A Walker in the City: Writings by Peter Anastas

Bowdoin Beata: 50th Class Reunion

2009-06-05T16:51:00.000-07:00

When a letter arrived announcing the 50^th reunion of the Class of 1959 at Bowdoin, I quickly realized that my retirement income wouldn’t allow me to contribute the amount our reunion committee had suggested as a basic pledge from each member. As a consequence—and perhaps out of embarrassment—I decided not to attend. Yet I was torn. Although I happily participated in our class’s 25^th reunion and I’ve visited the College on annual trips to Maine, it has been many years since I’ve reconnected with classmates and friends, several of whom have died in the interim. And of those who were still alive, I wondered what we would have to say to one another, considering that my own life has hardly been what I or my classmates might have expected. Under those circumstances, what sort of account could I give of myself?

But the reunion was not about success or failure—it wasn’t even about expectations (except perhaps for the College’s need in a time of economic crisis to depend upon the generosity of graduates to strengthen the endowment and contribute to its many innovative programs). The reunion was, as Judy, my ever practical and consoling partner of twenty-two years, suggested, an opportunity, perhaps one of our last, for the surviving members of our class to reconnect with each other after half a century apart.

“Wouldn’t it be fun?” she offered. “Besides,” she added, “I’d like to go. I want to meet your old friends. Let’s treat it like a mini vacation.”

So we signed up and I pledged what I felt I could afford to the Alumni Fund before falling back into my daily life of writing, political meetings, emailing my children, my addiction to television news, and the long walks Judy and I take each day by the ocean that has sustained me ever since I came home to Gloucester and decided to live and work here—again, much to my surprise.

Of course, the reunion was great fun. Once we were safely inside the College gates and had registered and been assigned our dormitory suite (no less), we began to feel part of the swing of things. Students chauffeured old grads around in golf carts from dormitory rooms to parties and dinners. Everybody you met exchanged the famous “Bowdoin hello.” The liquor flowed, as we did, from one reception to another; the food was, as always, superb, the hospitality legendary. In short, I felt back home in college again.

The best part, however, was meeting up with old friends, many of whom I had not seen since our 25^th reunion—and some of whom I hadn’t laid eyes on since graduation. The laminated tags we dutifully hung around our necks with our names and graduation pictures helped us to avoid the embarrassment of not recognizing each other. Though it was amazing to consider than many of us hadn’t changed that much, give or take some hair, the addition of a beard (I noticed many more of those since our undergraduate days, when few of us dared to go unshaven), and a little extra weight (I vainly tried to walk some of mine off before reunion, to little avail).

Members of our class have distinguished themselves as physicians, lawyers, scientists, artists, writers, photographers, teachers, pastors, scholars, public officials, business executives and investment bankers. We’ve started companies, gone into politics, sat as judges and served our country in the military. We even have a brigadier general in our midst. One of our classmates has practiced Yoga for many years while also involved in holistic healing; another developed a well known ski resort and wrote a book about it. Some returned to the small towns of their origins, while others have lived and worked all over the world. All of us have had interesting lives, and it was amazing to hear classmates share their insights and experiences over the far-too-brief weekend.

What was incredible, though, was how much we remembered about each other, not only from fifty years ago, but from the class notes we’d been sharing in the alumni magazine in the intervening time. In fact, we knew a lot about what each of us had been up to in the way of children, grand children, great grandchildren, second marriages, vacation or retirement homes in Maine (in Brunswick even). There was a moving service in the Bowdoin Chapel on Saturday afternoon to remember those of us who are no longer alive; and among those of us who made it back to Brunswick, there was a great deal of serious conversation about what we’d done, where we’d been and how we felt about it all.

I had several talks with classmates about attitudes like homophobia that were often prevalent when we were undergraduates, prejudices that we have since regretted and tried to outgrow. In fact, we paused to reflect upon what it must have been like for our gay classmates in those far less tolerant times, not to speak of the very few people of color who were present on campus. We talked of class, too, and of the social and ethnic backgrounds so many of us came from in small Maine or Massachusetts towns, from families among whom we were the first to attend college. There was, we agreed, a pressure on those of us from immigrant families to succeed, just as those students from upper class families were held to certain norms of behavior and social expectation.

The College was small in the 1950s, fewer than 800 young men, and the campus was pretty much centered around the original quad, with athletic buildings and playing fields, along with most of the fraternity houses, on the periphery of the college grounds. Since then the College has expanded incredibly. There are residential towers on campus, a huge new student union, new rinks and field houses, and many new dormitories built to house a student body that is equally comprised of men and women, nearly 1800 in number. Who could not feel this change around one, returning to the campus after so many years away? And who could not also feel an immense sense of privilege after touring state-of-the-art laboratories, class rooms and lecture halls, a newly renovated museum displaying world-class works of art, a stunning new library; privilege, also, after meeting members of this new student body, so attractive and self-possessed, so worldly and articulate, as if chosen for those very qualities, even though some of those students may still come from Kezar Falls, Maine or Norwood, Massachusetts.

Though it offered an education of the highest quality, the Bowdoin we matriculated at was a small, provincial liberal arts college, located in a quiet Maine community. Today’s Bowdoin is all of that and much more. It seems far more sophisticated, indeed an elite educational and social environment, just as Brunswick itself is no longer the run down mill town it was during our college days. With its upscale boutiques and restaurants, its bed and breakfast inns, its farmer’s market, Brunswick has become as gentrified as the College. One must suppose this change, reflective of the changes in the larger world, is for the better. One also wonders what qualities of intimacy in student relationships and the classroom experience—the educational encounter—may have been exchanged for it.

By the same token, when our class entered Bowdoin, in 1955, we met many older students, some married with children, others who had fought in Korea or served elsewhere in the military before matriculating. The presence of such students with broader life experience was a benefit, both in the classroom, where their maturity enhanced discussion, and in the relationships many of us cultivated with them in our fraternities, in clubs or in simply joining them for coffee between classes. One would hope that the College has continued this tradition of admitting older students or those with a background of diverse non-academic experience. I can also imagine the benefit of having students on campus who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Though I felt a bit shy as we all marched in straw skimmers, wives and partners alike, to Convocation, the ceremony itself, at which President Barry Mills ‘72 spoke and Dr. Michael Fiore ’76 received the Common Good Award, was moving; and the reception our class received at our fifty year mark was memorable. Not one of the formal events was overbearing, all having been planned and executed by our class reunion committee and the College Staff with a light touch, another of the welcome things I remembered about college life, even those sometimes onerous daily chapel services, which many of us endeavored to avoid as students.

Underlying the entire weekend was the theme celebrated at Convocation, that of the Common Good, which has expressed the philosophy of the College since it was initially articulated, in 1802, by Bowdoin’s first president, the Reverend Joseph McKeen, who urged his students to commit themselves to lives “in the interest and for the benefit of society,” disregarding personal gains in wealth or status. With some of the greediest decades in American history hopefully behind us, it is not such a bad idea to be reminded of the principles we were taught at Bowdoin, though from what I heard and learned from the classmates I met at our 50^th reunion I think those ideals have animated the lives of most of us since we first came to Bowdoin.

Jonathan Bayliss (1926-2009)

2009-04-28T08:21:00.001-07:00

(Photograph by Mark Power)

I met Jonathan Bayliss 47 years ago this month. We were invited by Charles Olson to read at Gallery Seven in Magnolia, a contemporary art gallery that sponsored readings by poets and writers. On that unseasonably warm April night, I read first from a novel I’d been working on, set in Italy. John Keyes, a New York poet, then living in Gloucester, read from a long Olson-inspired poem about his hometown of Washington, D.C.

The final reader was a youngish, balding man of thirty-six, wearing a business suit. Olson introduced him as Jonathan Bayliss, a novelist and playwright, who worked as a market analyst at Gorton’s, having moved with his family to Gloucester in 1956. Jonathan had with him the thick manuscript of a novel-in-progress, set in Berkeley and San Francisco; and he proceeded to read from the beginning, titled appropriately “Prologos:”

Michael Chapman had not cherished any of his three sons before they were born nor had he hoped for them before they were conceived. Ruth Chapman the wife and mother agglomerated them licked them into shape and bred them up for his approval. Except when gripped by a universal pathos of babyhood he had been nearly careless of each undifferentiated babe in the cradle. But he found that humankind’s uniqueness entered his history as engagingly as any less casual father’s. In every case the gathering person of a child’s incorporated him against his will as if without warning.

At first I thought, “Well, this is quite old-fashioned,” but as Jonathan read on, I and the rest of the audience became spellbound:

In the years of growth as the new people in the family nourished their possibilities partly on the father’s protein his own possibility continuously diminished. One by one they joined their mother in pruning and oiling the plumage by means of which he personally might have fledged. It was not in themselves that they embarrassed him, not by virtue of existence or intention, but by the statistical fact of their economic connections. Their organic requirement prevented further exfoliation on the father’s part. At the age of thirty-three all he had left to himself was the inner man.

Not only was Jonathan’s prose stately and beautiful in its exquisitely formal cadences, it was humorous, and it was subtle. On the surface it seemed to reflect, even mimic, the prose of certain 18^th century British novels—Sterne’s Tristram Shandy came immediately to mind—yet there was something quite modern about it, indeed Modernist, in the sentences’ paucity of punctuation, the irony inherent in their diction, the inflation of the domestic subject into myth. Jonathan continued:

Yet there was nothing unsure about his love for the three who loved each other and both parents. His love was crescent and irreversible, a moon that never waned and always grew, even when obscured by clouds of annoyance or despair—not like the moon of his love for the mother, which in the course of the years waxed only haltingly, with countless fluctuations, magnified chiefly by complexity of perception.

As he entered more deeply into his narrative, a sense of the form of this book in gestation, the trajectory of its narrative, began to take shape. The longer Jonathan read in a quiet, sometimes faintly audible voice, the more I realized that his was not an old-fashioned book at all. In fact, it was revolutionary. I could hardly contain my excitement.

After the reading that night at Gallery Seven, after Olson had introduced Jonathan and me; after Olson had been heard to exclaim that Bayliss’s novel might be one of the most important then being written in America; and after some of us had repaired to Olson’s house at 28 Fort Square for the first of many nights around that kitchen table, which Olson referred to as my “graduate school,” Jonathan and I initiated one of our countless talks that would spread over 47 years and be among the greatest delights of my life.

We felt an immediate affinity, Jonathan and I, not only because we were both engaged in the writing of novels, but because we discovered that we were attracted to many of the same writers—the great British novelists of the 18^th century, and some of the more eccentric ones of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, George Gissing, Ford Madox Ford; not to speak of Europeans like Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, whose novels inspired both the reach and the structure of Jonathan’s. We also had William Butler Yeats in common, on whose plays, in particular, Jonathan had done graduate work at Berkeley. Then would come Melville, Jonathan’s deep study of whose novels and poems benefited me immeasurably in the years to follow.

That first night at Olson’s we agreed to meet and read to each other from our ongoing work. And we did so each Friday night in Jonathan’s study, secluded on the top floor of his house at 165 Washington Street, overlooking Oak Grove cemetery. In that book-lined room, redolent with the smell of his pipe tobacco, where Jonathan wrote at a heavy, dark-stained wooden table on an old manual typewriter, we took turns sharing with each other our latest chapters. As Jonathan expanded his narrative, I began to understand the complexity of its structure and of his own mind, which I could only marvel at. Ultimately, we came to realize that we were, or were going to become, quite different writers. Encouraged by Jonathan, I began to find my voice as a social realist, while Jonathan evolved into one of our great maximalists, his novel exfoliating from a bourgeois family story to the vast Pythagorean structure it became, as it expanded to include the systems of ritual and myth as they mirrored the systems of science, cybernetics and business. But I think we helped each other in those early years before our personal lives diverged. Certainly Jonathan helped me, not only through the education I received listening to his evolving novel, but through our talk about books, politics and philosophy.

Jonathan had—and Olson firmly believed this—one of the finest minds in America. Olson also claimed that Bayliss, as he always referred to him, was “the only person in the country who understands me,” while Jonathan, in his unerring candor, was one of the few who dared stand up to what he sometimes referred to in person and in the margins of Olson’s books as Charles’s “BS.” Compared to Olson’s monumental assaults on knowledge, Jonathan’s scholarship was patient and circumspect, though no less deep and thorough, as befitted the Harvard student, who followed his great teacher, the scholar, critic and biographer Mark Shorer, to Berkeley after the war.

As to Jonathan’s demeanor in those years, he was often quiet, reticent, even shy. Who could be otherwise around Olson and Vincent Ferrini, confronted with the drama of their personal lives, the agony and ecstasy of creation, the endless dialectics that sometimes exhausted the rest of us as we talked and drank far into those starry Gloucester nights?

Let me share one story: We were at Jonathan’s on a stormy early winter night, Vincent, Charles and I, sitting around the dining room table, as we often did, Doris and the children all in bed by then. There was talk of JFK and the recent Cuban Missile Crisis, of the direction of the Democratic Party, Charles having spent years in the thick of Washington politics. The subject turned to Joyce, not a favorite of Jonathan’s or Charles’, veering then to Jonathan’s novel. In a characteristic gesture, Charles stood up, gripped the table and said to Jonathan, “I’ll do whatever I can to see that your book gets published.” Embarrassed, as he often was by compliments, by any attention paid to him, Jonathan demurred in the face of Olson’s mounting enthusiasm. Offended, Olson stopped short in his praise. He slammed his glass down.

“Bayliss, I’m leaving your house,” he said, turning from the table to put on the huge overcoat, which Jonathan would later describe as “the mantle of [Olson’s] respectability.”

“No, Charles,” Vincent and I shouted. “Stay, stay! It’s only a misunderstanding.”
But Olson left in a huff, stomping out into the snow, as we watched his massive form disappear down Washington Street.

“I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings,” Jonathan said, after we resumed our places at the table. Vincent and I quickly jumped in to reassure him that he had done or said nothing wrong. We attempted to return to our conversation, but Olson’s absence created a void that we three could not fill. At once, Ferrini got up. “Let’s go to Charles’,” he suggested. So the three of us traipsed out into what had now become a blizzard. We slogged through the driving snow from Jonathan’s house, across the railroad tracks, down past Washington Square and Gould Court, past Joan of Arc and the Legion Hall, and onto Commercial Street. When we reached Fort Square, the plows had not yet come through and the snow was a couple of feet deep.

Up Olson’s flight of steps we charged, wind and snow lashing our faces. Ferrini knocked on the kitchen door and Charles, wrapped in a big blanket, answered. At first he scowled, and then, warmed by our attempt to succor him, he let us in. The heat from the gas-on-gas stove melted the snow from our coats. We hugged; Jonathan apologized for seeming to reject Charles’ generous offer; Charles forgave him. We sat down at the kitchen table, littered with Olson’s daily mail yet unread. A bottle appeared and the night continued as if there had been no interruption. And all through this, Olson’s wife Betty and their son Charles Peter slept soundly.

Jonathan has been characterized in his obituaries as being as committed as a writer and business executive as he was as a father. To this I can attest, having spent so many hours in his house on Washington Street with his family at impromptu dinners at which the famous “Spaghetti Bayliss” was featured, or on quiet evenings of unmoistened talk. Jonathan read to his three children, Cathie, Vicky and “Geeka,” as I knew them then. He took them to the movies and to concerts and plays. This man, who carried a shirt pocket full of used punch-cards on which to record the rush of his ideas, was ever accessible to his children.

Flaubert, the father of the modern novel, insisted that writers “Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you can be violent and original in your works.” Jonathan was the most gentle and self-effacing of men, polite, deferential, thoughtful and considerate of friends and family. He dressed and lived conservatively, frugally, almost invisibly: the complete bourgeois. He was a lifelong Democrat. He confessed to me that he’d once voted for Henry Wallace and immediately regretted it. He opposed the war in Vietnam, yet he continued to support Lyndon Johnson; and once, when I pressed Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man on him, he returned the book with a quiet, though dismissive, shake of his head—“He’s a Platonist,” Jonathan said, and that was the most devastating rejection anyone could receive from him.

And yet in the writing Jonathan soared. He grappled with complex ideas, he explored archaic and post-modern structures, and, like Joyce, he pushed the English language to its limits. The diction of his novels is not your demotic American. In Jonathan’s hands our native tongue becomes a richer medium, precise yet imaginative, playful yet knowing, “not by simplifying the complexity of English,” as his narrator in Gloucestertide explains, “but by fixing more dimensions of abstraction.” For Jonathan, the novel was still “our quintessential medium of experience.” In the end, the games of words and identities he posed, the structural puzzles, the myths and counter-myths, systems and meta-systems—indeed, the counter-factuality of reality, as he limned it—were only one level of the play of Jonathan’s remarkable intelligence, an intelligence that had for long been missing from most American fiction. The other level is the writing itself—for Jonathan was a writer above all else—often breathtaking in its lyricism. I will close with one such example from Gloucestertide, one of his evocative descriptions of the city that became his actual and spiritual home and the source of his work:

Between every two beaches here on our stone island, between harbors and coves, wherever the land stops the sea, those tawny anfractuous rocks are a jagged pathway of choices. At chaotic elevations, with footholds on irregular cusps at all angles, no step is predictable until your foot is in the air, no step is determined by habits of graceful continuity. From ledges and pinnacles, on whalebacks and whalejaws, you fling yourself across one crevasse to another in jerky motion, sideways and forward, sometimes switching back to descend a crag or traverse a tidal gorge, sometimes down to a tongue of popples, at the lower tides always keeping above the slippery seaweed. Each imbalance is corrected by the next…It feels as if you’re rapidly covering great distances. Your dazzling way is bleached by salt and sun. It’s impossible to stop and think. Yet all the while you are both spectator and center of attraction for surf below, clouds above, and boats in the offing.

(This eulogy was delivered on April 27, 2009, at a memorial service for Jonathan Bayliss, at St. John's Episcopal Church in Gloucester, Massachusetts.)

Broken Trip: A Review by Richard M. Amero

2009-04-20T12:21:00.001-07:00

Broken Trip (Glad Day Books, 2004) by Peter Anastas consists of ten short stories that are tied together because they interact with the professional activities of Tony Russo, a welfare case worker, who provides his clients with shelter, food, medical treatment, and pats of encouragement. Reading the book is something like drinking a martini. At first one feels the astringent taste and then the BANG hits you. Not all the stories have the same punch, but as a group they pack a stunning wallop. There is so much agony, suffering and loss among some of the characters that they remind me of sinners in Dante’s Inferno, whose obsessions were similarly painful and everlasting. Perhaps a saving factor in this collection of down-and-out stories is that they end, as poet George Oppen puts it [in an epigraph] at the beginning of the book, in a place where all human emotions ultimately founder.

While the book has a Gloucester setting and most of the characters are involved with the demise of the fishing industry, there is more to the book than Gloucester, for its basic theme is poverty of body and mind, a poverty that reaches across America and the world. Some of the people depicted are as horrible as human beings can get, short of Buchenwald. While not an intellectual novel on the surface at least (remember the delayed reaction), nurses Amanda and Rochelle, in “The Psyche Unit,” represent opposite points of view regarding the question: Is it mind or is it environment that dictates human behavior? Since so many of the damned are dope addicts, the answer would seem to be environment and the treatment DETOX. Yet, by itself, the treatment doesn’t work, so the force of consciousness can be brought into play. That is why nurse Rochelle grieves over the suicide of Terrence, a junkie, who demonstrated insight but could not control his destructive urges.

The most interesting character in the book for me is Larry, Rochelle’s understanding husband. For all his good will, Tony functions as a device. It is through him that the stories are told in a concise reportorial manner that shifts from inner thoughts and outer taunting dialogue. Tony may understand the world, but Larry sustains his wife Rochelle, who has had to cope with abuse from her dope-afflicted mother and Roy, her mother’s lover, and her murder of Roy. Why does Roy act as he does? Why do most dope addicts act as they do?

The Gloucester emphasis appears most prominently in “Skag,” (heroin). Here the most unlikely of trios go out to sea in a once-in-a-lifetime trip to catch cod on the Stellwagen Bank. The miracle is that they succeed. There is a wisp of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea in this section, but the wisp soon merges into a story of victory not over the sea but over self. All three men—Shitter, Frankie and Jimmy, but principally last-minute replacement captain Jimmy—achieve a victory that is more substantial than Terrence’s defeatist views of himself. Like the hired man in Frost’s great poem, Jimmy prepares to die with the sense that at sea he has at least conquered—or forgotten—his demons. Perhaps here is the answer to why men, from time immemorial, have gone down to the sea in ships. In doing so, they escape from the exactions and turmoils of land for work that is so bracing, energetic and dangerous that they forget themselves. This is the HIGH addicts don’t have and the reason they go to sea instead of to the lab.

There are many surprises in Anastas’ book. His criticism of the Department of Public Welfare, now changed to Department of Transitional Assistance, is justified at least for people who accept the burden of being their brother’s keeper. It is not Gloucester alone that produces a class of half-civilized or worse people. Anastas doesn’t dwell on the people in the barrooms and on the belt lines in fish factories; but these nameless people are as lonely, bored and unhappy as the principals and spend too much of their time sniping about the actions of their neighbors.

One of the bigger surprises is that the drugs that infest Gloucester and, for that matter, all of the Massachusetts North Shore, do not come from the fishing boats—though some do—but from dealers in Boston. The book does not propose a cure for addiction, unless it be through methadone, therapy and analysis. Except perhaps for Tolstoy, there is no reason why a writer of a naturalistic work of fiction should try to solve all the world’s problems.

Finally, “Has Gloucester changed and not for the better?” The “Broken Trip” is when a boat returns without fish. Anastas does not give alternatives; but certainly the 19^th and 20^th century fishing town of Gloucester has changed. As counselor Julie in “Getting Straight” says to Jade, who claims she never gave her long live-in companion “Doc” love, “Love is a lot of things.” By the same token, some portion of the degraded, desperate and deranged underclass in Gloucester may, like Rochelle, arise from the wallow, the filth and the stench. As Dante has written, after the Inferno is Purgatory. For most of us Paradise is out of reach.

(Richard M. Amero is a writer and historian, who lives in San Diego. A Gloucester native, Amero attended Black Mountain and Bard colleges. He was a prime mover in the restoration of Balboa Park and has written extensively on the park, on San Diego and California history. His writings, including essays on Melville, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Hart Crane, James Joyce, Dostoevsky and the Gloucester novelist and playwright Jonathan Bayliss, can be found on his website http://www.balboaparkhistory.net)

What Holds us Together

2009-03-29T12:54:00.000-07:00

(The Western Shore, by Fitz Henry Lane)

In the name of saving Gloucester, some of the very people who are promoting growth and development are destroying or destabilizing the one thing that makes Gloucester what it is—the primary quality that renders life at all tolerable and special here. And that is a sense of community.

Like many other natives, I’ve discovered the meaning of community as a result of living away from Gloucester. When I lived in Florence, Italy or among the Penobscot Indians of Maine, I responded, often as consequence of missing my home town, to a sense of community I felt in those quite separate cultures and places. What I experienced was a quality of shared institutions, of tradition, heritage, history and architecture. Along with these attributes, I found a sense of interdependence, of mutual responsibility; of people taking care of each other.
At bottom, this amounts to what some have called “a sense of place.” It is a combination of physical and spiritual qualities. It’s a chemistry between particular people and a unique landscape. It has to do with the way people react to that landscape, how they feel about it and themselves as part of it.

Often the place we live in, our very community, becomes invisible to us because of our long habit of simply being in it, of taking it for granted. We take the light of Gloucester for granted, as we do the configuration of buildings along the waterfront, the skyline above Main and Rogers streets: the hue of West End red brick, the reflection of the sun off the water of the inner harbor, or the way Ten Pound Island seems to loom closer to the land than it actually is on certain days of hazy sun or fog.

We take each other for granted, too. We think that fishermen will always be part of our lives here, that the waterfront will accommodate them because it always has. We take the availability of jobs for granted (or at least we did before the collapse of the world’s economy), of housing we can afford (or once could). We expect to wake up each morning and find the objects we take our bearings from—the flowering shad bush at the edge of Dogtown in the spring, the gulls in the harbor—in their habitual places and observing their special rhythms of appearance. We expect to do what we always do, to be who we think we are.

But the immediate world around us, or the sense of community we derive from simply being here—from our comfortableness with the ever-recurring patterns of life that are as precious to us as the blood flowing in our veins—doesn’t exist undisturbed or unchangeable forever. Community must be nurtured. It must be stabilized by good planning, enhanced by proper growth. It cannot be allowed to languish or deteriorate like an abandoned house. By the same token, it cannot sustain radical social, physical or economic change without suffering in ways both obvious and subtle. For when you destroy neighborhoods by driving long-time residents out; when you undermine deep-seated cultural traditions, like those which have accompanied maritime life; when you destabilize long-existing local businesses, you destroy a sense of community. You dismantle it piece by piece.

A case in point was the closing of neighborhood schools, beginning in the late 1970s. During the fight to save those schools, which formed part of the lifeblood of this community, proponents claimed that those who wished to keep them open were backward-looking. The wave of the future, they said (or at least the way under Proposition 2 ½) was to centralize. Ironically, the school department later regretted the closing of those five crucial neighborhood schools.

But the damage was done. Life in those neighborhoods was never the same as it was when the children walked to school and their parents could drop by and check on their progress or just visit. The intimate person-to-person experience of the neighborhood school—the small classes, the manageable environment—gave way to the anonymity of the large institution. The walk became the bus ride. And we’ve yet to ascertain the effects of these dislocations on the children themselves.

Community is a number of things, both visible and invisible. It is buildings and people, jobs and homes, traditions and values, all held together in a special kind of suspension. Community is the speech of the people. It’s the way we look and sound to each other and outsiders. When you are a part of the community you feel alive, secure. You know who you are and who your neighbor is. When you are away from community you realize what you miss. When you see change, or when inappropriate change seems imminent—when the real gives way to the fake; when a working community becomes little more than a bedroom for commuters, who have scant investment in that community—you begin to feel disoriented. The quality of your daily life is diminished.

Community is hard to define. But ultimately it is the “glue” that holds everything together in a place like Gloucester. And when that glue becomes unstuck, as it threatens to do with the development of a massive shopping center that is certain to undermine downtown businesses or the push to build a luxury hotel on the industrial waterfront, both of which run counter to everything a place like Gloucester stands for, all that it holds together comes loose or disintegrates. Community disappears and so do we and what we stand for along with it.

Some Thoughts about John Updike

2009-02-07T09:57:00.001-08:00

John Updike (1932-2009)

If, as John Donne wrote, “each death diminishes us,” the death of a writer should have a singular impact upon living writers. The recent death of John Updike has affected me more than I expected, considering that I’ve not been a great fan of Updike’s writing, though I’ve always respected his industry and admired his envious productivity. Like many writers who made their living by writing alone, Updike produced his share of novels and stories that seemed composed more out of necessity than inspiration. Indeed, he tended to over-write both in quantity and in the quality of his prose, which I often found excessively ornate, if not tending toward the precious. But write he did; and while many of us were compelled to make a living by teaching or other means, Updike produced book after book, while his stories and reviews appeared regularly in the New Yorker.

Updike was not “our one great writer,” as a eulogist has recently suggested, comparing him to Henry James. Though he doubtless traveled farther and more widely than James, Updike had neither James’ breadth nor his worldly experience. And Updike simply did not produce a novel of the depth of James’ late great masterpieces, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove or The Golden Bowl. Nor do his stories, as technically adroit as some clearly are, have the subtlety of James’, or, for that matter, Hemingway's. If there is one great living writer in America he is Philip Roth; and during his lifetime that honor would have gone to Saul Bellow, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. Bernard Malamud can’t be dismissed either; and for sheer visionary reach, not to say formal invention, Updike pales in comparison to Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and, more recently, David Foster Wallace.

As a critic, Updike was fluent, but he lacked the range and adventurousness—along with the languages—of Edmund Wilson. He didn’t share John Aldridge’s polemical edge or Alfred Kazin’s Talmudic intelligence; neither did he exhibit the dialectical rigor of James Wood. At bottom, Updike was not really a critic but a sensitive reviewer, able to lead non-specialist readers through the work of writers as diverse as Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Chinua Achebe. There was a mildness to his non-fiction, an apparent geniality in his character, as described in his obituaries, that carried over into his critical insights. He appeared never to attack a writer or book under scrutiny, not an unlikable characteristic in a reviewer, though he himself admitted to have refused books that he felt he couldn’t review positively.

That said, I almost always turned to his reviews and other non-fiction in the New Yorker. I found them more interesting than his fiction, often solider, more absorbing because he seemed to have a way of leading you through a book or a writer’s career by describing his own encounters with each. As for his art criticism—art reporting is probably a better term for what he published in the New York Review—I found it often amateurish. The potted history and biography he included in the pieces seemed culled from Wikipedia and his insights had none of the incandescence of the reviews I enjoy in Artforum. Like his book reviews, his art writing seemed directed at a literate readership, subscribers who’d probably taken a course in art history, but, like spectators one encounters in museums plugged into digital docents, still wanting to be told what to see in what they were looking at. In that respect Updike delivered, but not with the power and the energy, or the deep knowledge and understanding, of critics as diverse in their politics or approaches as Robert Hughes, Arthur Danto, John Berger, or Jed Perl.

But then, from the very beginning, I always had the impression that the principal readership for Updike’s fiction was comprised of suburbanites of his own generation, Ivy League graduates who’d studied some literature, probably under the aegis of the New Criticism, and had therefore been taught that a novel, story or poem was a system of symbols they were required to identify and decode. On that basis, Updike satisfied them amply. His use of easily recognizable interior monologues or his employment of a modified stream of consciousness narrative in novels like Couples—indeed, the seamless way he appeared to mimic Modernist techniques in his fiction—didn’t alienate them the way Faulkner’s denser narratives or time shifts may have, not to speak of the stringencies inherent in the novels of the American experimentalist Robert Mc Elroy, or the fine intelligence of William Gaddis’s fictions.

Was Updike a realist, as claimed? One of his eulogists wrote that Updike looked unflinchingly at American life and rendered it with utmost precision. What I found in Updike was an often cloying lyric interference with the real. Adam Gopnik called it a “lyric surface.” And it was this often distracting poetic patina that seemed to create a dissonance, if not a disconnection between what was being described and the way it was rendered. For example, in the early pages of Updike’s 1965 novella Of the Farm, he describes a rural mail box as standing “knee-deep in honeysuckle.” Mail boxes don’t have knees. Furthermore, this mail box has “a flopped lid like a hat being tipped.” Simile or not, mail boxes are not hats, nor can I observe any correspondence between them. Across a meadow “buildings waited on the far rise.” Again, people wait, inanimate objects don’t. While the poetic fallacy of this sort of description may indeed constitute “lyric surface,” what it calls attention to more often than not is the author’s cleverness, not the actual attributes of the things described, their inherent or implied meaning, so that, in the end, the reader’s attention is almost always on the writer not the thing or person being written about. In this sense, Updike could have learned something from objectivists like William Carlos Williams who insisted upon “no ideas but in things.”

Compared to the prose of the great American realists like Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell and Sinclair Lewis, Updike’s can hardly be seen to be realistic. Rather, it verges on the magically real or surreal. And if the prose diverges often wildly from the object or scene it attempts to render (one critic described Updike as “trying to kill a mosquito with a howitzer”), what about the authorial vision itself? Is Updike indeed looking unflinchingly at the reality of American life or is he refashioning it into a hyper-real version of itself? As for realism itself, there are few contemporary American novels that can compete with the truly harrowing narrative trajectories of Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road or The Easter Parade, not to mention Yates’ own stories, recently collected. And compared to Yates emotionally, Updike remains in adolescence.

With respect to narrative itself, Updike could have learned a lot from Raymond Carver and the later minimalists. He claimed to have benefited from an early reading of Hemingway’s stories, but I never found Hemingway’s concision or his characteristic narrative and descriptive restraint in Updike. Rather, there is too much exposition in Updike’s fiction, too much “sheer writing” as Norman Mailer noticed early on. Too often he tells the reader what the characters are thinking and why, instead of letting us gather up the clues as we read, making us partners in the narrative journey, thereby increasing its tension and our suspense. By the same token, Updike tells the reader what to look at, how to interpret the behavior of a character, rather than letting us discover it for ourselves.

His slick use of the present tense, especially in the Rabbit novels, often trivializes the subjects, making both character and action seem superficial, with little concomitant depth or resonance in the narrative, only forward motion. Events flit past, don’t stick; seem more cinematic than real. The attempt is clearly to re-enact life’s flow, but ultimately it’s here and gone, with no profundity, all glitter and show, all “look what I can do with language!”

In this sense, Updike has always seemed to me the high school show-off, as he once described himself, clever but not a member of the in crowd. And like that outsider, he’s always trying to insert himself into the conversation with wisecracks and bright locutions, to impress, although he apparently didn’t have to impress his teachers—the novelist and critic, Albert J. Guerard, who was Updike’s writing and literature professor at Harvard, called him one of his most brilliant students. By way of compensation, he seems to have built an entire literature on adroitness rather than on depth of feeling or breadth of experience (Updike once confessed to a group of students at Brown University that his greatest regret was that he’d never worked for a living--hence, the lives of his working class characters, including Rabbit Angstrom, who becomes declasse` through marriage, seem more researched than directly experienced). Moreover, what I find particularly lacking in Updike’s fiction is any sense of the tragic, as one finds it in Hawthorne or Melville, the sense that there is an inexorable will to destruction in the human character, to self-destruction, even, and the destruction of those around us; a death wish, if you will, deeply engrained in our nature, leading to acts of monomania like Ahab’s, or Faustian bargains like those entered into by Hawthorne’s blighted scientists; a sense, finally, that human beings seem doomed to repeat their mistakes. There exists no Portnoy in Updike’s oeuvre, pushing the envelope of his sexuality, no Herzog, so monumentally sympathetic in his failure. Granted, as a practicing Christian, another of his cloying characteristics, Updike didn’t appear to believe in the tragic—he believed in redemption and salvation, in transcendence, for what that was worth in Richard Nixon’s or George Bush’s America. Updike also supported the war in Vietnam—our only major writer who did; and his apology for his position and the war itself, in Self-Consciousness, betrays an incredible political naivete.

The four Rabbit novels have been seen as Updike’s greatest achievement. Some eulogists have gone so far as to call them the most important fictional achievement of our time. Compared to Philip Roth’s masterful trilogy of our national life from the 1930s to the present--American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and Human Stain—Updike’s novels fall far short. Nor has Updike produced anything with the intellectual depth or sheer experimental reach of Roth’s Zuckerman novels. Apart from the Rabbit books, which tracked the life of an uneducated lower-middle class small town Pennsylvanian, who might well have been a high school classmate of the author’s, Updike’s principal subject, like John O’Hara’s and John Cheever’s, both of whom influenced him, was suburbia, in particular the small town life of educated professional couples—the life he and his first wife appeared to have lived in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a life of boozy parties, restless social striving and dreary adulteries.

Which brings me to the sex in Updike. Hailed by some as a pioneer in writing openly about sexual experience (as if D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller had never lived—or in our time, Norman Mailer), Updike always seemed to me to write from a position of sexual repression. He often describes the sexual act as if from a voyeur’s perspective, acts that appear furtive or blown out of proportion by his prolixity; in Of the Farm he describes Joey Robinson’s intercourse with his wife Peggy as involving cities, countries and castles—whole landscapes—rather than the conjunction of genitals and desires. At bottom, I have always suspected a deep ambivalence on Updike’s part toward women. The female genitalia are often described as dark, hairy, unclean, hidden; women are commonly degraded in terms of their motives and intelligence; and there is frequently, it seems to me, an attempt to shock with explicitness, again the high school show-off vying for attention. Sex, especially in its adulterous liaisons, seems an attempt at escape from stultifying marriages entered into by couples who, as Updike noted, were “children when they had children.”

All this could be the subject of major fiction—Evan S. Connell successfully attempted it in the Mr. and Mrs. Bridge novels, and no one has written better about adulterous sex than Andre Dubus, with far greater realism than Updike. But in Updike’s hands it seems overdone, willed, the driven writing of an obsessive overachiever: Dickens scribbling away until death, Joyce Carol Oates turning out one mediocre novel after the other, rather than the art of a Flaubertian master. Think of Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, James Salter’s Light Years, or the exquisite novels and stories of Gina Berriault.

Still, there is something quite moving about Updike’s achievement, and not, as Norman Mailer suggested, solely in terms of the writing itself, whether one is attracted to it or not. Returning recently to Rabbit Angstrom, I found the novels more engrossing than they had previously seemed to me, often addictively so, especially when Updike sticks to what’s at hand and doesn’t allow himself to get lost in flights of fancy writing, though the political issues he alludes to have worn thin, and Updike’s attempts to situate the narratives in their own time seem now superficial, as if his primary sources had been the weekly news magazines. Yet in the end, merely describing city streets or the parking lots of supermarkets and shopping malls, listing consumer products by brand or the names of television programs, does not constitute an analysis of their reality or its social or political context. That crucial analysis is sadly lacking in the novels, indeed in most of Updike's fiction.

Nevertheless, every day Updike sat down to produce a minimum of three pages. He wrote stories, essays, reviews, memoirs, novels, children’s books, light verse—and all of it was published, as if there were an inexhaustible hunger, a readership that couldn’t wait for the next installment. To have created such a readership is an achievement in itself; indeed to have a single magazine whose editors cherished your work and paid well for it, a publisher, who, without hesitation, produced every manuscript you submitted. How many writers have shared that munificence? And Updike was, according to those who knew him, a person almost entirely without pretension, unfailingly generous, friendly to younger writers, self-effacing, a gentleman of the old school.

Yet, even though he wrote compulsively millions of words, he seemed, at some level, to have held back. There appeared to be some part of him he never revealed, for all the talk of psoriasis, of stuttering and asthma. For all the lavish prose, all the incandescent images, I find an absence at the center of his work, and maybe equally in the writer himself. It may not on the surface appear that way--and his most devoted readers would doubtless disagree. Nevertheless, I can't locate the man in all the words, all the books. He seems to be avoiding himself, escaping in the rush of words. It's as if the writing, the very prose itself, were a mask to hide the man from himself and from the reader, if not the world. There is no depth in Updike, only the illusion of depth; and I wonder if, in the end, Updike ever lived an authentic life, or did he merely write as a substitute for living? Was he, finally, like Hawthorne, who, having fled the world, once confessed that he had not lived but only dreamed of living?

Postscript, February 25, 2009: In a 2006 review of Updike's novel Terrorist, David Walsh examines Updike's work from a political perspective sadly lacking in most Updike criticism. Here is an excerpt. The entire review, along with an important analysis of Updike's life and work in the contect of the Cold War, can be found at http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/updi-j29.shtml

Novelist John Updike dead at 76: Was he a “great novelist”?

By David Walsh
29 January 2009

Updike remains an enormously gifted writer. Very few Americans have ever put words together as effectively as he. However, an artist is not free to do as he or she pleases and works, in fact, under definite historical and historically shaped intellectual conditions. Updike, born in 1932, grew up in the small town of Shillington, Pennsylvania (near Reading in the southeastern part of the state), son of a high school science teacher and grandson of a Presbyterian minister, and came of age during the Cold War.

The need to champion the "free world" against "communism," of course in a sophisticated and literate fashion, stayed with him. (His first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), in part, is a rather mean-spirited attack on the welfare state and any attempt at "socializing" American life.) In Rabbit at Rest (1990), one of Updike's finest books, his long-running character, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, remarks laconically, "Without the cold war, what's the point of being an American?" (The comment, interestingly, was cited by Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations, in Foreign Affairs magazine in 1997.) However ironically intended, the words shed considerable light on Updike's evolution.

On the basis of liberal anti-communism ("blacklists, congressional show trials and meaningless, redundant loyalty oaths for a time gave patriotism an ugly face," he later wrote), Updike was able to explore "the whole mass of middling, hidden, troubled America" (his words) with some degree of honesty in novels such as Rabbit Run (1960) and The Centaur (1963). As the name of his most prominent character, "Angstrom," suggests ("angst" = anxiety or apprehension), Updike, a lifelong churchgoer and student of Christian theology, was initially influenced by thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century melancholy Dane, and theologian Karl Barth.

As to the latter, a commentator writes, "The principal emphasis in Barth's work...is on the sinfulness of humanity, God's absolute transcendence, and the human inability to know God except through revelation. His objective was to lead theology away from the influence of modern religious philosophy back to the principles of the Reformation and the prophetic teachings of the Bible." Not very attractive, and Updike weaned himself from Barth's influence to a certain extent in middle age, while remaining a devout Protestant.

This is not the occasion for an in-depth accounting of Updike's religious philosophy, if such an accounting be warranted. What strikes one most forcefully about the novelist's "theological" concerns is the extent to which they form part of an overall cultural regression in the postwar period. Updike speaks of a certain "religious revival" in the 1950s, but such a phenomenon could only have taken place as part of a serious intellectual falling off, made possible in large measure by the purging of left-wing ideas from American cultural life.

After Twain, Mencken, Dreiser, early Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, early Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis (for all his limitations), Richard Wright of Native Son, the Harlem Renaissance members, and Steinbeck, O'Neill, Sherwood Anderson and Faulkner, for that matter, as well as other lesser figures, are we to arrive at this: "an unavoidable, unbearable, and unbelievable Sacred Presence," which Updike believes we will find in his fiction; "the yearning for an afterlife [which]...is love and praise for the world we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience"; and the demand that we "examine everything for God's fingerprints"? It's the concentrated provincialism, self-limitation and, to be blunt, banality of many of the concerns that is most disturbing, and, in the end, has proven most harmful to Updike's art.

Updike's explorations of certain aspects of small-town, lower middle class American life in portions of the Rabbit Angstrom series are irreplaceable, as is his encounter with the surreal hideousness of Florida's Gulf Coast in Rabbit at Rest (admittedly an easy target). However, and this is a great inadequacy, Updike has rarely been able to truly empathize with (and recreate artistically) anyone who does not resemble himself in important ways, in particular in his search for and belief in the "transcendent." (This quality, in fact, is what saves Ahmad in Terrorist, unconvincingly.)

A thorough consideration of "middling, hidden, troubled America" would have required a far different, more critical starting point. In Rabbit Redux (1971), a contrived consideration of 1960s radicalism (one of Updike's bête noires), Harry Angstrom announces that he has learned the US is not perfect; however, "Even as he says that he realizes he doesn't believe it, any more than he believes at heart he will die." The general acceptance of the status quo has had a paralyzing effect on the American literary arts and cinema over the past half-century.

In Updike, one sees a certain cultural process in concentrated form: the accumulation of great formal, technical skill at one pole, and the severe weakening of the artist's understanding of history and social organization at the other.

PROCESS is here!

2009-01-04T08:48:00.001-08:00

Process is a Gloucester lit mag with a post-Olson awareness, and many of the writers they've published were directly influenced by him.--OlsonNow

The first issue of Process, a new literary journal, is now available. Edited by David and Lisa Rich and published in Gloucester, Process offers cutting-edge poetry, prose and drama in a stunningly designed format. The intention of the editors is to present work by new and established writers world-wide; work completed and work in process. Contents for the first issue:

FICTION & DRAMA:

Edward Dahlberg: Previously unpublished letters to Louis Zukofsky and Fanny Howe; poem entitled "For Louis Zukofsky;" and an excerpt from his 1934 novel Those Who Perish.

Peter Anastas: Excerpt from the unpublished 1962 novel Until the Axle Break.

Jonathan Bayliss: Excerpt from the forthcoming novel Gloucestermas, last volume of the Gloucesterman Trilogy.

Michael Rumaker: Excerpt from the controversial play Queers, previously printed only in German, produced only in Germany and the Netherlands.

POETRY:

Clayton Eshleman: "Dali," "Inner Parliaments," translation of "The Eternal Bum in the Heart of Bohemia" by Czech poet Milan Exner.

Alan Davies: "Once in a Blue Moon," "Slooping Down the Long Slope Toward," "We're moving forward down the then."

Diane Wakoski: "Black Ship Drawn Up On A White Beach," "On Leonard Cohen's Greek Island," "Proust Askew: Poem Using A Line From John Wieners."

Christopher Rizzo: "East Meditation Suite."

Jerome Rothenberg: from "Fifty Caprichos, After Goya."

James Cook: "Companion to the WPA Guide to Massachusetts," translation of "Confusion" by Federico Garcia Lorca.

Nathaniel Tarn: "At the Funeral of a Child Too Old to Die."
Ewa Chrusciel: "Invasion," Of Wonders," "Undoing Paul Celan."

Pierre Joris: from "Meditations on the 40 Stations of Mansour Al-Hallaj."

Nancy Kuhl: "N is for the Nightjar," "[Some Words from that Letter]."

Janet Rodney: "There Are No Accidents."

Saint-Pol-Roux: "Alouettes," translated as "Larks" by Lisa Rich

John Mulrooney: "2007, Fragment After Wieners," "Heard at Oakes Cove."

Price: $15 (order from the editors; also on sale at many independent booksellers)

Email contact: process.journal@gmail.com

The editors can also be contacted at P.O. Box 1268, Gloucester, MA 01931-1268 and http://gloucesterboattrain.blogspot.com/

http://processliteraryjournal.blogspot.com/

The Lights are Still on at Gloucester's Waterfront

2008-12-09T09:02:00.000-08:00

(Photograph by Ernie Morin)

The industrial waterfront is the defining characteristic of the city we all love and cherish. It is an engine that drives a significant part of our economy and brings people to Gloucester from all over the world, visitors who are fascinated by the work that goes on here and by the beauty of the harbor and the city itself. Without a working waterfront there really is no Gloucester, at least as those of us who have spent our lives here understand it, including residents who have arrived more recently, drawn by the city’s special quality of light, a rugged granite-girded landscape, our stunning architecture reaching back to the town’s colonial origins, the diversity of our people, an experienced workforce, broadening employment opportunities, two thriving industrial parks, and a quality and authenticity of life that only a real place like Gloucester can offer.

Fishing has been a way of life in Gloucester since the Dorchester Company of Puritans landed here in 1623. For almost 400 years, Gloucester Harbor has been the center of one of the country’s most important commercial fishing communities. Even with the strictest federal regulations ever imposed on the ground fish industry, Gloucester is still a vital working port and a regional hub for the New England fishing industry. Many millions of pounds of fish and shellfish are being unloaded every year in Gloucester—last year alone 94.4 million pounds, bringing in 46.8 millions dollars; and the year before, 117.4 million pounds at 47.3 million dollars. Boats from Gloucester and from other ports in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and Rhode Island are unloading in Gloucester (and some seek temporary dockage here, to fish from Gloucester for periods during the year); there are two fish auctions, many critical shore side support businesses, other key elements of commercial fishing infrastructure; businesses like Neptune’s Harvest are thriving and growing, while new businesses are starting up.

Gloucester is not a dead seaport; neither is the fishing industry “moribund” or the waterfront “stagnant.” In 1978, the Gloucester harbor became a “Designated Port Area” in order to protect the viability of the harbor for marine industrial usage. Given the ongoing intensive efforts to rebuild ground fish stocks by 2014, the evolving character of the fishing fleet, modernization of the shipping industry, seafood processing trends, growing demands for boat repair and construction of energy efficient vessels, and other marine trends, the Port of Gloucester will continue into the future to be an important regional hub port for commercial fishing (for ground fish and other species) and for other marine related industries and activities. Essential to this is the maintenance of the Designated Port Area, which Vito Giacalone will be addressing tonight, in order to ensure a continued, expanded, and re-invigorated commitment to marine related industries and activities, and, in particular, to commercial fishing, in the port of Gloucester. But, it is a fact that Gloucester also faces new challenges and opportunities.

Existing infrastructure needs to be modernized, including commercial fishing infrastructure. Investment in new docking and processing facilities is necessary, not only because they are needed now—every docking space assigned to commercial fishing is currently in use and we need more–but also because when ground fish stocks rebound, which scientists tell us will be six years from now, we want Gloucester people fishing for them, landing, and processing them, not some other community or country. In addition, Gloucester is well positioned to become a world leader in marine research and technology in some or all of the following areas: climate change, fish and fisheries, marine biotechnology, marine electronics, marine sources of alternative energy, and others. Gloucester’s large natural harbor, its proximity to Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine, the extent and variety of the marine know-how of its residents and the people it draws to it, the work ethic prized and practiced here—all these and more are elements from which to forge highly successful collaborations between fisheries and marine science and technology. Valerie Nelson will be speaking about this tonight.

Since federal regulations began to become restrictive fifteen years ago, Gloucester Harbor has still seen the following developments on the waterfront, among others:

• Restructuring of the State Fish Pier and new dockage
• Rebuilding of North Side of Fish Pier
• Building of Stalls Building on the State Fish Pier
• Creation of Fish Auction by the Ciulla Family
• A rebuilt Captain Carlo’s Restaurant
• Intershell wholesalers and processors; development of products from by-products
• New England Marine Industrial
• Intershell expanded down the Fort – bought the old bait company, D & B Bait
• Pigeon Cove Trading Company bought out by Whole Foods Market
• St. Peter’s Park Marina rebuilt with State Funding
• Gloucester Maritime Heritage Center
• Development of Latitude 43 from the popular McT’s and Captain’s Courageous
• Expansion of Gloucester House (function room)
• Cruiseport (2007)
• Connolly’s Retail Store
• Neptune’s Harvest
• National Fish
• Paint Factory – purchase and preservation by Whale Ocean Alliance (2008)
• Playgrounds at the Fort and Cripple Cove
• Expansion of Cripple Cove Marina
• Expansion of Whale Watch Industry (Yankee Fleet bought by employees)
• Thomas P. Lannon Schooner
• East Gloucester Marine – gigantic new wharf facility
• Development of Herring Fleet

Here are some longstanding businesses which are still a vital part of the industry:

• Rose’s Marine; vessel repair, machine ship, dockage facilities
• Gloucester Marine Railways
• Felicia Oil, and dockage facilities
• Cape Pond Ice
• Mortillaro Lobster
• North Atlantic Fish
• Ocean Crest Seafood, Inc.

Other developments in the last fifteen years:

• Fishermen’s Health Plan
• Northeast Seafood Coalition
• Use of LNG money for development of harbor entities, e.g., Permit Bank, Gloucester Maritime Heritage Museum.

Just this year alone:

3 million in new capital spending on the Fort
80 million worth of business on the street
Jobs in the hundreds
Wages in the range of 5 million

Further needs for the waterfront:

1. Gloucester needs pre-treatment infrastructure to prevent continued exporting of revenue streams and jobs.
2. Protein recovery is another key infrastructure that is lacking in our port.
3. Dock and piers could be a good collaborative effort between the city and property owners that do not currently utilize their entire water sheet area.
4. Pre-treatment and short haul shipping and truck and bus parking.
5. A community boating facility; sailing and rowing for all

This is just a brief snapshot, but I hope it will help to dispel the myth of a dying industry and a waterfront on which “the lights are out.” This is not to say that we have laurels to rest on, or that there hasn’t been a painful downside to the collapse of stocks and the imposition of severe federal regulations, a downside acutely experienced not only by fishermen and their families but by waterfront property owners and their employees and families. It is only the beginning for a revitalization of our waterfront that will continue to make Gloucester one of the region’s most significant hub-ports as well as becoming a center for bio-marine research and development. And that brings with it the added benefits of increased tourism and the growth and expansion of downtown businesses—and yes, a centrally located hotel, but not on the Fort—more jobs, and an expanded tax base, all driven by the waterfront itself.

The economic question is important, indeed vital, and we must all work together to support the fishing industry and to sustain a 21st century waterfront. But there is another issue of equal importance, another dimension we need to include in the conversation. We all live here because of that quality of life I’ve spoken about. But we also live here because of our attachment to the place itself, to Gloucester, to Cape Ann. Place is not only where we live, but also where we get our bearings from. Place is who we are and how we feel about ourselves, how we’re anchored in the world. Place is our very identity, “the geography of our being,” as Charles Olson, who lived down the Fort, put it. And if we lose place, or undermine its character, whittle it away year by year by inappropriate development—chopping up neighborhoods, driving people away from the houses they were born or grew up in— we destroy the very basis of our lives.

Author Mark Kurlansky, who has traveled the world and written many books about his encounters with some of the most exotic places and people, warns us in his latest book, The Last Fish Tale, not to undermine our identity as “American’s oldest fishing port and most original town.” Don’t go the way of so many fishing ports that sold their souls, bartering away their heritage, to become resort communities, only to regret it, Kurlansky cautions us. Don’t let tourism with its service economy overwhelm Gloucester’s gritty blue collar marine industrial character; for tourism is only the icing on our economic cake, not the cake itself. Or to shift the metaphor: the waterfront is the goose that lays the golden egg that feeds our economy and brings people to Gloucester. Kill the goose and there will be no more egg.

Kurlansky writes that we must celebrate the fact that even in the face of the strictest federal regulations Gloucester has remained a major port, second in New England only to New Bedford, with five hundred working fishermen and an annual catch that made us the nation’s tenth largest port. This is not a fish tale, Kurlansky asserts, “nor a (fictional) Gloucester story,” but, as he says, “an improbable and remarkable story of survival.”

We need people like Mark Kurlansky, who writes from outside the city, and photographer Ernie Morin who documents Gloucester’s daily life from the level of our own streets, to remind us who we are and what we mean, both to ourselves and the world, because living here, caught up in the stresses of daily life, the place often become invisible to us. We take Gloucester for granted. Living here daily, knowing each other, working together, even arguing together, we have been given an enormous gift, the gift of Community and of the ocean that surrounds and sustains us. Even if we do not fish ourselves or our families did not follow the sea, living in Gloucester, brought up at the ocean’s margins, we all follow the sea; and as the waterfront, which is the very heart and soul of Gloucester, stands or falls, so do we all. Let’s commit ourselves to working together to keep our waterfront working. This is not romanticism; it’s not a yearning for the past, as some have argued—it’s not obstructionism. It’s who we are and what we are. Lose it and we lose ourselves and everything else that matters about our lives here.

(Delivered as an address at Citizens for Gloucester Harbor's public forum, "Fresh Ideas for Gloucester Harbor," Monday, December 8, 2008, City Hall, Gloucester)

Barack Obama's Victory and the Bush Legacy

2008-11-07T12:56:00.000-08:00

Maybe the worst isn't what George W. Bush took from us. The worst is what he gave us. All the farewells from him, from Washington, from America are nothing but losses of our illusions, helplessly postponed. And the losses themselves are an illusion. For we won't be able to free ourselves from the core of things he leaves us. Conceptually, Bush has put democracies into slavery by using its constitutional vocabulary, be it “freedom” or “dignity of man“, as an instrument of his exercise of power. Farewells from the loyalty to the United States, from its apotheosis of the good life and its might, as we can read in all newspapers? Instead, we have received something we cannot say farewell to: the shameful experience of a deep unfaithfulness towards ourselves, the overwhelming feeling of powerlessness, a dislocation of identity unknown in the annals of free societies.

--Frank Schirrmacher

Frankfurter Allgemeine, October 6, 2008

Barack Obama’s victory on November 4 is very real and very beautiful. It goes a long way toward helping to restore our faith in the American electoral system and in our democracy itself. It was a faith sorely tested in the last two presidential elections and especially during eight years of what may arguably have been the worst presidency in American history.

While many will feel relief that we will soon have a new president, who will hopefully restore a social contract badly tattered by the Bush administration, and that the Democratically led Congress may have the opportunity finally to do the right thing by the American people, the social, economic and psychological wounds of these past eight years will not heal so quickly or so easily.

We have been a badly abused and misguided multitude, as John Milton once described the English people under King Charles. Both as individuals and as a people we have found ourselves greatly diminished during the Bush presidency, our civil liberties, our self-esteem and our once great reputation abroad equally eroded. While the joy we may feel over our new president elect, whose intelligence, articulateness and authentic spirituality we can embrace and rejoice in, we will be compelled to confront the aftermath of the Bush years. Not since the presidency of Richard Nixon has an administration treated the American people with such contempt or exploited our good will for its own purposes, marginalizing its critics, while attempting to demonize them or destroy their reputations, and always impugning their patriotism.

The legacy of George W. Bush includes two horrific and inconclusive wars; rendition of captives to secret prisons; torture carried on and lied about in violation of the Geneva Accords and American law; invasion and occupation under false premises of a country (Iraq) that was no threat to us (WMDs never found); the prison scandals of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo; mishandling of hurricane Katrina and its aftermath; reckless fiscal policies that caused the collapse of our economy; an anti-science, anti-intellectual bias with regard to social, scientific and educational policy; denial of the threat of climate change and environmental degradation; refusal to sign the Kyoto Treaty on global warming initiatives; refusal to participate in the World Court; a Justice Department that protected the Administration and worked against the interests of the American people; lack of transparency in government dealings with Congress and the public; assertion of presidential power and privilege as never before practiced, leading to an imperial presidency; withholding of documents from Congress; an unprecedented policy of preemptive wars; alienation of friends and allies all over the world; instilling fear and terror in our own people; using the tragic attacks of 9/11 to create and sustain an atmosphere of fear in the nation to enable the passing of laws that undermined individual and civil rights; rule of fear; elections based on the generation of fear; massive government spending in the face of fiscal crisis; cuts to education and human services; greatest increase in poverty levels since the 1960s; an attempt to privatize Social Security that would have created a disaster given the current market collapse; a Medicare Prescription bill that provided millions of dollars in subsidies for drug companies while offering only limited coverage to elders in need.

These are just a few of the initiatives, actions and biases that have come to define the Bush administration, as arrogant in its attitudes as it has been punitive in its behavior. Their effects have left us traumatized, not to speak of the impact upon the lives of thousands of men and women, who have served honorably, fighting and dying in Afghanistan and Iraq, sent back on tour after tour of duty without proper equipment, returning home disabled or mentally ill, only to be mistreated in government hospitals and by federal agencies. In fact, the treatment of our veterans and their families under this administration is a scandal unprecedented in our nation’s history.

How do we go about healing ourselves after such trauma? How can a deeply divided country come together again? More especially, how can we allow the perpetrators of this trauma and violence—these crimes—against their own people and others, leave office without suffering any consequences or being brought to justice? These are questions of tragic proportion and their effects will not diminish or disappear merely because we have a new president and there has been a sizable power shift in Congress. The political consequences of the past eight years are, of course, enormous, but the less obvious psychological effects are and will be more subtle and therefore all the more difficult to confront. But confront them we must if we are to heal as a people.

Melanie Wallace, whose mesmerizing post-Civil War novel, Blue Horse Dreaming, was published in 2003, during some of the worst conflicts in Iraq, has written that “postwar periods reveal the ravages of what came before in extraordinary ways, for in them the changes wrought by the experience of war—individual, collective—become apparent.”

Wallace contends that “The Civil War’s most violent aftermath was played out on the western American frontier; it was the ultimate reach of nation-building, which was overseen and directed by a government whose military, whose officers had, by and large, fought in the Civil War on the side of the victors.” She says that she was drawn to this particular period “because of its haunting complexity—it was a time of violent, imperial confrontation—and because the parallels with today are subtly transparent.”

When I speak of war here or allude to it in describing the Bush years, I do not only mean the actual wars we have fought and are continuing to fight in the Middle East, I refer also to the state of war we have lived under during the entire administration of George W. Bush. For Bush and his advisers have not only taken us to war, they have governed under an atmosphere of war, which they themselves have created, a war against both perceived enemies and the American people themselves. This has been an adversarial presidency, perhaps the most contentious one in our history, and we, the American people, have been both the target and the victims of an often take-no-prisoner approach to governing.

“All wars,” Melanie Wallace writes, “leave in their wake a form of devastation that is immeasurable, for those who fight them—victors and vanquished, both—and those caught up in them are always diminished, in some way, by the experience.” I can only hope that the healing begun by the election of Barack Obama will continue, for we Americans are deeply in need of it.

Hold the Fort: Planning Before Rezoning

2008-09-22T13:23:00.000-07:00

(Current zoning map of the Fort neighborhood of Gloucester, MA)

There are two questions about the proposed rezoning of the Fort—and of the waterfront itself—I’d like to address briefly.

The first is about the language we’re using. Slogans like “putting the harbor back to work” or “turning the lights back on on the waterfront” presuppose that the harbor isn’t working and that the lights of commercial activity are out. Neither statement is true. Even with the worst federal regulations ever imposed on the fishing industry we’re still working on Gloucester harbor. Millions of pounds of fish are being landed, boats from other Massachusetts ports, Maine and Rhode Island are unloading, there are two fish auctions, businesses like Neptune’s Harvest are thriving and new businesses are starting up. This is not a dead seaport; neither is the fishing industry moribund or the waterfront “stagnant.” These negative myths need to be refuted because they don’t provide the facts on the ground we need for intelligent planning. Instead, they create a crisis atmosphere that allows only for knee-jerk solutions.

What I’m suggesting is that we reframe the issue, from crisis to opportunity. The collapse of stocks and the advent of restrictive federal regulations to ensure they recoup has forced the industry to downsize, creating hardship for boat owners, processors, ancillary businesses and individual fishing families. Fishing is not what it was thirty years ago. But Gloucester, a city of courageous, inventive people accustomed to hardship, has kept its waterfront working, knowing that our city still is and will continue to be an important hub port. We want to renew existing infrastructure and invest in new docking and processing facilities, not only because we need them now (every docking space assigned to fishing is currently in use—and we need more, right now) but because when the stocks recoup (scientists tell us they will by 2014—only six years from now) we want to be the people fishing for them, landing and processing them, not some other community.

Meanwhile, we’re all working together, planning together, to protect our maritime heritage, our hardy character, and to bring in new marine industrial business, creating by-products and value-added commodities and encouraging hi-tech, research and bio-genetic facilities, all related to the sea. What we want to tell the world, and ourselves, is not that Gloucester is on the way out, but that we’ve turned crisis into opportunity and we’re on the way up. Come and see for yourselves!

This is just a sketch, but I can envision it as the basis for a whole new pitch for Gloucester—re-branding the city, if you will, from a negative image of “the town where fishing once was,” as so many people around the country have been led to believe by the Media, to a positive picture of Gloucester as “one of the premiere hub ports in the country,” where citizens have taken their future into their own hands while preserving the best of their historic past.

With this in mind, let me turn to the zoning. The current proposal for the Fort puts the cart before the horse. It doesn’t look at the fact that there are currently thriving businesses on the Fort, with the potential for more to come (how do we help them to stay here and grow); or the fact that real people with real lives live on the Fort, people who pay their taxes and are committed to their neighborhood. It is really an "urban renewal" proposal that would primarily open the way for a hotel with condos to be developed, no matter what negative social or economic impact they would have on the residents and business owners of the Fort. It is disingenuous to think otherwise. It’s a case of development driving planning. Jam in a hotel and let the chips fall where they may.

This is not good planning. Real planning lets the community say what it wants where it wants it, and from there we go out and get what we need. Real planning looks at what’s currently working, what is its history and how does it fit into the total ecology of the community. Real planning is not a knee-jerk response to a myth: fishing is dead, the waterfront is stagnant, let’s sell it out for a hotel.

Real planning asks what should we be doing to promote Gloucester as a place to move or start a business in. Real planning asks how can we make it easier to get permits to fix up and maintain current properties. Real planning asks if we need to change the DPA, or if under the current DPA we already have the flexibility we need to keep the waterfront working. Real planning answers the question of how we get businesses to come to Gloucester right now, businesses that are compatible with the economic, social and physical character of the city; business that create year-round jobs with good pay and comprehensive benefits, not the service jobs of hotels that depend on the ups and downs of tourism.

Let’s address these questions before we start rezoning the Fort and the rest of the waterfront out of existence.

I received an email last week from a close friend, a Gloucester native, who lives with her family now in Florida. She writes: “If Gloucester becomes soulless, then what hope is there for the rest of the country? This is what is wrong with the place where I live. It doesn’t have a soul, and there is no one I’ve met who would even know what I’m talking about. It’s heartbreaking.” The Fort is the heart and soul of Gloucester. Let’s keep it that way.

(Presented as testimony at a joint public hearing of the Gloucester Planning Board and City Council Planning & Development Sub-committee, at City Hall on September 22, 2008.)

The Fort and our Sense of Place, by Ernest Morin

2008-08-23T09:07:00.000-07:00

Unloading the Day's Catch Aug 2008 - 4 am Ocean Crest - the Fort
(Photograph by Ernest Morin)

A few weeks ago, I presented a slide show at City Hall to a few hundred people on a stormy Thursday night.

That show is rooted in a deep sense of place — the place being the Fort section of Gloucester. It is a part of town you could drive past and never really notice on land, yet it is quite prominent by sea or from the Boulevard.

One of the points I made during the introduction was that you could cut the Fort away from Gloucester and it would still be Gloucester.

It would still contain all the essential elements we have come to hold together as our notion of place.

It has industry, a tight-knit neighborhood with economic diversity, fishing boats, fuel docks, ice company, lobster sheds, a beach, the greasy pole, a brewery, a deep freezer, a playground, artists in residences, even a synagogue now, the Chamber of Commerce, Tally's Towing, St Peter's square ... How much more Gloucester could it be?

But if you take the Fort out of Gloucester then what does she become?

It is a valid question to pose because the mayor has asked the city to "fast track" a rezoning proposal for the area which inevitably will foster a lot of change.

What type of change is a matter of concern and deserves far more public debate.

The city wants to grow tax base, which is understandable; the question is how can you move forward and yet retain your sense of place?

How do you allow for change and yet retain your core values? How do we do it without selling our soul?

The fort is the most interesting place in the city — visually, economically and culturally it is a major contributor to the life of Gloucester.

The businesses on Commercial Street work at night or in the wee hours of the day while we sleep.

They generate more revenue and jobs than the State Fish Pier does for the city and they are family owned and operated local businesses.

They ship product world wide every day. If you drive down there though, you would swear it is empty because the activity is not visible on the street side — you have to go indoors to see the action.

The neighborhood has a long and rich history and a way of life and quality of life that is hard to match. It is perhaps the last working class neighborhood with ocean views and reasonably priced apartments on the entire East Coast.

The people are very real, know each other, help each other and look out for each other, which is rare in 2008. It is not a gated community of cookie cutter condos.

It is the neighborhood that contributes strongly to produce the Fiesta — that has a real cultural and economic value for Gloucester.

Can the area use improvements? Sure it can. Is there a way to move forward without clearing the decks and gentrifying the area? That is a real question for Gloucester.

So please go read the proposed changes for zoning on the city Web site and think about what the city is wanting to fast track. Are we indeed going to go forward in a way that retains our sense of place? Or are we going to begin the end and become another Newport, R.I., Monterey, Calif., or future bedroom community?

Will the rezoning affect and act to push out the waterfront business? Will they move to lift the DPA once they rezone?

We have real advantages as a regional hub port with our own fish auction.

We should not give up on our working waterfront quite yet, nor do anything that would serve to weaken our most economically viable area of the waterfront, either.

We are now truly standing at the crossroads, Gloucester. What is a city or its people without a deep sense of place?

This city is a very real place. We should be working to keep it that way.

(Ernest "Ernie" Morin is a Gloucester photographer, engaged in documenting the American experience, focusing first and foremost on the working life of his native city, especially Gloucester's marine-industrial waterfront, which is endangered by a fishing industry in transition and current plans for rezoning that could, if not carefully undertaken, threaten the heart and soul of the city. The above essay by Ernie appeared in the Gloucester Daily Times and the Cape Ann Beacon just as the city is poised to consider new zoning proposals for the Fort area of Gloucester Ernie writes about and has documented in individual photographs and a highly acclaimed slide show. Below is a review of Ernie's slide show by artist and critic Greg Cook, from his blog The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research.)

Watching my Gloucester photographer pal Ernest Morin’s “Sight Lines” slideshow at Gloucester City Hall Thursday night, I was struck again by how comprehensively and richly and honestly he has captured the city of Gloucester. It starts with his sharp eye (note the careful arrangements of lines and shapes, the use of signs to comment on the scene) and technical excellence, and winds up with him getting so deep into the marrow of the community that his photos, as a group, seem (even to Gloucester’s residents) like some essence of the city itself.

We don’t have artist laureates, but if we did, Morin would have to be the artist laureate of Gloucester. It is rare for an artist to be so thoroughly and successfully engaged with the nature of a community. In Gloucester, it’s something of a tradition – from painter Fitz Henry Lane to poet Charles Olson to photojournalist Charles Lowe to poet laureate Vincent Ferrini (a great character, excelling more as a laureate than as a poet, who died last December). There is something about Gloucester being big and complex enough to be a city, but also finite because it is ultimately an island (there are only two roads – bridges – in or out of the place) that make it seem both intriguing and possible for a person to know it in its entirety (or at least feel they do). Its artists are drawn to take up this challenge.

Morin grew up in Gloucester, lives downtown, and haunts its streets. He’s come to know the city as a boy and as a man, to know it with his feet and his camera. The result – if I may be allowed a pretentious literary allusion – reminds me of a passage from T.S. Eliot’s (who summered in Gloucester while growing up) “Little Gidding”:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

--Greg Cook, New England Journal of Aesthetic Research

Revisiting Edward Dahlberg's "Because I Was Flesh"

2008-07-12T10:29:00.000-07:00

Because I Was Flesh was the first book I owned by Edward Dahlberg. I bought it in the fall of 1964 from Gordon Cairnie, at the Grolier Book Shop on Plympton Street, in Cambridge, shortly after it was published by New Directions. Until then I had not read anything by Dahlberg, although I recognized his name from Charles Olson’s dedication of the “Christ” chapter in Call Me Ishmael to “Edward Dahlberg, my other genius of the Cross and the Windmill.” But when I caught sight of the book’s distinctive dust jacket photograph of a shoeprint in the sand, as I browsed among Gordon’s “new arrivals” on a small table near the front of his cluttered but welcoming shop; and when I opened the beautiful red, cloth-bound volume with its attractive type faces, laid paper, and letter press format to Dahlberg’s first sentence—“Kansas City is a vast inland city, and its marvelous river, the Missouri, heats the senses.”— I knew I had not only to read but to posses this book.

“Good choice,” the ever attentive Cairnie commented when I brought the book up to his desk for payment. “Just don’t let Charlie know you bought it,” he added, referring to the well known rift between the two writers, who had been competitively close since they first met in an East Gloucester boarding house, on August 9, 1936, while Dahlberg was on vacation from New York and Olson was preparing to enter graduate school at Harvard. By the time I acquired Because I Was Flesh, it had been nearly nine years since the two friends last communicated, when Dahlberg, on November 24, 1955, had written a final letter to his former disciple, a letter which concluded “in a rebuke, in love and sorrow.”

Naturally I said nothing to Olson, who never once referred to Dahlberg during the many years of our friendship. But as soon as I returned home to Rocky Neck, I opened the book and began excitedly to read. Having spent the previous several years immersed in Beat and Black Mountain writing, I found Dahlberg’s richly biblical and classically allusive prose a bracing antidote to Kerouac, Ginsberg and even Olson. As a young English teacher and graduate student, I immediately recognized Dahlberg’s absorption in the stately cadences of Elizabethan prose, particularly that of Sir Thomas Browne, echoes of whose Hydriotaphia or Urne Buriall and Religio Medici I discovered, along with allusions to both the imagery and diction of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Webster, the Euphues of John Lyly and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. But these allusions and occasional direct quotations were no mere borrowings or decorative effects in an otherwise highly original style. Dahlberg had internalized the major works of these canonical writers, along with Homer in Chapman’s translation, the pre-Socratics, and the Latin and Greek texts of Alexandrian philosophy, not to speak of the theology of Origen and Augustine. And when he came to write, what resulted was not affectation, as one might assume, given the range and eclecticism of the texts I’ve referred to, but a prose that was entirely unique—direct, resonant and breathtakingly beautiful:

Would to God that my mother had not been a leaf scattered everywhere and as the wind listeth. Would to heaven that I could compose a different account of her flesh…Should I err against her dear relics or trouble her sleep, may no one imagine that she has not always been for me the three Marys of the New Testament. Moreover, whatever I imagine I know is taken from my mother’s body, and this is the memoir of her body.

It was this language, then, that held my attention, along with Dahlberg’s acute sense of place. Kansas City, where he grew up with his widowed mother Lizzie, a “Lady Barber,” emerges in his pages not only as a quintessential American mid-western, riverine town in all the specificity of its streets, drug stores, slaughter houses, tenements and bordellos, but also as one of the generative places of the earth:

Kansas City was my Tarsus; the Kaw and the Missouri Rivers were the washpots of joyous Dianas from St. Joseph and Joplin. It was a young seminal town and the seed of its men was strong. Homer sang of many sacred towns in Hellas which were no better than Kansas City, as hilly as Eteonus and as stony as Aulis. The city wore a coat of rocks and grass. The bosom of this town nursed men, mules and horses as famous as the asses of Arcadia and the steeds of Diomedes…Kansas City was the city of my youth and the burial ground of my poor mother’s hopes; her blood, like Abel’s, cries out to me from every cobblestone, building, flat and street.

Although I was moved by Dahlberg’s account of his and his mother’s many misfortunes in this first reading—the eccentricities of her endless suitors, her struggle to retain what she felt was a necessary “respectability” as a woman who cut the hair of cowboys and traveling salesmen—and though I found the story of young Edward’s horrific incarceration in a Jewish orphanage in Cleveland nearly impossible to bear, what riveted me especially was the language I’ve spoken of. And its music remained for many years in my head.

But now, forty-four years later, when I revisit the book, which critics Alfred Kazin and Allen Tate both called “one of the great American autobiographies,” I’m once again taken by Dahlberg’s language, especially in a time when our own has become increasingly debased and trivialized. In this second reading, I’m even more fascinated and delighted by Dahlberg’s clear mastery of authors and texts once so central to our own self-definition. But what emerges in greater relief for me, though it was always resonant, is Dahlberg’s stunning sense of the social and the political. For when I first read Because I Was Flesh I was unaware of the author’s beginnings as one of our finest proletarian novelists; and it wasn’t until I had read Bottom Dogs, his first novel, published in 1930, with an introduction by D. H. Lawrence, who wrote that Dahlberg’s “directness, that unsentimental and non-dramatized thoroughness of setting down the under-dog mind, surpasses anything I know,” that I began to understand the political underpinnings of Because I Was Flesh in Dalhberg’s early radicalism.

What is Bottom Dogs but a first telling of the story of Edward and Lizzie in the most extraordinary plain American English, so reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson’s? In 1964 I had read little Anderson, perhaps in college only the deeply affecting Winesburg, Ohio, and I was unaware of how important his novels and stories had been to the young Dahlberg, just as they were to the youthful Faulkner and Hemingway. But when you come upon the opening sentences of Bottom Dogs—“She moved from town to town, selling hair switches, giving osteopathic treatments, going on again when she felt the place had been played out. In this way she hoped to save a little money and establish herself in some thriving city. She had taken Lorry with her wherever she went.”—the echoes of Anderson’s diction and narrative mastery, especially in his masterpiece, Poor White, a stunning novel of small town failures and broken dreams narrated against the backdrop of emerging industrialization, are unmistakable, along with Dahlberg’s sharp sense of outrage over the kinds of oppression that he and his mother and so many others experienced as the country moved from a human-scale agrarian way of life to an alienating market economy.

So in revisiting Because I Was Flesh I find the echoes of Anderson along with Dahlberg’s ever-present social consciousness, though perhaps less stridently expressed than in his first book. It’s as if the two sensibilities, the lovely, direct Andersonian voice of the middle American storyteller and the rueful, politically seasoned awareness of the mature Dahlberg, have interpenetrated in the context of Dahlberg’s exquisite late and more classical style, creating a new dimension of understanding and a greater, more tragic depth to his narrative. Yet the long-suffering figure of his mother Lizzie remains; and in dramatizing the story of their painfully conflicted life together, Dahlberg has given us one of the great accounts in literature of the relationship between a son and his mother:

When the image of her comes up on a sudden—just as my bad demons do—and I see her dyed henna hair, the eyes dwarfed by the electric lights in the Star Lady Barber Shop, and the dear, broken wing of her mouth, and when I regard her wild tatters, I know that not even Solomon in his lilied raiment was so glorious as my mother in her rags. Selah.

(This essay first appeared in the June 2008 issue of Context, published by Dalkey Archive Press, with many thanks to editor Martin Riker.)

A Walker in the City: Isaac's First Fiesta

2008-07-03T10:42:00.000-07:00

(Photograph by Benjamin Anastas)

It should have been a more joyous occasion. My son Ben and I were taking his 19-month-old son Isaac to his first St. Peter’s Fiesta. My mother had accompanied my brother and me when Fiesta started up again after the war, and I, in turn, took my own three kids, beginning in the 1960s. If you count the fact that my mother, born in Gloucester in 1910, had attended the earliest Fiestas in the1930s, four generations of our family have been celebrating the Feast of St. Peter with our Italian friends and neighbors.

As I’ve said, it should have been a happier time. Though a bit overwhelmed by the crowds along the midway, the music from the rides, and the amplified voices announcing games of chance, Isaac seemed to take to Fiesta. Eyes shining with wonder, he refused to be carried by his father or me, rushing instead among the legs of those on their way down Beach Court to where we could watch the seine boat races and greasy pole contest from the shore.

Returning to Commercial Street, we decided to walk to Fort Square for a better view of the events and so that Isaac, who loves to play in the sand boxes of New York's city parks, where he lives, could fully enjoy Pavilion Beach. On the way there I pointed out the old Birdseye plant with its iconic white tower to Ben, where, from 1928, his grandmother worked as Clarence Birdseye’s secretary. On our way back to Fiesta we walked around Fort Square to Charles Olson’ house, where we got a picture of Ben, Isaac and me in front of the commemorative plaque to Gloucester’s great poet.

That afternoon we walked all over the Fort, from Beach Court to Fort Square. We shared fried dough and Ben shot a few baskets to see if he could win a stuffed animal for Isaac. What came home to me during our walk, along with the powerful sense of attraction I’ve always had for Fiesta and for the Fort itself, where I once worked on fish, was the fact that if we allow a Marriott resort hotel or any other kind of hotel to be built at the Birdseye site without serious design and environmental impact restrictions there could be unforeseen consequences.

Prospective developers have already expressed reservations about this traditional marine industrial neighborhood (one was quoted in the Gloucester Daily Times as saying, “When our guests arrive we want them to know they’ve arrived somewhere”); and one wonders how many of their guests will want to spend a lot of money to stay in a busy neighborhood full of trailer trucks and early risers. What will be the impact of the new hotel on Pavilion beach, which is public and protected as such under Chapter 91? And while I can imagine some hotel guests enthralled by Fiesta, will others on vacation be annoyed by the noise, the crowds, or the smells from the working waterfront—the engines of the fishing vessels, the early morning activity of taking on ice?

During our walk I tried to envision the Fort with a fancy upscale hotel in its midst. All I could think of was that the hotel might ultimately displace the neighbors, the neighborhood, the Fiesta, and all the traditional kinds of single and multi-family housing on the Fort. Once the hotel was in place there could be even greater pressure for gentrification or condos. Then, quite covertly, we would have the beginnings of Newport right in the heart of the waterfront.

I'm not suggesting that a hotel couldn’t be tastefully designed and located in the Fort. One approach might be the concept of a small adaptive reuse hotel that kept the Birdseye tower. These "boutique" hotels have become increasingly popular. Still, I’m concerned about the potential for "collateral damage" in the neighborhood as a consequence of outsize development. I couldn't stop thinking about it as I walked with my little grandson and his father—three generations of Anastases enjoying Fiesta (a forth if my mother, who first took me, were still alive, and a fifth if you include my grandfather Angel Polisson, who also took me)—and suddenly a great sadness came over me, a terrible sense of loss.

What should ultimately have been an occasion of unalloyed joy with my family, my grandson’s first Fiesta, prompted a bittersweet reverie, in which I could imagine all that has meant so much to our family and every other Gloucester family of Fiesta and of the Fort itself, swept away from us if we are not vigilant about protecting our heritage and the very places in which it lives and breaths. Viva San Pietro!

The Books in My Life

2008-06-18T14:28:00.000-07:00

I don’t ever remember not having books in my life. Each night at bedtime my mother read to my brother and me from Thornton Burgess, the Babar books, Wind in the Willows and the Peter Rabbit series. At the age of five, I taught myself to read. I had picked up the rudiments in kindergarten when I was four; by the time I was in first grade there was no stopping me. My Aunt Helene, who was an elementary school teacher, got me my first library card when I was six years old. This began a lifetime of browsing among what were once the amazing resources of the Sawyer Free Library.

The first books I got out of the library were the Oz series. Once I was in school studying geography and history, I became fascinated with Native American culture. I’d always known about the aboriginal presence in Gloucester and the legend that Vikings touched upon our shores, perhaps even wintering along the Annisquam and Little Rivers near West Gloucester. Elliott Rogers, a family friend who was a local historian and amateur naturalist, told me stories of the town’s settlement in 1623 by “planters” out of England’s West Country. My first sight of his collection of artifacts from the paleo and archaic periods of Indian inhabitation initiated a lifelong interest in these peoples, and I began to read everything I could find in the library about how Indians lived and what they made. The Holling C. Holling books, with their beautiful illustrations, opened windows to me not only on Eastern and Adena cultures but on the earliest inhabitants of the entire North American continent.

When we studied “Cave Men” in school, prehistory also held me. This led to a subsequent passion for the Ancient Egyptians and the Greeks. I found books for young readers about Egyptian religion and the Peoloponesian wars, yearning for the time when I would turn fourteen and be allowed to use the adult section of the library. Meanwhile, teachers lent me more advanced texts or my mother or aunt would borrow what I wanted from the main library using their own cards.

This was when I fell in love with mythology and devoured the Bullfinch books recounting Greek and Roman myths and legends. At the same time, I read about the settlement of the American frontier, about pioneer life, always with an eye on how people survived, how they got their food and cooked it, how they built houses and raised crops. I became fascinated with process and the records of daily life among the various peoples of the earth.

Although I remember a wonderful thick, green, clothbound book of illustrated short stories Aunt Helene gave me when I was recuperating from an attack of the mumps, I can’t recall reading much fiction until sixth grade when we were assigned books in the Illustrated Classics series, including Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and Stevenson’s Kidnapped. N. C. Wyeth’s dramatically colored illustrations established ur-images for me of Cooper’s characters, bringing woodsmen and Indians to life in a way that was only rivaled by images in the movies we saw each Saturday afternoon at the Strand and North Shore theaters on Main Street, beginning with the last years of the Second War.

In seventh grade a new interest in science, cultivated largely by my teacher Lovell Parsons, sent me not to science books at first but to science fiction. After reading my way through Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, I began reading Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles along with some of contemporary sci-fi and fantasy novels of the time like L. Sprague De Camp’s Genus Homo and John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids. Novels like these seemed to satisfy my need to understand how science entered our lives and my curiosity about social relations, especially sexual ones. I still read simplified versions of Einstein’s theory of relativity, devouring each monthly issue of Scientific American even though I barely understood the technical articles. But reading adult science fiction novels helped me find answers to the things I was beginning to ask myself like, where do we come from and what does life mean? Encountering what was then called “the love interest” in those novels provided analogues to the things I was feeling about my body and this helped me to understand what the crushes I was getting on girls meant.

By high school I was reading serious fiction, not simply the novels we had been assigned to read by Dickens or George Eliot, but all of Steinbeck I could get my hands on. I read an occasional best-seller like The Caine Mutiny; but mostly I stuck to the classics of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. I didn’t discover these books by myself. As I’ve described in my memoir Siva Dancing, it was my chance meeting with a young woman painter after our family moved from the Boulevard to Rocky Neck in 1951 that opened the world of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to me, along with the novels of Thomas Wolfe that overwhelmed me with their torrents of feeling.

Virginia Whittingham was a contemporary artist, barely out of school herself. I met her at the counter of my father’s luncheonette and S. S. Pierce grocery store, where I began to work during the summer between Central Grammar and Gloucester High School. When she learned that I loved to read, expressing an amazement that I was trying at that time to get through Zimmer’s Philosophies of India, Virginia wrote out a list of novels she thought I might enjoy. It included Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, all of which I eventually read with immense pleasure and interest. Virginia’s list also included American novelists like Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson and Thomas Wolfe. Perhaps today it might not be possible to understand the impact on a thirteen year old boy of these texts. Quite literally they changed my way not only of looking at the world but of being in it. Reading the novels Virginia had suggested made me the person I am today, and though I never saw or heard from her again (if she’s still alive I suspect she would be in her eighties) I cannot begin to say how grateful I am to her for taking the time, those many years ago, to write out a simple lists of books for a boy to read, books that changed his life. With her long, ash-blond hair, Virginia was stunningly beautiful, and a fine painter. Discussing art with her throughout an entire summer started me on another lifetime fascination with the visual. Naturally I had a crush on her, but I’ve already written about that.

The novels I began to read that summer before high school and the ones I continued to read throughout my secondary education were crucial to me; but there is another source of my reading that is equally significant. That was the Book Find Club. I first joined the club in 1951, when I saw a membership offer advertised in Scientific American. It was the usual book club offer—if you bought one book and joined the club you got another book or two free. To me, who was just beginning to collect books, this seemed like manna from heaven. Also, the titles of the books intrigued me. Many were scientific; in fact, I began my membership with W. P. D. Wightman’s The Growth of Scientific Ideas and George Gaylord Simpson’s The Meaning of Evolution, both from Yale University Press. But the club also offered literary titles along with its list of political, sociological and philosophical books, all of them new.

It was through the Book Find Club, which I was later to learn had been investigated by the House Un-American Activities committee for offering its members “subversive” books, that I began to branch out in my reading. Henry Steele Commager’s attack on McCarthyism, Freedom, Loyalty and Dissent, was probably my first foray into political analysis. I also read C. Wright Mills’ White Collar, along with Emanuel Velikowsky’s Worlds in Collision (the renegade psychiatrist’s assertion that life on this planet sprung from living matter brought to earth by crashing asteroids, discredited until recently, may well be proven true by the discovery of microorganisms in asteroids found in Antarctica and suspected to be from Mars.)

This may seem like heady reading for an adolescent; but I had nearly ten years of practice behind me when I first opened the pages of these attractively designed books, which arrived regularly each month. I was responsible for scarcely more than $1.98 in costs if I didn’t return the announcement card in time. But I wanted the books—I could certainly afford them out of the small salary my father paid me each week. I wanted them to read and I wanted them to stand side by side in the antique Victorian bookcase my mother had bought for me at an estate auction. I was beginning to love books for themselves as much as for what they contained.

Other books of significance that I got from the club were Carlton Coon’s The Story of Man and C.W. Ceram’s Gods, Graves and Scholars. Although I would later reject Coon’s racist anthropology, his was the first book that gave me a systematic sense of how we came “up from the ape,” in the words of another Book Find author, Ernest Hooten. Ceram’s book, however, opened up an entirely new avenue of interest for me in archaeology and ancient languages, combining my prior fascination with Egyptian and Greek origins with a glimpse into Central American cultures that I knew little about. Ever since, archaeology has been one of my chief loves.

I’ve said that the club also offered more purely literary texts, including autobiographies like Sean O’Casey’s Sunset and Evening Star. It was through the club that I discovered the stories of J. D. Salinger and The Catcher in the Rye. I suspect that these two books were among the first literary fiction by living authors I read beyond Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Reading Salinger helped me see that I, too, could write about growing up, using the language that people employed in daily life and not the formal rhetoric we were subjected to in the reading we did for our English classes.

There must have been some dissonance for me then, perhaps a conflict between the demands of the classroom and its more traditional texts and the reading I did on my own that took me right into the heart of my own times—the politics, the literature, the sociology and science. In retrospect, I think I managed the separation because I had always considered my own private reading to be more important than what was assigned to us in school. I did my assignments, and I was a pretty good and competent student; but my real life was always in my own books and in the pursuit of those interests that were never satisfied by any school.

Still, I don’t mean merely to list the books I read in high school that had such an influence on me. What I want to do before I speak about my college reading is to note that encountering these books helped me to establish and explore the social and intellectual themes I continue to pursue today; they helped to lay the foundation of the life of my mind. I’ve never stopped reading in ancient history and archaeology or in science, particularly neuro biology and physics; I still read in politics and political science, even in sociology, although much less than I did in the 1960s. All this was made possible though a simple advertisement in Scientific American that led me to the Book Find Club and those books that helped me move from adolescence into the adult world of ideas.

In college I began the systematic study of literature. Many of the books that were assigned to us for class were also books that had a profound influence on me, although I continued to read on my own even more than I had done so previously. This was made possible because the Bowdoin College library was everything one sought in a library. I can’t recall ever being unable to find any book I wanted in that vast collection. Through an aggressive acquisition policy the library also kept up with contemporary British and American writing, so that I was able early on to read such Beat classics as Clellon Holmes’ Go and novels by the Angry Young Men of Britain like John Wain’s Hurry on Down and Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim. It was also at this time that I began eagerly to devour the initial volumes of Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet as each appeared. Sadly neglected today, their exquisite prose inspired many of us to become writers, indeed, to travel beyond the narrow literary and intellectual confines of America.

The first two books we read in Stephen Minot’s freshman composition course during the fall of 1955, Thoreau’s Walden and Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, have remained books that I return to constantly. Reading Thoreau for the first time, beyond excerpts in our high school textbook on American literature, helped me to understand my own need for solitude and my deep connection with the natural world. Jewett, whom at first I disparaged because of her subtlety, became the first localist who caught my attention, nurturing my love for a Maine landscape I would respond to for the rest of my life and showing me how one might write about one’s home country.

While these books had some immediate meaning for me, it was later in life that I would find their resonance of deeper importance. But the books which had the greatest impact upon me were those I discovered for myself in the library and in the remarkable off-campus bookstore operated by Carl Appollonio, a Korean war veteran and history major, who had returned to college on the GI Bill. At Carl’s I literally found the books that were to have the profoundest intellectual influence on me, books by Walter Kaufmann and William Barrett about the Existentialists that changed the shape of my life and set me on a personal and philosophical journey that continues today.

I can’t begin to describe the impact on me of first reading Sartre’s Nausea in that early New Directions cloth bound edition, which I still possess. Other students were reading Camus in the classroom by then and I read The Stranger, The Plague and The Fall with absorption, later picking up his philosophical essays, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel, which had just been issued in the Vintage paperback library. But it was Sartre’s grittier vision of alienation that I ultimately connected with, reading everything I could find in English by him and straining my elementary French to comprehend the original when no translations were available. This is not the place for a digression on Sartre’s philosophical and political influence on me. Let me simply indicate that of the handful of writers and thinkers who have shaped my own mind, Sartre is among the foremost and remains so today.

I should, however, add a note about the paperback explosion that happened just about the same time as I entered college. Although by high school I owned a few books in the Mentor paperback series, notably E.V. Rieu’s fine prose translation of The Odyssey and Ortega Y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses, which I had picked off the magazine rack in my father’s store, I had not begun to purchase other inexpensive editions of classics that were becoming readily available then. What started me on the creation of my paperback library was my purchase during the summer between high school and college of C. Day Lewis’s wonderfully readable translation of The Aeneid in the Anchor Books series, which I had just studied in my fourth year Latin class.

I bought that book at a little bookshop in Rockport called The Mariner’s Bookstall. I mention it because, along with Brown’s Book Store in Gloucester it was the only bookstore I knew. And Mariner’s began to stock copies of most of the new paperback imprints that were then coming on the market, including Anchor Books and the Vintage series. To be able to buy a classic for as little as eight-five cents was a tremendous gift for young people like me, who were just getting started collecting and reading books. And once I was in college I doubt that a day went by during my first year or two when I wasn’t in Carl’s bookstore picking up yet another translation of Homer or Dante or deep in discussion with Carl or certain members of the group of local artists and intellectuals who lived in and around the college community. We talked about Sartre, of course, and Spengler; we read and discussed the new fiction that was beginning to come out of England, novels by John Wain and John Braine, by Kingsley Amis and Alan Sillitoe.

Slowly I amassed a library of books, many of which I still own. By the time I entered college I had stopped my membership in the Book Find Club, which soon ceased operating. Carl gave me a discount on whatever I bought from him. And what I bought was mostly paperback editions of books of such diverse subject matter as Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey and Zeller’s Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy. Naturally I overspent my budget, which consisted of the money I earned during the summer and an “allowance” my parents sent me regularly to help with extra expenses. Needless to say those “extra expenses” were generally for books, for I had little else to buy at the time. By sophomore year I was earning pocket money playing piano during the weekend in a small dance band at the Officer’s Club of the Brunswick Navel Air Station and working at the library, where I continued to work through the rest of my college career, not only because of the pay but also because it gave me unlimited access to more books,

Looking back on my reading between 1955 and 1959, my undergraduate years, I can only say that it was not uncommon for me to read a book a day, many of them not required for any course I took. Certainly I read books that my professors in English, history and philosophy, or in the Greek, Latin, French and Italian literature I also studied, suggested as outside reading. Titles that come to mind would be Lionel Trilling’s book on Arnold or certain volumes in Toynbee’s great series (which I’ve never finished). I also read Clive Bell on the post-impressionists and Herbert Read’s ground breaking essays on Cubism and Surrealism in The Theory of Modern Art.

Then there were the poets we studied in class and those we read on our own—Rimbeau, Verlaine, cummings, Stevens and later the Beats. And the modernist novelists who came to mean so much to me: Joyce, Proust, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Celine. There were books like Arturo Barea’s memoirs of the Spanish Civil War and Hermann Broch’s the The Death of Virgil, books I came across in my wanderings through the library stacks on idle afternoons or late nights when the library was closed and I had its treasures all to myself. These are books I pick out of my memory or as I walk past one of my book cases and catch sight of the actual volume I bought in those years, books like The Recognitions

by William Gaddis or John Rechy’s City of Night. They also include Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, LeComte du Nouy’s Human Destiny and Denis de Rougment’s Love in the Western World, books that our teachers disparaged but that some of us read with interest and excitement. To this day certain eccentric writers or visionary thinkers, like Leo Stein or Marshall McLuhan, not to speak of the great individualists like Henry Miller, continue to hold my interest. It is the rebel in me that attracts me to them and the fact that I take what I need from the books I read no matter what the received critical opinion or judgment might be.

Speaking of rebels, my political education began not with Marx but with John Dos Passos’ USA, which had been assigned to me in a seminar on American writers required for English majors. Reading Dos Passos I first became acquainted with native radicals like Randolph Bourne, whose essays on war and cultural renewal had a profound impact upon me. And my real induction into the most contemporary and avant-garde writing was through the pages of the Evergreen Review, where I discovered the works of Samuel Beckett and the philosopher E. M. Cioran and rediscovered Charles Olson, the poet who was living in my home town at the very moment I read his seminal essay, “Human Universe” in the review.

I should also mention the profound influence upon me of D. H. Lawrence, particularly during my last two years in college when I chose to write my senior thesis on Lawrence and myth, concentrating particularly on his Mexican novel, The Plumed Serpent. Introduced to Lawrence in Larry Hall’s course in modern literature, I began to read everything by him I could lay my hands on, even a splendid copy of the original 1928 Florence edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, housed in the rare book room of the library. But it was not the sexual in Lawrence that attracted me so much—after all, I had read Miller’s Tropics in the Obelisk Press editions friends had brought back from France. What I loved in Lawrence was his evocations of places in the world, his north of England, Italy and the American Southwest, which I would later travel to myself literally because of the way Lawrence had described New Mexico. I was also attracted to Lawrence’s life, to the way he and Frieda traveled like Gypsies from place to place, the way he appeared to write effortlessly at the kitchen table while dinner was being prepared, the way he seemed to penetrate the psychology of human relationships, which I had long puzzled over and began to write about myself in my first attempts at a novel. Lawrence seemed then to me the very model for the kind of writer I wished to be, itinerant and urbane like Hemingway, a linguist like Pound, an expatriate; for I had also read the major Lost Generation writers, Fitzgerald, McAlmon and their precursors in Paris like Gertrude Stein, and the option of living outside of one’s country and culture seemed a compelling one.

Lawrence, the working class intellectual, who was alienated both from his own class and from the culture he grew up in, along with the literary society that should have provided a sustaining environment, attracted me deeply, not only as a writer but as a person, restlessly moving from Nottinghamshire to Germany, from Italy to Ceylon, Australia and the American Southwest, ultimately dying in the South of France. The Lawrence who also interested me was the Lawrence who wrote, “At times one is forced essentially to be a hermit,” adding: “Yet here I am, nowhere, as it were, and infinitely an outsider.”

My deep study of Lawrence in my solitary room on 83 Federal Street, during my final year in college, prepared me for the senior thesis I was expected to submit as partial fulfillment of the graduation requirements for an English major. I chose The Plumed Serpent, not one of Lawrence’s most successful or highly acclaimed novels, but one which interested me because of its mythic substructure. For as a student of Dante I was also interested in myth and symbol and the creation of anagogic structures of belief

By, then, I was already pointed toward Europe. Lawrence’s travel books on Italy and Sardinia delighted me. I also read Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli and Words Are Stones in translation and Paura della Liberta`, his book about the myth of fascism and the fear of the terrible responsibility of freedom that attracts people to authoritarian regimes, in the original. Levi, a doctor, writer, painter and political activist, seemed yet another example of the urbane, multi-faceted European intellectuals I found so attractive. Levi’s descriptions of Italy during and after the war drew me to the country as a whole, just as reading Dante had drawn me in particular to the city of Florence.

I suspect the turn to Europe was already implicit the moment I read Sartre. I knew that my genetic and intellectual roots lay there. It was only a question of how to manage the trip with military service hanging over my head. An announcement posted in the library from the University of Florence offering courses in Dante and Renaissance culture and history in Italian to foreign students caught my attention. I applied and was accepted. So long as I continued to be a student I would be exempt from the draft.

Ironically, it was not in Italy but in my own neighborhood that I first learned about the single most important Italian writer of my life. During the summer before I left for Europe I befriended a young Italian graphic artist named Emiliano Sorrini, who had come to Gloucester to work with the painter Leonard Creo before moving on to New York, where he hoped to settle with his American wife. When Lenny introduced me to Emiliano it was with the hope that we could exchange language lessons with each other. Of course I jumped at the opportunity to practice my spoken Italian, and Emiliano whose English was already good proved to be a challenging student. Like many of the Italian artists I would later meet, Emiliano was also a reader—indeed, he was an intellectual with a deep understanding of the major political and cultural issues of the time. He had met Alberto Moravia and he knew Carlo Levi personally. But his favorite contemporary Italian writer was Cesare Pavese, of whom I knew nothing.

“If you love Moravia,” he told me, “you will die for Pavese.” And he advised me not to seek out translations in English, which he had been told were poor, but to wait until I arrived in Italy to buy and read Pavese in the original.

As soon as I arrived in Rome—even before I looked Lenny up in his studio on the Via del Babuino, I visited a nearby bookshop and bought my first Pavese novel, Il Compagno, initiating one of the profoundest literary and intellectual experiences of my life. Once I was settled at the Pensione Cordova on Via del Corso in Florence, I went out and on the strength of that first novel bought all of Pavese’s works in print, that is everything he had published.

Thus began another of those divided experiences for me. While I studied Dante, Medieval literature and Renaissance culture at the university by day, I read the poems, stories, essays, diaries and novels of Pavese by night. By the time I had arrived in Firenze, just at the time of my22^nd birthday on November 15, 1959, my Italian reading comprehension was good. But after a few months of classroom lectures, almost nightly film going, conversations with fellow students and friends in the pensione, not to mention my daily readings of newspapers and magazines, I was able to read Italian practically without the help of a dictionary.

(to be continued)

A Walker in the City: Toward a Responsible Harbor Plan

2008-06-03T05:24:00.000-07:00

A few years ago the renowned art critic and historian Robert Hughes came to Gloucester for the first time. He was taken on a tour of the city, through Gloucester’s historic streets with their beautiful examples of Colonial and Federal Period houses. He walked down Main Street. He observed the working waterfront, and he saw first hand some of our traditional neighborhoods where Gloucester’s working people live.

Hughes, who grew up in Australia, was educated in England, and has traveled and lived in practically every corner of the world, turned to his guide, a member of the Cape Ann Museum’s staff.

“This is a real place,” he said. “My God, it’s a real place. There are so few of them left today. You must do everything you can to protect it.”

It’s because Gloucester is a real place that so many visitors like Hughes come here. They come to experience what has been lost or developed into nothingness elsewhere. They come to experience what for many us, who live here daily, has become invisible. At the very heart of our realness is the working waterfront, and we are now charged with creating and implementing a plan for its future, a plan that will hopefully take into account the deep history and tradition that our harbor is grounded in and the real economic necessity for assuring its continuation and viability as a port, as home to the fishing fleet, and to an enhanced marine-industrial economy.

These must come first. For it is the marine-industrial uses of the waterfront—and such uses include research and education facilities such as the Ocean Alliance’s acquisition and restoration of the Paint Factory, along with potential marine bio-tech and engineering enterprises—that will continue to be the principal economic drivers of a reinvigorated waterfront.

There are several approaches on the table now, including the original Draft Harbor Plan, which has passed through an extensive public process and has, to my mind, considerable value. Each has merits, but for me, any plan which begins in negativity, with the myth that “the waterfront is dead—fishing is gone forever—the future lies in tourism and recreational boating,” is a plan driven by desperation rather than by imagination and an objective understanding of how one reinvests in a priceless resource. Such a plan would also be based on the selling out of Gloucester’s marine heritage, on the loss of our identity as the nation’s oldest fishing port, and I don’t believe Gloucester people will stand for that. The waterfront is not dead, though property values have regrettably been reduced. Walk along it, sail the inner harbor, and you will find great vitality, even new investment.

I support tourism—most of us have become tourists as we travel and learn in the world—and I don’t oppose a hotel on the Fort, though I would love to see the original Birdseye building and its signature tower incorporated into the overall design. That would demonstrate some real understanding of Gloucester’s marine heritage on the part of its prospective developers and their architects. But tourism in Gloucester can and should never be the principle economic engine. There are too many variables that make tourism undependable, a major example being the current fuel crisis. A tourist economy, indeed a service economy such as Cape Cod has, does not produce enough year-round, full-time, well paying jobs with benefits, which allow local people to live and raise their families where they work. Those jobs come mainly from, and can be increased by an expanded industrial base, both in our industrial parks and on our industrial waterfront.

There are challenges. The fishing industry is in transition as stocks replenish. The city is facing economic hardship. The economy is in recession. However, these challenges must be seen as opportunities, demanding carefully thought through and creative solutions, rather than knee-jerk, crisis-ridden responses. We must not allow ourselves to be frightened or manipulated into selling out our waterfront “to save the city” by those who stand to gain the most from it. Individual property owners deserve respect and consideration; but the waterfront is also part of our joint stewardship as citizens of Gloucester. Generations who came before us have taken good care of it, and it is our responsibility to do likewise.

In a recent interview in the Gloucester Times, my friend Lenny Linquata says he's convinced the city can once again be a bustling waterfront without losing a grip on its heritage.

"People who come to visit here, people who would come to [the proposed hotel on Commercial Street in the Fort], don't want to see us change," he said. "They want to come to see and experience Gloucester as it is. Look at the assets we have. We have to capitalize on what we are, not try to become something else."

I agree completely with Lenny. He and his family have deep roots in the fishing industry and an intimate experience of the waterfront—they know what they are talking about.

We have got to move slowly and carefully. Our waterfront is the most precious possession that we all share in Gloucester. And the DPA (Designated Port Authority) should be seen not as a restriction but as a valuable framework for marine-industrial growth and development. The decisions we make will stand for all time. If we lose or destroy this treasure we can never have it back again. Look at the examples of harbors like those in Newburyport, Salem, Marblehead and Newport, whose working waterfronts have been radically altered to accommodate tourism and luxury housing. This is not the way for Gloucester to go. I have great faith that in the coming months the people of Gloucester will come together to forge a plan to foster reinvestment in our harbor and working waterfront, a plan that will both respect the history of this precious resource and guarantee its vitality for generations to come.

(This essay appeared as a My View column in the Friday, June 6, 2008 edition of the Gloucester Daily Times.)

Carlo Levi's Fear of Freedom

2008-05-01T08:13:00.000-07:00

I read Fear of Freedom (Paura della liberta`) in 1959, when I was a senior in college. It was the first book I read in Italian, after studying the language for two years, and I have never forgotten its impact on me. Levi's searching essay had already been translated into superb English by Adolphe Gourevitch and published in 1950 by Farrar, Straus, the same lucid version that's now reprinted in a splendid new edition from Columbia University Press. But I was unaware of that translation, finding only the Italian original in my college library, when I went looking for another book by Carlo Levi, having already been enthralled by Christ Stopped at Eboli, his first published book, the story of his internal exile, in 1935, by the Fascist government, in Lucania, Southern Italy, and his life among its peasant population, where, having previously given up medicine for painting and writing (he’d received his MD from the University of Turin), Levi returned to its practice, treating the impoverished residents of the community and gaining their respect.

Fear of Freedom was written in 1939, after Levi's release from confinement in Lucania, when he was living in France, again in exile from fascist Italy. In this essay, in the midst of war, Levi attempts to confront and understand the cultural, religious and political origins of the phenomena of Fascism and Nazism, along with the reasons for the capitulation to authoritarianism by whole populations in an otherwise democratic Europe. What troubles Levi is why so many people seemed so willing to give up their freedom--their independence and their autonomy--to dictators, instead of struggling to remain free. And one of the reasons Levi gives, in anticipation of Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom (published in Britain as Fear of Freedom), is that, all through history, the dizzying prospect of freedom of choice and the responsibility it entails has effectively terrified people, and they would rather live in the certainty of the State and the Church, taking comfort from imposed forms and rules of thought and behavior instead of having to think for themselves and live according to their own self-created personal dictates. In a word, the presumed comfort of an unexamined life was easier to accept than the uncertainty of the rigorously examined life Socrates had proposed.

Levi's small but incendiary book had an enormous impact on me at the age of 21, an apolitical student just coming out of the McCarthy era and beginning to ask the kinds of questions Levi addresses in the book--Why do people shrink from freedom? Why do Americans seem so timid about expressing their beliefs and feelings? Why were we so afraid of Communism? What was the Cold War really about? Levi didn't answer those questions directly for me, but he gave me the intellectual and philosophical means to examine them for myself.

I think again of those questions and I'm moved to return to this marvelous new edition of Levi's powerful essay, as we appear to be living once more in a time of guilt by association, a time when expressing one's opinion about the debacle of the war in Iraq has often brought down upon one the accusation of treasonous behavior, a time of fear; indeed, a time of undue executive power and privilege. It is a time when all our freedoms appear again to be under assault. So this little book, written in exile by a great European thinker and artist; written when Levi had no hope of publication, speaks to us down through the years.

As Levi later wrote so presciently, "Every age has its own Fascism, and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own free will...and not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralyzing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned and where the security of the privileged few depends on the forced labor and the forced silence of the many."

Vincent Ferrini (1913-2007): All There, All of the Time: A Eulogy

2008-03-23T07:56:00.000-07:00

For Vincent Ferrini community was as real as his Italian immigrant family, and as closely knit. It was as encompassing as the working class culture he’d been nurtured by in the industrial city of Lynn, and the Catholic Church he formed an uneasy truce with. Vincent understood community because he grew up in the thick of it. After graduating from Lynn Classical High School, he sought community at the public library, where he and friends developed their own college curriculum, while their high school classmates attended the universities Vincent and future novelist and historian, Truman Nelson, couldn’t afford; and later, when he became a factory worker, he found community in the trade unions he helped organize and in the Communist Party, which, quoting Melville, he called “his Yale College and his Harvard.”

But just as the need for community underlay everything Vincent strove for and wrote about, he was also a supreme individualist. He believed wholeheartedly in Emerson’s “infinitude of the private man;” and, in ultimately rejecting collectivism, his indomitable individuality drove him from what Vincent called “the Church of Politics.” No dogma ever held Vincent long in its thrall, except perhaps for his core belief in life as the poem and the poem as life itself, a concept potentially more radical than the politics he eschewed.

His nephew Henry’s brilliant film, Poem in Action, has given us Vincent’s biography and his history in stunning words and images—the poverty he grew up with in Laconia Court in Lynn’s Brickyards, the debilitating strikes and lay-offs he wrote so dramatically about in his first book, No Smoke—events which drove traumatic wedges into working class family structures; his father’s admonition that he was born into the wrong class to become a poet; his “graduation” from the Lynn Public Library, rather than any college that would, in his words, “un-educate” him; his life long hunger for books; and his plunge into the daily grind as a bench hand at General Electric in the midst of war mongering, war preparation, and war fear.

Community was also the WPA, where, in the 1930s, Ferrini, like so many other writers and artists, found work, in his case as a teacher and researcher into maritime history during the Great Depression. It was as a participant in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration that Ferrini learned that government was not the enemy but could be the great social equalizer and intervener of last resort, something he never forgot in his anger over what dangerous uses government had been put to under subsequent administrations.

Poets are not usually thought of as being political, as embracing the exigencies of citizenship, though many American poets have become activists out of necessity, if not of vocation. Vincent had been political long before he moved to Gloucester, in 1948, where he eventually became one of the great advocates for the fishing industry and the preservation of a working waterfront; nor was he driven from politics by McCarthyism, which had destroyed the lives of so many American writers, artists and intellectuals. Even after his disenchantment with ideologies, Vincent remained political. Along with the Catholic Worker and the Gloucester Times, which he devoured as soon as it was delivered to his frame shop at 126 E. Main Street, he subscribed to and read Time Magazine every week—religiously—“to find out,” as he said, “what the oligarchy thinks and what the ruling class is up to.” For Vincent never ceased, as he wrote in one poem , “upsettin’ da setuppa.”

The poetry Vincent began writing in Lynn was informed by the life he and his family and neighbors led, the life of working people, during the Great Depression. In fact, it could be said—and several scholars and critics have affirmed it—that his first book No Smoke, a series of poetic portraits of people caught up in hard times rendered in the manner of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, is one of the great documents of that era. Those poems and others in two subsequent books, Injunction and Blood of the Tenement were described by critic and novelist Mike Gold as being “as genuine as a soldier’s wound or a row of stamping machines;” and because of their depictions of grinding poverty, social injustice and the hardscrabble lives of the industrial working class, the writer and anthologist Walter Lowenfels identified Ferrini as, “the last surviving Proletarian poet,” an honor that meant more to Vincent than the award of any literary prize.

As soon as Vincent moved with his wife Margaret, daughters Sheila and Deirdre, and son Owen, to Gloucester in 1948, he found himself part of yet another community. Through the family of Captain Serio, his landlord at 3 Liberty Street, he gained entrance into the Italian fishing community, perhaps even more closely knit than the Italian community he’d left behind in Lynn. And he wasn’t here long before he and his wife Peg made the acquaintance of the large community of artists and writers, who had made Cape Ann their home. In 1949, Charles Olson, still living in Washington, D.C. and teaching at Black Mountain College before his return home to Gloucester in 1957, paid Ferrini a “fan visit” after reading some poems of his in a little magazine called Imago, beginning a long and fruitful, if sometimes contentious, friendship. The Ferrinis became friends with ceramicists Kalman Kybinyi and Doris Hall and their children, Moisha and Laszlo, who lived on Old Salem Road and owned a gallery and coffee house on Rocky Neck; with painter Edo Hansen Rhodes, who lived on the Back Shore, with painter Adlolph and weaver Eva Matz, who ran a campground in West Gloucester, with the Fehlharbor family at whose home on Washington Street one could meet Brandeis professor and historian, Ray Ginger, who had written The Age of Excess and the definitive biography of Eugene Victor Debs (two books we should take down off the shelf today), and with Doris and Jonathan Bayliss. Jonathan, a novelist and playwright, worked as a business analyst at Gorton’s, later becoming controller—and then treasurer of the city of Gloucester— while Doris ran a pre-school in their Washington Street home. Other friends included painter Albert Alcalay, his wife Vera and sons Leor and Ammiel, who spent summers on Rocky Neck during the 1950s.

Out of this community of artists and writers—and with the help of local patrons including art collector Harold Bell, dentist Bernard Cohen, psychologist Ruth Borofsky, and painter Dorothy Segal—emerged the first issue of Four Winds, Cape Ann’s first quarterly magazine of arts and letters, edited by Vincent and Margaret Ferrini, Gloucester High School English teacher David Meddaugh and his wife Ilmi, and painter Mary Shore. The table of contents of the inaugural summer of 1952 issue included poetry by Ferrini, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov, as well as translations from the work of Gottfried Benn, one of Europe’s most respected post-war poets. Featuring poetry of that caliber, along with fiction by Jerre Mangione, a major Italian-American scholar and writer, and art by Albert Alcalay, Tom O’Hara, Stephan Antonakos and Serge Trubach, the founder of the Cape Ann Society of Modern Artists, Four Winds transcended it local origins.

What had originally attracted Ferrini to Gloucester—the community’s closeness to the sea, the working class culture of wharves and fish processing plants, and the intimacy of Brace Cove, where Ferrini walked every morning contemplating the natural world around him—soon found its way into his poetry. Leaving behind the strife of the factories (“abandoned by the Bosses/our skeleton teeth locked on the sky…”), the former Proletarian poet entered more deeply into himself. In books like Sea Sprung, The Infinite People, and The House of Time, one found a new lyricism, grounded in the personal, the subjective, as exemplified in “The Tiny Room:”

the factory

is in a forgotten

city

we dance

to the warbler’s chant

and explore

the sky

take time

apart

and with singing

eyes

approach

the magic world

of sleep

During this time Ferrini also began writing plays, which require a community to stage, plays eventually selected for publication in the Best Short Plays of 1952-53, and 1953-54 and performed in New York, Boston, and mostly happily for him, by his friend Michael MacNamara, in Gloucester. Having left General Electric to open his own picture framing shop, Ferrini set himself solidly down in the community. And the community came to him not only to have its pictures framed by a master (frames that were often more beautiful than the pictures they contained), but to talk and argue, to learn from Ferrini, who fused art and work in that shop, as he writes in one poem, “Eleven:”

I pull the plug out at 5

and all the nightbirds start whistling in my ears

trade is arrested

my hands forget the table

I’m in the bell throated song

But Ferrini did not remain inactive. His conversations with local customers, with workers in the sawmill and warehouses of the Building Center, where he purchased materials for picture frames, his many talks with his friend, writer and historian Joe Garland, who, like Ferrini, had also been a union organizer, and his encounters with the realities of life in a blue collar city reported daily in the pages of the Gloucester Times—fluctuations in the fishing stocks, the depredations of Urban Renewal, which his friend Charles Olson called “renewal by destruction,” the encroachment of development that would threaten the fishing industry or undermine the historic character of Gloucester—spurred Ferrini to a new activism, an activism that was reflected in his poetry, in which the personal and the social reached a new and dramatic synthesis.

And there was the war in Vietnam and the civil rights struggle, which affected the poet as they were convulsing the nation. Out of Ferrini’s own struggles of conscience came two powerful poems, “The Garden of the Apocalypse,” in which he wrote in his characteristic universalism:

The black man has no premium

On color and enslavement

Neither has the yellow man, nor the white

Nor the brown skinned

Each person

Carries a civil war within him

and “Lenin Speaks,” first published in the Guardian and reprinted in anti-war newspapers, in which one could hear again the fiery voice of the young radical, as Ferrini scored the Cold War bureaucracies of East and West for impeding freedom of thought and action:

Smash this Frankenstein Mausoleum

let breath in my frozen corpse

for the Winds to free!

we were the first to step off

the globe

and walk upon the OZONE!

and

imagine

an IKON!

who think the REVOLUTION

only

ONCE?

ah,

what surprises they are in for

Vincent understood from his personal experiences during the Cold War and the McCarthy period, that in shrinking from our revolutionary origins in America we deny our own radical traditions, our insurrectionary roots inherent in the Declaration of Independence—what his friend Truman Nelson called “the right of revolution.” For in the final analysis, Ferrini’s radicalism was native, a pure American radicalism, in part the Enlightenment heritage of Sam Adams and Tom Paine, but more closely linked to the radicalism of Emerson and Thoreau, of Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott and Orestes Brownson. Vincent Ferrini was at heart a Transcendentalist. Like Emerson, he believed in the radical transformation of the self and society, often telling friends that Emerson’s 1837 Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard, “The American Scholar,” (“We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds”) had awakened him as much as The Communist Manifesto. With Emerson and Thoreau, Vincent also believed that the divine was reflected in the mundane; he subscribed to the holiness of every person and to our inherent inviolability. He loved Thoreau the naturalist, who wrote that all objects are symbols and history but a reflection of myth—Thoreau the hermit of Walden Pond, understanding that at some level all poets are condemned to be hermits in America. But he was also in tune with the Henry David Thoreau, who, in defense of Captain John Brown’s campaign to overturn the abomination of chattel slavery, had shouted out in Concord Town Hall, “I need not say what match I would touch, what system endeavor to blow up!”

To many living here in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Gloucester seemed much like the Concord of Emerson’s time, a community of artistic, intellectual and political ferment. There were the never-ending conversations with friends Charles Olson, Jonathan Bayliss, Gerrit Lansing, Harry Martin, Jean Kaiser, Vera and Albert Alcalay, Adolph and Eva Matz, Jay McLauchlan, and Celia Eldridge, individually and in groups, in the rear of Vincent’s frame shop, where, in later years, he lived in a book lined room that had the simplicity and spotlessness of a monk’s cell, in Olson’s magazine and letter-strewn kitchen at 28 Fort Square, or Bayliss’s big house next to the cemetery on Washington Street; in Geritt’s apartment on Main Street, or Harry’s above the pool room. Those were years when the flood of visitors to Gloucester to see Olson or Ferrini seemed unstoppable—Lawrence Ferlinghetti came, and Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, Michael Rumaker, Joel Oppenheimer, LeRoy Jones/Amiri Baraka, Diane di Prima, Robert Kelly, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ed Sanders, Diane Wakoski, Paul Metcalf, and filmmaker Stan Brakhage, to name but a few. Younger writers like me could only marvel at the talk that was generated around dinner tables and in living rooms, the books that were discussed, the art that was described and commented upon with an excitement and trenchancy that I had never experienced in college or in graduate school—conversations that continued after Olson’s death in 1970, at Gerrit’s house, at Jonathan's, at Jay’s, at Henry Ferrini’s, and always in Vincent’s frame shop, even after he retired to devote himself entirely to poetry. It was here, in the frame shop-turned-home, that Ferrini also completed his stunning autobiography, Hermit of the Clouds, published by Greg Gibson’s Ten Pound Island Book Company, in 1988 and later translated into Japanese.

Vincent’s rich life was not without sorrow. He never recovered from the death by leukemia of his younger daughter Deirdre, just as the loss of his baby sister Yolanda, when a stove exploded in the family’s Lynn tenement kitchen, continued to haunt him, though in later years he found solace in his grandchildren Ben and Carrie by son Owen, just as his daughter Sheila’s career in the theater was a source of great pride.

No account of Vincent’s life would be complete without mention of the range of friendships he enjoyed with so many people, and all those he corresponded with. Annie and Geoff Thomas were always there for Vincent, helping him in so many ways, as were Shaun McNiff, Paul Sawyer, Joy Buell, JoAnn Castano, Hartley Ferguson, Elaine Wing, and the staff at the Book Store. Also important to Vincent, especially in his final months, was the caring of his children, Owen and Sheila, Howard Richardson, Barbara Oliver, Susan Steiner, Henry Ferrini, Susan Frey, Jane Robbins, Helen McLeod, and so many others, for the omission of whose names I apologize.

By the 1970s, with the war in Vietnam that had so troubled him winding down, Ferrini was poised to enter a new community of rising concern over gathering threats both to his beloved fishing industry and the city’s treasured resources, her land, water supply and valued wetlands. Speaking at City Hal in favor of the 200 mile limit to protect American fisheries brought Vincent into contact with Lena Novello, Angela Sanfilippo and Peg Sibley of the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives, who were beginning their many years of advocacy for the industry that provided them and their families a livelihood. Vincent grasped the parallels between fishing and the shoe industry in Lynn; for him the collapse of a community’s economic life blood would mean the collapse of the vital community they sustained. When the Wives opposed an extension road across the Babson Watershed, arguing that any threat to our water system would also threaten the fish processing industry, Ferrini was at their side, along with Richard Emmanuel, the activist pastor of The Church, in East Gloucester; and he continued to advocate for the endangered industry for the rest of his life. This renewed activism on his part informed the major poem he was working on at the time, Know Fish, in which all of the concerns of his life and work—the political, the personal, the social and the ecological—become fused in the metaphor of “knowing fish,” as Ferrri wrote: “The thrust of the whole work is in the title, knowing fishes, in men, women and the sea. The pitch is that only when we connect with the interior fishes are we discovering and extending life by the innate rules of Earth, and thereby saving the self, the family, the city, and the planet.” I do not know of a better description of ecology—and Ferrini would spend the rest of his life living it directly while elaborating it in book after book. His nomination as Gloucester’s first Poet Laureate, by his friend and fellow fishing industry advocate City Councilor John “Gus” Foote, and his unanimous election to that office by the Council, was one of the greatest moments of his life, an acknowledgement, Ferrini felt, of the caring he had expressed in words and actions for the community he had adopted and now, it seemed, had finally adopted him.

No tribute, however, can capture the intensity of Ferrini’s presence, the dynamism of his talk, or the never-ending fire storm of his perceptions. His nephew Henry Ferrini’s film, Poem in Action, gets as close as is possible to capturing what it was like to be in Vincent’s presence. He never gave up hope, even in the darkest of times; nor did he ever say no to experience, no matter where it led him. The loss of a person like Vincent, to his friends and to the community, is enormous, not only for those of us who were fortunate to have known the poet, but for others who will never have that opportunity.

Vincent was all there, all of the time, from when I first sought him out to the last letter I received from him fifty-five years later, in which he wrote: We cannot live without the hope that drives our dreaming!

I’d like to close with two short poems. This is the poem, first published in Four Winds that sent me to Vincent’s frame shop in 1952, when I was fifteen years old and out of sorts with the world and myself, fortuitously discovering the magazine at Doris Hall’s gallery on Rocky Neck and meeting the poet for the first time:

I pass

by day

and night

no one has

seen me

If you ever

want to find

and know me

leave behind

yourself

and enter

the caves

of other

people

there you

will find

who is

yourself

And this is the poem I most want to remember him by, Vincent’s summation of his life and beliefs, his own epitaph:

This house

is holier

than a temple

it is where

I live

and have my

being

this house

of bone

and blood

molded

by the weathers

of experience

is all

I have

this house

after

this house

which is me

only

is dust

I will be

in your

house

Thank you.

(This eulogy was delivered on Saturday, March 22, 2008, at a celebration of the life of Vincent Ferrini, Gloucester's Poet Laureate, at City Hall, in Gloucester, MA.)

Why I'm Supporting Barack Obama

2008-02-22T13:23:00.000-08:00

The American people are tired of politics that is dominated by the powerful, by the connected. They want their government back.

--Senator Barack Obama

Richard H. Rovere, the New Yorker’s late Washington correspondent, once characterized himself as being radical by intellect, conservative by temperament and liberal by compromise. I would describe myself pretty much the same way. Though I’ve been a registered Democrat since I first began voting, I’ve really had no political home in America. If I lived in Europe, particularly in Italy where I came of age politically, I would vote with the post-communist Left. Contrary to what conservatives have erroneously represented, liberalism in America is not the left end of the political spectrum—it’s really the center, as Arthur Schlesinger once described it in The Vital Center—anymore than classical Burkean conservatism is the right. Though neo-conservatives come closer in belief and behavior to the old right, the far right in America has, since the 19th century, been occupied by a know-nothing native fascism, just as the left was traditionally the domain of communists.

To understand this shift of meaning and attention is to begin to understand the kinds of political derangement the country has been suffering from at least since the Goldwater campaign of 1964, whose aftermath saw the rise of a well-funded conservative movement focused on changing the face of political culture in the U.S., indeed moving the entire country from its natural, non-ideological New Deal liberalism to a hard core conservatism represented by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (remember, Lyndon Johnson was unanimously voted into office in 1964 by an electorate whose majority characterized itself as “liberal.”)

A crucial step in the process of moving the country rightward was the demonization of liberalism by associating it first with communism (even though most liberals were anti-communist) and then as being dangerously “out of step” with mainstream America. Indeed, it could be said that just as McCarthyism had demoralized and destroyed the traditional left in America, so under Ronald Reagan and the rising power of conservative think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, liberalism was both discredited and forced into hiding. The L-word became the bugaboo of American politics. In retrospect, Barry Goldwater’s conservatism appears more like old fashioned libertarianism. Were he alive today, he would doubtless disown the neo-cons.

But I’m not setting out here to write about ideology—that can be for another time. I’m merely attempting to ground my argument—why I’m supporting Barack Obama for president—in the process of my own political evolution.

The first politician I admired was Adlai Stevenson. Although I remember President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom my nominally Republican parents idolized, he was still a shadowy figure from my childhood, a grainy image of a man in a cape, smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder, in Saturday matinee newsreels about the war, the Yalta Conference, and his death in Warm Springs, after which I first saw my father cry. I was in college when Stevenson made his second presidential attempt, in 1956; and I was old enough to understand his speeches, most of which he wrote himself in a resonant, elegantly literate prose (much like Obama’s today) and to canvass for his campaign as a member of Students for Stevenson. My classmates were Ike likers (“I Like Ike” was the first campaign button I remember); and I had separated myself from my parents, who, under the pall of McCarthyism, had re-embraced the Republican party. Once I heard Stevenson deliver his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, I knew this was a man I could believe in, and nothing he did after his considerable loss to Eisenhower (a greater loss to the nation, I might add) disabused me of my admiration for him.

You might expect that after cutting my political teeth on Stevenson I would naturally have given the very first presidential vote of my life to John F. Kennedy, but I didn’t. I was living in Europe, where the Cold War arms build up was not a rhetorical crusade but a fact of life, and it was clear to me that there was very little difference between the militant anti-communism of Kennedy and his Republican opponent Vice-President Richard Nixon. I joined a group of expatriates, who signed letters, petitions and newspaper ads urging Americans living abroad not to vote for either candidate, as a protest against their joint refusal to curtail the nuclear weapons race. Indeed, after his election Kennedy proved to be every bit the Cold Warrior he promised to be.

Returning home frightened by Goldwater’s apparent extremism, I felt compelled to support Lyndon Johnson. I registered to vote as a Democrat and I have not changed that designation since, though I have voted for Republicans, notably Edward Brooke, who served Massachusetts ably as a senator, and Francis Sargent, who was one of the state’s finest governors, an early environmentalist and a liberal Republican of the old school.

I turned against Johnson as soon as he escalated the war in Vietnam, later canvassing for Senator Eugene McCarthy whose upstart presidential campaign drove Johnson from office. When Hubert Humphrey won the 1968 nomination at a convention reminiscent of Nazi Germany, I was forced to make another of the odious choices I have had to make as a Democrat, given the fact that Humphrey’s opponent was none other than Richard Nixon, who campaigned on a plan to end the war, which he kept running for another six years, resulting in the deaths of 55,000 Americans and over a million Vietnamese. After my disappointment at Nixon's 1972 victory over George McGovern, another Stevensonian figure, I voted eagerly for Jimmy Carter in 1976, though as president he, too, disappointed me (he’s since become a hero for his courageous stand against Bush’s pre-emptive wars). I can say nothing more about the Reagan debacle (like Thatcher’s in England) than I wrote in column after column in the Gloucester Daily Times during his tenure as one of the worst presidents in history before Bush. I don’t subscribe to the conservative’s myth of Reagan as having ended the Cold War—not the Reagan who sponsored death squads in El Salvador, while illegally supporting a war against the democratically elected government of Nicaragua with funds secretly obtained by selling weapons to our putative enemy Iran. This was also the president who turned Americans against their own government, another of those conservative-managed derangements I’ve spoken of, under which Americans have been convinced to vote against their own best interests.

After George Bush’s prelude to his son’s invasion of Iraq, I welcomed a young, fresh-faced Bill Clinton to the White House, only to discover that he was another sweet talker, though a highly intelligent one, at least as regards policy matters. I might even have pardoned his philandering had he not done the unthinkable, when he effectively dismantled the Welfare system, "ending Welfare as we know it," and driving thousands of women and children deeper into poverty, not to “reform” a system badly in need of it, but to take the issue away from the Republicans as he prepared to run for a second term. The move was called “triangulation” (adopting for oneself the ideas of one’s opponent, both to take credit for them and to insulate oneself from criticism by the opponent on those issues) and the Clintons have been running on this fuel ever since. (Note: Under George W. Bush 37 million people, or 12.7% of the population, live in poverty, according to the latest Census Bureau figures--the highest poverty rate on record for the U.S.)

I’ve never believed that the Democrats were less corrupt or more honorable than the Republicans. After all, I live in Massachusetts, whose state politics and most of whose offices are controlled by an in-group of Democratic old boys (and girls), as intransigent politically as they are intellectually bankrupt. This is the gang that gave us a string of Republican governors, who have left cities living off lottery funds, turning public schools into dilapidated detention centers, where the only teaching that occurs is to prepare students for useless state competency exams. This is also the crowd we can thank for three LNG terminals that further undermine our endangered fishing industry, while leaving coastal communities more vulnerable to attacks from those who would target the terminals. And we can’t forget the gambling casinos that will soon be built, presumably to increase the state’s tax base, depleted for some twenty-six years as a result of Proposition 2 ½, one of the early anti-government initiatives conservatives foisted on an unsuspecting public. Would the state’s “liberal” Democratic leadership ever push to repeal this dinosaur that’s driven the Commonwealth into penury? Don’t even think about it!

If I’m cynical about the party I’ve belonged to and most of whose candidates I’ve voted for since 1964, the above is self-explanatory. You could ague that I’ve had alternatives in Ralph Nader’s spoiler campaigns or the candidates of the nascent Green Party. However, when you live in a two-party system it’s foolhardy to vote for or support third parties, even if their agendas are appealing. You may feel personally good about it, but you will usually be undercutting the lesser of the two evils we’ve been presented with for most of our recent political history. Of course, one can opt out of the system entirely, but in doing that one cedes any small effectiveness one might otherwise have enjoyed, and you only end up throwing your vote away. Politics in America is, after all, the art of the possible.

But this time I refuse to take the lesser road. As a “Democrat” I now have two choices for my party’s nomination, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and I’m throwing my support to the candidate I believe to be the better choice, Barack Obama. Clinton and her husband (they are indistinguishable politically and they tell us disingenuously that if we vote for Hillary we’ll be getting “two for one”) represent the old politics of either party. Behind them lies the power of the special interests and their lobbies (especially the Israel Lobby, which has had such an inhibiting effect on American foreign policy), the money of the giant corporations and Wall Street, the health insurance cartels, the party hacks and back room old boys, who wouldn’t know a progressive idea if they fell over it; yes, and the Democratic Leadership Council, which has done more than its conservative opponents to undermine what little progressivism remains in the party. Beyond that, the presidency is not Hillary’s entitlement, as she seems to be suggesting. It may be an office she has prepared for and fought for during a good deal of her political life. She may even be the hard working senator she wants us to believe she is. But those not uncommon desires and putative accomplishments do not automatically guarantee her the highest elective office in the land.

If you listen to Hillary, who gave Bush permission (as Barack did not) to fire bomb thousands of women and children in Iraq and won’t repudiate her vote, you’ll hear the same old litany: “universal health care” but not “single payer,” or a much needed national health system, (Hilary and Obama both remain in the thrall of the health insurance industry); the conflation of the working class (which is now poorer than ever) with the middle class, which used to be the working class and still earns what the old working class earns, even as their industrial jobs dwindle or are shipped out of the country; no major critique of Bush’s phony “war on terror,” which has depleted our treasury and turned the rest of the world against us, just the same old “it’s a dangerous world and we need strong, experienced leadership” (it’s a dangerous world because every action Bush takes creates a more threatening reaction). Underlying so much of this is Hillary’s attempt to project a posture of power, of assurance (“I may be a woman but I am as strong and willful as a man.”)

However, the most significant factor for me in my decision not to support Hillary, is her uncritical embrace of neo-liberalism; and that, I believe, is the most insidious force threatening our political, economic and social wellbeing, far more than the canard of “terrorism” or Islamo-fascism. Neo-liberalism, an outgrowth of right-wing libertarian economic and philosophical principles, posits a market-dominated system, which seeks to privatize the entire public sphere into a globalized uber-market, which, according to social philosopher Pierre Bordieu, benefits least those who are most adversely affected by it, including the world’s poor and indigenous peoples whose local economies, communities, languages and folkways are endangered by globalization.

George W. Bush is also a neo-liberal, as is Tony Blair, for neo-liberalism makes no ideological distinctions. Its proponents believe in deregulation of markets, tax relief for the richest corporations and individuals (neither of whom need it), the transformative power of wealth, liberalization of trade, and market-determined interest rates—in other words, in non-governmental interference in an unfettered market. The consequences of neo-liberal economic policies are now being experienced by Americans as our economy falls into recession and millions of working people are losing both their jobs and their homes.

At bottom, Hillary and Obama are scarcely liberals of the Ted Kennedy or Gary Hart schools. They are both moderates and their records on that account do not differ much, though Obama gets higher marks than Hillary on his positions from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action organization.

When you listen to Hillary her speeches are all couched in terms of “I, I, me, me.” In contrast, Obama talks of “we, our, ours and us.” The differences are striking, if you care about the nuances of language and how arguments are framed. Hillary talks about giving us “solutions,” while Obama outlines ways of bringing people together to create our own solutions and to take back our country from the very special interests who support Hillary and Bill Clinton (and Bush). Deeper than that, Obama talks about hope, about caring again for our country and each other. Hillary, instead, raises the old Bush specter of fear. “It’s a dangerous world,” she reminds us, just as Dick Cheney did, while preparing to invade a country that was no threat to us. What emerges is the image of Hillary, who wants to be our first woman president, as Commander in Chief—as a warrior, a polarizing figure right out of the Cold War: “Us against Them.”

In comparison, Obama steps forth as a unifier, a healer. He wants to bring Republicans and Democrats, Independents and the disenfranchised together. I believe Americans are ready for that dialogue; indeed, we yearn for it. After eight years of the world hating us because of George W. Bush’s exceptionalism; eight years of secret government under an imperial presidency; eight years of payoffs to the rich, of thousands of deaths in unnecessary wars, and retaliation, threats and abuse against those of us who have tried to voice our opposition, I think the nation is poised for a new beginning. For that reason I’m placing my hope in Barack Obama.

Some Thoughts on Finishing a New Book

2008-02-18T14:22:00.001-08:00

Et in Arcadia ego--Olympia, July 18, 1960

I’ve just finished a new book. It’s a sequel to At the Cut, my memoir of growing up in Gloucester, Massachusetts in the 1940s. I’m tentatively calling this one From Gloucester Out. I should be happy, or at least relieved after the completion of a not insubstantial piece of work. Instead, I feel sad—and it isn’t the melancholy one often experiences after giving birth or reluctantly letting go of something that has engaged us significantly. I’m sad because I think I’ve written a consequential book about how reading liberates, how education empowers, and how speaking up and fighting for what one believes in is ultimately liberating; yet I know there is little hope of its ever finding the kind of publisher who could make it accessible to a wider readership than it will have when it is inevitably published by a small press, or, barring that, when I bring it out myself.

I’ve read the stories about authors who self-publish and whose books are subsequently picked up by trade imprints after they create a sensation. But these books are generally of the self-help variety, or they are novels that would have elicited a commercial interest anyway, due to their subjects or the genre to which they belong—romances, mysteries, thrillers, the occult. There is a further story that accompanies the accounts of success of such books, and that usually tells how the authors promoted them vigorously and often with great creativity. I recently read about a couple in Salem, MA, who spent $50,000 of their own money self-publishing and promoting the wife’s historical novel about women with the ability to read the future in the patterns of old lace to the extent that it won the author a million dollar two-book contract from a major trade publisher. Again: history-mystery-the occult. Also: women's lives.

But I have not written such a book. There is little or no suspense or mystery in the story I’ve tried to tell about my life from high school to the present—the teachers who’ve influenced me, the books that have mattered, the places I’ve visited and the people I’ve met, both in my own country and in Europe. The book is also about my political and intellectual coming of age, narrated against the backdrop of life in America’s oldest fishing port. Furthermore, it’s a record of my search for and discovery of an identity through my involvement in the life of the place where I grew up, a city I left briefly, and, against all expectation, eventually returned home to live and work in.

In my earlier memoir, At the Cut, I wrote about my childhood in one Gloucester neighborhood and about the city, as I watched it change under the pressure of time and historical events. In this sequel, I’ve attempted to write about what it meant to attend a local high school at the height of the McCarthy “Red Scare,” and what it felt like to be a small town boy, the son of Greek immigrants, at an upper class college in New England. I’ve tried to describe what it was like to return to the Europe of my family’s origins during the Cold War—and then to come home on the eve of the war in Vietnam, where I married, started a family, divorced, and have spent the rest of my life living and working.

From Gloucester Out is not a memoir of trauma and recovery. It does not explain how the author overcame addiction, incest or abuse and found religion, peace, or a new life, as many current memoirs do. Neither does it describe how a writer escaped from her New York society life with a distant father and a drug-taking mother, who tried to seduce her boy friends, to find eventual happiness as a housewife and newspaper columnist in rural Montana, as another recent memoir, which one reviewer called “an emotional thriller,” recounts.

My book doesn’t have a single narrative arc--I always tell several stories simultaneously. It isn’t written to mimic a novel, like most memoirs published today. Though separate chapters focus chronologically on my life from high school and college to the present, the narrative also moves backward and forward in time, developing a series of inter-related themes, including my psycho-social development, my search for an identity, my political and intellectual growth, and a prolonged vocational crisis. From Gloucester Out also tells how an alienated bookish young man became a political activist, how I was finally able to combine potentially conflicting interests into parallel careers as a writer, teacher and social worker; indeed, how, contrary to what Thomas Wolfe suggested in You Can’t Go Home Again, I was actually able to return to the place of my birth and enjoy a rewarding life, though not without difficulty and struggle.

All of this should be of interest to book lovers beyond my usual readership on the North Shore of Massachusetts. But I’m skeptical. Agents or editors who have looked at my previous work tell me that because I focus on a single American place, which I know better than any other, my books are “too local,” or that they lack commercial appeal. One agent confided to me that the “gritty, unrelenting realism,” of my novel Broken Trip (which was eventually published by the late Grace Paley and her husband Robert Nichols’s Glad Day Books) wouldn’t sell because “readers want to feel good.” At the very least, they want “redemption.” In writing about loss and pain, about troubled lives at the bottom of the social ladder, about the violence of an addict’s life, I would apparently be depressing my readers, the implication being that everyday life is hard enough for most people, why make them read about adversity when all they are really seeking is escape?

Readers who, like me, grew up and went to school in the 1940s and 50s will remember that it wasn’t always this way. While publishers still churned out best sellers and television had begun to cut into the time many had previously spent reading, there was a wide readership for serious literature. Books also did not have to compete with the Internet, and we had not yet shortened the attention span of readers currently conditioned by cell phones, iPods and text messaging. Equally, the saturation in violent action and the hyper-visual stimulation today’s media offer make it more difficult for a reader to sit for hours absorbed in a book. Life moves too fast for those who do not already have the habit of print.

Nevertheless, like all of my books, my memoir is simply and directly written. I focus on a single American place, a city like Gloucester, which is fairly well known in the world. Even after the notoriety of The Perfect Storm, readers paradoxically don't appear to be curious about other views of Gloucester (so editors tell me); and there are so few readers of serious literary writing, fiction or non-fiction, today anyway. My best hope is to find a small press that will take a chance on me, like Grace and Bob did with Broken Trip, or a university press that likes the way I write and finds my work of some intrinsic interest or value because they ultimately know they won't make much money from me. Otherwise, I will publish and promote my book locally, with a friend’s small press or under the imprint a group of us have created to produce books and promote and distribute them via the Internet.

I am fortunate to have a loyal readership in Gloucester. These are the people I write for and care about, and they respond by coming to readings and buying books. To my great pleasure, they actually want to discuss my books with me. Still, like most writers, it remains my hope that somewhere out there is an editor who will pick up my manuscript and say, "This is interesting. I like the way he writes. The voice is unique and the approach to memoir is original. I think we'll take a chance on it." Perhaps one can still dream...

Addendum: February 21, 2008

As if to corroborate what I wrote about the current state of publishing, this morning's New York Times has a double review of father-son memoirs. The son is writing about his addiction to methamphetamines and the father is writing about the effect his son's addiction had on him. Again: addiction/recovery; trauma/salvation (redemption). The reviewer even notes that the nation seems "addicted" to reading this sort of memoir. I don't know what it will take to break the cycle. Publishers just seem to want to cash in.
But the rejection of books that don't fit into established (and marketable) patterns is a form of censorship, and that is very dangerous. It forces writers either into silence or the pitfalls of self-publication, which is both costly and often self-defeating because it's hard to gain a wider readership. Main stream media outlets don't generally review self-published or small press books. Without reviews book stores won't stock a title, hence sales are limited and the vicious circle continues.

There is a further concern. Just as market demands can act as a kind of censorship, there is the self-censorship writers are often forced to undertake if they write to meet commercial demands instead of writing the books they are compelled to create, books that take their own shape and find their own form, books that say what they want to say, regardless of what commercial publishers feel they can sell or what the readership wants. Some of the greatest books in contemporary literature, like Joyce's Ulysses, would never have existed if their authors had not fearlessly followed their own dictates rather than pandering to a market. Who is to say what significant books are lost to us today as writers turn away from what is best in them, away from the great risks that are inherent in our most important works of art? And what happens to the artist who is not faithful to his or her vision; what damage is done to one's creativity, not to speak of what is lost to the world when a writer or artist does not respond to what is best in him or her?

John W. Aldridge, 1924-2007

2008-01-31T14:42:00.000-08:00

I heard John Aldridge speak only once. It was in 1956, during the spring of my freshman year in college, when he delivered a major address on the role of the writer in the university at an American literature conference held at Bowdoin. Renowned as a critic, though still young, Aldridge was an imposing figure. Looking more like a Southern aristocrat than a literary critic (born in Sioux City, Iowa, he’d grown up and gone to school in the South before graduating from Berkeley), Aldridge was tall and well built, dressed in a beautifully tailored dark blue suit. His hair was long for the time, though well cut, and he smoked a pipe constantly during the discussion period. Actually, I heard him speak twice that weekend because he also delivered a paper on Robert Frost during a session on the poet, a brilliant essay that advanced a reading of Frost's enigmatic poem "Neither Out Far Nor In Deep" that was so complex and densely argued that I missed its point entirely, though other scholars attending the conference challenged its premises during the often contentious discussion that followed.

But it was Aldridge’s keynote address on the growing phenomenon of creative writers—novelists and poets—as college and university teachers, and the rise of graduate writing programs, that forced me to confront an issue I had never considered before, especially since I myself had, that past year, begun to dream about becoming a writer with the expectation that I would also be teaching.

The substance of Aldridge’s presentation, based on two of his most important and controversial essays, “The Young Writer in America,” and “The Writer in the University,” was that academic life was no place for a creative writer. Not only was the teaching of literature counterproductive for a writer, who hoped to produce imaginative work of any originality or distinction, the life itself—faculty parties, departmental meetings, the seemingly endless grading of student papers, and the intellectual careerism—was deadening, he argued. Aldridge himself was a teacher. At that time he was an associate professor in the English department at the University of Vermont. He had also taught at Princeton, and he would continue to teach, beginning a long career, in 1964, at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor that would last until his retirement, in 1990. But, as he later wrote about his own teaching, “I do not see that any purpose is served in attempting to make a virtue of the necessity which impelled me to teaching, nor in remaining blind to the many dangers inhering in it for the writer.”

Aldridge continued: “I am specifically concerned with the tendency now rapidly accelerating in the intellectual world to endow the university with creative powers and advantages which it cannot and does not possess, and I am particularly opposed to the development which has made the university the seat of literary politics and power in our time and which has transformed so many of our younger intellectuals into university apologists and literary politicians.”

Aldridge wrote these words in 1956, shortly before his Bowdoin address. They also formed the core of the presentation I heard. I needn’t point out how prophetic they have become to readers with any knowledge or understanding of academic life or literary politics today, when writing programs are centers of power and their faculties and graduates produce most of what’s published today as literary fiction and poetry.

All this was new to me as an eighteen-year-old with literary aspirations. But when Aldridge set the text of his talk back down on the lectern, looked out over the audience, and said, in effect, that if there were any aspiring writers among the students in the hall they shouldn’t be listening to him, they should be on the first train out of Brunswick, I was stunned.

“You will not learn how to write by first studying the writing of others,” he said. “That can come later—most good writers do it on their own anyway.” “What is primary,” he insisted, is that the young writer gain “a fund of experience in the world outside of the academy.” He didn’t say “real world.” It was not a term used then. Travel the country, Aldridge advised, like Jack London, Dreiser and Hemingway; take a series of jobs; do manual labor; work for a newspaper. Get the feel of the country. Come to know a diversity of people, men and women you will never meet in college. “Saturate yourself in the particulars of daily life—that’s where art comes from,” not from “an artificial environment,” like the university, where, Aldridge insisted, “more ideas are conceived than are ever put to use,” and “more passions are analyzed than are ever felt.”

As for those writers who were already teaching, Aldridge warned: “Remain here at your own risk and the integrity of your work, if not of your lives.” Writing and teaching about writing or literature were mutually exclusive practices, he concluded.

I left Aldridge’s talk reeling. A friend, with whom I had published in the college literary magazine, dropped out immediately and hitchhiked to New York, where he got a job and began living and writing in the Village, subsequently producing a remarkable series of plays. Another classmate left in June, heading for San Francisco, from which he sent me some poetry that made what had been published in our undergraduate magazine seem the merest imitation. Overhearing my own writing teacher, novelist Stephen Minot, in discussion with Aldridge and speaking with Steve later, I realized the impact Aldridge’s talk had on him. “It forced me to re-think my own choices,” Steve said.

I finished college, largely because I was afraid not to. I think it was also because I couldn’t bear to disappoint my parents. But my deepest wish had been to drop out, to travel across the country with my friend Mark Power, who’d gone ahead to San Francisco, and begin the living Aldridge posited as the primary consideration for a writer. I finished college and I went to graduate school, two in fact, though I was never a committed scholar and I always felt that writing was the principal focus of my life. Yet, as I struggled with remaining in school, I returned often to that warning Aldridge had issued to hopeful writers and to the books he’d written, which advanced and deepened his own critical thinking about writing, its making and function.

Until I’d heard Aldridge speak, I hadn’t read much literary criticism or even thought about it as a separate genre. I began by reading two books by Aldridge that had recently been published, After the Lost Generation (1951) and In Search of Heresy: American Literature in an Age of Conformity (1956). I can’t begin to describe the impact of those books on me. In fact, it can be said that if anything helped me ultimately decide to become a writer it was reading Aldridge, who had written so poignantly about what it meant to be an American writer, first in Paris in the 1920s, when he focused on Hemingway, Fitzgerald and other members of the Lost Generation, and then in post-war America, in his no less powerful chapters on Norman Mailer, John Horne Burns, Vance Bourjaily and Gore Vidal. Aldridge gave me American writing as it was then being practiced, more directly than from any course I might have taken; and he also gave me the first means I had of evaluating that writing beyond the narrow New Critical precepts that were built into our English instruction. After reading Aldridge I went on to read Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return, his first-hand report on the Lost Generation, and then Cowley’s The Literary Situation, about writing and publishing at mid-century. From Cowley I moved on to read Edmund Wilson’s literary criticism (it would be some years before I found To the Finland Station and Patriotic Gore) and Alfred Kazin's seminal study of American prose, On Native Grounds. By sophomore year I had begun to read formal criticism of a more academic nature in my literature courses; and then I took a year-long seminar from Lawrence Sargent Hall in the theory and practice of criticism. But it was Aldridge who got me started, and I have been reading criticism ever since, not only for what I can learn from it about writing, but also because I find the best criticism incredibly stimulating on a purely intellectual level.

I bought and read every one of Aldridge’s subsequent books, and there were many, including, A Time to Murder and Create: The Contemporary Novel in Crisis (1966), The American Novel and the Way We Live Now (1983), and Talents and Technicians: Literary Chic and the New Assembly-Line Fiction (1992). There were further collections of his critical essays, Classics and Contemporaries (1992) and The Devil in the Fire: Retrospective Essays on American Literature and Culture, 1951-1971 (1972), an omnibus of his career. Aldridge even published a novel, The Party at Cranton (1960), which was coruscating in its criticism of academic life, especially English departments. He also published a book of social criticism, In the Country of the Young (1970), an attack on the inherent anti-intellectualism of the growing youth culture of the 1960s, which I disagreed with at the time, but have since come to appreciate for its prescience, the same clairvoyance that obtained in Aldridge’s essays about the danger of academic life for the creative writer.

As Aldridge aged his focus narrowed, as one might expect. Just as he had called for “heresy” in 1956 and when it arrived in the persons and work of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs he didn’t like it, Aldridge later rejected the fiction of Raymond Carver, who, like Hemingway before him, had given new voice and form to the American short story. Yet it was thrilling to see how Aldridge penetrated the stilted preciosity of John Updike’s prose and over-determined plots and the pseudo-portentousness of William Styron's "big" late novels, while being among the few critics to have understood the kinds of risks Norman Mailer was taking in books like An American Dream and Armies of the Night.

It is said that Aldridge was working on a memoir—he called it “a literary biography”— before his death, in Madison, Georgia, on February 7, 2007. I once saw a chapter about his early life and family in a literary review and found it hauntingly beautiful. I’m posting this essay in part because, aside from a death notice in the June 2007 newsletter of the Hopwood Writing Awards program at the University of Michigan, which Aldridge once directed, I was unable to find an obituary for him anywhere on the Internet, though I can’t imagine a writer and critic of his importance not having been memorialized. I’ve also written these words of tribute because had it not been for hearing John Aldridge speak in 1956, and having then discovered his books, I would not be writing today. I would probably not be the person I am either.

A Canticle for Bread and Stones: Emilio DeGrazia's novel of Italian-American life

2008-01-14T13:59:00.000-08:00

Growing up in immigrant families one hears stories. These stories are one of the ways we make sense of our histories, of each other, ourselves. When we are very young we can’t get enough of them. As we become acculturated we can’t seem to put enough distance between ourselves and the stories. And then there comes a time when we must have them again, a time when these stories are so essential to us that, at any risk, we must recover them, even though the original tellers may now be dead or suffering from the attrition of memory that comes with age.

A Canticle for Bread and Stones is a novel about stories; it’s a novel of stories. More specifically, it is a beautifully imagined narrative of the Italian experience in America, and as such it is a response to what Gay Talese asked for in his 1993 New York Times Book Review article, “Where Are the Italian-American Novelists?”

In that controversial article, Talese, a novelist-turned journalist, asserted that “it is a fact that there is no widely recognized body of work in American literature that deals with this profound experience.” While there may not yet be Italian-Americans who have produced an oeuvre like that of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow or Bernard Malamud--and Talese offers some of the reasons for this disparity--there are both established novelists like the late Pietro di Donato and Gilbert Sorrentino and emerging writers like Joe Torra, Maria De Marco Torgovnick, Frank Lentricchia and Rita Ciresi, who have written trenchantly in memoirs, stories and novels about what it feels like to grow up Italian in America. With the publication of A Canticle for Bread and Stones Emilio DeGrazia, already the author of two prize-winning collections of stories, Enemy Country and Seventeen Grams of Soul, and the Minnesota Voices Award novel, Billy Brazil, joins their company.

The drama of this luminous novel involves not only the telling of stories about four generations of an Italian family’s experience in a mid-Western city, but the very quest for such stories. Its narrator-protagonist Salvatore “Sal” Amato, is an unemployed 28-year old “BA in History, City University” whose marriage is dissolving even as he and his non-Italian wife Sandy cling to each other sexually. As Sal half-heartedly looks for work, entranced by the women he encounters on the street and in shops (“God, what a lovely woman the stranger was!”) he becomes obsessed with a family legend.

The legend is about his great-grandfather Raphael, an accomplished stone mason, who left his native village of San Giovanni, south of Naples, to travel with the famous French architect Pierre Vente to America There, in a city bisected by a wide river, they were commissioned to build a great cathedral to be called St. Paul’s through which Raphael could make concrete his and Vente’s dream of a structure symbolizing faith, love and the redemptive nature of work (“He was in charge of the stones,” Sal’s mother says of Raphael. “He built the walls.”) The cathedral was completed to wide acclaim, but Raphael did not remain on the job to see his vision made manifest. Depending upon who tells the story, the family or the local diocese, Raphael was either dismissed from his job or left of his own volition because of irreconcilable differences about the details and design of the structure. The family’s version is one of betrayal, dismissal and regret, and it sets the theme for the family’s sense of its unsuccessful history in America. For in the next generation Raphael’s son Guido, Sal’s grandfather, was forced out of business, according to the family, by an unscrupulous landlord who sold him the building that housed his grocery store and then foreclosed on him when he was unable to make two mortgage payments.

The sense of betrayal and a concomitant loss of the promise of America emerges again in Guido’s son Paul, Sal’s father, recently retired after thirty-three years of hard labor in an automotive factory, where he made “the side part for carburators…three hundred a day.” Yet Paul reminds Sal, whom he calls a bum for not working, “Who ever said you were supposed to like work? We all hate work. That’s life.”

So it falls to Sal, who, with his pianist-composer brother Bruno and his “little sister” Bea, still an undergraduate, are the only members of the family to have had a college education, to get to the heart of the mystery of the family’s betrayal by America and the dream of success which has eluded them, and to find some way beyond their ambivalence about the very work that was to make the dream come true. Paul tells Sal, “Our people came here to this country to get out of the jungle, and we worked like animals all our lives. We came because we didn’t have washing machines and cars, because we were tired of living from hand to mouth, because we worked in the field all our lives.” Yet Paul, like his father Guido, yearns less for success or wealth than for a small plot of earth where he can grow beans and tomatoes; and Guido, long bereft of his store, returns daily to its empty rooms and backyard to brood over the lost business and his ruined garden. What are Sal and his siblings to make of this legacy of betrayal and ambivalence, of the conflicting and conflicted feelings about the new country the family has uneasily settled in, the nostalgia for the one that was abandoned (Sal’s mother’s mother Serafina had left America for Italy, never to return; while Guido, in his 90s, talks constantly of “going home” again—“It’s all in my mind, just the way everything was.”)?

Bruno’s choice is to make a precarious living playing piano in nightclubs and dives. By day he composes music (“some crazy blue tune”) in the vacant storefront of Guido’s old grocery, his grandfather constantly brooding outside in the garden. His lover Kate, born Protestant like Sal’s wife Sandy (“You Catholics are really weird.”) runs the Socialist Workers Party headquarters across the street. Kate idealizes work, but Bruno remains a drop-out from the Great Society, and Sal refuses to spend a life doing “stupid useless things.” Of himself and Bruno he says, “Bruno and I were alike: We both wanted to find a habitable hiding place away from a world growing too ugly for words.”

Under pressure from wife and parents, Sal searches desultorily for a job. He also searches for the elusive woman, the “soul,” which his father tells him is counterpart to man’s “flesh,” embodied in the unknown women he encounters in the ever more alien streets of his native city or the waitresses who serve him coffee along the Via Crucis of his quest. But his real search is for the truth of Raphel’s abandonment of St. Paul’s and for the man, Waldman, who cheated Guido out of his store, a German immigrant, now Catholic, now Protestant, who became a self-made millionaire. In getting to heart of Guido’s dissapointment and in finding and perhaps even punishing the mysterious and contradictory Waldman, Sal hopes to live up to his name and become the Savior of his family’s honor and history. Only this, he feels, will provide release from the uneasy tension he experiences in his marriage and from the taunts and exhortations of his family to become a man, that is, a worker, and a father himself.

The quest will not be an easy one. It will end with his mother’s death and the demise of his marriage. Sal will find a job briefly as an apprentice wood worker and uneasy comfort in seeing Bruno and Kate married and the parents of a child. He will watch his father entering a new life with Edna, a born-again Christian Pentecostal whom his mother befriends before her sudden death. Bea will settle down with Kate’s hippie-musician brother Dylan, and Sandy will move out to live with another man. Equally, Sal will come closer to an understanding of Raphael’s relationship with the church heirarchy under whom he was to build St. Paul’s. He will even confront Waldman, who emerges less an exploiter than a recluse whose wealth has brought him only confusion and isolation. But, more ominously, Sal will witness the destruction of his neighborhood as the city evicts his father, Bruno, Kate, and himself from their houses to make way for a gigantic sports complex. And with the razing of the places where the family has lived out its history the visible monuments of that history will dissolve.

All that will remain will be the stories and versions of stories, which Sal has patiently listened to, gathered, sifted and compared, his family’s stories and those of his mentor and ex-professor of history, Seymour Markels, who guides Sal’s work as family historian. All that will remain is what Sal has learned from the attempt of others to make sense of the myths of belief, labor and family they have accepted largely on faith and under the pressures of tradition. Sal’s own education, warily assented to by his parents, for they know it will eventually take him away from them, provides no key to his enlightenment, nor even a well-paying job in a city that renews itself by destruction as racial tensions mount and public space becomes privatized.

If A Canticle for Bread and Stones is a novel of stories it is also a novel of voices. Just as DeGrazia shows exceptional skill in weaving the stories told by and about the novel’s characters throughout the narrative, he is equally skillful in giving us the voices of the characters themselves. There is the sound of Sal’s father’s rough resignation: “Thank God I’m through. Thank God I’m almost dead myself.” Of Guido’s feisty hatred of the land that he never made his own: “Don’t talk to me about Amerdica!” Of his wife Rosina’s fluent piety: “All these years and no baby comes. What do you expect? Don’t forget to say the rosary every morning and night by your bed. You’ll see then a baby will come.”

If the bread of the novel’s title is what Sal’s family has lived on, the warm, sustaining, sacramental homemade loaves his mother has baked and served in spotless white napkins since his childhood, whose recipe will die with her, it is the stones of the world the men must ultimately shape and master in work in order to feel that their lives have purpose. The women have faith in prayer and song, the men seem to need something more concrete, those three hundred carburetor parts hatefully turned out or the plot of tomatoes lovingly tended after a day on the assembly line.

Canticle is song or psalm, celebration. In the book’s division into thirty-three chapters or cantos, each with its own theme or refrain, Emilio DeGrazia has given us more than a novel of Italian-American culture. A Canticle for Bread and Stones is also hymn to a vanishing way of life, to the once vital ethnic communities now disappearing everywhere in the face of mass culture and consumerism, and to love in all its exalted or perverted forms, especially, as Sal re-discovers as an Italian and Roman Catholic, the love of woman—Queen of Heaven, mother, sister, wife, stranger:

“What did I know about Her? Maybe even less than she knew about Me. But this I felt deeply and therefore knew all along: That she was vital to my work, that she who could bring new life out of passion (call it love) had the power to create and conserve I craved, that in her absence all work went wrong.”

(Emilio DeGrazia. A Canticle for Bread and Stones. Rochester, MN: Lone Oak Press, 1997. 312 pp. The author's photograph is reproduced from the dust jacket.)

Reflections on Turning Seventy

2007-12-07T14:49:00.000-08:00

(Sky in Honfleur by Nicholas de Stael)

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita...

I was twenty when I first read the opening line of Dante’s Inferno in my undergraduate Italian literature class. It would be another fifteen years before I reached the age the poet claimed for himself at the beginning of the journey he describes in the Commedia. Now I am twice that age and the years have appeared to pass with inconceivable rapidity. One moment, it would seem, I was sitting in my Italian professor Jeff Carre’s basement office, in Brunswick, Maine, where three of us met twice a week to read Dante in the original, and the next I’m standing in front of my bookcase in Gloucester, Massachusetts with the same volume of Grandgent’s edition of Dante I used in 1959, seeking out those words, which led me into one of my own life’s great journeys.

How nice it would be to find myself transported back to Jeff’s comfortable book lined sanctuary in Sills Hall to read Dante once again under his guidance, particularly with what I now know about literature and about life itself. For Dante, was, after all, one, if not the first, of the great literary realists, and that poem, as allegorically as it can be read, is also the story of a real journey—Dante’s through the inferno, purgatory and paradise of his own existential and spiritual quest, and the reader’s by extension.

How nice it would also be to return to Florence, where I again read Dante, this time with the great Medieval and Renaissance scholar Eugenio Garin, whose lectures on the Divine Alighieri sent me in search of the poet’s movements in the streets and alleys of the ancient city I came to love above all the cities I had visited or would ever visit.

But I can’t turn back the clock on my life. I can’t recover the years I’ve lost. All I can do is return to Dante, as I’ve been doing for most of the intervening years—years during which my Italian has faltered, while my understanding of the poet’s meaning has deepened with the help of my teacher’s teacher Charles Singleton’s incomparable six-volume edition of the Commedia.

It is hard not to think of Dante and the extraordinary months during which I read him so many years ago, not to speak of the nearly three years in Florence during which I pursued his shadow through that enchanting city. They were years of youth, years of excess, years of blunders and mistakes—but they were also years during which the foundation for the person I was to become was laid. While my college classmates were serving in Korea or laboring away in law or business school, I was granted a moratorium. I was given the gift of enormous space in my life, space in which to study, to read, to write, and to explore a culture rich in artistic and literary achievement, and I lost no time in doing so. In fact, I threw myself into that experience with a greater passion than I have ever since felt. I suppose one could call it the passion of youth, or what the offer of Bowdoin College described as “generous enthusiasm.” As we age we learn, hopefully, to temper that enthusiasm but not to lose it, for if we were to let go of that thirst for life there would surely be no reason to go on living.

But I sit down now to write not so much about Dante or Florence, as I’ve surely done elsewhere and hope to do again, but to reflect on the stage of my own life’s journey I’ve recently arrived at. I turned seventy on November 15, 2007, a birthday I had the privilege of celebrating with some of the people who mean the most to me, my three children, my life partner, and her two children and granddaughter, in Santa Fe, a city that I've come to love almost as much as Florence. That our children suggested this special celebration and that we were all able to meet where some of us had gathered before was as much a treat for me as the actual weekend we spent together walking, talking, breaking bread, and reminiscing under a warming sun and in the clear, clean, dry mountain air of New Mexico.

I don’t feel physically much older at seventy than I did at fifty or sixty, though my memory is not what it used to be. My former wife liked to tell people that I could recall every meal I’d ever eaten. Today I’m lucky if I can remember what I had for breakfast; and the names of writers or the titles of their books that were at my finger tips ten or twenty years ago, are hard to retrieve, along with the titles of songs I once loved or the singers who made them famous. I suppose one has to accept these losses as part of aging. Fortunately, the Internet provides me with much of the information I’ve forgotten; and my spell check is handier than ever, though the right word or phrase I’m often searching for takes longer to arrive.

These are small consolations for aging. If what I read recently is true, that seventy is the new fifty, perhaps there’s still hope for some productive years. But what I can’t have again is what has seemed to me to be irretrievably lost in the world around me as I’ve aged. Things change and places are transformed under the pressures of time and human willfulness. Some of these changes—the rehabilitation of historic houses that had fallen into disrepair, or new technologies that make our lives easier—are to be welcomed. But the losses I feel both in the community where I’ve lived most of my life and in the larger culture itself are more problematic.

Reading Dante as an undergraduate and studying history, literature and classical languages and culture were part of an old fashioned humanistic education that has pretty much disappeared in today’s over-mediated society. Living in the crass, materialistic world that has replaced it, I often feel obsolete, my interests shared by few. To be sure, literature is still studied by a waning number of graduate students, but I found it ominous to read recently that most choose their specialization with an eye toward the current needs of academic departments rather than as a response to their own passions. And most graduate students I meet today are woefully under-read, if not also under-educated.

Of course, the decade of the 1950s, during which I went to high school and college, was no golden age of the intellect. Though more students majored in literature or the humanities than they do today, I still found myself surrounded in college by classmates, who, though bright and ambitious, appeared largely incurious about the world. They were, for the most part, politically conservative; some were openly anti-intellectual. They tended to major in economics or the hard sciences, while dismissing those of us who cared about painting or theater. Many of those classmates of mine, who became doctors, dentists, CEOs, and military officers, or who made fortunes in real estate, have now retired affluently in gated communities. They boast about their golf games, while donating annual sums to their alma mater that far exceed my meager income. They are, in a word, successful, at least as the culture defines success. They have money and expensive possessions, and many have known great power.

I, in turn, have lived simply in a city that still feels like a small town. I’ve written and taught; I’ve also spent thirty years as a social worker, helping the kinds of people—displaced workers, alienated teens—who often harassed us as undergraduates on the streets of Brunswick. I have no regrets about my life choices. I could have remained in the academic world; but I ultimately came to experience it as an unproductive place for a writer, especially one like myself, who felt the need to interact with a broader range of humanity than what exists on a college campus. And even in a surrounding community, as I learned in Maine, it’s hard to know people who have no connection to the college or university. So I returned from Italy to Gloucester, where, except for travel and vacations, I have spent the rest of my life.

It is a sobering experience to live in one’s home town. You observe the generations as they come and go. People who once seemed incredibly old to us as children have died and we are now their age. I have only recently become a grandparent, but some of my high school classmates already have great grandchildren. I’ve watched neighborhoods deteriorate or become gentrified; I’ve seen a once thriving fishing industry become endangered through restrictive federal regulations. The Italian I once heard on the waterfront or in Gloucester’s West End has been displaced by Spanish, though the Azorean Portuguese of my childhood continues in the voices of new immigrants from Brazil.

The changes I’ve experienced in Gloucester have mirrored those in the larger society. Living through them, watching them occur with often dramatic immediacy, rather than through the distorting prism of the media, has been important to me as a writer. I’ve watched human behavior enacted on the sidewalk and in the consulting room, and I’ve observed and participated in political dynamics that have taught me more about democracy in action than any course or textbook. I’ve also stood by, often impotently, to watch as those in power have sold our birthright to developers, who wished only to exploit Gloucester’s uniqueness and great natural beauty for their own purposes, not for the common good. In the end, I’ve tried to do what I could as a writer and citizen in concert with others to make our community aware of what it was losing of its heritage, of the mistaken direction our leaders were often taking us, sometimes with success, but more often with a deep sense of failure. Much of what I experience now is loss—loss of people and places that were special to me as a child, of fields and forests I played or walked in, of folkways and values that were an intimate part of a closely knit community that served as a larger family to those of us who grew up here. While I understand that I cannot have back what was lost, often through human ignorance or lack of imagination or vision, I can’t help but feel angry that it was taken away in the first place and that so few seemed to care about what we were losing.

It is equally no consolation to live in a nation governed by an unutterable mediocrity, surrounded by neo-conservative ideologues, who have brought this country closer to fascism than it has ever come. Neither do I have much faith in the Democrats, whom we helped regain control of Congress so that they would get us out of this absurd war in Iraq. Like her husband, Hillary Clinton is attempting to triangulate her way to the presidency, while the other candidates seem to be competing with each other to occupy an equally vacuous center. Meanwhile, the public sleeps the sleep of denial with the help of the narcotic of consumerism. I try not to be cynical in my old age; but I can’t help being skeptical.

Writing in the New York Times of November 11, 2007, Frank Rich argues that “to believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal.” He concludes: “We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon.” I can only agree. Were he here today, Dante, who lived through every political and social horror of his time, would doubtlessly concur.

Thoreau Comes to Town: Henry David Thoreau's 1848 Gloucester Lyceum Lecture and his Return to Cape Ann Ten Years Later

2007-11-05T13:56:00.000-08:00

(1854 crayon portrait of Henry David Thoreau, by Samuel Rowse; Riverdale, by Fitz Henry Lane, as Thoreau would have experienced the parish during his walking tour of Gloucester in September 1858)

Henry David Thoreau was fond of telling people that he had traveled a good deal in Concord. As a consequence, many of his readers and lecture audiences came to believe that the writer and naturalist seldom strayed from the confines of his hometown. While it is true that he was scarcely the traveler that his friend and earlier mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson had been—even in his seventies Emerson was still on the Chautauqua lecture circuit in Oklahoma and Texas, not to mention camping out with John Muir in the California Sierras—Thoreau was not as sedentary as some imagine, or as he sometimes ironically gave the impression of being.

He traveled as far west as Minnesota, and north to Canada on the first rail excursion that was offered from Massachusetts to Montreal. As a younger man he spent a dreary winter on Staten Island, in New York, tutoring Emerson’s brother’s children. He covered most of Massachusetts and New Hampshire on foot; and before his tragically short life ended, he made three trips to Maine and several to Cape Cod.

Significant for North Shore residents, however, are the two trips Thoreau made to Cape Ann—one by invitation, the other on his own—for they show him in action in our home territory during two distinct phases of his life. An examination of these relatively obscure visits reveals how Gloucester first reacted to Thoreau as a social critic and how he, in turn, responded to what an earlier, more pastoral Cape Ann offered in the way of unspoiled landscape and natural beauty.

In 1848, after the Gloucester Lyceum (now the Sawyer Free Library) heard that Thoreau had given a successful lecture on November 22 in Salem, they engaged him to speak the following month. According to biographer Walter Harding, the Salem Observer thought that the thirty-one year old Thoreau had “created quite a sensation.” His Salem lecture, which he would repeat in Gloucester, was an early version of the first chapter of Walden, entitled “Economy.”

Thoreau offered his “Life in the Woods” as an antidote to the money-grubbing spirit of his age with its rising industrialism. But he didn’t suggest, as many think, that we should all build cabins in the wilderness as he had done at Walden Pond, in Concord, three years before, in 1845. Rather, he stressed that each one of us discover for ourselves some “essential” mode of life in accordance with our own inner promptings, so that, as he wrote, when we came to die, we would not discover that, in fact, we had not lived. Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose husband once—and not disparagingly—compared Thoreau to a “Red Indian,” when they were neighbors in Concord in 1843, found his Salem lecture “enchanting.”

Thoreau arrived in Gloucester on Wednesday evening, December 20, preceded by this notice in that morning’s Gloucester News and Semi-Weekly Messenger:

“Mr. Thoreau lectures before the Lyceum this evening. This lecturer is one of the eccentric characters of the age, of whom Ralph W. Emerson predicted a few years since that ‘He would be heard from.’ From the notices we have seen of Mr. Thoreau, we think an original and highly entertaining lecture may be expected.”

Since there exist no entries for 1848 in his otherwise voluminous and outspoken journal, we do not know what Thoreau himself expected of Gloucester, nor of his reactions to what he got here.

The anonymous reviewer of the Gloucester News reports approvingly on December 23 that Thoreau “attacked with keen but good-natured sarcasm the customs and fashions of the present age, and ridiculed with much force the folly of men.”

After summarizing Thoreau’s account of how he had built his cabin at Walden Pond, the reviewer somewhat skeptically reports Thoreau’s assertion that “good, wholesome food sufficient for one hermit can be procured for four cents a week,” and counters it with an interesting bit of localism:

“There are, we have been often told, families of eight or ten souls in this town, who live a year on one hundred and fifty dollars, which falls considerably within Mr. Thoreau’s estimate.”

Having apparently had his fill of Thoreau’s practical Transcendentalism (what the followers of Emerson would characterize as “plain living and high thinking”), the reviewer soon asserts the status quo:

“Mr. Thoreau and a few other men in the world can despise the pleasures of society, worship God out-doors in old clothes, can hear His Voice in the whistling or gently sighing wind, and read eloquent sermons from the springing flowers: but the great mass of men DO and WILL always laugh at such pursuits.”

Although the writer goes on to say that the lecture “certainly lacked system…and some of Thoreau’s flights were rather too lofty for the audience,” his does comment positively that “in originality of thought, force of expression, and flow of genuine humor, Thoreau has few equals.” Yet he found Thoreau’s delivery “decidedly Emersonian.” To him it was evident “that in this respect he is an imitator,” a consideration, in the reviewer’s words, “which always detracts much from the force of genius.”

He concludes that “although the lecture was entertaining and original, it was not calculated to do much good, and we think may be considered a literary curiosity [rather] than a practical dissertation on economy.”

The reviewer for Gloucester’s second newspaper, the Telegraph, which advertised itself as “Devoted to Patriotism, Sound Morals, Temperance, Literature and News,” reports also that Thoreau’s lecture was “rather a unique performance.”

Just the same, to Thoreau’s now famous “I have traveled a good deal in Concord: and everywhere in shops and offices and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways,” he—or she—has this to say:

“The lecturer gave a very strange account of the state of affairs at Concord. In the shops and offices were large numbers of human beings suffering tortures to which those of the Brahmins are mere pastimes. We cannot say whether this was in jest or in earnest. If a joke, it was a most excruciating one—if true, the attention of the Home Missionary Society should be directed to that quarter forthwith.”

The reviewer concludes:

“With all deference to the sagacity of those who can see a great deal where there is little to be seen—hear much where there is hardly anything to be heard—perceive a wonderful depth of meaning where, in fact, nothing is really meant, we would take the liberty of expressing the opinion that a certain ingredient to a good lecture was, in some instances, wanting.”

So much for the most famous chapter of Walden, a book destined to stand alongside such classics of the American Renaissance as Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter and Leaves of Grass (all published within the same five-year period) and to remain in print since it was first published in 1854.

“Gloucester, unlike Salem,” Walter Harding concludes, “had had enough of Thoreau.” There is no record of his ever having been invited to lecture here again.

Leaving Gloucester, Thoreau went on to speak before large and approving audiences from Concord, Massachusetts to Portland, Maine. Publisher Horace Greeley devoted an entire editorial page of the New York Tribune, on April 2, 1849, to the success of Thoreau’s lecture tour.

“There is not a young man in the land—and very few old ones,” Greeley wrote, “who would not profit by an attentive hearing of that lecture.”

When Thoreau next traveled to Gloucester it was ten years later, in 1858; and he came not as a lyceum lecturer but as a typical late summer or early fall visitor of the time, with a pack on his back, and probably, as the reviewer of the News had written, worshipping God “out-doors in old clothes.”

The Henry David Thoreau who arrived in Gloucester on September 22, 1858, was a somewhat different person from the Walden hermit whose lyceum lecture here ten years earlier had seemed for the most part to have fallen on deaf ears. For one thing, he was older. He appeared to his friends as a more substantial yet serene presence in their midst. Many would attribute this to the fact that he had published two books of astonishing originality and force of expression—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden—the making of which had doubtless solidified his character, integrating many of his interests and concerns, especially his ability to observe and write about nature and the outward world, while also describing the inward world of his own thoughts and feelings.

A Week, published in 1849, a year after his first visit to Cape Ann, did not sell well. Unable at first to find a publisher who would take the manuscript at his own risk, Thoreau had finally paid Emerson’s publisher, James Munroe of Boston, to bring out his first book, which had been ten years in the making. Undaunted by the book’s poor sale (a recent rare copy sold for $19,500) and even poorer critical reception, Thoreau took back 706 unsold copies from an initial printing of 1,000, placed them on his personal bookshelves in the attic of his family’s home in Concord, where he had his room, commenting wryly in his journal:

“I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes, over 700 of which I wrote myself.”

But those who had read A Week and who had truly understood it were well aware of its importance. The young naturalist and teacher, fresh out of Harvard when he made that trip on the rivers with his brother John, in 1839, was already predicting the impact of industrialization on the agrarian life and rural ecology of the New England of his time. Thoreau was the first writer to warn us about the adverse effects upon our waterways and the air we breathe of the new mills and factories under construction in the Merrimack Valley. In A Week and subsequent writings and lectures he pointed out how the once-clear waters of the great Merrimack were running purple and black from the dyes of Manchester’s cotton mills. He also noted the emergence of an entirely new kind of pollution in America—noise pollution—a result of the railroads and the new technologies of the factory system, which he also felt had the chilling effect of turning its laborers into human machinery.

In his imaginative use of local history and in the precision and accuracy of Thoreau’s descriptions of the places he and John visited during their travels on and off the two rivers, A Week stands today as one of the last visions of a pristine rural America before the Industrial Revolution destroyed its human scale agrarian economy forever.

Unlike A Week, Walden sold well when it was first published in 1854. As particular as Thoreau’s experience in the Concord woods had been—Henry James called it “parochial”—the book told a universal story. In detailing his encounter with the divinity and with himself at edge of the “holy well” of Walden Pond through all the seasons of the year, Thoreau gave us “one of the last great religious books of the West,” according to poet Gerrit Lansing.

As a rejoinder to those skeptics, mostly journalists, who poked fun at his “out-door religion,” Thoreau wrote in “Slavery in Massachusetts,” one of his most scathing essays, “We are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians. We do not care for the Bible, but we do care for the newspaper!”

“Slavery in Massachusetts” was originally a lecture given in Framingham, in 1854, in which he warned his audience of startled Abolitionists that they had better address themselves to their own servitude to material possessions and a corrupt state government at home before they began trying to free Black people in Nebraska and the South.

But in September 1858, Thoreau did not come to Cape Ann to lecture or otherwise engage in polemics. He was on a walking tour of the North Shore with his friend John Russell of Salem. After examining the Indian relic collections at the Essex Institute (today the Peabody Essex Museum) in Salem, the two men toured Salem, Marblehead, Beverly and Manchester, “botanizing along the way,” as Thoreau wrote in his journal.

They “scuffed” along what Thoreau refers to as the “musical sand” of Singing Beach in Manchester and cooked their supper in a salt marsh “some two miles this side of Gloucester, in view of the town.” That night they “put up in Gloucester,” after enjoying some late blackberries, the persistence of which Thoreau attributed to “the cool air of the Cape.” He also notes that “the foliage had but just fairly begun to change.”

The next morning, September 23, the two men set out for Rockport. Thoreau writes:

“Having reached the shore, we sat under the lee of the rocks on the beach opposite Salt Island. A man was carting seaweed along the shore between us and the water, the leather-apron kind, which trailed from the car like the tails of oxen, and when it came between us and the sun, was of a warm purple glow.

“On the edge of the beach you see small dunes, with white or faun-colored sandy sides…Just before reaching Loblolly Cove, near Thacher’s Island [we] sat on a beach composed entirely of small paving stones.

“We could see the Salvages [T. S. Eliot’s "Dry Salvages"] very plainly, apparently extending north and south and east-northeast of Straitsmouth Island…”

“Rockport well deserves its name—several little rocky harbors protected by a breakwater, the houses at Rockport Village backing directly on the beach. At Folly Cove, a wild rocky point running north, covered with beach grass…”

The hikers paused there to look across Ipswich Bay to Newburyport and Plum Island before setting out for Annisquam. Thoreau continues:

“In Annisquam we found ourselves in the midst of boulders scattered over bare hills and fields. This was the most peculiar scenery of the Cape…”

He is referring to the moraine of the Dogtown section of Gloucester, and Thoreau’s description of his experience of this still relatively wild interior of Cape Ann is worth quoting complete:

“We struck inland southerly, just before sundown, and boiled our tea with bayberry bushes by a swamp on the hills, in the midst of these great boulders, about halfway to Gloucester, having carried our water a quarter of a mile, from a swamp, spilling a part in threading swamps and getting over rough places. Two oxen feeding in the swamp came up to reconnoiter our fire. We could see no house but the hills strewn with boulders, as if they had rained down, on every side, we sitting on a shelving one.

“When the moon arose, what had appeared like immense boulders half a mile off in the horizon now looked by contrast no larger than nutshells or buri-nut against the moon’s disk, and she was the biggest boulder of all.

“When we had put out our bayberry fire, we heard a squawk, and, looking up, saw five geese fly low in the twilight over our heads. We then set out to find our way to Gloucester over the hills, and saw the comet very bright in the northwest. After going astray a little in the moonlight, we fell into a road which at length conducted us to town.”

On the following morning, September 24, the two men left Gloucester, Thoreau proceeding immediately to Concord by train. A last note reads:

“There is a scarcity of fresh water on the Cape so you must carry your water a good way in a dipper.”

In his journal entry of September 30, Thoreau returns to the Gloucester visit:

“In our late walk on the Cape, we encountered Gloucester each time in the dark and mid-evening traveling partly across lots till we fell into a road, and as we were simply seeking a bed, inquiring the way of villagers whom we could not see, the town seemed far more home-like to us than when we made our way out of it in the morning.

“It was comparatively still, and the inhabitants were sensibly or poetically employed, too, and then we went straight to our chamber and saw the moonlight reflected from the smooth harbor and lighting up the fishing vessels, as if it had been the harbor of Venice…

“Walking early in the day and approaching the rocky shore from the north, the shadows of the cliffs were very distinct and grateful and our spirits were buoyant. Though we walked all day, it seemed the days were not long enough to get tired in. Some villages we went through or by without communicating with any inhabitant, but we saw them as quietly and distantly as in a picture.”

Although Cape Ann obviously left an indelible impression on him—some of his descriptions invite comparison with the views of native painter Fitz Henry Lane, who was an exact contemporary—Thoreau never returned. Four years after his second visit here, he succumbed to his lifelong struggle with tuberculosis, dying on May 6, 1862, two months before his forty-fifth birthday. His last two books, Cape Cod and The Maine Woods, accounts of other journeys he made in his beloved New England, were published posthumously, along with his masterful journals, in which the report of his walking visit to the North Shore can be found in its entirety.

(Earlier versions of this essay appeared in North Shore and Essex Life magazines.)

On the Road Fifty Years Later

2007-10-14T09:32:00.000-07:00

“There is nothing to do but write the truth.”

--Jack Kerouac

Fifty years ago, on September 5, 1957, a novel was published that changed the face of American literature and, with it, much of American culture. That novel was On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, a young writer from Lowell, Massachusetts, who grew up in a French-Canadian working-class family and had been a football star at Lowell High School and Columbia.

Writing in the New York Times, on September 5, Gilbert Millstein described Kerouac’s book as a “major novel...an authentic work of art.” He went on to call On the Road, “the most beautifully executed, the clearest and most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat.’”

I was nineteen years old when I read Millstein’s rave review. A less enthusiastic one by David Dempsey appeared a few days later in the Times’ Sunday Book Review, as if the timid editors had gone too far in allowing a positive appraisal of a novel that was destined to become one of the most subversive in our literature and felt they had to correct Millstein’s enthusiasm.

I had not heard of Jack Kerouc and I didn’t know what the Beat Generation was. The literature I was studying in college was pretty much canonical. But I raced down to my friend Carl Apollonio, who owned the only bookstore in Brunswick, Maine, and within a week I possessed a first edition of On the Road. (I should have hung onto that copy, instead of sharing it among my friends until it disappeared, because today a first edition of On the Road is worth between $7200 and $19,000 depending upon its condition. Kerouac’s own manuscript of the novel, typed on a continuous roll of architectural drawing paper, was sold five years ago at auction by Christie’s for $2.4 million dollars. Kerouac would have loved it that the winning bidder was James Irsay, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts football team, whose comment upon taking possession of the manuscript was, “I look on it as a stewardship. I don’t believe you own anything.” Happily, Kerouac’s original publisher Viking Press has just issued a stunning new edition of On the Road, effectively reproducing the initial scroll manuscript and, true to Kerouac’s wishes, reinserting the actual names of people upon whom the characters were based. The original scroll is currently on view at the Boott Cotton Mills Museum in Lowell through October 14, 2007).

On the day I bought On the Road I sat down after dinner in my rented room on Federal Street and didn’t stir until I had read the novel in its entirety.

Describing the novel’s young and articulate, if often manic, characters, narrator Sal Paradise, alias Jack Kerouac, says: “They rushed down the street together, digging everything in the early way they had, which later became so much sadder and perceptive and blank. But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars...”

Imagine the effect of this prose, indeed of a narrative in which Kerouac’s people are racing from one corner of the country to the other in pursuit of experiences I could only imagine, on a studious small town boy attending a staid New England College. It was incendiary, to say the least. And while I’d learned to play on piano the bebop that accompanied Dean and Sal and their friends from New York to Denver, and from Denver to San Francisco, LA and Mexico City, I had no idea that people like them or their chronicler Kerouac existed.

As a budding literary critic, I grasped the relationship between Kerouac’s Beat Generation and the equally alienated Lost Generation of the 1920s that Ernest Hemingway, one of my heroes, had described in The Sun Also Rises, a novel that had as much impact on its era as Kerouac’s had on mine. But the Beats were less after “kicks,” as their critics alleged, than they were in search of transcendence in the face of post-war materialism and Cold War anxiety. Asked by his friend, novelist John Clellon Holmes, whose 1952 novel Go was really the first Beat novel, to describe Beat sensibility, Kerouac replied:

“We were a generation of furtives...with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, a kind of beatness—I mean being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are—and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.”

I wish I could tell you that after closing the covers of On the Road, I dropped out of college, like some of my friends did, traveling to San Francisco in pursuit of the “subterranean” culture whose members Kerouac characterized as “hip without being slick, they are intelligent without being corny, they are intellectual as hell. . . without being pretentious or talking too much about it, they are very quiet, they are very Christlike.” But I didn’t. As much as I may have wished to go “on the road” literally and metaphorically, I was committed to my studies, and afraid, I see now, of taking any risks beyond the purely academic.

Nevertheless, On the Road had a deep impact on me as a writer, an impact that reverberates to this day, when I am no longer nineteen but approaching seventy. In fact, when I put down the novel after my first reading, I picked it up and started reading it all over again. Then I thought about it for weeks, pondering its meaning on long solitary October walks down the Mere Point Road in Brunswick, the red and yellow leaves accompanying my mood of autumn melancholy.

For all its surface elation, On the Road is at bottom a profoundly tragic book. It’s a novel about a missing father who was never found, a childhood never regained, a country whose innocence is forever lost. At the end of Kerouac’s road, and Hemingway’s, too, instead of enlightenment for Sal and his friends there is only the recognition of lost illusions and inevitable death.

“I’m writing this book because we’re all going to die,” Kerouac said. “In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother faraway. . . nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our death.”

Like much of our finest fiction—U.S.A. and The Great Gatsby come to mind—On the Road interrogates the fundamental American myth of success, the viability of a life based on material values. For all their seeming irresponsibility, Sal, Dean Moriarty (a character based on the legendary Neal Cassady), and Carlo Marx (poet Allen Ginsberg), are committed to achieving a higher consciousness and an authenticity of personhood and spiritual insight that cut through the religious and political cant of Henry Luce’s “American Century.”

For this reason, more than for Sal or Dean or Carlo, who drank too much or took drugs in order to “see God’s face,” who refused to work nine-to-five jobs, and who flaunted conventions with their liberated or inter-racial sexual expression--indeed, for the experimental brilliance of Kerouac’s “spontaneous prose”—On the Road was viciously attacked by the established press and marginalized by mainstream and academic critics. Literature, unlike politicians, tells the truth; and sometimes the truths it reveals are unpleasant. Yet, since its publication in 1957, On the Road has sold 3.5 million copies in the United States alone and continues to sell more than 100,000 copies a year. Like Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, which was once banned from the classroom, On the Road, is now taught as an essential American text.

Along with On the Road, Kerouac published nine other novels. Perhaps the most achieved in terms of structure, language and the poignant evocation of his childhood in Lowell are three books set in his hometown, Dr. Sax, Maggie Cassidy, and Visions of Gerard. Kerouac also wrote movingly about growing up in Lowell in his first novel, The Town and the City, (1950) and his last book, the elegiac Vanity of Duluoz, published in 1968, a year before his death of alcoholism in St. Petersburg, Florida at the age of 47. Kerouac was buried in Lowell on October 23, 1969. As he wrote in On the Road, “I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.”

Turning the pages of this book again, I rediscover my youth in Kerouac’s stunning prose, with a voice as unique as Whitman’s or Henry Miller’s, and the unremitting energy of his narrative, both so characteristically American. I see myself and my circle of friends, aspiring writers, all of us, electrified by a novel, which beckoned us away from our textbooks, opening us to a world that lay beyond classrooms and degrees, beyond jobs and the promise of suburban respectability. In one way or another many of us eventually followed Kerouac’s road to self-discovery; and that decision, in the words of another great New England writer, “has made all the difference.”

Coda: The Scroll

I have just finished the "Original Scroll" and what an improvement over the edited version as first published. Seeing the original names made the whole thing more authentic for me; I never liked those made up names, 'Sal Paradise' and the like. I was also struck this time around how reductive the journey was, not one trip but a number of trips over the years condensed into one sprawling journey. I didn't remark on that the first two readings. I guess that's one reason it is such an authentic 'Great American novel' - like a human being, it seems to change and you see new facets each time you re-visit it.

--Mark Power (email communication)

I was ten years old when Jack Kerouac began the journey, hitchhiking and by car and bus, that would take him back and forth across America. And I was thirteen when Kerouac sat down at his typewriter, on April 2, 1951, to begin writing an account of those epic trips on eight sheets of tracing paper he would later tape together to form the 120-foot “scroll” version of the novel that would be published in 1957 by Viking Press as On the Road. He completed that single-spaced draft version of the novel twenty days later, on April 22, 1951.

By the time On the Road was published, six years later, I was two months away from my twentieth birthday. Between the time Kerouac had begun work on the scroll and the date of its book publication, I had read those sprawling narratives by Thomas Wolfe—Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River—which had been an inspiration to Kerouac, especially in his first novel, The Town and the City; I’d heard in person the great tenor saxophonist Lester “Prez” Young and the bebop innovator Charlie “Bird” Parker, both of whose lives and music inspired Kerouac and his Beat companions on the road; and I’d become something of a jazz musician myself. I’d also heard and begun to experiment with the “bop talk” that became a prevalent form of communication among jazz musicians, black and white, and among many of the literary and artistic bohemians of the time, and which found its way into both the speech of the characters and the narrative of On the Road. By that time, too, I’d read most of the key texts of Modernism, which had equally inspired Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, later to be characterized as the Beat Triumvirate, though Burroughs was older than Kerouac and Ginsberg and never considered himself part of the Beat Generation.

Consequently, as soon as I began reading On the Road I understood Kerouac’s cultural frame of reference, though I had never read a word of either writer, nor had I traveled further west than Pittsfield, Massachusetts. I knew the music he referred to, and I had myself experienced those extraordinary moments when, as he wrote, “the tenorman jumped down from the platform and stood in the crowd, blowing around…”

So much of that excitement comes back to me as I read the scroll version, which in its rawness, its lack of paragraphs and chapter breaks, sounds to me like what Kerouac really wanted to write, what was burning inside of him to express in incandescent images, whole exhalations of pure language--that "spontaneous bop prosody" he strove to attain. Even as the young scholars and critics, who have edited and introduced this important new—and authentic—version of an American classic, detail Kerouac’s painstaking revisions (including drafts of the novel before he began the scroll), and the difficult editorial negotiations during which the book’s handlers at Viking attempted to “manage and commodify his wild book and Kerouac’s enthusiastic vulnerability and complicity in that process,” they make clear to us that the scroll is the ur-text and should be read as such. I agree with them. My experience of reading it is not unlike the one I had fifty years ago when the Viking version of the novel blew my mind.

It’s clear from reading the excellent introductory material to the scroll that the earlier published version of the novel, which has enthralled millions of readers, was not entirely ruined by Viking editors Malcolm Cowley and Helen Taylor, who worked with Kerouac in preparing the text for publication. Unfortunately, Kerouac’s original text had been sanitized. The sex had been tamed and most of the graphic language removed, including four-letter words that are freely employed today, while the homosexual encounters between Ginsberg and Cassady, who appear in the novel under fictionalized names, were eliminated, in keeping with the era’s regrettable homophobia and the censorship restrictions publishers often slavishly operated under. But after reading the scroll one can see that the published version retains a good deal of the spontaneity of the original, along with Kerouac’s marvelous voice. In fact, in some cases, Kerouac sharpened his language and his imagery in the published version, though I prefer what editor Howard Cunnell takes to be the final pages of the scroll to the published version.

But in the final analysis it is the scroll, both in form and content, in which Kerouac enacts the archetypal trip; and it is the scroll which should be read as the definitive text of On the Road. It was a moving experience to have been able to see the manuscript itself in Lowell at the Boot Mill Museum. The curatorial staff did a superb job of creating a powerfully atmospheric exhibition space, in which the scroll was surrounded by images of Beat life and culture, the actual music, the art and the writing, and Kerouac’s entire history--family photographs, memorabilia from his personal collection, books from his library, even a typewriter like the one on which he wrote On the Road, and an old felt hat of his father's he wore during the time he was writing the book.

You entered the room listening to jazz--Bird and Diz, Billy Holiday. On the walls, painted a dark, autumnal rust-orange, were quotations from Kerouac in blue, along with enlarged images of the American road in the late 40s, early 50s--small town Main Streets, the deserts of the Southwest, the Mississippi, with quotations from On the Road describing the places. There was some excellent narrative material also on the walls, texts that introduced Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cassady--and wonderful photographs of life in jazz clubs, poetry reading, loft parties, Beat pads in San Francisco and New York City. A great lovely image of Diane Di Prima sitting on top of a piano in a Village club reading her poetry.

The era was perfectly described and characterized. One was able to understand the Beats as a significant part of the last truly concerted avant-garde movement in art and literature in the US, when you consider that Action Painting/Abstract Expressionism, bebop and hard bop, the dance of Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham, the new theater, and the poetry of the Beats, Olson's Black Mountain group, and the emerging New York School all came together, intermingled, and fertilized each other, from 1947, when Kerouac first went on the road, to the late 1950s, when On the Road and his other novels emerged, along with Ginsberg’s HOWL and Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.

It was a heady time for the arts--arts that were also in opposition to the Cold War, to American materialism, the myths of family life, suburban respectability. We haven't had a total movement like that since, and we may never again because the literacy doesn't exist anymore, nor the material conditions. It was cheap to live in the East Village from 1947 to the early 60s, or in San Francisco or Venice Beach. It isn't anymore. The Bowery is now full of high-end hotels and restaurants. People could live on next to nothing, get part time jobs, sell their work and essentially give their time over to making art. Now we are all, and have been, compelled to teach or to find other work that takes us away from art, while artists are being forced out of all the cities and neighborhoods they once inhabited. With the loss of places to live and gather the kind of community that the Beats created, lived in, and traveled to and from in SF, Venice Beach, Denver, New York, Mexico City, and LA no longer exists. This is a great loss, not only to art but to the creation and sustenance of the kind of transgressive culture a nation needs for its intellectual and imaginative growth, whether most people think so or even care. On the Road is therefore all the more poignant because it describes a radically new world just as it was coming into being, a culture and a time—an energy—we will never have again.

A Walker in the City: Plum Island Autumn

2007-09-24T11:21:00.000-07:00

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness...”

Gazing beyond the dunes of Plum Island at the Great Marsh, bronzed in late summer light, I thought of that evocative first line of Keat’s poem, “On Autumn”.

It was the last weekend in September. Each year at summer’s end I love to walk the barrier beach of the Parker River Wildlife Refuge. There are no dwellings nearby; and except for those who fish the ocean’s edge for striped bass, few beachgoers after Labor Day. It’s a place where one is up against nature in the raw. I make it a point to visit the beach often during the year, observing the seasonal changes—the piping plovers as they propagate, the redwings that arrive by the end of February, the tree swallows who begin their pre-migratory flocking in mid-August, and the purple martins who leave by summer’s close.

But autumn is a special time for me. It’s the time of my birthday and therefore an occasion for reflection. It’s also the time when one prepares for the year’s declension into winter, a time of mellowness in the air, the light, as Keats’s poem suggests; a time of actual and spiritual harvest.

Stretching from West Gloucester to the borders of New Hampshire, the Great Marsh is a wonder. As I contemplate its vast fertility from the silent dunes of Plum Island, I think of those early settlers, who gathered beach plums here (hence its name) and took the shellfish. I think particularly of Judge Samuel Sewell, who in 1697 gave us this description of Plum Island:

“As long as Plum Island shall faithfully keep the command post, notwithstanding all the hectoring words and hard blows of the boisterous ocean; as long as any salmon and sturgeon shall swim in the streams of Merrimack, or any perch or pickerel in Crane Pond; as long as the sea fowl shall know the time of their coming, and not neglect seasonably to visit the places of their acquaintance; as long as any cattle shall be fed with the grass growing in the meadows, which do humbly bow down themselves before Turkey Hill; as long as any sheep shall walk upon Old Town Hill, and shall from thence pleasantly look down upon the River Parker and the fruitful marshes lying beneath; as long as any free and harmless doves shall find a white oak or other tree within the township to perch or feed or build a careless nest upon, and shall voluntarily present themselves to perform the office of gleaners after barley harvest; as long as nature shall not grow old and dote, but shall constantly remember to give the rows of Indian Corn their education by pairs; so long shall Christians be born there...and shall from thence be translated to be made partakers of the Inheritance of the saints in light.”

Those words were written three-hundred and ten years ago, yet they describe with perfect clarity what can still be seen and enjoyed today. While some of us may not share Judge Sewell’s prophetic religiosity, we can still marvel at the acute sense of place evoked in his description of Plum Island and its surrounding forests, hills and wetlands. We can marvel at this early ecological vision, at its appreciation of nature’s bounty.

Years pass as if they were days, places change and the people who inhabit them disappear. Due largely to the vision and commitment of the Essex County Greenbelt Association and the Trustees of Reservations, Mass. Audubon, numerous town land trusts, and preservation-minded property owners, Essex County has retained much of its austere beauty. There is no present without a past, as Judge Sewell understood. Yet today’s destroyers act as if they were the only people on earth, as if no one had been here before them, preserving what they cherished for us today. They act as if their greed were a right, instead of a sin against each of us and the land itself.

Tasteless “trophy” houses and out-of-scale McMansions spring up in fields and meadows once husbanded with meticulous care by our colonial forebears. Signs dot the oceanside warning natives, who have always had access to the shore, that the property is now “private.” Gates appear where once we all walked with impunity; and greed reigns. A heavily opposed public sewer system has been completed for the residential part of Plum Island, opening a floodgate to development, just as the controversial sewer did in North Gloucester.

The sense of Commonwealth our puritan predecessors bequeathed us, the belief that the land and sea were ours to use and enjoy together, to preserve for the next generation, has eroded vastly since Judge Sewell’s time. More than ever, it is our responsibility to secure this covenant once again. Otherwise, those who come after us may never enjoy the seasons “of mists and mellow fruitfulness” we have accepted as our birthright.

A Walker in the City: Summer's End

2007-08-28T11:40:00.001-07:00

(Gloucester street photographer Louis Bland/Mark Power photograph)

After Labor Day the whole town seemed different. Most of the summer people had left. Living down the Cut, we’d still run into a few tourists along the Boulevard in mid-September—“stragglers,” everyone called them.

They’d be snapping pictures with their “Brownie” box cameras. Or they’d be getting their own pictures taken by Louis Bland, who held onto his post in the circle in front of the fisherman’s monument until the days grew cold and the rains washed down Stacy Promenade and the wind blew the leaves out of all the trees along Western Avenue.

Louis would take your picture—it couldn’t have cost more than a quarter in those days—and the most fun would be watching him develop it right there, dipping the print into a little tank of chemicals, washing it off (you could smell the “hypo”), and handing to you in a stiff gray cardboard “Souvenir of Gloucester” frame.

How many of us have had our childhoods recorded in a series of images by Gloucester’s only street photographer? Can you see yourself now in bathing suit or shorts in front of the statue, the backdrop always a façade of Western Avenue houses?

Still, you always knew when summer was over. The days felt different. And the light was different, too, as it had been since the last few weeks in August: more oblique in the morning, sharper; falling earlier in the evening, the trees casting long shadows at suppertime when you’d limp in after scrimmage along the river bank. No more baseball, once the football season had started; only the World Series on radio.

Of course, school was just around the corner, if it hadn’t already started. During the last week of August there would be the annual ritual of shopping for school clothes. Your mother would drag you around Brown's or the Empire, or in and out of Goldman’s or Grants. If you refused to make those obligatory trips, you’d probably end up with clothes you didn’t like—shirts, for example, the color and style of which you wouldn’t be caught dead in at Central Grammar.

So it was best to submit to the ordeal of trying on slacks that had to be cuffed, or the embarrassment of seeing yourself with those droopy trousers in several views in the big mirror of the men’s department in the Empire with the rest of the customers looking on. Henry Weiner sold me my first pair of long pants there, and I’ll always be grateful that he didn’t patronize me because I was a kid. Later, in high school, when you had the freedom of buying your own clothes, you could also go to Bloomberg’s or Alper’s for your back-to-school wardrobe. Their men's fashions were more up to date.

After we’d moved from the Cut to Rocky Neck in 1951, Labor Day was a more dramatic event. The number of customers in our store and in all the shops and restaurants on Rocky Neck would decrease markedly. You could tell the difference the day after Labor Day. The Neck would literally be deserted. Slowly all Dad’s “regulars”—Richard Hunt, Stan Farrell, Tommy Morse, Bill Sibley, Joe Garland, Jerry Hill, Harry Wheeler, Walter Kidder and Parker Morong—would reappear to take up their old stools at the counter for those long fall and winter nights of coffee and talk. Come winter, Dad closed early and we actually got a chance to sit down and talk together as a family before my brother and I went to bed early on school nights.

Summer ended precipitously in East Gloucester. One day you’d be walking past the Hawthorne Inn Casino, the “deli” thronged with bathers from Niles Beach, Johnny Windhurst and his Dixieland Band screaming away upstairs at night with us kids on the back porch taking in the music breathlessly; and the next day, it seemed, the Casino would be empty, boarded up like the rest of the cottages, silent. And with the sharp winds of coming September nights the whole place would take on a forlorn air, the Rockaway Hotel and the Harbor View, the Delfine and the Hawthorne Inn, the Fairview and the Seacroft Hotel, all “closed for the season,” as the signs on them would read when we walked past them on those chilly nights after Labor Day to discover that summer had indeed gone, disappeared just like that, and all of us here somehow left holding the bag.

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