A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (22 page)

Struck by my making telephone calls to New Jersey upon two or three occasions in his presence, he wondered why and to whom. My way of life with relatives seemed strange to him.

A girl he knew had read his palm and he showed me what she had pointed out to him: right hand and left hand very different; and I saw and touched the indentation of a wedding ring, deep between calluses. Why wasn’t he wearing it?

“How dare you and John find each other?” he wanted to know. He envied us our friendship.

One night he inquired whether authorship didn’t embarrass me, when surely all the great beliefs and profound experiences had been dealt with by the classics, the Bible and the Greeks and the Romans and their direct successors. “Life isn’t all greatness and profundity,” was my answer. Surely the first principle of literature is to behold in nature and human nature little things that the ancients had not encountered or had not noticed or cared about. When he had asked to come and visit us he sometimes made us wait, which John especially resented. Once when he had done so, he calmly explained that, on his way, he found himself half inclined to stand us up; he stopped at a bar and had two drinks while thinking it over. Apparently he regarded us as a temptation, a strong temptation. The next time that happened, John, his Irish eyes glittering, his happy voice suddenly inflamed, upbraided him. He immediately reopened the door through which he had just come and sprang down the stairs into Fifty-ninth Street. I never saw him again, except for the dream that prompted these minutiae of memory.

The dream itself was not in the least dramatic or circumstantial. It consisted, in a doorway of mine, on a threshold of mine, of a motionless standing figure and a silent face. Save for something rapturous in the turn of his neck, the lift of his chin, the tousle of his hair, I could not have identified him. I saw him by his own light. What I saw, or imagined, was a life turning on its own hinges, exalted for the time being, or in remembrance of the time, all about nothing; and as it faded upward in my morning arousal it was not an emotion, it was a moral or a lesson.

As follows: Again and again one is told, and very likely one tells oneself, how fortunate and enjoyable it is to be at peace in one’s psychology, single-minded, wholehearted. Then and there between stuporous slumber and hot daybreak, with the above details of personality, inconsequential but congruous, the meaning seemed to be the opposite. There the lost friend or non-friend stood, having blushed to come, refrained from coming, scrupled and delayed, but come anyway. One aspect of himself, after a struggle, had surrendered to another aspect; at least there was a truce. What he had been thinking of as a weakness of character, he suddenly recognized as strength of temperament; and it thrilled him. Two characters could scarcely be less alike than he and I, and yet this was something that in making certain moves in my own life, transitions of fact, or changes of heart, I too had found thrilling.

And, believe it or not, it took me the better part of three hours to ponder this and to note down my findings and musings; useless scribble which I afterward threw away. Perhaps its use has been to lead to the pages that I am now writing and re-writing, twenty years having passed. Verbalization, even unsuccessful or partial, is conducive to memory.

The routine of life with my aged mother in those bygone days was that, having bathed and dressed and put up her beautiful hair, she would ring a little bell, which was amplified and conveyed from her end of the house to my room upstairs by means of electric wiring; whereupon I would go down and breakfast with her. And that morning as I gathered up my neglected, postponed Yeats notebooks, that bell seemed to tinkle with guilt, not just because I was not quite ready to join her—it signified time and energy wasted, caprice and deviation, bad enough in life, worse in literary work.

I paused on the stairway where there was a window at elbow-height, and gazed at the beginning of another day of burning heat and desiccation; the kind of weather that probably would have settled it, if it had not been settled anyway, as to our being dispossessed and inundated, in short order. Already, in Somerset County and Middlesex County and Union County, I heard someone say, it had become forbidden to water anyone’s garden.

Farewell, I said to myself. Farewell, large golden lawn! Here and there, where my housekeeper’s brother had cut it too short, a week or a fortnight ago, the sun had burned it to the roots; it looked as dead as a mineral or a metal, golden in that sense. No breeze blew, I observed, except in one small tree in the hedgerow. But it was not an exception, there was no breeze: that was the mulberry tree, with avid birds breakfasting on the white fruit, shaking the small stiff branches.

Closer to the window stood an aged crab-apple tree. Farewell to it also, I thought, noticing that it had one broken bough with dead leaves hanging loose. Perhaps, after breakfast, I would bring the long rickety sectional ladder and the dull saw out of the garage, and remove that bough. There were also several disgusting tents of gypsy caterpillars that wanted burning.

At that moment our male catbird of the last couple of years, whom we recognized and loved because he had two or three notes more than the regulation song of his family, came dartingly around the garage and perched there. I wanted him to eat some of the disgusting caterpillars; he did not. He sang, so ecstatically that when he got to his high notes, he threw his head all the way back and pointed his bill straight up to the stricken blue sky. Upon which I shed tears, and it occurred to me that whereas my sadness had been building up for some time about the drought and the drowning of our valley and uncertainty as to our home (possibly several homes) in the years ahead, what had actually triggered that little moisture in my eyes and on my cheeks was love of the bird, delight in its freakish bit of song, tears of joy, not altogether unlike Pascal’s tears!

It was in early September that the brook entirely ceased. I remember standing on the lawn, amid the above-mentioned colorless reflections from the moribund grass, like moonlight intensified, and suddenly I noticed the hush, all around the house, in the entire space amid the trees. For just a second, with a twinge of hypochondrical fear, I fancied myself afflicted with sudden deafness. But it was the opposite of deafness; I was hearing a combination of small sounds that, normally, a general auditory fabric hid from my ears: sighing of the half-dead sod with my feet weighing on it; once in a while, slight thuds of apples falling; and tiptoeing movements of unnoticeable tiny insects.

The missing generality was the brook: its gurgle and foaminess over the stones, its silky rush where there were muddy passages, and the precipitation of its slight waterfall into its dim pool. Having lived near it for twenty years I almost never consciously listened to it. Now, what I was hearing was the vacancy left behind, the bereavement.

I wandered over and looked down into the pool, deeper than I had known it to be: a big mud hole with steep sides of slimy soil and only a foot, or a foot and a half, of opaque water. There lay a great dead eel as long as my arm; and beside it on top of the water, its mate, weakly undulating, not dead.

September, I remembered having read somewhere, is the eel’s migratory season, and was not the belly of this still live one somewhat silvery and polished-looking, and were not its pectorals dark and sharp, physical symptoms of its wanderlust? Down to the ocean and away to Bermuda and the obscure weedy Sargasso Sea, from which they never return, but from which they send back their spawn to exactly the fresh water that was home to them in the first place, even my brook! Now, would the living one, if it lived, make the Liebestod voyage without its mate?

My brother came along and found me brooding upon the two eels in the muddy water—the apparent difference between life and death only a slight tone of skin, a soft nervous undulancy—and he knew what to do to save the live one; characteristic of him. The twelve inches of water ought to suffice, he thought, except that probably it was devoid of oxygen; so he pulled the garden hose across the lawn and aerated it.

A little later my housekeeper’s brother arrived and offered to dip up the live one in a pail and to take it down to Mulhocaway Creek, which was not stagnant, and he did so. Dear housekeeper wanted to cook and eat the dead one. “I can tell by the smell whether it is nice and healthy or not,” she said. I dissuaded her. Suddenly that afternoon it occurred to me that Yeats had felt the importance and enigmatic truth of the small inhabitants of the countryside somewhat as I do. For example, in the summer of 1938—his grandiose old heart aching with expectation of his death—he wrote one of his few poems of pathos, “The Man and the Echo.” His identification in it was with a creature even more commonplace than my catbird or my eel, namely, a rabbit. Perhaps, he thought, self-tormentingly, he was to blame for certain tragedies of the past. Was not some of the blood of the Easter Rebellion on his hands, because he had written provocative political poems? Had not his adverse criticism caused the dancer Margot Ruddock, whose poetry was not as good as her dancing, to go mad? Hush! he said to himself in the last stanza; he had lost his theme. Sorrow interrupted it: natural self-pity, because he was dying, taking the form of compassion, of oneness with other victims of life and death. He felt sorry for even the commonest and pettiest.

I think there has never been a lyric poet to match him. In beauty of language, in imagery, in prosody, he is as enthralling as Catullus or Baudelaire, with twice their life-span, and a range and quality of intelligence far more interesting than theirs. Never do I go to the oracle of his lifework in vain, even casually, to verify some quotation or to inform myself about this or that Irish matter. Suddenly a page, a page that presumably I have never before read attentively enough, will cry its wondrous meaning to me, strike home in me with its truth, touching my very soul.

Even a sort of extreme foolishness about some things seems not to detract from his importance and splendor. I like to say of him what he said of Schopenhauer: “… he can do no wrong in my eyes—I no more quarrel with him than I do with a mountain cataract. Error is but the abyss into which he precipitates his truths.” In many respects, historic respects especially, as to the fate of our immediate family of nations in the West, he has a very pessimistic soul. So have I, and since the time of his death, certain hopes that he still held have deteriorated and new reasons for fear and anger have developed for us, worse and worse.

He said, “We only begin to live when we conceive life as tragedy.” One of his foolish perturbations was a lifelong and absolute impatience with Bertrand Russell, the philosopher. “He fills me with fury by his plebian loquacity,” he told his closest friend, Olivia Shakespear, and said to someone else, “… he has a wicked and vulgar spirit.” When it came time to send young Michael Yeats, aged nine or ten, to school, he drafted an imaginary letter of instructions to a schoolmaster, specifying what the small boy was to be taught, and what not. For example, Greek, but no Latin. No history, no geography. As much mathematics as possible, for a comical reason: he himself, perfectly certain that Russell was a featherhead, never had had enough mathematics to prove it, and wanted his son to be able to.

In view of this prejudice, it has pleased and impressed me to find that the extreme Irishman and the noble philosopher-mathematician have had in common a definite tragic sense. Russell told his biographer some years ago that the secret of happiness is to face the fact that life is horrible, horrible! “You must feel it deeply,” he said—and he beat his breast a little, the biographer reported— “and then you can start being happy.”

When I was in my late teens or early twenties, a rather grandiloquent essay of Russell’s, entitled “A Free Man’s Worship,” meant more to me than any other philosophical writing. Now that I am a post-mature man, with changed taste but unchangeable mind, in the deteriorating, alarming, angering circumstances of the world at large, this anecdote of the breast-beating nobleman means more to me than that essay meant then.

For needless to say, I am trying—I was trying, all that parched and bitter summer of 1957—to apply philosophy not only to the drowning out of a New Jersey valley, and to sorrows of the animal kingdom, catbird and tent caterpillars and eels and rabbits and the like, and to sorrows of my own, mostly having to do with limitations of my talent, weaknesses of morale, but to vast dark historic prospects also. For, needless to say, the remainder of the twentieth century may turn out to be worse than anything that the human species has experienced to date, with all sorts of effects of untrue religion and unwise education and irresponsible experimental science, and democracy perhaps too slow and soft a process to compete with various more recent bodies politic, with no diplomacy worthy of the name, and insufficient defensive preparation, flying our strange, competitive relative kites in the stratosphere like lunatic small boys, setting up our vast radioactive firecrackers by remote control or perhaps no control; nuclear physics perhaps a lethal gene, if not for the entire species, at least for those of us who lead the complex modern life, in areas of concentrated population, in (so to speak) the northwestern portion of the world.

Therefore, in the northern and western nations, both in general and in particular, the spiritual situation is that the soul is in love with reality, absolutely in love, but throughout eternity can never forgive it, never, in the nature of the case and in its own human nature cannot, will not, must not.

Sorrow, truthful sorrow, is not unhealthy for the mature human being. Resentment, vain combativity against fate inside one’s own head, is the perilous habit. “When men are very bitter,” Yeats said, “death and ruin draw them on as a rabbit is supposed to be by the dancing of the fox.”

Poets and other men of the arts, he said, are not “permitted to shoot beyond the tangible,” and I somehow believe that this is so— but who or what forbids it? Mere feasibility of form and style, I guess. The poem or the tale on one’s desk, the picture on one’s easel, coarsens and weakens when one grows too theoretical or argumentative, though in a good cause.