I have heard poet George Scarbrough described as the best poet Tennessee ever produced. Such pronouncements are subjective, and I am in no position to prove or disprove such a claim. I can, however, claim that several of his poems are absolutely indispensable to my sense of poetry’s power, not the least of which is the title poem to his 1989 collection Invitation to Kim. When I arrived at Austin Peay State University in the fall of 1986, I had scarcely heard of any living poets, national or local, but through the pages of Zone 3, APSU’s newly-formed literary journal, I began to find poems that fueled my own imagination.
One of those first poems belonged to George Scarbrough, a poet who lived in Oak Ridge and who, later, would become a friend. In the poem, “Schoolhouse Hill,” the speaker, which I take to be George, recounts the story of a girl who “traipsed townward / To steal the creams and sticks / She bought her friends with.” Scarbrough spends three stanzas painting a portrait of a young girl who “drifted about Benton” and who “flourished / In perfumes like bouquets,” only to turn in the last stanza to an indictment of himself:
I stole too for my moment
Of attractiveness. Pariah
Of ordinary hours, I stuck
To my desk at noontime, writing
Papers for the less authorial,
Great dumb brutes I loved.
I can’t exactly explain why those words resonated for me when I read them more than 30 years ago. Perhaps the three hard stresses of “great dumb brutes” represented one kind of world to me while the speaker acknowledging that he “loved” these “brutes” represented another kind of world. I wasn’t a scholarly type, and I never wrote papers for anyone. If anything, at that time in my life I was struggling to write my own essays in college. I was the first person in my family to go to college—perhaps I counted myself as one of those “less authorial / Great dumb brutes.” Perhaps I was trying to move from being a brute to being someone who could learn to love. Perhaps, reading his words, I sensed that one part of myself was looking at another part of myself.
In the early 1990s, while in graduate school at the University of Alabama, I practically read every new issue of the numerous literary journals in the periodicals section of the university’s library. I can still remember where I was standing when I read a handful of posthumous poems by Howard Nemerov, one of which, “Trying Conclusions,” ended with the following lines:
What rational being, after seventy years,
When scriptures says he’s running out of rope,
Would want more of the only world he knows?
No rational being, while he endures,
Holds on to the inveterate infantile hope
That the road ends but as the runway does.
I can also remember standing there on the second floor, holding an issue of The Southern Review, reading a poem of George’s, at which point I suddenly slumped down in the middle of the floor, my back against the shelves, and I tried really hard not to lose my composure. “The Train” caught me off guard, in the way the best poems do. It didn’t just entertain me for a few lines; instead, it revealed something vital to me about the power reading had always had in my own life.
THE TRAIN
Tandem and straight we sat before
the washstand reading, my literate
mother and I, while my unhappy father
scoffed at us from his bed, restlessly
turning in a room so small he could have
reached out and torn the books from our
hands. “A man can’t sleep with the lamp
lit,” he said. “Douse it. It’s late.”
It was late. Eleven by the clock. We sat
on oblivious of time. “You make,” he said,
“a short train with two cars,” meaning
the local that ran past our house. “It’ll
get you nowhere,” not knowing it had already
carried us past all the houses he knew.
George grew up in a share-cropping family with an illiterate and hard-driving father, the likes of which—either rightly or wrongly—I came to imagine through Faulkner’s Abner Snopes in the short story “Barn Burning.” In much the same way that Sarty, Abner’s son, must find his own path in life and reject his father’s cruelty (among other things), George, too, had to forge toward his own world; and he did so through reading and writing poems, many of which explored empathetically the nature of his rural, poverty-stricken childhood.
In this particular poem, I’ve always been drawn to how the poem portrays size, or scale, as a way to make an argument about the value of reading. Illiteracy is portrayed as occupying “a room so small,” one where both a washstand and a bed are present, indicative of the meager means the family must endure. Rest and enjoyment are pitted against one another, vying for the same small space. The father is exhausted—by exertion, by limited choices—but the mother and child, “oblivious of time,” occupy a larger space, one that is communal, not isolated, as the father appears to be within the family, “unhappy” and restless.
One of the products of the father’s small conception of the world is a dismissive attitude that strikes out toward others. The speaker says of the father that “he could have / reached out and torn the books from our / hands.” He doesn’t “reach out” toward them in familial intimacy; he doesn’t “reach out” in recognition of his own need; nor does he “reach out” in empathy or understanding toward what he doesn’t know. Sadly, the smallness of the room seems to mirror the smallness of his imagination for dealing with what frustrates him, producing a response that is destructive instead of creative. The word “torn,” for instance, indicates a mindset accustomed to doing things by force, a mindset accustomed to what the body can make happen instead of what the mind can imagine possible. The small space the mother and son occupy contains an intimacy, though, as well as a vastness, that the father cannot enter.
Not only does the father lash out physically—he also lashes out verbally, his words blunt and forceful. Of the light the mother and son read by, he states, “Douse it. It’s late.” The father’s concerns are of the body, not the mind, spirit, or imagination. One can imagine that, given his own limitations in life, his own labor netting him little to show for his exhaustion, he can’t really imagine another life. All he knows is hard labor. Sadly, the father fails to imagine how reading (and therefore education) will benefit his child. He demeans both mother and child, comparing them to a short train, and he says of reading, “It’ll/get you nowhere.”
The train, though, changes everything. The train goes “past all the houses” and, by implication, suggests the larger world that lies beyond what the father can conceive. The act of reading therefore transforms “a room so small” into something even larger than “houses,” which the train then carries the speaker “past.” Where the father’s life is closed-in upon by his illiteracy, the son’s life seems boundless. While the father remains in a state of “not knowing,” the son enters into another realm altogether. Both space and time are enlarged, as is the self.
Two or three years before George died, I visited him in Oak Ridge. I had been to his small home on Darwin Avenue only a handful of times in two decades, but I always enjoyed our visits, which could easily last half a day. Years earlier, in 1994, as I was moving books into my new office at my new position at Columbia State Community College, my secretary informed me, “You have a letter waiting for you.” The letter had arrived on campus even before I had, which seemed hilarious to everyone, and she had been holding it for me. The letter was from George.
On that last visit, he told me to go through and pick out any books I wanted to take with me. I tried to refuse, saying that I thought he had planned to donate them to the University of the South’s library. He insisted that he was giving books to his friends and wanted me to find what I wanted. He even pulled a few items from his shelves and handed them to me, a book by Dylan Thomas and a 1st edition hardback copy of Wallace Stevens’s The Palm at the End of the Mind, among others. I told George that all I really wanted was the copy of the Southern Review that contained “The Train,” and I told him of the story of sitting on the floor of the library, trying not to cry, and of how crucial that poem had been for me.
We looked and looked but never found that issue. One journal he did give me that day was the January 2002 issue of Poetry, containing three of his Han-Shan poems, part of a larger manuscript (Under the Lemon Tree) that wouldn’t appear for almost another decade. I asked George if he would mind inscribing something right there on page 199, just a few words that I could take with me. I keep that issue of Poetry in my office at Columbia State and often open it to read what George wrote to me, treasuring that moment I watched him write these words:
How words have taken us past all the houses our fathers knew.
George
When I read those words in George’s shaky, near-illegible handwriting, I’m right back there in that university library again, slumped to the floor, reading and rereading a poem that continues to remind me of how large the act of reading has made my small, less authorial life and how—how else to say this?—I have felt love entering into my life, turning it, in sympathy, toward all I cannot—and may never—know.