Swann

by Carol Shields

  “Dear Morton,” reads letter three. “Your cheerful letter arrived on a day when I particularly required a cheerful letter —”

  He is glad she waits a decent interval before answering his letters. The silence torments him, but endows her with substance.

  Ah, Sarah, Sarah. He sings her name aloud, so round a sound, so annulated—to the walls, the ceiling, the open window. The smell of flowers floats in from the garden, and he wonders if it could possibly be jasmine at this time of year. (The neighbours have mentioned jasmine; he himself wouldn’t recognize a jasmine bloom if it were right before his eyes, another admission. The neighbours have also cautioned him about leaving the windows wide open. Hasn’t he ever heard of burglars?)

  From nowhere comes an overpowering wish to share the fragrant air with Sarah Maloney of Chicago. He inhales deeply—the stillness of uncommunicated rapture!—releases his breath in a long sighing moan, like a man gasping out of the richness of his cravings, and then picks up Sarah’s letters again. They bring him—what?—solace. And connection with the world, a world redolent with intimate pleasures, sight, sound, touch, especially touch. His tongue tests the sharpness of his teeth. He imagines Sarah Maloney’s soft lips, and how they must enclose small, white, perfect teeth, opening and speaking, her teasing voice. Take off that ridiculous shirt, she says, and helps him with the buttons. Hurry, she commands, now those silly green pants, let me do the zipper for you. There. That’s better. Ah, how soft. How adorable. Like a little bird, all fluttery. Let me put my mouth there for a minute. Please. See, I told you I’d be gentle.

  It is not quite sane, Jimroy knows, these images, this caressing of a strange woman’s words, but the warmth they carry has become a necessary illusion, what he appears to need if he is going to continue his life.

  In October Jimroy was asked to address a group of graduate students and staff.

  As a Distinguished Visitor, his official title for the year, he knew he would be required from time to time to “share” his experience as a writer of literary biography. The word share is an irritant, nevertheless, for what would these hundred or so naked faces in the audience share with him? Their gaping incredulity? Their eagerness for “advice”? What?

  Back in Winnipeg he had demanded a year’s leave of absence, hoping his life might hold one more surprise. Leave had been granted without a murmur, one of the rewards of fame, and Stanford, also without a murmur, had given him the Distinguished Visitor title, plus office space—if that little cinderblock cube with cracked floor tile could be called an office—and provided him with the services of a typist, as though he would for a minute let anyone, anyone but Mrs. Lynch, handle his personal correspondence. He had, moreover, been “welcomed to the Stanford community of scholars,” as Dean Evans put it in his introduction to Jimroy’s afternoon talk.

  Welcomed? A nebulous word. An ingratiating word. An oily, blackened coin. Community of scholars? Equally cut-rate, and ludicrous, too, since they all looked like tennis players arrayed before him. A ripple of faces, eye slits and dark combed hair, a collage of open-necked T-shirts, muscular forearms, healthy hands gripping biceps, and the conditioned eagerness of beagles, the fools, the idiots.

  Stop, Jimroy hissed to himself, in God’s name, desist.

  He longed for Sarah in Chicago, serene and responsive and saying the right thing, the only thing; he longed for autumn, for the indulgent sadness that autumn brings. He longed for Manitoba and his bumbling starch-fed students who conceived of literature as a comical family product to be gnawed upon between real meals, Shakespeare’s Richard, a nutty Oh Henry bar for a vacant Saturday afternoon. And why not?

  Didn’t these monied Stanford sharpies realize that literature was only a way for the helpless to cope. Get back to your tennis courts, he wanted to shout. Out into the sunshine. Live! Universities are nothing but humming myth factories. Dear God. How we love to systemize and classify what is rich and random in life. How our fingers itch to separate the tangled threads of theme and anti-theme, moral vision and moral blindness, God and godlessness, joy and despair, as though all creativity sat like a head of cabbage on a wooden chopping block, ready to be hacked apart, first the leaves, then the hot, white heart. Scholarship was bunk—if they only, only knew. It was just a matter of time before the theoreticians got to Mary Swann and tore her limb from limb in a grotesque parody of her bodily death. But he could not think about that now; now was not the time.

  His talk, entitled “The Curve of Life: Poetry and Principle,” went well. The applause was prolonged and vigorous, even from the back of the lecture hall, where a number of people had been forced to stand throughout the hour. When Dean Evans called for questions from the floor, Jimroy was flattered to see so many hands in the air. Such strong brown arms, flailing the air, beseeching. Rather touching in a way.

  “Can you tell us if you think a biographer has a moral obligation to his or her subject?” This from the slenderest of young women, lovely, lovely, those frail shoulders. Crushable. And such hair. A voice clear as bouillon. Pour forth, my beauty.

  “What kind of moral obligation are you thinking of?” Jimroy asked her in his most tender, questioning manner.

  She hesitated, raised her lovely shoulders an eighth of an inch. “I just mean, well, if you’re looking at someone’s life, say, and you feel that there’s something, like, well, private, would you —”

  “Respect it.” Jimroy supplied. Gentlemanly. A thin smile playing on his lips, but nothing committal. He liked to think he had eyes that expressed irony.

  “Exactly. Yes. Well, sort of, yeah.”

  “I think that that would depend on whether the subject was still living. One certainly must respect the living, that goes without saying. And perhaps this will explain why my work, so far anyway, has focused on deceased poets.”

  Laughter. Right on cue. Discouraging.

  “But,” cried a young man, excitedly leaping to his feet, “What if the body of work is still alive and breathing? Don’t you feel that the work is the poet? Take Sylvia Plath —”

  “Rexroth says —” came a carroty-textured voice from the front row.

  “I believe,” said Jimroy, squelching the untimely intrusion, “that you must be alluding to the central mystery of art. Which is —” he paused and sent his long visionary look out over the heads of the audience, “which is, that from common clay, works of genius evolve. That is to say, the work often possesses a greater degree of dignity than the hand that made it.”

  “But isn’t —?”

  Jimroy cut him off. Crapshooter! Dunce! “Of course a biographer of a writer must pay as much attention to the work as to the life. But the life is more than gossip and disclosure. It is what the work feeds on. One’s own experience, before it is tainted by art.”

  “Tainted?” A challenge like gunfire.

  He was being doubted; that same shouting voice. “Yes, in a sense.” (Give the lad his orotund best.) “The highest work, the most original work, comes, I believe, out of an innocent, ignorant groping in the dark.”

  The young challenger was on his feet, but now he was seeking reconciliation. “Would you say, sir, that Pound had a sense of innocence?”

  Sir? That was better. But Jimroy paused, always defensive about Pound, always sensitive to the sin of apostasy. “In the beginning, yes. Later on, quite definitely no.” The old equivocation, the old yes-and-no trick. Dear Christ, it shamed him to think he could still get away with it.

  “But Dr. Jimroy —”

  “It’s plain mister, I’m afraid —.” He gave the audience his expansive look, hands held out to his sides, palms up, fingers crabbed, as though caught on invisible wires.

  “Mr. Jimroy, then. In your book on Starman, you said something or other about his ability to sustain the elegiac by–”

  “Up to a certain point.”

  The afternoon was a success, yes, definitely. Jimroy spoke for some minutes about the mystique of elegy, leaving behind a cloud of allusions for the astu
te to sniff out, and a final silver aperçu that never failed, an after-dinner mint, sinuously phrased, to hold in their mouths while their hands applauded. Dean Evans, summing up (“our speaker is far too modest …”) was kind enough to mention Jimroy’s three honorary degrees, one of them from Princeton.

  Coffee was served, also chocolate doughnuts—an odd choice, Jimroy thought, but enthusiastically consumed. Californians! The young woman—concupiscence—with the blade-carved shoulders came up to him and took his hand and said, “You must feel so close to Pound and Starman. Writing on them like that. You must feel, really, you know, in sync with them. As real people, I mean.”

  Jimroy detests the popular fallacy that biographers fall in love with their subjects. Such cosy presumption; its very attractiveness makes it anathema to him. So easy, so coy; this romance between writer and subject, so cheerful, so dear, such a convenience, such an invitation to sentimentality. And it is, in a sense, brother to that other misconception people hold about the writing of books: that after a certain point a book acquires a life of its own and begins, as they love to say, to write itself.

  Why in the name of God, Jimroy asks himself, does the world seek so anxiously to lighten the writer’s burden by pretending that writing is the product of a grand passion, that it is the effluent of love and ease? That it is fun?

  Writing biography, as Jimroy perfectly well knows, is the hardest work in the world and it can, just as easily as not, be an act of contempt. Think of the Sartre writing on Flaubert. Ah, God. And—closer to home—who could love Ezra Pound? Certainly not he, not Morton Jimroy, moralist manqué.

  The longer he spent closeted with the Pound papers—and his book on Pound took the better part of five years (oh waste)—the more he desired to hold the man up to ridicule. Those long months sitting at his oak table in his study in south Winnipeg, crowded by books, crowded almost to the point of suffocation, he had felt himself being slowly crushed to death by Poundian horrors. And as the horrors accumulated he became convinced that lovers of Pound’s poetry should not be spared the truth about their poet. Far from buttering over Pound’s nasty little racial theories, Jimroy found himself going out of his way to expose them. This was easy enough; all that was required was that he pile massive incriminating quotations onto the page, worrying not a whit that they might be out of context. What was the point of context anyway? Wasn’t Pound, he said to himself, wasn’t the flatulent flabby Ezra Pound always and fatally out of context himself? Yes, oh yes! And poor Dorothy, did anyone ever spare a thought for Dorothy?

  From time to time, exhausted and appalled by some fresh revelation, Jimroy stopped and demanded of himself why he had ever decided to write about Pound in the first place. Apotheosis? Never! There must have been some initial tinkling attraction—but what? He was unable to remember. But he was certain that he had never had any desire to be Pound’s apologist. Meticulously, then, patiently, and with a minimum of annotation, he set out Pound’s specious social prescriptions so that they sat on the crisp typescript in all their deadpan execrable naivety for all the world to see. When a line of Pound’s poetry failed to yield to analysis, he left it for the stubborn little nut of pomposity it was. Let Pound be his own hangman, Jimroy decided early on, and the correspondence alone was enough to hang him—the pettiness, the fatuous self-stroking, the hideous glimpses into a mind swollen with ghastly ambitions and believing in his tissues that he was a genius. Yes, Pound wrote to one friend, he would remain in Italy until the United States of America established a Department of Beaux Arts and “called him home” to be its director. Dear God. Elephantiasis of the ego, the horror of it.

  How is a biographer to respond to delusions of this scale, to this ninny who insisted on performing cartwheels on the tremulous and silly edge of vainglory? “Make it new,” the old goat exhorted young poets, tricking them into acts of foolishness. Why should a biographer be expected to explain, justify, interpret or even judge? These are acts one commits out of love, or so Jimroy has always believed.

  Nevertheless the willingness, the glee with which he offered Pound up to ridicule frightened him slightly and forced him to modify his disgust into a mild and sour sense of distaste. (Miss Lynch, his typist, usually reticent, encouraged these modifications.)

  Flinching only slightly, Jimroy observed the disgust he felt, and indeed he recognized a moral ungainliness in himself that vibrated with a near-Poundian rhythm. His original attraction to the old fart, he supposed, must lie in this perverse brotherly recognition. Like persons who in secret sniff the foul odours of their bodies, he had been mesmerized by Pound’s sheer awfulness, by his own sheer awfulness.

  He had had to rethink the book’s structure. Certain vivid anecdotes had to be withdrawn or consigned to small temperate type or worked into the inky compression of footnotes where they would scream less shrilly for attention. The rewriting of the book—the neutralizing of the book was how he thought of it—required an additional six months, but the result was a biography that had been regarded, and was still regarded, as being balanced, dispassionate, scholarly, humane. The reviewer in the New York Times, describing it as Ellmanesque, cited its “marriage of decency and distance”—delicious phrase. Jimroy likes to chant it to himself as a kind of mantra on sleepless nights. Decency and distance, decency and distance.

  After a three-month vacation (during which he took Audrey back to Birmingham for a visit; and what a disaster that was), he began his book on John Starman who, in the beginning, had seemed less detestable. The poetry, at least, with its intricacies and gymnastic daring, appealed to him as Pound’s never had; but there was no avoiding the man’s greedy seeking after fame or the slurpy lushness of his pensées. Even his suicide note had a hectoring wonderful-me, beautiful-me clamour. There was no way, either, to overlook Starman’s childish misogyny (poor Barbara) since the clod insisted on wearing it as openly as a pair of overalls. That line in his love series about keeping his genitalia in a vasculum for all the world to gaze upon and admire! Dear Christ. And finally, at Starman’s centre, there was nothing but shallow and injured feelings, a gaping self-absorption that rivalled Pound’s. Though Jimroy diligently chronicled the famed acts of generosity and the long lists of kindnesses to friends and fellow poets, the hollowness rang loud. And it rang with a double echo for Jimroy, announcing not only deadness at the centre of life, but a disenchantment with surfaces. The discovery of emptiness affected him like the beginning of a long illness. Once again he seemed to be looking in a mirror. (It was during this time that Audrey finally lost all patience with him.)

  Three long years. Despite the fact that the Starman book was highly thought of, almost up to the Pound some said, it seemed to Jimroy that the writing of it had drained away too much of his energy. Three years with the exasperating, unhappy, unswervingly self-regarding John Starman; a thousand days of hanging each morning over his oak table, long hours of shifting notes, idly, despondently, feeling sick, feeling the gnawing of an incipient ulcer, and losing weight he could not afford to lose, and reflecting that this was a man he would not have wanted to spend so much as an hour with.

  He told himself that perhaps it was just poets he was weary of, poets from mean northern states, Minnesota, Idaho. Working on the Starman proofs (while the situation with Audrey deteriorated even further), he asked himself whether it was poetry itself he had come to despise. Certainly he was suspicious of it, its scantiness and shorthand. It was so easy for a poem to be fraudulent, for what was the difference, really, between an ellipsis and a vacuum? What indeed? Even when the words of a poem fell together in rough, rumbling, delectable rhythms, there might be nothing beneath them that spoke of thought and feeling. For this reason he had always distrusted the flashy line and kept a chilly eye on pyrotechnics, on the hollow stem of the dead narcissus. Speak to me, he wanted to say to poets. To poetry.

  It had always seemed something of a miracle to him that poetry did occasionally speak. Even when it didn’t he felt himself grow reverent before the quai
nt, queer magnitude of the poet’s intent. When he thought of the revolution of planets, the emergence of species, the balance of mathematics, he could not see that any of these was more amazing than the impertinent human wish to reach into the sea of common language and extract from it the rich dark beautiful words that could be arranged in such a way that the unsayable might be said. Poetry was the prism that refracted all of life. It was Jimroy’s belief that the best and worst of human experiences were frozen inside these wondrous little toys called poems. He had been in love with them all his life, and when he looked back on his childhood, something he seldom did, he saw that his early years, those passed before the discovery of poetry, had drifted by empty of meaning.

  Even the failures strike him as touchingly valiant. That, if the truth were known, is what seduces him, the poet’s naive courage. Keats, visiting the rough cottage where Robert Burns had lived, had wept to think a man had lived in such a place and tried to be a poet. (When Jimroy tells this Keats story to students, he comes close to weeping himself.) Which is why, despite everything, he is always moved when his thoughts settle on the riddlesome nature of his two large, imperfect men, Pound and Starman, thick-fingered, crippled by provincialism, morally clumsy—but made graceful, finally, by their extraordinary reach.

  And so it was natural (inevitable, he told himself that when he came to write a third biography, he should choose as his subject another poet: not a muling modernist with Left Bank pretensions this time, but a woman named Mary Swann, a woman who had lived all her lean, cold, and unrewarding years in rural Ontario, a place more northerly and restrictive than the most northern state. The decision to write about Mary Swann had been made sitting in his Winnipeg study. (Audrey had departed.) He had felt a momentary sense of elation, the by-now-familiar nascent ritual. A new beginning. Rebirth. The egg, the genes, the reaching out.