A Moveable Famine (2 page)

I
drove a ten-year-old Mercury Comet to Iowa City. The four-story Iowa Bank and Trust building, the tallest in town, flashed the temperature: 101 degrees. In the
Daily Iowan
classifieds I found a cheap furnished basement apartment with a wall so thin I woke to my neighbor’s spoon scraping her cereal bowl. I lived on money from a summer job at the Associated Press, and had a budget of twenty dollars a month for food. I ate mostly hot dogs and drank powdered milk from the Royal Market where the aisles were stacked with products still in their cartons.

The packet of information I received in New York told me to see my advisor, Serge Andreyev, editor of the
Ethical Literary Review.
I walked to his office in EPB, the English Philosophy Building. The Old Capitol, with its gold dome, presided over university buildings known as the Pentacrest. Sandwich shops and barbershops stretched out before it, along with hardware stores and department stores whose windows displayed cracked mannequins in floral housedresses. Two Epstein’s Bookstores were a block apart: one used, one new, run by twin brothers, Harry James Epstein and Glenn Miller Epstein. Farmers in overalls walked among sorority girls, hippies, frat boys, school children and tweedy professors. There were bars on every block: The Airliner, Donnelly’s, The Deadwood, The Mill and The Vine. George’s, The Brown Bottle and Magoo’s. Each with its own clientele and some with a particular literary aesthetic.

Andreyev waved me in just as his phone rang. The building was cool, but sunlight entered his office and warmed the spines of the
Ethical Literary Reviews
with the smell of burnt toast. A heavy, bald man with a red face, he kept repeating into the receiver, “I’m on my way. I’m leaving now.” When he hung up, he said, “That was my wife. We had ham last night and now she has stomach pains. She’s sure it’s trichinosis, but it’s guilt. I’m taking the bone for testing.”

I asked if he would help me choose my courses.

“I really don’t know what to suggest,” he said. “You can’t go wrong. And I have to be off, as you heard.” He lifted his briefcase, which contained, I guessed, the ham bone. On the way out, I stopped at a framed print of men touching torches to tree branches and snaring birds with nets.

“Batfowling,” he said. “And over here.” He pointed to other prints, “Pike fishing and otter hunting. Pursuits of the nineteenth-century common man.”

We took the elevator together in silence and, when we got out, he said, “Don’t worry. The worst you can do is take a wrong step in the right direction.”

I went back to my apartment and opened the course list while my neighbor’s voice came clearly through the wall as she phoned friends, telling them that her married boyfriend was cheating on her with a high school girl. She spoke with a twang, and said she was going to call her rival’s parents and reveal their daughter’s affair.

I chose Seminar: American Transcendentalism.

My neighbor’s friends counseled against her plan, but she insisted she could convince the girl’s parents to keep her home. As she dialed, I found Poetry Workshop.

“Hello, sir,” she said. “You don’t know me, and I don’t know you, but I want to tell you, sir, that your daughter is going out with a married man.” The father’s response encouraged her. “Yes, I thought you would like to know.” They talked for a while, my neighbor upholding family values, but adding at one point, “And, sir, I hope I can be frank and tell you your daughter is known as ‘The Gang Banger of Iowa City.’ ” Even this did not put off the father and they talked for another minute while I added “Chaucer” to my list. At four a.m. I woke to the roar of a motorcycle, followed by bone-shaking thumps on my neighbor’s door. After the visitor drove off, the girl ran to the window, lifted the metal venetian blinds, and moaned a long wavering moan.

In American Transcendentalism, I met the Thompson twins, Mandy and Sandy, from the tiny town of Longleaf, Georgia. Sandy, rotund and blonde, full of giggles and good cheer, was the opposite of her sister whose high cheekbones and dark hair, parted in the middle, gave her a somber look. Elderly Alexander Kern held the class in his living room on Mayflower Heights, a promontory overlooking the city. Deer nosed at feeders outside his glassed-in balcony. Twelve of us sat in a row of folding chairs, six on a side. Kern, an elfin man at Iowa for forty years, sank into an armchair at one end and blew smoke rings from his cigar down the center as he lectured. Twelve heads followed each circle of smoke. On occasion, he reached the farthest student.

The Art of Poetry was taught by Frank Ridge, a second-year MFA candidate in the writers’ workshop. Ridge’s handsome but slightly pudgy face loomed above a football player’s body. He shuffled through the halls, dragging his Wellingtons. We had Catholic, working-class backgrounds in common and became friends.

I thought Chaucer would be a festival of lewd stories, but Dr. Stabile believed Chaucer a religious man who wrote bawdy tales to mock sinners. Stabile rode a girl’s thick Schwinn to campus, his long red pony tail trailing down the back of the poplin suit he wore every day. Doctoral students, marked by jackets and ties and the thermoses they carried to the library, comprised the entire class, except for me and a member of the writers’ workshop, Mike McPeak, who smelled of beer and missed every other class. Stabile flew into rages at contemporary moral misconduct, condemning the workshop in particular for lecherous behavior. One day McPeak muttered that it was no worse than any other department and I agreed. Stabile crowned his argument against us by pointing his finger toward the ceiling and pronouncing, “May I let it be known that when Philip Roth was here, he seduced the wife of our most prominent faculty member!” After class, McPeak bought me a beer at The Deadwood, a bar with a western theme, where workshop students gathered. Wanted posters of outlaws covered the pine paneling. A gnarled piece of driftwood loomed over the bottles. Frank Ridge joined us and tried to guess the cuckold’s identity. McPeak said the answer rested on whether “most prominent” meant the English department or the entire university. “If it’s the whole school,” he said, “then it’s clearly Van Allen of the Van Allen belt.”

From then on, McPeak pronounced words in Stabile’s class as double-entendres, saying, “Really, do you think Chaucer wrote that scene just to save
our souls
?” But he drew out the last two syllables, so it sounded like,
assholes
. In his research paper, he quoted a character’s standard for a successful tale—“Mirth is All,” and wrote, “Chaucer puts his
dictum
into Harry Bailey’s mouth.”

He tried to get me to join in, but I had already been through that at Fairfield with Father Rogers, a sadistic priest who wiped the sweat from his forehead with his index finger and flung it into our faces as we entered his class on Victorian prose. In his role as prefect in the Loyola dorm, he forced students to strip publicly and take cold showers while he doused them with buckets of water. Rogers seemed more comfortable with students like Monk Lawrence who hung by his legs for hours from an isometric bar, and Tim “No Mind” Garahan, who died diving headfirst into a rock in the Connecticut River. My roommate and I consulted Frank Harris’s
My Life and Loves
, for its bizarre accounts of famous nineteenth-century writers. He pointed out Tennyson’s “preferring dogs to niggers,” and that when a physician examined Thomas Carlyle’s wife after twenty-five years of marriage, the doctor reported that she was a “virgo intacta.” Rogers hotly insisted that biography was extraneous. My roommate’s climactic moment was noting that John Ruskin became forever impotent on his wedding night, quoting Harris: “This art historian who rhapsodized over the beauties of marble nymphs was shocked at the sight of a real woman’s pubic hair.” At this remark, Rogers became so flustered he lost his place and kept licking his finger as he whipped through
English Prose of the Victorian Era,
our two-thousand-page tome of tissue-thin paper. I searched Harris for writers’ deaths, selecting the most absurd. I noted that Matthew Arnold died jumping over a fence, and that only five people attended John Stuart Mill’s funeral. After a while, I stopped consulting Harris altogether and simply invented things. When Robert Browning died of a heart attack, it was after being chased across a field by a goose. Christina Rossetti’s cancer was hastened by her shame at being glimpsed on the toilet when an outhouse collapsed around her.

In college I had embraced the zing and pop of New York School poetry, thanks to the thoughtfulness of Allen Ginsberg. Stirred by
Howl
, I had read all of Kerouac’s novels, seeking him out in the guises of Irwin Garden, Carlo Marx and Alvah Goldbrook. I took the train from Fairfield one night to see him read in New York. He wore jeans and a flannel shirt and not the saint’s robe or sorcerer’s gown I imagined. He sang the poems of William Blake and played the harmonium. A band performed afterward and, when Ginsberg joined the dancers, I introduced myself. He took me by the hand and swung me through the crowd of swirling tie-dyed shirts and kaleidoscopic body paint. A week later, I regretted not talking with him. I had met Ginsberg’s friend, Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs, at the Peace Eye when I bought his book,
1001 Ways to Beat the Draft.
I called him and he gave me Ginsberg’s address in Cherry Valley, New York. I wrote a letter that began, “I write to you with the same sincerity you once wrote to William Carlos Williams.” He answered with a postcard.

Dear John S --

Yes, can’t write -- gone north, hundreds of letters in a pile -- in NY check out Wednesday nite readings at St. Marks in Bowerie Church & there poetess Anne Waldman & others come weekly for company and reading -- see Village Voice listings -- Tom Veitch young poet is good -- and spontaneous -- Yes, I still follow movements of my own mind & keep notebook for Musings. Only raw mind creates surprises, not deliberate calculation -- What’s unknown more poetic than conscious known --

                                                    Allen Ginsberg

Anne Waldman wore silver bangles on her wrists and a full-length loose blue dress that somehow seemed revealing. I faced her on the altar and felt as if I should genuflect as she told me about the free poetry workshops and mentioned a poet I should meet. His name was Merrill, and she tried to spot him in the audience.

“James Merrill?” I asked.

“No,” she said, vigorously shaking her head and looking beyond me. “That’s a much more famous poet.”

“Merrill Moore?” I had found a book of his sonnets in the library.

“No,” she said. “Merrill Gilfillan.” I had lost the Merrill guessing game, and she stopped trying to find him, pointing me to the schedule of classes posted in the sacristy. I signed up for Dick Gallup, whose speech had an Oklahoman tinge which grew more pronounced when he used phrases like “out to lunch.” Members of Andy Warhol’s Factory attended and, at the critique of my first poem, Gerard Malanga, star of the fifty-minute film of a kiss, changed my phrase, “day into dark,” to “daylight into darkness,” and as he said it, he curved his hand through the air like a breaking wave, making it splendid. One evening everyone was late and Gallup and I sat alone in the room. I asked him about the word “rrible” in his line, “In the quiet air of the rrible morning.” He said he takes lines from poems that don’t work, cuts them out with a scissors, and puts these phrases into a cigar box. When he gets stuck in the middle of a poem, he reaches in and grabs a scrap. He said, “rrible” must have been part of “terrible,” or “horrible.” I started calling my poems “works” because that’s what Gallup called them, saying, “We have some interesting works to read tonight” and “I’ve been reading some of Ted’s latest works.” One poet, Ray, called his poems “shirts.” This struck me as especially odd because he never wore a shirt, just a vest with nothing under it. He’d distribute his pages, saying, “I’d like to hear what you think of my new shirts,” as a large gold ankh banged against his chest. Gallup pronounced the poems that pleased him “totally great.” My poems began to incorporate brand names such as Pepsi, and the precise time of day, like “8:17,” and they were not totally great, but suddenly they were totally contemporary.

Anne Waldman accepted three of my works for the
World
, the mimeographed magazine published by the Poetry Project. They appeared next to Lou Reed’s “Andy Warhol’s Chest,” which he recorded with the Velvet Underground. One of my poems began, “Those horses ate my lunch.” Another ended, “The genitals are the faucets of the soul.”

In The Art of Poetry, Ridge criticized my work for lacking emotion. He quoted Pound—“Only emotion endures”—and introduced me to Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and John Berryman who I admired. I could see what Ridge meant, yet some workshop poets wore their hearts on their sleeves in ways I wanted to avoid. I returned to John Wieners’s
Hotel Wentley Poems
for mysterious lines like “We ride them/and Tingle-Tangle in the afternoon.” When I mentioned his name in The Deadwood, he was disparaged as a lunatic, and a minor lunatic at that. After classes one afternoon, I went to Epstein’s where I saw a poster for a reading by poets who called themselves the actualists, poets whose literary extravaganzas included writing mile-long poems; poems of words without vowels, like pygmy and rhythm; and typing poems blindfolded. They had invited Robert Bly to town. Bly had called the writers’ workshop stagnant and “arthritic” in his magazine,
The Seventies,
mainly because 90 percent of the current students had been taught at their colleges by Iowa graduates.