The postcard from an “old” friend who is a relatively new friend came a few weeks ago. Sent from Augusta, it sported a photo of George Clarke in his new abode of a nursing home, kinfolk gathered around him. George, age 97, bid us to come visit.
Allow me some backstory. His son, Milton Clarke, was a good friend and the owner-operator of the Little Rome Italian restaurant in Chatsworth. It’s where I proposed to Teresa on Valentine’s Day in 2007. After Milton died unexpectedly following surgery a few years ago, I wrote a tribute column. George, who lived in Dalton, read it in the Daily Citizen and wrote to me. Our correspondence eventually led to us taking him out to lunch, and a story about his days as the newspaper’s publisher decades ago.
Augusta is a long day trip, so I pulled out my planning calendar to see if we could work in a trip to the Carolina coast during a week without appointments. The end of September fit the bill — without Hurricane Helene in the forecast, of course. We would visit George on the way back home to Ellijay.
At a secondhand store on Hilton Head Island, dozens of escapist literature books were crammed into a haphazard and rickety corner bookshelf. Yet a tome stood out — “The Norton Anthology of English Literature.” Dare I purchase it? I leafed through the contents and there emblazoned on the thin pages — 2,578 in all — were many of the authors and poets I’d studied in college lit courses: Blake, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, they were all waiting. Even Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” although my professors — unlike the broken-necked blacksmith Ygor who befriends the monster in the 1939 film “The Son of Frankenstein” — had not engaged with the stiffly plodding aberration.
My wife bought it for me and I lugged it to our rented condo. Initially, I focused on “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” while sitting in a beach chair one afternoon on the north shore of the isle, but before diving in I raised my eyes to see the landform of Parris Island across Port Royal Sound. Although obviously a gifted poet, author Coleridge was addicted to the same opium-alcohol mixture imbibed by Wyatt Earp’s wife Maddie in “Tombstone,” the film with Kurt Russell in the lead role. (I read an online essay once that claimed English majors were enamored with the movie because of its language, and I count myself among their number — and would add the latest version of “True Grit” with Jeff Bridges. But I digress.)
I looked back down after wondering about the Marine Corps recruits a few watery miles away in the aftermath of the storm and read this: “Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.” So that’s where we got the phrase. And further on after his comrades aboard ship died from the mariner’s own sin of inexplicably killing the beneficial, guiding albatross with his crossbow, the mariner laments: “The souls did from their bodies fly — they fled to bliss or woe!”
Although death appears as a major theme among the major poets, in this case the souls eventually came back to life in a happier ending. Could it be as we scan the endless horizon of oceans that we, like the poets, realize it was there before us and will exist after we’re gone — and our lives are indeed brief, and death awaits us all?
As opposed to Coleridge, English-American poet T. S. Eliot might be considered more sublime — and yet also bizarre. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” begins:
“Let us go then, you and I,
“When the evening is spread out against the sky
“Like a patient etherized upon a table.”
Later, I almost gasped aloud when I read this passage I’d studied decades ago:
“I should have been a pair of ragged claws
“Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”
In the anthology there’s a footnote to the couplet: “I.e., he would have been better as a crab on the ocean bed. Perhaps, too, the motion of a crab suggests futility and growing old; (compare) Hamlet, ‘For you yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if, like a crab, you could go backward.’” As in “Mariner,” there’s the theme of impending death again.
And even Eliot, as an accomplished writer, has the temerity to say within the love song “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” (Over a half-century later, he is echoed by the ragpicker character Simon Potter in “The Greatest Miracle in the World” by Og Mandino, to wit: “It is difficult for me to put into words … yet I am positive that certain pieces of music, certain works of art and certain books and plays were created, not by the composer, artist, author or playwright but by God, and those whom we have acknowledged as the creators of these works were only the instruments employed by God to communicate with us.”
And at the end of Prufrock’s life some silliness:
“I grow old … I grow old …
“I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
“Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
“I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.”
Which, of course, makes us older Southern rock-and-rollers wonder if the members of the Allman Brothers Band were influenced by Eliot in naming their bestselling studio album “Eat a Peach.”
As I write this column during a mini-vacation about looking back and finding reading pleasure anew in old works, I’m thanking George for unknowingly pointing us toward the Lowcountry and that resale store whose parking lot was covered with the shade of live oaks and their Spanish-moss beards. Before we go see him on the morrow, and perhaps report more, I’ll close with this:
“For I have known them all already, known them all:
“I have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”
Now wait just a darn minute, Mr. Eliot!
Mark Millican is a former staff writer for the Dalton Daily Citizen.