A Moveable Famine (32 page)

When everyone was seated, Tobias showed slides of the headhunters in the Amazon whom he met as he walked naked through the jungle. He hinted he had sex with several of the men and also ate human flesh, including heart. He described tribesmen carving a canoe in a hut, scoring the likenesses of their ancestors into the bark. When they finished, he said, four men held each side of the craft, but, as they moved toward the door, the canoe made a great whooshing sound, a sound like a strong wind, and it pushed them back. This happened several times, until they finally rushed it out with a noise like a slamming wave. Tobias spoke gently as he told his stories, and we left in awe of our adventurous colleague who seemed anything but the adventurer in appearance and manner.

As I lay in bed that night, I heard a strange sound, a constant hum. I peered into the West House yard, which was brightened by floodlights. Bats circled the treetops. The noise continued and I recalled the windowpane of Stanley’s room, and Tobias’s canoe, and I tried to ignore both by reading Ned Rorem’s
The Later Diaries,
borrowed from the mansion library. To my horror, I found he had rated his Yaddo dinner companions. He gave “silver stars” to Donald Justice and Mark Strand, and a “gold star” to David Del Tredici, one of the composers who played after dinner. The sound grew louder and I traced it to the hall, to the half-open door of Larry Dalton, the artist with whom I shared a bath. Four hairdryers, clamped on the backs of chairs, were aimed at a girl in a bikini made of something resembling seaweed, who stood before a large paper fan shaped like a clamshell. Her hair was flat from the heat. I recognized the waitress who served us at dinner. Dalton was taking photos, and comparing her to Venus.

Back in bed, I opened Rorem’s diaries and found a portrait of Frank O’Hara, written three weeks after his death. I admired the line, “Frank O’Hara died in the middle of a sentence,” and fell asleep.

The next morning I learned the breakfast routine: walk through the dining room, open the door to the kitchen, and state your order.

“Two poached, Beverly,” the woman in front of me said. Beverly, dressed in white, sat at a table, which held a tub of butter. She placed a spoonful in a bowl of ice water, then molded it into a sphere. She rolled it between two grooved paddles, making the “butterballs” which had confounded me the night before.

I joined a table but when I introduced myself, everyone burrowed deeper into their books and papers. This was the “silent table.” But because no one spoke, no one told me.

On my way out, I passed a guest and said good morning.

“I don’t talk before breakfast,” he said.

Mail delivery was the highlight of the day, everyone surrounding the letters, packages and cards on a desk in the lounge. I had received several envelopes from my mother containing rejections of my book,
A Little Faith.
I had resigned myself to the fact that I’d written a collection of love poems, and the editors complained about the book’s small orbit. One asked, “Isn’t sincerity the biggest con of all?” Porter sent
On the Cod,
his book of barroom monologues. His letter said he had walked nervously into the Fo’c’sle, terrified of meeting his contributors. He had quoted their binges, betrayals and thefts. To Porter’s astonishment, no one recognized himself. He guessed they had been either too drunk or lying. He mentioned that Vince’s publisher rejected the draft of his Pancho Villa book and he owed a chunk of the advance. He took an advertising job in Boston, but after a month he returned to the Fo’c’sle, fired for his copy for a jewelry store that said, “We’ll give you the ring, if you give us the finger.” A postscript said that Barkhausen won a contest for his first book,
The Birthday Suit.
I loved that poem, an account of his father presenting him with a three-piece on his thirteenth birthday, but had advised against using it for the book since it also meant to be naked. Still, I preferred it to his original title,
Eating Out the Angel of Death.
Barkhausen’s neologisms began to make sense. As cockeyed and impetuous as they were in conversation, they charged his poetry with an askew and often mad language. My teachers had seen it, Stanley saw it, and I came to believe in it—it was poetry—the thing that no one could define, the thing about which it could be said that no one really knows what it is.

There were readings and slide shows every week and an eighty-three-year-old poet with a long gray beard, Henry Chapin, read one night with Spear, a San Francisco poet. She performed her poems, flinging her arms in the air, snorting, growling and inhaling gruffly between phrases like the musician Roland Kirk. She introduced her final piece saying, “This summer, I fulfilled one of my lifelong dreams. I did something I always wanted to do.” She paused. “I went to my favorite Chinese restaurant and tried something from everyone’s plate.”

The crowd laughed.

“It’s not funny,” she said. “I’ll tell you when it’s funny.”

Her poem began as an homage to the delicacies and their origins and then veered into a litany of the injustices endured by those who brought them to our tables. With the final line about the fiery rashes of those who peel shrimp, she stormed off the stage and rickety Henry ascended, using a cane. He wore a heavy tweed jacket despite the heat.

“Spear,” he said, “I feel you’ve thrown a lot of confetti into the air and it’s still coming down.”

“Those are serious issues, Henry,” Spear yelled back. Henry said he was sure they were, and then introduced himself. He had gone to Princeton with Edmund Wilson, whom he called “Bunny.” He said Bunny hated his poetry. Many years later he contacted Wilson, saying, “You were right to avoid my poetry when we were young, because I was a very bad poet, but now I’m a very good poet and would like to give you my books.” Wilson was famous for the postcard he sent to those who made requests from him. Henry had one with him and read it:

“Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him to: Read manuscripts, write articles or books to order, write forewords or introductions, make statements for publicity purposes, do any kind of editorial work, judge literary contests, give interviews, take part in writers’ conferences, answer questionnaires, contribute to or take part in symposiums or ‘panels’ of any kind, contribute manuscripts for sales, donate copies of his books to libraries, autograph works for strangers, allow his name to be used on letterheads, supply personal information about himself, or supply opinions on literary or other subjects.”

Henry then showed the card, with Wilson’s answer to his letter scrawled over it in big black letters, “NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!”

He read from his book,
A Countdown at Eighty,
and then “A Narrative Poem of the Norse Discoveries of America.” Spear cheered him on from the front row, calling him “brother.” Next to her, the poet Sally Elgin, wrapped in scarves and appearing much older than her sixty years, drank from a flask.

Rorem stopped me on the way out and said, “You look like a man who’s been waiting a long time for a bus.” I could feel he was getting ready to give me a bad grade.

Lewis Abolia, known for his sonnets, invited everyone to his room at the top of the mansion to toast the poets with port. Dalton, who liked Henry, brought several blueberry pies, with help from his girl in the kitchen, and everyone held slices on sagging paper plates. After a glass of wine, Henry fell asleep in a rocking chair, the pie on his lap, his chin lost in his beard, looking like one of the Norsemen he described. Sally whirled through the room, commending the blueberries at the top of her lungs so loudly that even Spear shuddered. I talked with a woman in her late twenties, a fiction writer, who told me she had published stories in the
New Yorker.
Her name was Melissa Owen, and I thought we were hitting it off when she excused herself, saying she had to make a call. And yet she stayed. And mentioned again that she had to make a call. There was only one phone in the mansion, and a line usually formed to use it. I finally realized she was trying to get me to ask who she was calling.

“Your boyfriend?”

“No,” she whispered, “M’editor.”

“Who?”

She said it again, a breathy word I couldn’t understand.

“M’editor.” She closed her eyes when she spoke it. “M’editor at the
New Yorker
.”

“Oh,” I laughed, “Your
editor
!”

“We have to discuss changes.”

Sally had overheard us, and pointed a finger at Melissa, shouting, “I must make a call myself!” She asked Dalton to put another piece of pie on her plate and unsteadily rushed out the door. Melissa did not seem to care that she would have to wait.

“He thinks it’s the best thing I’ve done.”

We were interrupted by Abolia yelling at two other poets, “I’m not bitter! I am
not bitter
!” Leaded windows surrounded Abolia’s bed, and I recognized the room as Stanley’s, the room in the tower he had told me about. Henry opened his eyes and asked if I would escort him to West House. I said I would, and waited while he lectured the young poets for five minutes on contemporary poetry’s neglect of the amulet as a fecund image.

Dalton told me the kitchen girl asked him for a reference to art school. Melissa repeated, “m’editor,” to a leftist novelist from the village, who turned away, saying,
“New Yorker, New Schmorker!”

When I thought Henry had run out of steam, he pulled a piece of paper from his overstuffed wallet and read a poem clipped from the take-out menu of Hattie’s Chicken Shack in downtown Saratoga. The room quieted. “It’s called ‘Woman,’ ” he said, and read:

She’s an angel in truth, a demon in fiction.

A woman’s the greatest of all contradiction.

She’ll scream at a cockroach and faint at a mouse,

then tackle a husband as big as a house.

She’ll take him for better, she’ll take him for worse.

She’ll split his head open, and then be his nurse.

And when he is well and can get out of bed,

she’ll pick up a teapot to throw at his head.

You fancy she’s this, but you find that she’s that

for she plays like a kitten and fights like a cat.

In the evenings she will, in the mornings she won’t

and you’re always expecting that she does when she don’t.

Some women in the room began to hiss at the third line, but Henry persisted until the end, which had Abolia applauding and Spear puzzled.

“Let’s go, Henry,” I said, and we went down the staircase arm in arm.

Melissa was waiting for the phone, stamping her red shoes. She said, “You’re not supposed to stay on that long. Sally knows that!”

I leaned Henry against the wall and tapped the solid oak door of the booth.

“Maybe it’s empty,” I said, listening.

“No, she’s in there,” Melissa said. “I heard her.”

When there was no sound, I knocked loudly, wondering if Sally might be hard of hearing.

“Let me take a look,” I said, and when I turned the knob, Sally, who had fallen asleep against the door, tumbled out and crashed her plate, pie and fork onto my feet, yelling, “This isn’t my stop!”

Melissa and I picked her up and Melissa guided her to her room.

Henry said, “She has nice legs.”

As we crossed the grounds, he said he didn’t want to be boastful in public, but he had received letters from two well-known poets in response to
A Countdown at Eighty.

“Here they are,” he said, handing me a flashlight and paper strips from his wallet. “Read the underlinings.”

I focused the beam.
You’ve outdone yourself, Henry.

“Nice, isn’t it?”

“Very nice,” I said.

“Someday I’ll tell you who they are. Read the other.”

I found the sentence circled in blue ink.
I always know a poem by Henry Chapin!

“I didn’t want to brag,” he said.

Two poets, Sandro Brezini and James Dorwin, invited me for a drink downtown. Dorwin was a gaunt Midwesterner who had the odd habit of scratching his head with the hand opposite to the itch, so his right fingers circled over his head and above his left ear in a simian gesture. His grandfather invented Shredded Wheat, which, he said, changed the way Americans ate breakfast in the morning. Brezini was powerfully built, but dainty. After Del Tredici played the piano after dinner, he called, “Oh David, how I love to watch your fingers fly!” He began a series of poems, a dialogue between the black and white keys on the piano.

The bar, The Neutral Corner, was outside Saratoga proper, in the woods behind the Grand Union, far from the touristy Triple Crown, Winner’s Circle, and Thoroughbred’s. Dorwin said that famous boxers used to hang out there, and that the place was filled with autographed photos. Brezini asked what the name meant and Dorwin explained that when you floor an opponent, you have to retreat to the farthest neutral corner before the referee can start his count.

As we were getting into the car, the English critic Malcolm Bradbury leapt from a hydrangea. Since he didn’t have transportation, he hung around the parking lot, hitching rides. Bradbury had founded a renowned creative writing program at the University of East Anglia. He smoked a pipe and his wiry long hair sprung from his head in all directions. We drove through the main streets of Saratoga, past the supermarket and onto a dirt road that led to the bar.

“How’d you find this place?” I asked.

“The bartender at the Winner’s Circle said his brother owned it,” Dorwin said.

“I also got the feeling his brother was a loser,” Brezini added.

The bar was packed with tradesmen in work clothes who looked us over. We paraded past them in our khaki pants and white button downs and sat in a booth in the back room, which had a pool table. The waitress took our drink order and also gave us menus of Chinese food. The

Neutral Corner was both bar and a Chinese restaurant. I went to see the photos. Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano—all signed to Bill. I guessed Saratoga drew them here in its prime, and then I noticed each name was scrawled in the same handwriting. I told Dorwin about the fake autographs and he picked up a cue, walked into the bar and darted it toward several photos.