[sic]: A Memoir (5 page)

Pound, I propose, is the most emblematic artist of the twentieth century because he was the most ambitious, and basically single-handedly created the English with which we’re speaking and writing right now; and then a war happened, and he went insane, became a fascist, and was arrested and locked in a small open cage outdoors, and in this cage he was floating and shrieking and trying to put things together. And then he was nearly penalized with capital punishment for treason; finally, he was placed in a hospital room, from which he was later released, and he moved to Venice in Italy and finally died.

And then there’s that great thing the writer C. David Heymann writes about, actually meeting Pound in Venice near the end of the old man’s life. Mr. Heymann walked in and there’s Pound, sitting there, saying absolutely nothing. After a long period of what must have been freakishly uncomfortable silence, Pound started rhapsodizing about Eliot and Yeats and Joyce and Ginsberg and the Beatles as if he’d known this young writer, a stranger, for years.

But then the brittle-boned figure before me had once again retired behind his impenetrable shield of reticence: he said nothing. The hands continued to work away at each other, and the eyes were quiet and far away. Then the lips began to move, searching for words which would not come.

Finally: “It is sad . . . very sad to look back.”
³

C. David Heymann’s book from which the preceding passage is drawn is terrific—he wrote it when he was only thirty, for heaven’s sakes. How exactly he ended up becoming, as his publisher states, “the author of several acclaimed biographies, including
Poor Little Rich Girl: The Life and Legend of Barbara Hutton
;
A Woman Named Jackie: An Intimate Biography of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis
;
R.F.K: A Candid Biography of Robert F. Kennedy
; and
Liz: An Intimate Biography of Elizabeth Taylor
”—I have no idea. That’s quite a career trajectory. And also some of these biographies have been turned into television miniseries. Not the Pound one though. Mr. Heymann is currently in the news for alleging—for the third time!—that Bobby and Jackie did what my friend Steve in college called the “bone dance” (as in, what’re you up to tonight, Steve? and he’d say, well, taking this chick out to dinner and, hopefully, doing the bone dance). I thought—and later, I discovered I was mistaken—that it’s Mr. Heymann’s book on Pound that includes an anecdote in which somebody visits the poet, either in Venice or at the madhouse, and Pound abruptly stops a beautiful monologue on something or other and, glancing at his listener, says, “The film breaks.”

“What?” I said.

“I said,” my oncologist apparently continued, “do you have any questions?”

I asked him—such a nice guy—to kindly repeat everything he just said. Ever the good student, I took notes. And note the difference in style. For
this—
not the diagnosis—was the real bifurcation. Here I’d thought all along the diagnosis was the rupture. No; the proof is in the pudding, the truth is visible in the penmanship, forever altered. And how many losses of innocence have I already described, and how many more will I have to describe, recontextualizing—which is the same as minimizing—the previous ones? How many will there be? Just when you think you are out, they pull you back in. Innocence, apparently, isn’t lost in a moment, like Eve biting into an apple, like a column disappearing suddenly in a cloud of dust; innocence crumbles, sometimes over centuries; it stumbles against itself, the loss ever-widening, exactly like a sequence of modulations in Beethoven (as the nineteenth-century music theorist Heinrich Schenker described—and I paraphrase—oh now we’ve arrived at our cadence, our musical goal, and—oh, wait, no
now
we’ve arrived, and—oh no sorry
now
we’ve arrived, I thought it was then but it’s now but so now we can—oh no jeez sorry
now
we’ve oh no sorry
NO
W
); exactly like the stupefying orchestral circle of fifths that leads us back to the reprise of the first (“A”) section of the stupefying coda to the eighth album of those English-born but actually in a way mainly really Irish musicians Pound was talking about in the hospital with Ginsberg,
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
, a coda that occurs after the show is
over, finished, it’s done, hurry up please it’s time, good night ladies, good night ladies, good night, good night (next to this line, in Eliot’s original
Waste Land
draft, Pound, who took the “jumble of good and bad passages”
⁴
and made a masterpiece out of it, had written—uniquely in his annotations!—“splendid”); and it’s not over, of course, it’s never over, there’s always an after, there’s always a coda, here in the form of a terra-cotta zephyr of a C major chord (there’s still plenty of good music to be written in C major, Arnold Schoenberg, of all people, once said) wafting in and lilting down to its
resolution, G, pausing just long enough for John Lennon to tell us, heartbreakingly, that nothing of what we’ve experienced over the last thirty-five minutes—not the initial exuberance of the masquerade; not the admission that without community we cannot live; not gazing at variegated jewels of the nighttime sky, which the unblind see as a black void, and which Joyce, who went blind, correctly catechistized as “the heaventree of stars”; not the overcoming of, as Shakespeare put it, and as Pound put it later, “the capacity to do harm”; not the joy of letting meandering thoughts meander, reasonless, for the sole sake of joy; not the heartbreak of that singular moment in life when you understand you’re no longer a child (for me it was crossing a steel bridge after driving through fields of yellow grain which now were orange); not the celebration of the blissful madness of the West (the circus) or the blissful sanity of the East (the flow); not the charms of the music hall; not the glimpse of a woman wearing a cap (“a fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember,” the now elderly Bernstein warns the ambitious young newsman; “she didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl”); not the rage against the machine of Madison Avenue and daytime television; not the ecstasy of the symmetry of the musical reprise (a joy unknown, until this moment, to the pop/rock album)—none of this matters, Lennon tells us, because he’s just read the newspaper and—oh, boy. And now we’re in minor. And we may never get out. But of course we will, unforgettably, with the help of ten hands on three pianos—one lent, uniquely, by Daniel Barenboim, just when you think the guy’s exhausted pretty much any further possibility of cultural generosity, you learn something like this about him—and with the help of one of the, well, no, I’ll just go ahead and say it,
the
greatest E major chord in the history of Western music,
*
a conclusion that
very nearly had been a bunch of white guys humming Tibetan chant, which incidentally is as good an illustration of the fragility of great art as the image of a forty-nine-year-old Ryan O’Neal (Paramount’s original choice, to Mr. Coppola’s horror—hey, the suits told him, Italians can have blond hair too) saying, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” Which would have been even worse. But we know now, in hindsight, it ends with that chord and, as the groove proves, we will never see it any other way; but before, when it was actually happening, we simply weren’t sure how it would turn out.

It’s also exactly like yet another fresh spring after yet another waterfall in the center of a Greek island: yet another giving away.

What I wrote now, in foreverafter altered penmanship:

Lymph node shrunk and is stable—not unusual

Still some PET activity, much less than before

This is troubling b/c it correlates

False positive rate 20/40%

Money is in the chest.

Media stanoscopy.

If there is persistent disease, we still have an excellent chance of getting rid of it.

Autologous st

Supportive

Stem cells. After chemo,

Cell separator, takes blood out, centrifuges it, get the stem cells.

Then high dose chemo with radiation

with autologous stem cells, back in for a transfusion, after

2/3 weeks, they start growing back.

Risk not huge, been doing it for 20 years.

Mortality under 5%.

ICE. Two cycles to start with. In hospital.

2/3 weeks, 6/9 weeks I is continuous infusion

1 to 2 days

then more

a little more intensive but still conventional

2) replace the port—this is the catheter

3) stem cell separator. Few days.

4) High dose chemo with radiation. 48 to 72 hrs after chemo

stem cells go back in.

Then in hospital for weeks.

Could be worse.

Pretty well tolerated.

Some risk, not too much.

Notice something? The writing’s way better. Like having Pound around, but for free, without having to put up with his fascism. (Joyce was “genuinely frightened of him” and wouldn’t meet him for dinner in Paris in 1934 if Hemingway wouldn’t come along.)
⁵

Then I said, how long will all this take?

“A year.”

Okay and we shook hands and I walked outside and kept walking and when I reached Park Avenue I called a friend of mine with whom I’d been speaking during the six months of chemo; she’d had the same thing, she’d done the same chemo and was fine. I told her that for me there was some “uptake” on the scan results and that I was going to have a bone marrow transplant, and she started sobbing uncontrollably, crying, “But that can’t be true, that’s not true. That’s salvage treatment, you’re not going to die. You have to go to another hospital, because that can’t be true.” Now this reaction made me feel a little uneasy, like Eurydice must have felt when she saw the look on her boyfriend’s face ahead of her, and felt herself slipping into Hades. I called my friend Carmilla. She told me where to meet her, a pan-Asian restaurant in Chelsea. I jumped in a cab and watched the old Pan Am Building, now the MetLife Building, swell.

She was at the bar with about a dozen plates of dim sum in front of her. She hugged me tightly and gave me a deep kiss, then handed me a martini; and the second act began.

•

SHE HUGGED ME
tightly and gave me a deep kiss, then handed me a martini—freeze it there for a sec. This should not be taken as a value judgment, but just as lives may be thus bisected, so doth humanity divide itself, for some inscrutable reason, between people who seem illuminated from above, and those who seem lit from below. (I mean “seem illuminated”
literally
, like with light gear you see on film sets.) Either quality is no particular indicator of either intelligence (although a case could be made for a statistical correlation between intelligence and the former) or beauty (same for the latter), and anyway—thankfully—beauty and intelligence are unmasked as the combatants they truly are only upon reaching their very extremes. The above-lit slash below-lit continuum is, like virtually every other orientation (whether political, sexual, ethnic, religious, technocratic, melodic, whatever) (televised, aquatic, whatever), exactly that: a spectrum, on which the vast majority of us will fall somewhere in the middle, more or less. But God bless America. Gimme your tired, your poor. I became tired, and poor, due to treatments for a disease, and due to a disease, that had everything to do with genes and nothing to do with the environment. (“If anything,” my bow-tied oncologist said once, “you could suggest a socioeconomic bias,” and he smirked. That was the point where we really bonded. Even more than when he said I could keep smoking. “Quit after. Don’t worry about it now. One thing at a time. Do that next.” Or when I asked him about diet, herbal supplements, red cabbage, flavenoid-rich kale, antioxidants, sulfuric garlic. “Yeah, that stuff is just terrific, the whole idea’s great, the only thing is that it makes absolutely no difference and it doesn’t work. Listen, don’t eat any of that crap. Okay?”)