BOOKS IN HEAT

What Really Happened to the Class of '65?

2026-08-13T01:29:59.581-07:00

What Really Happened to the Class of '65 by Michael Medved and David Wallechinsky was a best seller in 1976 or so. I got a paperback copy soon after it was published but didn't read much of it--even though I'd graduated high school in 1964 and this was my generation, I didn't find much to relate to, at least in a skim or two. When it was made into a TV series later in the 70s, I don't remember ever watching it.

But when a deep dive into an obscure corner of my bookshelves recently revealed this old copy, I found more interest and more relevance in it, if only for the perspective of time and the greater breadth of my own experience.

The premise of the book was simple enough. In 1964, Time Magazine sent reporters to interview members of the class of 1965 at Palisades High School, a brand new and lavish campus in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles. Its 1965 article positioned these students as harbingers and leaders of the new post-war generation, the best and the brightest. The authors, who were among those Palisades students at the time, decided to see what had happened to this promising group of students a decade later.

This book was a pioneer in at least two aspects: it was an early example of oral history, consisting almost entirely of excerpts from taped interviews with the subjects, and as one of the first of by now endless analyses of the Baby Boom--or Boomer--generation.

David Wallechinsky, son of the then best selling novelist Irving Wallace was the apparent spark plug of the project. Like his father's work (and their later work together) this book didn't involve a high proportion of actual writing--the work was in conducting the interviews, and having others transcribe them, then editing and assembling them. Apart from the transitions designed to pull the reader onward--some skillful, some transparently artificial--the art of it is in the structure. This may have been the role mostly of Michael Medved (whose name became more familiar later, as a TV film reviewer and conservative commentator.)

For one thing, interviews they conducted with 11 of their classmates were dumped entirely. Apart from short thematic sections (on the JFK assassination, sex, the draft and political confrontations) each chapter centered on a specific individual. These were introduced by brief comments about this person by other ex-students interviewed, remembering (or trying to remember) what they were like in high school, before the bulk of the chapter was given over to narration by the subject person.

Though the person was often presented as the example of a type, their individuality dominated the narrative. So on that level the book could be absorbing. They did typically have a tumultuous decade, with a number of sometimes radical changes in their activities and attitudes. Given their affluence, a surprising proportion did some jail time (drugs were always involved.) None had yet achieved very much, their promise still awash in turmoil or otherwise not yet fulfilled.

In terms of simply being reminded of what it was like to be that age, I noted in this reading the number of students who were very insecure in high school, including some considered the most handsome or the most beautiful, who were cheerleaders and class leaders. Some of this was an acute sense of class differences based as well on parents and their status and wealth, or lack of it.

Palisades however was not a typical high school. Many of the students came from wealthy families, including the sons and daughters of prominent people, including Hollywood stars. Despite this, the introduction makes a pro forma claim to universality, and of course, adolescence and the the high school years have much in common nearly everywhere. But in the stories themselves I was distanced by differences, though not quite as much this reading as the first time I encountered the book, perhaps because I am more aware of having met more contemporaries of more privileged backgrounds.

Of course my high school was a relative oddity in that it was a Catholic school, towards the end of the era of the Latin Mass and a general imposition of religion throughout the curriculum and the days of our lives. One of the important events for the class of 1964 in my school is not even mentioned--the brief reign of Pope John XXIII and the Vatican Council that eventually changed so much that Catholics and Catholic school students experienced ever after.

My school was in western Pennsylvania, a working class culture within a growing middle class. The translation of wealth into social status--of which these Palisades students were acutely aware--was both more subtle and less important for us. Family and community were also stronger factors and pressures in our lives than apparently in theirs. And I'm pretty sure that in my high school there weren't any women who claimed to have had sex with more than 400 men before they were 18, as did the first student interviewed in this book.

But the biggest impression I came away with as I read about the wild swings of what these graduates did, and the serial excesses they sought and experienced, is that they typically had wealthy parents to bail them out (sometimes literally.) We didn't have that luxury, though some of us did careen around for years. We had our perhaps more modest but still for us wild swings as well--though this more typically happened with later graduates, as cultural changes swept from west to east, high to lower.

Still, there were elements of those years brought home sharply in these pages. Most of the major themes of those years are involved: drugs (prominently), Vietnam and politics (less so), religious searches and cults (the "brain" in high school went from Eastern religions to TM to Scientology to the John Birch Society), the back to the land movement (big in California especially.) All the intellectual or artistic currents are lacking--not even a rock musician, or a single Dead Head.

Race has a token chapter--there was but one black student in the Pali Class of '65 (though some subjects later got involved in various black communities.) There wasn't much about Women's Liberation as it was being called by the early 70s, though some of the themes within it were reflected in their lives: for instance, how smart should a girl let herself be and still be attractive? Or the role of going to college mostly to meet a good potential husband.

But there are occasional flashes from my late '60s experience, as when someone notes that he learned more from antiwar readings and discussions than he did in college classes; and another who noted all the "contradictions" in his schooling. There were contradictions all over the place then--really maddening for those young and hopeful, or even dare we say it idealistic.

The weight of Vietnam and the draft, particularly on young men, has largely been forgotten, but some of these accounts brings a little of it back. When one such ex-student avoided the draft system until the lottery was instituted, and then drew an extremely favorable number, he recalled: "Interestingly, it was not until that moment that I realized the psychological burden that I had been bearing for several years. Until it was lifted, I didn't realize that my whole life style, my whole mentality was cramped and distorted, twisted by fear of the United States government. The fear of constantly having to evade and dodge, to defend myself against people who wanted to kill me, and wanted me to kill."

I personally was aware of it, although that awareness didn't prevent the damage, which I also felt when the burden was lifted. The theme of self-awareness runs through this book. Partly it's just extended adolescence, but it may also have been particularly acute in a time of such great change, when the young were almost forced to find a truer identity.

Perhaps subsequent generations have (or are having) a tougher time. Apparently they think so, because the prevailing image of boomers is how easy everything was for us. But I'd take seriously this comment by the mother of one of the students interviewed, who was also a fictionist often published in the New Yorker, Sylvia Grossman:

"The late sixties were an incredibly difficult time for people to grow up. I have some basis for comparison, I had other children and I know how it was the generation before. I think the sixties were the most difficult time to be young that the world has ever seen. All values were falling apart. The bottom was falling out of everything. We were at war--in a perfectly horrible war. It was a terrible time. The only thing worse than being a child was being a parent in those days."

Stopping With Stoppard

2026-05-29T02:25:23.995-07:00

In a prior post, I announced my intention to read--and mostly to re-read--as much of Tom Stoppard's work as I could. From late December into early April, that's what I did (along with other reading, of course): all the original stage plays, all but two or three of his translations, most of the TV and radio plays, though just one screenplay--his Oscar winning Shakespeare in Love. Along the way I re-read Hermione Lee's biography and several collections of Stoppard interviews, in tandem with the plays discussed in each.

All I have left in my possession un-re-read is the book of scripts for the miniseries of Ford Maddox Ford's Parade's End. I read it several years ago after seeing the miniseries, then reading and essentially discovering the brilliance of the Ford novels collected under that title (which tell a continuous story.) My first impression of the scripts was that Stoppard incorporated all the best lines.

These days I read mostly for the experience of reading; that is, inhabiting the moment. But I did come away with some impressions. Stoppard famously dismissed the reading of his plays, insisting that they could only be enjoyed by seeing them on the stage. In later years he modified that view when he came to understand that some people in fact did enjoy reading them. But the additional factor of course is the absence of opportunities to see them.

Regional and community theatres in the U.S. regularly produce only a few (mostly Rosencranz and Gildenstern Are Dead, Arcadia and perhaps The Real Thing), mostly because they are deemed the most accessible and certainly because they have relatively small casts and are less dependent on elaborate staging than, say, Jumpers or even Travesties. Most of us have only the written words. They are often brilliant, and so reading his work is rewarding.

But he was partly right about casually reading rather than seeing his plays--you do tend to miss a lot. There are the verbal gymnastics and jokes, but even their effectiveness often depends on performance. Even the radio plays are more than only dialogue--sound effects play a large part in several.

The BBC does offer most of the plays, at least in radio versions, though only from them. There are a few easily available online--notably the television plays Professional Foul and Squaring the Circle, the radio plays In the Native State, a television version of the stage play Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and what is probably Stoppard's last radio play, Darkside, which incorporates the entire Pink Floyd album, the classic Dark Side of the Moon. I watched and listened to all of these in those months.

Darkside ends, by the way, with Stoppard's most eloquent statement on the planet's ecological realities. Since as far as I know there is no published script, I include here the final speech as I heard it, incisive and yet full of Stoppardian puns, ending with a kind of political prophesy already being fulfilled:

"The ice is melting. The drink is getting warm. A wall of water is heading for your patio. From space you can see the coal furnaces burning. We consume everything. We're dying of consumption. Hardwoods are toppling for dashboards. The last rhino has given up its horn for a cancer cure that doesn't work. The last fish is gasping beneath a floating island of plastic as big as France. The weather forecast is a state secret."

The play scripts did tend to change, at least slightly, with each major production, so my very early editions don't entirely reflect the now standard versions. I did re-read a few as collected in what so far is the only series of collected plays--I expect a more definitive series will eventually be published. I did find myself enjoying The Real Thing more in the collected volume, though perhaps that had more to do with the typeface and the book itself.

Apart from the radio plays, to me the best pure reading experiences were Indian Ink, and the radio play from which it was derived: In the Native State. I certainly enjoyed reading the three plays of The Coast of Utopia more the second time, as I could follow the characters and action better. But except for Indian Ink, Stoppard was right--seeing them makes a difference.

For I did see The Real Thing in its original production on Broadway (with Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close, as above) and a university theatre production of R&G, which informed the reading experience. Curiously, I also saw a production of Arcadia, which did not, other than in the general way of knowing the outline of the plot and the narrative technique. I simply don't recall the performances. Arcadia, Stoppard believed, was the closest he came to a perfect play. It does read well, while suggesting a superior theatrical experience.

The best reading experience was of his screenplay for Shakespeare In Love. Every line of it is sparkling and resonant (and despite sharing the Oscar with Marc Norman, every line of it is Stoppard.) I can't discount of course that I've seen the movie a number of times, so the voices match with the actors. ( I've also had multiple viewings of the feature film of "Rosencranz" that Stoppard directed--I have both on DVD--but he re-wrote it for the screen. Still the major speeches which are also in the play sing off the pages in the voices of Gary Oldman, Tim Roth and Richard Dreyfus. The movie is very entertaining.)

The one Stoppard play I hadn't read before was his last, Leopoldstadt. It is involving and moving on the page, suggesting the impressive theatrical experience extolled in reviews. I would love to see it but its large cast makes it forbidding to mount, except perhaps in an ambitious university production. But I think my theatre-going days are over, so I'll have to be content with reading it, and re-reading.

House of Books

2026-03-02T01:41:00.000-08:00

A little summation for National Reading Month...

I live in a house of books. They line part of almost every room. In two there are shelves ceiling to floor. This used to be called a personal library. Now it’s hoarding.

I don’t bother much with de-cluttering. This is the clutter of my life. The clutter that is me.

Over there are the very twelve deep blue volumes of the My Book House books of my childhood (the set recalled by novelist Jim Harrison, Mr. Rogers and many others.) The cover of the first volume ("In the Nursery") is rubbed bare. My mother read to me from this book. There are my early crayon scrawls in the interleaves of volume 2, “Story Time.”

There is a later paperback edition of the first book I borrowed from my hometown public library: The Spaceship Under the Apple Tree, a story with marked resemblance to E.T., the movie by Steven Spielberg, born in 1946, the same year as me.

And the baseball novel by John R. Tunis, The Kid Comes Back I first found in the library, an unacknowledged source for The Natural, both novel and Redford movie.

There are several 1950s hardbacks in the Winston Science Fiction series for young readers (with the same memorable black and white illustration on the inside covers of every volume), and two of the original brown-bound Hardy Boys novels—all acquired later because I cherished them from early public library days. I can still describe the layout of that library, and memories attached to each room.

There’s a 1960s shelf, from James Baldwin to Tom Wolfe. My town had no bookstores, but mass market paperbacks spun on wire carousels at drugstores, supermarkets and news stands. In that colorful chaos were my first excited explorations. For 35 to 75 cents I found books only rumored in Catholic school, and especially books never mentioned there. Those were among the intimate building blocks of me and my expanding, deepening world—statements to myself of who I wanted to be.

My path as a writer was marked with finds among the pulp fiction carousels, of early John Updike stories, J.D. Salinger and Joseph Conrad, and one of the first books on writing itself, Writing Fiction by R.V. Casill, a legendary teacher at the Iowa Writers Workshop, where I would someday be accepted as a grad student.

These were mostly the small mass market paperbacks you could fit in a back pocket. As such they are among the last of an endangered species driven by digital media into extinction.

At certain liminal moments in my life I went away into very long books I’d neglected: Melville, Tolstoy, Dickens, Pynchon. But regardless of what I was doing in the world, each era of my inner experience is witnessed on those shelves, each assimilated into my ongoing life. There's Jung and James Hillman, William Manchester and Jane Jacobs, Paul Shepard and Gary Snyder, Northrop Frye and Jim Harrison, Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw, Wallace Stevens and W.S. Merwin, Vonnegut and Garcia Marquez, Shunryu Suzuki and Leslie Marmon Silko; H.G. Wells, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. LeGuin, Kim Stanley Robinson.

Many have memories, people, moods, historical moments stuck to their pages, to those very books themselves: I’m not primarily visual, but I can instantly recall book covers. They embody the past absorbed into my being, and opening those pages again releases new responses. So in that way, every book on these shelves is a new book waiting to blossom. Sometimes they represent only aspiration, but they are always a moment away from speaking in new air.

When one book refers to something in another, it’s a confirming delight to be able to just reach for that book. It does not require an algorithm. The physical reality of my books—including evidence of where some used ones have traveled—is vital to their value. Besides, they don’t spy on me.

I was not a particularly precocious reader, and often too impatient to fully inhabit my reading. But as Mailer once suggested, a book and a reader just have to be ready for each other. Some of these books are still waiting, but that can happen at any moment.

I have avoided the vampire technology, so I’m reading with even more patience: two 600 plus page books on FDR helped me through these inconceivable days. Of course there’s lots of comfort food on these shelves as well— Joe Leaphorn and Commissario Brunetti police procedurals, Sherlock Holmes stories, Star Trek novels.

I’ve always read for the pleasure of the words, for the music, the voice, the inspiration and excitement, the sparks that connect into the infinite. These days when I seem to retain less, that pleasure in the moment of reading remains. Here in my house of books.

Starting With Stoppard

2026-01-19T00:59:00.000-08:00

Tom Stoppard died in November 2025. From his first success in the late 1960s--Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead-- to now, I followed his career and his work longer and more consistently than I have of any other playwright. (One bit of evidence: most of my copies of his plays are first edition paperbacks.)

So beginning in December I have embarked on a reading (and viewing) project, exploring his life, thoughts and work. I did something similar starting at the end of 2024 when I learned of the death of the writer known as K.C. Constantine--too obscure to make the Notable Deaths lists but known to me and self-selected enthusiasts for his unique police procedurals, which happened to be situated in a somewhat fictional version of my hometown of Greensburg, PA. This resulted in two essays posted on this blog.

This time I'm likely to spread this project over more time, and it involves not only reading plays but seeing as many as I can that have been filmed (for example, the BBC version of Every Good Boy Deserves Favor) or were originally TV plays (for example, Professional Foul), and seeing as well as reading appropriate interviews. My procedure so far has been to start re-reading Hermione Lee's fine biography of Stoppard, and stopping at the points where a play is discussed, to read that play first.

Already I've had the luxury of simply dipping into my own library for some associated material. For example, when Lee mentions Kenneth Tynan's profile of Stoppard for the New Yorker, I pulled down my copy of one of three Tynan profile collections, including the one with Stoppard in it, called Show People. When Lee writes about Stoppard meeting Vaclev Havel, the playwright and essayist who would eventually become the president of the Czech Republic, I found the Havel essays she refers to in my copy of his collection Living In Truth.

From the first I knew Tom Stoppard was a writer after my own heart. I was in college then, and experiencing real theatre for the first time. I came to admire other dramatists of my time (Arthur Miller for example was still alive and writing) but I always suspected that if I had become a successful playwright, my work would be most in sympathy with the work of Tom Stoppard.

I felt a certain stream in common in those first plays: the word play, the ongoing comic exploration of language philosophy so prominent at Cambridge and Oxford, and its relationship with the satire of the 60s--Beyond the Fringe, That Was The Week That Was, the Goon Show and Peter Sellers, Richard Lester and the Beatles, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and later Monty Python and Douglas Adams. These were exciting me and my writing in the 60s as well, but I knew them only from their artifacts. Tom Stoppard knew many of the people involved--he even wrote for a magazine run by Peter Cook. (Of course they all had further roots in English Music Hall (or American vaudeville), the Marx Brothers, and Laurel and Hardy (and the appropriate British double acts.) These influences show up in Stoppard's work as well.)

Even the collision of Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett in R&G Are Dead was also familiar--in a way, that describes much of my college experience.

Later plays continued the elegance of language, the high and low humor, the unapologetic focus on ideas in philosophy, science, literature and history, with increasing inventiveness if in quieter ways. And it wasn't all fun and games--for instance, he returned several times, from an early play to one of his last, to the question of what is the nature of the good.

Especially in those early years, what I was reading or had read showed up in his work, along with less familiar stuff, like Lenin's writings. We seemed to have similar literary tastes. That we may not have agreed on political questions in the Reagan/Thatcher era, and we might not agree on some larger subjects, not only didn't bother me, it didn't occur to me. These were beside the point. (Besides, the whole left/right thing was more extreme in the UK than the US at the time.) Then by the time his work overtly took sides in favor of free expression in Eastern Europe, we were on the same page.

From the first also, there were always stories of people and relationships, including love stories, that were sometimes overlooked--even by the playwright. Plays are a narrative art, Stoppard insisted.

Our lives have been quite different, of course. But that unbeknownst to me, it appears he was also a left-handed and right-eared Cancerian night owl, with even less digital tech than I have, is now a little eerie.

Over the years I valued Stoppard's musings in and outside his plays, especially as a writer. Like his very helpful description of the art in writing as controlling the flow of information. He was a realist with a deep sense of vocation, who said "One's duty is to write as well as you possibly can, and to write whatever it is that you are now in a fit state to write." That's a kind of classical conception that seems increasingly fragile.

A few years ago as he was giving a tour of his home library to a guest and his film crew, he remarked: "I'm deeply romantic about literature as a devotion." I identify with that as well, though it also seems a fading feeling in following generations.

Stoppard often insisted that reading his plays was fairly fruitless, not only because the published plays are notorious for having been changed already by the publication date, but because of the nature of them as "description of a future event." That event is the production, the performance. It's a complicated subject. There are playwrights, like Shakespeare and especially Chekov, that provide a full reading experience with their texts alone, which performance sometimes does not match. A good deal of Stoppard does repay reading, but it's also true a lot can be missed. Not just the many sight gags (they can be at least imagined) but nuances and even narrative moments that are hard to pick up or to be given their proper weight by reading only.

Unfortunately, I've seen only a few of his plays performed: I did manage to see The Real Thing in its original Broadway production (directed by Mike Nichols), regional theatre productions of The Invention of Love and On the Razzle, as well as college productions of Arcadia, The Real Inspector Hound and R&G (and I've seen Stoppard's award-winning movie based on that play several times.)

But he also has work preserved in the movies: for example, his contributions to the hallucinatory Brazil, the Spielberg production of Empire of the Sun, and his voice in the Indiana Jones film with Sean Connery as Indy's father. (Stoppard also wrote the screenplay for John Le Carre's The Russia House, starring Connery.) Of course he is most famous for his Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love, which despite co-writer credit is mostly his work.

Perhaps his most sustained work for television was the British miniseries based on the related Ford Maddox Ford novels collected under the title Parade's End. I admire both the script and the novels greatly.

Besides some TV plays and even a few radio plays done early in his career on YouTube, and more available from the BBC, there's a late radio play on YouTube called Darkside, a remarkably short play that incorporates all of Pink Floyd's classic album, Dark Side of the Moon. (This play also concerns the struggle to define the good.) For those curious about Stoppard, this is not a bad place to start.

Stoppard wrote outrageous comedies and quieter if equally unusual dramas, often incorporating history and playing with concepts of time. But all his plays had laughs. The laugh, he told an actor in one of them, "is the sound of comprehension."

He loved the process of theatre, working with producers, directors, actors, designers, all through rehearsals in major productions, often rewriting on request. That meant the play was still alive. He wrote for small casts and large ones, in one-acts, and in a trilogy (The Coast of Utopia) that took nearly nine hours to perform. In New York, it was the hottest ticket in town. What was its sensational subject? Mid-nineteenth century intellectuals of pre-revolutionary Czarist Russia. Each of those plays ran separately and consecutively during the week, but all three were performed back to back on Saturdays. I was in New York briefly during the run and heard the buzz, but the tickets--especially for Saturdays--were sold out far in advance, even if I could somehow afford to buy one.

Before I started my chronological exploration this month I watched a lot of interviews from recent years, particularly about his last play, Leopoldstadt, a summary work in more ways than one, reflecting aspects of his own life and its previously unknown context--namely that many older members of his Czech Jewish family died in the Holocaust. The play follows a similar family from the turn of the 20th century to the 1950s. Performances left people in tears, including on more than one occasion, Stoppard himself. He was 83 when it was first staged in London, 85 when it came to New York. In interviews he expressed an eagerness to be writing another play, but also admitted that after this play, it was hard to know where to go after that crowning work.

Stoppard died in November, at the age of 88. "Death is not anything," Guildenstern says towards the end of R&G. "It's the absence of presence, nothing more...the endless time of never coming back..." He was by all accounts a very sociable man (his large annual parties were legendary), who (he admitted) felt most comfortable alone. He was a loving husband and father and friend, known for his kindness--and he owned that the kindness was deliberate, a commitment. A lot of people are missing him. He's not coming back. Throughout his life Stoppard quoted another playwright's line to the effect that the obscure current underlying all of life is grief.

His work lives on, and so in this way he lives for me. Stoppard realized his plays would be produced and read for an indeterminant time after his death, but beyond that he felt such speculation was idle. Who knows what will survive and speak, if anything, especially in the increasingly uncertain future.

Stoppard was committed to writing for the theatre, which of all writing is most obviously experienced in somebody's present. But his reservations duly noted, the same is true of reading his plays, his words. The writing that is read is also experienced in the present, whenever (and wherever) that present happens to be.

Stoppard's verbal eloquence wasn't restricted to jokes, ironies and epigrams. In particular I think of the profound and profoundly moving eloquence that appears at the end of play Shipwrecked, the middle play of his Coast of Utopia trilogy. To me it is as enduring as any lines of any playwright in my lifetime.

Alexander Herzen has just suffered the sudden death of his young son. Michael Bakunin attempts to comfort his by saying, "Little Kolya, his life cut so short! Who is this Moloch...?" Herzen replies:

"No, no, not at all! His life was what it was. Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don’t value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it’s been sung? The dance when it’s been danced?... Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question."

History of My Reading: Get Me Rewrite!

2025-09-23T01:46:00.000-07:00

Washington Newsworks had a weekly slot for a restaurant
review, which became a pain. I did a couple to fill in,
including one on French bistros called "Salads and Sad Cafes,"
in the manner of Apollinaire, Parisan poet and friend of Gino
Severini. But we had no illustration, so our photographer
Michael McCarthy followed me and my coffee cup
into our conference room. I threw some coins on the table to suggest
a cafe, disguised myself as best I could, somewhat in the manner of
an early Picasso painting I had a poster of in my Cambridge apt.
This became the photo we used.

Not long after I’d abandoned Boston and began my Greensburg exile, I got an unusual phone call. There were two voices greeting me on the line. I knew both but from different places and contexts—two people I couldn’t imagine having ever met.

One was Michael Shain, a friend since college who I had last seen in New York. The other was someone I’ll call James, who I’d known in Boston as a young reporter out of Harvard writing for the Boston Phoenix. (Most of the names that follow are authentic. I’ve indicated where I’ve changed a few—like “James”-- to be free to offer my interpretations of long-ago events than might not be theirs.)

I would have thought these two had little in common other than both knowing me. And they weren’t calling from either of the places I had last known them. They were calling from Washington, DC.

They delighted in my surprise. Then they told me they were involved in a soon to be launched alternative weekly newspaper called Washington Newsworks. James was the Editor, and Shain was the Arts Editor. Somehow my name came up, and they discovered they both knew me.

A copy of an old letter suggests I was offered the job of film critic, but the pay seemed not enough to live on (which is ironic considering what followed,) let alone compensate for all the bad movies I would probably have to see. I preferred the idea of freelancing from a distance, and maybe going down to DC for a week or two at a time to report a few stories.

For awhile after I returned from my Florida trip, that’s what I did. My first assignments from Shain were pop music pieces, including a pretty good one on the Eagles and the LA ethos, especially the music’s relationship to the sensuous weather of southern California, which Eastern rock critics didn’t get. I got checks in the mail, so it was looking good.

At some point in early spring of 1976 I took the train to DC to stay with Shain for awhile and see what other articles I could do. The train was for people without cars (like me—and Washington was only a four hour drive away) who weren’t budgeted for air fare, but also for people who just liked the experience—and I met several such kindred spirits on my first trip down.

I stayed with Shain in his three rooms, kitchen and bath on the fourth floor of an apartment building that had seen better days at 2147 O Street, on the corner of 22^nd Street, and within walking distance of Dupont Circle up the hill. Contemporary photos suggest the building has since been renovated and upscaled, and is now called The August.

As I would learn, this was in the Northwest (or NW) quadrant of Washington, with the city’s Federal Triangle and main business district —the largest, richest and most white of the quadrants. The city of Washington was then about 70% black. (The distribution across the city now is roughly equal among the major official categories of white, black and non-white Hispanic.)

When I threw my duffle bag on the living room couch where I would sleep, I had not a clue that this would turn out to be my residence for many months. It was also the residence of an ever increasing and ever more visible population of cockroaches.

One of the pieces I reported in Washington was on a new revival movie theatre on Capitol Hill. One of its principal owners was Jim Lardner, son of Ring,Jr. and a former colleague and office-mate at the Boston Phoenix. My first interview with Jim was in the cinema’s projection room during an afternoon showing, which included an unintended bit of slapstick comedy when the film started unspooling onto the floor and I got involved in the rescue operation, along with the dressed for success ad rep for Rambling Through Alexandria magazine. (I actually saw Jim on a TV clip recently, the Lawrence O’Donnell hour on MSNBC, out on an overpass protesting, identified as a man-on-the-street.)

I also worked the phones for a piece on the by now perennial fear that college humanities programs were being abandoned for the fashionable pursuit of more practical career paths. With the Larks and Owls section of my New Times piece as background, I added some new interviews and a satirical frame (I invented the Night People’s Liberation Front that issued its press releases at 3 a.m.) for a story on day vs. night people.

Otherwise I was hanging out at Newsworks, making my calls and getting absorbed into the camaraderie of the staff. The Newsworks offices took all three floors of a wood frame row house at 2311 18^th Street NW in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. That area has since become gentrified and fashionable, but at the time it was a battered and abandoned district, unreconstructed from the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. There was a certain tension and tentativeness about the neighborhood. Most businesses had fled or not reopened, and some buildings were still empty.

I learned from staff members that their building was owned by the Newsworks publisher, who I will call Diane Archer, in her early 30s. I was told that her family was generationally wealthy (oil money) and that she was listed in the Social Register, an honor with which I was unfamiliar but clearly was significant in status-conscious Washington.

When I first started going there, the first floor was staffed with ad reps, circulation, distribution and others engaged in the business side, as well as—sequestered alone at a bulky machine in a back room-- someone called the word processor. Editorial was in the big front room of the second floor, with management (the publisher, associate publisher and general manager) in offices at the back. The third floor—all one room as I recall-- was the province of the art and production staff.

Both at the offices and back at his apartment, Shain acquainted me with the extent of his job and the non-staff freelancers he used. It wasn’t long however before he announced he was taking time off, and with the correct approvals, I would be his substitute as Arts Editor. He promptly disappeared for awhile but when he came back he admitted that he wasn’t returning to Newsworks.

So in May I became Acting Arts Editor. I was enjoying myself, partly because the work was stimulating but mostly because of the people I was working with, particularly the editorial staff: bright, lively, engaging and friendly. Among them I felt useful and wanted.

Maybe my sense of ease had something to do with the similar parts of our backgrounds, largely modest economically, with some fellow Catholic school survivors and a high proportion of Italians—very unlike the Boston Phoenix staff. John Aquilino was the capable and mischievous managing editor, and he introduced me to the impressive-on-all-counts general manager, Gwen Capabianco, who was comfortable and welcomed in editorial, partly because she shared our sense of humor. From the first floor, frenetic ad rep Gigi Fava would come up to join the noise. (Bob Mondello was one of the theatre reviewers, but he wasn’t around the office very often in my time.) It seemed everybody was funny and fun, and in their 20s or early 30s.

Now I was there among them pretty much all day every day. Looking into the room from the front windows, my desk was on the right, facing the room. I could see just about everybody from there, except James, the editor, who was nearest the windows behind a folding rattan screen.

But it was also a volatile, emotional and expressive group, and together with those coming in and out of the office—photographer Michael McCarthy, news writer Jeff Stein and others—there was a fair amount of cacophony and chaos, often high spirited but sometimes contentious.

In this dynamic I for some reason became a center of calm. For one thing people seemed amazed that I was organized, but I was also the only one in editorial with experience running part of a paper. They looked on me as a voice of reason, which is not the role I would predict for myself in all contexts.

In 1976, the late 1960s television series Star Trek had been rediscovered in syndication for several years, and it was becoming a cultural phenomenon. In Washington (as elsewhere) episodes were on every day, on multiple channels. I mention this because Star Trek was the source of my nickname as Arts Editor. They started calling me Spock. I was very logical, and at least somewhat alien.

So it happened that one day I looked up from my desk when I heard two male staff members arguing loudly just beyond the front room. They were facing each other when I got up and approached them from behind, and silently applied the Vulcan neck pinch to each of them. They both immediately slid to the floor.

That’s what Newsworks was like.

By June I also had my first cover story, a Washington-centered update of my futurists piece that New Times failed to print. It worked partly because Washington was host to many futurist organizations and futurist consultants were either working for the federal government or trying to influence it. I positioned the story as a conflict between the technocrats and the alternative futurists (the cover was a kind of comic book illustration) but what stands out now is the response to all the enthusiasm I originally reported from the World Future Society convention in Washington a year earlier.

From new interviews it became clear that nothing viable had been sustained, and the whole futurist field was coming up against its built-in limitations. It seemed like the beginning of the end, though it would be about five years before the Reagan administration effectively killed futurist concerns, along with the few meaningful institutions like the congressional Office of Technology Assessment.

By June everyone on the staff knew that Newsworks was in deep financial trouble. Diane would periodically announce a new small “investor” whose money would keep us afloat for a few more weeks. The paper’s financial straits fed increasingly insistent and anxious questions and discussions among the staff about editorial direction and the paper’s identity. Part of this stemmed from the early history of Newsworks of which I was then unaware.

Someone sent me a 1977 academic paper about Newsworks from the beginning, but since too many facts and surmises from my time there were wrong, I hesitate to depend too much on its version of the paper’s origins. But after I left Washington I did talk with a few staff who had been there from the beginning, and they confirmed a general story.

It’s generally agreed that Washington Newsworks started out with a big bank account. They spent thousands on an initial ad campaign, and threw a lavish inaugural party that drew journalism luminaries including the Washington Post’s power couple, editor Ben Bradlee and writer Sally Quinn. This was the Woodward and Bernstein era, when investigative journalists were the new heroes, so journalism was suddenly glamorous. (Though Watergate was over, as was the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration, yielding to the comparatively bland Gerald Ford presidency when the big Washington stories concerned a series of now forgotten sex scandals.)

Newsworks began with large ambitions. It was going to be “Washington’s Third Newspaper,” in the same league as the dailies, the Post and the Washington Star. “It was like people were..ready to go into orgasm,” one of my informants told me about those first days. “We were going to be instantly important.”

But their first issues were disappointing. (I’m not sure I ever saw them, but they’ve been described as unfocused and boring.) “We heard that people at the Post and other media people looked at those first issues,” my informant said, “and never picked up a copy of Newsworks again.”

For some of those involved from the beginning, the flaw was in marketing. Maybe—that’s not my area—but maybe that’s also disingenuous. From my point of view it’s not how you sell it—it’s what you print.

My instincts were educated by the Boston weekies, where the alternative press grew out of the counterculture. Even in 1976 it was still twentysomethings writing primarily for their contemporaries. The Washington area had a lot of universities and colleges, and there were a lot of young people working for the federal government. What did they have in common—in life experiences as well as interests and attitude?

We were the rock generation, and the film generation. We were a generation made skeptical as well as idealistic by the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam and Watergate, so alternative views of political matters were part of what drew younger readers. We were culturally different, but some older readers as well responded to quality writing and a different point of view, especially on the arts.

As an alternative paper, Newsworks could focus on some local stories (real estate scandals, etc.) and even if its readership didn’t automatically care about them, the stories themselves could get people reading. But a heroic but tiny news staff wasn’t ever going to compete with the resources of the dailies, even if the Washington Post was notoriously uninterested in local news. The question for me was: what excited us? Maybe it would excite readers more or less our age.

I began to learn more about Washington, primarily from our staff and freelancers—not only talking about topics and stories, but their lives. For one thing, the staff was mostly single—and there were a lot of single people out there. Informal discussions about the local culture accumulated (I recall specifically a fascinating conversation with ad rep Valerie McGhee), and I jotted down an idea among a number of article ideas. And then it grew.

Staff members were intrigued, and in May I got James’ approval to develop, assign and edit a special section, to be called “To Be Young, Single and Lonely in Washington.” It became the cover of the June 10 issue, which would eventually be the paper’s most successful.

Objectively, this was a series of articles that the Post and the Star did not have the credibility to produce. We didn’t necessarily provide great journalism, but the articles had insights and started the conversation.

From the inside, what stands out is the enthusiasm of the staff in producing this section. I wrote the introduction and one piece, and our brilliant features editor Jean Callahan wrote about celibacy, but News Editor Amanda Spake interviewed people about meeting partners in bar, and hard news writer Jeff Stein wrote about attitudes towards love at first sight. Eight staff members contributed to the “Fifty Ways to Meet Your Lover” guide, with some suggestions definitely tongue in cheek. The issue also included Jean Callahan’s expose of an alcoholic rehab facility, which had—and failed—mostly black patients, as well as an expose of phony rental agencies.

1976 was the American Bicentennial year, with big celebrations scheduled in Washington. Newsworks did a special section for the first week of July, which I edited. For one article I came up with the idea of finding people in Washington with the same names as the 1776 founders, and telling their stories. That some of them were likely to be black gave the idea real promise. It seemed to me such a natural newspaper idea that I was worried all week that the two dailies, the Post or the Washington Star, would come out with their version first. They didn’t.

Instead Newsworks had Jean Callahan’s incisive set of interviews with Ben Franklin (a Marriott executive), Betsy Ross (retired government worker), Abigail Adams (bartender at a fashionable bar), and two George Washingtons (a counselor for DC public schools and a retired third generation Washingtonian, both black.)

It was probably this experience, of working together on something that excited us, that provided at least some of the impetus for the staff to want me as Editor, and for me to want to do it. Diane, the publisher, was impressed that I was a “grassroots” choice. A meeting of everyone was called but the outcome had been pre-arranged. I have my regrets about how this was handled, but I was voted in as Editor in July, moving up from Arts and Culture Editor on the new streamlined masthead. James went on to a reporting job in Paris.

I had decided that my first official act would be to eliminate the folding screen that separated the Editor’s desk from the rest of editorial, but by the time I got back to the editorial office, the rest of the staff was taking it down on their own.

I suppose I made my mark immediately in two ways. First, I discovered that most freelancers weren’t being paid, though they often had not been told they wouldn’t be. Some were never told, just strung along. I stopped that immediately. I’d been a freelancer and half the work of it is getting the money you were promised in a timely way. So I did my best to make sure that were promised payment got it, and—to blank dismay in the publisher’s office—I insisted on telling prospective writers that we weren’t able to pay.

In fact we still got new writers—eager for clips perhaps, or wanting to appear in Newsworks specifically. I did this partly as a practical matter: I didn’t see how to establish relationships with writers by lying to them.

The second matter was reviving a story that had been quietly killed by the publisher’s office because it might offend a crucial advertiser. We got the writer back in, meticulously fact-checked the article, and printed it. It turned out the advertiser didn’t care. He figured that’s what newspapers did.

My first issue as Editor was in mid-July, coincidentally with my previously scheduled story on the Star Trek phenomenon (“Star Trek Explained”) on the cover. The occasion was Washington’s first Star Trek convention. The conventions were relatively new but already widespread, and for a good many years they themselves were a cultural phenomenon (as suggested in the 2004 Spielberg/ Tom Hanks comedy The Terminal, in which a minor character successfully woos a young woman through her participation in Star Trek conventions. The young woman is played by Zoe Saldana, who went on to play Lt. Uhura in the 2009 Star Trek feature film.)

At the convention I met Star Trek’s chief founder Gene Roddenberry and his wife Majel, observed actor James Doohan (Scotty) interact with fans, and interviewed some vendors of Trek related merchandise who traveled in teams from one convention to another every few days.

In my research I used The Making of Star Trek by Roddenberry and Stephen Whitfield, and Leonard Nimoy’s first book, I Am Not Spock. Star Trek was about to become a publishing phenomenon as well, when The Star Trek Fleet Manual led the quality paperback best seller lists in 1976.

This issue also contained a story by Tom Redburn (now designated our City Reporter on our new masthead) about schemes for a new DC convention center, particularly the proposal by a certain New York real estate developer who would name a tower after himself, as yet unknown in Washington. I loved this story for its understated skepticism, and the suggestion that this developer was just making stuff up and the assembled reporters were simply writing it down. If Redburn and Washington Newsworks had been heeded in 1976, this country could have spared itself a tragic future. (But even at the time, the Village Voice took note of Redburn’s story, and his follow-up.)

The Redburn story on convention center proposals was one of many examples of our alternative take on the news. Some were on topics too obscure by now to explain, but in particular I remain proudest of three cover stories of lasting significance in my tenure as Editor.

The first was a story that came to us. We learned that the Congressional Black Caucus together with other members of the House would soon be considering a congressional investigation into the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and that his wife, Mrs. Coretta Scott King, was secretly coming to Washington to offer her support.

We were offered exclusive publication of attorney Mark Lane’s case for this official inquiry, which alleged a conspiracy, with two conditions: Lane would receive copyright for his text, and Mrs. King’s presence in DC would not be disclosed.

These days the term “conspiracy theory” is rightly associated with far right craziness. But in the 1960s and 1970s, many serious people all along the political spectrum were troubled by the repeated lone gunman orthodoxy in the notable assassinations of the 60s, and various sorts of conspiracies were seriously suggested.

Moreover, there was growing hard evidence of other conspiracies, especially involving J.Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the CIA. For years in the antiwar movement we were warned of government spies around us, and agent provocateurs who advocated violence to discredit the movement. By 1976 there was undisputed documentary evidence that the FBI had run a number of such operations.

The common sense objection was that conspiracies were impossible because somebody would talk about them. In fact people did talk about them, but there were so many charges and counter-charges that muddied and muddled the narratives that the truth was often unclear.

My role was to edit the Mark Lane manuscript, mostly by creating a continuous thread and breaking it into “steps” with subheads. What emerged from his account reflected the now well-known hostility of the FBI towards Dr. King and the Civil Rights movement, and local police hostility in Memphis that could have allowed the actual assassin to escape.

I prepared the August 26 issue with this story on the cover, but at the very last minute before we went to press, the people who gave us the manuscript got cold feet and wanted to withdraw it. I let it be known to them that if they did so, we would not be bound by our agreement to keep Mrs. King’s presence secret, and that would be our story. They relented.

In addition to printing the story, I went to Capitol Hill with one or two staff members, and we personally distributed copies to every Congressional office. When we were finished I found myself in the Capitol Dome, across the rotunda from what looked like a document in a display case. Curious, I walked over to see it. It was the Magna Carta, the English charter of freedoms signed in 1215, the precursor to the Bill of Rights and all such documents. It was one of the four surviving originals, lent to the US for just this Bicentennial year. But there was no crowd around it that day. Just me. (A replica replaced it, and is still displayed there.)

The meeting did result in a congressional inquiry a few years later, which in 1979 concluded that a conspiracy was likely. Though accounts of this assassination, like all the others, remain disputed and controversial, the King family has since openly and consistently believed that the man convicted was not the actual assassin.

The second story also involved an assassination, but one that happened in Washington days before Newsworks ran a cover story about it. Orlando Letelier, exiled member of the elected Allende government of Chile that ended in the military coup and dictatorship of the notorious Pinochet, was killed by a car bomb in the heart of Washington. Also killed was American Ronni Karpen Moffitt, while her husband Michael (also a passenger in the car) escaped serious injury.

The Nixon presidency was hostile to Allende when he was elected in 1970, and was privy to plans within the Chilean military to overthrow him in 1973, with CIA support. In 1976 Letelier was in the United States lobbying with some success against loans by US institutions and those of other countries being offered to Chile’s military junta, already proving itself to be murderous and oppressive.

Newswork’s coverage was organized entirely by Jeff Stein, our designated Political Reporter. He wrote the main story, mostly about the ongoing investigation into the assassination, plus a background piece on the Chilean dictatorship’s reign of terror. It was widely believed that the bomb was planted by agents of the Chilean secret police, but the FBI’s lackluster investigation seemed to focus more on Washington’s “left-leaning” Institute for Policy Studies, of which Ronni and Michael Moffitt were members. (Eventually even the CIA concluded that the Pinochet government was responsible, though the extent of the CIA’s own foreknowledge or involvement is still debated.)

The section also included a remembrance of Letelier by Michael Moffitt, a tribute to Ronni Karpen Moffitt by an Institute staff member, excerpts of a Letelier interview, and Jeff’s short account of the Institute on the days after. Jeff also wrote about the memorial service in Washington, where Senator George McGovern spoke and Joan Baez sang.

Apart from some text editing and organizing, my contribution was to look at all the material Jeff spread on my desk, and after some weary hesitation, to cancel the planned cover and run with this, which required a few editorial staff but mostly a production staff stretched thin already to work overtime to get it ready. It was one of my better decisions. To my recollection, no other paper in town came close to our coverage.

For the third cover I had a bigger role. A story came to us by a writer unknown to us named Nowlan MacDonnell Ulsch, about Johnny Perrin, a Stanford Law student and war resister who was the defendant in a celebrated case questioning the Vietnam era draft in 1970. Just after his appeal was heard but before the decision was reached, Perrin disappeared from the face of the Earth.

Ulsch’s story described this All-American Boy who resisted the draft, and narrated the mysterious circumstances around his disappearance, with suggestions that the FBI and/or CIA might be involved. It was an absorbing and well constructed story, and I spoke with the writer at length to gauge its credibility. That it was a kind of Missing In Action story—Vietnam MIA’s were beginning to be an issue—but in the war against the war, made it different, if not unique. It was also timely—for Democratic party presidential candidate Jimmy Carter was talking about issuing unconditional amnesty to resisters in Canada and elsewhere.

At our next staff meeting I solicited ideas for other stories that could comprise a special section, something that was becoming part of the Newsworks identity, for which this would be the centerpiece.

So that was our September 23 cover: the Johnny Perrin story, Jeff Stein’s interviews with Vietnam reporters now at work on books, and interviews with six young veterans of the war and of the war against the war, produced by John Aquilino, Ken Shapero and our Capitol Reporter, Pamela Larratt.

In addition to editing these pieces, I contributed an introductory essay called “Amnesty and Amnesia.” This essay and the section as a whole clearly struck a nerve. We got some buzz and some very complimentary mail. I was asked to appear on a Washington early evening television talk show to talk about it; as far as I know, it was Newsworks first media recognition for stories we printed.

I kept one self-described “fan letter” that said my introduction “is one of the best pieces of its kind I’ve ever read.” It was signed simply Terry Alford, on Northern Virginia Community College stationery. It arrived during the frenzy of that fall and I never acknowledged it. Now I find that its author has become Professor of History Emeritus of that same college, as well as a distinguished scholar of the US Civil War era, with books that include the definitive biography of John Wilkes Booth. Alford was also a consultant to Steven Spielberg for his film, Lincoln.

My essay (reproduced at Kowincidence here) asserted that just a few years after it ended, the Vietnam war had all but completely disappeared from public discussion, including all the issues it raised. Reading it now, two things strike me: it reminds me of today’s cultural amnesia concerning the Covid pandemic, in which more than a million Americans died. And the essay now reads as a clear forecast of the sea change in American politics begun a few years afterward, with the Reagan revolution. Disappearing the moral and political questions the war and the war against the war brought to public consciousness paved the way for the illusory nostalgia-driven reactionary 1980s.

As for the Johnny Perrin story, all these years later he is still officially a missing person. Perhaps ironically however, N. MacDonnell Ulsch, apparently the same person who as a young writer suggested federal involvement in Perrin’s disapperance, has since become a prominent analyst of cyber strategies who advised, among other entities, the CIA.

Writer Arnie Reisman and director David Helpern of "Hollywood on Trial." We used
this photo taken for us by Elizabeth Offner.

As it happened, the two Hollywood Blacklist films I’d followed as they were being made—the documentary Hollywood On Trial and the feature The Front—were both being released that fall of 1976, so I had the opportunity to finally use what I’d researched and written almost two years earlier. The result was my last solo cover, “The Return of the Blacklist” for the September 9 issue.

We got some positive comment and mail on this story, including from a witness to the Blacklist’s destruction. (A greatly expanded version of this story is posted on my Kowincidence blog, here and here.) Besides being personally satisfying, this story added something that was generally missing from alternative journalism to that point—a sense of history, and its connection to the present.

For those summer and autumn months I was working like crazy. The Newsworks organization was visibly depleted by fall. Several of the chief writers at the beginning, like Amanda Spake, Frank Browning, Craig Unger and Chris Pala, had moved on. A few freelancers held on, like Art Levine, Bill Holland and Peter Koper, who was probably brought on board by Jean Callahan, as they had a shared history involving Baltimore’s Fells Point and director John Waters.

It was worse on the first floor, where the few survivors in circulation and ad sales (only Gigi Fava and Michele Paradise were left; Valerie McGhee now filled in as copy editor) seemed to be working with desk lamps surrounded by deep darkness.

Those who remained multi-tasked. Mark Jenkins (Distribution Manager), Fran Moshos (Listings Editor) and Nancy Williams (Proofreader) all contributed articles and reviews. Hilary Berns was Subscription and Classified Manager, and also our receptionist at the front door.

Jean Callahan produced a long and lively story for almost every issue, if not two. Meanwhile, Managing Editor John Aquilino and I wrote like mad, including under pretty obvious pseudonyms. All the copy went through me, and mine were the last eyes to proofread before press. I worked closely with the art and production people on the third floor (Art Director Tom Trapnell, Leslie Perkins, V.J. Fahey and Craig Millet), even more than I had at the Phoenix. They were more a part of the editorial process from the beginning, so they were more personally invested in what we were doing.

I streamlined our format, grouping short local stories under the title of “Here” and added a new feature called “Persons.” People Magazine had just become a wildly popular publishing phenomenon that eventually changed print and media journalism profoundly. Our publisher wanted to know how we could adapt. I came up with “Persons,” that instead of glorifying celebrities, did stories on unpublicized local individuals with something remarkable (or maybe eccentric) about them.

Editing news stories was interesting, and I developed a rule of thumb: the lead (now vulgarly called “the lede”) was usually in the third paragraph.

And I was still Arts Editor as well. There was some stability week to week: Art Levine and Mark Jenkins wrote about music, and Mark did our regrettably few pieces on visual arts. I could count on solid copy from film critic Joel E. Siegel, dance critic Marcia Mintz MeGehee and theatre reviewer Bob Mondello. But I felt we needed an additional writer to thoughtfully cover the less well-known theatres and productions. I more or less mentored a student who also worked in the Kennedy Center checkroom, named David Paglin. And I found the combination of writer and critical intelligence I was looking for in an MFA student at Catholic University, Janice Paran. But by then it was pretty late in our game.

It also fell to me to pick up the slack (and cover for vacationing regulars), with theatre and film pieces, and even restaurant reviews. In fact two of my favorite pieces I did were fill-ins for the vacationing Siegel: one on movies about the newspaper biz (All The President’s Men came out that summer) and one on the film programmer’s art of what films to pair for a double feature. (One of my examples was the pairing of two Truffaut films at the Biograph. A few years later, after I interviewed Truffaut for Rolling Stone, I sent him this piece. He wrote back saying my analysis was “very accurate.”)

Back when I was just the Arts Editor, I started doing what I did at the Phoenix: feature more book reviews and to that end, establish relationships with publishers.

In particular I discovered Dover Books. I hadn’t paid much attention to the Dover imprint, but I must have received an announcement of new release plus their catalog. Dover performs an immense service by reprinting in sturdy but relatively inexpensive editions many classic works now in the public domain. These may include new material—prefaces, commentaries, or in the case of H.D. Thoreau: A Writer’s Journal, a new selection edited by Laurence Stapleton. I cherished the copy I’d had since it was assigned for Douglas Wilson’s Thoreau class at Knox College.

I got Dover to send me several new and older books by and about Lewis Carroll as well as Thoreau’s essays, but they drew the line at their multi-volume complete Thoreau journals.

Otherwise (to sneakily return to the alleged theme of this series) I read and reviewed Robert Creeley’s latest book of poems and Carlos Castaneda’s Tales of Power, the volume in his Don Juan series that impressed me so much that eventually I went back and read the earlier ones I hadn’t taken seriously. I still saw it as, if not actual fiction, a literary work, but within a different tradition.

After I’d added Editor to these responsibilities, I managed one feature piece centered on another spasm of books about Scott Fitzgerald, including a new collection of some of his magazine stories together with several by Zelda Fitzgerald. Thanks to my college studies of Fitzgerald, I had the background for this overview.

But there were more books than editorial space, let alone time, so in the guise of a feature on Summer Reading, I highlighted a new enthusiasm, William Irwin Thompson, and his book Evil and the World Order, referencing his somewhat earlier The Edge of History, while at least mentioning a dozen or so new books by John Ashbery, Marge Piercy, Ralph Keyes, Lillian Hellman and Henry Frenay on the French during the Nazi occupation, as well as two new novels: Doctor Rat, a short novel by William Kotzwinkle published by Knopf in what they were internally called the “Borzoi Puppies,” and Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star. This is perhaps DeLillo’s most forgotten early novel, but it remains a favorite of mine—and, I was pleased to learn from an interview—of the author’s.

When my futures piece was on the cover, I selected as a kind of companion piece a review of two science fiction books (The Cyberiad by the great Russian writer Stanislaw Lem, and The Space Vampires by the well-known British writer Colin Wilson) by a young writer named Garrett Epps. Contemporary Washingtonians now know him as an eminent legal scholar and professor of both constitutional law and creative writing, as well as the legal affairs editor of the Washington Monthly and a prominent commentator for the Atlantic on, for example, the Supreme Court.

Another source of books comes from friends. I must have glanced at the spine of Creation Myths by Marie-Louise Von Franz a hundreds times on the bookshelf at Shain’s apartment, seemingly a forgotten gift. I was intrigued, but it would be years yet before I got a copy, years more before I seriously read it, and along with other books by and about her mentor C.G. Jung, it opened an entire new area of reading for me.

In those months in that office I mostly lived on coffee (years later, Gigi Fava told me she still associated me with the smell of coffee), but my long days were sometimes broken by a sandwich or snack carried in my new Spider-Man lunchbox, contributed by Pamela Larratt (and her son who’d presumably outgrown it. I still have it.) There were few places to eat in Adams-Morgan then, and only a neighborhood bodega for snacks. The closest restaurant would have been Avignone Freres, a prestigious restaurant on Columbia Road since 1928, but it shut down after the 1968 riots. It had recently re-opened its bakery, however, its pastries being among its claims to fame. But those were occasional special treats. (The restaurant did open again months later, but closed for good in 1986.)

But when I needed to escape, eat something substantial and bathe in the air conditioning, I walked to the block above to Columbia Station. In particular my Sunday treat was bacon, eggs and toast, which came with a slice of cantaloupe.

I could visit Columbia Station at the end of my day as well. It was also the scene of the release party for one or both of the first two albums by our contributing writer Bill Holland, and his band, Rent’s Due. I still have “Run or Fight” playing in my head, the tune leading off his second album, and the title tune of his first album likewise remains a favorite: “If It Ain’t One Thing, It’s Another.”

I missed a lot of what Washington had to offer (including plays and music events our reviewers wrote about but I couldn’t see because I had to work) but I did manage to see James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt down at the Merriweather Post Pavilion outside Columbia, Md., and two events early in my residence at the huge Capitol Centre in Landover, with a capacity of 16 thousand or more. One was Paul McCartney and Wings. Our press seats were high up and distant, but a kind stranger near us passed his binoculars around, and when I focused on McCartney singing at the piano (maybe it was even “Maybe I’m Amazed”), I had the weird sensation that he was looking right at me.

Just a night or two earlier, I witnessed a benefit performance at Capital Centre featuring Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles, on behalf of the Jerry Brown presidential campaign, shortly before the Maryland primary. Afterwards, Michael Shain and I joined other press invitees in a huge room with nothing in it but a long table laden with cold cuts. We were somehow lined up in front of this table waiting expectantly for the stars as I saw Jerry Brown striding across the empty distance, with an aide or two. He shocked me by purposefully walking on a direct line to me, and spoke to me those profound and unforgettable words: “Where’s the food?” (Linda—who we were clearly hoping for—and the other stars never showed.)

At the other end of my stay, I saw the early punk messiahs, the Ramones, at the behest of our young writer, Mark Jenkins, who seemed fascinated that I was among the first generation of rock critics, a distinction I hadn’t realized until then. It was one of three shows at the Childe Harold club and I sat alone at a table very near the stage. Each member of the band struck a pose and varied it little as they blasted one short robotic tune after another. And yet they were mesmerizing. I didn’t exactly feel over the hill (though a few months earlier, at a desultory midnight publicity party for a new album by David Crosby and Graham Nash, I’d officially turned 30) but I knew something had changed that wasn’t going to include me.

Dupont Circle was an uphill walk from Shain’s place and not very far from Newsworks, so I tended to hang out there when I found the time, especially in the bookstores. (At one, I found myself perusing one sale table while Carl Bernstein was at another.) I particularly liked a new bookstore called Kramerbooks, which soon added Afterwords, a few tables crowded up against the bookshelves, but with an espresso bar and cafe food. It was an innovation then, and for me reminiscent of the bookstore and cafe I dreampt up with friends one afternoon in the Gizmo at Knox College. It was the only sort of job any of us wanted.

I recall one day in Kramerbooks, with several Newsworks colleagues. I bought a book to distract me from the journalistic level of thought—a paperback copy of The Order of Things by French philosopher Michel Foucault, which I doubt I ever finished. We then had lunch together, served by Robert Hinton, who had been a major part of Newsworks early days, but had apparently found the cafe business to be more remunerative.

At that time author Larry McMurtry owned and operated a book shop in Washington, which I never got around to visiting. But I did hear him give a talk—his voice was not at all what I was expecting, not the voice I heard in his prose. I met him afterwards, inviting him to write something for Newsworks, which he didn’t get around to doing.

Editing and writing for Newsworks was months of dizzying hard work, some desperate hard play, and along with a peculiar kind of loneliness, the kind of companionship and closeness I’ve rarely experienced.

Early in my tenure as Editor, a call for me came through the main number. I answered without knowing who it was. I heard a stern voice say with heavy contempt, “So you think it would be fun to run a newspaper.”

I knew who it was halfway through, and I knew who he was quoting. It was David Helpern (my friend and the director of Hollywood On Trial) calling from Cambridge, and he was quoting a famous line we both knew well from Citizen Kane, pronounced by Kane’s disapproving money manager and former caretaker to the young Orson Welles as Kane. We shared a long and very satisfying laugh.

For despite the wilting Washington heat, the frenzy and frustration, the wolf scratching and growling at the door and the constant side debates about the paper’s future, it was fun. It happened way more than once that we would be separately working at our desks, attacking the typewriters, mumbling on the phone or staring morosely at notes or copy or thin air, and suddenly one of us—John Aquilino, Jeff Stein or I, for example—would pick up a telephone receiver and shout into it: “Stop the presses!” “Get me rewrite!”

It was perhaps a feeling of irony or absurdity, as if we were in some crazy movie about being a newspaper, but often it was exuberant recognition that for as long as this lasted, we were a newspaper. It was hilarious, desperate and precious, and something we shared.

We worked in the office together, went off to stories together—I recall especially a long car drive and conversation with photographer Michael McCarthy. By the fall we were a tight little group that worked and socialized together. If we were at the same party somewhere, eventually that core group would gradually drift together, as if drawn by gravity to the same corner of the same room.

By fall it did seem that Newsworks was getting favorably noticed and our journalism was getting attention. The September Washingtonian magazine featured Newsworks in its “Good Reading” slot, noting it was “beginning to find its place.”

We got a number of letters suggesting we were popular with young newcomers to Washington, and an accepted and valued resource. A key to that was the colorfully designed selection of upcoming events of interest to a young readership called Eight Days A Week and appearing on our back page every week. Like other collections of short items throughout the paper, these were contributions from across the staff and from freelancers. Also inside were more comprehensive listings, organized by the indispensable hand of Fran Moshos.

I can’t say we were establishing an identity, if that means some apparent and easily summarized category. But we were creating a character, a reflection of the small group of people pouring themselves into Newsworks every day.

We felt we were on the road to success (by which I mean survival), as measured by reader enthusiasm, general buzz and the eagerness of good younger writers to appear in our pages. In addition to his other duties, John Aquilino began and ran an intern program, and his work with these writers resulted in several stories we used. He in particular felt that one more substantial investment could lead to Newsworks becoming a going concern for years to come.

But the paper seemed to be existing financially only on a series of last-minute, very small pots of investment cash. As early as August we weren’t sure we would continue to publish two weeks ahead. I found myself once again resisting attempts by one or two people I haven’t named here to allow advertising to dictate editorial content, but otherwise I was doing what I could to aid our survival, even beyond my editorial responsibilities. I spoke (though awkwardly) to a few potential investors, compiled a list of complimentary quotes and significant stories for publicity, and designed a new house ad that “re-branded” us (an expression exactly nobody used in 1976) as the “Washington Outsider.”

I also persuaded management to offer back issues for sale, partly as a kind of poll to see what stories attracted readers. To the surprise of the publisher’s office, we got a good response. I personally tallied the results. All I now remember is that the “Young, Single and Lonely in Washington” cover remained the most popular. We did do a follow-up, a special section on “Couples.”

But time was clearly running out. From the publisher’s office came a proposal outlining a greatly scaled- down Newsworks. It involved firing almost everyone who had remained when others moved on. My response was that whatever merits this plan might have, I personally was not interested in being part of it. My loyalty was more to the beleaguered group that remained, and I was not so intoxicated with Washington that I would stay under all circumstances. My own living situation was clearly unsustainable—still sleeping on a futon couch in a small roach-infested apartment (and by then, Shain was himself getting restless with this place.) I wasn’t being paid enough to afford more, and the paper’s precarious state didn’t make even a year’s housing commitment possible anyway.

There was support in the Newsworks building for that proposal, and though I didn’t oppose it, I took some heat for what was primarily a personal decision. But for whatever reasons, that idea faded away.

My relationship with publisher Diane Archer was amiable and professional, though with growing tension as time went on—and time ran out. She was smart, savvy and generous. We just had different points of view, leading to different actions.

So the critical moment came with another proposal from the publisher’s office, to reduce staff salaries. (“Salaries” was a bit of a misnomer, as I found that for at least part of my tenure I was being paid as a freelancer, without Social Security.) Everyone who remained was sacrificing, probably missing out on other opportunities, and though I didn’t know the full financial circumstances of really anyone else, I was certain that I for one did not have inherited wealth to fall back on. So I countered with a proposal to raise staff salaries, just slightly, mostly to make the point. And perhaps to force the issue, for I felt a number of staff members had their lives and careers on hold, out of loyalty and—well, the fun of being a newspaper. At the next meeting it was approved.

We soldiered on awhile longer without a last minute rescue; then the wolf finally came. At a meeting, contentious at times (only my trust in Gwen kept me from really losing my temper), it was decided to “suspend publication.”

After the decision but before we completed the last issue, I used the last comp ticket I would ever get through Newsworks to attend a performance at the Kennedy Center of No Man’s Land, the play by Harold Pinter in its original production, starring John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson.

I was seated too far back, and too distracted by Newswork’s imminent end to see much of these two great actors I admired, though I did hear a line I used as the out- of -context quote above our goodbye announcement: “Once a man has breasted the tape, he must breast the tape forever.” (It refers to winning footraces.) At intermission I met two Washington Post reporters who expressed admiration for Newsworks, especially the arts coverage.

The night we put the last issue to bed (which ironically contained a double page record company ad, precisely what kept the Boston weeklies in business), much of the staff gathered in the third floor production office for a bittersweet farewell. I tried to lighten the occasion by treating it as a graduation, complete with Class Prophesies and a Class Will I assembled. It would be the last time we were all together.

Between then and the final day I spent most of my office time writing letters of recommendation for everyone in editorial, and a few others. Personal notes of appreciation went back and forth throughout the building.

The day the issue came out was my last in the office. I arrived to the chaos of men carrying out desks and furniture. All that was left in editorial were phones on the floor. I was on one of them, doing a media interview on the life and death of Newsworks, when the line went dead. All the phones had been disconnected. As soon as I put the receiver down, someone scooped up the phone and took it away.

Later I was back on that evening talk show, in which I mostly sat with the camera on me while I listened to my old publisher at the Boston Phoenix, Steven Mindich, on the phone holding forth on the perils of the alternative press. (In recent weeks we’d been sending issues to the Harvard Square out-of-town newstand, where they invariably sold out.)

While I was sitting alone for a moment backstage after the bright bath of light around me during this TV show, the finality and the exhaustion finally hit me, especially when I realized the Newsworks story was out of my hands. It would now be what others said it was.

The Washington Post did a feature story, positioning Newsworks as the last in a long line of underground newspaper failures. When asked if I thought this was the last, I was quoted as saying no, it was the first of the second generation, the alternative weekly. A very few years later, the Baltimore City Paper and then the Washington City Paper proved this to be true.

Another post-mortem, the academic paper I mentioned before, also concentrated on the paper’s failure. Although the people associated with Newsworks quoted in it all had positive things to say about me and my tenure, the author asserted that as Editor I had been so desperate for readers that six of the last 12 issues had covers featuring sex or violence.

To get to that number of six, “violence” would have to include some or all of the following: the Martin Luther King assassination inquiry, the Letelier and Moffitt car bombing assassinations on the streets of Washington (kind of a big news story, especially since it’s the only time that it happened, television dramas notwithstanding), our cover on the gun control debate, and/or on the Vietnam war. “Sex” might mean “Selling With Sex” cover story by Jean Callahan, the theme of which is in the first paragraph: though everyone believes it, sex doesn’t actually sell much of anything. Then perhaps the Couples cover, the cover on the abortion debate, and maybe even the cover on women DJs in Washington radio, talking about sexism in the media.

At the time, the only solace I felt was supplied by Max Robinson, the first black anchor on a Washington TV station, who in a couple of years would become the first black network anchor at ABC. After he reported one evening that Newsworks had printed its last issue, he commented: “Too bad. I thought this town was big enough.”

The only other recognition I recall was either a phone call or a note from Jim Bellows, the excellent editor of the Washington Star daily. I asked for his promise to consider any of our staff members who applied.

I heard later that Diane had consoled herself with a trip on the Amazon. I took the train back to Greensburg.

I made a few trips back to Washington over the next year or two, seeing some combination of John, Gwen, Jean, Marsha and Mark in particular. Once I met with the editor of the glossy Washingtonian magazine, who commissioned an article comparing Washington and Boston. Among those I interviewed were Frank Rich (who grew up in Washington and went to Harvard) and Tim Crouse (who lived in Cambridge but political reporting took him to DC.) But my story was apparently too negative about Washington and never ran.

I did have a final adventure on one of those trips. After various social outings with Newsworks friends, I found myself on my own the night before I was scheduled to leave Washington. So I went to see yet another Truffaut double feature at the Biograph in Georgetown. I was in the lobby between movies when I spotted a familiar face. When I was at Newsworks she was a young actor at the Washington Theatre Lab. I saw her at an afternoon rehearsal when I’d gone along with John Aquilino, who was writing a short feature on the Lab, and Michael McCarthy who was taking photos. In the ensuing story we managed to misspell her name but I did squeeze in a line about her as “strikingly beautiful” with “a compelling presence.”

In the lobby dimness, she seemed to half-recognize me as well, so I went over and re-introduced myself. She was also there on her own, so we sat together for the second feature, Mississippi Mermaid. She thought it was too romantic. Afterwards we had a long conversation with some food and a glass of wine or two at a nearby restaurant. Perhaps the candle light I remember just reflects the giddy magic of those moments, the kind intensity of her eyes, her luminous smile.

I walked her to her apartment, which was so far away that she rode on my back for a bit, and then I rode on hers. We laughed a lot. In her living room we traded songs on her guitar. She played and sang “You’ve Got A Friend.” The evening ended not quite the way I would have liked, but I was certainly enthralled. Still, I made my train the next day.

We exchanged letters that winter—she thought she might join friends sailing around the world. My second letter went unanswered, and the next time I saw her she was 10 feet tall on the silver screen in National Lampoon’s Animal House, co-starring as the only sane person in the film. That was just the beginning of a long career. Her name was, and still is, Karen Allen.

It’s been nearly 50 years now since Newsworks published. The Biograph, Columbia Station, the Capitol Centre, the Childe Harold, the Cellar Door, the Washington Star daily and the print edition of Washington City Paper--all gone now, along with Washington Newsworks.

I’ve long since lost touch with my colleagues there. My most recent contact was with Tom Redburn, who went from Washington to the Los Angeles Times (he and his wife hosted me for one of my working trips to LA in the late 70s) and then to the New York Times as a writer and editor for many years. He put me in touch with the right editor there for my last piece for the Times in 2004, appropriately enough an arts section cover story on Star Trek. Retired from the Times, Tom now writes a Substack newsletter.

Tom Redburn and wife in a recent profile photo

I don’t participate in any social media so my sources of Internet data are limited, but I managed to glean some information about our alums, however dated. And like Tom, they also have done quite well.

Our Jeff Stein was briefly editor of Newswork’s successor, the Washington City Paper before he started his own weekly, which lasted a little longer than Newsworks did. He appears to have turned his full attention to national security for Salon online, and began his SpyTalk column for the Congressional Quarterly, before taking it in various forms to the Washington Post, Newsweek and currently onSubstack. He also freelanced for the New York Times and many other prominent publications and online outlets, and is the author of three books.

Jeff Stein in 2019 photo

In the years just after Newsworks I was still in touch with Jean Callahan when she was an editor at American Film and in Boston, at New Age magazine. Her author’s page at Simon and Schuster for her book, Your Older Dog, says she returned to being a freelance writer and made a home in Massachusetts.

I failed to find anything that suggested the correct Gwen Capabianco, and a hard time with John Aquilino. I know he’s not the young actor nor the Navy admiral that pop up first on Internet searches. I remember maybe a decade ago he used to have a web site filled with interesting writing. But I did find that our John Aquilino likely remained in the DC area where he’s been a writer, editor and consultant. He is on LinkedIn.

Mark Jenkins was probably the last Newsworks person I saw in Washington or maybe Baltimore, when I passed through in the early 1980s. He’s since has had a long career writing about film (including for NPR.org) and music (Rolling Stone, Washington Post, etc. and co-authored a book on—fittingly enough—punk rock.) He’s also written on architecture and for 13 years authored the weekly Washington Post column on art, “In the Galleries.” Some examples of his work are online here and here.

Pamela Larratt back in the day. Maybe a Michael McCarthy photo, maybe not.

The last I heard directly from Pamela Larratt was a postcard from Montana (I think) in the 1980s. Her online profile describes her as “Reporter, Mom, Nana, Teacher, Singer, Activist” living in Spokane, Washington. There are a few videos on YouTube of her on piano and singing her own songs. Good to hear her voice again.

Of our regular freelancers, film reviewer Joel E. Siegel was not the Joel Siegel who would review movies for Good Morning America, though a film writer for the Washington Post called our Siegel “the best film critic who ever worked in this town.” From Newsworks he reviewed regularly for Washington City Paper and taught at Georgetown. He was also a jazz aficionado who won a Grammy for liner notes.

On the other hand, one of our theatre reviewers was that BobMondello—who after a stint at—where else—Washington City Paper, went on to national fame reviewing movies and theatre for NPR’s All Things Considered.

Janice Paran

Janice Paran, my “discovery” as a theatre writer, was soon writing for American Theatre magazine. She has multiple MFAs, including one from Yale Drama, and was a long time director of new play development at the McCarter Theatre Center in New Jersey, where she worked with such notables as Christopher Durang and Beth Henley. She is a playwright and dramaturg, taught at Princeton, and recently was an artistic associate for the Sundance Institute Theatre Program.

There are several David Paglins associated with the performing arts in the DC area but I’m not sure which (if any) is the one I edited in the autumn of our Newsworks.

After Newsworks, Amanda Spake became an editor at Mother Jones. She’s since edited at and/or written for the Washington Post Magazine and U.S. News and World Report, among other publications.

I last saw Frank Browning in the late 70s or early 80s in southern California, where he gave me a copy of his book, Vanishing Land: The Corporate Theft of America. He’s since written or co-written at least eight more books, many dealing with gender issues. He was a science correspondent for National Public Radio.

Craig Unger went on to become deputy editor of the New York Observer and editor of Boston Magazine, with articles published in the New Yorker, Esquire and Vanity Fair. His 2004 book, House of Bush, House of Saud was featured in the Michael Moore film Fahrenheit 9-11 and praised by none other than Kurt Vonnegut. He detailed links between Trump and Russia in his 2018 book House of Trump, House of Putin.

After Washington, Michael Shain went back to New York, where I saw him often throughout the 1980s. He had a long if off-and-on career with the New York Post, eventually becoming a well-known columnist. Most recently his work has appeared in the Queens Chronicle in Queens, New York, where he lives.

Ezra Doner, as he was

Ezra Doner has his own law firm specializing in entertainment and copyright law. I was pleased to see his name in the credits of The Practice of the Wild, a film on poet Gary Snyder I watch repeatedly.

As a writer, Peter Koper went from appearing in Newsworks to the Baltimore City Paper, probably when Mark Jenkins was there, and wrote for American Film, possibly when Jean Callahan was there. He continued a varied career as writer, film director and occasional actor, often involving his long-time friend, director John Waters. Koper died in 2022.

Valerie McGhee became the co-founder of the Washington Journalism Review. She maintained an active interest in the arts and the environment. But at only age 46, she succumbed to a brain tumor in 2000.

Gigi Fava, around her Time Magazine time, I believe

I last saw Gigi Fava in the 1980s after she’d moved to New York. She eventually became an award-winning art director for Time Magazine and the New York Times. She’s now the creative director of her own firm.

Robert Altemus, who designed the overall look of Newsworks, has since won over 150 national awards designing for prestigious magazines and TV networks, but also with a penchant for fantasy and science fiction projects.

Art director Tom Trapnell created designs for the Los Angeles Times and other publications and organizations. The testimonials on his website mirrored the “Trapper” I knew as art director for Newsworks: highly talented, decent, calm and collaborative.

There are a lot of Michael McCarthys, but I’m pretty sure ours went back to Boston where he got a medical degree at BU, became the North America editor of The Lancet (UK) from 1997 to 2007, and is described on LinkedIn as a medical editor and writer in Seattle, and video producer for Northwest Science Media Workshop.

Bill Holland and Rent’s Due kept playing through the 1970s while Bill kept freelancing as a writer, with a side gig as a book scout. In the 80s he was the Washington bureau chief for Billboard Magazine, and starting gigging as a musician again in the 1990s and beyond, with a “Best of” album issued in 1996. You can hear some of his tunes (including “Run or Fight”) on Apple Tunes and Spotify.

Bill Holland in 2014

I’ve noticed that none of the bios I found online mention their time at Washington Newsworks. And why would they? No one else would know what they were talking about. Newsworks was a kind of brief dream we all had together, a long time ago.

History of My Reading: Florida Fantasies

2025-06-07T02:06:00.000-07:00

West Palm Beach--1970s postcard

When I abandoned my Cambridge apartment in late 1975 and arrived in my hometown of Greensburg, PA, I immediately regretted it. I felt I’d made a terrible mistake.

I quickly made a panicked call to Linda, the young woman I’d been seeing who lived on the floor above in my Cambridge building (discounting for her possible regret over youthful folly, I’ve disguised her name.) She assured me I could return, and that settled me for awhile.

But it turned out I wasn’t back for long, at least at that point. First came a car trip with Linda from the desultory north in February, down the gradually warming East Coast to Florida, where I’d never been. We stopped first in West Palm Beach to stay with her relatives, an older couple who had a ranch house in a slightly scrubby wooded area off Forest Hill Blvd.

Her direct relative was Jane, who had lived in Los Angeles in the thirties and forties, working in Hollywood and later, during the latter part of World War II, at one of the many aircraft plants that transformed southern California. Hers made bombers.

I’ve forgotten what she did in Hollywood—maybe the costume department-- but she worked on the 1935 classic “The Informer,” and knew John Garfield, Al Jolson and other stars. Carole Lombard was as “wild off-screen as on.” She recalled that the vibe between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall was so intense when they met while making To Have and Have Not that people all over the studio lot found a reason to visit the set and watch them together.

Eventually Jane met a young sailor there in Los Angeles and married him. When I met him, Jim was a movie model of an old salt: deep, very tanned wrinkles, thin to the point of seeming frail. He had the slightly haunted demeanor of someone who’d struggled with drink. But he was charming and funny, with a soft southern accent and courtesies. They lived in Florida mostly because he had a good job cooking on board ship for a wealthy shipbuilder.

Jane took a shine to me, and over shrimp at our farewell dinner at Frederick’s French Onion Soup restaurant in Palm Beach, she decided that my real name was John—John Severini. She noted that in every restaurant we ate—sometimes in the company of other of her friends-- the servers presented me with the bill. Before we left Jane gave me some old movie stills from her collection, because she felt I was someone who would appreciate them.

First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in Palm Beach

Palm Beach was the older and far richer city, settled by millionaires in the 19^th century. It received new prominence in the early 1960s when President Kennedy used a family home there. Palm Beach is also the location of the now infamous Mar-a-Lago. There are fewer than 10,000 full-time residents even now.

Contrast that with West Palm, the poorer relation across the Intercoastal Waterway, with a population of 124,000. It was only 23,000 when we visited in 1976.

Even then, the divide between the rich and the rest was keenly felt. Everyone I met in West Palm didn’t really want to be there.

The only other memory I have of West Palm is a sunburn and its remedy. When I complained of the burn, Linda took me outside the house into some small nearby trees in sandy ground, and pointed out a number of plants growing among them. They were aloe plants. She removed some sticky substance, I rubbed it on and the mild burn was soon all but gone. This was years before aloe became so widespread in over the counter products.

From West Palm we drove down to Key West, the final leg being the strangest and straightest highway in America (US Highway 1), much of it over water. We pitched Linda’s tent at a fairly crowded and often raucous campground of mostly young travelers, but at least near enough to decent sanitary facilities.

1976 postcard

Key West is essentially an island at the southernmost tip of the East Coast, a famous 90 miles from Cuba (a figure often repeated during the Cuban Missile Crisis). Because of this location and remoteness, its first and furtive residents were reputed to be smugglers, pirates and bootleggers as well as those engaged in fishing and other legal pursuits, such as harvesting sponge, sea turtles and conch, the mollusk that remains a Key West identifier.

Eventually its weather and the fishing put it on the map. In 1946, President Harry Truman established his Little White House there. Over the years it was devastated several times by hurricanes.

Key West also became known for a tolerance that extended to interracial relationships and homosexuals not as welcome elsewhere in the US. By the 1930s it was attracting artists and particularly writers. Poet Elizabeth Bishop and most famously, fictionist Ernest Hemingway established residences there, as did dramatist Tennessee Williams a decade or so later.

Robert Frost & W. Stevens in Key West

Others in this period made extended visits, sometimes annually. Wallace Stevens is a notable example. The eminently respectable poet who walked to his office every day as a vice-president in one of the major insurance companies in Hartford, Connecticut, and grappled with metaphysical questions in his poems, had a number of drunken episodes in Key West that have entered historical gossip. As a regular visitor Stevens graciously welcomed Robert Frost on his first trip, but after a few too many at a cocktail party, argued incoherently with him at dinner, somewhat scandalizing his fellow New England poet.

On another occasion, Stevens worked himself into an inebriated rage and challenged Ernest Hemingway to a fight, drunkenly swung and missed, then landed a blow that broke his hand. Though Stevens was larger, Hemingway was younger and more skilled. He knocked Stevens into a mud puddle. (Both participants corroborated the basics of this story.)

Beyond indulging in bad behavior away from prying eyes, Key West also inspired Stevens’ poetry, notably the long poem “The Idea of Order at Key West” (not meant ironically, except maybe privately) that literary writer Jay Parini ranked second on his list of the ten best American poems. Both effects—inspiration and inebriation-- recurred among a later generation of writers who began appearing in Key West in the early 1970s.

Guy De Valdene, Tom McGuane with
Richard Brautigan in foreground:
Key West early 1970s

Though Tennessee Williams was still around, Truman Capote visited often, and other writers such as Richard Brautigan (Trout Fishing in America) and playwright James Kirkwood (1976 Pulitzer Prize winner for A Chorus Line) were on the scene at times, the core group was comprised of fishing writer and memoirist Guy De Valedene, novelist Tom McGuane and his close friend from college days at Michigan State, poet and fictionist Jim Harrison. They were there for the fishing (as Hemingway had been) and magical waters as well as the spicy anarchy of the Key West scene.

“It was an island totally devoid of rules of behavior,” Harrison recalled in his memoir Off To The Side, “a tropical island fueled by sunlight, dope, and booze, as far from Kansas as you could ever get in America.”

These three writers were also close friends with an itinerant local musician, Jimmy Buffett. Together they were so embedded in the Key West life that both Buffett and McGuane met future wives at the Chartroom Bar. McGuane’s choice was Buffett’s sister.

By the time I visited in 1976, I’d read just one slim volume of Harrison’s poems, and McGuane’s 1973 eye-opening novel Ninety-Two in the Shade, a National Book Award nominee set in Key West. (I’ve always remembered—or maybe misremembered—that in its pages someone observes that the great American law is that it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.) I didn’t know of their ongoing connection to Key West. But I was aware of Jimmy Buffett as the reigning spirit of the place.

Jimmy Buffett is his Key West bar band days

He was just becoming nationally known: his breakout album “Havana Daydreamin’ had just come out weeks before, but its first single was on the radio, and I loved it. “Woman Going Crazy on Caroline Street” had such resonant lines as “she listens to the jukebox for her answers,” and “she slides her dapper legs from beneath the table/as if to reveal some kind of treat” (“dapper legs” is classic) and that haunting chorus: “There’s a woman going crazy on Caroline Street/ stopping every man that she does meet/saying if you be gentle, if you be sweet/I’ll show you my place on Caroline Street.”

We didn’t see any of these notables (and likely wouldn’t have known it if we had) but by 1976 the era was already fading. Tourism was starting to swamp the place (its population then was under 8,000; now it’s 23,000) and we heard complaints about invasions from New York. I saw some of that once when I peeked into the compound surrounding the only chain hotel in the small central area, between the Coast Guard dock and Duval Street: there were hundreds of pale northerners intent on rapid tanning, packed into the area around the pool as densely as a Manhattan subway, or a Coney Island beach.

There was so much marijuana being smuggled in, Harrison recalled, that it was virtually free, but in the late 70s the cocaine trade invaded, with cartels and serious violence. The innocence was gone, the writers were getting older (and better known), and so that scene faded.

Jim Harrison & McGuane, some years later

McGuane retreated to Montana, his highest fame behind him but with enduring new writing, while Harrison would create a body of work over the next several decades that to me seems likely to grow in recognition, a major American writer of his generation. And Jimmy Buffett soon became internationally famous, acquiring a perennially loyal following and almost mythic dimensions below the flavor of the week radar, and becoming a billionaire along the way, as well as—to the astonishment of his old literary buddies—a best-selling author, topping both fiction and nonfiction lists.

Meanwhile, cocaine was already such a big problem that Florida had set up an “Operation Conch” that yielded more than 20 arrests. But while we were in Key West, the big news was that a former City Attorney who’d been busted for delivering cocaine was exonerated, when a snitch finally admitted he lied. He’d also been the source for other arrests. Of the City Attorney, a state law enforcement spokesperson deadpanned, “He was set up. He was framed.” Where was Hemingway when we needed him?

There were probably scattered photos on barroom walls of the 1970s writers but the conspicuous monuments belonged to Hemingway. His spacious house on Whitehead Street was a registered national historic landmark, and at the time, number 18 on the list of 48 Sites To See in Key West.

Hemingway & Pauline 1927

In 1927 Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer in Paris, the journalist daughter of a wealthy American. For the birth of their first child, Pauline wanted to return to the United States. Key West may have been suggested as a residence by the writer and Hemingway hunting and fishing companion, John Dos Passos. Pauline’s uncle bought them this house, and they moved there early in the 1930s.

Key West was then as much Cuban as American, and Hemingway may have first visited it from Havana. The English speakers were mostly railroaders, fishermen and descendants of New England sailors. Several Native tribes had been the first inhabitants, and in the mid-19th century Key West became a haven for fugitive slaves. By then it was a major salt supplier, and civil war in Cuba brought Cuban tobacco factories. For a few years Key West was the richest and largest settlement in Florida. Key West cigars were still part of the local economy when Hemingway arrived, though the 1930s Great Depression hit hard, as suggested by his novel To Have and Have Not.

My own history with Hemingway began while he was still alive, and I saw his photo spread that accompanied his novel The Old Man and the Sea, first published in the pages of Life Magazine. I even recall reading it there, though it is unlikely since it was 1952 and I was 6 years old. It became an immense best-seller and led directly to his Nobel Prize in 1954. But whenever it was, I’m sure this was the first of his work I read.

I had some later Hemingway binges, including reading his stories lying mostly naked for days in a tiny room in Berkeley, covered in wet baking soda—a hippie remedy for a bad case of poison oak—while eating Oreo cookies and drinking cheap California white wine from the grocery next door. In 1976 my latest binge had been just a few years before in Cambridge, after I read his just published posthumous novel Islands in the Stream. (Though Jim Harrison had Key West and Upper Michigan rivers in common with Hemingway, and was sometimes lamely and lazily compared with him, he professed not to like most of his work. One of the exceptions was that novel.)

I also knew Hemingway’s classic Paris Review interview, with its reverent if also earthy treatment of the writing vocation. Though in college I’d preferred Scott Fitzgerald, he had still been the figure of the writer I’d grown up with.

Hemingway House tour, evidently during Covid

We took the $1 tour of his Key West house, where whatever quiet observation let alone hushed awe I might have applied was mostly shattered by the company of noisy tourists. I couldn’t even concentrate on his writing studio, being distracted by the young blond in shorts and platform shoes walking in front of me, but I did note the writing tablet and pencil on the desk, and the balled up paper on the floor, just the kind of absurd and inauthentic touch that characterizes modern tourism. I also noted that our tour guide had much more to say about Pauline’s decorative choices, which probably was appropriate.

But Hemingway, in his thirties, really did write there. I recently re-read A Farewell To Arms which he finished there, when I was researching the far northern Italian front in World War I for my Severini Saga, because my grandfather had been there. So had Hemingway briefly, though earlier than the actual war events in his novel. He also wrote To Have and Have Not in that Key West house, which I dipped into more recently, but found pretty much unreadable. It’s also much different from the Bogart and Bacall (and John Huston) movie.

When we were there in late February 1976, Key West was coping with water shortages from a recent drought and an economic recession, but was also experiencing a record year for tourism. Some businesses were shuttered while other areas were rebuilding.

2017 photo by Judd McCrain

Presiding over the Duval Street area of bars and restaurants was Sloppy Joe’s, famous as a Hemingway hangout from the 1930s. Among the resident memorabilia was his birth certificate mounted on the wall.

I remember it as akin to an open air market, with shuttered sides open to the sun-white streets in two directions, though it still managed to be dark inside. The jukebox was formidable: everything from the Eagles to Glenn Miller, Harry Belafonte’s calypso period, and of course Jimmy Buffett. In the men’s room I spotted and copied grafitti expressing what could be the Key West ethic: “Where would we be if everybody did what they were told…”

Sloppy Joe’s was still under its original ownership then (Sloppy Joe himself, reputed to be the model for the barkeep in To Have and Have Not, or his family.) Later management began the annual Hemingway Festival, which includes a lookalike contest yielding unappetizing crowds of bulky men with florid white beards.

At nearby El Cacique Restaurant I ate my first plates of Cuban-style black beans and yellow rice, and my first slices of homemade Key Lime pie. I don’t remember that we made it to Crazy Ophelia’s Cafe on Duval, if indeed it was still there, but in 1972 Jimmy Buffett often played at this counterculture haven—it’s where he first sang “Margaritaville,” his signature song, just after writing the final verse on his way to the gig.

I might mention that at this point in my life—in fact, for most of it—I constitutionally could not maintain a decent relationship with the world unless I played a little guitar or piano every day. So I traveled with my guitar and took every opportunity on every open piano I encountered. And I encountered one at a bar in Key West. I’d been happily playing my blues runs when the owner approached and offered me a job playing there regularly.

He didn’t mention terms but considering that Jimmy Buffett played at a local bar for years for nothing more than free beer and tips, I’d assume they were similar. However I quickly demurred, saying I was just passing through, and got out of there quickly, before he noticed that I could play only variations on the same three and four chord patterns in different keys. Still, it was a memorable occasion (even though it took resurrecting the old notebook to remind me): my one and only job offer as a piano player came in fabled Key West.

1970s Key West

The evening would commence with a gathering down at the Coast Guard dock to watch the sun drop into the ocean, Key West being the only place on the East Coast where this phenomenon occurs. When the orange ball dipped below the horizon and then suddenly disappeared, the crowd would applaud. It was such a well-known custom that food vendors assembled at the entrance, with the occasional street performers. Apparently in later years this has become much more elaborate, and much more for the tourists.

Then we might sample the night life before returning to the campgrounds, which in a notebook I described as our “suntanned tenement.”

On our way back north we stopped for a few hours at Walt Disney World in Orlando, my first and only visit. At that time just the Magic Kingdom area was open, and it was only five years old. But already the Disney convenience/control ethos was evident, beginning with the signs on the highway approaching the park directing visitors to tune to a certain AM radio frequency for instructions, and including the parking lots and sections named after Disney characters.

My recollections begin in the same vein as those from my day at the New York World’s Fair in 1965: blinding heat reflected off concrete, and long lines for everything. The “attractions” we selected were fair to middling (but then, we weren’t the target market), and while Space Mountain added complete darkness to the roller coaster experience, I recall still preferring the coasters at Kennywood in Pittsburgh.

The exception was Pirates of the Caribbean (a replica of the one at Disneyland in California, built at popular demand and opened only in 1973.) It started with another winding slow ride in a boat in inches of water with narrow walls around us, past displays more elaborate but otherwise little different from ordinary carnival haunted houses. But then it suddenly opened up, and we were afloat on a large expanse of dark water, heading towards an apparently full sized pirate ship, with cannonballs splashing and some sort of battle going on. It was an actual magical moment, especially for me as it was unexpected.

But we did not leave sadly, or at least I didn’t. Something about the manipulation and replication, the artificial fantasy of the place bothered me. It was an extension of what was done to the Hemingway house. I imagined that same writing room, complete with the phony crumpled balls of paper on the floor, but with an animatronic Hemingway writing at the desk, turning slowly to smile at us behind the rope border and intoning one of his pithy sayings, like “Good writing is true writing,” and turning back to move his lifeless hand over the page.

Possibly such a display would not have him repeat his most famous line from that Paris Review interview: “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector.”

The one memory I retain about our drive back up the East Coast is located in Georgia. We were on Interstate 85, and I wanted to eat something other than the usual burger, something southern I hadn’t had before. So we stopped at Katherine’s Kitchen for ham and biscuits. But the meal was handed to us in a limp cardboard box by a nervous older woman standing under a handprinted menu, fast-food style. She evidently was trying to go with the flow, which to her meant becoming a cut-rate McDonalds of the South.

President Harry Truman in Key West

My notebooks record disproportionately little of my actual experiences on this trip, along with a lot of the usual bits of ideas for freelance articles I might propose, and stray phrases that might be of things I overheard (“Shalom, y’all”) or seen (The Slice of Life Pizza, the Margaret Truman Launderette) or maybe it was stuff I made up.

But I also recorded observations that suggest I was starting to see the Highway as a place in itself, more or less the same everywhere, with the same food, the same music on the radio, television news, newspapers, and the same faux history and regionalism (I recorded another restaurant advertising southern home cooking that was served on plastic fake pewter.) It was only in going back through these notes and memories that I realized how this trip may have influenced the point of view and subjects of much of my writing in the late 70s and early to mid 80s.

But before all that started I had a long, strange and personally important interlude as a writer and editor at a fledgling alternative weekly in Washington, DC. Be with us next time for: Get Me Rewrite!

History of My Reading: Alien's Tapdance

2025-02-17T22:14:00.000-08:00

“Intelligence is a friend to that enigmatic light that comes to the world.”--Magritte

“What a dream this place has been.”--The Bee Gees

New Times illustration by Dickran Palulian.

My first New Times article, “Bodies in Revolt” appeared in that magazine in March 1975, just in front of an interview with Gena Rowlands, cued to her now hit movie A Woman Under the Influence. That particular issue was notable also for its cover story on the threat of aerosol cans to the ozone layer, an issue about to become a very big one. My story was graced by the illustrations of Dickran Palulian that outlived the article itself as greeting cards.

To produce this piece I read articles on related research and did phone interviews with experts on sleep and biorhythms, as well as lighting and the specific problems in office workplaces caused by unhealthy and distracting heating or cooling. I don’t recall who I interviewed for the narrative portions, about the problems of a Owl in a Lark world or the conflicts the difference could cause in relationships, since I disguised names. But a lot of it was me.

According to research on biological rhythms—a fairly new concept then—Owls (as in night owls) are likely to be physically and psychologically weakest early in the day, and so they are likely to be more stressed in the workplace. It’s pretty much the opposite for Larks, the early birds. Such stress has consequences. I stated my case:

“Individual differences are often treated by employers as illegitimate, as attempts to shirk and cheat. Employees themselves often think of them as abnormal and self-indulgent. We like to think of ourselves as the kind of machines that only need fuel and occasional maintenance to operate at the same level all the time. Biological cycles tell us otherwise…Biorhythms tell us that we are not made of insensitive steel, like desks or lathes. They tell us that we are not dynamos or even computers, but vastly more complex organic mechanisms with processes and subtleties that demand respect.”

Nearly fifty years later, though the reality of Larks and Owls is acknowledged, those demands are still not recognized, let alone met. More flexibility in scheduling famously existed in certain computer-related workplaces for other reasons, and ergonomics theoretically could apply, but in practice seems to follow a rigid sense of efficiency.

Nor is much priority or attention given to environmental factors such as lighting, heating etc. that affect individuals in the workplace, even though more is known about the short-term and long-term effects. It could be, however, that the popularity of working from home has a lot to do with biorhythms and these other office environment factors.

* * *

I obtained in fairly short order three other assignments for New Times. One had a similar if now piquant theme—the psychological burdens of the telephone. This too had a personal origin.

But I was more interested in the other two assignments. One emanated from a lifelong interest. The other came from the movies, and the Orson Welles Complex.

As a concept, even as a word, the future had been magic for me for a long time. From Captain Video and Forbidden Planet to Star Trek; from the Winston Science Fiction novel series at the public library, the Robert Heinlein juvies to the speculative stories in comic book and then print anthologies that went beyond outer space adventures, science fiction had fed the fascination. But by the 1970s, the concept of the actual future had also become more serious, and more present.

That’s partly because the future had become a place of potential disasters: from overpopulation (Paul Eurlich’s The Population Bomb, published in 1968) to the doomsday prospect of Lifeboat Ethics in The Limits to Growth (1972), and more broadly to the impact (psychological and otherwise) of the onslaught of new technologies in Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. Published in 1970, the Toffler book was so popular that its paperback edition was the first to be issued with six different-colored covers.

Books and articles on alarming levels of air, water and soil pollution, as well as environmentalism in general, had also been added to the perennial threat of nuclear war as possible threats to the future itself.

Doom was in the air, but there were also visionaries with ways to meet these challenges and make the future better—Buckminster Fuller being a popular one in the 1970s. Then there was the tantalizing idea of predicting the future.

There were always those who claimed to see the future. In my first years in Cambridge I remember buying annual paperback anthologies of psychic predictions for the following year. I noticed that a lot of these seers forecast the assassination of Fidel Castro. A lot of the prophets also lived in Florida. Years later, when the efforts of the US “intelligence” community to kill Castro by means that included an exploding cigar, it occurred to me that these seers were possibly less connected to psychic vibrations than local CIA agents.

But more than a decade before, Herman Kahn and his cohorts at the Rand Corporation had applied math and computer technology to the possibilities and possible outcomes of thermonuclear war. Their macabre conclusions involving "megadeaths" aside, they came up with two key concepts: how different circumstances in different combinations could lead to “alternative futures,” and that those sets of circumstances could be developed in chains of events they called “scenarios,” which up to that time was a little-used term. By the mid-1970s, these ideas and technologies were being applied to all kinds of alternative futures, and the field of future forecasting was starting to hum.

But for me, the most exciting development—and the biggest impetus to my creating an article proposal—was the trend in something called Future Studies in colleges, universities and even high schools: at least a thousand such courses, including at Harvard and UCLA. By their nature, they tended to be multi-disciplinary, cutting across departments and requiring synthesis as well as analysis. That’s the approach I always wanted to experience when I was a student.

“We cannot humanize the future until we draw it into our consciousness and probe it with all the intelligence and imagination at our command,” wrote Alvin Toffler in the introduction to his 1972 anthology The Futurists. “This is what we are now just beginning to do.”

Toffler listed some of the fields relevant to this inquiry: “anthropology, biology, engineering, philosophy, mathematics, physics, astronomy, sociology, art, economics, history, journalism and a dozen other disciplines.” Uniting them was their major if not sole purpose: the study of the future. This felt like something I was moving towards all my life.

So I attended a symposium on the future at MIT, where I met an advertising copywriter who talked about vector analysis and Gurdjieff, a social scientists who was also a transcendental meditator, and a Harvard Business School student who had spent four years in Vietnam. There was an Israeli physicist, an economist and several biologists who talked about an operating principle common to biology and futurism, that survival during periods of change depends not so much on being well-adapted as on being collectively adaptable.

I discovered that one of the most impressive future studies programs was across the state in Amherst at the University of Massachusetts. It granted not only a bachelor’s degree but a Masters and a PhD in future studies. So in 1975 I went there and met a futures studies student named Fran Koster, who guided me into this new world. (Koster later had a career in environment and the future.) One of the chief books he recommended was Profiles of the Future by Arthur C. Clarke. That book was the gateway to many others, and I was off and running. (The texts that resulted are reprinted at Kowincidence here.)

* * *

Arnie Reisman and David Helpern, Jr. while making
"Hollywood on Trial" 1976. Photo by Elizabeth
Offner.

If that article idea was to be about the future in the present, the other I was pursuing was about a dark aspect of the past coming into the present. And once again, it came from the Orson Welles.

Or at least from someone I met there regularly: David Helpern, who while launching his one-hour film on director Nicholas Ray, was shooting interviews for what would be the first full-length (90 minutes or so) theatrical documentary on the Hollywood Blacklist. Once again he was teamed with producer Jim Gutman, and this time with film editor Frank Galvin (both also veterans of the Orson Welles film school), as well as writer Arnie Reisman.

Beginning with the first "Inquiry into Hollywood Communism" conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947, a period of intense political and cultural repression hit the dream factories: a time of fear, suspicion, doubt and injustice that did not end for nearly twenty years. It destroyed families, friendships, careers, and lives well into the 1950s.

Before it was over it had taken from the screen such talents as John Garfield, Lee Grant, Zero Mostel and hundreds of screenwriters, actors, directors and other artists in film, television and even theatre, as well as some academics and others. In particular, the Blacklist sucked the lifeblood from Hollywood.

I knew little about this, but I wasn't alone in that. Though the Blacklist slowly began losing its teeth until it quietly died out in the early 1960s, Hollywood still had not acknowledged it. There was a sense that this was changing in the mid-1970s.

In addition to closely following the progress of this movie, to be titled Hollywood on Trial, my particular focus became the children of the Blacklist. I interviewed several, including the child of an informer, who buckled to HUAC’s pressure to “name names” of people in Hollywood who had somehow been associated at one time with the U.S. Communist Party (a legal party that participated in elections) or with groups the committee found suspicious (especially those involved in civil rights and civil liberties.) It didn’t matter if the committee already knew the names (as they did in this case.)

Among those I interviewed was Tony Kahn, the son of blacklisted writer Gordon Kahn, who Arnie knew and who later became a well-known broadcaster for NPR and PBS. But I also interviewed his brother Dr. James Kahn, at his house in New Hampshire. He showed me documents suggesting he himself had been blacklisted from a medical position associated with the government, solely because of his father’s blacklisting in the 1940s and 50s.

Buffy Offner, awaiting her scene in the
John Semper student film mentioned later.

It turned out that I also knew a child of the Blacklist. Buffy Offner lived in my building on Columbia Street for a few years, but I got to know her at the Orson Welles Complex, where she worked as a waitress in the bar restaurant. Her father was Mortimer Offner, who’d been a Hollywood screenwriter ( including three movies with his friend Katharine Hepburn), a television producer and a New York theatre director—until the Blacklist wiped out everything.

In addition to my interviews, the footage that Hollywood on Trial shot included interviews with children of the Blacklist. Two children of screenwriters Hugo and Jean Butler, and Dalton Trumbo’s son Chris were filmed around Jean Butler’s dining room table. But the interview that brought the experience home to me aesthetically and emotionally was with Buffy Offner and her younger sister, actress Deborah Offner.

They were filmed sitting on a sofa side by side in the upper West Side apartment where they grew up, and where Debbie was then living. The green shades of their dresses blended softly with the leaves of houseplants behind them, and sunlight through the window illuminated their hair, as they sifted through what their father left: pictures he’d taken as a young portrait photographer of stars such as Sylvia Sidney and Tallulah Bankhead (he was Ethel Barrymore’s favorite photographer, and the famous profile of her in the Barrymore Theatre is by Offner), clippings from his first Broadway hit, an ecstatic letter from the sponsor of his hit television series in 1951 (“A Date with Judy”) and reviews of the last play he directed in New York, the Broadway revival of “Room Service” (which introduced Jack Lemmon.)

Deborah Offner

Then his subpoena to appear before HUAC in 1953 (which absurdly is pink). His show business career then abruptly ended. The next document was a letter lauding the number of insurance policies he’d sold.

Debbie has been reading and showing the documents, which included a letter describing an earlier hearing that year, while Buffy had a protective arm around her. Both had been very young at the time, though both were aware in some way of what had happened, when their father—who loved show business, and taught them how to do double-takes—suddenly became an insurance man who worked quietly at home. “He loved working in TV,” Buffy recalled. “He talked about it a lot. That was one year. The next year he had nothing.”

There wasn’t much written yet about the Blacklist I could find, but I did have journalist Stefan Kanfer’s history, A Journal of the Plague Years, as well as Dalton Trumbo’s memoir, Additional Dialogue, and Eric Bentley’s 1972 play that reproduced actual HUAC testimony, titled Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been (the beginning of the standard HUAC question) as well as his larger work on the committee, Thirty Years of Treason. But I was especially absorbed in that interview footage.

Several interviews were shot on lush lawns in warm sunshine, as incongruous as a deadly Blacklist in Hollywood. I found that seeing the complete footage of these interviews was very powerful, though only sections of some of them made it into the finished film, and some (like the Offner sisters) not at all. I hope that footage exists somewhere. (Again, the texts resulting from my research into the Blacklist are available at Kowincidence here.)

* * *

So I was working on all three pieces that year, attending a local hearing on the monopolistic practices of Bell Telephone and interviewing people who expressed various forms of disenchantment with the telephone, while also pursuing the future and Blacklist stories.

I probably sent a draft of the future article to my editor Frank Rich (who responded positively) before I took the train down to Washington that summer for the second general assembly of the World Future Society.

Alvin Toffler and Barbara Marx Hubbard during
the WFS convention

Gathered at the Washington Hilton in early June were some 2800 participants: the director of Technological Forecasting of Tel-Aviv University, government planners from Japan and India, and the director of marketing for Hooker Chemicals and Plastics. There were city planners in Hush Puppies, corporate forecasters in khaki suits and university students in cutoff jeans, plus parapsychologists, science fiction buffs, and members of communes dedicated to ecological self-sufficiency.

Formal sessions explored topics such as long-range economic and environmental planning, new technologies, systems analysis, and the future of religion. The exhibit hall overflowed with future-oriented products from flushless toilets to books on the anthropology of outer space. Discussions continued at coffee shops and restaurants.

Above all, there were the futurist stars. Young visionaries like Stewart Brand and Karl Hess mingled with Alvin Toffler and author Paul Goodman (Growing Up Absurd), who both roamed the halls between hotel meeting rooms wearing sunglasses. Economist Kenneth Boulding and Roy Amara, head of the Institute of the Future in Menlo Park, California, spoke at sessions. There were four Members of Congress and Senator Edward Kennedy was a featured speaker. Frances Fitzgerald was there, covering it for Harper's.

But the Assembly took an unexpected and dramatically different turn at the opening press conference. On stage were the elders of the field, including Harvard’s Daniel Bell and Herman Kahn, who’d left RAND and founded the Hudson Institute to research the future beyond nuclear war scenarios. Kahn, who was once an inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove, was looking more like a white-bearded Santa Claus. He was speaking softly, gravely and authoritatively about the prosperous future ahead, when the stage was suddenly invaded by an uninvited guest.

It wasn’t a wild-eyed flying saucer abductee or a vegetarian revolutionary but a neatly dressed middle-aged woman. She was Wilma Scott Heide, a past president of the National Organization of Women. Standing on a stage filled exclusively by white men, she made the point she spoke about: the future the Assembly discussed apparently didn’t have any women in it. Specifically, it had not one woman among the main speakers.

The ironies were many. The women’s movement had been making headlines (and disrupting male bastions) since 1970. So an organization dedicated to forward thinking was having its feminist crisis several years after everybody else. Anticipating it wouldn’t have required systems analysis, just reading the newspaper.

Moreover, Alvin Toffler and presumably others had noted that women and people of color were underrepresented at the first Assembly four years before, but nothing had been done about it. The Assembly leadership at first tried to respond by shooing her off the stage, until the audience protested. She finished to applause and some conciliatory mumbles. But the real response came later.

That night a women’s caucus was formed, and assembly leaders were persuaded to add a woman as a main speaker. She spoke the very next morning, and apart from being the hit of the convention, she changed its entire emphasis. She brought another kind of futurism to the forefront.

She was Hazel Henderson, an economist with an interest in ecology, and an advisor to the Office of Technology Assessment. Born in England and retaining a British accent, she was tall, blond, and charismatic, and she galvanized her audience.

She told them that she wasn't interested in developing strategies and scenarios. "I have humbler goals. They are to open up processes and decision mechanisms, to expose underlying values and assumptions buried deeply in our so-called value-free methodologies.”

“Citizens now understand that professionals with narrow, specialist training cannot adequately define our problems,” she continued. “Not that professionals aren't essential to the debate, but they must now see where the limits of their technical competence end, and”—the key phrase—“where their values carry no more weight than those of any other citizen in a democracy."

Hazel Henderson was instantly the new star of the convention, and her message inspired a fierce energy and focus for the rest of the proceedings. No one from the World Future Society had predicted this. But her clarion call for a kind of participatory or democratic futurism engaged not only in exploring alternative futures but “desirable futures” changed the following days.

I did some quick interviews, collected transcripts and press releases, observed a lot and had coffee with Frances Fitzgerald. When I got back to Cambridge I quickly re-wrote my article to include some of what had happened and what I learned at the Assembly, and sent it off to New Times. By then I’d also finished and sent in my telephone piece.

* * *

Walter Bernstein, Martin Ritt on set of "The Front"

Come the autumn it was back to the Blacklist, for Hollywood on Trial wasn’t the only movie being shot about those dark days. The other was The Front, a major studio feature film directed by veteran director Martin Ritt from a script by movie and television veteran Walter Bernstein. Both had been blacklisted.

The movie mostly followed a blacklisted screenwriter (played by Woody Allen, in his only role in a movie he didn’t write or direct) and a blacklisted comic actor (played by Zero Mostel, who had been blacklisted.) The title comes from the practice of some blacklisted writers to employ a “front,” or a person who pretended to have written their script. They got screen credit, and sometimes showed up for script conferences. Some got carried away. A lot of rueful blacklist comedy ensued in real life, and Bernstein drew on his own experiences as well as others.

Most of the movie was shot in New York, except for a sequence at a mountain resort in western Massachusetts, where I spent a day observing and doing my own interviews, along with a crew from Hollywood on Trial. I’m pretty sure I caught a ride out there with Fred Barron, a former Boston After Dark/Phoenix colleague and friend, who may have been representing the Real Paper, but I remember for sure riding back with him. He’d also become friends with David Helpern.

We were present for a scene in which Zero Mostel (playing a writer/performer named Hecky Brown) was finishing his nightclub act, which he was performing for a fraction of his pre-Blacklist fee because it was the only work he could get.

Later there would be a scene in which the night club owner pays Hecky even less—something that had really happened to Zero Mostel. But the scene we saw was wondrous. We watched Zero Mostel sing, crack jokes, do sight gags and otherwise resurrect his 1940s nightclub act. There were a number of takes but Mostel made sure to do something different each time, so the audience of extras would really laugh. He kept getting funnier.

It was a bizarre scene. The young extras from New York, dressed for a night out in the 1950s at 7 in the morning, mixed with hotel guests, many of them visiting members of the National Hebrew Association and the Medical Center of Denver. It looked like the last remains of a junior prom held at an old folk’s home.

I interviewed Walter Bernstein, who was warm and funny, and several others on the set with connections to the Blacklist, including two who were children: Julie Garfield (who had a small acting part) and her brother David Garfield (a production assistant), the children of blacklisted actor John Garfield. John Garfield was a big star in the 1940s, and one of the worst victims of the Blacklist, condemned for signing a few petitions and attending a few parties with the wrong people.

“My father wasn’t a leader in the thinking department, but he was curious,” David Garfield told me. “When his best friends turned against him, it broke his heart. One minute he was a star, the next people were crossing the street to avoid him. I really believe it killed him.”

Later, in between set-ups in another part of the building, director Martin Ritt talked to me, saying that though the movie had started out to be more of a comedy, it was getting more serious as they went on, and morally tougher. He wanted the movie to be entertaining but “At my age I don’t have too many more films to make, I want them to be serious.” (In a few years he would make probably his most famous film, Norma Rae.)

In his rumpled blue jumpsuit, Martin Ritt was totally present in his conversation with me, and I was concentrating on him completely. But I suddenly realized that things around us had gone quiet, and when I looked beyond him I was startled and then amazed to see that everyone working on this large set was motionless and looking at us, waiting for the director to start the scene. I was holding up the progress of a Hollywood movie. Awed and a little shaken, I quickly wound up the interview.

* * *

My moviegoing in Cambridge continued, most of the time alone. I still spent hours at the Orson Welles Cinema and sitting in its lobby, subsisting on coffee, popcorn and licorice. Part of my social life consisted in talking to the people I knew when they came to see movies there. I also once spotted Faye Dunaway skulking along the lower lobby (she was then in a relationship with a Boston rock and roller), trying so conspicuously not to be recognized that it was obviously her.

In March 1974, my friend and former colleague at the Boston Phoenix, Kerry Gruson, had been attacked by a deranged Vietnam vet in Hawaii when she was on her way to Vietnam as a reporter. The attack left her partially paralyzed. We hadn't parted on the best of terms but when I heard what happened I wrote her an encouraging letter. Apparently others we knew had abandoned her, although her family was completely with her. But I hadn't seen her until one evening in the Orson Welles lobby, when there she was in her wheelchair, accompanied by an unfamiliar young man. As far as I knew she was still in New York, so it was a shock, as was my first sight of her condition. We spoke warmly but briefly, after which I retreated to the men's room very shaken.

I later visited her once at a rehab facility in New York State and we kept in touch by letter and phone for the next 15 years or so. She had moved to Florida and in 2024, despite a worsened condition, she is a principal in a nonprofit, ThumbsUp International, dedicated to positive change, mostly through participatory sports that include the disabled.

Pat Mitchell

In addition to my own cinema outings, I occasionally accompanied Janet Maslin to films she was reviewing, especially in the dodgier parts of town. Probably through Janet, I met the new entertainment reporter at the Boston television station WBZ, Pat Mitchell. Her list of credits and awards since then is enormous, including as head of PBS. But this was her first job in TV journalism, as part of that first major wave of women on camera. I went to a few movies with her, after which we sped to the TV station so she could write and deliver her review for the 11 O’Clock news.

Once on the ride to the station she asked me what I thought of the film and then stopped me after a few sentences, saying that’s what she thought as well, so she didn’t want my words to get mixed up with hers. Writing a review as quickly as she did amazed me. She would show me her script before air time—that second pair of eyes. This was my first look at a TV newsroom before and during a broadcast.

One evening after the broadcast she took me to a restaurant and bar in Boston where show business people hung out, including famous performers making local appearances. We wound up seated near the table of Maggie Smith and her companion. In person in 1975, Maggie Smith was breathtakingly beautiful, and I found myself envious of those empathetic eyes trained on her older male companion.

While Pat and I talked at a very late hour we could hear someone playing piano and singing above the din. I thought he sounded a lot like Joel Grey, famous for his recent role in the stage and film versions of Cabaret. A few minutes later when we got up to leave, I was astonished to see that in fact it was Joel Grey.

That year I was especially inspired by a new book I read: The Lives of the Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher by Lewis Thomas. These eloquent essays illustrate the interdependence of life at every scale, beyond the categories that limit our understanding. The human body as a cooperative, symbiotic medley of lifeforms, human intelligence as located in the body beyond the brain, the permeable definitions of organism and superorganism—these and other themes were largely new, and not only to the general public. But fifty years later, they are becoming the basis for new understanding of life on Earth. In its quiet (though best-selling) way, this has to be one of the most important books of the twentieth century.

That book in turn inspired me to write in a form I don’t think I’d attempted since college: stage plays. I wrote three short plays designed to be performed on the same evening on basically the same set that I called After Dining at Googolplex. One was about the relationship of a man and a computer. Long before AI or even home computers, these were still the days of the big mainframes. I used to get Carol’s brother Raymond to bring me back computer printouts from M.I.T. just so I could see what the language looked like.

My play involved an expert summoned to diagnose an experimental computer that had stopped functioning. As a younger and more idealistic man, this expert had passed many nights reading to the computer. Eventually the computer began repeating back quotes to him from those nights: lines from D.H. Lawrence, Thoreau, Jean Cocteau, William Blake, Jung and John Cage, as well as Carl Sagan, Jacob Bronowski, Lewis Thomas etc. The expert, now compromised, discouraged and disenchanted with his life, gradually recognizes them, and wonders why the computer is saying them to him, and only him.

The other two plays (one set in a bedroom, in which the television is a character) also riffed on these same authors, especially Thomas, in contemporary stories. The premises of these plays were creative and ahead of their time; the execution of them however was much less successful. Today they seem pretty much unplayable.

I continued to write pages for my college novel that year, and started a revision, but it was getting unwieldy, the chapters I sent out elicited no interest, and I couldn’t get a handle on it anymore. So in some frustration I dropped it for awhile, and sometime in 1975 I started something completely different.

* * *

I made collages as title pages, which I've
lost track of. This old photocopy remains.

For this fiction project, titled “Alien’s Tapdance,” I did pretty much the opposite of what I tried to do with the novel: I wrote spontaneously, based on contemporary experience, and the style was bolder, more experimental in places, reflecting more directly the surrealist writings and art in my books and on my walls, while also influenced by the films I was seeing. I used collage (including visual collages); I even tried a brief section using Burrough’s cut-up method.

I started with a fictional version of the Orson Welles Complex and Cambridge as the main settings, but as I kept writing and adding other sections (such as the first person “Confessions of a Popcorn Fiend”) the Complex became itself a subject, as well as the form (as if each of three sections was a movie playing in one of the theatres.)

The end result was A Night At The Complex, nearly 100 single-spaced pages, which I photocopied and distributed to people I knew there (and yes, I was aware of the triple meaning in the title, and the allusion to A Night At The Opera was intentional.) It created a little buzz in the building. Reading it now, I recognize an early DeLillo influence in the style. It became, by default, the most sustained and finished work of long fiction I had accomplished.

The third part of my Complex fiction involved the fictional making of a film by people that worked and hung out there. The urge to get beyond just exhibiting and watching movies to making them was widely shared. Larry Jackson was assembling a documentary on the making of classic Warner Brothers cartoons, featuring Bugs Bunny and other cartoons from the 1940s. It was released in December 1975 as Bugs Bunny: Superstar, the first of many collections of these cartoons and films about them. Terry Corey also worked on the release of this project. Larry would become a producer and movie executive in Hollywood.

Meanwhile, John Semper, another young OW Cinema employee I knew, was making a student film using people from the Complex as actors (among them, Buffy Offner) as well as in creative and technical capacities. Semper would go on to a career as a screenwriter and story editor, notably for Spider-Man: the Animated Series.

And even while completing Hollywood on Trial, David Helpern was looking ahead to finding a feature film project. We discussed books we liked that I would adapt, such as Don DeLillo’s End Zone, J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man (which got as far as a phone conversation between Donleavy and Helpern during which the author explained why he wasn’t selling the film rights to anyone) and Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions—which for a blissful moment looked like it might happen, until a bigger bid for the film rights took it away.

(A film version of Breakfast of Champions was finally made—in 1999. It wasn’t very good and didn’t do well. In the book’s introduction Vonnegut wrote about how his plays had failed because they didn’t include his voice. The novel was replete with his voice—and I wasn’t planning on making the mistake of eliminating it, as the 1999 film did.)

At some point David had mentioned that the two local alternative weeklies, the Phoenix and the Real Paper, might make a good subject for an original script. Maybe I was still too close to both the complexity and the traumas associated with my experiences with them, but I didn’t immediately seize on the idea.

Some months later, director Joan Micklin Silver came to the Orson Welles with her first feature, Hester Street (which went on to success, with its star, Carol Kane, nominated for an Oscar.) I was included among those invited to share a meal with the Silvers at the Restaurant. Also present were David Helpern and Fred Barron.

One of the topics of table conversation I remember (possibly because I started it) requires some historical explanation involving two outside events that dominated the news that year. After a bloody and chaotic decade, American troops had withdrawn from Vietnam in March 1973 as a result of the Paris peace treaty, but fighting continued throughout 1974 between North and South Vietnam. By spring 1975 the victory of the North was complete.

The other was the Watergate scandal and the surrounding events in Washington, which were unlike any other in memory. That tumult had absorbed us since early 1973. I was among those who obsessively watched the televised Senate hearings into the Watergate break-in and coverup in May 1973, and then the televised hearings the bipartisan House committee considering the impeachment of President Nixon in the summer of 1974, at the end of which anguished Republicans as well as Democrats voted to send three articles of impeachment to the House floor. But before the House could consider them, President Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974.

The reporting team of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had covered the Watergate story from its beginning in 1972, and in 1974 their first book on the subject was published, All The President’s Men. By 1975 the movie version had been announced, and particularly among film obsessives a popular game was debating which actors should play which real-life characters. (I’d made my own semi-serious list, proposing Jack Palance as Nixon, Broderick Crawford as attorney-general John Mitchell, Orson Welles as Senator Sam Ervin and Peter Sellers as Henry Kissinger. It turned out that none of these figures was ever seen in the movie. My only choice that actually came true was Robert Redford as Bob Woodward.) So this was a topic of table conversation with Joan Silver, which she joined enthusiastically.

We also talked about the much talked-about movie version of The Great Gatsby, again with Robert Redford. Joan Silver said she would have flipped the two male leads, so that Bruce Dern would play Jay Gatsby and Robert Redford the callous, wealthy husband of Gatsby’s love object, Daisy Buchanan. I thought that was a fascinating idea, and I could see the difference it would make, even if the chances of it ever happening in Hollywood seemed slim.

I left after the thoroughly enjoyable meal. Only later did I learn that David and Fred stayed behind to discuss a feature film story with Silver—about an alternative newspaper in Boston. I didn’t know David had talked about this idea with Fred, and I don’t know what was in writing at that point, but eventually they were both credited with the story, and Fred Barron with the script.

It became Silver’s next project. Initially titled Alternative Lives (I read several early drafts), it came to be called Between the Lines, now known for introducing an astonishing number of young actors (including John Heard, Lindsay Crouse, Jeff Goldblum, Jill Eikenberry and Bruno Kirby, plus Stephen Collins, Marilu Henner and others) who went on to prominent Hollywood careers.

Silver eventually filmed at least some of it in Cambridge and Boston. Several Orson Welles Cinema people worked on it, as their first jobs in the movies. OW Cinema manager Mary Galloway was a location manager, and Martha Pinson was a production assistant, who got interested in the work of the script supervisor. In any case, Mary soon moved to LA and Martha became a prominent New York-based script supervisor for major directors like Martin Scorsese and Sydney Lumet, and more recently she directed the award-winning feature Tomorrow.

Though there was nothing particularly nefarious about David and Fred pitching this movie without mentioning to me that they'd been working on it, and I remained friends with both of them, it seemed not only a lost opportunity but another piece of evidence that despite my regular presence I was still at the fringes of things.

* * *

closing time at the Orson Welles bar. Photo by Frank Siteman

I am the Alien. I am not one of you. How do you know until you know who we are? Listen: I know. So says the protagonist of Alien’s Tapdance, an “astropologist” from another world. The alienated alien, shades of Mr. Spock, was my internal persona as well as, I thought, my external appearance. I felt like an alien from a startled world, nearby in space and time perhaps, but in another slightly different dimension of being. I was more observer than participant, or at least that’s how I felt---both there and at a distance.

And it was hard not to see it that way. One afternoon I was having coffee with David in the Orson Welles bar when someone—I think it was Nat Segaloff, who at the time I believe was doing publicity for Boston’s big cinema chain—came hurrying in, and asked David to join him outside for a photo someone was taking in front of the Welles Cinema. Larry, Terry and Myron Meisel (who’d been the writer on David’s Nick Ray film) were waiting. Nat said something to the effect that someday people would marvel that the five of them had started out in the same place at the same time. I was not invited or included.

It was just a moment but it came to mean something, more to me than probably to anyone else involved. In fact, all five of them went on to careers in and around Hollywood, at least for a time. (However, as writer and producer of two hit television comedy series, a producer of a major motion picture and a later career in British television, Fred Barron eventually eclipsed them all.)

On one level that moment just amused and also insulted me, but on another it fed my doubts. It hadn’t escaped me that many of my colleagues in Boston had attended Harvard and Brandeis and other high-powered universities, and came from solidly middle class if not upper middle class or wealthy families. In day to day work and relationships it didn’t matter. I didn’t discern that I was treated any differently, and I didn’t feel any less intelligent or talented.

But they seemed to know things I didn’t know, like how to succeed or at least survive in the worlds that interested us all. I’d made it this far on talent and luck but my sudden progress had stalled, at least in terms of making a living, of assembling a career.

I was not the only one ambivalent about this career-building business, but somehow they managed to make the right moves. When I came up against unfavorable circumstances and my own limitations, I didn’t have family contacts or old school ties or other networks, or any experiences to draw from: I was not brought up nor educated anywhere near the worlds in which I was trying to navigate a life.

I sensed also that my friends were moving into long-term relationships and marriages with partners who coincidentally would help them in their ambitions. I was nowhere near that: practically, financially, emotionally.

When I started writing for Boston After Dark, everything was equal and sui generis. I never thought about my future, other than to dream of publishing novels and other books, of making records, writing plays and movies. Within a few years, however, much to my surprise though maybe not to the surprise of others, the mainstream media outlets that we scorned and that had scorned us, started to raid our editorial offices. The first I was aware of was the BAD film critic John Koch, who was hired for that same position at the august Boston Globe. (John and his wife Sharon remained my friends while I was in Cambridge.)

It took a few years more, but eventually the alternative papers became proving grounds for mainstream media jobs. Janet Maslin juggled gigs at Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, New Times and elsewhere even while she was still at the Phoenix. But shortly after Frank Rich was recruited by Time, Janet got the film critic position at Newsweek. When several years later she moved to the New York Times, she was replaced at Newsweek by the Real Paper’s critic, David Ansen, and shortly after that, Frank Rich became the chief drama critic of the Times. And so on, for decades.

Apart from considerations of experience and whatever qualified as qualifications, I didn’t especially want that kind of specialization, or what I perceived as the straitjacket of those institutions. I also doubted I could handle it.

I knew the path most suited to me was the one I was more or less on—of writing on various subjects for magazines until I hit on something I could write a book about. Or even if I was luckier, I might find a novel among my pages and plans.

But maybe I didn’t have the right skills for success. I probably didn’t have the right attitude either, for the world symbolized by Cambridge and New York and Hollywood. My attempts to make a life work must be individual and improvised: my alien’s tapdance.

My doubts were underlined by financial and professional realities. Towards the end of the year, my telephone story had been edited and scheduled for publication in a December issue of New Times, as “Fear of Phoning.” It’s interesting now to note how much of a love-hate relationship many people had with telephones even in the 70s—their intrusive demands, their phony-ness (it’s where the word comes from), how people talked on the phone and ignored the person standing there, etc. But reading it now, I recognize the people I interviewed and gave disguised names. Apart from expert testimony, many of the interviews were conducted in the Orson Welles bar, and several with Complex employees.

It’s interesting now to notice how the subject of these articles reflected aspects of my own alien-ness—for example as a Night Owl and telephone-phobic introvert—while practically pleading for the world to make a place for me.

But my future studies piece was in trouble, chiefly because my editor Frank Rich left New Times to become the film critic for Time Magazine—in those days still a powerful and prestigious position. A new editor was assigned to me, and we never really saw eye to eye on much of anything. My revisions, and revisions of those revisions, didn’t meet with anyone’s enthusiasm at the magazine. I could see the writing on the wall for the Blacklist piece as well, and it too was ultimately rejected.

Having devoted so much time to these pieces, I was behind in my bills and behind in my rent, and now with no active publishing relationships. I still had a little money coming in, but it would go fast—if I remained in Cambridge.

I can’t completely reconstruct my thoughts and feelings at that point. But my notebooks suggest that I felt too caught up in the emotional turmoil of others to deal with my own. Emotional noise combined with a strange loneliness. At this remove I can see how busy and complicated and depleting that year had been, especially in the lack of immediate results of all that energy and effort. It did not feel like the ordinary rhythm of ups and downs that it probably was, and there was no one to counsel me. But in any case I didn't feel I had the resources (financial and otherwise) to weather the storm.

So beyond the emotional confusion was the intuition that to move forward I needed to take a step back, conserve my resources, and be ready. After all, I could write anywhere, and travel from anywhere.

I’d been thinking about quitting Cambridge for some time, to the point of figuring out what to take and what to leave behind. Then I just decided to do it. I can’t say what role my mother’s death played in all this, or the letters that kept coming from family and friends after my two months back home, or even the time I spent there, but that was my rent-free option. My youngest sister Debbie and her new husband Jerry would drive up in a covered pickup truck to take me back to my family home in Greensburg.

I packed up, gave stuff away. I stripped my blue walls of the representations of my Cambridge life: the arts prints—Magritte, Picasso, Ernst, Klee, etc.—the clipped cartoons (mother and father observing their son at the typewriter as the mother says: “Good news! It’s not a novel. It’s economic theory”; another with a middle aged man in a suit telling his office secretary, “my tragedy is I joined the surrealist movement too late”), the poster of the Marx Brothers with a photo of Einstein, the drawing of the god Janus (who looks both ways, to the future and the past), movie stills, a photo of Kirk and Spock in the transporter room, a Paris cafe photo allegedly of Brigitte Bardot by Cartier Bresson, several child drawings, most of them by my niece Chrissy.

I left my excellent work table and my beautiful dark wood bed to friends, gathered my three cats and of course my books and records, and then suddenly I was gone, breathing out at the dark highway.

History of My Reading: I'm A Stranger Here Myself

2025-01-13T01:13:00.000-08:00

“And the roses of electricity still open

In the garden of my memory.”

Apollonaire

photo by Paula Rhodes 1974 or 5

At the end of March 1974, after I returned to my Cambridge apartment from my mother’s funeral and the eight weeks in Greensburg that preceded it, I started a new notebook.

On the first inside page I wrote: “Write of other worlds, not this one.” I didn’t attribute it, but it was (as only I knew) one of the last things my mother said to me, in the midst of a stream of consciousness goodnight.

I recorded my state of mind and the state of my affairs as April began. Though I had many acquaintances beyond my apartment’s walls, I was more alone within it than ever. My last housemate was moving out, to live with a new group of friends. My time was untethered by any particular responsibilities other than the flexible mealtimes of my cats. Various tensions from those weeks at the hospital and then the funeral (the slow motion loss, the guilty tedium, the sense of unreality in the midst of as real as it gets) were releasing, accompanied by unpredictable physical ups and (mostly) downs. Plenty of tensions remained. Yet I was not unhappy, I wrote--though too much was lost and was otherwise missing for happiness either.

I was still collecting unemployment checks for a few more months, and had some savings left, so I resolved to work hard on my college novel. I had worked out a plan and written about 80 pages the previous year, and now I would write to that plan—25 pages a week was my goal: 300 pages by my birthday at the end of June. Though that still would be a fraction of the plan.

I had plenty of doubts. Could I? Should I? Was I crazy to try, especially without support or encouragement of any kind? Could I find the necessary temperament, the energy combined with the stillness? What could I draw on, in this Cambridge of ambition and acquisition, of drive haunted by compromise, of ego and insecurity and the reflexes of angst, of feckless frenzy and rolling confusion?

These doubts were never really resolved and haunted me from time to time. At other times I was entirely absorbed in what I was doing.

I was buoyed a bit by a used copy of a book titled The Rise of the Novel by Ian Watt, originally published in the late 50s and kept in print by the University of California Press. It chronicled and analyzed the early English novel in the 18^th century, of Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Looking at it again now, I feel the same excitement at the birth of something new that was derived—and often improvised-- from many older sources, yet was particular to the time.

Among the characteristics Watt named as distinguishing the novel from other forms was especially relevant to my project: “…the novel, whose primary criterion was truth to individual experience… which is always unique and therefore new.” I was also encouraged to learn that Daniel Defoe had begun as a journalist, essentially writing his own periodical, including reporting on crimes, something else that was relatively new in his time.

Another characteristic of these early novels, Watt writes, is embedding the characters in a particular time and place. Fielding seems to have regularly consulted an almanac to keep tracks of days and dates, as well as external events such as the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. This is something I learned from James Joyce, and it was especially important for my college novel, given that 1965 was so different from 1967 as to be almost another planet.

Also important to me, perhaps indirectly but very strongly, were the books about early to mid 20^th century art in Europe, primarily in Paris. I had art books from Phoenix days and a few before that (mostly to do with Picasso.) Now in the many Cambridge bookstores I searched for books of text as well as reproductions. I often got them used or from bargain bins and hurt books tables. I was especially alert to volumes in the paperback series Documents of 20^th Century Art: Dore Ashton’s book on Picasso, the memoir of a major modern art deader in Paris, dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, Apollonaire on Art and a volume on Italian Futurism. Dada and Futurism led me to French Surrealism, which had its literary expressions and tradition.

Though the artist I was most drawn to—Magritte—worked later and not in Paris, it was that sense of Paris as a willing home to an artistic community that became important to me, especially when cobbled together with my previous reading of Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s time there, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and the Paris of Henry Miller. Janet Flanner’s collection of her New Yorker “Letter From Paris” columns of the 1920s onward, Paris Is Yesterday, had recently been published in paperback. (I had Suzi Gablik’s groundbreaking book on Magritte as well.) I also obtained Andre Breton's surrealist novel, Nadja; I wanted to like it more than I did.

This became my dream community, superimposed on the cafes, bookstores, newsstands and art print outlets of Cambridge. At the same time I was absorbing the poetry of Paul Eluard and Apollonaire, who influenced the verse I was still writing.

My identification with this place and period was both vindicated and greatly strengthened when I came upon the name of Gino Severini, as a painter and theorist of Italian Futurism. When I mentioned him to my grandmother, she immediately recalled a conversation she’d overheard many years before, among her husband’s Severini relatives, about the black sheep of the family who had run away to Paris to become a bum. The time fit pretty exactly, and a penniless painter, even with famous friends (including Picasso and Apollonaire) and future fame himself, would fit the bill as a bum.

Now it seemed I had blood in the game. I visited the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan (on a press pass) every time I was in New York. Besides buying one of the few books on Futurism then (derived from one of their exhibitions) I could see several Severini paintings, including the largest and most famous: Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Bal Tabarin.

It was about this time that I added Severini to my byline name (though at first only to my “literary” efforts), mostly to honor my mother and her family—for that had always been more the family than my father’s—but I was also linking myself to Gino. When years later I read his autobiographical books, I felt even stronger resonance.

This—along with writing poems and plays, writing songs and playing music—constituted my creative life. I pursued possibilities to extend it, by going through the laborious process of applying for fellowships (I recall going to the Harvard Square Xerox place to pick up my bound manuscript for the annual Massachusetts Arts and Humanities Foundation grants, and seeing under the harsh florescent light the stacks of other applying manuscripts the night before deadline) as well as sending out poems and the occasional story: except for a single prose poem published in a local literary magazine, without success.

But I also pursued opportunities in the areas I had established some credits, a kind of journalism. I knew little of career-building, though I was soon to see how it could work as I watched friends and former colleagues swiftly ascend to the heights, but I did intuit (rightly or wrongly) one path I might follow: from writing for city weekly periodicals to national magazines, and then to book contracts.

By this time I was mostly trying to write for magazines. I had written for Creem (I have an undated letter from the legendary Lester Bangs, probably from the previous year, encouraging me to re-start my relationship there. “I think you’re one of the best writers who has appeared in this magazine,” he wrote. I don’t think anything came of this, though I’m not sure why.)

But I had also entered the big time magazine world with an assignment from Esquire in 1972. I’d been called by a young editor there named John Lombardi, who liked something I’d written for Creem (I’m guessing it was my review of the early apocalyptic movie Omega Man starring Charleton Heston) and he probably found me through its editor, Dave Marsh. He wanted me to research and write a story for Esquire’s annual college issue on one of Harvard’s better known dorms, Adams House, that was now co-ed (radical for the time), and especially the rumor that their swimming pool included nude bathing. Without ever actually witnessing such an event, I did some interviews (yes, they said, but the nude swimming was no big deal), wrote the story and it was published.

After I left the Phoenix in 1973, I learned from Dave Marsh that Lombardi had moved to Oui Magazine, a new glossy from Playboy, and they were assigning. I proposed a story on a singles cruise that advertised itself as employing computer matching, a hot trend of the time. He assigned it, and off I went that December.

It turned out to be mostly bogus: the computer matching was a fraud (so much so that the guy doing mine offered to “hand select” anyone who’d caught my eye) and the singles theme hadn’t filled the boat, so there were families as well. But by the time I realized this, we were on the water and I was trapped for the week. We hit rough seas in a relatively small ship and this absurd floating imprisonment became a sickening one as well. Still, I did get paid to visit Puerto Rico and St. Thomas-- for an hour each, but a memorable hour. I wrote the story but in early 1974 the magazine had wisely passed on publishing it.

In addition to my excesses in response to the Phoenix and other separations in 1973, I was walking a lot more and lost weight I’d acquired from hurried restaurant meals, helped no doubt by the fact that for the first time I was dependent on my own cooking. I also quit smoking, which set off a series of revelations.

I discovered I was less addicted than habituated, so I was able to wean myself off cigarettes by concentrating on my primary smoking circumstances. So instead of a cigarette next to the typewriter when I wrote, I kept a bowl of popcorn. To accompany drinking, I chewed gum, or on Twizzler-type licorice. That these were awkward substitutes was part of the plan. I could soon do without them, though I kept the popcorn for awhile.

In social situations I especially noticed the way smoking cigarettes became part of people’s conversational style—the pauses for inhaling, the cigarette itself “as a baton at the end of our gestures.”

So while I was in Greensburg those eight weeks, I wrote an article about quitting smoking and these observations, and sent it out. By spring it had been rejected everywhere. The dependence of magazines then on the revenue from cigarette advertising I’m sure had nothing to do with it. But this attempt did start something in my professional life: the impetus for an article was my own experience.

My most promising new contact probably came through Janet Maslin, friend and former colleague at the Phoenix, who had been spreading her wings beyond that paper when I was editing there. Now she was the regular music columnist at a new magazine in New York called New Times (unaffiliated in any way with publications of that name since.) She was pals with the film reviewer who also was an editor at the magazine, Frank Rich. She suggested I get in touch with him—perhaps to review books. I did, and in February I had heard back. They had more book reviewers than books to review, he said, but he encouraged me to send article ideas. I did but with no success yet that spring.

So while I continued to write pieces for the Real Paper locally for a little income (and go through hell to get paid) I had little excuse not to organize my life around writing those 300 pages of fiction.

And so I did—with days of lethargy and nights of elation, 18 hour binges of work and sleep, with stretches of numb despair and high anxiety. But as the clock struck midnight on June 30, 1978—my 28^th birthday—I had produced those 300 pages, or near enough.

I recorded this in that blue notebook while sitting in the place that had become the center of my life outside my apartment: the Orson Welles Complex, specifically this time, the Orson Welles Cinema lobby.

I could say that the three overlapping, interacting, competitive, conflicting and symbiotic parts of my life were creative, professional and personal. I’m not going into much detail about the particularly personal here, but it’s fair to say that significant aspects of all three did their dance at the Orson Welles Complex, especially in these years.

When I first arrived in Cambridge in 1970, the Welles was a single-screen cinema on Mass Ave between Harvard and Central Squares. Cinema blossomed in those early to mid 1970s, with the availability of foreign films, the rediscovery (partly through the enthusiasm of French New Wave directors) of past decades of American films, a surge in creative Hollywood films and a growing recognition of film as art. There was a surge as well in film schools and courses (though I didn’t know it at the time, the Orson Welles itself had a film school.)

My devotion was guaranteed in that spring of 1970 when as part of a Godard retrospective, I saw Pierrot Le Fou three times, including the last screening in a mostly empty theatre with only hardcore fantatics, accompanied by the aroma of Gaulloises.

A few years later—certainly by 1973—the Welles Cinema expanded to three screens, descending in auditorium size but not in quality of viewing. This was also still the era of the double feature, except for some first run theatres. So on any given day, there were six movies playing at the Welles. At its height, on Saturdays with morning screenings and midnight shows, there might be ten.

So for the first five years of the 1970s, I had a cinema experience and film education that is unimaginable now, just as it would have been unlikely if not impossible before. I saw probably hundreds of good if not pristine prints of a wide variety of movies, well-projected, on big movie screens. I saw new movies there, though not the same ones at the Boston commercial chain theatres. More like Lucia, a Cuban film, or The Harder They Come, the Jimmy Cliff movie from Jamaica that introduced reggae music to many, which ran at the Welles for a year or so.

The Welles was one of four movie theatres in Cambridge, all of them showing foreign films at least some of the time. But the Welles had the most films, especially in organized retrospectives. It was mostly there that I saw almost all of Truffaut and Godard released to that point, a lot of Bergman, Fellini, Renoir, Kurasawa, and of course Orson Welles. Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, Orpheus, Blood of the Poet. Hitchcock’s early British films, Chaplin from The Gold Rush to The Great Dictator, City Lights, Modern Times and Limelight (which had been banned until 1972.)

I saw what was available of the astonishing early French filmmaker Abel Gance, the definition of innovator and the avante garde, including a version of Napoleon (with some scenes split into three screens) and the 1938 version of the antiwar J’Accuse, much of it shot in World War I, featuring a harrowing scene of men who were really about to go into battle with many likely to die, essentially playing their own ghosts. I believe there was a documentary on him as well, perhaps the 1968 The Charm of Dynamite.

Black Orpheus, The Blue Angel, Rene Clement’s Forbidden Games, Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart, De Sica’s Umberto D. Wuthering Heights, The African Queen, Borsalino, Bicycle Thief, Savage Messiah, Straw Dogs.

There were Bogart, Garbo and Brando retrospectives, the classic Cary Grant and Kate Hepburn comedies, and in the full flower of their 1970s revival, all the Marx Brothers movies except their first, The Coconuts, not yet available then. There were comedy festivals, one which included Richard Lester’s non-Beatles movies, The Knack, the surreal How I Won the War, and the even more surreal The Bed-Sitting Room.

Gena Rowlands in Faces

Newer filmmakers were also featured: the early films of John Cassavetes (Shadows, Faces, Husbands) and Brian DePalma (the eminently weird Hi Mom and Greetings, starring a very young Robert De Niro, as well as his 1974 Phantom of the Paradise.) I saw the elder Robert Downey’s wicked comedy Putney Swope there, and the original X-rated Flesh Gordon. Features were often accompanied by contemporary short films, and there were programs of silent movies, including Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

Stan Vanderbeek was one of the experimental filmmakers who came to show and talk about their work. Robert Altman was hot in the 70s—I saw The Long Goodbye and McCabe & Mrs. Miller there. I remember documentaries on and starring Henry Miller (The Henry Miller Odyssey) and Anais Nin (Anais Nin Observed.) And I’ll never forget seeing Night of the Living Dead for the first time there, and hearing for the first time in any theatre the screams of adults watching it.

As part of my cinema enthusiasm, and especially under the influence of Truffaut and Godard, who always showed books and characters reading in their films, I started collecting film books, in the same way as the art books. I was drawn mostly to books on the French New Waves and its directors, but there was a lot of other writing on film at the time.

I particularly collected book versions of film scripts, which often included stills from the film, and sometimes interviews and criticism. Most of these were in the Modern Film Scripts series, but there were others. Bergman’s and Truffaut’s filmscripts in particular became available in hardback and paperback editions. I saw these books for the first time at the f-Stop camera store that was attached to the Welles for awhile.

Though we had the privilege of seeing these films on the big screen, we could only see them when the cinemas exhibited them—there was no video of any kind, and foreign films were rarely on TV, almost never with subtitles instead of dubbing. So these script books were all I could keep. Now with so much dependence on streaming and the disappearance of art film cinemas and video stores, when once again most of these movies aren’t readily available, these books are again all I have of them, unless I have the DVD or they are on YouTube.

I was writing and editing at the Phoenix when I met Larry Jackson, manager of the Cinema and the one who selected the movies shown. Later he was the manager of the entire Complex, but still programmed the films. (Martha Pinson succeeded him as manager before she, too, moved to the administrative offices upstairs as publicity director, and Mary Galloway took over.)

me at the typewriter some years later in that t-shirt.
Photo by Elizabeth Offner.

While at the Phoenix I'd written about some of the movies, and I especially recall writing a feature about a science fiction mini-festival, which I headlined “It Came From the Orson Welles.” Larry liked that so much that it put it on a t-shirt. In 1976 he instituted an annual science fiction marathon, using that phrase as its title. It continued for 11 years at the Welles, and afterwards at other Boston area theatres apparently to this day.

By the time I left the Phoenix we’d become friends, and he continued to include me in Welles film activities. For instance, in 1974 I got to hang around “backstage” with Peter Bogdonavich and Cybil Shepherd when they introduced their film version of Henry James’ Daisy Miller, and accepted some semi-silly award from Harvard students. I saw fame from a different perspective: both of them were near-sighted, so the crowds around them were mostly noise and a blur. I thought it was admirable how they could keep their composure.

Orson Welles and Larry Jackson, 1976?

I would tag along with Larry and other film friends to screenings elsewhere in Boston, featuring question and answer sessions with the filmmaker. At one such university event, Larry leaned over to me and said, “There’s a lot of film students here. One of them will ask what the shooting ratio was.” Shooting ratio is the number of film feet shot vs. the number used. Sure enough, the question was soon asked.

Another of these forays however gave me one of the greatest cinematic experiences of my life: a 1974 screening, probably at Boston University on a portable screen, of the as-yet unreleased new Cassavettes film A Woman Under the Influence, starring Gena Rowlands in a transcendent, bravura performance (which eventually led to an Oscar nomination.)

The lights came up after this very powerful film to show Rowlands and Cassavettes standing in front of the screen. For a mind-bending moment it seemed she had just stepped out of the movie. I asked a question from the crowd, struggling with emotion, and I saw the empathy in Rowlands’ eyes. Afterwards, on the sidewalk outside, I met them both.

Martha Pinson at the snacks counter

Seeing films became an obsession. When I wasn’t watching I was sitting in the Orson Welles Cinema lobby, living on coffee, popcorn and licorice, sometimes chatting with theatre staff, which included young John Semper, Manny Duran, Murphy Birdsall in the box office, as well as Mary and Martha. John Rossi was usually there, but he seemed to be in a perennially bad mood so I kept my distance. (Rossi was nevertheless mostly responsible for a unique feature of the Welles: a mimeographed sheet for nearly every movie, with full credits and excerpts from interviews and critiques. He didn’t seem to think much of me, but he did include a long excerpt from one of my reviews.)

Most often I was just drinking coffee and starring off into space or scribbling in my notebook, as I was at the clock struck twelve, inaugurating my 28^th birthday.

I was there so often that Mary or Manny would enlist me to help take tickets when several movies were starting at the same time. My conversations upstairs with Larry included my suggestions for films to program (my greatest triumph: the double bill of Morgan! and Charlie Bubbles, two of my idiosyncratic favorites of the 1960s British New Wave) and eventually led to becoming the co-editor of the program book for the 1974 Boston Film Festival there.

I was not the only one to be obsessed with film—the cultural moment might be indicated by the fact that Jon Landau gave up editing the record review section of Rolling Stone and writing about music there, to become its film critic. I recall at least one movie we saw together at the Welles—it was a Welles in fact. He claimed to have seen 300 movies in one year. Thinking about it, I probably came close. I did have it bad. One Saturday, starting with the morning show at the Welles, I saw 10 movies in one day, including a few on television… And then I was sick in bed for a week.

By late fall in 1970, the Orson Welles Restaurant opened. It seems to me the bar on the level above it didn’t open until some time later. In any case, when I wasn’t at the Cinema, I was opening the thick wooden doors to the bar, which wrapped around and looked down on the restaurant below street level. I ate at the Restaurant a few times—almost always the duck with orange sauce—but that was for special occasions. If I ate there it was in the bar, where they served from the lunch and dessert menus. Together the cinemas, the restaurant and the bar comprised the Orson Welles Complex.

The social life of film and the Welles continued there. In addition to Larry Jackson and Terry Corey, who also worked upstairs, I met other film buffs, some of whom were engaged in filmmaking. I even ran into David Axlerod, who started me on my cinematic journey with the Cinema Club at Knox College; he was in Boston for day or two, so naturally he stopped by the Welles.

David Helpern, Jr. Photo by Paula Rhodes

Among the local filmmakers I met was one of the more successful at that point: David Helpern, Jr., who became one of my closest friends of my post-Phoenix days in Cambridge. He introduced me to others, including filmmaker and photographer Paula Rhodes.

David had just finished a one hour documentary film on director Nicholas Ray, whose most famous films included Rebel Without A Cause, Johnny Guitar and two Bogart films, In A Lonely Place and Knock On Any Door. It was called I’m A Stranger Here Myself, which the documentary noted was what Ray said was the working title of all of his films, and appears as a line in Johnny Guitar.

Nicholas Ray had a tumultuous and colorful career, often at odds with Hollywood, but his movies were admired by film buffs, particularly the critics and directors of the French New Wave (a short interview with Francois Truffaut appears in David’s film.)

David had an even longer history with the Orson Welles Cinema than I, having been (I believe) both a student and teacher in its film school. (He was later co-editor with me of the 1974 film festival program.) He involved several people from the Welles in making his film, including Murphy Birdsall (production assistant), and he acknowledged Larry Jackson, John Rossi and the Welles in general in the credits. His producer was Jim Gutman, who had been the chief administrator of the film school.

To introduce his film, he got Nicolas Ray himself to spend a few days in Boston. At the time Ray had been teaching at what was then Harpur College (where my ex-prof William Spanos taught), and is now the State College of New York at Binghamton. Much of the documentary follows Ray as he works with students on making an actual film, part of which was later shown at Cannes.

David invited me to tag along with him and Nick Ray, so I was present for all his public events, his radio interview, and shared a couple of meals with him. (One evening he and I were the last to leave the table. At the time, the price of sugar at the grocery store was very high, so as we left I pocketed a few of the small bags of sugar at the table. He was amused by this, and pocketed some himself.)

Ray was known as an especially sensitive director (he had a close working relationship with James Dean) and a sensitive man. His talks were sometimes halting, but concise and articulate. Hearing him speak softly about the ideals of filmmaking and art in general to a scattering of attendees after a very late screening in the Welles’ smallest theatre was almost a religious experience.

I scribbled down one line: “Wherever you go in the world, the principal concern is ‘Who am I? Where am I? Why am I?’ We need to find ways to say hello to each other and look one another in the eye. To dream and try things.”

He was 63 but seemed older, very weathered, but with a corona of white hair and the remnants of a noble face. (He’d started as an actor, and would soon appear in Wim Wender’s film, The American Friend.) He smoked incessantly, but what I didn’t know is that he was struggling with, or in the grips of alcoholism and drug dependence. A few years later he was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. He died five years after his days in Cambridge.

But the Orson Welles bar was more than a hangout for film buffs and those engaged somehow in movies, with ambitions for some sort of film career. It was presided over by a cadre of waitresses, the most beautiful young women I’d ever seen in one place, and they were there every night. I got to know some of them to some extent, so Buffy, Celine, Emily, Emily, Kathy, Laurie, Lori, Marie, Martha, Teri and others were my ambiguous Muses.

Cambridge was deep in the throes of absorbing new mores and conditions brought on by the early 1970s women’s movement, known then as women’s lib. I had many conversations with other young men there—some of them complete strangers—about the confusions and ironies arising from that new consciousness, which had become for some men a nearly paralyzing self-consciousness. We noted for example that while we were supposed to be getting in touch with our feminine side, we were watching some of the women of the Welles going off with men on motorcycles.

Meanwhile my professional life was reviving somewhat. In August I got a letter from Frank Rich responding favorably to an article idea for New Times, and book review assignments from Suzanne Mantell at the new Harper’s Bookletter, a publication of Harper’s Magazine.

My New Times idea resulted from a report I must have stumbled on, of research that found a biological basis for why some people like to stay up late, as I did, and it was a revelation. The majority of people are born Larks, who are energetic early and then fade; a minority are Owls, whose body temperature rises slowly, so full energy doesn’t arrive until later. I fit the Owl profile exactly—so it wasn’t a character defect but a matter of biorhythms.

It got me thinking about other elements of the built environment that affect people but aren’t recognized as having effects, like lighting and temperature. I might well have been thinking of my response to the awful lighting in the hospital where I spent so much time, and how my father kept the house heated too high for my comfort that winter. Relating all this to people’s behavior and self-image, especially in the workplace, could be the basis for an article. I don’t recall if I had to write a formal proposal but I eventually got the assignment.

I did maybe a half dozen reviews for Harper’s Bookletter, the most notable being a plea to get Paul Shepard’s Man in the Landscape back in print. I complained—as I often did, and would again--that the editing had taken out my writing voice.

I don’t think the Bookletter lasted very long, but I have kept one with Lewis Lapham’s cover essay on “The Pleasures of Reading.” He was then the editor of Harper's. “On first opening a book I listen for the sound of the human voice,” it begins. "Most books don’t have it, but there are still so many that do." It’s a long and lovely essay; I read Lapham every month in Harper’s as well as some of his books. I met him briefly in his Harper’s office in the 1980s, and he was a friendly generous and open man as well as a writer always worth reading.

Books I was reading other than those I was paid to read evidently (from notes) included: Don DeLillo’s first novel Americana; a selection of Kafka short stories, and Conversations with Kafka by Gustav Janouch; a novel I loved entitled Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino, which I picked up off the remainder table at Reading International. I wrote Sorrentino to express my admiration. He wrote a gracious letter in return, urging me to keep writing despite the difficulties.

Also that year, Neil Young came to the Orson Welles with his first movie, Journey Through the Past. I saw it at the press screening, and when the two weeklies panned it, I wrote a letter to the editor to both papers. They were both music critics, and suggested Young stay in his lane. I suggested they both do the same, for it had cinematic qualities, however unconventional, that they failed to mention. I praised the cinematography and especially the sound, and called it authentic and surprising. I recall Larry Jackson saying that I was the only writer who understood the film.

But they carried the conventional wisdom, and today it’s known mostly for the concert footage, especially from Buffalo Springfield, but there are sequences with Hollywood actors and one very visual scene that came directly from one of the director’s dreams.

During the screening I sat in the aisle seat of the third row, and I could see Carrie Snodgress, Young’s partner at the time, and their two year old son Zeke standing near the side curtain by the stage and the screen. I was absorbed in watching the movie when I felt a tug on the fringe of my jacket. I looked down to see Zeke, with Carrie close behind him, taking him away.

I was wearing my suede jacket with the fringe—I’d always wanted a fringe jacket like those I’d admired on The Range Rider and other childhood TV heroes, though this one had the added advantage of thick fleece lining against the Massachusetts cold. Neil Young wore a more classic fringe jacket in some album photos. That’s what I immediately thought of at the time—that Zeke had seen the fringe jacket and headed straight for it.

Neil Young, Larry Jackson and
Manny Duran in the OW lobby

I met Neil Young in the theatre lobby (and found myself the center of some buzz when I was mistaken for Graham Nash) and later, looking for Larry in the Restaurant, I found him at a long table finishing dinner with Young and his entourage. Larry invited me to sit down. At some point I said to Young I’d heard him live several times and I hoped he’d make another live album. He shrugged and said, how many times can you do “Southern Man?” I said I was thinking more of “The Loner,” a song from his first album that I’d heard lived in Boston. I loved that song: "He's the perfect stranger, like a cross of himself and a fox. He's a feeling arranger and a changer of the way he talks. He's the unforeseen danger, the keeper of the keys to the locks. Know when you see him/nothing can free him/step aside/open wide, he's the loner."

“The Loner,” he said, considering it. He soon did release another live album, and “The Loner” was on it.

After dinner, I was among the party that piled in a car or two and headed up the coast to a roadhouse bar where a local band was playing. Again we sat around a long table, now drinking beer. I somehow wound up playing pool with Neil Young, a game I know nothing about except that, in my experience, a certain reckless confidence works wonders. So it was this time, and I won (though really, only because he scratched.)

We were still there when the band ended their final set, and one of Neil’s guys told them that Neil would like to jam. They refused. The guy put a $50 bill on the drumhead as they were packing up, but the answer was still no. For some reason they gave up the chance to jam with Neil Young (maybe they were pissed that we made noise during their sets), and we lost the opportunity to hear him so close up.

We headed for the car and the long drive back in the dark. On the way, Neil spotted a lighted cross on a hill or atop a church and said that kind of thing freaked him out. Crosses were evident in his movie, too, especially as carried by the Klan. Back in Cambridge the Welles people and I were dropped off in front of the Cinema. I tried saying goodbye to Young but he was glowering straight ahead, somewhere else entirely.

I did have another rock and roll moment, though it was more in the nature of a non-encounter. Janet Maslin invited me to grab a sandwich with her and then go to the Bonnie Raitt concert at the Harvard Square Theatre. We ate somewhere in Harvard Square, and she explained that her husband Jon Landau was meeting with the opening act, a band starting to make some noise fronted by a guy named Bruce Springsteen. He was frustrated because he felt their first couple of albums, which didn't sell well, had been badly produced, and Jon had helped make Jackson Browne a star by producing his breakout album. But my conversation with Janet was so irritating and exhausting that I decided to just go home. I'd seen Bonnie Raitt several times so I thought it was no big loss.

A few days later the Real Paper published Jon Landau's column that began with the most famous words in rock critic history: "I have seen the future of rock and roll, and it is Bruce Springsteen." Some of the column was personal and heartfelt, but it was that sentence--bannered on ads--that has lived on. Landau's prophesy was a bit self-fulfilling, in that he did produce Springsteen's breakout album, Born to Run, and later became his manager. It would be several years before I saw Springsteen live, at a theatre in Pittsburgh, and it was amazing. But I missed my chance to be present for the concert that made rock history.

I returned to Greensburg in August for the wedding of my sister Debbie and Jerry Boice. Their reception happened to be on the evening of my high school’s 10^th anniversary class reunion. So with two of my Central Catholic friends, Clayton and his wife Joyce, who were also at the reception, I headed a short distance down the highway to check out the free gathering in the bar of the restaurant where the reunion dinner would occur. Since I had dated Joyce in high school, she reveled in the idea that people would be wondering which of us she was married to.

I saw that the cheerleaders etc. of our class were now sleek married women, and most of the guys were already overweight. I spotted one former friend who’d been timid and socially backward who was now a prestigious professor with that ageless middle-aged bearded look of the academic, standing aloof in the shadows, long drink in hand. We didn’t stay long.

When I got back to Cambridge I found that my apartment had been broken into. Among the stolen items were various stereo components and, adding insult to injury, my typewriter.

I continued to be absorbed working on the novel, completing another two or three hundred pages of first draft by the end of the year. But money was getting tight. So I tried to concentrate on paying work.

In late fall I was researching the Larks and Owls article for New Times, finding relevant research and professional sources to talk to. Except for the ensuing phone interviews, I worked in the Widener Library at Harvard, with breaks at Harvard Square cafes. Once at my favorite Patisserie (as I recorded in a notebook), I could overhear two conversations at nearby tables—a couple was talking about places they’d lived, while two women were discussing scientific research articles. One person at each table said “Berkeley” at exactly the same time.

I drafted a letter about a possible job to a friend who’d recently been hired at Rolling Stone—possibly the most pathetic job-hunting letter ever written, although I've had a few nearly its equal. “I need money, but I’m not up for another long-term suicide mission like the Phoenix.” I revised it a few times but to no avail.

In November, I looked out “into the blue twilight of Columbia Street on Thanksgiving afternoon. Little traffic, a few people in the street. Bare branches, old houses; it is, in repose, a European street.” In fact even more international—along its lengths were new residents like the Portuguese speakers, holdover Irish, Jamaicans, educated young whites still experimenting and living on the margins.

me and my shadow. Photo by Paula Rhodes

I noted the talismans of my blue rooms (teal bedroom and reading room, lighter blue study)--my "alchemist den": Magritte, Cezanne, Picasso, Klee, Gris, Matisse, Van Gogh, Vermeer repros from the Harvard Coop on the walls, a cave painting, photo of a Turkish sculptural head, photos of Groucho, Paul Eluard, George Harrison…a Cartier-Bresson photo of Brigitte Bardot or a lookalike at a café, photo of a Liverpool girl in a graveyard.

On the mantle photos of my mother and sisters, a Gino Severini card, a program from my college play. In the study, two photos of me—one as a small boy, one in college, both with the same gesture; a Marx Brother poster with an Einstein photo interposed as the fourth brother, photos of Catherine Deneuve, Truffaut, Vanessa Redgrave. “Books, colors, music, some furry animals, some food in the kitchen and a tub for hot baths. My home.”

“I understand what I have to do,” I wrote. “Pay my bills to keep my blue rooms, the nice heat, the nice hot water, the electricity for the music, the nice food. I will be commercial. I will be journalistic. I will be a cross of myself and a fox.”

History of My Reading: Bluebird of Nothingness

2024-11-29T21:07:00.007-08:00

Flora Severini high school graduation photo 1938 from a local newspaper

In late January 1974 my father called me in Cambridge to say my mother was in the hospital again and I should come home as soon as I could. I did. She had passed the five -year mark that was supposed to indicate she was safe from cancer’s recurrence, but nevertheless it had returned.

She was in a hospital in Pittsburgh for evaluation and treatment, but basically because of her alarming condition. I soon learned that when my father had called, he’d been told she might not last the night. When I got there, she was out of immediate danger but was being given morphine for her severe pain. When she was conscious she talked a great deal, at times abruptly and irrationally, so that I barely recognized her. But at other times she spoke more calmly, with such conviction that even her strangest insights were compelling.

The one instance I recall was her insistence that there was an essential piece of information in the work of Christopher Morley, and that a certain high school classmate would know what it was. She pleaded with me to search it out. So even as I knew how crazy it was I found this classmate from Youngwood High School in the late 1930s and called her from a pay phone near the hospital. Of course she didn’t know anything but that they had both liked Morley’s writing.

Morley was a prolific and well-known American journalist, humorist, essayist, poet and novelist from the 1920s through the 40s. I don’t recall my mother mentioning him before, but I now surmise that his 1939-1940 best-selling novel Kitty Foyle (later a popular dramatic film starring Ginger Rodgers) was something she would have read. It was about the trials of a young working class woman from a small town who joined the new generation of overworked and underpaid office workers, and had romantic—and tragic--misadventures in confronting the biases of the wealthy ruling class.

It's also possible that she read a much earlier novel of Morley's called The Haunted Bookshop. This gently amusing novel is notable for two features: it champions books and reading, and it offers complex emotional responses to World War I, the war in which her father participated.

Flora Severini, my mother, grew up in a small town in an immigrant family of modest means, graduated high school in 1938, and did some subsequent secretarial and clerical work, among other jobs before her marriage. (If she'd read this book then, she would have seen an early reference to a new expression: the "rat-race.") As mentioned before, she always had books on display in her homes, not typical in the homes of everyone else we knew. But what she remembered about Morley in the hospital, if anything real, remained a mystery.

After a few days she had improved enough that she was taken off morphine and given other medication for pain. But the doctors also concluded that further treatment of the disease itself was useless. She was taken to Westmoreland Hospital in our hometown of Greensburg. She had been employed by that hospital for more than a decade, beginning when I was around 11 years old. She’d worked her way up from a night shift clerk to an administrator and head of her department. Though she hadn’t worked there for several years due to her illness, she was known and loved there.

Flora's First Communion photo

She was given a private room, the last at the end of a corridor on an upper floor. Across from her room was a visitors’ lounge. Much of the time our family had it to ourselves. Only a few of us could be in my mother’s room at a time. Besides myself, there was my father and my sisters, Kathy and Debbie, joined many times by Kathy’s six year old daughter Chrissy, Debbie’s boyfriend Jerry, Kathy’s boyfriend Chad. My uncle Carl, Flora’s younger brother came often from his job in Pittsburgh or his home in Murrysville, and eventually her younger sister Antoinette, who taught school in Maryland, came for the duration. My grandmother was nearly always there. Other relatives who lived in the area dropped by, as did Flora’s friends, especially those who worked with her at the hospital.

Though her pain meds were less intense, my mother struggled with their effects. At times she was lucid but dreamy. Her bed faced a large window, and I remember one day when we watched fast moving clouds over Seton Hill College, high on a distant hill. The school was built around the last remnants of what had been the most elaborate dwelling in Greensburg, built by a wealthy industrialist. According to Andrew Carnegie, it was where he saw his first private library as a young railroad employee, and was inspired to someday build his own.

Seen from the south, the college now was a collection of massive stone and brick buildings, replete with spires and turrets. That day she said it reminded her of Wuthering Heights. I said that when I was younger, and gazing out at it from the living room picture window in our house on a different hill, I used to imagine it as a castle, and associated it with Robin Hood.

(In fact my mother and I had seen it from a much closer vantage point in our first home together in the late 40s, from an attic apartment on College Avenue, at the foot of that long hill.)

Flora at 16. On the back she'd
written "The Dreamer"

There were moments I found my mother’s dreamy talk, with its sudden associations, its quick and at times surreal changes and non sequiturs (she once referred to “the letter Pete”) much more comfortable than what I was seeing and hearing around me. The daily incongruities, the grotesque contrasts, set to the cheerful inanities from the television; the strained conversations and hospital absurdities, were hard to take.

But both the pain meds and the pain played havoc with her lucidity. She got to the point that she (briefly) refused to eat, because she said she didn’t want to wake up one more day and not know where she was.

For the roughly eight weeks I was there, I lived in the family home. I’d been there in November and most recently at Christmas. For some reason I had recorded the meal my mother made me the night before I started back to Cambridge: a hot turkey sandwich, mashed potatoes and gravy, and corn--probably made from Christmas leftovers. It would turn out to be the last meal she made me, out of many.

I recently found the last letter she wrote me, and the last letter I wrote her, both from that early January after I'd returned to Cambridge. She was enjoying the parakeet named Nikki that someone evidently gave her for Christmas (I have no memory of this), keeping her company in her daytimes alone. She wrote that it was wonderful having me home. I wrote back that I enjoyed being there with her, and that I noticed and appreciated the extra efforts she made for me, even if I didn't always say so at the time. I apparently knew she was seeing the doctor soon, and wrote I hope the holidays didn't tire her too much. It's good to have evidence now that we were on good terms then, and that her last Christmas and New Year's were good ones.

Now back in Greensburg, I went to the hospital every day, sometimes with my father but often on my own. It wasn’t far: I could see it—and had seen it most of my life—from that same picture window. Our house was on a hill just outside the city limits, and the hospital was on the next hill within the city itself. So now I often walked to the hospital, on very familiar streets.

I walked down along the West Newton Road to Hamilton Avenue, facing the corner where, as the first-born child, I’d waited with my mother for the green Hamilton-Stanton bus to downtown. As I crossed Hamilton, a few blocks to my right was the building where I’d first gone to school—it was called Sacred Heart then. It had been built when my mother was a girl, living close by, though she was already going to the nearest public school.

If I chose to walk on Hamilton along its upward slope, I passed houses where schoolmates had lived, and the church rectory. Down an alley was the old church where I’d had my First Communion and Confirmation, and where I’d served Mass on many early weekday mornings as well as Sundays. This was likely the first church my grandparents and my mother had attended in their New World.

Near the crest of the hill at Pittsburgh Street was the house where some Severini relatives still lived. In the 1920s it was where my grandparents and mother first lived in America. Looking ahead to where Hamilton terminated, I could see the corner that once hosted a pizza place, where as a young adolescent I played the nickel jukebox and mourned the sudden early death of Buddy Holly.

Pittsburgh St. approach to Westmoreland Hospital

Up the steep hill of Pittsburgh Street—again passing family homes of high school classmates—was the entrance of Westmoreland Hospital, where I’d been born. But it was now connected to a newer, taller building, and was at least twice the size in 1974 as it had been in 1946.

Or if I wanted the shorter way I might come at it from behind by walking straight up West Newton St. toward downtown, as I had countless times, carrying a baseball glove or books to return to the library, or 25 cents for the Saturday afternoon movies plus a nickel for a box of Dots or Root Beer Barrels. But this time I would cut across on side streets to the hospital parking lot.

I was there at all hours and often walked home late at night, reacquainting myself with a sky full of stars that had been hidden from me in Cambridge. Or seeing those old streets from the other side of dawn. I enjoyed these walks, especially returning home. Even if the air was cold and damp it was better than the stale florescent blankness inside the hospital. Occasionally I would escape for a few minutes outside, just to feel the rare winter sun on my face, and be assured it was still there.

I kept irregular hours and slept in spurts or great chunks. Once in mid-March after falling asleep just after midnight I awoke at 2 a.m. in the silent house, and looked out the picture window into the now snowy night. Through snowflakes I saw the white street lights, the green light down at the crossroads, the lit dome of the Court House, the Cathedral obscured by snow and trees. I saw a township truck with sand for the roads stuck on my street, its yellow light turning and its wheels whining.

Flora at the 1939 New York World's Fair

At first I did get away from the hospital at times, to escape the threatening tedium and persistent overload, and absorbing some sense of Greensburg now, where the late 60s I had left behind were still making waves. I recall once being in an unfamiliar bar in a familiar oddly shaped building--when it was new, it was the hip new food place eatery on Otterman Street where my father took me for hot chocolate after my Confirmation. Now it featured drinks and a live rock band, and I remember standing too close to a guitar speaker, the music burning through me.

Later I couldn’t stray far from my mother’s room, but I recall once feeling so stir-crazy that I called my old friend Clayton and extracted him from his family dinner to sit with me in a restaurant near the hospital. Once I escaped by myself up to Pennsylvania Avenue to a movie theatre, but alerted the manager that I might get a phone call from the hospital, and I sat at the end of the aisle at the back. I don’t remember what was playing.

By early March, some remaining Cambridge and Boston Phoenix friends had learned from my housemate where I was and why, and I got a few letters. Housemate Andrea herself wrote about house matters but also gossip. I got Phoenix and “poetry biz” gossip from Celia Gilbert, and Janet Maslin wrote about hosting Joni Mitchell when she was in Boston for a concert. She even went bowling with her and her traveling entourage. Joni’s team always won, she reported: she had been on her high school bowling team and she had skills.

As this is ostensibly a series about my reading, it is worth recording that splayed on a plastic cushioned chair in the small narrow visitors lounge, or eating countless toasted cheese and other bland sandwiches and slurping endless weak coffees at the brown counter of the hospital snack and gift shop (“The Hospitality Shop”) for those eight weeks, I was probably reading something almost constantly, but I don’t recall what.

I remember there wasn’t a lot of choice. The lounge (according to one of the notebooks and scraps that have survived) had a scattering of old magazines—months’ old Time, years old Sports Illustrated. The Hospitality Shop had little of interest on its publications racks: lots of women’s magazines (“Cancer Tests That Can Save Your Life,” and 29 Spring Hairdos, plus the latest on the Kennedys and the Nixons), rifle magazines and True Detectives, gothic novels and comic books, and books of crossword puzzles. My father bought those. He did dozens of them in that visitors’ lounge.

There were books at home: a miscellany of my mother’s book club books, books I’d left behind and some acquired by my sister Kathy and left there. Among my fugitives was probably a set of three F. Scott Fitzgerald novels-- a few quotes in a notebook suggests that I re-read Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night.

The one book I associate with this time was a children’s book, but not from my own childhood (though, for example, the My Book House set was still there.) It was a hardback with an orange cover of The New Treasure Seekers by E. Nesbit. It was evidently bought used, probably by Kathy, possibly to read to Chrissy. I’d never heard of Nesbit, but I was completely charmed by this book. It was a very English set of childhood adventures in the late 19^th century. The tales of the Bastable family are supposedly told by the eldest, Oswald, who suggests that when he grows up he hopes to be a pirate in his spare time.

Racial, ethnic and class attitudes of the times get a little squirmy now and then, though the children always have their hearts in the right place. It’s very well written, and over the years I’ve acquired and read several more E. Nesbit children’s books. When I first started reading the Harry Potter books, E. Nesbit was the first possible influence that came to mind, and I was pleased when J.K. Rowling said so.

This book did not remind me of my childhood, though I suppose you could say indirectly it did. It offered an alternative space, which I guess counts as escape. Still, as far as I recall, I did not seek or find inspiration or solace or anything profound in my reading in those weeks, partly I assume because those hours were characterized by the need to be vaguely alert amidst the tense boredom and exhaustion that mostly resulted in a persistent spaciness, with sharp moments that were emotional and yet complex and ambiguous, and very new to me. I don’t know what this absence in my reading means. I still don’t know what any of it meant. I do recall that I guiltily experienced so much of it as grotesque.

In particular I did not read about death, though beyond poetry and philosophy there wasn’t much to read yet specifically about dealing with the situation we were in. It was still something of a forbidden topic, which might help account for the fact that visitors didn’t really know what to say.

Everyone knew my mother was dying, and no one said so—least of all to her. When the doctors in Pittsburgh told us but not her, I was angry. My father followed the authority, the expert. I somewhat self-righteously announced that if my mother ever asked me, I would tell her.

Just after one of the doctor’s infrequent visits, probably in early March, she admitted that she almost asked him if she was ever getting out of this room, but was afraid of the answer. So I kept quiet about it.

Flora in her back yard 1944

When she was asleep or it was my turn to retreat to the lounge, I wrote letters (I specifically remember writing to Carol) and in notebooks. I noted the plethora of smoking in the hospital: smoke choking the few green plants; standing ashtrays full of butts under a No Smoking sign. Perhaps that’s what sent me to the public library, to look up stories on smoking in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, with an eye to eventually doing my own article.

Generally we were a hapless and helpless lot. We stood around, we sat around. The television in her room was a cynically cheerful counterpoint, though once I saw that it scared her—it was Nixon on the screen, and she was afraid of him. Watergate was well underway, it had been for years; it was just five months or so from President Nixon’s resignation.

Visitors came and went, most of them (like us) not really knowing what to say, struggling against the desire to get back to their lives, and the fear of facing sickness unto death. I hadn’t yet read Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illych but by the time I did, this aspect of it would be familiar. Years later, I taught this novella in an evening class with Margaret; the students were nurses from this very hospital.

It struck me as hypocritical, but it was very human:the false optimism, both hollow and helpless, with everyone playing the cheerfulness no one could actually feel: the bluebird of nothingness. It was a phrase I scribbled in my notebook at the time.

When there were visitors in her more alert moments, I noticed my mother playing hostess, smoothing over any awkwardness with questions and conversation, calming their conflicting emotions and unease, their nervousness, their fear to get too close.

We in the family who were there every day were so dependent on the nurses. When one was bad, it led to alarm, anxiety and prolonged discussions of what to do. Then she was replaced by an older nurse, who immediately took charge. She was from “the sticks,” where she had a pet crow. Her vocabulary and pronunciation said she lacked education and sophistication. But she had a sure touch, physically and otherwise. My mother told her she was worried that she couldn’t help with the family’s problems. “You let them take care of their problems,” Gussie said, “and we’ll take care of yours.”

Over the weeks, the pain and the fog got worse. “A dream within a dream within a dream,” she said. When asked how the pain was, she didn’t know. She couldn’t remember feeling it in the night. Sometimes she couldn’t say how she felt at that moment. She improvised, sometimes getting canny about her responses, and subtly suspicious, then sometimes abruptly frustrated because she wasn’t sure what she was being told and not told. At times she wanted it to be over, and the next second she prayed that she could get up and walk.

each breath was a cry

in that landscape of soft-edged

denial

but for now:

three merged

sighs of sleep

in the last hour

before dawn

and the next uncertain moment

She found some escape. She’d said that she’d been thinking about England, she didn’t know why. (I expect it was that view of Seton Hill.) But it had an eerie feeling, she said. Later she had times during several days when she believed that she was actually in England. She had never been there but she named places she had perhaps seen in the movies or photographs or just read about, like Trafalgar Square.

Walt and Flora in 1945, year of their marriage

Probably in mid March, my father’s father, my paternal grandfather Frank Kowinski, came to visit, and sat for some minutes at her bedside in his somber dark suit. In my life I’d seen him maybe a half dozen times outside of the home he shared with his daughter and her family in the “coal patch” town of United, the house where my father grew up, built by the United Coal Company. He probably still frequented the nearby Calumet Club, but otherwise, he seemed to spend most of his time alone in his basement.

Some time after he left my mother said, “When I saw that old man, I knew I had to be dying. That’s the only thing that could get him here.”

But it was also probably in mid-March that Debbie and her boyfriend Jerry talked to her alone, to tell her they were engaged to be married.

At times my mother still spoke from a different realm. I wrote down what she said to me late at night on Saturday, March 16. At this remove I can only guess where I might have embellished a bit, but this is the essence of it, including most of the words:

“One hundred years, one hundred years, one hundred years, to sleep, you’re sleepy, go ahead. You’re sleepy, aren’t you? Go ahead and sleep. Go ahead and sleep.

It’s too late. There. It’s gone. It’s gone. Now I want you to go. Put on your coat and get your things and go away and forget. Forget everything. And then write it all down on paper, as something you have forgotten for a long time and then suddenly remembered. Now don’t move. Don’t get up or you will die. Promise me, promise me that you’ll lie back, lie back and sleep and never get up. And write it all down on paper, remember that your mother told you, think of other worlds…Now go, please, promise me that you’ll go now.”

And yet soon she seemed much better. That week she even sat up in a chair for the first time in awhile. We wondered at it, but the nurse cautioned us. She’d seen this before, just ahead of the end.

The room became more cheerful. Debbie repositioned some of Chrissie’s painting high on the glass window of the door. Near the bed was a ceramic goldfinch I’d purchased from the Hospitality Shop, when my mother wished for a bird to perch on the window ledge. It’s now on a shelf looking over my left shoulder.

On Sunday, March 17, she sat up in bed and looked out on a bright day. She watched a clear blue sunny sky, and white clouds passing by slowly, slowly moving in one direction, some slowly breaking up, with pieces floating upward, and she listened to the wind blowing.

Sunday evening she was visited by a priest and I believe made her confession, though I don’t remember being around at the time. By then she believed she was dying. Sunday night she had the whole family gathered around her and she said her final goodbye to everyone.

But when the moment was over, life resumed as if it hadn’t happened. She asked for the television to be turned on. It was a Peanuts special, which nobody watched. She hadn’t been eating much, even with her mother and her children feeding her. But now she ate one of the Girl Scout cookies someone had bought, a chocolate one. Everyone else also had one, like a communion. Then she napped, and awoke to ask if the bills had been paid.

Later she called me to her. “ A long time ago, there was something I wanted to do. I almost did it one night a long time ago, but I didn’t. Everything sounds melodramatic coming out of this mouth, but now I guess it’s ok, I’m getting things straight in my mind bit by bit. But today I did it, and I’m so glad. I’m so glad I did it and it’s done.”

“What did you do?”

“I can’t tell you. It was a little thing but it was the world and life and religion, you know. I don’t know why I want to tell you these things but I do. And now everything that I do, I’ll start and finish, start and finish, and the past is past, with nothing to do with the past.”

By then her sister Antoinette was there, my Aunt Toni, who my mother called Ant. Once my mother was talking in spontaneous rhyme. “She used to write poetry,” Ant said, and asked her, “Do you still write poetry?” “Yes,” she said. “Where is it? Where is your poetry?” “Billy has it.” I didn’t, or maybe I did.

On the following Monday she was feeling worse. “Something is wrong. I don’t know what it is. I try to get through but nobody understands. I can’t tell what it is, because I don’t know what it is.”

“I told you before, that I wanted to be pretty. I didn’t want everyone to have to see me when I wasn’t pretty. I’m sorry for that. I wanted to make it easier. But I couldn’t make it easier.”

The last conversation I had with her was short and convoluted. I don’t remember what it was about, something to do with how she was feeling at the moment, and finding the nurse. I don’t recall what I said. But I do remember that she said: “If I trust anybody, I trust you.” I still wonder if I earned that trust, or how. But that’s the last conversation we had, and possibly the last words she spoke, except perhaps to the nurse.

By then we knew the end was very close, and we were there all the time, however bleary and nearly numb. On Friday night, March 22, my aunt came into the visitors’ lounge and quietly told us all to come into the room. When we got there my mother was breathing long throaty breaths. I remember I was standing on her left side, at or near the head of the bed. We stood without a word as she took those long heaving breaths until after an exhalation suddenly no inhalation came, just a long silence, a true absence of any sound. Only my grandmother cried. None of the rest of us moved, we just looked down at my mother. Eventually Aunt Toni standing across from me told us all we could touch her.

My mother and I making a snowman in front
of our first home together on College Ave.

I certainly had been closer to my mother than I was with my father, and I once overheard him telling his father that I had taken her death harder than anyone. I wasn’t aware of that at the time. At this remove, I see myself then as a self-absorbed 27 year old, immersed in the world of contemporaries in the contemporary world, with only a vague sense of the past and an anxious purchase on the present, which was elsewhere.

We had always written letters back and forth, talked on the phone as much as long distance rates permitted, and we talked when I visited home. At the time I still felt, as I had since college, or perhaps since adolescence, that she and I inhabited different worlds. The whole generation gap thing didn’t help. That distance and my defensiveness might well have faded in time. In any case, I felt the deprivation, the absence of her presence in subsequent years. I missed the conversations we might have had as we both got older, comparing memories and sharing observations. She was only 54.

But any process at that moment leading to any realization, even any real grief, had to be withheld, to first confront what to me were the bizarre protocols of the funeral, as they were in that time and place.

I was a relative innocent to these. This was only the second death in my close family. Although I was home from college the summer my grandfather died, and I called some relatives to tell them, wrote his obituary for the newspaper and served as a pallbearer, that was the extent of my involvement with “the arrangements.”

But now I suffered for the first time the (to me) absurd rituals: reviewing the long rows of coffins to select one, listening to discussions on the decision of a dress, of how to deal with relatives who felt snubbed, while privacy was suddenly gone as people trooped through the house with obscene amounts of food and solemn sentimentality. The loud incongruity of it—which I experienced as indignity akin to cruelty—was too much for me. I erupted in violence against several innocent objects in the storage garage.

I was particularly appalled by the so-called “viewing” at the funeral home. My mother’s body and barely recognizable face in an open casket behind us and mostly ignored as the family stood in a placid line facing the other way to chat amiably with people we might not know well or hadn’t seen in years. Even the nun who had most made my high school life miserable and who my mother despised, evidently showed up, although only Kathy saw her entrance, now habitless (thanks to those late 60s reforms.) Even the Darvon or whatever I’d been given to take to cope with these hours didn’t insulate me, and I quietly sailed for the men’s room. Whereupon, my sister said, the nun left in a huff. And the next day we did it again.

I was however calm enough to appreciate the sincerity of the women from the hospital who had worked in my mother’s department, and who wanted us to know how much they admired her, how fair she was with everyone. They wanted to tell their story. Still, the venue freaked me out.

We gathered for the funeral Mass at the relatively new St. Paul’s Church, just up to the next street from ours and across the Carbon Road. The church had originally been designed to eventually become a gymnasium for the adjacent new school, but funds (and a large enough congregation) for a proper new church never materialized. On this morning, before the service could begin and while the organist was played the preliminaries, a young altar boy in his cassock and surplus suddenly ran out to the altar and began crying “Fire!” Eventually we saw wisps of smoke coming from the sacristy and cooler heads had everyone file out.

Of the many people who attended, at this remove I remember only my cousins on my mother’s side. We stood around the parking lot and sat in cars as fire trucks arrived and departed, until we were told to go on to the Blessed Sacrament Cathedral, a large, tall gray stone building with turrets and spires, at the northern peak of Main Street in Greensburg. The funeral would take place there. Later the priest told the local newspaper that if this service hadn’t been scheduled, the fire at St. Paul’s might not have been discovered until much greater damage was done. Meanwhile, my mother got a funeral Mass in the largest church in the county.

Shortly after the funeral I returned to Cambridge. I would not be back to Greensburg for awhile, even missing the next Christmas.

History of My Reading: Friends and Other Strangers 1973-4

2024-10-11T23:14:00.000-07:00

In 1973 I was the Managing Editor for the Boston Phoenix arts and entertainment section, roughly half the newspaper each week. In addition I was still its Books Editor and I was expected to keep writing regularly.

One of my first unfamiliar tasks as managing editor was authorizing that week’s payments for our section’s freelance writers. A number of writers wrote for us regularly but were paid as freelancers (as I had been with my Book Reports column) but I discovered that the amount of those payments varied wildly. Pretty much without anyone’s authorization, I increased the fees for those getting much less than others. I got away with it.

I made a number of changes to the section, discontinuing some regular features and adding others, setting up rotations for the coverage other than the major areas of movies and pop music, and so on. These and other changes were also meant to give the section an identity.

The Arts Editors for music (Ben Gerson) and movies (Janet Maslin) continued to write lead pieces and to assign other pieces in their area. I dealt directly with regular contributors and freelancers in other areas, as well as books. I didn’t hire staff on my own but I assigned to new freelancers. I had the final edit on all copy for the Second Section. In several cases I was pleased to do for others what had been done for me: give that first assignment to writers who went on to writing careers. Most of the time I advocated for writers when there were problems, but there were also situations in which they were disappointed and there was nothing I could do. Listening to people's problems--and bearing their secrets-- was part of my job, and also part of my social life.

I attended the weekly staff meeting but the business there mostly involved the news section. Ideas for our stories got generated through conversations with the Arts Editors, staff members, freelancers and others, and (pretty often) out of my own head. I fielded some calls and a lot of mail from organizations and venues looking for coverage.

That was the first thing to greet me when I arrived at the office—our receptionist Martha handed me a pile of pink slips with my accumulated messages, along with bigger piles of mail (including books.) She handled all calls first. We must have had some kind of intercom system or perhaps she just rang my phone with the line number of my incoming call. Working the phone was occasionally pleasant, mostly a chore, and sometimes maddening.

The first part of my week generally involved working with writers on possibilities for future issues. I might tinker with the lineup of stories scheduled for the next issue, if necessary. When copy came in for that week, I worked with that. I recall meeting with our regular contributor on art, Kenneth Baker, often down in the small lunch counter tucked into our building at street level. I would peruse his usually immaculate copy while maneuvering a sandwich and coffee. I didn’t understand much of what he was writing about, but if he could interest me in it as a reader for the time it took to read the piece, then it could appeal to other readers as ignorant as me as well as to contemporary art aficionados. Baker went on to be the long-time art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.

In general text editing was something of a challenge—deciding whether first impressions and sense of the piece were right, versus second or third reading. Copy- editing was a pleasure if I was relaxed enough—I was good at it. I became aware of the temptation to change things just to show I’d worked on it, and fought it off as best I could.

Once I had enough copy in hand, and I factored in the photographs our staff photographer (Michael Dobo) had either taken or would take, and the advertising staff told us how many pages we could run, I met with the layout editor to solve the jigsaw puzzle of every page—where the copy, the ads and the photos would go. There was often a little leeway, and decisions to be made later, not infrequently at the last minute. Often the layout had to be completed before I had all the copy. An event near (or sometimes past) deadline was being covered, or essential copy that simply came in late. Space was saved for those.

Janet Maslin

Janet Maslin had moved to New York, so theoretically she saw movies sooner than their Boston run, but in practical terms, there was often some suspense as to when her review copy would arrive. (Janet had married Jon Landau, who had switched from editing record reviews to writing movie reviews for Rolling Stone, while he still wrote on music for The Real Paper. At a certain point Janet was also writing on music for a new national magazine based in New York, called New Times—which is unrelated to any current publication of that name. I had been invited to their wedding, and had even picked out their wedding present: since they were both reviewing movies, at the Harvard Coop I found matching pens with a little light near the tip, so they could write in the dark. But I came down with a sudden illness and didn’t make the trip to New York—not the first time this happened within view of a wedding.)

In any case, their New York experiment didn't last very long. Within months they were back in Boston. Once I happened to pass the Italian restaurant in Inman Square and saw them sitting at the window table where Carol and I used to eat, when that restaurant was smaller and unknown.

Ben Gerson’s music pieces were always meticulously written, but also invariably late. They were so late at times that he took his piece directly to the composing room at the last possible moment to fill the space waiting for it, thereby coincidentally also avoiding any editor messing with his copy.

There would be one day in the week that could last well into the night when the paper had to be put to bed, and I was wrestling with late copy as well as making adjustments when stories came in too long or too short, photos were missing or didn’t work, or ads that got dropped or added. I wrote headlines and captions, copy-read the printed copy on what I believe we still called the flats, then approved each page before it could go to the printer.

The next day there would be “blue pages”—the paper as printed, except on a different kind of paper with blue print. A few corrections were still possible at this stage. When they were made, the issue was done. And it was time to start work on the next.

I still wrote for the paper—among what survives in my files is an impressionistic rant on Muzak, an appreciation of One Hundred Years of Solitude on the occasion of Garcia Marquez’s birthday, a few Talk of the Town type pieces for the inside-cover column I started, and a Second Section cover piece on Picasso when he died. There were times that a section cover story fell through, and I had to quickly write one. I recall one forced ramble on the big awards in the arts and the various entertainment award shows.

I started out working in the office next to the Editor’s office that used to belong to Kate Herriges. Kate had been my strongest supporter when I started out in 1971, but she’d moved on. Eventually the paper took over a large room on the building’s third floor, and I set up my headquarters there. At one point, I shared that office with staff writers R.D. Rosen (eventually to be the author of the book and therefore part of the language: Psychobabble) and Jim Lardner, also a subsequent author, whose grandfather was Ring Lardner (and Ring, Jr. was his father.)

It was in that room that we entertained Ted Solataroff, editor of the New American Review (recast as American Review), one of the great publications of the era. What I recall most about the afternoon he visited was basking in the sunshine coming through the high window, and speaking in euphoric and awestruck tones about the magnificence of One Hundred Years of Solitude. That book, especially at that time, was the most magical literary work I’d ever encountered. For years, whenever anyone asked me to recommend a book, I gave them a copy of this one, and it never failed, from Cambridge sophisticates to a western Pennsylvania waitress.

Another interview I recall from that year was with writer Anthony Burgess. He was in Boston for the premiere of the new musical based on Cyrano, for which he’d written the book and lyrics. We were supposed to have lunch in his hotel suite but we never got past the drinks stage before his next interview was scheduled. It was an exhilarating conversation as well as interview. As I left he shook my hand and said with apparent feeling, “a very great pleasure.”

The Burgess interview came out when I was filling in for our regular theatre critic Carolyn Clay. I was also writing about music and movies, which at that point constituted mini-vacations from managing, editing and books. In February 1973 I wrote about a Neil Young concert. His current album was Harvest, his biggest seller and the top album of 1972. He did three concerts in Boston that week, two of them at the huge Boston Gardens and one at the smaller Music Hall. His surprise opening act was Linda Ronstadt, who sang on his biggest single, “Heart of Gold.”

In Young’s last appearance in Boston, he’d been nursing a bad back and did an all-acoustic tour, mostly seated and playing guitar and harmonica, and piano. This time he was playing a mixed set with the Stray Gators, the session musicians on Harvest, but his back wasn’t completely healed, so he again sat in a chair for part of the gig. My piece began like this:

“The band’s instruments were in place and tuned, and after suitable pause, a roadie finally brought out the final prop and placed it carefully at center stage. The Chair: one part papal, one part electric, an all-organic, down-home chair, obviously not one of your backstage fold-ups, but something special that traveled with the tour. Then the house lights went out, part of the stage was darkened, then all of it—each change brought gradually louder swells of oohs and ahs. As eyes adjusted to the dimness, a single shadow emerged from the back of the stage. Tumultuous applause greeted a still longhaired, baggy-jeaned Neil Young, wearing what appeared to be the same flannel shirt he wore for his last Boston appearance more than two years ago, its condition suggesting that he’d been wearing it ever since. He sat down. The crowd went wild.”

I then quoted Linda Ronstadt’s comments from the stage on the Boston Garden show the night before. “Usually at these big concerts the kids come in and then get messed up, until they’re ready to be taken out in stretchers at the end. Last night it was like they came in on stretchers.” It was the beginning of the Quaalude era in pop music audiences.

The concert itself included songs from Young’s entire career, already extraordinary, and was taped for possible inclusion on a live album. At that point in my life, he was the songwriter and rock musician I most identified with.

At some point in 1973 I met Harry Nilsson at a press affair. I've forgotten this entirely but found a letter I wrote to him later with some information he wanted, which I also don't recall. Apparently we had an actual conversation.

Then in April I reviewed the reggae-filled film The Harder They Come starring Jimmy Cliff, and predicted it would play in Cambridge forever—which it more or less did, running at the Orson Welles Cinema for over a year.

Meanwhile the Phoenix was undergoing a couple of major changes. A managing editor for the entire paper was hired—a genial Englishman who was startingly older than the rest of us, though probably not by much. But it was the new Editor that became consequential.

The search for a new editor came down to a few remaining candidates (several top choices had dropped out of contention.) I thought we’d found a pretty solid one, but then another candidate showed up, and exuded a cheerful charm. I can’t say I was entirely immune to it—he quoted the likes of Wordsworth and Yeats, and offered bold ideas, like reviving the Dickensian tradition of serializing novels—this time in the Phoenix. But I was also suspicious—I’d seen the damage so-called charismatic figures could do, not to mention con artists. In Dickens tradition therefore, let's just call him Wily Brass.

Others also had misgiving but in the end, an editorial meeting vote was taken and Wily Brass was selected. He was the third of the three finalists; the top two had turned down the job. Steve Mindich took the recommendation and hired him. At first Brass and I got along very well—after a pleasant dinner conversation, we walked around Boston until he found what he wanted to show me—an historical marker commemorating a reading of his work given by Charles Dickens on one of his two American tours (probably at the site of the old Tremont Theatre.)

But things quickly devolved between us, and between him and everybody else. His bold plans, like the serialized novel, went nowhere. He was perceived to be arbitrary and unresponsive, petty and abusive, and borderline incompetent. We had a number of staff and freelance defections, often to the Real Paper. At one point I discovered that he was intercepting packages of books meant for review, including those addressed to me personally (once he purloined a personal gift), and keeping those he liked for his personal use.

Over those months, Brass chipped away at my innovations and authority. I told at least one staff confidant that I was sure he intended to take control of the arts section, even if it meant driving me out.

At the same time there was a movement to unionize the paper, including editorial staff, and become affiliated with the United Electrical Workers. It had begun the year before but was getting more intense in early 1973. I thought the affiliation was a bit absurd but I supported the efforts to organize. There was a lot of discontent, and a lot of reasons for it. It didn’t occur to me at first (or seemingly anyone else) that I was actually management now, so I attended some meetings. After one, I was called into the publisher’s office where the paper’s lawyer grilled me on what I knew. I simply refused to talk to him, and only Steven’s intervention kept it from becoming a shouting match or worse.

In addition to all this, I edited a Book supplement that spring. I wrote the cover piece on Kurt Vonnegut’s new novel, Breakfast of Champions (which soon became the NYT top best-seller), a review of DeLillo’s Great Jones Street, reviews of poetry collections by James Wright and Joyce Carol Oates, and a number of short notices of forthcoming books. I solicited a piece on the new collection of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories from my Knox professor and ongoing friend, Doug Wilson. Much to my embarrassment there was not enough room for it, but it was later published in a literary journal.

The supplement also included reviews of two avowedly ambitious novels: Philip Roth's The Great American Novel and American Mischief, a 500 page novel by Alan Lelchuck, who taught at Boston's Brandeis University--both pretty much forgotten. Earlier that year we reviewed another massive work, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. This is the one that has lasted. Its length and complexity were daunting, though clearly it was a work of genius. In college I'd read maybe 100 pages of Pynchon's first mega-novel, V, (I remember in 1973, the New York Times Book Review relishing the pun of calling the new book V2, since that Nazi rocket was a main character in it.) I loved Pynchon's dynamic style but I couldn't follow the story. Although I'd had no such problem with Pynchon's shorter 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49, it recurred with this book.

My experience was similar to my periodic confrontations with Joyce's Ulysses. I would read and rapturously re-read the first Stephen Dedalus section, but I could only dip into fragments until the Molly Bloom soliloquy at the end. Similarly I so loved the opening section of Gravity's Rainbow that I couldn't get past my confusion about the story to go much beyond it, for years. It would in fact be at least a decade before I read it through--still mostly for the writing and its rhythms--and another several decades before I read it through again, with the help of a plot guide, and actually knew what was happening. But in 1973, the style was exciting and inspiring enough, though I was pleased to find another dynamic voice in novels I could follow, by Don DeLillo.

The supplement went over well. I got a letter from Joyce Carol Oates praising it: "What a marvelous issue! My husband and I are really impressed by the depth and background of reviewers. Nothing seems treated flippantly or casually..." She passed along individual compliments, and mentioned she was sending a copy to her friend, Margaret Drabble, also reviewed in the supplement.

It was shortly after the books supplement came out in May that I took several weeks off. I flew to Minnesota where I was hosted in St. Paul by Barbara Azer, sister of my Knox classmate, Mary. I’d never been to the Twin Cities before, and Barbara and her roommates were excellent guides. We picnicked on a bluff overlooking the place where the Mississippi began, and drove up past the immense devastated landscape in the iron range near Duluth to a little cabin on Lake Superior (where now there are expensive condos.)

We even did some literary touring, visiting fields where Robert Bly lived (I got out of the car to imitate him reading poems about them), and a hotel bar once frequented by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I asked the bartender reputed to have served Fitzgerald what he was like, and he gave the perfect answer: “He was a good tipper.” Whether or not he actually had been there that long, it was a ready, pointed and potentially lucrative response.

At that time in the early 1970s, what most of America knew about Minneapolis was that was the home of Mary Richards of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. On my first visit to downtown Minneapolis (to meet up with one of Barbara’s housemates at the department store where she worked), we saw people lined up along the sidewalk watching some other people walking right down the middle of the street. One of them was Mary Tyler Moore, on possibly her first visit to the city (though probably her second), filming a new introduction to the show.

So on my first visit to downtown Minneapolis, the first person I saw was Mary Tyler Moore. This was the second such coincidence of that spring, and it wouldn’t be the last. The first was while making my way to the Twin Cities. Just before I left, I’d put the Phoenix second section to bed, leaving space in the music section for a review by Peter Herbst of the Paul Simon concert occurring the next night. It was in fact Paul Simon’s first concert as a solo performer—that is, without Garfunkel, for he had lots of musicians and singers as part of his show.

I went to that show, and the next morning to the Boston airport, where I picked up a copy of the Phoenix and read Peter’s review on the plane. He hadn’t liked the concert as much as I did (or as Jon Landau did, writing in The Real Paper.)

I was to change planes for Minneapolis at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, as many people did—it was the busiest in the country, and a hub before there were hubs. As I walked to my new gate, carrying my guitar case and copy of the Phoenix, I had a stray thought of—wouldn’t it be something to run into Paul Simon? After all, he was starting a tour, he might go through O’Hare. Then I turned a corner and saw…Paul Simon.

He was standing near a ticket counter chatting with a young woman wearing the uniform of an airline. I realized I had a copy of the Phoenix in my hand, and took it over to him. “Here,” I said, “you can read about yourself.” As he opened the paper, I suddenly realized it was not my review in there but Peter’s more mixed one. I quickly tried to cover: “I was at the concert, too, and I loved it.” At which point the young woman looked puzzled, and I realized she didn’t know who he was, just some guy chatting her up. For him perhaps a rare normal moment, charming someone who didn’t know he was a celebrity rock star. “Don’t say anything else,” Paul Simon warned me. I backed away, saying only, “I’ve got to a plane to catch. Nice seeing you… Fred.”

After the Twin Cities I flew back to Pittsburgh and spent the rest of my time off visiting my parents and other family and friends in and around Greensburg. My mother had suffered through treatments for breast cancer over the past several years. My recollections of what happened when are hazy, partly because in those years no one talked about these things (especially cancer, as if you could spread it by saying the word)—certainly not my family, and specifically not my father. I was home for part of the time and I kept in touch when I wasn’t, but mostly these treatments and her health were distant backdrops to everything else. At this point the cancer was in remission. She was getting close to the five year survival point, which at the time was believed to signal something like a cure.

She was still a bit fragile and tentative, but mostly herself. I helped her plant flowers in pots and flowerboxes, and we watched the movie “Stormy Weather,” just about the only program on this new cable TV, just starting up. She and my father had put a down payment on some land in Florida, and she showed me the plan for the condo where they eventually would live. Before that, she said, she hoped to see Hawaii.

But I had a hard time sitting still. Even in Minnesota, surrounded by even younger energies than mine, I had trouble gearing down from the relentless demands of my job, the frenetic hours of phone calls and conferences, quick evaluations and instant decisions, generating story ideas for the endless appetite of the Second Section, keeping track of rock concerts and promo events, while juggling a hundred things in my head that had to be done. I was often tired and I experienced things at a distance, as if I wasn't really there.

So in Greensburg I went out with old friends, hung out with my sisters and their crowd. Eventually my mother said she was disappointed I didn’t spend more time at home. As was typical in our family, she said this when it was too late for me to do anything about it. I was due back in Boston.

I returned to the Phoenix to find an editorial staff in turmoil. An ongoing conflict (I no longer recall what it was about) had come to a head. The staff was united against Editor Brass, and conspired to steal the copy for an entire issue to force him to confront the issue. I joined them. When Brass realized what was going on, his dismissive arrogance turned to beet-red fear. He gave in, temporarily settling things down. Though I wasn’t particularly a leader in this action, it didn’t escape his notice that it happened once I was back.

Meanwhile the unionizing efforts were stalling, and there were secret conclaves to discuss the possibility that there was an agent provocateur among the staff.

In early June, another eerie coincidence. I was walking near the Ritz when I had one of those wouldn’t it be strange if I ran into thoughts…this time it was Kurt Vonnegut. But no, he wasn’t around the next corner. However…That evening I attended a performance by a new band called Stories. I’d been following them, gathering material for a piece ever since Ben Gerson and I had been flown down to Nashville by their record company to see them perform there. (We stayed in the King of the Road motel, where the Bee Gees were also staying, but I didn’t catch a glimpse.)

That night I went out with the band to a large all-night restaurant. I was sitting in a booth with bassist Kenny Aaronson, listening to him comically complain about the absence of all these groupies he’d heard about, when I glanced across the room and into the somewhat hostile stare of Kurt Vonnegut. He was there with a group of people apparently after a university speaking engagement.

The last was perhaps less of a coincidence than a portent. One night in late June, probably after I’d put the Second Section to bed that week, I was walking home from the subway station at Central Square, when I cut through an alley from Mass Ave. Ahead of me I saw a car’s headlights coming towards me, and a kitten facing me. The car ran over the kitten. I was more than upset—I felt immediately that it was a portent, and that night I called a woman at the Phoenix for whom I had, let us say, romantic feelings, of which she was well aware. She reassured me and calmed me.

After some problems with missing mail at my Columbia Street apartment, I had added a post office box at the main Post Office on Mass Ave. in Central Square. The next day I picked up mail there and got on the bus to work, down Mass Ave. to Bolyston Street in Boston and the Boston Phoenix offices, to wrap up the week and start on the next. There might have been an early birthday card in the mix, but there was a business-sized envelope with the orange Boston Phoenix return address but no name.

Inside was a very short note written by the woman I’d been pining for, the one I’d spoken to the night before, telling me that in my time away from Boston she and one of my closer friends had begun an affair. At the time it seemed grudging and cold, though perhaps it was trying to be gentle and even affectionate. But both of them were on the Phoenix staff and I worked with them every day. It felt like a betrayal, as well as a humiliating, impossible situation.

And suddenly there I was, approaching the Boylston Street offices. I walked up the long stairs, then up another flight to my third floor office, unusually empty. Perhaps I examined the blue pages one last time. I wrote a brief letter of resignation, gathered what personal belongings I wanted to take, left the letter in the reception area, and walked down the dark stairs to the bright street.

I’d been on the edge of quitting once before this. The incessant demands, the tawdry office, and the constant onslaught of emotional and auditory noise, had me shattered by my day's end. Steven assured me then that over time I’d get used to the pace and intensity of the job. But since I’d been back I’d struggled to gear up again, after my vacation had been marred by my anxious inability to slow down. I felt oversaturated and isolated, especially with added layers of shifting conflict. All the egos and agendas, the moods and misunderstandings, the hormones, the noise, everything out of proportion. Surrounded constantly by so many people, I was often exhausted and lonely. This final sudden situation was almost a metaphor for it all, as well as the paradigmatic last straw.

Meanwhile, Editor Wily Brass was so eager to prevent any second thoughts or attempts by others to persuade me to return, that he accepted my resignation that same afternoon—by telegram. I don’t think I’d ever received a telegram before, or since. (As I learned later there were such attempts to get me back, but Brass was intransigent.) Within a few days, I was later informed, Brass mumbled aloud his plans to take over the Second Section himself, fulfilling my prophecy.

I had a Saturday ritual of doing the week’s food shopping (including cat food) at the Purity Supreme supermarket in Central Square, and eating a tuna sandwich in their adjacent lunch counter while reading the Boston Globe, in particular the weekly “Lit’ry Life” column by George Fraiser, which dealt in Boston literary and media tidbits. The Saturday following my resignation, this column noted a decline in quality at the Boston Phoenix, which “a number of Phoenix people” informed him was due to the incompetence of Editor Wily Brass. Only a fierce loyalty to the paper, he wrote, kept old hands like Ben Gerson and Janet Maslin from resigning.

My name, as usual, wasn’t mentioned—I don’t think Fraiser ever mentioned me—probably a networking error on my part. And this time I didn’t read the column at Purity Supreme. It was hand-delivered to my mailbox by Phoenix poetry editor and friend Celia Gilbert, along with a note and birthday greetings. That particular Saturday I had turned 27.

I eventually heard from a few other editorial staff and writers (or just ran into them) but as was to be a pattern in my departures, the most open regrets came from support staff.

I kept very much to myself the rest of that summer, with strange long days awake—sometimes 24 hours straight-- followed by almost as much sleep. For awhile I entertained the fantasy of sailing on a transatlantic liner to Europe to visit Carol (though by then only the Queen Elizabeth II was left) but I couldn’t even focus the energy to visit a friend in Gloucester up the coast as promised, which ended that friendship. I couldn’t be around anyone for very long.

My one public responsibility was teaching a course in the Boston Adult Education program, which I’d been persuaded to do some months before. It was called Best of the New Books, so basically a reading and discussion course, meeting one early evening a week (Mondays at 6:50) for eight weeks. I had a class of 13, seated easily around a long table. There was a nice age range, and though there were a couple of college students with an academic approach, I especially appreciated the openness and direct responses of the post-college age adults, including an older married couple. In the midst of a melancholy haze, I enjoyed it as much as was possible.

Since I opted for paperbacks to limit the costs to students, most of the books were months old, despite the course title. So instead of Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions (very new in hardcover), I chose Slaughterhouse Five. For the third class we read two fairly short novels: Don DeLillo’s End Zone and Margaret Drabble’s Thank You All Very Much. The books in subsequent weeks were Wonderland by Joyce Carol Oates, You Might As Well Live (biography of Dorothy Parker), Norman Mailer's collection of pieces titled Existential Errands, Anne Sexton's poems based on fairy tales, The Book of Folly, and finally, the one I knew would be a winner, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Although I didn't choose it, I would think I considered Kosinski's Being There. It’s interesting to reflect that in 1973 Marquez, DeLillo, Kosinski and Drabble were all relatively early in their careers, at least in America.

I spent much of my time trying to write myself into coping with and even understanding what I’d been through, mostly in the forms of fiction and poetry. (But also the inevitable Shakespearian parody, with Wily Brass as Richard III.) I was in revolt against concentrating exclusively on what was new—forthcoming books, new records. As I explained in a letter to Lester Bangs at Creem, most of the record companies had dropped me from their mailing lists when I became an editor, and now I was listening to music the way I used to—one or two albums at a time, repeated many times. My records that summer were John Cale’s Paris 1919 and Joni Mitchell’s For the Roses. Her "Judgment of the Moon and Stars" in particular.

I did something similar with books, turning my reading to non-new writers in old paperbacks. I had a definite Hemingway phase, which unfortunately showed up in my writing. I recall reading several novels by Balzac and Stendhal for some reason. I applied for unemployment when I became eligible, and stood in the long lines at the unemployment office (there was a recession on) reading The Red and the Black.

I emerged somewhat in September, when I wrote a cover story for The Real Paper on Marlon Brando. I wasn’t sure I was ready for a staff job yet, but I wasn’t offered one there anyway. Its editor confided that if I were a black woman he could hire me immediately. I pass this on now with the amusement I felt then. This was the social justice I’d supported, in action. That it might have personal consequences for me was a fitting irony—even if I believed him, which I’m not sure I did.

I still occasionally got invitations to music events. I always got music critic treatment at Passim, the Cambridge club down below the street, where the fabled folk Club 47 that had opened in 1958 with the debut of Joan Baez. One evening that fall I sat with Janet Maslin and some others at the table near enough to singer Maria Muldaur to pick up the cable connector to her microphone that dropped to the floor. This was her pop moment with “Midnight at the Oasis” on the radio, and she was radiantly beautiful. When she clicked the cable back into the mike and thanked me, it was the closest I’d gotten to sex in some time.

At some point that fall I found myself in the apartment of an attractive woman. There’d been a bit of a vibe when we met one Saturday night through mutual friends from the Harvard Bookstore, and I went to see her Sunday afternoon to explore the possibilities. It didn’t take long for me to realize I wasn’t really interested, and I don’t think she was either. But I saw a paperback book in her living room of Larry McMurtry’s novel, All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers. I’d seen it before—it was fairly fashionable—but I’d resisted it because the title made me angry: it was too close to my title for an admittedly still unwritten fiction to be called “Friends and Other Strangers,” after the Dylan line. I hadn’t read any other McMurtry.

Still, something should come of this wasted trip, so I took the T back to Harvard Square and bought a copy. I read it straight through, and then I read it again. Its protagonist, Danny Deck, was soon my current tortured alter-ego. McMurtry also was in the early phase of his long writing career. These writers of 1973--Vonnegut, Garcia-Marquez, DeLillo, Pynchon and McMurtry--would be mainstays of my personal literary arcana for decades to come.

Probably in October I spent a week on assignment for a magazine--fascinating in its way but basically disastrous. Carol returned on a visit from Europe for a week or so. She'd had a scare in Switzerland that her Hodgkins had returned, but her doctors at Mass General confirmed it had not. I went with her on the train to New York and she flew back from there. We continued to correspond regularly for about another year, but this was the last time I saw her.

According to contemporaneous notes and letters, I spent some of November back in Greensburg, which must have included Thanksgiving. My mother's health was of concern, though reports were typically vague. I returned to Greensburg from Cambridge for Christmas. It is also a blank in my memory, but I chanced upon a page torn out of a notebook that recorded my impressions of Christmas in Greensburg that year: the traditional dinner at my Severini grandmother’s, the annual visit to my Kowinski grandfather and his daughter’s family in United. I noted that my elders seemed noticeably older, and that my mother was experiencing pains again, and that her hair had started to thin. “Gone with the wind,” she said.

Then it was late January 1974 and I’d been back in Cambridge for awhile when I got a call one night from my father, who said my mother was in the hospital again, and I should come home as soon as I could. I had one housemate left at the time, and I quickly arranged for her to again take care of my cats, and booked the next flight to Pittsburgh I could manage.

History of My Reading: Phoenix in Flight/ Boston 1972

2024-08-19T00:43:00.000-07:00

For young writers in the 1920s it was Paris. In the 30s it was the WPA Federal Writers Project and various literary and theatrical communities in New York. In the 40s it was radio and Hollywood. In the 50s it was television. In the 60s, improbably, it was theatre—in London, New York and even Eastern Europe. (Unless you were at least equally a musician, and then it was rock music. For a few, there was also the Andy Warhol scene in New York.)

In the 1970s it was the alternative press, including the new rock music publications, and the New Journalism of New York-based magazines.

These were the entry points, the new and exciting places hungry for talent and maybe even community. They were where it was happening, but also, crucially, they were the prime opportunities of their day.

This was the opportunity I stumbled into, when I began writing humble book reviews for the alternative weekly, Boston After Dark in 1971. It was one of the new weeklies sometimes described as “sea-level,” because they were midway between the underground press and the established daily newspapers. They were also called “countercultural,” and they certainly were aimed at a young readership, with emphasis on rock and other entertainment and arts, as well as more or less radical politics. With all of its colleges and universities, the Boston area had a huge potential readership.

I had a book review assignment for early November but I first delivered an unsolicited but timely piece on poet Pablo Neruda winning the Nobel Prize. That was the first to be published, followed a couple of weeks later by a review of Sylvia Plath’s now classic novel The Bell-Jar. I’m not sure if this was assigned, but the book was newly published in America in 1971. The first review that definitely was assigned was Paul Dixon’s Think Tanks, a nonfiction appraisal on those little known but influential institutions, published in early December.

I delivered my pieces in person, sometimes hanging around for feedback from Jake Kugel, the literary editor, and hopefully to get another assignment and some more books. Once that December he told me that the staff Christmas party was taking place at a restaurant and bar nearby, and that I should go over. I did, but there was almost no one there yet. I was sitting alone at a small table with my free drink when an amazingly beautiful young woman walked in, looked around and left. She turned out to be Janet Maslin, one of the Arts Editors at Boston After Dark. John Koch, the senior movie reviewer, and Ben Gerson, the music editor and chief writer, were the others.

On another visit to Jake, he sent me back up the corridor to Ben Gerson’s office, who was pretty open to new writers for record reviews. Ben pointed to a pile of records stacked against a wall, told me to pick out a couple, and write 150 words or so on them. I’d earn $5 for each review published, plus I got to keep the record.

By then I had already started writing for Creem magazine, which published my movie reviews and even a short piece of fiction, as well as record reviews (the first national review for Bonnie Raitt) and music features (my first was on James Taylor.) With a few pieces for Creem as well as B.A.D., Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs told me how to write to record companies and request to be put on their lists for new albums. They sent me a list of contacts. Some responded, some didn’t, but pretty soon I was getting free records through the mail. Warners was particularly generous, I recall. I also wrote reviews occasionally for other publications, such as Time Out. That’s how I got to be one of the first generation of rock critics, at a time that rock artists were big business.

There were concerts and club dates galore as well as records, and I covered some, mostly in Boston but also on trips to New York City. My first one-on-one interview was with Bill Withers in his trailer before a summer concert on Boston Common. He probably sensed I was nervous so we sat together on a step to the trailer and chatted. I asked him about the theme running through his new album; he said he didn’t think anyone would notice that there was one.

Harrison with Pete Ham of Badfinger

My first big concert assignment was Badfinger, and I dressed up in a three-piece corduroy suit. Before the concert I got up from my seat and walked up the aisle to the outer area, and heard this titter in the crowd. I then realized that they might have thought for a second I was George Harrison, who’d produced Badfiner’s latest album. I had the long hair and beard as well as the cord suit.

The life of a rock critic also included attendance at various promotional events, which always featured free food and drink. A few times a limo actually picked me up at the B.A.D. office. My friend Mike Shain, writing for Broadcasting Magazine then, said there were freelancers in New York who pretty much lived on the food at these events.

Rock music as a serious cultural force was so new that there were few books on it then. Mostly we read magazines and music tabloids, especially Rolling Stone, but also others that have come and gone. And of course we read each other. The coverage in established newspapers and magazines was sparse and generally laughable.

I reviewed albums by David Bowie, Aretha Franklin, Harry Nilsson, the Bee Gees, Little Feat, Bob Seger, Paul Simon, Ravi Shankar and the Incredible String Band as well as the now mostly forgotten (but remembered and revered by some) Jackie Lomax, Family, Kenny Rankin, the Hoodoo Rhythm Devils and Jim Carroll, and the completely obscure Audience and Formerly Fat Harry. Some reviews are embarrassing now (I didn’t understand Steely Dan’s first album) but I was maybe ahead of my time on others (I was much in the minority in proclaiming John Cale’s “Paris 1919” a masterpiece, which it is now acknowledged to be.) I was hardly a music scholar, even about the roots of rock music before the 1950s, but the power of that music in those years was emotional.

Besides Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs in the Midwest, the titans of rock criticism were Robert Christgau at the Village Voice, and Jon Landau, the record review editor of Rolling Stone in San Francisco, who actually lived near Cambridge, and wrote for its weekly, the Phoenix. I met Christgau a few times, through Mike Shain, and later was friends with his younger sister Georgia. I knew Jon Landau a little better, especially after he and Janet Maslin became an item.

Boston After Dark had its offices then at 1108 Bolyston Street in what likely was an old industrial building, close to the Bolyston Street subway station. (It looks like the building is now part of the Berklee School of Music.) The paper was composed on the first floor, and the editorial and business offices were up a long flight of stairs on the second floor. The door opened onto to the central reception area. Back to the right was the entry to the advertising and business offices. Ahead were the editorial offices. There weren’t many of them.

Walking down that corridor, past the room sometimes occupied by a staff photographer and/or cartoonist, the first office on the left was Ben Gerson’s. John Koch and Janet Maslin were in the next office on the left, opposite Jake Kugel’s on the right. These consisted of a desk or two surrounded by plasterboard walls and a door.

At the end of the corridor was a room occupied by assistant editor Kate Herriges and her intern, Mike Baron. But a sharp right immediately before this area led to a large room that was basically the office of the Editor (by early 1972, Teddy Gross) but was also the entire news department. True to its name, Boston After Dark had begun as an entertainment paper, with gradually expanding news. For awhile it especially was home to veteran journalists of “the movement,” such as Carl Ogelsby, Alexander Cockburn, Derek Shearer, Frank Browning and others.

Soon I was also writing a few movie reviews but mainly I did books—all kinds of books: fiction (short story collections by John Updike and Doris Lessing, novels by Vonnegut, Margaret Drabble and Don DeLillo, and posthumous novels by Hemingway and Camus), poetry (including Ann Sexton, James Wright, D.H. Lawrence, James Tate, Jonathan Williams) and poetry anthologies; literary criticism, psychology, anthropology (including Elaine Morgan’s The Descent of Woman), linguistics, politics, education and memoir (Run-Through, John Houseman’s nearly 500 page evocation of working with Orson Welles in the 1930s Federal Theatre project and the Mercury Theatre, which I’ve recently re-read with great pleasure.)

A number of my reviews were of books of countercultural interest, like a novel by Raymond Mungo (author of the classic hippie memoirs Famous Long Ago and Total Loss Farm), Michael Weller’s play Moonchildren, and Digger guru Emmett Grogan’s bitter memoir, as well as the latest pop psychology, including astrology and the occult. I was enchanted by the novel Hide Fox, And All After by 17 year old Rafael Yglesias, who went on to a writing career in books, movies and television.

I also got (or created) some reviewing opportunities related to old enthusiasms. I wrote about Richard Ellmann’s Ulysses On the Liffey, a fairly short book based on a series of lectures about the structure of Joyce’s novel. In college and afterwards I idolized Joyce as well as Ellmann’s hefty biography. I also contrived to review a couple of books by Thoreau, including one we’d used in Doug Wilson’s Emerson and Thoreau course at Knox College, along with a newer enthusiasm, Henry Miller’s The Books in My Life.

In fact, to this day my shelves include books I reviewed or at least mentioned then, that I was unlikely to acquire otherwise: Penelope Gilliatt’s wonderful stories in Nobody’s Business, Lewis Mumford’s Interpretations and Forecasts, The Unknown Lewis Carroll, Evan S. Connell’s Points of a Compass Rose, Reynold Price’’s Things Themselves, Suzi Gablik’s Magritte (the first in depth treatment of that artist), poet Paul Eluard’s Capital of Pain and poet Michael Benedikt’s Mole Notes. Reviewing William Irwin Thompson’s first book (Imagination of an Insurrection) led to looking out for his subsequent books over ensuing decades. The same was true for several other authors.

One of the books I no longer have, however, is Dow Mossman’s novel Stones of Summer. A very long first novel that quickly disappeared, it has since become legendary, especially due to a documentary film made about it and its iconic status, as well as its reclusive author who never published again. It turns out that my review was just about the only one it received, perhaps 250 mostly admiring words. The documentary director heard of its existence after he’d made his movie, so although two people I know (and who do not know each other) are interviewed in his film, I am not. Plus I had by then sold this apparently rare first edition along with others to a Pittsburgh bookstore in 1996, to lighten the load of the Ryder truck I drove here to California. It’s worth a lot more now than I was paid for it.

Joyce Carol Oates in 1972

Book reviews didn’t pay much—the book itself was the treasure. Still, you can’t eat them, so I aimed for some sort of weekly stipend. I lobbied for a book review column, which would include a main review and short notices of other books received, to encourage publishers to send us more. By spring of 1972 my “Book Report” column was appearing. And we were getting loads of new books from presses large and small. I was getting letters from writers I reviewed or mentioned. A note from Joyce Carol Oates, probably responding to my laudatory review of her nonfiction book on tragedy in fiction, resulted in a correspondence of a half-dozen or so letters.

I also got letters from readers, some appreciative but others disputing or correcting me, and even a few threats. Other staff members and people I knew or just ran into often commented on my reviews and other pieces. This helped make me conscious of reading eyes, so I was even more carefully about checking facts and spelling, and avoiding other mistakes. If it wasn’t before, this instilled a consciousness and habits of care that has been part of my writing process the rest of my life.

As for how I learned to write book reviews at all, the answer is simple: by reading book reviews. Those magazines I subscribed to in high school ostensibly for speech club all contained book reviews—from the newsweeklies to The New Republic, the Atlantic and the New Yorker, and a magazine I recall reading the first year or so of college, the Saturday Review. I also happened to begin reading the New York Times Sunday Book Review regularly just as its most glorious era began with the editorship of John Leonard, the best reviewer and editor I ever encountered as a reader, before or since.

I absorbed the rules of the form (including the journalistic part of conveying information about the author and the book, etc.) and a sense of their style and their possibilities. And I learned from my peers. It was the same basic process by which I learned to write all other journalistic forms.

Apart from the journalism basics I learned in high school social studies, I didn’t have a single journalism course. I learned by reading and by writing. My college education as a liberal arts English literature and composition major helped of course, in general and various specific ways. But that education led up a path of graduate school (or a writers workshop) and the combination of college teaching and literary writing. I had wandered off that path, never to return.

Eventually that year, when Jake Kugel left, I became responsible for managing this surfeit of incoming books as Books Editor (Celia Gilbert became the Literary Editor, responsible among other things for the poems the paper published.) In terms of sheer volume at least, I’d come a long way from borrowing two books for two weeks from the Greensburg Public Library.

In late summer of 1972, we returned from a weekend to learn that our publisher, Steven Mindich, had bought out his Cambridge rival, the Phoenix. We were now the Boston Phoenix. A few Cambridge Phoenix writers elected to come over, but most stayed and reconstituted themselves as a staff-owned weekly called The Real Paper. There was a stir—one of the former Phoenix writers (Andrew Kopkind) referred to Mindich in our pages as a “hip capitalist.” Steve and I had our differences, but I admired the moment he came to an editorial meeting. “I am not a hip capitalist,” he announced. “I am a capitalist.” Still, for most of us, nothing much changed, at least not immediately.

Also that summer, while racial tensions over busing in Boston were erupting in sporadic riots, the Rolling Stones played the Boston Garden. I was there with a half-dozen others from the Phoenix. We were high up and far away from the stage as we watched a tiny Stevie Wonder perform, and when he ran out of tunes, we waited for the Stones to appear.

An hour or so went by before Boston Mayor Kevin White appeared at the microphone instead of Mick Jagger. He told us that Jagger and Keith Richards had been arrested for an altercation with a photographer after getting off their plane in Rhode Island, but that he’d gotten them released and they were on their way. After the cheering stopped, his voice dropped dramatically. “Another part of my city is burning,” he said. He was pulling police from the Garden area to help with the emergency. He asked the crowd to act responsibly.

We had about another hour to wait, but the mood turned giddy, and frisbies and beachballs began to appear, being tossed from level to level, with notable catches roundly cheered. Finally the Stones appeared, but I was too exhausted by then to appreciate much. I don’t think there was much energy left in the rest of the crowd, either.

I probably reviewed more books than I remember, but as far as I know, no B.A.D./ Boston Phoenix archives exist anymore for 1971 and most of 1972--at least, not online. My bookshelves remind me of some, but I have clips of most of those I mentioned. As book review editor, cutting out clips of reviews was part of my job as I conceived it. I kept some of my own but mostly I clipped everybody's, to send to publishers of the books reviewed. This was especially important if I'd written or called to request review copies. This gave us credibility as a publication that regularly wrote about books and authors. If nothing else, it probably encouraged publishers to send us more books. But it got their attention in another way, as I was to discover.

I described the basic physical layout of the B.A.D., now Boston Phoenix offices, with the business side separated from the editorial side by the reception area. This was more than a physical separation. There was (in those days) something called The Wall between business (specifically advertising) and editorial. It meant that editorial did not take advertisers into account when deciding what to cover or print. This protected editorial integrity, while giving the ad reps cover when advertisers were unhappy about something that appeared.

But this didn’t stop certain efforts at persuasion, gentle or otherwise, from Barry M., the head of advertising sales. Barry came to me with various ideas for things I should write about, basically because they were good for advertising. (Or things he was afraid we were going to write about that might be bad for advertising.) I listened to him, and though I got angry a few times, he was a genial guy and I basically saw it as a game we played, because I never accepted a single idea he offered.

In addition to the regular weekly paper, which by mid- 1972 sometimes came in two sections (news and arts), we published occasional supplements on particular subjects. The largest as I recall was the Music Supplement. I wrote several pieces for those, including the article I had the most fun researching, on the iconic countercultural comedy group, Firesign Theatre. Their hilarious recorded narratives were filled with puns and countercultural references and themes. This was at a time that shaggy strangers who were lined up to get into rock concerts might while away the time by combining to reproduce a Firesign Theatre scene from memory. At one point I had all four of its members on the phone for an interview, which was as funny and surreal as their albums.

Then I proposed a Book Supplement, which was approved. But not by Barry. He came to moan to me about how he couldn’t see how to sell ads for it. There were two major publishers in town: Little, Brown, and Houghton-Mifflin, and lots of bookstores. But how was he going to fill all those pages? I didn’t know, I said, and I didn’t care.

I edited our first books supplement in fall 1972 (November 28 issue.) Unfortunately I haven't yet found a complete copy if I have one somewhere. I did locate a couple of pages from it, with my essay on Philip Roth, about his complaint that American reality was more bizarre than anything a fiction writer could imagine, along with a review of his latest novel, The Breast. The piece was headlined "The Gripes of Roth," suggesting I'd learned something from John Leonard's amazing headlines in the Times Sunday Book Review. The pages also have the beginning of Victor Burg's piece on the latest works of several Southern writers, including Flannery O'Connor's collected stories, Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins, Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter and essays by Reynolds Price. I met Victor at his day job of presiding over the Harvard Bookstore. I believe there was another piece on Southern writers, by a young woman who grew up in New Orleans and never written for publication before.

A word about Walker Percy, who seems to be forgotten but was then a respected and in some ways seminal writer, and still deserves to be read. Re-reading Love In the Ruins today, it first of all reminds me of two things: where I first heard of Early Times bourbon, and how apocalyptic those years were, the late 60s through the mid-70s, which he had projected into an alternative near future tale. Walker portrays the extreme division in American life and politics in terms that look very familiar today. The breadth of those divisions was perhaps obscured by the most obvious cause: the still-ongoing war in southeast Asia.

Speaking of which, this book supplement may also have been the occasion for a review of David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, which suggested that hubris in high places was a chief cause for getting into Vietnam and staying there. There may well have been an interview with the author included.

In any case this did appear, even if not in the book supplement. I was part of the Halberstam interview, held in his room in the Ritz hotel, where major New York publishers liked to house their top authors when they visited Boston. Halberstam’s speaking voice, even in conversation, was at once authoritative and intimate, almost conspiratorial. He had an easy yet urgent way of describing his books as if he was letting listeners in on amazing things he’d just discovered. His interviews were tremendous assets, evident in this one, for his first of many books. Any criticism of the Vietnam war was still controversial, but this book was an immediate success. By early 1973 it was the #1 Best Seller on the New York Times list.

I was also part of an interview at the Ritz with Jerzy Kosinski, who published probably his best novel, Being There in 1971, and The Devil Tree in 1973. I’m guessing it was the occasion of a paperback edition of Being There in 1972. He turned out to be an dazzling raconteur who had us mesmerized with bizarre but convincing tales, mostly about his own life in Poland, Europe and America. This is something else that might have appeared in the supplement.

Some surviving notes indicate I prepared a number of short reviews and lists: Fred Barron wrote short reviews of books on film, Mike Baron on books on Tarzan, Wayne Biddle on fiction, Adrienne Rich and Liz Fenton on books by and about women.

In any case, while I was getting the final editorial copy ready for this first book supplement, Barry bolted through the Wall from advertising, showed up at my desk very excited. The ads for the supplement were rolling in, including the first national ads he’d ever sold for books. He wanted to know when we could do another one.

As I recall we also got good response from readers, including a letter on McGovern for President stationery from a professor of English at Northeastern who took out a subscription, not because of our (mostly my) positive coverage of the McGovern campaign (read on), but because of the writing in our book supplement.

I wrote on other subjects as well in 1972. I did music concert features on T-Rex and Neil Young, stories on music artists who appeared at the summer series on Boston Common (including Arlo Guthrie, the aforementioned Bill Withers and the last concert appearance anywhere by Smokey Robinson with the Miracles) as well as at least one news story on the music biz.

But I also did arts section cover stories, including one on Buckminster Fuller and another on Dick Cavett. The week that latter story was in the current issue, I got a disorienting jolt one night. I was watching Cavett and about to turn it off, when I saw the next guest was comedian Mort Sahl. He entered carrying a copy of my Cavett story (“Does the Emmy Spell Cancellation for Cavett?” Spoiler alert: it did.) Sahl then read a few lines from the story, and the camera focused on the newspaper, with my byline. So my name appeared on Dick Cavett, though without my person. (It turned out Sahl had a week’s engagement at a club in western Massachusetts, where he saw the paper.)

I ended the year with a series of stories that appeared in the front section of the Boston Phoenix, all concerning the 1972 election campaign between incumbent Richard Nixon and Democratic nominee George McGovern. For reasons lost to history, I was assigned—or perhaps just permitted—to cover McGovern’s day-long, early October campaign stop in Boston.

It was a bleak moment in a baffling campaign year. The country was riven by the Vietnam War, and McGovern had a clear plan to end it immediately. Never very popular, Nixon was embroiled in scandal, especially with the first reporting on what came to be called Watergate. But there was still considerable hostility towards the anti-war movement, and my generation in particular. The polls—just beginning to be a force in American politics—showed Nixon overwhelmingly ahead. Yet McGovern was getting increasingly large and enthusiastic crowds at his rallies, and after the contentious convention the Democratic party seemed to be uniting behind him. So I focused my story on how the McGovern campaign and the press covering it evaluated the candidate’s chances.

Before I started, I spoke with Tim Crouse, who lived in Cambridge and whose pieces on the media covering this campaign that eventually became his classic book, The Boys on the Bus, had begun appearing in Rolling Stone. He suggested people to talk to for my story.

With my press credentials, I got to the noon rally early and stole a quick interview with Senator Eugene McCarthy, one of the antiwar candidates in 1968. I witnessed him meeting long-time Massachusett’s congressman and former Speaker of the House John McCormack. I characterized this as the meeting of the Saint and the Pol. “Should I genuflect?” I heard McCormack say, probably the best line in my story. I talked with other campaign operatives, and eventually with campaign manager Frank Mankiewicz (an interview on the campaign bus to the airport) but I also spoke with various members of the press covering the campaign, in an enormous room full of tobacco smoke and typewriters at the Sheraton Plaza Hotel.

At first I was just dazzled-- all these reporters from wire services and large newspapers across the country, pretty much all friendly and accessible. When the most eminent of reporters entered—the New York Times columnist James “Scotty” Reston-- the waves parted before him. He gave me a courtly nod, a kind of welcome to a newcomer, and maybe a blessing.

As I reported in my piece, the traveling press saw a campaign that by traditional measures (crowd size and enthusiasm, party support and organization) looked like a winner. I spoke with Connie Chung, then a young CBS News reporter attached to the campaign (smart, playful and more vibrantly beautiful than TV cameras ever captured), who also summed it up that way, and added: “Then I go back to Washington and they tell me he’s blowing it, look at the polls.”

I was also present when McGovern spoke to a small group of young people working for his campaign outside the hotel, and asked him a question or two as we shook hands there.

My resulting piece was the front page lead. When it was decided that it would be, I was summoned by editor Teddy Gross for a close edit session. I learned more in that session than in years, before or after. I had the same feeling a few other times over the decades, in particular with copy editors, but it was rare. Reading now the five pieces I wrote over the next few weeks, this is clearly the best.

It also happened to be published in Teddy Gross’ last issue as Editor. Kerry Gruson, an associate editor for news, became the interim editor while a not very urgent search for a permanent replacement began. Very early she said she would not take the job herself, a decision she came to regret.

In the October 17 issue I had two pieces in the news section. One was another piece on the McGovern campaign, when it came back to Boston for an evening fundraiser, a Gala which featured Hollywood stars (Tommy Smothers, Warren Beatty, Shirley McLaine) and political stars (Senator Ted Kennedy, the teenage Caroline Kennedy.) Other politicians spoke as well-- they told jokes (as I noted in my piece) while the Hollywood stars made political speeches.

Cassie Mackin

Again, I was an accepted citizen in the huge but this time mostly empty press room (where I ambushed Warren Beatty, evidently looking for NBC News reporter Cassie Mackin. His answers to my questions were short, embarrassed and as useless as he meant them to be.) Later, during McGovern's speech, I stood in the press area near the front taking notes and looked over at the only other reporter who seemed to be doing the same--the aforementioned Cassie Mackin. Tall, blond and outspoken, she was later targeted by the Nixon people and pretty much driven off the air. She looked back at me and flashed a quick, incandescent smile.

Members of McGovern’s family were also at the gala, including his teenage daughter, Mary, who at some point ran past me in the company of a laughing Caroline Kennedy. I ended my piece by re-stating the stakes of this election through these two teenage girls. Referring to McGovern’s dedication to transforming the political life of the country, I wrote: “One could not see Caroline Kennedy and not remember what that dedication means, and hope that the boy she was smiling at from the stage would at least be spared the killing and the dying, that Mary McGovern at least could be spared the further twisting of conscience, the frustration and the terrible absorption of energy that the war has brought to being young in America.”

My second piece in that issue was a long exposition on the Nixon administration’s attempts to intimidate and control the press—efforts that would become even more obvious and effective in coming years.

Along with the influence of polls, another new wrinkle in American politics was the role of television network projections of outcomes based on computer analyses. Computers had been used to predict vote totals as early as the 1952 presidential election, but even in 1960 they were treated as a novelty, a sideshow. In 1972 they threatened to become a major factor.

I got a tip from someone—probably Mike Shain in New York, who couldn’t use the information himself—that NBC was planning for the possibility of announcing the presidential winner before the polls were closed in all the states. This had never happened. So I reported this in October 31 issue, along with reactions I solicited, from the ACLU for instance. The response was divided. Some saw it as a free speech issue, others as essentially disenfranchising western voters, and possibly affecting the election because the projections became self-fulfilling prophesy.

This possibility was related to the overall danger that potential voters—especially potential McGovern voters-- would see all the coverage of the polls and then the projections, and become too discouraged to vote. They would simply give up hope.

My pieces seemed to respond to the feeling I was picking up, even among the antiwar young, that either McGovern was insufficiently radical, or that no candidate who promised to immediately end the Vietnam war could win. The McGovern campaign itself seemed to sense this, for in Boston and elsewhere they had the candidate stand under banners or behind a podium that said simply, “President McGovern.” Conceiving of the possibility seemed half the fight. (Erstwhile Yippies Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman co-authored a paperback titled Vote! in which they tried to persuade their readership that McGovern was one of them, sort of.)

On the front page of our last issue before Election Day, we confronted the doubts about voting for McGovern with two stories. A short book had been published outlining how McGovern could surprise everyone and win, mostly because of a huge youth vote. It was excerpted, under a picture of the famous photograph of Harry Truman in 1948 holding up a newspaper proclaiming his defeat, the morning after he’d won.

Under that began my story about the many reasons to vote against Nixon, including the corruption that had already been at least partially exposed by Woodward and Bernstein in Washington. (McGovern himself had proclaimed the Nixon administration “the most corrupt in American history,” but no one listened to that, either.)

I spent election night as a reporter at McGovern headquarters. It was filled with anxious but noisy supporters and campaign workers early in the evening, as a few young staffers stared at numbers coming into their computer terminals, eventually rendered speechless. Indeed at least one network did project McGovern’s defeat well before California polls closed, and the room emptied out as if by magic. Local politicians in particular disappeared. Someone eventually came down to the lonely podium to thank the few shell-shocked campaign workers who were still around. But the silence in that room was like nothing I’d experienced, despite the fact that McGovern had won Massachusetts. Unfortunately, it was the only state he did win.

J. Anthony Lukas

Some weeks later, when New York Times reporter Anthony Lukas came to town to report on why Massachusetts was the exception, he had dinner with Kerry Gruson and she brought me along (he knew Kerry through her father Sydney Gruson, a Times executive.) Kerry gallantly suggested one factor in the Massachusetts vote might be my series of stories in the Boston Phoenix.

(This was the winter that men were wearing fur hats, and Lukas was particularly proud of his, because he got it in Russia. )

In months to come, as the war in southeast Asia got even worse, and the Watergate hearings and later the Impeachment hearings gripped the nation, I had a locally popular bumper stickers slapped on my guitar case, which I took on all my plane trips. It said: “Don’t Blame Me/I’m From Massachusetts.”

In 1972, the Boston Phoenix editorial staff was largely comprised of people in their twenties, most of them graduates of local colleges: principally Harvard (and Radcliffe), Brandeis and Boston University (BU). That was true of regular freelancers as well. A slim majority were male, and I don’t recall a single person of color.

I was friends with many of the people I worked with, including support staff. We were part of each other’s social lives—we were swimming in the culture we were reporting, so I would often attend music events with Ben Gerson and others covering music, for example. We all went to movies together in various combinations. Janet Maslin sometimes enlisted me to accompany her to movies she was reviewing, especially at theatres in a dodgy part of town.

I socialized most with those on the arts and entertainment side, but I did become friends with Kerry Gruson, before and after she became interim editor. We had an odd moment that seemed significant when we both unexpectedly came back to the office after a weekend with dramatically shorter hair.

For reasons I don’t recall if I ever knew, Kerry invited me to Thanksgiving dinner at the house in Essex that she shared with her boyfriend at the time. Her father was also coming, and in fact, they picked me up at my East Cambridge apartment for the hour or so drive to Essex. They had a typical father-daughter moment on the way, when Sydney remarked on my Polish name and suggested his family might be Polish. “We are not Polish,” Kerry said emphatically, in that “Oh, Dad” tone.

By the time we sat down to dinner at a long table, I was surprised to see that I was the only Phoenix staffer there. As mentioned, Sydney Gruson was a New York Times executive. He had been a reporter and distinguished foreign editor. (His wife and Kerry’s mother, Florence Lewis, was also been a Times reporter in Europe. What I don’t think I knew at the time was that 1972 was the year of their divorce.)

Gloria Emerson

Because of Sydney’s presence, there were several Times reporters there, including Pulitzer Prize winners Gloria Emerson (who won hers for Vietnam reporting) and Anthony Lukas. I mostly watched and listened. After dinner, I was packed into a car going back to Boston. I was in the back seat, squeezed between Anthony Lukas and Gloria Emerson: the filling of a Pulitzer sandwich. Lukas was so tight against me that when we turned to each other to converse, we were practically kissing. On my other side Gloria soon fell asleep, with her head on my shoulder.

But that somewhat out of body experience wasn’t the end of my day—I had another Thanksgiving dinner to attend that evening. This one was hosted by Martha, the Phoenix receptionist. She lived in my general neighborhood of East Cambridge with several housemates, and I’d been to their house several times. I found myself again at a long table, this time with a few others from the Phoenix plus a number of others I knew and didn’t know. This was a more relaxed and raucous group—at least I was more relaxed. I found myself seated between two women I’d had at least flirtations with, and at one point was holding hands under the table with both at the same time. A group of us ended up trooping off to a nearby blues club, after which I had just a short walk home.

My biggest problems with the Phoenix was in getting paid. We had some real conflicts over both rates of payment and promptness. But though I was the regular book columnist, and even filled in as music editor while Ben Gerson was away, I was essentially still a freelancers, and freelance writers were often treated poorly, and not just by this publication.

But then I got the chance for an actual weekly salary. I believe it was towards the end of the year that Steve Mindich offered me a job that had not previously existed. The Phoenix was about to launch a redesign, and it would now regularly appear in two sections. He offered me the new position of Managing Editor/Arts, with the Second Section as my responsibility. The salary (which would cover my writing and continued tenure as Books Editor) was substantial: not only more than I had ever made (that would be easy) but more than my parents were making (though I didn't know it at the time.)

By the time I went back to Greensburg for a Christmas visit, I had accepted. I would begin my new work in the new year—a year that turned out to hold more than one major change.

Reading Mason & Dixon

2024-07-14T02:38:00.001-07:00

I like reading long novels. Often they are among my favorites of favorite authors, like Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City or Richard Powers' Goldbug Variations and The Time Of Our Singing, Don DeLillo's Underworld (though my absolute favorite of his is the somewhat longish Ratner's Star), and Jim Harrison's The Road Home (nearly 500 pages on its own, it is also a kind of sequel to the shorter Dalva.) I've had stretches of taking on long classics all in a row: Moby Dick, War & Peace, Anna Karenina. In the first few years of my retirement I read several long Dickens' novels, though I admit I haven't attempted the longest, Martin Chuzzlewit.

I didn't come to this naturally (but that's a longer story) and I don't get through them all--I have yet to sustain interest in the world of Middlemarch, though I appreciate the skill of the writing. I do need to be involved in the world of the novel, but what grabs me and holds me is the rhythm of the prose. The pleasures of that are enough to keep me going, even when (as frequently happens) I'm not all that sure what's going on. I've turned to plot guides, and in the case of Dickens, a good BBC/PBS film adaptation, to help me sort out the characters and events.

The writing, the mesmerizing rhythms of it have especially been the attractions of several of Thomas Pynchon's long novels. I read V twice and had a pretty good idea of what was going on the second time. I started Gravity's Rainbow several times, I loved the first section a lot (same with the first section of Ulysses) but couldn't get past it. Then I read it through in the 1980s (when I noticed that the movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai stole the name of Yoyodine Propulsions from this book.) After my retirement in 2016 I read it again, this time with a guidebook or two. That added to the pleasure.

Gravity's Rainbow is very likely Pynchon's masterpiece, but I have a special fondness for the 1085 pages of Against The Day. If it has a plot I don't know what it is. I experienced it as a compendium of early twentieth century genres, including the western and especially boy's adventures. The group of boys as a kind of Starfleet in dirigibles is just perfect.

The occasion for all of this is that I have finally finished another long Pynchon, Mason & Dixon. I read its 773 pages over several years--so many I can't remember when I started it, but probably two or even three this time. I've had a copy since it was published in 1997, but I was always stopped in my reading tracks by the strange 18th diction and spelling, and especially the rampant Capitalizations of nouns and their modifiers, and perhaps more.

This still slowed me down in this recent attempt, and this hefty volume would drift to the bottom of the pile next to me. But I'd dip into it every once in awhile, if only for a shot of Pynchon energy in a dismal verbal world. Then I would get rolling for awhile. But since I seldom understood what was going on beyond the particulars of a scene, I couldn't sustain the momentum. Until I did, and read the last two or three hundred pages in a long series of consecutive evenings.

In general, the novel really is about Mason and Dixon--before, after and especially while they were embarked on the one job for which they are remembered, fixing the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland that by the 19th century became the border between North and South. Other characters in the novel have historical counterparts as well (George Washington and Samuel Johnson have cameos, and Ben Franklin comes across as a wily crank who keeps getting people to electrocute themselves.) I suppose I actually did learn things about the 18th century , but basically I was just along for the ride.

Besides--as Eileen Ecklund notes in a contemporary review I chanced upon after writing this piece, "...the most basic of my Pynchon reading lessons: you will not be tested on this later."

Instead of plot developments I noted little allusions, buried anachronisms and jokes. Several titles of other Pynchon works appear in the prose, like "inherent vice" (p. 272) "against the day" (p.683), and a brief appearance of a family name (Bodine--p.566) that appears in other Pynchon novels, notably in V and Gravity's Rainbow. There are allusions that perhaps only a Doctor Who fan would know (a Coach designed by the Jesuits--the scientist/magicians of the day--is "bigger on the inside" (p. 354) and a structure decaying in the woods also suspiciously akin to the TARDIS (412.) And then there's the Kabbalistick sect that flashes a strange hand sign while uttering, "Live Long and Prosper." (485)

The Reader's Fortitude is rewarded with Pynchon elegance and eloquence, such as on the subject of slavery. Stories of new scientific technologies and of magic intermingle, especially on the Pennsylvania frontier (including country I know from my own boyhood) and there is plenty of the Fantastic (a Robot Duck and a Talking Dog for starters.) The futility of the frontier mentality--in which perfection is finally just beyond the next ridge, until it always isn't--and the fluidity of actual and metaphorical border areas, all appear to be themes. But I mention all this less to explain the book, than to celebrate the fact that I read it.

I had just about finished reading it in fact when I learned of the imminent publication of the Mason & Dixon Companion, out next month, which presumably suggests more than I discerned about the plot, themes etc. as well as the many allusions I'm sure I missed. But as much as I enjoyed this book, I'm not quite ready to start it all over again, Companion at my side. But maybe someday. For now, I am comforted by noting that it took 27 years for anyone to write a Companion to Mason & Dixon.

The Greatest Unknown American Writer: K.C. Constantine

2024-06-05T23:06:00.000-07:00

This is the second of two posts on K.C. Constantine. The first looks at origins of his fictional town of Rocksburg in Greensburg, Pa., where we both lived, partly at the same time, including some years that are those in the novels.

His publisher once called him the greatest unknown writer in America. It's a logical impossibility, of course: if the writers are truly unknown, how would you know which is the greatest? But it makes a point anyway. K.C. Constantine's obscurity is not based on merit, and should not last.

“K.C. Constantine’s crime novels are among the best in American literature,” said a San Diego Union-Tribune review. An Los Angeles Times Book Review piece called him “A superb writer and social chronicler,” and the New York Times “ a marvelous writer.” Washington Post Book World claimed he “writes some of the best American regional fiction appearing today.” Of these novels main protagonist, a Boston Globe reviewer wrote: "Balzic is one of the great characters in contemporary fiction.” Notice the lack of qualifier--not mystery or police procedural fiction, just "contemporary fiction."

Over the years the reviews in major US and UK publications have praised Constantine’s novels as not only as among the best in crime fiction, but for their literary style and quality. Yet relatively few readers know about him, even after more than fifty years since his books began, and now a year after his death, as well as shortly after his last novel was published.

Part of the reason has to be that for most of his career he insisting on remaining no more than a pseudonym. In this publicity-crazed age, there were no book jacket photos, interviews, book tours, television appearances or feature stories. (There were stories about how zealously he guarded his identity, and some of them may even have been true.) An anonymous author living in an obscure and culturally isolated little town, in an unlauded and decidedly unromantic part of America—not a recipe for fame.

After nearly forty years publishing his Rocksburg series of police procedural novels under the pseudonym K.C. Constantine, and stubbornly protecting his real identity from just about everyone, Carl Kosak showed up for his first book signing in 2011, at the Festival of Mystery in Pittsburgh, an annual event that attracted mystery writers from around the country (Louise Penney attended as well that year.) But it’s only been after his death last year in 2023 that anything much has been known about his life, due principally to the efforts of his son Christopher.

Carl Constantine Kosak was born in 1934, and grew up in the Bottoms neighborhood of McKees Rocks, a small town within the Pittsburgh metro area. His father, an immigrant probably from modern-day Latvia, was an artist and founding member of the Pittsburgh Artists Guild. He painted murals and also did commercial work and design for clients such as the Kaufmann department store family in Pittsburgh, including on their famous Frank Lloyd Wright house, Fallingwater.

But the dominant figure in the Kosak household was Carl’s grandfather, according to some cryptic comments the writer offered in an afterword to a paperback edition of his first novel, The Rocksburg Railroad Murders. Carl developed a “murderous hatred” of him. He died when Carl was 12. After asking to see the body to make sure, “I danced around chanting ‘He’s dead, he’s dead’ until I fell down exhausted. When you hate someone and he dies, it’s a wonderful feeling.”

Carl was an honor student at Stowe Township High School, as well as a star baseball player, good enough to be offered a minor league contract. He played for several teams in the South before returning to Pennsylvania to attend Westminster College, a small liberal arts college affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in New Wilmington, a town about 50 miles north of Pittsburgh.

He got in some unspecified trouble with police, and was given the choice of jail or enlisting in the military. He joined the Marines. I haven’t run across any further information on his military service, but if he graduated at 18 and played ball for even a couple of years, the Korean War would have been over when he enlisted.

After his stint in the Marines, Kosak returned to Westminster College, where he met Linda Tweedy, who grew up in Greensburg. They married in 1962.

While in the Marines, Kosak had begun to write seriously. He did well enough to be accepted at the Iowa Writers Workshop (this had to be the early to mid 60s, a crucial half decade or so before I was there.) Kosak and his wife could afford to be there only a year, but his son said he kept in touch with some of his teachers. I’m curious who they were. R.V. Casill? Richard Yates? Kurt Vonnegut? He mentions writer and California teacher Robert V. Williams several times in his afterword, so he must have encountered him somewhere. In any case, he seems to have gotten more out of the Iowa workshop than I did.

Their son was born in 1964, and at some point they moved to Greensburg, where Carl worked construction, and eventually taught English and/or Creative Writing at Seton Hill College for four years, reputedly forced to leave because he wouldn’t pursue an advanced degree.

He became a proofreader/copy editor at the Greensburg Tribune-Review for an unknown period. He may have been able to write full time after 1993. He believed in the craft of writing, passing on his copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style to his son. (They also enjoyed conversations about Star Trek.) He and Linda lived in Greensburg and remained married until her death in 2018.

That’s about all that I’ve found in the public record (the K.C. Constantine wikipedia page is currently a disgrace.) There seem actually to be more biographical details about his wife available, thanks to the obituary that Carl obviously wrote.

Beginning with The Rocksburg Railroad Murders in 1972, the main character of Constantine’s first eleven novels was Mario Balzic. In this book he’s in his mid-forties, and has already been on the Rocksburg police force for a quarter century, the last eleven years of which he’s been Chief of Police. Balzic would be the protagonist of 13 novels in the series total, and made at least an appearance in all 18.

Some aspects of Balzic’s biography and the character itself would change slightly as the series went on (he went from drinking beer to enjoying wine), while other elements were clarified and augmented, but from the start it’s Mario Balzic who caught the attention of readers, and particularly in the many laudatory reviews.

Right away, Balzic was unusual. For one thing, he didn’t carry a handgun, because “cops kill too many people, if you ask me.” But he takes his modified Springfield rifle to the range every week to practice bringing down a man without killing him. He’s restrained his officers as well, with the result that nobody has been shot by any of them since he became Chief. “I’m prouder of that than anything.”

Balzic isn’t idealistic and he’s also not entirely cynical, nor he is totally innocent, or erudite and all-knowing. He curses a lot and screw up pretty badly at least once in every story. But he knows people. He knows that a 90 year old old woman calls police headquarters once a month to demand an officer take her complaint in person, so that she can eventually persuade him to go to the market for her because she can’t get around herself anymore, or the reason that an old man insists on complaining in police headquarters about his garbage pickup rather than walk to the second floor of City Hall to the right department is that he’s not supposed to climb stairs.

These daily details surround some twisted crimes, and painful investigations. But beginning with this first novel, usually something psychological is involved—in this case, a killer with a serious but concealed mental illness.

Gradually we learn that Mario Balzic was born in or around 1926, joined the Marines out of high school (eventually named as Central Catholic) and saw horrific combat on the island of Iwo Jima in the late stages of World War II in the Pacific. He joined the Rocksburg Police immediately after returning.

Mario had a Serbian father who was killed in a coal mining accident, and in the first few novels, his Italian mother lives with him and his wife, Ruth. They have two daughters. As is common in at least western Pennsylvania marriages of mixed ethnicity that include an Italian, it is the Italian side that is the family culture.

Where did Mario come from? He’s almost a decade older that the author, who had no daughters. Despite Balzic’s dominant Italian heritage, Carl Kosak had none. This is intriguing to me, what with the many Italian American characters in the novels, and even the adoption of a pen name that suggests Italian (I knew of Italian American families in Greensburg named Constantine—I think I am vaguely related to one.)

K.C. Constantine asked the general question about Balzic’s origins and answered it at length and very indirectly in the aforementioned afterword. The short answer is that Balzic is a predominantly imagined character, drawing some qualities from authority figures the author admired (possibly in the Marines) but also reacting against qualities in authority figures (mostly in law enforcement) he detested.

Although I suspect the author might have denied it, that “Balzic” is only a letter away from “Balzac” probably isn’t a coincidence. The 19^th century French novelist is known for creating complex characters from all segments of society in a realistic portrait of his time and place. In his own way, K.C. Constantine has done the same in this series of novels. Though at times it seems to me the character’s name could just as well have been Mario Dickins.

For my own convenience if nothing else, I’ve divided these books into three phases. The early third were fairly short and came out a year or two apart. The Man Who Liked To Look At Himself (1973) is told mostly in pitch-perfect dialogue, as Balzic is present when a body buried for years is exposed, and must follow the twisted trail of an unsavory murder while dealing with the petty bureaucratic and political demands of being Chief. His character still has some jagged edges that get smoothed later on. In particular, he tells (for effect presumably) a story with racist language that would have been shocking even in the early 1970s.

The Blank Page (1974) shifts milieu slightly to a community college, especially a teacher/poet and his protégé, that perhaps draws on the author’s experience at the Iowa Workshop and maybe his teaching gig at Seton Hill. The murder of a young woman student who was traumatized by an earlier event is especially poignant. It calls to mind a somewhat similar childhood trauma suffered by Linda Kosak, as described in her published obituary as a form of PTSD. “Despite the best efforts of well-trained and well-meaning therapists, that emotional hand grenade…exploded as many as three times a month for the next 65 years.”

A Fix Like This (1975) settles into the family and neighborhood violence that characterizes the series, including the desperation of people on the edge of survival. The coal mines have mostly closed, and as the series continues the jolt of jobs and entire industries disappearing to distant lands that began in the mid-70s begins to contribute its devastating effect.

Critics often make much of this aspect, which tends to make Constantine seem like an anthropologist examining an alien culture. But as someone who grew up and lived for a time in this part of the country, other cultural—and human--elements are at least as important in these stories.

Another theme that’s here from the start is Balzic’s battles with a casually corrupt political establishment, which includes law enforcement. Balzic has made his own compromises as well. Through the “connected” Dom Muscotti, he’s set rules to keep the illegal numbers games clean, and in exchange for allowing that gambling enterprise to persist, the crime bosses will keep drugs and prostitution out of his jurisdiction.

When I first read The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes (1982) I was especially impressed by a dialogue of several pages in which the reader is taken step by step through the delicate intricacies and strategies Balzic employs to extract information, while simultaneously presenting a portrait of a psychologically abused working class woman who is slowly bringing to consciousness all her repressed feelings and motives. This is when I knew a literary artist was at work.

Always a Body To Trade (1983) was longer and maybe a bit more ambitious while still taut and fast-moving, using the innocence of a young and too eager new Mayor to reveal more complexities and corruption—another reason that Balzic affirms his belief in the rights of the accused. But to me it was his next novel, Upon Some Midnight Clear (1985) that gave Constantine’s a larger canvas for his next several novels, without moving the focus away from Rocksburg.

By this time, Hill Street Blues was into his network run, with Homicide: Life on the Streets just ahead. Some of the police headquarters chaos described in this novel reminds me of some of the qualities of those shows. The story he tells, with some major characters based on Greensburg people I knew about, took on the twisted fairy tale quality of its Christmastime setting. There’s more description of place, and more of Balzic’s inner life.

Joey’s Case (1988), his first novel with Mysterious Press, the publisher of the rest of the series, was also his most formally recognized, nominated for the Edgar Allen Poe Award for best mystery novel of the year. By this time, the Constantine novels had collected high praise in Great Britain as well as North America. But his anonymity probably hurt his chances for a wider readership in this celebrity-centered age. Still, if it enabled him to write and do so more freely, it was probably worth it to him, and now to us. Because we have these books.

Sunshine Enemies (1990) involves the death of Mario’s mother, who his wife Ruth considers her best friend. This first whiff of mortality and change in Balzic’s private life is a foretaste of more to come. There’s change in Rocksburg, too, as Dom Muscotti admits he has no say anymore over organized crime in town, and a new day is heralded by a sad little porn shop out on the highway. (I remember one just like it appearing in the 1980s outside Greensburg.)

With Bottom Liner Blues (1993) time is getting to be a theme. Though cues of the year in which each novel takes place are scattered through previous books, they basically seem to be set in a timeless present, with Balzic a timeless presence—only vaguely described, with his age barely implied. With this book, Balzic is thinking about his age—he admits he’s 64--and the year it takes place is stated: the brutally hot summer of 1990, the first record-breaker that became known for awhile as Greenhouse Summer.

For more than a decade, Rocksburg’s downtown has been hollowed out, mostly due to the two shopping malls on the highway just east and west of city limits, while city committees spin their wheels with loopy ideas for revival. (Again, exactly Greensburg’s situation. One such organization, called Go Greensburg!, debated saying something nasty to me for what I wrote about the town in my book The Malling of America.)

The resulting cratering of tax revenue has led to a vastly reduced Rocksburg police force, and an aging Chief Balzic finds himself doing the work of a patrolman to cover for the summer vacations of the few officers left. Out at Rocksburg’s version of Greensburg’s Greengate Mall, he has a flashback in the parking lot, suddenly taking him back to Iowa Jima. It’s not the last such episode in the book.

There is of course a spiraling crime story, but this novel is notable also for a couple of other things. First is the poignant plight of Mario’s wife Ruth, who wants a life and an identity outside the house, but is stunned to find she has no readily identified job skills. The other is the very long dialogue between Balzic and one of Rocksburg’s colorful barflies named Myuskin, who turns out to be a respected and translated novelist with nine books almost nobody in Rocksburg knows about, and he’s broke and nearly broken. Myuskin goes into a long complicated rant about how unfair it is for libraries to lend out his books without compensation. It has dramatic impact, since he’s doing it with a gun in his hand, but it’s hard not to hear the author’s voice.

Cranks and Shadows (1995) involves something I vaguely remember from Greensburg: the Fire Chief (here called Ed Sitko) who organizes a privately funded paramilitary group in response to 1980s terrorist incidents. While Chief Balzic deals with more budget cuts and the prospect of laying off more officers, he learns more about the politics of power and money in his little town. He learns it up close and personal when he is forced into retirement, after 24 years as Chief.

The novel and Balzic’s career ends with two supposed retirement dinners. One is an ill-attended and insulting testimonial by the very public officials and private powers that forced him out, which he quickly observes is meant to humiliate him, and which he just as quickly leaves. The other is a huge, raucous party given by the people of the neighborhoods he served, with food and drink all donated in appreciation. This party adds a rare and surprising note to the series: unmitigated joy. (The author also namechecks some actual well-known western Pennsylvania musicians of the time, including Kenny Blake, who played saxophone on my one and only record—but that’s another story.)

Judging from the book sleeve copy, even the publisher expected this to be the last of the series. It did end a major part of it, but there was a third phase yet to come, with six more novels in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and a final one published in 2024.

A now-retired Mario Balzic is the protagonist of two of them. In Family Values (1997), Balzic is hired by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to look into a crime in a very rural county some distance from Rocksburg. The back cover summary mentions “Balzic must enter his own heart of darkness,” and there is some of that quality to it, as well as grotesque characters that could be out of the horror genre, especially when Balzic faces a psychopathic and truly corrupt police chief who made a practice of abusing the power they both had.

Blood Mud (1998) finds Balzic employed by lawyer Panagios Valcanas (one of the handful of characters that appear in most of the Balzic novels) to investigate thefts at a mall gun store (chronicling as well the deterioration of the soon-to-be defunct Greengate Mall) for an insurance company. This seemingly quick job gets much more complicated, especially when Balzic has what he’s told is “a cardiac event.” This is meticulously described, including his treatment at the county hospital (based on the same hospital where my brother-in-law got similar treatment just a few days before I read this account), and his edgy feelings of vulnerability and mortality afterwards.

Balzic seems to be sinking in fear and guilt, certain he’s damned for what he failed to do, but one of his daughters is giving him books, including some on meditation, and he’s becoming an advocate. (Besides the Strunk and White, the other book the author gave to his son was Zen and the Art of Archery.)

As far back as A Fix Like This, a promising young officer named Ruggiero Carlucci (called “Rugsy” at first, and then “Rugs”) was introduced, and as a detective he soon became essential to Balzic’s investigations. After Mario’s retirement, he was the main protagonist of three novels: Good Sons (1996), Brushback (1998)—which involves a minor league pitcher, perhaps drawing on Carl Kozak’s youthful memories—and Grievance (2000.)

In 2002 came Saving Room for Dessert which follows three protagonists from the Rockburg police: Robert Canoza, James Reseta (on the force in Balzic’s time) and William Rayford, Rocksburg’s first black police officer, who Balzic met and formally recommended in Blood Mud.

By this time, Constantine’s fictional world dominated over any real world resemblances. These characters worked out their fates within it, with distinct elements of classical tragedy—tragic flaws and all. They are different from the Balzic books, yet just as compelling. (Balzic appears in the Rayford section, does him another favor and says that it will mean Rayford has to forever “listen to my stories,” a perfect distillation of both elder behavior and elder Balzic’s function in these last books.)

And the rest was silence, or so it seemed. The books stopped coming, and Carl Kozak finally revealed himself as the author, and signed a few books in 2013. But at that time, he complained that while he was still writing, he wasn’t getting published.

Yet he must have persisted because the manuscript for his final book emerged from the editing process, and was signed, sealed and delivered just days before he unexpectedly passed away in 2023.

Published earlier this spring (of 2024), Another Day’s Pain centered on Rugs Carlucci for the fourth time. Like the previous novel, Mario Balzic puts in some spectral appearances as a (maybe) slightly addled sage. By this time, Carlucci himself is on the brink of retirement, but apart from dealing with the petty violence and twisted personalities he must confront on the job, he is dealing with the fallout of tragic circumstances in the present and the past.

Psychological issues emerge in all of these novels, but mental health is never more central than in this, the last one. Over the course of the Carlucci novels, his increasingly violent mother goes from being a kind of deluded harpy in his home, torturing him with a past neither of them can fully deal with, to a very violent threat who inflicts serious injury, to a mental patient who enacts one last violent revenge.

If this was not enough to shatter Carlucci, he is hit with suddenly resurrected memories of abuse by a priest in his own youth, as well as the breakdown of the one person who gave his life hope, his girlfriend, the beautiful Franny Perfetti. The novel ends with both of them making slow progress towards normality, but far apart. There are words about how you don't have to be in a war to get PTSD that are similar to words in his wife's obituary. The story at times edges perilously towards the Gothic, but the writing is just as hypnotic, and the artistry is intact. In his late 80s, K.C. Constantine still had it.

What did he have? I can’t make comparisons with other police procedurals. Apart from Raymond Chandler, a dash of Hammett, most of Sherlock Holmes and Poe’s original detective, the only such series I’ve read are Tony Hillerman’s Navajo Nation Police novels and Donna Leon’s Commisario Brunetti in Venice. And it’s very obvious I can’t detach from the variations on Greensburg.

But I can say this much. In that afterword, Constantine wrote about the importance of getting the tone right. Call it tone, flow, music, voice—it keeps you reading with forward momentum, and it keeps you comfortable reading, even when the stark hardness of many of those lives and the people living them are hard to take. There is humor, though mostly black, and there are moments of warmth and hope. The protagonists—Mario Balzic, Rugs Carlucci—are flawed and conflicted but above all they are earnest—and so you root for them, even when what they are up against is themselves.

Meanwhile, in the real Greensburg, the Rialto bar --at least in the 70s and 80s-- was never quite as populated and lively as Muscottis, and didn’t look much like it, except for the ancient restrooms in the basement, which might have been built by the Romans if their empire had extended that far. The last time I was there was on a 2019 visit with family and friends, when I had a plate of overcooked spaghetti in the restaurant half, learned that there was different management, and that the new bartender didn’t know that the famous bartender of Dom's day (named Vinnie in the novels) was called Baldy, now the name on the pizza shop next door. Since then, the place fell on darker days, with a shooting and then a stabbing. The state closed it, though new owners plan to reconstitute it as something called a gastropub.

Greensburg also lost an actual police chief when he was arrested for dealing drugs. Another descendant of the real fire chief called Ed Sitko in the books is the new fire chief, at least the third generation, and the town experienced a murder more horrendous than any in Constantine’s books.

Seton Hill is now a university and has spread itself through downtown, which is looking less bedraggled, if not more lively. There still seems to be no recognition of these novels, and the Kosak home was put up for sale.

K.C. Constantine: The Mysteries of Greensburg

2024-05-15T23:49:00.000-07:00

by William Severini Kowinski

Every December I resolve that this year I won’t expend the time and effort to look up notable deaths of the past twelve months to write about the people I remember, as I have for some years past on various blogs. Failing that, I tell myself, I will restrict my research to the more prominent names assembled by major newspapers and magazines.

But every December, including in 2023, I still find myself trolling through Wikipedia’s comprehensive rolls of hundreds of deceased soccer stars and those in other fields around the world who made the cut. I do so partly because every year, a name surprises me—someone whose death means something to me, but I had not known of it until then.

Last December, that was the writer K.C. Constantine. His series of 18 police procedurals began in 1972 with The Rocksburg Railroad Murders, and concluded with the just published Another Day’s Pain in April 2024. All of them are set in his fictional Rocksburg, Pennsylvania.

Despite consistently laudatory reviews in the New York Times, Washington Post and other prestigious places, he was never very well known (and therefore, his death was not noted in their year-end summaries.) A blurb on the back of his final novel by mystery writer Ken Bruen sums it up: “…a great and ferocious talent who was unjustly ignored.”

K.C. Constantine was a pseudonym, and for most of his career his real name was not generally known. But for part of that time I knew it. Carl Constantine Kosak died at the age of 88 in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, where he’d lived while writing this book series, and where I was born, grew up, and returned as a visitor and temporary resident.

I hasten to add that I did not know him, and even after I knew who he was, I never met him. I learned of his books in the 1980s, fittingly enough, in the very bar he immortalized as Muscotti’s in the novels. A newspaper reporter friend told me of the series, and that it was basically set in Greensburg, though I didn’t get the impression he’d read many himself.

I found five or six of his novels in the Greensburg Public Library. I was excited by what I read, and amazed that nobody in town—including my otherwise well-connected acquaintances-- seemed to know about them, and therefore, about him. And it was very clear from those novels that it was Greensburg he was chiefly writing about.

The Wikipedia entry on Constantine asserts the novels are set in a version of McKees Rocks, another western Pennsylvania town, where Kosak grew up. There are elements of McKees Rocks represented—notably the neighborhood of the Bottoms, called the Flats in the novels, as well as other places, real and imaginary. But basically, it’s Greensburg. That fact is now acknowledged in the author’s bio with the last novel.

That an author who is known elsewhere could remain unknown in Greensburg was not exactly news to me, but that Constantine was writing police procedurals about the very city that was blind to him did seem strange. So I continued my search for the author’s identity, and eventually found my answer, once again, at the model for Muscotti’s.

Facing Pennsylvania Avenue (called State Street in the novels), on a downhill slope of West Otterman St., there was a bar and grill called the Rialto since 1933. (It’s name possibly had something to do with the long gone Rialto movie theatre nearby.) This had been the location of one tavern or another for much longer, going back to when it was close to the trail between Fort Pitt on the Point in Pittsburgh to the west and Fort Ligonier in the mountains to the east. The place that became Greensburg was a rest or overnight stop , so it was at first a settlement of taverns and inns. According to a town history, one early tavern on the precise location of the Rialto had walls three feet thick to repel arrows from hostile Indians. Later the trail became the stagecoach road, and still later, the railroad right of way.

Into the early 1980s, the Rialto was owned by a man named Dom, just as Muscotti’s is. It so happened that one of his daughters was a high school classmate of mine. After Dom died, she renovated the place (which had become pretty seedy) and I happened to see her there one day after it had reopened as more of a cafe restaurant. I mentioned the novels and she said that she had recently met the man who’d written them, after her father’s funeral. He tried to explain how much her father meant to him. He’d introduced himself as Carl Kosak.

By then I was living in Pittsburgh and writing a column for an alternative weekly there. Talking to the paper’s CFO who coincidentally was a friend from Greensburg, I proudly confided that I learned K.C. Constantine’s identity but wasn’t going to reveal it, when she laughed and said, “Oh, you mean Carl Kosak.” It turns out that she had been a babysitter for his son (and once kept him up late to watch Hitchcock’s “The Birds” on TV.)

So I wrote a column about the books of K.C. Constantine titled “The Mysteries of Greensburg.” (The Mysteries of Pittsburgh had been a recent best-selling novel for Michael Chabon.) I described my search for the author but, true to my word, did not divulge his name.

Some days later I received a letter from Carl Kosak, thanking me for keeping his secret, and correcting me on a few points, notably on the quality of his previous publisher, which he’d abandoned. His new book—Joey’s Case— would be nominated by the Mystery Writers of America for best novel of the year, the closest Constantine got to official recognition.

Along the way I learned that Kosak had taught at Greensburg’s Seton Hill College (though only for a few years, it turns out) and worked at the Greensburg Tribune Review (as a copy editor, I learned later.) Beyond that I knew nothing.

I soon moved more than 3,000 miles away, but over the years I kept an eye out for new K.C. Constantine titles as well as copies of older ones. After learning of his death I began reading from what I had, and my rekindled enthusiasm inspired me to complete my collection with what I could find online, and read them all, more or less in order.

My collection reflects an interesting publishing history of both obscurity and interest. I have seven hardback first editions (though one is a discard from the Burlingame CA Public Library), but also a couple of editions from England: The Man Who Liked To Look At Himself (1973) in an Allison & Busby American Crime Series paperback (I acquired this at a university bookstore sale—back when university bookstores actually sold books), and a Coronet paperback Double Detective combo of The Blank Page (1974) and A Fix Like This (1975), which claims to be the first appearance of these books in the UK. (However I also have an apparently rare hardback of The Blank Page from Saturday Review Press, its US publisher.)

I’ve got a David Godine paperback of The Rocksburg Railroad Murders (1972) with a 1983 afterword by the author, a Penguin paperback of Always A Body To Trade (1983), Warner Books/Mysterious Press paperbacks of Bottom Line Blues (1993) and Family Values (1997), an advanced reading copy of Brush Back (1998) and a Thorndike Press large print edition of Blood Mud (1998.)

This recent reading of the Rocksburg series—one after the other, over the first months of the year—reinforced two impressions of that 1980s reading of the first half of the group. We all know the cliché of “the page-turner,” the book you can’t put down. In my many years of all kinds of reading, this cliché has seldom been as true for me as it was reading Constantine. I almost invariably found myself blowing past the time I’d expected to read at one sitting—and it was seldom because I needed to know whodunit.

The second is the eerie reading experience of knowing exactly where many of these places are that I’m reading about, and even the people particular characters seem based on, or are meant to represent. This knowledge, while not absolutely unique, has to be rare. I mean, I’m not having an experience in common with millions of New Yorkers, or thousands familiar with southern California or the Bay Area. I personally know no one who has read this series and knows Greensburg, especially from the 1970s and 80s. The fictional and the real universe keep crossing in and out of each other, but this is not an experience I can readily share.

Of course, Rocksburg exists only in the pages of Constantine’s novels. Its placement in western Pennsylvania is somewhat different, and somewhat impossible. But the Greensburg I know is clearly there as a model and a source, giving physical form to many of the scenes I am reading and imagining, as well as supplying aspects of varying proportions of some characters.

S. Main St. Greensburg 1977

It’s there from the beginning, in the Rocksburg Railroad Murders. The locations of the county court house, city hall and police headquarters are the same as in downtown Greensburg. The location and layout of the train station is the same, though by 1970 (when this novel takes place, by the internal evidence of the outcome of the National League baseball playoffs that becomes a plot point) this grand old station had been long closed, though trains still stopped in Greensburg (I took many Broadway Limiteds from there to New York in the 1980s.)

Even the location of the hippie store on “State Street” (Pennsylvania Avenue) suggests the health food store that was still there in the early 80s, in the below- ground floor of the old Rappe/Greensburger/General Greene hotel.

Some Greensburg history with which I was personally familiar also appears. In The Blank Page (1974), Constantine conflates several local coal barons families, but writes about the one that maintained their sumptuous residence in “Rocksburg” after all the others moved on, (some far away, some to Pittsburgh and some in estates east towards Ligonier, where they had a hand in causing the great Johnstown Flood.) The remnants of that family, called the “Summers” in this novel, held on to its façade of wealth into the 1950s, but suddenly that pretense vanished. The first sign, Constantine writes, was that the chauffeur was dismissed. I remember tales of such a family in Greensburg (the Jamisons), because that chauffeur lived next door. I'd even seen the car.

Recognizable Greensburg people also form the basis for characters in these novels. The combination of characters and locale got downright dizzying in Upon Some Midnight Clear (1985): Westmoreland Hospital, Greengate Mall and the cinder block bunker that housed the Greensburg Tribune-Review newspaper, are all given different names but accurately described. Some downtown street names are exactly the same, so I knew the precise location where a mugging is alleged to have occurred.

Meanwhile, three major characters seem closely based on well-known Greensburg figures of the time: There’s “hard charging and outspoken” fire chief Ed Hutchinson (as described in another Greensburg history) who is the model for fire chief Ed Sitko in this and several other Rocksburg novels. Ruth Love (called Mary Hart) was a prominent and controversial columnist for the Greensburg Tribune Review, particularly in the early days after it was bought by Richard Scaife, known then and now for his wealth and hard right wing politics. Besides purported news stories, she wrote the rambling and often scurrilous and self-righteous column Lovelines (called Hartbeats in the novel.)

Constantine provides a more sympathetic portrayal of that newspaper’s veteran editor, called Tom Murray in the novel. I’m almost certain he is based on Tom Aikens, the editor of that era who I met and admired. In pre-Scaife days, in the late 60s or early 70s, I recall Aikens actually writing an editorial opposing the American war in Vietnam. Aikens, like Murray, died young. In researching him for this post, I found very little available on the Internet. Constantine’s portrait of him thus becomes his most lasting memorial.

In review excerpts dotting the novel covers, Constantine is praised for his mastery of dialect in dialogue. This has several components, or layers. There’s ethnic dialogue of typical western Pennsylvania immigrants and their descendants, mostly Italian. This I find familiar, though probably disappearing, if not a 20^th century artifact.

Black dialogue seems more urban to me. But there is a western Pennsylvania way of talking common to all ethnic and racial groups—at least in these decades—that is accurate, if somewhat exaggerated. It reminds me of playwright August Wilson, widely praised for his dialogue, though actor Roscoe Lee Browne mused that neither he nor the other black actors in a Wilson play recognized its talk from their own communities. I'd guess it's a specifically western Pennsylvania approach to language as spoken in the black community of Wilson's youth (for as New Orleans-bred Branford Marsalis noted, black argot is regional) plus the playwright's artful stylization. It’s writing, after all, and this seems true also of Constantine.

Western Pennsylvania retains some words and expressions that other places don’t—like “nebby” (meaning nosy) and "slippy" (meaning slippery) which are still used in at least northern England (if the ITV series Vera is anything to go by) , and “redd up” (lightly clean up, usually the house) which I ran across in Dickens.

But there are differences even within the region. Pittsburgh, currently proud of its unique expressions, has made a fetish of the word pronounced “yinz,” which means the plural “you.” But to my ear Greensburg (just thirty or so miles away) harbored a slight variation: the pronunciation was more like "yunz"-- closer to "you-uns" and so more clearly derived from “you all.” And sure enough, in Constantine’s last novel, Another Day's Pain (2024) he gave the Greensburg version, which he spelled “youns.” He casually employs a number of other expressions rooted in this region, just as a matter of course in the dialogue.

Some of the plots also have familiar elements from vaguely recalled news stories, but as a whole the series makes me feel I led a sheltered life there. There was a certain harshness as well as warmth to the place, and I recognize the meanness and excesses of some characters, but fortunately I didn’t have to deal with very many as extreme as appear often in these pages.

Still, I feel a kinship with the author as well, based on those shared streets and people. In his 1983 afterword to his first novel, The Rocksburg Railroad Murders, Constantine describes its origin: buying a newspaper one Sunday morning at a particular newsstand, he saw rows of paperback mysteries, which the proprietor told him just about fly off the racks. He’s been struggling with his attempts at literary fiction, and wonders if he could write one of those and actually be read. On his drive home he passed the train station, and he had the idea for this novel that starts the series.

I know exactly what newsstand he’s talking about—on Otterman Street in Greensburg—and I’ll bet he was there to pick up the Sunday Pittsburgh Press and maybe the New York Times, for it was the only place it could be obtained in the pre-Internet days (though whether it was even there in the early 70s I'm not sure. In any case, that’s where I got my Sunday Times later in the decade, and eventually signed up for a reserved copy. Maybe Kosak did, too. When I came for it every Sunday, it was on a separate stack, possibly with names attached. If so, considering how close the names Kozak and Kowinski are in the alphabet, there’s a chance that for at least a few years my copy was just on top of his. Which is only one of the ways our ships may have passed in the night, on the streets and buildings of Greensburg, PA.

All of this adds another dimension to my reading experience, which is a delight but also has some weight for me. What I share with all readers however is even greater: the experience and appreciation of a unique literary voice in K.C. Constantine. That’s the subject of my next post.

N. Scott Momaday 1934-2024

2024-02-20T02:38:00.000-08:00

N. Scott Momaday, poet, novelist, playwright, artist, essayist, scholar and teacher, died in January. He is best known for his first novel, House Made of Dawn, which won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His father was Kiowa, as a child he was given a Kiowa name and identified as Kiowa, although he lived among and studied other American Indian peoples.

House Made of Dawn concerns a mixed blood Indian returning from the multiple traumas of World War II to the pueblo, trying to find his place in the modern and traditional worlds. In telling this journey, Momaday uses both his knowledge of the written literary tradition and the traditional ways and stories of an oral culture.

With this novel, Momaday revealed and defined a central dilemma of contemporary Native people: how to make a life in the often contradictory "two worlds" of modernity and their traditions. This would become the model and inspiration for a slightly younger generation of Native writers who burst on the scene in the late 1970s through the early 1990s. Each in their own way would also employ this dynamic of modern literary approaches and traditional storytelling and beliefs, in part to explore and honor traditional Native cultures and its point of view, particularly towards the natural world.

Leslie Marmon Silko is the most obvious heir: her debut novel Ceremony also follows an Indian soldier, this time a Vietnam vet, coping with the difficulties of returning home and finding himself. Others were direct and indirect beneficiaries of Momaday's example and success, including novelists Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, James Welch and Michael Dorris, as well as poets and storytellers Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz, Paula Gunn Allen, and many others.

These explorations are multiple: using literary form and traditional content, expanding literary forms to include traditional forms--all sorts of combinations beyond categories to create new stories that honor and expand the old. The past is never left out, it is (as Faulkner articulated) always present. The Native tradition is particularly important for its living attitudes towards the natural world and its relationships to human beings and culture. Those attitudes and beliefs can be adapted and absorbed in our contemporary world--in fact, they must be, if the past and the present and the eternal itself are to have a future.

Momaday was a champion of the Native oral tradition, and he taught the subject for many years at various universities. But he was also steeped in written literature, particularly American fiction and poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries. His detailed descriptions of the landscape use literature (including modern) in expressing and interpreting what the indigenous senses observe.

Momaday believed in the spoken word today as well, and he read several times at the Humboldt State University near me. I've seen the tape of one such reading and attended another one. He had a bearing of great dignity, a precise pronunciation and an uninflected voice of great depth and power.

The reading I attended was in one of the larger venues on campus, with Momaday at a lectern on a stage. He had hardly begun when the power suddenly went out. He paused, calmed the crowd and continued anyway, so that deep, deliberate voice came out of the semi-darkness with no need for amplification, and with dramatic effect.

Afterwards he signed my copies of The Names, (A Memoir) and The Man Made of Words, a collection of essays, stories and poems. The essays touched upon the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Emily Dickinson (he studied her poems for a year, in manuscript), Teilhard de Chardin and Lewis Thomas, Georgia O'Keefe and Jay Silverheels, as well as his grandmother's stories. He included observations from his travels in Russia and Germany as well as the American West.

I think my favorite of his books that I've read is his second novel, The Ancient Child. It uses his lifelong fascination with the legends of Billy the Kid to explore planes of myth of the past and the contemporary world. It is at once a traditional novel with contemporary and semi-historical characters, a kind of personal anthology and an exploration of storytelling itself. It has humor, too. Momaday identified with the bear, saying he had bear power and occasionally turned into a bear. But there was some Coyote in him, too.

Return of the Hardy Boys

2024-01-16T02:11:00.000-08:00

Since I first wrote about the original Hardy Boys mysteries six years ago (in the History of My Reading series), there’s been some news.

The Hardy Boys books began in 1927 with three titles, then three more in 1928 before the series settled down to issuing one title a year. Last year (2023) the copyrights on these original versions of the first three novels expired. That means they are in the public domain, and anyone can publish them, no permissions (or author payments) required. It also means that anyone can alter them or just publish them badly, with mistakes, changes and eliminations. But they are well published online at Project Gutenberg. They are: The Tower Treasure, The House on the Cliff and The Secret of the Old Mill.

The three titles published the next year, in 1928, presumably entered or will enter the public domain some time in 2024. They are: The Missing Chums, Hunting for Hidden Gold and The Shore Road Mystery. They are likely to appear online at some point this year. [UPDATE 3/35: These three are also posted now at Project Gutenberg.] [FURTHER UPDATE 2025: these and two more public domain titles are also available in paperback from Dover Publications.]

These are the original Hardy Boys novels, as written by Leslie McFarlane and edited by Edward Stratemeyer. McFarlane wrote 1 through 16, and 22 through 24, while other authors wrote the rest of the original 58, all under the name of Franklin W. Dixon.

the revisions series

To further complicate matters, these originals were revised and rewritten by other authors in the late 1950s through the 1970s, supposedly to take out offensive stereotypes and update references and language, but often the stories were changed, as well as the writing style. Many were shortened. Then the series continued with new stories, in various formats, right up to today.

Unfortunately the distinction between the originals and revisions is seldom made. For example, the online site The Creative Archive purports to publish the first 58 Hardy Boys novels online, but these are the 1950s-60s revisions, not the originals.

At the end of this post, I make some comparisons of the originals with the more widely available revisions. Four of these appeared in my post six years ago (in slightly different form), but I’ve added comparisons of two more: #3 The Secret of the Old Mill and #8 The Mystery of Cabin Island, which the unofficial Hardy Boys page calls “probably the most popular story among fans.”

On balance, I continue to greatly prefer the McFarlane originals. I recently chanced upon an article written by Gene Weingarten in 1998 entitled “The Ghost of the Hardy Boys” (included in his collection, The Fiddler in the Subway) that helped clarify my thinking.

Weingarten, a magazine feature writer and purported humorist, trashes McFarlane’s writing in these books before praising him as a literary artist trapped by financial circumstances into painfully turning out trash, namely the Hardy Boys books. (McFarlane seems to base his quality of writing judgments on the first book he picks up--The Missing Chums, which unfortunately isn't one of the better written.) This has become a familiar point of view on McFarlane, perhaps the prevalent one. I think it’s at best overly simplistic and on balance, deceptive and wrong.

a young McFarlane

It is true that McFarlane (just 25 when his first Hardy Boys books were published) was paid scandalously little to quickly write these novels, based on detailed outlines by Edward Stratemeyer, who invented the Hardy Boys, as well as Nancy Drew and Tom Swift. The author named on the cover, Franklin W. Dixon, did not exist. There would be many authors as the series went on.

But are the resulting novels possibly “the worst books ever written,” as Weingarten insists? Not hardly. For one thing, Weingarten hadn’t read the later revisions, which are arguably worse. But even in themselves, the McFarlane versions do not fully merit his critique, especially in style. He says it is “overwrought.” Apart from questions of taste (and Weingarten is very certain his taste is correct), there is the fact that these books were written for young readers, roughly ages 9 (the age when I started reading them) to 12. Weingarten provides an example of this overwrought writing: “Frank was electrified with astonishment.” It’s not a phrase appropriate for adult literary fiction perhaps, but it’s vivid language for young readers—many of whom are quite capable of becoming electrified with astonishment.

(It’s certainly more creative language that Weingarten uses to introduce this article: “I started working on it with a chip on my shoulder. I ended it with a lump in my throat.” Now that’s bad writing--"overwrought" doesn't cover it.)

Weingarten mocks the conversations conducted while the boys are riding their motorcycles, as if anyone could converse over that noise. While stretching credulity a bit, these are 1920s motorcycles ridden by teenage boys after all, and not the behemoths of today. In The Tower Treasure, a specific contrast is drawn between the “putt-putt” of their motorcycles, and the roar of an automobile. Certainly there is awkwardness and repetition in the writing, but that more or less goes with the genre, and can be part of its charm.

The elaborate language, not uncommon when these books were written, has a painless educational value for young readers in expanding their vocabularies. As for the overuse of adverbs, it’s worth noting that Stratemeyer had the final edit, and at least one of his other book series is well known for characteristic proliferation of adverbs—so much so that they inspired a specific type of joke: the “Tom Swifties.” He may well have inserted some adverbs into the Hardy Boys books himself.

Even so, the book are decently written, ascending to some fine writing. At the beginning of The House on the Cliff, set in summer, McFarlane refers to the “torrid warmth” of the city. The cliché is “torrid heat,” but his choice is more poetic, the double-r sound in “torrid” matching the “rmth” sound in “warmth.”

The Mystery of Cabin Island opens with a page describing the winter landscape in clear physical language and measured sentences that remind me of Hemingway. Nor was I surprised by Weingarten’s revelation that McFarlane was a devotee of Dickens—I got that from his books—especially the characters and set pieces that tended to be edited out of the revisions.

It is this language, as well as the period details, that charm many readers today. Although Weingarten quotes McFarlane’s granddaughter saying he hated these books (and his children are quoted elsewhere saying similar things), McFarlane is also directly quoted referring to his Hardys with some pride, saying that instead of the slapdash style of other boys books, “I opted for quality.”

By and large, the revisions I've read did not. In addition to changing plots and characters, with some bewildering story choices and careless writing, there were changes particular to reflect the J. Edgar Hoover 1950s obsessions with subversion, expressed in altered plots and an end to the skepticism of authority figures in the originals, especially local police. Says the Hardy BoysUnofficial Homepage: “The quality of the revised stories is generally so far below that of the originals that it can only be considered an act of literary vandalism.”

There's no question that some of the writing and vocabulary as well as the action in the originals reflect an earlier time. But that was true when I first read them as a boy in the mid-1950s, and I was charmed anyway. The fact that there weren't roadsters and touring cars anymore, or chums, even added to the appeal: the charm of the exotic. Reading them as an adult, I see them not as exotic but true to their time, in the modesty of the stories, their pace and organic quality, as well as evidences of a bygone era. And so I remain charmed.

Here are my comparisons:

The Tower Treasure (#1)

The original version of this first novel in the series begins with exposition, while the revised starts with an action scene. This appears to be one item of the brief for the revisions--hook the reader with action. This time it works; in others I read the action is absurd by the standards set in the original series--of realism, especially of the Hardy Boys as normal or at least believable boys.

Another item in the brief was to shorten the books to the same length of 180 pages. So what took two chapters and 17 pages in the original is reduced to one chapter and 8 pages in the revised.

Some arcane language in the original is a bit disruptive, though funny, cf. "I'm going to ask these chaps if they saw him pass." But the revision goes further than updating words and eliding the story--it unaccountably adds incidents and characters, to no better effect than the originals. Plus it doesn't actually eliminate all ethnic stereotypes--just the ones people were more sensitive to in 1959.

It isn't long before the losses become obvious. The original has a comic set piece involving a group of farmers; the human comedy is entirely lost in the revision, as is the pretty realistic dialogue in the scene. Similarly a scene involving the small town police chief and his detective is derisively funny. That such scenes reminded me of Dickens is reinforced a few pages later by a reference to a character habitually carrying Dickens' novels (naming three.) The original also throws in a sly Shakespeare reference, a phrase from Hamlet.

But the loss of a certain literary quality is more telling in a line Fenton Hardy says to his sons on page 76 of the original, when he tells them they can help "by keeping your eyes and ears open, and by using your wits. That's all there is to detective work."

Later when the boys solve the mystery that has puzzled everyone (including their father), they conclude that "The main thing is that we've proved to dad that we know how to keep our eyes and ears open." (209) The symmetry of these lines more than anything else starts off this series of books. They are entirely absent from the revision.

The revision has the good sense to keep the subplot of the father of one of the Hardy Boys' school friends who is unjustly accused of a crime (a similar situation will be repeated in a subsequent book), even keeping most of the dialogue. But for every arcane line the revision eliminates ("Brace up, old chap") it seems to lose one of delicate feeling or meaning: "Frank and Joe, their hearts too full for utterance, withdrew softly from the room." (68)

This being the first novel, it has the first instances of official police incompetence, and Fenton Hardy's disdain for the local police. In the revision this is gone, though the comic futility of the chief and his detective Snuff is replaced by a comic and less convincing Snuff, now an aspiring private detective lost in self-importance, ambition and incompetence.

The climactic scene in the revision suddenly adds a character to increase threat and action (the 1950s Disney teleplay has its own version of this character though he appears early, and interestingly represents a seemingly friendly but ultimately untrustworthy and violent adult) but it adds little to the scene. The ending of the original is longer and more satisfying.

#2 The House on the Cliff

The original story begins with the Hardy Boys and their pals (or "chums") escaping summer heat with a motorcycle ride,which leads them to a remote abandoned house, reputed to be haunted. They do hear eerie sounds inside (which later turn out to have been staged to scare them away.) As they are leaving, Frank and Joe Hardy discover tools were stolen from their motorcycles. They later witness an attempted murder on a boat and rescue the victim, but he soon disappears. This begins another strand of the mystery.

The revised version begins with Fenton Hardy letting the boys in on a case in progress. This is another odd trend in the revisions: the boys are less independent.

The original story involves Fenton Hardy kidnapped by drug smugglers, with the boys putting together the pieces of the puzzle involving the "haunted" house on the cliff and hidden tunnels. They rescue their father, though they are almost immediately captured. There's a lot of action, including fist fights but they are believable. Some believe this is the best written novel in the series. The revision has some sloppy writing and makes inexplicable changes in scenes but basically follows the same story.

#3 The Secret of the Old Mill

This is one of the three originals that entered the public domain in 2023. I read it online at Project Gutenberg. It begins quickly with an incident that defines the mystery: while waiting at the train station for their father to arrive, the Hardy Boys are approached by an affable stranger with a convincing story why he needs to quickly change his five dollar bill, which they do, only to find that it's counterfeit. When their father, detective Fenton Hardy arrives it turns out he is working on a counterfeit case. The boys are embarrassed by being "stung," but eager to help solve the mystery,.

A gently comic piece follows in which the boys are kidded by their high school friends for falling for the swindle--these glimpses of their regular lives are something the originals do well. The Hardys are grounded in family, community and school-- though today's students might be surprised that their studies include Latin grammar and reading Virgil in the original. Still, the emphasis of the story is on action and solving the mystery.

After the Hardy's learn of another victim, there is another set piece of a high-spirited outing where the Hardys and their friends learned that an old mill has been revived by new tenants, though they aren't taking grain from local farms to grind. Instead they've kept people away because they say they are working on a new breakfast cereal formula they must keep secret. While there, the Hardys also rescue a boy from drowning, and he becomes important later in the story. In due course they discover that the old mill is the center of the counterfeit operation that covers several states, and where the phony bills are made. There's also action on the water, as the Hardy Boys get their new speedboat, the Sleuth.

In the revised version, it is their high school friend Chet who is victimized with a counterfeit $20 bill, discarding the opportunity to show the boys' generosity as well as their youthful naivete, as well as losing their personal motive to crack the mystery. The revised version turns the old mill into the site of an electronics firm, doing something undefined that has to do with guided missiles. Eventually Fenton Hardy is investigating sabotage at the electronics firm, where the counterfeit ring is a sideline by some of the employees who use the old mill itself as an entrance to a secret room where they print the fake money. It's needlessly complicated and less credible, but it's also typical of the revisions in that it tries to make the stakes more dramatic and important, using a Cold War theme. Small town life and small time crimes aren't good enough anymore, though it does reflect that, for example, there are probably fewer farmers around mid-20th century Bayport.

The revision includes some scenes from the original, though in different places in the story, often where they seem less organic. The scene when the boys first see their boat is so much better in the original. The new themes in the story and the shuffled and missing scenes suggest why the Unofficial Hardy Boys site calls this version "Drastically Altered" from the original. Yet it isn't the worst of the revisions I've read. At least it is carefully plotted (with the bad guys helpfully explaining everything just before they are caught.)

#6 The Shore Road Mystery

The HBUHP calls the revision "completely different" but it basically reassembles elements of the original plot in a less coherent way.

The original is more vivid in its scene-setting, and is pretty good at the effect on the town as a series of car thefts continue without a clue. There a nice school scene that's a kind of interlude. Scenes of the Boys in the caves where the thieves have hidden the cars are exciting, even if their handling of "revolvers" comes out of nowhere. The revision again starts with a big action scene--the Hardys have more technology now, like police radios on their motorcycles--but the plot seems more contrived.

In both stories, it's a school friend who is unjustly arrested for the thefts, but the revision adds a buried treasure mystery for some reason. Also the thieves aren't just stealing cars but smuggling in "foreign" arms for "subversives" in the US. Hello, 1950s!

In the original, the Hardy Boys solve the mystery, and catch the bad guys in the act. But in the revision, they gets their butts saved by Dad, who incidentally has "an iron fist." What's up with that? as the Hardys wouldn't say. Also the revision suggests that the Boys' hometown of Bayport is in New England, which is contradicted by several of the originals. They imply and finally say that Bayport is south of New York City.

#8 The Mystery of Cabin Island

In summer (as we’ve seen in previous stories) the Hardy Boys and their chums run motorboats in Barmet Bay as well as ride motorcycles, go on picnics and engage in other warm weather activities. What do they do in the winter? In this original the answer is: ice-boats.

Ice boats in this case are homemade skiffs on skis propelled by wind in sails to skate across the frozen area of the bay. They can go very fast (the record for contemporary professional ice boats is well over 100 mph.) These craft were in fact becoming popular in North America in the 1920s. A Saturday Evening Post Americana cover in early 1928 shows boys in their homemade ice boat, which may well have inspired this aspect of this 1929 story. (Most ice boats ran on lakes and rivers, so an ocean bay south of New York might be a stretch.)

Introduced by some of the best descriptive writing I’ve read in the series so far, the Hardys and friends take their ice boat to search for a place to go winter camping, and so they explore the small and solitary Cabin Island, but a strange man angrily orders them away. They know the island and its cabin are owned by wealthy Mr. Jefferson, and so are surprised to find a note from him upon their return home, asking them to visit. When they do they see the angry man leaving. From Mr. Jefferson they learn the angry man is named Hanleigh, and is badgering him to sell him the island, but he won’t. The elderly Mr. Jefferson is all smiles—he thanks them for finding his stolen car (in #6 The Shore Road Mystery), rewards them, and agrees to allow them the use of his cabin on the island for their winter outing.

The trip is to begin before Christmas so there is a lovely family scene in which the Hardys celebrate the holiday early so the boys will have both the traditional feast and presents, and their outing. Back on the island they watch Hanleigh in the cabin, measuring the fireplace. He threatens them again but they have the key and he is the trespasser, so he leaves. But they have the start of their mystery: why was he measuring the fireplace? Why is his so fierce about the island?

Eventually the boys learn of Mr. Jefferson’s missing collection of priceless stamps, and find a notebook kept by the man suspected of stealing the stamps (it’s the only instance I’ve run across of an actual date: 1917, which the Boys observe was 11 years before.) The notebook contains a coded message, and the mystery goes on from there, with a dramatic climax.

In the revision, Mr. Jefferson’s reward (communicated to them offstage) is permission to camp on Cabin Island, and the promise of a new mystery. When they meet him at his house he asks them to search for his missing grandson, who disappeared around the time that his collection of commemorative medals was stolen. (Why the switch from stamps remains a mystery.) As usual, the incidents crowd together while scenes of ordinary life are dropped or shortened, like the Christmas scene.

Adults (Fenton Hardy and Mr. Jefferson) are also present in the action more often. Both versions involve two minor villains—in the original they are young men, but in the revision they are high school dropouts who hang around the school and make trouble. “Juvenile delinquency” was a catchword of the 1950s. The Hardy Boys page classifies the revision as "Altered."

A side note: my copy of the original and of the revision both have the same cover image, and both have a "picture cover," rather than a jacket. My original is evidently part of the reprint series issued in 1962 (and my book apparently was a Christmas gift in 1963, though not to me) and it appears to be the same typeface as the original editions. It also has the same brown flyleaf illustrations as the original brown hardbacks that I remember so well from the public library.

#10 What Happened At Midnight

This is my favorite of the originals I've read as an adult, but I don't think that's entirely why I'm contemptuous of the revision, which HBUHP calls "drastically altered."

The original is well-paced and balanced, as each increment of the mystery is pursued with activity, such as the Boys trip to New York City. But most of all, it has a real sense of high school boys doing the investigating, their normal life integrated with the mystery.

It's also a great 1930s story, starting with the opening scene at Bayport's newest innovation, the Automat. Joe is kidnapped, Frank and his chums find him, but that's just the beginning. The brothers impulsively follow a suspect on the train to New York, lose their money to a pickpocket, sleep on park benches safely, prepare to hitchhike back to Bayport and earn a meal by washing dishes at a diner. (The diner owner is right out of a movie by Frank Capra or Preston Sturges.) They get a key clue overhearing a hotel switchboard operator, and learn of the existence of the collect call!

As obsolete and therefore nostalgic as all this seems now, none of it was so arcane in the 1950s when I might have first read this book. The telephone system was basically the same, and I remember going to an automat restaurant in Manhattan in the 1960s.

But the revision dumps pretty much all of it anyway. (Though I thought for sure the revision would drop a key scene of the boys in a biplane that loses power- they have parachutes and go out on a wing to bail out. But the revision makes the plane an antique reconstruction, and the scene happens in a different part of the story.)

Bayport, by the way, in this novel is explicitly said to be located about 200 miles south of New York City, which suggests New Jersey.

The mystery is solved through a combination of legwork, deduction, serendipity and coincidence. (Which fulfills Fenton Hardy's definition of a detective as someone who basically pays attention.) Some may object to the coincidences, such as the clues supplied by the clueless Aunt Gertrude. But it sure makes for a good story that keeps moving forward.

A coincidence puts the Boys in touch with a couple of FBI agents, and so the big finish is more believable with the adult agents doing the shooting and fighting during the capture, though Frank manages to chase and wrestle down the ringleader of the diamond thieves gang. (The Boys relationship with the local police is also better than in previous originals.)

Other elements of the story are kept, but there are inexplicable changes. This time the gang is stealing diamonds and "electronics." (What kind of electronics? Why are they valuable? It doesn't say.) Again another needless and basically useless if not confusing plot element is added, a secret invention.

The revision begins with a completely outlandish fight between the brothers and adult thieves. In general, the revision is haphazard and careless--literally in the sense that it seems to be written by someone who doesn't care. For dialogue that sounds somewhat formal, it substitutes dialogue that sounds entirely wooden. As for updating arcane expressions etc., the revision actually has one of the boys say "Gadzooks!"--a word from the 17th century that barely made it into the 19th.

Finally, let me point out something else that's apparently obsolete. Especially in the originals, I did not find a typo or a grammatical error. These boys books, written quickly and expected to be read by teenagers or younger, and then to disappear, are immaculately edited, copyedited and proofread. So 20th century, right?

R.I.P. 2023 Review

2024-01-02T02:01:00.000-08:00

When I was spending a fair amount of time in Manhattan in the 1980s, Martin Amis was a name I heard a lot. My friend Michael Shain, then a reporter for the New York Post, designated a different Amis novel for each of his friends. (Mine was The Information, which I still have not read.) I followed the Amis career without ever really becoming engaged with his novels. But in interviews he would often say something that hit me directly, as when he mentioned being ambushed by memories that were accompanied by searing regret, just walking down the street and thinking of something else. This was an experience I often had, but which I’d never heard anyone else confess.

When Amis died last May I noticed how he was almost universally praised as a literary eminence. (He was Sir Martin by then.) So I went back to his more famous novels (Money, London Fields), neither of which I could finish once again, and I read entirely his last novel (Inside Story) and his collection of essays and reviews, The War Against Cliché. In both I responded to gems of insight and stylish writing, but on first reading I couldn’t experience Inside Story as a whole novel, for all its shining parts. So I remain a frustrated reader of a writer with whom I nevertheless felt an odd bond, as much for many differences as for similarities and sympathies. The tension of that seems productive and affectionate.

Another novelist much talked about in the 1980s was Milan Kundera, principally for one book: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, now a classic of the era. I read it with fascination, and found his previous novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, published in English through the auspices of Philip Roth and his series of works by Eastern European authors. More recently I read Kundera's Slowness, and wrote about it here.

With the paradox of its title, The Unbearable Lightness of Being seemed to become fashionable mostly because of the sex, though Italo Calvino pointed out that its virtues were the liveliness and intelligence of the writing. I doubt I understood or endorsed a lot of it, but I liked its rhythms and it did feel like something I hadn’t encountered before in fiction. I better understood the meditations on the speed of life today and the paradoxes of memory in Slowness.

Cormac McCarthy was a controversial and respected novelist over several decades. Though his fifth novel in 1985, Blood Meridian, became recognized over time, his first commercial success was All the Pretty Horses in 1992. Probably his biggest and most enduring literary, cultural and popular success was the haunting post-apocalyptic tale, The Road.

some of the books by Garcia Marquez translated by Edith Grossman

Harold Bloom called Edith Grossman “the Glenn Gould of translators,” because she too was a precise virtuoso. Her translations of Latin American authors, together with those of Gregory Rabassa, helped fuel the boom for these novelists in the 1970s and 80s. In particular she translated seven books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who once said that he preferred reading her English translations (and Rabassa’s) to his Spanish originals.

Russell Banks was a prolific American novelist and story writer who detailed working class lives but also wrote about Jamaica and Haiti and The Magic Kingdom. He was especially beloved by fellow literary writers.

Robert Brustein was a titan of modern theatre in America, founding both the Yale Repertory Company and the American Repertory Company at Harvard. He backed his work as a producer, director, actor and playwright with essays and books from The Theatre of Revolt (1964) and Who Needs Theatre? (1987) to Winter Passages (2014.) He engaged in many controversies, such as his debates with playwright August Wilson.

British Jungian psychologist Anthony Stevens wrote several books on Jung and his theories, particularly on archetypes and dreams. I remember reading with pleasure Ronald Steel’s sterling biography of journalist Walter Lippmann, and D.M. Thomas’ novel The White Hotel. I recall enjoying Francois Gilot’s reminiscences of her uneasy life with Picasso when I read them in the 1970s, and Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory: An American Voyage in the 1980s.

As the last veterans of World War II fade away, so do the authors who examined aspects and outcomes of that war. Japanese author Kenzaburo Oe wrote about the legacy of the atomic bomb in Japan, while Selichi Moriura exposed Japanese wartime atrocities. Marga Minco wrote about the ramifications of the Holocaust and the war in postwar Europe.

Also among the writers who passed on in 2023 were poets Louise Gluck, Charles Simic, Naomi Replansky, Robert Pack, Benjamin Zephaniah, David Ferry, Saskia Hamilton, Park Je-chun, Amy Utematsu, Trienke Laurie, Antonio Gala, Asad Gulzoda, R.H.W. Dillard, Robin Mathews, Maria Laina and Wendy Barker; playwrights Tina Howe, Megan Terry, Robert Patrick, John Mairai and Ama Ata Aidoo; eminent screenwriter Bo Goldman; novelist/playwright Fay Weldon, story writer Edith Pearlman, novelists AS Byatt, Herbert Gold, Ted Morgan, Eve Bunting, Meir Shalev, Martin Walser, David Benedictis, and Amy Schwartz.

In genre fiction: Carol Higgins Clark (mystery), K.C. Constantine (master of the police procedural--more about him later), John Dunning (detective fiction and books on old time radio), John Jakes (historical), Julie Garwood (romance); Michael Bishop, Michael A. Banks and Richard Bowes (science fiction.)

Artist and writer Linda Salzman Sagan, sociologist and communitarian visionary Amitai Etzioni, historians Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Eugenio Riccomini and Marceli Kosman; feminist scholars Dale Spender and Jean F. Yellin, psychologist Alice K. Ladas, philosophers Harry Frankfurt and Ian Hacking; crime writers Anne Perry and Mary Willis Walker; satirist Dan Greenberg.

Writers William Howarth, Gail Tremblay, Phillipe Sollers, Luca di Fulvia, Doris Gregory, Michael Denneny, Zaleka Mandela, Echo Brown, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Ramzi Salame, Darchhawna and Ronald Blythe.

Journalists Betty Rollin, Kevin Phillips, Victor Navasky, Michael Parkington, Paul Bradeur, Warren Hoge, James Reston, Jr., Bernard Kalb, Hugh Aynesworth, Eva Hauseserova, Howard Weaver, Edwin Wilson, Michel Ciment, Jack Anderson, Colin Spencer, Bill Shipp, Mandy Jenkins, Ian Black.

Apologies for misspellings and misappropriations. May they and all the writers who died last year rest in peace—their work lives on.

Ignoble Nobels? Is That Why They Ignore Margaret Atwood?

2023-12-02T00:58:00.000-08:00

It's been over for awhile but it still bothers me. 2023 was the latest year in which Margaret Atwood did not win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

At least the Pulitzer Prize committee finally recognized Barbara Kingsolver. There's been no better US novelist, none more consistent and capacious in the breadth, depth and style of her work. But also this year the Nobel committee has once again ignored not only my now-perennial favorite--and the world's-- in once again passing over Margaret Atwood.

Atwood was widely believed to be the favorite back in 2017--so much so that the actual winner, Kazuo Ishiguro, publicly apologized for winning it instead of her. But there was always next year. And next year. And next year... And now Margaret Atwood is 84.

I don't claim to have read all the fine writers of the world, and I must defer judgment on a lot of prizes, like the Booker. But the Nobel has a specific, specified mission. In the words of founder Alfred Nobel, it is for the writer "who, in the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind."

That person, year after year for the past decade (I've been touting her since at least 2011), has been Margaret Atwood. She is unique in the world for sustaining quality literary work over many years, while her work consistently engages the contemporary world. She is now a global presence, for the shared present and future dilemmas she writes about (and the increasingly relevance of The Handmaid's Tale), but also as a literary figure and an active voice. Her contributions are immeasurable.

Of course the Nobel committee in Sweden has ignored their founder's goals for years. They tend to award for a body of work rather than something from the previous year, which is defensible. But they also tend to choose writers who are perhaps known mostly within a single nation (usually a small one), if, frankly, at all. Their influence on the world is minimal, at least until they win and their work gets new editions.

Body of work? Margaret Atwood has published 18 novels, nine story collections, 18 volumes of poetry, 11 books of nonfiction, eight children's books and two graphic novels--and these are only works brought out by major publishers and presumably translated widely. She writes and speaks on ecology and economics as well as literature.

But there's no point in making the case. Everyone knows it. Everyone knows she is the perfect Nobel Laureate, and has been for years.

So why hasn't she been one? It can't be only because she sometimes writes speculative or science fiction--they gave the award to Doris Lessing many years ago. Atwood herself hasn't commented on it in interviews I've read or watched on Youtube, usually praising whoever just won. But I got the feeling that she doesn't expect to ever win it, because of some problem with the Nobel committee. Maybe there's animosity, personal or otherwise, from a member or members of the committee.. Maybe they feel she's gotten too many other awards. Who knows? (Actually, I think she does.)

The Nobel committee in any case has a well known track record of not getting around to honoring major literary figures in their lifetimes, and therefore never honoring them at all. So why should I care? I probably shouldn't. But to me it calls into question not only the Nobel committee's judgment but their integrity. I know all these prizes are political to some extent, and this is not the worst injustice in the world. But seeing some justice done is a rare but good feeling. She deserves this.

So I don't care who wins the Nobel anymore. Not until the name that's announced is Margaret Atwood.

P.S. Margaret Atwood's latest fiction is a story collection, Old Babes in the Woods. Barbara Kingsolver's Pulitzer-winning novel is Demon Copperhead. Both are fine gifts for discerning and appreciative readers.

History of My Reading: Cambridge Baptism 1970-1

2023-10-21T21:40:00.000-07:00

Carol and me with kittens from Stuff's litter at our Cambridge apt.

I returned with Carol and company to Cambridge after my Cummington community experience in August 1970. By this time Carol and her Knox College friends had moved into a summer sublet—probably more of a housesitting gig—on a quiet leafy side street at 13 Ellery St., apt.4. It was about half a block from the central artery of Massachusetts Avenue, known colloquially as Mass Ave: a roughly 16 mile road that begins in Boston and defines the heart of Cambridge before heading onward past Somerville to Concord and the fabled Lexington Green, and beyond.

13 Ellery St.

It wasn’t until I’d gone to college in the Midwest that I heard people give city directions in terms of north/south, east/west (cf. “Go north three blocks and turn west.”) In western Pennsylvania as in most of the northeast, cities were ordered by the borders of serpentine rivers and eccentric coastlines, as well as hills and ridges and valleys. So while Cambridge is vaguely north of Boston, it is connected by Mass Ave in a way that defies the compass. Orientation reverts to directions like left and right.

So emerging from the tree-shadowed Ellery Street to busy, noisy Mass Ave puts Central Square (Cambridge) and Boston to your left, and Harvard Square a few long blocks to your right. While I was living there the rest of that summer, the first commercial building to the right on Mass Ave housed several businesses, including the F-Stop camera store, Cheap Thrills records, a music and musical instrument store, and the Orson Welles Cinema. At the time I first saw it, the Welles was a single screen, so-called “repertory cinema” showing foreign and offbeat American movies. (It had a film school as well, though that was not immediately obvious to me.)

Orson Welles at the Orson Welles

The Orson Welles intrigued me. I’d been increasingly interested in film and filmmaking. I had one film course at Iowa, and in my months at Buffalo I got to know film professor (and McLuhan pal) Gerald O’Grady. I attended a number of his film classes, especially when they were showing movies.

Carol had gotten interested in film, too, especially after she read The Film Director as Superstar by Joseph Gelmis, a collection of interviews (Kubrick, Bertolucci, Lindsay Anderson, Richard Lester, John Cassavettes and a very young Francis Ford Coppola, among others), a book I’d left with her when I was at Cummington.

We emerged from one of our first movies there when I saw a familiar face in the lobby. It was Steve Goldberg, formerly of Knox College, who turned out to be the theatre manager. He remembered me, and in the course of our conversation, suggested I try writing for the local weekly paper called the Phoenix. I laughed before I nodded an acknowledgement. I didn’t see where I would fit in. I knew nothing about Boston or Cambridge, and though I’d seen the Phoenix a few times, I still didn’t have a handle on it. It was more seriously journalistic than an underground newspaper, but it wasn’t like a daily either. A few years later in his defining New Yorker piece, Calvin Trillin would describe the growing number of such journals as “sea-level” newspapers. Today, their descendants are usually lumped together as “alternative.”

(As if meeting a former Knox student there wasn’t coincidence enough, I soon after walked into the music store next door to see behind the counter someone I’d known at Greensburg (PA) Central Catholic High School. Paul Lenart had been a year ahead of me, and had gone off to Columbia University on a football scholarship, which made him a subject of my envy since that was my aspirational and unaffordable first choice school. But he’d been injured early on, lost his scholarship and was now a guitarist in a regionally popular band that sometimes played at Jack’s bar near Central Square, famous then for featuring Bonnie Raitt before she went national. Eventually he sold me my next guitar.)

Pierrot Le Fou

I soon had my first immersive film experience, when the Welles programmed a Jean-Luc Godard festival, a bill of Godard double-features that changed every couple of days. I got a discount ticket book and saw many of them, almost all for the first time (among them “Band of Outsiders,” “Alphaville,” “Contempt,” “Masculin Feminin,” and my favorite, “Pierrot le Fou” with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina), eventually watching from the back row while drinking coffee and smoking Gauloise cigarettes. Mass Ave and the Welles would turn out to be mainstays of my time in Cambridge and Boston.

Past the Orson Welles, two particular wonders of Harvard Square awaited. First, the bookstores. There was one before the square, but more past the high brick walls of Harvard Yard that began the Square proper. Harvard Bookstore was right there on Mass Ave, shortly to be joined by its book annex, with hurt books and remainders. Around the corner was the Grolier Bookshop, reputed to be a gathering place for poets, though I never experienced this. It was one of the contacts that Robert Creeley wrote down for me.

The huge Harvard Coop had a big book section. There were more bookstores on Brattle Street behind it, including one of my favorites, Reading International. Across from there and below street level on Mt. Auburn St. was Passim, a bookstore during the day, and a music venue at night—it had formerly been Club 47, where Joan Baez first sang in concert, among many other luminaries of the folk revival 1960s.

But bookstores weren’t the only sources of books. There were two Ecology Action storefronts and a couple of other such organizations that collected and gave away surplus books, and since it was Cambridge, the quality was high. I scored a mother lode of books at one such place on a memorable afternoon, and walked out embarrassed at my haul, but ecstatic.

I was soon reading Henry Miller for the first time, and his rhapsodizing descriptions of Paris bookstores suggested that this might be my Paris. That feeling was reinforced by the cafes, some with outdoor seating, an anomaly in America at the time. There were not varieties of coffees available on every corner in the 70s, but in and around Harvard Square there were coffees closer to their foreign origins, such as the Turkish coffee in a dark café buried in a complex of shops.

Harvard Sq 1970. BK photo.

Soon I had a favorite place: the unpretentious Patisserie below street level on the section of Brattle Street that wound around to the left as you faced the Harvard Coop. Its menu was modest but everything tasted great. I loved especially their almond croissants. Its French coffee had a taste still unique in my experience. It tasted blue, the equivalent of Gauloise smoke. I was a frequent enough customer that the owner (who was Greek) knew me by sight, and remarked on how long it might have been since I was there last.

The riches of the cafes included the newspapers left by patrons and strewn around, not only the Boston Globe and the counterculture and political papers but the New York Times and Washington Post. There were magazines of all kinds from everywhere at several of the bookstores, with walls of them at the Out of Town News just outside the Harvard Square subway entrance.

The cafes completed the mental ambience of the bookstores, and I felt as comfortable as I got, reading and writing in them. That extended to less exotic but still strange venues, like the ice cream place with the delicate 1890s wrought iron tables and chairs, and the Pewter Pot, which served a variety of muffins (very big in Boston) and 15 cent coffee in Pewter mugs. I was reading and writing there once when I glanced up and saw a man passing quickly by the window, looking my way with a wistful half smile. I was sure it was the writer and actor Buck Henry. And it might have been, for this was Harvard Square, where I routinely saw Nobel Prize winners bicycling by.

The apartment on Ellery Street was large and well kept, though mostly empty. It was on the top floor, with easy access to the flat roof, where a lot of sunbathing had gone on all summer, and continued while I was there. But with fall, the sublet was up, Carol’s friends returned to school, and we had to look for another place.

Repainted and gentrified, 325 Columbia St.
now. First floor apt. was ours.

We clearly couldn’t afford anything so spacious in such a prime area, but we did find a large room at the front of a duplex in East Cambridge, at 325 Columbia Street. (According to a notebook, I found it by answering an ad in the Phoenix titled ISMAEL COME HOME.) The street turned out to be a kind of local truck route, so the rumbling was fairly constant, but I eventually got used to it.

We painted our room teal blue, with lighter blue around the sort-of bay windows. We painted the living room in shades of sea green and violet. The previous tenants had left a lot of psychedelic posters, which I cut up and affixed to a wall in the narrow hallway as collages. (Through unforwarded mail and some detective work, I learned that this apartment had been the gathering place for poets and others in the antiwar movement, and that poet Denise Levertov had often been there. She confirmed this in an exchange of letters. We had met my senior year at Knox.)

My Cambridge reading started there with authors unauthorized in my college lit classes. Both Carol and I read Jack Kerouac, beginning with The Dharma Bums (in which a character based on Gary Snyder has a large role) and Big Sur, even before On the Road.

I moved on to Henry Miller, whose style I found enthralling despite the sometimes questionable content: the novels Tropic of Cancer (my sun sign) and Tropic of Capricorn (Carol’s), his narrative nonfiction (The Air Conditioned Nightmare, The Colossus of Maroussi) and essays (The Books in My Life and The Wisdom of the Heart, in which he described his Zen-like approach to writing.)There was soon something of a Henry Miller boom in the 70s, and at the Orson Welles I saw an autobiographical film on him, and another on his compatriot Anais Nin (I also acquired and read some of her volumes of diary entries which were then popular.)

I tried reading William Burroughs, whose theories of writing—especially his cut-up method—fascinated me, but I didn’t match up with his resulting fiction. There were others, but I most recall Kerouac’s ecstatic discoveries as reflecting the flavor of those first few months for us on Columbia Street.

I was still attracted to poetry with a surrealistic flavor. I read Robert Bly’s translations of Pablo Neruda, more of Bill Knott (who I’d encountered in New Haven) and a new poet, James Tate, who I heard read and met in Cambridge. (He had exasperated tales of trying to help Knott just get through life and empty the garbage.) I’d admired Jon Anderson’s first book of poems, Looking for Jonathan, in 1968, and now the harder edged Death and Friends in 1970.

Gino Severini self-portrait

In the next months my reading expanded in different directions. For example, I began seeking out books on the modern artists of the early twentieth century, from the Dadaists to those artists who clustered in Paris—Surrealists, Cubists, Futurists and more. It was then I discovered the Italian Futurist Gino Severini—the only one of that group who lived in Paris and knew everyone from Picasso to Erik Satie. With the same last name as my mother, I learned he might have been a blood relative of my grandfather, but even if only a relative in imagination, he became a guide over the years.

At the same time I also discovered Dorothea Tanning, the only American and only woman enrolled in the Paris Surrealists. She was a native of Galesburg, Illinois, and (as I later found) a Knox College student who preceded me (by several decades) as an editor of the college literary magazine. My fascination with this place and period, which had begun with the expatriate writers like Joyce, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, brought me around through the painters to other writers, particularly the French poets Guillaume Apollinaire (another friend of Gino) and Paul Eluard.

Thanks to the extensive collection of cheap art prints at the Harvard Coop department store (the large ones were a dollar), we had our own modern gallery (though the Vermeer in the living room—a print I still have—was the exception): a Magritte and Picassos in our room, a Max Ernst in the kitchen and a Paul Klee in the bathroom, which otherwise featured a large ceramic bathtub with a Moby Dick shower curtain but no shower, and an ancient pull-chain flush toilet.

I continued reading about ecology, including Paul Shepard’s second anthology, Environ/Mental. I don’t remember what precipitated it, but I began reading Buckminster Fuller obsessively. The autobiographical sections in Ideas and Integrities grabbed me—his despair at his lack of worldly success and acceptance of his ideas that drove him to the edge of Lake Michigan, contemplating suicide. That resonated. But even navigating his strange vocabulary I saw him as literally a sailor (he’d served in the Navy) who knew what he was talking about with his concept of Spaceship Earth—that all we needed to live was aboard, but we were limited mostly to what was on the ship.

Fuller’s concept of an “anticipatory design science” made a lot of sense, even if I couldn’t follow all his proposals. A few years later I attended one of his improvised lectures at M.I.T., and saw him up close as I joined a cluster around him afterwards to hear more.

I got hold of a new anthology for students called Worlds in the Making, which related ecology to the future. I was already looking at the future as a subject, and even collected these strange paperbacks that came out every year in the early 70s, with professional psychics (a lot of them from Florida) who predicted events of the coming year. There were always several predictions that Fidel Castro would be assassinated. Years later, when the CIA plots to kill Castro were exposed (including one involving an exploding cigar), it seemed that these were less seers than spooks, or at least they knew some. Fidel probably outlived them all.

Carol and I were also reading ostensibly more serious books in the psychedelic/countercultural vein, including on astrology, and we got our charts done (I’ve lost mine but I still have Carol’s.) I was nervously consulting the I Ching, which never quite assuaged my frustrations at my lack of worldly progress, probably not the best attitude.

And we were surrounded by lots and lots of music. For awhile we didn’t have any at home, but Carol made a trip back to Chicago and shipped more of her belongings to Columbia Street, including the component stereo she’d had at Knox. By the end of 1970, the Beatles breakup led to an efflorescence of new albums: McCartney’s solo album (which we had from the previous spring), Lennon and Ono’s separate Plastic Ono Band albums, Ringo’s “Sentimental Journey” and “Beaucoups of Blues,” and George Harrison’s triple album, “All Things Must Pass.” The flood continued in 1971 with “Ram” (McCartney), “Imagine” (Lennon) and the multi-disk live album from Harrison’s all-star concert for Bangla Desh, the first such charity event.

J.T. & Carole King

James Taylor was a kind of favorite son in Boston, and the “Sweet Baby James” album that made him a star was played everywhere. “After the Goldrush” also came out in 1970, and began my Neil Young obsession. Carol and I had to be selective in the concerts we attended, but we did see Neil Young play in Boston, and caught a concert in the now legendary James Taylor and Carole King tour. The strangest concert I remember we attended was when Poco opened for the Moody Blues. We went to hear Poco, assuming the Boston crowd was there for the psychedelic Moody Blues. But Poco blew that audience away, and nobody much was in the mood for the Moody heaviness afterwards.

There were also free concerts, including a few in the Cambridge Common, just beyond Harvard Square. Carol and I heard the distant music one Sunday in Harvard Square and walked over there. We passed a smiling young woman coming the other way and asked her who was playing. “It’s a beautiful day,” she said. We agreed, it was a beautiful, sunny day. But who was playing? She laughed. “It’s A Beautiful Day.” Yes, there was such a group—I remember staring stoned at their album cover a few years before in Galesburg.

The ex-Beatles releases, the back-and-forth accusation songs of Lennon and McCartney, and John and Yoko’s events and interviews were widely discussed in the pages of Rolling Stone and other music papers as well as the Boston area weeklies, and among people we met. Lennon’s first album and Neil Young’s “Goldrush” in particular grabbed me and didn’t let go for years. But Carol and I also listened alot to John Phillips’ (of the Mamas and Papas) solo album, even though the music media dismissed it. I don’t think I ever quite convinced her of the brilliance of the Bee Gees though, even if I played their “Odessa” double album too often.

In a new relationship and a home of our own, and with the stimulations of my Cambridge baptism, I was bursting with creative expressions. I wrote in every form from verse to polemic. I was writing songs at a furious clip, enlisting Carol to add bits of gentle percussion to tapes I made of them, at first just to not forget what I’d written.

Inspired by Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, I resumed constructing collages, as did Carol. I briefly continued my Cummington experimentations with painting. And I devised and physically made a board game—the Cambridge Conspiracy Game. It was arranged like a Monopoly board but with Cambridge sites. Its purpose however was as a kind of anti-Monopoly. The object was not competition. The only way to win was for players to cooperate. Everybody won, or everybody lost.

In the beginning we led a kind of John and Yoko existence--both of us taking photos, making artworks, collaborating on music. We explored Cambridge and Boston, but we also spent a lot of time in our blue room, and in our neighborhood. Columbia Street extended down from Mass Ave on the Boston side edge of Central Square a considerable distance before it got to us. Our building was a bit run down, and so was the immediate neighborhood. It was not fashionable or even recognizably Cambridge. It evidently had been Irish and (a bit further on) Italian, but was now mostly Portuguese.

We shopped for major groceries at the Purity Supreme supermarket in Central Square, but we also explored the shops in Inman Square: a walk down Columbia St. for a long block in the opposite direction from Mass Ave, and then the streets to the left that eventually led to the Harvard Square area.

My impression was that Inman Square had once been the Italian area, and there was a very good but decently priced Italian restaurant there, that we could afford occasionally. There was also an authentic German bakery, and a large deli restaurant called S&S, that is apparently still there.

Inman Sq. early 1970s

There was an old fashioned 5&10 next to a small grocery that sold $1 bottles of French Bordeaux wine (vin ordinaire in Paris), not far from a blues club. Legal Seafoods was the Cambridge choice for fresh seafood. We took our clothes to the Laundromat in Inman Square, where each washer and dryer had an individual name inscribed on it. If we wanted to leave while our clothes were still in process, the Italian who owned it would watch over them, and we might come back to see them folded and waiting for us.

This end of Cambridge was noisy and sooty, as urban a place as I’d ever lived. But we also belonged to a co-op that every week delivered organic vegetables from nearby farms (in the revolution talk of the day, it was called the Food Conspiracy.) We also were asked to work in the fields periodically, which I remember doing once. For awhile Carol and I tried the brown rice diet recommended by John and Yoko, so we wouldn’t be “sampaku” (supposedly you were if there was white all around your eyeballs, and it wasn’t a good sign.) We gave that up pretty quickly, and I wrote a song about it.

I extended my ecology commitments to the household, perhaps a little too much (a succession of housemates weren’t thrilled.) But I was motivated to do kitchen cleanup and some of the cooking. Carol made amazing Irish stew I still remember.

Early on we added a tricolor kitten to the household, a female we named Stuff, on the theory that cats respond to sibilants when called. Soon Carol adopted a young stray, a black male we called Muk (I think as a reference to milk, which he loved.) However, we failed to monitor their maturation, and soon we had a pregnant Stuff.

One day I awoke to find that Carol and our housemate Andrea had panicked when they thought Stuff wasn’t delivering properly, and had rushed her to the vet who said she was fine, but that adventure caused Stuff’s labor to stop. We had to take her back to induce birth, and by then I was the only one with the nerve to be present for the actual births. Stuff had six kittens of various hues and combinations, including a silver gray male. We decided to keep him, and named him Gray. Those three cats—Stuff, Muk and Gray-- would be under my care for the next twenty years.

All this may sound idyllic but of course it wasn’t quite. We both had demons to work through, and after the initial overriding bliss, we had each other to get used to. Neither of us had anything but vague direction, and so along with the freedom of exploration, we had anxieties. Plus the complications of family pressures, housemates, and a few neighborhood and apartment problems, etc. But complications is all they were. We had what Carol would later describe as a good little life.

Carol started out working as a waitress at the counter of the Brigham’s ice cream shop in Central Square, which was also a kind of luncheonette, with coffee, sandwiches, etc. She wore a light brown uniform and dispensed “frappes” (Bostonese for milk shakes) and ice cream cones with “Jimmies” (sprinkles) on top. She soon figured out how to sneak me almost free meals. She thought the manager didn’t notice, but it turned out he did, and didn’t care.

The main Cambridge post office building was nearby, and it may have been an employee having lunch at Brigham’s that alerted Carol to job openings at that post office. She took the Civil Service exam and was quickly hired, perhaps as a temporary for the Christmas season rush, but she was kept on afterwards. To my surprise she liked it there, especially her co-workers, and she visibly began to open up again to the outside world.

I “took in” typing, edited and rewrote graduate school papers, and had temp jobs, such as working in college bookstores during textbook rush or doing inventory, and painting the vast interior of a former Harvard eating club preparing to become a restaurant, Grendel’s Den on Winthrop St. and across Brattle from my Patisserie, near Harvard Square. It’s still there. (Though I thought I did good work on those walls and ceilings, I was fired for insubordination, for sticking up for a colleague being bullied. He probably thought I was a dope for doing so.)

hawker later in 70s (not me)

I eventually added a weekly gig as a “hawker,” selling one or both of the counterculture papers on a street corner (in my case, at Prospect and Mass Ave at Central Square in Cambridge.) By then—probably early 1971—the Cambridge-based Phoenix had been joined by Boston After Dark, which had started out as a tabloid of mostly entertainment listings and stories, but by then had expanded to a full weekly newspaper, with news and arts coverage.

Unlike most alternative weeklies since, these papers weren’t given away, but sold. Both had gained initial circulation with free classified ads, personals mostly. The next attraction was coverage of the kinds of arts and entertainment that appealed to young readers, including the hordes of college students at the many colleges and universities in the Boston area. The writers were also young, and spoke the same language, unlike the stodgy dailies. That applied to the cultural and political coverage and point of view of news stories. There was a huge potential readership that had nowhere else to go locally.

For some reason lost to history, I gravitated towards selling Boston After Dark. I took the T (Boston area’s subway/light rail system, which Carol likened to amusement park rides) to the Boston printing plant, picked up and paid for the number of papers I was gambling I could sell, and transited back to my Cambridge corner.

There were a lot of hawkers. Every corner in and near Harvard Square was taken, and often enough, one or two of the corners near me in Central Square were also claimed. There were occasional turf wars, but generally hawkers respected the claims of regulars. Where I was, the clientele came mainly from surrounding office buildings, usually at lunchtimes. My best customers were young women from those offices, who bought their copy from me with their friends watching from the floors above.

Since I didn’t always sell them all, I had lots of opportunities to read what was in them. I read the Phoenix as well. Meanwhile, I fantasized my own publication, complete with articles I’d like to see in it. Eventually the light bulb went off, and I realized I might pitch these existing publications with those ideas. That took a surprisingly long time.

I was always sending things out, poems and stories but increasingly also reviews and articles. I had my first acceptance in Rolling Stone, with an unsolicited review of the book, A Child’s Garden of Verses for the Revolution, by my erstwhile teacher and correspondent, William Eastlake. I did a piece on Henry Miller accepted by a west coast publication called Organ. The editor liked it, and agreed to assign a piece on Buckminster Fuller. I think the magazine folded before it could be published, but I did get paid.

I’ve found the notebook from this time which contains my first draft of a long poem called “Ears.” I remember it as inspired by a Kenneth Koch poem on the theme of eyes that I heard him read, but I can’t locate that poem and don’t remember where the reading was. A version of “Ears” as well as several other poems and a prose piece of impressions of Cambridge, appeared in a one-off publication called Words Cambridge in spring 1971. The people who appeared in it put the publication together, assembling and binding it in the offices of the Orson Welles cinema. Another version of “Ears” would appear at the end of the year in a more professionally produced though also short-lived literary magazine, Cotelydon.

Carol 1968 at Knox. Bill Thompson photo.

Both Carol and I had various physical complaints that sent us for tests at the Cambridge hospital and especially to Massachusetts General, which because it was a teaching hospital, was more open to doing tests for people who couldn’t otherwise pay for them, as long as students could observe or participate. My tests proved inconclusive. The best advice I got was “drink more water.”

So I was not unduly concerned when Carol went for tests at Mass General, after my repeated urging. Her health had always been somewhat shaky, but there had been two recent incidents in which she’d been overcome by fatigue. We’d attended a screening at the Orson Welles and met the filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek, who was about to show one of his films beamed by multiple projectors onto the inner dome of a building—the Moviedrome at Stony Point in New York state. The audience would be lying on the floor looking up. The film would last for several hours—a truly immersive experience. We signed up for the bus to go, but when the day approached Carol suddenly felt extremely tired, so we cancelled.

Another wave of fatigue prevented us from meeting up with some Knox friends. We were literally out our front door when she said she had to go back. The prospect of a long bus ride to the Moviedrome had been daunting, but this outing was not going to be so strenuous. It seemed more serious.

I was back in our room when she returned from her visit to Mass General. I asked her what the doctor said. She brought up something else that had us both laughing. Then I asked her again what the doctor said. She suddenly burst into tears.

After initial tests she had been sent to a doctor in the hospital who diagnosed her with what was then called Hodgkin’s Disease (now Hodgkins lymphoma.) Through her tears, and fear that she would die, she provided what turned out to be an accurate account of what the doctor said (I’ve unfortunately forgotten his name.)

The diagnosis was serious, he said, but the good news was a new treatment that had excellent results, available at only two hospitals in the U.S.: Stanford and Massachusetts General. It involved removing the spleen, followed by two rounds of treatments, some combination of radiation and chemotherapy. Because they'd caught it at an early stage, after that she should be fine.

She repeated the words but did not seem to believe them until I repeated them back to her. Part of her despair resulted from a stop at a library or bookstore on the way home where she read that the disease was usually fatal. But soon she accepted the assurances she brought back from her doctor. Later I did what research I could, which confirmed what she’d been told.

In the early 1970s, it seemed most cancers were mysterious and fatal. Not many years before that, the word “cancer” was not even uttered in polite company (comedian Billy Crystal had a routine that reflected this.) I was becoming a little familiar with the radiation and chemotherapy treatments because my mother had recently undergone some, and would undergo more, after Carol completed hers. But I wasn’t around for most of my mother’s, and my parents were generally secretive about such things, so I was somewhere between discreet (not wanting to embarrass my mother) and frightened. It was very different with Carol.

Outside our Columbia St. apt. we each took
a photo of the other

I was there with her completely, every moment, every step. I was at the hospital for her spleen removal operation, and her initial treatments. Sometimes, instead of remaining in the waiting room, I would spend the estimated time outside on Boston Common before returning. Carol waited her turn in an area reserved for patients, where she befriended a few regulars also waiting for their treatments, and heard their stories. Some had much less hopeful prospects. Later, when she felt stronger and self-reliance was important to her, she bolstered her confidence by going to the treatments on her own. She found her courage, partly in making it ordinary.

At home, I took care of her as best I could. We talked about everything involved, what she thought and how she felt, and I tended, however watchfully, to follow her lead. She needed to comprehend and cope with what was happening to her. A part of her body was cut out, and the rest of it subjected to the damage (including to her beautiful hair) caused by radiation and chemicals, as well as the eventual healing.

I could also offer a different perspective. “You felt your body broken,” begins a poem I wrote to her, “but I saw it whole/with such/ joy at its aliveness/its softness and beauty/that the tubes hanging out/were proof only/that your loveliness/was present/transcendent…”

She wanted above all to be not sick, so we tried to keep things as normal as possible. She had taken up knitting, as did her friends at the hospital, to pass the time before and after treatments. She knitted at home as well, including a six foot long, blue and green scarf for me—not often very practical (except for Doctor Who conventions) but beautiful. I still display it. When effects of the treatments accumulated, we watched a lot of TV on our small black and white set, and she began painting, as well as making rude sculptures out of play dough.

Carol on one of our visits to Cape Cod. BK photo

The cats helped, particularly the kittens while we had them (we placed them in other homes when they were old enough. Stuff had a second litter of four, all black.) I recall sitting in our armchair reading, while several of the kittens chased each other, up one of my arms and down the other.

Looking back through our earlier correspondence, a pattern of precedent emerged from the previous year—particularly Carol’s series of inexplicable fevers and fatigue. She had been hospitalized in Galesburg months before I arrived, and one of the reasons she didn’t want to go back was her fear that she would die there.

Over the years I’ve wondered what fate led us to Boston, where this disease could be treated. Though the treatments themselves had serious medical consequences for her years later (they are no longer done in the same way), and both the disease and the treatments may have led to her final illness, she nevertheless had another fifty years of what might even be characterized as a fabulous life.

Jeremy Gladstone visited us in Cambridge, on his way back to Europe (he didn't finish his dinner with us because he was "shrinking his stomach" in preparation for being on the road.) He and Carol had a previous relationship (they’d lived together in the same house in Galesburg and the same rooms as I had the year before) and they remained friends. They corresponded when he was in Lausanne, in French-speaking Switzerland. He assured her that she could teach English there, and urged her to at least make a long visit. Carol was intrigued, and having the goal of a European trip helped her through her treatments.

In the fall of 1971 I finally sent an article to Boston After Dark, with a letter inquiring about writing book reviews. The associate arts editor Jake Kugel wrote back, said he liked the article but couldn’t use it, and suggested I come in to the office to see what books they had that they wanted reviewed. I did, and came away with at least one. But before my first review was due, it was announced that the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda would receive the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. I dashed off an article about him and sent it to Kugel. It was published in early November.

By the end of the year I’d published two book reviews (including one of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar) and an article on Norman Mailer in Boston After Dark. Meanwhile, I was in touch with Dave Marsh, editor of the Detroit-based magazine Creem (actually, their address was Walled Lake, Michigan.) Though the now-legendary Creem was mostly a rock music magazine, it published more. I may have published a review of The Greening of America there, but the first I recall of a flurry of pieces for Creem—a review of the movie “Omega Man” starring Charleston Heston—appeared in December.

Suddenly the apparently random aspects of my life seemed to be coalescing in these opportunities—the aimless observations of counterculture in Boulder and Berkeley, the seemingly wasted hours watching movies, listening to the latest music and discussing it all in perilous detail, and the instinctive reading and cultural curiosity, as well as the years of unread writing, of absorbing and searching for forms and expression.

Now I was suddenly getting published regularly and meeting new people, especially at Boston After Dark. But Carol still felt intimidated by what she perceived of that world, which was becoming my world. And then she felt well enough, and it came time for the dream of Europe to become real.

I went with her to Logan airport and saw her off for her first trip to England, Greece and France (sending me a pile of postcards) before settling in Switzerland. She worked part time while taking French courses every morning, and she learned to drive. Eventually, true to Jeremy's prediction, she was hired as an English teacher in Lausanne. She came back for visits and follow-ups at Mass General a couple of times. At the end of one of these visits of several weeks (including a trip to see her parents in Chicago), I put her on the train to New York, where she would get a direct flight to Switzerland. But before the train left I impulsively bought myself a ticket to New York (it was all of $10 then) and joined her, intending to return on the next train back. On the way she decided to stay longer, so we spent a few days in New York (hosted by Michael Shain) and Cambridge and again in New York, before she flew back to Europe.

I have many blue airmail letters from those first years she was in Switzerland. Early on, there was some thought of my joining her there or in England, but as my involvement in Boston increased and her attraction and commitment to Europe solidified, those thoughts faded. Years passed, and eventually she wrote that she was getting married to someone she met there. I could only wish her well. I didn’t hear from her for many years shortly after that. It was clear that she blossomed in Europe, just as we both suspected she would not be fulfilled if she stayed. Our roads and our lives diverged. But we always had Cambridge.

History of My Reading: Cummington Summer 1970

2023-09-11T00:43:00.003-07:00

BK at Cummington 1970. Photo by James Baker Hall

"What you remember saves you. To remember/Is not to rehearse, but to hear what never/Has fallen silent..." W.S. Merwin

“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming/We’re finally on our own/This summer I hear the drumming/Four dead in Ohio…” Neil Young:“Ohio” May 1970

In June 1970, weeks after the protest occupation, I left Galesburg, Illinois and Knox College. They had been one center of my life since 1964. Except for a brief visit in the 1980s, I never returned.

While in Galesburg I was staying with Carol Hartman, who was finishing her third year as a student. She and three friends were planning to spend the summer in Boston. Since I had been accepted for the eight week summer session at the Cummington Community of the Arts in western Massachusetts, I decided to join them.

Jane Langer and Carol at Knox

By then of course it was more than that. Carol and I had been friends since her first year at Knox, when I was a senior. A mutual attraction was evident from the start. But I was more of an older confidant then. Carol and her close friends—among them Jane Langer, Judy Bowker, Jan Byrne, and Steve Phillips—more or less adopted me. For awhile, Judy was “the Little Kid” and I was “the Big Kid.” I won’t say it was foremost in my mind, but I did remember how important my relationships with older students were in my first and second years.

Our attraction led to a romance that flowered in that spring of 1970 when we were both free of other such active relationships. The summer together—before and after Cummington-- was to be the next step.

Carol passed away in August 2020. Partly in deference to those who were an active part of her life in recent years, and partly because I’m not sure I’ve come to terms with this, I haven’t shared memories before. There were decades when our contacts lapsed. She got back in touch with me by 2000, and I have a Christmas card from 2001. At some point a couple of my emails went unanswered. After that I had news of her mostly through the Knox alumni magazine. In a recent year I emailed her birthday greetings out of the blue—it might even have been in January 2020.

Carol and me, Galesburg 1968, photo by
Bill Thompson. Perhaps part of a student
film Bill made with us as costars.

To do more than describe the Carol I knew in the 1970s would be presumptuous. So I can’t even attempt a full portrait or tribute. But with the discretion appropriate to circumstances—including the purpose of these posts—I can allude to what I know from that time.

We stopped in Chicago first. While Carol visited her parents, I stayed with Knox alum Howard Partner at his apartment in the city. It was in a then-funky neighborhood at Dickens and Fremont. My first night there I listened to the second Poco album, unable to sleep. (So I recorded in a notebook, which otherwise has the usual and frustrating lack of details about that time, but is filled instead with notes on writing projects, memories and bits of verse. Though I did record impressions of a free concert in Lincoln Park, and a noisy voyage on the L to meet Carol at the Carson Pirie Scott department store, where I was still getting hostile stares for my long hair.)

At Howard’s I picked a book off his shelf I’d meant to read: Joy: Expanding Human Awareness by William C. Schultz. Turns out, he said later, that it was my book that he’d borrowed. So I got it back, and I have it still. Most of it was derived from the Human Potentials Movement, encounter groups and so on. But one thing jumped out at me then (or so I noted): the relationship between the body (and its ills or health) and the mind or emotions. Pretty standard now, it was largely disregarded in the conventional medicine of 1970.

Schultz’s book begins with a description of his infant son, his innocent absorption in his surroundings, his joy in discovery, learning and experience. It wasn’t just that his son was often joyful: “Ethan is joy,” he writes. But typically this does not last. “Where does the joy go?” Reading this now, I realize that a version of this question—what happens to this kind of innocence, why is it destroyed, and how can some of it be recovered—was the active subtext of my twenties.

Meanwhile Carol was having some conflicts with her parents, particularly concerning her reluctance to return to Knox for another year. But they also were skeptical about me, though we never met. They (meaning her mother mostly) referred to me as “the Polish poet.” Carol said (fondly) that her parents had strange nicknames for her, including "Miss Pasadena" and "Zookie."

Carol and her mother

After exploring other options, Carol and I simply used half-fare cards (mine borrowed) to fly to Boston, with what we could carry. Carol’s older brother Raymond was attending M.I.T. (or Harvard, or both.) She and her friends were to stay at his Fairwood Circle apartment in Cambridge, before a summer sublet was available that probably Raymond arranged. After a few days there on the floor, I was off to western Massachusetts and the Cummington Community of the Arts.

My actual memories of Cummington are like snapshots, loosely related. I also haven’t found manuscripts or notebooks that I can attribute specifically to my time there, which turned out to be only about four weeks. But I do have a few relevant documents. And I have many letters (remember them?) that Carol wrote to me as well as letters I wrote to her, beginning in 1968 and including while we were separated that summer. Some of the contents provide details and a few prods—or even corrections—to memories of Cummington.

I also have a supplement to memory that’s unique in my experience: a published novel written about the Cummington Community and partially about that summer. Music From a Broken Piano by James Baker Hall was published in 1982 by the Fiction Collective—the outfit founded by the previously mentioned novelist Ronald Sukenick, among others. I remember James Baker Hall being there in Cummington that summer of 1970—though I was introduced to him as a photographer, not a writer.

Some of the characters, a few events and relationships, and even some words spoken, I recall from that summer. But the novel is actually set in the summer of 1969, when this arts community was formed (called “Farmington” in the novel.) Some, perhaps many people were there for both summers. The novel seems highly fictionalized, and is somewhat cleverly confusing in that he gives the names of a couple of actual people to characters not based on them but (it seemed to me) on someone else I recognized. Some of the novel’s events may have in some sense happened in 1969. That summer did feature (according to a subsequent newsletter), for example, the presentation of “3 Pieces for Broken Piano.”

Of course I first paged through this novel to see if there was a character based on me. When I was pretty sure there wasn’t, I lost interest for awhile. Though reading it recently I recognize an imaginative story of those times, it’s useful in this context mostly for ambiance, description of the places, which seem accurate to my recollections. The ambiance included frequent seemingly important discussions and rapid interpersonal events and impressions, most of which I've forgotten, but even if I remembered them, Baker Hall's novel would convince me to ignore most of them.

James Baker Hall was indeed known for his photographs as well as his writing, principally poetry, and was much honored as a poet and teacher in his native Kentucky, where he was the state's Poet Laureate.

The Cummington Community of the Arts was located on some 150 acres of woods and fields, between Northampton and Pittsfield in western Massachusetts. It was centered on what had been a working farm, though not in cultivation for decades, perhaps generations. Beginning in the 1922 when it was called The Music Box (which apparently was a summer theatre), Cummington had hosted a succession of arts schools and summer workshops. A number of famous people had participated at one time or another, including poets Marianne Moore and Archibald MacLeish, artists Willem de Kooning and Helen Frankenthaler, and photographer Diane Arbus.

The Cummington area was best known for another sprawling fallow farm, the former residence of the poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant. Though I don’t think I knew it at the time, we also weren’t very far from the farm where Herman Melville lived when he was writing Moby Dick, and occasionally dining and telling tall tales at the neighboring farm of the Nathaniel Hawthornes.

Partly because of all this, and the presence of teachers and students from prestigious New England universities, I was perhaps dimly if not consciously aware that I was swimming in different waters, closer to traditional centers of power, past and future. It wasn’t western Pennsylvania or the Midwest anymore.

cover of brochure with photo from 1969

This Cummington spread had been reconstituted as a self-organizing Community of the Arts just the year before—that is, the summer of 1969 that Baker Hall had novelized. Evidently one of the poetry readings I attended at Yale when I was in Stony Creek the previous winter had included a few Cummington attendees showing a film and making a pitch for the community. I wrote to the address they gave and applied for this summer. I was invited to attend, pretty much cost-free. The invitation followed me to Buffalo.

So on Sunday, June 20 I arrived for the session that was to end August 15. Part way up a hill was the center of the Cummington spread: a large building with kitchen and dining hall, a large barn that served as a dormitory and another barn-like structure with art studios and darkroom. One of Cummington’s selling points was that it could accommodate several families, and they were housed mostly in cabins further up the hill. There were also buildings down the hill that I don’t think I ever visited, but as it turned out, that’s where the cool people wound up. There were some 45 people there at Cummington in 1970, somewhat straining its capacity.

As a solo, a newbie and a freebie, I was housed in the big barn. Baker Hall described it well: I was to live in “more of a stall than a room, with four walls and a door but no ceiling.” There was no privacy based on sound. I had a bed and a table for a desk. The nearest bathroom and source of hot water was in the main building next to the barn. My first letter back to Carol mentioned the cold (later it would be the heat), the weak light (I requested and got a decent reading lamp), and the incessant sound of an oboe player relentlessly practicing his scales. As I was soon to discover, close to half of the “community” were classical musicians and music students, many from Yale. It was as if a busload of them got lost on their way to Tanglewood.

One of the C. structures (not THE barn); maybe
what was Rhea's studio in 1970

Though I was impressed by the country silence and the skyful of stars, the first group meal didn’t suggest that this was going to be a community experience for me (or so I wrote to Carol.) What I was hoping for I suppose was something like the Black Mountain College experience of the 1930s through the 1950s, that Robert Creeley was part of and talked about—cutting-edge artists and students in various arts (and in Black Mountain’s case, sciences) in an environment of experimentation and cross-fertilization.

Apart from high expectations, my hopes were doomed (as I think I knew then) by another imperative: the overriding political issues of the moment. We were less than two months past Cambodia and Kent State. The Vietnam War was still expanding. It was supposed to be the summer we’d hear the drumming. But all I was hearing was the oboe, and the vast silence of the country.

Harvard spring 1970

Not that there was much drumming elsewhere. We arrived in Cambridge in time to witness and participate in an antiwar march through Harvard Square, but it clearly was nothing like what we heard had happened there that spring. It turned out to be the last such demonstration I ever saw there. For one thing, the students had taken their drums and gone home. That had happened everywhere. And though political ferment was not over, it had turned sullen on the war, and fractured into separate and sometimes hostile movements. Women’s lib, for instance, and Black Power. But I was still experiencing those emotions from the spring, including the anger I had suppressed so as not to endanger others during the Knox occupation. That didn’t make me a happy camper.

Plus my own diffidence in an unfamiliar situation with people I didn’t quite get. The only time Cummington is mentioned in a surviving notebook is to quote some unnamed person after I’d evidently held forth on something or other. “Gee, I didn’t know you could talk like that,” this person said. “I didn’t know you talked at all.”

Though I probably read fiction and poetry as well as journalism and so on, the most characteristic reading I did at Cummington—and the only thing I specifically recall—was the Black Panther Party newspaper. I was constructing a play out of fragments, quotes from its articles as well as other elements, a series of voices. I never finished it, but the reading helped me see things from another perspective, as I began to more deeply understand what was and is called institutional and structural racism. Some of this amplified the personal point of view I first found in James Baldwin’s essays, as far back as high school. This time I did get caught in the rhetoric (revolutionary and otherwise) of the Panthers political engagement and analysis, though not the imagery of violence. Mostly I learned a little more of what it was like to be Black in America.

The Black Panthers were known in the media for their aggressive rhetoric in favor of violent revolution, which owed some of its intellectual basis to Marxism. But as their newspaper chronicled, they pioneered social services directed to the Black community. The best known of these was the free breakfast program, in which the Panthers organization fed more children in the Oakland area particularly, than did the state of California. The federal public school free breakfast program didn’t exist then, and may well have been inspired by the success of their efforts. But all levels of government in those years felt free to harass, arrest and at least in the case of Fred Hampton, murder people because they were Black Panthers.

This was within the more general context of the times. The Vietnam War period of the 1960s and 1970s was an intense dance of the apocalyptic and utopian. As poet W.S. Merwin described it: “Wild aspiration and vertiginous despair existed not alternately but at once, and at times we may have clung to visionary hopes not so much because they were really credible as because we felt it would be not only mean-spirited but fatal to abandon them. We knew a kind of willful desperation.” And I would add, a kind of willed innocence.

W.S. Merwin. Photo by James Baker Hall

It may be hard to remember and difficult to explain in today’s context, just how different this period was, and how it nevertheless still echoes. “We know that age to be utterly beyond our reach now, irretrievably past, a period whose distance we already feel as though it had stretched into centuries,” Merwin continues (in the preface to his 1992 collection The Second Four Books of Poems), “and yet it appears to us to be not only recent but present, still with us not as a memory but as a part of our unfinished days, a ground or backdrop before which we live. It could be said that we are haunted by it, which would suggest that that time was not done with in us, that what we saw and felt then is still part of our incompleteness and our choices.”

Cummington was not untouched by countercultural concerns, and some of it founding members probably wanted to integrate them into its communal experience. But I didn’t sense much awareness around me there of the political ideas and ferment going on then. The place seemed to be divided among oblivious academics, spaced-out hippie artists and frightened music students. I felt isolated.

Rhea Ormond photo. The book is
"A Quick Graph," collection of
Robert Creeley's commentary

Later in the summer I came to some empathetic understanding of at least the frightened music students. On a trip to town or somewhere with a few Cummington people, I found myself at a coffee shop table across from a quiet young woman I hadn’t really talked with before. She was a music student at Yale. Our somewhat stilted conversation seemed to be loosening up until I said something about the war. She became quiet as I babbled on, until her eyes filled with tears. “I just want to study music,” she finally said. So I saw that her life, too, was being deformed by the war.

By then my isolation had already been dramatized. Since I was getting a largely free ride at Cummington based on my work, I felt obligated to share it, so I gave a poetry reading after a couple of weeks. However, some discussion the previous day infuriated me so much that I stayed up all night writing a long discursive and often angry poem which ended with the words, “Cummington, you are up against yourselves.” It was the last thing I read, and I sat down to a complete and lasting silence. Oddly, I hadn’t expected that.

However, I was to have one more public performance with a different outcome, before I left halfway through the scheduled eight weeks.

I had other moments of alienation, as when many were talking about (and participating in) an “environmental art” project, which essentially was digging a big ditch. To me it was the opposite of “environmental” in the sense of ecological, since it was basically an act of needless (and to me, worse than pointless) destruction of the environment—and as such, a demonstration of human ego that was a principal cause of our depleted planet. I don’t think anyone else got my point.

On the other hand there was one event I recall that gave me a Black Mountain College community vibe. Someone organized a performance of Erik Satie’s “Vexations,” which is comprised of a short musical passage to be played 840 times. A complete performance could take from 18 to 36 hours.

New York premiere of Vexations: John Cage
(standing) with one of the pianists, John Cale
(later of the Velvet Underground.) Seated is
the only audience member to witness the
entire 18 hour performance.

Though the eccentric and influential composer in late nineteenth/ early twentieth century Paris is now known for several haunting piano works, this Satie piece was not published or performed in his lifetime. In fact it was not commercially published in the U.S. until 1969. John Cage (who incidentally had participated in Black Mountain College) discovered the manuscript, and later organized the first concert, in New York City in 1963, in which a dozen pianists played the repeated motif continuously for just over 18 hours.

The same basic format was followed at Cummington, which may well have been the second performance anywhere of this piece (most of the documented performances seem actually to have been in the last decade or so.)

The grand piano was moved in front of the fireplace in the main building, with candles around it. Seats were provided, and audience members came and went over the hours. There were enough pianists to perform it in relays, though probably they had more than one shift. I went to listen three times—at the beginning, at some point late at night, and for the finish. I stayed long enough each time to feel the hypnotic effect, which fatigue and a few tokes tended to enhance.

I was not entirely solitary or even misanthropic at Cummington. I participated in community discussions and some events, did my turns in the kitchen, played volleyball and spent sociable hours usually inflected with wine and dope. On one of the first days I was part of a group that piled into a car to see the Beatles movie Let It Be at a Northampton theatre, much to the consternation of Chris Horton, an artist and the person in charge of the community, who wanted everyone to focus on Cummington. But people came and went all summer anyway. (As for the movie, it played as the dour prequel to the recent breakup of the Beatles, but on the evidence of the recent Get Back cuts of the same 1969 footage, seems more like a reflection of the original director’s offended ego.)

I also observed (as apparently did James Baker Hall) some of the sexual and interpersonal dynamics of an idealistic group of high achievers isolated together. I’d already heard of a summer in which four young male philosophers and their wives lived together in one house to “do” philosophy together, and all four marriages collapsed before fall. At least one marriage openly lapsed at Cummington: a blond wife, the most glamorously attractive woman there, took up with the most strikingly attractive young man. There were also racial dynamics too complex to get into (though Baker Hall gives it a try, with limited success in my view.)

Heather McHugh in 1981

One of the first people I met at Cummington was a young poet named Heather McHugh, 22 at the time, who was assigned a room (or stall) near mine on the barn’s second floor. She visited my room, read some of my poems and declared that I might become as famous as she would be. Then she reclined on my bed. I was frozen at my desk for a little too long, so by the time I could move she had already left.

In memory, that was about the last I saw of her, though letters to Carol indicate we were casually friendly throughout. Carol even met her a couple of times. Heather did quickly disappear from the barn, however, becoming associated with the residents of a cabin elsewhere—visual artists or ceramicists and filmmakers, I think. Anyway, they were what I thought of as the Cool Kids of the community. She moved down there.

And Heather McHugh indeed became famous, at least in poetry and academic circles, with prize-winning poetry collections, much-praised translations and literary essays, as well as teaching. She’s a literary eminence now.

I had other casually friendly relationships with people whose names I unfortunately no longer remember, including the slightly older man, also a writer, with whom I got roaring drunk one night. When he tried to drive us in his big old Buick up the rutted hill to his family cabin, it slid backwards into a ditch and we were suddenly pitched at an angle looking up at the stars, laughing hysterically.

Rhea Ormond at C. 1970. BK photo

I made one friend, an artist and photographer named Rhea Ormond. She lived in the smaller barnlike building some yards from the big barn, with an enormous studio and a darkroom. Rhea was enthusiastic, open-hearted, astute and generous. She got me to collaborate on an oil painting with her, and she also showed me how to develop photos. I believe she had been at Cummington the summer before, and returned at least one more year. We exchanged infrequent letters for several years, and met at least once more. Rhea eventually settled in rural North Carolina and specializes in murals and large canvases, while also teaching at a community college. She’s a valued artist and respected member of her community.

After awhile I met a guitarist, Alan Jaffe, who lived on the ground floor of the barn. The “stalls” that Baker Hall described pertained mostly to the second floor, which was on the level of a hayloft. At least some of the first floor stalls had ceilings and full-length walls, so they were fully enclosed rooms. Alan lived in one of these. I’m not sure how we met. Perhaps I heard him playing jazz on his electric guitar, or maybe Rhea introduced us. In any case, we wound up collaborating on a set of my songs, working them out in relaxed sessions in his large room over a couple of weeks.

Alan Jaffe was a Yale music student then, and has since become a notable jazz guitarist in New York. I think he especially enjoyed playing the rock riffs and country licks he probably didn’t usually get to do otherwise. He had both taste and touch as a guitarist, so these hours were easily among the best I experienced at Cummington.

Meanwhile, Carol and I were exchanging frequent letters and occasional phone calls. Soon she arrived for a few days visit. I found an unused room at the bottom of the barn—not really fit for ordinary habitation, but private, so we slept there. At first Carol was wary, perhaps intimidated by the people at Cummington, and didn’t want to participate in much. But she warmed up to several, like Rhea, one at a time.

Her visit definitely changed how people viewed me. They could now tell themselves my moodiness was a natural response to being separated from such a beautiful girlfriend. Women whose interest in me had gone nowhere now understood, and at least pretended to approve of, my faithfulness. When Carol left—hitching a ride with several community members driving to Boston, including Heather—I knew that I wasn’t going to spend the whole summer apart from her.

Though I was in some ways settling into Cummington life, taking afternoon baths in the main building, heating up water in the empty kitchen late at night for my instant espresso, I decided to go back to Cambridge early. About halfway through the summer there was a kind of open house event, with community members giving recitals, showing their artwork and so on. Alan and I were going to perform my songs. That seemed like the best time to leave. I worked out the plan with Carol, who somehow got the use of a vehicle large enough to bring her friends (including a driver) and haul me and my stuff back with them.

My memory is that Alan and I were set to perform late in the afternoon, pretty much at the end of the schedule. Most of the strangers who I’d seen wandering around all day were already gone, so our audience was a good chunk of the Cummington community, plus Carol and her friends.

I’ve managed to unearth the lyrics to the songs we did, and I have a tape. Songwriting for me was (and sometimes still is) a process of working with sounds, including the sounds of words, how they fit the rhythm, with rhymes at the end of the lines. Interpreting them might come later, if at all.

Alan Jaffe

Alan and I had worked out seven or eight songs, though I doubt we did them all that afternoon. Alan played electric guitar, I played acoustic guitar, with a mike or pickup, and I sang. We’d prepared two hard rockers, both which qualified as a possibly new genre of apocalyptic rock: “SST” (surreal imagery of ecological devastation) and “Baby, Are You Looking for Me Now?” which formed the same sort of lurid imagery into a relationship song. I’m sure we did this one live, as it is the better song, very propulsive, with lines like “Snarls of bible ministers’ broken lives/death cry of the power mower wives…”

We did a mid-tempo rocker called “It’s Right,” with a kind of John Fogerty Creedence Clearwater vocal line, though with a bit of structure copped from “Get Back.”

This was becoming the “personal is political” era, though these interpretations come after the fact of composition. "It's Right" starts with verses about personal relationships ("When I'm away love, your eyes are in my mind"), then moves to a wider source of meaning: “When love is winning/crying in the streets/ Everyone you meet is your tomorrow.” “To cast the numbers/against the darkened sky/all we know is why and we can be there.” Then it moves to action, if only marching in the street: “When light is moving/across the face of time/the moment’s changing rhyme becomes/the sound of happy feet and I know it’s right…” A bit of self-mockery there with "happy feet"--a little Lennonesque.

We probably did my 50s-style rock and roll tribute to the Chuck Berry era, called “Berrybush,” which I must have written while I was a Knox student. We had a jazzy, neo-Dylan/Lennon rant, which never got a title better than “Dostoevsky and the Purple Voice,” but I doubt if we did this one live, as I couldn’t possibly remember all the words. We must have done “His Blue Image,” a slower song with Alan’s choice licks as background to chilling imagery about President Nixon (“the king of ice/with his melted smile and his dagger dice”) and the war. I notice now that I managed to shoehorn images from Blake (“the horses of instruction”) and James Joyce (“the cabman’s battered face”) in the same verse. The blue image is Nixon on so-called black and white TV.

We’d worked out two straight-ahead country songs, of the type common on the radio in those days, with simple structures that turned on the reversal of a phrase or image, like “Act Naturally” (which the Beatles copped from Buck Owens.)

Of these, I’d written “Leaves That Are Green in the Winter” as a novelty number for my hometown group, the Crosscurrents. “No Down Payment,” came more recently, at Iowa. It’s got a line that resonates with my memories of those months ostensibly at the Writers Workshop, in my narrow Iowa City room. Several times the singer lists his possessions, which include: “and a bottle of red wine/a book of empty pages/and an awful lot of time,” before the chorus: “But fair is fair/and trade is trade/no complaining about the deal when the bargain’s made/my terms were loneliness for the freedom of a dove/and I’ve made no down payment on your love.” We probably performed this one.

All of these songs were more or less heartfelt; none more than “We’re All Together Again,” which used the jaunty old ditty (“We’re all together again/we’re here, we’re here) that you can find sung by Berle Ives on the site devoted to Scout camp songs. My version was slower, with the brilliant, mournful country-inflected backing Alan devised. With the traditional chorus, it added verses that suggested an inventory of gently disappointed lives at a school reunion.

My cache of letters from friends contains many stories about the sad outcomes of clashes with the “real world” of jobs, the meaningless work, crazed or sterile work environments, the awful bosses, the mindless humiliation and boredom, and the accompanying crazed world-- the sense of imprisonment in a lunatic asylum.

These accounts began with summer jobs while we were still in college, but the stories—on and off such pages—became weightier after schooldays were over. This song reflects these sentiments.

Though the lyrics were completed some time before, letters from Carol this summer also included such stories, as she and her friends dealt with the job market. Carol applied for an opening as a telephone operator, but was told she was too intelligent. Her friend Julienne planned to apply the next day, but now knew to play dumb. Carol knew she could have almost any entry level job she wanted, but she kept backing off, as they all seemed so bleak.

Later in the summer, the Little Kid visited, and said she had to suppress her true answer to yet another erroneously arrogant boss asking why he should hire her: “Because I’m smarter than you.”

My song included a verse loosely based on two people I had known, including a Knox student in the past: “Marcia dropped from college, and went into the city/Wrote ads for a bookstore, dressing very pretty/but the air in the city made Marcia blink and cry/She rented an apartment and stayed there till she died. But we’re all together again, we’re here, we’re here. We’re all together again, we’re here.”

What I felt dying were dreams, hopes, integrity, innocence, changing who we were, and could be. This is not the last word on the eventual careers and achievements over a lifetime of people I knew, but these experiences and sentiments were prominent at that early stage, and at that historical time.

As for Cummington audience reaction, apparently such sentiments were easier to swallow combined with a melody, a tasty guitar and bouncy lines familiar from youth, however ironically used. The song went over well, as did the entire performance. When it was over, a number of community members with big smiles congratulated me, and also stayed to say goodbye. I even got a big embrace from the beautiful blond having the affair who hadn’t said three words to me all summer.

Then I grabbed my gear from the barn, and with Carol and her friends, left Cummington in the rear view mirror. In three or four hours we were in Cambridge, where over the next years, life would change, more than once.

History of My Reading: The Students Are Revolting May 1970

2023-08-09T23:11:00.002-07:00

The Context: May 1970

I was still in Buffalo, New York, when all three major television networks carried an address by President Richard Nixon at the White House. It was Thursday evening, April 30, 1970. With the aid of a map, he announced that American forces were attacking “sanctuaries” and command centers for North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers in the neighboring--and neutral-- nation of Cambodia.

The U.S. was withdrawing troops and negotiating, Nixon said, but the North Vietnamese were increasing their attacks. Action was necessary to protect American troops, and to avoid American "humiliation" and "defeat." "If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world."

Reading this speech more than fifty years later, it might seem eminently reasonable--except that by that time, few believed anything that the administration said about Vietnam, and with ample justification. Most of the assertions in the speech have proven to be lies. That phrase--pitiful, helpless giant--would become an epitaph of the era.

Instead, what jumped out of the TV screen was another escalation, this time an invasion of another country without either its formal request or a declaration of war. It was also a time of hyperbole, but it isn't much of an overstatement that, almost at the moment the speech ended, America exploded. In particular, its college and university campuses. Hundreds of them erupted in protest and in varying degrees of violence.

At Kent State in Ohio, that violence on campus brought the war home when on May 4 National Guard troops fired on unarmed students and killed four. This instantly led to even greater and more widespread campus consternation. Within days, the normal functioning of higher education had pretty much stopped.

Eventually this disruption hit the isolated campus of Knox College in Illinois, with a certain surprise--when Time Magazine covered it, the article concluded that if it could happen in Galesburg, it could happen anywhere. And much to my own surprise, I found myself at the center of it.

I had been visiting Knox alum Steven Meyers, a graduate student at SUNY Buffalo, as described in the post before this one in this series. Steve drove us to Galesburg in his MG. We were escaping the endless Buffalo winter as much as anything else, but I was unprepared for the fullness of the Galesburg spring. The campus was intensely green after a rain, and the air was soft and warm. The month of May was the brief glory of the Galesburg year as I remember it—an enchanted moment between the frigid winters and torrid summers. Only the different stimulus of October came close.

But in this early May, such delicate and peaceful beauty was distorted by anger and bewilderment. The war in Vietnam had been expanding for five long years of our young lives, and protests growing along with it. The war at home had become especially bitter since 1968. It included a kind of generational war as well as a counterculture. Almost from the moment I arrived, I was surrounded by Knox students debating and demanding action.

I had been active at Knox on both campus issues and such national issues as Civil Rights and Vietnam, and I'd been a student recently enough that I knew current students, and was generally known on campus.

My acquaintance with student activism began in high school, in electoral politics, school issues and one major moment of protest: I participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1962, the only person in my school--the only person I knew--to do so. Books and other reading were often my lifelines in these activities. I marched in Washington as much for James Baldwin as Martin Luther King, Jr.

It was also in in high school that I read about some of the late 1950s and early 60s student protests in a paperback I found on a hometown Greensburg supermarket rack, called Student by David Horowitz. He described the demonstrations in San Francisco against the House Un American Activities Committee (during which police turned fire hoses on demonstrators), as well as the first Berkely protests that culminated in the Free Speech Movement of 1964-65, my first year at Knox. That was a formative book for me, though ironically the author later repudiated it and became a right wing extremist.

In college my activism involved a lot of reading, talk and listening, and the phenomenon of student activism in the late 60s--particularly the worldwide actions of 1968--led to books of reportage and analysis.

The historical moment of May 1970 was the product of many currents, pulled into the same whirlpool by the issues and situation of the Vietnam war. These currents can be represented by the phenomenon and the individuals involved in what was first called the Chicago 8.

Charged with conspiracy associated with the demonstrations outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, their trial—a media circus surrounding a courtroom carnival—lasted from the fall of 1969 until February 1970. It was covered on every evening news broadcast, and helped sell a lot of the defendants’ books. It would generate numerous other books, at least two plays and eventually a 2020 film by Aaron Sorkin (which I haven’t seen, since the actors don’t look or sound like the originals I vividly remember, a problem possibly only for ancients like me.)

Tom Hayden was the most prominent of the Chicago 8 who started in the student movement. While in college he was a cofounder of Students for a Democratic Society and the principal author of the Port Huron Statement in 1962, that applied the ideals of "participatory democracy" to all aspects of American society.

More broadly, the student movement symbolized political activism applied to internal college and university issues as well as issues that went beyond the campus. Hayden began in the Civil Rights movement in the early 60s, and became an antiwar activist during Vietnam. He always brought American-born ideals to these issues, as when he adopted the words of Sitting Bull for the title of his 1972 book on Vietnam, The Love of Possession Is a Disease With Them.

The Chicago 7, after Bobby Seale was separated.
Many had never met before their conspiracy trial.

Several of the Chicago 8 were organizers with roots in earlier traditions, such as unionism. David Dellinger was the oldest defendant at 54, a pacifist and Civil Rights activist. But just as SDS had broken into factions, at least one of them advocating violent resistance, there were also stark divisions in the Civil Rights movement, especially since the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Defendant Bobby Seale was a co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, an organization also proposed with a document setting forth its ideals (and demands) in the Ten Point Platform. Though the document and many Black Panther Party activities stressed community service and self-determination, the imagery and rhetoric were often militant and violent, emphasizing armed resistance.

And then there were the Yippies. The 60s political and student movements joined with the broader cultural revolution, beginning with shared music, dope and sexual liberation. Chicago defendants Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin founded the Yippies, the political hippies. They were flamboyant, deliberately and strategically outrageous. At the time I didn't know much about the Dadaist art movement in Europe between the world wars, but when I read about it, the lineage was clear: the Yippies were Dada with a purpose.

So there was conflict and commonality, but it was the commonality that was most apparent to the older generations of conventional America, the Silent Majority (as Nixon called them). The Generation Gap was its strongest in these years, and it became clear (as in the Anthony Lukas reporting) that jurors were judging these defendants as much on their appearance and demeanor as their alleged actions. The common culture (or counterculture) was real enough, but the differences, especially in tactics, were also real, though that wasn't apparent to the most threatened outside this culture.

That hostility had resulted in casual and official violence against activists. Apart from the violence that African American men in particular could expect simply in daily life, black activists were particular targets, and the Black Panthers most of all.

This was brought home to Knox College students when Fred Hampton, Illinois chairman of the Black Panthers, was ruthlessly gunned down in his bed and killed by Chicago police and FBI in December 1969. Hampton was engaged in organizing the multicultural Rainbow Coalition that brought together street gangs to work for social change instead of killing each other. Hampton had evidently visited Knox that year. When I read of his murder in a Chicago underground newspaper, his photo showed him wearing a Knox sweatshirt.

Chicago author Richard Stern visited Hampton's apartment after his murder (and that of another man in the apartment), and noted the books that were there. In a brief essay that later became the title piece of his 1973 collection, he wrote:"...it meant that the blood which lumped the mattress and stained the floorboards was in part the blood of the books as well as their readers. If it didn't make that fierce nest a shrine, it lifted its meanness and anonymity."

Previously immune white youth were also victims of violence, and not all because of politics. In a Ramparts collection on the cultural revolution, several articles chronicled routine violence against "hippies" and members of communes--assaults, arson, rapes-- unrestricted by age or gender.

Students experienced beatings and routine tear-gas during political protests, and the campus was no longer a sanctuary. In response to this violence and to the endless war, some protesters engaged in violence against property. Some was planned, some spontaneous, some extraneous, and some undoubtedly fomented by government agents, agent provocateurs.

Violence against student activists was encouraged by the White House, in v.p. Agnew's rhetoric and Nixon's praise of the "hardhats" who attacked protesters. Even in his Cambodia speech, Nixon asserted: "We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last 500 years. Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed." There would be more of this after the speech, when the protests started.

The Chicago convention itself was a prime example of official violence, though the trial of demonstrators attempted to distract from this. The government's own Walker Commission concluded that it was the Chicago police that had rioted.

The resulting trial in Chicago was mostly theatre of the absurd, thanks not only to Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin but the transparently biased Judge Julius Hoffman. But the darkness at the heart of it became clear immediately when the judge refused Bobby Seale's request for his own lawyer, or to represent himself. When he continued to protest, the judge had him bound and gagged in chair in the courtroom. That image--seen only in the sketches permitted during court proceedings--became indelible. Bobby Seale was soon separated from this trial, and so the defendants became known through the history since as the Chicago 7.

The verdicts came down in February 1970. The trial was so manifestly unjust that the anger and alienation it engendered were still in the air in May. (Though some defendants were found guilty on riot charges and on contempt of court, eventually all the charges were thrown out because of the judge’s obvious and active bias.)

That winter in Buffalo also saw a lot of ferment, including barricades in the street, though most of the issues were with the university. After spring break in mid March, the intensity was dying down, only to flare up suddenly in response to Nixon announcing the Cambodian invasion. Fighting in the streets between crowds and police resumed at a higher pitch over that weekend.

There were significant protests the next day--on Friday May 1--at Princeton, University of Maryland and other campuses and in cities like Seattle, as well as smaller protests at places like Kent State in Ohio.

Also on Friday, President Nixon spoke to Pentagon employees in a statement that made the front pages by Saturday, saying "You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses...I mean, storming around about this issue, I mean you name it get rid of the war, there'll be another one."

On Sunday, a meeting of representatives of 11 universities met at Columbia U. and issued a call for a nationwide student strike the next week, declaring that “classroom education becomes a hollow, meaningless exercise,” in the face of this escalation of war.

Over the weekend, a protest march through Kent resulted in some broken windows, while on campus a small group set fire to the old wood frame house devoted to ROTC. It burned to the ground. The Governor of Ohio, whose own rhetoric had become even more heated than Nixon's, sent the National Guard to occupy the Kent State campus. National Guard were also called to the campuses of Ohio State, the University of Maryland and probably elsewhere.

The National Guard presence at Kent State stirred the campus. On Sunday, a 19 year old student named Allison Krause placed a flower in the gun barrel of a National Guard soldier, who may well have been 19 as well.

There was no strike at Kent State on Monday, so at noon, some students were going to classes, others to lunch. A crowd had gathered at the Commons--some to protest the Guard's presence, some for a previously scheduled protest that had been called off. The Guard ordered them to disperse but many did not. According to witnesses, the two sides were so far apart that the rocks students threw landed in the same open area as the tear gas the Guard lobbed.

The Guard marched up the hill, backing down the students in front of them. The students behind them were still far away. But a number of the Guard turned and fired into the crowd. Whether they were ordered to do so is still at issue, but they may well have been. They killed four students, including Allison Krause. They inflicted wounds on 11, with one student paralyzed for life.

On Tuesday, an Extra edition of the Spectrum headlined the call for a national strike, with an early report on the Kent State killings. By Wednesday it was a front page story, with that iconic photo, under the banner headline: "They shoot students, don't they?"

Maybe it was some homing instinct at a time of crisis, but at that point Steve and I got into his MG and headed for Galesburg.

We had an uneasy moment being stared at during a stop on the Ohio turnpike. A newspaper I picked up along the way carried a story quoting Nixon as saying that he hoped the fatal shootings at Kent State would convince universities to stand against "the resort to violence." Vice President Spiro T. Agnew said that they proved he was right to attack violent demonstrators.

Somewhere I also saw a story quoting Kent townspeople who blamed the students for the shootings, with one woman complaining that the newspapers were printing the dead students' high school photos but they didn't look like that when they were shot.

Newspapers also reported that on Friday May 8, 200 construction workers attacked protesters in lower Manhattan, in what became known as the Hard Hat Riot. It lasted two hours, spilled into City Hall and left 70 injured.

Around this time, 58% of respondents in a Gallup poll blamed the Kent State students for their own deaths. Another survey (according to historian Katherine Scott) found that 76% did not support the Constitutional right to assemble and dissent from government policies. Whatever their accuracy, these polls reflect the atmosphere I remember.

The Students Are Revolting: An Inside Story

We must have arrived at Knox College before the huge protest demonstration in Washington on Saturday, May 9. I'm pretty sure I’d already been party to impassioned discussions students were having.

I know we were there when the news began to circulate that a Knox student demonstrator had been arrested in Washington--John Podesta. Though this was two years after my senior year spring, I knew some students who'd been first and second years then, and John was one. We took up a collection for his bail, with a "Free Podesta" banner, but by then he was already on his way back to campus.

John Podesta went on to other things, such as White House Chief of Staff to President Clinton, White House advisor to President Obama and campaign chair for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. That--and his continued alumni support for Knox--probably contribute to his place in the College's official history of the Knox events of May 1970, as the heroic leader of the protest and takeover of the dean’s office.

At the time, the takeover of a dean's office was hardly something that earned a lot of praise from the college administration. In fact, it was scheduled to earn me jail time. But in retrospect apparently it has become his heroic deed, presaging a prominent future. He and I actually joked about this over dinner at his house in Washington, when he was between Presidents. John certainly was intimately involved in the events I am about to recall. But I'll leave descriptions of his role to his own memoirs.

Instead I will patch together my recollections with a few artifacts that have survived from that time, along with fragmentary notes I made at various times in the following few years. This is a personal account, informed by surviving documents, but everyone involved (or observing) probably has their own story.

Some 400 campuses went on strike that week, the first national student strike in US history. Knox College was not one of them. Some of its students were upset by this. I found there the same emotions as on other campuses--anger and sadness, frustration and disbelief, feelings of being betrayed and misunderstood, scapegoated and even hated.

Some months later I summarized what I observed. The activist students "were small in number, somewhat paranoid about their alienation from the majority of [Knox] students, factionalized and not all overly fond of each other, yet energized by the solidarity they saw [elsewhere] and the frustration they felt that their own campus was so unresponsive."

I described the situation as "volatile," and I recall some specifics of that. At one end of the spectrum were those students who wanted to work within established channels and the usual means of petitions, letters and demonstrations. At the other there was a small number of students angry enough to advocate violence, specifically setting fires and exploding bombs. And many, probably most, somewhere between them.

Bombing buildings was certainly happening on and around some campuses, and there were individuals and organizations that advocated violence. These particular students at Knox did not strike me as radical ideologues. Mostly they were angry young males. Some of them actually did make a bomb which they attempted to detonate. It may have simply been a stink bomb, I'm not sure, because it didn't work. But it was enough to be alarming. I was frankly less worried that they would blow something up than I was that they would blow themselves up. They seemed more impulsively angry than doctrinaire, or competent at bomb-making.

I recall several meetings held in a large, mostly empty room at the off-campus apartment shared by Carol Hartman and Mary Maddox, where I was staying. Eventually these meetings coalesced around finding a plan of action that everyone could support. I saw that it had to be peaceful but forceful, or at least dramatic.

Taking over administrative offices had become a tactic since the Columbia University demonstrations a year before. I don't remember who proposed this, but I do recall my contribution at this point, which was to suggest a Yippie-like action. While I was at Knox that spring I was reading Jerry Rubin's book, Do It! I'd previously read Abbie Hoffman's books, Revolution for the Hell of It and Woodstock Nation.

I'd been at the big Pentagon demonstration in 1968 that had been in part a Yippie action, described in Rubin's book. I didn't subscribe to all their ideas but I did feel a certain vibe in common. Writer Jack Newfield called Hoffman "a pure Marxist-Lennonist: Harpo Marx and John Lennon." That worked for me.

Hoffman and Rubin's humor was natural to them but also tactical and strategic. They used humor and outrageousness as political jujitsu, to throw their establishment opponents off balance. The people who held the power--in government, the military, business and in colleges--couldn't be defeated or even meaningfully confronted on their own terms: in terms of power. But in other ways they could be.

Hoffman and Rubin used humor in part the way Madison Avenue did, to attract attention and to make their point through imagery and irony. They used other kinds of theatrics for the same reason, a kind of forerunner of live "memes." But they also used humor as a weapon, as psychological leverage. With humor they could expose hypocrisy, pretension and the truth behind these facades. It opened the opponent to ridicule they brought on themselves. There was also something disarming and winning about humor, especially irony. It made violence against those who employed it perhaps less likely, and certainly less justifiable.

By this time, Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five had made him a ubiquitous name on campuses in particular. That novel joined Heller's Catch-22 as cultural--countercultural-- touchstones. Both novels employed what was sometimes described as black humor, but which novelist Vance Bourjaily insisted was more accurately called gallows humor. In this context it conveyed Mark Twain's view (Twain being one of Vonnegut's models in particular), that "the source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow.” It was a way to work with the pain to get at some sort of meaning.

The Yippie approach also had the advantage of appealing to almost everyone in that room as a common action, though I'm sure many had their different reservations. However, many were Yippies at heart anyway. So we proceeded along that line. Was it the best approach to take? Maybe not. With a more straightforward approach, there may have been more support among students, faculty and even administrators than anyone in that room believed there would be. But I don't regret the choice. Because in the end there were no bombs. There was no violence.

This being Knox, everyone at the preliminary meetings knew each other. Black students had organized several years before and a representative attended at least one of the meetings, but the black students decided not to officially participate in a common action, and keep control of their own message.

At the final meeting the target and the time were decided, and the small group of students who would enter first. I believe there was even lighthearted discussion of style--what kind of outrageous costumes we would wear. But apart from a couple of opening statements, nothing much was planned. Most of these actions elsewhere were largely improvised. But this one was continually improvised by design. It was part of the point.

Just about all I knew of what to expect came from reports from other campuses, and books such as The Strawberry Statement by James Simon Kunen, about the Columbia takeovers. Again, I saw that Kunen took a light, personal approach. The cover of his book featured an effusive endorsement from Kurt Vonnegut. So that book as well as the Yippie books were in the back of my mind.

At around 4 on Friday afternoon, May 15, a handful of students entered Dean Sanville's office and handed him the Eviction Notice, which began: "In the name of Abraham Lincoln, Bobby Seale, Bobby Dylan and the scholars of Woodstock Nation at Knox College, the current administration is hereby evicted from Old Main."

It ended by declaring solidarity with the national and international fight to "free Asia from imperialist oppression, to free the nation from racism and repression, to free the planet from self-destruction, to free ourselves." It was signed: The Students Are Revolting.

That's the name I came up with: a Yippie pun. In subsequent documents, it was shortened to the acronym SAR, but it took Time Magazine to point out that the true acronym was TSAR, which was even better because it was funnier and in the same spirit of mirroring expectations and throwing them back. Happy accidents will happen.

My notes remind me however that the phrase had a Knox precedent. I remembered it from a Mortarboard satirical skit--the last one before they were temporarily banned for being salacious. "The students are revolting" was a line said, with appropriate emphasis, by the Dean of Students.

The students in that first group reported that the Dean and his secretary seemed unsurprised by the takeover and left without argument. (They got maybe an extra hour start on their weekend.) After the first group took possession, reinforcements of around 30 arrived. We locked the doors and opened the first floor window, so that people could enter and exit as Lincoln did when he "went through Knox College" and into Old Main. (Though not, scholars suggest, by that same window.)

In the office we found the previous night's campus "activity report" which stated: "God provided us rain" Everything quiet on the campus. We also found college president Sharvey Umbeck's memo on how to deal with crisis situations. Though it included some surprising humility (" Don't focus on finding a scapegoat...We start by searching our own souls before seeking fault in others") the basic message was to emphasize the positive and "develop a program which turns the crisis to the College's advantage."

We issued a press release: From an original strike force of 2,000 who nonviolently took over the administration, the ranks have grown to nearly a million...We are getting all our orders from Ho Chi Minh. Then everyone was encouraged to issue their own press releases, which they did, on the best available official stationery. Dean of Students Ivan Harlan stuck his head in, saw us using the phones, and left to have the phones cut off.

I later described the occupation as an open-form action without imposed structure, an expression that became a challenge. "We're not being violent. We are having a political party," that first release said. By evening this was literally true. Somehow a rock band appeared (again, not previously planned), and set up in the Old Main hallway. Soon there were hundreds of people outside and inside--talking, arguing, and occasionally dancing. They were students, faculty, the occasional administrator, and the college public relations person.

It was a surreal few hours, in a good way at first ( a rock band playing under a portrait of Lincoln.) But some students got uncomfortable as the atmosphere got more boozy, especially as some participants, notably faculty members, seemed to be treating it as just another Friday night party.

There was also a classic Yippie moment when a faculty member went ballistic when told the soft drinks were spiked with LSD. The actual Yippies had used the same rumor at the Chicago convention demonstration. It wasn't true then, and it certainly wasn't true at Knox, as inspection of the factory sealed bottles might suggest.

Some of the students who originally threatened bombing were particularly upset by the party atmosphere. By that time news had spread of more students being shot by police, this time at the predominantly black college, Jackson State in Mississippi. Two were killed and 12 wounded. So the rest of us responded by pulling the plug on the band and asking people who wanted to discuss further action to stay, and others to leave.

When things quieted down there were (my notes indicate) now about 80 committed to the occupation. This larger group had a serious and heartfelt discussion that went on most of the night, interrupted for a time by drunken comments and personal insults from the other room (aimed at me, for one) by a few members of the faculty and administration. A meeting of a faculty committee, probably the Student Affairs Committee, was scheduled for 10:30 in the morning.

The discussion ranged from the war in Vietnam and now at home, to earnest talk about community, ideals and possibilities. This week that forcibly took everyone out of regular time was an opportunity. A consensus quickly arose (again, I'm referring to more or less contemporaneous notes) that the students who were now present wanted a strike, with official mourning for the Kent State and now Jackson State students, and discussions of relevant issues instead of standard classes.

The difference of opinion was whether or not to bring such a proposal to the faculty committee. Some believed they would consider it, others doubted it. Almost everyone realized simply making the proposal was a concession, a return to the old power dynamic of asking for something.

Eventually everyone agreed to work out a proposal, and that's what happened the rest of the night. Unfortunately I don't have a copy of it. But I believe it proposed several days of a "free university" devoted to relevant issues. A group of representatives was elected, and they took it to the committee in the morning, while everybody else tried to get some sleep on the floors.

I remember one moment from that strange night. I was walking through a group of students sitting and lying on the floor, when one young woman looked up at me and smiled. I hadn't known her before, but she looked at me with such faith and trust. I felt a particular responsibility placed on me by that look, beyond what I'd felt from the start of this, and I knew at that moment that I would do my best to see that no harm would come to her or anyone, as the priority. We all knew that the police might well become involved at some point, for not even Knox College was immune.

On Saturday morning the faculty committee refused to discuss anything with occupation representatives while we occupied the offices, because (they said) that meant the faculty was under duress. So the representatives roused the sleeping occupier and we all went to the committee room down the hall. The faculty did not discuss their proposals but rejected their legitimacy, and harshly criticized the occupiers.

Cooler heads might have expected this, and even seen it as a part of the process that would end up in some sort of compromise. But (my notes more than indicate) most of the students were shocked by its dismissive intensity, involving what would today be called shaming. The desires and possibilities they had articulated, sometimes tearfully, in the suspended space of the night, were ignored and disdained.

A theorist might suggest that the Yippie/Dada occupation had monkeyed with the structure and mystique of authority, denying its moral validity, and the faculty now reflexively attempted to restore and enforce that authority and mystique. Or it simply was an angry reaction with rational justification, which felt like violence to the exhausted and vulnerable.

Knox student John Podesta

The faculty meeting did have its Yippie moments. I noted that John Podesta brought a flashlight to the meeting and pretended to flash messages to confederates outside. He and the other representatives requested donations for the Old Main One--a student who'd been arrested for trying to shoplift chains, to chain up the doors.

In any case the faculty response also seemed like part of a bad cop/good cop strategy, because when we got back from the meeting, the Dean of Students entered, made "a few subtle threats" but offered to negotiate. "I'll be in my office," he said. "We'll be in ours!" one of the students shouted, to cheers. The occupying group seemed on the verge of splintering until that moment.

The deans stuck around and talked with whoever came into their offices. Perhaps some actual negotiation began at this point, but it mostly became chaos. The deans' huddle was interrupted by a student asking for a match, and then leaving. Just as one of the more traditionally liberal members of the occupying group was explaining to the deans that one of these days things might get so bad that somebody might throw a bomb, in slid a long sputtering fuse attached to a loaf of bread. Then 30 of the occupiers got down on the Old Man hallway floor and crawled towards one of the offices crying, "Crumbs! Crumbs from the table! Please!"

The occupation continued throughout the day on Saturday. There seemed to be only two alternatives: to acknowledge defeat, or await the police. We talked about it. We could ask those not willing to be busted to leave, but the group believed it had achieved something by staying together, and they wanted to remain together. But to some, and especially to me, the whole group staying required trusting that the police would not be violent, and in this week that did not seem a safe bet.

And what would be gained? Injury or worse, radicalization of some, a lot of alienation and turmoil with lasting repercussions. This scenario had become predictable. Issues had been raised and a process begun, however disingenuously. It seemed time for a last act of Yippie jujitsu. I made the proposal, and the group made the final decision, with what seemed like relief.

In the darkness of very early Sunday morning we packed up and left, announcing that we were enacting the solution to the wearisome question of how do we get out of Vietnam? Our answer was: declare victory and go home.

That’s what we did. There was no vandalism, no damage to persons or property. I’m pretty sure we cleaned up before we left.

Later I learned, probably from Becky Harlan, Dean Ivan Harlan's daughter, that a police raid had been in the works, working with the college. Students who participated would simply be sent home, but--as an ex-student Outside Agitator-- I would be arrested, as would the other ex-student present.

Shortly after the occupation, the college did call off classes and held an open university for a day or two. I can't imagine where they got the idea.

The occupation and my participation in it got me some odd responses. Some people I knew who I thought would be more positive, weren't. But one faculty member I expected to be hostile--in fact the professor who'd flunked me and adamantly refused to let me graduate--complimented me on taking an interest in my old school, with a smile. To this day I don't know if he was sincere, or more skilled at blank sarcasm than I'd ever seen.

The head of college public relations--who I've decided not to name here-- may have felt personally betrayed because he'd employed me writing for the alumni magazine and tried to get me a summer reporting job while I was a student. In any case he was bitter, angry and very hostile.

While it was going on, I'd written a verse parody about the occupation called, naturally enough, "The Students Are Revolting." The main character was Free Podesta, which wasn't meant to be John specifically, but was a pun referring both to the "Free Podesta" signs and to Abbie Hoffman's adopted name of Free, to designate a kind of Every-Protester.

Later someone slipped me this p.r. man's own Shakespearian verse parody, quite skillfully written, with personal digs at a number of students but in which the chief villains are me ("King Owinski") and somebody called "Jan Siesta."

All of this reminds me of something Abbie Hoffman said years later:"We were reckless, we were headstrong, we were impatient, we were excessive. But goddammit we were right."

During the occupation I snuck out a few times, once to go to the library to check out the story about the occupation in Time Magazine (with its immortal quote, "If it can happen at Knox College, it can happen anywhere.") Oddly, there were a couple of alums I knew who visited Knox that weekend, for reasons of their own. One was Neil Gaston, one of the first of my classmates I met my first year. I ran into him in front of Seymour Hall. He was in the Army. He wanted to talk about books.

The other was Valjean McLenighan, in her Dress for Success period. We had a brief conversation before I had to go back. I only found her because Dean Deborah Wing saw me and said she was on campus and looking for me. In all my years at Knox I had hardly a good word to say for Dean Wing, and yet she was calmly civil with me.

That was the last time I saw or heard from Neil. And though Valjean and I spoke on the phone, wrote letters and emails over the years, that was also the last time I saw her. Both Neil and Valjean would go on to do great work (Neil wrote major environmental laws in Illinois; Valjean wrote childrens books, did political work, and more) and both were special people. And both died too young.

Two other relevant memories: I did participate in the open university, though my contribution was decidedly undistinguished. In retrospect it reminds me of the actor's nightmare, in which you find yourself on stage unprepared. I'd begun something which I'd planned as a multi-media presentation on "the classroom without walls," on old forms restricting new information, but I didn't have anything coherent in shape in time. And I was exhausted, so I mumbled and grumbled through the nightmare.

All I managed to prepare, besides pages of preliminary verbiage, were copies of a page from a McLuhan book. The first sentence makes the point:"The speed of information movement in the global village means that every human action or event involves everybody in the village in the consequences of every event." True enough if largely unrecognized in 1970, it has become more profoundly true in the age of the Internet and global heating, even if it is treated merely as a fact of life.

Before I left campus I successfully made my first and only movie--a super 8 one-reeler, about 3 and a half minutes long, edited in the camera. It was about an Allison Krause figure, one of the students killed at Kent State. She also captured the imagination of many poets and others, probably for the flower in the gun barrel moment. I had immediately gravitated towards her also because she was from Pittsburgh, and grew up not far from where I did.

I planned my scenes and shots but while I actually shot the film I had a tune in my head--Paul McCartney's first solo album was just out, and I kept hearing "Maybe I'm Amazed." The first and I think only time I ran the film, I put the record on, and the film and the song exactly matched, in length and rhythms. Spooky.

Two Postscripts

Sometime in the 1980s I met Jerry Rubin. He was a millionaire by then, and was beginning to host networking parties. My literary agent at the time was helping him out. I rode in the back seat of a car with him, and attended one of his parties at his Upper East Side apartment. It was all carpeted in white. And I noticed that he served only white wine. I also noticed that I never saw him smile.

Also in the 1980s, when I was back in western Pennsylvania working on my mall book, I got an unusual phone call. Former Knox Dean Ivan Harlan and his new wife, the former Lynn Metz, were nearby and invited me to dinner. They were visiting St. Vincent College in Latrobe, evidently job-hunting. At one point Ivan told me that his daughter Becky had explained to him what my role was in organizing the occupation, that it had helped keep things from becoming violent. And he also told me that he missed those days. Students now were so boring.

History of My Reading: To Stony Creek and Buffalo 1969-70

2023-07-06T23:52:00.000-07:00

Stony Creek, Connecticut 1969/70. BK photo.

After my months in Berkeley, I flew to Chicago in late October or early November 1969. I visited for a few days with Jeremy Gladstone (a friend from Knox College) who was back from Europe and staying at the family home in Park Forest until he sorted out his next move. In Europe Jeremy had acquired a taste for Pernod, one of the anise-based French liqueurs, a legal form of absinthe. He showed me how to drink it over ice, with water.

One evening he invited a group of former Knox friends, and initiated them as well. I’m pretty sure Howard Partner was among them. We sat around a table drinking Pernod. I think it was on this occasion that I got a better appreciation for how far apart these Chicagoland suburbs really are. It took longer for everyone to get there and to get back than the time we spent together.

My next stop was the family home in Greensburg. This was likely a short visit because I was soon on my way to rejoin Joni in Connecticut. I got myself there by first going to Washington for the second Moratorium demonstration against the Vietnam War on November 15. This turned out to be officially the largest Washington demonstration of the war. I may have gone down with my friend Mike or maybe I met him there because he was stationed nearby. He had been drafted into the Army the year before. So I marched against the war in the company of an active duty soldier (or in his case, chaplain’s assistant.)

Many demonstrators from distant places came on rented buses, and so my plan was to find a bus returning to New Haven and hitch a ride. Not really a mad strategy in 1969. In any case, the plan worked. Mike and I found a bus going to New Haven and they had empty seats. I even got acquainted with someone on the bus who offered to put me up for the night when I couldn’t reach Joni upon our arrival. In the morning I met his wife, and he and I traded versions of Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country” (I knew the Nashville Skyline version in G, he knew the original version in C.) Then I called Joni again and she came to pick me up.

Joni had found a small place in a village called Stony Creek, directly on Long Island Sound, about eight miles from New Haven. As I recall, it was three rooms in a building set back from the main drag, Thimble Island Road. Though oysters and lobster fishing were part of its identity, the “stony” in Stony Creek likely came from the quarry. Before it closed at the beginning of the 20^th century, it supplied pink granite for the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, and the base of the Statue of Liberty.

Probably Thimble Island Road. BK photo.

With a population of about a thousand, Stony Creek was part of the town of Branford, Connecticut. An article I clipped from the New York Times a decade later began with the quip of an unnamed critic: “Every town has its village idiot, but only Branford has an idiot village.” This article made much of Stony Creek’s resistance to change; specifically to tourism. I don’t know if it’s still that way, though photos on line don’t give me that impression.

The 1979 Times article suggested that many residents were employed at Yale, and perhaps that was the case to some extent also in 1969. Across the Sound from Stony Creek there were houses where groups of Yale Law students lived. One of them was named Bill Clinton. His girlfriend Hillary was often around. Joni’s brother-in-law was at Yale Law, and she attended a party over there sometime before I’d arrived. Perhaps they met.

I don't know if it was a cultural high point but in the late 1930s, Stony Creek had a summer theatre, operated by two women who also interned for the legendary Mercury Theatre in New York, run by John Houseman and Orson Welles, often the star in its productions. This is how Stony Creek hosted a Mercury Theatre show for a week prior to its Broadway debut. Unfortunately the tryout was so dismal that the show never opened--only those who came to Stony Creek, like Katharine Hepburn, ever saw it. She stole one of the actors, Joseph Cotton, for her 1939 Broadway hit, The Philadelphia Story, which revived her career.

That New York Times article sings the praises of Stony Creek in summer, but I saw it only in the dead of winter, intermittently from November through February (with some time back in Greensburg for Christmas, which extended well into January to avoid Joni’s parents, visiting her and her sister. They were not my allies.)

Still, even though it was dim and frigid (or sunny and slushy) much of the time, I liked our corner of Stony Creek by the Sound. The Sound wasn’t the ocean but it was something, and it was always there. I wrote this about it:

Dredging the gray sky,/the winter wind sears home./Against the window/it pours/stinging rain from the sea./Though it does not leap into the warm kitchen/I go out to meet it/greet it/say hello/and come back in.

Something about that dynamic suited me then, and still does. Besides the Sound, there was very little else in Stony Creek, at least within walking distance, except farther down Thimble Island Road there was a small store--and a public library. It was (and is) the Willoughby Wallace Library, built in 1956 thanks to a bequest by the eccentric but public-spirited Mr. Wallace, plus an architect’s donated design, and donated town granite.

So this bright substantial building was pretty new when I discovered it, amazed it was there. I was inside it just after 3 in the afternoon, and found it was a prime hangout for high school students after school. They sat around sunny tables, munching candy from the store and debriefing the day: who got in trouble on the bus that morning, who got ripped last weekend, plus demonstrations of how Martha and Jennifer walk. (As well as casting suspicious glances at the possible narc with the long hair, taking notes.)

Around 4, they were replaced by a noisy bunch of grade schoolers. “I wonder what menstruation means?” I watched a third grader look over a Jimi Hendrix album. Others laughed over the magazines, or broke into whispery, gossipy groups.

The library became my regular destination—walking past the abandoned offices of Pacific Sanchero, Permittee, and the house with the multicolored design painted by a summer tenant, who also inscribed on its wall “Latch onto a feather.” In relatively good weather, I could sit on a stone bench outside, if it wasn’t already occupied by the aforementioned students.

It was in this library that I discovered an author I would follow for the rest of his life: Ronald Sukenick. Very likely his latest book was on display, with a title bound to catch my eye: Death of the Novel and Other Stories. (The “death of the novel” was a thing, long before—and much different than-- the death of the author.)

Sukenick

The stories amazed me—I hadn’t read anything like them before. Today some might qualify as “metafiction,” or be called deconstruction. At the time they felt to be attempts to find new forms commensurate with the current fractious and fractured reality, as well as further forays in expanding the possibilities of writing by essentially playing with some of those possibilities. These stories were basically comic, and in a sense conventional—the experiments were part of the story, as for example, when he includes a transcript of a conversation with his wife with a tape recorder between them. When the conversation becomes uncomfortable for him, he wants to turn the tape off. (At least that’s how I remember it, from a re-reading ten years ago or so.)

So I was delighted to find in the library stacks a copy of his novel, Up, published the previous year. It also played with narrative—the initial character was a writer, so part of it is about a character he’s writing (Strop Banally), including the changes he’s making along the way (the character’s hair color, etc.) It also threads other narratives, but again includes critiques of their discontinuities and excesses as part of the story.

Sukenick seemed only a little older, and I immediately bonded with our similarities in outlook and literary attempts, ignoring many differences. Writing conventional narrative seemed superficial and false to many in those nuclear psychedelic Vietnam Nixonated days. I didn’t get all he was doing or trying to do, but I was attracted to the mosaic form and the irreverent style I’d been drawn to in the Beatles, Vonnegut, Donleavy, Joseph Heller, etc.

My Sukenick collection, minus "Mosaic," hiding somewhere

But Sukenick became a hard author to follow—even as a reader. Those first two books were from major publishers, but subsequent ones were from small presses, including the organization he helped to start, the Fiction Collective. At least a few times I found his books on carts of university bookstores sale books. I found his 1986 novel Blown Away (Sun and Moon Press) deep in a pile of discount books on my last visit to the Harvard Coop bookstore. But I managed to get copies of all of his novels, and one collection of stories. I still have most of them, including his last, easily the best fiction I’ve read about 9/11, Last Fall. I even have his extremely useful book on Wallace Stevens, Musing the Obscure, from his earlier life as a very perceptive and methodical literary scholar. He died in 2004.

Sukenick was a named character in Up, and the novel followed other characters (his boyhood friends mostly) who also were a little older than me. There were retrospective scenes from their past, though I wasn’t much interested in them at the time. (Now they seem vivid.) What impressed me was that this was contemporary fiction about contemporary times and people. Characters smoked dope and talked about revolution (though usually their complicated reasons for supporting it and not supporting it simultaneously.) They were out of school (though some were teaching) and trying to find a place in a society they feared and loathed. That got my attention, as I was just beginning that journey.

When I wasn’t in Stony Creek, I was in New Haven, a 20 minute bus ride away. My efforts to find a job—desperate, muddled and halfhearted simultaneously-- were focused there. I checked bulletin boards and the newspapers, including the Yale student paper.

In one of those papers I saw an ad for volunteers for a Yale psychology department experiment “in learning” that paid $25 for a few hours. I called the number and asked for more information on what this experiment entailed. My first suspicion was that it involved drugs, and at this point in my life I wasn’t eager to let others experiment on me. The female voice on the other end assured me there were no drugs but when I asked other questions she was persistently evasive. That turned my suspicions into alarm bells. As much as I needed the money, I didn’t participate.

Years later I realized that this was very probably an early iteration of the famous (or infamous) Milgram experiments. (This was pretty much confirmed for me in a book by psychologist Elliot Aronson when he described what subjects were told the experiments were about—precisely what that ad said.)

The Milgram experiments were one of the most often cited psychology experiments of modern times. Participants were instructed to give electric shocks to people in the next room if they answer questions incorrectly. With each wrong answer the shock is intensified, until the victim can be heard screaming in pain and begging to be released from the experiment. The victims weren’t actually getting shocks—they were in on the con. The experiments weren’t about learning; they were to see how many people will follow instructions and administer the shocks, even after hearing cries of pain and the begging.

The answer was a shockingly high percentage of them. I first heard it reported as 100%. Later the figure given for those willing to administer the maximum voltage was 64%. The experiment is usually said to prove two main points: that people will do what authority tells them to do, and that people will do so in situations even if they believe that they wouldn’t, regardless of their personal ethics.

But here’s the problem. To make such an inference about people in general, the participants had to accurately represent the population. This is the fatal flaw of most such psychological experiments (participants are mostly students who always need money, and overwhelmingly white.) In this experiment, those who actually participated had to be willing to take the unquestioned word of authorities, without knowing what they were getting into, just to walk in the door. So they were self-selected pre-disposed. But how many people like me smelled something fishy and just didn’t participate? On the other hand, how many participants needed the $25 enough to do what they were told?

Think about it: this was Yale in 1969 and 1970. There were antiwar protests on campus. William Sloane Coffin, an advocate for defying the draft and therefore the authority of the government, was a campus hero. Part of the huge generation gap was the distrust many younger people had for the honesty and veracity of those in authority in the government, the university and big business. Scientific research secretly funded by the military was a big issue on many campuses.

So if you were against the killing and the maiming in Vietnam, to the extent of resisting the government’s orders to do so, or even if you were a stoned peace and love hippie, how likely is it that you were going to push a button to cause somebody pain? I’ve seen photos of these experiments—there was no long hair, no countercultural clothing in any of them.

(These experiments, now considered unethical, are often cited along with the equally notorious Stanford experiments that purported to prove that people given the role of prison guard invariably act in sadistic ways towards prisoners. This was a much-cited finding in the corporate world of the 1980s and 1990s, though the experiments have largely been discredited.)

My perspective on the Milgram experiments led to my skepticism of many psychological experiments, and books about them. I found support in the work of eminent psychologist Jerome Kagan, particularly in his book Psychology’s Ghosts: The Crisis in the Profession and the Way Back, in which he gently but definitely questioned whether universal conclusions about behavior can be based on small numbers of culturally identical subjects in a laboratory setting.

In any case, the stark divide in the late 1960s was something I keenly felt. Even before the Pentagon Papers or Watergate, there was amply evidence of systematic lying in high places. All our literature, movies and music questioned the moral authority if not the intelligence of those running things. Apart from my ignorance of how the “adult world” worked, and how I could possibly find my way into the elements of it I still respected, my general attitude was both baffled and adversarial. How could I make a living, and not lose myself? I had too much yet to learn.

“Out of college, money spent,” went the Beatles’ lyric, “see no future, pay no rent/all the money’s gone, nowhere to go. But oh that magic feeling/ no where to go...”

Apart from visits to my Knox friend Mike Shain, who for some reason now forgotten was living in a New Haven rooming house, with a sign on his door that said “Home of the Bobby Dylan Conspiracy,” I gravitated towards Yale. The academic campus was still the only industrial site I knew, and where I was somewhat comfortable. I went to readings and knew how to get myself invited to the parties afterwards. I believe that’s where I heard poet Kenneth Koch read.

He read a long poem that may have been called “Eyes.” In any case, it was my inspiration for a long poem I later wrote called “Ears,” which was published a couple of times in the mid-70s.

I heard the poet Bill Knott, who at the time was writing under the name of St. Geraud. I was astounded by his poems—they were the most unrelenting and mind-blowing surrealist poems I’d encountered. Also very short. He may have read on the same bill with Koch or perhaps another poet, because I remember him being at the after-party and he left without much notice. Later I happened to be in the living room of this house when the doorbell rang and I answered it. It was Bill Knott, looking shamefaced about returning. I laughed. I loved it.

I met poet Michael Benedikt and we began a correspondence when he was back in New York. He was interested in my writing that I sent him. This was some rare encouragement. I was still sending things out and getting them back.

Thinking back, it seems obvious that this would have been a good moment for a mentor to appear in my life. But it didn’t happen then, and never happened. I later depended greatly on the faith of several editors, but they were all more or less my contemporaries. This, like everything else, was as much my fault as anyone’s, and equally a sign of the times.

I did manage a fair amount of writing at Stony Creek. Apart from verse and short fiction, and the usual endless notes on the novel I wasn’t writing, I once simply let go and wrote a sustained prose fiction called “Apostrophe S.” Influenced by Sukenick but more by Vonnegut in its tone, I wrote it late at night, in the warm quiet kitchen, while Joni was asleep. I often had the company of our two kittens, named Abbey and Rhoda, who prowled around the pale plywood plank I was writing on, and chased my pen across the yellow legal pad.

What survives of “Apostrophe S” seems to include elements added later. Perhaps a wise editor could have helped me develop the good parts (some were quite funny) into something publishable, but in retrospect, the best part of it is remembering the experience of writing it.

But I did write something while at Stony Creek that was more of an indication of a direction I would later follow. It’s not much remembered, but in late 1969, there was a brief but intense frenzy over an assertion that Paul McCartney had died in a car crash some three years before, and been secretly replaced by a lookalike. Then the Beatles had seeded various songs with clues. This “Paul is dead” theory led to top 40 stations all over America airing the “evidence” as well as lots of Beatles songs. It made the news (Huntley-Brinkley, Time Magazine) and a New Haven moviehouse advertised a special showing of Yellow Submarine with the line, “Paul is alive and well in Yellow Submarine!” Sales of Beatles albums shot up.

But what apparently impressed me most was how seriously the high school students I saw in Stony Creek were taking it. I realized that this was a contemporary subject of interest to my generation and younger that I knew something about, both in terms of the Beatles and what are now known as “conspiracy theories.” The long piece I wrote about it, entitled the “The Paul Is Dead Theology,” was the kind of cultural reportage and analysis that in the not too distant future I would be writing and publishing. But at that moment, though Michael Benedikt especially liked it and tried to get it published, it only joined my manuscript pile of futility.

The article asserted knowledge concerning what high school students were talking about that I probably didn’t derive just from hanging around the Stony Creek library. Joni was teaching high school, and we talked about her students.

We had happy times in Stony Creek. The music I associate with those wintry days includes the Band albums and The Papas and the Mamas, especially the song "Safe in my Garden." But our garden was not so safe. Our problem was the future, and the nature of our future together. These issues were the sources of tension, and along with external and internal pressures, were more than an undercurrent to those months. But as far as I knew we’d come to no conclusion.

Stony Creek sunset. BK photo.

Apart from manuscripts, I’d sent out various proposals, applications and inquiries. I applied for a summer arts workshop at Cummington, in western Massachusetts. I was in touch with Knox friend Steve Meyers who was in graduate school in Buffalo. He was enthusiastic about the English department there, and urged me to come up and check things out. Perhaps I’d come to the reluctant conclusion that I didn’t know how to do anything that paid a salary except maybe teach, and if I was going to have to make a living that way, I would need an advanced degree. Or maybe I was just looking for some income for a few years, burrowed into books.

So one cold March morning I slid a duffel bag and my guitar case into the front trunk of Joni’s yellow VW bug. We drove first to the dump in a frozen field of thin snow, and I unloaded a bag of garbage. I got back into the car and she drove me to an interstate ramp, so I could begin hitchhiking up to Buffalo. After a brief farewell, she drove away. It would be the last time I saw her.

Shortly after I got to Steve’s in Buffalo, her letter arrived inviting me not to come back. Over the next weeks we talked on the phone a few times and exchanged letters, but the situation didn’t change. I was dislocated and bereft on many levels, but I don’t think I really blamed her. I certainly saw the justice of her point of view.

If Sukenick’s Up has a theme it would probably be to “be true to the discontinuity of experience.” Even then, the 60s seemed an especially discontinuous and contingent time, so it seemed writing should express it. But discontinuity is also a theme of youth. All experience that falls outside the expected, the changes and rapid twists and turns, especially when moving among “worlds” of what passes for the traditional or normal and what seems to be new, as well as crossing undefined geographical, socio-economic (class) and other borders, is experienced as discontinuous. It’s only later that it’s possible to sense the patterns, the continuities, even if they never become entirely clear, or they are multiple.

There may be accidents or missed opportunities or stupid moves and so on, the memory of which may keep us up at night, but ultimately they become elements in the pattern. For example, had a certain letter arrived a few days earlier when I was in Berkeley, my life might have taken me in a different direction, perhaps to western Canada. And so on. Or as we said a lot in those days, so it goes.

In a way that’s what this project is about: partly through the agency of reading, seeing where things fall into the pattern that time has made, that can only be seen retrospectively. In a larger sense, that’s a project of old age.

Events of all kinds contribute to the pattern—things that happened and did not happen, as well as things read or thought or felt or heard or seen, or desired, or feared. The influence of others at a particular time, or the lack of it. The picture will never be complete, because memory and various kinds of records of the time are almost guaranteed to be incomplete, if not distorting. But it’s pretty clear what the pattern is of: it’s how you got to where you end up.

Virgil Thomson (r)

Sometime in the early 1990s, I had the television on, not entirely absorbed in what I think was a documentary film about the American composer Virgil Thomson. There was a brief scene, apparently filler, of Thomson at a party. He was talking to a young man, who I imagine was troubled about his career or his life. Thompson was looking at him intently, and said very carefully and earnestly: “The outcome of everything is the way it happens, and the way it happens is the story of your life.”

It took me awhile to accept this but that’s the pattern. That’s the retrospective continuity: the story of your life. And as I am finding now, it begins to become visible when the story is pretty much over, and you’re in the coda, or maybe the last act.

In Buffalo it was still winter. I slept in Steve’s living room, for longer than I intended. Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water album had come out, and I learned the first song on the second side, “The Only Living Boy in New York.” I played it so much that a friend of Steve’s thought I’d written it. I also liked “Papa Hobo” from that record. Together they represented my moment.

Bobbie and Bob Creeley

The only reading I remember was from the bookshelf in that living room: several books by William Carlos Williams, notably his essays In The American Grain.

I must have also been reading Robert Creeley’s newer poetry, since he was teaching in Buffalo, and I was seeing a lot of him. I attended at least one of his classes, spoke with him in his office, and was at an epic party in which, at one end of the host apartment, Robert Creeley held court, surrounded by others, and at the other end, his wife Bobbie Creeley was equally the center of attention. When Bob mentioned Bobbie's enthusiasm for palmistry and I held up my liberally creased hand, he immediately sent me to Bobbie (later known as writer and artist Bobbie Louise Hawkins), who, as predicted, exulted in the challenge.

I was deliberately spending time at the English department building, particularly one long row of offices, belonging to (among others) poet John Logan, fictionist John Barth, and literary critic and gadfly Leslie Fiedler, as well as Creeley. I learned enough about them to find the ways they decorated the window in the door to their offices appropriately expressive. Logan’s window looked like stained glass, Fiedler’s was psychedelic, Barth’s was blacked out, and Creeley’s was clear.

I met a lot of people in the department, as well as other of Steve’s friends, especially at the almost weekly huge communal meals. Steve remembers that we both brought guitars to a class he was teaching and improvised a song with lyrics by T.S. Eliot.

But it was also a moment of crisis for SUNY Buffalo, eventually including street demonstrations. After awhile police of various kinds were called in, and there was barricades and tear gas. Steve and I mostly listened to the reports each evening on the campus radio station. But we also attended meetings, including a big one of the faculty (that included graduate TAs) in the College of Arts and Letters. The issues were wide-ranging, including academic freedom (unjustified suspensions of faculty) and others I’ve frankly forgotten.

Leslie Fiedler

Leslie Fiedler spoke about how serious it was to call for the resignation of a university president—and why he was calling for it now. A resolution of no confidence passed overwhelmingly (according to my notebook.) Then a student came in shouting that police were on their way to a particular campus building, and so all of us marched arm in arm to that building, where nothing happened.

There was another moment I had reason to remember later. Before the meeting started, someone behind us cautioned that people chatting with each other needed to be careful what they said because there were probably FBI undercover agents in the crowd. What seemed a tad paranoid though not crazy turned out to be broadly true, when the extent of FBI infiltration of antiwar and related groups was revealed. Some agents were even provocateurs, pushing radical groups to violence.

I’d never entertained participating in premeditated political violence, and I was skeptical of its benefits versus its human and moral costs. My attitudes towards “revolution” were also complicated. I was selective in what I felt needed to change, and how to go about obtaining that change. Some of these attitudes were not quite conscious, so I learned something from a moment in Buffalo.

Richard Ellmann, author of the biography of James Joyce that had meant so much to me, was teaching at the university (though I never met him.) But I read somewhere that his collection of Joyce memorabilia was on display that month at the university library.

When I went to see it, I couldn’t find it. A library official asked if he could help me, and when I told him, he said that unfortunately the display had to be put back in storage because of the ongoing strife in the streets. He must have seen my expression of dismay—I’d never dreamed that angry students would sack the library but at the same time, it didn’t seem like an outrageous precaution. And I suppose that, with my long hair and jeans, I was a bit ashamed to be a cause of such anxiety. But he saw right away that I was a Joyce enthusiast, and sympathized.

SUNY Buffalo campus

At some point in my Buffalo exile, I made a trip over the Canadian border for a quick visit with Bill Thompson, my former housemate our senior year at Knox. I met his friends from the University of Hamilton where he was (or had been) a graduate student. So cold and insistent was the Buffalo winter that it actually was warmer in Canada.

It was at the University of Hamilton that I had my first exposure to what was then called Women’s Liberation. I attended an open forum on the subject, run with authority by leaders of a campus Women’s Liberation organization. It was an eye-opener, or as we would soon learn to say, a consciousness-raiser. A lot of their points I experienced as valid immediately, and others it took a short while to admit. I was troubled however by how the women leaders treated a woman in the audience, who said she didn’t think women had to have a career to feel liberated or be fulfilled—she felt liberated working in her garden. They fell on her like a ton of bricks. Today it seems like a first iteration of the “woke” moment: it’s liberating side, and it’s tyrannical side.

I was still in Buffalo in April (where it was still winter), for the very first Earth Day. Some 20 million Americans marched or otherwise participated. It was a big deal. (I wrote more about this here.) I heard Ralph Nader speak, and engaged a garage mechanic in a conversation about how ecology could generate jobs.

In general Buffalo had calmed down in late April, until President Nixon announced the U.S. incursion into Cambodia, widening the Vietnam war. The university, along with colleges across the country, immediately erupted. On May 4^th, National Guard troops shot and killed four Kent State students. The war, it seemed, had come home. There were larger protests at even more colleges, and a national student strike. For those of us a little older, Kent State crystallized a feeling we’d had for years: that we were enemies in our country.

The University of Buffalo was shut down, and Steve and I spontaneously decided to head back to Knox College in Illinois, perhaps from some homing instinct in this crisis time.

I had miraculously (and largely through the efforts of Robert Creeley, I’m convinced) been accepted into the SUNY Buffalo graduate English program for the following fall. But I no longer saw myself staying there. Whatever I was going to do or be next, it wasn’t going to be in academia after all. In the immediate sense I’d abused Steve’s hospitality for too long. So I knew I wasn’t going back to Buffalo.

I had also been accepted at the Cummington, Massachusetts summer arts community, all expenses paid. Before and after that, I was back to “nowhere to go.”

We got in Steve’s MG, and by the time we got to Ohio—and drank coffee while being stared at by truckers—we realized that outside of Buffalo, and despite the ongoing crisis, it was spring.

History of My Reading: Booking Berkeley 1969

2023-06-06T03:36:00.003-07:00

“No Thyself”

sidewalk graffiti, Berkeley 1969

Many of the countercultural concerns I heard in Berkeley were the same I’d seen in Boulder that summer (and fall) of 1969: astrology was big, we often consulted the I Ching. “Hexagrams to horoscopes, these add the symbolic dimensions to our lives erased by technocracy,” I wrote in one of my Berkeley notebooks.

There was also a lot of emphasis on alternative medicine and health, organic food and so on, as well as the evolving countercultural economics and politics. But in Berkeley I quickly experienced the latest echoes of a West Coast approach to psychology.

I kept hearing about something called encounter groups, which may or may not have been related to the Gestalt Therapy that Fritz Perls had been practicing, mostly at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, down the coast from Berkeley. I don’t remember the exact vocabulary but there were certain phrases that I heard a lot, from the moment I got there.

Somewhere in the years since then, I picked up a vintage copy of Perls 1969 book, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, which is basically a series of edited transcripts of Perls’ sessions, in which he focused on an individual (usually telling a dream, or trying to) but with a large group as audience and occasionally participants. Reading this recently, I began to see the likely source of a lot I heard in 1969: the idea of stripping away “your bullshit,” of confronting illusions and habits of evasion, and being honest with yourself and others...The idea of identifying a personal mythology, which is both a public face and a private identity, and which in both instances could be fake and self-delusion... The often repeated exhortation to “get out of your head” and pay attention to what your senses and your body were telling you. ("Who am I in your mythology? Mike Hamrin once asked me.)

But if I was ever introduced to Gestalt as a system, it escaped me. I recall only fragments, most conspicuously the one that became a hippie cliche: doing your thing. It apparently came from what Perls called the Gestalt Prayer: “I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations” (I heard that sentence a lot) “and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped.” (The last part of the prayer, a little harsh for the love generation, I’d never heard before.)

Other elements of Gestalt have become absorbed into various sorts of therapies, such as Perls’ method of interpreting dreams (his idea was that every character—in fact, every thing-- in the dream is you.) Perls had some concepts and models (he was clearly influenced by Zen Buddhism) but even if I’d been sophisticated enough to understand this system, I probably still would have found key concepts lacking, such as the ones I eventually found through Hillman and Jung. So I noticed this element of Berkeley counterculture without entirely understanding it.

But the interest in psychology would be a natural outgrowth of new living arrangements that characterized the counterculture, which involved individuals intimately in groups. (Through Jung we get the concept of introvert, which explains a lot of how I experienced these months, when people intensely relating was stimulating for awhile but quickly exhausting.)

Which might make this a good moment to mention what may be obvious: that I’m leaving out of this account most of the personal and interpersonal events and impressions that absorbed so much time, energy, attention and emotion at the time. I’m not minimizing them—and I do have memories—but I couldn’t do them justice in this space, or possibly at all. But of course, all of that interpersonal and intrapersonal activity was one basic reason for this interest in new psychologies, especially through the lens of insights gained from cannabis and psychedelics as well as the evolving counterculture itself.

As “science” is finally confirming, cannabis and psychedelics really do expand your mind, and though this may include a consciousness of connection (“It’s all one, man!”) it happens inside your own head. So the first effect is personal, and psychologies deriving from these experiences were starting to develop in these years (and Berkeley remains a place where they continue.)

Today the buzzwords of “positive psychology” include self-fulfillment, flourishing, achieving potential. These are influenced by what happened in the 1960s, since before then, the buzzwords were about fitting in, fulfilling your role, adjusting to society. These of course persisted, and became the basis for the sneering title given to the 1970s—the Me Decade. While excesses of self-indulgence and selfishness were part of that decade (though with a cynically different spin, these became major themes in the Reagan 80s) and some crazy stuff spun out from what had been the human potentials movement, the attention to physical, mental, and societal health, spiritual growth and an exploration of potentials were unjustly vilified and ridiculed.

But by the time I got to Berkeley, and communes and other new living forms were features of the counterculture, the concentration only on the inside of one’s head was turning out to not be enough. Relations to others—and therefore to one’s social self, which implied a different order of psychological understanding—became necessarily active concerns. Hence the encounter groups and Gestalt therapy.

Still, what we are likely to forget is that the drugs, the music (especially the music) and even the psychologies and spiritual trips were responding to a suppressed need for joy, for experiences of ecstasy. So much of the cultural forms were meant to create an absence of hassles—“hassled” was a big word, a big problem—which was a precondition for freedom. And freedom in turn was a precondition to joy and ecstasy. And this was part of the social arrangements as well—people who could share ecstasy. These were persistently felt needs of the time, along with an insistence that it was all possible. Today it mostly may seem inconceivable. Yet the desire for ecstasy is perennial.

Psychedelics entered my Berkeley experience only once I can recall. In a hapless attempt to earn some “bread,” members of our household acquired and attempted to deal a small quantity of what was purported to be LSD. But most of what wasn’t given away was stolen. We saved enough for one trip apiece. I had mine in the living room with the Beatles Abbey Road album.

Others in the house (I learned later) had a heavier trip, getting deep into psychological complexities and relationships. So while my experience was more pleasant—maybe even a little ecstatic-- it was also solitary, and beyond the music, not memorable. (But Abbey Road is the music I associate with my Berkeley time, and another album in the house I listened to a lot, Judy Collins Who Knows Where The Time Goes.)

Of course, cannabis (as we call it now; grass was a more preferred term then) was more ubiquitous. I remember walking down a street in Berkeley with someone else, entirely engaged in a conversation, and about to pass two young men walking up the hill, also conversing. One of them was holding a Berkeley joint, wrapped in yellow paper. As we passed he simply handed me the joint and we all kept going.

Combining the psychology of the counterculture with its spiritual quests was Stephen Gaskin’s Monday Night Class.

Any number of us in the household climbed into David’s bus on several Mondays to ride over to the Richmond district of San Francisco. There on the Great Highway edging the ocean was the former Ocean Beach Pavilion Ballroom, re-named the Family Dog, which was beginning to host now legendary rock concerts that very summer of 1969, promoted by the manager of Janis Joplin’s band, Big Brother and the Holding Company. But on Monday night, this huge space belonged to a single slim bespeckled man, a former Marine and creative writing teacher called Stephen Gaskin.

Upwards of a thousand heads crowded their bodies into available spaces on the floor, as Gaskin held forth on a raised stage. He was riffing on a vast area of what would be classified as Western and Eastern metaphysics, esoteric philosophies, religion, psychology, what we’d now call neuroscience, physics, biophysics, the history of the species, as well as areas then called the occult, mystical, paranormal, and so on. This started as an actual class at San Francisco State called Unified Field Theory, and grew from there. The entry point to it all was the psychedelic experience, the stoned consciousness; the insights not from on high, but from being high. Many of his riffs became a book titled Monday Night Class, and it is still in print in a revised and annotated edition.

From my notebooks it’s clear that we in our household talked about things he said, and I extrapolated and commented in my notes, though the actual content is less clear. The ideas were stimulating. Energy is focus. Truth is experienced. Consciousness is paying attention. Pay attention!

Considering that most of his audience was high, there was a good chance that those who were paying attention to him were really paying attention. Words on a page can’t convey the weight of those words spoken in that moment.

“Get high, stay high,” he said. When you are high you know the truth, and no one can lie to you." These statements, seemingly about drug highs, may have been metaphors for higher consciousness and a particular energy state, but was that how they were heard?

So I was also wary, suspicious of his certainty. He never qualified his statements—everything was just that: a statement. My Catholic immersion made me sensitive to the sound of dogma, and to any sort of guru attitude or energy. But his sort of rolling synthesis was what a lot of people in the counterculture talked and thought about. If they weren’t as erudite as Stephen, they also came at it from their own experiences, expertise and education.

For the psychedelic or stoned experience was not only sensation, but perhaps the flying open of doors to a new consciousness, including cosmic consciousness (It’s all one!) These feelings and insights suggested connections to indigenous and ancient approaches, ignored and even forbidden in the modern western world, even in the 60s.

While Stephen spoke in metaphors of electricity and quantum physics as well as auras, such stoned insights and ideas found resonance in non-modern and non-western traditions. So it was the 60s that jumpstarted the already seeded Bay Area interest in Buddhism and other Eastern systems. Now pretty much part of the mainstream, they were foreign then. (Fritz Perls interpreted the Buddhist “nothingness” as meaning process, a Gestalt insight that might be revisited in terms of the now more familiar meditation practices.)

So it seemed a natural outgrowth of the Monday Night Class when Stephen announced an upcoming three- evening event he dubbed the First Annual San Francisco Holy Man Jam. Guest “holy men” included Ram Das, Timothy Leary and Alan Watts. We attended one evening, when Alan Watts spoke. Watts had been the charismatic voice for Eastern insights for decades in the Bay Area. His radio talks are still replayed. I seem to recall that Mike Hamrin praised in particular Watts’ The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, a modern interpretation of insights from the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. (Who you really are might be described as a persona of the eternal.)

What I recall about this evening is the festive atmosphere, and the giddy experience of being ordained a minister in the Universal Life Church, sanctified by a pious inhalation on the longest bong I’d ever seen, maybe six feet.

Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez

I missed a lot during my Berkeley time, which extended into the autumn. I never got down to Big Sur or Yosemite. Although I attended a few free Saturday concerts in the park in Berkeley, I couldn’t afford live music. I didn’t even know about the mini-festival of musicians in Esalen that summer, just weeks after Woodstock (but there’s a fine documentary of it on YouTube called “Celebration at Big Sur,” with which has breathtaking footage of a very young but musically mature Joni Mitchell. For one thing, she sings her composition of “Woodstock” for the first time.)

As far as that goes, I missed Woodstock itself that August, and only read about in Life Magazine in a bookstore on Telegraph Ave at least a week afterwards, shocked that it took place in the old East while I was finally on the happening West Coast.

Zen Buddhism was a more fashionable element of the counterculture in the Bay Area than elsewhere, but I missed the substantial change in emphasis, from concepts to practice, that was underway, principally emanating from the San Francisco Zen Center. (Speaking of practice, however, I did attend a free, open acting class at San Francisco’s ACT, given by Del Close. Now revered as a master of improvisational comedy, he was with the San Francisco improv group The Committee, between gigs running Chicago’s Second City. Simply sitting in a large auditorium, I learned more about acting in that hour than in college or anywhere afterwards, although it took me awhile to realize this.)

Instead I immersed myself in my Berkeley neighborhoods. Berkeley extends from the residential hills steeply and then gradually down to the flat downtown area, with the UC campus and the Telegraph Ave artery cutting across between them. The hills were known to us as the land of the rich, and we only went up there a few times in the bus to scout out the furniture, appliances and other ritzy stuff left out on the street for garbage collection. The downtown was mostly the residual province of the middle class straights.

Since our Shattuck Street digs were close to downtown, I did visit a few places there, mostly an Italian restaurant called Giovanni’s, though mostly for coffee and maybe a small salad. I first went there because I’d met someone in Colorado who had waitressed there. I mentioned her to a cashier, who remembered her, and that got us acquainted. So I also went there for the company.

But I spent most of my wandering time along Telegraph and on the UC campus. Between hippiedom and academia—yes, that was me.

The places where these worlds—and many others—came together were the bookstores, and at that moment, Telegraph Ave had a lot of them. I’d never experienced that before: going from one bookstore to another to another, in a day or over days, available to me every day. I was in a daze. At times I felt overwhelmed and anxious—so many books, so little time! And no money to buy them anyway! I worried that I didn’t belong there, that they would find me out and ask me to leave. Sometimes I was calm enough to accept that I was in Wonderland. And eventually it began to be a little normal to be there.

Apart from a number of small and specialty bookshops on Telegraph and adjacent side streets, there were at least four very big bookstores on the first few blocks of Telegraph from the Berkeley campus. There was the university bookstore itself, then Cody’s Books, and two big used bookstores: Moe’s and Shakespeare and Company. I don’t remember how big the Shamhala bookstore was inside, but it had a conspicuous storefront window.

Cody’s Books was the most prominent in many ways, and the one that remains in my memory. But though I found photos online that showed several of these stores, I haven’t come across one of Cody’s as it was in 1969. The closest are photos of both exterior and interior in 1974 or so, which look glitzier than I remember. What I seem to recall is the huge glass doors that retracted so that the bookstore was open to the air and the street. When I walked by I could literally see into the bookstore, and that proved irresistible just about every time.

Cody’s sold new books, lots of paperbacks (its initial claim to fame) but also lots of literary titles in hardback and periodicals. One of my last experiences in Cody’s was picking up the new issue of the Carleton Miscellany, with my review of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. I also got my check for it—my first paid piece of writing—while I was in Berkeley.

Cody’s became part of Berkeley culture and politics as well. During 60s demonstrations that often included clashes with police (always referred to in 1969 Berkeley as “pigs”), it became a medical aid station for wounded antiwarriors.

Judging from notebooks, I not only browsed but read in the bookstores, but I must have purchased a few used paperbacks somewhere. For my other activity on Telegraph Av was coffee and reading (and writing—I’m surprised to find two pretty good poems in my notebook, and parts of a third.) And occasionally, eating. Our meals on Shattuck were almost exclusively oatmeal in the morning and brown rice with whatever vegetables came to hand in the evening. (These might come from dumpster dives behind the Co-op grocery, where old but still edible veggies were carefully placed by staff.) I supplemented this diet with tuna salad sandwiches at a university cafeteria, though they would be more accurately described as a thin smear of tuna paste on sliced bread, with some carrot sticks on the side. But it was cheap.

I also frequented a small Mexican restaurant on Telegraph called La Fiesta. They placed a basket of chips on the table and gave you a glass of water, no matter what you ordered. What I usually ordered was coffee. But I got the chips, and sympathetic waitresses might refill both cup and basket as I sat absorbed in my reading. The taste of those chips and that coffee still adhere to at least the first two volumes of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandrine Quartet. (On my last visit to Telegraph Ave in 2003, that restaurant was still there, pretty much the same—though it was just about the only thing that was.)

In Justine, Durrell’s prose was mesmerizing even when I’d lost track of what was going on or why. I then found a volume of Durrell’s correspondence with Henry Miller, probably in Cody’s, and read some of it there.

I quote in a Berkeley notebook from Kenneth Patchen’s Journal of Albion Moonlight, an apocalyptic antiwar novel that was all but suppressed in 1941 for the next 20 years but became a legendary work of the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat era of the 50s and 60s. Patchen was revered as well within the counterculture (Jim Morrison was a fan.) I have a used copy now, but I don’t know when I acquired it. Maybe in Berkeley.

My notebooks also mention Frank Budgen’s book on James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses. Budgen was an artist who knew Joyce in Zurich. I recognize the paperback cover of the time, so I must have read that one and possibly owned it, though it is not now among my Joyce collection.

However, my continuing Joyce obsession did lead to a compulsive purchase. High on a shelf in Cody’s Books I spotted the second two volumes of Joyce’s letters, edited by Richard Ellmann. Though the price for these hardbacks was a bargain, they were still too much for me.

They were high enough on the shelf to require a ladder, so I felt diffident about asking to look at them more than once. But every time I went in or even passed by, I glanced up to see if they were still there. Finally, when I knew I was leaving Berkeley, I broke down and used some of my travel money to buy them. I still have them, though I can’t say I’ve spent a lot of time reading the letters.

Those bookstores had a quantity and variety of books, including arcane collections of the past—from obscure literary and specialized scholarly works to an era’s worth of pulp science fiction—that would have fed a lifetime of voracious curiosity. But they didn’t last for my lifetime.

Cody’s was still there in 2003, both on Telegraph and downtown Berkeley, where I happened on a reading by Maxine Hong Kingston, shortly after my review of her Fifth Book of Peace appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review. (I met her afterwards and she was pleased that my review “got it.”) But the Telegraph Ave. Cody’s closed for good just three years later in 2006—it had been at that location since 1965-- and the downtown store closed two years after that, victims of high rents.

Shakespeare & Company closed in 2015, after 51 years. The Shambhala bookstore opened in 1968, offering spiritual books with an emphasis on Buddhism. In 1969, Shambhala published its first book, and has since become the foremost publisher of non-Western books on spirituality in America. The publishing side soon moved to Boulder and Boston, while the Berkeley bookstore lasted until 2003.

Many other smaller bookstores of that era are also gone. Of the big four, only Moe’s remains, and the university bookstore, which if it follows the national pattern, would be mostly sweatshirts and other branded merchandise, with barely a whiff of a non-textbook, or even a book shelf.

Gary Snyder (l), Lew Welch (r) with fellow
poet and Reed College pal Philip Whalen (c)

Near the end of my stay in Berkeley, I attended a poetry reading for Ecology Action and the Ecology Center that turned out to be a bit historic. It featured some of the better known poets of the time in the Bay Area, a group that likely never read together again. I wrote about it at the time.

The event was held in the Pauley Ballroom on the UC Berkeley campus. I arrived early enough to get a seat in the orderly rows of folding chairs. Eventually the master of ceremonies, one of the ecologists, came to the microphone. “I know this might be difficult, but if somehow some room can be made at the back of the ballroom, more people could get in.”

Instantly a cacophony of scraping chairs as everyone moved them towards the front, obliterating the rows and clumping closer together. The ecologist m.c. watched, and when it was quiet again he said, “What just happened was very much like the action of wind, or water. I think we’re ready to begin.”

The poets who read included veterans of the Beat era: Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Lew Welch and David Meltzer. Welch and Snyder were former classmates and roommates at Reed College, and maintained a close friendship. The more recent counterculture star was Richard Brautigan.

Gary Snyder was the crowd favorite (I noted). During some poems there was applause after every line. Brautigan read his short non-sequiter poems, marching or preening around the stage during the laughter and applause between them. McClure was more quietly but respectfully received. David Meltzer spoke of the sensations of a city boy moving to a cabin in Marin County.

I’d heard Snyder read at Knox College some three years before, which seemed like a lifetime, and maybe in a way it was. But I recall—and I wrote at the time—that I was otherwise most impressed by Lew Welch.

“A tall, theatrically handsome but obviously gentle man, he read poems about a child’s view of the world,” I wrote. But the moment that most impressed me and stayed with me was Welch reading his epic poem, “The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings.” Mt. Tam is the sacred mountain outside of San Francisco. It became a rite among poets and hippies to “circumambulate” it—that is, walk around it as a ritual. Mike Hamrin and I had done it earlier in my stay.

Besides being a paean to the Bay Area, where (he said) all American revolutionary movements began, Welch’s poem sums up the movement of Europeans across North America, pushing beyond one frontier after another. Essentially it’s the story of humanity, always looking for a better place, and despoiling it before they move on, knowing there’s more. But in California, they reached the limit. Welch’s haunting refrain was: “This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.”

In the context of an ecology reading, he was talking about Earth itself. I never forgot that line, or that moment.

Less than two years later, Welch disappeared into the Sierras with a gun, leaving behind an old suicide note. He was never found. At a publication event for a posthumous volume of Welch’s poems in 2012, Snyder said Welch could not overcome his alcoholism. David Meltzer called Welch his “demented mentor.” When I spoke on the phone to Michael McClure in 2004, I mentioned this Berkeley reading and he remembered it as a special occasion.

Finally, there was a repeated experience of my Berkeley stay that for me characterizes that time and place, or at least the brighter side of it. It was the Saturday Night Midnight Movies.

First, though, you have to know something about the tradition of the Saturday afternoon matinees at the movies. Back when most films were seen in the movie palaces of cities and towns, there were Saturday matinees for children, beginning in the 1930s and continuing probably until the hegemony of mall cinemas and multiplexes.

The standard movie program for adults as late as the 1950s and possibly later called for: a cartoon, the newsreel, a short (usually a comedy, like Chaplin or Laurel & Hardy), the latest episode of a serial (always ending with a cliffhanger), previews of “Coming Attractions,” a “B” movie feature, and then the main feature, just released that week. The Saturday matinee started out with the same basic mix, but the features were selected for kids. The main feature was often new or fairly new, but might be an old favorite.

By the time my early Baby Boom generation was old enough in the 1950s, the Saturday matinee was even more elaborate. It might start at noon or even before, with a dozen or two or three dozen cartoons. At least one of the movies might be an older science fiction, horror or adventure film. The entire program might keep us in the theater until 5 p.m. The point being that everyone in Berkeley in 1969 could have attended Saturday matinees as children.

I don’t remember which theater held the Midnight Movies. I have a vague feeling it wasn’t the Repertory on Telegraph, where during my stay I saw Yellow Submarine and Lindsay Anderson’s ...If again, but downtown. In any case, the Midnight Movies in Berkeley were essentially a Saturday matinee program for heads. There was no disguising the assumption that everyone in the audience would be high, or would be getting high during the shows. Being high in some ways returns the sensory acuity, intense belief and openness that the years erode. So this was the Saturday matinee on dope, and we were children again.

There were differences. The audience behaved badly (in a fun, good-natured way), which no theater manager would have tolerated for long on Saturday afternoons. (I can remember only a few instances of general rowdy behavior in my youth, mostly when the movie was boring. I especially recall a showing of one of the Lone Ranger feature films (there were two, with basically the same plot.) As we walked in, we were all given a plastic silver bullet as a movie promotion. But the movie wasn’t very engaging, and I remember being in the balcony at one point, watching the silver bullets crisscrossing in front of the screen as kids below threw them across the auditorium.)

At the Berkeley shows, bad behavior usually amounted to throwing popcorn at each other, crawling over seats and being loud in response to what was on the screen. It was hilarious. But as it was Berkeley there was also political critique. Whenever a policeman appeared on the screen, there were boos and shouts of “pig!” When the Laurel & Hardy or other comedy short was silent, the entire crowd read the subtitles out loud together, and if the line was addressed to a police officer, usually some version of a Keystone Kop, the word “pig” was spontaneously added. Crowds in Berkeley, I wrote at the time, weren’t like those in other places: people there seemed comfortable in the identity of a crowd. That was certainly true at the movies.

There was a newsreel, but it was from some week in the 50s or 40s. There were cartoons, a serial, a short, and a feature. Some were culled from the archives of our childhood: I specifically remember seeing George Pal’s 1951 apocalyptic science fiction movie, When Worlds Collide. It was the first time I’d seen it since one of those childhood matinees, so I was revisiting it in that late 60s apocalyptic context. But after the world literally ends and a single space ship of survivors lands on a new world that I had experienced as wondrous, I saw this time that this new Eden was an obvious painted flat backdrop. Which was another kind of a message.

The other movie I recall from a midnight show was the Busby (no relation to the city) Berkeley musical Gold Diggers of 1935. It was the first B.B. movie I’d ever seen, and it was on the big screen, augmented for me by being high, so I was mesmerized. But the wide-openness of that state has had its drawbacks in my life, and this was one of those memorable times.

I was totally immersed in the long and immensely elaborate song and dance sequence for “Lullaby of Broadway,” and totally unprepared—and undefended—for the climax, in which at the height of the frenzy the female singer is suddenly pushed accidentally off a balcony and falls to her death. So much for musical comedy. This may or may not have been a dream sequence, but I was shocked and sobered. A downer, man. And as some things do in that state, it seemed portentous and symbolic beyond the bounds of an old movie.

All during my months in Berkeley, I was writing and receiving letters. Apart from friends and family members, a lot of them were to and from Joni, who had started teaching in Connecticut. In a way also I was being called home. Eventually I decided to head back East.

Of my original housemates on Shattuck, Phil had already left. The others were embroiled but restless. Mike Hamrin’s girlfriend referred to my “solemn and tacit presence,” a characterization I’ve never forgotten, for it was both a revelation and inarguable.

At times it was a close thing, but my life didn’t catch in Berkeley. My head was not always there, and not always in the present. Maybe I was too much the spectator. “All Berkeley really needs,” I wrote in a notebook, “is a proscenium arch.” Though with the gate to the UC campus, maybe it had one. And it was on the UC campus one sunny afternoon that a stray dog came straight over to me, licked my hand, lay down at my feet, and went to sleep.

History of My Reading: Intro to Berkeley 1969

2023-05-07T03:29:00.000-07:00

I was dropped off in Berkeley in late summer 1969 on College Avenue at a house shared by a Knox College grad I will call JB. (Even at this remove, it’s hard to know how people feel about themselves in the 1960s.) I had friends from Knox in the Bay Area, but JB was more a friend of Joni’s, and she had arranged that we would stay there (or “crash” there as we’d say) upon our arrival. But it was only me.

JB shared the house with a young man, maybe a bit older, who was either a medical student or intern or both, and a very attractive young woman who worked in a Berkeley clothing shop. I was given a space behind the couch in the living room for my sleeping bag, and a fairly definite limit on my stay.

I believe it was on the very day of my arrival that two other former or maybe current Knox students showed up, fraternity brothers perhaps, to take JB on a drive up to Napa wine country. She couldn’t go but they accepted me, and I found myself in the back seat of an open sports car, cruising up the highway, awash in the California sun. We stopped at a wine tasting or two, they bought a few bottles and on the way back stopped at a roadside stand for fruit, bread and cheese, making it a kind of Mediterranean adventure. Within a few hours, I was back in Berkeley.

I met up with a few Knox friends in Berkeley, including Mike Hamrin and Mary Jacobson, but had no prospects for another place to stay when my welcome period expired. I tried a night outside in my sleeping bag, but turned out to be a hopeless hobo, because by morning I had a definite head cold. I got my spot back behind the couch until I recovered. It was probably then that I read the first book in Berkeley I remember, which had little to do with Berkeley but more with the happenstance of being on the road, and the guest in someone else’s house. In fact, I can’t guarantee it happened there, but by process of elimination, it probably did.

In any case I remember the book very clearly, and the happenstance. I saw a paperback book in the living room, perhaps on a mantle piece, with an intriguing title and cover. It was Tiger! Tiger! by Alfred Bester, a science fiction author whose name or work I didn’t know. What I found was a British edition, complete with the UK price (4/6.) This novel was published later in the US with the title The Stars My Destination.

I read it through, intrigued by the science fiction ideas, propelled by the plot. Apart from some of Kurt Vonnegut, I hadn’t read actual science fiction in a long time. I didn’t do much more than open even the best-sellers and hippie favorites like Dune and Stranger in A Strange Land. But this book got me interested again. I was especially taken with the concept of “jaunting,” which was a latent ability to transport oneself by the power of thought that it turned out everybody has.

Alfred Bester has since become a revered name in sci-fi, especially for this novel and the one that preceded it, The Demolished Man. He is now considered an inspiration for both the New Wave and cyberpunk science fiction writers. He himself had a love-hate relationship with science fiction, and spent most of his career in other forms. Bester wrote for comic books, especially Superman (something of a family business as his mother had played Lois Lane on radio), as well as radio, television and magazines, especially the travel magazine Holiday, where he was an editor. I’ve more recently acquired a selection of his sci-fi stories and essays, with a few articles and profiles, notably of authors Robert Heinlein and Issac Asimov, titled Redemolished.

Re-read today, The Stars My Destination seems a different book. I was probably impressed by the villain being the autocratic head of a huge corporation, but that’s become more frequent in fiction as in life. Though basically a riff on The Count of Monte Christo, the extreme pulp fiction characters and the throwback attitudes towards both women and men tend to detract, but the forward momentum of the story remains.

I probably read it through my stuffed head, until one evening the medical student/doctor prescribed a heavy dosage of beer, and took me to a bar. He was right. I was better the next day. Meanwhile, Mike Hamrin had moved into a house at Shattuck and Ashby in Berkeley with several others, and invited me to join them.

The house at 3011 Shattuck as I remember it was a white wood frame building with a back porch entrance at the end of a set of wooden stairs. It was a plainer version of many older houses in the Bay Area, where wood had been plentiful and more practical in terms of earthquakes. This likely was the second floor (the house there now is a large two level), with the first floor occupied separately, and it may even have been a duplex, but all I recall is the rooms and the people living where I did.

Inside the back door to the right was the kitchen, and to the left a small living room. They were separated for most of their lengths by a wall. Off the kitchen towards the porch was a small unfurnished room, which may have been a pantry or even a servant’s quarters in the house’s heyday. Past the kitchen was a hallway and several rooms and bathroom.

Four people were living there when I arrived. David and Priscilla were a couple. Mike had a girlfriend who visited but had her own place. The fourth was a young man I’ll call Phil because he was from Philadelphia. He may well have been the named tenant.

It was a varied group. Phil was Jewish, I had a Catholic background and the others a Protestant, if any. David was a California Indian. Today I’d guess Yurok, though his hometown was not that far north, so maybe not. I don’t recall if Priscilla was from New England, but there was something mythic about her alliance with David. Despite these differences, which we rarely if ever discussed, we were united by age, general attitude, the times and the place. And of course we all smoked dope (to varying degrees) and were therefore “heads,” as opposed to “straights,” which in those days referred to anyone who wasn’t a head.

David has acquired a small yellow school bus, and reconfigured the inside to accommodate gear and the possibility of living in it. We made a number of road trips in that bus, mostly along the coast.

On one trip we were pulled over by a Highway Patrol. We were told it was illegal for the bus to look like a school bus, and we were therefore instructed to paint it. Which we happily did, in a somewhat haphazard psychedelic style.

We might be accompanied on these trips by others who stayed at the house for awhile. These might be day trips or longer, when we slept in the bus. On one such trip we wound up late at night at Drake’s Beach in the Point Reyes Seashore in Marin County, and had a ghostly visitor’s center all to ourselves. It was a kind of chalet, with restrooms and huge vending machines that glowed in the night.

These longer outings might include hiking and taking an ocean dip, impressing upon me how frigid the waters are in this part of California even on a warm day. And as a result of one such adventure, I was surprised and very impressed by another California feature: poison oak. I’d had poison ivy several times “back East” and had some immunity, but not to the unknown poison oak. I got a bad case.

We consulted a hippie elder who advised rubbing wet baking soda over my entire body. So I spent several days isolated in that little room off the kitchen, lying on my sleeping bag, naked and covered with clumps of wet and slowly drying baking soda. (Nudity was fairly common in this house. Priscilla often stirred the morning oatmeal still naked. Seeing naked bodies doing normal things became ordinary with surprising speed.)

The persistent itching as well as the flaking baking soda made my hours of reading in that room particularly memorable. I got small bottles of the cheapest California white wine (which was still pretty decent) and whatever comfort junk food the little wine store near us sold. There were books in the house, only some of which had a known origin. One was a volume of Hemingway short stories, probably the Scribner collection. I read it to the end, accompanied by white wine and Oreos. This is a definite Berkeley memory. (I finally hobbled off to the Free Clinic and got some topical medicine, and either it worked right away or my affliction had just about run its course, or most likely both.)

I made some other trips more or less on my own. I went into San Francisco (usually hitch-hiking), including a few times to meet up with Ric Newman from Knox. The first time, I saw him in the San Francisco production of Hair. When we met in the lobby afterwards he was enthusiastic about the prospects for What’s Happening, Baby Jesus?, the play I wrote and directed our senior year, in which he played the lead role. He thought Hair had made it a hot property. I was unconvinced.

I’d been in San Francisco just once before this trip, so I saw some of the sights this time, like Fisherman’s Wharf, and made my pilgrimage to North Beach and the City Lights Bookstore, known throughout the world as the center of the beat literature revolution. I bought a kind of pamphlet book by Alan Watts, just 25 pages, titled Beat Zen Square Zen and Zen. I was interested in Watts and Zen but since it was published by City Lights Books I mostly bought it as a kind of souvenir. It was all I could afford.

One day on the UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza I ran into someone I’d known slightly at Knox. He was a few classes behind me, and was scouting California campuses, perhaps to transfer or for grad school. Eventually I accompanied him on a hitchhiking tour of several other coastal colleges, including UC Santa Cruz, and ending up at San Jose State, where we were the overnight guests of English professor Richard Alexander, who’d left Knox to teach there. He fed us the most substantial meal I’d had in awhile.

But I spent considerable time over the next few months in Berkeley itself, particularly on the UC Berkeley campus and along the now fabled Telegraph Avenue.

I had arrived in Berkeley in late summer 1969 at an uncharacteristic moment: it was quiet. Both the university and the city had been in near constant turmoil since even before the Free Speech Movement in the mid-1960s. That turmoil had reached a new height just a few months before I got there, with the events that culminated in death and military occupation enforcing a kind of police state. It was the battle of People’s Park.

The University had acquired through eminent domain a large property near the campus and within the residential and business community near Telegraph Avenue. In 1967 they bulldozed the buildings on the site but left it empty. It became an eyesore, a repository for abandoned cars. Nothing much happened until early April 1969 when a group of local merchants and residents met to figure out what to do about it. Then everything happened, very fast.

At this meeting, a student activist presented a plan to make the space a public park, and the attendees approved. An article appeared in the Berkeley Barb, a local/ underground newspaper, and a hundred people, including a landscape architect, showed up to begin building People’s Park. Eventually a thousand people participated, either working on it or contributing plants and money.

The university then suddenly announced it had immediate plans for the site: a university sports field. The chancellor met with park activists, and promised not to do anything to the site without notifying them. A week later he ceded a quarter of the property to the park builders, and repeated the pledge. A week after that, that pledge was broken. He announced the beginning of construction.

On May 15, Governor Ronald Reagan sent the Highway Patrol and university police to tear out the plantings for the park and erect a fence. Demonstrations began immediately, spilling from the university’s Sproul Plaza—made famous by the Free Speech Movement—to the adjacent Telegraph Ave. The crowd of several hundred headed to the site. The police used tear gas and called in reinforcements as the angry demonstrators became a formidable 6,000.

Members of some sheriff’s departments carried shotguns, and in pursuing vaguely violent protestors, fired in their direction. Instead they hit innocent bystanders, killing a man watching from a bookstore roof on Telegraph Ave, and permanently blinding another. Hundreds of protesters and some law enforcement were injured, some seriously.

That night Governor Reagan sent in nearly 3,000 National Guard troops, who acted as an army of occupation for the next two weeks, liberally using tear gas to prevent anyone from planting anything, and breaking up groups of four or more on the streets.

The turmoil increased, more people became involved, the university partly shut down, and demonstrations continued. On May 20, National Guard helicopters dispersed tear gas over the Berkeley campus, which spread through the city of Berkeley. School children miles away were taken to hospitals for treatment.

After that the unapologetic Reagan government backed off somewhat, withdrawing all but 200 troops, who nevertheless continued to prevent four or more people from talking to each other. There was a peaceful protest march on May 30.

By the time I arrived in August, there was a silent stalemate. When I first saw the site, I noted that it was one-third dry earth and a few plants, one-third sod being drowned by implacable water sprinklers, and one-third asphalt, where a solitary police sat on a bench guarding it. Some people drifted through. A helicopter suddenly flew over, startling me. But nobody else reacted.

Meanwhile, there was such internal pressure from Berkeley faculty and a majority of students that the university was at an impasse. Eventually people drifted back to treating it as a park (which is what it is today, with both good and bad effects.)

But already in August it seemed that Berkeley as a place had moved on. Most students were gone for the summer, and what was left was Berkeley’s ongoing experiment in how a counterculture might function.

Not that Berkeley gave up politics. In the few months I was there, I heard activists Bernadette Dohrn, Angela Davis and Tom Hayden each speak on separate occasions and circumstances on the UC Berkeley campus.

I took notes on Hayden’s talk in a large classroom where he was introduced by sociologist Edgar Z. Friedenberg, author of a book I’d so admired in high school, The Vanishing Adolescent, and of the more recent Coming of Age in America. This was just before Hayden went on trial as a member of the Chicago 8, charged by the Nixon Justice Department with inciting violence at the Democratic Convention in 1968.

Whatever his positions or his image later, Hayden sounded very militant to me on that day. He foresaw a long revolution in America of perhaps 20 years, with periods of violence and periods of peace. When the revolution is successful, the worst counter-revolutionists, such as racists, would be confined in their own ghettos. “The enemy is not in your head,” I heard him say. “The enemy exists and must be dealt with.”

In terms of a broader cultural revolution, though he had no kind words for hippies, he approved the form being developed by people in Berkeley, of “collectives,” small groups of people who live their politics but may specialize in a particular activity, like medicine, to support the community now but also be equipped to take over after the revolution. “If you have any faith in the future,” you have to plan for after the revolution,” he said.

One such collective in Berkeley, said someone in the audience, was teaching itself first aid and self- defense, for future confrontations. There had been quite a few antiwar demonstrations down Telegraph Avenue, and a lot of injuries inflicted by police. But there were other institutions responding to the day-to-day needs of what might loosely be described as the counterculture. There was the Free Clinic staffed by volunteer doctors, and a similar organization for legal aid. There were efforts to feed people and distribute free food.

There was also informal support. The food co-op—basically a supermarket—did not prevent scavengers from carting away overripe vegetables and fruits that were discarded. Some restaurants fed people out the back door, and I witnessed individual waitresses placing food left behind where “street people” could reach it.

What was the counterculture? Political opposition was a major catalyst—from opposition to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee at UC Berkeley in the late 50s and early 60s, student issues, to the ongoing and growing opposition to Vietnam and the draft. In the face of overwhelming disapproval by their elders, this alone created a sense of separation and fostered a subculture within especially the younger generation.

It was also a more general rejection or at least questioning of prevailing societal values, expressed at one end by the 1967 film The Graduate (part of which takes place in Berkeley) and at the other by the hippies, the political radicals, and their hybrid, the Yippies.

But at its heart, the counterculture was about an alternative search for meaning. Questioning the value system of the dominant consumer society (“Work, Study, Get Ahead, Kill” was an antiwar march chant), questioning the basis for current social mores, for attitudes towards the body and the soul, were catalysts for explorations of self, society and reality itself, by means of experience and imagination that were encouraged and enabled by the “mind-expanding” substances of cannabis and the psychedelics, but by no means limited to them. Music and other people were major psychedelics in the counterculture. And sometimes, even books.

Inevitably it led to spiritual quests and, as I saw in Berkeley, more formal forays into psychologies. That aspect jumped out at me immediately upon my arrival. But more on all that next time, plus the bookstores of Telegraph Ave, the Midnight Movies and the First Annual Holy Man Jam.

History of My Reading: 1969 To Boulder Go (part 2)

2023-04-05T02:50:00.008-07:00

Nineteen Sixty-Nine was a prime year for the counterculture (in fact, it was the year it got its name, when Theodore Roszak’s The Making of The Counter-Culture was published), and Colorado was one of its capitals. It would be my first prolonged exposure beyond midwestern college campuses.

As music was the counterculture’s living, pulsing heart, it was also the year of the music festival. More or less invented on the model of the Newport Folk and Jazz Festivals by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas when he organized the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, music festivals of current and cutting edge rock, blues and hybrid forms happened here and there throughout 1969, culminating at Woodstock in August.

For three evenings and nights over a weekend in late June, there was one in Colorado: The Denver Pop Festival. I was participating in the writers conference in Boulder until Friday evening, so on Saturday I took a bus to Denver to hear some music.

I’m not sure why I decided on Saturday, since the Jimi Hendrix Experience headlined the Sunday lineup. And it turned out to be mildly historic: the last concert the original Experience ever played. (Perhaps I had other plans for Sunday since it was my 23rd birthday.) But 1969 was a big year for Creedence Clearwater Revival, and they would close the Saturday show.

However I did meet a girl on the bus to Denver who claimed to be a cousin of Jimi Hendrix. She said the last time she’d visited him backstage she’d seen the drug paraphernalia, and showed her concern. He agreed he needed to slow it down. He was really just a sweet guy, she said.

It was a hot day—95 degrees in Denver, and still around 90 when I arrived at Denver’s Mile High Stadium after 5 p.m. I either bought my ticket or already had it ($6 a night, $15 for three nights) and I was early enough to get a seat in a center section, as people were still arriving. Still, the stage was set up on the field so I was separated from it by a considerable distance.

I have specific memories of that event, which I am able to corroborate and expand on, thanks to a Masters thesis posted online by Justin Kite of Rutgers University. He fills in some of the history and the facts of the evening.

As the time came closer to the scheduled 6:30 start, those in my section of the stands became aware of a crowd growing outside one particular locked gate. It looked to be wood and wire, and thanks to our position and height, we could see at least part of it. On the inside of the stadium were contingents of uniformed police, most of them opposite the increasingly raucous crowd outside, demanding to be let in, because the music was meant to be free.

Though I was unaware of it, there was already a history to this festival. A similar but smaller crowd the night before had tried to force their way in, and they clashed with police, egged on by some of the performers, especially Frank Zappa. Tonight there were more of them, and they were concentrating on that one gate.

There was also a longer history involving the Denver police, and their successful efforts to close down the Family Dog, a club in the city that featured rock acts. And of course, there was the ongoing tension between the straight world and the freaks, the culture and the counterculture, parents and the young. Perhaps we forget how strong the hostility and suspicion could be.

The confrontation got louder when the first act began, a Chicago band called Aorta. I could see the gate bulging as bodies raged against it. Then the next act took the stage: a new Boulder band called Zephyr, which eventually made a couple of albums and is noted as the first band of electric guitar virtuoso Tommy Bolin. Lead singer Candy Givens was the constant in various versions of the band into the 1980s.

Zephyr had hardly begun its blues-rock set when the police unleashed their first volley of tear gas canisters at the 500 or so on the other side of the gate. Some of them lobbed the canisters back. Tear gas came streaming down towards us.

The music was halted as the announcer instructed those of us in our section to come down on the field and lie on the ground, face down, until the tear gas cloud passed. So there I was: reenacting a duck and cover drill with my nose on the grass of Mile High Stadium. In a few minutes we returned to our seats and Zephyr finished their set—but this time the band members were reportedly wearing gas masks.

Winter at Woodstock

The next band was Poco, the new country rock band featuring Richie Furay and Jim Messina, two members of the recently disbanded and already legendary Buffalo Springfield. (Kite’s thesis asserts that the new band of Springfield’s main members, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young was originally supposed to play at this festival, but the promoter backed out of the deal when the new lineup failed to get their first album out before the festival.) Things quieted down enough during their set for me to hear and enjoy it.

But the blazing blues guitarist Johnny Winter got the crowd outside revved up again, and probably the police, too. They shot off tear gas again, in greater quantity, and this time successfully dispersed the crowd at the gate. But there was a cost, as during Tim Buckley’s set the wind caught the gas and blew it back into the stadium. Now people from all over the stadium rushed down to the field to escape the fumes. In the confusion, the crowd outside attacked the gate again and some got through. There was a pitched battle between them and the police, until the festival producers opened all the gates to let everybody in. And suddenly there was nothing to fight about.

It wasn’t the first time I’d smelled tear gas, and it wouldn’t be the last. As singular as it seems now, it didn’t impress me at the time as all that unusual, that a rock festival would be disrupted in this way. I was more affected by the distance from the stage. Without my perceptions artificially enhanced (though there were probably joints making their way across the rows) I felt too detached from the performers.

By then night had fallen and just as if none of this had happened, Creedence Clearwater Revival played a normal set. According to Kite, even some of the police stopped to listen. As Creedence played “Bad Moon Rising,” the full moon rose behind them. When they noticed this, they played it again. That’s the story. I don’t actually remember it. Kite reports that the young Denver Post reporter called Saturday’s the best music of the festival.

Much of the Jimi Hendrix Experience set on Sunday night is preserved on YouTube. Besides being the last Experience show, its other claim to fame is the pre-Woodstock debut of Hendrix’s version of the Star Spangled Banner, which flowed into “Purple Haze.” But apparently the prior hours were dominated by noisy and constant warfare between police and gatecrashers. Kite reports that the now iconic singer Joe Cocker, on his first U.S. tour, was found hiding in his dressing room. “So this is America?” he asked.

For me, there was one further outcome to the Boulder writers conference. After the open reading at the end of it, a tall man with dark curly hair sought me out to compliment my poems. Not the Litany so much as the sound poem. He was Arnold Weinstein from Yale, and he was accompanied by four or five acting students from the Yale Drama School.

A few days later I ran into him again. I was having eggs and toast at the Charcoal Chef, one of those chain restaurants that serves breakfast all day, near where I was staying in Boulder. I was at the counter when he came in for coffee. The jars of jelly for toast in restaurants had recently been replaced with little plastic tubs which were then, as they are even more so now, nearly impossible to open. So I simply stabbed at mine with a fork, which for some reason he really liked.

It might have been after the reading or there at the counter, but at some point he invited me to hang out with his group, which was sticking around for awhile to work on improvisations. Actually it was never clear to me what they were doing, or what he did, but in fact Weinstein taught playwriting at Yale, was a poet and playwright, and at that point in a long and successful theatrical as well as academic career, he had been working with Paul Sills’ Story Theater.

It also was never clear to me what he expected me to do. At first he asked me to fool around on piano, and then on guitar, as his students did whatever they were doing onstage. This resulted in only one moment I remember. I heard someone on stage say “hello” and I began riffing on it on guitar. The actors picked it up and built it until the cast was clustered at center stage shouting a rhythmic and frantic “hello” to the (non-existent) audience.

It was an interesting, confusing and somewhat uncomfortable few days. It’s too bad I wasn’t up to it, because Weinstein did several theatrical pieces that integrated music, and took them to Broadway. I’ve also wondered who those Yale students—and one in particular--turned out to be.

My immersion in the counterculture began in Fort Collins, where (thanks to Joni's cousin Mary) I had my palm read and my astrology chart done by stoned hippies around a fire. And there was a lot of talk, from the cosmic to the very personal. People just trying to figure things out. Especially themselves.

It continued in Boulder. I hung out quite a bit at a bookstore called brillig (“Twas brillig and the slivy toves”—Jaberwocky in Alice in Wonderland, in which brillig means four in the afternoon, which is probably when I usually showed up at the bookstore) with their books on astrology (Dane Rudhyar), numerology, natural health remedies, cosmic philosophies, as well as books on underground filmmakers, artists, writers. Scorned or overlooked past writers were being rediscovered, too—including Lewis Carroll. Brillig was also a great place to overhear conversations or engage in them. (Somewhere I have a note about befriending a clerk there, who admitted she was afraid of the customers.)

There were books reflecting the evolving sexual revolution and the boundaries of censorship: everything from Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask to newly available novels by Henry Miller and the illustrated book version of the scandalous stage pastiche Oh! Calcutta!

There was R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience, Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body, Fritz Perls’ Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. George Leonard’s Education and Ecstasy, Postman and Weingartner’s Teaching As A Subversive Activity. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones; The Book of the Hopi. All breaking accustomed boundaries around mind and body, searching for new answers and new questions. Mind-expanding chemicals suggested untapped powers of mind, human potentials censored by a narrow, rigid society. Cosmic feelings and new intimacies required a stubborn and sometimes misguided search for conscious and nurturing communities that honored individual freedom while withdrawing from a culture of self-righteous conflict that unfeelingly trashed the planet and mechanized non-human life.

The apocalyptic tenor of the 1960s had deepened towards decade’ end. The unrelenting Vietnam war, the oceans dying, DDT and other chemicals poisoning food and the environment, were all in the summer’s news. So there was interest in arcane takes on the patterns, on the future. Edgar Cayce’s books and prophesies, and similar approaches were part of the mood.

I browsed the bookstore but unfortunately the only book I can remember reading specifically in Boulder—and I didn’t read all of that—was Bill Stage’s paperback copy of The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda. I didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t until his later book, Tales of Power, that I got deeply into his work, and went back to read what I’d missed.

Besides the bookstore, I often gravitated to the campus. I recall attending a public lecture by Nobel Prize winning physiologist George Wald, who’d begun speaking out against the warfare state. He concluded his talk, accompanied by slides, by referring to the ultimate biological cause of the Vietnam War. It wasn’t clear to me what he meant, so I stayed afterwards and asked him. “You’re young now,” he said smiling, almost teasing. “But soon you’ll have to make a living and then you’ll understand—Protein!” Very apropos as it turned out, though just what the direct relevance to Vietnam could be, however, still eludes me.

A somewhat cryptic surviving note tells me that it was in Boulder that I saw the 1968 film version of Chekhov’s play, The Seagull, with David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave—the couple that had debuted together and had such a strong effect on me in Morgan! a couple of years earlier. (I’ve now seen at least four versions of The Seagull, none I can think of on a live stage.)

All of my experiences that summer adhere to the music that was playing in the background. Everywhere, from Galesburg to Boulder, if a stereo was blasting, it was the Crosby, Stills and Nash debut album. Or it was Tommy, the Who’s double album. Or if not those, then Neil Young’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.

It was one of the ironies of Boulder that it was legally dry—nothing alcoholic but 3.2 beer could be served. (Despite my attempts at a bar called The Sink, I never quite got the taste for it.) On the other hand, pot and psychedelics were everywhere.

My surviving notes record that on July 30—the day I heard President Nixon on the radio declaring that Vietnam was “America’s finest hour,” I dropped mescaline for the first (and so far only) time. Or what we were told was mescaline. Unless you know the chemist, you could never be sure. (I seriously doubt that I ever ingested a full strength pure psychedelic. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure some of the marijuana had an extra ingredient.)

This event was at a cabin in the mountains about 20 miles outside Boulder. The cabin was rented for the summer by John, a friend of Bill Stage’s who had shared the living room shag rug with me when he first got to town. Since then he’d bought a truck and a couple of dogs—both blond Samoan huskies, more or less puppies. One he named Kachina. And he’d rented this cabin.

John was the host for this event, and there were five others besides me. I’d met four of them, including (let’s call them) Don and Susan, a couple. We dropped in a meadow about noon, and everyone immediately left—singly and in pairs. I eventually walked around, came upon one of the group—the only unattached woman—but she had such an evident force field around her that my smile faded and I got as far away as possible.

So I walked, sprawled in another meadow in the sun, and heard voices of some of the others but I couldn’t see them. Then when it started raining lightly but threatening a storm, I returned to the original meadow and gathered up everybody’s gear—radio, cameras, etc. that they’d left—and took them into the cabin.

I remember the sense of distance and perhaps alienation from the others. I recorded a certain self-consciousness that rippled through my experiences, as if I was watching a film or a series of films, but I was also the lead actor. My perceptions and emotional reactions were heightened, so when I saw Don and Susan in an intense couples thing, I felt both sides of that. I had a lot of thoughts, about past and present and ongoing relationships, among other subjects.

And eventually, through the six hours or so, I had one lasting observation. I had enough visual hallucination to see the whirls and striations in rocks or the rings in wood as if they were in motion. I saw them as process: for example, the rocks forming from volcanic flow. Everything seemed to be half growing and half decaying, simultaneously on the way to life and death.

I was also sick much of the time. I had the sick stomach associated with mescaline but not intense enough to throw up. Instead I had it longer. But I wouldn’t call it a full-blown psychedelic experience. Afterwards, John felt there had been some speed in it.

Feeling sick wasn’t an entirely new experience in Colorado. The altitude and the dry air played havoc with my sinuses, and often I felt lightheaded or suddenly fatigued. Eventually I heard fluid sloshing around in my good ear, which was alarming enough that I saw a doctor. He was a young ear specialist, and said it was the altitude. He asked about my hearing, and I told him of my deafness in one ear. He tested it, and thought the problem was in the middle ear. He got very excited, because, though there was nothing that could be done for it when I first was diagnosed as a child, there was treatment now. He was so happy that I might get my hearing back. But he did another test and his face fell. No, it was the inner ear after all, and still permanent hearing loss. I had been on this roller coaster before so I wasn’t much fazed, but he took it hard.

Throughout all this I kept writing. Either falling asleep or just waking up on that shaggy floor in Boulder one day, I had the germ of an idea that would obsess me for decades, and lead to a novel and a screenplay in several versions. It was a good story and pieces of it have appeared in other people’s movies and in digital life since then. But what I wrote then was a story about something happening in Colorado that summer.

Somehow I missed the controversy that summer over a scheduled atomic bomb explosion in Colorado, the incredible purpose of which was to test the feasibility of extracting natural gas by exploding 100 to 200 underground nuclear bombs across the gas field. There were protests organized by activists from Boulder and Denver, but apparently there weren’t very many of them. And in early September, the bomb was actually exploded underground, with demonstrators bouncing in the air above it. (I was gone by then.) But eventually voters got it banned, and the idea failed anyway—too much radiation in the gas, duh.

However, there was another controversy that did get my attention. Just about a month before I got there, a fire at the huge Rocky Flats plant that manufactured plutonium components, and was highly radioactive, got people wondering what other hazards were around them. While I was in Boulder it was revealed that at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal there was some 21,000 clusters of nerve gas in explosive bombs—enough to kill two trillion people, if there were that many. They’d been manufacturing it there for years. The canisters were basically stored out in the open and decaying. A stray bullet or a lightning strike that set off a chain reaction, a scientist said, could wipe out a lot of Colorado in a matter of minutes.

It was insanity on such a huge scale that it called for a kind of Doctor Strangelove approach in the less that successful short story I wrote towards the end of my stay in Colorado. Bill Stage read it and liked it, and showed it to a friend he especially respected when he stopped by. He read quickly through it and made a face, directing his dour judgment to Stage, although I was in the room.

I was crushed enough to remember this. It wasn’t just that it was hard to be objective about new work, especially at a time of fluid standards, but that so much depended on the last thing I wrote. It could be the key to my future, which would go a long way to directing my present.

That said, reading it now, the guy wasn’t wrong.The main plot was funny, though perhaps not as ironic as I meant it, and I can see what I was trying to do with the subplot in contrast, but it was especially awful. It was at best a shaky first draft.

Besides which, the reality was more absurd than my story, and became even stranger. Nerve gas production stopped in 1969, and Rocky Mountain Arsenal eventually became, first, a Superfund cleanup site, and now, a National Wildlife Refuge.

All through my Colorado stay, I saw Joni whenever we could manage it. She visited me in Boulder at least once, when Stage was away for a few days. She also invited me down to Denver to meet her sister and her sister’s husband when he came to town. He was a law student at Yale.

What she didn’t say was that her mother would also be there, for our first encounter ever. We met at some kind of public swimming pool, so I was basically on nearly naked view for judgment by the family. Everybody got along fine, it seemed. The only memorable moment was at poolside when I turned around to look down at the level below. It was lined with people in lounge chairs sunbathing. One was a teenage girl in her skimpy swimsuit who looked up at me and extravagantly licked her lips. I turned away so she wouldn’t see me laughing. I was living the theatre of the absurd.

Another time I remember specifically we were together was on July 24, the day the Apollo 11 astronauts were scheduled to land on the moon. Joni arrived with her friend Kathy, for a drive along mountain roads. My Boulder days were marked by the huge flat rock faces visible from Cascade Avenue and the university campus. Now we were twisting through what were literally rocky mountains, with little vegetation. Maybe it was my mood as much as the scenery, but sitting in the back seat while Kathy and Joni chatted in the front, I felt like I was getting a preview of the moon.

Kathy drove us to her house, and we watched the moon landing, and saw Neil Armstrong become the first human to touch another world, in the basement rec room.

When we had sold and given away the elements of our Galesburg household and headed west, the ultimate goal was California. This was a pause on our way to the Bay Area, specifically Berkeley, where we both had friends. The last patch of the Colorado interlude was waiting for a “driveaway:” some unknown car a stranger paid an agency to arrange to be driven to California. High and dry Colorado was not wearing well with me. I yearned for an ocean.

At last we scored a car, and we prepared to leave. I took the bus down to Denver to pick it up. Joni met me there. We were going to leave the next day. She packed an elaborate picnic lunch, complete with a bottle of wine. We went to Washington Park in Denver, near the sculpture of Eugene Fields’ most famous characters: Wynken, Blynken and Nod. In my perennially ongoing college novel, three of my main characters being swept along by the tides of the times were Lincoln, Blakely and Nod. Eugene Fields also figured in the mythology of the Illinois college I’d invented, since he’d been a Knox student for a year and later a columnist in Chicago. But as it happened, he’d previously worked on a newspaper in Denver. Of course, Joni knew all of this. The sculpture was her surprise.

We spread the picnic out under a tree near the sculpture. After I’d had a glass or two, Joni told me that she had decided not to go with me to California. She was instead going to Connecticut, where her sister had secured a teaching job for her. However, she though it was important for me to go on to California myself. She did not use the phrase “to sow your wild oats” but I thought that was the basic idea. I could rejoin her later in Connecticut.

Who could blame her? California wasn’t a plan. It’s hard to say what it was. I won't go into the various ways I was a jerk. Still, I drove the car to Boulder in shock. The next day I felt worse—lightheaded, queasy, weak. This didn't seem to be the way to start a solo drive for a thousand miles across challenging country I'd never seen. Instead I drove the car back to the driveaway agency in Denver. Eventually, Joni’s cousin Mary and her boyfriend decided to take his vacation in California, and they kindly ferried me along with them. Their camper wasn’t exactly a wooden shoe, but I had definitely sailed off. They dropped me in Berkeley.