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“Raising money for his philanthropies, I expect.”

twelve

Thus went my meditation on the green sofa. Of all the meditative methods recommended in the literature I liked this new one best. Often I sat at the end of the day remembering everything that had happened, in minute detail, all that had been seen and done and said. I was able to go backward through the day, viewing myself from the back or side, physically no different from anyone else. If I had bought Renata a gardenia at an open-air stand, I could recall that I had paid seventy-five cents for it. I saw the brass milling of the three silver-plated quarters. I saw the lapel of Renata’s coat, the white head of the long pin. I remembered even the two turns the pin took in the cloth, and Renata’s full woman’s face and her pleased gaze at the flower, and the odor of the gardenia. If this was what transcendence took, it was a cinch, I could do it forever, back to the beginning of time. So, lying on the sofa, I now brought back to mind the obituary page of the Times.

The Times was much stirred by Humboldt’s death and gave him a double-column spread. The photograph was large. For after all Humboldt did what poets in crass America are supposed to do. He chased ruin and death even harder than he had chased women. He blew his talent and his health and reached home, the grave, in a dusty slide. He plowed himself under. Okay. So did Edgar Allan Poe, picked out of the Baltimore gutter. And Hart Crane over the side of a ship. And Jarrell falling in front of a car. And poor John Berryman jumping from a bridge. For some reason this awfulness is peculiarly appreciated by business and technological America. The country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poets’ testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can’t perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. Miracle and power no longer belong to him. So poets are loved, but loved because they just can’t make it here. They exist to light up the enormity of the awful tangle and justify the cynicism of those who say, “If I were not such a corrupt, unfeeling bastard, creep, thief, and vulture, I couldn’t get through this either. Look at these good and tender and soft men, the best of us. They succumbed, poor loonies.” So this, I was meditating, is how successful bitter hard-faced and cannibalistic people exult. Such was the attitude reflected in the picture of Humboldt the Times chose to use. It was one of those mad-rotten-majesty pictures —spooky, humorless, glaring furiously with tight lips, mumpish or scrofulous cheeks, a scarred forehead, and a look of enraged, ravaged childishness. This was the Humboldt of conspiracies, putsches, accusations, tantrums, the Bellevue Hospital Humboldt, the Humboldt of litigations. For Humboldt was litigious. The word was made for him. He threatened many times to sue me.

Yes, the obituary was awful. The clipping was somewhere amongst these papers that surrounded me, but I didn’t want to look at it. I could remember verbatim what the Times said. It said, in its tinkertoy style of knobs and sticks, that Von Humboldt Fleisher had made a brilliant start. Born on New York’s Upper West Side. At twenty-two set a new style in American poetry. Appreciated by Conrad Aiken (who once had to call the cops to get him out of the house). Approved by T. S. Eliot (about whom, when he was off his nut, he would spread the most lurid improbable sexual scandal). Mr. Fleisher was also a critic, essayist, writer of fiction, teacher, prominent literary intellectual, a salon personality. Intimates praised his conversation. He was a great talker and wit.

Here, no longer meditative, I took over myself. The sun still shone