Part XI

50) In the opening lines of this section, above, I feel now a some-what unnecessary and untrue reaching for place-names, probably to disguise the fact that I had never been anywhere far from N.E. I had, however, spent some parts of several summers on a small island off the coast of Maine, invited to live there by Ted Packard, who owned it. The "hundred-trap" designation is an exact descriptions it is about the limit in number that one man with one motorboat can tend; and such a man stopped at our rocks with the mail, from Cundy's Harbor, or to offer us fresh lobsters. From a lifetime of squinting over the water, his eyes, like those of other lobstermen and boatmen, were pale blue. The thing about the Ford truck is wholly imaginary, yet as I wrote it, it seemed very real; I could feel the night air. Minnesota, no, and Kentucky, no; but they probably say it there the same, and say the same thing, as at a Vermont postoffice, and I had stood around in some of those.

51) I should have seen when I was writing this section that this was the local geography, with local and family names, and all the time, in the background, I was writing the poems that I have interspersed here. The contrast between these poems, as they appear, and the long run of names and moments later, is the real map-making here.

52) These three lines interest me a good deal now, and please me, that I kept to the notion of sound, and here brought together a sequence something like the sequence in Part I, the forest - ocean-music lines. The clock would have been the banjo clock in the dining-room, if any, for which Will Upham, son of the man who went to Japan, painted a coaching-scene on the lower door that hid the brass pendulum. The sound of my father's hammering, on a box or anything else, was familiar; he drove a nail true, wasting no blows, but always gave it an extra confirming tap. I had spent several summers at a YMCA camp on Lake Winnepesaukee, hence the bugle. Herbert's mother was an Upham, sister to Will the artist, and daughter of the quartermaster on the Perry voyage to Japan. Herbert was the musician - pianist, organist, composer - and died of heart failure lust before the second world war. In the back room of the house on Powder House Boulevard where he lived with his mother the immediate family sat during the Christian Science funeral services - Will Upham and his wife and three daughters; my mother and father and myself; and other aunts and cousins. Herbert's mother was deeply attached to him, as all knew. That one sob was the only outward sign of her grief, and we all sat there unmoving, as if it had not happened, but far from unmoved.

53) This was part of a sonnet I had written for Elmore Andrews, a classmate and fraternity brother, whose fianceé had died in the summer after our graduation; she was also a classmate, and is "Elinor in white" later in this part of the poem. I cannot imagine from what wounds of my own I drew this wisdom, or advice, unless it was that referred to in Note 46; and it is not true that "this is worst," or it has not been, for him.

54) Though none of the "Map" poem itself was written in the house in Somerville (excepting of course the earlier poems quoted) I have a strong feeling here of that house, and of placing myself there as I worked on these particular lines just above - the uneven bricks, certainly, and the shuffling on the porch. Not the crib: that was later, and Johnny's - yet it was also in that house but in a separate apartment, after I was married. But I remember that once, in the room that was mine when I was going to college, and living at home, I looked out the window at a plane, and made myself find words to describe how it felt to see, or perhaps be, that plane. Satisfied that "scratches a long line" caught the sound, and the guidedness, and the slow movement, as seen from below, I wrote it in the notebook, and years later used it in this place.

55) Now it turns from sound to sight again, and I can feel the cadences limiting and partially suggesting the sort of things I included - that each should be different from the others, that all, and each, should be evocative yet not too particular, and should thus work for anyone anywhere. As it happens, I have a particular memory of my other calling us all out to see the Northern Lights, from the front steps of that house, but none in particular of sunsets. It is a long time since I have seen Northern Lights. Has weather changed so much?

56) The tile came from the potteries in Doylestown, Pa., and was given me by my wife's mother. It was said to be a copy of one that Thomas Carlyle had designed for himself. The Latin means "I burn while I am of use" (it shows a candle lighted) or "Although I give light I am consumed." The sentiment appealed to Carlyle enough to have a tile made, apparently, and it also appealed to me enough to keep my tile in sight, as it is still. I was glad to work this tile into the poem, because it was and is a room-object and near-at-hand, and it was and is a part of my ideas: an awareness, often painful, of time passing.

57) This poem was, I am quite sure, written as repentance, penance, or exorcism of an actual failure on my part to be as outspokenly hospitable and friendly as I really felt - a lost opportunity I tried to recapture by writing about it - a use I have found myself often making of poetry. I can still feel the pang of shame and regret, but I cannot say that I have not committed again and many times the same sin of omission. In this reticence, withdrawal, masking, embarrass sent, or whatever it is, I have often hurt others, and myself, and I believe, too, that it is part of my feeling about the Good Samaritan story. In this instance I am one of those who does not cross the road, but passes by on the other side. Not all the roads are really roads, and not all the Samaritans talk to a man in a car at midnight and save him from killing himself. We are not told that any of those who passed by on the other side had a trouble of the conscience later. But I did that time, and I do still. I eased my conscience a little by writing the poem, and I know very well that I have done so a good many times, and out of far more acute need.

It is also true that in choosing from my old notebooks some lines to use here in this section, as map-items, poems I was writing while some of the other things went on around me, I took care to show a variety of form, line-length, and subject-matter. The planning was going on.

But there appear to have been more cross-relationships, and echoes and restatements of my ideas, than I knew then, and of which I have become aware in the present examination.

58) It is in my mind that I wrote this when I was in college, for another classmate and fraternity brother, Leonard Short, when in his senior year he was told by the Department of Biology that they would not recommend him for medical school. It is also in my mind that I rather shyly showed it to him, and that he was neither much impressed or helped by it. My feeling about it was not as deep as my feeling about the death of Andrews' fiancee, and the poem was in a way more of an exercise for me. More, that is, than a real outgoing. Short had a hard time of it, the poem doing him no good. He was admitted to another medical school which was obliged to drop him and many other first-year students when the national examining board overhauled the school and required tightening up on standards. He went to a third medical school while working as a night attendant at the state institution for the insane poor. That school soon after went out of business. He established a good practice in Lexington, served a long and very hard time in the Army during the second world war, and returned to what is now a very profitable practice. He paints prize-winning oils and water-colors.

This is not important, nor perhaps is what happened to Andrews, nor to the fourth fraternity-brother classmate, and I am interested only because I see now how frequently I drew my ideas from immediate occasions, and people close to me.

59) I have written more notes for this section of the poem than for any other, and am wondering why. The identifications are more, but not more necessary. It probably simply shows the difference of this section in tone and purpose; it is certainly more of a gathering-up of more diverse images than any of the others. It is also, I think, an indulgence I had denied myself until now.

The lines immediately above, by including Johnny at five, and his toys and clothes, show again that one uses (I used) the images at hand, the matters of my experience. The girls were my students; the searchlights were the wartime night scene; the printer's ink meant the college press, where I had been as a student editor, and later as faculty editor. Nothing so painful in a poem as children by non-parents But what about my Ford truck coming home with supplies at nightfall?

No. I'll keep that. It doesn't make any real difference that I imagined it. The thing is that the actual personal allusions can be grossly overdone, and so can the imagined passages. I'm not disturbed yet by excesses, and though here, and from here on, the personal allusions are frequent, this is autobiography.

It is autobiographical fact, though minor, that sitting at my desk one night, wanting to prolong a night of writing, and looking for something to write about, I reached up for a globe on the shelf above the desk, spun it and watched it slow down, put it back, and wrote the poem.

60) As I copy this poem about the globe, I realize that I have often raised my eyes, sometimes my hand, to things in the room, and brought them down onto the page I am writing. This time it was all but a laboratory experiment: spin the globe: no, slower than that: what fingers?: now Asia is up and the US out of sight: give it another spin: ten lines done now: I'm riding a globe, too: but I stay right here: the desk-lamp makes a small dazzle on the shiny surface when I let it stop: enough for tonight.

Somerset Vaugham, in THE SUMMING-UP, which I have been rereading in the last few days, says that the act of writing must never lead the writer; only the idea. But the look of the page. or something near, has very often suggested what I say; and the nature of these very footnotes has affected their style.

61) By this time it has become much less of a curiosity to me what I picked out of memory to put into the poem than why I did, and how I used what I took from here and there. I want to examine for my present satisfaction what happened in this passage, insofar as I remember, understand, and am honest.

The swirl, all in my head, but slow, as it might have been in bed after writing the poem about the globe, seems right enough for the movement here, and the mood. Thus the names could be from backward and forward, unrelated. But what is it they have in common? I had met Gogarty several times at Horace Reynolds' house in Cambridge, often enough anyway so that he remembered me, and we talked at length. I liked his poems and prose, but his presence was more exciting, and his speech a delight. Whitehead was lecturing at Harvard, and I had seen him on the street, knowing instantly I saw greatness - he was tall, white of hair and I think carried his hat in hand, and wore a long black coat, and moved alone in the crowd - so that to have him named by my companion was almost unnecessary. These two men I had seen at about the same time, and the time I was writing the poem.

Fish Ellis was captain and quarterback of the Tufts football team in 1929, and a classmate. When I watched him play I knew that I was seeing one good of his kind; in his case, superlatively good. He was obviously better than good players, faster, surer; his excellence made them seem sluggish, and was like a daydream of playing - ninety yards for a touchdown, and not a hand laid on him. The superior artist always makes it seem easy. I think I can recognize the good artist, and good artisan, no matter what the medium. And I admire even Chaucer's perfect rascal: of his kind perfect. Of his kind, Ellis was perfect.

Robinson Jeffers came to Harvard to deliver a reading, and read every word of his manuscript. When he was escorted onto the platform, he seemed to me a captive, a dressed-up Indian among the white men to be shown off. Black hair, deeply browned face, and deeply lined, hawk nose. He went directly to a chair and sat down. Only his eyes moved, as if noting the nearest doors and windows, the ways of escape. Of course I remember what he said and read, but that flash of an impression is stronger, as of all the games I saw Ellis play in, it is one flash I have of him in my eye, slim, twisting, and running.

Mrs. Osgood had a very deep voice, and had known Yeats. She was always saying, "I told Willie Yeats the other day…" and she was so much older that he was indeed Willie to her, and I don't doubt that she had told him. She lived to be ninety-six. When she held my hand, as she made me sit down beside her in a large supper-gathering after a meeting of the New England Poetry Club, she said, "Tell me one of your poems. I know you are one of the poets here. Tell me a poem." I protested that I knew none of my poems to say them aloud, even for myself to hear. But she made me say a first line, then the second, then she commanded the third and fourth and fifth, and she dragged a whole poem out of me, holding my hand hard, that I am sure I did not consciously know.

The lines about my grandmother Murdock need no explanation. She was determined to come to the meal, but was too weak, at the table. I carried her up two flights of stairs, knowing it was final.

I suppose that what these people all had in common, for me, was an intenser life, at the moments I remembered them, than is usual. Even Curley; I had come into a barbershop on Province Street, in Boston, never having been there before, and he was leaving, talking his time about it, shaven, massaged, arrogant, contemptuous, and secure. The sharp flash again. If there was a plan in the downward curve from Gogarty to my grandmother, from his bright spark to her gray, it was instinctive.