Life and Death: a memoir -- ii

Pieteer Claesz, Still Life with Violin and Glass Ball, 1628

(continued from yesterday)

Soon enough, the conference made clear what a "waiter" was. We were designated to wait on tables at the dining hall, the requisite training having brought us in a day early. We were told where to place the knives and forks and spoons and napkins, lessons in etiquette I'd never been taught.

But I had more to learn at Bread Loaf because the place served guests unlike any I’d ever known in the rural Midwest, in Oostburg or Sioux Center. I’d never been around so many blue-blooded Easterners with pedigrees from Yale, Brown, Harvard, and so many New Yorkers. I never felt quite so flatbush, without even knowing what the word meant; and, for a time, at least, I thought my own parochialism imminently visible, the old man in American Gothic, even though I didn’t own bibs. I do own a pitchfork.

For a while at least, I had this new friend, Deborah. Together with another dozen aspiring writers, we waited on tables, forming a delightful gang among America’s glowing literati.

But it wasn’t long and friendships turned into something more; adventuresome folks started wandering into each other’s affections, quite publicly. Then beds. I’d never been in the neighborhood of flat-out public adultery; and soon enough, this new friend of mine with the Dutch Reformed heritage was swept off her feet an older poet with a head of hair to die for. I shouldn’t point fingers—I really don’t know who bedded whom, and it’s fair to say that in their liaison there were no real victims. I don’t know that my friend Deborah was powerless, and it certainly seemed clear that her passions were fierce.

But I had thought of her as an innocent back then; after all, our paths seemed so approximate that I couldn’t have guessed her hooking up with the famous poet was not her first tumble. A memoir she wrote just a few years later tells the tales; she was not as innocent as I thought her to be in those first few days at Bread Loaf.

The atmosphere up on the mountain among a host of brilliant people was electrifying. I roomed with another poet, a Vietnam vet from LA, who ritually set his buzzing alarm early because, as waiters, we had to be at the dining hall early for breakfast. Each morning he’d slam down that alarm, pull himself out of the bed across from mine, and say, “Showtime, Schaap.”

We were wired, every one of us. Aspiration was as palpable as respiration. We all wanted endorsement, wanted favor, even a smile from the aristocracy—John Gardner, Tim O’Brien, Stanley Plumly, Linda Pasten—and some did anything to get it. Having been there, I understand the impulse to succeed in a way I never would have had I not been a part of crowd.  It was in me—I too had my own dreams, and at Bread Loaf they felt so close.

Once, out with the waiters, we walked to a pond not all that far away from the conference grounds, where a young woman whose name I’ve long ago forgotten shed every bit of her clothing without a thought and took a buck-naked dip in the cold mountain water. Once upon a time at an anti-war protest in Washington D.C., I’d seen a whole gallery of nakedness in the wading pools, but I never knew anyone who would simply strip down so unabashedly and jump in simply because that water was, like the mountain, there. I wouldn’t have told a soul back home that I was, for two weeks, so intimately a part of that society. And, to be honest—call me a sinner—I rather liked it. Some of it, at least.

One night the John Gardner reading was the evening’s feature. Not long before, he’d written On Moral Fiction, and it was clear that some of his colleagues at the top of the Breadloaf hierarchy were not taken with the book. Or him.

No matter. He read a something later published in The Atlantic, “Come on Back,” the story of a sad, small-town bachelor who loved music more than life and found it difficult to get along with those who didn’t share his exquisite sensibilities, even though many of those were kin. When he eventually takes his own life, his friends and family, the Welch folk from whom Gardner himself had descended, simply didn’t know what to say to each other; the paucity of their conversation at his wake made clear that no one knew exactly how to measure the man’s life—or death. But then, the silence of those good Welch folks rather mysteriously turns into song, an old Welch hymn they sing together--Gardner’s magical story ends with a comforting hymn.

As Gardner read that story, I found myself seated in one of the steel chairs around that coffin, even though I wasn’t the singer and I wasn’t family; but I was in the room as they broke into song, their only way of measuring the mystery of his life. What they sang could just as well have been “Old Hundredth.”

After his reading, Gardner was standing by himself, no friend to many of those in attendance for the way stark way he’d laid out principle in On Moral Fiction. But I had loved the story so much that I put away my own reluctance, walked over, and told him in what he’d read I’d found myself so much more clearly than I did in so much of the frenetic atmosphere of Bread Loaf.

“Just want to thank you for that story,” I told him, or something to that effect. “That could have been home.”

“Where are you from?” Gardner asked me.

“Iowa,” I said. “My background is Dutch, Dutch Calvinist.”

“You and I,” he said, smoking his pipe, “are the lucky ones.”

That was another blessing, and I have no second thoughts about calling what he said exactly that.

Where Gardner read "Come on Back"

Tomorrow: Meditation--and homeward bound.