by Lore Segal
William says, “If I go like this, it means ‘Nobody can hear you,’ and like this means ‘Slow down.’ ”
“I’ll be fine,” I say. “You won’t remember me,” I say to Newman, who looks fabulous in flannels and a ribbed navy turtleneck. “We met at Maurie’s.”
“And you told me your theory about parties,” he says.
“And you told me yours about power, which I didn’t understand but I knew it was fascinating. And the second time that same evening we meet at the Friendlings’ and you snapped my head off.”
Newman jumps. “I did?” he says and takes my arm. “I did not!”
“Okay, okay, okay,” says Maurie. “Everybody. Let’s get this show on the road. Who has a car?”
“I’ll drive Lucinella,” says Newman, and takes my elbow.
“William, you take young Lucinella and Meyers. Pavlovenka is driving J. D. Winterneet. Betterwheatling and Cilena, will you please take old Lucinella.”
Cilena says, “The three of us can sit up front if Betterwheatling would either wear his jacket or throw the damn thing in the back. This silly symposium is bad for the temper. Are you all right there in the middle?” she asks old Lucinella.
Betterwheatling is manipulating key and shift. Old Lucinella stares in surprise at the fat forearm moving a quarter inch from hers: it has bulk, gives off a warmth; old Lucinella can barely believe what she is remembering.
She says, “Why are we having this damn silly symphony … sympathy … I mean …” She shakes her head, squinches up her eyes, and stares where the missing word keeps just out of sight.
“There’s Maurie!” Betterwheatling says. “I’ll let you two off here.”
“That happens more and more these days,” old Lucinella says. “I’ve got a case of galloping aphorism … aphrodisiac …” She laughs and shakes her head. “Aphids …” She shakes her head. “What’s the aph I’m after?” she asks Cilena, who’s holding the door to the auditorium for her. Cilena inclines her head and asks, “What?”
Old Lucinella laughs and shakes her head.
VI
Already Maurie is chivying us up the steps and out into the merciless illumination of the platform.
“We might have a couple of lights in the auditorium, so we can see whom we are talking at,” he says to the student, a tall black kid, who is stagemanaging the water pitcher and glasses on the narrow speakers’ table that runs the width of the stage.
“Betterwheatling, kindly take this end. Zeus, please … Lucinella, next to Zeus. Meyers …”
(Meyers’s eyelids are neon-pink. Now he has nothing to hold on to except his own extravagantly drooping blond mustache.)
“I’ll sit next to Meyers,” says Maurie. “Then Newman, please.”
(When did he change into that satin blouse, open to the navel, showing a silver fist on a heavy chain around his throat?)
“Then Winterneet.”
(And when did he diminish? His bank teller’s navy suit I remember from that first time at Yaddo hangs in elephant folds.)
“Pavlovenka, if you don’t mind taking the other end?”
(Pavlovenka, wearing red-and-white-and-blue-striped stockings, doesn’t mind. Her beautiful, fat face glows.)
Where’s William sitting in this solid blackness in front of us? Where is young Lucinella? And Ulla, and the rest of our crowd?
Now Maurie is welcoming the audience to this symposium on writing. Zeus is going to get the ball rolling.
Zeus rises, enormous at my side. He says the word “symposium” comes from the Greek syn (“together”) and pinein (“to drink”) and still connotes just such a meeting of old friends as are here come together on this platform, for a free flowing of ideas …
“And now a few words from Lucinella. Her subject is ‘Why Write?’ ” Maurie says, and already my voice is launched upon the depth of this silence, and there’s no hope of a reprieve ex machina, now I have got to go on reading all the way down to the bottom of the page. I feel my words rolling in my mouth. Fondly I raise my eyes to the audience inside the darkness before me. How nice of all those grownups to sit so quietly, listening to me! Zeus and Meyers laugh; everybody’s laughing. I guess I made a joke, it’s just that I can’t remember what it’s all about, this writing I am reading, nor is there any way now to stop and make it out. But I’m a pro. I carry on with this unlovable and strange new stridency—where was I when this authoritative note was creeping into my voice? So this is the world’s expertise! Me! And it’s true; I do know what I mean when I say, “Writing is like brushing my teeth, without which the day is misspent, I quarrel with the grocer, will get no letter from a friend, and mislay my key, so there’s no way for god to get into his heaven,” I wind up emphatically. Already? Over so soon!
Zeus smiles at me.
Maurie is introducing Meyers. I look anxiously toward him.
Meyers says, “There’s a character in a Huxley novel who arranges his suicide for the moment before his friends are due to arrive. Instead of a note, they find Beethoven’s last quartet revolving on the phonograph. If that doesn’t explain, nothing can. My subject tonight is ‘Why Read Poetry?’ and I’ll explain by reading you a poem.” Meyers inclines his head to listen to himself.
Through that pure virgin shrine,
That sacred veil drawn o’er Thy glorious noon,
That men might look and live, as glowworms shine …
Newman blows his nose into his handkerchief.
Maurie passes me a sheet of paper on which it says: “What’s with the auditorium lights?”
I look toward the stage manager, hovering in the wings, and wiggle a finger for his attention, point up at the lights and out into the auditorium, but he doesn’t understand. He’s disappeared. I look toward Maurie. He signals: Do something.
I push my chair noiselessly back. I feel adventurous, walking into the wings. There is the bank of switches; the top row is marked “Auditorium.” I feel efficient.
“Don’t do that,” says the stage manager out of the shadows.
“What! Why?” I say. “It’s just we want more of a sense of colloquy. We want to see who’s out there.”
“Oh no, you don’t,” he says. “That’s what you don’t want to see.”
Is this some gothic scene I’ve got myself involved in? I don’t believe this! The kid and I are staring at each other. He is large, and black. I go back to my seat out on the platform, avoiding Maurie’s eyes. Winterneet and Pavlovenka seem to be scrapping.
“I tell my students,” she’s saying, “to write what they feel, to experiment, to throw off the tyrannical old forms.”
(Hear, hear, I think.)
“And impose on the poor young people the tyranny of freedom?” says Winterneet.
(Hear, hear, I think again.)
Pavlovenka worries. She doesn’t like people saying unkind things about freedom. “How d’you mean, ‘tyranny’?”
“I mean it’s hard having to invent a free-verse form for every new occasion.”
“It isn’t hard for my students to write free verse,” Pavlovenka says.
“But mayn’t it be hard,” says Winterneet—his pale nose pinched, eyes gummed by his recent illness, he turns his famous, bald, old head with weary sweetness in Pavlovenka’s direction—“might it not be hard, forgive me, on their readers? Even the often dazzling experiments in The Magazine”—here he turns toward Maurie—“seem to be choosing to be opaque and boring.”
Maurie, who seemed to be dozing in his chair, rouses himself to say, “Which brings me to my subject: ‘Why Publish What Nobody Will Read?’ The reading public, not to speak of the publishing community, is a bunch of Gertrudes. Poor Gertrude! She’s so horrified to see the Prince familiarly in conversation with what looks to her exactly like the empty air, she must conclude he’s mad or, at best, a put-on artist. Remember the little man who slashed the early Picasso canvases? One concluded he was mad—why this passion? Why not stay quietly at home? But how could he ignore what must be p
roved to be nothing, or prove him blind—and deaf, and dumb! That’s very, very terrible! No wonder these Gertrudes plant the letter for our execution in our pockets and put us out to sea.”
“And while you,” says Newman, “are communing with your elitist ghost, the real world burns.”
The speakers along the table stir. Newman, overwrought and intense, leans toward Maurie, who leans back in his chair like some fat Farouk of the intellect, and says, “Yes.” His smile is warm and his eyes are spunky.
But Newman will not let Maurie be charming. He bends his neck into a U and forces Maurie to face what he is about to say and says, “I’m talking about hunger.”
(That’s true, I think, dazzled by the enormity he means.)
“I publish poetry. The world—starves.” Maurie gives the word its fullest and slowest weight. “Neither causes, nor prevents, the other.”
(And that’s true too, I think.)
“What you publish,” says Newman, “is an elitist magazine.”
“Hear, hear!” says Pavlovenka.
“Written,” says Newman, “by a couple of dozen literati—”
“Of whom you are one!” says Maurie.
“—read not even by each other,” says Newman.
“I never read it!” Pavlovenka assures him.
“I publish literature,” says Maurie.
“Literature is elitist,” Newman says.
“Right on,” from the stage manager in the wings.
“Oh, but,” Pavlovenka says.
“What!” Winterneet and Meyers cry.
(Is that true, I wonder.)
“Aren’t you—” begins Betterwheatling.
“Errant crap,” says Maurie, “and you know it, Newman.”
“While Winterneet,” says Newman, “is embalming the sonnet and the villanelle—” The stage manager laughs.
“You don’t take my meaning,” says Winterneet with irritable eagerness.
Zeus puts his mouth close to my ear and whispers, “You’ll have to pay admission if you’re going to enjoy yourself.” (It’s true. My head is turning form one to the other. How beautifully each is doing his own thing!)
“—and Lucinella,” says Newman (I jump), “writes for her private prophylaxis, she says, the way she cleans her teeth—”
“You know what I meant,” I cry, shocked. I thought I was on his side! He’s righter, surely, than the rest of us. “I only meant that writing has grown as deep as habit—”
“Aren’t you—” Betterwheatling tries again.
“What I meant”—Winterneet leans toward Newman—“is that to refuse forms perfected by the past is like having to invent the bed each time you want to go to sleep.”
“Your forms,” says Newman, “were created on the backs of blacks.”
“And women,” cries Pavlovenka.
“Aren’t you confusing—” Betterwheatling says.
“I’m talking,” says Winterneet, “about the mastery of technique.”
“Technique is racist,” says Newman. “Its purpose is to master slaves.”
“I’ll never master it!” Pavlovenka promises.
“Aren’t you confusing the realms of poetry and politics?” says Betterwheatling, bending his neck into a U to force Newman’s attention.
“Poetry is politics,” says Newman.
“Oh yes,” from the wings.
Meyers leans forward intently:
“God’s silent, searching flight;
When my Lord’s head was filled with dew,”
he says, but Newman sits back in his chair and laughs into the audience and says, “Not my lord.”
“… and all
His locks are wet with the clear drops of night;
His still, soft call,”
sings Meyers, reaching across Maurie to touch Newman on the arm to make him listen. Newman trumpets into his handkerchief.
“His knocking time; the soul’s dumb watch,
When spirits their fair kindred catch.”
“What about their dark kindred!” shouts Newman and sticks his middle finger into the air.
“By technique, don’t you see,” says Winterneet—he looks exhausted—“I mean what has become as unconscious as the techniques of grammar.”
“Grammar is racist,” cries Newman, laughing.
“And sexist,” I yell. I’m getting into the spirit.
“Except you need it to deny it,” shouts Maurie.
“The hell you say!” Newman cries. “We will invent our own!”
“Absolutely! Newman, I agree with you!” calls Pavlovenka.
“That’s your problem!” says Newman, without looking at her.
“Straight, or butchered,” Betterwheatling says, “it will be English.”
“English,” pronounces Newman, with an excruciating clarity, “is an imperialist language, its grammar and vocabulary so perverted in the service of oppression and obfuscation it has lots its capacity for truth. English is no longer capable of poetry.”
Pavlovenka splutters, Meyers howls, Betterwheatling, Maurie, and Winterneet have risen to their feet shouting what Newman cannot hear in the uproar. I’m helplessly laughing. I laugh and I laugh and I laugh. Zeus towers over all. “Have we come to exchange ideas or to shout one another down!” he thunders.
“I,” cries Newman, “have come to break the whole thing up, and the time is now!” he calls to the audience. He raises his right hand in a fist while the left pushes the table so jug and glasses slide. We grab for our papers, which lift upon the updraft as the table overturns once and with a second somersault clatters over the edge of the platform.
“Don’t forget the party!” cries Maurie over the hubbub. “At the old Fraternity! Everybody welcome! Is everyone okay down there? For Chrissake, will you put on the lights?” he yells at the stage manager, who flips the switches with an embarrassed smile at me and a shrug of his shoulders, and as the brown lights come on in the auditorium we see nobody’s out there except our crowd in the second row on the right. Hera, Cilena bending to pick up—is it old Lucinella’s shawl that’s slipped under the seat? Ulla is coming forward to congratulate us. “You were terrific! I thought it went very well!” There’s Frank Friendling—who’s the girl with him? That’s William’s back disappearing up the aisle with young Lucinella. I jump off the stage, climb over the upended table, but by the time I’ve run up the aisle and out the door into the night, the car with William and young Lucinella is speeding off.
“Hop in!” “Ride, anybody?” Everybody is shouting hilariously. “Come with us, Lucinella!” Cilena and Betterwheatling say.
VII
Back at the house every room is lit, the party is in swing. People carrying their drinks from one room to another stop to ask, “How did it go?”
“Did you see William?” I ask everybody.
Here’s Friendling—with the furiously pretty girl. Of course! We stop to chat. I mean to scowl, out of solidarity with Alice, whom I like, but the girl is so lovely, so intelligent, seems so much to like Friendling, I like her.
Friendling says yes, he thinks he saw William and young Lucinella carrying their drinks up the stairs.
I open the door into our bedroom. It’s full of black people, perching on the bed, cross-legged on the rug. The stage manager waves to me.
“Have you seen William?” I ask Newman, who’s leaning in the embrasure of the window surrounded by students. He reaches a hand around my waist and draws me into the circle. I’m pleased and I relax against his side.
A young girl with a face like Wedgwood basalt, in an Afro shaped into a two-by-two-foot topiary cube, is saying for her senior thesis she’s constructing a soul syntax based not on inflected parts of speech, nor word order, nor the pitch of voice, but on rhythms which will be incomprehensible to whites.
I smile, trying to catch Newman’s eye, but his head inclines with courteous eagerness toward the young speaker.
(Am I one of these Gertrudes?)
Newman says there is
a small hill tribe he knows whose language used to be so rich in conjunctions it made possible varieties of loving outside our experience. There the smallest baby could play safely in the road, so that the women were free to be themselves. No one grew old, because their vocabulary had no word for ill or dead, nor for black, poor, ugly, stupid, or small, so it was not possible for them to use one another rudely, to ignore, exclude, or put each other down. Their grammar did not permit the concept “less” or “worse” until the missionaries introduced the comparative form, simultaneously banning the use of the eight full and five half gradations of the superlative which, in their near-infinity of intercombinations, had made possible a precision and multiformity of joy unknown to Western cultures. Now their loving conjunctions are all atrophied and turned into a singleness of hate that will, in good time, burn off the white pollution and return them to their black purity of tongue. Even now, they’re gathering and training the bloodiest army on the continent.
“Where?” ask all the students. “What latitude is it? Do you need a passport?”
My eyes have filled with sulky tears because they won’t let me come, I know, so the hell with them! I’d go away if Newman were not holding me around the waist. I don’t want to hurt his feelings.
I’m fascinated by the complex intelligence the human touch conveys, by means of what? The temperature, the duration and distribution of pressure across the surface points of the four, say five square inches of Newman’s palm are saying to a corresponding patch of my skin that he does not intend, that he disapproves, the natural warmth of his right hand. He curls it into the loose approximation of a fist and, resting the ball of his thumb above the bone of my hip, bores his middle finger into my flesh with increasing malignity until I yowl, “I’d better go find William!”
Bodies part to let me escape into the hall. No one watches me go. Their conversation closes over my head.
From inside her room old Lucinella hears me in the hallway asking Cilena if she’s seen William anywhere, and old Lucinella keeps thinking that she is about to rise out of her chair and come to the door to tell me, “I saw William and young Lucinella carrying their drinks out to the verbena, I mean the verdure … verdigris …” She smiles at the posy of words; none of them has the right letters in the right order that so curiously coincides with a veronica … a vermifuge … vernissage … vichyssoise …
