Poetics and Ruminations

The Journal of Charles Ally, Part Four

         Wesley, it seems, was something of a personality. He wrote on lined blue paper for the most part, in an elegant hand. The first letter is dated,

                                                                        "Lowell, Oct. 2d 1859

"Dear Charles,

         "I now take the pleasure of writing you a short note. I went to meeting this morning & after diner I went to take a walk up to the falls. It is quite a pleasent seenry, every thing is so new to me. There is a great meny people going & coming from the falls, but they are all strangers to me. Last Sunday I saw James Pushard the one we used to call little Jim, he works in the carpet factory I see him most every day, he buys his tobacco to the store of Buttrick & Co. Grocery business is some different from painting, I get along very well considering it is new to me, I think I shall like very much after I get broken in. We do grant deal of business & it keeps us all at work so I don't have much time to go about. I am going up to Mrs. Erskings after tea to see Miss C. Cooper I suppose you know her if you don't Henry does. I went home with her last Sunday night & now I am going up there so she can come home with me thats no more than right is it, I should like to see the folks in Frankfort & one in particular, I suppose you know who that is. Has Mr. Bridge got his house painted yet let me know when you write I suppose he does not like it very much. Well Charles if ever you come to Lowell come & see me our house is on Tyler St. the store is on Market St. No. 20 givus a call,

         "It is geting late & I must go up & see Miss Cooper

         "Give my love to all the folks

                           "Write soon

                                    "Yours truly

                                             "Wes the Painter"

         Monday, 14th It's a chilly, dreary morning. A while ago I walked to the post office, which is on the Gardiner road down the hill, across the culvert, and a few houses over, Turn right on the Gardiner road, pass a gas station, a church, and the village green, walk over the bridge that crosses over our river. The post office is the first house on the left, painted red. There's no RFD here, and all town residents must pick up their mail.

The postmistress, Mrs. Goodspeed, said, "Good mawnin'," and she'd been expecting me. There was a letter from Norine:

                                                                        "September 12

"Dear Charles,

         "We are fine here and hope you are too. Our friends have been kind at the College, and I have a job in the library. Don't worry about money.

         "Drop us a note to let us know you've arrived safely. Melany sends her love, She doesn't understand. I'm not sure I do, either. Do you, Charles?

                                             "Norine."

         I bought a card at the window and sent it off. I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before.

         One more thing to feel guilty over.

         Ever since Cara, things had been going downhill, and Cara was no one's fault but my own. It was either my fault or bewitchment. Or age. I'd rather not consider the latter too deeply — I'm still young enough: thirty-six isn't ancient. But I was less and less use in Norine's bed after Cara and I had broken off. Disease? Nerves? Probably the latter. But Norine had been growing colder over the years as well.

         Certainly, nerves were part of it last year. From the beginning of the fall semester I had been growing more and more bitter with my students, almost none of them were in class to learn. I couldn't come to grips with the new romanticism and deliberate turning; away from the life of the mind that this generation has taken to heart. I saw everything through lenses that magnified the dark side of human nature — a side these kids were denying. In their denial I saw great danger, for I believe man is not basically good — nor basically bad — he is both. He is of two minds: the bestial, unthinking mind left over from the mud from which we've risen, and the specifically human, thinking but unfeeling, rational intellect.

         If one abjures the latter, he gives himself over to shadow. If he does not consciously attempt to be human, he runs the danger of being animal.

         All these notions my students derided. Man's animal nature was at least, in their opinion (if and when they could articulate their feelings), better than his brain, which had brought us more and more deadly technologies, fewer and fewer livable environments. It was time to try to believe in goodness; feeling is good, thinking is bad.

         In January the doctors found evidence of ulcers. My affliction, in specific terms, was excess acid; in literary terms, an excess of Black Bile and deadly humours; in theological terms, a frustration of missionary zeal.

         I come by these things honestly, as my father had the zeal, my mother the bile and humours, and their combination produced a writer in an Aristotelian mold. I detest mysticism, even though my preacher father was a truly good man, a la the Platonic conception. My students, had they known him, could have pointed to him and said, "See, it's possible."

         But my mother was possible too. I had, over the years, watched her mind deteriorate as my father's grew stronger. It was as though his spirit and zeal had fed on hers and grown great as hers had grown weaker, and the strain of darkness in her clan flourished like nightshade till only bitterness remained; bitterness and a fear of death and loneliness, while my father looked forward to the end with his mortal eyes becoming blinder physically, but increasing proportionately in religious clarity of vision.

         I saw something unwittingly vicious in this single-minded, zealous mission of my father's. He knew the truth, because he had seen the truth, and he was saved. Those who could not see the truth, like my mother, were lost, though he never said so in. so many words.

         So there I stood in the classroom, surrounded by the saved, doomed because I could not see; destroyed because no monolith of Salvation inhabited my soul, but only an ambiguous duality, a combination of light end dark: Ouroboros, the worm that bites its tail and devours itself; the One made of All: birth and death, love and hate, microcosm end macrocosm, matter and spirit. I could not deny half of it. But which half would win in me?

         Then, in the Spring, I sat before the television set and watched as the President sent us deeper into war; as flames engulfed the Black ghettos; as the National Guard shot some students, including girls strolling on a campus lawn.

         As I watched the father of one of the girls speaking in rational bitterness to America, I raged, for I had a daughter too, and she might someday lie beneath a nationalist muzzle if this war went on another rational, honorable, technological ten years. I raged, and I joined the May Strike, standing on the steps of the Humanities Building with a picket sign, trying to persuade my colleagues and the more cautious students to join us in the rain, arguing in hastily-called faculty meetings, turning our classes into workshops, arranging Poets for Peace readings on the mall in front of the library.

         For a while all. went well. The strike was successful on our campus, despite some sporadic violence and deadly editorials in the local papers.

         Then, the students copped out! These believers in Good left the school in droves once they got their early marks, while I sat in class with one or two people and talked about ideality.

         I remember an evening class to which none came but one of my extension students, an old shop teacher working on an M. Ed. who needed some English credits. I listened as he told a story.

         The kids are always talking about morality, he said. But I don't understand what they mean. They've blown the lid off colleges all around the country because these youngsters got shot at a Midwest university, and I can understand that in a way. But they would laugh at me if I told them I'd just come from the funeral of an old friend and neighbor of mine, who was also shot. I feel his death was more tragic than the deaths of those girls, yet there were no headlines, only an obituary notice in the town paper, and a second-page story.

         My friend, when he was ,younger, had been a geek — you know, a carny man. Hs stood in a sideshow and ate live chickens. Don't laugh. That's what he did for a living, and few livings were easy in the thirties. He did what he had to do to support a family. When he could, he quit.

         Last week he was in a bar, and there was a woman there whom he didn't know, but she was being bullied by another man at the bar, who called her a foul name.

         My friend got up and went over to this man. He said, "that's no way to talk to a lady." The other fellow said, "She's no lady. And stay the fuck out of my hair.'

         The geek took him and pulled him off his barstool, shoved him through the door. "Let's go outside a minute," he said.

         Instead, the other man pulled a gun and shot my friend dead on the spot, then ran out.

         I've .just come from his funeral, and he died for honor, nut no one cares, He was a brave man, and a good father, but none of these kids could care less.

         I said nothing, because I stood halfway between the old man and my students. In my mind I could see that tarnished honor in his mind, and the shining new one in the minds of my pupils, an honor that meant as little to most of them as the geek's meant to the righteous townsfolk who read the story in the newspaper. I could see a cosmic smirk spreading across the face of America at the geek's outmoded honor, and the smirk was of all generations,          'What the significance of this story is, I don't know, nor do I know why I include it here. except that, perhaps, it was the beginning of the end of my marriage. I became less of a man, less of a husband and father, if that were possible. I don't know where I am going, any more than Nothus does, but I have to write it all down. I see nothing up ahead, and when I look inward I see nothing but guilt for the many things: for loss of mission, for the mission itself; for my actions and inactions; for my inability to cope with love and honor and thought any longer, after so many years of surety.

         I sit here, listening to the old books, writing a new one. They are all full of darkness, the shadow of one canceling out the light of another: Ouroboros spinning and, as he spins, devouring himself.

The Journal of Charles Ally, Part Three

Saturday, 12th.

THE BOOK OF THE BLACK HEART

Chapter One: The City

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with child, and the word was the child. "Nothus" was the last thing his mother said before she died in childbirth, so Nothus became his name, Nothus Doe, son of Jane, father unknown — that is to say, even less known than his sole female relative. When she was buried in Potter's Field they took off her toe tag, and this became his heirloom, which eventually he had embalmed in plastic and wore about his neck as a concrete referent to genealogy, however tenuous.

His existence thus certified both by the attending physician and the coroner, Nothus grew up an existentialist, though it is doubtful that he would have so categorized himself — doubtful even that he would have heard the word, given the walk of his life, for Nothus had had a rough row to hoe and tough seed to sow. His milieu was the back alleys of life and the city. Under his shock of red hair there were few ideas and many ploys, a paucity of thoughts, but wiles in plenty wiring his synapses together in a network of survival instincts. Daily urban warfare was second nature to him.

Thus, it was to a degree significant, if not wholly wondrous, that Nothus was in a single aspect of his being an idealist, for he had accepted a quest — or, rather, had bowed beneath the weight of the quest fate had thrust upon him: he wished to know who he was, not essentially, but really. Who were his immediate forebears? Who, in fact, was his mother, let alone his father? For he had heard that "It is a wise child that knows its father." Nothus was already a wise guy, why not, therefore, a wise child and, later still, a wise man?

He bore his burden fretfully. He stood, hands raised over his head, bearing the weight of the buildings. His legs twisted his feet into the sidewalk. His eyes burned under the neon siege — Nothus could not follow the motion of the road driving between facades that cut space into rectangles and squares.

Nothus was his name, then. Was that sure? Was that a fact, or was it true that Nothus was no man's name? Had he just entered Broad Street from that door there, four fronts from the corner of St. Cloud? Or did he imagine the hall leading to his apartment? It was not easy, he decided, to believe in a place once it has been left behind.

"For sure, then, let's make believe all of this is," he said wavering among the images of stone and iron. "All right, then, this is someone's city, let's say. Whose? And who is the One?" In his mind there were faces and figures swimming in a vat of silence. His mother — had he a mother? — vacillated between being and seeming.

Only one thing to do, then, if he were to see this picture clearly. Nothus sought out the establishment of the famous Gypsy seeress, Madame Sostostris of ancient name and fame. In her crystal palace the ancient dame sat before her tapestries of silk and Velcro, suns, moons, and planets hung above her revolving for all the world as though they were the universe; sat before her ball of bluest and deepest crystal waiting to have her palm crossed with silver at the very least, but perhaps more hopefully with the long green of professional golfers of the first water.

Nothus seated himself before her. "I have come to you, O most notable of scriers, for the purpose of...."

But she interrupted him. "Need you tell me what you have come to me for?" she asked, shaking woefully her beturbaned cranium. "Come, cross my palm," said she, “and we shall see what we shall see." And Nothus did as he was bidden — he made the sign of the cross upon her palm, touching as he did so her life line and her love line. "Now then," said Madame Sosostris, "I need an appurtenance, something that belonged unequivocally to your life-giver, your nurturer, in effect, Jane Doe."

And Nothus rose to the occasion, for he passed across the card table the plasticized toe tag that had been his heritage since day one of the rest of his life. The good Madame took it gingerly, placed it in her left palm, and raised it until it rested flat against her forehead. Then she bent forward to gaze into her ball of blue glass and bade Nothus do likewise. And this is what they saw:

There in the family glass his father's teeth materialized for a moment. His brother's hand reached out of his mother's sleeve to take a baseball bat, a glove. All their features merged. His father's eyes peered out of a Bible — he was a preacher! Christ's blood stained his temple; a Sunday School teacher closed his cover and mounted the pulpit to drop pennies down the baptismal fount. A sea of faces was ordered in undulating rows of pews. In front of Kresge's five-and-dime Nothus saw his brother Nothus — Nothus was his name! Is that sure? Or is it true that Nothus is no man's name? — standing and listening to the glare of sticky spoons, straws sucking communion grape juice out of paper cones.

"Was that truly my brother?" Nothus asked Madame Sosostris, and she shook her head.

"Not your brother," she said, "your twin. That was you in another life, the life you would have led had you not led this one. Peer closely and you will find yourself as you should have been in the proper element, in the orderly retreat, in the Eye of God had he not blinked."

Nothus was himself person of that parish. His hands, lifted to pull glorianas out of the sky that cracked like bad plaster, were instead tangled in chains of construction paper and Della Robbia berries that festooned the Holy Stable. Nothus moved his lips, parted them, made his jaw widen to say the Word — instead, the organ issued from his throat and toppled into the hands of the gathered ushers.

They were dressed in tinseled burlap. One was Sir Galahad carrying a box of candy; one was the King of Africa mounted on a camel made of alloy; one was a man in a business suit collecting pennies in a tray of straw. They bore away frankincense and myrrh, and the smell of gasoline in a dark garage.

The barrel organ had a handle that was turned by a chimpanzee wearing hair and a red cap. The parishioners closed their pockets, stared into their hymnals, were driven down the aisles in a golf cart by a man dressed in crimson flannels, crossed oars sewn to his blazer pockets.

Nothus could look no longer. "Excuse me," he said to Madame Sosostris, "but I have seen as much of my family as I can undertake to digest for the time being. I shall return, but meanwhile, the buildings of the city will fall unless I return to the streets that are the seat of my strength." He rose, bowed, and left the old Gypsy to her own devices.

What time did Nothus keep coiled there on the tight skin just above his wrist's joint? He brought his arms down, slowly — the buildings waggled but remained above him, pelting down soot and glare. He breathed and looked: the hands, beneath their flat wall of crystal, spun through the hours, unable to fix on a stable point.

The hooks had been worn from the numbers that snaked and wormed beneath the double whips of catch-as-catch-can. He seized on a moment, turned it into a neighborhood in the morning rising out of the horizon as though it had nothing better to do than start some child's day. Nothus had become his brother, Nothus.

"Where do I know these shop fronts and popsicle wrappers speckling the walks?" Nothus stepped among the windows of nostalgia, musing and darkling. The slat-frame tenements, some with a cat on a strip of earth looking out for the family dog through the spokes of a rusty trike between the weedy steps and the feet of passers-by, the phone poles growing their vines straightway through the leafless breeze scuttling newsprint along the street, the grainy shingles knocked up underneath some old living room turned into a grocery store where all the cornflakes hosted banqueting black specks that scattered in the bowl long after the rustling had stopped — these he remembered as out of a crystal kept in fog...on the card table of Madame Sosostris.

"There is a lady I know here somewhere," Nothus said. "She is bent over a tub that has a wheel driven by an antique washer motor, and there is a grinding of ice and sugar and flavoring, but she gives no samples of her lemon-ice, for her husband sits grizzling somewhere behind a curtain behind a counter nearly empty of candy behind a position long since assumed behind a mask made of spaghetti and red wine and the lies he was told concerning the pavement of this new Eden before he and his tremendous signora stepped off the boat to find the fortune to be found in an antique motor and a tub and ice and sugar and lemons and paper cups one can squeeze and mirabile dictu! throw away on the summer sidewalk outside where all the kids collect, as on a day such as this, maybe to play ball or break a window and 'Make-a them buy the jumbos if you can because-a we need.'"

Nothus! — or was it Nothus? — went down the block a little way and there found old Ercole the butcher spraying lamb chops out from under his snicker-snee as though he were some charnel potentate mucking his way to glory through the ribs of his enemies.

Underfoot the going was unsteady — the floor was a beach of shavings that slid like a wooden tide against the watery metal and the watery glass of the transparent mountain sheltering a museum of entrails and carrion. Ercole rose, stained as Judas' mustache, from behind the chopping block, laid down a fistful of meat. His belly did a ponderous waltz as he lifted his happy hacker. The bow of his apron tied off his rump where a man's back should start above the buttocks. His slab face was a gorgeous lividry. "Ah, Ercole," Nothus cried, gay to be in a homing place, "you are cartoonish you are so real! My mouth waters for you! Your eyes are so certain beneath that baldness surrounding your swirl of forelock that I can see my image in your pupil. This is safety, a good thing in a small world. You feed us!"

"Yah, kid, have some chips and lemme alone. I got work." He moved toward the coldroom door. His ham appeared in a frame of polished oak. Nothus stared — a forest of meat ate Ercole. The cattle, growing downward like stalactites from the roof of snow, ogled the monster parading among them. Their soft lips nibbled his thighs, and their eyes were full of savory thoughts that rolled downward among a mound of kidneys which he mounted. Having come into his own at last, Ercole, his head moving among the clouds of frost, gathered in cutlets and roasts, chops and steaks, loins and filets, climbed down and walked steaming out of the crystal cave. He spread his bounty in the great cases of his shop and he brimmed with only small malice while he murmured, "Goddamn. Goddamn priest's kid. Always hangin' around for a handout. Just like his dad. Here, kid, here's a free thing...." A hand within a hand, severed at the joint, holding a heart made of cellophane. The lettering: Kingdom Come Potato Chips. Mfd. in U.S.A. Made from pure....

Sunday, 13th. Flash and dissolve — the Street again. The church on the corner floating in white wood. Some urchin sang on the steps swinging on the gate of wire and silver tubing. The grass greened in the big lot — the whole holy Word clapboarded astraddle the corner where wop and kraut collided in a melee of huge elms and No Parking signs: of two worlds at least. The whispers had it that these renegade Protestant Eyetalians were holy rollers. The funny little Sicilian priest wanted to marry some Mayflower queen. They drank real blood in those little shot glasses. They hired a band to praise the Lord.

"Let's see you spit on the stairs," somebody said to Nothus, another kid, a bigger one. "You're scared, punk. Your old man eats snails. Where do you people keep the snakes you kiss on Sunday?"

Down in that lung, down there in that cavern of air, in that gray mass of wheezing sacs, yes, under the pulsating cage of bone spindle Nothus could feel it rising in Nothus' chest — the mucous rummaging for more space. It could squeeze the heart, make it palpitate, turn his lips into a hose nozzle straining to inhale the wind. If Nothus tried, Nothus felt, some of it would come up, would wind past the apple that clogged his throat, would rise and spurt like a yellow pearl to lie glistening on God's ladder: it — this smashed eye that knew his crimson center — stared blindly up at the foot that came down in rage and fear. Nothus, stumbling, mewling like some sack of dying animals, trekked past the dirt grin that spread over some triumph or other, the exultation of small grime that guarded the gate which closed slowly, growing as it did so into pylons and pillars that smoothened into a stately forbidding. The church widened to encompass all that was other than this deed. A child, vaguely familiar, said "Nothus" and opened the vestibule doors, climbed a marble cross that was certainly pine before this basilica grew up, and draped himself smugly over the crosstimber. He hung there smiling and eating small cubes of communion bread coated with powdered sugar. No force closed the doors, but they closed anyway, and there was silence.

         I wrote all day yesterday, and this morning. Today, the writing came easily, but yesterday it was Iike madness, like pulling a demon out of my guts. I quit at midnight, exhausted, and fell into bed. I have taken the large western bedroom upstairs, with its table, chest of drawers, wardrobe, and hallseat-with-mirror, and I thought I would drop into, dream as though into a well.

         But, though my head was bursting, as soon as it was on the pillow I began to hear the night. It was then that I missed Catch from the foot of the bed, He can get in and out of the house at will, through a tear in the screening of the porch and the door from the dining room onto the porch, which I prop open a little with an antique flatiron. Today, Catch still is missing.

         Filling his absence last night was the sound of the brook flowing past the ruined mill. At first I thought I'd left the water running in the kitchen. I lay in bed, staring out of darkness through the south window of my room, and watched the blue spruces looming against the sky — we had the "brighter heaven" Mr. Salmon spoke of. Occasionally a bat would flicker against a star as I lay watching.

         For the first time, too, I noticed all the sounds of the house. I heard what must be squirrels scuttling overhead, and it occurred to me I hadn't yet been up attic. There were peculiar flutterings in the fireplace, which initially I thought must be the wind blowing over the chimney, but there was no wind. Then I realized the sounds were the wingbeats of chimney swifts nesting in the flue — I had heard they sometimes raise two broods in a single summer. It must be so.

         I heard the sounds of the house timbers, too, and the creakiness in the walls. At last I got up and, in the dark, went out to the hall and sat down in a chair in my "library." My head began to clear almost immediately. My thoughts turned in all directions. I reached out my hands and touched the leather spines I couldn't see. It was almost as though calm flowed out of them into my fingers and blood.

         I saw myself, sitting there in a house where my mother's ancestors had sat, writing a book, hemmed in by books on three sides. All things were one thing — past end future — the present might as well have been ahead as behind. My book might be about the confusions of the world, the terrors of this very day and this very flesh, but they would pass, and nothing would change. Whatever I might suffer by pen and paper would come to the same thing eventually: voices locked in ancient darkness on shelves in shadow.

         I sat there a long time. And then I went back into my room and slept.

         When I woke, I ate a little, wrote some more. So far, I know where I am going. But the next stint will be harder, for I must give a true account of Nothus. So far, he is an abstraction. I'll have to wait a while to let the well fill again.

         In one of the pigeonholes of Uncle John Putnam's desk I've found a bundle of eight letters, some of them still in their envelopes, and all dating from the late 1850's and early 1860's. They are addressed to Charles Putnam, who vas my great-grandfather, and signed by Wesley Court, who had moved from Frankfort to Lowell, Massachusetts. I've put the letters into chronological order, but decided not to read them all at once.

 

The Journal of Charles Ally, Part Two

PART TWO

Thursday, 10th. This evening the wind is high. It is turning the weather — two shifts in a day. The morning was bright, and I spent it exploring these two hundred acres of the Putnam farm. The afternoon turned to thunder showers and, between, clammy mists. I shopped for food, and used the rest of the late afternoon looking through the books upstairs. I shall have to build some good shelves and sort things out. Now summer is blowing away in scuds across; the moon.

         The farm is various. In the river-yard, to the right, is a raspberry patch; to the left, a patch of blackberry bushes. There are a few apple trees as well, but most of the land is clear of everything but high grass and milkweed.

         Steep banks go down to the river, which is tidal, and trees run along the top edges — several kinds: oaks, pines, and cedars. The tides have undercut two cedars, about fifty yards apart, and they are growing almost straight out from the bank, over the water. One can climb out on them and sit. I've found an old, heavy plank boat lying in a corner of the barn, and next summer I'll put it in shape, launch it, and tie it up at the biggest cedar, which will be my pier.

         The river makes an S-curve not far to the northwest of the house and barn. Uncle John's land extends quite a way beyond the curve. Most of it is woods, but back of the barn are fields that once were pasture.

         On the other, eastern, side of the house is the road, and the town cemetery where Uncle John lies is up the road, not far from the dooryard — one can see the headstones up a dirt path off the main road at the first curve; the road makes an S in reverse, so that it and the river, if seen from the air, must form a wishbone, with the farm in the stem.

         There are a good many Putnams in the cemetery, some of the stones dating — when one can make them out — well back into the 18th century. My mother once told me a branch of the family immigrated here after the great shame of Salem, where the original Putnams settled, and where some of his progeny pointed out the road their neighbors were to take to Hell. I don't believe she ever talked of that again. It's not something much spoken of in my mother's family.

         Across the road from the dooryard is the millstream at the bottom of a deep gully filled with alders. Up the stream a way is a falls, where the foundations of a shingle mill can still be made out among brambles and roots. The stream drops down off Blind Man's hill from the bogs five miles distant. Where the road once followed the river, it now follows the brook. The falls are small, but beautiful, hidden away, as they are, from passing traffic by woods. Uncle John's property stops at the falls.

         The stream crosses under the road, through a large culvert, below the house, not far from the village, such as it is. Where the stream emerges from the culvert, on my property, are the shambles of a grist mill: three huge round grinding stones and the fallen rock foundation.

         If one stands in the kitchen door and looks across the gully, one is faced with a domed hill, also mine, covered with maples, pines, and oaks.

The old well is up there, still partly filled with water — it used to be full, and it fed the house by gravity till the new spring was dug down by the river's first bend.

         They say an Indian fort stood on the bluff in the riveryard overlooking the confluence of the millstream and river, commanding the prospect downriver toward the Kennebec, which is fed by our smaller waters. This was Abenaki country.

         I've browsed in the books a bit. There are about two-hundred volumes dating from the late seventeenth century to the Civil war. Someone last century had an excellent collection — geographies, histories, religious books, volumes on astronomy and other sciences — Bowditch's Navigator is one; books on law — mostly the laws of Massachusetts, of which Maine was originally a part; literature, husbandry. Truly remarkable.

         One of the books, by "Mr. Salmon" and published in Edinburgh in 1771 is called A New Geographical and Historical Grammar. I looked up "New England" in the chapter on British America. I found the old Esses that look like effs confusing at first. The article mentioned prominently the trade of shipbuilding, and there was, in fact, a shipyard on this land, at the mouth of the stream, on the other side where the flat land starts. A 19th century print on the wall of the parlor shows a schooner being built there. As I read on I came to a passage that mentioned "the Dutch and Hamburghers" — the word brought me back with a jolt, It all sounds so impossible, and yet so likely. I must begin to think about my own book. It is midnight. I miss Norine and Melanie. The capital H and the small h must be exorcised.

Friday, 11th. It has been clear, bright, and crisp today. Here and there, on the old-well hill across the road, the upper limbs of maples are turning to autumn flame.

         In the barn is a stack of lumber, salvaged from the demolition of an outbuilding or two, I imagine. This morning I went out, picked some good boards, and spent the rest of the morning into early afternoon building shelves upstairs. I've always liked working with my hands when I want to mull something else. This is a very different life from the one I've led for ten years…classes, exams, student problems, faculty meetings and committee work, and, lately, all the unrest and violence. There's not even a television set in the house — which reminds me that I haven't read a paper lately. I don't know what's been going on out there these past few days.

         If I had known what ease there is in merely turning off, I might have tried it long ago, The world seems irrelevant — as my students would say — here in this place.

         And I wonder whether that will be good or bad for my novel. I know who the protagonist is — Nothus, myself. It will be set in the years when I was a younger man, just out of high school, and a sailor. The days of the Cold war and the beginnings of all the unending complications of this frenetic, fanatical, space-age, super-everything "civilization."

         Nothus will be found, at the beginning of things, in the middle of everything, searching for himself in others.

         As I envision it, the novel will really be a prose epic. There will be the traditional voyage — in this case, a real one: the world-cruise of the aircraft carrier U. S. S. Hornet, aboard which I served for two years, following the track of the New England whalers. But as he moves through the world, Nothus will meet people who tell their stories — Chaucer won't mind. There have been Other pilgrimages.

         Looking back over what I've just written, I wonder if my having been a professor of English hasn't destroyed me. It all sounds so artificially literary. But I've felt the novel in me, like a fetus, and, if I don't know where I'm going with Nothus, I must at least find out if there's someplace to go. So I'll begin it tomorrow, and I'll use the weekend for writing.

         Norine, I think, believed at last that I'd never write it. But Cara knew better, even after we had stopped our affair. She hadn't just been putting me on, or putting me on a pedestal, God knows I'd written enough else in those ten years — poems, articles, textbooks, a few stories. The royalties and Uncle John's bequest will keep me, barely I guess, till the book is done.

         I even have a title: The Book of the Black Heart. Perhaps

I'll dedicate it to Catch.

         The shelves are finished, and I've put the books up. I've browsed a bit more. In one volume, Dr. Chase's Recipes or, Information for Everybody — the 10th edition, published in Ann Arbor in 1866, there's a tremendous recipe for "Tomato Wine," which Cara would love, and an even better, comment on the product:

         It makes a most delightful wine, having all the beauties of flavor belonging to the tomato, and I have no doubt all its medicinal properties also, either as a tonic in disease, or as a beverage for those who are in the habit of using intoxicating beverages, and if such persons would have the good sense to make some wine of this kind, and use it instead of rotgut whisky, there would not be one-hundredth part of the 'snakes in the boot' that now curse our land.

         "Dr." Chase, it appears, used to be a merchant with a sweet-tooth:

         I have destroyed my own teeth, I have no doubt now, by constantly eating candies, while in the grocery business, before I knew of its injurious effects; and I believe it to have destroyed the first teeth of all my children which were born during my candy-eating propensities. What say our candy-eating gentry to the above?

         He was a self-made physician, I take it —

         Many persons will stick up their noses at these "Old grandmother prescriptions," but I tell many "upstart Physicians" that our grandmothers are carrying more information out of this world by their deaths, than will ever be possessed by this class of "sniffers," and I really thank God, so do thousands of others, that He has enabled me, in this work, to reclaim such an amount of it for the benefit of the world.

         A very good sense of ego.

         To bed — Catch is waiting for me. I can feel him sitting on the floor behind my chair. Tomorrow I begin my work. I will lay my carbons into this journal so that someday I'll be able to see how it all was, as a single entity of time.

The Journal of Charles Ally, Part One

THE JOURNAL OF CHARLES ALLY, Part 1

Friday, September 4^th, 1970. Norine has told me to leave or be left. I will leave. It is a strange time for her to have found out about Cara, two years after the fact, just as we were to settle in for the semester. The students are just beginning — to arrive — those who will live off campus, Perhaps it's their arrival as much as anything that's stirred Norine so — The young things coming on another year, an endless supply, though she's still as good-looking as any of them except, perhaps, for the thin look about her lips, and the coldness of her eyes.

         I had asked Norine only a week ago, during one of the squabbles we've been having so frequently lately, whether she'd mind if I took a mistress. She said, "Yes, I'd be humiliated — more so than usual," and now, to discover Cara, who is no longer a student here, but to see the image of Cara everywhere....

         I'll leave everything. I'll regret leaving Norine and Melany, but nothing else — not the job, which gave me a bad stomach last year during all the turmoil on campus; not this poky town or our few friends. Not even our possessions. I've wondered for years whether I couldn't make a living on my writing alone, and I'll find out. Perhaps, at least, I can get to the novel that's been building in my brain and temper. It's been the novel, anyway, that's been wearing my nerves thin lately, and the silver on our wedding plate.

         I will leave it all, as partial compensation, and go live on the farm in Frankfort. Since Uncle John's death last spring it's been standing empty by the river, and I might as well use it. I've never spent a fall in Maine, in the town of my maternal ancestors, and I've always imagined how it might be with the leaves lying in the fields, along the road.

         Now we'll see; and, as this is another life, I well record it here, in this journal, from the seminal moment, as I will try to get down that other life in my novel

Wednesday, 9th. It was simple. I bought an old car, packed a few clothes, and put Catch, my cat, into his traveling cage. Before we left, though, there was a picnic in the college park beside the lake with a few friends and their families. It was the most beautiful Labor Day afternoon I can remember, no other faculty but the five couples and our children all over the grass, I launched my boat and gave rides. No one said anything serious.

         Yesterday, before leaving I told my chairman, and I'm sorry he's left in the position of having to scratch for a replacement only a week before classes start. He was surprised and, at first, upset, but he understood the situation finally.

         I drove the ten hours from upstate New York to Frankfort in one stretch, and I'm now in Uncle John Putnam's old farmhouse, writing this at his rolltop desk. Tomorrow I'll have to do some shopping.

         The house is in good repair, but it seems to me it's been left essentially unchanged since last century. I understand there's a new water supply, though, and the house is electrified; there's a hot water heater standing in the kitchen-corner in the ell.

         I've looked the house over thoroughly, and the first thing Catch did was to bless our new home with a dead star-nosed mole. As soon as I let him out of his cage, he disappeared into the fields. When I had wandered about a bit and come back to the kitchen, there was Catch on the doorstep, staring at me out of his black head with those yellow eyes, the mole between his forepaws. Catch has always been mine, not Norine's, for it was Cara who gave him to me. She is a good deal like him.

         The house was built, according to family tradition and the lawyer's letter, in 1754, the second oldest house still standing in Frankfort, It was originally a hunting lodge: square, two stories tall. The ell was added about a hundred years later, and the interior of the house proper Victorianized.

         The cellar does not extend under the ell; it has a stone floor, and a stone foundation, In the house proper there are, downstairs, two sitting rooms — each with a fireplace — on either side of what was once the front door entranceway when the road followed the riverbank. Now, the "front" door looks out into a yard that falls down, between two large and beautiful blue spruces, toward the stream that flows into the river about 100 yards away.

         In the sitting-room on the river side of the house there is an old square grand piano. Off that room is a small bedroom, on the north side, and off that, to the east, is the small room where I am now sitting at Uncle John's desk. Beside me is his combination safe, which the lawyer has told me how to open. I've looked into it, and it's full of old deeds and ledgers dating back a hundred years and more.

         Behind me is the hall, and the stairway slanting west as it rises. There is another outside "middle" door at the foot of the stairs — the house is full of doors: on my right there's one leading to a screened porch that faces north, and, at the south end of the porch, still another opening onto the dining room.

         At the foot of the stairs to the left as one descends, is the door into the single story ell; dining room, kitchen, and shed, in that order. The toilet, with a shower stall, is really, a room in the shed, on the west side of which there is still the two-seater "outhouse." If one stands on the screened porch, the outhouse juts out of the ell and blocks a view of the barn.

         Upstairs there are three rooms; over each of the downstairs rooms is a large bedroom with fireplace. The arched brick structure in the basement that supports all this central masonry is massive.

         In the northeast corner upstairs is another, smaller, bedroom, facing the stairs. The upstairs hallway is large — in effect another room, It surrounds the stairs, and in the southwest corner there are bookcases and a table filled with old books. I want to look at them as soon as possible: some look very old.

         The house is clapboarded, painted white. The kitchen door looks out on the new road — on either side of the entrance to the drive is an immense, dying elm. The barn stands at right angles to the house, slightly north, facing the dooryard.

         I am tired. I don't know, yet, whether I miss Norine and Melany, but I'll sleep on it and get over this shock of strangeness. It's growing dark. The house is saying night things. Catch will sleep with me, at the foot of the bed, as usual. He is sitting behind me, telling me it's time to go to dream.

 

TO BE CONTINUED ON POETICS AND RUMINATIONS