Genoa (2 page)

          
Rather the ice than their way: to take what is mine by single strength, theirs by the crookedness of their law. But they have marked me—even to myself. Because I am not like them, I am evil. I cannot get my hands on it: I, murderer, outlaw, outcast even from Iceland. Because their way is the just way and my way—the way of kings and my father—crosses them: weaklings holding together to appear strong. But I am alone, though in Greenland.

Where does it come from, this Metcalf work of poeticized collage? The William Carlos Williams of
In the American Grain
and
Paterson
is certainly there, and the poetical points of reference are certainly easier to come by: Pound’s
Cantos,
with its rich substratum of Chinese poetry and untranslated lines from the Romance languages, Louis Zukofsky’s experimental later work, Charles Reznikoff’s
Holocaust,
and of course Charles Olson’s
Maximus Poems.
Olson was known to Metcalf and appears briefly therein.

But to think of Metcalf only in a poetical context, which he himself certainly did later in his career, understates the novelistic pleasures
of
Genoa,
and makes it seem more like a slightly acrid literary syrup that is
“good for you,”
rather than a narrative of two brothers and the way the literature of this continent shapes their lives. The question of
what this book is
—whether it’s even a book or something more intimate, like an act of whispering, or one of those late nights when a friend tells you
everything
until the early hours of the morning—is an open question. But let us not forbear to report that the act of reading these pages is exceedingly pleasurable and full of event, full of the kinds of insights into the
real
of consciousness, if in fact there is a real that is not an effect of literature itself. This book is not work, but it is a work of joy.

How do you read it then? Like all the books that have changed me as a reader and made me think otherwise about the book as a vessel for language,
Genoa
can be read in ways that are like unto the novel, in which you start at the beginning and move page by page to the end. But you can also read
Genoa
as a particularly rich act of Melvillean scholarship by a person with abundant feeling for the work of his great-grandfather. You can read it, too, as a work of scholarship about American exploration narratives, a kind of
Anatomy of Melancholy
in which all is the lesson of the classics. And you can read it as a work of repetition compulsion about
what lineage is.
Each of these readings is coincident with the others, and each is available at any time. In a way,
Genoa
requires that you
don’t
start at the beginning on one of your perusals of its chapters, but rather that you start in the middle and let the languorous semiosis of compulsive quotation be your guide. And it also requires that you read only for Columbus, and that you skip the quotations entirely. It permits you license as a reader and judges you not at all.

And so
Genoa
is also a work
about
the act of reading. As the beginning, the transition, into Metcalf’s subsequent vanishing into quotation and poetry, this makes sense, that the work should be about reading, that it should locate the old debunked theory that
ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny
in the stratum of citation, in which all novels consist of a history of literature, each with its influence.

So much happening in such an abbreviated space, a mere couple hundred pages! More the length of a poem than the length of a novel. And happening well before the period in which fiction this innovative (I’m thinking of the period between, for instance,
Snow White,
by Donald Barthelme, and
The Age of Wire and String,
by Ben Marcus) would have found a
success d’estime
simply for being new and unpredictable. But that is exactly why this reissue gives us a chance for an overdue reevaluation, and gives you the opportunity to have the experience with this book that I was so happy to have, the experience in which the history of literature, again, seems populated by eruptions of a kind you never knew to expect, eruptions of the unpredictable and new.

HEADWATERS

ONE

C
ITY OF INDIANAPOLIS
, a cold spring day, late. Blackberry winter, my father called it—after some warm days, some affluence of sunshine, a sudden crackling blast of cold, rain edged with sleet, low, almost formless clouds scudding across the level land.

               
“When ocean clouds over inland hills Sweep storming . . .”

Thus Herman Melville put it, thinking, perhaps of Pittsfield. Here there are no hills—only the squared-out city. Further south, toward the Ohio, Crawford County, where Mother’s family, the Stoneciphers, came from, there are hills—hills and valleys, woods and caves.

But here I turn a square corner, and the old house comes into view, the house that used to be country and now is city, that has not moved, but in remaining still has allowed our fellow Americans to sweep around it, to put up suburban dwellings in what used to be the cornfield, so that it now stands, as it ever was, but with the largeness of land lopped off; the house in which I was born and raised, on the land that we farmed; house and land that we lost, or that I thought we had lost, but that unknown to the rest of us remained, during the years of depression, in the arthritic grip of my mother, so that when I married and gave evidence of settling down, it fell into my lap, a gift—the land gone, but the rough old house, of timbers pegged and nailed before the Civil War, the house my father was born in, and his father before him, standing strong.

My father’s name was Paul B. Mills—he would never tell us what the B. stood for—we would guess and joke about it, Carl and I, but
he remained passive and humorless—nor did my mother offer help, either condone or criticize our curiosity, and to this day I don’t know if she ever discovered what it was—but there was the strange look from him one day when out of a clear blue, I had been thinking of other matters, I suddenly said “Bunyan—my father is Paul Bunyan,” and again he neither affirmed nor denied, just for a moment the queer look—but there it was, on the birth certificate that showed up after his death, and the shock, perhaps greater than the accident of his death and those who died with him, the funeral, the relatives, the shock when I read it, the spelling of it: “Paul Bunion Mills.”

Making the right angle turn I am now “running up into the wind’s eye,” as Melville said it—the only approach to a storm. Elbows digging into ribs hold an overcoat tight around me, and I lean forward, letting the rain and sleet beat against my face, so that forehead, cheeks, nose and chin, and the lines incised into my face, become a mask, at once me and not me, alive . . .

          
“During the Cambrian, Ordovician, and most of the Silurian periods, Indiana was submerged beneath the seas. In the later Silurian, a mighty upheaval began; eventually most of the continent was uplifted and the great interior seas slowly receded. This was not a violent or sudden process; the earth rose only an inch, perhaps, in a century or more.”

          
“In the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian epochs of the Carboniferous period, Indiana was steadily elevated; at the close of the Mississippian the whole region was above sea level. During the Pennsylvanian, a period of millions of years, Indiana was probably a rank, lush swamp—populated by amphibious creatures, and covered with fern-like plants growing in vast luxuriance.”

          
“In the Pleistocene about five-sixths of the whole region—all except what is now south central Indiana—was at one time or another under a massive layer of ice, sometimes 2,000 feet thick.”

and

The Miami, original Indian inhabitants of Indiana, lived on wild game and fowl, corn, tubers, roots and dogs. As late as 1812, the Miami burned their war captives, but the practice of cooking and eating them, which had once been very popular, ceased around 1789.

Passing the suburban houses, homogenized so that one might be another, I approach the old farm house down the road, anachronistic and stubborn; but for this, the regularity would be complete.

Complete, that is, but for one other factor, rendering irregular all that I reach through my eyes: with every step I lean off balance, off center, and back again, the prairie landscape ragging down with every leftward thrust:

Klumpfuss. Pied bot. Reel foot. Or, from the medical book: “Talipes equinovalgus, or ‘rocker foot,’ with some syndactilism.” I have clubfoot.

From Melville, M
ARDI
:

          
“Averse to the barbarous custom of destroying at birth all infants not symmetrically formed; but equally desirous of removing from their sight those unfortunate beings; the islanders of a neighboring group had long ago established an asylum for cripples; where they lived, subject to their own regulations; ruled by a king of their own election; in short, formed a distinct class of beings by themselves.

          
One only restriction was placed upon them: on no account must they quit the isle assigned them. And to the surrounding islanders, so unpleasant the sight of a distorted mortal, that a stranger landing at Hooloomooloo, was deemed a prodigy. Wherefore, respecting any knowledge of aught beyond them, the cripples were well nigh as isolated, as if Hooloomooloo was the only terra firma extant.

          
Dwelling in a community of their own, these unfortunates, who otherwise had remained few in number, increased and multiplied greatly. Nor did successive generations improve in symmetry upon those preceding them.

          
Soon, we drew nigh the isle.

          
Heaped up, and jagged with rocks; and, here and there, covered
with dwarfed, twisted thickets, it seemed a fit place for its denizens. Landing, we were surrounded by a heterogeneous mob; and thus escorted, took our way inland, toward the abode of their lord, King Yoky.

          
What a scene!

          
Here, helping himself along with two crotched roots, hobbled a dwarf without legs; another stalked before, one arm fixed in the air, like a lightning rod; a third, more active than any, seal-like, flirted a pair of flippers, and went skipping along; a fourth hopped on a solitary pin, at every bound, spinning around like a top, to gaze; while still another, furnished with feelers or fins, rolled himself up in a ball, bowling over the ground in advance.”

The sleet cuts into my eyes, and I incise deeper the lines among the features, steel myself to the weather. Limping, steady-gaited, I turn into the path, past the frosted jonquils, leading to the door. The heavy latch responds.

“Oh, Daddy, Daddy—close the door, quick!” Only one of my three children turns, the youngest, Jenifer. And quickly her back is to me again, like the others.

As I stand just inside the closed door, shaking the weather from me, there is, first, the warmth of the house—central heating and therefore without source, simply a presence—then the second warmth, radiant from a source, and it is this that draws the family, as I felt drawn, as a child, to the black wood range, back in the kitchen: the family, now, the children, attentive to the glowing vacuum tube: the television. Taking off my coat, watching the hunched heads, the shoulders, the little backsides perched on stools, I think, for a moment,

                                        
(of Maria Melville, Herman Melville’s mother, who, it is reliably reported, would require her eight children to sit on little stools around her bed, motionless, while she took her daily nap, that she might keep track of them)

of the weird business, soon after we got the
TV
, of the electronic particles that hit the screen one night, and then kept recurring—I was in the kitchen, and the children came running, said there was a woman’s face interfering with the cowboys—I recognized her from the show the night before—she stayed for a while, went away, and kept coming back—the service man tried to explain her, the local station, even the network people—none could give an answer, they had to take out the set, put in a new one.

Stepping into the kitchen, I reach at once for the oven

BECAUSE MY WIFE WORKS
. I don’t make enough money at General Motors to support the family—and it is this—this mystery, that my classmates at medical school are now making twenty, forty, fifty thousand a year, and I, possessing the same sheepskin, Doctor of Medicine, and with a school record better actually than most of theirs, but the sheepskin is furled, in the attic, and I am unshingled, I cannot, will not practice, and this is mysterious to me