What to do when you learn your literary gods have clay feet?

Author: By C. K. Williams

Date: SUNDAY, June 14, 1998

Page: C4

Section: Books

I came across ``Lone Cowboy'' when I was 11 or 12. I was mad about horses then; all I wanted to do was ride and have a horse of my own, not a very likely prospect in Newark, N.J. So what I did instead was to read obsessively about horses and their riders; everything in our school library, then in the branch library not far from our house, and finally in the big central library downtown. I think I read literally every book I could find that had anything to do with horses, the way 10 years or so later I'd read everything I could find on the Holocaust, and after that everything by and about the various poets whose work I'd fallen in love with.

But right now it was horses, and especially it was Will James; in some ways I think I almost assumed his biography as my own. As some children have imaginary playmates, I had James, and that book, which recounted a real cowboy's life: being born under a wagon in Montana, the mother dying in childbirth, the cowboy-father so distraught after her death that he became careless of his own life and was killed a few years later by a raging steer. Then being adopted by a French Canadian trapper -- Bopy, his name was, from ``Beaupre,'' I think -- who was also a cowboy during the warm months when pelts were thin. I still remember so well. The winter one had two wolf cubs as pets. The gift of a little horse for a birthday. Saddles. Boots. The slow wanderings down out of Canada. The herds of cattle, wild horses, roundups, and line-camps. Then the trapper, too, disappeared, probably drowned fetching water from a flooded river, and you were on your own, to wander and work as a cowboy all over the West, from Montana even down into Mexico. Then, as vengeance for some sort of affront, you stole a herd of cattle, were caught, and ended up in prison for a time, where you begin to draw and paint seriously, and so start another life as an artist, then as a writer.

The part about prison, the most seemingly unbelievable yarn, turns out to be almost the only thing in the book up until then that was true. I found out years later in a study of James I happened on in another library that he had actually been a French-speaking Canadian from Quebec, had conceived a passion for cowboy life, and had gone West when he was 16 -- this would be around 1908 -- and become one. His tragedy begins when he comes to believe that in order to be an authentic Westerner you have to have been born to it, so he makes up that biography, which he swears to no matter what, though it means cutting off all except furtive communication with his original family, and though his marriage to a woman he's obviously very attached to falls apart, because he's taken to serious drinking, the reason for which, the author of the study hypothesizes, was that he couldn't bear the split between his real life and his ravaging lies: He would actually drink himself to death not many years later.

I think I was too old to be broken-hearted when I found out the truth, though I certainly found it illuminating about how we can order our own reality according to examples we're not even aware have been spuriously generated for us. I suppose no great harm had come from my wanting to be a cowboy, by my working later on in the riding stables I found outside of Newark, and finally convincing my parents to buy me a $100 horse; I certainly met a lot of people and learned a lot I never would have otherwise.

But thinking about James has made me wonder about the poets upon whom I've probably just as gullibly shaped my life in poetry. It was certainly wrenching to find out that Rilke, my first and enduring model as a poet, could be a terrible hypocrite, a lackey of the rich, a cad with women and worse with his own wife and daughter, and that he was at times a crude anti-Semite. Where do I fit all that into how much, really limitlessly, I esteem his poetry?

As for the anti-Semitism, it's all too common. A Jewish poet can forgive Shakespeare Shylock because of that one heart-rending ``Do I not bleed?'' speech, but what about Chaucer versifying, poeticizing, a vile anti-Jewish blood-libel in ``The Canterbury Tales,'' and what about Wordsworth choosing just that same section of Chaucer to translate into modern English? And Eliot: Besides his not at all unspoken contempt for the Jews, in prose and more shockingly in his poems, there's his cultural elitism, his royalism, and his general social contempt. And what about Yeats, another of my heroes, dabbling with fascism?

And then one has to ask about the truths, the sensitivity, wisdom, and nobility in so much of the work these and other great but surely flawed poets have brought forth: Do I feel suspicions about that, too? No: I believe everything the poems say, every radiant image they gather, every metaphor they imagine, every nuance of experience they register, believe it all with unquestioning conviction. Yeats of ``The Tower,'' singing his magnificent grief at a nation and a world destroying itself; Rilke in ``The Duino Elegies'' finding a way to figure human spiritual aspirations in a way they never had been before, and probably never will be again: That particular fusion between an age's moral desolation and a genius's transformative brilliance happening twice is inconceivable. And Elizabeth Bishop, who drank too much and seemed to love so ineptly, softly recording in the intricate stanzas of ``The Moose'' the human microcosm, on a bus ride, of all things, which becomes a repository of human longing, resignation, and joy. And William Carlos Williams, whom I once heard tell Mike Wallace that maybe his friend Pound's raving broadcasts for Mussolini were possibly credible: Williams's ``Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,'' his sinuously graceful summation of a complicated marriage, and of the history -- private and public, flowers and A-bombs -- lived through during that marriage.

Certainly we shouldn't be surprised that the voices who inhabit works of imagination don't necessarily jibe with the identities who create them. We can come to feel that the sad fallibilities of even the greatest need our forgiveness, but if those masters do, then who doesn't? We all make our lives up to some extent; perhaps we can learn from the lies and sad self-deceptions of those we admire to define ourselves, too, not by our illusions and probably inevitable failures of generosity and love but by our willingness to value and be grateful for all the unlikely gifts life and art generate for us.