Robert Coover - Public Burning

His mother’s words. She loved the adulation, the wealth, the power. His father loved the poet’s life more than its rewards, loved controversy, loved style. True genius, he once told his young son, is to be faithful to one style, while exploring intransigently all that it contains — like making love all your life to one woman. Maybe he learned that from Ernest Hemingway. Or vice versa. TIME in any case has kept his father’s counsel, pursuing those stylistic infatuations that bedizened his earliest work and have been ever since the only passion he’s ever known: the puns and quips, inverted sentences, occupational titles, Homeric epithets and rhythms, compound words, cryptic captions, middle names and parenthetical nicknames, ruthless emphasis on physical details, especially when somewhat obnoxious, extended metaphors (“slowly the ribbon of his voice unrolled/ with here and there a knot…”), alliteration, rugged verbs and mocking modifiers, and TIME’S own personal idioglossary of word-coinages, inventions like “kudos” and “pundits” and “tycoons” and hundreds more which have passed into the national lexicon. He called footballer Red Grange an “eel-hipped runagade” and G. K. Chesterton a “paradoxhund” before most children his age could even spell “cat.” A Charlie Chaplin movie was “a gorgeously funny example of custard-piety,” and when the Queen Mother of Spain died, he looked up the true meaning of “the Escorial,” where she was buried, and blithely penned: “They took her to the Dump.” Well, he was a youngster, he could do such things and get away with them, even the Queen Mother might have smiled. And if sometimes he strove too hard to be clever and overshot the mark (“A ghastly ghoul prowled around a cemetery not far from Paris. Into family chapels went he, robbery of the dead intent upon…”), if sometimes the coinages proliferated into self-parody and “backward ran sentences until reeled the mind,” it was understood that such excess was a necessary flaw in any great poet: you have to take your pratfalls while you’re still young — the old man who suddenly lurches into audacity late in life is a fool.

TIME was close to his father and deeply mourned his sudden passing — more perhaps than Mother Luce did, though she was pregnant again and so had worries of her own — and though he kept his feelings largely to himself, one could sense in him ever after a restless unconscious search for his missing father. Perhaps — he forced himself to admit this — perhaps he needed his father’s death, needed the search, the inexpressible longing, in order to achieve the emotional depth and maturity essential to a Master (and let’s face it, there was always something sophomoric and nihilistic about his father’s influence, loving and protective as he was, something of the restless jock and compulsive boozer), perhaps in all great poets’ lives there had to be these early tragedies, and this was his. His mother, though increasingly occupied with other children, took over his development for a while, and though his most important formative years were behind him, she did instill in him a stricter discipline, a wider-ranging urbanity, and a greater appreciation of intimate detail. The growing cynicism and detachment, however, were his own.

His sister FORTUNE was born the week of his seventh birthday, a beautiful child, well-endowed, ultimately more brilliant and sophisticated than he, tutored by songsmiths and loved by the rich, but though she sometimes teased him and once even called him a “fascist” (admittedly he was flirting at the time with the far right, supporting Franco in Spain and Mussolini in Italy, picturing Haile Selassie as “squealing for protection” for his “squalling Abyssinia,” and smearing Jews and Socialists — but all that only went to show he was a lot smarter than Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who’d been growing up with him), FORTUNE always looked up to him as her big brother, and depended upon him, a father surrogate of sorts, for guidance and protection. As did his baby brother LIFE, even though he’d enjoyed a success in the art world the equal of TIME’S in literature, radio, and film. There were other children along the way, some adopted, some stillborn, others neglected and allowed to die, even a bastard called HIGH TIME, apparently engendered in a nightmare by the Phantom and quickly done away with when the truth was known; but the pride of Mother Luce, and indeed of the nation, were her three remarkable and close-knit sibling prodigies, TIME, LIFE, and FORTUNE.… Or at least up till now. The old lady’s been getting skittish again of late, seems to be losing interest in the arts, flushes like a schoolgirl at ballgames and boxing matches. There was a big party just a few days ago, everybody high as a kite and letting themselves go, he’s pretty sure she’s been knocked up again.

He’s not jealous — why should he be? Oh, some people say she’s trying to breed his successor since she fears for his life, but he doubts this: one Poet Laureate is all any mother can hope for. What does upset him, though, is that she’s being drawn away from him, just like when his father died. He feels his self-confidence draining away. Tonight’s events, for example: how will he cope with them? What can he hope to achieve? MOTHERLESS CHILDREN HAS A HARD TIME WHEN THE MOTHER’S DEAD — he saw somebody a while ago carrying a picket with that written on it, and when he should have laughed, he shuddered. Has he lost the way? This spectacle, even as it fascinates him, frightens him with its challenges to the imagination, its dangers, its hints of hidden appositions, confrontations with the Shape-Shifting Absolute, webworks of treacherous abstractions that make his verse somehow irrelevant, unequal to the occasion, silly even. Everybody else seems to be rejuvenated by coming here, he feels years older. His instinct is to flee, forget it — it’s not his mission “to exorcise the Doubt which is conquering the Western World,” his mother’s already told him that, his job is to stay alive — but he is a poet (he reminds himself) and he can do no other than to stay. Art is not an idle affectation, it is a solemn calling, a penance, a manly devotion to something behind the profane world of baseball games and movie reviews. The poet is not merely an entertainer, though this would be the easy way out, not merely a celebrator of his age — he is also a prophet of religious truth, the recreator of deep tribal realities, committed “desperately, whimsically, absurdly, cockeyedly, whole-souledly” to Revelation. “TIME will reveal everything,” Euripides prophesied. “He is a babbler, and speaks even when not asked.”

And so, though circuses and theater generally fail to move him, though he distrusts mobs and is dubious about the selection of Times Square for the executions (as Mother Luce has said: “New York is in the bloodstream of America and America flows hot through New York. But New York is not America, son… New York is the fascination of America — where vices easily become virtues and virtues vices…”), here is where he must be tonight. It is, as his mother would say, his “manifest duty.” And he is not without defenses. If worse comes to worst, he will do what he has always done. If he bursts through the scrim of phenomena and grasps the whole of tonight’s events, he will celebrate them; if they overwhelm him, he will belittle them. He’s a professional, after all.

“I been busy as a one-armed paperhanger with the nettle-rash,” stormed Uncle Sam, “copin’ with riots and wars, payroll robberies, murders, and onscrofulous sabotage! Them parleyvoos, who can’t even get a damn guvvamint together, are tearin’ up our Embassy, the Bolsheviks are massin’ for a riot in Munich, I’m exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without and convulsions from within stirrin’ a ‘ruption in me equal to a small arthquake, time is fast runnin’ out, I need ever’ able hand at my command at full strength and manly firmness — and Holy Foley! what do I find you doin’?!”