Gotham Diary:
Poems
23 July 2015
There is not much to say today. I am thinking about loss — and I have suffered very little of it.
I am thinking about loss because I am reading Colm Tóibín’s book about Elizabeth Bishop, and reading most of the poems to which he refers.
I had put off this project because of its gay-studies possibilities: sometimes, the focus on homosexuality expands discussions, but, more often, it seems to narrow them, and I often wish that Tóibín, one of our best critics, would consider the work of some non-homosexual writers who appeal to him — there must be a clutch.
As it turns out, On Elizabeth Bishop is not a gay-studies book, because, while he was working on it, Tóibín was surprised by a new recognition. He had thought that his youthful interest in certain writers, Bishop among them, was rooted in the problem, common to them, of alternative sexual preference, but there turned out to be something deeper and darker that he shared with them: the loss of a parent in childhood or adolescence.
I thought at once of William Maxwell, the central event of whose creative life was the death of his mother in the influenza epidemic that followed World War I. How great it would be if Colm Tóibín wrote about William Maxwell! There would even be the gay angle that is provided by The Folded Leaf, which some gay critics have adopted as a “gay novel.” Maxwell rather furiously insisted that this was not his intention, but such remarks, while interesting, are never dispositive.
Anyway, between William Maxwell and Tóibín on Bishop, I’ve been reading a lot about loss. I’ve learned, with a new crystal clarity, that loss provokes some people to recreate what they’ve lost in language that registers and accepts that loss.
***
How do you lose what you’ve never had? The question is absurd. And yet I did lose it. I lost it even as I was born, wrapped up and carried away forever from the woman who bore me. The protocol of the time suggests that she was never allowed to hold or even to see me, which would have been terrible for her but which also seems so shockingly inhuman to me, now, that the enormity of what I call the Adoption Racket overwhelms my ability to consider one woman’s grief. I try to imagine it, but I am interrupted by a visceral hatred for the people who, with the best intentions in the world, took her child away. And who took me away from her. What I lost was the company of my biological kin. Most people quite reasonably take this for granted. If it’s no bed of roses, it is almost everybody’s bed of whatever. It wasn’t just the loss of kin, either. It was the loss of the right to propose that my biological kin might have regarded me as strange. The adoption racketeers have always been able to find adopted children ready to insist that their adoptive parents were just as loving as birth parents could have been, and that they love their adoptive parents as much as if they were their birth parents, and so on. More credulous than I am now, I used to feel unlucky in this regard — my case hadn’t worked out so well.
And what the hell do I mean by that? I was fed, clothed, schooled, and sheltered as well as anybody ought to be. I was treated kindly and reasonably. My welfare was never overlooked for a second. So what am I whining about?
Well, I am not whining about Barbara and Bill Keefe, that’s for sure. They have my deepest sympathy, in fact: they’re the ones who were unlucky. They got the kid who looked sure to grow up to march with the Irish Guard at Notre Dame, but who so very much didn’t. Why, he didn’t even go to the games! One Saturday afternoon, in fact, he went to a poetry reading instead. What had they done?
And I can tell you why I’m not whining about the Adoption Racket, either, and why whining is not what I’m doing: I’m outraged by the brainless optimism, coupled with a willingness to do unspeakable, unnatural things, that characterized American policy in the Cold War. It may seem grandiose, but at this particular moment, sitting here in my quiet book room, I can connect what happened to me and my mother with what happened to Vietnam and Iraq. The bad thinking behind the one and the others is stamped by the same American brand of hubris. We can do it because we’re special.
What’s special about America is that it was settled by social misfits who wanted to do things their way. They would have fought like spiders if the country hadn’t been so vast and largely empty. Their children had to figure out how to settle down. As they did so, they decorated their civil society with bric-à-brac from an ornamental mythology: Washington crossing the Delaware, the first Thanksgiving, Pocahontas, the Founding Fathers and their democracy thing. If we were an honest people, we would cover the Capitol’s walls with Saul Steinberg’s lampoons.
No, there is nothing special about this country, least of all the feeling special. Lucky, certainly: the land was special. But ours is a country like any other. I take that back: it is still at least two countries trying to coexist under one umbrella, just as it was at its inception.
***
I have endeavored to write this slowly, as if I were working on a poem, getting everything right and writing it clearly. There has been a great deal of excision. I have serious misgivings about some of the statements made, particularly the one that links the first thing that happened to me with military misadventures. But these misgivings are stylistic: the editorial board here prefers a temperate gloss, and generally disapproves of italicizing words like “outrage.” I am also dismayed by a sense of having said almost all of this before, on not a few occasions.
There is also the “so what?” factor. So you were adopted: deal with it. The funny thing is that I thought that I had dealt with it. I can remember joking, when adopted people began looking into their origins, that one family was enough for me. (It makes me angry to remember this flippancy: I want to slap the man I was then.)
But then, I began keeping this Web log, charting the course of my mind, building up something that few people have the leisure to develop, an articulate view of the world. Articulate and articulated — I am always making connections. More and more, I find that what obstructs these connections, or makes them obscure, is the received dishonesty of American life, the practical insincerity of American idealism. Perhaps other nations are dishonest, too, but this is the nation that I know. This is the nation that thought it best to spare my unmarried mother the embarrassment of an inconvenient child, and to spare me the stigma of illegitimacy. The dishonesty of what happened as a result of this thinking was far worse than a lie. It was the willful disregard of human nature, of everything that has ever been known about mothers and infants. We can do it because we’re special.
I have tried to write this as a poem, mindful, above all other things, of the truth that it is far worse, in a poem, to utter a lie than to say nothing at all.