Sherry Chandler

A cat may stare at a [son of] King [MacLain]

In the foreground was a cat. In the deep grass she held a motionless and time-honored pose.

Her head was three-quarters turned toward them where they stood. It seemed to have womanly eyebrows. Her gaze came out of her face with the whole of animal comprehension; whether it was menace or alarm in the full-open eyes, her face made a burning-glass of looking. Her eyes seemed after so long a time to be holding her herself in their power. She crouched rigid with the devotion and intensity of her vision, and if she had caught fire there, still she could not, Eugene felt, have stirred out of the seizure. She would have been consumed twice over before she disregarded either what she was looking at or her own frenzy.

— Eudora Welty, from “Music from Spain”

According to James Shimkus in Aspects of King MacLain in Eurdora Welty’s The Golden Apples, a master’s thesis I found online, Eudora Welty had not originally considered “Music from Spain,” set in San Francisco, as part of The Golden Apples.

The story, whose protagonist was originally named Francis Dowdie, had several different titles, including “Dowdie’s Guilt,” “Guilt,” and “The Flower and the Rock,” the latter being the title under which Russell submitted the story to the New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Town and Country, Atlantic, Harper’s, Harper’s Bazaar, Tomorrow, and Partisan (Polk 62). “The Flower and the Rock” was rejected from all of the aforementioned magazines, but Welty expressed her faith in the story in a letter to Russell dated September 17, 1947: “Nobody has yet bought the S.F. story [“Music from Spain”], have they? That really makes me think less of editors (said the author)—I do think that a good story”

In the end, the story was eventually published in a limited, monograph edition in June 1948 by the Levee Press of Greenville, Mississippi. It was while she was typing a clean copy for the Levee Press edition that Welty decided the story belonged with the others in The Golden Apples

She communicated her discovery to Russell in a letter dated February 18, 1948: “I’d already typed solidly all day getting Music from S. ready for Levee (wrote the whole damn thing just about over—but really I think this time I got it right—and the key is, you’d never guess, the little man in it is from [Morgana] and who he is is one of the MacLain twins—don’t faint. Cleared everything up.).”

I neglected to mention in my tarradiddle on this subject last week that one reason why these stories are full of “caricatures” is that they are also full of avatars of various Greek gods and mythological figures. The collection is to a large extent a re-telling of these myths. So Morgana is, in some ways, a land as enchanted as the Forest of Arden, complete with rude mechanicals in the form of the African American characters. Shimkus points out that the name of the town may refer to the Fata Morgana.

The title of the collection may refer to William Butler Yeats’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” Aengus wanders in search of

The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun

And as I did point out last week, all the characters seeking to escape this fated place, to find their own version of the golden apples, find themselves tethered still to Morgana, Eugene MacLain, who physically escapes to San Francisco, perhaps most of all.

The message in the end may be that escape is not the right tactic, that the quest is inward not outward.

Eugene MacLain encounters two cats in his day-long (Bloomesque?) meander around San Francisco. One in a store window, and this one in the grass by the shore.

__________
My thanks to everybody for good wishes. I am not usually so public about my ills but then I don’t remember when I’ve been this sick. I’m mending but I fear not very coherent.

Cat and Golden Apples

from “Music from Spain,”

A tortoise shell cat pillowed in apples gazed at him from a grocer’s window. She pulled her round eyes closed as on little drawstrings. Eugene recollected that one street back a plaster bull dog, cerise with blue rings around the eyes, which ordinarily sat in the ground floor window of a hotel between the drawn shade and the glass, had this morning been taken away. Eugene had missed it—been cheated of it. As the cat opened her eyes again, he had a moment of believing he would know anything that happened, anything that threatened the moral way, or transformed it, even, in the city of San Francisco that day: as if he and the city were watching each other—without accustomed faith. But with interest . . . boldness . . . recklessness, almost.
— Eudora Welty, The Golden Apples (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1947)

One I know, admire, respect, remarked a while back that s/he had undertaken to include The Golden Apples in a literature course but would not do so again because Welty uses the N word way too much.

The remark aroused my curiosity, so I pulled our copy off the shelf. I don’t remember having read this collection of connected short stories before. It is true that it has frequent use of the N word and appearances of African-American characters that seem caricatured. I think it might be a very difficult book to take into the classroom today, especially in an area that doesn’t tend to be what you might call culturally enlightened.

On the other hand, all the characters in the book are sometimes treated like caricatures. It is not a strictly realistic work. The stories refer to folklore and mythology.

The whites in this complex collection of interconnected stories are not admirable. The stories seem to be about the way your culture catches you, drags at you, keeps you to their expectations of you. Morgana, Mississippi is a closed decaying culture that does not embrace difference. Or change. If you are poor white, you are to remain poor white. If you are “class” then you must act a certain way, even in the face of disaster. All the stories on some level are about those who attempt to escape and fail. In the story “Moon Lake,” three girls flee the confines of summer camp, find an old boat, and think they will use it to float out into the middle of the lake, outside the carefully marked off swimming area of the camp. But the boat turns out to be tethered and locked and they can’t get more than a chain’s length from the shore.

“Moon Lake” is anthologized elsewhere and it is one story from the collection that I had read. Like everything in Welty, it is beautifully written, but it always puzzled me. In context of The Golden Apples, its themes are much more resonant.

I didn’t resolve my own questions about treatments of race. It is not a modern book, times have changed, and the racial attitudes in The Golden Apples seem shocking. Maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe we weren’t meant to take that stuff for granted. Maybe we were. The white people of Morgana, Mississippi did. Welty doesn’t treat her African-American characters as wise, the way Faulkner did. But they aren’t any sillier than the white people.

Smelly cat

IV

catpiss smell,
the pink bloom open:
I press a leaf
of the flowering currant
on the back of your hand
for the tight slow burn
of its sticky juice
to prime your skin,
and your veins to be crossed
criss-cross with leaf-veins.

— Seamus Heaney, “from Field Work” in Selected Poems 1966-1987 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990)

Gutter cat

The night is as cold as its onan-semen
I’m writing to tell you

even now, where the alleycat is cantor
and the moon bends to drink
from the sewerage ditch, even now
at the mating of prick and palm with the little rabbi
beer-on-the-breath presiding . . .

— Albert Goldbarth, “Letter to Tony,” Comings Back (Doubleday, 1976)

A man’s poetry

The other day I was browsing around the archives at the Michigan Quarterly Review where I stumbled on the text of a 2009 Hopwood Lecture given by Ellen Bryant Voigt. In this lecture, she described herself as “essentially an earnest person,” and I was glad to read it because I’ve felt, in this age of irony, that I also suffer from the sin of essential earnestness, and if it’s good enough for Ellen Bryant Voigt, well, it’s good enough for me.

More than that, I confess to the sin of having a small mouth with thin lips, just right for compressing into a tight prudish line of disapproval. I check the mirror daily for a craze of hair-line pursing wrinkles along my upper lip.

Which is my way of saying there are certain types of humor that I just don’t get. I never quite felt comfortable with Zap comix, for example. All that hair and those exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics. My appreciation of Frank Zappa has limits. The National Lampoon of the 1970s often sort of creeped me out. (Though I’ll admit I thought Cheech Wizard was cute.) For that matter, the Brobdingnag sections of Gulliver’s Travels always struck me as pretty gross — but then I think they’re supposed to. And as for the Yahoos, well . . . But then I like horses.

[Just as an aside here, because I've been immersed in this stuff, Gulliver's Travels is supposed to be a book Daniel Boone carried with him into the wilderness of Kentucky, which is how there came to be a creek in Kentucky called Lulbegrud.]

As for Portnoy and his liver, give me a break.

Once upon a time, Elizabeth Bishop infamously refused to lend her work to a volume of women’s poetry, saying, if I recall this correctly, nobody would publish an anthology of men’s poetry. Whatever the merits of that statement, I would argue that some things, including poetry, can only be written by men. And those same things are written for men.

Men’s poetry.

Which is my way of saying, I’ve been reading Albert Goldbarth’s Comings Back (Doubleday, 1976) and pretty much totally failing to get it.

Take, for instance, these lines from “Some Poems Around Some Lights”

when the iron asserts itself out of my blood, and is jostled
through the heat in the form of ingots, or the sexual loneliness
seeps through my mattress, and hangs gray semen
stalactites into the dark below the bed . . .

My reaction to that, I am sorry to say, is “not my problem, never going to be my problem.” Unless, of course, I’m called upon to do his spring cleaning.

No doubt this is a cretinous reaction.

Onanism seems to figure in this collection quite a bit. And look here, I’m the mother of sons, and though I may be earnest, I’m not easily offended. At least, not by masturbation jokes.

I’m just not touched by it.

I suppose men may have the same reaction to poems about — what? dildos?

Okay, well look, I’m being silly.

More likely men are bored by poems about pregnancy and childbirth, nursing, yada yada.

As always, I say, if I read these poems by Goldbarth this time next year, I may find them brilliant. My theory is that literature speaks to you when you need it or when you’re ready for it.

And I understand the reason for this Rabelaisian sort of writing, that for all our airs and intellect, we are trapped in a body that demands and excretes and dies, that like old Nobadaddy we are prone to fart and belch and cough, that Marie Antoinette had cooties under those elaborately sculpted coiffures.

There is much in Comings Back that is brilliant. But there is too much in Comings Back. For me.

And it’s not just the obsession with jism and feces. The poems are long and ambling and brilliant. Comic and tragic. But they don’t pull me in.

One thing I do like is Goldbarth’s way with a metaphorical cat. As in “The Two Poles: a New Year resolution 1975”

. . . sorrow is here
to stay and the arch of a cat’s back bridges
the process of understanding grief and connects
something unspeakable registered in its eyes with
its fearful, uncontrollable sphincter, and we
if we could see in the dark a cat sees
would do the same for these sorrowful times . . .

Sorrowful times we certainly are in, still, again, 35 years later.

And this is my way of saying, here is your cat blog for Friday, Febraury 12, 2010 (Happy birthday, Abie Baby).

Cats and Goblins

from Goblin Market

Evening by evening
Among the brookside rushes,
Laura bowed her head to hear,
Lizzie veiled her blushes:
Crouching close together
In the cooling weather,
With clasping arms and cautioning lips,
With tingling cheeks and finger-tips.
“Lie close,” Laura said,
Pricking up her golden head:
We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?”
“Come buy,” call the goblins
Hobbling down the glen.
“O! cried Lizzie, Laura, Laura,
You should not peep at goblin men.”
Lizzie covered up her eyes
Covered close lest they should look;
Laura reared her glossy head,
And whispered like the restless brook:
“Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie,
Down the glen tramp little men.
One hauls a basket,
One bears a plate,
One lugs a golden dish
Of many pounds’ weight.
How fair the vine must grow
Whose grapes are so luscious;
How warm the wind must blow
Through those fruit bushes.”
“No,” said Lizzie, “no, no, no;
Their offers should not charm us,
Their evil gifts would harm us.”
She thrust a dimpled finger
In each ear, shut eyes and ran:
Curious Laura chose to linger
Wondering at each merchant man.
One had a cat’s face,
One whisked a tail,
One tramped at a rat’s pace,
One crawled like a snail,
One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry,
One like a ratel tumbled hurry-scurry.
Lizzie heard a voice like voice of doves
Cooing all together:
They sounded kind and full of loves
In the pleasant weather.

— Christina Rosetti. Read the whole poem here.

Green towel, Goldbarth

Photograph by TR Williams

from The Leave-Taking

. . .

I’m going to the hills for a while, I hear
you can spear down game there with a toothpick,
and if you leave the door unlatched, your only skulking in
will be the night air’s, not a chill air, it curls
on your chest like a kitten. . . .

— Albert Goldbarth, Comings Back (Doubleday, 1976)

By the way, Poetry Daily this week features Why All This Music?

Wherein Goldbarth, Badgered by The Georgia Review into Conducting a Version of an Interview, Sighs and Accepts a Few Queries from Poets in the Audience, on the Condition that These Questions Come from the Bodies of Their Poems, and the Answers (Such as They Are) Come from the Bodies of Goldbarth’s Poems (with a little verbal glue in non-poem form in italics)