Remembering Thomas Duddy, poet and friend

Tom Duddy came for tea on May 26, 2012

Tom Duddy precipitates a rush of memories.  It began in 2012 when KumKum found him sitting on an upturned boat, reciting sonnets to the bystanders on Fort Kochi beach. Perhaps, he was just exercising his lungs and giving breath to the sonnets of William Shakespeare. Tom has always maintained that both the human voice and the printed word were required to impress the Sonnets emphatically on the modern world, four hundred years after they were written. To this end he had memorised as many of the 154 sonnets as he could. You can refer to his talk on the occasion of KRG’s celebration at David Hall of Shakespeare’s 450th birth anniversary in April 2014. He selected six sonnets and drew out their pith, eloquently explaining wherein lay their strong appeal to us, far removed though we are from Elizabethan England.

Tom was a relatively young man of 82 when he delivered that lecture. His customary morning regimen was to get up, make coffee, and go to work on a long poem he was writing at the time called A Wedding Song in which he hoped to fuse the wedding of his parents with subsequent events culminating with the current scene in Kerala. After spending the creative hours of the morning, ringing with the furtive cries of koels in the bush, he would step out for a walk. In times past his walk would weave along Palace Road, a crowded thoroughfare, toward Jew Town in Mattancherry and on his way back he would stop for vadas and sambar at a little restaurant. Then he would wend his way to the fruit stands opposite Koker’s on Amaravathi Road to buy apples, his favourite fruit.

Tom Duddy and Joe on Jan 14, 2020 – Michal, our daughter, took this pic at his apartment 

I used to encourage Tom to complete his poem so we could read it privately at least, even if he was not keen on publishing. His standard response was that everything was in the act of writing; that was where the pleasure and the pain lay. Next day when he would gaze at what he wrote he would be surprised and annoyed in equal parts. ‘Ah that was good! Just right and it held a surprise.’ More often he was pained that such banal stuff had issued from his pen, and that he had actually thought it good at the time … what a let down! These were Tom’s daily struggles. 

My chagrin is that in spite of all the urging, and his promise that by May 2014 he would complete it, he didn’t. Much worse, his ancient Apple MacBook crashed, and A Wedding Song went poof! I wish I had helped him make a backup before the computer died. I pleaded he should have the disk crash analysed and the data possibly recovered, but he never agreed. He didn’t mention the disaster any further – he went on to his next long poem. But I chaffed him by writing this for his 84th birthday

Poet goes walking,

trailing Wedding Song behind — 

Poem unending …

A sidebar. Why do people write epic length poems, when we are short-lived mortals living in an era when a tweet of 140 characters (now 280) is as far as the attention span of a modern goes? Why not a sonnet? Why not several sonnets, each just 14 lines? It begins, you develop the thought, usher in the crucial volta after the octet, and if you can devise a punchy couplet at the end, you’re done. A finished poem. But that was not Tom. He loved the sonnets of WS, but his own short form was the haiku, of which he was something of a master. The most famous one I liked and quoted back to him many times was this, inspired by the china-valas of Fort Kochi. It began his intended long poem, A Wedding Song:

O fished-out fishnet 

Poetry's your only catch

And blood-red sunset 

Chinese Fishing Nets in Fort Kochi

As the hostess, KumKum had a special place in his affection, and he composed some haikus on her birthdays, among which this stands out for a wonderful surprise:

August is abloom 

On day double one, renewing 

Our dear double Kum

Joe reading Tom Duddy's haiku for KumKum for her birthday on Aug 11 2019

For another birthday he wrote six haikus, which shared the same first and third line, but varied line 2, for example:

Seventeen's too few

Syllables to plumb her depth

At seventy-two!

Tom was born in upstate New York on Jan 22, 1932. His parents divorced while he was still a young boy. During the school year he stayed with his mother in Buffalo, and summers he would take the train to Boston where his dad worked on the railroad. He had one brother and one half-brother (his mother married again). He was the only academically inclined sibling. He studied at the State University of New York (SUNY) at their Buffalo campus and did his Master’s degree there. For a while he taught after that, and then decided he wanted to specialise in the Renaissance period of English Literature (1500 – 1660) whose great glory was in the middle, The Elizabethan times when not only William Shakespeare, but other great poets and dramatists flowered: Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh. And then the Jacobean Age (named for the reign of James I) which includes includes the works of John Donne, Shakespeare, Michael Drayton, John Webster, Elizabeth Cary, and Ben Jonson.

Tom Duddy with our grandson Gael

These studies took him to the University of California, Berkeley campus, on the West Coast, where he did his Ph.D. That is where he made the acquaintance of Allen Ginsberg, the Beat Generation poet, who moved to San Francisco in the fifties from the East Coast. Tom moved back to teach in the East after his terminal degree, and his academic career is entwined with two institutions that are part of New York city: City University of New York (CUNY) and Brooklyn State College. His passions besides literature were opera and music. He was given ample opportunity to taste its delights by living close enough to the Lincoln Center, that he could attend late shows and get back home in half an hour by commuter train. 

Once KumKum and I visited him at his apartment at 134 Remsen Street in Brooklyn, a lovely neighbourhood with quiet tree-lined roads and neat apartment blocks. His was a two-bedroom place five floors up, which meant KumKum could’t go, but it was indeed a comfy place, scattered with papers as a professor’s pad ought to be. We went out and had an ice-cream and something to drink in a local cafe. 

Allen Ginsberg, the poet (top), with Tom Duddy (below) shot by Documentary Film-maker, Daniele Frison

Brooklyn was quite the place to live for literary people. That prodigy of a poet John Ashbery lived there and Tom said these literary folk were outgoing people and would invite kindred spirits at the drop of a hat for a drink at their place. Living there you could rub shoulders easily with Norman Mailer, John Ashberry and Joseph Brodsky. Brooklyn indeed calls itself the birthplace of American poetry because of its association with Walt Whitman and his famous poem Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry, which Shoba chose to read in August 2017. Once, aiming to fox our good friend, I told him I would read two poems, both allegedly by John Ashbery, but one was fake. The genuine article was The Short Answer . The fake was mine called An Unfortunate Entanglement which began:

Somewhere where the Sky Train goes
There's a store for ordinary folk;
The blended Scotch we bought
Made us all a jolly lot.
What more can we ask
Than that we should love our children,
Whose absence, when young,
made them suffer for years.
…

He had to find out which was which. Tom did, and he called what I had assembled a pastiche, not a parody, because it had bits and pieces of Ashbery’s style.

Tom Duddy having lunch with KumKum on Easter Sunday, Mar 31, 2013 – shrimp biriyani, filet of black pomfret crumb fried, vegetable ishtoo, ice-cream

Until six months ago he used to come every few weeks to our house and have lunch, and K2 would  send him home with a packed dinner and fruits. He had lost touch with the only remaining blood relatives, cousins who were in California. Several of his former friends, scouring the Internet for him by name, would land on KRG's blog, see his picture, and write to me. I read him the messages and replied to all of them, but it was as though after adopting his way of life in Fort Kochi, he had turned a new leaf and left all that behind. One who was very fond of him was Daniele Frison of Venice, Italy. Tom travelled often to Italy in his younger days and met and stayed with Daniele. Tom in turn invited Daniele and his family to the US and they stayed with him in Brooklyn. This is a picture from those times:

Tom Duddy from earlier days in New York, taken by his Italian friend Daniele Frison

Here is a link to a short movie showing Tom during a visit to Venice in 2004. Daniele’s daughter Miriam was two years old then. In the background is the Madonna dell'Orto, one of Tom’s favourite churches. 

Daniele wrote several times to inquire and I gave him news and he sent photos and gave news of his daughter and what he was doing. When he first wrote, he said:

“I would kindly ask you if you could give me some news of Thomas who, as I saw in the blog, is surrounded by many people who have esteem and affection towards him.”

I wrote back and told him that Tom had a clear visual memory of Madonna Assunta in the Frari church in Venice painted by Titian; and had described it to me in the most poetical terms. As you stood looking up at the painting high behind the altar and gazed to see her ascending into heaven, you could almost sense an upward motion:

Madonna Assunta in the Frari Church by Titian

Daniele sent the greetings of his wife, Cecilia, daughter Miriam, and many friends Tom still had in Venice. He also referred to a beautiful poem, Regarding the Snow, dedicated to Nepal. Although Tom was generally neglectful of replying to friends, since he was not on the Internet, at my insistence he once dictated a reply to Daniele as follows: 

“I think of you often and remember your very very handsome face. There is nobody like you in India, Daniele. One thing which makes me calm is I have no obligation to anyone any longer. My brothers both died early. But there is something missing here. People don't read books, at least the people I mix with. They don't enjoy good music. My hostess, KumKum reminds me that I have chosen to segregate myself from readers and other people who might have a taste for the good things of life, like those who invited me to a Poetry gathering at the Kochi Reading Group, in whose blog post you saw my face. I feature there on a couple of occasions, once when I gave a lecture about William Shakespeare on his 450th birth anniversary:

https://kochiread.blogspot.com/2014/05/shakespeare-450th-birth-anniversary_12.html

Another time they invited me and I recited from memory a poem of Andrew Marvell:

https://kochiread.blogspot.com/2012/03/poetry-session-on-mar-16-2012.html

Tom Duddy at the Poetry Session on Mar 16, 2012 when he recited ‘To His Coy Mistress’ by Andrew Marvell

But I am in India for what it has, and I enjoy it. My life is a small life, but I am content. I have contact with a young man, Mansour, who helps me in many ways, bringing me food from time to time, and taking me to see a doctor, etc. Through him I have experienced a version of fatherhood – he is in his early thirties. And I have helped him with some money when he needed it for a new house.  Though he is not poor at all.

There is something about being here and living a life in which I lack nothing. There is a great deal of satisfaction. I do have a breathing problem, but remain mobile and love going for a walk every day. Sometimes the idea of returning to New York arises in my mind. But who do I have there? Regarding the Metropolitan Opera and theater which I used to love attending, ‘I have been there and done that.’

I am writing a poem – it is all about India. I was very long engaged in writing another poem called The Wedding Song which began with a haiku

O fished-out fishnet

Poetry's your only catch

And blood-red sunset.

But it all got erased when my ancient Apple computer's disk failed.

Next week I will return to my friends, Joe Cleetus and KumKum, and have promised to read a few excerpts from my new poem, which is still a work in progress.

Meanwhile cheers to you and best wishes, dear Daniele Frison.”

Daniele Frison and his wife Cecilia visiting Lincoln Center, New York

Daniele was happy to receive news of Tom and hoped soon to meet and embrace him. He replied to me:

“I spent a very, very nice time in his New York home in the early eighties. Thomas made me discover 'his' city, of which he knew almost everything!

Surely he will have told you about the ballet, the theater and the opera of which he was a great connoisseur and passionate. I do not know if he told you something that surprised me very much, his knowledge of skyscrapers, he knew them one by one, height , architect etc. He was very proud of it, not only for the power they represent but I think above all for the ingenuity of which the architects and builders had been capable.”

When I wrote two days ago to tell him of Tom’s death Daniele was sad that he had not talked to him, and added:

“For me besides being a friend, he was a most generous person. By chance we were brought into contact on various occasions. What will always remain is his irony, his wisdom, and his great culture. So too his poetry. 

At his funeral, if you can, recite his poem, Morning Song, Kathmandu.”

Morning Song, Kathmandu 

God's is the first song, 

begun when the old Tibetan next door 

rattles his double-headed hand-drum 

to create the universe new each morning. 

He likes to do this at four, four-thirty, 

I'd say, from the blue-on-black sky 

at my window. 

Into half-sleep bhajans drift with daybreak 

the asthmatic wheeze of harmonium 

and the whine of old men pleading with Rama 

at nearby temples. 

Puja bells and bicycle bells 

nest prettily in each other's tinkling 

at first light, 

but the singly struck 

baritones of neighborhood mandirs 

are graver bellsounds, and give you pause. 

Before you know it, the street's awake. 

The steely roll of shutters pulled open 

and the marauding growl of motorbikes 

play ground bass to some young newspaper wallah's 

KantipurKantipurKantipur 

and by now the old Tibetan is hawking

over his beads (though you never hear 

the spittle launched), and a dog bark 

incites duelling dog barks, and sarangis, 

strung with the very soul of Nepal, 

are selling their sweet sad music 

on early Thamel streets. 

There's no second song, really. 

The ear of my ear knows 

without knowing 

it's all godsong, 

the bikes and bells, the barks and bhajans. 

His complete oeuvre, Opus Oneness.

Links to articles on Thomas Duddy
1. A news item in The Hindu  newspaper on Jan 17, 2013 by Priya Sharma. 


http://www.thehindu.com/books/scholarly-pursuits/article4316496.ece

2. An obituary notice in the Times of India, Kochi Edition, on Apr 6, 2020

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/74998336.cms