“An accomplishment in a teacup”

John Oliver Simon wrote a book dealing with his daddy issues. We all have them! In Neither of Us Can Break the Other’s Hold John includes letters from his father. Dad isn’t in favor of the poetry thing. He wants his son to have a better life than that. Dad wants John to be ambitious, materially, at least. That’s what success is, right? 

When I was a teen and into my early 20s I was Depressed. I remember visiting my mother’s old friends, Jean and Lee. Lee was trying to figure me out. I said something about just wanting to be happy. Exasperated by this response, Lee said, “Any skid row bum can be happy!” They can? You mean, the key to happiness is to be a skid row bum? I couldn’t imagine that being the way to happiness, and suggesting that happiness was something anybody could get easily, even when they were barely getting by, seemed … contrary to my experience.

What does make a life? What makes a life worth living? In this excerpt from one of the letters, John’s father seems to have a Lee-like attitude toward happiness. It’s not enough! 

Your mother once said she’d be satisfied if you became a truck driver or any other sort of blue collar man, so long as you were happy, at peace with yourself. But I couldn’t agree then, or now. You have taken steps upward over me — Phi Beta Kappa, an athlete’s letter in college. And I gather you have some standing among the poetry followers of the Bay Area. Good.

But that reminds me unhappily of Rena Eisenkramer. Rena was a housewife in Pine Bluff, a friend and contemporary of my mother’s. But she was beset by the devils of ambition beyond her capacities. She wanted to be a song-writer — popular songs rhyming moon and June. Nobody would publish her songs so she got printed by a vanity publisher and the ladies of the Jewish congregation of Pine Bluff ooh’d and ah’d over her songs very politely. She persuaded my father, then owner of the town’s major movie house with occasional live acts, to persuade a singer … to sing her songs in public, and the local paper had a story about Mrs. Eisenkramer’s prowess as a song-writer. An accomplishment in a teacup.

The story about Rena Eisenkramer is clearly meant as a cautionary tale — the moral of the story is not to … what? Not to do everything you can think of to honor your commitment to your art, certainly not if that means paying for the printing of it yourself or calling in favors from the local theater owner and the town weekly? In the face of rejection from the establishment industry you should just nod and accept their wise judgment? Yeah, that’s the idea. Letting your ambitions exceed your capabilities is crazy! You should leave music to the professionals. You should leave painting and dancing and poetry to the professionals — people who know how to do it, people who know how it’s really to be done. Which is … ?

source: Neither of Us Can Break the Other’s Hold: poems for my father

by John Oliver Simon

1981. Shameless Hussy Press, Berkeley CA