The Heart Is Strange (11 page)

older, of money, continually

lawyers & so, myself a flat-broke Junior.

But the one who made me wild

was who she let take naked photographs

never she showed me but she was proud of.

Unnerving; dire.

My love confused confused with after loves

not ever over time did I outgrow.

Solemn, alone my Muse grew taller.

Rejection slips developed signatures,

many thought Berryman was under weigh,

he wasn’t sure himself.

Elspeth became two snapshots in his keeping,

with all her damned clothes on.

She married a Law School dean & flourisheth.

I almost married, with four languages

a ballerina in London, and I should have done.

—Drawing the curtain over fragrant scenes

& interviews malodorous, find me

domestic with my Muse

who had manifested, well, a sense of humour

fatal to bardic pretension.

Dance! from Savannah Garnette with your slur

hypnotic, you’ll stay many.

I walked forth to a cold snow to post letters

to a foreign editor & a West Coast critic

wishing I could lay my old hands somewhere on those snapshots.

Two Organs

I remind myself at that time of Plato’s uterus—

of the seven really good courses I ever took

one was a seminar with Edman met at night

in his apartment, where we read them all

all the Dialogues, in chronological order, through

so that I got
something
out of Columbia—

Plato’s uterus, I say,

an animal passionately longing for children

and, if long unsatisfied after puberty,

prone to range angrily, blocking the air passages

& causing distress & disease.

For ‘children’ read: big fat fresh original & characteristic poems.

My longing yes was a woman’s

She can’t know can she
what kind
of a baby

she’s going with all the will in the world to produce?

I suffered trouble over this,

I didn’t want my next poem to be
exactly
like Yeats

or exactly like Auden

since in that case where the hell was
I
?

but what instead
did
I want it to sound like?

I couldn’t sleep at night, I attribute my life-long insomnia

to my uterine struggles. ‘You must undress’

a young poet writes to me from Oregon

‘the great face of the body.’

The Isolation so, young & now I find older,

American, & other.

While the rest of England was strolling thro’ the Crystal Palace

Arnold was gnashing his teeth on a mountain in Sicily.

An eccentric friend, a Renaissance scholar, sixty-odd,

unworldly, he writes limericks in Medieval Latin,

stood up in the rowboat fishing to take a leak

& exclaimed as he was about it with excitement

‘I wish my penis was big enough for this whole lake!’

My phantasy precisely at twenty:

to satisfy at once all Barnard & Smith

& have enough left over for Miss Gibbs’s girls.

Olympus

In my serpentine researches

I came on a book review in
Poetry

which began, with sublime assurance,

a comprehensive air of majesty,

‘The art of poetry

is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse

by the animating presence in the poetry

of a fresh idiom: language

so twisted & posed in a form

that it not only expresses the matter in hand

but adds to the stock of available reality.’

I was never altogether the same man after
that
.

I found this new Law-giver all unknown

except in the back numbers of a Cambridge quarterly

Hound & Horn
, just defunct.

I haunted on Sixth Avenue until

at 15¢ apiece or 25

I had all 28 numbers

& had fired my followers at Philolexian & Boar’s Head

with the merits of this prophet.

My girls suffered during this month or so,

so did my seminars & lectures &

my poetry even. To be a
critic
, ah,

how deeper & more scientific.

I wrote & printed an essay on Yeats’s plays

re-deploying all of Blackmur’s key terms

& even his sentence-structure wherever I could.

When he answered by hand from Boston my nervous invitation

to come & be honoured at our annual Poetry Reading,

it must have been ten minutes before I could open the envelope.

I got
him
to review Tate’s book of essays

&
Mark
to review
The Double Agent
. Olympus!

I have travelled in some high company since

but never so dizzily.

I have had some rare girls since but never one so philosophical

as that same Spring (my last Spring there) Jean Bennett.

The Heroes

For all his vehemence & hydraulic opinions

Pound seemed feline, zeroing in on feelings,

hovering up to them, putting his tongue in their ear,

delicately modulating them in & out of each other.

Almost supernatural crafter; maybe unhappy,

disappointed continually,

not fated like his protégé Tom or drunky Jim

or hard-headed Willie for imperial sway.

How I maneuvered in my mind their rôles

of administration for the modern soul

in English, now one, now ahead another,

for this or that special strength, wilful & sovereign.

I had, from my beginning, to adore heroes

& I elected that they witness to,

show forth, transfigure: life-suffering & pure heart

& hardly definable but central weaknesses

for which they were to be enthroned & forgiven by me.

They had to come on like revolutionaries,

enemies throughout to accident & chance,

relentless travellers, long used to failure

in tasks that but for them would sit like hanging judges

on faithless & by no means up to it Man.

Humility & complex pride their badges,

every ‘third thought’ their grave.

These gathering reflexions, against young women

against seven courses in my final term,

I couldn’t sculpt into my helpless verse yet.

I wrote mostly about death.

Recovery

I don’t know what the hell happened all that summer.

I was done in, mentally. I wrote nothing, I read nothing.

I spent a pot of money, not being used to money,

I forget on what, now. I felt dazed.

After some wandering days in Montreal

I went to a little town where Dr Locke

cured any & everything with foot ‘adjustments’,

on hundreds of patients daily from all over North America

outdoors in a hardwood grover in front of his clinic.

I made vague friends with a couple, the brother in a wheel-chair,

his pleasant sister looking after him.

They were dull & very poor. I gave them tea,

we talked about what young people talk about.

Weeks somehow went by. All this time my art was in escrow,

I vegetated, I didn’t even miss Jean,

without interest in what I was, what I might become

never came up, as day by day

I stood in line for the Doctor & gave them tea.

I didn’t think much of the nothing I knew of Canada,

half British-oriented, half-French, half-American;

no literature, painting, architecture,

music, philosophy, scholarship …

(McLuhan & Frye unthinkable ahead).

I wasn’t unhappy, I wasn’t anything,

until I pulled myself reluctantly together at last

& bowed goodbye to my lame ducks

& headed for Pier 42—where my nervous system

as I teetered across the gang-plank

sprang back into expectation. I kissed Jean

& Mother & shook hands with old Halliday

and I mounted to the
Britannic
’s topmost deck

O a young American poet, not yet good,

off to the strange Old World to pick their brains

& visit by hook or crook with W. B. Yeats.

Transit

O a little lonely in Cambridge that first Fall

of fogs & buying books & London on Thursday for plays

& visiting Rylands in his posh rooms at King’s

one late afternoon a week.

He was kind to me stranded, & even to an evening party

he invited me, where Keynes & Auden

sat on the floor in the hubbub trading stories

out of their Oxbridge wealth of folklore.

I joined in desperation the Clare ping-pong team

& was assigned to a Sikh in a bright yellow sweater

with a beard so gorgeous I could hardly serve;

his turban too won for him.

I went to the Cosmo, which showed Continental films

& for weeks only Marx Brothers films,

& a short about Oxford was greeted one evening

with loud cunning highly articulate disdain.

Then I got into talk with Gordon Fraser

& he took me home with him out to Mill Lane

to meet his wife Katharine, a witty girl

with strange eyes, from Chicago.

The news from Spain got worse. The President of my Form

at South Kent turned up at Clare, one of the last let out of Madrid.

He designed the Chapel the School later built

& killed himself, I never heard why

or just how, it was something to do with a bridge.

Message

Amplitude,—voltage,—the one friend calls for the one,

the other for the other, in my work;

in verse & prose. Well, hell.

I am not writing an autobiography-in-verse, my friends.

Impressions, structures, tales, from Columbia in the Thirties

& the Michaelmas term at Cambridge in ’36,

followed by some later. It’s not my life.

That’s occluded & lost.

That consisted of lectures on St Paul,

scrimmages with women, singular moments

of getting certain things absolutely right.

Laziness, liquor, bad dreams.

That consisted of three wives & many friends,

whims & emergencies, discoveries, losses.

It’s been a long trip. Would I make it again?

But once a Polish belle bared me out & was kind to it.

I don’t remember why I sent this message.

Children! children! form the point of all.

Children & high art.

Money in the bank is also something.

We will all die, & the evidence

is: Nothing after that.

Honey, we don’t rejoin.

The thing meanwhile, I suppose, is to be courageous & kind.

The Minnesota 8 and the Letter-Writers

Here’s one who wants them
hanged
. A poor sick mind,

signing itself & saying where it’s from:

St Louis Park. Out of the woodwork vermin come.

To crises rise our worst, and (some) our best

to dare illegal deeds in an unpopular cause

defying prison because they feel they ought, because

the sanity & honour seem endangered,

or seem convulsed, of their own country, and

a flaccid people can’t be got to understand

its state without some violence undertaken,

by somebody without a thing to gain,

to shock it into resisting,—one program pain

of treatment back to the health of the body politic:

to stop napalming pint-sized yellow men

& their slant-eyed children, and ground arms & come home again.

O the Signers broke the law, and deserved hanging,

by the weird light of the sage of St Louis Park,

who probably admires
them. These
bear their rare mark.

Damned

Damned. Lost &
damned
. And I find I’m pregnant.

It must have been in a shuffle of disrobing

or shortly after.

I confess: I don’t know what to do.

She wept steadily all thro’ the performance.

As soon as I tucked it in she burst into tears.

She had a small mustache but was otherwise gifted,

riding, & crying her heart out.

(She had been married two years) I was amazed.

(Her first adultery) I was scared & guilty.

I said ‘What are you crying for, darling?
Don’t
.’

She stuttered something & wept on.

She came again & again, twice ejecting me

over her heaving. I turned my head aside

to avoid her goddamned tears,

getting in my beard.

I am busy tired mad lonely & old.

O this has been a long long night of wrest.

I saw her once again: on a busy sidewalk

outside a grocery store

& she was big & I did
not
say ‘Is it mine?’

I congratulated her.

Brighter it waxeth; it’s almost seven.

Despair

It seems to be
DARK
all the time.

I have difficulty walking.

I can remember what to say to my seminar

but I don’t know that I want to.

I said in a Song once: I am unusually tired.

I repeat that & increase it.

I’m vomiting.

I broke down today in the slow movement of K.365.

I certainly don’t think I’ll last much longer.

I wrote: ‘There may be horribles.’

I increase that.

(I think she took her little breasts away.)

I am in love with my excellent baby.

Crackles! in darkness
HOPE
; & disappears.

Lost arts.

Vanishings.

Walt! We’re downstairs,

even you don’t comfort me

but I join your risk my dear friend & go with you.

There are no matches

Utter, His Father, one word

The Hell Poem