R2E Excerpt #44*: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Wallace Stevens handed me the binoculars. But all I did was watch. WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE

*DEAREST READERS: Don’t you hate it when writers get all harrumph-y about what you’re about to read? I do, and here I am, introducing my introduction! Harrumph! As if you’re too dumb to figure out that this is an excerpt from my forthcoming illustrated memoir, of my own coming-of-age moment in Paris and on The Continent, and that I’m back at it, here, based on about six million (yikes!) words worth of daily journal entries I’ve made since October 12, 1978. Take that, Samuel Pepys! You can find the most recent post here, or you can start way back at the beginnng, here. End of harrumphing. I’ll let you read now.

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WHEN I LEFT PARIS, my journal moved on as well. I was learning what belonged in it, and what didn’t.

I was still devoting pages to various writing projects I’d never complete; I hadn’t yet worked out the connection between “planning” (exciting!) and “execution” (arduous). But I’d recorded enough days to suspect that this daily act of writing might be valuable in its own right. 

Not that I could extract a living from it, but rather, valuable because it was unrelated to all those ambitious projects I’d never finish. The novels never happened. Life did. And I recorded it, and savored it, and complained about it, every night, with pen in hand.

After docking in England, I made my way to London and a pub called The Flask, drinking a “stout” which cost me 21p. Cheap enough. This establishment had been awaiting my visit for 315 years—”Founded 1663,” it said over the door. A solid wooden awning stood over a dark-stained wooden door, showing the wear of London weather. The building itself was brick. Great vines grew up the wall, and potted flowers hung from rusted hooks. Think of the oceans of beer swallowed and pissed in those three centuries! 

How did I get here? By being friendly on the train.

A girl from Berkeley, looking strangely like the transplendent reporter in Annie Hall, offered me a seat. I talked with her and a huge 18-year old male—nothing of great interest. But we eventually got around to discussing lodging, and she offered to help me find a spot where she was going. She did all the telephone work, came back with reservations and directions to the hostel. 

Bed 36 (a single) was waiting. 

It’s curious for me to read how I was approached and helped by so many young women about my age as I blundered through foreign towns, foreign languages, foreign urges. Any number of them might have tipped over into bed with me, had I made an earnest effort to engage in a horizontal way. Or even, to allow them to seduce me, if I wasn’t up for the heavy lift of flirtation and follow-through.

But that’s James Salter’s memoir, not mine.

I remember little of this “girl from Berkeley,” aside from what I wrote in my journal. But, think of her: On the trip of a lifetime, encumbered with a huge 18-year old male (probably a relative or dull-witted, displaced acquaintance), and meeting a carefree and talkative fellow-traveler without a place to lay his head for a night. Why else would she book me a room, if not to encourage—or at least entertain the possibility of—a traveler’s fling? This was the freakin’ pre-AIDs 1970s! And the young woman who arranged my lodgings evidently looked like Shelly Duvall (pre-Shining). Why not give it a go? Aside from the chlamydia, I mean.

I had my reasons. 

The terrors of body contact, as I’ve noted. What if I did it wrong? 

But there was also the terror of possibility. When you’re 21, your options are overwhelming and nonexistent in equal measure. Just then, my life might have flowed, or spun out of control, in any direction. I had equal chances of becoming an actuary in Hartford (à la Wallace Stevens) or a poet chasing the ghost of Lord Byron. Equally true that I might marry any woman, known or unknown, if I could only connect. Embrace all that and you’re living a high life of possibility and romance. For me it was a recipe for reticence. 

Choice is the enemy of happiness, according to the psychologist Barry Schwartz. 

Pick your poison, says the bartender.

Pick your blackbird, says the poet Wallace Stevens.

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,   

The only moving thing   

Was the eye of the blackbird.   

II

I was of three minds,   

Like a tree   

In which there are three blackbirds.   

In that same poem—”Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”—Stevens tries to choose between the beauty of anticipation, or the satisfaction of fulfillment.  

IV

A man and a woman   

Are one.   

A man and a woman and a blackbird   

Are one.   

V

I do not know which to prefer,   

The beauty of inflections   

Or the beauty of innuendoes,   

The blackbird whistling   

Or just after.   

On the train to Folkestone, I was all about the innuendo. I looked up from my journal long enough to note the presence of a girl who uncannily resembled Natalie Wood (when she played Maria), and then looked back down at the page. We were facing each other diagonally across the aisle, parted by a distance of 20 feet. We stared at each other to a shocking degree, my journal insists, and I recounted a chance encounter with her outside the bathrooms, reddening her face and eliciting a shy “hello.” 

She wasn’t English-speaking. But there was great communication in our entwined eye-beams. 

Instead of making an approach, of course, I spoke with the mother of the Texan lady with the poodle and the pool table. Her mother proved infinitely more sensitive and intelligent, which wasn’t a very high standard. I also chatted up a group of English schoolboys, and managed to convince them I was French.

But soon I was in London: They spoke English there, and the girl sitting next to me at The Flask told me she “simply must read The Waves!” again. 

Why would any female express a desire to reread The Waves, apart from an auxiliary desire to plunge in, as it were? I’ll never know, because I slept on dry land that night. But sentence by sentence, in my journal, I can see so many alternative lives rearing up, and being passed aside, within so many of my encounters in my travels. I was all bustle and go, no stop and spelunk. 

Enough of vin-chaud Paris, boy; welcome to tea-service England!