When you’re seventy-six, as I am, you can die in ten minutes, ten hours, ten months or maybe ten years, or every minute in between. About fifteen years ago I had intuitions of doom and wrote a memoir. Now fifteen years later I have noticed that I’m not dead yet. There is a temptation to bring the memoir up to date in the form of a novella. I am fiction anyway, lock, stock, and barrel. I made myself up from scratch and started fibbing as a baby.
This February I had to cancel a book tour trip to Paris because I was feeling poorly. I thought that maybe I had been feeling poorly for seventy-six years, though in my thirties and forties I walked a couple of thousand miles in wilderness forest. I hated to miss the duck and goose fat I need to keep going in this woeful life. Also the oceans of wine across the wine-dark sea. But to be frank I didn’t want to go to Paris and feel ill in the middle of winter when the body craves fuel. My publisher, Flammarion-Gallimard (they recently united), had promised to build me a little temporary igloo in the Luxembourg Gardens to save hotel money. Frenchwomen love to rub their hot butts against chunks of ice or so I’ve heard around the quad. Also you don’t want to be sick without your momma and she’s been dead twenty years and is no longer available. Of a family of seven there are only three of us left. Life is like that.
Unfortunately my illness isn’t faked to get out of a book tour, which I’ve done here in America. My doctor found it inscrutable that my blood pressure had dropped to ninety over fifty which is perilously low. I am drastically lethargic though I still write every day like a good Scout. I suppose I am losing specific density and might blast from earth into an azure haze.
Somehow I remain roaring with largely irrelevant ideas and plots. Instead of living in a confused state of what I call the “high whine” why doesn’t the Republican Party settle down and figure out how to recycle toilet paper? It would save hundreds of millions to build prisons to house the poor, who they loathe. You dunk water and Clorox along with the toilet paper into the oil barrels that they love. On a hot day you dump them on the neighbor’s tennis court. Voilà! By evening you scoop up the detritus with snow shovels and you have precious toilet paper. Naturally I should patent this brilliant idea but as an artist I don’t have time to deal with legalities.
That’s just a starter in a list that includes using atomic cannons to fire tens of thousands of condoms into poor neighborhoods from a distance of thirty miles. Keep that population down by every means.
I’m also in favor of a high tax on poets for their poetry. We abound in the mediocre and somebody has to do something about it, though it might deliver us into the hands of rich poets.
Stop women from denying dates by saying, “I have to wash my hair and do my nails this evening.” Any idiot can do this in ten minutes. It hurts bad to take second place to grooming.
Of late I’ve been rereading John Keats. He is where I started at age fourteen when I first contracted the disease of writing. I read “The poetry of earth is never dead” and was utterly won over. I’ve never stopped writing poems since then, though early on I worried how I was going to make a living. My first volume, Plain Song, came out in 1965, just short of fifty years ago. Recent to that date I had been flunked out of graduate school for what a professor called “arrogance.” Imagine that! Anyway they changed when I got a book published by a New York publisher, W.W. Norton, which had never happened to one of their students before. I got a job at a university on Long Island on the basis of this slender book of verse. This was a mixed blessing indeed as I did not thrive in an academic atmosphere. It made me drink too much. Again, imagine that. Sadly I could not thrive in that atmosphere which was too fustian and pimpy with its craving for tenure. By the grace of two years of grants we moved to a small farm back in northern Michigan and stuck it out. For a period of ten years I never quite made ten grand a year, short rations with two kids. We had a huge garden and ate a lot of venison and fish that I caught. I wrote a novel, Wolf, which did so-so, and one called Farmer, which failed, but then struck pay dirt with a novella, Legends of the Fall. Unfortunately I got mixed up in Hollywood with which I didn’t deal well. Now as an old man I have published thirty-six books and I’m tired indeed. I wish I could afford a fishing sabbatical. Philip Roth quit everything and I was a bit jealous but then he’s real famous and could afford it, which I can’t. However it’s gross to complain when I’ve done fairly well as a writer, and any writer who makes close to a livelihood is fortunate indeed.
Was it that nitwit Edna St. Vincent Millay who said, “Life must go on I forget just why”? Try to remember, kiddo, the reason for life is simply life.
The part that is barely endurable is that I was an epic walker in my life but two years after spinal surgery I’m now what you must call a “shuffler.” There are worse things. Before surgery I couldn’t walk at all so I was quite grateful when I learned to walk again. So was my dog who was terribly melancholy in my inoperable stages. Now I take her down to our creek early every morning where she flounders with delight. The other emotional mainstay on the Mexican border where we live in the winter is the virtual flood of birds that migrate through our property on the creek, beginning in late February through March and April. The profusion of these songbirds is consoling.
I was so sorry to miss my trip to Paris. My behavior there seems a bit peculiar to some of my local friends. I get up very early and walk three or four hours, often having an omelet full of lardons to fuel my effort. I usually walk through the Luxembourg Gardens, first stopping to look at le jardin fruitier, a small fenced garden of fruit trees that was begun in the seventeenth century. For reasons of energy and hydration I stop at cafés for a verre de rouge. Any fool knows that red wine is the best energy drink if you keep it within two bottles. A light lunch and a nap and I’m ready for my ceaseless interviews in which I extravagantly fib about the past. Each evening I have an elegant dinner with my publisher or the usual lust-crazed actress. French actresses invariably ask me, “Can you help me off with my undies,” and I always say, “Not today, I am doing my hair.” They weep, of course, but I maintain my impeccable standards in foreign countries. I nearly got thrown out of Russia for lying on my visa but I begged them to let me stay until I saw the tomb of Dostoevsky.
The peculiar thing about Paris for me is that I always keep the same schedule as in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, that depleted and over-timbered wilderness. Up very early, walk my bird dog for several hours, back to the cabin for breakfast, a little nap, then work inventing a new universe.
Luckily my books do very well in France. The surge came at a time when I had just quit screenwriting. It was a time of financial insecurity as I had to make enough to feed my savagely hungry daughters. The French saved my little family for which I’ll always be grateful. I had many bestsellers over there but never in America.
I didn’t want to drop dead in the middle of Hollywood and have producers rape and rob my body. I got a couple of productions off the muddy floor out there but nothing of the quality to write Mom about. She was convinced the place was immoral and that I was daffy. She was right on both counts. So much alcohol, drugs, money, and beautiful women. I told Mom that showbiz wasn’t built as a cathedral. I was relentless and never got a dime from the profits of Legends of the Fall. I have recovered by fishing, hiking, and watching birds, and writing poetry, taking countless naps, and talking to my dog. Maybe I could write a bestseller about naps, then move to Montreal and eat.