My
eighteen-year-old cat Claudine died recently. A tortie tabby or
tortoise shell tabby, I had called her the Welsh Terrier Cat because
her markings were similar to a dog breed I would like. She often sat
near me when I wrote rough drafts. Despite kidney disease, she was
spry up to three days before her end.
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| Claudine in 2018 with scratch paper |
Watching
her, I opened up poetry I hadn't read in years – T. S. Eliot's
“Four Quartets.” The poet who provided lyrics for the musical
Cats felt like good
company.
Being
involved with new journals and new poets, I probably don't read poets
that fascinated me in college often enough. I had a seminar on T. S.
Eliot however I read his “Four Quartets” again during a winter
break. Lines from it stayed with me for years. The first stanza
beginning with “Time present and time past/ are both present in
time future,/And time future contained in time past” had a philosophical content that spoke to me when I
had separated from home and my earlier years.
Four
decades later, I found the poetry not only philosophical and written
in a style that mirrored the deco era, but more understandable in its
confrontation with time. It was about waiting and suggested a
possible undiscovered dimension, pointing to physics. The flourishes
and sudden everyday images in these contemplations, even though cats
were not mentioned as they were in “Prufrock”, had a feline
solemnity.
I had
written an observation about Claudine and included that as the third
section of a long poem, an after thought. Later on, I felt the linkage was weak so I
revised the poem with only the two sections. I had a fragment, a
revision project because there were a few lines I couldn't discard.
In
this mood, I was reminded of the summer's best finds for my internet
used bookstore. I obtained a number of The Dial back issues at
a library sale. The Dial was the main literary magazine
during the 1920's, during my favorite era of literature. No, I did
not find the issue that first published T. S. Eliot's “The
Wasteland”, darn. But I have issues with “London Letters” from
T. S. Eliot, letters to The Dial about the literary scene in
England.
The
eight issues I still have contain an array of writers and artists
still extant in our literary memory. I immediately read a poem by
James Joyce, “A Memoir of the Players”, which describes a stage
kiss. I'd read Chamber
Music, a thin book of
Joyce's poetry which reminded me of Stephen Dedalus's villanelle in
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
This poem was different!
In the
issues I have are poems by E. E. Cummings before he committed his
name to lower case, D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Marianne
Moore, Sterling North, and Hart Crane. There's fiction by Thomas Mann
and A. E. Coppard, essays by Virginia Woolf and Liam O'Flaherty, and
a long piece by William Butler Yeats in which he seems to feel
obliged to explain his work relationship with Oscar Wilde. An essay
by Maxim Gorki is titled “About Murderers” and also refers to the
cinema. There is art by Picasso, Kahlil Gibran, Rodin, Georgia
O'Keefe, and Jean Cocteau.
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| Sanguine Drawing by Picasso in The Dial |
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| The Flagpole (First Painting) by Georgia O'Keefe in The Dial |
I
don't know what it means for an artist to have a photograph of a work put in a journal. The value a famous writer's first publication
or first printing of a literary piece is something I can better
appreciate as in a gallery. For some, it might be beyond value, like the first
memories of a person or a pet after you've spent years with them.
