Drinks with Dead Poets

by Glyn Maxwell

  To steal away from human form, to back away from questions, to hide out in The Book, how the children love that game these days, oh, zealots all, disciples. . .

  Sir, my captain, my friend, my brother, your poetry is no less than a blueprint for earthly survival. And it gets studied for style options. I myself oh sod this my hand’s tired

  Something just slid under the door, Baggs.

  Thash jolly intreshting profesher.

  Go and see what it is.

  Not my shircush profesher.

  Tosser. Fine I’ll go.

  *

  Dear chief, change of plan, swing by

  the saddler’s so we can buy you drink’s

  and give you your thank-you gift etc

  peace & love Lillian © xxx

  *

  I walk, gladly, I see the pale sun battling westward home through clouds. I see the flat far grey of the lagoon between the houses, I think of the wooded island and the hut and McCloud’s little blue bike and Rowena. I turn my face to the south and think of the Coach House, I think of that girl and another girl, and all the girls and one girl, I turn to the east and think of that lone portly fellow at work on his hen with his worn old pastel crayons, I turn to the north and my bed and its tartan blanket and its books re-reading themselves on the desk.

  Most things aren’t there, or there any more, and now I think – the Saddlers was closed for something, there’ll have to be some other place, some other place to say goodbye -

  But no one’s waiting outside on the pavement. No one is anywhere.

  Till I reach the front of the Inn and there’s no mystery on earth – for -

  There’s the church and there’s the steeple, open the door and there’s the people, standing, sitting, laughing, getting jokes, sharing secrets, listening and explaining and insisting and demurring, over candles being touched alight on three great long tables.

  Look if you’ve no truck with sweet endings just don’t follow me in here, friend, you go home and sketch a cool ironic take on your general disenchantment while I stumble through this door into memory and fantasy, made lovely and inexorable by all that I’ve forgotten – that it was the last Thursday in November in our village, and Nathan Perlman hailed from Massachusetts and was dressed up to the nines, with Peter Grain beside him, suits matching very proudly, and plates and drinks were everywhere and over reception they’d hung a huge great banner in reds and blues and whites that said

  HAPPY THANKSGIVING WALT WHITMAN!

  Because why, because of Peter.

  Peter didn’t think it was right, when he heard it all from Kerri. He thought it wrong that Tina had had to go, and wrong that my students should be barred from my classes. Perhaps it was pure selfishness, as he did enjoy my classes. And because he was an employee he knew the number of the readings agent, and when they cancelled the invitation he went in after hours to the village’s locked-away landline and he dialled and invited Mr Whitman after all, but not to read or perform or lecture, just to join some forty strangers for Thanksgiving, which he and his new Yankee partner Nathan proposed to host at the Saddlers Inn. And the readings agent listened a while and agreed why not, sounds crazy.

  Of course the thing grew as word got around (this all came out over the butternut squash soup and the pumpkin bread and this New World white with its tones of passion-fruit) Peter had seen the letter to my students on the system, so they all knew about it the day before my class. They didn’t like being told what classes they could go to.

  Lily said let’s make a game of it, let’s agree, let’s pretend to be that lame, let’s see what that would feel like, guys, they can’t chuck us all out!

  And so, one by one, they opened their letters and play-acted the thing, taking up their bags, walking bleakly from my class. . .

  Steps quickening round to the Saddlers, to dress up, Gentlemen and Ladies, in pristine guest-rooms, Bluebell and Oleander, to glide downstairs arm-in-arm to the tables, seek and spot their names on the great Seating Plan, and wait for their professor to get with the programme. . .

  And to think how Nathan had nearly blown the secret this morning, looking so smart in the Saddlers at breakfast – he couldn’t help it! habit he said, but I’d not bothered to ask him more, being so taken then with the arc of my sorrows.

  Oh and Peter had lost his job, he was helping out at Mrs Gantry’s.

  I was the second shabbiest man there. The shabbiest was in a long coat and hat, he was entering conversation, tearing off bread, I heard his brimming and barrelling laughter at some crack somebody made, I saw the crust-crumbs sprinkling the grand white beard. I took my seat right opposite, shyly, couldn’t speak a word. I’d written so many to him that day, not one of which he’d ever see. I didn’t know where to start. Except not to start. And instead to range my eyes about the crowing and chattering multitude, at all the ones I knew and loved or loved and didn’t, it all felt the same, friends and strangers, the various helpers who’d been summoned from all the hostelries and halls of the place to cook and carry, uncork and uncover, to set down and serve, and the mostly elderly puzzled ones Barry must have swept up on his lonely rounds towards the great hearth-fire of the autumn.

  *

  Blanche Mimi Molly Nikki P Gough

  Roy Claude

  Bella Syrie JPJ Kornelia format

  Ollie Iona moi Lilly Niall

  Caroline Heath

  Kerri Peter Walt Nathan Sami

  small girl old lady portly man old bloke Mrs Gantry

  Rowena Barry

  McCloud small boy Maureen Mrs that Mrs this

  *

  Before the much-trumpeted turkeys arrived there was the not-insignificant matter of the Iroquois Thanksgiving Address, which Nathan and Peter did from memory, and in which all living things were thanked – in person, it felt like after a while – and everyone chanted Now Our Minds Are One whenever there was a gap, until it seemed as if they were, though not in a good way. And when it was done and everyone turned to bless a neighbour – ‘Sorry, chief, our minds are one,’ Lily warned me – Mr Whitman set his napkin aside, then rose and took the floor.

  ‘Thanksgiving!’ he began and there was hush. ‘Thanksgiving goes probably far deeper than you folks suppose,’ and he turned a wide angle to include the lot of us attendant limeys: ‘I’m not sure but its the source of highest poetry. As in parts of the Bible. Ruskin makes the, the central source of all great art to be – praise to the Almighty for life. And the universe, with its, its objects and its play of action.’

  There was a whole lot of nodding going on, whatever we believed, I was nodding for Old England.

  ‘We Americans devote an official day to it every year,’ said Whitman with brisk pride, and he clapped his hand on Nathan’s shoulder, which turned the young man gold, yet I – I sometimes fear the real article is almost dead or dying in our self-sufficient, independent Republic. . .’

  ‘U-S-A,’ ventured someone in a cautious English voice,

  ‘Gratitude,’ he went on solemnly, ‘has never been made half enough of by the moralists. Gratitude,’ he said again, ‘is indispensable to a complete character – mans or womans – the disposition to be -to be appreciative, thankful.’

  A starting ripple of applause and ‘That’s the main matter!’ he called out over it till it subsided, ‘the element, inclination – what geologists call the, the, the trend. Of my own life and writings I estimate the – giving thanks part,’ now he beamed all around, ‘with what it infers, as, essentially the best item. . .’

  I was nodding so hard he looked down at me, so I calmed into it a vague accord directed at my soup.

  ‘The best item. I should say the, the quality of gratitude – rounds the whole emotional nature. I should say love and faith would quite lack vitality without it. There are people/ and his eye sort of twinkled at this, ‘there are people – shall I call them, even, religious people, as things go? – who have no such – such trend to their disposition.’

  ‘Hear
hear!’ said someone and I resumed my rapid nodding.

  Whitman lifted his glass and beseeched, ‘Keep your face always toward the sunshine – and shadows will fall behind you!’

  We were all so hungry we buried this in clapping and cheering, and he sat back down, a shabby ancient in his might, to our tumultuous acclaim.

  I raised my glass to his, and he clinked with Iona and Peter and me and my old pal Ollie Faraday and with everyone else in reach, and then everyone out of reach, for here came Heath Bannen and Roy Ford and Kornelia Nowak and Barry Wilby bringing one of his old gents with a large dog-eared volume to be signed. . .

  And there young Nathan Perlman stands, toasting the perfected thing in fire-lit splendour, because now here come the silver trays with the golden glistening birds upon them, and I hear the young man helplessly cry out, as if a moment only dreamed of has come true in every detail. I watch him staring now it’s passing by, I watch him look down a moment, as on life goes, with the lord knows what revealed to him hereafter.

  *

  And the rest of that November day? Is what I can remember of what Walter could remember.

  I don’t recall his ever moving from his central station in that flickering firelit hall made so rich for one night only, but I do remember the slow piecemeal westward movement of the rest of us, the polite villagey scrape of chairs, the waving at waiters to serve me now I’m moving here, as we settled and formed our hemisphere of listeners.

  Fair Isabella always seemed to reach the seat she wanted, and there she soon was beside him pouring elderflower, getting him started on the old days.

  ‘Living in Brooklyn I went every week – in the mild seasons – to Coney Island – at that time a long, bare shore – which I had all to myself! Loved to race up and down the hard sand, declaim Homer and Shakespeare to the seagulls..

  ‘Did you see plays in New York, sir?’ Nathan asked and Whitman smiled: ‘As a boy I’d seen all Shakespeare’s dramas, reading them carefully the day before. . . One of my big treats was The Tempest in musical version, at the old Park. Castle Garden, Battery, splendid seasons of the Havana musical troupe, the fine band, the cool sea-breezes. . . It was there I heard Jenny Lind,’ he told beaming Iona, who could listen like a child. I found my voice at last:

  What did you read when you were young, Mr Whitman? ‘Everything I could get,’ of course, but the poet had still more to say about the old dream-city we both adored, the mention of which will always cast a spell: ‘I should say – an appreciative study of the current humanity of New York – gives the directest proof yet of successful democracy.’

  ‘The friendliest place I ever was,’ I offered from the heart.

  ‘Not only the New World’s but the world’s city,’ he proclaimed, to general satisfaction.

  ‘Did you see famous people in New York?’ Lily demanded, jerking her thumb at Ollie next to her, ‘this guy wants to know,’ and Ollie gaped and spluttered as the old man thought about it,

  ‘Andrew Jackson, Van Buren, the Prince of Wales, Charles Dickens, the first Japanese ambassadors, lots of other – celebrities of the time. Remember seeing Fenimore Cooper in a court-room in Chambers Street, carrying on a law case.’

  ‘Last of the Mohicans,’ I said helpfully, and my drunken soul flitted far to a library long ago – in an old boarding-school where we had some summer holidays – the scent of polish and the bygone – twelve years old? I would turn the ochre pages and breathe the illustrations – Sykes and his dog at the end of Oliver Twist – the eyes again! — frightful Struwelpeter, poor joyous Edward Lear – I could smell the ancient soil of the books, I was moonstruck then as now. Some journey had begun there and here I was still marching through the fields, how could that be? The length of my life had so gently disarmed each moment of its strangeness.

  Walt proceeded with his memories: ‘I remember seeing Poe -having a short interview with him in his office, second storey of a corner building – Duane? or Pearl Street?’

  ‘Poes crazy!’ Bella cried, ‘did you like him?’

  ‘He was – very cordial, in a quiet way. I’ve a – pleasingremembrance of his looks, voice, manner, matter – very kindly and human. Subdued.’

  ‘Drunk!’ hissed Molly Dunn and he indulged her: ‘Perhaps a little – jaded.’

  ‘Do you admire Lord Byron?’ Bella wondered, merrily ignored the groans.

  ‘A vehement – dash,’ said Whitman, ‘plenty of impatient democracy,’

  ‘But?’ she anticipated, rightly,

  ‘Lurid and introverted! amid all its magnetism. . .’

  ‘Hey Bell, you can tell him yourself,’ Mimi jabbed from the next table.

  ‘What d’you reckon to Poe’s work, Mr Whitman,’ Heath questioned, flushed with wine and ha! starstruck.

  Whitman smoothed his unsmoothable beard: ‘An – incorrigible propensity to. . . nocturnal themes. A demoniac undertone,’

  ‘Tell us about it!’ yelled Molly,

  ‘I want for poetry,’ Walt said, ‘the clear sun shining, fresh air blowing. The strength and power of health, not delirium. . .’

  ‘But what if you’re, y’know, delirious?’ Heath tried.

  ‘Even among the stormiest passions,’ said the old man firmly.

  I wondered if Heath was thinking of Niall, whom I noticed was long gone.

  From the other end of our table Caroline with her notebook open queried the poet on Form. He turned, responding simply and firmly: ‘The day of conventional rhyme is ended.’

  ‘Tell that to him,’ Heath muttered my way, but when I glanced up he was grinning, not quite at me, but still.

  ‘The truest and greatest poetry,’ Whitman proclaimed, ‘can never again, in English, be expressed in arbitrary and rhyming metre.’

  He said more but I was murmuring beneath, as if I thought this might get relayed somehow to Master Bannen:

  I’m allowed to think beyond what I wrote, you know. . .

  Nathan was raising up his Leaves of Grass for signature, ‘Would you do the honours, sir?’

  ‘My chief book,’ cried its creator, unrhymed and unmetrical, has as its aim. . . to utter the same old – human critter!’

  Jubilant Lily cried ‘Our teacher says poetry should be creaturely but now it can be critterly okay guys?’

  She raised her pint of cider to ‘All critters small or large!’ as the old poet scrawled his name and Nathan’s, blew on the drying ink, checked it, closed the volume.

  ‘The song of a great, composite, democratic individual – male or female. The poem of average identity – yours, whoever you are,’ which in fact he said to me, as I was in his eyeline, whoever I was. . .

  And he’d caught me at the strangest moment, thinking life could be strange no more. . .

  I was at my place of work, it seemed, in Angel, long ago, or soon or now, or once again. I was sitting at my small black desk in the utterly quiet hours of the night.

  Seven candles I’ve lit, as I do when I begin, and out there on the dark canal I see the green lamps under the bridge, they’ll go blue next, then maroon, I see the single amber streetlight above, below I see a soft dwelling glow emanating from a houseboat, and behind me in the long dark room I’ve coffee burbling on the hob. . .

  Was I wishing for this or remembering this? The poet’s voice roared and rippled, he was riding horse-drawn taxis down the spine of Manhattan,

  ‘Night-times, June or July, in cooler air, riding the whole length of Broadway listening to some yarn. I knew all the drivers then, Broadway Jack, George Storms, Pop Rice, Yellow Joe. . .’

  Then he was hearing the news of Abraham Lincoln – ‘that dark and dripping Saturday, that chilly April day. Little was said. We got every newspaper. Not a mouthful was eaten.’

  Then he was telling us of his place of work, perhaps it was that that had set me dreaming of mine, or am I stationed now at mine, helplessly recalling his? What was beginning – the end of term was beginning. Was I beginning to depart?

  ‘The upper storey
of a little wooden house near the Delaware,’ hes saying, ‘rather large, low-ceilinged, like an old ships cabin. A deep litter of books, papers, manuscripts, memoranda, two or three venerable scrap-books. Two large tables – one of St Domingo mahogany with immense leaves. . . Several glass and china vessels, some with cologne-water, some with honey, a large bunch of yellow chrysanthemums. . . Many books, some maps, the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Emerson, John Carlyles Dante. . . A strew of printer’s proofs and slips, and the daily papers. Several trunks backed up at the walls. . . Three windows in front. At one side’s the stove, with a cheerful fire of oak wood, a good supply of fresh sticks, faint aroma. . . On another side – the bed, white coverlid, woollen blankets. A huge arm-chair, yellow, polished, ample, rattan-woven seat and back, and over the latter a great wide wolfskin of hairy black and silver, spread to guard against cold, and draught. A time-worn look – and scent of old oak – attach to the chair. . . And the person occupying it!’ he roars and raises his palms to the happy company, and it’s only then, as twenty faces dip back and forth, candlelit, unlit, in and out of laughter, that I realize I spent the entire length of that account staring at someone who is staring right back.

  Patiently, blankly, like a game she’s never lost at. Then irritably what? what? then as I muddle to respond to that she’s sparking up her roll-up, cheeks colouring, whatever.

  * * *

  Week Eleven – December 5th

  I was wrestling with Wolfskin, I was evidently losing, I was cold, I need a wolfskin, and Walt’s got one in his big room, bastard, trade me your hairy silver wolfskin it’s draped across that armchair look, I would ask if I could borrow it, the black Delaware ran moonlit past the window, and as I woke his last words to us all were fading away with the last of the night, we were on the railway platform each looking at the moon coming over the hillside and he said of the moon ‘A true woman by her tact – knows the charm of being seldom seen, coming by surprise and staying a while. . .’