Pleasant things to hear, though hearing them from him embarrasses me. I soak up the praise but feel obliged to disparage the gift. I believe that most people have some degree of talent for something—forms, colors, words, sounds. Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations too many. Something.
Talent, I tell him, believing what I say, is at least half luck. It isn’t as if our baby lips were touched with a live coal, and thereafter we lisp in numbers or talk in tongues. We are lucky in our parents, teachers, experience, circumstances, friends, times, physical and mental endowment, or we are not. Born to the English language and American opportunity (I say this in 1937, after seven years of depression, but I say it seriously) we are among the incredibly lucky ones. What if we had been born Bushmen in the Kalahari? What if our parents had been undernourished villagers in Uttar Pradesh, and we faced the problem of commanding the attention of the world on a diet of five hundred calories a day, and in Urdu? What good is an ace if the other cards in your hand are dogs from every town?
Sid has picked up a stick from under a tree, and he swings it on thistles and milkweed stalks along the road, causing explosions of fluff and seeds. In a tone so surly that it surprises me, he says, “What if you’re born in Pittsburgh and your father thinks literature is a frill, for women and sissies?”
We walk on in silence. “Is this you?” I ask finally.
Between beheadings of roadside weeds he looks at me sidelong. “My most vivid memory of my father is the total incomprehension— the contempt—in his face when I told him I wanted to major in English literature at Yale. That and the red hairs that sprouted on the backs of his hands. His hands always made me think of some clean, well-manicured strangler. I was afraid of him from the time I learned to walk. That hand with its pink fur was the symbol of power, callousness, philistinism, Presbyterian bigotry, business ruthlessness, everything I didn’t want to be ruled by. Is that what you’d call bad luck, or should I have been stimulated to surmount it?”
Caught off guard, and more than a little incredulous, I say cautiously, “But you did surmount it. You did go ahead and study literature. You’re teaching it.”
“Not with his blessing. I was in economics till he died, then I switched. And sure I’m teaching, but that wasn’t exactly the idea.”
He has taken off his glasses and tucked them into his shirt pocket and buttoned them down. At once he looks less scholarly, more robust, and more cheerful. Many times, later, I saw that change. Glasses, and winter pallor, and his teaching uniform, could make him look like Milquetoast. Outdoors, and with a summer tan, he was somebody else.
Out of the corner of his eye he is studying me. “Your father was a mechanic, Charity says.”
“Yes.”
“Did he have any opinions about poetry? Did he think it’s a frill?”
“I doubt that he ever thought much about it.”
“So he left you alone to develop your gift.”
“He was a hard-working, home-brew-making, ballgame-going, lawn-mowing, decent, unintellectual man. We got along very well, generally. I think he was proud of me. He used to tell me, ‘Do what you like to do. It’ll probably turn out to be what you do best.’ ”
“Ha!” Sid says. “He was a wise man. That’s all it would take.” He swipes at some goldenrod and kicks the litter off the road. “It would have made a lot of difference to me if my father had said anything like that to me. If he’d been proud instead of baffled when I published a couple of poems.”
“You write poetry?”
“I used to. I tried to, never very successfully, never with much encouragement. I was the only son, I was supposed to step into banker’s shoes after a good long humbling training of twenty years or so. I don’t suppose he had any objection to poetry as a hobby. But to study it seriously, make it a career, that simply undid him. So I went into economics. A month after I went back to New Haven for my junior year, he dropped dead. At midterm I switched to literature, and I’ve felt guilty ever since. End of stupid story.”
We walk. Crows flap over. The woods on the hill ahead glow yellow and bronze. “Why is it the end of it?” I ask. “Why feel guilty?”
He ponders that, shrugging the pack basket higher on his shoulders. “I suppose you’re right,” he says. “Maybe it didn’t have to be the end of it. And I did go back to writing poems. I never quit, in fact. I published a few, mostly in little magazines but some in other places—The Nation, Saturday Review. But every time I wrote one I could feel his eyes on me. Every time I published one I’d read it with his eyes, and gag. Then I went to Harvard to graduate school, and you know how that is. You spend so much time filling the cistern that you don’t have any time or strength to do any pumping. Then teaching—other things. I’ve just sort of let it lapse.”
“Recite one.”
But he won’t. I understand that his father is still looking over his shoulder telling him they’re amateur and unworthy of a grown man’s time. He would be overcome with embarrassment to expose them to a real writer, one with the Atlantic’s letter in his pocket. Though I can’t see that poems in The Nation and The Saturday Review of Literature are necessarily lesser things than a story in Atlantic, and would have been very high on myself if I had made those magazines as an undergraduate, I don’t grant him his premise that there is a deficiency in him, kindling or match or both.
Full of abounding conviction that what we elect is not beyond us, I urge him to start writing again, turn it out, not let anyone discourage him. Graduate school, after all, is over; his life is what he wants to make it; he has passed all the examinations required of him. I have the insufferable confidence of a small success.
But he won’t talk about his poems. He turns the conversation to that banal subject, fascinating to non-writers, of why writers write. Ego enhancement, sure. What else? Psychological imbalance? Neurosis? Trauma? And if trauma, how far can trauma go before it stops being stimulating and becomes destructive? Academic pressures to publish, do those mean anything? Not much, we agree. How about the reforming impulse, a passion for social justice?
Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what? Who appoints them as mouthpieces? If they appoint themselves, as they clearly do, how valid is the commission? If Time alone makes masterpieces, as Anatole France thought, then great writing is just trial and error tested by time, and if it’s that, then above all it has to be free, it has to flow from the gift, not from outside pressures. The gift is its own justification, and there is no way of telling for sure, short of the appeal to posterity, whether it’s really worth something or whether it’s only the ephemeral expression of a fad or tendency, the articulation of a stereotype.
But the fact is, you can tell, don’t I think? He quotes me, seriously, the old bromide about a pretty good poem being like a pretty good egg, and asks me if anyone could feel good about laying pretty good eggs.
I can’t help suggesting that he has overlooked an important inducement, and that outside pressures do count. The libraries are full of authentic masterpieces that were written for money. Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing.
“Or a wife’s?”
Again I am astonished. “Don’t tell me Charity is against poetry.”
Swinging his stick, he walks with his head down, brooding at the road. “She wants me to get promoted.”
“Poems will help with that. This is an English Department, after all.”
Sid holds his nose delicately with thumb and finger as if shutting out a bad smell. “Charity’s got a very practical head, a hell of a lot more practica
l than mine. Last year she made a study of all the ranking professors and associate professors—what they’d done to get promoted to tenure. The results were what you’d expect. A scholarly book is best—write The Road to Xanadu and you’re in. Next best is articles, but it takes a lot of them. She cites me DeSerres, who takes a single idea like perfectibility and lays out a whole string of thinkers and writers on that bed, one after the other. Jefferson on Perfectibility. Freneau on Perfectibility. Emerson on Perfectibility. Whitman on Perfectibility. You can practically do it out of the indexes to the collected works.”
“Don’t tell me Charity likes that bullshit better than poetry.”
“No. She just thinks I have to write it for a while. It’s like politics, she says. First you get elected, doing whatever you have to do; then you can vote your principles. Academics have it better than politicians because if you’re a congressman, say, you have to get re-elected every two years, but if you’re a teacher all you need to do is get promoted to associate professor and you’re as safe as a justice of the Supreme Court. They may never promote you from associate to full professor, but they can’t fire you.”
“Why is it so important to be safe?”
He must hear something scornful in my voice, because he looks at me sharply, starts to reply, changes his mind, and says something obviously different from what he has intended. “Charity’s family are all professors. She likes being part of a university. She wants us to get promoted, and stay.”
“Yeah,” I say. “All right, I can see that. But if I were in your shoes I might feel like utilizing the independence I’ve already got, rather than breaking my neck to get promoted into a kind I might not like so well.”
“But you aren’t in my shoes,” Sid says. It sounds like a mild rebuke, and I shut my mouth. But after a few seconds he adds, squinting my way, “Ask Charity about the fate of poets in this English Department. They’ve got just one, William Ellery, and he’s a pariah.”
“He’s got tenure.”
“Not because he’s a poet. Because he’s an Anglo-Saxon scholar.”
“I hate to think you’ll have to write articles about Floyd Dell on Perfectibility for six or seven years before you can write poetry again.”
“That’s about it.”
“Well, good luck,” I tell him. “Count on my reading you when tenure has brought you independence.”
Laughing, he shakes his head. Ahead of us Charity and Sally have climbed through a fence and started up a hill crowned with yellow trees. We follow, saving our wind for the climb.
When we arrive, our wives are clearing a space of limbs and nut hulls. We spread a blanket. Charity opens the basket and lays out fried chicken wrapped in wax paper, a wooden bowl of ready-mixed salad, French rolls already buttered, a jar of artichoke hearts, celery sticks, fruit, cookies, napkins, paper plates. And our Jonathan apples, to make us feel we have contributed. Sid and I lie on the ground and crack hickory nuts between rocks. The view is spreading, bronzed, conventionalized like a Grant Wood landscape. The air smells of cured grass, cured leaves, distance, the other sides of hills.
Charity looks up, as brilliant as a flash from a heliograph. “We’re ready. Sid? ”
He rises promptly. His arm goes into the hamper and brings out a sodden sack. Inside is a wet towel with ice chips in it, and inside the ice chips is a magnum of champagne. (I have never seen one, but I am literary, I recognize it.) Abruptly he is manic, reviving the shouting conviviality of the night before. His excess leaves me faintly uncomfortable. “Celebration!” he cries. “The day of Jubilo!”
He untwists the wire, the cork explodes up into the hickory leaves, he shakes the bubbles off his hand. “I know it’s show-off to blow the cork. Experts do it with a discreet sigh of gas. Well, better overstimulated champagne than no champagne.”
We hold up our Dixie cups and he fills them. With the enormous bottle in one fist, he raises his cup with the other. “What an occasion! How marvelous to be in on it! We salute you at the beginning of a great career.”
“Wait,” I protest, and Sally says, “No, no, no! It’s your day, it’s your fourth anniversary. Here’s health and happiness forever and ever.”
Stalemate. We stand with our uplifted cups throwing bubbles above their rims, and our smiles are uncertain but our intentions honorable and unselfish. After a moment Charity saves us. “It’s all our day, yours and ours too. Here’s to all of us.”
Sitting on our blanket among twigs and yellow leaves and dusty blue asters, we sip what is probably the first champagne that either Sally or I ever drank, and are promptly refilled, and refilled again. In the circumstances, it doesn’t take much to exhilarate me. So I am caught in the wrong mood when Sid, looking down as if with distaste into his cup, repeats the toast with variations. “To all of us. May we all survive the departmental axe.”
“What are you talking about?” I say, somewhat raucously. “I’m cannon fodder, I’m a nine-month wonder. But if anybody’s in, you are.”
“Don’t kid yourself. Rousselot was inquiring delicately just the other day what I’m working on. By the time they vote in April or May you’ll have a bibliography as long as your arm, and I’ll have my little undergraduate poems.”
Our faces, I am sure, reflect our degrees of understanding of what is going on. Sally knows nothing about any poems, and is only curious and interested. I know about them but don’t believe they are as amateur as he suggests, or that Charity is really opposed to his writing them. Charity doesn’t know what Sid may have said to me but knows he must have said something. Her eyes flick from his face to mine and back to his.
Sitting cross-legged with the salad bowl in her lap, she makes a sudden, impatient face and bends far over the bowl and straightens up again. “Oh, bosh, Sid! Have some confidence in yourself ! You’re a splendid teacher, everybody says so. Go on being that. If they demand publications, write some. Just take it for granted you’re going to be promoted, and they won’t have the nerve not to.”
At me she smiles with all her vividness and urgency, a smile meant to tell me that my luck with the Atlantic has hit him, and she knows it, and knows I know it, and wants me to know that it is nothing serious. It’s not your fault, she seems to say. If he sounds discouraged it’s only because your letter started him thinking about us.
Troubled that what started as a celebration has begun to sound tense, I hold out my Dixie cup for more champagne. “Let us be unignorable,” I propose.
“Exactly!” says Charity. “You have to take your life by the throat and shake it.” She shakes a double handful of air, strangling it, and we all laugh. We sidle away from Sid’s anxiety and whatever it is between him and Charity. We fill our plates with chicken and salad and rolls, we eat with our eyes contentedly grazing on the countryside, in shade as temperate as the air of Eden, colored gold by hickory leaves. And then, as Charity rises to her knees to help us to more, she freezes, tilts her head listening, and makes a shushing motion with her free hand. “Oh, listen. Listen!”
A sound like a big crowd a good way off, excited and shouting, getting closer. We stand up and scan the empty sky. Suddenly there they are, a wavering V headed directly over our hilltop, quite low, beating southward down the central flyway and talking as they pass. We stay quiet, suspending our human conversation until their garrulity fades and their wavering lines are invisible in the sky.
They have passed over us like an eraser over a blackboard, wiping away whatever was there before they came.
“Oh, don’t you love them!” Charity says. “Sometimes when we stayed late in Vermont, or went up late for the color, we’d see and hear them like that, coming over Folsom Hill. Someday you’ve got to visit us there. We’ve got all kinds of room. How about next summer?”
“Next summer,” I tell her, “if they’ll let me, I’ll be teaching summer school, and maybe cleaning out steam tables at the hospital in the evenings, and driving a cab nights. Come spring we will have a little hostage to fortune.”
/> “Summer after next, then.”
“Summer after next I may be wearing out shovels for the WPA.”
“Pooh,” she says. “Sid’s right, by then you’ll be famous. Please plan on coming. You can write all day except for mealtimes and picnic times and swim times and walk times.”
Sally’s big eyes, liquid, shiny with champagne and feeling, touch mine, and she shakes her head as if in disbelief. The hickories move in the light wind, and a nut thumps down. “Don’t extend any invitations you don’t want accepted,” Sally says. “It’s dangerous to wave raw meat around tigers.”
“We never invite if we don’t mean it,” Sid says. He looks into his Dixie cup and looks back up as if surprised at what he found there. The future, maybe. “God, how marvelous that would be! That’s a standing invitation. Anytime you can, for as long as you can.”
In that fine place, in the ripened Indian summer weather, those two once again choose us. In circumstances where smaller spirits might let envy corrode liking, they declare their generous pleasure in our company and our good luck. What we felt last night when we fell into a laughing bearhug and fused our frosty breaths outside their door, we feel again on this placid hill. We have been invited into their lives, from which we will never be evicted, or evict ourselves.
But I have become aware of unexpected tensions in their relationship, and to my own surprise have begun to feel a little protective of a man whom only last evening I thought the luckiest and most enviable man alive.
Another afternoon. We are skating on Lake Monona, just off our snow-mounded wall. Silvery air, slatey sky, spidery clinging flakes of snow, red runny noses, a cold wind, laughter. January, probably; I have the feeling that Christmas has passed. The girls are both noticeably pregnant. Sally is being extremely cautious, for ice skating was not her most natural sport in Berkeley, and she is afraid of falling and doing harm to the child she carries.