Letters to a Young, Middle-Aged, or Geezer Writer, X

In our daily wading through the streams of ideas and language with which we seek familiarity in our chosen craft, there is invariably up there in the stream ahead of us the flashing metaphor of the tail of a dam-building beaver or a speckled trout, seeking a fly to finish off its lunch.  With luck, we catch full sight of these metaphorical notions, these ideas and excellent arrangements of words that, in combination, become the stories we write about.

Because we are writers and, by nature, curious to see how the other ladies and gents in the craft are doing, we read.  We read particular writers because their work has so many flashes of wording or idea.  In some cases our favoring these writers we read is so complex and demanding that we scarcely take the time to articulate what it is about their work that so beckons to us.  It is important to step out of--to continue the metaphor--the streams of our own language and time, going back into the past, going to other places as well.

Aha, I can already hear some of you young and middle-aged writers with a particular complaint:  I only have the one language.  It is not quite fair that you, because of your shall we call it generational access to other languages have an advantage.  You and your brother and sister geezers have heard middle-Eastern and perhaps Asian languages at one time or another.  And some of you, the complaint continues, actually have been instructed in Latin and Greek, making your wading streams and fishing holes and wine-dark seas all the more diverse.

All these arguments may hold some weight.  I did persist in my studies of Spanish from about grade five onward, and I did live in places where I picked up enough awareness of profanity to be able to render racial, social, and sexual insults in a number of tongues, but to make my point here, I'm going to speak of other writers, writers to the north of us and considerably to the east, both groups of which speak an English that is only a cousin to our English.  I start with my favorite, a man who wrote one of what I consider the most splendid, evocative lines that transcend his being English and me an American.  He is the poet, John Keats, dead since 1831.  The line of which I speak is from his poem "The Eve of St. Agnes."  It is, in fact, the third line of the poem:


 ST. AGNES’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
  The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
  The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass...

After the many times I have read the poem, by the time I reach that line, I have no doubt it is cold when, shortly, we meet a lonely herdsman, at his prayers and rosary, his fingers quite numb --quite in keeping with the other creatures of this vision of a dramatic moment.

I am similarly fond of the novels of my Canadian neighbor, Janette Winterson, whose writings about love reveal yet other dimensions of that remarkable state; as well I treasure the mordant wit of her fellow Canadian, Mordecai Richler, and the mischievous, rollicking possibilities of mocking solemnity that find their way in and about the works of Robertson Davies.

And true enough, writing in his native Australian English, the splendid poet Les Murray causes me to stop my reading and glance at the metaphoric stars he has cast in the metaphoric sky.

The urgency I cast upon you is that you not be satisfied with the mere recitation of your own language, rather that you look beyond the boundaries it has set for you, looking for words as hoary and wise as the old trout who has resisted being caught all these years.  There are words and phrases and rascally ideas hiding in the fifteenth century prose and ideations of Geoffrey Chaucer, words and phrases and visions that collide within the situations set before us by a remarkable twenty-first century short story writer, Deborah Eisenberg.   Those collisions of word and sound and nuance are the reasons why our stories must never become the literary equivalent of farm-raised fish; they must swim about in the free waters of risk.

Comfort Poetry

When the world is too much with us, as Wordsworth viewed it, late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers...
and so we turn, much as he did when looking out at a particular field, for a vision of comfort. And so, past comments about comfort food and comfort reading still in my mind, I turn to another of the enduring comforts available to us, comfort poetry, where often the Wordsworth sonnet bubbles up to the top and begins to set things aright.

Begins. You are too absorbed in material things, he seems to be saying, and missing out on the intensity of nature.

What helps the inertia of moving forward is some time spent with Houseman. Terrence, this is stupid stuff. Houseman has long been a cherished comfort, a companion of the road.

Yeats, for the sheer madness of invention and antic, lyric exuberance, breaking over the horizon like a schizoid skyrocket. I went out to the fabled wood because a fire was in my head.

And what comfort in e.e. cummings Damn everything but the circus!

Can your need for comfort fail to be moved by Hopkins?
Glory be to God for dappled things
For skies of couple-color as a brindled cow
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim

And of course more Hopkins yet:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God,
It will flame out like shining from shook foil...

The Eve of St Agnes fpr cpmfort and Cavafy and Anne Sexton and mad, maddening Pound:

Winter is icummen in
Lhude sing goddamn
Winter is icummen in,
What an augue hath my ham.
Skiddeth bus
And sloppeth us,
Sing damn goddamn.

And the argumentative Pound in:
Hang it all, Robert Browning,
There can be but one Sordello...

And the first eighteen of you know what by you know who:
Whan that Aprille with her shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which virtu engendred is the flour...

Comfort, all of it, all of them, and the world is again fecund with the possibility of you...

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

"I hope you recognize me."
"Well, you do look familiar."
"I should hope so."
"I know we've spent time together."
"Oh, yes, long hours."
"It's beginning to come back to me."
"Ah. Thank goodness you didn't mistake me for a student. I don't know if I could have borne that."
"No, no; I sense it was something more--"
"Yes?"
"More intimate."
"Yes. Although--"
"Although?"
"You never really had time for me. Oh, I know how it was at first. You were quite attentive. I felt drawn to you, hoped to spend more time with you until, well, you know."
"How have things been for you lately? I mean, since I last saw you."
"Men. So predictable. You didn't really have time for me and yet you wanted me to be available."
"It was just a sincere interest."
"Heaven protect us from sincere interests. Not at my age, please."
"Listen, I could--we could--Fridays are good days. Maybe even Monday. Yes, for the rest of this month, I have Mondays as well."
"You really don't know who I am, do you? You think I was-- Alright, we'll put it to the test. What's my name?
"It's coming to me. Really."
"I suppose I should be flattered, having you think of me that way. Or maybe I should be insulted. No, neither one. No wonder we didn't work out. You were objectifying me. Ah, what you would have seen if you'd looked a bit deeper."
"Wait, I think I have it! You were the one about the discouraged man. I-I even named you after the first line of a poem. Keats. 'O What can ail thee, knight at arms?' Right?"
"Yes. When we were very close, you called me 'Alone and Palely Loitering.' Said it amused you. Well, it is nice to be seen for one's self."
"Where are you going?"
"Listen, Buster, you gotta work for it. Recognizing me makes points, but--"
"But--"
"You gotta work for it. See you around, kiddo."

Dragons, Dragons Everywhere

Keats had a presentiment.

"WHEN I have fears that I may cease to be," he wrote,
"Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance..."

he was the better part through a sonnet, and if my math was correct, he was only twenty-two. Which meant of course that his presentiment was closing in on him fast. 

In 1821, a scant twenty-six, John Keats was toast, having written some of the most remarkably wonderful lines the English language has yet known, and having ventured such risky business as The Mermaid Tavern, which simply doesn't sound like him. My favorites of his are La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and The Eve of St. Agnes if for no other reason than the plangent line "The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass."

Keats could not have been a pleasant person to have been around while he was alive; he had, as someone I know is fond of saying, issues. But he endures, warts and all, illustrating, I think, the two sides of the artistic coin, the desire to get "it" all down, right off the truck, as it were, and the fear, the numbing fear that the last good idea was literally the last idea, that there would be no more, zilch, circus left town.

By no means a bi-polar person, although certainly given to highs of enthusiasm that could, I suppose, be characterized as manic, I have vivid memories of the seemingly endless tingle of an idea and the mad race to trap it, drive it to a tree as my blue-tick hounds did their quarry, then set about capturing it. I also recall the numbing fear that such creativity as I have is like Net-Flix, they say the next movie is in the mail, but you know better; they've lost your address. Of all the customers they've ever had, you're the one they've dumped.

John Keats would likely have traded away what he could to have had the eleven added years of life Mozart had. And our own American version of Mozart, George Gershwin, scarily had only what seems a scant thirty-seven years.

Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you, shoulder-high...

That's Houseman, actually celebrating in To an Athlete Dying Young those who were gone before suffering such indignities of age as he himself suffered, scarcely able to mount the stairs of his splendid Cambridge apartment, the acclaimed Latin scholar, the accomplished poet.

I now begin to fear as well that I may have introduced a funerary note into this essay, when what I intended was to celebrate that polar tug of not being able to get done all the projects that seem so attractive and the bug-hitting-the-windshield smack of emptiness, the sense of it all having been used, these two polar opposites being infinitely preferable to the drone and lurch of boredom. If there is a hell, it is boredom.

My great favorite, Mr. Clemens of Hannibal, inspires me by having stayed on, as well as by the things he did and the things he tried while he was with us.

Perhaps the greatest lesson of all is to be taken from Sally, who just roused from one of her deep, snorry sleeps to essay dragons or possibly raccoons or coyotes outside. It is long past the time when the squirrels are bedded down, and besides, what menace were they in the first place? 

 Once again I am saved from the menace of a Grendel or worse, and if put in perspective, a dragon or monster is infinitely more scary than not finishing a project or, worse, finishing it but mucking it up.