“Now, here,” said Fairchild, flattening a page under his hand, his heavy hornrimmed spectacles riding his blobby benign face jauntily, “is the Major’s syphilis poem. After all, poetry has accomplished something when it causes a man like the Major to mull over it for a while. Poets lack business judgment. Now, if I—”
“Perhaps that’s what makes one a poet,” the Semitic man suggested, “being able to sustain a fine obliviousness of the world and its compulsions.”
“You’re thinking of oyster fishermen,” Mrs. Wiseman said. “Being a successful poet is being just glittering and obscure and imminent enough in your public life to excuse whatever you might do privately.”
“If I were a poet—” Fairchild attempted.
“That’s right,” the Semitic man said. “Nowadays the gentle art has attained that state of perfection where you don’t have to know anything about literature at all to be a poet; and the time is coming when you won’t even have to write to be one. But that day hasn’t quite arrived yet: you still have to write something occasionally; not very often, of course, but still occasionally. And if it’s obscure enough everyone is satisfied and you have vindicated yourself and are immediately forgotten and are again at perfect liberty to dine with whoever will invite you.”
“But listen,” repeated Fairchild, “if I were a poet, you know what I’d do? I’d—”
“You’d capture an unattached but ardent wealthy female. Or, lacking that, some other and more fortunate poet would divide a weekend or so with you: there seems to be a noblesse oblige among them,” the other answered. “Gentleman poets, that is,” he added.
“No,” said Fairchild, indefatigable, “I’d intersperse my book with photographs and art studies of ineffable morons in bathing suits or clutching imitation lace window curtains across their middles. That’s what I’d do.”
“That would damn it as Art,” Mark Frost objected.
“You’re confusing Art with Studio Life, Mark,” Mrs. Wiseman told him. She forestalled him and accepted a cigarette. “I’m all out, myself. Sorry. Thanks.”
“Why not?” Mark Frost responded. “If studio life costs you enough, it becomes art. You have to have a good reason to give to your people back home in Ohio or Indiana or somewhere.”
“But everybody wasn’t born in the Ohio valley, thank God,” the Semitic man said. Fairchild stared at him, kind and puzzled, a trifle belligerent. “I speak for those of us who read books instead of write them,” he explained. “It’s bad enough to grow into the conviction after you reach the age of discretion that you are to spend the rest of your life writing books, but to have your very infancy darkened by the possibility that you may have to write the Great American Novel. .”
“Oh,” Fairchild said. “Well, maybe you are like me, and prefer a live poet to the writings of any man.”
“Make it a dead poet, and I’ll agree.”
“Well. .” He settled his spectacles. “Listen to this.” Mark Frost groaned, rising, and departed. Fairchild read implacably:
“On rose and peach their droppings bled,
Love a sacrifice has lain,
Beneath his hand his mouth is slain,
Beneath his hand his mouth is dead—
“No: wait.” He skipped back up the page. Mrs. Wiseman listened restively, her brother with his customary quizzical phlegm.
“The Raven bleak and Philomel
Amid the bleeding trees were fixed,
His hoarse cry and hers were mixed
And through the dark their droppings fell
“Upon the red erupted rose,
Upon the broken branch of peach
Blurred with scented mouths, that each
To another sing, and close—”
He read the entire poem through. “What do you make of it?” he asked.
“Mostly words,” the Semitic man answered promptly, “a sort of cocktail of words. I imagine you get quite a jolt from it, if your taste is educated to cocktails.”
“Well, why not?” Mrs. Wiseman said with fierce protectiveness. “Only fools require ideas in verse.”
“Perhaps so,” her brother admitted. “But there’s no nourishment in electricity, as you poets nowadays seem to believe.”
“Well, what would you have them write about, then?” she demanded. “There’s only one possible subject to write anything about. What is there worth the effort and despair of writing about, except love and death?”
“That’s the feminine of it. You’d better let art alone and stick to artists, as is your nature.”
“But women have done some good things,” Fairchild objected. “I’ve read—”
“They bear geniuses. But do you think they care anything about the pictures and music their children produce? That they have any other emotion than a fierce tolerance of the vagaries of the child? Do you think Shakespeare’s mother was any prouder of him than, say, Tom o’Bedlam’s?”
“Certainly she was,” Mrs. Wiseman said. “Shakespeare made money.”
“You made a bad choice for comparison,” Fairchild said. “All artists are kind of insane. Don’t you think so?” he asked Mrs. Wiseman.
“Yes,” she snapped. “Almost as insane as the ones that sit around and talk about them.”
“Well—” Fairchild stared again at the page under his hand. He said slowly, “It’s a kind of dark thing. It’s kind of like somebody brings you to a dark door. Will you enter that room, or not?”
“But the old fellows got you into the room first,” the Semitic man said. “Then they asked you if you wanted to go out or not.”
“I don’t know. There are rooms, dark rooms, that they didn’t know anything about at all. Freud and these other—”
“Discovered them just in time to supply our shelterless literati with free sleeping quarters. But you and Eva just agreed that subject, substance, doesn’t signify in verse, that the best poetry is just words.”
“Yes. . infatuation with words,” Fairchild agreed. “That’s when you hammer out good poetry, great poetry. A kind of singing rhythm in the world that you get into without knowing it, like a swimmer gets into a current. Words. . I had it once.”
“Shut up, Dawson,” Mrs. Wiseman said. “Julius can afford to be a fool.”
“Words,” repeated Fairchild. “But it’s gone out of me now. That first infatuation, I mean; that sheer infatuation with and marveling over the beauty and power of words. That has gone out of me. Used up, I guess. So I can’t write poetry any more. It takes me too long to say things, now.”
“We all wrote poetry, when we were young,” the Semitic man said. “Some of us even put it down on paper. But all of us wrote it.”
“Yes,” repeated Fairchild, turning slowly onward through the volume. “Listen:
“. . O spring O wanton O cruel
baring to the curved and hungry hand
of march your white unsubtle thighs. .
And listen.” He turned onward. Mrs. Wiseman was gazing aft where Jenny and Mr. Talliaferro had come into view and now leaned together upon the rail. The Semitic man listened with weary courtesy.
“. . above unsapped convolvulae of hills
april a bee sipping perplexed with pleasure. .