Lit: A Memoir

When I bristled that I’d been a philosophy major in college, he said, And that’s all you’re telling anybody. What you took in college. You’re pointing right back at your own head, telling everybody how smart it is. Write what you know.

But according to you, I don’t know squat.

Your heart, Mary Karr, he’d say. His pen touched my sternum, and it felt for all the world like the point of a dull spear as he said, Your heart knows what your head don’t. Or won’t.

He wanted me to picture a woman climbing five flights in a Harlem apartment building in summer heat, then having to go back down with armloads of garbage. He said, If you’re standing on the corner of 116th Street poeticizing, what could you possibly say to help her climb back up?

This prospect of actual readers flattered me less than it scared me. He kept pushing me to go back to school. Also, long before seeing shrinks helped me to reconcile my warring insides, Etheridge fought to import Daddy onto my page. In one poem, he picked out some feeble old guy whose hands shook as he tried to bait a hook and said, Your old man’s knocking on your door, and you won’t let him in.

Etheridge spoke to the pool-shooting, catfish-gutting, crawfish-sucking homegirl I was trying to squelch.

Such an unlikely savior. Etheridge sometimes banged on my apartment door at three a.m., trying to mooch money for dope. Mary once caught him in the bathroom—with his kids in the next room—a hypodermic in his jugular.

He talked to me about this new kind of graduate writers’ program in Vermont—low-residency, they called it. You show up a few weeks at a pop, twice per year, for lectures, readings, workshops, intense tutoring. A poet tailors a curriculum with you, and for six months you mail manuscripts and papers he or she works over. What did I think? It was either bogus, or I’d never get in.

Meanwhile, I cobbled up an experiment with the ladies to see whether the poems I brought had sunk in at all, for the scene was part spelling bee, part revival meeting. Each week, I’d pit two poems against each other, a great poem and a crummy one. With an accuracy that rocked me back, they’d boo the crap stuff, then hallelujah the Yeats. Walt talked me into keeping a running tally to see how consistent they were, which I did on an index card taped to my closet door. Over two years, some 80 percent of their choices were as good as most book critics’. Even hard pieces by Stevens and Apollinaire, they’d go crazy for. The sole exceptions? If both poems were average or okay, or if one poem was plain speech and one ornate—in those cases, no predicting what they’d go for.

At the symphony one night when Shirley couldn’t go, Walt pressed on flaws in my method, asking, Any way you’re swaying them?

You mean I’m unintentionally signaling them somehow? I said. Maybe intoning the gorgeous ones in some hyper-approving way?

The violins were tuning up, the different bows trying to find the same note. It was that instant before a concert when I always wanted to bolt, because what if I didn’t like Beethoven, which I’d never heard? Maybe I should beg off and say I’m feeling sick. At home, I could make a hoagie and turn on the tube, rather than stay captive in an overheated hall in a seat that made your legs sweaty with a stranger on one side hogging your armrest.

Walt’s face had that expectant air, though, he maybe knew the music was so magnificent that even a plebe like me could hear it. He said, Let’s say the women do have some innate taste, despite lacking any analytical tools they could articulate. What’s that mean, you think?

I can’t remember how I said it—and we both knew I cared too much about the outcome for my little test to pass as science. I told him I wanted to believe in quality the way I had as a kid, when a great poem could flood me with certainty that there was something good in the world. Or somebody out there knew who I was even if we’d never met—or never would meet. Which made poetry one of the sole spiritual acts in our mostly godless household. Just because the ladies never went to school didn’t mean they couldn’t tell the difference between Beethoven and The Hokey-Pokey. Awe was okay with them, possibly their natural state. No really crap teachers had ruined their native taste by preaching what they were supposed to like.

Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air, a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody’s head off.

Which was what the symphony did that night for the first time, me sitting alongside Walt while the soft timpani mallets with the dandelion-puff heads banged loud enough for the dead, deaf composer to rouse from the distant German dirt.

Afterward, Walt and I didn’t say much, just walked through the parking lot exhaling steam with the crowd, everybody’s eyes glancing in opposing vectors, brushing off each other but meeting, too, with that soft recognition you have after being drenched awhile by the same orderly chaos. We were like swimmers walking out of the sea. Every ten paces or so, headlights flipping on would turn shadow figures into full-fledged human units. Unlocking the car, Walt brought up my half-assed experiment again, saying, How’re you sure you know which poem’s best?

I slid inside, saying, I just do.

Which—ignorant though I knew I was—the ladies had proved to me in some way. And the next day, at Walt’s urging, I sent away for that graduate application.

5 (#ulink_6759fe6f-8cac-510a-876b-31e820bedf38)

Never Mind (#ulink_6759fe6f-8cac-510a-876b-31e820bedf38)

You wear a mask, and your face grows to fit it.

—George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant”

My first therapist’s name was—I shit you not—Tom Sawyer. What are the odds. A grad student Shirley Mink supervised, Tom must’ve been cudgeled into seeing me for the measly five bucks a pop I paid months late, if at all. With his runner’s lanky form, he was usually clad in jeans and hiking boots. His fox-red beard was tamed into the same shape as Freud’s—the color so at odds with his streaky blond pageboy that I wondered if it hooked over his ears.

Twice per week, when I deigned to show up—three times if I’d broken up with some beau or been drunked up enough days in a row to wonder was I finally going insane—I whined to Tom about who to date or whether to go back to school or why nobody published my (infantile, unintelligible) poems.

Let’s go back to your mother, he said for the hundredth time.

Lord, don’t be so Freudian. Soon I’ll find you in a tweed vest and bow tie, those little wire rims.

Your complicated mother. Your absent father.

We’ve been over all that, I said. She’s not like that anymore. I mean, she drinks and takes pills more than we’d like. There are the benders still.

Tell it again.

In language more glib and jokey than I’m capable of now, I crankily told Tom the story for the umpteenth time. How Mother doused our every toy with gas and tossed on a match. Much of the night’s a blur but for her standing over us with a carving knife.

Tom said, You still have nightmares you’ve murdered her.

Usually, my daddy does that with a cleaver—wouldn’t old Sigmund eat that up, so to speak. There’s a Bill Knott poem, I’ve recently killed my father and will soon marry my mother. My problem is, should his side of the family be invited to the wedding …

You joke a lot, but you’re carrying around some very powerful feelings.

Oh, I feel bad enough, awful even, just not about Mother and Daddy.

Let me ask you something. Whose fault was that night?

We’ve gone over this. I don’t know. Probably mine, like I said. I was a pain in the ass. My sister’s to blame maybe a little, but she was older and way less trouble.

For a mother to be expected to show up sane and reliable is the least any kid deserves.

I heated up to defend her. And there, infuriatingly, the scene in the therapist’s office and with my mother just cut out, went blank, like undeveloped pictures accidentally slid through an X-ray.

Which kept happening—therapis interruptus. Whenever Tom probed toward my folks at length, I suffered these dramatic erasures and snapped awake, zombielike, leaving the office for the bus stop, wet face stinging. What had I been blubbering about? Not a shred of the session stayed with me, the same person who found long stretches of movie dialogue or yards of doggerel running through her head.

Once when Walt met me for lunch, I asked if these nonalcoholic blackouts were definite proof I was crazy. Just tell me straight, I said, upending the sugar canister into my coffee. Don’t hold back.

The brain sometimes has a hard time incorporating certain memories, he said.

I liked that he talked about it in physiological terms, to make it feel less like me, more like a car we were staring into the engine of.

So it’s not me—just my brain?

Are you your brain?

Don’t try to trick me into learning something, I said.

Your level of functioning contraindicates serious mental illness.

Only intermittently. I keep setting fire to my life.

Interesting image, he said, knowing my incendiary backstory. Maybe if your mother comes in with you for a session the way Tom’s suggested, you’ll get new data about her hospitalization.

He’s theorized that she’s manic-depressive.