When
I wrote "Old Frankenstein," the newest poem in Love If We Can Stand It, I got the first line out of nowhere. I was watching TV in the living room and
thinking about nothing. The line was
"The old man never calls" and the title came right after it. I laughed.
I got paper and a pen and started writing. By the time I got to the smoking jacket I
knew what I was doing. The whole thing
took about two hours. The poem reads:
The old man
never calls.
He quit making
us
settled down
with his bride
in a stone
cottage
went back to
his smoking jacket
wrote a book
and tore it up
they say, I
never saw it.
I learned to
talk again
in spite of
them all
every crowd
and Burgomaster
—read by
fires, by lakes
ate what I ran
across
but killed no
people
not for a long
time now.
The flesh has
not decayed, probably can't.
I carry a cane
and that explains the walk.
I dress like a
cheap old man
a man with
peculiarities
a man you'd
leave alone
to live in a
shed in the woods.
He'll die, I
won't.
He can't live
forever
and he doesn't
like it when I show up.
I haven't
tried that in twenty years.
I accumulate
birthdays like everyone else.
He could
call. His wife
could
call. My only family.
I wonder how
it will be without him.
By
line 2 of the poem I found that I had to decide between the Hammer series
(which began with The Curse of
Frankenstein, 1957) and the Universal series (which began with Frankenstein, 1931). In the Hammer series Dr. Frankenstein, played
by Peter Cushing, reappears in each sequel and builds a new monster. In the Universal series the Monster
reappears, but after Bride of
Frankenstein the doctors change; in the first two films he is played by
Colin Clive. I have a special affection
for Bride of Frankenstein and wanted
to work it in, as I had worked it into "One, or Words for Poetry," a
poem about one-syllable words:
smoke good
the fiend said
friend good
fire no good
good, bad
bride of
but we can not say the long name
not his in the first place
of the man who made him
son of
bride of,
the kids
I did not have
So
I chose Colin Clive as my doctor. Peter
Cushing was not ruled out, though. There
could have come a time when he "quit making us," us being all his consecutive monsters, and settled down. Clive makes the Monster and the female whom
Dr. Pretorius calls "the bride of Frankenstein," hence the "us"
in the Universal series sense. At first I
meant the "us" to apply to the Monster (Boris Karloff) and the bride
(Elsa Lanchester) from Frankenstein
and Bride of Frankenstein as well as
the series of monsters made by Cushing, but by the time I saw the doctor in his
smoking jacket, he was Colin Clive and the "stone cottage" was in
black and white. Then I saw the title
had made the same choice.
There
was a rule in the first three Universal sequels' titles that Frankenstein had to refer both to the
doctor and to the Monster. In the first
film, as in Mary Shelley's novel, it was meant to refer only to the doctor, but
the public was soon calling the monster Frankenstein. In Bride,
the doctor gets married and the Monster has a bride, even if she rejects him. In Son
of Frankenstein and The Ghost of
Frankenstein, there is always a relative of the original doctor. But in Frankenstein
Meets the Wolf Man, the name refers only to the Monster. So my title, Old Frankenstein, needed to refer both to the aged Dr. Frankenstein
and to the aged Monster, and that was no problem; it dictated the story of the
two old Frankensteins. I also thought of
Young Frankenstein, which I love, and
saw this poem as a sequel to it as well as the final entry in an imaginary
Universal series.
Another
advantage of being able to use Bride of
Frankenstein was that in that film, the Monster can talk. "I learned to talk again" is my defiant
response to the decision made in all the sequels after Bride, in which he can't speak. (The exception is that in Ghost, when the Monster has Ygor's
brain, he does briefly speak, but they are Ygor's words.) My Monster would learn, and as in the novel,
he would read.
The
doctor's torn-up book got me back to the Monster and to the end of what worked
as the first stanza, and it was seven lines.
I decided to make the poem in seven-line stanzas, not sure how many
there would be. I have written my share
of sestinas with their six-line stanzas, and I enjoy working in tight forms, as
I had done in "Slides" where each ten-line section of the poem is a
rectangle of type set halfway down the page to resemble a projected 35mm
slide. A contemporary take on the
Renaissance sonnet sequence (like Samuel Daniel's Delia), it was presented as a slide show of episodes from and
meditations on an unrealized romance. I
wrote it first in 1969 and rewrote it from 2010 to 2011, changing the plot,
cutting out half the "slides," and revising many lines and images, so
that it's now tighter and makes more sense.
It's also more honest although it remains deliberately obscure.
But
back to stanza 2. The crowd and the
Burgomaster (as the credits spelled it) came from the Universal series. I always enjoyed the torchlight parades when
the crowds get torches and search for the Monster. The Burgomasters are fools that my Monster
would look down on. The
"fires" and "lakes" are in the novel. By the end of the stanza, I had him stop
killing people. He's an old monster
conceived in the era of the slasher movie, a Jason who's given up his machete
or just uses it on trees. He's also an
old monster in approximately 1955, because he says he hasn't shown up to see
the doctor for 20 years, and I figure he did that in 1935, the date of Bride.
Of course he could have done it later in some film we didn't see.
Jason
also shows up in stanza 3, as the model for the monster living in a shed in the
woods. I was thinking of Friday the 13th Part 2. By the time I wrote about his walk and his
clothes, I was clearly seeing the Universal Monster and the way he walked when
he was played by Karloff, which wasn't as stiff as he later got, and the
thrift-shop clothes he would wear. I
thought the lines were funny and I was really enjoying writing them. With "He'll die, I won't" I
tightened up the rhythm to prepare the ending, the thing that's bothering the
Monster and making him take stock of himself and his current life.
Stanza
4 starts with a repetition of thoughts about death because I needed seven lines
in the stanza. That happens
sometimes. By line 4, I was feeling
outraged about the birthdays the monster was accumulating in solitude, I was
feeling his isolation, I was feeling that his more-or-less father (implied in
the double meaning of "old man" in line 1) and Mrs. Frankenstein should call him and certainly could. I felt he was a real character and I felt his
emotions inside me. That is a wonderful
feeling. It's like what writers mean when
they say their characters created their own dialogue. It happened to me a lot when I was writing
"Two Greek Women," which is a short epic about two contemporary
lesbians whom I made up out of two women I slightly knew who were not lovers;
mainly I made them up, and I certainly didn't know what my models (whom my
characters looked like and from whom they took their names) thought about
anything, but the characters I made up spoke words and lines and did things the
way they—the characters—would; they became real to me while I was writing, and
in that way every invention in the poem became both true and something I
couldn't miss. So that's the kind of feeling
and creating that came out as "He could call. His wife / could call."
Then
came "My only family," and the poem had stopped being funny a while
ago. The last line came to me as
suddenly as the first, and I knew it was the last line when I wrote it: "I wonder how it will be without him." Everything came together with that line,
which for me was the most creative and insightful moment in the writing. Then I went back to the top of the stanza and
wrote the redundant but not that bad "He can't live forever" to make
seven lines, and the first draft was done.
I went over it until I had things like the shed image the way I wanted them
and the correct rhythm for the line about his walk, and the poem was done.