Candlelit tablecloth
To blow them out with a breath.
And, when Frank was forty, I would send him a birthday greeting with Donald Justice's 'Men at Forty' poem enclosed.
Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.
Frank fired me back a note saying he stopped reading the damn poem right there. 'Close your own doors!' Frank snapped. 'You'll be forty soon enough. As for me, I bang the damn doors and come back to them all the fucking time!'
Bravo, Frank! I thought. He has always kept passing the open windows without the slightest trace of fear. It's what all the great agents do: they make the most incredible and illogical advice sound reasonable, they make you go ahead without fear, and that way you get it, you get more or less what you want, or you get something, anyway; at least you don't end up with nothing when you go ahead without fear, when you lunge into the darkness as if you were operating on the soundest advice in the world. Who would have thought Frank would have ended up so lovable? (He was such a rotten kid.) And I do not blame Frank for pushing Lilly too hard. 'It was Lilly,' Franny always said, 'who pushed Lilly too hard.'
When the damn reviewers liked her Trying to Grow -- when they condescended to her with their superior forms of praise, saying how in spite of who she was, the Lilly Berry of that famous opera-saving family, she was really 'not a bad writer,' she was really very 'promising' -- when they prattled on and on about the freshness of her voice, all it meant to Lilly was that now she had to get going; now she had to get serious.
But our little Lilly wrote her first book almost by accident; that book was only a euphemism for trying to grow, yet it insisted to her that she was a writer, when perhaps she was only a sensitive and loving reader, a lover of literature who thought she wanted to write. I think it was the writing that killed Lilly, because writing can do that. It just burned her up; she wasn't big enough to take the self-abuse of it, to take the constant chipping away -- of herself. After the movie version of Trying to Grow made Franny famous, and after the TV series of 'The First Hotel New Hampshire' made Lilly Berry a household word, I suppose that Lilly wanted to 'just write,' as one is always hearing writers say. I suppose she just wanted to be free to write her book, now. The problem was, it wasn't a very good book -- the second one. It was called The Evening of the Mind, from a line she stole from her guru, Donald Justice.
Now comes the evening of the mind.
Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood;
and so on. She might have been wiser to take her title and make her book from another Donald Justice line:
Time a bow bent with his certain failure.
She might have called her book Certain Failure, because it was just that. It was more than she could handle; it was over her head. It was about the death of dreams, it was about how hard the dreams die. It was a brave book, in that it departed from anything directly relatable to Lilly's little autobiography, but it departed to a country too foreign for her to grasp; she wrote a vague book that reflected how foreign the language she was only visiting was to her. When you write vaguely, you are always vulnerable. She was easily wounded when the critics -- when the damn reviewers, with their dull, plodding cunning -- jumped on her.
According to Frank, who was usually right about Lilly, she suffered the further embarrassment of writing a bad book that was adopted as heroic by a rather influential group of bad readers. A certain illiterate kind of college student was attracted to the vagueness of The Evening of the Mind; this kind of college student was relieved to discover that absolute obscurity was not only publishable but seemingly identified with seriousness. What some of the students liked best in her book, Frank pointed out, was. what Lilly hated most about it -- its self-examinations that led nowhere, its plotlessness, its people fading in and out of character, its absence of story. Somehow, among a certain university population, the obvious failure to be clear confirms that what any fool knows is a vice can be rearranged, by art, to resemble a virtue.
'Where in hell do these college kids get such an idea!' Franny would complain.
'Not all of them have this idea,' Frank would point out. 'They think what's forced and strained and difficult with a fucking capital D is better than what's straightforward, fluent, and comprehensible!' Franny shouted. 'What the fuck's wrong with these people?'
'Only some of them are like that, Franny,' Frank would say.
'Just the ones who've made a cult out of Lilly's failure?' Franny asked.
'Just the ones who listen to their teachers,' Frank said, smugly -- happily at home in one of his anti-everything moods. 'I mean, where do you think the college students learn to think that way, Franny?' Frank asked her. 'From their teachers.'
'Jesus God,' Franny would say.
She would not ask for a part in The Evening of the Mind; there was no way to make that book into a movie, anyway. Franny became a star with so much more ease than Lilly became a writer. 'Being a star is easier,' Franny would say. 'You don't have to do anything but be relaxed about who you are and trust that people will like you; you just trust that they'll get the you in you, Franny said. 'You just be relaxed and hope that the you in you comes across.'
For a writer, I guess, the you in you needs more nourishment to emerge. I always wanted to write Donald Justice a letter about that, but I think that seeing him -- only once, and from a distance -- should suffice. If what's best and clearest in him isn't in his poems, he wouldn't be a very good writer. And since something good and strong in him emerges in his poems, it would probably be disappointing to meet him. Oh, I don't mean that he'd be a bum. He's probably a wonderful man. But he couldn't be as precise as his poems; his poems are so stately, he'd have to be a letdown. In Lilly's case, of course, her work was a letdown -- and she knew it. She knew her work wasn't as lovable as she was, and Lilly would have preferred it the other way around.
What saved Franny was not just that being a star is easier than being a writer. What saved Franny, too, was that she didn't have to be a star alone. What Donald Justice knows is that you have to be a writer all alone, whether you live alone or not.
You would not recognize me.
Mine is the face which blooms in
The dank mirrors of washrooms
As you grope for the light switch.