She didn’t see Ben again. There was no fire. She wanted something sparkier. If she had to grade it, it would be a C-minus.
Paradise Lost was on her reading list. It was chilling to visualize earnest Ben making a Technicolor extravaganza from the outlandish imaginings of a blind poet.
Her cavernous bathroom was so dark, and California should be so light, she thought.
Ben and the eggs. That was exactly what happened. Why can’t she imagine that scene differently?
HOPEWELL, KY.
November 15, 1966
Dear Ann,
Remember Mrs. Slocum’s boy Tommy? She got word this week that he got killed over there. Oh, she’ll be to bury. She loved that boy. She waited on him hand and foot. Raising him without a daddy and now this. Several on our road are going to make up for flowers if they ever get him home. Tommy aimed to go to the junior college and learn a trade, but he went off to fight.
He helped hay here summer before last.
I hope they get this thing over with before your brother’s old enough to go. What you said about him going to college and getting out of being drafted—I don’t know if he could go to a college. He won’t study. He just wants to play ball. He couldn’t get a scholarship like you did.
Love,
Mama
ANN’S FIRST QUARTER at Stanford tumbled along swiftly. The schoolwork was demanding, like pulling an all-nighter eight days a week. In retrospect, Yvor Winters’s seminar seemed ludicrous. He was sometimes gruff and touchy, with a scowl and odd literary prejudices that Ann quickly learned to ignore. He admired Emily Dickinson but didn’t see her humor.
Ann said to the class, “‘I heard a Fly buzz—when I died.’ How can you fail to snicker?”
Although several of the students in the seminar dismissed Dickinson as a minor versifier, Ann thought death to Dickinson was like a pet, or a mascot—a thing always looking over your shoulder, waiting for you to finish some trivial task. Death was a comic figure. A sidekick, like Smiley Burnette to Gene Autry. You could take a broom to Death, sweep it under the rug, talk to it, play jokes on it, pretend it wasn’t in the room. Even though you were too busy to stop for it, Death was ridiculously patient and polite. Ann was drawn to the spinster waif of Amherst, who was undoubtedly a victim of sexual repression—not because she was neurotic, as the Freudians would have it, but because she was afraid of getting knocked up.
Ann no longer feared such shame. She could explore possibilities with dear devil-may-care Enovid. The wheel design of the little compact of twenty-eight pills both pleased and alarmed her. Ovid’s ancient girlfriend should have had such a cosmetics case, Ann thought.
“Did you read Ovid’s poem about makeup?” she said after class to the girl who resembled Twiggy. “Ancient beauty tips.”
The Twiggy girl, whose name was Elise, ran her fingers through her short hair.
“Did he mention aerosol spray?” she asked.
AFTER THE LACKLUSTER, lackadaisical night with Ben and that interminable breakfast, Ann proceeded with care. She wanted something more glorious. To take something just because it was free was a bad habit of country people, she thought. She was restless and uneasy. She had a habit of jumping in over her head. She was scared.
SOME SONGS ON the radio the autumn of Yvor Winters’s seminar in modern poetry:
“You Can’t Hurry Love”
“96 Tears”
“Just Like a Woman”
“Lady Godiva”
“How Sweet It Is”
YVOR WINTERS SUMMONED Ann to his office for a conference. He was scribbling notes on a paper, and when he raised his head he stared hard at her. “Why are you wearing sunglasses?”
“They’re prescription.” Her contacts had been irritating her eyes.
“But I can’t see you.”
Didn’t he see they were chic Italian sunglasses? She wore a miniskirt, white go-go boots, and Mary Quant makeup. Already those styles were passé, she realized.
“What are you hoping to get from the program here?”
Ann remembered her fourth-grade teacher smacking her upside the head for an innocent impertinence—sticking her tongue out at a boy. Haltingly, she tried to explain to Yvor Winters how she had been a big reader all her life. Her mother always said Ann had her nose in a book, lost in stories. She felt like a child talking this way, her face flushing.
“For example, take Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. I’m enamored of Heathcliff.”
Professor Winters hooted. “He is only a fictive creature on the page. Would you really love someone so monstrous in real life?”
She was stymied. She pictured Heathcliff rising thrillingly out of the mist on the moor. She wondered if a heath and a moor were the same.
“I don’t know,” she said, fumbling with her sunglasses. When she removed them, Yvor Winters shimmered in the form of a turtle.
“We don’t know what to make of you,” he said. “We can’t tell how serious you are as a scholar. We don’t know what you think.”
Her head was stopped up. She was sure her own peculiar ideas were of little value to people like him. She wondered if he thought she was a redneck. Although she rarely spoke up in class, she took notes with dedication and always read her assignments. She loved literature but didn’t see the need to argue about it. Her classes were full of know-it-all pedants competing like Quiz Kids, each trying to sound more professorial than the professor. Their talk seemed to freeze her brain. She thought Yvor Winters expected her to explain herself in lit-crit jargon and to take sides on the New Criticism. She didn’t care about the New Criticism. She liked the pleasure of verbal oddities, the mouth-feel of Anglo-Saxon words, the exhilaration of Moby-Dick, the lustiness of the Wife of Bath and Molly Bloom, the swooning rhythms of Woolf’s Orlando. Old English filled her with joy because it was so intricate and strange. Sometimes a poem was so beautiful it would make her head shoot smoke. But she was no judge.
“Don’t worry,” Yvor Winters said, the first note of kindness she had heard from him. “Your papers have been commendable, even original, and we know it sometimes takes some adjustment in graduate school, but remember, we do expect great things from you.”
She felt jumpy. She stumbled to the bookstore and bought a ream of typing paper and a box of blue ink cartridges for her fountain pen. She could never remember to say what was in her mind. She felt ashamed that she would allow Yvor Winters to intimidate her. But he had said her work was original.
She typed all evening, a political-science student’s dissertation on the rise of fascism in England. Her typing was swift and purposeful, while the Beatles’ Revolver played full blast on her stereo. Now that she was charging sixty cents a page, she could earn almost ten dollars an hour—as good as modeling baby-doll pajamas for a vagabond pervert. She didn’t think the scholar of fascism would mind if she corrected his dangling references. At eleven, she paused to eat a hard-boiled egg and some saltines with a large bottle of Coca-Cola.
BEREA, KENTUCKY
November 22, 1966 (Three years gone by!)
Dear Ann,
I couldn’t make any sense of your letter. Are you in some kind of trouble, or are you just overcome by stultifying academic voices?