Tuesday, February 20, 2024

N. Scott Momaday 1934-2024


 N. Scott Momaday, poet, novelist, playwright, artist, essayist, scholar and teacher, died in January.  He is best known for his first novel, House Made of Dawn, which won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  His father was Kiowa, as a child he was given a Kiowa name and identified as Kiowa, although he lived among and studied other American Indian peoples.

House Made of Dawn concerns a mixed blood Indian returning from the multiple traumas of World War II to the pueblo, trying to find his place in the modern and traditional worlds.  In telling this journey, Momaday uses both his knowledge of the written literary tradition and the traditional ways and stories of an oral culture. 

With this novel, Momaday revealed and defined a central dilemma of contemporary Native people: how to make a life in the often contradictory "two worlds" of modernity and their traditions.  This would become the model and inspiration for a slightly younger generation of Native writers who burst on the scene in the late 1970s through the early 1990s.  Each in their own way would also employ this dynamic of modern literary approaches and traditional storytelling and beliefs, in part to explore and honor traditional Native cultures and its point of view, particularly towards the natural world. 

  Leslie Marmon Silko is the most obvious heir: her debut novel Ceremony also follows an Indian soldier, this time a Vietnam vet, coping with the difficulties of returning home and finding himself. Others were direct and indirect beneficiaries of Momaday's example and success, including novelists Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, James Welch and Michael Dorris, as well as poets and storytellers Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz, Paula Gunn Allen, and many others.

These explorations are multiple: using literary form and traditional content, expanding literary forms to include traditional forms--all sorts of combinations beyond categories to create new stories that honor and expand the old.  The past is never left out, it is (as Faulkner articulated) always present.  The Native tradition is particularly important for its living attitudes towards the natural world and its relationships to human beings and culture.  Those attitudes and beliefs can be adapted and absorbed in our contemporary world--in fact, they must be, if the past and the present and the eternal itself are to have a future.

Momaday was a champion of the Native oral tradition, and he taught the subject for many years at various universities.  But he was also steeped in written literature, particularly American fiction and poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries.  His detailed descriptions of the landscape use literature (including modern) in expressing and interpreting what the indigenous senses observe.   

Momaday believed in the spoken word today as well, and he read several times at the Humboldt State University near me.  I've seen the tape of one such reading and attended another one.  He had a bearing of great dignity, a precise pronunciation and an uninflected voice of great depth and power.

  The reading I attended was in one of the larger venues on campus, with Momaday at a lectern on a stage. He had hardly begun when the power suddenly went out.  He paused, calmed the crowd and continued anyway, so that deep, deliberate voice came out of the semi-darkness with no need for amplification, and with dramatic effect.  

Afterwards he signed my copies of The Names, (A Memoir) and The Man Made of Words, a collection of essays, stories and poems.  The essays touched upon the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Emily Dickinson (he studied her poems for a year, in manuscript), Teilhard de Chardin and Lewis Thomas, Georgia O'Keefe and Jay Silverheels, as well as his grandmother's stories.  He included observations from his travels in Russia and Germany as well as the American West.  

I think my favorite of his books that I've read is his second novel, The Ancient Child.  It uses his lifelong fascination with the legends of Billy the Kid to explore planes of myth of the past and the contemporary world.  It is at once a traditional novel with contemporary and semi-historical characters, a kind of personal anthology and an exploration of storytelling itself.  It has humor, too.  Momaday identified with the bear, saying he had bear power and occasionally turned into a bear.  But there was some Coyote in him, too.

Tuesday, January 16, 2024

Return of the Hardy Boys

 


Since I first wrote about the original Hardy Boys mysteries six years ago (in the History of My Reading series), there’s been some news.  

The Hardy Boys books began in 1927 with three titles, then three more in 1928 before the series settled down to issuing one title a year.  Last year (2023) the copyrights on these original versions of the first three novels expired.  That means they are in the public domain, and anyone can publish them, no permissions (or author payments) required.  It also means that anyone can alter them or just publish them badly, with mistakes, changes and eliminations.  But they are well published online at Project Gutenberg. They are: The Tower Treasure, The House on the Cliff and The Secret of the Old Mill.

 The three titles published the next year, in 1928, presumably entered or will enter the public domain some time in 2024. They are: The Missing Chums, Hunting for Hidden Gold and The Shore Road Mystery. They are likely to appear online at some point this year. 

 These are the original Hardy Boys novels, as written by Leslie McFarlane and edited by Edward Stratemeyer. McFarlane wrote 1 through 16, and 22 through 24, while other authors wrote the rest of the original 58, all under the name of Franklin W. Dixon. 

the revisions series
To further complicate matters, these originals were revised and rewritten by other authors in the late 1950s through the 1970s, supposedly to take out offensive stereotypes and update references and language, but often the stories were changed, as well as the writing style.  Many were shortened.  Then the series continued with new stories, in various formats, right up to today.

 Unfortunately the distinction between the originals and revisions is seldom made. For example, the online site The Creative Archive purports to publish the first 58 Hardy Boys novels online, but these are the 1950s-60s revisions, not the originals. 

At the end of this post, I make some comparisons of the originals with the more widely available revisions. Four of these appeared in my post six years ago (in slightly different form), but I’ve added comparisons of two more: #3 The Secret of the Old Mill and #8 The Mystery of Cabin Island, which the unofficial Hardy Boys page calls “probably the most popular story among fans.” 

 On balance, I continue to greatly prefer the McFarlane originals.  I recently chanced upon an article written by Gene Weingarten in 1998 entitled “The Ghost of the Hardy Boys” (included in his collection, The Fiddler in the Subway) that helped clarify my thinking.

 Weingarten, a magazine feature writer and purported humorist, trashes McFarlane’s writing in these books before praising him as a literary artist trapped by financial circumstances into painfully turning out trash, namely the Hardy Boys books. This has become a familiar point of view on McFarlane, perhaps the prevalent one. I think it’s at best overly simplistic and on balance, deceptive and wrong.

 

a young McFarlane
It is true that McFarlane (just 25 when his first Hardy Boys books were published) was paid scandalously little to quickly write these novels, based on detailed outlines by Edward Stratemeyer, who invented the Hardy Boys, as well as Nancy Drew and Tom Swift. The author named on the cover, Franklin W. Dixon, did not exist.  There would be many authors as the series went on.  

But are the resulting novels possibly “the worst books ever written,” as Weingarten insists?  Not hardly.  For one thing, Weingarten hadn’t read the later revisions, which are arguably worse.  But even in themselves, the McFarlane versions do not fully merit his critique, especially in style. He says it is “overwrought.”  Apart from questions of taste (and Weingarten is very certain his taste is correct), there is the fact that these books were written for young readers, roughly ages 9 (the age when I started reading them) to 12.  Weingarten provides an example of this overwrought writing: “Frank was electrified with astonishment.”  It’s not a phrase appropriate for adult literary fiction perhaps, but it’s vivid language for young readers—many of whom are quite capable of becoming electrified with astonishment.

 (It’s certainly more creative language that Weingarten uses to introduce this article: “I started working on it with a chip on my shoulder.  I ended it with a lump in my throat.”  Now that’s bad writing--"overwrought" doesn't cover it.)

 Weingarten mocks the conversations conducted while the boys are riding their motorcycles, as if anyone could converse over that noise.  While stretching credulity a bit, these are 1920s motorcycles ridden by teenage boys after all, and not the behemoths of today.  In The Tower Treasure, a specific contrast is drawn between the “putt-putt” of their motorcycles, and the roar of an automobile.  Certainly there is awkwardness and repetition in the writing, but that more or less goes with the genre, and can be part of its charm.

 The elaborate language, not uncommon when these books were written, has a painless educational value for young readers in expanding their vocabularies.  As for the overuse of adverbs, it’s worth noting that  Stratemeyer had the final edit, and at least one of his other book series is well known for characteristic proliferation of adverbs—so much so that they inspired a specific type of joke: the “Tom Swifties.”  He may well have inserted some adverbs into the Hardy Boys books himself. 

Even so, the book are decently written, ascending to some fine writing.  At the beginning of The House on the Cliff, set in summer, McFarlane refers to the “torrid warmth” of the city.  The cliché is “torrid heat,” but his choice is more poetic, the double-r sound in “torrid” matching the “rmth” sound in “warmth.”

 The Mystery of Cabin Island opens with a page describing the winter landscape in clear physical language and measured sentences that remind me of Hemingway.  Nor was I surprised by Weingarten’s revelation that McFarlane was a devotee of Dickens—I got that from his books—especially the characters and set pieces that tended to be edited out of the revisions.

 It is this language, as well as the period details, that charm many readers today.  Although Weingarten quotes McFarlane’s granddaughter saying he hated these books (and his children are quoted elsewhere saying similar things), McFarlane is also directly quoted referring to his Hardys with some pride, saying that instead of the slapdash style of other boys books, “I opted for quality.”

  By and large, the revisions I've read did not.  In addition to changing plots and characters, with some bewildering story choices and careless writing, there were changes particular to reflect the J. Edgar Hoover 1950s obsessions with subversion, expressed in altered plots and an end to the skepticism of authority figures in the originals, especially local police.   Says the Hardy BoysUnofficial Homepage: “The quality of the revised stories is generally so far below that of the originals that it can only be considered an act of literary vandalism.”

There's no question that some of the writing and vocabulary as well as the action in the originals reflect an earlier time.  But that was true when I first read them as a boy in the mid-1950s, and I was charmed anyway.  The fact that there weren't roadsters and touring cars anymore, or chums, even added to the appeal: the charm of the exotic.  Reading them as an adult, I see them not as exotic but true to their time, in the modesty of the stories, their pace and organic quality, as well as evidences of a bygone era.  And so I remain charmed. 

Here are my comparisons:

 The Tower Treasure (#1)

The original version of this first novel in the series begins with exposition, while the revised starts with an action scene. This appears to be one item of the brief for the revisions--hook the reader with action. This time it works; in others I read the action is absurd by the standards set in the original series--of realism, especially of the Hardy Boys as normal or at least believable boys.

 Another item in the brief was to shorten the books to the same length of 180 pages. So what took two chapters and 17 pages in the original is reduced to one chapter and 8 pages in the revised.

 Some arcane language in the original is a bit disruptive, though funny, cf. "I'm going to ask these chaps if they saw him pass." But the revision goes further than updating words and eliding the story--it unaccountably adds incidents and characters, to no better effect than the originals. Plus it doesn't actually eliminate all ethnic stereotypes--just the ones people were more sensitive to in 1959.

 It isn't long before the losses become obvious. The original has a comic set piece involving a group of farmers; the human comedy is entirely lost in the revision, as is the pretty realistic dialogue in the scene. Similarly a scene involving the small town police chief and his detective is derisively funny. That such scenes reminded me of Dickens is reinforced a few pages later by a reference to a character habitually carrying Dickens' novels (naming three.) The original also throws in a sly Shakespeare reference, a phrase from Hamlet.

 But the loss of a certain literary quality is more telling in a line Fenton Hardy says to his sons on page 76 of the original, when he tells them they can help "by keeping your eyes and ears open, and by using your wits. That's all there is to detective work."

Later when the boys solve the mystery that has puzzled everyone (including their father), they conclude that "The main thing is that we've proved to dad that we know how to keep our eyes and ears open." (209)  The symmetry of these lines more than anything else starts off this series of books. They are entirely absent from the revision.

The revision has the good sense to keep the subplot of the father of one of the Hardy Boys' school friends who is unjustly accused of a crime (a similar situation will be repeated in a subsequent book), even keeping most of the dialogue. But for every arcane line the revision eliminates ("Brace up, old chap") it seems to lose one of delicate feeling or meaning: "Frank and Joe, their hearts too full for utterance, withdrew softly from the room." (68)

 This being the first novel, it has the first instances of official police incompetence, and Fenton Hardy's disdain for the local police. In the revision this is gone, though the comic futility of the chief and his detective Snuff is replaced by a comic and less convincing Snuff, now an aspiring private detective lost in self-importance, ambition and incompetence.

 The climactic scene in the revision suddenly adds a character to increase threat and action (the 1950s Disney teleplay has its own version of this character though he appears early, and interestingly represents a seemingly friendly but ultimately untrustworthy and violent adult) but it adds little to the scene. The ending of the original is longer and more satisfying.

  #2 The House on the Cliff 

The original story begins with the Hardy Boys and their pals (or "chums") escaping summer heat with a motorcycle ride,which leads them to a remote abandoned house, reputed to be haunted.  They do hear eerie sounds inside (which later turn out to have been staged to scare them away.) As they are leaving, Frank and Joe Hardy discover tools were stolen from their motorcycles. They later witness an attempted murder on a boat and rescue the victim, but he soon disappears.  This begins another strand of the mystery.

 The revised version begins with Fenton Hardy letting the boys in on a case in progress. This is another odd trend in the revisions: the boys are less independent.
The original story involves Fenton Hardy kidnapped by drug smugglers, with the boys putting together the pieces of the puzzle involving the "haunted" house on the cliff and hidden tunnels. They rescue their father, though they are almost immediately captured. There's a lot of action, including fist fights but they are believable. Some believe this is the best written novel in the series. The revision has some sloppy writing and makes inexplicable changes in scenes but basically follows the same story.









#3 The Secret of the Old Mill

This is one of the three originals that entered the public domain in 2023.  I read it online at Project Gutenberg.  It begins quickly with an incident that defines the mystery: while waiting at the train station for their father to arrive, the Hardy Boys are approached by an affable stranger with a convincing story why he needs to quickly change his five dollar bill, which they do, only to find that it's counterfeit.  When their father, detective Fenton Hardy arrives it turns out he is working on a counterfeit case.  The boys are embarrassed by being "stung," but eager to help solve the mystery,.

   A gently comic piece follows in which the boys are kidded by their high school friends for falling for the swindle--these glimpses of their regular lives are something the originals do well.  The Hardys are grounded in family, community and school-- though today's students might be surprised that their studies include Latin grammar and reading Virgil in the original.   Still, the emphasis of the story is on action and solving the mystery.

 After the Hardy's learn of another victim, there is another set piece of a high-spirited outing where the Hardys and their friends learned that an old mill has been revived by new tenants, though they aren't taking grain from local farms to grind.  Instead they've kept people away because they say they are working on a new breakfast cereal formula they must keep secret.  While there, the Hardys also rescue a boy from drowning, and he becomes important later in the story.  In due course they discover that the old mill is the center of the counterfeit operation that covers several states, and where the phony bills are made.  There's also action on the water, as the Hardy Boys get their new speedboat, the Sleuth.

In the revised version, it is their high school friend Chet who is victimized with a counterfeit $20 bill, discarding the opportunity to show the boys' generosity as well as their youthful naivete, as well as losing their personal motive to crack the mystery.  The revised version turns the old mill into the site of an electronics firm, doing something undefined that has to do with guided missiles.  Eventually Fenton Hardy is investigating sabotage at the electronics firm, where the counterfeit ring is a sideline by some of the employees who use the old mill itself as an entrance to a secret room where they print the fake money.  It's needlessly complicated and less credible, but it's also typical of the revisions in that it tries to make the stakes more dramatic and important, using a Cold War theme.  Small town life and small time crimes aren't good enough anymore, though it does reflect that, for example, there are probably fewer farmers around mid-20th century Bayport.

The revision includes some scenes from the original, though in different places in the story, often where they seem less organic.  The scene when the boys first see their boat is so much better in the original.  The new themes in the story and the shuffled and missing scenes suggest why the Unofficial Hardy Boys site calls this version "Drastically Altered" from the original.  Yet it isn't the worst of the revisions I've read.  At least it is carefully plotted (with the bad guys helpfully explaining everything just before they are caught.)    

#6    The Shore Road Mystery

The HBUHP calls the revision "completely different" but it basically reassembles elements of the original plot in a less coherent way.

 The original is more vivid in its scene-setting, and is pretty good at the effect on the town as a series of car thefts continue without a clue. There a nice school scene that's a kind of interlude. Scenes of the Boys in the caves where the thieves have hidden the cars are exciting, even if their handling of "revolvers" comes out of nowhere. The revision again starts with a big action scene--the Hardys have more technology now, like police radios on their motorcycles--but the plot seems more contrived.

In both stories, it's a school friend who is unjustly arrested for the thefts, but the revision adds a buried treasure mystery for some reason. Also the thieves aren't just stealing cars but smuggling in "foreign" arms for "subversives" in the US. Hello, 1950s!

 In the original, the Hardy Boys solve the mystery, and catch the bad guys in the act. But in the revision, they gets their butts saved by Dad, who incidentally has "an iron fist." What's up with that? as the Hardys wouldn't say. Also the revision suggests that the Boys' hometown of Bayport is in New England, which is contradicted by several of the originals.  They imply and finally say that Bayport is south of New York City.


 #8 The Mystery of Cabin Island

In summer (as we’ve seen in previous stories) the Hardy Boys and their chums run motorboats in Barmet Bay as well as ride motorcycles, go on picnics and engage in other warm weather activities.  What do they do in the winter?  In this original the answer is: ice-boats. 

Ice boats in this case are homemade skiffs on skis propelled by wind in sails to skate across the frozen area of the bay.  They can go very fast (the record for contemporary professional ice boats is well over 100 mph.) These craft were in fact becoming popular in North America in the 1920s.  A Saturday Evening Post Americana cover in early 1928 shows boys in their homemade ice boat, which may well have inspired this aspect of this 1929 story.  (Most ice boats ran on lakes and rivers, so an ocean bay south of New York might be a stretch.)

 Introduced by some of the best descriptive writing I’ve read in the series so far, the Hardys and friends take their ice boat to search for a place to go winter camping, and so they explore the small and solitary Cabin Island, but a strange man angrily orders them away.  They know the island and its cabin are owned by wealthy Mr. Jefferson, and so are surprised to find a note from him upon their return home, asking them to visit.  When they do they see the angry man leaving.  From Mr. Jefferson they learn the angry man is named Hanleigh, and is badgering him to sell him the island, but he won’t. The elderly Mr. Jefferson is all smiles—he thanks them for finding his stolen car (in #6 The Shore Road Mystery), rewards them, and agrees to allow them the use of his cabin on the island for their winter outing. 

The trip is to begin before Christmas so there is a lovely family scene in which the Hardys celebrate the holiday early so the boys will have both the traditional feast and presents, and their outing.  Back on the island they watch Hanleigh in the cabin, measuring the fireplace.  He threatens them again but they have the key and he is the trespasser, so he leaves. But they have the start of their mystery: why was he measuring the fireplace?  Why is his so fierce about the island?

 Eventually the boys learn of Mr. Jefferson’s missing collection of priceless stamps, and find a notebook kept by the man suspected of stealing the stamps (it’s the only instance I’ve run across of an actual date: 1917, which the Boys observe was 11 years before.) The notebook contains a coded message, and the mystery goes on from there, with a dramatic climax.

 In the revision, Mr. Jefferson’s reward (communicated to them offstage) is permission to camp on Cabin Island, and the promise of a new mystery.  When they meet him at his house he asks them to search for his missing grandson, who disappeared around the time that his collection of commemorative medals was stolen. (Why the switch from stamps remains a mystery.)  As usual, the incidents crowd together while scenes of ordinary life are dropped or shortened, like the Christmas scene.  

Adults (Fenton Hardy and Mr. Jefferson) are also present in the action more often. Both versions involve two minor villains—in the original they are young men, but in the revision they are high school dropouts who hang around the school and make trouble.  “Juvenile delinquency” was a catchword of the 1950s.  The Hardy Boys page classifies the revision as "Altered."

A side note: my copy of the original and of the revision both have the same cover image, and both have a "picture cover," rather than a jacket. My original is evidently part of the reprint series issued in 1962 (and my book apparently was a Christmas gift in 1963, though not to me) and it appears to be the same typeface as the original editions. It also has the same brown flyleaf illustrations as the original brown hardbacks that I remember so well from the public library.  


#10 What Happened At Midnight 


This is my favorite of the originals I've read as an adult, but I don't think that's entirely why I'm contemptuous of the revision, which HBUHP calls "drastically altered."

 The original is well-paced and balanced, as each increment of the mystery is pursued with activity, such as the Boys trip to New York City. But most of all, it has a real sense of high school boys doing the investigating, their normal life integrated with the mystery.

 It's also a great 1930s story, starting with the opening scene at Bayport's newest innovation, the Automat. Joe is kidnapped, Frank and his chums find him, but that's just the beginning. The brothers impulsively follow a suspect on the train to New York, lose their money to a pickpocket, sleep on park benches safely, prepare to hitchhike back to Bayport and earn a meal by washing dishes at a diner. (The diner owner is right out of a movie by Frank Capra or Preston Sturges.) They get a key clue overhearing a hotel switchboard operator, and learn of the existence of the collect call!

 As obsolete and therefore nostalgic as all this seems now, none of it was so arcane in the 1950s when I might have first read this book. The telephone system was basically the same, and I remember going to an automat restaurant in Manhattan in the 1960s.

 But the revision dumps pretty much all of it anyway. (Though I thought for sure the revision would drop a key scene of the boys in a biplane that loses power- they have parachutes and go out on a wing to bail out. But the revision makes the plane an antique reconstruction, and the scene happens in a different part of the story.) 

Bayport, by the way, in this novel is explicitly said to be located about 200 miles south of New York City, which suggests New Jersey.

 The mystery is solved through a combination of legwork, deduction, serendipity and coincidence. (Which fulfills Fenton Hardy's definition of a detective as someone who basically pays attention.) Some may object to the coincidences, such as the clues supplied by the clueless Aunt Gertrude. But it sure makes for a good story that keeps moving forward.

A coincidence puts the Boys in touch with a couple of FBI agents, and so the big finish is more believable with the adult agents doing the shooting and fighting during the capture, though Frank manages to chase and wrestle down the ringleader of the diamond thieves gang. (The Boys relationship with the local police is also better than in previous originals.)

 Other elements of the story are kept, but there are inexplicable changes. This time the gang is stealing diamonds and "electronics." (What kind of electronics? Why are they valuable? It doesn't say.) Again another needless and basically useless if not confusing plot element is added, a secret invention.

 The revision begins with a completely outlandish fight between the brothers and adult thieves. In general, the revision is haphazard and careless--literally in the sense that it seems to be written by someone who doesn't care. For dialogue that sounds somewhat formal, it substitutes dialogue that sounds entirely wooden. As for updating arcane expressions etc., the revision actually has one of the boys say "Gadzooks!"--a word from the 17th century that barely made it into the 19th.

 Finally, let me point out something else that's apparently obsolete. Especially in the originals, I did not find a typo or a grammatical error. These boys books, written quickly and expected to be read by teenagers or younger, and then to disappear, are immaculately edited, copyedited and proofread. So 20th century, right?

Tuesday, January 02, 2024

R.I.P. 2023 Review


When I was spending a fair amount of time in Manhattan in the 1980s, Martin Amis was a name I heard a lot.  My friend Michael Shain, then a reporter for the New York Post, designated a different Amis novel for each of his friends. (Mine was The Information, which I still have not read.)  I followed the Amis career without ever really becoming engaged with his novels.  But in interviews he would often say something that hit me directly, as when he mentioned being ambushed by memories that were accompanied by searing regret, just walking down the street and thinking of something else.  This was an experience I often had, but which I’d never heard anyone else confess.

 When Amis died last May I noticed how he was almost universally praised as a literary eminence.  (He was Sir Martin by then.)  So I went back to his more famous novels (Money, London Fields), neither of which I could finish once again, and I read entirely his last novel (Inside Story) and his collection of essays and reviews, The War Against Cliché.  In both I responded to gems of insight and stylish writing, but on first reading I couldn’t experience Inside Story as a whole novel, for all its shining parts.  So I remain a frustrated reader of a writer with whom I nevertheless felt an odd bond, as much for many differences as for similarities and sympathies.  The tension of that seems productive and affectionate.  

 Another novelist much talked about in the 1980s was Milan Kundera, principally for one book: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, now a classic of the era.  I read it with fascination, and found his previous novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, published in English through the auspices of Philip Roth and his series of works by Eastern European authors.  More recently I read Kundera's Slowness, and wrote about it here.

 With the paradox of its title, The Unbearable Lightness of Being seemed to become fashionable mostly because of the sex, though Italo Calvino pointed out that its virtues were the liveliness and intelligence of the writing.  I doubt I understood or endorsed a lot of it, but I liked its rhythms and it did feel like something I hadn’t encountered before in fiction.  I better understood the meditations on the speed of life today and the paradoxes of memory in Slowness.   

 Cormac McCarthy was a controversial and respected novelist over several decades. Though his fifth novel in 1985, Blood Meridian, became recognized over time, his first commercial success was All the Pretty Horses in 1992.  Probably his biggest and most enduring literary, cultural and popular success was the haunting post-apocalyptic tale, The Road.  

some of the books by Garcia Marquez translated by Edith Grossman

 Harold Bloom called Edith Grossman “the Glenn Gould of translators,” because she too was a precise virtuoso.  Her translations of Latin American authors, together with those of Gregory Rabassa, helped fuel the boom for these novelists in the 1970s and 80s.  In particular she translated seven books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who once said that he preferred reading her English translations (and Rabassa’s) to his Spanish originals.

 


Russell Banks was a prolific American novelist and story writer who detailed working class lives but also wrote about Jamaica and Haiti and The Magic Kingdom.  He was especially beloved by fellow literary writers.

 Robert Brustein was a titan of modern theatre in America, founding both the Yale Repertory Company and the American Repertory Company at Harvard. He backed his work as a producer, director, actor and playwright with essays and books from The Theatre of Revolt (1964) and Who Needs Theatre? (1987) to Winter Passages (2014.)  He engaged in many controversies, such as his debates with playwright August Wilson.

 British Jungian psychologist Anthony Stevens wrote several books on Jung and his theories, particularly on archetypes and dreams.  I remember reading with pleasure Ronald Steel’s sterling biography of journalist Walter Lippmann, and D.M. Thomas’ novel The White Hotel.  I recall enjoying Francois Gilot’s reminiscences of her uneasy life with Picasso when I read them in the 1970s, and Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory: An American Voyage in the 1980s.

 As the last veterans of World War II fade away, so do the authors who examined aspects and outcomes of that war.  Japanese author Kenzaburo Oe wrote about the legacy of the atomic bomb in Japan, while Selichi Moriura exposed Japanese wartime atrocities. Marga Minco wrote about the ramifications of the Holocaust and the war in postwar Europe.   

 Also among the writers who passed on in 2023 were poets Louise Gluck, Charles Simic, Naomi Replansky, Robert Pack, Benjamin Zephaniah, David Ferry, Saskia Hamilton, Park Je-chun, Amy Utematsu, Trienke Laurie, Antonio Gala, Asad Gulzoda, R.H.W. Dillard, Robin Mathews, Maria Laina and Wendy Barker; playwrights Tina Howe, Megan Terry, Robert Patrick, John Mairai and Ama Ata Aidoo; eminent screenwriter Bo Goldman; novelist/playwright Fay Weldon, story writer Edith Pearlman, novelists AS Byatt, Herbert Gold, Ted Morgan, Eve Bunting, Meir Shalev, Martin Walser, David Benedictis, and Amy Schwartz.

 In genre fiction: Carol Higgins Clark (mystery), K.C. Constantine (master of the police procedural--more about him later), John Dunning (detective fiction and books on old time radio), John Jakes (historical), Julie Garwood (romance); Michael Bishop, Michael A. Banks and Richard Bowes (science fiction.)

 Artist and writer Linda Salzman Sagan, sociologist and communitarian visionary Amitai Etzioni, historians Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Eugenio Riccomini and Marceli Kosman; feminist scholars Dale Spender and Jean F. Yellin, psychologist Alice K. Ladas, philosophers Harry Frankfurt and Ian Hacking; crime writers Anne Perry and Mary Willis Walker; satirist Dan Greenberg.

 Writers William Howarth, Gail Tremblay, Phillipe Sollers, Luca di Fulvia, Doris Gregory, Michael Denneny, Zaleka Mandela, Echo Brown, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Ramzi Salame, Darchhawna and Ronald Blythe.

 Journalists Betty Rollin, Kevin Phillips, Victor Navasky, Michael Parkington, Paul Bradeur, Warren Hoge, James Reston, Jr., Bernard Kalb, Hugh Aynesworth, Eva Hauseserova, Howard Weaver, Edwin Wilson, Michel Ciment, Jack Anderson, Colin Spencer, Bill Shipp, Mandy Jenkins, Ian Black.

 Apologies for misspellings and misappropriations.  May they and all the writers who died last year rest in peace—their work lives on. 

Saturday, December 02, 2023

Ignoble Nobels? Is That Why They Ignore Margaret Atwood?


 It's been over for awhile but it still bothers me.  2023 was the latest year in which Margaret Atwood did not win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

At least the Pulitzer Prize committee finally recognized Barbara Kingsolver.  There's been no better US novelist, none more consistent and capacious in the breadth, depth and style of her work.  But also this year the Nobel committee has once again ignored not only my now-perennial favorite--and  the world's-- in once again passing over Margaret Atwood.

Atwood was widely believed to be the favorite back in 2017--so much so that the actual winner, Kazuo Ishiguro, publicly apologized for winning it instead of her.  But there was always next year.  And next year. And next year... And now Margaret Atwood is 84.

I don't claim to have read all the fine writers of the world, and I must defer judgment on a lot of prizes, like the Booker.  But the Nobel has a specific, specified mission.  In the words of founder Alfred Nobel, it is for the writer "who, in the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind."

That person, year after year for the past decade (I've been touting her since at least 2011), has been Margaret Atwood.  She is unique in the world for sustaining quality literary work over many years, while her work consistently engages the contemporary world.  She is now a global presence, for the shared present and future dilemmas she writes about (and the increasingly relevance of The Handmaid's Tale), but also as a literary figure and an active voice.  Her contributions are immeasurable. 

Of course the Nobel committee in Sweden has ignored their founder's goals for years.  They tend to award for a body of work rather than something from the previous year, which is defensible.  But they also tend to choose writers who are perhaps known mostly within a single nation (usually a small one), if, frankly, at all.  Their influence on the world is minimal, at least until they win and their work gets new editions.

Body of work?  Margaret Atwood has published 18 novels, nine story collections, 18 volumes of poetry,  11 books of nonfiction, eight children's books and two graphic novels--and these are only works brought out by major publishers and presumably translated widely.  She writes and speaks on ecology and economics as well as literature.

But there's no point in making the case.  Everyone knows it.  Everyone knows she is the perfect Nobel Laureate, and has been for years.  

So why hasn't she been one?  It can't be only because she sometimes writes speculative or science fiction--they gave the award to Doris Lessing many years ago.  Atwood herself hasn't commented on it in interviews I've read or watched on Youtube, usually praising whoever just won.  But I got the feeling that she doesn't expect to ever win it, because of some problem with the Nobel committee.  Maybe there's animosity, personal or otherwise, from a member or members of the committee..  Maybe they feel she's gotten too many other awards.  Who knows? (Actually, I think she does.)

The Nobel committee in any case has a well known track record of not getting around to honoring major literary figures in their lifetimes, and therefore never honoring them at all.  So why should I care?  I probably shouldn't.  But to me it calls into question not only the Nobel committee's judgment but their integrity.  I know all these prizes are political to some extent, and this is not the worst injustice in the world.  But seeing some justice done is a rare but good feeling.  She deserves this.

So I don't care who wins the Nobel anymore.  Not until the name that's announced is Margaret Atwood.  

P.S. Margaret Atwood's latest fiction is a story collection, Old Babes in the Woods.  Barbara Kingsolver's Pulitzer-winning novel is Demon Copperhead.  Both are fine gifts for discerning and appreciative readers.

Saturday, October 21, 2023

History of My Reading: Cambridge Baptism 1970-1

Carol and me with kittens from Stuff's litter at our Cambridge apt.
I returned with Carol and company to Cambridge after my Cummington community experience in August 1970.  By this time Carol and her Knox College friends had moved into a summer sublet—probably more of a housesitting gig—on a quiet leafy side street at 13 Ellery St., apt.4.  It was about half a block from the central artery of Massachusetts Avenue, known colloquially as Mass Ave: a roughly 16 mile road that begins in Boston and defines the heart of Cambridge before heading onward past Somerville to Concord and the fabled Lexington Green, and beyond.  
13 Ellery St.

It wasn’t until I’d gone to college in the Midwest that I heard people give city directions in terms of north/south, east/west (cf. “Go north three blocks and turn west.”) In western Pennsylvania as in most of the northeast, cities were ordered by the borders of serpentine rivers and eccentric coastlines, as well as hills and ridges and valleys.  So while Cambridge is vaguely north of Boston, it is connected by Mass Ave in a way that defies the compass.  Orientation reverts to directions like left and right.

 So emerging from the tree-shadowed Ellery Street to busy, noisy Mass Ave puts Central Square (Cambridge) and Boston to your left, and Harvard Square a few long blocks to your right. While I was living there the rest of that summer, the first commercial building to the right on Mass Ave housed several businesses, including the F-Stop camera store, Cheap Thrills records, a music and musical instrument store, and the Orson Welles Cinema.  At the time I first saw it, the Welles was a single screen, so-called “repertory cinema” showing foreign and offbeat American movies. (It had a film school as well, though that was not immediately obvious to me.) 

Orson Welles at the Orson Welles
The Orson Welles intrigued me. I’d been increasingly interested in film and filmmaking. I had one film course at Iowa, and in my months at Buffalo I got to know film professor (and McLuhan pal) Gerald O’Grady.  I attended a number of his film classes, especially when they were showing movies.

 Carol had gotten interested in film, too, especially after she read The Film Director as Superstar by Joseph Gelmis, a collection of interviews (Kubrick, Bertolucci, Lindsay Anderson, Richard Lester, John Cassavettes and a very young Francis Ford Coppola, among others), a book I’d left with her when I was at Cummington.

 We emerged from one of our first movies there when I saw a familiar face in the lobby.  It was Steve Goldberg, formerly of Knox College, who turned out to be the theatre manager.  He remembered me, and in the course of our conversation, suggested I try writing for the local weekly paper called the Phoenix.  I laughed before I nodded an acknowledgement. I didn’t see where I would fit in. I knew nothing about Boston or Cambridge, and though I’d seen the Phoenix a few times, I still didn’t have a handle on it.  It was more seriously journalistic than an underground newspaper, but it wasn’t like a daily either. A few years later in his defining New Yorker piece, Calvin Trillin would describe the growing number of such journals as “sea-level” newspapers. Today, their descendants are usually lumped together as “alternative.” 

(As if meeting a former Knox student there wasn’t coincidence enough, I soon after walked into the music store next door to see behind the counter someone I’d known at Greensburg (PA) Central Catholic High School. Paul Lenart had been a year ahead of me, and had gone off to Columbia University on a football scholarship, which made him a subject of my envy since that was my aspirational and unaffordable first choice school.  But he’d been injured early on, lost his scholarship and was now a guitarist in a regionally popular band that sometimes played at Jack’s bar near Central Square, famous then for featuring Bonnie Raitt before she went national.  Eventually he sold me my next guitar.)

Pierrot Le Fou
I soon had my first immersive film experience, when the Welles programmed a Jean-Luc Godard festival, a bill of Godard double-features that changed every couple of days.  I got a discount ticket book and saw many of them, almost all for the first time (among them “Band of Outsiders,” “Alphaville,” “Contempt,” “Masculin Feminin,” and my favorite, “Pierrot le Fou” with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina), eventually watching from the back row while drinking coffee and smoking Gauloise cigarettes.  Mass Ave and the Welles would turn out to be mainstays of my time in Cambridge and Boston.

 Past the Orson Welles, two particular wonders of Harvard Square awaited.  First, the bookstores.  There was one before the square, but more past the high brick walls of Harvard Yard that began the Square proper. Harvard Bookstore was right there on Mass Ave, shortly to be joined by its book annex, with hurt books and remainders.  Around the corner was the Grolier Bookshop, reputed to be a gathering place for poets, though I never experienced this.  It was one of the contacts that Robert Creeley wrote down for me.

 The huge Harvard Coop had a big book section. There were more bookstores on Brattle Street behind it, including one of my favorites, Reading International.  Across from there and below street level on Mt. Auburn St. was Passim, a bookstore during the day, and a music venue at night—it had formerly been Club 47, where Joan Baez first sang in concert, among many other luminaries of the folk revival 1960s.

 But bookstores weren’t the only sources of books.  There were two Ecology Action storefronts and a couple of other such organizations that collected and gave away surplus books, and since it was Cambridge, the quality was high.  I scored a mother lode of books at one such place on a memorable afternoon, and walked out embarrassed at my haul, but ecstatic.

 I was soon reading Henry Miller for the first time, and his rhapsodizing descriptions of Paris bookstores suggested that this might be my Paris. That feeling was reinforced by the cafes, some with outdoor seating, an anomaly in America at the time. There were not varieties of coffees available on every corner in the 70s, but in and around Harvard Square there were coffees closer to their foreign origins, such as the Turkish coffee in a dark café buried in a complex of shops.  

Harvard Sq 1970.  BK photo.
Soon I had a favorite place: the unpretentious Patisserie below street level on the section of Brattle Street that wound around to the left as you faced the Harvard Coop.  Its menu was modest but everything tasted great.  I loved especially their almond croissants. Its French coffee had a taste still unique in my experience.  It tasted blue, the equivalent of Gauloise smoke.  I was a frequent enough customer that the owner (who was Greek) knew me by sight, and remarked on how long it might have been since I was there last.

 The riches of the cafes included the newspapers left by patrons and strewn around, not only the Boston Globe and the counterculture and political papers but the New York Times and Washington Post.  There were magazines of all kinds from everywhere at several of the bookstores, with walls of them at the Out of Town News just outside the Harvard Square subway entrance.

 The cafes completed the mental ambience of the bookstores, and I felt as comfortable as I got, reading and writing in them. That extended to less exotic but still strange venues, like the ice cream place with the delicate 1890s wrought iron tables and chairs, and the Pewter Pot, which served a variety of muffins (very big in Boston) and 15 cent coffee in Pewter mugs.  I was reading and writing there once when I glanced up and saw a man passing quickly by the window, looking my way with a wistful half smile. I was sure it was the writer and actor Buck Henry. And it might have been, for this was Harvard Square, where I routinely saw Nobel Prize winners bicycling by.

 The apartment on Ellery Street was large and well kept, though mostly empty.  It was on the top floor, with easy access to the flat roof, where a lot of sunbathing had gone on all summer, and continued while I was there.  But with fall, the sublet was up, Carol’s friends returned to school, and we had to look for another place. 

Repainted and gentrified, 325 Columbia St.
now. First floor apt. was ours.
We clearly couldn’t afford anything so spacious in such a prime area, but we did find a large room at the front of a duplex in East Cambridge, at 325 Columbia Street. (According to a notebook, I found it by answering an ad in the Phoenix titled ISMAEL COME HOME.)  The street turned out to be a kind of local truck route, so the rumbling was fairly constant, but I eventually got used to it.

 We painted our room teal blue, with lighter blue around the sort-of bay windows.  We painted the living room in shades of sea green and violet. The previous tenants had left a lot of psychedelic posters, which I cut up and affixed to a wall in the narrow hallway as collages. (Through unforwarded mail and some detective work, I learned that this apartment had been the gathering place for poets and others in the antiwar movement, and that poet Denise Levertov had often been there. She confirmed this in an exchange of letters. We had met my senior year at Knox.) 

My Cambridge reading started there with authors unauthorized in my college lit classes.  Both Carol and I read Jack Kerouac, beginning with The Dharma Bums (in which a character based on Gary Snyder has a large role) and Big Sur, even before On the Road.

 I moved on to Henry Miller, whose style I found enthralling despite the sometimes questionable content: the novels Tropic of Cancer (my sun sign) and Tropic of Capricorn (Carol’s), his narrative nonfiction (The Air Conditioned Nightmare, The Colossus of Maroussi) and essays (The Books in My Life and The Wisdom of the Heart, in which he described his Zen-like approach to writing.)There was soon something of a Henry Miller boom in the 70s, and at the Orson Welles I saw an autobiographical film on him, and another on his compatriot Anais Nin (I also acquired and read some of her volumes of diary entries which were then popular.)

 I tried reading William Burroughs, whose theories of writing—especially his cut-up method—fascinated me, but I didn’t match up with his resulting fiction.  There were others, but I most recall Kerouac’s ecstatic discoveries as reflecting the flavor of those first few months for us on Columbia Street.

 I was still attracted to poetry with a surrealistic flavor. I read Robert Bly’s translations of Pablo Neruda, more of Bill Knott (who I’d encountered in New Haven) and a new poet, James Tate, who I heard read and met in Cambridge. (He had exasperated tales of trying to help Knott just get through life and empty the garbage.) I’d admired Jon Anderson’s first book of poems, Looking for Jonathan, in 1968, and now the harder edged Death and Friends in 1970.  

Gino Severini self-portrait
In the next months my reading expanded in different directions.  For example, I began seeking out books on the modern artists of the early twentieth century, from the Dadaists to those artists who clustered in Paris—Surrealists, Cubists, Futurists and more.  It was then I discovered the Italian Futurist Gino Severini—the only one of that group who lived in Paris and knew everyone from Picasso to Erik Satie. With the same last name as my mother, I learned he might have been a blood relative of my grandfather, but even if only a relative in imagination, he became a guide over the years. 

 At the same time I also discovered Dorothea Tanning, the only American and only woman enrolled in the Paris Surrealists.  She was a native of Galesburg, Illinois, and (as I later found) a Knox College student who preceded me (by several decades) as an editor of the college literary magazine.  My fascination with this place and period, which had begun with the expatriate writers like Joyce, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, brought me around through the painters to other writers, particularly the French poets Guillaume Apollinaire (another friend of Gino) and Paul Eluard. 

Thanks to the extensive collection of cheap art prints at the Harvard Coop department store (the large ones were a dollar), we had our own modern gallery (though the Vermeer in the living room—a print I still have—was the exception): a Magritte and Picassos in our room, a Max Ernst in the kitchen and a Paul Klee in the bathroom, which otherwise featured a large ceramic bathtub with a Moby Dick shower curtain but no shower, and an ancient pull-chain flush toilet.

 I continued reading about ecology, including Paul Shepard’s second anthology, Environ/Mental.  I don’t remember what precipitated it, but I began reading Buckminster Fuller obsessively.  The autobiographical sections in Ideas and Integrities grabbed me—his despair at his lack of worldly success and acceptance of his ideas that drove him to the edge of Lake Michigan, contemplating suicide.  That resonated.  But even navigating his strange vocabulary I saw him as literally a sailor (he’d served in the Navy) who knew what he was talking about with his concept of Spaceship Earth—that all we needed to live was aboard, but we were limited mostly to what was on the ship. 

 Fuller’s concept of an “anticipatory design science” made a lot of sense, even if I couldn’t follow all his proposals. A few years later I attended one of his improvised lectures at M.I.T., and saw him up close as I joined a cluster around him afterwards to hear more.

 I got hold of a new anthology for students called Worlds in the Making, which related ecology to the future.  I was already looking at the future as a subject, and even collected these strange paperbacks that came out every year in the early 70s, with professional psychics (a lot of them from Florida) who predicted events of the coming year.  There were always several predictions that Fidel Castro would be assassinated.  Years later, when the CIA plots to kill Castro were exposed (including one involving an exploding cigar), it seemed that these were less seers than spooks, or at least they knew some. Fidel probably outlived them all.

 Carol and I were also reading ostensibly more serious books in the psychedelic/countercultural vein, including on astrology, and we got our charts done (I’ve lost mine but I still have Carol’s.) I was nervously consulting the I Ching, which never quite assuaged my frustrations at my lack of worldly progress, probably not the best attitude.

 And we were surrounded by lots and lots of music. For awhile we didn’t have any at home, but Carol made a trip back to Chicago and shipped more of her belongings to Columbia Street, including the component stereo she’d had at Knox. By the end of 1970, the Beatles breakup led to an efflorescence of new albums: McCartney’s solo album (which we had from the previous spring), Lennon and Ono’s separate Plastic Ono Band albums, Ringo’s “Sentimental Journey” and “Beaucoups of Blues,” and George Harrison’s triple album, “All Things Must Pass.” The flood continued in 1971 with “Ram” (McCartney), “Imagine” (Lennon) and the multi-disk live album from Harrison’s all-star concert for Bangla Desh, the first such charity event. 

J.T. & Carole King
James Taylor was a kind of favorite son in Boston, and the “Sweet Baby James” album that made him a star was played everywhere.  “After the Goldrush” also came out in 1970, and began my Neil Young obsession.  Carol and I had to be selective in the concerts we attended, but we did see Neil Young play in Boston, and caught a concert in the now legendary James Taylor and Carole King tour.  The strangest concert I remember we attended was when Poco opened for the Moody Blues. We went to hear Poco, assuming the Boston crowd was there for the psychedelic Moody Blues.  But Poco blew that audience away, and nobody much was in the mood for the Moody heaviness afterwards.

 There were also free concerts, including a few in the Cambridge Common, just beyond Harvard Square.  Carol and I heard the distant music one Sunday in Harvard Square and walked over there.  We passed a smiling young woman coming the other way and asked her who was playing.  “It’s a beautiful day,” she said.  We agreed, it was a beautiful, sunny day.  But who was playing?  She laughed.  “It’s A Beautiful Day.”  Yes, there was such a group—I remember staring stoned at their album cover a few years before in Galesburg. 

The ex-Beatles releases, the back-and-forth accusation songs of Lennon and McCartney, and John and Yoko’s events and interviews were widely discussed in the pages of Rolling Stone and other music papers as well as the Boston area weeklies, and among people we met.  Lennon’s first album and Neil Young’s “Goldrush” in particular grabbed me and didn’t let go for years.  But Carol and I also listened alot to John Phillips’ (of the Mamas and Papas) solo album, even though the music media dismissed it. I don’t think I ever quite convinced her of the brilliance of the Bee Gees though, even if I played their “Odessa” double album too often. 

 

In a new relationship and a home of our own, and with the stimulations of my Cambridge baptism, I was bursting with creative expressions.  I wrote in every form from verse to polemic.  I was writing songs at a furious clip, enlisting Carol to add bits of gentle percussion to tapes I made of them, at first just to not forget what I’d written.

  Inspired by Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, I resumed constructing collages, as did Carol.  I briefly continued my Cummington experimentations with painting.  And I devised and physically made a board game—the Cambridge Conspiracy Game.  It was arranged like a Monopoly board but with Cambridge sites. Its purpose however was as a kind of anti-Monopoly. The object was not competition.  The only way to win was for players to cooperate.  Everybody won, or everybody lost.

In the beginning we led a kind of John and Yoko existence--both of us taking photos, making artworks, collaborating on music.  We explored Cambridge and Boston, but we also spent a lot of time in our blue room, and in our neighborhood. Columbia Street extended down from Mass Ave on the Boston side edge of Central Square a considerable distance before it got to us. Our building was a bit run down, and so was the immediate neighborhood. It was not fashionable or even recognizably Cambridge. It evidently had been Irish and (a bit further on) Italian, but was now mostly Portuguese. 

  We shopped for major groceries at the Purity Supreme supermarket in Central Square, but we also explored the shops in Inman Square: a walk down Columbia St. for a long block in the opposite direction from Mass Ave, and then the streets to the left that eventually led to the Harvard Square area.

  My impression was that Inman Square had once been the Italian area, and there was a very good but decently priced Italian restaurant there, that we could afford occasionally. There was also an authentic German bakery, and a large deli restaurant called S&S, that is apparently still there.

Inman Sq. early 1970s
 There was an old fashioned 5&10 next to a small grocery that sold $1 bottles of French Bordeaux wine (vin ordinaire in Paris), not far from a blues club. Legal Seafoods was the Cambridge choice for fresh seafood. We took our clothes to the Laundromat in Inman Square, where each washer and dryer had an individual name inscribed on it.  If we wanted to leave while our clothes were still in process, the Italian who owned it would watch over them, and we might come back to see them folded and waiting for us.

 This end of Cambridge was noisy and sooty, as urban a place as I’d ever lived. But we also belonged to a co-op that every week delivered organic vegetables from nearby farms (in the revolution talk of the day, it was called the Food Conspiracy.)  We also were asked to work in the fields periodically, which I remember doing once.  For awhile Carol and I tried the brown rice diet recommended by John and Yoko, so we wouldn’t be “sampaku” (supposedly you were if there was white all around your eyeballs, and it wasn’t a good sign.)  We gave that up pretty quickly, and I wrote a song about it. 

 I extended my ecology commitments to the household, perhaps a little too much (a succession of housemates weren’t thrilled.) But I was motivated to do kitchen cleanup and some of the cooking.  Carol made amazing Irish stew I still remember.

 Early on we added a tricolor kitten to the household, a female we named Stuff, on the theory that cats respond to sibilants when called. Soon Carol adopted a young stray, a black male we called Muk (I think as a reference to milk, which he loved.)  However, we failed to monitor their maturation, and soon we had a pregnant Stuff.

  One day I awoke to find that Carol and our housemate Andrea had panicked when they thought Stuff wasn’t delivering properly, and had rushed her to the vet who said she was fine, but that adventure caused Stuff’s labor to stop.  We had to take her back to induce birth, and by then I was the only one with the nerve to be present for the actual births.  Stuff had six kittens of various hues and combinations, including a silver gray male.  We decided to keep him, and named him Gray.  Those three cats—Stuff, Muk and Gray-- would be under my care for the next twenty years.

 All this may sound idyllic but of course it wasn’t quite. We both had demons to work through, and after the initial overriding bliss, we had each other to get used to.  Neither of us had anything but vague direction, and so along with the freedom of exploration, we had anxieties.  Plus the complications of family pressures, housemates, and a few neighborhood and apartment problems, etc. But complications is all they were. We had what Carol would later describe as a good little life.  

Carol started out working as a waitress at the counter of the Brigham’s ice cream shop in Central Square, which was also a kind of luncheonette, with coffee, sandwiches, etc. She wore a light brown uniform and dispensed “frappes” (Bostonese for milk shakes) and ice cream cones with “Jimmies” (sprinkles) on top. She soon figured out how to sneak me almost free meals.  She thought the manager didn’t notice, but it turned out he did, and didn’t care. 

 The main Cambridge post office building was nearby, and it may have been an employee having lunch at Brigham’s that alerted Carol to job openings at that post office. She took the Civil Service exam and was quickly hired, perhaps as a temporary for the Christmas season rush, but she was kept on afterwards.  To my surprise she liked it there, especially her co-workers, and she visibly began to open up again to the outside world.

 I “took in” typing, edited and rewrote graduate school papers, and had temp jobs, such as working in college bookstores during textbook rush or doing inventory, and painting the vast interior of a former Harvard eating club preparing to become a restaurant, Grendel’s Den on Winthrop St. and across Brattle from my Patisserie, near Harvard Square. It’s still there.  (Though I thought I did good work on those walls and ceilings, I was fired for insubordination, for sticking up for a colleague being bullied. He probably thought I was a dope for doing so.) 

hawker later in 70s (not me)
I eventually added a weekly gig as a “hawker,” selling one or both of the counterculture papers on a street corner (in my case, at Prospect and Mass Ave at Central Square in Cambridge.) By then—probably early 1971—the Cambridge-based Phoenix had been joined by Boston After Dark, which had started out as a tabloid of mostly entertainment listings and stories, but by then had expanded to a full weekly newspaper, with news and arts coverage.

 Unlike most alternative weeklies since, these papers weren’t given away, but sold. Both had gained initial circulation with free classified ads, personals mostly.  The next attraction was coverage of the kinds of arts and entertainment that appealed to young readers, including the hordes of college students at the many colleges and universities in the Boston area.  The writers were also young, and spoke the same language, unlike the stodgy dailies.  That applied to the cultural and political coverage and point of view of news stories.  There was a huge potential readership that had nowhere else to go locally.

 For some reason lost to history, I gravitated towards selling Boston After Dark.  I took the T (Boston area’s subway/light rail system, which Carol likened to amusement park rides) to the Boston printing plant, picked up and paid for the number of papers I was gambling I could sell, and transited back to my Cambridge corner.

 There were a lot of hawkers.  Every corner in and near Harvard Square was taken, and often enough, one or two of the corners near me in Central Square were also claimed. There were occasional turf wars, but generally hawkers respected the claims of regulars.   Where I was, the clientele came mainly from surrounding office buildings, usually at lunchtimes.  My best customers were young women from those offices, who bought their copy from me with their friends watching from the floors above.  

 Since I didn’t always sell them all, I had lots of opportunities to read what was in them.  I read the Phoenix as well. Meanwhile, I fantasized my own publication, complete with articles I’d like to see in it. Eventually the light bulb went off, and I realized I might pitch these existing publications with those ideas.  That took a surprisingly long time.

 I was always sending things out, poems and stories but increasingly also reviews and articles.  I had my first acceptance in Rolling Stone, with an unsolicited review of the book, A Child’s Garden of Verses for the Revolution, by my erstwhile teacher and correspondent, William Eastlake. I did a piece on Henry Miller accepted by a west coast publication called Organ.  The editor liked it, and agreed to assign a piece on Buckminster Fuller.  I think the magazine folded before it could be published, but I did get paid. 

I’ve found the notebook from this time which contains my first draft of a long poem called “Ears.”  I remember it as inspired by a Kenneth Koch poem on the theme of eyes that I heard him read, but I can’t locate that poem and don’t remember where the reading was. A version of “Ears” as well as several other poems and a prose piece of impressions of Cambridge, appeared in a one-off publication called Words Cambridge in spring 1971.  The people who appeared in it put the publication together, assembling and binding it in the offices of the Orson Welles cinema.  Another version of “Ears” would appear at the end of the year in a more professionally produced though also short-lived literary magazine, Cotelydon. 

Carol 1968 at Knox. Bill Thompson photo.
Both Carol and I had various physical complaints that sent us for tests at the Cambridge hospital and especially to Massachusetts General, which because it was a teaching hospital, was more open to doing tests for people who couldn’t otherwise pay for them, as long as students could observe or participate.  My tests proved inconclusive.  The best advice I got was “drink more water.”

 So I was not unduly concerned when Carol went for tests at Mass General, after my repeated urging. Her health had always been somewhat shaky, but there had been two recent incidents in which she’d been overcome by fatigue.  We’d attended a screening at the Orson Welles and met the filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek, who was about to show one of his films beamed by multiple projectors onto the inner dome of a building—the Moviedrome at Stony Point in New York state.  The audience would be lying on the floor looking up.  The film would last for several hours—a truly immersive experience.  We signed up for the bus to go, but when the day approached Carol suddenly felt extremely tired, so we cancelled.

 Another wave of fatigue prevented us from meeting up with some Knox friends.  We were literally out our front door when she said she had to go back.  The prospect of a long bus ride to the Moviedrome had been daunting, but this outing was not going to be so strenuous.  It seemed more serious.  

 I was back in our room when she returned from her visit to Mass General.  I asked her what the doctor said.  She brought up something else that had us both laughing.  Then I asked her again what the doctor said.  She suddenly burst into tears.  

 After initial tests she had been sent to a doctor in the hospital who diagnosed her with what was then called Hodgkin’s Disease (now Hodgkins lymphoma.)  Through her tears, and fear that she would die, she provided what turned out to be an accurate account of what the doctor said (I’ve unfortunately forgotten his name.)  

The diagnosis was serious, he said, but the good news was a new treatment that had excellent results, available at only two hospitals in the U.S.: Stanford and Massachusetts General.  It involved removing the spleen, followed by two rounds of treatments, some combination of radiation and chemotherapy. Because they'd caught it at an early stage, after that she should be fine. 

 She repeated the words but did not seem to believe them until I repeated them back to her. Part of her despair resulted from a stop at a library or bookstore on the way home where she read that the disease was usually fatal. But soon she accepted the assurances she brought back from her doctor. Later I did what research I could, which confirmed what she’d been told.

 In the early 1970s, it seemed most cancers were mysterious and fatal. Not many years before that, the word “cancer” was not even uttered in polite company (comedian Billy Crystal had a routine that reflected this.)  I was becoming a little familiar with the radiation and chemotherapy treatments because my mother had recently undergone some, and would undergo more, after Carol completed hers. But I wasn’t around for most of my mother’s, and my parents were generally secretive about such things, so I was somewhere between discreet (not wanting to embarrass my mother) and frightened. It was very different with Carol.

Outside our Columbia St. apt. we each took
a photo of the other
 I was there with her completely, every moment, every step. I was at the hospital for her spleen removal operation, and her initial treatments. Sometimes, instead of remaining in the waiting room, I would spend the estimated time outside on Boston Common before returning.  Carol waited her turn in an area reserved for patients, where she befriended a few regulars also waiting for their treatments, and heard their stories.  Some had much less hopeful prospects.  Later, when she felt stronger and self-reliance was important to her, she bolstered her confidence by going to the treatments on her own. She found her courage, partly in making it ordinary.

  At home, I took care of her as best I could.  We talked about everything involved, what she thought and how she felt, and I tended, however watchfully, to follow her lead.  She needed to comprehend and cope with what was happening to her.  A part of her body was cut out, and the rest of it subjected to the damage (including to her beautiful hair) caused by radiation and chemicals, as well as the eventual healing. 

 I could also offer a different perspective.   “You felt your body broken,” begins a poem I wrote to her, “but I saw it whole/with such/ joy at its aliveness/its softness and beauty/that the tubes hanging out/were proof only/that your loveliness/was present/transcendent…” 

 She wanted above all to be not sick, so we tried to keep things as normal as possible. She had taken up knitting, as did her friends at the hospital, to pass the time before and after treatments.  She knitted at home as well, including a six foot long, blue and green scarf for me—not often very practical (except for Doctor Who conventions) but beautiful.  I still display it. When effects of the treatments accumulated, we watched a lot of TV on our small black and white set, and she began painting, as well as making rude sculptures out of play dough.  

Carol on one of our visits to Cape Cod. BK photo

The cats helped, particularly the kittens while we had them (we placed them in other homes when they were old enough. Stuff had a second litter of four, all black.)  I recall sitting in our armchair reading, while several of the kittens chased each other, up one of my arms and down the other.

 Looking back through our earlier correspondence, a pattern of precedent emerged from the previous year—particularly Carol’s series of inexplicable fevers and fatigue.  She had been hospitalized in Galesburg months before I arrived, and one of the reasons she didn’t want to go back was her fear that she would die there.

 Over the years I’ve wondered what fate led us to Boston, where this disease could be treated.  Though the treatments themselves had serious medical consequences for her years later (they are no longer done in the same way), and both the disease and the treatments may have led to her final illness, she nevertheless had another fifty years of what might even be characterized as a fabulous life.

  Jeremy Gladstone visited us in Cambridge, on his way back to Europe (he didn't finish his dinner with us because he was "shrinking his stomach" in preparation for being on the road.)  He and Carol had a previous relationship (they’d lived together in the same house in Galesburg and the same rooms as I had the year before) and they remained friends.  They corresponded when he was in Lausanne, in French-speaking Switzerland.  He assured her that she could teach English there, and urged her to at least make a long visit. Carol was intrigued, and having the goal of a European trip helped her through her treatments.  

In the fall of 1971 I finally sent an article to Boston After Dark, with a letter inquiring about writing book reviews. The associate arts editor Jake Kugel wrote back, said he liked the article but couldn’t use it, and suggested I come in to the office to see what books they had that they wanted reviewed.  I did, and came away with at least one.  But before my first review was due, it was announced that the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda would receive the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature.  I dashed off an article about him and sent it to Kugel.  It was published in early November.

 By the end of the year I’d published two book reviews (including one of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar) and an article on Norman Mailer in Boston After Dark.  Meanwhile, I was in touch with Dave Marsh, editor of the Detroit-based magazine Creem (actually, their address was Walled Lake, Michigan.) Though the now-legendary Creem was mostly a rock music magazine, it published more. I may have published a review of The Greening of America there, but the first I recall of a flurry of pieces for Creem—a review of the movie “Omega Man” starring Charleston Heston—appeared in December. 

 Suddenly the apparently random aspects of my life seemed to be coalescing in these opportunities—the aimless observations of counterculture in Boulder and Berkeley, the seemingly wasted hours watching movies, listening to the latest music and discussing it all in perilous detail, and the instinctive reading and cultural curiosity, as well as the years of unread writing, of absorbing and searching for forms and expression.

 Now I was suddenly getting published regularly and meeting new people, especially at Boston After Dark.  But Carol still felt intimidated by what she perceived of that world, which was becoming my world.  And then she felt well enough, and it came time for the dream of Europe to become real.

  I went with her to Logan airport and saw her off for her first trip to England, Greece and France (sending me a pile of postcards) before settling in Switzerland.  She worked part time while taking French courses every morning, and she learned to drive.  Eventually, true to Jeremy's prediction, she  was hired as an English teacher in Lausanne.  She came back for visits and follow-ups at Mass General a couple of times.  At the end of one of these visits of several weeks (including a trip to see her parents in Chicago), I put her on the train to New York, where she would get a direct flight to Switzerland. But before the train left I impulsively bought myself a ticket to New York (it was all of $10 then) and joined her, intending to return on the next train back.  On the way she decided to stay longer, so we spent a few days in New York (hosted by Michael Shain) and Cambridge and again in New York, before she flew back to Europe.

 I have many blue airmail letters from those first years she was in Switzerland.  Early on, there was some thought of my joining her there or in England, but as my involvement in Boston increased and her attraction and commitment to Europe solidified, those thoughts faded.  Years passed, and eventually she wrote that she was getting married to someone she met there. I could only wish her well.  I didn’t hear from her for many years shortly after that. It was clear that she blossomed in Europe, just as we both suspected she would not be fulfilled if she stayed.   Our roads and our lives diverged. But we always had Cambridge.