What Poets Need. Finuala Dowling
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to town to do your Christmas shopping. You used to do those things alone: we used to be able to see each other under the cover of those expeditions, however briefly. Now you say Theo will accompany you.
I wonder why you say that, write that, and then make no further comment. Because in effect what that letter says is, we may never, probably will never, see each other again, or certainly not “see” as in “touch” – however chastely. I receive the message, express my great regret. You reply, yes, you feel my sadness. Then it’s over and we carry on chatting mindlessly – heartlessly – about our daily routines.
Or am I just slow to pick up a long-extant truth? This is what you meant last year, when you said, after Theo’s discovery, that you had nothing to offer me unless I would join you in unrequited love. You were so remorseful. I thought that once Theo had stopped making you feel guilty, you would write again about an opportunity to meet. But you didn’t; you haven’t.
I think you never look forward, as I do, as a matter of course. You’re happy when things turn out so that we see each other, but quite easily resigned to the other. It is this stupid optimist in me that is the problem. I think: I have this much of Theresa, this three-times-a-year thing, and the letters. It can’t get less than this. And then it does. In fact, it could all go, letters, everything. And I wonder what it really means that Theo goes along with you now. Does it bring you closer, heal things, bring intimacy, trust, happiness? And if it does, you wouldn’t let me know, not because you are deceitful, but because you believe that each relationship is completely separate, autonomous. And I will end up knowing less and less, understanding less and less. As Dylan says, It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there. Though writing this, setting it down, has helped me to understand.
Today Sal asked me, “Have you ever been into space, John?” I felt touched that she ranked her uncle among the astronauts. Would I keep something like that from you, I asked.
This exchange was after a day in which she played her first netball match, against the chop-fed giantesses of Laerskool Jan van Niekerk. Sal was supposed to be a reserve, along with the morbidly obese girl in their class, but they each got to play half a match as wing-attack when Harriet’s nerves got the better of her and she decided to stay on the sidelines. Sal loved the newness of netball, the fact that her uncle “lifted”, the freshness of the day, the camaraderie, the bib saying WA, the eminent reportability of the event, the way her opponent said “Kom hiersô” and showed her where the drinks were after the match.
Angie stood on the sidelines in her castration-issue boots, bellowing encouragement at her twins, to no avail. Holy Cross lost 0–16. On the drive back, Sal cheered up the despondent shooter-defence. “At least we went and showed them. We are Holy Cross Girls. We did what we had to do. Even though they’ve been practising for four years and we’ve only been practising for four hours.”
Monica phoned tonight, just as I was tipping the fish fingers onto brown paper to drain. She was in town and would I like to meet for a drink at her hotel and “catch up”? I told her I was babysitting. “Isn’t that what teenagers do for pocket money?” she asked.
There is a James Thurber cartoon that aptly sums up my life with Monica: the little man coming home nervously to a house that is encircled in the arms of a monstrously overbearing housewife. But the same way as you want to shake the little Thurber man and tell him, Get a life!, so I was unformed, waiting for life to happen to me. And Monica was no housewife.
While Monica was out resolving conflicts between worker organisations and big corporations for increasingly impressive remuneration, I went steadily and unambitiously back and forth to my job at Karoo Books. One year when the company was failing or, rather, doing worse than usual, I even took a cut in salary. Monica never understood my attitude to money, that it wasn’t important. If you think how all the luxuries I enjoyed those years in Johannesburg – meals out at restaurants, weekends in game reserves – were thanks to her job, you’ll see how hypocritical I must have looked.
I met Monica when she was a student of my mother’s. She was writing a thesis on gender in the South African workplace. As she was a graduate student, it was natural for her to stay for tea or drinks or supper after handing in a chapter. My mother and sister both being committed feminists, my father having lived off a tray and then died, I was in many ways the ideal partner for Monica. Because male sexual aggression was so strongly criticised in our house, and because I had been weakened by what happened to me in the Eighties, my only hope was that a woman would make the first move on me. Which Monica did.
Her thesis was very well received, and she was offered work in Johannesburg. I wasn’t doing much – some temporary shifts in the university library and packing books for a local publisher – so I went with her. I wasn’t planning on being her long-term partner – I wasn’t planning on anything at all. I had a vague idea that life began when one left home. Things still seemed pretty unreal to me, after the army stint and all that. I was lucky to find work, being so unambitious. At Karoo Books, as I say, I just plodded along, lost in my own thoughts.
My thoughts were mostly about words. I’d hear or read a new and unusual one, and it would occupy me for days. “Segue”, for example, gave a lot of pleasure.
Monica, on the other hand, lived in the cut and thrust. She was always being flown around the country, put up in top hotels. I’d fetch her from the airport and in between look up recipes to surprise her. She liked complicated food like roulades and terrines. You mustn’t think I was an ace chef or anything. I was – am – just capable of following a method. And I no longer believe in roulades.
I’d try to tell Monica about my words – riparian, egregious – but her vocabulary had been almost completely colonised by the jargon of ballparks, playing fields and nouns made verbs. We talked past each other, took no joy in one another’s discoveries.
But she was appreciative of the food. “Don’t you want to be a TV chef?” she’d ask. “I’ve got contacts I could use.” In Monica’s world, you always acted for an advantage; you never did simple, homely things for local good. It only occurs to me now that my low-level gastronomy was a sublimated creative urge.
Although I always made a big fuss of Monica’s homecomings, I secretly loved being left alone in the house. I never brought work stress home with me because even though Karoo Books hovered on the edge of bankruptcy through the entire time of my employ there, I knew I wouldn’t starve or be homeless if it collapsed. I also didn’t have to do housework, as we had a maid. So I’d come home to the quiet, clean house in the ominous silence that precedes a Highveld thunderstorm, with a clutch of new or uncommon words – animadversion, atavistic, fizgig, recidivist, conurbation, rugose, sacerdotal, caryatid, wayzgoose – and I’d rejoice at my solitude. As night fell, I’d make myself something delicious like a toasted tomato sandwich or a bacon omelette and, without Monica peering inquisitively over my shoulder, I was able to begin work on what was to become The Secret Life of Things.
The Secret Life of Things was a series of poems about everyday objects and the arcane or clandestine stories they hold within themselves. The French clock with its tiny key Monica had inherited from her grandmother, a piece of driftwood I’d picked up on Noordhoek beach as a teenager, an antique Cape Dutch pestle and mortar Mrs Cloete gave me when I graduated, a bicycle bell from my childhood. All these things we did not use, or pray to, or even look at much, yet we kept them because they exerted a power over us. In the fading light I’d sit and stare at each one of them until, myself disappearing, they rendered their account. Those are my best moments, when the lines start to dictate themselves, and I become merely the amanuensis of thoughts that present themselves to me.
I remember a poem by the American Charles Wright, which ends with the lines:
I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear
Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace.
It’s phrases like “the upper right-hand corner of things” that we poets live for.
My life felt very small and private compared to Monica’s large and public existence. She was quoted in newspapers, pictured coming out of high-level meetings in fetching suits