With the two (or more …) tales printed as they are, consecutively and not parallel at all, a romantic code hierarchizes them: the second account — full of guilt, silence, desire, and subterfuge — displaces the first — overt, positive, rich, and social — at once discrediting it and at the same time presumably revealing its truth.
Yet reread closely.
Nothing in the first is in any way explained by the second, so that this “truth” that the second is presumed to provide is mostly an expectation, a convention, a trope — rather than a real explanatory force.
(The third, Chuck’s “space shoes,” parenthetical, oblique, idiosyncratic, ironic, simply problematizes the first two, opening the space for a continuation of codes to write, to revise, to develop. …)
The more historically sensitive among us will remember an older — and conservative — code from which the Romantic questioning, distrust, and uneasiness with the feelings grew. It holds that, in day-today occurrences, the desire- and deceit-laden narrative always develops alongside the “socially acceptable” one. Doctors, lawyers, and artists are privileged to discuss it when it impinges on their specialized domains: the body, ethics, representation. But for the rest of us, the old code says, it should be private (rather than subjective: it is the abolition of the private code by active medical, legal, and aesthetic intervention that creates, that necessitates, that constitutes Romantic “subjectivity”). As adults, we have the right — indeed, the duty — to keep it so.
Why speak of what’s uncomfortable to speak of?
What damage might it do to women, children, the temperamentally more refined, the socially ignorant, the less well educated, those with a barely controlled tendency toward the perverse?
Since publishing it in most cases explains little or nothing of the public narrative, why not let it remain privy, personal, privileged — outside of language …?
But if it is the split — the spaces between the columns (one resplendent and lucid with the writings of legitimacy, the other dark and hollow with the voices of the illegitimate, and even a third aglitter with ironic alterities) — that constitutes the subject, it is only after the Romantic inflation of the private into the subjective that such a split can even be located. That locus, that margin, that split itself first allows, then demands the appropriation of language — now spoken, now written — in both directions, over the gap.
6.33. The second morning, Chuck and I somehow weren’t together among the students shoving each other up the steps. The traffic snarl out on the red-tiled roof, in the September cool and sun, was particularly bad that day. While I was standing in line, the girl with the long hair and glasses whom I’d seen the day before at the end of the GO meeting ran up through a hiatus in the crowd, in the absolutely opposite direction from anybody else, her coat flapping. She came to a halt before me, and, with a breathless smile, declared, “I just wrote three poems last night!”
“Good for you!” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Marilyn,” she said. “Yours …?”
“Chip,” I told her.
Then, just as she’d left yesterday’s meeting, she ran on.
“What was that?” which was Chuck, who’d just managed to join me; he’d recognized her from yesterday too. I shrugged. But Chuck, the most normal of fellows in his sexual orientation, would usually have a comment to make about any girl I talked to — and, indeed, any boy. Fortunately, I thought most of them were funny.
That night I pondered the rooftop encounter. “I wrote three poems …!” What, I wondered, was the experience this young woman had gone through that was so exciting she’d blurted it to an all-but-stranger? In my third-floor room, sitting on my bed, back against the brown wainscot up to the yellow molding, I turned to a new piece of paper in my school looseleaf and wrote … five!
A day or so later, when I ran into Marilyn again, I mentioned — very casually — the poems I’d written. But she had written even more by then. She even showed me some. And while I was prepared for my own concept of poetry, I wasn’t prepared for hers to be full of bright words and electric with inner music. I wasn’t prepared to find lines like:
or for such cascades of glossolalia as
In short, I was not prepared for the poems to be — as far as any thirteen-or fourteen-year-old could tell, judging the work of another — good, however that is defined for or by the young. (Oscar Wilde once said, “The only true talent is precosity”) A year ahead of me, Marilyn was thirteen when I met her and an entering sophomore, though she turned fourteen two months later in November.
Where I had gone to private school, she had gone to public. She had been able to read perfectly well at three, and one of her earliest school memories was being told to sit in a corner with a book (usually of the teacher’s choosing and well below the level of what she was already reading on her own) because she already knew the work. “For years,” she told me in those first weeks, “I really thought I was being punished for being smart — go sit in the corner. I mean, that’s what you tell dunces.”
A year or so younger than most of the people in her class, even at Science, her best friends seemed to be among the brightest students in the grade ahead of hers. Because of this I met, and heard even more about, a whole circle of older students I would not have otherwise known.
There’d once been a show, which, after a lengthy career on radio, moved briefly to television, called “The Quiz Kids,” on which bright youngsters in caps and gowns answered questions sent in by adults. For a season, when she’d been seven, Marilyn had been the youngest Quiz Kid. (To give her credit, for she was never a braggart, I didn’t even learn this till I had known her at least three years.) She was curious, hugely talented, deeply compassionate, and wonderfully generous; she was quite attractive, though in many ways she was physically awkward; and she had emotional blind spots that were glaring and, I suspect, as crippling as some of her physical limitations. She could be extraordinarily perceptive about other people. She was very excitable, very funny, and very smart. And we were very soon friends.
6.331. A couple of months into the term, I sat down to begin writing a novel. Joey Torrent, I thought. Certainly his second name had all the romance one could ask for. But maybe “Joey” was a little ordinary. What about “Erik” Torrent? That was more dashing. I wrote out the title page:
4
This line is from an uncollected, unpublished poem by Marilyn Hacker, whose title I no longer recall.
5
From “Soliloquy for a Sunset” by Marilyn Hacker. In four long stanzas, this poem is uncollected and unpublished. I quote these lines from memory.