Black Light

by Galway Kinnell

  “Nothing?” said Jamshid. “Nothing?” Effat smiled broadly.

  “Nothing at all.”

  chapter twenty-four

  Jamshid could hear the girl breathing across the room. In the New City he had felt desire only in imagining the widow. That promise on the horizon of a new beginning, however faintly it glowed—and never so faintly as now—was his tie to another life, a second world, and it put a barrier—perhaps mostly of pity—between him and these other women, who had only this one. Now, in this darkness which seemed to consist of the breaths, in and out, of an unknown girl across the room, the barrier suddenly vanished. He felt come over him an intense sexual longing.

  He raised himself on an elbow, and looked in the girl’s direction. The room was completely dark. It was a little like that darkness in Shiraz in which he had awaited the widow. As if the darkness itself were some kind of candlelight. He looked around him. Though it was totally dark, he felt he could see the photographs of beautiful women that were pasted all over the invisible walls.

  He crossed the room. Kneeling at the girl’s bedside, he heard the huge, passionate gasps of her body clamoring for air. It gasped with the ruthless will of an infant sucking at the breast. It was funny, he thought, how at night a person clings savagely to a life that, in the daytime, he only wants to throw away.

  He could smell the girl’s odor, bright and bewildering. With his hand he touched the smooth, hot skin of her arm. Sharp pains wriggled through his loins. He drew his hand away. And yet possibly it wasn’t his disease that was hurting him, but the pain of desire. He reached out and touched her again.

  Her breathing seemed to grow slightly deeper. He could not tell if she were awake or asleep. Surely asleep. And yet her nipples rose under his fingertips, and when he touched her belly it seemed to cave in a little under the caress.

  “Ah, it’s you,” the girl said, waking suddenly, “the old man Effat said to be good to. That’s fine with me. She says you’re nice. Come in with me.” Jamshid slid under her blanket. He moved his hand over the mound of hair. The gash between the thighs was wet and open. He opened it wide with his hand. The odor flared, like a dropped bottle of perfume.

  He moved on top of her and thrust apart the loose thighs and pushed in. As he put his arms around her he felt on her back several tiny welts. Effat had shown him the little bumps on her own back where men had stubbed out their cigarettes. . . . He seemed to hear her sob. If so the sound had come from a great distance, a small cry from far down a street, heard at the moment a motor starts up and drowns it out. Some last, useless appeal. Her mouth kissed him back, her pelvis tipped up to meet him, she came alive down the length of her body. . . . They moved slowly . . . now more quickly, as a river gradually finds its bed deepening . . .

  Jamshid lay looking up at the darkness. He felt no joy or peace. He remembered his disease. He felt only apprehension. Beside him the girl gave a low sigh. The sound caught in his mind. It had a familiar tone. . . . He abruptly dropped this idea. Yet his heart started to beat fast. . . . Now that he thought about it, there had been something so familiar in her voice. He did not dare speak, in case it was true. He put his hand out and felt her face. As he felt her he could see her. Yes. The eyebrows . . . the forehead . . . the cheekbones just so . . . the nose, exactly . . . the lips . . . chin. . . . He got to his feet and snatched up his clothes and plunged half falling down the stairs.

  “Nothing?” he gasped, “nothing?”

  He thought he would vomit but retched uselessly.

  If only he could die. And as he was wishing to die he heard the sound of snoring—two snores—one deep-throated, made of groans and harsh warbles, one a high, empty rattle—now coming in alternating step like a thing with a limp, now one overtaking the other, now joined in sisterly unison. He stared swollen-eyed at the mud. The pains started up again in his crotch, first in crawling flashes, now as if actual fires burned in him. Tears poured down his face. The snores drew apart once more, and the high rattle resonated in Jamshid’s mind. He realized he did know how to die.

  He looked in at the open door. Effat was tossing under her huge tremors. Mehre lay trembling and shaking. Goli was heaped in a stiff and silent bundle in the corner. He stepped in. The snoring grew louder. Goli suddenly started up a wheezing, gasping snore. As Jamshid tiptoed toward Mehre’s bed the noise continued to increase. It was like a jungle at night. He knelt now at the hag’s bedside. Reaching across, he groped down in the space between the wall and the bed. His hand struck a bottle and knocked it against another with a little clang. He withdrew his hand and froze. All the snores stopped at once.

  One by one, they resumed. He groped again for the bottle. The noise of the snores seemed to grow louder. It was as if the sounds had slid over some last edge of the human world. The room filled with deep, throaty noises of animal suffering. A breath gurgled like a new baby as it went in, and death-rattled as it went out. There arose a great seething, tearing, sucking noise, of an enormous mouth gobbling compulsively at life itself.

  Jamshid touched a bottle. As he snatched it up, a claw tore at his arm and another grappled at his belly. . . . He wrenched himself from the hag’s clutches and stumbled out the door.

  In the courtyard, he unscrewed the cap and tipped the jar to drink. Nothing flowed. He held it up to the light. In the bottom of the jar lay something caked and pink. He smelled it. Face powder, a century old. He hurled the jar at the pool.

  Now Jamshid saw the hag was dragging herself toward him, and he ran into the street. He kept running until he came to the gate, that passage back to the world. He wished only to throw himself at a policeman and beg him to shoot him on the spot. But he could not see a policeman. He stopped and looked about. As he stood there a man walked past him and continued to walk through the gate and out the other side. Jamshid was astonished. The gate was not guarded. He was free.

  chapter twenty-five

  Frayed branches hung all about him. Ahead, in the open world, it was no longer raining. Against the pale sky the corners, angles, and rectangular markings of the buildings began to define themselves. Any minute the whole place was going to blaze up in gorgeous color and to fill with symmetrical trees and great emblematic birds. And if donkeys walking out there with mincing, effeminate tread were to happen to cry out, their cries would be bright and lucid, like shepherds’ pipes, or young girls’ laughter.

  He looked across the threshold at the world where his new life would begin. But how could he step out there? Wasn’t he kin to those filthy, dark beings which, in his shop in Meshed, he had so desperately tried to hide and do away with? He did not know if he had the right to pass through. He stood still, trying to keep from staggering.

  A girl was walking down the street behind him. He turned and looked at her. For an instant he thought it must be Leyla. He couldn’t be sure. He studied her face as she moved past him. It made him draw in his breath. What was it that caused the radiance in her features? It was a light coming from paradise. Tears stung his eyes. He guessed that it was, just as likely, a light reflected up from some fire of dread or disgust in her breast.

  From a garden somewhere in the New City he heard a cock crowing. Perhaps, he thought, it is a bird of paradise, the original one, crowing in the mud. Jamshid sat down in a doorway. He stared at the empty gate. He took out his little package of matches and opened it. He struck one against the wooden door. Was it the match, or the wood, that was damp? He struck another. This did not light either. The world was dark, and we who inhabit it are also dark. He struck another, and another. He wanted now, more than anything, to see. Then he struck the last match. It flared a shrill, yellow, upwardly blackening flame. He got up and passed through the gate under the distant pale sky of early morning.

  a note from Galway Kinnell, 1980

  In 1959 I spent six months in Iran as lecturer at the University of Tehran. Because of my feelings for the country, I arranged to stay on another six months as a journalist, writing a weekly article about Iran
for the English-language edition of a Tehran newspaper. In preparing these pieces I wandered about the country quite a lot, sometimes with friends who knew Iran very well, more often alone, and with the five hundred words of Farsi I had managed to acquire, I was able to get along pretty well. The Japanese writer Makoto Oda titled his book about his travels, I Saw As Much As I Could; that is what I tried to do while in Iran.

  This note is simply to acknowledge the obvious—which is that while I saw as much as I could, alas I wasn’t able to see everything. In a regular novel, one expects a description of surface life—which Black Light may provide. But one also expects a certain understanding of the social fabric. For me, as a foreigner who spent only a total of twelve months in Iran, it was impossible to know much about the inner workings of that ancient, complex, tradition-ruled, abruptly modernizing country. But I did not intend Black Light to be a naturalistic novel; rather I had in mind to write a book that would be closer to a fable than to a novel and thus could not pretend to depict an actual society.

  In preparing the book for re-publication after its first appearance fourteen years ago, I made a great many small revisions throughout. Each revision seemed a matter of style, yet the cumulative effect has been, perhaps, to change perceptibly the entire mood of the book.

  afterword by Robert Hass

  Black Light was published in 1966. It came into existence because Galway Kinnell had spent six months in Iran in 1959 as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Tehran and stayed on for another six months as a journalist writing short articles about the country for an English-language newspaper. Reading it again recently, after its author’s death in October 2014, I was struck by its originality and ferocity. And I found myself looking in it somewhat more urgently for Galway Kinnell, and wondering—especially in these days when Iran is so much in the headlines—about how its young author came to the place—psychically, geographically—where it was written.

  There were not many road markers in the 1950s for young Americans aspiring to write poetry. That seemed a place to start. Kinnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and brought up in Pawtucket, a working-class town, in the last years of the Great Depression. His parents were immigrants, his father Scottish, his mother Protestant Irish. His father was a carpenter and teacher of woodworking, a man with craft skills. Kinnell, asked in an interview about powerful influences in his life, said that he thought that Pawtucket was that influence. “Perhaps,” he wrote, “the sense of stagnation I felt growing up in a decaying mill town in the Depression damaged me into poetry.” One notices this because Jamshid, the protagonist of Black Light, is a man who, by committing a violent crime, breaks out of a deadening life.

  Kinnell’s way out of Pawtucket was a scholarship to a prep school in his senior year—the Wilbraham Academy in Massachusetts. From there, at eighteen, he entered Princeton, intent on writing poetry. The war was on. He joined Navy ROTC and after a semester went on active duty. “When I was in boot camp,” he later told an interviewer, “I was put in charge of 120 men who had also come into boot camp at that time and I was put in charge because I had a semester of college. Then I fell into the habit at night when everyone was in bed and it was very quiet of reading one poem before the lights went out. So I’ve been interested in poetry, in writing poetry, basically all my life but I hadn’t published anything then. When I was in Iran my first book was published . . . and mailed to me. That was very satisfying to see.”

  I like the way the comment in the interview elides the ten years between the college freshman, turned ROTC officer, reading poetry at night in the barracks, and the young poet who holds his first book in his hands in another world altogether. When the war ended, Kinnell returned to Princeton. Universities had begun to teach creative writing courses and the English department at Princeton offered courses taught by R. P. Blackmur, a poet who was also one of the most eminent modernist critics of his time, and John Berryman, one of the country’s most visible emerging poets. Kinnell did not sign up for their classes, having a feeling, he said, that there was something wrong with the idea of “teaching” people to write poetry—and also, he said, afraid that they wouldn’t like his poems anyway. But one of his classmates was W. S. Merwin, who also was going to become one of the prominent poets of his generation, and Kinnell in the same interview remembers one night when an excited Merwin first showed him the poems of William Butler Yeats, stayed all night, in fact, and read poems to him into the dawn. And one Princeton teacher, Charles Bell, he remembers, told him that one of his poems was “good,” after which Kinnell walked home, he said, “in a state of near delirium.”

  In the summer of 1947, he attended Black Mountain College on the GI Bill, and he records of that time that another student on a backpacking trip read him the poems of François Villon and that, walking into a railway station with a black writer from the college, and seeing him peel off without comment into the Black Only section of the tiny station, he got his first Northerner’s glimpse of the way segregation worked in the South. He graduated from Princeton the following spring in 1948 and took a master’s degree at the University of Rochester in 1949. Why Rochester? A future biographer will have to inform us. He wrote a thesis there on Hart Crane’s The Bridge and for the next two years was an English instructor at nearby Alfred University in upstate New York. I find it hard to visualize him as a college instructor for some reason. There was something leonine about him, about his intensity, so that he always seemed either to be in repose after having feasted or about to pounce, and I can’t quite see how this would have worked in a classroom. But after his death in October last year, one of Kinnell’s students wrote a note to Bobbie Bristol, his widow, that gives us a glimpse of him in those years. “He was my English professor at Alfred and one of the best professors I have ever had. He came to Alfred with a new master’s degree, only about five years older than his students, and enchanted us all.”

  That would have been the years 1949–51. The war was over, the postwar and the Cold War were on, and the next move of this young would-be poet was to take a job teaching in and then directing an adult education program established by the University of Chicago in its downtown center. It was a job he did for three years from 1952 to 1955. There is even a publication from those years of which he is listed as coauthor—Stuart Demerest, Galway Kinnell, and Alvin Johnson, “New Directions in University Adult Education: A Symposium,” March 1955—which suggests he gave himself to the job with some earnestness. Later he would publish a book of his juvenilia, titled First Poems, 1946–54. That would cover the period from his first year at Princeton until this last year in Chicago. And the first poem in his first published book, What a Kingdom It Was, is set in Illinois, so perhaps one can mark his beginning to write his own poems to that year. It’s a quite mannered poem (as an older man he liked to recite it from memory at readings, as if to touch ground with the first impulse to poetry in himself). It sounds a bit like Yeats and a bit like Dylan Thomas and it’s about a boy, “a sapped thing, weary to crying” from hauling dung all day, who hears what he thinks of as joy in the song of pond frogs and finds his way to music.

  So he had begun to find his way in his poetry when he got what must have seemed in those years a gold ring: an invitation to become a Fulbright scholar in France and to teach American literature at the University of Grenoble and then for a summer on the Riviera at the University of Nice. It was the same program that would take him to Tehran. The Fulbright program was begun in 1951 by a civilized Southern senator, William J. Fulbright, a former Rhodes scholar, who understood that the new international role of the United States in the aftermath of World War II required a more internationally minded intellectual class and more cultural exchange bringing the world to American universities. American popular culture was thought to be, and mostly was, isolationist and provincial, with a sense of the larger world got from comic books and movie stereotypes. Fulbright fellows—exchange students—and Fulbright scholars—exchange faculty—were to be the advan
ce guard of a more cosmopolitan country—or from another point of view, a first wave of American imperial influence abroad in the Cold War years.

  The young Galway Kinnell was a beneficiary of this moment. He used the time in France to work on what would be his first book of poems; one of the important events for him that year was, he said, his discovery of Walt Whitman when he was asked to teach American poetry at the University of Grenoble. He had been to college in the years of the ascendancy of T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats. It bred in Kinnell a permanent aversion to Eliot, but he took to Yeats. And Dylan Thomas had made his meteoric streak across the United States. He had died in New York City in 1953 after an epic drinking bout, and the early Kinnell poem set in Illinois—

  Then it was dusk in Illinois, the small boy

  After an afternoon of carting dung

  Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing

  Weary to crying. Dark was growing tall

  And he began to hear the pond frogs all

  Calling . . .

  —is shot through with the Welsh poet’s music. So Yeats and Thomas were among the young Kinnell’s influences. His first book also contains a poem entitled “To William Carlos Williams” and describes a reading in which the local “lovers of literature/paid you the tribute of their almost total inattention.” So it was to the ignored Williams side rather than the much-revered Eliot side of the modernist legacy that he was pledging himself. Later he would show the poem “First Song” to Dr. Williams and Williams told him that he didn’t know anything about Illinois and that he should write about the places that he knew.