mr. Purcell demanded.
He looked around the room and, when no one replied, said angrily
to the dog, "Come here. Come here, you."
The dog moved forward warily. So suddenly that I caught my
breath, Mr. Purcell lunged at it, grabbed it by its collar and began
beating it with his fist in a cold fury. Veins stuck out on his forehead.
The first blow must have knocked the wind out of the dog,
because it made no sound at all.
I was angry and disgusted and I turned and left the house, fully
expecting someone to stop me. Just as I reached the porch steps I
heard a cry from the dog and then Mr. Purcell came to the door and
shouted something at me that I could not understand. He slammed
the door behind him so hard that the windows rattled. As I went
down the walk I heard Higgins playing Shine, Little Glowworm on
the piano with one finger.
That was the last I saw of any of them. Shortly afterwards
they went to California to live. Mr. Purcell hired another man to
look after his farms. They live in a suburb of Los Angeles and
spend a lot of time at the horseraces. Mr. Purcell has dyed his hair
black, and it is said that he made the Higginses his sole heirs.
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The Brothers
Decision, March 1941
Myron Anderson was still angry when he came home from
the studio. Riding home on the streetcar, he found it difficult
to get his brother out of his mind. It was the fourth
time Joe had failed to make the broadcast, and it had taken all the
smooth talking Myron was capable of to pacify the higher-ups at
the radio station. Joe would have an excuse, though, he thought.
He always had an excuse. He could be depended upon to have one
all worked out.
He got off the car at Xantha Street and walked three blocks to
where they lived. The two brothers were still holding on to the
house, and they had a couple of roomers. Their mother had died
several months before and left the house to them, along with the
first mortgage. They were waiting for an agent to find a buyer.
Climbing the steps, he picked up the evening paper and looked
in the mailbox, but there wasn't anything. It was dark in the front
room and he turned on the light, considering what he would say to
his brother when he showed up. If he did show up, he thought.
From time to time, Joe would stage twenty-four hour disappearances.
The goldfish were swimming lethargically in the bowl by the
window. Myron took some fish from a box and scattered it on the
surface of the water. He watched the fish swim up to the white
flakes and nibble them. He liked watching them. It had originally
been his brother's job, feeding the goldfish, but Joe had experienced
the greatest difficulty in performing this task; and after one of the
smaller fish had died and the others began to look slightly ill,
Myron took over the feeding. Their mother was responsible for the
fish. She had got them, along with the bowl, at a drugstore. They
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The Brothers
were a premium for buying more toothpaste than the three of them
could possibly use in a couple of years. There was still some of it
left when she died.
The house was still and empty. Myron would be glad when the
agent found a buyer and they would be able to move into a small
apartment. He went upstairs and took off his shoes and stretched
out on the bed for a while to read the paper> but after a few minutes
he turned off the light over the bed.
He lay in the darkness, resting his eyes and listening to the
ticking of the clock. The light that came in the window was gray
and smoky and he looked out at the roof across the alley,
remembering previous scenes he had had with his brother. Once,
when he had overheard some dirty remarks Joe had made about a
girl Myron knew, he had called him about it, and there had been a
fine scene. Then there was the time when Joe had been in a jam
over a stolen car. It had been a good one, too. Another time, they
were going to kick him out of high school for cheating. It was also a
good one. There had been a lot of good ones.
He knew it was Joe when he heard the doorknob turn
downstairs, even before he heard his footsteps. Joe opened the door
more quietly than either of the two roomers, turning the knob
quietly and surely, with the technique of sneaking in that he had
developed when he was in high school, coming in drunk late at
night from basketball games. He closed the door and Myron listened
to him walking through the house and up the stairs.
"Oh, hello," Joe said, coming into the room. "You home?" He
looked about cautiously in the semidarkness, wearing a false smile
and not looking quite straight at his brother.
"Yeh, I'm home. I'm quite a homebody, as a matter of fact."
"Reading, eh?"
"Just trying to see if there was anything in the paper about you.
Where the hell have you been keeping yourself?"
"I thought that's the attitude you'd take."
"Oh, for God's sake," Myron said.
"Every time it's the same way. Every time you jump to conclusions.
You act like a goddamned protecting angel. You always
think it's my fault. I'd have got there if I could." He was looking at
himself in the mirror.
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Kees
"What happened this time?" Myron asked.
"I don't really know if it's any of your business."
"Oh, you don't really know? Listen, Joe, I wish you could have
been there to hear the excuses I made for you at the studio. Or
maybe you don't want to hold that job. Maybe you think you can
find easier jobs than that. If there are any, I'd certainly like to hear
about them. Two hours a day. When you manage to show up, I
mean. Two hours. You don't really know whether it's any of my
business, eh? Well, that certainly is fine. All right, maybe it isn't my
business. I don't know. Maybe I ought to let them can you. Maybe
that would give you a little sense. I doubt it. I goddamned well
doubt it."
"You're in a grand mood, aren't you?"
"Perfect," said Myron. "On top of the world." He lit a cigarette.
"Come on, I'm waiting for your story. Blonde?"
"Accident."
"Another one? What are you trying to do? Establish a record?"
"I was with Jack."
"Who?"
"Jack Wilkie. We were in his car and he ran through a closed
street sign and then into a tree."
"A closed street sign. What won't they put in his way next?
That must have been very nice."
"Could I help it?" Joe said. "What do you want me to do? The
cops came and took us down to the station and I got locked up as a
witness. Jack was pretty drunk."
"What a lot of splendid friends you have. I suppose you were
leading the temperance forces yourself."
"I'd had a couple. Jesus, Myron, I couldn't get to the phone or
anything. They had me trapped there. Those dumb bastards
wouldn't even let me use the phone. You don't know how I argued
with those guys." Joe became animated. " I've got to report to the
studio!' I said. 1 may lose my job!' A hell of a lot of good that did.
They just laughed at me and told me to take it easy."
Myron looked up at the ceiling.
"Was it my fault?" Joe went on. "A thing like that could happen
to anybody. Could I help it that I was with him when he had to pull
a stunt like that? Christ, there wasn't anything for me to do."
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"You might try running around with more inhibited types than
Wilkie for a change. Or did that ever occur to you."
Joe was looking at himself in the mirror again. He had a
scratch on his cheek and his left hand was bandaged.
"Why do you have to run around with nuts like that?" said
Myron.
"I don't know."
"You sure did get us into a nice little fix this afternoon."
"I'm sorry as the devil, Myron. Honest." His voice had a repentant
tone. "Now listen, Joe, Mitchell almost went through the roof
today, and this is the second time in three weeks. I had to talk like
the devil to keep your job for you."
"It sure won't happen again."
'That's what you said before."
"I mean it this time."
Joe went in the bathroom. It was very dark in the bedroom
and Myron sat up, feeling numb. He began to get the feeling that
always came over him after such conversations. He would think of
his mother and remember the way she had talked to him about Joe
and how she had always told him to look out for him. Myron was
the older one, and his mother had never allowed him to forget it.
The two of them were acting in a radio serial. Myron had got
the job for his brother after Joe had been unable to hold three other
jobs. The name of the serial was The Adventures of Uncle Herb.
Myron took the title role. He loathed Uncle Herb. He felt that Uncle
Herb was undoubtedly the most odious old character that he had
ever come across. The whole program was beneath him.
Because of his close association with the program, he had
come to regard it as the most ghastly thing ever produced by a radio
station. Its followers had no such criticism to make. No matter how
banal and insipid the episode, no matter how much fun some of the
actors privately made of it, letters would pour into the studio,
many of them asking Uncle Herb to solve their various problems,
domestic, economic, and erotic, and the sales of K-O, the product
which the serial advertised, were mounting steadily. K-O was a
very popular beverage which Myron, from curiosity and a
misguided sense of duty to his sponsors, had once sampled. It had
tasted like embalming fluid.
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In each episode of the serial, which went on every afternoon at
five o'clock except Sunday, lasting for a half-hour, Uncle Herb and
other rural characters, lovably portrayed, would become involved
in all manner of seemingly overwhelming difficulties. These were
always neatly straightened out in the last few minutes by Uncle
Herb, who spoke haltingly through his nose.
Myron sat on the edge of the bed, thinking about Uncle Herb
and his brother and about the house and why the hell they couldn't
get a decent price for it, and then he put on his shoes and combed
his hair and called to Joe to ask him if he wanted to go downtown
to eat with him.
"You go ahead, Myron," Joe said behind the door. "I've sort of
got a date."
"All right."
Til see you later."
"Rehearsal tomorrow morning," Myron said.
"Don't worry. I'll be there."
'Try to make it on time for once."
He could hear Joe splashing in the tub. "You don't need to
worry about me," he said. "From now on I'm the Punctuality Kid."
"So long," Myron said.
Everything went along wonderfully for several weeks. It was
too good for Myron to believe. Joe was on time for all rehearsals
and broadcasts, and he even seemed to take more interest in his diction,
which Myron felt had never been more than adequate. The
biggest change was in his drinking. He quit altogether.
Once, riding down to work on the streetcar, he confided to
Myron that he was seriously thinking of saving his money and attempting
to go back to college. It would mean four whole years for
him. He had had one year at the State University, where he had
distinguished himself by passing in only two subjects, American
History and Physical Education. Myron had come to the conclusion
that the passing grade in the history course was an error of the
instructor.
But Joe's model behavior did not continue for long. Several
nights later, after they had come home and collaborated on cooking
the dinner, Myron began to feel sick. He had had a similar at-
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The Brothers
tack several months before and the doctor had given him a
prescription that had fixed him up very shortly. The medicine was
all gone, but Myron found the prescription among some papers in
the desk. He told Joe that he was going to bed and asked him if he
would mind going down to the drugstore to get the prescription
filled.
"Do you have to have it right away?"
"Go ahead, Joe, take it down for me. You don't have anything
else to do right away, do you?"
"What's the rush?"
"I want to get that stuff in my system and try to get some sleep
as soon as I can. Wait a minute, 111 give you some money."
"You'd better. I'm broke."
"Saving it up for college?"
"I gave that idea up. It didn't seem worthwhile."
All Myron had was a ten dollar bill, and he gave it to him, cautioning
him to be careful with it. 'That's got to last until the first of
the month."
Til be careful with it," said Joe. He seemed rather put out
because he had to run the errand.
Myron went upstairs and took a bath and went to bed. The
symptoms seemed to be worse than they were before. Perhaps, he
thought, they weren't the same symptoms. He went through all of
the diseases he might be getting, feeling worse with the thought of
each disease that occurred to him, and debating whether or not to
call the doctor. His body was breaking out in a rash.
An hour went by. Joe did not come back. Myron got out of
bed and called the drugstore. He felt feverish. Joe had not put in an
appearance there at all, they said. Myron was unable to tell them
about the medicine, because Joe had the prescription.
When he began to have intermittent attacks of chills and fever,
he rang the doctor. He came over immediately. When Myron told
him that there was no one in the house to take care of him, the doctor
looked him over glumly and announced that he must go to a
hospital at once. He had scarlet fever. They took him in an ambulance
to the hospital and shot him full of serum. He was unconscious
most of the night.
He almost died. It was several days before he was sure where
he was. He stayed in the hospital for several weeks, losing about a
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pound a day; and the studio would send over letters that had come
in from Uncle Herb admirers. Everyone was wondering about Uncle
Herb and asking when he would be back. Myron was too sick to
care. Sometimes he would wake up in the night and wonder why he
wasn't dead.
As his health improved, Myron speculated on what kind of a
story the studio was giving out about him. Uncle Herb was being
played by another man at the station whose real gifts lay in the
realm of Negro dialect; but Myron did not feel sufficiently interested
to ask for a radio to hear how the character of Uncle Herb
was being interpreted. He thought it would be rather nice if his successor
gave Uncle Herb an Old Black Joe flavor. The doctor was
very cagey about telling him how soon he might be able to return to
work.
The day before they moved him back to the house, he read
about Joe in the afternoon paper. He had been in another
automobile accident. It was on the front page. It was his friend
Wilkie again. It was Wilkie's last accident. He had been killed instantly.
The car he had been driving had collided with two other
cars on a crossing, and a girl that had been with them had been
badly injured. Her name was Maxine Burgess. Her age was given
as nineteen.
The steering-post had been rammed clear through Wilkie and,
according to the account in the paper, the girl would be crippled
and might very conceivably lose the sight of one eye. Joe had
escaped with a few minor injuries. The three of them had been in the
front seat, with the girl in the middle, and from what the paper
said, Myron gathered that Joe had only been scratched and bruised
a little.
There was a picture of Wilkie's car, or what remained of it, on
the front page; and inside, of course, another editorial on safe driving,
inspired by the accident. There was also a blurred picture of
the Burgess girl, taken when she was in junior high school. She
wore a middie blouse in the picture.
They took Myron home the next day. He sat in the car with
the interne, looking out at the streets. When they went up to the
house and opened the door, there was Joe.
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"Well, welcome home," he said grandly. "The sick man's well
again."
"Get out of the way," said Myron. He thanked the interne, who
seemed embarrassed and asked him if he would be all right. "I'll be
all right," Myron said. The interne went down the steps and back to
the car.
With the exception of a piece of court plaster across his
forehead, Joe looked perfectly whole. He was dressed to go out,
wearing a topcoat and a dark gray hat Myron had never seen
before. The hat did not seem to go with the rest of him.
"What's your grouch?" Joe said. "Still sore at me?"
"Yes. Will you kindly get the hell out of here?"
"Listen, Myron, he said, "I know you think I'm three kinds of a
bastard. ..."
'That's right. You're three kinds of a bastard. So now that
you've got it all figured out perfectly, I wish you'd clear out."
'That night you were sick ..."
"I don't want to hear about it. I don't want to hear any more of
your goddamned phony excuses. You'd let the goldfish die. You'd
let your brother die. You'd let your own mother die if she hadn't
beaten you to it. And it's a damned good thing she's dead, too.
Goddamned good. Do you get that?" Myron was shouting. He was
very thin and pale. "Now for God's sake get out of here, will you? I
don't like to look at you."
"Listen, Myron ..."
Myron started upstairs. He had lost eighteen or twenty pounds
and was very weak. He held on to the bannister, trying to get his
breath.
"Listen, Myron," Joe was saying, "I got a buyer for the house."
"All right, sell it," Myron said. "Get a lawyer and 111 talk to
him. Sell the house, do anything you want; but stay away from me.
Ill be out of here in a day or two. I'm going to get a room."
Td certainly hate to have your temper."
"Oh, for Christ sake, get out of my sight."
"Don't worry about that."
"Have you managed to hold your job at the station?"
Joe felt of the patch on his forehead, wetting his lips. 'They
canned me. Today."
"I don't wonder. That a new hat you've got? It doesn't look
right."
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Kees
"What's a matter with it?"
"It just doesn't look right."
"It belonged to Wilkie," Joe said. "He was wearing it—you
know, night before last, when we had the accident."
"So now he's dead and you're wearing it."
"It's funny; it wasn't hurt a bit," said Joe. He took off the hat
and examined it with admiration. "Why shouldn't I wear it?" he
asked. "I was his best friend, wasn't I?"
"Goodbye," said Myron, going upstairs.
In his room he lay down on the bed. The climb had winded
him. He heard a horn honking outside and Joe going down the
walk. Then he heard the car drive away.
It was chilly in the room and he noticed that someone had been
using it during his absence. There was an empty gin bottle on the
dresser and a pair of dirty socks in one corner. Whoever the visitor
was, he had left some cigarette burns on the windowsill.
Myron looked down at his clothes. They were much too big
for him now. He felt terribly tired, but he was gradually getting his
breath. The doctor had told him that he could probably go back to
work on Thursday. That was three days. He would call the station
before long and tell them.
On Thursday he would take the streetcar to the studio and
walk through the waiting room where people with pianoaccordion
cases would be sitting with blank expressions on their
faces, and where the new announcer with the wasp waist and the
waxed mustache would be talking in a voice that was not yet completely
free of a Kansas accent, and Myron would wait with the
others in the anteroom while the Studio Ramblers completed their
rambling, and then another Uncle Herb episode would be on the
air.
Myron tried his voice on some of Uncle Herb's stock remarks,
to make sure that he had it under control. It was fine. There wasn't
a flaw. The lack of practice had not destroyed his Uncle Herb
technique in the least. He pulled a blanket over his legs, feeling very
tired. It was pleasant to know that every thing was going to go
smoothly from then on. It'll be all right now, he thought, clumsily
pulling at the blanket.
106
Every Year They Came Out
The Old Line, April 1943
They had not been able to get the room at the hotel that they
liked, the one they always had. The room they preferred to
all the others was on the fourth floor, facing the park and the
boulevard. It had a little balcony on which they could sun
themselves on good mornings.
It was because of Miss Cora's negligence that they had to take,
instead, a dark, unpleasant room at the back. It offered nothing in
the way of a view. Before they had left Nebraska, Miss Ernestine
instructed Miss Cora, since Miss Ernestine was the senior sister as
well as the dominant one, to write for reservations. "Write them
that we want our old room, 417, the same as always," she told her
early in September. Later, having some doubt in her mind about
her sister's capability, Miss Ernestine asked Miss Cora if she had
carried out her instructions, and Miss Cora said, "Yes, Ernestine,
I'm quite certain that I wrote them." "Quite positive?" said Miss
Ernestine. "Did you write to them or didn't you?" "I think I did,"
Miss Cora had said.
It was an unconvincing reply, and Miss Ernestine had remarked
rather acidly that it was scarcely enough for her to think that she
had written. What she wanted to know was: Had she or had she
not? Well, Miss Cora had said, she was almost positive. Yes, she
remembered now. She remembered sitting down one morning and
writing a letter to the hotel people. Yes, it all came back to her now.
She was very definite about it.
But, as it turned out, the manager of the hotel had received no
word at all from them. They had arrived in Los Angeles by train on
the eighteenth of October, tired out from the long journey and
from the berths in which neither of them had slept well, and irritable
because they had not had their daily baths, only to find out,
107

Kees
after a frightening ride with a surly and careless taxi-driver who
they felt was bent on destroying them both, that Miss Cora had not
written after all. She had not written, and there were only two
rooms left.
For days Miss Ernestine had given Miss Cora no peace. Suddenly,
in the middle of a sentence about something totally
unrelated to their room, she would break off to say "Cora, why in
Heaven's name didn't you tell me you hadn't written? Certainly you
should have had that much sense."
"Ernestine, please, I'm awfully sorry. Why don't we go to
another hotel."
"I don't want to go to another hotel."
"But you're so upset. And we always come here."
"I am not upset. Honestly, it's getting so I can't depend upon
you to do the simplest things right."
"Ernestine, if you don't like this room, why don't we pick up
and go someplace else? There are lots of other hotels. I've told you I
don't know how many times how sorry I am about not writing for
reservations. It happened, and we can't do anything about it now."
"It's all very well to be sorry," said Miss Ernestine grimly. "But
that does not alter the fact that we are in this abominable little
room."
"Please, Ernestine, let's move to another hotel."
"I am certainly not going to. We've been staying in this hotel
for ten years. I'm used to it here. I am certainly not going to go to
all that trouble."
It was actually their eighth winter in the hotel. The hotel had
been recommended to them originally by Mrs. Griffin, a friend of
their mother. Mrs. Griffin was a Christian Scientist who had spent
her last years in Los Angeles, in order to be close to the heart of
Christian Science. She had lived there until she had died, or
whatever it is that Christian Scientists do when they no longer give
the appearance of having life. Mrs. Griffin had almost converted
Mrs. Cuthrell, the mother of Miss Cora and Miss Ernestine, to this
faith, but the daughters had remained Episcopalians. One reason
they had for liking the hotel was its close proximity to their favorite
Episcopal church in Los Angeles.
Every winter Miss Ernestine and Miss Cora came out to Los
108
Every Year They Came Out
Angeles, sometimes in October and sometimes in November. They
would stay until Spring. Then they would return to Nebraska.
They were both extremely cold-blooded and liked to get back to
Nebraska for the hot weather. They liked the scorching summer
heat. It made them feel alive.
It was a curious phenomenon that neither of the Cuthrell
sisters perspired. On the hottest days, when there were numerous
deaths from heat-prostration and all who found it possible were inside
their houses with all the windows closed and the curtains pulled
down and electric fans blowing on cakes of ice, the Cuthrell sisters
would think nothing at all of working in their flower garden under
the blistering sun. They would work together in the heat, Ernestine
nervously, giving directions, and Cora slowly and painstakingly.
They would not perspire.
Behind the Cuthrell sisters was money, and behind them, too,
importantly, were their ancestors. Their father had been a judge on
the bench of the State Supreme Court. In their home in Nebraska,
above the mantelpiece, across from the head that had once belonged
to a deer the judge had shot, was an oil painting of the judge in his
black robes. He wore a cold, stern expression while posing for the
portrait. It was a good likeness. The Cuthrell sisters admired but
secretly feared the painting of their father, for his expression in it
was the same one he had affected when reprimanding the members
of his family. He used the same expression, too, when handing
down a decision from the bench. It was the way Miss Ernestine and
Miss Cora remembered him. Although he had enjoyed wearing this
expression while posing for the picture, he had not had the opportunity
of enjoying if for long. He had died of a heart attack three
weeks after it was completed.
Their mother had died three years before the judge's attack,
and their older brother, Harvey, had been killed in the first World
War in an airplane crash. He had voluntarily enlisted with Canadians
before the United States had gone in. There had seemed, at
the time, no reason for his extremely hasty enlistment, but shortly
after he had sailed for France, the Cuthrells had had an unwelcome
visitor. She was a girl who had worked in the basement of Birnbaum's
Department Store. She no longer worked there, however;
they had let her out. She was pregnant. Even the Cuthrells could
109

Kees
see that. The girl, whose name was Marjorie Jergenson, told them
that the child she was going to have, in a few months, was Harvey's.
The judge was furious. He had ordered her from the house. But
after the judge's death, they had learned that he had given her
money to go to Omaha and have the child. He had been sending
her fifty dollars a month.
Miss Ernestine and Miss Cora never discussed Harvey. They
would never, under any circumstances, discuss Marjorie Jergenson.
If either of them thought of Marjorie Jergenson, they did not speak
of her. They would talk about the judge, reverently and briefly,
and they would talk about their mother, sadly and with nostalgia,
and at considerable length; but Harvey and their younger brother,
William, who had stayed in the East after a sensational two years at
Princeton, and who drank heavily and had been divorced twice,
were not subjects for discussion. There was still a comfortable income
from the judge's estate; there was money in the bank back in
Nebraska; and there was more money pinned to the inside of Miss
Ernestine's corset, unpinned at night and placed cautiously beneath
her pillow. Miss Ernestine and Miss Cora did not have to. worry
about finances.
They had many friends in Los Angeles. Quite a number of
them lived in the hotel. They were people from the Middlewest who
spent the winter in much the same manner as Miss Cora and Miss
Ernestine. In the morning there were automobile rides and in the
afternoon there was bridge and in the evenings, the movies. Miss
Ernestine would walk through the lobby of the hotel, large and impressive
and dressed in a black dress with a bit of white lace and
very dignified, with the bankroll pinned in her corset, followed by
Miss Cora, slighter and with a face that some called tragic, with a
small amount of money, not in her corset, but in her purse; and
they would eat all of their meals in the hotel dining room and be
called Miss Cuthrell by the waiters. They would walk, on sunny
afternoons, on Wilshire Boulevard, looking into the shop windows
and sometimes, less frequently, to buy, and on Thursday they
would take a bus to visit the Grahams in Pasadena, and on Mondays
they would visit some distant relatives of their mother in Long
Beach.
It was a pleasant pattern of existence for them that had been
110
Every Year They Came Out
disrupted, shattered, by the new room. Eventually, they knew, the
people who were in their old room, a Swiss and his wife, would
leave. Then they could fit perfectly into the pattern again. But the
Swiss and his wife, who were considered somewhat mysterious and
aloof by many at the hotel, were staying much longer than anyone
had thought. The Swiss and his wife would go in and out of the
hotel at odd hours, and they struck up no friendship with the other
guests. "Just when do we get our old room?" Miss Ernestine would
ask the hotel manager, while Miss Cora looked the other way; and
the hotel manager would tell her that the Swiss were sure to leave
almost any day. They had already stayed much longer then anyone
had expected.
One night matters reached a crisis. Miss Ernestine and Miss
Cora were returning from Long Beach after seeing the Morrises, the
distant relatives there, and on the way back they had a fierce argument.
Miss Ernestine was very irritable because of a call Miss Cora
had failed to make to a friend of theirs, Mrs. Partridge, as she had
been told to do. It was night when they returned. A band was playing
for the opening of a new market and the spotlights were sending
their long beams into the sky.
In their room they took baths and Miss Ernestine unpinned the
money from her corset and placed it under her pillow, talking continually
while Miss Cora attempted to read. Miss Cora looked out
the window. She held the book in her lap, opened to page nine. She
could see nothing but a light in a room across the court. They were
right next to the elevator. That was another thing that was wrong.
It was then that they heard some people in the room next to
theirs. They had never been bothered previously in this fashion. It
was a man and a woman, and they heard the man say something to
the woman that they had not heard since they were little girls. It
was an expression that they thought they would never hear again.
At least they knew that it was an expression which would never be
addressed directly to either of them. Miss Cora was no longer looking
out of the window. Miss Ernestine was standing by the bed that
let down from the wall. She was wearing an old-fashioned
nightgown. They heard the man used the same expression again
and then he laughed. The woman was talking to him. Her voice
was soft, but they could hear it. Then they heard a strange noise
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Kees
that they had never heard before, not even when they were little
girls. The bed squeaked.
Miss Ernestine was quivering. "Animals!" she said.
Miss Cora was looking out the window. She had closed her
book.
"AnimalsI" Miss Ernestine said again. "And you! You're the
one who's responsible for this!"
"Oh, Ernestine!"
"If you'd only had enough sense to write for reservations, we'd
never have to put up with this. We'd be back in our old room."
"Don't listen to them. Pretend they aren't there."
"Don't listen to them! How can I help listening to them?" She
stood for a moment looking at the wall as though she wished to tear
it down. "I'm going to pound on that wall!" she said.
"No, Ernestine, no! You mustn't."
"I'm going to pound on that wall!"
"No, no!" Miss Cora hurriedly rose from her chair and took
Miss Ernestine by the arms. "No, you mustn't, you mustn't!" she
said.
They were looking at each other. Their faces were close to
each other. Miss Ernestine was breathing heavily. There was a
great tenseness in her arms.
"Let go of me!" she said.
'Tell me you won't do it."
"Let go of me!" Miss Ernestine commanded.
Miss Ernestine broke away. She stood in the middle of the
room, glaring at her sister. Her breath came fast. "Get out!" Miss
Ernestine was shouting. "Get out of this room!"
Miss Cora looked at her.
"Did you hear me?" said Miss Ernestine. She was almost
screaming with rage. "Get out! Get out!"
"Ernestine," Miss Cora said pleadingly.
"Get out of this room! I never want to see you again!"
There was a knock at the door.
"Who's there?" Miss Ernestine called out.
"Bellboy, miss. Is everything all right?"
"Yes, yes, of course, What's the matter?"
"It's pretty late, miss. Would you mind lowering your voice?"
112
Every "Year They Came Out
Miss Ernestine was rigid. Her jaws quivered angrily as she
looked about the room. They could hear the bellboy going away
from the door. They heard him go down the hall to the elevator
and then the sound of the elevator door opening and closing.
"Never in all my life!" said Miss Ernestine. "I will not stay
under this roof another night. Come on, Cora, don't just stand
there. Help me get packed. We're getting out right now."
"Ernestine—"
"Help me get packed!"
They paid the bill in full at the desk. Miss Ernestine had counted
out the correct amount before pinning the roll back into her corset,
They took a cab to a hotel where, Miss Williamson, a friend
of theirs, lived. It was a hotel for women guests only. In the morning
they slept late and in the afternoon they went for an automobile
ride with Miss Williamson and her brother, a man who sold raw
motion picture film. They thought they would like it very well in
the new hotel. They did not talk about their quarrel, and they did
not talk about the man and woman they had heard in the other
hotel the night before.
In the lobby of the new hotel there were many women with
dogs on leashes. Their room was airy and bright and looked out on
a quiet street. Miss Ernestine said that she thought it was one of the
nicest rooms they had ever had anywhere. She said she thought
they might as well plan to come back to it the following year. She
asked Miss Cora what she thought of the idea, and Miss Cora said
yes, she thought that that would be nice to do. Miss Cora said she
would just as soon do that as anything else.
113

Farewell to Frognall
The Briarcliff Quarterly 4, 1945
St. Clair had no intention of calling on Frognall, whom he did
not know at all well and did not, as a matter of fact, like particularly;
but he had become tired of walking about aimlessly
and, finding himself in Frognall's neighborhood, decided to look in
on him. The weather, too, had turned bitterly cold, and St. Clair
had come out with only a thin topcoat. Frognall always prided
himself on the warmth of his place.
Frognall had been living for some time in a garage that had
been converted into an apartment. To get to it entailed certain difficulties
which St. Clair had almost forgotten. He was not even sure
that the driveway into which he turned was the correct one. It was
certainly equally as dark as the one that led to Frognall's. St. Clair
crept along in the darkness, keeping one hand in front of him as a
guard. There was no use in taking chances. The houses on each side
of him were darkened. He lowered his hand momentarily and took
a few more tentative steps. The last one was unfortunate, for he
stepped into the spokes of a tricycle that a child had left in the
driveway, and narrowly escaped falling flat on his face. He began
to curse in a loud tone of voice, and, when he had recovered his
balance, struck a match and took a look around. A huge and very
vicious-appearing dog, suddenly awakened, began to bark furiously
at St. Clair. He was terrified for a moment and then noted with
relief that the animal and he were separated by a fence. He walked
away with an air of outraged dignity, while the dog threw himself
against the fence, still barking savagely.
St. Clair reflected that it must be the second driveway down. It
was with a certain dim elation that he noted a light in Frognall's
window. The wind was growing steadily colder. He rapped on the
door and it was opened by Frognall.
114
Farewell to Frognall
St. Clair scarcely noticed Frognall at first, but looked beyond
him to the front room. He was distressed to see it in such a state of
disorder. Frognall had long been noted for a worship of neatness
bordering, St. Clair felt, on the fanatical. But now the pictures had
all been removed from the walls, exposing light squares and, in one
instance, a very unsightly spot; there were piles of books and packing
boxes everywhere; a disconnected radio trailed its wires like
vines across the floor.
Frognall was blinking as though this aided him in attempting
to recognize his visitor.
"Parsons?" he asked experimentally.
'It's St. Clair."
"Oh." Frognall's tone was skeptical. "Get in the light a bit
more, will you?"
St. Clair obliged ill-naturedly.
"Oh, St. Clair," said Frognall. "I suppose you might as well
come in."
When Frognall had closed and bolted the door, St. Clair looked
about the room with an air of suspicion and disapproval, narrowing
his eyes in the manner of a person enduring a dust storm. The
room was not at all as pleasant as he had remembered it. A mirror
had been taken down and lay on its side against the wall, and he
saw from the reflection it threw back that it badly needed a shine.
"There seems to be no place to sit," he observed.
Frognall said, "I'm moving."
"Yes?"
'Tomorrow. I have to be out of here by tomorrow. As long as
you're here, you can help me pack."
"I'd like to," St. Clair said, without any particular eagerness.
He stood by the door to the kitchen, looking at a sink full of rusty
spoons and greasy dishes. A line of very large ants were crawling
up the wall, where they disappeared behind a piece of pink-andmauve
oilcloth.
"I have all these books to be packed," Frognall said.
'There must be several thousand."
"About."
From one of the chairs St. Clair removed a drawing board, a
number of broken graham crackers, and what appeared to be a sort
115

Kees
of harness, and, after taking off his topcoat, sat down and lit a
cigarette.
"What have you been doing?" said Frognall. He was a tall man,
no longer very young, with bushy carrot-colored hair and bad
teeth. He did not look straight at one when speaking.
St. Clair said, "Translating the poems of Grobman-Pauli."
"Never heard of him."
"Few have. He is quite unknown here. His poems are virtually
untranslatable and depend for their effectiveness on an almost
unbearably tedious repetition of guttural sounds. It is very difficult
to reproduce their flavor in a translation. He wrote exclusively in
septenaries. Little is known of his life. He abandoned poetry in his
twenty-fourth year and seems to have allowed himself to be supported
by women of a low sort from that point on until his death, a
peculiarly revolting one, at the age of forty."
"Who wrote, 1 come from haunts of coot and hern'?" Frognall
asked.
"I haven't the faintest idea," St. Clair said. "I'm certain it wasn't
Grobman-Pauli."
"That line happened to occur to me."
St. Clair and Frognall were looking at each other. There seemed
to be a sort of tension in the atmosphere. Just then the telephone
rang. It was buried under a pile of soiled shirts and toilet articles on
the floor, and it rang ten or twelve times before Frognall was able
to extricate it. "Hello," he said, "Oh, it's you, Vera. No. No. No,
postively no. I'll call you tomorrow morning. No, there's no one
here. If you call back I shan't answer. Goodnight, Vera."
St. Clair sat with a smug look while listening to this conversation.
"Do you want a drink?" Frognall asked. He was perspiring a
good deal.
St. Clair brightened. This was more than he had counted on.
Frognall had rarely been known to offer anyone a drink, except to
girls he brought to his place occasionally in the hope of seducing
them.
They went into the kitchen, from which St. Clair soon
withdrew to stand in the doorway, since it was, he discovered, far
too small to accommodate both of them in comfort. Frognall was
116
Farewell to Frognall
taking bottles down from a cabinet and, in some cases, holding
them up to the light.
"A finger of rum," he said. "An inch or two of gin. This was
given to me by that ski expert who was in town a few months ago
posing as a British lord. He took everyone in." Frognall put the
bottle down on a shelf by the sink. "Rye. Fully a quarter of a pint
there. Scotch. Scarcely enough to cover the bottom of the bottle.
More rye. More gin. I don't know why I've been hanging on to this
empty cognac bottle."
By the time he had finished, there were fully a dozen bottles,
each of them nearly empty, but collectively representing a decent
amount of liquor.
"Ah, here's another," Frognall said. "A quart of brandy, and it's
never been opened. Want to buy it?"
"What brand?"
"Uh, 'Old Badger' it seems to be called."
"Never heard of it."
"The man said it was very good."
"What did you pay for it?"
"Three and a half."
"Let me see it," St. Clair said.
Frognall handed it to him. The label was very beautifully
printed but the lettering on it was rather difficult to read. Then St.
Clair noticed something else. "It says here," he said sternly, "$1.89."
Frognall frowned. "Where does it say that?"
"Right here, in pencil."
"So it does. Strange. Oh, it must have been what it was, three
and a half, and then marked down to the other price."
"I don't think it can be very good brandy, Frognall. 'Old
Badger.' Thank you, no."
"Ill let you have it for a dollar."
St. Clair debated the wisdom of the purchase. One could always
serve it to people one did not want coming around again, he
reflected. That could be done if it turned out to be as unpalatable as
he somehow felt it would be. He gave Frognall a dollar.
"It's a pity I shan't be able to drink it," Frognall said, after having
scrutinized the bill and put it in his pocket.
"Going on the wagon?"
117

Kees
Tm leaving. For good."
"Oh?"
"The Army."
"Just hand me that bottle with the rye in it," St. Clair said. He
took a long drink. "I thought you were a conscientious objector."
"I was. I was. But I've been doing some reading lately that has
given me an entirely different slant on things," Frognall said. He
poured out some gin in a glass and held it under the faucet, but no
water come out when he turned it on. "I had them turn the water off
today," he said, rather wearily.
"We can drink it straight," St. Clair said. "You were saying?"
"Oh, yes. Some of the reading I've been doing lately has made
me realize, not only the folly of holding minority opinions in wartime,
but the very real objections to pacifist doctrine."
"I see."
'Then, too, I've been much pleased to hear about the way conscientious
objectors have been treated. And there's a chance, if
things work out the way I hope they will, that I may fall into a very
soft spot in the Army."
"I see," said St. Clair. He carried the bottle into the other room
and sat down and drank some more rye.
"Can't you say something else but 'I see'?" Frognall asked.
"Not at the moment."
"I hope you're not planning on getting drunk," Frognall said.
There was a peevish quality of reproach in his tone that irritated St.
Clair. "I need help in packing these books."
"What do you want me to do?"
"A friend of mine is going to store them for me. Now, I want to
know in which box each book will be, in case I should want to write
for something. You pack the books and read me the title and author
and 111 write it down. Then we can assign numbers to each box and
put the same number on each sheet of paper."
"It seems like a lot of work, Frognall."
"Do you intend to help me or don't you?"
"Very well."
Til have to ask you to stop drinking my liquor if you're not
going to help."
"Any particular place you want to start?"
118
Farewell to Frognall
Frognall brought out a large packing box. "We'll begin," he
said, "with this pile," indicating one nearby. He watched St. Clair,
who still hung on to the bottle, as he got down on the floor.
Satisfied that he was about to repay him for the liquor he had not
known how to dispose of anyway, Frognall picked up a pad of
paper with a red cover and a picture of an Indian chief on it and
said, "Are you ready?"
"I suppose so." St. Clair opened the book on top of the pile.
" Tumors of Domestic Animals,' by Heriani Forepaugh," he read.
Frognall wrote and St. Clair put the book in the box.
"Next."
" 'An Introduction to Missionary Service,' by Georgina Anne
Gollock."
"Next."
" 'Gazophylacium Divinai Dilectionis.' No author."
"No author?"
"Not on the title page."
"Go on. What's the next one?"
" 'Strange Holiness,' by Robert P.Tristram Coffin."
"Next."
" 'Simple Conjuring Tricks Anyone Can Do,' by Wlademirus
Goldway," said St. Clair. 'This is certainly an eerie little collection
you have here, Frognall."
'These books represent fifteen years of collecting," Frognall
said coldly.
St. Clair picked up several books. " 'Meet Mr. Coyote,' by
A.V. Meelbom," he said. " 'Down Woodbrook Ways: Poems,' by
Hanna Horgan Burrell. 'How to Punch the Bag,' by W.H. Rothwell."
"Not so fast."
St. Clair finished the bottle. He felt the liquor burning a hole
the size of a silver dollar in the pit of his stomach. He sat looking
questioningly at a red rubber glove lying on the windowsill. It impressed
him. It gave him a momentary sense of loss and emptiness.
How symbolic it was I he thought.
He picked up the next book, aware that Frognall had finished
writing. " 'Where Knowledge Means Happiness: A Handbook of
Facts and Practical Procedure for Conserving Throughout Married
119

Kees
Life the Rapture of Honeymoon Days,' " he said. "The author is Vee
Perlman."
"Just the brief title, St. Clair. Next."
" 'A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh Made Under the
Auspices of the Pittsburgh Girls' Conference, 1925.' By Collis A.
Stocking."
'The brief title only, St. Clair," said Frognall, giving him a
reproachful look.
The telephone made a strange brittle noise. It was the
operator, telling Frognall to put the receiver back on the hook.
"What in God's name induces you to buy such books as these?"
St. Clair said, when Frognall had completed his dealings with the
operator.
"What's the matter with them?"
"I should hesitate to say. Have you read any of them?"
"I read 'How to Punch the Bag.' "
St. Clair sighed. "Are you sure you don't have any water,
Frognall?"
"I told you I had it turned off."
"I suppose I may as well finish up that other bottle of rye."
Frognall got it for him. As he was coming out of the kitchen,
the telephone rang again. He handed the bottle to St. Clair and
answered it. It was another girl, someone named Eloise. She seemed
to be of a more insistent nature than Vera, for it took Frognall
much longer to get rid of her. He seemed very distraught when he
was finally able to hang up.
St. Clair was pretending to read a book called "Directions for
Using the Patent Eagle Training Process" while listening to the conversation.
'These women!" Frognall said. "It's enough to drive you insane.
I may as well tell you, St. Clair, that I've become horribly involved
with two girls here in town. Horribly involved. You
wouldn't dream. I've been living for weeks in an absolute torment,
and I finally decided that the only way out was either suicide or the
Army." He lit a cigarette and puffed nervously.
St. Clair made no comment. He had just then noticed a section
of the wall, where a large bookcase had once stood. It was covered
with one of the most dreadful murals he had ever seen.
120
Farewell to Frognall
Frognall became aware of St. Clair's focus of interest.
"Another girl did that," he said. "I just went out one night to go
downtown — I couldn't have been gone more than an hour or so —
and when I got back she had painted that on the wall."
"You in the Army," St. Clair said. "I can't get over it."
"You'll be there soon," Frognall said.
"Yes, I suppose so."
"I wish I were dead," Frognall said. He slumped down in his
chair and began pounding his forehead with his fist. 'There'll never
be an end to it, St. Clair, this horrible, horrible, world."
'That's right."
"We're all washed up," Frognall said. "Listen. Do you know
anyone who is happy?"
"Quite a few people," said St. Clair. 'That's what makes it all
the worse."
"Why do you go on living? Do you ever think about suicide?"
"All the time, practically. Except when I'm translating someone
like Grobman-Pauli."
Frognall sat there, staring at the mural. "When I was a kid I used
to dream about becoming a great violinist. Well, they gave me
music lessons and it was discovered that I had no sense of time. Do
you know what a thing like that can do to a person?"
St. Clair could not think of any comment to make. He had no
gift for rising to the occasion when matters took this sort of turn.
"I can't do anything more with all this stuff tonight," Frognall
said. "Ill have to do it in the morning. Go away, St. Clair."
"Don't you want me to help—"
"Go away, St. Clair, go away."
Frognall was still sitting there, staring at the floor, when St.
Clair took his leave. St. Clair went down the driveway and walked
home. The cold air cleared his head a little. It had begun to snow.
He unlocked the door to his room and took the bottle of brandy to
a table, where he opened it. It was even worse than he had expected.
It would do, though, for the unwanted guests. But even
they were getting fewer and fewer. Everyone was going to the wars.
St. Clair undressed and got into bed. A military band was playing
loudly on the radio downstairs, and it was a long time before he
could get to sleep.
121

Interview with Jack Gilbert
The following interview took place on December 11, 1982
* * *
JOHN HARNEY: In some of your poems you mention Pittsburgh
as the place where you grew up.
JACK GILBERT: I was born there and stayed until I was twentythree.
JH: In "Threshing the Fire" there seems to be nostalgia as well as
some bitterness.
JG: No bitterness at all. None whatsoever. Though it wasn't always
easy. I was always fighting against rules and my teachers. In fact, I
never graduated from high school. I remember back in high school
the teacher would say, "We're going to do poetry now. Jack, would
you go out in the hall." I don't think there was any great principle
involved. I just wpuldn f t conform. We were both very stubborn.
But I don't feel I was mistreated or anything like that. I did what I
wanted to do and they punished me for it and I think that's perfectly
fair.
JH: When did you start writing?
JG: About fourteen.
JH: Can you remember anything you wrote back then?
JG: I still have the texts, but they're not interesting. The first poem
I've really kept is the first poem in Views Of Jeopardy.
JH: That's the one about the elephant, "In Dispraise of Poetry"?
JG: Yes. When the book was published, the poem was supposed to
be dedicated to Ezra Pound. In fact, when I went to see him, I asked
if I could. He thought about it for a while and then said softly, "Yes,
I think you might very well dedicate that to me." It wasn't written
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Gilbert
to sum him up, but it does. I don't say that in vanity, but simply
because of what his pursuit of poetry cost him.
JH: Did you know Pound very well?
JG: No, I went to see him once, that's all.
CAROLYN KIZER: Was that in St. Elizabeth's or in Rapallo?
JG: I visited his wife in Rapallo, but I went to see Pound in the castle.
Just before he stopped talking. December of 1960.
CK: Just before the "great silence."
JG: It had already started in a way. I'd ask him a question and he
wouldn't answer sometimes for twenty minutes. Can you imagine
what that was like? You're sitting there looking attentively at Ezra
Pound for twenty minutes and he doesn't say anything! You can't
repeat the question or look away or nudge him by asking it a different
way. Him just looking at you steadily. . . . But when he
finally answered , it was to the point and perfectly lucid . . . You
have to understand that Pound had a real influence on my
life . . . Pittsburgh was like the Dark Ages when I was a kid. I used
to go around all the time looking for what we didn't have. There
was an old, unclean man who lived in his failed bookstore. He was
eccentric, but very bright, and I'd go there every few weeks and
talk. And I'd always buy a book out of the dusty ones he had left,
because he needed the money. One time it turned out to be a black
book by Ezra Pound. My friends and I asked our teacher who he
was, but nobody knew. That was about 1943. It was the Boni
Liverwright edition of the Personae. I've admired Pound ever since.
I just plead him guilty to his rotten anti-Semitism and crazy
economics and the boring parts of the Cantos. I admire the rest
very much. We've had very few people who've lived their lives so
disinterestedly for literature, for poetry. Not to mention the writers
he helped . . . His wife told me they never had enough money. That
she never cooked for her husband because they never had a real
kitchen, and how their furniture in Paris was made from orange
crates. He knocked himself out for other people. And the sad thing
is that he never had a real friend. Even to the end, I think Williams
had strong feelings against Pound.
124
CK: He was still much kinder to him than most people.
Interview
JG: Certainly. Williams was a good, decent person. But I'm not
sure he liked Ezra. And who else did Pound have? His first book
was dedicated to some guy he barely knew. And when he was in
college the people he knew didn't really seem like friends. The guys
in his fraternity or dormitory or whatever it was liked to use him as
the butt of jokes. Like the night he came in late and they had it set
up so one was on the floor moaning in pain and they convinced
Pound he was desperately ill, that Pound had to go find a doctor.
Pound said it was the middle of the night and snowing and he didn't
know where there was a doctor. But he ran out to try. Hours later
he came back and they were all sitting around laughing and drinking
beer. Who was ever Pound's real friend, except maybe Ford
Madox Ford?
CK: What about Eliot?
JG: They were literary friends. I doubt that anyone hung out with
Eliot . . . Pound really wanted a friend like you have in high
school. Somebody you go have chili with late at night and then
walk back and forth between your homes for hours talking about
death and girls. And whom you secretly love better than your own
brother. Pound never had anyone like that.
CK: But didn't Pound set up those relations as either master and
disciple, or patron and patronized?
JG: Probably. In the same way he'd provoke people into battle
because his social insecurity left him uncomfortable with them.
Like his gold earring and cowboy hat when he found himself a provincial
intimidated by London.
ELIOT SCHAIN: Do you think he put that extra energy into
literature? If he'd had a good friend, maybe he wouldn't have worked
so hard.
CK: I think he put it into looking out for people.
JG: I think you find that longing in the writing, too. You can read a
lot of the Cantos that way. The Pisan Cantos are filled with longing
for the times when he did have a life with people: chop houses they
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Gilbert
would go to, and the times they sat around drinking and talking
about poetry, and going on walks. Lists of those people and those
times in London and Paris. All that world wiped out by the First
World War. He never forgave the politicians and the merchants for
destroying the one human world he did belong to.
CK: John says you told him that Waley's Chinese translations also
were very important to you.
JG: Crucially important.
CK: I'd like to know when that began and how it affected you. My
great passion for Chinese poetry is because it is precisely' of the immediate.
One doesn't write a poem to a best friend when he is dead;
you write it to him now. There is an immediacy of the love and caring
that is almost unique.
JG: That's probably true, but it's not the way I work. I think maybe
Chinese poetry and the Greek Anthology got me more because
Shakespeare was unusable. I read a lot of Shakespeare then. I was
in love with Shakespeare. His language was, in a way, natural
then. Now it's foolish to use that kind of florid rhetoric . . . But I
think there is maybe a deeper reason why I was so much attracted
to the ancient Chinese poets and the Greek Anthology. It's because
back then I was mostly interested in being a novelist, and that
poetry was what prose wasn't. Which also may be why I feel a
vague disagreement with a good deal of contemporary poetry. If
you think of it, the modern novel is aspiring to the condition of
poetry: elliptical, metaphorical in structure, disjunctive, dense,
nonlinear . . .
CK: Jump-cutting.
JH: Lyricism of language.
JG: Image clusters. While poetry seems more and more willing to
take on the frontal literalness of prose: narrative, quotidian
vocabulary, and the other aspects of the novel. Or at least the better
kind of short stories —such as Ray Carver's. Not that the two
genres are meeting or merging. They have passed by each other . . .
Anyhow, for me the novel was a place for analysis, careful exploration
of complexities, and especially the gradual creation of a world.
126
Interview
The imposition of an illusion. Making the people and place of an
invented world seem real to the reader. The reader is, in a way,
hypnotized by the gradual accumulation of concrete action and
specific detail —if it's done right.
CK: By an accretive technique.
JG: Yes. The mind doesn't notice it's being conditioned, because the
conscious mind is distracted by the plot, leaving the levers of the
subliminal mind unguarded. So the characters can become . . .
There are characters in literature, at least for me, who are more real
than my brothers or sisters. What's the name of that older woman
in Colette's Cheri? The courtesan? . . . Lea! She goes on in me
more real than some of the people I actually knew and knew fairly
well fifteen years ago when I encountered Lea in that book.
CK: Well, I'm haunted by Colette's mother, Sido. But how does
Waley fit into this?
JG: Because I was involved with the novel, what I went to poetry
for was . . . magic: the making things happen not by expansion
and demonstration, but by compression and implication. The ancient
Chinese poetry, and the poems in the Greek Anthology,
fascinated me by their pleasure in doing the most with the least.
CK: What age were you then?
JG: Fifteen, sixteen. But in Pittsburgh we were still getting the
wheel invented. The only book I remember my mother reading
during my first thirty-five years was The Care and Feeding Of Rabbits.
ES: Are you saying that compression produces magic?
JG: I'm not saying what produces magic. But it's one of the
characteristics of magic in poetry. Magic occurs in different places.
I was part of a group called The Magic Workshop that Jack Spicer
conducted for several months in the Fifties. Robert Duncan, James
Braughton, Helen Adams, and the like were in it. Spicer started off
by saying we weren't going to define magic. That if we started
defining it, we'd never get anything else done. "Let's see if we can
make it happen in our poems," he said. "That's what matters. That's
what the poet does."
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Gilbert
CK: You say Chinese poetry is compressed. I think Chinese poetry
is far less organized. You know a Chinese poet writes a long poem,
and he doesn't put something in the second stanza, he doesn't go
back and revise it. I meant to say this earlier, that's one reason they
were so immensely prolific. They didn't have our notions of revision
and polishing and all that, they just wrote, and they frequently
wrote to each other. It was almost like a better letter.
JG: There is that kind of Chinese poetry, but the ones that haunted
me were the ten, twelve, fourteen line ones in books like Waley's A
Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems. Especially the four or five
line ones. Like Po Chu-I's:
Out of the Eastern Gate this morning
Rode ten thousand horsemen.
Looked back at the mountain, not one.
Or something like that. It's been forty years now. And it still rings
in me like when you tap a thin glass with your spoon. Or his poem
about having tired eyes from reading poetry all night by candelight
and sitting in the dark, after, listening to the waves hitting the sides
of the ship. Or the poem by the emperor whose woman has died
and he gets magicians from all over China so he can talk with her
and everybody fails. Until one finally produces her shadow on a
curtain —and the emperor wrote just four lines:
Is it or isn't it?
I stand and look.
The swish, swish of a silk skirt.
How slow she comes.
That's magic for me, and it's not the kind I find in the novel. It's the
magic of the true lyric. I don't mean the kind of poem people like C.
Day Lewis call lyrics. People who talk about the lyric usually end
up saying it's a song. It's not a song. It's often song/i/ce. But that's
different. Just as the music of music is not the music of poetry.
When I say a magical lyric, I don't mean a pretty, short, personal
poem, suitably rhymed, about how the poet's heart is broken. I
mean the unaccountable lyric like Lawrence's little poem about the
Interview
boy with the horse. Or "Western Wind." And I think there is a
reason why these poems are short and compressed. The brevity
doesn't leave time to get the material structured in the mind. The
poem gives you resonantly implicative material very quickly and it
is over before you can get your bearings. There's a confused, groping
pause — then it is clear, all of a sudden and complete. It's that
detonation inside us, and the presence of a poem that is not on the
page which gives a special delight. A feeling of something like
magic . . . And there is another reason compression creates this
magic. The compression produces energy. It keeps the flux of overtones
and half-grasped associations resonant. The longer poem
spells out the possibilities, and as it does, the poem slackens. I think
it is the mistake made by so many of the poems I see in magazines
like The American Poetry Review: the poet often starts with a subject
and proceeds to milk it dry. Uses it up. You start with something
vibrant, coiled tight like a spring, then expand and expand,
explain and explain, repeat in different images or metaphors—until
you have a slack spring and you stop. One stops. But you read the
short poems in the Greek Anthology, people like Archilochos, and
those damn things are vibrating after 2700 years. They're alive 1 It's
like a pentagram or a mandala: they aren't a way of summoning
spirits and demons, but a way of keeping them contained once they
come. Like plasmas for fusion reactors. The best poetry does the
same thing. Or at least the best of shorter poetry. The compression
accomplishes two things which are like magic: it raises a true apparition
. . . You can't just tell a poem. It's analogous to a joke. A
real joke either works or it doesn't. It doesn't work "sort of." And
it's the same thing for the magical short poem: it works or it
doesn't. You have a poem or you don't. It's either/or.
ES: So you're not explaining the spirit, you're containing it.
JG: You don't explain the poem, you make it happen. You
somehow have it and your job is to detonate it in the reader. You
set the reader up. That's what craft is about more than anything.
Doing the poem inside the reader, not pleasing him ... If you take
a glass of water and carefully put in salt while you gently stir, you
can dissolve more salt into the water than the water can hold. I
don't mean keeping the salt suspended by keeping the salt in mo-
128 129

Gilbert
tion. If you stop, in fact, the water will be perfectly clear. You don't
see any salt and it won't have settled on the bottom. If you do it
right. Then if you strike the glass, the excess salt instantly
precipitates out. That's pretty close to what I'm trying to say. Arid
that's why compression is crucially important: to invisibly
overload the words. Obviously, I don't mean to overdress the
poem with tropes—poetry that takes you by the hand and explains
everything as you tour the new house, nudging you to notice the
fine rug so that your mind says as it reads, oh, yes, that goes after
that and this is a symbol for greed . . . when you do that, it's like a
"sort of" humorous story, but it will never be a successful joke —
thefe's no magic when you get to the end.
RON LIEBER: Do you see much magic going on now?
JG: People don't seem to want magic anymore. They want the
relaxed meandering of somebody talking about something in the
poem. There are some, thank God. Like Gregg and Jean Follain and
Ritsos intermittently in that library of poems he turns out. And
Simic had real magic. He came to this country with a couple dozen
magical poems—like Marco Polo returning with precious gems
stitched away in the lining of his clothes. I admire them. But I feel
sympathy because I get the feeling he can't do it any more. Which is
another quality of magic. You can use the same spells and recipes
and equipment that worked before, and very often they don't work
ever again. Like Coleridge after his Muse abandoned him. It's one
of the reasons the magic of poetry fascinates me. It is so rare and so
hard to accomplish. That's why Linda Gregg's poetry is so valuable
for me. Or one of the reasons. I've been trying for twenty years to
figure out how she does it. When you find a poet like Linda Gregg
or Roethke or the Creeley of For Love . . . It's like watching Monty
Python when they were on television. They drove me crazy. I
couldn't figure out how it was done. They were a joy.
CK: And they don't just depend on the intellectual apparatus.
JG: No, that's true. Of course, some of it can be figured out. Obviously,
one of the elements is unaccountable disjunction. Which is
often true of the magic in poetry. The world unaccountable may, in
fact, be part of the definition of magic: making something important
happen unaccountably.
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Interview
ES: You've made attempts at that. You have that in your poetry.
JG: I thank God if I do. It matters a lot to me. But Linda has it far
more, and like a birthright. She can't always do it, but she succeeds
so often that it puts pressure on me.
JH: Has she been a big influence on your work?
JG: More than anyone alive. Especially in the ways we've been talking
about. And because of her strange ability to think as the poem
thinks — unmediated a lot of the time.
JH: Have you been an opposite influence on her?
JG: I think I've influenced her in a secondary way. In linebreaks
and the things you learn in workshops . . ,
CK: Well, she would certainly say you've influenced her.
JG: I can tell you what Linda said when she was asked this. She said
the thing which affected her most when we were first together was
the sort of thing I did in the broadcast for The Voice Of America,
which was printed in Poets on Poetry, edited by Howard Nemerov
and published by Basic Books. She said she was very young then
and what affected her most was the sense of magnitude, and the
pressure to get to what really mattered . . . But she already had
that largeness and seriousness and passion in her which fills her
book, Too Bright To See ... I think my contribution was the less
important things. The body work: grilles and fender lines. The kind
of stuff we do in workshops . . . And we do them in workshops
because they are the mechanicals. We teach mostly repairing. And
all too often we concentrate on how to make a negligible poem
presentable. Mostly somebody brings in a dead cat and the group
says it would be better if the third line was taken out and the title
changed. Some kind soul will point out that it is nicely organized,
with a clear head, middle and end. Rarely does anyone mention
that it is a dead cat.
RL: One thing I've noticed about Linda Gregg's and your poetry is
that you both use fragments instead of complete sentences.
JH: Is there some kind of aesthetic behind it? In your work I've
noticed it from the first poem to the last.
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Gilbert
JG: Partly I used them for pace and sometimes for energy, but
mostly it's because I'm so anxious to avoid discursiveness in my
poetry. I don't want to talk about the subject of the poem. My mind
is by nature analytical and expository. Which is fine for essays or
conversation or even for novels, but not poems. Poetry is the art of
demonstration . . . Which is one reason why I care so much about
tactics and strategies. Craft is a way of implementing the matter of
the poem, the technique of doing something to the reader. Too
often craft is mistaken for canons of correctness, or rules for
embellishment. People think craft means writing villanelles ... Let
me give you an example. A friend of mine, Jean McLean, was in
Roethke's workshop. He was very excited about the villanelles they
were writing, and how hard it was. I said it's because you're doing it
the foolish way. That villanelles are written backwards, and by
choosing a subject you are mostly indifferent to. First you find two
lines that are vague and which say essentially the same thing, or
which are comfortably parallel. You put these down at the end of
the poem. Then you distribute them through the rest of the poem at
their prescribed slots, and the poem is pretty much finished except
for harmless lines which lead to or away from the recurring lines.
You can stuff them, using what James Dickey once called the
poetry kapok: the all-purpose romantic excelsior. That is where the
indifference comes in — so you have no compunction about twisting
the lines to mean anything that fits . . . Which is how I came to
write the poem "Elephants" in Views Of Jeopardy. Jean wrote back
and asked me how I would do it. The really hard way, I said. I'd
choose two lines which were antithetical and have their recurring
work like an Hegelian dialectic which was resolved at the
end . . . It's not wrong or even entirely immoral to use craft in that
deliberately visible way. But it's mostly just cleverness and hard
work, and it's basically as recreational as beauty usually is in
poetry ... I think of craft as functional. After all, "craft" comes
from an Old Norse word that means strength and cunning or guile.
For me poetry is about human life, so craft is a way of getting
something important accomplished. Craft as fashion, or craft as ingenious
theories and poetics isn't of much use for that . . . Which is
why it's hard for me to get interested in things like Language
Poetry. Ron Silliman and those people see poetry as a technology
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Interview
of cognition. One lists all the things impinging on the mind at a certain
moment, and then mix in the wonderful vocabulary of recent
studies of how the mind operates ... I probably shouldn't be so
frivolous about it. I've known Ron a long time. I like and respect
him. He's bright and very serious. He and his friends work very
hard. But the results are extraordinarily boring. Which is fine if
you're working with science, but not if you're writing poetry . . .
Besides, the whole thing seems to be based on an obvious misunderstanding
about how the mind thinks. It doesn't think like it
thinks, any more than a conductor conducts like he conducts.
What the conductor is acting out for the audience has nothing to do
with how he accomplishes things with the musicians. The mind
thinks only the narrow range of meaningful data.
CK: Why would anyone try to do this? I'd never write again.
JG: It's different, and seductively filled with theoretical linguistics,
quantum mechanics, and subatomic physics where an apple is a
grid of quasi-occurrences. It's fun to fool around with. One of the
paradoxes of their work is that a dumb mind registering data makes
the same poem as a brilliant mind. The other is that they choose to
ignore that our mechanism sees everything upside-down and backwards,
while our brain automatically and unconsciously revises it.
They are a little like fanatical Ptolemaic philosophers . . . They
seem to strive for a kind of formless language entropy.
ES: So how conscious of form are you when you are writing a
poem?
JG: I'm as conscious as Ted Williams was when he was hitting a
baseball. In a way, I'm not conscious at all. Just as Ted Williams
did not think of hitting the ball. He had worked on it until his
whole body thought of how to hit the ball. Like making love. To do
it well, you have to think what's going on and at the same time not
think of it. Simultaneously. Which is possible because those are
two different kinds of thinking. The kind of craft that is conscious
is fairly easy to learn. But the other kind is a mystery. I remember
how Einstein said toward the end of his life, when he was still
working very hard on his Unified Field Theory, that one of his
greatest difficulties was that he had lost the sense of what to discard
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Gilbert
from among a dozen plausible solutions. When he was younger, he
would have known there were three to work on. Like a good chess
player who never looks at all the moves he could make, as an
amateur does, but instinctively focuses on the right parts of the
board to consider. . . . And you get that way with craft. Some
people seem to be born with it. Others have to work at it: think
about it, wrestle hard, read lots of poems, try to take them apart. . .
I remember William Carlos Williams the last time I talked with him
saying that one of his great pleasures was taking apart poems to see
what made them work. "Of course," he said, "with the greatest
poetry you get them apart and still can't tell." . . . You have to
develop an instinct, like a boxer or a killer. Now!, something says.
ES: Well, what happened to Einstein? Is there something in youth
that allows you to be able to go on just a few possibilities?
JG: Yes and no. It seems to be that way with mathematicians. But
then you have Yeats and and Rembrandt and Aeschylus and Pound
of the Pisan Cantos . . . Dick Cavett asked the choreographer, Jacques
d'Amboise if it wasn't hard to choreograph at the Ballanchine
studios, didn't it make him nervous to know Ballanchine might
walk in? D'Amboise said that once he'd been working on a piece for
months and Ballanchine came in, stood for a moment and said,
'Too many steps." And left. He was absolutely right, d'Amboise
said, and afterwards he was able to make the ballet almost easily.
D'Amboise called it, "Instant craft." Ballanchine didn't analyze, he
knew.
RL: Well, how would you define form? Because I remember when I
was at writing school they all said sonnet, villanelle, some set structure.
JH: Well, I read an essay not long ago, in which a contemporary
critic says form is any kind of system that obtains in a poem. For
instance, he mentions that Gary Snyder poem, "August on Sourdough,
a visit From Dick Brewer," with two balanced beats on
either side of a variable caesura. But people didn't see that because
it was written, ostensibly, in free verse. And the tradition it was
written in was of the Chinese farewell poem. And the reviewer
missed what Snyder was after because the poem was written in an
unfamiliar "form,"
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Interview
RL: The idea of organic form.
JG: Organic form sounds good, but I wonder. If you let plants just
grow, you often live with spindly avocadoes, or rosebushes that
run to leaf instead of producing flowers. They have a form, but not
necessarily a satisfactory one. To say form is whatever system is
apposite to the poem seems to be saying only that the poet should
choose the appropriate form. It doesn't say much about the nature
of form ... I agree in a way, but I'm troubled by the word appropriate.
It seems passive. I'm interested in form as a way of making
something happen. For example, the rondeau would be "inappropriate"
for writing about Vietnamese babies being cooked alive
by our napalm, but it might be an effective form because of that
. . . which raises the question of formal and nonformal form, external
and internal. Formal, external, meaning the appearance of the
poem being clear in a way that makes evident the rules of the performance,
so the reader can enjoy watching how the poet gracefully
handles the restrictions he has imposed on himself. At its worse,
this can be like watching Bobby Riggs play tennis amid the six
chairs he's agreed to have on his side of the net. But it's the invisible,
internal form that specially interests me. Not just the kind
which gives a general feeling of wholeness to the poem —though
that's important. But the enterprising form with its strategies and
tactics. I think of form in its most important sense as an organization
of means to augment the power, emotional and perceptual, of
the poem's content and to effectively transmit this to the reader . . .
I hope it's clear I'm not prescribing for others. This is a conversation
about what poetry is for me. I'm not saying people are wrong who
like elegant, formal poetry. I am saying that I find cinquains and
pantoums make the content ancillary. I'm saying I prefer poetry
that's out to get something less polite. And I'm saying the important
form for me is the crucially active kind that interferes with the content's
"natural form" —its being a tree by being a tree —in order to
make the content more effective.
JH: In most of your poems you don't work in a metrical system.
There is meter, but . . .
JG: I spend a lot of time on the sound of my poems. If I understand
the point Saintsbury is making in those three volumes of his, metric
regularity is against the true nature of prosody in English.
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Gilbert
JH: As a matter of fact, the only poem of yours I've read that is a
form is the villanelle you were talking about.
JG: There are secret sonnets, masked haiku, half a sestina and the
like in my books. And for me, poems like "On Growing Old In San
Francisco" are formal poems:
Two girls barefoot walking in the rain
both girls lovely, one of them is sane
hurting me softly
hurting me though
two girls barefoot walking in the snow
walking in the white snow
walking in the black
two girls barefoot never coming back
JH: Right, and then there's that longer one.
JG:
The oxen have voices
The flowers are wounds
You never recover from Tuscany noons
They cripple with beauty
And butcher with love
Sing folly, sing flee, sing going down . . .
ES: Did you have a form for that poem before you wrote it?
JG: The first two lines of "Two girls barefoot walking in the rain"
just came. Out of nowhere. They seem to imply a form. It took me
twelve years to find the rest of it.
ES: So you're not forcing anything into anybody's slippers.
JG: Sure I force things into the forms of others. Sometimes into the
Anglo-Saxon scheme or Cavalier lyrics, but it has to work. I find it
harder to use form which is not mechanical. I worked on "Pewter,"
often, for fourteen years. Scared the whole time. The sound, the
unspecified melody is the source of its form, and if you work over
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that kind of material, if you try to craft it ... the chances are it
will go dead in the center. And you'll never get it back. There is no
defined system to fall back on. You have to hold it with the mind's
ear ... I remember how shocked I was to find in Stravinsky's lectures
at Harvard him saying that Beethoven had no gift for melody.
But I thought about it, and I think he's right. Certainly not like
Schubert or Bellini had a gift for it ... I think I have a strong sense
of form. But I want to find it in the poem.
ES: When you talk about the innards of poetry are you talking
about form or content?
JG: You can't really separate them in poetry. And yet, in some
sense, content is the more important for me in poetry. At least if by
form you are talking about form with a capital F. About strict
form, prescribed form, villanelles. But the form I'm talking about
as being important to me is lower case. What I called earlier, implementing
form ... I think you could say that writing in the 20th
century was an attempt to escape from upper case Form to lower.
Certainly that was the aesthetic asserted by Pound at the very
beginning back in 1915 when he started writing the Cantos. Form
really should concentrate on helping the poem do its job, not go into
business for itself. To transfer the content to the reader, as he
said another time, with as little loss as possible . . . Which doesn't
prevent form and craft being a joy in themselves to the poet —and
some of the poet's readers. I think for the lucky poet it becomes a
deep happiness in itself. Even though he knows the majority of his
admirers won't notice the felicity of how it's done — unless the poem
wears that accomplishment blatantly. I think of the content of the
poem as the most important, as the marriage. But craft is like what
in the old days would have been called the mistress. Something the
poet has for himself finally. Like the Gothic stone mason carving a
rose on a bench up on the roof where nobody would ever sit, and
carving it on the underside where they wouldn't see it if they did.
For a pure delight in his craft.
JH: How do you think the Beats fit into that? Do you reject their
idea of form, or rather their idea of a lack of form?
JG: Allen Ginsberg is astonishingly intelligent, and he was wonder-
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fully talented, but his ideas about form were foolish. He really
believed, and probably still does, that if you were pure in heart and
sincere and used ordifiary speech, whatever you wrote would be a
successful poem. I admire and care deeply for Allen, but after Kaddish
he seems to me like a man sitting with a paper bag on his lap
who pours fine honey into it. After a while he has a lap full of
honey, I think it was somewhat the same problem that Pound
wrestled with for half a century in finding a way to make his idea of
permissive form work. George Stanley, I think it was, said to a
class of mine a long time ago: "You can be famous by your instincts
until you're about thirty. But after that, if you haven't done your
homework, it all starts falling apart."
CK: Jack, do you agree that you couldn't be an American poet if
you didn't know Whitman and you didn't know Williams?
JG: The Williams Carlos Williams poem has been the basic model
for the American poem for the last twenty-five years. And it has
been importantly productive for American poetry. But it also has
been a handicap. This kind of poetry is disinclined to the intellect.
And it is mistrustful of the richer resources of language, of
metaphor, and of music in poetry. The Williams' poetry is basically
a sand dance. Like at a rural South dance or on the wooden porch
of the country store. You scattered a handful of sand and then did a
kind of shuffle dance on it. Shoes or hard bare feet made a fine gritty,
slurry sound. The Williams' sound is wonderful, but it is limited. It
leaves out most of that music English poetry is capable of and it
leaves out the other resources of poetry beyond the plain image, the
useful vocabulary of natural speech, and the truthfulness of the antipoetic.
CK: There's no nightingale there.
JG: There is, in one sense, an inherent lack of ambition in the
Williams' poetry. They are often fine poems, even great poems, but
they leave out enormousness. Or maybe it's fairer to say that the
other kind of enormousness gets left out. Along with richness.
RL: Of language you're talking about.
JG: Of language, but also of subject matter. Patterson, in fact,
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seems to me a deliberate attempt to expand the scope of subject and
a secret attempt almost at the last minute to capture some of the
richness and dynamics of the Cantos. I guess I'm one of the few
people alive who thinks it's less than successful. And it's a good example
of what can be accomplished with the admirable rhetoric of
English which Williams chooses against. In Patterson, Williams
tried to achieve something similar with his thin "American" sound
and an almost Amish plainness. He seemed to have the traditional
American mistrust of lyric beauty, and the old American suspicion
that fancy talk was not to be trusted.
CK: Also, Bill thought beauty was imported from Europe, and he
didn't want any part of it.
JG: Right. He mistrusted European English. He was afraid, especially
because of Eliot's influence, that we would again lose the sound of
America to it. It was very important to nearly everything he cared
about. And I think the distrust of rhetoric in general is similarly close
to the heart of what Williams thought of as American. In the same
way, trying for masterpieces was against the grain of American egalitarianism
unless the effort was noticably demotic. It was probably
one of the things about Pound and his epic which set Williams' teeth
on edge. He wanted the plain, genuine, native American style
. . . And oddly enough, I share a lot of his temperament in this.
Even while I rejoice in the rich possibilities of language and rhetoric,
something in me is on guard. I have a bias toward plain nouns and a
suspicion of decorative devices. I have a deep admiration for
Williams as a man and as a poet.
ES: But what if you go back to Whitman?
JG: I think Williams felt comfortable with Whitman because of the
exuberant celebration of the common man, the river of antipoetic
images, and the clear opposition to elitism. Whereas, it was the
heroic stance of Pound and Eliot, Melville and Dostoyevski, Mann,
Thomas Wolfe and Graham Greene ... It was their very excess of
aspiration, their overreaching that attracted me. And it is one
reason I feel distant from much of what is aspired to by younger
poets today. A lot of them seem to wear their unassuming on their
sleeves. As though they're saying, "I'm not anything special. I just
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want to tell you a little poem about how it was when I was a kid in
Mississippi."
RL: But isn't that sort of like Chinese poetry? They were seeking
beauty in the ordinary.
JG: Maybe so, but the Chinese seem to get a big sound in their ordinary
poems. Some of their ordinariness is still ringing in me after
forty years. And what I read nowadays as "ordinary" poems doesn't
ring long enough afterwards for me to get to the kitchen.
RL: That's strange, because when I think of some of your poems I
think of how they praise the ordinariness of daily life.
JG: But I'm trying to make the ordinariness enormous. Gigantic.
JH: Yes, I think of that poem, "Not Part of Literature."
JG: That's one of the main things about that poem. I'm trying to
make an immensity visible. I'm not trying to tell you about me.
And I'm only incidentally trying to manufacture a poem. I'm trying
to get you to realize someone is sitting in that chair at this moment,
that the moment exists powerfully, that marriage is more real than
a red wheelbarrow, even ... I think you can understand my
poetry better if you see how true it is when I say I'm not much interested
in talking about me. Not that there would be anything
wrong in my wanting to tell about me. And it is true that I am very
much interested in myself. But that's not why I write poems. They
are not self-expression. When I write the poem, "All the Way From
There to Here," I'm not trying to tell you about my hundred-foot
fall and crushing my spine. Nor am I asking you to sympathize
with me because my wife gradually was not in love with me any
more. I'm trying to talk about marriage and romantic love and
what a splendid thing there was once upon a time. And I would like
you to begin to suspect it is a happy poem!
CK: Now there we're getting into the Chinese thing, the essence, the
distillation of the event that becomes more than the event itself.
JG: Yes, the tenor of human life. I'm interested in human life,
human beings doing things or being things that are significant. And
that is why I have only mild interest in experimental or conceptual
poetry. Conceptual, that is, in the sense of theories of poetics.
140
ES: Is it love relationships that permeate most poetry?
Interview
JG: I can't think of anything more important to permeate it. At
least for me, the matter of romantic love is primary. Especially
romantic love inside marriage — romantic with a lower case r. It is
the greatest invention of our species, even though it is virtually impossible
to make a success of. It's the dream my life has pivoted
on ... It's hard to talk about without sounding painfully innocent
. . . You asked me why I went away when I was the most successful,
the year I was awarded a Guggenheim and the rest. I
discovered that fame didn't mean a lot to me. I liked it. I enjoyed
being praised. I liked being stopped on a misty summer night in
empty Greenwich Village by a lovely young woman who asked if I
was Jack Gilbert and could she have my autograph. Of course I liked
it. Just the same way I enjoyed being photographed for Vogue
magazine. But it seemed to have nothing much to do with real
life . . . I've always wondered what they give someone like Marlon
Brando to convince him not to make fine movies. The most important
actor in our time. Luckily, we have Last Tango, but he could
have made major movies. As Ingmar Bergmann, Dryer, Kurosawa,
Fellini made great films . . . Anyhow, there's nothing wrong with
people wanting fame if that's truly fulfilling for them. But it wasn't
for me. And even now I can't understand people giving up all that's
necessary in order to have it — when they could spend their lives on
real things. What the hell is so overwhelmingly important about
applause?
RL: What does it mean to live your life?
JG: Trying for substantial romantic love within reality. And owning
oneself. I know very few people who can afford themselves.
They've got to keep their job, they've got to keep publishing and
keep in the public's eye, and they have to be cautious of what they
say about the work of the other writers. They've got to be around
pretty much all the time.
CK: All the hideous paraphrenalia that keeps the whole thing going.
Someone called it "po-biz."
JG: Well, people have kids to feed and responsibilities to fulfill.
That I can understand. And I realize it is easier for me because I
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Gilbert
don't have responsibilities. But there are young writers who are free
to choose, and they seem to give everything up for the career even
so ... And it's not as though it is easy. They can see it is hugely
hard even when they focus entirely on success. It's not like you can
sell out and the clouds open and drop riches on you, automatically.
I remember Ginsberg saying he would have sold out when he was
young, but there were no buyers. Otherwise, he said, he'd still be
selling stocks in his three-piece suit.
JH: Well, you'd have to leave America to do this, right? Why did
you leave?
JG: To look for what I wanted.
JH: Was Greece an answer to something in yourself?
JG: No, it didn't have to be Greece. I went to Mexico first, in fact.
But it could have been anywhere. San Francisco in the early Beat
days was one of the best times of my life. And the Haight-Ashbury
for the first few years was an important place to be, until the hard
drugs messed it up. The flower children really believed in the
Children's Crusade all over again. They trusted innocent love, really
practiced being nonjudgemental, sailed off into the old secret
dreams of drugs and open sexuality and serious astrology and magic
and remaking the world by being pure in heart. All the ancient visions
of the alternate tradition. All of it failed, but it's one of the
few times in our history that any large number of people gave the
dreams a chance.
JH: You wrote a poem called "The Revolution," and you're looking
back, I think, on all that.
JG: No, that poem is about a completely different kind of politics.
Revolution by anger and hate and hurting. The Weatherman and
Maoism. Guns and bombs, not flowers.
JH: What do you see in those kinds of directions?
JG: We've come back to the same thing. I'm not interested in partisan
doctrines. Or ideologies. I don't believe there are geneticallydetermined
good guys and bad guys. History makes it clear that
when the downtrodden get power, they become pretty much like
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the previous oppressors. You can see it in Liberia and Iran and the
Soviet Union. Just about anywhere. I'm not interested in joining a
faction. I'm interested in understanding and clarifying. I'm interested
in helping to create a better future by creating new models
for the human heart and spirit in the remarkably different age weVe
about to enter, and for which the traditional forms are inappropriate.
We are, for the first time in all of human history, entering
an era when people will live the middle years richly and freshly
and adultly alive. Before, we always had the young and the old,
because people died so early. And those who did survive thought of
themselves as elders. And so became elderly. Now it is going to be
different, and we have to create a whole new spectrum of who and
what we can be. If the artists, especially the writers don't do it,
functionaries and academics and, unfortunately, politicians
will ... I guess that's why I'm not much interested in telling people
what they already know. There's a place for that kind of poetry. It
comforts and reinforces our transmitted identity as a society. It's
what folk art most importantly does. But I believe the most important
artists are the ones who tell people the vital things they don't
know. I read once that when Beethoven finished a score, the oboist
or some other musician would have to go to a shop and have some
alteration made on his instrument so he could play the piece. That's
the kind of artist who excites me. Not one who thinks up something
new, but one who forces you to change your heart in order to deal
with the important understanding he has achieved.
JH: Is that what you mean by the "essence" versus the "mode?" You
mention that in "Remembering My Wife," and it seems you come
back to it an awful lot.
JG: It's the obvious difference between the loveliness of the woman
you are in love with and the woman you are in love with. I miss the
great sweetness of Michiko's body, the dearness of her pale honeycolored
skin. A lot! But what I yearn for when I'm groaning on the
rug is Michiko . . . Men in New York tell me about the terrific
cheekbones of the woman they're fucking this month. These are
famous, intelligent men. And I don't understand what they mean.
Not that I wouldn't be impressed by myself if one of those great
beauties with her cheekbones got in bed with me, but I wouldn't
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Gilbert
give up a big chunk of my life so somebody would say, "Look at the
cheekbones on what he's got." Love interests me hugely. / interest
me. Death and evil and goodness and true intelligence and
loneliness and what women will choose to be in twenty years interests
me. Gerald Stern's poetry interests me. The poetry of Linda
Gregg and Galway Kinnell, Ted Hughes, James Dickey, and
Hayden Carruth and the others interest me. But not cheekbones
and not, in any crucial way, fame.
JH: You keep mentioning myth in your book, alluding to mythical
figures, etcetera, and insofar as myths are manifestations of certain
patterns within us, you seem to tap that very often.
JG: I think myths are a way of making wholes of things that happen
only intermittently and at wide intervals, or are seen only in imperfect
states. Like when you go through a Swiss tunnel where they
cut big windows here and there through the rock. You go through
the darkness and suddenly, wham, light and then darkness again.
And a vague sense of maybe a valley down below. Then another
burst of light, and darkness immediately after. Then another. And
suddenly you see a whole landscape in your mind in the dark. That
seems to me how myths work. You don't find love, or true intelligence,
or God, or the sonata form anywhere in a pure
form—but after you listen to a number of traditional symphonies,
you have the archetypal sonata form in you. The myth is like an armature
to which we attach the glimpses of impure versions until we
know what the thing we've never seen looks like.
JH: So these are ways through which you have returned to the
significant life.
JG: Myths are not the way I try to get there. They are more like the
means by which I try to express something I have come to know
but cannot find a better way to communicate . . . But I want to
make clear that when I talk like this about ideas it is not how I want
to deal with them in poetry. I don't want the poems to be lectures—except
for maybe an occasional expository poem. I want to
use poetry to transfer felt knowledge or the sense of something experienced.
If a poem is going to be a lecture, it should be an essay.
When I read the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, it imposes on
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Interview
me a knowledge of God. I may choose against it afterwards, but for
a moment I can experience what Hopkins felt when he knew God.
That's what I believe poetry does at its best: it enables me to experience
what the essay talks about.
ES: You said earlier about your life that the most important thing
was trying for a romantic love that could exist inside reality. What
do you think of marriages that last fifty years7 You don't have the
same love you had when you were twenty, but you have all that accumulated
love, or something like it.
JG: If I understand the sort of marriage you mean, it's not what I
want. It usually is an admirable affectionateness. A genuine
tenderness. A loving. But it's not what I think of as romantic love.
It's not like cellos burning. I'm greedy about my life. I want romantic
love, in reality, in marriage, between adults, who truly know
each other, and yet which continues to multiply the world. Which
exceeds. Whether it is for fifty years or three.
ES: You can't have both?
CK: You can have both. I've got both right now. I don't know how
long it will last..It's lasted eight years.
JG: I had it with Linda Gregg until she left me —for eight years. It
was imperfect, but it was splendid. A privilege. And then I had it
for eleven years with Michiko. Totally different, but augmenting
constantly for those years. Eleven years without even one argument,
without needing make-believe, always fresh, always more
alive. And I am not talking about tender reasonableness. Each year
I was more in love with her. Romantically.
CK: Well, what happened?
JG: She died. Unexpectedly. I picked her up in my arms and she
died.
CK: When was this, Jack?
JG: New Year's Day. 1982. We didn't know she was sick. Not like
that. The doctor had said maybe she had picked up a parasite of
some sort in Greece that summer, but that otherwise she was fine.
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Gilbert
Then she started to get more sick that afternoon, so I decided to
take her to the hospital—just to be safe. As I was carrying her
down to the car, her heart stopped . . . They got it started again in
the Emergency Room. And they kept her alive for thirteen days in
the intensive care unit, in a coma. But her brain was dead. And
they discovered she had terminal cancer ... I kept trying to get
them to let her die. I told them what kind of woman Michiko was.
That I didn't want her to come back with just enough brain to experience
the pain and horror of the long cancer-dying.
CK: Where was this, Jack?
JG: San Francisco. It was hard. She was only thirty-five. And so
beautiful . . . But she had a complete life in those eleven years. A
four-and-a-half mat life. She became herself in those few
years ... I guess this sounds fatuous and sentimental and wrong.
But I know! She lived all her dreams. You have to understand that
a woman growing up in Japan, especially the daughter of a senator,
lives an entirely moderate life. A life of correctness. And our's
wasn't ... To live in Greece was the last of her childhood
dreams . . . She got sick when she first got to the island. We
thought it was a reaction to some goat cheese I gave her. But then
she got well and it was a paradise up there on the mountain month
after month. The sun and the lemon tree and the small owl calling
in the clear nights. And the stars. And Linda coming through the
creek every few days to visit ... I can hear how wrong this
sounds . . . When she was sick the first week after coming, she
asked if I could make a bed in our pretty stone outhouse so she
wouldn't have to go back and forth. We'd lie there with the sweet
air blowing in and out, with the great olive trees at the windows,
and she would sleep hour after hour in my arms. I was supposed to
be getting Monolithos back to Knopf, but I couldn't even make
notes for fear of waking her. So I wrote in my head. That turned
out to be 'Threshing the Fire," and I added it to the end of the
book . . . It's strange to know now that she was dying as I held her
and said the poem over and over inside as I got the lines. Neither of
us knowing . . . This sounds so theatrical. But it wasn't like that.
Not in Greece and not in San Francisco . . . She died mildly. Her
mother came from Japan and we told them to turn off the
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Interview
machines. I was allowed to sit with her. Just Michiko and me, with
the door closed. It took most of the night. There was no struggling.
No fighting to breathe. Finally the monitor fluttered and recovered.
After a little, it fluttered again and she was dead. . . . She
and I were lucky to have all those eleven years One
of the old Chinese poems says at the end:
The Autumn wind blows. The morning
Is misty, with dripping eaves.
All through the troubled night I was
Not able to forget in sleep.
I hope the time will come when
I am calm enough to beat
On a pot like Chuang Tsu did
In mourning for his dead wife.
Interviewed by John Homey, with thanks to Carolyn Kizer,
Ron Lieber and Eliot Schain
Edited by Kirsten Dehner and John Harney
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Jack Gilbert
Prospero Dreams of Arnaud Daniel
Inventing Love in the 12th Century
"Let's get hold of one of those deer
that live way up there in the mountains.
Lure it down with flutes, or lasso it
from helicopters, or just take it out
with a 30-30. Anyhow, we get one.
Then we reach up inside its ass and maybe
find us a little gland or something
that might make a hell of a perfume.
It's worth a try. You never know."
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150
Growing Up in Pittsburgh
Go down to the drugstore on the corner,
it said. At the drugstore it said,
Go to the old woman's house. On her porch
was scribbled: Where has love gone?
To the arcades of the moon, I wrote.
To the Palladian moon, and is embezzled
there as well. Therefore are the gunwales
of my heart plated. For the birds
have rings on their necks and must
take the catch to the white boats
at the marble pier in exchange for gruel.
Old hoplites cursing under the arcades
snap the pale fish and wrap them in plundered
drawings. A whimpering leaks from the bundles,
from the stalls, into the piazza and up
to the roof where everyone in the shining
is watching a performance of romance.
Michiko Nogami (1946-1982)
I try to see the smokestack against the sky
and see the sky with a chimney in the way.
A chimney and a winter sky and a woman
not there. Smokestack and sky. Smokestack
and sky. This and that. Merely this and that.
Is she more apparent because she is not
any more forever? Is her whiteness more white
because she was the color of pale honey?
A smokestack making the sky more visible.
A dead woman filling the whole world. Michiko
said, The roses you gave me kept me awake
with the sound of their petals falling.
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Gilbert
152
Married
I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment crying hard,
searching for my wife's hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came
there was no way to be sure which were
hers and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko's avocado, I find
this long black hair tangled in the dirt.
Getting Better
Now there will be good times.
I will come back from the picnic
in Umbria with my friends.
Back from the Aegean in the dusk
with a beautiful woman or girl
who loves me. My home will be
filled with talk and happiness.
I will go outside into the quiet
and whisper to Michiko.
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Gilbert
Having Everything Except What Isn't There
What the hell are you doing out there,
he writes, in that worn rock valley
with chickens and the donkey and not farming?
And the people around speaking Greek?
And the only news faint on the Armed
Forces Network? I don't know what to say.
And what about women? he asks. Yes,
I think to myself, what about women?
What I've Got
After twenty hours in bed with no food, I decided
I better have at least tea. Got up to light the lamp,
but the sweating and shivering started again
and I went backward across the room. Slammed against
the stone wall. Came to with blood on my head
and couldn't figure out which way the bed was.
Crawled around feeling for the matches but gave up,
remembering there was one left in the box by the stove.
It flared and went out. Exaggerated, I said and groped
back, feeling for the matches with barefoot geisha steps.
Began to shake and moan the chattering way the hero
did when his malaria returned. I smiled but worried.
No telephone and nobody going by out here in the fields
I could call to. And god knows what I had. Realized
I was on all fours again. Interesting, something said
as I dragged myself onto the bed. Interesting?
the other part said. For Christ sake!
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Gilbert
156
Toward Dark
I can no longer see the cove in the distance
but I can make out the faint sound of waves.
The farmer and his cow merge into the night
as they reach the other side of the field.
There is a pause and then the chink of metal
as he gets her water from their well.
If I go into the house now to look
for the lamp, I will hear myself.
Linda Gregg
About Jack Gilbert
It is hard for me to write about Jack. My mind goes everywhere
at once. I feel sad and don't want to tell you. I remember the
photograph of his young face twenty years ago looking down
through the glass in the library case, and I don't want to tell you.
Or me sitting alone after everyone left the lounge where I first
heard him read, because I couldn't imagine anywhere else to go
after that. Or rain and Chinese greens soup. Or eucalyptus trees. I
don't want to tell you. It's too sad. All that love. Huge things and
pleasures. Things that don't go together easily. The Acropolis with
the bright sky. Our poverty in Athens and how he took me to the
bakery every night so that just I could have coffee and something
sweet. How that kindness made me sit patiently during the days
with no money, above the Agora, drawing, teaching myself, finding
tiny ancient things. Happy. There is too much. More like a film.
More than a life. The winter on Kos with no heat and the trees were
ripped out of the ground. And how, when he gave readings, I felt
like fainting. Or throwing up. And did sometimes. It was too
strong. It made the world too naked. That important reality felt
cruel, however much I admired it. But there was a lovely world
too. Made out of dry dirt and dry rock and the sea and the Greek
light. And my rabbit Penelope. And finally leaving Monolithos at
five in the morning when the full moon and the sun were up on
either side of the flat island. The journey was wonderful and sad
and always loving—even though he did some wrong things which
were important and not forgiven and too tender . . . What is not
known and helpless is revealed when great intelligence is at work
on the world and our humanness and our beautiful created values
... I had in me even Jack's past. His childhood with the deer in the
zoo he sang to nights in Pittsburgh. (What was I to do with that
when I had grown up by a mountain where deer were free? The
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Gregg
easiest necessity?) His savage brothers, and the father who died in
sad indignity unless you really knew. And a war that I was not
alive for. I did know his mother. I remember her smell and the way
she called him Jack. He rubbed her back in the hospital at the end
because it hurt. She was ninety and it was the first time he had
touched her body since childhood. She was afraid, but as if it were
a moderate ordeal. Which is unspeakably sad for me because a
blackness was waiting . . . And Michiko's death. Their eleven
years together before that. I think of her hitting the bushes on Paros
as we walked up the stream behind their house going to mine. With
the bamboo stick she liked to carry and butterflies flew up all
around her and she smiled and was happy. She did not go everywhere.
The sun was too powerful and she did not go there. She did
not need to go. Sitting under the jasmine in their patio and being
with him was enough . . . There is no place I want to return to as a
way of telling you. Not Mexico or Kentucky or Denmark or just
south of Rome. It was a life that is a world more than the one we
usually walk in. He walked there making a specialness of whatever
was at hand. Out of donuts and movies. There was a lot of laughter.
But there was something else. If we saw an imitation Della Robbia
in a store window in Northampton, Massachusetts, he would
see it with real pleasure; but also make it into something much
more. Not only the original, but the Italy he knew and of his heart
of all the years and a sort of vision of something he might or might
not have known but owned by virtue ... It is a great pressure to
live with a man who wants to know the stone's heat and finds
Paradise in women and weeps over messages he finds in a book
after death. It is not easy to live close to what is "burning and
fathering." However special and gentle. Most people work it out so
things aren't that big. So they are manageable. With Jack the dark
is really dark. Death is terrible. Love is so large ... It is important
to know that he is also very physical, deeply loving, and the most
naturally happy of any intelligent man I've ever seen ... I want to
bring gifts but I start to cry. And instead go back behind the
Monolithos house to look for Penelope —who will leave us as soon
as she's old enough to escape over the wall. I find her or go to the
sea. That is easy and small enough to live next to. In the morning
Jack (who often fell asleep outside thinking and looking at the
Greek stars) would wake me, saying a morning glory had opened in
our window box. All I had to do was turn my head to see its blue.
158
Linda Gregg
Me and Alma
Time holds us together with a strong hand.
Nothing is allowed to go away on'its own.
Not fish, snow nor grass.
All must issue one from the other.
This woman is my flesh, my heavy bones.
She turns as if I am the tree
and Alma its leaves.
I the green the wind of her is undoing.
Soon there will be nothing so different together
as she and I. Stone and water, dirt and fern.
159

Gregg
160
Dry Grass & Old Color of the Fence & Smooth Hills
The women are at home in this California town.
The eucalyptus trees move against whiteness.
When a mother comes by I touch the child's face
over and over, sliding my hand lightly down
and each time he smiles. All life is beautiful
at a distance. But when I sit in their houses,
it's all mess and canning and babies crying.
I hear over and over the stories about their men:
betrayal, indifference, power. Age without passion,
boys without fathers. My sister lives between.
She cleans her house. She names all the roses
she shows me. She turns on the record and we dance.
She in the studio with the door open, me on the porch.
Later her boyfriend arrives. The one who hits her,
and steals her money, and gets drunk. Etcetera.
They have sex. In the morning we're alone and she
wants to know if I want waffles with rasberry jam.
The Shopping Bag Lady
You told people I would know easily what the murdered
lady had in her sack which could prove she was happy
more or less. As though it were a game, the old women
who carry all they own in bags, maybe proudly,
without homes we think except the streets.
But if I could guess (nothing in sets for example),
I would not. They are like those men who lay their
few things on the ground in a park at the end of Hester.
For sale perhaps, but who can tell? Like her way
of getting money. Never asking. Sideways and disconcerting.
With no thanks, only judgment. "You are a nice girl,"
one said as she moved away and then stopped in front
of a bum sitting on the bench who yelled that he would
kill her if she did not get away from him. She walked
at an angle not exactly away but until she was the same
distance from each of us. Stood still, looking down.
Standing in our attention as if it were a palpable thing.
Like the city itself or the cold winter. Holding her hands.
And if there was disgrace, it was God's. The failure
was ours as she remained quiet near the concrete wall
with cars coming and the sound of the subway filling
and fading in the most important place we have devised.
161

Gregg
162
The Visitor
She came in and saw winter and him
alone in the apartment.
Sat at the table thinking of when
they had lived together. Seeing
what her life was like now.
Thinks how often gentleness means suffering.
She looks out at the panel of snow.
A bird lands on a wire.
He said it was a starling.
"Fat, dark bird," she said and felt sad.
It went away and came back.
And went away completely.
The man had come to see her
bringing his life. To a place
she did not yet belong.
Now her life was divided between him
and John. She looks at the snow
and thinks of her warmth and its meaning.
She puts the curtain down over the dark
before returning to the man in Amherst.
At the Gate in the Middle of My Life
I had come prepared to answer questions,
because it said there would be questions.
I could have danced or sung. Could have loved.
But I wanted intelligence. Now it asks
what can be understood but not explained
and I have nothing with me. I take off
my shoes and say this is a plate of food.
I say the wind is going the wrong way.
Say here is my face emerging into clear light
that misses the sea we departed from to join you.
Take off my jacket and say this is a goat alone.
It embraces me, weeping human tears. Dances
sadly three times around. Then three times more.
163

Gerald Stern
164
Berkeley
Today I saw the weird leg of Apollo
go in after Daphne — it was either Cyprus
or Monterey pine, I am so blind and ignorant
of west coast flora. I saw the wood waver
and the ground shake; I sat on my black brief-case
looking up at the leaves. I who am so
wondrous, I who always looked for Messiahs,
I who gave opinions, caught up now
in a new strangeness thousands of miles away
from my own cold river, learning quickly to eat
the other foods, learning to love
the way they do, walking after them
with my mouth half open, starting gently to teach,
doing the wind first, doing the dark old days
before there was even wind, saving Picasso
for Monday or Tuesday, saving the two dark strings
for Wednesday night, the night of the dozen tears,
saving New York
for the trip back to the airport, pushing the door
with tapered fingers, racing down the belt
with all that fire around me, sitting by the window
with only three minutes to go. Swinging my brief-case
with all the secrets inside. Keeping my secrets.
Thinking of Poland again. Getting ready for snow.
Singing
I have been waiting for a month
for this squirrel to dissolve in water.
I couldn't afford the disgrace
of dumping it on to the ground
and watching its body lurch and its teeth chatter.
There is such ghoulishness now
that it might drag its back legs after it,
such desperation
that I might rub its shoulders or brush its lips
to bring it back to life.
You who rushed home to masturbate,
you who touched the same red flower every day,
you know how I must skirt this lawn
to avoid the barrel.
You know how I live in silence.
You who knelt on the frozen leaves,
you know how dark it got under the ice;
you know how hard it was to live
with hatred, how long it took to convert
death and sadness into beautiful singing.
165

Robert Creeley
166
Four For John
MOTHERS THINGS
I wanted approval,
carrying with me
things of my mother's
beyond their use to me —
worn-out clock,
her small green lock-box,
father's engraved brass plate
for printing calling cards —
such size of her still
calls out to me
with that silently
persistent will.
ECHO
Lonely in
no one
to hold it with —
the responsible
caring
for those one's known.
LEAVING
My eye teared,
lump in throat —
I was going
away from here
and everything that
had come with me
first was waiting
again to be taken.
All the times
I'd looked, held,
handled that or this
reminded me
no fairness, justice,
in life, not
that can stand
with those abandoned.
BUFFALO AFTERNOON
Greyed board fence
past brown open door,
overhead weather's
early summer's.
The chairs sit various,
what's left, the
emptiness, this
curious waiting to go.
May 29, 1983
167

James Merrill
Spell
Three times a triple strand
Of quietly ticking wire
Is wound about what were
Acres of wonderland
Cropped bare now. One prize ox
Gazes in mute appeal
At grass beyond the pale:
Terrestrial paradox
That, drawn to by degrees,
Weird, rough-and-tumble veldt
Of voltage, jolt on jolt,
Hell sooner starve than graze.
The vignette touches you?
Be my guest, let him out
— And yourself in, no doubt,
For a shock or two.
Stephen Dunn
Traveling to Nova Scotia
We take the Bluenose
out of Bar Harbor,
choppy seas, the girls
riding the wave
between nausea and excitement.
They're nine and twelve,
their mother home, working,
all the rules now
uncertain, negotiable
up to a point. In truth,
I'm the autocrat
with the democratic pose •
every decision
an illusion of consensus.
Soon the passage
into other waters,
the learning to live
with two lives
set in motion years ago,
already charted.
168 169

Dunn
This ship, going forward
in fog, is made for this rocking
and worse. The girls are
full of disaster movies —
when the foghorn sounds
they think iceberg, lifeboat.
They think all accidents
are large. If I have a job
it's to offer the alternative
truths. It's to insist
we keep going
and then we arrive.
Of course I say nothing
so direct. I put my arms
around them. When we don't die
it's a small triumph
for this kind of loving,
another stay
against what's out there,
what they suspected all along.
Alfred Corn
Looking Back
Pan Am to New York, August, 1965
"Now I am one-and-twenty," so I heard
Myself think. Too hectic to take a bow
When in Rome the day had come to confer
Its ghostly toga on me, here was time
To ponder a civic status needing
Two Augusts more to seem at all confirmed.
Back to home and country. And to a last
Year of school, which, though senior-level, felt
Retarded, the mid-Atlantic limbo
Rushed to agree with him who rode it out.
Now, with just twice his span of consciousness
Under my hat, should I envy, pity,
Mock that fledgling life? No more, I guess, than
Any other other person's. The bulk
Of his archive's come down of course to me;
And sift as I will its strange content keeps
A far-gone quality I recognize
Yet would no sooner try to reassume
Than squeeze into the vintage jeans he wore
Or reread his latest favorite book.
170 171

Corn
172
Now, I know, will have been that misnomer
That rarely holds the fort for long —so brief
A stay it couldn't always accustom
Its golden hoard of clairvoyance to all
We might have meant to one another. See
How slowly we move to be reconciled;
How stoutly Jetstream contention baffles;
How reluctantly we touch ground, even
In the tall city where, back then, I could
Visit —believing or not— The World's Fair.
Mary Karr
The Lives
" 'Ovid had it worse,' Pound said
leaving St. Elizabeth's."—Hugh Kenner
A spider struggles down my page.
I read his path until he drops,
plops in the ashtray, curls
like a wild asterisk on the red coal
of the cigarette on which I burn my breath.
It troubles me less than you'd expect.
His agony is brief, his world too small —
the lamplight's moon on the snow slope
of this book. I think of biographies
thumbed today, alphabetical deaths
in the library's sliding wooden box.
Pound sat once under olives in his black
greatcoat of silence and old age,
addressing letters to them in their graves:
Eliot and Yeats and Ford. It was senility
perhaps, that physiological rage, the way
173

Karr
174
my father shouts marching commands to his nurse
wielding orange juice and bedpans, weeping
when she won't obey. As I weep hearing him,
believing some mad geometer must exist
to plunge the compass' spike into a heart,
measuring degrees of suffering
until the circle of dark is drawn
around a life, every struggle, fall, and burn.
I suck the sour smoke, steal
to the sickroom to touch my father's pulse.
We could do worse than love in spite of this.
Exile's Letter
Dearest dear, from far away I write,
wanting to shape a boat
from these white leaves of paper,
a frail shell, something to reach you.
I woke this morning foggy,
everything phantom, pearl mist
tumbled down the mountain
over sleeping columbine and spruce.
You were strong as pepper oil on my skin.
I trudged through snow to the mailbox.
No letter from you. My fingers froze
on the cold metal. I wanted to crawl
inside, to chalk blue horses on the walls,
or to pull a chair deadcenter, to have
a serious talk with my emptiness.
Our years together barely fill one hand,
yet what I thought my strongest
characteristics — restraint, cruelty,
a blind attention to the self— are gone. How
175

Kan-
176
can I defeat my enemies? Even now
their hounds test the wind for this place,
howling, howling in my skull, in the small
bones of my inner ear reserved for your words.
Yannis Ritsos
Renovated Space
We crossed under the arcades of the dead. As we came out,
the glare from the whitewashed wall struck our eyes
as an open hand against the chest. We stood there.
For a moment we closed our eyes, inhaling deeply
the smell of burnt besom.
"Othat
ungraspabie and unrepentant thing," the foreign woman said —
and maybe by that she meant our frequent disobedience to death,
while the cicadas cooled their bellies on the marble ruins
in that pure gold noontime, and a slender thread of water
from the mountain's spring snow came down, binding
the right rear hoof of the great stone bull.
Edmund Keeley — Translator
From The Wall Inside the Mirror
177

Ritsos
178
The Lead Actors and the Spectators
That which began as a wrestling match turned little by little
into a familiar, forgotten dance. The two antagonists,
beautiful, muscular, robust, with faces lit up,
moved from rivalry to consent. They ended
by embracing erotically in front of our eyes. And we,
wearing large, red, aroused masks,
gave them a standing ovation, cheered, wept,
throwing off our clothes piece by piece, having abandoned
our watches and our trowels on our seats.
Edmund Keeley — Translator
From Muted Poems
Horizon
A morning of islands and marble lions,
this land that bleeds and hurts you,
with yellow thorns all the way to the customs house,
when the ram comes down the hillside
with flared nostrils, a flower between his teeth,
and the stones behind him roll toward the sea, there
where the beautiful deserters are swimming naked,
looking into the distance, in front of them, into the white water,
looking at the red line left by the wounded dolphin.
Edmund Keeley — Translator
From The Wall Inside the Mirror
179

Ron Lieber
180
Pre-Classical Greece
Their women are ageless, grief
pulling hair, farewell
in the upraised palm, but the gesture of detail
is left to the viewer who must imagine
the clenched teeth, a lowered tearful eye,
except, in some, notice a nipple
dots the blouse, hardened and aroused,
and a bearded one, half woodland animal, half
deity, his stiff cock balancing
a pale Aegean air, assaults her
with both song and doubt etched
into the moment of his face.
Sketches, 9:40 A.M., Houston & Bowery
1.
A key is slipped
into the puzzle of a padlock,
the arm springs open. An aproned man
with a cigar stub clenched between
his stained teeth, jaw pressed tight,
lets out a grunt as he heaves
the grillwork iron gate
into its aluminum casing. Turning,
he surveys the waiting customer
like a boxer eyeing an opponent,
steady and sure. With the cuff
of his long-sleeved polyester shirt
he wipes the sweat ruled in his forehead,
he spits. Business begins.
2.
A petroindustrial haze
east from Jersey refineries
languishes in the abrasive heat
along with the burnt smell of beef
vented from the corner coffee shop.
Two men hunch about
a Captain Scuppernong pint bottle
and trade sips. Their voices
grapple like tomcats
over each swig, scratching
the plodding air.
181

Lieber Carole Oles
182
3.
Long-armed and lanky, she ignores
the taunts and discursive catcalls
of baseball-capped youths
and the dude's heavy stare
by not meeting their eyes
and passes through.
4.
A Negro man squats
on a pinewood Bartlett pear box
and fingers a scab. He cannot remember
falling asleep, or the one dream scavenged
from childhood—just the caustic
discharge of Ford, General Motors & Company
shunting him into the light.
He lifts his brow
and idles his gaze on a yellow-plated Checker.
The driver flips him a coin. The quarter
skips on the concrete median strip
and drops between the metal
subway gratings. The traffic signal
flicks green.
5.
On the northeast corner
in a fenced lot curtained with ivy
and bordered on the backside by two
boarded up tenements, a bearded man
tills what little ground there is.
City of the Holy Flesh
New Orleans, Mardi Gras
At every corner, cops patrol in pairs.
Our first night, sirens haul us
in and out of dreams. We improvise
the crimes —coke, theft, murder —
until day, when helicopters
lettered SHERIFF fan the sky.
On Royal Street a blond in shorts
is frisked to his athletic socks.
Three black men unfurl across
a doorway in the early heat.
Before we pass, they leave:
we must be dangerous.
At the Battle of New Orleans
General Jackson ordered his men
to cut the sugar cane
in spears to stop the British.
In Jackson Square now, no one's
stopped. Dixieland, bare breasts,
face-painting, mooning from a balcony,
Mozart on the glass harmonica,
spoon-playing by the dervish,
183

Oles
184
even God is here, in the steeple
of St. Louis Cathedral, watching
with his eye, the clock.
Ego sum via et veritas et vita
echoes in gold leaf above the altar.
A man pisses against the transept wall.
Girls crowned with floral wreaths
parade their innocence along the levee.
A Christian with a mike harangues
us all to call on Jesus. We turn
the other cheek, the Mississippi yawns
we're a paraplegic in his wheelchair,
whose jokeshop penis towers
from his lap, circled with the necklaces
of Mardi Gras, a game of ring-toss
and a beauty in shocking pink
coy at first, refusing, who yanks
her dress down to serve the crowd
the "Tits" it yells for,
St. John's head on a plate
When Zulu went bare-breasted
white men said Sin.
In today's paper:
"Many New Orleans blacks are light-skinned
and must wear blackface in the Zulu floats."
we're the lame women of every sex
the drunk asleep on garbage
the drunk who wants a match
we're the voyeur at our window
Meanwhile the Christian passes flyers.
"Your future foretold:
'He who has Christ will live forever in heaven.
He who has not Christ will spend eternity in hell.
This isn't hell or heaven
but the place they meet, a seam
that joins the two sides of a shirt.
we put it on
185

Peter Klappert
These are the only poems from THE IDIOT PRINCESS OF THE
LAST DYNASTY previously unpublished in periodicals or anthologies.
186
Does It Have a Plot?
Does it have a what?
Darting, it has
a charnel house, a catacombs,
nine hundred statues, twenty cemeteries,
and unnumbered mausoleums.
Or, as Galileo
said recently in German, take care
when you travel with the truth under your coat.
Tut nichts,
der Jude wird verbrannt.
D'ac.
Look into your teacups, then, look into
what itches your palms.
Cut cards, scatter straw, cast a nativity,
consider a diminished constellation
and light a five sou candle.
Haruspicate the guts, prognosticate the feces, levitate
the simple dust
— augur a Bible, rap a table, say soothe,
eat superstitious pie, pursue the deus absconditus,
approach the oak of Dodona
or go talk to Mother Carey's chicken.
Have you witnessed
the blood in the yolk, the panfish hooked in the eye,
the dead dressed in their livery skins?
Have you seen history written on a window shade?
Sero medicina
paratur cum mala per longas convaluere moras.
When you know you know nothing at all
you are a stone that has stopped falling.
187

Klappert
An Oratorical Derailment
— Moral rearmament? My stunned mullets!
Nearly as fine as Puvis de Chavannes, nearly
as fine as truth
(No, I feel fine. It's the catarrh.
I've been taking the lung linctus.)
as truth, I say
(No, really,
not at all. I feel fine, I feel fine.)
truth leading the sciences
and shedding her lux over mankind,
or Method Coue healing.
"How to improve your handwriting
and change your personality."
188
- We must not give up Parthenogenesis!
it is the outpost of the Incarnation!
(The wound, Madame,
is the mouth, and the wound that will not heal
is the well of cures. It is true, Madame,
abjectly true.
And remind me to mention the previous century,
late lamented, when the Eiffel Tower was bigger
than anything else and the medical leeches of Paris
— I know whereof I speak —
drank cent mille kilos per annum.)
189

Klappert
Nora (He Might Have Said)
She loves you with the leather under her nails,
with the delicate young mushroom in her mouth,
but it was sleep behind her eyes
you taught to talk. Soon she was saying
the words, almost daily.
The rooms the two of you lived in
seemed higher, more flooded with light.
But something you
cannot speak to, with a feral smell,
stays down in the umbering courtyard.
When the mice come to eat at its hands
it slaps them against the wall,
and your small, animal noises
get themselves eaten up whole.
Daniel Simko
Dust
'Au silence de celle qui laisse reveur.
Rene Char
A girl and her lover are scaling
an imaginary hill. In the distance, the sun
reflects from the surface of the lake;
a trembling shadow of falling twilight.
In one of the houses a young woman
has fallen asleep on a couch, just so,
that her open shirt and breast
resemble the heart of the ticking
metronome on the mantle. Her fallen
arm, like the warped neck of a musical
instrument, points to a bloated dog,
obliviously dead on its side.
O, the dreams of old lovers, her father
floating over the chimney where she burns
the few post cards she gets, past the thin
blue line of smoke rising
from the chimney now, past the thin
blue horizontal line of trees.
190 191

Simko
192
The horses are asleep in their stalls
waiting for a fire that will drive them back.
But everything turns with the stars,
pales, darkens, and from the other side
of the village people in black
are returning from a funeral.
The night itself is still,
touches no one, except, from a distance,
and quite suddenly, a terrifying laughter
rises toward the moon. And what becomes
frightening is, that I continue to look
into this grave scene in the painting
and feel my bones resisting the dust
they will become in time. And I imagine
the lovers are through with their love
and they are dust themselves now,
as is the anonymous painter who hallucinated
his way across the canvas in hope
that everything would remain precisely
as he wanted it to happen, though he
has long turned into the wind blowing
from the East, and I am not far behind.
Bruce Beasley
Easter
for my father
But the gravestone is still here,
and the fireflies
floating in the half-light by the lake,
the horses loping over fields you'll never see.
Everything pale, opaque,
as if a layer of ice
were left on the world.
Only that last line of horizon
is stroked with red-brown light,
your wounds lying far away in the sky.
193

Beasley
194
Elegy and Prayer
A boy lifts a cow's empty skull
toward his father in heaven, at the edge of a field.
A barn in the distance flashes
once, rust-red in a shimmer of ice. He thinks
everything dead
lives in this place:
the bones of another life
protruding in the ice,
the hollow tree he climbs into,
and the cluster of graves, fenced-in
and buried in snow.
His fist fills the hollow of the skull,
an absence he can hold onto,
lifting it up so it blocks the moon
and glows
a pale white, like a lamp:
and he keeps glancing back at the sky,
now clear and settled with stars,
wanting to be startled
by a face like his own there,
by someone
staring from the inside of a dark window.
195

Mark Craver
196
Against Funerals
When you see farther than you think
you're in the South. Think of a funeral as a car
in winter driving the rainy South knowing
speed kills. (Think of speed not as distance
traveled but as a force of uprooting.) That's it:
A Comet against traffic, a rainy Southern night.
No, it's a bumper-sticker you can't read.
Think of the Sheriff's Department with hats
over their hearts, a green tent flapping in the wind,
of stopping the car to see what it is: the evil
of compassion; that same helplessness
watching what you love go into the ground.
It's not that someone died; it's that you are
tired, and so happy to be back in your car.
Every word that describes it is wrong.
Robert Hass
The Apple Trees at Olema
They were walking in the woods along the coast
and in a grassy meadow, wasting, they came upon
two old neglected apple trees. Moss thickened
every bough and the wood of the limbs looked rotten
but the trees were wild with blossom and a green fire
of small new leaves flickered even on the deadest branches.
Blue-eyes, cranes-bills, and little dutchmen
flecked the meadow and an intricate, leopard-spotted
leaf-green flower whose name they didn't know.
Trout-lily, he said; she said, adder's-tongue.
She is shaken by the raw, white, back-lit flaring
of the apple blossoms. He is exultant
as if some thing he knew were verified
and looks to her to mirror his response.
If it is afternoon, a thin moon of my own dismay
fades like a scar in the sky to the east of them.
He could be knocking wildly at a closed door
in a dream. She thinks, meanwhile, that moss
resembles seaweed drying lightly on a dock.
Torn flesh, it was the repetitive torn flesh
of appetite in the cold white blossoms
that had startled her. Now it seems tender
and where she was repelled, she takes the measure
of the trees and lets them in. But he no longer
has the apple trees. This is as sad or happy
as the tide, going in or coming out, at sunset.
The light catching in the spray that spumes up
on the reef is the color of the lesser finch
they notice now flashing dull gold in the light
197

Hass
198
above the field. They admire the bird together.
It draws them closer and they start to walk again.
A small boy wanders corridors of a hotel that way.
Behind one door, a maid. Behind another one, a man
in striped pajamas shaving. He holds the number
of his room close to the center of his mind
gravely and delicately, as if it were the key,
and then he wanders among strangers all he wants.
John Lane
The River Falling
Once, we slept in oak woods,
zipped our two bags together, pulled free
of flannel shirts, shucked jeans,
counted the sad lights of planes
flying to Asheville until the darkness
of dying oak leaves offered up some light.
All that night Bradley Falls argued the moon down:
That morning, we climbed down,
took off our clothes, listened
to a song of water leveling with stone.
You sat in a hole where the river once
licked its own bed. I squatted, pressed silt
in my palms, caught round stones dragging
the creek bottom. The fall sun was up,
cliff-high, a star in a stub oak.
I squinted, spoke,
"you know I could be this river, easily
live my life between two places, two women."
You watched the falls, the perfect sadness
of the river falling. I swear the wet air hummed,
water dug for something to hold.
Then you turned, said,
"then go, the seed's in us all, this leaving."
199

Lane
200
The Distances
While I was gone south the dull spade
of waking, each morning, unearthed
the wrong stones: a black burst
drifted among the quilts and sunlight
until you saw birds, dreamed angels.
Two figures, twin and electric,
walked toward the back fence with us
watching, sure of something,
some part of us made otherwise,
lost in the dream's distance.
When.I returned, you repeated the two
recurrent dreams and details gathered:
something green darkened by shadow, the two
of us aware of an immense free thing
finally revealed. And in both dreams
"the distances" and within distances,
tricks of perspective: the earth seen
from a vulture's eye, the huge black bird
tightening circles in the revolving world
above our field, and you, caught somewhere
between the earth and a retreating light
that walked as we do.
Sam Hamill
Nihil Obstat
The bees are building stairways toward heaven.
Soon the world will cloud over and the bees
will fall silent and die among the dead blossoms
of scotchbroom and thistle.
We who often buzz
among our own works will not listen. This
is called natural history and is left
for specialists to explain. Someday everything
will be explained in the footnotes of basalt
and granite, in igneous thumbprints
of another century.
For now, there is the song
September sings to welcome home the autumn.
We cannot save the bees. We cannot save
each other.
The birds of prey that stagger
down the skies will wait for us
at the other end of history,
as we, stung
by the brevity of our song, enter
the resonant long corridor of dying light
that leads us not toward heaven,
but toward home.
201

Hamill
202
October Frost
The poor cricket longs for a song, and I
know it, I can feel it in the air
at dusk when shadows swirl and October frost
settles all the dust.
Between us on this table,
a bottle of warm red wine, the pen,
the ash tray, and the wood. Soon enough,
the dark will nail us down. Our hands
hold a cup, a knife, a noose.
Even for a cricket
song may mean no more than an act
of contrition, unreasonable fear of the dark,
or its own expression of this alien life
on a fertile, fading planet.
Whatever
we lose or have lost, we find it
elsewhere, in someone else's hands, and we know
that something's wrong that has no name
of its own.
The poor, poor cricket
wants to sing. The dust begins to freeze.
In some other country, in some other time,
he might mean something, he might be important
enough to cage.
But it is the end of the day
at the end of October when the year begins
to close. In the wine cup, in the pen or the air,
we can feel it in our bones: we don't belong.
The poor poet wants a dithyramb.
The cricket longs for a song.
203

Tim McNulty
204
Lake La Cross
Sometimes the mountains
are bitter medicine.
Sundown and miles from camp.
I once wrote a poem — winter
on the coast —sitting alone
with the women I'd driven away.
Now the same barren ridges & draws
the mosquito hosts, the old
fields of snow in the shadows.
A broken ridgetop
like an impossible traverse
back to you, that I couldn't do.
Bitter sometimes, lost
and aching in their loveliness.
1.
Spring at Bark Shanty
dusk and the old trees stir
on the far bank
a warbler
trills across the springthaw torrent
soft winds
preen in the bankgrass
2.
down from the chill snowy pass
my friends
have followed out to the road
voices
ebb at the edge of a clearing
move off soft
as deer
3.
and those same thoughts that
drew me away —
once here
have slipped like thin
papery husks
at the tips of branches
at budburst
205

McNulty
206
As a Heron Unsettles a Shallow Pool
for Mary
At times
when the too-many threads
of our speech become knots,
and words fall back on us unsaid.
When I go brooding across wet fields
to the river, and you
in the kitchen alone.
When the earth itself is burdened
as if the sky
or the weight of the sky
were suddenly too much for her —
the rain-drenched maples bent low
and crossed,
the words too quickly cast.
A stillness
heavy as snow. Then
as a heron unsettles a shallow pool
as it lifts blue wings
and leaps
slowly into the downstream wind,
the weight of love finds its own wings,
unfolded as slowly, one
to each.
And as a band of sky opens at dusk
so the heart will open.
The smoothly rippled flow —river
of our days
unsettling
in a litany of light.
207

David Romtvedt
208
Farm Accident
A tractor fell on the eldest son, James,
my uncle, whose name I rarely say,
leaving eight, my mother.now
to play the eldest son, and though
I was her first born and a boy,
it was another daughter she raised.
I had the same rights as a boy.
"You must accept responsibility," she'd say,
"for your life, you must control your life. Though
you do what please you, never waste your talent.
No matter what you think you want,
later on you'll want something else."
How could I have the same rights as a boy?
I was a boy. She was a woman. It was the spring
of 1951. The fields got wet and hard to work.
The tractor got stuck and though the wheels stopped,
the worm drive kept turning and the tractor rose,
falling backwards on itself, the field and James.
At the funeral the Lutheran minister spoke calmly.
James once spoke like this, asking whether God
and the angels were male or female. And the minister
thought and calmly answered back that no,
they had no sex. And you couldn't tell
if either James or the minister were joking.
People say I do things
like a woman, and my mother,
they say, is something like a man.
Possibly James would know
if this makes the two of us
more like God and the angels
or less so.
209

Nancy Schoenberger Cathy Song
210
Spring Maddens Animals
And now the cows move wet mouths through alfalfa.
They're tame, they sigh, they don't have time
to form attachments, though time is all
they have. The wild herds of Uganda
were masked like totems.
Ground thundered under the wildebeest.
And the slim-legged horses — arched, nervous . . .
whole continents were living testament —
spring maddens animals.
We know better. We're disappointed
in one another. We turn our attention
to cottonwood sparkling along the river.
(They're pure, distant, alive.
Dust films their pale leaves.)
Animals drift through the fields,
the horse with his dark coat,
the cow's veil of flies.
The horse is confused by a memory
of woman: her thighs pressed
to his ribs, her wild heart
loud in the pasture.
A Mehinaku Girl in Seclusion
When the pequi fruit blossomed,
I went into seclusion.
A red flower
dropped out of my body
and stained the red dirt of the earth
one color. With one color
I became married to the earth.
I went to live by myself
in the hut
at the end of the village.
There no one must see me.
For three years,
no one must touch me.
The men carve the spirit birds
and dream of me
becoming beautiful in the dark.
They say my skin
will be as delicate as the light
that touches the spider's web.
The women walk to the river
and bathe and time passes.
211

212
One woman, the old one,
brings me news of the harvest,
the names of the children
who are born.
The children are taught
to make babies out of mud,
babies in the shape of gourds.
The children cry when the rains come.
When the rain comes I slip out
and circle the dirt plaza.
I pause as if to drink at each door.
At each door,
the sound of the sleeping.
I return before the first
hint of light,
return to hear
the click of my spinning.
I will learn to become
mistress of the hammocks.
The man who will be my husband
shall be proud.
When I walk beside him
to bathe in the river,
I will say with my body,
He is mine.
The manioc bread he eats
becomes the children I will bear.
His hammocks are not tattered.
Ask him. Yes, ask him.
I am learning to say this
with my body.
Sharon Olds
The Man-Child
Now that my son is ten I cannot
touch him much. I must not ruffle his
hair, stiff and lovely as it is,
unwashed, resilient as shredded bark, I
may not take the milky narrow
prong of his jaw in the palm of my hand
as you'd heft the weight of a calla lily with its
heavy loaded gold cone, and I
absolutely must not touch his cheeks
with my fingertips, like walking in moonlight over a
white field.
I can never get close enough to him.
All I can do is sternly and professionally
touch his bad hand a moment to
check on the wasting of the muscle, touch his
good arm to feel the bicep
bulge like a soft apple, and sometimes
stand there casually batting at his hand the way he
bats at the world, all the time, to
feel it bounce back, but I cannot take his
face in my hands with any meaning at all,
his soul depends upon my not doing that.
Once in a while I can soap his back,
freckled and moled and marked with old
ineradicable dirt, I can run my
hand over his spiny spine and his ribs
and those shoulder-blades sharp as the fins of old Cadillacs,
213

Olds
214
peeking at the lovely swaying of his sex in the water, that
one place on his body with some fat, some
luxury, and every night I can
rub his back for ten minutes, just a
circular motion, no tricks, just the palm
going around calmly, around and around,
and then at the actual moment of parting
one kiss on the lips, no emotion, just an
animal kiss like a seal on the end of the day,
and I can say in a quiet nursery-rhyme way Good
night, I love you, see you in the morning and he
says in his high melodious voice with the
ritual calm of a boy whose childhood is going on forever,
/ love you too, resigned and kindly, he
settles down busily at the center of his bed
and floats off easily to the side and
up the blue slant into his own sleep
and I feel I will never know him,
even if I married him
I would not know him, just as I do not
know his father, however I love him and touch him,
they are somewhere out of reach, like my own father.
Sometimes when I tuck my daughter in I
lie there awhile holding her and
knowing her, soul to soul and
skin to skin, and I think of the men
floating up there somewhere and I wonder if they're lonely
but I know they're not, they're so relieved, they
float, and the cut end of the gold
cord on each shines as it dangles toward earth.
William Matthews
from A Happy Childhood
The map in the shopping center has an X
signed "you are here." A dream is like that.
In a dream you are never eighty, though
you may risk death by other means:
you're on a ledge and memory calls you
to jump, but a deft cop talks you in
to a small, bright room, and snickers.
And in a dream, you're everyone somewhat,
but not wholly. I think I know how that
works: for twenty-one years I had a father
and then I became a father, replacing him
but not really. Soon my sons will be fathers.
Surely that's what middle-aged means,
being father and son to sons and father.
That a male has only one mother is another
story, told wherever men weep wholly.
Though nobody's replaced. In one dream
I'm leading a rope of children to safety,
215

Matthews
216
through a snowy farm. The farmer comes out
and I have to throw snowballs well to him
so we may pass. Even dreaming, I know
he's my father, at ease in his catcher's
squat, and that the dream has revived
to us both an old unspoken fantasy:
we're a battery. I'm young, I'm brash,
I don't know how to pitch but I can
throw a lamb chop past a wolf. And he
can handle pitchers and control a game.
I look to him for a sign. I'd nod
for anything. The damn thing is hard to grip
without seams, and I don't rely only
on my live, young arm, but throw by all
the body I can get behind it, and it fluffs
toward him no faster than the snow
in the dream drifts down. Nothing
takes forever, but I know what the phrase
means. The children grow more cold
and hungry and cruel to each other
the longer the ball's in the air, and it begins
to melt. By the time it gets to him well be
our waking ages, and each of us is himself
alone, and we all join hands and go.
Contributors
BRUCE BEASLEY is a graduate of the Columbia University Writing Program
and currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia. He has poems in, and forthcoming
in, The Missouri Review, Quarterly West, and other magazines.
JORGE LUIS BORGES is the Argentine poet, critic and short-story writer.
Some collections of his poetry translated into English include Dreamtigers,
A Personal Anthology, Selected Poems: 1923-1967, and In Praise of
Darkness; major collections of short stories include Ficciones, El Aleph,
and Extraordinary Tales. Labyrinths and Borges-A Reader are collections
of stories and selected writings.
MELVIN JULES BUKIET lives in New York City. 'The Virtuoso" is the
third chapter of his novel, Stories of An Imaginary Childhood. Other work
has appeared in Antaeus.
ITALO CALVINO is currently living in Rome, Italy. He is the author of
many books. Among those published in English are Cosmicomics, The
Watcher and Other Stories, Invisible Cities, If on a winter's night a
traveler, and his collection of Italian Folktales, a compilation of tales
transcribed from dialects of all Italian regions.
ALFRED CORN lives in New York City and Vermont. He has been a
Fulbright Fellow, and in 1974 he won Poetry's George Dillon Memorial
Prize. His most recent collection of poems is In A Various Light (Penguin,
1980).
MARK CRAVER was educated at the College of William and Mary, and
George Mason University where he recently finished an M.A. in Modern
Literature. He lives in Vienna, Virginia, and works as a teacher and editor.
217

Contributors
ROBERT CREELEY's most recent book is The Collected Poems, 1945-1975
(University of California Press). New Directions will publish Mirrors, a
collection of new poems, this fall, and his Collected Prose (Marion Boyers,
Inc.) will be published early next year. He is the David Gray Professor of
Poetry and Letters at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
STEPHEN DUNN has a fourth collection of poems. Work and Love,
recently published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press.
JACK GILBERT has lived much of his life abroad in Greece, Japan, and
other countries. He was the winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award in
1962 for Views of Jeopardy, and since then he has been the recipient of a
Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the
Arts. His most recent book of poems is Monolithos (Knopf, 1982). He is
currently in France working on a novel and finishing his next collection of
poems.
LINDA GREGG teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been
published in many magazines including Antaeus and Ironwood. Her book
of poems, Too Bright To See, was published by Graywolf Press in 1981.
DEBORAH GUPTA has studied anthropology, likes to travel, and is interested
in the way crossing cultural boundaries can affect people's lives.
She wishes to thank Charles Henderson for his inspiration and support in
the writing of "Daljit Singh's Place."
SAM HAMILL runs Copper Canyon Press in Port Townsend, Washington.
His most recent books of poetry are Triada and Animae (Copper Canyon
Press).
ROBERT HASS won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1973 for
his first book, Field Guide. His most recent book is Praise (The Ecco Press,
1979). He grew up in San Francisco and attended St. Mary's College and
Stanford University. He currently lives with his wife and three children in
Berkeley, California.
MARY KARR works in the computer industry in Cambridge,
218
Contributors
Massachusetts. This year her work as appeared in Poetry, Antioch Review,
Crazyhorse, and Sonora Review.
EDMUND KEELEY teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton
University. His first novel The Libation was awarded the Rome Prize of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters. He's been the recipient of many
grants—NEA, NEH, and a Guggenheim Fellowship among them. He is the
author of several books of translation, including George Seferis: Collected
Poems (1924-1955), Voices of Modern Greece, and C.P. Cavafy: Selected
Poems. He was recently awarded the Harold Morton Landon Award for
his translation of Yannis Ritsos in the book Ritsos in Parentheses (Princeton
1979).
WELDON KEES' works in print include The Collected Poems of Weldon
Kees, published by the University of Nebraska Press. Forthcoming are a
selection of Kees' correspondence, edited by Robert E. Knoll, and a selection
of short stories published by Abbatoir Editions, edited by Dana Dioia.
PETER KLAPPERT teaches in the M.F.A. Program at George Mason
University. The Idiot Princess of the Last Dynasty will appear in 1984. His
other collections of poems are Lugging Vegetables to Nantucket (Yale
Series), Circular Stairs, Distress in the Mirrors, and Non Sequitur O'Connor.
JOHN LANE teaches in the English Department at Wofford College in
South Carolina. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Ironwood, and
other magazines. He is editing, with Scott Gould, the collected works of the
novelist, Oman Lare.
ROBERT LEMPERLY lives in New York City. He is currently working on a
novel.
RON LIEBER lives and works in New York City. His most recent publications
are poems in The New England Review and The Nation.
WILLIAM MATTHEWS' current book of poems is Flood (Atlantic, Little
Brown, 1982).
219

Contributors
TIM McNULTY lives and works in the foothill country of Washington's
Olympic Mountains. A collection of poems, Pawtracks, was published., by
Copper Canyon Press, and a new chapbook, Tundra Songs, is out now
from Empty Bowl.
JAMES MERRILL lives in Connecticut. He is the author of nine books of
poems which have won him two National Book Awards, the Bollingen
Prize in Poetry, and the Pultizer Prize. His most recent collection is The
Changing Light at Sandover.
CZESLAW MILOSZ is the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature.
He is Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of
California, Berkeley. His most recent book is a collection of essays, The
Witness of Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1983).
SHARON OLDS' first book, Satan Says, was published by the University
of Pittsburgh Press in 1980. Her second book, The Dead and the Living,
will come out with Knopf in the fall of 1983.
CAROLE OLES' second book, Quarry (University of Utah Press), was
published this spring. She teaches at the University of Massachusetts-
Boston and is on the staff at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.
ARLENE PLEVIN is a poet, a cyclist, and writes articles about cycling. She
received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa and teaches at Clemson
University. "Letters" is her first work of fiction.
YANNIS RITSOS is the author of fifty-two volumes of poems. The English
translations include Selected Poems, Gestures and Other Poems, Ritsos In
Parentheses, The Lady of the Vineyards, and Scripture of the Blind. He was
awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1977, and has been nominated for the
Nobel Prize in Literature three times.
DAVID ROMTVEDT currently works with the Ground Zero Center for
Non-Violent Action in Bangor, Washington. His first book of poems,
Moon, is available from Beiler Press. A chapbook of short fiction, Free and
Compulsory for All, is due to be published in the summer of 1983.
NANCY SCHOENBERGER works for the Academy of American Poets in
New York City. She received an M.A. from Louisiana State University and
220
Contributors
an M.F.A. from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in the
American Poetry Review, Antaeus, Poetry, and other magazines.
DANIEL SIMKO was educated at Columbia University and the University
of Iowa. He lives in New York City and is presently at work on a new
translation of Friedrich Holderlin's last poems.
CATHY SONG was selected as the 1982 winner of the Yale Series of
Younger Poets Competition for Picture Bride. She received a B.A. from
Wellesley College in 1977 and an M.A. in Creative Writing from Boston
University in 1981.
GERALD STERN's most recent collection of poems is The Red Coal (1981).
His book, Lucky Life, was chosen as the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1977.
He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he is currently
teaching at the University of Iowa Writing Program.
221