A Teacher’s Pride
Mea culpa.
That’s right: I am here to make a confession. I am guilty of the first deadly sin. Pride.
It’s not what you think. Oh of course I am proud of my writings and my modest publications and the few small honors I’ve been fortunate enough to harvest.
But the source of my greatest pride is and always has been my accomplishments as a teacher.
What makes a teacher proud? What in fact gives a teacher the right to be proud? The success of his students, that’s what. And the greatest pride a teacher can feel comes when he realizes that the success of one of his students has surpassed his own.
That is why, as sad as I am—as we all are—today to have lost the brilliant poet we knew and loved and admired, my heart will not let go of the joy and, yes, the pride of having been Heidi Yamada’s mentor.
I am often asked, “Can the writing of poetry really be taught?”
The answer, of course, is of course not. All a teacher can do—must do—is recognize that brilliance and encourage it.
Heidi once asked me, “Professor Summers, do you think I could ever be a poet like you?”
“No, Heidi,” I answered. “You could not. You must be a poet like you.”
That is what she did, and that is why I am proud to have been her teacher.
I admit I was amazed when Heidi brought me, along with the manuscript of her first book, a blurb from Arthur Summers.
“This is a startling first collection by a new poet I’ve had my eye on for quite some time. I can honestly say I’ve never read poems like these by any other student of mine—or by anybody else, for that matter.”
“Isn’t that great?” Heidi bubbled. “That Arthur is such a sweetie pie! He called me a poet.” She kissed me, then kissed the blurb, then kissed me again. “A poet!” She set the sheet of paper down on my cluttered desk and said, “I want you to print that super big on the back of my book.”
I set my coffee cup down on top of the famous poet’s priceless words and looked up into her sweet, innocent grin. “Heidi—”
“Watch it,” she said. “Don’t spill coffee on that paper. I’m going to frame it.”
“Heidi,” I said, tapping a pencil eraser on the UCSB English Department letterhead, “this is meaningless. It’s transparent bullshit.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Read it again,” I told her. “Find the praise and win valuable prizes.” I handed her the blurb and watched her face grow a scowl.
“It’s meaningless,” she agreed.
“Meaningless.”
“Which means what?”
“That it doesn’t mean anything,” I said.
“I know what ‘meaningless’ means, dodo. But what this piece of shit means is Arthur Summers doesn’t like my work.”
“Well,” I shrugged, “there’s no accounting for taste.”
“I don’t care if he likes my poems or not,” Heidi said. “But that asshole owes me a better blurb than this.” She crumpled the paper into a ball and threw it across the office at my wall of feminists. “You mind the store. I’ll be back in an hour.”
She was. She handed me another sheet of paper, again bearing the letterhead of the UCSB English Department.
“Buy this book,” I read aloud. “Read it and be amazed. Heidi Yamada is spectacular. She is a real poet.” I handed the blurb to the real poet and said, “Way to go. How did you do it?”
“Do what?” she answered. “Arthur did it. He made it all up, except the last sentence. I made him add that.” The grin, the by-now-famous Heidi Yamada grin, was back again, lighting up that perfect face. God damn it.
“You’re sleeping with him, aren’t you,” I said.
“Aw. You’re jealous.”
“Never mind,” I said. “As long as it gets people to buy the book.”
“You are jealous,” she taunted, still grinning. “My jealous publisher.”
“This isn’t your publisher feeling jealous,” I told her. “It’s your lover. I think.”
Heidi put her hand on the side of my face and said, “Arthur’s just a friend. We were lovers once, yes, but that was years ago, back when I was an undergraduate. Oops.”
“Oops?”
“I’m not supposed to say that. That’s part of the deal.”
“What deal?”
“Arthur gave me the first blurb because he likes me. He gave me the second blurb to keep me from telling the entire world that I used to fuck his brains out while I was taking his class on the Romantics.”
“You took a class in the Romantics? Were you an English major?”
“No. Environmental studies. Talk about boring. I thought the Romantics would be fun. I was reading a lot of Georgette Heyer and Barbara Cartland at the time. I didn’t know the Romantics were a bunch of dead English flits. But by then I was having a good time giving Arthur a good time, so—”
“So it’s all over now between you and him?”
“Right,” she said. “Ever since he told me I’d never be a poet. I figured if Keats and Shelley and those guys could get famous writing bullshit, so could I, but I planned to write stuff that was real. Arthur said I’d never make it. ‘You’ll never be a poet,’ he goes. And now he’s saying, in writing, that I am one, and I want you to print that on the back of my book, as big as it will fit.”
“I was hoping to put a picture of you on the back,” I said.
“No way. My face goes on the front. And another thing. I’m dedicating my book to him. ‘To Arthur Summers, who taught me so much about the love of poetry.’”
“And vice versa,” I commented.
Heidi clapped her hands. “Yes! That’s great! That’s going to be the title of my book. And Vice Versa.”
***
A couple of years later, by which time Heidi Yamada was the darling of the New York literary establishment and I was no longer either her lover or her publisher, I got up the nerve to ask him how and why he had written such effusive praise for such silly drivel as And Vice Versa.
We were in the back room of Guy Mallon Books, which was still a used bookstore in the front but was now primarily a publishing company in the back. I was publishing four titles that season, all Santa Barbara poets. Julia Cunningham, Julia Bates, Perie Longo, and of course Arthur Summers. Arthur was still being published by major university presses, but he threw me his table scraps, recycled collections of his previously published poems about baseball, about Southern California, about academe. I brought these out in signed, numbered editions of three hundred each and sold them for a hundred bucks a pop to a list of subscribers. It was easy work for me, as long as there were addicted collectors like Lawrence Holgerson forever willing to buy poems they already owned in other collections.
It was after hours and Arthur and I had spent all afternoon planning the next Summers collection, a bunch of beach poems with etchings by a local artist he was currently bedding.
I closed up the shop out front and opened up a bottle of pinot noir in the back and we toasted the new project.
Then Arthur raised his glass again and said, “And here’s to the little bitch who made all this possible.”
“Hear hear,” I said. “Did you read the interview she gave Publishers Weekly last week?”
“No! Heidi was interviewed by PW?”
“Yup.”
“Did she mention me by name?”
I laughed. “No. It appears she’s forgotten us both. We knew her when.”
“Thank God.”
“The interviewer called her the Judith Krantz of the poetry world and she asked, ‘Who’s Judith Krantz?’”
“That’s to her credit, I suppose,” Arthur said.
We each had another glass of wine, then we finished the bottle, and I said, “I’ve always wondered how you could have done that.”
“Done what?”
“That blurb for And Vice Versa. ‘Heidi Yamada is spectacular’? How could you say that?”
Arthur stuffed his bulldog brier with latakia and fired it up. Sitting there in my leather armchair, his legs crossed, he cut quite a figure, with his forest of unruly white hair, his face like the profile of a New Hampshire mountainside, a portable chimney clenched in his jaw. Filling the room with a delicious sour cloud, he replied, “Heidi Yamada was spectacular. I believe you had an opportunity to know that yourself.”
“Oh that,” I said. “Sure. But ‘She is a real poet’? How could you say that?”
“Oh that. Well, because Heidi was…spectacular. Shall we open another bottle?”
Halfway through the second bottle of pinot, he volunteered more. “She had me by the short curlies, of course. It’s in my contract with the university that I’m not supposed to shtup the undergraduates. I was fired from Stanford for getting a sophomore pregnant, and UCSB made it clear that I had to keep my dick out of the coeds’ britches.”
“I hate to tell you this, Arthur, but by now everyone has guessed that you and Heidi were lovers.”
“I suppose,” he sighed. “It’s a bit embarrassing. That I screwed her and she screwed me into writing such stupid praise for her stupid book. But it’s thanks to the spectacular Heidi Yamada that you have a publishing company, the only publisher of poetry that I know of to make a profit without grants, and thanks to her that I have a new publisher.” He lifted his glass again.
“I’ll tell you this, though,” he added after a smoky pause. “I want that whole episode forgotten. It’s done, and it’s done with. Heidi doesn’t need my support anymore, and if she ever dredges up that affair again, now that the world is for some reason paying attention to her, I shall personally, and I mean this, kill her.”
***
I’ve never mentioned that promise before, not because I’m not a gossip (because I am a gossip, obviously), but because I never thought that promise had any promise. But poets have a way of telling the truth. The tricky part is knowing how much of that truth is literal and how much is poetry.
So come with us to the WESTAF party, Friday night, before the official opening of the Las Vegas ABA. Summers had just been named the next Poet Laureate, and it had gone to his handsome head in a big way.
***
We turned our station wagon over to a valet parker and approached the front door of the large ranch-style house. It was a warm desert night, loud with insects, and a waxing moon was flood-lighting the manicured cactus garden in the front yard. The front door stood wide open, and from inside we could hear cocktail chatter and piano music.
Carol took my hand and said, “Here we go. Ready to boogie?”
“Always ready to boogie,” I said.
“Shit,” Marjorie said. “This fucking camera bag keeps sliding off my shoulder. Guy, would you give me a hand?” Marjorie was dressed to maim, her translucent white blouse covering a bright red bra.
At the door we were met by a giant in a shiny suit who said, “You got invitations?”
I fished the engraved WESTAF invitation out of my jacket pocket and gave it to the goon. “Right,” he said. “Two. You two have a good time.” Then he turned to Marjorie. “Yours, miss?”
“I’m with them,” she answered.
“This invite says two. You make three. Doesn’t compute. You want me to call you a cab?”
“Wait a minute,” she said, gaily laughing. “My mistake, okay? I thought since I was coming with Mr. Mallon I wouldn’t need my invitation, so I left it at my hotel. I have all this camera equipment, see, and—”
“Yeah, I see that. What I don’t see is your invitation. You want me call you a cab, like I said?”
Marjorie set down her three bags and crossed her arms under her red breasts, took a deep breath and said, “Listen. I’m on assignment. I’m from Publishers Weekly.”
“So? I’m from Winnemucca.”
“Guy, help me out here!” By now there were two groups of people behind us on the front stoop, waiting to pass muster.
“There you are!” was the lilting call from just inside the door. Herself, dressed in skimpy silk, a gardenia in her inky hair, a copy of Second Helpings in her hand. “Guy, Carol, you come on in here! Oh, hello, Marjorie! Still alive after that long shoot this afternoon? Oh, hey, I forgot to give you this.” She opened her book and brought out an invitation and handed it to Marjorie, who turned it over to the doorman.
“You have a nice time, miss,” he said, then he turned to the next party. “You guys got invitations?”
Marjorie hefted her bags and we followed Heidi into the beige living room. “Isn’t this lovely?” Heidi gushed. “It’s ‘old Las Vegas,’ which means it was built way back in the fifties. Isn’t that cute? This place is gorgeous. All this art.”
Indeed the walls were covered with what I assumed was trendy and expensive art. Paintings, lithographs, collages, woodcuts, photographs. All over every wall in sight. “These people are big supporters of the arts. They gave a million dollars to the Western States Arts Federation this year, so they got to host this party. Great people. Come on, I’ll introduce you around. There’s Arthur.”
Marjorie had already spotted the Poet Laureate Elect and was hustling across the room, pulling a camera out of a bag as she went.
“Your big night, Heidi,” Carol said. “You nervous?”
Heidi laughed. “I don’t get nervous. Mitzi gets nervous enough for both of us. She’s so nervous she didn’t come to the party. That was her invitation I gave to Marjorie. She refused to come, so she asked me to let the photographer in, and I said what the hey, right?”
“I suppose Mitzi’s upset,” I said. “Her book delayed and all.”
“It’s her own fault,” Heidi said. “She didn’t send it to press. We had a disagreement, so what? She still could have sent it to press. Especially since it won the Western States Book Award. Don’t worry, honey, that book is going to be published. If Mitzi won’t do it, I’ll find somebody else. The important thing is the poems, right? That’s what this award is all about, right?”
“I have a certain affection for those poems,” I admitted.
“Maybe you should publish the book if Mitzi bails,” Heidi said.
“Spare me,” Carol said. “I need a drink. Then I’m going to spend the evening draped across that grand piano listening to that hunk play Gershwin tunes.”
She stepped down into the sunken living room and strolled off toward the music and I followed Heidi into a crowd of poets and publishers and publicists, most of whom I’d met at ABAs past. A drink materialized in my hand, good smoky scotch. Marjorie took photos of me shaking hands with Arthur Summers. I don’t enjoy having my picture taken with somebody as tall as Summers, because it makes me look like a toddler instead of just a short person. But I’m a good sport. I smiled up into his craggy face.
Arthur Summers looks like a bald eagle. I don’t mean he’s bald; he has a great mass of slightly unkempt white hair. I’m talking about his commanding eyes.
“Congratulations, Art,” I said. “It’s about time.”
Summers chuckled and put his arm around Heidi. “It’s about time for this little lady, too, wouldn’t you say?” Heidi grinned up at him and Marjorie kept her camera flashing.
It was about time for some shmoozing and boozing. I wandered around the house admiring art. I picked up another tumbler of single-malt scotch and a little brie and caviar sandwich, then stepped up some tile steps and wandered out into the back yard to admire the topiary juniper bushes in the moonlight. I found Maxwell Black out there sitting by himself by the swimming pool, a bottle of Bud in his hand. He looked up at me and said, “Howdy, Guy.” He didn’t stand, and I didn’t sit down; we were fairly close to eye level anyway. He looked snazzy in clean faded jeans, a lavender chambray shirt with pearl buttons, and his trademark yellow bandanna ascot.
“What do you think of the party?” I asked him.
“Hmmph,” he said.
“You don’t care for this kind of horseshit?”
“Don’t insult horseshit.”
The free drinks and canapés were inside, so we were the only ones out on the patio. “So Max,” I said, “what’s the real story on Out of My Face? Is it ever going to come out, or is it dead in the water?”
“You got me by the seat of the pants,” he answered. “The poems are all written, as you know.”
“Indeed I do.”
“So now it’s up to Mitzi. But there’s this standoff happening. One of them gals has to bend, or the world will be deprived of another fine collection of poems.”
“What’s the squabble about?”
“Two words,” he said. “Heidi Yamada. Sorry, pardner, but that’s all I’m allowed to say.”
I chuckled. “It’s always about Heidi. Everything’s about Heidi.”
“I didn’t say it was about Heidi, exactly. I said it was about two words.”
“You’re a man of few words yourself, Max.”
“Well, this is her night. She gets the prize anyway, and she spent all afternoon getting her pitcher took.”
“That must have been fun.”
“That photographer is one hot little chick.”
“Marjorie? She seems pretty taken with Art Summers.”
“Coupla sluts,” Max snorted. “Made for each other. Somebody’s going to get laid tonight.”
“Well look at you two! Two of my favorite men,” chirped Beatrice Wright, wending her way across the patio with a champagne glass in each hand. “Max, honey, you look stunning tonight. Love the bandanna.”
“Shit,” Max said. “Wisht old Heidi would let me stop wearing these damn things.”
“It’s all packaging,” Beatrice said. “You’re in good hands. Anything new coming out for you?”
“Naw. Heidi’s pretty caught up in her own work these days.”
“Maybe you need a new agent,” she told him. “You know I’d kill to get a client like you.”
“You’d have to,” I said. “Max is Heidi’s personal property.”
“Shit,” Max mumbled.
“I need another scotch,” I said, and I moseyed back into the living room, which had become more crowded with bookish bohemians. I knew a lot of them and most of them knew me. I had to dodge my way across the room to keep from being talked to or stepped on.
I met up with Carol at the piano; she was singing along with the piano player, who looked spiffy in a powder-blue tuxedo and a Hawaiian shirt. The piano was quite a piece of furniture, a huge ebony grand polished to look like a black mirror.
“You doing okay?” I asked her.
She handed me her glass and said, “Would you get me some more gin?”
I did, then went on wandering.
I said hello to Robert MacDowell of Story Line Press, Randall Beek of Bookpeople, Tree Swenson of Copper Canyon. Bobbi Rix of Consortium was laughing with Eric Kampmann of NBN, each of them outsmiling the other. Marjorie Richmond bustled among us, urging us to just act natural (“God, I’m only Publishers Weekly. Smile!” Flash!) I chatted with Howard Junker, Douglas Messerli, Jim Hepworth, all the small-press western bigshots. Forgive me for name-dropping, but let me point out that they all said hello to me, too. Maybe it was because I was Heidi Yamada’s first publisher, the one who discovered her talent for the first time. After Arthur Summers, of course. He’ll always have that honor.
“I feel deeply honored,” he said, finally, after the piano player struck a large chord and the cocktail crowd hushed to hear their next Poet Laureate. He stood on the steps that led out onto the patio and addressed the assembled audience in the sunken living room. “I feel deeply honored to be here tonight, and I want to thank the Western States Arts Federation for giving me this opportunity, and on behalf of WESTAF I also want to thank our gracious, generous hosts tonight, Pete and Carla Benedetti, for having us into their lovely home.”
Gentle applause.
“This is the moment we wait for every year, the annual WESTAF poetry award presentation. There’s no surprise this year; the winner was announced two weeks ago. That was before it was announced that the book itself is on hold and won’t be published for a few weeks yet. But I think we all know about delays in this business. Authors blame them on publishers, publishers blame them on printers, printers blame them on God, and God is too busy trying to get Inland Book Company and Bookazine to carry the Bible.”
Chuckles.
“The winner of this year’s award, Heidi Yamada, is a remarkable phenomenon in the publishing world. You could say she’s a significant sidestep in the history of literature, and I only call her a sidestep because she’s taken poetry in a new direction that nobody else has dared to explore. In any case, her poems are unmistakably her poems, and all of us look forward to reading the new collection, Out of My Face. The judges who have read it assure me that we’re in for some surprises.
“The Western States Arts Federation honors western authors and western publishers by awarding a handsome check to one poet and one publisher each year, to celebrate and help promote a book properly in a business world dominated by the New York Literary Establishment. To be eligible for this award, the author and publisher must each be from one of the seven Western states, which pretty much guarantees that the award also celebrates small and independent publishing, a tradition that is older than the New York Literary Establishment, older than New York itself.
“Some authors, like Heidi, start out with the small press and use their critical achievement as a stepping stone to the larger houses. And like Heidi, many of them find that the world of big-time publishing is not so devoted to literature as to sales. A few authors who make this journey become stars. Others leave New York and leave the writing life, disillusioned. Some return to the more comfortable and artistically rewarding atmosphere of small-press independent publishing. Tonight’s honoree, Heidi Yamada, has done all three.
“Heidi and I go back quite a ways, as some of you know. That’s why it’s with affection and nostalgia as well as pleasure that I now award her this certificate and this check. Here you go, Heidi. Can’t wait to read that book, doll!”
Heidi stepped up next to Arthur Summers and accepted his chaste kiss and the check. Still holding his hand, she beamed at her audience and nodded to their applause.
“Oh God,” she breathed, when the crowd settled down. “This is so cool. I know there are a whole bunch of people I should be thanking right now, and some of them are in this room right now, and God, I’m really grateful to them, I really am, but since they’re all in my book, well, you’ll see when you read it, if you ever read it, I mean if Mitzi Milkin gets off her ass and her high horse and sends the damn thing to the printer, shit. Oops. Anyway, yeah Arthur here and I, we go back a ways like he said, in fact he gave me my first big break. Well maybe not that first break, that happened in high school in the back of Bob Snyder’s Mustang, but anyway. Art Summers, our new Poet Laureate—hey, congratulations, baby!—he gave me some great advice when I was just starting out. ‘If you want to get to the top,’ he told me, ‘you got to start on the bottom.’ And then he said, ‘Turn over.’”
Flash!
Marjorie probably gave up her one chance to sleep with a Poet Laureate by photographing Professor Summers at that moment, with such a horror-struck look on his bright red face. His wide grin turned to a scowl in what looked like time-lapse photography, and he looked over his snickering audience as if they were a classroom of misbehaving children. Then he strode down from the tile steps and the party parted as he headed for the front entrance of the Benedetti house and left without saying good-bye.
Back on the tiles, Heidi shrugged and said, “Well, he never did last very long, as I remember.”
But she had lost her audience. The party was revving up again with cocktail chatter, and the piano man began to play some pleasant ballad and I decided to go check on Carol. She wasn’t at the piano, but there were Max and Beatrice, holding hands. She clinked a champagne glass against his beer bottle and sang along with the piano: “I’ve got a crush on you.…”
“Hey, what’s going on here?” Heidi stormed over and pointed at Beatrice’s left foot, which was outside its shoe and resting on the top of Max’s blue suede boot. “You playing footsie with my man, Beatrice?”
The piano player played on. Beatrice gently put the champagne glass on the piano’s shiny top and put her foot back into her shoe.
“Huh?”
“Aw, sugar, old Beatrice is just trying to show me how to flirt at a cocktail party so I can keep up with you, baby,” Max said, grinning. He took a swig of Bud. “Okay, baby?”
Heidi ignored Max. “You keep your hands and your feet to yourself, Beatrice. Max is my property. Everyone knows you screw your clients. Well, Max is not your client, and you’re not screwing him. Is that understood?”
“Aw, Heidi,” Max persisted. “She wasn’t doing any of that.”
“Oh shut up, Max,” Heidi said. To Beatrice she said, “Make yourself useful for a change. Go get me a glass of champagne.” She turned to the piano player and said, “Quit playing that stupid song.”
Flash!
Marjorie was back among us. Heidi quickly dropped her fury and smiled sweetly at the camera, then at me, then at Carol, who had returned to the scene with a fresh glass of gin, then at the piano player, while Marjorie kept pointing and clicking her camera. The grande finale was a big kiss on Maxwell Black’s lips. Lovebirds, you gotta love ’em.
“Come on, Maxwell,” Heidi said. “I’ve had enough of this. Take me gambling.”
Carol and I got away from the piano and walked around the perimeter of the living room and out onto the patio. “Well,” she said, “welcome to the ABA. Having fun?”
“What a crowd,” I said. “That old gang of mine.”
“Not to mention that little redhead.”
“What do you have against Marjorie?” I asked. “So New Yorkers are a little different from us, big deal. I can’t wait to see her pictures of this party in Publishers Weekly.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Carol said. “Marjorie Richmond is a phony.”
“You keep saying that. You’re just jealous.”
Carol chuckled. “She’s too short for you, chum. Anyway, I want to get back to the hotel.”
“What if Marjorie isn’t ready to leave?”
“Maybe the doorman will call her a cab.”
Back inside, the party had thinned out, and uniformed caterers were picking up glasses around the room. We found Marjorie on the bench next to the piano player. He was a good-looking man even if his taste in clothes was a bit odd, even for Las Vegas. The two of them were playing, and replaying, and replaying, the first eight bars of “Heart and Soul.”
“We’re ready to go,” Carol told her.
“Big day tomorrow,” I added.
Marjorie took her hands off the keys and lost her smile, then found it again as she turned to her piano partner and said, “Casey, can you give me a ride home?”
Casey grinned. “Sure. My place or yours?”
“Whatever. Now, where were we?”
They got back into “Heart and Soul,” and Carol and I got back into the warm desert night outside the Benedettis’ ranch mansion. I gave the valet ticket to one of the teenage goons standing around in white shirts and clip-on bow ties.
As we waited for our car, Carol ruffled my hair and said, “Tell me again, Guy. Just what is it you found so charming about Heidi Yamada?”