“Man Alone,” a Memoir by Jeffrey Sussman
(03/18/2010) Along with about 30 other undergraduates, I was seated in an overheated February classroom one snowy morning waiting for our instructor to arrive. The steam radiators hissed and clanged, and pockets of students conversed with Ping-Pong-ball alacrity.
As if calling us to attention, a theatrical figure loudly clapped his hands as he strode into the classroom. A black cape plumed out behind him; his head was thrown back; his strong aquiline nose cut through air. His pianist’s fingers combed his wavy black hair back from his broad forehead.
“Welcome!” he bellowed, as if we were the ones who had just entered the classroom. “It’s a pleasure to see such eager, upturned, youthful faces, ready to grasp the best of Anglo-American poetry. We’ll go from noetics to poetics and back again. Inspiration and ratiocination.”
He flung a black leather briefcase onto a metal desk and spun off his cape with a bullfighter’s grace.
He was dressed in a black corduroy suit, bright-orange shirt, and a blood-red tie. His Halloween getup charmed and amused me. From his appearance alone, I was prepared to like him.
“Name is . . .” (I have chosen not to reveal his real name, but to call him Shelley). “Though I’m more of a songwriter than a poet, my mission here is to instill in you an educated appreciation of highly compressed language that reaches for the realms of music and philosophy. I’m not one of those free-verse anything-goes kinds of poetasters. I believe in form and discipline married to inspiration and intelligence culminating in the music of profound ideas. Not Hallmark verses, not trivial sentiments wrapped in predictable rhymes. We will analyze ballades, elegies, sonnets, villanelles, odes, sestinas, bops, and even limericks. We’ll even look at the rhymes of Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin, two of the most clever and inventive of lyricists. Now listen to this sonnet by Shakespeare, to which only someone with a heart like a catcher’s mitt would not be moved.” And he then recited from memory:
“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.”
“Now there is a sonnet that is pure perfection, each word exactly right; in just 14 lines in a pattern of precise iambic pentameter, expressing profoundly poignant emotions. Shakespeare above all else is about language, not some actor’s platform for emoting. The words are the thing, and Will is our king.”
I noticed that while he was declaiming Shakespeare, his face reddened as if engaging in a punishing athletic endeavor. His long fingers raked through his hair as if searching for misplaced metaphors.
He then went on to explain, to our ignorant ears, the construction of a sonnet, pointing out the effective use of such rhetorical devices as metaphors, similes, litotes, synecdoches, paradoxes, metonymies, apostrophes, assonances, consonances, onomatopoeias, anaphoras, prolepsis, and imagery. My head was spinning and the fingers grasping my rapidly transcribing ballpoint were white with excitement.
Whew, I thought. This guy is amazing.
At the end of the class, a flock of attractive females chirped around Shelley. He ruled his small nest beneficently, casually puffed on a cigarillo, smiled, and generously exchanged songbirds of banter. He seemed like a mythical enchanter, part satyr, part Pan, and part Dionysus with a touch of Calliope and Thalia.
I wanted to make Shelley my friend and mentor, but I could not penetrate his circle of admirers, at least not without a slashing saber. There were questions bubbling up in my excitement.
That night, I looked him up in the phone book. There, an address in the West Village. I would call him and simply say how impressed I was and could we get together for a drink.
“If you have a girlfriend, why don’t you come to my apartment on Friday evening around 8 p.m. You can meet my girlfriend, my anima, we will drink wine, smoke a joint or two, listen to a little bit of Thelonious and Miles, and see if we can develop bonds of friendship.”
I muttered “great” and hung up the phone.
We arrived in a dimly lit apartment one flight up in a brownstone on Charles Street. Candles, in colorful glass cups, were burning on the windowsill. And from large speakers on the floor, wild piano chords of Thelonious Monk were leaping and prancing and caterwauling, interrupted and accompanied by the scream of a sax. The room had an old velvet maroon couch on arched mahogany legs. On the couch sat a pair of imperturbable white Persian cats. Their incandescent blue eyes suspiciously studied us, then looked away.
“Heather, this is Jeffrey Sussman. He’s a student in my poetry class and he’s having a wonderful time understanding the difference between metonymy and synecdoche. And this must be the charming Evelyn.”
Ever the contrarian, Evelyn lifted Shelley’s right hand and pretended to kiss it. Not missing a beat, he mimicked a small curtsy. Off to a good start, I thought.
Evelyn and Heather seemed to have been inspired by the hip look then popular in the Village. They were each dressed in black, black tights, black turtlenecks, and very short black skirts. Evelyn had long blond hair parted in the middle, and Heather’s was also long, a rich auburn parted on the left.
As Evelyn and I sat in chairs opposite the two inscrutable cats, Heather brought out a bottle of Chianti and Shelley offered us a joint. By midnight, the initial bonds of friendship were loosely tied.
There were many such evenings, and every six to eight months, there was a change in Shelley’s love life. His amours were invariably students, infatuated with the would-be poet. His laughter, his energy, his wit were all irresistible attractions. And he used his attributes the way a good athlete would, knowing what would work and would not, when to exert himself, when to glide through the motions of charm and seduction.
He once said to me, “When I was an instructor just starting out on the climb to tenure, I used to walk up to the most beautiful young women on the street and ask them to go to bed with me. Most of them ignored me; every once in a while, I would get my face slapped; but on rare occasions, my question would result in a delicious affair. That, of course, was before I had the power of maturity and experience and before I learned to use my classrooms as theaters. Now, I don’t need to ask; it just happens.”
To say that Shelley was a narcissist would be to state the obvious. Everyone in the world was there to perform a service for him. In his eyes, my purpose was to further inflate his ego by being his malleable epigone.
After I graduated from college, I didn’t get together as frequently as I used to with Shelley. And then he was offered a series of visiting professorships, which not only took him to various college campuses in the United States, but also to Europe, Japan, and Canada. He wrote books that were tomes of brilliant ideas. He became an arbiter of what was good avant-garde poetry and what was fake or meretricious. He held soirées for newly established poets, where he dominated the room and barely let his new discoveries speak.
He had become the great impresario of poetry, and the man who could have virtually any woman he wanted. Of course, they had to be well educated and hip. Beauty was important, but if a woman didn’t have the right credentials, she was “infra dig,” as he used to say with a wink and a smile.
As his reputation grew, he was invited to be on literary panels, to be a consultant for a special PBS program about poetry, to edit highly regarded anthologies, and write reviews for prestigious journals. And because he was so handsome and dashing, he was often seen on intellectually pretentious television interview programs. He even had a few cameo appearances in three feature films.
By his early 60s, he had become an industry unto himself. He was a star, burning fiercely and provocatively, challenging others to be his circling moons.
Then it happened. He had been in New York City to deliver a lecture at Town Hall. The night before his appearance, I got a phone call from his current lover. She sounded frantic, frustrated, confused, and angry.
“Jeffrey. He’s in the hospital. He’s had a bad stroke. He was lying on the floor of his bathroom. I was out of the room. When I came back, I saw him there. He looked dead. He was in a coma. I tried to wake him, but couldn’t. I called 911. An ambulance took him to the N.Y.U. Medical Center. His left side is paralyzed and his words come out slurred, as if his mouth is full of sticky syrup.”
I visited Shelley every evening after I left my job at an advertising agency. He could barely speak. And when he did his words were an angry stammer. His right fist would repeatedly slam the mattress of his bed, or he would angrily press a button to call forth the floor nurse. When she arrived, he would struggle to yell at her, making demands she couldn’t understand.
I thought it would calm his nerves if he read some poetry. When I suggested it, he violently shook his head NO. Day after day, his condition remained unchanged. I continued to visit him; and then after two weeks, I could see a series of incremental changes. A nurse helped him to shuffle across the floor as he pushed one of those metal walkers in front of him. After another two weeks, he was informed that he would be going to the Rusk Institute for physical therapy. He hung his head as if a judge had just sentenced him to more torture.
During his time in that therapy, I was sent out of town by my employer. I had to supervise the shooting of a TV commercial for which I had written the script. It was shot in Southern California and in Hawaii.
When I returned to New York, Shelley was in an assisted living facility, where he was being cared for by round-the-clock nurses. He was now able to speak haltingly, and he expressed his sadness in blunt prose.
“I . . . am . . . alone. . . . Will . . . always . . . be . . . alone. I . . . never . . . married . . . never . . . had . . . children. . . . All . . . that . . . I . . . have . . . left . . . are . . . books . . . that . . . I . . . wrote. It’s . . . all over. . . . I’m . . . finished. . . . What . . . comes . . . now . . . is . . . a . . . waste.”
When he died after suffering another stroke, a large obituary was published in The New York Times. His publisher took out a memorial ad in The New York Review of Books. A memorial service was held at Town Hall. I was invited to give one of the eulogies, but felt that my words would be either artificially good-humored or they would be so downbeat as to annoy those who came to celebrate Shelley’s memory. Instead I chose to read one of his favorite poems, a sonnet, not by Shelley, but by that other great Romantic poet, John Keats:
“When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love; — then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.”
Jeffrey Sussman is president of Jeffrey Sussman (www.powerpublicity.com) and the author of “No Mere Bagatelles,” a biography of Judith Leiber, the handbag designer, and Gerson Leiber, the modernist artist.