Richard Howard

for Joseph Cady Camden, 1882 Is it raining, Mary, can you see? I hear rain. Is the road black, is it shining? Dark, I can see for myself. Put on my red tie, red has life in it—most men I know dress like undertakers making sure they look mournful enough to manage their own funerals No accounting for taste: we should be grateful for that. Help me get to the window, I want to see Mickle Street. Don’t you hear it now, something like rain, off in the distance? My ear, maybe, is playing me tricks again; there was a rushing, like rain when it moves closer and starts a millstream in the trees. No? I guess my senses must be losing their touch. It was nothing. then, nothing more than a tantrum of the boneyard: best for me to hold still in this chair and listen to my beard grow. Now if hair was poetry, then your Walt Whitman would be a great success. I wear out trying to come to terms with the wrong weather— what you might call speaking terms. I don’t want to talk to much else. You tell them to go home, Mary, no visitors today—or one, just one: what else is a red tie for? Some English poet, keeps me up, coming all the way here from California, Colorado—coming to ask the usual questions. I don’t like questions that require answers: English questions. That’s a country of things answered. London is a city of things done with. Brooklyn is different, New Orleans, Washington they’re my cities of romance, all the cities of things begun. I may have been deliberate, even laborious, but I never looked for finish. Here, where’s his name? Bucke wrote about him after hearing one of his lectures. I had it somewhere. You let him in, Mary: no one else, no one ... I’m slipping—here it is, here’s the name!— slowly, maybe, but slipping. Who can say he has hold of what might be called a standing? That’s what they do say, though, all these visitors— they write, they call, and they stay: it makes a problem Doctor says: bar them. I can’t. I won’t. Still, they bother me. One young fellow walks in, says, “Walt, I should like to read you my epic and have your opinion of its worth.” “Thank you,” say I, “but I’ve been paralyzed once already.” Suppose someone took it in his head to come and sit here and say nothing! someone who knows even the first syllables of the great speech of silence ... Today’s visitor, maybe, will mind his tongue, maybe spare you the trouble of putting his latest tribute on the shelf with all the rest. Give me enemies rather than these disciples of mine. Best thing I ever heard of Browning is how he disapproves of all those Societies. Not that I quote Browning, or care for him, or read him: I’ve tried Browning on every way, but he don’t fit. Tennyson— now he has his place, a local English place: I don’t see how the world could make much use of him elsewhere— but the others: I conclude most literature was written on all fours, and the rest on stilts! ... There, Mary, the bell. I did hear that! I know my own bell, don’t I? Go on, go on down, bring the man up ... In here, Mr. Wilde. This room is not such a ruin as it seems: I find most things I search for without much trouble— found Dr. Bucke’s letter with your name, for instance. Found my red necktie as well. Come in, you cast a shadow where you stand. Come in, the chaos is more suspected than real. I suspect no chaos: I am convinced of the cosmos in your company, Walt Whitman! I greet you, sir, as America’s great voice.

for David Kalstone Stand to one side. No, over here with me: out of the light but out of darkness too, where everything that is not odd or old is gold and subjugates the shadows. There, now you will be no trouble and behold none— anything but trouble, at first glance, last chance to see what I say is worth a look. This whole palazzo is the property of a middle-aged and penniless dilettante, Pen Browning (Robert’s son), who has made terms —palatial terms, in fact—with towering premises afforded by the tact of his New York heiress, Fannie Coddington Browning, dutiful daughter-in-law, doubtful wife. Yet who would not be full of doubts, perplexed at having to define Pen’s talents and finance his tastes? Their Ca’ Rezzonico itself is dubious. The ripened fruit of centuries, rat- and roach-infested, peeling, rank, withers with each tide that rots the piles, though apt withal to weather these tenants as well ... He is painting from the model:Dryope, undressed of course but draped against the draft in a looping swathe of silver-printed stuff that seems to move, glistening over flesh— it does move! lapped in its silver mesh are coils of a python wrapped in loving torpor round the contadina’s undistracted torso. The afternoon is numb: Dryope sleeps in her pose, the python slips a little down the umber slope of her thigh, and Pen, spired, slaps a dashing curlicue across his canvas. “I had the Jew come by with this brocaded velvet yesterday— I bargained some old clothes against it, Fan, so you needn’t ask how much it cost in dollars.” To whom does Pen speak, his eyes intent, his hands “working busily”? Beyond his “subject,” look past the unimposing Dryope, look through the tufts of pampas grass extending up to the tufa vault whose patination casts a pall of watery splendor on the scene— if you manage to overlook the sumptuous junk, jasper urns, a suit of Japanese armor, two stuffed bears, on the divan bearskins too— there, or in this atmosphere let me say lo! on that very divan Robert Browning lolls, a short and foreshortened colossus with feet of clay but the hardest imaginable cranium, among his son’s possessions slightly ill at ease though well bestowed on slippery pelts, and plays (against the wealthy Fannie—see her white shawl?) at draughts with agate pieces, red and green, like a page from some old parchment of kings and queens. In approbation of his son’s economies the old man smiles now—but does she? The skull interfering with our view of Fannie is, I believe, or was the Mahdi’s which Pen keeps beside his easel (Victorians could make anything into a tobacco jar). “I took my pipe through Cannareggio on a long tramp yesterday morning, right into the Ghetto, looking for likely faces, which I found! Didn’t you say, Father, a satisfactory Jew is worth a dozen Gentiles? The one who sold that velvet to me is sure to be ready by Spring: for Lear, you know, or Lazarus at least ...” Pen chatters on to charm the python, not Dryope or Fannie who look up only when the poet, roused, exclaims— as rapt before himself as a child in front of the Christmas tree: “A satisfactory Jew! Setting mere Rothschildsplay aside, Pen, I never saw but one in all my life: Dizzy, I mean—the potent wizard himself, at Hampton Court a dozen years ago, murmuring at the Queen’s ear like a wasp who hoped to buzz his way into the diamonds ... With that olive cast and those glowing-coal-black eyes and the mighty dome of his forehead (to be sure, no Christian temple), as unlike a living man as any waxwork at Madame Tussaud’s: he had a face more mocking than a domino— I would as soon have thought of sitting down to tea with Hamlet or Ahasuerus ...” As if on cue, the poet’s high voice fades, the lights on his tree go out. Yet we have seen enough and heard enough: the secret of losing listeners—did Browning never learn?— is to tell them everything. We lose details. The Mahdi’s skull and Fannie’s coincide ... The scene blurs and the sounds become no more than exaggerated silence. Stand with me another moment till our presence is sacrificed to transitions altogether. Time will not console—at best it orders into a kind of seasonable chaos. Let me tell you, it will not take much longer than a medical prescription— give you ingredients, no cure ... Visitors to the palazzo used to speak of the dangerous ménage—the menagerie! yet the Costa Rican python that cost Pen (or Fannie) sixteen pounds was the first to go, untempted by the rats of Rezzonico; Dryope followed Dryope underground, the girl carried off by a chill and buried at San Michele, the great daub interred in the cellars of the Metropolitan ... “Dear dead women, with such hair, too,” we quote, and notice that hair is the first of ourselves to decay before—last after—death. In a year Robert Browning too was dead, immortal; in another, Fannie dropped her shawl and took the veil and vows of an Episcopalian nun; and Pen? Oh, Pen went on painting, of course— buono di cuore, in yellow chamois gloves, obese, oblivious, dithering into debt and an easy death. The sale of what we saw or saw through in Venice realized, as they say, some thirty thousand pounds at Sotheby’s. I told you: first glance is last chance. Darkness slides over the waters—oil sludge spreading under, till even Venice dies, immortally immerded. Earth has no other way, our provisional earth, than to become invisible in us and rise again. Rezzonico ... Disraeli ... We realize our task. It is to print earth so deep in memory that a meaning reaches the surface. Nothing but darkness abides, darkness demanding not illumination—not from the likes of us— but only that we yield. And we yield.

“Messieurs, l’huitre étoit bonne. Adieu. Vivez en paix.” —Boileau Secret they are, sealed, annealed, and brainless And solitary as Dickens said, but They have something to say: that there is more Than one way to yield. The first—and the hardest. The most nearly hindered—is when you pull Them off the rocks, a stinking, sawing sedge Sucking them back under the black mud, full Of hermit crabs and their borrowed snailshells, Minnows scattering like superstitions, The surf dragging, and every power Life permits them holding out, holding on For dear life. Sometimes the stones give way first. Before they will, but still we gather them, Even if our hands are bloody as meat, For a lunch Queen Victoria preferred: “A barrel of Wellfleet oysters, points down” Could last across the ocean, all the way To Windsor, wakening a widow’s taste. We ate them this afternoon, out of their Armor that was formidably grooved, though It proved our own reversal wiser still: Keep the bones and stones inside, or never Leave the sea. “He was a brave man,” Swift said, “Who first eat one.” Even now, precedent Of centuries is not always enough. Driving the knife into muscles that mould The valves so close to being impartial. Surrender, when it comes—and it must come: Lavish after that first grudging release Back there in the sea, the giving over Of despair, this time—makes me speculate. Like Oscar and oysters, I feel “always Slightly immortal when in the sea”: what Happens now we are out? Is the risk worth While for a potential pearl? No, what we’re Really after is the moment of release, The turn and tear of the blade that tightens, Tortures, ultimately tells. When you spread The shells, something always sticks to the wrong One, and a few drops of liquor dribble Into the sand. Scrape it off: in the full Half, as well as a Fautrier, a Zen Garden, and the smell of herring brine that Ferenczi said we remember from the womb, Lunch is served, in shiny stoneware sockets, Blue milk in the sea’s filthiest cup. More Easily an emblem for the inner man Than dinner, sundered, for the stomach. We Take them queasily, wonder as we gulp When it is—then, now, tomorrow—they’re dead.