DAVID CRUMM: 32 years later, a poet's words of wisdom finally make sense

April 22, 2005

BY DAVID CRUMM
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

I got the letter 32 years ago, but I'm only getting the message now.

I've spent hours trying to find the original letter, digging through dusty old boxes. So far, it hasn't turned up, but at least I'm able to share the story of that letter, now that I finally understand what it meant.

This week, I traveled back to my hometown, Goodrich, to address a spring community luncheon about my three decades as a writer, including the last 19 years exploring the mysterious world of the spirit. The centerpiece of my talk was this story:

In the spring of 1973, as a senior at Goodrich High School, I was impatient with my English teacher's slow pace. I was eager to focus on an exotic poem in our literature book, "The Morning Song of Lord Zero" by Conrad Aiken, before the school year ended.

I was crushed when my teacher announced that "we only have time left for the famous writers in our book," so we would skip Aiken. I strongly objected, but she silenced me in short order.

That's when I wrote a letter to Aiken, pouring out my disappointment in the class. I hoped to be a writer someday, I told him, "and I, for one, as lowly a critic as I am, enjoy your works."

He replied, calling my classroom appeal on his behalf "delicious." He encouraged me to pursue writing, but I had little sense of what his note really represented.

I knew that he was a widely respected poet, a Pulitzer Prize-winning friend of T.S. Eliot. His daughter, Joan Aiken, was a famous author of books for young readers.

But Aiken's true message to me didn't begin to materialize until I got a recent e-mail from Joan Graham, a writer in Cape Cod, reporting "an amazing coincidence."

My name had cropped up in an article in the Cape Cod Times on the same day Graham was thinking about the final scene in a play she's writing about Aiken's life. It's a play she plans to close with a scene in which characters will read my letter to the poet and his response to me.

Until she saw my name in her local newspaper, Graham had no idea that the boy from Goodrich had pursued a form of writing, too.

When I called Graham, she delivered 32-year-old news that stunned me: "Didn't you ever realize, Mr. Crumm, that you received the last letter he ever wrote?"

I had no idea.

There was no hint in his note to me that, at age 84, he lay dying in a hospital in Savannah, Ga. In his final days, Aiken had chosen my letter from his mailbag to answer. I could not even recall his exact words, until I found a copy of "Selected Letters of Conrad Aiken" and reread our exchange.

What he was doing in 1973 was sending his spiritual epitaph to a kid in rural Michigan. At the time, I was so young that I didn't have a clue what the great poet meant.

In recent years, I've written frequently about the universal spiritual yearnings that shape our daily lives. Often, I've explained that the most troubling spiritual question is this: "At the end of a busy day, did anything I accomplished today have any lasting value?"

That's the question Aiken focused on in his note to me, saying, "If there is anything good in my poetry, people like yourself will find it. That's all we can hope for, and goodness knows it's enough. The effort alone is worth it."

He was telling me that the trick in responding to this nagging question about whether there's any lasting value in our lives is that we don't have to answer it. Instead, we can approach each day holding fast to a confidence that, ultimately, goodness, compassion and creativity do matter.

I pulled out "Lord Zero" for the first time in more than three decades and read Aiken's words with wiser eyes. I'll let a few of his lines from the poem close this particular note for readers with hearts and minds to hear it:

"Can you remember what I remember? Are we of one substance? Are we flesh or stone? Yet brought by solar synthesis together, comedians of the soul's capricious weather, obedient to who-knows-what -- we seek to chart disturbances of the heart."

This page was last updated:  April 22, 2005 9:34