How to Save Your Own Life (21 page)

 

“Men today are gutless,” she said. “But who can blame them? I'm often terrified myself,” and she laughed like a shower of gravel hitting a window.

She was merry in a hysterical sort of way. She was drinking Stolichnaya vodka on the rocks with little twists of lime and dashing around the room looking for fallen worksheets under the bed, refilling her glass, filling mine, answering the phone. There seemed to be many more people in the room than just the two of us. From time to time, her huge blue-green eyes would fix on mine and she would say, “Forgive me, please, please forgive me for being so hysterical”—and then she would recommence her dashing around.

No forgiveness was necessary. I loved her. There was an openness there, and a vulnerability in those eyes that made you forgive everything. Anyway, I am no stranger to disorder, obsession, fear of hotel rooms. I kept wanting to hug her and tell her it was okay. This was just shortly before Bennett broke his Woodstock news to me—and I must have sensed a fore-trembling in Jeannie's own marital disaster. I wanted to hug her as much for my own sake, perhaps, as for hers.

“I'm blind!” she said, staring at a page of one of her early books. “The words are blurs on the page! They look like Rorschachs! Can you imagine—all these years I've fought for this album, this record, this goddamned Bardic
mishegoss,
and now I'm
blind!
Like Homer! Talk about success phobias! All my shrinks told me I had a will to fail!” Her voice was gravelly, yet somehow resonant. It was the voice of a Sibyl, a Delphic oracle. Where they chewed laurel leaves, she drank Stolichnaya. It was all one. Anything to oil the unconscious.

“You know what I need?” she asked.

“What?”

“A magnifying glass. Do you suppose we could find a magnifying glass around here?”

It was ten at night. Everything was closed. All the art-supply stores and stationery stores were closed. I offered to go out looking for an all-night drugstore, but she wouldn't let me. She rang for the bellman instead.

He arrived—a bright-eyed Irish boy of eighteen or so with a thick brogue and curly hair—and she began flirting with him outrageously, using the desired magnifying glass as the excuse. Would he go out to an all-night drugstore for us, would he try to find a good one, a big one, not one of those crummy little plastic ones? It seemed as if the magnifying glass were a metaphor for something else. And the bellboy picked it up immediately. He was Irish, after all, and a born wordsman. He also had a poet's twinkle in his eye. The Playboy of the Western World—from Central Casting.

“A big solid one, is that what you fancy?”

“Yes,” said Jeannie, laughing, meaning the glass and not meaning it, knowing the transparency of the metaphor and pretending not to know it, magnifying the game as well as the illegible print on the page, delighting in her hysterical Homeric blindness, eyeing the boy (for whom she was
not
blind), and enjoying herself thoroughly.

“I'll be glad to get you one and bring it back to your room later, ma‘am. But right now I can't because I can't get off me work.” The brogue thickened, seeking a tip.

“Do you faithfully promise you'll come back later?” Jeannie asked seductively.

“I faithfully promise,” said the boy, more Irish than ever.

I felt that I had entered a time warp and been transported back to the days when the Algonquin was new. There were no Irishmen in New York anymore. That was television or Hollywood—not reality. But Jeannie had a way of making you feel that you had gone back in time, were living in a legendary age—an age of myths and poets and chthonic deities.

The Irishman bowed out, promising to return later with “a fine big magnifying glass.”

Jeannie made him promise six times not to forget, telling him she was a poet, after all, and had to read her work, batting her eyelashes, flirting, quoting herself until the poor man was quite overcome.

As soon as he left, having promised and promised, she became obsessed again. He would surely forget. She would never be able to read a single word. She would miss this golden opportunity to record her work. She was finished. Her dream of reading for Bardic Records was over and done.

“Why don't I call the desk?” I said brightly. “Surely there must be a magnifying glass somewhere in the hotel.”

“Oh, you are brilliant as well as beautiful—aren't you, Isadora? Aren't you, my love?” She was absurdly, passionately grateful for this obvious suggestion.

Feeling terribly pleased with myself, I sat down on the edge of the bed and called the desk. I was drunk on vodka by then and had a drunk's verbal nerve.

“The Algonquin,” I said rather pompously into the telephone, “is known to be a friend to poets. We have a very famous poet right here in this room—a Pulitzer Prize winner, in fact—and...”

“Say
Nobel
Prize!” Jeannie prompted, in her gravelly voice. “They won't know the difference!”

“A Nobel Prize-winning poet,” I went on, “and a bludgeon —I mean a legend—in her own lifetime ...”

Jeannie laughed her wonderful throaty laugh.

“And we were wondering if, by any chance, you might have a magnifying glass—because, you see, she can't seem to find her glasses, and she has to give a poetry reading and... yes?... you do? Would you send it up? Thank you so much ... room Six-fourteen. Yes. Oh thank you. Thank you.”

Jeannie was delirious. She waltzed around the room with her Pulitzer Prize-winning third book of poems,
Holy Fool's Day
(whose epigraph was: “Yes, to be a fool, that perhaps requires the greatest courage of all”).

The magnifying glass came, the
other
magnifying glass came (with the Irishman), we all drank together, and the next day Jeannie read her poems for Bardic without mishap. By the time the record was out in the stores, it was all that remained of her voice.

 

Two nights after the Algonquin blindness episode, Jeannie came to my house to a party at which I had been instructed to have as many “yummy single men” as I could find.

It was a hastily thrown-together party—because I was leaving for that fatal booksellers' convention in Chicago the next day, but it was gay enough. Bennett and I were always at our best at parties—when other people were there to fill in the vacuum between us. The food was takeout Szechuan, with lots of good cheeses and wine; the guests were mostly literary—with the exception of Holly, who met Jeannie that night and fell hopelessly in love with her; but the one “yummy single man” I found for Jeannie left without offering to take her home. This was not because she wasn't beautiful, but because she had an edge of hysteria everyone could feel. The man in question was pretty flaky himself—and this was clearly a question of his not wanting to fuck someone with more problems than himself. It was the first and only time I've known him to be so prudent. Both his wives were psychotic
and
alcoholic.

Jeannie was in rare form that night. She was (to use a much overused word that happens to be literally true in this case) incandescent. She sat in a straight-back chair in the center of the room (while all the rest of us sat on upholstered ones) and seemed to catch, with amazing grace and dexterity, questions that showered upon her from her enchanted, happily captive audience.

The guests were all fans of Jeannie's and they all wanted to interview her about her methods of composition, her life, her art. She was spectacularly patient with them. Also with me. I had to leave early the next morning and I was panicked about the flight, the public appearances, the lonely hotel room. I have this truly paradoxical gift of looking completely calm and fearless on public platforms, on television, in interviews. But I do all my suffering later, in the hotel room, or on a plane. I'm forever trying to convince my friends and family that I bleed when stabbed—but no one believes me because I look so jaunty.

And then there was the matter of sex. I was troubled about the way the public treated me and I needed Jeannie's advice badly. We live in a world so nutty on the subject of sex that a book of poems which uses it as a persistent metaphor can be confused with an exploitation book written by a former hooker. This disturbed me greatly and Jeannie knew it. I wanted her to tell me how to handle it. I was plagued by the confusion between natural earthiness and licentiousness, the mistaking of openness and lack of pretense for a desire to titillate and shock.

“What do I do when they come up to me and ask me for a zipless fuck?” I asked Jeannie.

“Thank them,” she said firmly.

“Thank
them?” I was incredulous. “Why?”

“Thank them,”
she said again, “because no matter how crude their expression, no matter how vulgar their speech, what they are
really
trying to say—what your fans are
really
trying to express—even when they pinch your ass, even when they send you obscene letters—is that they have been moved. They know no other way to express it but crudely. Yet they are really saying:
I have been moved. You have touched me in a very deep place which I do not dare call my soul, so I call it my

cock
. So thank them and then say, ‘Zip up your fuck until I ask for it!' ”

Jeannie's audience broke up.

“God—what a wonderful line. Can I steal it?”

“Steal—there's no stealing,” Jeannie said passionately. “Your words, my words—language can't be appropriated by one person, one poet. The words belong to all of us. They belong to God, really.” And she stared ahead as if at a vision of Him.

This
is
the reincarnation of the Delphic oracle, I thought.

“Don't you see, Isadora, that there
is no
‘your poem, my poem'? There is no ‘your line, my line'? There is the language, and we are its vessels. We speak for the mouths that can't speak, we speak
their
thoughts—not our own. That's when we're writing, when we're pure. When we're not writing we worry about ego, ego, ego, and the critics talk about ego, ego, ego. Whose by-line? Whose book? How long? Which prize? But the gift for language has no particular by-line-just as a river doesn't care if it stays in a given state. It will flow across boundary lines, down mountains, from one country into another, from one civilization into another. The small minds sit there labeling, arguing about naming things, arguing about by-lines, but the river just keeps flowing. It doesn't care if it's called Jeannie River or Isadora River. It doesn't care if it's masculine in one state, feminine in another. It doesn't care how many copies are bought, or what the reviews are, or if anyone gets paid. All it cares about is flowing. And
you
are its servant. Your
only
job, and I mean
only,
is not to hold up its flow with your silly ego, your worries about approval or disapproval, about by-lines, about stealing this line or that, about second-guessing the public. Your
only
job is to go with the flow. The rest is not your business. Or mine.”

Jeannie's audience was speechless and transfixed.

“You see,” she went on, “the river has more rights than the ego that wants approval. The river has the only rights there are.
Your
big mistake, Isadora, is that you think it matters what the river is called, or who says what about the river. Is it a ‘profound' river? Is it ‘deft and lyrical'? Is it a ‘break-through' river? Who
cares
—as long as it flows. All the rest is foolishness, distraction, jockeying for position and reputation—politics, in short. Your ego has
no
rights
whatsoever
in this matter. Nor do the egos of the critics have any rights whatsoever. The
river
has the only rights there are. And the river corresponds to the rights of the readers. Nobody else has any authority at all over the river—not the author, not the reviewer. It is only river and reader. The reader is like a fisherman, standing in thigh-high boots, in the midst of the rushing stream and catching what he can, trying to see his face in the moving water, trying to reel in his dinner. He has the rights—not you. You must only see to it that nothing dams up or diverts the river. You must let the river flow so he can see his face and possibly even catch his dinner. That's all. That's all there is to say about it.”

 

Before Jeannie left, she took me aside and gave me a slim, oblong package wrapped in tissue paper.

“What is it?”

“Something to remember me by,” she said cryptically.

“Remember you? I'll never forget you as long as I live.”

“Longer,” she said, smiling.

I tore open the package. Inside was a notebook covered in red marble-patterned paper, with a red morocco spine and red morocco corners. On the first endpaper, Jeannie had written (in a hand that seemed to flatten the lowercase letters into submission—but leave the uppercase ones standing taller as a result):

“A notebook,” Jeannie said, “to understand your life—or save it. You could call it,
How to Save Your Own Life.”

“How did you know that was exactly what I needed?” I asked.

“Because I'm a witch,” she laughed, hugging me. “Just make sure you fill up the notebook. Do it for me.”

“I'll mail it to you as soon as I'm through.”

“You may never be through,” Jeannie said.

 

My friends Louise and Robert Miller drove Jeannie back to the Algonquin at midnight, had a nightcap with her—and then wanted to head home.