The White Goddess (114 page)

The second wrote very discourteously, to the effect that he could not make either head or tail of the book, and could not believe it would interest anyone. He died too, soon afterwards.

But the third, who was T. S. Eliot, wrote that it must be published at all costs. So he did publish it, and not only got his money back, but pretty soon was rewarded with the Order of Merit, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and a smash hit on Broadway.

Very well, call these coincidences. But I beg you not to laugh yet! Wait! I beg you not to laugh, unless you can explain just why the second publisher should have dressed himself up in a woman’s panties and bra one afternoon, and hanged himself from a tree in his garden. (Unfortunately, the brief report in
Time
did not specify the sort of tree.)

Was that a blind
act
of God
,
or was it a calculated
act
of
Goddess
? I leave  the answer to you; all I know is that it seemed to me natural enough in its horrid way.

I must end this talk which, I hope, answers more questions than it raises, by driving home my main point. A poem which is moon-magical enough to walk off the page – if you know what I mean – and to keep on walking, and to get under people’s skins and into their eyes and throats and hearts and marrows: that is more-than-coincidence at its most miraculous. And Solar Apollo, for all his new thinking-machines and rhyming dictionaries and analytic courses in poetry-writing, can’t begin to imitate it.