Swann (2 page)

They forget what time it is. They forget where they are—that they’re sitting in a taproom on Sixty-second in the city of Chicago in the fall of the year in the twentieth century. They’re too busy talking, thinking, defining terms, revising history, plotting their term papers, their theses, and their lives so that no matter what happens they’ll keep barrelling along that lucent dotted line they’ve decided must lead to the future.

Last night my good friend Brownie—Sam Brown, actually—aged thirty, earning his living as a dealer in rare books, living in an Old Town apartment decorated in mission-revival fashion, son of a State of Maine farm labourer, dropped in to chat about the theme of castration in women’s books. While I was demurring a little about the way in which he arrives at his critical judgments—like a noisy carpet-sweeper darting under obscure chairs and tables—he dropped the golden name of Mary Swann. “Your Mary,” he announced, “is a prime example of the female castrator.”

That surprised me, though I knew Brownie had been reading Mary Swann’s book, since I had lent him my only copy; and I demanded proof for his conclusion. He was prepared for this—he knows me well, too well after all these months—and he pulled from his jacket pocket a piece of folded paper. Clearing his throat and holding his head to one side, he read:

“Preposterous,” I said. “She’s talking about societal and family connections and you’re thinking about crude anatomy. Roots! Stems!”

He smiled, refolded his piece of paper, and invited me for a walk in the park. We set off into the cold, I in my winter things—knitted scarf, woolly hat—and with my collar turned up to my ears. I slipped my arm through Brownie’s. Cordially. Affectionately.

I am fond of him,
too
fond, too fond by far, and he may well love me, but with an ardour sunk under a drift of vagueness, as though he’s playing through that crinkled head of his scenes of former conversations and encounters. He’s too lazy, too preoccupied, too much a man who dallies and dreams and too given to humming under his breath that insouciant little tune that declares that nothing really
matters
. That is why I’m drawn to him, of course, seeing him as an antidote to my own passionate seizures. For Brownie, today’s castration theory will be tomorrow’s soap bubbles. His mind, like a little wooden shuttle, is forever thinking up theories to keep himself amused. Being amused is his chief ambition. And getting rich. Dear Brownie.

We walked along in silence for a few minutes, watchful for muggers, kicking the piles of fallen leaves. The cold was intense for so early in October. Brownie gave me a quick hug and, putting on his fake cockney accent, said, “I thought you’d be chuffed that I gave your bird a turn.”

I am, I am, I told him. I’d been urging him for two years to read Mary Swann, ever since I wandered into his store on Madison Street, The Brown Study, and found no more than half a shelf of poetry. Inferior poetry. We had an argument that first day. Real money, he told me, big money, was in vintage comic books. He was depending on his Plastic Man collection to keep him in his old age. Poetry gave him pyloric spasms, economically speaking, and he only carried the biggies, Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost and that ilk. Volumes of poetry didn’t sell, didn’t move. Whereas a first
edition of
The Sun Also Rises
.… And Updike. And lately, Ivy Compton-Burnett. I like to argue with Brownie about such things. He shouts. I shout back. An extra piquancy settles on us, a round little umbrella of heat. Still, one can’t count on Brownie.

I like to think that my view of him is detached.

This man has serious limitations, I tell myself. I should overlook the cynical addiction to comic books. I should discount that smile, which flashes too readily, too indiscriminately. What is the value of a smile anyway?

Still he has a certain erudition, an appealing, splintery intelligence that, like the holes in his sweaters, conceals a painstaking grasp on the business of reality. Yes, but he is a lightweight; though he denies it, he thinks of a book as a commodity. Yet, a lightweight can be good company at times, especially when that lightweightedness is so arduously cultivated and so obviously a defence. Or is it? That shunting breath and laughter of his ripples with energy. But can he be trusted, a man whose brain dances and performs and hoists itself on market trends and whimsical twenty-four-hour theories? No. Yes. Possibly.

I keep my objectivity about Brownie polished and at the ready, yet again and again it yields to wild unaccountable happiness when in his company. Yes, but he is indolent. Ah, but under the indolence he has ambition. That may be, but it’s a scheming ambition. Remember what he once said, that he’d cheat his own granny to make a buck. He cares for nothing. But why should he? Why should anyone? I don’t altogether understand him, but what does understanding between people really mean—only that we like them or don’t like them. I adore Brownie. But with reservations. Last night I was close to loving him, even though he dumped my Mary Swann into the same bathtub with
Sigmund Freud. He didn’t mean a word of it though; I could almost bet on it.

For a number of years, for a number of reasons, I had a good many friends I didn’t really like. One of them was a fellow graduate student, a downy-cheeked boy-man called Olaf Thorkelson who kept hounding me to marry him. He was young, wise, opinionated, good, and joyful, but weak at the centre. What I wanted was a man of oak. My mother had one, my grandmother had one, but at that time I had only Olaf.

I told him that I was afraid of marriage, that it could only lead to a house in Oak Park and the tennis club and twin beds and growing deaf. He said he could see my point, but that at least we could live as lovers. No, I said, that wouldn’t be fair to him. He said he didn’t care a fuck for fairness. I said that fairness was the rule I lived by. (A fugitive conscience is better than no conscience at all.) This went on all one spring and left me so exhausted that by June I had to go to bed for a week. Oh yes, the indomitable Sarah, slain by indecision.

The sight of me spread weakly in bed moved Olaf at last to guilt, and he urged me to go away for a bit and “think things through.” His sister had a friend who owned a cottage on a lake in Wisconsin, and since it was empty for the summer he would get me the key and put me on a Greyhound bus.

Two days later I was there, walking on a pebbly strip of beach and admiring the cleanliness of cirrus clouds and bright air. The cabin was a flimsy, friendly affair with wood
floors that sloped and creaked and a fireplace so smoky and foul that on chilly nights I lit the cookstove instead for warmth.

I particularly loved that cookstove, the prepossessing way it stood away from the wall, all bulging girth and black radiance. The wondrous word
negritude
formed on my tongue as I opened its door and poked in newspaper and kindling and lit a match. At the top of its heat it shuddered and hissed like a human presence, and I thought how fortunate a woman I was to have such a good, natural, uncritical companion at this time in my life. All month I amused myself by making sweet soufflés—rum and apricot and lemon—and in that black hole of an oven they rose to perfection.

When I wasn’t making soufflés I plunged into the singular pleasure of cottage housekeeping. There are rewards in cleaning things—everyone should know this—the corners of rooms, dresser drawers, and such. I concocted a primitive twig broom and bashed joyfully at cobwebs and dustballs. A clothesline that I found stretched between two trees seemed to say to me:
Isn’t life simple when pared down to its purities?
In the cabin, resting on an open shelf, were an eggbeater, a wooden spoon, an iron frying pan, four bowls, four cups, and a plastic dishpan, which I emptied out the door on to a patch of weeds. Swish, and it was gone.

The cabin had a screened porch where I took to sitting in the hottest part of the afternoon, attentive to the quality of filtered light and to the precarious new anchoring of my life plan. Serenity descended as the days wore on. I absorbed the sunny, freckled world around me. Olaf could be dealt with. His supple sexual bulk faded, giving way to a simple checklist. My thesis revision could also be managed, and so could the next two years of my life; that was as wide
a span of time as I cared to think about. In the distance was the heaving, spewing lake, broad as a small sea and impossible to see across. The long afternoons dipped and shimmered. Flies grazed stupidly against the screen. “Hello, fellow creatures,” I said, suspecting I was going blobby in the head but welcoming the sensation.

Seated in a wicker chair on that dim porch I seemed to inhabit an earlier, pre-grad-school, pre-Olaf self. My thesis,
The Female Prism
, and the chapter that had to be rewritten were forgotten, swirled away like the dishwater. Instead there were trashy old magazines to read, piles of them in a mildewed wicker basket, and a shelf full of cottage novels with greenish, fly-spotted pages. I read my way through most of them, feeling winsomely trivial, feeling redemptively ordinary, and, toward the end of the month, at the end of the shelf, I discovered an odd little book of poems written by a woman named Mary Swann. The title of the book was
Swann’s Songs
.

At that time Mary Swann had been dead for more than fifteen years. Her only book was this stapled pamphlet printed in Kingston, Ontario, in 1966.

There are exactly one hundred pages in the book and the pages contain one hundred and twenty-five poems. The cover design is a single musical note stamped on rather cheap grey paper. Only about twenty copies of
Swann’s Songs
are known to have survived out of the original printing of two hundred and fifty—a sad commentary on literary values, Brownie says, but not surprising in the case of an unknown poet. How Mary Swann’s book found its way
down from Canada to a cottage on a lonely Wisconsin lake was a mystery,
is
a mystery. A case of obscurity seeking obscurity.

Even today Swann’s work is known only to a handful of scholars, some of whom dismiss her as a
poète naïve
. Her rhythms are awkward. Clunky rhymes, even her half-rhymes, tie her lines to the commonplace, and her water poems, which are considered to be her best work, have a prickly roughness that exposes the ordinariness of the woman behind them, a woman people claim had difficulty with actual speech. She was a farmer’s wife, uneducated. It’s said in the Nadeau area of Ontario that she spoke haltingly, shyly, and about such trivial matters as the weather, laying hens, and recipes for jams and jellies. She also crocheted doilies. I want to weep when I think of those hundreds of circular yellowing doilies Mary Swann made over the years, the pathetic gentility they represented and the desperation they hint at.

Her context, a word Willard Lang adores, was narrowly rural. A few of her poems, in fact, were originally published in the back pages of local newspapers: “A Line a Day,” “Rimes for Our Times,” and so on. It was only after she was killed that someone, an oddball newspaper editor named Frederic Cruzzi, put together and printed her little book,
Swann’s Songs
.

Poor Mary Swann. That’s how I think of her,
poor
Mary Swann, with her mystical ear for the tune of words, cheated of life, cheated of recognition. In spite of the fact that there’s growing interest in her work—already thirty applications are in for the symposium in January—she’s still relatively unknown.

Willard Lang, the swine, believes absolutely that Swann will never be classed as a major poet. He made this
pronouncement at the MLA meeting last spring, speaking with a little ping of sorrow and a sideways tug at his ear. Rusticity, he claimed, kept a poet minor and, sadly, there seemed to be no exceptions to this rule, Burns being a different breed of dog. My Mary’s unearthly insights and spare musicality appear to certain swinish critics (Willard is not the only one) to be accidental and, therefore, no more than quaint. And no modern academic knows what to do with her rhymes, her awful moon/June/September/remember. It gives them a headache, makes them snort through their noses. What can be done, they say, with this rustic milkmaid in her Victorian velours!

I tend to get unruly and defensive when it comes to those bloody rhymes. Except for the worst clinkers (giver/liver) they seem to me no more obtrusive than a foot tapped to music or a bell ringing in the distance. Besides, the lines trot along too fast to allow weight or breath to adhere to their endings. There’s a busy breedingness about them. “A Swannian urgency” was how I put it in my first article on Mary.

Pompous phrase! I could kick myself when I think about it.

I live in someone else’s whimsy, a Hansel and Gretel house on a seventeen-foot lot on the south side of Chicago. Little paned casement windows, a fairy-tale door, a sweet round chimney and, on the roof, cedar shakes pretending to be thatch. It’s a wonderful roof, a roof that gladdens the eye, peaky and steep and coming down in soft waves over the windows with fake Anne Hathaway fullness. The house
was built in 1930 by an eccentric professor of Elizabethan literature, a bachelor with severe scoliosis and a club foot, and after his death it was, briefly, a restaurant and then a Democratic precinct office. Now it’s back to being a house. At the rear is an iron balcony (loosely attached, but I intend to have it seen to) where I stand on fine days and gaze out over a small salvage yard crowded with scrap iron and a massive public housing project full of brawling families and broken glass.

I bought my freak of a house when the first royalties started coming in for
The Female Prism
. I had to live somewhere, and my lawyer, a truly brilliant woman named Virginia Goodchild, said it could only happen to a person once, turning a Ph.D. thesis into a bestseller, and that I’d better sink my cash fast into a chunk of real estate. She’d found me just the place, she said, the cutest house in all Chicagoland.