Milking the Moon (20 page)

The result was that since both of them protected this sensitive and delicate Marie, she woke up one morning and got tired of being the sheltered flower. Ran off to Long Island and got a job teaching English at Long Island University—she had all kinds of degrees. She married this delightful professor and started making babies right and left. Miranda took up with a little blond Polish refugee. But she was still getting younger and younger actresses all the time. I think she is now doing Girl Scouts. Robert took up with one of his art class friends that he’d been dating before. And everybody lived happily ever after.

Combating Dailyness

Jean Garrigue and I used to love to go to the Museum of Modern Art garden on Sunday afternoons. They had all these little tables under the trees, looking very European. They had a proper alcoholic bar run by these Filipino boys, and they had a soft drink bar run by Baptists, I guess. We used to go there and sip gin and tonic and watch the students and professors who had come to New York for summer courses. They would always be looking sort of expectant, hoping they would see Picasso in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art. And I said to Jean one day, “You know, really it’s so sad, these children from the provinces. They come here in August when everybody has left New York and nothing is happening.” So I said, “Let’s do something for them.” It’s because I’m a poet. When you say the word
poet,
there are people who think of something pale, frail, or a college professor with a bow tie writing sensitive verses. Or they think of something slightly mad. But the old Greek word for poet,
poiētēs,
means somebody who makes things or makes things happen. I make things happen.

This really was the first “happening.” It wasn’t called a happening. Other people later began to do this all over America, and they were called happenings.

We called ourselves the Apparition Group. It was José Garcia Villa, the poet Howard Moss, Robert DeVries, Ruth Herschberger, Josephine Herbst, this wonderful painter Ann Troxel, and the actress Marie Donnet. We rehearsed it for a week and timed it, because I wanted some things to happen simultaneously. Nobody else knew what we were doing. We sent little postcards to some well-known artists and writers, saying “The Apparition Group, Sunday at 3:00, August the so-and-so, Museum of Modern Art garden.”

I had chosen my friend from Mobile Edith Zelnicker’s birthday. I wrote to her and her husband and said, “I’m having a little party for you. You and Edwin come to the Museum of Modern Art and you’ll see a little pink crepe-paper flower. That’s your table.” They thought I was just doing something silly like I might always do. That I would come dressed as Santa Claus in August or something like that. They came nervously and sat at the table indicated. They’re old Mobile Jewish: conservative and no public display of any kind.

What happened was, at precisely three o’clock, a very beautiful little boy about ten years old, wearing a rather odd sort of blue hussar jacket and blue short pants, came into the middle of the garden, lifted his toy trumpet, and played a fanfare and then ran. That was the only sound we made. So everybody was looking. Then I appeared. I was the Very Sick Poet. My hair was jet-black, done with Kiwi shoe polish, and my face was dead white with black eyebrows and shadows under my eyes. I carried a large aspirin bottle and a bouquet of dead white roses. I was dressed in a Southern white linen suit with a flowing tie. My jacket pockets were full of diamond flitters—sequin dust. With this I made a little path behind me. Then Jean Garrigue came in as the witch of Christopher Street. She was no longer blond. I had dyed her hair jet-black, and we added ostrich plumes to her natural curls. She wore black to the floor and this fringed black cape with sequins. She carried a basket of four kittens wearing tiny little ballet skirts and came precisely on my path of sequin dust.

I went to the central table where some tourists were sitting. I put my aspirin down and my dead white roses and in my best Boris Karloff voice, I said, “I’m terribly sorry; this table is taken.” They got up and ran. They ran. So I sat down, and Jean Garrigue came and sat opposite me. Turned the kittens in their ballet skirts loose under the table. We sat and talked in total gibberish. The Filipino boys running the drink booth were so enchanted they brought us drinks on the house right away. The soft drink people went to the armed guard and said, “They can’t do this here. They can’t do this here.” The delightful German refugee guard who was always there said, “Well, they bought their admission tickets.…”

When Garrigue and I stopped our conversation suddenly, raised our champagne glasses, and clinked them, that’s the moment when Robert DeVries got up from the table in the corner and hung several globes of colored paper in the trees and started blowing soap bubbles. He was dressed in a proper double-breasted business suit, white shirt, and necktie, looking as though he might be a young Wall Street lawyer. When he started blowing bubbles, that was the signal for all our cohorts dressed as ordinary citizens throughout the garden to do the same. Suddenly there were globes of colored paper in every tree and the whole garden was full of soap bubbles.

Everybody was in silent awe. I looked up and the whole glass wall of the second floor was smashed noses looking into the garden. Then people started sort of coming timidly out of the museum. Nobody was looking at pictures by then.

Jean Garrigue and I sat there and resumed our conversation in an unknown language. People were gathering around staring at us, but we didn’t notice anybody. Then this woman in a raincoat with a hood appeared, staring at us. She was very pale with long green hair and a kind of mermaid’s costume. This was Ann Troxel. I had copied the Graham Sutherland painting of a chartreuse, red, and white beetle. She was carrying it like a baby and rocking it and staring at us. Then the crowd was staring at her. Marie Donnet floated in like a dream figure in a bright red dress of chiffon to the ground and evening makeup, with rhinestone earrings to her knees and a cigarette holder three feet long.

At that moment, José Garcia Villa was supposed to come in the back door with purple hair, an old-fashioned movie camera, and start filming us and then pull endless yards of tinsel out of the camera and throw it around. But he lost his nerve. Howard Moss was supposed to come in and do something, but he lost his nerve and said, “You all are going to be arrested.” We said, “No, we are not. We are buying our tickets. We are not making any noise.” The only sound was the initial trumpet and our little nonsense conversation at the table. Everything else was done in silence. The whole idea was silence, except for the little fanfare and our conversation.

By this time the crowd was going mad, trying to talk to us, asking us, “What does it mean? Who are you? What does it mean?” The one guy I remember in the crowd—all the effort was worth it if only for him, this little fat man. He had to have been from somewhere way off. He was climbing onto his table and snapping pictures and shouting, “I just happened to have my camera! I just happened to have my camera!” You could tell he was the guy who sees a train wreck or a skyscraper collapse, and he’s never got his camera when he needs it. He kept saying, “I just happened to have my camera!” For once in his life, he had his camera when he needed it.

At a given moment we all got up, went through the garden, and handed out miniature French playing cards. Everybody got a playing card. People said, “Oh, they are advertising something.” Typical American reaction: the meaning is that they are advertising something. But our message was, the moral of the whole thing was, “You too can play.”

Then we all slowly congregated at the back door as planned; taxis were waiting that had been called in advance. Josephine Herbst gathered up the kittens. Somebody in the museum had called the
New York Times
and there was a
Times
reporter who was tugging at me, saying, “What is all this? Who are you all?” Again, in my best Boris Karloff voice, I said, “We’re the Apparition Group.” He said, “What does it mean? What’s it all about?” I said, “We are combating dailyness.” Got in a taxi and was whisked off.

Afterwards I had a party in my courtyard in the Village. José came to apologize. He said, “I really thought we’d get in trouble.” I said, “Well, since what we were doing was innocent, what trouble could we have? Seymour or New Directions would have bailed us out if we’d been arrested.”

New York was full of it for weeks. Nobody quite knew what had happened. Nor did the
New York Times.
We never told them. We never let on.

And with the way fact turns into fiction with each retelling, a week or so later, I heard that the Museum of Modern Art had staged a preview in the garden to advertise Roland Petit’s Ballets de Paris that was coming to town. Then years later—years later—I went to a dinner party in London and I had to almost bite my tongue off. There was a young woman there who said, “When I was studying in New York, I went to this wonderful birthday party in honor of Edith Sitwell at the Museum of Modern Art.”

*

Oh, there were parties, parties, parties, parties. But for me, almost anything is reason for a party. The first tulips in spring: have a party. The first green peas are in: have a party. I just think that way. That’s how I think. The reason I have never had more than ten dollars to my name—if I had ten dollars, I gave a party. If I had two hundred dollars, I gave a very good party.

So when Dylan Thomas came to New York, I had a party.

During the war, when I was in Alaska and the Aleutians, I subscribed to a magazine published by the University of Illinois at Urbana called
Accent.
That’s where I read my first Eudora Welty story, about a black midwife, and I flipped. Then in the next issue there were these poems by this young Welsh poet named Dylan Thomas, and they said that his book had come out in ’38 or ’39 and was called
Fifteen Poems.
What I liked about those poems was that they were fresh and youthful. We get so much of that “I’m unhappy in the suburbs in spite of the steam heat and my new polka-dot tie.” I get so sick of that kind of American poetry. It’s as though the eternal themes are unavailable to some of these college professors and darling children. Oh so sensitive. Oh so unhappy in the steam-heated suburbs. I can’t take it. What I loved about Thomas’s poems was a kind of sideswipe quality, as though he heard words differently, as though he spoke words differently. He was born and raised in Wales; naturally his English would be different, as a Southern writer’s English would be different. I flipped. I mean, wowee. So then I tried to find that
Fifteen Poems
or
Eighteen Poems
or whatever that book was called. Never could find it.

Well, there was this English poet who had taught somewhere in Alabama, who naturally ended up at my place in Greenwich Village to call on me and then also came to parties after. Ruthven Todd. People in Alabama had sent word to him, If you are going to New York, you have to meet Eugene. Well, one day he said, “You’ve probably never heard of him,” because at that time, Dylan Thomas was known only to a few professors at Harvard who were keeping up with everything in them islands. But he hadn’t published anything in America to speak of, and was unknown really. He said, “You probably don’t know this Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas—” I said, “Stop right there. Know him? I LOVE him.” He said, “Well, he’s coming to New York.” I said, “Coming to New York!” He said, “Do you want to meet him?” I said, “Do I want to meet him!”

There are some people I was friends with before I met them. Like Isak Dinesen. I knew I would love her. I knew she would like me. I knew I would get along with Dylan Thomas when I read those first poems in
Accent.
And I knew I’d meet him.

Ruthven Todd brought him one day, and there he was. A little old drunk. Just a little old rosy-cheek drunk. And as jolly a sense of humor as one would wish. Nothing professorial. Rather shabby. With all these Welsh curls and these wicked, wicked bright eyes. He didn’t miss a trick. Harlech and leeks all the way, when so many American poets are hermits, or professors, or cranks, or show-offs. So I gave this party to welcome him.

I thought, Well, he’s from the British Isles; that means rose gardens. So I went down to the Woolworth’s in the Village and bought green-covered florist wire. It was summertime, so I was living in my “summer place” on West 9th. The day of the party I got up early in the morning and went down to the flower market and bought lots of roses. I came home and wrapped the stem of each rose in wet cotton wadding and then made these rose trees with florist wire and green wax paper. I wanted rose trees like those in the illustrations of
Alice in Wonderland.
I put a row of those trees against the brick walls on each side of this little courtyard. I had some other flowers that I put into fruit jars full of water and buried in the ground since that earth was so sordid after who knows how many years of New York soot. I had tried to work that garden, but nothing would grow; it was a desert. So I made an English garden. I had millions of candles. Millions. I looked out and I thought, Well, it needs a touch of Mobile. Of Carnival. So I got the last of those diamond flitters and spread them all over the flagstones. And in the candlelight, that twinkling pavement was rather something.

There was Curtis Harrington, the young film director, and his beautiful cousin Thamar. There was José Garcia Villa. Jean Garrigue. Oscar Williams, the anthologist who did so many anthologies of American poetry and included so many very young, practically unknown people. Ruth Herschberger. Josephine Herbst. Baby Andrew. Robert DeVries. And Gene Derwood, this rather serious lady poet, who came in a wool moor-stalking cape and brought a quart of milk. She said, “I know you won’t be serving milk at this party.” And I looked at this quart of milk. Nobody had ever brought a quart of milk to any of my parties. Then I took her out to the garden, and she said, “How spurious. I would never do a thing like this.” Well, that and the milk: I never spoke to her again. Arriving with milk and saying my diamond flitter rose garden was spurious. Spurious. She was spurious. That moor-stalking cape—and this was August—and that quart of milk.