Fear of Fifty (23 page)

The bus nearly swerved off the road.

I met the dashing, sinister Ted Hughes after his reading at the 92nd Street Y. In my copy of Crow he wrote: “To a beautiful surprise, Erica Poetica.” Then he filled the half-title page with a phallic snake curling through a new poem about Crow.

“In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath,” Dr. Johnson said. But poets often pimp with book inscriptions.

I went to dinner with Ted (and his entourage) and we flashed eyes at each other all night. In those days, Ted Hughes had a reputation in feminist circles for being a lady-killer, or indeed the devil incarnate. This only made him more exciting. I grew wet, imagining the handsome hulking author of Crow in bed. Then I fled in a taxi—fighting my own fantasies. Sylvia Plath and Assia Gutmann floated before my eyes like Shakespearean ghosts, warning me. I knew I wanted to write and live, not write and die.

Why was it always the fate of women poets to die? Were we punishing ourselves for the presumption of the pen? Were we trying to undo our lives to undo that presumption? Had we internalized the punitive rules of the game? (For even then I did not believe that Sylvia Plath's suicide was anyone's choice, finally, but her own.) Still, I understood how hard it was to be a woman poet in a literary world in which the rules were made by men.

In Chicago for a celebration of Poetry magazine, I collided with a beautiful young Southern poet (whom I will not name in the unlikely event that he is still with his wife). This poet wrote about his search for himself, his thwarted hankering for love, the many frustrations of his interminable marriage, his endless and unappeasable yearning.

Yearning was my middle name. So we went back to the Lake Shore Drive apartment of one of the moneybags behind the poetry festival (the poets were all put up in maids' rooms of these glorious mansions in the air), crept stealthily past the Jasper Johnses, the Motherwells, the Rothkos, the Frankenthalers, the Nevelsons, the Calders, the Rosenquists, the Dines, through the kitchen into the maid's room, where we made tender love all night. At dawn, we woke (as if to an explosion) and walked along Lake Michigan. We had not really felt welcome with the rich folks anyway. And we were suddenly seized with guilt about our spouses.

At home, I wrote poems to him—or whomever he represented—and he wrote poems to me—or whomever I represented. We corresponded for a while. We still send each other sweetly autographed books.

These encounters somehow fueled my first two volumes of poems. They also led ineluctably to Fear of Flying. “The muse screws,” I used to joke. Flippant but true. In The White Goddess, Robert Graves says that true poetry springs from the relationship between the muse (the White Goddess) and the poet. It relies on the poet's erotic knowledge of her, embodied in an earthly woman. Graves followed his own theory with increased desperation as he aged. Eventually, he became a parody of his younger self. Henry Miller did likewise—if only in the area of “love.” When he wasn't being a sage, he was being an old goat—wisdom side by side with low burlesque. Many aging poets find they have to crank up poetry with “love.” What comes naturally in youth becomes the ultimate self-deception of age.

The muse, for a woman poet, has historically been a male adventurer: Adonis, Orpheus, Odysseus. Since a woman poet also discovers inspiration through her solar plexus, the prohibition against women's sexuality has hurt us creatively as much as it has hurt our pleasures.

There were quite a lot of muses in those days. I usually kept them sacred by never “knowing” them in the flesh. And those I fucked, I quickly fled, turning them into pen pals.

I was seeking inspiration, not relationships—whatever they may be. All I could deal with were relation-dinghies or relation-surfboards. I had to get home fast and write it all down. That was, after all, the point. Besides, I didn't want to be disappointed by a mortal man. I wanted a muse, who, by definition, only appears in moments of ecstasy and is never given the chance to disappoint. He is the prince who may revert to a frog if you take him in, the Odysseus who may revert to a pig. If you don't linger, you'll never know. And you'll have the poem.

Every time I have set out to achieve something in my life, it has been total immersion. At that time, poetry was my element. It was bread and breath to me, husband, lover, child. Allan was just a shadowy companion, a crow sitting in a tree.

Poetry remains my solace still. I actually read other people's poems. Poetry refills the well when I am empty. Poetry finds me when I am lost. The temporary trauma of a painful relationship, the career disappointments, the pains of motherhood, the deaths of friends, are healed by poetry. If I let myself surrender to poetry, eventually it will bring me to the next novel, predicting its themes.

Novices in the arts think you have to start with inspiration to write or paint or compose. In fact, you only have to start. Inspiration comes if you continue. Make the commitment to sit still in solitude several hours a day and inevitably your muse will visit. “I write fifty pages until I hear the fetal heartbeat,” Henry Miller used to say.

The very mechanical act of sitting down in privacy, turning off the phone, giving yourself the time to play and make mistakes, being non-judgmental with yourself, knocking the censors off your shoulders, is enough to get anyone going. It's not etched in stone, I tell myself.
You
can always edit
and
rewrite later. You don't even
have
to publish if
you
don't want to. This is just for
you.

I write as if for samizdat, not above-ground publication. All my writer friends from the Eastern Bloc tell me that
samizdat
gave a more intimate tone to books. They felt they were writing for friends, not enemies. They felt they were writing letters—letters to themselves.

The permission to fail, plus certain artificial goals—
I will write ten handwritten pages, then stop
—often works. It also defeats the habitual self-flagellation that accompanies the writer at work. If you dare to play, you can risk everything on the page.

Submitting poems for scrutiny was another matter. At first it was impossible for me. My anxiety was so great that I heard jeers of derision when I even
thought
about sliding a sheaf of poems into an envelope. I solved this pragmatically. In Heidelberg, I bought myself a three-by-five-inch plastic box and named it: POEMS SENT OUT. On each card was a date, a list of poems, the magazine sent to, and the date of acceptance or rejection. This was simply a way of fooling my fear. If I couldn't lose the fear, at least I could contain it in a plastic box.

“I will know I'm a terrible poet when this box is filled,” I told myself. I had published a book of poems before the box was even partly full.

Was my threat to myself hollow? Poets are not made by editors' approval but by their own
self-approval,
as the fates of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman remind us.

When the plastic box is full of rejections, the real poet will simply say: “If the second box is full, or the third, or the fourth ... ” but she will keep sending her poems out—if only to toughen her hide.

Was I a real writer or was I only a hound for approval? I became famous so young that I could hardly know. I only learned the truth later when the approval stopped and I went on writing anyway.

Sooner or later, every artist encounters rejection—even the most famous. If you persevere a lifetime with your work, it must go through periods of being out of sync with the politics or literary theories of your time. And you must work past that, even if it means rejection. Politics change. But the time to work can never be brought back. Nabokov would be astonished to see his work in print all over Russia. He predicted that would never come to pass.

Rejection from outside is always better than inwardly rejecting your writer-self. Your writer-self is all you have to deal with. If you deprive yourself of that, you will never come to know how ultimately unimportant outer rejection is. But if you ally yourself with the forces of rejection, you will have committed creative suicide. The bastards will not only have got you down, they will have killed you, with your own enthusiastic complicity.

My poetry mania led me annually to assemble collections and send them to contests that promised publication of a first book. Each year from 1967 to 1970, I collected what I thought were my best poems (some revised within an inch of their lives), arranged them by theme, gave them titles and half titles, and sent them off to University Press X, University Press Y, and University Press Z—each of which had a literary lottery. I had no notion of how to contact a commercial publisher, and anyhow a university press seemed more elegant to me, with my graduate school snobbery (or fear of rejection in disguise). Even then New York publishers were phasing out poetry, but it hadn't quite reached the final solution stage yet.

The first collection I submitted was Near the Black
Forest.
Weighted with poems about my discovering my Jewishness in Germany, it contains things I still read with an occasional intake of breath, wondering how did this little
pisher
know that? The following collection, called The Tempter Under the Eyelid, contained the best of the Heidelberg poems, plus a sheaf of new ones about seducing the muse, marrying poetry, chasing after love in fruit and vegetable form. The third collection, Fruits
&
Vegetables, took this tendency even further. It was full of ironic poems about the poet in the kitchen, the poet as housewife, sex, love, feminism, and whiplash womanhood. Freer than the first two—in both form and content—the collection still (mostly) pleases me. I was peeling the onion of myself, and finding in that pungent vegetable my own endlessly shedding soul.

By the time I came to assemble Fruits
&
Vegetables, I was furiously impatient for publication. It seemed that only a published book of poems could give me what I lacked. Little magazines and poetry quarterlies no longer satisfied. I was hungry to be heard by my contemporaries. I believed a volume of poems would change my life. I was fretting to become one of the unacknowledged legislators of womankind, to reach the huge audience of poetry lovers I believed was out there, to lash the world with poetry and bring it to its senses.

How entirely mad these assumptions seem now! I lived for poetry, so I assumed the world did. By now my duo of poetry mentors had become a triumvirate. Louis Untermeyer, that defiant Old Red and indefatigable anthologist, had joined Mark Strand and Stanley Kunitz in my personal pantheon. Louis had seen one of my poems in a dismal quarterly and had written me a letter: “What are you doing in that mass of mediocrity?” It was the literary equivalent of “What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” Soon after, he invited me to his Connecticut house for dinner, and we fell immediately in love—as only a poet of twentysomething can fall in love with an anthologist of eightysomething (and vice versa).

There followed many other literary dinners—dinners with Arthur Miller and Inge Morath, Howard and Bette Fast, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Anderson and Teresa Wright, Arvin and Joyce Brown, Martha Clarke, and any number of other poets, playwrights, novelists, actors, dancers, directors, and Old Reds.

Because of Louis and his wife, Bryna, I believed that Connecticut was a low-key New England version of Mount Olympus. Because of Louis and Bryna, I met the Fasts, who introduced me to my daughter's father. Because of Louis and Bryna, I revised the poetry book yet again.

So I sent the new collection to X, Y, and Z. Through a fluke of fate, which really turned out to be a major synchronistic miracle, I also sent it to Holt, in those days called Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

 

I had come home from Germany the summer before our “tour of duty” ended, to find my grandmother dying. She languished on her real linen sheets, gazing out her sunny West Side window. She was altering her clothes to make them smaller—“so I will have something to wear when I go out again.” But she never went out again. The pancreatic cancer killed her faster than AIDS killed my friend Russell. But we were both denying cancer. Neither of us mentioned the word.

She asked me weakly what I was doing. “Working on my poems,” I said tentatively. Not tentatively at all, she admonished me: “Go see Gracela, Gracie, Grace.” (My grandmother always tripled or quintupled names, often calling me “Erica, Claudia, Nana, Edichka, Kittinka.”)

“Gracela, Gracie, Grace” was the daughter of an old friend of my grandparents', an indomitable Russian lady named Bessie Golding. Grace and I later discovered that Bessie had been my grandfather's lover while my grandmother was waiting in London to be summoned to the Golden Land. This only took eight years.

When Mama arrived in New York, Papa immediately found a proper communist husband for Bessie. Ever after, he described her as “an anarchist, a follower of Emma Goldman, a believer in free love.” In short, the opposite of my proper grandmother, who believed in real pearls, creamy kid gloves with pearl buttons, real linen sheets, real linen tablecloths with monogrammed napkins, duvets with embroidered covers. She also believed in fresh-squeezed orange juice, cod liver oil, soft-boiled eggs with toast “soldiers” (strips to dunk), and English chesterfield coats with velvet collars for little girls. She also believed in leather leggings. But not free love. She definitely did not believe in that.

So off I went with my poems to Gracela, Gracie, Grace (the product of Bessie and the proper communist my grandfather had fixed her up with). I had my three consecutive manuscripts of poems in a tough black morocco spring binder.

The crosstown bus took me near Park and Sixty-eighth, where Grace (who had spent her life in publishing) now worked for
Foreign Affairs
magazine.