A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (23 page)

The idea has to come with the image or we seem not to be thinking straight. There is no cause and effect in the abstract. The questions we ask, and the answers we try to give if you ask us, are all a matter of what has happened or is happening. Theory of the future only vexes us, unless it is based on some confession and forgiveness and self-forgiveness of what has gone by.

Thus, all the days of our lives, Yeats said, we have to go from desire to weariness, then desire again, then weariness again; and we “live but for the moment when vision comes to our weariness like terrible lightning …” Vision like lightning, messages of the far and absolute reality like thunder, and dread epiphanies of flood and drought and fire and ice, and indeed of mushrooming atomic cloud and other such novelties—or it may be some less dramatic manifestation of the inhuman, non-human, extra-human truth.

It is one of the solemn peculiarities of this century that small persons like myself, great persons like Yeats, get grief-stricken by fears of science, on which war and peace are based, and fears of politics, fraught with cynical hypocrisy and unrealistic optimism. I intend to stop shivering. No one can escape dying. No one has to die more than once.

I have known vision to take the form, the forms plural, of mere low-class or no-class sexual intercourse, not even authorized by majority practices or justified by true love; mere beauty of dancers’ bodies resulting from nothing but exercise and keeping time to music; poetry more transparently intelligent than prose, and vice versa; prose more sonorous than verse; mere paintings that are not even pictures entitled this and that and the other subdivision of the palette, and yet arousing in the mind’s vain-glorious sunrises or the opposite, funereal sunsets of the gods—all epiphanic!

Now, 1978, nothing is left of my house in Union Township, except broken foundations under utilitarian water. I haven’t forgotten, and I expect never to forget the exact way the sunrise appeared in my bedroom window there, at second hand as it was a north window, encompassing a certain panorama of the half-wooded, thousand-foot Musconetcung Hills. In early October of 1957, to my astonishment, my old crab-apple tree re-grew in smaller format some of the foliage that the caterpillars had devoured, and it curtained my window quite closely. But the rough showers that relieved our drought at last, at the end of October, followed by gusts of wind in the first week of November, drew the curtain back; so that I could see all that lofty part of the landscape from my bed.

There was an unusual and beautiful place almost at the top of it, a juncture of wood-lots and upland pastures, which made me think of someone’s forehead, with dark hair growing down in a widow’s peak. Just below that, my neighbor Dalrymple’s son and daughter-in-law and daughter and son-in-law had two small-frame houses painted white, closely adjacent, appearing to be one and the same structure. At daybreak, that is, in the quarter before daybreak, from some point below the horizon in the east or the southeast, the preliminary sunbeams would arch up across the valley, behind my back, over my head, over my house, illuminating those houses of my neighbors first of all. Suddenly I would see them at the foot of my bed amid the darkness: the sunrise singling them out, before it had actually risen anywhere else, pouring itself into them, and transfiguring them into magic lantern architecture, palaces of porcelain, as in a fairy tale; or as it is described in the last few pages of the Bible, New Jerusalem, battlements of glass and pearl measured with golden reed.

Some mornings the sun seemed to fall back to sleep, once or twice before it actually got its stride and started up the sky. Having delivered its distant greeting and fixed its god like gaze upon the conjoined Dalrymple dwellings, and the last bit of hillside to the right and left of them, it would stop and let just one or two more drowsy clouds pass, one or two lapsing shadows, with auroral breezes inhaling, exhaling—then it would recover consciousness, take on effulgence and color; stronger every instant but less thrilling every instant, until it had achieved daylight—prose! And as all the rest of the earth and sky, groves and farmland and outcroppings of limestone and rough hedgerows, lit up realistically, the Dalrymple house faded back to mere clapboard and paint and cement block and shingle.

Certain mornings, as I propped myself up on pillows and sipped my first black coffee, endeavoring to wake all of myself up at once, talent and morale as well as
joie de vivre,
self-respect as well as self-consciousness, all that vicarious aspect of the new day—the great response of the landscape to the light while my eyes were still dim with sleep and dream—gave me a measure of that satisfaction which others (they tell me) derive from regular religious observance, prayer or rite or mystical exercise.

In an almost religious mood, in that autumn of 1957, I resolved that for the remainder of my tenure of the doomed house—twenty years of occupancy dwindling down to a matter of months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds—I would like to keep track of the time of the sunrise and set my clock accordingly, so as to allow myself ten minutes of vigil, supplicating, grateful, self-pitying, self-forgiving, in the dark. After that, welcome to the day again, daily, airy divinity of the rays of our particular star, light ever seeking and ever finding, symbolizing that certainty which comes most naturally to the imagination, to the effect that happiness exists, is here, is there, is some-where, which is what matters; giving one occasion to pretend, auto-suggestively, that it does not matter much whether or not one is happy personally.

Naturally, in those vigils, I also resolved some new practices having to do with literature as such: for one thing, to try to curtail what is called inspiration, ideas of things to be written, and to give three quarters of my time and energy to just workmanship, especially the reworking and finishing of a quantity of my scribble of years past. But, I exhorted myself, let there be no ambiguity or uncertainty as to what work or works I have in progress. Let me always have a plan, to be changed if and when my power of execution happens to change or fail, but without making a mystery of it.

While I would reveal myself to my heart’s content, I vowed that, for the time being at least, I would stop my self-criticism. Especially I decided to refrain from writing about my writing, or about my failures to write. It is unhealthy for the eye to gaze into itself; a stupidity for the pen or pencil to annotate itself. The difference between subjectivity and objectivity is only form; but it is one of the great differences. Whatever is not (or seems not) narratable can be turned into aphorism or lyricism.

Also it occurred to me to beware of letter-writing, as one of the poorest of the categories of self-expression, almost invariably given over to seductiveness of some kind, and to apology, diplomacy, and didacticism. The letter-writer is always something of a lover and something of a politician. Where there is so much personal purpose there is not apt to be sincerity enough. “The rhetorician,” Yeats said, “would deceive his neighbor, the sentimentalist himself, while art is but a vision of reality.”

I must admit, realistically, that while indefatigable and immense in my correspondence all my life, I am not, never have been, never have thought myself a very good letter writer. It is one of my miseries, one of my mysteries, underneath the good fortune and the delectable duality of being a city mouse as well as a country mouse and blissful bookishness and retrospective longing and other components of the self-portrait that I have been painting in these pages.

I still write letters. Not to do so was one of many good resolutions that in the elapsed twenty years have availed me nothing. Nevertheless I believe that resolving is worthwhile. It is an education and an exercise. I could if I would describe eloquently, with titles and casts of characters, a couple of novels that I have not produced, with good reasons for not having succeeded at them. As a rule, disappointment in oneself, frustration, renunciation, are a vain wasteful reverie, a slothfulness. Wreckage of manuscript may provide good substance for another piece of work. A vow or a promise will sometimes arouse an unknown, unexpected talented part of the soul. What one does then may be the opposite of what one took oath about or was inspired by, and failed to accomplish and didn’t even have the sense to abandon until one had tired oneself out. No matter; in literature as in life, what happens is of greater worth and consequence than the vision and the will-power and the dream.

And now, as this strange-shaped essay draws to its close, petering out, the word “dream” gives me pause. That nameless young man, unhappily hesitant in the dreamed doorway, joyfully entering the room and then, having irritated John Connolly whose room it was, departing in haste and disgrace, what did I mean by him or about him, almost at the start of this reminiscence and self depiction? Nameless, yes; I now add to my small memory of him that he called himself by two names, and neither of them, as we learned later, was true—but not meaningless.

He was a personification of my Self with a capital S, vacillating at the end of my early middle age, the beginning of my later middle age, with downright elderliness in prospect. My life, leaving out infancy, seems to divide in thirds, not in halves or quarters. To my slowly awakening mind the dream suggested something of the difference between prose and poetry, the one impinging upon the other, with as many of their senses as possible, grasping my being of two minds, my double-meanings, my heart divided against itself. In passages like this, I want others to read as they please, to think as they please, even against me. Furthermore, when a prose piece of any length is composed in a style as specific and compact as mine, it is good to have something in it unexpressed, even ill-expressed, or inexpressible. I like my readers to enter into my thoughts, to sense my emotions, the way mere forgetfulness may bring about some slight elements of fiction in the most honest, earnest literary work.

Landscape is easier than self-analysis. Forty or fifty feet of water lie wavering and flashing and darkening, according to the hour and the wind and the sky, over my brother’s and sister-in-law’s house; fifteen feet over mine and my mother’s. I used to go there often. The last time, I walked along the shore, as close as I could get to my once happy abode, close enough to throw a stone out to it, and in fact I threw one. A young, stout, disrespectful state employee ordered me back to the road. I did as I was told, without any exhibition of grief or irritation. Only I vowed not to go there again. Another lapse of the exact truth; another promise to myself broken. That wasn’t the last time; I sometimes take visiting friends there and I point out landmarks around the water and I explain things. But I scarcely look and I turn off most of my memory.

Displacement and resettlement may teach one not to despair too quickly, even of great changes. In almost every respect the good fortune that I have emphasized throughout this essay has persisted. Let me not exaggerate my happiness. My mother did not live to see the actual flooding of our valley. Now, as you may know, my all-important sister-in-law has departed this life. The death of those we love when they are old and ill cannot be regarded as tragedy. It is just loss, like the contents of what was once Mulhocaway Farm and its affiliate reservoir (that natural cup huge and deep).

I remember the day when Spruce Run Reservoir claimed its first victim: a fifty-five-year-old fisherman unable to swim, in a ten-foot aluminum boat which capsized. I recall some of the hapless friends who frequented the valley in our time: Margaret Harrison who looked in her mirror when she was young and, observing how good-looking she was and how cruel looking, like, perhaps, Messalina or Media, determined to behave accordingly, and her little son Norvil who wanted to die and soon did—whereupon she took her own life because she could not bear the thought of what she had done to him. And Michael Miksche, who all one year, 1943 or 1944, bombed Berlin twice a week, a genius-type with very little talent and little education, and George Platt Lynes who greatly loved, and let love go, because it bored him, and died of a broken heart, and Dorothy Hotchkiss, a childlike, childless, and amorous young woman snatched by cancer from the embraces of her young husband, my nephew Bruce, whom in his infancy, in the summer of 1929, I took care of because both his parents were ill. I wondered if their spirits still inhabited that impounded water, strange mermaids and mermen, and perhaps, in envy of the living, with that sad capriciousness which indeed they all had in common, reached up from the drowned fields and overturned the irrelevant fisherman. I never entirely believe any such thing, but all around me I always see metaphors expressive of truth; it is my habit, it is one of my specialties as a writer.

When I went abroad in 1952 and called on my old and dear friend Cocteau, who was Colette’s neighbor in the Palais-Royal, he told me that it had been one of her most dolorous weeks; her arthritis clamping down tight and chiseling away at her. In spite of which, he thought, surely she would receive me, especially if he telephoned and asked her to. For various reasons, I scarcely wanted his powers of persuasion so exercised in my behalf.

Later in the week I found Anita Loos, the dramatizer of
Gigi,
dining at Florial’s, out beside the fountain under the honey locusts, and she confirmed the bad news of the arthritis; nevertheless, she encouraged me. “Don’t write,” was her advice. “M. Goudeket, the guardian husband, will think it is his duty to ward you off. Just take a chance, ring the doorbell. At least you will see him, or you will see Pauline, the perfect servant. They’re both worth seeing.”

But I could not imagine myself standing all unannounced on their doorstep, nor think of any suitable initial utterance to the doorkeeper. Then I recalled the fact that when my young friend Patrick O’Higgins wanted to get in and take photographs of her, he armed himself with roses. With neither his infectious half-Irish gaiety nor his half-French manners, perhaps I could afford an even more imposing bouquet, to compensate. I sought out the major florist near the Palais-Royal, and asked if they knew which size and shape and shade and redolence of rose Mme. Colette favored. They knew exactly: I forget its name; it had a stout but not inflexible stem, and petals wine-red on the inside, brownish on the outside.