Pulphead: Essays (9 page)

With a bad feeling I watched her recede. Back at the cabin, Lytle was caning around on the front porch in a panic. He waved at me as I turned into the gravel patch where we parked. “She’s drunk!” he barked. “Look at this bottle, beloved. Good God, it was full this morning!”

I tried to make him tell me what had happened, but he was too antsy. He wore pajamas, black slippers without socks, a gray tweed coat, and the fedora.

“Oh, I’ve angered her, beloved,” he said. “I’ve angered her.”

He gave me the story as we sped toward the gate. It was more or less as I suspected. The same argument came up every time Polly visited, though I’d never seen it escalate so. They had family in a distant town with whom she remained on decent terms, but Lytle insisted on shunning these people and thought his little sister should, as well. It had to do with an old scandal about land, duplicity involving a will. A greedy uncle had tried to take away his father’s farm. But these modern-day cousins, descendants of the rival party, they weren’t pretending, as Lytle believed, not to understand why he wouldn’t see them. I think they were genuinely confused. There’d been scenes. He’d stood in the doorway and denounced these people, in the highest rhetoric, “Seed of the usurper.” Doubtless they thought he was further gone mentally than he was, that when he uttered these curses he had in mind some carpetbagger from olden days, because the relatives just kept coming back, despite never having been allowed past the porch steps.

Now Miss Polly had let them into the vestibule, nearly into the Court of the Muse. Lytle viewed this as the wildest betrayal. He’d been beastly toward them, when he rose from his nap, and Polly had fled. He seemed shaken to remember the things he’d said.

“Mister Lytle, what did you say?”

“I told the truth,” he said passionately. “I recognized the moment, that’s what I did.” But in the defensive thrust of his jaw there quivered something like embarrassment.

He mentions this land dispute in his “family memoir,”
A Wake for the Living
, his most readable and in many ways his best book. That’s perhaps an idiosyncratic opinion. There are people who’ve read a lot more than I have who consider his novels lost classics. But it may be precisely because of the Faustian ego that thundered above his sense of himself as a novelist that he carried a lighter burden into the memoir, and this freedom thawed in his style some of the vivacity and spontaneity that otherwise you find only in the letters. There’s a scene in which he describes the morning his grandmother was shot in the throat by a Union soldier in 1863. “Nobody ever knew who he was or why he did it,” Lytle writes, “he mounted a horse and galloped out of town.” To the end of her long life this woman wore a velvet ribbon at her neck, fastened with a golden pin. That’s how close Lytle was to the Civil War. Close enough to reach up as a child, passing into sleep, and fondle the clasp of that pin. The eighteenth century was just another generation back from there, and so on, hand to hand. This happens, I suppose, this collapsing of time, when you make it as far as your nineties. When Lytle was born, the Wright Brothers had not yet achieved a working design. When he died,
Voyager 2
was exiting the solar system. What does one do with the coexistence of those details in a lifetime’s view? It weighed on him.

The incident with his grandmother is masterfully handled:

She ran to her nurse. The bullet had barely missed the jugular vein. Blood darkened the apple she still held in her hand, and blood was in her shoe. The enemy in the street now invaded the privacy of the house. The curious entered and stared. They confiscated the air … To the child’s fevered gaze the long bayonets of the soldiers seemed to reach the ceiling, as they filed past her bed, staring out of boredom and curiosity.

Miss Polly passed us again. Apparently she’d changed her mind about the butter. We made a U-turn and trailed her to the cabin. Back inside they embraced. She buried her face in his coat, laughing and weeping. “Oh, sister,” he said, “I’m such an old fool, goddamn it.”

I’ve wished at times that we had endured some meaningful falling out. In truth he began to exasperate me in countless petty ways. He needed too much, feeding and washing and shaving and dressing, more than he could admit to and keep his pride. Anyone could sympathize, but I hadn’t signed on to be his butler. One day I ran into the white-haired professor, who shared with me that Lytle had been complaining about my cooking.

Mainly, though, I’d fallen in love with a tall, nineteen-year-old half-Cuban girl from North Carolina, with freckles on her face and straight dark hair down her back. She was a class behind mine, or what would have been mine, at the school, and she liked books. On our second date she gave me her father’s roughed-up copy of
Hunger
, the Knut Hamsun novel. I started to spend more time downstairs. Lytle became pitifully upset. When I invited her in to meet him, he treated her coldly, made some vaguely insulting remark about “Latins,” and at one point asked her if she understood a woman’s role in an artist’s life.

There came a wickedly cold night in deep winter when she and I lay asleep downstairs, wrapped up under a pile of old comforters on twin beds we’d pushed together. By now the whole triangle had grown so unpleasant that Lytle would start drinking earlier than usual on days when he spotted her car out back, and she no longer found him amusing or, for that matter, I suppose, harmless. My position was hideous.

She shook me awake and said, “He’s trying to talk to you on the thing.” We had this antiquated monitor system, the kind where you depress the big silver button to talk and let it off to hear. The man hadn’t mastered an electrical device in his life. At breakfast one morning, when I’d made the mistake of leaving my computer upstairs after an all-nighter, he screamed at me for “bringing the enemy into this home, into a place of work.” Yet he’d become a bona fide technician on the monitor system.

“He’s calling you,” she said. I lay still and listened. There was a crackling.

“Beloved,” he said, “I hate to disturb you, in your slumbers, my lord. But I believe I might freeze to DEATH up here.”

“Oh, my God,” I said.

“If you could just … lie beside me.”

I looked at her. “What do I do?”

She turned away. “I wish you wouldn’t go up there.”

“What if he dies?”

“You think he might?”

“I don’t know. He’s ninety-two, and he says he’s freezing to death.”

“Beloved…?”
She sighed. “You should probably go up there.”

He didn’t speak as I slipped into bed. He fell back asleep instantly. The sheets were heavy white linen and expensive. It seemed there were shadowy acres of snowy terrain between his limbs and mine. I floated off.

When I woke at dawn he was nibbling my ear and his right hand was on my genitals.

I sprang out of bed and began to hop around the room like I’d burned my finger, sputtering foul language. Lytle was already moaning in shame, fallen back in bed with his hand across his face like he’d just washed up somewhere, a piece of wrack. I should mention that he wore, as on every chill morning, a Wee Willie Winkie nightshirt and cap. “Forgive me, forgive me,” he said.

“Jesus Christ, Mister Lytle.”

“Oh, beloved…”

His having these desires was not an issue—no one could be so naive. His tastes were more or less an open secret. I don’t know if he was gay or bisexual or pansexual or what. Those distinctions are clumsy terms with which to address the mysteries of sexuality. But on a few occasions he’d spoken about his wife in a manner that to me was movingly erotic, nothing like any self-identifying gay man I’ve ever heard talk about women and sex. Certainly Lytle had loved her, because it was clear how he missed her, Edna, his beautiful “squirrel-eyed gal from Memphis,” whom he’d married when she was young, who was still young when she died of lung cancer.

Much more often, however, when the subject of sex came up, he would return to the idea of there having been a homoerotic side to the Agrarian movement itself. He told me that Allen Tate propositioned him once, “but I turned him down. I didn’t like his smell. You see, smell is so important, beloved. To me he had the stale scent of a man who didn’t take any exercise.” This may or may not have been true, but it wasn’t an isolated example. Later writers, including some with an interest in not playing up the issue, have noticed, for instance, Robert Penn Warren’s more-than-platonic interest in Tate, when they were all at Vanderbilt together. One of the other Twelve Southerners, Stark Young—he’s rarely mentioned—was openly gay. Lytle professed to have carried on, as a very young man, a happy, sporadic affair with the brother of another Fugitive poet, not a well-known person. At one point the two of them fantasized about living together, on a small farm. The man later disappeared and turned up murdered in Mexico. Warren mentions him in a poem that plays with the image of the closet.

The point is that you can’t fully understand that movement, which went on to influence American literature for decades, without understanding that certain of the writers involved in it loved one another. Most “homosocially,” of course, but a few homoerotically, and some homosexually. That’s where part of the power originated that made those friendships so intense, and caused the men to stay united almost all their lives, even after spats and changes of opinion, even after their Utopian hopes for the South had died. Together they produced from among them a number of good writers, and even a great one, in Warren, whom they can be seen to have lifted, as if on wing beats, to the heights for which he was destined.

Lytle would have beaten me with his cane and thrown me out for saying all that. To him it was a matter for winking and nodding, frontier sexuality, fraternity brothers falling into bed with each other and not thinking much about it. Or else it was Hellenism, golden lads in the Court of the Muse, William Alexander Percy stuff. Whatever it was, I accepted it. I never showed displeasure when he wanted to sit and watch me chop wood, or when he asked me to quit showering every morning, so that he could smell me better. “I’m pert’ near blind, boy,” he said. “How will I find you in a fire?” Still, I’d taken for granted an understanding between us. I didn’t expect him to grope me like a chambermaid.

I stayed away two nights, but then went back. When I reached the top of the steps and looked through the back porch window, I saw him on the sofa lying asleep (or dead, I wondered every time). His hands were folded across his belly. One of them rose and hung quivering, an actor’s wave; he was talking to himself. It turned out, when I cracked the door, he was talking to me.

“Beloved, now, we must forget this,” he said. “I merely wanted to touch it a little. You see, I find it the most interesting part of the body.”

Then he paused and said, “Yes,” seeming to make a mental note that the phrase would do.

“I understand, you have the girl now,” he continued. “Woman offers the things a man must have, home and children. And she’s a lovely girl. I myself may not have made the proper choices, in that role.”

I crept down to bed.

Not long after, I moved out. He agreed it was for the best. I reenrolled at the school. They found someone else to live with him. It had become more of a medical situation by that point, at-home care. I drove out to see him every week, and I like to think he welcomed the visits, but things had changed. He knew how to adjust his formality by tenths of a degree, to let you know where you stood.

*   *   *

It may be gratuitous to remark of a ninety-two-year-old man that he began to die, but Lytle had been much alive for most of that year, fiercely so. There were some needless minor surgeries at one point, which set him back. It’s funny how the living will help the dying along. One night he fell, right in front of me. He was standing in the middle room on a slippery carpet, and I was moving toward him to take a glass from his hand. The next instant he was flat on his back with a broken elbow that during the night bruised horribly, blackly. His eyes went from glossy to matte. Different people took turns staying over with him, upstairs, including the white-haired professor, whose loyalty had never wavered. I spent a couple of nights. I wasn’t worried he’d try anything again. He was in a place of calm and—you could see it—preparation. His son-in-law told me he’d spoken my name the day before he died.

When the coffin was done, the men from the funeral home picked it up in a hearse. Late the same night someone called to say they’d finished embalming Lytle’s body; it was in the chapel, and whenever Roehm was ready, he could come and fasten the lid. All of us who’d worked on it with him went, too. The mortician let us into a glowing side hallway off the cold ambulatory. With us was an old friend of Lytle’s named Brush, who worked for the school administration, a low-built, bouncy muscular man with boyish dark hair and a perpetual bow tie. He carried, as nonchalantly as he could, a bowling ball bag, and in the bag an extremely excellent bottle of whiskey.

Brush took a deep breath, reached into the coffin, and jammed the bottle up into the crevice between Lytle’s rib cage and his left arm. He turned and said, “That way they won’t hear it knocking around when we roll it out of the church.”

Roehm had a massive electric drill in his hand. It seemed out of keeping with the artisanal methods that had gone into the rest of the job, but he’d run out of time making the cedar pegs. We stood over Lytle’s body. Sanford was the first to kiss him. When everyone had, we lowered the lid onto the box, and Roehm screwed it down. Somebody wished the old man Godspeed. A eulogy that ran in the subsequent number of
The Sewanee Review
said that, with Lytle’s death, “the Confederacy at last came to its end.”