There’s a scene in Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim where one of the characters (who eats every night at the same Village restaurant, The Dante) is a poet on the trail of a Missing Person. This poet, Jason, goes to the New York Public Library and flirts with the librarian so that she’ll give him access to the index cards listing the titles each patron has checked out.* He realizes that two characters from different worlds have checked out the same books. What do a perfume manufacturer and a psychiatrist have in common? the poet wonders.
Well, as it turns out, they are linked to the same secret society, a diabolist cult.** The perfumier’s product is called La Sagesse (wisdom), and its corporate logo is the cult’s sigil. The psychiatrist (epitome of a different kind of sagesse) is helping one of its members escape. The poet Jason serves an alternative sagesse in his detective work, and it’s no accident that it begins at The Dante and pivots on the library.
Could it be that there is a profound cultural connection between the poet and the detective?***
In the comment thread here, Don Share wrote:
I was conveying that don’t have much admiration for anthologies, either. It’s one thing to discover a Sitwell (or a Graves or a Riding (Jackson) in just the way this thread describes, another to be beset with set pieces! The discussion here actually illustrates the value of real reading and exploration as against the artificial elevation of a poem or poet here or there.
I have done a bit of library detective work too: I went to the New York Public Library to find a copy of David Schubert’s Initial A, which I photocopied on the spot. Another time, I went to repeat the experience with Joan Murray’s Poems, only to discover, after waiting for forty-five minutes, that the book was missing! In its place on the conveyor belt was a book-sized block of wood with my request slip taped to it. I have gone chasing after such obscure poets on the strength of an offhand comment. But not only poets. When I was reading Charles Olson in my twenties, I followed Butterick’s Guide to The Maximus Poems and pursued recondite scholarship: Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. Ether, God and Devil. Preface to Plato. A poet follows her sources, Robert Duncan thought, as one follows the branches of a tree of knowledge.
So, in a certain sense, one chases after Missing Persons (Schubert, Murray). In another sense, one discovers what the perfumier and the psychiatrist have in common. Individuals from disparate worlds find themselves in a secret society, in The Dante, or at the loft party where the codeword is La Sagesse.
There is one caveat, though. In The Seventh Victim, the poet Jason is prompted to search for the Missing Person (Jacqueline) through an erotic interest: the sister (Mary). We first meet Mary at boarding school; throughout her journey in Manhattan’s Underworld, she is warned again and again, “Go back to school.” That is, stay out of trouble. La Sagesse then involves trouble; La Sagesse is not generally learned in class.
* Compare with the scene in Se7en where Morgan Freeman’s detective goes to the vast, dim public library to research the literature his serial killer has been quoting. At one point he illegally gets a list of borrowers from an FBI guy, hoping it will lead to a suspect.
** Compare the mise-en-scene to Cocteau’s Orphee, whose poet must find his missing wife.
***Robert Bolano’s Savage Detectives is also on everyone’s bookshelf these days.
I once liked a very short poem so much that I quoted it in full in a song lyric. The poem was titled “Death Song” and attributed to a Papago Indian named Juana Manwell (Owl Woman) I first read it in Jerome Rothenberg’s monumental anthology “Technicians of the Sacred,” in a translation by Frances Densmore. My song is called “Down into the Death.”
I went to the library to read the 90-year-old government report in which Densmore first published the poem. The library will not lend the report but will let someone read it on the spot.
It turns out that the title is a later invention, and, according to Densmore’s notes, Manwell said the song is a healing song. Not a death song at all.
I later found that Rothenberg had not invented the faulty title, because Margot Astrov used it in her anthology of American Indian Prose and Poetry, “The Winged Serpent.” But maybe Astrov got the title from somewhere else.
“Down into the Death” also quotes a line that Ted Berrigan borrowed from Shakespeare.
Following a stream to its source can be a journey worth taking.
Here is Juana Manwell’s healing song. I love singing it.
In the great night my heart will go out.
Toward me the darkness comes rattling.
In the great night my heart will go out.