Stories, Etc.

OPEN LETTER, CLOSED BOOK

VEILSVILLE’S quiet. Wind’s playing low tunes through the whitened, skele¬tonized trees in the woods surrounding the house. I survive the nights with sleeping pills and bourbon, dull books and dying fires. But the days, George!

When I stepped out to collect the half-frozen milk this morning, a young woman poet was in the hammock on the porch. Late November! Bittercold! She lay snoring in a thin dress under a raincoat without a lining. Another of my crazy conquests. They come from all over, everywhere, anywhere! This was a good-looker. You’d be sur¬prised at how many are good-looking. What do they want? I’m a serious man. I’m a heart-broken man. Don’t they know? Where’s all that much talked of poetic sensitiv¬ity? Can you imagine me, of all people, with stalking fans? It’s too fantastic. Some¬times I think I’ve gone mad, that I’m hallucinating all this.

What was it? A year ago? A year ago! Here I was, a plain ordinary Professor of English in the English Department of a little backwater, jerkwater college with an enrollment of 600 students in the unheard of hamlet of Veilsville, Tennessee—and, George, I was happy! You, who weren’t even satisfied to hold a chair in literature at one of the best—if not, etc.—Ivy League schools in the country; you, who must have power in New York as a critic; you, sophisticate, bon vivant, etc.; you, who have never been “happy”—you would not and probably still cannot believe it; but I was happy. I remember your constant jibes; your: “Why bury yourself with the hillbillies in the Appalachians?” Your Erewhon/Nowhere ribbing. But George, you were fully grown, a mature man. I’ve only recently been born. At forty!

I interrupted this letter for a few minutes to send my young stalker back to bed. Can you imagine? She’s about twenty and “simply steaming” for me. Think of it! Charlie Fallon, a sex object! It’s so ludicrous it must be true. Now don’t cluck your tongue. Yes, I let her in—yes, I let her stay. Why not? She’s of age, and I’ve never been so lonely in my life. Maybe she’ll help. I don’t know. Her poetry’s execrable but her legs are great; and she must be healthy or she’d be sick from sleeping out last night. Not a clogged sinus do I detect. Don’t worry about me; it doesn’t matter anyway.

What I mean is, George, that the past—one might say my pre-birth years, the ones from that false start my mother gave me to that period of a year or so ago—seems to me now like some sweet dead happy dream. I’m in the real world now, bloody born at last. Now I’m like you—tough old George—in a way. Except—I have a dream of happiness and yes even of beauty to recall. I can draw on it, like a big bank account. The Pulitzer was nothing, George. I’m going to be a great poet now. I hurt enough to send me right up to and on past the Nobel and into history. What poor Kathleen always wanted!

I suppose you see them occasionally. The cocktail circuit, or The White Horse, or wherever the literary chic waste their breath these days. Pardon my ignorance. I was a literary anchorite. I never knew that life. Whistler is a good poet—hell, a fine poet, maybe a great one—but he’s had no luck. Not really. How odd that I of all people should have had such luck! Strange, strange luck! Whistler offended too many impor¬tant people. But five fine books! And I, with just my one absurd sad long account of forebemoaned moan, and suddenly—as one of the New York papers put it—I’m a Cin¬derella poet (my God!), a Big Prize Winner! I’m more popular—I shy from the word famous—even more academically respected (but there I’ve got Whistler who never stopped to pick up a degree) than poor Kathleen’s hero roaring boy. Add to that, that, at the age of forty (now forty-one) my ridiculous career, unlike Whistler’s, has been called “meteoric.” The world is truly tilted. And that embarrassing letter I wrote to my sub¬scribers a year ago, when I was in the middle of my worst agony and confusion. Did you ever see it? I don’t suppose so. You never would subscribe to what you called “Charlie’s Little Poetaster’s Journal.” I can hear you now: “Don’t encourage him. If you do, he’ll stay buried out there in the boondocks forever. Charlie’s a dear soul. He’s got talent, but he wants bringing out. He’s pathologically retiring.” No, George: per¬haps I was simple but I wasn’t sick. Now I’m sick—and I’ll never be able to be simple again.

When I look over copies of “A Poet’s Journal” now, I can’t believe that I was its editor, that I chose the pathetic (sometimes bathetic) poetic stuff that mimeos its pages. Was that Charlie Fallon? Did I think such stuff of merit? It’s a wonder you didn’t kick me down the stairs, George, as it’s said Schopenhauer’s mother did him. But, you see, I must have been a happy man. Innocent beyond belief. But nothing, George, absolutely nothing, had ever gone wrong for me. Now I understand that I didn’t understand poetry at all, though I taught it. Think! I spent my summers at The Writers’ Camp, giving my seminar on “Poe and the Dark Side of the Mind!” Well, here’s a copy of the letter I sent out to the subscribers of “Fallon’s, A Poet’s Journal.” Don’t skip reading it, George. As simple-minded as it is, it will become part of literary history—now that I’m such a famous fellow.