Coming into the End Zone (15 page)

Sybil and I go to Great Falls across the river in Virginia for our last, winter look at the rushing water and violent swirling eddies, inhabited even this late in the year by devoted kayakers. The falling water is wild and beautiful. The leaves on each side of the Potomac are red, gold, brown, yellow. We stand at a lookout point beside two teenage girls.

One says: ‘I saw a doe drinking at the edge as I climbed up here. And of course I forgot to bring my camera.'

The other: ‘Too bad. Let's go. What's there to see up here?'

At the end of the stairs in my study I have posted a memory sheet, to remind me that I must pay attention to the tyranny of machines and other devices. It reads:

When I get to the house the unwritten but no less demanding list is: TURN OFF outside light/oven/stove gas jets/power to VCR/television/radio/fans/air conditioners in bedroom and kitchen,
und so weiter
. At the time I bought these things, or installed them, they were intended to add to our comfort and ease in living. Now they have mounted up, to the point that we do not ride on them, as Thoreau said of the railroads he disliked, they ride on us. I try to take a stand against still another of them by steadfastly refusing the gift of a microwave oven someone wishes to give us. Sybil believes the instant, or almost instant, cooker will improve the quality of our suppers, so I will probably give in, add ‘TURN OFF microwave' to my list, and sink deeper under the Rule of the Machine.

I am reading a collection of John Cheever's letters, edited by his son. They are wonderful. Cheever wanted his correspondents to destroy his letters. ‘Saving a letter is like trying to preserve a kiss,' he said. Fortunately few did. ‘I am much less afraid of burglars when I am busy,' he wrote. When last did I hear the word ‘burglar'? It has begun to sound old-fashioned. Now we talk about muggers, break-in crooks, thieves. A burglar has the ring of Conan Doyle and Poe: archaic. Cheever's language gives these honest, sometimes painfully revealing letters a curiously decorous sound.

I am sent in the mail a glossy magazine, thick almost as a Sears catalogue, called
Museum and Arts
. It is published in Washington. There is a slip in it that says it is being sent to me because I am mentioned in it. Snare. Trap. Hook. I go carefully through the damned thing, reading here and there, when I can bear its fancy, overheated writing and unreal colored photographs, and of course, I am not. I realize I have been suckered into wasting an hour in an egotistic search for myself.

An editorialist on the radio begins his lecture with ‘A thought I want to share with you.' ‘Share', of course, is not what he means. Listen to me, he is insisting. There is not the slightest chance that you can reply. ‘Share' is a misused verb these days.

Back from Paris for some weeks, I find I often think of those exciting days and nights. Reliving a trip is an added virtue of travel, just as preparing for it is sometimes better than the journey itself. (Sybil's delight is more often in the planning stage. The actuality for her often falls short of expectation, which nothing, of course, can diminish.) To my surprise, looking back, it was very good to have the company of the Emersons. Indeed, my well-being depended on them (a reliance I have always resented in my early years). Bob took my arm through all the always-being-repaired streets of Paris; Jane helped me bathe and dress. Hooking one's bra is an impossibility with a broken shoulder.

MARK TWAIN
: ‘I have found out there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them, than to travel with them' (Tom Sawyer's observation when he goes
Abroad
, 1894).

Traveling alone is curious. One experiences new things more directly but quickly tires of it when one has no one to tell about it. William Hazlitt thought otherwise: ‘One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey; but I like to go by myself.'

I remember one January in the late sixties in London, when I was preparing to write a biography of Mary McCarthy. I found the month at first a welcome escape from the constant presence of family and the world of academe. But after a week of frigid, raw streets and a cold desk in the library of the British Museum, solitary poor meals, good but lonely teas, walks, queues, theaters so cold I had to wear gloves through all the performances, I grew tired of myself, and then of the city, and then of Hazlitt's vaunted pleasure in solitary travel.

The Sunday
New York Times
, here at six in the morning, to stay the week until I can absorb the essays in the magazine, do the puzzle and the Double-Crostic, read the travel, entertainment, and ‘Week in Review' sections; I am always at least a week behind in the ‘Week in Review.' But I read the
Book Review
first, and note that Faith Sale, the editor whose judgment I questioned last spring, now has a worthy best-seller, Amy Tan's moving and original
The Joy Luck Club
. Last winter in New York, after her publisher's party during the National Book Critics Circle affairs, Faith pressed upon me the galleys of Tan's book. I read it on the Metroliner going down to Washington, and loved every gentle, graceful word of it.

Later I see in the
Times
that its paperback rights have been sold to Vintage for $1.2 million and I rejoice. For once the rare event, a good book appears on the best-seller list among all the adventure tales, mysteries, romances, science fiction, horror, and popular schlock. The author will make money, a great deal of money, it seems, and the editor will be celebrated at her house and all around publishing for her astuteness in acquiring such a good novel, and a first novel at that. For once, all's well in this narrow corner of the publishing world.

‘There is no pain greater than being bitten by one's own dog.' I remember this astute sentence but cannot for the life of me remember who said it. Mark Twain, it may be.

I am back at work culling material for this memoir from my notebook of last summer. At Peggy Danielson's house in East Blue Hill, where I tried to bury all thoughts of my seventieth birthday, I found a prayer the sculptor Lenore Straus had used to conclude her book on the process of creating a stone statue, now standing in Norway:

O God,

hold my hand

that

holds the tool.

Without using those precise words, I often find myself praying similarly before I sit down with my clipboard. Substitute ‘pen' for ‘tool.'

Peggy told me that in the last few days of Lenore's life, when she was dying of cancer, she worked on tiny wax sculptures. Much reduced in size from her customary larger-than-life heads, these little figures contrasted significantly with her heroic stones, signifying not just the diminution in her energies but her sense of how little was left to her life. Never once, having been compelled almost to give up her hold on life, did she abandon her art.

Louise Nevelson (in a book on her work by Arnold Glimcher): ‘In the end, as you grow older, your life is your art, and you are alone with it.'

In a book on Zen Peggy gave me, I found Lenore's AA card: ‘Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our teaching, ever reminding us to place principle before personalities.' Useful admonition, not only to the alcoholic but also to the book reviewer.

Reading
Nevelson
I come upon another statement by the sculptor: ‘You have a white, virginal piece of canvas that is the world of purity.' I expected she would add that the artist proceeds to pollute or pervert or degrade it by painting on it, but no. ‘And then,' she writes, ‘you put your imprint on it, and you try to bring it back to the original purity.'

And then she says: ‘My work is delicate; it may look strong, but it is delicate. True. Strength is delicate.'

‘Have a good time,' someone says to me, hearing I am going away for the weekend. ‘Let's have a good time tonight, and eat out,' I say to Sybil. ‘A good time was had by all' is the way social items end in little local newspapers in small towns. Good time. Ford Madox Ford wrote in
New York Is Not America
(1927): ‘It [New York] is the city of the Good Time—and the Good Time is there so sacred that you may be excused anything you do in searching for it.'

I put into the storage bin of my head some new lingo I have just come upon in a novel about Las Vegas. In gambling, ‘drop' is the total amount bid at a gambling table, ‘cage' is the place you cash in your winning chips, the ‘pit boss' is the executive in charge of a group of gaming tables during a work shift. And best of all, ‘toke'—a tip given dealers by a patron. One never knows when it will be necessary to use one or another of these words, in life or in fiction. They are fine Anglo-Saxon, monosyllabic words, good to have in place of elaborate modern pseudoscientific jargon.

I remember the pleasure I felt as a college student when I discovered the force of few words and the power of the monosyllable, that ‘a minuscule edifice' was not as effective as ‘a little shed.' In William Strunk's mimeographed sheets which I first encountered at Cornell I found the instruction ‘Use definite, specific, concrete language,' and an example: For ‘A period of unfavorable weather set in' he suggested ‘It rained every day for a week.'

December

Once again I mourn the change of season. Into winter now, I think of loss of light, of deterioration of trees and gardens, of letting go of sunlight and water to swim in. In a dour mood, I thought this morning while I waited for coffee to brew (always a low moment in my day) of the things I once wanted, and hoped to have in my life someday: a sailboat, a swimming pool, a convertible. Until last summer when, feeling the ineluctable pressure of age, I recognized that these dreams will not materialize. May Sarton once wrote to me: ‘What is it I can have that I still want?' My version of this is more direct. What I once wanted, I know now I shall not, ever, have.

I've been rereading Annie Dillard's
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
and find I have marked in the margin:

I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book [
Pilgrim
] is the straying trail of blood.

That is what this memoir is: a straying trail of blood, with not much optimism that it will dry up and disappear, or turn to Hansel's white bread crumbs that will lead the reader out of the black forest into light and hope.

Today I heard a name, of someone older than I. It often happens to me. The name may be of a poet, an actor, a public figure from the past. I think: He must surely be dead because
I
have not heard or seen that name for a long time. Can he still be alive? Surprise. Then, pleasure. He has survived my ignorance of his existence.

Beginning of a dark month of despondency. I am working on
Camp
, a novella about my thirteenth summer as an ‘intermediate camper' (as we were called) at Crystal Lake Camp in the Catskill Mountains. It comes hard. When I see the light in the kitchen across the way, and know that Sybil is home from the bookstore and puttering around with food for our late dinner, I want to leave the carriage house and join her. But I'm not finished rewriting the section I am stuck in.

I know why people choose occupations that take them daily into offices, shops, faculty lounges, stores, and theaters. They prefer to be surrounded by other workers, conversing, exchanging observations about the news, last night's TV programs, weekend plans, family anecdotes, the everyday trivia that constitute life in the world.

People like me sit alone from early morning to midafternoon, sometimes later (like tonight), confined to one-way talk with lined paper and a yellow-on-black display screen, and then with a white page called, inelegantly, a printout. The telephone is turned off. We are engaged in a one-way, solipsistic monologue. The sound of one's own voice on the page grows tiresome; one runs out of things to say to oneself. The house is silent, the Holy Ghost, reputed to be one source of enlightenment, does not descend, the compost heap in one's head stops ‘working.' There is no one to complain to about this sudden, inexplicable dearth of ideas.

After many years of such solitary confinement, I fantasize about being younger again, coming to the job I once had in an elegant townhouse on Nineteenth Street in Washington, D.C., walking to work in the fresh, bright, early-morning air carrying three plastic cups of fragrant coffee and three sugar buns, greeting Robert Myers and David Sanford, my friends at
The New Republic
, sitting in my little office that looks out on the washed street, eating, drinking coffee, planning, questioning, joking, gossiping. There was a satisfyingly warm, intimate air in the office, made up of the odors of recently showered and powdered and shaved editors, fresh coffee, crisp, unread galley sheets, and warm sugar buns. For the moment, in this place, at this time, all is right with one's life.

A warm early-December day. Sometimes December in Washington can have just such unusual days. Once, when the Modern Language Association was meeting here in the days between Christmas and New Year's Day, we gave a small luncheon party out on our deck for friends who were attending the meetings. Everyone sat delightedly in the sun, in shirt sleeves and cotton slacks. Someone even complained of the heat.

Today is reminiscent of that day, so warm I dream of spring coming tomorrow without having to pass through the dreaded winter. I take my clipboard across to the deck, and start to outline a possible short story. (By ‘possible' I mean there is a slight chance that I will be able to bring it off.) Middle-aged writer, a good writer with a very small but persistent (over many years) critical reputation. For each successive novel gets very small advances, wins an occasional obscure literary prize. Develops a block, bad block. In this sterile period, a very young (twenty-seven) writer is published. First novel. Acclaimed. Book-of-the-Month Club main selection, half-million-dollar paperback rights sale, foreign rights too, movie purchase, etc. The horror: He has the same name as the hero. Some common name, like John Smith, Joseph Brown. Not even the grace to add a middle initial. In one fell stroke, a 190-page novella, in fact, makes an instant killing. Even if his start is too fast, too early, like spontaneous combustion, he is so far ahead of his namesake, with that one stroke, that the hero will never catch up, never regain his hold on his own name. Too little time left for him, too little desire. His block. Gives up entirely. Changes his name and goes to work selling books for a chain in malls. Defeated not by success (as his namesake might well be) but by two proper nouns.