I have been out with Gaynor and the family to a café and the waitress
was hopeless; forgot every thing. Saw a super funny cowboy ¤lm, began
like this. Out in the west there are many cowboys. Some are good, some
are bad. Some are bad with a bit of good in them, some are good with
a bit of bad in them. This story is about some pretty good bad cowboys.
See postcard. (11)Ironically, the distance between Tom and this young enthusiast for Hell’s An-
gels and cowboy ®icks may be greater that that between Tom and his father.
Accordingly, the world of dream and of memory take over: in the poem’s
present Tom ¤nds himself irrelevantly searching the Yaddo library for a “col-
lected Bridges,” where he might “check on that ‘London Snow’ poem” (12).
And increasingly, as the “plot” of Letters develops and Tom ¤nds himself,
especially after Mr. Kim’s departure from Yaddo, “Adrif t and alone... inside
my head” (17), the poet increasingly ¤xates on the world of his adolescence
and youth.
This lower-middle-class world of the 1950s and early 1960s, with its hectic
rhy thms, its jazz, drugs, and fashion-consciousness, contrasts sharply with
the isolation and singularity of the present, in which the poet sometimes
feels so anxious that he goes down to the main house and rummages through
the drawers, ¤nding old sepia pictures of “Snow-Crowned Popocatapetl and
Ixtaccahuatl Guarding Cathedral, Puebla, Mexico” or “The Flower of Vene-
zuela’s Regular Army” (17). Appropriately enough, there is even a picture de-
picting the slaughtering of the “fatted calf ” in the parable of the Prodigal
Son. But if Tom is himself a Prodigal Son, the narrative of the ¤fties is made
poignant by its very chronology. It is in 1954, a year before the discovery of
the hole in his heart, that Tom and his friends sport narrow trousers and
“slim-jim ties,” play hookey, and go into Central London, where they eat
huge meals at Lyon’s Corner House and sip Manhattans, Side-Cars, and the
other exotic cocktails of the 1950s. There is, as yet, no inkling of the fu-
ture. The narrative now elides the hospital years and gives a hilarious account
of Tom’s job with the Continental and International Telephone exchange
in 1964:
... I liked the job. Apart from the usual Civil Service shit, and the 200
different varieties of ticket to ¤ll out for calls, you were left pretty
much to yourself. I would “accidentally” disconnect people whose tone
I didn’t like or who were rude to me. I’d let girls phoning their soldier
boyfriends in Germany for three minutes from a call box (over 10/-)
talk for perhaps ten, instead of cutting them off. One Christmas I
238 Chapter 12