Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction
Page 16
Thank God that’s over. I can assure you I didn’t order it.
I think—I know—this is going to be my last “physical” notation. Let it be reasonably funny. I’d love to clear the air before I go to bed.
It’s an Anecdote, sink me, but I’ll let it rip: At about nine, I had the very pleasant notion that I was the Fastest Boy Runner in the World. It’s the kind of queer, basically extracurricular conceit, I’m inclined to add, that dies hard, and even today, at a super-sedentary forty, I can picture myself, in street clothes, whisking past a series of distinguished but hard-breathing Olympic milers and waving to them, amiably, without a trace of condescension. Anyway, one beautiful spring evening when we were still living over on Riverside Drive, Bessie sent me to the drugstore for a couple of quarts of ice cream. I came out of the building at that very same magical quarter hour described just a few paragraphs back. Equally fatal to the construction of this anecdote, I had sneakers on—sneakers surely being to anyone who happens to be the Fastest Boy Runner in the World almost exactly what red shoes were to Hans Christian Andersen’s little girl. Once I was clear of the building, I was Mercury himself, and broke into a “terrific” sprint up the long block to Broadway. I took the corner at Broadway on one wheel and kept going, doing the impossible: increasing speed. The drugstore that sold Louis Sherry ice cream, which was Bessie’s adamant choice, was three blocks north, at 113th. About halfway there, I tore past the stationery store where we usually bought our newspapers and magazines, but blindly, without noticing any acquaintances or relatives in the vicinity. Then, about a block further on, I picked up the sound of pursuit at my rear, plainly conducted on foot. My first, perhaps typically New Yorkese thought was that the cops were after me—the charge, conceivably, Breaking Speed Records on a Non-School-Zone Street. I strained to get a little more speed out of my body, but it was no use. I felt a hand clutch out at me and grab hold of my sweater just where the winning-team numerals should have been, and, good and scared, I broke my speed with the awkwardness of a gooney bird coming to a stop. My pursuer was, of course, Seymour, and he was looking pretty damned scared himself. “What’s the matter? What happened?” he asked me frantically. He was still holding on to my sweater. I yanked myself loose from his hand and informed him, in the rather scatological idiom of the neighborhood, which I won’t record here verbatim, that nothing had happened, nothing was the matter, that I was just running, for cryin’ out loud. His relief was prodigious. “Boy, did you scare me!” he said. “Wow, were you moving! I could hardly catch up with you!” We then went along, at a walk, to the drugstore together. Perhaps strangely, perhaps not strangely at all, the morale of the now Second-Fastest Boy Runner in the World had not been very perceptibly lowered. For one thing, I had been outrun by him. Besides, I was extremely busy noticing that he was panting a lot. It was oddly diverting to see him pant.
I’m finished with this. Or, rather, it’s finished with me. Fundamentally, my mind has always balked at any kind of ending. How many stories have I torn up since I was a boy simply because they had what that old Chekhov-baiting noise Somerset Maugham calls a Beginning, a Middle, and an End? Thirty-five? Fifty? One of the thousand reasons I quit going to the theater when I was about twenty was that I resented like hell filing out of the theater just because some playwright was forever slamming down his silly curtain. (What ever became of that stalwart bore Fortinbras? Who eventually fixed his wagon?) Nonetheless, I’m done here. There are one or two more fragmentary physical-type remarks I’d like to make, but I feel too strongly that my time is up. Also, it’s twenty to seven, and I have a nine-o’clock class. There’s just enough time for a half-hour nap, a shave, and maybe a cool, refreshing blood bath. I have an impulse—more of an old urban reflex than an impulse, thank God—to say something mildly caustic about the twenty-four young ladies, just back from big weekends at Cambridge or Hanover or New Haven, who will be waiting for me in Room 307, but I can’t finish writing a description of Seymour—even a bad description, even one where my ego, my perpetual lust to share top billing with him, is all over the place—without being conscious of the good, the real. This is too grand to be said (so I’m just the man to say it), but I can’t be my brother’s brother for nothing, and I know—not always, but I know—there is no single thing I do that is more important than going into that awful Room 307. There isn’t one girl in there, including the Terrible Miss Zabel, who is not as much my sister as Boo Boo or Franny. They may shine with the misinformation of the ages, but they shine. This thought manages to stun me: There’s no place I’d really rather go right now than into Room 307. Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he never wrong?
Just go to bed, now. Quickly. Quickly and slowly.
Notes
[←1]
This modest aspersion is thoroughly reprehensible, but the fact that the great Kierkegaard was never a Kierkegaardian, let alone an Existentialist, cheers one bush-league intellectual’s heart no end, never fails to reaffirm his faith in a cosmic poetic justice, if not a cosmic Santa Claus.
[←2]
Since this is a record, of sorts, I ought to mumble, down here, that he read Chinese and Japanese poetry, for the most part, as it was written. Another time around, probably at irksome length—to me so, anyway—I’m going to have to dwell on an odd inborn characteristic common, to some extent, to all the original seven children in our family, and as pronounced as a limp in three of us, which made it possible for us to learn foreign languages with extreme ease. But this footnote is mainly for young readers. If, in the line of duty, I should incidentally titillate a few young people’s interest in Chinese and Japanese poetry, it would be very good news to me. At all events, let the young person please know, if he doesn’t already, that a goodish amount of first-class Chinese poetry has been translated into English, with much fidelity and spirit, by several distinguished people; Witter Bynner and Lionel Giles come most readily to mind. The best short Japanese poems—particularly haiku, but senryu, too—can be read with special satisfaction when R. H. Blyth has been at them. Blyth is sometimes perilous, naturally, since he’s a highhanded old poem himself, but he’s also sublime—and who goes to poetry for safety anyway? (This last little piece of pedantry, I repeat, is for the young, who write to authors and never get any replies from the beasts. I’m also functioning, partly, on behalf of my title character, who was a teacher, too, poor bastard.)
[←3]
The normal and only rational thing to do at this point would be to plank down one, two, or all hundred and eighty-four of the poems for the reader to see for himself I can’t do it. I’m not even sure that I have a right to discuss the matter. I’m permitted to sit on the poems, edit them, look after them, and eventually pick out a hard-cover publisher for them, but, on extremely personal grounds, I’ve been forbidden by the poet’s widow, who legally owns them, to quote any portion of them here.
[←4]
Just for the sake of making a point I could be embarrassing my students unnecessarily here. Schoolteachers have done it before. Or maybe I’ve just picked out the wrong poem. If it’s true, as I’ve wickedly posed, that “Ozymandias” has left my students vividly unimpressed, perhaps a good deal of the blame for this can be laid to “Ozymandias” itself. Perhaps Mad Shelley wasn’t quite mad enough. Assuredly, in any case, his madness wasn’t a madness of the heart. My girls undoubtedly know that Robert Burns drank and romped to excess, and are probably delighted about it, but I’m equally sure they also know all about the magnificent mouse his plow turned up. (Is it just possible, I wonder, that those ‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone’ standing in the desert are Percy’s own? Is it conceivable that his life is outliving much of his best poetry? And if so, is it because—Well, I’ll desist. But young poets beware. If you want us to remember your best poems at least as fondly as we do your Racy, Colorful Lives, it might be as well to give us one good field mouse, flushed by the heart, in every
stanza.)