(read Part I and Part 2 of this series)
When I moved
back to Cincinnati in 1975, I began collecting Cincinnati quotes—references to
the city in books, magazines, the popular media, etc. Sort of along the lines of Berryman’s
reference to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in one of his Dream Songs: “I saw in my
dream the great lost cities, Macchu Picchu, Cambridge, Mass., Angkor … “ Or Eliot’s, in a letter to, I believe I
remember correctly, Conrad Aiken, or was it MacLeish: “Cambridge seems to me a
dull nightmare now … “ Of course,
Cincinnati wasn’t as bad as all that—and it was certainly prettier than
Cambridge—so I was just being defensive.
I’d put off adulthood for as long as I could; it was just that starting
out seemed worse here. Staring into the
dark, empty Ohio night brought to mind Nietzsche’s abyss—except, instead of
staring back at you, it fell asleep.
Hence, my
Cincinnati quotebook. A particularly
good one was Wilfred Sheed’s crack, made in The
NY Times Book Review, which I quoted in my last post. There were many others; I really do have them
in a notebook somewhere. But my all-time
favorite was one from a TV series I never watched an episode of, though I saw
the particular excerpt not once but twice.
Serendipity, of a sort. It was
from a Columbo scene, in which the
rumpled, passive-aggressive sleuth knocked on the hotel door of a high-priced
hooker played by Valerie Harper. Valerie’s
character was pretty jaded, and she was expecting a customer from Ohio, a
dentist, I think. When she opened the
door, instead of the condescending sonofabitch who was going to namby-pamby her
ass into admitting something crucial, she saw a crumpled ball of repression
from the hinterlands. She left the door
open, turning away and waving him in, as she flung back patronizingly over her
shoulder, “Oh, don’t be so Cincinnati!”
“Don’t be so
Cincinnati!”! From Valerie Harper! We were being condescended to by Rhoda, for god’s sake! That was brutal, a new low. But this was the hotbed of provincialism that
John Ashbery, the most sophisticated poet on the planet, the Genius of the Age,
flew into in the winter of 1979, to be the Elliston Poet-in-Residence for ten
weeks.
I’d begun
reading John’s work in 1970, introduced to it by David Schloss, starting with The Double Dream of Spring, a
life-changing experience for me. I
suppose I should say I didn’t have a clue about the work, but in truth I had
many clues; your life doesn’t change without clues. But I was staggered and perplexed and in awe
of those poems. More than that, I was
thrilled. What I felt but couldn’t say
then was that we’ve got it turned around:
the unconscious isn’t images we try to find language for, try to describe. The unconscious is language, words working together below conscious restriction and
ordering. The whole word, if you will, wholly felt. Words bond in the unconscious, creating
pictures for us, or pathways of new logic.
So I didn’t
look at words as flat, two-dimensional, but as many-sided, with volume, capable
of combining in a multitude of possibilities.
Remember that toy from way back when, the Magic 8 Ball? It had a many-sided ball in it (an “icosahedral
die”—I looked it up!), on whose flat planes “answers” had been printed in
raised metal letters, that floated in black ink. You asked it a question, then tilted it to
one side, and read the answer. One can
only see the top of the word on a printed page, but there were many more sides
to it in the ink below. I saw JA’s
language as containing this power—my pathetic description of it pales in the
face of its dynamism, its depth and range—yoked to surface recognitions of
sentence structure, pattern, clichés, pastiche, etc. John’s process to me seemed the essence of
“negative capability,” and his work a prodigious poetic achievement that would
begin to come clear to us over the next fifty years or so. Anyway, I thought The Double Dream of Spring was a great book, the depths of which
were—to me, certainly, at 22—unfathomable, inexhaustible, yet palpably glorious
and overwhelming as I held it in my hands and read it.
Okay, so I’m
a fan. So sue me. But these were some of the thoughts I had in
mind when, a better part of a decade later, I entered the room where John sat,
in a suit and tie, his belly churning with the aforementioned chili, his mind
trying to drop down low enough to take in a confrontation with our chairperson,
the aforementioned horsewoman from the Tidewater area of Virginia, and her
riding crop. She’d been determined to make
damn sure John Ashbery—despite (or maybe because of) the Pulitzer Prize, the
National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle prize, and a resume from
Hell-On-Wheels—wasn’t some city slicker who could just waltz in here like any
ol’ body and pull the wool over our eyes! We were the “Harvard on the Ohio,” after all! John smiled weakly as I sat down, and said,
“Is she always like that?” I
laughed. I don’t remember which of us
used the term “Professor Montezuma,” but I did reassure him it was safe to
drink the water here.
For years,
decades, really, I counted time by Elliston residencies; but spending time with
JA stays in my heart for the sheer fun we had.
John was hilarious, brilliantly witty, of course—punning at three or
four levels, in a couple of languages, is fairly standard—but a Cincinnati
residency in those days cut you off from your life, your friends, your
routines, and the loneliness that can develop wasn’t uncommon. So we spent a lot of time drinking and, um,
“inhaling,” and hanging out. John would
bring a record over to play, and we would get zonked and listen to the Firesign
Theater or Monty Python. This is how I
got to know Dame Edna Everage (“I’m just a woman, who loves other women/I’m
funny, that way …”; “The Night We Burned Mother’s Things”), and her partner,
Norm—stoned, and singing along, of course.
God knows what we sounded like.
One day I got free tickets to see The
Deer Hunter at a preview showing.
For some reason, lost now in the sands of time, this seemed like an
important thing to do. John couldn’t go
because he had to give a poetry reading at a local college. Would I drive him over? Of course, but I made clear, in no uncertain
terms, that I had to see this movie—I was quite the serious filmgoer, I assured
him. “Andrew Sarris on the Ohio,” I
was. Naturally, we ended up getting
stoned in the car outside the reading hall, and when I took him in, the most
amazing succession of faces greeted us, ending, no kidding, with a scene
straight out of Bunuel. Five identical
small round nuns, all under five feet tall and wearing exactly the same glasses
with black plastic frames and “coke bottle” lenses, and dressed in full penguin
regalia (this was 1980), filed past us.
“Hello, Mr. Ashbery, Hello, Mr. Ashbery”—five times. Their eyes were swimming behind the lenses. JA literally sagged against me; I believe
there was actual terror in his eyes.
“Don’t leave me,” he said plaintively; and I didn’t. How could I have possibly thought The Deer Hunter could be better than
this? John then went onstage and gave
probably the greatest reading I’ve ever heard him give.
John’s humor
can be very quiet, but no less devastating for that; through it all, though,
shines that incredible, luminous love of words.
Once we were going to see a locally-famous restored home, on Dayton
Street in the West End. I’d left the
window of my VW Bug open the night before, and water got on the back
floor. I wasn’t aware of this until JA
lifted an exquisitely-polished shoe as he exited, saying, in his inimitable
way, “I think your car needs a sump pump.”
I can’t tell you how funny this was, the commentary mixing with his
obvious delight in speaking the phrase, “sump pump.” It’s funny what you remember best. We were driving along one day, and John asked
about an opera that was being performed at our College Conservatory of
Music. I said, oh, well, you know,
“business was punk at the opera”—quoting, I thought, a line from his poem,
“Faust,” in his second book, The Tennis
Court Oath. He corrected me, in his
best professorial manner (which of course cracked us both up): “Business, if you wanted to know, was punk at the opera.” Italics his.
But if I claim a special memory with John, it would be from a couple of
years later, when John visited again, and this time, somewhat in a rush before
I drove him back out to the airport, I was able to arrange a lunch at the
Maisonette, a five-star French restaurant downtown, now defunct, with John,
myself, my wife, Maureen, and Jean Valentine, the current Elliston Poet. Jean had never met John. It was pouring outside, a real deluge, and we
were cozy in French elegance within. Once
in a rare while, an hour can have the texture, the density, the richness of
several hours. That day the world shrank
to just our table, and we had an hour like that. John was the sweet, kind, generous man he
always is, and I was my usual happy-to-be-there self. Rowf. But
toward the end of our stolen hour, I looked at Jean, whose eyes redeemed
“shining” from John’s cliché bin. She
truly, beautifully, sparkled.
Afterwards, she told Maureen and me how much it meant to her to meet
John, that she was thrilled to have had that time with him. Only an hour out of the rain, but perfect. Jean sent us flowers the next day. How long ago it seems.
(ed note: John Ashbery will read at the New School, Sat. Dec 8, 7:00 pm. Details here.)
