The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (11 page)

Our losses were terrible. The wing must have lost at least 30 percent, the highest we suffered that late in the war. And no publicity because it happened on December 17, 1944, the same day the Battle of the Bulge began.

One German fighter had come into the formation, and instead of shooting and pouring through had put the nose up, like putting on the brakes, and hung in full view like a hesitant bird. Our tail gunner, Tony Cartwright, said it was like a target in a shooting gallery. He, no doubt with help from other gunners in our six-ship box, blew it apart. He speculated that the pilot was a woman, given the timidity of the unexpected and fatal maneuver. We had heard rumors that German women were flying fighters that late in the war. We gave each other congratulations on the ground, loud, wild, laughing congratulations for being alive. We did not mourn those who hadn’t come back. We were too happy to have made it ourselves.

I remembered the dark green man from the gunnery shed who had to be flown to Bari for hospitalization. Our co-pilot flew him there. His wife had sent him a “Dear John” letter. He could do nothing about his loss but dwell on it until it was too much and he blew his stomach open with a .45 he had just repaired.

I remembered that only a day or two after we arrived we were called to a meeting of officers in squadron headquarters where we heard the squadron commander deliver an incoherent speech about formation flying. He ended this chaotic diatribe by assuring us that he was a good guy and if any of us would just have a drink with him we’d realize just how good a guy he was. A week later he was sent home, a mental casualty of the war.

I remembered a co-pilot from Tennessee who came into our tent and sobbed because his crew had crashed trying to land in Vis and some were dead. He had stayed behind and claimed that if he’d been there to help the pilot, it would not have happened. And I remembered his pilot when he came back weeks later, his face so disfigured I barely recognized him.

And Charlie Marshall. Sweet, bullshitting Charlie Marshall from Texas. He had some bad luck, a couple of crashes and other narrow escapes. The Germans shot his plane up bad one day over Vienna. By holding the stick back as far as he could he managed to stagger over Yugoslavia and bail everyone out. He came back limping and pale two weeks later, having been rescued by Tito’s partisans. His leg was injured in the jump, but he was pale from the slivovitz the partisans forced on him morning to night. He also had had a frightful time talking the partisans out of shooting his co-pilot. Since the co-pilot’s name was Gross and since he didn’t drink, the partisans suspected he was not an American.

All flying was voluntary. You could quit whenever you wanted and all you lost was your flight pay. We didn’t quit because of social pressure, fear of what others would think, and the fear of ending up in the combat ground forces, although that was a remote possibility. Charlie Marshall had had it and he quit. “Hugo,” he said to me, “for every man there’s a limit. There are pilots with 30,000 hours in the air. They haven’t reached their limit. Maybe they never will. But for old Charlie Marshall, it’s nineteen hundred and twenty-six hours.” He had acquired about 1,700 hours as an instructor before he was transferred to combat.

They threatened Charlie with court-martial, but he knew his rights and held firm. Finally, they offered to fly him to Naples where he could catch a boat home. “You’re not flying Charlie Marshall anywhere,” he assured them. How I admired his resolve. Finally, they had to drive him across Italy in a truck. We watched him wave from the truck when it pulled out. He was grinning and very much alive, and I had the feeling he would be very much alive for a long time.

Nothing would do but that we lunch at the home of the driver, Vincenzo’s friend. It was a house I’d passed many times on the edge of Cerignola twenty years before. Now: screaming children silenced by screaming parents. Tripe and wine. A long afternoon. Why did you come back? I don’t know. Are you still flying? No. No. That was just the war. I’m a poet now. No. Not famous at all. Just one book published. Another taken. Rich? Hardly. What did I do in America? Worked in an aircraft factory. And what do you do? What we can. Drivers sometimes. Drivers, today. No. I will not go back to the aircraft factory. When our money is gone we must go home and find jobs. Yes. Cerignola is much better now. No beggars. No bad odors. Lots of young men. Lots of grain in the fields. And it is all beautiful now, all much better now. That back there, that war. That was a terrible time.
Troppo tensione. Troppo miseria. Troppo fame
.

Vincenzo drove us back to the hotel. Could we stay longer? No, we were taking a bus that afternoon to Bari. I was feeling the wine as we rode through the wide streets of Cerignola.

Reputation? I came from a town with a bad reputation too, just like the reputation Cerignola had in Puglia. What the hell does it mean? Look at the warm, friendly time we had had at lunch, the long afternoon of hospitality. How do nice people get in a war? People like Sofio or Charlie Marshall? How does anyone? Could this be the place we ridiculed and sometimes feared and came to with hard feelings, yelling at children who begged us for food, trying to scare them away?
Troppo miseria
is right. That’s what the Neapolitan cabbies say about Naples and that’s what I say about the whole damned world. And what the hell can we do about it but hope we are born again, next time better. I didn’t know how good the poem would be but it would be honest and I would like it because it wouldn’t be any tougher than the human heart needs to be.

At the hotel when we got out, Vincenzo did too. He said, “Of all the Americans here during the war, you’re the only one who ever returned.” He started to sob and he suddenly embraced me and said, “
Come mio fratello
.” His crying became more violent and I turned, vaguely embarrassed, and started up the stairs, his choked sobs trailing me from the street. “Oh, hell,” I thought, “I’ll never be Humphrey Bogart or Herbert Marshall,” and I sat down on the stairs and had a good cry too.

My wife sat understanding beside me while I blubbered, matched Vincenzo Lattaruolo sob for strangulated sob, though he was hidden from me beyond the closed door, and I never saw him again. I still wasn’t sure why I’d come back, but I felt it must be the best reason in the world.

QUESTION: You worked for thirteen years in the real world before you went into academia? What are the differences for a poet?

I dread that question, but by now I’ve developed some replies the audience might find funny. How do you answer it seriously? I hate that phrase “the real world.” Why is an aircraft factory more real than a university? Is it? In universities I’ve had in my office ex-cons on parole, young people in tears racked with deep sexual problems, people recently released from mental hospitals, confused, bewildered, frightened, hoping, with more desperation than some of us will ever be unlucky enough to know, that they will remain stable enough to stay in school, and out of hospitals forever. I’ve seen people so forlorn that I’ve sat there praying as only an unreligious man can pray that I don’t say something wrong, that I can spare their feelings, that I might even say something that will make their lives easier if only for a few moments. Sad drug addicts too. Not people you usually meet in industrial offices. Often they are coming to me because I’m a poet and I’m supposed to be wise, to have some secret of existence I can pass on to the forlorn. In some ways the university is a far more real world than business.

So there are differences, but I’m not sure they affect the writing of poems, though obviously they matter one hell of a lot to me. I’m more inclined to wonder what difference it makes what a poet does for a living, or how he leads his life.

Sometimes these preoccupations can become absurd.

I have here a book by a Llewelyn Powys, called
Advice to a Young Poet
, The Bodley Head, London, 1949. You needn’t read far until you run into:

That seems silly in print, and in life it can get boring. I’ve been seriously advised to take drugs, to avoid drugs, to eat only seafood, to live on welfare, to stop drinking (good advice it turned out), to drink more (at one time an impossibility), to avoid sex, to pursue sex, to read philosophy, to avoid philosophy. Once someone told me I should master every verse form known to man. A poet is seldom hard up for advice. The worst part of it all is that sometimes the advice is coming from other poets, and they ought to know better.

But the question has been asked about the differences between the business world and academia. And because it doesn’t deserve a serious answer, I’m perverse enough to give a few from there (business) and here (university).

There: 62,000 employees and no one cares that I write poems.

Here: When I first start, twenty-six employees in the department and three of them hate me because I write poems.

There: Those who know I write poems don’t seem to assume anything is special about me.

Here: I’ve been named the head of a student dope ring. A student informant tells the administration I’ve advised students to print and distribute copies of a “dirty poem” about the campus. I am a homosexual. I am a merciless womanizer. I throw wild parties. I write my poems in Italian and then translate them into English. I come to class dressed in dirty, torn T-shirts. I am a liberal, a reactionary, a communist, a Nazi.

There: When you leave at the end of eight hours, there’s a tendency to feel you’ve fulfilled your obligation to the universe. Why go home and write?

Here: When teaching well I’m making love to a room of people. Is that the same energy that goes into a poem? Is that meeting my obligation? Is the day over now? See. I’m a victim too.

I’m apt to sound too self-assured about the unimportance of a poet’s job because no matter what I’ve done for a living I’ve gone on writing, and because with one exception I’ve never found the initiating subject of a poem where I worked. That one exception I didn’t see myself, but rather heard about from an immediate superior.

C was easy to dislike if you saw only his surface. He was humorless and seemed to have no friends, and he tried to be what he thought big business wanted its executives to be. He hid his emotions under a mask of self-control. His upper lip had vertical creases from years of pursing his mouth in what would appear to be considered objective thought.

Once he confided to me that he found democracy wanting because the vote of each person in the shops who didn’t have the prestigious position he had and who hadn’t made money in outside investments as he had counted the same as his vote in an election. Another time he called a black who worked in our office “Rastus” aloud in a meeting. By then I knew him well. When he said Rastus he was actually trying to be funny and informal, to include the black rather than ridicule him. He was in fact a decent man, but he had practiced inhumanity so long that when he tried to be human he was crude.

He was obsessed with success. Once he told me about a man who was offered a bonus of a million dollars to take a position with a large industrial firm. A few weeks later, half-drunk on martinis at lunch, he told me
he
had been offered that million dollars to take that job. I didn’t think he believed it, but he wanted to say it about himself. And typically, while he had spent years repressing his warmth, he had also developed ways of gaining the emotional advantage. (Whoever described the bourgeois as an emotional politician knew what he was talking about.) Once I brought him something to sign and thinking he had no pen, I offered him mine. He said coldly, “I have my own, thank you,” and pulled it out from his inside jacket pocket. Even though he knew me well, he couldn’t stop himself from chalking up another victory.

One day in his office he started chatting about a distasteful job he once had as one of a small group of men who were assigned to evicting a squatter from company land at Plant I. Plant I was the first and, for a long time, the only Boeing plant. It was on the bank of the Duwamish River, between the river and the Duwamish slough where, as a boy, I’d fished for porgies. Later the slough was filled in.

Plant I was now a small facility. They developed a gas-turbine engine there for trucks and cars but never could get the price down to compete with conventional car motors. Plant II, the Developmental Center, Renton, these had become the centers of activity. Plant I, once a narrow hope for the unemployed during the Depression, was now all but forgotten. A few minor machine shops, some draftsmen and engineers, a couple of labs. Whenever I went there it seemed to me a welcome relief from the bursting, profitable huge factories and offices of Plant II. Even the forlorn drabness of it was attractive. Compared with the rest of the company it seemed almost pastoral.

The company owned the land, nearly all of it, right up to the river, or rather where the river swelled to when high tides in the bay two miles downstream backed up. Naturally, when the plant was fenced, part of the property remained outside the fence. The fence had to be straight for practical reasons, and the river bank was serrated with coves and juttings. On the northeast point of the property sticking out into the river and outside the fenced boundary, a squatter lived with his wife. They had a shell of a house, four walls and a roof, doorless doorways and no partitioning walls inside. No windows. No floors. No running water or electricity. And no one remembered how that shell or that squatter came to be there, but part of the house was on company land. It couldn’t be moved back or it would fall into the river.

The squatter was a small man, and he and his wife never bathed. His wife, perhaps twenty years younger, always had on rubber boots. They hauled water in buckets from a gas station about three blocks away. When they walked along the trail just outside the fence, between the fence and the river, the Boeing guards would taunt the man, and he would jump up and down in violent anger and scream back wild, incoherent phrases. He dominated his wife something awful, ordering her about like a slave. And she obeyed every command.

They had been living there for about five years. Under state law, two more years and they’d have legal ownership of the land. The company had plans for the property, so they started eviction action.

As C talked, a picture started to form. The squatter, evidently insane, frightened, even terrified at the idea of moving. The woman, totally dependent, probably masochistic, maybe subnormal. What also fascinated me was C. I could sense his complicated feelings. He was troubled by the man even after all these years because the man was so irredeemably outside any values my boss assumed normal. He was regretful because he had been assigned to the eviction and so was partly responsible for throwing those sad people out. And secretly, even to himself secretly, he admired, almost envied, the man because the man was not civilized, and I suppose basically no one wants to be civilized. In his own way, C was civilized and at what a price.

The poem almost wrote itself. After it had been accepted by
The Yale Review
, but before it was published, I transferred to the Renton plant, said good-bye to C and hello to another boss. Changes of that kind were normal at Boeing. Treat those who work for you well, tomorrow you’ll be working for them, we used to say.

When the poem was published I showed it to someone at work, and before long several people in the office at Renton heard about it. It turned out many of them had been at Plant I at the time of the eviction, and they remembered it vividly. Especially they remembered the strange man and woman who were evicted. They all wanted a copy of the poem, so I kept sending away for copies of the magazine. Never have so many copies of
The Yale Review
found their way into the Boeing Company. I included the poem in my second book,
Death of the Kapowsin Tavern
.

It was a good thing I wrote the poem when I did. The people at Renton who saw it brought me so many more facts and stories that my imagination could never have handled it all. I would have needed years to forget the details in order to create.

The squatter had worn a yachting cap, and the employees called him The Admiral. I’d made one good guess. The man had kept rabbits, but not nearly a thousand as the poem says. I didn’t know why the company wanted the land but I said “hammer shop” because the rhythm seemed to ask for it. Actually they planned a sand-blast facility. “The lone goat” came from two goats I’d seen tied to a kitchen stove in an adobe whorehouse on the outskirts of Juarez on Christmas Day, 1943. Most of the rest is imagination, although salmon did come up the Duwamish River and did roll along the surface, and you could sell stray logs to mills if you found one floating that was unmarked by an owner.