Clear Springs

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  He was disdainful of my movie magazine work. He sneered at my journalism background—fatal for a writer, he said, as if my writing for the college newspaper had already caused permanent damage. But I told him I was grateful not to be sewing labels in Tony Martin jackets or canning tomatoes in a hot kitchen with brats underfoot.

  “You were pretty dumb in Kentucky, sitting on your ass in that journalism building,” he said. He had a way of delivering cutting remarks with a little dip of his head, eyes lifted, coquettishly assuming forgiveness. He dressed in brown—trench coat, twill pants, V-necked sweaters over plaid shirts. His brown hair had a flipped forelock like a horse’s. Back in Lexington, he had been dazzling—handsome, electric. But now he was beginning to fade, like a worn-out couch.

  We attended lectures on French painting and Federico Garcí Lorca at the New School. He took me to N.Y.U. to hear Lawrence Ferlinghetti rave repetitiously about death, to the beat of a jazz tune. I lumped him with the beatniks, which Bob told me was not exactly right. Distinctions were important to him. He could talk about “hip” and “cool” and “beat” in precise terms. He wasn’t beat himself, but he was exceedingly hip. In college, I had yearned to wear black tights and chant poetry at a coffeehouse. I owned some bongo drums. I didn’t drink coffee, but I liked jazz, which was essential to the beatnik scene. I was vague, though, about exactly what the beatniks were rebelling against.

  I know Bob introduced me to Ferlinghetti after the reading because I jotted down the meeting in my diary, but evidently the poet wasn’t as impressive as Fabian because I have no memory of our encounter. To me, poetry was like layers of wet lace stuck together. But Bob was a serious poet and was recognized as a good one; he aspired to the mantle of Hart Crane. Bob was at the end of the twentieth-century wave of celebrating and romanticizing the alienated artist. He was a problematic figure, around whose center I wavered uncertainly. He had been fired from the University of Kentucky for a dalliance with a student (her father had complained to the dean). Earlier he had attempted such a dalliance with me. I recalled how he’d put the moves on me back when I was in his writing class my junior year. And here he was again. As soon as he turned up in New York, he began flirting with me again. I could have avoided him, but he was the nearest thing to La Dolce Vita I could find.

  At U.K. in Professor Hazel’s class, unlike any other literature class I took, we read some works by writers who were still alive. We read Goodbye, Columbus and Lie Down in Darkness and Flannery O’Connor stories. From Professor Hazel we first learned of cocktail parties, European cafés, Greenwich Village, and the Brooklyn Bridge. He lectured the class against women’s magazines, melodrama, and Henry James. He eschewed bourgeois values. His poems juxtaposed the lyrical and the cynical, and he admired the brutally physical and sordid. His novels were lurid. In one of them, rats ate a baby’s face in a New York apartment. Authenticity was essential in that period. Everyone was reading Nausea and trying to use “existentialism” in a sentence.

  He was an egregious flirt. At the time, I didn’t imagine that his come-ons were anything but normal, since his romantic vision of masculinity fit sweetly with all I knew of seduction from high school, songs, and the movies. I was in his class, and I was flattered and elated by his attentions, since he was a handsome, worldly man—a writer.

  I had been in Professor Hazel’s class about two months when he invited me one Saturday to go out to the country to shoot mistletoe out of a tree. Mistletoe, an evergreen parasite with gummy white berries, grows so high up a tree you have to bring it down with a gun. In the South, it is traditional for a man to go out shooting mistletoe on Christmas Day. Professor Hazel had a .22 rifle. After he blasted down a couple of mistletoe bunches from a tall ash, the farm family who owned the land asked us in for some cornbread and beans. Professor Hazel said there was nothing he loved better than good cornbread and succulent beans. He seemed right at home with farmers, which seemed odd to me, as if this suave professor who had lived in New York secretly hankered to hitch up some mules.

  With the mistletoe in the backseat of his car, he drove me to his place in Lexington. He was renting the downstairs of a brick antebellum manor house with a circular drive and Doric columns. An art professor and his wife lived upstairs, but they weren’t home. The house was dark and shabby, furnished with antiques. I noticed manuscripts lying around casually, worn books stuffed with papers, original artwork (by the upstairs professor) on the walls. Professor Hazel laid a jazz record on his turntable and pricked it with the needle. “Progressive jazz,” he said, and he told some story about New York and a jazz club and Gerry Mulligan. I took all of this in, heavy with the weight of its authority.

  Holding the mistletoe above my head, Professor Hazel asked me to spend the night with him. He said something like “Your charms require you to stay here in my bower until morning.” Or something less lame, more acutely modernist.

  I wasn’t sure about my charms—or his, either. I was scared of a person so old. He was about eighteen years older than me, divorced, and he was my teacher. His marriage had fallen apart not long before. I wanted to please him, but I wasn’t sure what the rules were. I hadn’t expected such a bold advance from him.

  “Will you do me the honor of spending the night?” he asked.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I have curfew.”

  He seemed genuinely disappointed, as if he were lonely and carried a sorrow that was too adult for me to understand. He returned me to my dormitory, but he wouldn’t get out of the car and walk me to the door—as etiquette required on a college date. He said he didn’t want to be seen.

  After that, Professor Hazel’s overtures toward me cooled, which disappointed me. A mystique hung over him like a purple wine haze, and I signed up for the second semester of his course. I loved the way he made his students feel privileged to get a glimpse of his literary domain. Commenting on our work, he would say “That scene puts me in mind of Hemingway” or “When I read your story I thought of what Dylan Thomas said on one occasion when I was with him in New York.” He made his students believe that writing was a calling; a writer was much like a preacher receiving his personal summons from the Lord. This was a notion his wide-eyed students found irresistible.

  In the second semester, I wrote a story that featured Professor Hazel as a character—renamed Tom or Bud or something. It included some suggestive remarks that he had made to me at a party, lines such as “Where do we go from here, baby?” The day I was to read the story aloud in class, I became nervous and withdrew it. I had encountered him in the hallway just before class. He said he had read the story, and he handed it to me with a mock flourish.

  I couldn’t look him in the eye. I stuffed the story between the covers of my notebook, as if to hide it. “I can’t read it in front of the class,” I mumbled.

  He didn’t seem surprised. He nodded. “That story has some things going for it,” he said. “But there are others you may want to think about.” He gave me an enigmatic smile, which I loaded up with significance.

  In confusion, I retreated. I had always got my lessons dutifully, but I did not write any more stories that semester. He gave me an A in the course anyway. No doubt he sensed my bewilderment, and perhaps he felt guilty about his part in it. By then he was in deep with the student whose father later got him fired.

  He cultivated a coterie of young male followers. When these protégés visited his house, he fed them whiskey and steaks, and they brought their manuscripts and stayed for hours talking about writing. Four of these students—one right after the other—had won prestigious creative-writing fellowships to Stanford University. I wanted to apply to Stanford too, but I had not completed enough work to make a strong application, so I decided not to try that year. I had never before ended a class on a note of inertia. It surprised me, and I did not know what to do.

  When Robert Hazel appeared in New York, we did a cautious little dance around each other. I safely distanced him, but he was still my guide, my foil to Miss F
lorence. He had a boozy complexion. I didn’t know what cigarettes and hard liquor had to do with writing, but I inferred that a certain school of male writers—the romantic degenerates—depended on them. And there were rules about food. It had to be authentic, such as Spanish peasant fare, with wine. Writers like Bob found their European cuisine in cafés. I figured they just didn’t know how to cook. But Bob invited my roommate, Kyra, and me over once for fresh asparagus. He panfried it in cornmeal, the way Hemingway’s character Nick Adams might have fried up a fish over a campfire. Asparagus and Scotch were the entire meal. I didn’t like Scotch. I’d never had asparagus; it was all right, but not enough to fill up on. I was still hungry.

  On another occasion, Bob invited me out to one of the cafés on MacDougal Street. He ordered veal scallopini marsala and wine.

  “I have an offer to make to you,” he said, looking up at me with his familiar dreamy-eyed come-on gaze. “Let me seduce you, and I’ll make you happy. I’ll make you happy for the rest of your life if you’ll be my mistress.”

  Mistress? What an adult word! And dirty sounding. In the Italian movies, mistresses were commonplace. Maybe the word occurred to him because we were in an Italian restaurant, I thought. I picked at my pasta.

  “That doesn’t sound like me,” I said. Mistress of the house. I envisioned cooking and cleaning.

  He had a little mean streak. After a while, he said, “Three things, if you’re going to be a serious writer.” He held up his fingers to tick off his list. “You’ve got to hold back youthful enthusiasm, and don’t emulate that mediocre sludge on television, and avoid sentimental shit about dear old grandparents.”

  He finished the veal scallopini, spearing the mushrooms and mopping up the marsala sauce with a hunk of Italian bread. He ate sloppily, drunkenly.

  I didn’t know where this was going. I had been feeling that my job and my ambition and my background were all a jarring and jerky mix, like Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie. At my job, I was exploiting people who romanticized the movies, but Bob Hazel exalted the very kind of people who loved the movies and TV—farm folks, laborers, working people—while condemning what they felt. My parents were at home watching Gunsmoke. Bob Hazel would have sneered.

  “I’ve spent my life getting away from my rural Indiana background,” Bob explained when I tried to ask what for me were central questions about a writer’s material. “My family thought writing was sissy, even though I was a quarterback on the football team.” He slugged down some more wine. “You’ll have to resist sentimentalizing ‘good country people’ if you’re really going to be a writer,” he said. “They’re too nice. You need to get tough.”

  “Does that mean I can’t write stories about where I come from?”

  “It means that you have to stop going to those shit movies and think about what Randall Jarrell said.”

  I don’t remember what he said that Randall Jarrell said. It was indistinguishable from what he said that Allen Tate said and John Crowe Ransom said and Wallace Stevens said. On the subway, I reread Lie Down in Darkness, about a Southern girl who went off to New York and eventually committed suicide. It was written from her father’s point of view. None of it applied to me.

  Bob Hazel invited me to Poughkeepsie one winter weekend to visit his brother and family. From the train window I saw trees, whole forests, deep in snow. I hadn’t realized how much I missed trees. Vividly, I recalled the ice-covered twig I had broken when I was a child, the act that stung me with guilt. These trees seemed so calm and beautiful, so necessary in the landscape. As we rode along, Bob spotted a teddy bear left out on a fence, and he pointed it out. Maybe he wrote it down. It was the sort of thing he would put in a poem, he said.

  There was a party that weekend, dozens of professional, nonliterary people in their thirties. I wore my black cocktail dress with the taffeta balloon-hem, the dress I had worn the last time I saw the Hilltoppers. It was still stylish. Bob said to me, “How does it feel to be the most beautiful woman in the room?” I was twenty-two. The others were all old. He was forty. He thought I was beautiful because I was young.

  I returned to New York on an afternoon train on Sunday, in time to meet Kyra and rush to Rockefeller Center for The Jack Paar Program, a weekly television show. Someone at work had given us tickets to the taping. George Burns and Pearl Bailey were guests. I knew I didn’t belong in New York. And I knew I shouldn’t be building a career based on TV stars. Before long I began searching for a different job. I went to an interview at an address on Fifth Avenue, on the sixteenth floor. I knew that the Empire State Building was in that vicinity. Afraid of heights, I had always avoided going there. It was only after I was far down the block, after the interview, and glanced back that I realized I had been in the Empire State Building. For a long time that trivial irony impressed me. It seemed like the teddy bear on the fence.

  By then, it was trees I needed. The occasional trees I saw in the city’s concrete landscape leaped out at me like images in a 3-D movie.

  I could not imagine my future. I thought I would be alone, but not lonely. My farm background had taught me to take what comes—drought, cattle disease, dead dogs. I had thought that if my life were to change, some opportunity had to present itself to me, so I should keep bumbling along until this cosmic accident occurred. But now I came to realize I had to take my life in hand. I had to ask myself what I really wanted. I knew I wanted sanity and clarity, and I knew I didn’t want to waste my life. Bob Hazel started me on my true course, but he yanked me backwards, too. Then I yanked loose. Later, I saw that for all his shining facade and sad romanticism, he had been utterly serious. He was a genuine poet, and I was still young, unformed.

  In 1963, only weeks before President Kennedy was murdered, I left for an upstate school to take a graduate assistantship in literature. Bob warned me that academic study was anathema to a writer, but I knew I had plenty to learn before I could write. In Binghamton, the trees were blazing autumn colors on forested mountainsides. I had never seen trees perform so brilliantly. Back home, the predominant oak trees made the autumn brown and gold. But this Northern landscape was full of fire; the trees were flames.

  15

  When I went away to New York City in the summer of 1962, I left many of my college books at home. Mama stored them out in the junkhouse. Why keep books in the house, where they would be in the way? Two years later, during a visit home, I learned that Granny had found the books soon after I left, and she had read a few of them. She read The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway and Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson. And she read my copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.

  “Such as that is awful,” she told me. The books were stacked on her wicker lamp table, on a white doily. Her hands worked nervously along the edges of her apron.

  A pervert looking for filthy books could have searched the whole University of Kentucky library and not found anything naughtier than Tropic of Cancer. It’s raw sexual adventure. It has the word “fuck” in it. I had left that book behind and taken The Great Gatsby with me. As far as I was concerned, Tropic of Cancer was a reject—too sordid and lacking literary style—while The Great Gatsby was a treasure.

  I knew I had caused my family worry, but I did not dwell on the possibility that I had sent my grandmother to the nuthouse. She seemed better now, and I was immersed in my studies.

  Later, when Granddaddy got sick again, I was studying James Joyce. I came home for a long stretch—from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. The weather was mild, and I sat outside at a picnic table in the oak woods by the house, reading Ulysses. Dutifully, as I had always been taught to study, I was following a guidebook, annotating the pages of the novel. There was a comfort in plunging deep into this methodical task while trying not to think about what was happening with my grandparents. Fourteen years before, when Granny was at the hospital in Memphis and I was certain she was dying, I had been deeply afraid. Now I had annotations to do. Joyce had used the kidney as the dominating organ of the Caly
pso chapter. Copying that in my book didn’t seem at all wacky to me then. I kept notebooks of system and design. Joyce’s art was too dazzling to question. I consumed, I regurgitated.

  No one in the family knew about James Joyce, and I would not tell them anything. Anyway, they didn’t ask. I wouldn’t tell them Ulysses had been banned, or that Joyce and Henry Miller might have crossed paths in Paris. I didn’t know how to explain a writer who had taken years to write six hundred pages about a day in the life of an Irish ad salesman. I couldn’t tell my family what pure pleasure was in this book, surely of no relevance when it came to stocking the freezer for the winter. Mama had wanted to follow my studies with me in high school, and we began with the Latin text, but she was too busy to keep up. After a few fitful starts and stops, she had to quit. Now, at a school of higher learning, I felt guilty that I was soaring out of sight, into the arcane—and often inane—intricacies of scholarship.

  Granddaddy died in January, 1965, a victim of ulcers, his stomach lining gnawed away from years of secret worry about Granny’s delicate health. The day before his surgery, I was in his hospital room. He unzipped his leather change purse from the bedside drawer and counted out several coins.

  “Go get me some cream,” he said.

  At the drugstore across the street, I bought two dips of vanilla ice cream in a waxed pasteboard cup. I was aware of his dignity, his precision, his intention to pay his way, and his love of ice cream. He was very much alive. I didn’t consider that he would not survive the surgery.