Sod

I was shocked when it happened. One spring day I was sitting under a tree in the spring on the South Lawn at Columbia College in Spanish Harlem, reading the poem “Daffodils” by Wordsworth.

And seconds later I knew who I was. I had to write poetry. Not business reports, my father’s idea of writing.

How this moment outlives all the negativity, misdirections, digressions, distractions, trivial pursuits, insanities, inanities of normal life is I suppose the MacGuffin, the primal code that unlocks any life. Prodigies of any kind are bizarre, cursed, idiot savants who have to be protected from life and saved from themselves, either by parents, friends, lovers, or police.

At this stage, being around 79, I have to accept the past as a fait accompli. But when I was 21, in 1967, I was a sponge, vulnerable to the garbage on the street, the soot on the joints, the horror story of New York, compared to the pristine lawns and primal forests of my youth. I was terrified, panicked, appalled by everything in New York, even though it had been my obsession for years. I would stay on the train past White Plains, skipping the bus that would take me to Stepinac, and get off at Grand Central, take a cab down to Greenwich Village, and skulk about, with nothing better to do than to identify with the sound of Chopin or Schubert coming from a brownstone, dream about encountering a beat poet like Allen Ginsberg but instead just have coffee (it was before anyone in the States served the elegant Italian varieties which created their own culture, maybe even their own poetry).

I ignored anything positive about my writing, and focused despairingly on the negative. I suppose my mother’s three-year battle with a brain tumor had a lot to do with it. I’d be brought in to say a few words to her once a day; she was in bed and barely recognized me. I never admitted to myself that it had an effect on me, but I registered every sound, every smell, every angle of a blade of grass, so I was in retrospect living in some kind of trauma.

I don’t think I emerged from it until I became aware that Cathy loved me. I wanted to be worthy of it, and all I had was poetry and music. A few photographs, a few paragraphs of prose. Poetry and prose had been my idea of myself since I was 6, but I had very little to show of it. I stopped short of finishing anything. I had my own variation on Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which would have done well had I published it. (Jason Epstein talked me out of it, maybe because his son was at the time plagiarizing and he was worried about legalities. On the other hand, Timothy Seldes, my agent, the brother of Marian Seldes, loved it, and was dying to publish it. I decided a compromise was to rewrite Hamlet. I did a few scenes, and they were quite funny.) Sadly, Tim Seldes died before I gave him anything else.

I’d written a 300-page paper in eight languages, De Veneficia, Lycanthropo, et Superstitione, which was more of a diary of my life with witchcraft thrown in for padding. I later wrote and illustrated Capt. Vomit’s Christmas, a funny Christmas story about a junk-food Christmas tree, and a photo book about guinea pigs who wob a toy twain. I suppose I’ll publish all of these, now that none of them will shape the trajectory of my life.

I was quite worried about Eliot’s line, the last line in Prufrock: “Till human voices wake us and we drown.” I knew that if I became a piano teacher I’d be obsessive and do nothing else. If I became a teacher I’d want to adopt all my students. If I became a college teacher I’d want to date my students. I was a college student myself, so I suppose that was normal. I imagined a long and happy life as a teacher, or a short career as a sexual predator.

I didn’t want to be a pianist, maybe because my father had removed the piano from our house, after one too many Beethoven sonatas. I had one lesson, where the teacher refused to teach me because she couldn’t play Liszt’s Second Rhapsody, which I had played for her. Every piano teacher’s nightmare.

I had heard that our neighbors the Raos were related to Garrick Ohlsson, who had been sent to the White Plains Conservatory, but I never met him. My father would leave the house when I played their piano during parties. This undoubtedly had an effect on me.

When I played the piano at our other neighbors, the Busmans (Ellie Busman was the sister of the writer Ira Levin, who wrote No Time for Sergeants and Deathtrap), my father would break into the house, grab me by the ear and pull me off the piano in front of our poor mortified and cultured friends. He told me I should never go into a Jewish house, because it wouldn’t be clean. It was much cleaner than our house, and it had books, and a piano, after my father had gotten rid of the one my grandfather had given us. My father felt the piano would lead to poverty, starvation, misery, and death. Which is in fact what my novel is about, so I begin to understand where I got its underpinnings.

I shared a practice Steinway backstage in Carman Hall at Columbia with Manny Ax. We stared at each other, but never spoke. I was friends at Columbia with Germano Romano, who had been raised to be a concert pianist, but who disappeared forever after I left New York (or maybe I disappeared). Daniel Ellsberg, whom I knew briefly in Cambridge because my friend’s sister dated him, had also been raised to be a concert pianist; he was quite good. At camp I was friends with Eddie Goldman, after whose grandparents the Goldman Shell at Lincoln Center was named: they had a popular Strauss and Sousa band. Eddie was a good pianist. Our friends at camp said that it was either Eddie playing simply something difficult, or me, fancying up something simple.

I was sent to a Jewish camp by mistake, Camp Music Land, run by Guido Brand, a violinist at Juilliard. We did spelling bees, I played Brahms’ G Minor Rhapsody on Ithaca TV, got a crush on a girl, and starred in the camp play, Antigone, the version by Jean Anouilh. I was Creon, the king, Antigone’s uncle. I played it without my glasses, so when I entered on top of the temple stairs, shouting “Antigone,” I fell down the whole flight, about thirty stairs, and landed at Antigone’s feet. She was handcuffed. She was so nervous, as she had the whole play in front of her and she was in almost every scene, that she threw up. We never managed to top that.

I came out into the audience after the play and my mother asked me, “And which one were you?” I was so sad for her. But possibly my Richard Burton accent was vindicated. I had a British accent of some kind for around ten years. My nighttime companions were Burton, Olivier, Rex Harrison, Paul Scofield. My inner life was entirely in the Seventeenth Century.

My mother died that summer and I was sent to Deerfield Academy. My father wanted military school, but my grandfather probably offered to pay for it if he sent me to Deerfield, where my grandfather knew the architects, William and Geoffrey Platt, who had designed the new dining hall and the new meeting hall.

For a while, I didn’t want to write. My father had jeered at me, “What makes you think you’re authorized?” He didn’t realize how untypically clever he had been.

After the Columbia riots in 1968, I went to Boston, got an apartment and bought a 1928 seven-foot Steinway from Paul Murphy, Jr., who was my age and whose parents owned the Steinway dealer, Steinert’s. My teacher, the lovely Clara Slater, recommended me to her teacher, Russell Sherman, who at that time was the head of the piano faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music. Sherman said to me once, “Peter, your mistakes are always so musical….”

He was quite indulgent with me, and eventually Cathy and I funded his albums with Pro Arte, Intersound, and then Albany Records. When I went back to Columbia, having left Boston, I sent Sherman a poem, “Second Childhood,” about how we perceive more as we get older and blinder. He sent me a note about it, but obviously hadn’t read it.

I spent life before Deerfield in my room, provided for me by my Grandfather (he’d given the house to my mother as wedding present), filled with books and my writing. He built bookcases for me. I would sneak out the back window, jump off the roof, and prowl the lush Midsummer Night woodlands behind our house at night, then read under the covers. My father caught me a small percentage of the time.

At some point my inventor uncle Bill decided I was a genius while I was improvising at the piano. Sadly, he died shortly thereafter, leaving me with that lovely compliment.

When I played a Chopin Polonaise for Maria von Trapp, my aunt Helen snapped at me, “Don’t ever play that piece in public again.” She asked a friend, who edited the “Salt and Pepper” limerick column at the Wall St. Journal, if I was a good poet, and he said no, so that was it. She actually said to my father, “Get rid of him.”

I asked a publisher if I should write, and he said I should change my name. Jason Epstein, the founder of The NY Review of Books and chief editor at Random House, said my Agatha Christie pastiche was probably illegal. His son was caught plagarizing a novel the next month, so Epstein’s malaise wasn’t about me.

I was discouraged, I despaired, but I always did what I still do.

I’m still a pianist, still a poet, still write prose, still take reflection photos, still produce piano albums.

My wonderful grandfather, Will O’Brien, thought I was amazing, and showed me off to all his friends. He sadly died after I went to college. I’ve written much about him.

It was Cathy’s belief in me that encouraged me to do something about it finally. My friends Jimmy Finkelstein, Sam Klutznick, and Peter Van Etten always believed in me, despite the fact that I was a lazy, dissipated wastrel in the best Charles Surface tradition. Not that I drank, gambled, or womanized. I just didn’t write. For a few dark years, I only played Broadway show tunes at frat parties. Nothing classical.

I drove a cab, tutored Barnard girls, lived on Hamburger Helper without the hamburger, and one day under the only tree on campus (I don’t think there were any others, except the city trees set into the sidewalks on the far side of the buildings), I was, like Saul, struck by lightning.

This was the lawn which in 1968 had mounted police galloping like Cossacks on students, and which this past year has been overwhelmed with the tents of protesters. I haven’t noticed the tree since it spoke to me. Its work was done, its blossoms inside me. In a way I ate it.

I don’t remember the weather, or anything else that happened that week. I remember what happened under that tree.