Famagusta
by Daniel Galef
Famagusta
Fame!—FAME!—Know ye the half? I’d venture not— but, mark my words, you’re better in that state, for, once it’s launched, one can’t un-sling the shot that felled Goliath. Fame’s the foulest fate! I was a young and inexperienced player pimping out at some pathetic launch, to find and schmooze some wild-success-purveyor, shake every hand, perhaps kiss every haunch. I’d just begun to gear up to deliver a little speech in thanks to a few or more then present, when I felt a sudden shiver chill the room. All eyes pulled to the door where stood a solitary, haggard figure, tottering in his tux, but eyes alert. His form as he advanced grew ever bigger until I smelled each wine stain in his shirt. The stranger seemed familiar, yet was alien. His eyes were flame—a man quite out of mind. He eyed me like a stone slab, he Pygmalion; I asked him if he’d like his photo signed. He begged me: did I recognize his face?— a smoother version, maybe, and less drawn? He asked if just perhaps my mind might place a phiz like his, but closer to its dawn than to this misty dusk. I shrugged. He urged. But as he wheeled to go the way he’d come he turned; and, as he did, his profile verged and snapped in place: I knew it—knew it from a poster I had seen, some long-closed show proclaimed by all the critics as superb, sun-faded, on my agent’s wall; below, the word “Immortal!” blazoned as its blurb. I said: “It’s you!” He said: “Indeed it is,” and back into the fold the giant came. I begged for his instruction in the biz. He grinned a thin, cold grin. “What is my name?” But I drew blanks and longer blanks. He smiled and said: “It seems my luck’s at last run out. A time there was when I would be reviled as soon as sighted, or loved by devout fanatics. In between, a gulf of bleak indifference. But most took one extreme, It’s tough to say which worse, or which could wreak the most of mischief. Sometimes it would seem that both were but the same: two devils in opposing guises, who would take in turns, to torture me for complementary sins with complementary punishments. It burns as much, you can be sure, to be adored by cloying masses, as it does to be abhorred by clawing mobs—though I have scored without a doubt, a greater quantity of those in the latter camp. Now I must warn what you can well expect if you persist: for I’ll be dead before the coming morn, but you—there still is hope. You yet exist! You think yourself a marble bust. You’re slate, and every creep and critic is a sponge who with a single swipe across your pate remakes it as their own so they can lunge full-tilt at wheeling windmills with your voice and knock them over, pin the crime on you, and leave you limp with little other choice but shrug and laugh ‘What are you going to do?’ And with this game, a death of a thousand cuts, you’re whittled away: your life; your spirit, too; your face, a feast on which the fame-beast gluts, to chip and chip at all that makes you you, until all that remains, an empty name, undusted, by the trophies, on some shelf!” Thus I heard sung the crippling curse of fame . . . but, still, I’d like to find out for myself.
Daniel Galef was recognized on the street one time, while he was appearing in a one-act drama festival as an undergraduate, and he is still not over it. His level of literary fame is more modest, seeing as how the publisher of his debut collection recently asked him when he was going to come out with a debut collection. On the other hand, he once won the cartoon caption contest in the New Yorker . . . and that and a nickel will buy you a cup of coffee, assuming prices are the same as they were the last time the New Yorker published light verse.
Poet’s Note
I don’t think I’d like to be famous, you know, probably, but also when we formulate an opinion like that who’s to say there isn’t an element of sour grapes going on? If I *were* trying to become a famous writer, though, formal verse poetry is probably the wrong way to go about it. The first version of this poem, published several years ago in Lupo, was about two writers, one aspiring and one (once-)famous, but, after taking and teaching a lot of writing workshops in the years since, it has become reflex to roll my eyes at W.W.W.W. (Writers Writing about Writers and Writing) and so I decided to revise this to be about an aspiring and a (once-)famous actor instead, for a showbiz-themed manuscript I am putting together.
Since you don’t get recognized on the street for writing a poem, the only tiny morsel of fame I *have* experienced was when as an undergraduate I briefly acted in a small part in the university Revue. I played the role of God, appearing to the main character in a dream scene wearing a bedsheet toga and a long beard, and the next day I got stopped while walking to my statistics class by someone who said: “Hey, weren’t you God?” It’s easy to see how a thing like that might go to a fellow’s head.
This poem is not exactly a parody of any specific individual work, but came about vaguely in imitation of those eighteenth-century poems that go in for long stichic narrative in couplets (though here the couplets have been swapped out for alternating rhyme). People who have read my collection Imaginary Sonnets may recognize a couple of passages here, as some of the dramatic monologues in that manuscript are snipped and reworked from this and other longer narrative poems, including persona poems in the voice of an Italian Renaissance painter and a hero of the medieval pamphlet novel Fortunatus.
The opaque title is a dumb Latin pun that probably is not worth it.