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84. On Tuesday,
when I went. . . .
On
Tuesday, when I went to campus to check my mail, I found a memo from the
Interlibrary Loan office notifying me that my books had come in. I presented
myself in short order to reap the harvest of my diligence, and soon had in my
trembling hands four worn, dingy, unprepossessing volumes. Three of these held
little immediate interest, but in the fourth I had possession of, for the first
time ever, In Parenthesis by David
Michael Jones in its entirety. It being early in the term, I had no proper
business on campus that day, so I took the books home to my lair, where I
brewed some tea, made myself a luxurious nest on the sofa, and had my first
look at the thing itself. What I found there renewed my commitment (such as it
was, for a time) to the study of literature.
Beside
the Mort D’Artur, which was and
remains my first and truest love, In Parenthesis is probably my favorite work in English. It’s a long
and rambling poem in four sections, in which a company of mostly Welsh and
Cockney infantrymen is trained, equipped, and marched inexorably to war in the
trenches; it ends in an unnamed battle that is the death of all but one of
them, Corporal John Ball, who, wounded in the legs, crawls away to become the
narrator of the poem. This characterization of the major events describes the
book as accurately as would a statement that Moby Dick is a novel about whaling. For one thing, John Ball’s
is not the only consciousness presented; others, notably the Welsh private
Aneirin Lewis, contribute their observations and terrors. For another,
virtually the whole body of literature about war from Homer onward is brought
by allusion to bear on the poem’s events. For a third thing, there’s the beauty
of the language, for all that it’s a catalogue of suffering and a lament of
death. Charmed into a trance, I read the book through—it is not long—and reread
it. When I looked at the clock, I found it was already suppertime; I’d
forgotten lunch.
Thus
I spent the happiest afternoon of my career as a graduate student. I rose from
the couch, steadied myself against the wall, and drifted to the bathroom and
then the kitchen. I opened a can of split pea soup and put a pan of weenies on
to boil. David Jones had been worth the wait.
While
the meal was heating, I got pen and paper and made a list of books I’d need to
read. I’d have to read the Odyssey
and reread the Iliad, for a start;
the Aeneid and all of Dante would
be necessary, too. Then there were the medieval romances, like the Song of
Roland, and there was my old friend
the Mort D’Artur. Jones also made
allusions to Celtic myth, books and heroes of whom I’d never heard; I’d have to
find what I could of Welsh and Irish literature, maybe get some historical
perspective on the Celts in general. Undoubtedly there would be criticism on
Jones himself. . . . I looked at my list and blinked. If I did nothing but read
eight hours a day, it would’ve taken me the rest of the semester. Longer. All
this for one lousy paper to remove an Incomplete in a class I’d hoped I was
done with. Looked at in the light of discovery, it amounted to weeks of
delightful reading, with a day or ten of drudgery at the other end. Seen as an
imposed task, it was a formidable pile of shoveling, all for something I was
supposed to have already accomplished. Nettled, I put down my pen. In order to
decide what I thought of it, I’d have to decide who I was. Or should that go
the other way around? It brought me right back to the problem of myself,
slouched over a cheap dinette table in an unsavory kitchen in an apartment full
of books, facing a meal of split pea soup and weenies. It was enough to make a
person want a drink.
I
went to the refrigerator to look for beer, even though, since the surgery on my
back, I’d been mainly abstinent. Nada.
I could roll a joint, but that would only make me thirstier. Obviously this
called for a night on the town. At the end of it, I might drive out to
Lederer’s and see if Grace was working. I took a shower, trimmed the hairs in
my nose, and put on clean clothing, such as I had.
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