Swann (28 page)
And so I am afraid, Book Browser, that I cannot be of help to you, nor you to me.
Respectfully yours,
Frederic Cruzzi
November 16
Dear Mr. Cruzzi,
My name is Sarah Maloney, and I’m a fellow Swannian. Recently I’ve had a phone call from Willard Lang, chairman of the Steering Committee for the Swann Symposium, saying you had declined the committee’s invitation to be our keynote speaker. I can tell you that we are all downcast at this news.
I’m writing to see if I can possibly persuade you, instead, to take part in an informal question-and-answer session concerning the original publication of
Swann’s Songs
by your own Peregrine Press. This hypothetical event might take place on the second or third day of the meetings, after the academic stiffness has been leached from our bones. Those of us in the Swann industry can endlessly speculate, but you’re the one who midwifed the original text and the only one to lay eyes (and hands) on the manuscript—which I understand was grievously lost some years ago. What a tragedy.
Speaking selfishly, I’d like very much to meet you and hear your impressions of Mary Swann. To me she remains maddeningly enigmatic, not only her work but herself. How did all those words get inside her innocent head? Perhaps you know. I think you may. I hope you’ll tell me. Please reconsider and come to the symposium. We can talk and talk.
With sincere good wishes,
Sarah Maloney (Ms.)
November 26
My dear Ms. Maloney,
Your charming letter arrived today. (Forgive me for suspecting that you make rather a specialty of charming letters. Certainly you flatter me with your suggestion that
I understand the secret of Mary Swann’s power; in fact, I am as baffled as the next person by her preternatural ability to place two ordinary words side by side and extract a kilowatt, and sometimes more, much more, from them.) At any rate, I am both seduced and persuaded by your invitation, and feel this crisp fall morning decidedly anticipatory—though I will probably regret my decision in a week’s time.
As for my possible contribution, perhaps it would be useful to those at the symposium if I were to talk for a few minutes in a generalized “midwifery” way about how I came to know Mrs. Swann, though I expect the story of her bringing me her poems on that long-ago snowy day is fairly well known. I might also describe briefly, if it would be of interest, the odd clutter of paper, or “manuscript” as you call it, on which the poems were written. I’m not at all sure myself that I would call such a heap of scraps a
manuscript
, and I cannot agree with you that the loss of it is “tragic.” (As a matter of fact, my late dear wife used it for wrapping up some fish bones after a particularly fine meal of local whitefish, but I believe that story too is well documented.)
Furthermore, as an old newspaper man, rather than a professional scholar, I may have rather less reverence than you for the holiness of working papers. If you are familiar with Urdu poetry, or indeed with the oral tradition of most of the world’s literature, you will know that this cherishing of original manuscripts is a relatively new phenomenon, and one that I find puzzling. A manuscript is, after all, only a crude representation of that step between creative thought and artefact, and might just as usefully be employed as kindling for a fire or in the wrapping of fishbones.
Frankly, the endless checking of one text against another, this tyranny of accuracy that rules the academic world, is all rather tiresome. I have found that it is sometimes better to look at the universe with a squint, to subject oneself to a deliberate distortion, and hope that out of the ‘jumbled vision, or jumbled notes if you like, will fall the accident that is the truth. So please, Ms. Maloney, don’t “grieve” for the loss of a few shreds of paper. As you surely know, there are other things to spend your grief upon.
Yours,
F. Cruzzi
P.S. May I compliment you on your handwriting—the almost engraved quality of your uppercase C’s in particular, and the deep whimsical, old-fashioned way you indent your paragraphs—very pretty indeed.
December 7
My dear Freddy,
Let me say first that you have nothing, nothing, nothing to reproach yourself for. I am not, as you suggest in your note, offended, and I am sure Hildë and my own dear Barnie, too, would think it the most natural thing in the world. You are not ready yet for mellow avuncularity, and why should you be? I was only a little startled, that’s all—it’s been so long. Oh, my dear, I am finding this difficult to put down on paper. What I know is that words are rather pathetic at times and that what we need most is to reach past them and touch each other. That’s all that happened, such a little thing, but what happiness it brought me, though you seem to have thought otherwise.
Please come on the 17th. I am going to do partridges with that sauterne sauce you’re forever talking about, and with luck there’ll be strawberries in the market.
Yours,
Pauline
December 10
My sweet Pauline,
I will be there, bearing a walnut cake, just this minute out of the oven and ready for its brandy bath.
Until then,
F.
December 11
Dear Mr. Cruzzi,
You probably won’t remember meeting me at the Library Association meeting a few years back, when you were the guest speaker. We had a little visit afterwards. Maybe it will jog your memory if I tell you that I am the librarian (part-time) out in Nadeau and that I was a great friend of Mary Swann’s before she passed away. Wouldn’t she be surprised how famous she’s got to be? I hope there’s some way she knows.
Not so long ago I received an invitation to her symposium in Toronto, and last week I had a nice little note from Professor Lang saying you would be coming too and would be giving one of the speeches, in fact.
To get to the point, Professor Lang suggested that if I was driving down to Toronto maybe I could give you a ride, but the problem is, crazy as it seems, I’ve never learned to drive a car, and so I’ll be taking the bus into Kingston on Monday morning (Jan. 3) and then getting
the 10:00 A.M. train. Whenever I go into Toronto, which isn’t half as often as I wish I could go, I take the train. Once I took a bus all the way and didn’t like it half as much and got bus sick part way there to make matters worse.
This may seem awfully forward of me, but I thought maybe we could take the train together and keep each other company on the way. We could meet at the train station in Kingston about 9:30 or so, in plenty of time to buy our tickets, unless we get them earlier, which I always do. So as you’ll know who I am, I’m five feet, four inches, and people say I’m on the thin side these days due to being a bit under the weather of late, though I’m bound to pick up before too long. I’ve got glasses with blue-grey frames and I’ll be wearing a brown suede coat if there’s no snow, but if it’s snowing, as it probably will be, I’ll be in my old down-filled blue coat with a grey fur collar (just artificial).
By now you’ve probably made other arrangements for getting there, so please don’t think my feelings will be hurt if I get there (the train station) and you’re not there. It was just that Professor Lang asked if I could drive you down, but as I explained, I don’t drive a car. Which is ridiculous living out in the country like I do. But anyway, I love the train, every minute of it, especially the part along the lake.
Sincerely,
Rose Hindmarch
P.S. Merry Christmas
December 18
Dear Ms. Hindmarch,
I expect Lang wrote and told you I was elderly and infirm and muddled and needed looking after, all of
which is true or partly true, and so it is with gratitude that I accept your kind invitation to be your travelling companion.
I too love the train, especially at this time of the year. We can gaze out the window and you can tell me all about your good friend Mary Swann, whom I am sorry to say I met only briefly. It has been some years since I’ve passed through Nadeau, but I have been told that the local museum has a special Mary Swann display.
I send you best wishes for good health and for a happy Christmas.
Yours,
F. Cruzzi
P.S. Since we’ve met before, you’ll recognize me easily, though I am somewhat more tottery than I was when we talked at the Library Association.
Everyone is familiar with the Persian poet Rashid and what he has written about the power of dreams, how if all the dreams dreamt by men on a single random night were gathered into a bundle and hurled into the early morning sky, the blaze of it would:
…put to shame
The paltry shrivelled,
Fires of the sun.
When Frederic Cruzzi’s wife, Hildë, was alive, the two of them occasionally made gifts to each other of their dreams as they moved about in their large old-fashioned kitchen preparing breakfast. Hildë, rhythmically buttering toast,
described wild animals, brightly coloured food, sudden nakedness, and misplaced objects, objects that remained stubbornly unidentified.
Cruzzi himself, ever the editor, was sometimes guilty of polishing his disjointed dreams for Hildë’s benefit, giving them a sense of shape and applying small, elegant, decorative touches. (There are many modes of estrangement, the poet Rashid has observed, and elegance is one.) Cruzzi’s dreams, as conveyed to Hildë, were filled with flowers, with long healing conversations, with the whimsical or heroic defiance of gravity. A lack of linearity lent charm, and still does. He is forever in his dreams bumping his forehead against some surprise of texture or weather or, even at age eighty, watching his hands, which are the symbols, the messengers, of his whole self, travelling across a landscape of undiscovered female bodies, breasts, clefts, thighs, ankles—and all these mountains and vales pinned down by the patient cobalt eyes of his wife, Hildë.
Ever since her death a year ago—a single cataclysmic explosion of the cranial artery—Cruzzi has kept his dreams to himself. He would sooner plunge his hand into boiling water than bore his good friends with his dreams. (Whereas these same friends approach the subject of
their
dreams rather frequently, and whenever they do Cruzzi knows he’s in for a dull time of it.)
Nevertheless, his dreams continue, and are, if anything, more varied, more vivid, more Dadaist in their narration, and more persistent in their reaching after odd tossed chunks of history. Their pursuit of him into old age amazes him, and he is perplexed always by their utter uselessness, sometimes comparing their substance to the magically soft, recurring skin of lint he peels from the steel mesh in the door of the electric clothes dryer. (There’s a certain pleasure
in this peeling, he thinks; but to what use can the clean, gathered handful of fluff be put?)
The idea that dreams are the involuntary poetry of the mind appeals to him, but he rejects it. He is also by nature skeptical of that theory that dreams accumulate and become part of the making and unmaking of the universe, and equally distrusts the notion that dreams exorcise guilt or fear or mend the imagination. He doesn’t know what he believes, and remains as baffled as the poet Mary Swann (cosmic cousin to the great Rashid) who felt herself tormented by:
What seems
A broken memory that tears
At whitened nerves
Like useless dreams
The night preserves
In sealed undreamed-
Of jars.
Early in September, or perhaps late in August, after a short afternoon’s walk in the woods that began behind his house, Cruzzi fell asleep in an armchair by an open window, and in his first breath caught a glimpse of his mother’s white hand attempting to open a bottle of mineral water and, after making a struggle of it, handing it to her husband. In the foreground, a red cloth is spread on the grass, a picnic is in progress, and the sleeping Cruzzi catches with his second breath the round Muslim face of his father—soft, slightly overripe, as smooth and hairless as a pear, and made even rounder by a wonderful spreading candour. How they smile, the two of them! The radiance of their smiles forms the melody that keeps this dream aloft, even as a fly buzzes in Cruzzi’s ear, threatening to whisk the picnic cloth out of
sight and overturn the bottle of mineral water. The smiles of the two picnickers are directed upward into the leaves of a small dusty tree, at each other, at the rippling water poured from the bottle, and at Cruzzi himself who is somehow there and not there.
Walking through this dream, and through all Cruzzi’s dreams, are the stout, sun-browned legs of his wife, Hildë. Mahogany is how he thinks of those legs, solid, polished lengths of hardwood between walking shorts and laced boots, legs brought to full strength on her annual hiking tours in the Appalachians or along the Bruce Trail. The roundness of Hildë’s brown thighs on the picnic cloth overwhelms the multiplicity of other forms and gestures and brings a whimper to Cruzzi’s groin, breaking through the fragile arrangement of sandwiches and fruit and pulling him slowly and painfully to consciousness. In October, on that particular Saturday night when clocks are officially turned back one hour, Cruzzi sleeps soundly, thanks to a nightcap of warm whisky. It is almost as though the fibres still strong beneath his aged, flaking skin are fused to those other fibres that make up the smooth cotton sheets of his bed.
But toward morning, perhaps because of the dislocation of the single unaccommodated hour, his sleep is invaded by violence. The violence comes in the form of a voice that achieves a loudness rare in dreams. It goes on and on, booming against the tight weave of the sheets, and Cruzzi, sleeping, his hands curled into fists, struggles to hear what the voice is saying, but can hear only a roar of anger and injury. It is his own voice, of course, and this makes his inability to distinguish words all the more frustrating. An oldfashioned clock strikes the hour and announces that the floor—for a patterned floor has suddenly established itself
in the void—is tilting dangerously. Hildë is running, her strong brown legs frightened, trying to keep her balance; but the voice, loud enough now to tighten a muscle in Cruzzi’s shoulder and bid him turn on his side, threatens to pull down the floor along with the slippery tiled walls and the beautiful ceiling tracked with blue-black hieroglyphics, which, because of their astringent colour and configuration, remain maddeningly unreadable.
