Accounts Due: Self-Portrait at Forty-Two

He turned forty-two last month, on a day that came and went largely unnoticed. His several children, as the blues song goes, are way out in the world somewhere. Most days now, he wears an oversize sweatshirt and jeans, sitting at the sole window in the one-room apartment he and his wife share. The typewriter and radio on the table before him have followed him through most of his adult life. He drinks tea incessantly.

In the time of that life, and in his work, he has been many people, and if sometimes he contradicted himself, well then, like Whitman he contains multitudes.

For a few years there he was Dylan Thomas, a doomed minor poet. Then in quick succession a blues musician, political radical, expatriate editor, science fiction star. He tried very hard for a number of years to become French. He almost turned himself into a madman. He was Tolstoy for a time, dressing in workshirts and jeans to embrace the moral life at whatever cost. Then he tried on the habit of gentleman essayist.

None of the clothes fit, and now he is back in his own irredeemable, baggy ones.

He writes small essays about his life for local papers and magazines. Two or three novels tumble about in the out-trays of New York publishers. Every few months he receives an award for some poem or story which appeared in a literary magazine read only by its other contributors. Young writers periodically write to tell him how important his work has been to their own.

Many of the things he will not do or become in his life are clear now, and he supposes that this is what life's journey consists of, this gradual giving-up of ground, a quiet acceptance of could-have-beens. He wishes he could believe there was a gain for every loss, but that sort of thinking, common to moralists and Christians, is alien to him.

He has believed deeply in art and in women. Both have damned and saved his life.

Daily long walks take him among the parks and recreation centers of affluent Arlington, along Marrow Bone Springs where Indians once lived, and among the homeless poor of Fort Worth. Once he lived as close to the ground as these latter, half-humorously suggesting that all decision-makers be required to live for six months without money or resources on the streets of a major city. Once he was locked away for a time, and it changed him forever.

Once a revolutionary of sorts, he now believes that authority exists only to be rebelled against, a ceaseless dialectic that must just go on and on, sea tearing at beach, beach pushing against sea.

And so he carries his heroes (Voltaire, Marx, Woody Guthrie, Pasternak and Pushkin, Thoreau) changed by it all, into middle age.

He carries, also, stacks of escalating debts, unanswered letters, cardboard boxes of old and abandoned manuscripts. He carries forward the unfinished books on the table and floor about him and the familiar weight of those others, every year more and more, as yet unbegun. They simply accumulate, insubstantial as clouds.

He remembers a wholly negative description Emerson once wrote of Thoreau – that he ate no meat, that he owned nothing, that he neither drank nor smoked, belonged to no group – and wonders if Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" may not be a central metaphor of America. Certainly his own life has seemed a kind of retreat, a ceaseless decamping and resettling, reformulated again and again like America itself, like Whitman's ongoing revisions of Leaves of Grass. He has a predilection for solitude and early mornings alone.

Now he thinks, this morning, of other wives and lives. He has been loved. In a letter to a friend he writes: Will we ever recover from this terrrible ache, from these words wanting eternally to be born in us? Must we know all our lives this wanting, these hollows?

Today birds have overtaken the powerlines, and one sits on the narrow ledge of his window turning its teardrop head to watch him at his work. With the very pulse and presence of living things, Bach plays on the radio beside him.

Rain in the sky, but shy about falling.

With a shock of recognition, as the bird flies away, an old thought comes to him. He thinks how, in all these endless pages, all these stories and poems and essays and letters, he tries to give imaginary meaning to parts of his life he doesn't understand.

He thinks how, once, he understood so clearly.

First published in The Bloomsbury Review (1986).