The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (17 page)

He’s hungry, as he has been all his life. “The venison pastry that the chief cook had just taken out of the oven smelled so delicious that hungry flesh could not endure it. I arranged the chief cook in a more comfortable position on the slate floor of the kitchen, with his hat crumpled up for a pillow; and then I attacked the great pie, breaking off a corner with my hands and cramming it in my mouth. It was still warm, savory, succulent. Next time I came through the kitchen, the pastry was whole, unbroken. The enchantment held. Was it that, as a dream, I could change nothing of this deep reality of sleep?”

So he stays there. He has always been alone, that is nothing new; and now he is not hungry. Not even sexually, for he shares a sleeping peasant girl with her sleeping lover, and she smiles with pleasure in her sleep, and there is no harm in it, for the spell holds: nothing can be changed, or broken, or hurt. What more can he desire?

Speech, perhaps, which he never had much of in his old life either. Here there is no one to answer if he speaks; but he has vast leisure, time without end, and so he teaches himself to read. He reads the princess’s book of fairy tales. He knows then where he is. Perhaps he knows what more there is to desire.

He knows who the princess is. “I knew that she, she alone in all the castle, might wake at any moment. I knew that she, alone of all of them, all of us, was dreaming. I knew that if I spoke in that tower room, she would hear me: maybe not waken, but hear me in her sleep, and her dreams would change.” He knows that to break the spell, all he need do is move the spindle in her hand so that its tip does not prick into her thumb. “If I did that, if I moved the spindle, a drop of red blood would well up slowly on the delicate little cushion of flesh above the joint. And her eyes would open. Her eyes would open slowly; she would look at me. And the enchantment would be broken, the dream at an end.”

My story, like Townsend Warner’s poem, merely asks a question. It does not alter anything. All will go on as told. The prince will come; his kiss will wake his virgin bride. I and my poacher had no desire to change the story. We were both just glad to get into it. To be there, awake.

Thinking about it now, I believe that the tale is as impregnable and unassailable as its hedge of thorns. We can play variations round about it, imagine peasant trespassers, or rapist princes, happy or unhappy endings, as we please. We can define it; we can defile it. We can retell it to improve its morality, or try to use it to deliver a “message.” When we’re done, it will still be there: the place within the thorn-hedge. The silence, the sunlight, the sleepers. The place where nothing changes. Mothers and fathers will read the tale to their children, and it will have an influence upon those children.

The story is, itself, a spell. Why would we want to break it?

P
OSTSCRIPT
(2003):

I want to take this opportunity to pay a little further tribute to Sylvia Townsend Warner, whom I had the great good fortune to meet. When
we were in England in 1976, our friend Joy Finzi knew how much I admired Sylvia’s work, and thought she might enjoy meeting me. So, after talking me up a bit, I imagine, and giving Sylvia some of my poems, she drove me to the cottage on the river in Dorset where Sylvia had lived for many years, first with her lover Valentine Ackland, then alone. The place is marvelously described in her letters and turns up in several of her stories. It was a sort of a naiad of a house that seemed to be only partly above water, with bits of beautiful, muddy, unkempt garden, and the murmur of the river all around it. We had a cup of tea in a sort of sunroom at the front of the house. Antiquities from Valentine’s antiques shop still stood or lay about here and there, or possibly they were part of the furniture. Sylvia smoked more or less continuously, as she had done for sixty years or so, and it was impressive to see the golden-brown walls of the interior rooms, which had been white; smoke varnish lay so thick on the glass of the pictures that you couldn’t make out the pictures. Of course, some of it may have been wood smoke from the fireplaces, too, in that dank place. Sylvia was old, and tired, and reserved, and kind, and keen as a splinter of diamond. She said she liked one of my poems, “Ars Lunga,” which is about being a storyteller, and since then I have liked that poem better myself. I asked her about one of her stories, which I had read long ago in the
New Yorker
and had forgotten the name of, about a nice English family on a picnic. At the end of the story, a stranger sees them: one of them is wearing a bloodstained Indian shawl, two of them are in eighteenth-century costume, the father is sitting on the ground listening to an enormous music box, while the mother approaches with a bird cage. All this has come to seem perfectly reasonable to us, as it does to the family, because we know why it is so, but the stranger does not, and the reversal of viewpoint is revelatory and ravishingly funny. Sylvia smiled happily at my description and said, “Oh yes I do remember that,” but she couldn’t remember what it was called either, or where I could find it. No wonder. She had published nine volumes of stories (and this is not in any of them; it is “A View of Exmoor,” in the
posthumous collection
One Thing Leading to Another
). She also published seven novels, of which
Lolly Willowes
is perhaps still the most amazing, though I love
The True Heart
and
The Corner That Held Them
as well. Her last major work was a stunning biography of T. H. White. Her poetry has been collected at last, her brilliant letters and her heartbreaking journal have been published. I think she is still esteemed at something like her worth in her own country, though she seems largely forgotten here, where most of her stories were first published. I hold it one of the dearest honors of my life that I knew her for an hour.

OFF THE PAGE: LOUD COWS

A T
ALK AND A
P
OEM ABOUT
R
EADING
A
LOUD

“Off the Page” was a talk for a conference on Women and Language held by graduate students of the Department of Linguistics at the University of California in Berkeley, in April 1998. In getting it ready for this book, I didn’t change the informality of the language, since the piece not only is about reading aloud to a live audience but was written for performance. The audience was by no means all women, but they were more receptive to uncomforting remarks about gender equality than most academic groups. I have performed the poem “Loud Cows” at that meeting, in New York, and elsewhere, and it appears as a frontispiece in
The Ethnography of Reading,
edited by Jonathan Boyarin.

What happened to stories and poems after the invention of printing is a strange and terrible thing. Literature lost its voice. Except on the stage, it was silenced. Gutenberg muzzled us.

By the time I got born the silence of literature was considered an essential virtue and a sign of civilisation. Nannies and grannies told stories aloud to babies, and “primitive” peoples spoke their poems, poor illiterate jerks, but the real stuff, literature, was literally letters, letterpress, little black noiseless marks on paper. And libraries were temples of the goddess of silence attended by vigilant priestesses going
Shhhh
.

If you listen to the first Caedmon tape of poets reading, which was a landmark, you’ll hear T. S. Eliot going
adduh, adduh
in this dull grey
mutter, and Elizabeth Bishop going
gnengnengne
in a low flat whine. They were good poets who’d been taught poetry was to be seen not heard, and thought the music in their verse should be a secret between the poet and the reader—like the music that people who know how to read music hear when they read a score. Nobody was playing the music of poetry out loud.

Until Dylan Thomas. You know the Caedmon tape of him reading at Columbia in 1952? I was there at that reading, and you can hear me—in the passionate silence of the audience listening to that passionate voice. Not a conspiracy of silence, but a participatory silence, a community collaboration in letting him let the word loose aloud. I left that reading two feet above the ground, and it changed my understanding of the art forever.

So then there were the Beat poets, all posing and using and screwed up by testosterone, but at least audible, and Ginsberg’s “Howl,” which from the title on is a true performance piece that will not lie down quietly on the paper and be good. And ever since then, our poets have been noisy. Now God knows there are too many open-mike readings in the world; but better drivel at an open mike than silence from a closed mouth. And we have the voices of all recent poets on tape, so we can hear their word on their breath, with their heartbeat in it. Whereas of the greatest English writer of the twentieth century we have one tiny BBC recording: about ninety seconds of Virginia Woolf’s voice reading a little essay. But in it you hear an invaluable hint of the rhythm that she said was where all the words began for her, the mysterious rhythm of her own voice.

It wasn’t till the seventies, I think, that publishers realised they could sell more books by sending the author to two hundred cities in eight days to sign them—and then realised that people like not only to see the author sit and grin and write its name, but also to hear the author stand up and read its story. So now you here in Berkeley have Black Oak and Cody’s, and we in Portland have Powell’s and the Looking Glass, and Seattle has Elliott Bay Books running two readings a day
every day of the week, and people come. They come to be read to. Some of them want books signed and some of them want to ask weird questions, but most of them want to be read to. To hear the word.

One reason I think this is a restoration of an essential function of literature is that it is reciprocal: a social act. The audience is part of the performance. A lecture isn’t reciprocal, it’s a talking-to. There were professors at Harvard when I was there who would give you a C if you
breathed
during a lecture. But the hush during a performance is alive and responsive, as at the theater. Nothing kills a play like a dead audience. This response is recognised and called for in all oral literatures. Zunis listening to a narrative recital say a word,
eeso
, meaning yes, OK, about once a minute and whenever appropriate. In oral cultures generally, kids are taught to make these soft response-noises; if they don’t, it’s assumed they weren’t listening and they’re sent out in disgrace. Any Baptist preacher who doesn’t hear Yes Lord! and Amen! pretty often knows he’s lost the congregation. In poetry readings, big groups or small, the convention is mostly a little soft groan or
hahh
at a striking line or at the end. In prose readings the response convention is even subtler, except for laughter, but there are audible responses which the reader counts on just as the actor does.

I learned that once for all at a reading I did in Santa Barbara. They had no lights on the audience, so I was facing this black chasm, and no sound came out of it. Total silence. Reading to pillows. Despair. Afterwards the students came around all warm and affectionate and said they’d loved it, but it was too late, I was a wreck. They’d been so laid back or so respectful or something they hadn’t given me any response, and so they hadn’t been working with me; and you can’t do it alone.

It was men who first got poetry off the page, but the act was of great importance to women. Women have a particular stake in keeping the oral functions of literature alive, since misogyny wants women to be silent, and misogynist critics and academics do not want to hear the woman’s voice in literature, in any sense of the word. There is
solid evidence for the fact that when women speak more than 30 percent of the time, men perceive them as dominating the conversation; well, similarly, if, say, two women in a row get one of the big annual literary awards, masculine voices start talking about feminist cabals, political correctness, and the decline of fairness in judging. The 30 percent rule is really powerful. If more than one woman out of four or five won the Pulitzer, the PEN/Faulkner, the Booker—if more than one woman in ten were to win the Nobel literature prize—the ensuing masculine furore would devalue and might destroy the prize. Apparently, literary guys can only compete with each other. Put on a genuinely equal competitive footing with women, they get hysterical. They just have to have their voices heard 70 percent of the time.