Sherry Chandler

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.

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).

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)

Houses

From Daniel Drake’s Pioneer Life in Kentucky 1785-1800 (Henry Schuman, Inc., 1948):

Now fancy to yourself a log cabin of the size and form of Dove’s dining room — one story high — without a window — with a door opening to the south — with a half finished wooden chimney — with a roof on one side only — without any upper or lower floor — and fancy, still further, a man and two women stepping from sleeper to sleeper (poles lad down to support the floor, when [my father] should have time to split the puncheons), with two children — a brother & sister — sitting on the ground between them, as joyous as you ever saw . . . and you will have the picture which constitutes my first memory. [ p. 15]

. . .

The first event I can remember I have described in my letter to Harriet Echo. It occurred in the autumn or beginning of the winter of 1788 when I had entered my 4^th year. For the next 6 years my father continued to reside at the same place, in the original log cabin, which in due course of time acquired a roof, a puncheon floor belown and a clap board floor above, a small square window without glass, and a chimney, carried up with cats & clay to the height of the ridge pole. These cats & clay were pieces of small poles, well imbeded in mortar. The rifle, indespensable both for hunting & defense, lay on two pegs driven into one of the logs. The axe and a scythe (no Jerseyman emigrated without that implement) were kep at night under the bed as weapons of defense, in case the Indians should make an attack. On the morning the first duty was to ascend the ladder which always stood, leaning behind the door, to the loft and look through the cracks for Indians lest they might have planted themselves near the door, to rush in when the strong crossbar should be removed, and the heavy latch raised from its resting place. But no attack was ever made on his or any other of the five cabins which composed the station.[p. 24]

From Annette Kolodny’s The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630 – 1860 (UNC Press, 1984):

As late as 1859, for example, the forty-eight-year-old Nicolas Stott Shaw accompanied her children on a week-long trek “through a dense and often trackless forest,” nervously making her way from the railroad station in Grand Rapids to a waiting cabin about ten miles from present-day Big Rapids, Michigan. Sustained by the belief “that we were going to a farm . . . [with] some resemblance at least to the prosperous farms we had seen in New England,” Nicolas was shocked to discover at the end of her journey only “the four walls and the roof of a good-sized log-house, standing in a small cleared strip of the wilderness, its doors and windows represented by square holes, its floor also a thing of the future, its whole effect achingly forlorn and desolate.” To be sure, Nicolas Shaw and her children succeeded in making a home of the cabin some “one hundred miles from a railroad, forty miles from the nearest post-office, and half a dozen miles from any neighbors save Indians, wolves, and wildcats.” But in the first shock of recognition “that this was really the place father had prepared for us,” she could only bury her face in her hands, and in that way she sat for hours without moving or speaking.” Indeed, as her daughter would insist many years later, Nicolas’s “face never lost the deep lines those first hours of her pioneer life had cut upon it.” [pp. 229-230]

It’s not my problem

Cat with cynic

Cat and King
A cat was looking at a King, as permitted by the proverb.
“Well,” said the monarch, observing her inspection of the royal person, “how do you like me?”
“I can imagine a King,” said the Cat, “whom I should like better.”
“For example?”
“The King of Mice.”
The sovereign was so pleased with the wit of the reply that he gave her permission to scratch his Prime Minister’s eyes out.

– Ambrose Bierce

Though cats are cynics by nature, much more than dogs, and more honest too, they don’t care much for dogs or dog-like philosophers. This cat is Baxter, sometimes known as Baxter Black, though he is not a poet, certainly not a cowboy poet. He’s 14 years old and his whiskers are turning white. Otherwise its hard to find any distinguishing marks.