by Glyn Maxwell
‘An hour for books,’ says Emily, absorbed.
She starts finding things of interest: eight big black volumes of Shakespeare – ‘why clasp any hand but this?’ – a battered blue book she takes and weighs in her palm – ‘of Poe I know too little to think’ – a tattered Byron with the spine gone – ‘I’ve heard it argued that the poet’s genius lay in his foot, as the bee’s prong and his song. . . are you stronger than these?’ – right at me, making me stronger from foot to forehead – then a dozen hefty red titles – ‘Father gave me quite a trimming about Charles Dickens and these modern literati’ – which of course we all three smile at for different reasons, especially when she wags her finger and sounds an old soul’s Yankee voice: nothing compared to past generations that flourished when I was a boy!’
She reads for a while and I try not to stare at her reading. Kerri shuffles her feet a bit to show it’s cold and time’s troops are marching by. I ask Emily if her parents encouraged her to read, and she closes the book she was reading. ‘My mother doesn’t care for thought, and father. . .’ She sets the book back neatly where it was. ‘Too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books but begs me not to read them, he fears they joggle the mind.’
The wind gets up and dark leaves blow about her ankles. She watches till they settle.
‘No one taught me,’ she says.
I feel a drop of rain. It’s too dark to read a thing now.
She asks how one may borrow from this library and we both simply spread our hands to say do what on earth you please, so she chooses a dense little brown volume from the shelf, comes over and drops it straight into Kerri’s coat pocket. I could see the name on the spine in golden, GEORGE ELIOT, but not which one it was, and I’d forget to ever ask. But ‘a little granite book to lean on,’ was what she said to Kerri. Then she insisted on joining in with us pulling the covers over the stalls, and tying them in place with all these frayed black ropes.
*
‘My life closed twice before its close –
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me.
So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.’
Her voice doesn’t so much cease as disappear and she sits down between the tall lit candles in the chilly hall. We burst into acclaim, I start musing on whether it’s possible to rig up applause on a loop, which I could maybe control from a switch at my seat. For this will never bloody suffice. I make do with clapping like a loon, nobly supported by my tiny class (or most of them, Barry’s not turned up again, nor has Samira, nor Ollie) along with two or three Academy girls at the front including long fair Isabella my one-time student. The desk-boy from the Inn came, bless him, but I see him creeping out now the reading’s over. And a portly bearded man in a hat I noticed earlier in the pub. Mimi slid in at the back about halfway through, the worse for wear I thought, and loudly requested ‘that one with the fly’ to which request the poet politely acceded.
I’m afraid the applause will stop if I stop, so I twine my arm through a chair-back to carry it to the stage and keep clumsily clapping away. When I lower the chair down nearby the poet I’m still at it, last man standing, then I sit.
A quite incredible reading, Miss Dickinson! I’m sure you all have questions before we adjourn to the Saddlers Inn? So, any questions. . .
This, as in all poetry readings, silences Creation.
How about I start us off. . . Um, Miss Dickinson, this maybe sounds silly, well it does now – ha! – but what do you like to have around you when you write?
‘For companions?’
I nod and she smiles downward as if she’ll say nothing. . . Then:
‘Hills, and the sundown, and a dog as large as myself, that my father bought me.’
The audience love this, and she looks right at them. ‘They’re better than beings, because they know but don’t tell.’
A dog person not a cat person then (I play safe to the pet lobby) and Emily shudders to confirm the impression: ‘My ideal cat has a huge rat in its mouth, just going out of sight.’
Some dog-lovers sway with vindication as she adds: ‘though going out of sight in itself has a peculiar charm,’ which leaves everyone blankly smiling. ‘Carl would please you,’ she tells the front row, ‘he’s dumb, and brave.’
One of the Academy girls asks with biro poised: ‘Miss Dickinson whom would you regard as your main influences.’
She smiles: ‘For poets I have Keats, and Mr and Mrs Browning’ (and Lily happily hisses ‘Keats!’ along the chairs to show them she remembers life a week ago) ‘for prose, Mr Ruskin, Sir Thomas Browne, and the Revelations’
‘What about Whitman?’ Heath asks flatly, as if she had it coming.
She puts her hands together in her lap. ‘Mr Whitman, Mr Whitman. . .’ she ponders, only to reveal with quite a fierce little smile to no one, ‘I never read his book but was told it was disgraceful!’
Her new devotees laugh who’ve not read him either, but Heath has, and sits there. She notices his stillness:
‘Perhaps you smile at me. I had no monarch in my life, and can’t rule myself.’
Heath looks uncomfortable and nods by way of support.
‘Could you tell me how to grow?’ she asks him, innocent of mischief.
Blindsided, he looks grave, stares away, quits the field.
‘Or is it unconveyed,’ she says, looking up at the rafters, ‘like melody or witchcraft. . . I’ve no tribunal.’
All smile amiably as she passeth understanding.
Breezily I ask if she follows world affairs, and she makes that clear as day: ‘Won’t you please tell me who the candidate for President is?’
We all mention names you know and the candles cringe with shame.
‘I don’t know anything more about the affairs in the world than if I were in a trance. Do you know of any nation about to besiege South Hadley? If so, do inform me – I’d be glad of a chance to escape, if we’re to be stormed.’
Out of the laughter Caroline ventures: ‘Emily, if I may, when you say your soul selects its own society, do you mean you rather prefer your own company to, well, to company? Do you think you have a tendency to avoid people?’
I don’t expect her to agree quite but what do I know? ‘They talk of hallowed things, aloud, and embarrass my dog. He and I don’t object to them, if they’ll exist their side.’
Lily digs it and ventures ‘How d’you like know good poetry when you see it?’
Emily shakes her head slowly, then breathes in sharply – ‘If I – read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that’s poetry. If I feel physically as if – the top of my head were taken off! I know that’s poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?’
The consensus murmurs there is not, and then she closes her eyes and sighs from memory: ‘Though earth and man were gone, and suns and universes ceased to be, and Thou wert left alone, every existence would exist in Thee.’
(There’s a space for mooing in awe which is duly filled, while I find some recklessness to hand) Is that a new poem, Miss Dickinson?
She smiles sadly, and it hits me too late, not hers at all –
‘Gigantic Emily Brontë. . .’ (We all nod, we knew that) ‘Of whom Charlotte said: Full of ruth for others, on herself she had no mercy. ’
Caroline is nodding wisely, and Lily pipes up: ‘Bit random but: when you say about hearing a fly when you died right? which is mentally good, and about life closing twice and that? like, what is it you mean if that’s not moronic.’
Emily frowned, then thought, then said she’d tell a little story, of a woman who came to her door in Amherst one morning, ‘an Indian woman with gay baskets and a – dazzling baby, at the kitchen door. Her little boy once died, she said, death to her – dispelling him. I asked her
what the baby liked, and she said – to step. . . ’
Lily devilishly shivers, when a husky voice from the back inquires: ‘You ever send a valentine?’
The audience frowns and giggles and turns, enjoying that question, and I notice both Caroline and Heath staring back curiously at unbothered Mimi for longer than they need to. I assumed everyone knew everyone, as we do when we know no one.
Sure she sent a valentine:
‘Put down the apple, Adam,
And come away with me;
So shalt thou have a pippin
From off my father’s tree. . .’
She may not have meant to but she says this straight at Niall, who visibly freezes in the beam. His eyes are wider than I’ve seen them. His shy paralysis seems to slow the atmosphere, and though she’s no longer looking at him, the expression on his face is you and me in the dark together – out of which she mines a gem for him and him only: ‘I work to drive the awe away. Yet – awe – impels the work.’
*
On the short walk to the Saddlers from the village hall – Emily suggested we prolong it by walking the long way clockwise round the lamp-lit oval green – several of her listeners made their private move towards her side, but I noticed that the one she sought out and found was Heath. By the time I reached them, rather fearing he might be indelicate or rude in some way, they were parting most politely: ‘I’ve read nothing of Turgenev’s,’ I heard her say, ‘but thank you for telling me – I will seek him immediately.’
She then walked some slow yards with Iona McNair, who said she liked that bracelet very much, and the poet, having touched Iona’s white scarf and wondered at the material, said gaily: ‘Santa Claus was very polite to me last Christmas. I hung up my stocking on the bedpost as usual – I had a perfume bag, a bottle of otto-of-rose to go with it, a sheet of music, a china mug with Forget me not upon it, a watch case. . .’ she couldn’t remember for a moment and now everyone was listening. . . ‘Abundance of candy! Also two hearts at the bottom of it all, which I thought looked rather ominous.’
Lily came up explaining why last Christmas in Camden Town was a total mare, then asked her, before I could do anything, how she went about being published, to which Emily cheerfully pronounced: ‘Two editors of journals came to my father’s house and asked me for my mind, and when I asked them why – they said they’d use it for the world.’
She chuckled at this sufficing answer, so Lily did, actually I did, then one of the Academy girls quickened her pace and asked if Emily enjoyed a bit of – we couldn’t catch what – to which she said: ‘To live is so startling, it leaves little room for other occupations!’ and all wondered and jested as to what had been asked, and all jingled and jangled into the inn so pleased they’d chosen to attend.
*
We’d lost a few by now. Niall, who had shied away – shying was Nialls active verb – Heath, who parted from the poet with a stiff male bow from some bygone century in his mind, the Academy girls who’d got all their answers, and Mimi, who’d had her fun. Lily, Bella, Iona and Caroline sat down around a table set for tomorrow’s breakfast. The desk-boy listened from Reception as he doodled in a ledger. Our company was briefly augmented by Barry Wilby, who dropped by to make his apologies – ‘duties, Teacherman, beaucoup de duties’ – and wanted to ask ‘Mrs Dixon where she gets her ideas’ – but at that point I called a halt, for the lady looked fatigued and on our time not hers.
All four women rose to escort her upstairs, and Barry cried ‘Another day!’ and though I summoned up the speech to tell her how I felt, by the time those words came in their nervous Sunday best I stood alone, in the cold on the lamp-lit village green, watching her one amber square of light go on in the wooden roof of the inn. I’d done all I could do with a smile. I didn’t expect to be here in the morning. I waited till her room went dark.
*
On the way back I swing by Student Services – Kerri’s given me a key now and I can pick up what’s there. These are.
Samira Sharma: ‘I Have the “Hots” for Lily’
If we all spent a night in here
I would stay awake until you sleep
and then I would overcome my fear
and cut a red hair for me to keep.
(*I do NOT have the hots for Lily.)
Pity for Orlando (I. McNair. Poetry/Maxwell)
I don’t think – I can risk it –
It is not – my Place to say –
But I want to give that boy – a Biscuit –
And tell him – Things will be okay –
I collect them, as if I’ll need them, if I’m dead I may well need them, and I lock the office behind me.
*
At the end of his Letter to a Young Contributor Thomas Higginson wrote the following, and I thought I’d tape it to my bedroom wall before turning in for the night. He couldn’t figure out anything either – and with his one great Young Contributor he both grasped and missed his chance – but he sensed there was a place where it would matter to have tried. He was a famous abolitionist.
War or peace, fame or forgetfulness, can bring no real injury to one who has formed the fixed purpose to live nobly day by day. I fancy that in some other realm of existence we may look back with some kind interest on this scene of our earlier life, and say to one another, – ‘Do you remember yonder planet, where once we went to school?’
* * *
Week Three –October 10th
I’m wondering why the sky is blue.
I always know why it isn’t when it isn’t but I’ve woken and it is, I’m looking at it.
Or I was looking at it, now I’m gazing into it, sky did that to the verb, blue did that to the preposition, bequeathed it time and sweetness and reach, not bad going for empty space. I’m gazing into blue sky.
With the deep breaths I concede: it’s October, autumn, fall, falling, landing, landed. Thursday again. I’m alive in the sense of being where I was, I’m still contracted, hired in some shape or form – there’ll be a class to teach.
But since something brought me here, thought why to, chose when to, there must be a reason it was cloudy before and now it’s perfectly fine. What chose me for this – didn’t it choose the weather too? Now there’s a way in. Tap the void on the shoulder, see what turns around.
The void has personality or not, is present or not. Give it a capital V and it’s The Void! that V lights out for the visible horizon, the oid is deep enough for aliens to swim in, see? on speaking terms already -
But small v, the void? doesn’t want to be talked to.
Here I am, perched on the bed upon my tartan coverlet, my trusty flying carpet that sailed me here through the galaxy. I pat it like my dog. I give everything there is a personality, I decide to meet them all, I place them all along a zodiac of character and yet the void’s a void? My own heart let me have more pity on. . .
Everything is someone. Colours, cutlery, capital letters. As complacent, B indignant, C tricky, D worthy, I can’t help this, never could. The hot tap thinks the cold tap’s common, the cold tap thinks the hot tap’s precious. I back out of my small bathroom peacemaking – you’re both right for pete’s sake – my fingers are clannish brothers with a secret, my toes a mum and her babies, my slippers hush me: pipe down they’re trying to sleeps and yet the void’s a void? Perhaps thats all that humans do, fill the space with folks to meet. . . My own heart let me have more pity on. . .
Something brought me here. Or an accident befell me and while I wait to be well - well what? – something keeps me here. While it keeps me here I do this work. Why should I do it? Do I grow old if I don’t? Do I grow old if I do?
The sky is blue. If it stays like this all day I will have to respond, lead my students out of doors, start walking and not stop, breast the horizon like a tape and keep running, seek and find the trail of what brought me here, ask questions till it’s black and even I’ve been left behind.
I have to start considering how one departs this place. Ah
:
My own heart let me have more pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet. . .
Look whose books are open on my desk in the grand old sunlight. Father Gerard Manley Hopkins, of the Society of Jesus. He is coming here today, Hopkins, which he furthermore can’t be, so I had better prepare some questions.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet. . .
Where I’m from I don’t believe a word the little priest believed. Not a word, not The Word. And yet to subtract what that was from his work leaves the poems still immensely standing, gold, white-gold cathedrals in splendour, numberless cathedrals throng an infinite sunny common. There I worship daily, hurrying through shadow. How do I believe?
I remember, from where I’m from, sitting in a bedroom while my small child was trying to sleep. It was Christmas Eve in England at the turn of the century. She believed what children do. Make-believe, made to believe. A great old red-and-silver stocking was draped at the bottom of the bed. Her mouth was open on the pillow, her breaths trembling, mine were steady, eyes shut. I must organize the magic in an hour or so, stay awake to sort the miracle, get in costume, play the part. . .
I am Father Christmas, and so is Father Christmas. She and I knew different worlds, worlds that couldn’t both be so. Between them something poured and streamed – belief one way, compassion the other, and now they both flow both ways, poor believer, poor nothing. . .
Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile’s
not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather – as skies
Betweenpie mountains – lights a lovely mile.
These words are still surrounded by what surrounded them. It surrounds me too, and it wore blue this morning, cloudless, all its mountains moved, I need coffee, I need orange juice – I want my betweenpie – I have three appointments, I am not where you still are, I have quietly shut the door and am off on my zigzag path.
