The flames had been gorging on the barn for forty-five minutes. Fire trucks from twelve different stations blocked the perimeter, sirens screaming, water cannons aiming thick shots at the thirty-foot flames rocketing up out of the roof. At least fifty firefighters surrounded the conflagration, outfitted as if they could land on Mars, with oxygen tanks and masks. A couple of frightened horses ran the perimeter. Some of the True Prospect grooms and riders, including his own, were in hysterics.

Boyd raced up the drive toward Dutton, who was standing, stunned, watching the old barn groan with the flames.

Lillian Heard, Martin’s head groom, who had been staying in the apartment upstairs for the weekend, had woken to the smell of smoke wafting through the floorboards. Silliman and her boyfriend, Ryan “Woodsy” Wood, a four-star Australian eventer who worked for Phillip Dutton, lived in the apartment full-time. They heard her call out.

“I have here something that’ll solve all our problems.”

“Well, go on, what is it?”

“A bootleg.”

“Oh great. That’s all we need is another bootleg. What’s this one? Copenhagen, April 30, 1966, reel two, second half missing? We’ve got eight thousand bootleg tapes, man; we’re never going to find enough time to listen to them all in our lifetime.”

“It’s not like that.”

Erotic poet, writer of shocking manifestos, accomplished visual artist, modernist “it” girl, stunning beauty, sexually-liberated feminist, tragic and heartbroken wanderer: Mina Loy was all of these things. With hundreds of appearances in the letters, memoirs, and photographs of many of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, where did Mina Loy disappear to in the decades between then and now? In her day, Loy was ubiquitous in artistic circles. One of Loy’s poems, “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” appeared with T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in the November 1922 issue of The Dial magazine. Her visual art was shown alongside Paul Gauguin’s in the 1906 Salon D’Automne in Paris. She acted in the play Lima Beans with a fan of her work, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound complimented Loy’s writing in the same breath as Marianne Moore’s. Gertrude Stein, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, identifies Loy as always “able to understand.” Loy was friends with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, she was inspired by her friend Joseph Cornell’s boxes of found objects in her own work, and she wrote the book Insel about her relationship with surrealist painter Richard Oelze. Encountered today, Loy’s work as a poet and manifesto writer, a painter and assemblage artist, a creator of exotic lamps, moves viewers and readers emotionally and challenges them intellectually. So where has Loy been all our lives?

You’d be hard-pressed to find a life that’s been more mythologized than Georgia O’Keeffe’s. By the time she was anointed Most Famous Woman Artist in America so many people had gushed so flagrantly over her singular style, her huge erotic flower paintings, her snappy (and occasionally snappish) bon mots, her long and unconventional marriage to Alfred Stieglitz, the other-worldly landscape of northern New Mexico with its voluptuous land forms and many large dead animals, whose skulls and vertebrae she immortalized, and her prickly devotion to her privacy, that it’s amazing there aren’t more O’Keeffe folk songs, limericks, totems, feast days, rituals, annual pilgrimages, and bank holidays. Given our feelings for everything she represents, it speaks well of the human race that we haven’t fetched up a minor religion around her that worships independence, focus, creativity, and wearing those bad scarves my mother used to don the day before she went to the beauty parlor.

O’Keeffe attracts as she repels, and perhaps that’s what makes her so intriguing. People like to say they don’t give a damn, but O’Keeffe lived it. The proof? She was the embodiment of two aspects of living that most of us dread: being old and being alone. For O’Keeffe, forty was the new sixty. She had no problem being known for decades as the old lady in the desert with an affinity for cow skulls, an old lady in heavy black clothes with beautiful cheekbones and a lot of wrinkles, with no one for company but her various housekeepers and a pair of fierce chows who provided hours of entertainment by chasing off and occasionally biting unwanted guests.

I’m sure there is someone out there—perhaps you’re reading this right now—who aspires to look old before her time and spend days and weeks following her muse in the middle of nowhere, but I’m going to wager that most of us don’t want that for ourselves. What we do want is to know what went on inside O’Keeffe to allow her to defy society and make her own way.
Few human beings manage to be so resolutely themselves for so much of their lives. If we’re lucky, we’re able to scrape together a few days of self-realization in high school, followed by a month or two in college, after which we fall in love and completely revamp our personality to please our beloved, or else we land a job that requires us to kiss up to someone to whom we normally wouldn’t give the time of day, after which we have children and don the invisible t-shirt that says “I live to serve.” By the time the kids are grown, we’re tired and set in our ways and all it takes is waking up in a hotel room in a new city to forget who we are completely.

O’Keeffe is the poster child for doing exactly what you want, in the service of an abiding passion. Intuitively, we know how rare this is. In 1999, monster.com, the online employment agency, made a mockumentary commercial “When I Grow Up,” which featured kids answering that age-old question. Instead of saying they wanted to be astronauts or the person who discovers the cure for cancer they foretold their futures. “I want to file . . . all day,” said one kid. “I want to climb my way to middle management,” said another. “I want to be a yes man!” said a third. The ad was wildly successful; we laughed in recognition of how hard it is to make our dreams come true.

How O’Keeffe Became Herself

Unless you’re fifteen, when the point of defying convention is to piss off everyone around you, the main reason for refusing to go along with familial, societal, and economic expectations is so you can free up your time and thoughts to pursue something meaningful. Living up to the expectations of the world can take up all your time and energy if you let it. The clearer we are about what we want and what may be our abiding passion, the easier it is to chart our own course.
In the art world, critics remain divided over whether O’Keeffe was a genius or merely an energetic fetishist who pressed upon us, year after year, her sexy yin and yang paintings of calla lilies, sweet peas, the various chalk white bones of horses and cows, mysterious doorways, and  adobe walls. What remains indisputable, however, is her genius for navigating the waters of her own vision, for discovering it, nurturing it, and never abandoning it. At a time when women still didn’t have the right to vote, when their life goal was marriage to pretty much anyone who would have them, O’Keeffe was having none of it. She had better fish to fry. How, we may ask, did she catch these all-important fish?

She wrote letters.

I realize I may as well be suggesting that you take up whittling, but the fact remains that one of the best ways to figure out what you’re all about is to write letters. Many letters, hundreds of letters. Letters to friends, lovers, acquaintances, and colleagues, each one a mini-manifesto about how you waged the battles, both large and small, of each day, what you did, why you did it, and how you felt about it. I feel equally compelled to say that if you did this, in a short time you would have no friends at all.

There’s always e-mail, except that e-mail, too, is about to join letter-writing as a lost art. A newsy, content-rich e-mail has too many sentences, and, God forbid, paragraphs. Social networking in all its manifestations may try to pass itself off as the modern iteration of letter writing, but posting, tweeting, and so on is all about soliciting a response. It’s about audience, not expression.

O’Keeffe claimed to have never trusted words. She said that she and words were not friends. To prove her point, she refused to learn how to punctuate. Still, every day for most of her life she was writing her struggles, trying to figure out what she was doing, what was important, and how she felt. O’Keeffe and her correspondents were one another’s therapists in the time before therapists, serving as witnesses to each other’s struggles to locate themselves in their own lives.
In an oft-quoted letter to Anita Pollitzer, the college friend who hooked Stieglitz up with O’Keeffe’s early, transcendent charcoal drawings, O’Keeffe attempts to both explain and sort out her mixed feelings about showing her work: “I always have a curious sort of feeling about some of my things. I hate to show them – I am perfectly inconsistent about it – I am afraid people won’t understand them and – I hope they won’t—and am afraid they will.”
We could write such a thing in a journal, but no one would reply, reassuring us not to worry or telling us she understands. We could write such a thing in a blog, but it’s a tender statement, one that requires a loving, supportive response and not an anonymous comment that may very well say You suck. Perhaps an ad on Craig’s List might work. Knitting has enjoyed a comeback, why not letter-writing?

She found a devotee.

One of the reasons O’Keeffe was able to flaunt the conventions of Canyon with such confidence and ease is because she had Stieglitz rooting her on from New York. Fat envelopes arrived from him daily. He sent her books to read, conversed with her about the work he’d included in a group show at 291, closely monitored her current work, and cheered her on every baby step of the way.

On January 1, 1917, four months after O’Keeffe arrived in Texas, Anita Pollitzer had marched over to 291 on a whim and showed Stieglitz some of O’Keeffe’s charcoal drawings. Legend has it that Stieglitz fell into a memorable quote-producing swoon and gasped, “At last! A woman on paper.” It’s doubtful he said this then or ever, but he behaved as if he did. When Pollitzer reported back to O’Keeffe, it was Georgia who sought out Stieglitz and wooed him with her letters about her work. People who knew her well said that she possessed the nose of a bloodhound when it came to finding people who would champion her art.

The best devotees are people whose interest in you is mixed up with their own self-interest. It’s not only what they can do for you, but what you can do for them. Stieglitz was a compulsive educator. Art students used to bait him for fun. They would go to 291 and venture an unlearned opinion about the Picasso or Matisse currently on exhibit, just to see how many hours (five) Stieglitz could lecture them on their poor judgment.

Thus, he required an audience and a pupil and she was there; she required someone who supported not only her radical approach to painting (how something made her feel was more important than how it looked), but also encouraged her rejection of middle-class expectations. That one day they would fall in love, marry, and wind up driving each other crazy was only to be expected.

She defied all accepted conventions of feminine beauty.

I’m willing to accept that you’re reading this book because someone gave it to you for your birthday, or because you like to take a stroll around an art museum on occasion. But even if you don’t seek to defy every social norm so that you may pioneer a new school of art and become a personal icon to millions of women and aspiring painters everywhere, not to mention a one-woman tourist magnet for a previously overlooked yet majestic corner of our fine and enormous nation, please nonetheless consider abandoning the pursuit of robo-beauty in favor of accepting—and even celebrating—a few flaws.
With her fabulous raw-boned frame, snaggly brows, and school marm’s bun, her black vestments, man’s shoes, and odd assortment of hats and turbans, O’Keeffe was out there. There was none like her, then or ever. A few months before she left her teaching post in Canyon, when someone mustered up the nerve to timidly ask her why she wore her hair that way, O’Keeffe said, “because I like it.” Freeing herself from the endless demands of looking like other women released her into a parallel, and freer, universe. After people adjusted to her curious look, they accepted it and expected nothing else.

Let your freak flag fly. Or at least retire your flat iron. You just may gain a sense of yourself as a unique human being, rather than as a mere consumer of $150 lip plumpers and $400 handbags. Do this in the interest of your own self-worth.

This is a Hollywood story, and it starts simply: A car drives through the streets of Los Angeles. It is March 2, 1994, and behind the wheel sits a man who has found a level of success that eludes the desperate majority here. Simon Lewis is a film producer and, at 35, an accomplished one. His is not a household name, but it is becoming an industry one. He makes light stuff mostly, and brings it in on time.

Lewis’s path to Hollywood began with plans to become a lawyer. At 19, he’d emigrated with his parents and siblings from Wimbledon, in London, to Southern California, and headed straight to UC Berkeley to earn a law degree. He’d maneuvered his way into entertainment law, which led to managing talent, which eventually led to producing. Lewis had thick curls and steady, clear blue eyes. He was that special and simple genre of person who does all that he sets out to do.

The Simon Lewis driving down the road on this early California evening does not make complex or particularly profound movies. He makes small and sometimes cheesy movies. In Slipping Into Darkness, from 1988, three snobby college girls fall into a horror-style revenge plot with some biker dudes. In You Can’t Hurry Love, from the same year, modern-day dating is skewered: video-dating-service antics, lousy matches, true love at last. The New York Times called it “a very dim comedy.” The paper had no words at all for 1989′s C.H.U.D. II: Bud the C.H.U.D.

It wasn’t Shakespeare, but Lewis was diligent and professional, and people liked him, and he possessed the mysterious Hollywood gene—part drive, part charm, part genius for packaging ideas—that made things happen. Still, it wasn’t until a particularly hokey project fell in his lap in the late ’80s that he hit it big.

The film seemed destined for instant obscurity: a sarcastic baby whose thoughts the audience can somehow hear. It was one of many films then being shot cheaply in Canada in the hopes of bringing in just enough for a small profit. The actors who agreed to star were hardly A-list. John Travolta was a has-been from the ’70s and Kirstie Alley a little-known TV actress. Lewis loved it immediately.

As co-producer he quickly began pushing Look Who’s Talking to be far more ambitious than what the studio had in mind. It was as though a line cook from Burger King had shown up in chef’s whites and proceeded to set each table with the finest silver. Lewis was sweet and politic, but he could play hardball. At one point, about to fly to Canada to begin filming, he simply refused to take a call from executives, sensing that they might cancel the trip—and maybe the project. He got on his plane and made sure the shoot happened.

The real trouble began when filming was finished and TriStar received the final cut. One must mind-warp back to the late ’80s to accept the following truth: The film was too good.

Having planned for a modest release, TriStar suddenly found itself sitting on a potential hit. The studio’s first impulse was skepticism. When Lewis and his fellow producers market-tested an early cut, the assembled viewers responded so enthusiastically that TriStar seemed to think they were plants. The studio decided to conduct its own test at an undisclosed location. The scores were even higher.

Following a last-minute scramble, Look Who’s Talking was released in October 1989 at 1,200 theaters across the country. It was an instant smash, a record breaker. Afterward, Lewis was never busier. He executive produced an Emmy-winning TV movie called Age-Old Friends and some variety specials starring Howie Mandel. He brought Universal Studios an idea for a don’t-mess-with-nature sci-fi/horror film about a biosphere gone awry. Universal liked it and paid Lewis and other writers to develop the script, though ultimately the project foundered. No matter; Lewis had other irons in the fire. He’d been invited to teach film to grad students at USC, and he had a meeting scheduled with a director and producer at Sony Classics regarding a soon-to-be Nick Nolte film.

But that’s tomorrow. On this night, March 2, 1994, Lewis has an entirely different sphere of his life to celebrate.

He met Marcy by chance—a shared drive to a ski cabin on a vacation with mutual friends—less than two years earlier. By the time they reached Fresno, there had been no question; in a year, they were married. She was talkative and vivacious to his pale British bookishness. On a trip to Hawaii, she sunned on the sand while Simon scrunched into the narrow shadow of a palm tree, bent over scripts. Someone had once predicted Marcy would marry a left-handed Englishman. Simon was ambidextrous. Close enough, they decided. They adored each other.

And now Marcy is in the passenger’s seat. Simon has picked her up from work—at 27 she is marketing director at downtown L.A.’s Music Center—and they are back on the road. The two have been married just five months and are celebrating their first major purchase together: a sleek new Infiniti only two days old. In the way that one splurge begets another, they are treating themselves to dinner at their favorite Italian restaurant. Had Simon paused to tie a shoe before getting in the car, or had Marcy made one more phone call, everything would have ended differently.

* * * * *

It’s hard now not to see that March night unfolding cinematically—as Lewis himself, at a pitch meeting or on a set, might have described it. Random events are inserted into a timeline, actions imbued with meaning. A two-day-old car bearing a young couple to dinner assumes all the hope and innocence of youth. A white ’78 Chevy van, also bought two days earlier, turns on to a tree-lined residential street, and a horrible plot is set in motion.

Around 7 p.m., Simon and Marcy are heading west on Beverly Boulevard, nearly at the restaurant. Marcy mentions that they are close to her boss’s home, which has recently been renovated, and suggests they make a detour to see it. At that moment the white van screams full-speed through a stop sign at McCadden Place. Maybe the driver is thinking he will miraculously thread the five lanes of traffic. Maybe he is too drunk to think.

The van rams Lewis’s side of the Infiniti at 75 miles per hour, bulldozing it sideways across the remaining lanes until it hits the curb. There is nowhere to go but up. The car flies and spins through the air until its path is interrupted by a maple tree on the corner of Beverly and McCadden. It slams into the tree several feet up the trunk, then comes to rest in a nearby garden.

A screenwriter couple—colleagues of Lewis’s, incredibly—are driving to dinner when they come upon the accident. They park and run over. Lewis’s body has been crushed into the collapsed space between the center console, the driver’s-side door, and the steering column. Standing just two feet away, his colleagues do not recognize him.

Moving to the passenger side, they see that neither occupant can be removed without dismantling the car. The wife hands flares to a meter maid who’d been in the area and waits for help. An off-duty paramedic has already called 911. No survivors, he reports.

It takes over an hour and two Jaws of Life tools for the rescue team to splay the Infiniti open. The car still bears dealer plates, and with no access to Lewis’s wallet, the police scrawl “UNK” on the collision report. The driver of the van is a mystery, too. That fellow sprinting up McCadden was not getting help: He was putting as much distance as possible between himself and the newlyweds whose lives he’d just annihilated.

The extraction team shears the roof and doors off the Infiniti. Marcy’s face has no blood on it; she looks like she is sleeping. Simon, for his part, is shattered in every way possible. When at last they get to him, rescuers are shocked to discover he has a pulse. They slice through his seatbelt, cut off his clothes, and ease his broken body into an ambulance.

Inside his smashed skull, his brain has begun to swell. Ruptured blood vessels leak, causing more oxygen to be needed, thereby causing the swelling to increase and, with nowhere for it to go, to destroy more and more brain tissue. The paramedics slip on a bag-valve mask and flow meter that feeds oxygen into his lungs, but pressure within his skull is skyrocketing. As the team speeds him to Cedars-Sinai, two miles away, blood begins to trickle from his ears.

Later, a doctor will suggest that being stuck in the wreckage all that time might have kept him alive. Because rescuers couldn’t extract and wrap him in blankets, Lewis’s body temperature fell to hypothermic levels. Death went into slow-motion.

* * * * *

Because we saw too many soap operas as kids, or because its contours are improbable, or because we just can’t bear to believe such a thing is real, there’s something otherworldly about a coma. In reality, of course, comas are simply mundane and awful. Loved ones don’t whisper just the right thing at just the right time, causing the patient magically to revive. More often at this level of injury, all that comes is death or a persistent vegetative state. A few hours at level three and doctors assume permanent damage to the brain, should the patient be lucky enough to wake at all. Lewis’s parents sat by their comatose son for four weeks.

Then one day in April, Lewis’s eyes opened.

 

The man behind the typewriter paused to make a very private and profound decision.

Reassessing the risks and benefits for the thousandth time, he made up his mind.

Would he have the guts?

He lowered his head and attacked the keys.

 

One day you’re working in the Post Office, selling stamps to chatty pensioners, and the next thing you know, you’re staring into a towering mountain packed with pissed-off Germans unleashing thunderous machine guns in your direction, all hoping to God they can shatter your skull with one of their bullets.

Grab a seat. Life’s in session.

Born in 1916 to first generation Irish immigrants, Joe grew up in the grim city of Worcester, Massachusetts. In his true crime masterpiece, In Cold Blood, author Truman Capote described Worcester as “a Massachusetts factory town of steep up-and-down streets that even in the best of weathers seem cheerless and hostile.” Fort Lauderdale, it was not. Hell, on a good day it could barely give Akron a run for its money.

Once a hotbed of anti-Irish sentiment, Worcester nonetheless harbored an abundant Irish population who gamely stepped into whatever jobs they could secure in its blue collar wonderland. Joe’s father was a janitor at a local grammar school who did well to provide an apartment for his wife and four boys. Joe’s mother, orphaned at age 7, spent her childhood working in a barroom while her peers enjoyed the benefits of public education. Naturally, the virtues of hard work and self-reliance were enthusiastically celebrated in Joe’s boyhood home.

Possessed of an uncommonly deep understanding of chemistry and languages, Joe made it into college, graduating in 1937 with a liberal arts degree from the local Jesuit institution. With the Great Depression still in the rear view mirror and stormy skies gathering across the Atlantic, he was happy to find work in the local Post Office, where he dreamed of one day becoming a chemist.

Of course, by the turn of the decade, no one was making any long term plans. Germany’s Nazi regime had begun horse-whipping the rest of Europe, leaving the Allies and the rest of the planet wondering if the big kid across the pond was ever going to step in and help.

The Imperial Japanese Navy resolved that uncertainty on December 7, 1941.

Joe began checking the morning mail for his draft card.

 

Joe was drafted on February 2, 1942 and sent to Fort Devens, in Ayer, Massachusetts, for basic training. Four months later they shipped him off to Camp Croft, in South Carolina for infantry training.

It was hard to swallow- four years of college and five more in the workforce all amounted to this- the bottom of the bottom of the United States Army. Cannon fodder.

“The infantry man is the lowest man in the company,” Joe later said, “The lowest man in the whole organization. They thought we were all dumbbells.”

To those who speak military, he was assigned to K Company, 180th Regiment, 45th Division, which was based out of Oklahoma. Originally comprised of National Guardsmen from Oklahoma, Texas and Colorado, the division’s motto was (and still is) “Tanap nanaiya Kia alhtaiyaha,” which is Choctaw for “ready in peace or war.” This was a tribute to the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, whose removal and relocation in the 19th and early 20th centuries became known as the “Trail of Tears,” yet who nonetheless sent many of their boys to fight with the 45th.

Ironically, before World War II, the 45th’s insignia was a swastika, a symbol of good luck to Native Americans. Understandably, Mr. Hitler’s choice of flag rendered the 45th’s banner somewhat unusable, and the division wisely adopted a less-incendiary emblem that still embraced its storied lineage.

 

 

 

In the sticky heat of South Carolina, Joe and the rest of his battalion were indoctrinated into the U.S. Army way of life.

“They change you right away. Before you know it. You might go in there saying ‘they won’t change me,’ but they do. Even today I don’t put my hands in my pockets. When I go into a building, I take my hat off. Nobody has to tell me that. That’s what they did to me.”

As Joe was keeping his hands out of his pockets, the Chiefs of Staff were planning several European invasions through both Europe and Africa. It didn’t take Albert Einstein to figure out the kind of invasion for which the fighting 45th was being trained.

Their lieutenant was a red-haired Choctaw, curiously named Fitzpatrick. Early one morning he led the platoon to the South Carolina shore where a Navy man stood, a boat anchored not far behind.

Lt. Fitzpatrick began barking out orders, sending the entire platoon into the sea and up the ramp into the back of the boat. Slogging through the waves and the tepid salt water, every single man understood the significance of the drill they were about to rehearse.

Once all were aboard, the boat headed out into the open sea, pulled a U-turn and then stormed towards the beach. When the engine stopped revving, the ramp would drop and the entire platoon would burst out and charge toward the shore, rifles in hand, with some banking right and others left.

“Go! Go! Go! Keep that rifle up, boy!” Fitzpatrick barked.

“You’d have to be pretty dumb not to realize what you were getting ready for,” Joe dryly observed.

They repeated the drill several times until Fitzpatrick rhetorically asked, “any questions?”

Joe raised his hand.

“Yes?” asked the lieutenant.

“Sir, we’re always taught in a defense action to bring the machine guns back to the tree line so you can catch the invaders when they hit the beach.”

“Right.”

“Well, don’t you think the enemy knows that, too?”

“Boy, you can’t have the Navy with you all the time!”

That was the moment when Joe knew he was fucked ten ways ’til Sunday. He went home and began saying his goodbyes to everybody.

“You’re never gonna see me again,” he told them.

 

All fear stems from the anticipation of losing something you’ve already got or not getting something that you want.

When your fear is imminent death, both sources flow with abundance.

The man behind the typewriter was ready to make his move.

He had not just seen the writing on the wall- it was in the very missives that he typed. An administrative clerk in Regimental Headquarters, he sat in the presence of officers and strategists as they plotted the invasion of Europe. Tucked deep inside the brains of the regiment, he was among the first to receive intelligence and he knew what the rest of the guys had long suspected- that the entire regiment would be heading straight into the belly of the beast.

Combat was assured. Survival was not.

Fuck that, he thought. He wasn’t ready to cash his chips in just yet.

And so the man quietly slipped off of the base without telling a soul.

Absent Without Leave.

His name was Tobin.

 

The officer entered the barracks and called out to Joe.

“Go to Regimental Headquarters, pronto. They need some help up there.”

“Yes sir,” he replied, hoofing it up to HQ.

For the rifle-toting rank and file of the infantry, HQ is like heaven. That’s where all the strategic planning occurs, so while HQ moves with the rest of the regiment, that section tends to be physically insulated from the front lines. Basically a whole lot of hell has to rain down before the guys sitting at their desks in HQ are required to pick up a rifle and start shooting.

Joe found the Adjutant of the regiment and reported for duty.

“This is the situation. The army regulations have to be brought up to date. There’s a big book of corrections here- just cut them out and paste them in over the old regulations. You think you can do that?”

It turns out that HQ had recently been audited by the Army Inspector General (AIG), who determined that while a considerable number of regulations had been changed, those updates were not reflected in the regiment’s manuals and Hell was in the midst of being paid.

“Yes sir,” Joe replied, “that’s just like changing mail schedules. We do that every week in the Post Office.”

The Adjutant could not have given less of a shit what they did at the Post Office. He just wanted the AIG off of his ass. Apparently the old clerk, catching wind of their impending deployment, had gone AWOL, leaving a mountain of work behind him.

“What happened to the guy who was doing this,” Joe asked.

“AWOL.”

The errant clerk’s folly was short-lived and he was quickly retrieved, relieved of his duties at HQ and returned to the lowest rung of the regiment.

“Who was he?”

“Name’s Tobin.”

 

Realizing his outrageously good fortune, Joe kept his head down and his mouth shut, quickly becoming a de facto authority in army regulations.

When an opportunity came to apply for a seat in Officer Candidate School, he leapt at it. Surrounded by officers all day long, Joe knew that his overall quality of life, as well as his odds of surviving the war in one piece, would be vastly enhanced by an officer’s commission.

“I knew there was a difference between being an officer and an enlisted man. I knew.”

He approached the Sergeant Major, a guy named Jim Arnett from the Oklahoma National Guard.

“Look at this, Jim,” he said, producing his completed application, “is this OK?”

“Just let me know when you need to get it done and we’ll push it along.”

With Arnett bringing his influence to bear, Joe’s application was fast-tracked straight to The Adjutant General of the United States Army, with explicit directions that the application be moved to the head of the AG’s “To Do” list.

The response arrived three days later.

A guy from the regiment strode into HQ with a telegram in hand and walked up to the Sergeant Major. He gestured back at Joe, sitting at his desk, and said, “well, you gotta salute him now…”

Joe was “to be commissioned directly in the Army of the United States as a Second Lieutenant and ordered to report to the Commanding General at the Port of Embarkation in Brooklyn, New York, immediately.”

 

Joe did three months in Brooklyn before being shipped over to the North African Headquarters, stationed just outside of Casablanca at Camp Cazes, where he was awarded command of a postal regulating section- the 40th PRS.

They promoted him to Captain, and after a couple of years, the PRS began preparing to move the base post office out of North Africa and into Europe. It was during those initial preparations that a sheaf of papers came through the post office with some stunning news.

A new man was being transferred onto the base.

The man was from K Company, 45th Division.

His name was Tobin.

“This is the guy!” Joe exclaimed when he realized who had just arrived at Camp Cazes. “Bring him in here,” he told his clerk.

He had so much to say to him. Whatever the man’s motives for going AWOL, Joe felt obliged to extend his gratitude. Had Tobin not fled when he did, Joe would have missed out on the opportunity to attend Officer Candidate School and receive a commission. At the very least, he’d buy him a drink.

Then Tobin shuffled into the office. His trembles and sunken eyes told a story that his voice never could.

“Tobin!” Joe reached for his hand, but no familiarity registered. “Don’t you remember me?’

“No sir,” Tobin replied with the unfocused weariness of the thousand-yard stare.

“Weren’t you that guy who went AWOL? You know, I got your job and that’s why I’m here today.”

“I don’t know that, sir.”

It was clear that Tobin had been through the wringer and that in his condition, formalities were impractical. Perhaps he could pass along news of Joe’s old buddies.

“Well then tell me, how about Donnelly? How’s Donnelly?”

Donnelly was the envy of the Company because he had a highly-polished metallic plate that fit into the pocket directly over his heart. It would take a pretty special bullet to stop Donnelly’s ticker.

“Donnelly? He’s gone. They’re all gone.”

“Donnelly? No,” this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, Joe thought, “didn’t he have that plate? Remember that plate? The silver plate?”

“Yes sir.”

“How did he die?”

“The head.”

Unwilling to accept what he was hearing, Joe offered up another name.

“Gone.” Tobin replied, “Sir, they’re all gone. I’m the only one left.”

“You’re the only one left?”

“Yes sir.”

“Where did it happen?”

“Sicily.”

Upwards of 200 men- Joe’s old friends and barrack-mates, stormed the beach that day and all but Tobin were killed.

They stood face to face for a moment before Joe dismissed Tobin.

The gravity of what he had just learned pulled him down into his chair. The faces of his buddies flashed in his mind.

That was supposed to be me, he thought.

Had an office clerk named Tobin not gone AWOL, Joe’s life would have met a bloody end on a pitiless beach in Italy.

Maybe he would have been the one to beat the odds and ended up like Tobin. He couldn’t decide which sounded worse. He just knew that his message has been received.

This is your one shot, boy. Make it count.

 

Joe made it through the rest of the war in one piece and reunited with his parents and three brothers in Massachusetts, where he went back to work for the Post Office.

He was recalled to serve during the Korean War, finishing his military service as a Lieutenant Colonel. Returning home once again, he resumed employment with the Post Office, but this time they gave him a gun- he served as a United States Postal Inspector for many years, eventually finding his way back to his hometown of Worcester.

One day as Joe was leaving his post office for lunch, a co-worker asked him to wait a moment. The co-worker then asked a brunette at the counter, “Hey, you got any lunch plans?”

“No,” she replied cautiously.

“Well, Joe, why don’t you take her to lunch then?”

Grudgingly, Joe ended up taking the girl out to lunch. A few years later they were married in St. Peter’s Church in Worcester- a couple miles from Joe’s boyhood home.

I was born in August, 1968- their first child, and my sister came along in 1976. We grew up on Worcester’s west side- a small, happy family that was ripped apart in 1989 when cancer took my mother from us. Nonetheless, we did what the rest of the world does when they lose a loved one- we moved on.

My sister and I have fluttered all over the world, graduating from colleges and grad schools, living in cities and countries across the globe, ever anchored by our father back in Worcester.

What a ride it’s been.

My dad still lives in our old house back on the west side, about a mile up the road from my sister, her husband, two daughters and their dog Ray. Hardly a day goes by that my dad and I don’t chat on the phone for at least a few minutes, and I return home from California once or twice a year. While I miss San Diego’s sunshine and beaches whenever I’m away, when I’m home with my family in Worcester, I feel like everything in the world is perfect.

My father, Lt. Colonel Joseph W. Daly, turns 95 years old today- September 16, 2011.

Happy Birthday, Dad. Enjoy your day.

And Tobin, wherever your light now shines, rest well, soldier.

 

 

 

 

This is a true story. Names and locations have been changed to protect the criminally parochial.

 

Day One

I was standing in the gym, minding my own business. Minding your own business is often the worst thing you can do, especially when you’re 15, too smart for your own good and surrounded by the lowest form of human life: the high school administrator. An unnerving presence burned into my back, the type of feeling that there’s no logical explanation for. The feeling you can’t describe without resorting to tautology. Being watched feels like being watched. I spun around to see one of my high school’s vice principals making an ugly face, probably the only kind she knew how to make. Her wrinkled face contorted into the shape of an old Yankee woman seeing something she doesn’t understand.

“Miiiiiiiiiister Pell…” she said, drawing out the first syllable, her efforts at intimidation landing squarely in the camp of self-parody. “What on earth does this patch on your bag mean?”

She pointed towards a small piece of cloth on my bag displaying a swastika crossed out. The patch covered a Prussian eagle on my messenger bag, the coat of arms of the DDR sticking out slightly beneath. To any normal person the meaning was as self-evident as a “no smoking” sign. To a high school administrator it’s an opportunity to feign confusion before engaging in unprovoked harassment. I briefly explained the origins of my patch, a stupid and naïve grin of placid adolescence across my face as I related the tale of how I got it and what it meant. I was about to learn that few things are more dangerous than being smarter than the musical comedy dictators populating the corner offices of America’s public schools.

“Modify it.” Her face pulled tightly around her pursed and angry lips.

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means remove it. And watch your mouth.”

I laughed quietly. “I’m not removing it. What about that kid over there with a Confederate flag on his jacket?”

She gestured wildly toward the far end of the gymnasium, beckoning another vice principal. She briefed him curtly before he laid the good cop routine really thick, as if auditioning for a B-grade noir. “C’mon little buddy, be reasonable! You know you can’t walk around here with that thing! Give us a break, champ! Help us out! Just maybe cover it up with something. That way you can show it off after you leave school.”

As if.

The pair escorted me to the principal’s office. I was asked to remove the patch by the principal, refusing once again. He looked at me incredulously. He was clearly a man used to getting his way. The secretary called my mother and told her that I was suspended indefinitely. I sat nervously in my seat, more or less confident that I was in the right, but wondering how my mother would react (or overreact) once she walked into the school.

My mother arrived and we both went into the principal’s office, her face a mask of plastic smile hiding livid confusion. I half paid attention to the conversation between my mother and the fat administrator with the gin-blossomed nose.

“So you’re telling me that I can go outside and smoke next to that sign with a cigarette crossed out?”

“All syllogisms are not universal, Mrs. Pell.” He clearly thought much of his Franciscan education, emphasizing the fifty-cent words and lightly toying with his Providence College class ring. “However, if you son can prove that the symbol on his bag is against Nazism, we’d be happy to let him back in school.”

My mother exited his office wearing her indignant face. “Come on, Nick. We’re going to the library.”

A trip to the library’s reference section beat the shit out of sitting in school all day. Hell, I might actually learn something at the library. My love for the library’s reference section is how I first learned about dictionaries, thicker than standard ones, filled with symbols. I photocopied about 20 pages from two or three books, different variations on the red-circle-with-a-line-through-it design.

I wasn’t so much a smart kid as I was too clever by half. I really thought any of my work might matter when we met with Principal Rummy the next day.

 

Day Two

“I don’t get it.” My father boomed. A tall and imposing ironworker with hair halfway down his back, he made Principal Rummy shift around in his seat nervously and sweat gin. “He did what you told him to. He has twenty fucking pages here proving that the symbol on his bag is against Nazis. And from what I’ve read you can’t keep him out of school. What about this… the case he looked up.”

“Tinker.” I said softly. “They have to prove a material and substantial disruption to the learning process.”

“Yeah. The Tinker case. You can’t keep him out of school for this.”

“Mr. Pell, I merely asked him to produce documentation. I never said that I would let him back into school.” I wondered if he even knew that he was lying. “Frankly, at this point I’m concerned about the boy’s safety. He’s had numerous run-ins with neo-Nazis at our school and I’m worried that this will provoke violence against him.” He oozed all the sincerity of a politician expressing concern for the poor.

“What about the Tinker case? You have to let him back in. It’s the law.”

“I’m going to break the law.”

My father raised his eyebrows in the furrowed wrinkle of incredulity that I used to rub my fingers across when I was small.

“You’re sitting here in this office as a representative of the school system and telling me that you’re going to break the law?”

“Well, let us say that I’m going to test the law.”

“You’d better hope I never see you on the street or I’m gonna have to ‘test the law.’”

My eyes bugged in unison with Principal Rummy. I stifled a laugh, but he looked like he was about to shit his meal. He didn’t, instead swallowing audibly, then nervously shifting his alcoholic corpulence around in the chair. We all went home and had dinner, a funk of anger and confusion hanging over the table.

 

Day Three

I called the ACLU the next morning and described the facts of my case. The woman I spoke to was particularly impressed that I knew about the Tinker case. The ACLU doesn’t take quixotic cases they know will lose. A meeting was scheduled for that day to determine if they would take my case. I would hear from them by five o’clock, I was told.

I hung the phone up and related the information to my slightly overwhelmed mother as I grinned widely from ear to ear.

“Can I go outside?”

“Why not? You’re not sick or in trouble.”

I grabbed my skateboard, my Walkman and my flight jacket, heading for the smooth blacktop of the nearby housing project to ride around, burning calories in a manic fury. I’m gonna burn that fat fuck so hard, I thought, furiously slamming my size nine Vans Old Schools onto the pavement, blasting my ear drums out and pumping my fist as I careened around the blacktop.

I came home, buzzing with the energy of a school day spent skateboarding instead of hunched over, head on the desk, trying to sleep over the sound of teachers droning on about subjects I either knew backwards and forwards or didn’t care about.

“The ACLU called.” My mother had a look on her face similar to the day she told me that Kurt Cobain blew his brains out. A small but noticeable knot formed in my stomach. “They’re taking your case. You have to meet with them tomorrow before they talk to the Assistant Superintendant.”

I spent the rest of the day watching talk shows and cartoons. When my friends came home we walked around the woods talking shit. By the time ten o’clock came I was uncharacteristically exhausted. I fell asleep soon after laying down, fantasies of brutalizing Principal Rummy with my skate deck flooding out reruns of favored sexual fantasies.

 

Day Four

The next day I met with lawyers from the ACLU, which had agreed to take my case. They were both a right-winger’s worst nightmare — liberal Jewish lawyers who give a shit about people’s rights. They instantly loved me, the mouthy little asshole of a child that didn’t take shit off of imperious wannabe dictators. We were quite a fit, me listening closely as they explained the way the law worked, them indulging me as I went off on my Constitutional flights of fancy, telling them about how I was a communist and stories of the Nazis in my school hassling me, throwing things at me, spitting on me, calling me “nigger lover” and “faggot” as I skulked through the hall or chasing me down a flight of stairs.

The pair of lawyers disappeared for two hours into the office of the Assistant Superintendant. I sat around nervously waiting for them, thumbing through hardcore zines and books about history I’d read a thousand times before.

My legal team emerged, smiling and shaking hands with the official who looked slightly put out at having to deal with the situation in the first place. They sat down with me and my parents, briefed us a bit about what went on during the meeting and assured us that we had an ironclad case should this go to court.

“Do you think it will go that far?” My mother asked, nervously.

“It may. Nick may have to remove the patch for the duration, but we’re confident that this is a slam-dunk case.”

My dad put his hand on my back and massaged me a bit. We piled into the car and went out for a nice dinner, laughing a bit in amazement at the whole thing.

 

Day Five

Word came early. I was to be let back into school with the patch on Monday. The Assistant Superintendant believed that my immediate suspension was a necessary consequence of sorting the matter out, but was happy to have me back at the beginning of the next week.

I did what any savvy teenage boy with a chip on his shoulder would do. I called the local media.

 

Day Six and Six-and-a-Half

On Saturday the reporters showed up around the house and mom dropped me off at the local newspaper office for my interviews. My media moment was over sooner than I thought it would be. I answered a few questions and posed for a few pictures. Once the reporters were done with me I pretty much forgot about my interviews and photographs. I skateboarded around the project. I hung out at the mall. I went to a diner and ordered cup after cup of black coffee, getting wired on caffeine until I could feel my hair growing. I played manhunt with my friends on the streets near my house, running until I was so winded I thought I would pass out, screaming obscenities at the entire neighborhood and stealing “For Sale” signs from neighborhood houses, planting them in front of the wrong house.

 

Day Seven

When I woke up on Saturday morning my mother had a slight smirk of disbelief on her face as she poured me coffee. She plopped two local newspapers down on the kitchen table in front of me. I was on the front page of both, wielding my bag and looking surly. I grinned widely, liking the attention but most of all loving that Rummy wasn’t going to be able to miss these. I cockily grabbed my bag and trotted off to the bus stop, getting glares from the usual suspects and slaps on the back from friends, allies and supporters.

The beginning of each class was like a miniature press conference. Everyone wanted to ask me what was going on, how it happened, why they wanted to throw me out, how lawyers got involved, didn’t my parents mind and all that. Sometime during the next-to-last period yet another vice principal came into the room and asked to speak to me. She spoke quietly, like a woman trying to discipline a child in a restaurant without attracting too much attention.

“There are some news reporters from the local television station here to see you. Now you don’t have to talk to them if you-“

“I want to talk to them.”

I sat seriously answering questions about my patch, racism in my school and why I chose to fight. I wasn’t the only one with something to say about it. Kids spoke in explicit detail about racist graffiti in the bathroom and racially motivated violence around the school. Pretty young things from far away lands who had the misfortune of landing in my hometown as exchange students talked about how they wished that they knew me. Even Rummy put on his best fake plastic smile and said that this was “by far, the most positive thing to happen in all my years” at the school.

No one believed him.

 

Epilogue: Day 1102

They fired Principal Rummy. I’m not sure what it was — his DUI charge or his inability to keep his dick out of the health teacher or his total lack of competency as an educator or his contempt for students, parents and the teacher’s union — but I know that what happened between me and him didn’t help much.

High school doesn’t last forever. It’s a really minor part of your life, and while I had a lot of fun there, most people didn’t. Despite what anyone says about these being “the best years of your life” the best years of my life generally involve being able to smoke a cigarette in my living room and walk into a bar without fear of being carded. Get through it, then get the fuck out of whatever shitty little town you live in and never look back.

The first thing you notice in Wellington is the wind. A full southerly buster was blowing as I drove in around the bays of the harbour, hurling the waves onto the rocks. At the hotel on Tinakori Road, shutters slapped and banged in a crazy percussion, just as Katherine described in one of her earliest stories, ‘The Wind Blows’. I recognised the way it blew the stinging dust in waves, in clouds, in big round whirls, heard the ‘loud roaring sound’ from the tree ferns and the pohutukawa trees in the botanic garden, the clanking of the overhead cables for the trolley buses. Clinging to the car door to steady myself, the street map levitating from my grasp, I experienced the exactness of Katherine’s images – ‘a newspaper wagged in the air like a lost kite’ before spiking itself onto a pine tree; sentences blew away ‘like little narrow ribbons’.

Tinakori Road, where Katherine was born and where her father occupied progressively larger houses as his status rose, runs along a steep hillside with spectacular views of the city. Above it, a tree- clad slope climbs upwards towards the ridge and below it, houses stagger downhill towards the brief fringe of level ground that edges the circular bay, enclosed by hills. The street follows a major fault line in an area that remains seismically active, and tremors were part of Katherine’s childhood experience.

Katherine loved the view from Tinakori Road, writing in her youthful notebook how ‘all in a fever myself I rushed out of the stifling house . . . on to the gorse golden hills. A white road round the hills – there I walked. And below me, like a beautiful Pre- Raphaelite picture, lay the sea and the violet mountains. The sky all a riot of rose and yellow – amethyst and purple. At the foot of the hill – the city – but all curtained by a blue mist that hung over it in pale wreaths of Beauty. Though engulfed by the expanding capital, the old houses renumbered to accommodate the new, Tinakori Road has changed little in a hundred and twenty years. It is still lined by brightly painted wooden houses, and you can have a drink in the local working men’s pub, where Katherine’s inscrutable face looks down from the wall.

The prime minister now occupies the residence where Katherine was given a farewell garden party before leaving for England in 1908 and which she used as material for one of her best- known stories.

The fabric of her narratives is laid out in front of me as I look from the motel window. The curve of the bay where Katherine spent her summers, the quays where she and her brother watched the steamers depart and dreamed of one day leaving themselves; the botanic garden where she wandered with her sisters, conscious always of the untamed wilderness just on the other side of the garden fence. ‘Here is laughter and movement and bright sunlight – but behind me – is it near, or miles and miles away? the bush lies hidden in the shadow.’

Katherine’s childhood was spent on the insecure margin between a recent immigrant civilisation and the encroaching wilderness, inhabited by an older, more primitive culture that was being dispossessed. As a visitor to Wellington you can walk along the road Katherine took each day to school, visit the cemetery where her family were buried, see ‘the gully’ where their servants lived in relative poverty, and visit the house where she was born, now meticulously restored. A square, white, plain, two- storey weatherboard house behind a picket fence, it has four bedrooms, two reception rooms, a kitchen, scullery and ‘other offices’.

In the space of a decade Harold Beauchamp would be able to move his family to a sprawling mansion further up the street – opposite, and similar in size, to the prime minister’s house. The increasing opulence of Harold Beauchamp’s houses signified his changing position in the city as he rose from a mere finance clerk to become chairman and director of the Bank of New Zealand and a member of the Wellington Harbour Board, and of a dozen other public companies. Eventually he was given a knighthood. In the New World, where the infrastructure was still unformed and flexible, ambition was worthy, ability was rewarded and anything was possible. It was an optimistic country where women would become the first in the world to win the right to vote in 1893, and where they worked alongside men to develop frontier land and commercial enterprises. This was the atmosphere that formed Katherine, and shaped her own dreams and ambitions. Katherine’s grandfather, Arthur Beauchamp, was a self- made extrovert who came to New Zealand from England by way of the Australian goldfields, settled at Picton at the upper end of the South Island and became active in local politics, being elected briefly to the New Zealand parliament.

His son Harold, Katherine’s father, started out working for Arthur at the family store. Lively and enterprising, Harold realised that the future lay in the capital rather than the provinces and a family story tells how he and a friend made plans to move there, raffling their horse and boat – the only things they possessed – in order to finance the trip. Raffling was a novel notion to raise more money and they sold a lot of tickets. But the two young men also bought a couple of tickets themselves and were suspected of foul play when they won both the boat and the horse. They got the money and kept the goods, but had to leave town quickly. In Wellington, Harold found a job as a finance clerk in the import- export business of W. M. Bannatyne & Co., and prospered. Marriage to Annie Dyer, the beautiful daughter of another Australian immigrant, in 1884 established him socially and, when his employer died, he was made a partner.

In New Zealand terms, the Beauchamps were not part of the colonial aristocracy, but of the vigorous, commercial class that underpinned and would eventually overtake it. Harold traced his origins back to a London silversmith at the time of Samuel Pepys, and several Beauchamp relatives in England were upper middle class professionals – doctors, lawyers and businessmen. Katherine’s cousin Mary Beauchamp, known as Elizabeth, made a very advantageous marriage in 1891 to the German Count Henning August von Arnim, which gives some indication of the social classes on whose fringes the family moved. Respectable, solid, but not above taking a gamble occasionally, they were the backbone of the Victorian commercial empire – the class so authentically portrayed by John Galsworthy in his Forsyte Saga. The girl who would eventually become known internationally as Katherine Mansfield was born on 14 October 1888. She was christened Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in the wooden cathedral church of St Paul’s in the centre of Wellington, though her siblings called her Kass. She was the third daughter and her entrance into the world was something of a (never publicly acknowledged) disappointment to parents who wanted a son to be heir to the growing Beauchamp estate. Katherine’s two elder sisters, Vera and Charlotte (known as Chaddie), were already attractive, intelligent, unexceptionable young girls who would grow up to do everything expected of them by their parents and social peers. A younger sister, Jeanne, and a brother, Leslie, were equally conventional. Katherine, with all the privilege of the middle child, always believed herself to be different and this conviction was reinforced by her parents’ response to a girl who refused to conform or to be pleasing in order to please. Her resistance showed itself in the stubborn, direct gaze scowling at the observer from family photographs, the penetrating point- blank questions that disconcerted both her family and their social circle.

There were physical differences too. Katherine wore glasses and was plumper than her sisters. She did not smile as often. She could be awkward and was regarded as the most demanding of the five children. She
felt herself to be loved less than her siblings and as a result became more difficult to love. The feelings of rejection grew. When her parents went off to Europe, leaving Katherine with her grandmother, her mother’s first returning words to the eager little girl waiting on the quayside were ‘Well, Kathleen, I see you’re still as fat as ever!’ Katherine’s answer was to cultivate her difference and develop a keen inner life that divided her ever more sharply from her family.

She was always imaginative. A school friend remembered playing with Katherine in the garden at Tinakori Road and hearing ‘a noise which to ordinary people would have sounded like a lawn mower’. To Katherine it was ‘Bronzo the dragon gnashing his teeth’. The spiral of smoke from a bonfire became the dragon spitting fire. Katherine armed herself and her friend with spears and shields cut from aloe and flax plants and stealthily crept through the mysterious, forbidden, green door that led to the neighbour’s garden. The dragon was quickly revealed as ‘an irate gardener’ who chased the two girls with a rake. They ran out of the gate and in a panic turned the wrong way, rushing up the drive instead of into the street. They were trapped. ‘It was tea time, but to go up past the dragon and his rake was unthinkable.’ But Katherine had the answer and approached a ‘kindly looking man’ walking past. They were, she told him, two princesses who had been chased by a gardener, who was ‘really a dragon in disguise’. The man, who knew Katherine’s family, entered into the spirit of the occasion and escorted the girls home ‘as though we really were fairy princesses’.

Katherine received yet another scolding and would always be labelled an actress and a liar. But the adventures that took place in her head were as real as anything that happened outside it. She published her first story at the age of nine. ‘Enna Blake’ – printed in the Wellington Girls’ High School magazine – is an imaginary trip to Torquay, relocated to rural New Zealand, where girls go on walks to collect ferns and mosses. It opens in Enna’s voice with a directness that already presages Mansfield’s mature style: ‘“Oh mother, it is still raining, and you say I can’t go out.” It was a girl who spoke; she looked about ten. She was standing in a well- furnished room, and was looking out of a large bay window.’ The editor comments: ‘This story, written by one of the girls who have lately entered the school, shows promise of great merit’.

The house at 25 Tinakori Road is a shrine to Katherine’s memory, its fussy Victorian colonial interior carefully matched to the period. The rooms seem crowded now with even two or three visitors. How they contained the expansive personality of Harold Beauchamp, his languid wife Annie, her two unmarried sisters, her mother, Margaret Dyer, three children and a live- in servant, is difficult to imagine. It perhaps gives an insight into the adult Katherine’s love of Japanese minimalism, her hatred of clutter, and her obsession with order.

The Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Society, founded by Oroya Day, has several treasures that belonged to Katherine. In pride of place are her typewriter, locked away in a glass case, and an exquisite black, embroidered jacket – narrow- waisted and buttoned Chinese fashion. These items found their way back to New Zealand after Katherine’s death, gifted by Ida Baker, her lifelong companion, through the scholar Margaret Scott, who has dedicated her life to the transcription of Katherine’s letters and notebooks. While Oroya painstakingly restored the house, Margaret decoded the work and, through her friendship with Ida, returned a number of surviving artefacts to New Zealand – some to the Birthplace Society and some to the Alexander Turnbull Library, where the memory of New Zealand’s most famous writer is preserved.

Although the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Society thrives on visitors, Harold’s own memorial to his daughter, erected in 1933, is run down and neglected. When I went to see it, graffiti had been scrawled on the pergola, and the filthy water of the concrete pool contained the body of a dead bird. There were no flowers and the paint was peeling. Katherine’s portrait, a triumphant statement of personality by the American Colourist Anne Estelle Rice, is hidden away in the vaults of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, along with much of the art collection Harold Beauchamp gave as an endowment to the capital city he helped to build.

Katherine’s literary fortunes have fluctuated since she died in 1923. For many years her work was undervalued in her birth country, as her first biographer Ruth Mantz discovered, and there were those who considered her to be more European than authentically a New Zealander. In the Oral History Centre of the Alexander Turnbull Library, listening to the cultured Kensington accents of her sisters on tape, one can well imagine how this might happen – after all, Katherine spent a large part of her life in Europe. But there are other voices there too, reassuringly New Zealand voices. Edie Bendall, the object of Katherine’s eighteen- year- old passion, talks of the stifling atmosphere of Katherine’s family, the social calendars of fashionable young women, the corseting of young minds along with their bodies, and how she and Katherine walked every evening to talk of literature and art and the world beyond their limited horizons. ‘I am ashamed of young New Zealand,’ Katherine wrote in a letter. ‘All the firm, fat framework of their brains must be demolished before they can begin to learn. They want a purifying influence – a mad wave of Pre- Raphaelitism, of Superaestheticism, should intoxicate the country.’ Katherine and Edie’s views were in direct conflict with the prevailing mores, expressed by one of Annie Beauchamp’s contemporaries. ‘After all that is said of the advantages of art & high civilisation & the way some girls consider home ties, duties and affection mere dust in the balance when weighed against European culture & advantages, I had far rather my children & grandchildren grew up loving dunces than have them value intellectual gains as the supreme objects to be striven for in life.’

The teenage Katherine was on the side of intellectual gain and European culture, but against the Victorian straitjacket its social conventions imposed. It was a dichotomy she struggled with. ‘On one hand lay the mode bohème – alluring, knowledge- bringing, full of work and sensation, full of impulse, pulsating with the cry of Youth Youth Youth . . . On the other hand lay the Suitable Appropriate Existence. The days full of perpetual Society functions, the hours full of clothes discussions – the waste of life. The stifling atmosphere would kill me . . .’

Part of her would always be rooted in an older, more primitive heritage. In Wellington Katherine had a passionate adolescent love affair with a Maori girl, Maata Mahupuku. Even after the affair was over, they remained friends. Maata’s nephew talks on tape of her funeral, and asserts that draft chapters of an early autobiographical novel called ‘Maata’, which Katherine sent to her from England, as well as their personal letters, were put into the coffin when Maata was buried.

In the novel, fragments of which exist elsewhere in manuscript, Katherine herself takes on the Maori persona of the heroine. Her fictional and actual relationships with Maata illustrate her fascination with the double heritage of her birth country – the balance between Maori and Pakeha.

As early as 1906, in a piece called ‘Summer Idylle’, Katherine assumes a Maori identity, but with a Pakeha name – Marina. She imagines the ‘slow, tranquil surrender of the Night Spirits’ and dreams of eating ‘eggs and bread and honey and peaches’ with her female Pakeha counterpart, who bears the Maori name Hinemoa. The whole of Katherine’s sexual and racial ambivalence is there – the crossover of names, Marina and Hinemoa’s erotic exchange in a room redolent of tea tree blossom, and Hinemoa saying ‘it is because you are so utterly the foreign element . . .’

Leaving Wellington on the ferry as Katherine did, I crossed Cook Strait to the South Island, the vessel edging its way through narrow fjords of impossibly turquoise water to the small port of Picton, where Arthur Beauchamp, Katherine’s entrepreneurial grandfather, ran a store and tried to farm. She remembered visiting him, ‘lying to one side of an immense bed . . . like a very old wide- awake bird’. Further south, the city of Christchurch was the last place in New Zealand Katherine saw before she left for England. She arrived by ferry from Wellington and transferred to the liner anchored in the deep- water terminal at Lyttelton, over the hill from Christchurch, which now takes container ships and oil tankers. I went there to visit Margaret Scott, whose home nearby Diamond Harbour is a focus for scholars and writers from all over the world who want to share a bottle of wine and talk Mansfield.

Margaret describes the almost impossible task of learning to read Katherine’s handwriting as like translating a foreign language, and the specimens on show in the Alexander Turnbull Library support this description.  Margaret once spent an entire week deciphering one word, the blown- up photocopy propped in front of her at breakfast, lunch and dinner in the hope that some blinding fl ash of insight would eventually occur. And it did. Katherine’s habit of choosing the unusual, the least expected, word – as in the phrase ‘the swooning sun’ – added to the difficulty of the task. Margaret is one of the few people still alive to have known Katherine’s surviving family and friends. She visited Katherine’s sister, Vera, in the United States, stayed with John Middleton Murry’s fourth wife in Norfolk and became a trusted friend of Ida Baker – the famous ‘L.M.’ of Katherine’s diaries and letters. Margaret tells wry stories of Ida’s haphazard housekeeping. On one occasion Ida, her eyesight very poor, cooked some rather elderly mushrooms she had kept for too long in a paper bag. ‘Lesley, dear, they’re crawling with maggots!’ Margaret said, as they sizzled and seethed in the pan. Ida was mortified, throwing them out into the garden with profuse apologies to the maggots she had almost cremated. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘they had eaten so much mushroom they would have been more mushroom than maggot. So it wouldn’t have been too bad if we had eaten them.’ Margaret glimpsed the infuriatingly irrational logic that had so enraged Katherine, as well as the naivety and honesty that kept Ida loyal.

On subsequent visits to New Zealand, I spent weeks in the archives of the Alexander Turnbull Library, reading Katherine’s letters and original notebooks, which reveal much more than their printed transcriptions. They are human documents that show their author’s method of working and her fluctuating moods. Katherine liked to write in ‘cahiers’ – French school exercise books – but she also used Strakers’ diaries and pocketsized notebooks with board covers. She wrote on the right- hand side of the page, leaving the left- hand side free for annotations. The notebooks are well used: there are pages torn out, corners folded down and sometimes pressed flowers between the pages. In the margins, she scribbled comments and doodles, shopping lists and occasionally, in a fit of boredom, snatches of music hall songs and jokes. You can tell by her handwriting when she is angry or exhausted.

John Middleton Murry’s diaries and letters are there too. For the first time it is possible to put them side by side with Katherine’s to provide a complete narrative of their years together. John’s diaries, which he kept
until his death in 1957, and his fragments of autobiography, are a harrowing record of emotional inadequacy and how his obsession with Katherine destroyed two of his three subsequent marriages and adversely affected the lives of his four children. He is often accused of being ‘the man who made Mansfield miserable’ and, before I went to New Zealand, my background reading had reinforced that view. I began my research prepared to be critical. But, after reading his diaries, I found myself much more compassionate and better able to understand why he had behaved as he did, and why Katherine went on loving him ‘in spite of all’. Mansfield scholar and author Vincent O’Sullivan, who co- edited The Letters of Katherine Mansfield with Margaret Scott, was a sane and objective adviser in my quest to understand their complex relationship and to unravel the ‘Mansfield myth’ that John Murry’s editing of her work created.

To go to New Zealand in search of Katherine Mansfield is to be aware of the heart of her duality. This remains one of the least urbanised places on earth. Small oases of human habitation exist in a vast wild landscape still largely unshaped by humans, full of dramatic contrasts and contradictions. Snow- covered alps, volcanoes, glaciers, craters and geysers, glacial torrents in wide flood plains, impenetrable rain forests and tropical beaches give place to each other just as they did in Katherine’s time. She experienced this landscape with a passionate physicality. It became a metaphor for the disordered adolescent landscape within her that resisted ‘European cultivation’ as forcefully as the Maori had resisted appropriation of their
traditions and their land by the white immigrants – the Pakeha. The hinterland of Maori culture, ancient and powerful, exerted a strong influence on Katherine. Harold Beauchamp learned their language in order to do business with Maori. His cousin married a Maori and had five children. Katherine’s Maori relatives and friends showed her a different view from the European perspective, a new way of living and experiencing the world around her, and a way of resisting colonisation. Katherine knew she had ‘the taint of the Pioneer’ in her blood. She was aware of the role of Pakeha as usurpers, insensitive to any kind of right that was not expressed in a legal document. Katherine could see, when she looked out into the bush, ‘vague forms lurking in the shadow, staring at me malevolently, wildly, the thief of their birthright’. She imagined a shadowy host of dispossessed, ‘passing, passing’. And the sound of water, the wind swaying in the trees suddenly became ‘the sound of weeping’. Yet the bush was a source of strength and creativity as she fed on its erotic power. ‘There is bush, silent and splendid . . . and everywhere that strange indefinable scent. As I breathe it, it seems to absorb, to become part of me – and I am old with the age of centuries, strong with the strength of savagery.’

Born across two cultures, educated in yet another, Katherine would always struggle for one definitive identity. And her work, edited for a European audience, reflected the divisions, though it remained always recognisably antipodean. As one of Katherine’s compatriots remarked, It touches neither fiord nor geyser certainly but it has the feel of the land. – If she mentioned neither street nor tree that New Zealand knows, if her work were set before us unknown and unplaced I think we would lift our noses like dogs to the wind and smell our country. I think we would know the Picton boat and morning At the Bay . . . I cannot pass a certain house in Tinakori Road without a stir of pain for the girl who they say lived there as Cassie Beauchamp. It is a far cry from Tinakori to Fontainebleau where from the nettle, danger, she plucked the flower, safety.

I watched a tear roll down Valerie’s face. She said nothing for the longest time, then she stepped in close and whispered, “I lost my husband to drugs.”

I didn’t respond.

“My parents are in Iowa now,” she reminded me. She hesitated a long time before she said, “I have no reason to stay here.”

She pulled an enormous wad of cash out of her purse.

“This is your half of what we had.” She shoved the money into the pocket of my coat, then she walked away.

I shot every dime of that nest egg into my veins within a month. It wasn’t enough to dull the pain of losing Valerie.

Nothing short of death could dull that pain. But I tried. I was shooting up in the bathroom one afternoon when the resident crackheads called me downstairs.

“Frankie! We need you.”

“Later,” I slurred as the heroin surged through me.

They had to wait a few minutes, until the first wave of the high passed over me, until I could manage to hold myself up against the wall and teeter down the stairs.

“What?” I asked, only it sounded more like “Whaaaaa?”

“You’re outta control, dude. We love you, but you’re losing it.”

“Whaaaaa?”

“Dude, we’re sorry, but you can’t stay here no more.”

You have to be fucked up to have crackheads pull an intervention on you. They were smoking crack the whole time they were telling me how messed up I was and how they couldn’t handle watching me kill myself. I would’ve told them to go fuck themselves, but it would’ve come out sounding like gibberish.

I crawled up the stairs to get my stash out of the bathroom.

I looked at myself in the cracked mirror over the sink. If only I’d had a needle hanging out of my dick, I would’ve been a dead ringer for the corpse man.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Tears poured down my face. “This ain’t who I am. This ain’t who I want to be. I swear to God I don’t want to live like this no more. I don’t want to fucking die like this.”

There was dead silence on the other end of the phone.

“I’m checking myself back into rehab. All I’m asking is one more chance. Just one. Wait for me. Please.”

“We’ll see,” Valerie said.

When I showed up at the Eagleville rehab center for the third time in less than two years, the staff skipped over most of the normal admission rigmarole. They waltzed me past potted plants and game tables in the common room, not bothering to give me the tour spiel again. They marched me straight to the Dual
Diagnosis Unit, which deals with alcoholic-addicts suffering from depression, and hooked me up with methadone.

I always entered rehab sincerely wanting to get clean. Then after a week or so, I’d pretty much get clean, clean enough to realize I couldn’t handle the idea of staying clean. Staying clean meant dealing with me, the me who disappeared when I was high or drunk. Staying clean meant living with the memories, con-
fronting the monsters, wallowing in the fucking misery. Staying clean meant being me, unprotected, forever.
During my third stay at Eagleville, I didn’t even manage to stay clean while I was still there. When the nurses weren’t looking,

I stole medications issued for other patients. Some of the dudes in the dualie unit were whacked out for real, regardless of booze and drugs. I didn’t know what they had wrong with them or what pills the docs prescribed for them, but anytime I could get my hands on one of those little plastic cups the nurses passed
out, I swallowed everything in it.

Of course, Valerie had no clue I was using inside the rehab center. That was the one place she thought she could trust me to stay clean, or at least trust the staff to keep me clean. For thirty days, she let her guard down. For thirty days, she stopped worrying. For thirty days, she tasted what it must feel like to be
married to someone who wasn’t an alcoholic-addict. Those thirty days gave her hope. False hope, but still hope. Valerie decided to wait for me. She decided not to leave our marriage so long as I would agree to leave Philadelphia with her. She thought if she could just get me away from the dealers in the Badlands
and the dealers on Second and Porter and the dealers in my family, I’d make it. We’d make it.

***

BARRY MORRISON CALLED TO ASK IF I’D BE WILLING to talk to some people on behalf of the ADL.  “I don’t know,” I hesitated. “I ain’t ever given, like, a speech. I just talked to youse guys that one day.”

“And that’s all you need to do this time: just talk. Just share your story so others can learn from it. Will you do it?”

I thought about it for a few minutes and figured, how bad can it be? So I committed with, “Okay,” then after the fact asked, “So who am I talking to?”

“My daughter’s seventh-grade class.”

Shit.

Barry drove me to the suburban school himself. The whole ride, I kept coaching myself, “They’re just little kids. Don’t cuss. Don’t cuss. Don’t cuss.” We walked into the classroom. The teacher had all the kids arranged in a circle. One little chair at the front was empty and waiting for me. “Oh, fuck!” I thought, as I wedged myself into the seat, “What in holy hell have I gotten myself into?” Then I reminded myself one more time, “Just don’t cuss.”  It was my only goal for my first public speech. Just don’t fucking cuss!

Cussing, as it turned out, wasn’t the challenge; crying was. I broke down sobbing minutes after I started, before I even got to the part where I joined up with the skinheads. I spilled my guts to those little kids for nearly an hour, and I bawled like a baby the whole damn time. They just stared at me. No one said a word; no one so much as coughed or squirmed around in their chairs. Not the kids. Not the teacher. Not even Barry Morrison.

I was a basket case the whole ride back to Philly. Barry kept trying to console me, saying I’d done a good job and it was his daughter’s class and the teacher knew it was going to be rough and the kids and their parents had all been warned about that beforehand, but nothing he said mattered. I’d blown it, and I knew I’d blown it, big-time blown it. It wasn’t just that I didn’t think I’d made my point, or even made any sense. I was worried I’d actually scarred those kids for life. Two dozen twelve year-olds just spent an hour locked up in a classroom watching my nut job Nazi ass have a complete mental breakdown. Getting my point across was the least of my worries; I was worried about getting bills in the mail for all their therapy sessions.

I stayed high for days trying to forget that God-awful experience. Not even Second and Porter had a drug that could block it out. So when Barry called me about a week later and asked me to stop by his office, I figured he wanted to tell me in person that I would never, ever again be speaking on behalf of the ADL, ever, under any circumstances, about any subject, ever.

“A package came here for you.” Barry handed me a large manilla envelope addressed, “Frank Meeink, c/o ADL.” I just stared at it.  “It’s from the school you spoke at last week.”

I kept staring. The first round of therapy bills? Grievances from the school board and the PTA? Hate mail from twelve year-olds?

“Open it,” Barry said.

The first letter on the stack sounded like the kind of letter a teacher would make a kid write to a guest speaker who’d had a breakdown in front of a bunch of seventh-graders.

“Mr. Meeink, Thank you for talking to our class. You were brave to share your story.”

The second letter was about the same: “Mr. Meeink, Thank you for visiting us and talking about what happened to you.”

A few letters farther in, a few of the students wrote, “I’m going to try to be nicer to people from now on” and “I promise I won’t ever hate anybody.”

I remember thinking it was nice of the teacher to have at least some of the kids pretend they got my point.

Then I hit this one letter that changed everything: “Mr. Meeink, I bet you had a long, boring ride back to Philly.” That’s all it said. That’s exactly the kind of letter I would’ve chicken-scratched in seventh grade. That was the real deal.  And if that was real, so were the others. Some of those kids had actually heard me through all the crying. My words had made a difference.

When I looked up from the stack of notes, I was crying again. Barry was beaming like a proud papa.

“I told you your story could help people,” he said. “A lot of people want to hear you speak, Frank. I just need you to tell me if you want to keep going.”

I did. Within just a couple of months, Barry and other members of the ADL team were driving me to speaking engagements all around Southeastern Pennsylvania. It was like therapy for me, only instead of lying on a couch, I stood on a stage.

The Wisconsin primary was a scramble anyhow, a frozen ordeal that started in February and cost the whole of March until the voting on the fifth of April. The Kennedys needed Wisconsin to prove that they could win in white-bread America. March is a lion of a month that far north among the Great Lakes prairies. There are no white-tie receptions in Wisconsin. All Hubert Humphrey, the straw opponent, had, really, was his bus to ride in and the fact that he seemed to understand these Finnish ice fishermen and Croatian-Slovene brewery workers, knew dairy politics and resort problems: This might be enough.

Bob Healy, subsequently the executive editor of The Boston Globe, tells the story of the winter afternoon, shortly before the primary ended, when John Fitzgerald Kennedy was soaking his aching back and swollen right hand in bathwater in a motel: Teddy was around the suite, fidgeting, sure that there was still something he could do, some way to spend the time effectively. John Kennedy asked Healy to keep Ted company while he distributed whatever handbills were around out there wherever he found a likely place to use them up. Ted Kennedy and Healy put coats on, drove around the sanded and potholed network of the local Class A road system for a while, and wound up in a shopping center parking lot. Ted Kennedy grabbed an armload of leaflets, prowled among the cars while snapping the material under the windshield wiper blades or through whatever windows he found open.

Most of the windows were snowy or frosted, and just as Kennedy was running out of enthusiasm he was able to get the back door of a four-door sedan ajar a little and was reaching across to drop a leaflet on an inside seat when Healy tells it best–”The biggest goddamn bulldog in the world appeared from behind the transmission tunnel and just about took Ted’s arm off cleanly at the elbow. He jerked his forearm out of there in a hell of a hurry, of course, but I could see that the bulldog had just about torn off the sleeve and had sunk his teeth pretty nicely into Ted. I said, ‘Jesus, let’s get you to a doctor or something,’ but he mumbled something about no, we don’t have time, it doesn’t hurt anyway…. What he was really saying was that he was a Kennedy, and you can’t hurt one of them, of course. But I’ll tell you something…” the impish Healy, feet onhis desk, finished his story off with one of those smothered Irish smiles. “It would have hurt Jawn all right. He wasn’t that much of a Kennedy.”

At first Steward occupied the booth on Wednesdays and weekends, Webb the rest of the time. But as Steward established himself as the superior craftsman, customers in search of tattoos began abandoning Webb in favor of Steward. In retaliation, Webb put the word out that Steward was homosexual. “In those days,” Steward later wrote, “you had to keep it hidden. Otherwise [you either risked a beating, or else] would be bartering blowjobs for tattoos.” (Faced with a sudden influx of “barter-boys,” Steward simply told them they had the wrong man, and directed them across the street to a grotesquely ugly and alcoholic tattoo artist named Shaky Jake.)

The neighboring Pacific Garden Mission also proved problematic. While it trafficked in “the usual holy-roller stuff of the far-right fundamentalist kind, derived from . . . Billy Sunday, who had actually been ‘converted’ on their premises,” the mission quickly revealed itself to Steward as yet another racket—one that after giving free doughnuts and coffee to sailors later milked generous donations out of their worried parents. Particularly galling to Steward was the mission’s practice of sending out its temporarily reformed drunks, known as “runners,” to stop sailors from getting tattooed. Steward eventually hired a lawyer to keep the mission from interfering in his business.

In opening his booth at the Sportland Arcade, Steward knew he was taking an enormous risk with his academic career. But it was, in fact, a calculated risk—for although he knew he wanted to be a tattoo artist, he did not yet know whether he would be able to make enough money at the job to survive, and he wanted to hold on to his DePaul paycheck for as long as he possibly could. While his moonlighting was surely an expression of rage against the university—for he felt extremely ill-used by its administration—working as a tattoo artist was yet another form of thrill-seeking for Steward. Never before had he done anything so potentially dangerous to his livelihood and professional reputation, and never before had he existed in any place so perilous as South State Street. As a result, he wrote, “The street’s miasma and excitement began to play hob with my sense of reality, giving me an almost schizoid separation in my mind and emotions . . . I [had entered] . . . the seamy, sodden world of whores and pimps and pushers and winos and con-men—yes, and of tattoo artists.”

While living a double life of this sort might well have been difficult for the average man, Steward was far from average. He had, after all, lived with a strongly divided consciousness since childhood, when he had appeared angelic to his aunts and teachers, yet as a renegade to neighborhood boys. As a closeted homosexual with an exceptionally dynamic sex life, he had again needed to live a life of constant concealment and trickery. For years he had courted danger and discovery as he moved between a series of highly compartmentalized personas. Now, however, he had become another person altogether: professor Sam Steward by day, tattooist Phil Sparrow by night.

There was, of course, no explaining any of it to his friends. Even among the most permissive and sympathetic of them, Steward could hardly begin to describe his erotic fixation on tattoos and tattooing, for at that moment in history, such markings were looked upon largely with horror, and were worn almost exclusively by misfits and outcasts. (Nor could he explain to his friends his overpowering attraction to delinquents, criminals, street toughs, and working- class men.) To many of his most liberal acquaintances, including Alfred Kinsey, tattoos were a mark of degradation, and to be a tattoo artist was to traffic in corruption. In that sense, tattooing was just the opposite of Steward’s vocation as a teacher, for he had by now devoted nearly twenty years to the enlightenment of young minds.

Even Steward himself was quietly conflicted about this new activity, for a great deal of its allure came directly out of his gut sense that what he was doing was profoundly bad, sinful, and wrong. “[My] secret embarrassment over the whole matter,” he later wrote, “led me to denigrate the skill by usually referring to it as ‘tattoodling’ . . . as if to show my ‘intellectual’ scorn of such a profession.”

After Steward had set himself up as a tattoo artist down at the cage, Kinsey made a proposal, one that would add an intellectual component to the work there:

After a month or two passed in my new career, [Kinsey said], “You are probably one of a half dozen literate tattoo artists in the country—if indeed that many. And we’ve noticed tattoos of hundreds of persons during our interviews. But they seem totally unable to tell us why they got them, and we don’t have the time to probe as deeply as we would like into that aspect . . . [So] keep a journal for us on what you can perceive as the sexual motivations for getting tattooed. You may not be a trained scientific observer, but you have a writer’s keen eye, and you should be able to unearth a great deal.”

Steward’s sex-and-tattooing journal would run for six years, and ultimately amount to more than a thousand pages in single- spaced typescript; with it he kept remarkable statistics about physical and emotional responses to tattooing, basing these statistics on interviews he conducted afterward with his clients. He later noted that along with its investigations into the psychology and sociology of tattooing, the journal evolved into a partial record of segments of the subcultures that existed in the 1950s. “The tattoo shop was of course a magnet for the very young boot sailors stationed at nearby Great Lakes Naval Training Station, but it also drew into it the youth gangs of Chicago, the juvenile delinquents, the sexually confused and rootless (sometimes illiterate) young men—the rebels without causes. In a sense, the journal crystallize[d] a troubled time that included McCarthyism, Korea, and the seeds of the deeper rebellion of the 1960s.”

What Steward neglected to mention in this description, however, was that the journal was also a highly detailed sexual confession—for even as he began it, he found himself erotically transfixed by the men coming for tattoos, and also found himself surprisingly successful at propositioning them. Through the strange sort of sorcery that came with applying tattoos to bodies, he discovered he was able to establish a powerfully intimate connection with one young man after another. Sometimes he merely observed sexual responses in the men; at other times, he ended up having some sort of sexual interaction with them. Just as often, however, he found himself becoming emotionally overwhelmed by these men whose bodies he was handling so intimately, for their exceptional youth and beauty left him in a highly responsive state. As a result their joys were his joys, their sorrows, his sorrows:

[The other day at the tattoo kiosk] there had been standing around a young 17- year- old in a big black navy raincoat and a civvie hat . . . Came his turn—he took off the raincoat [and] he was wearing a grey corduroy jacket too small for him, and a pair of nondescript trousers . . . [I put an arrow- pierced heart on his] forearm . . . He was a little pressed for time, mentioned East Liverpool and the train leaving shortly. It was only when he stood up to put on his Navy coat, however, that he took hold of the corduroy jacket, and said, “Navy suit.” Whereat the whole story tumbled out—he had got to Great Lakes, and there been rejected for a strain or sprain, and was now going back. I was floored, and felt the emplastic unfolding within me so much that my own lip began to tremble, as his was doing, restrained only by will. I felt it all vividly, perhaps because it was so close to my own experience: the shame at rejection, the great burning to wear the uniform—and then to that I could add his feeling of loneliness in the big city, and the final desperate gesture of something to remember the Navy by—or some little sign of his all too short period of service: the tattoo, to show the folks at home, at least, a pathetic souvenir of a career cut short, and high hope extinguished.

I was more shaken by the kid than I cared to admit . . .

With entries such as these, Steward began to discover the real significance of his journal: like Lieutenant Seblon in Querelle de Brest, his writing would explore feelings that were otherwise denied all expression—for there was no one in his life with whom he could share them, including even the young men who evoked them. Such stories could never be published, or even told to friends. Steward was entirely alone in this new world of his own creation, but the idea of an understanding listener—the father-confessor he had so vainly sought in his conversion to Catholicism in the 1930s, and subsequently thought he had found in Alfred Kinsey—now propelled him to write about his sexual thoughts, feelings, and activities as never before. It was the only place he could tell the absolute truth about his life. As a result, his involvement with the journal became all-consuming, and would ultimately prove the most intimate relationship of his life.

1951-1953

The First Holly

Traveling was forced upon little Truman Capote from the beginning. By the late 1920s, his mother, Lillie Mae, had made a habit of abandoning her son with relatives for months at a time while she went round and round from man to high-falutin’ man. Gradually the handoffs began to hurt Truman less—either that, or he grew more accustomed to the pain—and in time, his knack for adaptation turned into something like genius. He was able to fit in anywhere.

After his parents’ divorce, five-year-old Truman was sent to his aunt’s house in Monroeville, Alabama. Now was Lillie Mae’s chance to quit that jerkwater town and hightail it to a big city. Only there could she become the rich and adored society woman she knew she was destined to be, and probably would have been, if it weren’t for Truman, the son she never wanted to begin with. When she was pregnant, Lillie Mae—Nina, as she introduced herself in New York—had tried to abort him.

Perhaps if she had gone away and stayed away, young Truman would have suffered less. But Nina never stayed away from Monroeville for long. In a whirl of fancy fabrics, she would turn up unannounced, tickle Truman’s chin, offer up an assortment of apologies, and disappear. And then, as if it had never happened before, it would happen all over again. Inevitably, Nina’s latest beau would reject her for being the peasant girl she tried so hard not to be, and down the service elevator she would go, running all the way back to Truman with enormous tears ballooning from her eyes. A day or so would pass; Nina would take stock of her Alabama surroundings and once again, vanish to Manhattan’s highest penthouses.

Had he been older, Truman might have stolen his heart back from his mother the way he would learn to shield it from others, but in those days he was still too young to be anything but in love with her. She said she loved him, too, and at times, like when she brought him with her to a hotel, promising that now they’d really be together, it looked to him as though she finally meant it. Imagine his surprise then when Nina locked him in the room and went next door to make money-minded love with some ritzy someone deep into the night. Truman, of course, heard everything. On one such occasion, he found a rogue vial of her perfume and with the desperation of a junkie, drank it all the way to the bottom. It didn’t bring her back, but for a few pungent swallows, it brought her closer.

For the better part of Capote’s career as a novelist, that bottle—what was left of his mother—would be the wellspring of most of his creations. The idea of her, like the idea of love and the idea of home, proved a very hard thing to pin down. He tried, though. But no number of perfume bottles or whiskey bottles, no matter how deep or beautiful, could alter the fact of her absence. Nor could most of the women or men to whom Truman attached himself. They could never pour enough warmth into the void.

In consequence, Capote was equal parts yearning and vengeance, clutching at his intimates with fingers of knives that he would turn back on himself when left alone. However sharp, those fingers pulled his mother from the past and put her on the page where, in the form of language, he could remake her perfume into a bottomless fragrance called Holly Golightly. That’s how Truman finally learned the meaning of permanence.

Once the reading world got a whiff of it, eau d’Holly made everyone fall in love with Truman, which, since his mother had left him that first time, was the only thing he ever wanted. That and a home—a feeling of something familiar—like an old smell, a favorite scarf, or the white rose paperweight that sat on Truman’s desk as he wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

April, 1996

I was in a hotel room in Ohio.  I think it was Cleveland.  I’m pretty sure it was not Cincinnati, but to this day, I’m not one hundred percent on that.  I had been up for two days, so just getting Ohio correct is worthy of scientific notice.

I was working as a roadie for a rock and roll outfit from San Diego who were in the midwest swing of a North American tour.  I was a drum tech, which meant that each evening when we arrived at the venue, I would unload the equipment with the band, set up the drums, and hang by the side of the stage during the gig to re-string guitars, fetch new drum sticks and make enthusiastic use of whatever liberal drinking privileges were extended to the band.  After the show, I would pack up the drums, load them into the van and then pursue activities more consonant with a rock and roll lifestyle.  Next morning, off to the next show.  Rinse and repeat.

The thing is, I only did this for a week at a time, a couple times a year.  It was how I spent my vacation time from my real job.  Some people choose sun-drenched beaches or historic faraway lands for their paid time off, but not me.  I’m a rock and roller at heart.  Whether or not I’m playing music is immaterial- I bleed fat E chords, long sweaty pentatonic solos and the machine-gun snap of double kicks.  So wherever and whenever I could get my fix, I took it.

Oh, my full time job?  Attorney-at-law.  And Lord, did I hate my job…

In fact, it was in the aforesaid (how’s that for a lawyerly word?) hotel room that I put an end to my law career.  I had staggered into my hotel room that afternoon to finally crash, and walking to the window to draw the blinds seemed a hellaciously unreasonable task.  Therefore when I awoke only a couple hours later, the room was blindingly bright from the sun that was roasting me like a putrid, alcohol-soaked tamale.

It was from that dingy bed, still wearing my clothing from the night before (actually two nights before), that I picked up the phone, called one of the senior partners at my law firm, and said that while I understood the tackiness of resigning over the phone, I was simply done with the legal profession.  Adios, muchachos.

To be fair, although they were completely surprised by the call, I have to think that they were somewhat relieved.  While the senior partners of my little law firm viewed my employment there as an otherworldly gift that they had channeled to me, I had regarded it more as an agony to endure.  My only bright spot in the day had been in the mornings, feasting on breakfast sandwiches and gallons of coffee while reading the morning newspaper at my desk.  I am quite sure that my professional malaise was apparent in a host of colorful ways.

I know, I know- “if you hated it so much, ‘Mr. Rock and Roll Guy,’ why even go to law school?”

Oh, so it’s like that, eh?

Well, if you must know, while law school is a most hallowed stepping stone towards a noble vocation for most attorneys, for people like me, it is a respectable place to regroup while evaluating mistakes made during the undergraduate years.  It is also a socially acceptable way to extend the party another three years.

Now, I am eminently aware that I have a bit of the gift of gab, so I took to law school like the Vatican takes to a good cover-up.  I enjoyed both public speaking and the challenges of persuasive writing.  The rugby-playing slacker who graduated college in the bottom hundred of his class was the same guy who finished near the top in law school.  Bizarrely, when I actually tried, I got results.  Who knew?

The thing was, while I enjoyed the flashy stuff, I loathed the intensive research and the myriad of detailed procedural regulations that governed all legal action.  I basically wanted to perform only the fun and sexy roles that lawyers play on television, while avoiding the other 95% of the legal practice, which is neither fun nor sexy on any level.  Hey, I’m an optimist- what can I say?  Still, having clerked at a small firm throughout all of law school, I was well prepared to take on my new career.

After passing the bar, I ended up at a small spin-off firm where the senior partners tried to haze me like a college freshman and where my salary was somewhere between that of the maintenance man in my apartment building and the guy who reported to him.  They believed that it was their divine right to impose a never-ending stream of demeaning administration on me, with very little in the way of personal or professional encouragement.  In fact, my first role as a new lawyer in the firm was taking over as the new law clerk, while the old law clerk studied for the bar.  And so I began my professional career being the office errand boy, while at the same time, trying to work on my own files.  I felt emasculated.

I still remember one Friday afternoon, sitting at my desk and getting ready to cut out a little early for the weekend.  Both senior partners walked into my office on their way out the door, grinning smugly.  The woman threw a file on my desk and scoffed, “[h]ope you don’t have any plans for the weekend.  Here’s a new case.  I want to see a memo on this on Monday.”

I looked at the front of the file and immediately noted that it had been prepared on Monday and assigned to me on Tuesday.  But rather than let me get started then, they held onto it until Friday afternoon to give it to me.  I was apparently supposed to ruefully accept the assignment and show them that I could rise to the challenge by spending all weekend in the office, and presenting a world class case assessment on Monday morning.

However, in what would surely have been a career-limiting move (had I cared much for my career), I replied, “I’ve already been through college and law school.  I worked thirty hours a week clerking at my old firm while going full time to school.  I don’t think I need to prove anything to you guys.”

If I could crystallize the look on their faces, I would crush it into a fine dust and snort it.  It was that satisfying.

“Excuse me?” the woman said with considerable offense.

“Look, we got this case on Tuesday.  I get it.  You want me to show you what I’ve got.  But if you weren’t sure if I was up the the challenge, why even hire me in the first place?  I mean, haven’t I already shown you that I can do this?”

They both stammered and stared uncomfortably at each other.  While I knew the last word would not be mine, I nonetheless relished this fleeting moment in the sun.

“Look, Joe,” said the man, getting a little feisty, “this is how it is.  This is your assignment and I don’t care how you do it, I want this done by Monday.”

“Cool, I’ll have it to you on Monday.”

“Monday morning,” the woman clarified with considerable agitation.

“OK, I’ll get this to you on Monday,” I replied, implying that I would both begin and complete this task on the same day.

The partners stormed out.  I sat at my desk with my heart racing at a much faster pace than my demeanor might have revealed.  I knew I was done.  The clock had begun to tick.

I had found myself depressed at the prospect of a lifetime in law.  That I needed to leave this law firm was obvious.  But it was hard to see a true solution in simply moving to some other small firm with more of the same.  I had become burnt out after only two years.  In all fairness, my dim outlook was mainly due to my own inability to accept many of the realities of the profession.  It was only compounded by my unpleasant experiences at my little firm.

But it wasn’t just my character defects that led me to my professional unhappiness.  I had also become disheartened by what I perceived to be a systematic abuse of the legal system. I saw plaintiffs exaggerating and sometimes fabricating injuries in order to get more money.  I saw their lawyers abuse rules of procedure to attempt to pressure insurance companies into paying them off.  I saw insurance companies try to use sleazy exclusions to get out of defending people who had paid them for the right to a defense.  And I saw a court system full of poorly-compensated clerks who rarely engaged in a transaction without letting you know how much they were looking forward to their day ending.

I was depressed, jaded, and entirely unhappy with my vision of the next thirty years.  I wanted out.  Thankfully, out arrived a couple of months after “The Friday Afternoon Unpleasantness.”  My out arrived in the form of a technical writing gig for a start up telecommunications company.  The job had nothing to do with the law.  Not only that, but it paid better and most importantly, it allowed me to reclaim my self-esteem and a long lost sense of dignity.  I accepted the new job immediately.  It was one of the best decisions of my life (next to buying a Gretsch Silver Jet).

***

After giving notice from my dingy little hotel room, the weight was lifted.  I felt empowered for the first time in years.  I was driving my own ship now and I was thrilled at the possibilities before me.

I returned from my roadie vacation and worked on my files for two more weeks, preparing memos on my cases and handing them off to the different lawyers in my firm to whom they would be re-assigned.  I mainly got the cold shoulder from the other attorneys, except for the one guy who had become one of my best friends and a much-needed ally during those two harrowing years.  He was happy for me, and having him as a confidante helped get me through those two final weeks.

On the last day of my legal career, I arrived in the office at around nine a.m. and had a breakfast sandwich at my desk while I read the morning newspaper.  I worked until about noon and then my attorney buddy and I absconded to a watering hole, where we spent the rest of the afternoon.  I strolled back into the office at around 4 p.m. reeking of alcohol.  I was triumphant in my ambivalence.  The senior partners were standing in front of their corner offices on the other side of the floor, glaring at me.  I walked into my office, threw a couple of my books into a cardboard box, and emerged.  With my box under one arm, I waved to the partners and walked out the door.

Havana

On the afternoon of February 17, 1909, a small boat pushed off from a dock in Havana’s harbor, cut through the pearl-green waters hugging the shoreline, and slid into the ultramarine-blue bay. Out ahead of it, one of the most luxurious private yachts in the world lay at anchor.

The length of a football field, the Liberty was rivaled in size and extravagance only by J. P. Morgan’s Corsair, which had set the standard of seagoing opulence for a decade. With two raked masts front and aft of a large smokestack, the white-hulled Liberty was like the beautiful schooners that had plied the oceans years earlier. “I have never seen a vessel of more beautiful lines,” said one man on board, who had served on a yacht belonging to the second white raja of Sarawak. Inside, the spacious vessel contained a gymnasium, a library, drawing and smoking rooms, an oak-paneled dining room that could easily seat a dozen people, quarters for its forty-five-man crew, and twelve staterooms fitted by a decorator who had designed furnishings for London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

At this hour, on board all was still. The engines were silent, the bulkhead doors remained closed, and the upper deck gangways were roped off. The Liberty’s owner, Joseph Pulitzer, had just gone down for his after-lunch nap, and severe consequences would befall anyone who disturbed the repose of America’s most powerful newspaper publisher.

Since becoming blind at the apex of his rise to the top, the sixty-one year- old Pulitzer suffered from insomnia as well as numerous other real and imagined ailments, and was tormented by even the smallest sound. Every consideration possible was made to eliminate noise on board. Engraved brass plaques in the forward part of the ship warned, “This door shall not be opened until Mr. Pulitzer is awake.” At sea, the ship’s twin steam engines drove propellers set at different pitches and running at varying speeds in order to minimize vibrations carried through the hull. The Liberty was a temple of silence.

It was also Pulitzer’s cocoon. The demons that beset him never rested. For two decades, he had roamed the globe. At any moment, he might be found consulting doctors in Germany, taking baths in southern France, resting on the Riviera, walking in a private garden in London, riding on Jekyll Island, hiding in his tower of silence in Maine, or at sea. Since his yacht was launched the year before, water had become his constant habitat. In fact, the Liberty carried sufficient coal to cross and re-cross the Atlantic without refueling.

Wherever he went, it was in the company of an all-male retinue of secretaries, readers, pianists, and valets. In every practical sense, they had replaced his wife and children. From morning to night, these men tended to his every whim and kept the world at bay. By long practice, they had mastered handling his correspondence, discerned the most soothing manner by which to read books aloud from his well-stocked traveling library, and found ways to entertain at meals.

However, during his long exile Pulitzer never relaxed his grip on the World, his influential New York newspaper that had ushered in the modern era of mass communications. An almost unbroken stream of telegrams, all written in code, flowed from ports and distant destinations to New York, directing every part of the paper’s operation. The messages even included such details as the typeface used in an advertisement and the vacation schedule of editors. Managers shipped back reams of financial data, editorial reports, and espionage-style accounts of one another’s work. Although he had set foot in his skyscraper headquarters on Park Row only three times, whenever anyone talked about the newspaper it was always “Pulitzer’s World.”

And it was talked about. Since Pulitzer took over the moribund newspaper in 1883 and introduced his brand of journalism to New York, the World had grown at meteoric speed, becoming, at one point, the largest circulating newspaper on the globe. Six acres of spruce trees were felled a day to keep up with its demand for paper, and almost every day enough lead was melted into type to set an entire Bible into print.

Variously credited with having elected presidents, governors, and mayors; sending politicians to jail; and dictating the public agenda, the World was a potent instrument of change. As a young man in a hurry, Pulitzer had unabashedly used the paper as a handmaiden of reform, to raise social consciousness and promote a progressive—almost radical—political agenda. The changes he had called for, like the outlandish ideas of taxing inheritances, income, and corporations, had become widely accepted.

“The World should be more powerful than the President,” Pulitzer once said. “He is fettered by partisanship and politicians and has only a four-year term. The paper goes on year after year and is absolutely free to tell the truth and perform every service that should be performed in the public interest.”

Like Pulitzer himself, however, the World was aging. Its politics had grown conservative, its novelty had spawned dozens of imitators, and its great achievements lay in the past. Most readers couldn’t remember a time before newspapers, thick as magazines, circulated in the millions, sold for as little as a penny, and were filled with dramatically written news, riveting sports coverage, comics, marital advice, recipes, fiction, and even sheet music.

On this day, a reminder of the paper’s fabled past stood nearby. Rising from the waters of Havana Bay like a cadaver’s finger was the top portion of a mast. It was the only visible remains of the USS Maine, which blew up a decade before, killing most of its crew. The disaster, coming at a time of rising tension between Spain and America, became incendiary kindling in the hands of battling newspaper editors in New York. William Randolph Hearst, a young upstart imitator from California armed with an immense family fortune, had done the unthinkable. In 1898 his paper, the New York Journal, was closing in on the World’s dominance of Park Row. Fighting down to the last possible reader, each seeking to outdo the other in its eagerness to lead the nation into war, the two journalistic behemoths fueled an outburst of jingoistic fever. And when the war came, they continued their cutthroat competition by marshaling armies of reporters, illustrators, and photographers to cover every detail of its promised glory.

The no-holds-barred attitude of the World and Journal put the newspapers into a spiraling descent of sensationalism, outright fabrications, and profligate spending. If left unchecked, it threatened to bankrupt both their credibility and their businesses. Like Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, they fought it out at the edge of a precipice that could mean death to both combatants.

In the end, the two survived this short but intense circulation war. But their rivalry became almost as famous as the Spanish-American War itself. Pulitzer was indissolubly linked with Hearst as a purveyor of vile Yellow Journalism. In fact, some critics suspected that Pulitzer’s current plans to endow a journalism school at Columbia University and create a national prize for journalists were thinly veiled attempts to cleanse his legacy before his approaching death.

In addition to forever sullying his name, remembrance of the war pained the publisher for another reason. Pulitzer’s most formidable political foe had come home a hero. Worse, Pulitzer had contributed to this enemy’s glory. When Theodore Roosevelt led his famous Rough  Riders to victory on Cuba’s San Juan Hill, he had brought the press along. After unleashing and glorifying the power of the press, Pulitzer watched his nemisis Roosevelt harness it as the most potent tool of political leadership in the modern age.

For a quarter of a century, the Republican Roosevelt and the Democratic Pulitzer had battled for the soul of America’s reform movement. It had been an epic clash. On one side was an egotistical, hard-boiled politician, convinced that Pulitzer was an impediment to the resplendent future his own leadership offered the nation. On the other side was a sanctimonious publisher who believed he was saving the republic from a demagogue. “I think God Almighty made it for the benefit of the World when he made me blind,” Pulitzer had confided to one of his editorial writers a few months before. “Because I don’t meet anybody, I am a recluse. Like a Blind Goddess of Justice, I sit aloof and uninfluenced. I have no friends; the World is therefore absolutely free.”

Now, as twilight descended on his presidency, Roosevelt hoped to take revenge for all the years of abuse. The immigrant son of Hungarian Jews—blind, tempestuous, and neurotic—had become the bête noir of the brawny, bellicose scion of the American aristocracy. Triggering the president’s wrath was the temerity of Pulitzer’s World in raising the possibility that the Panama Canal, Roosevelt’s most sacred accomplishment, had been tainted by corruption. Under presidential orders the Justice Department was madly combing through dusty century-old law books hoping to find some means to punish Pulitzer for his most recent affront. Grand juries were convened in Washington and New York. If Roosevelt had his way, Pulitzer would spend his last years alive locked up in prison.

At last the small boat from the harbor reached the Liberty. It pulled alongside and a handwritten copy of a cable from New York was passed up to Pulitzer’s loyal valet and confidant, Jabez Dunningham. When he read it, Dunningham rushed to the ship’s bridge and gave orders to the captain to put out to sea. Roosevelt’s grand jury in Washington had announced its decision.

Mitochondrial DNA is a profound, primeval truth.  As far back as all the creatures we can see with our naked eye, ourselves included, it’s meant that the blueprints for the energy of our lives are passed only through the lines of mothers.  Poetry is all about such profound truths.  Sometimes those truths possess lives in cruel ways.  Sylvia Plath is known as a writer and a woman who killed herself.  Her daughter became a writer.  Her son has just killed himself.  A tragic purification of the mitochondrial line.  It so happens that Sylvia’s imagined rival, mistress of her husband Ted Hughes, and Sylvia’s rival to the dramatic (but not poetically) minded, also killed herself, and her daughter with Hughes.  But that is soap opera, not poetry.

The power of that popular drama is pretty compelling.  Masses of inferior poetasters (OK, I’ll say it—like Anne Sexton) were mostly interested in Sylvia’s reflected notoriety, a notoriety, I think, that also raised sensation over the sort of solid poetical talent that, say, Denise Levertov had on offer.

I’ve always been keen to look past all that.  I don’t know Sylvia nor Ted nor their children personally, and there is plenty of drama to be found among people I do know.  The universe, however, has perhaps never seen so much poetry concentrated in one phenomenon as in the union of Ted and Sylvia.

That’s why, when I heard of Nick’s suicide yesterday, the first thing that flooded my mind was not “Oh, that sad, tragic family”.  No.  The first thing was the poetry.

Love set you going like a fat gold watch

That line was for Frieda.  The one who writes.  The one who lives.  It has that Sylvia-line quality of leaving you gasping.  It beautifully illustrates her mastery of stress (in prosody, of course, which is why we must leave aside that the stress of life led her to the oven).  tick…tick…BANG!BANG!BANG!  I love reciting this “Morning Song” to my children at bedtimes.  When Osita was about four years old he interrupted me at

I’m no more your mother…

O: Hey, Dad.  That part’s all right for you.

Of course it is.  I don’t share mitochondrial DNA with Osita.  I stand under the golden bough, and wait for him to come and kill me, and to stand in my place, waiting for his son, if any.  And what is the poetry of a son killing his father?  It’s in the very name of my father’s home village.  Umunakanu, which is Igbo for: “May my children be greater than me.”  I don’t remember what I replied to Osita.  But I do have what I wrote later, in “Rooting Reflex”, for Udoka.

I’m no more your mother
Than the nervous squibs of smell, sight and sound the brain balls
into love.

(And yes, I know how foolish it is to put my own lines down in the same article as Sylvia’s and Ted’s, but poetry tolerates even foolishness where it faithfully seeks meaning).

Sylvia has also been there for Lori and me.  When she was pregnant with Osi, and we took winter walks in Ft. Collins, I would often recite “Metaphors” to her.

This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.

L: You know.  That wouldn’t come off flattering to a Cosmo girl.

U: Good job you’re not a Cosmo girl, what?

L: And what’s that supposed to mean, anyway?

So even though I’ve never been interested in any hint of a truce in the battle between the sexes, and certainly no such weak-kneed pap for my own marriage, I’ve shared with Lori some of the feminist’s loud indignation of Ted, if only (again) because of irresistible poetry.

I made a model of you,.
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.

Oh you did.  So bring it, sister! What?!

I fell in love with Sylvia’s words in college, when I thought I could never reconcile myself enough to women to marry, all the while knowing I wanted a family, and pouring the energy of that contradiction into my reading and writing.  I always knew that when I had a family, I’d have to share Sylvia with them.  But not Ted.  Ted is mine.

I awoke to a shout.
“I am the Alpha and Omega”
Rocks and a few trees trembled
Deep in their own country.

(Off-head, so may be off a bit.  I looked on-line and can’t find Ted’s “Gog” anywhere.  I’ll probably seek it out in my books and post it myself).  Ted has always expressed perfectly the distance that I know is one of my own most intrinsic qualities.  The distance that was always obvious with my father, and that I already see in my three young sons—maybe I’ll have to share Ted, after all.  It’s a distance I’ve become pretty good at closing when it suits me, like Ted striding across a crowded party, seeing Sylvia for the first time, to seize her, and to pound a kiss into her face. The soap opera says some salacious things but truth is in the poetry.  The distance was the “rack and the screw”.

I awoke to a song jarring my mouth.
Where the skull-rooted teeth are in possession
I am massive on earth
My feet-bones beat on the earth
Over the sound of motherly weeping

You can read right there where love electrified the colossus like a cavity punched through the dentin.  Love maddened him with pain, and yet it never closed the distance to the object of that love.  Because it’s not supposed to.  The point of an all-consuming presence is that distance doesn’t matter (or shouldn’t).  Closing, weaving, stitching, cinching—that’s not how the colossus works.  He doesn’t gently spin the strand of mitochondrial DNA.  He sharpens his sword and strides off to the golden bough to cut something.  Indeed sometimes what the father doesn’t want to share, the son takes by force.  I think Osi was closer to five when I was reading from Crow to him.

God tried to teach Crow how to talk.
“Love,” said God. “Say, Love.”

I got around to:

Crow convulsed, gaped, retched and
Man’s bodiless prodigious head
Bulbed out onto the earth, with swivelling eyes,
Jabbering protest—

And Osi chuckled.  It was my turn to gape.  And to fume a bit.  I recite all sorts of poetry to the kids.  I want to give them a chance to enjoy the texture of language well before they become preoccupied with the drama it conveys.  But Osi was chuckling at Crow.  It seemed a bit too early for the duel under the golden bough.

Indeed sometimes what the father doesn’t want to share, the son takes by force. It’s too pat to draw a direct line, because poetry best conveys truth in intricately woven strands, but Nicholas did meet an untimely end in some form of struggle, and his mother’s poem still does echo, in a way that I cannot get out of my head.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

✄ ✄ ✄

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