BY ELIZABETH HARDWICK
Cal’s recuperative powers were almost as much of a jolt as his breakdowns; this is, knowing him in the chains of illness you could, for a time, not imagine him otherwise. And when he was well, it seemed so miraculous that the old gifts of person and art were still there, as if they had been stored in some serene, safe box somewhere. Then it did not seem possible that the dread assault could return to hammer him into bits once more.
He “came to,” sad, worried, always ashamed and fearful; and yet there he was, this unique soul for whom one felt great pity. His fate was like a strange, almost mythical two-engined machine, one running to doom and the other to salvation. Out of the hospital he returned to his days, which were regular, getting up early in the morning, going to his room or separate place for work. All day long he lay on the bed, propped up on an elbow. And this was his life, reading, studying and writing. The papers piled up on the floor, the books on the bed, the bottles of milk on the window sill, and the ashtray filled.
He looked like one of the great photographs of Whitman, taken by Thomas Eakins—Whitman in carpet slippers, a shawl, surrounded by a surf of papers almost up to his lap. Almost every day Cal worked the entire day and if we were alone he would go back after supper. Since he was in no sense an auto-didact, and not the sort of poet, if there are any, for whom beautiful things come drifting down in a snowfall of gift, the labor was merciless. The discipline, the dedication, the endless revision, the constant adding to his store by reading and studying—all of this had, in my view, much that was heroic about it.
Fortunately, Cal was “well” much more of his life than he was not; otherwise his large and difficult, for him, production would not exist.
The breakdowns had the aspect of a “brain fever,” such as you read about in 19th century fiction. His brain was literally hot, whirling, but even at these times it was his brain that was fevered, askew and shaken out of shape. When I visited him in the hospital it was quite clear that few of the other afflicted were capable of this temperature, made or otherwise. We were always ordered rather grandly to bring the Vergil, the Dante, the Homer, the Elisabeth Schwarzkopf record. Of course he was not really “cool” enough to read or to listen, that being the problem. But he could make the patients listen to his scattered readings aloud. For the most part I got the impression that they didn’t mind and looked on it in a sort of bemused daze, while of course mumbling the refrains of their own performance …
Then at last the books were brought back home, the socks, with their name-tapes as if for a summer camp, were gathered up. And there it was, with only the sadness, actually the unfairness of the fate, remaining.
Cal was very sociable, curious, fond of a large number of people—otherwise there would not be so much “testimony” about him. After literature, his passion was history, of which he knew a great deal. He liked music and liked to listen to it, but I never felt he could take it in the way he took in painting, for which his love was detailed, thoughtful and very strong. In Europe I often fell by the wayside, into the coffee bar, but he went on to each thing, each church, never seeming to have enough, to be tired.
Everything about him was out-sized: his learning, his patience with his work, his dedication, and the pattern of his troubled life. I think it is true, as he said, that he knew a lot of happiness in each of his decades, happiness that is when he was fortunately for such long creative and private periods “himself.”
Ian: I put in the rather dull paragraph about painting and being sociable just in case at some point that could be helpful in moving from one thing to another. For the rest, I don’t think of it as being all of a piece, but to be used perhaps broken up here and there to give some idea of what returning over and over to writing was like. I feel strongly about all of these points, especially about the amount of time well and the amount otherwise.
Strange, what I have written about the working habits, the coming out of the hospital is not new. It is what I wrote in the “notebook” I tore up, which did not seem to have a proper context for such reflections. It turns out that one has very few ideas finally and I have written more or less these same things to friends over the years in letters that also contained my distress over Cal’s actions. […]