Paterson (Revised Edition) (17 page)

You don’t need to.

.     .     .     .     .     .

Dear Pappy:

For the last time!

All day today, believe it or not, we’ve been coasting along what they call up here the North Shore on our way to the place we’re going to fish at. It sounds like an Italian dinner, Anticosti, but it’s really french.

It’s wild, they say, but we have a marvellous guide, an Indian I think but it’s not sure (maybe I’ll marry him and stay up there for the rest of my life) Anyway he speaks french and the Missis talks to him in that language. I don’t know what they’re saying (and I don’t care, I can talk my own language).

I can hardly keep my eyes open, I’ve been out almost every night this week. To go on. We have wine, mostly Champagne on board. She showed it to me, 24 cases for the party but I don’t want any of it, thanks. I’ll stick to my rum and coke. Don’t worry. Tell Ma everything’s all right. But remember, I’m through.

.     .     .     .     .

Phyllis & Paterson

Do you know that tall

dark girl with the long nose?

She’s my friend. She says

she’s going West next fall.

I’m saving every cent I

can put together. I’m going

with her. I haven’t told

my mother yet     .

Why do you torment yourself? I can’t

think unless you’re naked. I wouldn’t blame

you if you beat me up, punched me,

anything at all     .     I wouldn’t do

you that much honor. What! what did you say?

I said I wouldn’t do you that much

honor     .     So that’s all?

I’m afraid so. Something I shall always

desire, you’ve seen to that. Talk to me.

This is not the time for it. Why did you let

me come? Who knows, why
did
you? I like

coming here, I need you. I know that     .

hoping I’d take it from you, lacking

your consent. I’ve lost out, haven’t I?

You have. Pull down my slip     .

He lay upon his back upon the couch.

She came, half dressed, and straddled him.

My thighs are sore from riding     .

Oh let me breathe! After I’m married

you must take me out sometime. If that’s

what you want     .

Corydon & Phyllis

Have any of these men

you speak of     .     ?

—and has he?

No.

Good.

What’s good about it?

Then you’re still a virgin

What’s it to
you?

You were not more than 12, my son

14 perhaps, the high school age

when we went, together,

a first for both of us,

to a lecture, in the Solarium

topping the hospital, on atomic

fission. I hoped to discover

an “interest” on your part.

You listened     .

Smash the world, wide!

—if I could do it for you —

Smash the wide world     .

a fetid womb, a sump!

No river! no river

but bog, a     .     swale

sinks into the mind or

the mind into it, a?

Norman Douglas (
South Wind
) said to me, The best thing a man can do for his son, when he is born, is to die     .

I gave you another, bigger than yourself, to contend with.

To resume:

(What I miss, said your mother, is the poetry, the pure poem of the first parts     .     )

The moon was in its first quarter.

As we approached the hospital

the air above it, having taken up

the glow through the glass roof

seemed ablaze, rivalling night’s queen.

The room was packed with doctors.

How pale and young the boy seemed

among those pigs, myself

among them! who surpassed him

only in experience, that drug,

sitting erect to their talk:

valences     .

For years a nurse-girl

an unhatched sun corroding

her mind, eating away a rind

of impermanences, through books

remorseless     .

Curie (the movie queen) upon

the stage at the Sorbonne     .

a half mile across! walking solitary

as tho’ in a forest, the silence

of a great forest (of ideas)

before the assembly (the

little Polish baby-nurse) receives

international acclaim (a

drug)

Come on up! Come up Sister and be

saved (splitting the atom of

bitterness)! And Billy Sunday evangel

and ex-rightfielder sets himself

to take one off the wall     .

He’s
on

the table now! Both feet, singing

( a foot song ) his feet canonized     .

.     as paid for

by the United Factory Owners’ Ass’n     .

.     to “break” the strike

and put those S.O.Bs in their places, be

Geezus, by calling them to God!

—getting his 27 Grand in the hotel room

after the last supper (at the
Hamilton
)

on the eve of quitting town, exhausted

in his efforts to split (a split

personality)     .     the plate

What an arm!

Come to Jesus!     .     Someone help

that old woman up the steps     .     Come to

Jesus and be     .     All together now,

give it everything you got!

Brighten

.          .          the corner where you

are!

Dear Doctor:

In spite of the grey secrecy of time and my own self-shuttering doubts in these youthful rainy days, I would like to make my presence in Paterson known to you, and I hope you will welcome this from me, an unknown young poet, to you, an unknown old poet, who live in the same rusty county of the world. Not only do I inscribe this missive somewhat in the style of those courteous sages of yore who recognized one another across the generations as brotherly children of the muses (whose names they well know) but also as fellow citizenly Chinamen of the same province, whose gastanks, junkyards, fens of the alley, millways, funeral parlors, river-visions—aye! the falls itself—are images white-woven in their very beards.

I went to see you once briefly two years ago (when I was 21), to interview you for a local newspaper. I wrote the story in fine and simple style, but it was hacked and changed and came out the next week as a labored joke at your expense which I assume you did not get to see. You invited me politely to return, but I did not, as I had nothing to talk about except images of cloudy light, and was not able to speak to you in your own or my own concrete terms. Which failing still hangs with me to a lesser extent, yet I feel ready to approach you once more.

As to my history: I went to Columbia on and off since 1943, working and travelling around the country and aboard ships when I was not in schools, studying English. I won a few poetry prizes there and edited the Columbia Review. I liked Van Doren most there. I worked later on the Associated Press as a copyboy, and spent most of the last year in a mental hospital; and now I am back in Paterson which is home for the first time in seven years. What I’ll do there I don’t know yet—my first move was to try and get a job on one of the newspapers here and in Passaic, but that hasn’t been successful yet.

My literary liking is Melville in Pierre and the Confidence Man, and in my own generation, one Jack Kerouac whose first book came out this year.

I do not know if you will like my poetry or not—that is, how far your own inventive persistence excludes less independent or youthful attempts to perfect, renew, transfigure, and make contemporarily real an old style or lyric machinery, which I use to record the struggle with imagination of the clouds, with which I have been concerned. I enclose a few samples of my best writing. All that I have done has a program, consciously or not, running on from phase to phase, from the beginnings of emotional breakdown, to momentary raindrops from the clouds become corporeal, to a renewal of human objectivity which I take to be ultimately identical with no ideas but in things. But this last development I have yet to turn into poetic reality. I envision for myself some kind of new speech—different at least from what I have been writing down—in that it has to be clear statement of fact about misery (and not misery itself), and splendor if there is any out of the subjective wanderings through Paterson. This place is as I say my natural habitat by memory, and I am not following in your traces to be poetic: though I know you will be pleased to realize that at least one actual citizen of your community has inherited your experience in his struggle to love and know his own world-city, through your work, which is an accomplishment you almost cannot have hoped to achieve. It is misery I see (like a tide out of my own fantasy) but mainly the splendor which I carry within me and which all free men do. But harking back to a few sentences previous, I may need a new measure myself, but though I have a flair for your style I seldom did exactly what you are doing with cadences, line length, sometimes syntax, etc., and cannot handle your work as a solid object—which properties I assume you rightly claim. I don’t understand the measure. I haven’t worked with it much either, though, which must make the difference. But I would like to talk with you concretely on this.

I enclose these poems. The first shows you where I was 2 years ago. The second, a kind of dense lyric I instinctively try to imitate—after Crane, Robinson, Tate, and old Englishmen. Then, the Shroudy Stranger (3) less interesting as a poem (or less sincere) but it connects observations of
things
with an old dream of the void—I have real dreams about a classic hooded figure. But this dream has become identified with my own abyss—and with the abyss of old Smokies under the Erie R.R. tracks on straight street—so the shroudy stranger (4) speaking from the inside of the old wracked bum of a paterson or anywhere in america. This is only a half made poem (using a few lines and a situation I had in a dream). I contemplated a long work on the shroudy stranger, his wanderings. Next (5) an earlier poem, Radio City, a long lyric written in sickness. Then a mad song (to be sung by Groucho Marx to a Bop background) (6). The (7) an old style ballad-type ghost dream poem. Then, an ode to the Setting Sun of abstract (8) ideas, written before leaving the hospital, and last an Ode to Judgment, which I just wrote, but which is unfinished. (9) What will come of all this I do not know yet.

I know this letter finds you in good health, as I saw you speak at the Museum in N. Y. this week. I ran backstage to accost you, but changed my mind, after waving at you, and ran off again.

Respectfully yours,

A. G.

Paris, a fifth floor room, bread

milk and chocolate, a few

apples and coal to be carried,

des briquettes
, their special smell,

at dawn: Paris     .

the soft coal smell, as she

leaned upon the window before de-

parting, for work     .

—a furnace, a cavity aching

toward fission; a hollow,

a woman waiting to be filled

—a luminosity of elements, the

current leaping!

Pitchblende from Austria, the

valence of Uranium inexplicably

increased. Curie, the man, gave up

his work to buttress her.

But she is pregnant!

Poor Joseph,

the Italians say.

Glory to God in the highest

and on earth, peace, goodwill to

men!

Believe it or not.

A dissonance

in the valence of Uranium

led to the discovery

Dissonance

(if you are interested)

leads to discovery

— to dissect away

the block and leave

a separate metal:

hydrogen

the flame, helium the

pregnant ash     .

— the elephant takes two years

Love is a kitten, a pleasant

thing, a purr and a

pounce. Chases a piece of

string, a scratch and a mew

a ball batted with a paw     .

a sheathed claw     .

Love, the sledge that smashes the atom? No, No! antagonistic cooperation is the key, says Levy     .

Sir Thopas (The Canterbury Pilgrims) says (to Chaucer)

Namoor—

Thy drasty rymyng is not

worth a toord

—and Chaucer seemed to think so too for he stopped and went on in prose     .

R
EPORT OF
C
ASES

C
ASE I.—
M. N., a white woman aged 35, a nurse in the pediatric ward, had no history of previous intestinal disturbance. A sister who lived with her suffered with cramps and diarrhea, later found by us to be due to amebiasis. On Nov. 8, 1944 a stool submitted by the nurse for the usual monthly examination was found to be positive for Salmonella montevideo. The nurse was at once removed from duty with full pay, a measure found to be of advantage in having hospital personnel report diarrheal disturbances without fear of economic reprisal.

— with ponderous belly, full

of thought! stirring the cauldrons

.     in the old shed used

by the medical students for dissections.

Winter. Snow through the cracks

Pauvre étudiant
     .

en l’an trentième de mon âge

Item
     .     with coarsened hands

by the hour, the day, the week

to get, after months of labor     .

a stain at the bottom of the retort

without weight, a failure, a

nothing. And then, returning in the

night, to find it     .

LUMINOUS!

On Friday, the twelfth of October, we anchored before the land and made ready to go ashore . There I sent the people for water, some with arms, and others with casks: and as it was some little distance, I waited two hours for them.

During that time I walked among the trees which was the most beautiful thing which I had ever known.

.
knowledge, the contaminant