Unless It Moves the Human Heart Read online

  “Oh, no man smells good,” says Ana, causing the four men in the room to sniff their armpits dramatically.

  “I loved the pun on ‘lie’ in ‘My soul cannot lie, / But I will,’ ” says Veronique.

  “What I liked especially was the word ‘still,’ ” says Nina. “It shows him doubting her love in spite of all his affectionate moves. He knows she mistrusts her lover, no matter how she answers him.”

  “Poetry is all contradiction, isn’t it?” says Jasmine.

  “Mostly. One thought clashing with another.”

  “Held together by the poem,” says Kristie.

  “Does that mean we believe in contradictions?” says Nina. “Things continually at war with one another?”

  “Only in discontinuity do we know that we exist. Robert Penn Warren said that in a poem called ‘Interjection #2: Caveat.’ Warren actually opposes continuity and existence.”

  We read a poem by Nina, called “I Do the Worrying Now”:

  I’ve been out in the garden pulling weeds, if you have to know.

  It hasn’t been too much for me. I’m fine.

  I know it’s January, but it’s been warm.

  Those weeds—you know the ones—

  with shallow roots—the leaves are like geraniums?

  They’re coming up all over.

  I saw them from the window when I was drinking my coffee

  so I just went out and pulled a few.

  It didn’t do me any harm.

  I know what I can do and what I can’t do.

  They would have choked the myrtle.

  “Precision and restraint,” says George, looking at me. “Just what the doctor ordered.”

  “Beautiful,” says Kristie.

  I think so too. “And like so much of modern poetry, Nina’s makes something of an event in the present. The poet is occupied with this, and she makes that. She sees what is present and calls upon what is absent.”

  “Like Wallace Stevens’s ‘Snow-Man,’ ” says Robert. “Seeing the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

  “It also sneaks up on you. Poets do that deliberately.” I tell them about a poem I had pinned to my bedroom wall in high school—Robert Francis’s “Pitcher.” I put it there because I was a pitcher on the baseball team, though no better at that than I was at poetry. “His art is eccentricity,” Francis says about the pitcher, whose intention is “not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,” thus to trick the batter and make him “understand too late.” This takes as much calculation as natural talent, and a great deal of practice. You look as if you’re throwing a fast ball when you’re throwing a changeup, a slider when you’re throwing a curve. In a way, the poet is always throwing a curve. “If Nina’s poem were an essay, what would it be about?”

  “About ten pages,” says Diana. “And please don’t bop me on the head again.”

  “It would be about simplifying one’s life,” says Veronique.

  “It would be about knowing one’s limits,” says Ana.

  “It would be about order over chaos,” says Donna.

  “I don’t know what it would be about,” says Suzanne. “That’s the difference between a poem and an essay.” She gives me a grin.

  “You know what I notice about all our poems?” says Kristie. “They’re not difficult to understand. So many modern poems I read are like puzzles, impossible to get without someone explaining them to you.”

  “I don’t think difficulty is absent in our poems,” says Jasmine. “They’re just not impenetrable.”

  That’s a valuable distinction. I give them the example of song lyrics that are both clear and deep, such as the last lines of Cole Porter’s “In the Still of the Night”—“. . . like the moon growing dim on the rim of a hill, in the chill, still of the night.” The longing of “Do you love me as I love you?” is made deeper by the internal rhymes. They break your heart.

  Once in a while I’ll look up from an idea, as I do now, and see my students staring straight ahead. Something about Cole Porter has touched them, and they are lost in their private thoughts. They are not really themselves when they enter a class. They adopt the role of “student,” leaving their lives at the door of the college. But occasionally, something strikes them at the core, and the outerwear that goes with being a student is shed. Sometimes they bring personal pain with them. Early in the term Veronique suffered the death of a lifelong friend, and her face bore that sorrow in class. Sometimes an emotion will hit all of them at once. I can see the effect of Porter’s song on each of my students, as it reminds them of their own longings. These are tender, melancholy moments in a teacher’s life, and they don’t last long. You wouldn’t want them to. The student’s mask is useful to them and to you. You both function within the deal you make to teach and to learn. But for a glimpse or two, it is very nice to see my group for the sweet, suffering people they are, alone with their lives.

  “People tend to make more grand statements about poets than prose writers,” says Nina. “Legislators of the world, and so forth.”

  “There is a kind of assumption that the poet knows the truth about things,” says Ana. “And even if that same truth is known by the novelist, the poet gets to it faster.”

  “Maybe that is why poetry rises to a special place above the other genres—because it grapples with the difficulty of knowing the truth.” I indicate the blackboard. “Small wonder Shakespeare yoked together the lunatic, the lover, and the poet. Poets not only embrace uncertainty, they construct their works of art in a way that ensures an appreciation of uncertainty. Everything important in life is unknown.”

  All this requires both attention to life and respect for life, the way children look at things. Poets may not be formally religious themselves, but they are religious as writers and observers of the world. The disinterestedness by which the poem comes into being is like God’s. And like God, who seems to be defined only by his own existence, the poet remains only himself, admiring the world of his subject matter—also fearing, loathing, and adoring it—standing back and “paring his fingernails.”

  Inur asks, “So, what is truth—”

  “—said jesting Pilate,” says Robert. “And would not wait for an answer.”

  “Truth is beauty, beauty truth,” says Kristie. “I just made that up.”

  “It’s all too vague for me,” says Sven.

  “A poet tries to identify a situation or an emotion as accurately as possible. To name it, nail it, so that the thing and his description of the thing are virtually the same. At the same time, the poet knows that perfect identification is impossible. I think that’s where imperfection is the same thing as divine.”

  “Woody Allen said that God was an underachiever,” says George.

  “What does it mean to identify an emotion or a situation accurately?” asks Ana, indicating the quotation from Rasselas on the board. “Isn’t it accurate to count the streaks of the tulip? Johnson seems to think that’s not enough.”

  “It can’t be enough. Otherwise a poem would be so private in its subject matter or its references, it would be useless to others.”

  Robert’s “Digging Out, January, 1954,” makes that point. It is an elegiac poem about growing from boy to man. I read a few lines:

  Toward the watchful, blue-white eyes

  of humming, arched streetlamps,

  their steamy, whiskey-sweetened breath rose silently,

  as they stooped over the scraping

  of heavy handled steel shovels,

  Then I ask him what he would think if I rewrote them this way:

  Toward the eyes of streetlamps

  their whiskey breath rose

  as they stooped over the scraping

  of shovels.

  “What would I be doing, Robert?”

  “Removing the adjectives and adverbs,” he says. “You like it better that way?”

  “Sure he does,” says Sven. “The nouns stand out.”

  “My, my! Am I actually teaching
you people something?”

  “No!”—from five or six.

  Robert indicates that he’ll think about my revision, which is enough for me. I prefer the undressed-up style in everything, as my students know. But if I had foisted my preference on Keats, there would have been no Keats. And “rosy-fingered dawn” is a hell of a lot more beautiful than “dawn.” What I can do, especially with a writer as good as Robert, is to offer choices, and leave it at that.

  “Why are poets so sad?” Donna asks. “Our poems aren’t, not most of them. But the published poems I read are nearly all tear-jerkers.”

  “Do you think poets are sadder than other writers?” I ask.

  “They kill themselves more often,” says Ana. “Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman.”

  “So many poets go mad,” says Robert. “Do you think that it helps one’s writing?”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “I think poets are more high-strung than novelists,” says Nina.

  “Could be, though if you talk with Richard Wilbur or John Ashbery or our own in-house poet, Billy Collins, you might confuse them with solid, golf-playing citizens who happen to write poetry.”

  “I wonder if there isn’t something fundamentally hysterical about poetry,” says Suzanne. “Poets may live in an agitated state, and then calm down in their poems.”

  “I doubt if poets are sadder or more high-strung than prose writers. But their personas may get on their nerves. Prose writers don’t really need a single persona. Every essayist can have two or three. And fiction writers can spread themselves among a thousand different characters. The poet living with his persona all his life may recognize the growing disparity between his controlled self and himself. The final contradiction of a poem is that it is controlled hysteria.”

  “ ‘A fine frenzy,’ ” says Donna.

  They collect their papers, and we are about to disperse. But I don’t want to leave the subject of their poems without indicating that I think an essential element is missing in nearly all of them. “Before we drown in self-congratulations, I want you to consider something.”

  “Uh-oh,” says Kristie.

  “Every one of you is adept at milking the moment. You’re clever, you’re precise. By the time you’ve reached the end of your poem, you’ve covered the moment you started with from every angle. What I’d like you to do now is to train your minds to get off the precipitating moment of the poem and make something larger of it—wider and deeper. Treat the moment as you have done. Then stand back, breathe, and see what thoughts the moment generates.”

  “You mean we haven’t seen all that we ought to see?” Diana asks.

  “You’ve seen the thing. Now find the other thing. I think you’ll discover that you’ve written a much more satisfying piece of work.”

  Ana feigns a huff. “So, just as we were about to head home assured that we’re all poetic geniuses, you tell us to start over from scratch.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re impossible,” she says, eliciting a general agreement.

  “I have a new poem,” says Kristie, “for the arrival of spring.”

  Roses are red

  Violets are blue

  But Roger thinks “roses” and “violets” will do.

  Chapter 7

  Parting Shots

  Wouldn’t it be nice if you knew that your teaching had shape and unity, and that when a semester came to an end, you could see that every individual thing you said had coalesced into one overarching statement? But who knows? I liken teaching to writing, but the two enterprises diverge here, because any perception of a grand scheme depends on what the students pick up. You may intend a lovely consistency in what you’re tossing them, but they still have to catch it. In fact, I do see unity to my teaching. What they see, I have no clue. It probably doesn’t matter if they accept the parts without the whole. A few things are learned, and my wish for more may be plain vanity.

  “You know what I hate about writing,” says Suzanne. “It makes me crabby.”

  “Crabbier,” George corrects her.

  “I get into something I’m writing,” she says, “and I lose patience with family, friends, and, of course, him.”

  “You haven’t begun to know crabbiness in writers.” I tell her about the time Faulkner sent the manuscript of Absalom, Absalom to his editor. The editor was on vacation, so the manuscript was read by an assistant who returned it, complaining that Faulkner’s sentences were too long, his plot murky, and the whole thing a mess. Faulkner fired back a five-word telegram: “Who the hell are you?”

  We are having drinks before our reunion dinner at Robert’s restaurant in Water Mill. It is late February 2010. I didn’t have to inveigle Robert, after all. Good guy that he is, he offered his place to the class, and we jumped. Our final meeting of the semester last May had begun with a lofty discussion of their artistic aims, and soon disintegrated into plans for their summer vacations. There is nothing like the light on eastern Long Island in late spring. By the time the class ended, we all were stealing glances at the bright windows and hearing the ocean in our daydreams.

  Now, patches of snow cling to the ground around Robert’s. The restaurant occupies a handsome yellow-shingled house on the south side of Montauk Highway, which cuts through the center of Water Mill, between Southampton and Bridgehampton. The town has a windmill on its green. A stagecoach stop in the 1670s, Robert’s retains an antique country feel, with small windows, candlestick wall lights, little sand-colored lampshades, wide-plank floors, dark beams on the ceiling both bearing and decorative, two fireplaces, and a large, wide, gleaming wood bar. The dining area is an L-shaped room, with a dozen tables, and a private room with an open entrance is framed by more beams. Here Robert’s staff has set up a round table for the twelve of us. Only Nina couldn’t make the dinner. Excited to see one another after a year, the students talk nonstop as soon as they take their seats, occasionally acknowledging that I am here too.

  “How’s the book about us coming?” asks Diana, who is all dressed up tonight in black slacks and a black sweater. We are seated at the round table, chatting before dinner.

  “Oh, I’ve chucked the book. The characters were too flat—boring, if you know what I mean.”

  “You better treat us right,” says Sven.

  “What are you going to do, beat me up?” I smile my old man’s smile.

  “Has it been hard to write?” asks Veronique.

  “It would have been, if I had used things you actually said. But the stuff I made up is so much better—brighter, funnier—than could ever have come out of your mouths.”

  “So you’re finished?” asks Jasmine. “I guess it’s time to call the lawyer.”

  “Class action,” says George.

  “I hope you included all the things you learned from us,” says Jasmine. “Teachers always say how much they learn from their students.”

  “They must have different students.”

  “Did you ever feel you couldn’t do the book?” Kristie asks. She too is dressed for the party. All the women look aglow.

  I tell them about a conversation last week, with my three-year-old grandson James. He looked at a bunch of papers on my bed. “What are you doing, Boppo?” he asked.

  “Writing a book about teaching people how to write.”

  “But people already know how to write,” said James. “You don’t need to teach them.”

  “To James!” says Inur, raising a toast. In the year since our class, she has married a lawyer and lives in New York. After a day of appointments in the city, she made the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Robert’s to be with us.

  “Are you writing?” I ask her.

  “I’m starting to write again,” she says. “It’s been a while. I don’t have a job now, so there’s plenty of free time.”

  She has her right arm in a cast, from a fall on the ice. Suzanne helps her cut her food. When Inur entered the room, we all laughed because Veronique had arrived
a short while earlier with her left arm in a cast. She dislocated her shoulder in a fall down a flight of stairs. Veronique announces to the group that she’s in love. “At forty-four! At last!” Inspecting her arm, George croons, “Falling in love with love.”

  Jasmine is looking for work in publishing and has a nibble from a Long Island magazine. She is writing “every single day,” she tells me. I forgot how fresh and sweet her face is. Her hair is done up in bright ringlets.

  We raise our glasses to Robert. His play, Alternate Spaces, will be put on at the Southampton Arts Festival this spring, as will a play by Diana. Diana has also begun to teach Stony Brook undergraduates.

  “I’m writing plays. I’m writing everything,” says Diana. “Wonder where I got that idea.”

  “Think you want to be a playwright?”

  “I never want to do just one genre,” she says. “And I don’t want a real job. I don’t want to be real.”

  “How come we didn’t discuss playwriting?” asks George.

  “There wasn’t enough time. And I don’t know much about plays.”

  “You write them,” says Suzanne.

  “That’s what I mean.” I taught a playwriting class some years ago, which went okay but nothing great. One thing worked. I gave my students an exercise that emerged from a conversation I’d had with Wendy Wasserstein. Wendy had said that she knew she was really into the writing of a play when she had created a third character. I had my students set up a situation consisting of two people. Once they had done that, I asked them to introduce a third character, to see how things were shaken up. We also discussed the rhythm of the action of a play, and the odd fact that in dialogue, no one’s really speaking to anyone else. But that was about it. Most of the class was spent with the students simply enjoying one another’s plays.

  “How’s teaching going, Kristie?” She teaches a “developmental” class at her community college. Ana is amused by the euphemism. Kristie says she has to go over assignments again and again, “and still they come up after every class and say, ‘What’s the assignment?’ ” It’s clear that she is very good for the students by whom she is less exasperated than tickled. “There’s a navy vet in my class. He sat next to a girl who said not a word to him for the whole semester. On the last day, she looked at him. ‘You’re like older, right?’ she said. ‘And you’re in the army or something? You do drugs?’ ”