November 27, 2012

Dim, wintery, cold moon moving toward full.

HJ has come back into my life at full throttle. In a long phone monolog, he caught me up on a life of almost incredible success, declining, now, to a life of almost inexplicable obscurity. He leapt from Exeter to Harvard. He studied with Heaney and Borges. If I understood correctly, he was senior editor of a publishing house and ran Carnegie Hall. He had anorexia. . . and gastric by-pass. . . and for a while couldn’t eat, but could drink, and so became an alcoholic. He was almost back together and became an alcoholic again. . . coming to rest at last and at bottom in a family home in Asheville– which explains, anyway, his ghostly re-appearance. Details went by too fast, and lacked the enriched information of a face-to-face. HJ is bewildered by all this, bewildered by the success which he couldn’t see how he deserved, bewildered by the catastrophes which seem utterly to have forgotten his former life. One thing I remember from long ago was that, even as a boy, he seemed confused by the honors heaped on him, uncomfortable, looking over his shoulder to see if there was whispering behind upraised palms. There wasn’t. Everyone thought he was better than he thought himself. The personal history lesson was a build-up to his asking me to help him, which I am glad to do, sorting out poems so he can apply for fellowships, writing recommendations to employers whom I might know. I considered how his story is an alternate version of mine, with two differences. A boy coming out of Ellet High School in Akron Ohio would not, under any circumstance, whatever his attainments, have the same opportunities as a boy coming out of Exeter, heading, automatically, toward Harvard. There would be no way fully to catch up, ever. Balancing that, though, is that, in my life anyway, both the temptation and opportunity for dissipation were less. If there were plaudits I positioned myself far enough away that the sound of them wouldn’t drive me off course. I dedicated myself early on to protecting my gifts, and in that, at least, I have been successful. Whether that was actually a benefit cannot now be tested. Perhaps if I had a couple of sessions at rehab or committed some public outrage, things would have gone better for my career. This is to say that after HJ’s outpouring, I felt very strange, as if I were Achilles’ big brother who stayed at home, who heard the tales from the Front, and welcomed the battered body home, unsure whether he had taken the better part.

Chall closes his restaurant, You’d think being excellent would suffice, but it doesn’t.