what must go on. Devoid of flowers and family photographs, all is subordinate
here to a function, designed to discourage daydreams—hence windows averted from plausible
videnda but admitting a light one could mend a watch by—and to sharpen hearing: reached by an
outside staircase, domestic noises and odors, the vast background of natural
life are shut off. Here silence is turned into objects.
I wish, Louis, I could have shown it you while you were still in public, and the house and garden: lover of women and Donegal,
from your perspective you'd notice sights I overlook, and in turn take a scholar's interest
in facts I could tell you (for instance, four miles to our east, at a wood palisade, Carolingian
Bavaria stopped, beyond it unknowable nomads). Friends we became by personal
choice, but fate had already made us neighbors. For Grammar we both inherited
good mongrel barbarian English which never completely succumbed to the Roman rhetoric
or the Roman gravity, that nonsense which stood none. Though neither of our d(ids, like Horace's,
wiped his nose on his forearm, neither was porphyry-born, and our ancestors probably were among those plentiful subjects
/
it cost less money to murder. Born so, both of us
became self-conscious at a moment when locomotives were named after knights in Malory,
Science to schoolboys was known as Stinks, and the Manor still was politically numinous:
both watched with mixed feelings the sack of Silence, the churches empty, the cavalry
go, the Cosmic Model become German, and any faith, if we had it, in immanent
virtue died. More than ever life-out-there is goodly, miraculous, lovable, but we shan't, not since Stalin and Hitler, trust ourselves ever again: we know that, subjectively, all is possible.
To you, though, ever since, last Fall, you quietly slipped out of Granusion,
our moist garden, into the Country of Unconcern, no possibility
matters. I wish you hadn't caught that cold, but the dead we miss are easier
to talk to: with those no longer tensed by problems one cannot feel shy and, anyway,
when playing cards or drinking or pulling faces are out of the question, what else is there
to do but talk to the voices of conscience they have become? From now on, as a visitor
who needn't be met at the station, your influence is welcome at any hour in my ubity,
especially here, where titles from Poems to The Burning Perch offer proof positive
of the maker you were, with whom I once collaborated, once at a weird Symposium
exchanged winks as a juggins went on about Alienation.
Who would, for preference, be a bard in an oral culture, obliged at drunken feasts to improvise a eulogy of some beefy illiterate burner.
giver of rings, or depend for bread on the moods of a
Baroque Prince, expected, like his dwarf, to amuse? After all, it's rather a privilege
amid the affluent traffic to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into
. background noise for study or hung as a status trophy by rising executives,
cannot be "done" like Venice or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon
being read or ignored: our handful of clients at least can rune. (It's heartless to forget about
the underdeveloped countries, but a starving ear is as deaf as a suburban optimist's:
to stomachs only the Hindu integers truthfully speak.) Our forerunners might envy us
our remnant still able to listen : as Nietzsche said they would, the plebs have got steadily
denser, the optimates quicker still on the uptake. (Today, even Talleyrand
might seem a naif: he had so little to cope with.) I should like to become, if possible,
a minor atlantic Goethe, with his passion for weather and stones but without his silliness
re the Cross: at times a bore, but, while knowing Speech can at best. a shadow echoing
the silent light, bear witness to the Truth it is not, he wished it were, as the Francophile
gaggle of pure songsters are too vain to. We're not musicans: to stink of Poetry
is unbecoming, and never to be dull shows a lack of taste. Even a limerick
ought to be something a man of honor, awaiting death from cancer or a firing squad,
could read without contempt: (at that frontier I wouldn't dare speak to anyone
in either a prophet's bellow or a diplomat's whisper).
Seeing you know our mystery from the inside and therefore how much, in our lonely dens, we need the companionship
of our good dead, to give us comfort on dowly days when the self is a nonentity
dumped on a mound of nothing, to break the spell of our self-enchantment when lip-smacking
imps of mawk and hooey write with us what they will, you won't think me imposing if
I ask you to stay at my elbow until cocktail time: dear Shade, for your elegy
I should have been able to manage something more like you than this egocentric monologue, but accept it for friendship's sake.
July 1964
IV Down There
(FOR IRVING WEISS)
A cellar underneath the house, though not lived in, Reminds our warm and windowed quarters upstairs that Caves water-scooped from limestone were our first dwellings, A providential shelter when the Great Cold came, Which woke our feel for somewhere fixed to come back to, A hole by occupation made to smell human.
Self-walled, we sleep aloft, but still, at safe anchor, Ride there on caves; lamplit we dine at street leveclass="underline" But, deep in Mother Earth, beneath her key-cold cloak, Where light and heat can never spoil what sun ripened, In barrels, bottles, jars, we mew her kind commons, Wine, beer, conserves and pickles, good at all seasons.
Encrust with years of clammy grime, the lair, maybe, Of creepy-crawlies or a ghost, its flagstoned vault Is not for girls: sometimes, to test their male courage,
A father sends the younger boys to fetch something For Mother from down there; ashamed to whimper,
hearts pounding, They dare the dank steps, re-emerge with proud faces.
The rooms we talk and work in always look injured When trunks are being packed, and when, without warning, We drive up in the dark, unlock and switch lights on, They seem put out: a cellar never takes umbrage; It takes us as we are, explorers, homebodies, Who seldom visit others when we don't need them.
July 1963
V Up There
(FOR ANNE WEI S S)
Men would never have come to need an attic.
Keen collectors of glass or Roman coins build
Special cabinets for them, dote on, index
Each new specimen: only women cling to
Items out of their past they have no use for,
Can't name now what they couldn't bear to part with.
Up there, under the eaves, in bulging boxes, Hats, veils, ribbons, galoshes, programs, letters Wait unworshiped [a starving spider spins for The occasional fly): no clock recalls it Once an hour to the household it's a part of, No Saint's Day is devoted to its function.
All it knows of a changing world it has to
Guess from children, who conjure in its plenum,
Now an eyrie for two excited sisters,
Where, when Mother is bad, her rage can't reach them,
Now a schooner on which a lonely only
Boy sails north or approaches coral islands.
July 1963
VI The Geography of the House
(FO R C HRIS TOPHER ISHER WOOD)
Seated after breakfast In this white-tiled cabin Arabs call the House wh ere Everybody goes, Even melancholies Raise a cheer to Mrs. Nature for the primal Pleasures She bestows.