Tony Abbott's Blog, page 9

The comfort of family . . .

. . . is all about the devil you know. The eastern side of Cliffview Road near the corner of Weston was a sequence of nearly identical tract houses built in the late forties for homecoming veterans and their new families. Our neighbors to the left were the Downings, a couple with two daughters: Holly, the oldest, who often babysat for my brother and I, and Regan, my age. While Regan sometimes joined the boys in neighborhood play, the Abbotts and Downings never consorted as families. There...

Part of the armor . . .

. . . I wore as a young man in a foreign city was not making eye contact. Because, I suppose, I had the sort of eyes that impressed others as belonging to a lost soul (I have tried to change this, with middling results), meeting someone's glance could lead to uncomfortable contretemps, like that time in Cambridge when a stray look around the cafe called forth an eerie guy from the shadows.

But I digress. The point is that there used to be in the seventies a bookshop in London with a life-size ...

The thing about . . .

. . . Anne Sexton's letters is that, even as she types a blue streak to her correspondents, spiraling up and down about her flaming inner life — " . . . sometimes I am a little crazy (withdrawn for a time and then flashing into a manic excitement, wild words, wild talking) . . . and yet not quite as crazy as all that — she thinks in poetry. Here is a fragment of letter from 1962, word for word, but unprosed:

At night the dump was lovely,

burning in gray and scarlet fires out over the water.

I r...

Fine, so . . .

. . . let's mark a birthday. James Agee was born a hundred years ago today in Knoxville and died forty-five years later in a New York City cab, by which time he had written two novels, a couple of stories, scripts, lots of journalism, poetry, and that thing that still can't quiet be categorized, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, early on in which he writes:

While we were wondering whether to force a window, a young negro couple came past up the road. Without appearing to look either longer or...

The Apple Tree . . .

In the middle distance of the backyard stands an apple tree. For years it blossomed and bore fruit, a surprisingly decent harvest of small apples in the late summer and fall. It was sturdy, with two main trunks splitting away from each other about two feet up from the ground. When our oldest daughter was young, we had a swing tied onto one thick outreaching limb that grew horizontally toward the house. The swing came down one day when its rope snapped and our daughter fell; she was likely...

Animal Game . . .

The bear in the pit is stupid for freedom,

rushing against your linked hands.

If you trap him there the game is stopped.

If he breaks the pit the game is stopped.

If he goes too far the game is stopped.

You take him by the hands, you love him up good.

He says he was a good idea gone bad,

a must-do inspiration that fizzled out,

and he recants his preposterous bearness.

You dance a little. The game starts up.

Now you're the bear.

Essential things . . .

Well, with all the other things going on (and on and on), we take refuge in quiet voices from the past. A car ride was in the offing and I found that Capote had recorded an hour's worth of In Cold Blood, which may have been available before, but was recently combined with pieces of the score by Mychael Danna from the film Capote. Well it's a real treat. Not only do we hear the poetry of the writing as it was meant to be heard, read here in snippets from the bold first paragraph to the...

One might be afraid . . .

From Anne Sexton's letter to W. D. Snodgrass, February 24, 1959, from 40 Clearwater Road, Newton Lower Falls, Mass.

. . . I read "Heart's Needle" and I changed. It made me see myself new. In seeing you, in feeling your marvelous restrained sense of immediate loss, I saw my own loss in a new color. And I changed. I said to Fred [Morgan:], "A poem isn't supposed to do that! It isn't supposed to be that vital!" . . . meaning, of course, how unusual, how much genius and the fine grip of talent, is...

The Golden Age of Milton Meltzer . . .

Now that he's no longer here, I wish I had more to say; there isn't much. I met him once in Toronto in 1994 when my first books were being released and he'd already had a long (but by no means finished) career. It was an odd gathering of writers. I can't quite remember the occasion; maybe we were all Harper authors, but Milton was at my table. I can't recall either how the conversation got around to the WPA, but it did, and as a writer and worker in the Federal Theater Project, he began to...

It's that thing . . .

. . . where you have to forget so much, so very much, lose it all, the up and down and wet and dry and all the ill-fitting shirts, dribble it out onto the sidewalk and let the sun lap it up, the history and presence of mind and sense of future, before you can muster enough — what is it, breath? pants? molecules in space? — to speak.

Paul Celan.

So, nothing. Right now.

But before long, folks, don't you fear, a raddled symphony of phrases heavy with wit and flourish and idea (up and down) and...