Airmail (37 page)

Jan ’78[?]

Dear Tomas,

I started working today on your tour, so I’m not captured by a flying saucer after all!! I want you to get to New Orleans...What is happening in Sweden? Here we are waiting for blood transfusions—the poetry is getting worse. I think it must be mercury in the water...I’ve finally finished my Rilke translations I’ve worked on for 20 years, and Harper & Row has promised me $4,000 for it! We’ll be rich!! Right now I’m so broke the children couldn’t go to the basketball game tonight—only Carter’s brother is rich in this administration. We are all well here, and I’ll tell you all that is happening and has happened when you come!

Rip Van Winkle’s doctor,

Robert

Västerås Jan 20-78

Dear Robert,

wonderful to hear that New Orleans is possible. And to hear from you, it was a long time ago! Many things have happened and at the same time not very much! We are well but a little overworked. Monica’s colleagues in the hospital are a frail sort, often ill, so she has been on duty too much since Christmas. Epidemics are harassing Sweden now. I have been active too, in my job and also writing to Oberlin, to the Swedish Institute and a Yes-reply to Iowa. The Swedish Institute wants to send me to Seattle first. Here is a sketch of my trip.

North pole

Minnesota

(Minneapolis? Meeting you)

Seattle

Iowa

workshop

around april 1st:

Oberlin

(We together—you longer than I)

preliminary sketch. Is it realistic?

The South!

(Please help me with these addresses)

Home

Texas?

(Lars Gustafsson recommends Austin, a Christopher Middleton...) Have you any contact with them?

My economy now is almost as bad as that of Sweden in general. But on Wednesday I will go to Stockholm and sell my new book! I finished everything except the title (do you have any good titles left over?) two days ago. The most difficult thing to finish was the long poem I include in this letter, a mini-sized Faust, “Ihr naht euch wieder schwankende Gestalten,” confessions of a too complicated psychologist. All the people mentioned are my previous clients, including myself 10 years ago: “En konstnär sa: etc.” The opening scene is from a motel in Laxå, West Sweden in 1969. That was a bad night! Stop Tomas, you are talking too much. Any difficult words in the poem? “Kohandel” is a funny old fashioned slang word for give-and-take deal, mostly in politics. I find in my dictionary the word “log-rolling,” which seems mysterious. “Karbol” is a cheap purifier used in hospitals, probably “carbole” in English. “Det lyhörda huset” means a house that is insufficiently sound proofed, where you can hear what your neighbor is doing.

I remember that I did not thank you for the beautiful Snail-book. How ungrateful! But I was grateful when I read it.

I have seen only one review of our Bly-volume in Swedish. It was Björn Håkansson in
Aftonbladet,
saying some nice words about you and attacking the Publisher for not giving enough information about you (about your service in the navy probably) but the publisher, or rather, Aggestam, thought that you are so well known in Sweden that a presentation is unnecessary. I also met a person who said “I don’t agree with your foreword at all”—he thought
I
had written your foreword because my initials were after, meaning that I am the translator. I will send you clippings when something interesting arrives...

How is my godson?

Love

    Tomas

Västerås Febr 19-78

Dear Maestro,

a short note about what happens here. I had asked the Swedish Institute for a contribution to my U.S. trip, got a half-promise and waited for the definite word. The other week came this message: Sorry, we have spent all our money for this budget year, try again after July 1. Then I wrote to Betty Kray, who had sent me a nice letter, and asked for 3 days free lodging in her house in New York—I wanted to start in New York because that is the cheapest trip. But the other day I had a preliminary positive answer from another foundation, so I will probably get some travel expenses paid after all. I will probably start with New York anyway, not Seattle...Well, that depends. If you have promised me to some place in California it would be a good idea to start in Seattle, but otherwise Boston or other places in the east would be better. Tell me! What I will do is probably this: I’ll buy a ticket for New York and back plus a $390 ticket for endless flights inside the U.S.A.—my travel bureau tells me this exists, maybe only for Europeans? Well, send me a small note anyway, I am eagerly waiting for information so I can draw a map. I have always loved maps.

In the meantime, take a look at the two clippings from Sweden. Lundkvist has read the prose poem anthology. He is not included himself. Gyllensten is angry. The article is one of the better volcano eruptions since Strindberg’s days. Gyllensten is of course too paranoiac here, the narrowmindedness and the need to make the great men shrink is not quite so systematic and conspiratory as it is described here. But he has lanced a boil with a carving-knife. Will the patient be better or worse?

Ironwood
wants to make a special Tranströmer issue. They sent a Wright-issue with your horse David in it.

Love to all on the farm

Tomas

Västerås March 16 [1978]

Dear friend and Impresario,

I think I will go back to Sweden April 19 and that means that IF somebody between Austin and New York City is interested in a reading on the days 16th–18th I am willing to do it. I can see Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama etc., wonderful states full of universities and poetry freaks...And if Austin says no (which I hope it doesn’t) I can do readings anywhere south of Oberlin during April 14th–18th.

Your questions about “Galleriet”...The faces are pushing forward through the overpainting of oblivion. As if through a wall. Or as seals pop up to the surface to breathe...The part with “hissen.” It is the same hiss (elevator) as you once traveled in, when we visited my mother’s apartment in Stockholm in 1968. In Sweden we have the following system of electric lights in staircases of houses. A button is pushed and then the light lasts for 3 minutes or so, then it is dark and you have to push a switch again. So I arrive (one winter evening) when a previous person has switched on the light 3 minutes before. It suddenly gets dark, except inside the lift, where there is a separate lamp, which is always on. Do you understand? So when the whole house is dark the lift is shining (and rising) like a diving-bell. And as I live on the 5th floor I pass floor after floor and imagine faces looking into the lift when it passes each floor. I am ten years old.

There is a snowstorm today. Horrible. It was spring yesterday. I know so little about your situation now but I am thinking of you. Here is all well. Monica sends her warmest

Tomas

Västerås May 11-78

Dear Robert,

it’s unbelievable: cold and windy, a true winter day. And Sweden was beaten by Czechoslovakia (in ice hockey) by 6–1. I am in a miserable mood, trying to feel better by writing to you. You left the coffee shop in Minnesota...after a while Keith Harrison arrived, more energetic than ever. I remember nothing from the reading except that I (for once) followed your advice to let the host do part of the reading, Keith in his forceful Australian...The party afterwards with an Indian couple: Mr. and Mrs. Ramanujan. I slept in Keith’s house. Close to his bathroom in the upper floor is a flight of stairs so steep that an abyss opens. In the middle of the night I went to the bathroom in complete darkness, went back, took a long step and suddenly found myself hurtling into the abyss, but turned miraculously, almost in the air, and was saved, went back to bed, slept, went to Oberlin, hugged the whole Oberlin lot, gave a reading
in a very loud voice
without dropping a single syllable (I questioned the whole audience afterwards). After this the trip went well, my Minnesota (or Louisiana) disease conquered. Two professors met in Austin, both fluent in Swedish, especially Bob Rovinsky, who is also a distinguished marathon runner. During the walk in the Lyndon Johnson part of Austin the following day I happened to meet two dwarves and I also bought some good records. In Atlanta Coleman Barks met me, it was moving to see him again (I met him last time in the U.S.), we went quickly to Troy, had some catfish on the way there, and stayed overnight in Ed Hicks’s house. Have you met that man? He is a 2-7-1, an extreme muscle type, a former baseball star, now a Faulkner specialist and also a pilot with his own aeroplane. He is very nice. I found that in Troy I was a sort of test pilot myself—Ed used me to prove that he could make his colleagues and superiors accept a non-Alabaman, non-Southern, even a non-American poet in Troy. They did not want to pay of course. But he forced them to...The reading was funny, in a restaurant, with a nice audience including some necktied professors. Next day through a tornado to Indianapolis and Muncie. I don’t think the reading went very well there, the audience was like a Swedish one. The flight home was taxing, delayed by tornadoes etc. When we left Kennedy airport a flash of lightning hit the plane, the purser in front of me fluttered up like a rooster in an earthquake, which was more discouraging than the thunderbolt itself...I forgot to tell you that I was very happy to have your parcel in Muncie—those wonderful dolls! 2 great
penates.

Yes, master, that is how it ended. It was a healthful trip for me (especially for my economy) and it was necessary to see you again and find out that, in spite of the tragic complications around you, you are the same person and the same irreplaceable friend.

Important: tell me the full name and address of “Calvin” in New Orleans. I lost it. It is important for Swedish music, I have plans to send him some symphonies he could play on his radio programs.

Emma has quit school and is now working as a horseman in Småland. She will start in a new class this autumn. Love

Tomas

23 May ’78

Dear Tomas,

Just a note to tell you that I too returned more or less sane from my reading tour—like you, my last stop was Muncie, Indiana. The audience stared at me as if they had recently seen an inhabitant of a flying saucer, and I was
not
one, but I managed to get through the reading, and get home. Now Noah and Micah and Biddy (sometimes Mary) and I play softball every evening. Micah is an excellent first baseman, with one exception—he never catches the ball. Outside of that he is fine.

I heard of your refusal of Gov Wallace’s photograph—that has already become legend in the Red Branch Cycle of stories of visiting poets—and I must say the story pleased me! Southern ladies are insistent!

Calvin Harlan’s address is c/o Art Department, University of New Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Thank you for receiving my grief and my uncertainties and my shadowy complications without running out the door. I enjoyed our reading together and I have heard nothing but good reports of your readings! I’ll send you a funny report of the Oberlin reading in the next letter—no enclosures allowed in this one!

Carol has a new job with Farmers Union—$2000 a month for three months. I think that will be very good for her.

With deep fondness always,

Robert

Katrineholm 6-9-78

Dear Robert,

as often when in strange circumstances, I like to write to you. I’m longing for an answer.

I am at the training center for civil defense officers in Katrineholm. I am taught sick-care in general and especially to dig out, rescue and transport wounded civilian people under tumbled-down houses. I wear a helmet and institution clothes and everything is rather military except for the fact that we carry no weapons at all. It is not meaningless. Anyone can happen to meet a tumbled-down house! Didn’t you fall from the roof of your chicken house once—if I had had this training I could rescue you very quickly. You would get expert embalming (or what is the word for winding cloth around broken extremities?).

Michael Cuddihy wants to have some letters from me to you but I have to censor them a little first—I mean wipe out things that might insult an innocent reader of
Ironwood.
Of course if you have burned my letters already, then there is no problem. (I will not take away my stupidities, only the worst gossip.)

And, at last, what happens to you? Is it bad? Is it better? Are the children as irresistible as when I saw them.

Here everything is fine, and I suppose they are saying hello, but I can’t promise because I live in this civil defense camp...I will be back in Västerås 11 days from now. Write!

Your friend Tomas

21 Sept, ’78

Dear Tomas,

Thank you for your letter when out rescuing people from collapsing houses! It’s good to know you could rescue me, if you could only get over here in time...

I’m happy these days—sometimes positively joyful. My life is arranged this way: The first two weeks of each month I’m at my writing cabin at Kabekona—Ruth and her children are nearby—she is working in a home for 350 mental patients, all considered incurable by the State—no psychiatrist at all for them, not even one—and then on the 15th of each month or so, I come down to Madison, and live in this lovely house I’ve bought in Madison, at 127 2nd Ave. Madison 56256. I came down here on the 15th of Sept and the boys have been living with me since, and we’re in the process of furnishing the rooms for Mary & Biddy. All is going well in that area. Don’t worry for your impulsive, prudent friend...and Carol, I think, is doing well too. She’s going to England in a few weeks, and doing a reading tour in Connecticut in late October. I’ll get to work on that letters problem, and send any letters chosen to you
before
Ironwood
sees them...A hug from the Norwegian owl. Love to Monica!!

Robert

12 Nov, 78

Dear Tomas,

I’ve finally gotten the letters together for
Ironwood!
I had lots of fun doing it—you are one of the greatest letter writers in the literary community at the moment! It’s a community of mumblers, compulsive secret-keepers, stutterers, verbal limpers, balloon enthusiasts of sin, sailing over the “poor details of life”—In any case, here are eight chosen half at random, half from an eye to humor—they are very funny! Cross out whatever you don’t want in, drop out whole letters if you want to. I think they’re all good. The praise of me