R.I.P. 2021

American poetry and the lives of poets since the middle of the 20^th century would be inconceivable without Robert Bly.  I heard Bly read twice in the 1960s, in a relatively small room on our college campus.  He was theatrical, enthralling, mesmerizing. He above the few others who got poets reading in public again popularized the practice. Poetry readings are now everywhere, and provide another income stream and contact with the public for contemporary poets.

 Bly organized and led poets against the Vietnam war, and they gave group readings. I heard him again years later in a reading in Pittsburgh with his good friend, James Wright, in one of the last appearances of Wright’s life.

 With his magazine The Fifties (later The Sixties), his translations and his proselytizing at his readings, Bly introduced previously ignored poets from Europe and especially Latin America.  He especially championed Pablo Neruda.  In one of his last interviews in 2011, Bly acknowledged that these activities brought new poets to the attention of American writers, and that attention “changed American poetry and made it less rigid and more playful.”  He favored a more imaginative poetry “which allows the unconscious to come in with its various ignorances and brilliances.”

 In the late 1980s and early 90s, Bly reached a larger audience through his participation in a series of Bill Moyers programs on poetry and then in Moyers’ program “A Gathering of Men,” the first national exposure of a series of workshops for men, which were  joined by psychologist James Hillman and scholar Michael Meade.  At roughly the same time, his book Iron John was published, which explored an ancient tale for insights into modern men.  It became a best seller. 

This so-called men’s movement and Bly’s participation in it have been willfully distorted from that time to this.  Bly, who organized the annual Great Mother conference in the 1970s, used myth and poetry to illuminate common and unspoken challenges for contemporary American men.  His emphasis was not on their relationship to women but on their damaged relationships to their fathers, those “bad moods behind the newspaper” which were many boys’ experience of their fathers in childhood.  Bly, Hillman and Meade later edited an excellent anthology of poetry they used in these retreats and conferences, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart (a line from a Yeats’ poem.)

 In later life Bly became an example of articulate aging, as he became more humble and his poems became even more playful, with some of his most incisive lines.

   I first encountered Bly at the age of 19 or so, and all along the years since. (He was also one of the few established poets who responded to poems I sent him, though he had no reason to.)  Now that I have entered old age and recognize some of his changes, I expect I will continue to look into his work for the rest of my life.

 American poetry since 1950 would also be very different without Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died in 2021 at the age of 101.  Though his own exuberant and playful poems were important, it was his role as publisher and leading light of the fabled City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco that provided access to a number of poets outside the mainstream at the time, but who later became major figures in American literature.

 Joan Didion operated in a different sphere, as evidenced by the many tributes published in major newspapers and magazines in the short time since her death, especially in contrast to the absence of attention to Bly.  She was a writer of the public world, of current mostly urban landscapes (particularly California, when California was still something of a mystery to New York publications) and events in larger contexts. 

I valued her especially in two areas.  First, contemporary writing, the writing biz and Hollywood. In particular I absorbed what she and her husband John Gregory Dunne said and wrote about the movie biz.  I think it was in one of their dual interviews their tip for writers in story conferences with executives was to bring a conspicuously large legal pad and take notes.  They claimed that executives found this so disconcerting that they suddenly had little to say. Even if it doesn’t actually work, it says all you need to know.

 Didion once called writing a hostile act, which means (as she explained in her Paris Review interview) that “you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it.”  She seems to have done that partly by defining herself as part of stories, so readers could identify with her perspective.  She learned journalism the old fashioned way, by doing it.  But Hollywood helped, and she was already unusual simply by being a woman in a then male dominated trade. The skillful deployment of intriguing and attractive photos of herself added to the mystique. She became a name, and that became part of her professionalism.

 Didion said that one way she learned to write was by typing out some of Ernest Hemingway’s fiction.  The famous Hemingway sentences are of course pertinent to her writing style, but it was the typing out that interested me—that the knowledge was physical.  This is both a neglected aspect of writing and another key to Didion’s style. 

Her writing applied a unique point of view to matters important to me in the 1960s and 70s.  I must have been reading Didion in the New York Review of Books for I acquired her first several books as soon as they came out in paperback.  The title song in her The White Album begins with the sentence that has since become the title of a omnibus of her nonfiction, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Yet in the penultimate essay of that book, “On the Morning After the Sixties,” she admits she found no narrative in that decades events, especially not the conventional ones.  Her own reporting emphasizes the specific, the contrary, the fragmentary.  I was in the generation that identified with the 60s and our narratives, but I valued her observations that questioned them, for it added to and validated my own questioning observations.  She was a bit more than a decade older, but I got at least a whiff of what college was like for her (which, she wrote, formed her perspective) from some of my professors, who also drilled us in Pound and Yeats and existentialism.

 That of course included the lines from Yeats that provided her with one book title, and with a central sense of apocalyptic breaking apart.  And we’ve had searing reasons to recall multiple lines from “The Second Coming” during the Bush years and most emphatically in the Trump era, which still seems to be the gyre that’s widening. 

I’ve written extensively earlier in the year on the death of Larry McMurtry.  Other prominent writers include journalist and literary critic Janet Malcolm, and novelists Ved Mehta and Roberto Calasso.

 Speaking of the 60s, Gene Youngblood wrote the definite book on that era of filmmaking dreams in Expanded Cinema, and Morris Dickstein one of the first evaluations of the decade in The Gates Of Eden.  We remember Ed Ward’s music coverage in Rolling Stone.  And speaking of California, Eve Babbitz was famously infamous as a commentator and exemplar of LA.  In defining the black experience of the era, especially of women, bell hooks was the measure. 

 The theatre world—which generates books as well—saw the deaths of lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim, credited with changing the American musical and theatre in general.  In his era, playwright Arthur Kopit was also revolutionary. Other prominent playwrights who died in 2021 include Ed Bullins and Robbie McCauley.  Novelist Jean-Claude Carriere wrote classic movie scripts for Bunuel and other European directors.  Veteran actor for the world stage and screen Christopher Plummer also wrote a graceful and informative memoir, In Spite Of Myself.

 2001 Pulitzer Prize poet Stephen Elliot Dunn died in 2021, as well as poets Martin Greenberg, Al Young and Jack Hirshman.  Denis Donaghue wrote extensively on literary authors.  Vartan Gregorian was an effective advocate for book culture, and savior of the New York Public Library. 

Other prominent names—including world icon Desmond Tutu, Apollo astronaut Michael Collins, veteran talk show host Larry King, comedian Mort Sahl, and television reporter Roger Mudd—also generated books.

 2021 lost beloved children’s books authors Beverly Cleary, Joan Walsh Anglund and Norman Juster (The Phantom Tollbooth). Gary Paulsen wrote adventure stories for young adults and children, Bill Johnston wrote young adult novels and Lois Ehlert wrote for children.

 Harry Mark Petrakis wrote fiction about Greek immigrants in Chicago, and Gerald Haslam wrote about working class communities in the California Central Valley.  Margaret Warner Bonanno, Anne Wingate, Sally Miller Gearhart, William F. Nolan, Patricia Kennealy, Graham Dustan Martin and Storm Constantine, wrote science fiction or fantasy or both.  Dewey Lambdin wrote nautical novels, Michelle Serott wrote romances, Margaret Maron wrote mysteries and Jason Matthews wrote spy novels.

 Literature also lost literary biographer Jonathan Fryer, and translators Harriet Weaver and Thomas Cleary. 

In the multiple areas of non-fiction, I want to draw attention to a few authors whose deaths were not widely noted.  Jerome Kagan was an eminent American psychologist who wrote a series of books in his last years that questioned current methods and directions in psychology, including An Argument for Mind (2006), Psychology’s Ghosts (2012) and On Being Human (2016.)  I get the sense that they were politely ignored within the current mainstream, but they are the kind of books that current and future rebels may well discover.

 Mary Catherine Bateson first came to my reading attention as co-author of Angel's Fear, the posthumous book by her father Gregory Bateson that she completed.  Later I read her fascinating book about her famous father and even more famous mother, Margaret Mead.  Trained as an anthropologist (her opus, with Richard Goldsby, was on race), she wrote perceptively about contemporary culture and thought from the perspective of her own life.

 Lee Marmon photographed Laguna Pueblo and other Native American life for some 60 years.  He was particularly known for his portraits of elders, creating lasting art and giving faces to memory and tradition. (I reviewed one of his books here.)

 John Naisbitt wrote best sellers such as Megatrends. Hans Kung had a long career writing on theological matters which often got him in trouble with the Catholic Church.  Journalist James Ridgeway exposed far right American movements when more people should have been listening.

 Writers in the field of history include Mary Matsuda Gruenwald (on U.S. World War II internment camps for Japanese-Americans), Frank J. Cappa, Stuart Woolf (English-Italian historian), Leon Litwack, Robert Middlekauff (American revolution), Lyn McDonald (World War I.)

 E.O. Wilson wrote prolifically and often dubiously about biological matters.  Bruce Berger wrote about American deserts.  W. Royal Stokes was a music writer and historian, Peter G. Davis was a classical music critic.

  Apologies for omissions and misspellings.  May they rest in peace: their work lives on.

Two Giants of Our Times, Also Friends

Mike Nichols: A Life

By Mark Harris

Penguin Press

671 pages

 Tom Stoppard: A Life

By Hermione Lee

Knopf

872 pages

 These two books belong together not only because they are both extensive and well-written biographies published in the last year, and their subjects are major arts and entertainment figures of the past half century, but because these two men knew and very much liked each other, and featured in each other’s lives.

 They also started out in a similar—and similarly peculiar—way.  Both were eastern European emigrants at a young age, and remade their identities in a new country and a new language with new names, prompting a sense of doubleness or inauthenticity that haunted each of them.

 They both became globally famous, yet highly identified with their new countries. As they became financially as well as creatively successful, they each developed a lavish lifestyle, tailoring it to their particular tastes: Stoppard collected first editions, Nichols collected art and horses.  They were both inner-directed and perhaps shy, while both also cultivated a large and varied array of friends, and both became known for entertaining well and on a large scale.

 Both of these biographies extol this friendship. Both note the speech Stoppard made when Nichols received the ultimate accolade of the Kennedy Center Honors.  But only the Nichols biography mentions that, in a long mental fog from a reaction to prescription sleeping medication that led him to believe he was going broke, Nichols called Stoppard and asked if he could come and live with him.

 Yet they worked together only once, when Mike Nichols directed the first Broadway production of Stoppard’s play, The Real Thing in 1984, which began their friendship.  Though Stoppard sometimes wrote for the movies, he never worked on one that Nichols directed. The main aspects of their professional lives were very different.

Mike Nichols with playwright Neil Simon

 Nichols was famous in America, first from television and then as a director.  He was a powerful presence in Hollywood and New York theatre who was essential to the success of many others, beginning with Neil Simon and Whoopi Goldberg, and many young actors who became stars.  But Tom Stoppard is equally famous in England, and in the smaller theatrical world of London he also had furthered careers and maintained a web of relationships.  People were devoted to both of them. The style and subjects of Stoppard’s plays, which may seem arcane to Americans, nevertheless have won him international attention and acclaim.

 There was much about Nichols childhood I didn’t know, but I remember Nichols and May on our black and white TV set.  Still, I was surprised to realize that of Nichol’s 19 feature films, I saw all but three in theatres when they came out.  There is no other director I can say that about, nor is there ever likely to be another. Though I didn’t live in New York, I even saw two of the Broadway plays Nichols directed, including that original production of The Real Thing.

 I was in college when Nichols directed the quintessential 1960s movie, The Graduate. He’d already directed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in its way the classic movie about 1950s marriage and sexuality, and Carnal Knowledge, which took that sensibility into the 1970s.  He nailed the 80s with Working Girl, and the 90s with Angels in America (a miniseries for television that I first saw on DVD) as well as Postcards From the Edge, Primary Colors and The Birdcage.  One of his lesser-regarded films, Regarding Henry (with Harrison Ford) is one of my personal favorites.

 At the same time, the style and subjects are so varied, I’ve often forgotten which movies Nichols did direct. This biography notes that his genius was applying fundamentals by the core question he asked: what was this situation really like?  And his attention to the expectations of story: what happens next?

 I was in college as well when Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead exploded in London and then on Broadway.  We could feel the exciting rush of fresh air (not usual with explosives, as Stoppard might point out) breathing into our theatrical efforts on the Midwestern prairie.  I read it, as I did all of his plays thereafter. 

 Stoppard is rightly skeptical of how true to the play as performed the reading of it can be.  But most of his early plays required such large productions that they seldom got out of New York.  I eventually managed to see several regional theatre productions (notably of Arcadia, which he calls his “perfect” play, and which has the advantage of a small cast and single set and no special effects) and several university productions, good and indifferent.  Some of the plays became more coherent on stage, and some productions didn’t match my imagination.  Though I’ve seen some of his television plays and heard radio plays, basically, the playwright Stoppard has been on the page, as language. Even so, I’ve been an enthusiast.

Benedict Cumberbatch in "Parades End"

 I’ve been particularly delighted by some of Stoppard’s film work: from the Indiana Jones movie with Sean Connery to his Oscar-winner Shakespeare in Love, probably the most similar to his stage writing on film (apart from the film of “Rosencrantz…” he directed—his one play made into a movie so far.)  But I equally admire Parade’s End, his BBC TV miniseries adaptation of several novels by Ford Maddox Ford.  I’ve seen it, and by reading the books and then Stoppard’s screenplay, I’ve deepened my appreciation of his achievement (and his methods.)   

Stoppard brought wit and erudition back to playwriting. In his work and through his personality, he made intellectual respectability respectable as entertainment.  His sense of craft is also important and inspiring, and his idea that the writer's task is to regulate the flow of information to some end, is especially fruitful.

 So I’ve been aware of Nichols and Stoppard’s professional careers more or less all the way through.  (Nichols died in 2014 at age 83.  Stoppard keeps threatening to retire, but then comes up with another idea for a play.) Therefore these biographies contrast and compare with my experiences and memories of these years.  I know the references, I get the jokes.  But of course there was a lot I didn’t know, that I learned in context in these pages.  Marriages and affairs, children and friendships, muses and nemeses, all texture their lives.

 Stoppard gave many interviews over the years which I’ve read and watched.  He was intelligent and charming, as was Nichols in his interviews and discussions.  So I’d formed impressions of both men, which were augmented if not fundamentally changed by these biographies.  Perhaps Nichols was somewhat farther from his public persona, but my sense of him deepened.  These biographies detail how both of them were aware of these differences between their public persona or public perception, and the complexities of their private selves.  Both had persistent self-doubts.

 Given the circumstances of their early lives, a dogged sense of uncertainty would seem inevitable.  Hermione Lee in particular suggests how the theme of doubleness runs through Stoppard’s work.  He consciously applied it to his own life with his play Rock & Roll, which he said began as an exploration of what his life might have been like had he not left Czechoslovakia and ended up in England. 

As seems ironic but is frequently the case, both are immigrants who more thoroughly embrace and express characteristics of their country than many native-born.  Stoppard has lived the life of an English squire and man of letters of earlier ages, adapted to his times.  Mike Nichols lived the American dream of show business fame and glitter, and expressed much of what America was in his time.

But late in life both men looked to the past and to their roots, and found something else they had in common: while Nichols knew of his European Jewish relatives and ancestors, Stoppard learned of his only in recent decades.  Both lost relatives to the Holocaust, adding tragedy to their dislocation. 

 Both biographies—by Mark Harris and Hermione Lee—are judicious and admirably written, and a great pleasure to read.  Lee has the additional critical job of elucidating plays that many readers probably haven’t seen, which she does gracefully and convincingly. 

 Books are internal negotiations; perhaps biographies more than others.  It’s a difficult form, requiring a lot of research and then a lot of construction.  Harris and Lee have selected and shaped, but without reducing their subjects to formulas.  They sprawl appropriately, making for rich reading.  

How The Story Continues: The Ministry For the Future

 The Ministry For the Future

By Kim Stanley Robinson

Orbit (new in paperback)

 Towards the end of Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2004 near-future novel Forty Signs of Rain, a superstorm batters the U.S. East Coast, flooding streets and subways in Washington.  He called the storm Sandy.  Eight years later in the real world of 2012, a superstorm called Sandy flooded streets and subways in New York City, with winds, rains and floods wreaking extensive damage in 24 states and several Caribbean islands.

 In the same novel, at about the same time as Robinson’s fictional Sandy hit the East Coast, an enormous storm attacks the West Coast, resulting from what is now called an “atmospheric river.” That name didn’t exist then. We have that name now because many have since battered the real world West Coast, including this year.

 So attention must be paid to the harrowing opening pages of Robinson’s The Ministry For The Future, describing the effects of an intense heat wave covering a large area of India that generates temperatures and humidity that overwhelm the human body’s ability to function.  The heat and air conditioning demand lead to the prompt disappearance of electrical power. Old people, babies and young children are the first to die.  In the one town described, people stand in the lake to escape, but the water is close to the boiling point. In the air as well as the water, they are being cooked. Night does not save them. By the next morning, nearly everyone is dead.  Across this region of India, perhaps twenty million people die.

 In several instances (one of them in the U.S.), the real world has briefly reached this combination of heat and humidity. The only ingredient missing so far is extent of time-- that it lasts for perhaps a few days. But on this heated and overheating planet, a disaster of this magnitude may be only a matter of time, and not much time in the future.  It could happen next year.

 The Ministry For the Future was published in hardback in 2020.  This recently published paperback edition bears a new cover: an old pocket watch without hands.  Because the future is now. 

 Nevertheless, this is a story in the utopian tradition.  It suggests paths to a better world, or at least better than it will otherwise be.  Robinson has been saying recently that his definition of a utopian outcome is avoiding a major extinction event.  Period. 

 So compared to the trilogy centered on the climate crisis that Forty Signs of Rain began early this century (later condensed into one long novel titled Green Earth), The Ministry of the Future is darker and harder, more morally complex, filled with uneasy choices.  It still is carried along by Robinson’s easy style, inventiveness and humor (even if the humor is a little black at times, as when he gleefully describes the total inundation of Los Angeles and surroundings.)  But its implications are as grim as they are hopeful. 

In this novel’s near-future world, a conference of parties to the international Paris Agreements sets up a new organization to “advocate for the world’s future generations of citizens,” and to defend “all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves.”  This organization, headquartered in Zurich and headed up by former political leader Mary Murphy of Ireland (a character based on former president of Ireland Mary Robinson), soon becomes known as the Ministry for the Future.  (This concept is based in part on a real world movement, led by environmental lawyer Carolyn Raffensperger and others, to create a framework in which future generations have legal rights to a habitable planet.)

 But even after the catastrophe in India—and the new Indian government’s determination to prevent it happening again by deploying a controversial geoengineering technique of scattering sulphur dioxide in the stratosphere to temporarily block solar radiation and slightly lower global temperatures for a few years, much as the volcano Pinatubo did in 1991—the Ministry’s efforts aren’t having effects commensurate with the crisis.

 The India event was described from the point of view of an American aid worker named Frank May; he turns out to be its only survivor, though he is psychologically as well as physically damaged.  Followers of Robinson’s fiction know of his predilection for naming one of his main characters Frank.  The author has claimed (perhaps with tongue in cheek) that he gives this name to characters who are not truthful.  However, in his two climate-themed utopian novels, his Frank character gets the action going precisely by being frank.

 In Green Earth, scientist Frank Vanderwal writes a scathing letter to his boss at the National Science Foundation, charging the NSF isn’t doing enough to address the climate crisis, which leads to action and a forward momentum for the rest of the story.  In this novel, Frank May does something similar, but the difference in how he does it reflects the new urgency.  This time, Frank briefly but forcibly kidnaps Mary Murphy to demand that the Ministry for the Future do more.

 A frightened but chastened Murphy does just that, including the embrace of secret means.  She stirs up significant opposition, resulting in attempts on her life and the need to go into hiding.

 If the Ministry’s “black wing” doesn’t exactly engage in violence, there are other groups that do—like the Children of Kali, that uses targeted assassinations and other acts, some of them in cyberspace.  Both the ethics and effectiveness of such methods are debated, but they remain as measures of the desperate moment, which is neither exaggerated nor minimized: sobering in itself.

 But the novel also does the basic work of the utopian story, at least in Robinson’s formulation: it maps out how the better world might be created.  There are a number of technological ideas, at least one of them fairly novel, but the momentum of change is created in the way Robinson has been suggesting in speeches and interviews for several years: through financial systems as backed by the world’s big banks.

 I found notable that the major players in this utopian scenario are India, China and the European Union as well as the Ministry in Switzerland.  In his earlier climate crisis utopia, changes were led by the United States government, and even five years before this present novel, Robinson was spinning out his ideas on global finance with the United States playing the key role.  But in this novel, the U.S. is characterized in passing as a reactionary force, paralyzed by its peculiar ideological and political conflicts.   Though not quite irrelevant, America is no longer the leader or hope of the world, but at best a dead weight.

 This novel intermittently covers about a quarter century.  There are more disasters, economic depressions and warfare.  But the world starts to look better, with more animals and fewer people.  The ruinous control of most of the world’s wealth by a few is largely over; there is more equality and broader sufficiency.  Airships (high tech dirigibles) replace jet planes, and on the oceans, fossil fuel-driven vessels are replaced by the kind of high-tech sailing ships that brings this utopia more towards the one in Robinson’s first utopian novel, Pacific Edge (1990), which he wrote while living for a year in Zurich.

 He uses a few narrative forms in short chapters (first person accounts by unnamed characters never mentioned again, “Who I am?” riddles like those presented in old school texts and children's magazines, and meeting notes and transcripts) in addition to the main narrative that mostly follows Mary Murphy.  Some of these interpolations are real highlights.  A chapter that is nothing but the names of a number of grassroots permaculture organizations introducing themselves, while functioning as an economical way of suggesting the hundreds of activities that contribute to making this better future, turns out to also be powerfully moving.

  In figuring out ways that an extinction event could be stopped and the future saved from the broadly fatal climate cataclysm, Robinson ends up with a classic utopia: a greatly changed but better world, that nevertheless saves the best of what’s still around. But it is neither perfect nor permanent, especially as climate distortion effects continue, and some of the environmental consequences (such as ocean acidification) are in a practical sense permanent.  But it is a kinetic utopia (as H.G. Wells called it)—built to continue to respond and change. 

 Initially published to wide praise and attention, The Ministry For The Future arrives in paperback just in time to refocus the refracted feelings of cautious hope and dire disappointment engendered by the recent international climate conclave in Glasgow.  Perhaps above all, it embeds efforts to form a better future in experiencing the daily beauty of the present world.  So appropriately, for all its hopes and hard truths, it’s part of that beauty, the beauty of reading. 

 The novel ends with Mary Murphy, newly retired from the Ministry for the Future, and living in the kind of housing co-op that Robinson made up in Pacific Edge  and now actually lives in. She is in the company of a new flame, the less than dashing pilot of one of those new airships, attending an event with centuries of history and continuity: the Fasnact, Zurich’s version of Mardi Gras. 

  Elsewhere in this novel Robinson mentions the statue in Zurich of 20^th century writer of mythic fiction, James Joyce.  In the original preface to his first collection of stories, The Planet On The Table, he conducts a dialogue with it, and the Joyce statue talks back.  Robinson concludes this novel with a circular Joycean flourish (and a final sentence that echoes the ending of Richard Powers’ Overstory), in which the end is also a beginning, in Mary’s testament of stubborn faith in the future:

  “We will keep going, she said to him in her head—to everyone she knew or had ever known, all those people so tangled inside her, living or dead, we will keep going, she reassured them all, but mostly herself, if she could; we will keep going, we will keep going, because there is no such thing as fate.  Because we never really come to the end.” 

The Story Isn't Over: Bewilderment

Bewilderment

by Richard Powers

Norton

 "Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light."

Plato

 Bewilderment, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, can mean “confusion from losing one’s way.”  Richard Powers’ previous novel, The Overstory, featured nine major characters (and their back stories), in a narrative told in several voices that took places in many locations over decades.  It is 502 pages long, and ends: “This will never end.” This novel had powerful scenes, memorable ideas and impressive sentences; it broke new ground in contemporary fiction and won the Pulitzer Prize, but bewilderment was probably not uncommon among readers trying to navigate it.

 Except in its basic concerns, Bewilderment is in many ways its opposite.  In just 278 pages (not all of them entirely filled with prose) comprised of short chapters (some just a couple of pages.)  The story is told by one narrator in one narrative voice, and apart from first-person description, it is basically a series of dialogues between two characters.  There are only a few locations, and it takes place in a single year.

 A couple of early reviews (in the Guardian and the New York Times) characterized the book as polemical and unliterary.  Dwight Gardner in the Times (a reviewer no writer should ever read) called it an “earnest opinion page essay” and “middling Netflix sci-fi product.” “As fiction it is DOA.”

 I take an opposite view: to me the book is highly literary, and to suggest otherwise misleads readers who might anticipate a kind of self-help book.

 The narrator is Theo Byrne, an astrobiologist and the single father of a troubled nine year old son, Robin.  Robin is highly intelligent and sensitive, but his behavior endangers both of them (though it would barely seem unusual in novels of a different age): school officials want him in treatment that usually means drugs, and Theo’s parental rights are also threatened.  

Robin’s equilibrium in what we all know is often a nasty world for a sensitive child, is thrown off by the sudden death of his mother, an environmental activist, two years before.  The dialogues between Theo and Robin that form the bulk of this book often center on her. Much of Theo’s reminiscence is also about his wife.   She (Aly) is the novel’s third major character.  There is a phantom fourth, to be noted later.

 To avoid drugging his son, Theo seizes on the hope implied in an experimental treatment called decoded neural feedback.  (It is being developed by a scientist he and his wife knew, who becomes a subsidiary but important character.)  As a literary device, this works like Wells’ time machine: it’s plausible and drives the story. It’s also a real and potentially useful and scary thing, though Powers gives it superpowers it may never possess.  In the novel, Robin entrains with the ecstatic state previously recorded by his mother, absorbing her equanimity and empathy as well as their shared passions for the natural world.  For a while it works: with his sketchbook in hand and his eyes wide open to the non-human world, “Fascination had made him invincible.”

 The precocious and angelic child, the child who sees and feels what adults are too jaded and conflicted to see and feel, has a long literary pedigree, going back at least to Charles Dickens.  Paul Dombey, the son in Dombey and Son is a clear precedent.  Their literary nature is as memorable, revelatory and tragic characters.  Readers who are looking for tips on how to deal with their own children suffering from “eco-anxiety” (a now leading source of mental and emotional problems for the young) should not expect a happy ending in this sense.

 As substitute bedtime stories, Theo shares with Robin examples of radically different forms and fates of life that may be possible on distant planets, based on Theo’s astrobiology but with literary models in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities for example, and the mind-bending varieties of civilizations in an acknowledged science fiction masterpiece, Olaf Stapledon’s Star-Maker (which Theo mentions late in this book.) 

 There’s also the precedent of Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes, which both major characters mention in this novel as a kind of model for Robin’s experience.  Powers has said in interviews that when he went back to re-read that book, he saw that Keyes prefaced it  with a version of the quote from Plato at the top of this column, about the two types of bewilderment: of going from darkness (in Plato’s cave of illusions, for instance) into the light, and of leaving the light for the darkness. That in essence is the movement of Bewilderment. 

The irony of Robin’s angelic vision is that he is the only one who is attuned and attends to this earthy, physical world—the not just human but planetary universe that humanity ignores (and therefore is profoundly ignorant of), that humanity misunderstands and is actively (if not always consciously) destroying.  For example, only Robin sees the huge great horned owl in their own neighborhood that is invisible to others until they see photos of it on their phones.

 As often in literary tradition, the character names don’t appear to be arbitrary.  Maybe Robin Byrne is a bird whose wings are burned when he flies too close to the sun, so perhaps this is also a slant on the Daedelus and Icarus story. Theo is the flawed god of this tale because he’s the sole teller, revealing what he’s tried to create and what he has failed to fix.  But Robin’s journey is also joyful, and (in a book in which Buddhism is referenced more than once) he lives a kind of enlightenment: of being in the present moment, and the intense presence of the planet.  The ghost of his mother Aly, as patterned in the neural feedback machine, becomes Robin’s ally, like a goddess to a mortal.  Even the neuroscientist Currier is a carrier, bringing Robin together with his mother, and ultimately uniting them with Theo.

 The structure of this book aids the simple magic of its sentences to create beautiful reading.  There is more going on than simplicity would cover, and some of it remains puzzling to me, but re-reading is likely to either solve the mysteries or deepen them.

  The novel is set in a kind of near future or alternative present, or slightly skewed recent past, in which Trump is triumphant.  This recognizable political background noise becomes deafening and defining at the end, which makes this also seem like a literary equivalent of a realistic novel set in Nazi German in the 1930s. 

Robin’s voice reminded me especially of the Quibbler boys in Kim Stanley Robinson’s similarly near-future or alternate-present Science in the Capitol trilogy, reborn as the long novel Green Earth.  There are other literary connections there as well.

 The missing fourth character I mentioned is the one non-human (also ghostly) character in the story (though lots of animals—and aliens—are mentioned): Chester, the family dog, whose death shortly after Aly’s precipitated Robin’s crisis.  Robin wanted to get “a new Chester” but Theo demurred.  He thought better of that decision later, but too late. As a literary matter, a dog in the family might take the story places the author didn’t want to go.  But as a practical matter, the father’s decision seems under-explained and flawed.  For a child so desperate to bond with non-human life, an animal companion could be better therapy than drugs, or a machine.

Part of Robin's sweetness becomes the ecstasy he feels just seeing the world underneath, above and around the human world.  It becomes part of the beauty of the reading.  But this also makes his tragedy all the more troubling, as well as the essentially artificial way he comes to it. 

 As he did with The Overstory, Powers challenges the assumption that literary fiction can’t include non-human life as legitimate subjects. Other writers in other traditions do this routinely—Powers mentions sci-fi in interviews, but there’s also Native American fiction and other forms and traditions that often get overlooked if not sneered at by the literary establishment.  But Powers has too much literary cred for them to ignore.  That some feel compelled to deny literary legitimacy to this novel, which is less than a frontal assault on human supremacy, is telling.  There is a vital movement in law to assign rights to non-human life and the natural environment as a whole.  That may happen before those captive to a Manhattan mind get an inkling.

 Readers seem far ahead of them.  More important than being short-listed for the Booker, Bewilderment was selected for the Oprah book club. 

History of My Reading: The Music Is Your Special Friend (Fall 1967)

My first of three trips out of Galesburg during the fall term of 1967 was the October bus trip to the March on the Pentagon in Washington.  My second was the shortest: the 200 or so miles up to Chicago in early November, also with Knox College classmates, to attend a Donovan concert.

Judging by this ticket stub on sale on ebay, the concert was on Saturday November 11 at the Opera House on Wacker Drive at Madison St.  I don't recall exactly who went or even how we got there and back.  I only remember camping out overnight on the living room floor of Jeff Katz's parents house.  So I'm guessing Jeff was one, and maybe Steve Meyers, Howard Partner, Susan Isono, Karen Miyake--but those are just guesses.

Donovan was pretty much at the height of his fame.  After his folk period--influenced by Dylan and other American artists, but also with roots in Celtic traditional song--he had two huge pop hits in "Sunshine Superman" and "Mellow Yellow."  He was becoming a psychedelic troubadour, which was very much the imagery of this show.  In addition to his hits and other past songs, he performed songs from his forthcoming double album, Gifts From a Flower to a Garden, the musical expression of that imagery.   

His Chicago gig was part of a US tour. Amidst flowers, incense and other trippy trappings, each two hour concert began with an introduction by his father.  I remember that his first tune was the simple but mesmerizing "Isle of Islay." He played solo guitar, and then on some numbers he was accompanied by a jazz quintet (there were jazzy arrangements on his Mellow Yellow album especially), and did two songs backed by the Metropolitan String Quartet (according to a letter I wrote at the time.)

We had good seats in one of the center sections, third row--close enough, I noted in that letter, that we caught flowers that he threw into the audience at the end of the concert.

My third trip was the longest in distance and time.  In late November--probably during Thanksgiving break--I flew to San Francisco.  So months after the Summer of Love had cooled, I finally got there.

I went as an official representative of Knox College, to the national convention of the Associated Student Governments.  I suppose I got the gig because I was still one of the student representatives on the Faculty Student Affairs Committee, and possibly because I was one of the few students still around during Thanksgiving break.  There were three of us: Bill Larkin, Karen Miyake and me.  I don't recall seeing much of Bill Larkin while we were there, but I did hang out a lot with Karen.   

Demo against Dow Chemical and Vietnam War at U. of Wisconsin
in fall 1967--just one example of what this convention ignored. 

The convention was held in a downtown hotel, and I dutifully attended various sessions and seminars.  I wrote an article about it, published in the Knox Student. I noted that the male attendees mostly wore identical dark suits and thin ties, and seemed chiefly interested in promoting one or another candidate for ASG president.  It was clearly and disturbingly a clueless establishment organization, and I noted the contrast between the reactionary rhetoric and what was actually happening on university campuses at that moment. I heard with some satisfaction the luncheon speech by Paul Goodman (who had also been at the Pentagon), expressing my own evaluation. He asked, "Is the ASG for real?"

I recall one seminar I mention, that was billed as being about experimental colleges but was actually about sensitivity training and t-groups, the first time I'd heard of them, and I left laughing but with chagrin as I suspected there would be more and worse ahead (EST anyone?)

But I especially recall one session I didn't include in my article: a panel about drugs on campus.  I sat in the audience waiting for it to begin, and I suppose I was fairly conspicuous sans thin tie etc.  Apparently spotting my boots and long hair, someone came down from the platform to ask me if I'd like to come up and be on the panel.  I was clearly being asked as an obvious representative of the country's campus potheads (or "freaks" in the parlance of the day.)  As I had gotten authentically stoned for the first time earlier that autumn, I did not feel qualified, and immediately lost confidence in the panel itself.  I not only declined, I got the hell out of there.

Reading this article is interesting to me now because I see in it glimmers of the writing I would be doing professionally in a few years, for the Boston Phoenix and later for Esquire and other magazines: accurate reporting but with a cultural point of view. In this article I noted that: "We had also been issued a gift bag as we entered the hotel, which contained toothpaste, mouthwash, soap and deodorant, which meant that in addition to looking the same, everyone soon smelled the same as well."  (I noticed this phenomenon many times in later years at various conventions I attended as a reporter or speaker, though I began to see it as an unconscious element in the strange solidarity that often develops.)

But the memorable moments of the trip came outside and after the convention.  I don't recall how we connected, but one evening Jay Matson came by the hotel and drove me and Karen back to the apartment he shared with another ex-Knoxite--I believe it was Buddy Blatner. Their apartment was on an upper floor, with a view of downtown San Francisco, especially a fancy high rise hotel, all steel and glass, with a bubble-like glass elevator that operated on the outside of the building.  They told us an outrageous story of noticing one night that the elevator had stopped.  They tried to report this to the hotel, but instead got connected to the elevator itself.  It went on from there.  To this day I'm not sure if that actually happened, or Karen and I were the gullible audience of an urban legend.

On a glorious day we were driven up Highway One to the rocky seacoast in Marin County, surely one of the most beautiful places I'd ever been.  Mike Hamrin was probably there, and Mary Jacobson definitely was.  When I returned I wrote a song about that day (since lost), sort of on the order of "San Francisco Bay Blues."  The only line I remember was: "Mary's hair was shining for a thousand miles."

And I remember an evening that Karen and I saw a double feature at a theatre not far from the hotel: Doctor Strangelove, in the most incredibly brilliant black and white print I've ever seen, and The War Game, Peter Watkins' 1965 graphic and apocalyptic faux documentary about nuclear war and its aftermath in England.  It's the only time I've ever seen that film shown in a theatre, and one of the few times I've seen it at all.  The films were powerful and the walk back to the hotel decidedly melancholy.  We were continually fighting off the feeling of being a doomed generation anyway.

As for the residual Summer of Love, we visited Haight-Ashbury and I was not especially inspired.  It looked pretty tawdry.  The cannabis culture was more impressive.  In my few months of experience, I was used to watching seeds and stems being separated, small joints being twisted roughly into shape and passed around whatever group had assembled. In San Francisco, the joints were neat machine-made cigarettes in yellow paper, and everyone got their own.

I did make my way to the Avalon Ballroom, one of the two or three hip venues for the burgeoning San Francisco music scene.  I was hoping to see Jefferson Airplane but instead caught a new band called Big Brother and the Holding Company, with a raucous lead singer.  There was a light show blanketing the auditorium and I was pretty far from the stage, so I note with appropriate irony that I spent considerable time trying to figure out if the singer was male or female.  Female, I finally decided.  She was Janis Joplin.

Karen and I had stayed on after the convention was over.  I believe Jay hosted us. Then Karen looked at me sadly and said, "We have to go back."  It was true, and so we did.  But I didn't return empty-handed--the convention had unexpectedly provided some lasting souvenirs.  On its last day I heard someone say that a record company representative was giving away record albums.  I rushed to the appointed room, and got the last two he had.  One was John Fahey's Requia, a series of his meditative composition on acoustic guitar, which I listened to a lot over the years.

The other was the second album by Country Joe and the Fish: I Feel Like I'm Fixin To Die, which we played over and over that year on First Street, in the house Bill Thompson dubbed "The Galesburg Home For the Bewildered."

Karen and I arrived back at Knox in time for a dance in the darkened Oak Room.  Prominent among the music played that night were both sides of the just-released new Beatles single: "I Am the Walrus," and "Hello Goodbye."

Which suggests a point to be made about these 1960s college years: the music gave us pleasure, thrills, wonder, solace, the beat of our lives.  But it also provided much of the text of our lives as well.

Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was innovative in many ways, and one of them was the back of the album cover, imprinted with the words to the songs.  Printing the lyrics then became standard practice in the late 60s and 70s.  This only emphasized what was already true: these were the words we knew, we talked about, we even debated.  We communicated using them.

In fact I'd read an interview (and clipped it from a teen magazine) in which Donovan made this very point.  He referred to "Eleanor Rigby" as a three minute novel.

Of course, as Phil Spector had famously insisted (immortalized in a profile by Tom Wolfe), the meaning of the words was also in the music, the beat.  They couldn't be separated.  Still, these were the texts of those days as much or more than any books.

Movies were also important, of course.  We had access to some films from around the world, both old and new, including experimental film. Todd Crandall inherited the Knox Cinema Club, and deputized me to run a packaged experimental film series--which basically meant advertising it, picking up the movies and delivering them for exhibition in the Round Room of the CFA.

In those packages I recall a lot of trippy shorts and animation, especially from the Film Board of Canada, and a live action short I remember to this day, and have never been able to track down. (For awhile I thought it might be Steven Spielberg's Amblin, but it's not.) It was about a young male hitchhiker, picked up and seduced by a young woman, and then abandoned by the side of the road.  What I most remember is their conversation in the cabin where they spent the night.  She asked him what he wants to be, and he shrugged and said, "I'd like to be a Beatle."  Pretty much my less than secret sentiments. All of this led to interest in film techniques, and in 1967-68, English professor Richard Alexander offered the first filmmaking course I know of at Knox.

Even some Hollywood films were culturally important.  I made a list of a couple of dozen that were significant to us and the times in some way by 1968, and apart from the movies I've previously mentioned that were important to me, our generation more generally got catch phrases and visual imagery from movies as well as a few books.  During our time at Knox the most important movies generally would have to include Dr. Strangelove, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Bonnie and Clyde, Blow-Up, The Graduate in 1967 and 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968.

But music had a special place, and that school year of 1967-68 also happened to be a remarkable year for popular music.  Some years later, when I knew a lot of people in the movie business around Los Angeles, I was having lunch with some technicians working on an independent production--a sound guy and a camera guy.  One was an older veteran with lots of stories, the other was about my age.  He and I started talking about the albums released in 1967 and '68, at a level of detail that included the season if not the month of release.  "You guys sound like a couple of medieval scholars," the older man observed.

These days I need a little goosing from the Internet, but there are records I remember vividly.  With three housemates and assorted friends, this was the first time I had multiple people contributing to a common cache of albums.  We played older ones (all the Dylan electrics, for example) but the new ones came in a flood.

 

We arrived still listening to Sergeant Pepper as well as Hendrix Are You Experienced?, Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow, Donovan's Mellow Yellow and Sunshine Superman, Dylan's Blonde on Blonde.  Tim Hardin's first two albums were making the rounds.  I recall watching Anne Maxfield stare intently at the phonograph as she listened to a Tim Hardin record to the end, then sent the needle back to the beginning again.

The school year began with the Doors' second album Strange Days joining their first;  Buffalo Springfield Again, Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant and Procol Harum, joined in late autumn by Cream's Disraeli Gears,  Jefferson Airplane's After Bathing At Baxter's, and (thanks to my San Francisco trip), Country Joe and the Fish I Feel Like I'm Fixin to Die.
   

Winter releases included Dylan's John Wesley Harding,  Hendrix Axis: Bold As Love, Traffic's Mr. Fantasy, The Songs of Leonard Cohen, Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle, The Notorious Byrd Brothers, Aretha Franklin's Lady Soul, Steppenwolf, The Graduate soundtrack of songs by Simon & Garfunkel, The Who Sell Out, Donovan's A Gift from a Flower to a Garden, the Stones Their Satanic Majesties Request, and the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour.

The spring saw Joni Mitchell's first, the Supremes Reflections, Simon & Garfunkel's Bookends, Moby Grape's Wow/Grape Jam, the Papas and the Mamas, the Beach Boys Friends.

All these plus blues from Paul Butterfield and John Mayall, new albums from Motown, from Judy Collins and Joan Baez, and who knows how many psychedelic bands that came and went (the  Electric Prunes, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Seeds, Iron Butterfly, Electric Flag, H.P. Lovecraft, the International Submarine Band etc.)

 Also on turntables were the Velvet Underground, Mothers of Invention (Frank Zappa) and the Fugs. I was listening as well to Ravi Shankar and this strange new singer, Harry Nilsson.

Bill Thompson introduced me to Vanilla Fudge, a white soul band gone psychedelic, and to the Buffalo Springfield's first album.  I listened to several songs on it over and over, and found in "Do I Have to Come Right Out and Say It" some echo of my own awkwardness.

 I  introduced him to the Bee Gees first album, and then their second (Horizontal) that winter.  He especially liked the song "Daytime Girl."  That year women students were wearing ponchos, some with Native American-style designs.  He saw a woman in a poncho raising her arms when he heard the line "spreading her wings like a high-flying eagle..."

The texts of the songs, and the songs themselves, reflected and articulated feelings and insights of the times, as well as of more timeless situations.  There was an edge to them borne partly by rebellious responses to the dominant culture.  They broke old boundaries, and though this was often due to new techniques, influences of different styles of music, and pure imagination, there was that element of cannabis and psychedelic drug experiences and the attitudes they suggested.

All of this probably made us more receptive to certain poets and writers working in other media.  But that is a subject for another post.

Ric Clinebell. Leonard Borden photo

First we read, then we write, as Emerson said.  First we listened, then we played and/or composed.  I learned what I could from the records, but housemate Ric Clinebell got a little frustrated with my guitar playing, and taught me a few basic bass runs and accompaniments.  Figuring out and learning new songs with different chords and patterns also inspired my own compositions.

Me and Steve Meyers, again on one of those
Knox construction sites.  Photo courtesy of
Howard Partner.

A few times--maybe including this year-- I sat on the floor in a circle with Dick Wissler and Steve Meyers as we improvised together on guitars.  I was not skilled as they were in playing licks low on the neck but I had noticed in the guitar improvisations by Country Joe and the Fish, there was a chord or chord pattern that anchored it all, so I did that.

I first remember Dick Wissler when he was in a band, and came into the Gizmo one night with his band mates.  They were standing at the counter when they suddenly broke into "He's a real Nowhere Man" in full harmony.  I thought that was the coolest thing.  Back home when Clayton, Mike and I learned those harmonies, I loved the moments when we spontaneously sang that opening line. One of us would start and the others immediately joined in.  We got it right every time.

For those who want a sneak preview of the rest of this long-winded tour through my college years, I posted on another blog about my senior year in a series of posts around the time of my class of 1968's 50th anniversary (winter here and here, spring here and here).  But I'll be continuing here on this blog with more history of my reading in college and after.