Double Vision : A Novel [1 ed.] 9780817381875, 9780817314286

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DOUBLE VISION

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DOUBLE VISION DOUBLE VISION a novel

GEORGE GARRETT

The University of Alabama Press

•

Tuscaloosa

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Copyright © 2004 The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380 All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designer: Michele Myatt Quinn Typeface: Minion, GillSans ∞ The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Garrett, George P., 1929– Double vision : a novel / by George Garrett. p. cm. — (Deep South books) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8173-1428-8 (alk. paper) 1. Biography as a literary form—Fiction. 2. Literary quarrels—Fiction. 3. College teachers—Fiction. 4. Biographers—Fiction. 5. Authors—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series. PS3557.A72D685 2004 813′ .54—dc22 2004000726

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For Susan

It would be prayer to praise her in words. —“A Parable of Four Sowers”

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“Anything processed by memory is ¤ction.” —attributed to Wright Morris “I would prefer fact.” —attributed to V. S. Naipaul “With Greene we cannot always separate fact from ¤ction in the fantasies he composed on autobiographical themes, or the legend made of him by his contemporaries.” —S. Schoenbaum William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life

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BEGINNING BEGINNING

Life is sad, because it ends sadly, and every story of a life follows its narrative thread to the same unraveling. —Kelly Cherry, The Hollins Critic

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ONE

Begins with the call of a crow, a lone crow. Reedy, repetitive caw. He is out there high and all alone in the budding branches of the sweet gum tree next door. Peter Taylor’s sweet gum tree, close by the toothpick fence marking the line between his place and mine. A handsome old tree. Crow is most likely a handsome fellow, too, a glossy shard of darkness, at this moment far from the fellowship of his black caucus, for some reason or other. He calls out something loud and clear, and by the time that I am standing at the kitchen window to watch him more closely, he is long gone. Peter Taylor is long gone too. Death is much on my mind these days. My friend thinks I am dying. I am not so sure. And, after all, it’s my choice, not his. Before I had the MRI at Martha Jefferson Hospital we were both in this thing together. Roughly the same situation. We had the same symptoms—double vision, drooping eyelids, muscle weakness and fatigue, occasional problems maintaining balance, things like that which, taken together, might point directly to a brain tumor, though statistics, they cheerfully allowed, were against it. So, with the statistics on our side, we patiently waited, he and

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I, ¤rst for the scheduling of the MRI, then more anxiously for the report based on a reading of the MRI by the radiologist. Is reading the right word? It’s the one they used. MRI . . . the only time I had ever seen one was in a Woody Allen movie. I forget which one.* It was a sight gag where you see old Woody, world-class coward and hypochondriac, a perfectly bland and innocent expression on his face, being slid like a pizza into the metal whale mouth oven of the MRI. The theater audience dissolved into tears and gales of laughter, something that doesn’t happen all that often any more. What they didn’t do anything with in the Woody Allen movie was the noise of the machine. It’s a very noisy experience, a very noisy machine. They give you earplugs and that helps a little. Wonder why they didn’t use the sound in the movie. Maybe it would have distracted from the purity of the sight gag. Maybe it scared Woody. After the experience we waited—he and I and my wife Susan— in the crummy and depressing little radiology waiting room full of sweat smell and sad humanity, for an hour or so until somebody came along to say that the radiologist was satis¤ed with the pictures and would “read” them later at his leisure and convenience. A fortnight or so later somebody or other called me and said that the MRI was “clear” and “very normal.” Which for me meant (a) no brain tumor and (b) having to take a battery of tests to ¤nd out what really is wrong with me. In due time—and in another story, a factually true one—it turns out that I am suffering from something called Myasthenia Gravis, “a chronic autoimmune neuromuscular disease.” It’s the same thing that killed Jackie O’s second husband, Aristotle Onassis. Remember that? Remember him? I think it should be named after Onassis. Like Lou Gehrig disease. Not enough dread diseases are named after celebrity patients. It’s not supposed to kill me too. We’ll see about that, won’t we? *It was Hannah and Her Sisters.

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My friend and I shared an anxious fortnight. Which seems fair enough. I do not, however, believe that I will share my MG with him. For a number of reasons. Not least of which is that, though quite serious and sometimes even deadly, MG is also vaguely comic. In a purely literary sense—and that is the only sense we are considering here and now—MG is not as interesting as the fact or the possibility of a brain tumor. As my family doctor told me about my MG: “Well, hey, it’s better than a brain tumor.” My ¤rst thought, my best idea at this point is to separate myself from my imaginary friend more clearly. Let him be the one with all the symptoms. Let him be the one, all alone like that crow, waiting for an anxious fortnight to hear about the “reading” of the MRI brain scan. Even though, in fact and in truth, we both shared that bad time with some equality, I here and now elect to leave him alone with it. Let it be his problem and none of my own. Let it be his story. He is a character, not I. The time span of the story, then, is an indeterminate time. Might as well be a year or two or even his whole lifetime, past, present, and (possibly) future. Let it be, at least super¤cially, give or take, the here and now of this writing, part of a new year and century, 2001. It is therefore your world, too, reader, as well as mine or his. It’s our time. It’s his particular situation. His problem. Who is he? you ask. And what is his name? I hereby christen him as Peter Toomer. Bad pun, bad joke? Not quite. Toomer is one of the family names on my mother’s side. So be it. Here is Peter Toomer, by trade a modestly talented and minimally successful writer. “A lesser ¤gure, but a ¤gure no less,” one critic named him. Not that I think writers are especially interesting, but for the sake of this story, my plot, not his, it will be more convenient if he is a writer. I will step away, back into the shadows and out of sight. He is all on his own, waiting to learn whether or not he has a brain tumor. What did you say was his ¤rst name? you ask. DOUBLE VISION

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Originally I chose Peter. Partly by accident. A crow called from the sweet gum tree and I found myself thinking of the late Peter Taylor, my good neighbor, whose work I greatly admire. Peter, I am pretty sure you would not approve, at least aesthetically, of this kind of story, the whole thing from guggle to zatch. It’s not the kind of story you would like to end up in. I won’t risk your posthumous disapproval. Next I thought of Fred in honor of my Uncle Fred, one of my mother’s ¤ve brothers, a gifted musician, a kind and gentle and good man, and a born loser. But then I thought: Fred has his own honorable story and I have no right to tamper with it. So? Another one-syllable name, then, starting with an “F”—Frank. Let’s go with Frank. Frank Toomer is waiting to hear from the radiologist. I know exactly how that feels. While I was waiting for results of the MRI, death was much on my mind. And there were other things as well, a multitude of things I had done that ought not to have been done and things I had left undone that ought to be done. And there is no health in us. Along with the usual fear was the fear that I was here and now and arriving, mostly unprepared, at the raggedy tag end of things. I had enjoyed a full lifetime and had no good excuse but my own foolishness to explain away the fact that I was unready for the one absolute certainty of my life, of our lives. And then one night, in a dream or on the edge of dreaming, that state of being where it is uncertain whether you are awake or asleep, where all too often in my youth the purely erotic escaped its ®imsy cage to dance a show and tell, I found myself alone in a dark place. That is the best that I can describe it—a dark place. Neither clearly exterior nor interior, country nor city, just a place of darkness, though not a fearful place. In fact, the darkness seemed, at least at that time, softly reassuring. I heard nothing, not a sound or a word. And I saw nothing, no object, no other person, shape, or shadow. But nevertheless I felt some-

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thing very strongly. Vividly I would say, except that I couldn’t see anything in the dark. I felt presences. Presences plural. I felt the presence and nearness of all my dead, close kinfolk and others too, friends and lovers of long ago and mostly lost to memory by now. I felt the wince of shame at having forgotten so many of them so easily and for so long: so many boys and girls from the schoolyards and playing ¤elds of days gone by. They were all there, a multitude, a cloud of presences; and, without saying anything to me or doing anything, they were telling me not to allow myself to be mastered by my fears and trembling, but to know, now and forever after, that I have never been, never will be, all alone. These presences are here and now and always will bear witness to whatever becomes of me, and, at the right time and place, they will welcome me into their company. Meanwhile they watch over me. Thank you, Jesus. I eased into a sound sleep. Woke in the morning remembering all this and something more. It came to me that this is my story too, and so I must bring at least some of those presences into it one way or another. What has happened in this story, mine and his, so far? A lone crow, a fragment of the night perched up high in a huge old tree, has called out something, a message I cannot decode or translate, and then ®own away. Will he return, come home to roost?

EE One thing, among others to consider, is this: When you have been sick, and I mean really and truly sick (though it need not, perhaps should not be a life-threatening condition), when you have been sick enough for a good while, you tend to dispose of a lot of life’s baggage. You try to travel light. So many quotidian hopes and fears become entirely expendable. And, as the body, already at my age busily, steadily, remorselessly unzipping, un-

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buttoning, unfastening its wrinkled and disheveled garment of skin and bones and the atrophying muscles from whatever puff of ghostly smoke is at the center of being, this is a good and appropriate feeling. Heavy with your weight of private woe, you are also given a surprising gift. You are lighthearted, and, in the words of Holy Scripture, every bitter thing is sweet. It’s not a form of wisdom, however, not at all. Wisdom doesn’t matter anymore. Wisdom and folly look like identical twins. It is not regret either. Not precisely. That is, regret, as long as you are living and breathing, is, of course, inevitably present. But regret can always be mitigated and modi¤ed, unlike pride, wrath, lust, sloth, envy, gluttony, and greed, which are with us always, like the poor, undiminished, at least until the end of us if not the end of the world. And where do the seven deadly dwarfs go then? God knows. Free at last! All we know is that we are free of each other. Do they sing and dance around that aforementioned sudden puff of smoke that is all we really are anyway, all that can be left of us? Or do they disappear, a scruffy crew of surly Rumpelstiltskins, shaking their tiny ¤sts in outrage at being so rudely disembodied? Are these spirits, who have been so dangerous and so much trouble for a whole lifetime, now suddenly revealed to be a band, a jolly gang of klutzy clowns, like Fellini’s white clowns? Do you remember the magni¤cent conclusion of Fellini’s 8 1/2 where, at the tag end of all that loss and failure, the major and minor characters of the story suddenly arrive clad in dazzling white and form a ring hand in hand around Guido, the director, and he joins them and so on? No such complete vision for me. The darkness was all around, but close also around me was that sense of presences, a version of Guido’s vision. What happened to me is that I began to get not well but better. And with that change for the better I located my lost luggage. I found myself reaching out again, grasping for my old life. With cheerful pratfalls, belching and farting as usual, my seven

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dwarfs happily returned and encamped for the duration. Tenting on the old campground. Of course, I did not and cannot ever fully revert to the kind of ignorance and innocence I relished when I was still more or less healthy. Even if I may pretend otherwise, I know now that at all times I am only one step, a stumble, a gasp of breath, a missed heartbeat away from where I was and where I will surely be again. One step, one breath, and I am gone forever or, anyway, in Dylan Thomas’s words, for as long as forever is. So are you. So are we one and all. All of the time. So, at the outset, this story begins with a man of a certain age, in fact, an old man—myself, then, in my early seventies—feeling a little better after an illness that has already wasted and wiped out months of his life. He has experienced a visitation by palpable, invisible presences. He too was reassured. He is disappointed now that better health has brought back with it the old familiar heaviness of heart, the sagging weight of this world, that he had cast aside before, like a traveler leaving his luggage behind at the airport carousel to join all the other lost luggage in many a cluttered warehouse. Who simply walks out into the real world’s noise and sunlight empty-handed and with an undeniable sense of inexplicable joy. With this turn for the better, as it seems, I now ¤nd myself again pushing a burdened luggage cart. The man in my story will not have any speci¤c illness. Let us say he has been sick. For the time being he seems to be getting better. That’s all we need to know. Just one more thing, something in common between myself and the man in the story. Because of my illness I have serious vision problems. I require special glasses and, at times, have to use a magnifying glass to read any printed words smaller than

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newspaper headlines. I think that, without explanation, he will share these problems. A little more brevity, crispness, and simplicity of style might be in order also. That way is usually my way. Partly it is to distinguish myself and my own habits of composition from his that I have adopted, for the time being, this slightly knotty and somewhat more self-conscious manner. It is appropriate, I would argue, for this particular subject and this particular story. I too dislike stories about writers. They present a lot of problems for both the writer and the reader. See how writers are portrayed in the picture show, say in a movie like Julia where Jason Robards and Jane Fonda are shown sitting around in front of their respective typewriters, typing away and crumpling up a lot of balls of paper and throwing them on the ®oor. In Julia Jane Fonda demonstrates her, or Lillian Hellman’s, ever-demanding creativity by throwing her little portable typewriter out the window. They type and crumple and then a little later we dissolve through, and everyone is applauding them and they are suddenly rich and famous. Other kinds of artists can be portrayed more dramatically. See Ed Harris in Pollock. But most of what writers do is not outward and visible and most often a lot less than colorful. In this story, I’m afraid that our protagonist has to be a writer; though I believe we won’t have to waste much time, space, and energy on exactly what he writes or how he gets there. His “creative process” is largely irrelevant. Which is just as well, by the way, because he doesn’t understand very much about how it works. It’s mostly a mystery to him, and he would just as soon keep it that way. He knows, or knows of, a lot of writers who kick-start their daily labors with all sorts of rituals or tricks or habitual gestures: sharpening a lot of pencils, cleaning pipes, skimming the daily papers, masturbating, feeling guilty about something they said or did yesterday or last night, something they deliberately said or did yesterday or last night for the express purpose of feeling guilty today. Some of them can only

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work with a serious hangover. Some of them have more intimately personal, even unpleasant habits they feel that they must cultivate. Some habits are strictly practical and probably even helpful. I recall reading somewhere or other that Thomas Berger, a writer I have admired and enjoyed for half a century, begins his writing days by writing letters. When he runs out of people to write to, he eases over into the making of ¤ction. Berger said that, as I remember, in an interview. He could have been kidding or lying, of course, as so many people being interviewed so often are. It’s an irresistible temptation. If you can get away with it. That’s what an interview essentially is, isn’t it? A couple of people kidding each other to the outer limits of probability and then joining together to kid the readers, if any. Let’s try to keep the “creative process” out of this story. It will be better that way. Just remember that all writers are fearful and fascinated by the mystery of it. They have, as mentioned, their standard little rituals designed to get things going, but beyond that they are clueless. They remain in constant apprehension— fear and trembling is more like it—that the whole thing will at any moment stagger, stumble, collapse into silence. Truth is, they fear that silence most, even more than the dusty oblivion they secretly believe they deserve and have already earned and will, anyway, certainly receive. My protagonist, this old writer, Frank, is housebound, recovering from a lingering illness. Prognosis is that he will continue to get better, though not, perhaps, really and truly “well,” in the months and years ahead. Like myself, he too has experienced a sense of gentle presences, a cloud of the dead and gone who have evidently not yet given up on him. Or maybe they have no choice in the matter. Maybe, he thinks, this is one of the social obligations of the dead. To be present, in some fashion at some signi¤cant time, to the living. Anyway he has experienced those presences and now, feeling better, he has lost all but a memory of them. He feels a sense of loss. Because of them, he will never be quite the same; but, with better health, he will ¤nd that he

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has not changed as much as he thought or wishes. What was brie®y a blessing now turns out to be a kind of wound. Happens that Frank has a task, a chore to be done, one that he cannot decently ignore or avoid. He is aiming to write a review of the biography of a distinguished writer of his own generation. This is a complex assignment for Frank. It is going to be dif¤cult for him, given the limited elbow room that a brief newspaper review allows, to do even partial justice either to the book or to the writer who is its subject. The writer died a few short years ago. Frank thought about him often during his own illness, felt his presence there (and was oddly grateful for it) when he was at his lowest point. In large part because that other writer, the subject of the biography, was, for a good number of years, his next-door neighbor. Their backyards, separated by a tall toothpick fence, shade each other with old trees. The houses face the same quiet street, side by side. Though never close friends— the other writer was a little older than Frank and moved in slightly different social circles—they knew each other and had, as Frank likes to believe, no bad feelings or hostility. Oh, yes, occasionally a tic or twitch of jealousy when one or the other received a prize, earned a fellowship, was given a favorable review in some honorably prominent place, that sort of thing; though this never happened often enough to lock into a rigid or sustained posture of envy on either side. Now, reading the bound proof of the biography, Frank discovers that there are many things he never noticed or knew about his next-door neighbor, things he had not guessed or imagined. Too much was lost on Frank at the time. According to the biography, not much was lost on his next-door neighbor, who seems to have been more acute and more subtle in life and in art than Frank ever gave him credit for. Frank feels ashamed of his own inadequacy. Similarly, Frank is embarrassed by his reaction to the fact, the plain, hard indexed fact, that he, Frank, is mentioned only once in the whole book, and then as a name on a list of those who

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had paid visits to the neighbor in his bedridden days shortly before his death. Close friends or not, they had sometimes been together on panels, in conferences, at readings and so forth, as is almost inevitably the case in contemporary American letters, and Frank knows some anecdotes that he thinks might well have brightened up the biography had the biographer also known them. Frank was not interviewed by the biographer. Never heard of the biographer. Never heard of the biography either until it arrived FedEx from the book editor. Didn’t have any idea it was even in the works. Of course, he had been sick and out of touch. This truth adding a soupçon, a smidgen of self-pity, that most ignoble and vulgar of self-indulgent failings, to his already bestirred envy and disappointment. But there is more. The biographer limited his interviews to a few genuinely close friends and colleagues. What the biographer made most use of were the extensive papers of Frank’s nextdoor neighbor—diaries, journals, all sorts of letters to all sorts of people. Not to Frank. Next-door neighbors for years, why would they write to each other when, even ignoring the telephone, they could call across the fence? What troubles Frank is that, evidently, his neighbor never mentioned his name or even his existence anywhere in his papers. What disturbs Frank even more is that he is still able to be hurt, however lightly, by this fact. How easily, Frank thinks, the white whale, oblivion, swallows us all in one great gulp. One might as well have never been here. On the other hand, shamefully suggests one of Frank’s deadly dwarfs, and Frank is ashamed of it and of himself for harboring the idea: one is, after all, at this instant, alive, while his neighbor is stone dead. Frank vows to make some changes. When he ¤nishes the review and perhaps feels a little better than he does now, he will begin to organize his own papers, such as they are, with a view toward helping his own future biographer, if any. He will create a legacy. Another wince of shame and irrepressible self-pity. If he cannot even make it into the index, except for that one citation, of his

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next-door neighbor’s biography, then how in the hell can he expect to be eligible for a biography of his own? Worst of all. How far he has come, in such a short time, from those lovely presences who promised him nothing, to be sure, but who nonetheless blessed him with the lighthearted gospel that none of it mattered, matters, or will matter, world without end. Who gave him the gift of their presence and the sudden epiphanic knowledge that presence is all. When they were there, when he was aware of them, even though his bedroom was pitch dark, all things seemed to be darkly shining.

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TWO

Can you legitimately tell a whole story about a man who is writing a book review? The conventional answer to that question is that you can, of course, make up a story out of anything, based on any model— an obituary, a letter of recommendation, a checkbook, a rejection slip, an application for a fellowship, a letter of resignation, and so on—if it works. And that always remains to be seen, doesn’t it? Not that it makes any difference since this is not intended to be about me and my problems; but, still, it is necessary to pause here and to let you know that, among other things I am engaged in at this same time, is an assignment (and gladly accepted) to write a brief review (800–1000 words) for Colin Walters, book editor of the Washington Times, of Peter Taylor: A Writer’s Life (LSU Press) by Hubert H. McAlexander. It is a real book review of a real book by a real biographer. Whether I am real or not remains to be seen. In a larger sense, I suppose, we can therefore consider this whole piece, fact and ¤ction tangled together, as a kind of an extended book review. With the short newspaper piece as its

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center, it becomes a book review with some, to cop a jolly Supreme Court word, penumbra. That turns my earlier question around and upside down, doesn’t it? One asks—can a story be a book review? Quite aside from our ¤ctional protagonist, Frank, and his story, it has to involve myself even though I have so far chosen to stay out of the spotlight as much as I can. There are some things I can’t deny. My next-door neighbor, for the ¤nal decade of his life, was Peter Taylor. A matter of happy circumstance and not design. I was looking for a house in Charlottesville, close, if possible, to the University of Virginia where I worked as a teacher. Am now retired. This house, of ¤eldstone and frame, small and tidy and well kept, well suited to our needs, was available at a reasonable price. Our children were now grown up and gone, except for visits, and we didn’t need a lot of space for ourselves. One odd thing, though appropriate for this particular story, I surmise, about the house is this. Originally it was built, in the early 1920s, as a one-storey house. Maybe twenty years later, someone added on the second storey. The architectural result is an unusual upstairs with odd nooks and crannies, deep closets under the eaves, two bathrooms side by side in the hall, with a bedroom on one side and my attic/study on the other. A sense of being all casually cobbled together. It’s just the right house for Frank to live in. When we moved in here Peter welcomed us with a bottle of champagne. We popped the cork and raised our glasses in toast. “It will be nice to have someone living in the little house again,” he said. The large shadow of his handsome house loomed over ours. Would Frank feel intimidated by his neighbor’s house? Maybe. He may prove to be a better man than I am. All we need to know at this stage is that just as Frank lives next door to his late neighbor, so I am living next door to Taylor’s house. I knew Peter for many years before we happened to

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move into “the little house.” We were friendly, but never close friends. Our paths sometimes crossed. Our lives sometimes overlapped. But this is not a story about all that. It is not Peter Taylor who lives and dies next door to Frank. Whoever it is, and I honestly don’t know yet, it is and was not Peter Taylor.

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THREE

June 11th, 2002. My 73rd birthday. How odd to be old. Hadn’t planned on it. I am unprepared for it like everybody else. But, of course, it’s here and now and it has been for a while even as I enjoyed my own happy state of being well deceived. Busy little day it is and was, even though I am still housebound and slowly recovering from my illness. Feeling stronger than I have been, feeling a little more energy, I have decided to try to straighten up my attic of¤ce, years out of control. That has already proved to be an almost hopeless task. I’ve been using it for twenty years, steadily accumulating . . . things, stuff, junk, piling up in corners and closets. But if my efforts have produced more mischief than progress, if I have only moved things and dust around, I have also turned up things I had long forgotten. For one thing I stumbled on a piece of paper, one among many jottings and scribblings, on which I had written down a few lines that seem to be lifted from John Berryman’s Dream Songs: Kierkegaard wanted a society, to refuse to read ‘papers, And that was not, friends, his worst idea.

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Tiny Hardy, toward the end, refused to say anything, A programme adopted early on by Houseman, And Gottfried Benn Said: —We are using our own skins for wallpaper and we cannot win. Seems to me perfect for this story, about two old writers living and dying side by side, told from the point of view of one of them who must, as it happens, read the brand new biography of the other one and review it for a newspaper. It could serve as an epigraph for my own life story. I ¤nd Berryman’s words in my attic of¤ce. Which is on the same side (north) as Peter Taylor’s house. The fence and a tall thick hedge separate us. His upstairs bedroom was directly across and behind the hedge. All that we could see of each other’s rooms was whether or not the lights were on. Sometimes I worked late at night. Sometimes I forgot to turn off the lights and left them on all night. Peter teased me about this, politely asking if I were engaged in some huge project, writing for hours and hours through the long nights. He was much too courteous to complain that the lights were keeping him and Eleanor awake. He allowed as how he marveled at and envied the energy and ambition of so many other writers with their large, sprawling, capacious stories to tell. Mostly, he said, he was restricted to the cultivation of a little ®ower garden of quiet stories. Was I perhaps working on another of my large-scale historical novels? “Quiet” my best exit cue. I wanted to change the subject and direction of this conversation. So I told him that I had seriously considered, as a practical joke, making a tape recording, maybe an hour or ninety minutes long, of someone furiously typing, then placing the tape player next to the window, turning up the volume, and letting the listener, if any, imagine that I was creating, furiously writing just the kind of huge work he had already assigned me.

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Peter laughed. His cue for segue was the tape recorder. He remarked wistfully that all these high-tech aids to creative composition were, alas, beyond him. After that I always double-checked to see if I had left the lights on in my study. How would I use that in the story? Would Frank really do it—I mean make and play tapes of somebody typing? Wouldn’t that be in character? Question is the extent and nature of Frank’s vulgarity as compared with his more elegant neighbor. Ideally, at the outset, thanks to his colloquial, speech-based style and to his readily apparent attitudes and opinions, Frank will seem to the reader to be a cruder sensibility than that of his neighbor. The neighbor will be at the outset somewhat mysterious. But what must happen to ¤ctional characters, at least in my old fashioned view, is that they must seem to change. They must be gradually revealed as in a striptease. Consistency of character is, then, not quite enough. First impressions, powerful as they may be, must be cumulatively modi¤ed, adding to or subtracting from the initial introduction. This process gives the feeling of change, of forward movement. The story and the people in it move like a movie. Movies being without question the narrative model of and for our times. We can do things with prose, with the words singing and dancing on a page, that they can’t possibly do in ¤lm. But the ways and means of ¤lm have become the chief ways and means of storytelling. What really matters is that both Frank and his neighbor must seem to change before our eyes, under our noses. June 11th. It was a day of clippings—a multitude of odds and ends, cut out of papers and magazines and stashed away and forgotten for years. Mostly useless and irrelevant now. A few things, though, now seem apt. For example, I turned up an April 1986 review—just about the time I had bought and moved into this house on Wayside Place next door to Peter—from Chronicles by Fred Chappell—

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“The Sheriff and the Goatman.” It is a joint review of my book An Evening Performance: New and Selected Stories and Peter Taylor’s The Old Forest and Other Stories, both published, I’m surprised to notice, by Doubleday. I had forgotten that brie®y we had the same publisher, paid no attention to it at the time, anyway. Fred, whose art—poetry, ¤ction, drama, translation, criticism—I unreservedly admire, had been a close friend and colleague of Peter’s at UNC-Greensboro. Fred and I are also friends. With Fred Chappell, a creature of ®inty integrity, friendship cuts you no slack in a book review. He calls them as he sees them. And that is very rare. He is not afraid to praise or to blame friend or foe. Which lifts the level of his honesty above that of all but a very few of us. Maybe Fred, or rather somebody based on him, should also be reviewing the same biography. Frank knows this and wonders what Fred’s take on it will be. Frank can’t help feeling challenged. Glancing at this rediscovery, I tried to remember if there had been any other time or occasion when I had been reviewed together with Peter Taylor. All I could come up with was the vague recollection of a chronicle review in The Sewanee Review—a magazine that was often a home place for Peter and myself— where a critic, nameless to me now, compared my work unfavorably to Peter’s, not in any technical sense, but rather in terms of content and speci¤cally in terms of “vision.” This critic marked me as a man of dark vision, a sort of down-home cracker nihilist; whereas, he argued, Peter’s vision, though unblinking and unsentimental, was more positive, even hopeful. Irony that right now, as I am slowly recovering from my illness, I should be suffering from real “vision problems.” Read by me now, for the ¤rst time I really believe, Fred’s review is quite remarkable, comparing more than contrasting Peter and myself, placing us in the same pasture: “When Katherine Anne Porter, some decades ago, pointed out George Garrett and

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Peter Taylor as the two younger short story writers she had most faith in, she may have noticed their predilections for one of the themes she preferred in her own work: the con®ict between the new ®edged independent spirit and customary authority and the eventual bargains they strike with one another.” He goes on to point out that neither Peter nor myself are really what we at ¤rst seem to be: Garrett is, from a long way off, a recognizable troublemaker. His prankishness, his genial skepticism, his cheerful range of grotesque characters mark him as something of a Pan ¤gure. . . . These qualities may distract attention from his deep conservative tendency, which is partly a product of his traditionalism and humane admiration of civilization itself. . . . The opposite misperception operates upon Taylor. Because so many of his stories take place in an upper-class setting, because there is such ®utter about decorum and good manners, because of the formal tone of his prose, his work is often seen as embodying the good traits of Southern gentility. But in truth his whole career has been one of steady subversion. His ethic is revolutionary in the setting he has chosen, and his irony is unremitting and unremorseful. I don’t know, at least as it applies to myself and my own work, whether that’s “true” or not. And I would prefer, for obvious reasons, not to have to think about it. I do think, though, that he is right on the money as far as Peter is concerned. And no denying, Fred’s ideas can help me, if only as a subtextual shadow and guide, to pair off Frank and his neighbor, to discover some clues to their disguised and hidden selves. Something else needs to be said here about ole Fred. He has spoken and written elsewhere and eloquently about Peter Taylor.

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One of those places was in his brief “Tribute” attached to the obituary article by Peter’s former student, Mark Trainer, in the DLB Yearbook 1994. Short as it is, it is intensely perceptive. Here he describes Peter’s special sense of humor: I believe that witty replies often rose to Peter’s mind and that he suppressed most of them in the interest of good manners. I think he found humor more sociable than wit. Allen Tate’s gossip was often sexual; Peter’s rarely. His was a gossip of character rather than incident; he was fond of pointing out contrarieties, foibles, and contradictions in the behavior and conversation of friends and acquaintances. . . . But this gossip was never malicious. I can’t remember that he ever spoke against anyone. He would sometimes allude darkly to “his enemies,” but in my presence he never derogated or even identi¤ed them. I ¤nd that, until now, I have never written much, if anything, about Peter or his work. With one exception. I too wrote a “Tribute” for the same DLB Yearbook 1994. Here is what I had to say: I doubt that there is anyone who admires Peter Taylor’s literary accomplishments more than I do or has a greater respect for his art and craft. He brought something new and wonderful to southern writing even as he sustained our ¤nest and ¤rmest American traditions. There is no question that the work he created, ¤rst to last, is here to stay. The man has left us behind, slipped away into the spirit world, leaving each of us our separate memories of him. My memory goes back more than thirty years. We ¤rst met in (of all places) New York City, doing some work for the Ford Foundation. We pretty much agreed on things and had a good time. Later on I worked with him at some

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writers’ conferences. He was ¤ne to work with. I visited Greensboro a few times while he was teaching there, and delighted in his company. Later I had to leave Virginia for the wide world, and Peter Taylor came up from Greensboro and took over my job. To round the story off, when he retired I was chosen, partly by Peter, to replace him at Virginia; and then entirely by accident, we ended up living next door to each other on Wayside Place. What else did we share? We both had roots in Sewanee where he is now buried. We taught some of the same students and had a good many mutual friends. We belonged to some of the same organizations. It is the man I mourn. The work is safely alive. I loved and admired Peter’s style—his graceful ways, his special wit and wisdom, his irrepressible sense of humor, and, above all, the courage that never failed him. I will always miss him. Light perpetual keep him. RIP Another clipping that surfaced came from the University of Virginia’s student newspaper, The Cavalier Daily. (April 16, 1987): TAYLOR RECEIVES PULITZER PRIZE. Don’t know why I kept this. That’s true of a lot of the clippings I have kept and now found. Maybe I wanted a model for when I won the Pulitzer Prize.* Good picture of Peter, and it’s *Needless to say, at least to the best of my knowledge and recollection, I have never won a Pulitzer Prize. I say this cautiously because once upon a time, deep in the heart of Texas, a professor introduced me to an audience as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. Afterward, at a reception, a nice lady asked me how I liked the elegant introduction. I replied that I was ®attered and grateful. I added, though, that I had never won the Pulitzer Prize. She frowned: “Are you sure?” “Yes, ma’am,” “Oh, I think you must be quite wrong,” she said. “Dr. Whatziz—” [they call

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the lead story, very nicely written. Couple of quotes from Peter. I like this one: “I write about the life of people I observe in the old agricultural society and how the industrial revolution affects family life. I think it’s a great loss that the family is no longer the cultural unit.” I also liked this one: “Art is not like a baseball game. Prizes don’t make literature.” The story mentions yet another prize he had just been awarded within the same month— the $50,000 Ritz Paris Hemingway literary prize, for the year’s best novel published in English, noting that he was at that time the ¤rst author who actually wrote in English to win that prize. The earlier ones had won for English translations of their works. I do not want to deal with the subject of prizes. Not here and now at least. Maybe somewhere else in the story. Nonetheless prizes are a problem. We all know better, but we come to want them, sometimes even urgently. They matter far more than they ought to, but we must never ever say so. They matter to publishers, and with so many writers of our generation, post– World War II writers, earning their keep from academic institutions, they matter to our employers who are always looking for more “visibility.” A prize, especially the right one with acceptable status, can make a signi¤cant difference in details like tenure, salary, teaching load, parking place, and the number of windows in your of¤ce, if any. I must say that, as far as I could tell, Peter was always graceful about the prize game. For all I know he may have sometimes wept and prayed, cursed and cried out, beat on the walls with his bare ¤sts (haven’t we all done that?), but he never let anybody except his most intimate friends and kin see anything like that. each other “doctor” in Texas and that suits me ¤ne] “—does a lot of research on these introductions. I don’t believe he would ever make a mistake like that.” “I hope not,” I said. “Maybe it is a retroactive Pulitzer or, even better, it’s his personal choice for 1961.” “You’re just kidding, aren’t you?”

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If at all. They say nothing, probably because they witnessed nothing and have nothing to show and tell. Which is one of the things that troubles me about the biography that I must review. Naturally and typically enough, the biographer makes a lot out of prizes and awards. He knows they matter seriously to any serious writer and it helps his sedentary story to punctuate the tale with some bright moments of recognition and success. Still, I can’t help feeling that Peter would be embarrassed by the emphasis on the prizes he won or didn’t win. Just a little too tacky for his taste. Frank, as I conceive him now, is a pretty tacky guy anyway. Tacky enough to be openly jealous of his neighbor’s good fortune. Frank will be ashamed of this weakness in himself and will have taken the public attitudes of his graceful and courteous neighbor at face value. Reading the biography he is reviewing, he will now be surprised to learn that his neighbor concealed behind good manners an avaricious hunger for the fruits of “success,” that he sometimes campaigned and connived behind the scenes to win the things he won—awards, fellowships, grants as well as prizes—or didn’t win. At least at ¤rst Frank will be disappointed in his late neighbor, because that example had served to teach Frank a little humility. If his gifted neighbor could bear the wounds and blessings of Fortune with equanimity and with good grace, then why the hell couldn’t Frank do a little better? Next he would feel a sense of betrayal. The kind of conduct he aspired to, a touch of his neighbor’s class, turns out to be at once more devious and hypocritical than he had imagined. He feels like he has been snookered. Where will he turn his anger? On the ghost of his neighbor—who, after all, never asked or pretended to be the man Frank took him to be? On the biographer? An easy target, though Frank had better be careful. His situation is not so different from my own. The real biography of Peter Taylor isn’t a bad job, it’s just not very good. Not good enough. Peter deserves much better and will no doubt re-

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ceive better and more thoughtful treatment. I hear other studies are in the works. Meanwhile this book at least de¤nes some of the background and establishes the essential facts of Peter’s life. Not to overlook or deny something else—it is an LSU Press book. I have published books with LSU Press and have worked with them and for them for years in many different ways. They are good friends to contemporary literature with the Poetry series and their Voices of the South series of reprints of southern novels and collections of stories. I am not going to savage this biography by stressing its obvious failures and inadequacies. At the same time, I am not going to praise it in spite of its ®aws. This is still a book review, not a blurb. What Frank may decide to do, I do not know yet. Where were we? Cleaning up an attic after close to twenty years. Old clippings . . . Actually, if truth must be known, I am not ¤nished (yet) with my digression about prizes. As irony and curious synchronicity will have it, there is a brief piece about just that subject (“The Financial Page: The Power of the Prize,” by James Surowiecki) in the new issue of The New Yorker (June 18 and 25, 2001). Here the author has nothing new to say on the subject, though, of course, he says what he has to say with . . . panache—mainly that, for “literary” books and their authors, prizes are more important than they used to be: “The consensus among editors and publishers seems to be that literary prizes have become more important in the last decade, as publishers and booksellers have grown more adept at taking advantage of them.” An alert reader may well have noticed that this section of the story is dated June 11, 2001, and if so, I, as its author, could not possibly have already read The New Yorker for June 18 and 25. Permit me to explain. It is easier and more convenient and, ¤nally, more pertinent if I set this whole section at one time and in one place, June 11 in my attic of¤ce, rather than recording the exact time—the several days before and after June 11 that I spent

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trying to clean up and set down these words. In ¤ction the whole thing, the entire story as it develops, could be set in the attic and all the primary time be on the single date of June 11, allowing for digressions into the near and far past and, if necessary or useful, even by ®ashes of the future. On the other hand, you might well argue, this part of this story, my part, is assumed to be non¤ction; that is, the factual truth of it is to be considered as already balanced against, if not in outright opposition to the imaginary story that I am also pursuing. Question is, though, do I want to stress the clear differences between my life and story and those imaginary people in this ¤ctional narrative? Or do I deliberately want, indeed deeply need to cultivate a little ambiguity in these matters? Never mind that there is much to sort out. There are all the letters for example. Some of them coming from writers living or dead now. More and more of them are dead and gone. Bound to be the case at my age, but, even so, it is always surprising. Death has already undone or done in so many. Letters, many of them, alas unanswered. Some not even opened until now. Others no doubt were answered inadequately. Documents of every kind. A life of trash. A life of waste management. Cf. Tony Soprano. Old checkbooks, tax records, and receipts. Manuscripts. The manuscripts of others, some opened and read at one time or another. Others dusty and still sealed innocently in their packages. One’s own manuscripts—un¤nished jottings and scribblings, fragments without any context. Sometimes they prove to be oddly prescient. As, for example, these few verse lines on a yellow legal pad, beginning nowhere, really, and going nowhere. Who knows what it was meant to be? “What have you learned/from ¤re and ice?/from the coach of bruises?/from the schoolmarm of sorrow?/the lieutenants of loss?” I can envision a novel, albeit a short one, on the subject. A sort of Nicholson Baker novel of the early ilk of The Mezzanine and Room Temperature (forget Vox). A novel about somebody 28 GARRETT

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cleaning out an attic after twenty years and thus recapitulating, though in distorted and documentary form, his whole life. A sort of cubist documentary. Condemned to dispose of most of the evidence, favorable and unfavorable. A kind of trial of himself by himself as judge and jury. Sentenced and condemned to sweep out the dust of himself and at the very end to vanish also, an invisible being amid the fragmentary things that will outlast him. Since I brought up Nicholson Baker, you are perfectly entitled to bring up his lovely little book U and I: A True Story, all about his obsession with the real and imaginary John Updike. Someone might venture that this is a kind of southern-fried version of that same story and argue that I must have been much in®uenced by Baker’s example. I won’t lie to you—the fact that somebody had seen ¤t to publish U and I at least gave me some hope that my story, about two and more writers, might also someday ¤nd a happy home. As for in®uence? Well, I have to admit that Nicholson Baker intimidates me. I have to keep my dictionary handy when I read him. Of course, that’s an educational experience, but I guess it’s a little bit late in my life to try to jump start a serious program in self-improvement. So. . . . If you want to, go right ahead and think of Double Vision as the other side of the coin, the ®ip side of U and I. Fair enough? Let us return to literary clippings. A new one, something to add to the pile, just arrived in this morning’s mail. Came from the poet Brendan Galvin. A piece from the Boston Globe, written by a staff writer named Mac Daniel: “An Author at the Crossroads: Pub became haven for Yates in struggle for literary acclaim.” Came with a short note from Brendan that pretty well says it all: “Have a sad laugh or two.” Clipping, with a couple of suitable photos tells some of the story of Richard Yates during his Boston years (1977–87), and the neighborhood bar, the Crossroads Irish Pub on Beacon Street, where according to this story, Yates ate most of his meals and drank a lot of booze. Yates is dead and gone too. Died in DOUBLE VISION

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Tuscaloosa, Alabama, home of the University of Alabama (“Roll Tide!”) where he had been a visiting writer, holding down a chair called the Coal Royalty Chair. “Yates’ death in Alabama in 1992 at age 66 garnered little notice in the literary world,” the Globe story continued. “By then most of his books were out of print, forcing dedicated fans to scour dollar bins and buy up out-of-print copies to give to the uninitiated.” I knew Dick Yates slightly over a long period of time. We were together a number of times and places. I hired him to be on the staff of the Hollins Conference in Creative Writing and Cinema (1970), a one shot, pick up, three-ring circus that somehow worked. Yates needed the work and did well. Later on, early in the 1970s, he came to Portland, Maine, as a visitor to Ken Rosen’s Stonecoast Conference. There he visited classes and talked with students and in the evening gave a joint reading with his old friend—Andre Dubus. Morning came, and a young writer, Madison Bell, who was charged with guiding and guarding Yates, took him to the Portland airport for the short ®ight to Boston. At the check-in desk they couldn’t locate Yates’s ticket. They missed the ®ight. Got back to the conference, located the ticket, called in and made a reservation for the next ®ight— tomorrow morning. Started ¤ghting his hangover with a few beers and a little bourbon. Well, sir . . . this went on for days. It took Bell, and everybody else, almost a week to get Dick Yates safely and securely aboard an airplane and off to Boston. He could have walked all the way to Boston from Portland in that time. A few years later Yates showed up at a reading I gave at Boston University. It was a surprising act of generosity. Yates hated—or so he said—readings and seldom went to any. I’m pretty sure that the reason he showed up for mine was that he had heard I was being looked at and over for a job at BU, and he wanted to lend me all the support he could. I didn’t get the job, but I was and am deeply grateful to Yates for his aid and comfort.

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At Alabama, I came a year after his death to take for a semester the Coal Royalty Chair, living in the same house, called the Chair House, a two-storey frame house, well furnished and comfortable, at the edge of the campus. Writer Allen Wier had cleaned up after Yates, packing up everything and sending it all off. By the time I arrived someone else had been there for one semester—the poet Galvin and his wife. That partly explains the clipping and his note to me about sad laughter. All the things of Yates, except a few books on the shelves, were gone. But the signs of his presence remained everywhere. Yates was a heavy smoker. When he was done with a cigarette, usually after a few puffs, because he was always about to quit smoking, he would ®ip it across the room or over his shoulder and forget about it. The Chair House was a mass of cigarette burns in the rugs, on the ®oors, on the furniture, everywhere. I found it kind of comfortable that way. There are plenty of Yates stories. Somebody out there is doing his biography too. In a neater story, both biographies would be out, and Frank would be comparing and contrasting the life of his neighbor with that of Yates. Yates’s biography ought to be lively and often funny . . . and pretty sad.** I don’t know if Peter Taylor ever knew Richard Yates. They certainly met, had to at least once, when they were on the staff of the Hollins Conference. Couple of tall, slender, “aristocratic” men who both were highly honored for their short stories.

**As irony would have it—and, Lord knows, irony will sure enough have it all, bearing all away (as Elizabethans say), or is it baring all?—at this writing, near the tag end of it anyway, a biography of the late Richard Yates has just been published: A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (Picador USA), by Blake Bailey. To compound coincidence, or synchronicity if you prefer, Fred Chappell has written a review of A Tragic Honesty. Chappell has words of highest praise for the art of Richard Yates: “This refusal to sentimentalize or prevaricate, informs Yates’ ¤ction thoroughly and made him perhaps the best American portraitist since Hawthorne or Henry James.”

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FOUR

I have trouble with names. The names in my ¤ction never seem to me quite right. But without proper names, somehow appropriate (to me if not to anybody else), the work does not seem fully ¤ctional or functional either. For the next-door neighbor, I have picked out of thin air a name Peter Taylor might be amused by—Aubrey Tucker. It is a name that Taylor himself used for a character in In the Tennessee Country. It gives me something to work with. If it doesn’t seem right, then I can always change it later on, can’t I? I like the idea, though, of using a name (nothing else to be in common) right out of Peter Taylor’s ¤ction. Frank presents a different problem. Though he has yet to make an entrance in this story, he is already, from my point of view, some kind of kin to any number of other characters I have written about. I see him as belonging to the tribe of Billy Tone, the failed reporter and true crime writer of The King of Babylon Shall Not Come Against You. Who, in turn, is like a ¤rst cousin to John Towne, antihero of a novel called Poison Pen and of several associated short stories. Towne was once aptly described in the pages of the Chicago Tribune as “a lecherous, misanthropic, failed academic.” Which is at least a cut above the way Fred

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Chappell more accurately described him—“a loathsome, racist, sexist, crude and gruesome creep”—in the Greensboro News and Record. I don’t want Frank cut from the same motley cloth. The names Aubrey Tucker and Frank Toomer are a little too much alike. Maybe that’s a point to consider. They are more alike than they know or would like to be. Maybe each has one quality that the other lacks and desires. For Frank, that quality in Aubrey is class, style, a certain natural elegance. For Aubrey, though Frank might not believe this, Frank’s apparently easygoing vulgarity is enviable. Frank may never guess that he is credited with an energy and an ease that Aubrey, acutely conscious of his multiple social inhibitions, longs for. Change Tucker to Carver. The review of The Aubrey Carver Biography has to matter to Frank. And that should tell us some things about him. One of these is that he is not, clearly never has been, close to the bright hot center of American literary life. Nobody, probably not even the anxious biographer, will care a hoot or a hoop about what Frank has to say about this book in his 800–1,000 word review in The Washington Times. Never mind that The Washington Times has really good, well-selected, and well-written book reviews. Their book editor, Colin Walters, does an outstanding job, selecting the books to review and singling out the book reviewers. But none of that matters much. What does matter a lot in contemporary American culture, including publishing, is status. Why would Walters have chosen Frank for this one, aside from the fact that Frank has, over some years, reliably written reviews for him? Maybe Walters knows, or anyway somebody told him, that Frank was Aubrey Carver’s next-door neighbor. Even so, all these things considered, why does it matter to Frank? Well . . . here’s one thing. After the prolonged illness and serious “vision problems” rendered Frank unable to read or write, except for some dictation to his patient wife, Anne (?), and his tape recorder, after six months of serious troubles, this is his ¤rst

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“real” assignment. Frank has to be wondering if he may have lost the knack of it. It’s not a matter of love or money. It is all about pride and survival. Add to that the already mentioned and I hope established subtext: that Frank would very much like to do an adequate job for the sake of his late neighbor whom Frank now feels he never honored enough while he was still alive and well. The ¤rst thing I had better do with Aubrey Carver is to set him free from the shadow of the late Peter Taylor. Free as can be, anyway. Begin with some physical details. Peter was tall, lean, rangy, and strong-looking even when he was seriously ill. Aubrey will be based more on the imaginary model of William Humphrey.* I am told that Humphrey was a small man, ¤t and neat, small hands and feet, a handsome man who seemed larger in his book jacket photographs than he really was. Something of a dude, very well dressed. Peter dressed well too, but always with a casual ®air. Humphrey, I am told, was an intensely serious man and, according to these friends, who lamented the fact, often seething with ill-concealed fury at his bad fortune. Able to muster a towering rage in response to a bad review. Wounded by the good luck of other writers, even his good friends. Nothing special about that. We are all so af®icted that way, one way and another. Peter Taylor seldom revealed to others his inward feelings about these mundane things. In all the years that I knew him I can recall only two occasions in which he mentioned a book review of any of his work. One was when John Updike savaged Peter’s novel A Summons to Memphis, in The New Yorker. Peter *For an evocative summoning up of the ghost and ®esh of William Humphrey, see “Proud Flesh: William Humphrey Remembered,” The Sewanee Review 108 (Spring 2000), by Hilary Masters: “He was a small, neatly made man with an East Texas twang to his voice that he could artfully modulate to suit a mordant account of his boyhood in Texas or an acerbic judgment of a contemporary.”

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was jokey about that: “We are not allowed to say the name Updike any more in my house.” The other time, a summation of his attitude, may have been at roughly the same time and about the same book: “I can’t decide what is the worse fate—being trashed by Anatole Broyard or praised by Jonathan Yardley.” I can’t, myself, decide which image would best suit Aubrey Carver. Peter’s style is more attractive. But wouldn’t the Humphrey habit give an extra edge, a wee little turn of the screw to Frank’s problematic book review? If ghosts are really presences, and if contrary to St. Augustine, the dead, at least for a time, do have some interest in the living, then Humphrey can hardly be happy to be used as an approximate model for Frank’s neighbor.

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FIVE

Peter Taylor was not the worst driver I have ever known. I knew some hot dogs and crazies in the army who, placed at the steering wheel of a 6-by or a deuce-and-a-half or a jeep or a three-quarter ton or, as was the case in my old out¤t, a fourteenton, high-speed tractor pulling a 155mm howitzer behind it, instantly became a menace to one and all. And then there was my own ninety-year-old grandfather who kept an ancient, rusty, and rattling Pierce Arrow in his barn. Which sometimes he would shoo hens and other small creatures out of and off of and then drive down to the post of¤ce a couple of miles away. It was a sight, that ¤ne old car, last remnant of his rich days, furiously swirling a trail of red clay dust behind it. Cars pulled off the road to give him space. People got out of the way. He never had an accident. Neither did Peter as far as I know. Since Eleanor did not and does not drive, Peter did all the driving, to and from a lot of places in the South and, in addition, all up and down the East Coast and in the Midwest. There is a lot of driving in Hubert McAlexander’s biography, but never once (unless I missed it) does he mention Peter’s dashing style as a driver of automobiles. He does tell us that on long trips Peter

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would drive and Eleanor would read out loud to him from the works of Anthony Trollope. Except for the fact that one always felt at high risk and in imminent peril while riding as a passenger with Peter at the wheel, it was a pleasant experience. Because Peter chatted along, amusing and amiable, and was always worth listening to, so long as you didn’t look out the window and pay attention to where we were headed and what was happening all around us. One habitual gesture: coming from a side road, out in the county, say, and entering the fury and ®ow of an interstate or a major highway, he didn’t slow down or stop. He just pulled out into traf¤c amid a chorus of screeching brakes, screaming horns, shaking ¤sts, and all the signs and portents of what we now call “road rage.” He politely ignored his crudely aroused critics. Each time this happened I was sure we were dead meat. Yet, aside from the brief public ®urry of excitement, nothing bad or untoward happened to us. Sometimes I caught a ride with him, coming home from a party on the other side of town. He preferred to go directly through the dying downtown rather than taking a by-pass. Which was all well and good, and he drove carefully along—we had usually been drinking at the aforesaid party—not violating the speed limit. Far as I know Peter never got a traf¤c ticket. Only bad thing was that Peter paid no attention at all to the pattern of one-way streets of downtown Charlottesville. Almost always we drove steadily along, wrong way on one-way streets with predictable results—brakes, horns, ¤sts and middle ¤ngers, cars running up on the sidewalks, and so on. Sometimes, in this situation, Peter became the aggressor himself and loudly tooted his own horn. Sometimes we ran up on the sidewalk to avoid a head-on collision. Always on these occasions Peter responded with some very interesting remarks about the decay and decline of decorum, civility, and good manners in America.

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I concluded—what else could it be?—that God loved Peter Taylor and looked down on him with special favor. I could only hope that same favor included any passengers, people like myself who were just along for the ride. Not word one about this in the biography. Since, as far as we could tell, Peter and his passengers were unhurt and nobody else, to our knowledge, was ever injured (scared shitless sometimes maybe but that happens anyway all the time to everybody in this car-crowded country), there was no harm done. First do no harm. . . . As for Aubrey Carver. I don’t know yet whether his driving habits or style should ¤gure in this story. Maybe this much. Peter always had nice, reliable, comfortable cars for his road trips. No frills or nonsense. Aubrey, on the other hand, as I imagine him, would be a sports car kind of guy. A Stanley Fish? A Randall Jarrell? A neat little dude tooling around in, say, a Jag, even, maybe a BMW or a Mercedes. Given such an expensive, elegant, and intricate machine, he would be extremely careful with it. A dashing, hot-ticket car driven with less style than a little old lady might muster up. Aubrey would be very careful. Quite the opposite of Peter Taylor. One thing that might allow for a little humor. These ¤ne and fancy cars are all-too-often in the shop. One thing or another always seems to be going wrong, and you ¤nd yourself at the mercy of mechanics with ambiguous, if not dubious, quali¤cations. Aubrey Carver would often be without wheels. Would have to depend on Frank some of the time to drive him to and from the dealer’s car lot. Aubrey would be grateful, but embarrassed. And Frank, being Frank, could not resist the opportunity to needle Aubrey about his troubles with expensive lemons. Once Aubrey called Frank’s bluff and invited him to take the wheel of his new Jaguar and open it up and see what it would really do. With Aubrey beside him, Frank went out to Interstate

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64 and goosed it up to more than 100 mph. He was slowing down, really not much more than ten miles over the limit (65), when he got jumped by a state trooper and earned a speeding ticket. Trooper looked the Jag over, looked all around. Not a lot of traf¤c on I-64 that day. Made a proposition. He would reduce the citation to a warning ticket if they would let him take it for a spin just up to the next exit and back. Why not? Frank gets out and waits with Aubrey by the police car. Trooper hops in behind the wheel, scratches out, and he’s off and gone down the highway (and back) in a shiny blur and a smooth roar. Returns and surrenders the keys to Frank. “Man, that is some kind of a machine,” Trooper allowed. “You all be good and drive careful if you can.” Something Aubrey and Frank could summon up any time they felt the need for a laugh. It’s an anecdote that does not appear in the biography that Frank is reading and reviewing. Too bad. Maybe it doesn’t really matter. But, then again, maybe it does. Aubrey was never a seriously conspicuous consumer. He had plenty of nice things, but was, in general, a frugal man. Had enough money—some kind of trust fund income, but nursed it. The exception was these cars. Had to have a hot car. Then he drove it around like a sissy. What do you make of that? .

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SIX

In the writing trade I have long since learned that a great many of my colleagues are slowly and steadily creating interesting ¤ctive lives. Their book jacket biographical notes are apt to be a bit more colorful than they might be if hard, factual truth-telling were the principal criterion. Some—I’ll name you no names, at least not among the living, for writers are as wildly litigious as any other crazed Americans—have created masterly ¤ctions of themselves—my friend the late James Dickey, for example. He may have been the best at it. Some of these have been caught in the act, as it were, and exposed. But if you follow the literary press at all—and I don’t recommend it—you will have noticed that lately the ¤ctive life, the artful autobiography is now deemed to be an essential part of the author’s—or should I say auteur’s—oeuvre? Writers, artists in general, can now be praised or blamed for the imaginative lives they lay claim to. I think all this probably started with our celebrity culture that celebrates the reinvention of the self. It is curiously respectable. More and more it is claimed as a traditional American gesture and virtue, part and parcel of our whole national mythos. It is said to be what we do with reality. We don’t accept it, we mess around with it. I don’t know how I feel about all that. These grand generaliza40

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tions are mostly a matter of smoke and mirrors. Like grandiose abstractions. Colossal sound bites. Didn’t I say, didn’t I warn you, way back at the beginning, that I was “amused” by all this? I won’t deny it. I do believe that there is a profound human hunger (I doubt that animals fully share this feeling, since they are technically more innocent than we are) that takes real comfort—“comfort and joy”—from the downfall of the high and mighty and the privileged and powerful, and not just those, but also lesser princes too—the beautiful, the bright, the rich, the favored, the prize winners, the highly honored. There is something as old as Homer and Hector’s shining helmet, and before that even, something that powerfully persists in the human psyche to this hour. Something that says to us and for us: “Let them fall down and be dragged in the dust behind chariots. Let the dust blow and carry them away to the darkest Oblivion.” Sometimes it is a little less serious than all that. Sometimes it is mostly comic. No real harm done and we are, or can be, amused. What has all this to do with . . . ? Glad you asked. We have two biographies under consideration here, the “real” one about Peter Taylor by Hubert H. McAlexander, the one I have to write about, and fairly soon, too, to meet the deadline; and the ¤ctive one concerning the life of one Aubrey Carver. Both of them will surely have some things in common. All biographies have this much in common: that they must take the available materials that may be called evidence of the subject’s “real” and ¤ctive lives, examine them, study them, order and rearrange these materials, and then create a new life story to ¤t the subject. They must decide what is worth featuring and what is worthy to be forgotten or ignored.* *At this writing (in “real” time), the most recent LSU Press catalogue, “Books for Fall and Winter 2003,” announces and advertises “a deeply felt biography,” by Ashby Bland Crowder: Wakeful Anguish: A Literary Biography of William Humphrey. It’s a full page ad and states that this book “achieves something

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Point is, the biographer, like an undertaker with a corpse, has, within certain limits, the ability to shape the subject’s life story to suit his own private blending of fact and ¤ction. In our selfconscious, self-re®exive, self-of-steam age, subjects are often fully aware of all that and try to organize and arrange their evidence in advance, creating a “legacy,” still image-making from beyond the grave. Sometimes to advantage and sometimes not. Think of Larry Thompson’s dark, payback biography of Robert Frost. I remember Joseph Blotner telling me the difference between writing the Faulkner biography and the next one he did about Robert Penn Warren. With Faulkner, Blotner had to sweep and clear aside a multitude of factual errors and even deliberate ¤ctions just to gain access to the basic facts. Not unlike the problem of Henry Hart in his James Dickey: The World as a Lie. With Robert Penn Warren, Blotner said that it was ever so much easier because Warren did everything he could to help the biographer except actually draw a road map to the buried treasure. Follow the yellow brick road. . . . This way to the Egress. . . . It is interesting, sometimes important, to know what the biographer’s assumptions and interests are, to the inevitable extent that the biographer seeks to impose those interests and assumptions on, or conceal them from, his subject. Either way, the biographer’s sleight of hand is often revealed by emphasis, space allotted, and ¤nally by the quality and energy of the writing. The writing picks up and gets more lively when the biographer is interested and engaged. Professor McAlexander, for example, seems to turn on when he writes about Peter Taylor’s social life, the parties: who was there, what was served, what was said and rare in literary biography: a portrait that reveals both the sustained suffering in an artist’s life and work as well as his exaltation in the triumph of his art.” There are two pictures of Humphrey, one a photo from the 1960s, the other identi¤ed as a painting by his wife, Dorothy. He looks to me a whole lot like Aubrey Carver. You might call this a coincidence. Taking my cue from Nabokov, I call it synchronicity.

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unsaid, the good times. Which is fair enough. Peter was a very social guy. He liked to party down. But he was also an extremely hard worker, self-disciplined and demanding. Sick or well, he worked long and hard at his desk. I have not the slightest idea whether writing was easy or hard for Peter. Nobody’s business. But no question he was devoted to the hard labor of it. You get some sense of that in the biography. It was, is, after all, undeniable. But someone who didn’t know Peter or his work well might miss that in this biography, coming away with the idea that the life of Peter Taylor was a montage of literary cocktail parties, occasionally interrupted by the publication of a book or something, punctuated by prizes and awards. In my judgment, McAlexander also comes across, by interest and implied attitudes, as something of a snob. Which is not inappropriate. Peter was a bit of a snob too; but he seldom let that interfere with his genuine interest in and curiosity about all kinds of other people. I remember a story Peter Taylor liked well enough to tell more than one time. It was about when he was in New York and some of his friends took him to a (what else) literary cocktail party where Norman Mailer was likely to be present. They wanted to witness a meeting of Mailer and Taylor, an event, in their view, a little like the celebrated brief meeting of Joyce and Proust. Got there and, sure enough, after awhile Mailer showed up. Big party. Mailer on one side of the room, Peter on the other. Finally Peter summons up courage and bravado and starts across the room to shake hands and introduce himself to Mailer. Evidently out of the corner of his roving eye, excellent peripheral vision, Mailer sees him coming, turns, breaks off his conversation with ®unkies and fans, and goes forth to meet Peter in the middle of the room. They shake hands and are all smiley and begin to have an animated private conversation. Nobody can hear what they are saying to each other. There is some laughing, some thigh slapping, even, at the end of it, some back slapping. “What did you talk about?” Peter’s crew asks eagerly.

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“Our mothers,” Peter says. “We both have very interesting mothers.” One missing factual element in the story. Mailer is a small, anyway midsized man, roughly my size. He is used to intimidating other people of about his same size, but it’s hard to intimidate a big, rangy guy towering over you. Peter’s people were pretty grand—senators, governors, and the like, rich and powerful and privileged folks. There was a wonderful moment, not all that long ago, in the grand scheme of things, locally called “The War of the Roses,” when, as a voter in Tennessee, you had the simple choice of voting for one Taylor or another, his brother, for governor. McAlexander is good on this, the family background. It becomes an important contribution to the better understanding of Peter’s ¤ction. I knew some of these things about him and his background, but only vaguely. Peter did not violate the southern code by asserting or baldly advertising his elegant pedigree. When he did talk about his family, as I remember, he almost always spoke of the colorful eccentrics among them, with pleasure and amusement. I remember his telling me about his mother who more or less secretly was a gifted juggler; how, once in a while, she would don a costume and perform her juggling act for him. What about Aubrey Carver and his biography? It would be more fun—and we do need some fun here—if Aubrey were more of a snob than Peter ever was and with much less good reason. Fun if Aubrey had openly claimed an elegant ancestry that, under the tough scrutiny of his biographer, turned out to be composed of ¤gments of wishful imagination. And if Aubrey Carver fabricated his family history and background, mightn’t he also have lied about many other aspects of his personal history— for example, claiming athletic prowess and performance, war service, active involvement, always on the right side, in the great social issues of his times? Wouldn’t Aubrey have been convincing enough, as all good liars are, so that Frank would have taken

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it all in, swallowed it whole, hook, line, and sinker? And wouldn’t Frank now be pissed off to discover, through reading the biography, that he had allowed himself to be duped? If so, who would Frank blame—the ghost of Aubrey Carver or his biographer?

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SEVEN

Another possible epigraph for this story: “It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.”— Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie. That little beauty ought to give everything a good old-fashioned intellectual goose. Besides being an almost incomprehensible (don’t ever say incoherent) theorist, Adorno is said to have been a pretty good musician himself. Played the piano. Does Frank play a musical instrument? Did he ever do so? Like in a school marching band? Aubrey, I think, plays the piano, modestly well, that is, plays with technical facility and not much feeling one way or the other. Music meant to be background noise at a party. Played not much classical or jazz, but mostly some good old pop standards—Cole Porter, Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Johnny Mercer. And then there is the problem of age in this story. At the center of it, under the lights, we have so far two people—the late Aubrey Carver and the other one, Frank Toomer, stumbling along, puf¤ng and blowing, not far behind him. A geezer in his early seventies. Not feeling all that well, either. Just getting over an illness that might have been the end of him. 46

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These two have (had?) wives and families, friends and enemies, living and visible presences, as it were. All these things might help to “open up” the story a little bit, at least to counteract the musty, dusty, forest-of-pill-bottles, memory-ridden and forgetful aches and pains of old age. With the two central characters we need to bear in mind always that their lives are mostly behind them. One of them is already dead, but he is, in truth, getting a second chance, a second lifetime, in the perhaps distorted form of this new biography. Frank, considering this, is beginning to think that his own truncated second chance is partial recovery from a serious illness and is beginning to feel, if not to think, that his little book review for The Washington Times could just as well be the last piece of writing he will ever do. Soon enough he will shuf®e off to Buffalo, wearing his crossover beard, in a brief vaudevillian ride on the coattails of the late Aubrey Carver. I want to give Frank a brother. It is the brother (younger or older?) who, like my own Uncle Fred, could be far away from all this, living in a driftwood shack nestled amid sand dunes on the upper East Coast—somewhere maybe up around Fernandina— of Florida. Not lawfully owning anything, not even the shack, not the sand that it stands on. Nearest potable water maybe a half-mile or a mile away, a small artesian well, sulfurous, the rich odor of rotten eggs. A slow and steady, sweaty walk every single morning to ¤ll two buckets with this elixir and return, more slowly, to his shack. He would bathe his lean, tanned old body in the surf of the beach. He would have a long, shaggy, tangled gray beard and wild white hair. Like Saraghina in Fellini’s 8 1/2, he would become an object of popular legend and curiosity among children of a certain age. Who would come out there on their bicycles (he can ¤x them) to see that crazy old hermit in his place. Call the brother Mark. We do not know, and maybe will never know in the con¤nes and context of this story, whether Frank’s vision of Mark is true or false, “real” or imaginary. DOUBLE VISION

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There is, buried here, a factual story of some kind. Let us say that Mark, like my Uncle Fred, had been for a time a very gifted and even moderately successful classical musician. Something happened. An accident, a physical injury, a serious breakdown, something. From which, once more or less “stable,” Mark withdrew himself from the active world to enter, on his own terms, the contemplative one. He disappeared off the face of that selfsame earth. Vanished from the radar screen. It is Frank, we will come to guess if not positively learn, who has created this biography of the (sometimes) happy beachcomber for his brother. Under another name, an identity he has assigned himself in a kind of privatized witness protection program, Mark could just as well be an attorney in Denver, a banker in Tuscaloosa, a barroom piano player in the Australian Outback. Frank will have tried most of the usual ways and means (including hiring private detectives) to ¤nd out what may have become of Mark. No luck. Mark has disappeared and, in the eyes of the professionals, he is most likely to be among the dead. No trace of his comings and goings. Frank is likely to envy this. He thinks that the late, great Aubrey Carver might prefer it also. Better blank silence, no traces, no footprints in the soft sand dunes, than a biography that ought to be better than it is. Mark’s life goes on—dead or alive no matter, real or imaginary, no difference—for as long as Frank’s does, that is, for as long as Frank can remember him and think about him, picture him. My ¤rst thought is that Mark Toomer comes out of some of the childhood needs and loneliness of Frank. Who, with several older sisters, probably felt the urgent need of a brother as companion, friend, and ally. Many children create and enjoy imaginary companions. Isn’t that so? It is easy at that time. As I remember it now, we, some friends and I, even invented other alternate worlds and nations and put ourselves in the impor-

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tant leadership positions there. My best friend at that precious time of life was Bobby Akerman, prime minister of the dazzling country of Dondazo. The kind of place that places like Oz aspired to be. My own turf was the socialist nation of Arkia, usually friendly with Dondazo, enjoying “a special relation,” except for the times when Bobby and I quarreled or fought about something. Then we couldn’t resist releasing our far-®ung, wellequipped, and massive armed forces against each other in total war. No serious harm done, though. Peace agreements were, on the whole, fairly easy to come by. Reconstruction was easy and quick. Sometime in my own childhood, early or late, I learned the fact that I had had a brother who died at birth or shortly thereafter. I felt somehow relieved to learn this. An unexplained absence, which I had felt deeply, now made more sense. Presence or absence, he does not haunt me in the same way that Mark haunts Frank. But I have to admit that I have used him, exploited the idea of him in ¤ction, as do we all our living and our dead. I don’t suppose that I should be so de¤nite about this. How can I be de¤nite about what is imaginary and ambiguous? But it should be openly admitted that Mark Toomer may be only a ¤gment of Frank’s imagination. Imagination slows down like, maybe concurrently with, metabolism. It has become easier for old Frank to imagine the beachcomber script than to invent other new ones. So here we have the two of them. Aubrey who invented an elegant, aristocratic past that served him well enough while he was alive, but now has given his biographer the gift of refutation, something to talk about. Funny thing to Frank is that the biographer chooses not to deal with Aubrey’s pure habit of pure fantasizing, opting instead for a more moderate view of Aubrey’s imaginary past history, merely modifying the invented legend. Frank concludes that the biographer (a) wants to believe the myths, at least a little bit, and (b) prefers the imaginary family

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background and back story to the “real” one. Bit of a snob himself, and maybe on less grounds and with less good cause than Aubrey, the biographer would rather not be seen investing his time and energy in the unmitigated exposure of his subject. Frank writes in the margin of his bound reviewer’s copy— “Chicken Shit!!!” Another fragment of scribbled verse that turned up along with so many other things during Frank’s big attic cleanup. Where does this come from and where was it coming from or aiming to go to? It’s obviously an early draft version of something or other, maybe presciently jotted down before illness arrived and struck Frank down. Seems to begin, allude anyway to the ancient story of Jacob and the Angel at the river’s edge, then eases into the classical world, the river becoming the Styx, the Angel vanishing to be replaced by the celebrated Charon, boatman and boatswain of that river. Petition Sir, a dark being has come again to wrestle me down. Close by calm water of this polluted river rich with its rainbows of spent fuel and solvents, this self-same place where he ¤rst wounded me, then gave me my name, close here by these dark waters, this dark boatman calls my name out loud and will ferry me over and far away, for good and all, unless, kind sir, good Lord Almighty, out of your inexhaustible mercy, you will grant me a stay of execution.

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EIGHT

These two imaginary men, Aubrey and Frank, are, of course, “bookish” people. They read a lot. “Nasty, bookish, and short,” that was Frank’s lame little joke about himself and Aubrey, a weary pun, to be sure, but one that nevertheless served to break up Aubrey’s habitual mask of calm indifference and even elicited the ghost of a slight and slightly wan smile. Frank had used the same pun in a book review of one of the busybody contemporary generation of British novelists—a kind of “specialty” of Frank’s during his last few years of teaching at Jefferson: “nasty, British, and short.” Who could that have been? Barnes? Ackroyd? Amis? Who amongst these seriously talented gentlemen is seriously tall or short? Frank now thinks it must have been a book by Martin Amis. Recalls that the father, Kingsley, sometimes in correspondence referred to his son as “Little Shit” and that somewhere or other (unless Frank misremembers) Auberon Waugh described Amis as a “degenerate dwarf.” In any event, that brief and less-than-incandescent smile of Aubrey Carver in the face of an unremarkable pun is based on something else entirely, or so he probably took it at the time and so Frank remembers it even now. There is something, a shadowy

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vague quality about Aubrey that even his friends took note of, made comment on, though never in his presence. A “British” quality ampli¤ed by his tweedy style, modi¤ed by touches like the ascot he affected, the handkerchief in his coat sleeve. “Old time Hollywood,” he would have said if anyone asked him about that. Quasi-Brit clothes, then, and just the hint of an accent that could as well have been Tidewater, gracefully acquired—Aubrey was, in fact, a native of Huntsville, Texas—in the years living here in Virginia. There was a story to go with it. How Aubrey had evidently, once upon a time, for a length of time not yet clearly de¤ned or speci¤ed, studied at Oxford. Perhaps on a Rhodes, though, Frank recalls, Aubrey never actually claimed that distinction. May have implied it a couple of times. May not have rushed forward to correct some book jacket copy or the contributors’ notes that accompanied something or other published in a magazine. But never himself announced an of¤cial Oxford af¤liation, early or later. Some of the blame for the story of his Oxford days falls on Aubrey’s disciples. There were some in those days who embellished his stories. How he had studied at Brasenose, at Christ’s Church, at Magdalen, or above all at small and lovely Trinity College, surprisingly set there right next to Blackwell’s and all that, yet blessed with a wonderfully colorful and commodious garden. Trinity was not an astonishing choice because, in fact, Aubrey Carver had been there in the summer for a ten-day course arranged for alumni of Jefferson University. He could speak with some accuracy about the beauty of the hall where they dined and the bar and beer cellar beneath it. One of his disciples offered up a new twist: that Aubrey had only visited at Oxford, but had actually studied in small, elegant Trinity in Cambridge, the one, adding a detail for verisimilitude, with no chimney, but a great medieval smoke hole in the roof of the hall. Medieval Brits believed that smoke was good for body and soul, as to this day, in their novels at least, they profess

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consensual agreement that bathing too often and drinking cold beer are bad for you. Frank ¤nds the biographer’s treatment of this part of Aubrey’s life to be at once ambiguous and disappointing. The biographer is not much interested in following up the Oxbridge legend and connections of Aubrey Carver. That might have involved some actual primary research—heavy lifting, a little digging around, some dusty weighing and sifting. Nasty, British, and short . . . Frank had not intended to crack wise with his neighbor. He was never either so gauche or so clever (take your pick) as all that. But the moment he said the words and summoned up that sad, ambiguous little smile from Aubrey, he was aware of how Aubrey took it. Face to face, eye to eye, he did what he had to. Which was to reply to Aubrey, weak smile to weak smile, uncertain as ever how Aubrey would read and interpret Frank’s facial expression. No, quite certain that no matter what he did— crossed his eyes or rolled them and ®uttered his tongue in a loud Bronx cheer—it would be understood and taken . . . the wrong way. Or maybe that was the right way. Maybe whatever he said or did, whatever expression Frank conjured up or merely allowed to take temporary control of his features, was in truth a mere camou®age for that mutually understood rich, fartysounding, metaphorical Bronx cheer that Frank, almost in spite of himself, wished upon Aubrey Carver and all his works and days. But I am talking along about the fact that Frank and Aubrey, different as they may be, are both avid readers. They are members of the last generation of American writers about whom this claim could honestly be made. Most of the younger generation of writers don’t read nearly as much as they ought to, and they are painfully aware, know it even before they begin to put words on paper and then expect other people, including other writers, to read and even admire them. But in a relative sense, and, as

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well, in the larger context of a whole culture not so slowly, selfindulgently allowing itself to become functionally illiterate, rich with cultivated and invincible ignorance, even in such a time and place writers can still be called bookish people. Most of them, even the ignorant new generations, still begin as eager listeners to fairy tales and to bedtime stories, soon becoming happily lonesome children, curled up somewhere with a good book or a bad book, any old book. What is something Frank Toomer might be reading back there in the summer of 2001? It is now nearing the end of summer 2002 as I write about this, but the time of the story here is, or should be, based on the summer of 2001, allowing always for memory of the past and guesses about the future. Frank, when we ¤nd him, cleaning up his attic of¤ce on or about June 11, 2001, is reading a new book, a novel—Angelica’s Grotto (Carroll & Graf ), by Russell Hoban. I picked that one mainly because I read it at roughly the same time that Frank did. Neither of us has kept up with Hoban’s work over the years. I had deeply enjoyed Ridley Walker years ago. I opened this one, Grotto, and read it straight through, from left to right, from front to back. Good serious fun. Lively picture of London today. Full of interesting things. Fine on its own, in its own terms, but also relevant to my particular problems concerning this account of a man writing a review of the biography of his next-door neighbor. For one thing, Harold, the protagonist of Grotto, is a geezer too. He is seventy-two—exactly my age on June 11th, 2001. Roughly the same age as Frank Toomer, and younger than his late neighbor, Aubrey Carver, would be if he were still alive. You don’t get many books these days featuring geezers. Maybe —I think he must be—Hoban is roughly the same age as the rest of us. Looks like it in the author’s photo, though I think he looks a little better, less weathered and worn down than we do. Harold, however, is not better off than we are—not counting Aubrey, of course. Truth is, or emerges, Harold has such a string of ailments, a regular rosary of dread diseases and conditions, that he

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is a challenge to the hard-pressed British National Health Service. Throughout the story he is always going into or coming out of his neighborhood Casualty. Which is, I gather, what the Brits call the emergency room. Nevertheless Harold manages to carry on a busy life, including a complicated, crazy love affair. His list of drugs and medicines easily dwarfs my own little cache of pill bottles and even the ones I plan for Frank to take. I take some comfort and challenge from Hoban’s ability to maintain a lively tale about a geezer. Harold is a failed painter (failed in his own eyes at least) who has earned some modest reputation as an art critic. Hoban is able—as Joyce Cary once was, in a different way, with the inimitable Gulley Jimson—to make Harold’s talent seem real and credible. Harold is working on a book about Gustav Klimt and, in a larger sense, about the complex relationship of art and pornography. Think that’s not a chic topic? Well, take a look at the July 9, 2001, issue of The New Yorker and see, maybe even read Peter Schjeldahl’s essay occasioned by the opening of a show, “Picasso Erotique,” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal: “Picasso’s Lust: was sex the artist’s real muse?” And Harold is interested in even grander, larger topics like the give and take of high art and pop culture (including pornography) side by side, brothers and sisters, simultaneous. Peter Taylor, as far as I could tell then, and now after reading the biography, never cared a hoot about the comings and goings of contemporary popular culture. McAlexander’s biography seems to con¤rm that impression. There was art, high art, and there was trash. That position ¤ts my idea and understanding of Aubrey Carver. Of course, Aubrey, a subscriber to Gourmet, Town and Country, and The New Yorker, never considered these venues as being exemplary of pop culture. I’m not really so sure about Peter, though. He liked to present himself as ignorant of and largely indifferent to the ups and downs and trends of popular culture. But, in fact, after perfunc-

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tory dismissal of the subject, he usually was all ears, interested in what seemed to be happening out there in Trash World. And he was acutely interested in the older popular culture, the folk culture, the country ways and means of people from his childhood. And McAlexander notes that Peter also took delight in a lot of the details of contemporary life in America, including gay life at Key West. I prefer for Aubrey not to be quite that contradictory and complicated. Aubrey’s an intellectual snob. Ole Frank, on the other hand, liked to try to keep up with at least some aspects of popular culture. Enough to be able to swap and share a few clichés with his students while he was still teaching at Jefferson. Fine and dandy, and this, in itself, makes for a good point of contrast between the two neighboring writers; though Frank, locked into his character, is naturally embarrassed about his assigned motivation. Imagines that his students must have been (if only privately) contemptuous of his grandfatherly incursions on sacred turf. They had to wonder how an adult, a genuine grownup, could, as they might have put it, “get serious about all that shit.” More important than the arts and crafts is the erotic component of Angelica’s Grotto. First to last, old Harold is about as horny as man or beast can be. More or less limply impotent, he nevertheless has a profound and powerful sex drive. He is driven. This is the ¤rst piece of writing I have encountered in a while that tries to deal with, directly and seriously even if in comic context, the sexual feelings, habits, and appetites of the elderly. Exception? Maybe Philip Roth. A lot of Harold’s daily life, as dramatized in this story, seems to be sadly and comically true. I don’t know what to do about that in my story. If anything. If I had not read Hoban’s new novel, I might not have realized that it was something I was going to have to make up my mind about, to come to terms with. I could still elect not to get into the subject. Can I choose to preserve the secret that, behind a

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smokescreen of jokes and winks and elbow nudges, old guys are as horny or hornier than randy teenagers? That we are swept away with crazy chemicals? I think, when I allow myself to think about it, that it is something the dying body does to us. Last call to pump out some sperm and pass along some mixed genes before the body, no good buddy anymore, bids us, one and all, a thieves’ farewell. Was there, could there possibly have been any kind of sexual rivalry between my two—Frank and Aubrey? If so, then in what form and at what point? At this point their wives remain shadowy ¤gures, not yet introduced to us. I don’t know yet who these women are or may turn out to be. In any case, a neighborhood affair, impossible to sustain in any secrecy, would be almost out of the question and much too troublesome to trouble with. Better that it is another woman, someone who, years before, both of them separately had brief, intense, highly charged erotic love affairs with. Then something happened to render her unavailable. She wasn’t interested in marrying either one of them. Lucky for them in the long run. Lucky for everybody concerned. Here’s how I see it at this time, though Frank might not, now or ever, agree with me. She was a good person, a warm and loving woman, who turned to them (and to some others, they have to allow) for comfort and joy at a bad time in her life. A good comfort woman. It was brief and bright and hot while it lasted. And it all ended with somehow minimal harm done. Easier said than done, but nonetheless done at this time and in this case. Partly out of gratitude for that, as well as for her generous favors, Frank brought her together with a friend, an old and good friend, who was a well-to-do widower and, as luck would have it, living half way across the country between Jefferson and the Paci¤c Ocean. They married and, as far as Frank can now tell or wants to know, have lived happily ever after. Now of course Frank knew about her affair with Aubrey. Can’t wholly rid himself of ®eshy images that ®ash when he thinks of the two of them, Aubrey and “Peaches,” making “the beast with two

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backs.” To do that he would have to purge his memory of all his own good times, his personal best, a sacri¤ce he’s not yet willing to make. There is more to it to be sure. And there is the serious question that Frank tries to ignore, avoid, and escape. Was his true and hidden motive in bringing together his old friend and “Peaches” and sending them off to live a long and happy life, was this less a matter of gratitude and friendship than an attempt to even up the score with Aubrey Carver? Frank doesn’t know the answer to that and doesn’t care to. The biography of Aubrey Carver does not mention any of this or even hint at it. As for the original, no problem. Peter Taylor was clearly fascinated by the thinking of Doctor Freud and the shuf®ed deck of Freudian metaphors. Some of his best short stories are seething with Freudian implications. But direct and overt literary treatment of the subject of sex is just not part of his art. Thanks to Hoban, I think I can see why. Geezer sex is, because it just has to be so, almost always farcical. Certainly it is in Angelica’s Grotto. Taylor could be very funny, but was rarely, if ever, ®at out farcical in that way. I can’t quite imagine Aubrey Carver writing any explicit sex scenes, either. Frank, vaguely farcical in his own version of himself, willing to try anything once, might be different. He might give it a go. But would he be any good at it? Remains to be seen. Aubrey certainly wouldn’t approve, though he might be pleased that once again Frank’s essential vulgarity is so obvious. Was Aubrey ever that hostile toward Frank? Do you know what that Aubrey used to do? Frank has seen him do it, or claims to have, back awhile, not long after Frank moved in next door at “the little house.” Back then Aubrey and Eileen gave a lot of small dinner parties for the local literati, the Jefferson faculty and the like. Frank, to this day, has no idea why they were doing that, what they were up to, what their goals and objectives, their hidden agenda might be. Frank didn’t care. He was happy to be invited over to dinner. A little stuffy—what

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would you expect?—but always with good wines, acquired in Washington, D.C., and fancy food right out of Gourmet. One potent cocktail was allowed before dinner, and Aubrey could turn out a perfect little martini: frozen glass, gin or vodka together with the scent and hint of vermouth, a minute or an inch away from being solidly frozen too. Only one martini disaster that Frank knew of. Aubrey had read somewhere that Evelyn Waugh and that crowd used to make a martini not with dry vermouth, but with a very dry sherry. Aubrey tried it. Didn’t prove to be as good as it ought to have been to please Waugh. Maybe Waugh was joking. At table, candles burning and glowing, wine glasses glistening, heavy old (family?) silverware winking and blinking, the ladies sitting, the gentlemen still standing, Eileen would casually suggest that Aubrey should say grace. And Aubrey would do so: “Deus conservet Ecclesiam, Reginam, principes, regnum, veritatem et pacem. Amen.” Usually someone had the curiosity and chutzpah to ask about what it was that Aubrey had just said. “Oh,” he said. “It’s just a short version of the grace of one of the Oxford colleges.” Short enough to be easily memorized, Frank thought. “What does it mean, Aubrey?” “I translate it, roughly, as—‘Dear Lord, protect and defend the Church, the Queen, the princes and this kingdom in truth and peace.’ Or words to that effect.” “I’ll drink to that,” Frank heard himself saying. Swallowed his wine in one snorting gulp.

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NINE

Does Aubrey Carver have a dog? Would he have had a dog? Peter Taylor did not have a dog while we lived as neighbors. I don’t know if he ever owned a dog or any cats. I assumed, for no good reason except deep-rooted regional custom and tradition, that at some point or another, he must have had a dog.* Certainly he always displayed a friendly neighbor’s interest in my dog—James, a ¤ne hound dog, mostly black and tan, though his mother was a Bluetick hound, with (we sometimes fancied) just a confusing touch of the savage Doberman tar brush. James was a Maine dog, trekked westward with us to Ann Arbor, Michigan, then South to Virginia. James was handsome and knew it. He also had a deep streak of the cowardly or the eminently sensible, depending on your point of view. Larger and more formidable animals—a moose in Maine that often browsed an old millpond near our house, the black bear of an anecdote that follows—did not exist. James simply ignored them and went on about his doggy business. He reserved his loudest barks for other dogs and for all kinds and forms of small scurrying beasties and for the *“Yes, Peter did have a dog—a terrier named ‘Sugarplum.’ ”—Fred Chappell

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indefatigable sea gulls that roosted on the roof of my boathouse jutting out on the York River. Peter seemed to like “the bear story” and professed regret at having been away and missed the whole thing. James was by then old and in¤rm and arthritic. Where we used to walk together eagerly for miles, we were now reduced to short turns in the backyard. I was walking James slowly, gently around that yard. I noticed nothing unusual, though in hindsight I think I may recall that at one point James paused and stood tall and sniffed the air as if brie®y captivated by a most intriguing odor or scent. Sniffed the air in the general direction of Peter Taylor’s fence, sniffed, seemed to savor it, then turned away to continue to poke and sniff again in my yard. I report this hindsight because, with the good nose of a good hound—he would have been a wonderful hunting dog if he hadn’t been so fearful of loud noises—James was bound to have noticed, then ignored what was happening from the ¤rst. We ¤nished our turns around the backyard and moved toward the garage and the driveway, planning to go around and reenter the house from the front door. As I turned at the foot of the driveway and moved toward the street, something else was moving, very slowly, in the street—a police car with a cop at the wheel slowly, slowly, as if the brake were holding but slipping a little, to block my driveway. The policeman, gray haired and serious, said nothing, but crooked his ¤nger to beckon me toward the car. I waved back, but let James sniff around the garage and a little hedge, not in any hurry to respond to the policeman’s odd and silent gesture. Now he began motioning with his whole right arm, a strong, busy gesture that seemed to say: Hurry up! Come here right now! I did not ignore him, but nonetheless I did not hurry. Walked up to the passenger window and leaned in. He spoke to me in a soft, audible stage whisper: “There is a bear yonder in your backyard.”

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“Are you kidding?” After all, I had been there only a minute or two earlier and hadn’t seen a bear or anything unusual. I did not bother to look back over my shoulder. I looked at him. He made a face—a slightly sad, slightly exasperated look. James sat by my feet, calmly relaxed. Still whispering: “No, sir. I am not. I don’t run around telling people there are bears in their backyards.” “Let me put my dog back in the house,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” Turned toward my house and then saw, coming on foot down the street, in a Smokey-the-Bear, wide-brimmed hat, wearing a uniform, carrying a strangely shaped ri®e, a ranger of some kind. I could hear the front door of the police car open as the policeman got out. Moved more quickly to put James in the front door and lock it. Instant that door was slammed and locked James began to bark wildly and bark from the back of the house. Turned back and followed behind the cop and the ranger as they eased down my driveway, alert, cop with pistol not drawn yet. Ranger cradling what was obviously some kind of a tranquilizer gun. Into the frame then comes a very large and lively black bear. Looks at the three of us all at once, then turns away and, with astonishing speed and grace, runs behind the garage, vaults the back hedge, and runs down the hill in a dry creek bed. Cop and Ranger hurry after him, headed downhill toward, maybe half a mile away, the four busy lanes and median of U.S. 29 North and South. I went back to the house where James had now ceased his racket and was quietly waiting for a dog biscuit to reward him for his watchdog services. Maybe an hour later, looking tired and somewhat bedraggled, the cop and the ranger returned to climb in the police car and drive away.

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“What happened?” “Well, sir, he got safely all the way across 29 and into that patch of woods on the other side near the football practice ¤eld. And we lost him. That’s university property anyway. Out of our jurisdiction.” “Well, have a good day.” Never heard any more about that particular bear. Was left to imagine it, how it all turned out. The only evidence of his coming and going was a large chunk of Peter Taylor’s fence that the bear knocked down to get from Peter’s backyard into mine. Frank wrote a short story about it. How the bear escaped from the cop and ranger by blending in with the football players. How he found himself on the team, going to classes, joining a fraternity. How he graduated, with honors, from the Business School. Peter was sorry he had missed all the excitement. Aubrey, who like Peter was out of town at the time, with Frank picking up newspapers and checking the mail and packages for the Carvers, would be more concerned about the damage to his fence. I believe he would even be inclined to doubt Frank’s story, taking it as a version of “the dog ate my homework.” Something or other happened and Frank came up with the bear story. Aubrey might have been away in England doing a little “research” (tax deductible) for one of his ¤shing books. Aubrey wouldn’t be in the mood to consider the possibility that a black bear came into town from the national forest many miles away for some obscure purpose and left no sign or clue of his passing by except for that wrecked section of the Carver fence. Bears don’t run around Charlottesville, Virginia, happy and free, any more than they do in Kensington or Chelsea or Abbey Lane. Aubrey doesn’t care about bears. Pressed, he might admit that he admires the bearskin hats affected by the Brigade of Guards. Would he send Frank Toomer the bill for the repair of his fence? Back to the initial question. Does Aubrey Carver have a dog? Or dogs, plural?

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Frank thinks that Aubrey ought to have a couple of loutish Dalmatians, pretty and pretty dumb and plenty annoying. James has no use for them at all and isn’t shy about expressing his displeasure, early in the morning or late at night. I think better of Aubrey. At least for the time being. I imagine he has a couple of handsome Labradors. Walks them on leashes ¤rst thing in the morning. James can take them or leave them. James and the Labradors move in different doggy circles. Mrs. Carver (did I already name her Eileen?) could be a cat person, adding another little twist to the whole relationship. James is helpful here. He’s used to the cats and mostly ignores them.

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TEN

Having acknowledged that the age of these people is a problem, I must also add that the “academic connection” presents a problem too. The “academic novel” has been kicking around for more than a half-century, a well-explored and well-exploited genre, good ones and bad ones and (surprise, surprise) mostly mediocre, and always there, though not, one hopes, without some interruption at the outset by the publishers, those porters, those proud gatekeepers of American culture. In this case the gatekeepers perform a real social service, nipping many an academic novel in the bud. Problem remains that if you are writing, seriously or frivolously no matter, about a writer or two and maybe a view of the passing literary scene where they work and play, you almost certainly have to consider that the overwhelming majority of our so-called serious mid-list American writers work for institutions of higher learning. And most of the new young writers (or not so young) from the two generations that have come along after my own have actually studied their art and craft in formal courses in school. We can’t ignore these selfevident truths. Nor ignore the astonishing fact—if it really is one—that in contemporary America we now have many more college professors than we do steelworkers.

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But what can and ought to be said about life and death in the groves of academe that has not been noticed and repeated before? Truth is, there are some things that need to be said, that ought to be, though maybe not here in the context of this story. Some of these things might be alluded to here and there. My tentative solution? For what it’s worth. Aubrey lives partly off an inheritance, a trust fund that frees him from the necessity of a day job. This freedom would not have inhibited him, moved by the spirit and/or some offer he thought he couldn’t refuse, from joining the ranks of adjunct teachers and/or writers-inresidence. A sort of contemporary scholar-gypsy. We need to remember something about these visiting people— call them once-in-a-while teachers, sometime academics. Precisely because they are more innocent and inexperienced than others who have been there in the trenches for a long time, they tend in my experience to be more easily deluded, taken in and then taking too seriously the baubles, beads, bolts of bright cloth, the real and imaginary losses and gains, the rewards (in most cases mighty slim pickings) of the academic life. All too soon—even though they are proud of their part-time status, and thus their slight distance from the political pitched battles that use up so much academic time and energy, they ¤nd themselves weighing the desire for tenure on the job, for a better schedule of classes, for a little more money together with the sometimes really important bene¤ts—health insurance most of all, and soon, also, a more desirable parking place, a larger of¤ce with maybe two or three windows. The System, as the System is fully aware, tends to swallow them whole like that biblical whale. At least that would be the considered opinion of Frank Toomer concerning some of his former colleagues at Jefferson. Retired at last, he is, as far as is possible in a small town like this one, out of the academic “loop.” Six months or so of illness have isolated him from the busy world at Jefferson only a few blocks away. He calls “the little house” the ha-ha Toomer Bunker.

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Frank believes that Aubrey (and don’t forget Eileen) at one point—coincident with all those dinner parties, probably— made a genuine effort to get himself hired by Jefferson in some sort of a cozy position, a foot in the door, through a better doorway and with more status than Frank himself could probably muster. At one point the dean of the faculty, a man who had to introduce himself, including his title and job, to Frank at a large cocktail party—or, as they elected, with Aubrey-like intent, to call “a drinks party”—took him aside and asked him a few questions about his neighbor. Basically: did Frank think Aubrey was seriously interested in coming to Jefferson in some capacity or other? And: did Frank think he, Aubrey, might ¤t in and make a genuine contribution? Did we need his services? Frank liked that “we,” as if his opinion might mean anything. Which he was not fool enough to believe for a minute or less. Partly to assuage any guilt he might incur for being less than wildly enthusiastic about his next-door neighbor joining him (at a better deal, no doubt about that) at Jefferson, Frank replied at ¤rst obliquely, pointing out that Aubrey was de¤nitely a “hot ticket” at the moment. His latest novel was earning some excellent reviews and might very well cop a couple of prizes that year. Did the dean read The New Yorker? Doesn’t everyone? Well, Aubrey has a ¤rst-rate story in the current issue. Frank knew very well, and all the more so because not one word by or about Frank Toomer had ever so far appeared in that magazine—that the blessing of, that is, publication by The New Yorker, was a trump card in the academic poker game. Played that card in Aubrey’s favor right up front. Where it would, he reckoned, do the least good. Added: Yes, sir, I think Aubrey is very serious about joining the faculty at Jefferson. And: Yes, sir, I think he would make a real contribution, certainly in terms of the “visibility” and reputation of our creative writing program. His presence would help us many ways.

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Teaching? Do you have any knowledge of or an opinion about his ability and potential as a teacher? No, sir, I do not. He has visited a number of places over the years and seems to have done all right. I never heard anything negative about Aubrey on the creative writing grapevine; and they are quick, you know, to judge and condemn. Pause. I gather—I’ve never seen his resume and never discussed any of this with him—that he once had a full-time academic job, back in the early days. Some lively and progressive place like Bard or Bennington. I honestly don’t know for sure. Frank knew that all deans and administrators, unlike their more restive faculty colleagues, tend to shudder and shiver at the prospect of administering “some lively and progressive place like Bard or Bennington.” Places blest and curst with the 1960s gift of “participatory democracy.” Administrators, even the lively and progressive ones, tend to be highly suspicious of these places and everybody associated with them. Or so Frank believed. Anyway, Aubrey never came aboard at Jefferson. Maybe they didn’t offer him anything he wanted. Maybe Aubrey changed his mind. In any case and event, no harm done. Aubrey lived well enough on his trust income, his modest advances, and on some books about ¤shing that he wrote just about that time. Frank didn’t even know that Aubrey was a passionate and dedicated angler until the ¤rst of these books came out and made a (pardon the expression) splash. It was a pretty book, as an object as well as in its stylish writing about a trout ¤shing adventure on the Tweed up and around the ancient lowlands Scots town Kelso, with its beautifully ruined abbey and a small and lovely hotel, a true haven for serious trout ¤shermen. Though he had not ¤shed for anything, excepting one longago deep sea ¤shing disaster with Anne and his unhappy thenteenaged children on a bobbing, stinking charter boat, in forty

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or ¤fty years, Frank still greatly enjoyed Aubrey’s little book. Loved the detailed and fastidious accounting of the good trout ¤sherman’s gear, the hallowed names of it all, the feel of it, the rituals. Frank thought at that time that author and subject were, really for the ¤rst time in Aubrey’s whole career, a perfect match. He envied him that, though his admiration far outweighed his envy. He found himself waiting impatiently for Aubrey’s next ¤shing story; and when his book on salmon ¤shing, also in Scotland, appeared, Frank wrote a rave review of it for The Washington Post. As a boy, a southern boy growing up in the bleak, hard times of the Great Depression, Frank had hunted and ¤shed the countryside around his hometown and sometimes, more adventurously, in the world around his grandfather’s farm. There is a family farm in every southern past. Except for an antique pump-action Winchester .22, passed along by the same grandfather, and a mostly rusty and worthless salt water rod and reel, Frank had owned no equipment for these sports. He ¤shed with worms and with a long cane pole, armed with a cork and a lead sinker and a large, rusty, all-purpose, ever hopeful hook. That hook caught him all kinds of ¤sh and not all of them trash. Trash or not, he shared the catch with his regular companion— an ancient black woman, name of Mercy, with whom he often spent long summer days, dawn to dusk, allowing high noontime for a little picnic and a nap in the shade, the two of them wearing identical ¤ve-and-dime store straw hats, the two of them armed with identical cane poles and one extra between them in case some monster of the depths should be hooked and proceed to snap a pole in two like a drinking straw. Monster, nor any alligator either, ever rose to the occasion. Some big cat¤sh could, however, bend those poles almost double. Mercy must have been a hundred or close to it. Grew up in Slavery Days, she said and it must be true. Told the boy about those days and taught him a few tunes of the times and some of the skip-rope rhymes.

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He has forgotten them one and all. Remembers the deeply wrinkled, bright-eyed look of Mercy, the rakish tilt of her straw hat, the snuff—Garrett Snuff, as it happens—that she gummed with quiet and easy pleasure. He would sometimes smoke a cigarette, lifted from his mother’s pack of Luckies, at the noontime break in the serious ¤shing. Never snuff. Tried it and couldn’t stand it though Mercy never failed to offer him a share. Once she brought him a cigarette—a Picayune. Likes of which he would not see or smoke again until he was in the army in Korea and living out of C-ration cans. At the end of the day he gave Mercy, who was ¤shing for the supper table of her family, most of the catch. Gave her all the big cat¤sh because, as he remembers it now, in those days white people thought cat¤sh were inedible. In return she would deftly gut and clean his along with hers so that when he came home with a string of ¤sh to show for his day, his mother could pop them directly into the frying pan. Mercy never argued with him about the cat¤sh. But she did once say: “You ought to try it, boy. You may be missing out on something good.” Frank does not know now what became of Mercy. Surely she has long since gone to glory. Did she have a couple of sisters named Shirley and Goodness? He grew, in stature, if not wisdom, and turned to other things than cane pole ¤shing. He wonders now whether that old woman’s burial insurance policy paid off and if she had the funeral she wanted and deserved. And if he could and would have gone to it, as he had always promised her he would, if he had known. Chances are she died long after he left home. What he wonders, too, and in a sense more seriously, is how the image of the two of them, sitting at the edge of a lake or a stream or a deep ditch of slow water with their cane poles deployed, watching and waiting for the cork to bob with a nibble, the cool of a bright, early summer morning all about them,

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though soon to be broken by the sweaty power of the southern sun, how this simple image has come to mind, more and more, as a man grows older, as a picture of calm, of contentment, of the peace that passeth all understanding, well remembered and long lost in a busy lifetime?

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MIDDLE MIDDLE

In the realm of biography interest in the subject-author relationship has reached obsessive levels. There is a subgenre of confessional writings by anxious biographers who worry about putting too much of themselves into their work. —Emily Eakin, “The Untold Links Between Biographer and Subject” Facts are better than dreams. —Winston Churchill

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ELEVEN

Came in today’s mail . . . I need to say a word or two about the importance of snail mail to all of the housebound and especially to most of my generation. You might think that we would eagerly avail ourselves of the latest technology—e-mail, fax machines, cell phones, or, at the least, the speed and ef¤ciency of UPS, FedEx, and so forth. But we did not grow up with these things, are not really comfortable with any of them. We are, I’ll admit, even a little tentative with that old-fashioned modern marvel—the telephone. When someone calls me long distance, I ¤nd myself talking loudly, shouting hurriedly into the phone as we witnessed our parents doing in those days. For us the postal carrier is and always will be a kind of hero, all the more so to the sedentary writer waiting always for news from the outside world. In my attic of¤ce, blinds drawn, myself alone with my pen and paper and too many books, I nevertheless know what is happening in my neighborhood, by the noise, by heart. First I hear the dogs begin to bark. They start at the other end of the street and pretty soon the whole block is a fugue of yelps and snarls. You would think it’s Judgment Day the way they carry on

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to greet the garbage man, the laundryman, the postal carrier walking slowly, door to door, bearing his weight of dooms. That’s best of all, as far as I’m concerned, the progress of the postal carrier. I go with him, sweating also, shifting the bag as I deliver joy or tribulation or nothing at all, just something or other addressed to Resident or Occupant. He brings bills always. He gives us pleas, rejections, bitter recriminations. Love and death lie lightly in his hands. In my study, all alone with the steady rhythm of my pulse, and perhaps the stereotypical song of a trapped bee or ®y against a dusty window pane, I hurry to write a postcard he can take away with him: Dear World, Though I have loved you and lost you, times beyond counting, still I write again upon this instant, being in receipt of all your ordinary music, to inform you that I can’t live without you. I intend, by God and hell or high water, rain and sleet and snow and the wild spins of the wheel of fortune, to come back for more of the same. I am alone too much with books and blank paper and my expensive fountain pen. I send you love and kisses. Next time I appear, blinking like a bear fresh from a long sleep in a deep cave, I will reveal shocking secrets. Go ahead, turn on your chain saws and your power mowers. I’ll drown them out. Let every dog in Creation bark and be happy. I remain yours truly. Came in today’s mail, then, the new summer issue of The Chattahoochee Review. This one is a special issue, “Informal Writing: Letters and Diaries,” and presents “The First Week of the Last Summer, 1994,” by Eleanor Ross Taylor, her own diary notes of the ¤rst week of the last summer of Peter Taylor’s life.

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It is a tough-minded, sharp-eyed view of his illness, of the confusion, mistakes, troubles of Peter’s suffering at the hands of the (then) new UVA Hospital. Nobody who reads it will ever want to go there. If they can help it. There is also an unsparing portrait of Peter, privately, as most of us had never seen him—drugged, in pain, petulantly angry, dif¤cult, troubled and troublesome, dying. . . . In a lead paragraph she gives a brief history of his ailments beginning with his ¤rst heart attack in 1974, progressing through strokes, bleeding ulcers, diabetes, blocked arteries, surgery. You name it. Next door all I knew was that, from time to time, Peter was “not well.” I knew nothing at all about the terrible week that is the subject of Eleanor’s notes; only, along with other neighbors, I noted that the Rescue Squad, in a blinking ambulance, came and took him away on Saturday, May 28. How quietly real suffering goes on, always. How we go on, too, avoiding and ignoring it as much as we can. Thanks to my recent and ongoing illness, I am now much more alert to the signs and portents, the clues of the troubles of others. But I missed most of the signs at the time. I wonder what Aubrey Carver went through. Whether (or not) Frank Toomer was alert to and empathetic with all that was going on. He will have to do a better job, as a good neighbor, than I did. I hope he will. I also wonder if this whole idea, the story of and behind a single book review, is or is not an attempt to do the impossible— to replay, to rerun the sequence of my relationship to Peter Taylor one more time in one more version, in order to assuage my commonplace guilt at not being a better friend, or at least a better next-door neighbor in his hours of need. I don’t know the answer. I will heap the problem, just as it is, on the yoked shoulders of Frank Toomer.

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TWELVE

“How do you do it, Frank? How do you stand it?” Aubrey is talking literary here, the lit biz, a rare thing between the two of them. Not part of their habitual custom or code. “What do you mean?” Frank knows very well what Aubrey means to ask him, and the occasion for it, in this case a negative notice—“a really shitty review,” Frank would call it—Frank received for his most recent book in the “In Brief ” section of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Knows, too, that Aubrey intends to be genuinely serious in his sympathy even as he is genuinely curious. But, of course, Aubrey also wants to use this moment to let Frank know, very politely, that he has not missed the review, that he is fully aware of the current standing of Frank’s work on the ®uctuating literary stock market. “It just doesn’t seem to bother you that much,” Aubrey continues. “I envy you.” Frank laughs out loud. What else should he do? “I hate to be reasonable about it,” Frank says. “But, all things considered, it doesn’t seem to matter a whole helluva lot one way or the other in the grand cosmic scheme of things. When I was young and hopeful and eager, something like that could have

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broken my heart—if not my spirit. Now I won’t even break wind over it.” “How do we keep going?” Aubrey is now politely including Frank in the honorable company of the craft and art. “It’s all we know how to do,” Frank says. “No big deal.” Because the two men have not only distinct and different pasts—and the past is most of what they have—but also separate visions of the past in general, we need to know how they see themselves professionally. A lot of what they have said and done derives from and depends on “the literary situation,” the larger scene that they imagine themselves to be a part of, in which they picture themselves as players. Like so many of their friends and colleagues of roughly the same age, they have been surprised and troubled by the newfound world of conglomerate global publishing companies, each with its own complex mixed bouquet of imprints, with its battery of lesser and subordinate companies, each of these with its own imperative overhead and immutable bottom line. A world, as they see and tend to believe, of vanishing independent bookstores rapidly being displaced and replaced by the huge chain stores and the rising and falling of internet dot coms. Both of these writers have spent their whole careers as steady, moderately productive workers. Neither (Aubrey has come closer) has ever had a bona ¤de big-time blockbuster; though both have enjoyed ups and downs, sometimes made a little money for themselves and their publishers, and sometimes lost a little too. Both are increasingly aware that they are living near the end of something, at the least of a way of doing things, are close to the ¤nish line of a ¤nal heat. Something has happened, something they should have seen coming and didn’t. Easy to understand how somewhat more successful and/or prestigious midlist “literary” writers might have been lulled into a false sense of comfort and security. Not so easy to explain how those like themselves, minor provincial “regional” writers from out on the far edges and fringes of our imperial literary scene, could have been

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so deluded as to imagine that any changes might work to their advantage. Perhaps it was merely a matter of their irrepressible American optimism, the familiar pattern of irrational hope replacing cynical good judgment. Yet, even as they separately and inwardly reproached themselves for their failure to pay close enough attention, to notice the new directions, missing the point, then, they were surely aware that the same pattern was playing its part in the lives of their own generation of friends and kin, those, for example, now in the corporate and professional worlds, well out of the world of the arts and crafts, those who can’t deny that they too have been blindsided and sacked by things that could have been, should have been, on the basis of all the obvious evidence, easy to anticipate. One result of this demonstrable weakness and failure is that most of these geezers are fearful of any future they can imagine. Knowing that what comes to pass is almost certain to be precisely that which they are unable to imagine. Which is wonderfully ironic—if irony happens to be your pleasure—in that the future is, by de¤nition, precisely that which is always unimaginable, and equally so to all of the present generation. Whereas, it is in fact in their misunderstanding of their past that Aubrey and Frank just failed. Frank Toomer thinks, and has so argued, even lectured out on the road from time to time, that misunderstanding of the past, particularly the immediate past, has been the characteristic folly of writers throughout the whole of the twentieth century and continuing without interruption into the new one. The ¤rst generation, the generation of the great masters— Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and so on over here, and Proust, Joyce, and Mann over there—seems to have believed that they were part of the same game and the same scene as their own elders—you know, people like James and Howells and Stephen Crane, like Meredith and Conrad who in turn saw themselves as close kin to their elders—Dickens, Trollope, Thackery.

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But the truth is that the game itself kept changing radically, whether they noticed it or not; and the rules kept changing all around them. It’s like football during the same time span. Frank likes to use sports metaphors and analogies. Knowing full well the inadequacy and inapplicability of these facile comparisons to the subject, but estimating that the annoyance levels habitually aroused among intellectuals tend to outweigh the disadvantages. Take football, for example (he says). We think of it as being pretty much the same old game that has been played for the whole past century, actually taking shape in the last years of the nineteenth century just as rugby—still around and mostly unchanged, by the way—began to phase out. Records and statistics of this and that are measured as if last week’s games were more or less the same kind of a game as, say, a game played in 1935. But all during that time the rules of play, and therefore the nature of the game, too, have been constantly changing. Okay. They still call it football and name it as the same game. But it isn’t. It’s the same, only different. Like the book publishing business, like what some people insist on calling “the literary life.” It’s entirely possible that Frank ran this one, or some similar trope, past Aubrey, knowing how much Aubrey at least professed to loathe the sweaty and more plebian sports—anything except tennis, golf, and polo, allowing for the nostalgic exception of rugby and the Jefferson Rugby Club of which Aubrey was a faithful fan. Also aware that high school life in Huntsville, Texas, in the late 1930s may have been a hard row to hoe for a neat and kind of prissy little guy who had to share the halls, the locker rooms, the showers, and the playground, if not the playing ¤elds, with brutes who in a better world would have been sent off to live in isolation with other hairy beasts in zoos and state and national parks. Frank’s pet theory and argument is how and when the society

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and the culture—American or Western, take your pick—changed and, in the relative sense that these things can be measured, suddenly. He dates it all from World War II and after. Once we were in World War II everything changed. And once it had changed, it was changed for keeps. There could be no going back to the way things had been before. In a world in which strategists and policy makers made decisions, signed or concealed pieces of paper, the results of which often involving the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes millions, and the death of many, some by design and some by simple mistake (“mistakes were made”), in such a world as this one, and as soon as it dawned on the victims thereof, the only conceivable and appropriate response was to dedicate oneself wholly to personal survival, to the care and maintenance, for as long as that may be possible, of Old Number One. In that sense we are all of us combat veterans. Not challenged then, still unchallenged now, and even more openly cultivated than before, this philosophy has, like the infernal plagues of old, infected every nook and corner, every cranny and hidey hole of the culture and, not by any means least, the arts and crafts. “The whole thing is,” Frank said, then paused. . . . I seriously doubt that Frank, then or ever, tried to tell Aubrey, or anybody else, all that stuff—a mouthful! Or to share his “ideas” on the subject. If he had, Aubrey would surely have reminded him of what Raymond Chandler once said: “Ideas are poison.” It probably went more like this. “The whole thing is breathtakingly simple, old sport. We are white. You know? We are male. We are too old, much too old. We are provincial. We are Christians—Episcopalians, anyway. And as if that weren’t already enough against us—two strikes and a whole string of foul balls, we have already had our chance and didn’t make the cut. “Everybody else, the publishing business and the literary es-

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tablishment, is perfectly happy with the status quo. Our last forlorn hope is that posterity may feel differently.” “Posterity?” “Who else?” “Do you know what Groucho Marx had to say on that subject?” “What did he have to say?” “What has posterity ever done for me?” Of course, Frank was not half as indifferent as he pretended to be. He knew that his casual indifference irritated Aubrey to the core even though Aubrey knew that, in large part, it was an affectation. Frank also knew that Aubrey, who in any case had, at least in his own view of things, literary seniority and status over Frank, did not enjoy Frank’s presumption in linking his own fate and fortune with Aubrey’s professional history, thus inadvertently allowing Frank to cap and end the conversation. “Truth is, Aubrey, we are both of us just too fucking middle class.”

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THIRTEEN

And the wives. What about them?* What about Eileen and Anne? We are getting to know them, the two of them, seeing them (and the rest of their world as well) from the points of view of Frank and Aubrey. Which, in any case, are strictly limited. Anne has been married to Frank Toomer for almost ¤fty years. That anniversary is coming up in 2003, and the happy occasion will bring together, for the ¤rst time in a long time, their three children—Frank Jr. and Marty and Courtney, the daughter. All three children are married with children and lives of their own. Thus Frank and Anne are, somewhat to their surprise, grandparents. Frank was still in the army when he met and married her. Went from the military life to ¤nish college (Chapel Hill) and *It is important and only fair for all of us to realize, right here and now, that these wives of Frank and Aubrey are imaginary women (imagined from a male point of view), in no way whatsoever based on or intended to resemble my wife, Susan Garrett, or Peter Taylor’s widow, our friend and next-door neighbor, Eleanor Taylor. Fictional wives, like any and all ¤ctional characters, are composites, composed of shards, bits, and pieces, fragments of memory, speculation, and day dreaming.

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then to graduate school (Princeton) on the G.I. Bill. Anne was a musician in those days, a tall, dark-haired, good-looking, easygoing woman from suburban Philadelphia, “a very nice Yankee girl,” as Frank’s mother had politely put it. It is hard and tricky guesswork to understand what it may have been, a half-century ago, that, ¤rst of all, attracted them, each to the other, then, in spite of the usual and inevitable ups and downs of marriage, allowed them to stay together. “I thought she was rich,” Frank sometimes says. Sometimes adding: “And in the end, by God, I was right.” Frank’s appeal to Anne was very complicated or, like so many complex things, maybe, very simple at heart. Good-looking young man more boyish than he ought to be after the war in Korea that he went to and survived. More than a bit of a rogue and a rowdy. And that may have been the secret of it all in the view of those who knew them best—that Anne, from their very ¤rst meeting until here and now, was fascinated by the rascal in him. Maybe this is true, but it fails to take into account Anne’s honed intelligence and sensitivity. Funny . . . among all their friends and casual acquaintances, only Eileen Carver really understands what Anne must have known from the outset, that Frank Toomer would prove to be a poster boy for adventurous in¤delity. Must have known, too, he would be a loving husband and father, and now grandfather, known he would never leave her or his family for any other life, known he would strive manfully to be a dutiful and adequate provider, but known also that he would be an inveterate womanizer and a reasonably successful one, though perhaps not quite so much so as Eileen, for reasons of her own, may have liked to imagine. And there is something else to bear in mind. To this day Anne is a blithe spirit and very much at ease with all kinds of people. She was never dazzled in the least by the stars of the literary world. Indeed, she harbors a secret sympathy for the literati who seem to be condemned to the everlasting shabby company of

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each other. She has always given Frank her full and unstinting support in his “career.” It would be the same if he were a tap dancer or a lobsterman. Eileen ¤rst met Aubrey Carver precisely because he was a writer and, at the time, relatively well-known and well regarded in the literary scene. He was her teacher at Bennington (or Bard). She is, therefore, the youngest of the four of them. She was a very pretty girl and has kept her ¤gure and her good looks more or less intact. Aubrey was always a handsome man. “Neat looking little dude,” Frank used to say. “Puts me in mind of a French croupier.” A thought and a remark that came to mind when he saw Aubrey Carver resting, calm and quiet, in his casket. At that moment Frank envied him. There had been plenty of ¤re and passion in the early coupling of these two pretty people. And even as ardor cooled, as it must, Aubrey remained a model of rectitude and ¤delity, allowing for the important exception of “Peaches.” Eileen grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, not all that far from Aubrey’s native East Texas. But they had more than general geography in common. Each was an unhappy only child. They were, as so many couples are or come to be, versions of each other. Frank called it a kind of narcissism, closer to the truth than he knew; for, lacking a core of innocence himself, he failed to understand the original myth (or one version of it): how, out of a genuine innocence, the boy who looked into the pool and saw his image staring back at him was amazed at the stranger he had discovered. Back to the two women, the wives. Friendly enough, respectful to each other always, they were never close while Aubrey was alive. In matters of habit and style they were, at ¤rst thought, distinctly different. Eileen, small and lively and fashionably thin, tended to follow the trends within reason as she discerned them. She seemed to enjoy clothes and to take pleasure in fashions she

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would never, in fact, buy or wear. Her one serious extravagance was to ®y up to New York regularly to have her hair done. Anne was never quite so worldly or, to be more accurate, was more or less indifferent to, though evidently well aware of the fashions, assumptions and conventions of the times. This was her mindset as well. She was ready and willing and able to test and to taste new ideas, to weigh and sift alien points of view. Unlike her sisters from the South (including Eileen, even if she did go to Bennington), Anne, though ever polite, did not defer to men. Would argue with any of them as equals. Frank enjoyed this because it seemed to set him free to ¤ght back. It may not have helped him and his career at Jefferson—which, though outwardly and visibly a self-declared “liberal” institution in honor of its famous founding father, was, like Chapel Hill and Duke and Vanderbilt, behind all the smoke and mirrors—“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”—a formidable bastion of the upper-middle class and the new New South, proudly comparing and contrasting themselves with the redneck culture from which, in Frank’s view, so many had so recently emerged. To this day these people do not much enjoy free and unfettered debate and look askance at any serious interrogation of their basic assumptions, especially when the questions are being asked by a woman. Something else. The dreary business of housekeeping. Eileen, southern or not, was meticulous, fastidious, even sometimes obsessive. Kept Aubrey’s books in alphabetical order in the book cases. Anne was casual as can be, chie®y indifferent. “Slovenly” was the word that Eileen thought but did not say out loud even to Aubrey. Frank—and Aubrey too, though he never said such a thing to anyone except Eileen—attributed Anne’s social and intellectual independence to class. Anne was to be found in the Social Register and, because he had married her, Frank was listed there also, a fact of which he was inordinately pleased. “Top of the world, ma!” he said. “Pretty high and far for a

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Sergeant First Class in the dogface Infantry to rise in one brisk fucking lifetime.” Aubrey, still to Eileen only, opined that what had kept Frank and Anne bound together in holy or unholy matrimony for nearly ¤fty years, so far, is that Frank did not want to be dropped out of the Social Register, which he certainly would have been, following a divorce. Not much of the above, someone skeptical might note, about the Great American Obsession—sex. Pray to remember that all of these people, excepting Eileen, were in their seventies. Remember that both Frank and Aubrey were seriously ill, Aubrey terminally so. Of course, it can’t have been truly “bad” for any of them, else they would not have endured the stormy years of youth and middle life. “Peaches” ¤gures in the action, plays a part in the life of both Aubrey and Frank. Even as he was dying, Aubrey could summon up and vaguely celebrate the naked, sweat-slick times shared with that remarkable woman. It embarrassed him even as he elected to remember her and to wince at the sweet outrageous pleasure of it. Shamed him that, even as he was dying, he could create a fantasy, an alternative life he might have led, a life with her. Frank was a creature of his own fantasies as well, though, oddly, he seldom composed an erotic scenario featuring himself. Often it would be an adventure of his real-or-imaginary, bearded brother-or-cousin—Mark. How it would be. The low, lonely dunes. Sea wheat swept and dancing from an easy sea breeze. Mark in an old, battered armchair in front of his shack, weathered silver driftwood. Dozing in the afternoon sun, he listens to the surf, watches waves form and break on the beach and beyond them the pelicans diving for ¤sh. Behind him—he can see them without looking—huge, dark muscular cumulous clouds promising rain. He is waiting for something, listening. Hears it after a while,

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the rare sound of a car on the shell-and-sand, rutted road (more path than road, really). Can see, without moving to look, the Range Rover with the tall, dark, high-boned woman—distantly part Cherokee she claims—at the wheel, steering over the crackling shells. That sound and the sound of the engine die. A moment of silence (is she looking, brie®y, in the rearview mirror?) followed by the sound of the car door closing. He smiles and stands up, turns toward the shack where, in the ¤ltered sunlight scattered through chinks and cracks, they will meet in a moment, the hairy, hard-muscled man, the lean and long-legged supple woman. Will meet in that scattered, spindrift sun and shadow, silent and already completely naked and will embrace. And then, slowly kneeling she takes him in her strong, graceful hands and her full-lipped, slightly pouty, beestung mouth. . . . Well, how else would an old geezer imagine it?

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FOURTEEN

Context, as they say, is almost everything. When I ¤rst began writing down these words (with a fat, cigar-shaped, black Mont Blanc pen and a yellow legal pad) it was, in fact, early springtime in Charlottesville. The time of the story was to be the previous summer of 2001. It would begin on my birthday, June 11, 2001. But the “real” beginning, the actual time when I was writing a draft of the story was springtime of 2002, a time of wide skies of pale blue, sunny, and cloud-teased. Never mind that I was ill and housebound with my illness, I could still look out the window and rejoice in the beauty and extravagant colors of the season. Off to the west are the Blue Ridge Mountains proudly poised. Nearer at hand are the tall trees of my neighborhood—oaks and sycamore and sweet gum—®ashing their brand new leaves, and the evergreen company of pines and spruce, of magnolia and holly. Nearer, front yard and back, this season’s ®owers are coming alive together—demonstrative daffodils, tall and lazy tulips, the small, deep purple Creek Iris, the virginal crocus. Dogwood and redbud are like ®aming torches in the breeze, even before the forsythia has fully faded from saffron to green. Peonies are stirring, soon languidly to bloom. Any minute now

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the azaleas will explode. Close by the house, and no less threatening a spendthrift extravagance of blooming, are the lilacs, mountain laurel, rhododendron. But there is more to the context of this piece than can be measured by the state of my health or the joys and glories of one more springtime. There is also the world as it comes to us and at us by mail, from television and in the daily papers. Comes at us, from all sides and the four corners of a baf®ed and anguished place, horror and terror, hunger and sickness, blood and guts, the carryover of the ceaseless warfare from our last and bloodiest century. Like many millions of my countrymen, I was there also, a witness to and an active participant in some of it. And so were Frank and Aubrey; Peter Taylor too. Much has been safely misremembered since then by most of us; though sometimes while watching the evening news on television, I can easily slip back into the skin and bones of the young man I once was, not pondering national policies or global strategy, but instead wondering how much those huge packs on the backs of today’s American soldiers must weigh, how their boots feel and ¤t, what their combat rations taste like. The context of this piece that I am writing is a world at war, then, and, all fancy public rhetoric to the contrary, not much chance of any peace in our time.

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FIFTEEN

In the New York Times Book Review for Sunday, July 22, 2001— therefore something Frank Toomer would have seen—there is a review by Jay McInerney of a new novel, Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale (Farrar Straus), by Chuck Kinder. This one evidently tells a story about two writers—Jim Stark (“loosely based on Kinder himself ”) and Ralph Crawford who is based on Kinder’s friend Raymond Carver. It covers their relationship over several years. Wouldn’t you know it! Under the circumstances I guess I’ll have to read it or, anyway, get Frank to read it for me. Of course I’m worried about being preempted, but I take comfort in something Sam Vaughan, then the Big Gun at Doubleday, used to say: “American publishing has the memory of a may®y.” Kinder is quoted as saying that the book required a “25-year gestation” and that it used to be 3,000 pages in manuscript. Twenty ¤ve years is next to nothing, kiddos. As we used to say in the good old U.S. Army: “I have stood in chow lines longer than that.” That’s someone that I never got to know—Raymond Carver. Worked together with him one time when we were both on the

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staff at a summer writers’ conference. Teaching separately—and under slightly different titles if not strictly different subjects— at roughly the same time of day, middle of the morning, in classrooms along the same hallway. We ate lunch together a few times, usually with some of the others on the staff. Carver was already at that time “known,” in fact “well-known” in the literary world. His class was always well attended. His public reading attracted a capacity crowd where they had scheduled it. I arrived at the last minute and couldn’t get inside the open door. Stood out in the hall with others, all of us keeping very quiet, listening. I recall a very soft reading voice, by nature or by design. A voice that asked you please to listen up and to listen carefully please. Of the man, himself, I think I can remember, without the ¤rm assurance of accuracy, a tallish guy, maybe a little slouchy, so it was hard to gauge how tall he really was. Is this story slowly but surely morphing into the memoirs of a midget, of the ceaseless battle of the short against the tall? Carver’s head was large as I remember, though not disproportionately so, and seemed familiar from book jacket photos and book reviews in magazines and newspapers. It was a pleasant face, not a smirky or malicious one, touched with a soft kind of sadness. He seemed to be essentially a quiet man. Seemed to me a little bit . . . subdued. Like maybe he was on some kind of a tranquilizer, I might think now. I didn’t think so then. Never occurred to me. Didn’t think anything much at the time except that, when we had lunch or when we talked about this and that, here and there, he seemed very calm, soft-spoken, polite. Also, maybe just a tad restless. He was not drinking, certainly not hard liquor, at the evening receptions and gatherings. I noticed that, not without envy, because I was still fueling myself with the old sauce in those days. I do now seem to recall—though this too could well be a false memory—that unlike most of the winos and alkies that I knew well, mostly my own kith and kin, he seemed to be able to drink a little beer without that leading di-

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rectly to a whole lot of trouble. I picture him as holding a bottle of beer, not a glass or a mug, frosted or otherwise, not a can, but a long-necked bottle that he nursed along and maybe (maybe not) would sip for a taste only, like a taste from the chalice in the Episcopalian service of the Eucharist. Did Raymond Carver ever put a few peanuts into that beer bottle and then swirl them around and hold the bottle up to the light just to watch their planetary rotation? I can hardly believe he would do that, but that is what I see happening when I click on memory. The thing that I do forget now, just as I ignored it then, is how much older I was. I was in fact old enough to be his father, and to his young eyes I must have seemed older than that. I didn’t feel old yet or even a lot older than he or his generation were or felt. Truth is, I was already gray-haired and could never possibly have been mistaken for a member of his generation even with the bene¤ts of some creative makeup and a full costume and disguise. Nobody could be fooled except for me. I always enjoyed the company of young people. It never occurred to me that this amiable feeling might not have been a shared and mutually gratifying experience. Out of good manners they put up with me. It never dawned on me until much later that, in the pitiless vision of the young and the restless, all old guys are geezers. That we had already had our turns at bat— fanned out, most of us did, though a few among us had run out a bunt or hit away and maybe a very few of us had hit one out of the park—but were now seen as just standing around taking up valuable space and wasting precious time (theirs). I am now surprised that these talented young people were so polite and patient with their boring elders.

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SIXTEEN

Here’s what Frank Toomer has to say about Honeymooners: This is not a review or a book report, not even of the briefest imaginable kind. Nor is this a blurb. The dust jacket of Honeymooners is well freighted, highly decorated with plenty of colorful blurb lingo offered up to us by the likes of Scott Turow, Michael Chabon, Larry McMurtry, and Richard Ford. Richard Ford’s is one of the longest blurbs I’ve seen in a long time. Admittedly I’ve been out of touch and out of the loop. It might as well be a preface or an introduction or something. Anyway, as you can see this ain’t a review or a report or a blurb, not even an informed or uninformed opinion on my part. To tell the truth, I have only skimmed pages, browsed like a moose in a millpond. Stopped and read a little here and there. So? It looks like fun. Parts of it that I jumped in and out of were plenty lively and good for some laughs. You have got these two moderately wild men, Ralph and Jim, and

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their girlfriends and literary buddies, a lot of whom, it’s a safe guess, are portraits of “real” people, well-known to a whole lot of other people, if not to you and me. These two writers are described by Kinder as “bold outlaw authors on the lam from the gloomy tedium called ordinary life.” He goes on to tell us: “They were both daring, larger-than-life characters living legendary as they engaged in high drama and hilarity, the stuff of great stories, they were convinced, and not simply drunken, stoned stumblebums and barroom yahoos. . . . The stupendous dream Ralph and Jim shared was for fame. They were hungry for it (and who could have guessed how famous old Ralph would have become!).” I like that exclamation point. Plenty of exclamation points and plenty of booze, sex, smoking dope. Not much rock-and-roll. Music doesn’t seem to have played a big part in the lives of this particular group, though, from time to time, a popular tune is mentioned. On the whole, so far anyway, I like the novel. I ¤nd myself a little surprised, though. There were times, even in full middle age, when Aubrey Carver was far and away wilder than these boys. In his blurb Ford calls the book “an homage [good, trendy word these days] to a raf¤sh, boozy, disconnect-swagger-life teeming below the surface of the settled, old middle-class properness the rest of us cling to.” Did these guys, blurbmeister Ford included, sleep and dream through most of the past century. Or were they too stoned to notice it? Who knows? Frank Toomer likes The Honeymooners, in fact and in ¤ction, a lot more than I do. It reminds him of his salad days—as he vaguely remembers and revises them. Was it really like that back then?

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Together with these memories, it reminds him of the life of the protagonist of a “biographical novel” about the ne’erdo-well Elizabethan writer Robert Greene that Frank has long wanted to write. Reminds him, and chides him, that if he’s ever going to do that story, he had better get started, get going. He vows to get on with the job just as soon as he wraps up and sends in the review of the Aubrey Carver biography. What is it about the lost and gone and almost forgotten Robert Greene that summons up Frank’s interest and attention? Well, Frank would say, Greene is an active, lively subject. He had a brief wild life, spent mostly in the company of rowdy and madcap fellows. Greene was a brilliant and gifted (also careless and casual) writer. Ended up dying badly and poor. A contemporary remembered him as “a handsome well-shaped man, very good company and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit.” On the basis of his very limited knowledge Frank imagines that this Robert Greene, his version, is a man something like himself, misplaced in time and history. In this respect, in Greene’s own age—the reign of Queen Elizabeth that we, in all due time, unimaginable to Greene, or anybody else alive and breathing at that time, will come to call the Age of Shakespeare—he, Greene, seems to be closer kin to us than to his own contemporaries. Just so, Frank is (as you have seen) somewhat weary and ill at ease in his times. Otherwise why would he ¤nd himself thinking about writing an account of the adventures and misadventures of a minor writer who has long since been con¤ned to the darkest corners and inches of our libraries? But—and here’s the rub—to write about the Elizabethan age, particularly the busy and chaotic days of the 1580s and early 1590s, to write from the inside as if he were in fact present and at ease, more than a tourist in an alien land, is going to call for, no, demand some serious reading and research. Would he have time and energy for that? And, even if he did, even if he believed he could live long enough to do the job, the prospect of that kind

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of heavy lifting and hard labor is daunting. Lies heavy, heavy on his heart. Is Frank as ®at out lazy as he seems to be and would surely deny? Probably. Probably so.

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SEVENTEEN

. . . Here is an odd thing for you. Or could it be yet another simple example of . . . synchronicity? In this entire story so far, from the beginning, I had forgotten about a ¤ctional and quite different “Aubrey” to be found in and taken from the ¤ction of Peter Taylor. I mean, of course, Aubrey Tucker Bradbury, the mysterious and elusive ¤gure from “Cousin Aubrey,” a story collected in Peter’s ¤nal book—The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court (Knopf 1993). In that story the ¤rstperson narrator shares a number of common characteristics with Peter Taylor. He is from a historically important and political Tennessee family, lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and teaches at the university there. Peter also makes the point, which becomes a plot point in this story, that, unlike many people, especially the university faculty, he (and/or his ¤ctional counterpart) and his wife do not subscribe to or read the Washington Post: “But since my wife is a native of a small town in Southside Virginia, we have always read the Richmond Times-Dispatch for our morning paper and purchased the New York Times at the corner.” Here are some facts that a next-door neighbor can attest to—seeing a paper—not the Post or the Times on the sidewalk in front of Peter Taylor’s house. Point of fact: it was not the Times-

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Dispatch, but the Wall Street Journal that always lay there, neatly rolled and waiting for his inspection. Just so, Eleanor Taylor is a native of a small town in central North Carolina, a climate and a terrain not signi¤cantly different from that of Southside Virginia. Ironically, the professor-narrator discovers part of the answer to his obsessive quest to determine whatever had become of his vanished cousin, Aubrey, in a copy of the Washington Post: “I just beheld his visage not in a paper that was delivered to my doorstep, and not in one for sale in a newsstand, but in a fragment of newsprint wrapped around a vegetable that my wife bought from the curb market. It was from an issue of the Washington Post that was at least three weeks old.” Never mind, though, the “discovery” that in this late story— his story not mine—Peter Taylor could and did play easily with the shape-shifting images of fact and ¤ction. Never mind, either, myself—me, myself, and I—in the midst of making up a story of my own that began with the fact that once upon a time I happened to live next door to Peter Taylor. Somehow his little game encourages me, indeed invites me to continue to play mine. Most of all, however, and much more to the point, the point both of the ¤ction and of the facts, I paused from my efforts and read again some of my favorite short stories by Peter Taylor for the ¤rst time in many months, rejoicing in them even as I felt a heavy sense of loss and sorrow for the man and for his art. The contemporary American habit of ranking everything—the ten best living sculptors, the ¤ve worse-dressed formalist poets in the Western world—is utterly contemptible. But somewhere above and beyond all that foolishness, all that expense of spirit and of common sense, there are a precious few who are simply inimitable and therefore irreplaceable. Peter, we miss you.

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EIGHTEEN

Ideally, and making full allowance for the continual tidal overlapping of past and present and future, this story, loose and baggy as it is and has to be, should take place within the context of a limited time frame. We begin, then, on June 11, 2001, the seventy-second birthday of Frank Toomer. We probably begin with Frank climbing the steep stairs to his attic of¤ce. He is going up there for the ¤rst time in a long time. Several months maybe. He is aiming to clean up the place and to straighten out his life, even as he straightens up his of¤ce, and then, he hopes and prays, to get back to work. The ending of this story will be the date of Frank’s letter to Colin Walters, book editor of the Washington Times, begging off the task of reviewing the biography of Aubrey Carver, otherwise a day of no special urgency or importance. All that the author can and will say here and now, at the presumed time of writing, of telling the tale (in ¤ction then and there, in fact here and now, that is afterward), is that with the immense and irrefutable exception of shining moments and examples of extraordinary acts of courage and heroism, the public events, in their edited versions and repeated images, seem to

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possess the demonic power to trivialize what is best about us and to bring out the worst in almost everybody. June 11, 2001, besides being my birthday and Frank Toomer’s, and the time I established for him to begin to clean up his attic study, was also the occasion of the execution, performed on behalf of the power and the glory of the United States of America, of Timothy McVeigh. A lot has happened since then, but the reader may remember that McVeigh made no ¤nal statement in his own words. Instead he copied out by hand the poem “Invictus,” by W. E. Henley, which was read aloud to an unruly mob of television cameras, microphones, and tape recorders and thus to the wide world—or anyway that portion of the world that happened to be watching the lively media circus that accompanied the execution—by a somewhat puzzled reporter who obviously had not often, if ever, read poetry out loud to anyone. They should have had our peerless former poet laureate (poets laureate come and go), Robert Pinsky, read it. Matter of fact Pinsky was available and standing by, ever ready with an appropriate sound byte statement: “Robert Pinsky, the former poet laureate, observes: ‘The pathetic attempt on the executed man’s part to cloak himself in a late-Victorian rhetoric of courage against darkness makes the execution seem to me all the more grotesque and inadequate to Mr. McVeigh’s crime and its consequences.’ ” (See “The Irony of Invictus,” Washington Post, June 12, 2001.) Henley was nobody’s poet laureate. On the other hand, Henley is said to have served as the model for his friend Robert Louis Stevenson’s unforgettable character, Long John Silver (no Clarence Thomas jokes please) of Treasure Island fame. Thinking about Henley and my vague recollection of his work, I browse my bookshelves and ¤nd my old Louis Untermeyer anthology—Modern American and Modern British Poetry. It’s the 1950 edition, the ¤rst one put together after we had weathered the experience of World War II. I look up Henley.

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Untermeyer leads off with “Invictus.” I skip that, for now, and read some of the others, mostly musical, lyrics clearly written to be set to music and sung. I also read poems from Henley’s Hospital Sketches and his London Voluntaries, poems that Untermeyer praises as much for their in®uence on “the modernist, free verse movement” as for their merit. Untermeyer writes: “Although he was not one of the great poets of his period, his period as well as ours, would be incomplete without him.” Who could ask for anything more? Beats oblivion any way you look at it. Okay. “Invictus” is probably not a very good poem. Who gives a rat’s ass? It is simply one of those rare poems that capture the attention and the consciousness of a whole people. School children all over America once learned it by heart back in the days when school children were still required to memorize some poetry. It is easy to memorize and its sentiments offer some comfort. In some schools, an old friend tells me, they had a musical version that was regularly sung in assembly ¤rst thing in the morning. I remember my father, naked and shiny as an apple, stepping out of his morning shower and reciting “Invictus” among other poems. He would belt them out in a cheerful baritone voice. For a long time I thought it was supposed to be a happy poem. Well, maybe it is. It is a curious thing about the poems that came to have a permanent place in the heart. I remember one time (1959?) overhearing Robert Frost say to some close old friends that he would have given anything (an arm and a leg, a decade off his lifespan) to have written “The Man with a Hoe.” Of course, he wouldn’t want to change places with Edwin Markham, a man and a poet whom Frost cruelly ridiculed; but to have written that one poem that so many people loved, once upon a time, would have been worth the candle. As for Timothy McVeigh, that terrorist. I am not going to consider his story and all that just here and now. Not yet, anyway.

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Maybe never. Except to point out, once and once only, that this story of ours, as I am arranging it, begins and ends with bookends of terrorism and violence. The background before which our central characters play out their little lives is not at all irrelevant whether they are able and/or willing to recognize it or not. June 11 is Frank Toomer’s birthday. It is also the death day of Timothy McVeigh. Frank will take notice of this fact or he won’t. Never mind. Either way this historical event will help to de¤ne him. May I add here that I sincerely hope you won’t confuse me too much with Frank Toomer. It is true that Frank and I have a number of things in common. There are some characteristics, even attitudes and opinions, that we share, quite aside from the roots and branches of a complex family tree. Frank is, after all, my cousin. One of the things that Frank and I have in common is a certain kind of built-in, hard-wired, ineradicable, probably genetic cynicism. Had you noticed that? First things ¤rst, though. We need to de¤ne terms. According to my Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1974), there are two basic de¤nitions. First, cynic—“an adherent of an ancient Greek school of philosophers who held the view that virtue is the only good and that its essence lies in self-control and independence.” Second, that a cynic is “a fault¤nding captious critic; esp: one who believes that human conduct is motivated wholly by self-interest.” The adjective cynical seems to come on a little bit stronger—“contemptuously distrustful of human nature and motives.” Why not? Why the hell not? I would have to say—and I’m sure Frank would agree with me unless he was in the mood for an argument—that anybody in his right mind, taking a serious look around and at the world we live in, the fucked up planet we all are stuck on, be it ever so brie®y, would have to agree also.

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There is also the special problem. Like it or not, Frank and I (Aubrey too) are Americans. Consider: if Jonathan Swift was right, that happiness is “a state of being well-deceived,” then what do you make of a whole nation and its people being dedicated to “the pursuit of happiness”?

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NINETEEN

Sorry but I have to consider politics in telling this story. We have lived, and continue to, in an age when everything down to the breakfast cereals we eat, the soda pop we drink, the baseball teams we root for—all, all, all are politicized. But more than that, more imperative than any checklist of late twentieth and early twenty-¤rst century concerns, it is a natural part of the story and its origins. Peter Taylor came from a very political family, a distinguished and successful one. Not himself much involved— as far as I can tell—with politics, he nevertheless understood how things work and what was happening. How could he not do so, even though he had rebelled against most of the conventions of the time? And, if you take a good look, you will see a bright political thread in his ¤ction. I never talked politics with Peter, not much anyway. Once I remember bringing up the Gore dynasty, quickly to discover that the Taylor dynasty took a dim view of the Gores, seeing them as some kind of modern, well-heeled and well-dressed, slicked up version of the Snopes family from the works of William Faulkner. Remember them? Faulkner had the Snopeses deeply involved in the Mississippi political scene. In our time a Snopes might have been vice-president.

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My own political interests, background, and point of view were different. I tried to explain some of this once in a talk to the Women’s Democratic Club in Washington, D.C., a talk entitled “Caveman Democrat.” In this story I am going to allow Frank to make that talk for me. Here is an excerpt from it: What you see here standing before you, for better or worse and mostly for poorer, is an archetypal 1930s Democrat, more than ¤fty years out of date. Some kind of a (stereotypical) hairy Neanderthal man with a club, face wrinkled in frank puzzlement at a world well beyond his understanding, a world so jaded and sophisticated that nobody in it is even surprised to see a Neanderthal man ambling along the sidewalk. It’s a world where people can wear whatever they want to, or don’t want to, and can pretend to be anyone or anything they please. So I claim to be a Neanderthal. A young colleague, a child of the 1960s, now a typical, middle-class tenured radical, says I’m more of the Cro-Magnon type. Same metaphor, but—I don’t know—Cro-Magnon sounds a lot worse. When I was a child in the Deep South, many houses had somewhere or another, usually prominently displayed, a painting, one of those trick paintings so popular in less sophisticated times. It showed a crowd of people of all races and creeds, working people, both men and women (the latter, who knows?, probably shown in stereotypical roles), factory workers and teachers and clerks and farmers and miners and lumberjacks and construction workers and so forth and so on, busily united in their dedication and hard labor. Step back a couple or three steps, and see the separate elements come together to form the instantly recognizable, always memorable, smiling, con¤dent face of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

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Neanderthal Democrats were not terribly aesthetic. And we had not yet decided to divide ourselves in half, in the European fashion—into elite intellectuals and other people. Characteristic of old-timey Neanderthal Democrats was an open-minded independence of mind and spirit often edging close to anarchy, which made them very dif¤cult to organize, but likewise never allowed them the license to surrender themselves to such vicious and duplicitous intellectual fads and fashions as Trotskyism or Fascism or Communism or any other temporary ism in good standing. Trust the people. That was the motto of Neanderthal Democrats. Anything else or less is hypocrisy and an absence of principle. When the people (both they and we) are in the wrong, they are nevertheless saying something, sending out a message that must be listened to. We were, then, in those days, the party of hope, hope in the individual (self ) and for the nation. To have and to hold hope, you must also have faith and charity. They always go together. We were the party of pride, of integrity. We held to certain self-evident principles, which were never really negotiable, not for the sake of victory, not in the face of defeat. In those days the press was pretty much owned by the other party. We had no good reason to take the press seriously. We had no reason or incentive to concern ourselves more with appearances (image) than reality (hard facts). Because we had pride and integrity, we also possessed a sense of shame. We could still be ashamed of ourselves and to admit it, not for the sake of good or bad publicity, but for what we had done that we ought not to have done and for what we had left undone that we ought to have done. We were still willing to admit in public that “there is no health in us.” We Neanderthals were hard-nosed and unsentimental,

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but not hard hearted. We were embarrassed to use words like caring and compassion much, lest they be sullied and cheapened by an easy familiarity. And I think we looked on all who did so as intellectual ®ag wavers. But the record is there. We acted more compassionately than any other American political group or faction or party before or since. It is well that we should remember these things when we are tempted, as we often are, to think better of ourselves, measured against the faults and ®aws, even the prejudices of our forefathers. It is well to keep in mind, also, in this constant con®ict between image and reality, between word and deed, some more permanent words on the subject, words from the seventh chapter of Matthew: “Beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns or ¤gs from thistles?” There is more to it, of course. In some weird way I was (am) the reverse image of Peter Taylor. Opposites in most things. Item. I don’t know how many houses he owned, lived in, and sold in a lifetime of fooling around with real estate. Let us stipulate a dozen or so. All of them eventually sold at a nice pro¤t. He was proud of that and had every right to be. During roughly the same period, I also was nomadic, moved from one place to another, buying and selling houses all along the way, at least a dozen of them. I lost money on every damn one of them. This became a little joke between us. I argued that, due to the intricate and mysterious workings of the economy, what I had lost worked its way around and became what he had won. Therefore out of love and charity and his natural noblesse oblige, he should rightly share some of his wealth with me. Reparations, don’t you know? He did not ¤nd my argument persuasive. That gives you an idea of the delicate balance. Just so in family

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matters. My grandfather, on my mother’s side of the family, was (among other things) solicitor general of Georgia, and a good one. Later he ran for governor in Florida and was well trounced in the Democratic primary—the only “real” election in these days with Republicans an endangered species in the postReconstruction South. Later, years later in his nineties, after my grandfather had returned to his roots in the South Carolina Low Country (McClellanville), he went forth, on his own initiative and at his own expense, to campaign in the state on behalf of Adlai Stevenson, whose elegant speeches had inspired my grandfather to go out and urge the voters to vote for Adlai. My grandfather, Colonel William Morrison Toomer, patron saint of lost causes. In Peter’s family, at least according to McAlexander’s biography, Peter was really the ¤rst overt rebel in the family, the ¤rst to opt for art instead of law, business, politics, professional respectability. Colonel Toomer had ¤ve sturdy handsome sons, including the aforementioned Fred who is the model for Mark in this story. One was somewhat conventional. Became a cavalry of¤cer, rode with “Black Jack” Pershing on the Mexican border and in Mexico, too, during the fruitless Pancho Villa chase. From the cavalry he went into ®ying airplanes for the army in World War I, then back to the cavalry he loved after the war. The others were, in chronological order: Fred, the musician; Courtney, a minor league baseball player; Jack, a golf pro; and Chester (Towne), a dancer. Might as well have been a crew of ¤ve jugglers. Not much better, on the male side, in my father’s family. One of his two brothers was a mountain guide and climber in the Northwest. Killed in a sudden blizzard on Mount Rainier, his body never found. The other was a newspaper reporter turned screenwriter at the time (end of the 1920s) that the talkies began to take over the movie business. He died of a heart attack in New York City in 1952 and was labeled in the morgue as an “unidenti¤ed laborer,” probably on the basis of the casual Cali-

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fornia clothes he was wearing at the time he keeled over. They might have checked his wallet, mightn’t they? Only this was New York, folks, and of course that wallet was long gone, like the wind done gone, before he hit the sidewalk. A Caveman Democrat himself, Uncle Oliver would have been proud to be identi¤ed as a “laborer.” Most of these uncles, together with the many cousins they spawned, worked as manual laborers at one time and another. Aside from their speci¤c talents and interests, they had limited skills. So when they were broke or down on their luck, they sold themselves for stoop labor and scut jobs. Didn’t whine. My father had worked in Colorado and Utah as a copper miner, member of the original group that was to become the United Mine Workers, early in the twentieth century. He ended up being a lawyer in Florida, but all his life had the scars and the muscles to remind him of those years of hard labor and danger. All this factors into my relationship with Peter Taylor. With Frank Toomer and Aubrey Carver it ought to be somewhat different. Frank can, already simply does, share with me a similar family background and back story. Aubrey, however, does not come from a family that was actively and practically involved in politics. Like so many others in the town-and-university community of Jefferson, he is a good limousine liberal. Which is to say, I suppose, that he has a good heart, sometimes even a bleeding one, trying always to do the right thing, good things in a bad and greed-ridden world, but not allowing that there should ever be any serious self-sacri¤ce or risks involved in his public positions. He does not plan on serious programs of ascetic austerity. He prefers guilt to contrition and penance. The Jaguar stays in his driveway (or in the shop). In a better world everybody would have a Jaguar. Meantime he’s got his. If Aubrey had still been alive when President Clinton got himself into the Big Monica Mess this might have become a point of friction between Aubrey and Frank. Frank had an

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oddly old-fashioned point of view about that. He said then and would probably say again now that someone for whom doors are opened, for whom musical accompaniment is proudly played, who is served and saluted by one and all, all day long and into the night, for someone who is spoken to with tones of formal awe and deference, someone rich in perks and privileges, this same someone owes something, at least an assumed rectitude, in return. No wonderful plans and policies, no catalogue of good works, no hopes for brighter and better days, none can outweigh the inexplicable absence of that required rectitude. Frank usually tried to joke about it in those days when many others, on all sides, were joking, though not so many were laughing. “No blow jobs on public property at least during duty hours,” he would say. Frank wonders, from time to time, if Aubrey ever actually went over to the Venable Elementary School, their precinct voting place, to cast a vote for anyone or anything. Frank has seen many a ¤ne and expensive automobile—Mercedes, BMWs, Range Rovers, SUVs of every kind—in the parking lot, but never that Jag. What about the Jag? With Aubrey gone now, what has become of it? Does it sit, quietly and elegantly, in the back of the Carver driveway? Or did the widow, Eileen, surprise everybody, everybody in the Wayside Place neighborhood at least, by unloading it almost immediately following the memorial service (“A Celebration of the Life and Work of Aubrey Carver”) and evidently at a real bargain? So Frank might also wonder later on whether, if only he had been quick enough, he might have bought it cheaply for himself. Maybe Aubrey and Eileen Carver have a child, an only child, a son, now a large, burly, red-faced, hard-drinking lout of a man, a kind of an archetypal oaf and an acute embarrassment to them in his childhood (hyperactivity and tantrums) and youth (sex, drugs, rock-and-roll at the peripheral fringes of The Movement), but is now indistinguishable from and interchangeable with a whole generation of hustlers and hard cases. Jerry, his

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name for the time being, has done well in real estate development in Jefferson and the Jefferson area. Makes good money. Blew away an early marriage and then a second, longer-lasting one, involving three children who have tested his resources and his patience and good will by attending, more or less simultaneously, some very expensive universities and graduate schools. The eldest is a physician who already makes more money than his father or his late grandfather put together. Now happily married, for third and ¤nal “heat” (as he says), Jerry cheerfully preempts and co-opts real and potential critics by a little shtick he has worked up celebrating the special joys of wedded bliss with an unreconstructed trophy wife. His wife, Jennifer, worthy of a trophy in Frank’s eyes, is a sport about it. “I’ll be dead and gone long before I am disillusioned,” Jerry says, not meaning a word of it. She is at the sensitive steering wheel of the Jag far more often than ole Jerry. Politics? I would guess (and Frank Toomer agrees with me) that Jerry Carver votes Republican but talks Democratic. Covers the bases. Contributes something to both sides and hopes for the best. There is very little, next to nothing about Jerry or about politics in the biography of Aubrey Carver. Certainly ole Aubrey would be embarrassed by his only son and heir, that boisterous and often vulgar alien to Aubrey’s selfimposed aesthetic lifestyle, the legacy of which, his literary remains, would be held in the coarse hands of Jerry. It must have troubled Aubrey more than a little to think on that prospect. More interesting to Frank Toomer would be Eileen’s view of her child, so roughly and distinctly different in almost every way from his father, her husband. As far as Frank could tell, she showed no signs of any embarrassment or assumed any other role than that of a loving mother. Frank had once written a short story, “Look Who’s Laughing Now,” published in one of the quarterlies, probably the Sewanee,

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all about a sensitive aesthete and his rough and ready son. Frank slightly camou®aged the connection of Aubrey and his life by having Andrew (read: Aubrey) be a musician, a classical guitarist, rather than a writer. Writing the story, he discovered that Ellen (Eileen), though a good and loving wife, was delighted by Gregory, the son, that it was eminently satisfactory to her that he was untouched by his father’s views of the cosmos. It pleased her that Gregory was neither, in Kierkegaard’s terms, a model of the ethical man or the aesthetic man, but was, rather, to his own insouciant pride and peril, a clear, unabridged, and unabashed example of the purely sensual being. The key scene in the story was the time that Andrew, supposedly enjoying a lazy summer afternoon nap, overheard Ellen and Gregory casually discussing what should become of Andrew’s things on the occasion of his death. Talking in calm, indifferent whispers of how to dispose of his legacy. Would Andrew tell either one of them, ever, that he had listened to their valedictory conversation? Probably not. Being the man he had come to be, he would keep it a secret if he possibly could, hugging that secret like a wound. Meantime—how could he help it?—Andrew must have brooded until his ¤nal conscious hour on the bitter irony that his legacy would be in Gregory’s clumsy hands. Frank felt almost certain that neither Aubrey nor Eileen would take offense at “Look Who’s Laughing Now.” Not because it would not have been painfully clear to them where the story came from and what it was really all about, but because neither one of them would be likely to read it. He could safely count on that.

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TWENTY

Eileen Carver, still Frank and Anne Toomer’s next-door neighbor, though soon, she says, to move away either to a nearby and rather elegant Episcopalian “retirement community,” out on Route 250 West, or else to a Gulf Coast condo on the Florida panhandle, just as soon as son Jerry sells the house. Eileen Carver blames Frank for Aubrey’s little ®ing, aforementioned, with the woman here known by her semiof¤cial nickname—“Peaches.” Something Eileen said to him when she popped in to borrow the phone the other day (hers was out of order), leads him to believe she believes that he pointed an innocent Aubrey toward that primrose path and then gave him a good push down it too. Nothing Frank can say or do in self-defense. Her remark— wisecrack would be more like it—something about this year’s wonderful new crop of peaches coming in—was acerbic, but not made in any context that might allow him to defend himself and his actions (years ago!) without sounding like some kind of a raving paranoid nutcase. All he could do was grit his teeth in a kind of a guilty grin. And bear it. The fact that she may actually believe her version of the story indicates to Frank that somewhere along the way Aubrey either

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confessed his in¤delity or that she put two and two together and confronted him with her strong suspicions and whatever evidence she had at hand; and that Aubrey sought to mute her anger and to mitigate her disappointment by passing the buck to, or at the least sharing the burden and guilt with, ole Frank. Not an altogether unusual move by many a husband who has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. In our day and age does anyone still keep a cookie jar in kitchen or pantry? Eileen would certainly be willing to believe it too. Frank can see and understand that. Partly it would give her a good reason not to disrupt an otherwise more or less satisfactory marriage and partly, maybe mostly, because it would con¤rm and strengthen her impressions and suspicions about Frank. There was the matter of his general reputation as, in his lost youth anyway, an unreconstructed and indiscriminate womanizer. About which the less said the better. If we somehow are able to survive our youthful follies and indiscretions, let us thereafter let well enough alone. If Anne could and can put up with him, how bad could it all have been? Frank also thinks that Eileen has viewed him, ever since Aubrey popped a champagne cork on the ¤rst day he and Anne moved into “the little house,” as a somewhat milder version of Brando as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. And herself ? As a Blanche Dubois, to be sure, though too sane, too all-white Wonder Bread, ever to depend upon the kindness of strangers. Frank had helped to goose along this image of himself (inadvertently?) by telling her, while he was moderately intoxicated at one of their parties, back when the Carvers were still doing that kind of thing, some tall tales about his family. He spoke in reply to a direct question. But always remember that this was in the clumsy context of an ongoing and crowded social occasion not calling for the kind of detail he then proceeded to supply. What he described was a long arc of downward mobility by his

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people, one that began well before the Civil War with the ¤rst great failure of the crops of rice and indigo in the South Carolina Low Country and then continued, with ups and downs, well into the twentieth century. When he (¤nally!) came to the generation before his own, the generation of his father and his eccentric uncles, his summary judgment—“a really weird bunch of Tennessee Williams people”—must have lodged in her mind and then taken command of her sense of him. Frank, in turn, sensed this and trusted his intuition. And, as you can guess, he then played the role that she had created for him as well as he could. How easily we become the victims of our own masks, costumes, and disguises!

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TWENTY-ONE

As I said earlier (pardon the repetition), one of the problems with literary biographies is that they don’t deal in any meaningful detail with the serious subject of money. They go along merrily talking about almost everything else, but then they begin to tiptoe when they come to things involving dollars and cents, earnings and losses, advances and royalties. It seems to be a great American middle-class taboo. Even diehard Marxists don’t ask and won’t tell. When they do get around to giving you some sort of precise numbers, they do not create a useful context to consider. What was the economy doing at a particular time? What was a living wage at any given time? What were other writers earning for their labors? What was the value of the subject’s earnings and assets? Above all, where did the subject’s money come from? I am thinking of a very grand and acerbic lady from Philadelphia, thin as an anorexic leaf rake, hoarse and as loud, when she wanted to be so, as any crow. Matter of fact usually clad all in black, too, a lady from a very old and very distinguished American family. Here is what she once said to me and to the rest of a crowded living room: “I am not in the least bit interested in the subject of who is sleeping with whom and all that

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kind of thing. What I really want to know is how much money they have and where did it come from.” The old gal was absolutely right. Now then. I can well understand certain basic aesthetic and narrative problems that might arise from too close a concentration on a lot of these mundane details. That would clutter up and slow down an already sedentary tale. My ¤rst thought was: why not uniformly add an appendix, like notes, devoted exclusively to a basic accounting of the subject’s ¤nancial affairs? Which are probably more important than all the subject’s love affairs put together. Of course there are some practical reasons as well. Most academics, the usual authors of literary biographies, are hopelessly, cluelessly naive about money. Besides which, people, even literary biographers who ought to know better, like to believe (on the basis of next to no evidence) that our best writers, at least the more successful and well-known ones, become at least a little bit wealthy over the years. Like to think that writers can somehow live off of their earnings. Maybe so, but mostly maybe not. Some do and some don’t. Mr. Grisham, he went and got rich. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, just to mention three, did not. In fact they died poor in comparison with most usual standards and measurements. The total accumulated earnings of their whole lifetimes don’t add up to the average advance against royalties of any given Grisham book. Their families, their estates, have made out just ¤ne and dandy, thank you. But that is a matter of historical irony or, if you are a true believer, it is just another little joke of Providence. You don’t think God has a good sense of humor? Try reading some literary biographies. Peter Taylor had his trust fund or funds. Aubrey Carver had his too. Frank Toomer proudly claims to live off of his Social Security and the TIAA-CREF pension he earned by toiling all those years at Jefferson. Frank, even if he were well enough, won’t be ®ying off anytime soon to London to do some deductible research on his ¤ctional life of Robert Greene.

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On the other hand—and ole Frank will never forgive me for saying so, for letting this little kitty-cat out of the bag—Frank is the only one of them to marry a rich woman. “We are not talking Bill Styron and his One Perfect Rose here,” he told me once. “We are just talking about modestly wellto-do, that’s all.” Defending himself, as if he had to, Frank would say, and it would be the truth, that when he married Anne more than a half-century ago, in the full glow of their ignorant youth, neither one of them had, as Frank put it, “a pot to piss in” or, indeed, great expectations for any future solvency, let alone wealth. Her inheritance came as a big surprise to both of them. And it would have surprised others, too, would certainly have surprised Aubrey if he had ever known of or suspected it. Neither Frank nor Anne was or is a big spender. Beside the point. Real point is that if you are an American writer of the generation of Aubrey and Frank, you would have to seek and ¤nd a way to afford to be a “literary” writer. Even if you are/were a rich boy like Jimmy Merrill or Big Jim Dickey, it can be a very expensive hobby. Like serious golf. Every literary biography owes it to tell us how our hero managed to pay his/her way and his/her dues. To which Frank Toomer says: “Well, how about those two Yahoos in The Honeymooners? “Those guys are always about a step and a half away from total ¤duciary disaster, as are a lot of characters in the Raymond Carver stories. But, even so, somehow or other (how exactly?), they still manage to rent and even buy apartments and houses and used cars and all kinds of other material things that were— when we were that age—beyond not just our means, but even our dreams. These boys had credit cards. Best of my recollection, there weren’t any credit cards in our salad days. Or if there were any, they sure didn’t fall into our hands. “Biggest difference between us and the generation right be-

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hind us is this, I’ve come to think. Just about everybody in my generation, everyone who could walk and talk and had a warm body, served in one of our wars—maybe they were really all the same war—World War II and/or Korea and/or Nam. The survivors came home believing that there was no way in hell we were not going to have another Big War sooner or later. Probably sooner. Believing that sooner or later somebody was going to blow our sweet asses into sky-high dirt and dust. “I don’t think I knew anybody, not one swinging dick, who really believed we would make it to the age of forty. “Oh long before Timothy Leary and all that silly crowd, a lot of us had dropped out of the rat race. Not out of life, mind you. We wanted to live and to enjoy as much as we could of ‘the good life’ before they wasted the whole world. We saw ourselves as dead men walking. “Isn’t that what Existentialism, the recreational intellectual drug of the early ¤fties—in America, at least; in France they were much too smart to believe that shit—was all about? “Remember Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech where he chastises the younger generation (us) for not recognizing that mankind will not only somehow endure but prevail? I sometimes think that old boy was the only one around who noticed what was really going on and what we were feeling and disguising. “We were shocked when we lived to be forty. And I am really surprised to be here now. I had not planned on it. “These kids in The Honeymooners do have a goal in life (they say)—careers as writers and literary ‘fame.’ “We aren’t the ¤rst generation of Americans to step aside quietly and allow the generation behind us to have our turn at bat. The Civil War, which was and remains worse than all of our other wars put together, had pretty much the same result, right? “Take a look sometime at the tag end of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War. Where he wraps it all up and outlines the immediate future for the surviving veterans. In one place he says it all in a few judicious quotes from a speech made by Oliver Wen-

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dell Holmes on Memorial Day 1884 in Keene, New Hampshire. Here’s some of what Holmes had to say. Let me read it to you. May I?” The generation that carried on the war has been set aside by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with ¤re. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold ¤elds, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us. “True, there’s some of your routine and basic geezer talk in there. He can’t help it. The war had been over for almost twenty years by then. And true, too, that my generation proved to be guilty of the one thing he says they scorned—indifference. Well, I ¤gure most of his generation had stepped aside and was worthy of his scorn also. Otherwise why would he bother to talk about it?” Allow for a couple of things, please. One is that Frank always tends to exaggerate himself, his “character,” and his “ideas” and “arguments.” As you may have noticed. Two is that having been holed up, bunker-bound for months with his illness, he hasn’t enjoyed a lot of company to talk to. And Frank does dearly love to talk. The prednisone he’s taking seems to stimulate his natural loquacity. Given even a temporary captive listener—the postal carrier, say, or maybe a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses patiently standing at the front door, Frank is likely to let go at any time.

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TWENTY-TWO

We were all soldiers, did our time in the service, anyway, one time or another. I am here talking about Frank Toomer and Peter Taylor, myself, and Aubrey Carver. Fact is that Aubrey was in the navy in World War II and he alone among us was a commissioned of¤cer. Peter Taylor was an enlisted man, a sergeant. Frank and I, as said, served at the time of the Korean War. It is the four of us that I am thinking of, but I am also including, among my casual thoughts and words, a good many others, known and unknown, kith and kin, lifted out of family histories, from the many who came before us and some also who came after our own wars and served in Vietnam and the Gulf War and so forth. Which is to say, yes, indeed, we have fought, and some of us have died, in all the American wars as a family and as a tribe. And there were more of them, wars that is, named and not, than you may now remember and be able to name. Beginning in these lost days long before we were an independent nation, no more than a gathering of little states, and well before that time, also, back to those times before we were even a colony or serious settlement, being not much more than some far-®ung and oddly

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named and thinly manned outposts clinging to the edges of this dark continent. If you drive west from Staunton, Virginia, on old Route 250 and climb the mountains up to Monterey, you will have to pass by some acres of virgin forest. Stop there—there’s a sign to warn you—and go for a walk in the faint, scattered “cathedral” light and shadows cast by these enormous, ancient trees and feel some of the same things that the earliest settlers must have felt. Frank, typically cultivating cynical contrariness, calls these folks, his ancestors and ours, the lost tribe, the newest American minority, the Early Americans. He has been known to argue that we “Earlies” deserve some kind of postmodern reparations for being shipped out and then tossed up on the inhospitable Atlantic beaches of the East Coast, thousands of miles away from friends and relatives, civilization and home, and then left there to sink or swim. The earliest soldier I can de¤nitely document and trace in my own family bloodline—in this case Frank’s bloodline as well— comes from the Yankee side of the family. He is one Gershom Palmer, born here in America in 1644, who served as a lieutenant in the Stonnington (Connecticut) Company during King Phillip’s War (1675–1678). As far as I can tell we have furnished only one general, though at least one man got close enough to the beating heart of things to serve awhile as one of George Washington’s personal bodyguards. And he was duly rewarded, after the Revolution was over and done with, with a personal gift from General Washington— a splendid toasting fork, one that, though now broken and rusty and bent, I still possess somewhere. Out in the garage, I think. Maybe. We can muster up a modest crew of ¤eld grade soldiers, captains and colonels and the like. But the most of us, civilians and not soldiers by choice and at heart, in the Early American tradition, were dutiful enlisted men. Peter and I both served as sergeants. Frank was a sergeant too, at least for a while. I seem

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to remember, vaguely and with no good evidence or hard facts to help me, that Frank was “busted” for some infraction. I have never known what that may have been. I have never asked him. I do assume that he must have received an honorable discharge, because he went directly on to graduate school on the G.I. Bill after he came home. Before he got sick, when Frank was still able to do some light yard work and other outdoor chores, he often wore a faded and battered ¤eld jacket (once cut and tailored for his youthful ¤gure, though by now beyond all possible buttoning) with three stripes and “one rocker,” the chevrons of a Sergeant First Class on the sleeves. Aubrey Carver was an of¤cer and a gentleman from ¤rst to last in World War II. None of us, I have to admit, took note of Aubrey’s service as seriously as we probably should have. Partly because, as you will have observed, he did not encourage that kind of familiarity. He seldom spoke of those times. His biographer doesn’t devote much space to the subject, either. Maybe justly so, because it seems to have very little, if anything, to do with Aubrey’s literary work and career. He wrote nothing about the navy or the war. We did know—and the biography con¤rms this—that Aubrey ended the war, his war, as a liaison of¤cer aboard a French cruiser in the South Paci¤c. That role seemed to us so pat and perfect, so “on the nose,” that none of us doubted it or felt any need to ascertain any other facts about his war experiences. It was satisfactory to picture Aubrey in a crisp white tropical uniform sipping a little red wine and trading witty bons mots with his Froggie colleagues. It was Frank who ¤nally found out something, and not by asking or even wanting to, but by accident, from Eileen, I think. Though it could have come directly from Jerry, the aforementioned loutish son and heir. Who was never above (or do I mean below?) using his father’s name and accomplishments if he thought that might prove helpful in the realization of any of his elaborate schemes and business dealings. Jerry, to be sure and

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to give him full credit, never served his country in any way, shape, or form, except for reluctantly paying his income taxes; but faithful in his own fashion, he was an active supporter of and contributor to and sort of de facto member of the American Legion and the V.F.W. Aubrey’s story goes something like this. Sometime in 1939, two full years, then, before the U.S. was to be directly involved in the war, Aubrey could see some of what was coming soon, anticipating the Selective Service System (“the draft”) would come to pass. And so he dodged it by joining the old Navy Reserve. The draft was at least a reasonable possibility in 1939, but our entry into the European war was, as few may remember now, unlikely. If you had to serve, anyway, being a kind of part-time of¤cer in the peacetime Navy seemed to him much preferable to the picture of himself as yet another anonymous draftee, a buck private in the crude blue denim fatigues they still wore in the army in those days, taking stupid orders and performing pointless tasks under the pitiless scrutiny of near-illiterate, proletarian, Regular Army, cracker and redneck types. So far so good. See Aubrey, even then, even in his youth, acting consistently in character. And that much of his story he could and did tell years later with appropriate amused and selfdeprecating irony. And the results were indeed, true to form, nothing at all, if not ironic. Since, by the time of the sudden events of December 1941, he had already had some training and experience and had even acquired some rudimentary naval skills, he was immediately called up to full-time active duty and then went on to serve throughout the whole war. First of all served on convoy duty in the North Atlantic on an antique destroyer. Then, following several eventful 1942 crossings, and one very dangerous and scary run up to Murmansk and back, he was, for no noticeable or particular good reason, attached to the Canadians on board one of their little corvettes (“a highly maneuverable armed escort ship that is smaller than a destroyer”— Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary). It was an assignment where

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he found himself more or less lost and forgotten by the powersthat-be for the next year or so until one ¤ne day some bored clerk, shuf®ing and dealing papers in a comfortable of¤ce somewhere far from the high seas, happened to notice his name, rank, and serial number and his unusual assignment. Convoy duty, and especially in the early days when Hitler’s “wolf pack” of U-Boats were enjoying such great success, was dif¤cult, dirty, and highly dangerous. Life on a corvette, a clumsy little ship that pitched and rolled and heaved like a ¤shing cork even in good weather, was extremely uncomfortable. It was more than uncomfortable, it was a kind of living hell for Aubrey Carver, who was one of those people who suffer from chronic and constant seasickness. Meaning that he was always urgently sick, without any respite or relief, the whole time he was at sea, often for weeks at a time. Days and nights of dizziness and dry heaves without end until they were safely at anchor or moored in harbor. Even then, unless he found himself safely on dry land, he was at the mercy of any sort of motion. Soon enough he knew what to expect, what would happen to him. How because it was, quite aside from seasickness, always routinely a matter of life and death, he would simply have to carry on and do his duty, whatever that duty turned out to be, and no matter how seasick he was. It was completely predictable each and every time his ship escorted a convoy. Somehow or other he had steeled himself and done his duty. Aubrey’s biographer makes very little, next to nothing, about this part of Aubrey’s life, missing the point. “What we are talking about here is almost the textbook de¤nition of courage,” says Frank, the only infantryman among us. “Aubrey was a truly brave man. All the more so because he never made much out of it, himself. Anybody who ignores that truth about Aubrey, or makes light of it, does him a grave injustice.” Frank usually follows that pronouncement with a long, rambling tale of his own, an account of his voyage on a stinking troopship, a trip that took all of nineteen extra days because

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they found themselves in the big middle of a hurricane; a trip with several thousand seasick soldiers who managed to decorate the ship fore and aft with rich foamy festoons of puke. Frank is ashamed that he did not know enough to be able to honor Aubrey’s courage while he was still alive and Frank’s neighbor. He now acknowledges the injustice of his GI’s cartoon image of Aubrey on that sleek French cruiser in 1945, clean in dress whites, drinking excellent wine from a wine glass in the of¤cers’ mess, hobnobbing with those Frenchmen, talking the talk and sleeping in an ample bunk with clean sheets and a pillow in a comfortable cabin. It takes some imaginative effort for Frank to concede and to forgive these things. Frank’s war was mostly in Korea and is summoned to his memory by the scent of human shit, whole ¤elds and acres and miles of it. He would rather have kept the other image of Aubrey, true or false, as more consistently in character. But Frank is adept enough at his writer’s craft to believe that consistency, like its ¤rst cousin, predictability, is in and of itself more than a convenient ¤ction. About abstractions and the old verities and qualities like courage, he knows enough, from three score years and ten of living in this fallen world, to believe that they often bloom and thrive in the most surprising places. There are some serious moments, rare enough but real, when Frank is willing to allow himself to think that it is the bounden duty of the novelist, seasick or not, to seek out and then to illuminate precisely those surprising places. Two other things Frank has mentioned, given a little time to do so. That Aubrey, white uniform and red wine or not, endured the worst the Japanese had to offer at the tag end of it—the kamikaze attacks. And he will sometimes talk about what it must have been like when Aubrey ¤rst came home to recover from wounds, and ®oating for some hours in the North Atlantic, and saw for himself, with newly educated eyes, the uninhibited greed and moral laxity (in prewar terms at least) that now pos-

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sessed “the home front.” It was a shock to many veterans and soon became a theme and subject for many writers. Aubrey never wrote what was (brie®y) known as “a war novel.” He didn’t live long enough to see the arrival of the trendy literary fashion of the memoir. Otherwise—especially because Aubrey tried his best to keep himself fully aware and abreast of all the literary fashions, he might have found the ways and means to tell his own story. As it is, however, he never so much as mentioned World War II in any of his literary work. Once in a while he would talk with Frank about that time, and the time when the war was ¤nally over and he came home for good. “I didn’t know my way around. It was a strange place and people spoke a foreign language that I couldn’t understand.” It was a view of things that pleased Frank because it seconded and con¤rmed his own. Frank was a teenager in World War II. Waiting to join the others, as soon as he was old enough, in this war that was surely going to last for many years to come. From that point of view he witnessed the gradual and radical changing of America. He did his soldiering later, serving an America that had already changed for better and for worse. Came to America with World War II a baf®ing multitude of large and small changes. As Frank sees it now, more than a halfcentury later, long after the facts, with even Korea for him no more than a dimming and diminishing, if stinking, memory, here at home came ¤rst the routine, then the uniform and habitual cutting of all ethical and moral corners, the ends—and in this case the essential ending in victory, if that were possible, and certainly not in defeat, which was always seriously possible until the very end of it—as wholly justifying the means, any means whatsoever. Came at one and the same time in the gospel according to Frank, the sense of, then an unembarrassed hunger for huge pro¤ts and rewards to be earned easily for the taking. Sweet

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fruits to be enjoyed in comfort and safety here in America, and without the need anymore for duty, honor, courage, obedience, or any of the familiar forms of self-sacri¤ce, while elsewhere their less fortunate countrymen paid out a price in blood and sweat and tears and were killed or were maimed beyond any repair. While elsewhere millions of people on both sides, the innocent and guilty alike, indifferently, died like beasts in some grungy slaughterhouse. Slaughterhouse Five, maybe . . . ? The former, our new nation, not of shopkeepers but of cheerful pro¤teers, set free by the enormous scale and blind horror of events and lacking any operable inhibitions, or even the ghostly recollections of conscience, who were able to enjoy themselves without the least twinge or wince of conscience or of shame. Was this, in fact, the triumph of Usura that crazy old Ezra Pound announced on his anti-Semitic and treasonous radio programs? The latter, the ¤ghters, soldiers and civilians alike “in harm’s way,” those who happened to have survived, would never again be allowed the luxury of imagining that their lives had any meaning or purpose whatsoever. Never again could they consider that the fall of a great empire or a single sparrow could or should raise a human eyebrow anywhere, let alone be able to capture the wandering attention of an overworked, solicitous, and loving God. As for the many millions of the silent dead, they may, after all, have been lucky to have been spared that ¤nal disillusionment. Frank sometimes likes to argue that it was not only America, but the whole of the wide world that had changed and (done) gone Babylonian on us. By the waters of Babylon I have wept. . . . So often eager to argue, sometimes to quarrel, and in his lost honky-tonk youth even to stand up and ¤ght, Frank would sooner or later play the redneck Confederate card—what Aubrey

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used to call Frank’s “grandpa-was-a-drummer-boy ploy”—and assert that the changing of and in America began with our own ¤rst total war. Quoting verbatim from U.S. Field Manual FM 100-5, giving full credit where credit is due: “Sherman’s campaign, like Sheridan’s in the Shenandoah, anticipated the economic and strategic bombardments of the twentieth century.” You know what they mean. Like Warsaw and Rotterdam. Like London and Coventry. Like Tokyo and Hamburg. Like Dresden. . . . Take Dresden . . . On second thought let us not take the example of Dresden except to say that it was not an accident or a mistake, but was wholly intentional and quite successful insofar as the particular intentions were realized. It is, no question, a considerable stretch to compare and connect the Dresden ¤re bombing with, for example, the burning of Columbia, South Carolina, by Sherman’s army. Be that as it may, with the aid of a couple of drinks under his belt, Frank Toomer is prepared to make exactly that case. Here is something the four of us have in common. Soldiers in the thick or thin of it—and here we must include Aubrey, our blue-eyed sailor boy, pitching and rolling and puking, though never quite drowning, ever at the mercy of the high sea and of his own swirling and rebellious bowels—were taught some hard lessons, lessons we were still young enough to learn by heart; though just because we were young and ignorant, if not all that innocent, even as we rehearsed to embrace death, not without fear but rather with a fearful indifference, we nevertheless considered and counted ourselves as being among the immortals. And there is some truth in that ¤ction. For the young are to be named and honored among the ranks of the lesser gods if only for the sake of that brief, incredible blooming and ®owering that is youth. One of the mundane lessons we all learned, one that is apparently amazing news to each new generation, never passed on

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from one generation to the next, is this: that, with the exception of the motivations of the fanatic and suicidal terrorist, there is not a cause that means or matters more than any other. A soldier in combat may live or die, and does so with courage or cowardice, but the cause he serves, the institutions he represents, have nothing whatsoever to do with any of this or with his success or failure. Soldiers do not ¤ght any better or worse because of a good cause or a bad one. They ¤ght and live or die to save, as much as they may be able to, the skin and bones of themselves and their comrades. What they experience, what happens to them, is far more real than any imaginable or imaginary cause. When Frank Toomer talks about the Old South and the Lost Cause, he is only kidding.

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TWENTY-THREE

Frank Toomer says: The last time I saw Aubrey Carver he didn’t seem to be knock, knock, knocking at heaven’s gate. In fact, he seemed animated, quite lively. His color was all right, his eyes bright, his speech clear and unslurred. A couple of us came by, at Eileen’s invitation, to pay a visit. Neatly turned out in ironed pajamas and an elegant bathrobe, Aubrey was in a hospital bed, set up in the living room for all around convenience. He was propped up, resting back easy on a stack of pillows. Eileen was in and out of the room, and there was a nurse, vaguely hovering somewhere nearby. Eileen brought Aubrey a tall glass of iced tea, bouquet of mint and lemon just as he liked it. We were given cut glasses and a bottle of Dry Sack to sip and a bowl of salty mixed nuts to play with. We sat in straight chairs (don’t get yourselves too comfortable, gentlemen) placed side by side and at a little distance from the bed. I was about to move my chair closer when I remembered that his immune system was supposed to be all screwed up from the heavy medications he was taking. It would be better for us to keep a proper distance. Brave of him to let us in the room at all. “I was hoping Peter Taylor would be able to come too,” Aub-

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rey said. “A real literary tea party. But he’s not feeling so well, either.” “Christ, we are all of us falling apart,” I said. “Nothing much left but the bits and pieces.” “Speak for yourself, old sport,” Aubrey said. Then: “If I could drink, I would open a bottle of champagne and we could all celebrate.” “Celebrate what?” “Believe it or not, old friends, I have not only ¤nished my new novel, I have likewise dispatched it—or, rather, Eileen has done so on my behalf—this very day, UPS overnight, to my agent. It will be sitting there on his desk by ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Which, I can assure you, is a good deal earlier than he will be at his desk.” “Here’s to the agents, God bless ’em all.” “No,” Aubrey said. “First I want to raise my glass to toast the wonders of modern communications.” “Next thing you know, old Aubrey here will be composing on a computer and sending out faxes and e-mails.” “Not bloody likely,” Aubrey said. Though never a joker, not much given to hearty laughing and scratching, Aubrey, even on his death bed, had the good manners to be lighthearted enough to put his guests at ease. I remember he told a little anecdote—he had told it to me before, but what the hell, it’s a prerogative (if you’ll pardon the expression) of geezerhood. How once upon a time he had to take the bus downtown, then transfer to yet another bus to go out to Pantops Mountain where the Jag was being repaired. Frank was out of town. Aubrey could have called a cab, but he had not ever ridden a bus in Jefferson before and was looking for an adventure. The very idea of old Aubrey taking public transportation anywhere at any time was, in and of itself, mildly funny. Riding along he had overheard from a nearby seat where a young woman seemed to be having some trouble, her hands

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full with a rebellious and hyperactive child: “All right for you, Junior. I’ve got two words for you and I mean it—BE HAVE!” These two words would later become, for those of us who remembered Aubrey and the anecdote, a kind of greeting and farewell, if we ran into one another walking a dog or at the Barracks Road Mall. BE HAVE!* That afternoon we also talked brie®y about the importance of the obituary as the capstone of a writer’s career. Would any of us somehow make it into the sacrosanct pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post. “Totally Unknown American Writer Dies.” Would we even ¤nd ourselves a place in the Jefferson Daily Progress? “Not bloody likely,” Aubrey said. That was my cue to introduce my own shtick about the absolute necessity of hiring a good obituary agent, someone who could, one way or another, in return for a considerable retainer, sneak us into hallowed pages and, brie®y to be sure, save our asses from permanent assignment to Oblivion. This inappropriate little number led directly into another old routine—imaginary southern hometowns, places like Truckmire, Georgia; Speedtrap, Florida; Explosion, Mississippi; Bear’s Ass, North Carolina; Blowout, Tennessee; Oblivion, Alabama, and so on. I asked Aubrey about his new novel. “It’s probably bad luck to say this, even to talk about it at all, for that matter—and I truly do not need any more bad luck, believe me. But, anyway, I have to tell you, my brother rats, that I am pleased with it. I read it straight through last night and I am happy about it. I honestly think it is the best thing I have ever done.” “Is this the story about the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago?” “The World’s Columbian Exhibition,” Aubrey corrected me.** *See “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” by Flannery O’Connor. **He was wrong too. It was, in fact, The World’s Columbian Exposition. Sorry, ole buddy. Close, as they say, but no cigar.

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“Of course,” he added, “I’ll have to wait for Carl’s professional reaction. He’s always slow, but he’s always been absolutely honest with me over the years. And he’s even been right a lot of the time.” Rather than encouraging yet another dreary conversation on the subject of literary agents, or obituary agents either, I tried to take advantage of his good mood and get him talking about World’s Fairs in general. All us geezers in the room had, separately but equally, attended “The World of Tomorrow,” the New York World’s Fair of 1939–40. We had all stood a long time in line waiting to see “Futurama: Highways and Horizons” at the (truly) fabulous General Motors Building. We all agreed, here and now, that it was worth the wait and that we were still waiting for tomorrow to arrive. Talking about lines led Aubrey to play a riff on the subject: In those days, in spite of the urgent bread lines and soup kitchens in the big cities, most Americans, especially in the Depression-ravaged South, seldom had to stand in line for anything or, if so, then not for long. It was one of the pleasures and perquisites of rural and small-town life—not to have to stand in lines. At the public schools we all lined up once a day at the “Boys” door and the “Girls” door waiting for the ¤rst bell to ring. And I remember lining up to have our shots and vaccinations looked at by a nurse at the Jeff Davis Elementary School. But, you know, lines were not yet a familiar part of our mundane American experience. Maybe at Ellis Island or some place like that, not down home. In the South, though we were said to be more “military” than other Americans, as if we were a kind of crude and brutal Sparta being compared and contrasted with some urbane and genteel Yankee Athens, the very idea of standing in lines was socially unacceptable. We would learn to line up, wouldn’t we?, soon enough.

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In New York City, at their fair, we honored the native custom of standing in line for many things, though we would not ever have used their idiom to describe it— standing on line. We were never standing on some invisible line, rather in a line of living and breathing people. Two other native New York customs, having to do with waiting one’s turn, were not yet accepted so readily by the visiting southerners. One was the common practice of permitting very important people, celebrities of one stamp or another, to ignore the whole unpleasant experience and go directly to the head of the lines. A long season of general poverty, from Reconstruction to and through the Depression, had humbled the South and served as a powerful force for equality in almost everything but the intransigent inequities of race and race relations. Secondly, and a worse sin by far, was to try to sneak ahead of others while waiting in a line. I had seen this lead to shouting matches, even violence when my fellow provincial countrymen clashed with the locals. The New Yorkers could not, it seemed, imagine that anyone would be troubled by their sneaky behavior or, for that matter, that it was in any way the business of others. The southerners tended, on the other hand, to imagine that these alien people took them to be stupid, dumb as a ®ock of sheep and just as worthy of fooling and ®eecing. I remember that, as I waited in the line at the General Motors Futurama, I was afraid that something bad might happen. But there was a kind of communal spirit about that World’s Fair, a sense, however ®eeting it may have proved to be, that nations were joined together in some common hopes for the future. Outside and beyond the Fair, which in itself, after great initial success, would die bankrupt in a year, a world of woe, of ¤re and brimstone and the violent deaths of many millions, millions more than all the

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numbers who have ever attended all the world’s world fairs taken together, was about to begin. Did begin in September 1939. We went to the Fair. We came back home. And then everything changed in ways we could not have imagined, even with the full bene¤t of the astonishingly prophetic Futurama. One of these huge changes is simply this: that, camou®aged by the noisy activities of corporate and political globalization, the large ungainly nation states are in fact coming apart, breaking up and crumbling into multiple, more autonomous local units, places, then, joined by tribal af¤liations or by geographical location or by language and history and love, the local past becoming more than ever a part of our present. If all the above, or any of it, is true, then the primary duty of the American writer is to explore this rediscovered past. “You forgot the best part, Aubrey.” “What was that—the Parachute Jump?” “You didn’t even mention Billy Rose’s Acquacade—Eleanor Holm and old Johnny Weissmuller and 500 girls, in the ®esh, as they say.” “You’ve got a one-track mind, Frank.” “It gets worse as the years go by.” For a while, while his energy lasted, Aubrey went on to talk about his novel, tentatively titled Futura, set in 1893, the action taking place in and around the magni¤cent and pretentious World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. America as it dreamed itself awake. He talked about the fair itself, which fascinated him—the size and scale of it; the fact that it was the ¤rst great public event lit by electricity; that the shining white material for the huge neoclassical buildings, material that looked like carved stone and marble, but was in truth a kind of plaster that would last for only a year or two, for the brief life of the fair,

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then crumble and melt away. A year or two later there would be nothing to prove they had ever been there. Aubrey saw that as a kind of symbol of the on-coming American empire—that it began and would end as illusion. But mainly, as I can remember it now, Aubrey talked, with enthusiasm, as if he were describing a book he had read or a movie he had enjoyed, about his characters and the general story line. Which is what you can expect from a geezer writer. Young writers pride themselves, and we honor them for it, for their vivid sensory intensity and acutely observed details. Our older writers—and more and more of us are living longer and continuing to write—seem to be roused by characters and excited by the architecture of the stories they tell, by the patterns that emerge and bloom out of the chaos of ¤ctive lives. Aubrey and I had hardly ever talked to each other about our own work, in general or in particular; and never, as far as I know and can remember, did we talk about work-in-progress. I should have guessed there was something ¤nal, valedictory about this occasion. Aubrey even teased me into talking about my novel about Shakespeare’s contemporary and rival—Robert Greene. First step was to needle me about whether or not it really was in progress or just some kind of geezer game being played out late in life. Once I went on the defensive, he pressed me on why I was interested in Greene. What was it that attracted me to the man?*** I couldn’t answer that directly. Wouldn’t have, anyway. I did manage to say that the scholars and critics who touched on Greene’s brief, but important and, as it happened, posthumous quarrel ***Frank Toomer got the idea from a couple of sentences in the book Young Shakespeare, by Russell Fraser: “In the age of Shakespeare, Greene, not Shakespeare, typi¤es the professional writer. Like a ¤ddler or ‘wait,’ he stood below stairs, expectant. Society having no use for his minor music, his hand is raised against it. The con man or ‘conny catcher’ par excellence, he stole from one novel to piece out another. In both he mixed moral bromides with prurient teasing.”

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with William Shakespeare, made the most of the clear, strong, distinct differences between the two men. I told him that I was working on an opposite assumption—that Greene and W. S. were much more alike. Were alternate versions of each other, two sides of the same gold coin. “Think of Greene as being the bad side, like a bad twin, of Shakespeare. “I’m feeling reckless,” I added. “I’m going to make Robert Greene the hero of my novel.” “You just like Greene because he was such a rowdy—an Elizabethan redneck, a sixteenth-century Elizabethan cracker.” Later on, with Aubrey dead and gone, I asked Eileen what had happened or was happening to Aubrey’s novel. “Nothing,” she said. “Not a damn thing.” “Is there anything at all that I can do? Maybe I could help.” “Nobody can.” “Why not?” “Aubrey burned it. Burned all of it all by himself somehow, and did a good job of it too.” “That’s bad news.” “A little bit too theatrical for Aubrey, wouldn’t you say? But who can blame him?” “Is there a copy on his computer?” “What computer?” “Did he say why he burned it?” “Remember that afternoon when you came over to visit and you guys sat around making up stories and telling each other lies? Well, the very next day, before ¤ve o’clock in the afternoon Carl called from New York and said he was sending it back. He said that things had changed a lot since the good old days and there was no way he could place that novel in today’s market. Not now. Not in the near future. Maybe down the road a few years. Only . . . let’s face it, Aubrey wasn’t, as Carl politely put it, getting any younger. “ ‘It’s a kids’ game out there,’ Carl told him. ‘Let them have it.

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Why not relax and enjoy your retirement? You like to ¤sh. Why not go ¤shing somewhere? Maybe I can get you a magazine piece—trout ¤shing in Lower Slobovia.’ “Who the hell did he think he was, burning his book like that?” Eileen said. “Franz fucking Kaf ka?” I’ve had another brief conversation with Eileen since then— at the reception (a good boozy party; Aubrey would have been pleased) following the memorial service—“A Celebration of the Life of Aubrey Carver.” At that service they read from some of his wartime letters. Very moving. And they also read some poems by Wallace Stevens. That surprised me. I didn’t know Aubrey all that well, but, best I can remember, I never heard him mention or refer to the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Trying to say something not entirely inappropriate, I mumbled that I had not known until this very moment that Aubrey was such an admirer of Wallace Stevens and his work. “Oh, he wasn’t,” Eileen said. “I doubt that he ever read a line by Wallace Stevens. But Stevens is my own special favorite and I decided I might as well listen to some of the things that I like at the memorial.” As long as I can still remember things, I reckon I will remember the last words Aubrey and I had on that day I went to visit him. “Your Greene could learn something from Graham Greene. You know what he had to say about a really bad character who seized control of one of his books?” “No, Aubrey, I don’t. What did he say?” “Greene said: ‘It was as though somebody I hated spoke from my mouth before I could silence him!’ ”

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ENDING ENDING

Nothing gums up ¤ction like facts. Attributed to John Updike Polonius: My lord, I will take my leave of you. Hamlet: You cannot take from me any thing that I will more willingly part withal—except my life . . . except my life . . . except my life. Hamlet, II, ii

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TWENTY-FOUR

Came in the mail today the latest issue of The New Virginia Review, edited by Mary Flinn. Titled “Remembering Larry Levis,” it’s a memorial for the late Larry Levis (1946–96), consisting of ¤fty-four poems, statements, memoirs, tributes, even a fairsized critical article by poet Dave Smith, and a poem by Levis. Some heavy hitters from the poetry world, various Pulitzer prizewinners and suchlike on board, as well as some of Larry’s friends and students. Nice-looking paperback volume of a uniform pale gray, perhaps Confederate gray. Well, Levis wrote a Civil War poem— “Shiloh.” A native Californian, Levis came to Virginia—Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond—to replace the itinerant Dave Smith who had moved on to LSU. Larry taught at VCU for four years. He died of a heart attack while alone upstairs in his small, old, rented house, working on a poem, as it happened—a work-in-progress. Peter, Dick Yates, Ray Carver, Aubrey, Larry—I could give you an epic list as long as your arm: we are a wounded generation that, steady and sure, one by one, is slowly disappearing. Think

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how we slip away one at a time, out of all our ambiguous loves and into the blaze and bright of another kind of weather. He (the dead body anyway) was on the ®oor. On his desk were a yellow pad with the un¤nished poem, a pen, a cup with some coffee left in it, cigarettes. Lights were on. Must have happened at night. They had to do some guessing because they were awhile—¤ve or six days, give and take—¤nding out Larry was dead and gone. In “May 17, 1996,” Elizabeth King of the Sculpture Department of VCU sets the discovery scene: “On May 9, the day Mary (Flinn) and Greg (Donovan) had the police break into Larry’s house where they found his body curled on the ®oor upstairs—a poem un¤nished and his pen uncapped on the desk—Mary, Greg, and I sat for many hours on Larry’s front steps waiting for the city detective people to complete their examination of the death scene and for the Medical Examiner people to gather Larry’s body up.” A couple of minor factual corrections. According to Mary Flinn, she called the police about Larry’s absence and such signs as mail piling up on his porch, and so on. The police responded quickly. But it was ¤re¤ghters from the ¤re department who, in fact, (lawfully) broke into the house from an upstairs window and found Larry’s body. As soon as the body was discovered, it became a matter for the police—a possible homicide or suicide. The three friends did, then, sit out front for some hours waiting. Did not sit on Larry’s front steps. Sat on a wall near the steps up to the little house. House was originally built in 1812 in the old Church Hill neighborhood north of Broad Street. Levis liked to think of this same house being witness to Richmond in the Civil War, ¤rst to last. No one, nobody who was not legal and of¤cial, was allowed inside until the following morning. Mary Flinn identi¤ed Larry’s body from some Polaroid shots while sitting in the back of a police car. Later that day, says Mary Flinn—reinforced by and in Ellen Bryant Voight’s “What I Remember of Larry’s Dream of Yeats”—a local out¤t called Robin-

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son’s Removal came, in the persons of, in Flinn’s words, “an enormous woman and a tiny little man,” and awkwardly and with much dif¤culty, pushed, shoved, and wrestled the large bagged body of Levis down the ®ights of stairs and out into a hearse. I didn’t really know Larry Levis. Met him here and there a few times. Once many years ago in Missouri (John G. Neihardt was still alive out there, that ancient poet who had known Sitting Bull and became famous among hippies as the source of Black Elk Speaks) when Levis was a very young teacher, and I came for a few days as a visiting writer. I went to his poetry workshop. Which was fun, lively and engaging, even though, at ¤rst anyway, I could barely understand what he and the other kiddos were saying. I don’t know what I had been up to (Hollywood?). But whatever it was, it had cut me off, for the time being anyway, from the latest buzz and jargon of the new young poets. Even the names of their heroes, mentors, rising and setting stars, and major in®uences were more or less new to me. It was . . . a learning experience, as they say. Later, I had individual appointments with these students and asked them about their reading habits, what poets they usually read for pleasure and for exemplary inspiration. They seemed to be reading quite a lot and most of it very recent contemporary work. I asked how “far back” their reading of and interest in poetry had taken them. One allowed that, for no special reason except his insatiable historical curiosity, he had included some of “the old timey guys”—Roethke, Lowell, and Wilbur and so forth—in his studies. Nobody among them, it turned out, had ever read a word by Hart Crane, a poet whose habits and practices might have been useful to them, because in those days the fashion was for “deep images” and a soupçon of lightweight surrealism. Best I could tell, and I cheerfully admit that my comment is neither here nor there, it never occurred to any of them or Larry and including most of the people in this memorial issue of The

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New Virginia Review not to write fashionably. In his critical article, Dave Smith admits to being “out of the loop” by choice a few times and paying a price for it too. As I understand his piece, Smith sees Levis as almost an opposite image of himself, sees Levis as a poet whose early work was highly derivative, conventional—“tedious, mawkish and callow”: “Levis was at ¤rst a poet of rhetoric whose poems have little life and much learned gesture.” Who was, at least initially, spoiled, as he nudged forward (“The poet, then twenty-six, became overnight a serious contender for eminence.”) by his powerful establishment friends: “Levis had prepared well with Donald Justice, Mark Strand, W. D. Snodgrass, Philip Booth, Marvin Bell, and Stanley Plumly, in addition to (Philip) Levine, ¤ve of them Pulitzer Prize winners. Great race horses have had less fastidious breeding and grooming.” And he is seen as perhaps unduly in®uenced by some other poets, including James Wright, Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, Charles Wright, and, of course, Levine. If this seems an odd way on Smith’s part to begin an encomium, and in the context of a memorial celebration, actually it is not, being in fact a traditional rhetorical stance from classical times to the present, and it is soon transformed into the highest praise of Levis’s artistic pilgrimage, one that led him to overcome even the burden of “success” and good luck as well as the anxieties of in®uence, ¤nding his own voices, and making “poems that were no longer imitations.” As Smith writes with obvious approval: “The poetry of Larry Levis is the autobiography of a man’s mind, what he has come through, what he has understood, what he has sloughed off, what he hopes for, what he loves. But it is also the structured carriage for a true innocence, a gentle spirit.” Larry Levis was tall and thin; yes, a variation on exactly the same body type as Peter Taylor and Richard Yates. More like Yates—“an Ivy League wino,” in Galvin’s words (about Yates). Rag doll loose limbs. Always seeming to be unfolding himself. More of him than you ¤rst noticed, partly because he slouched

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and shuf®ed. Laid back and easygoing, you might say. Mildly stoned, somebody else, a stranger, might opine. Mustached and smiley and ruggedly handsome. In this issue of The New Virginia Review you can see him from different points of view and different angles, in the past and in the memories of his friends and colleagues. You can see, can feel how his friends miss him. A couple of times that you won’t see him in action in this Review are the Hollins Literary Festival of 1993 and another time, a little later on, I can’t date it in memory or documents, when Larry turned up at a reading that Richard Dillard and I gave at the University of Richmond. This was way beyond and above the call of duty, gratuitous and extravagant generosity really, for him to trouble to be there. He appeared in the parking lot, hunched over and down at the wheel of a small car—I recall it as a Volkswagen, a badly battered and somehow surviving beetle; Dillard tells me that it was, in fact, some kind of a Japanese car. In any case, it was a small and very noisy one. The muf®er was completely shot; you could hear it halfway across Richmond; Sherman tanks weren’t any louder than that. You could smell the smoke and fumes from the exhausted exhaust system minutes before you saw the puf¤ng source of all that noise and pollution. And before you could see and guess who the bold driver might possibly be, you would see on the windshield, brightly visible at a hundred yards or more, a large red badge of shame, af¤xed where the inspection stickers on Virginia cars are required to be, a bright red badge with (closer now) Rejected! stamped or printed on it. Larry found an empty parking slot, came to a shuddering stop, and climbed out of the car. Actually, and this was something to behold, a big tall guy like that, Larry climbing out of the window on the driver’s side, unfolding and writhing and wriggling, but not without grace and dispatch. The two doors were not able to be opened, permanently shut tight by one or more collisions. The whole car looked as if it had been playing

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in and losing badly at a demolition derby. Or maybe more than one encounter with that imaginary Sherman tank. Larry said he had paid ¤fty bucks, in cash, for it. Right off the lot. It had started up, coughed and sputtered all the way home and had never yet failed to start and run. Took him where he had to go. So far he had never been stopped by the police or given a traf¤c ticket. Maybe they couldn’t believe their eyes or trust their senses. March 13, 1993, a Saturday, was the date of the annual Hollins Literary Festival, starring novelists Carolyn Chute and Bret Laidlaw and the poet Larry Levis. The date is also remembered as the worst blizzard in Southwest Virginia in more than a hundred years. I drove down on Friday afternoon from Charlottesville— maybe I will send Frank Toomer on this same mission in the ¤ctional version—with two students. I wanted to see Dillard and Carolyn Chute, who had once upon a time been my student, before the busy festival schedule was underway. Along with Levis and others—Mary Flinn was there I recall—we went out to dinner and then packed it in early. I remember chatting with Carolyn for a few minutes, standing in front of her apartment. There were tentative snow ®akes in the chilly air. Carolyn’s a native of Maine and I had lived there for some years. Neither of us anticipated any more than a few ®akes. Neither did the local weather forecasters predict any “signi¤cant accumulation.” By dawn there was more than a foot of snow already on the ground; the air, wildly breezy, was full of falling and whirling fat snow®akes; most roads, including Interstate 81, were closed to traf¤c; and it was only beginning. Somehow some people, mostly from Hollins, but some from as far away as Tennessee, managed to get there and assemble in the Green Drawing Room for an intimate reading and conversation with the writers. The writers sat in armchairs and the audience sat close by in a kind of casual half-circle. It was pleasant. Later, as the weather worsened, things got a little tougher.

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Feeding these people and ¤nding places and spaces for them to sleep were a problem, but it all worked out. What I summon up to memory is Larry Levis wandering about in his stocking feet (he had taken off his shoes at some point to let them dry and then lost them) with a bottle of Scotch in one hand and a clutch of poems in the other. His overcoat, looking for all the world like a Goodwill castoff, dragged on the ®oor. He was good company for the blizzard of the century. We left three people sitting on a retaining wall in Richmond next to Larry Levis’s steep front steps. Down which the big woman and the tiny little man were staggering under the weight of his dead body. The rest of this comes directly from Mary Flinn. How, in the presence of at least one detective, she saw to organizing Larry’s things. The house was going to have to be cleaned up by professionals and she had to pack up his things before the cleaning began. At some point the detective opened the closet door, looked inside, then motioned for Mary Flinn to come and have a look. What they saw was a single coat and a pair of pants on a hanger. One coat, one pair of pants, a few metal coat hangers. That’s it except for the clothes he had been wearing when he died. The city detective with a very slight shrug and a very slight smile: “Traveled light, didn’t he?”

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TWENTY-FIVE

. . . Frank Toomer writes this in a brand new, pristine notebook, the one he is now carefully keeping for posterity and for the sake of the biographer he doesn’t have yet.

When I really thought I was going to die, I was a lot better off. Not a better man, mind you. I didn’t allow myself to fall victim to nostalgia and regret. I didn’t secretly and inwardly take back anything, not even some really important things, the kinds of sins that have maimed me, left me with sincere regrets, scarred me with sorrows. No, it was all much simpler and more credible than that. It was that none of it seemed to matter very much anymore— not even the bad things. And so, for a little while, for that little while, the dark prospect of dying and death mingled (as I’ve said already, I know, but it needs to be said again) with an unanticipated lightness of heart, that might have been interpreted by someone else, someone still in good health and not yet imagining its contrary, that is, somebody not obviously dying at the time, to be an overwhelm-

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ing sense of joy. Or, at least, joy knocking quietly at the back door. Thank you, Jesus. Frank also copies down one sentence from a piece, “The Writing Life,” by Thomas McGonigle: The dead are always with us.

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TWENTY-SIX

“Didn’t you know?” she asked him. “I thought everybody knew.” Surprised beyond words, Frank shook his head. Matter of fact, Eileen Carver sipped her coffee and held her cup and saucer without so much as a tremble in her ¤ngers. Frank was not so self-possessed. Had to grip his mug with both hands to lift it to his lips. This was to be Eileen’s last day here and she had come next door to say goodbye. On the other side of the fence, in the ¤ne shingled house, movers were bringing out boxes and furniture and loading up a moving van. At moments they could hear Jerry Carver issuing orders in an authentic drill sergeant’s voice. The dogs, tied up somewhere, were barking. “No,” Frank said. “I can honestly tell you I never imagined such a thing.” “Well, it’s the truth. I would have spoken about it long ago if . . . ” “But how could he . . . ?” “Aubrey had so many serious things wrong with him then, at the end. It could have been any one of them all by itself that killed him. And he had so many different drugs and medications in his system and lying around in little bottles that they couldn’t possibly measure whether he had an overdose of any of them,

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an interaction or anything else. He hadn’t been well or happy for ages. And now he was dying. The thought of having to go back over to the University Hospital for more tests and treatment and probably dying there—the prospect was just too much for him. “He sent me out of the room to see if I could locate a book he wanted me to read to him. We were doing Chekhov again. It was out of place. It took me a few minutes to ¤nd it, as I guess he knew it would. By the time I got back Aubrey was sound asleep. He looked so peaceful there. “I left the book in an armchair and went back to the kitchen to straighten up and make myself some coffee. By the time I came back from the kitchen he was dead, though I didn’t know that either for awhile, not until I noticed that he was not breathing. . . . It was better that way.” “There’s not a word about that, Eileen, nothing even faintly suggesting that Aubrey might have killed himself, in the biography.” A dumb thing to say, Frank. But she nevertheless favored him with a warm smile. “My great talent, Aubrey always used to say, is for acting after the fact. Other people—and, of course, especially Aubrey— would feel free to make a complete mess out of things and then depend on me to put whatever it might be back the way it was or ought to be. Sometimes I succeeded and sometimes I didn’t. In the matter of the biography, I managed to do the right thing.” “I’m sorry, Eileen,” Frank said. “I am really sorry.” “Don’t be.” Eileen ¤nished her coffee, talking to Anne about the new condominium in Florida. Rose from her chair, smoothing her skirt, and then walked with them to the door and across the front yard to the sidewalk. “I’m going to miss that old magnolia tree,” Eileen said, when they stood under its glossy green leaves and the rich shade of it. “We’ll miss you,” Anne said.

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The sunlight—he hadn’t been outside in days—was bothering Frank Toomer. Even with his eyelids held open by adhesive tape he was having trouble seeing Anne and Eileen clearly. “Don’t look so damn sad and gloomy, Frank,” Eileen said. “I don’t want to remember you that way. And neither would Aubrey.” Remember me that time in your kitchen when you turned back from the refrigerator and kissed me full on the mouth and let me kiss you and tongue you and even reach out and touch and cup a high ¤rm little breast with my left hand, my right hand being fully occupied with a dark glass of Johnny Walker Black, and you laughed and turned away to go look after your guests in the living room and that’s all there ever was to it between us in fact and in real life and was never mentioned or referred to again. . . . A crow perched in Aubrey’s sweet gum tree made a rude, reedy squawk that must have meant something. “He liked you a lot, Frank, about as much as he was capable of liking anybody.” Dappled sunlight in Frank’s eyes shuts them. Listens to Eileen’s heels as she walks away on the sidewalk toward the house next door. A siren in the distance fading away. An airplane overhead. Bird cries and a squirrel’s chuckle. That crow again, same place, no nearer—the reedy two-note squawk repeated (again) three times. Down the block the sudden cartoony sound of a chain saw cranking up.

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TWENTY-SEVEN

1. Letter to Colin Walters from Frank Toomer Colin Walters—Books The Washington Times 3600 New York Ave., NE Washington, DC 20002 Dear Colin— I really hate myself for what I am about to do to you. I’ve never done this or, really, anything like it before now. And I hope you will bear that in mind and keep me in mind for a next time—down the road. I ¤nd that I just can’t put together a good and adequate review of the Aubrey Carver biography. I have given it my best shot, have tried several times in several different ways and failed. It is not by any means ®awless, but it isn’t a bad biography; and both the book and its subject deserve some serious critical attention, better attention than I can offer at this time. Part of the problem has been that Aubrey and I lived next door to each other for the last decade of his life. Our relationship—I

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can hardly call it “friendship”—was close, con®icted, often ambiguous, sometimes edgy. I had very mixed feelings about Aubrey then and I have mixed feelings about him now. In fairness I hasten to add that I have no mixed or negative feelings at all about his work. Which I honor just this side of idolatry. Which I do believe will last, if anything does. Did you know that Aubrey and I had been next-door neighbors when you ¤rst sent me the book? I assumed so at the time, but maybe I was wrong. In any case, this is one that I just couldn’t handle, though it took me a long time to admit this to myself. And I think I might have been able to do the job if I were not still suffering from serious vision problems. I don’t know if you know how sick I was, basically housebound for more than six months, barely able to function. I am happy to report that I seem to have turned a corner and am getting slowly better. I still have a good way to go—my treatment program continues at least until December. And then we’ll see what we shall see. Meantime, in sickness and in health, and for a little bit poorer, I have gone and let you, and my old friend and neighbor Aubrey, down. I am truly sorry. I hope this ¤nds you well and that life in Washington goes on in spite of that endless search for the missing intern and the death and instant canonization (by acclamation) of the late Katharine Graham. If I ever do get well and set free, again, will you permit me the pleasure of taking you to lunch or dinner (or both) at the Cosmos Club? Thanks, again, for thinking of me for this one. With all good wishes— Sincerely, Frank Toomer Professor Emeritus— Jefferson University

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2. Letter to Colin Walters from George Garrett Colin Walters—Books The Washington Times 3600 New York Avenue, NE Washington, DC 20002 Dear Colin— I am happy to be able to send along to you my review of Peter Taylor: A Writer’s Life, by Hubert H. McAlexander. It’s a fairly short review, coming in at the bare minimum, right around 800 words give or take: Truth is, I really don’t have anything more to say. McAlexander’s book is okay, in fact pretty good, though not good enough, in my opinion. In that sense it’s disappointing. Not good enough for more than minimal praise. Not bad enough to merit a serious knock in the head. See what you think. Meanwhile I am happy to report that my health is slowly improving. After a real siege, I’m getting better, I think . . . don’t know, can’t remember if I have already bored you with the story, so I’ll spare you now. I hope this ¤nds you in good health and that your summer has been a pleasant and productive one. If something good and appropriate comes along, I hope you will remember me as a possible reviewer. Thanks and all good wishes. Sincerely, George Garrett Professor Emeritus— University of Virginia

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3. Peter Taylor: A Writer’s Life by Hubert H. McAlexander Literary biographers face daunting challenges. Maybe the most troublesome is that, allowing the notable exceptions (Hemingway on safari, Fitzgerald splashing around in the Plaza fountain, etc.), writers are not in serious competition with captains of industry or action heroes. They are private people engaged in solitary performance. Outwardly and visibly, they sit quietly at desks. Inwardly and spiritually, they are busy casting spells designed to turn their lives (even themselves) into words on a page. The best of them somehow become their work. Sometimes the work endures. And it is the work that matters most. The rest is mostly irrelevant. Hard as it is in our time—an age that celebrates public life (“image”) above all, an age grievously infected by the culture of celebrity—for the writer to make the old magic work, it may be harder for the literary biographer to make good sense and lively copy out of the counterlife of an artist. Hubert H. McAlexander has done pretty well by Peter Taylor (1917–94). Taylor, important, original, and in®uential, especially in the art of the short story, arrived on the scene brilliantly with his ¤rst book, A Long Fourth and Other Stories (1948), and, overcoming the ups and downs of ¤ckle fashion, retained a wellearned place in the literary pantheon, creating an important body of work—fourteen worthy books. McAlexander, an English professor and editor of two earlier books concerning his subject, Conversations with Peter Taylor (1987) and Critical Essays on Peter Taylor (1993), gives a fascinating account of the facts of Taylor’s life, a sense of his artistic accomplishment, and the richly intricate story of his family background. What a colorful crew his ancestors, his kith and kin, were, Tennessee governors and senators, men of substance and character as well as wealth and privilege. McAlexander has chosen not to clutter his story with much literary criticism. If that is a weakness, this

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biography has other and signi¤cant strengths. With primary access to the letters and papers of Taylor (and others), the author uses them well, quoting extensively and thus allowing the reader to enjoy the pleasures of the prose of a writer who couldn’t turn out a bad sentence at gunpoint. McAlexander’s writing is appropriately clear and workmanlike and does not try to compete with that of his subject. Taylor was a charming and courteous man, a gregarious social animal. His deep, long-lasting literary friendships with Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, with Eudora Welty, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, and many others offer us some rare verbal snapshots of these people, taken by a sensitive and wholly credible witness. If there is only rudimentary literary criticism, there is plenty of literary history and lively gossip here. The early pages dealing with family and Tennessee background are a real contribution. McAlexander is able to de¤ne the world out of which Taylor’s ¤ction bloomed. Closely following the details of Taylor’s career—stories accepted and rejected by magazines, grants and fellowships and awards and prizes won or lost, good reviews and bad, the hard labor of teaching at a variety of institutions, sometimes happily and sometimes not—McAlexander produces an exemplary documentary of the changing literary situation in America in the second half of the twentieth century. Peter Taylor was a hard-working writer, courageously so in his last years when he suffered terribly from ill health. Off duty he liked to party down, and some of McAlexander’s best attention and most engaged writing is devoted to his subject’s social lives. There are a whole lot of parties here. Taylor also enjoyed gardening and together with his wife, the poet Eleanor Taylor, who survives him, he bought and rehabilitated and sold (pro¤tably) an astonishing number of houses. Peter Taylor had a lot of fun. He was a witty and sometimes outrageously funny man, a world-class southern gentleman with an irrepressible streak of

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rowdy hillbilly. People who knew him well will miss some of that quality in this biography. Are there other weaknesses? Nothing serious. A sprinkling of minor factual errors and, perhaps more serious, self-imposed limits on the scope of the study. Even though McAlexander interviewed a large number of former students and colleagues and friends, he has missed any number of others whose testimony could have made for a fuller, more fully dimensional portrait. The book seems a little hurried. What we have, then, is a readable ¤rst biography of one of our ¤nest writers, and we can be grateful for it. Other books, biographical and critical, are said to be in the works. Meanwhile Peter Taylor: A Writer’s Life is a helpful aid to the understanding and appreciation of a major American writer. (George Garrett’s most recent book is Bad Man Blues. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia.)

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BEGIN AGAIN BEGIN AGAIN

Life isn’t what it was but it’s a lot better than it’s going to be. —Russell Hoban, Angelica’s Grotto Here, gentlemen, break I off Roberto’s speech, whose life in most part agreeing with mine, found self-punishment as I have done. Hereafter suppose me the Roberto and I will go on with what he promised. Greene will send you now his groatsworth of wit, that never showed a mites worth in his life. —Robert Greene, Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit

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TWENTY-EIGHT

A rainy summer Sunday in Jefferson. Soft, steady rain falling on the just and unjust. Badly needed. Not only for the sun-stricken ®owers and gardens of this town, but out in the country coming just in time to save the corn crop and give a second crop of hay a good dousing. Lovely sound of rain on leaves. Sweet smell of freshness, fresh earth, already in the air. Frank’s on his covered back porch sipping a cold mug of coffee, mostly skim milk, watching the rain fall and glisten on the green backyard, reading bits and pieces of the Sunday Times, the Washington Post, the Charlottesville Daily Progress. Midsummer ®owers—the tall orange day lilies, purple hosta, pink sedum—endure. Wet glistens on the high, green, leafy dome of the late Aubrey Carver’s sweet gum tree on the other side of the toothpick fence. When Frank Toomer was down and out sick, half-blind and feeling generally about half-dead, a lot of things, things that had once troubled him, began to seem deeply unimportant. So much, as he has told us more than once before, didn’t matter anymore. One of these things was “the literary scene” and his place, his presence in or absence from it. Nevertheless every Sunday was

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Gloomy Sunday. He felt that he had to read, or be read to by Anne, the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post Book World completely, beginning to end, usually in a hypertensive and paranoid rage at the regular and relentless triumph of the Bad Guys, rage at himself for his bearing witness to and tacit, passive acceptance of Gresham’s (Grisham’s?) Literary Law wherein and whereby Bad sweeps up and swallows Good like a Hoover vacuum cleaner. But today, for whatever reason, that spell, like a fever, seemed to have broken. He read through the papers, calm and content, utterly indifferent to the ups and downs, the ins and outs of the literary establishment and its little doll house world. Both book sections were run-of-the-mill today, pleasantly mediocre, with even some funny stuff—like Mark Alan Stamaty’s “Boox” comics at the back of the Times Book Review. Frank had a couple of chuckles to lighten up his breakfast time. Wonder who will write the review of Aubrey’s biography for them? Frank Toomer will not stay for an answer. Not today. Close Shot: raindrops running down window panes. Dissolve through to another place, another time, another town, another rainy day, another writer in another story. Frank is writing it in his mind. Some day soon, any day now, he will begin to put the words on paper. After that, who knows? Meantime . . . here we go. What should have been another dry hot day with a wealth of late light and a pleasant if shifty breeze, playing now off the shiny river, now from the north or the west as it wills, swirling around (good wine in a good Venetian glass) with all the richness and the surprising stinks and scents, odors, perfumes, sweet enough to taste, that, taken together would expose the character of this city to a blind stranger. Should have been that kind of day. A day like yesterday and the day before and so forth through the long

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dry summer season. People had been offering up prayers for rain: Send us we beseech thee in this our necessity, such moderate rain and showers, that we may receive the fruits of the earth to our comfort, and to thy honor; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Well, then, prayers were answered today though perhaps our Lord missed the adjective moderate, at least as it applies to the busy, crowded, muddy streets and alleyways and footpaths of this ancient city of London where nothing less than ¤re, ¤re in the high thatch of a rooftop can bring busyness and hustle to a brief halt. Damn the rain and the mud and the coarse laughter of strangers at this antic man in his cloak of goose-turd green rising up now from the mud as if he had been buried there and were rising again from among the dead intending to frighten folks out of their wits. The cloak is all besplattered, his long hair and his pointy beard, naturally red enough to play the part of Judas Iscariot without any color or cosmetic, are covered with the mud and his face as dark as any African Moor’s. Who is this muddy fellow? A man called Greene, poet and playmaker and pamphleteer (among a number of things, not all of them honorable). Never (yet) a common player, though, as it happens, playing a comic part at this very instant in order to take the hurtful sting out of vulgar laughter, pretending to seek, to elicit the laughter he would be earning anyway. Float with the ebb tide, don’t you know? What’s he doing there, rising so ¤lthy from the stinking street? Ah, then. That is what we missed and that the others, the laughing others, witnessed a moment ago, just as we came out of the alley and out onto this wide street. What they saw was the doors of that tavern over yonder, the Fighting Cock, ®y open and ¤rst, announced and ac-

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companied by a choir of angry shouting, this Greene in his appropriate green cloak, held up ¤rmly in the large hands of a half-dozen burly men, who, upon the count of three and ignoring his ¤nal airborne plea for mercy—“At least let me ¤nish my pot of ale! I have paid for it!”—then heaved him, arse over kettle, into the thick and trampled muddy, horse-turd-strewn middle of the street. From which, accompanied by laughter and profanity, then ignored, he has risen indeed and now is in costume and character as Mudman of the New World, moving in search of a horse trough where he can begin the sad business (and not for the ¤rst time in his short and busy life) of repairing the damage of what might as well have been a self-in®icted injury to his pride, to his honor, yes, to his simple and irredeemable vanity. “I can tell,” says a sweet soft voice, “that you are a scholar and a gentleman, sir. And I ask pardon for the rude and barbarous behavior of my neighbors, those tavern rogues.” A servant girl, long apron and a bucket of wash water and a cloth towel of some kind, a servant girl as pretty as a pony. Came out from somewhere in this same neighborhood. God bless her. Thank you, Lord, for sending her to me in my time of need. “Well now,” he tells her as he begins to splash and mop and swab layers of mud. “In all fairness and all honesty I must confess to you my dear, else I should be utterly remiss in my bounden duty as the scholar and the gent you have so rightly judged me to be, I must confess that I may have aggravated these young fellows, these jolly tavern birds, by introducing them to a game of cards that’s new enough to London so that none of them had ever seen it or played at it before. It behooved me to offer them an introduction, if not a serious education in the art and craft of the three-

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card game known as Holy Trinity by the blasphemers who invented it. Probably in Italy. Most likely an Italian game. “To teach them the art of self-defense against these and other suchlike Italianate practices, there is no good purpose in lecturing the brutes. They must enjoy and endure a memorable experience. And that I offered them for an hour or two, during which, with full good intention to return every penny of it to those whom Fortune did not favor, I was easily able to empty their purses into mine. A simple transaction among fellow players of a friendly game. Took their money, fairly and squarely, and then even shared some of it in the purchase of pots of good ale for everyone in the tavern, even the keeper, and all was well. Would have been well, too, if I had not by great mischance revealed the place where, in a game of Trinity with blasphemous Italians and the like, I do sometimes keep the aid and comfort of a few more cards to draw on in moments of dire need. Out ®uttered my secret little cache of cards, and before I was permitted to offer one word of explanation or mitigation, I was cursed and rudely treated and then heaved out here into the mud of your street.” “Well,” she replied, “I am truly sorry for it, though I do take some pleasure in listening to you tell the tale.” “Thanks to you, my dear. My everlasting gratitude. But listen some more.” From somewhere under the apron she produced a steel glass where he could look at himself and ¤nish the chore of cleaning himself as well as might be possible under the circumstances. “These stout fellows were so angry at me that they allowed their rage to overcome their good judgment. Look here, I still have their money in my purse. They will remember this soon enough—though maybe not, for by now the ale I bought them (with their own coins to be sure)

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will have addled their judgment all the more. Still, if one of them should suddenly happen to remember, I shall be lucky to escape worse by far than a drubbing and a beating and a merry mud bath.” “I will be done with my chores in an hour or so,” she tells him. “Perhaps in an hour or so I shall be back here, in full disguise and completely unrecognizable to everyone, even your bountiful and gracious self, I shall be back here close by whatever doorway or place you wish to show me now, ready to continue our conversation over a bottle of sweet sack. If that’s your pleasure.” “It might well be.” A moment or two later this red-bearded fellow named Greene, whistling an old tune and wet as he is from the rain and the wash water, ducks into yet another well-lit noisy tavern, “Saracen’s Head,” to warm and dry himself and, see how it goes, perhaps to see if there’s anyone here who is as skillful at playing cards as he has been. Let Dolly, bless her soul, and dear Fortunatus, our little son and heir, please to be patient and to wait a while longer for his coming back home to Dowgate and the small upper chambers in Master Isam’s house, home, if only brie®y until Greene can (as he will) afford something better, nestled in that spider web of muddy alleyways and set close, too close for comfort, to the rising and falling river. He will come home today bearing gifts for the mother and child and good things to eat and drink. With any luck he will bring them something or other worth waiting for. Fortune, in the shape and form of that servant girl, has smiled on him again and, believe me, all manner of things shall be well. A wet rainy day in that very dry summer of ’92 with the playhouses closed down on account of the Plague and

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of the riots that began at the Rose on June 11. Playhouses closed and all the principal players and their various companies long since gone out of the city on tour and to breathe cleaner, safer air while earning some coin of the realm. Whilst he, poet and playmaker, whose plays are even now being performed on a half-dozen makeshift stages in inn yards and guild halls and the halls of great houses all around this kingdom, he who gave them the very words they have learned by heart and now speak, likely with no more comprehension than a crow or a hearth cat or a barking watchdog, he is to be left behind to sink or swim on his own, to live or to die at the cost of whatever he may prudently (like the ant in Aesop’s fable) have saved and put aside against the possibility of just such a change in the world and the weather. Which sum is in truth next to nothing. Spent it all without a worry and now is reduced to this felonious nipping and foisting and cheating at cards and at dice and at anything a man can hazard a wager on. Maybe he can, once again, earn something by his true trade with yet another hastily written pamphlet warning against the criminal tricks and practices of the conycatchers of this city, replete with his own confessions of criminal acts and habits, of sins venal and mortal. For do they not, those sweaty, ham-handed, ®ea-ridden, licetickled, fart-smelling fellows, the selfsame kind who beat him and hurled him into the mud, do they not love tales of crime and sin sharpened with the spice added of an authorial confession and a show of humble piety? Coming in now from the gray rain to torch light and the noise of many voices, to the yeasty odors of ale and the fat meaty scent of the tallow rushes burning, of food being cooked and served, of bodies sweating freely in the smoky air, he felt the slight wincing touch of a fever he had been pretending (to himself ) all day to be purely imaginary.

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Could not, cannot allow himself to be sick and feverish now. Could it, can it be the ¤rst warning signs of the Plague? Surely not. You may wonder, as I do, why, when all the playhouses, the bear gardens, bowling alleys, cockpits, and so forth, great gathering places for crowds in London, are closed down on account of the Plague, may wonder why the inns and taverns and alehouses should remain open to anyone, with at least a penny in his purse, to enter and add his body to the raucous crowd. Well, Sir or Madame as the case may be, if the Plague continues, then no doubt but these places will have to be closed down too. But only as a ¤nal and last resort—excepting always the churches. There are some reasons why this is so. One of which is summed up in the words of a devoted haunter of taverns: “With all these deaths from the Plague and the spotted fever we must drink deeply to ward off the infection. Never mind the beer and ale, though I’m told they are helpful, and never mind the small wines and hot wines, though they are good for body and soul. Sack and canary will do the trick and, above all, cordials and strong spirits will laugh Plague and pestilence to scorn.” Another reason is precisely that the folks who come together in taverns fear, more than the Plague itself, that these happy places will soon enough be shut and a man will have to drink by his lonesome all alone. Not knowing—another more potent reason—that the governors and elders of the city would just as lief that all those who frequent taverns and such should be, like the advance guard, on a battle¤eld, the ¤rst expendable casualties of the Plague. As if, as many precisians of religion ¤rmly believe, the Plague were a form of Divine Providence and retribution. God (Who knows the devices and desires of our hearts and from Whom no secrets are hid) knows that Robert Greene is not yet beyond deliverance and redemption.

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A little more time, Lord, is all I need or ask. In his heart of hearts, gnawing at it like a dog bite of envy, is the fury that the players, these common players and antics, are now safely grazing in the country while he, and others, too, scholars and gentlemen like himself, are left behind here. Lucky the rare and gifted lad who can do both things—strut as a player on the open stage and likewise dip a pen point into fresh-made ink and write down on paper the words and thoughts for the players to mouth as if they had thought of them themselves. Lucky that smugly serious lad from Stratford, W. S., mild and modest enough and altogether too cheerful to be credible, who has risen in the mere blink of an eye to be both player and poet and someone very much to be reckoned with. I will reckon with you, lad, Greene thinks, and God willing, you shall pay the reckoning.

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POSTSCRIPT

Greene (1558–92) was a poet, pamphleteer, playwright, novelist, sometime criminal, and a close contemporary of William Shakespeare. It is to Shakespeare, whom he apparently deeply disliked, that Greene owes the fact that he is now remembered by anyone at all. In his last work, written in illness and published posthumously, he had sharp words for some of his fellows in the theater—Marlowe, Nashe, Peele, and Kyd. And, almost in passing, for the sake of puns and allusion, he mentioned a player who had already earned some reputation as a playwright: “Yet trust them (the players) not, for there is an upstart crow, beauti¤ed with our feathers that, with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.”* This malicious mention of Shakespeare in a published work is important evidence, placing Shakespeare in London in 1592. Poor Greene, who, like every writer from the beginning of time, yearned for some measure of immortality, unfortunately had *“From antiquity the bird (crow) gifted with powers of mimicry but not invention had been likened to the actor.”—S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life. Schoenbaum cites classical sources in Aesop, Martial, Macrobius, Horace, and others. Also quotes Greene himself in Francesco’s Fortunes: “Why Roscius, art thou proud with Esop’s crow, being pranked with the glory of others’ feathers?”

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his wish granted. As long as Shakespeare is remembered, so will he be. Not all his contemporaries were unkind. In The Unfortunate Traveller, Thomas Nash had elegiac praise for his old friend: “He was one of the wittiest knaves that ever God made. His pen was sharp pointed like a poniard. No leaf he wrote on but was like a burning glass to set on ¤re all his readers.”

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Other Books by GEORGE GARRETT

Fiction King of the Mountain The Finished Man Which Ones Are the Enemy? In the Briar Patch Cold Ground Was My Bed Last Night Do, Lord, Remember Me A Wreath for Garibaldi Death of the Fox The Magic Striptease The Succession An Evening Performance Poison Pen Entered from the Sun The Old Army Game The King of Babylon Shall Not Come Against You

Poetry The Reverend Ghost: Poems The Sleeping Gypsy and Other Poems Abraham’s Knife and Other Poems For a Bitter Season: New and Selected Poems Welcome to the Medicine Show

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Luck’s Shining Child The Collected Poems of George Garrett Days of Our Lives Lie in Fragments

Plays Sir Slob and the Princess Enchanted Ground

Nonfiction James Jones Understanding Mary Lee Settle The Sorrows of Fat City Whistling in the Dark My Silk Purse and Yours Bad Man Blues: A Portable George Garrett Going to See the Elephant Southern Excursions

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The University of Alabama Press

Vicki Covington Gathering Home Vicki Covington The Last Hotel for Women Nanci Kincaid Crossing Blood Paul Hemphill Leaving Birmingham: Notes of a Native Son Roy Hoffman Almost Family Helen Norris One Day in the Life of a Born Again Loser and Other Stories Patricia Foster All the Lost Girls: Confessions of a Southern Daughter Sam Hodges B-Four

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Howell Raines Whiskey Man Judith Hillman Paterson Sweet Mystery: A Book of Remembering Mary Ward Brown Tongues of Flame Jay Lamar and Jeanie Thompson, eds. The Remembered Gate: Memoirs by Alabama Writers Mary Ward Brown It Wasn’t All Dancing and Other Stories Eugene Walter The Untidy Pilgrim Julia Oliver Goodbye to the Buttermilk Sky Lee May In My Father’s Garden Don Keith The Forever Season Kelly Cherry My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers: A Novel in Stories Madison Jones Herod’s Wife

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