Eight months after Nagasaki, young verrenkt men had with eager haste returned to North America bursting with the impression that children would accelerate the forgetting, which it rather did. And so in some unison they impregnated the women they had perhaps suddenly married prior to departing for the ETO or the PTO. If twenty-nine of us fry had all taken a field trip to cross the bridge at San Luis Rey, in medias res, on a certain day, you and I would not have met like this.
Demographic actuarial statisticians employed by departments of education seemed to have fixed in their minds the casual pace of procreation and rate of infancy-survival that had preceded World War II, but in fact they had nervously to deal with teeming human surpluses that forced them to herd young people like lambs into new buildings and old annexes.
The room held one group of persons in the morning, and another in the afternoon. Names and the intertwining narrative paths associated with them jingled in my time-at-sea for many years afterward, all embraced within my arms as scoundrels, sailors, and coquettes.
Years later, on Eddy Street in Ithaca, hard by Cornell University, I spoke with Ephim Fogel (progenitor of the President of the University of Vermont), and I believe that it was Vladimir Nabokov (by then resident of Saint Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, Cannes, and Prague) of whom he spoke, describing the novelist’s asking the ten year old daughter of a colleague how she liked living in a small town. She didn’t know, she said: she’d never lived in a small town. When wee Rachel Kahn appealed to her father that her allowance might be a bit raised, she did so to the “Father of Airline Deregulation.” He was working in the White House as the “Inflation Czar” at the same time my brother was lunching there with Carter, as the EPA “Sunset Law” czar. My brother has concluded that he must have been a particularly sadistic Sixteenth Century Inquisitor, and is consequently my-brother-for-his-sins. When Laura Shill met me in 1967, she yelped “so you’re the guy who hates clichés” for which, in leafy green Geneseo, I had made myself famous and risible, such was my life-long fear-of-snakes abhorrence of canned language. When I rusticate now on sultry July and August afternoons at the little triangular park, I often read a few pages of IN THE SHADOW OF YOUNG GIRLS IN FLOWER or FINDING TIME AGAIN to abet the vodka’s roasting of my reminiscentia-strands entwining back. Brief moments later, in another kind of kitchen, not far from the oak and forsythia, aswoon in the present tense, before she has written THINKING IN TIME: AN INTRODUCTION TO HENRY BERGSON, or THE IMPERSONAL SUBLIME: HUGO, BAUDELAIRE, LAUTREAMONT, or VISUAL DUST: PROUST AND PHOTOGRAPHY, I stood in the breath and by the personal flesh of Suzanne Guerlac, a Haze, black-clad, pre-transgressive not-yet-beaten nik by whom I had been long-mystified and entranced, and who loped through the expansive Sargasso penels of semiotext(e), rhizome/surface tropes, and deconstructed intertextuality, and which will base the novel she will write in the American Vorticist prose that had lately led me to Hart Crane.
A few short months after 1952, Rachel Kahn met the President of the University of Vermont; they immediately ran off together to Ouagadougou Burkina Faso, and affirmed a relationship that is now spanning fifty years. Half a decade after they met, and during the time they were forging that bond, I had one conversation with the President, on the odd occasion of my knowing something that he did not. His eyes looked at me with a startling, or perhaps disarming clarity, one that was so unlike the wise-guy scowls of the sullen and the misshaped, my collegial peers. A person of reckless imagination might confect the notion that in her blossoming greensickness, it was Rachel Kahn herself who infected the President and me with a fantastical devotion to Henry James (much later on to manifest itself as his founding the Henry James Review and the Henry James Society with its fine scholarship, and as my paralleling the Jamesian, sirenic, and romantic gnarlies by living out really horrible approximations of what Charlotte and the Prince might have done had they been given to “Urban Cowboy” sorts of emotional explosions of anger and remorse). I unstopped my ears and subjected myself to fabulous Densheric and Ververian tortures of the heart. My Henry differed from the President’s, just as they were the same.
On the first day of that spell of mornings in the room at the south end of a building on Chestnut Street, Chuckie Srnka and I walked across Elm Street and entered the building together. We felt comfortable doing that, and every morning thereafter we walked to school together (though later we drove Volkswagens and Chevies) until the very last day, thirteen years later in 1965, of our indoctrination as capitalists, imperialists, appeasers, suborners, chauvinists, and egocentrists. Cancer: 2007, wife and daughters at his side.
Nick Adams (R.M. refers to his mother, an earlier social crime that was reluctant to speak its name: the embarrassment of a divorced woman) was acutely aware of the gaping force across the valley on East Hill, Cornbell University. I once had dinner with Nicky and his mother, who had invited a Brit visiting scholar. Liver was served. Shortly after that, the three of them decamped for Oggsford, and I suppose Nick became an Oggsford man.
Barbie Hodes lived across the street from the trangular park, on Chestnut Street. In 1964 every element of her dazzling mien proposed and assured that she was preparing herself for and directing her life to Fifth Avenue, among the very metaphorical starlights of Society, as if she had a secret foreknowledge of founding Barbara Hodes Ltd. on 39th, and her marrying Michael Gross, who wrote ROGUES' GALLERY: The Secret Story of the Lust, Lies, Greed and Betrayals That Made the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Barbie boarded a train in 1964, a TGV, that flew like an arrow from Ithaca to Manhattan. Before her calmative marriage, she was a sidekick of Lou Reed, a glory and pain that will have demanded much exposure to the elements.
Ithaca’s “Rhine” district is difficult to define, but the impression it leaves is quite clear, of bums, hovels, and transients. Chronological and geographical distinctions are easily disproved, but the sentiment and effects of the Rhine can be confused with no other element of the city’s societies or culture-bands. My father (1917-1993) was, and I am life-long a resident of West Hill. The odd numbered houses of Elm Street perch above a very steep bank, a cliff, overlooking Floral Avenue. The boatyards in which he and I spent many years of our lives are adjacent to the swamplands that, before Flood Control, formed some of the dark and doubtful homes and haunts of the Rhiners. In the 1930s my father and the bolder of his many brothers would hop down the bank to the wetlands below, to socialize (that is to say, play) with the young Rhiners, not excluding the ‘coloreds’ and the many doomed transient hobo kids strung along there by a feckless and drunken parent. It was fishing and fistfights, mostly; but either activity would be followed by some congenial hanging about, until the West Hill kids would scamper up to homes and chores and dinner, and the Rhiners would disappear into their hovels and camps, and vanish from consciousness. “They never came up to play with us,” said my father. “Dad would have skinned us alive.”
Nate was a Rhiner who had “settled in.” He lived-rough in a leaky, tattered boatshack a few yards north of the Buffalo Street bridge, and had in his possession a motored skiff that sometimes ran and always listed due to the sloshing bilges. He was toothless and greasy, and made rather an impression on me in the 1950s. My father would always hail him, and they’d talk, though they doubtless had never been introduced or exchanged anything more than their voices. His boat must once have been rather a dashing craft – sleek, many years before – but it had degenerated into a heap, with flecking paint, loose decking, gashes, wounds, and much creek scumdirt. CCC workers had failed to eradicate the squalors in the 1930s, but waterflow Reconstruction in the 1960s erased any trace of Nate’s life in Ithaca. Nate was born ten years after Antietam; he told us his father had no hands.
Throughout the Rhine era, notions of its crime and poverty were often exaggerated into attributions of a dangerous kind of unwholesomeness and depravity. Socio-economic eugenics supplied enough of a gulf between its people and those of us on West Hill or Fall Creek or South Hill, but democratic educationalization began to integrate persons who otherwise had no occasion to mingle. I became aware of Joe Simon in 1960, at Boynton Junior High on Buffalo Street. He was a Rhiner in all ways. I believe he lived on Cherry Street, in execrable conditions, and his share of life was a desecration. He wore the same clothes every day; and I never knew him to own a winter coat. He was undernourished, small and weak. Despite these afflictions, Joe had classroom friends, and was included in the joshing and jokes, though he too probably never was invited home. One day after school I saw him on the street; he’d secured a one-serving bag of potato chips, and just as he opened it a Creeker came along and needled him into sharing his chips. It is possible to imagine that those chips were the most nutritious meal he was going to have all day. As he palmed the open bag to the other boy, several more Creekers came by, each dipping their hand in for a chip. Joe could only smile, and let all the chips go, with a sort of bemused exasperation that might have suggested he’d rather have the amiable attention of those boys than the chips.
Later that winter Joe and his cousin were walking on the railing of the State Street bridge near today’s “Jungle,” which is presently rather an innocuous area for transient and lifer outdoor sleepers compared to the much severer privation from which it is sometimes said to derive. The other boy slipped and fell into the ice and creek below. I don’t imagine either of them could swim anyway, and certainly not flailing in icy water. Joe, of course, immediately jumped in to try to help his cousin. Death by drowning, both.
Those of us whose parents were reasonably proficient at moving things around according to the little marks on special paper, or those of us who might even have ourselves flourished at moving things around according to the little marks on special paper, will have Ithaca fixed in our memory as a benign and healthy place in which to have matured with other persons who grew up safely too, but it is unlikely that our lives lived out in the second half of the Twentieth Century and curling into the Twenty First Century will have ever demanded taking the measure of that within us which might have forced us to fling ourselves into cold water heedless. I have afforded myself the privilege, and honor, of calling this particular element of instinctive behavior “courage,” and if I cannot quite see it in myself or in others, I can always see when in other people it is not present at all.
Sandra Bowlsby and I ate crackers together. There are Bowlsbys living in the Jungle in 2010. George E. Bowlsby, Sandra’s younger brother, later to occupy the room that Chuckie and Rachel and I did, lived in the Jungle for forty years. He was found drowned, a few weeks ago, in the creek by which he had lived. That would be May 26th, 2010.
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob branched Sephardim and Ashkenazi and let us also say Anastasi; there was a diaspora, and dispersion, expulsion, migration, exiles, pogroms, Nobel prizes, Shoah, homeland-seeking; there was the business of mitochondrial DNA, ancestry-lineage markers and signifiers, and there was parenting. Thus appeared Judy Hamilton. At various times in my life, she has been the only ghost-figure (reified) that featured in the subtile reaches of my own mythmaking. She was always at my side, I realized much later. For six years at the building on Chestnut Street I was consistently measured as the fastest runner, a fact in which, year repeating year, I took much pride. (A stopwatch would reveal that I was the fastest except for Judy, but that never counted because she was only regstered on the girls‘ ledger.) Among us all, because of her true true smile, she was the only knight pure enough to be capable of peering into the grail cup, while Bors and Parzival and Lancelot were finding other excuses to fail, and errants such as myself just went burbling down with the Pequod. Diabetes.
We departed Ithaca in twenty-nine stout ships, bound for Castile. We each in our various cabins circumnavigated the Fifteenth Century world, and harbored in Capetown jails, on Iroquois trek-tramp trudges, and deep within the Age of Innocence; some of the voyages were vivid, bloody and gai, and some were brutally wearying by any standard, yet most of the sailors led lives of quiet desperation and went to the grave with the song still in them. “Quiet desperation” refers to those who (cravenly) sailed too close to the rocky shore, whereupon giant cannibals threw rocks down upon them and sank many ships, and ate the sailors alive as they were drowning.
Harry the Truman looked down upon our soft-edged pine blocks from a large glassed frame. Our naps were opiated. There was much hopping, some skipping, and bunching up in smaller groups. There were indemnities and there was cringing.
Bruce Bryant, pickled with LSD, sledded down Libe Slope. Rosie Wertz, a Rhiner, dressed in rags. Do not think that I am very much impressed with that as a colorful way of describing the habiliments of persons from that slough of poverty, for what she dressed in was rags. Her eyes were crusty, and her face was a sheencake of dirt. Quo vadis my Rosie? Surely not half so easefully onto death and dissipation? One married a Viennese prince; one disappeared into the hollow far plains of west Texas.
Some of us are homers. Albert Smith made the sort of difference that can usefully be called “real” by founding the deli in town that has pleased countless thousands of souls by replicating the perfect enjoyment of taste that is implied in the title of Edmund Wilson’s collection of short writings: “This Room and This Gin and These Sandwiches.” A thousand, thousand sandwiches have been perfect in execution and fulfillment, by measure in excess of the pleasure delivered by William Shakespeare, Milton S. Hershey, or that malevolent Malvolio of a Melvillean Confidence Man, Diane Disney’s pap Walter (another Laestrygonian). Albert’s deli stands. If there ever was an abiding in Ithaca, other than the gorgeous one, it was the sandwiches.
There were fathers. I have held firmly to the image of Sammy Panato firing from the deck of a battleship, an anti-aircraft gun (bob pop bob pop pop, ta,ta,ta,ta,ta) but I also believe that Darlene displayed in a later classroom a swastika flag he’d captured in Europe. John Vasse was shipboard near the Philippines, and he would have been the wisest guy on the boat, unimpressed with rank, and able with the most facile wit to unflate the boneheaded lies and soulless encouragement coming from the captain’s jerk of toadies. My father entered Paris soon after it was possible to do so, gathered up an abandoned German motorcycle and breezed with a friend up and down the long, opened-air spaces of the boulevards. He bumped into Marlene Dietrich in a store; she was searching for nylons. His father had voyaged from Kansas in a prairie schooner back east, to these ravines and lakes of Upstate. Earl flew over Sugarloaf full of bombs, and came home to never say a word about the dead. My uncle Paul is at the bottom of the North Atlantic, in the form of silt.
Ithacans vow pen is champ, and Trojans are material bearers. Mike played ball, but failed to make the Majors. Leon carried a purse, it made us mad. Ricky was from the very beginning, napping on our floor throws, an accomplished gay rights advocate in San Francisco. Ronnie taught us everything we would ever know of cerebral palsy, and there were polio receivers in the building. Sam wondered what made the white kids think they could just go ahead and play. Daedalus had four matrimonial adventures and has regarded himself as a bicyclist. Warriors died. Pete Smith, alcohol. We had cancers, we had strokes. I had thought that Noni Korf was the coolest person I have ever known, though lately I have realized that it is her daughter Maia Vidal who may save us. In other mills, where the breeding of nuclei transpired against different intentions, Ithaca bred actresses, just imagine: Amy Rosoff and Mary McDonnell and others, to walk among whom, as to trip in skipping among Rosie, Barbie, and Rachel in the early fomentation of their wills - was to be flying as if in a dream. I clasp your hand, topic sentence, we used to say; a semiotic and textual present tense. Following the reduction of lighthouses to irrefutable registers, I bicycle through the night ‘til dawn, and read about Passchendaele and Verdun, where boys jumped heedless into icy water.
Eventually, signal June 16th 1953 came along, and shortly thereafter we each deliquesced like butterfly wings into our summertime yaws of even vaguer negative being. Less than half of us remain. One day there will be but one left, and after that last passing, there will remain for other Ithacans, after the last ship has disappeared below the waves, the heart of the heart of the sort of Daisy Miller one can see well beyond the petulance and poofy vanity James has laid upon her: that would be the vision of Judy Hamilton smiling and laughing, susurrant in the trees with the voices of the Iroquois kids who played here six hundred years before us, as they dazzled one another with beauty and promise and their accomplished hunting of bunnies and cunning angling for the plentiful fish in the creeks and lake in the flatlands at the bottom of the hills, as we, after the late war, built our inextricable mazes.
Wendy Haslem writes about Maya Deren in senses of cinema.
Several days were passed, late in November 2001, in the Cleveland Clinic. The duckdrop secret word of admittance, to the most esteemed cardiological Research Hospital in the world, was hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy, and the only means of exit from that Sao Paolo favela of inter-connected buildings, was a myectomy, a procedure that had before then been performed only two hundred times. That act was described by the chief surgeon (a graduate of the University of Rochester) as carving away muscle from the walls of the heart (as with a grapefruit spoon?) to permit cardiologic function to resume and life to be allowed, against forecasted expectations, to continue.
After the operation and the early stages of recovery, there is astonishment out of measure, and gratitude out of measure, and heightened appreciation, out of measure, for two particular miracles: one that survival has been assured, and two, Ohio’s sunlight on the dust motes behind the blinds has turned them into actual diamonds.
Then the subject goes home.
Just before that, a number of legally exculpatory tests are “run,” including the simple matter of a chest X-ray, which is carried out in the dim basement of the grand and palatial Cleveland Clinic, in Radiology, evidently too déclassé an activity for prominent space in a facility that routinely welcomes potentates from Oman and Robin Williams, or his like, to its four-star, adjoining hotel.
Opiate derivatives play their part; family members act queerly as if they were stoned; nurses and technicians appear and disappear like non-speaking actors in some commedia del arte farce, (O! farce it is!) and of course there is a confrontation with the food tray, which contains what must seem to be joyous gustatory delights, but turn out to be the tricksters’ outward manifestation of what are really archived, period-area Civil War biscuits. These particular distortions are but croutons in the large vague vichyssoise that is the soul’s helen kellering through such strange lands as faith, and flammable rivers, and the ceaseless and reckless vacillation between utter hopelessness and paroxysms of a grand guignol Humoresque. That is to say, pensee, or its leftovers.
My conventional, miserable personal habits of distressed familiarity seemed to have returned, as I was wheeled (I believe it was in a looping bi-plane) to Radiology. There, I realized that I was and had never really not been a desiccated sponge, as I was immersed in water and watched myself from within and from the outside burst into a blue ducky. All credit to the Clinic supervisors and policy-makers who must have been confronted with this issue and had decided for the side of right and justice, to permit the technician called WENDY to make her appearance as she would, (in fabulous contradistinction to the many dozens of desiccated sponges with whom I had been passing my time) with her black lipstick, white powdered face, and dangling piercings depending from the patches of skin just below the eyes, where later in life lesser sufferers often develop dark bags. I cannot trust myself to rightly describe the magnificent ocean sunrise she threw upon me, with her scintillating happy nature, dance-prancing around the room, and light laughter.
She asked: “Where are you from?”
I answered: “Aurora, New York.”
This town, apparently, permitted her to ask: “Do you mind if I sing?”
Mind? I don’t think I mind?
During the preparations for the procedures, and during the procedures, she replicated the sound of (it was not mere singing) Marianne Faithfull’s “As Tears Go By,” a song I had first heard in 1964 while driving through the Everglades. That audition was an early occasion of one of Virginia Woolf’s “moments of being” in which time and consciousness merge harmonically. (A person is limited to seven of these in a lifetime.) Another was hearing in an Iowa City record store in 1970, Joshua Rifkin playing Scott Joplin. Another was napping and then sleeping through the Met’s Pelleas and Melisande in 1978 in Raleigh, which is probably the only way to really understand Maeterlinck and DeBussy. Another was watching Paris and its environs pass by from the top floor of an RER car. You will have noticed that all of these epiphanic perceptions depend for their effect and focusing energy on juxtaposition, which is the bête noire I have for years been trying to eradicate from the structuralist interpretive folly of my ungrand, ununified undercooked half-theory. (Books are not life, but then, what is?) Prior to satire, juxtaposition was all men knew of comedy, and even now, in the twenty-first century, much of our work is perfecting our patience with those persons who prefer not to be dragged past 1726 (about when Swift published Gulliver’s Travels) and who actually can convince themselves that Falstaff and his heirs were doing something that was truly funny. If you must know, I walk around Ithaca in a state of almost perpetual annoyance due to the fact that here, in a college town, so many people teach and so many people believe that what some of the early Roman writers were up to was satire, which is wrong, wrong, wrong. Someday, somebody’s going to make a movie of Mrs. Dalloway that actually depicts what Virginia Stephen was thinking, with that long neck of hers and her kind-versus-pitying eyes. Relativism accounts for so little, really, don’t you think? The difference between atheism and anti-theism is important here, or at the least extremely helpful. Perhaps we can’t ask for more than that. Though demanding some final resting place, for our ashes or for our last flickering opinion, may be the single most useful expedient for determining when our homeland has been recovered. I had done what I could, by moving from city to city, and I had tried to call the attention of my fellow citizens to the trench battles of the First World War. I have worked in various mills, and trudged across the plains. I ate in Vicksburg, grits on a hot dog sausage. The belief settled upon me, finally, that I was going to ship out with both Ishmael and Herman Melville, and that in our little pica type of a lifeboat we were going to reach our homeland port, and there abide with our people. Two people, in my case: one of them was real and symbolic and has been described accurately (I have avoided the word ‘goth’ in reference to Wendy, but that may suit you better). And the other is presently finding that after the late Victorians and chasing precisions, playing Brubeck on the Steinway is her Crow’s Nest in Gloucester.
Mlle Vogdes advises me that her career as a lexicographer may result in our moving to Beijing for three to five years, where three hundred square feet of putrid air might contrast in the sharpest manner with, here, an acre of lush grass, raspberry bushes, a brook, saplings and oaks, and a pink-blossomed apple tree. If we do not move there - if that doesn’t happen - if that doesn’t eventuate - you will find me here until the end, where I started, near the lake and among the gorges and ravines of Ithaca, where nothing is out of context, and everything is in its original position.
Sentiments rise with the sun and vanish with the moon, similar to the way in which a river port moors for a night or two boats which then float away. “They All Go,” wrote Randall Jarrell. But I am presently bound to the deepest sort of impression that the only two geographies in which I have ever felt naturally-born, are the lakes and hills of upstate New York, and the Mississippi Delta. Port Gibson was declared “the town too beautiful to burn” in the Civil War, but that might equally have applied to Greenville. (One day I must drive from Cayuga Lake to Cayuga, Mississippi – this would be straight through – in Mississippi via the Natchez Trace.) The Civil War made one million persons dead out of the thirty million who then lived in the United States (Ten million in today’s dollars.) The moneyed people in the North deceived and suborned those fellaheen with no hope to engage militantly with the fellaheen with no hope in the South on behalf of the Confederacy’s moneyed people. The latter fellows supplanted their having been reduced to beasts of burden and wage slaves before the war with the entirely factitious Homeric and Tennysonian ideals of the glory of perpetuating slavery by reason of melanin.
According to some sources, Shakespeare rusticated-within-disguise and spent several months in Virginia, where he wrote a play (extant) that he willed to have produced on the 400th anniversary of his death date, (which is to say, 2016). It is little-known that Henry James spent the summer of 1912 in Vermont, reading Proust in manuscript, and a long kept secret was the fact that Matisse passed most of 1952 at the eminently vulgar Fountainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, which he pronounced the most pleasant place on earth. Dvorak summered in Spillville, Iowa. You may wish to look this up, too. Greenville, Mississippi is also known for its unraveling of statistical probability by salubriously hearthing an unusually large number of authors, among them Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, and Tennessee Williams (though the latter spent more time at the Cutrer Mansion in Clarksdale, also a soul’s balm village). Greenville, Port Gibson, Vicksburg, Clarksdale; (Bourbon, Rosedale, Anguilla, Le Tourneau, Roxie, Redwood, Satartia, Nitta Yuma, Panther Burn, Hushpuckena, Alligator, Dubbs, and Bobo). This trip I will take in a convertible Saab, dark green.
Twenty years after souls had been freed from Auschwitz, which is to say, twenty years after souls had turn to melting and sparkling radium-fire in Nagasaki, some of us had retreated from battle engagement, and, except for a few skirmishes in the outlands, encamped mid the dusty lawns and copses of the Genesee Valley – a place in which, incidentally, despite my four years of residence, I never learned the cardinal compass points or ever felt topographically at home. The year before we had daily gathered round the chuckwagon in a place called Mary Jemison (a white girl raised among the native people, not so uncommon an occasion, as it turns out) and the next year for rations we stumbled over the lawns toward Letchworth, named for the nearby river gape. We did not bear weapons or memory; a peacetime army declines to attend muster. There was much mystification, and it seemed that nothing was not seen as through an opaque veil. Near Geneseo, there was a small park near a wandering stream, where we gathered in period costumes for afternoon charivaris and stupidly, recklessly, and pointlessly rode bareback the wild horses of our innocent and incipient wills. A monument there remembered the ignoble passings of Boyd and Parker, scouts of General Washington’s murderous and genocidal Sullivan Expedition. We used to picnic there (Alice B. Toklas Brownies, LSD, vodka-spiked lemonade, and cheeseburgers), by the tree around which by their intestines were those soldiers tied, run in circles, and finally fileted.
Someone had stolen her umbrella one rainy day, and afterwards she left at the coat rack scene of that purloining a note of the most sophisticated kind of sarcasm, well before that literary form had been by forty years corrupted with writhing pain and literal tears. I had not known that one might use English to fling the very wryest imprecations into the darkness of undifferentiated malfeasance, and the feat amazed me. After two martinis I place myself before my computer’s keyboard and swing lassos, fling javelins, sail down ocean swells at thirty knots. When I do this, or when I sit for hours reading or writing, I have in mind the girl who left a note intended to provoke the emotional disruption of the umbrella thief. She was the same person, I later learned, I had been secretly espying every day, and by whom I was fatally intrigued. She would come and go on the gentle hillside of the Genesee Valley, and by her I confected (as one will) a transubstantiation involving meat wrappings and wispy daydreams. She occasionally wore flowered, colored-print stockings. I think they depicted orchids or magnolias, but now I see them as Charleston dogwoods, hothouse bougainvillaea, tropical dahlias, tormenting daffodils, calla lilies, red red peonies, pornographic oleander, jazz gardenias, fen hibiscus, titillating hyacinths, amatory fuchsia, and sweaty hydrangea. Or maybe lotus flowers. Eventually she and I married and lived in Ithaca, but that didn’t work out well. There, in the hills by the lake, the only topography of which I was aware, was the cold and mean moonscape that her dazzling luminosity had made of my heart.
Patricia Hampl was a bright and noble friend for the two years we each lived out in the green plains just west of the Mississippi River. Her work since then has earned truly its many devotees, and her understanding of memoir has withstood distortion and contamination by the hot vogue of its adjacent cousins, genealogy and blatant self-reflection. I vex myself by saying that she is the wittiest woman I have ever known, thus revealing latent gender prejudices, but other than the writing of Dorothy Parker, the band of literary wits is gentle men.
A Romantic Education was published in 1981, an era when my feverish reading of Pound, Henry James, and Briffault had wholly given way to feverish reading of bicycling manuals, bicycling catalogs, and tales of sailing. My rustication was quite fine, yet hermetic. Since my MFA thesis at Iowa had concerned itself with the Cayuga Iroquois who had not so long before fished the very waters upon which I sailed and rowed, and the long thesis poem had ventured fanciful semantic fantasies about their linguistic interpretation of our topography, I could not avoid presuming that Pat’s “sometimes in fake and unconvincing ways” was remembering my poetastical presumptions. But I’d had about the same reaction then as I later had when in a book Brock Yates lifted without attribution a phrase from a letter I’d written him, and when Stacy Schiff had lavishly and embarrassingly overlauded me in the credits to her Pulitzer Prize winning book in 2000: it was only pleasant to be inside a joke.
But I regard the Cayuga who grew peaches in Chonodote (Aurora) and netted graylings in the gorge creeks at the south end of the lake principally as persons like myself who regard this glacial topography as the immanent form in which all ideas and perceptions – and all poems too – are born and flourish. People who live and write in Ithaca listen to the torrents of spring, and are deafened-to-trance by this second source of thunder; they throw fifteen-year-old virgins off 215 foot waterfalls; we never thought it was necessarily amusing that Daisy Miller came from a blunt place called Schenectady, and George Washington camped on West Hill, just up from the wayward inlet that one day would be called the Rhine, and his colonels couldn’t always get his attention because he would spend hours tossing a ball back and forth with some of his young soldiers. You may wish to look this up. I rode the city buses listening to girls have conversations that sounded like Roman declamations; the land shall submit to floodwaters, and east shore towns shall have constant dawns, the sun rising and obscured by long hills. It is natural that green knee socks gain a quarter inch of supple sinew from climbing slopes and steps. There seem to be currents on the water, rippling cross the garden party bits of conversation heaving breasts, and clefts take bits from the horizon, cool wet walkways did they secret themselves within, eddies turn the story round; and we are always climbing, fountains sunsets creeks. They were not braves here, and we let the Tuscarora in later on because in Carolina their talk had become barbarbar. Keeping fire; the Iroquois were matrilineal; Apaches sought their democratic counsel. It is useful to remember that the Iroquois had no word or use for mythology. There is a small triangular park up Elm Street, upon which fifty years ago I sat for centuries benumbed with wonder that there was no noticeable difference between what I thought of as the past and what I thought of as the future. Now I go there with a bottle of sherry in a paper bag and a good cigar and take the measure of the certainty that this is where George played ball, and where, if it came to that, I would chase and prepare bunnies for my evening meal. Poetically.
Unfortunately, one of the cheesiest poems in the public domain, Ithaca by C.P. Cavafy manages somehow in its mangling of rather a nice sentiment, to foist upon the author a rhyme of considerable merit, though of some concerning grief. First, one must despise being lectured and patronized, but if I am going to encounter eighteen episodes of drama after departing the homeland, as surely I must, I can only send peals to the sunbeams above that they might settle upon me melodies immeasurably more beautiful than the honk-honk that C.P. somehow once thought fit to publish. The horror:
Ithaca’s Rhine is difficult to define, but easy to feel in one’s memory. Chronological and geographical distinctions are easily disproved, but the sentiment and effects of the Rhine can be confused with no other element of Ithaca’s societies or culture
Ms. Ulysses and I live in a hollow, a moderate ravine, a gap in the hills overlooking Ithaca. 350 years ago Cayugas lived here, in a village of longhouses on a spot chosen doubtless for the same reason later was built a mill and a covered bridge extant.
