History of My Reading: Graduation 1968 (Part 1)

“No need to survive.”
Nano Sakaki to Gary Snyder

These next two posts are perhaps less about what I was reading in the spring of 1968 than some of the consequences of what I had read within my life and my own writing.  In that sense, they are about graduation.  But they also center on a literal graduation ceremony--the one that was supposed to be mine.

a later Knox commencement

Gray metal chairs were lined up on the freshly mowed, bright green lawn at the back of Old Main. Men in suits, women in dresses were starting to assemble, parents and relatives of the graduates, with younger brothers and sisters dancing and jangling around.

Meanwhile, members of the graduating class of 1968 were buttoning their black robes, at least some of them rented for the occasion, shiny with the wear of generations. Or so I imagined.

Not far away, with just a wall between them, was the Seymour Hall student union parlor. It was dark, curtains on the tall windows drawn against the June sun. The big squat television set was on. Laughter and chattering voices drifted in from the foyer, but tended to diminish if someone came cautiously into the carpeted room for a moment to peek at the TV, though there were those who had cynical comments to make.

At first a few people sat watching the television. But as the ceremonies began there was usually only one person there, lost in the sofa’s worn out cushions, hidden from sight behind the ancient couch’s stiff high back. That was me.

Why I was on the other side of the wall from what would have been my graduation ceremony after four years at Knox was the result of two very different sets of circumstances.

One set was set in motion at the end of winter term, as related in a prior post, when I flunked evolution.

Bill Thompson and Joni, enacting an American
Gothic scene in the broken fields behind our
house on West First Street.  My photo.

In the golden green month of May, many things were moving towards conclusion, if not culmination. I was living in a big prairie Gothic house on West First Street, shared with my last remaining housemate, Bill Thompson, and my frequent guest, Joni Diner. I was back in the attic, as I had been at the start in Anderson House. This time however I had the whole floor—basically two rooms, a snug bedroom and down a short narrow passage, a large study.

I wrote a lot in that room, though it never felt like enough. I had already begun to mythologize my time at Knox, and those manuscript pages—worked over, cut up and reassembled many times over the next decade or so—currently reside in boxes in the garage, along with the detritus of those years that happened to survive. I never did get the manuscript quite right.

That spring of 1968 I was writing fiction for another workshop course. Earlier in the year I’d written a short story that everyone who read it seemed to like, called “Diamond in the Sky.” Robin Metz was in his first year teaching fiction writing—he and his family lived just a few doors down on West First—and he urged me to send it out to possibly get published.

So I sent it to my favorite magazine, the New Yorker, which also was pretty much the gold standard, the premiere place for fiction for professional writers. I’d read John Updike and J.D. Salinger in those pages.

They kept it for an unusually long time. Then the letter from the New Yorker finally arrived. It was from the inimitable Roger Angell, then the fiction editor. Its first sentence has been seared into my brain for fifty years: “We could hardly bear not publishing your story.”

And yet, they did bear it pretty well. In the letter, Angell wondered whether it wouldn’t have been better to just send me a straight rejection, but they thought so highly of the writing...and so on. Highly encouraging in a way, but in another way... I don’t want to exaggerate the effect, but I think it did qualify as being a bit traumatic. It haunted me for years. I never got that close again.

In April I finished off and collected my fiction, as well poems and plays for the college annual writing awards. Earlier in that attic room I wrote the play I directed in April, What’s Happening, Baby Jesus. I recently found the production script which included some lines I added late:

SONNY: We gave you everything we had. Where did we go wrong?

DRIFTER: Where? Dresden, Berlin, London, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Birmingham, Watts, Hue, Saigon, Berkeley... 

SONNY: Well, nobody’s perfect.

That’s God speaking, get it?

Me with Thompson's hat, enacting my version. BT's
camera facing the other way, towards campus, the
field already being prepared for major construction.
All the houses on W. First are gone now.

Also that spring I wrote a twenty page paper, with footnotes, for my Science and Society class. It’s strange what papers survived storage and transport over the years. I’m missing the ones I best remember: my long independent studies paper on three Scott Fitzgerald novels, my paper on a Wallace Stevens’ poem that at the time Doug Wilson thought was good enough to submit for academic publication.

 Instead, I have a junior year paper on Emerson that Wilson thought wasn’t very good, and gave me a B-. I remember it with frustration: I was annoyed that a love affair had interrupted writing the paper, and annoyed that writing the paper had interrupted the love affair.

And I also have the Science and Society paper, which I recently found. Indeed its subject is how scientific theories are influenced by outside factors and ideas: in particular, Darwin’s theory of evolution and Einstein’s theories on relativity. The citations are from history and philosophy of science, and include Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was later to become quite famous. So I got to research that subject after all, though a term too late for other "evolutionary" purposes. I got an A on the paper and for the course.

My other course work was in connection with the English comprehensive exams. I remember the frantic reading and studying that shredded that beautiful spring, all the near-panic among the students I knew as the exam date drew near.

There was a question and answer component, and an essay. The essay seemed to cause the most concern, as we tried to figure out in at least what period or area we should expect the topic to be. The whole of English literature was a daunting expanse to consider. I remember that one of our professors—on his way down to the bookstore or the mail boxes in Alumni Hall—laughed at our anxiety and told us to relax, we would enjoy it.

This image of Vanessa Redgrave was not on a
Grecian urn but my bedroom wall on First St. 

Oddly enough he was right. The essay question was to analyze the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats, a surprising choice in that none of my teachers had seemed that impressed with the Romantics.  But in fact I did enjoy every minute of discovering elements of the poem that led directly to the famous conclusion: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," – that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

I’d love to have that particular blue book now. Later I was told that my essay “could not be graded high enough,” and that as a result, I had the highest combined score on the comprehensives for my department. Given my grade however, I have my doubts about that.

At some point in May, the spring edition of the college literary magazine was published. It was still called, for probably the last time, the Siwasher. I was co-editor that year with Wendy Saul. I believe we divided the basic editorial chores in half—she took the winter issue, I took the spring. There was more of a shared process on selection of the material for both issues, involving other students as well.

For my years at Knox, the magazine looked basically the same: a standard size print magazine with poems, short stories and an occasional play script, with a discrete section of reproductions of student art work, some in black and white and some in color.

I wanted to try something different. My dream was to someday create a complete art work in a box: a novel with a related musical record album, visual collage, photo or art work, and a film. For this issue I wanted to try a variation of that, and especially to include components or presentations that hadn’t been included before.

The question was the budget. Though I had (and have) remarkably few practical skills, I had been bringing things to publication since junior high school. I did the grunt work for several issues of the Knox magazine called Dialogue in previous years. Budgets weren’t my forte either but I did figure out how to do this for the same price as earlier issues: a magazine that came in a brown manila envelope. It contained a booklet of print, plus two vinyl records of music and six 8x10 sheets of photographs, and a poster by Steve Miller.

Unfortunately that didn’t leave enough money for the usual four color separation for art works. But I figured skipping one issue was worth the additions. We did include a black and white photo of a sculpture by Peter Overton and Recep Goknil, an art student from Turkey.

The photographs were by Jack Brown (whose photo from the Pentagon demonstration in October was the cover of our fall issue), alumnus David Axelrod, Leonard Borden and Bill Thompson (including a portrait of Lisa Metz, then four or five, looking rapturously ahead at what Robin ruefully admitted was the TV.)

The envelope itself included a short unattributed poem by Howard Partner. (I was a big fan of his poems. We published two of them in our winter issue.) The booklet inside included fiction by Jeremy Gladstone and Barbara Ann Cottral, a play by Sherwood Kiraly and poems by Nicholas Brockunier, Anne Maxfield, Bob Epstein, Harvey Sadow, Linda Pohle, Wendy Saul, Phil Ralston and me.

One side of the pink record was comprised of “Allegro Con Brio for Two Pianos” written by Karen Janecek, and performed by Karen and James Pinkerton; “Single Girl” by Four in the Morning and “Baby, Now That I Found You” by the Bushes, a Rascals-style group composed of Knox students and Galesburg residents.

The other side was the Joni Mitchell tune “The Urge for Going” performed (vocal and guitar) by our star at both, Rick Clinebell.

The yellow record had three songs by the Stoney Hollow Boys (“Maggie Blues,” “I Saw the Light,” “Mountain Dew.”) The other side was me, singing a long song I wrote, “Nightdove.” However, I used a 60s whimsy secret identity of Captain Toothpaste. I did own up to co-writing the song, but my co-writer was another fictitious alter ego.

Most of the cuts were from live performances. Rick Clinebell reviewed the submitted tapes for quality, and rejected mine. He was rightly impatient with me and my slipshod musicianship in general. In this case he pushed me into a rehearsal room in the CFA, handed me his guitar (much better than mine), plopped down a tape recorder and told me to re-record the song. I seem to remember there was urgency in getting it done before we were off to Iowa, and I believe I had exactly one take.

Wendy, Barbie Cottral and I took the tapes to the nearest studio capable of turning them into records, which was in Iowa—Davenport, I think. It was run by an older gentleman and his wife. She thought “Captain Toothpaste” was a scream. Every once in awhile she would repeat it and laugh again. (When I went back to pick up the actual records weeks later, she was still in stitches over it.  She said when she brushed her teeth at night she would think of Captain Toothpaste and laugh.)

While we were there the first time, he played the tapes and fiddled with his dials, to see if they would work. As he played mine he added a little echo and asked if I wanted him to use it. I said sure. That was the extent of the studio production.

So by May, I was treated to a special experience—walking under an open window at Post Hall and hearing my voice and my song floating out:

And you turn yourself to magic
and fall into the snow
you go the way the wind is slow
foggy and warm, away from harm...

In mid-May the college writing awards were announced. I got a first in fiction, second in plays, third in poetry. I also won the award for the best student library, for the second year in a row. That streak actually went back to winning a library competition for sophomores only. I won the prize of $50 in books from the Knox Bookstore, which helped me build up the bookcase for the following years.

I’m not sure when I was accepted into the University of Iowa Writers Workshop graduate program (one of a handful to be admitted into both the fiction and poetry workshops) and given a fellowship. That process must have at least begun in the spring, assuming my B.A.

All of these apparent achievements bunched together in late spring were distanced by the experiences and feelings of a surreal finality—that this all-embracing and defining madness of our college life would soon be abruptly over, that the next time you saw someone you’d seen many times over four years might actually be the last time.  They were also hollowed by the ongoing effects of those few hours towards the end of winter term.

For though the domino theory was famously not applying to Southeast Asia, it turned out to be working very well in regard to me: I flunked the Evolution final, and so failed the course, failing thereby to complete my distribution requirements, and therefore failed to be eligible to join my class for graduation.

That fate, and ongoing efforts to somehow avoid it, formed the undercurrent to everything else that spring, especially in May. I no longer remember the exact sequence of events, but the first effort was to find some sort of accommodation that would allow me to graduate. I knew that students in prior years had been granted such accommodations (though I failed to consider that, unlike the one student I knew, my father was not a trustee.)

The decision was up to a faculty and administrative committee—though I don't think it was the ultimate irony of being the Student Affairs Committee. I petitioned the appropriate committee. I was refused.

Some years ago I attempted to write about all of this in a short story, and I included an account of a conversation I no longer remember. Still, it has the ring of truth, both in terms of the teller and of my response.   If it didn’t actually happen that way (as my Aunt Toni used to say), it could have.

In this conversation, a faculty member told me that the main reason my petition was denied was because the professor who taught the Evolution course--who was on the committee making the decision-- vigorously opposed it. “When he wouldn’t budge, the others fell in line. You got his back up.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You as much as told him his class was a fraud. It made him mad. So instead of punching you in the nose, he just dug in his heels.”

“But...” I stammered. “He’s a—he’s a teacher.”

(There's some documentary evidence supporting this possibility: the 1968 Knox Directory (I actually have two surviving copies) shows that the professor who flunked me was also on the committee that decided my fate. As far as I know he didn't recuse himself from the case, which might have been appropriate.)

A few years later I collected a bunch of poems I’d written in college and shortly after, and labeled the folder Epitaphs of Innocence. As naive as I had been about value-free science, I discovered that I harbored this weird innocence in which teachers put aside ego and anger, and eventually act in the best interests of their students. This situation stuck the epitaph on that particular illusion--though of course there were and are those who do. I suspect others had figured it out earlier. And since I had been attacked viciously and personally by a faculty member in the Knox Student just a few months before, I should have figured it out earlier as well.

Of course I had also been a well-known loudmouth (though mostly in print) and troublemaker on a range of issues, who particularly (and stupidly but somewhat innocently) insulted the college administration and faculty. I guessed that didn’t work in my favor.

Denise Levertov

I had some faculty support, and two writers who visited that spring added theirs. Novelist Daniel Curley, who judged the writing awards, wrote a letter on my behalf. He told the committee what he told me in person: though he had awarded me a first in fiction, he could have just as easily awarded me a first in any of the categories. But the moment I wish I had witnessed was when poet Denise Levertov told off one of the deans, asserting that they were being “irresponsible.”

There was also some effort to get someone else to give me an independent studies course that would fulfill the requirement, but the only professor available, in math, was reluctant because he had to finish his dissertation, and his continued employment probably depended on it. Robin Metz, who was active on my behalf, was willing to talk to him again, but I called a halt.

Just earlier this year, when I finally went through some papers left to me after my father died and the family house was sold, I found a letter from Robin to my mother. Evidently she’d written to him about what could be done, and he mentioned this last effort and my deciding against asking this professor (the same one who’d taught my first year math classes) to do what he felt he couldn’t manage. Robin’s very kind letter made me sound like a hero of self-sacrifice, but I remember just being tired of it all.

I had seen what was coming, at least by early spring when I wrote a poem later published in the Siwasher called “Evolution.” There was a famous and favorite example of natural selection that teachers loved because it perfectly illustrated the principle, and it had happened in modern times. It was the peppered moth that lived in England.

It was a mostly white moth that suddenly found itself visible to predators when it perched on tree trunks that had been blackened by coal dust and soot generated in the 19th century industrial revolution. Thereafter the moths tended to be black, so they were less visible. The white moths largely died out but the black moths survived and procreated—a neat example and illustration of natural selection.

The particulars of this example were already being questioned in 1968 by further research that suggested, for one thing, that these moths might not actually cling to tree trunks very much. For awhile the peppered moth as an illustration of natural selection itself died out, but it seems to be back in favor.

Anyway, it was the prime example in our course, so I could end my poem with the lines: “And I am a white moth/pressed against/ a blackened tree.”

The hardest part of all this was writing the letter home to tell my parents not to plan on coming to graduation after all. They’d driven me the 800 miles to Galesburg for my first year, but they would not be returning. Neither of them had gone to college. I would have been the first to graduate.

A year or so later, Douglas Wilson suggested various changes to the Knox curriculum, in an article published in the new campus magazine, Catch (which combined the old Siwasher and Dialogue.)  His strongest words were in favor of dumping distribution requirements, as "a major source of frustration and resentment," and an expression of hypocrisy by faculty (and one might add, administrators) whose education did not include these courses.  I believe at least for awhile, Knox did drop them.  Need I mention, not soon enough for me.

But as hard and as saddening and depressing and guilt-inducing as my situation was at that time, it had serious competition in the immediate scheme of things. Whether I graduated or not, I faced the near certainty that I would be drafted within weeks or months. That—and my possible responses--were causing conflict and confusion in the family already. I won’t even get into the uncertainty it added to personal relationships.

And it was late spring, and there were the gold-green days, the night wind high in the trees around the cemetery, the Toddle House waffles and the Q’s blueberry pancakes, the smell of the first donuts of the morning downtown, the lovely, long-haired girls in the warm light. There were still the pattymelts and endless paper cups of coffee in the Gizmo, the poetry reading against the war on the soft lawn as evening edged across the brick sidewalks. There was music from the open windows:

Though the dark trees can’t see the sun
you walk through the cold
before you’re old
the day must begin
fly above them...

Then it was June and this account of my little drama has told why I wasn’t out there on the Old Main lawn with a funny black hat on my head. But as that day grew closer a larger drama of a larger fate began, which accounts for why that day I was on the other side of the student union wall.

To be continued...