Somebody Trying

The author has grown old. He is eighty now. He is a little surprised by the success of his prose and his poems, but as much by his longevity. Though his many stubborn beliefs—together with the approval of his readership—aid in the decline of his faculties. They have not yet failed completely, however. He recognizes that alongside the welcoming applause of the majority, there is the mild chill of the minority. The young are not interested in his work. Their movement is not his movement, their style not his style. They think and above all write differently. The old writer reads and studies their works open-mindedly but finds them inferior to his own. He considers the new school much less important—or at least not better—than his own. He believes that if he could, he would write in this new way. Though not now, obviously. It would take him eight to ten years to absorb the spirit of the new style—and it is almost time for him to go.

There are moments when he grows frustrated with their ideas. Why are they so important? A handful of young people who for some reason do not like his work? Millions admire him. But this makes him feel like he is going round in circles. He started this way, after all. He was one of fifty or so young people who developed a new idea, wrote in a different style, helped change the opinions of millions who revered a handful of the older generation and one or two out-of-fashion artists. (The deaths of the latter aided his cause greatly.) Thinking in this way, the old writer concludes that art must be a thing of vanity if fashions can change so quickly. Indeed, the work of these young people will be as ephemeral as his own—though this does not comfort him.

Reflecting further afield, he notes bitterly that from the age of forty or fifty the enthusiasms and artistry of any author begin to appear eccentric or risible. Maybe—it is one of his hopes—they will cease to be eccentric or risible aged one hundred and fifty or even two hundred. At that point, instead of  appearing démodé, they are classic.

He also has doubts about the brazen and sometimes conceptual assessments he made in much of his criticism. Those writers he criticized when he was young and later replaced—maybe he wrote what he did because he could not sympathize with them—not owing to their lack of genius, but because the act of criticism is probably corrupted by contemporary concerns—fashion again. Superficially, his criticism resembles that which the young people of today write about him. His opinions have not changed—at least the major ones. Most of those old writers he would criticize today as he did sixty years ago. But this is not any great proof that his criticism is well-founded. It is only proof that, mentally, he is still the same young man.Translated from the Modern Greek

I

Out of scarcity,—
...being.

Because, when you were nine, your father

was murdered,
betrayed.

Because the traveler was betrayed by those with

whom he had the right to seek

Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table
Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,
She ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage
To meet him in the doorway with the news
And put him on his guard. ‘Silas is back.’
She pushed him outward with her through the door
And shut it after her. ‘Be kind,’ she said.
She took the market things from Warren’s arms
And set them on the porch, then drew him down
To sit beside her on the wooden steps.

‘When was I ever anything but kind to him?
But I’ll not have the fellow back,’ he said.
‘I told him so last haying, didn’t I?
If he left then, I said, that ended it.

I remember when I wrote The Circus
I was living in Paris, or rather we were living in Paris
Janice, Frank was alive, the Whitney Museum
Was still on 8th Street, or was it still something else?
Fernand Léger lived in our building
Well it wasn’t really our building it was the building we lived in
Next to a Grand Guignol troupe who made a lot of noise
So that one day I yelled through a hole in the wall

PART I

I
In a far country, and a distant age,
Ere sprites and fays had bade farewell to earth,
A boy was born of humble parentage;
The stars that shone upon his lonely birth
Did seem to promise sovereignty and fame—
Yet no tradition hath preserved his name.

II
’T is said that on the night when he was born,
A beauteous shape swept slowly through the room;
Its eyes broke on the infant like a morn,
And his cheek brightened like a rose in bloom;

But do not let us quarrel any more,
No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once:
Sit down and all shall happen as you wish.
You turn your face, but does it bring your heart?
I'll work then for your friend's friend, never fear,
Treat his own subject after his own way,
Fix his own time, accept too his own price,
And shut the money into this small hand
When next it takes mine. Will it? tenderly?
Oh, I'll content him,—but to-morrow, Love!
I often am much wearier than you think,
This evening more than usual, and it seems
As if—forgive now—should you let me sit
Here by the window with your hand in mine
And look a half-hour forth on Fiesole,

It’s a spring morning; sun pours in the window
As I sit here drinking coffee, reading Augustine.
And finding him, as always, newly minted
From when I first encountered him in school.
Today I’m overcome with astonishment
At the way we girls denied all that was mean
In those revered philosophers we studied;
Who found us loathsome, loathsomely seductive;

The wind, that beats the mountain, blows
More softly round the open wold,
And gently comes the world to those
That are cast in gentle mould.

And me this knowledge bolder made,
Or else I had not dare to flow
In these words toward you, and invade

Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song
in my own breath. I'm alone here
in Brooklyn Heights, late morning, the sky
above the St. George Hotel clear, clear
for New York, that is. The radio playing
"Bird Flight," Parker in his California
tragic voice fifty years ago, his faltering
"Lover Man" just before he crashed into chaos.
I would guess that outside the recording studio
in Burbank the sun was high above the jacarandas,
it was late March, the worst of yesterday's rain
had come and gone, the sky washed blue. Bird
could have seen for miles if he'd looked, but what
he saw was so foreign he clenched his eyes,
shook his head, and barked like a dog—just once—