Now that he had raised pigs the only consequential fantasy of his youth left to him was to live in France. He had saved all his earnings from age thirteen to eighteen to live in France, thirteen hundred dollars in all. A scoundrel eye doctor checking his sight said that he might be able to restore some sight in his blind left eye. His parents had no insurance that would cover this previous injury and no money what with a modest salary and five children. Being able to see out of the left eye was a more immediate temptation than France so when the surgeon asked what kind of money he could raise he stupidly said thirteen hundred. The surgeon said he would do the operation at that discounted price plus throw in a contact lens to help it work. It didn’t work at all and the lens also was worthless and painful. He threw it out in the swamp behind the house. He was destined to always see a dense fog bank, unconsoled when he discovered that holding the lids open he could see a small light in the sky. He had spent his life savings for France on an utter failure. Later on another eye doctor said the surgery was “criminal.”
Not surprisingly he entered a depression. His girlfriend abandoned him because she wanted to get married right after high school graduation. He was an ace debater but couldn’t talk her into sex without marriage. The loss of this girl and France at the same time prolonged the depression. In fact on his senior trip by train from Michigan to New York City they had stopped in Niagara Falls and on a very high bridge across the river for the first time he thought deeply of suicide. What prevented him from the fatal act is that he didn’t want to upset his parents or brothers and sisters who apparently loved him as he did them.
He never quite escaped this darkness but it was a small problem that his poetic thoughts about death were often disturbed by the fact that he was hungry. Maybe he should eat something first and then commit suicide. He had always kept this a secret only and inevitably thinking of it when he had a minstrel dream. The only good thing about the minstrel dreams is that they detoxified the suicidal mind-set by inspiring such hatred. The other and more long-ranging effect of the minstrel nightmare was of course that he forever quit doing poetry readings. He didn’t unlike so many others see the connection between performance and poetry. Some poets seemed to take to it quite naturally, grinning and chuckling over their own dark witticisms. He had always thought that a Native American should have shot Robert Frost for the outrageous lie of the line “The land was ours before we were the land’s.” What a scandal that would be, America’s best-loved geezer falling in a battle over poetry.
Chapter 4
Raising the pigs had given him the courage to plan an extensive trip to France. He had by now been there several times but always for overplanned trips for his French publisher Christian Bourgois. They were full to the hilt with interviews and bookstore signings with very little time for the general wandering around that he valued so highly. He later reflected that these were exactly like American book tours except the food was wonderful and Paris itself was more fascinating than any American city. For reasons completely unclear to him the French had taken kindly to his work and soon his French sales exceeded those in the United States which had never been all that good. He was reviewed widely and well but that had never translated directly to the cash register. It had always amused him that publishers like movie companies would never know sales in advance.
He wanted to be aimless in France. A month might do it and he would stay longer if he wished. He wanted to go to Toulouse and eat as much as he could of the bean stew cassoulet, which would be a lot, and to the seaport Marseille, and to Arles which he knew of by having read about the lives of van Gogh and Gauguin. Of course they had lived together but it hadn’t worked out because van Gogh’s instability exceeded Gauguin’s. He cut off his own ear which made some biographers sympathetic saying that he did it for love, in itself incomprehensible. No one cuts off his nose for love.
Thinking over his short trip to Paris he mostly recalled lunches and dinners and getting over them. He would rise early, usually because of jet lag, and walk for an hour or so until a café opened where he could get an omelet with lardons (pork morsels) after which he would rest, then walk another hour to stimulate his appetite for lunch, then a long nap, and another longish walk and a couple of glasses of red wine. Hard liquor was too expensive. He had been hungry the afternoon before and had stopped at the Ritz for a fifty-dollar chunk of foie gras and two forty-dollar glasses of burgundy. It was just what he needed after crossing the bridge and walking in the Tuileries. The tab was a hundred and thirty dollars to which he added a twenty-dollar tip. While walking back across the river he thought it over and once again decided that he had no meaningful comprehension of money. He had stayed in the Ritz once for several days in the early 1990s. It was the anniversary of Le Nouvel Observateur and everything was billed to the magazine. Allen Ginsberg was also a guest and called one morning to complain that two eggs were forty dollars on the room service breakfast menu. He told Allen that it was on the house and Allen had said, “I don’t like the idea,” and he agreed. “Me neither. Back home farm eggs are two bucks a dozen. I could be eating twenty dozen eggs at this price.” You simply ate the hotel eggs and regretted it in the name of the poor.
He was brought up in modest circumstances but his wife’s parents were well off if not wealthy. His wife kept a sharp eye on their budget. She said she didn’t “connect” with his newfound wealth when the screenplay money started rolling in. She continued on in her usual modest way though he paid fifteen grand for a horse she had been wanting that reminded her of Black Beauty. He had no particular interest in horses but this one was gorgeous and would follow him and the dog as they walked in the pasture. Now he often walked Marjorie, the only piglet left. She was slow because she sniffed at everything like a bird dog. One day she flushed a covey of Hungarian grouse and he liked the idea that Marjorie would work as a bird dog.
His wife kept warning him that his newfound prosperity couldn’t last forever and that he should save more of it. He ignored her. In truth spending a lot of money put him off balance though it didn’t quite sound an alarm. He was transparently a financial nitwit. He spent way more than sensible redecorating the house, spent lavishly on meals in New York and LA, spent on cars, hotels, pointless travel, fishing in Mexico and Costa Rica. When the air cleared, though it was still fuzzy, he figured he had loaned out more than $250,000 and had got only the two thousand back from the Indians. This only served to make him sensitive to the fact that he was stupider than he thought.
The real hurt, though, came when he understood that he was overlooking his true work, poems and novels, to make more money writing screenplays. This happened only twice after he quit teaching for good, and he immediately wrote harder, ten hours a day, seven days a week. Naturally he got tired and the only thing that saved him was taking his bird dog and some groceries up to a reasonably remote cabin he had bought on his splurge near the harbor town of Grand Marais in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The cabin drew him back to his youth when he was seven and his father and two uncles built a cabin on a lake for a thousand dollars in used lumber, a wonderful cabin only twenty miles from Reed City where his father worked as a county agricultural agent. His family lived there all summer long. Sometimes he rode to work with his father in order to make a little money weeding gardens, mowing lawns, washing cars. On a good day he could make two or three dollars. He would come home and swim, eat some dinner, and go fishing for bass in the evening. On good days when he didn’t work in town he would catch a pile of bluegills his family loved to eat. This was how he was slowly led to his life as a passionate fly fisherman. It’s not just catching fish but the delicacy and grace with which you catch them. Not big hooks, hurtful to the fish, but tiny flies with tiny hooks.