Museums and Women: And Other Stories Read online

  He insists on wearing a droll porkpie hat from which his heavy brown figure somehow downflows; his sloping shoulders, his hanging arms, his faintly pendulous belly, and his bent knees all tend toward his shoes, which are ideally natty—solid as bricks, black and white, with baroque stitching, frilled kilties, and spikes as neat as alligator teeth. He looks at me almost with interest. His grass-green irises are tiny, whittled by years of concentrating on the ball. “Loosen up,” he tells me. I love it, I clench with gratitude, when he deigns to be directive. “Take a few practice swings, Mr. Wallace. You looked like a rusty mechanical man on that one. Listen. Golf is an effortless game.”

  “Maybe I have no aptitude,” I say, giggling, blushing, hoping to deflect him with the humility bit.

  He is not deflected. Stolidly he says, “Your swing is sweet. When it’s there.” Thus he uplifts me and crushes me from phrase to phrase. “You’re blocking yourself out,” he goes on. “You’re not open to your own potential. You’re not, as we say, free.”

  “I know, I know. That’s why I’m taking all these expensive lessons.”

  “Swing, Mr. Wallace. Show me your swing.”

  I swing, and feel the impurities like bubbles and warps in glass: hurried backswing, too much right hand at impact, failure to finish high.

  • • •

  The pro strips off his glove. “Come over to the eighteenth green.” I think we are going to practice chipping (a restricted but relaxed pendulum motion) for the fiftieth time, but he says, “Lie down.”

  The green is firm yet springy. The grounds crew has done a fine job watering this summer, through that long dry spell. Not since childhood have I lain this way, on sweet flat grass, looking up into a tree, branch above branch, each leaf distinct in its generic shape, as when, in elementary school, we used to press them between wax paper. The tree is a sugar maple. For all the times I have tried to hit around it, I never noticed its species before. In the fall, its dried-up leaves have to be brushed from the line of every putt. This spring, when the branches were tracery dusted with a golden budding, I punched a 9-iron right through the crown and salvaged a double bogey.

  Behind and above me, the pro’s voice is mellower than I remember it, with a lulling grittiness, like undissolved sugar in tea. He says, “Mr. Wallace, tell me what you’re thinking about when you freeze at the top of your backswing.”

  “I’m thinking about my shot. I see it sailing dead on the pin, hitting six feet short, taking a bite with lots of backspin, and dribbling into the cup. The crowd goes ooh and cheers.”

  “Who’s in the crowd? Anybody you know personally?”

  “No … wait. There is somebody. My mother. She has one of those cardboard periscope things and shouts out, ‘Gorgeous, Billy!’ ”

  “She calls you Billy.”

  “That’s my name, Dave. William, Willy, Billy, Bill. Let’s cut out this Mr. Wallace routine. You call me Bill, I’ll call you Dave.” He is much easier to talk to, the pro, without the sight of his powerful passionless gloom, his hands (one bare, one gloved) making a mockery of the club’s weight.

  “Anybody else you know? Wife? Kids?”

  “No, my wife’s had to take the babysitter home. Most of the kids are at camp.”

  “What else do you see up there at the top of the backswing?”

  “I see myself quitting lessons.” It was out, whiz, before I had time to censor. Silence reigns in the leafy dome above me. A sparrow is hopping from branch to branch, like a pencil point going from number to number in those children’s puzzles we all used to do.

  At last the pro grunts, which, as I said, he never does. “The last time you were out, Mr. Wallace, what did you shoot?”

  “You mean the last time I kept count?”

  “Mm.”

  “A hundred eight. But that was with some lucky putts.”

  “Mm. Better stand up. Any prolonged pressure, the green may get a fungus. This bent grass is hell to maintain.” When I stand, he studies me, chuckles, and says to an invisible attendant, “A hundred eight, with a hot putter yet, and he wants to quit lessons.”

  I beg, “Not quit forever—just for a vacation. Let me play a few different courses. You know, get out into the world. Maybe even try a public course. Gee, or go to a driving range and whack out a bucket of balls. You know, learn to live with the game I’ve got. Enjoy life.”

  His noble impassivity is invested with a shimmering, twinkling humorousness; his leathery face softens toward a smile, and the trace of a dimple is discovered in his cheek. “Golf is life,” he says softly, and his green eyes expand, “and life is lessons,” and the humps of his brown muscles merge with the hillocks and swales of the course, whose red flags prick the farthest horizon, and whose dimmest sand traps are indistinguishable from galaxies. I see that he is right, as always, absolutely; there is no life, no world, beyond the golf course—just an infinite and terrible falling off. “If I don’t give you lessons,” the pro is going on, “how will I pay for my lessons?”

  “You take lessons?”

  “Sure. I hook under pressure. Like Palmer. I’m too strong. Any rough on the left, there I am. You don’t have that problem, with your nice pushy slice.”

  “You mean there’s a sense,” I ask, scarcely daring, “in which you need me?”

  He puts his hand on my shoulder, the hand pale from wearing the glove, and I become a feather at the touch, all air and ease. “Mr. Wallace,” he says, “I’ve learned a lot from your sweet swing. I hate it when, like now, the half-hour’s up.”

  “Next Tuesday, eleven-thirty?”

  Solemnly my pro nods. “We’ll smooth out your chipping. Here in the shade.”

  One of My Generation

  SOMETIMES, to test my courage, I face students; they gaze at me with those drug-begentled eyes that have seen Krishna and the connection between a baby-pink dean and a canister of napalm, and their polite (more or less) silence poses the question “And what of your generation?” In search of an answer, I see myself climbing, nearly twenty Septembers ago, the five flights to my college room and finding, bent-necked and narrow-shouldered in an island of light, in a chamber bare but for the bleakest sticks of institutional furniture, my new roommate writing a poem. I tiptoe closer and peek over his shoulder. He writes with a tensely gripped pencil very tiny letters with long, gouging descenders. Now, as then, I cannot make out the poem, but it had a rose in it, and a cross, and a mother, and a lot of compacted backward phrasing. His poems, of which I was to read many, usually struck me as instances of misapplied force, like screws hammered into wood. However, through the mist of years certain images still wink: a father’s arm outflung like a lighthouse beam, a ferret suddenly twisting in a nest of religious imagery, an orchidaceous canopy dappling the water (“lizarding / the glissant scum”) during an imaginary trip down the Amazon. Writing on with his strange neat vehemence, my new roommate completed the stanza before rising to shake my hand. His name was Ed Popper and he came from Nebraska. He had been raised a Baptist but had become an Anglo-Catholic. He was a disciple of Robert Lowell—the early, Boston Lowell, the Lowell of Lord Weary’s Castle and “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.” I learned all this later; as he rose to shake my hand I knew only that his shoulders were narrow for the width of his hips and that, though alone in a drab dormitory room on the day before registration, he wore a rose-colored shirt with a tight starched collar and a silver collar pin beneath the tiniest, driest, most intense necktie knot I had ever seen. His glasses were so thick the flesh of his sockets formed concentric circles around blue bull’s-eyes. His domination of me began at once: he was composed and intense and I panting and weak-kneed, for in those days I made it a point of honor always to run up the five flights two steps at a time, without stopping.

  He had read everything, it seemed. His father was a grain farmer, and Ed’s companions in his rural isolation had been Eliot and Lowell, Valéry and Pound, Ford Madox Ford and Anaïs Nin. I pictured him carrying the books down the aisles o
f cornfields and settling to read in the shade of a creekside willow. As an adolescent he had written letters East to great men (signed answers had come from John Dos Passos and William Carlos Williams) and to Manhattan booksellers. He owned Knopf’s lovely first edition, bound in pastel clown stripes, of Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium; the war-time pamphlets, in four different dusty colors, in which Faber had issued each of the Four Quartets; the dove-gray booklet, printed in Dijon in 1923, containing three stories and ten poems by Ernest Hemingway; and a polychrome row, from To the Lighthouse to Between the Acts, of Hogarth Press’s delicately designed Virginia Woolfs. The acquisition, physical and mental, of these works belonged to Ed’s past. Literature had ceased to be his study and had become his essence, an atmosphere he effortlessly breathed. In the year we lived together I never saw him read a book or heard him say a respectful word about any author save Lowell and, once, Lord Byron. We were building—Ed was building in my presence—a ladder of the English poets, ranking them by excellence. Tennyson? “Altogether soft,” Ed said—“a Victorian moonbeam manufacturer,” and placed him on the rung below Cowper. Browning, then? “A rhyming O. Henry,” Ed pronounced, and banished him to the nether region below Cowley. I timidly offered him Pope. “Twaddle, and his only saving grace was that he knew it. A notch above Wordsworth and no higher.” Hopkins received Ed’s favorite verdict: “Minor. Except for two or three stanzas of the ‘Deutschland,’ a thoroughly unmajor poet. Better than Longfellow, worse than Sidney.” Sidney in turn was better than Shelley, worse than Keats. Keats weighed in under Donne, who was inferior to Milton (on the sole strength of “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”; Ed detested Paradise Lost and thought “Lycidas” unpleasantly homosexual), who, if we followed the guidelines of Eliot’s rather overrated essay on the breakup of sensibility, was less worthy than Dryden, who could not in good conscience be ranked above Thomas Traherne. At the session’s end, through the pewter haze of cigarette smoke, George Gordon, Lord Byron, emerged by negative deduction as the greatest of all English poets. Ed considered this unexpected result and thoughtfully nodded assent. “He has the necessary hardness,” he said, adding, “We’re speaking pre-Lowell, of course.”

  Could I explain, to a crowd of riot-minded guitarists, how real, if imperfectly read, these great names were to us? Or with what zest we executed the academic exercise, by now perhaps as obsolete as diagrammatic parsing, called explication? To train one’s mind to climb, like a vine on a sunny wall, across the surface of a poem by George Herbert, seeking the handhold crannies of pun, ambiguity, and buried allusion; to bring forth from the surface sense of the poem an altogether other, hidden poem of consistent metaphor and, as it were, verbal subversion; to feel, in Eliot’s phrase, a thought like an emotion; to explicate—this was life lived on the nerve ends. Ed was a master of explication; whatever on exams he lost on the facts he made up on the set passages. Once, for my amusement, he explicated a column of names in the Boston Telephone Directory and proved it to be really about night journeys, seed-planting rites, and the Eternal Return. Less playfully, beneath the surface text of history he spied the Christian counterpoint of Fall and Redemption, the radiant skeleton wrapped in earth’s distasteful flesh. Ed was a master, too, of literary gossip, an unprinted Lives of the Poets; he would tell me, with the deadpan rattle of a secret agent, how one night in Paris Pound saved Eliot from suicide, or what Wallace Stevens said to Marianne Moore before disappearing forever into the disguise of a Hartford insurance executive. On an occasion of rare excitement, fresh from a festive night in the offices of the literary magazine of which he was an editor, he brought back to our room a holy relic, a blank piece of paper upon which had been impressed the wet ring, now dried to near-invisibility, of a Martini glass set down by Conrad Aiken.

  Ed’s devotion eventually earned him a martyrdom. At his oral exams, with a summa in the balance, he declined to discuss, on the ground that they were minor, a number of poets including Tennyson, Wordsworth, and Pope; he was knocked down to a cum. Out of college, his talents for explication and passionate discrimination lacked a ready market. For a time, I would see him in New York, where he was always about to be interviewed for a job with some textbook publisher or news magazine. But even when he kept the appointment, he must have betrayed his opinion that the organization, let alone his prospective function within it, was impossibly minor, for he was never hired. He grew eccentric and fat. His striped shirts were worn dirty; his tiny tie knots looked pained. My wife and I had him several times to dinner. The last time, we discussed Proust, whom I, in my plodding way, had just begun to read. “Charlus,” Ed said. “What a horrible man! What a loathsome, incredible individual! Oh!” And, to our consternation, he couldn’t stop ranting; he drank all our brandy, smashed a lampshade, and left at two in the morning, still spewing abhorrence of Charlus. I walked him to the corner, where he embraced me. He would have kissed me, had I not ducked my head. Roommates make such gauche hellos and goodbyes. A few months later, I heard that Ed had found a job, and a year later that he was very good at it, and rising rapidly. His employer was the C.I.A.

  So, students, when you revile the “power structure” and storm the Pentagon, you are disturbing a haven of old English majors. It is only Ed Popper in there, with his narrow shoulders, his nicotine-orange fingers, his first editions (worth hundreds now), his farmboy twang, his crucifix, and his eyes like blind blue targets. He was an Arabist first, and spent years in Beirut, Istanbul, and Damascus. In the middle sixties he was taught Lao and sent to Southeast Asia. Now, I believe, he is in South America, perhaps seeing with more than a poet’s inner eye the orchidaceous canopies that dapple the Amazon’s gliding scum. Neither of us, surely, is capable of a “political” act; we rang doorbells for Stevenson, as I recall, because he seemed a poet manqué. When we met accidentally a year ago, before Ed disappeared into the “southern continent” that he refused to identify by name, and lunched in a Chinese restaurant, where he one-upped me by ordering in fluent Mandarin, I timidly asked about Vietnam. There must be, I suggested, some secret strategic reason, some resource worth fighting for. “Nonsense,” Ed said, “there’s nothing. Nobody wants it. We don’t want it, Ho Chi Minh doesn’t want it; it’s simply a question of annoying the other side. Vietnam, I’m afraid, is thoroughly minor.” Ed was impeccably dressed and slimmer—he had developed, I thought, the necessary hardness. He also told me, of my own poems, which had slowly begun to leak into print, that though I handled stanzaic patterns well I quite lacked resonance—which seemed true enough to be a reason not to see Ed soon again. I would rather look at a map, all those flat warring colors, and imagine him in it, a hidden allusion in the poem of the world.

  God Speaks

  THE WORLD IS MOCKED—belittled, perforated—by the success of our contemporaries in it. The realm of deeds and wealth, which to a child appears a gaudy heaven staffed with invincible powers, is revealed as a tattered heirloom limply descending from one generation of caretakers to the next. In the ten years since our graduation, one of my Harvard classmates has become a Congressman; another a bit movie actor, whose specialty is playing the “goofy” guy in those beach-party movies that co-star Fred MacMurray and Elvis Presley; a third a professor of Celtic languages at Brandeis. Three others have annual incomes of over a hundred thousand a year. Which these three are, the class report (a fat red paperback) does not say. Nor does it say anything, beyond a curt forwarding address in Kabul, of my old tennis opponent Gish Imra, whose fate has been the noblest and strangest of all; for, if I read the newspapers right, he has become not merely important but divine.

  The numinous rumor haloing his slight and sallow person—with his slicked-down hair the no-color of cardboard and his lavender little lips like the lips of a sarcastic prepubescent girl—seemed, when I knew him, a kind of undergraduate joke. I understood only that his father was the “profoundly venerated” chieftain of the Shīgar tribe of Nuristan. Two years ago (that is, in 1962) when his father died, in an assassination so a
mbiguous in its effects that both the Russians and the C.I.A. were rumored to be responsible, the newspapers printed some helpful, if not entirely enlightening, background material. I synopsize briefly:

  The region of Central Asia now called (though not by its own inhabitants) Afghanistan has been overswept by many political and religious tides—Greek and Arab from the west, Mongol from the north, Buddhist and Hindu from the east. The old Afghan chroniclers, surprisingly, call themselves the Children of Israel and claim descent from King Saul. Under the Kushan dynasty, derived from the Yue-chi tribe that expelled the Parthians in the first century A.D., the Buddhist religion was established. Huns ousted the Buddhists; Turkish adventurers brought Islam; Genghis Khan devastated the dynasty of Ghor. Aloof from these conversions and counter-conversions stood the mysteriously fair-skinned people of the Hindu Kush, a mountain range in the region north of Kabul traditionally known as Kafiristan, “The Country of Unbelievers.” The region is impenetrably wild. The mountains are so steep some valleys are in shadow for six months of the year. Landslides of loose scree occur. Mulberries grow, and the ibex flourishes. A legend traces the human inhabitants back to stragglers from the army of Alexander the Great, who crossed the Hindu Kush on his way to the Indus in 327 B.C. But Alexander did battle in the Kunar Valley with a blond and warlike race called, then, the Aspasians. The Kafirs worshipped a pantheon of gods that included Imra the Creator and Gish the God of War, drank gross amounts of wine, kept slaves, robbed strangers, lived in tall wooden houses, and spoke, valley by valley, mutually unintelligible dialects of Dardic. Their women were, and are, renowned for handsomeness.