SYNOPSIS:
After The Death of Robert Francis Kennedy is a short novel that follows the intellectual and emotional development of Thomas Malleus. The story is structured like a classic five paragraph essay; but its style is more that of free verse. Malleus, something of an outcast, is faced with the common challenges of all young men in that contentious decade, the 1960s. Set in San Francisco in the fall of 1968, he seeks to cast off the personal. religious, and social shibboleths that mark the American way of life.
ONE
The outcome of the debate that night turned on the poetry of Robert Frost. Richard Apperley and the young woman from Stanford had assumed their intellectual en gardes. The young woman opened with the opinion that if form and function were one, then truth and beauty must out. She argued that craft did not need art, that freedom was an illusion, a mere adjunct of function and form. She was on the debate team. Her propositions were self-evident, she said, and her a priori argument was unimpeachable.
“Frost had not a jot of interest in beauty or truth. Frost’s poems function simply to capture what he himself described as a ‘sense of sound.’ Form was less important to Frost, sometimes classic, sometimes not. His words, his phrases, chosen with care, hung like ornaments on some noble fir and thereby proved their value, his worth. But never mind beauty, never mind truth. Or, rather, truth and beauty were incidental. A word that worked was the thing. And all his poems had and did function; he was a craftsman.”
A toothsome wench was Richard’s descriptive phrase. With hips neither narrow nor wide, but just so, and begging for maternity. Her a posteriori was rather charming as well, and his eyebrows went up and down, up and down.
“If you write with just form and function in mind, sweetie,” he said to her, “your words and phrases become mechanical, brutish things; they go clumping about, ugly noisome things. You ever read law? Function is uppermost. Clarity and precision rule the day: And the party of the first part renders unto the party of the second part who herewith and henceforth becomes the party of the third part therefore and so forth and so on. Law is about function; art is not.”
“The craftsman as artist uses and then transcends form and function.”
“Transcends, is it?”
“Transcends.”
Richard Apperley looked to his friend for support.
“Help me out here, Tom,” he said.
Thomas Malleus sat in the bay of the front window watching the crosseyed cat pad carefully about the opening of the alley between the buildings across the street.
“You’re the writer,” Richard added. “Got some imput?”
Supercilious, thought Thomas Malleus. Arrogance shapes the face with disdain in mind. She could be beautiful. Should be.
“He writes?” she asked.
“He writes,” Richard replied.
“What does he write?”
“Prose and poetry.”
“Published?”
“Nope. He doesn’t bother to submit.” And Richard had shrugged. “An apostate. He doesn’t subscribe to that faith. He writes for himself alone.”
“Can he write?”
“Sure. Got notebooks full. Prima facie.”
“But can he write?”
The face of the young woman from Stanford became all angles, straight line of mouth, arched eyebrow, hand swiping lank blonde hair straight back.
Thomas turned away, thinking, I am invisible.
The cat leaped nimbly atop a garbage can and sat to lick a forepaw. She sat up and stared across at the light.
Ears gnawed, the old bitch. Yellow eyed. Thomas gave a curt nod of the head to the cat. And there it is in fur and flesh: Form and function, truth and beauty. Gulls and cats and all things that have dodged Pythagoras. Function and form becoming one thing, free, and with beauty, and a simple truth. Which comes first is the chicken and the egg. He turned back to the room.
They sat on the sofa, turned awkwardly towards each other. Their debate had moved from Frost to Segovia. And Thomas heard Richard say, “Yeah, but could Andres play the blues?”
Freeing the function from the form, the 12 bar blues.
“Yo, Tom, what do you think?”
The young woman from Stanford thought it was getting late, and that she had better get back down the peninsula. And, of course, she did not want to be there when Richard’s mother returned.
Putting on her jacket, she said, “He hasn’t said a word all evening.”
“Enigmatic,” said Richard. “I’ll call you.”
And then doors opened and closed and the young woman from Stanford appeared on the sidewalk below him, shadow long and oblique from the lamp light up the street. The cat bellied down, alert, with a tense, tight loop, a twitch, of her tail, leaping suddenly away as the young woman stepped from the curb to cross the street. The cat leaped away in the darkness, disappearing.