Love Endures—An Appreciation of Judith Roche by Jerome Gold
Judith Roche: 1941-2019
A week after Judith died last November, 2019, I learned in my random reading that Perdida Doolittle had worked for Norman Holmes Pearson during World War II. Norman Holmes Pearson was a professor of literature at Yale, but, during the war, was in charge of the American personnel assigned to Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service to learn the tradecraft of covert operations. Perdida had worked at Bletchley Park, the home of the code breakers who deciphered the German military’s most secure code, and Pearson recruited her to be his secretary. Perdida Doolittle was the daughter of the poet, Hilda Doolittle. Hilda Doolittle’s pen name was “H.D.” Reading about Perdida, I thought immediately about what Judith’s reaction would be when I gave her this bit of trivia regarding H.D., one of her literary heroes. But, of course, I couldn’t now.
Judith and I were born two years and a day apart—both of us Virgos, both of us in thrall to the word—the written word, the spoken word, the word as sung, the word in itself. Both of us were elder children, meaning we were born to responsibility, to the feeling of obligation. Both of us, I think, regarded obligation, at least obligation freely accepted, as a part of love. Both of us issued from parents, or at least one parent, who identified with the radical left of the 1930s, those who were labeled the Old Left by those who, in the 60s, called themselves the New Left.
Neither of us suffered gladly the superficial, those who were content to wade in the shallows when the depths called. Judith was herself genuine in her relations with others, and she expected the same from them. I once offered a glib response to something she said—I don’t remember now what she said or my precise answering comment—and she made this movement with her mouth and for an instant turned away from me to let me know that I was being lazy and that I should not accept this from myself.
Regarded as a “free spirit” by some, she was not capricious. She was disciplined. Except for her family, I don’t think anything meant more to her than her work—not the work you must do to stay alive physically and to care for those who are dependent on you, the work that was an unbidden necessity for her, and is for most of us—but her true work, which was also, I think, her truest pleasure: poetry.
She wanted to be surrounded by beauty. She wanted life itself to be beautiful. She wanted to feel passionate about it, and often she did about much of it. I, who was often fascinated by ugliness, learned to be careful in how I expressed to her parts of my own experience of the world. Judith wanted always to live in beauty, but she could not deny the world. She knew ugliness, but felt it was for other poets and writers to deal with if they wished. I think her insistence on dwelling, insofar as she could, in beauty, was a way of defending herself against the pressures of hate and injustice and prejudice and degradation—the degradation of our planet as well as the abasement of human beings—and all the things that go into making the dark side of Americans, certainly, but, more inclusively, the dark side of our species. Beauty transcends. Beauty is transcendent. Beauty leaves pettiness below. To dwell in beauty is to acknowledge pettiness, but to live, in spite of it all, with hope.
For Judith, poetry was a calling. This may seem obvious. It may seem to non-writers that everyone who writes feels the call. But I am convinced that most people who write do not feel a call, or, if they have felt it, are not able to sustain that feeling. I realized that only within the last few years. I had thought that every writer wrote until she or he was no longer physically able. I had thought this because I knew Judith and because of my own experience. It had never occurred to me that Judith and a few others composed the exception rather than the rule. When her muse appeared to have left her a couple of years ago, it diminished her life. The irony is that it returned, although in somewhat different form, only shortly before she passed.
Judith and I met in the mid-80s. Marilyn Stablein introduced us when Judith was about to replace her as the Literary Arts Director for Bumbershoot, what was then Seattle’s annual arts festival, and I was one of the publishers who vended his wares at the small press fair that was part of Bumbershoot. Golden days, then.
About five years later, she approached me about publishing her collection of poems, Myrrh/My Life as a Screamer. Empty Bowl, who had published her first book, Ghosts, had, I think, stopped publishing and Copper Canyon had turned Myrrh down. I had not published a book of poetry before, though I had done a couple of chapbooks, selling them primarily at book fairs, and I was hesitant to take Myrrh on. I had no doubts about the quality of the poems, but I fretted about my ability to make a success of her book, or to help her make a success of it, for it was primarily through her public readings, her hustle, as it were, that Myrrh actually became a success. (At the beginning of my publishing career, I thought it was the norm for books to be profitable, at least prose books. Black Heron Press’ first two books, short novels, turned a small profit, and I thought that this would happen with, if not all, then most books I selected for publication. I had no idea how lucky we—my partner and I—had been with the first two. I had not yet learned that almost all literary books fail to earn back their financial investment.)
It was because of Myrrh that I began reading poetry again, and then trying to write it, and then experimenting with bringing poetic technique to prose forms. Judith educated me in a way a university could not have. Basically a storyteller, I gravitated to Louis Simpson and Philip Levine and Ai for their narrative poems. Almost exclusively a lyric poet, Judith was sometimes impatient with narrative, although, in her last collection, All Fire All Water, she included “Hoffa,” a straightforward narrative. It just came to her, she told me; she could not explain it.
Working with her on Myrrh, we became friends, and during much of the 90s and then into the 2000s, we met for dinner and wine several times a year. We gossiped, of course, but only a tiny bit, and I have to say that her gossip was never malicious, at least when she talked with me. Mostly we talked about love and its varieties, its responsibilities and obligations, the transition from the insistence, the passion, if one is lucky enough to experience it, of youth to the responsibilities of age. Both of us had had experience with deception, with inflicting it on another and with being deceived, and we talked about the consequences of living with lies, your own or someone else’s. It was a calm, even analytical discussion we had, and every time we met for dinner we explored a little more of the topic of love.
She knew how much I enjoyed stories about human inconsistency and told me about the death of someone she had been fond of and whom I had also known. He had converted to Catholicism and had told me that he was a different person now. I had known him as extremely self-serving, focused almost entirely on himself, what he thought, how he felt about what he thought, what he thought about how he felt. I did not trust him—I had known him to be dishonest—and I could not figure out why Judith liked him. A former lover of his told me that he was the only person she had ever known who could walk miles along the beach and not once look at the water. But he assured me he had gotten past himself.
He became very ill and then depressed about his illness, and he decided to commit suicide. But before that he invited his first lover, a woman he had never stopped loving, out to Seattle so they could be together again, at least for a while. The visit was a success and she returned to her home on the East Coast. After a short time, he called her and told her about his intent to kill himself and asked her if he could call her and talk with her as his heart slowed and he died. She agreed. And that’s what he did. He called and they talked until he couldn’t talk any more.
I was amazed at his cruelty. How could he put someone through that, especially someone he loved and who loved him? I could imagine how he talked her into it. He had a way of softening the tone of his voice so that it became almost childlike in its uncertainty, and this had the effect of inducing you to feel sorry for him and want to give him what he wanted.
Yes, Judith said, but he was a romantic, and what a romantic thing to do, talking to your lover as your life ebbs away.
And what about his Catholicism? I said. Why did he become a Catholic if he intended to kill himself? He may not have had that plan when he converted, she said. But whether or not he did, his willingness to violate the dictates of the Church for a romantic gesture made it even better.
During most of the period of our dinners together, I worked as a rehabilitation counselor in a prison for children, one of the prisons where Judith gave poetry workshops. Sometimes we talked about the kids we both knew, or I told her about kids she didn’t know. In those days, perhaps still, I was obsessed with the kids I dealt with. Once a kid I knew actually won his appeal. What a rare, momentous occasion that was—his mother coming to take her son home, her tears, his tears, the prison staff’s pleasure in witnessing something at work on behalf of a kid—it was wonderful. I knew a girl who confessed to a crime that her boyfriend committed. She got a two-year sentence. She was pregnant with his child when she was sentenced and gave birth to their daughter while in prison. Soon afterward he found someone else. After all, how could she expect him to be faithful? She was in prison, after all. Another girl allowed her boyfriend to take the rap for a crime that she had committed; she was convicted as an accessory. She got seven years; he got twenty.
Love and its consequences.
I finally wrote a novel that, I think, shows the influence of our conversation—our continuing, decade-long conversation—and finally got it polished enough to show to other people, but before I could give it to her, she became unable to read it.
Toward the end of October last year, Judith became incapacitated from a stroke, or a series of strokes. I was reluctant to impose myself on her family, so I waited a couple of weeks before going to visit her. She was lying on a hospital bed in her living room where she could look out the picture window into the forested area below where it descended to Lake Washington. Tari, her daughter, was there, as well as Judith’s sisters who had flown in from Michigan, and one of her granddaughters. A housekeeper and a woman from hospice were also there, the latter seemingly unconnected to whatever was going on, perhaps wanting simply to keep out of people’s way. I reminded Tari that we had met a couple of times years ago, but she didn’t remember. She said her mother had said she wanted to see me.
I had just sat down when Tari said, “You’ve been friends for a long time, haven’t you?”
“Thirty years,” I said. “More than thirty years.”
I could see Judith’s eyes moving as, I think, she calculated what year thirty years ago was, or perhaps trying to remember when we met.
I stroked her face and then her left hand. She was unable to speak clearly, but occasionally she got out a word or a phrase that I could understand perfectly. In one instance, I said something—I don’t remember what—and ended my sentence with the word “sometimes,” and Judith said “Sometimes” after me, seeming to consider the aspects of its meaning.
I asked her if she wanted me to tell her what was new in my life and she nodded yes. I said Jeanne, my wife, and I had moved to Fidalgo Island. Judith’s eyes widened; she had not known that. I knew she had taught in Anacortes when she first came to Washington, and that she was fond of the area. “We can see the Guemes Channel from our house,” I said. I told her that my daughter, Leah, had had a bout with cancer and that she was taking radiation treatments now, after having undergone chemotherapy and surgery. Judith winced. She knew Leah. I told her that Jeanne and I had adopted a young woman, but I got the sense that I had already told her this. Then I could think of nothing more to say. Judith dozed off and woke up and dozed off again. Once, when she was awake, Tari gave her some wine on a bit of sponge.
Tari said Judith wanted her library to go to the Hugo House. Her library had an emphasis on Northwest poets. I said I would call Tree Swenson if they wanted me to. I suggested they also consider the Washington State University library, which had a Northwest collection. (In the end, Sibyl James made the arrangements for the transfer of at least some of Judith’s books to the Hugo House.)
There were long silences. Tari went to another part of the house to sit with her daughter and the relatives who had come in from Michigan. The woman from hospice sat quietly alone at a table off the kitchen. The housekeeper changed the bedding in the bedroom. Judith’s eyes were closing more frequently.
Finally, waiting until her eyes had opened again, I said I had to go. She looked disappointed. Her eyes closed. But I didn’t move. I took her hand and kissed it. When I raised my head, I saw that her eyes were open again. I said I would come back. Although she and Tari seemed to believe that she would pass on soon, I did not believe it. Judith said something so clearly that I thought I did not hear her correctly.
“What?” I said.
“I love you,” she said again.
“And I love you,” I said.
In all the time we had known each other, and as close as we had been, we had never said those words to each other.
She smiled.
Tari had come back. “We have to give her her morphine now,” she said.
I had not realized Judith was in pain. I stood up. “I’ll come back,” I said, but nobody was paying attention to me, and I left. Outside, a line from the novel I had recently completed came into my head. “Love endures, whether or not we will it, despite the world and despite ourselves.” It had just jumped onto the page as I was writing, but even at that moment I could see Judith’s influence in my forming it, and now I wanted to mention it to her.
Walking to my car, I considered when I would see her again. This was Saturday. Next Saturday or the Saturday after, I thought. But she died before the next Saturday came.
—January 16, 2020
Jerome Gold is a founder and the publisher of Black Heron Press, a small literary press located in Anacortes, Washington. Black Heron Press was the publisher of the last three of Judith Roche’s four collections of poems. Mr. Gold is the author or editor of sixteen books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He resides on Fidalgo Island, Washington. Visit Black Heron Press @ https://blackheronpress.com.