LETTERS: 1982: 29 - 31

LETTERS: 1982: 29 – 31

29.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               January  7  ‘82

My dear friend,

With every year our ages in years pull toward each other; though they will never coincide, our differentials diminish, because youth is ephemeral and age is not, and you now grow older at a faster pace than I do.

Therefore, if you can do so without harming your psyche, I suggest that it is time now that man with a Ph.D. and a Readership in an Indian college should stop addressing me as “Respected Sir” and use the name of “friend.”  I recall so well, years ago, when I was young in Buffalo, being summoned to the chairman’s office to hear him say, “This will come harder for you than for me, but I would like it if from now on you will use my first name and I yours.”

So, please, my dear R.K. Singh, whom I very likely will not again see in the flesh, please do me the honor of brushing away on paper  that pallid fence of deference and accept me as your friend.

I like your new poems, and it does seem to me that you catch the trick of diminishing the adjectives, though as to that “eisonophillic” is quite mouthful.

I look forward to hearing that you progress in finding a publisher for your poems.  For me it was a long courtship before my first was published by Alan Swallow.

I wonder, did you ever feel, as I do, that in a sense each lyric is a kind of ejaculation thrown into the teeth of fiscal social determinism?  Each of the little poems comes out with a certain formlessness as if it is important to keep from being academic.

At the telephone pole

knees define

boneshift past prime

Day tips to dark

year to freeze

road tips from climb

Next year I

will  drift with

snow on that

saddle beyond the

saphouse, it doesn’t matter

who owns the woods

That group of three poems-in-one called “Haying Season,” is as you guessed, difficult only in particularity of allusion.  A Bullrake is a tall rake, 6-feet tall, very wide at base, whose two handles are bent till they join above the head of the small boy who usually mans this rake meant for a grown man.  The image is visual and refers to a real thing, a farm implement.  The men, too, are real. Perry was my father’s brother.  Erwin, my grandfather’s brother. “Rowen” is a second or third crop of hay. The grindstone is mounted over a trough filled with water to keep the stone cool and moist  for cutting & sharpening the scythe edge.  The boy has to turn the handle that turns the stone. His great uncle steps in to relieve him. “Mowing away” means to unload the hay in the barn loft. The “lumbar of the hayrack” rides on the hay wagon floor. 

When you write next, please give me more news about your wife and small boy.  What a wonder it is to have a child and how often the parents are too busy to enjoy to the full their privilege.  Sexual love followed by conception followed by childbirth must be the chief, perhaps the only miracles, and yet they are all explainable by interlinking natural laws.

            Affectionate greetings to your tripartite family—

                                                                        Yrs.

                                                                        Lyle Glazier

30.

                                                                                    January 28  ‘82

My dear friend,

Thank you for the salutation, which removes a load of undeserved false distinction. Among the ways—in spite of your disclaimer—that young man catches up with the an old one—is that as he masters his métier, he becomes the older man’s peer; as he superlatively masters his métier, he can surpass his elder.

I enjoyed so much your open conversation about Bikku and Bulli.  You know that it is a great honor to have an Indian confide his wife’s name.  I recall my thrilling astonishment when Pandeya invited me to his house, where, after he and I lunched alone, he called his wife from the kitchen and made us known to each other.  That kind of distinction is prized because it can be conferred, never merely “earned.” I like to believe that if I came to your house, you would confer the same honor, and Bulli would be happy to have it so.  And that, as when I visited G. Nageswara Rao in Tirupathi, your son might climb in my lap and win the heart of the visitor as Rao’s smallest son conferred that pleasure.

It is not important that we meet again “in the flesh.”  Our meeting through letters is closer than many friends get.

I hope that indeed, as I triggered your doctorate, I may have triggered your readership. I can partly conceive of your suffering at the hands of your chairman, who is obviously a jealous man.  For years at Buffalo, I felt the animus of my chairman, after having for a half dozen years basked in the affection of an earlier chairman who admired me.  Survival requires holding a job until we have another.  This becomes more critical for a man with wife and child.  As Ben Jonson remarked, “He who has a wife and child has given hostages to fortune.”  I’ve just had occasion to review my years from 1942 to 1947, at 31 years until 36, when we were living in Boston, and I taught at Tufts University, then moved to Harvard for fulltime graduate work and teaching freshman English. We brought with us a small daughter of 2, and my wife during 5 years was pregnant three times, once ending in miscarriage and twice brought to term, so that in Buffalo in fall ’47, we had our full family of three daughters.  I had finished my Harvard courses, and my language examinations in Latin, French, and German, but I had not passed my oral examination till May  ’48, and didn’t begin to write my dissertation till early summer of ’49, getting my degree in May ’50.  Looking back now in fiction and poetry, I try to master those experiences.

I enclose a review of the poems of Genet, a result of considerable labor, because as I read the two translations, I discovered that neither was getting near the full import of the French text, so I had to make my own translation in order to make a judgment.  I have read several other reviews, all ecstatically praising the translators, and I wonder if any of the reviewers know French.

                                                                                          Cordially to all,

                                        Lyle Glazier

Thank you for explaining “eisonophillic,” for me an unknown word, and even more confiding the intimate context, a context I comprehend from situations that were similar in their difference.

31.

                                                                            December 9,  1982

My dear Singh,

I haven’t heard from you in a long time and fear that you are in a blue mood, something that I understand very well from my own frequent melancholia.

You have been an active presence here during the visits of some poet friends, who have admired your book on my poems.  What you said is very discerning. 

I am trying to make a difficult decision. A young, and very intelligent scholar in Buffalo, has been working for some time on what he calls a critical biography drawn from my poems. Next year he intends to be on sabbatical for the whole year.  The rather famous Poetry Room in the library of the State University of Buffalo has agreed to accept my books and papers for their archives, so that they will be where this young man—a good friend of the curator of the collection—can have access to them.

In some ways I am glad about this, because it means that my writings will have a safe haven, but I do fear I will miss them—and among them your cherished thesis—which has consoled me many times when my spirits have been depressed.  I have had your work prominently laid on a small console at the door of my study, and many people notice it when they enter.  Most of the other books and papers have been set up on the third shelf of my bookcase, conveniently at my elbow when I work at the typewriter.  I can reach from my chair and pull out whatever book or magazine or offprint I need.

But if they go to Buffalo, I will be lacking them.  For example, yesterday I was preparing a group of 10 poems to enter in a contest for a chapbook, and I could lean over to the shelf and find the magazine that had published the poems.

On the other hand, at my age of 71, I must begin to think of a final resting place for these papers. I may not have such a good chance again to place them in a library. They could conceivably be burned someday to get them out of the way. At the Poetry Room they will be cared for.  I think I have made my decision. I have taken them down and stacked them ready for putting into boxes.  There are many more of them than I thought. Standing up on the shelf, they make nearly a yard of occupied shelfspace.  The most recent is a festschrift THE LAUREL BOUGH, published at S.V. University in honor of the retiring chairman of the English department, who has become Vice Chancellor.  My contribution is the first passus of Langland’s PIERS PLOWMAN translated.   Dr. Sarma was a Milton scholar, and the Middle English PIERS PLOWMAN has a passage on the fall of Lucifer and his legions.  One line in it can be literally translated “Nine days they fell,” as in PARADISE LOST VI, 871, so my translation could be a tribute to the Milton scholar.

That book of essays was published in Tirupathi in August.  Also just come is a review of James Baldwin’s last novel JUST ABOVE MY HEAD, printed in the datalog of Giovanni’s Room Bookstore.  And there are my this years poems in ORIGIN and COUNTRY JOURNAL.  If I send all this stuff I may have no convenient copy  of some of it. 

You see the problem.  When you receive an honor, it can turn into a hardship as well.  So, when you were invited to Birmingham, the invitation was an honor, but you were lonely without your son and your wife, and the seminars or lectures turned out to be of small merit.  In your letter describing your visit to England, what seems to have given you  most pleasure was your stopover in Amsterdam. Even there, you were thinking, How much happier for me if my darling Bulli were with me.

Please forgive me if I have already sent you copies of the three lyrics, my most recent  publications, in a magazine called THE COUNTRY JOURNAL, September, 1982, where the poetry editor is famous—Donald Hall.

                        The Shanties (1916-1918)

1

West window looks to the river

beyond houses

strung on the valley road

east window looks to the mountain

We hear the drag of the saw

a long time before

we see the dustcloud

A team is unloading in the bay

Perry snags logs with a canthook

Maurice is sawing

Pop brings Mayflowers in April

swamp pinks in June

wild honeysuckle in July

2

Schoolnights early to bed

from the  upper bunk

we boys hear voices

above the ping of horsehoes:

“Keep your eyes on this one, Harry,

my ringer will slip

between the legs of your leaner

without touching a hair”

3

Dead level

under  apple boughs

April to June is muddy,

Mel & I carry lard pails

to the spring box,

the slope

spongy with bluets

A shanty is a one-room shack, like the one I lived in when I was 5, 6, 7.

A canthook is a pole with a hinged hook for catching hold of a log.

The bay is the area in a sawmill where logs are piled before sawing.

Horsehoes are used for playing quoits, throwing them at a stake.  If one of them surrounds the stake, it becomes a ringer, worth 5 points. If it leans against the stake so that you can get three ringers between the top and the ground,  it becomes a leaner, worth 3 points.  If a new player slips a ringer between the legs of a leaner without knocking it down, he gets the sum of the points, or 8. 

The spring box is a wooden box set into the ground where there is a spring of water gushing.

Bluets are tiny blue flowers with white centers.  They grow in dense clusters, very fragile, close to the ground.

                  

                                                  Love to you three dear friends,

                                                          Lyle Glazier