True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand
the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.
--George Washington
|
|
Writers
Friendship
Edited
and compiled by Robert Sward
On
the Nature of Literary Friendship: Paul Oehler
by William Minor
In 1962-63,
I was a graduate student in Language Arts (Creative Writing) at what
was then San Francisco State College. I was also a fairly recently "ordained"
father (I had two kids under five years of age), a husband of sorts,
and a full time employee--a Scientific Data Analyst no less--at Lawrence
Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley. I rode the bus to and from work every
day, studying Russian (a portion of my M.A. thesis consisted of translations
from Alexander Blok), and took classes at night. Needless to say, this
was a hopping, hectic, nervous, but exciting time.
I had
some poems printed in Transfer 15, S.F. State's literary magazine, and
two of the editors were fellow students I never met: Ed Devlin and Paul
Oehler. I won the twenty-five dollar annual poetry prize in ‘63, for
a poem called "The Barmaid," modeled on the intricate syllabic
stanza patterns (and adding a rime scheme) of Dylan Thomas’ "Fern
Hill." I was twenty-seven years of age, left work, attended classes,
returned home, and was decidedly not a part of the campus literary scene.
I was also so shy at the time that, accepting the prize and giving my
very first poetry reading, I never even looked up--thus missing my own
boycott. "Beat" students objected to a closed form or "cooked"
poem (as opposed to open and "raw") having won the prize,
and protested by raising a banner at the back of the hall--a gesture
of dissent that, my then reticent and bashful consciousness buried in
the task of reading my poem, I never witnessed.
Eight
years later, I was teaching English at Monterey Peninsula College, and--as
fate would have it--my office mate was my former editor, Ed Devlin.
One day his old S.F. State buddy Paul Oehler drove down to the Peninsula,
walked into my home, and recited--"by heart," as they used
to say--a twenty-three line poem of mine in iambic pentameter called
"Persian Miniatures," a poem he had also once selected for
Transfer. Needless to say again, I was thrilled. We formed an instant
friendship that would last until Paul's death, sixteen years later.
I haven't
many friends I would call "gentlemen," nor would they care,
perhaps, to be thought of that way. But Paul Oehler was a gentleman,
not of any old corny school but the genuine sort: a man nearly medieval
in soul, in intentionality, carting an inherent dignity which--for all
the damage he could do to himself, and he did considerable--I seldom
saw him put aside for long. For all Paul's contemporaneity--his tattoos;
his place of honor (or stool) at the Pine Cove bar in Sacramento; his
long, hard fought battles for the Union--he was of some other world:
archetypal, historical, transcendent. And I don't intend that as hyperbole.
He once wrote of "the eloquence of the unsaid," and it's not
necessary to say more of Paul than he was, or than he might approve
of. Yet his "otherworldliness" is legendary: saying "Aye,
Sir" to close friends or, if his patience had been provoked, "You
swine"--both delivered in his courtly style. He wasn't much for
twentieth century chitchat, thank God, and the mannerisms this paradox
produced will long be remembered by his friends, literary and otherwise.
A paradox:
a sensitive cerebral poet who collected stamps and recordings by Callas
and lived with his mother in a turquoise Victorian home and ... and
all the rest. The friendship of poets is a grand thing. Paul's capacity
for solid friendship is also legendary, but poets get not just the customary
good things--shared laughter, rare conversation (customarily at three
in the morning), song, memorable gatherings--but that fine hinge of
respect for each other's work; for what the soul can find and speak
of through poetry. I enjoyed that highest form of communication often
with Paul. That ’s why, in 1985, out of mutual respect, we decided to
pool our poems and do a book together called Natural Counterpoint, a
book in which we set our egos aside, temporarily, and remained--aside
from authorship designated on the title page of each section--anonymous--in
the spirit of those Vagantes, troubadours, scops, and wandering scholars
who placed the content of their poems and the poems themselves above
self in the Middle Ages--a time that, after all, was not that much unlike
our own.
Paul
and I were very different. He complained once, on a radio show we did,
of my "folksy approach to life." I love jazz and uncritical
fun; Paul dug the harpsichord and being serious. Yet, in his stately
way, he could get fairly folksy himself, and he had a vast capacity
for good solid nonsense, a sense of the all-pervasive absurd, and that
I think--the near religious sense of it and the open laughter provoked--is
something else we shared.
A true
story: one night, in Monterey, we went out to a bar (Paul and I were
very good at this; too much so, perhaps, for our own good), a bar called
the Halfway House (irony--everywhere!). The place still smacked of Steinbeck
days, Cannery Row, and Bob Dylan was purported to have hung out there
while courting Joan Baez. The pool table was tough, the clientele the
same. You could tell by the number of motorcycles parked outside. Whatever
Paul's past--and I've never doubted a legend of it for a second--he
looked like just about anything but an ex-biker. He looked like a stand-in
for Michael Caine in "Educating Rita," a classic British don.
So, with great dignity, and shark and hustler he'd once been, he proceeded
to wipe out everybody at the pool table. The tension--as they say--mounted.
The honor of the house came down to the bartender, a small, dark, wiry
man who, finally, was compelled to reach for his prize silver cue. Yes,
an O-honest-to-God silver cue.
I had
been fooling around at the piano and the bartender, rankled by his approaching
shootout, his High Noon, was pissed. He turned the juke box up full
blast. My ear isn't all that good but that night, infused with the spirit
of defiance surrounding me, I kept right on playing, in the same key
as each cruel tune that blared--"so many teeth, standing in a row,"
as Paul wrote in a poem about Doc Holliday--from the machine. Paul never
lost his cool. He decimated that bartender, silver cue and all, and
did so with the disinterested poise of a man lecturing on Jane Austen.
It was one of life's supreme moments, and I feel honored to have been
a small part of it. We marched through a sea of menacing tattoos--and
out into the night.
Another
true tale: Paul was having women troubles (when was he not having women
troubles?) and decided to drive out to see an old biker buddy: someone
with a name like Hard Bourbon Bob, Toothless Charlie, something like
that. I went along. We drove in Paul's truck, which approached a state
of junk itself, out to a junkyard. There, chugging past mounds of bruised
furniture and discarded refrigerators, we arrived at the shack--constructed
of junk also--of Paul's friend--on whom he unloaded his love woes. I
recall vividly but will not repeat here (this is a “family” website,
isn't it?) the other man's advice. It was apt, and after, when they'd
finishing reminiscing on good ole days on the road, we left, Paul--as
we passed back through the hillocks of trash--seemingly comforted.
Only
deliberate incivility seemed to bother him, and dishonesty. He might
be amused, on the latter score, by some of the tribute paid to him after
his death, by people who did not acknowledge his worth while he was
alive. Yet I do not recall anything spiteful in Paul. He was annoyed,
and amused, by the bullshit that abounds and prevails in this world,
but I don't recall his ever whining or carping about it. Swearing? Well,
yes. And toying with it, teasing, in his bright witty manner--but seldom
on a level beneath his high standards. He set very high standards for
poetry--a pastime for some, a profession for others, a trade not without,
like most in the world, its share of poseurs and charlatans. Paul was
not one of these. He was the real thing.
It ’s
a shame he didn't write more, especially prose. His fine piece, "An
American View of Dylan's Laugharne" shows what a delight it would
have been to have more of the same, to watch his fine alert mind go
to work on any subject. But there ’s not much point in talking about
what was not done. I have memories of that rare capacity for friendship
attested to by so many others. I loved Paul, as a poet and a freind,
and I hope he has found his "tankard of good ale, a forest, and
a spot of dignity."
On his
last trip to Laugharne, his twelfth pilgrimage to the home of the poet
he emulated too much, he hemorrhaged in flight and died in a hospital
in England. He was just forty-seven years old. Paul Oehler is buried
in Wales, in the same cemetary that houses his beloved Dylan Thomas.
We have
his poems, and the way to pay tribute to literary friendship and genuine
poets is to print them, and keep printing them, so that they may be
read, again and again. I think the most fitting coda is a poem by Paul
Oehler:
THE OLD
STANDARDS
My great-aunt,
two hundred and forty pounds
and short,
could play by ear. She ’s dead now.
Her fingers
were pudgy and soft
like
warm chocolate. They spread across
the keys
until we couldn't bear it.
But she
was always right, and her hair
was always
red, and she ’s dead now.
She was
an alchemist before we knew,
my cousin
and I, what alchemists were.
She had
the patience of a distiller,
the quickness
of a turkey in the straw.
Her fingers--I
remember her fingers--
could
turn brittle. You'd swear they'd break.
Her smile
was a sliver moon behind
a high
cloud. But she ’s dead now, and her death
was like
the breaking of old, old glass.
Copyright
(c) 1999, by William Minor
Natural
Counterpoint: Poems by Paul Oehler & William Minor; Betty's Soup Shop
Press, 847 Junipero Avenue, Pacific Grove, California 93950
return
to Writer's Friendships
|