Meaning a Life

by Mary Oppen

  George, now well launched on The Materials, wrote to Henry Rago, editor of Poetry in Chicago, “Do you remember me?”

  Henry wrote back, inviting George to send some poems. George wrote to James Laughlin of New Directions, asking him if he would print a book of poems. George’s sister, June Degnan, who was publishing the San Francisco Review, offered to publish two books by George with New Directions. James Laughlin wrote to George, “I will publish your book with or without your sister’s partnership.” The books were published by New Directions with San Francisco Review.

  Charles Reznikoff was sixty-six years old when we looked him up in New York. His poetry was largely unrecognized, and he was in very low spirits. George discussed with Zukofsky whether he thought Charles would agree to being published if New Directions could be persuaded. Zukofsky said, “I think Rezi does not care about any but a Jewish audience.”

  George thought for a moment. “But what about Mary?” he asked.

  Louis replied, “Oh, I guess he thinks of Mary as Jewish.”

  Rezi agreed to be published; James Laughlin and George’s sister too were pleased. George’s book, The Materials, and Charles Reznikoff’s book, By the Waters of Manhattan, were published at the same time. The Gotham Book Mart gave a party at the time of publication, and among the people who came to the party was Sir Charles (C.P.) Snow, who had written, at June Degnan’s request, a foreword for Reznikoff’s book. Reznikoff had never met Sir Charles, nor had Sir Charles known Rezi’s poems before he was asked to write the foreword. At their meeting Sir Charles bent over and said, “Er, ah, you aren’t—er, ah—as thin as I thought you’d be.” George was introduced next; George, who is tall enough and thin enough for anyone’s idea of a poet, left Sir Charles with nothing to say. They smiled and shook hands.

  While signing books, in a lull George signed one and handed it to Charles Reznikoff. “Read it in health,” said George.

  Rezi accepted it gravely and corrected George’s translation from Yiddish, “Read it in good health.”

  George and Charles came West together on a reading tour after The Materials and By the Waters of Manhattan were published. At one of the colleges they sat, after reading, for a discussion of students’ work, with each young person’s poem making the rounds of the table. When Charles had finished reading one of the poems, he laid it down, folded his hands, and with one eyebrow higher than the other said, “If I come to a poem like this when I am reading, I turn the page.”

  In Michigan, at a poetry conference to which George and Charles as well as many other poets had been invited in the early 1970s, we found ourselves, men and women, housed in a women’s dormitory with one bathroom for both sexes.

  Charles had forgotten to bring soap, and when I supplied him I watched while, with his towel over his arm, Charles set out for a long walk to a dormitory where he had found a bathroom for men only. At this same conference, young people showed their love for Charles and for his poetry by a standing ovation after he finished reading. As Charles bowed and accepted the ovation, he was murmuring what he had planned to say: “I hope I haven’t taken up too much of your time.”

  The students teased him thereafter; after talking to him about a poem, as they left him they said, “We hope we haven’t taken up too much of your time.”

  In San Francisco Charles was invited to read, and George and I went to his hotel to accompany him to the reading. He was not there; we waited, and presently Charles appeared, looking very much the New Yorker in black overcoat and astrakhan hat, carrying his briefcase in one hand. “Have you had breakfast, or do you want lunch?”

  “No,” he replied, “I had breakfast at seven, and I’ve been out walking.”

  On our return to the United States, we paid two visits to William Carlos Williams. On the first visit his wife Floss cautioned us not to stay long, that Bill had difficulty in talking since he had had the strokes, and that he tired easily; we assured her we would leave when she thought we should go. Floss remained in the room to help Bill remember the words which came painfully to him now, but soon she left, as Bill was talking easily and was exultant that he was having no difficulty with speech. George was soon to read at the Guggenheim Museum (I think it was George’s first reading), and Bill asked George to read to him. George read “Population”:

  Like a flat sea,

  Here is where we are, the empty reaches

  Empty of ourselves

  Where dark, light, sound

  Shatter the mind born

  Alone to ocean

  Save we are

  A crowd, a population, those

  Born, those not yet dead, the moment’s

  Populace, sea-borne and violent, finding

  Incredibly under the sense the rough deck

  Inhabited, and what it always was.

  Bill said, “George, promise me that you will read that poem slowly, and that you will read it twice at the Guggenheim.”

  George replied, “I wouldn’t dare.”

  Bill said, “Tell’em I told you to.”

  As we stood up to go, Bill stood up too, wavering and fragile where he had been straight and tall; but when I kissed him it was a young man’s kiss.

  Other

  Writings

  RE: MAINE

  our boat makes a way for us

  a free passage

  on a sea of glass

  or held in the surges

  our words move toward

  each other

  I

  The anchor flukes strike down through ooze to rock. This island can be entered up a bank of drifted wood and worn round stones on a path as small as a deer’s trail, but it is made by humans. The firs and spruce stand thick, occasional birch, maple, and oak bring light and movement into dense shade in August, on the forest floor. We walk on moss, and ancient stones flat as masonry, make steps. We climb beside trunks of trees, and through branches we see our boat below, the water smooth, glassy, clear. Stones below us enter water, green stones, great rocks of an upheaval more recent than the ancient stones of the steps up the cliff.

  A chick-a-dee infant discovers us, he comes chirping down branches, hops from tree to tree—comes close, flutters his wings, asking for food. His parent calls—mouth full of bugs, calls and flies from branch to branch, baby follows, follows for food, hops near us again to see.

  A cairn to mark the turn. Probably the piles of rocks mark the path to be cleared anew each spring, rocks stacked make precarious sculptures, sharp angled slabs and shards of the most ancient stones. The cairns are lichen-covered, stained with circles, colors spread and grow on the rock surfaces. Soil is made of fallen spruce needles, birch-leaves, rotting stone; tree’s roots are covered with moss, inches deep and various in kinds of moss and shades of green, the pile of this carpet is close-grown, or clustered stars, resilient where the foot falls: we leave no mark. A plank shaped by a carpenter for some other use at some other time, found on the beach, is now a bridge, and nailed to a large root, it makes a firm crossing. Berries and leaves of Bunch-berry are red on each side of the path where we come out of the forest to stand on a narrow, high end of the island above the water; nearly silent water in no wind, water surface is glassy, it swells and recedes—it does not break, it soughs—hsssss—hwww. We stand quiet, we hear it rise and recede.

  The path divides and we climb high; steps cut in rich mold, held in place by cedar roots: cedar trees, trunks smooth with fans of cedar branches hang quiet, ferns grow up through the moss. We climb into the sun. Above the tree-tops steps are cut in the rock, we feel beneath our feet the back-bone of the island, back-bone thrust up from the ocean floor deep in Penobscot Bay. Great Spruce Head, from whose top we can see the islands of the bay: Eagle Island in the distance, across from us Dirigo and Bear, and off to the south North Haven Island, but between them all are the rocks, spits of sand, and pebbles; Scrag Island is a crag
with two trees and piles of stones like slag, where a fisherman has a snug all-year house with storm-windows still up in August and a complex television mast stayed to stand in the winds. The sea still lies glassy, but in the center of the small islands we see on the water that the wind is coming. Southwest wind is turning the water dark blue and streaks of darker blue riffle and sweep in some logic they find among the islands. To the north, east, and west, the mountains rise blue, Blue Hill, the Camden Hills, and off to the east Cadillac Mountain, purple because its rock is rosy-gray granite. Now it is a deeper blue than the other mountains, it shows its sixty miles’ distance from us here. We retrace our steps. Back-bone, cairn to cairn. Maine forests are impenetrable without a man-made path. We’ve tried to walk or climb into forests here in Maine, but exhausted, confused, assailed by black-flies and mosquitoes, we’ve been lost in dense forest growth pervading as jungle and as fast growing. At the feet of spruce are spruce trees one inch high, up through the moss the new trees start from seed, next year they grow first branches, rise in height, with lichens and dead branches in the lower levels of the forest where light is scarce, their roots in gloom, their branches are nearly black, their green is so dark against the sky. Two ospreys build their nest in the top of a tall, old, broken spruce. They find a current of air and lie against the sky above the cliff to watch over their fierce young one who sits like a phoenix in the nest: he fixes their gaze, whistles his piercing cry: they answer. We find a long black feather—a raven’s feather; nearby are shells, a perfect large sea-snail shell, clam-shells, and mussel-shells lying with both halves open, emptied and cast beside the path or scattered on the moss, far above the beaches. We’ve seen ten different mushrooms, and a yellow and brown velvet lichen like a velvet hat left lying on the ground beside an old tree-trunk. Flowers grow in the moss and ferns, faces turned down, petals thrust face down to the moss—Pipsissewa, used by the Indians as a medicine.

  We near our beach, retrace our path over the plank-bridge to our orange, inflated canoe. We carry it to the water’s edge, step in and float on water. We are beside the island, no way is now visible to penetrate it.

  II

  We flew kites that year, kites that flew high and steady. An engineer and his family visited us that summer and we all made kites. I put them in the barn when the engineer left and Marge and her little brother Samuel came in the afternoons, put the baby in the shade and flew one kite or another in the field beside the house. Marge caused more anxiety to her parents than all the other children. She would go to Boston, she would go to Washington D.C. They drove her there, but she beat them home both times; couldn’t deal with the big world she was unaccustomed to. She made friends and then fell in love with a Black Portuguese boy who took her home to his mother. They married and she tried to live with him in his mother’s house in a Boston slum. “I got up when he was sleeping, I slept when he was awake. When we walked I was a few steps behind him—he never heard a word I said and I didn’t understand their speech. He played cards or practiced his music with other young men. He played the drums, and he shipped out in the Merchant Marine to earn money, and was seldom at home.”

  “Why did you love him, Marge, what was it about him?”

  “He looked like Belafonte,” she said in her low, slow, reluctant speech. She came home. Still almost a child herself, she now has a child, a child half-Black, half-Portuguese Black, a glowingly beautiful dark child on these islands of descendants of Scotch-Irish pale people.

  “I mean,” said Marge, clapping her hands for the baby to dance with her first steps, “she has Africa in her veins!”

  Marge walked with me that summer, took me to her favorite haunts where Mumma shot the deer. We walked on a logging-road fast disappearing in the fir forest that grows fast and thick. She says, “Over there is an old silver mine that someone tried to work.” She showed me a miniature graveyard. “Samuel and I made it for all the pets.” In a circle of trees in deep forest, small blocks of native granite marking graves. “My bird, our dog”—with a stone, Duchess scratched on the polished fragment of granite, “Duchess went deaf and was run over on the highway.”

  She and Samuel, the youngest boy, felt close and intimate that summer. Marge tried to talk to us that summer, tried and the effort failed. She tried hard. She came from such shy and quiet people who talk little of what is important to their lives. They keep secret how they feel, how they feel toward each other, what they want in their lives.

  Our friend Steve was visiting us and we were talking of Russian Roulette when Marge and the baby came to visit. Steve explained the game to her. . . . She sat, silent as usual, but I heard her murmur, “I could play Russian Roulette and not lose.” She is a little wandering spirit—when we first met her she said, “I will get to Peru.”

  Now in another summer she is married to an insistent suitor, she has a second child, but she lives a strange life. The children reflect her strong, strange adventurous spirit. Not a strange spirit to someone out there adventuring, but she is an adventurer who must live at home. But where Marge is life is not ordinary. One year she couldn’t bear to be in the same house with her husband. She took the children and moved into a cabin in deep woods—in Maine, in winter! But it is her country, and they survived. Her husband worried about her, begged her to return. Perhaps she is his spirit of adventure. He bought her a car, made her kitchen modern and shining, but she stays outside, works all the land anyone offers her, plants gardens that grow. Even in a year of drought Marge’s gardens grow. She is dear to her husband and very much trouble. The children are bright. “Little devils,” their grandmother says. “I would rather have all my other grandchildren in the house at once than Marge’s two.” The little girl is in school now, the outstanding child in her class, and the teacher loves her. She is a different child to the teacher than she is to her grandmother, or to her mother’s husband. Her own father loves her too, calls her on her birthday, and on Christmas. This year, her third at school, a child called her Dirty Nigger. Neither of the children knew what the words meant, but Marge comes to us for comfort and to plan her strategy for protecting this wonderful child, for in the future there will be more, more name-calling, and here in the islands the child may suffer. “Beautiful, she is so beautiful, with a father who calls her on her birthday. He loves her too, even though,” Marge says, “he couldn’t take care of us down there in Boston, so I came home.”

  III

  Captain Frank sits out in front, almost sightless, nearly deaf, smoking the little corn-cob pipe that George brought him at the beginning of summer. From my bicycle, I shout, “Hello, Captain Frank.” He raises his arm in greeting, peering to find someone to connect with my voice. Captain Frank came to Eleanor’s birthday party, everyone was there, everyone she still remembers. (Everyone, that is, who is still alive.) Captain Frank stands in the doorway, leans there until he has the attention of the roomful of people, shouts, “Eleanor, another eighty years and maybe you’ll be all growed up!”

  She came one summer from upstate New York, a girl—Hudson River-Dutch. A tall, lank woman on an island of short, wide women, she married that first summer, a son of a farmer on the island. He had come to meet the steamer that brought Eleanor to Maine. She had sailed down the Hudson on her father’s boat, a working boat, the last of the sailing-barges on the Hudson River, New York to Boston by steamer, on a smaller steamer to Portland, and smaller still, the boat from Portland to Rockland, and then to the Penobscot by one of the many little steamers that were the means of transportation for the islands. A dirt covered promontory of jagged granite blocks made the landing, where every summer a hundred people came for their summer vacations. They came, each to a favorite spot, “a camp,” or a rented room in a house opened to summer visitors, or to their own houses. A summer population that was lively, vacationers who brought employment to the islanders to augment their income from fishing or from lumbering, or from shipping out on lumber-schooners or as captain or as crew on the yach
ts of the rich. The island young people met the steamer at the landing, walking or coming by horse-carriage to meet and to view the new arrivals, and to escort them to their summer homes. Young people greeted friends from past summers, they flirted with boys and girls who arrived with these families. Some families even brought their own horses and carriages in order to have their own transportation on the island. Summertime is the busy time in the islands, summertime means work for those who live year round on the islands, for the women as well as for the men. For the young people it means also the return of the dances that are held in a great barn, a boat builder’s barn, used for their dances during the summer; picnics, swimming at ponds warm enough to allow swimming; or trips to places of particular beauty.

  Eleanor married into an old island family, and her young husband took her to live in a small house near his family’s large farm-house whose acres stretched down to the bay—but Eleanor had no children. She knew, at last, that she would have no children of her own, all her young friends had their first baby, then a second, even a third and she had none. She was barren and desolate. A sister back in New York State died suddenly, leaving three boys. Her sisters were willing to take one boy each, but Eleanor wanted all three. She asked her husband if he was willing to take the boys. “We’re too young to take on all that responsibility, Eleanor,” he said. “They aren’t ours.” But Eleanor was persistent, it was her chance to have children, and they were her own sister’s children, close to her by blood. She was persistent, she tells. “When I baked, I’d say, ‘Isn’t it a shame the three boys can’t have some of this?’ Or when we went sleigh-riding or skating or picnicking, I’d say, ‘How the three boys would enjoy this.’’’ Until one day her husband said, “Eleanor, you’d better send for the boys.”

  Her husband is long dead, now, and her loyal “boys” visit her in the summers where she now lives again in the little house near the water’s edge, the old farm-house and most of the acres sold long ago to summer-people.