The Last of the Wine

By Antonia Hildebrand

When people die they leave a lot of loose ends behind. Harry Lange had died the week before and I had been sent to ‘see to his papers’ as the other members of the writer’s group put it. ‘He wouldn’t want people who aren’t writers snooping in his notebooks,’ Val said, grimly tossing her head. Harry was a poet and a much better one than he would ever let himself admit. ‘I’m just a hobbyist,’ he would say with a dismissive grin. He was seventy-five when I joined the writer’s group—old enough to be of the generation that saw poetry as unmanly. ‘It’s my vice,’ he would say with a frightening smile. He had dentures and they belied his sweet nature, giving him the look of a small, baffled dragon. I always enjoyed his poetry but owed him a much bigger debt. I was about thirty years younger than Harry and it was he who first mentioned that I might like to read some of Gwen Harwood’s poetry. He shyly slipped a book into my hand. ‘It’s only a lend,’ he growled with his dragon smile. Later,  I sat at the table with a pot of coffee and some tuna sandwiches. An hour later the coffee was stone cold and the sandwiches were uneaten. It was love at first sight. In the introduction, Gwen Harwood was quoted as saying: ‘I’m a Romantic. I am a great Romantic with all the capitals you care to give me. An upper case Romantic … always have been … always will be.’  I found myself nodding and saying ‘Yes’ to the silent kitchen and my uneaten sandwiches. If you find yourself saying ‘No’ when you’re reading someone’s poetry—well, that’s a Bad Thing usually. With Gwen it was ‘Yes and yes and yes again.’  How had I never heard of this woman? Well I had, in fact. Faint memories of school days stirred and the English teacher with the sweet smile and the greasy hair. Perhaps it was a timing thing. Understanding. Age. All of that.             

Harwood wrote about dry reeds rustling and the ‘nightwind’ being set free and the heart, holding ‘like remembered music’ a landscape that had grown too dark to see. Yes. She wrote about the lovers who cut themselves and bled and knew, as we all do, that knives are sharp but don’t believe there’s any such thing as sharpness. Yes. So I owed him that. When I tried to talk to him about Harwood and how her poetry had affected me, he watched me silently and only nodded from time to time. When I realized he had said nothing for at least three minutes, I stopped and tried to apologize. ‘Go on, go on,’ he said. ‘These things have to be said.’  He showed the dragon dentures shyly. So we became friends. I could talk any nonsense to him and he would only nod. I could rave about Harwood until I was nearly in tears and he would never have that look that said, ‘Bloody women. They’re all mad.’  Above all, he didn’t say she was too traditional, wrote too beautifully, and that I should be reading some other poet. Some people can never be satisfied with any poem if it’s comprehensible. If it was also beautiful that was simply unforgivable. He wasn’t like that.

Val said Harry had left a manuscript. A collection of his poems that they thought they could get a grant to publish. This was my mission: find the poems. I walked up the cracked cement path which had once been red but was now an indeterminate pink. The roots of nearby trees had lifted one whole slab of cement and cracked the path. Key in hand, I approached the front door feeling strangely excited; my heart rate had quickened. It was really quite an honor, I supposed, to be chosen to find Harry’s manuscript. I was his friend, though, and it was only natural to ask me. I actually doubted there was anything to find. Harry was a great talker and he could be very convincing when he talked about poetry, especially his own. But he had been so sick for the last eighteen months of his life that I didn’t expect anything approaching a publishable collection.

The front door creaked open on rusty hinges and the smell of a locked-up house rose to greet me. There was a clock ticking on a wall and a China cabinet with photos on it of a young and handsome Harry with his bride – the Joyce he often mentioned in an absent-minded way, as if she was still sitting at home (possibly knitting), waiting for his return. But Joyce had been dead for ten years. She had been a nurse and a practical, no-nonsense woman. ‘Joycie didn’t like poetry,’ he told me once. ‘She liked Bridge,’ he added pulling a fearsome face that told me more than he probably wanted me to know about their marriage. ‘We didn’t have any children – so she played Bridge,’ he sighed.

There was dust everywhere. Whenever I came over to visit him, he would always show me into the ‘sunroom’ at the front of the house. I had admired the tidy room and told myself he managed well for a man on his own. Now I realized that was the only room he cleaned and tidied. Down the hall was another room. It had once been a bedroom but he had moved a cheap desk in there and a swivel chair. There was a computer and a printer. I felt disappointment rise from my stomach up into my throat when I saw how dusty the desk was. Even the pens lying on it were dusty. I had wanted to be wrong, but now I started to think that my belief that there was no collection of poetry was correct. Perhaps it had only ever existed in his mind.

I found his notebooks in a drawer of the desk and when I opened them, I saw some indecipherable scribblings—his poems. There were five notebooks. He had dated some of the poems but lines had been scratched out, words had been written over the top of other words. Being legible wasn’t one of his strong points. Then I saw some disks lying in a heap over to one side of the desk. I picked them up. Three of them had no labels but one of them had a rather grimy label, as if it had been much handled. I could hardly read the writing, of course. ‘Looks like a spider crawled over the page, doesn’t it?’ he would laugh whenever he showed me a poem scribbled on a piece of paper.  He always ended up reading it to me. He would pretend I had hurt his feelings. ‘I’ve got a wonderful hand! Mrs. Furlong caned me for blotting my copy book but that was in Grade Two!’

I took the disk over to the window and studied it carefully in the light. The Last of the Wine: Poems 1945-1994 and as an afterthought, in pencil he had added Harry Lange. I switched on the computer and let it go through its mechanical burping noises. Clicked on Microsoft Word and pushed in the disk. There were pages of poems but one immediately caught my attention. It was the title poem The Last of the Wine. As I read it I could see that it was a kind of homage to Harwood’s The Wine is Drunk but it was in no way derivative and was full of Harry’s lovely phrases and vivid images and observations. We had had a fascinating conversation about the last lines of Harwood’s poem.

     My love, the light we’ll wake to praise

     beats darkness to a dust of gold.

‘Do you think,’ I asked him, ‘that she worked on those lines? Do you think she slaved over them? Or do you think it just came to her?’

‘I had a friend, a Catholic priest, who used to say that God wrote all the good lines and we just got to fill in the spaces. Of course, I don’t actually believe in God so it put me in a rather strange position. Because you’re right; lines like that do just happen. They just come, seemingly out of nowhere. My problem was that I didn’t accept what he said but I had no alternative explanation. I was pretty annoyed. Of course, I told him I disagreed—violently—but he could see the look on my face. A kind of guilty knowledge, I suppose.’

He laughed and shook his head. ‘He got me that time!’

‘Was he a poet?’

‘He loved poetry and I’m sure he wrote it but he would never admit it.’

‘It must’ve been his vice too.’

‘Perhaps it was,’ he said, winking.

I smiled tenderly at the memory there in that dusty room.  I would miss Harry for the rest of my life and I had only just become conscious of the fact standing there staring at a computer screen and reading his poems. In Nightfall Harwood had written that in the deepest solitude we reach another’s. Yes.

‘In the end, you know, we’re all just shouting into the void. That’s what art is.’ Harry said this when he’d had too much wine but, of course, he was right. As he was right about so many things. ‘I’m the best, worst-known poet in the world’ he would snarl, old and drunk and comical in an armchair at the writing group’s end-of-year Christmas party. I would drive him home as he lay sleeping and sprawled across the back seat of the car.

On impulse I opened the refrigerator. There was hardly anything in there but there was a bottle of red wine, almost empty. Looking at the wine, I realized how much I wanted Harry to wake to that light that beat darkness to a dust of gold. Amen to that, I thought. With a careless gesture I hoisted the bottle and drank the last of the wine in a gulp. Superstitiously I hoped it was a sign that the book would come to fruition. ‘Amen to that!’ I shouted into the silent house.

It was winter and when I walked back down the cracked path, darkness was already closing in. Two young lovers walked past, their laughter echoing down the empty street. They had their arms around each other and they were kissing. It hurt me to see their youth and their passion but I couldn’t exactly say why. Had Harry and Joyce ever been like that? I could only hope they had and that Harry had found some light beyond what Harwood called that field of black everlasting flowers. Amen to that too.