History of My Reading: Spring Things 1967

First we read, then we write.  I did most of my writing in 1966-67, my third year at Knox College, on a white enameled metal kitchen table, the only suitable surface in my two rented rooms.  I wrote my academic papers there--the table otherwise piled with books and notes-- and my fiction, poems and plays, which were often likewise assembled from notes, handwritten pages with prior draft paragraphs stapled in place.  I typed them all on my gray portable typewriter, something very much like this Smith-Corona.

This was the first year, not only of college but of my life, that I lived alone.  My two room apartment was in a shabby wood frame building, and there was that questionable dip in the linoleum-covered kitchen floor, as well as the bathroom downstairs shared with scary old ladies.  But otherwise I enjoyed the place.

I still had my food service number at school so I ate there a lot, dinners and lunches, as well as patty melts in the Gizmo.  But I made coffee and tea in that kitchen, and got cereal and so on for breakfast, as well as Pecan Sandies and Chips Ahoy cookies, and possibly something as exotic as English Muffins (which were actually hard to find in a place like Galesburg.)  I probably did most of my grocery shopping at Higgins Diary.

 The bedroom was comfortable, with a double bed--the first time I had that at college: there's a certain luxury in a double bed all your own. I could spread out papers and books, and read and write there, as well as stretch myself sleeping.  There was at least one window in the bedroom near the bed, and the enduring image I have of that apartment is sitting on the bed, with a lacy curtain over the window open to spring air and light, sipping tea I'd made, with my little stereo playing "Retired Writer in the Sun" from the Donovan Mellow Yellow album.

I listened to music a lot.  Besides LPs I also had some 45 rpm records, like Beatles singles not yet on an album ( in the spring that would have included "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever.")  The 45 I remember playing repeatedly that spring was "Pretty Ballerina" by the Left Banke.  Many years later, I would spend an evening with the member of that short-lived band who wrote it.

And of course I played my guitar, learning songs, writing songs.  I had occasional guests, especially early that fall, with some memorable if sometimes strange and poignant moments throughout the year.  But mostly it was a haven, my fortress of solitude.  Occasionally I would spend an entire day and night there without leaving, usually on a Sunday when there were no classes and the school dinners were notoriously skimpy.  The one thing I knew how to cook was spaghetti.  My grandmother had advised me on which ready-made sauces in jars were acceptable.

The deep 60s were beginning that school year, with their three most prominent characteristics: the music, Vietnam war protests, and the substance we called grass.

Audience for the spring 1967 antiwar event.  I may be hidden behind Bill
Thompson in the foreground right.  Leonard Borden photo.

The music I'll get into in more detail in a later post, but I do recall the dance tunes at parties that spring included the Stones "Let's Spend the Night Together" and "Ruby Tuesday." Other songs we heard a lot--on the Gizmo Jukebox and elsewhere that spring-- were the Buffalo Springfield "For What It's Worth,"  Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love" and the Turtles "Happy Together."

Wendy Saul reading. L. Borden photo.

There was an anti-war reading that spring in front of Old Main, with people sitting on the grass to hear.  Leonard Borden remembers that it was organized by Steve Goldberg, who had returned from Vietnam where he'd been posted with the International Volunteer Service.  Leonard figures it was late April or early May. He took a number of photos of the event.  They show Sam Moon, Wendy Saul, Dennis Stepanek and Goldberg reading, and Rick Clinebell singing.  Many others are visible in the crowd, including professors Howard Wilson, John Stipp and Miki Hane.  I read a poem, "Things To Do Instead of the Army," dedicated to Valjean.  More about that later.

As for grass, I probably would have caught on sooner to the increasingly open--if nevertheless furtive--smoking of the weed had I not been in an isolated apartment, but I was only becoming aware of it on campus (as opposed to the publicized use elsewhere) in the spring.

In late May, the second Siwasher of the year came out (it's the one with the psychedelic poster cover by James Campbell) that included a story I'd written, "the continuing adventures of the incredible hairyman." The story included an account of a series of "heightened perceptions" which the narrator claimed was "not like a drug."  But readers knew better.  Clearly I was a "head," and had probably dropped LSD.

It wasn't true, yet.  The first time I smoked a joint was after the story came out.  I sat on the floor with Neil Gaston and Chuck Goodman in their apartment, as they separated the seeds and rolled it, an operation they conducted literally on a copy of the Siwasher with this story in it, which I could see was open to the page where my story began.

That's partly why I thought I was being put on.  Neil and Chuck began to act high, but I didn't feel a thing.  Later I understood that this sometimes happened the first time.

That issue of the Siwasher featured a story by J. Mark Brooks, who also wrote a column for the Student that year.  It includes poems by Leonard Borden, Nicholas Brockunier, James Campbell, Julia Fonda, Candi Lange, Alison McClure, W.R. Peterson, Gerry Roe, Wendy Saul, Dennis Stepanek and me.

Peter Overton and Erica Overberger. L. Borden photo

There were photos by Jack Herbig, and photos of artworks by Mary Borden, Jack Brown, Dorie Campbell, James Campbell, ceramics by the future famous Tom Collins, Don Hansen, Peter Overton, Jane Seamans and Susan Walsh.  Gerry Roe was the editor.

Late that spring, I ran into Geroe in the Oak Room.  He seemed hesitant but finally said he'd decided to name not one editor for the Siwasher for the following year, but two: me and Wendy Saul.  I said, great.  He seemed relieved.  My first editorial meeting with Wendy was equally brief and easy.  She asked how we were going to split the editorial work, apart from selecting manuscripts which was more of a team effort.  I said, you take the first issue and I'll take the second.  She said, great.  And though we were both involved in both issues, that's pretty much what we did.

As for my story in the spring 67 issue, at this remove it seems to me the best thing I published--and probably the best I wrote--that school year.  But I didn't feel that way then.  I remember Sam Moon approaching me to talk about it, but I dismissed it as an entertainment--not my serious writing. (Perhaps I'd heard of Graham Greene dividing his fiction that way.)

The story starts with the protagonist passing a music store, when a mail truck stops, delivers a package to him that turns out to be a bomb.  That is literally how the story started in life--I was passing Butz Music House in Greensburg, resisting the temptation to go in and buy sheet music I couldn't actually read, when I had that fantasy.

"The Incredible Hairyman" by Jack Herbig
scanned from the Siwasher Vol. 45 #2 The
photo title came after my story, though I'm
not sure how Jack knew about it before it
was published.

The rest of the story collects other events and fantasies, some of them set at Seton Hill College in Greensburg, where the "Scottish castles" were almost literally that, for several of the city's most wealthy citizens in the 19th century were Scots, and the main college building had been a castle-like home.  These buildings had an
air of the fantastic.

This section contains a line I'd wanted to get into a story for awhile--the observation of the view of a young woman walking away: "her closely hipped levis swinging him alternate winks."  I actually thought of it on that particular campus.  I don't know about "closely hipped," probably "tight" would do, but the "swinging him alternate winks" seemed something Updike would have liked.

The style of the story combines the artifacts I clung to for psychic survival at the time: certain music (the Beatles) and movies (again the Beatles, as well as--and especially--the British comedy "Morgan!": the first two lines of the song about the Putney duck more or less quote one of David Warner's lines in the movie) and superhero comic books, mostly Spiderman and Daredevil.

But now I see that the story is more than that. It expresses certain illusions and disillusions of the time.  The protagonist's interactions with a psychologist and his hospitalization at the end reflect both the protagonist of Morgan! (subtitled "A Suitable Case for Treatment") and an earlier iconic character, Holden Caulfield.  Though the protagonist's descriptions of the hospital at the end reflects some of my own experience being hospitalized the previous winter, his vocabulary suggests Holden, and it was meant to.  Morgan and Holden were two alienated guys, two disillusioned dudes.

I have a similar impression about my pieces published in the Knox Student.  My column that year was called "Revolver" (Beatles reference of course), and under that marque as well as otherwise, I wrote many earnest and serious expositions on student issues, while attempting to apply McLuhan to everything.  But the columns I like now are the more poetic ones, and especially the ones that employ my Joycean/Lennonesque word play.

I'd written a few the year before--at first it was the way I recast familiar names that got attention.  But I refined the style each time, until several I published in 1967--one an account of a Student Affairs meeting (called the "prudent repairs comite"), the other on the Anderson House women's dorm controversy--I still find funny.   To come up with a more absurd name than Sharvey Umbeck was a challenge but I think I did okay with "Shafty Farfetch."  Though that was only one of his alternates (which included "Sharpy" and "Sharkey".)  I recast Valjean McLenighan as "palgeorge mccartneyism," which is funnier if you know who George Pal was (producer of some of the classic 1950s sci-fi movies like War of the Worlds and When Worlds Collide), and see immediately the McCartney/McCarthyism collision, which also reflects on McCartney's pal George.  Anyway, these columns make me laugh out loud (as opposed to cringing), a nice bonus after more than 50 years.

Bill Dean--relaxing after a performance?
Photo by Leonard Borden

The first production of a play I wrote happened in the Studio Theatre that spring. It was called By the Sea By the Sea By the Sea By the Sea  or The Samuel Morse Songbook.  Ric Newman directed it.  Unfortunately I can't find a program that tells me who else was involved in the production.  As I've written elsewhere, its high point was a pantomime scene--done to the entire Beatles song "The Word"--of a group of elderly demonstrators being arrested by a motorcycle cop, played by Bill Dean, who came into the theatre, up a ramp and onto the stage, riding his actual motorcycle.

"Sunshine Superman" by Jack Herbig. Scanned
from the Siwasher 1967.  The title refers to
a song by British invader Donovan.

The play reflected my major obsessions of the year: partially digested McLuhan, and the continuing British invasion of my heart.  I played with McLuhanish ideas on media and perception; for example, the characters suddenly break into a television interview.  But the British invasion stuff--Beatles, Morgan!, Beyond the Fringe etc. was embarrassingly prominent.  I couldn't seem to believe a line could be funny unless delivered with an English accent.  But then, I wasn't the only one at the time who was smitten.  The American culture--especially youth culture-- had been undergoing this for several years, and it was soon to get even more pronounced.  So the audience laughed, and seemed pleased by the play's good spirits and antic disposition (one of the characters was The Great Dane, also known, of course, as Hairyman.)

Spring brought with it the annual awards.  I took first in the Bookfellow Library Contest--and it's because I catalogued my books to enter it, and those pages survived, that I now can identify the books I had then.  And I won something at least in poetry, though the Student article on the matter isn't entirely clear.  Henry Rago, nearing his final year as editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago, was the judge.   I was reading more poetry and trying to assimilate it (I loved James Wright, and had books by Bly, Corso, Creeley, Ginsberg, Lorca, Levertov, Snyder, Lowell and Kenneth Patchen as well as Cummings, Hart Crane, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Stevens, Williams, Whitman,  D.H. Lawrence and Dylan Thomas) but I can't say much good about my poems in the Siwasher, except they're a bit better than the year before.  Maybe one good metaphor.

Sam Moon reading, Howard Wilson in
foreground.  Leonard Borden photo.

What wasn't reflected in those poems was my growing interest in spoken word poetry, partly influenced by McLuhan's suggestion of a return to sound and oral tradition, partly by the readings of poets who came to campus, especially the more dramatic readers like Robert Bly. That tendency would get even stronger in the coming year, when I discovered the Liverpool Poets who wrote their poems to be read before audiences at jazz and rock clubs.  But even that spring, public readings were becoming more frequent and pointed as part of protests.  I already had Bly's collection of A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War which he probably brought with him to Knox.

I combined these interests in the poem I read at the protest/teach-in on the Old Main lawn, called "Things To Do Instead of the Army."  The direct inspiration in a number of ways was Gary Snyder.  Among the work he read at Knox were several poems called Things to Do.  (He published three in Poetry magazine: "Things To Do in Seattle", "...in San Francisco," and "..on a Ship At Sea.")

Rick Clinebell singing, Steve Goldberg watching.
Leonard Borden photo.

At Knox he remarked that these poems were both particular and universal; they were his particular experiences, but they were the kind of things anyone could do and write about.  Though he may not have said so, they were also especially effective when read out loud to an audience.

The "Things To Do"--which is a kind of list that everybody makes, as well as a catalog of possible experiences, like a guidebook to having a good time somewhere--grabbed my imagination, especially as I was already thinking about the oral and even mythic dimensions of reading poetry in public.  It had that very McLuhanesque quality of participation, because the audience is part of it.

I said some of these things in a short Revolver column that appeared in the last Student issue of that spring.  I asserted that the "Things To Do" poem could be a legitimate poetic form, like the sonnet or lyric.  (For the record, Sam Moon disagreed with me, and curiously Snyder did not publish these poems in any of his books that I know, especially not in his Mountains and Rivers Without End sequence he announced them as being part of.  But since then, at least one other published poet has tried one: Dan Albergotti, whose poem "Things To Do in the Belly of the Whale" was featured in the Writers Almanac in 2015.)

The Beatles bicycling in Nassau in Help!

My column also included the first few lines and several of the last lines of "Things To Do Instead of the Army,"  maybe half of the poem I read.  Like previous Things To Do poems I'd written, it includes things I'd actually done, or someone else had, though this one sometimes reflected my experiences in ways I wasn't even conscious of.  (The first line is "bicycle riding in nassau," which I doubt I consciously associated with a scene in one of my touchstone movies.  Then again, maybe I did intend this.)

 But otherwise, through odd proposals it tries to imaginatively suggest that there are alternatives that make more sense that going to war, as something we're just supposed to do next.  It was one attempt to break out of the apparent logic of Vietnam and the draft that adherents repeated, often with undisguised condescension.

I'm not sure if I wrote that column because I'd caught wind of what else the Student was publishing in what appears to be a four page issue, but a goodly amount of its inside space was taken up with two attacks on a person never named.  That person was me.  I can imagine the bewilderment of readers who weren't on the inside of this reference, and had no idea of who was the subject of a fable about an imitator who went too far.  The shorter of the two pieces came right out and used the word "plagiarism."

The complaint stemmed not just from general observations, including the Things To Do poems I'd published, but a specific line in one of them. It was in "Things To Do in Iowa City," which was about the Gentle Tuesday event I attended, as did other Knox students and faculty, that featured Allen Ginsberg.  I referred to a "quaint and magical house."  I had in fact read that combination of words on a piece of paper posted on the bulletin board in the Seymour Union, advertising a house for rent.  I don't recall seeing any names attached to this paper.

David Warner in Morgan!

This was the era of the found poem, the pop pastiche, the collage. (I was later to use verbatim a promotional paragraph from American Chickle that appeared in my mailbox, in What's Happening, Baby Jesus.)  I did what writers have been doing forever: I repositioned those words--those anonymous words-- in another context.  (I hasten to add that I have more rigorous standards for non-fiction.)

Whether or not this use of these three words in a poem is in any sense plagiaristic, according to the mores of that time or any other, is debatable.  (I assume they weren't claiming copyright on "and.")
 Unfortunately the veiled accusations appeared in the last issue of the year, and couldn't be debated in its pages or anywhere else.  And by the next fall it was forgotten.  I note, however, that one of these pieces begins beside the ads for the local movie theaters.  Now (that is, then) playing at the West: Morgan!

So this quaint and magical year ended, but on a high note: in early June (as I've written about earlier) I spotted Bill Thompson turn the corner purposefully and head towards the record store in downtown Galesburg.  And I knew why.  The latest Beatles record must have just arrived, and so an hour later we were back at his rented house, listening to Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

(I might mention in this context that this particular record includes a song by John Lennon in which the lyrics are almost entirely taken from a circus poster on his wall.)

And so the summer began.  Before I left Knox, I once again had an assured place to live in the fall, and once again had my choice of summer jobs.  And once again, none of it happened.

The Dancing Balloon with Emerson and Thoreau

In the Knox College spring term of 1967, I took a 16th Century English Literature course from Mr. Brady.  At that time we were both on the Faculty Committee for Student Affairs, and our interactions there could be described as inflaming mutual frustration.  Our conflicts would become oddly defined in public in the upcoming fall term.  But whatever bad feelings there might have been at this point did not spill into this course.

I have two surviving papers from this course: one short, the other longer.  I got an A on both.  Brady even included a pun in his comments on the short paper, which was on a poem by Thomas Wyatt, in which a central metaphor was a filesmith's file.  Along with the grade, Brady wrote: "Far superior to the rank and file."  (He did not however get my joking reference to a contemporary novel I was enthusiastic about: Richard Farina's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me.) On my longer paper on Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, he disapproved of the "staccato style," but concluded "it's a very good job."  

Truth is I didn't much care for 16th century literature--but it is interesting that the approach I took to the Faerie Queene was to focus on "innocence as the essence of ideal love," carrying on a theme I followed in 20th century writer Scott Fitzgerald in winter term.  One paragraph is worth quoting to indicate my thoughts and feelings on the subject at that time, and for years later:

"Innocence, openness, gentlenesss, are the qualities of love that make it what it is--the conciliator of disparate elements in human experience.  It must often be a fostered innocence, deliberate, treasured.  And it does not always promise perfection, for love blends the mortal and the immortal, but is not wholly of either.  It is poignant."

The chief element of this course that I remember is an assigned book: The Allegory of Love by C.S. Lewis, particularly the first two chapters, on Courtly Love and on Allegory.  Impressions of these lasted beyond the course.

Now I come to the course on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau taught by Douglas Wilson in spring 1967.  The opportunity to read and study these two writers has had perhaps the most lasting effect on my life of any literature course in college.  I can't imagine my life if I hadn't read them that tumultuous spring.  They were a necessary connection to nearly everything that came before, and nearly everything that would come after.

As with the Walt Whitman/Wallace Stevens course the spring before, Doug Wilson's enthusiasm infused this experience.  I can't read any of these writers--Whitman, Stevens, Emerson or Thoreau--without thinking of Doug Wilson.

But even before his knowledge and enthusiasm was displayed in the classroom, Wilson made this course memorable by the choice of books we used as texts.

Emerson's best known works were his essays, and Thoreau's was Walden.  But the specific books Wilson chose both broadened the view of these writers, and placed their work in context.

Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Riverside paperback edited by Stephen E. Whicher, placed Emerson's major essays in the context of his journal entries surrounding the times of their composition.  The book also included Emerson's poems, which Wilson did not neglect in class.  We probably were assigned the Prentice-Hall volume of Emerson criticism, also edited by Stephen Whicher, along with Milton Konovitz.

Similarly, the Norton Critical Editions paperback of Walden and Civil Disobedience included not only the full texts but excerpts from Thoreau's journals, plus reviews and critical essays, ranging from Thoreau's contemporaries (including George Eliot and Emerson) to modern writers and critics, including Van Wyck Brooks, F.O. Matthiessen, Sherman Paul and E.B. White.

Providing further context was what for me was the most valuable addition: H.D. Thoreau: A Writer's Journal, selected and edited by Laurence Stapleton (Dover, which kept Thoreau's entire published journals in print for years, along with other Thoreau books.)  How thoroughly I consumed this volume (for this class and a later independent studies) is indicated by the profusion of underlinings and check marks throughout.  The idea behind the selection was to highlight entries--some of them quite long--that illuminate Thoreau as consciously a writer.

These kinds of contexts not only informed the main texts but made the course more involving, more personal, and more of an adventure.

Unlike Whitman and Stevens,  Emerson and Thoreau came from the same place at the same historical moment--in fact they were close friends for years, and the younger Thoreau even lived for awhile in the Emerson household.  That historical moment involved the Transcendentalist movement, so we had Selected Writings of the American Transcendentalists (Signet paperback) as background (My copy has underlining only in the introduction and first chapter.)

My copy of Thoreau's book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, dates from this time, and it may have been an assigned text.  I also acquired The Portable Thoreau that spring.

My feeling for Emerson and Thoreau was genuine during the course, but my sense of them in history and literary history comes later, as well as the obviously inaccessible knowledge of their role in my personal history.  Surviving papers show concerns somewhat derived from academic questions that were probably prominent at that moment, and an approach that still derives largely from philosophical analysis.

About history: today I see Emerson and Thoreau partly in historical context--a context I can feel, imaginatively, that I could not back then.  My feel for this history begins with imagining the historical contexts of my parents and grandparents generation, and the generation before that.  That takes me into the latter 19th century.  The Civil War era was not of much interest to me when I was young.  I grew up in western Pennsylvania, where the French & Indian war was fought, and in a town named after a general of the American Revolution.  That period was somewhat alive. In grade school I greatly admired Thomas Jefferson.  But even this period was merely "long ago," along with Davy Crockett and Robin Hood.

Even in college, historical periods were discrete and unconnected coalitions of facts and personalities.  In literature I was interested in the writer, not the period. I recall Mr. Wilson asking the class at one of our first Emerson/Thoreau meetings, who was President in the 50s?  I immediately said Eisenhower.  Of course he meant the 1850s.  But that combination of numbers meant nothing to me.  I was interested in what Thoreau and Emerson had to say to me NOW.  We were the Now Generation, after all.  But part of it was a failure of imagination because of a lack of experience: i.e. I was young.   Some of my contemporaries in college had that historical sense.  I did not. As I used to say in the 1990s, I got interested in history when I'd had some.

 A short paper wound its way through Emerson's essay on Art, with reference to contemporary trends in art, of which I actually knew little.  My final paper on Emerson was more ambitious, returning to the theme of innocence (footnotes include references to a book called Radical Innocence by Ihab Hassan, though I have no memory of it--some credit Hassan with the term "postmodernism"), the nature of good and evil, and Transcendentalism vs. existentialism.  The paper is interesting but mostly an emotional mess, clearly written with a distracted mind and a broken heart. It marks the low point of my spring affair, as well as a surfeit of other influences--the aftereffects of campus visits by Gary Snyder and John Cage among them.

 After this course at Knox, I acquired various collections of Emerson, including several old hardbacks: a Greystone Press edition of essays, the Modern Library abridgement of his journals, and a Chelsea Classics edition of Representative Men.   

To a paperback edition of Thoreau: The Major Essays (Dutton), I added new editions of some late Thoreau works: Faith in a Seed (Island Press 1993, edited by Bradley P. Dean), which calls itself Thoreau's Last Manuscript, at least until Wild Fruits:Thoreau's Rediscovered Last Manuscript (Norton 1999, also edited by Bradley P. Dean.)  I also got a few more books on the transcendentalists,  including Philip F. Gura's 2007 history, American Transcendentalism.

I also received (as review copies) several in the series of Yale University Press annotated Thoreau volumes, but I didn't care for the format (two columns of text, with annotations on both sides of them, plus a lot of white space.)  I did hold onto one of them--I to Myself, a selection from the journals.

But my major new adventure into Emerson and Thoreau began when I read a review by John Banville in the New York Review of Books of December 3, 2009. The review began with the greatest opening sentence of any review I've ever read, and quite possibly my favorite sentence ever.  It is: "Surely mankind's greatest invention is the sentence."

I've been wrapping my head around that ever since.

The review was of First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process by Robert D. Richardson.  This slim book also became one of my favorites.  And it introduced me to Richardson as biographer.

Over the next year or so I read his big three: Emerson: The Mind on Fire  (U. of CA 1995), Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (U. of CA 1986) and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Houghton Mifflin 2007.)  They led me as well to Richardson's selections of William James essays and of Emerson's essays, lectures and poems.  All three of the biographies are excellent in approach and as writing.

Emerson and Thoreau continue as living influences among contemporary American writers of various kinds, including the science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, the one fictionist whose books I buy immediately on publication.  In his Science in Washington trilogy (which he more recently edited into a single volume, Green Earth), one of his principal characters stumbled on a website called Emerson for the Day, and so quotations from Emerson and Thoreau became part of the text. (That website didn't actually exist, but for some years afterwards it did, because of those books.  I did a version of it on this site for awhile.) Then when Robinson visited Arcata several years ago, he advised his audience to read an entry in Thoreau's journals every morning, as he does.

There's much more that could be said about the influence of Emerson and Thoreau, and I will have a little more in my post on the upcoming summer of 67. But I will say this much here: in retrospect, it is evident that for me, Emerson and Thoreau were both a bridge from earlier literary enthusiasms, and a counter-example.  They were an American version of the English Romantics, and therefore a link to all that echoed in the Romantics (Wordsworth's "something more deeply interfused,/ Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,/And the round ocean and the living air,/And the blue sky, and in the mind of man/A motion and a spirit, that impels/All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts,/And rolls through all things...")

But Emerson and certainly Thoreau went beyond the pastoral identification with innocence as in Spenser or even Shakespeare, to reclaim nature itself and the beauty and essentiality of the wild in the world and in the human soul ("In wildness is the preservation of the world"--Thoreau.) That notion links them forward to poet-ecologist Gary Snyder and ecologist-poet Paul Shepard, and back even farther than English literature goes, to the Native American and other Indigenous and original cultures developed in the far past.

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.

The Archer City Kid

On the last Friday night of March, when I got up from my computer my glance fell on a bookshelf as I passed, and fixed for a moment on one slim book: Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen by Larry McMurtry.  I reflected for a second that it was the book that got me started on my “History of My Reading” series here, the only successful format I’ve found for any sort of autobiographical exploration.  I’ve been researching and writing it for several years now, with 45 entries, and I haven’t gotten past 1969.

 Then I took the ipad off the kitchen counter and into my den/library/mancave to do the New York Times Spelling Bee.  Scrolling down the news to it I saw Larry McMurtry’s obituary.  He’d died the day before.

 McMurtry had been publishing novels for a decade before I was aware of his work.  But he certainly started with a bang—his first novel Horseman, Pass By was immediately made into Hud, a classic Paul Newman movie.  His next two novels were also made into movies, though The Last Picture Show didn’t hit screens until 1971.

 I probably was first aware of his name in connection with that film, though I have no memory of either reading the novel or seeing the entire movie. But I probably did, at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, MA, when its director and co-star came to town a few years later.  McMurtry’s luck with selling stories to the movies had its downside, not so much from the flops as from the successes, particularly the iconic Lonesome Dove miniseries and the Terms of Endearment feature, which will overshadow the books at least until they become more readily available than the movies, and people who remember the movies die out. 

My first clear memory of his name is also from the early 70s, when I saw it on the cover of a novel titled All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers.  The title pissed me off, because it was too close to a title I’d intended to use: Friends And Other Strangers, which admittedly I’d stolen from a Bob Dylan song (and who knows who that famous packrat stole it from.)  I think I was mostly pissed off because I hadn’t written the book yet that the title would go on, and this guy McMurtry had.

  I was resentful enough that I refused to read the book.  Then one subsequent Sunday afternoon, visiting a young woman I’d recently met, I saw the paperback of this novel lying on a coffee table, at almost the precise moment that I realized I was never going to see this woman again.  Somehow I took that as a sign that the whole point of this non-relationship was to point me back to this book.

 So I bought it, I read it, I loved it, and read it again. I liked the character of young Danny Deck and the laconic yet precise, sometimes passionate and often bewildered first person voice of the narrative.  It was a book of its time and a book of my 20s. 

 Then shortly after his novel Terms of Endearment was published, I met McMurtry in Washington.  By then I was editing an alternative weekly, Washington Newsworks, and our publisher was the sister of a McMurtry lady friend, and possibly a partner in his Washington bookstore.  So when I went to a public talk McMurtry gave, I had an introduction.

 I don’t remember anything about meeting him after the talk, except that it was brief.  I was mostly interested in getting him to write something for the paper.  What I chiefly remember is my impression of his talk.  I was astounded at his voice: indolent, insolent and insinuating, or in a word, Texan.  Of course I knew he was Texan, and that the Danny Deck novel was set in contemporary Texas.  But when I read that dialogue, I didn’t hear Texas voices in my head.  That remained true for his novels set in contemporary times that I read later.  Some essays published after his death fixated on the resonance of Texas cities and scenes in his novels.  To me all of that was irrelevant.  (In my own defense, I’ll point out that none of the major characters in the movie version of Terms of Endearment sound particularly Texan, and the words sound just fine.)

 Probably my period of sustained attention to McMurtry’s novels was in the late 70s and early 1980s—the pre-Lonesome Dove 80s.  This was the period of Somebody’s Darling (a novel about Hollywood he later denigrated), Cadillac Jack and The Desert Rose (the novel set in Las Vegas that years later he called his favorite.)  I read these, while re-reading All My Friends... and Terms of Endearment, which by then was a hit movie with Jack Nicholson and Shirley McLaine in great late performances, and Debra Winger in one of the best performances ever.

 It was around then that I had my first and only conversation with Larry McMurtry.  (It hadn’t even occurred to me when I was in Washington that I could have walked into his Georgetown bookstore and chatted many times.  Sometimes my cluelessness astonishes me. Though I recall this was also an occasional quality of Danny Deck.) 

 My paper was no more, and I was back in my Pennsylvania home town when I tried to contact McMurtry for some freelance story I was working on—I don’t remember how or what the story was.  But one day the phone rang and it was him.  He didn’t have much to say about whatever it was I called him about—it must have had something to do with movies because when he demurred, he noted that he enjoyed the people he worked with there and wanted to continue. 

 So instead we talked about his books.  I proposed my theory that he’d written a kind of trilogy that included All My Friends and Terms of Endearment.  He agreed—he’d deliberately written that trilogy including those two books, but I’d gotten the third book wrong.  I thought the third was Somebody’s Darling, which does center on a character known to the main characters of the other two.  But even then, he downplayed that book.  No—I had missed the first of the trilogy, a novel called Moving On.  I hadn’t even heard of it, which seemed to delight him—he recommended it.  It was one of his books that, at least at the time, he liked. 

Nowadays, this trilogy is considered part of McMurtry’s “Houston Series” of six novels, which also includes Somebody’s Darling.  The next to last in the cycle is Some Can Whistle, which works out the final fate of Danny Deck.  I so disliked this novel that it put me off reading McMurtry for awhile. 

But on his advice I had read and liked Moving On.  Bill Holland, a musician and songwriter friend in Washington who was becoming a book scout, sent me a copy. He had a spare because it turned out to be a book club edition.  McMurtry always considered his work as a book scout and bookstore owner at least as significant in his life as being a novelist.  I wonder what he’d think about the fact that I’d sold the few first editions of his novels I owned to help finance my move to California.  He’d probably approve. 

 McMurtry subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove, and became a Lonesome Dove and Old West industry with novels begetting mini-series after mini-series.  The books had a lot of charm, owing perhaps to his belief that the 19^th century western figures were basically English Victorian in speech and otherwise.  He later won an Academy Award for the script to Brokeback Mountain, from a story by Annie Proulx that he admits he should have written.

 In the week or so since I read of his death, I’ve re-read Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, which has to be a unique book in his writing career.  I noted first that his comments on the dearth of books to read in his youth was a very small part of it.  He did mention a cache of boys books that got him started, and the My Book House volumes, both of which were part of my childhood.  These are the element that got me started exploring the history of my reading. But most of the book is not about all that, exactly. Although it is a brilliant, fertile book, it’s hard to say what it is about.  The autobiographical underpinning is probably its most consistent feature, though perhaps it is more an autobiography of the West.

  It started out to address the assertion made by Walter Benjamin in his essay “The Storyteller,” that storytelling in the classic sense has gone from the world.  McMurtry notes that this kind of storytelling—ordinary people telling stories to each other—was something he experienced in his childhood, before he’d read a single book.  But the places where these stories were told had largely disappeared.  In his hometown of Archer City, the natural gathering place was now the town’s Dairy Queen, which is where he read that essay.  He wondered if even there he could discern if stories were still being told.

 He wanders away from this promising beginning pretty quickly, though he makes gestures of returning to the topic now and again, and maybe in a subtle way he does.  Some of this book is very carefully written, deliberately so.  McMurtry’s lifelong habit was to toss off five pages at the typewriter every morning, as quickly as he could.  For at least parts of this book he wrote slowly, with a pen. 

But other parts of this short book contain repetitions that suggest chapters were cobbled together from other sources—prefaces to other writers’ books, etc.  However, in several places particularly, this book is uncharacteristically reflective.  He expresses his ambivalence at writing so much about the old West, when he knew that the Old West was basically a Hollywood myth, and that the actual era of the big cattle drives and the open range was the blip of perhaps 20 or 30 years total.  He set out to de-mythologize the West, and admits that instead he created a new myth, beginning with a Quixote story called Lonesome Dove that got out of hand.

 On the other hand, he was in his youth an actual cowboy on an actual ranch outside Archer City, and his grandparents—who lived with him as he grew up—were authentic pioneers in that part of Texas.  He was in that sense writing out of his own life and experiences.  He was especially conscious that his father maintained a lifelong commitment to ranching even though he knew it was a lost cause (he admitted to being in debt for 55 straight years.)  Here McMurtry suggests the Old West was a way for him to understand his father’s “essentially tragic” take on his otherwise happy life.

 The Walter Benjamin book’s subtitle is “Reflections At Sixty And Beyond” (He was 63 when it was published) and McMurtry becomes especially reflective in the final pages.  He writes that his major achievement may turn out to be the same as his father’s: he kept his good name and passed it on to his “gifted and responsible” son.  He considers that maybe two or three of his books are “good,” (without saying which ones.) “I would have liked my fiction to have a little more poise, a little more tact—but those are qualities that seem to have found their way into my son’s songs, and that is satisfaction enough.”  His son, James McMurtry, is a singer-songwriter, as now is his grandson, Curtis McMurtry.

 McMurtry made lit biz news in recent years when he moved back to his hometown and amassed a mammoth number of books in his Archer City bookstores, filling several buildings on its decaying main street.  The town where in his youth the only books sold were drugstore paperbacks now had more books for sale that any other town in America. When some of those buildings started falling apart, he had a huge book sale, but still retained more books than the few surviving used and antiquarian bookstores of big cities possess.  (The decline of bookstores in his lifetime is a theme he sets besides the melancholy self-defeat of the cowboy and the Old West.)

 Unlike some book scouts and bookstore owners, he loved reading the books he acquired.  He seemed to retain an enormous amount from his wide-ranging reading.  (The daughter of his close friend and writing partner Diana Ossana described him as “a data base with opinions.”)  The worst moments after his major heart surgery in the early 90s, he wrote, was when he was unable to read.  

 “In my seventh decade,” he concludes, “I feel a new haste, not to write but to read.”  It does seem that he’d stopped writing largely for love some time ago.  But he didn’t lose his pure love for reading.  He was eighty-four when he stopped, the last Thursday in March 2021.  May he rest in peace.  His work lives on.