The Tenth Muse

The Tenth Muse

William Browning Spencer

I needed the money, but that wasn’t my sole motivation for flying the next morning from my home in Austin, via a disorienting stopover in Dallas, to Kansas City, renting a car, and aiming that car east on 152. I was curious about what Morton Sky had to say, and, in truth, I couldn’t resist this opportunity to contemplate my past through the patina of accrued wisdom and regret. I’d always intended to return to Empire to see if it made any more sense now then it had when I was ten. This was my chance. The aging, almost irrelevant Morton Sky and his overly venerated relic of a novel would serve as the catalyst for deeper philosophical concerns.

And I’d write about my father and mother, remarkable people, volatile people. My father was, for a while, famous himself, having written a collection of poetry, Imploding, that captured the spirit of the late sixties with such passion and anarchic wit that it sold several hundred thousand copies, an extraordinary feat for a book of poetry, an unheard of feat for a book of poetry that was rigorously metrical and assumed an educated, literary background on the part of its readers.

My father wrote Imploding when we were living in Durham, where he taught literature courses at Duke University.

The Tenth Muse. Photo by Elena

I remember the students, ragged and exotic to my child’s eyes, who sat at his feet while he declaimed, waving his arms, standing on a coffee table. My father knew everything and could grab, from the air, any secret a book had ever held, and dead author’s words, any thought the mind of man had formulated in the face of the terror and beauty of the world. My father was the spokesman for all that was important. I couldn’t have articulated that when I was a kid, but I knew it is what I thought, because I still think it, reflexively, and it requires an effort of willed objectively to think otherwise.

My mother is a more elusive shape in my mind, because she is still alive, and I am older.

When we moved to Empire and rented the house near to Morton Sky, Marshall Harrison was the celebrity author, and Morton Sky was an odd, morose man tending to his dying grandmother who had been ill for years and who expired a month after our arrival.

If I could portray my father in juxtaposition to Sky, I might have something quite powerful, something worthy of a book.