History of My Reading: Vietnam and my (two) draft physicals

As the summer of 1968 ended and I finally worked out the details of attending the Iowa Writers Workshop in the fall, I faced a more formidable test.  I was going to be drafted, at the height of the Vietnam War.

The subject of Vietnam had been a necessary focus of my life and my reading since 1965, growing in urgency as I approached the moment my student deferment ended.  Draft calls were high by then--mine was certain to come soon. 
 

Vietnam in all its aspects wasn't easy to face, and it still isn't.  Benjamin B. Barber begins his essay, which leads off the 1990 compilation The Legacy: The Vietnam War in the American Imagination (Beacon Press): “There is no event in America’s recent history more painful—more memorable yet less remembered—than our long and futile military engagement in Southeast Asia...Vietnam is an invitation only to amnesia—a hard and numb scar we prefer not to notice.”

On a track of Randy Newman’s great 1970 album 12 Songs, the singer describes the promising start of a love affair, except that she wants to talk about the war. “I don’t want to talk about the war” the singer asserts.

 By the time I heard this song I was heartily sick of talking about the war. I had been talking about it, thinking about, bewildered and angry, bitter and immensely sad about it, for what seemed like forever, even if, all told, it took up a wearisome decade. In particular I was aware of how it was poisoning my college life and beyond, my early to mid 20s, with all of its immutable experiences and all of its urgency in determining the course of my life.

For we were shadowed by Vietnam war events until, for a few years we ate, drank, slept, read and talked the Vietnam war, and what it was doing to our personal lives, our generation, our country and humanity, as well as the people living and dying in that faraway land.

Meanwhile it took friends and acquaintances and distant contemporaries, wounding their bodies, minds and lives, and killing them dead, whether they fought in the war, fought against it, or otherwise witnessed it close up. It deformed the country, turning family members, friends and generations against each other.

Knox History prof John Stipp

In college, Vietnam also became an education in itself, and eventually central to my education there. The first event I recall was a “teach-in” on American policy in Vietnam given by a group of Knox College faculty in my first year, probably in the spring of 1965. With lots of competition for attention, it drew only about 100 students (according to history professor John Stipp, one of the two speakers I definitely remember.  The other was another history professor, Gabe Jackson.) But I was one of the students in the audience, and I’ve never forgotten at least the feeling of that event.

Our professors placed the American military presence in the context of the geography and history of southeast Asia and Vietnam specifically, from even before the French Indochina war. They described political and moral implications. They provided facts and sources that already contradicted US official statements.

Their scholarship and analyses (some familiar, some not) were daring to contradict official policy, lambasting the mistaken reasons for a war and its conduct while it was happening. This was academic discourse with a contemporary purpose. It meant something to our lives at that moment. And it was at least a little dangerous for them, as it would be very dangerous particularly for the male students listening, and not listening.

The amount of scholarship and writing on Vietnam already by 1965 is suggested in The Viet-Nam Reader published that year, edited by Marcus Raskin and Bernard Fall. Reporter and scholar Bernard Fall in particular was a respected voice on Vietnam, since he started out a supporter but became a critic. He had been reporting on the region since the early 1950s and warned the US was making the same mistakes as the French. He continued to report on the war, and was accompanying US Marines in Vietnam in 1967 when they were ambushed, and he was among those killed.

That spring of 1965 was when the US became fully involved in a war in Vietnam, with the first ground troops, the first search-and-destroy missions and in particular, the first bombing of North Vietnam. Escalation (a word we were learning) continued through the summer, and so student interest also escalated the following fall.  In 1965 (either spring of my first year or fall of my second) I took a public position against the war in a debate sponsored by the Speech department, but I remember it as a defining moment for me.  

Then by 1966 and 1967, Vietnam was on everybody’s mind. We saw our time, thought and emotions absorbed by meetings, debates, petitions, marches, demonstrations with four or five people or thousands—in hot rooms, in the cold and snow, in the rain, and a broken-hearted poetry reading in the spring sun. Draft calls began to ramp up, which added to the urgency for those of us facing the draft in our near future.

Much of the reading I remember was in pamphlets, booklets and periodicals. We relied on periodicals partly because these events were happening rapidly, and books take a long time. But a lot of the press seemed to be simply repeating government and think tank misinformation and lies. We relied on different periodicals, such as Ramparts and the New York Review of Books, which published, among others, Mary McCarthy’s journalism (collected in Vietnam, 1967) and Noam Chomsky’s analyses.

In The Nation magazine I was particularly reading William Eastlake’s columns from Vietnam, probably before and certainly after he taught a semester at Knox. Esquire under editor Harold Hayes published provocative pieces, as did Harper’s Magazine. I didn’t regularly see the better New York Times reporting while I was at Knox, mostly because the paper didn’t get to the Knox Library for several days by mail. I might read the Sunday Times on Wednesday, if I remembered.

I.F. Stone

Another invaluable resource (when we could find it) was I.F. Stone’s Weekly. It was unique—the product of one man, a veteran Washington journalist who was blacklisted in the 1950s, but refused to be silenced. He became virtually the only journalist to question the official account of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident that LBJ used as a pretext for war. He was later proven correct. His lacerating critiques of US Vietnam policy and the lies the government told were often based on careful reading of public sources including newspaper stories. A wonderful 1970s documentary on Stone showed him literally tearing the New York Times apart, page by page.

There are now several collections of I.F. Stone’s work. The two I have are The I.F. Stone’s Weekly Reader (1974) and Polemics and Prophecies 1967-1970 (1972.) Also in the early 70s, when the poet Celia Gilbert, my colleague and friend at the Boston Phoenix, turned out to be I.F. Stone’s daughter, I got the opportunity to meet him several times.

“It is time to stand back and look where we are going,” Stone wrote in early 1968. “And to take a good look at ourselves.” The students I knew felt this was something we were more or less forced to do just about every day.

Eventually the periodical reporting got into book form. I read Jonathan Schell’s long article in the New Yorker in the summer of 1967 that became the book, The Village of Ben Suc, a detailed account of the destruction of a Vietnamese village by American troops.

But the book that had the most direct and profound effect on me in my college years was an unheralded paperback by an unknown author. It was Air War: Vietnam by Frank Harvey, a factual account of exactly what the title said. I read about it in Robert Crichton’s review in the New York Review of Books, and the excerpts he quoted were so horrifying that, when I read them aloud as part of Bill Thompson’s teach-in in the Gizmo, I had to choke back the tears.

The Bantam paperback was troubling and exhausting, mundane and horrifying—I often had to stop reading, fearful I would fall into a melancholy without end. The incredible damage that this bombing did was almost beyond understanding—I still remember one fact: B-52 bombers—with conventional bombs-- could kill every living thing within a fifty mile radius.

This book led me many years later to Gerald J. DeGroot’s 2005 The Bomb: A Life (about the atomic bomb) and in particular Sven Lindqvist’s A History of Bombing (The New Press, 2002.) I wrote about the latter book in a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle, on the eve of the bombing of Baghdad that began the Iraq war. Lindqvist’s book further deepened my conviction that arose from Frank Harvey’s book in 1967, that all bombing of civilian settlements is fundamentally immoral.

When the internal government documents purloined by Daniel Ellsberg—which later became known as the Pentagon Papers-- began appearing in 1971, they confirmed what some of us already knew or at least strongly suspected. The pattern of official lies was there for all to see. In his 1972 book Papers on the War, Ellsberg used them as a basis for his recollections about Pentagon analysis and how it was used, and misused.

Two of the classic nonfiction books on the Vietnam war appeared near its end. Fire on the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam was a nearly 600 page history by scholar and freelance journalist Frances FitzGerald, published in 1972. Some of it had appeared in The New Yorker. It won a Pulitzer.

A year later, former New York Times reporter David Halberstam devoted more than 800 pages to a history of hubris-directed policy on Vietnam in The Best and The Brightest. By then I was the books editor at the Boston Phoenix, and interviewed Halberstam on this book (his first) in the Boston Ritz hotel—his energetic eloquence and intimate buzzsaw voice that made him a talk show favorite for decades were already in evidence.

I also met Frances FitzGerald, when we were both at a futurist convention in Washington on assignment to different magazines, and again in New York. She also had abundant wit and charm, but she was not as much of a media personality as Halberstam throughout a writing career that also resulted in a number of distinguished books on a variety of subjects.

The memoirs and fiction from the Vietnam war mostly came later, towards the end of the war or afterwards, such as Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July (which exposed the horrors of the medical care wounded veterans received, years before this became a public issue), Michael Herr’s Dispatches (expanding on his work as a Vietnam correspondent for Esquire) and Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam books. In the 1992 book Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers, Herr and O’Brien both had trouble describing the nature of their books—memoir, New Journalism or fiction? It seems these war experiences required hybrid forms.

But in the late 1960s, three of the contemporary novels we were reading that had some bearing on Vietnam were actually about World War II. All three employed black humor to expose the deadly folly. Castle Keep by William Eastlake was about the war in France and later Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter-House 5 was about the firebombing of Dresden. But the novel everyone I knew was reading in my later college years was Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

Here was a war novel unlike any other, especially for young men like me who had grown up on war movies and war comics and playing at war with our friends using World War II surplus and souvenirs.

The main protagonist is an American bomber pilot named Yossarian, who is convinced that the American military is trying to kill him. The novel is a model of the painful humor of the absurd. But that insight wasn’t absurd to me. By its actions, I was convinced that my country was trying to kill me, or at least cynically devaluing my life by using me as an instrument for unjustified ends. And though one could argue whether this was chiefly impersonal or semi-personal, even today I can’t see much evidence that I was wrong.

It was a point of view buttressed by a few other things we were reading and hearing about in the late 60s. One was The Report From Iron Mountain, about a supposed secret government commission that concluded that war was necessary to the US economy and way of life, including the need for combat deaths. Eventually it was claimed to be a satire, that no such commission existed, but its arguments remained.

The other was a Selective Service memo on “channeling”: the use of the draft and draft deferments to channel young men into desired occupations useful to the military, or—in the parlance of the time—to the military-industrial-university complex.  (This language in Selective Service documentation for years has since been confirmed.)

This spoke to the larger context as well as to a specific subject of great moment: namely the draft and what to do about being drafted.

I remember talking with draft counselors in Chicago several times. Some were sponsored by American Friends and other pacifist organizations with religious affiliations. Others were more specifically against the Vietnam War, and offered technical knowledge and advice on laws governing the draft, including our rights as potential and actual draftees.

So I read a lot of associated pamphlets and booklets and books, a few of which survive in my collection, if not specifically in my recollections. One is We Won’t Go: Personal accounts of war objectors, collected by Alice Lynd in 1968 and published, as many of these books were, by Beacon Press.  Another is In Place of War: An Inquiry into Nonviolent National Defense, prepared by a working group of the American Friends Service Committee, and published in 1967 by Grossman. It's a thought-provoking thought experiment in a different kind of civil defense.

1967 poetry reading at Knox College. Leonard Borden photo.

We were also reading—and listening to—poems about the Vietnam War, which were important in both deepening and sorting out my thoughts and feelings. Robert Bly brought his collection,  A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War, on one of his Knox visits. We had our own such event on the Old Main lawn, as I described in an earlier post.

Bly’s collection, published by his own Sixties Press, contained some nonfiction excerpts by I.F. Stone and others, appropriate lines from Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln, and poems by contemporary poets who participated in group readings. They included Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Lowell, George Hitchcock, James Wright, Donald Hall, John Logan, Louis Simpson, William Stafford, Robert Creeley and Bly.

Denise Levertov visited in the spring of my senior year, and handed out antiwar factsheets as well as her antiwar poems. I was one of the students granted a few private minutes with her, up in Sam Moon’s office. I remember I brought her a cup of tea from the Gizmo, which pleased her. I recall mentioning to her how the barrage of news and necessary decisions relating to the war was becoming overwhelming to “us.” Some wondered, I said, if we could even justify doing anything else. She was startled by this, and quickly affirmed that of course we should still take time to do life-giving things every day, like read, write and “think about your dreams.” It was that think about your dreams everyday that stuck with me.

(Levertov also edited the 1968 Peace Calendar and Appointment Book for the War Resisters League, which interspersed poems among the calendar pages by scores of American poets, including William Stafford, Robert Duncan, Jonathan Williams, Nancy Willard, Galway Kinnell, Sam Hazo, Gilbert Sorrentino and Jim Harrison, as well as these poets who visited Knox while I was there: Robert Creeley, Robert Bly, Gary Snyder, David Ignatow, Mitchell Goodman and Levertov.)

I left Knox in 1968 without a degree, vulnerable to the draft. I kept changing my official address all summer—a tactic recommended by one of those draft counseling handouts or articles—so a draft notice couldn’t find me. In the fall I became a student in fiction and poetry writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop, but I never really settled in Iowa City. I was often in restless transit, to Galesburg, to Chicago where Joni was living in the Del Prado Hotel near the lake on the South Side along with other student teachers for a semester in the Chicago school system. And back again to my narrow winter room, my pork tenderloin sandwich at the lunch counter before class on Tuesday afternoons, with the Moody Blues on the jukebox.

But my every step seemed dogged by the draft. I was sunk into myself and my conundrum. I learned one thing from responses in every place, from family, lovers, friends and other strangers. That no one knew what I felt as I faced what was before me. Only other young men with a draft physical looming at that moment could begin to fathom it.

From Alice's Restaurant (1969)

A draft physical order finally caught up with me.  On one of my preliminary visits to moving to Iowa City, I was warned by Workshop students not to register with the Iowa City draft board, so I remained registered in Galesburg.  That turned out not to be so wise either.

I was called for a pre-induction physical in Chicago. I caught the train from Galesburg, and had my draft physical straight out of a nightmare Alice’s Restaurant movie. I had hearing test results with me that clearly showed I was functionally deaf in one ear, which I’d been assured by a joyful draft counselor would get me out. But it didn’t.

Among the multiple ironies--none of which I was in the mood to savor at the time--was that my fondest ambition at age 11 or 12 was to become a Naval Academy midshipman.  Because Members of Congress could appoint a qualified candidate to Annapolis, I figured I had a chance, since I was known to ours.  But I think I can remember the moment--trotting down the steps made of piled rocks from my house to the street-- when it came to me: I could not meet the Annapolis physical standards because of my deafness, and there was nothing I could do about it.  And so I had to give up that dream.  All that I knew about Army standards now told me my deafness should be disqualifying again.

But standards seemed to be functionally relative. There were quotas to meet, and it was a high draft call that month.  Still, the times were such in the late 60s, and the war so controversial, that substantial disagreement if not dissidence had begun to appear within the military. This was clear at the draft physical. Comparing notes later with others from Knox and Galesburg who had their physical that day, it seemed that its outcome depended more on the luck of the draw than any factual basis. If your line led to a sympathetic doctor, and you wanted out (some even asked), he got you out. If it led to a functionary or an angry true believer, you were in, no matter what. I was unlucky.

There was a written part to the exam. We started out at school desks in rooms set up like school rooms, filling out forms and taking psychological tests, directed by a no-nonsense young lieutenant.

After our humiliating physicals we returned to the same room for further forms. When we finished, the lieutenant closed both doors, and told us what it was really like in Vietnam. It was the most powerful anti-war message I had yet received. He told us that in effect our lives were being thrown away.

Dazed and disoriented, I managed to also get my wallet stolen so I left penniless as well as hopeless. I borrowed a dime for a pay phone to call Joni at the Del Prado.

But I soon went back to the pamphlets and books, wrote letters and got an appeal physical. Unfortunately it was also going to be my induction physical. If I passed, I would be inducted into the army.

I also started the process of obtaining conscientious objector status. I’d been corresponding with William Eastlake, and he cautioned me not to let my perfectly reasonable objections to the Vietnam war become opposition to all wars—a justifiable one might come along any day, he wrote.

At the time, CO status was granted almost always only on religious grounds if you were a member of a recognized church, and only if you were conscientiously opposed to all wars and killing, and not only to killing in this war.

But this was the only war they were going to send me to fight or support. And potentially killing me wasn’t as infuriating as forcing me to kill others I had no reason to harm. The first might kill my body, but the second would definitely kill my soul. To me this was personally and morally clear. It was defining.

Still, I was torn about CO status, but I filled out the forms, and I was prepared to use them if necessary.

And if all else failed, I knew my last step. There would come a moment in which inductees would be asked to take one step forward, indicating they accepted induction.  That was a step I would not take. That would set off another process which could send me to prison, if I didn’t figure out how to survive in Canada first.

My appeal/induction physical was at Fort Des Moines in Iowa. The Obamas stayed at the Fort Des Moines Hotel during his presidency, but it’s a little different from the place where I stayed back then, in the barracks for three nights. My physical lasted three days.

I took a bus alone from Iowa City. As the only person in my “group”, the Army designated me as its leader, and assigned me the responsibility of filling out the forms and keeping the expense accounts.  On the forms I had to keep an accurate count of myself each time I got off and on the bus.

 I got to Des Moines early, and spent a giddy afternoon with a girl I met on the bus, whose name was Trish. She worked at the phone company in a small Iowa town. We walked around in the sunny air and may have gone to a movie. I do remember that we eventually were talking to each other in slight English accents.  It was a time when the practice of youth, freedom, sunshine and innocence was summarized by the Beatles.

I arrived on time at Fort Des Moines, though my actual physical was to be the next day. I was billeted in a barracks for the night with at least a hundred others from all over Iowa, most of them younger and very excited and eager to be leaving Iowa in uniform.

Robert Bly in the 60s

But there were a few, identifiable by age and hair length, who quickly found each other, and found me. One of them knew even more about our rights than I did, the first of which was we were still civilians and the Army had no legal right to hold us there. So we went somewhere for a beer, and I got more valuable advice about the physical itself.

My physical at Fort Des Moines replicated the conflict among the personnel conducting it that I saw in Chicago, but this time more dramatically. My appeal physical was managed by a desk sergeant on the first floor, who was mutely if clearly sympathetic. If I wanted out, that seemed pretty ok to him.

But that decision was to be made upstairs (literally—I think it was the third floor) by a doctor, a young lieutenant who eventually told me that no matter what I brought to him, he was going to pass me. He’d been drafted out of medical school, and if he had to go, I would have to go.

This back and forth, this circuit from downstairs to upstairs with occasional trips to off-base doctors, went on for three days. I caught on to the drill early: maybe because this was an appeal, or maybe because of the desk sergeant, they were duly if not actually examining every claim I made. And so I kept making them, and they kept sending me for more tests and evaluations.

There were a couple of highlights. They sent me to a doctor elsewhere in Des Moines for another hearing test. He was elderly, and had the most primitive equipment I’d seen since my first grade hearing exam. I’d been tested several times since with the latest machinery at the University of Pittsburgh, but this guy’s idea of a hearing test was to stand behind me and ask me to repeat what he said. “One,” he said, and then moved a few feet. “Two...”

Denise Levertov in 1968

So by the time they sent me to see the psychiatrist I was either hallucinating or seeing some odd things, like a film crew following me, and a nurse smiling brightly as she emerged from a broom closet door I’d been staring at as I waited.

Eventually, after three nights in the barracks and three days on the first, second and third floors, the desk sergeant was briskly amused and rather pleased to tell me that I’d essentially worn them out, and that I would be reclassified as unfit. The papers I got in the mail merely stated that my appeal—based on my hearing—had been successful.

My journey back from Fort Des Moines began with hash browns at the bus station eatery, and in the adjoining arcade I bought an old red marching band coat, Sergeant Pepper style.

It sounds like a Joseph Heller story now, but it was hell at the time. I was so traumatized and conflicted by the years and months leading up to the hours and days at Fort Des Moines that I dropped out of the Workshop, left Iowa, and wound up back in Galesburg, fulfilling my own prophecy in a poem published in the Siwasher my senior spring: “I will hide.”

Valjean Memories and the Lit of Crit

Valjean at Knox.  Photo by Leonard Borden

Before we hit the books, a few words about an aspect of the winter 1967 term at Knox that I especially remember.  It was during these months that I spent the most time with Valjean McLenighan.

We'd known each other slightly before that year--we were both in the Whitman/Stevens class the previous spring--but usually in a group.  Then we were both in Macbeth that fall of 1966, of my junior and her senior year, though we had only one scene together, in which I did nothing but gape at Macbeth and his Lady (played by Valjean), along with the other thanes. But we did acquire that bond and familiarity that actors share when they're in the same production.

She was also an active resident of Anderson House, which became the "experimental" dorm for fourth year women, the experiment being the absence of curfews or a housemother, and relaxed rules on visitations.  I got involved in their campaign to resist some sort of re-imposition of restrictions, as the college decided to take the term "experimental" literally, and deputized a stiff-necked  member of the psychology department to study their "variables" as if they were mice in a maze.

In any case, while I was back in Pennsylvania with mono for the first part of the winter term, Valjean was just about the only Knox student to contact me and check on how I was doing.  When I got back to campus, she was the first person to greet me.

Thanks to the mono I still didn't have the energy for much socializing, but we went to some campus events together and had more one-on-one conversations, lingering at a Gizmo table for hours, interspersing serious ideas and distressing news of the day with peals of mischievous laughter.

One afternoon we had outlasted everyone else at our Gizmo table and sat there alone as it got dark.  Eventually Valjean sat up straight and asked, "Shall we to dinner?"  "Let's!" I said, as we both got up smiling.  Val kept beaming--"That was the perfect response," she said quietly.  In that instant we'd both inhabited the same sort of old movie, of bright young things in their tennis whites, with not a care in the world.

The next year Valjean went off to the University of Iowa graduate drama program, and I saw her there several times the autumn after that, when I briefly attended the Writers Workshop.  I was mostly being drafted and sadly was not good company, but she hung in there with me.

I saw her briefly a few years later, when we both happened to be on the Knox campus; she was playing the part of a career woman in real life, all made up and dressed for success, but I could tell her heart wasn't in it.  That, as it turned out, was the last time I actually saw her.

Years went by after that 1970 moment, and in the early 1990s she called me up.  She'd just been to a Knox reunion and wanted to organize friends to go to the next one.  Her enthusiasm was contagious but in the end I didn't go. Still, we were in touch by phone and letter and email right up to the time that she was diagnosed with cancer.

Valjean on her last trip to Mexico

We'd talked about freelance writing, which we were both engaged in at the time, and her experience at meditation retreats with Zen teacher Joko Beck, who I knew as the author of a wonderful book, Everyday Zen.  When I was going through a rough stretch I got a package from her.  It was a beautiful candle.

We came close to meeting again a couple of times, including sometime around 2005 when she came to California, but we couldn't work out the logistics.  It's a big state.

I realize now that she didn't talk a lot about her past, so  I learned much more about her accomplishments, her activism and compassion, and her wide circle of devoted friends from the blog she set up as a focal point for news about her illness.  I found out about her diagnosis from an email she sent out, which also asked that all communications go through the blog, a request that I foolishly honored.  So it was from the blog that I learned of her death in July 2008.  She did not live long enough to see the man she had told me about a couple of years before, Barack Obama, become President. But she lived her last months with the euphoria and anxiety of his first campaign around her in Chicago.

What I still didn't know, and only discovered (or maybe rediscovered) later is that Valjean was an author of children's books, many of which were in conjunction with Sesame Street (and many listed on Amazon etc.).  But one that isn't part of that franchise is called One Whole Doughnut, One Doughnut Hole.  A title Wallace Stevens would have loved. 

Valjean was in the class ahead of me at Knox and she was fiercely intelligent, so it was awhile before I realized she was about six months younger than me.  She was a presence, a force of nature. Anyone who heard her voice knew she was full of life.

I remember Valjean from that winter term, but I don't remember a thing about the literary criticism course my transcript says I passed (with an A).  Unfortunately I haven't found anything to jog my memory.  A partial draft of something that could have been a paper in lit crit survives, but without indication of what course it was for, if any.

However, literary criticism itself was a major aspect and activity of all literature courses, and of being a literature (and composition) major.  I do remember books in literary criticism that were suggested, assigned or often referred to in college.  And my reading of literary criticism and books in related areas did continue after college, through to the present.

So this will be my post on lit crit, in college and beyond.

First, to locate my era.  At least at Knox College, the trends and virtual cults that overtook and in some ways overwhelmed lit crit in a big way in the 1980s and 90s--the various approaches known as structuralism (and post-structuralism), deconstructionism, semiotics, and more generally as postmodern"theory"-- had not yet joined the conversation, let alone shouted everybody else down.  As I've mentioned before, the New Criticism of the 1940s was still the most influential guide, but different styles that for example looked at the writer's relationship to the times were also in the mix. Analysis from other points of view (political, historical, cultural, economic, class structure, etc) was edging in, and the latest approach of McLuhan and media studies was hotly debated.

All that said, there were literary critics that won respect for their criticism and its eloquence, transcending any affiliation with one label or another. (Many were leftists politically and some were Marxists or communists in the 30s; I doubt we knew much of this when we read them in the 60s.)  In fact they tended to be highly individual, and often employed a mix of perspectives.  What especially distinguishes these works from later lit crit is the quality of the writing.  These books were meant to have some of the literary qualities of the books they were about; they were written be read with pleasure and understood by non-specialists.

What is in those books defined as literature anyway?  How do they work?  How do they fit into the literary landscape and literary history?  How do the various works by a particular author relate to one another?  To their times and beyond? These are some of the questions addressed by the literary criticism that I remember.

My Anchor hardback has no dust
cover and just a blank red surface.
This Anchor paperback edition
has an intriguing cover design.

I won't attempt to develop a hierarchy or history, though I do notice that a lot of the titles I remember best come from the 1940s and 50s.  One that seems likely I acquired from the Knox Bookstore in 1967 is a small, neat 1953 Anchor hardback copy of The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling,  a collection of essays, most of them on American literature and writers.

His essay "Manners, Morals, and the Novel" contains Trilling's most famous phrase, when he defines manners as "a culture's hum and buzz of implication."  I've since added his slim volume, Sincerity and Authenticity, and his final Selected Essays titled The Moral Obligation To Be Intelligent. I also have a huge anthology of western literature that Trilling edited.

In his essay "The Meaning of a Literary Idea," Trilling takes on the strict New Criticism of Rene Wellek and Austin Warren's Theory of Literature, an earlier lit crit classic, often referred to simply as "Wellek and Warren." I'm not sure I ever had a copy of it until I found a vintage paperback a few years ago.  I. A. Richards is another lit crit elder whose name I heard. His books on literature go back to the 1920s and 30s.

A book often mentioned that I did have (and still have) is The Well Wrought Urn by Cleanth Brooks, which is chiefly about poetry.  I marked up the opening essay, "The Language of Paradox" and in the next I probably found some answers in the treatment of the play I'd acted in, Macbeth.  

The aforementioned names and titles--and probably others--were given to us as the gods of lit crit.  Northrop Frye's influential 1957 Anatomy of Criticism may well have been in that company.  His name at any rate was familiar enough to me that when I spotted an interesting title on a sale table at Squirrel Hill Books in Pittsburgh in the early 1990s--The Educated Imagination--Northrop Frye as the author made the sale.

I found that slim book very stimulating and generative, so the next time I came across a Frye title, I snapped it up.  After re-reading The Educated Imagination a few years ago I became more deliberate--I hunted down Frye titles online, until I had--and read--(two things that do not always go together, of course) a total of 10 of his books, including The Anatomy of Criticism.

Probably the most interesting acquisition was a collection of short pieces entitled Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature which I bought just a few years ago.  Like many books of this kind, the editions available are often library discards.  The one I bought was a 1978 first edition hardback, and when it arrived I was amazed at its pristine condition.  It was from the Barat College library. Barat was a small Catholic college in a leafy and wealthy Chicago suburb, until it went bankrupt and eventually dissolved in 2005.

  This book had been acquired from the University of Chicago Press presumably in the year of publication.  Barat had emphasized the arts, but apparently not the work of one of the 20th century's most esteemed literary critics--for on the Date Due sticker on the back there was not a single name.  This particular book had led a very quiet life on a college library shelf for a quarter century, possibly untouched, yet outlasted the library itself as well as its college.

There were other perhaps less exalted names I learned then, probably from essays on specific writers, such as Scott Fitzgerald or Wallace Stevens. Alfred Kazin made his mark with On Native Ground, a study of American prose from 1890 through the 1930s, with an emphasis on realism.  He continued writing up to his death in 1998, including memoir and history. One of my favorites is the late Writing Was Everything (1995), an autobiographical celebration of an era and community committed to literature.  I have 7 of his books, plus a biography.

Malcolm Cowley, a poet, critic and literary historian, wrote mostly about writers and writing of the modern era.  An extra element of fascination for me was that Cowley was originally a western Pennsylvania boy (like me), who grew up to know writers (Hemingway, Faulkner, Kerouac) and critics (Edmund Wilson, F.O. Matthiessen and his Pittsburgh high school classmate Kenneth Burke.) He started out earning his living writing rather than teaching: one of his personal histories is titled --And I Worked At the Writer's Trade.  I have six of his books.

Cowley not only knew writers personally (including Hart Crane) but he engaged them in dialogue about their work--particularly Faulkner.  He was also one of the American pioneers of what we know now as the interview--the public dialogue with writers--especially in the Paris Review Writers At Work Series.  He edited and wrote the introduction to the first collection. (With some effort, I collected all ten of the published volumes.  Subsequent interviews live only in the physical magazines and online, as far as I know.)

Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle introduced many modernist writers to American readers in the 1930s.  I don't recall him being among the favored critics in college, and I didn't read him then (except in relation to Fitzgerald.)  I've acquired several collections of his bracing and highly opinionated pieces by decade, as well as a more general collection.  (My copy of The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects came to me from the Arts, Literature and Sports Department of the Birmingham, Alabama Public Library via Better World Books.)

Many of these critics concentrated on the modern period of their own lifetimes, and since this was the most recent period we really studied in college, I've remained interested in exploring these writers in depth.  So I also have several books by Hugh Kenner (The Pound Era, The Elsewhere Community, A Homemade World, etc.) and Richard Ellman ( Golden Codgers is a more recent acquisition, but in 1967 I had and would revere his biography of James Joyce.  I had also added novelist Anthony Burgess' study of Joyce, titled ReJoyce, to my Joycean collection. There would be several more Ellman books added to that group over the years.)

What's worth emphasizing, given what happened to Lit Crit later, is that many of these figures were not primarily academics, and they did not write only criticism. Edmund Wilson was a magazine editor and a reporter--he traveled the U.S, by train in the 1930s, reporting for The New Republic.  Malcolm Cowley listed himself as a literary historian and poet before critic.  Richard Ellman and Hugh Kenner were biographers (Kenner wrote a major book about Buckminster Fuller.) Alfred Kazin edited several books, and wrote autobiography as well as literary history. And so on.

Some novelists and poets wrote interesting lit crit, both the famous (Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, Stevens, Updike etc.) and the lesser known.  In fact, poet Randall Jarrell is perhaps better known for his criticism--though he seems unjustifiably overlooked in both categories these days.

I haven't totally limited my subsequent lit crit reading to this early 20th century era by any means.  I have studies and biographies of writers who wrote before and after the moderns, including some written in recent decades, such as works by Louis Menard, Margaret Atwood, James Wood, Denis Donoghue, Octavio Paz, Italo Calvino and Ursula K. LeGuin.  That's apart from works on literature from elsewhere (or very much here: Native American writers) and what gets called genre literature. Needless to say, there's no death of the author idiocy among them.

I also haven't mentioned here the works on specific writers or periods that were assigned or suggested for specific courses at Knox such as 16th century English literature, or such studies that I've included in earlier posts.

I've also read enough to realize my comparative ignorance of even the usual western tradition, so I have a few more extensive literary histories.  My favorite of these is Literature and Western Man by British dramatist, novelist and critic J.B. Priestley.  It is a briskly written series of essays from a somewhat covertly Jungian point of view.

In fact, I have more lit crit books than I could ever possibly read, partly for one reason.  For years the Humboldt State University Library held an annual book sale, with most of the books being their discards.  (Perhaps they still hold it, but I am afraid to know.)  For the last hour of the sale, buyers could fill shopping bags with books and get them all for one price.  I kept my avarice within decent limits until the years the library started shedding books by the hundreds and thousands.  They had to make room for computers and cafe areas, and were depending more and more on online resources.  Books just got in the way.

The last sale I attended was truly scary.  I saw what looked like the entire works of authors (William Dean Howells was one I remember) stripped from the shelves and sold off.  By the end of the sale the dregs included hundreds of books of literary criticism, literary history and biography, mostly published before 1970.  I filled up several bags full of them, and they now line my shelves, or are in piles atop them or on the floor, all with their white Dewey Decimal ID stickers with the big black x through them.  Among them are several gems, a few are pedantic twittering but many are serious works, analyzing and celebrating writers worth reading--and remembering.

Needless to say, this kind of literary criticism--and literary culture--are relics of a bygone age. And so, I suppose, am I.  But you knew that already.

Now that I am no longer a student, or much of anything really, I read literary criticism, history, memoir etc. for the pleasure, challenge and inspiration of reading it, without the necessity of retaining any of it afterwards.  Remembered consciously or not, it may still nourish the soul.
  
Lit crit has it dangers.  While it can illuminate, it often distorts and simply denigrates.  It sets up orthodoxies (which change, but not often within four years of college) and hierarchies.  It can use ideology not as a perspective or starting point but as a litmus test.  And as an academic industry, it too often misses the point.

There is in lit crit, as almost everything else, a pack mentality, so that books and writers become defined by a generation of critics. This discourages students and others from reading frowned-upon books and authors.

I began discovering literature in my Catholic school days, so I was immediately familiar with banned books and suspect authors (really most of them except for Cardinal Newman.)  Even though I was on guard against this on any grounds in college, I nevertheless was heavily influenced in my reading choices by these judgments, especially when they were, in a sense, the correct answers on graded tests.

So in addition to the lit that academia had not caught up to (from the 1950s on), there were writers from the past I learned to scorn and ignore, including Dickens, Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Frost and many others.

Books could be tainted by criticism of the author's character or prejudices, which is a more complicated issue.  Racism and other "isms" are often evident in texts and pointing out instances of them is worthwhile, though evaluating them is trickier.

How much an author's personal behavior and beliefs should influence reading is a vexing question, and distortion or disproportion is part of it.  As Alfred Kazin (among others) suggests, writers were often prejudiced as well as cruel, malicious, mendacious, snobbish and arrogant--and so were their critics.