Outside of a Dog (11 page)

Her note to ‘Leda and the Swan’, that tale of the overcoming of innocence by male lust, seemed in retrospect positively prescient: ‘Zeus – passionate. Leda –
helpless and terrified.’ So my loved one was overcome by a God-like teacher (the animal!), but it wasn’t her fault. That was some consolation, though her notes stressing the
purification that comes from the flames of passion in the margin to ‘Byzantium’ seemed to indicate that much good could, and had, come out of it for them both, if not for me.

Risible nonsense, of course: merely a nice example of how badly we read if our feelings obtrude unduly. But in comparison my own annotations seem sexless, impersonal, and banal:
‘Wit!’ I say here, ‘Symbolism!’ there, make references to Shelley, Keats and Arnold, paraphrase this or that, add a reference to gyres, or to Fergus and Cuchulain, those
supremely uninteresting figures from Celtic mythology. What a boring little pedant I was, how bloodless in contrast to my winsome, passionate lost love.

We met in 1961, during my senior year at Huntington High School (her junior year), and were welded together until I left for Oxford in 1966. I thought her quite the most beautiful girl ever,
dimpled, wavy-haired, easy-smiling. When I said so to my father, who liked to be accurate, he agreed that she was ‘rather pretty’. I was so furious that I hardly talked to him for
days.

This unformed, infinitely agreeable girl – I hardly recall an angry word between us, and I am the sort of man who makes women cross on a regular basis – may have seemed to him an
unprepossessing object to occasion such an intense attachment. I was drunk with the intensity of my desire for her, though the opposite possibility (of
hers
for me?) never seemed plausible.
In that period young women didn’t have sexual desires, they responded to them. If you were lucky. Love needed to be involved: kisses, troths, going steady, having ‘our song’,
rings, charm bracelets and anklets, professions of fidelity, plans for the future. But when the regulations had been negotiated and obeyed, the erotic possibilities were surprisingly varied and
exciting.

My pre-pubescent reading in my father’s library had led me to the exhausting supposition that sexual love consisted of a geometrically expanding series of
activities
. Having done
this, might it not be exciting to do this, and that, and that? The sexual mores of the time were obsessed with drawing lines and establishing boundaries, but it began to seem as if the purpose of
all these prohibitions – kissing but no tongues, above the waist but not below the waist, below the waist but no penetration – was to multiply the possibilities of daring, guilty
transgression, and satisfaction. Lines were drawn and breathlessly crossed, redrawn, recrossed. The months passed in a haze of yearning and erotic exploration.

Not that there was a lot else to do on Long Island in 1961. We watched Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show and hardly knew whether to laugh or cry. We were too square for any of that, all that
shimmying and shaking. I couldn’t and wouldn’t do the jitterbug, and was utterly humiliated trying to do the twist in front of my bedroom mirror. (I still cringe at the memory of my
mother grinding away desperately to my Chubby Checker record: ‘That’s it, isn’t it!’ she’d cry. ‘I think I’ve got it now!’) Our other tastes and
pleasures were equally suburban: we had rounds of miniature golf, ate at that quirky new eatery McDonald’s (you couldn’t even eat a dollar’s worth!), played family tennis at the
racquet club, hung out at the beach, begged the car to go to a drive-in movie in the evening. ‘What did you see?’ my mother would ask, disapproving yet slyly animated by the thought of
what we might have been doing in the back seat of the car. We made it a point to remember a scene, or at least the title. Sometimes someone would give a party, after long negotiations with parents,
and we would try to wangle some beer, making regular trips to the car to consume a can, before returning to swoon to Johnny Mathis and Pat Boone. Later, when we were more than making-out, when we
were actually doing it in our own college rooms and apartments, in came a new wave of music, as if in confirmation of our sense that the times were indeed a changin’: Dylan, the Beatles, the
Stones. Sometimes, smugly, I felt as if we’d fucked the new decade into life, ignited it. A lot of people felt like that then, and they were pretty much right.

It was intoxicating. I spent years drugged by sex, by the memory and anticipation of sex, indifferent to the creeping certainty that it would be right for both of us to move on. The physical
fervour was not accompanied by an equal emotional intensity and curiosity – I had encountered no equivalent to Hirschfeld regarding the inward life. We were both stuck, and bored, without
recognizing it, enacting the same old postures and rituals, both physical and emotional. Fortunately she saw this before I did, and had the courage to break our engagement just before we were due
to get married in the summer of 1967.

I soon discovered (though I can’t remember how) that Rachel’s teacher had courted her by sending her a copy of Yeats’s early poem, ‘Brown Penny’, which opens like
this:

I was horrified by this bit of pretentious loopiness, so typical of the worst of Yeats, with a characteristic build-up to a pseudo-climax where sound overwhelms sense. It seemed to me
breathtakingly banal, the final repetition serving only to suggest that the would-be lover (read: her teacher) was the sort of fanciful dope who would seek, and follow, such advice. It was obvious
that Rachel was in trouble, and should tell her undiscriminating suitor to get lost. He must, I concluded, be both an emotional and a literary retard.

Unlike me. Outraged that my loved one should be courted so ineptly, I responded by sending her another, and palpably better, Yeats poem, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, which ends
with an exalted crescendo of feeling:

That would do it! When I regained my lost one – and how could I not, sending her such a wonderful poem? – then we would enjoy the fruits of those countless nights and days.
We’d be reunited, and I would have freed her from the momentary blindness that had caused her to choose (and to read) so clumsily.

Actually it was me who was reading badly. At least ‘Brown Penny’ is in the voice of a young man, full of desire, while ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ is that of an old
man full of regret for what has been lost. We do not believe, reading it, that Wandering Aengus will reunite with his love, only that it is characteristic of age to yearn for lost vitality. Why
would I have sent Rachel such a poem? Was I unconsciously acknowledging and accepting her decision? And in so doing, acknowledging, too, that she was right?

Months went by as I waited despondently for her answer. Surely, someone as sensitive as me had to be preferable to this surrogate, this seducer foolishly chosen while I was away at Oxford.
Surely no woman could prefer the prosaic twerp who sent her ‘Brown Penny’ to a man with the passionate intensity to choose ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’? And if my dear one
– here was a startling and terrible thought – could make such a choice, perhaps she wasn’t the girl for me after all? I was in a vulnerable state, sleepless and emotionally
wrought, and informed my Oxford supervisor not to expect any essays ‘for at least a term’, owing to my broken heart.

It was just as well. Literary criticism was hardly my strong point at the time. In any case, I’ve always had my reservations about Yeats, who is the most irritating poet since Blake, whom
he revered, and whom he edited (with Edwin Ellis) in 1893. Blake invents a cosmology and cast of characters for his prophetic books which are allegorical – there is, loosely, a one-to-one
correspondence between a named ‘character’ and the force(s) that are represented. This seems oddly at variance with his insistence on the goodness of ‘minute particulars’,
and his credo ‘to generalize is to be an Idiot’, which is my favourite generalization. You can see why Yeats was drawn to this, though there seems something oddly unimaginative in the
project, which is why, I suspect, people who claim to admire Blake are really only delighted – as I am – by the
Songs of Innocence and Experience
, and
The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell
. The later works are deeply obscure, and read largely by nerds, or Blakeans, as they call themselves.

Yeats is never this prolix, and begins from a different starting point. Amongst his earliest works he edited collections like
Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
(1888) and
Irish Fairy Tales
(1891), and steeped himself in Celtic lore. He wrote a considerable number of plays based on these subjects, which are (thankfully) rarely performed, even at the Abbey
Theatre. This obsession with the world of druids and mythological Celtic figures can cause a softening of the brain, and has been known to lead to the compulsive singing of songs, and even (in
extreme cases) to vegetarianism.

When I took my course on Yeats at the University of Pennsylvania, I can remember mugging up this material, being furiously engaged with it, in the way that characterizes ambitious
undergraduates, anxious to master and to stand out. But none of it stuck. The mere thought of such folkloric subjects now fills me with a kind of agitated vacancy, as if I were listening to a
prolonged weather report in Esperanto.

Yeats’s later, and even more boring, reading in eastern religion and philosophy, as well as Christian mysticism, was driven by the desire not so much to master these traditions, as to root
about within them for new metaphors and sources of poetic inspiration. The process through which the material was filtered did not ask ‘is this true?’ but ‘how might it be
useful?’

The effect of this rage for abstract thought, which Yeats allied to a ‘longing . . . to be full of images’, has curious effects on the poetry. So intense is his desire to see the
world whole, that he rarely sees it clearly, or, to put this more carefully, he rarely registers it in its particularities. I can remember few characters, moments, or voices from individual poems
by Yeats (as one does from, say,
The Waste Land
). He strains for, and reaches, a kind of pitched intensity that has archetypal – he occasionally uses the term ‘ceremonial’
– radiance, but he frequently lacks a way to locate that visionary quality in the ordinariness of everyday life.

And hence, I think, why I reach for my Yeats when something large is at stake, as one might reach for the Bible. Since that time in Oxford, perhaps semi-consciously prompted by memory of
Yeats’s role in my life when I was twenty-two, I have increasingly turned to his poetry, not for solace, exactly, but for that assured magisterial understanding that characterizes his later
poems.

I now feel uneasy with most of early Yeats, even ‘The Song of the Wandering Aengus’, which strikes me as suffering from a number of the same flaws that characterize ‘Brown
Penny’. I have had enough of those poems. (I
hate
the much anthologized ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’.) Perhaps it would be a sign of retardation if I hadn’t, at my
age.

Of course, most great romantic poetry has been written either by those who died young (Byron, Keats, Shelley) or those who, having written poetry while young, later wrote less (and less well)
and turned instead to criticism (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Arnold) – as if, no longer able to produce great poems, one could at least reflect upon the nature of what one had done. Yeats is a
great exception here. He not only maintains the intensity of his early thinking and feeling, but enriches, deepens and widens it in his later work: instead of turning to prose to reflect upon his
early sources of inspiration, he allows such reflection to become part of the poetic process.

He is no less, though differently, moved and inspired by the fact of growing old than of having been young. Yeats provides, of course, many of our most haunting images of physical decay. My
favourite of all his poems, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, puts this squarely. It begins with a most wonderful evocation of the urgent flow of universal life:

But this flood of procreative activity, this swell of comings and goings, hardly takes account of, or makes a place for, the consciousness of those who – having experienced the tides of
youth – have time enough, also, to reflect upon their withdrawal. And thus the second stanza immediately, almost necessarily, begins:

You get a stick when you detach a piece of wood from a branch, when it dies and the sap dries up, when the organic connection to its tree of life is severed. So too, and yet more poignantly, can
a man apprehend his own slow detachment from his vital sources:

It is a harrowing, unforgettable image: one of those phrases that attaches itself to one’s consciousness, defines and refines it. For desire is never shed, neither is it overcome. It is
remembered, and unless transformed by the spirit, or the imagination – by the power of poetry – it torments us with what we have lost without putting anything in its place.
Yeats’s answer to this, in the fourth stanza of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, is not entirely satisfactory – the poet imagines himself immortalized as a Byzantine golden bird,
singing ‘of what is past, or passing, or to come’. This final artistic incarnation feels impotent and trivial, hardly enough ‘to keep a drowsy Emperor awake’.