A Moveable Famine (4 page)

“What’s wrong with you?” he said to Artie. “I wouldn’t think of taking her money.” He walked out of The Mill, bumping into Ridge who was leaving with the pretty girl.

A reading by W. H. Auden was scheduled to conclude orientation week. I was looking forward to it as I had seen only one famous poet—Robert Penn Warren. When he came to Fairfield, he wore a suit and tie, which shocked me. I thought all poets were beatniks. The next day, my English teacher reprimanded us for talking during the reading, for the beer bottle that rolled under the seats until it clunked into the foot of the podium, and especially for my wearing sandals, saying, “Poetry is a formal occasion.” This was a surprise. I thought poetry was a protest against society.

Auden never arrived. He died that same week and was replaced by Stephen Spender. Spender, another poet in a suit and tie, robust and ruddy, read from Auden’s first book, which he had hand printed in 1928. There was something wonderful in the way he clutched Auden’s humble pamphlet, with its unassuming title,
Poems
, and its modest number, twenty, the initial step in a great career, the fragile collection almost within our reach.

He read the poems with true tenderness and, when the applause ended, Leggett took the microphone and invited workshop poets to meet Spender in EPB. We rushed over and took our seats. Harvey and Spender entered the classroom. Harvey wore brown jeans, a vest and a paisley shirt, his head reaching just above the breast pocket of Spender’s luminous blue suit. They sat on folding chairs and Spender took questions. He believed a poem is a verbal construct and a kind of word game. He equated Beat poetry with abstract art, which he said looked like the palette a painter would use if he knew how to paint. A beautiful blonde said, “I enjoy abstract poets like Wallace Stevens, but Harvey says poetry must be concrete. What do you think?”

“Who’s that?” I asked Ridge.

“Belinda Schaeffer,” he whispered. “I’ll tell you later.” As Spender answered, the room filled with laughter and, in that way you can hear something after it was said because you were half listening, I realized that a puzzled Spender had asked, “Who’s Harvey?”

“Harvey Clay,” she said, equally puzzled. She lifted a pale hand in his direction. “Next to you.”

“Of course, of course,” Spender said, touching Harvey’s shoulder. Harvey grew red, and Spender flushed further. “I agree with Harvey completely,” he said, but it was too late. Someone in the back of the room couldn’t help repeating, “Who’s Harvey?” and voices cackled. It was all the more painful because we worried who we were ourselves, whether we would become anyone and, to derail that awful doubt about our own identities, the words, “Who’s Harvey?” appeared scrawled in the workshop men’s room, on the bulletin board, and across the walls of bars around town.

A week later, I stumbled on the fiction of Cesare Pavese in the library. The only way I learned was by stumbling, and I stumbled often. I was taken with his world-weary yet stalwart tone: “Maturity is realizing that telling one’s troubles doesn’t make anything better.” In one passage, the “Who’s Harvey?” question rebounded to me when the protagonist, a writer, is told by his sister that she wants her little son to be
someone.
“Like you,” she says. He replies that she doesn’t know what she is talking about, “that to be
someone
you have to live alone, have neither lover nor friend, and then, after a life of isolation, then, after you die, and after you are dead many years, only then, if you are lucky, do you become
someone
!”

I sat in my basement apartment as I read, prepared to live the life of Pavese’s character. I looked around and decided that, yes, if that was the prescription, I was on my way—powdered milk, instant coffee, high school sport coat, no girlfriend. I returned to the book, to the sister’s response. She said, “Oh, you make everything impossible just so you can feel sorry for yourself.”

Barkhausen wound up in Lawson’s workshop, the only newcomer to do so. The rest of us had Harvey. His research assistant printed our poems on a Thermo-Fax machine and placed them in a cubby hole near the lounge in advance of our class which met from two to five each Monday. At our first meeting, I sat between Ridge and a former priest who was always laughing and joking except when he was crying. Harvey asked “Bear,” a student nicknamed for his size and bristling facial hair, to read his poem, which was written in the “you” voice. The poem was a list of his older brother’s cruelties. The final lines read:

You resented him when he refused
to lend you his id,
and you watched him from the window
frolicking prettily with pretty girls.
He left you alone
with his birthday dog
who bit both your ears.
You bear the scars today.

Bear read with such feeling that his cheeks shook under his full beard along with the fringe on his buckskin jacket. He paused for dramatic effect after what he thought were his best lines but, due to his heft, it seemed instead that he had run out of breath. He was gasping as he pronounced the final words, overcome by their truth. Yet his reading had the opposite effect. It was like watching someone at a bathroom mirror rehearsing a speech, or overhearing an earnest basso profundo in the shower.

Charlotte Spencer, whose spare poems Harvey would soon flirtatiously describe as
svelte
, stared across the table at her boyfriend and raised her eyebrows happily. Every bad poem made the rest of us better. Charlotte pointed out that the speaker wanted his brother’s ID, not his “id,” and this comment set the tone. A firefighter from Brooklyn, who quit his job for poetry, wanted to know where on the ear the speaker was bitten.

“The lobe? The helix?”

“The
what
?” several asked.

“The helix,” the firefighter explained, grabbing the top of his ear. “The tip.”

“Don’t complain, Bear,” Pryor said. “You got your ears pierced for free!”

Bear’s forced grin did not mask his anger, and he gritted his dark, stubby teeth. After twenty minutes of chuckling, we were hushed by Harvey who pointed out that while the poem’s emotion overwhelmed its writing, he admired the adverb/adjective combination—“frolicking prettily with pretty girls.” I hadn’t considered the language, just Bear’s performance, and I looked appreciatively at the highlighted phrase.

“Isn’t that a bit euphemistic?” someone asked. “How about ‘fucking prettily with pretty girls?’ Isn’t that what it means?”

“How do you ‘fuck prettily’?” another said.

“Charlotte, do you think you can ‘fuck prettily’?” The question was posed by Todd Trotta, a heavy second-year student.

“Some can and some can’t,” Charlotte said, looking right at him.

Charlotte’s boyfriend, dressed in a tan cashmere sweater and matching sport coat, said, “Fucking is a private matter.”

Harvey said, “Poetry is a private matter made public.”

“I think you missed the point,” Bear said. “It’s not about me, it’s about my brother.” He slapped both palms on the table for emphasis and the hair on the back of his hands quivered.

“Still,” Harvey said. “It’s about
you
when you put
your name
in the last line.”

Bear’s eyes, as well as everyone’s in the class, leapt to the final words of his poem, “I bear the scars today.” Bear squinted deeply. None of us had caught the coincidence, but one student piped up, “I noticed that, but I didn’t want to embarrass Bear.”

Harvey said, “Opposition is true friendship. Okay?”

The next poem, a tiny thing of six lines, described each leg of a spider.

“Spiders have eight legs,” Charlotte said.

Unfazed, the author said. “Then I’ll add a couple lines.”

When the class and Harvey criticized the poem, the poet turned his page face down and said, “I’m not surprised. I just tossed it off.”

We all admired Charlotte’s poem about the magical properties of antler velvet and when it was her turn to speak, she was giddy with the reception. “I’m surprised because I just tossed it off,” she said. I looked hard at her, to see if she was parodying the previous student but there was no trace of irony. This was a step toward my learning the code. If your poem was a failure in the eyes of the class, and you just tossed it off, you were blameless. If it was a success and you just tossed it off, you were a genius.

At the break, Harvey and Charlotte talked in the hall, their backs against the wall, facing the same direction. Ridge said we had to be at The Deadwood at five o’clock because the beer distributors delivered kegs and bought everyone a beer. He was anxious for class to end early. Charlotte’s boyfriend’s poem started the second half and he broke the rule and spoke before discussion ended. The edict of silence imposed upon an author was intended to prevent refuting objections or clarifying murky passages. His poem was a scramble of images and, when someone expressed sympathy for the loss of the speaker’s dog, everyone chimed in about how hard it was to lose a pet. The ex-priest said, “I just want to praise the poem for its courage in risking such sentimentality.” Charlotte’s boyfriend stood and yelled, “It wasn’t my dog who died, it was my father!” He gathered his papers and left. We sat in the echo of the slammed door, the ex-priest softly weeping, his face in his hands. Charlotte pushed her chair from the table and followed.

“If it looks like a dog, barks like a dog and wags . . .” Harvey said.

Ridge said, “Bow Wow,” and we all relaxed.

Before Monique read her “Poem about the Moon,” she said, “In case anyone missed it, this poem is about the moon.” She paused and deepened its meaning by adding, “And yet it’s not about the moon.” Monique had a way of breaking authorial silence. She nodded her head at every comment that supported the poem’s intention and rolled her eyes at negative remarks. I looked to see if Harvey would suppress these pantomimes, but he did nothing. Monique’s nodding accelerated as a student said that comparing the full moon to a communion wafer was not only original, but sacramental. His comment was seconded by another who felt the poem touched on the significant female presence in the universe. Monique’s eyes widened and her chin vibrated as if hitched to a pneumatic drill. The workshop devolved into two games: charades, and trying to find a hidden object—each time we unearthed her intentions, we were “getting warmer,” and when we strayed, she gazed at the ceiling, frowned, and we knew we were as cold as we could get.

My piece was last. I had written about the day I was born, and in my quest for a fresh approach, I wrote that I was born as a balloon, “my body swelling with helium.” Everyone hated it but Harvey spared a few kind words.

“Aristotle said the sign of a poet is the ability to make metaphors,” he said. “However, the weakest writing is at the end, so I’d take the last four lines, cut them and dream your way back.”

Ridge said, “Great edit! And a great note to end the class on!”

Harvey looked at his watch. It was four forty-five and we had spent only ten minutes on my poem, but he was just as glad to be through. As we streamed out, Charlotte and her boyfriend were at the door. The boyfriend, obviously under orders from Charlotte, apologized to Harvey who just tapped him on the shoulder and kept going. The gesture had the feeling of someone pitying a lost cause, not granting absolution, and the boyfriend looked at Charlotte as if he could kill her.

As Ridge predicted, we drank a free Budweiser, and then a free Hamm’s, courtesy of the drivers. They were brought to us by Brandy, the tiny, cherubic waitress. Her full cheeks and lips were framed by luxurious shoulder-length amber curls, and she spoke only in baby talk. “Dis one for you,” she said to me, placing the draft on the table. “And dis one for dis nice man.” She gave us free packs of Beer Nuts. Trotta was already there, an empty glass in front of him.

“You know how to move when beer is around,” Ridge said.

“Your friend’s diction is a bit
inflated
, don’t you think?” Trotta said, referring to my poem.

“Cool it,” Ridge said.

“You never told me about Belinda Schaeffer,” I said. “You know, the one . . .”

“I know!” Ridge said. “The most beautiful and smartest woman in the workshop, that’s all! PhD in French from Yale.”

“She seems nice,” I said.

“Her poetry has a long way to go,” he said, and I was grateful for this single flaw.

“By the way,” he continued. “Don’t let one metaphor dominate a poem, especially if it’s a bad metaphor. You just got in deeper and deeper with that balloon trope until you were floating above the Macy’s Day Parade.”

I agreed that it was ludicrous, and I felt ludicrous. I opened the nuts and poured a pile in the middle of the table while I made a mental note to look up
trope
.

“I noticed you paused today when you spoke about the spider poem, I think you were about to say
terrible,
which it was. When you don’t like something, try
mannered
or even
inchoate
.”

I said I would.

“Everyone will understand you meant
terrible
. And speaking of terrible, your first line, ‘In the neighborhood where I was born,’ sounds exactly like the first line of ‘Yellow Submarine.’ ”

I could immediately hear the Beatles singing, “In the town where I was born . . .”

“But failures are stepping stones to success,” Ridge said. “What did you think about Harvey’s assignment to write our first memories?”

“I’m going to have a hard time writing about opening a refrigerator and having a tray of deviled eggs fall on my head.”

Ridge chewed the foam on his beer. “Don’t tie the poem so literally to biography.”

“No?”

“Recall a scene from childhood and invent something.”

“That’s a good idea,” I said.

I was thinking this over when Harvey slid into our booth. He liked Ridge. Brandy followed him, but Harvey ordered nothing.

“Who’s that new guy with the mustache, from California?” Ridge asked Harvey.

“Larry Levis, Phil Levine’s student,” Harvey said. “The job market is so bad that even though he has a book, he’s getting his MFA.”

“Another Levine student?” Ridge said. “That makes five.”

“Six,” Harvey said. “Where did you go to school?” he asked.