“Poet” is from Ruth Rudner’s latest collection, Partings: And Other Beginnings, in which she reflects warmly and unsentimentally on the goodbyes in her life. A native of New York, Rudner now lives in Bozeman, Montana, and writes frequently for the Wall Street Journal, where a number of the essays in her book first appeared.
We’re grateful to the Continuum Publishing Company for permission to reprint.
— Pamela Tarr Penick
The main street of Yellow Springs, Ohio, is more chic than it was thirty years ago when I went to school there. But the Old Trail Tavern, where we went for burgers and 3.2 beer, is still there. So is the Little Art Theatre, where I sold tickets to the films — most of which I remember as French — that formed forever my views of what film should be. My boyfriend managed the theater. He had red hair and a red beard and was handsome in a Christ-like sort of way. Until he began managing the theater, he was a sandal maker. I haven’t seen him since I left school, but someone wrote me a year ago from California, where he lives, that he looks exactly the same, except his hair and beard are snow white.
Many of Yellow Springs’ houses date from the late nineteenth century. They look like houses in Bozeman. I never thought of Yellow Springs as a nineteenth-century town when I went to school there, although in those days I thought the nineteenth century was about literature, not architecture. Now, seeing the houses, I understood why Bozeman had been so immediately familiar to me. Bozeman is bigger and possessed of an almost daily increase in its twentieth-century sprawl, and is surrounded by mountains to boot, but if you don’t look up, the similarity seems greater than the difference.
I had come to Yellow Springs for the Antioch Writers Workshop, an annual event on the Antioch College campus. My college writing teacher and advisor, the poet Jud Jerome, was an integral part of the workshop. It was he who had invited me to attend. He figured I could be useful somewhere in it, and thought that I would find it interesting.
Although Jud and I had had no contact for most of the years since I had left Yellow Springs, we had begun a correspondence two years earlier, after I sent him a copy of a book in which I had mentioned him. The correspondence was an enormous act of grace on his part because I had made a mistake in the book.
In the book I said that, having discovered a passage in Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” where the dialogue between two waiters was illogical, I had written to Hemingway and told him that, and he had answered saying it was perfectly clear to him. I went on to say that I had given the letter to my teacher because he had wanted it.
That is not what happened. I had gone to Jud with the passage and told him it didn’t make sense. He had looked at it and agreed, and then he had written to Hemingway on college stationery, signing his name and title — “Assistant Professor of English.” Months later Hemingway sent the letter back, scrawling in the margin, “Dear Assistant Professor Jerome, I just reread it and it makes sense to me. Sorry, E.H.” Jud never again signed his name with his title.
The letter (of which I now have a copy) is in the Judson Jerome Collection at Boston University Library, where it was examined by a professor who later published something about it, setting off a whole scholarly industry revolving around finding passages of Hemingway dialogue in which the speakers did not alternate in the expected sequence. “The literary scholars had come to the conclusion that this was a deliberate technique,” Jud wrote me. “I remember writing the professor to the effect that it might be a technique, but it was a lousy technique, introducing confusion without deepening meaning.”
“I assure you,” he went on, “that I wasn’t at all bothered by your mistake. Indeed, I had forgotten that you were the one who pointed out the problem to me. I thought I had discovered it all by myself! But it’s a real problem in that passage. . . . It doesn’t make sense for sure. I was amused by what you said in your book — and realized how muddied our memories can be. I’m discovering a lot of that these days, working on the second volume of my memoirs. I think we have a rewrite button in our heads, such as the Stalinists used on history, to make it all come out all right.”
I suppose it did come out all right. We had each made a mistake, so I guess we came out even, although mine was certainly more public.
I put off accepting Jud’s invitation for months because, although I was eager to see him, and curious about the school and the town and who I was when I had been there, the time of year really was wrong. Leaving Montana to go to Ohio at the beginning of July, the beginning of Montana’s summer, the time I do most of the outdoor things I write about the rest of the year, seemed irresponsible to me. Not to mention dumb. The time is so brief in Montana when it is possible to get into the mountains easily. Summer is short and utterly beautiful. In Ohio it is beastly hot.
I kept thinking that perhaps the timing would be better some other year. Yet, by spring, it occurred to me that the timing of things is never any better and if I meant to do it, I should simply do it. I felt ready to connect with what was past and curious to see what new things that old time could bring. And, after his letters, it seemed essential to connect with Jud. He had been the only person who had tried to keep me in school when I decided to drop out. I had not listened to him then. Perhaps because I understood that he was right, I could not listen to him. There is a necessity, when you are young, to make serious mistakes. This allows you the rest of your life to analyze them. It allows you to never again take anything for granted; to understand the difference between choice and obsession; to see, with far greater clarity than you ever imagined, your own relationship to the universe. I was ready to listen to him now.
I wrote to the workshop director and told her I would come.
A few weeks before my planned departure, a letter arrived from Jud. “Dear Correspondent” was followed by an apology for a canned letter. “I’m going through a ‘closing down’ phase because it is clear that cancer will have a radical effect on my life,” Jud wrote. “It has been determined that I have a fairly aggressive large-cell cancer apparently stemming from a small mass in the lung inaccessible to surgery. . . . I’ve heard that there’s some chance that if cancers like mine come on quickly, they may quickly be defeated. Something like half those who contract this particular variety seem to be cured by the particular ‘protocol’ of chemotherapy that I’m on, so ‘closing down’ hasn’t, for me, any particular sense of finality about it. This simply seems a good time, ceremoniously, to tidy up the workshop of my mind, to set some things aside, perhaps for good, to finish up some others, and, most importantly, to rededicate my energy to some new ones. . . . The occasion of this illness seems to me to be revving up my creative energy; it’s ‘fasten seatbelts’ time. I feel like I’m taking off with unimaginable excitement and anticipation (never mind a little pain here and there, occasional nausea, and, it seems, stretches of lassitude).”
My instinct was to cancel the trip. If Jud would not be available, there was, I thought, no reason to go. This may not seem an appropriate response when someone writes you he has cancer, but I am sure I am not the first person to feel betrayed by someone else’s cancer. Cancer. Cancel. They’re almost the same word. Perhaps they are the same word, although the one thing I felt from Jud’s letter was that his cancer was the opposite of cancel. His cancer was a challenge, a raging call to life. His letter was designed to keep its readers from fear or mourning, to engage them in the triumph of challenge, in an insistence on life. Once again, Jud had come through with extraordinary grace.
On the first of July, a perfect Montana summer day, I loaded my car and drove east. In Yellow Springs, I found my way to the campus easily, but once there it was as if I had never seen it before. Everything seemed foreign. Some buildings were boarded up; others looked abandoned. A few newer buildings looked cheap and dilapidated, although I suppose that if school had been in session, it would have looked different. I had no idea which was the dorm where I had lived. I had no memory of the hall where the writers’ workshop was taking place, although it was obviously not a new building. I stood in line waiting to register, wondering how it was that nothing at all remained to me of those years.
An hour later I walked over to the Main Building where Jud was giving a reading as part of a program of poetry, music, and dance in his honor. I did not remember the theater in which the event was being held any more than I remembered anything else about the campus. (The next day, in the fiction workshop, the instructor began his class by saying, “Remembering gets in the way of memory.” What he meant is that if you can let go of reporting facts, you are free to come to the essence of feeling. I took this as a personal message.)
At Jud’s reading, everyone in the audience — which seemed to consist largely of people who had graduated, then found a way to stay in Yellow Springs — looked as everyone had when I was in school: the same intense, ascetic faces; the same instincts toward peasant fabric and color in their clothes; the same rapt attention that swept from their faces down their bodies to performance, to word, to sound — only they all seemed to have gray hair. Jud was already reading when I slid into a seat on the side aisle. Hearing his voice, I remembered it. He looked as I remembered him too, the young teacher not so many years older than I, slight, intense, and laughing at once. Lacking some brooding darkness, he had not looked like a poet to me then. He did now. Down there at the edge of the theater, slight and brave and insistent on life, whatever its pain, he seemed the essence of poet to me. The difference between youth and middle age is not physical. It is in how you see the soul.
Jud’s poems were reminiscences of a life intimately observed, moving and funny and wise and full of hope. When he finished his first round, a dancer from the Dayton Ballet performed. She seemed heavy, but willing. I heard later that she was well over six feet tall. She looked large, but you can’t really tell how tall a person is when she or he is alone on a stage. Jud read again, his voice strong in his wonderful words. Then a chamber music ensemble performed, although they dismissed one of their pieces after a few false starts, saying they simply hadn’t practiced it enough. I had to leave before the concert was over to get to my lodgings and back to campus in time for the kick-off banquet.
Jud entered the dining room as the instructors were being introduced during dessert. He sat on the far side of the room from me. When my name was called he raised his arms over his head, joining his hands and shaking them in salute, smiling with a joy that made me proud I had come. Minutes later he left the dining room looking ill.
I was told by the workshop director that he would teach the poetry class the next day but after that would be in the hospital. She suggested I call him in the morning.
Standing before the class, Jud looked exactly as he had as my teacher. I had seen recent photos of him with a huge shock of white hair, but now what hair he had was very close to his head, courtesy of the chemotherapy. His hair had also been very short when he was my teacher, so I did not see a man who had lost his hair but the same young teacher who had stood before class thirty years earlier. On the telephone, Jud had asked if I would drive him home after class and stay for lunch. I met him in the hall after class and he embraced me, kissing me with a powerful urgency that had nothing to do with man and woman, or old friends. It was the urgency of the present toward eternity, of the artist toward art, of life against dismissal. It was as if he would give me life, would form me like the poem to which he gives his breath and his passion. In his kiss was his own insistence on life, the urgent, eternal, absolute necessity of life — there, in his kiss, was all there is of life.
“You are more beautiful than you were,” he said. I smiled at him. “We’re all more beautiful, aren’t we?” he said.
It was true. All of us are. “Yes,” I said. “We are.”
At lunch, Jud and Maggie — a New York magazine editor who had been his student a few years before me and who had been close to Jud and his family ever since — and I ate sandwiches in a room lined with books and talked about Hemingway, laughing over the to-do evolving from the question about which waiter was talking. Then Jud read to us a long poem recently published in a small magazine. The poem struck both Maggie and me as marvelously funny, and we laughed throughout Jud’s reading. Even he paused occasionally to smile. It was a poem about a man who has always done everything in exactly the same way but who suddenly finds himself on an unfamiliar road on his way home from work. The road leads him into places of dark dreams, yet, rather than a sense of nightmare, we felt adventure, the irreversible and inevitable inexplicable in a life of routine.
We both saw the poem almost more than we heard it, it was so completely visual. I asked the two screenwriters who were conducting the screenwriting classes if they would read it — something I would normally never do, but this, after all, was for Jud. Besides, I felt so sure. When they gave the copies back to me, they each said (sadly — they wanted me to be right about it) it was not a film, not visual at all, not a story to be filmed, not, in fact, the least bit funny, as I had told them it was. What they saw was the darkness.
“But we laughed the whole time Jud was reading,” I said.
“That’s the art of the performer,” they said.
When it was time for us to go, Jud walked Maggie and me out to the car. He would be going into the hospital the next day. He knew it would make him sick, but he believed it would also make him well. “I’m going to beat this thing,” he said to me. I believed him.
Several days later, on an impulse as I walked past the Yellow Springs post office, I decided to buy stamps in case I had time to write a few postcards. I was not aware of having been in the post office before, and it certainly was not someplace I thought about, but the instant I walked inside, I knew — for the first time in the days I had been in Yellow Springs — where I was. Nothing at all about it was changed. No time had passed. I was not there now, but then. All that has happened was yet to come. The force of the memory was enormous. Or, rather, it was not memory at all. The actual place may be a catalyst to memory, but it is not memory. It is some unexpected moment of touching home base so you can go on from there.
What is curious is the form home base takes. I am sure it is never the form one seeks. The act of seeking automatically changes the thing sought. The thing you find by chance is something you had never considered. The campus had changed, the town had changed, Jud had changed, I had changed. The post office had remained the same.
A post office is an odd reference point, although in some small eastern Montana farm towns where everything — even the saloon and cafe — has closed down, the post office is the one public place still functioning. People meet in post offices all over the country. It is a crossroad, the junction where communication passes en route from one place to another. Sometimes the communication gets lost, held up, torn up in the machinery. Sometimes it is delivered in record time. In any case, it is words that pass through a post office. It is connection. And I had come because of Jud’s letters. . . .
Two months later, when I was back in Montana and Maggie in New York, I was talking to her on the phone. She told me that Jud’s brother and another old friend were visiting him a month after the workshop when Jud asked his doctor, “Am I going to die?”
“Yes,” the doctor answered.
“Then I want some really good whisky,” Jud said.
“Go for it,” the doctor said.
Maggie said Jud’s wife went out and got the best whisky she could find. The three men spent the night drinking that good whisky and talking. The next day Jud died.
From the book Partings: And Other Beginnings by Ruth Rudner. Copyright © 1993 by Ruth Rudner. Reprinted by permission of the Continuum Publishing Company.
