From an autobiographical sequence called "La Boheme" I wrote four years
ago.

La Boheme, section 2


In '66 Yale took the covers off
the Vinland Map; so there were conferences
and interviews with medievalists
and lots of press releases to deliver.
The latter was my job, and Mr. Wood
my boss; though once I learned what envelope
to carry to which studio or newsroom,
we only chatted. "Just between us," he said
(or something like it) when that story broke,
"I have my doubts. The source is so obscure,
the ink of course is suspect, and it seems
unlikely there would be no other map;
but who am I ... ?" (It was a phrase of his;
it meant he had no influence on what
the university considered news.)
His metal-rimmed bifocals caught the light;
the eyes above them seemed, as usual,
amused; and the blunt aged hands abandoned
the cluttered desk to fold across his tweeds.
I made, I think, some inappropriate
remark about "following orders," and went off
to do my rounds. By winter of that year
I knew the shortcuts - had discovered them
in dusty, hot September; so when ice
covered the intersections, and behind
my drooping hood I couldn't see a block
through horizontal snow, I angled through
two alleys to the TV station, left
new tracks across the park to reach the paper,
circled the somber courthouse (whose immense
and lightless iron tripods were already
a symbol I had stored for later meaning),
and, having carried slush and envelopes
into perhaps a dozen other lobbies,
cut through the Taft, in whose moth-eaten rooms
a host of undergraduates and I
and Vassar, Smith and townie girls had lost
our cherries.

                         Of the many jobs by which
I paid off my work-scholarship, this was
my favorite. Shelving had been tiresome,
although I liked the catwalks riveted
to the highest stacks, the isolated carrels,
the dim and greenish light, the random things
I read, and most of all the privacy.
The year before that I had learned a skill
already obsolete: repairing slides
at the Art Library. It was a clean,
inviting place, and after the first month
I rarely cut myself. But fully half
the personnel were graduate-student girls -
the other half, or so I thought, their lovers;
and among all those half-winks, half-remarks,
allusions, moues, Warhol- and Beatle-cuts,
there would have been no room for someone half
as eager to impress as I. The year
before that was, of course, my freshman year
and bussing tables the required job -
in which, more than in other interactions,
one saw the special spirit of the preppies
(and of their acolytes from public schools)
declare itself; so that I sometimes found
a ketchup-painting or a glassware tower,
or the fat border of a slice of beef
dropped in a glass of milk.

                                                 But what I liked
about the final job they found for me,
more than the solitude, was Mr. Wood.
I remember, though abstractly, that he treated
everything that happened with the same
good humor, the same unselfconscious patience;
told stories with not one but many points
about his former life with major papers;
had shared more than one drink with Hemingway,
Mencken and Malraux among others; seemed
to remember people's troubles, children, birthdays,
and always found the time to talk to me.
He condemned the war; approved, with reservations,
of what was happening in Berkeley - once
murmured, "When all this is over, they
will scurry into sociology
or Lit departments, and retire there;
meanwhile they have a target of convenience."
He viewed my struggle to evade the draft
benignly, even shared my grim relief
when the old joke of asthma, in my case,
turned real enough to save me. Otherwise
it strikes me that I only spoke to him
about opinions, not about my life
either at home or in the tower room
where Wallace, Jeff and I had, for three years
accepted the cold hearth, polluted walls,
gray laundry, sagging cots, and much-initialed
desks that were the price of privilege.
Sometimes we almost managed to escape
our general mistrust and the familiar
loathing of men confined too long together,
and then we talked. But Wallace, who had lost
three months after his fall from Jeff's Bultaco
and would be back, was spending all his time
in bed with Mariann, a candy-striper
from the hospital. His ROTC greens
had been returned, his father's vast ambitions
sensitively considered and refused,
and we were friendlier. The laughs and moans
emerging from his room, her working-class,
explosive, sentimental diction grated
until one afternoon she tried me on.
She grated more on Jeff, whose bedroom was
the living room, and who, the previous spring,
had drunk his breakfast. Now, in rare half-hours
squandered outside the library, he stared
over the brown or bare or budding trees
with rage that any counselor would find
inordinate, or with a question that
the Ordinary Language types in charge
of his department probably would call
ill-stated. He became a banker.

                                                            I
was buried, meanwhile, in my senior thesis,
which was, I think, called Images of Freedom
in Cowper, Collins, Thomson, Young, and Gray.
(It bombed. One reader spoke of my "tendentious
insistence on Romantic prototypes.")
One night I drew a graph: one rising curve,
one falling, several dotted verticals.
If my Coefficient of Exhaustion crossed
that of Increasing Workload (I explained
to Jeff and Wallace) any time before
our graduation, I was doomed. - Also
there was the agony of asking my
professors to send rave reviews of me
to graduate school (to which I didn't want
to go, and ultimately didn't). B____
had valued me, but lacked the influence
he attained later; cycled around campus
like a pale, troubled, ratty-sweatered pumpkin.
H____ liked to growl about how hard the work
would be if we got anywhere important,
meanwhile steadily dropping half-smoked Trues
into a bowl already overflowing.
He lived and taught in the same office; had
a bed like ours beneath a rubbing of
the words on Shakespeare's grave. I didn't think
he'd help, and didn't ask, and all that year
avoided various pillars of the Old
and very Protestant ascendancy
I had known earlier. - When I had done
as much as I could stand for class or thesis
or for what other people called career,
I liked to walk beyond my normal route
and farther than my classmates ever dared
into New Haven. Urban planning had,
that decade, separated Negroes from
downtown and campus; what we feared instead
(though just as tacitly) were roving gangs
of Polish, Irish, and Italian youths,
who fought each other happily with fists
but went for us with knives. That late at night
I noticed no one, but discovered streets
like my home town's (which fact resulted less
in homesickness than an illusion that
my life would have some overlap); a cross,
tall, wooden, fancifully filigreed,
in the garden of a Lithuanian church;
a park with lamps; and, at the farthest point
I reached, a blockhouse-modern senior center
with small concrete chess-tables, where I couldn't
sit without remembering Max von Sydow
and Anders Ek. And there I thought about
the poems I was writing - densely formal
(there seemed no point or impetus to something
freer, more Ginsbergesque). Also a story,
its basic subject sexual frustration,
which I was polishing. I liked the prose;
in prose it seems you can go on and on.

I finished it one day in early March,
and when the literary magazine
of my residential college said they'd take it
I thought of showing it to Mr. Wood.
He smiled at it above his spectacles
and firmly promised he would have it read
by Thursday. And on Thursday he announced,
"I like it very much. That dream he has
of Europe is especially delightful."
"I've never been - " "Of course you let that on;
it's very stylized." Asked if I had read
Kafka's Amerika. "But what I think
is really good - I mean most clearly seen
and rendered - is your young protagonist:
the split between his thoughts and his surroundings,
his need and his capacity to act.
He is a kind of existential hero."
I went back to my room immensely happy
that someone had applied that phrase to me
(or to my character). By now it was
the season when, traditionally, students
committed suicide. The melting snow
was bringing out last year's unburied flotsam;
the stones appeared to wear new coats of grime.
None of it bothered me, and all that night,
as I recall, the work went easier;
for I, confirmed in the one wish or plan
I ever had, was thinking I could talk
to Mr. Wood, not only about writing
or politics, and looking forward to
tomorrow. But on Friday he was out
and Monday I was off (I think I took
the GRE). On Tuesday when I came
to work, people were quiet, and his desk,
always a mess, was neat and empty, with
perhaps an extra pair of bifocals
folded in the center of his blotter.