Swann Read online

  Even today Swann’s work is known only to a handful of scholars, some of whom dismiss her as a poète naïve. Her rhythms are awkward. Clunky rhymes, even her half-rhymes, tie her lines to the commonplace, and her water poems, which are considered to be her best work, have a prickly roughness that exposes the ordinariness of the woman behind them, a woman people claim had difficulty with actual speech. She was a farmer’s wife, uneducated. It’s said in the Nadeau area of Ontario that she spoke haltingly, shyly, and about such trivial matters as the weather, laying hens, and recipes for jams and jellies. She also crocheted doilies. I want to weep when I think of those hundreds of circular yellowing doilies Mary Swann made over the years, the pathetic gentility they represented and the desperation they hint at.

  Her context, a word Willard Lang adores, was narrowly rural. A few of her poems, in fact, were originally published in the back pages of local newspapers: “A Line a Day,” “Rimes for Our Times,” and so on. It was only after she was killed that someone, an oddball newspaper editor named Frederic Cruzzi, put together and printed her little book, Swann’s Songs.

  Poor Mary Swann. That’s how I think of her, poor Mary Swann, with her mystical ear for the tune of words, cheated of life, cheated of recognition. In spite of the fact that there’s growing interest in her work—already thirty applications are in for the symposium in January—she’s still relatively unknown.

  Willard Lang, the swine, believes absolutely that Swann will never be classed as a major poet. He made this pronouncement at the MLA meeting last spring, speaking with a little ping of sorrow and a sideways tug at his ear. Rusticity, he claimed, kept a poet minor and, sadly, there seemed to be no exceptions to this rule, Burns being a different breed of dog. My Mary’s unearthly insights and spare musicality appear to certain swinish critics (Willard is not the only one) to be accidental and, therefore, no more than quaint. And no modern academic knows what to do with her rhymes, her awful moon/June/September/remember. It gives them a headache, makes them snort through their noses. What can be done, they say, with this rustic milkmaid in her Victorian velours!

  I tend to get unruly and defensive when it comes to those bloody rhymes. Except for the worst clinkers (giver/liver) they seem to me no more obtrusive than a foot tapped to music or a bell ringing in the distance. Besides, the lines trot along too fast to allow weight or breath to adhere to their endings. There’s a busy breedingness about them. “A Swannian urgency” was how I put it in my first article on Mary.

  Pompous phrase! I could kick myself when I think about it.

  5

  I live in someone else’s whimsy, a Hansel and Gretel house on a seventeen-foot lot on the south side of Chicago. Little paned casement windows, a fairy-tale door, a sweet round chimney and, on the roof, cedar shakes pretending to be thatch. It’s a wonderful roof, a roof that gladdens the eye, peaky and steep and coming down in soft waves over the windows with fake Anne Hathaway fullness. The house was built in 1930 by an eccentric professor of Elizabethan literature, a bachelor with severe scoliosis and a club foot, and after his death it was, briefly, a restaurant and then a Democratic precinct office. Now it’s back to being a house. At the rear is an iron balcony (loosely attached, but I intend to have it seen to) where I stand on fine days and gaze out over a small salvage yard crowded with scrap iron and a massive public housing project full of brawling families and broken glass.

  I bought my freak of a house when the first royalties started coming in for The Female Prism. I had to live somewhere, and my lawyer, a truly brilliant woman named Virginia Goodchild, said it could only happen to a person once, turning a Ph.D. thesis into a bestseller, and that I’d better sink my cash fast into a chunk of real estate. She’d found me just the place, she said, the cutest house in all Chicagoland.

  This house has been sweet to me, and in return I’ve kept it chaste; that is, I haven’t punished it with gaiety. No posters or prayer rugs or art deco glass here, and no humanoid shapes draped in Indonesian cotton. I’ve got tables; I’ve got a more than decent Oriental rug; I’ve got lamps. (Lord, make me Spartan, but not yet.) In my kitchen cupboards I’ve got plates and cups that match. In the dining-room, admittedly only nine feet by nine feet, I’ve got—now this is possibly a little outré—a piano that used to sit in a bar at the Drake Hotel, and after I finish my paper on Swann for the symposium in January, I intend to take a few piano lessons. Brownie says playing the piano is as calming as meditation and less damaging to the brain cells.

  I hope so, because I’ve never been able to see the point of emptying one’s mind of thought. Our thoughts are all we have. I love my thoughts, even when they take me up and down sour-smelling byways where I’d rather not venture. Whatever flickers on in my head is mine and I want it, all the blinking impulses and inclinations and connections and weirdness, and especially those bright purple flares that come streaming out of nowhere, announcing that you’re at some mystic juncture or turning point and that you’d better pay attention.

  Luckily for me, there have been several such indelible moments, moments that have pressed hard on that quirky narrative I like to think of as the story of my life. For example: at age eight, reading The Wind in the Willows. Then saying goodbye to my blameless father (bone cancer). At age fourteen, reading Charlotte Brontë—Charlotte, not Emily. Then saying goodbye, but only tentatively as it turned out, to my mother, a woman called Gladys Shockley Maloney. Next, reading Germaine Greer. Then saying goodbye to my virginity. (Goodbye and goodbye and goodbye.) Then reading Mary Swann and discovering how a human life can be silently snuffed out. Next saying goodbye to Olaf and Oak Park and three months of marriage, and then buying my queer toy house downtown, which I fully intended to sell when the market turned. But unsignalled, along came one of those brilliant purple turning points.

  It came because of my fame. My mother has never understood the fame that overtook me in my early twenties. She never believed it was really me, that mouth on the book jacket, yammering away. Neither, for that matter, did I. It was like going through an epidemic of measles, except that I was the only one who got sick.

  Six months after The Female Prism appeared in the bookstores someone decided I should go on a book-promotion tour—as though a book that was number six on the nonfiction bestseller list needed further pumping up. I started out in Boston, then went to New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland, then hopped to Louisville, skipped to Denver and Houston, and ended up one overcast afternoon on a TV talk show in L.A. The woman who interviewed me was lanky and menacing, wore a fur vest and was dangerously framed by lengths of iodine-glazed hair. To quell her I talked about the surrealism of scholarship. The pretensions. The false systems. The arcane lingo. The macho domination. The garrison mentality. The inbred arrogance.

  She leaned across and patted me on the knee and said, “You’re not coming from arrogance, sweetie; you’re coming from naked need.”

  Ping! My brain shuddered purple. I was revealed, uncloaked, and as soon as possible I crept back to Chicago, back to my ginger-cookie house on the south side, and made up my mind about one thing: that as long as I lived I would stay in this house. (At least for the next five years.) I felt like kissing the walls and throwing my arms around the punky little newel post and burying my face in its vulva-like carving. This was home. And it seemed I was someone who needed a home. I could go into my little house, my awful neediness and I, and close the doors and shut the curtains and stare at my enduring clutter and be absolutely still. Like the theoreticians who currently give me a bad case of frenzies, I’d made a discovery: my life was my own, but I needed a place where I could get away from it.

  6

  God is dead, peace is dead, the sixties are dead, John Lennon and Simone de Beauvoir are dead, the women’s movement is dozing—checking its inventory, let’s say—so what’s left?

  The quotidian is what’s left. Mary Swann understood that, if nothing else.

  A morning and an afternoon and

  Night’s que
er knuckled hand

  Hold me separate and whole

  Stitching tight my daily soul.

  She spelled it out. The mythic heavings of the universe, so baffling, so incomprehensible, but when squeezed into digestible day-shaped bytes, made swimmingly transparent. Dailiness. The diurnal unit, cloudless and soluble. No wonder the first people on earth worshipped heavenly bodies; between the rising and the setting of the sun their little lives sprouted all manner of shadows and possibilities. Whenever I meet anyone new, I don’t say, “Tell me about your belief system.” I say, “Tell me about your average day.”

  Dailiness to be sure has its hard deposits of ennui, but it is also, as Mary Swann suggests, redemptive. I busy my brain with examples.

  Every day of his short life, for instance, my father pulled on a pair of cotton socks, and almost every day he turned to my mother and said, “Cotton lets the skin breathe.” He also made daily pronouncements on meat that had been frozen: “Breaks down the cell structure,” he liked to say. “Destroys the nutrients.” In the same way he objected to butter, white bread, sugar—“attacks the blood cells”—garlic (same reason), and anything that had green pepper in it.

  He was otherwise a mild man, a math teacher in a west-side high school. His pale red hair, the drift of it over his small ears, his freckled neck and the greenish suits he wore in the classroom—all these things kept him humble. His small recurring judgements on garlic and green pepper were, I’ve come to see, a kind of vanity for him, an appetite that had to be satisfied, but especially the innocent means by which he was able to root himself in the largeness of time. Always begin a newspaper on the editorial page, he said. Never trust a man who wears sandals or diamond jewellery. These small choices and strictures kept him occupied and anchored while the cancer inched its way along his skeleton.

  My mother, too, sighing over her morning cup of coffee and lighting a cigarette, is simply digging in for the short run. And so is my sister, Lena, with her iron pills and coke and nightly shot of Brahms; and Olaf with his shaving ritual, and Brownie with his daily ingestion of flattery and cash. Who can blame them? Who wants to? Habit is the flywheel of society, conserving and preserving and dishing up tidy, edible slices of the cosmos. And there’s much to be said for a steady diet. Those newspaper advice-givers who urge you to put a little vinegar in your life are toying, believe me, with your sanity.

  Every day, for instance, I eat a cheese on pita for lunch, then an apple. I see no reason to apologize for this habit. Around two-thirty in the afternoon Lois Lundigan and I share a pot of tea, alternating Prince of Wales, Queen Mary, and Earl Grey. She pours. I wash the cups. Sisterhood. Between three and five, unless it’s my seminar day, I sit in my office at my desk and work on articles or plan my lectures. At five-thirty I stretch, pack up my beautiful briefcase, say good night to Lois and hit the pavement. The sun’s still keyed up, hot and yellow. Every day I walk along the same route, past grimy shrubs and run-down stores and apartment buildings and trees that become leafier as I approach Fifty-seventh Street. About this time I start to feel a small but measurable buzzing in the brain that makes my legs move along in double time. There I am, a determined piece of human matter, but adrift on a busy street that has suddenly become a conduit—a pipeline possessing the power of suction. Something, a force more than weariness, is drawing me home.

  There’s no mystery about this; I know precisely what pulls me along. Not food or sex or rest or succour but the thought of the heap of mail that’s waiting for me just inside my front door.

  Among my friends I’m known as the Queen of Correspondence, maintaining, in this day of long-distance phone calls and even longer silences, what is considered to be a vast network. This is my corner on quaintness. My crochet work. My apple sauce. Mail comes pouring in, national and international, postcards and air letters and queer stamps crowded together in the corners of bulging envelopes. Letters from old school friends await me or letters from sisters in the movement. Perhaps a scrawl from my six-year-old nephew, Franklin, and my real sister, Lena, in London. My editor in New York is forever showering me with witty, beseeching notes. Virginia Goodchild, my former lawyer, writes frequently from New Orleans where she now has her practice. Olaf, in Tübingen, keeps in touch. So do last year’s batch of graduate students and the year before’s, a sinuous trail of faces and words. There are always, always, letters waiting. A nineteenth-century plenitude. I tear them open, I burn and freeze, I consume them with heathenish joy, smiling as I read, tapping my foot, and planning what I’ll write back, what epics out of my ongoing life I’ll select, touch up, and entrust to the international mails.

  Mailless weekends are hell, but Monday’s bounty partially compensates. Every evening I write a letter, sometimes two, while the rest of the world plays Scrabble or watches TV or files its nails or whatever the rest of the world does. I write letters that are graceful and agreeable, far more graceful and agreeable than I am in my face-to-face encounters. My concern, my well-governed wit, my closet kindness all crowd to the fore, revealing that rouged, wrinkled, Russian-like persona that I like to think is my true self. (Pick up a pen and a second self squirms out.) The maintenance of my persona and the whole getting and sending of letters provide necessary traction to my quotidian existence, give me a kick, a lift, a jolt, a fix, a high, a way of seizing time and keeping it in order.

  Today there’s a thick letter from Morton Jimroy in California. A four-pager or I’m an elephant’s eyebrow. I can’t get it open fast enough. There I stand, reading it, still in my coat and hat with my beautiful briefcase thrown down on the floor along with the mutilated envelope.

  I read it once, twice, then put it aside. While eating dinner—a boned chicken breast steamed in grapefruit juice and a branch of broccoli al dente—I read it a third time. I’ve been writing to Morton Jimroy for almost a year now and find him a teasing correspondent.

  Today’s letter is particularly problematic, containing as it does one of Jimroy’s ambushing suggestions. I’ll wait exactly one week before I reply and then—now I’m eating dessert, which is a slice of hazelnut torte from the local bakery—I’ll send him one of my two-draft specials.

  It’s a guilty secret of mine that I write two kinds of letters, one-drafters and two-drafters. For old friends I bang out exuberant single-spaced typewritten letters, all the grammar jangled loose with dashes and exclamation points and reckless transitions. Naturally, I trust these old friends to read my letters charitably and overlook the awful girlish breathlessness and say to themselves, “Well, Sarah leads such a busy life, we’re lucky to get any kind of letter out of her.”

  But in my two-draft letters I mind my manners, sometimes even forsaking my word-processor for the pen. Only yesterday I wrote a double-drafter to Syd Buswell in Ottawa. “Dear Professor Buswell,” I wrote. “On behalf of the Steering Committee of the Swann Symposium, may I say how much we regret that you will not be presenting your paper in January. Nevertheless, we hope you will attend and participate in discussions.” I keep myself humble, am mindful of paragraph coherence, and try for a tincture of charm.

  For Morton Jimroy, the Morton Jimroy, biographer of Ezra Pound, John Starman, and now Mary Swann, I get out my best paper and linger over my longhand, my lovely springy I’s and e’s, aglide on their invisible blue wires. And I always do a second draft.

  Once again—now I’m having coffee, feet up on the coffee table—I read Jimroy’s letter. Though his home is in Winnipeg, Canada, this letter is from California where he’s spending a year putting together his notes on Mary Swann. Today’s letter, like his others, is imbued with a sense of pleading, but for what?—who can tell? His are letters from which the voice has been drained off, and instead there’s a strenuous concentration, each casual phrase propped up by rhetoric and positioned so as to signal candour—but a candour undercut by the pain of deliberate placement. Ring around the rosy. How am I supposed to interpret all this? Painstaking letters are born of pain; I must be generous, I must overl
ook transparent strategy, stop sniffing for a covert agenda. But there’s something unsettling in the way he’s always wringing a response from me. I am summoned, commanded to comment and comfort and offer gifts of flattery.

  He has one rare quality that I suspect is genuine: an urge for confession, or at least intimacy. We’ve never met and have no claims on each other, and there’s no real reason for him to tell me about the depression he suffered after his book on Starman was published, a long painful depression, which—he told me all this in a previous letter—neither medication nor analysis was able to heal.

  My dear Sarah,

  I am someone who can understand how Flaubert must have felt when seized with doubt about the validity of art, his terrifying perception—false, thank God—that art was nothing but a foolish and childish plaything. This was exactly the state of my mind when Oxford Press sent me my advance copy of the Starman biography some years back. It arrived, I remember, at breakfast time—forgive me if I’ve written this before—swathed in a padded envelope. I opened it at once, regarded its gleaming cover and experienced—nothing. The granola and milk in my bowl had more reality than this pound and a half of text with its appendices, its execrable, sprawling annotation, and, worst of all, its footnotes. These footnotes, I realized at that moment, were footnotes on Starman’s footnotes. And I could imagine what would occur in the future, as surely as day must follow night: a graduate student would one day construct footnotes on my footnotes to Starman’s footnotes. The thought brought a physical sense of shame. I felt not only self-disgust but the fierce sadness of a wasted life, the conviction that I had done nothing but dally with the dallyings of other human beings. Such a feeling of depression—perhaps you know, though I hope you don’t—can be swift and overwhelming. It seemed to me at that moment that not a single man on earth had ever spoken the truth. We were all, every last one of us, liars and poseurs.