To the Lighthouse, With I didn't get here on purpose, only an accident that I found you at all, a donated paperback from some UNC student syllabus, dog- eared and discarded, twenty-five cents at the Cannon Library, crammed in between a 1971 Census and a Book of the Month Club edition of The View from Pompey's Head, either of which had to intrigue me more, for long before, back in grad school (U of M, '59), I sailed right past the thing without reading a line, thinking it wasn't you, but Brother Thomas I needed, you know what I mean, all that stuff about him and Aline, the losers, the lost, the wind- grieved Caspers, the cost of land in Altamont, the whole lupanarian vision (I thought) of a world I can scarcely even recall nowadays except the vague longing and hunger it gave rise to, the nightmares that all came true, the broken affairs and misconstrued promises, wandering the streets of Dinky Town and thinking (Breughel) (yes, Dostoevski) give me something bold, some Paul Bunyan dilemma to get me through this Minnesota winter, thinking (Saul Bellow, yes) Bellow, who'd just set loose his Rain King and scared the shit out of us all, and was teaching at the U that fall, a kind of Howling Wolfe in his own right, down on his hands and knees, we could imagine, whining like a jackal when he wasn't teaching, broke and divorced (and divorced, divorced) and grading papers that we ourselves had written, smitten with lectures that really addressed themselves to the spirit, to the writer trying to survive, to Henderson, to us, yes, even we, ravenous monks coming off a two-day drunk at two in the morning on Hennepin, and gasping, yes, that we might do something too, that Allen Tate was wrong, was himself madder than any hatter, not to recognize us as brothers, not even to let us in his senile fucking Seminar in Creative Writing because (and his wife, an almost young Yale Younger Poet, agreed): because, he said, our work was obscene, and all that, and so much more was going on, and the thing is, you were there the whole time, perched on the shelf behind the dusty glass at that creaking bookstore on the other side of University Avenue, and no one I knew even read you at all, except for those stringy longhairs that drove rusty VW's and wouldn't go hear Dylan at the Triangle Bar because well, it smelled like puke most of the time and if you parked too close to the building next door the city would have your MGA hauled away and impounded and by the time you got it back again the hood wold be bashed in and sometimes they would steal the seats or whatever else wasn't tied down, so what I'm saying is we just couldn't get serious about somebody like you, who probably wouldn't have gone to the Triangle either, would you, but that's okay, because look what happened to Dylan, who fell down on his knees and started praying and whining like some Methodist at a Vegas convention, so what I'm saying (2) is nothing is constant, esp. when it comes to Art, to finding an audience that will listen, to bark up the wrong tree if you want to and not give a fuck, truly, if they haul off your car and run the sucker through a compactor before they hand it back, and that's what I mean, I think I can see, finally, what you were trying to accomplish, the whole shebang, that's all, just the whole terrible lie we live by, on TV and everywhere else, and I realize, yes, that you never owned a TV in your life, probably, but that doesn't negate my essential argument, which is that I can't get over it that you're a woman, because that wasn't the way we were taught, not in the fifties, not even in the sixties, because back then (and most of the time, even now) it was Joyce, Joyce, Joyce, and Brecht, Brecht, Brecht, because the only writers that knew the slightest thing about women (we vowed) were guys, yeah, like Bellow, who even if he didn't scratch his balls in public could still hit a home run with his Henderson and juggle all those characters (esp. the women) like nobody that ever came out of Chicago unless it was Nelson Algren (and who wanted to read his stuff after Frank Sinatra decided he was the one to play the man with the Golden Arm), but maybe you think this is beginning to sound like one of those idiots who used to go around reading Allan Ginsberg out loud, esp. Howl, and wouldn't shut up until you got them so drunk they would pass out in your bathtub and everybody that came in would piss on them for spite because people like that were so fucking abnormal what else could you even do to them that they would fucking understand, but it's a thing I think about when I think about what I've just gone through with this incredible heroine of yours, Mrs. Ramsey, and Jesus, no sooner did I fall in love with her than you up and killed her off, Christ, and we thought Bellow could write? When did he do a thing like this in his whole life, give us somebody that wonderful and understanding, give us her every thought, and not tell us, the whole time, that what you were really planning to do was take her away, take them all away, dammit, how could you ever have anticipated that we'd put up with a gag like that, did you just assume we were all as crazy as you, did you, or is it really like I told Mary Lou, that I don't care what anybody says, you aren't much of a woman ("Can they write? Can they paint?") not in my book, you're just too goddamn fine, so you're either a man and kept it a secret from everybody, or else you're the meanest cherry dyke I ever came across in my entire experience and that includes James Joyce too, like a virgin (you say) fierce in his Chastity, like that war (you say) which has revived our interest in poetry but if you ever feel tempted to give it a fling, I'd truly be honored to have you play lady play in my big crass dreams and if we should one day sail together, God willing, to meet the old Keeper and his Son, I will gladly carry your brown paper parcels, and let somebody else worry where to draw the line as we hand over our stockings and tobacco and get ready to steal the fuckers blind James Lineberger |