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<Title><H2> ROBERT CREELEY A Poem  for Albert Cook –followed by a biography </h2></title></head>

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ALBERT
SPAULDING COOK ( July 7, 1998)

ROBERT CREELEY

from The Scope of Words edited by Peter
Baker,

Sarah
Webster Goodwin, and Gary Handwerk

(Peter
Lang, NY, 1991)

For Al

What we
got on

kept happening, happening--

parallax landscape,

days passing--

All that
world of heroic echoes,

passionate belief--

One's
intent to get there,

night's sleep--

I remember
Professor Nock

and Latin prosody

at eight in the morning

in Widener Library--

I remember
you then so bright,

intent, determined--

All that
you got done

was earned, was earned--

But now
clouds, say, or breezes

lift you, lift you- Now they see

the ampleness of it all

was for free, for free.

POETRY
BOOKS

1998    The Sometime Master

The
Edwin Mellen Poetry Press

Reasons for Waking

The
Edwin Mellen Poetry Pres

1997    Haiku

The
Edwin Mellen Poetry Press

The
Future Invests

The
Edwin Mellen Poetry Press

1996    Reasons for Waking

The
Edwin Mellen Poetry Press

1994    Affability Blues

The
Edwin Mellen Poetry Press

1993    Modes

The
Edwin Mellen Poetry Press

1992    Delayed Answers

The
Edwin Mellen Poetry Press

1992    Modulars
poems on a new metrical principle

see also Modern Poetry Studies.

The
Edwin Mellen Poetry Press

1981    Adapt the Living

The
Swallow Press

1072    The Charges Reprint
(paper)

The
Swallow Press

1970    The Charges

The
Swallow Press

1963    Progressions

The
University of Arizona Press

POEMS
(Alphabetical by Journal)

Alaska Quarterly Review 1:3-4 (Spring 1983): p.56
"XVII" from

Modes

Art and
Literature, 11 (Winter 1967), pages 124-125 "Poems (Barriers)" and

"Hands for the Space of Wisdom."

Art and
Literature, 6 (Autumn 1965), pages 168-174.
Translations of Poems

by Paul Celan

Audit,
II:2 pages 15-20. "The
Faring," "Theatre," "Lesson of Journeys."

Audience,
A Quarterly of Literature and the Arts, (1962)  VIII:3 Issue 49

pages 59-60 "Retoucher of
Moonlight."

Brown
Classical Journal, No. 3 (1986) pages 31-32. "LIII,"
from Modes.

Canto,
I:3 (Fall 1977) page 121. "Waiting
Minotaur."

Centennial
Review, The XX:4 (Fall 1976) pages 376-377. "The Old Mother."

Chelsea, 9 (March 1961) "Composition of Place
II," "Heartening for the

Voyage."

Circle
Review (Cleveland, Ohio), III:1
(Spring 1967) n.p. "The good

politician at his constituents' party for him."

Colorado
Quarterly, The IX:3 (Winter 1961), pages 239-240. "Weekend."

Denver
Quarterly, The (University
of Denver), XVII:2 (Summer 1982) pages

118-121.  "XII"and "XIII" from Modes.

Poems from Modulars</I,Delayed Answers,Modes and
Affability Blues are included in Peter Baker, ed., Onward: Contemporary Poetry
& Poetics, Peter Lang, 1996

PLAYS

COMPLETED MANUSCRIPTS

ARCHES,
CAKEWALK, DOUBLING, THE EMPEROR OF CHINA,
THE FROZEN TURKEY
AND

THE
VANISHING DOLLS, OBJECT: GO, THE PINATA,SCRIMMAGE,
SNAPPING TO, TRIAL

JOURNEY, ZAP.

PRODUCTIONS AND PUBLICATIONS

OEDIPUS
REX of Sophocles, translated into English verse.  Printed in

Ten
Greek Plays, Houghton Mifflin, 1957 and Reading
for

Pleasure Prentice-Hall, 1960. POublished in
Oedipus Rex: A Mirror

for
Greek Drama San Francisco
1963, and reprinted several othr times

in
anthologies. Produced at the Tribultary Theatre of Boston (two-week

run),
the Cleveland
Playhouse (three-week run)and others. Included in

Greek
Tragedy:An Anthology,
revised edition Wayne,
1993

DOUBLE
EXPOSURE (full length) Edlred Theatre, Cleveland, 1958

NIGHT
GUARD  (one
act) broadcast by WBAI, New York
and KPFA San

Francisco,1962

BIG
BLOW (full length) Chamber Theatre, Buffalo,
1964

CHECK
(full length) Chamber Theatre, Buffalo,
1966

PAN
IS DEAD (full length) staged reading, Playwright's Platform

Boston, March 1985

THE
DEATH OF TROTSKY, THEATRE AND DRAMA, Spring 1971

RECALL
American Hoerspiele ed by
Richard Kostelanetz.

LESLIE FIEDLER'S MEMORIAL TALK

Leslie Fiedler Just this
morning I received what purported to be a final version of today's memorial for
Al Cook, in which my contribution is listed under the heading of
"Fiction." It will not be - intentionally, at least -fiction, or for
that matter, poetry, but only the prosiest of prose. I have been moved to
memorialize Al Cook not as a poet but as a scholar, teacher, and especially
creator of an environment in which others (including me) could practice those
homely arts freely and joyously. It seemed to me, there fore, only fitting to
cast what I had to say in the form of a (mercifully very brief) mini-lecture
based on an appropriate, though cryptic text from the Talmud which reads in one
translation, "He who quotes correctly hastens the coming of the
Messiah." I take this to mean that the conscientious researcher and
teacher in addition to preserving and transmitting consciously what in his time
is considered the best that has been thought and written in the past, somehow
also prepares the way, consciously or not, for future revisions and revelations
by self-declared prophets and saviors whom, when they actually appear, most of
their contemporaries will consider nuisances and nuts to be silenced at
whatever cost. But there are always a prescient few in any age who though they
do not finally share the new beliefs which they had anticipated do not harass
or imprison those who proclaimed them or seek to ban their books. In our time
Al Cook was, of course, on of tho se prescient few. I
am convinced, in fact, that had he actually encountered a messianic pretender
of the first rank--the founder of an enduring sect whose members would contend
that the founder had never died or would forever await a Second Coming - inst ead of posting "Closed" on the doors of the
academy much less calling the cops, Al would have offered him or her a full
professorship with tenure. He would have done so, moreover, on the spot,
ignoring or bypassing all customary bureaucratic delays. Nor would he have
checked first to make sure that the candidate had a proper Ph.D., or that the
course he/she proposed to teach would fill some previou
sly identified gap in the department's full coverage of English and American
Lit. Certainly Al would not have made the appointment contingent on whether or
not that candidate was able-bodied or disabled, straight or gay, on the
political right or left- m uch less whether he or she
belonged to a currently favored gender race, religion or race group: and least
of all, perhaps, practiced the chic critical methodology of the moment. Since,
however, Al never encountered such a world-class messiah, he had to make do
with talented and articulate but second or third rate eccentrics and small time
mischief makers- like me and a group of other chutzpadik,
loudmouthed, but finally congenia l colleagues whom
he recruited with the same contempt for administrative red tape and distrust of
both traditional academic and latter-day PC standards. By doing so he created
the unconventionally splendid and productive English Department which- though i t meant leaving my beautiful and beloved Montana - I
joined some thirty -five years ago: and in which I have, despite the many
changes in me and us, remained for long enough to appear here and declare my
gratitude to the unconventionally splendid and prod uctive
man who made it all possible: no just that department but the "me"
who says in closing, "Thank you, Al Cook."

RECENT REVIEWS

THE
REACH OF POETRY

William
Kumbier, Southern Humanities Review Summer 1998 v32
n3 p312

Charles
CagleThe Midwest Quarterly Spring 1997 v38 n3 p339

J.D
McGowan Choice Feb 1996 v33 n6 p945

CANONS
AND WISDOMS

Colin
Nicholson The Modern Language Review April 1995 v90 n2

p400(2)

B>W.
Whitlock Choice April 1994 v 31 n8 p1289(1)

THE
BURDEN OF SUFFERANCE: Women Poets of Russia

Victoria
A. Babenko-Woodbury World Literature Today Winter
1995

v68
n1 p162

Mary
f. Zinn Library Journal August 1993 V118 n 13 p 109

Autobiographical Statement

It was my mother who
fostered me and bolstered me from the beginning.She
grew up in an Ohio
village as the second eldest in a dirt-poor family of eight children. When she
was sixteen in her tiny high school she was given the Army Alpha intelligence
test, and she got a score higher than all but seven men of the entire World War
One U.S.
Army. She was immediately hailed as a prodigy, graduated, sent off to Ohio State,
and pulled into the swirl of life around campus. There she encountered my
father, a salesman travelling from New
England for Lever Brothers. She dropped out of school, married,
and deferred her education for forty years

.

My father, the pampered
youngest son of his family, was the first to graduate from college. He trained
briefly for the First War, further delayed his degree by easy living, but then
settled down into the staid, reserved life of a conservative executive. Already
officially engaged to an entirely appropriate fellow Yankee when he arrived in Columbus, he startled
everyone by making the mistake of breaking it off and marrying my mother. She
gave birth to me at the age of nineteen in the hospital of Exeter,
N ew Hampshire, the nearest
one to the village where my grandfather had settled as a cooper. Eventually he
had become the town clerk there, holding the office for decades. His wife ran
their large house for summer boarders, and she, my grandmother, seems to have
been the only member of the family who treated my disoriented mother decently.
We drove the distance there for cer emonial stays from wherever we happened to be living. They
saved the comic sections of the Boston
Sunday papers in a pile for me by the stove, and I rushed to them at each
arrival after the long drive.

I loved that house with
its screened-in porch of seemingly endless length, its screened-in small summer
house between it and the general store my grandfather had once run, its large,
fragrant woodshed now become a garage, stacked high with wood for the w inter,
its henhouse out back towards the woods that stood across a field behind, its
large kitchen around the giant black all-purpose stove where the beans were
slow-baked unfailinglyevery Saturday, its bins for
the dry beans and for flour, its large dini ng room where the family's early nineteenth century sampler
(now owned by my half-sister) hung over the giant rolltop
desk that held all the records of the town. There my grandfather would now and
then closet himself with some townsperson. Beyond the sun ny dining room was the large living room, opening on
the wraparound porch through a vestibule. It was organized around the console
radio where my grandparents would settle down to hear favorite serials.
Visiting the Frost Place a couple of years ago, I was surprised to see that on
a slightly smaller scale the house where Frost set his first New England poems
matched my grandparents' point for point: large stove, dining room, living
room, woodshed, henhouse, woods across a field behind.

The poorer house of my
Ohio grandparents was smaller and far shabbier: simple furniture, next to
nothing on the cracked walls, faded wallpaper, a pervasive smell of mould, and,
as I remember from my first visit, an outhouse. Behind it ran a muddy stream,
the Scioto River, where small freshwater crabs
could be found floating under rocks. They were used for bait by my grandfather
on fishing expeditions. I tried to capture him later in a poem my mother framed
and passed around to the family under a photograph of him holding a fishing
pole over his shoulder:

In
the river where you went fishing, crayfish

Trailed foetal white at the edge of the
brown sluggish current.

Behind
the iron railing trees grew too dense for deep shade

You
used doughballs for bait, crayfish lacking, and

were gone all afternoon,

Returning,
often as not, laden with car

Your eyes unladen. Such was your
decline.

Your
eyes affirmed that the burden of eight children

Constrained but did not depress the
unwizened

Indeterminate
set, scarce darkened by age,

Of their steel gray answer to
grandchildren and strangers.

Sent
into the world too young by your father's drink,

You avoided drink, from that Tennessee moved north,

Had
a family, and ended up papering houses,

Then
lived out the long rest of your life on a pension,

Fishing, or in the back room of the poolhall,
over cards.

You dealt, it was dealt, unbearably equally.

Yet
your gray coevals told at a Reunion

How
once, when young, in the forest, you found a honey tree...

Who
was bugler at the full military funeral

The
Legion gave you? Or was there a bugler?

Your
war was over, bugler, before you got to it.

Back
home, still, you lived decades on the memory of bugling,

On
the government pittance for it, and taught me to bugle

As
Memorial Day you bugled in the same town graveyard

Where veterans of a war without bugles have borne you, your

survivors.

When I was five,
breaking the move from Springfield to Albany, we rented a camp for the whole summer on Crooked Lake, staying into October. I learned to
swim there, pushing off our dock in my linen water wings for many weeks till
the great moment when I could leave them behind. We returned for the following
three summers, and during the last I swam all the way across the lake, followed
in our rowboat by my uncle Dave, one of my mother's brothers.

In our first Albany house we lived on
the edge of the city. At the end of our short block was a woods,
where I loved to wander. One path led, after what I remember as most of a mile,
to a large amusement park where I would stroll and watch the crowds, oc casionally feeding a penny
into the glassed machine where a mechanical gipsy would dip down and pick up
with a claw hand a random prize to deliver through a small chute. The other
path led to a steep hill off the main street, issuing behind a Catholic sc hool. That first Albany
house was far enough out that there was still a large farm with horses on my
walk in towards town to school. Do I really remember hearing the terrified neighings of the trapped horses as the barn burned down? I
did see the charre d remains on my walks.

Literature was all
around me, pervasive and elusive. At the time when I was drawn to a book of
Greek myths at the front of my first grade classroom, my uncle Paul arrived out
of his Ohio high school into our household in the teeth of the Depression. He
sold door-to-door off of a tray slung from his neck the pies my mother baked,
waited for the job with Protection Company where my father was a salesman, and
studied by lamplight in his attic room the manuals that would make him a
lieutenant in the Citizens Military Training Corps, a supply major in Australia
during the War, and, it all counting, an early-retired Cape Canaveral technical
writer turned real estate agent. Back then he also wanted to write and won
contests from Black Mask magazine, writing in his off hours from the Protection
private police force.

Of all my many cousins,
the only writer of the lot published in his youth a play with French's. After
the war he settled down for life as an itinerant high school class photographer
among the country and mill towns become fringe exurbs, not far from the farms
of my father's ancestors. A recent visitor to those farms is my much younger
half-sister, a journalist who aspires to write fiction.

My mother, a lifelong
would-be writer, spoke anxiously in her final months about the unread books of
poems on her shelf. They stood behind her flights, at long-spaced moments of
stress, into conventional verse. My radio-announcer younger brother, when he
broke away from the big time, wanted also to break into being a writer via the
tape recorder, which was to give private shape to what he kept so successfully
uttering in public. In that new mode he sailed to a dream of Tahiti;
there he married for good a mute, obsessive Polynesian, his fourth wife, his
widow now.

When we moved from Albany to Utica my parents
sent me for three entire summers to the Albany
Y camp, where I improved my swimming and learned to develop pictures in the
camp darkroom. There I practiced the bugle that my Ohio grandfather had begun teaching me,
becoming one of the camp buglers my last summer, when I was twelve.

My father was
transferred from city to city. And within the cities we would move as well. Our
second Albany house, further in toward the city,
also abutted a wood, one that was later levelled to
make room for the campus of SUNY Albany.
The third was an a partment
most of the way downtown. In Utica
too, our first house was even further out, on the actual property of a farm. My
walk to school led through part of a wood, along railroad tracks, and across an
open field. That field was later levelled for a pla yground where I played paddle
ball, tennis, basketball, and pickup football. Still later the playground was levelled to build a GE plant where my future brother-in-law
would find the employment that freed him from the family business. And still
later the GE plant was abandoned.

Starting in Albany, my
father soon showed his unhappiness with my mother by staying away from our
house longer and longer, even on days when he was not travelling.
Typically he would make us wait in the car for sometimes over an hour while he
completed s ome errand, and even when I was in my
teens on ceremonial father-son fishing expeditions he would park me on a rock
and disappear for hours upstream where the fish really were, returning with his
full creel to me and my empty pole. He loved to drive, and we spent Sundays
those years exploring the terrain north, south, east, and west of the city
where we happened to be living.

Our second house in Utica was a flat on the
main street near an orphanage; our third one up a hill
on the best street in town. Behind the houses across the street a wooded ravine
fed down into a sewer running a mile or so underground, roofed high enough t o
permit surreptitious expeditions through it to the other side of our district.
And a mile or so out the railroad tracks into another neighborhood stood a
movie theater, the James, where every Saturday afternoon I could see two films,
serials, cartoons, and an amateur show, while munching complimentary popcorn,
all for a dime. Later the theater was converted to a synagogue in honor of a
schoolmate who died early. I had many friends, and I was included as a possible
though ungifted player in the seasonal sports, baseball, football, and
basketball, the seasons changing as if by magic when one day on the impromptu
field as we were playing baseball a couple of boys would be passing a football
off in the wings, and within a week everybody would be playing football.

A confident and
exploratory twelve-year-old, I delivered magazines on a weekly route, swam on
the seventh grade team, sang as a soprano in the paid choir of the downtown
Episcopal church, worked quickly up the ranks as a Boy Scout in my own
Congregational church. When our scoutmaster resigned, I took it on myself to
ring the doorbell of a neighbor I hardly knew and asked him to assume the post
(which he did). I learned out of a pamphlet ordered from a novelty company and
succeeded in hypnotising my brother and some of my
friends. Word got around: on the school playground some unknown kid from
another class would come up, blurt out "Hypnotise
me!" and dash away.

Just before my
thirteenth birthday we got the news that this idyll was over. My father had
been promoted by a transfer back to the home office in Boston. In the new school I was refused
admission to the college entrance track because I had not had the oth ers' opportunity to start
French in seventh grade. I offered to try to catch up ("I'll try very
hard. I already know a few French words; I'm a stamp collector"). But I
was placed in the shop program, on a metal lathe, where I turned out a metal
rock hamme r that I put to use for my rock collecting
expeditions on the wooded hills up from our new house. This recalled my
experience in the new school on our second Albany move when I was nine and found myself
in a class where strangely no other child in the ro om could answer any questions.
That lasted only a couple of weeks till I was transferred from this bottom
track to the top track.

And then later that
Boston year we moved again, this time to an apartment on the edge of a fancy
suburb where the new school, full of the affluent (five of the twenty boys in
that eighth grade were later in my Harvard class), threw me heavily off
balance. By May it was announced that by this school's assessment I was failing
in all subjects. If my mother had not stormed in to protest, I would have had
to repeat the grade. They decided to let me graduate. They gave me the role of
bugler at commencement, a nd then abruptly withdrew
it when they remembered that the offspring of a legendary Brahmin family (who
died that summer in a hunting accident) had taken a few trumpet lessons and so
could adapt more appropriately for my role---just as when I won a spelli ng bee against the
offspring of another legendary family, the star of the school (later a Marshall
of my Harvard Class and a renowned lawyer), they declared a mismatch and
started over.

All
that year I had noticed widening cracks in the family unity, though no open
arguments that I can recall, simply absences on my father's part and anger on
my mother's. It was announced over the summer that they were
separating. We drove back towards Ut ica to reinstall my
mother, my brother, and myself, while my father would return to Boston. Newspapers all
along our route announced the German invasion of Poland.

Our new house in Utica was not on the best
street in town this time; it was a rooming house my mother set up on the main
street. She took a job as a clerk in a downtown hotel. Many of her old friends
snubbed her; we were now declasse. Very soon a
strange man appeared on our porch looking for me. My mother had set up an
interview with the supervisor of routes for the local newspaper. I was to
deliver papers to set aside money for college. My schedule abruptly changed. I
delivered papers every day for four years in all weathers, getting up at 5:45
to pick up my bundle that had been dumped on a nearby corner.

Walking
the route alone those early mornings I began composing poems in my head again,
writing them down and revising them at home.

My brother became
increasingly unmanageable and soon was sent away, first to a prep school that
expelled him for stealing apples in a nearby orchard, then on back to my
grandmother in the Ohio
village, to the very high school my mother had attended. He st
ayed there and graduated when I was in college.

In my solitary
independence I taught myself to play chess from a book. Soon tiring of feeble
games with my contemporaries, I ran a news item in the local paper that a
meeting of the (non-existent) Mohawk
Valley Chess Club was to
take place that month and prospective members should phone me. This notice
flushed out a local physician from a suburb, who phoned to ask whether a group
of professionals who met at his house monthly to play chess might join our
club. On my confession, he invited me to their nex t meeting, and I improved my chess through the
winter. I subscribed to the main chess monthly and bicycled one summer down to
Colgate for the day to observe some of the best players in the country at the New York State Chess championships. Later in a
war -depleted Harvard I was the shaky eighth board on an eight-man Harvard
chess team.

In ninth grade I became
editor of the school magazine where I had published in sixth grade a poem that
had already appeared in a newspaper column for children's writing. I began to
read poetry widely, and fiction, and philosophy---at first in popular int roductions and compendia and
then, as I got into tenth grade, in full treatises, some of which I dimly
understood. I realized that if I really wanted to read Plato I would have to
know Greek. By then I was in the high school downtown, where an earlier enl ightened superintendent of schools had hired as his heads
of departments men who were already teaching in college. One of these, a Ph.D.
in Classics, was still there. I approached him to teach me Greek, and I had
daily sessions with him for the rest of m y high school career, along with the
more usual Latin courses.

I was also ranging free,
often away from the larger rooming house my mother was running closer to
downtown. I intended to become a writer; I bought a typewriter and a manual and
taught myself to type, typing up stories and poems I never showed anywhere.

I was also becoming contestatory. Thrown out of the senior honors English class
for ostentatiously refusing to read an assigned trashy novel, and for arguing
with the sacrosanct Atlantic Monthly's wartime putdown of Spengler,
I became the first person ev er
from our school to win publication in that magazine's national prep school
contest; in their student prize fascicle they printed my sonnet sequence epigraphed with a quotation in Greek from Xenophanes, and they singled out for their prose honor list
my rhapsodic essay on the novels of Thomas Wolfe.

My sophomore year I was
chosen with two others in a school assembly contest to represent the city for a
station in Schenectady
that ran a Sunday program modelled on Quiz Kids. The
alcoholic speech teacher, with whom I had never studied, chose me to repres ent
the school at a statewide Youth Congress in Syracuse. And in my senior year, for the
local radio station on which my brother was to become an announcer some years
later, I was the male half of a duo hosting a children's program, The Wizard
and the Witch.

At the suggestion of
another English teacher I called on the city's one Rhodes scholar, a man who
had been fired from Hamilton during the Depression for a mild socialism, then
failed to take hold as a high school Latin teacher in spite of sponsorship from
the head of the Latin Department, my mentor. He was reduced to a job as night
watchman in the milk plant owned by one of his own classmates, the father of my
earlier hypnotism cronies up on the hill. Random nights I
listened in his living room to his disquisitions about history and politics,
walking home late.

Through the local bike
shop, where I had used my newspaper earnings to buy one of the town's few
English bicycles, I met the local checker players, a different stratum,
reaching down into factory workers and retirees like my Ohio grandfather, who
had ta ught me pointers
about the game. One of the articulate regulars around the stove in the bike
shop turned out to be the Congregational minister who had been imported from Scotland a few
years earlier to the church where I was a Boy Scout, and then fired f or having
an affair with a parishioner. He was now estranged from her and working as a
printer.

The owner of the bike
shop organized day-long rides through the nearby communities, of ninety miles
or so out and back, on the then lightly used highways. And I went on forays of
my own: one to Lake Champlain, from which my companion and I took the train
back; one to visit my cousins in Michigan; and one which started out north to
Watertown and became on an impulse we voiced as we crossed the bridge over the
Thousand Islands a six-hundred-fifty mile circuit of Lake Ontario, lasting a
week and taking us, in late September, 1941, through a Canada that was already
at war. I was written up in the newspaper and dressed down by the high school
guidance counselor. I bicycled all over the routes surrounding the city, at random,
or on expeditions to collect rocks (I found garnets on one, a glacier-scraped
piece of shale on another).

Summers I hung around
the tennis courts, meeting there a fellow aspiring poet, who later became a
published one, a colleague and lifelong friend. I also hung around the bowling
alleys, where I made another friend who distinguished himself in our elective
course on European history, later a CIA man and library administrator who in
his retirement has become a cabinet maker, working on refinishing some cabinet
doors for us as I write.

My parents were still
only separated. The summer before my senior year I joined my father in Boston, taking a room in
an apartment building next door to the building where he had a room. We met
every night for supper. I got a job in the Boston ball park s hawking pop and hot dogs.
In the locker room under the stadiums I was roughed up and ostracized by the
clannish townies who had bullied me on the streets when I was in eighth grade.
That summer fueled both my fears and my aspirations. And the aspiration s, if
nourished, I felt, could provide an escape from what I feared, the world of
rough survival in which the company of other hawkers jostled. Another place beckoned, the Harvard Yard and the Harvard Library. I
dropped into the Widener Reading Room and c onned its
shelves of books on reserve for English courses. And on the steps of the Fogg
Museum I heard a sentence
uttered that still rings in my mind: it epitomized the cultural speculation I
sought: "So it's simple, James, the more decadent the society
, the more flamboyant the architecture." Indeed, given the
approximate age of the speaker and the itself flamboyant British accent in
which the sentence was uttered, I fancy I can identify him, though I have never
met him, nor have I ever heard him since.

Writers
everywhere. In Utica generations before my time of growing
up there a pre-Civil crude symbolic logic worked out during his off hours and
presented before the Utica Lyceum; he turned it into a book that was buried
nearly a century till its resurrec tion and republication by a symbolic logician at Berkeley
while I was teaching there in the early fifties. Harold Frederic, whom I first
heard of from a Berkeley colleague, surveyed in Utica the stresses and limitations of
Methodist bureaucracy and Cathol ic sophistication. An imperious woman led him to
transplant all this to the Surrey of Henry James (whose grandfather laid out
the streets of Utica), and of Stephen Crane, who
had studied at nearby Syracuse
University. Having made
his name with an evocativ e story about a victimized
prostitute, Crane had married a trapped, devoted madam. Frederic would have
found there a context for his own personal, powerful maturation of those
relevant sexual sympathies; and, indeed, comparable considerations had alread y been sketched out in the pamphlets, bearing a
Utica imprint, of the Oneida Community, located between Utica
and Syracuse.
Another local writer, Thomas Jones, Jr., most persistent and perdurable of
sonneteers, was published first by the Thomas Bird Mosh
er who early gave Pound a cold shoulder; and
ultimately by one of the major publishers, who had done likewise. Jones was a
crony of the busy poetaster Clinton Scollard, who
taught at Hamilton College where Pound briefly studied and graduated, in
what is n ow a suburb of Utica. I gathered these two poets, and
others, into an anthology of Utica
poets I compiled when I was in high school, seeing myself as on the way to
becoming one of their number. On my newspaper route, living in a large, single
first-floor room in a rundown mansion of the main, elm-shaded street, was the
retired Hamilton
professor who had taught Pound Provencal. That tradition must have provided
some of the books for the glassed-in bookcase he warned me away from as I
approached it in the business of collecting on my newspaper rounds. Nor did he
recognize me when he came by around midnight Saturdays to the Kewpee, the hamburger joint where I worked on the weekend
night shift. He sat quietly over his pie and coffee when the Roller Drome c rowd after its closing
flooded in for giant burgers and Frosted Malteds.

Then there was my high
school hitchhiking crony, picked up by a local Communist because he published a
fantasy story in the high school literary magazine about a Soviet soldier
kissing the Russian earth. Much later in life he paid to put into print the c areful fruits of metaphysical, social, and religious
meditation, including some measured comment on the Soviets, his balance riding
the crest of desperation in both (if not all) instances. Retired now, he toys
with the bad idea of giving a bad novel he ha s written another vanity
publication.

A few miles north in
nearby Talcotville intermittently the pastoralizing, patronizing, crude and urbane critic, Edmund
Wilson, who by implication allows for little of this, was writing away at his
own local impressions and investigations. Within easy drive was the friendly
anthropologist-bureaucrat of Albany,
who gave him the data for the book he would write about the local aborigines.
The anthropologist was based at the State
Museum that I used to love to visit
when I lived in Albany
as a child, return ing with fascination to its
exhibit of crystals and phosphorescent minerals, before I began collecting
rocks myself. It was to Utica
this quasi-mandarin was summoned to pay his back taxes, giving himself away by
writing to justify his peculation after the fact in a book that attacks public
military spending. Evasions and concentrations cancelled each other out, as
they always threaten to do.

Soon after my rearrival to Utica in ninth grade I discovered that in one
of the buildings of the Cultural Institute near downtown anyone could listen on
request to rolls played on their old player organ:

I, having

heard the player organ

reel out Rachmaninoff's

"Stone
Island,"

was some years

later driven across

that island on a Soviet bus,

not knowing of Pushkin's

death at that spot (the site

on the itinerary) in a

foul duel anything beyond the sense

of passion I began

to undergo, knowing

still how it drove me on

under huge trees at night

from the endowed mansion

containing the organ.

The following year I
heard that in the building next door the Institute offered to all comers all
day long the choice of music selections played on their massive Capehart from a collection that completely lined the walls
below the windows of their large salon. This room became a meeting place for
the culturally inclined at the high school, my poet-tennis friend, the history
buff, the local piano prodigy, my hitchhiking crony, a theate
enthusiast who was to become my college roommate and later a psychoa nalyst, the still younger
parochial school student who had begun reading Proust
and Joyce under his eighth grade desk (later my collaborator in an anthology of
Greek tragedy)---and, among many others, Carol, the girl who was later to become
my sweetheart and my wife. We went there almost every afternoon after school,
rushed home for supper, and rushed back, staying till they closed at 10 PM. We
would file our music requests with the attendant, sit and talk in low tones or
play chess or read their current copy of Poetry Magazine, and their other books
too advanced for the local library, like T. S. Eliot's translation of Perse's Anabase. Over three years
we outgrew Tchaikovsky's Symphonies, progressing gradually to Beethoven's Quartets---and
to Couperin's Les TŽnbres,
a title we overheard the Hamilton
col lege intellectuals
choosing one afternoon and forthwith made a favorite of our own. The Institute
held one winter a free evening course on Renaissance Painting by an ŽmigrŽ professor of art
history at Hamilton,
from which I also took an extension course o n philosophy. I had begun going in
ninth grade to the movies the Institute brought up once a week all winter from
the Museum of Modern Art; in four years we saw much of
the history of film.

At our high school
graduation picnic while others were playing baseball Carol and I sat on the
grass in a long conversation that resulted in our agreeing to write one another
when I went off in a few weeks to Harvard for the wartime-accelerated beginning
of my freshman year.

My first week there I
found a note pinned to my freshman theme inviting me around to the rooms of a
sophomore who had studied with John Berryman the year before. After about five
minutes he said, "I'm homosexual. I can see you're not. That's O.K."
He con tinued, "As
Kenneth Burke says"... I had read very widely by then, seeing Eliot and
Pound as the acme of the modern, but this was a new name. When I said
"Who's he?", my host expressed surprise and
lent me Counterstatement. We had the same exchange ove
r Partisan Review and The Castle, and some other books
as well. I walked out of his rooms with my future in my arms,
and returned all through the semester to the weekly literary salon he held,
till he was expelled for homosexuality. Frequenting those li
terary nights were ex-members of the temporarily
defunct Harvard Advocate and others like myself, including an aspiring poet who
was to become the novelist John Hawkes.

I had entered a large
world, where my classmate who had won the Westinghouse National Science contest
(later a physicist for Westinghouse) was abashed at being outclassed by a
promising physicist who went on to the Princeton Institute and then to a post a
t Berkeley. (Later he and I were fellow Fulbright Professors in Vienna.) Living in a wing
of our residence house was the pre-Hitler Chancellor of Germany, Bruning; and Salvemini, a famed
opponent of Mussolini now a Professor of History, lived a couple of floors up
in the entry where a hospitable, crippled French tutor welcomed all and sundry.
I heard news about the philosophy of history from a budding comparatist
who was dating the daughter of Bertrand Russell.

I took five courses
instead of the regulation four, and I audited three more, doing all the
reading. I was thus busy night and day. In the Latin course I audited was a
prospective Latin teacher who was to become the poet Robert Creeley.
I soon learned wh y none of
the people whose criticism I admired was teaching me, though nearly all were on
university faculties. There were records of Pound reading the Cantos in the
poetry room, Eliot had given Norton Lectures eleven years before, and one
professor was writing a book on Eliot; yet the official poet, the Boylston
Professor, sneered at Pound and Eliot and everything modern. Even the
charismatic young professor who was the author of a
book on Joyce, when I encountered him later, sneered at Faulkner, Willia m Carlos Williams, the later Stevens, and many
others. The expert on the seventeenth century liked to get a laugh from his
classes by referring to "a tale told by an Eliot, full of Pound and
fury." There was still much intellectual direction and stimula
tion to be had, from the classicists Arthur Darby
Nock and John Finley and Werner Jaeger in my field, and in many quarters
elsewhere too. With the last of the "Humanists" I studied Seventeenth
Century French literature; I took courses from a theoreticia
n of the "psychology of language," and from a theoretical
sociologist. For the rest we educated each other.

Not having 20-20 vision,
I was ineligible for the Naval Officer training program that my qualified
classmates could enter. I enlisted in the Army so as not to be drafted out of
my second semester, and I entered active service that winter. While still at
the reception center I got a three-day pass to attend my mother's divorce
hearing in Boston.
One evening at the YMCA there I met a uniformed Canadian who for me embodied
all the purpose of the war. Converted to Communism when he was a graduate
student of economics and saw the hordes of strikers massed in his plains city,
he had enlisted to join the Spanish Loyalist Forces overseas; captured and
imprisoned a long time in a Fascist jail, he found himself released in time to
reenlist for World War Two. He had given most of a decade to this, but I was to
give little more than six months. Devoted as I was to the war effort, by the
time I finished Infantry Basic Training I had become subject to splitting
headaches. Instead of being shipped as a replacement for the still unexpected Battle of the Bulge, I
was discharged at a moment in September, 1944 when it was assessed that the war
would be over before winter and all doubtful cases should be released. Hating
the Army, and especially professional soldiers as death-dealers, I felt immense
relief, and at the same time immense guilt for abandoning the Cause of the
century.

Carol wrote me
faithfully during my time in the Army, and we grew deeply close as she went off
to Antioch College, having worked a year to earn some
of her fees.

I had begun Finnegans Wake in Utica.
Now back at Harvard I joined a Finnegans Wake reading
group of four or five, organized by a freshman who kept massive notebooks on
each paragraph of the text. The group met evenings all through the winter after
my army discharge. It included a member of the faculty and a Canadian graduate
student who would join my Department at Buffalo
twenty years later. The freshman, after a spell in the family business on
graduation, went to graduate school and became a renowned so ciolinguist. I also lifted weights weekly the same winter
in the rooms of a classmate and ran with him mornings, long before
"jogging" became popular, in a loop around the bridges over the
Charles. This man had abandoned his home at fourteen or fifteen, sent himself
to a cram school, got into and got free of West Point, and was now gung-ho for
a business career, boasting of the wealthy fiancee he
had cultivated and acquired for her father's high-level connections. His dorm
room hung with ticker tape, an d his portfolio of
holdings was swelling. But then he had a change of heart. "If I had ten
lives, " he said, "I might spend one of them
making money." He precipitously gave up all that for religion, philosophy,
and literature. He spent a summer in the Ozarks trying to write a novel, but it
didn't pan went back more quietly to business and married the no-nonsense
physical education girl friend whom he had courted after breaking with the
other.

I had already won as a
freshman the undergraduate poetry award, the Garrison Prize, and on my return
to Harvard I made some new literary friends.

One literary friend,
Lou, was already writing accomplished poems. He was soon to take a part in a
film by another who was in the process of launching himself as a film-maker. Dipping
in and out of school, when he graduated Lou buried his poems and attend ed to his career in advertising. But he surfaced as a poet
again thanks to a long near-mortal brush with Hodgkin's Disease.
Lou was an enthusiast of sports car rallies, till fear of his own death
suddenly turned him ahead on his own clock, if then back tothe
fold of poets. He stuck to his desk on weekends out in the space of an elegant
colonial town distant from his workaday city; till his death did come---but not
before he had broken the record for lines of verse published in The New Yorker
and been presented a medal in Widener Library.

Norm, another avid
would-be writer, kept maniacally dreaming up Wagnerian projects. Guetteur melancholique, he cycled
into repeated breakdowns. Fired as a young advertising copywriter after one
breakdown, he got a job as a comic book editor and was then fired after
another. He had already formulated a couple of years out of the never-finished
college how the pop writer, too, must give his all and square the depth of his
past.

He fulfilled his
prophecy a score of years later, surviving the legal troubles sometimes
occasioned by his outbursts in the advanced breakdowns. He shaded from
promising playwright into first the punch-loaded film writer of a collaboration
between a gun- maniac worker (as from the Detroit of his childhood) and a
jaded, gutsy ad man (as of his own stormy, silent twenty years); then the
honest draftsman of a film about the one honest policeman; then the high-credit
screenwriter of a black slave stud in the Old South, his own ingrained
forthrightness repackaging the nightmare of interracial sex. His biggest hit
celebrates the emergence into wider aspirations of an honest, avid dancer who
follows his partner out of a metropolitan Italian enclave (Saturday Ni ght Fever). Here and there the script echoes my haunted
friend's own stresses and aspirations. He was following the prediction he had
uttered in the form of a denial; he had turned out to be giving commercial
writing his life blood. The money that shower ed in
only fuelled his movie phases.

The gloss and
hurly-burly of his life spelled the lifelong sacrifice. Early on his
star-blasted eyes were burning, as all but really foreseeing his acclaim, his
Herculean breakdown cycles, his prosperity.

Still, these were single
literary friendships. I remained unconnected to the official college literary
groups. What I published in one group magazine, Wake, I submitted in the dead
of night under a pseudonym that encapsulated the contradictions of my
self-image: Charles Hamilton Sorley, a minor British
poet who died in World War One. I kept the barrier-bridge of my absorption in
classics between myself and my more insistent preoccupa
tions, and the further barrier-bridge of my focus on
French and other literatures. I refused to join the poetry workshop into which
the kindly head of the Poetry Room invited me. Constantly auditing English
courses, the only ones I took for credit then o r ever were Chaucer,
Anglo-Saxon, and a graduate seminar on the critical literature of
Neo-Classicism. I saw myself as a loner while being treated well by an
officialdom my anti-authoritarian self scorned. In this, indeed, I was one of a
generational gro up of self-styled loners, as I
gradually discovered, learning later that many of my schoolmates felt the same
way. And even in centralized, hierarchical France, as I have recently come to
learn, some of the most famous and best-placed thinkers of our time saw
themselves in their youth as isolated loners, at least six of them having publically testified to that effect.

The following summer I
spent in New York,
sharing with my mother a small Village apartment and working as a
typist-receptionist at the American-Scandinavian Foundation. Carol was in
Manhattan too on a cošp job from Antioch, and we
were constantly together all over the city, now secretly engaged. That summer
we joined the throngs at Times Square on V-J
Day. One of our favorite places was the old Museum of Non-Objective
Painting with its grey carpets and velvet-covered
walls, mellowing piped-in baroque music. The attendant on the second floor
turned out to become Mrs. Delmore Schwartz,
recognizable when she opened the door of their apartment some years later, to
which I had been invited on the heels of his accepting my double sestina for
the Partisan Review.

The contrast of
confidence and isolation came once again to a head at my early graduation in
1946, where I was the Latin orator, choosing as my topic "On Joy for War's
End and Concern for Its Imminence" ("De Belli
Gaudio Finiti et Imminentis Sollicitudine ").
Eisenhower was the commencement speaker, and the whole
assemblage rose in homage to him. Still smarting from my Army experience, and
determined not to honor any professional soldier, I sat planted resolutely in
my front-row seat, resisting the effort s of those next to me to drag me to my
feet. Eisenhower on his way down off the platform shook my hand. The next day
my scandalized tutor in Advanced Latin Composition, who had been an officer in
a unit preserving Art Monuments in Italy, argued with me vi gorously.
Still, however scandalously I acted, and however simplistically (I had no
notion of Eisenhower's later demonstrated commitment to peace), those
responsible for assessing me always rated my intellectual performance
equitably--- a rare advantage it took me years to appreciate.

I wanted badly to live
for a while in a French-speaking milieu, but limited funds and the recent war
and my desire not to be too far from Carol kept me from France itself.
I settled that summer for French Canada. Staking myself with my
savings from prize moneys, I went to the library and from a map picked a
village that looked to be far enough away from Montreal to be wholly
French-speaking but close enough so that I could bicycle in to a university
library once a week or so. I flew to Montreal,
took a bu s to Ste. Rose, found almost at once down
the main street a sign "Chambre ˆ louer," and rented the room. For the next two months I
ate at the communal table of this farm family (the farms a distance from the
village), spoke French all day, wrote poetry an d the draft of a verse play and
a long story, and evolved out of a central notion in my undergraduate thesis
the schema for what the next summer would become my first critical book, The
Dark Voyage and the Golden Mean. And then I joined Carol in Boston. The agnosticism of my adolescence was
being tempered by my war- sharpened sense of the pervasive sinfulness of the
world and of the redemptive possibilities that beckoned at the same time. These
stirrings, transmuted and fortified by a year-long study of theological
writings and Dante, brought me to the threshold of the Church. The role of the
Roman Church in the War, and much else, put me off from it. A friend who hoped
to become---and did become---an Anglican priest, kept up an ongoing dialogue
with me. Finally I was ready for conversion. He took me to the Anglican
monastery of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge for
instruction, after which I was received into the Episcopal Church, of which I
am still a communicant. For a while later I joined the lay order to which Dante
belonged, the Third Order of St. Francis.

The stimulation towards
thinking about Greece that John Finley triggered was supplemented in graduate
school by Eric Havelock, who communicated the excitement of his evolving ideas
to the seminar in the Pre-Socratics I took my first semester, along with D ante
in Italian, Beginning Sanskrit, and a private reading course on Thucydides.
Present in all three of these group courses was a man whose fourth course
turned out to be an advanced course in physics. For his war service he had
published a book-length t reatise on the mathematics
of supersonic flight. He was a member of the Society of Fellows, of which I had
vaguely heard before and now hoped to enter, since it provided three supported
years for writing. (He, too, was eventually converted to Episcopali
anism. He became a priest, editor of a series of
intellectual magazines and books, author of studies of Near Eastern thought and
of a trenchant meditative diary, a Professor of Old Testament at the Church
Divinity School of the Pacific until he was fired for leading a protest against
the entry of official military weapons into the San Francisco Cathedral during
the Vietnam War.)

In my independence I was
already too far along, being now a graduate student, to join the traditional
magazines at school,and so I
founded my own, with my Utica
poet friend and others:

The vital advances are being made
in theoretical works like

those of Kenneth Burke and others. We applaud this tendency

For
literary criticism, focusing as it does the most abstruse

problems of ontology, ethics, the theory of knowledge, and

their interrelations, is the chamber music of philosophy.

So I wrote in the
manifesto for Halcyon, a magazine that was to bring fiction and poetry together
with criticism in the vigorous continuing mode of the time. We published
Wallace Stevens, James Merrill, Allen Ginsberg (as a reviewer), E. E. Cummings,
and many others, including ourselves.

A year earlier as an
undergraduate I had written my first, and almost my only, fan letter to Kenneth
Burke, congratulating him on The Grammar of Motives. I did not meet him myself
till nearly thirty-five years later when we coincided as visiting lecturer s at
the SUNY Buffalo English Department. This was more than a decade after my
three-year tenure there as its chairman, when I reshaped it along principles
still partly based on the Halcyon manifesto.

My literary aspirations
included playwrighting. Presenting myself that fall
to the forming theater group at Harvard, I was sidetracked into typing up
multiple copies of a section of a windy self-indulgent British play they were
mounting. I soon withdrew. Not long afterwards I presented myself to the
Tributary Theater of Boston,
where I was taken on as a stage manager for Peer Gynt,
Ghosts, King Lear, and Measure for Measure. Wanting t o produce an Oedipus Rex,
they commissioned me to prepare a verse version that would be stageworthy. They produced it, and in its revised form it
is still in print.

My contrast of
confidence and isolation was brought to a head by my election to the Society of
Fellows, an honor which I owed, as I owed intellectual stimulation and much
else, including the publication of my first book, to the sponsorship of John
Finley, the mentor who directed my undergraduate thesis and stuck with me
through all the vagaries of my purposes. As an aspiring writer and
self-directed thinker I was refusing to take the Ph.D., abetted for that
purpose by the official posture, though not the actual practice, of the Society
of Fellows. It had been founded on the principle of sidestepping the Ph.D.,
though of the eight people elected my year, I was the only one who did not
already have that degree.

Then, and for decades
afterwards, I gathered myself to write fiction, trying to model myself on a
range of commanding virtuosi in my own language, and beyond them on Flaubert,
and on Proust, whom I had already begun to imitate in
high school from the flor id English version of the
time. (I had soon plunged into the old, badly printed first French edition, and
have been readinghim steadily all my life.) My own
style differed from the first. I published stories at very long intervals,
beginning early with one in Partisan Review.

Swept after our long
wait into the joy of marriage, Carol and Ientrained
to New York for a few days in a borrowed Brooklyn Heights apartment, then back
up the Hudson on the Hudson River Day Line, proceeding to the isolated hunter's
cabin in the Adirondack s where we spent the summer with our cold well, ice
chest, and kerosene lamps, rowing together on the lake:

Yes yes, love claims us, our several marriages

Rescued from war. On a train to the same

City, bemused bride, we took our common flight,

You in the yellow dress of a mere ten years gone by.

In that world we dipped, out again by waters of a river-

Fed lake, high. And we are brunted
to be courting

Responsibilities of labyrinthine energy, alive.

(Curiously the same
poem, written in Cleveland, places along with three of our earlier cities of
residence, another two that I had no way of knowing or guessing would one day
take up the major time of our lives: Letters this past year snowed in from New
York, Buffalo, Vienna, Berkeley, Providence.)

At our return from the
Adirondack summer I entered upon my appointment to the Society of Fellows,
threw in the wastebasket the paper attesting to my loyalty to the State of
Massachusetts (I never heard another word about it), and once again took up the
su ccess-in-isolation that
I had been choosing for myself, burying myself not mainly in critical writing
but in poetry and fiction---at the same time reading vastly for what would
become a few years later the critical writing of my second book, The Meaning o
f Fiction. I wrote an essay that would get incorporated as part of a chapter in
History/Writing and another that I would collect in Soundings, both after
almost forty years. And, under the inspiration of a keen young historian of art
and architecture in the group (he to abandon that for a career as a college president),
I drafted a few pages that would turn out to be the germ of my four books on
art.

Carol was soon pregnant,
and we moved up our planned trip to France. We settled for four months
in a hotel room right in the center of Saint Germain
des Pres recommended by the already famous young poet in the Society. We
plunged into exploring, viewing, and reading. Another poet, who was readying to
found his own magazine, greeted us and showed us around. In the cheap
restaurant much frequented by other Americans we met over a copy of Partisan
Review a couple who became our close friends. He was a paint er, she a writer. (He was already ill and died five years
later; she then married a writer and became a painter herself.) They introduced
us to an indigent Israeli painter and his wife, who also became our friends.

Earlier I had had our
friend Ken mail me from his teaching post in Dijon
Sartre's L'Etre et le nŽant, which I spent much of the summer of 1948
studying through, during our honeymoon in the Adirondacks.
Following this line during my later sojourns to Fran ce, I attended Merleau-Ponty's
inaugural course at th Collge
de France in 1952, LŽvi-Strauss's course in the
winter of l963-4, and Lacan's lectures in the late
sixties and early seventies.

David was born on our
return. During that summer Carol was stricken in the polio epidemic of 1949,
and our apartment became a rehabilitation watch, once she was returned from a
month at Massachusetts General
Hospital, which luckily
stood just at the foot of our street. She could not come to the party for my
first book at The Gotham
Book Mart (attended, among others, by James Merrill, Hayden Carruth,
Paul Goodman, and Oscar Williams). It was not till January that she could go
out on crutches. Her first ou ting was to attend Dylan
Thomas' inaugural reading in America, which bowled us both over, as during our
courtship we had read in rapture together his poem "A Winter's Tale."

We spent the whole
following summer with the infant David in a cottage overlooking the Bay of Fundy, and three more entire summers, the last one after my
first Buffalo year, David now fifteen, Daniel twelve, and Jonathan ten. Huge
tides, misty fog every m orning, water and headlands
out our window, strawberries in the field beyond the garden out back, fresh
eggs from the farm next door, fresh fish from a delivery truck. We kept busy
building wood fires in our stove and fireplace, invigorated by swimming in the
icy water, clamming, fishing, and taking excursions to town with our generous
landlord's family, ranging further afield in the
summers afterwards when we had a car. I wrote in a tiny space on the second
floor of our cabin.

Then we lived in an old

Man's house by the sea shore.

On the slope to the bay

He let pink and purple

Lupine grow and grow wild.

His wife sowed them, and more.

In us the fronds stipple

A thousand miles away.

Back
we went once again.

Love keeps gathering head

To strength not before known.

Time acts as its leaven.

All lights: a broken fan

Of peacock plumes, tail-eyed,

Hung over clouds, given

A shining not their own.

It was my deep
conviction that a devotion to writing meant I should not teach. "The
professor's preoccupation with the past as a scholar and with the future as a
teacher could only confuse the presentness of the
writer's self-set concerns." Some such wer e the
words I wrote to the Society as I left it not for an academic job but for the
fortunes of what I could pick up otherwise, unaware that these words contained
an affirmation in the form of a denial. Carol loyally backed me in this
troublesome venture . We were to have another child
six months hence---Daniel---when we moved to New York. A flurry of vain job searches left
me as a salesman on the exploited staff of the commission-only force of
Encyclopedia Brittanica. Briefly I did motivational intervie ws on car selection for
a psychologically oriented market research firm. Next I was typing lists for an
executive employment agency that masked itself as a self-help cooperative. I
supervised my two associates, a minister losing his faith who disappeared
mysteriously every morning for what was probably an analytic hour, and a young
Romanian diplomat who had defected and then come to the end of a stipulated
support from Radio Free Europe---with which I had interviewed myself. (He had
been to art school an d found his way to a successful
career as an illustrator of children's books.) I wrote every evening, or tried
to. Fired from this job along with most of the staff---the organization was
subjected to a pseudo-dissolution---I landed through a member of my church a
post as accountant for the Brooklyn
Museum Art
School, from which I was
ultimately fired after unsuccessfully blowing the whistle on the sweetheart
deal of the major supplier to the school's art store. I ended up as the
technical editor for a trade journal of the commercial fishing industry, my
longest job during that year. I knew nothing about motors and simply
paraphrased my monthly column out of a manual issued by Shell. Soon Shell
phoned me to hire me away, but by summer I knew I was to h ave
a student Fulbright to France; during my last weeks on the job I watched with
relief and anticipation out the window of my office as the transatlantic liners
moved in and out of their berths on the Hudson piers.

France this time was hard for
our two children, and for us. We traded our New York
apartment for a large but primitive apartment in the Paris suburb Clamart,
where downstairs lived a modiste and her ex-Wehrmacht officer-husband. Upstairs there arrived a p ainter already deep in gastronomy who became a famous
writer on food. We shared an icebox with him in the hall, and he painted
David's portrait (never in our possession). The semi-automatic toilet for
everyone was on the first floor. We had one coal sto ve in the living room and one small wood stove in the
children's bedroom. In our unheated bedroom days I wrapped several layers of
clothing around myself to write poems, a verse play, and a long monograph on
Balzac, reading through all of La ComŽdie Humai ne in the process (I
vividly appreciated his characters' attention to domestic heating). I later
condensed what I had written for the Balzac chapter of The Meaning of Fiction.

Carol and I would get a
baby sitter once a week, or sometimes oftener, and go into Paris for the day,
visiting our painter friends from the earlier sojourn, wandering about the
city, and attending the theater, returning either on the last metro and bus ou t from the Porte de Versailles, or on the train at
half-past midnight from the Gare Montparnasse,
which obliged us to walk home a couple of miles up the hill through the dark. Clamart was a Communist suburb and an old White Russian
enclave. Opposite our f ront window was a walled
estate owned by a prosperous pre-Revolutionary family that ran a small wire
factory on the premises and had a whole entourage, complete with private chapel
and priest. On their wall across the street, facing our apartment,
was pai nted in big
letters: American Go Home. It was the time of the Rosenberg trial, and one poster showed a
smiling Eisenhower, every tooth an electric chair. Another poster said
"Don't send your sons to fight under Nazi officers for the Bank of
Indo-China." (It was France's
Vietnam war; and at that time ex-Nazis did predominate
in the Foreign Legion.)

Before returning we
managed to spend the summer in England,
with the help of the British Fulbright Commission, which arranged to have us
share a house in Chiswick. We shepherded over as we
flew the daughter of a friend of our Israeli painter (the friend's husband had
been executed as a resistant by the Nazis). The family we joined ran a nursery
school downstairs in which we enrolled David; their presence allowed us to leave
overnight, as we did for a trip up the Thames as far as Henley, and on to Oxford. The family became
our friends. He was an oil chemist turned teacher of candy chemistry whose
father had been a leader in the British Communist Party. As a Boy Scout he was entrusted
with funds, which he concealed in his backpack, for the German Communist s
beleaguered under Hitler. They arranged a visit---I hitchhiked---to the
Communal colony in the Shropshire
countryside where her brother was a teacher. We kept in touch for years after
their emigration to Australia.

Having practised the experimental method, as one wry Harvard
philosopher put it, I was ready to propose myself for
teaching jobs. I was interviewed in Florence by
a Berkeley
professor whom I had impressed while he dined at the Society of Fellows, and
they hired me. It was right after the Berkeley
oath contraversy,and as part
of my appointment I was obliged to sign their oath and have it notarized, which
I did, at the Clamart town hall. Back in America we took the train across the country and
sublet a sma ll house on the Berkeley
flats for the year, not having the funds to buy a car, let alone a house. My
sponsor hinted that his own house in the hills might be for sale, in a part of
that community so expensive I could have afforded it at no time in my life . He had misapprehensions about me, and soon other
misapprehensions developed. While I felt I had done well in my teaching, after
my first year I was told I had not, that my second critical book, of which they
had seen a hundred pages, was so unintelli gible I would never be able to publish it, that my creative
writing was uncertain. All this was delivered by the chairman, in the presence
of my "sponsor," as a bill of particulars in the process of firing me
and preemptively denying me a second three-yea r term, as I believe they had
not done to any of the forty or so assistant professors passing through that
rank over the decade. I was also, I believe, the only one with a book behind
him and a publishing career firmly under way. Another of the charges ag ainst
me was that I had exhibited dilettantism when I submitted myself to a course,
complete with examinations, in Hebrew. I was doing this for both devotional and
intellectual reasons, preparing myself to write what would later appear as my
studies of J ob and the Song of Songs (The Root of the Thing) and the Hebrew
prophets (The Burden of Prophecy).

My two lame duck years
at Berkeley
were pleasant but uncomfortable. I forged ahead with my writing, and with
Hebrew. By the end of the first of those years I had completed The Meaning of
Fiction. I took the two huge black binders of the manuscript in to my former
sponsor and reached up to hand them over, asking him to read them; but he held
up his hands in front of him and said he did not have time.

Luckily I got a research
Fulbright Professorship to the University
of Munich, where I
deepened my immersion in recent German poetry, expanded my own poetry, and
began my books The Classic Line and Prisms. We met a German art critic who had
known Rilke an d I had brief
ceremonial encounters with a couple of professors. Our closest friends were the
family of an art historian on a Guggenheim who had abandoned the house we rente after a quarrel with the difficult resident landlady.
Our first new car, a Volks wagen,
took us on many expeditions to as close as the nearby Starnbergersee
and as far as Vienna.
I audited a course on Pascal given by Romano Guardini,
and we went to many concerts.

Toward summer that year,
still jobless, we took off for Rimini on the
Adriatic, stopping off at the Pound Castle in the Tyrol above Merano, having been introduced to Pound's daughter Mary by
Eva Hesse, our new Munich friend, Pound's translator.
It was Aug ust before my cliffhanging attempts at a
job search elicited a telegram from Western Reserve in Cleveland offering a one-year post. My new
chairman, puzzled, later asked the Berkeley eighteenth century specialist, my
ex-sponsor's close friend, why they h ad fired me. "He was not one of
us," he replied.

I stayed for six years,
allowed a role I could not have exercised at Berkeley as the university's main exponent of
modern literature. Within a month I was asked at a neighboring school to take
part in a panel on Endgame. Because Reserve had appointed lea nly for years, the younger staff was sparse in number, and
we formed a vivid social milieu of mutual support and encouragement. The best
literary students there flowed into my courses. While writing The Classic Line
and finding no satisfactory version of the Odyssey from which to quote, I did
some renderings of my own and found them an ideal means of loosening my poetic
style. I proceeded systematically to carry through with translating the entire
poem.

In the middle of my time
there I accepted a teaching Fulbright to Vienna,
where I renewed and fortified my German, met some poets, polished the Odyssey,
and revelled with Carol in the rich musical life of
the city. In persistence and stubbornness I was still trying to find my way
into writing fiction, redrafting earlier work and scrapping it while inventing
larger structures that would direct and contain what I might produce. The
harvest yield of withdrawal to a foreign country was diminishing, and yet for
my poems it still functioned. I broke into writing haiku. The boys' isolation
was compensated for, as it had been in Munich,
by the ski excursions they loved to the mountains an hour or so south. They
became very fond of our friend Ken, now the Dutch uncle of a group of
expatriate students of psychiatry. Having foundered or floundered in America, he had come to Vienna
for affordable psychoanalysis, staying on since before our Munich days. He had visited us there. Here,
down on his luck, he became alm ost
part of the family. He was still in touch with the writer, a fellow
Irish-American, who had broken into fame for The Ginger Man, a novel that
chronicled Ken's Dijon days as a sidelight on
their Dublin
experience. He was to cast Ken as the protagonis t of
a Vienna novel
too. Ken was beginning to work part time---as he would, on his return to
America, a while full time---for another American Dublin friend who had gained
renown as the most creative Jungian of his generation. Ken was the link when we
ou rselves met this
psychiatrist during his Zurich years, where we had visited him from Munich, and
again at intervals, usually with Ken.

Ken joined us as far as Bern in our ample Peugeot (he would split off from there
to Zurich) through our youth hostel trek across
Europe on our way to a London
summer. There we rented the Hampstead cottage of our Cleveland subtenant. I read my poems at th e Poetry Festival of the
Mermaid Theater. On the liner home, knowing I was to be teaching some Russian
poets in my modern poetry course, I began the study of Russian and kept it up
for another decade, until I got a fellowship to Moscow on the Senior Scho lar exchange to write what
would become the Russian chapters of Thresholds. I also steeped myself in
Russian poetry, and I began to translate some poems which especially drew me, an
enterprise that took its final form as my collaborative book The Burden of
Sufferance: Women Poets of Russia.

For my plays I developed
a style for dialogue and a strategy of stage presentation. They stayed in verse
for over a decade: one of these was staged in Cleveland,
another broadcast over WBAI, New York
and KPFA, San Franciso. Then I evolved an idiom that wa s neither verse nor prose but
something between the two, for plays that were semi-allegorical in conception.
I have continued to write them over the years, having published one and had
small productions of others.

I had submitted some
poems to the Arizona
Quarterly, and they wrote back asking to see more. Soon after I sent those, I
got another letter: they would like to do a book! It had been ten years since
the editor of a major publishing house had phoned me at night to announce their
acceptance of a book of poems, an acceptance that after many twists mutated
into a rejection. Now delighted, I put together Progressions, and Arizona brought it out,
complete with illustrations.

I ruminate constantly
working towards a poem. When a new music pulls at my ears it tends to be a sign
that the poem will be a long one, first Midway, and then a decade later, for
more than a decade itself, finally Modes, which I thought of as the last of
this series employing the "syllabic module" and at one time came to
think would last me my whole life, on the model of Pound or Olson (or for that
matter, Whitman). My way turned out to be different, thankfully, and lo, along,
slowly, came "Prophecies," and then "Dooms and
Inclinations," and then "Transfers." I still don't know of a
nascent poem at first even when it will turn out to be only epigram-length, or
only a haiku; most of my many haiku start out headed for more expansive
expression. As I per petually do too. In the inch as in the mile.

What are my purposes as
a poet? Do these poems cohere into a unity other than retrospective---or
crucially prospective as I keep trying to forge ahead? The very expatiations of
my bulky critical commentary on poetry, which I have always thought of as an
endless prolegomenon to my own poems (whatever else they have been), tend to
displace the integrative center of my purpose. My masters are themselves a
large and various chorus whose voices I try to blend
with my own.

My salary as a full
professor at Reserve was almost exactly at the official Federal figure defining
the poverty level for a family of five. Poorly paid, my colleagues and I were
involved in frequent contestation against bad policies in the University. Wh en I heard about the chairmanship opening at Buffalo, at
first I passed it over; I never wanted to administer anything, and I had sent
from Vienna a
brief "No" to a Big Ten university that had asked me to be a
candidate for their chairmanship. Buffalo
was rated far lower. But Buffalo
had become a State school wit the promise of massive infusions of State money.
English ha fifty staff members with a prospect then of growing to seventy;
twenty-five on the staff were in a low, temporary rank, and there were only
three full professors, all scheduled soon to retire. Carol urged that if I took
policies seriously, this was my chance to put my money where my mouth was. My
old Utica poet
friend was on the staff and guided me through preparing my interviews; I wa s hired. At once I found myself
both prosperous and dynamically at the center of gratifying, empowered
professional fulfillment.

I took the job only on
condition that I not have to keep regular office hours; and I intended to give
it, as I did, just the three years of the initial term. During that time I
bureaucratized the department and organized our considerable hiring not on the
hackneyed principle of covering century fields, but rather of looking for the
best people we could find and then letting them carry on or develop as they
might. Instead of having a single poet in residence I established poetry on a
par with other activit ies,
and we hired several poets, while others whom we hired blossomed into poets.
Much activity was soon generated; it drew marvelous graduate students and an
unpredictable range of keen thinkers to the staff.

I was able to taper out
of my chairmanship under the auspices of a fellowship at the Center for the
Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences. There, instead of any isolation, I
found an intellectual continuum of stimulation. Everyone in the redwood studi es, each facing through a
glass wall into greenery, operated effectively all day on the high, even plane
produced by meeting at the outset the three minimum
requirements---intelligence, commitment, and good work habits. Over Christmas
we drove the whole family the twenty-five hundred miles to Mexico
City in our Volkswagen camper, stopping off on the way at the
Poet's House of the University
of Arizona and visiting
my old classmate who was a priest there. Mexico was a revelation to all of
us. Crossing in to Mexico,
we were enchanted by the mix of Spanish, nineteenth century French, and modern
set in the context of indigenous civilizations. We celebrated Christmas in the
Cathedral of Guadalajara and swam at Mazatlan, revelling
when we reached Mexico City i
n the light-strung trees of the Alameda.

All the Buffalo developments took place in the toils
of an oath controversy, and of the Vietnam War. On my arrival nine of the ten
non-signers of the oath in the entire State of New York belonged to my Department. Only one
of these was a writer. "You ha ve many writers
on the staff here," said a visiting art critic to the President's wife.
"Yes," she said, "And they're all under investigation."
Having signed the oath myself, I did everything I could to aid the non-signers.
The President had begun calli ng
me by my first name within a month after my arrival. Within another month he
reverted permanently to my title. His successor fostered me, but the next in
succession was an administrator I had had trouble with from the beginning. He
was installed as P resident for his role of student-suppressor as a leader of
the faculty faction favoring the Vietnam War, against which I had been involved
in active protest virtually since my arrival. Though our rich intellectual and
social life continued, the last sever al years of that administration worked to
erode my confidence in the collective decision making. I was searching for
another job. Then out of the blue I got a phone call from Brown inviting me to
apply for a slot in their Comparative Literature Department .

The arrangements were
quickly concluded. Before leaving Buffalo
I was asked to do an interview with the main local paper, and I agreed. The
interviewer turned out once to have been the editor of the student paper that
groaned under this President's polic ies, and she was delighted when I assailed his
administration. The interview, to my surprise, was printed under a headline on
the front page of the Sunday paper. "My wife comes from Buffalo," the President of Brown said on
my arrival, with a genial twinkl e in his eye,
"And her family sends her the newspapers from there."

Brown fulfilled exactly
my expectations. It provided, though in a somewhat austere community, a range
of enriching possibilities for my professional expansion. I lived for the next
decade, as I have for nearly another decade since my retirement, in an am bience where I could flourish in the confidence of
enlightened encouragement. It persists, as I have too.

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Sylvester a note

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