The picture is of the novelist, short story writer, and memoirist Donald Antrim, a hale looking fellow with a good resume, which includes, for example, a MacArthur "genius fellowship," a no-strings attached grant of $625,000 paid over five years--$31,250 quarterly for twenty quarters--to . . . geniuses, so that they can stay hard at work, I guess, without having to worry over much about how to cover expenses. Despite evidence of being among the fit and fair, Antrim has in the current New Yorker a "personal history" piece, "Everywhere and Nowhere," that opens with him crawling on his belly on the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building, soiling the front of his clothes and scraping his hands and knees as he navigates to the roof's edge for the tentative purpose of hurtling himself over. He made several approaches, also multiple trips up and down the fire escape, in full view of affluent neighbors enjoying, on an April Friday in 2006, after-work cocktails on the private decks of adjoining apartment buildings. Antrim later imagines these neighbors explaining to themselves the curious sight. Possibly the antic motions of an energetic but not very efficient work man engaged in maintenance or roof repair, something along that line? The scene is like a real-life variation on a poem by Stevie Smith, "Not Waving but Drowning":
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
Just want to point out (because it tends to refute popular notions) that the language of this poem is simple, simple: of 77 words, 67 have one syllable, and it feels instructive to list the other ten--waving (2), drowning (2), moaning (2), larking, further, always, nobody. People think poetry should rhyme but they probably aren't expecting "he's dead . . ./They said."
Happily, Antrim's piece ends with him checking himself into Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where he must have gotten help--because he lived to tell the story, quite a harrowing read: again, "Everywhere and Nowhere," subtitled "A journey through suicide."
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