The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told

by Dikkon Eberhart

  You are above the sin of killing an eight-year-old girl.

  Addicting, that.

  Addicting, that seduction not to be you.

  Addicting, that seduction for Dikkon not to be messed-up Dikkon. Addicting, to be another Dikkon who is not messed up. Addicting, to be able to prove that Dikkon is not that messed-up Dikkon. This Dikkon is another Dikkon who has just made three hundred people cry by saying one single word.

  It scared me, that addiction to seduction.

  It scared me that I might become addicted to not being me.

  It scared me that I might become addicted to trying to control everything around me. It scared me that I might become addicted to the attempted control of the uncontrollable.

  Train wrecks are uncontrollable.

  Then—then, when it mattered—messed-up Dikkon had not said that one single word.

  Then—then, when it mattered—I could have said that one single word.

  “Stop!”

  That is that one single word that I could have said.

  But back there on that train platform, I was playing to the wrong audience. I was playing to my girl and not playing to the whole wide world, which is filled with pretty little gals and with much else besides, all of which needs loving attention from me, all of which needs me to say one single word of truth—when it matters.

  I would simply have to bear my sin after all. My artistic subterfuge of making three hundred people cry on cue was not enough to get me out from under the boulder of my sin. Better, I thought, to turn my back on this addiction to being someone else than myself and to figure out how to live within the world as it had actually been given to me by God.

  But I was still an actor. I was an actor wherever I went. I couldn’t help myself.

  Let’s call it—say—the summer of 1967, and I’m in Paris by myself. I am very conscious of being on the terrasse of the Dôme Café. I’m in love with the fact that I’m sitting on the terrasse of the Dôme Café. So much happened here, really, not so very many years before.

  Right over there at that table—this is how I set my scene—right over there at that table, Modigliani, the great Italian painter and sculptor, sits with his lover, the French artist, Jeanne Hébuterne. This is just before he dies and she throws herself, nine months pregnant, from her father’s fifth-floor bedroom window. Perhaps those two are not so famous in death as Romeo and Juliet, but still Modi and his lover are free—those lucky ones.

  At that other table on that other side, I see Henri Cartier-Bresson, the father of photojournalism—an acquaintance of Dad’s during our DC years—dallying with Caresse Crosby, while her husband, the poet and bon vivant Harry Crosby, looks indulgently upon their explosive love affair from the next table, glass in hand. Perhaps their affair is not as culturally famous as the affair of Héloïse and Abelard, the ideal among twelfth-century lovers, but Harry is soon to be free of this vale of tears himself. Dead by suicide pact—Harry and one of his many lovers, while his wife Caresse waits for him that evening at the theater. Harry Crosby’s suicide was the champion literary suicide until Dad’s friend Hart Crane, poet, jumped off the stern of a steamship in the Gulf of Mexico two and a half years later.

  Crane’s was the archetypal suicide for Dad. It was clear that artists, and poets, and bohemians, and absurdists, and other knights of Mankind Only—since there is no God—had this to say: “Why in the world not? Well, I mean it. My life is mine only, and I may take it away.”

  Their atheist conclusion, and their actions, horrified Dad.

  I am on the terrasse of the Dôme, and I am not free. By negligent omission, as a killer, I have lost my right to be alive. Yet I do still find pleasure in life. I find pleasure being in Paris; it is my first visit. I am heavily mustachioed, like Hemingway—another champion literary suicide. When you look around, suicides seem suddenly to be everywhere.

  I have no intention of suicide, but I am deeply wounded by my messed-up-ness, and my literary romanticism inclines me to muse upon the self-indulgent suicides of the life despisers, and the humanity despisers, and the God despisers.

  My French is almost nonexistent. Still, I have a little playlet for myself to act out. I’ve just spent a week kicking around in the Spanish-speaking areas of Morocco. I am thrilled to be told by a Dôme waiter that he assumes I must, indeed, be Spanish, for I speak my hesitant French with that sort of accent.

  Hot stuff!

  At the table next to mine sits an American couple of Midwestern middle age, enjoying their European vacation. I have overheard them trying to make themselves plain when ordering, but I have, of course, disdained to assist them in any way. Certainly they are no fellow countrymen of mine!

  After a time, I realize that the wife of the couple is trying to catch my eye. I deign to give her a slight nod. She rises and makes her way to my table. She does her best to communicate that she desires to sit at my table and to have her photograph taken with me by her husband. After all—this is the Dôme, and I am evidently an artist of some kind, and here we are in Paris.

  Once I manage to grasp her meaning—her French is poor and, after all, I have no English—I gravely allow that this might be permissible.

  The thing arranges itself. She sits; her husband manipulates the camera. Voilà! It is done.

  Her thanks are profuse, and in them her husband joins. I am gracious, though cool.

  “Harry,” she says, nudging her husband, “he wants some money. Give him some money.”

  Harry has the obligingness to reach into his pocket and to withdraw a five-franc coin. He offers it to me, and with condescension that becomes me very well, I accept it.

  I have a career!

  I order another vin, and the sun smiles down on the intersection of boulevard Raspail and boulevard du Montparnasse. Later in the day, I will order an omelette jambon avec pomme frites (which is all I ate during my ten days in Paris because it was all I knew how to say), and the evening will come on with a smatter of new faces, like petals on a wet, black bough. (Poet Ezra Pound’s phrase, not mine; but apropos.)

  I believe Toulouse-Lautrec, in his disinterest, would have enjoyed me with a sharp pencil. (Another steal, slightly altered, from Dad this time.)

  As a college boy, I am in Paris looking for something to say of my own. I want to stop reading lines. I want to stop stealing phrases. I want to say something that hasn’t been said before.

  Back in the States, though, I live onstage. At least, at single-sex Dartmouth, it is a way to meet girls without going through the horrid dating “scene.” As it turns out, it isn’t hard to meet girls in Paris, either—indeed, many girls come up and desire to meet me, for a fee.

  But in Paris it is hard to find words to say of my own. I have no pal to go around with, and that may account for it. I have Paris, and I have my career, but I am mute.

  Years and years before, Dad, pedaling south out of Paris on his way to Provence, had felt “a very god,” as he put it. He wasn’t very much older than I was, but he was already a songster entire.

  What will Dikkon do? In my family, the question was a big one.

  Back in the States, Dad sat me down. I suspect Mom had goaded him—“You’re his father, Richie. He’s lost. He doesn’t know what to do. He needs to talk to you, not to me.”

  So Dad sat me down. He told me that his brother, my Uncle Dry, had chosen stocks and bonds. I knew this. Then he told me that Mom’s brother, my Uncle Charlie, had chosen to stay in the family company and now ran it very well and had become very rich. I knew this, too. Finally, he told me that there were lots of businesses in which I could make my career. He said there was insurance. He knew men who had made a life in insurance. He said there was medicine—though he didn’t think of me as a medicine type. He said there was law. He said I might be a law type; he would need to think about that. Then he got around to teaching. I was a natural there, he said. Teaching might be the perfect thing. You get three months off in the summer so you can do your other work too, if you are
an artist of some sort. I could do some acting and still teach. I should think about that. Then he said we should go out to dinner, so we did.

  (Stage-managing note: this conversation, Dad’s and my single one of its type, took place in his and Mom’s suite at Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel—they told me it was the same suite William Faulkner used to occupy when he was in town—when Dad was helping his bestselling-novelist friend Erica Jong finish a teaching stint at Columbia. Jong’s book Fear of Flying was a delicious national scandal. I would have liked to meet her, but I was too shy to ask for an introduction from my dad because her book was famous for its . . . sex.)

  What Dad did not know, and what I did not know how to tell him while we sat in Faulkner’s suite, was that I wanted to be him. Well, not him exactly. But he, too, received that applause I knew the seduction of. And yet he was a regular guy—not as messed-up as me, of course, but messed-up enough.

  Acting aside, for me, my real career choice was just fiction over poetry; that was all.

  Recently I had reread all of Hemingway’s short stories (for about the tenth time), and “Big Two-Hearted River” had convinced me of my goal. If I could turn away from theater, and if I could do the same thing Hemingway had done—metaphorically show my readers the sunlight dancing on the surface of the river while they were allowed to sense the power of the big fish down below—then, when I came to die, I should not have been hanging around and just breathing up the air.

  I want to be you, I shouted silently to Dad, but I don’t need any more poets! Who I need is Hemingway. Unhappily, that man’s suicide had occurred five years before.

  Still, Dad must have understood. He was awkward in his role of The Father of Dikkon, but he was a kindly man when just being my dad. So, shortly after our talk about careers, Dad drove me over to introduce me to the former Hadley Richardson, Hemingway’s Paris wife.

  Hemingway’s Paris wife was just then living on a hillside in New Hampshire. She turned out to be a nice-looking, middle-aged woman of pleasant mannerisms. I do not recall that she spoke much about her former husband during our visit. Perhaps she was content to leave the subject well enough alone, now that she was no longer tossed about in the wake of her preposterous, genius husband. Mostly she chatted about how her life had gone since Hem. I liked her.

  As it happened, I had read a great deal about her former husband. Though fascinated, I did not like what I learned. I hated Hemingway’s statement that a moral act is one you feel good about afterward. I hated Hemingway’s need for a new wife at every shift of his literary career. Unlike some fawning critics, I felt the man’s stylistic genius really was for short story only, though he translated it successfully into parts of his first two novels and into his Paris memoir. I deplored Hemingway’s later life of parodying himself literarily, despite my sympathy with him for what I suspected was his terror that he had lost his muse, and that he had no power left—but that he still had his fame to feed anyway.

  Intuitively, I knew about the anxiety of the artist whose youthful flair is subsiding into sometimes-forced reiterations.

  At the time I met Hemingway’s Paris wife, Dad was in his middle sixties. Dad had been respected in his field for more than thirty years. He had not yet won the National Book Award (though he would soon), but he had won the Pulitzer Prize and the Bollingen Prize and the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award and so on. Dad could open almost any literary or artistic door he wanted to open, and he could—and did—bring Mom, Gretchen, and me through that door with him.

  Many other men in their middle sixties begin to think about golf, or fishing, or moving to the sun, or volunteering at the soup kitchen as ways to relax now that their work has been done. Dad was not relaxing. He was still turning the stuff out as quickly as it came to him—or as quickly as he could force it to come to him. Off each new poem would go, with eager enthusiasm, to this editor or to that one.

  Dad lacked literary political intuition. Frost had more discipline as well as more literary political sense than Dad did. Frost once told me that poetic genius is like mathematical genius. It flares in the young, but an old poet must parse it out slowly and carefully; there may not be much of it left.

  Frost would hold a poem sometimes for years before releasing it; Dad released his poems before their ink was dry. Frost starved the critics, so they were eager for their next Frostian meal. Dad flooded the critics, so even when they liked the look of their next Eberhartian dish, their minds were on Maalox.

  Dad won the Pulitzer because James Loughlin of New Directions Publishing would not let Dad push him around. Loughlin published a selected collection of Dad’s poems, and only he—Jay—was allowed to do the selecting. Bingo! The Pulitzer.

  Dad’s most frequently anthologized poem during the first two-thirds of his career was “The Groundhog.” He wrote it in 1934, when he was thirty and had found the dead animal in a field in Pennsylvania. It’s a death poem: Dad’s greatest theme.

  Dad told me that he wrote three poems that same day, all of them seeming to him to be of equal power. He said he did not change a single word in “The Groundhog”—“Or maybe I changed one, but that’s all.” “The Groundhog” made my father famous, but the other two poems were scarcely noticed by the world.

  Why?

  Now and then he would go back and lay the three pieces of paper next to one another and gaze at them. Maybe, he thought, he might see something in the penmanship that would suggest why one of these poems was God-sent and the others were not, but he could never find a difference in the handwriting nor in anything else that was material. It wasn’t the handwriting, or the ink, or the paper, or the time of day, or the angle of the sun, or the rumble in his stomach because he had missed lunch. It was something else—on a different plane entirely.

  One of those three poems ought to endure in English literature forever. Two will not. Why?

  It’s a God thing.

  By the 1980s, academic and critical taste had changed since Dad wrote “The Groundhog.” That dead rodent had launched Dad like a rocket into the literary stratosphere, a great trail of fire burning behind him. Burning—that’s the point.

  When Dad wrote the poem, five years after T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” appeared, some within the literary world loved it that Dad and others challenged the cool rationalism of what they called “modernism” in Eliot and his new poem.

  But times and tastes had changed since the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s, and the critics are self-appointed as the door wardens of literary immortality. They grind away and they grind away, very fine. For many critics in the last quarter of the twentieth century, modernism may have become passé, but its virulently ironic child—postmodernism—had won out entirely over hot passion.

  It is the taste of the critics that controls who gets into the big new anthologies, and by the late 1980s and the 1990s, often the critics, like policemen, would pull my father’s poetical car to the side of the road and chastise him for driving while innocent.

  In the 1990s, when I was being hurt for Dad over his lack of inclusion in some important new anthology, he was in his own nineties. The burden of the past for my father was ninety years heavy. The events and urgencies and tastes and astonishments and agonies in which he had participated during his years were being forgotten by the world, faster and faster. Yet they were the facts of Dad’s life which, to borrow from Frost’s poem, had made all the difference. In a general way, Dad was loath that the world’s knowledge of these facts should be lost. Yet what was most urgent for my father was not the loss of the facts but that we new people—we new people who have our own urgencies to attend to—we new people should concentrate on what remains permanent and does not disappear, and what is ever renewing.

  Dad saw cultural taste about poetry change just as cultural taste about much else changes. He did not see, nor did he ever believe, that the urgency among poets to write poetry was changing. Poets write the way they write because they were put on earth—as Dad would say it—to write the way they wr
ite.

  In his last published interview, when Dad was ninety-five, he said, “The young poet should go on writing poetry and finding out what is his true nature and what is his destiny. What is his soul. Since God Almighty has to do with all of us, this young poet is put on earth by the immortal Truth. But it is his human job to discover his human truth. There must be some kind of mystery in which Shakespeare became Shakespeare, Milton became Milton, Keats became Keats. How incredible that these people appeared on the face of the earth! But they did. But why did they? And isn’t it strange. And is there any answer to it? Who can know?”[1]

  Interviewers frequently asked Dad the question, “If you could go back and meet Shakespeare, what would you ask him?” Dad’s answer was always the same: “Do you know you are Shakespeare?” Somehow a man born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, the son of an alderman and glove maker, became an ink-scribbling, theater-minded entertainer . . . and became Shakespeare. Just so, Milton became Milton, Keats became Keats—and Dad became, well, Dad.

  What was I to become? By what becoming would I become authentically me?

  I had one consolation in my confusion. Unlike Modigliani, Hemingway, Crosby, or Crane, at least I was still alive and was free to craft an answer to my question.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “So this is the very boy!”

  Marie Rexroth stood on the landing outside her house, high on a slope among eucalyptus trees, north of San Francisco Bay. She was a slender figure of middle age, swathed in offhand and colorful garments, attractively casual to my prim New England eye.

  “Yes,” my mother called up to Marie. “Yes, he is the very boy!”

  Mom and Dad and I had just emerged from our car, which we had parked in the small opening among the trees perhaps one hundred feet below Marie’s house.

  Marie watched us for a moment more. She assessed me with a speculative eye. “Your son looks very like you, Dick.” Then she smiled. “Come on up.”