A POEM FOR A SUNDAY
FRAN LEBOWITZ , EDWARD ALBEE, and MICHELLE WILLIAMS ALL LOVED POET HOWARD MOSS. I LOVED HIM, TOO
(Above: Howard Moss and Fran Lebowitz at a 939 Foundation literary evening at the Puck Building, 1983. Listening to Brendan Gill. Photo by Diana Mara Henry.)
Fran Lebowitz and I have lots of mutual friends - which confounds her but bemuses me. We did share a confoundment, however, that Howard Moss befriended us both, that such a man could be a connective narrative thread in our lives. Fran has always been able to rationalize my reach into her social realm, I think, because our parallel narratives are just bound to conflate, set as they are from time to time in the same wealth of worlds - the socially mighty, Factory workers, magazines. Howard - who shared a National Book Award for poetry with Frank O’Hara in the early 1970s - was the Poetry Editor of The New Yorker from 1948 until his death in 1987. Fran loved the man and loved his poetry and loved his company, but it was a parody he wrote of Ned Rorem’s diaries and published in The New Yorker in 1975 that she holds dear to her heart - yes, Fran has a big one actually (sorry, Fran) - as a talisman for its wit and how it makes those who understand its wit laugh in a kind of wicked wonder at how smart it is without ever having to resort to a smarmy sort of meanness. Howard grew up in New York City and early on seemed to have hung his wit out to dry in the drollest of Manhattan light. W.H. Auden loved his drollness as well and wrote a droll little clerihew in his honor:
TO THE POETRY EDITOR OF THE NEW YORKER
Is Robert Lowell
Better than Noel
Coward,
Howard?
I remember Fran looking at me without a tint of contempt in her eyes, which was usually how she saw me for years, but with a kind of kinship that shocked us when we spotted each other at Howard’s funeral. It was sorrow over Howard’s death where we finally found our truest similarity.
As I child who suffered the consecutive deaths of my parents in 1963 and 1964, I was groomed by grief. So sharing sorrow with someone comes naturally to me. When I interviewed Michelle Williams for The Daily Beast, it was not long after the death of Heath Ledger, the father of her child. I had done a cover story on Heath for Vanity Fair that they both had liked which was one of the reasons she had said yes to my doing the Beast interview with her. I stopped beforehand at a used book store on Smith Street in Brooklyn close to the brownstone where she still lived, one that she had been sharing with Ledger, to buy her a gift. I purchased a book of Selected Poems by Howard because I knew she liked poetry and thought she might find Howard’s a kind of emotional salve, a becalming presence as I always had. I was correct. Upon arriving at the brownstone and settling in for some tea, I handed her the book. She gasped and teared up. Just that morning, she told me, she had been trying to recall the name of the Howard Moss poem that had helped her through her profound sadness after Heath’s death. But she couldn’t remember its title. She ran a finger down the Table of Contents. “My God,” she said, “here it is,” and then she softly read it aloud:
THE PRUNED TREE
As a torn paper might seal up its side,
Or a streak of water stitch itself to silk
And disappear, my wound has been my healing,
And I am made more beautiful by losses.
See the flat water in the distance nodding
Approval, the light that fell in love with statues,
Seeing me alive, turns its motion toward me.
Shorn, I rejoice in what was taken from me.
What can the moonlight do with my new shape
But trace and retrace its miracle of order?
I stand, waiting for the strange reaction
Of insects who knew me in my larger self,
Unkempt, in a naturalness I did not love.
Even the dog’s voice rings with a new echo,
And all the little leaves I shed are singing,
Singing to the moon of shapely newness.
Somewhere what I lost I hope is springing
To life again. The roofs, astonished by me,
Are taking new bearings in the night, the owl
Is crying for a further wisdom, the lilac
Putting forth its strongest scent to find me.
Butterflies, like sails in grooves, are winging
out of the water to wash me, wash me.
Now, I am stirring like a seed in China.
Howard Moss convinced me that I was indeed a writer. I was still in my twenties and had been encouraged by a fiction editor at The New Yorker, Linda Asher, another dear friend of Howard’s, to continue to send her short stories when she had discovered one I had submitted to the magazine in the slush pile. I had been introduced to Howard by a neighbor of his, our mutual friend Henry Geldzahler, and I told Howard about Linda’s encouragement and the number of letters she had sent me telling me to keep writing and keep sending her my stories. I had only recently come very close to having one published since her tone in the last letter she’d sent me had been one of deep disappointment that she had not been able to get it into the magazine. Howard told me to send him something I’d written that I had not sent to her. “Send me your latest,” he said. So I sent him the story to which he refers in this letter below. It is still some of the most insightful advice I’ve ever gotten not only about writing but about being a better person. I cherish it.
I even used what he wrote at the end of this letter to begin my second memoir I Left It on the Mountain. “I’ve met some friends of yours,” he wrote. “In fact, you seem to be known by everyone, and I have a whole new idea of your life. You were born and instantly flown up to New York, where, like a Commissar of Culture, you proceeded down a long receiving line that included major and minor figures in the worlds of dance, drama, poetry, sculpture, architecture, and so on. The only thing you missed is alchemy.”
Henry Geldzahler and Howard are the focus of “The Mentor” chapter in that second memoir. Edward Albee, a mutual friend of Howard’s and mine, had liked my first memoir, Mississippi Sissy, and agreed to be in the second one talking about Howard in that chapter. Indeed, I first met Edward at one of Howard’s New Year’s Eve parties. Edward invited me down to his Tribeca loft to talk about Howard when I was working on I Left It on the Mountain. I asked him when he and Howard had first met, but he couldn’t recall. “I just can’t really remember - starting back during my formative years in New York City - when Howard wasn’t around,” he told me. “I left home in 1948 when I was around 20 and moved straight to Greenwich Village. There was a ten year period there between ’48 and ’58 - like your own, Kevin, between ’74 and ’84 - when I really learned everything and educated myself. We were all around each other, all of us who were to make it in the next generation, all the painters and poets and everybody. Nobody knew anybody and yet everybody knew everybody because none of us was famous at that point. We were all just at the cusp of doing stuff in that ten-year period.
“I had my own mentors back then, you know, a whole generation of them,” said Edward. “You need all that. You have to have that. It’s harder now. Everyone is so protected from everyone else these days. And it’s too expensive now to be a struggling artist in this town. My second apartment here was on Henry Street on the Lower East Side. A six-floor walk-up. It was $16 a month. One of my later apartments was underneath Howard in that brownstone on Tenth Street between Sixth and Fifth. That’s when we really became close, when we were upstairs, downstairs neighbors.
“But back in the late 1940s and early 1950s there were only a few hangouts with their specific denizens. There was the Cedar Bar where all the painters would go and ... hmm ... lie down. I assume I must have first met Howard back then at one of those places. I don’t remember when I actually met anybody, I’ve met so many people in my life. I just knew him forever. But it was probably in the early 1950s when our paths crossed. He was already at The New Yorker so he was the impressive one. I was the impressed. …
“I was first attracted to Howard because of his poetry,” he continued. “I admired his work so. Howard was a brilliant, brilliant poet. Very much influenced, I’d say, by Auden. And Elizabeth Bishop, who was a dear friend. But his poetry was more than brilliant; it was moving. He was an elegist, I suppose, except when he was not being one. All his poems are about Howard’s perception of reality.
“Speaking of which - reality- I tried to persuade Howard not to buy that house of his in East Hampton where you’d often visit him. It really didn’t have anything to do with him. It was very modern. Too modern. It was a strange little house. It just didn’t suit him. I wasn’t proper for him. I kept showing him houses. Older houses. With all sorts of wonderful areas for books. Lots of little rooms hidden away. I thought he would have been happier in such a house. He did like to get away from the place and visit me in Montauk, as that awful dinner party you came to with him attests.”
Edward was right. I’d often visit Howard at his home in The Springs section of East Hampton and we’d ride over to Montauk to have dinner at Edward’s place. The dinner party Edward mentioned was for his mother Frankie. He had invited Howard and me along with Joanna Steichen and Elaine Steinbeck, “two widows at their peak,” as Howard described them on our drive over.
When we got to Edward’s he was busy in the kitchen pureeing most of the food we were to eat because of his mother’s digestive problems. She was in the bathroom tending to such problems I presumed and, as Howard and Elaine and Joanna caught up with each other, Frankie emerged, all six feet of her, from the bathroom in her Halston ultra-suede dress. She eyed me up and down. “You look like you’re good with a zipper,” she said and turned around so I could zip up her Halston for her.
During the dinner everyone decided to pretend that nothing was pureed - at least no one mentioned it. Elaine Steinbeck, who still had the gruff charm of the stage manager about her - she was one of the first females to ever have such a job on Broadway (Howard had prepped me in the car about her) when she took the backstage reins of Oklahoma! and then ran Paul Robeson’s national tour of Othello - took it upon herself to keep the conversation going until the curtain could fall on this rarified bit of dinner theatre.
A violent summer thunderstorm erupted by dinner’s end and blew over a Henry Moore sculpture that was on the bluff outside the dining room’s picture window. I volunteered to go outside to right it. As I stood it back up in the pouring rain I turned and saw Howard and Edward standing at the window with their backs to the women. Howard said something to Edward, something droll no doubt, something dear, and made him laugh. Edward then rejoined the women, but Howard stayed right there at the window. He stared at me where I had found my place that night - not at that dinner table but, outside, next to the precariousness of art. He waved at me. I waved back. I am waving still.
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