Meaning a Life

by Mary Oppen

  The last year I was in Mexico I was disturbed, and for a longer time than I realized I needed help. My need was for a psychiatrist, but to even say that word was admitting weakness. I felt guilty and feared that my life with George would be threatened by this exposure. My need was finally desperate, and although George was reluctant, I convinced him that I needed help from outside our private world, from which I could not now find my way forward. I found a Mexican psychiatrist, who had recently returned from study in the United States. He was young and intelligent and had advanced ideas of women’s freedom. I sat and talked; I thought one began at the beginning, but he cut me short—“Let’s get on with it, what is on your mind right now, now. We’ll take it from there. Write down your dreams, and at the next session we will discuss them. Think hard about what it is that you want. We’ll try to get through this very quickly.”

  I went home and dreamed. I was standing beside a deep black hole at the top of a hill. I drew back from the rim with a feeling of fear and terror. I turned and went away from the black abyss, to where a little man was standing smiling, eating peanuts; he gave me some and ran down the hill, and I ran after him. I did not want to die yet, but what was it that I wanted? I dreamed and dreamed. I thought hard about what I wanted. The psychiatrist and I moved fast through my frustrations and my wild casting about to put blame on others—anywhere but on myself for not being what I wanted to be. Time after time he said patiently, “But no one is preventing you; you are free to move forward, to become whatever it is you decide to become.”

  I thought about identities within which I had lived and about the frustration of being only wife and mother. So many years! The years were full, and full of meaning, but there was now no necessity for continuing in the old forms of keeping a big house and maintaining an ambience for Linda and George. George had an outside world with his furniture business, and Linda was going away—her future seemed full to her. We were soon going back to the United States, and I was full of fear. My fears were not unreasonable, but they made my future seem fraught with uncertainty and indecisiveness. I was paralyzed. I had been brave with a sort of frontier bravery when it had been necessary, when we had left the United States and danger had been real and immediate. Now my fears were vague; I was suffering anxiety.

  The psychiatrist asked to see George and Linda. George had a dream: he and his sister were going through his father’s papers after his father’s death. In a file marked “miscellaneous” was a paper entitled “How to Prevent Rust in Copper.” George thought, “My old man was a little frivolous perhaps, but he certainly knew that copper does not rust.” He shook the bed with his laughter, but I did not find the dream funny. Dreams that seem funny are, in my experience, the ones to watch out for; they are the jokers. Sometimes the dream is saying what is so deeply hidden that one’s reaction of laughter protects one from understanding what the meaning is. But George tells of driving on Avenida Insurgentes in Mexico City, weaving the truck from side to side, laughing at the dream of rust in copper that he was going to discuss with the psychiatrist. When he sobered and drew up to the curb, he said to himself, “I’ll kill myself driving this way,” and drove the rest of the way carefully. When he told the doctor the dream, laughing again at its ridiculousness, the doctor stopped him.

  “You were dreaming that you don’t want to rust,” he said. On the way home George stopped and bought a pad of paper and some pencils and started to write The Materials.

  In 1975 a friend was remonstrating with me; she wanted me to make a return trip to Mexico. I replied, “No, I don’t think I’ll ever want to go to Mexico again.”

  “Why Mary,” she said in surprise, “those were the happiest days of our lives.”

  U.S. passports were being issued again in 1958, and we began to plan our return to the United States. We engaged a New York lawyer who had made a public statement that he would take any case in which a passport was refused to a citizen. He wrote a letter for us to the passport division when we found our request for a passport was delayed for an unreasonably long time, and we received the passport at once. A passport meant that our rights as citizens were again being respected—we always had the right to the passport. Joseph McCarthy symbolized more illegalities than this one, but to us a passport meant we were free to leave the United States legally, to go where we chose, to live with all the rights that citizenship presumably guarantees under our constitution—our basic rights of citizenship which had been grievously violated.

  So Near

  New York had meaning to George for his writing. New York was where he had roots from which to write again; but before we returned to New York to live we made a visit to Linda, who had gone to college in New York. We discussed our attitudes toward our return. We decided to look up everyone we knew and find out what we all made of meeting again; we saw friends, of course, but also acquaintances from twenty or thirty years before—the ancient aunts of George’s father’s family, his uncles, poets, political acquaintances.

  Printmaking seemed to me a remarkable medium, to have the picture that one loved while working on it, and to be able to sell equally original copies. I set myself to return to a discipline of drawing, and to begin the techniques of printmaking when we returned to New York.

  In Mexico, Linda and I had talked of being in the United States, where women, in my memory, walked safely even at night, where I would understand all language that flowed around me, and where an evening of conversation would be in my native tongue, and I would not be exhausted from the effort. When we crossed the border to Texas the language flowed; I heard it and I did not understand.

  We had neglected to buy automobile insurance for the United States. As we passed the border we said, “Oh well, we’ll drive carefully and get the insurance in New York. In New York, George went to see an insurance man and asked, “How do I buy insurance for a car with Mexican plates?”

  “Come back tomorrow and I’ll have looked up the procedure,” said the salesman. Next day he admitted defeat. “Go to the licensing bureau and ask them,” he suggested.

  George stood in line at the window marked “Information” and asked again, “How do I buy insurance for a car with Mexican plates?”

  The man behind the desk wet his finger and leafed through pages of a book. He looked up and said to George, “Do you speak English?”

  George turned to me and said, “Let’s just drive carefully.”

  We visited the Zukofskys—Celia, their son Paul and Louis—who were living in Brooklyn. In the course of conversation Celia said, “I don’t know what we’ll do for a vacation this year.”

  I impulsively said, “Why don’t you come to Mexico with us?” and was immediately stricken by my own words. I had taken on more than I was going to be able to deal with.

  Celia replied, “We will.”

  As we left their apartment I said to George, “I’ve done it again, inviting them without asking you if you want them, or without knowing if I want them.” It was not a good moment to cause strain, but now we were committed. We did indeed want them for our friends, as we had once valued Louis’ friendship. But my heart sank.

  Our friend Max Pepper, a doctor, laughed at me when I told him what I had done; he laughed at my dismay and my own behavior. Max said, “I can give you Miltown, a tranquilizer—take one each morning and I think you will feel quite tranquil.”

  “But what about George, he’ll have to do the driving, he can’t take a tranquilizer.”

  “For George I have no prescription. It’s you, Mary, who asked.”

  “We’ll try to make the trip in five days,” said George, who was making the schedule. Indiana was our first stop for sleeping; Celia chose the motel, and I was surprised that she cared so very much about where she slept. There was wall-to-wall carpeting, a heat lamp in the bath and television. Evening in Indiana meant green country, rolling hills, and farmland; the green grass of the motel sloped to wheat fields, and
across the highway was a farm center with trees and lawns, cool and moist in the summer evening.

  Louis said, “Let’s go for a walk.”

  “I’ll stay here and rest,” said Celia. Paul, Louis, George and I walked on the paths toward the houses and the one store at the meeting of the roads, and as dusk came on and shadows lengthened the fireflies appeared, first in the fields and then near us on our path.

  “Paul,” I asked, “did you ever catch fireflies and put them in a jar to light your room at night?”

  “No,” Paul gravely answered, and I dashed after a firefly and held it in my cupped hands to let Paul see the flash of greenish light that made my fingers glow.

  “Here, take it,” and I held it out to him, but Paul backed away and the insect escaped. “Too bad,” I said, “I’ll catch another.”

  We walked back to meet Celia, who was standing outside the motel talking to a Jewish man. As we came up to them Celia made introductions: “My husband, my son Paul, George Oppen a friend, and Mary who is not one of us.” And my expectation of having Celia for my friend disappeared.

  We came to the International Bridge to re-enter Mexico and stopped at the customs shed. George got out and walked to the back of the truck with the customs inspector. “How much do I pay if you do not inspect the truck?” asked George.

  “Five dollars,” replied the inspector.

  “But there’s nothing illegal in it,” said George.

  “In that case, one dollar,” said the inspector.

  After our unsuccessful attempt to buy insurance for the truck in New York it was a relief to be back in Mexico, where as long as the money holds out one can arrive at an understanding with officials.

  After our first night in Mexico, George and Paul and I were up first, standing outside beside our panel truck, waiting for the others to come along for breakfast. “Paul,” I asked, “can you balance on this curb-strip here, between the cars?” There was a six-inch raised strip separating the parked cars. “You can balance if you tense your belly muscles; you could balance the same way if you were ten feet up. It’s a Yoga exercise, try it!” We were laughing at ourselves, balancing with our arms outspread like two birds, being silly.

  “Paul,” Celia’s voice came, “I don’t think you should be doing that.” With a slight motion of annoyance Paul stepped off the six-inch curb.

  We drove deeper into Mexico on long straight roads without a curve for two hundred miles south of Laredo. Paul sat between his parents, bored with us grown-ups, saying little; we watched the desert on each side of the road, where we occasionally saw a man or a woman walking, or a pig or a donkey near an adobe hut back from the highway. A drought held the land; there was no green anywhere except in the arroyos or dry watercourses, where the roots of cottonwoods sucked moisture from deep below the surface. We were all a little sleepy. The road was, in places, on a raised dike between low fields, and driving on the dike made the road even more uneventful, but safer from the flash floods that could in minutes flood the roads. We watched the mountains for a sign of clouds, but there was not a cloud in the sky, no water for this parched land. A young heifer stood dejectedly beside the road on our right hand; as we approached her, George slowed the truck and the cow looked away. George proceeded, and as we drew abreast of her, she suddenly gave a wild leap and landed in front of our car. We hit her, and she skidded across the road and slid, all feet braced under her, onto the left shoulder of the road. We scarcely felt the bump, and I jumped out to inspect the damage; I could see that the car was not injured, but I gave a gesture of dismay. “We are covered with cow shit.”

  Paul began to laugh, released laughter from days of restrained behavior; he clambered out over his parents’ knees and said, “Two thousand miles of driving and this is the first funny thing that has happened!”

  We were plastered with a thin coating, and no matter what any of us called it from then on, Paul laughed. We cleared the windshield and the headlights, but we were unable to wash the car until we were at home in our own garden in Mexico City. It was enough to even insinuate the situation with the cow and Paul would laugh, with thoroughly fifteen-year-old humor. He regaled us with his favorite jokes, having to do with orchestra conductors, and with anecdotes of the music school; he laughed at himself, at his own jokes, some of them pretty old and decrepit. We told him our favorite jokes and laughed too.

  After we had returned to New York and George was writing The Materials, our relationship with Louis was no longer the same. We loved and cherished Louis still from our early friendship and from George’s relationship with Louis when George had been the nineteen-year-old poet learning from Louis. “He taught me everything,” said George. But now, with George at fifty returned to poetry, and Louis a few years older, the relationship was a different one, one of equals. George was writing out of many years of his life; he was full of his own poetry, and he was about to be published again. And again, Louis asked, “Do you like your poetry better than mine?”

  With a lifetime of poetry to be written, George answered “Yes.” George, insisting on clarity and understanding, speaking of his difficulty in knowing if the readers would understand; Louis, with a shrug replying, “It doesn’t matter, they don’t care if they understand you or not.” Louis was implying, why don’t you write like me—does the reader care whether you have arrived at truth?

  Not knowing how to say it without insulting Louis, but implying that Louis used incomprehensibility and obscurity as a tactic, George said, “You’re tougher than I am, Louis,” referring to Louis’ disregard of the reader.

  To George “tough” meant an operator, a schemer. To Louis the term probably meant being of a lower class, a street kid. He turned pale and replied, “You would not use that word if you knew what it means to me.”

  Long before, jokingly, George had once said to Louis, “Drop dead!” and Louis had replied by turning pale. When he could speak, he said, “It’s an exoticism.”

  We went for a few more walks together, but Celia ceased to join us, and then Louis stopped coming. Our friendship was at an end. I think the Zukofskys were moving into a very private world, to which few were admitted.

  How does one describe it? We had friendship and love with Louis a long time ago, when Louis was the slightly older, brilliant prodigy. His bitterness which we glimpsed and the stubbornness with which he holds himself aloof from the people in the world of poetry leave only his poetry to tell all that Louis, and perhaps Celia too, wish to be known about themselves. In the poetry is hidden the record of their lives, convoluted and at times impossible to decipher. It was Louis’ intention not to be easily or clearly understood—this was the argument between George and Louis. Music is in Zukofsky’s poetry, and if that is all one can have from it, one can be grateful that a great deal of his poetry does indeed sing.

  In 1968 in Wisconsin, during an interview, the discussion concerned Zukofsky’s study of Shakespeare’s Bottom, “a metaphysics of cognition” based upon what he conceived to be Shakespeare’s definition of love. Louis said, “So much for epistemology . . . the theory of knowledge, which is done away with in Bottom . . . when I was through with doing away with epistemology in Bottom . . . The interviewer asked, “What do you mean, you got rid of epistemology in Bottom? The work seems to me all epistemology.” Zukofsky replied, “The questions are their own answers. You want to say ‘yes,’ say ‘yes’; you want to say ‘no,’ say ‘no.’” Asked “Where does the idea of love fit in?” he replied, “Well, it’s like my horses. If you’re good enough to run or feel like running, you run. If you want to live, you love: if you don’t want to live, you hate—that’s all . . . it’s as simple as that.”

  Robert Duncan explained to us recently that Louis, Pound, and Rexroth misunderstood our financial position; Louis expected us to help him more than we did, and his disappointment probably colored his relations with us from the time we discontinued To Publishers. Duncan sa
id, “Did you know that Pound was preparing all his works for To Publishers to print?” We had not known.

  In 1959, on our return from Mexico, we walked once again with Charles Reznikoff, who had been ill, and who had lost his job when the law book company dissolved. Al Lewin, a friend of Charles’ youth who had written poems and read and discussed them with Charles, was visiting New York. Charles told us, “Al’s poems were too fancy, he wrote them fast too; I preferred mine, but I benefited from the discussion because Al discussed every word.” Al was living at an elegant hotel and Charles, who was going to visit him, said, “I find that one had better be rich if one has a rich friend. Now I am on my way to visit Al, and I must stop in here at this delicatessen to buy him a kind of bread that he remembers from our boyhood days.” We entered the shop, Charles pointed to a loaf of pumpernickel bread and the clerk wrapped it; then, handing it to Charles, he said, “One dollar, please.”

  “You see?” said Charles. “And every time the word haiku enters our conversation, Al says to me, ‘I think those translations by Arthur Waley are the best; I love that book you gave me, I wish I had the others.’ I must buy them for him—I am so poor and he is so rich.”