For once she did not bother to confront him. She should have buried her own star-crossed pet.
*
Flowers of two kinds borne of different trees … male in an elongated cluster, female in a round ball
When the South was the South and not the same. Not the same as up here or out there or yonder. When: she was learning who she was. Loveable. Unloveable. Loved. Unloved. Loving. Beginning to walk upright. Loving it.
*
Going back in the summer is preferred to winter. When it’s all leafed out. Grown over. Winter is bald. The hawks are seen as easily as they see us. We see the new houses on the denuded hills. The hawks see the denuded hills beyond the houses, where the newer ones will be. The hawks see the future too clearly. They are nowhere in it.
durable wood prized for longbows; known by hunters as bow wood
Going back is not the same as not going back. Going back is not the same as not going off to begin with. We leave to be who we will become. We go back to see who we are. We are no less than our struggle or that of our foes, even those we would make ciphers.
Who died there. Who is dying. Who forfeited a once-perfect breast. Whose once-lovely daughter fell asleep with a desolate cigarette. Whose body wears a bag to pee in. Who is a hundred percent queer now. Who knew it all along. Whose youngest son drowned in their stupid bean-shaped pool. Who got born again. Who made a pile of money gypping people out of their savings. Who was a party switcher. Who came home from the city to help his widower father fend. Who is left. Who left.
*
Whose heartwood yields a dye comparable to fustic.
Who shot himself to death in her paternal grandmother’s bed. With a target pistol. Who ran in the room to straddle the body, pump the dead poet’s chest. Who ran out the door. Who called the police.
Who opened their doors to the mourners. Who was wedded to whom the same afternoon on Petit Jean Mountain.
Who photographed the last blaze rose in the rented yard.
She remembers. She misremembers. She disremembers. Like everyone.
She goes back. She doesn’t go down. There. Anymore. It is not poetry. It smells of mortality. Sepulchral.
And here is the peeling rent house by the ravine. This is the ravine where she threw the telephone receiver to make herself stop calling and calling when one was there and the other was not.
This is where everyone who heard, who knew or thought they knew, or felt as if they had known entered a separate landscape of pain and loneliness. Everyone came and stood apart like a boat in a field. Then came the young men in uniforms. One young woman in uniform. And the poet was covered, rather he was bagged, tagged and taken away. Very little blood. Only powder burns. No more sound.
And everyone who came to hear, gradually, they came too and sat on the stoop or stood in the garden more or less motionless. Photographs were taken of the last blaze rose. People who didn’t like each other, who had never liked each other, felt a burning love. Backs were patted and the lady cat was stroked. Old stories got told. Everyone drank until they went to sleep wherever they folded over. And on the weekend came the musicians, out of the Delta and over the mountains in the beat-up bus.
The memory of it is very hard. It goes down. There. Geotropic. It would take a long time to fell. It is not poetry. It is a scratched, repetitive record of loving. Unloving. Losing. Leaving.
Madura pomifera: The largest specimen on record was a sixty footer. Over. In Hickory Plains, Prairie County. The soil wouldn’t raise one that tall. In the Ozarks.
*
Over here is the periphery. From whence you came. Can you describe it. In detail. What you remember is moving. Backward. You do not see the beginning. Words scumble the view.
Here is the center of your enterprise. Your life. Almost miraculously, without a sound, it grew up around you protective and full. You abide in it. Volatile yet alive. Living. Loving. Loved. For the venation of one’s own leaf. Into its plenary.
Back there. Down. When. Is the ruinous forever. Yearning for perfection.
*
YOU
Sometimes in our sleep we touch
The body of another woman
And we wake up
And we know the first nights
With summer visitors
In the three storied house of our childhood.
Whatever we remember,
The darkest hair being brushed
In front of the darkest mirror
In the darkest room.
—Frank Stanford
(August 1, 1948-June 3, 1978)
Loren Eiseley. University of Nebraska-Lincoln Archives/Special Collections, UNL Libraries.
The Strange Case of Dr. Eiseley
Phillip Lopate
LOREN EISELEY DIED IN 1977, just over twenty years ago. At the time he had a solid reputation, based on titles such as The Immense Journey, The Night Country and The Unexpected Universe, as a scientist who could write, though name recognition was beginning to fade, going the way of Joseph Wood Krutch and the other worthy, dusty science and nature writers who had served their purpose, laying the groundwork for the contemporary school of Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas, Edward Hoagland, Gretel Ehrlich, Barry Lopez, Bill McKibbon, Scott Russell Sanders, etc. etc. I myself was happy to ignore him, being somewhat biased against science/nature writing in general.
Why the bias? Several reasons: 1) as an ignoramus about science and the mechanics of the natural world, I do not enjoy being lectured on matters I will never grasp; 2) I abominate the tone of wonderment and abstract mystic awe which afflicts the “alone with the universe” genre; 3) I miss the human tension, the drama of individual behavior in relationships and the ensuing guilt which informs the literature I like best; 4) I mistrust the persona of the nature writer, the too-often pious, self-righteous goody-goody who considers himself the last noninterfering witness of a wilderness about to be overrun by dunderheads.
All this by way of saying that, before reaching the conclusion that Loren Eiseley was a major American writer, I had to overcome considerable resistance.
It did not happen at one stroke. When I was reading materials for my anthology, The Art of the Personal Essay, I kept being urged to check out Loren Eiseley. I read The Night Country, which convinced me that he was master of the sentence and of a classically meandering essay construction. But I was still put off by his posture of lofty isolation, which seemed to lack humor. (I find it very difficult to appreciate any literature which is not somewhere humorous.) Then a friend sent me ‘The Star Thrower,” his signature essay, a most peculiar meditation touching on seacoasts, evolution, death, Goethe, Eiseley’s deaf mother, mental illness and the struggle to commit to life. I was struck by its go-for-broke air of at times inconsolable bitterness. Singular it was, and dark—almost too harsh for my taste. I didn’t know what to make of the rawness of pain underneath the immense knowledge and Emersonian epigram. In the end I realized I didn’t understand the essay enough to include it, and put Eiseley aside, much as one might pull back from a brilliant acquaintance who is simply too neurotic for easy companionship.
But something about Loren Eiseley kept nagging at me. I felt I had failed him as a reader, not he me as a writer. Then, in a used bookstore, I came upon his autobiography, All the Strange Hours, published two years before his death. On the back cover was a photograph of this gaunt man with a haunted expression and gray pompadour, very much the male literary ideal of an earlier, more existentialist era, wearing a raincoat, a brother of Philip Marlowe. The jacket carried a quote from W. H. Auden, saying “I have eagerly read anything of his I could lay my hands on.” (Interestingly, Auden also had a liking for Raymond Chandler.) I bought it, let a year go by, then picked it up. Aha! I saw immediately that here was the key—for me at least—to all of Eiseley’s works, which would allow me to return to the earlier books with keener understanding. I have rarely received as much satisfaction or enlightenment from a memoir. That this out-of-print masterpiec
e, surely the greatest American autobiography that is out of print, fell into my hands at precisely the moment when the memoir has come to dominate the literary scene, was irony enough; but even more delicious was the way its concentrated intelligence, its restraint, its disenchanted obligations to wisdom and maturity acted as a reproach to the victimized darlings of the season.
*
All the Strange Hours is fittingly subtitled “The Excavation of a Life.” Eiseley’s scientific training was in archaeology and anthropology, which gave him a long, long perspective into the shiftings of time, his philosophical obsession. In the twilight of his life—though still shy of seventy—he approached himself as a ruin: “A biography is always constructed from ruins but, as any archaeologist will tell you, there is never the means to unearth all the rooms, or follow the buried roads, or dig into every cistern for treasure. You try to see what the ruin meant to whoever inhabited it and, if you are lucky, you see a little way backward into time.”
Eiseley uses two devices to structure his criss-crossed ventures into the past. The first, and most important, is the “strange hours” promised by the title, a reexamination of moments when he came face-to-face with the uncanny, whose continuing resonance within him he seemed to find much more indicative of what counts in a life than any straight narration of external events.
The memories evoked in All the Strange Hours frequently revolve around cruelty and shame. Auden, whom he came to befriend, asked him what public event he remembered from his childhood, and he muttered something about a prison break. But later, another memory surfaced. As a boy he was playing with some chums, trying to escape the overprotective care of his deaf, hysterical mother: “She pursued us to a nearby pasture and in the rasping voice of deafness ordered me home. My comrades of the fields stood watching. I was ten years old by then. I sensed my status in this gang was at stake. I refused to come. I had refused a parental order that was arbitrary and uncalled for and, in addition, I was humiliated. My mother was behaving in the manner of a witch. She could not hear, she was violently gesticulating without dignity, and her dress was somehow appropriate to the occasion. … Even today, as though in a far-off crystal, I can see my running, gesticulating mother and her distorted features cursing us. And they laughed, you see, my companions. Perhaps I, in anxiety to belong, did also. That is what I could not tell Auden. Only an unutterable savagery, my savagery at myself, scrawls it once and once only on this page.”
In All the Strange Hours, many confessions are flung out “once and once only” in this lacerating manner by Eiseley, who seems to be purposely violating his privacy—the encapsulated, solitary silence of a son raised by a deaf mother—only to return to it, spasmodically, the next moment. Rarely has a memoir exhibited such an odd mixture of the bared and the withheld. Mabel Langdon, Eiseley’s wife and lifelong support, is mentioned only three times—and then, only in passing. We do not learn in the book, for instance, that she was his high school English teacher, a woman seven years his senior, who devoted her life to him. The biographer Gale E. Christianson reproduces a letter from Mabel, stating that Eiseley was only following her stated wish that he protect the privacy of their marriage by not writing about it, though one might also wonder if long conjugal descriptions would have marred the picture he was trying to create of himself as a solitary. In any event, his reticence on this key relationship, like many other omissions, creates an intriguing space of freedom in the reader. Since he is so honest and forthcoming on other matters, you do not begrudge him his secrets.
It was Auden, in an essay-review of an Eiseley collection published in the New Yorker, who noted: “Dr. Eiseley’s autobiographical passages are, most of them, descriptions of numinous encounters—some joyful, some terrifying. After reading them, I get the impression of a wanderer who is often in danger of being shipwrecked on the shores of dejection. … I suspect Dr. Eiseley of being a melancholic.” Eiseley, a devotee of old English writers, would have relished this lineage with Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy. His fellow Nebraskan and good friend Wright Morris nicknamed him “Schmerzie,” short for weltschmerz, or world-pain. Certainly he comes across in his autobiography as a connoisseur of painful memories: his dying father, listless around him, perks up when his older brother Leo enters the hospital room; contracting tuberculosis himself, he is bluntly told by doctors that he has no chance to live; becoming a drifter in the Depression, he is almost pushed to his death by a railroad worker, and a fellow hobo gives him the lowdown: “Just get this straight. It’s all there is and after a while you’ll see it for yourself. … The capitalists beat men into line. Okay? The communists beat men into line. Right again? … Men beat men, that’s all.” Later on, a full professor and provost of a distinguished university, Penn, he is sickened by academic politics and remembers this saying: Men beat men. Eiseley makes all his periods and personae coexist on the page, so that you still see the anxious ten-year-old running from his mother, or the drifter hanging onto the boxcar for dear life, when he is acting the part of university dignitary.
And beyond that, you still see the animal lurking in the man, a Darwinian ghost. The second device by which Eiseley structures his memoir is to superimpose on the narrator various fellow creatures—a rat, a dog, a cat, a worm, a wolf—whom he encounters along the way. Both as an evolutionist and as a loner, more comfortable, it would seem, with any other animals than humans, Eiseley takes the position, as he wrote in The Immense Journey: “In many a fin and reptile foot I have seen myself passing by—some part of myself, that is, some part that lies unrealized in the momentary shape I inhabit.” He is never far from glimpsing what he calls “the frightening diversity of the living,” or the instability of organic forms, over the long haul, which gives him an almost schizophrenically empathic vision of pullulating creation, such as one finds in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway— though Eiseley is calmer about it.
Among the most poignant episodes of creature identifications is the one in which he accompanies a medical researcher to the animal house to fetch a dog for purposes of dissection. “We entered. My colleague was humane. He carried a hypodermic, but whatever dog he selected would be dead in an hour. Now dogs kept penned together, I rapidly began to see, were like men in a concentration camp, who one after another see that something unspeakable is going to happen to them. As we entered this place of doleful barks and howlings, a brisk-footed, intelligent-looking mongrel of big terrier affinities began to trot rapidly about. I stood white-gowned in the background trying to be professional, while my stomach twisted.
“My medical friend (and he was and is my friend and is infinitely kind to patients) cornered the dog. The dog, judging from his restless reactions, had seen all this happen before. Perhaps because I stood in the background, perhaps because in some intuitive way, perhaps—oh, who knows what goes on among the miserable of the world?—he started to approach me. At that moment my associate seized him. The hypodermic shot home. … He did not struggle, he did not bite, even when seized. Man was a god. It had been bred into this creature’s bones never to harm the god. They were immortal and when they touched one kindly it was an ecstasy. … But he had looked at me with that unutterable expression. ‘I do not know why I am here. Save me. I have seen other dogs fall and be carried away. Why do you do this? Why?’”
Eiseley reports his failure to “protect, save, or help” thousands of threatened animals in his lifetime. He concludes: “Men, too, it seems, have a bit of common dog in their natures. But in the shelter by the stones the dogs slept and thought I would be coming back. They have an enormous, unquenchable, betrayed trust in man.”
The placement of that one word “betrayed” is priceless. I have said that I don’t like writing which has no humor; and, while there are funny passages in Eiseley’s memoir, much of it is grim. Then why do I like it? Because his humility, his finely honed irony, his elegant precision of language and his unflinching eye function in the same way as humor. They produce the same frisson.
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br /> Eiseley is a supremely self-conscious stylist. A bibliophile who dug through used bookstores as methodically as he excavated archeological sites, he was, for all his scientific training, as much a literary man as a scientist. In All the Strange Hours he makes the point outright that his favorite form is the personal essay: “I had long realized an attachment for the personal essay, but the personal essay was out of fashion except perhaps for humor.” He cites as his models Montaigne, Emerson, De Quincey, Coleridge, Sir Thomas Browne, Sir William Temple, Chesterton, Hardy. (Eiseley also wrote several volumes of poetry, where he showed himself more under the influence of Robinson Jeffers.) All the Strange Hours is, in effect, a memoir in the form of a string of personal essays. This is what gives the book its circling, interconnected quality. What gives the book its dignity and power is something else, something much more unique: Eiseley’s determination to go to the bottom of his experience, and cleanly distinguish between that part which he understood and that part which remained unknown, perhaps unknowable.
When his mother died, he reports: “I was an unnatural son. I did not weep. I outdid the reserve of a professional undertaker. There was nothing in me.” Standing over her grave, he thinks: “We, she and I, were close to being one now, lying like the skeletons of last year’s leaves in a fence corner. And it was all nothing. Nothing, do you understand? All the pain, all the anguish. Nothing. We were, both of us, merely the debris life always leaves in its passing. … ” On the other hand, he argues (when a Mexican driver takes the mountain curves too tightly while trying to frighten him with a speech about life not mattering) that “La vida, she does matter” and is “muy importante.” His resolve in his mature years is to live with uncertainty, to embrace ignorance and overthrow youthful certitude. As he puts it in “The Star Thrower”: “I would walk with the knowledge of the discontinuities of the unexpected universe.”
Tributes Page 31
