I’ve always said one of the banes of my existence and yet, ironically, one of its saving graces, too, is being raised by a mother and her two daughters, me being the second son of her second daughter. My brother was raised by them, too; in fact, he spent his “learning” years living with this matriarch, that mother, his grandmother, my grandmother, the matriarch of her own woman kingdom, her politics, her religion, her love of nature, her ability to blend natural colors into works of art as a painter, though more dominating by her ability to put words down on paper that on first reading made no sense but upon living within them for years soon became the normal way of life in the kingdom of the White Pioneer Woman under whose reign I grew up.
A poet path, which is what my grandmother describes in one of her best poems, a description of her nirvana, her Tao—her way as she set it down in the two thin volumes of poetry that were published at the height of her heyday, her time in the middle of that primrose path she wrote poems about, a path that leads to fame, according to her, though what her conception of fame was never was truly clear to me. She seemed contented living her life out as Lord Mother over her son and two daughters, the son trying so hard to succeed and impress her, his style always dangerous, the art in him, I suppose. He tried his hand at early filmmaking, starting his own movie studio down south of my hometown in a practically abandoned Old West town, complete with a courthouse and a jail still standing and nice old hacienda-type stucco rancheros all around with arbors and rail fences and taller trees down near the creek that ran through this place—the perfect place to set up a movie production company.
And my uncle tried to impress his mother also by buying a Curtiss Jenny bi-winged single-engine open cockpit two-seater airplane after WWI, with which he opened the first airport in my hometown. I had the distinction of having a whole family around me back in my early days who were used to flying in an airplane long before airplanes were common, years before commercial aviation and passenger-carrying airlines existed.
My mother flew with her brother in demonstration flights he gave at his airport. She was a young girl at the time, 14, 15, 16, a pretty little blonde thing that he dressed in a quasi-pilot’s uniform, except her khaki pants were tight khaki shorts, though her jacket and leather helmet were authentic WWI-issued air force duds. She would sit in the seat behind her brother and he would take that sturdy plane up around 200 feet above the “flying field,” what they called airports then. Then my uncle would put that Jenny through all sorts of unbelievable tortures, driving it straight high up into the air until it stalled out when he would then flip the plane over on its back and let it float downward until maybe 50 feet above the ground when he’d flip it over upright and then pull back on the joystick with all his might until the motor would spit back alive and he could once again gain elevation and off he and my mother would go back up to 500 feet where he’d get ready for his next trick During the finale, my mother would unfurl an American flag off her lap, which she would then hold high above her head letting it wave in the breeze as the plane landed and taxied back to the hanger. After the flight, he and my mother would bounce out of the plane all smiles, bowing, scraping—and yes, he had a camera and cameraman set up on the strip and filmed several of his exhibitions, though I never saw any of his film. His last wife, we called her our Aunt Crazy, in a fit of insanity burned all his film—and he had film of me as a toddler—one of me riding in a hydraplane racing boat he owned sitting in his lap putting down the Guadalupe River, which ran behind his big fine house in New Braunfels, Texas, where he by then he owned a chain of movie houses around Texas.
My mother would go into ecstatic excitements when she told the stories of how many hours she had flown in that plane and she kept that uniform she wore in a trunk in our attics for the rest of her life.
During WWII, my dad worked for the Army Air Corps (“Up we go into the wild blue yonder, flying high into the sky”) as a warehouseman. One Xmas he presented my uncle and my mother with silver Air Corp wing insignia—you know, the wings a pilot earns when he’s ready to go flying totally on his or her own.
During WWII, all around my hometown were US Army training camps and Army Air Corps flying schools. Avenger Field, thirty miles west of my hometown, was where the Women’s Air Force Auxiliary trained, the WASPs, they were called, women pilots who were trained to fly new planes from the production sites to the airbases or overseas to the European or Pacific campaign bases; they also flew supply planes, stuff like that, though they knew they would never be allowed to fly combat missions. These women were tough babes, and a lot of them were just that, babes, and their lives in the Air Corps weren’t all that pleasant—all of them were harassed by the male personnel, especially the male pilots. Most of them were sexually attacked and harassed but several of them died mysteriously, a couple of the best of them dying in crashes some said because their planes had been sabotaged by the male mechanics who hated them and loved them at the same time (one of these pilots was Virginia Rawlenson, said to be one of the best women pilots to ever fly).
My mother envied those WASPs and she would drive over around the base where those women were training hoping to catch a glimpse of one of them or one of their planes—my mother loved planes—except, after those adventures with my uncle’s flying machine, I don’t think she ever flew in a plane again—as far as I know—though she traveled a lot after I left home in the sixties—though I think most of her traveling was done in chartered buses—she was an officer in her state organization—she was a dietician—and they traveled by bus to most of their meetings, one national in L.A. I know for sure; my mother loved bus travel, too; her favorite form of travel. [Please see my incompleted posts a few miles back on my first bus trip. I wish I were organized like some of my friends—especially this one friend who’s technically and intellectually perfect in his schemes of organization. I’ve just never been organized.]
My mother’s sister, one of the gang that raised me, was petite, really cute, a party girl who played the piano with more vim and vigor than my mother, both of them into stride-style piano, W.C. Handy my mother’s specialty, New Orleans-style her sister’s specialty, and that was because my aunt lived on the Gulf Coast of Texas and was married to a Cajun who had a sister in New Orleans who was known as "the Gumbo Queen of New R-leens," I tell you de truff.
My aunt and my mother were quite a pair. Both bright, witty, but still unable to overcome the power of their stronger mother. The girls never dared write poetry, though I found my mother’s attempts at it one time when I was stealing through a drawer in her vanity where she kept letters, diaries, private stuff like that, and photographs of her best moments. I was old enough by then, a college man, to know her poetry wasn’t very good; it was too poesy. Truth up, I was a published poet by then, having my first poetry published when I was a senior in college—in the Piggott, Arkansas, newspaper—5 poems, the best one about a telephone pole and a flying red horse (a symbol of the Magnolia Oil and Refining Co. (also Magnolia Petroleum) whose headquarters was in Dallas in a skyscraper, the Magnolia Building, that had a huge neon-lit flying red horse (Pegasus, I always assumed) sign atop it that rotated around like a merry-go-round all night long—Magnolia was one of the predecessors of Mobil Oil—Magnolia first a Socony-Vacuum Company and then later becoming Socony-Mobil--"Socony" being an acronym for Standard Oil Company of New York).
If my aunt wrote poetry I never knew. She did write country & western songs later and I know she was insanely nuts about Hank Williams, who she knew and followed around when he was in that part of Texas, which was a lot since it was host to a plethora of beer joints & halls, dance halls, Cajuns, oilfield workers, dockworkers—I mean hellraisers deluxe, the kind old Hank and his Drifters band thrived on, his music popular as hell from Southeast Texas up the Red River to Shreveport, home of the Louisiana Hayride, a hayseed barn dance-type scene where a lot of future white rock and rollers, including Elvis, got their start, alongside Hank Williams from Alabama, and native Laws-bananians, Red Sovine (his band was called the Syrup Soppers), Webb Pierce, and a dude who called himself the Groovy Boy and who had an afternoon radio program on Shreveport radio station KWKH—and Groovy played blues and early R&B and he also had a band called the Bluesmasters—I’ve never had a Groovy Boy recording though I’m sure he made some since Shreveport was home of Stan’s Record Shop, a record shop owned by a man named Stan Lewis who I believe was from Brooklyn, who also owned Paula Records and whose radio show on KWKH, Stan's Record Review, featured black music of all types, but favoring the blues artists like Muddy Waters, Walter Jacobs, Howlin’ Wolf, Alex “Rice” Miller (Sonny Boy Williamson #2)—or Gospel stars like Brother Joe May, the Thunderbolt of the Midwest, and Aretha’s father, the Reverend C.L. Franklin in Detroit who recorded his sermons and had them issued as 78 records and then later as 45s when 45s took over pop music in the fifties. Oh, jeez, I could go off on one of my infamous tangents here—about that time, those years, those so-important years for American music, our native musics no matter our ethnic backgrounds, our beats, our swing, our boogie, our blues, our Cajun, our C&W, our bluegrass, our Western swing, our Be-bop, our Afro-Cuban, our salsa, our rhumbas, our rags, our ballads, our…the greatest form of musical expression that ever evolved out of a culture and due to the mixtures of human beings that immigrated to this country or were forced to come here against their wills, all those musical forms coming together with them to settle all over this country, all ending in jams—I’m getting carried away. I warned you that I was writing poetry again.
“Oh my God, he wants to be a poet!” I can still hear my mother now.
I published 26 poems in various "little journals" around the country before I threw in the towel when I settled in NYC. I had my last poem, a poem about a baby eaten by a Persian rug (yes, of course, I was reading Mark Twain in those days), published in a small publication out of a college in Virginia in the early seventies just before my divorce.
I never made much money from poetry; most poetry journals in those days paid you in free subscriptions to their soon-out-of-business small-press ventures. The big one to hit was still Harriet Monroe’s Poetry in Chicago.
I submitted a brace of poems to Harriet Monroe and got a great life surprise when they were sent back to me rejected but with a note from a woman who said she was Harriet’s assistant and though Harriet had rejected my poems, she could see something she liked in them, something about me as a person she liked in them, something in them that made her want to meet me and, the biggest surprise of all, to fall in love with me. Wow.
I was married at the time and one day my wife came into my workroom and she was acting too cutesy-wutsey to me, a way I never trusted. She then handed me a letter. “Here, from the smell of this it must be from one of your lovers—actually, it smells like a letter from a whore,” she snarled and then turned and left the room. The letter did smell, and, yes, it did smell like a whore; it smelled as though it had been soaked in perfume.
It was from Harriet’s assistant. In this letter she wrote me all about herself, how she was a graduate of U of Chicago; how she was a writer and said she had been called a “female Hemingway” by one reviewer reviewing one of her three novels she’d had published. Then she went on and told me she had just bought a bookstore in Chicago, an old-line established bookstore in the Hyde Park area, crammed full of great books, like the first edition Hemingway she was alternately sending me as a gift.
I was stunned. Of course I was curious yellow. I couldn’t imagine what had gotten into this woman. The first edition arrived a few days later, an almost mint copy, with DJ intact, of Green Hills of Africa, a book I’d always wanted but hadn’t bought yet because even then 1st edition Hemingways weren't cheap. Inside the book was a calling card with my secret love's name and address and a note saying, “I love you; I think I’ve always loved you.” Another Wow left my solar plexus. I was still wet behind the ears both as a writer and a man. To me this was extremely intriguing. I actually thought seriously about pursuing this woman. I did.
In her next letter, amongst another bunch of strong love messages, she told me she knew Ezra Pound and had once had breakfast with him and Olga in Venice. Holy Christ, that almost had me telling my wife adios, packing up, and movin’ to Chicago right then and there.
All in all, she sent me 3 Hemingway first editions. Then my wife and I moved to Florida and I never wrote the female Hemingway and told her how to reach me again. She used to prominently advertise her bookstore in the back pages of The New Yorker but one day her ads were no longer there and it’s been so long now since this all happened, I'm sure the female Hemingway is as dead as Harriet Monroe and the woman who was my wife, too. I do still remember the smell of her letters—and I still remember her name. Yet, and this interests me from my Freudian self-observation deck, I might could actually find out what happened to her on the Internet but I'm too shy to Google her name or the bookstore's name. [I may dare to search for the bookstore--I am a little curious.]
I decided too late that I blew what could have been a good move literarily for me. I should have jetted to Chicago and hooked up with her—hell yeah, I should'a divorced my wife—damn right, that’s what I should have done, but…. hey, I’m part wolf; we’re faithful to our lady wolves; besides, my wife was only 20 years old at the time, a gorgeous, petite, half-Mexican-Welch, raven-haired, brick-house-built chick that every man and his damn dog she ever met wanted—desired—were willing to pay for, including the ex-dictator of Venezuela who while in exile in NYC asked her to join him in Paris for an affair—instead she joined me in Austin, Texas, for a disastrous adventure in graduate studies at UT and living on a working goat ranch that was crawling with rattlesnakes—but that’s another story for another time.
But, it’s true, I am writing poetry again.
In Santa Fe, my wife and I rented our studio from this old woman who had once been the lover of the poet Robert Graves. Graves still sent her love letters from Majorca and occasionally included a poem or two. One day, while I was up on her back porch helping her air out some huge Persian rugs, she told me, “in strict confidence, young man,” that she was terribly embarrassed by the poems that now old-man Robert Graves was sending her in his continuing love letters--for 50 years they'd been lovers. She said as she held her latest letter from him, “Poets should not try to write poetry when they are old. Old poets write old poetry, to me; it's disastrously bad.”
Instead of marrying Robert Graves, this grand dame named Selma, from Brooklyn, had married a painter from Philadelphia instead of the poet Robert Graves, a very nice little dude who had studied with Robert Henri at the Pennsylvania Academy of Arts and then he along with 4 other painters from back East had moved to Santa Fe in the 20s and formed an art colony and called themselves “Los Cinco Pintores." Then they all built their dream houses with their own hands and design along a stretch of what at that time was a heavenly well-used dirt trail that led to an old seminary, now St. John's College on what is now called El Camino del Monte Sol. [The old road led to Sun Mountain--a large Sangre de Cristo foothill just a mile or so on past St. John's College.]
All the bourgeoisie have now taken over that area; but oh the beautiful American art that was once painted in those Santa Fe studios—Stuart Davis, Fremont Ellis, Joseph Bakos, John Marin, Georgia O’Keefe, Marsden Hartley—and those other great innovative American painters up in Navajo-style Taos, also then untarnished by the invasion of the bourgeoisie, the ruiners of natural beauty and graceful style who turned Taos from a beautifully preserved ancient Native American and then artist-colony village into a ski resort—isn’t that insulting! A friggin’ ski resort.
I would be totally afraid to go back to Taos now. I went back to Santa Fe a few years ago and except for a woman I was madly in love with being there and offering me love I hadn’t had in many years of being separated from her, nothing else in the town was beautiful and fun at all. Santa Fe just wasn’t bohemianly exotically nonAmerican anymore—nope, it was a playground for the bourgeoisie by then—Hilton hotels mockingly all around the horizons; Loretta Academy, home of the “miraculous” stairway, an old Catholic convent, now turned into a luxury hotel; and the old Fred Harvey hotel across from Saint Francis Cathedral now turned into a senior citizen’s home. The whole town looked vulgar to me that last time when I was there. The Native Americans were paying these white devil bastards back then by putting up tacky yellow board signs all along the highway from Albuquerque up to Santa Fe and then on up to Taos, blatantly advertising their taxless gasolines and cigarettes, plus by now, I’m sure, their gambling casinos. Gone are the days when Santa Fe was a special place to me, a city of romance and art, history and innovative styles—but then Texans found it…Sorry, I’m off on a prowl again.
I’m writing poetry again.
My brother had never written poetry in his life—he was raised by that matriarchal grandmother that wrote poetry, too. He loved poetry and was a specialist in the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, his favorite poet until he discovered T.S. Eliot and then he became Eliotized.
My brother published right-at thirty books in his lifetime. Right before he died he told me he had several months back finished a book of poetry and that it had been accepted for publication and would be coming out in time for the Xmas list (2001). By this time, he was blind and was dying of brain cancer—yet the spirit of those old Pioneer hardtack women that had raised him boiled up in him, that poetic sense of fatalistic valor, until his very dying day--a day before he died he turned in his regular Sunday newspaper column right on time; in fact, he had written 3 additional columns just in case he wouldn’t be around the next several Sundays. Even in dying he wanted no help, though by that final day he was physically totally helpless, so helpless that for the first time in his adult life he did not get up, go to his office, and start writing at 6 in the morning—writing like he did until noon—when he took a quick lunch break—usually making himself a sandwich and going right back out to his office and then writing until martini time on the patio around 4:30 or 5, a very special time for him in those days when he was the talk of the town and called the “dean of Texas letters.”
His book of poetry came out right before he died. He managed to autograph a bunch of them and send them out, but I never got mine, though he always, in his last days, when I talked to him on the phone as much as possible, said he was sending me my copy--"You mean I never sent you that yet--I'm leaving my secretary a note right now..." but, no, he never sent me a copy. He did read me several poems from it one time over the phone—though blind, he said he had no trouble reading his own work—he seemed to gain his sight back when he did that.
Several years before he died, he had sent me a typed manuscript of a poem he'd written as an Xmas present for me. The morning I was told he was dead, I just accidentally came across that poem as I was looking at the row of his books that line one of my long bookshelves. The manuscript, coincidentally, was stuck inside the cover of my grandmother’s novel that resides among his books on the same shelf. That old matriarch poet had even trapped my brother's poem between her covers--that's perhaps a personal joke that only I understand.
I gotta admit, I read that poem and damn I liked it and was startled by how poetically thought out it was. It awoke me to a passion I had never known was within my brother. I read the poem again; I broke down and started crying.
Did I say, I’ve started writing poetry again?
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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