Dubin's Lives Read online

  The walk he was into now Dubin estimated an additional four miles, the whole taking about an hour and a half or three quarters, unless he hurried. The way not to hurry—to enjoy nature, not suffer obsession—was to go the short walk; but sometimes he hurried the long. He felt he was taking his time today when he had the thought—sensation—that the road was coming at him counterclockwise—moving as though the journey hastened its end. Dubin’s mind ran ahead of itself. What’s my hurry to get back? What must I do that I haven’t done? The truth was he hadn’t meant to take the long hike today and was probably hitting it up unconsciously; he had meant at the bridge to turn back but walked on remembering his accident. And Betsy Croy.

  As he hastened on he warned himself to be attentive to what’s present, namely nature. If you looked without seeing, the walk was more of the same —the same subjectivity. The good of it beyond exercise was that it changed the mind’s scenery after a day’s work. He felt uneasy when not observing—the big ones missed nothing, had eyes that remembered. Thoreau: “The perception of beauty is a moral test.” More test than moral but one ought to look. The road came at him in slow motion—he tried to explain it but couldn’t. What’s happening today that hadn’t yesterday? Only this moving road, a device of time hurrying me home. Dubin runs to do what’s next. The way to counteract forgetting to look was to join up—take courage in both hands, move your ass off the confining road, be involved. Hop a wall; follow a stream through pasture—what’s so sacred about private property when it’s all God’s earth? Walk up a hill; enter sunlit wood; swim bareass in a pond reflecting day’s eye. Walk home wet in dry clothes.

  When had such happened lately? He could count the times on one finger. I rarely leave this road. Now and then a picnic under Sunday-evening trees. Sometimes I cut in along an old path to the pond in the quarry. Wild flowers scattered in clusters along the way. Once, with Kitty, we climbed Mt. No Name with the kids—walked up the low north flank. They’d been summer people who had stayed on. City people—Dubin from Newark and Bronx tenements, Kitty originally from Montreal; she had also lived in Augusta, Maine, with her grandmother. Dubin, after a decade and a half in Center Campobello, could recognize and name about twenty trees, a half dozen bushes, fifteen wild flowers, a handful of birds. He followed the flight of a crow elated to know who was flying. He had slowly learned to look, name things of nature. When he passed a flower he told himself to take it all in. What he couldn’t name, or when names slipped his mind, he asked Kitty. She saw the flower whole—corolla, stalk, the shape of its leaves. He felt for a moment bereft.

  In sum, William Dubin, visitor to nature, had introduced himself along the way but did not intrude. He gazed from the road, kept his distance even when nature hallooed. Unlikely biographer of Henry David Thoreau—I more or less dared. Even in thought nature is moving. Hunger for Thoreau’s experience asserted itself. Besides, great men are men; a genius in doubt is a man in doubt—I got close to his human nature. Thoreau gave an otherwise hidden passion and drew from woods and water the love affair with earth and sky he’d recorded in his journals. “All nature is my bride.” His biographer-tobe had been knocked off his feet on first serious encounter with nature, a trip to the Adirondacks with a school friend when they were sixteen. Before that he had hungrily sought signs—promises?—of the natural world on city streets and found, in walks out of his neighborhood, private houses with flowers on lawns; hedges; trees; and the dead leaves he was surprised to find in summertime. As a young man he had lived much in public parks; had sought, if not his bride, his bride’s cousin? The first time in the mountains had turned him on in the manner of the Wordsworthian youth in “Tintern Abbey”: “The sounding cataract haunted me like a passion.” Dubin, haunted, had been roused to awareness of self extended in nature, highest pitch of consciousness. He felt what made the self richer: who observes beauty contains it. One is stabbed by the miraculous creation and interwoven whole. He wanted nature to teach him—not sure what—perhaps to bring forth the self he sought—defined self, best self? Nature compelled him to feel what he hadn’t felt so well before: “the shaping force,” Hardy called it. He never forgot this although the experience, infrequently renewed, had diminished as youth had. My God, how nature moved me. Now “that time is past,” as Wordsworth had felt it. Now, on the whole, in varying moods Dubin looked at scenery, and scenery, in varying moods, looked at him. But in his heart he still expected something he could not define. If you dared look you earned seeing. Dubin did his walks in nature’s presence.

  Still, what nature had meant to him, though not only nature, had inspired him to undertake and ultimately complete a fine life of H. D. Thoreau. In his mind he flipped through pages: close portrait of the solitary sensuous man, privately wounded, who lived on wonder, observed the bald fact and spun metaphor and myth out of nature. In his writing he celebrated his consciousness identified with the Absolute. Walden was a lied of death and song of resurrection: Thoreau had it both ways. Now and then someone argued the book was not literally true; it was fictitious: In truth, the man went home often to see his mama. If so, Dubin thought, it was nonetheless a masterpiece, nonetheless inspiring. It had stirred the imaginations of Proust and Yeats. How can it be less than it is? You write sentences and men are sensibly affected. Dubin, proud of the biography, contemplated with confidence his present work on D. H. Lawrence. Do the primitive labyrinth of the man, mystic flame-boiled essence, bloody simple human self.

  He warned himself then as he often did, although it came to not much, that a good writer adventures beyond the uses of language, or what’s there to put into words? Yet the truth is some do not: of them Dubin is one. As though to make up for his limitations, from his pants pocket he dug out one of his impulsive notes to himself: “Everybody’s life is mine unlived. One writes lives he can’t live. To live forever is a human hunger.”

  He was running. As the road dipped the hills rose. In spring light-green foliage raced up the rumpled hills and by June covered the scabrous shoulders of the mountains. Dubin trotted on the road going south. In the distance white clouds moving above patches of sunlight on the hills. The land sloped up to a line of trees advancing on him like a marauding army. For a while the wood rode on his head. Dubin rose on the road as the hills sank; he settled into a fast walk. A sparse quarter mile of old houses went by as on a rusty turntable, then broad fields with now and then a stark farmhouse, upright and spare to a point of principle—with weather-beaten barns, red or black silos, Angus and Herefords on cow paths in the pasture. Dubin liked to come by on rainy late-afternoons to see the steaming swollen-uddered cows lying in the wet waiting to be milked. When he passed in light fog, the ripe hot smell of cow dung from a barn nearby assailed him across the field—he knew where he was. One night, driving the road alone, he saw a cow cropping grass in moonlight. The farmland around gave pleasure: each neat walled field, each shifting shade of brown beige and green; furrowed, cultivated, harvested, plowed under: order of uses of men, animals, seasons eternal.

  Robert Frost and his doomed brood had lived a summer on one of the farms not far away, and Dubin, long after the fact, had talked with his neighbors in Vermont and written an article: “Frost, the Season of His Wife’s Death.” The poet had been hard on her. His will, it had been said, could tolerate no other wills around. “Elinor has never been any earthly use to me.” She had kept him from her bedside while she was dying. He waited in the corridor, saw her only when she was asleep, unconscious; dead. He’d had no last word from her. Her defense was silence. “She was not as original as I in thought but she dominated my art with the power of her character and nature.” Dubin occasionally visited their anguished grave in a churchyard a dozen miles away. They were together now in the vault under the tombstone; their ashes were, with the remains of those of their children who were not buried elsewhere, although all their names were incised on the stone. “There’s only one subject for a poem,” Frost had said. Dubin had laid a small white stone on the marble tom
bstone.

  The biographer had once wanted to do a full-length life of the poet and had written him a letter requesting a talk if he was interested. But the old man wrote back he had already chosen someone “to preserve my immortal remains.” “I’d rather be in the hands of a man whose spit I’d seen.” Dubin, after going through her papers in the N.Y. Public Library, had considered the life of Virginia Woolf, whose intelligent imagination and fragile self had drawn him to her; but her own nephew, Quentin Bell, was already into a biography of her. Dubin had then thought of D. H. Lawrence, a complex type with tormented inner life, if that’s who you felt you had to get involved with.

  Thinking of the biographies he had written, in particular Short Lives in a single volume, he felt a sadness come into him. Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living—joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows. Some lives accomplished much, some very little. One learned, as he wrote, the arcs, forms, consequences of the flight of lives. One learns where life goes. In fact he led them there. When you know the end the rest moves up only too quickly. Therefore, Dubin, what’s on your mind? That he was about to create a new life would in the end shorten his own? When the work was done he was that much older—more serious matter than a decade ago. He had sacrificed to his labors that many hours, that many years. Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others. You lost as you gained; there’s only one subject for a poem.

  The last part of the country walk went west before it turned south again on an upward pitch to the highway, a length of solitary shaded road heavily wooded on both sides. Overhead, lightly laced branches touched and intertwined. The road was cool in the green shade, the air fragrant. Dubin breathed. He tramped on in the light-green dark. No sound except him walking along thinking his thoughts. At one place on the deserted road he broke into a run. He had more than once encountered a dog racing at him across a field, or bursting out of the woods, teeth bared, growling in its belly. His response was sternly to say, “Go home, boy,” and hope for the best. Mostly they wandered away as he walked on; but he feared meeting an animal with no respect for human language. A black German shepherd had all but treed him once—his back against a tree, the hound snarling when Dubin attempted to inch forward. He’d been trapped a mad long time but kept the dog off by talking to it, his heart where it needn’t be, telling it the story of his life. At last it yawned and trotted off. In afterthought it had seemed that a cardinal’s shrill call, sounding much like a man whistling for his dog, had sent the animal on his way. Dubin waved to the invisible red bird in the trees. He’s been set running by the thought of the dog and was running now. “Why, then, should man hasten as if anything less than an eternity were allotted for the least deed?” Who says?

  As he ran, the road had stopped moving and he slowed to a walk. A reddish-brown bitch followed him, a shaggy Irish setter who sometimes appeared, a friend of the people. Ahead, where the bushes rose fifteen feet high on one side of the road, and the trees moved into the downsloping wood on the other, he observed a moving figure. It was Greenfeld in white cap and shirt, ambling along. He often carried his flute or recorder and would play as he walked. Dubin would hear a song in the trees. The flute got gut-close to primitive lament. “Ach, ich flöte.” Greenfeld did one thing and did it well, not a bad way to live a life. Not now in a mood to listen or be listened to —he felt a hunger for solitude—the biographer stepped behind a tree until the flutist had passed by.

  Some other time.

  He was looking at a grove of evergreens below—a pleasure to gaze down at the pointed tops of trees—and a little farther on turned as the road grew level and approached the highway. Soon country merged into village, not a charming sight. After departing the highway Dubin walked north on an old sidewalk of broken slate. Center Campobello was a town of 4,601 souls in New York State, almost a mile from the Vermont border. He had lived there fifteen years, unknown to most: Wm. B. Dubin, who wrote lives, and who, it said in Newsweek, had once received a medal from President Johnson. There was a picture of them shaking hands. He recalled the clutch of the man’s big paw. At the courthouse he turned and walked toward a crimson sunset until he came to the edge of town: his three-story yellow clapboard house with black shutters and wrought-iron widow’s walk on the roof. A porch with white pillars ran half the length of the rear of the house. Dubin began his daily walk at the back door and returned from it, as from a journey, by the front.

  He went around to the rear but Kitty was not in her garden. Dubin studied the dead elm coming down next week. And a skimpy-leaved maple was expiring—“maple decline” the tree man called it. “Save money cuttin’ them both down the same time.” Dubin thought he’d wait till the maple was properly dead. Emerson had counted one hundred and twenty-eight trees on his property, lamenting they must ultimately fall. Dubin had counted sixty-one on his nine acres. Emerson could name every one of his trees; not Dubin. The biographer entered the house, called his wife, and when there was no reply, walked up the stairs. He stood solemnly in Gerald’s old room, then in Maud’s. Later he heard Kitty come into the house and she called up that they had a new cleaning person. “That’s what she calls herself. I advertised today and she phoned while you were on your walk. Would you like your supper hot or cold? I feel dreadfully hot.”

  Dubin, in his study, had picked up his marked copy of Women in Love. A wasted walk, he had wanted to work.

  “Why do you berate yourself in the poor mirror?” Kitty had asked.

  “Because I’m handsomer in my mind than when I look in the glass.”

  “Don’t look,” she had said.

  Rubbing in shaving cream, he was this morning in the bathroom mirror a solemn gent earnestly expostulating. “Next time round I’ll do a comic life. Mark Twain’s wasn’t all that funny.”

  “Shush,” Dubin warned himself, then remembered Kitty had left their bed. He tried to hold down the talk when she was in the bedroom because —if she was awake or it woke her—it made her uneasy; still, after these many years. If you shouted, groaned, or muttered for no apparent reason, or gestured Up Yours in her presence, you were showing loose ends, reminding her of hers. She would rather not be reminded. Kitty, when Dubin rambled on, made clicking noises with her tongue. He would then shut up, though he had more than once reminded her that Montaigne himself used to groan “Confounded fool” in the morning mirror. And Dr. Samuel Johnson was a noisy beehive of crackpot mannerisms.

  “I’m not married to them.”

  “Montaigne’s motto was, ‘What do I know?’ He was a wise man. And Johnson—‘winking and blinking,’ Blake described him—though he looked like a mad hatter, inspired men to reason and courage. He had learned from life.”

  “It’s your voice I hear, not theirs.”

  He beheld in the mirror, under stress of course—like this morning beginning a new biography—a flash of himself in his grave, and with a grimace clutched his gut where he had been stabbed. “Papa,” he cried, wishing he had done things better, and made unhappy gestures of evasion and shame that irritated Kitty when she observed them. He would strike his chest with his fist, point at the sky; his nose twitched like a rabbit’s. Or he would intone a single sentence like: “My daughter never learned to waltz.” That, after six times, would awaken Kitty; she asked through the closed bathroom door what it meant. Dubin pooh-poohed it all. But here he was at it again—a relief this particular morning, conversing with himself at length, glad she had got up and gone out, rare thing for her to do this early in the day. Through the window he watched her contemplating her flowers in thinning mist on the ground. Kitty, wearing blue sneakers and faded pink straw gardening hat, though there was no sun to speak of, looked up and casually waved. The biographer lifted his razor like a sword in salute.

  When he arose at seven, usually she slumbered on. Kitty slept raggedly and liked to pick up an hour or more at the morning end. Her sleep, after a fairly decent springtime interval, had
got worse in summer. She slept deeply awhile, then was restlessly awake for hours; and slept again in the early morning before Dubin awoke. He left her lying on her stomach, wound in a sheer nightgown, the coffee au lait birthmark on her buttock a blemished island, visible when it was too hot for sheet or blanket. Though she tended to deny it—this depended on how well she was presently treating herself—her figure was good, despite large slender feet and thin shoulders. Kitty, brown hair fading, was still an attractive woman. She said she slept best mornings, when he was no longer in bed; and her most memorable dreams were morning dreams.

  He had asked her recently what she thought about when she was awake and she said, “Lately the kids again—mostly. Sometimes silly things like a pair of shoes I paid too much for. Or a clerk who said something rude to me. Or I wish I had been born beautiful, or could lose weight. Some worthless things grind on all night.” “Hemingway prayed when he couldn’t sleep,” Dubin said; “he fished and prayed.” “If I prayed it would have been to be more purposeful, organized, kinder. One would have liked to do less harm.” “To whom?” “Anyone.—To Gerald,” Kitty confessed. He asked her if she thought of death. “I think of those who’ve died. I often play back my life.” Sometimes she went downstairs to read if the house wasn’t too cold. She’d rather not read because it woke her thoroughly and she could afterward not find her way back to sleep. She lay listening to the singing bird-world in the 5 a.m. trees. Or sometimes wept that she wasn’t sleeping. Once in winter Dubin woke to soft stringed music and went downstairs to find her playing the harp in the dark.