Free Thomas Murphy by Roger Rosenblatt Page A

you’ve said no to the barrel and a million dollars. And no to the curtain and the Isle of Capri. So, let’s see what’s in the box. He opens the front wall like a door, and there is nothing in the huge black container. Now the crowd is hysterical with pleasure, and Stevens smiles and thwacks me on the shoulder. You’ve done it, Murph, he says. You’ve chosen the prize of prizes, the best deal we’ve ever offered. But the box is empty, I say, sounding like a disappointed little boy. Empty? says Stevens. Empty? Why, Thomas Murphy, where are your eyes, man? The box is full! Full of you! And with that he shoves me inside, and closes the box. The audience has gone silent. Inside the box, it is black as pitch, and I’m suffused with the odor of turf. Then I hear a noise. Stevens is slipping me a note through the mail slot in the wall. It reads, And your poetry is shit, too.
    TU FU ( A.D. 712–770), Chinese poet, wrote of his lack of recognition in his own lifetime. Other poets praised histalent, but he lived in a humble house, hungry, his clothing one notch above tatters. Servants, he said, treated him with disdain. His fellow poets, too, lived this way. They knew one another’s work, but their fame went no further than their small circle. I read a translation of “To Pi Ssu Yao,” the poem on which this information about Tu Fu’s life is given, and I cannot tell if the poet means to lament or boast. Closer to a boast, I think, an expression of satisfaction that the quality of his work and that of his contemporaries will be sufficient recompense for him. That his poems will be handed down to “descendants” consoles him. What then did I, neither hungry, poor, nor ill-clothed, who lives in eleven rooms, and is well known enough to win a reading here and a prize there—what did I make of that?
    In the back of the taxi I go over my acceptance speech, delighting in its wit and flow, its mixing of sincerity and self-effacement, the warming anecdote, the dip into a pun, the soar into high seriousness here and there, a splash of poetry, a flash of skin. Then I crumple the pages, and leave them on the taxi floor. Here’s what I want: When they announce my name, I want to approach the podium in concentration camp stripes, and tell them nothing. Not even my serial number. But in reality, of course, when the time comes, I rise from my ballroom chair, curtsy left and right, and smile like a baby. The master of ceremonies pats me on the head, powders my bottom, changesme, and sends me back to my chair. About prizes? Blake never won one.
    WHEREAS TODAY I WALK the city with my head dug in like a plough, mired. I hate these moods, their selfishness, grotesque. Around me march my beautiful New Yorkers with their cowled faces, flayed by the wind, fresh from their vile mills. They hear the drumming of real graves, while I, fancy me, indulge myself in a pastime. Greenberg would have ribbed me without mercy. Oona too. Me too. Snap out of it, Murph. In a day, an hour, I will be on a high again, thrilled to the bone to be permitted life and poetry, thrilled to have Máire with me and to be able to read William to sleep twice a week—while they, my beautiful New Yorkers, have not the luxury of mood swings. Or of moods at all, for Chrissake. Courage with resignation. That’s their bloody mood. One mood forever. How I adore them, though I would not tell them so, lest I sound patronizing, as if I were accepting them, when the opposite is true. They accept me. Me, the freakish exception to the rules of their existence. What one must do as a poet, before placing the right words in the right order, before wandering lonely as a cloud or summoning a second coming, is to recognize the precious gift of one’s perch, and then walk with one’s fellow citizens and feel their powerless power. I push my body into my beautiful New Yorkers, and vanish with them in the brown, humiliating