A Walker in the City: Writings by Peter Anastas

Hemingway's Death Fifty Years Later

2011-07-02T13:48:00.000-07:00

I can remember exactly what I was doing on July 2, 1961, fifty years ago today. I was walking through Piazza del Duomo, one of the main squares in Florence, Italy, on a hot early summer morning when I saw the headline on a newsstand: `E MORTO HEMINGWAY. He was one of my heroes, as the recently deceased Albert Camus had also been, and I stood there frozen in front of the headline. As soon as they noticed it, the people in the piazza around me paused in silence. Those who wore hats took them off; others bowed their heads and crossed themselves. Italians considered Hemingway one of their own. He had been awarded medals for his service on the Italian front in WWI and they loved his novels and stories, especially those with Italian settings.

I was twenty-three years old. I had been living in Florence since the fall of 1959, studying Medieval literature at the University and teaching English at the International Academy, a private school for high school graduates and college students, who wished to pursue careers in diplomacy. Writers like Hemingway and Camus, whose classically paired down French prose was influenced by Hemingway’s, were very important to me as a budding writer. I had already completed my first novel, set in Greece, and I was working on a second, set in Florence, involving a love affair gone awry between a young expatriate couple.

I had been reading Hemingway since ninth grade. There were passages in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, as well as from some of his stories like “In Another Country” and “A Clean, Well-lighted Place,” that I knew by heart. The Hemingway who had inspired me to write was not Hemingway the big-game hunter or Hemingway the adventurer of later years. It was the early Hemingway, the young writer, who had learned his craft in 1920s Paris, surrounded and influenced by important avant-garde writers like Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and Ezra Pound. I had gone to Europe not so much to study literature as to imbibe the cultural, artistic and intellectual atmosphere that had nurtured the Lost Generation of writers and artists I admired as an undergraduate, reading everything I could find about their lives and their work habits. I chose Florence not Paris because I also wanted to study the poetry of Dante and his contemporaries on the very ground of its creation, in the original language.

Still, I had followed Hemingway’s later life in newspapers and magazines. I continued to read his more recent novels and stories, and I had been thinking of him a great deal as I devoured the novels and stories of the late Cesare Pavese, an Italian writer, who was much influenced by Hemingway’s style and sensibility, and who had committed suicide himself in 1950.

I can’t imagine what sort of impact the death of a master like Hemingway might have on an impressionable young writer today, although I’m aware of how the recent death of the incredibly gifted young novelist and philosopher David Foster Wallace had on many writers of his generation. Though I had not read a lot of Wallace before he died, I, too, was devastated by the news of his suicide, saddened as I also was about the promising life that was cut short.

When Hemingway’s death was first announced, it was suggested that it might have been accidental, that the shotgun that had killed him had gone off when he was cleaning it. But those of us who knew Hemingway through all his novels and stories , though we might not have known much about the depression he suffered in the years leading up to his death, or the terrible bouts of paranoia that his later biographers described, knew, or intuited, that he had ended his own life. His suicide was the stoical act of a Hemingway hero, a man who had pushed himself to the limits of human endurance and, in the process, had understood that when something was over—a love affair, a battle, a life—it was over. Given his depression, exacerbated, as we later learned, by an array of physical and psychological symptoms, not to speak of alcoholism, it could not have been easy for Hemingway that he seemed no longer able to write. Nor that he had been forced to leave Finca Vigia, his great home and refuge in Cuba since the 1940s, and was, at the time of his death, an exile in his native country, while also under surveillance by the FBI. (See today's New York Times op-ed page for a column by Hemingway's friend and collaborator, A. E. Hotchner, which corroborates the FBI surveillance).

After his death, Hemingway’s art was subjected to the critical eye of feminism, an important and perhaps even necessary reappraisal, though today some of the most astute and sympathetic critics and scholars of Hemingway are women like Rose Marie Burwell, Hilary K. Justice, Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin and Debra Moddelmog. Nevertheless, his finest biographer, in my view, is Gloucester native James R. Mellow, whose Hemingway: A Life without Consequences is the benchmark against which all future biographical and scholarly work on Hemingway must be measured.

There was much that Hemingway taught us, we young writers, who dreamed of living and writing as he had. He showed us what a perfect sentence looked like and how feelings could be reflected by the things we described or that our character’s encountered. He helped us to understand the importance of place and the equally important precept that you did not need to say more than was necessary to set a scene or describe a character. Indeed, his greatest contribution lay in his teaching that what lay under the surface of things had as much or more dramatic impact as what one could immediately observe or report, and the writer's responsibility was to suggest it not tell it.

On this blog, on July 22, 2009, I posted my own appraisal of Hemingway on the occasion of the publication of a revised edition of A Movable Feast, Hemingway’s masterful sketches of his early years in Paris. "Hemingway Revisited" can be read at http://peteranastas.blogspot.com/2009/07/hemingway-revisited.html While neither complete nor definitive, it is my tribute to a very great writer whose work will live as long as we have literature and whose death, fifty years ago today, I remember with equal sadness.

"Townie," by Andre Dubus III: A Review

2011-05-12T12:57:00.000-07:00

Townie, Andre Dubus III, W.W. Norton & Co., pp.387, $25.95

Andre Dubus III, age 16, was walking through the student union building at Bradford College, in Bradford, MA, where his father, famed short-story writer, Andre Dubus, Jr., taught English and creative writing. Though it had recently admitted men, Bradford, was primarily known as a women’s college.

“So many of them were tall and slim,” the younger Dubus recalls many years later in Townie, his riveting memoir of coming of age in the dying industrial cities along the Merrimack River. “They had long straight hair and straight teeth and straight postures from what I imagined were childhoods spent riding horses and swimming and playing tennis.”

As he made his way to class that day in the early 1970s, a group of these students stood near a picture window that looked out over the well-tended green lawns of the college.

“That’s Dubus’s son,” he overheard one of the young women commenting to her friends: “Look at him. He’s such a townie.”

Though his famous father is dead and Bradford College has closed its doors, Dubus, now the highly acclaimed author of novels like House of Sand and Fog, cannot forget that slur.

“I’d heard it before,” he writes. “They’d used it for the men they’d see at Ronnie D’s bar…plumbers and electricians and millworkers.” Though not yet 18, Dubus was already a full-time college student.

“I enjoyed reading the books,” he writes, “but I was surrounded by people who seemed reared from comfort, most of whom knew where they were headed.” These privileged students all appeared to have aims for the future. “But I didn’t have any,” Dubus admits. “All I wanted to do was bench press 300 pounds and get so big I scared people, bad people, people who could hurt you.”

Townie is the gripping story of what led the son of a professor, who lived in the secluded comfort of a suburban college community, while his former wife and four children endured poverty across the river in working-class Haverhill, to seek strength and self-worth in body building. It’s the account of how a small boy who was bullied became a defender of himself and his siblings in a city where “kids roamed the neighborhood like dogs,” and teen-age girls “just gave it away.”

But this painfully honest memoir isn’t only the story of how a boy who grew up on the mean streets of Haverhill became an accomplished writer; or about how the way he learned to defend himself as a street fighter and trained boxer became both a salvation and potential damnation. It is, most urgently, about how Andre Dubus learned to transform the pain and violence that led him to become that fighter into words, which ultimately saved him. Townie, in all the immediacy of Dubus’s compelling narrative, is at its core a book about the paradoxically redemptive power of violence.

Dubus’s prose, and the distinctive voice it embodies, is the hard-won achievement of the author of three novels and a collection of stories. Its stunning tensions also reflect his father’s precision in matters of the heart, along with Jack Kerouac’s haunting descriptions of the streets of Lowell, so much like those Dubus himself lived and fought on in Newburyport and Haverhill.

Townie is more than a fine memoir. It is the record of a quintessential American life. Its bravura ending, tying together all the disparate strands of an often harrowing childhood and adolescence, is one that only a skilful novelist like Andre Dubus III could have achieved.

“Just go ahead and write,” his father once counseled him. And Dubus has done precisely that—brilliantly.

(This review appeared in the May 2011 "Literary Madness" issue of North Shore Art Throb.)

Why I Self-Published Decline of Fishes

2011-03-24T13:06:00.000-07:00

There has always been a certain stigma attached to self-publication. When a writer decides to bring out his own book, the unstated but ever present question is: “Why couldn’t you find a publisher?” By a publisher, the asker of such a question usually means a conventional trade publisher. A subsequent, if hidden, assumption is, “If you couldn’t find a publisher—or an agent to represent the book—it can’t be a very good one.” This is the nub of the problem for writers who do not have an agent or who have not published with a major trade publisher.

After I completed a first draft of my novel, Decline of Fishes, I thought about querying agents. I also thought about the current state of the literary market and whether my book would fit into any of the categories—or niches— for commercially marketable books. Each week I read the major book review publications, I visit bookstores, and I scan the “new books” shelves in public libraries, so I have a pretty good idea of what’s being published and who’s publishing it.

Consequently, I asked myself if my novel conformed to any of those categories or if my personal and literary profile matches that of any of the writers currently being published. Aside from the masters like Philip Roth and Thomas Pyncheon, who have their own loyal readerships, or the dwindling number of mid-list writers who remain in print, my work seems to have little in common with that of younger urban-based writers who are publishing today. Surely it has none of the exoticism of post-colonial writing or the linguistic experimentation of recent European immigrants. I don’t write about ethnic subcultures, or about the challenges of contemporary marriage and child rearing. Neither do I write about divorce and the single parent life or the demands on young professionals of corporate culture, so why would an agent be interested in representing me?

Even if I were to find an agent, how long would it take to place my book? And once placed, would it be subject to the kinds of violations a number of writer friends have recently had their fiction and non-fiction subjected to in the editorial process? In other words, would the wait—a long and probably fruitless one—be worth the effort, especially at my age and considering that the subject of my novel—the pressure on traditional cities and towns like Gloucester, Massachusetts to sell out to developers, thereby undermining their indigenous character and culture—is of moment.

On its face, my novel about a group of local activists who oppose the construction of an upscale shopping mall on the city’s working waterfront, just as the fishing industry faces its greatest crisis, sounds like a story that might attract interest. It’s relevant—how many American communities are fighting to preserve the traditional culture and economies of downtowns forced to compete with Wal-Mart or Big Box shopping malls? It’s accessibly written in direct and realistic prose. It has what I have been told are believable characters, who struggle with personal conflicts and a threatened way of life as they fight the mall’s developers. The plot is suspenseful—what kinds of power and money lie behind the attempt to develop the mall? And there is a dramatic payoff. Will the developers get their way? Will the main characters resolve their conflicts; and who will benefit or lose from the final outcome?

I shared my concerns about finding an agent or an appropriate publisher with several writer friends, each of whom had experienced some form of the interventions I have described in the agenting or publication process. One friend had 150 pages cut from her original manuscript and was required to rewrite the book from a more marketable perspective, thereby violating her original intent. Given these concerns and our shared sense of the exigency of my subject, my friends urged me to bring the book out myself.

Five writer friends—one a former senior editor at a prestigious Boston publishing house, another the editor of a national magazine, all of whom have published fiction and non-fiction in major venues—have read and commented upon my book through several revisions. Their comments, criticism and suggestions have helped to shape, sharpen and improve the novel. Considering their experience, I feel that Decline of Fishes has received as much if not more editorial scrutiny than it would have received from a trade publisher. And the book has not been compromised to fit a commercial interest or market.

Fortunately, a local alternative to mainstream publishing already existed. Believing that writers themselves should have ultimate control over the content, editing, design, promotion and distribution of their books, poet and playwright Schuyler Hoffman and I founded the Back Shore Writers Collaborative in 2005. To date we have published two books under the imprint of Back Shore Press, Peter’s Tuttle’s road poem, Looking for a Sign in the West, and my novel, No Fortunes, both of which have been well received and reviewed. We have worked with local artists and designers and regional printing facilities to produce our books and we distribute and sell them through independent booksellers and the Internet.

Along with the incredible support of Janice Severance, owner of the Book Store of Gloucester, two thoughtful and positive reviews (see below) and several local news articles and interviews have helped to launch Decline of Fishes. In the coming months I hope to be doing more public readings. But what has encouraged me the most are the personal communications from friends and readers, who have taken the time to write or email me their responses to my novel. Their helpful and insightful comments have made the years I spent researching and writing this book, often with scant hope of publication, seem worthwhile. I extend to them my deepest gratitude.

Decline of Fishes: Review by Alex Miller

2010-12-01T12:56:00.001-08:00

Peter Anastas, a member of the generation of Gloucester writers influenced by Charles Olson, is by now a familiar figure for attentive readers on the North Shore. Having adopted Olson’s pattern as a writer-plus-activist, Anastas has made a career out of hearty involvement with his own place. His emphatic view is that, for an author of his disposition, citizenship and art must grow through and out of one another-hence his dual role in Gloucester as a writer and, at various stages, a social worker, a protester, a teacher at community colleges, and a sitter on numerous committees. Now in the mature flowering of his career, and more hounded than ever by questions of responsibility toward his endangered home landscape, he has released what he refers to as “the most personal book I have written.” Decline of Fishes, whose Greek-American-writer character Jason Makrides bares a massive resemblance to Anastas, is an arresting work of storytelling, which functions as a crash course in local politics and economics while managing to be neither preachy nor fact-clogged.

Set in 1993, Decline of Fishes narrates the struggle of several Gloucester residents to resist the building of a mall on the city’s waterfront; a project which, according to local regulations, is prohibited due to the fact that it depletes the docking and loading space available to working fishermen. Additionally, the mall is seen by many Gloucesterites, including Jason Makrides, a social worker and former novelist, Allison, the intelligent wife of a local pro-mall development committee member, who is having an affair with Makrides, Nina Calogero, a tenacious fisherman’s wife, and Frank Acciaio, an aged and wise sculptor and connoisseur of local flavor, as nothing less than a stain on the city’s “soul”: an exploitative and trivializing project that will poison Gloucester’s home-grown industry while inviting more rich out-of-towners to come in, build condos and luxury boutiques, and speed up a destructive process of gentrification. Though much of the novel’s action takes place in committee rooms, restaurants, and around kitchen tables, where those resistant to the mall discuss its implications for the city and strategize about how to defeat the development committee’s request for special permission to build on property reserved for the fishing industry, the lives and struggles of the characters remains its focus, and as a result, it flows smoothly and remains, perhaps surprisingly, a page-turner.

“Gloucester, like many communities, is really struggling to define itself-and hang onto itself,” says Anastas. “I am an activist; I have lived through this struggle, and I wanted to participate in any conversation that would help people understand how real this place is.” In Decline of Fishes, he has certainly done this. By the time we are ushered into the meeting where the mall will at last be voted up or down, the tension is wound harrowingly high. But the tension of Allison and Makrides’ Romeo-and-Juliet affair, which breaches warring clans, and of the Gloucester Daily Times reporter Lori Lambert’s internal struggle to reconcile painful memories of an abusive fisherman-father with increasing sympathies for the fishing families who would suffer an economic body-blow from the mall’s presence, is just as involving. Decline of Fishes proves to be as much about the inner lives of its major characters as it is about the eco-cultural life of a city. In fact, the implication is that these two aspects are, ultimately, synonymous.

--Alex Miller

Decline of Fishes
By Peter Anastas,
Back Shore Press, 382 pp., $18.95

(This review appeared in the November 29, 2010 online edition of North Shore Art Throb)

Decline of Fishes: Reviewed by Rae Francoeur

2010-11-21T10:15:00.000-08:00

“Decline of Fishes” By Peter Anastas. Back Shore Press, Gloucester, 2010. 382 pages. $18.95.

The view from your window matters.

Jason Makrides, the protagonist in Peter Anastas’s beautiful and thought-provoking new novel, “Decline of Fishes,” gazes upon Gloucester, Mass., the venerable but troubled fishing town he loves. Gloucester appears to him like a painting of Venice by Canaletto, rising in radiant sunlight.

In a moment of solemn reverie he takes in the city’s special, endangered beauty — as lovely as it is sad. “I saw fishing vessels making into port, trailed by gulls. I saw the shining Birdseye tower and seawalls along the Boulevard holding everything in against the power of the ocean. Gloucester, I thought, Glowing City….” Readers must complete this passage on their own to understand the significance of this concluding meditation.

In “Decline of Fishes,” the last empty waterfront parcel becomes the focus of a heated citywide debate between developers and the imperiled fishing enterprise. The parcel pits those who see a proposed new mall as a way to bolster the flagging tax base against those who want to hold on to Gloucester’s unique culture. It examines the difficulties of choosing between promising profitability and preservation of existing businesses subsisting on meager profits.

Simply put, the book tracks the divided community’s preparations for the City Council debate up to and including their final vote on the mall’s future. Or is it Gloucester’s very identity as a fishing community they are deciding here? The focus is less on the immediate drama — neighbor vs. neighbor — and more on the far-reaching consequences having to do with community, values and economy. A man does wield a rifle, the automatic response, in some cases, to oppressive conflict. In this book, though, discussion prevails over violence.

The parcel, remarkably, is smack in the middle of the fishermen’s working waterfront. Is this symbol or just good storytelling? Neither. In real life, such a parcel exists. If you take that empty lot away from Gloucester’s fishermen, what will follow but condos and yachts and the demise of a sacred, centuries-old way of life?

Among the key players in this story are the mall developer Win Guest, originally from Gloucester, and project’s lead attorney Jock O’Hanley. They want to build a mall with 25 stores, two restaurants and a 200-car underground garage. Their backing, though impossible to pin down, includes leaders in Boston politics, the Catholic Church and other outside special interest groups.

Lori Lambert follows the story for the local paper. The daughter of an abusive fisherman, she counters any possible sentimentality readers may conjure about the fishermen and their plight. Her life is a struggle still. Her marriage is on the rocks but she managed to get an education and a job at the newspaper. Still, the publisher is pro-development and the tendency is to quash findings that endanger the mall’s chances.

Among Lori’s mentors is Jimmy, the paper’s editor. Brilliant and community oriented, his days are numbered because the local paper is about to sell to outsiders. Lori’s other mentors include Jason and his friend and a fellow intellect named Frank. Nina Calogero, the president of Save Our Fishermen and a lively, articulate, committed wife of an Italian fisherman, is a natural-born organizer who makes delicious espresso and biscotti. When the battle begins to coalesce, she’s right there to help rally and organize. Allison is an attractive mother and teacher currently taking time off to raise her children. Her husband Dennis, a successful local builder in a position of power, has grown away from Allison. Allison and Jason conduct a passionate sexual liaison resulting in affection, self-examination and change.

This carefully constructed, layered book, so tightly focused in on Gloucester, is nonetheless a book of universal importance, especially in our country at this moment in time. Though a study on the deliberation of economic investment, growth and a community’s decision-making, “Decline of Fishes” is at its core a book about passions — intellectual and physical and entrepreneurial — and our attendant responsibilities. How do we function and choose, given these powerful, complex, at times warring drives?

Anastas, author of several works of fiction and nonfiction, is also a respected expert on the works and life of the poet Charles Olson. In “Decline of Fishes” he explores, with care and precision, a number of timely themes.

First, of course, is the future of this city that’s still, by most comparisons, as unique an “island” culture as any in existence. And there is, indeed, a last undeveloped parcel that was the source of contention in the 1980s. Now its disposition is a bit more resolved, with half the property reserved for maritime use. At the current time, this vacant parcel, called I-4, C-2, is under “idea development.”

Another resonant issue is the empowerment and importance of women. Allison, Lori and her less fortunate sister, as well as the fishermen’s wives take on vibrant heartening roles via Anastas’s pen.

My own favorite theme is the deeply explored meditation on reading, writing and study. In Gloucester’s world of fishermen and poets — and unique and fully realized characters — books are as significant as the fishery. In this city there are bookshelves crammed with books. Books, though possibly as imperiled as fishes, are here key to man’s most passionate of all endeavors — the search for self and meaning.

Writing, too, emerges as a significant theme. Jason is the writer who suffers tremendous unhappiness when he tried to merge his writing life with his family life. Unable to resolve the conflicts, he puts his writing aside.

For now, there’s enough of Gloucester’s unique personality to celebrate and debate. Yet those who read the development attorney’s dire warning at the end of the book will know what he’s saying. The “Decline of Fishes” takes place in the past — when the fishery was larger and more viable.

The view today, though stunning and reminiscent, is not quite the same.

This review appeared in the Cape Ann Beacon, on November 17, 2010. Rae Francoeur can be reached at rae.francoeur@verizon.net. Read her blog atfreefallrae.blogspot.com or her book, “Free Fall: A Late-in-Life Love Affair,” available online or in bookstores.

Peter Anastas reads from Decline of Fishes, November 4, 2010

2010-11-10T05:40:00.000-08:00

Why I Wrote Decline of Fishes

2010-10-24T09:33:00.001-07:00

Set in the historic fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts during the summer of 1993, Decline of Fishes depicts the battle, led by an intrepid group of local citizens, to prevent the construction of a shopping mall on the last remaining parcel of the city’s harborfront. The mall’s promoters—city councilor Joyce Benson; the out-of-town developer Win Guest; and Jock O’Hanley, his well-connected attorney—claim that with Gloucester’s fishing industry threatening collapse, the harbor should be redeveloped as a tourist attraction and commercial center to raise tax revenue and create jobs. But the development’s opponents, led by native son Jason Makrides, artisan Frank Acciaio, and Nina Calogero, president of Save Our Fishermen, wage a pitched battle to convince their community that, instead of providing jobs and taxes for the city, the shopping mall will pave the way—literally—for this proud, gritty fishing port’s extinction.

Decline of Fishes is a multi-layered novel about the recklessness of growth at any cost, the survival of an endangered industry, and the value of hard-won principles. The novel tells the story of a choice faced by cities and towns across America: whether to stay true to their historical selves or sell out to the highest bidder.

I had long wanted to write a novel about my hometown that encompassed the struggles of the often beleaguered fishing industry of America’s oldest seaport and my own conflicts about having come home to live and work. But it wasn’t until I returned in 1962 that another dimension of the struggle surfaced. Urban renewal was eating away at the infrastructure of Gloucester’s working waterfront, as well as the fabric of the city, followed by the stirrings of what would shortly surface as a building boom—subdivisions, condos, industrial parks—that threatened to transform both the nature and character of this historic fishing community. Not only was the city under economic pressure because of fluctuations in the fishing stocks, we also faced the social and environmental consequences of overdevelopment. Everything we loved about our human-scale city was under siege.

Instead of setting to work on my novel, I was forced into activism by the urgency of what was happening to the place in which I had chosen to spend the rest of my life. A series of skirmishes against luxury condominiums and upscale subdivisions soon turned into a struggle over the soul of the city itself. Would Gloucester remain the gritty working-class community we’d grown up in and loved, or would we give in to those development pressures that would transform the city into a bedroom for Boston while making housing unaffordable to natives? This was not an idle question as we watched towns like Newburyport, Portland, Maine and Newport, Rhode Island fall captive to the allure of tourist dollars and condominium lifestyles, which ended up forcing fishermen off the their waterfronts and natives into low-paying service jobs.

For three decades I worked with citizen-based groups opposing what many of us felt was inappropriate development and advocating for long-term comprehensive planning that would provide for orderly growth while preserving the vital character of the city. During this time I published At the Cut, a memoir about my childhood in Gloucester, and Broken Trip, a novel-in-stories based on my experiences as a social worker at Action, Inc., the city’s antipoverty agency. I also contributed over 600 weekly columns about local affairs to the Gloucester Daily Times. While carrying on these activities, I continued to be haunted by the novel I had hoped to write about the tensions I was experiencing in my daily life in a city rocked to its foundations by the battles between those who pressed to transform our community and those who fought to maintain its traditional character and folkways.

As I searched for a dramatic focus for my novel, an event or issue around which I could construct a narrative, a Boston developer announced his proposal to build a shopping mall on the last open parcel of the city’s industrial waterfront. The battle that ensued over that mall practically tore the city to pieces. I had become so intimately involved in the struggle, along with dozens of individuals and local groups, that it didn’t occur to me until much later that I had finally been given the subject and basis for my story, what Henry James called a donne`. I would write about the fight to stop the mall, which, in reality, proved to be the key struggle to preserve the soul of Gloucester.

During the battle over the mall, in the mid-to-late-80s, the fishing industry fell deeper into crisis with the virtual collapse of the North Atlantic stocks, actuating the most stringent government restrictions on fishing the industry had known. After days at sea were cut, along with the institution of catch limits, many fishing families lost both their boats and a large portion of their livelihood. Gloucester suffered from the effects of these onerous regulations along with the entire seacoast of New England. I observed the impact of the government regulations as I watched my friends in the fishing community fight to maintain their way of life. As a social worker, I experienced first hand the economic and emotional fallout from the crisis in the lives of the families I attempted to help stay afloat. Feeling the need to incorporate this crisis into my narrative, I decided to set my story about the mall in1993, eight years after its actual occurrence. This was the precise time when government regulations were beginning to have their most dramatic impact on the city and when, capitalizing on the crisis, out-of-town developers began to exert increasing pressures on city officials to grant permits to build what many citizens looked upon as unsuitable development projects in terms of size, placement and potential impact on the local character and environment. Combining the crisis in fishing and the city’s economy with the seductive demands of developers would, I hoped, increase the novel’s dramatic potential.

The narrative extends over the course of a single summer, in 1993. The novel opens with a demonstration at the federal National Marine Services office building during which fishermen, organized by Nina Calogero, president of Save Our Fishermen, try to prevent government workers from going to work, just as they believe restrictive federal regulations keep them from fishing daily; and it reaches a climax with the final vote of the City Council for or against the mall. The action of the story, its plot, unfolds in a series of contrapuntal chapters narrated from the point of view of four of the principal characters (Jason Makrides, Allison Banks, Nina Calogero, and Lori Lambert), beginning and ending with Jason. This enables the story to be told and the action and meaning of events to be perceived through diverse points of view, hopefully lending greater dimension to the novel. Narration is in the third-person, selective-omniscient, except for the chapters devoted to Jason, who speaks in the first person to create a subjectivity that I hoped would enhance the tension among voices while maintaining his role as the novel’s protagonist.

The dramatic payoff comes after the build up of suspense leading to the City Council’s vote that will determine the fate of the mall for its adherents and opponents. In the course of achieving this resolution in the narrative, each of the principal characters surmounts a personal conflict or challenge that results in growth or change, even if those changes are often painfully won.

Finally, this novel is about the process of its own composition. Jason has long wanted to write a novel about the struggle of his hometown to maintain its identity in a changing world and his own conflicts as he came of age as a writer. Decline of Fishes enacts that struggle. It is the novel that Jason has dreamed of writing and ultimately writes.

Though the actual battle against the mall took place twenty-five years ago, the story I’ve fictionalized has not lost its relevance. As federal restrictions continue to plague the fishing industry, which is still fighting for its life even as stocks recoup, and Gloucester, like the rest of the nation, suffers from the collapse of the global economy, new proposals continue to challenge our community, as we attempt to balance necessary growth against the equally vital imperative to retain our fundamental character, which brings people from all over the world to our city. But the will to persevere among fishermen and their families has not wavered, nor has the love of place of the majority of the city’s residents. It is these verities I hoped to celebrate in Decline of Fishes.

In conclusion, let me offer a word about the way this book has been published. Believing that writers themselves should have ultimate control over the content, editing, design, marketing and distribution of their books, Schuyler Hoffman and I founded the Back Shore Writers Collaborative in 2005. To date we have published two books under the imprint of Back Shore Press, Peter’s Tuttle’s road poem, Looking for a Sign in the West, and my novel, No Fortunes, both of which have been well received and reviewed. We have worked with local artists and designers and regional printing facilities to produce our books, and we distribute and sell them through local distributors, independent booksellers and the Internet.

(Decline of Fishes is a available from area book stores and from our distributor Len Bolonsky, Good Harbor Books, 978-283-4769 or 978-283-9294. Also available from Amazon.com

Paul Sawyer Honored at Charles Olson Centennial

2010-10-12T15:56:00.000-07:00

The final weekend of the Charles Olson Centennial, October 8-10, began with a celebration of the life of a man who was a poet and writer himself and the friend of some of the country’s leading poets and writers, including Gloucester’s recently appointed Honorary Poets Laureate, Charles Olson and Vincent Ferrini.

On Friday, October 8 at 3 p.m. the life of Rev. Paul Sawyer was commemorated in words and music at the Universalist Unitarian Church of Gloucester, a church he often attended and sometimes preached at. Family members, friends, former colleagues and poets and writers, who had traveled to Gloucester for the Charles Olson Centennial, joined together to pay tribute to the life of this remarkable man at the church where Vincent Ferrini often read and Olson wrote about in his Gloucester epic, “The Maximus Poems.”

Rev. Sawyer, who died in Pasadena on June 23 of pancreatic cancer, was the animating force behind the newly founded Gloucester Writers Center, formerly the home of Vincent Ferrini, where Ferrini and Sawyer spent countless hours talking during Sawyer’s many visits home to Gloucester. Even as he struggled with cancer, Sawyer campaigned for the project, helped to raise funds for the purchase of Ferrini’s house, and visited Gloucester to garner final support for his dream’s realization, writing to board members:

“The Ferrini Olson Poetry Center will provide a setting for writing and scholarship in the spirit of these two outstanding Gloucester writers. It will carry forward their commitment within the Cape Ann community as well as the wider world, reaching out to schools and writers engaging in the ‘unfinished business’ in front of us.”

A native of Saugus, Sawyer grew up on Cape Ann during the summers, where his parents, a brother, sister, nieces, nephews and cousins lived. His schooling was completed nearby at Phillips Andover Academy and Harvard University, and Sawyer returned frequently to Gloucester to visit family and friends, always marveling at the natural beauty of the city and its ability to attract and nurture artists and writers.

As much as Sawyer was animated by poetry, which he shared often with his congregations as a Unitarian Universalist minister and graduate of the Star King School of Ministry in Berkeley, California, he was also a strong advocate for peace and social justice. According to his obituary in the Pasadena Weekly, he had been incarcerated “some sixty times during protests against the death penalty, nuclear power and the war in Vietnam.” His jail companions included singer Jackson Brown and “Pentagon Papers” author Daniel Ellsberg.

But “he had so many spheres—jazz, politics, history,” Susan, his wife of 25 years, said, describing his fifty years of ministry in Seattle, Oregon, Berkley, Pittsburg, New Jersey and Pasadena. His sister Charlotte, wife of retired Gloucester pediatrician, Dr. Hamer Lacey, told a story about how Sawyer, though gravely ill, attended a reunion at Andover with old classmates, many of whom occupied positions of power in the world.

“He didn’t want to talk about old times,” she said. “He didn’t want to discuss his illness. What he wanted to talk about was the war in Afghanistan and how to end it.” His wife added that Sawyer reminded his former classmates, “Your values aren’t worth anything unless you are ready to go to jail for them.”

Shortly before his death, Sawyer completed a memoir, “Untold Story: A Short Narrative History of Our Time,” in which he told his own story in the context of the turbulent years during which he preached, wrote, taught and made of himself an example of the “examined life,” so important to Emerson, Thoreau and the New England Transcendentalists he spent a lifetime studying and emulating.

Charles Olson Centennial Opens with Five Nights of Readings

2010-09-20T09:44:00.000-07:00

(Charles Olson and Diane di Prima on Dogtown Common, in Gloucester, MA, during the 1960s. Di Prima will headline the Charles Olson Centennial in Gloucester, October 3-10, with Michael Rumaker and Ed Sanders)

Gloucester’s Charles Olson Centennial Week, October 3-10, will open with five evenings of readings at three separate locations. Each reading begins at 7 p.m. They are free and open to the public. The schedule is as follows:

On Sunday, October 3, poet, novelist and CUNY Graduate Center professor Ammiel Alcalay will read from and sign copies of his recently published novel “Islanders,” at the Bookstore of Gloucester, 61 Main Street. Alcalay grew up as a summer resident of Rocky Neck in the 1950s and early 60s, with Charles Olson as a close friend of his parents, painter Albert Alcalay and his wife Vera. He has written extensively about Olson and his childhood memories of Gloucester.

Of his novel “Islanders,” published by City Lights Books, the LA Times wrote: “Atlantic islands, Northeastern U.S. fishing towns, the last years of the Vietnam War: Ammiel Alcalay flies over this time and these places. .. Memories emerge, and from the memories, stories. The placement of details on the pages is stunningly simple.”

On Monday October 4, a group of local poets calling themselves "The Usual Suspects,” will read from their own work at the Gloucester Writers Center, 126 East Main Street. Readers will include James and Amanda Cook, Kent Bowker, Schuyler Hoffman and other local talents. These writers have been inspired by the work of Charles Olson and the school of writing which formed in the 1960s called “The New American Writing,” of which Olson was a major influence. They will read from their work and discuss it with participants. Parking for the Gloucester Writers Center is across the street in the East Gloucester Marina.

On Tuesday, October 5, Gloucester natives Peter Anastas and David Rich will read fiction and non-fiction inspired by Charles Olson at the Gloucester Lyceum and Sawyer Free Library. Anastas will read from a recently completed memoir, “From Gloucester Out,” and his forthcoming novel, “Decline of Fishes,” also set in Gloucester. Rich will read from the fiction of the late Gloucester playwright and novelist Jonathan Bayliss, including excerpts from Bayliss’ posthumous novel “Gloucestermas,” due for publication this fall.

On Wednesday October 6, the Gloucester Writers Center, located at the former home of poet Vincent Ferrini, will host a second evening of readings featuring works by Olson's friends and fellow poets, Vincent Ferrini and Linda Crane. A highlight of the evening will be the presentation of unpublished work by Crane. Readers will include Sarah Stotzer, Joanna Bowker, Jo-Ann Castano, Carol Weston, Peter Anastas, Dorothy Nelson, Elizabeth McKim, and Fred Dewey.

On Thursday, October 7, poets Gerrit Lansing and Charles “Chuck” Stein will read from their work at the Bookstore of Gloucester, 61 Main Street. Both poets were close personal friends of Olson’s and each has paid tribute to Olson in poetry and prose. Lansing’s most recent book is “Heavenly Tree, Northern Earth,” published by North Atlantic Books. Stein is the author of a major critical study of Olson, “The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum: The Poetic Cosmology of Charles Olson.”

For further information about these readings and about the Charles Olson Centennial celebration, please visit http://www.Olson100.blogspot.com.

Diane di Prima, Poet Laureate of San Francisco, to be Featured Performer at Gloucester's Charles Olson Centennial, October 3-10

2010-08-27T12:30:00.000-07:00

Diane di Prima

Diane di Prima, Poet Laureate of San Francisco, will be the featured reader at Olson 100, Gloucester’s celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles Olson, the local poet whose reputation was international. Sponsored by the Charles Olson Society, the Cape Ann Museum and local booksellers, businesses and non-profit organizations, and with a grant from the Bruce J. Anderson Foundation, the main events for the week-long celebration will take place on October 8-10 in downtown Gloucester.

Di Prima, who rose to prominence as a member of the Beat Generation of American writers, and who has published over forty books of poetry and prose, will be joined on Saturday night, October 9, by novelist, short story writer and poet Michael Rumaker. Both di Prima and Rumaker were close personal friends of Olson’s during the 1950s and 60s. Rumaker, who was Olson’s student at Black Mountain College, in Asheville, North Carolina, is also the author of Black Mountain Days, a memoir of the college and his friendship with Olson, who was both a teacher and rector at the legendary experimental school, which launched the careers of painter Robert Rauschenberg and dancer Merce Cunningham. Di Prima will be introduced at her featured reading by newly appointed Gloucester Poet Laureate Ruthanne "Rufus" Collinson.

The diPrima and Rumaker readings, at 7 p.m. on Saturday at the Universalist Unitarian Church, 10 Church Street, Gloucester, will be preceded by two panel discussions at the Cape Ann Museum, 27 Pleasant Street. The first, at 10:30 a.m., “Remembering Olson,” moderated by Gloucester writer and friend of Olson’s, Peter Anastas, will bring together speakers who actually knew Olson to share their experiences of the poet as a writer, mentor, teacher and friend. DiPrima and Rumaker are expected to join the panel along with poet and musician Ed Sanders and others. This panel will be followed by “Olson’s Project,” in which the poet’s legacy and contemporary relevance will be discussed. Beginning at 1 p.m., the panel will be moderated by poet, writer and CUNY professor Ammiel Alcalay, at whose Rocky Neck home Olson was often a visitor. Participants will include choreographer and writer Kate Tarlow Morgan, poets Charles Stein and Kristin Prevallet, writer, publisher and Los Angeles urban activist Fred Dewey, and others to be announced. The panels will be followed by the showing of Henry Ferrini’s award winning documentary film about Olson in Gloucester, “Polis is This” at 3 p.m. at the Cape Ann Community Cinema, 21 Main Street.

On Friday evening, there will be a marathon poetry reading at the UUC church, beginning at 7 p.m. Participants, including Gerrit Lansing and Ed Sanders, will read from their own poetry and from Olson’s. Events for Sunday, October 10 will begin at 11 a.m. with a “Maximus Walk,” led by members of the Charles Olson Society. Those who join the walk will visit local landmarks, which Olson has written about in “The Maximus Poems,” his epic about the city’s history. Relevant poems will be read at the various stops along the walk, which will lead from Stage Fort Park to downtown Gloucester.

The “Maximus Walk” will be followed by a presentation by Sarah Slifer and Mark Wagner of Olson’s dance play, “Apollonius of Tyana” at the Blackburn Performance Center. After the performance composer and musician Willie Alexander will present a concert of Olson’s poems, which he has set to music. A reception and party, at a location to be announced, will end the festivities.

Other scheduled events include a week of poetry and prose readings by local writers leading up to the main events, the launching of “Letters Home,” David Rich’s edition of Olson’s letters to Gloucester residents, published by the Cape Ann Museum, on Saturday, October 3 at 4 p.m., followed by a reading and book signing by Ammiel Alcalay of his new novel “Islanders,” at the Bookstore in Gloucester’s West End. Concurrently, the Gloucester Lyceum and Sawyer Free Library will sponsor “Olson in Print,” an exhibit of Olson books and memorabilia, curated by Gregory Gibson of Ten Pound Island Book Company. There will be a contemporary art installation by painter Susan Erony and photographer Paul Cary Goldberg, sponsored by the Cape Ann Museum at the White Ellery House, filmmaker and writer Henry Ferrini will give a reading from his children’s book about Olson, “Little Charlie Goes to Gloucester,” at 10 a.m. on Saturday morning, October 9, and Gloucester writers James Cook and Peter Anastas will lead a weekly Charles Olson Study Group at the Bookstore, in Gloucester’s West End, beginning on Thursday, September 9 at 7 p.m., which is free and open to all to sign up for and attend (see posting below).

For more information about the Charles Olson Centennial Celebration please visit http://www.Olson100.blogspot.com

Contact persons: Peter Anastas, 978-283-4582 panastas@comcast.net

James Cook, 978-281-5570 jcgloucester@hotmail.com

Henry Ferrini, 978-281-2355 Henry.Ferrini@verizon.net

Charles Olson Study Group Begins Thursday, September 9 at the Bookstore in Gloucester's West End

2010-07-31T14:50:00.000-07:00

Poetry lovers and those who would like to learn more about the life and work of the internationally acclaimed Gloucester poet Charles Olson are invited to join a free study group at the Bookstore in the West End, beginning on Thursday, September 9.

Sponsored by the Charles Olson Society and the Bookstore of Gloucester, the study group is open to everyone without charge. It will meet weekly through October 7 at 7 p.m. each evening.

Leading the study group will be poet, editor and teacher James Cook and writer and former Gloucester Times columnist, Peter Anastas. Anastas, a personal friend of Olson’s, edited the poet’s letters to the editor of the Gloucester Times, published as “Maximus to Gloucester.”

The purpose of the group, according to Cook, is to make Olson’s poetry and prose accessible to participants.

“We’ll be reading the major poems together,” Cook said, “trying to place them in the context of Olson’s multi-faceted career as a Harvard-trained scholar and historian, a wartime bureaucrat and Democratic Party politician in Washington, DC, and a teacher and later rector of the famed experimental Black Mountain College.”

“Our special focus,” Anastas adds, “will be on Olson’s life and work in Gloucester, particularly ‘The Maximus Poems,’ Olson’s epic poem about the city through history.”

The only required text for the study group will be Ralph Maud’s comprehensive “A Charles Olson Reader,” which is available for immediate purchase at the Book Store (see above cover photo of Maud's book).

Those interested in joining the group are asked to stop in at the Book Store and sign up or to call at 978-281-1548 to reserve a place.

The Olson study group is part of a series of events leading up to Olson 100, Gloucester’s celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the poet’s birth, which will take place over the weekend of October 9-10.

The celebration will include readings by local and visiting writers, panel discussions about Olson’s legacy, a Sunday morning walk to Gloucester sites mentioned in Olson’s poetry and the performance by Sarah Slifer and Mark Wagner of a dance play by Olson, followed by a concert featuring local musician and composer Willie Alexander, who has set some of Olson’s poetry to music. For more information on the centenary or the study group, please go to http://olson100.blogspot.com/

Gloucester’s Charles Olson Centenary Celebration Receives Grant from Bruce J. Anderson Foundation

2010-06-14T14:49:00.000-07:00

The Charles Olson Society, a local 501 © (3) nonprofit organization, has received a $2500 grant from the Bruce J. Anderson Foundation to assist in planning and organizing a series of events to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the renowned Gloucester poet, Charles Olson.

The Bruce J. Anderson Foundation is a supporting organization of the Boston Foundation. It makes awards for preventive programs, direct services, and new initiatives in the fields of mental health, environmental protection and the arts. In past years, awards have gone to seArts, Gloucester Stage Company, Cape Ann Art Haven, and the Cape Ann Symphony Association, among other local recipients.

The main events of the Charles Olson Centenary celebration will take place in downtown Gloucester on Columbus Day weekend (Friday, October 8 through Sunday, October 10), though other events will be held before the main festival. The Olson Society is soliciting matching donations to make it all happen.

Events will include a Charles Olson study group for local citizens, led by writers James Cook and Peter Anastas, meeting at The Book Store in Gloucester's West End once a week for five weeks prior to Columbus Day weekend; nightly readings at venues throughout Gloucester in the week prior to the main events; symposia and panel discussions, co-sponsored with the Cape Ann Museum, followed by a screening of Henry Ferrini’s award-winning film about Olson and Gloucester, “Polis is This”; a marathon reading at the Independent Christian Church UUC on Middle Street on Friday, October 8; featured readers on Saturday, October 9; and an Olson walk with readings highlighting sites in “The Maximus Poems” on Sunday, followed by a performance of Olson’s dance play, “Apollonius of Tyana” presented at the Blackburn Theater by Gloucester dancer and choreographer Sarah Slifer and Mark Wagner, director of Worcester’s Charles Olson Centenary, held on March 25-27, 2010 in the city of Olson’s birth. Following the dance performance on Sunday, Willie “Loco” Alexander, the "legendary Godfather of Boston Punk,” will perform with his band, including the presentation of Olson’s poems set to music.

These events, and several others being discussed, will complement an Olson exhibit at the Cape Ann Museum, which will open the first weekend in October. In addition, the Gloucester Lyceum and Sawyer Free Library is sponsoring a special catalog/exhibition of rare, inscribed, and out of print books, letters, magazines and broadsides by Olson, curated by Greg Gibson of Ten Pound Island Book Company.

According to Olson Society president, Schuyler Hoffman, the Olson centennial celebrations in Gloucester will provide people with an opportunity to extend and intensify discussions and debates begun at events celebrating Olson’s life and work in Worcester, in March, and at Simon Fraser University, in Vancouver, in June.

Hoffman noted that the Gloucester events will also provide a unique opportunity for Olson's readers to encounter many local sites described in Olson’s masterwork, “The Maximus Poems,” in the company of other poets, scholars, and enthusiasts.
“The ways contemporary poets, artists, teachers, and activists are responding to Olson's work— exploring, extending, critiquing, revising—will be a principal focus of the Gloucester events,” Hoffman said.

“We’re grateful to the Bruce J. Anderson Foundation for the core grant to plan and coordinate the celebration. With help from other contributors we can make Gloucester's Charles Olson centennial events challenging, nourishing, and of essential use to those who attend,” Hoffman added.

Tax-deductible contributions to help organize the celebration may be sent to Olson Society treasurer, Kent Bowker, 11 Indian Rock Lane, Essex, MA. 01929, with checks made out to “The Charles Olson Society.” Further up-to-date information can be obtained by visiting the web site, http://www.olson100.blogspot.com.

Remembering Albert: Albert Alcalay, 1917-2008

2010-05-17T08:48:00.000-07:00

It was July of 1956. I had just completed my first year of college and I was beginning a summer job as editor of the Cape Ann Summer Sun, the weekly cultural and entertainment supplement of the Gloucester Daily Times. My sidekick and chief reporter that summer was Andy Leaf, son of Munro Leaf, the author of Ferdinand the Bull, who was spending the summer on Rocky Neck with his family before heading off to his first year at Harvard.

One day Andy came running into the office on Center Street, in downtown Gloucester.

“I’ve just met the most amazing painter,” he enthused. “He’s Yugoslavian and he doesn’t paint like anybody else on Cape Ann! He and his family live on the Neck. I’m going down this afternoon to interview him.”

It was important to us that this prospective subject for our weekly interview spot didn’t paint like anybody else in town because that summer we had begun to review the shows at local galleries and art associations and we’d had our fill of schooners under full sail, fishing vessels making into port trailed by seagulls, flower arrangements and pet dogs. We were both yearning to experience what we called “real art.” Neither of us understood exactly what constituted this vital new art we hoped to discover for ourselves, but I realized there had to be something beyond the faux Impressionist autumn landscapes that hung at the North Shore Art Association, in East Gloucester.

Having completed his interview, Andy rushed back into the office in the late afternoon and started typing away at his article on one of the paper’s old Royal manual typewriters, while Charlie Lowe, the in-house photographer and dark room technician, developed and printed Andy’s negatives (we used the old Graflex 4 X 5 Speed Graphic cameras then). When the eight by ten glossies came out of the darkroom I was astounded. There was Albert sitting behind an easel, working on one of his big, abstract cityscapes. This had to be the real thing, we both felt. The painting was not of a fishing boat, though Albert taught his students during those seven summers he and Vera spent in Gloucester, to paint wharf scenes that incorporated what was truly visually interesting and exciting about the place.

Andy finished his article. I headlined it “Albert Alcalay’s America Shown in Color and Design,” and when it appeared in the Friday July 6^th edition of the paper it revealed this unbelievably articulate painter, who not only talked about his own art, but about the art of being an artist: “I am not an artist only when I am working, but all the time,” Albert told Andy.

“You’ve got to meet Albert,” Andy said. Not “Mr. Alcalay,” Andy insisted, because he liked to be called by his first name.

The next day we both turned up at Albert’s house, the Rambler Cottage at 50 Rocky Neck Avenue, across the street from the Studio Restaurant, after Albert had finished the day’s teaching and painting. We met Vera. Leor and Ammiel, aged 3 and 1 respectively, were playing in the yard. The first thing I noticed in Albert’s studio—after his astounding paintings, including brilliant figurative works depicting Rocky Neck scenes like no other painter in Gloucester had rendered them, in marvelously bright colors—was Albert’ collection of avant-garde literature including some of the new Grove Press editions of Beckett, Ionesco and Robbe-Grillet, and Botteghe Oscure, the great international literary review that was published in Rome by Marguerite Caetani, which Albert immediately lent me, opening me up to a whole new world of European writing.

In visit after visit we talked about art, about writing, about life in America as Albert was discovering and depicting it. Vera’s hospitality was warmth itself, as she offered us fresh lemonade and wry asides, busy as she was with two energetic toddlers. And then, in a series of memorable afternoons, Andy and I drove Albert all over Gloucester at his request.

“This is a very European town,” Albert insisted as we roamed the Fort, the heart of Gloucester’s Sicilian community, or climbed Portuguese Hill on one side of Gloucester and Beacon Hill on the other, affording spectacular views of 17^th, 18^th and 19^th century houses all seeming to tumble down the hills toward the waterfront; church steeples rising among them. For the first time, and with Albert’s help, Albert’s eye, I began truly to look at and to appreciate the place of my birth.

Some of what we saw began to appear in Albert’s work, abstracted in ways that helped me to understand what contemporary painters were after, not just the objects themselves but essences, shapes in space, spatiality itself; rhythms, motion. And Albert was tireless in explaining what it all meant, always with references to the work of other artists and books about art that became seminal for my own understanding of the aesthetic impulse.

But there was more. When I shared with Albert and Vera that I was going to begin the study of Italian after I returned to college in September, they suddenly began speaking the very language that had intrigued me for years. For the following three summers Albert and Vera, who were joined in 1959 by their friend Emiliano Sorrini, the graphic artist and print maker from Urbino, helped me to grasp the living language, just as Albert had opened my eyes to the entire world of avant-garde art and writing.

Finally, it was in Albert and Vera’s house, during the summer of 1959, on the eve of my departure for graduate studies in Italy, that I met Charles Olson and his wife Betty, beginning another important relationship. And all because Andy Leaf had come rushing into the office on that morning of Thursday, July 5^th having met Albert and Vera and having written this article, published the next day (who needed the Internet?) Had I not met Albert and enjoyed his friendship during those crucial years of my young life, I simply wouldn’t be the person I am today. Thank you, Albert. Gracie mille per la tua amicizia cara e profonda.

(These remarks were delivered at a service in thanksgiving for the life of Albert Alcalay, on Sunday, May 16, 2010, at Memorial Church, Harvard University.)

Charles Olson Centennial Celebration in Gloucester, October 8-10, 2010

2010-04-07T07:07:00.000-07:00

Letter from the Charles Olson Society of Gloucester
To the extended Charles Olson community:

Gloucester's Charles Olson Society, a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization, is organizing a series of events to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Olson's birth. The main events will take place in downtown Gloucester on Columbus Day weekend (Friday, October 8 through Sunday, October 10), though other events will be held before the main festival. We need your donations to make it all happen.

Events will include a Charles Olson study group of local citizens meeting once a week for five weeks prior to Columbus Day weekend; nightly readings at venues throughout Gloucester in the week prior to the main events; symposia and panel discussions; a marathon reading at the Independent Church on Middle Street on Friday, October 8; featured readers on Saturday, October 9; an Olson walk with readings highlighting sites in the Maximus Poems on Sunday, followed by a performance of Apollonius of Tyana.

These events, and several others being discussed, will complement an Olson exhibit at the Cape Ann Museum, which will open the first weekend in October. In addition the Gloucester Lyceum and Sawyer Free Library is sponsoring a special catalog/exhibition of rare, inscribed, and out-of-print books, letters, magazines and broadsides by Olson, curated by Greg Gibson of Ten Pound Island Book Company.

The Olson centennial celebrations in Gloucester in October will provide people with an opportunity to extend and intensify discussions and debates begun in Worcester in March and at Simon Fraser University in June. The Gloucester events will also provide a unique opportunity for Olson's readers to encounter many Maximus sites in the company of other poets, scholars, and enthusiasts. The ways contemporary poets, artists, teachers, and activists are responding to Olson's work -- exploring, extending, critiquing, revising-- will be at the core of the Gloucester events. With your help we can make Gloucester's Charles Olson centennial events challenging, nourishing, and of essential use to those who attend.

Please send checks to Charles Olson Society c/o Kent Bowker, Treasurer, 11 Indian Rock Lane, Essex, MA 01929, with "Olson 100" in the memo line. Those interested in contributing toward the establishment of the Vincent Ferrini/Charles Olson Writers Place should send donations to The Charles Olson Society c/o Henry Ferrini, 5 Wall Street, Gloucester, MA 01930.

Sincerely,

The Charles Olson Society of Gloucester

Olson 100 events in Gloucester (as of April 7, 2010):

one day a week for five weeks at The Bookstore
Charles Olson Study Group led by Peter Anastas and James Cook

from early October on, Cape Ann Museum
Charles Olson exhibit

Monday, October 4 - Thursday, October 7 (readings by and of Gloucester writers)

Friday, October 8, 7pm, Independent Church on Middle Street
Marathon reading

Saturday, October 9, 10am, Cape Ann Museum
Moderated "Town Meeting" Discussion

Saturday, October 9, 7pm, Independent Church on Middle Street
Featured Readers

Sunday, October 10, 11am, from Stage Fort Park to 28 Fort Square
Maximus Walk with readings

Sunday, October 10, The Blackburn Performing Arts Center
Apollonius at Tyana

Become a member of the Charles Olson Society of Gloucester

To become a member send $35 to Charles Olson Society c/o Kent Bowker, Treasurer, 11 Indian Rock Lane, Essex, MA 01929 with "Member Dues" in the subject line.

By becoming a member you will be helping to support our efforts to organize Olson 100 events for Columbus Day weekend 2010 and to raise money for a Vincent Ferrini / Charles Olson writing center.

Florence: Looking Back Fifty Years

2009-11-18T15:29:00.001-08:00

Fifty years ago, on November 15, 1959, I arrived in Florence, Italy. It was my twenty-second birthday and I had come to study Medieval literature at the university. I remember that day as if it were yesterday. I remember getting off the train from Rome, where I’d spent the previous two weeks; and I recall walking in dazzling sunlight with my tan Naugahyde suitcase from the station through Piazza Santa Maria Novella over to the Pensione Cordova, in Via Cavour. I had chosen the pensione from a list of rooming houses the university supplied because it was only a few blocks from Piazza San Marco, where the university was located, just off Piazza Santissima Annunziata.

Fall in Italy was warm, the light incandescent, the days so mild I could walk about Rome in shirtsleeves. Daily I carried a copy of Il Corriere della Sera from my room in the Via del Corso to Piazza del Popolo. There, in that marvelous square where three ancient Roman roads converge, I would sit in the sun, or at a table at the nearby Café Rosati, and scan the news with the help of a pocket dictionary I still own. I had studied Italian for two years in college, practicing the spoken language each summer in Gloucester with my Rocky Neck neighbors Albert and Vera Alcalay, who had lived for many years in Rome and spoke Italian like natives.

After the vastness of Rome, Florence seemed a smaller, more human scale city. You could walk on the Lungarno along the river from the Cascine, once a dairy farm and now a park and former race-track, to Piazza Beccaria at the other end of the city in half an hour. That same day I arrived I began my habit of stopping periodically at the America Express office near the Santa Trinita` bridge to pick up my mail and exchange traveler’s checks for lire. Classes at the university’s Center for Foreigners, where those of us who had signed up for courses at the university were offered the opportunity to polish our Italian and attend lectures on Renaissance art and culture before plunging into graduate studies, were held in the morning on Via San Gallo, which ran parallel to Via Cavour, where I lived, and was a short walk from the university, in Piazza San Marco.

Slowly a pattern to my days evolved. Mornings were dedicated to classes. After lunch I would begin my exploration of the city’s art and architectural treasures. My friend Paul Hamilton, who’d gone to Williams with my high school classmate Tony Lovasco, and I would often set out for a particular museum or church, the Pitti Palace, say, Santa Croce or San Miniato al Monte. With the help of an old Baedeker guide I bought from a pushcart vendor in Piazza del Duomo we’d make our way through the Pitti Palace’s vast collection of paintings and sculpture, one gallery at a time. In those days there were few tourists in Italy between late fall and mid-May and one had the city pretty much to one’s self. I would often go to the Uffizi gallery an hour before closing time to find myself alone in many of the galleries. It was my habit to sit there contemplating one or two paintings a day—some Pieros, Botticelli’s “Adoration,” a stunning Caravaggio—until it was time to leave. This is unthinkable today when busloads of tourists are disgorged in Piazza Signoria and the wait to enter the Uffizi can last for more than an hour, if you can get into the museum at all.

My sharpest memory of that time is of the city at dusk, of workers hurrying home, the click of high heels on the pavement, last light reflected on the surface of the river as I leaned on a stone wall above the water, marveling at my good fortune to be living and studying in this cradle of European civilization. There were students in Florence then from all over the world—many from the Middle East, who were studying medicine and agronomy; Germans doing art history and philology, along with Americans like Paul and me. Paul concentrated on art history, later becoming a professor of Renaissance art. I took courses in Dante, in Romance Philology, the study of Medieval literature through its ur-texts in Latin, Italian and Old French. I also attended lectures on modern French and Italian literature by the contemporary Florentine poet Mario Luzi. But in those days the city beckoned to me more than the classroom did. Soon I threw myself into the reading and study of living Italian writers—Moravia, Pratolini—and the novels and stories of the late Cesare Pavese, whose work and thought would become central to my own for many years.

I wandered with Paul and other friends—Italians, Germans—but more often by myself, through the streets and alleys of the city’s ancient neighborhoods—Santa Croce, San Frediano—and at night I would take in a movie, often the midnight show, after which I would walk through the city, usually ending at the railroad station bar, where I would order one last espresso or a cognac and watch the travelers embarking from the Brenner Express. Then I’d return to my room, sometimes to study, but mostly to read or write. By January of 1960 I had moved from the Pensione Cordova into the home of the DiMaggio family in Piazza San Marco, where my room looked down into a courtyard and across the neighboring rooftops to the Duomo, Florence’s great cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.

I remained in Florence for nearly three years, teaching English at the International Academy in Via Bufalini and completing my first novel. During that time I left the city briefly to live in the nearby Tuscan hill town of Settignano with my American friends, novelist Peter Denzer and his then wife, the painter Ann Sayre Wiseman, whom I had met in Brunswick, Maine. It was an entirely new experience to live with Peter, Ann and their two sons in a small villa among vineyards and olive groves high above the city, where I took the bus to classes or to work, often arriving home late at night. But the city called to me, and when my friends decided to move into a farm house near Fiesole, I returned to Florence, taking a large room on Via dei Servi, around the corner from Piazza San Marco, where I remained for another year before moving finally into a small studio on Via dei Fossi, just off Piazza Goldoni, along the river.

All of these rooms and neighborhoods, and the magical fall and winter I spent in Settignano, are part of my Florentine memories; but what I recall mostly are those early weeks and months in Florence, a time for me of great adventure and discovery. There were wine shops hidden away in Borgo dei Greci or in Borgo San Iacopo and Via Santo Sprito, where you could drink the local “vino nero” cool from casks and demi-johns kept in cellars, and where you could get panini on rustic bread with fresh prosciutto and pecorino cheese. You learned where to find these vinai and to remember what specialties they offered. And of course you found the trattorie in those same neighborhoods, where there was no menu, just the daily fare the owner brought you as you sat at a long table with workers from a nearby construction job, or natives who knew where one ate best in the city. There was the Buca Niccolini in Via Ricasoli and Angiolino in Via Santo Spirito, where you enjoyed Tuscan specialties like Trippa alla Fiorentina or grilled pheasant, often served with faggioli all’ uccelleto, white beans cooked in a sauce of tomatoes, garlic and sage. And there was also the famous Bistecca alla Fiorentina, the best steak I think I had ever tasted from local beef, grilled in a way that retained all its juices.

There was the food and the wine, the little botteghe and the more elegant ristoranti, especially a marvelous Hungarian restaurant called I Tredici Gobbi, “The Thirteen Hunchbacks,” near Santa Maria Novella, where I discovered a delicious Tokay and where the food—chicken paprika, goulash with beef or veal—was exquisite. There were the antiquarian bookshops on Via dei Servi and Via Ricasoli, the art galleries and artists' studios near Piazza della Liberta` on the outskirts of the city. There were the free weekly concerts in the Palazzo Vecchio, opera at night at La Pergola, and dozens of movie theaters where I began seeing the films of Fellini, Antonioni and Pasolini that changed my life.

Living in Florence, traveling by bus and train to Pisa, Arezzo, Bologna, to the sea at Viareggio, and later to Venice and Milan, was the beginning of a new life for me, a small town boy, who had attended a small liberal arts college in a tiny Maine town. Florence was the right size for me. As much as I loved Rome and returned to it regularly for its avant-garde art, sunny streets and ample squares, Florence was my city. It is where I wrote my first stories that were published, where I perfected my Italian to the point where I could read, write and speak it, as my friends joked, with a Florentine accent. In fact, I even dreamed in Italian.

I can close my eyes and picture the city as I knew it then, the walk from Bar Rivoire in Piazza Signoria up Via Calzaioli to the Doumo, and from the Duomo along Via Ricasoli to Piazza San Marco, or over from the Duomo to Piazza San Lorenzo and the Mercato Centrale, where fruit and vegetables arrived fresh each morning from the countryside. There was the wonderful department store UPIM in Piazza della Repubblica across the square from the cafes, where it seemed the entire city—students, office workers, women doing their daily grocery shopping—met over coffee or Punt e Mes. There was the Gran Café Doney, the British tearoom on Via Tournabuoni, where late in the afternoon members of the Anglo-Florentine community gathered for tea; and there were the American and British libraries, where one could find the latest books from London and New York and hear one’s own language spoken again.

During my stay in Florence I didn’t want to speak English unless I had to. When I came to teach it, I discovered that my immersion in Italian had given me an objectivity about my own language that I was not aware of having possessed. I began to understand English not simply as words or expressions that came out of me like one’s breath, but as one of many possible ways of expressing myself. When I spoke Italian I thought in Italian and when I returned to English I heard the language as if it were spoken by a third party. Consequently, I came to speak it with greater precision. The effect on my writing was startling. I think it was then that I truly began to inhabit my native language with a keener awareness of its structure, rather than using it carelessly as I had done up until that time.

Much has changed in the city of my coming of age as a writer and discoverer of my European roots in this great treasure house of art and culture. The tourism of fifty years ago, which was seasonal and contained, has exploded.

As Walter Kaiser wrote in a recent review of Bernd Roeck’s Florence 1900 : The Quest for Arcadia, an extraordinary book about what attracted expatriates to the city beginning in the 19^th century, “Florence itself has long since fallen prey to the depredations and demoralizations of mass tourism. Day after day, bus after bus disgorges swarms of tourists who are imperfectly aware of what they are seeing or where they are….Florentine palaces and churches, like the temples of Cambodia, Egypt, and Greece, were never meant to withstand such trampling hoards, and these monuments are constantly imperiled. The throngs everywhere make it harder and harder for serious travelers and scholars either to examine or to enjoy the achievements of the past."

Kaiser continues—and I can only agree:

“It’s hard to know how to deal with this problem, but something must be done to save this beloved city. To be sure it can never again become the arcadia it once was, but one hopes it might return to something a bit closer to the city Nathanial Hawthorne fell in love with 150 years ago, or even to the one I first knew almost sixty years ago. ‘I hardly think,’ Hawthorne said, ‘there can be a place in the world where life is more delicious for its own simple sake.’”

As it was for Hawthorne a century before I arrived, so it was for me fifty years ago.

2. Settignano Days

Before moving to Settignano, in October of 1960, I had often visited this gem of a Tuscan hill town. It was a lovely excursion in any season. You took the number 10 bus in Piazza San Marco, winding your way from the center of the city out through the post-war neighborhoods of high-rise apartment buildings and up into the Florentine hills, dotted with villas and farmhouses, many dating to before the Renaissance.

Viale Augusto Righi joined Via Gabrielle D’Annunzio and the houses gave way to vineyards and olive groves until you stepped down from the bus in the center of this ancient market town that had roots in both Etruscan and Roman settlements.

There was a small square bordered by the Santa Maria church, the vinaio where Peter Denzer and I used to buy wine and olive oil, and the green grocer’s where his wife Ann shopped for vegetables. Across from the fountain and next to the grocer’s was the Casa del Popolo, the bar and meeting place for the village Communists, many of them partisans from the war. Often Peter and I would drink wine with the men and talk politics. They loved Peter, who had fought in the war before working as a foreign correspondent in occupied Germany; and the members enjoyed instructing me, as they put it, in the proper analysis of events, always from the perspective of class struggle.

The things we talked about in those noisy rooms in the midst of a quiet village opened my mind to a discourse I’d been shut off from in America. Our conversations had drawn me closer to Italy. The men’s stories of the Nazi occupation of Florence, rife with atrocities, the heroism of the partisans—bloody battles in the city’s streets and among the surrounding hills—made me realize that I had a lot to learn about what people were willing to endure to remain free. Aside from a brief period as a member of Students for Stevenson, during the presidential campaign of 1956, I was largely apolitical until I arrived in Italy to discover a society in which political life was central.

The Villino Martelli, which Peter and Ann had leased, inviting me to join them, was located directly above the piazza on Via Rossellino, 64, a paved hilly road that led past a walled cluster of villas, among which our house sat. At the summit of the hill, number 72, stood the Villa Gamberaia surrounded by cypresses and ilex trees. Formerly the property of a Romanian princess, the Villa Gamberaia had suffered mortar damage during the German occupation of Florence and was being restored by new owners. Its formal gardens were austerely beautiful, as were the main buildings themselves with their hue of sun-burnished stucco. The view from the villa out across the Florence and the Arno Valley was breathtaking.

We also had a remarkable view from the Villino Martelli. There was a terraced garden in front of the house, planted with lemon trees. You could sit in the sun on that terrace over breakfast or lunch, even during the winter, to watch the city unfold beneath you. Below us and to the west in the hills, near the parish of San Domenico, was I Tatti, the villa that had belonged to the great critic and art historian Bernard Berenson. Berenson, who had died only a month before I arrived in Florence, had left I Tatti, its farms, gardens, fabulous art collection and extensive library, to his alma mater, Harvard University, to be used as a Renaissance study center. It was closed to the public during this period of transition, so I missed an opportunity to view the fabulous books and art, which I had read about in Berenson’s Sketch for a Self-Portrait; but Peter and I took long walks in the vicinity of this stately villa with its clock tower, where Berenson had entertained some of the world’s intellectual and political luminaries and lived a life of culture and connoisseurship that one only dreams of today.

Settignano had been a place of resort for Florentines since Medieval times, and there were many tenant farms and villas that dated from that period, farms that provided a living for their urban owners. During the 19^th century the English began to acquire villas here and in neighboring Fiesole as an Anglo-Florentine community made up of Bohemians and aristocrats took hold. The American-born writer Iris Origo grew up in the Villa Medici, while Leo Stein, brother of Gertrude, a fine writer in his own right, and his Parisian wife Nina moved to an old farm house in the hills above the village, where they remained during the war years, and Leo produced a group of remarkable Cezanne-like paintings of the countryside. There was also the British writer and journalist Janet Ross's villa at nearby Poggio Gherardo, where they made the most delicious vermouth from a secret, centuries' old recipe.

Much of this history I did not know when we lived in Settignano, though we met several British and American writers and artists during our residence, including the American painter and designer Susan Nevelson (daughter of sculptor Louise Nevelson) and her young daughter Neith, who became a well-known painter.. There was a peacefulness in the country. We visited the surrounding farms, where one could buy the local wine and olive oil. It was in Settignano that I tasted polenta for the first time, cut into wedges and grilled with garlic and oil in cast iron skillets. At night a vast silence fell over the surrounding hillside, the stars brighter than I had ever experienced them in America. Walking in the dark, the constellations were visible to me in the way they must have been to generations of Tuscan farmers who read the night sky like a book.

You gained entrance to our villa through a heavy wooden gate in the wall flush with the street. A door let you into a large living room on the first floor, beyond which was an ample country kitchen with a stove and wood-fired oven. French doors gave onto the stone-paved terrace and a kitchen garden. On the second floor were two bedrooms and a bath with a wood-fueled hot water heater. The bedrooms contained wood-burning ceramic stoves, which took the chill off the mountain cold of fall and winter nights. I had my bedroom on the third floor across the stone stairway from Peter’s study. Our rooms, too, were heated by ceramic stoves. At night, as I read or wrote, or as I was about to fall asleep, I could hear the mournful shriek of the Brenner Express making its way though the Arno valley.

I remember the house as being full of people. Friends would join us from the city for Sunday afternoons of wine, cheese and talk, or dinners of homemade pasta and rich Bolognese sauce made from local beef and tomatoes. And always, there was the aroma of Ann’s freshly baked bread. The bus trip from the city took no more than half an hour, less so if there were fewer people getting on or off, and friends enjoyed an escape—una scappata-from the often noisy city. Piet and Kikko, Ann and Peter’s sons, attended the local school. Before long they were speaking Italian better than the adults.

During our winter and fall together in Settignano, Peter completed The Alien, his novel based on the life of expatriate American poet Ezra Pound. I finished From What Bone, a first novel inspired by my trip to Greece the previous summer. Peter and I talked a lot about books and writing. Ann painted marvelous oil paintings and water colors. She hooked rugs, wove tapestries and wrote a children’s book. I remember one particularly hilarious night when my Gloucester friend and high school classmates Tony Lovasco, who had come to Florence to study for a semester, read mimickingly to us from Mary McCarthy’s outrageously wrong-headed book, The Stones of Florence, in which McCarthy, who seemed to have learned nothing during her stay in the city, had the temerity to criticize the local cuisine. Those of us who had been enjoying this extraordinary food for over a year were aghast.

I read a lot during my time in Settignano, the final volume of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, some penetrating studies of Pound, Faulkner and Henry James, published in Oliver and Boyd’s Writers and Critics series, Ruskin’s Mornings in Florence and The Stones of Venice, and Richard Ellmann’s masterful biography of James Joyce. I read a lot of Italian writing, too, continuing my absorption in the novels of Pavese and a new discovery, Carlo Cassola, whose novels of the anti-fascist Resistance during the war corroborated everything our partisan friends at the Casa del Popolo had been telling us.

The brilliant fall gave way to a gray, rainy winter. Though we endured a chilly wind from the Apennines, there was no snow; and soon after Christmas, which we celebrated with gifts and a tree, the sunlight returned, ever brighter, until we could resume our lunches on the terrace. By early February the almond trees began to blossom and the earth smelled again of spring. When Ann and Peter started looking for a larger house, I knew it was time for me to return to the city. Though I had loved our country life, I missed the streets of Florence, teeming with pedestrians and motor bikes, the crowded cafes, where, warmed by the sun, one sat for hours over an espresso, the friends I met up with after classes, the new films. Resettled in Florence, where I resumed my nighttime walks, I felt at home again. But I missed the silence of the country, the brilliance of the night sky. I missed the vendemmia and the olive harvest. Most of all I missed the villino, where, among family, I had finished my first novel in a room that looked down over the city I would come to love like no other.

3. Casa Soldi

For some months in 1961, after I’d left the house in Settignano and moved back down into the city, I lived with Augusta and Stella Soldi in a room in their big apartment on Via dei Servi. At first I didn't think I’d be able to rent the spacious single room, which Augusta, the strikingly white-haired, middle-aged padrona, had taken me through. It was on the second floor of a 17^th century palace, directly overlooking Rigacci's art supply shop. If you stuck your head outside of the big French windows, you caught a glimpse of Piazza Santissima Annuziata, its two fountains splashing softly into their ornate catch basins on a hot summer's morning.

There was someone ahead of me, Augusta explained in her elegant Tuscan, a salesman who had given her a deposit, but, oh, how nice it would be—come bello—if the professore, who taught where her daughter was taking a post-graduate course in English, could become their guest. We commiserated in that way I'd learned to do in Florence, with facial gestures and a repertory of pat expressions; and I relinquished my dream of having that airy room with a bed by the door and a large, round work table under the window opposite the entrance. There was even a couch along its left wall, above which I'd noticed a long shelf, where all my books might have gone. Not to mention the frescoed ceiling with its intricate design of gorgons and swans.

The room was a writer's delight. By that time I had cut back on my classes at the university and taken on more teaching hours at night so I could devote the days to working on my second novel. But I left the Soldi household certain that I had come too late. With gestures of regret Augusta led me to the door, although not before conducting me into the recesses of that enormous palazzo to a tiny cell-like bedroom where La Mamina, her own mother, sat in a corner by her narrow, nunlike bed, rosary beads in her hand, dozing. We touched fingers, La Mamina and I, and I fully expected never to see her again.

A week later, however, on my way out of the afternoon class in conversational English I taught to local police detectives, I saw Augusta standing by the concierge's desk, a triumphant smile on her face.

"Lei ho pescato, professore!" she shouted above the voices of the high school students who were waiting for their next class. "I've caught you."

And she advanced in a black cloth coat that concealed her housedress to announce that the salesman had been transferred and couldn't take the room after all, so it was mine. Of course I had found another room, in Via dei Tavolini, on the other side of the Duomo, in the shadow of Medieval towers. It was dark and too small, and I'd regretted having taken it in my haste to resettle in the city. But I'd paid a month's rent in advance. So I made my apologies. Yes, I would have loved to return to her in Via dei Servi, but my room was already paid for—bell'e pagata—and I couldn't ask her to wait.

"You'll come now," she insisted. "Your room is ready. The minute I laid eyes on you I knew you would stay with us."

Then Augusta led me out of the lobby by my arm, past my amazed students, down the Renaissance staircase of our school building to Via Bufalini, where, having exacted my promise to move in by nightfall, she left me with the task of getting out of the month's tenancy I'd just barely paid for.

The padrona at Via dei Tavolini wasn't pleased. I didn't even think about asking her for my money back. Instead, I made some excuse about living with a friend closer to school and I left immediately, having called a taxi to carry my two suitcases, a carton of books, and some loose clothing to Via dei Servi, 32.

Thus began far more than a tenancy with the Soldis. On my first full day with them I was invited to lunch, "a trifle," as Augusta always called her generous meals, beginning with the characteristic pastina in brodo and culminating in fruit and gorgonzola. At that meal I was pumped for the details of my life—my age, my marital status, my desires, as Augusta put it, meaning, I was certain, my ambitions.

When I told her that I hoped to complete another novel that summer during the school recess, she was thrilled. "Anche romanziero!" she added with flattery. And Stellina, whom I was pressed to call by her diminutive, smiled. But the point of the lunch, and perhaps even of Augusta's hastened retrieval of me at school, became more apparent as the days went by. Augusta hoped that with a professore in the house Stellina could be convinced to do better in her class work. She could come to me to hear her lessons—without interrupting my writing, her mother intimated. And I might even spend a minute or two helping Augusta brush up on her schoolgirl's English, as she put it, so that when she was at the sea this coming summer she might not make such a brutta figura with the lovely foreigners, who also frequented Forte dei Marmi.

There was more, I learned. Augusta hoped that with me in the house she could leave La Mamina more easily. She suggested that from time to time I might look in on her, perhaps even stopping at the butcher's to buy her a few grams of ground meat, which she'd prepare for herself while Augusta and Stellina were away.

I didn't mind spending time with Stellina because she was so beautiful. Her dark hair highlighted with red was a perfect complement to an ivory complexion, which only Tuscan women seemed to possess. She was tall and slender, with long legs, and she wore a short black leather skirt that drew stares on Via Tornabuoni from men and women alike. Naturally she had a ganzo. Her boyfriend Roberto picked her up after class in his Fiat Topolino; sometimes she didn't arrive for class at all.

I soon discovered that I was to be recruited by Stellina, not only to assure her mother that she was doing well in school, but to provide cover for her frequent excursions with Roberto. Stellina would tell Augusta that she was going to see a film with me. Once we were there she'd rush away to meet Roberto, or he'd appear at the theater and I would be left alone for the duration of the film. Sometimes I'd be waiting for her afterward in a bar or cafe so that we could return home together, thereby satisfying Augusta that her daughter was in good hands.

My reward for the pretense was an occasional kiss on the cheek and the time I relished at my worktable with this marvelous eighteen-year-old, who had both the body and the affect of a mature woman.

Stellina was smart, too. She’d graduated from liceo classico and I’d always felt she should be at University. We spent a lot of time talking about Antonioni's films or the novels of Cesare Pavese, which she, like many other students, read with deep empathy for the post-war alienation they portrayed, a sense of malaise none of us seemed able to shake during that Cold War era. I wondered what she saw in Roberto, who seemed beautifully empty-headed, like the typical young men one ran into in the bars of the Piazza della Repubblica, with their coats draped around their shoulders, their perfectly combed hair and impeccable shoes.

For his part, Roberto was always polite with me, never failing to offer me his hand or a cool, conspiratorial smile, when I delivered Stellina into his hands or received her back from him to be escorted home.

So the spring became summer and Augusta began to prepare for her time at the sea, which I learned would last until early September. Before she left, however, I learned more about the family as she was often voluble, coming to my room to chat while she cleaned, always looking over my books.

Augusta had never married. She'd become pregnant with Stellina during the last years of the war, when, as a nurse in Naples, she fell in love with a young doctor. I never understood why they didn't marry. She was unclear about that part of her life, or perhaps I didn't comprehend her often hasty sentences. At any rate, she gave birth to Stellina in 1943 and they returned to Florence, where Augusta attempted to make a life for them during the occupation and later, as the new Republic took shape. She had never been a fascist, she assured me. Fascists were ignorant—brutte persone, she said. A woman of her education and raffinanza could never have countenanced such types. "But we dissembled," she added, "we went along to get along."

Augusta no longer worked at a hospital. As a public health nurse, she visited invalids at their homes to administer personal care or injections. I think she may even have had a few private patients, for she was often out at night as well. Augusta had also mentioned a sister, but when I pressed her for details she merely noted that the woman had died near the end of the war.

Still, I loved my room. Even on the hottest of July days, once school was over for the summer, it was cool and shaded. I hid out in it, writing on late mornings after I took my coffee and pastry in a bar around the corner on Via dei Pucci, and returning there to nap briefly after lunch at the Buca Niccolini on Via Ricasoli. Nights I'd see friends or go to the cheaper second or third showings of films in the outskirts of the city, often walking back to the center, where, after wandering through the deserted streets, I’d stop at the railroad station cafe for a cappucino or a final glass of cognac before returning home to read and write in my journal.

I cherished those quiet nights, when, for just an hour or two before dawn, the streets would be empty of motorscooters, and I, too, could read Pavese and dream of the novels I would one day publish. Soon I gave up my fantasy of getting closer to Stellina or, for that matter, any other Italian woman. After two years in Florence, and a couple of abortive relationships with students I’d met at the University—one a fiery Communist, who excoriated me for what she considered my political naiveté—I learned that natives kept pretty much to themselves, and American women avidly sought Italian boyfriends. Even when I had given lessons in English to a group of pretty, upper-middle-class matrons, I discovered that their mild flirtations with me were always conducted with circumspection.

Then I met an English woman my own age, a painter, escaping a relationship gone awry with an artist from Milan. Lynn and I became close, as the rest of our friends departed for the summer and we found ourselves thrown together. We spent most nights at the cinema, and on humid afternoons we’d often take refuge in the comfortable interiors of churches, while she studied the Massaccio frescoes in the Capella Brancacci, across the Arno at Santa Maria del Carmine, or the breathtaking late works of Uccello, in the refectory at Santa Maria Novella. With my help Lynn had located a studio in Via dei Fossi, just off Piazza Goldoni and the Carraia Bridge. It was there that I began to spend not only my afternoons but soon my evenings and nights.

Initially Augusta was quite pleasant about my new relationship, having met Lynn when I’d first invited her to my room. She was complimentary about Lynn's straightforward good looks, although she commented negatively on Lynn's refusal to apply the dense kohl eye-liner most younger women affected in Italy, which gave their eyes a strange indented quality.

"The English," she said, "with their lifeless hair and their bad shoes."

Lynn, to my mind, had wonderfully long hair and I came to adore her sturdy legs with or without shoes. So I offered no response to Augusta's sarcasm, though I took note of it. Stellina merely teased me, noting that I'd found myself altra compagnia as she continued to come and go with Roberto.

Then mother and daughter left for the sea and I was confronted with having to juggle my time with Lynn and my responsibilities toward La Mamina. With Augusta gone her mother ventured out of her room more often, while I took greater liberties with my own quarters. First I removed the religious pictures that had bothered me, a strange image of the bleeding heart of Christ above my doorway and an anorectic Madonna on the wall opposite my worktable. I put up some de Chirico prints I'd bought in Rome and a drawing by Fra Angelico.

But when I arrived home to write one morning after a night with Lynn, I found that the religious images had been returned to the walls and my own pictures lay on my neatly made bed. Without thinking, I rushed to confront La Mamina, who countered my questions with an amazing diatribe.

"Voi altri," she began. "It's bad enough that you foreigners consort indecently with each other, but to remove the little Madonna—La Madonnina!—from where she has been all these years!”

"But, Signora," I blurted out, "the room is mine. I pay good rent for it. Why can't I hang a few innocent pictures of my own?"

"Whatever your belief may be," she replied, sitting up straight in her chair, "this is a Christian household, and you mustn't forget it. Neither should you neglect your promises."

I knew she was referring to the tasks Augusta had pressed on me before I could properly respond. Her tiny eyes held mine, her hands shook, and I backed out of the room bowing my apologies. The bleeding heart and the little Madonna remained. During July and August I ran countless errands for La Mamina, until the late summer's heat drove Lynn and me to Venice for the Ferragosto holiday. While we were away, I asked my painter friend Carlo to look in on her; and I left feeling comfortable that her needs would be met because Carlo had an aging grandmother in San Frediano to whom he paid scrupulous attention.

When we returned from Venice, we found a dark faced Augusta at the door. She had rushed home from the shore because Carlo had discovered La Mamina unconscious in the kitchen one morning, alerting a neighbor who notified Augusta.

"Certain unthoughtfulnesses," Augusta began in her most imperious manner.

"I'm terribly sorry," I rushed to say.

"Don't speak!" she interrupted. "I know all about the removal of the Madonnina. La Mamina was heartbroken. We took you into the family, we fed you--we gave you the best room in the house. And all we asked was an occasional kindness, a little errand, a peek into her room to see that she was comfortable."

I could only listen. And when she finished, not without telling me that La Mamina was now resting peacefully in her room and that she'd had to hire—yes, pay—for a nurse to watch her while she and Stellina wound up their stay at the sea, I found myself agreeing to be more attentive.

Next it was Stellina, who returned prematurely from Forte dei Marmi, presumably to register for school.

"Sono incinta," she confided, closing the door of my room behind her as she entered. "I’m pregnant.”

She sat down next to me on my bed, her eyes imploring.

"Roberto?" I asked.

"Bo'" she replied, turning the palms of her hands upward, "who else?"

"Is he prepared to marry you?"

"Of course not. He wants no part of it."

"What about you?"

"Why do you think I'm confiding in you?" she said with exasperation. Then she put her arm around me, dropping her head softly to my shoulder.

"You're my only friend.” She began to sob. "I can't do this to my mother!"

That night I spoke to Lynn, who gave me some pills she had obtained from a woman in Edinburgh. Stellina was to take them daily and to sit in a bath as hot as she could stand it. Lynn said that if she weren't far along in her pregnancy the pills would probably induce menstruation. If that didn't work, she said she knew of an English doctor in Prato, who would perform an abortion.

The pills worked, or maybe Stellina wasn't pregnant after all. At any rate, she came ecstatically into my room a week later with the news and just as promptly left for the sea again.

La Mamina no longer spoke to me when I checked to see if she needed anything. She communicated through her "nurse," a sour-faced woman named Anna whose Siennese dialect was nearly incomprehensible. Meanwhile Lynn and I decided that it would be cheaper for the two of us to occupy her studio. So one morning I moved out of the room I had once delighted in, leaving a note and an extra week's rent for Augusta when she returned.

After school began in October, I ran into Stellina, who wagged her finger at me in mock admonition.

"My mother is very angry!" she said.

"Are you?" I asked.

"Of course not," she replied. "Ti ho sempre voluto bene."

A month later she was gone, having apparently dropped out of school to follow Roberto to Rome. Toward Christmas I read in La Nazione that La Mamina had died. I wanted to pay my respects, but I kept putting it off, fearing Augusta's wrath. The holidays passed, snowless but cold. In early March, just as spring was in full flower, I received a notice from my draft board in Gloucester to appear in a month for a pre-induction physical examination. Having stopped attending classes at the University, I no longer had an educational deferment. Reluctantly, I decided to return home. Lynn had been talking about spending some months in Mykonos, which I couldn't do without giving up the income I depended upon from my teaching job. So it seemed a good reason for us to go our separate ways, difficult as that was.

The day before Lynn was to accompany me to the boat at Genoa, I decided to visit Augusta. It turned out she had moved, but the downstairs neighbor directed me to her new apartment. It was out beyond Via Cavour, in what the natives referred to as the new quartiere among recently constructed highrise apartment buildings, hardly a place one would expect to encounter Augusta. But she answered the door and welcomed me in, leading me to a modern kitchen where she seemed utterly out of place.

"What can you expect," she said, sighing. "With La Mamina dead and Stellina married.... Yes," she added, "she eloped with that villiacco Roberto."

After the loss of La Mamina's pension and the state subsidy she got for Stellina so long as she remained in school, Augusta could no longer afford a large apartment. Besides, she added, with my sudden decampment an important source of income was gone.

"You couldn't have rented the other rooms?" I offered.

"Ah, professore," she said, reverting to her formal diction, "it wouldn't have been the same. Besides," she added, "you foreigners come and go, you take and you leave..."

"I meant to visit you after the funeral," I said. "And I'm sorry I moved so quickly—.”

"Look," she said, getting up to fetch the espresso she'd prepared for us on her sparkling white gas stove. "Don't think I lack understanding of Americans. After all, it was your people who killed my sister."

"You never told me that!”

"You never asked in your egotism," she replied. "But that is how she died. She was traveling in a boxcar with some partisans—yes, she was a patriot. When the train slowed down and they began to descend, your troops started firing on them as if they were Nazis. 'We're partisans,' they shouted. 'Siamo partigiani!' But the Allies paid no attention, assuming that if they were Italians they must be fascists. She was machinegunned to death in front of her fiancé."

"Signora," I implored. "I only remember the war from the radio."

"For us, it was our lives," she answered. "And because my sister cared to free us from fascism before your people even arrived, she was punished. Gunned down" she added bitterly--Fuccilata!"

"And I," she went on, "I was left with a baby and La Mamina, already a widow from the first war. But we didn't give up. I worked my fingers to the bone tending the wounded. And after the war I took care of the sick, the invalids and the aging. Look!" she shouted.

Augusta pulled her white blouse up revealing her slip.

"Guarda ai miei seni!" She puffed her chest out, pulling her slip tightly over her bra so that I could see the firmness of her breasts. Her skin was smooth and white, her shoulders round, her biceps solid.

"I haven't lost these womanly qualities," she asserted, smiling triumphantly.

I was speechless, as she smoothed her blouse back in place and proceeded to lift her brown tweed skirt to display a strong and shapely leg, right up to her solid thigh. I could imagine her at the shore looking far younger in a bathing suit than many women her age.

"Believe me, professore, I attract attention at the sea and not only because I'm well preserved," she said. "Our friends there like the way I express myself. They often ask me to talk so that they can hear my Florentine diction. I understand it is not unlike the way you speak English in Boston... I had such high aspirations," she shook her head disconsolately. "I hoped your presence in our family would be a stabilizing influence on Stellina. I hoped our fortunes might change with a man in the household."

I returned home to become a high school teacher, a job that saved me from Vietnam. I married and had children, then I became a social worker. Slowly I began to publish. Lynn and I corresponded occasionally. She had met a young filmmaker in Athens. Soon they left for Moscow, where he had a fellowship to study cinematography. Returning to England, they settled in London. After that we fell out of touch, except for an occasional brochure announcing a show of her paintings.

Many years later, a small envelope containing a white engraved card with a black border arrived from Italy. It announced Augusta’s death and was signed by Stella Spagnuola, which I took to be her daughter’s married name. Setting the notice down, I began searching for an old cardboard covered photograph album. Pasted among its faded black pages was a snapshot of myself in loden topcoat with my beard carefully trimmed. I was standing near the railing at the top of Piazzale Michelangelo, with the city of Florence spread out beneath me. Smiling next to me was a tall, bright-faced girl with her hair in a beehive—the beautiful Stellina!

Afterthoughts…

I often wonder what would have happened had I remained in Italy. I loved the years I spent in Florence. The city seemed endlessly fascinating. I made good friends among Italians and foreign residents, and I came to know a number of British and American expatriates, some whom had lived for many years in Italy without regret or any desire to return home. After he and Ann divorced, Peter Denzer remained in Florence, where he met the American artist Mary Alexandra Milton, who would become his wife of forty-five years. Living in an ancient palace, on Via dei Rustici in the heart of the city, Peter and Mary shared a remarkable life. Continuing to write and publish, Peter also carved from the native stone and modeled in clay, while Mary produced paintings, drawings and sculpture. And during the terrible flood of 1966, when so much of the city’s history and culture was threatened, Peter and Mary joined with their Florentine neighbors in digging the city out of the mud and caring for the afflicted.

Certainly, I, too, thought about expatriation. I was well read in the literature of the Lost Generation. In fact, it had been my absorption in college in the lives and work of Hemingway, Joyce and Pound that initially led me to Europe. Had I not been required to return home for a pre-induction physical examination by my local draft board (U.S. involvement in Vietnam was intensifying and the draft was very much in effect), I might well have stayed on in Florence. I had a teaching job I enjoyed, with prospects for advancement, from conducting classes in conversational English for bank clerks and law enforcement officers to offering courses in English and American literature to high school students. I earned 120 thousand lire a month, the equivalent of over $200. This may not have seemed a great deal in American terms, but when you consider that my rent was 15 thousand lire a month and one could eat abundantly for 1000 lire a day, I was fairly comfortable. I also earned extra money working at the Institute for Physical Chemistry at the University, where I translated scientific papers from Italian to English and interpreted for visiting American scholars and during various scientific conferences (I also translated Professor Giorgio Piccardi’s book, The Chemical Basis of Medical Climatology, into English, and it was published in America, in 1962).

I had made a life for myself in Florence. I was involved in a relationship, which, in retrospect, would probably not have become permanent. But at the time it held me to the city, along with many friendships with Italian and foreign writers and artists. Florence was not the great center of avant garde writing and visual art that Rome and Milan had become after the war; but there were many young writers who were producing cutting-edge work; and we had for inspiration the astounding new cinema of France and Italy, and the experimental writing and theorization about writing and art that was being published by Italian and French novelists and critics. There were marvelous journals to read in French and Italian. Newspapers like the Guardian and Observer arrived daily from England at the American and British libraries, so one never felt cut off culturally from the English-speaking world. Also, the Italian press was vigorous. You could not find a Communist paper in America like L’Unita` while the weekly gravure news magazine L’Espresso offered reviews and articles by leading Italian intellectuals, like Moravia and Pasolini. I borrowed books in Italian from the National Library, just off the Lungarno, there were free concerts of classical and progressive music at the Conservatory and Palazzo Vecchio, and one could see movies for 100 lire (less than 20 cents), while an espresso cost 50 lire, a mere dime.

In short, life was sufficient and affordable in Italy in the early 1960s. It was the era of the “Italian Miracle,” when the economy was surging and Italy design, automobiles and clothing were highly esteemed by the rest of the world. Discarding my American clothing soon after I arrived, in 1959, I bought two Italian suits off the rack at PanFin in downtown Florence for less than $100 each, and I had a white linen suit, which still fits me, custom tailored by Renato Lecci for 60 thousand lire, exactly $100. I bought a couple of pairs of Italian shoes, which were the envy of my friends when I returned to America, and a dark green loden topcoat, which got me through several American winters after my return.

But it wasn’t the clothes or the shoes that attracted me to Italy, nor the incredible food, or the fact that you could hop on a train without reservation and find yourself in Venice or the Italian Riviera, if you wanted an inexpensive vacation, or a simple getaway. It was the people of Italy I fell in love with, their warmth and openness. You’d find yourself sitting across from someone on a bus or train and the next thing you knew you’d be engaged in conversation. Food would be offered and out would come family pictures, followed by questions. Italians wanted to know who you were, where you came from, what your family did—why you were in their country. They actively solicited your views on art, on the war in Algeria. They complimented you on your mastery of their language, spoke to you without embarrassment in your own; took you into their confidence. Leaving your apartment to shop at a nearby grocer’s, a walk across the city, or a bus trip to San Gemignano was always an adventure. You’d meet remarkable people, hear amazing stories, get tips on where to eat or buy the best gorgonzola. Not that these things wouldn’t happen in America—but life was not fast in Italy. As soon as I arrived I began to slow down. I became more relaxed, more thoughtful, meditative.

“Non si fa fretta—don’t hurry,” was the watchword wherever I went. University classes didn’t begin exactly on time, but they were always richly rewarding. Friends might be a few minutes late for an appointment, but when they arrived they had a wonderful story to relate about whom they’d met on the way or what they witnessed in the street. And the streets themselves were full of the theater of life. One day I was walking through Piazza Santa Maria Novella when I heard a shot ring out. People rushed past me.

“C’e stato un’ omicidio!" someone shouted. “There’s been a murder.” And there on the sidewalk lay the body of a well dressed young man, blood running from his head. Nearby, the police were holding a beautiful, dark-haired woman, who stood screaming in a red dress. I later read in La Nazione that she had been the man’s cousin in Sicily. He’d seduced her, leaving soon after for Florence, where he studied law. When she found out she was pregnant, she went to her older brothers who called their cousin, demanding that he return to Sicily to honor their sister by marrying her. He refused, so they gave her a gun and put her on the train to Florence, where she tracked her betrayer down and shot him in the head and chest. She was indicted for murder, but a judge freed her because she had, in his words, committed “a crime of passion,” which in Italy was allowed under certain provisions of the law. In another case, a frustrated husband had thrown his mother-in-law out of the window. He, too, was exonerated.

Political life, as I’ve said, was intense, combative; but I loved living in a country where Communism wasn’t considered anti-Italian, though it was scary watching the newly regenerated neo-fascist party, Movimento Sociale Italiano, parade in the streets to the shouts of desecration from old partisans who’d suffered torture at the hands of Mussolini. And there were always the Christian Democrats, thrust into power after the war by the OSS and the CIA, many of whose members were corrupt to the core. One learned about politics fast in Italy, and I evolved very quickly, from an apolitical student to a deeply interested observer of the Italian process, returning home in time to vote against Barry Goldwater for President.

Living in Italy I felt free for the first time in my life. I earned my own money, bought my own clothing and lived in a room of my own. I traveled whenever I felt like it. Once, after reading in Richard Ellmann’s biography about James Joyce’s years in Trieste, a city I had first encountered in the pages of Italo Svevo’s novels, I got on the train and discovered an Adriatic metropolis that seemed more Balkan than Italian.

I also wrote with a greater sense of liberation, although the longer I remained in Italy the more my English prose began to sound like it had been translated from another language. Several other American writers I knew shared the same concern that we might be losing our spontaneity in English, not to speak of the freshness of its idioms. The Australian-born British war correspondent and historian, Alan Moorehead, had just then written an article in the Observer about his many years of living in Fiesole, in a villa that had once belonged to the Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino.

“Expatriation can become a living death,” Moorehead cautioned his readers. He warned that not only could one’s native language be subsumed in the new one, one could also lose touch with the vitality of his or her native culture. While agreeing that people became expatriates in order to escape their own cultures, if not their pasts, Moorehead felt it was dangerous for artists, especially writers.

I remember discussing Moorhead’s article with friends who dismissed it. But in retrospect, I believe that remaining in Italy might well have changed not only the way I wrote but also my choice of subject matter. While I continued to read contemporary novels from England and America, I read more deeply in post-war French and German literature, which began to influence my approach to fiction. The difference between my first and second novels was dramatic. My first novel, From What Bone, sounded and felt American, not only in language but also in its angle of vision. But my second, Until the Axle Break, was deeply influenced by the paired-down prose of Cesare Pavese and the anti-fictional theories of Alain Robbe-Grillet, as well as the films of Antonioni, especially L’Aventura and La Notte, both of which I had seen many times.

These influences are surely understandable, considering that I was living in the midst of an aesthetic explosion. Even in America I would have been drawn to the rising European novelists and filmmakers, as the critic Susan Sontag had been, becoming one of the first Americans to write about them. Nevertheless, I thought a great deal about what it meant to be an American writer while I lived in Europe. Even then I knew that if I remained in Italy I would become a very different sort of writer than the one I eventually became. I doubt very much that I would have written about Gloucester in the way I’ve written about my home town, or about the kinds of issues I’ve addressed in my fiction and non-fiction. I might not have addressed American themes at all, or, like Henry James, whom I was beginning to understand for the first time, I might have written about Americans from a European perspective.

All this is speculation; for, in the end, I returned to America and my voice as a writer is surely an American one, though I often look back on my European experiences as a benchmark for my growth and development.

Had I remained in Florence one of my dreams was to find an apartment or studio across the Arno (L'Oltrano, as the natives called it), on the Costa San Giorgio, a long, hilly street that sloped from the Fortezza Belvedere down to Via Guicciardini. From the windows and rooftop terraces the city stretched out in all its beauty. Walking down the Costa one could only marvel at the fortuitous location of these lovely apartments, many of which were occupied by artists or scholars. The rents were slightly higher than in the neighborhoods I’d lived in, but I had a new job during my final months in the city, interpreting for a manufacturer of men’s wear. A good deal of their business was done with Americans, so they often needed an interpreter during the visits of stateside buyers. The job paid well and it gave me the opportunity to interact with my own countrymen from whom I received first-hand news about what was happening in America, as the Eisenhower era gave way to Camelot. And then, precipitously, I returned home, leaving behind the life I had made for myself in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

I did not return to Italy for 37 years, and when I was finally able to make the trip, with my partner Judy and our friend Ray Bentley, I found a very different country. As in America, prime urban areas were heavily gentrified, working people having been pushed out of their traditional neighborhoods to make way for the new money; and Italians, who had always been attracted to technical innovations like transistor radios, were now communicating primarily by telefonino—cell phone—instead of talking face to face with each other, as they once did at the drop of a hat. Florence was overrun by tourists, the museums crowded; churches full of half-naked sight-seers, who appeared to have no respect for age-old proprieties of dress or decorum. The city was noisy beyond belief, but the lineaments of the Florence I loved had not completely disappeared. Among the transformations—Medieval towers into luxury hotels, monasteries now operating as bed and breakfast inns, fancy boutiques in every storefront—I still recognized the city that had once been as intimate to me as my own body.

But once I began to feel at home in Italy, once I could speak Italian again with some fluency and ease, it was sadly time to leave.

“I must come back,” I wrote in my journal. “I must live in Italy again, in Tuscany. I’m glad we spent time in Rome [see my Italian Journal below] and that it was hot and the sun warmed us to the bone. I’m glad we mingled with the crowds and sat in the cafés, entered the dark sanctuaries of churches, many of whose names I can no longer recall. But it is Firenze I want to return to, Firenze where I want to live again, or nearby the city, so I can come to know it as I did so many years ago, know it with that old certainty I once had of the location of everything. And when I walked the streets at night, sometimes until dawn, the city unfolded for me and I was able to peel back the years, the ages, knowing when each palace was built and who built it, being able to imagine the inhabitants, the way they spoke and dressed. Indeed, hearing their voices in the voices of the night people in the bars and tavole calde I frequented, like the pizzeria in San Lorenzo I couldn’t find this time, when at midnight, before a film, I’d enter, sit at the counter and order a veal cutlet Milanese style, and the counter man, a native Florentine in white short sleeved shirt with his gray hair slicked back, would shout in the direction of the kitchen, “Una Milano!” or if it was crostine alla Bolgonese, a sandwich of mozarella between two thick slices of bread dipped in beaten egg and lightly fried until the cheese melted, he’d shout, “Una Bologna!” And when he got to know me he’d call me professore and we’d talk while I sipped a glass of vino nero and watched the most amazing pizzas with paper thin crust being pulled out of the brick oven behind him. Then I’d go to my film, often one by Antonioni I’d be seeing for the third or fourth time.

“It can’t be that way anymore, or it wouldn’t. I’m old now and my memory for words, my ability to pick up and quickly retain idiomatic phrases, is gone. I’ll return, but it won’t be the way it was the first time, or this time, which was more like getting my feet wet again, getting acclimated, convincing myself I could come back after so many years, and that yes, it was still Italy, still Firenze, though different, as I’m different, but still the person I was those many years ago. I’ll come back and live for a time, no matter what. And when it’s over, when I’ve eaten the food and finished the wine, as Peter Denzer says, I’ll toss the dregs into the Arno and say good-bye to the beloved land.”

Reflections at Seventy-Two

2009-11-15T15:20:00.001-08:00

(Painting by Theodoros Stamos)

People never read books, they can't concentrate on anything significant for more than a minute or two, and as a result they don't really think anymore. Lulled by the "pacifier" of "infotainment," their civic and political decisions emerge from a confused welter of laziness, reckless emotion and prejudice. --Laura Miller, in a review of Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason (Salon.com)

“We’re gonna change our country. We’re gonna change the world,” President Barack Obama promised on the campaign trail. He has been in office for less than a year and the country has fallen deeper into recession. Unemployment has sky-rocketed, health care reform appears less achievable, and we are still mired in two unwinnable wars. What has changed in America is that the anger and despair that reached a boiling point under the failed Bush administration and seemed for a while to abate following the hopefulness of Obama’s victory, has returned, affecting the president’s approval ratings and fueling a Republican-led reaction to his policies, extending the fear-mongering of George Bush’s “war on terror” to encompass the domestic health care debate, which we are threatened will result in “socialism” and “death panels.”

Though it may be too soon to judge the president, perhaps we expected too much. Perhaps he promised more than any president could deliver at a time of economic collapse and failure of public will and intellect. After all, he has had eight years of Bush’s misguided neo-conservatism to overcome, not to speak of the Reagan-inspired hatred of government that has permeated our public discourse since the 1980s. And no sooner was he elected than the soundly defeated Republican minority set out to undermine his presidency just as they did with Bill Clinton, driving Clinton ever further to the right.

I reflect on this national disappointment as I turn seventy-two. It saddens me that the man I admired and voted for has not been able to bring the country together after what was arguably the most divisive presidency in our history. To be sure, a year is a short time when measured against the decades of events and policies that have set left against right, region against region and citizen against citizen. We don’t trust each other as Americans any more than we trust our elected officials or the political parties they represent. Nevertheless, I do not believe that government is the enemy. While it cannot solve all of our problems, there is a strong and positive history of the benefits of government intervention during hard times in America, not the least of which were the social and economic initiatives of the New Deal era, which should offer more guidance than they appear to be offering the present administration. For example, with unemployment at such a high level why is Obama not thinking about a new WPA? And what about the success of the CETA employment and training programs of the 1970s that put millions of younger and older unemployed to work, many of them in government-subsidized private-sector jobs that led to new careers?

I must confess that at my age I have lost much of my stomach for politics. My activism is confined to local issues—the preservation of the fishing industry and Gloucester’s working waterfront; the push to bring new marine-related industry to the city—and I am grateful to be working together in my own community with people I deeply admire, who wish to achieve these goals while retaining the city’s historic character, natural beauty and unique folkways.

Americans should be smarter than we’re demonstrating ourselves to be about the importance of establishing a national health care policy, the benefits of which are enjoyed in varying forms by citizens of every major industrial nation except ours. We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be misled by misinformation about a “government health care option,” (I’ve been on Medicare for seven years and I have nothing but praise for this government-run health insurance program), or about the Obama administration’s attempt to bail-out failing banks or our automotive industry. Government spending to offset recession and corporate failures is alarmingly high. The national debt is at an all-time level. But these desperate measures have been supported by economists of diverse points of view, and there has seemed little else that could have been done to turn a failing economy around. Unhelpfully, in its attempt to frame every event in terms of conflict, the media has concentrated on corporate bonuses rather than helping viewers to understand the roots of the crisis in lack of government oversight and uncontained greed. The signs of the present economic collapse could be read years ago, we are now told. Why is it that except for a few articles in specialized publications the general public was not apprised of the looming crisis?

Our news and information media have failed us just as our elected representatives have, along with institutions like our public education system, which a free society depends upon for the nurturing of citizens who are able to think critically and act responsibly. And our political system—democracy itself—has especially failed us, as one instance of corruption after another is revealed, while lobbyists for every corporate interest exert more powerful influence than ever on elected officials (the New York Times recently revealed that lobbyists for a bio-tech conglomerate actually drafted testimony presented by members of Congress in the current debate over the House’s health care reform bill). No wonder people despair—no wonder they lose themselves in every conceivable form of hedonism, from mindless consumption to pornography.

But at seventy-two I do not wish to present myself as a crotchety, disaffected old man, a crank. I’m understandably disappointed at the turn of political events, saddened by what I see as the dumbing down of our culture and institutions of learning, the schools and libraries we depend upon to help us understand the world we live in, the publishers who give obscene advances to moronic celebrities and air-headed political figures for ghost-written memoirs, while many of our best writers are dropped from their lists or forced into silence or self-publication. A free society depends upon the production and dissemination of a vigorous literature and social criticism, of visual art that excites and stimulates our imaginations while encouraging us to express ourselves with greater freedom of thought and action. The fact that publishers mostly accept books they feel will appeal to a mass market, instead of challenging readers to think and grow in new ways, is a form of censorship that should be resisted (I’ve often wondered what might happen if writers went on strike and readers quit buying books).

Many of us hoped that the collapse of financial markets a year ago, the bank failures, housing foreclosures, and the concomitant recession, might have helped people to change their habits of thought and consumption, reflecting on how we got into the mess we were in and how to avoid its repetition. We were foolish enough to believe that people might begin to live more simply and thoughtfully. We hoped for a return to a more private life, in which individuals and families would turn to each other for sustenance, spending time in joint activities instead of at the local mall. But anyone who has visited a mall recently or gone out to eat will find that the shopping centers and restaurants are just as busy as they were before the recession. Truly, it’s as if there had been no recession after all, though millions remain unemployed. Are we therefore all suffering from a form of national denial? Has there indeed been a dramatic change in our economic lives which hasn’t quite penetrated, or were we merely absorbed in a reality TV show about the collapse of the world economy?

I don’t know if I have added anything new to what I wrote two years ago in a series of reflections upon turning seventy, nor do I think I’ve said it better or more felicitously. My agitation over the state of my country makes it harder for me to write with ease or cogency, or even to think in any kind of repose. TV network news shows continue to package and oversimplify the events of the world as they filter down to us, creating easily consumable narratives instead of directly presenting facts and reports to help us form our own judgments of events. CNN gives us the talking heads—left, right, front, center—each canceling the other out in their banality and triviality. Except for Frontline, Now and Bill Moyers' Journal, PBS is earnest but boring, having long been stripped of its diversity of opinion and approach by conservative legislators. And there are the blogs—so many contributors, manic and quirky, knowledgeable and empty-headed, all striving to catch our attention as we browse the vast stretches of the Internet. If TV was once characterized as a waste-land, the Net is a black hole.

The narratives we are living with now—especially the ones that are created, elaborated and imposed on us by the producers of nightly TV news, and the dominant narratives so dear to editors seeking books to fulfill the clichéd paradigms of trauma and recovery they wish to sell to audiences they have either forced to accept by default or believe they hunger for—have to be subverted and undermined, if not destroyed, if we are to achieve any growth as individuals or a nation. We need new narratives and only a radically new art can create them; for what we have now is narrative by imposition, or, like the selling of the war in Iraq, narrative by stealth. Noam Chomsky once wrote that “it is the responsibility of intellectuals to tell the truth and expose lies.” I would add today that it is the responsibility of writers and artists to provide us with new paradigms: radically innovative narratives and art forms. Perhaps this is one way we might begin to change our country and the world, not only through political action but through stories that will animate the struggles we initiate.

Remembering Papouli

2009-11-01T09:22:00.000-08:00

(Polisson Shoe Repair Shop, Stoddart Lane, c. 1940, Cape Ann Museum; Cape Ann Diner, 1972, photograph by Mark Power)

My grandfather, Angel Polisson—we called him Papouli, which is the diminutive in Greek for Papou, or grandfather—had a shoe repair shop in the East End of Main Street, diagonally across from the North Shore Theater in the same alley where A. T. Stoddart’s machine shop was located.

Papouli’s shop was small and dark, even though there was a fairly large window in which he sat to repair shoes. To your left as you entered was a counter behind which his work bench stood. The side of the counter facing him had shelves which held various kinds of leather, shoe nails and shoes that had already been repaid. To your right and toward the rear of the shop was a row of belt-driven machines for cutting, smoothing and polishing new heels and soles. The machines also had brushes for shining shoes. Nearby was a big sewing machine, which looked like a band saw. When Papouli turned the power on to start shaping the new heel of a shoe, the whole shop shook as the machines themselves jumped and rattled.

At the very back of the shop on the left was a glass covered display case full of various brands of wax or liquid shoe polish and sample heels for men and women’s shoes. Above that were additional shelves for shoes awaiting their owners; and against the rear wall was an old couch for customers to sit on while waiting for their shoes or just to visit.

The shop had that characteristic smell of an old-time cobbler’s shop, a mixture of the smells of the different leathers, the waxes and pastes for polishing and shining the shoes or dying the edges of the heels and soles, and the rubber cement, which would be used to fasten on new heels and soles before sewing or nailing them in place. When I wasn’t at my grandfather’s elbow watching him work at his bench, endlessly fascinated by the process of literally rebuilding shoes, which he often did, I would be poring over ancient copies of Life magazine with photographs of the war, just over, or the making of “The Best Years of Our Lives,” or “Life Goes to a Party.” Sometime Papouli would set up a last for me and let me hammer away at an old heel or he’d let me play at “carving” leather with one of the dull knives he must have kept around for such purposes.

The shop also had an unheated back room with a shed attached to it. I would get lost out there for hours, playing with pieces of wood, reading even older magazines, especially National Geographic, making up games in the semi-dark of a late Saturday afternoon—Nick Carter or Lamont Cranston fantasies as I crept down the shadowy cellar steps into what I was certain would be an abandoned crypt, only to be brought back to reality by my grandfather’s voice wondering what I was up to since I’d been so quiet for so long.

In that back room Papouli often prepared tarama, the Greek caviar paste made from fish roe mixed with Italian bread (mashed potatoes can be substituted for the bread), lemon juice and olive oil and chilled after which you can serve it in a salad or as a spread for hors d’oeurves. He made large quantities of it, obtaining the roe locally from Gorton’s, and he would pack it in little wooden tubs, shipping it off to buyers in Boston’s numerous Greek markets. Papouli had stacks of those tubs and I would make several return trips to the back room to stick my fingers into the tarama, never getting enough. To this day, no matter where I eat it, or even if I make it myself, it just doesn’t taste like Papouli’s.

On those Saturdays in the 1940s, when I would “go to work with Papouli,” he would pick me up at 3 Perkins Road and we’d walk to the Boulevard and then the length of Main Street to get to his shop. Like all the older men of the city, he never left home without a hat, which he’d always tip when he met a woman. Once the shop was open he’d tie his apron on and set to work repairing shoes or dealing with the customers. My grandfather was an exacting man, having once been a Greek Orthodox seminarian, and if he didn’t think a shoe could be repaired he’d refuse to take the customer’s money.

Near mid-morning came “mug-up,” which consisted of coffee half-and-half and a chocolate donut at the Hesperus Diner, a few steps up Main Street from the shop. Other times I’d be running in and out of H. C. Brown’s candy and tobacco wholesalers next door with a wooden Indian out front, where Mr. Fraga would give me more candy than he sold me. For lunch—we called it “dinner”—we’d return to the diner. For fifty cents you could order a plate of home-baked beans with fresh cod fish cakes, with lots of catsup on the side. Another favorite was baked macaroni and cheese, which came with fish cakes or the delicious fried cod cheeks and tongues. After lunch Papouli might send me across the street with a dime to catch a Roy Rogers or Lone Ranger matinee at the North Shore Theater. But mostly I’d hang around the shop waiting for certain people who often popped in, like old Captain Brown, who was Portuguese but spoke excellent Greek, or the men from the machine shop who came to pass the time on a break from work. I was too young to be repairing shoes, but I did get to wrap them up for customers in stiff brown paper, though it would be my grandfather who had to tie the string. That took practice.

Those Saturdays seemed to fly. Then Papouli retired and after that he walked with a cane and there were to be no more Saturdays at the shop, which remained empty before they tore it down. Walking by there now I see that everything’s gone except for one of the old houses in the lane and that’s all boarded up. And the alley, which I remember as being such a busy and well-inhabited place ends now in a vacant lot.

Once I'd finished writing about my grandfather’s shoe repair shop, I had a sense I’d left something out, yet I couldn’t quite put my finger on the omission.

I had gotten the shop in, the way the counter loomed chest-high on your left the minute you entered. The shoes were there, too, the ones which had already been repaired and which lay along the window facing Main Street through which you could see the Saturday morning shoppers or the kids in a line for a Sherlock Holmes double-feature matinee across the street at the North Shore Theater.

Then there were the shoes to be repaired. My grandfather would keep them next to his work bench by the window, as I’ve said. Usually he’d save the finishing for last, so that when you came to pick up your shoes he’d polish the heels or the edges of the sole prior to wrapping them for you in brown paper tied with a string.

These details I’d gotten in. And the big Landis machines in a line, too. The noise of them, the rattle and clatter when they started up, the slapping of the leather belts that drove the polishing wheels. There was that and the way the whole shop shook when the machines were going full tilt. I’d also gotten in the smell of everything—the shoe leather, the rubber cement, the shoe polish, the pastes and dyes. I’d even remembered the Greek caviar or tarama, which Papouli made and packed in wooden tubs in the back room and which I couldn’t keep my fingers out of. In fact, a friend recently reminded me that her family used to buy tarama from my grandfather in those days.

I hadn’t forgotten the back room I played in or mug-up at the Hesperus Diner (later known as the Cape Ann Diner), though another friend recalled that where Parkhurst’s radio and TV store is now there used to be the Jonquil Restaurant, and on the other side of the lane where Giles auto parts store is now located, the Pett family had a fruit and vegetable store. H. C. Brown’s, which was a wholesale and retail tobacco store, where I got the penny candy I wrote about, was next to that. And farther down, just before the diner, was a Portuguese market where they sold home-made linguica, which the Greeks called lokanyiko.

So all that was part of the picture I could pull out of the past with my friends’ help. But there was still an omission, I felt. I had told the story I set out to tell. I’d described the places and some of the people who inhabited them on those long-ago Saturdays with Papouli when I was a child, yet I was still dissatisfied.

A few days later while watching some one take out a tall red pack of Pall Malls and light one up, it came to me: “Papouli used to smoke Pall Malls." Yet it wasn’t so much the Pall Malls I’d omitted, though I think having smoked Pall Malls myself for years must have had something to do with watching my grandfather smoke them at his work bench or as he sat reading the Greek newspapers on Sunday afternoons on Centennial Avenue.

It wasn’t the cigarettes themselves or the way he’d hold them European style between index and forefinger, instead of the way most American men held them with thumb and index finger. It was more that by remembering the cigarettes, the distinctive red of the package and the pungent smell of the tobacco, that I’d gotten a much clearer and more distinct, a realer picture of my grandfather himself.

I suddenly recalled how he would appear at our front door every Sunday morning to take my brother and me on a walk to the wharves along Commercial Street and Fort Square. There we would watch the men unloading the fish from the boats just in. We’d stop while my grandfather chatted with some of his old Italian friends. And we’d end our walk at Lufkin’s Diner with steaming cups of coffee half-and-half and the fresh, crisply fried donuts, which might have spoiled Sunday dinner if we hadn’t worked up such an appetite from walking along the waterfront.

I remembered, too, that Papouli seemed always to dress in a dark suit, black or navy blue pin-striped. In winter he wore a gray felt hat, or a Homburg for special occasions. In spring and summer it was a Panama hat. And his thick mustache was sometimes stained by the tobacco from the Pall Malls as were his fingers, which we held on to during our walks.

Papouli was not very tall, but he was a lean man who walked erectly even in his later years or after retirement when he used a cane. He spoke sternly—or at least we interpreted the authority of his Greek, some of which we couldn’t understand, and the patriarchal manner of his delivery as making him stern, even though his eyes would often twinkle behind gold-rimmed glasses.

There he would sit at his workbench behind the counter of the shop, the big, flat-headed shoe hammers, the razor-sharp knives around him, the hat on his head summer or winter, the way Charlie Psalides used to wear his hat in the market on Washington Street or “Uncle Mark” behind the counter at National Butcher’s. And if I return to that picture of Papouli behind his bench or walking with me down Main Street to the shop early on those distant Saturday mornings, it is not to re-tell my story, but only to try and fix its contours with a little more precision, to try to get back in some of the details I’d left out the first time, or that memory had withheld.

Coda

The last time I saw my grandfather he was laid out in his coffin at Greeley’s Funeral Home on Pleasant Street. It was April of 1955. In less than two months I would graduate from Gloucester High School. Papouli was wearing his navy blue pin-striped suit with matching vest. He had on a starched white shirt and a dark blue necktie with white polka dots. I noticed immediately that the tie had not been knotted in his customary fashion. His mustache was waxed and his face was made up in such a way that the wrinkles I knew so well were covered as if by pink-tinted putty. His ashen hands were folded just below his chest. They held a cross on a thin gold chain I had never seen him with.

A heavy smell of gladiolas hung over the room and something more pervasive like perfume. My aunts and uncles sat around the casket in folding metal chairs. Some cried softly, others sat staring into their laps. The Greek priest entered in his vestments and blessed my grandfather, chanting loudly and passing the heavy bronze censor over the body, while the smoke of frankincense permeated the room. Suddenly it felt like church and the old feeling of claustrophobia I had experienced since childhood came over me. I shifted in my chair. Sensing my desire to leave, my mother, who was sitting next to me, gripped my hand as if to say, “Don’t move.”

At the cemetery we all stood around the casket before it was lowered into the ground. For ten years before his death my grandfather had come weekly to tend the plot where he was to be buried along with my grandmother. He had already erected a headstone with their names engraved on it. Only the dates of their deaths were missing. By the side of the tall gravestone stood two small arbor vitae, and there were some plantings near them. After the priest had given his final blessing to my grandfather, he poured some drops of oil on my grandfather’s body from the spout of a bronze cruet, and then he picked up some dirt from the grave and let it fall softly on my grandfather’s chest. The mourners were encouraged to follow suit, ending with my grandmother, who was dressed entirely in black. Finally, when the casket had been closed and was being lowered into the grave, my grandmother stood over the opening.

“Fiyeh o geros,” she said almost to herself, “The old man is leaving."

For many years after that, and even after my grandmother died, driving through West Gloucester I would stop at the cemetery and visit their graves. Sometimes you could hear the voices of the children playing in the nearby schoolyard. Otherwise, it was silent except for the sound of insects in the summer.

Lucy Honig's Waiting for Rescue: A Review

2009-10-09T12:14:00.001-07:00

Some writers write engagingly about a single subject, secret codes say. Others—and these include our most versatile—seem able to handle anything with power and panache.

Gloucester resident Lucy Honig, recipient of the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize for her 1999 collection of stories, The Truly Needy, is among the second group. Whether she is writing about homesteading during the final days of the Nixon administration or picking potatoes in rural Maine, about AIDS in Africa, teaching ESL classes in New York City, or a young Cambodian woman’s escape from an arranged marriage, she is able to place her readers in the red hot center of her narratives.

In her new novel, Waiting for Rescue (Counterpoint, $14.95), her first since the Maine Novel Prize-winning Picking Up, Honig takes on another of the significant issues of our times, the effect of the events of 9/11 on those of us who may not have been personally impacted by that tragedy but who have nevertheless been traumatized by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and their reverberations.

Erika, the protagonist in this compelling novel, teaches writing in the public health department of a major Boston medical school. Her students are health professionals from around the world, “culture-shocked doctors and public officials from countries we call ‘developing,’” as Erika describes them. Her job is to help them articulate, in a language that is often not their own, their approach to research in some of the most pressing health issues of the day—the survival of individuals and families suffering from AIDS in impoverished cultures, the allocation of scarce medical resources in Third World nations, the looming fear of bio-terrorism.

As she struggles to help her students grapple with their research projects, Erika also contends with the interpersonal politics of the department where she teaches—the appointment of a chairperson who is unpopular with the faculty, the rise of incompetent staff, unwelcome changes in her teaching routine. She enters into an uneasy relationship with Ivan, a Russian doctor with whom she works, all the while obsessing over an unthinkable crime committed many years earlier by her former high school biology teacher, who, she learns, has recently been released from prison.

But as Erika’s story unfolds, intercut by her doomed affair with Ivan, the fate of one of her students, Ibrahim, a doctor from Eritrea, who is suffering from cancer, and the ordeal of Faith, a young African girl whose parents have died from AIDS, we discover that Erika is engaged in a deeper existential struggle. She is haunted by the events of 9/11, whose impact on her is brought into shaper focus by her daily struggles with work, her relationship with Ivan and the pain suffered by those around her.

It becomes clear as Honig’s compelling narrative gathers momentum that Erika, like many of us living through the after-effects of 9/11, is suffering from a form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It emerges in her uncharacteristically hostile behavior toward colleagues, her fixation on the crime of her former teacher and her increasingly disturbing dreams of disaster. Sadly, her powerfully rendered journey to Ground Zero with Ivan, coupled with memories of having traveled on the subway under the Twin Towers, when she was a young teacher in New York, bring not closure but further anxiety and dread.

The concluding chapter of the novel, in which Erika travels by bus and by foot through a Boston in violent transition, is a tour de force. It is also a nightmarish vision of post 9/11 America. “This is Boston’s march of progress,” Erika thinks, as she collides with homeless veterans, frenetic shoppers and indifferent investment bankers on their cellphones. “These are our times.” And her thoughts underscore the theme of this stunning and deeply-humane novel.

The author will be reading from Waiting for Rescue on Thursday, October 29 at 7 p.m. at the Book Store in downtown Gloucester.

This review first appeared in the September 29, 2009 issue of North Shore Art Throb, founded and edited by Dinah Cardin.

Charles Olson at the Harbor: A Review

2009-08-24T02:43:00.001-07:00

The nationally televised showing on PBS in April and May of Henry Ferrini’s award-winning documentary on Charles Olson, Polis is This, has sparked a renewed interest in the life and work of the late Gloucester poet. Just in time for those who would like to know more about Olson’s fascinating career, or how he came to write his masterwork about his adoptive city, The Maximus Poems, Ralph Maud’s new biography, Charles Olson at the Harbor, arrives, published by Talonbooks, in Vancouver, B.C. (http://www.talonbooks.com)

This beautifully-illustrated and highly readable life of one of the 20^th century’s most influential poets, serves as a perfect introduction to Olson’s ground-breaking poetry and prose. It comes further with the cachet of having been written by a distinguished scholar of Olson. Maud, who taught with Olson at SUNY Buffalo, and became close friends with the nearly seven-foot poet before his death, in 1970, has a masterly command of Olson and his work and he wears his learning lightly.

Along with telling Olson’s story and helping new readers to get started on the poetry, Maud’s book offers another benefit—and this one packs a wallop. Maud takes on the only other extant biography of Olson, Tom Clark’s controversial Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life, first published in 1991. Riddled with errors of fact and interpretation, Clark’s life has been the only version available and it has, in Maud’s words, “been at significant variance with truth.” In what he calls a “reactive biography,” Maud confronts Clark, for whom Maud’s superior scholarship and deeper understanding of the poet’s life and work are no match. Friends of Olson and his work, who came away from Clark’s book furious at his misrepresentations, will be pleased to see the record finally set straight.

Maud counters Clark at every stage of his mean-spirited attempt to demean Olson. He corrects Clark’s errors of biographical fact, shows the reader how Clark misquotes Olson to make a spurious point about his character, and he gives us a fuller, more compassionate and understanding portrait of Olson than Clark, who clearly had an animus against the great poet. In fact, one wonders why Clark ever decided to write about someone he clearly disliked, though there is no evidence he ever met Olson or visited Gloucester, where so much of Olson’s life was lived and where his major work was accomplished.

I recommend Maud’s biography to readers, who will enjoy following Olson from Worcester (MA) Classical High School, where he was an honor student and valedictorian, to Wesleyan and Harvard universities, where Olson began the study of American literature and history that would underpin his poetry. From Harvard, Olson moved to Washington, D. C. during WWII, where he worked first at the Office of War Information and then for the Democratic Party. Once Olson had committed himself to poetry after the war, he began teaching at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, later becoming the experimental school’s rector. When Black Mountain closed, in 1957, Olson returned to Gloucester, where he and his family had summered since the 1920s. It was during these important final years in Gloucester that Olson completed The Maximus Poems, which paid tribute to the “shining city’ he made his own and whose history he believed mirrored both the country’s and the world’s.

Unlike many other poets, Olson had lived a significant part of his life in the real world of politics. His understanding of human foible, carefully illustrated by Maud, animates the poetry. Olson was also an extraordinary scholar. Call Me Ishmael, his ground-breaking book on Herman Melville and the making of Moby-Dick, first published in 1947 and currently available in paperback from Johns Hopkins University Press is still one of the best studies of Melville.

All of these facets of Olson life and artistic career are addressed by Maud, who is respectful of Olson, though not uncritical. The result is a balanced and superbly rendered picture of one of American’s greatest poets. And just when you are asking the question, “Where can I find some of Olson’s poetry to read?” Maud comes forward with A Charles Olson Reader, published in England by Carcanet Press. Maud’s collection contains a generous selection of Olson’s prose and poetry, enough not only to satisfy a reader’s need to get started, but to whet one’s appetite for more. The book also includes highly readable introductory material on Olson and a running commentary on the work that places each essay or poem in the context of the poet’s life and thought.

(This review first appeared in the June 19, 2009 issue of North Shore Art Throb, an internet magazine of the arts founded and edited by Dinah Cardin.)

WHAT DOES NOT CHANGE: The Significance of Charles Olson’s “The Kingfishers.” By Ralph Maud. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998. $33.50

If Charles Olson were alive today he’d be a happy man. Thanks to the University of California Press, all of the late Gloucester poet’s books remain in print. Four separate volumes of Olson’s collected prose and poetry, including his masterwork, “The Maximus Poems,” are currently available from Berkeley in both cloth and paperback editions. In addition, Johns Hopkins University Press has reissued “Call Me Ishmael,” Olson’s study of the making of Melville’s “Moby Dick,” in an attractive paperback format with a new afterword by Melville scholar Merton M. Sealts, Jr. And both California and Wesleyan University presses will soon publish volumes of Olson’s selected correspondence.

The availability of these significant American texts points not only to Olson’s continued importance as a poet. It also speaks to a renewed interest in Olson as a thinker, not only about verse but about a wide range of historical, philosophical and cultural matters.

Just as Olson’s own works remain in circulation, so do two books that are essential to an understanding of Olson’s poetic and cultural projects. One is “Charles Olson: A Biography,” Ralph Maud’s study of Olson’s life and work through the books that Olson read, already reviewed in these pages. The other is Maud’s new book, “What Does Not Change,” a critical reading of “The Kingfishers,” Olson’s first major poem, long considered a milestone in postwar American literature.

Ralph Maud is the leading Olson scholar and editor of the “Minutes of the Charles Olson Society,” published regularly from Vancouver, BC. He taught with Olson at Buffalo in the early 1960s, maintaining a friendship with the poet until Olson’s death in 1970 from cancer of the liver. Since then, Maud, who is also known as an editor and bibliographer of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and an authority on British Colombian Native American traditions, has concentrated on documenting Olson’s life and the sources of his work. He has collected a replica of Olson’s library in anticipation of restoring Olson’s home at 28 Fort Square, in Gloucester, as a research center for Olson studies.

It seems fitting, therefore, during the celebration of Gloucester’s 375^th anniversary, that Maud’s examination of an essential Olson poem be made available. Not only does Maud help the reader to understand one of Olson’s most enigmatic poems, his examination of the poem’s sources and methods serves equally as a basis for the reading of all of Olson’s subsequent work, especially “The Maximus Poems,” in which the history of Gloucester becomes the history of America and, by extension, that of the world.

Maud’s study serves yet another purpose. It focuses on five crucial years of the poet’s life, between 1945, when in Washington, D.C. at the age of thirty-five he began to write his first poems, and 1950, when Olson’s essay “Projective Verse” was published, changing the face of American poetry. With Maud as guide, the reader experiences Olson’s coming into his own as poet and thinker. Through his careful reading of “The Kingfishers,” we come to understand, in Maud’s words, the poem “as a thoughtful response to the problem of being a sensitive American.”

After World War Two and the revelations of the Holocaust, brought home to Olson by his friend, the Italian painter Corrado Cagli, who had accompanied Allied Units in the opening of Buchenwald, Olson like many writers, asked himself what the future of literature was, if not that of humanity. “The Kingfishers” attempts to answer those questions affirmatively, according to Maud.

For Olson did not want to write another “Waste Land,” T.S. Eliot’s bleak poem about post World War I alienation. He wanted to write about the possibility of connectedness, of belonging, and he wanted to do that not in exile in England, as Eliot had done, but in America, in American terms. That Olson succeeded Maud makes clear. And he is not the first to suggest that a new American poetry began with Olson.

(Gloucester Times, 7/18/98)

Ralph Maud, CHARLES OLSON’S READING: A BIOGRAPHY,

Southern Illinois University Press, 1996, $44.95.

“Charles is just like I am,” Robert Duncan said of his fellow poet Olson. “He sits around and reads all day.” Duncan got it right except for one thing: Olson sat around all night reading. For it was only after the residents of his beloved Gloucester had gone to bed each night that Charles Olson returned to the voracious reading that both fed his mind and fueled his epic of Gloucester’s past, present and future, The Maximus Poems.

From an early age, Olson read “to know,” as he wrote, “to learn!” But he also read to write, as he said of Herman Melville: “Reading is a gauge of him at all points in his life. He was a skald (a bard, a historiographer), and knew how to appropriate the work of others.” These words, from Call Me Ishmael, Olson’s masterful study of the sources of Moby-Dick, describe its author as well.

Just as Olson once wrote that he came from “the last walking age of man,” it could also be said that he came from the last great reading age. For Olson hardly ever saw a serious book he couldn’t resist reading. He bought or borrowed books continually, sometimes reading them to shreds, marking them up, beginning letters in their margins, drafting poems on their fly-leaves or end-papers. Many he kept, even if he had checked them out of libraries; some he passed on physically. Always he urged them on friends, writing more about books, or referring to them, than any other source except perhaps his own direct perceptions of the world about him.

Taking as his premise Olson’s need to read, his hunger for books and what they contained, Ralph Maud, professor emeritus of English at Simon Fraser University, colleague of Olson’s at Buffalo between 1963 and 1965, and personal friend of the poet until Olson’s death, in 1970, attempts to tell the story of Olson’s life as a poet through his life in books.

As Maud, in this meticulously researched and written book, says of his subject, “We felt we were in the presence of the man for our time, almost complete in knowledge, and therefore a great resource for a general moving forward.” Maud goes on to explain: “The present work is an attempt to tell in outline—and in some detail as regards Olson’s reading—the story of his this accomplishment came about.

From his own direct experience of Olson Maud says, “I got a sense of what it was like when people left Olson alone to write, enough to sustain my conviction that to follow the evidence of Olson’s reading—the books he kept, the books he stored or gave away, the books that the poems, essays and letters reveal he used, the significant articles in magazines he was sent or read a the drugstore counter or whatever—to follow Olson’s movement within these source works, is the best way to get into the poems, which, as I witnessed, are often a direct extension of his reading.” Maud concludes: “The life of the poet was a life within books.”

Of course, Maud structures his account of the poet’s reading around a chronology of Charles Olson’s life, beginning with the books he read as a child growing up winters in Worcester, Massachusetts and summers “over the Cut,” at a cottage on Stage Fort Avenue in Gloucester. He goes on to describe Olson’s intellectual growth as a Phil Beta Kappa scholar at Wesleyan University and later a graduate student in Harvard’s American Civilization program.

After Olson left Harvard, Maud tracks him through the journal-like entries the poet made in his books to New York City, in the early 1940s, and then to Washington, D.C., where Olson pursued a career in government and politics until 1945. From Washington Olson moved to the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he taught a generation of artists, dancers and writers how to read. And then, in 1957, Olson returned to Gloucester to enter deeply into her history, as The Maximus Poems, begun away from the city, took on both a new immediacy, from the poet’s presence at 28 Fort Square, and an even greater particularity, due both to his observations of life around him and his study of local history. By the time Olson had described himself as being “physically...home,” he had, Maud writes, “decided not to be a professor, but only a reader and a writer.”

One might think that a book based almost entirely on Olson’s reading might be somewhat dry. However, Maud is able to recreate the excitement that the poet experienced upon discovering new books or re-reading old ones. “There I was this morning,” writes Olson, in January 1967, “waiting to go to sleep reading Parkman’s Oregon Trail with eyes so open to it I felt like all I might have imagined to be—and that book I dare say I bought in Cambridge 30+ years ago! Slow, sd Charles Olson, he is slow!”

But Maud’s narrative isn’t, nor is the often dizzying pace of Olson’s pursuit of what he needs from books, as Maud tells it. This is a booklover’s book; and for those who don’t know Olson, it’s a wonderful plunge—direct, down, deep into the mind in action of a great American.

(Gloucester Times, 3/28/96)

Hemingway Revisited

2009-07-22T07:04:00.001-07:00

The publication this month by Scribner’s of a “restored” version of Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous memoir, A Moveable Feast, forty-eight years after the great American writer’s suicide, is a notable event, not only for Hemingway scholarship but also because this more complete version of a significant Hemingway text could introduce a new generation of readers to the work of one of American’s most important writers. In what follows, I attempt an assessment of Hemingway, whose novels and stories I began reading in high school and have continued learning from through more than half a century. I conclude with some thoughts about the new version of A Moveable Feast. The first two sections of this essay appeared in slightly different form as columns in the Gloucester Daily Times.

Sooner or later you come back to Ernest Hemingway if you are an American writer. You come back to Hemingway as you come back to the novels of Herman Melville or the poetry of Emily Dickinson or Wallace Stevens. You come back to those writers who meant something to you, not only in your craft but in the way they transformed your means of looking at the world.

There are writers like Thomas Wolfe, whom you can never read again; writers you cannot go home to because you have outgrown them. And their attraction for you was based on what you needed from them at a certain stage of your development. There are writers like Faulkner, whom you find it difficult to read again, but you always know they are there and you look back with respect for what their achievement taught you.

There are writers of a particular time and place, like Josephine Herbst, who wrote about the 1920s and 30s. Such writers often read better now because the struggles they depicted, the issues which motivated them to write, are no longer of such moment. It is then you discover how fine a writer Herbst was—she who was overshadowed by Dos Passos and Hemingway, though it was Herbst who went to Cuba first and then to Spain; and it was she who stuck to her socialist ideals, dying finally in 1969 after living for years in obscurity in a stone farmhouse in Pennsylvania.

Since his death in 1961, six major biographies of Hemingway have been published, beginning with Carlos Baker’s groundbreaking Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969) and concluding with Michael Reynolds' definitive five-volume sequence, Hemingway (1986-1999), and James Mellow’s magisterial Hemingway: A Life without Consequences (1992), the third volume in his Lost Generation trilogy and the best-written and most critically brilliant of all the Hemingway biographies. Perhaps the time has finally come to consider Hemingway the writer and not the caricature that was made of him in the Media or by critics, who felt the need to attack him personally or for the myth that grew up around him, partially at his own behest, which obscured the exceptional work he did.

Six books published posthumously show Hemingway working right up to the end of his anguish. These include A Moveable Feast (1964), Hemingway’s poignant memoir of his Paris years, Islands in the Stream (1970), a seriously flawed abridgement of a massive novel Hemingway worked on after the war and left incomplete, True at First Light (1999) and Under Kilimanjaro (2005), two versions of a manuscript about Hemingway’s last visit to Africa, The Dangerous Summer (1985), a first-hand account of the competition between the bullfighters Antonio Ordonez and Luis Miguel Dominguin during the summer of 1959, which appeared first as articles in Life, in 1960, and The Garden of Eden, an abridgement of a long novel in which Hemingway returned to his Paris years.

Edited from an immense manuscript, The Dangerous Years is Proustian in its detail and in the author’s attempt to recapture the lost part of his life in Spain before the Civil War. It is also vintage Hemingway. It shows the mature writer working near the top of his form in the face of crushing depression and the emerging paranoia accompanying the psychosis that led to his suicide, on July 2, 1961.

I approached the published fragment of The Garden of Eden (1986) with some trepidation. I had seen a couple of reviews, a silly one in the New York Review by Wilfred Sheed, and a generous one by E. L. Doctorow in the New York Times Book Review. I was somewhat reluctant about reading a book that was not published with Hemingway’s consent or in the way he finally left it. I couldn’t read Islands in the Stream for that reason. And ultimately when I felt the need to return to Hemingway, I went back to his stories (Philip Young published a superb collection of the Nick Adams stories in 1972, and in 1987 Scribner’s brought out The Finca Vigia Edition of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway) and the two earliest novels, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms.

I am not as troubled as some critics have been by the way Hemingway depicts relationships or sex roles in those early novels. They are of a time and place; they describe behaviors and attitudes common to that era and not unknown in our own times. They render a consciousness that was as pervasive as our hopefully less sexist consciousness is now. Hemingway’s characters are also a projection of his own psyche. To ask them to be different is to ask for Hemingway to have been a different, less conflicted, and, as such, a very different kind of writer (see Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes’ Hemingway’s Genders, Carl Eby’s Hemingway’s Fetishism, and Hilary K. Justice’s The Bones of the Others for three recent provocative critical views of Hemingway’s sexuality as it played out in his fiction and his life).

To ask Hemingway or Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein or Kay Boyle, or even Josephine Herbst, who was both a feminist and a communist, to be what they were patently unable to be, or to write in a manner which would have been alien to them, is an impossibility. And those who condemn Hemingway for the regressive sexual attitudes they find, or think they find, in his stories or novels are missing the entire point of his work. They are missing the voice of the writer who can speak to us across the years as clearly and as directly as he spoke in 1925 or 1936. They are missing an angle of vision, the revolutionary ability of a writer who developed the technique to help him render the absolute quality and texture of the physical world while also expressing the emotions of the observer. They are losing sight of the Hemingway who could write like this:

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore. It was cold in the fall and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the street looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and the small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was cold in the fall and the wind came down from the mountains. (“In Another Country”)

There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won’t betray them.

(The Garden of Eden)

Twenty-five years after Hemingway’s death and forty years after he began to write, The Garden of Eden appeared. It was published by Scribners as a complete novel, although it was only part of a much longer manuscript of 1,500 pages left incomplete at the writer’s death on July 2, 1961. Yet I read it with pleasure, as soon as it was published, and with a sense of discovery. For what I found in the book, wonderfully and unexpectedly, was growth.

I found a stretching of the writer’s vision, a tenderness and a depth of feeling that demonstrated to me that Hemingway had not become frozen in old patterns of thought or regressive ways of rendering the world and the people in it, as many had believed. Looking back on that excited first reading, I can only wish the novel had been completed as Hemingway obviously hoped to conclude it. Still, there is much even in this truncated version that makes it worthwhile to experience, even though one recognizes immediately that some of the dialogue is loose and Hemingway would certainly have fine-tuned it, or that there must have been more context to the novel, which is now missing in the excavation by its editors of one single story from a much longer text.

There is some wonderful prose in The Garden of Eden, indeed some of Hemingway’s best writing. But it’s clear that the book as published is only a fragment of a larger design, a more complex narrative. Nevertheless, it works as a story. There is a fine tension between the writing life of its protagonist David Bourne—his struggle with his craft and with the use, the recovery and understanding of his past—and his strange marriage, including the sudden appearance of a second woman, Marita, with whom David and his wife Catherine both become involved. Indeed, there is a psychosexual dimension to the novel that helps the reader to understand much of what might have seemed enigmatic or ambiguous about certain relationships in early Hemingway stories and novels, including an intriguing fetishism around male and female hair styles.

The novel also contains some rich insights into the art of writing, as Hemingway returned in the narrative to the years in France when he had honed his style to perfection and was doing some of his finest work. It is probably Hemingway at his best on writing, on what it feels like to be a writer; on your relationship with your craft, your respect for it and for yourself when you exercise that craft with care and accuracy. Coming it as did, twenty-five years after the writer’s death, the book and its insights proved a wonderful gift to the reader.

Part of the problem with understanding or appreciating Hemingway is that we believe we have known him for a long time. We’ve read most of his writings and we know a great deal, or think we do, about the man himself. What once startled and shocked, what we admired and loved about his unique prose, his vision, is now a matter of everyone’s experience. Other writers, as diverse as Norman Mailer and Raymond Carver, have learned from Hemingway as he, in turn, learned from Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson; and they’ve gone on to make another kind of writing, which is as it should be.

Yet we mustn’t allow that necessary evolution and development in the novel, in the shared craft of writing (a development which Hemingway’s struggle with language made largely possible) to obscure his real achievement. We must try to go back and understand that achievement for what it was; see it in its own historical, social and aesthetic context. Then, I think, Hemingway emerges as the truly revolutionary writer he was.

Some of the evidence of Hemingway’s achievement you will find in The Garden of Eden. It’s almost as though Hemingway was compelled to visit his old ground of first success as a writer, just as David Bourne revisits Africa in his story to try to discover what, as a boy, had made him the man and the writer he would become. In revisiting that ground, Hemingway tried to revise what he had previously written, to relive what had gone into some of his earlier writing, including what scholar and critic Mark Spilka calls his “quarrel with androgyny.” And he did this not to repeat himself, I suspect, but to grow beyond what he had previously achieved. The result is quite moving and should be sobering to any writer who cares to learn from it.

I believe that long after many of today’s fashionable writers are forgotten, people will be reading about Nick Adams waking up on a sharp Michigan morning or about the little waiter in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” who met the nada of existence with the acceptance and grace of the very brave. Long after the myth of Ernest Hemingway has receded, people will encounter his work with that sense of discovery you experience with writers who have transcended time and fashion.

Some of those readers will still wonder, as we do today, about the cost at which those stories and novels were achieved. For, as another American writer very like Hemingway noted, nothing comes in this life without cost. No knowledge is gained without consequences or the requisite amount of life exchanged for it.

You don’t live without risk anymore than you can expect to grow without pain. You don’t achieve insight into yourself or love the clarity of certain spring mornings, the depth of summer nights, without a concomitant sacrifice in some other part of your life. Hemingway taught us that, among many other things. Perhaps it is a good time now, nearly fifty years after his death, to acknowledge our debt to this great American writer.

I know no better way of acknowledging this debt to Hemingway than by re-reading him or discovering his prose for the first time. Were I teaching Hemingway, as I did so many times at the high school and college levels, I would recommend beginning with the early stories, some of which I have mentioned above, and the first two novels (it is interesting to note that both presidential candidates in 2008 named For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway’s 1940 novel of the Spanish Civil War, as one of the books that had the most impact upon their lives). I would also recommend the “restored” version of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s posthumously published memoir of his years in Paris during the 1920s. While the book is by no means complete—Hemingway left the manuscript without an introduction or a final chapter, and several subsequent chapters remained in draft form—it is still classic Hemingway, and this new edition attempts to present the book just as he left it. The 1964 version, edited by Hemingway’s fourth wife Mary and his former editor at Scribner’s, is a smoother text; but that apparent smoothness has been achieved at the expense of patching together fragments from disparate chapters, so it is better, in the final analysis, both for Hemingway aficionados as well as for new readers, to have the text exactly as it came from Hemingway’s hand.

That said, there are some wonderful gems in this book, not the least being Hemingway’s breathtaking descriptions of the city in which he began his career as a writer:

Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. You would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside. . .

All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb-sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife—second class—and the hotel where Verlaine had died where you had a room on the top floor where you worked.

There are chapters on his relationships with Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford and F. Scott Fitzgerald, writers who helped, influenced or inspired the young Hemingway. Some critics have found Hemingway’s treatment of these relationships mean-spirited, vindictive even; and the persona of Hemingway that emerges in this book, of an American innocent corrupted by the rich, is often not a pleasant one to encounter. Still, there is an incredible sense of loss that pervades the narrative, not only the loss of that incorruptibility Hemingway exhibited when he first arrived in Europe, but of his first marriage to Hadley, which is described in heartrending terms (“Winters in Scruns,” the chapter in which Hemingway confesses his betrayal of Hadley, is for me the finest in the book).

Hemingway was becoming a very sick man when he began the composition of this book, in June of 1957. He and Mary had survived two plane crashes in Africa, and his head injuries had left him deeply depressed. He suffered from vascular problems, from a sense of waning literary power, after not having been able to complete any subsequent writing project to his satisfaction, and his alcoholism worsened. He became paranoid and he alienated many old friends. It was this Hemingway who sat down to write about his early years in Paris and his state of mind certainly colored both the way he remembered those years and the way he wrote about them.

And yet, for all the pain Hemingway suffered, the debilitating depressions and the incredible sense of guilt and loss, he persisted in writing the Paris sketches that we have today, leaving us, in the process, some of his finest prose. As Hemingway wrote in one of the fragments left out of the final manuscript but included in this new edition, along with ten unpublished sketches:

There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed nor with what difficulties nor what ease it could be reached. It was always worth it and we received a return for whatever we brought to it.

I believe the same can be said for Hemingway’s writing.

_____________

For a biopsychosocial view of Hemingway's life, see Christopher D. Martin, Ernest Hemingway: A Psychological Autopsy of a Suicide, Psychiatry 69(4), Winter, 2006. Martin's conclusions, in summary:

Significant evidence exists to support the diagnoses
of bipolar disorder, alcohol dependence, traumatic brain injury, and probable
borderline and narcissistic personality traits. Late in life, Hemingway also
developed symptoms of psychosis likely related to his underlying affective illness
and superimposed alcoholism and traumatic brain injury. Hemingway utilized a
variety of defense mechanisms, including self–medication with alcohol, a lifestyle
of aggressive, risk–taking sportsmanship, and writing, in order to cope with the
suffering caused by the complex comorbidity of his interrelated psychiatric disorders.
Ultimately, Hemingway’s defense mechanisms failed, overwhelmed by the
burden of his complex comorbid illness, resulting in his suicide. However, despite
suffering from multiple psychiatric disorders, Hemingway was able to live a
vibrant life until the age of 61 and within that time contribute immortal works of
fiction to the literary canon.

Michael Jackson: A Backward Look

2009-07-09T08:28:00.001-07:00

The recent death of pop music idol Michael Jackson sent me back to my files in search of a column I had written during the spring of 1984 when Jackson was about to appear in Boston during his highly touted “Thriller Tour.” I reproduce it below exactly as it was published in the Gloucester Daily Times.

“He’s coming to town!” read the headline on last Saturday’s Boston Herald.

The “He” referred to was not God or Christ for whom the non-specific capitalized personal pronoun is traditionally reserved. It was none other than pop star Michael Jackson. And for the thousands of fans in the Boston area whose sole preoccupation seemed to be whether or not their idol would appear here, there was presumably no need to say any more than was indicated by the cryptic headline.

You either knew what it meant or it didn’t concern you. All else—the heightened tensions in Lebanon, the Iran-Iraq war, or the president’s vicious proposal to lower the minimum hourly wage on summer jobs for those kids who most need the money and who also constitute Jackson’s largest group of fans—was relegated to the back pages, if it was mentioned at all.

Jackson was front and center. It is a position only fortified by his May appearance in the Rose Garden. There he was given the presidential seal of approval in return for lending his name and face to a long-overdue anti-drug and drinking campaign aimed at teenagers. Indeed, there seems to be little question that the country is in the grip of another craze, one that appears every bit as pervasive as that initiated more than 20 years ago by four young mop-headed working-class boys from Liverpool, England.

The Beatles began first by reproducing American rock n’ roll and recycling it back to us. Their early music was clean and hard-edged and it caught on fast. They soon revealed themselves not simply as imitators but as artists in their own right. In the process, they took most of their fans on that Magical Mystery Tour that lasted through a number of highly creative y ears. They also added to their devotees millions of older people like me, who came originally to scoff at the music our high school students were listening to instead of reading Silas Marner. But instead we stayed, not only to listen ourselves, but to be enthralled by their humor, their ability to grow and their extraordinary political and social consciences.

Years after they disbanded and after the tragic murder of John Lennon, whose creativity seemed only to expand with time, one could still listen to their music and find new things in it. It was also a pleasure to find one’s own children listening to the music we loved rather than laughing at it and us, as we often did with our parents and their generation’s music.

Michael Jackson is an altogether different sort of performer. His music is different, too. It’s far more commercially oriented, lavishly orchestrated, dramatic in its electronically modulated effects. With the advent of MTV Jackson has an entirely new medium for the extension of his music and for reaching vast audiences.

There’s no question about his talent as a singer or dancer. But that talent seems to lend itself to exploitation like a jewel overwhelmed and ultimately engulfed by its setting. When all is said and done, when MTV is off, the record over, or the radio playing another production, there is no resonance. You have to hear the song again, wait again for the segment to appear on MTV, play your record again, or buy the next one.

Jackson’s music depends upon its reproduction, upon the habit it has conditioned in its listeners, not upon its essential impact. A Michael Jackson song or performance does not change its listener. It does not make you see the world or yourself differently, as many Beatles songs did. It does not refer you to something outside of it or yourself. It is entirely reflexive, self-enclosed and self-perpetuating. It leads only to repetition or to another production like itself. It ultimately creates consumers for itself and for the packaged myth of the performer and his carefully orchestrated persona rather than an enlightened audience.

The Beatles were a craze—there is no question about that. They were exploited by the media and the music industry. But they exploited them in turn, using their immense popularity and the money they earned to make music, which the record companies before their time would never have risked producing. They also used their public prominence to espouse important causes and to raise the consciousness of their audience. They put their lives and their talents at the service of more than the music industry or their own personal wealth.

Time and time again, in ways both personal and musical, the Beatles undermined those who set out to exploit and to market them. They transcended the spectacle which they were being forced to participate in and which the larger society had become—that life which is lived at a remove from itself and entirely at the level of image. It is a life which depends not upon what is creative in each one of us but what has been created for mass consumption.

One could not imagine the Beatles being received by Ronald Reagan. Their own Queen acknowledged them only because they increased Britain’s GNP. But then, 20 years ago, one could not have imagined a Reagan presidency. That, like the Michael Jackson phenomenon, can only become possible when the spectacle displaces reality and we are all hooked into MTV and not into each other, our neighborhoods, our towns, our nation or ourselves.

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.