Extra Innings (7 page)

There is a letter from Linda Pastan, a poet I have known in Washington for many years. She sends me another story about Tom Victor, the excellent photographer of writers who died a few years ago of AIDS. ‘The day he spent with me taking photographs may have been the most “romantic” I have ever spent. We walked the streets of Manhattan, and he kept running ahead, kneeling down, and snapping pictures. It felt like
La Dolce Vita
. Tom had a way of making his subjects feel utterly beautiful. “Those cheeks!” I remember he said to me. It was a terrible letdown to travel home, look in the mirror, and see my usual plain face.'

Mixed in with a few commendatory letters there is a good, give-it-to-her-straight note from a lady in Maine (Scarborough) whom I do not know. She informs me that the ‘slow delivery' of my book reviews on National Public Radio ‘drove me up a wall.' She read
The Ladies
, she said, and ‘did not think I would read anything else by you,' a neat way of expressing her opinion of that book, I thought. She lets me know that she read an interview with me in the
Maine Times
, and so borrowed
End Zone
on interlibrary loan. Clearly she did not wish to be saddled with it permanently if it turned out to resemble my aired remarks or
The Ladies
. Finally, she admits that, to her surprise, she enjoyed it and has even gone so far as to order a copy for a friend. Against all reason and anticipation, I gather.

A long letter from Frederick Manfred, with whom I used to correspond regularly in
New Republic
days. I remember him as a Siouxlander, a white-haired, unusually tall and handsome

Minnesotan whose novel
The Manly-Hearted Woman
I reviewed enthusiastically. He comments on
my
comments in
End Zone
about Brenda Ueland, a Minnesotan, and another correspondent from those days, whose long, active, loquacious life I admired. He knows much more about her than I do and offers the fascinating suggestion that Sinclair Lewis (another citizen of Minnesota) was the father of her born-out-of wedlock daughter.

I no longer own a copy of Mark Schorer's life of Lewis, an enormous, detailed work as I recall, so I cannot look Ueland up in the index. It would be interesting to know if this is true. Ueland was a free spirit long before it was fashionable and socially correct to be one. She went to teas at Willa Cather's apartment in Greenwich Village, wrote for New York magazines, and produced at least two books, one on writing that was reprinted recently, just before her death. She lived on a health-food diet most of her life and climbed mountains after she was eighty.

Manfred himself must now be ‘getting on,' as they say, but he is still very active. He is reading galleys on a new book, and writing still another. I seem to recall a long list of novels in the front of one of his books. He writes: ‘It's funny but I have the feeling that I'm only now learning how to do it.'

Birth and death in a day: Wanting to see the last of the afternoon light yesterday (it begins to grow dark here before four), I went out on the deck and caught sight of a black, diaphanous mayfly, a very late comer to the fall lawn scene. I remember that the mayfly's life span is a day. It was born this morning and now, in the growing afternoon darkness, is on its way to its death.

The sight sends me back to my study, where I search until I find a copy of Thomas Boreman's
Moral Reflections on the Short Life of the Ephemeron
. First published in London in 1739, my copy was made by David Godine early (1970) in his notable career as publisher and designer of elegant letterpress books. It has delicate, colored etchings by Lance Hidy, is printed on fine Amalfi paper, hand-bound, and put up in a cloth-covered box made, I think by Arno Werner. I handle it with pleasure. In every sense it is an example of a book that suitably houses its contents.

The introductory paragraph reads this way:

The Ephemeron, or Mayfly, is a common freshwater insect. The nymph grows for two years before it surfaces, sheds its skin, and emerges as a delicate, transparent fly. It is unable to eat, and can only fly and mate during its day of life.…

Trout fishermen and philosophers have both written about the Mayfly.… Aristotle established the Mayfly as a symbol of the shortest-lived animal. Philosophers use it still as a reminder of our vanity and mortality.

I look through the study window to the deck that is now entirely obliterated by the dark. The mayfly I saw must now be dead, or moribund, as was the one Boreman contemplated in the eighteenth century, the ‘dying sage' who speaks to her fellow flies of her youth in the morning:

What confidence did I repose in the fullness and spring of my joints and in the strength of my pinions! But I have lived enough to nature, and even to glory. Neither will any of you whom I leave behind have equal satisfaction in life in the dark, declining age which I see is already begun.

Tonight I am unaccountably sad. I feel as if I were possessed of what in Hebrew folklore is called a
gilgul
. The soul of the mayfly seems to have entered into me, and I can think of nothing but the ephemera of time and the permanence of death, of bright life and then the dark, like the blackout at the end of a skit in an inconsequential revue.

Today we planted more bulbs, and accompanied them with mothballs, one ball to a bulb. It may be that the odor will discourage the avaricious squirrels. The ground is cold but very dry. I think of Gerard Manley Hopkins's line: ‘Mine, O thou lord of life / Send my roots rain.'

I am rereading parts of Hermione Lee's excellent life of Willa Cather. It is full of original, useful insights, so good that I despair of ever going back to my notes to do the book I once planned. Perhaps it is as well. In the ten or more years that I have been thinking about Cather, I seem to have taken on some of her personal characteristics. Lee remarks upon her ‘grumpy repudiation of the modern world.' The adjective has now grown familiar: Helen Yglesias, my good novelist friend who lives a few miles away from us in Brooklin and who provides me with much of the literary talk I sometimes crave, calls me ‘grumpy' in her
Women's Review of Books
piece, and I must be, because readers and reviewers detect something of that tone in my book.

Hard as it is to do, I take up
End Zone
and review my stated dislikes. Now, three years later, the edges of my discontents seem to have softened, perhaps because I am protected against the noise, pollution, crowds. I go, with reluctance, into the world and then come back, full of relief that this place is still here.

Sometimes I worry that I rely too much on this place for my salvation. Have I made a fetish of it, am I obsessed with it? Yet when I am here, I am content, protected, free, less grumpy, I think.…

And then, this morning, as I wrote these last words, there was a knock on the door. A lady who owns the house on the edge of the Point, within sight of the front of our house and across the Cove, asks if Wayward Books will be open today. I tell her Sybil has gone to look at books in Surry and should be back soon. I invite her in to wait.

She tells me that she and her husband occupy the grey house close to the edge of the Reach. They are there a few weekends in the fall and spring, and in the summer. We talk about closing houses for the winter and then she tells me that their house was vandalized last winter. Some young boys from the area (one from Deer Isle) broke in, for some reason decided to trash all the photographs on the wall, broke things but stole nothing, and left. The photographs were old, valuable ones of the Cove, the Point, the Reach, nineteenth-century views of Sargentville and Sedgwick.

So. I have been deluded. There is no absolute safety, even here. Twice trashed in the District of Columbia, we came to the Cove to escape the threat of the destructive city, only to have our neighbor's house on the Point damaged. I should keep in mind what I once knew but seem to have wanted to forget, that Shakespeare's Henry VI told his soldiers: ‘In ourselves our safety lies.'

Looking through a reprint of an old book,
Divine Poems
by Francis Quarles, I am reminded that faith offers another security, echoed in Martin Luther's hymn:

Great God! there is no safety here below;

Thou art my fortress, thou that seem'st my foe.

Resolved to be more cheerful (and not to fall back into the desolation and despair of my seventieth winter), I read my mail. There is a letter from a woman with whom I went to summer camp when we both were teenagers. Helen Mandelbaum has an incredible memory and recalls that I thought up charades for her ‘bunk.' A camper appears with dirt smeared on her forehead: Soily Temple. And a girl named Ann stands crying. The rest of the bunk touches her slightly as they pass her by: Presbyterian (press by teary Ann). How terrible. No wonder I opted to forget such things. But her memories cheer me up.

After a hasty trip to Washington for bookstore business, we are back in Sargentville. In the short time we stayed in the cool city, we combined our craving for Oriental food with a reunion with Jeff Campbell and Gene Berry, neighbors on the Hill and friends from the days when Sybil ran her shop on Seventh Street. Gene works at the Library of Congress and, until recently, collected first editions by living American authors he had read and admired. Then he would write to them, such charming and beguiling letters that they agreed to sign the volumes he sent. Anne Tyler, M.F.K. Fisher, and Eudora Welty are three I recall his having corresponded with.

But at the Queen Bee, our favorite Vietnamese restaurant across the river in Arlington, he tells us his new passion is collecting antiques. He does not mention any further correspondence with writers, even antique ones, and I am saddened by his defection.… Jeff, his architect friend, is always very patient, very quiet, during Gene's description of his enthusiasms. It's hard to know if he shares them, but I think it would be hard not to. Gene's eyes glow with that peculiar light common to all avid collectors when they talk about their pursuits.

Sleeping in the apartment the first night was strange. Neither of us could remember where we were when we woke at our usual early hour. Sybil remembered first, shot out of bed, dressed, and went for the papers (‘Imagine,' she gloated, ‘having the
Post
and the
New York Times
at seven o'clock on
the same day
they appear!') and what she calls
etwas
and coffee from Bread and Chocolate on the corner.

The pleasure of cities—
das gewisse
, that certain something—cannot be denied. Thus far I have been able to identify five: reunions with friends we have reluctantly left behind; the presence of a physician, Amiel Segal, whom I admire and trust; the morning newspapers; buttery scones from the bakery across the street; and daily Mass at St. James, five blocks away. Try as I might, I can think of no others.

Oh yes, one other: the flea market on our block, every Sunday morning. Last week we bought a photograph of the sculpture at Hain's Point. Jim Culhane took the picture of Charles Johnson's remarkable work. A furious prophet lies half buried in the ground; only his arm, one leg, and his John Brown—like head can be seen. The photographer says there is talk of removing the wonderful piece and replacing it with a park. So I bought his photograph in case the sculpture disappears. This morning we decide we will hang it in Maine near the woodstove in the living room and not far from the nineteenth-century colored drawing of the Capitol.

Graffiti spotted on a fence at Dartmouth College during a visit to Hanover:

‘Why worry about tomorrow when today is so far off?'

Jane calls to say she is still having her unpleasant health problems, although Valium continues to help. Her appointment with her neurologist is not far off. I am anxious for that to take place, although she seems quite sure nothing is really wrong. Her confidence calms me. I notice how willing I am to accept reassurance for my worry, as though I am glad to be rid of it, no matter how flimsy the grounds for its dismissal.

A rainy, windy, misty Sunday. I worry about driving across the bridge to church in Stonington, and even more about a power failure (as common as weeds in this area. Sometimes a cloud passing overhead seems to cause the power to go off) while I am using the computer. So I abandon both enterprises, put on my heavy jacket and gloves, take the ash cane that Richard Lucas, my friend who died of AIDS, sent me in the last month of his life, and walk across to the bookstore.

Sybil has a fire going in the woodstove, and is happily selling books to a dealer from away, and to our favorite customer, the potter Charlie Hance, who lives and works on Deer Isle, and is a serious (and yes, avid) collector of editions of modern poets. Sybil says he makes her feel secure in her business, because there is always a stack of his books ‘on hold' on the shelf, almost as if he were investing in Wayward Books' future. A few days after we first arrived to take up residence in Maine, Sybil showed her books at a fair in Bucksport. She had one customer, Charlie, who bought a first edition of Wallace Stevens, I think it was. After that, she says, she felt reassured about the future of Wayward Books Down East.

Next day: Ed Kessler writes from Washington (and American University) that
End Zone
struck him as ‘a sea-level book, a stoical book.' He says he senses no rage against the dying of the light and asks: ‘has the Hound of Heaven lost your scent?' and sends me a poem by William Carlos Williams called ‘To Waken an Old Lady.' I've never read it before:

Old age is

a flight of small

cheeping birds

skimming

bare trees

above a snow glaze.

Gaining and failing

they are buffeted

by a dark wind—

But what?

On harsh weedstalks

the flock has rested,

the snow

is covered with broken

seedhusks

and the wind tempered

by a shrill

piping of plenty.