Cityscape

The Back River separates Weymouth from Hingham, on the South Shore of Metropolitan Boston. I had a dream one night that I was on the west side of the bridge, on the Weymouth side. There was a guy with a beard, black hair and a pony tail there. It was Milton. Milton was a friend in a graduate school course who taught a course on “The Scarlet Letter” at a high school in Charlestown. He was talking to some people about different Christian sects, about the various restrictions they place on their adherents. At one point he said, “The Methodists are actually very lenient.” Here was where I cut in. “they don’t let you drink,”I said. “Yes they do,” he answered. “I happen to know that they don’t,” I insisted. “Come with me and we’ll ask Milton.” He ignored me and went on talking to the people he was with--I think they were mostly women--like some big authority. I went off and looked for Milton. I couldn't find him.


A few weeks before I had this dream, I had been with my brother and my father in a park on the Weymouth side of the of the Back River. We came to a spot which was just over the west side of the bridge, very near to where the argument in the dream had taken place. My father was telling my brother an anecdote from C.S. Forester’s biography, which he had been reading. It seems that a friend of Forester’s had been caught kissing his girlfriend in his parents’ parlor. This was in the twenties, in England, and being caught kissing a girl basically meant that you had to marry her. The friend’s father was a Methodist: he didn’t drink. One night the friend was up talking with the father in the same parlor, along with Forrester and another friend or two. They talked the father into having a glass of wine--and then another, and another, joking with him all the while. Eventually, all of them laughing, they persuaded him into taking a ride over to the girlfriend’s house--he still in his pajamas. They got to the girlfriend’s house, the girlfriend was appalled, she and the father got into a big argument and the father, incensed, called the whole engagement off.

I suppose that was how you dealt with the Church in England in the twenties. But perhaps Milton would disagree. After all, he’s an expert in all things clerical. And it was with him, I realized after I woke up, that I had been arguing. That was why I couldn’t find him. I had gone off in search of him merely to have him back up the argument I was making against him. He wasn’t wearing glasses in the dream. The must have been why I didn’t recognize him right off. Why was I having this oneiric argument with Milton? He had perpetuated a rebellious interpretation, in class, of a story I had written. We were not allowed to talk while the other students discussed our story, so I couldn’t object to what he was saying about me. My dream was a displaced way of retaliating against that unassailable onslaught of his. He actually said some very nice things about me, like why couldn’t this guy stay in one place, and he doesn’t seem very well educated, but he reads Freud.


In fact, I had already begun plotting out this retaliation, even as I reflected on Milton’s interpretation in the days immediately after he had made it. I conceived of my story as a type of net, trapping its readers in their very efforts to appropriate it, by means of their own interpretations. By virtue of their feedback, various participants in the discussion were to be transformed into characters in a new story I was to weave, a story about their individual efforts to enter into and probe the very story I had just presented them. An allegory, if you like.


What I objected to in Milton’s response was the way he construed the portrait in it of my brother. Milton seemed to have this notion, almost amounting to a conviction, that I viewed my brother as a cavalier daredevil, and that I felt inferior to him. During the weekend following the discussion of my story, I actually showed my brother the portrait I had done of him. Actually, he insisted that this portrait gave a misleading impression of him. I had left out essential details, he told me, in the anecdote I had used to portray him.


My brother had been confronted by a policeman one night while setting up his camera equipment on a deserted street in Brooklyn. He had told me this story a few months earlier, showing me the pictures he had taken that night. I had described the pictures just as I remembered them: a shadowy bridge underpass next to a barbed wire--or perhaps razor wire--fence, the fence lit up in an eerie way by streetlights. He protested that he had in fact been focusing on a group of dumpsters beneath the bridge. I insisted I had no recollection of those dumpsters, but took his word for it. I had assumed, as well, that the police officer was just being officious when he approached him. He had just come to tell him to move his car, my brother said, which was parked in an illegal way.


His other contention involved such questions as whether or not a story should have a plot, and whether or not fiction should be made up. I was in favor of doing away with the boundaries between fact and fiction, between such literary genres as stories, essays, and prose poems. He insisted that a writer should adhere to certain principles in the creation of a literary work, based on the specific choice of a genre. “Don’t you think that your story should have more of a plot?” he asked me. “What if you just thought of it as a prose poem?” I contended. “Well, what was it that your teacher assigned you to do” he asked. “That’s irrelevant,” I replied, a little irritated. I was about to support myself by explaining how contemporary genres have deconstructed into such styles as autofiction and metafiction, but he took umbrage. “If you’re going to get irritated, I just don’t want to talk about it any more,” he said. So I let the conversation flow according to the directions which his vodka on ice, and my whiskey neat, suggested, into the wee hours of the night.


I was still bothered by the contradiction between the two parts of his argument. On the one hand he was complaining about the factual inaccuracy of my portrait. On the other, the lack of actual fictive devices in my story as a whole. But I let it slide. It occurred to me that I was drawing on a set of arguments that he couldn’t be expected to know as well as I, he being a student of photography rather than of language theory, as I was. So here I was, unable to rebut his accusations, just as I had been unable to object to Milton’s misprision, as I saw it, of that same portrait. Milton and my brother were colluding with one another, without even knowing each other. They were taking two sides of the same argument against me.


My brother, like Milton, is a husky guy. He also has his hair in a pony tail, and he did have a beard, until my father paid him to shave it off. But unlike Milton, his hair is blond, and he doesn’t wear glasses. The person I argued with in my dream, then, had Milton’s traits combined with my brother’s. I don’t think I was, in my dream, fulfilling a wish to defeat them in their argument, but I had a deeper wish. It was that they would like my story and contribute to its evolution in a docile way. By condensing them into one character, I was, in one stroke, subjugating them. I was transforming them into thralls of my fictional, textual enterprise, whether they liked it or not.


So now I have this character, this psychic marionette, which I can incorporate at will into any plot I like. Also, I have this allegory which I conceived before the dream. It was to have, as its central character, a man who takes a trip to Rome and wants to write a book on it. The character was to represent Milton, and Rome was to represent my story. Milton would wander through the streets of Rome, the streets of my story, intent upon bringing to light the mystery and pulse of the city’s strata that are usually buried, for the traveler, under the colossal grandeur of the Holy City’s monuments. Milton would meander around fountains, linger at cafes in piazzas, wander into chapels. Passing back and forth over the bridges of the Tiber, he would amass a series of intense sensual impressions, of vivid accounts of free-wheeling discussions. He would avoid conventional tour guides and maps. He would get street names mixed up, or forget them. His sense of the relative locations of the sites would be scrambled. He would end up with an intoxicating novel, from what he had intended as a painstakingly accurate travelogue. The merchants, clerics, and musicians he had met would be conflated. A whole cast of characters would be engaged in exuberant conversation, in a vast town that never really existed.