When Kid looked up, he was surprised to see the elderly gentleman smiling straight at him.
"But that question is just your natural idealism speaking." Newboy turned a little on his cushion. "All good poets tend to be idealistic. They also tend to be lazy, acrimonious, and power-crazed. Put any two of them together and they invariably talk about money. I suspect their best work tries to reconcile what they are with what they know and feel they should be — to fit them into the same universe. Certainly those three are three of my own traits, and I know they often belong as well to some very bad men. Should I triumph over my laziness, however, I suspect I would banish all feeling for economical expression which is the basis of style. If I overcame my bitterness, beat it out of my person for good, I'm afraid my work would lose all wit and irony. Were I to defeat my power-madness, my craving for fame and recognition, I suspect my work would become empty of all psychological insight, not to mention compassion for others who share my failings. Minus all three, we have work only concerned with the truth, which is trivial without those guys that moor it to the world that is the case. But we are wandering toward questions of doing evil versus the capacity for doing evil, innocence, choice, and freedom. Ah well, during the Middle Ages, religion was often able to redeem art. Today, however, art is about the only thing that can redeem religion, and the clerics will never forgive us that." Newboy glanced at the ceiling and shook his head. Dulled organ music came from the stair. He looked down into his case.
"I guess what I want to know, really—" Kid's thumb had stained the galley margin: momentary panic. "Do you think these—" and four fingers marked the paper in a sweep—"that these are any good?" There will be other copies, he thought to ease himself. There will be. "I mean, really."
Newboy sucked his teeth and put the case on the floor against his knees. "You have no realization what an absurd question that is. Once, when I used to find myself in this situation, I would always answer 'no' automatically, 'I think they're worthless.' But I'm older, and I realize now all I was doing was punishing people who asked such questions for their stupidity, and was only being 'honest' in the most semantically vulgar sense. I really cannot think about poetry in such absolute terms as 'good' and 'bad', or even in the more flexible terms you'd probably be willing to accept in their place: 'well done' or 'badly done'. Perhaps it is because I suffer from all the aesthetic diseases of the times which cause the worthless to be praised and the worthy to be ignored. Well, they have ravaged all ages. But you must leave open the possibility that poetry means far too much to me to vulgarize it in the way you are asking me to do. The problem is essentially one of landscape. I've already made it clear, I hope, that I, personally, have enjoyed the particular complex of interchange between you and your poems, both as I have perceived it and, to my personal embarrassment, misperceived it. If you think my distance insulting, dwell on the complexities in it. But let me pose an example. You know of Wilfred Owen?" Newboy did not wait for Kid's nod. "Like many young men, he wrote his poems during the War; he seems to have hated that war, but he fought in it, and was machine-gunned to death while trying to get his company over the Sambre Canal when he was younger than you. He is generally considered, in English, the greatest war poet. But how is one to compare him to Auden or O'Hara, Coleridge or Campion, Riding or Roethke, Rod or Edward Taylor, Spicer, Ashbery, Donne, Waldmen, Byron or Berrigan or Michael Dennis Browne? As war— the experience or the concept — stays a vital image, Owen will stay a vital poet. If war were to be both abolished and forgotten, then Owen would become a minor figure, interesting only as a purely philological point in the development of the language, as an influence on more germane figures. Now your poems wrap themselves around and within this city as Cavafy's twist and refract about pre-World War Two Alexandria, as Olson's are caught in the ocean light of mid-century Gloucester, or Villon's in medieval Paris. When you ask me the worth of these poems, you are asking me what place the image of this city holds in the minds of those who have never been here. How can I presume to suggest? There are times, as I wander in this abysmal mist, when these streets seem to underpin all the capitals of the world. At others, I confess, the whole place seems a pointless and ugly mistake, with no relation to what I know as civilization, better obliterated than abandoned. I can't judge because I am still in it. Frankly I will not be able to judge once out of it, for the bias that will remain from once having been a visitor."
Kid, halfway through the second poem in proof, looked up at the silence.
"The worth of our work?" (Kid dropped his eyes and continued reading.) "People who do not create are always sure that on some inchoate level the creator knows it. But the roster of Nobel laureates I have come so near to joining three times now is cluttered with mediocre writers who have neither elegance nor depth, readability nor relevance: lauded during their lifetimes, they died, I'm sure, convinced they had substantially advanced their languages. Your Miss Dickinson died equally convinced no one would ever read a word she wrote; and she is one of the most luminous poets your country has produced. An artist simply cannot trust any public emblem of merit. Private ones? They are even more misleading."
Kid turned over the next galley. "You're talking to yourself." Eyes down, he wondered what expression was on Newboy's face.
"Most certainly," Newboy said after a longish pause.
"You're really that scared your own stuff isn't any good."
Newboy paused.
In the pause, Kid considered looking up but didn't.
"When I'm not actually working, I have no choice: I must consider it worthless. But when I'm engaged in it, writing, revising, shaping and polishing, by the same process, I have to consider it the most important thing in the world. And I'm very suspect of any other attitude."
Kid looked up now: the expression leaving Newboy's face was serious. But laughter marks were replacing it. "Ah, when I was a young man, as young as I once thought you were, I recall I labored with incredible diligence over a translation of Le Bateau ivre. Here I am at the respectable, if a bit garrulous, threshold of old age, and last night, in the front library at Roger's, after everyone else had gone up, I sat there working — by hurricane lanterns: the electricity is off in that wing now — on Le Cimetiere marin. The impulse was thoroughly the same." He shook his head, still laughing. "Have you found any mistakes?"
"Um," Kid said. "Not in the first three sheets."
"I spent yesterday and most of today checking it against your fair copy. I've put a couple of queries here and there. You'll get to them as you go through."
"Where?"
"The first one's near the front." Newboy set down his cup and leaned over Kid's shoulder. "Next sheet. There. It's the poem you had the loose copy of it on blue paper just stuck in the notebook. It looked like somebody else had written it out for you. Did you perhaps intend a comma in the third line? I checked it back with the version in your notebook, and neither one has it. Except for the phrasing, I wouldn't have—"
"The copy in the notebook has a comma, doesn't it?" Kid frowned and flipped handwritten pages. His eyes stumbled among words, trying not to be caught between any two, till he found the notebook page. "It's not there." He looked up. "I thought I put one."
"Then you did intend it. Here, use my pencil. Just cross out the question mark I put by the line. I had a feeling you might — what's the matter?"
"I thought I had a comma there. But I didn't."
"Oh, I'm always discovering I've left out words I was sure I wrote down in first draft—"