Wild Thymes

I thought of Paul Metcalf yesterday while reading Eliot’s Four Quartets. That’s an unlikely connection so let me explain. I interviewed Metcalf in July 1988, when I worked for the newspaper in Albany, N.Y., and he lived across the state line, about an hour away, near Lee, Mass., in the Berkshires. My editor let me write about him – an obscure experimental writer -- because he was born with a journalistic “hook”: He was the great-grandson of Herman Melville, and lived a few miles from Arrowhead, the house in Pittsfield, Mass., where Melville wrote most of Moby-Dick.

I had first learned of Metcalf, as I have first learned so many things, while reading an essay by Guy Davenport -- “Narrative Tone and Form,” collected in The Geography of the Imagination. Guy mentioned Metcalf’s innovative, collage-like “novel,” Genoa, which had been published in 1965 by Jonathan Williams’ Jargon Society. He termed Metcalf’s method “architectonic.” When I interviewed Guy for the Metcalf profile, he said Genoa received only two reviews – one written by him and the other by William H. Gass. I don’t think I verified that claim, but I choose to believe it’s true.

Metcalf and his wife, Nancy, lived in a sagging farmhouse, on an unpaved road lined with stone walls and old, thick-trunked maples. The Metcalfs were gracious and without pretension. We talked for hours. Nancy served lunch. Paul signed my copy of Genoa and gave me a signed copy of a later volume from Jargon, Both (a sonic meshing of Edgar Allan Poe and John Wilkes Booth). I was wearing work clothes – dress shirt and tie – and the day was becoming uncomfortably hot, even in the shade of the backyard maple, where Paul had strung up a hammock. He suggested we go for a swim in the pond across the road. There was certainly no traffic, and I trusted Paul, who was 70 years old and already dropping his jeans, so why not?

The pond, no more than 20 feet across, sat at the bottom of a bowl densely covered with wild thyme. It was so shallow the water was warm, like a bath. The scent of the thyme, combined with the tepid water, was soporific. We wallowed awhile, talking, I remember, about Charles Ives. We sat on the bank to dry off and that’s when I realized I smelled of wild thyme. Even after toweling off and getting dressed I smelled of thyme, and I smelled of it in my car and in my office and even at home that evening. To this day, when I smell thyme I think of Paul Metcalf, just as I think of my maternal grandmother when I smell cloves because she always carried Cloves chewing gum for us in her purse.

As to T.S. Eliot: I was rereading “The Dry Salvages,” the third of the Four Quartets, one of my favorite modern poems, which includes these beautiful lines:

“For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.”

There’s the “wild thyme unseen,” except in memory, and the “music heard so deeply,” which now makes me think of Charles Ives, and the fondness I’ve always felt for Paul, who died Jan. 12, 1999, at the age of 81.