[sic]: A Memoir (22 page)

There’s a lot of midwestern humor in there, but who is this editor, this woman who wanted to see his novel? What novel?

Interesting that he was reading Rushdie, I wonder which one. And the final page:

Not long after he finished writing this notebook, my parents did separate. I was living in Europe. My brother decided to go to college in Los Angeles. My father asked him if he wanted a ride. Sure, my brother said. So one fall morning they got up early and threw some luggage in the car and climbed in and pulled out of the driveway, and my brother asked my father if he’d said good-bye to our mother, and he didn’t respond, and off they drove to California; and my parents never saw one another again. My father lived in various places out West—for a while, in a motel on Route 66; for a time in a really tiny town somewhere called Lodi (not the one in California); for a while on the banks of Lake Powell, a stunning reservoir on the Utah/Arizona border. The dust was bad for his lungs; he wasn’t eating well; he smoked and drank coffee and wrote nonstop. He said he didn’t commit himself to writing as a youth because he felt he hadn’t accumulated enough experiences; but that by the time he tried to catch up, he had accumulated too much experience. He wrote mainly poetry, but also plays and essays, including an essay on the question of pain, also a theme, obviously, of this thing I’ve been writing. I only visited him once there. We had a great time, doing nothing, really, but talking. He rarely drank. For some reason he had a good bottle of Riesling sitting there, but he didn’t have a corkscrew, so we opened the bottle with the aid of a hammer and an awl. We sipped the wine outside, watching the desert turn itself from a desert in the daytime to a desert in the nighttime.

Was this when I was living in Paris? I guess. I forget the chronology—it gets confusing, because I took a year off from college to go live in Paris, and then I came back to finish college, and it was during part of that year that my dad came back to Chicago and we shared an apartment. Even then, my parents didn’t see each other—just ninety miles away. And then I moved back to Paris, so I guess it was then that he moved to Los Angeles, not that it really matters.

There’s a story about a famous filmmaker I heard or read somewhere, and I don’t know if it’s true. He sat his wife and family down and explained to them that he loved them very much, but he also loved film, and if it ever became a conflict, he would have to choose film, and he loved them and therefore wanted them to know that. And my dad would often quote Yeats’s quote about the choice between “perfection of the art and perfection of the life.” To me, my father was one of the most emotionally well-balanced people I’ve ever known—not that he didn’t have his moods, obviously—but overall he was one of the happiest people I’ve known. My brother, however, thinks that he was profoundly unhappy because he felt creatively unfulfilled. Certainly the question of whether to publish was on his mind—the strength of this preoccupation, as evident in the notebook which purports to be about junk mail but swiftly turns into a meditation on this subject, was a surprise to me. We didn’t spend a lot of time talking about the problem of balancing life and art, whether or not to publish, to submit stuff; whether it’s important to publish, to be recognized, et cetera. We spent most of the time talking about actual books. (We talked about philosophy sometimes too, especially when I was flirting with getting seriously into philosophy for a period of time in college that lasted maybe eight months. He was excited intellectually by philosophy but it wouldn’t stick, he said; the words had no “weight.”)

I had been talking before about the task of properly positioning the self that suffers within the other selves; Klee had wondered if he’d given the proper weight to eroticism in his work, as a whole. I guess one of the things that comes up when I think about my father is, what’s the proper position of art within a life?

A lifelong smoker, he acquired emphysema, and this mixed with other ailments that come up with aging. He loved Los Angeles, which might seem paradoxical since he might seem like he was an irascible aesthete, but he really wasn’t. Then there were health crises off and on in varying degrees of seriousness, but things always seemed to resolve themselves. But then one day I called him and—for some reason—I transcribed part of the conversation, and it turned out to be the last time we spoke. I’ve already quoted a part of this but it bears repeating.

[My father:] I’m just sitting on the edges of the ends of life, feeling no pressure to do anything, just the visual beauty of nature without worrying about what’s going on inside. The real mystery is in the science and the physics; that’s the mystery of life, in my opinion. The DNA and the molecular and the chemistry and the biology is just absolutely extraordinary, the intricacy of it just blows me away; the way it evolved.

[Me:] What about art?

[My father:] Art, I think, is an attempt of man’s conscious mind to make his own design, and he tries it in engineering, to see if it will work, and I mean he makes a rocket ship that will fly? Well, what the hell, the katydid does that with one arm tied behind his back and does it with painting and so on, nature is so good at that there’s simply no comparison. Ransom
*
said that there’s no reason, there’s no way we can improve it, except maybe a little with our arts, but I don’t know if there’s much of an improvement. I mean, the most scoffed-at remark in all of literature, Joyce Killmer’s—“I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree”—is the most profound thing ever said about art, because that is absolutely true. From any point of view, whether interior or exterior. And the thing is all built in. It just happens. You know how hard most of the time we have to work for anything good at all in our stuff, right? Meanwhile nature’s just throwing this stuff out.

[Me:] That’s a very good approach, it’s being intellectually honest, yet . . . It’s honest in both ways. Envious, astonished by the whole thing, and yet somewhat skeptical, wondering if it’s a virtue or not.

[My father:] I find your writing also often takes some very interesting self-saving turns! (Laughs.)

[Me:] Have you read David Foster Wallace’s essay on tennis? He played when he was younger. He said Stefan Edberg’s hobby, apparently, is staring at walls.

[My father:] Gee, that’s great. He’s my kind of guy.

He meant Edberg, not Wallace. He never read Wallace. And funny that he mentioned my “writing,” because I hadn’t written. I wonder what he was talking about. When we had that conversation I had already bought a ticket for LA, was due to leave in a couple of weeks; a few days later my brother—who was living out there—called and said—hmm, this looks kinda bad. And I said—should I fly out now? And he said—well, wait. And then an hour later my brother called back, and he was gone.

We cleaned up the apartment, pretty much spotless, an oxygen tank, nothing on the walls except for the poster of Favre, and books and reams and reams of paper, poems endlessly redone, hundreds of versions of the same poem (that was his problem, maybe—didn’t have the need to finish), and the manuscript in the typewriter, midsentence, paused, like Welles. My brother and I split up the books and the manuscripts and my gift to him—the
Waste Land
facsimile—was returned to me with an inscription on the frontispiece that reads thusly:

This book was given to me by my son Joshua. That is why I value it. Eliot is important to me (and important, not just to me) but more important is this book because it was given to me by my son Joshua, who is more important to me than Eliot.

Eliot is a great poet (I think) but Joshua is a great son and it is greater to have him as a son than to have Eliot, great poet tho’ he is.

I don’t, in fact,
quite
know what to make of Eliot—is he genuine or not? Something spurious about him, devious and/or at least elusive, but I have
no
doubt about my son Joshua, absolutely genuine.

So while my mind goes back & forth on Eliot, it doesn’t on Josh; my love for him and his for me is firm and committed.

Eliot has a world of admirers who love him (and hate him) with varying degrees, so that my admiration for him is not special and unique. But no one loves Joshua more than I do. I have a claim on him no one can equal. What a great boy. What a great son. What a great man to be.

Thanks a lot for the book, this Eliot, Joshua. This makes Eliot’s value to me, at times uncertain, often fluctuating, more certain, because you gave it to me.

7/92

P.S. I agree with you: Pound took out some good stuff.

He’s referring to a few passages we had talked about. He annotated the book, so we have the urtext and Eliot’s corrections and Pound’s corrections and comments and my dad’s comments. “My thoughts in a tangled bunch of heads and tails”: Pound took it out but my father wrote “great—exact.” Pound excised a Prufrockian parenthetical “Perhaps it does not come to very much” on grounds that it was “Georgian” and my dad wrote, “Why take out just because Georgian?” And in the fourth chapter, the one that Pound radically truncated, we have a section Eliot called “The Death of a Saint Narcissus,” but obviously a description of Saint Sebastian:

So he became a dancer to God.

Because his flesh was in love with the burning arrows

He danced on the hot sand

Until the arrows came.

As he embraced them his white skin surrendered
itself to the redness of blood, and satisfied him.

Now is he green, dry and stained

With the shadow in his mouth.
³⁰

And my father writes in pencil next to this, “an extremely fine poem, extremely erotic.” And obviously discovering this beautiful letter to me, after he had died, was very moving, and the letter tells us another thing about positioning: the positioning of art in life.

A very generous thing to do, to write that letter. Since his death, he’s appeared in three dreams, all related to my diagnosis. (Jeez, dreams again. Maine-born Carroll Terrell, that late, eminent Ezra Pound/Stephen King scholar, wrote that Yeats’s “whole work, early and late, is so filled with dreams that assigning a specific source can only be idle speculation.”)
³¹
When I felt the thing in my neck, I taught my music history class at Columbia and then went over to health services in John Jay Hall, where Lorca had lived when he was the poet in New York. A male nurse checked it out and said don’t worry about it, it’s just a virus, and for some reason I didn’t think so; I asked for a second opinion. So another white coat came in, a woman this time, and said, yeah, you should get that checked out right now, so I went directly across town, to the East Side, where an ear-throat-nose guy stuck a needle right into my neck. (He said, don’t worry, it’s so tiny it’s painless, and he was absolutely right, and that was kind of cool, to know that; Caroline was into needle play and occasionally that would freak me out a little, so it normalized that side of things.) And he said, come back in a week, we’ll have the results.