Pulphead: Essays (8 page)

That’s how it happened, he just asked. Actually, he didn’t even ask. The fact that he was ignoring the proper channels eventually caused some awkwardness with the school. At the time, none of that mattered. I felt an exhilaration, the unsettling thrum of a great man’s regard, and somewhere behind that the distant onrushing of fame. His letters came once, then twice a week. They were brilliantly senile, moving in and out of coherence and between tenses, between centuries. Often his typos, his poor eyesight, would produce the finest sentences, as when he wrote the affectingly commaless “This is how I protest absolutely futilely.” He told me I was a writer but that I had no idea what I was doing. “This is where the older artist comes in.” He wrote about the Muse, how she tests us when we’re young. As our tone grew more intimate, his grew more urgent, too. I must come back soon. Who knew how much longer he’d live? “No man can forestall or evade what lies in wait.” There were things he wanted to pass on, things that had taken him, he said, “too long to learn.” Now he’d been surprised to discover a burst of intensity left. He said not to worry about the school. “College is perhaps not the best preparation for a writer.” I’d live in the basement, a guest. We’d see to our work.

It took me several months to make it back, and he grew annoyed. When I finally let myself in through the front door, he didn’t get up from his chair. His form sagged so exaggeratedly into the sofa, it was as if thieves had crept through and stolen his bones and left him there. He gestured at the smoky stone fireplace with its enormous black andirons and said, “Boy, I’m sorry the wood’s so poor. I had no idea I’d be alive in November.” He watched as though paralyzed while I worked at building the fire back up. He spoke only to critique my form. The heavier logs at the back, to project the heat. Not too much flame. “Young men always make that mistake.” He asked me to pour him some whiskey and announced flatly his intention to nap. He lay back and draped across his eyes the velvet bag the bottle had come tied in, and I sat across from him for half an hour, forty minutes. At first he talked in his sleep, then to me. The pivots of his turn to consciousness were undetectably slight, with frequent slippages. His speech was full of mutterings, warnings. The artist’s life is strewn with traps. Beware “the machinations of the enemy.”

“Mr. Lytle,” I whispered, “who is the enemy?”

He sat up. His unfocused eyes were an icy blue. “Why, boy,” he said, “the bourgeoisie!” Then he peered at me for a second as if he’d forgotten who I was. “Of course,” he said. “You’re only a baby.”

I’d poured myself two bourbons during nap time and felt them somewhat. He lifted his own cup and said, “Confusion to the enemy.” We drank.

*   *   *

It was idyllic, where he lived, on the grounds of an old Chautauqua called the Assembly, one of those rustic resorts deliberately placed up north, or at a higher altitude, which began as escapes from the plagues of yellow fever that used to harrow the mid-Southern states. Lytle could remember coming there as a child. An old judge, they said, had transported the cabin entire up from a cove somewhere in the nineteenth century. You could still see the logs in the walls, although otherwise the house had been made rather elegant over the years. The porch went all the way around. It was usually silent, except for the wind in the pines. Besides guests, you never saw anyone. A summer place, except Lytle didn’t leave.

He slept in a wide carved bed in a corner room. His life was an incessant whispery passage on plush beige slippers from bed to sideboard to seat by the fire, tracing that perimeter, marking each line with light plantings of his cane. He’d sing to himself. The Appalachian one that goes, “A haunt can’t haunt a haunt, my good old man.” Or songs that he’d picked up in Paris at my age or younger: “Sous les Ponts de Paris” and “Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde.” His French was superb, but his accent in English was best, that extinct mid-Southern, land grant pioneer speech, with its tinges of the abandoned Celtic urban Northeast (“boyned” for
burned
) and its raw gentility.

From downstairs I could hear him move and knew where he was in the house at all times. My apartment had once been the kitchen; servants went up and down the back steps. The floor was all bare stone, and damp. And never really warm, until overnight it became unbearably humid. Cave crickets popped around as you tried to sleep, touching down with little clicks. Lots of mornings I woke with him standing over me, cane in one hand, coffee in the other, and he’d say, “Well, my lord, shall we rise and entreat Her Ladyship?” Her ladyship was the Muse. He had all manner of greetings.

For half a year we worked steadily, during his window of greatest coherence, late morning to early afternoon. We read Flaubert, Joyce, a little James, the more famous Russians, all the books he’d written about as an essayist. He tried to make me read Jung. He chopped at my stories till nothing was left but the endings, which he claimed to admire. A too-easy eloquence, was his overall diagnosis. I tried to apply his criticisms, but they were sophisticated to a degree my efforts couldn’t repay. He was trying to show me how to solve problems I hadn’t learned existed.

About once a day he’d say, “I may do a little writing yet, myself, if my mind holds.” One morning I even heard from downstairs the slap-slap of the typewriter keys. That day, while he napped, I slid into his room and pulled off the slipcover to see what he’d done, a single sentence of between thirty and forty words. A couple of them were hyphened out, with substitutions written above in ballpoint. The sentence stunned me. I’d come half expecting to find an incoherent mess, and afraid that this would say something ominous about our whole experiment, my education, but the opposite confronted me. The sentence was perfect. In it, he described a memory from his childhood, of a group of people riding in an early automobile, and the driver lost control, and they veered through an open barn door, but by a glory of chance the barn was completely empty, and the doors on the other side stood wide open, too, so that the car passed straight through the barn and back out into the sunlight, by which time the passengers were already laughing and honking and waving their arms at the miracle of their own survival, and Lytle was somehow able, through his prose, to replicate this swift and almost alchemical transformation from horror to joy. I don’t know why I didn’t copy out the sentence—embarrassment at my own spying, I guess. He never wrote any more. But for me it was the key to the year I lived with him. What he could still do, in his weakness, I couldn’t do. I started listening harder, even when he bored me.

His hair was sparse and mercury silver. He wore a tweed jacket every day and, around his neck, a gold-handled toothpick hewn from a raccoon’s sharpened penis bone. I put his glasses onto my own face once and my hands, held just at arm’s length, became big beige blobs. There was a thing on his forehead, a cyst, I assume, that had gotten out of control. It was about the size and shape of a bisected Ping-Pong ball. His doctor had offered to remove it several times, but Lytle treated it as a conversation piece. “Vanity has no claim on me,” he said. He wore a gray fedora with a bluebird’s feather in the band. The skin on his face was strangely young-seeming. Tight and translucent. But the rest of his body was extraterrestrial. Once a week I helped him bathe. God alone knew for how long the moles and things on his back had been left to evolve unseen. His skin was doughy. Not saggy or lumpy, not in that sense—he was hale—but fragile-feeling. He had no hair anywhere below. His toenails were of horn. After the bath he lay naked between fresh sheets, needing to feel completely dry before he dressed. All Lytles, he said, had nervous temperaments.

I found him exotic; it may be accurate to say that I found him beautiful. The manner in which I related to him was essentially anthropological. Taking offense, for instance, to his more or less daily outbursts of racism, chauvinism, anti-Semitism, class snobbery, and what I can only describe as medieval nostalgia, seemed as absurd as debating these things with a caveman. Shut up and ask him what the cave art means. The self-service and even cynicism of that reasoning are not hard to dissect at a distance of years, but I can’t pretend to regret it, or that I wish I had walked away.

There was something else, something less contemptible, a voice in my head that warned it would be unfair to lecture a man with faculties so diminished. I could never be sure what he was saying, as in stating, and what he was simply no longer able to keep from slipping out of his id and through his mouth. I used to walk by his wedding picture, which hung next to the cupboard—the high forehead, the square jaw, the jug ears—and think as I passed it, “If you wanted to contend with him, you’d have to contend with that man.” Otherwise it was cheating.

I came to love him. Not in the way he wanted, maybe, but not in a way that was stinting.
Mon vieux
. I was twenty and believed that nothing as strange was liable to happen to me again. I was a baby. One night we were up drinking late in the kitchen and I asked him if he thought there was any hope. Like that: “Is there any hope?” He answered me quite solemnly. He told me that in the hallways at Versailles, there hung a faint, ever-so-faint smell of human excrement, “because as the chambermaids hurried along a tiny bit would always splash from the pots.” Many years later I realized that he was half-remembering a detail from the court of Louis XV, namely that the latrines were so few and so poorly placed at the palace, the marquesses used to steal away and relieve themselves on stairwells and behind the beautiful furniture, but that night I had no idea what he meant, and still don’t entirely.

“Have I shown you my incense burner?” he asked.

“Your what?”

He shuffled out into the dining room and opened a locked glass cabinet door. He came back cradling a little three-legged pot and set it down gently on the chopping block between us. It was exquisitely painted and strewn with infinitesimal cracks. A figure of a dog-faced dragon lay coiled on the lid, protecting a green pearl. Lytle spun the object to a particular angle, where the face was darker, slightly orange-tinged. “If you’ll look, the glaze is singed,” he said. “From the blast, I presume, or the fires.” He held it upside down. Its maker’s mark was legible on the bottom, or would have been to one who read Japanese. “This pot,” he said, “was recovered from the Hiroshima site.” A classmate of his from Vanderbilt, one of the Fugitives, had gone on to become an officer in the Marine Corps and gave it to him after the war. “When I’m dead I want you to have it,” he said.

I didn’t bother refusing, just thanked him, since I knew he wouldn’t remember in the morning, or, for that matter, in half an hour. But he did remember. He left it to me.

Ten years later in New York City my adopted stray cat, Holly Kitty, pushed it off a high shelf I didn’t think she could reach, and it shattered. I sat up most of the night gluing the slivers back into place.

*   *   *

Lytle’s dementia began to progress more quickly. I hope it’s not cruel to note that at times the effects could be funny. He insisted on calling the K-Y Jelly we used to lubricate his colostomy tube Kye Jelly. Finally he got confused about what it was for and appeared in my doorway one day with his toothbrush and a squeezed-out tube of the stuff. “Put Kye on the list, boy,” he said. “We’re out.”

Evenings he’d mostly sit alone and rehash forty-year-old fights with dead literary enemies, performing both sides as though in a one-man play, at times yelling wildly, pounding his cane. Allen Tate, his brother turned nemesis, was by far the most frequent opponent, but it seemed in these rages that anyone he’d ever known could change into the serpent, fall prey to an obsession with power. Particularly disorienting was when the original version of the mock battle had been between him and me. Him and the boy. Several times, in reality, we did clash. Stood face-to-face shouting. I called him a mean old bastard, something like that; he told me I’d betrayed my gift. Later, from downstairs, I heard him say to the boy, “You think you’re not a slave?”

One day I came in from somewhere. Polly, his sister, was staying upstairs. I loved Miss Polly’s visits, everyone did. She made rum cakes you could eat yourself to death on like a goldfish. There were homemade pickles and biscuits from scratch when she came. A tiny woman with glasses so thick they magnified her eyes, her knuckles were cubed with arthritis. Who knew what she thought, or if she thought, about all the nights she’d shared with her brother and his interesting artist friends. (Once, in a rented house somewhere, she’d been forced by sleeping arrangements to lie awake in bed all night between fat old Ford Madox Ford and his mistress.) She shook her head over how the iron skillet, which their family had been seasoning in slow ovens since the Depression, would suffer at my hands. I had trouble remembering not to put it through the dishwasher. Over meals, under the chandelier with the “saltcellar” and the “salad oil,” as Lytle raved about the master I might become, if only I didn’t fall prey to this, that, or the other hubristic snare, she’d simply grin and say, “Oh, Brutha, how
exciting
.”

On the afternoon in question I was coming through the security gate, entering “the grounds,” as cottagers called the Assembly, and Polly passed me going the opposite way in her minuscule blue car. There was instantly something off, because she didn’t stop completely. She rolled down the window and spoke to me but continued to idle past, going at most twenty miles per hour (the speed limit in there was twelve, I think). It was as though she were waving from a parade float. “I’m on my way to the store,” she said. “We need [mumble]…”

“What’s that?”

“BUTTAH!”