Loudermilk

by Lucy Ives

  Praise for

  LOUDERMILK

  “With Loudermilk, Lucy Ives weaves a wryly comic tale set in the insular, masturbatory world of a Midwest MFA program. Dissecting ideas around authenticity, status, and the chronic wish for fame or legacy that plagues or drives aspiring writers and established authors/professors alike, Ives tears down the curtain to unveil the wizard—and here all the characters are implicated in operating the clunky machinery that creates then lionizes the concept of merit or talent in the academic/literary world. The result is this wildly smart novel that hilariously exposes its characters as they try to vault or cement themselves into some literary canon and/or ivory tower, unaware that the canon/tower is an ever-vanishing mausoleum wherein living writers go to get stuck, or lost, or to scrawl their names and draw butts and boobs on the walls.”

  —JEN GEORGE, author of The Babysitter at Rest

  “Lucy Ives is as deeply funny and ferocious a writer as they come. She’s also humane and philosophical when it matters most. I love Loudermilk.”

  —SAM LIPSYTE, author of Hark

  “Wonder Boys meets Cyrano de Bergerac meets Jacques Lacan meets Animal House. Something for everyone.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Praise for

  LUCY IVES

  “Ives . . . infuses even mundane actions with startling imagery.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “An accomplished poet, Ives also knows how to delight sentence by sentence, with turns of phrase that cry to be underlined or Tweeted . . . a voice that is at turns deadpan and warm, shot through with a crisp irony that makes it tempting to declare it the literary equivalent of an Alex Katz painting.”

  —Vogue

  “I first knew Lucy Ives’s work as a poet, and to have her prose is a gift, too.”

  —HILTON ALS, author of White Girls

  “A deeply smart and painstakingly elegant writer.”

  —WAYNE KOESTENBAUM, author of Camp Marmalade

  “A rampaging, mirthful genius.”

  —ELIZABETH McKENZIE, author of The Portable Veblen

  “Like the paintings of Agnes Martin or the films of Nathaniel Dorsky, the most important character in Ives’s prose is its reader. In the white space underneath these notes my own mind’s wanderings take on what is not exactly an importance, but a space for reading and thinking. I move around in this writing, and become aware of my moving around within it, and consider not only the shape of the writing, but my own shape as its reader. In other words, Ives’s writing encourages its readers to consider their own power and form among the reality they encounter.”

  —Make: magazine

  “Lucy Ives is smart in that heartbreaking way that can make a spare, suspicious, elegant work of anti-poetry out of the silent treatment between ideas and those who have them.”

  —ANNE BOYER, author of A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

  “Ives’s exquisite take on ellipsis as realism is a dream, as both vision and something that fully satisfies a wish.”

  —MÓNICA DE LA TORRE, author of The Happy End / All Welcome

  “Ives . . . is quickly developing into a poet of sentences on par with the poem-essays of Lisa Robertson and Phil Hall for their sharp blend of lyric, thought, and wit.”

  —ROB McLENNAN, author of Household Items

  “Think of the upkeep of the minotaur at the center of what can only be the labyrinthine mind of Lucy Ives. This particular creature feeds on its own enclosure. Who said time is eternity turned into a moving image? How does this work on the page? As soon as Ives allows things focus, she pulls back, revealing a small component of a larger construct, but never anything objective and irreducibly whole. Thus, effectively her subject and obsession is not the demarcation of time, but the inability of time to be properly or comparatively enacted. What if Stein and Paul Éluard were a single poet? What if Wittgenstein, Elaine Scarry, and Charles and Ray Eames collaborated on a novelization of Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits? What if Robbe-Grillet and Hélène Cixous were to rewrite The Duino Elegies as an essay? Daedalus never built anything quite like this. Good luck getting out.”

  —NOAH ELI GORDON, author of Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down?

  “Ives’s work is certain in its undoing of certainty; it has an unforgettable voice as it strips itself of voiced identity; it summons a deeply trusted narrator in a work which cunningly challenges that trust.”

  —JORIE GRAHAM, author of Fast

  ALSO BY LUCY IVES

  My Thousand Novel

  Anamnesis

  Novel

  Orange Roses

  nineties

  The Worldkillers

  Human Events

  The Hermit

  Impossible Views of the World

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2019 by Lucy Ives

  All rights reserved

  First Soft Skull edition: 2019

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ives, Lucy, 1980– author.

  Title: Loudermilk, or, The real poet, or, The origin of the world : a novel / Lucy Ives.

  Other titles: Loudermilk | Real poet | Origin of the world

  Description: First Soft Skull edition. | New York : Soft Skull, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018055884| ISBN 9781593763909 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781593763923 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3609.V48 L68 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018055884

  Cover design & Soft Skull art direction by salu.io

  Book design by Wah-Ming Chang

  Published by Soft Skull Press

  1140 Broadway, Suite 704

  New York, NY 10001

  www.softskull.com

  Soft Skull titles are distributed to the trade by

  Publishers Group West

  Phone: 866-400-5351

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Rilke was a jerk.

  JOHN BERRYMAN

  CONTENTS

  Personae

  IEarly Days

  ONE. Control

  TWO. Doubt

  THREE. Fate

  FOUR. Same

  FIVE. Fine Arts

  SIX. In Loco Parentis

  SEVEN. Settling

  EIGHT. Neighbors

  NINE. Prospects

  TEN. The Lucky

  ELEVEN. Instruction

  TWELVE. Same

  THIRTEEN. This Is a Pipe

  FOURTEEN. This Is Not a Pipe

  FIFTEEN. The Reason

  SIXTEEN. That Person

  SEVENTEEN. Predictably

  IIWriting Teacher

  EIGHTEEN. Early Poems

  NINETEEN. Motivation

  TWENTY. Allegory

  TWENTY-ONE. Grief

  TWENTY-TWO. A Portrait

  TWENTY-THREE. Veils

  TWENTY-FOUR. Soft Power

  TWENTY-FIVE. Lists

  TWENTY-SIX. A Break

  TWENTY-SEVEN. Elsewhere

  TWENTY-EIGHT. Custom

  TWENTY-NINE. Parity

  THIRTY. Fortune

  IIIVolta

  THIRTY-ONE. Images

  THIRTY-TWO. A Very Interesting Young Man

  THIRTY-THREE. Letters

  THIRTY-FOUR. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living

  THIRTY-FIVE. Love

  THIRTY-SIX. The Iceberg

  IVYour Best Reader

  THIRTY-SEVEN. A Novelist

  THIRTY-EIGHT. In Advance of the Broken Arm

  THIRTY-NINE. Their Penultimate Encou
nter

  FORTY. Détente

  FORTY-ONE. Worlds

  FORTY-TWO. Recognition

  FORTY-THREE. Persistence

  FORTY-FOUR. And Then

  FORTY-FIVE. Mingling

  FORTY-SIX. You

  FORTY-SEVEN. Persona

  FORTY-EIGHT. Est et Non

  FORTY-NINE. The Author

  Epilogue

  Afterword: The Libertine

  Acknowledgments

  PERSONAE

  TROY LOUDERMILK

  First-year student in the Seminars for Writing; poet

  HARRY REGO

  Loudermilk’s companion

  CLARE ELWIL

  First-year student in the Seminars for Writing; fiction writer

  LIZZIE HILLARY

  Daughter of poets; fifteen years old

  DON HILLARY

  Instructor in the Seminars for Writing; poet

  MARTA HILLARY

  Instructor in the Seminars for Writing; poet

  ANTON BEANS

  Second-year poet

  I

  EARLY DAYS

  One

  Control

  Troy Augustus Loudermilk has a silver 1999 Land Cruiser with tinted windows and sunroof. He claims he bought it with cash from an out-of-court settlement with the SUNY system. The civil suit stemmed from “repeated unwelcome sexual advances” allegedly made by a thirty-seven-year-old female assistant professor, an anthropologist, during office hours. Loudermilk was adept enough to preserve a number of these encounters on tape. Highlights include an afternoon of rhetorical queries—why Loudermilk “keep[s] coming back for more”; then, “what [he is] so afraid of”—followed quickly on by the professor’s playful mimicry of an exotic felid. She clambers gamely onto her desk and begins to “lap cream” out of a “saucer”/course pack. She yowls and purrs. Even in audio format, it’s pretty damaging stuff.

  At one point on the tape, Loudermilk meekly informs his protean instructor that he is “concerned about [his] future.” He says he’s worried about his grades, plus his personal relationships and employment prospects. He wants to know how he can “do better.” He says he’s stressed out about reproducing the bullish America he grew up in. He’s having trouble negotiating the unpredictable “peaks and valleys” of romantic intimacy, not to mention the color-coded shimmy of the terrorism threat advisory scale.

  If you think you know Loudermilk, then you think that when he says one thing he really means something else. If you actually know Loudermilk, then you know that when he says something that’s pretty much exactly what he means.

  Overall, Harry Rego is not that inclined to pity his friend.

  They’ve been driving now for two days.

  They have traced the southern hem of Lake Erie and powered past Gary, Indiana, but here in the home stretch the Land Cruiser’s CD player has at last shit the bed. They’ve been reduced to radio and tape deck, which, considering Loudermilk’s need to micromanage the acoustic environment, has been very nearly cataclysmic. In order to maintain a sense of calm within the vehicle, Harry has been forced to shell out twenty dollars to acquire a pair of overpriced but essentially listenable cassettes, one the Breeders and the other from Ike and Tina Turner’s late catalogue, at an Illinois truck-stop establishment called the Bucket. “Nutbush City Limits” is just embarking on its third consecutive rotation when a sign announcing the relative proximity of the city of Crete appears.

  Harry’s extremities are at least 99.9 percent zombie meat, due to extended confinement and Loudermilk’s enthusiasm for AC. He should by all accounts be psyched to put this journey behind him, but instead the news of their impending arrival sends a knot of fear into his stomach—which organ commences methodically punching itself—as his tongue takes on an increasingly profound flavor of humid roadkill.

  Harry boots violently into an empty Super Big Gulp.

  “Dude,” Loudermilk says.

  “Pull over.”

  “Dude, we’re almost there.”

  Harry heaves again.

  Loudermilk powers down all four windows. He removes his seat belt and uses his knees to steady the wheel while he leans over and trawls the debris on the back-seat floor.

  Harry gags. Something trickles up, and he spits it into the beige half liter he has already produced.

  “Fuck!” Loudermilk is proclaiming. He is not having great success in his quest for whatever it is.

  The Land Cruiser lists casually into oncoming traffic. Harry, cowed by nausea and dread, attempts to accept his own imminent demise, even as he regrets that someone as life-loving as Loudermilk is about to be deprived of a future, not to mention the innocents they are likely to take with them.

  “You see a fucking lid over there?” Loudermilk shouts against the wind and tambourine and blasting climate control.

  Harry squints. A big rig with a pale, determined-looking face inside its cab is barreling toward them.

  Harry mutters, “This is the whole problem.”

  “What?” Loudermilk has his head down, is groping around behind the passenger seat.

  Harry quietly reiterates, as the circular logo on the blue hat worn by the driver of the colossal tractor trailer becomes apparent, along with the driver’s expression of baffled rage, that this, their remarkably divergent outlooks on the world, this, Loudermilk’s blasé treatment of a scenario in which multiple tons of steel plus hundreds of gallons of igneous dinosaur juice are hurtling toward them, and they it, on a course of perfect inevitability, THIS, Loudermilk’s insistence on placing his hand on a cup lid at this very moment, none of which there is time to say, is a living, breathing summation of everything that is the matter with their incomprehensibly futile, and now increasingly brief, lives.

  “What?” Loudermilk, rifling, repeats.

  The semi driver, recognizing that he is in danger of being frontally reamed by a pair of fucktards from the Empire State, deploys his horn.

  “Got it!” Loudermilk exclaims, popping back up.

  The semi’s horn has become a deafening, uninterrupted blare. The driver’s face is contorted by what looks, at two yards’ distance, to be a mixture of mortal fear and the desire to commit slow, surgical murder.

  The Land Cruiser leaps into its designated lane, narrowly avoiding a white Bonneville.

  The rig wails by.

  Loudermilk swerves to the right and punches the car onto an exit, simultaneously fitting the reclaimed lid over Harry’s warm vomit. Windows rise.

  Loudermilk shakes his head. “And we’re in. Now what the fuck were you trying to say?”

  Harry balances the Big Gulp in the Land Cruiser’s cup holder and ejects the tape. He scrolls around on FM until he gets some classical. “I don’t remember.”

  Loudermilk is like, “That is stellar, dude.”

  Harry examines a strip mall. It is in no way promising.

  Loudermilk is saying, “I believe we have arrived.”

  They overtake a cluster of field-hockey enthusiasts in shorts and shin guards who are waiting for the light to change so that they may pertly advance to a campus athletic field.

  It is 2003, August, Friday the 29th.

  Two

  Doubt

  This isn’t anyone’s autobiography. What I’ve lost is so easy to name as to make it impossible to speak about.

  These are the two terse sentences Clare Elwil has been writing for the past ten weeks. Her notebook jitters on the tray table. Even a single additional three-word phrase would be an improvement. For ten minus three is seven, which is equivalent to three plus four, and three times four equals twelve, which, one plus two equals three, again. Ten divided by three is a little more than three. Ten times three is thirty, and three plus zero is three. The plane, meanwhile, is one. It’s grievously small. Clare is on the plane. It was impossible to fly direct and that of course indicates something about where she is going. It was a good day this morning, light and bright; yet, occasionally, as the plane darts and veers on its desce
nt down the unpleasant roads of the midwestern sky, she fears loss of consciousness. For a few months now her distress has attached itself to background noise; it is no longer “in” her. It arrives. “On catlike feet.” This is someone’s poem, no doubt? A book on the piano in that apartment. Her mother’s apartment, Clare corrects herself. She is headed to the Seminars.

  Slumbering beside her is a very pink man in his late fifties. His oblivion gives Clare ample opportunity, if not permission, to study the boyish short-sleeve button-down shirt he must wear in acquiescence to some regional career norm. Gray hairs curl on his speckled arms. His face has collapsed under weight of dream. He sighs. He is a machine for living, simple in conception and construction. In the right breast pocket of his button-down his boarding pass is displayed, as if to signal a belief that it might be reasonable and acceptable, a sensible business practice, that he be asked to leave the plane midflight should he be unable to produce the document at a moment’s notice. Associated with him is a salty scent, a faint musk; essentially inoffensive.

  Clare’s body, specifically her head, rebels. Dread is taking on several recognizable shapes—like continents of the northern hemisphere of the planet Earth or, perhaps, she manages to think, these are sheep. Sheep! They lumber toward her, throbbing electrically. Or hogs. Are there three? It is possible there are three of them. Maybe four: a fourth hides behind the body of one of his fellows, seems briefly to merge stickily with the others—viscous and amorphous—before coming unabsorbed once more. “Pigs,” Clare mutters, as the angle of descent is rendered more pronounced by the professional whose gestures control this can.