202
DAVID JACKSON
March air was wet and went straight to the bones. He twirled a
bent umbrella. The glow of the party was still upon him. He
made his way past the buildings of the University, the arch, and
into Leopoldstrasse, that grand avenue of Munich's bohemia,
Schwabing. He was heading for his pension on the edge of the
famous English Gardens.
But block by block the bloom faded. Soberness came to sit
on his black cape and bent hat. The moment was coming when
he would have to face
his
conscience. It had done a lot for him.
Without it, life might have been easier, but not so successful.
Looks, health, and a natural laziness were always at work per–
suading him to treat his poetic talent even more lightly than he
did. But no, his conscience had provoked him, far more than
any ambition, to work and polish and finally be recognized-by
authorities as vague as the
Times Literary Supplement
and as
partisan as the publisher of his volumes of verse (three were seri–
ous, one was a children's book) -as one of the leading young
American poets.
About himself, Meredith was modest. For every critic who
called his poetry too often shallow and mocking, there were
three who protested that he had managed the hardest of all
things: to speak lightly of tragic affairs. Through all of this he
pursued his own way. Unlike Paul Klee's defiant, "To hell with
uncle, let's get on with our building," Meredith's retort, "I can
only fly where I fly-and so the swallows always come back to
Capistrano," hid his fear that, perhaps, those severer critics were
right.
He had money, a small income left by his grandmother, and
he had been through good eastern schools; teaching in one of
them, now, but for this year when he was enjoying a leave of
absence and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Ostensibly he was here
in Munich in order to be near the source of nineteenth-century
German poets-post-Schiller to pre-Rilke-about whom he was
writing, a vague enterprise. To a few friends and himself he con–
fessed that his greatest enthusiasm for these poets flowered when
