Essays After Eighty (11 page)

 

In his “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” Ezra Pound has his poet protagonist say, “I shall have, doubtless, a boom after my funeral.” Particular circumstances contribute to the response, like death at a comparatively young age. When Jane died, obituaries reprinted her poems. I was interviewed about her. NPR rebroadcast her interview with Terry Gross. In India—Jane and I had visited—there were ceremonies in her honor in Bombay, New Delhi, and Madras. There were memorials in New Hampshire, in New York, at Harvard, and in Minneapolis. When her posthumous selected poems,
Otherwise
, came out on the first anniversary of her death, it quickly went into three hardback printings. Eighteen months later a paperback flourished, and her publishers have now added a
Complete Poems
. I love her work—but her books sold as they first did because of leukemia and her age. Eighteen years later she is reprinted in anthologies. Maybe she'll stick around.

 

My dearest old friend just died at eighty-nine. At least he died at home. I'm old enough to remember when everybody died in their houses, tended by family as Jane was tended. I was nine when I spent a summer at the farm while my grandmother's older sister lay dying in the parlor. Parlors in those days were reserved for special events—entertaining the pastor, funerals, weddings, and dying. (The parlor has become the television room.) Great-Aunt Nannie lay on a cot, blind, unable to turn over in bed, her back in continuous pain. She told my grandparents Kate and Wesley that the people of this house (Kate and Wesley) tortured her by making her sleep on a woodpile. She told Kate that she wanted to see her family, and Kate told her that she could arrange a visit from Kate and Wesley. When Kate and Wesley dropped by, Aunt Nannie was overjoyed. She died soon after I left for school, in September 1938, just before the New England hurricane. My mother got stuck coming back from the funeral.

Some fortunate people die in a hospice, which is tender but brief. I visited an old friend, James Wright, as he lay dying in a Bronx hospice, under warm and intelligent care—but the hospice found a bed only four days before he died. My first wife died in a New Hampshire hospice—admitted with six days to live. Some hospitals perform palliative care for the terminally ill. Others of us still die at home, like my father, Jane's father, and two aunts of mine. Jane could have died in a shiny hospital bed but chose home, as I will, if I can manage. In the same bed. These days most old people die in profit-making expiration dormitories. Their loving sons and daughters are busy and don't want to forgo the routine of their lives. One said he would
not
diaper his parents—so he handed them over to women who diapered at the minimum wage. My friend Linda spent two of her college summers working at a place called Eternal Peace, on the three-to-eleven shift. After she fed the patients, she pulled out their teeth and put them in a jar. One night she could not get a woman's teeth out. She pulled and pulled and pulled. One tooth came out dripping blood.

Old folks' storage bins bear encouraging names. I've heard of an Alzheimer's unit called Memory Lane. There are also Pleasant View, Live Forever, Happy Valley, Pastures of Paradise, Paradise Pastures, Heaven's Gate, Peaceful Meadow, Summerglen, Paradise Village Estates, Autumn Wind, Fountain of Youth, Elder Gardens, Harbor Isle, Enchanted Spring, Golden Heirloom, Golden Dawn, Pastures of Plenty, Thistlerock Farm, Village Green, Green Village, Ever Rest, and Everest.

At such an address our elders pass away, or rest in peace, or meet their Maker, or leave this world, or buy the farm . . .

A NOTORIOUS POET
sells all fifty poems to magazines, does a book with a publisher's advance, sells out the hardcover and then the paperback. If someone asks the poet to say the poems aloud, one poetry reading brings in more cash than the magazines and books together.

 

Instead of money, poetry hopes to create beauty, emotion, intelligence, insight, and pleasure all at once, as well as immortality. It rarely does. Whatever their poems try to do, poets are outraged by rejections and editors. (It's well known that the smaller the reward, the fiercer the competition.) Turned down six times by the
New Yorker
, a poet decides, “They don't like me there.” Does the poet think that a magazine (which gets a thousand poems a week and publishes two) checks out an index of forbidden names? “No. We don't like
her
.” I have a friend who sent a poem to the
New Yorker
that was rejected by e-mail in two and a half hours. He was apoplectic. Did he expect that an editor, or sub-sub-editor, would spend two and a half hours to decide? Rejections often take two and a half minutes. When people send poems to a small magazine and wait a year for rejection, did the editor read over the poem seventeen thousand times? Or did he wait until chagrin overcame boredom? “Damn, I've got to take care of that pile.”

My comfort with rejection began by accident, by being fourteen and submitting my poems to the
Atlantic
, the
Nation
, the
New Yorker
, and the
Saturday Review of Literature
. The poems returned with a printed slip. I was briefly disappointed, then found two more long white envelopes—one the stamped, self-addressed one, the other to enclose the same poems—and my juvenile endeavors went out again in the next mail. In minutes I zapped from despair to hope. When I came home from high school, my mother would often greet me cheerfully at the door. “Another rejection today, Donnie.”

 

It's helpful for a poet to be an editor when young, though not so young as fourteen. At Exeter and college I started choosing manuscripts for school magazines, and at Oxford I edited four publications at once. Then I became the first poetry editor of the
Paris Review
. (I knew George Plimpton at college.) I published Geoffrey Hill's poems for the first time, and Robert Bly's, and Thom Gunn's, and in the meantime rejected ten thousand poems and made mistakes. I rejected Allen Ginsberg's “Sunflower Sutra.” (He told George I wouldn't know a poem if it buggered me in broad daylight.) Some poems I printed were more humiliating than my dumbest rejections. Still, I learned from editing. There were other ways of writing than the way I had found for myself. I read all the literary magazines, scouting the field. I found friends for life, to whom I later showed my own drafts, with whom I argued usefully. The fellowship of the
Paris Review
—George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, William Styron—extended my literary community. At George's parties, at East 72nd Street, I met Philip Roth, Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell, and Kingsley Amis.

A fellow named Boris visited with a black bag, apparently carrying products not found in drugstores.

 

As you might guess, not every editorial encounter was benign. Poets' letters arrived for the
Paris Review
saying, “I am the greatest poet alive and if you don't print all my poems you are an asshole.” “I am a tenured full professor of English who played offensive tackle in the NFL.” “I am a serial murderer.” Editors learn not to offer helpful suggestions when they reject a poem. If I hinted that “bouncing baby” might be a cliché, by return mail I heard that I was an idiot, that the metaphor was innovative genius. Bags of poems arrived each month by mail from the office in Paris. Fifty percent I rejected immediately. The first five lines told me that the poem would never do. The better candidates I kept around, reading over and over, sending some back at each rereading. Finally I took maybe one, maybe two. I know I made mistakes. I was arrogant. At the age of twenty-five I felt cheekier about my taste than I have felt in the sixty years after. Probably I was narrower, more dogmatic, and better.

 

Many years ago I discovered that a good poet, a friend of melancholy temperament, was so devastated by rejection that she could not work on new poems. I argued, but she could not shake her despair. I had an idea. If she would let me,
I
would send her poems out. But if I used my own name, I would seem to be trying to throw my weight around—as if I thought I had weight. I invented Joey Amaryllis, a literary agent who represented only poets, possibly the one poetry agent in the universe. First I rented a post office box at Potter Place, New Hampshire, near where I live but with a different zip code. From the American Stationery Company I ordered letterhead and envelopes with the neonate Joey's address. Writing to editors, Joey was careful to enclose only brisk notes. If Joey told an editor “It's raining today,” the editor would suspect that Joey was looking for an angle.

With her permission, I submitted my friend's poems to good magazines, without telling her which ones. When the poems came back, I sent them out again, and when they came back again, I tried again. By agreement I kept quiet when I sent things out, and I never reported a rejection. When an editor took a poem, I spread the joy. One time Joey submitted his client's poems to the editor of an academic quarterly, a man with whom I had a friendly correspondence. Shortly afterward, I happened to write the editor a letter, and without thinking praised my friend. He wrote back that he had recently received poems by this woman, but that they were submitted by somebody else, “and I never read that sort of thing.” (The poems had not yet returned to Potter Place.) When I wrote the editor back to confess, and to apologize for my duplicity, he said that my friend should send the poems herself. Decades later, she continues to publish in the same quarterly. Joey also submitted her poems to
Poetry
, which bought several. The editor had printed my own poems, but he made it clear that I annoyed him. Even his notes of acceptance were frosty. On the other hand, he took a shine to Joey Amaryllis, and wrote him warm letters about Joey's generosity.

Why did I undertake this caper? I helped a depressed friend and I promoted good poems. How nice of me. But why did I like it
so much?
I adored being a secret agent. After a couple of years, my friend took over her own marketing and thrived. Joey came in from the cold.

 

At sixteen, poets think that if they publish in a magazine that will be
it
. When it happens, it is not
it
. Then they think it will be
it
when they publish in
Poetry
. No. The
New Yorker
? No. A book? Good reviews? The Something Prize? A Guggenheim? The National Book Award? The Nobel? No, no, no, no, no, no. Flying back from Stockholm, the Laureate knows that nothing will make
it
certain. The Laureate sighs.

 

Writers, of course, require praise. After Jane and I moved from Michigan to New Hampshire, I received a thick brown envelope from a cocktail party friend in Ann Arbor, a man who wanted to write novels but who settled for a job in PR. The envelope contained a long, long essay clipped from a literary quarterly in which an unfamiliar professor attacked me for everything I had ever written—my poems, my children's books, a memoir, short stories, even a textbook that the professor's own university had adopted. The professor said that my textbook was good. In fact it was
too good
, and he disparaged my book at length for the manner of its excellence. In a note that accompanied the clipping, my old acquaintance said, “I thought you'd be amused.”

Everyone has heard about the Emperor executing the Messenger. The Emperor was right. From the personals in the
New York Review of Books
I hired a hit man.

 

My generation assumed that the value of an artist proved itself not in contemporary fame but in durability. Lately we have not been hearing much about Robert Lowell, who when he died was at the top of the mountain. We will hear of Lowell again. Will we hear again about his mentor Allen Tate? It can be observed that most poets slide into invisibility, maybe for decades, maybe forever. Andrew Marvell's resurrection took three hundred years. Biographies or collections of letters draw some attention to the poetry, or away from the writing to the writer. So does the manner of death. More people know the lives of John Berryman and Sylvia Plath than know the poetry. Tennyson's glory lasted until the twentieth century decided that no Victorian could be a poet. Yeats died in 1939, and his reputation thrived into the 1960s, an unusually long term. Then his grandiloquence disqualified him. (Jane said that she would not buy a used car from this man.) Yeats will revive as Tennyson did, but not my old teacher Archibald MacLeish, who in his lifetime won three Pulitzer Prizes. So did Robert Frost, but the bulk of Pulitzer Prize winners make a paupers' graveyard. Theodore Roethke, enormously praised in the fifties, became largely invisible by the eighties. I think I see his vast shape looming again at the edge of the shadows. Early death was clearly a successful move by John Keats.

Otherwise we attend to our poets when they are alive—to hear them, to praise them, to despise them, to use them. Death usually removes them. I expect my immortality to expire six minutes after my funeral. Literature is a zero-sum game. One poet revives; another gets deader. Like the Laureate returning from Stockholm, we understand—and we sigh.

WHEN JANE AND
I moved to New Hampshire, we often drove to Tilton, where my aunt and uncle lived. On the way, we passed a small white building labeled
ITALIAN RESTAURANT
, and underneath, repeated on each side of the front door, in letters only slightly smaller:
NO GARLIC NO GARLIC
.

The declaration did not surprise me. In the old days, New Hampshire's food was almost as ruinous as England's. When I lived summers at my grandparents' farm, haying with my grandfather from 1938 to 1945, my dear grandmother Kate cooked abominably. For noon dinners, we might eat three days of fricasseed chicken from a setting hen that had boiled twelve hours. Sometimes we ate a slice of fried Spam, sometimes sardines. (I puked in the outhouse.) Weekly a butcher parked his truck by the front door and displayed his goods to my grandmother. His roast beef tasted like mummified mule. As for her veggies, they were almost edible. In spring she served fresh parsnips, planted the summer before and harvested when snow melted. She cooked peas and beans fresh all summer. Ball jars preserved vegetables for winter. These pickings from the garden, fresh or canned, came to the table overcooked into mush.