THREE MEMOIRRHOIDS

MY NABOKOV

Now I have written a novel. I can hold the thick of a manuscript in my hand. It makes me feel full and empty at the same time. I am a writer. Am I a writer? I call it The Steps Of The Sun, a title from Blake’s Songs of Experience. These pages are a Faulknoid exploration of the time of the Robeson riots in Peekskill, New York. I think it is great. I think it is junk. I have written a whole novel. My erstwhile Prof. Baxter Hathaway likes it a lot. I am a writer, no I’m not.

Vladimir Nabokov agrees to read it. He never reads student work. Everyone is surprised. I should be more flattered than I am in my ignorance and arrogance. We have a meeting in his office. His wife, Vera, is always there. Nabokov is famous in his classes for diatribes against Dostoevsky, and singing admiration for Chekov. What will he think about my Steps Of The Sun? I knock on the door and enter the dusty office in Goldwin Smith Hall. Vera and Vladimir are almost smiling. They sink me into a dilapidated beige velour easy chair, where my butt settles to the floor. Nabokov, his body a tall, slim edifice, his narrow face grizzled, distracted, severe in expression, leans over me from a high stool. I have seen him at Taughannock State Park, nimbling through the woods with his butterfly net. He is a respected lepidopterist, a taxonomist. All novelists I think must be perhaps taxonomists. Will I ever get to be a novelist/taxonomist? Below him I feel pinned into the chair like an object of his lepidoptery. Or I’m a helpless muzhik called in to face the lord of the manor. At the end of the room Vera leans against the desk. She does all the talking. I am defenseless, miserable, as if I’m paralyzed into the chair of the tallest dentist in the world.
Vera prefaces the onslaught with what is almost a kindness. “The talent is there, but…” and then all I hear is “crude”  “comic book prose”  “dull repetition”  “read Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson…” Vladimir nods and occasionally issues a sound like air escaping from a valve. The comments are intended to be helpful, but I am not ready to accept help. Praise is what I need to hear. I want Vladimir Nabokov to help hoist me onto the first rung of the literary ladder. Once the opposition is silent I excavate myself clumsily from the chair, and retrieve the yellow carbon copies of manuscript with his scribbles on it. He even initialed them. Hardly holding back the tears that saturate my anger I stagger down the stairs away from Nabokov’s office back into the life of a non-entity, knowing I will never write again.

Young ego is resilient. I sent the manuscript to Harcourt Brace, to a competition for a fellowship they gave to first novelists. They wanted references from three people who had read the work. Nabokov was one of the three people who had read it. I used his name without first asking his permission. This was presumptuous and impudent, and Nabokov was furious. Vera screamed at me that Vladimir was an important writer, a professional. (He was writing Pnin at the time, serialized in the New Yorker.)  How could I just use his name without permission? “Come on. A name is a name,” I said. I had somewhat reconstituted my cojones. “They asked for the names of three people who had read the manuscript, and you are one of the three.”  How hollow that sounded. My explanation did nothing to mitigate Nabokov’s outrage.

It took several years for me to acknowledge that Nabokov was a great writer. I’d got a letter back from Harcourt Brace saying that two out of three judges so far had favored my manuscript. They wanted to know more about my writing ambitions and my philosophy. At the time I was ecstatically in love with Pat Bell (aka Jingle) and we were fumbling young into marriage. I believe a lot of the delerium got into my response to Harcourt Brace. I forgot to sign the letter, and sent a signature separately on the next day. They finally turned me down. I don’t know if I missed because my “philosophy” was goofed up by love, or because, as I suspect, Vera wrote to them to withdraw the name of her Vladimir as a reference.

THE BERRYMAN BLOT

    In Verona, in Italy, I got my hands on a copy of John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs. They touched me profoundly at that time. Some locked into my memory. I recited them frequently in my mind.

            Filling her compact & delicious body
            with chicken paprika, she glanced at me
            twice.

(Restaurants in Verona don’t serve chicken paprika. Not in the city of Romeo & Juliet.)

            Fainting with interest, I hungered back
            and only the fact of her husband & four other people
            kept me from springing on her

            or falling at her little feet and crying
            ‘You are the hottest one for years of night
            Henry’s dazed eyes
            have enjoyed, Brilliance.’  I advanced upon
            (despairing) my spumoni. – Sir Bones:  is stuffed
            de world, wif feeding girls.

            -- Black hair, complexion Latin, jeweled eyes
            downcast … The slob beside her    feasts …  What wonders is
            she sitting on, over there?
            The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.
            Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
            --Mr. Bones:  there is.
 
Though the Dream Songs are stylized, stagy as a minstrel show, they were just what I needed to refresh my love for American idiom. We’d been living in Italy for almost three years. I understood that as a great privilege. I loved Italy, but I felt my grip on present usage in the American language slipping. We were ready to go back. My oldest son, Avrum, who was four, spoke Italian, the Leccese dialect (we’d lived in Lecce for a year) and the Veronese dialect, as well as English. I knew he risked losing that, and Nikolai, two years old, could lose his Italian smatter.

    We returned to Ithaca, New York. Baxter Hathaway had arranged for me to teach at Cornell. That was a stroke of luck, and expression of his faith in me I will always cherish. I didn’t want to teach. I never really loved school, and understood the precept that “them that teach don’t do”; on the other hand, I didn’t relish the idea of hauling my family, which had swelled to three sons, back to the U.S. with no job. We arrived in Ithaca, New York, myself packing my passion for John Berryman and his quirky Dream Song project.

“God bless Henry. He lived like a rat.”
   
“You’ll get to appreciate the wide palette of grays of the Ithaca skies,” Baxter said. He was founder of the Cornell Creative Writing Program, founder of Epoch magazine, a brilliant man of real integrity and compassion, the avuncular mentor of young writers at Cornell. He was always ready to take a cup of coffee with his protégés at Noyes Lodge, or Willard Straight Hall. Slow of speech, and laconic, perpetually drawing on a cigarette, he would listen for hours to amateur literary talk. He bristled against the dominance of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. I’d be curious to know what he’d think of the present plague of writer’s workshops in America. I can’t honestly complain, however. Because of that expansion, I was able to make a living.

    As a Cornell Prof I pushed to get John Berryman into town for a reading. It worked. I was put in charge of the event. The poet arrived at the Ithaca airport in the early afternoon, and was scheduled to read in the evening. He was staying at our apartment. Jingle and I cleaned thoroughly to make it nice for the great poet. The Ithaca airport had no gates. An eminence could descend the stairs as a President would, waving at the crowd. The poet appeared at the door supported under the arms by a flight attendant and the co-pilot. He was totally sloshed, the kind of drunk you have to prop up while he takes a piss. No one had explained to me that Berryman was a hopeless alcoholic; in fact, he wrote most of a novel, Recovery, about the disease of alcoholism. On my first encounter with him, he stank. He had pissed himself in flight. His suit was soaked. The cabin of the plane must have reeked of him. Behind his disheveled graying beard, his unkempt hair, his expression was that of a frightened POW. I introduced myself, but I don’t think it registered. I could feel his panic. He babbled incoherently, this shaper of some of the most muscular lines in the American language.

            “I’m scared a lonely. Never see my son
            easy be not to see anyone,
            combers out to sea
            know they’re going somewhere but not me.
            Got a little poison, got a little gun,
            I’m scared a lonely.

Someone helped me pile him onto the bench of our VW Microbus. The car smelled of him for weeks. He slumped over on me, babbling in a kind of frothy hysteria, as I drove him home. Jingle seemed to be the tranquilizer he needed. He calmed down as soon as he saw her. He took her hand, and walked up the eight steps to our apartment under his own power. “He probably needs to sleep,” said Jingle, with basic Winnemucca wisdom. I was nearly hysterical myself, wouldn’t have come up with that idea.

    We woke him an hour before the reading. He had pissed in his sleep, and the wet spot had drawn purple dye from the cushions onto the white sheet. He was used to this drill. In his suitcase, along with his poems, he carried clean underwear and a fresh suit. He washed up, and we headed for the reading, the poet grabbing Jingle’s hand on the way. He didn’t let go of it till after I introduced him and he climbed to the podium. He read pretty well, from Homage To Mistress Bradstreet, and The Dream Songs, but not with the minstrel show panache that the poems promise, that I had hoped for. We didn’t exchange more than three or four sentences. He was sequestered deep within himself. I wouldn’t suggest a drink. He wanted to sleep. The following morning he met a workshop, and several of the young women there perked him up. A later dream song is dedicated to Amy Vladeck, a student he met at the workshop. He probably never even registered my name. Berryman left on a flight before noon. He was sober. I’m sorry I didn’t get him to sign the sheet he had stained. We kept it for a long time flying on the clothesline – Henry’s banner, the flag of Mr. Bones.

            Supreme my holdings, greater yet my need,
            thoughtless I go out.    Dawn.    Have I my cig’s,
            my flaskie O,
            O crystal cock, -- my kneel has gone to seed,--
            and anybody’s blessing?  (Blast the MIGs
            for making fumble so

            my tardy readying.)  Yes, utter’ that,
            Anybody’s blessing? –Mr. Bones,
            you makes too much
            démand. I might be ‘fording you a hat:
            it gonna rain. –I knew a one of groans
            & greed & spite, of a crutch

            who had thought he had, a vile night, been – well – blest.
            He see someone run off. Why not Henry,
            With his grasp of desire?
            -- Hear matters hard to manage at de best,
            Mr Bones. Tween what we see, what be,
            is blinds. Them blinds’ on fire.

VONNEGUTS

It was a bright spring afternoon in Manhattan, and I was headed uptown. George Plimpton had arranged a gathering at Elaine’s with a sappy name like Convergence of Genius, or the Genius Club. It was meant to create an artistic, literary think tank. Many eminences like Joseph Heller, Robert Rauschenberg, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Susan Sontag, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Yvonne Rainer, Andy Warhol, Tom Wolfe and etc. were among the geniuses. I had just published The Exagggerations of Peter Prince at Holt and doors were opening for me, though I understood little about how to use this advantage. I was invited to this gathering but was too shy and insecure to know how to maintain myself among the literary/artistic glitterati. My seat was at a table with only Kurt Vonnegut and his friend, the photographer, Jill Krementz, whom he later married.

    I had almost crossed paths with Vonnegut before. He just left his teaching gig at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, when I started mine. I did meet Edie, his daughter, whom I liked a lot. She was finishing school there, an art major. Edie visited me at my apartment on Morton Street once, with her boy friend, little Geraldo Rivera. He hadn’t yet started on his way to being the media brute he is today. I could see he had little interest in what I was doing. Edie told me she’d shown my novel to her father, and he didn’t know what to make of it. I wasn’t attracted much to the writing in Cat’s Cradle, the only Vonnegut I’d read. My general social ineptitude and discomfort among geniuses conspired with those hovering opinions to make a nearly silent table. Mr. Vonnegut tried very hard to tell jokes and be jovial. Some of them must have been his ironic takes on the genius label. I might have enjoyed this under different circumstances. Jill Krementz enjoyed him immensely. I couldn’t listen. I couldn’t laugh. I could only think foolishly that we worked on different writing planets, his obviously more popular and lucrative. I didn’t have the grace to break through socially to a more congenial posture.

    When I visited Dresden I thought frequently of Vonnegut, of his distress after writing Slaughterhouse Five. I was on a research trip to see all the paintings of Antonello da Messina for my novel, Antonello’s Lion. Five months earlier I had emerged from a quad bypass extravaganza, and didn’t know what my life would be like, nor how much of it was left. The train from Berlin pulled into Dresden in the morning. My God, I thought, the city is still charred. Vonnegut, the fire bombing, why hadn’t I talked to him? The old city had been completely rebuilt, stones charred charcoal grey. They had preserved the scar. I could feel it in my scars. I imagined I could smell the death by burning.  I could feel Kurt Vonnegut breaking down in New York.

    A slight feathery angelic blonde woman with pink tints in her hair smiled at me as I got off the train, and I followed her flutter across the bridge over the Elbe onto the broad modern square. I was booked into one of the five high-rise hotels lined up like tombstones before the old city. My mission was to see Antonello’s Saint Sebastian. The Zwinger Palace holds one of the great art museums of the world, a pride of Saxon culture. The collection had been saved, had survived the fire-bombing. Vonnegut must have known this, people died, art survived. It was a “so it goes” item. I had no luck with Saint Sebastian, because the painting was in restoration. The Italians allowed me to look at works being restored, and even the Met let me look at an Antonello in storage, but the Germans have their rules, not to be bent. I never saw the painting until after my novel was published, when it was hung in Rome at the Antonello exhibition. It was, I realized, the greatest painting of all time. In Dresden that was a small disappointment, compensated for by the Raphael Sistine Madonna, and great works by Brueghel, Rubens, Veronese. Most interesting to me, almost embarrassing, was a series of paintings by Canaletto, the great Venetian painter of cityscapes, and the Grand Canal. He lived in Dresden for several years, and painted city scenes. The stones in his paintings were the same grey, the same charcoal as the buildings today. Grey is the color of the tufa they quarried to build Dresden then and now. I would have enjoyed a conversation about that with the gracious and troubled Kurt Vonnegut.
  
But I sat tongue-tied in Elaine’s. All around us I could overhear geniuses engaged in easy conversation. I looked into Kurt Vonnegut’s face and thought this was, as Hart Crane described Chaplin, “a kind and Northern face.”  I would have enjoyed a break-through to get to know him. I might at least have got Jill Krementz to include me in her book of portraits of authors at work. Whatever ridiculous opinion I had once about his writing, I finally came to recognize him as a humane and righteous advocate of truth and clarity. He carried his burden of fame with Twain-like wit and rumpled ambassadorial dignity. I left the geniuses, and headed back downtown in New York twilight. That was how I didn’t get to know Kurt Vonnegut. So it went.