An Angle on the World

by Bill Barich

  There isn’t much action in Tom & Viv (1994), alas. It’s difficult to imagine the pitch for this vehicle. “T.S. Eliot is, like, a tortured soul. He’s a Yank at Oxford studying with Bertrand Russell, who’s a great dancer.” The snooze factor sets in early, just as it does in the movie. Eliot (Willem Dafoe) proposes, more or less, to the wacky Vivienne (Miranda Richardson) in the first 15 minutes. “I never want to see the States again,” he says, almost vibrating. “I want to live in Europe and write poetry. I love you. I love you more than life itself.” Viv replies, “Oh, dear.” But they marry, anyway, and spend a dismal honeymoon night in a seaside hotel, where Viv comes undone. While Tom walks on the beach and into the ocean, she drugs herself and tears apart the room. For a few tense seconds, it seems possible that her head might spin around, as Linda Blair’s did in The Exorcist.

  I figured the movie had to improve, but I was wrong. Momentarily, we’re at a dance, and we see Eliot’s eyes glaze over. He’s in a creative trance and must get to a typewriter immediately, so he repairs to their flat and sits at a table before the keyboard, holding his head and groaning. Viv appears with a bowl of water and applies a compress to the back of his neck. “I never know when it’s going to strike,” T.S. complains, as if poetry hurt like a migraine.

  “You write best when you’re sick,” Viv counsels him. “You make yourself sick, you know you do.”

  “Poetry is in my skin,” Eliot says.

  That was the last scene I could bear to watch before turning to the final movies, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994), whose director Alan Rudolph has often displayed a literary flare. The story centers on Dorothy Parker and her writer pals at the New Yorker, when the magazine was in its infancy and the fabled Round Table was in full swing at the Algonquin Hotel. Although Rudolph doesn’t avoid all the traps—he gives us plenty of smoking, drinking, typewriters and even fornicating—he also supplies some true feeling, an element absent from the other films. In the lead role, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s accent wanders all over the map, but her performance is still moving, because Parker is aware of her dilemma and unable to escape it.

  She’s a prisoner of the self she invented. People expect Dorothy Parker to be clever and biting, so she is always on. She and Robert Benchley, her friend/muse/unrequited lover, never say anything that isn’t terribly snappy, nor do her chums at the Round Table. At first, the one-liners and the patter are funny (“Eddie,” Dotty chides her husband, a first class drug and alcohol abuser, “you don’t want to become the town drunk. Not in Manhattan.”), but they never stop, and soon you have the sinking sensation that you’re stuck at an endless cocktail party. Both Parker and Benchley wind up in Hollywood, where Benchley drinks himself to death and Dotty knits a sweater on the set of a picture she’s written, paying no attention to the dialogue.

  To her credit, Leigh looks awful at the close, puffy-faced from the booze and wobbly on her legs. There’s a devastating scene on the studio lot, where an eager young gofer falls into step with her and gushes, “So many famous writers are from the Algonquin Round Table!” Famous, maybe, but not great, and Dotty knows the difference. She brushes him off by saying, “Ah, but no real giants. No Mermaid Tavern,” and you feel the weight of a life gone out of control, along with its emptiness. The final moments find Parker alone at a hotel bar, where another young admirer stops at her booth and asks if he can buy her a drink. Sure, he can. The actor is Stanley Tucci.

  Hollywood movies must entertain a mass audience, of course, so we may never get a picture that’s sensitive to all the nuances of the writing life, but I’m still eager to see how Tucci fares with Joe Gould’s Secret. Tucci himself plays Joseph Mitchell, while Ian Holm, who was also in Big Night, has the plum role of Joe Gould and the opportunity to be far more wacky than Miranda Richardson. There are cameos by Susan Sarandon as a painter, and Steve Martin as a publisher who tries to pry the non-existent Oral History out of Gould. The film had its premiere at Sundance, where it received generally favorable reviews. “The appeal of the story and milieu to sophisticated audiences suggest an OK box-office future in specialized markets,” as Variety inimitably put it.

  Will the movie explain why Joseph Mitchell, who died in 1996, quit publishing in the 1960s, except for some unsigned “Talk of the Town” pieces? I wonder. Over the years, I’d heard many rumors to account for it—he was blocked, he had nothing more to say, even that the New Yorker no longer wanted to publish him—so I decided to check with one of his former editors. Mitchell still came to the office regularly, almost till the end of his life, the editor said, and worked on a long story about growing up in the South, but the story kept shifting its shape and gave him lots of trouble. His writing was so precise and lapidary that he had little margin for error. No final draft ever emerged, but Mitchell did leave behind some manuscripts, although it was as yet “unclear” if any of them would appear in print. Shades of Joe Gould?

  San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, 2000

  Two Tales of Nigeria

  One Pound Sterling

  I’d only been at St. Andrew’s College, Nnewi, for a few weeks when Paul Monike, my Nigerian friend, came down with a fever he couldn’t shake. At first he suspected malaria, but when a dose of quinine failed to cure him, he changed his mind and blamed the lover he’d been seeing on the sly. She practiced juju, he told me, and there were any number of ways she could have made him sick, all to punish him for his refusal to marry her. But marriage was impossible, really. She lived on her family’s yam farm, while Paul held an important post as a teacher of English. He couldn’t yield to her wishes, any more than she could give up on her dream.

  I held the same post as Paul, although I valued it a little less, partly because of G. B. Okoye, our headmaster. Okoye was a blustery type, loud and aggressive, who banged the ground with his walking stick and barked out orders. He considered himself an oga, or a man of power, and went to absurd lengths to prove it, driving his luxury Mercedes through the village at maniacal speeds. Paul couldn’t help making fun of him. It was only a matter of time, he predicted, until Okoye crashed into a herd of the scrawny cattle that Fulani nomads, barefoot and in rags, guided to our abattoir.

  “Principal will kill a cow,” Paul said gleefully. “It will be a big, big incident.”

  Okoye could never pronounce my name correctly, so he quit trying and addressed me as “Peace Corps.” If he was in a hurry, it sounded more like “Piss Cups.” He enjoyed having me on staff because a young volunteer from America, however unskilled and naive, amounted to a status symbol, but he coped poorly with my actual needs. I’d been promised a house, for instance, but it wasn’t finished when I arrived. The builders were holding out for a bribe, so for the moment I’d have to live in a toolshed. Okoye asked a servant to clear out the rusty spades and hoes, sweep away the cobwebs, and carry in a cot.

  The shed was an agreeably spartan space. It gave me a curious sense of mission. The students were away on a midterm break, so I had ample time to write shocking letters to my parents about the deprivations I’d already endured. At night I sat up late with my shortwave radio and listened to ball games on the Armed Services Network, or read books until the college’s generator shut down at ten, pitching us into a darkness so utter and complete I liked to step outside to admire it. Countless stars burned with an extravagant intensity against a black canopy of sky, and every noise was magnified—the buzz and click of insects, a bird’s shrill cry.

  St. Andrew’s was an Anglican school. It used to employ a few Brits, but I was Nnewi’s only white person now, so I merited a visit from anybody bold enough to come to my door. First was our local reverend, who wore an ill-fitting clerical collar and a threadbare suit coat. He had beady little eyes, vast enthusiasm for the gospel, and his own sense of mission. To my horror, he viewed me as a potential convert and grilled me about the nature of my faith, if any. When I mentioned this to Paul, he grunted and said, “That reverend is a fool.”

  I met next with an officer from the Benevo
lent Potters Guild, who asked for a small donation. When a Rosicrucian, too shy to knock, left some pamphlets by the shed, I boned up on the Knights Templar. Another well-wisher warned me not to sleep on the floor, because the concrete would suck the blood from my body. Word got around that I was from New York, so I had to verify the existence of snow and skyscrapers. A fan of Jim Reeves, the country singer, whose music was weirdly popular, valued for its syrupy sentiment, offered condolences on Reeves’s recent death in a plane crash.

  One day Okoye surprised me by taking an active interest in my welfare. He thought I might be lonely, so he forced Paul Monike to give me a tour. Paul didn’t exactly jump for joy. I must have looked ridiculous in my button-down shirt and khakis, a poster boy for the ideals I was supposed to represent and only half believed in. Paul was in his early twenties, too, sharp and funny, with very dark skin and a broad nose that flared when he was angry. His voice boomed, echoing from a barrel chest. Though he never exercised, he was as fit as a middleweight contender, all muscle and no fat. I felt physically diminished in his presence.

  “Come, come, make we go,” he said, annoyed at the inconvenience. He led me across a soccer field and introduced me to the college’s open-air classroom buildings. They were made of ocher-colored mudbrick and had corrugated tin roofs that drummed with a metallic splendor during a subtropical downpour, each drop of rain nearly as big as a dime. There were no doors or windows, so braying goats and squawking chickens wandered in, while lizards did push-ups on the ledges. Such challenges would test my ability as a teacher severely.

  We walked to the village, just a stone’s throw away. Nnewi had assembled itself in a haphazard fashion along a highway to Onitsha, the busiest market city in West Africa. The traffic was heavy, and accidents were common. A week seldom went by without a mammy wagon tipping over and spilling its passengers and cargo onto the roadside. I did many unwise things in Nigeria, but I never risked a ride in a mammy wagon. The prayerful mottoes painted on them were enough to scare me off—“Only God Knows For Sure,” say, or simply, “Amen.” Instead I traveled by Peugeot 404 station wagon, the elite form of transport, whose drivers were regarded as outlaws, both envied and feared.

  I followed Paul into our own little market. It had a ramshackle glory, hammered together from plywood and bits of tin. The linked stalls resembled a shantytown born of ingenuity rather than advance planning. Vendors hawked their wares with a brassy exuberance, yelling to be heard above the traffic din and the highlife music blaring from transistors. It was all noise and color, and I loved it. Women balanced trays of oranges and bananas on their heads, and also buckets of water. Infants they strapped to their backs or their bosoms in a hammock of cloth, stepping around the sprawl of beggars afflicted with a crippled limb or some other deformity, each with a hat or a raffia basket for coins.

  My notoriety had preceded me, of course. The traders were friendly but teasing, and they laughed appreciatively at the sight of me and called, “Onye ocha, kedu,” or “One who is white, how are you?” If I replied with my few words of Igbo, “O di mma,” or “I am fine,” they howled. It was as if a stump had spoken, some emissary from the spirit world. The children asked to touch my skin and my blond hair, gathering in giggly groups to plead for some spare change, so I fished out some pennies. Known as coppers, they had a hole in the middle, and when I pressed one to a child’s forehead, it stuck there like magic.

  Paul rescued me. He shooed the children away, swinging an arm wide, but they only giggled some more. I was out of pennies, anyway. There weren’t enough coppers in all of Nigeria to satisfy everybody who wanted them. We moved through the crowd and along the edge of a foul-smelling ditch piled with rotten fruit, trash, and excrement, all floating in an inch of murky water. High above, I noticed some vultures wheeling, a sign that more cattle had arrived at the abattoir. The cattle looked sick when they got to the village, their hides slack and their ribs visible as the relentless herdsmen, circled by flies, flicked at them with switches.

  Paul stopped at a neat, orderly shop. A youth in his late teens ran it, and I was struck by his open face, lightly marked with tribal scars, and his gentle manner. Edwin seemed glad to welcome me, yet sophisticated enough not to make a fuss. His family must have owned the shop, but I never saw anybody else on duty. There was no need. Edwin was conscientious and meticulous, a born merchant. He didn’t haggle over prices and could tot up a bill in seconds. Some traders inveigled their customers, while others were downright crooks, but Edwin never cheated. He had honor in his favor.

  He set up a table and chairs for us, then brought out plastic tumblers and a quart bottle of ice-cold Star beer. In the heat and humidity, I was as thirsty as I’d ever been and drank the first glass almost at a gulp while Paul told me about himself. He came from a village nearby and had hoped to go to university, but he couldn’t afford the fees and had settled for a lesser degree. He was content at St. Andrew’s, he said. There were eight tutors in all, and only one was a fool. You could eat well at Nnewi, and Onitsha had good nightclubs. For some reason, he chose to trust me and talked about his lover, already a source of distress. “Top secret,” he confided, glancing over a shoulder.

  For my part, I confessed how nervous I was about teaching. I had no experience, but Paul thought the students, who were grown men, would be kind and tolerate me as a novelty act, or words to that effect. I was also anxious about the state of the country. Just before I arrived, a band of soldiers, whose leaders were mostly Igbo, had seized control of the government in a coup d’état, the bloodiest in West African history. Paul approved of the coup, if not the violence, but he worried that there would be reprisals. I’d been assured by Peace Corps officials that Nigeria was stable again, but I didn’t believe it. Anyone with an ear to the ground, even a newcomer such as me, could hear the rumble of distant thunder.

  I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so Paul ordered a plate of barbecued chicken cooked over a wood fire. The skin was crisp, charred, and delicious. I took a leg and greedily chewed the meat, while Paul did the same and then broke open the bone to suck out the marrow. In the midst of the feast, I felt a sudden need to pee. The beer had done its work, so I turned to Paul for advice, but he merely nodded toward the ditch we’d passed. This was my baptism by fire. Gritting my teeth, I unzipped my fly. I expected the traders to howl again, but they ignored me completely. In an instant I’d become that estimable thing, a natural man.

  * * *

  The builders, properly bribed, returned at last to finish my house. They were a vagabond crew in mismatched clothes that they’d snatched up at the market, where the contents of Care packages were routinely pilfered and sold. How else to account for a painter in a Michigan State T-shirt, or a carpenter in tattered Levis and a Cleveland Indians cap? All the street-savvy dudes affected this warped version of hipster style, and if their top clashed with their trousers, so much the better. Loud colors they also embraced, Day-Glo orange and candy-apple red.

  The romance of the toolshed had faded, so I was thrilled to move in. Okoye had even splurged on a real bed for me, plus a mosquito net, a pair of armchairs with foam cushions in a floral print, and a two-burner propane stove. For fear of explosions, I installed the stove outside, near the shack that enclosed my one-hole latrine and cold-water shower. The latrine put me off at first, because I’d heard about a volunteer who sat down one morning and found a snake coiled in the muck below, hissing and flashing its tongue. It would be tragic to die in Nigeria from a snakebite on the ass, I thought, but in time I conquered my phobia and the constipation that went with it.

  The house, H-shaped, had two small rooms on both sides of a common parlor. It was meant to be shared, Okoye told me—another surprise—but I protested when he suggested our geography tutor, who was also single, as my roommate. The geographer was a decent fellow, but he bored me stiff with his recitation of longitudes and latitudes. As a devout member of the reverend’s flock, he did a fair bit of Bible-thumping, too, and never touched any alcoh
ol. That was more than I could bear, so I lobbied instead for Paul Monike, who pleased me by accepting.

  I slept well that first night in the new house. My net foiled the mosquitoes that had swarmed over me in the shed, and when I woke I could feel the cool concrete all around me, a welcome relief from the heat outside. Children passed by on their way to the primary school next door, carrying their books on their heads. Their uniforms were immaculate, washed and ironed almost daily. I could read the pride in each sharp crease. At the college chapel, the students sang hymns, an informal choir of 120 strong, and the words to such sturdy anthems as “That Old Rugged Cross” drifted toward me on a current of glad tidings.

  The oil palm bush was another comfort. It seemed to enclose and protect the house, a living, breathing entity, its mysteries manifold. I understood why people believed the spirits of the dead congregated there. The oil palms, scrappy rather than stately, created a lush green barrier against the hubbub of the market and the village. Sometimes a voice would greet me from the crown of a palm, and I’d wave to a tapper extracting the juice to make palm wine. The wine could be very good when it was fresh and unadulterated, but if any water had been added, it not only cured constipation but could lead to a case of dysentery, at least for foreigners.

  Paul and I got along well. The house, with its separate wings, allowed ample space for privacy. I never interfered in his affairs, and he didn’t meddle in mine. If I heard his motor scooter start up after dark, I knew he’d gone to visit his lover in the bush, but I never brought it up. That was his business. I’d met the woman just once, and then by chance on a path, and I thought she was quite beautiful. She made me more aware than ever of my isolation. I was capable of feeling very sorry for myself in that department. I had no woman at all, not even an Onitsha bar girl, but I tried not to dwell on it and concentrated on my work instead.