God-Born Devil-Dung: A true story
"Out for a walk with Robert Lowell, Just me and him and my Bell & Howell" — John Berryman
Warning: This is in Hexagon’s Weirdness & Miscellany column. There is nothing about France or food in it. If you’re looking for those, head straight to Seb Emina’s excellent Read Me and Laura Calder’s essential A Place at My Table.
Meanwhile…
Mr. MOONEY: Across Elm up the embankment, which is a high terrace there, across there is a kind of concrete building, more or less of a little park. Jumped over the fence and went into the railroad yards. And, of course, there were other officers over there. Who they were, I don’t recall at this time. But Ralph Walters and I were running together. And we jumped into the railroad yards and began to look around, there. And, of course, we didn’t see anything there. Of course the other officers had checked into the car there, and didn’t find anything. — The Warren Commission Report, Volume XXVIII, p. 126. 1810
Alvear Hotel, Buenos Aires, September 4, 1962
My love,
Allen Dulles is, of course, holding court in the lobby. Cal Lowell is in the Suite Diplomaticà on the eighth floor, there. Mary McCarthy and the eminently bamboozable Stephen Spender are keynote panelists at the PEN Conference down the street there. I’m of course with Lowell. Last night, he held me out of the window by my ankles while reciting paragraphs from Nitze’s NSC 68.
The avenue below throbbed with Nazis and psychoanalysts.
I miss you.
Cal Lowell. Nourished on sodium amytal and the protofascist apostates of Baton Rouge — the church of his conversion — and subsidised by the Oh-So-Social OSS. He says he is here to “represent the Free World, spill the beans and stop the war.” I am here to make sure he doesn’t run away. Or worse.
“Luke the Leash” he calls me.
“I see the role in Christ you play, Luke. You’re not just his God-born devil dung, you’re like your apostolic namesake, writing a theology of history, a unifying of the varied and scattered accounts, but also a proclamation, a work of social and humanitarian interest, a social gospel. Just don’t forget, opposites don’t so much attract as seduce, like bait, like bribes, the ones beguiled by the others, the sums by the parts, the particulars and the wholes caught up in the delirious dance of joy that is war.”
All day and all night like this, a whirling lather of muscular Christian insanity.
It is now just past two and we are, of course, no surprise, still resolutely pie-eyed. Serial martinis, chain smoking, sweating. Cal’s tongue lolling, his lopsided, dribbling mouth chomping on chocolates and bellowing: “Martinis are good, martinis are god.”
Old Caliban the Rattleass from Boston Mass, thorazine tanned from tip to tail a deep shade of golden-baked ocher. Lithium his muse, thorazine his ruling star. He talks constantly of his mother, the “Brahmin Bitch of the cloistral quadrangles” whose “foremother was the first woman to step off the Mayflower, who forced my father to join Lever Brothers, who said she would leave him with nothing with his name on it except the trashcans. The poor sod spent hours in the bathtub, singing “Anchors Aweigh” and thumbing through car brochures.”
He has a quirked clock out of synch with the real world, or perhaps his jail time kicked out his cycles — no windows, the lights on night and day — or maybe it was those two overlit months in the FCC at Danbury. Merrill Moore keeps rattling on about his biological thermostat and other homemade ideas equally silly. They’ve induced the same in rats at Madison: long periods of abnormal light spiking the production of some chemical in the pineal gland. Similar results on bipeds at St. Liz. He is still searching for his “voice”, he says and he attends all the services, vespers, benediction, compline, but he’s a million miles from the real presence, light years from anything remotely resembling religion.
“My bred-out parents were faithless disbelievers without a thought for the afterlife, and now my mother is gone, dead and boxed in Risorgimento ebony and gold, and my father before her, and me the only thing left, the sad, unbathed orphelin, the backslider, the sorrowful son, the sad cause, the useless effect.”
Cattle furnished my new clothes: my coat of limp, chestnut-colored suede, my sharp shoes that hurt my toes.
Next day. You find me once again surrounded by strap-hanging fascists and Congress of Cultural Freedom fighters. Cal still legless, dragging his heels, fiercely holding on to happy nakedness. Megavitamins, hydrotherapy, wet sheets, hypnosis, insulin therapy, electroshock therapy, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Now, the never-never of narcosis.
We started drinking at nine.
“Every morning,” says Cal, fumbling into his socks, “You and I and countless other like-minded lunatics get up, don our battle dress, strap on our swords, and go to war. It has always been thus, it will always be thus. You’ll see. Today, we’ll go to the Presidential palace, say grace, and down a dozen excellent martinis. Then I’ll pick a fight, tweak a general, drop my gear, say something complimentary about Hitler, you and I will wrestle, they’ll call for backup, I’ll be carted off to the padded room. All in the name of freedom.”
He only dropped his gear once yesterday, at the Borges breakfast, causing the almost blind man to lean over and say, “I might like his poems, but only if he keeps his trousers on.”
“Mercenaries in the cause for freedom, peace, and justice. The words, those great words that they have stolen, just as they have stolen our souls, turning us into poets, these bankers and ragpickers and philistine Reds. Barbarians or Greeks, pinkos or capitalists, golem or goyim, master race or chosen people, what’s the difference?”
“The difference?” I said, puzzling, tugging at the leash and trying to keep up — or, alternately, slow things down. “The gulags, for one.”
“I got into lots of scraps at St. Mark’s. I was big for my age. Defensive tackle, first string, and mean, cruel.”
“What’s your point, Cal?”
“You have returned from hell with empty hands, Mr. Mooney. You’ll see. It’ll fall the other way round next time.”
“What will?”
“The tree. The tree that gave tongue to the wind. One impulse from a vernal wood. Poplars, aspens and birches, sunshine tangible, girdling the globe. There’s an old juniper in Utah said to be three thousand years old. There’s old New Jersey Bill Williams, the poet-king of Paterson, shoes like polished wood. You’ll see. Hell, you’re a homosexual, you should see it already. You should have seen it just now down in the lobby, Dulles and that Toscanini tart at the bar, slack jaws akimbo, tongues jousting like two dead whales slapping against a becalmed shore. I thought I was going to faunch. The woman looks like Auden, who, it has to be said, is the sourest man I’ve ever laid eyes on. And Dulles up in the Royal Suite with her now, the old coot in his tweed suit, his pipe in his trap and the carpet slippers for his gout, banging away like a screen door in a hurricane.”
“I’m not a homosexual,” I said, for the umpteenth time.
“Then stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like Arnault Daniel in the Purgatorio. And help me with my tie, you illiterate flunkey, I’m all thumbs and I can’t see a blessed thing.”
Four hours later and we are two hours late. Cal stopped taking his anti-manic pills after the first sitting with Borges, two days earlier at the American Embassy, where he goosed a butler and arm-wrestled a poet and tried to “conjure up the spirit of Kipling” by singing the Harvard Whiffenpoof song.
Baa! Baa! Baa! Little black sheep who have gone astray Baa! Baa! Baa! Gentlemen songsters off on a spree Dammed from here to Eternity Lord have mercy on such as we Baa! Baa! Baa!
Night again, a beautiful night, a pink-flamingo sunset out the wide stretch of shimmering glass. Out of cigarettes. A few minutes ago, readying to smoke the carpet when the phone ignited. Cal the St Mark’s tackle bearpawed past the half-trousered Lieutenant Luke Leash, sending me flying into the bar cart.
“Cal Lowell speaking.”
Music tinkled through the receiver. Gluck.
“This is the voice of the Shofar,” said the voice on the telephone.
Cal spluttered his scorn, an overripe raspberry of contempt.
“Who is it?” I shouted, still on the floor, pants tripped up around my ankles.
“Soy el poéta americano,” said Cal in his best Boston. “Soy amigo con Pablo Neruda. Me encanta mucho las gauchistas y los juves y las gillipollas. Son mis compañeros.”
“Hang up, Mr. Lowell” I said. “Now.”
“It is time to make peace with your God, Mr. Lowell, “ said the quiet, calm, sober voice on the other end of the line. Mispronouncing his name, Lowell rhymed with vowel, howl, foul. Jesuit cowl. Bell & Howell.
“My God? Are there others? Good lord. Nobody told me.”
“It is time to issue last rites,” said the voice.
The leash reaches the cord and yanks it from the wall. Cal scratches his crotch, lights a Kool, says nothing.
“Well?”
“The Shofar, ancora,” said Cal.
“Jesus.”
“No, the Jewish rams horn for war. My old adversary.”
I was up, buckled. “We should go, no?”
“A whistle first. A chalice before the palace and a whistle.”
All day, Cal has been demanding that I whistle the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” My monkey, he says. My organ, grinding. He thinks this absurdly funny. My organ, grinding. He swivels his hips when he says it, pirouettes across the carpet, growling like a bear, his old alter ego, the true adversary, part Irish cop, part Boston Bull. He is having a ball. Six hours and six paramedics later, he’ll be strapped to a table in the Clinicá Bethlehem, his wellborn blood turned to lead by massive doses of chlorpromazine. And two days hence, on the Braniff flight back, he’ll fall for the air hostess, try to follow her off the plane at Asunción. We will have to tie him to his seat.
In Miami now.
“Yankee doodles,” he says.
“Sorry?”
“This shit we’re showing. This Pollock bollocks. Free enterprise painting, you call it.”
“Call what?” I said.
“As if. You’ve jumped the wrong boat, Luke. Where is the grace in this brainstormed chaos? The accuracy? Do you have any idea what these works disclose? They are secret maps. They show our weak spots. Soon you’ll see, as I and many others already do. Do already. Do do. Be be. Ha ha.”
At the lobby bar, before all this transpired, Luke the Leash has to pry Cal’s hands off a young woman named Luisa. Christ knows who she is or who she was there with. Then, successfully spilled into the limo, Cal refused to go straight to the palace, and insisted on visiting the zoo; he banged his feet and threw a hammerlock on my pig-shaved head until I submitted.
Top of his lungs: “And the multitudes asked him, saying, What then shall we do? What shall we do?” Something biblical, I think.
At the zoo he fed Jack Daniels to the baboons and urinated on a brown bear. Later, he dropped his gear again, climbed an equestrian statue in Plaza Mayor, recited Kilo’s Cantos and extolled the virtues of the Ubermensch. Meanwhile, back at the palace, Dulles got word, shook his head, and smiled. “We fall for Caligula,” he waxes, “And get fucked by Caliban. Then tomorrow, we wake up next to Calvin.”
Love Luke.
(That’s an order.)
PS. He’s writing now. This just in. “Buenos Aires” he’s titled it.
In my room at the Hotel Continental a thousand miles from nowhere, I heard the bulky, beefy breathing of the herds.