Opinion

Slapped by a composer, queried by a pianist, charmed by a novelist, etc., part 8

Saturday, May 22, 2010

"Writing a novel?" he offered. "Maybe a poet or playwright? Or a news reporter for a newspaper or a magazine? That might be rewarding for you, no?"

"Well, I don't know for sure yet," I answered, essentially cutting off the conversation, if you can call it that, with a kindly man who was just trying to help a typically confused American teenager make his way through the maze called 20th-century life. In the end, I thanked him for his advice, then asked him to autograph my big brown envelope. Until an unknown date in the history of my non-functioning family, when I discovered that the brown envelope bearing Rubenstein's signature was no longer inside the padded bench that accompanied my mother's Steinway. I mourned its loss because it was the only tangible proof I had that my family had ever really got to walk around in the city together, unwrap my present of two model cars (one of which still exists in a display box upstairs) together, sit together in Carnegie Hall and listen to Rubenstein play Chopin, spoke with the master one-on-one together backstage after the performance, and finally return to Grand Central and take a train, all three of us, back home to Larchmont, there to resume our individual, lonely lives. . . .

Having chosen for my doctoral dissertation topic dominant themes in the fiction of Mississippi writer Eudora Welty, I was delighted to read in "College English" that the elderly woman was to appear at an Ol' Miss conference dedicated to her, in May. It occurred to me that I might actually interview the elderly woman (she was known to be easily approachable), and that some of the relevant quotes I might get from her on her own fiction would make my diss not just a library diss, as nearly all of them were, but a unique document, with a human voice in it. Also, I was interested in the woman herself. She was said to be a real, soft-speaking, humorous Southerner, not a young tenure-seeking academic, whose fast-paced jargon probably conceals the fact that he's really got nothing to say. I was eager to hear her. And last, I was excited to see and hear the little town of Oxford, where Nobel Prize-winner William Faulkner spent his most productive years.

When I actually arrived in the town, the first thing I did was marvel that my banged-up little Volkswagen ("the color of yesterday's rice," as daughter Jessica described it) had made it. My friend and colleague Dale Brockmeyer had sold it to me for $200, and I worried about it at first, but having driven to New York City and Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio, before this trip to Mississippi, it had proven its worthiness many times over. R.I.P.!

Oxford's town square is, I imagine, just like that of a thousand other town squares. What made it interesting to me was the fact that so many writers, good and mediocre, had walked around in it -- Faulkner himself, but also some of his friends and fellow-writers, the great black novelist Richard Wright ("Native Son"); the powerfully angry black essayist/novelist James Baldwin ("Go Tell it on the Mountain"); and others whose works I'd already read.

I wanted to visit Faulkner's house, Rowan Oak, near the college campus. So I walked there, it was so close to campus. When I walked in the front door, there was no one there to sell me a ticket. In fact, there didn't seem to be any uniformed personnel there at all. And so, I wandered at will all through the house where so much of the Great Writer's life had unrolled. Ah, if I'd only been a fly on the wall the night he had it out with his daughter Jill, and, drunkenly, reminded her that "Nobody today remembers that Shakespeare had a daughter." I wandered into one of the first-floor bedrooms and stood all agog before the gigantic sentence outline that Faulkner, royally drunk one night, drew in India ink, for what turned out to be a mediocre and hopelessly confusing novel, "A Fable." Again, without a uniformed heavyweight staring at me, I just stood awe-struck, at the desk where sat Faulkner's little portable typewriter (Royal, Remington, Underwood, I don 't recall), on which he'd probably typed the manuscripts of "The Sound and the Fury," "Absolam, Absolam," "As I Lay Dying," maybe "The Bear," -- some of the most critically admired works of fiction since Melville. And he my have done it all on this little thing! I still have the 3x5 black-and-white photo I took that day.

That evening, after dinner, I walked to the Eudora Welty photography exhibit at the University's overwhelmingly spacious Mississippi Center. At the start of the Great Depression, Welty had applied to the Farm Security Administration of the FDR government aid program to help -- for a paying job taking pictures of farm conditions in Mississippi, in an all-important effort to finish writing her novel, "Delta Wedding." The results of this effort were now to be published in a book (which Ginny gave me for a present one day). On the walls of the Center, seeing them all for the first time, I thought they certainly reflected the dominant human values (a deep compassion, a sharp sense of humor, and a profound sense of the importance of history, not that of kings and dynasties, but of individual human beings just trying to lead a decent life in ravaged landscapes), that I and any alert reader could see beautifully dramatized in her fiction.

I was especially attracted to a black-and-white photograph of two black girls, about 10 years old, in pigtails, jumping rope as if their lives depended on it. Their pigtails stood straight out from their bodies. Gigantic smiles covered their faces. I had to laugh. "Those two kids don't know or care there's a depression. Gosh, ain't childhood a great way to escape the big problems that weigh down the rest of us?"

"At least on the surface," someone behind me said.

"Yeah, you're right," I replied. "I'll bet that when she grows to be 70, she'll still be saving old chewing gum wrappers, used razor blades, pieces of string of various lengths, and brown paper bags. The Depression of the '30s left pretty deep scars."

I turned around. "Miss Welty, you took some wonderful photos. And nothing like black-and-white for this kind of picture."

"They didn't have color when I took these."

"Thank goodness," I said.

We smiled broadly to each other, then walked in opposite directions, to the next photograph, she to a picture of a pig roast, I to a picture of a family packing their car with, presumably, all their worldly belongings, prior to leaving for California, that, purportedly, land of milk and honey. Upon leaving the exhibit, I rejoiced to myself, "I've met Eudora Welty! Now I can say I've met and spoken with the subject of my doctoral dissertation. And I didn't make a fool of myself!"