Dhalgren (57 page)

"I guess what I want to know, really—" Kid's thumb had stained the galley margin: momentary panic. "Do you think these—" and four fingers marked the paper in a sweep—"that these are any good?" There will be other copies, he thought to ease himself. There will be. "I mean, really."

Newboy sucked his teeth and put the case on the floor against his knees. "You have no realization what an absurd question that is. Once, when I used to find myself in this situation, I would always answer 'no' automatically, 'I think they're worthless.' But I'm older, and I realize now all I was doing was punishing people who asked such questions for their stupidity, and was only being 'honest' in the most semantically vulgar sense. I really cannot think about poetry in such absolute terms as 'good' and 'bad', or even in the more flexible terms you'd probably be willing to accept in their place: 'well done' or 'badly done'. Perhaps it is because I suffer from all the aesthetic diseases of the times which cause the worthless to be praised and the worthy to be ignored. Well, they have ravaged all ages. But you must leave open the possibility that poetry means far too much to me to vulgarize it in the way you are asking me to do. The problem is essentially one of landscape. I've already made it clear, I hope, that I, personally, have enjoyed the particular complex of interchange between you and your poems, both as I have perceived it and, to my personal embarrassment, misperceived it. If you think my distance insulting, dwell on the complexities in it. But let me pose an example. You know of Wilfred Owen?" Newboy did not wait for Kid's nod. "Like many young men, he wrote his poems during the War; he seems to have hated that war, but he fought in it, and was machine-gunned to death while trying to get his company over the Sambre Canal when he was younger than you. He is generally considered, in English, the greatest war poet. But how is one to compare him to Auden or O'Hara, Coleridge or Campion, Riding or Roethke, Rod or Edward Taylor, Spicer, Ashbery, Donne, Waldmen, Byron or Berrigan or Michael Dennis Browne? As war— the experience or the concept—stays a vital image, Owen will stay a vital poet. If war were to be both abolished and forgotten, then Owen would become a minor figure, interesting only as a purely philological point in the development of the language, as an influence on more germane figures. Now your poems wrap themselves around and within this city as Cavafy's twist and refract about pre-World War Two Alexandria, as Olson's are caught in the ocean light of mid-century Gloucester, or Villon's in medieval Paris. When you ask me the worth of these poems, you are asking me what place the image of this city holds in the minds of those who have never been here. How can I presume to suggest? There are times, as I wander in this abysmal mist, when these streets seem to underpin all the capitals of the world. At others, I confess, the whole place seems a pointless and ugly mistake, with no relation to what I know as civilization, better obliterated than abandoned. I can't judge because I am still in it. Frankly I will not be able to judge once out of it, for the bias that will remain from once having been a visitor."

Kid, halfway through the second poem in proof, looked up at the silence.

"The worth of our work?" (Kid dropped his eyes and continued reading.) "People who do not create are always sure that on some inchoate level the creator knows it. But the roster of Nobel laureates I have come so near to joining three times now is cluttered with mediocre writers who have neither elegance nor depth, readability nor relevance: lauded during their lifetimes, they died, I'm sure, convinced they had substantially advanced their languages. Your Miss Dickinson died equally convinced no one would ever read a word she wrote; and she is one of the most luminous poets your country has produced. An artist simply cannot trust any public emblem of merit. Private ones? They are even more misleading."

Kid turned over the next galley. "You're talking to yourself." Eyes down, he wondered what expression was on Newboy's face.

"Most certainly," Newboy said after a longish pause.

"You're really that scared your own stuff isn't any good."

Newboy paused.

In the pause, Kid considered looking up but didn't.

"When I'm not actually working, I have no choice: I
must
consider it worthless. But when I'm engaged in it, writing, revising, shaping and polishing, by the same process, I have to consider it the most important thing in the world. And I'm very suspect of any other attitude."

Kid looked up now: the expression leaving Newboy's face was serious. But laughter marks were replacing it. "Ah, when I was a young man, as young as I once thought you were, I recall I labored with incredible diligence over a translation of
Le Bateau ivre.
Here I am at the respectable, if a bit garrulous, threshold of old age, and last night, in the front library at Roger's, after everyone else had gone up, I sat there working—by hurricane lanterns: the electricity is off in that wing now—on
Le Cimetiere marin.
The impulse was thoroughly the same." He shook his head, still laughing. "Have you found any mistakes?"

"Um,"
Kid said. "Not in the first three sheets."

"I spent yesterday and most of today checking it against your fair copy. I've put a couple of queries here and there. You'll get to them as you go through."

"Where?"

"The first one's near the front." Newboy set down his cup and leaned over Kid's shoulder. "Next sheet. There. It's the poem you had the loose copy of it on blue paper just stuck in the notebook. It looked like somebody else had written it out for you. Did you perhaps intend a comma in the third line? I checked it back with the version in your notebook, and neither one has it. Except for the phrasing, I wouldn't have—"

"The copy in the notebook has a comma, doesn't it?" Kid frowned and flipped handwritten pages. His eyes stumbled among words, trying not to be caught between any two, till he found the notebook page. "It's not there." He looked up. "I
thought
I put one."

"Then you
did
intend it. Here, use my pencil. Just cross out the question mark I put by the line. I had a feeling you might—what's the matter?"

"I thought I had a comma there. But I didn't."

"Oh, I'm always discovering I've left out words I was sure I wrote down in first draft—"

"You…"

Mr Newboy started to question, grew uncomfortable with that, so returned his eyes to the line.

"…just read it and knew I'd wanted one there?"

Newboy began to say several things, but stopped (after a little nod) before voice, as if curious what silence would affect.

Two emotions clawed the inside of Kid's skull. The fear, as it rose, he questioned: Is this some trick of autonomic nerves that causes the small of my back to dampen, my heart to quicken, my knees to shake like motors; it was only a comma, the smallest bit of silence that I have misplaced—only a pause. I am quaking like Teddy's candles. The joy, mounting over, obliterating, and outdistancing it, was at some sensed communion. (Newboy had known!) To restrain it, Kid told himself: Between two phrases like that, why shouldn't Newboy be able to tell? He lowered his head to read on: his eyes filled with water and the emotion tore through such logic. And the darkness under. He anticipated their collision to make some wave. But like two swirls of opposite spin, they met—and canceled. He blinked. Water splashed from his lashes across the back of his hand.

There had been a recurrent pain on the back of his right shoulder that, three or four years ago, had intrigued him because it would be a pulsing annoyance for hours or even days and then would, in a second, vanish: no proddings or contortions could recall it. He hadn't for years, till now.

Tensing his shoulders, he read the next poem, and images set to at the backs of his eyes, their substance and structure familiar, their texture alien, alien and grave. He kept blinking, to finish the line in his mind; eyes opened to finish it on the page, where it demanded new bulbs. Boxes of glass ticked their clear covers on stunned marvels. Things were safe, and that was so horrifying his heart was pulsing in the little pit at the base of his throat as though he were swallowing rock after rock. "Mr Newboy?"

"Mmm?"
Papers shuffled.

Kid looked over.

Newboy was going through the illustrations.

"I don't think I'm gonna write any more poems."

Newboy turned another black page. "You don't like them, reading them over?"

Kid peeled off the next paper ribbon. The first two words of the first line of the first poem were transposed—

"Here!" Mr Newboy offered his pencil. "You found a mistake?" He laughed. "Now see, you
don't
have to write quite so hard as that! Wait! You'll tear the paper!"

Kidd unhunched his shoulder, unbent his spine, and let his fingers relax about the yellow shaft. He breathed again. "They're going to fix that, aren't they?"

"Oh, yes. That's why you're looking it over now."

Kid read, and remembered: "The parts I like, well…" He shook his head, with pursed lips. "They just don't have anything to do with me: somebody else wrote them, it seems, about things I may have thought about once. That's pretty strange. The parts I don't like—well, I can remember writing those, oh yeah, word by word by word."

"Then why aren't you going to write any—?"

But Kid had found another mistake.

"Here," Newboy said. "Why don't you lay the galleys on your notebook so you can write more easily."

While Kid passed the halfpoint of the next galley, Newboy mused: "Perhaps it's good you're not going to write any more: you'd have to start considering all those dull things like your relation to your audience, the relation between your personality and your poetry, the relation between your poetry and all the poetry before it. Since you told me you weren't responsible for those notes, I've been trying to figure out whether it just happened or whether you were making a conscious reference: You managed to reproduce, practically verbatim, one of my favorite lines from Golding's translation of the
Metamorphosis."

"Mmm?"

"Are you familiar with it?"

"It's a big green and white paperback? That's the one Shakespeare used for some of his plays. I only read about the first half. But I didn't take any lines from it, at least not on purpose. Maybe it just happened?"

Mr Newboy nodded. "You amaze me. And when you do, I suspect I'm rather a smaller person for having such petty notions in the first place. Well, the line I was referring to was from the last book anyway. So you hadn't gotten to that one yet. Tell me, who
do
you think should read your poems once they're published?"

"I guess people who… well, whoever likes to read poetry."

"Do you?"

"Yeah. I read it more than I read anything else, I guess."

"No, that doesn't surprise me."

"You know, in bookstores for the schools I used to go to, or down in the Village in New York, or in San Francisco, they got whole sections for poetry. You can read a lot of it there."

"Why poetry?"

Kid shrugged. "Most poems are shorter than stories."

Newboy, Kid saw, was suppressing a laugh. Kid felt embarrassed.

"And you're not going to write any more?"

"It's too hard." Kid looked down. "I mean if I kept it up, I think it would kill me, you know? I never did it before, so I just didn't understand."

"That's sad—no, I can be more honest than that. It's frightening for one artist to see another one, any other one turn away from art."

"Yeah." Kid's eyes came up. "I know. I really know that. And I wish—I wish I didn't frighten you as much as I do. What is it? What's the matter with you, now?"

"Nothing." Newboy shook his head.

"I wish I didn't," Kid repeated. "The last poem…" Kid began to turn through the galleys. "What did you think of that one, I mean compared to all the rest of them?"

"The one in meter? Well, it isn't finished. We printed it up to where you broke off. That's another thing I wanted to query about—"

"How do you like what there is?"

"Frankly, I didn't think it was as strong as many of the others. When I went back over it the fourth or fifth time, I began to see that the substance of it was probably on its way to a great deal of richness. But the language wasn't as inventive. Or as clean."

Kid nodded. "The rhythm of natural speech," Kid mused. "I had to write it. And it was pretty bad, wasn't it? No, I don't think I'll write any more. Besides, I'm probably never going to have another book published… ?" He raised an eyebrow at Newboy.

Newboy, lips pursed, considered. "I could say that I sincerely don't believe that should be a consideration. Or that, as I remember it, it was something like eleven years between my first and second book of poems. Or that I think you're asking for confirmation of something that really doesn't have anything to do with poetry."

"What else could you say?"

Newboy's lips unpursed. "I could say, 'Yes, possibly you won't.' "

Kid grinned quickly and went back to correcting.

"It's very silly to commit yourself to something like that, if you're going to write or not. If you wrote those, you will write more. And if you promise yourself you won't, you'll just be very unhappy when you break the promise. Yes, a good part of me doesn't like the idea of an artist giving up art. But this is another part of me talking. Believe me."

Kid's mind was on Lanya.

He pulled it away, to reflect on: Golding's
Metamorphosis.
He'd seen the book on a dozen shelves in a dozen bookstores, picked it up as many times, read the back cover, the first page of the introduction, flipped through three or four pages, unable to read more than three or four lines on each. (The same thing, he realized, had happened with
Pilgrimage.)
The first
half?
He'd been unable to read a whole page! Poetry, he thought. If it makes me start lying to a guy like this, I should stop writing it.

Kid corrected the last half-dozen sheets in silence drenched with vision. He flipped them, rattling like dry feathers, together.

He leaned on the couch arm (he breathed gently: but felt breath's coolness only on the left side of his upper lip) and looked at the paper over his lap. I've just corrected the last half-dozen sheets, he thought: his upper arms were bone tired. Pains pulsed in his finger joints. He loosened his grip on the pencil.