{"id":135723,"date":"2019-04-22T09:00:02","date_gmt":"2019-04-22T13:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=135723"},"modified":"2019-04-22T13:22:20","modified_gmt":"2019-04-22T17:22:20","slug":"a-walk-with-fame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/04\/22\/a-walk-with-fame\/","title":{"rendered":"A Walk with Fame"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Inside the church at Tepoztl\u00e1n<\/p><\/div>\n

One winter in January, I stood with the Irish poet Paul Muldoon in front of a glass coffin, in the Mexican town of Tepoztl\u00e1n. Inside, a figure lay under a purple cloth.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs that a saint of some kind?\u201d Muldoon asked. \u201cDo you think that\u2019s real?\u201d<\/p>\n

I said I doubted it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s disappointing. Where I come from in Ireland, in the cathedral in Armagh, is the head of blessed Oliver Plunkett. A church without a head is really no church at all,\u201d he said, with the bare trace of a smile. \u201cWhen your expectations are as high as mine, almost everything is going to be disappointing.\u201d<\/p>\n

We had walked to the church together from town, retracing the poet Hart Crane\u2019s footsteps around Tepoztl\u00e1n. Muldoon walked slowly, his tweed jacket flapping, his brows knit together behind his thick frames. I was nervous and enthusiastic, wanting to make a good impression. I was standing next to a real writer; someone I\u2019d read and admired.<\/p>\n

We were in Tepoztl\u00e1n as part of a writing program\u2014Muldoon was leading a poetry class, I was participating in a cultural journalism workshop. I\u2019d traveled there from Paris, where my husband and I had recently moved for my husband\u2019s work. I\u2019d never been published, despite many dozens of story submissions. I kept a blog, which was read by my mother and three friends. I worked odd, exhausting jobs, determined not to commit myself to any serious work that might get in the way of writing, but was rapidly losing faith in my own potential. <\/p>\n

I applied to the program in Mexico one night in Paris after I\u2019d unpacked all my books and placed them on our new bookshelves in the living room. When I was done, my husband asked whether I could clear a bit of space for his mathematics books, which I\u2019d relegated to the guest room.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d I snapped. \u201cI can\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

He told me I was being unfair.<\/p>\n

What did he know about unfair, I said.<\/p>\n

I went up to the shelves and spread my arms.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is all I have for an office,\u201d I sobbed. \u201cThese are my only friends.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

On the plane to Mexico, I read Hart Crane\u2019s Mexico City letters. One of the letters was written in Tepoztl\u00e1n, where I was headed. The descriptions in the letter were very similar to Crane\u2019s poem \u201cThe Broken Tower,\u201d which I\u2019d recently read for the first time. This letter, I thought, was a sign of something.<\/p>\n

Two days later in Tepoztl\u00e1n, I introduced myself to Paul Muldoon after a reading hosted at a town home. Muldoon was lying on the hosts\u2019 living room floor, petting their basset hound stretched on top of him. Outside in the garden, guests were drinking cocktails around a swimming pool.<\/p>\n

I told him about Crane\u2019s visit to the Tepoztl\u00e1n monastery eighty-three years before. Crane had written his last poem \u201cThe Broken Tower\u201d shortly afterward. In a letter, he described the religious ceremony he attended, very similar in its shades and echoes to \u201cThe Broken Tower\u201d: the churchyard at dawn, the ringing of the bells, the steep, terraced cliffs.<\/p>\n

Before Muldoon got up to go to the garden, I asked timidly if he would join me for a walk that week to retrace Crane\u2019s footsteps. We could visit the church, walk around the monastery, go up to the terrace. Then we would sit down to read \u201cThe Broken Tower.\u201d<\/p>\n

I would write an essay for my workshop afterward, about Muldoon\u2019s reactions to the poem and the landscape. Two great poets, I told him, meeting years apart in the monastery.<\/p>\n

I added that the bell tower was currently closed for restoration\u2014to me another strange sign\u2014as if the poem were reenacting itself:<\/p>\n

The bells I say, the bells break down their tower;
\nAnd swing I know not where \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

*<\/p>\n

The churchyard was empty except for young lovers nestled in the shade of the high walls, idle white dogs sprawled around the dusty grounds. Such courtyards are typical of Mexican churches and contain an outdoor altar, because the Spaniards had not wanted the indigenous people to enter the church.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, however conscious one would be of the cathedral in the center of town,\u201d Muldoon said, looking up toward the Aztec pyramid perched on the cliffs, \u201cI\u2019m sure a lot of people here haven\u2019t completely given up on what the pyramid stands for. Why should they? That\u2019s part of who they are and this is a belief system that\u2019s been imposed on them.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his letter, Hart Crane talked of the same clash between the two temples in Tepoztl\u00e1n, each one claiming the town as its own.<\/p>\n

As we crossed the church\u2019s wooden door embossed with animals (I thought they might be lizards; Muldoon suggested griffins), I said that Mexican churches must be very different from Irish ones.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was very familiar with the lushness of the entire Catholic package,\u201d Muldoon said, \u201chaving been brought up as an altar boy, serving mass, being in charge of the incense boat and looking at all the splendid uniforms\u2014the beautiful garments, the vestments\u2014that the priests wore as they advanced in significance from bishops and cardinals all the way up to the pope and his gaudy garb. After that, the church that I went to was actually quite sparse, quite barren, and in that sense, I suppose the Mexican experience is somewhat different.\u201d<\/p>\n

His voice rose, tilted, descended, as he paused to choose his precise words.<\/p>\n

We walked past the glass coffin, past plaster saints draped in sequined cloths and plastic roses, their niches lit with fluorescent lights. One Jesus was wearing a black wig.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you not find these dressed-up dolls humorous?\u201d I said, immediately regretting my question, and my choice of the word humorous<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI suppose,\u201d Muldoon said thoughtfully, \u201cthere is an exuberance\u2014something of the carry-over of the native peoples.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Eighty-three years earlier, in September 1931, Hart Crane visited Tepoztl\u00e1n with an archeologist from Wisconsin to dig in the surrounding cornfields. Crane had arrived in Mexico City in April of the same year on board the USS Orizaba<\/em> with plans to write an epic poem about the Aztecs.<\/p>\n

On his first night in Tepoztl\u00e1n, he went to the monastery for the yearly festival of the god Tepozt\u00e9catl. The monastery was abandoned, its painted walls plastered, the cloister overgrown with banana trees. On the terrace, people had gathered around lanterns wearing white suits and hats.<\/p>\n

In a letter to William Wright, Crane wrote, \u201ca drummer and a flute player standing facing the dark temple on the heights, alternated their barbaric service at ten minute intervals with loud ringing of all the church bells by sextons of the church. Two voices, still in conflict here in Mexico, the idol\u2019s and the Cross \u2026 It is something to hear bells rung, but it is inestimably better to see the sextons wield the hammers, swinging on them with the full weight of their entire bodies like frantic acrobats.\u201d<\/p>\n

As light was breaking over the mountains, a townsman handed Crane drumsticks and asked him to participate in the music.<\/p>\n

Some months later, Crane wrote what would be his last poem, \u201cThe Broken Tower.\u201d At the time, he was having an affair with Peggy Baird, the wife of his friend Malcolm Cowley. He sent the poem to magazines while he was still in Mexico.<\/p>\n

And so it was I entered the broken world
\nTo trace the visionary company of love, its voice
\nAn instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
\nBut not for long to hold each desperate choice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Baird joined Crane in Mexico City and the couple spent several tumultuous months together before deciding to go back to the United States. When they left for New York on the Orizaba<\/em>, Crane had not yet heard back from editors about the poem.<\/p>\n

On the morning of April 27, he came to Baird\u2019s cabin wearing pajamas and a topcoat. Baird told him to put on clothes, and shave.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not going to make it dear,\u201d Crane said. \u201cI\u2019m utterly disgraced.\u201d<\/p>\n

He went up to the deck. The ship was treading the Tropic of Cancer. He took off his coat, draped it over the railing, and threw himself overboard.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I spent my afternoons leading up to my walk with Muldoon on the terrace of the monastery, overlooking the cliffs. I read and reread \u201cThe Broken Tower,\u201d sitting on the terrace ledge, puzzling over the elusive words, cloaked in the shades of the landscape around me.<\/p>\n

Pagodas, campaniles with reveilles out leaping\u2014
\nO terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I also read everything I could of Muldoon\u2019s poetry, his essays, and interviews. I even found this verse he\u2019d written many years before:<\/p>\n

Both beautiful, one a gazebo.
\nWhen Hart Crane fell
\nfrom the Orizaba
\nit was into the trou normand of the well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This was another sign, I thought. Those days before our walk, I imagined the essay I was going to write, lines of it flitting through my mind at every hour. I imagined Muldoon enchanted by the landscape; the two of us deciphering its connections to the poem; all the coincidences leading up to that moment. I thought this essay would be a turning point for me, that I was finally going to write something that mattered.<\/p>\n

In the years since I\u2019d started writing, I\u2019d been waiting for something to happen. I wanted for someone with authority\u2014a real writer\u2014to encourage me. I didn\u2019t have an answer to that question writers are asked so often: Why do you write? I had no conviction of my own, so I wanted to be told why it was worth doing what I wanted to do.<\/p>\n

At that time, there was a short story I wrote and rewrote called \u201cA Letter to the Author.\u201d A young narrator describes going on an imaginary walk with an author she admires, all the conversations they would have and the ways in which she would delight him with her observations.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s possible that when I met Muldoon to go to the cathedral, I\u2019d already conflated him with a character I\u2019d imagined for years.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

We were talking about the first lines of \u201cThe Broken Tower\u201d as we entered the monastery. The cloister was bright with orange trees and rose bushes.<\/p>\n

The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn
\nDispatches me as though I dropped down the knell
\nOf a spent day\u2014to wander the cathedral lawn
\nFrom pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s quite effective,\u201d Muldoon said. \u201cWe tend to think of it as the bell-rope gathering the people of God to prayer, to the church. But of course, at some level, the implication is that God resides in the people.\u201d<\/p>\n

We continued up the narrow staircase to the terrace. The jagged cliffs appeared in front of us, red in the afternoon light.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe purpose of such structures must have been to leave the locals in awe,\u201d Muldoon said. \u201cTo inspire and to awe\u2014that\u2019s the principle at work here.\u201d<\/p>\n

I listened carefully, ready to be awed.<\/p>\n

We walked to the monks\u2019 cells, now converted to a library and reading room, chilly even in the late afternoon.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s so beautiful here,\u201d I suggested\u2014more question than statement.<\/p>\n

A bored clerk asked us to sign our names on a clipboard.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is something to be said of the cloistered life,\u201d Muldoon said.<\/p>\n

We sat for a while looking out at the town, the busy market stalls.<\/p>\n

I took out Crane\u2019s letter and \u201cThe Broken Tower\u201d from my bag. It was marked with syllabic accents and notes I\u2019d scribbled in the margins. I wanted to make sure I knew all the technical aspects of the poem\u2014all the iambs and spondees I\u2019d studied in the previous days.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a very strange line,\u201d Muldoon said, taking the poem from me.<\/p>\n

\u2026a tower that is not stone
\n(Not stone can jacket heaven)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cAnd this one,\u201d I said, underlining with my finger.<\/p>\n

My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored
\nOf that tribunal monarch of the air
\nWhose thigh embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201c \u2018Scored of\u2026\u2019 \u201d Muldoon said. \u201cWhat does that mean? Do you think of that in musical terms? Do you find that sums up Tepoztl\u00e1n, or the local god?\u201d<\/p>\n

I had not thought of the lines in those terms at all. I had been swept up in Crane\u2019s \u201cfelicitous juggling\u201d of words, as he had once called the writing of poetry. Muldoon continued reading aloud.<\/p>\n

Have you not heard, have you not seen that corpse
\nOf shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway
\nAntiphonal carillons launched before
\nThe stars are caught and hived in the sun\u2019s ray?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cI\u2019m lulled by Hart Crane, by his music,\u201d Muldoon said. I nodded vigorously.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut frankly there comes a point where one needs more than music. One needs some sort of pay-off.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHonestly,\u201d he continued, \u201cI find myself coming out and saying \u2018What<\/em>? Have I not heard<\/em>?\u2019 Actually I\u2019m not sure that I have. And why are you even asking that question? What sort of a question is that? I don\u2019t know. And I don\u2019t care.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI admire Hart Crane,\u201d he said, \u201cbut there are times when his poems seem slightly over-egged.\u201d<\/p>\n

I must have stared blankly.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the sense that we talk about over-egging the pudding,\u201d he explained. \u201cPutting in too many eggs. It becomes too rich.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is too much going on there,\u201d he said, \u201cSo much going on, in fact, that it\u2019s not entirely clear what is going on at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

I asked if he knew that the poem was about Crane\u2019s first affair with a woman.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, that\u2019ll do it,\u201d he said. \u201cThat would confuse a person.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the story, I insisted, was tragic. At his death, Crane thought himself a failure, believing that the editors had rejected his poem.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is conceivable,\u201d Muldoon said, \u201cthat those editors were not wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was going to explain that Malcolm Cowley at The <\/em>New Republic<\/em> had not rejected the poem but was too busy with his own book to respond; Morton Dauwen Zabel at Poetry<\/em> hadn\u2019t received Crane\u2019s letter with the poem. I might have convinced Muldoon that the poem had more merit; I could have salvaged another line, pointed out some surprising words. But I was disheartened. I could tell that the moment of bonding I\u2019d imagined for days was unlikely to happen.<\/p>\n

We got up to leave. The clerk pointed toward the clipboard and asked us to sign out.<\/p>\n

The cool hallways were crossed with shadows. Echoes of children playing rang faintly around us.<\/p>\n

\u201cI must say I rather like this\u2014the repose of it,\u201d Muldoon said. \u201cBut then I have to think about what they were doing to the local populace, in the name of a God who doesn\u2019t exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Without lingering, we walked back to town.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

When I was back in Paris, I sent Muldoon the essay I\u2019d written about our walk. I hoped, of course, that he\u2019d tell me he liked it and that I was a good writer. Or even that I should continue writing. I also sent him a book of photographs of Mexican villages to thank him for the walk.<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t respond.<\/p>\n

In the months that followed, I told the story of the walk with Muldoon to anyone who asked about my writing, as if the encounter legitimized me as a writer.<\/p>\n

With each telling, the walk took on fantastical proportions, littered with coincidences and signs. What Muldoon said about the poem\u2014that it was \u201cover-egged\u201d\u2014became an inside joke among my friends, synonymous with anything that disappointed us. And Muldoon himself became a sort of somber deity.<\/p>\n

I realize that Muldoon would have been startled by this version of events; to hear that a simple walk he\u2019d granted a student, and his honest views about a poem, were blown out of proportion.<\/p>\n

A few months later, I ran into him on the street when I was visiting New York. To me, it felt like an unbelievable coincidence; another sign. Muldoon, naturally, treated me like a distant acquaintance. He asked how I was doing, said he\u2019d been well, and busy. He didn\u2019t mention the essay or my present. It seemed he\u2019d forgotten all about it. Then he walked off, telling me to take care. All of this I added to the story the next time I told it.<\/p>\n

In the telling, I grew to love Hart Crane and \u201cThe Broken Tower\u201d more than I ever had. As a narrative device, my love for the poem served to highlight the effect of Muldoon\u2019s dismissal. I couldn\u2019t admit that my disappointment was about something else entirely, too strange to say out loud: that Muldoon and I had remained strangers by the end of the walk and that, when our hour together came to a close, I was no more or less a writer than I\u2019d been before.<\/p>\n

But perhaps there was a reason why I wrote. An obsessiveness; a proclivity to mythologize, to turn life into story.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s how I began writing my first novel, about a young woman\u2019s walk in Paris with the writer \u201cM.\u201d In its earliest form, the first chapter of the book was the essay I\u2019d sent Muldoon. To this, I added chapters about the coincidences that followed, compiling a meandering inventory of signs and symbols. But I was already tired of recounting the same story. I began imagining other scenarios for an afternoon spent in the company of a writer. Little by little, I let go of the walk in Tepoztl\u00e1n. I had more or less come back to that story I\u2019d been writing for years, the letter to the author.<\/p>\n

When I first spoke to Muldoon that evening he lay on the floor with a basset hound, he\u2019d said, \u201cPoems don\u2019t come from nowhere. They come from a specific time and a specific place.\u201d He added, however, that these times and places were often multiple.<\/p>\n

Early on in the novel my narrator says, \u201cThe symmetrical letter with which I represent M, offering a tip of the hat to the neat symmetries of fiction, is an invention.\u201d<\/p>\n

I finished the novel late in spring. That summer, I ran into Muldoon once again, this time in Paris. He was walking across the Saint-Sulpice plaza, talking on the phone. He squinted when he saw me, trying to make out who I was. \u201cJust a minute,\u201d he spoke to the receiver, \u201cIt\u2019s someone I know.\u201d<\/p>\n

We exchanged greetings, then walked our separate ways. This, too, I thought, must be a sign of something.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Aysegul<\/span>\u00a0Savas is a writer based in Paris. Her first novel,\u00a0<\/em>Walking on the Ceiling<\/a>, is out this week from Riverhead Books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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