Читать книгу Jay to Bee - Janet Frame - Страница 7
Оглавление1. MacDowell November 15 1969 (postcard)
The Management of Peedauntals Ltd thanks you for your visit to the East & reminds you that it wishes to keep close to its valued client. It moves shortly to lonely premises in Baltimore. Singing opera you need never be peedauntally underprivileged or under-achieved with our late model Peedauntals. You are missed greatly around the factory especially by the management who sends this postcard.
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2. November 17
Dear Bill,
The day in Boston was strange and sad and vivid, from the drive in sunlight and clear air and the arrival over Mystic Bridge near Storrow (I thought it was Sorrow) Street to the bizarre farewell in the lounge of the Y.W.C.A. In my mind it is like a lived piece of fiction or film. I can see you in your black coat and black cap standing larger than life like a monument against the clear blue sky, as if I had been a child gazing upward; Elnora like a figure from a painting in her bright strong colours and dark face; the scarf-stripes gashing downwards; Jo with a kind of pearl-coloured vivacity; I, squirrel-bulky in my coat, clutching my sweater as a child away from home clutches its favourite toy; the smiling man with the brief-case; the city benevolent because we were there. And all day was a journey with the four of us performing some kind of ritual dance, person to person to person to person, a long long journey to say au revoir; it would have been impossible to say goodbye.
I have never known such a mysterious sad strange day. It was like waiting to be executed, with the execution taking place in a scene from a painting. The lounge. The sailors sprawled asleep in the chairs. The tight-lipped woman guarding the messages and keys in their brown boxes—the striped shadows the striped scarf the striped sailors. And then, after the time in the Museum, all the paintings that had accompanied us, the image of them in our minds, their after-image projected mysteriously in the lounge of the Y.W.C.A. Boston.
Well, it was a dream. Was it a dream?
In lighter vein I have uncovered from the secret manuscripts of Emily Dickinson a letter from a blue jay to a bee which reads as follows:
B you are gone away!
even au revoir only
was hard to say.
We are lonely.
Jo’s in New York this week.
We’re settled and at work—
the others are mostly back—
your sweater’s warm and thick.
You’ll get my letter, say,
Friday. Reply straightaway
or better, be with me—
Yours, blue J.
I don’t want to embarrass you with these notes; I don’t mean to.
J
3. MacDowell November 22
Dear Bill,
I’m relieved to know you’re alive and well and living in California.
I (and we) were beginning to think you were dead and to mournyia.
(and from there, with a swift turn of a phrase she steered into a limerick)
The pecker of Harrison Kinney
was so excessively skinny
that like a Greek statue
his balls stared back at you
a. (classical) Let’s unGreek our leak, go Roman with Pliny.
b. (classical) as if you were Pallas Athene.
c. (pseudo-contem porary) Like matics without their cine.
d. (vulgar) ‘twas a miracle he had had any.
e. ( ’ ) so teeny so meeny so mini.
f. (novelistic) How mean is the thorn in our spinney!
g. (low) If you were a horse you’d whinny.
h. (anthropomorphic) with little eyes, nosy, and chinny.
How about that?
Now you are back on the city scene you might be interested in the model P[eedauntal] which carries with it a special testimonial from Al Bean, Moon-Man whose wife uses it. It is our Supermarket P designed for those who must spend time shopping in one supermarket without being able to get past the barrier. It’s an audio model. The user can select Snap-Crackle-Pop of breakfast food for Environmental Harmony; Mood Music for unexpected social encounters; and many other sounds which have to be heard to be believed. And remember, it carries a testimonial from Al Bean.
It is no mean accomplishment to serve those who now, their minds at peace, need never urinate in the Magic Flute, nor in the Frozen Foods.
There once was a fellow named Lionel
whose pecker was made of vynil
while trying to warm it
he did swiftly unform it
it melted—in fact—that was final.
Who finds himself beholden
to satisfy poor Eunice Golden
must measure his tool
with a thirty foot rule
The astronaut, Al Bean
said space is a lousy scene
once my orbit of fame
was from coming to came
but now I’m just Al has-been.
Completion of the last line wins a fabulous tour of the Eastern United States. Visit the MacDowell Colony. Play anagrams and other games with the famous
Elnora the Morer
Jo the pro
Janet the never-ban-it.
Mingle with the MacDowell Elite! Journey inside the Biological Time Bomb! Experience James Thurber! Play Losing Sweaters with Simon! Pedal uphill with Jill!
The range of experience is unparalleled. Spend one free morning in Mrs Crocket’s pocket!
One evening in the Specially cooled Jaffrey cinema!
Taste Rose Hips, diluted or concentrated.
This brochure cannot describe the numerous attractions of the fabulous Eastern Seabored.
Take a trip to Baltimore, half a mile to a mile from the Maryland State Prison and the Baltimore Jail. Walk down East Madison Street to the broken-down Laundrette and the writing on the wall
City to city
state to state
boys this girl
don’t need no date.
And more! Get your teargas gun in Johns Bargain Store, the Monumental Five and Ten Cent. Return to the lonely house. Play Schubert on the unplayed Steinway!
Switch on the radiator
human beings must be kept warm.
Open the window on the attainable and the unattainable heaven
Schubert is home.
In Schubert despair sits yearning on a bed of roses
a child full of warm dreams and wishes
lies asleep on the rain-rotted boards of a prepared grave.
Play a Schubert Impromptu for me.
And a Beethoven Bagatelle.
and that musical gossip, Bach, writing an aural manual of erotic technique between man and silence/God.
My chickadee is alive and well. I read Jude the Obscure, a book of unrelieved gloom and power. May Sarton’s Plant Dreaming Deep is a wise generous book. I saw her, briefly, in town and said I would write her a letter. I am now reading The Idiot (rereading).
Your absence is terrible.
The baby table is grim without you and—this week—without Jo. Basil has taken command of B.T. John Brooks also sits there. And Simon and/or Harrison who has discovered Eunice Golden who gives him a moon—(heartbeat). Elnora has been dieting & thus satisfying the maternal instincts of Sylvie (Who is, What is etc. After Shakespeare & Schubert) & of Jackie.
The Pornograph is back!
The library feels like a tomb. You gave so much, Bill! Look after yourself.
J
4. Baltimore November 26
Dear Bill,
Meanwhile, back in Baltimore . . .
It is half past five and I’m in the sitting-room in a rocking chair listening to the pornograph play the eight Schubert Impromptus. Beside me on one of the slabs of marble filched some years ago from an old cemetery being demolished in downtown Baltimore, are the complete piano works of Schubert which I’ve been reading as I listen. And thus I’ve spent my first day in Baltimore.
The house, once an old shop, is two floors and a basement with the old shop window made into a garden. The rooms are filled with paintings, sculptures, objets d’art. In this room there’s the black Steinway taking up much of the space, the pornograph with its speaker, chairs, daybed, a tree made of golden wire set in a tub of white river-stones, several paintings including a huge one of the X-Ray of a deformed foetus, an Abyssinian mural, African spears and shields, New Guinea carved heads, a ceiling-high cabinet of loot from Thailand, Mexico, Peru. There are musical instruments from the Pacific Islands; an Australian aboriginal pipe, a digiridoo, about three feet long from which it’s hard to get a sound. (‘Put in your digiridoo,’ my mother used to say to my brother when he was little and his thing was hanging out.) There’s also a fine sculpted head of a negro done by a negro sculptor; camel-bells; and odds and ends of various old houses including Scott Fitzgerald’s old mantelpiece. (When several old Baltimore homes were being demolished years ago John Money took out a demolition licence which enabled him to visit the sites and take away anything he cared to have.)
My own small room has three paintings done by one of John M’s former close friends; a Thai Buddha; a row of Peruvian fertility charms, little men with erect penises: seven.
The house has a characteristic smell which I can’t quite describe—it’s the smell of absence; nobody spends the day or much of the evening here and I suppose all the objects have their special kind of breath and sweat with no human smell to mask it. John M sometimes has people to stay, and sometimes throws a party but for the most part he spends his time in his hospital office trying to solve other people’s sex problems.
Now your ‘heartbreaker’ is being played. I am back in the Savidge Libraryaa.
library at MacDowell
My last hours at MacDowell were smooth and uneventful. I had turned in my pepper and salt and cutlery the previous day and thus severed my culinary cord. Jo, Elnora, Sylvie (who left after one game, her quota) and I spent the evening playing anagrams at Mansfield. We made a communal limerick about the Australian arrivalbb (quote—‘the moratorium is a communistic plot’)
The writer, Joan Colebrook, who had been born in Australia, had just arrived at MacDowell
Now Colebrook came from down under
hoping to be rent asunder
but all she could do
was sit on the loo
and make wild Australian thunder.
Earlier in the day I had played the pornograph by myself in the library.
Harrison drove me to the bus stop, I went to Boston to find the Museum of Fine Arts is closed on Mondays, I repaired to the Y and enclose the fruits thereof and will not bore you with a recitation of my thoughts.
I was sitting on one of the pew-like seats in the Boston station when I looked up and saw Henry Chapin in cold blood and real life standing with a small hazel-nut of a woman, evidently his wife. It was a strange experience. His wife looked quite old, like a kind of permanent measurement of Henry. We stood talking a while and he carried my bags for me. What rule is it that says people must stop ‘being’ when they leave places like MacDowell where they have freedom to ‘be’? Henry said that he missed the life at MacDowell and he frowned as if he had changed lives, as if the one he wears now is cramping and doesn’t fit.
Enough of that but it was one of those interesting encounters that stay in mind and return later as fiction.
It is late in the evening now, half-past ten. John M and one of his research assistants, Paul, came home and had a small meal and a large drink and went back to the hospital and won’t be back until past midnight. While they are away I put an iron bar across the door as this is a wild neighbourhood with bottles being smashed around outside and a few street fights.
I wish you and Jack Daniels would walk in now to say hello.
I wonder how your work is going.
I’m wearing your sweater to shreds.
It is now Thanksgiving Day, half-past ten in the morning and I am back in the sitting-room. I have played the pornograph, softly, so as not to disturb my host who is working on a paper in the adjoining room. I have been sorting out my MacDowell writings ready for retyping and I come across lines such as
in the sour taste of morning
we shovel bran-bits into our mouths
and look out of the window at the trees
whose defeat is showing.
Doggerel.
It is hot, airless, quiet here. I wish I could say hello to you.
As stylistic relief I enclose a little clean pornography.
Now back to the heartbreakers.
J
5. Baltimore November
A marksman without comparison
was our midnight cowboy Harrison.
With his weapon uptight
he’d shoot all night
at Eunice Golden’s garrison.
Though the women desired to gorge
at the smithy of Andrew St. George
there wasn’t a doubt
his furnace was out
and he had no tools in his forge.
Though I’m painter rather than pieman
this menu is tempting, said Simon.
Balls cantaloupe,
crème de cunt soup
Crocket’s casseroled hymen.
A writer named Basil the Gloom
kept waiting and waiting for doom.
When it came, ‘It’s a boy!’
he cried with joy.
‘Now who’s been fucking whom?’
6. Baltimore November
From the factory to you untouched by human hand.
A frightened young tailor of Boston
whose needle had melted the frost in
a lady’s French seam
cried, This is extreme,
It’s haystacks that needles get lost in!
The lady who lay with the tailor
had read Roth and Norman Mailer
but could not catch on
where the needle had gone
while the tailor grew paler and paler.
This experience is bewitching,
My needle keeps poking and pitching,
I’d never have sewn
such a seam on my own
and how happily I am stitching!
At last as the light was growing
there dispersed the ‘cloud of unknowing’,
the dawn it is coming
the lady said humming,
I too said the tailor still sewing!
7. Baltimore November
Dear Bill,
Another letter from my supply, just to say hello as if you were not absent and to try to make news of no news except it may snow tonight and outside I hear the sound of dogs that sound like wolves and a wind snarling around the house. I’m up in my small room where I’ve moved everything as I’ve decided to work here instead of in the basement. The room looks out over the small backyard with a garden as big as a cemetery plot, and beyond that an alley, then a school with its high encircling fence of concrete topped with pieces of broken glass. Beside the house is another alley and across from that another school, similarly forbidding, with a high wire fence which, of course, the children manage to climb to play in the yard as they have nowhere else to play. The lights are bright in the alley and cast a white glare on the pavement as if snow had been falling.
Did you know that Edgar Allan Poe who lived in Baltimore collapsed in the street and was taken dying to one of the big hospitals, and that one of his stories about a howling dog is based on a legend of howling wolves from one of the Baltimore Cemeteries?
I have just written to May Sarton saying a few words about her book; hoping that I didn’t sound false, because I’m inclined to be so self-conscious about everything I say (less about what I write) that my words seem to turn to oatmeal and dust. I sent her a cat, and I’m sending you one too, though I didn’t know I would until I began this letter. It’s a beautiful cat.
The dogs howl again. In the daytime I never see them but at night they howl especially when the wind is whining and snarling.
It feels like a prison here. I find the day passes without my doing much work yet I cannot account for the hours. John Money usually goes off to his work at half-past eight and has been coming home at a quarter past one in the morning and though I need not stay up, I do, because there’s a heavy iron bar I put against the door and I have to be awake to remove it. I miss the outside world of MacDowell! Theoretically, I have all day and evening to work without interruption, entirely on my own; and yet the hours go by remote from me without my making any impression on them: it is most curious.
Some time during the day I play the pornograph, usually in the morning as soon as John M has gone to work, and then around six-thirty in the evening. One evening I read a medical journal in which Daudet, Heine, De Maupassant were diagnosed as having had syphilis (sp?) and the extracts from Daudet’s Diary and the Goncourt Journal were nightmarish. In his last days De Maupassant had a terrible sense that his thoughts were escaping from his head and abandoning him and he used to wander about the hospital where he was confined asking if anyone had seen his thoughts. And then he felt that his face was escaping from him, and his smile and frown—Have you seen my smile?
These are fit topics for Basil the Gloom . . .
Enough for now, on this grim note. Another instalment tomorrow. First, extempore,
A psychologist named John Money
once combed his tool with honey
when it erected
the bees objected
but the beekeeper thought it funny.
Goodnight.
THURSDAY.
Nice to get your letter today, Bill. I’ll hold off posting this for a few days otherwise you won’t know whether you’re going or coming with all my hellos. You’ll be pleased to know that I’ve just sold three dozen deformed foetuses as Christmas hampers; and all I did was lift the iron bar from the door, unchain the chain, unlock the inner door, open it, unlock the outer door, and, foetuses in hand announce, Lovely Christmas hampers, lovely deformed foetuses seventy-five cents apiece. Truly, I didn’t know there was such a market for them; they went like hot cakes, and here I am having earned as much or twice as much as I get for a poem. On the other hand the Peedauntals are terribly slack. No-one in Baltimore is interested. I’m thinking maybe of Rental Peedauntals, though the drycleaning and wet-cleaning costs would be astronomous (anonymous and astronomical as they are always cleaned in secret).
Alas there is no record of the Schubert Sonata in B flat major but the music is here! I’ve managed by picking out a few chords to know which one it is—it’s magnificent; hearing even a few chords one feels as if one’s inside is being torn out. It’s a new experience for me to hear sounds like this so close to the source. In my brief term of learning the piano as a thirteen-year old (and we didn’t even have a piano at home) I learned ‘Puck’ (which sounds nice and dirty), ‘Robin Adair’, ‘Londonderry Air’, A Curious Story, The Waltz from the Opera of Faust, the Chopin Prelude which goes de/dee de de ??????? Wagner’s Star of Eve, Handel’s Largo, and a piece called The Shepherd Boy, which was prefaced by the lines, ‘Like some vision of far off times lonely shepherd boy/
What song art thou singing in thy youth and joy?’
That was the end of my private musical education. Music (i.e. singing only) was a big thing at school with a festival each year in which little-medium-sized-big-bigger girls sang ‘Oh have you seen my lady go down the garden singing’ and ‘Where’er you walk’ and played Moment Musical, Fantasy Impromptu, Marche Militaire, various lullabys, the Moonlight Sonata—all day.
Another instalment next week.
As I was saying it’s a new experience for me to hear music so close. The music of all the pieces I ever played had ‘safe’ sounds, though one or two phrases were a bit shattering; it was fairly safe and neat and self-contained; plaintive and poetic in parts; but each chord was not so clearly part of a tremendous whole. Oh My! (as Elizabeth Ames of Yaddo used to exclaim).
So you see how my MacDowell experience affected me! One of the ways, at least.
FOUR STARS NO TV IN ROOM
THREE STARS NO BATHROOM OR TV
Glad you liked the Y limericks. I sent them to Jo and Elnora too, and today had a brilliant letter from Jo, and I’ll go down in history as being driven to despair by her brilliance. It’s snowing in New Hampshire! Maybe it’s just as well I’m not there as I’d be writing verse about the snow. Yes, Elnora snored at the Y and thus will go down in history. She made a noise like a factory with all its machines working. I was in such a state of shock at having said au revoir to you that I didn’t mind but Jo kept whispering urgently to her, while outside the contractors decided to get to work in the middle of the night on the new parking lot they are building near the Y. We were all pretty much in a state of shock, I think, and the temperature in the room was eighty-five and the radiators hissed all night (they didn’t really, I’m just inventing this), and before we went to sleep we had one of those confessional chats that women have when they’re taking off their make-up and fixing their hair, their glass eyes, their false teeth; and washing their dildos.
NO MEALS, NO TV NO BATHROOM.
ROOM ONLY AND BOARD PINE OR WALNUT
GROAN BONUS INFLATABLE
PRESIDENT KENNEDY OR CHOICE WHICH MUST BE
MADE WHEN BOOKING
The moonlit evenings, the stars and the palms sound like Auckland New Zealand in the summer; with beach not far away. I had that impression too from the light in your paintings. The light in Dunedin is luminous, slightly blue like snow-light, clear and untouchable, sometimes hostile—what nonsense this is but this is what it seems to me. The light in the subtropical north is more invading, intimate, catastrophic; diffused yet the whole daylight is so brilliant one is constantly blinking and closing one’s eyes against it.
FRIDAY.
I’m sending you a New Zealand quarterly of five years ago. I have something in it—a part of a series N.Z. writers were doing called Beginnings.
I feel less homesick when I read your letters.
Blah
You will know this limerick?
Young man, said the countess at tea
Is it true you fart when you pee?
I replied with some wit
‘Do you fart when you shit?
If you do then you’re one up on me.’
I didn’t make this up, it’s in a book. I’m sure we should get our literary gems printed somewhere, even where you suggest, and you, certainly, should make the illustrations.
Goodbye for now.
A parking lot near the Y?
I’m afraid that I’m much too shy.
A quarter a time
is a swindling shime
it’s far too cheap at the pri
That limerick shows how my battery has run out!
J
a library at MacDowell
b The writer, Joan Colebrook, who had been born in Australia, had just arrived at MacDowell
