15. I
slept away most of Friday evening.
I slept away most of Friday
evening. When I finally awoke, I decided that, instead of making another
walking tour of downtown Lincoln, I would crack a beer at home and start work
on my presentation for Leonard’s class. (I had to give a report on a Modern
Poetry subject, and I had to acquit myself honorably if I hoped to pass with a
“B”.) Sometime after midnight, as I sat tilted back in my chair, listening to
late-night music over KUFM and nourishing my spite at T. S. Eliot, it occurred
to me that one thing that seemed innovative about his poetic technique was in
fact ripped off from the way tunes were interlaced in jazz—that his worked-in
snippets of other people’s poems, quoted or parodied, functioned more like
riffs than like, for instance, Milton’s allusions. Once this notion lit up my
attention, I listened harder, and the more I listened, the more it seemed to me
that I had found the key to his mysterious (considering he was such an
arch-conservative jackass) creativity.
I remembered that the roots of the
Cubist movement lay in Africa. If the Modernist painters of the 20’s raided
black Africa for techniques, could not the poets have done likewise with black
America? I grabbed a pen and started scribbling. If I could demonstrate that
riffing was “in the air” of the early 1920’s, I could make a case that Eliot
must’ve heard and adapted it. I could argue further that the scat-like phrasing
in poetry that began to show up everywhere following publication of “The Waste
Land” might have come, not from Eliot, but directly from his source, black
American singers and instrumentalists. Ergo, the constipated Jew-hating toady
was not as influential as was commonly taught.
That’s as far as I got with it that
first night: a few lines scratched on a yellow note pad, surrounded by margins
full of Afro-Cubist doodling. All the writing I did I could’ve put on a soggy
napkin, but the fate of soggy napkins is, you lose them. I went to bed feeling
accomplished because I’d have something tangible to start from in the morning.
My idea survived the Shower Test:
when I woke up, took a shower, made myself some tea, and sat down fearfully to
examine what I’d written, it didn’t look as if a chimpanzee had thought of it.
Even the marginalia were conventional in a Cubist sort of way. The result was
that, unaccountably, I did something I’d never done in my life before. I spent
a good part of each of the next five days in the library. I read a lot of
boring pages, but I found nothing that would support my jazz-riff theory. That
might be good; it could mean I’d hit on something original.
When you use Love Library while the
campus is on vacation, you find out who the real students are. Asian, African,
Caribbean, Middle Eastern faces suddenly become the majority; quietly and
sociably, people of color from all over the world are going about the business
of educating themselves. It made me think of my father’s generation, how
college had a meaning for many of them that it never had for me. My uncle
Bertie, Dad’s brother, put himself through the University during the Depression
by bussing dishes for thirty cents an hour. He got his meals at the back of a
frat house, knew Weldon Kees and Loren Eiseley, and rode the rails with hoboes.
It took him seven years to fight his way through; he wrote rhymed Marxist
poetry for the Prairie Schooner and got his
degree in Business Administration, then went to work for Westinghouse, stayng
on as a company hack for the rest of his life. For all his Commie poetry,
Bertie made the University his ticket to the middle class.
Kind of an odd duck, Uncle Bertie.
He lived alone in St. Louis and collected rare books and stamps. I could’ve
used his record collection to help make my argument about T. S. Eliot, but
Bertie died while I was in the Air Force; his stuff, for all I knew, had been
dispersed. Luckily I knew another jazz buff of his generation, Jack Keogh, a
banker from my home town. I figured he’d be glad to talk to me, because his son
Ed had joined the Air Force on the same day I did. In fact, he was still in it,
swooshing around over Nam. Ed was a better officer and pilot than I turned out
to be, and got into the Thud program. Flying A-1’s as I had done was a joke,
sort of like a Nazi on Hogan’s Heroes
getting sent to the Russian Front. Thuds were jets; if you wanted to get
somewhere in the Air Force, you had to get a jet. Ed Keogh wanted to get
somewhere, so he got a jet.
On Wednesday I made up my mind to
drive to Palemon the next day. Even if the old man was gone with a load, the
house would be open. I’d have Thanksgiving dinner at the Milestone and call up
Jack Keogh. But on Thursday morning, I found myself uneager to go. Once I’d
showered and poured a cup of coffee, I telephoned the cafe in Palemon and asked
for my father. Good to hear from you, he told me when he came to the phone.
Nope, won’t be home all day. Taking a load of feeders up to Aberdeen. Kind of a
busy time. Be real glad to see you, though. Maybe we could have dinner together
on Sunday. I told him I didn’t know, and to expect me when he saw my pickup in
the driveway; I wished him a safe trip and hung up the phone, in dread of those
empty hours in my father’s house. Pheasant season was on, and Pop had a nice
old Ithaca shotgun which he seldom got to use, but in the three years or so
since I’d taken up my recent occupation, blasting some desperate creature out
of the air had lost its appeal for me. There’d be nothing else to do in Palemon
besides drink.
I put a couple of eggs on to boil
and sat down to my notes. I’d already taken my project as far as it could go
without the music itself, so I didn’t accomplish anything; nevertheless, the
eggs had boiled nearly dry by the time I noticed them. Breakfast over, I rolled
a narrow joint to help me focus on the accumulating homework for my other
classes; I read a little of the Canterbury
Tales—it was the right way to approach Chaucer—but after an hour I was
staring at the page, the characters an out-of-focus blur. My problem, of
course, was the party at Selva Andersen’s. Though I disliked her personally, I
needed to see her red, red hair again.
I closed the book and went out to
buy groceries. On a shelf at the B&R I found a condensed-milk can with a
pumpkin-pie recipe on the back; I got brown sugar, spices, and Quaker oats and
chunky peanut butter for the crust. Instead of canned pumpkin, I purchased a
big green warty winter squash, confident it would give more flavor to the pie.
Back home, I lit the oven and tried to read again, but my eyes would not stay
focused and my brain refused to connect with the paragraphs. Finally, I had to
give it up; I lay down and took a nap while the squash baked.
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