Songs
.
Poor Mary Swann. That’s how I think of her,
poor
Mary Swann, with her mystical ear for the tune of words, cheated of life, cheated of recognition. In spite of the fact that there’s growing interest in her work—already thirty applications are in for the symposium in January—she’s still relatively unknown.
Willard Lang, the swine, believes absolutely that Swann will never be classed as a major poet. He made thispronouncement at the MLA meeting last spring, speaking with a little ping of sorrow and a sideways tug at his ear. Rusticity, he claimed, kept a poet minor and, sadly, there seemed to be no exceptions to this rule, Burns being a different breed of dog. My Mary’s unearthly insights and spare musicality appear to certain swinish critics (Willard is not the only one) to be accidental and, therefore, no more than quaint. And no modern academic knows what to do with her rhymes, her awful moon/June/September/remember. It gives them a headache, makes them snort through their noses. What can be done, they say, with this rustic milkmaid in her Victorian velours!
I tend to get unruly and defensive when it comes to those bloody rhymes. Except for the worst clinkers (giver/liver) they seem to me no more obtrusive than a foot tapped to music or a bell ringing in the distance. Besides, the lines trot along too fast to allow weight or breath to adhere to their endings. There’s a busy breedingness about them. “A Swannian urgency” was how I put it in my first article on Mary.
Pompous phrase! I could kick myself when I think about it.
5
I live in someone else’s whimsy, a Hansel and Gretel house on a seventeen-foot lot on the south side of Chicago. Little paned casement windows, a fairy-tale door, a sweet round chimney and, on the roof, cedar shakes pretending to be thatch. It’s a wonderful roof, a roof that gladdens the eye, peaky and steep and coming down in soft waves over the windows with fake Anne Hathaway fullness. The housewas built in 1930 by an eccentric professor of Elizabethan literature, a bachelor with severe scoliosis and a club foot, and after his death it was, briefly, a restaurant and then a Democratic precinct office. Now it’s back to being a house. At the rear is an iron balcony (loosely attached, but I intend to have it seen to) where I stand on fine days and gaze out over a small salvage yard crowded with scrap iron and a massive public housing project full of brawling families and broken glass.
I bought my freak of a house when the first royalties started coming in for
The Female Prism
. I had to live somewhere, and my lawyer, a truly brilliant woman named Virginia Goodchild, said it could only happen to a person once, turning a Ph.D. thesis into a bestseller, and that I’d better sink my cash fast into a chunk of real estate. She’d found me just the place, she said, the cutest house in all Chicagoland.
This house has been sweet to me, and in return I’ve kept it chaste; that is, I haven’t punished it with gaiety. No posters or prayer rugs or art deco glass here, and no humanoid shapes draped in Indonesian cotton. I’ve got tables; I’ve got a more than decent Oriental rug; I’ve got lamps. (Lord, make me Spartan, but not yet.) In my kitchen cupboards I’ve got plates and cups that
match
. In the dining-room, admittedly only nine feet by nine feet, I’ve got—now this is possibly a
little
outré—a piano that used to sit in a bar at the Drake Hotel, and after I finish my paper on Swann for the symposium in January, I intend to take a few piano lessons. Brownie says playing the piano is as calming as meditation and less damaging to the brain cells.
I hope so, because I’ve never been able to see the point of emptying one’s mind of thought. Our thoughts are all we have. I love my thoughts, even when they take me up anddown sour-smelling byways where I’d rather not venture. Whatever flickers on in my head is mine and I want it, all the blinking impulses and
.
Poor Mary Swann. That’s how I think of her,
poor
Mary Swann, with her mystical ear for the tune of words, cheated of life, cheated of recognition. In spite of the fact that there’s growing interest in her work—already thirty applications are in for the symposium in January—she’s still relatively unknown.
Willard Lang, the swine, believes absolutely that Swann will never be classed as a major poet. He made thispronouncement at the MLA meeting last spring, speaking with a little ping of sorrow and a sideways tug at his ear. Rusticity, he claimed, kept a poet minor and, sadly, there seemed to be no exceptions to this rule, Burns being a different breed of dog. My Mary’s unearthly insights and spare musicality appear to certain swinish critics (Willard is not the only one) to be accidental and, therefore, no more than quaint. And no modern academic knows what to do with her rhymes, her awful moon/June/September/remember. It gives them a headache, makes them snort through their noses. What can be done, they say, with this rustic milkmaid in her Victorian velours!
I tend to get unruly and defensive when it comes to those bloody rhymes. Except for the worst clinkers (giver/liver) they seem to me no more obtrusive than a foot tapped to music or a bell ringing in the distance. Besides, the lines trot along too fast to allow weight or breath to adhere to their endings. There’s a busy breedingness about them. “A Swannian urgency” was how I put it in my first article on Mary.
Pompous phrase! I could kick myself when I think about it.
5
I live in someone else’s whimsy, a Hansel and Gretel house on a seventeen-foot lot on the south side of Chicago. Little paned casement windows, a fairy-tale door, a sweet round chimney and, on the roof, cedar shakes pretending to be thatch. It’s a wonderful roof, a roof that gladdens the eye, peaky and steep and coming down in soft waves over the windows with fake Anne Hathaway fullness. The housewas built in 1930 by an eccentric professor of Elizabethan literature, a bachelor with severe scoliosis and a club foot, and after his death it was, briefly, a restaurant and then a Democratic precinct office. Now it’s back to being a house. At the rear is an iron balcony (loosely attached, but I intend to have it seen to) where I stand on fine days and gaze out over a small salvage yard crowded with scrap iron and a massive public housing project full of brawling families and broken glass.
I bought my freak of a house when the first royalties started coming in for
The Female Prism
. I had to live somewhere, and my lawyer, a truly brilliant woman named Virginia Goodchild, said it could only happen to a person once, turning a Ph.D. thesis into a bestseller, and that I’d better sink my cash fast into a chunk of real estate. She’d found me just the place, she said, the cutest house in all Chicagoland.
This house has been sweet to me, and in return I’ve kept it chaste; that is, I haven’t punished it with gaiety. No posters or prayer rugs or art deco glass here, and no humanoid shapes draped in Indonesian cotton. I’ve got tables; I’ve got a more than decent Oriental rug; I’ve got lamps. (Lord, make me Spartan, but not yet.) In my kitchen cupboards I’ve got plates and cups that
match
. In the dining-room, admittedly only nine feet by nine feet, I’ve got—now this is possibly a
little
outré—a piano that used to sit in a bar at the Drake Hotel, and after I finish my paper on Swann for the symposium in January, I intend to take a few piano lessons. Brownie says playing the piano is as calming as meditation and less damaging to the brain cells.
I hope so, because I’ve never been able to see the point of emptying one’s mind of thought. Our thoughts are all we have. I love my thoughts, even when they take me up anddown sour-smelling byways where I’d rather not venture. Whatever flickers on in my head is mine and I want it, all the blinking impulses and
Similar Books
The World Above
Cameron Dokey
Arsonist
Victor Methos
Jack in the Box
Hania Allen
Por qué ganaron los aliados
R. J. Overy
An Unlikely Friendship
Ann Rinaldi
Sparrow Nights
David Gilmour
Her Dark Knight
Sharon Cullen
WANTON
Cheryl Holt
The Tudor Secret
C. W. Gortner