A Moveable Famine (35 page)

Among my students was seventeen-year-old freshman Lucy Grealy who, at our first conference, kept her head down, her blonde hair covering her face. She hardly spoke, which made me babble and joke until she finally looked at me. She was missing most of her jaw, the result of multiple surgeries for cancer. We became close, regularly eating dinners of Chinese takeout in my office. She told me Halloween was her favorite day, the only time she looked like everyone else. Her memoir,
Autobiography of a Face,
would recount her struggle with the disease. Then there was Becca Schwan, who shaved half her head and wrote poems about Boy George and Fendi furs, and who wore hose clamps on her wrists and biceps. She was well-read, with a great imagination—when I asked her why she had missed an appointment, she said, “My twin fell off a high wire.” One day in my office she kept wriggling in her chair. She eventually opened her shirt and pulled out a white rat named Andy Warhol. At lunch afterward, I told my colleagues. Grace wondered how I responded.

I said, “Put it back in your blouse.”

“The voice of experience,” she said.

And there was a lot of experience in the faculty dining room. Grace, almost always in a house dress, argued for Paul Goodman’s fiction over Cheever’s with Doug Bose whose every pastel sport coat was festooned with so much spilled ink you could almost read it. Harold Axe, the piano teacher, fought a losing battle with the turned-up points of the collar, which poked his neck, swatting at them as if attacked by invisible forces. Someone kidded Ike Burke about his belfry office seeming an ivory tower, and he looked over his glasses and said, “The most common ivory tower is the average person’s passivity toward experience.” Hefty Nino Lo Presti, who boasted being born with a wooden spoon in his mouth, rejoiced when the college hired a gourmet chef. He looked at his plate of linguini and clams and sighed, “Lady luck has lifted her slip.” Gilbert Goulet, a novelist and Iowa graduate, asked at lunch one day if I knew Daniel Cook. Gil also taught at NYU and said that Dan’s disastrous interview had become legendary. Dan had tried to flatter Galway Kinnell by saying, “We have to stop our students from writing like you,” and he said, “You’re the best we have,” to two different novelists. The chair of the search committee complained to Cook about a celebrated English short story writer they had rejected for the post. Dan, impressed with the quality of his vanquished competition, asked why, and the chairman said, “Because I heard he referred to me as ‘a no-good Jewish cocksucker!’ ” Cook thought for a second and said, “I didn’t know you were Jewish.” Glamour flashed from the theatre people, as when a whirlwind of scarves and sleeves blew past the table with the actress Viveca Lindfors somewhere in its midst. Many were eccentric, some were slightly mad, but all were thoroughly human.

I had a second residency at Yaddo over Christmas break when a composer’s mother died and, because of my proximity, I was offered a portion of his stay. Unlike summer’s large season, the mansion was closed. Twelve of us lived in West House and ate dinner above the tack room. Jerre Mangione had replaced Director Curtis Harnack who was on leave. We took walks together in the afternoon and, passing the composer’s tower one day, I mentioned the party. He stopped abruptly on the path and said the insurance company threatened to drop coverage because of the incident. He asked me to testify as to what happened that night.

Jerre scheduled a call with Yaddo’s lawyer in his office, and was on the phone with him when I arrived. He pointed to a chair and I listened as he said I was filling a sudden vacancy, that I had been at the party, saw the bat bite Giorgio, and helped drag him from the moat. He told the lawyer I was a poet, the first time someone referred to me that way, and I took the receiver anxiously. The lawyer asked if I knew the conversation was being taped. Yes. Did I agree to it being taped? I did. Where was I on the night of August 15? At Yaddo. Did I see the bat bite Giorgio? Yes. Was he hurt? His hand was swollen. Was I present when Giorgio fell off the moat? I was. Did I help him? I tried. Had I seen him afterward? Yes. Was he hurt? It seemed so, his ankle was immersed in ice. Did I see him dancing after the fall? I couldn’t remember. Had Giorgio been drinking? Yes. Did you see what he was drinking? Beer. Are you sure? Yes, I brought him one when I got one for myself. Was he drunk? He didn’t seem so. Were you drinking beer? Yes. How many? Eight or nine. Were you drinking anything else? Bourbon. How many? Five, maybe six—I lost count.

“Thank you, Mr. Skoyles,” he said. “I’ll let you get back to your poetry.”

My contract was renewed and, when our enrollment demanded another teacher, I suggested Barkhausen. Jean liked his work and invited him for an interview. He took the bus from Provincetown.

Ken Newman convened the advisory committee and included me for the occasion. Ken served the chamomile, and Barkhausen handled himself well except for pausing at Verna Serrini-Smith’s question about teaching a student body mostly female. Artie seemed flummoxed for a moment and I knew why. It was not only Verna’s beauty, but he was haunted by Dugan’s poem about teaching at Sarah Lawrence:

. . . a Sophomore (female)

got down on her knees

before me by my desk

and tried to pull me

over her with the door

to my office OPEN. I said,

“You don’t want to be a slave,”

and she answered, “Are you

kidding?”

His brain swirling, Artie finally answered that women poets were among his favorites, listing Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore and Louise Bogan. No one questioned him further. When enthused, as he was often during the interview, he couldn’t halt the ends of his sentences, but only I seemed to notice his referring to the New York publisher as “Little, Brown Jug.”

Artie left the room and Newman praised his “rambunctious erudition,” and the others agreed. Ken asked what we thought of Lawson’s recommendation which touted Barkhausen’s work but called him, “a man of rough manners personally.” Ken accepted my explanation of Artie’s impetuousness, sipped his tea and said he would recommend the appointment.

I accompanied Artie to Provincetown for the weekend. Ronnie drove the Bonanza bus out of Port Authority as he had all these years. We moved to the rear after sitting behind a couple who had just returned from Botswana. They were describing in loud detail to passengers across the aisle how elephants had bowed to them because they sensed their power as healers. Their neighbors in turn told about a crow funeral they had witnessed at the Race Point parking lot, conducted by a chief crow, at the head of a circle of mourning crows around a dead crow. We took seats near the man I recognized from my first night in town, the one I stumbled against at the Fo’c’sle, the one who lost his voice when his wife left him. Artie sat by the window, and we shared the sack of favorite books he had hoped to display at the interview. He filled me in on things in Provincetown, saying he had become good friends with Dugan and Judy, often going to their house for dinner. He loved Dugan’s poems all the more and read aloud:

When I woke up with my head in the fireplace

I saw the sky up the chimney. “No clouds,”

I thought. “Good god day, what did I do

last night to wake up in these ashes fortunately cold?”

“Only Dugan could see the world from the bottom of a chimney, taking the point of view of a burnt log,” I said.

“And still optimistic about the weather,” Artie said.

At the rest stop in Providence we bought Cokes and tossed crackers to pigeons bobbing around the bus. One dragged a wing, and couldn’t nab any tidbits no matter how accurately we aimed his way. I mentioned Stanley’s “Robin Redbreast,” about a hurt bird he tries to help into the air, and I recited the final lines:

But when I held him high,

fear clutched my hand

for through the hole in his head

cut whistle-clean . . .

through the old dried wound

between his eyes

where the hunter’s brand

had tunneled out his wits . . .

I caught the cold flash of the blue

unappeasable sky.

A few hours later, we approached the Sagamore Bridge, with its sign, “Depressed? Call the Samaritans,” and climbed thirteen stories above the Cape Cod Canal into clouds we saw from neither a bed of ash nor through an open wound—a sky of our own—and below, the surface of the water like slate, far down.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

P
ortions of this book have appeared in the
Boston Globe
and
Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art,
in slightly different form. I have quoted passages from various poets, most of whom are cited, but include Weldon Kees, to whom I owe the book’s ending phrase. A sabbatical leave from Emerson College was instrumental in my writing of this book.