HISTORY THROUGH TWO EYES ONLY

or the meaning of the Poet’s

Doggerel: “I wrote poems for

his family’s good occasions. He

denied me fifty cents for transportation.”

Hugh J. Schwartzberg, Esq.

Delivered at the Chicago Literary Club

on November 12, 1979

Unless I am mistaken, some distant century may stumble across the following lines in the collected works of a certain 20^th Century Chicago Poet: “I wrote poems for his family’s good occasions. He denied me fifty cents for transportation,” In a sense, tonight’s paper is a gloss on those lines. At the risk of going down in literary history as an arch-villain, I offer this footnote for some future Ph.D. candidate, if he can find it. I was the man who denied that poet those fifty cents.

The speaker asks you to believe that the poet who is almost our subject for tonight is a real one; asks you to assume that somewhere in this city there is a living poet of probable merit of whom you have probably never heard, and whose poetry you have almost certainly never read. As to the future – assuming, of course, that this paper has a future – we ask that the future believe that this audience is real; that in the final quarter of the Twentieth Century there was still an all-male, female-barring private club with literary interests, which one might address with some expectation that a tale told in confidence might remain somewhat confidential.

The future is asked to imagine a setting of overstuffed leather and somewhat less comfortable wooden chairs. The future is asked to believe that a men’s club, resembling something out of a long-forgotten novelette by Richard Harding Davis, had survived to the year 1979, and that this club expects to be able to continue to keep its archives in one of the leading literary libraries of this city. After all, both the present and the future are always equally unlikely.

As to whether our poet is a major one need not concern the present; the future will make up its own minds. For the present, assume that this still unknown poet is a man in his middle fifties of above-average height, whose present hunger is gradually reducing a somewhat substantial girth, a shambly, lumbering man of glacial slowness, who enters the door of my home, and stands with his coat on for several minutes, slowly adjusting to the heat of the room. Because that hallway is my own, we know that this is a Thursday night.

While he stands there, coat and all – in my hallway – let me explain his presence, and also try to better explain what I am about.

There are days when I assume that if I ever get around to recording my magnum opus on the criticism of poetry, I may be remembered for some brief posthumous while. But even if those hopes are met – and I am seldom that hopeful – there is nothing of immortality in me, as and for myself. I may be a critic; I am not a maker.

Poetry tends to breed rather bitter thoughts about immortality, in part because of our rather perverse attitudes towards poets.

As you all know, in most centuries we have not paid poets enough to pad their bellies. Our most popular recent poet, Robert Frost, grubbed his way through later life by means of lectures, with the aid of a small inheritance. Even so, it was Frost who came closest to fame and self-sufficiency through the exercise of the unprofitable art of poetry. You will bear in mind that, in Frost’s case, that fame was fed by the man’s own careful bellowing. The potential cash audience for poetry is a tiny one. Wallace Stevens, shortly before his death, had sold less than 2,000 copies of his Collected Poems despite the best of reviews, and a lifetime of production, and more than adequate distribution. As you know, Steven’s comfortable life was funded by his role as Senior Vice President of a major insurance company.

Perhaps we have always had more producers of poetry than there are consumers of that product. Most poets blush unread, whether published or unpublished. One need not be that conventional figure, the hermit poet, in order to be largely overlooked while still life-size. But when death has struck a major poet down, fame then (and usually only then) may strike its hour.

It is then that the plot’s reversed, the sonnet shifts its meaning. The major poet soon becomes raw material for English Faculty Processing. In the final stage of such academic processing, any detritus associated with one of these immortals gets gathered up and stuffed into footnotes, only to be carried forward ever after by that stream of repetitive copying which we sometimes dub “research.”

I myself, I have suggested, may conceivably be one such immortal footnote in this particular poet’s biography; and that is one of the things that troubles me tonight. We would all rather be immortal in our own right, or so I assume.

I also assume that the Twenty-third Century may consider me something of a fool.

Let us assume that some young person of the 16^th Century knew just why Shakespeare left that second-best bed to Anne, and whatever happened to the original manuscripts, and above all knew and understood the Dark Lady’s attitudes towards Shakespeare and Shakespeare towards her, but failed to record a word of it. What would we, we with our hunger for tales of the famous, think of such a person today?

If someone out of the 13^th and 14^th Centuries was acquainted with both Dante and Beatrice, knew with relative certainty those bits of information that a future famished for such information would eagerly demand, but declined to provide any word of it, to what circle of Hell would we consign him?

What if the poet was neither Shakespeare nor Dante, but one of those obscure, recluse figures who trouble the course of literature? Would we not, at the least, accuse the man-who-failed-to-make-witness of an ungenerous lack of respect for the ongoing process of literary criticism? I plead guilty, my lords – I think.

We have been leaving that poet standing in my hallway for some time now, and he should be just about ready to take off his coat and place it on my bannister, along with the others already piled there. It is shortly after 8:00 o’clock at night, and it is still Thursday night, and I have not yet explained what he is doing there.

As a few of you know, the Schwartzbergs hold open house to discuss poetry every Thursday night at 8:00 o’clock. For two hours, we will discuss one poem or several poems, by a particular poet. Each poem is read out loud, analyzed line-by-line and world-by-word, and discussed. The session formally ends just after 10:00 o’clock. If some great poet has died, we will then read a few of that poet’s own poems as a memorial tribute. There may also be some announcements of general interest, after which people start to leave. Those who wish to do so may stay for a few minutes longer, if someone has a recent poem which they would like to share with the group. The poet in the hallway, among others, occasionally provides such a poem. By 10:30 or so, the last visitor is shooed out the door.

This formula has been used for more than 20 years now. If you have seen Fantasia, you know the kind of Magus I play in all this. Somewhat like Mickey Mouse, I don’t know how to turn off the flow of guests. Usually if I can’t be at home on a Thursday night, someone else is given the key, and another is anointed group leader for that night’s discussion. There are usually between 6 and 15 participants. The number is self-limiting.

It really is open house. For a while, we feared that one regular participant was also a potential homicidal maniac, despite his classical scholarship. As it turned out, I have no hard evidence one way or the other. The poet whom I started to introduce from my hallway some minutes ago, appeared to enjoy one’s company.

There have been various odd types. We occasionally see a small, rather bent bird of a man who finds our open house a substitute for the academic soirees of his White Russian forebears, and who come to sleep his way through the sessions, occasionally awakening to mouthe rather horrible puns. The bulk of the participants, however, are earnest and interested and able. Who else is going to trouble with poetry in this fashion, in this age?

By this point in our third decade, there have been several “published poets” among the stream of visitors. Some names might be recognized. You would not, however, recognize the principal figure in tonight’s tale, who, by the way, is no longer standing in the hallway but has just taken his accustomed seat in the large straight-backed chair along the Eastern wall. We will henceforth call him by the initial S, for easier identification.

I have been extracting from S the manuscripts of those poems which he has read in our home for many years, now which is more than most editors have been able to do. When I first met him, a little less than 20 years ago, he had had a piece or two published in something called “The Chicago Jewish Forum,” as well as a poem in a literary magazine called “Bitterroot.” All that I was to learn much later. It is the nature of these Thursday night discussions that one learns of the participants’ views on Life and Death, on Immortality and Forgetting, long before one learns what a visitor does or does not do in the more mercantile world. For some months, a Methodist minister passed himself off in our group as a “Salesman for Light and Power.” When a utility lawyer tried to talk shop with him, the minister confessed to his vocation.

It was many months after his first visit before I learned that S was unemployed, and conceivably unemployable, and some years before his father called me to mourn: “What will happen to him when I’m gone?”

In these poetry sessions, no expert is armored by expertise. If the Chairman of a College Department of English attempts to hide behind his or her citations of authority, the counter-attack will be immediate and effective. If one suggests a point of view, during these Thursday meetings, one must be prepared to defend it by oneself.

Over the years, the discussions have ranged beyond Juvenal’s views of First-Century Rome, and we have seen Eighth-Century China through the eyes of Tu Fu and Li Po and Po Chu-I. These last few months we have been dealing with some of the living: John Ashberry and Richard Wilbur, Donald Hall and W. D. Snodgrass. Next month we expect to progress to Shelley.

Mr. S is speaking on that night we have been hypothesizing. His words are delivered with that enormous thrust and wight which accompany a pre-carved, well-rounded sentence, delivered slowly and with a sense of great certainty. There is just a hint of greater deference toward him and towards those of his views with which the others do not automatically disagree. We are not a warm crew, although the arguments grow heated.

S’s beard is graying, his head largely bald, and there is a one-sided patch of his upper right lip on which no moustache grows. Tonight he wears a rather scruffy beard, and the edges of his face seem somewhat red-rimmed. At the moment, his clothes are large on him, but that appears to be a matter of hunger.

If the future can find it, there is a brief two-dimensional, color, motion-picture clip among my souvenirs, dating from some years ago. When the camera turns to S, he reaches for the Random House Dictionary and assumes a mock-classic pose. None of this has anything to do with his poetry.

Some of the earliest manuscripts which S presented to us bore pseudonyms like Cosmo Monkhouse or C. Giovanni Moravia or D. Delmore Brazil. If these names sound eminently unlikely, S himself liked to remind us of the unlikelihood of such a name as Adelaide Crapsey, who had at that time not yet been rediscovered by anyone other than S, so far as we then knew. Those of the early poems which bore S’ pseudonyms tended to be frothy, mythological structures, done in sprightly rhythm, and in a kind of bare-boned discourse. Among these were the Mary Moonlight poems. Others were a mixed bag. Some where derivative; all were promising. His earliest masters were Hart Crane and Walt Whitman.

Almost all of us often urged him to submit various things for publication. He did submit two poems t the New York Herald Tribune, and the Herald Tribune printed them as a part of their series of offerings of a poem-for-the-day. The Herald Tribune soon folded, and S again drew back from publication.

In the early 1970s, the Chicago Sunday Tribune had a poetry column run by Marcia Lee Masters, (Edgar Lee Master’s granddaughter, I believe). To our general astonishment, Ms. Masters convinced S to release one poem on October 31, 1971, which was entitled Late October in Lincoln Park. As I recall it, there was a sense of celebration on the following Thursday night. The poem itself was a brief one.

With those exceptions, S has published no poetry. So far as I know, no other poems by him have ever been submitted for publications.

Some years ago, I began to squirrel S’s scraps, and I will probably delay the beginning of his reputation – if he is to have one – because of the quantity of early trivia which I have hoarded. His work did not really begin to match his stride until his 50's.

My deal with S was that I would trade a number of photocopies of his manuscripts for the originals. I feared a replay of Gogol or Roualt, or even that S might find a more obedient literary executor than Max Brod was to Kafka. On the one hand, I feared that a life’s work might be destroyed in a moment’s rage; on the other hand, I believed that S was a survivor-type. Injured by the idea of the holocaust, but a survivor. Whatever S’ value, from the beginning, the thought of potential loss of the manuscripts seemed peculiarly terrible to me. The three copies or later, six copies he received as “payment” were to be distributed by him among friends.

Occasionally, he would arrive early on a Thursday night. Once he used a paper-bound book from my library as scrap paper, on which to write the poem known as Flowers Above a Dictionary. How could I criticize that, when he had added the words: “For Hugh and Joanne Schwartzberg, in whose home and in whose hospitality this was written.” One day he used our guest-book to record the poem entitled In Extremis, but Thinking of Hopkins.

My being is filled with the beauty of bouncing

Strike and rejoice in the journey to sun,

Touch and rebound in the touchstone of run-

ning of soaring – oh the winging of ing,

Oh, the bird of surprise coiled at the heart of thing.

Being of bread I bear the dust and the burr,

The wight of an ocean rests in my bone,

(And the ocean knows how weary I am,)

Being of grass, what will be is sure,

Being of parts, not a part will endure.

But the year can be flight, but the stone can be storm,

The mind may rescind the statute of rigor,

Mortal and May span and world rising in logar-

ithm, cadence and image lifting, transforming fresh form,

Bread and the ocean bouncing to angels, and oh, my heart, no harm.

There came a time when I began to learn something of his background. The God-intoxicated child whose hangover began with the knowledge of Auschwitz, had been a drop-out from rabbinical school. In another age, if not a Rabbi, he might have become an exemplar of that peculiarly Jewish institution of shtetel life, the town scholar, supported by the working community. He might perhaps have been married to the wealthiest merchant’s daughter. That, after all, was a tradition more powerful than metaphysical doubts.

S seemed particularly pleased when I was elected as local President of B’nai B’rith, the Jewish charitable and service fellowship, as he wanted a sense of identification with that religious community while continuing to proclaim his disbelief. He announced some weeks beforehand that he would write a poem in honor of my installation as President, and presented it to me just before that August ceremony. It arrived at the last moment, and he was hurt and angry that I did not cause it to be read. Let me hasten to assure you that I had no doubts of its relative merit, as against the ephemeral remarks of the State’s Lieutenant Governor. S’ offering was the Covenant Sonnets, which begins.

How shall our dead enter the heaven of

Covenant, when, into the fire sapphire:

Undeadened, disgraved, fired in the blazed air,

Kilned in their unkilling for the lambent grove

Whose adumbration lit the eyes and power

Of Moses, when time was honed from everywhere;

Oh, how shall our Auschwitzers be here

Who burned in other flames and were devoured?

Decades have drowned in the ocean, and the names

Of our children, drowned in Teretzien,

Whose stiff, succinct faces but eyes like sailes

Looked godward and hereward, then turned to games

Till one of death’s waves seized them. Let them in!

Though they be dressed in terror and the grave’s ills. . .

I did instead read S’ briefer poem on the same theme which begins: “Remembered, again they rise up through the stems of flowers” as I wondered what the Lieutenant Governor or most of that audience understood from those words.

When my son, Steven, was thirteen, his Bar Mitzvah gift from S was the poem which told that young, amateur geologist of S’ memory of him on his lap at eight months, reminded Steven of S’ having read Jarrell to him, and of a game of toss. All these memories were interspersed with S’ own post-holocaust horror. That sense of loss which centered on S’ never having had wife or child bursts into light in the poem’s final line:

“Because you are thirteen and also bright,

And hold a sextant in your looks, you think

That the world is explicable in light

And knowledge, like a rock collection, links

Atom to atom into an apercu,

And virtue follows wisdom, as is just

Once I was Bar Mitzvah, innocent as you,

And saw the smaller wheel in the very dust –

Whirling a providence to the grass, the snow,

While high homed, the circuits roared, We know.

Because you are thirteen, you also know

The photographs of mystery: brown and blue,

Modes of earth and Modes beyond the earth’s snow,

After Auschwitz, you see more than I knew

Who saw my people smashed to smalti, shareet

Of smalti, teeth in rows, hair in cameras.

Because you are Bar Mitzvah now, we meet,

After Teritzein, to discuss our Laws

And we bear differently yon Decalogue

Who became this Bar before and after Gog.

And because when you were small, six months or eight,

You sat on my lap, amazed by my glasses,

And later, laughing, always somewhat late

To seize the ball, shuttled between the tosses

Your father and I arched half a library,

Because I read you the Bat Poet, saw

Your fingers grope to learn geography

Your mind beside Jacob in the ascending awe

I especially rejoice to see you climb

Year on rung to bear the paradigm.

And I wish you energy and order,

I wish you love at the core of rubric.

May rock and fire be the ushering border

To imagination and the maker’s fabric.

May you move in justice through history,

The mortal arm in the gyres of Teffillin,

I wish you the sensate word in harmony

With time and towns, concord of the frontlets’ twin

Flowings.

I wish you, later, that one wife

Whose bones will shine to yours, Adam’s candlelife.”

This final theme is struck elsewhere in other poems:

“What others have and I have not –

a wife, a life, a place of light –

are somethings that I near forgot

Struggling to survive in night;

and getting older with the stars,

who have more time than I have got . . .”

To those of use who knew S’ propensity for long walks at night under those stars, so habitual that he may have come to sleep most days through, those words were very clear. To S, the merged alternative image of light, home and family has always been a powerful one, and is often infused with that sense of loss. This made more poignant for me such lines as those describing our own home thirteen years ago, in a poem which was given as a housewarming gift:

“In the ten rooms of love your

hands hold the world in.”

One of last year’s poems by S, Casual Mysterium at the Schwartzbergs, is not one of S’ strongest poems, but as a description of a strange feather awaft in my own home, it must and did necessarily move me. After all, I live in what he there calls that “capstone of quietude.” I own and love the paintings he there describes, but see no useful reason to cite the artists or their titles for the non-existent benefit of an imaginary future. Similarly, the poem In Return for Flowers is dedicated to my wife and myself because it was in response to an azalea plant we sent to S when he was ill. That is the poem which includes:

“Where shall we go but into beauty, ask

the petals, asks the earth beneath the red

Propellers, where shall we go but into

the world, asked the seed, propelled by itself.”

And the poem concludes:

“Arise, Azalea, bear the sharks, even, up;

His teeth are houses in your lives, citizens

On the streets of your bodies, Climb the hills

Bouquets of eagles; garland galaxies.

And I, sad critic of synechdoches.

Architect of buzz, poet of patience

And all zeros, observe the universe

Move but middling fast, and vermiculate.”

Obviously, I do not mean to suggest that the poems which bear some relation to myself are my favorites. As one of many counter-examples, I know only vaguely the Roy Lipscomb to whom the poem Seasonal is dedicated, but cannot resist reading it here:

The snowflake and the spider crawl,

Chiaroscuro, on a wall.

The snow climbs down, the other, up:

The seasons never wholly stop.

And when they pass each other, blind

To beauty of web and hexagon,

When briefly, autumnally aligned,

On mortar where a paragon

Holds worlds together-even rot

Is subsumed, given enough decay –

Their neighboring upon a dot

Is mindless, nor for them to say;

But we, less virtuous than they,

Still have the distance for the whole:

The thought collates, and puts away

Deeply, for later, move and goal.

What shall we make from strangeness? New

Longitudes such as Jacob flew;

As threads on topiaries wind

In the endless season of the mind.

At the same time, for the purpose of this paper, it is not inappropriate to conclude by noting that his early figure of Mary Moonlight grew up to become Blanche Byrd (whose adventures did bear S’ signature) and that Blanche Byred-2 bears the dedication: “For Jenny Schwartzberg, age 11, who is a very nice girl; whose father and mother are good friends.”

That half-dollar matter could be explained further, but it still rankles, stuck in the mind.