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Kingfisher a
Journal of Northwest Art and
Literature Dedicated to
the appreciation of poetry, fiction,
painting, Volume One, Number Three
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more reading Plath (Continued from page one) It is a difficult but rewarding year, the culmination of much hard work. Having published a short story in Mademoiselle the previous August, when she was nineteen, the same magazine now offers her the post of guest managing editor the following summer, 1953. She is twenty. A month later she attempts suicide. It is a pattern early established: heady success of a major kind, followed by depression and an attempt to kill herself. Ten years later, following the publication in England of The Bell Jar, the patterns repeats, only the suicide is successful this time. The three poems are technically excellent, but Plath does not include them in her first book, The Colossus and Other Poems, 1960. Ted Hughes includes them under Uncollected Juvenilia, fifty poems produced before 1956, and most as class exercises under her Smith College professor, Alfred Young Fisher. (Hughes says the typescripts are full of marginalia by her professor, suggestions which she dutifully followed for the most part.) Young they are, but not amateurish. They were professional enough to be accepted by a leading intellectual-oriented magazine. Today they continue to read well. Fisher urged his students to write in well-established metrical formats, such as the sonnet, sestina, or villanelle. This is excellent discipline. The poems are good in themselves. I think a closer look at them, or parts of them, might be in order. “Eva” is a villanelle, she tells us. As such it is a 19-line poem, with its first and third lines repeating in five tercets and repeating as closing lines in each of the stanzas that follow, joining again as the final couplet of the quatrain. Her lines are “(Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)” And “Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear.” There are additional lines of great skill: “The asteroids turn traitor in the air,/And planets plot with old elliptic cunning.” A keen ear is at work here and considerable learning of poetic diction is evidenced. Remember, she is but a girl, hungry for acceptance, both personal and literary. Foremost she is a writer and knows it. It is a pleasure to watch her work. But then we recall that poets, athletes, and folksingers are frequently at their best when they are very, very young. And often they aren't around long after that. The subject matter of the poem is not very important; what is is the talent at work in a tough rhyme scheme, forming a taut mental exercise, much like double acrostics. There is humor and the classic bombastic game of lifting to a cosmic plane such an ordinary activity as a fellow student (Smith was all female) coming down the stairs. The stairs are of necessity embellished. They are part of the mythological universe. Eva is just another girl, a fellow student. It is not necessary to define her except by a name with a feminine ending. She is not a person. She is simply a poetic device, a demi-goddess. “Go Get The Goodly Squab (I capitalize where Plath does not)” is another skillful exercise in manipulation of a form. It is also evidence of a lot of heavy reading in the mannered and structured stanzas of the past, with word inversions playfully executed and the pathetic fallacy (things acting like people, with commensurate emotions attached) carried to the point of good-natured excess. It does not bear close examination of its tropes; they fall apart and become laughable. But that’s okay. Plath means for us to laugh. The Romantic Poets wrote like this and only to themselves cracked a smile. But to their public this was dead-serious stuff. And Plath’s editor, Lynes, and teacher, Fisher, surely recognized them as such. They either gave her an A, or else paid her for her poetic accomplishments. I’ll give you but one such stanza. If you want more, go seek them out in the Collected Poems: “Let the fast-feathered eagle fly And the skies crack through with thunder; Hid, hid, in the deep nest Lest the lightning strike you to cinder.” Well, I didn’t say it was great, only good for what it is. It is “A” work, but where it may lead is anybody’s guess. Some students write this well, then falter and fall by the side of the road. They become persons of industry. Staid mothers and fathers. The third poem accepted by Lynes is “Doomsday.” It too is a villanelle. It is a difficult form, calling for tough writing and rhyming. Its twin refrains are: “The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans,” and “The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.” Not bad, in fact quite difficult. The universal clock, the clock of the late Yeats, is broken. “. . . the doomstruck city crumbles block by block.” The center cannot hold; hell, there is no longer a center for things to fall away from. What is such a young person doing, writing about doom? What does she know about it? Or about personal suffering projected onto a cosmic scale? Well, less than a year later she tries to kill herself. It is no mere gesture, one meant to be aborted just in time. The broken clock is ticking; it is ticking for Sylvia Plath. Not much time passes before Plath blossoms. It is a remarkable feat. Hers is a hectic life, the typical literary life of her time. First the student, it is only a couple of years later she is teaching students slightly younger than herself. And because of this, and for other reasons, she is resented when she returns to Smith from Cambridge U. By then she has met and married Hughes. (What the movies will make of this! Gwyneth, who is your Ted? ) Mine was Roethke. Plath knew him, but only indirectly from h is work. He as one of the many, many poets she had read continuously. In 1953, if I remember correctly, Roethke was at Firlands Sanitarium, drying out and being treated for what is now called bi-polar disorder. He was up, but quickly and badly coming down, and need professional help. But he has already written The Lost Son and Plath, who was reading nearly everything, had read it. A few years later, in her Journals, she remarks on how various aspects of Roethke’s writing had influenced her. But she was already too much her own person, her own poetic self, not to transform what she read and liked into something uniquely her own. And this she did. An unusual phenomena was taking place in American colleges and universities. Writers were being welcomed to the faculty. The idea of a Poet in Residence, the Poet in the Classroom, was rapidly gaining credence. There was Lowell at Harvard, Roethke at Washington, and in between—the State University at Iowa and Stanford, among others—permanent faculty position were being designated for these post. And for fiction writers, too. Universities, along with Fullbrights and Guggenheims, provided working writers with a more or less steady income that would support them for a year or two. Roethke, at the invitation of Chairman Robert Heilman, was brought in as a full professor and paid well; his flashy, four-holed Buick Roadmaster was clear testament to his status. (Never mind that it was also a gangster's car.) Plath in 1959 was being treated by a psychiatrist after a series of agonizing electroshock treatments. She had read more Roethke, including his poems in the stanzas of William Yeats, and notes this in her journal entry of March 9th. She refers obliquely to her “ravaged face,” and writes a fine poem with that as its title. “A line came,” she writes, then “the five lines of a sestet.” A total of eight lines arrived while riding the trolley, coming back from her doctor at Winthop. She likened the poem to the recently written “Suicide Off Egg Rock.” A troubled but prolific time for her, she writes that she “finished a New Yorkerish but romantic iambic pentameter imitation of Roethke’s Yeats poems,” but characterizes her efforts as “rather weak” and “not book material.” Nonetheless she decides to send it off to the New Yorker. The same day she visits her father’s grave and searches for the stone. Roethke could have been her missing father. It is stretching a point, I admit. He was of German extraction, too. Plath’s long-dead father was a bee keeper, Roethke’s a commercial gardener. Tellingly, both were named Otto (a fact that Plath could hardly have missed). Roethke’s greenhouse poems induced Plath to write poems drawn on a similar but wholly imaginary past, one with a potting shed in it and lots of flowers. But it was his techniques, based on Joycean stream of consciousness, that probably influenced her most and key elements of her style. In poems written about this time there is a strong macabre element. She has visited a cadaver room and is hyper aware of “the smoke and slaughter” aspects of a Brueghel painting she’s just seen. In the suicide poem “sun struck the water like a damnation." The suicide’s body was “beached with the sea’s garbage.” In short, it is a dismal poem, but the imagery is powerful, arresting. Her own “ravaged face” in the other poem is “obscene, lugubrious.” It is the result of electroshock and too much inward turning, the toll exerted by poetry writing and psychoanalysis, the last of which was dealing mostly with her relationship to the father who had “deserted” her by dying when she was eight. She also wrote the poem “Metaphors” in a nine-line stanza of nine syllables each. It is Roethkean in some of its imagery, and the following poem from this time, “Electra on Azalea Path” is pure Plath, but the stanzas are in the same iambic pentameter that Yeats and Roethke used. Areas of intra-family relationships are hard at work here, including the Electra myth that she alludes to in her journals, involving the deserting father and contesting mother. But how could she share a dead father with her mother, compete with her, and win out? Impossible, of course. She writes in obvious despair and agony, “O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at/Your gate, father—your hound-bitch, daughter, friend. It was my love that did us both to death.” She is of course poetically evoking a familiar all-encompassing myth, but at the same time she is giving voice to matters she has been talking to her psychiatrist about at those deadly regular sessions. She is trying to work matters out, at the same time she is exploiting them knowingly as poetry. It is a dangerous game and one’s mental health is what is at stake. She had but four more years to live. (The good news is, she had already lived two years longer than Keats.) Later in the same year, 1959, on October 23, Plath writes in her journal that she has “an exercise, begun, in grimness, turning into a fine new thing: first of series of madhouse poems. October in the toolshed, Roethke’s influence, yet mine.” She has talked to Ted (Hughes) about this and also to Malcolm Cowley, the previous night, but feels that Cowley will reject her book. But Heinemann in London is interested in her poems and will publish them, along with The Bell Jar, a couple of years later. What she is doing is trying to get together enough good poems for her first book. At the same time, her long dream of writing successful fiction is pushing her forward along a quite different line. Fiction is how you make good money. Poetry is intellectual achievement, the stuff that gets you a Fullbright, but the pay is small, if any. She is living out a year with no teaching in it, a year that will soon end up with her going back to England. She is writing fine, tortured poetry, and fiction still, aiming at the lucrative short story market. She thinks she may be pregnant (she’s not), and says that “England offers new comforts. . . . My tempo is British. Wet, wet walk with Ted. Blue drippings, dulled green lakes, dim yellow reflections.” Winter is approaching, with the colors “dulled to smoke-purple and blunt umbers.” Perhaps she doesn’t mean “burnt” umber. One
of the Roethke-inspired poems to come
out of this despair and tension is
the long one, “Poem for a
Birthday.”
The birthday is hers.
Late October, she turns 27.
She says her heart “Moldering heads console me, Nailed to the rafters yesterday: Inmates who don’t hibernate. A dressing of mule ears, mothy pelts, but greenhearted, Their veins white as porkfat.” You get the drift. While this must have been fun to write (“Take this, Ted—both of you. You see how good I am?), the word wallow comes to mind. It is an exercise for the right hand, not the left. A bit further along she writes: “O the beauty of usage! The orange pumpkins have no eyes. These halls are full of women who think they are birds.
I am a root, a stone, an owl pellet, Without dreams of any sort.” For some time now, reading Plath as she inches along through her life and her writing, I have experienced her growing proficiency. This is a long poem, “Poem for a Birthday” is, with seven named sections or parts. They are: 1. Who, 2. Dark House, 3. Maenad, 4. The Beast, 5. Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond, 6. Witch Burning, and 7. The Stones. Hughes lists it as finished on 4 November, 1959. It has a similar open-ended imagery of free association as does Bob Dylan in his “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowland,” written a little later. It doesn’t make specific sense and is ultimately indecipherable. But it works on an emotive level and is most affecting. If it isn’t great poetry, it is very good. Few have equaled it. Roethke has. Roethke writes (in Four for Sir John Davies, from The Waking, 1953), “I take this cadence from a man named Yeats,” and six years later Plath takes her cadence from a man named Roethke, but does not add, somewhat contemptuously, “I take it and I give it back again,” much as a home run hit by a visiting team into the bleachers today is tossed back on the field. No souvenir, this. Plath has too much respect to do this. She will simply strive to outperform, and in the process change the metrics a bit. Part 1, Who, does not ask a question but makes a very short declarative statement. The who is herself, the place a potting shed. Similarities, sure. She is working in the liberated free verse that Roethke used in earlier poems, such as The Lost Son. There is no enjambment in this section. Each line is a simple sentence of only a few words. It declares something and that something is always changing. In Part 2. Dark Horse, she continues the simplicity of style, but not of content. The style is freely associational. “I am around as an owl!/I see by my own light./Any day I may litter puppies.” It is no help to know that, many times, including this one, Plath thought she might be pregnant, and with a portion of her mind wanted to be. She adds, “Or mother a horse. My belly moves./I must make more maps.” Has she made maps before? Where would they lead her, or her thoughts? The next stanza is excellent. I shall quote it all: “These marrowy tunnels! Moley-handed, I eat my way. All-mouth licks up the bushes And the pots of meat. He lives in an old well, A stony hole. He’s to blame. He’s
a fat sort.” There are similarities to “The Waking”—the very short line, the exclamation marks at the end of certain, but not all, sentences. And of course from that book not entirely for children, I Am, Says the Lamb! And there is the use of exclamation even in the title. The book came out in 1961, however, so Plath could hardly have read it, unless she could have heard Roethke reading it on the lecture circuit. He had been working on it, off and on, for years, wanting to please children (though he had none himself), and I was privileged to be in his Poetry Appreciation class when he shyly read to us from the manuscript. Carolyn Kizer was there, too. Older than the rest of us, and a mother, Roethke wanted her appreciation of these poems, and got it. Others were less enthralled, I remember. Perhaps we were too near childhood ourselves and still struggling to get away from it and into the serious adult world. Anyway, the last line of Plath's poem, “He’s a fat sort,” is pure Roethke. It is a compliment, and not an entirely unconscious one in the form of flattery. Part 3. Maenad (which is a frenzied woman, one out for sensual pleasure) is metrically more of the same, and begins fetchingly: "Once I was ordinary: Sat by my father’s bean tree Eating the fingers of wisdom. The birds made milk. When it thundered I hid under a flat stone. The mother of mouths didn’t love me. The old man shrank to a doll. I am too big to go backwards.” It is the same infantile world Plath returns to as was occupied by Roethke for a short while, (a world created by James Joyce in Portrait of the Artist, probably), a childlike world, but one knowingly and cunningly formulated by a mature poet who is keenly aware of the power of words. And the Freudian psychoanalytical bent in it is evident: “Mother, keep out of my barnyard,/I am becoming another.” We know that she was suffering an identity crisis, angry at her mother, feeling deprived, deserted, by her father, long dead. So she asks at the section’s end: “Tell me my name,” she asks. O, she knows it well enough. Part 4 is The Beast. He is the shaggy, nameless creature, always in the shadows, never to be banished. He keeps reappearing throughout her life in slightly different forms, as best suits him. It is always a “him.” “The dark’s his bone.” She tells us. “Call him any name, he’ll come to it.” He is the beast of literature, nameless, familiar, menacing. He is so familiar, in fact, that she can joke about him and address him playfully. She says, “Mud-sump, happy sty-face,” as a child might call another child, pointedly disparaging, in mock anger, but friendly. “I’ve married a cupboard of rubbish./I bed in a fish puddle.” A bit later she describes herself in similar terms: She is “Duchess of Nothing.” She is “Hairtusk’s bridge.” Take that, Ted. One or the other of you. Part V. “Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond” is very different. It is different metrically, to start with. In all those juvenile exercises resulting in poems she did not think fit to publish in her lifetime—those fits, those starts, those completed gems—Plath was able to master the tight metrical forms. She now cunningly returns to them. Enjambment again, plus a variable line length, but a rhyme scheme that would challenge all but the skilled and talented. Of a quatrain, she rhymes the first, third, and fourth lines, then lets the second line in the second stanza rhyme with those lines in the stanza above, thus: aaba ccac, etc. The tone is elegant, elegiac. The “I” has appropriately become “we.” The poet is at a classic distance from both herself and her material, her childhood and its horrors. She is up there with the gods. And she stays there in the final section, Part. 6. "Witch Burning." It is as though as she matured (27 is mature when compared to three or four) the poetic forms she thought and wrote in also matured. We are back to iambic pentameter. It is a wonder she doesn’t rhyme her lines, as Roethke did, but we are a little further along in time and the need to do so is less. We know she can, and easily, for “Flute Notes” is only a few lines behind. So she presses on in her synthesis of ideas, poetics, and form. “In the marketplace they are piling the dry stick. A thicket of shadows is a poor coat. I inhabit The wax image of myself, a doll’s body.” In short, they are about to burn her at the stake. She reminds us that this is a birthday poem and the time is October: “In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed of fire.” The smoke mounts. She tells herself, “If I am a little one, I can do no harm. If
I don’t move about, I’ll knock
nothing over.” She has not only regressed (to use a vernacular term particular to her at the time), she has shrunk to “a grain of rice.” She is nearly back to the ovum, before the sperm. She asks, “Give me back my shape,” because she has lost it. This is a near suicide, but it is suicide that is induced from the outside. She is being burnt at the stake as a witch. Brightness ascends her thighs, she tells us. It is fire. She moans, “I am lost, I am lost.” She is the lost daughter, not the son. And Roethke—who would be about the right age for the job—is her father. Not that she ever had a real one. At least poetically he will play the part, opr so I would have it.. Part
7. "The Stones" is the poem’s
conclusion. She is back to being “I”
again. But she is also integrated
into nature.
She is a stone, bathed by a
river or by the sea. The
poet is also living in “the
after-hell.” She has been crucified, burnt
at the stake. At
the same time she is a stone. “Sponges kiss my lichens
away."
She has become a stone or
earthenware image that has been
thrown to the sea. Now she is a person again,
in the hospital for repairs, being
stitched back together, her legs
swaddled.
Images from the painter
Giorgio de Chirico leap
to mind, and are meant to: “A
workman walks by carrying a pink
torso. The
storerooms are full of hearts. This is
the city of spare parts. Tellingly she tells us, a moment later, “On
Fridays the little children come To trade
their hooks for hands. Dead men
leave eyes for others. Love is
the uniform of my bald nurse.” We
are back in Eliot’s “The
Wasteland,” too, not that we’ve ever
left it, really, even to celebrate
our birthday. Plath had seen her share of
hospitals and had
written her cadaver poem
earlier
in the year.
She had had electroshock and
surgery.
She was soon to undergo
childbirth and an appendectomy.
All is broken, at the best
newly mended. It is the most we can hope
for, to live in a shattered world
that is held together, perhaps
mockingly, by human love and adhesive
tape-- the
fragile, unfaithful love that Auden
tells us is all we have, at best.
There is nothing more to look forward to, she tells us. Likely there will be less. “Love
is the bone and sinew of my curse. The
vase, reconstructed, houses The
elusive rose.” And
the coda is that her mendings itch. This means she is physically
healing. “There is nothing else to
do.” She must wait, wait in
order to heal. “I shall be as good as
new,” she tells us in the long
poem’s last line. The irony is heavy here,
knowing what we do of her life to
come.
It is as if she knew it as
well. Happy
birthday, Sylvia. And many more of them. Well, three,
anyway.anyway |
more
poetry by Melvin La Follette Three Sonnets
Further
Than North 1
PORTAGE Female lakes respect the love of loons As waterfalls respect the mouth’s caress; Why have we wandered past the watercress Through untold Egypts filled with blowing dunes? This is no orient. No sallow moons Ride high on crescent cities. Savage dress Recalls no softness, and we matter less Than fallen empires when the wet wind croons. This is salmon country—all the fry Are growing up in lakes as blue as sky; Tumbling through these pools, their life is strong. Dipping blistered feet in quiet coves We wonder as the muscled water moves— Our world in circular—but not for long. (from Poetry, April 1956) 2 SUMMIT REACHED The big cat springs against the glowing dawn And finds the empty ashes of the spoor That we have left three fragile dawns before. He snorts about dry bones, and then stalks on. The latest salmon finds a lake to spawn In, and a black coot flies across the moor That now is empty of our steps—the floor Beneath the cedars quickens. We are gone. Gone. To the hills, to the white breast Of that one mountain where we cry for rest. Our footsteps dot the pumice slides, the dry Cinders hurt. I scoop a small blue flower Out of the rocks in our triumphant hour. Our bloody fingers bleed against the sky. 3
LAKE BEAVER Rivers should start in rocks too steep to climb And spill down canyons, where the roaring sound Of waterfalls is endless and the ground Is green with ferns, but treacherous as time. The strength of rivers is their basic crime: Tamed, they make good companions, smooth and round They fill blue lakes where many trout abound And sweaty men may wash away the grime Of many days away from tenderness. It is the fat tame beaver that we bless. But rip his pelt a way with bloody knife. The wolverine retreats. We wear his fur Against our panting faces, while we spur Our horses onward to the springs of life. (from Poetry, April 1956) THE
BALLAD OF RED FOX Yellow sun yellow Sun yellow sun, When, oh, when Will red fox run? When the hollow horn shall sound, When the hunter lifts his gun And liberates the wicked hound, Then, oh, then shall red fox run. Yellow sun yellow Sun yellow sun, Where, oh, where Will red fox run? Through meadows hot as sulphur, Through forests cool as clay, Through hedges crisp as morning And grasses limp as day. Yellow sky yellow Sky yellow sky, How, oh, how Will red fox die? With a dagger in his belly, A dagger in his eye, And blood upon his red red bush Shall red fox die. Published in the New Yorker in 1952, "The Ballad of Red Fox " is reprinted with the author's permission, as are the other poems included here. SUMMERHOUSEThere have been three storms in my heart Since the apricot blossomed, the gourd Where the purple martins nested is empty: Oh, goodbye. There is one room that I Must not touch. It is furnished with a hoard Of treasures. I recall, with a start, There was something in June I forgot, When the storm clouds fumed, lazy and hot, Over the orchard. In July, I could fling Dry clods at the noisy birds. Something Spoke. That was the second storm. In August A whirlwind filled my mouth with dust, And I cried. It is September; the lost Room is locked, my heart is attuned to frost. (from New World Writing 5, 1954)
THE BLUE HORSE That summer we saw the Blue Horse We tamed him. His sky-splashed mane Hummed with the current of surcharged hoofs That flowed into our stony lane. His love for us was infinite: The head held high; the tender mouth That never knew a bit; the eyes Compassionate as rain that follows drouth. We loved him; loved, but not because He was blue and blue horses are rare— He taught us love; he tamed us, too— Our
wild minds learned new meanings for
care. Winter: the Blue Horse was with us still, The mane now ragged; the eyes still bright But brightness now admixed with pain; We taught him hate; we showed him fright. For Christmas found us listening in the church To cruel stories, worshiping the star of war; Our fear forgot his love—forgot His grief at the sickly fear we bore. We fought among ourselves: we killed; The more we fought, the more we feared; The Blue Horse cried often; you struck me. One day and the Blue Horse disappeared. We found him when the snow had melted— Rotted eyes; the mouth become a leer— He tamed us with his eager love— We killed him with our feeble fear. (from Beloit Poetry Journal, Fall 1955) HUNTAll day it had been raining; now the leaves Were crisp and wet with light. It was not late Yet. Bright, the clouds were bright; but it was cold And in your small shivering you let me hold Your head against my chest, and in that great Alone it was only the light of the leaves That was watching us. Our breath was clouds, a stump Steamed quietly, a goldfinch landed on a clump Of thistle, and started to sing; and it was good To be warm with you in that untrammeled wood. But time, time broke around us like glass, our friendly park Grew bristling, we soon stood apart. From the dark Trees came a red fox, running. Then The dogs closed in, and finally, the men. (from. Beloit Poetry Journal, Summer 1954)
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AT
THE MOVIES We owe a lot to the movies and
the people who make them.
Admittedly it is an industry, one
intended to make money. But movies
have high aesthetic value, too. To see a
movie, you used to have to go to a theater.
No more. Many more
movies are watched in our own homes,
either over network TV, premium movie
channels, pay-per-view, videotapes
rented or purchased, or DVD. The industry includes many fields and technical specialties, each with its highly trained professionals. It is likely each of us knows one or two people employed in the industry, presently or in the past. Not many are stars of the magnitude written about in People Magazine. It takes a team effort, a large one, to make a movie. Each contributes his expertise Richard Sylbert was one such
person. He was at the top of his
field, production
design. It is an aspect of
movie-making that most people know
little about, including myself.
But the people in the business knew
Dick well and respected him and his
talent. He was the choice of
the best directors and producers for
nearly fifty years. It is a tough business. Dick differed from many by somehow maintaining his sanity when many about him were losing theirs. Fishing and hunting, and after a long stint at making a movie (which often takes several years), he would reward himself with a few days off fishing, or a week at some distant place where he could hunt birds. Pheasants were a favorite. It takes a keen eye and a steady hand to bring down a flushed bird in heavy cover. Since his work
took him to all parts of the world,
he was knowledgeable about hunting
and fishing all over the world.
But always work came first. I once asked him when he was
going to retire, since he was nearly
70.“Retire?” he asked,
incredulously.
“Why, I’ve got the best
job in the world.”
Dick Sylbert with a Wenatchee River steelhead. Drawing by Loren Smith I
am no hunter, but Dick and I fished
together for two decades on an
irregular basis. Sometimes it was in
the spring on the Sauk or Skagit.
Or else it was in the fall on
the Wenatchee. Rarely was it on the river
where he and I had getaway homes, the
North Fork of the Stillaguamish.
I loved talking to Dick. He
had a way of getting to the heart of
a given matter quickly and with sharp
insight. He made a lot of money, but
did not condescend. He was a regular
correspondent. He told me once that
writing letters (often in airports,
awaiting a flight) was a way of
relaxing for him.
“Don’t feel obliged to
answer,” he wrote me once. “I know
you’re busy.”
Me, busy? Not really, or not so busy as
not to reply as soon as I could. I wondered where he found the
time himself? Dead
now, of cancer since March of this
year, he is missed by many. Yet his numerous movies remain
with us and in a way keep him alive.
I have collected videotapes of
most of them.
A few early ones I am awaiting
a chance to copy from the AMC or TCM
channels. His
movies number in the dozens and span
almost fifty years of great work. There are
few duds among them. I
list them below in reverse
chronological order. They are all
worth seeing. What an
impressive list they form, the very
best of his time:
There is a number of good early
ones, as well:.
Then there are the really early ones, which he art directed: Art Director - filmography
9.
Patterns (1956)
A
Tribute by Robert C.
Arnold, Editor [The
following is adapted from my book, Steelhead
and The Floating Line (1995). It
has been expanded slightly and
brought up to date. It seems
appropriate to run it again.] One person I enjoy running into
on the Wenatchee River each fall is
Dick Sylbert. Once he took a
thirteen-pound steelhead on a
floating fly; so have I. We
have this and other things in common. Dick makes movies. He has been production designer for many of Warren Beatty's fine films, including Reds, at which time he lived in Europe and got to meet a number of writers whom I admire, including James Baldwin, William Faulkner, James Jones, and William Styron. I love to get Dick talking about writers and their idiosyncrasies. I also enjoy talking about the movies he has made, most of which I remember vividly. I
don't know anything about production
design, except that he has a twin
brother, Paul, who does the same
thing. Dick has his own company. I
gather that they are
responsible for the sets, the
location, the order in which the
scenes are shot (for maximum
efficiency and economy), and the
general ambience of the movie.
Dick did Chinatown, with Roman
Polanski, in which the golden-brown
atmosphere of long-ago, rural Los
Angeles was carried to art form
status. He also did Dick Tracy, utilizing
comic-strip colors.
Both pictures won Academy Awards. Whenever
I run into Dick, I always want to
talk movies. I want to ask him
questions and get my answers from the
inside, from the horse's mouth. He
wants to talk about flyfishing for
steelhead. Well, I can always
do that. He wants to know what
fly I'm getting them on, if I am, and
even if I'm not. Dick
has this peculiar habit of arriving
by air on the same night as the river
goes out. It is uncanny, and I
don't know how he does it. One
year the river ran dry for weeks and
only rose a couple of inches when the
agricultural diversion ended.
Fishing wasn't all that bad. It
rained that night, and all of the
next day. Dick was due in from
one of those B-places--you know,
Belgrade or
Bangkok or Brussels. Late in
the afternoon the river began to
rise, though the color held good.
We had some good fishing. At full
dark the river was lapping at the
brush and lifting about an inch and
hour. I drove to the only motel in
town at dark. Joe Butorac,
Dick's perennial guide, told me Dick
was arriving at midnight. It
figured. He
had but three days. There was
nothing to do but sit it out and hope
the river would clear. Me, I
had nothing better to do than wait.
Next afternoon I found them watching
AMC: one of Dick's old black and
white movies was on, one he made
before he abandoned NYC for
Hollywood. He pointed out some
of the special effects. The
movie was one of the bete noir
genre--see how easily I can bandy
the words about? Men were tough guys
and the women had no androgynous
qualities. Guns flashed and
there was much kissing and beating up
of people of both sexes. Great
fun. The
next day we had the World Series to
distract us. Dick had grown up in the
Bronx and had decades of batting
averages implanted at birth in his
head. I could hardly fake my lack of
knowledge. Questions about
movies now seemed about as relevant
as questions about childbirth.
So I sat with my questions in my
mouth. Meanwhile, bats were
being swung, hits beaten out, bases
pilfered, and Texas leaguers caught
or missed. I don't remember the
teams, but they were the two best of
1991. On the twin double beds with which motels come equipped today was spread an array of fishing tackle whose total value must have been several thousand dollars. All choice stuff. Rods were Sage, reels Hardy, bags Orvis, and lying there strangely limp and inert was Dick's filthy, sweat-stained khaki cap, with the silver FFF logo on the front. And flies, flies in
Wheatley boxes, hundreds of them,
bright and not so bright, for Joe was
a professional flytyer. I
looked at the neat, trim heads with
envy. Dick
and Joe had been eating at only two
restaurants, one a pizza parlor, the
other one that served bland country
food in volume. I told them
about Barney's, just around the
corner and nearly invisible with its
parkinglot entrance. They were
anxious to see it. It turned
out to be Taco Night. On Taco Night
they abandon their regular menu and
serve only tacos. We gorged and
washed them down with tap beer.
We talked fishing and baseball.
No movie chatter tonight. I was
only mildly disappointed. Around
midnight, half looped, we drifted
away and off to bed. No fishing materialized
the following day. Dick flew
off the next morning to one of t hose
places.
Immediately the river began to clear and the
fish commenced running up from the
Columbia again. The
last I saw of the pair fishing was
the following year, on the Wenatchee,
of course. At Merlin's Pool, at
the end of the season, they beat me
to the water at mid-morning. The
season was nearly over. Dick had hooked two fish, Joe none,
but then Joe had followed him through
the water. First guy usually
gets the taking fish. We talked a
while, then they were off to a fresh
pool. I had Merlin's to myself.
I took a nice fish. But there so
many fish around that the man
who arrived as I was leaving surely
hooked one moments later. For
some reason the river did not go out
until after Dick left. Then the
season ended. Next year the
river was closed to protect the wild
run of native steelhead, which is
endangered. It has remained
closed ever since. But I saw
Dick and Joe once more before
everything fell apart, and I am not just
talking about the river's fishing. Retired
now, my wife and I moved to the
country and bought a home on a sweet
little lake. It was not far
from Dick's house on the Stilly--the
one where he was never home. He
and Joe came out for lunch one day in
a lull between searun cutthroat
fishing. I showed them my small art
collection and Dick began to talk
excitedly about the Hudson River
School, and how it shared many
characteristics with the Northwest
School of landscape painting.
He had painted himself and planned to
again when he, laughingly, retired
from the movie business. Joe
yawned. Dick
and I exchanged letters on an
irregular basis that proved, over the
years, to be more regular than not. He was always off on location to
one of those remote places, but
he wrote to tell me he would soon be
in Vancouver B.C. to make a new movie. We
would see each other for certain
then. "Don't feel the need to
reply," he said. "I
know you are busy." What,
me busy? He further explained, "I
like to write letters. It
relaxes me." He
corresponded, I knew, to important
people all over the world. The
writer Richard Ford was one.
Russ Chatham another. He
had to come down to Seattle to
retrieve some fishing tackle that was
still in Joe's possession. We would
get together. Joe had
died of diabetes recently. That visit never
materialized, however.
Although we promised not to lose
touch through letters and over the
phone, we did. I figured that if the Wenatchee
reopened to fishing in the fall,
2001, it
would probably bring us
together for some great fishing
again. It would be
strange for Dick without Joe to guide him,
I recognized. But
that was not to be, either. One
Sunday morning in March of this year, my wife and
I were sharing the fat paper. She
said, "I see Dick Sylbert
died." "What?!"
I bellowed. I felt as though somebody
had struck me with a board across the
back. Dick, dead? I
didn't know how much I had loved the guy
until I learned he was gone.
No more flies, tacos, movies,
baseball. No more the Wenatchee
going out overnight, or for that
matter the Skagit, Sauk, or Stilly. A
river could now go out without any
special significance. It
was cancer, of course. Isn't it
always? Well, then, mostly? He
had complained to me about the pain
of losing three close friends.
It is always in threes, he added
superstitiously. (Touch wood.)
There was Joe, somebody else I didn't
know, and Jason Robars, all the
previous
year. Of course I didn't know Robars
or any of the other important
Hollywood people who were his
friends. (There must have been
hundreds of them.) But I knew Dick. And I now
suspect that when I last talked to
him on the phone about Joe's death and he
had lamented his loss of friends, he already
had cancer, or suspected he had, and was not about
to mention it to me, or to any of us. That
would be in character, as we say in
fiction and in Hollywood..
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