LETTERS: 1993: 57-59
57.
May
26, 1993
My dear
Singh,
I am glad to
have your letter. I missed having news of your family. Your children must be
teenagers, at least the oldest of them. How many do you have?
….
….
Since my
wife died in 1987, my sister-in-law, a widow and former distinguished teacher
(President of the International Reading Association) came to live in the
farmhouse, and died there of a stroke two years ago. We took care of each other.
I live by myself with 2 cats, continuing to write, deeply involved in local
politics, a career I have just put a stop to in order, I hope, to get back to
writing confessional poetry, fiction,
and autobiography.
I was
grateful for your effort to have me included in a British-published Dictionary
of International Biography, but—having twenty years ago retired from
professional academic life, I did not choose to become listed, even though
appreciative of your effort.
A few of my
poems, set to music by a Bennington composer were performed recently. Also I
have a short piece of fiction coming out soon in a book called VERMONT VOICES,
nothing important. I have been working
on a 5-part book of poems called SEARCHING FOR AMY, three of whose parts have
been printed.
Perhaps I
have written so much about myself because I have been puzzled how to give you
any useful advice on your proposed book on the forms and processes of
anger. There is a lot of anger
–including irony, sarcasm, and direct attack—in my writing against Elitism in
American Politics, but I have no idea how to help you, beyond saying that I
think the topic is a fine one & it seems to me your letter to me shows you
are organizing a number of subject matter and stylistic categories that can provide
useful focuses for collecting examples.
I would think that the business of collecting around such headings would
lead to further classifications. All I can advise is to start somewhere, begin
to collect material, and see where the topic takes you.
I can’t
refer you to any book or article that deals with this subject, but that doesn’t
mean there may not be several or many.
Satirists like Pope and Swift might well have inspired critics to
document their devices and satirical categories. The Middle Ages was rich in
curses. From what you write, I assume
you are aiming at contemporary writers of “Indian English.” I am sure you are
already far ahead of any random suggestions I can take off the top of my head.
In British Literature, the writings of Chaucer, Ben Jonson, the later Byron,
Oscar Wilde are rich in satire. In
Ireland, Shaw, Joyce, Becket. In America, Melville and Mark Twain. Far afield
from your intended emphasis in Indian writers, I stray and do not help you.
I have
recently passed my eight-second birthday. I think of next fall taking a course
in computer word processing because it is no longer possible here to buy good
typewriter ribbons.
I think of
writing an autobiographical memoir on a title taken from a Melville letter to
Hawthorne after he had finished MOBY DICK: “I have written a wicked book, and
feel as spotless as the lamb.”
Saturday,
three days from now, I plan to drive to
Middlebury for the 60th reunion of my college class. After that, I hope to lead a quiet life,
divorced from local politics, and devoted to taking care of my house and plot
of land, and getting back to my own writing.
I think of
you often and am very happy to have had your letter.
Your
friend,
Lyle
Glazier
58.
July
8, 1993
Dear friend
Singh,
Has it
indeed been more than 20 years we have been writing to each other, since you
began to write your MA thesis on my poems?
You and my other Indian friend Dr. Shiva Pandeya (who told me to address
him as Shiva, and he would address me as Lyle) have been in my thoughts so
much, and now Shiva is dead, who invited me to Sana’a, North Yemen, to teach,
and suddenly you gave me word he has gone.
I am so glad
you wrote me your personal letter with news of Bikku (Vikram) now 13
as I find it almost impossible to believe, and
your little (as I think) daughter Winny has by some magic sleight of hand of
passing Time become a young lady of 10.
I have always prized news of your family.
What you say about your
wife: “Ever since I married (1978) I have not been able to sleep in peace
without my wife beside” – how that rings true.
Amy and I slept naked in that close confidential intimacy of the double
bed (the great boon to marriage). I
think of my older friend Ben Amidon, who once visited Amy and me in Buffalo,
and talking about his wife Julia, dead 10 years, remarked, “I still wake in the
night and reach for her.”
I enclose Part II of a poem I am writing. Have I sent any of
it before? Part I and V have been
published by small presses. Amy has now been dead 6 years after a painful death
from rheumatoid arthritis. She died in
our hospital, where during her last month of suffering, I was able to sleep on
a cot at her side and hurry to the nurses’ station to order morphine without
which she couldn’t endure the pain. It
was morphine, in the end, that carried her away. I used to try to help her to let go and
accept the final passing from that great pain, centered in her brain at the last.
I cannot change what I
was, what I became in early childhood, nothing to be done about the moulding
when I was molested at 6, or perhaps I was born homosexual, but I needed a wife
and children, and to devote much of my life to trying to improve the quality of
life for all people, especially the
poor, the racially oppressed, and the elderly, of whom I am not one but refuse
to be silenced – not heroicly but stubbornly, as if my life depends on telling
my story and pleading the cause of people suffering unjustly, for handicaps
over which they have no control.
You are one of the few
who comprehends and shares fully what I am trying to say—in your poems enclosed
in your letter—your “white shirt black” with the coal dust from laborers
bearing their deaths on their shoulders; & “flickers of peace…love in
nudity” (not afraid to proclaim it); and “Love waves rise and fall”—the
ultimate communication of lovers, drinking “each other’s sea.”
You continue to be
unashamed of nature’s great gift to all who can receive it without fear,
without moral squeamishness. An old man
perhaps can be forgiven his jealousy of the young friend who still has his wife
with him, and his children still growing toward their own liberation. When I was 18, I left my home forever when I
went to college. When I was 22, I lost my father and mother, and had to learn
to live with that absolute taking away.
With
love to you, your wife, and your children,
Lyle Glazier
I can no longer buy
good cotton ribbons, so I placed a carbon paper on back to make the print
darker if you hold the page to the light….
59.
August
15, 1993
Dear Friend Singh,
Thank you for the
heartwarming July 28 letter, with enclosed photograph of your family, making
you all seem close. You speak of aging
as “degeneration” but in the photo you look no older than when I last saw you in
1971 in New Delhi when you were working for the Press, and I was traveling for
U.S.I.S., delivering throughout India a different opinion about the United
States “corporate colonialism” than my sponsors expected. It was an important
month in my life.
I remember in Delhi
arriving at the radio station, where I had been invited to give a talk on LeRoy
Jones, the militant African-American poet (who has since changed his name to
Baraka). The Manager of the Radio Station met me in the foyer and demanded to see
my script. I showed him a few words
jotted on scrap paper, and he protested, “That’s no script!” We have to see a
written transcript of your speech, with everything moving along from sentence
to sentence – with an introduction and a development and a conclusion.” I said,
“Don’t worry. When I start talking it will move along just as you describe it.
You will be surprised how smoothly it goes.” He still wasn’t satisfied, “We can’t let you go on the air like this!” And I said, “Well, I guess you’re going to.
You just listen how I will piece it together.”
So he threw up his hands and let me have a shot at it. In the booth
listening with him was my friend, a young American Black intern at U.S.I.S.,
and he told me afterwards how the manager was muttering to himself when I
began, and how amazed he was to see how it all hung together.
A couple of weeks
later, when I had travelled from Madras to Trivandrum, back to Madras, then to
Tirupathi, Madras again, Bombay, Nagpur, and arrived at Calcutta, I found the
baggage of that same young American Black already in my hotel room. Unknown to me, we were to be roommates. I told him our room was probably bugged so
we’d better be careful of our speech. This was the height of Bangla Desh &
US was valued way down on the scale. The cultural affairs officer told me not
to expect many to show up for my talk on
the Decline of the American Frontier (actually how we had used up our Western
frontier, and were now through imperialism trying to dominate the world). But I
had a good turnout, even a few poets, who got the Librarian of the American
Library in Calcutta to give a party for me.
A young guru at the party asked me why in my ignorance I had come to
Calcutta to give such speeches, and I said, “I didn’t come to give speeches. I
came to visit again a few Indian friends I made last year in Madras &
Srinagar at an All-India Conference of teachers of American Literature. Giving these speeches is only my excuse for
getting here again.” They invited me and
my Black friend to join them at their bar where Calcutta poets hung out, but
the American Librarian begged us not to go because he was afraid we would be
Shanghaied. Against our will we agreed
not to. But a couple of nights later the Consul gave a party for me, and some
of those new friends showed up, among
them a poet who ran all the way barefoot because he had vowed not to travel by any kind of transport so
long as so many Indians were so poor.
When I left a couple of days later, riding in the front seat of a
U.S.I.S. car with the driver, we were waylayed in a great square, where people
spotted the official car, and began to come at us from all sides, surrounding
us. I was excitedly trying to get my
camera to take the picture. The driver gunned the car and made our getaway through
the crowd. You can probably tell me the
name—is it gherao or something like that
where a crowd encircles a victim as a protest, nonviolently opposing his
political beliefs. I can’t find the word
in a dictionary.
My love to you & your wife
& son & daughter,
Lyle
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