The Ancient Minstrel Page 7

  This deflated him a bit though he knew very well writers in weak moments have always historically looked for philosophical underpinnings for their work. There were none that were not nearly laughable. Such campaigns were almost always led by the weakest writer in a group who had the most to gain, a fragile snippet of immortality as part of a “movement.” The Beats were a different matter, he thought, with quite a bit of substance, especially in contrast to the academic poets they were departing from who reminded one of a corn patch in a drought year. Jack Kerouac’s “automatic writing” worked if you were a good writer, otherwise it was gibberish. When he had tried it he came up with multiple pages about sex and food which was not surprising to him.

  Despite the setback he could not shake his feelings about “glimpses.” Maybe he could write such a book of vignettes if first he wrote a best seller and was back in her favor. Or when he went to France in a couple of weeks he would keep a journal of vignettes if they came to him in a foreign country, but why wouldn’t they? It seemed like art blasphemy to wait, especially until you were old and rich, and the unlikelihood of them happening together struck his mood momentarily dumb. Writers are victims of their own goofy flights of the imagination. To have an imagination doesn’t mean you have control of it. In his teens the mere thought of Ava Gardner’s body made him erect. Why in God’s name was she married to the loathsome shrimp Mickey Rooney when she could have him, he thought? Of course how could he afford her when he only made sixty cents an hour as a night janitor at the local college? What if she wanted a new Buick convertible and he couldn’t afford a hubcap? Maybe he could win a lottery if he could find one. Michigan did not yet have a lottery. She would want a mansion if she didn’t already have one with Mickey. Maybe she would be unfaithful to him with Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power or, more likely, Cary Grant. To become sodden and disarmed over the complications of getting Ava in his arms. Or Deborah Kerr tied to the stake in a nightie in Quo Vadis, or was it The Robe? Local girls were more reachable but were they suitable for a fifteen-year-old potential great artist? He was sweeping backstage one night when he saw a college girl actress just standing there on the stage in her undies looking out at the dark theater seats. He could think of nothing to say to her. She waved at him and he waved at her, and then she walked through one of those theater set doors that when you close the door the whole wall shudders. He swept more quickly. If he couldn’t say anything to this girl with her beauteous butt what could he possibly say to Ava Gardner? After he entered college the single most irritating thing people said was, “It’s all in the mind.” Of course it was. Where else would it be? But they said it with insipid incomprehension. What if he had followed the girl through the fake door? She might start running for the police. He couldn’t permit himself the fantasy line she would perform, “I’ve been waiting for you all my life.” But this was reality so neither of them said anything. This experience caused him a great deal of unrest for weeks. The problem was that it was an actual event and seemed to show him that he was unprepared for a life of high romance. What would Lord Byron have said but then it was unlikely Byron would be sweeping auditorium floors. When he finally found a girl willing to take his virginity he discovered he didn’t know how to go about it. She had whispered “go ahead” and they continued necking and wrestling on a sofa. She finally took charge and they were able to proceed. In novels couples usually flopped back on waves of nothingness and the particulars weren’t mentioned. He thought, with some help I have solved the puzzle. It was more like the sensation of melting than anything else. He expected dramatic changes in his life afterward but nothing of significance happened.

  Chapter 6

  The toughest thing about his pig adventures coming mostly to an end was that he felt more obligated to be strictly a writer again. He searched through his messy desk ceaselessly looking for some notes for the presold novel. He was usually uncanny at remembering details but his idea had come along strangely in a troublesome dream at three thirty in the morning and retained a dreamy elusiveness. He had awoken with a jolt, had a drink from a pint on his desk, coughed convulsively, then dreamed of three cantankerous families that were neighbors down an imagined but very vivid gravel road. Their parked cars and pickups in the landscape were muddy and junky with evidence of many minor collisions. There was one very large barn between them and across the road a very large hay crop recently baled. In the dream all the people in the three narrow houses had a passing resemblance which indicated to him that the families were all related. The dream came with the conviction that they were all evil people except the children who continued being children in the malevolent atmosphere. All of them, especially the men, were profound boozeheads fueled by endless gallons of cheap vodka.

  He liked the idea of evil rural families because the whole rural literary tradition in America had become buried in honeysuckle and lilacs, hardworking and noble yokels. He had lived all of his life in the country and knew that this was hopeless bullshit. It wasn’t even fair to the rural people because it denied them their humanity making them comic book cutouts. It was the clear interface of ideology with fiction. Anyway, the whole idea had now dissipated.

  He could always call his editor and ask for a copy of his original proposal but the idea was far too embarrassing because he had lied in his sales pitch and claimed to have written “a hundred pages” of notes for this new idea. The trouble with lying was how frequently you had to cover up for it. Sometimes you had to live the lie to prevent discovery that you had told it in the first place. What saved him was late that night he had yet another brief minstrel nightmare. His parents were holding him tightly because he was ill and shivering, but he had a miniature gun in his coat and was carefully shooting all the performers who would howl and drop to their knees with this acute form of a bee sting in the face. This image saved him because he dimly recalled his three farm families were severely alcoholic gun nuts imperiling his hero who lived downriver from them in his trout fishing cabin. Eureka! With guns and booze how could he fail? He had pretty much canceled the idea of France so harsh was the idea of writing the novel after having lost the story, so he was thrilled when his dream success revived it. The idea of him going to France to write had been much talked about for decades. He couldn’t recall who had done the talking but the idea was that looking back at America from France you would see the home place much more lucidly. He could put it off no longer and booked the tickets. Of course the girl who brought him coffee every morning in his inexpensive hotel would be seduced by him within a day or two. How could she resist? A bold American artist getting older but still in the arena.

  In the past if he suffered a literary slight he reminded himself that Melville had been forgotten for more than thirty years. Writing like nature was full of unfairness. Hail killed the baby warblers in their nest. Wars were obviously part of nature and killed millions. What struck him about reading Anne Frank was not what everyone knew, that she had died like millions of her relatives, but that she was obviously destined to become a grand writer. The mortality of songbirds hitting windows drove him crazy. You had a lovely life ahead of you and then you struck a window and it was over. The death of his sister at nineteen in an auto crash with his father was still unacceptable fifty years later. It had created its own nodule of permanent rage at the roots of his consciousness. It was ultimately the cause of his becoming a writer. If this can happen to those you love you may as well follow your heart’s wishes in your time on earth. He found it quite comic when he realized that he had never won an award that he had ever heard of before winning it. “Here today, gone tomorrow,” as people said. Ambition grated while humility soothed. This was quite different from ambition for the work itself. All he would allow himself was the wish that his books stay in print. The aim was that when he was walking Mary and Marjorie in the morning he was simply walking a dog and a pig on a lovely morning not brooding about what a reviewer in New York had done to him. Once when he was washing popcorn butter of
f his hands in a movie theater bathroom there was a dapper young man next to him who was combing his complicated hair with amazing wrist flicks. He had dozens of waves and curls and smiled at himself in the mirror as he did it. He remembered thinking at the time that the guy was fucked for life. He might have a girlfriend who liked or loved his hair but not as much as he himself did. After the movie he saw the guy with a rather homely girl which made sense in that he wouldn’t want to suffer by comparison.

  Chapter 7

  His month in France was a joy to the point that he later wondered why he came home. In every respect it was a feast for his senses and his naturally quizzical impulses. He had had a year of the French language but remembered next to nothing though a little seeped in from the past. It didn’t seem to matter because all the French, at least in Paris, seemed to have enough English to bail him out of his minimal difficulties. An artist friend had told him about a wonderful room in a little hotel on Rue Vaneau which was near Rue de Sèvres and Rue de Babylone and only a couple of blocks from the Invalides, a handy landmark. There were small city maps free at the hotel desk and he was never without one. He got it out so frequently that it only lasted a few days before it would turn into soft pulp. He got into navigational trouble one day when he forgot his reading glasses and the map became a blur. He finally asked an old lady in a small park who gave him directions in clear English. They spoke a few moments and out came that she had been married to a soldier from Chicago. She lived with him there until the 1960s when he died and she moved home. She said she was tough because her parents were Basques. He didn’t know what that meant but asked around and later found out. She took his shoulders and aimed him north toward the Tour Montparnasse, the only skyscraper on Montparnasse. From then on he would use the building as a beacon when he was confused. It was easy to take the proper right turn well before he reached the skyscraper.

  Paris seemed to agree with his notion of glimpses. He walked hundreds of streets in the first two weeks until he got bad shin splints from walking on cement which his legs were unused to. He had to take a few days off, mostly made up of hot baths. He bought a pair of thick soft-soled shoes at Bon Marché and consequently discovered the immense food court on that floor. That helped. He skipped restaurants for a while. In the morning he’d buy the Tribune, have coffee, and then go into the food court, buy bread, a few cheeses out of the hundred they had, some pâté, salmon, and several kinds of herring. He vowed he would someday live nearby and cook in his own apartment out of this marvelous and expensive store. They had a big wine department but he preferred the small wine store across the street where he had gotten to know a friendly clerk. One day he bought on impulse a large double magnum of Mouton Rothschild but couldn’t figure out what to do with such a large bottle so he took it to a dinner at his publisher’s home who doubtless thought “Crazy American” and hid it from his current guests with glee. “A wine for the proper occasion,” he said.

  France brought back glimpses of his life of travel in the years when he was ever so slowly writing his most ambitious novel, screenplays, and also informal outdoor essays for Sports Illustrated. He went to Russia with a friend but their KGB guide didn’t want him to write anything about Russian horse racing. He went to one race and saw Iron Jaw win. On the way home he stopped in France and wrote a piece about a stag hunt near a friend’s family château. Of course he had never stayed in a château before but was comfortable as had been Richard III who had stayed there during the invasion of France. One evening he and his friend ate a wild piglet stuffed with truffles.

  The same year, he and his wife went to Africa with the same friend and his wife, a grand trip. His biggest thrill was not the mammals, which he had seen so much of on television and in the movies, but the birds. Every bird in Africa was a bird he had never seen before including the large martial eagle who occasionally feeds on hyenas that weigh 150 pounds, just like Mongolian golden eagles can kill wolves. You imagine them dropping out of the sky the weight of a frozen turkey with huge talons. Bang. About anything is dead. He dreamed of returning to Africa simply to bird-watch by himself. He also traveled to Ecuador for a sporting magazine to catch a striped marlin on a fly rod. He succeeded finally on a later trip to Costa Rica.

  Perhaps the most momentous trip in terms of long-range effect was a month in Brazil to research a screenplay for a producer. The constant presence of the music of Brazil seeped into the soul and could be recalled anytime. The thousands of beach girls were also memorable, their shapely bodies maintained by the endless physical beach games they play. One day he joined the tail end of an anti–nuclear weapons march led by a hot samba band. Everyone was dancing and he did the best he could. Finally one austere older woman, the soul of dignity, joined him and helped with dance steps. Afterward he asked if she would like to have a drink. She answered that if she had a drink with a strange man her husband would cut his throat. He found out later that many husbands in Brazil have the nasty habit of killing their wives. Farther north he loved the big former slave port of Bahia which was even more, if that was possible, musically saturated than Rio. It was intoxication without alcohol or drugs. Every kid sitting on a park bench strumming seemed better than any quartet he’d ever heard in the United States. In Bahia music was their life. There was no other. Maybe music was the only way to subdue the smothering poverty. You kept thinking of the music, the Atlantic Ocean in front of you, the night sky that opened people up rather than closing them. The dancing was ceaseless and he suddenly envied these people who danced every day rather than occasionally. More than once during his month he thought he might move there.

  One grotesquely snowy December morning in Paris years before he had sat at his studio desk staring at an assortment of poems written since the last book of poetry three years before. This was when it was thirty rather than fifty years since he wrote his first poem while reading John Keats. Of course the poem was doggerel and he had known it immediately. He thought of the thousands and thousands of hours he had spent on poems since that calling at age fourteen. “Calling” is sort of a theological term, as people feel called to the ministry, and is less true of writing, but he knew he had made a lifetime commitment. He was standing on the roof of the house in the middle of the night at fourteen, staring at the Milky Way which seemed to stare back with its fabulous plenitude. Now staring at the snow thirty years later, he thought that his prose fiction seemed more of an afterthought though he read a great deal of it. He had to write and there were long periods of time when he didn’t have a poem ready to arrive. René Char, a French poet he worshipped, had said about writing poetry, “You have to be there when bread comes fresh from the oven.” You had to live your life in a state of readiness for the poem even though it could very well be a month or two between poems. Another pet obsession of his though not much believed in the cramped world of poetry was that every poet is obligated to read everything published in poetry through time, no matter from what country or time period. He spent years and years doing so. How could you write if you weren’t familiar with what was best in the history of the world? He went fishing and camping with friends at the cabin on the lake where they brought piles of sex magazines to read while he had only anthologies of Chinese and Russian poetry. He didn’t mind being teased about it because he was the biggest and strongest of the group and they went only so far in their teasing for fear of getting their asses kicked. He was an utterly nonviolent farm kid and just looked threatening because of his musculature from a life of hard work whether bucking hay bales in tall stacks, unloading fertilizer trucks, or laying out irrigation pipe in the fields.

  Recently while sitting in his studio watching his wife, a shapely woman indeed, work in the garden he had a few minutes of absolute happiness. He couldn’t remember his last one, other than catching a five-pound brown trout in a local river. But this one was more solid and overwhelming. What happened was that he had a rapprochement with her after several years of growing distance.

 
It all started with smoking. She had had a severe asthma attack and spent a week at a hospital in Tucson. Her asthma was bad enough that she could no longer be in the company of anyone smoking cigarettes. Whenever he spent time in the house he was sequestered in his office, taping black plastic sheeting across the louver over the door. He was already claustrophobic and his dismal space considerably upped the ante. He couldn’t face it, in fact. Maybe he would quit smoking. But then his singular success had been the seven weeks around spinal surgery. The surgeon told him for the sake of his healing bones he shouldn’t drink or smoke for those seven weeks. He played the role of the hero and somehow managed without cheating.

  They merged again one evening sitting on the porch swing watching fireflies and the thousands of stars above them, idly moving the swing back and forth with their feet. The night was unbearably beautiful with the constellations speaking their own strange language to each other. He told her he thought it might be the uninvented language used by Jesus and the Buddha to speak to each other.

  “What a wonderful thought. I have to tell you something unpleasant. Your friend Ralph in town died this afternoon. I waited because I didn’t want to tell you while you were enjoying your favorite lasagna dinner. His daughter is there on a visit. You should call her now.”

  He broke down weeping. He sobbed, in fact, thinking that his friend might have died of a heart attack while trying to pull the cork from a recalcitrant bottle of wine. He wasn’t very strong. The two of them had recently been corresponding about Chinese poetry and he had begun to think of Ralph as his only true friend.