A Moveable Famine Read Online Free Page B

a protest against society.
    Auden never arrived. He died that same week and was replaced by Stephen Spender. Spender, another poet in a suit and tie, robust and ruddy, read from Auden’s first book, which he had hand printed in 1928. There was something wonderful in the way he clutched Auden’s humble pamphlet, with its unassuming title, Poems , and its modest number, twenty, the initial step in a great career, the fragile collection almost within our reach.
    He read the poems with true tenderness and, when the applause ended, Leggett took the microphone and invited workshop poets to meet Spender in EPB. We rushed over and took our seats. Harvey and Spender entered the classroom. Harvey wore brown jeans, a vest and a paisley shirt, his head reaching just above the breast pocket of Spender’s luminous blue suit. They sat on folding chairs and Spender took questions. He believed a poem is a verbal construct and a kind of word game. He equated Beat poetry with abstract art, which he said looked like the palette a painter would use if he knew how to paint. A beautiful blonde said, “I enjoy abstract poets like Wallace Stevens, but Harvey says poetry must be concrete. What do you think?”
    “Who’s that?” I asked Ridge.
    “Belinda Schaeffer,” he whispered. “I’ll tell you later.” As Spender answered, the room filled with laughter and, in that way you can hear something after it was said because you were half listening, I realized that a puzzled Spender had asked, “Who’s Harvey?”
    “Harvey Clay,” she said, equally puzzled. She lifted a pale hand in his direction. “Next to you.”
    “Of course, of course,” Spender said, touching Harvey’s shoulder. Harvey grew red, and Spender flushed further. “I agree with Harvey completely,” he said, but it was too late. Someone in the back of the room couldn’t help repeating, “Who’s Harvey?” and voices cackled. It was all the more painful because we worried who we were ourselves, whether we would become anyone and, to derail that awful doubt about our own identities, the words, “Who’s Harvey?” appeared scrawled in the workshop men’s room, on the bulletin board, and across the walls of bars around town.
    A week later, I stumbled on the fiction of Cesare Pavese in the library. The only way I learned was by stumbling, and I stumbled often. I was taken with his world-weary yet stalwart tone: “Maturity is realizing that telling one’s troubles doesn’t make anything better.” In one passage, the “Who’s Harvey?” question rebounded to me when the protagonist, a writer, is told by his sister that she wants her little son to be someone. “Like you,” she says. He replies that she doesn’t know what she is talking about, “that to be someone you have to live alone, have neither lover nor friend, and then, after a life of isolation, then, after you die, and after you are dead many years, only then, if you are lucky, do you become someone !”
    I sat in my basement apartment as I read, prepared to live the life of Pavese’s character. I looked around and decided that, yes, if that was the prescription, I was on my way—powdered milk, instant coffee, high school sport coat, no girlfriend. I returned to the book, to the sister’s response. She said, “Oh, you make everything impossible just so you can feel sorry for yourself.”
    Barkhausen wound up in Lawson’s workshop, the only newcomer to do so. The rest of us had Harvey. His research assistant printed our poems on a Thermo-Fax machine and placed them in a cubby hole near the lounge in advance of our class which met from two to five each Monday. At our first meeting, I sat between Ridge and a former priest who was always laughing and joking except when he was crying. Harvey asked “Bear,” a student nicknamed for his size and bristling facial hair, to read his poem, which was written in the “you” voice. The poem was a list of his older brother’s cruelties. The final lines