Life Sentences (6 page)

Number two: whoring and metaphoring.

One aspect of writing was easy, was unstoppable, and that was the flow of imagery that ran through my head like a creek in flood—no—like the babble of voices around a bar at happy hour—no—like a stream of ants toward a source of sugar—oh, no—like carp rise to a dimple of bread—oh, no—oh, no—a cloud of gnats—a giggle when tickled. An attack of bats. I could swat away six and still write eight. It was a curse disguised as a blessing. I was always looking at the world from another word. The wolf spider roams at night from field to field in search of prey, while the mantis sits still as a twig by a flower’s sweetened cup until some sucker comes to nose it, and then she, the madam mantis, sups. But these facts interested me mainly because I knew people like that. I was one—a waiter—the sort of waiter who is always looking the other way. So I wanted, when I named a tree, to invoke a plant equal to every phase the plant had seen. I didn’t simply want to make a tree with roots, bark, branches, trunk, twigs, nesting birds, needles, and leaves; I wanted to imagine ones that were telly poles too, bore lynch limbs, and had branches to which possums were driven by packs of unpleasant dogs; I wanted trees with doors in them, clothes trees where dress suits were hung; trees that had family histories dangling from their diagrams.

I am not observant of persons, so if I imagine someone whose skin
is as smooth and pale as a grocery mushroom, it is the mushroom that did it. Among the thousands of my photographs there may be three (the fairy-tale number) that misinclude people, and even then they look like barely promising piles of rags. Recently, in an essay on François Rabelais, I wrote that while his work looked woolly, its sense was consistent, unified, pure yet iridescent, as though silk had swallowed water. That last image was a simple pun on watered silk that let me gloat a quarter of an hour before its time on the meter was up.

I am an octogenarian now and should know better, but I recently let a sentence reach print so embarrassingly bad its metaphors seemed frightened into scattered flight like quail. I meant to shame myself by reciting it to you, but I find I cannot, sparing myself, not you. Instead I’ll quote something that’s perhaps passable, from a story called “Order of Insects” in the collection
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
(New York: Harper & Row, 1968). For this piece I did indeed study cockroaches, and came to admire them immensely (few humans measure up: haven’t the humility, the wiles, the longevity or body armor, the moves), but it was as a metaphor made into a symbol that I wanted to use them. A housewife, who narrates the story, has begun finding dead roaches on her downstairs carpet in the morning, apparently killed by her murderously playful cat. As she inspects them she finds a beauty in their construction that imperils her opinion of her own life. She wonders what would happen if we wore our skeletons on the outside, like a costume for Halloween, and concludes this way:

Number three: jingling.

When you are a cowed and confused kid you say to the stupid question grown-ups always ask with such condescension that you want to bruise their shins: I hope to be a fireman when I grow up. But of course you really want to be a poet. Everyone wants to be a poet. It is the beckoning inaccessible peak. How many poets have told us? At twelve I wrote awful Edgar Allan Poe, much as Poe had—jingle all the way; at fourteen I was as interminable as Walt Whitman; I extolled the groceries and made lists of buffalo hunters and Indian scouts. I did patriotism, I’m ashamed to say, and praised mothers. My God, I was even against drink. Most of all, what I wrote was bad. Not just youthful. Not just undisciplined. Bad beyond excuse. After years of futile wondering, I think I now know why. My irreverence, my hatred for authority, my distrust of tradition, my enjoyment of the comforts of middle-class life and my contempt for its philistine values, my habitual “up yours” and “in your eye” attitude, also inhibited my ability to absorb conventional poetic forms. Instead I was attracted to the urchins among them, indecorous lines and unruly stanzas. Ezra Pound, an early hero, too melodious and poetical by half much of the time, would nevertheless burst out, to my delight, with, “Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace,” a sestina in praise of bloodshed and war, while at other times condemn such belligerence, as he does in
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’s
unforgiving anger at the First World War:

Or when, in the same poem, he wrote that “his true Penelope was Flaubert,” I was immediately moved, because Flaubert has always been my favorite hater, and I was grateful to Pound too, though absurdly, because he was the first poet I knew to use the word
fucking
in a poem. Even if they were panthers that were up to it.

I despised pop tunes, yet I imbibed their forms. When Gertrude Stein wrote: “I am Rose, my eyes are blue, I am Rose and who are you? I am Rose, and when I sing, I am Rose like anything,” I was perhaps more pleased than was reasonable. I practiced the limerick in secret and dallied with other cheapjack devices. My career as a poet ended in doggerel and japery. Yet I found a use to which I might put them—these dogs. For my novel
The Tunnel
(New York: Knopf, 1995), I invented a historian named Culp, whose subject, I meanly said, was the American Indian, and I claimed that he was energetically engaged in writing a limerickal history of the world, as well as a cycle of such rhymes that shared the same first line: “I once went to bed with a nun.” I got good at it—at the limerick, I mean—and began to do to it what I couldn’t do to the sonnet—torture its type.

Here are three from the Carthaginian period.

Earlier:

Later yet:

Some nuns:

Lastly, my favorite:

The compulsive doggerel syndrome does not confine itself to dirty verses, otherwise it would not be called “compulsive,” but turns up in almost every line of my prose, in sound patterns that get pushy, even
domineering. The narrator of
The Tunnel
, when a child, is caught by his father stealing pennies to play the punchboards so popular in the Depression era, and this is what happens as judgment is made:

Back in the days when there were inner tubes—items none of you now will remember—air would bubble up in the rubber like a rhyme, just before it burst.

Number four: preaching.

I have been characterized as—accused of—sentenced to—sentences. Well, it is easier to study the sentence than the story, and you do have to write a lot of sentences if you want to pretend to write prose. But I have always been equally interested in paragraphs. I like, for light reading, texts on rhetoric: not just those of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, but also those of George Campbell, Richard Whately, Joseph Priestley, Hugh Blair, and Thomas De Quincey. In such works, and only in them, is the question of the form of the paragraph as well as the shape of the phrase addressed, and the lost art of eloquence taken seriously.

Any plowboy can become a father, Mencken famously remarked; and, “Every man, as he walks through the streets, may contrive to jot down an independent thought, a shorthand memorandum of a great truth,” De Quincey says. “Standing on one leg you may accomplish this. The labour of composition begins when you have to put your separate threads of thought into a loom; to weave them into a continuous whole; to connect, to introduce them; to blow them out or expand them; to carry them to a close.” Just as De Quincey carries his own paragraph to a close by carrying it to the word
close
.

So I have tended, when conceiving characters, to prefer fulminators—preachers and teachers—and allowed them to consider the misfortune, more important to me than any other, apparently:
that of missing the opportunities and obligations offered you by the luck of having life. Here is one such preacher, Jethro Furber, speaking to his rural Ohio congregation in
Omensetter’s Luck
.