It has taken poet Philip Schultz six collections to square up to the ghost of his immigrant father, and the striving and savage disappointments that ended in his early death. The Pulitzer Prize winner tells BELINDA MCKEONabout the arrival of the poems he had waited half a lifetime to write
‘I ALWAYS ASSUMED that I was going to die around the same age as him,” says Philip Schultz of the father he lost almost 50 years ago. “I always thought of that age as some kind of milestone. And then, suddenly, I had lived beyond him.”
Schultz, now 64, still sounds surprised by this realisation. He recounts it slowly, even cautiously, as though its borders might have shifted since its last telling; as though he might find himself, suddenly, a week away from his 60th birthday again – but this time, like his father at that age, bankrupt, bewildered and in his death throes. As though he might feel, in the words of his poem, The One Truth,"his soul/ withering in his arms" as he lay in front of his son and his wife "without enough breath/ to say goodbye/ or even ask forgiveness".
The One Truthis the poem that took Schultz half a lifetime to write, yet that came to him rapidly, almost fully formed, the words tumbling, the images of suffering and striving and savage disappointment surging into place as though they had been waiting to go there all along. Which, of course, they had. Schultz simply hadn't been ready to face them, or to admit them; not until after a lunch one day – a day close, by the way, to his 60th birthday – during which his friend, editor André Bernard, had spoken frankly and openly about Bernard's own father, about the things at which his father had failed, about the ways in which his father's life had not gone to plan. Schultz, in turn, had told his own father's story, and on the walk home from the restaurant, he found himself suddenly in possession of The One Truth.
ANOTHER POEM ABOUT his father, Failure, followed with similar ease, "with a great sense of relief", says Schultz, and before long it was apparent to him that he had the makings of a whole collection called Failure. His father had been a presence in Schultz's previous five collections too, but not like this, not with this starkness and deep sadness, not with this truth.
This time last year, Failure won Schultz a Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
Robert Hass won a Pulitzer last year too, for his book, Time and Materials. When Schultz’s eight-year-old son, Augie (he has an older son, Eli, also), came racing across the Long Island dog park where Schultz was walking the family dog, and when Augie shouted, “Guess who won the Pulitzer Prize, Dad!”, Schultz, who had no idea that he himself had even been nominated, expected to hear Hass’s name. But Augie didn’t mention Hass’s name. Why would he? Augie looked at his father and said, simply: “You.”
The irony is almost overkill: the collection about failure succeeds beyond its author’s wildest dreams; the poet who finally, in his sixth collection, squares up to his father’s inability to succeed finds himself, as a consequence, being celebrated by his own young son, the very son described, in the volume’s dedication, as “a success story”. But, of course, the contrasts are not quite so simple, the emotional scale not quite so polarised. Between this happy present and the darkness of his childhood, there may be vast chasms but there are also deep continuities. Schultz has come, he says now, to have so much more sympathy for the father who caused so much misery for himself and his mother, whose death left them crippled with debt and blinking with pain.
“Having sons changed the way I thought about my father,” he says. “And I also find myself understanding more about him, his struggles, how difficult it was for this immigrant man, how focused he had to be on survival.”
WHO WAS THIS man, this father who has cast such a long shadow over his only son’s life, and who lives so vividly and so poignantly in his poetry? Schultz senior was the son of Lithuanian immigrants who tried his hand at many tricks to get rich, to lift himself, his wife and their only child out of the cramped grey streets of an immigrant neighbourhood in Rochester, New York, but failed right from the start. Having convinced his bride-to-be that he was a high-flier, with his three-piece suits and his job running a parking lot, he was a victim of embezzlement three weeks before their wedding and moved, penniless, into her mother’s house, the very house from which she was dreaming of escape through marriage. As a husband and father, he was mostly absent, flinging himself into one hare-brained business idea after another while his wife despaired and his son struggled with the undiagnosed dyslexia which rendered his schooldays a time of sheer misery.
“‘What do you want to be when you grow up, if you don’t read?’ asked my tutor, an enormous man who couldn’t fit under the desk,” recalls Schultz, before laughing aloud at the memory of the tutor’s name: Mr Joyce. “I want to be a writer,” the young Schultz answered.
“I don’t know where it came from,” he says now. “I suppose I lived in my imagination. I loved stories. Maybe I thought, magically, that a writer would not have to write.
“And he laughed and laughed and laughed . . . Waves of his belly, I remember, went from his chin down to the desk, and he couldn’t stop laughing. Shock, and the irony of it, that someone who couldn’t read or write would want to be a writer. I think he loved it. I think he loved the idea.”
Meanwhile, Schultz's father was deep in his own fantasies, as the poem Failurereveals: "a motel that raffled honeymoons/ a bowling alley with roving mariachis". There were stints, too, as a chicken rancher, a taxi driver, a janitor at Kodak and – most vivid of all in Schultz's memory – a vending-machine merchant. Nothing worked out, and he worked too much, "selling himself/ one lie at a time", as Schultz puts it in another poem, the long, post-9/11 meditation, The Wandering Wingless.
Schultz senior died of heart failure, as his doctors warned him he would if he did not slow down. But he did not slow down, does not slow down still. He charges, clatters, through Schultz’s poems. He is frenetic, and he is clearly frightened. And he was a failure; it has taken Schultz this long to give space to that word. But, as he makes clear in the collection’s title poem, to be a failure is not the same as to be a nobody. To be a failure is human, honest, “unforgettable”.
Schultz’s father does sound unforgettable, not just in his spectacular downfalls but in the highs he was capable of reaching before those downfalls claimed him. Listening to Schultz talk about those highs, those “transformations”, as he calls them, it’s not difficult to understand why a writer son would find it impossible to erase the forcefield of such a father.
In his 20s and 30s, after his father's death, Schultz lived in several parts of the country, going from college in Kentucky to a few years in San Francisco, from the prestigious writing school in Iowa to Boston, before eventually settling in New York. His first collection, Like Wings, was published in 1979.
In each place, he says, he found that he seemed to draw what he calls “fathers who were looking for sons in any way”. What he means is that some older writers, including George Oppen, Wright Morris and, later, John Cheever, took him under their wings (“Mary Cheever said I was a waif”).
Oppen was particularly influential in turning the young Schultz towards poetry, entrancing him with stories of William Carlos Williams, of Pound and Joyce, of the copy of Ulysses which Oppen and his wife had smuggled into the US in a suitcase with a hidden compartment.
But even for all that, it is the memory of his first storyteller which comes to life most strikingly in Schultz’s words, as he recalls his trips to factories with his father the vending-machine salesman, another Willy Loman hoping to impress his boy. “He would be dressed like a schlump – baggy pants, clothes filled with powder and coffee and sugar. He was cranky, he talked to himself all the time, he looked like a slob, he was five foot one.
“And suddenly he would give himself a pep talk and he would go into the boss’s office, and within minutes he’d be having the guy laugh, having them all laugh, doing his little soft shoe, his little song and dance. It was magical. From this frightened, immigrant, uneducated man who was afraid to get out of his car, he’d find this wherewithal.”
What Schultz’s father was finding within himself was something which would become crucial to Schultz as he developed his voice as a writer but also his thinking on writing itself: a persona. The Writers Studio, the intensive private writing school which Schultz founded in his New York living room in 1987, is built around the very idea of persona as central to what a writer does. Students are encouraged to try out as many voices as possible, to transform themselves over and over.
Even through the sheer neck he displayed in setting up such a school as a direct counter-presence to the prevalent – and powerful – university MFA system in New York, Schultz was proving himself to be his father’s son, he knows, though he claims that the “last thing” he wanted was to become a businessman like him. But a businessman poet is precisely what Schultz has become, whether he likes it or not, by virtue of the considerable success of the Writers Studio, which has some 300 students and outposts in Tucson and San Francisco as well as online.
WINNING THE PULITZER has brought about real changes in Schultz’s career. For a start, he says, he now has a career. And he has success, or renown, or what he calls his “new best friend, always looking for attention”, with its river of e-mails, letters, interview requests, invitations to read. It’s overwhelming, you sense, but not, either, unwelcome. The experience of reading in front of an audience may be one he speaks of in the same sentence in which he utters the words “firing squad”, but he gains a great deal from connecting with an audience, he says, from sounding his poems out in that way.
“You’re singing,” he says, “and you can come close, but you can’t really recreate that effect in your study.” He laughs.” And I did think it would get less scary as I got older. But I was lying to myself.”
Philip Schultz reads with Jane Hirshfield on Thursday at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway, which opens today and runs until Sunday. Other highlights include a reading by Joseph O’Neill and Timothy O’Grady, new short-story writers Sana Krasikov and Petina Gappah, Colm Tóibín reading from his upcoming novel, Helen Simpson, Carol Ann Duffy, Don Paterson, Ma Jian, Nadeem Aslam, Louis de Bernières, Claire Keegan, Joseph O’Connor interviewed by Philip King, and Aidan Higgins interviewed by playwright Neil Donnelly. www.galwayartscentre.ie/cuirt
