#346

Henry’s very rich American friends

drifted through Henry’s lean establishment

on the way to salmon-fishing 60 miles north

on the Fane, & the Irish theater

and all these friends were almost equally interesting,

the wives even more so than the vivid husbands.

A 13-pounder, two feet long, taking up his whole back,

gaffed we saw, and a very pretty fish.

We caught nothing.

It is the nature of Henry to catch nothing,

but not of Ed’s: crept into his fantastic optimism

a definite note of lack.

But that good man, stranded with all his dough,

uncertain, having travelled many paths,

of his vocation, FREE,

seemed once or twice to be wanting guidance O

which nobody can give: he is too free,

he needs the limitations of Henry.

I needed a job in a bad way, once, and a good friend, who works as the head waiter at a well-known restaurant company in the area with a number of popular white-tablecloth restaurants, fixed me up with a job as a waiter. I was grateful for this. I was a grad student still and a struggling ABD academic wannabe, on the street for the moment, who wound up working alongside 30-, 40- and 50-something pros in the hospitality industry. I struggled at first but figured it out eventually. What matters is that this was a restaurant where no guest got out with a bill under a hundred dollars, and that also routinely generated $1000 checks, and more. It poured $500 bottles of wine every night. The head waiter got a $1000 tip once when I was there. This generated lots of talk, but not much surprise—this kind of thing happened there now and then. I was not on the money train in this place, because I was only there for a year and had only taken the first step toward establishing a regular clientele, which is how the successful waiters made their living. But I did the work, and I served a number of people who struck me as incredibly wealthy and even more incredible, they were totally miserable. I formed a hypothesis about this phenomenon, which I’ve just left hanging since, about money and character. My hypothesis was that it takes a tremendous strength of character to support the freedom that too much money offers. Not everyone is up to it. It crushes some people, it seemed to me. I felt like I had seen what the burden of too much money can do, the only time in my life I’ve ever brushed up against people with real money. If this is indeed true (it’s a hypothesis, that’s all, formulated in bored or frustrated moments), I suspect it’s because there must be some kind of a deep-seated suspicion that if you’re too rich you don’t deserve it, so the response is to spend like crazy to fend the miserable suspicion off, or else some superego instinct doles out punishment. Depression, weird behavior, boob jobs and face lifts, a $2000 bottle of Margaux—and the waiter had better be damn sure the label faces out toward the dining room. No bottle of wine, no matter how exquisite, is worth $2000, though the publicity of drinking it might be. The burden of too much money is like when I played late at night, when my young son was asleep, with his Legos. When there was just a small pile to choose from, there was a real engaging creativity that came from putting together small sculptures from limited choices. Some of these little projects, I will declare, were very sophisticated. As more Lego sets flowed into the collection on every birthday and holiday, the Lego pile turned opulent and wealthy. I no longer cared to muster the creative strength of character it took to support such freedom, and the Legos piled up and no one played with them. It was too much. Wordsworth understood this phenomenon (of course he did!). “NunsFret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room” is about the creative enabling that stems from the tight strictures imposed on the poet by the sonnet form: 14 lines, iambic pentameter, strict, regular rhyme scheme. Like the devout nun in her spartan chamber, it’s all the space you need. The bee may have all of creation spread out beneath her, but she spends her day working inside the tight confines of a foxglove.

DS 346, of course, isn’t about fishing, though the image of a 13-pound salmon gets my fisherman’s heart pounding. (I would have caught a salmon on that trip, because I have some knowledge of this skill.) But, right, it’s not about fishing. (It would have been for me!) It’s about fishing as a metaphor pointing out, once again, the limitations that Henry’s emotional strictures place on Henry the stricken. Henry is not the kind of person whose dry flies the salmon fight over. He’s always the guy who gets skunked. But when this metaphor is applied to his mind, this opens up creative possibilities. It may be a paradox, but there it is. There is a scene from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where a teacher helps a student suffering from writer’s block by giving her the task of beginning her project by writing about a single brick in a wall.

She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. “I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,” she said, “and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn't stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don't understand it.”

The rich guy with too much freedom, so that he doesn’t know what to do with it, is doomed to boredom and self-loathing. He needs guidance. He doesn’t know where to begin. He needs to be pointed to a single brick. Because he is limited by opulence. You need a certain amount of wealth to be happy, because a lack of wealth will make most people unhappy. But too much wealth of any kind, money or life’s possibility, is too much freedom, which is too often a curse. There is a solace in limitation, Henry asserts—and he knows it as well as anyone.