LETTERS: 1983: 32- 36

LETTERS: 1983: 32 - 36  

    

32.

                                                                                    January 28, 1983

Dear R.K. Singh,

I have not done justice to your September letter in which you announce your wife’s second pregnancy, and now I have the January letter telling me that Bulli and your son have gone to your mother in Patna, where they will stay till the baby is born.  I am not sure of your age, but these letters carry me back to the ‘40s when we were having our children, and I was beginning my graduate work, first at the Bread Loaf School of English in the summer of 1941, and then from 1942 to 1950 at Harvard, when I went up to teach at Tufts College in Somerville (greater Boston) and was only five miles from Cambridge, where I went to teach in 1945. 

I was 29 years old in 1940 when Laura was born in Lewiston, Maine, where I was teaching at a small college, and where Amy came after two years – in 1939.  We had planned not to have children till I finished paying my college bills, which had remained unpaid, partly because from 1933—when both of my parents committed suicide (my father having lost his job in the Depression) and from then on I had the care and support of my youngest  brother, 13 in 1933, who came then to live with me.  He was with me for a year in Middlebury, where I had stayed after graduation from college, and was janitor of a community house.  In 1934-5, he went with me to Northfield, Massachusetts,  where I was principal of a grammar school in my home town.  Then, in the fall of 1935, I went across the river to become housemaster in Mount Hermon School for Boys, and Larry came with me and got tuition free because I was a teacher. He remained there another year and I went to teach at Bates College in Lewiston, then he went to Middlebury, where I helped pay his tuition.  He was drafted into the air force in 1942, and when he came back from the Pacific war against Japan, he had saved most of his pay for 3 years (no place to spend it in the islands) and also had the G.I. Bill funds for veterans to pay for his college.

I hadn’t intended to go in to all that about Larry, but it had to do with our marriage and feelings about the first baby, because it explains why we were so determined not to have children for a few years.  But in spite of the advice of a pediatrician, Amy’s protection against pregnancy didn’t work, and very soon after our marriage she was pregnant.  She was very unhappy about it, and tried by pounding herself to abort, but fetuses are hard to dislodge.  I suppose I was grudgingly glad to know I would become a father.  By 1943-4, when Laura was 3/4 we were well enough settled in Boston to decide consciously to have a second child and set out to have one.  Susan was born in April 1944.  Three years later in Buffalo, where we had just moved from Boston, and still 3 years before I got my degree, we had the third daughter Alice.  I was 29, 33, and 36 when our daughters were born, and 39 when I got my degree. 

In one way we differed from you.  Amy did not go from home to her mother’s for any of the births, but remained always with me to the end.  Even so, it was before the days of father participation in childbirth, so I was firmly excluded from seeing the child born or having to do with it till we got it home.

I had had a good deal of experience helping with babies at home, and taking care of small cousins, so as soon as the baby came home, I helped with its care, able to do more because Amy never had milk enough to feed the child, so it was put on formula from the start.  I could even get up for night feedings.

From all this you see why your last two letters about Bulli’s pregnancy were especially interesting for me. Please, if you don’t mind, tell me in your next letter how old you are, and how old you were when your son was born.  And please, if you don’t mind, instead of writing “my son,” always when writing to me, mention his name.  I want to have you print his name on my mind through your letters, and your wife’s name, and the name – in time—of the new baby.  They must not remain abstract. 

I read your three new poems with interest (996, 991, 990).  In 991, did it occur to you to say “is within me”?  That would be simpler and more direct, less “poetic” in the  wrong sense of what poetry ought to be.  #990 is altogether perfect, very transparently simple and therefore profound.  One small thought: You could even leave out the word “through” in the second line.

                                This moment

visits the dark

                                alleys of my body

                                as a guest sleeps

                       

Beautiful, and  the two lines about your son make exactly the right turn.

I work here in the basement study nearly every day and usually find something to work on.  I am still working on short stories, also working once more on the novel, this time having decided to go back to the original six chapters that I had with me when we met in New Delhi in 1974.  This means that the five chapters set in between each of the other pairs can be revised as short stories.  One of my friends, a professional editor for scholarly criticism, has objected because, he says that I have tried to combine two elements that won’t coalesce.  In his field—Spanish literature—there are domestic novels (about family life, of course) and picaresque novels (rebellious and neurotic), and I made the mistake, he said, of trying to include both in one book.  He could show me how to make two novels, two successful novels—one domestic, one picaresque-- out of my one failure. I tell him that the story of a married homosexual who truly loves his wife and children, yet is driven by compulsive homosexuality, is exactly the combination of domestic and picaresque, and I would rather fail with my ground  than succeed with his  simplified texts.  My hero engages in neurotic homosexuality, then returns home to feed the baby and have sex with his wife.  Nobody, I  think, has yet published such a novel, yet it doesn’t mean that there are no married homosexuals.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Yrs,

                                                                       Lyle Glazier

 Your thesis has gone to Buffalo. I miss it, for I could always see it. Now it has to be in my mind's eye.

33.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         March 25   ‘83

Dear R.K. Singh,

When your letter came, I went to the typewriter to answer, but something interfered ( I’ve forgotten what) and it is delayed far too long.

Your mother’s death makes me think how inevitable death is for all of us.  I have been anticipating mine without grief in the thought. It is merely an inevitable Passover – as I think of it—from life as a human being to life as part of the larger world , no longer conscious of myself, but in the great stream of nature.  Perhaps I sent you my poem written when I thought about my death:

                        Stopping in woods…

                Next year I

                will drift with

                snow on that

                saddle beyond the

                saphouse, it doesn’t matter

                who owns the woods

A saphouse is a house for boiling down sap from maple trees to make maple syrup, the sweet syrup North American Indians taught Europeans how to make.  We have such a house in the pasture and behind it a woods with a road winding through it, and along that road is a  place where Mayflowers grow in early spring.  This is where Amy and I have instructed our family to scatter our ashes after we have been cremated.  There will be no burial rites, but if sometimes later, the family wants to meet for a loving memorial service, we are happy to tell them now that the thought pleases us.

The title of my poem comes from the title of a well known poem by Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening:”

        Whose woods there are I think I know

        his house is in the village, though

       He will not see me stopping here

      To watch his woods fill up with snow…

Unfortunately I do not have a picture of myself to send Bulli at the moment, but perhaps I will have one by the next letter.

By now I suppose you may have another son or daughter. I recall so well the strain of childcarrying and childbirth when you are young and poor, as we were when Laura was born.  Amy had planned not to have a child till I was through graduate school. Then we had Laura the first year, and Amy had to stop teaching in order to bear her.  It was difficult for Amy, but as for me I was happy in a way to have a baby.  All fathers, perhaps, are glad to know they are fertile.

I think when you have the baby home with you, you will be happy to have (him/her).  Babies are so enchanting it they are well.  They make us forget our anxieties for ourselves and transfer the anxieties into love and planning and hoping for the happier life for the baby.  Bikku will like to have a young brother or sister, if he is not jealous.  Even if he is, he will learn.  Jealousy is natural for the first child when the second comes. Please tell me whether Bikku is a formal name or a nickname.  It sounds loving and intimate.

I cannot suggest a name for you.  Ours are so different from yours.  Our youngest daughter Alice, changed her name to Alis when were in Turkey in 1961-2, because that was the way Turks spelled it, and with an accent on the second syllable, where the British/American accent is on the first.

I like your two poems about the train moving until the thief steals the tracks, and now that will it do?  Also the one about the monkey with snakes in the lining of his coat.

I will copy you one of my recent ones:

                Saw River Bottom

Bare under overalls

my cousin and I

are skipping stones

in the shallows beyond the coalkiln.

“You have a better

arm,  your muscle is

better. Let me feel

your muscle.”

“The trick is the stone,

find a flat one,

lay it flat, it ought

to kiss the water.”

Kiss, kiss, kiss.

“Let the stone kiss

the water. Lookit,

like this.”

“Like this?”

lips parted. “Lookit.”

My flat stone is skipping,

skipping…

    

               

                                                Affectionate greetings to you all.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Your friend

                                                       Lyle Glazier      

           

34.

                                                                                                             May  7  ‘83

Dear R.K. Singh,

If there is a book on revising a thesis for publication, I don’t know it.  The most important hurdle  is to get a publisher to accept the script and to find somebody to pay the bill, and you have achieved these goals.  Congratulations. I never was able to change my Spenser thesis enough to get it published, though two chapters did get published, revised. My revisions for those chapters involved absorbing as many footnotes as possible into the text, and omitting some others that would not be needed by a general reader. That is probably the chief change that can be made—to adapt a scholarly book for a general audience.  The bibliography at the end can provide the scholarly look.  I don’t think that you will need to make major changes.  The object should probably be to make the book more readable, less a compendium for scholars to consult. Not having had your success in finding a publisher, I am not the one to advise you.  A short time ago I received from K.S. Misra his TWENTIETH CENTURY ENGLISH POETIC DRAMA, Vikas, New Delhi, 1981.  It is quite heavily footnoted, and I doubt if there were many changes from thesis to book.  If you are planning to omit one chapter, you are already making a major change which may be sufficient to persuade your publisher that you have done your publishing homework. 

I have been reading about pirated publications in India—how some publishers reprint foreign books changing only the name of the author.  Does much of that go on?  K.S. Misra asked me to send him a script of my unpublished GREAT DAY COMING—on Black American experience in books by both Black and White authors—and I sent the script two years ago, but have never heard it has been published.  My script was accepted by a reader at the Univ. of Massachusetts Press but then turned down by a faculty committee as “controversial,” then at Yale University Press, it was liked by the editor but turned down by a scholar, who felt it was publishable but not at that time at  Yale.  Hacettepe University Press in Turkey would have published it in 1971, but I never submitted it there.

So much for academese.

I loved your letter with all its talk about little Winny and Bikku and Bulli, and I like to have your formal names, and your won nickname even if I never use them.  The story about Bikku’s jealousy at the thought of a brother and delight to have a sister—how charming it is, and so humanly universal.  I like to hear about the children, about Bikku’s starting to go to school.  What a cycle we families go through.  I read about Bikku going to school and I remember my first day in school, when I was five years old.  At recess I walked down the road with other children, feeling very grown up.  When I passed a small playmate, in his dooryard, not yet old enough to be a “scholar” (our word for school children), I patted him on the head.  One of the older girls ran back and told the teacher that I had struck Kenneth Leach, a I was afraid and ran over the hills toward the shanty (the logger’s hut) where we were then living while my father worked in a travelling sawmill.  One of the big Polish boys followed me and brought me back on his shoulders.  The teacher understood that the big girl was a tattler, and I was not punished until I got home, where older brother Melvin (two years older) who had not seen the incident but only heard the tale-bearer, told my mother  who told my father how cruel I had been to the little boy.  When my father came home, I was spanked even though I was crying already, “I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it!” Melvin was jealous of me, the second boy, in the same way Bikku would have been jealous of a little brother.  Melvin would all my childhood treat me like a slave.  Last month I wrote a poem about it:

            Baseball practice for Mel

            from the time I was five

            catching without a mitt

           chasing wild pitches

          down the dirt road

          to the culvert

          and expected, on the way back

          to throw out my arm

I was  Mel’s adoring slave until we went to Middlebury College as freshman classmates and roommates in 1929.  There we lived on the third floor in a stone dormitory built in 1800.  The shower was in the basement. If Mel forgot to bring up his towel, he would say, “Lyle, I left my shower towel downstairs,” and I would go get it. One day he said, “Lyle, ‘I left my towel downstairs.’ I was studying and paid no attention. “Lyle, my towel is still in the basement.” I didn’t raise my eyes. “Lyle, I’ve already told you twice! I left my towel in the basement!”  I don’t recall what I said if I said anything, but at eighteen years old that was my declaration of independence.  Mel punished me for his jealousy by making me his all too willing slave.

Your story about  Winny at night – “She keeps us awake, for she wants someone to talk to”—is exactly what we had with Alice, our third daughter, who was born in Buffalo in 1947.  We were living in a tiny house with two small bedrooms, in one of which Laura (then 7) and Susan 3 slept.  Alice had to sleep in a crib crowded close to our bed and every night she would wake after midnight and start talking and laughing and singing, until finally we would get up and carry our bedclothes to the living room couch. After two years, when I knew I had tenure, we bought a house in the suburbs—a very large house with an upstairs which had a large hall and four bedrooms one for each daughter and one for us.  It was a lovely place for children, an acre of ground, with a good garden and flowers and trees, so different from the shanty I lived in when a child and the rickety house we then moved into—though as for that, although we were poor and my clothes were ragged, we lived in wonderful mountainous country, with troutstreams and a river a half mile away—the ideal world for a small boy.  I was a good boy when I was watched, and a hedonist when I was not.  As for that, I am sure my mother saw more than she mentioned, living by the rule, “have ‘em, love ‘em, and leave ‘em be.” She was a little woman, small enough to stand under my shoulder:

            Running home for lunch

            crossing the little bridge

          beyond Frank Howe’s

          visualizing, on the rise,

         Mom’s eyes at the windowjog

         facing northeast along the barn door—

         so short she’d be looking under

         the double middle joint

         between top bottom sashes

I’m writing on back of a Xeroxed copy of a childhood poem, the Xerox made so the inmates would have a copy when I gave a poetry workshop last month at Franklin County Jail in Greenfield, Massachusetts, where Alice, that little girl now 35 years old, is conducting classes to help inmates pass high school equivalency examinations for high school diplomas.  I was there on Good Friday in April, and about 15 young men came to my workshop.  I was apprehensive, never before having read poems to prisoners, but they were very well behaved, attentive and interested (asked good questions, as intelligent as any good high school or college freshmen class).  Of course, they knew that if they misbehaved they would be locked in their cellblock.  Most of them were in jail for petty crimes like Driving while Drunk, or possession of Marijuana, or perhaps violence in the family.  All of them, I’m sure, thought they were guiltless and blamed society for arresting them.  Anti-Establishment, myself, I could identify with them more than they realized.

Last week I drove two hundred miles to read from my new book AZUBAH NYE at the Bellevue Press in Binghamton, New York, near the Pennsylvania line, southwest of Albany.  There I began with a first draft and a final draft of “Saw Mill River Bottom,” that poem about skipping stones.  It is supposed to be a happy poem.  The younger boy is admiring his older cousin. When he hears, “Kiss the water,” he begins to come emotionally alive and thinks Kiss, kiss, kiss as if reflecting Girls, girls, girls. I  think  something like that is happening.

You ask me to send the full poem “Stopping in Woods…” You have it all.  I enclose the poetry postcard that was sent for an invitation to guests asked to come to my reading.

I was much interested to read how your wife went home to her mother to have the baby.  So different from here. When Laura was born in 1940, we were living in Lewiston, Maine, 300 miles from Amy’s home in Bennington, Vermont.  Amy went to the hospital in Lewiston on  a hot day in mid July, and there Laura was born in late night July 31.  I brought them home after three days, and after a week Amy’s mother came for a visit.  Susan was born on April 15, 1944 in the Boston Lying In Hospital, when I was teaching at Harvard, and Alice was born on October 31 in Buffalo in mid afternoon.  A neighbor had come in to sit with Amy, and I had gone to my afternoon class.  Toward the end of the hour, the department secretary knocked on the door, and whispered that I had a new daughter.  I went to the blackboard and with chalk wrote in tiny letters, too small for them to read,  “I have just become a father.”  Then I collected my books and papers, and left, while behind me the students gathered to read my message.

If the children were born today, I would be welcome in the delivery room, invited to watch the birth.  But thirty years ago, I was not welcome.  In Lewiston, in 1940, I was allowed to sit by Amy’s bed while she tried to drop off to sleep.  The nurse didn’t think a father had a right to be there.  She kept coming in to check on me.  Amy had just said, “I think if only you would lie on the edge of the bed and hold me, I could drop off to sleep,” when the nurse burst in like a hornet and ordered me off the bed and out of the room, “And I don’t want to see your face again till after the baby is born!”  She thought I had designs on my wife.

           Affectionate greetings to you all—you, my friend & Bulli, Bikku, & Winny

                               Lyle G

35.

                                                                                               June 29,  1983

My dear R.K. Singh:

I’m sorry I got off my letter of June 24 before reading your “SAVITRI: An Overview and a Summing Up” as it appeared THE CALL BEYOND. Your Conclusion is so well written and such a good summary of Aurobindo’s intentions and techniques (insofar as I comprehend them) that you make me wonder why you need an occidental commentator to intrude with ill-digested observations about a work, which, as you say, “has …brought to bear the whole course of Vedic and Upanishadic mythology as well as the Eastern and Western classical learning… on the appreciation of its dense spiritual texture.”

Do you really comprehend how good that is, and how nearly impossible for an American to do justice to it?

I have felt all along from my reading that your chapters are both descriptive and informative, and that an Indian publisher ought to be alert to the extraordinary merit of your thesis.

What you say about the plan of the epic, and its cogent execution is, in my opinion, just right, and if what I am now saying can be of any service to you, by all means make use of this letter. 

All along, my criticism of Savitri has had to do with its poetic texture of rhythm, imagery, and language, where, I feel, Aurobindo fails to persuade me that he has mastered English  idiom.  Along with his effects of grandeur, Milton (Aurobindo’s professed master) never forgotwhat he said in his essay  OF EDUCATION (written when he was 36) that poetry ought to be “simple, sensuous, and passionate.”  Those virtues are not SAVITRI’s; yet, accepting its dedication to the OVERMIND (or OVERHEAD), no one, I think, could do fuller justice to the epic than you have.

                                                                                        Yours,

                                                                                    Lyle Glazier

                                                                              Professor Emeritus (English)

                                                                  State University of New York at Buffalo

36.

                                                                                   

                                                                                                August   1,  1983

Dear R.K. Singh, my good friend,

Having received your letter of July 9, after you got mine of June 24, I waited to hear whether the letter of June 29 reached you, because it was written after I received the Conclusion of your book and wrote you how impressive I found it.  In that letter I hoped you would find an expression of admiration that might help you negotiate with a publisher.

In many ways, your experience with SAVITRI matches mine with Spenser’s FAERIE QUEENE.  I needed a subject for a thesis, and had one started in earlier papers on Spenser, and—prompted by a remark of John Crowe Ransom to “get on with the doctorate no matter what you choose for a thesis—it doesn’t matter—just get it over with so that you can have the degree and go on to what you become interested in.”

That is pretty much what happened to me.  I had no sooner finished the thesis and had a couple of articles from it published, than I got into American Literature, and Spenser seemed a long way off.  Furthermore, I had no interest in writing any more about him,  having exhausted what I had to say.  It was only years later that – to my surprise—my thesis was rediscovered and cited as a germinal study of Spenser’s treatment of the war between good and evil for control over the human spirit – in SOURCE  AND MEANING  IN SPENSER’S  ALLEGORY  by J.E. Hankins, Oxford U. Press, 1972.

With your  interest in writing lyrics, I doubt if you will devote your scholarly activities to becoming a disciple of Sri Aurobindo.  I think you are too much concerned with the day to day life in India to be diverted to that kind of elitist propaganda for letting problems be solved by the Overhead.  At the same time, as a study of SAVITRI yours is excellent and deserves publication, and I hope it will be published. What I tried to say in my last letter was that as someone on the outside I could not pose as sharing the admiration for Aurobindo’s poetics, that quite naturally in the course of your study, you were indeed to promote.  In the same way my chapter on Spenser’s “centripetal Imagery” (published as an essay  in Modern Language Quarterly in Dec. 1955) is more flattering toward Spenser’s technique than I probably could be today; it is something I would not even want to reconsider.  And I expect that you, too, having achieved a distinction with your thesis beyond anything I achieved with mine, will someday look back on it as a stepping stone toward achievements in other areas of research, and creative expression.  You would no more write a SAVITRI than I would write a FAERIE QUEENE.

I am glad you included a lyric “woodening house”—which I think is a good sign, even though I don’t think that this one is one your best, and I say that realizing how, if you are like me, it is not easy to have some one say that the last poem you written is not your best.  I go through spells of weeks and months when I hardly write anything worth salvaging, jotting down finger exercises, hoping they may be better than I think they are.  It is part of the writing craft to turn out such practice pieces. But you have done much better poems.  The phrase “tenebrous void” is poetic in the worst sense.  It doesn’t sound like something you would say to your wife or your friend, and poetry has to come from the real language of talk between people.  I think there is a poem behind “Woodening House” that doesn’t get written.

I doubt if you have suffered a great loss in not having Menke Katz for a sponsor.  Partly because I wished to do anything possible to support your relationship with him, I sent him – not a poem as a submission, but my book TWO CONTINENTS, that I once sent you.  In his note to me, he suggested that we exchange publications, but I have not heard from him since, and assume that he did not appreciate my kind of poetry.  No more do I appreciate his rather grandiose pose of being a seer or a Prophetic Voice.  I would have liked very much to have seen his poems about his childhood in Lithuania if he had sent me a copy.

                                    Recess

Scholars at Number Four schoolhouse

                                streaming into the road

                                scratching three lines in gravel

                                for pom pom pullaway

                                darting to cheat the jailor

                                faking to help a friend

                                big boys are last ones caught

                At noontime boys gulp sandwiches

                                link hands, wheel in a line,

                                crack the whip on the endman

                                for ever thrown end

                                over end, girls

                                eat lunch with Miss Dalton

                At half past twelve

                                everybody plays hide and seek

                                “anybody hanging around my goal will be It!”

                Last minute activity behind outhouses

                                under brushpiles, on the top stairs

                                of the fire escape

                                “Move over!”

                                “Find your own place!”

                                “He’s in there with a girl!”

                Miss Dalton rings the handbell

                “Gobble gobble in free!

                                Come on Frank, Elizabeth!

                                I  know where you are!”

                                                                                                Yours most cordially,

                                                                                               

                                                                                                Lyle G