Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(17)
I was speaking the truth. My lunch-poem routine, my practice of poetry, was actually quite similar to and compatible with my working practices. One just happened inside the department store, and the other happened outside.
In R.H. Macy’s I was a veritable stroller, too, taking the wooden escalators and roaming from floor to floor, surveying the displays, coming up with ads and writing them. Not so different from roaming the sidewalks around Herald Square after gobbling a sandwich or watching people—seeking faces or trees and greenery and then composing poems about them. That had become the way that I moved through the world, and the way that the world, in turn, moved my mind.
“Ah, Lillian,” said Chester, “I can see that’s the case. And it’s a load off my shoulders to hear you say so. And the viewpoint in the poems is certainly more that of a scoffer at convention than the one in the ads is.”
“But?”
“But,” he said, “I have another worry. And you can tell me if you think I’m being a ninny when I say this. While I agree there’s no sign of the Boxfish wit-well running dry, there’s a danger that comes with oversupply, too, isn’t there? Till now you’ve enjoyed the element of surprise: Your readers have happened on your verses in the pages of a magazine—or, hell, in the even unlikelier setting of an advertisement—and been swept off their feet. It’s like encountering some jungle beast on a stroll through Central Park. But this book—”
A copy of Oh, Do Not Ask for Promises—which had been lurking, I supposed, in my disorderly stack of mail—materialized in Chester’s hand.
“—is like a trip to the Bronx Zoo. It’s a delight, of course. I’m happy to give up serendipity in return for a chance to make a sustained study of your craft, and your sales figures show I’m not alone. But doesn’t this very success hem you in a bit? You’re now subject to the admiring scrutiny of connoisseurs. Each new Boxfish poem is apt to be compared with other Boxfish poems, received as part of a body of work, and not simply assessed on its own merits. Doesn’t this stand to lessen its impact? Now that you’ve become fashionable, are you in danger of falling out of fashion?”
His awkwardness had fallen away as he warmed to his own argument, and he summed up with the satisfied smile of a debate-society champ. It was impossible to tell how sincere he’d been about any of this.
“That is extremely prescient, Chester,” I said, “in one respect: You are being a ninny. As for the rest, I am truly grateful for your concerns, but upon reflection I am inclined to file them in the drawer labeled good problems. Now, shall I get back to the copy?”
“Last thing, Lillian, and then yes, I’ll leave you in peace,” he said, handing me his favorite fountain pen, a gift from his wife, along with the book from his hand. “May I please have your autograph?”
*
Back at E.P. Dutton, Artie, needless to say, was spared any temptation to say I told you so as he’d threatened he might. No one could argue with the bottom line.
“Oh, Do Not Ask for Promises has delivered on its promise!” he’d written in the note he sent with my author’s copies of the second printing.
Artie would end up editing all my books, or the poetry books anyway: Notes Found in the Street in 1933, A Complaint to the Management in 1935, and All Right, You Win; or, I Admit Defeat in 1936.
And my pride just went; there was no fall. Not for a long time.
But E.P. Dutton didn’t publish my final book of original poems. That came out much later, in the 1960s, after Artie was long dead.
With the help of a new editor, one whom I did not like remotely as much, I’d settled upon the name Nobody’s Darling, which by that point had become an accurate descriptor of my state of being.
6
A Sandwich at the Mission
I step out of the Back Porch bar and the streetlights come on. It feels like magic whenever I catch that moment. Like there ought to be a prize. What do I win?
The city is dazzling but uncompassionate. It always has been, but I feel it more now.
Winter, at bay for weeks, has taken sundown as its cue: The wind seems to clear a path for the dark as the chill the weatherman promised gathers in the unruly air. The end-of-shift sidewalk crowds have lost their common purpose and are on more particular errands, some suspect if not outright sinister. So it goes these days in my city.
A green Dodge on Third guns its engine to beat a light, startling me, although the Negroni has done much to calm my spring-loaded nerves. As it speeds off I notice that its stereo is playing a song I recognize, one that I’ve heard playing many times in recent years from other cars and apartment windows and portable tape players but that I’ve never learned the name of, a song about hotels and motels and hipping and hopping and not stopping, a song without any real singing in it. Rap, I gather, is what this is called. I wish the Dodge had stopped, so I could hear more of it.
I have always worked hard to keep myself up to date, to be mindful of trends. At first I did this in order to stay sharp at my two jobs, copywriter and poet, which both required me to know what my audience knew. Lately, since I retired, I do it just because I enjoy it, and because it keeps me from feeling old. I very much enjoy that MTV, for instance, those music videos, and I watch them often, though I still find that a long walk through an unfamiliar neighborhood teaches me more about what’s new and exciting than any number of hours of television can. As ever, the street is the source of the latest things humans have invented—culturally speaking, at least. The last new things, maybe, that humans will ever invent.