History of My Reading: The Pressure of Reality

Books come alive in real time, and in its context.  The book, a product of its time, enters into a kind of dialogue with readers in their time and place; the year, the year of their age, the month and season, the days and nights of sun or rain or snow, of being in love or longing, bereft, lonely, beset, anxious, ebullient, tired.

Seymour Library at Knox College 

In sunlight or yellow lamplight, in a specific room, on a train, within glancing distance of a tree, of tail lights bright in the dusk, in a noisy coffee shop or under florescent lights at a quiet table in the dead of night.

 But the context extends more generally. Part of it is what's in the newspapers, what's on the radio, what's on everybody's mind, what's most insistently on the reader's mind, the state of the reader's heart.

All the rhythms of life affect the rhythms of the words, and if the book casts a strong spell, the rhythm of its words will affect the rhythm of the reader's heart and spirit, and the kinds of things the reader sees and hears, thinks and feels.  Some effects evaporate, while others marinate.  The reader may forget the book, but the book seldom forgets the reader.

It matters to a greater or lesser degree how the book and reader find each other, who introduced the book, why and when, and who if anyone shares the reading, and what they say.

So the books I read in the college year of 1965-66 form experiences that are one with my head colds, my weekends, the wind in the trees, the scream of the war, and especially the web of events and relationships that seemed so dominant at the time, so fraught, so consuming and above all so fateful.

The class on Yeats lost in the blond hair inches in front of me. The fatal walk through the mist of Standish Park, with bursts of rain at the cinematic moments of highest emotion.  The surreal departmental party in the room where Lincoln had slept; flattery, cruelty, confusion and deception, with too much interior paramour punch.

In a prior post I mentioned how busy I was that year from the start of school, and subsequent posts indicate something of the intensity of that year's new reading.  I was also writing more, and more intensively, than I ever had: poems, plays and fiction as well as  columns and articles and course papers.  Though I took writing courses in poetry and plays, I also had an ambitious program of writing stories.

 So says the disorganized piles of paper that have survived, as well as a few notebooks and letters. This was all confused and confusing.  My poems reflected a cacophony of what I was reading.  In part it was experiment, in part exorcism, especially the attempts at grand statements on my time that read like collisions of "The Wasteland," "The Comedian As The Letter C" and "Desolation Row."

 Even the short lyric poems we all were writing seldom cohere.  Occasionally I stumbled on a resonant image. For instance: The light of her eyes is a sad light/ like moths in October in which I accidentally accessed a sense not only of autumnal sadness but of moths attracted to light.  (I suppose there was an unconscious association.)  But that’s the exception.  Mostly the images are simply unusual, too cute.  The strength that stands out now is the rhythm, the music of the best lyrics.  (Not too surprising, then, that I was also writing song lyrics that I actually set to music, or sent to my songwriting partner.)

All of this, all of this hothouse life at a small college, had its cost.  I'd had always been prone to colds (whereas now I go years without one), and my letters quite often mention them and their related conditions, and cold and cough and sore throat and flu remedies. Even a visit to the college health service is recorded, which indicates some desperation, since I had been warned of its reputation for resident quackery.

 Besides suggesting a mundane indication of physical strain, colds at Knox were a public thing.  I used to joke that you could wake up in your room with a cough, and on the walk to breakfast be asked three times how your cold is.

Towards spring, the pressure of reality got to be a bit too much, and I rebelled by demanding solitude.  I insisted on a single room by myself at Anderson House.  I even went to the extent of occupying an empty room without authorization (it happened to be my old turret room on the third floor) until I was finally given a small room near the foot of the stairs from the second to third floors.

 It's taken me years to begin to understand the probable effects of being deaf in one ear.  In many ways it's not noticeable to others, and became conscious to me only in certain situations.  But I've since realized these effects were profound.  For one thing, the act of hearing--of transforming sounds into intelligible information-- required more attention and energy. We all must sort out the signal from the noise (to put in information theory terms.)  Those with the confidence of two ears can be more relaxed about it.  I could not, even if that wasn't a conscious process.  I could not so easily block out the noise, because there might be a signal to decipher in it.  But it could also be overwhelming-- at a certain point it was all noise.  Only in solitude is there peace and a sense of safety and control.  That had to contribute to my mental state that year.

Again, I've written a little about events and activities in the fall and winter.  But spring did come--that brief and beautiful Galesburg spring.

  At some point in the year, I fell in with a group that tending to revolve around James Campbell, a student in the class a year ahead of me. He had a large apartment in a somewhat ramshackle frame house on West Berrien, which he painted entirely black.  He wrote poetry and fiction published in the literary magazine the Siwasher, and did finely rendered etchings of houses and plants--his work was featured on the cover of both Siwashers of this year. I remember him wearing crew neck sweaters without an apparent shirt or t-shirt underneath, and a blazer or jacket over it.  He taught me to keep a book of matches in the jacket's top pocket--"to light old ladies' cigarettes," he suggested.

James Campbell. Photo by Leonard Borden.

I don't actually know if he went to prep school, but in memory he does represent my first experience of a preppy--though a Bohemian preppy in his case. When I saw the PBS Brideshead Revisited on TV, I saw a little of him in the charismatic Anthony Andrews character, at least in how he functioned in our college ecology.

Though I suppose his apartment was something like our version of Gatsby's. He was at the arts and political center of things that year.  He was behind his friend, Student Senate president Mike Chubrich, in his successful efforts to bring Chicago blues musicians down to Knox, including the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the Siegel Schwall Blues Band.   They were largely responsible for me being appointed a student representative to the Faculty Committee on Student Affairs beginning the next school year.

 I was not in the inner circle but was often included socially.  I remember being at his apartment listening to a record by a new folk singer, Eric Anderson.  I'd heard someone (possibly Eric but I doubt it) do one of his songs on that album in my only visit to a Greenwich Village folk music club the previous summer.  I followed his music for decades.  Close the door lightly as you go.

James Campbell also is associated with one of the few books I remember that year not generated by a course.  He was very enthusiastic about a novel called The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy. He was particularly taken with the line "Bang on, wizard."  I found a copy, and was also swept up in its rhythm, language and personality.  The book was just taking off, and led to a series of Donleavy novels published in the 60s and 70s especially, and I read them all.

The only other novel not related to a class that I associate with this school year is A Separate Peace by John Knowles, a coming of age story set in a prep school. Perhaps ironically (and perhaps not), it was too suspiciously popular to win the approval of the Campbell group.  I read it in one sitting on a long train trip, to or from Galesburg.  I was utterly absorbed in it and charmed by it, yet once I finished it I never opened it again.  I don't know that the copy I have is the one I read, but it is a 1961 first paperback edition, and is in pristine shape.

 The Campbell group is the center of a sweet memory of that spring, a ceremony of innocence amidst the angst and anxiety.  (For this was the spring that an April TIME magazine's cover asked "Is God Dead?" and that LBJ proclaimed that the US would never leave Vietnam except in victory, on the same May day that the highest weekly number of US deaths in the war so far was announced.)

Linda Wise Campbell. Photo by Leonard Borden

But it was also the spring of "Batman" on television, and the Frisbee.  Adam West's Batman, with its camp-serious dialogue and crazy-angled action shots broken by cartoon balloons of BIFF!, POW! and ZONK! caught Campbell's attention. It soon become a national sensation. The Frisbee had been introduced in the late 50s but for some reason was only becoming popular, at least at Knox, that spring.

 Television sets, even in student apartments, were rare.  So the group of us would meet to throw a Frisbee around out on the green lawn in the last warm sunlight before going inside, to Campbell's apartment (I believe),  sweaty and happy, to watch Batman.  It was on twice a week then, on successive evenings.

  On the radio was "Good Lovin,'" "Wild Thing," "Secret Agent Man," "Gloria," "Red Rubber Ball."  On the jukebox: "Paperback Writer," "Monday, Monday," "Eight Miles High," "Pledging My Time," "Homeward Bound," "Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?"  Though the music of what would soon be called the counterculture was edging in, especially with the release that May of Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, the deluge wouldn't begin until summer.  Broadway show tunes still led the album charts, and the top selling record of the year was "Ballad of the Green Berets."

At spring parties we danced to the songs on the Stones' new album Aftermath (hearing that title, Ringo Starr proposed that the next Beatles album should be called After Geography): "Mother's Little Helper,""Under My Thumb," "Paint It Black," "Out of Time."

 It was the year of Levi's.  Female and male students wore them--the ones called "white Levi's" though the most common color was a brownish beige.

 They also came in actual white, light blue, dark green and black. They were far more popular than blue jeans (although that would soon change.) This was still an era in which it wasn't uncommon for males to wear blazers or sports jackets on campus: corduroy, cotton or wool blend but seldom tweed. Except for James Campbell, and maybe a few others.

  My first poems in the Siwasher appeared that year, but I'm more intrigued now with my short story in the spring issue, "The Pressure of Reality."  Early in the school year I had tried several realistic stories in the John Updike mode.  But this was different.  It incorporates several experiments--dropping capital letters as a way to speed up the rhythm, and a modified use of the punning Lennonesque/Joycean language I employed in some pieces published in the Knox Student.  But basically it is an attempt to enact rather than describe the pressure of reality that year.

The phrase comes from Wallace Stevens, introduced to me by Doug Wilson (not in our Stevens class actually, but before that--I heard him talk about it on WVKC campus radio.) "It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence from without," Stevens wrote in his essay "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words."  "It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.  It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives."  

Spring issue. Cover by J. Campbell

Those surviving piles of paper suggest that I was making notes and doing drafts of this story for some time that year. It's not a good story.  I can see with embarrassing ease that rhetorically I was trying to render campus life from the perspective of a Beatles movie, including a verbatim line or two from Help!  

How others experienced this I don't know. But mostly it has the same basic flaw of most of what I wrote then and for the next many years about college, of trying to enact the emotional chaos of everyday life, and especially the multiple collisions of relationships in the general tedium.

This involves too many names and oblique daily events which, though most absorbing at the time, turn out to be not that interesting to read.  A real moment dramatized, a real place described, would now be valuable (though there is some of that in those pages of drafts.)  At best, the snatches of coffee shop and in-class dialogue and so on provide something, a flavor, of that time and place, only suggesting the pressure of that reality.

 Still, a notebook records that another student told me the story made her cry.  I was 19, and it was both a technical experiment and a reflection of how I experienced Knox. So there is authenticity to it.  I can not like it that much, and still be fond of it.

  So this is how Pound and Eliot, Dylan (who wrote about them fighting in the captain's tower) and the Young Rascals, Wallace Stevens and Batman, John Lennon and J.P. Donleavy, LBJ and Walt Whitman are all part of the same experiences and memories, along with many people I could name, and therefore all part of each other, in my life and reading of that spring, that year.

 My reading and my book collection got a big helping hand that May, when I won the award for the second year student who had done the best writing in English classes.  The prize was (as I recall) $75 in books from the Knox Bookstore. Bonanza! It set me up for a magnificent summer of reading.  Or it should have.

To be continued...