I doubt if too many persons remember the ambience of the old Fifth Avenue Stouffer’s. It is fastened to my memory with all the painful glue of youthful embarrassment and an unbearable sense of social inadequacy. At noon the large, pleasant restaurant was filled with matrons from Westchester and white-haired dowagers from New Jersey and the East Side of the city, sipping iced tea and eating peaches-and-cottage-cheese salad. The redolence of Chanel No. 5 filled the sedate air as young Irish waitresses, their accents lilting and sweet, moved energetically among the tables.
Into this serene, feminine sea of diners strode Gypsy, with me several steps behind her. The hostess stared, recovered, and then said, ‘This way, please, ladies.’ I tried by whisper and gesture to indicate we wanted to sit somewhere near the wall, but she ignored me and waved Gypsy toward a table at dead center of the room.
The next hour was, for me, pure, unrelieved torment. Gypsy ordered a double martini in a voice that shook the Jell-O-with-whipped cream on the dessert table near us. The waitress, all smiles, said they did not serve liquor. I cannot remember what either of us ordered or ate. It does not matter. What I do recall is that an audible silence had settled over the restaurant. Gypsy, seemingly unaware of it, carried on an enthralling soliloquy in response to a foolish (I realized almost at once), low-voiced leading question about life in burlesque that I managed to ask; I could think of nothing else to talk about.
Everyone in the room seemed to me to be hanging on Gypsy’s every word as she described to me, in vivid, earthy language, how runway shows were conducted and what it took to qualify for, and then last in, the art. At this distance I remember very little of her monologue, so sunk in confusion, so red-faced, was I. But I do recall one graphic piece of lingo. She told me that burlesque queens placed their bare breasts in pots of ice water just before going onstage to guarantee the elevation of those appendages when they danced. In the trade, this was known as ‘icing the bordens.’
Toward the end of lunch I watched the door, praying for the appearance of George Davis, so that I would not have to walk the gamut of the floor eyed by the enthralled customers. George never came; it all went on and on as I dreaded it would. I could feel the gaze of the gathering on my neck as I struggled to open the door just ahead of Gypsy. I almost fell out into the street.
I think it must have been the longest lunch I was ever to eat. It taught me lessons in the pain of self-consciousness I would never forget. I admired Gypsy’s magnificent self-possession (was she aware that we were the cynosure of every eye and ear for an hour? She gave no sign of it) and the richness of her colorful vocabulary. I yearned to have her ‘command,’ her ‘presence,’ but I knew, in my twenty-one-year-old, stammering, blushing state, I would doubtless never acquire it.
As long as I lived in New York City, I could never again bring myself to enter a Stouffer’s, even alone. The restaurants, once all over the city, now have vacated their familiar sites and shrunk down into packaged TV dinners of that name. The memory of that lunch is still strong. I’ve never been able to buy one.
One other memory, another New York expression, is still with me. I used to have breakfast in a coffee shop near the Mademoiselle office. When I ordered an English muffin, the counterman would call back to the cook: ‘Burn the British!’
My old acquaintance Kurt Vonnegut, newly divorced from his second wife, someone tells me, is quoted in a book of ‘outrageous’ sayings titled The Natural Inferiority of Women, which arrived in this morning’s mail from Poseidon Press. He is said to have told an interviewer, in 1985, ‘Educating a woman is like pouring honey over a fine Swiss watch. It stops working.’
The book is a mine of evidence of how old and deeply embedded is misogyny. I am not surprised by the proverbs: ‘If wives were good, God would have had one’ (Georgian), and ‘Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same’ (nineteenth-century British), and ‘The woman cries before the wedding and the man after’ (Polish).
But modern man! Dr. Benjamin Spock, the hero of my generation of parents, female and male: ‘Biologically and temperamentally, I believe, women were made to be concerned first and foremost with child care, husband care, and home care.’
The respected black leader Stokely Carmichael: ‘The only position for women in the Revolution is prone.’
Lech Walesa, who became president of Poland, and said in 1981: ‘Women are to have fun with. In politics I prefer not to see a woman. Instead of getting all worked up, they should stay as they are—like flowers.’
Henry Miller, thought to be the originator of the movement for sexual freedom through literature, said he could not understand why the women’s liberation movement disliked him so: ‘I adore women as a whole. I enjoy them as a breed, like a dog. They’re another species that you become endeared to.’
I am pessimistic about reform in men’s view of women. After all the years in which some small change might have been expected, Patrick Buchanan, a candidate for President of the United States, was asked by someone if he still believes, as he did in 1984, that ‘the truth is that women’s income, on the average, will always be a fraction of men’s, so long as America remains free.’
December
Each age of life is new to us; no matter how old, we are still troubled by inexperience.
—Source Unknown
Driving back from Camden this morning, I notice a heartening change on the roads. There are no more dead deer in the backs of pickup trucks. Instead, I pass a number of cars and trucks carrying large Christmas trees.
Copper Canyon Press sends me a copy of Kay Boyle’s new Collected Poems. I am familiar with almost all of them. Kay is now eighty-nine and can no longer answer letters, but I write at once to tell her how much I’ve enjoyed rereading her work. I copy out a line I want to remember, from ‘Advice to the Old’: ‘Have no communion with despair.’ I take this personally, as we used to say. In another place I find: ‘Let it be courage that our tongues compose / There being no refuge from the hurricane that blows,’ from a long work titled ‘A Poem on Getting up Early in the Morning … When One is Old.’
I miss Kay, although I have not seen her for many years. I miss seeing her fine, readable, backward-leaning handwriting on envelopes, and her courageous voice in letters urging me to participate in one cause or another—Amnesty International, black students’ rights at California State, concern for a woman she knows in prison who is being badly treated. S.I. Hayakawa, former president of the college at which Kay taught, died a few months ago. He had tried to force her out of the school when she sided with the students during the Vietnam War and burned draft cards for them on the steps of the San Francisco Federal Building. In every sense, she has survived and overcome her old adversary.
I have noticed that some correspondence from readers of End Zone is in the form of portmanteau letters, that is, they are composed of two distinct halves. They begin with something like ‘I read your book and liked it,’ or ‘Your book meant a lot to me.’ There follow various reasons, some effusive and, as it turns out after reading the second half, not to be entirely trusted or believed.
The second half of the letter consists of one or more of the following:
1. I too am a writer and …
2. I am having trouble getting my book published.
3. I need an editor (an agent, a publisher). Could you recommend …
4. Can I send you my manuscript?
5. Under separate cover I am sending you my manuscript.
6. I have a book, somewhat like yours, being published next year. Would you be willing to write a blurb?
7. I am applying for a Guggenheim.
Of course there are genuine fan letters, and one hugs them to one’s breast with gratitude, and forgets the portmanteau self-seekers.
Kippers: in all the years I read about kippers for breakfast in English novels I was never quite sure what they were. Rereading a collection of Evelyn Waugh’s short pieces today, I am forced look up the word and discover they are smoked
herring. Simple as that.
My final issue of Harper’s arrives. I had decided not to renew the subscription, finding too little in it that interests me. But there is one exception. Harper’s contains the most fascinating classified section published in this country. Under ‘Personals’ there are twelve advertisements that contain offers to meet marriageable Oriental women. One claims it is ‘the World’s #1 Service,’ proffering ‘Asian women [who] desire Romance. Overseas. Asian Dreamgirl introductions.’
There are other curious ads: one for an Anarchist Cookbook, one for Literature for Skeptics, one for ‘Anti-Religious Classics that refute Christianity,’ and another for ‘Dix, a publication of Spanish Dirty Words.’ Three ads address persons who wish to obtain degrees (including Ph.d.s) by home study, one will print your book, and another will ‘write everything for you, including papers and books.’ Nudist videos are available as well as something called ‘Xandria … sensual products … plainly and securely wrapped … designed for both the timid and the bold.’ Even Xandria’s catalogue must be tantalizing. It costs four dollars.
Now that I think of it, maybe I will renew my subscription. I would miss the classifieds.
It has grown cold. I wear three layers of clothes, wrap my legs in a blanket in the evening when I sit to read or watch the news on television, and wear a hat to go out. At noon it is a little warmer. I think of the variety of temperatures a day in Maine can have. In summer, I’ve noticed, it is spring in the early morning, summer at noon, autumn in late afternoon, and winter at night.
And yet, when I am working well in my study, it always seems the right temperature, the true climate. Balzac, when he left a party to go to his study for the night, used to say: ‘I must rejoin the real world.’
A very elderly lady stops me in church on Sunday to tell me she is writing her ‘memories.’ She says a writer she knows wanted to put her in his book, and asked her permission to use parts of her life. She was very indignant at this suggestion, and said if anybody wrote about her, it would be she, not he. Elizabeth Taylor had the same reaction to others writing about her. She decided to write her autobiography and announced: ‘I am my own industry.’
While Sybil is away at a book fair, my friends and neighbors Ted Nowick and Bob Taylor and I decide to visit Grand Manan, a Canadian island in the North Atlantic that one reaches by boat from Canada’s St. Stephen. To my mind this will always be Willa Cather’s island; she spent about twelve summers there, the last time in 1940. In the only story she wrote about the place, ‘Before Breakfast,’ published posthumously, she described the difficulties of reaching the place she loved: ‘The trip up to Boston was long and hard, by trains made up of the cast-off coaches of liquidated railroads, and then by the two worst boats in the world.’ This is a condensation of her own laborious trips. They were actually longer and harder. From Boston she took the train to Lubec in Maine, and then a small ferryboat to Campobello Island, and then another, larger boat to Grand Manan, the place she chose because at that time it ‘wasn’t even on the map.’
Fifty years later, we drive to Calais, then to St. Stephen (here you cross the Canadian border), and thence to Buck’s Harbour, where we take a luxury liner, complete with restaurant, lounges, and room for a hundred cars, across the Bay of Fundy to the island. We stay at a curiously named inn, the Compass Rose. We are the only guests—all the summer and fall visitors, Maine citizens, and ‘snowbirds’ have long since gone south.
The next morning, in the deep fog that lingered on the island for our entire three-day visit, opening up now and then to allow us a glimpse of the harbor and the sea, we set out to find Cather’s cabin. Most people we asked did not know of its existence, but eventually we were directed to an obscure dirt road going through woods to the water, and there it was. In her story Cather says:
The cabin modestly squatted in a tiny clearing between a tall spruce wood and the sea,—sat about fifty yards back from the edge of the red sandstone cliff which dropped some two hundred feet to a narrow beach—so narrow that it was covered at high tide. The cliffs rose sheer on this side of the island, were undercut in places, and faced the east.
The story that follows is slight, taking place in the very early morning. After his first, bad night in the cabin, an elderly man is filled with despair at the closeness of death and his love for the wooded, glacial-rock island ‘off the Nova Scotia coast.’ ‘Why bother to put his eye drops in,’ he wonders. ‘Why patch up? What was the use … of anything? Why tear a man loose from his little rock and shoot him out into the eternities?… A man had his little hour, with heat and cold and a time-sense suited to his endurance.’
He takes a walk ‘to the edge of the spruce wood and out on a bald headland that topped a cliff two hundred feet above the sea.’ The sight of a young girl (a ‘plucky youth,’ Cather calls her) taking a quick dip in the ‘death-chill’ of the water cheers the old man. His appetite for life is renewed. He walks back to his cabin eager for his breakfast.
Old inhabitants of the island report that in all those years, from 1925, when she had the cottage built to her specifications, until 1940, when she stopped coming in summer because of the war, Cather remained secluded, unfriendly, encouraging no visitors, making very few friends. She had Edith Lewis, her longtime companion, proceed her on the narrow path to the inn to discourage unwanted encounters. We follow her path along the top of the cliffs, careful to stay ahead of her shade, through heavy woods. We find the footpath she and Miss Lewis must have taken to get to the hotel, the Whale Cove Cottage Inn, at which they usually dined. A vestigial path is there, much overgrown. I sense Cather’s lingering presence.
We search for her little garden, the wild-rose-bush hedge she writes about. Only the ‘patch of lawn’ in front of the cabin is there, now gone to rough-cut weeds. We look through the locked windows to see that her heirs have redone the tiny sitting room (how she would have despised that, she who railed against anything ‘modernized’). It would be nice to climb up the narrow stairs to her bare study, with its handmade desk, but of course the little cabin (disconcertingly small) is locked securely, having twice been vandalized, the caretaker of the local historical museum tells us later. (Her typewriter is displayed in the entryway to the museum.) In this study she worked on what turned out to be lesser works, Shadows on the Rock, Lucy Gayheart, her collection of essays, and Sapphira and the Slave Girl.
The study is the only upstairs room. I remember that Cather’s first, minuscule bedroom was in the attic of the tiny Red Cloud house. Ever since that time she seems to have hated being ‘underneath,’ at the mercy of sound and interruption by footsteps and noise over her head. I seem to remember that when she lived on Bank Street in New York, she rented the apartment directly above her to prevent hearing what Myra Henshawe, in My Mortal Enemy, was so plagued by: ‘We are unfortunate in the people who live over us,’ Oswald, her husband, explains to Nellie, the narrator. And the dying Myra adds: ‘They tramp up there all day long like cattle … beating my brains into a jelly.’ Cather loved her cabin for its ‘great quiet, in this great darkness.’
There was no telephone line in her time; now, of course, the wires are there. Once there were ‘four waterfalls, white as silver, pouring down the perpendicular cliff walls.’ Now we see only one, thin and almost tentative. But the weir she wrote about still stands in the water, within sight of her window had the trees not grown up so much. Weirs, I learn, are fishing traps, made of huge, pointed tree trunks, driven into the water and holding what is here called twoine (from twine?), nets into which herring swim and then cannot escape. At high tide the sticks are barely visible through the fog, reminding me of Whistler’s watercolor Southend at Sunset. Although I suspect the vague sticks in that work are a distant pier.
(I am always struck by how the memory of a work of art often shapes, indeed determines, what I come to see in the natural world. Would Cather’s weir have looked the same that fog-filled day had I not known the Whistler?)
When we leave, Ted educ
ates me about the trees on Cather’s land, tamaracks, which are pines with red-brown bark and needles that turn lacelike and bright yellow in the fall when every other pine remains green, and the scrubby shrubs on the headlands that are pygmy, speckled alders. Then he walks to the rear of the cabin, where there is a crumbling stone wall. I fantasize, seeing Cather’s heavy white hands (or Edith Lewis’s more delicate ones) building that low wall from the stones everywhere on the beaches and headlands. When we go back to the car, I find that Ted has carried away a small cobble-shaped one for me. I demur but am secretly pleased, having thought about ‘liberating’ one myself but being too cowardly to do so. Now it sits, solid and reassuring, on a corner of my desk, reminding me of a fine writer productively at work fifty years ago in a secluded, quiet, and beautiful place. Like mine.
Odd. I had the curious feeling Cather was still around there somewhere, resenting our intrusion on her privacy, waiting impatiently for us to leave.
On our way back to the inn, we stop at a small grocery store and buy some canapes to have with our evening drink. Herring, of course, is the major catch on the island and the main contents of its small canning industry. I buy a can of kippers, feeling smug about my newly acquired education.
I am reprimanded by an eighty-year-old correspondent. ‘Let me set the record straight,’ she says. ‘You are badly mistaken about the nature of old age.’ Her view differs from mine in many respects. She writes that she never thinks about the slow, inexorable decay of her body, as I seem ‘obsessively’ to do. Unlike me, she does not despair at losses and decline, but instead rejoices in what remains to her, and daily celebrates the gift of time she has been granted.
What shall I reply? That I could not write of her fortunate experiences in growing old, only of my own. I needed to be honest about what I felt, not dishonestly cheerful. ‘I needed to set my own record straight, unpalatable as it might be to some readers,’ I wrote to her. I have written this, in different words, to other protesters against, to them, my unjustified pessimism. Some of her words echo in my mind. I go to The Writer’s Quotation Book, published by Bill Henderson’s Pushcart Press in a neat, small, pocket-size book, and find what I thought I remembered. Gloria Swanson (married numerous times) said: ‘I’ll be eighty this month. Age, if nothing else, entitles me to set the record straight before I dissolve. I’ve given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can’t divorce a book.’
Extra Innings Page 10
