R.I. P. Mary Oliver

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

R.I.P poet Mary Oliver

"I made a world out of words.  And it has been my salvation."

History of My Reading: When It Was '65

Shortly after the year 1965 began, I was back at college in Galesburg, Illinois to complete my freshman year.  I'd returned home for the first time for Christmas break.  I visited my old high school (and yes, everything seemed smaller there, including the nuns), reunited with family and saw close relatives.  Someone asked me what I'd missed most being away from western Pennsylvania, and I said the hills, and the blue outlines of the wooded mountains in the distance. The unrelieved Midwestern flatness had started getting to me.

 Nobody seemed to quite understand that or much else I said (which wasn't a lot) about Galesburg or college, or even asked questions.  Few went very far from home, and certainly not to the Midwest, and few seemed curious.  But my godfather, who drove long distance trucks, understood what I meant, and felt the same.

I saw close friends, particularly Mike and Clayton.  Sometime in probably my second year of high school, I began playing with the reel-to-reel tape recorder my father had become bored with.  I wrote scripts--an update of Wells' War of the Worlds, and brief satires inspired by Stan Freberg and That Was the Week That Was on TV.  I enlisted friends to play the parts, do sound effects and music.  Soon we were a core of four, and one summer we worked up a stage act of comedy and music as The Four Frauds.  This collided with the folk music boom, so in our senior year, Clayton (an actual musician), Mike (otherwise my debate partner) and I formed a folk trio called the Crosscurrents.  So at Christmas we got out the guitars, refined the old songs and learned new ones, including some originals.

Among the tapered StayPrest shirts and whatever, this Christmas I probably received a copy of Robert Frost's latest (and last) collection, In the Clearing, which was a national best seller.  Frost was still the main contemporary poet I knew, though I was fascinated by e.e. cummings (who'd died in 1962) and was much moved by several poems by Theodore Roethke I'd read in a magazine in the Knox Library (he'd died in 1963, and his last book was published posthumously.)

Back at Knox, I first faced the unfinished business of the first semester: mostly final exams and papers.  I then spent semester break in Berwyn, Illinois with Jim Miller and his family (as described in a previous post here), who was about to be my new roommate. When we returned, my first semester roommate John Heyer had moved out of Anderson House, and Jim moved from across the third floor to my room (actually two small rooms) at the top of the stairs, the one with the crazy angle walls and the turret facing Tompkins Street.

I can tell you many things about this second semester, partly from a fair but incomplete set of student newspapers and a scattering of other documents, but largely from letters to and from home.  Letters were primary communications in those days. We did not have phones in our rooms, let alone in our pockets.  Long distance calls were relatively expensive, and otherwise problematic.  At Anderson House we had exactly one telephone, which sat on the landing between the first and second floors.  If it rang, someone might or might not answer it and find whoever the call was for.  If you were on the phone, your half of the conversation was audible to anyone in the living room on the first floor.  And it was largely a campus phone, that--if memory serves-- went through a campus switchboard.  As a result, a lot of communications still exist in what today we'd call hard copies, formerly known as letters.

So I can tell you what the weather was like at certain times: Snow in early February, for example, and tornadoes in the Quad Cities in early April. I remained on campus for Easter weekend, and joined a small motley crew on a muggy day filling gopher holes in the levees somewhere within shouting distance (though not visual range) of the river.  This day culminated with one of the best meals of my life--probably sandwiches and coffee--from a roving Red Cross pickup truck.

With more rain in late April there was substantial flooding in the Quad Cities. Illinois was declared a disaster area. Bob Misiorowski reported on Rock Island for the Knox Student. I went out with a large group filling sandbags on a rainy day in Oquawka. The river crested below predicted level, the town was safe, and we celebrated with underage beers at the Blue Parrot.

Second semester began in February, but March letters were already about my upcoming second trip home for semester break.  My friend Mike got excited because my return coincided with several events in which the Crosscurrents might participate.  The folk music craze was in full swing.  I don't recall if we actually did any of those gigs.  (I had however performed solo at the Knox hootenanny in mid-March.)

Mike was day-hopping to St. Vincent College--he'd been personally recruited for their debate team.  But it wasn't until second semester that I got back into the debate game, participating in an intramural tournament--the topic had to do with "individualism" so I suppose I consulted John Stuart Mill and David Reisman books (Individualism Reconsidered, The Lonely Crowd.)  Classmate and fellow third-floor Andy House resident Tim Zijewski was my partner. We won all four preliminary debates but came in second in the finals.

But that was enough to get me on the official Knox debate team, and on a tour of Iowa colleges just before spring break in late March.  Second year Judy Dugan was my partner, and in combined silliness we concocted the alternate identities of Tracy and Margaret Steele, by which names we were identified in a photo taken in the new Grinnell College student union, published in an Iowa newspaper.  Later in the term, I was Judy's guest for a party on a Mississipi riverboat.  We spent most of it on deck--my only time on the big river.

In reviewing campus events of that semester--plays, concerts, lectures, movies-- I was surprised how many stand out in my memory.  So maybe this is the place to outline my theory of the college experience.  We were young, we had little personal history and I for one had no sense of things happening over time.  Almost anything before the 1950s was in that murky territory of "the past."  In college, we were being presented with the past--its literature, philosophy, science as well as its music etc.  We were experiencing quite a lot of it for the first time.  So in college, everything is Now.

That came home to me in later college years a couple of times.  I noticed for example a fellow student who always wore long greatcoats, and a long beard.  He was a Russian major I believe, but in any case he lived in a Dostoevsky universe. That universe coexisted with all the other little universes other students were living in at the same time, including me.

Or this: I was in the Gizmo one evening when I watched a group of students I knew trickle in, looking particularly grim.  They sat together in that dark semi-enclosed area just to the left as you entered from Seymour, in silence.  I asked someone what was wrong.  They'd come from the final Hemingway seminar class, in which Hemingway's suicide was discussed.  Hemingway had killed himself in 1961--but for those students, it had just happened.

Richard Bauer, Halo Wines

So in the second semester of 1964-65, I heard for the first time Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" played live, when the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Lukas Foss, visited Galesburg.  I saw Shakespeare's Twelfth Night in January, performed by the National Players out of Washington, D.C. Two members of the cast--Richard Bauer and Halo Wines--would marry and go on to distinguished stage acting careers in New York and particularly at the Arena Stage in Washington.

In March I saw a memorable touring version of the Broadway hit Spoon River, made all the more haunting because Edgar Lee Masters, who attended the college affiliated Knox Academy in 1889, wrote his poetic Spoon River Anthology about small town Illinois (with even a reference to a "Professor Moon" of Knox College.)  In the cast was Gil Turner, prominent in the Village scene and Civil Rights movement, who a few years before had been the first person to perform Bob Dylan's song, "Blowin' in the Wind."  Dylan played at his wedding.

But some of the most memorable plays were Knox productions.  We'd had the unforgettable Hamlet.  The main stage production in April was Thornton Wilder's Skin of Our Teeth, and this remains the only live production of this play I've ever seen.  It's an intriguing play in form and content, particularly relevant to today, but seldom produced.  William Clark directed.  I was most impressed by the actress playing the maid Sabina, Peggy Miller.

The real revelations were the Studio Theatre productions--produced, directed and acted by (mostly) students.  In perhaps his last gift to Knox, Kim Chase revamped and opened up the process to allow more participation and productions, and there was an immediate payoff in creative energy that winter and spring.

Again, I saw plays there I would not have the opportunity to see again, or at least, very rarely, including Edward Albee's  The American Dream (directed by Richard Newman),  Pinter's "The Room," (directed by Joan Dillenback), Noel Coward's "Fumed Oak" (directed by David Axlerod, featuring Wendy Saul).

 Jim Eichelberger's production of Genet's Maids was the most memorable, for the stylized (I would later learn to call it "expressionistic") acting and makeup.  Joelle Nelson was mesmerizing.  Otherwise, I didn't understand a word of it.

  I took particular note of a new play by a Knox student--Skip Peterson's Last of the Harries, directed by Kevern Cameron.  I saw that a student play could actually make it to the stage.

I  had attended Cinema Club films, fascinated but without much comprehension.  The film vocabulary was so different from the Hollywood movies I knew.  At some point however it all clicked.
So this semester I saw Truffaut's Jules and Jim, and Kurosawa's Rashomon for the first time. There were also the Social Board weekend flicks that included the British New Wave film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

This was a time, by the way, several years before Knox offered anything like a film or filmmaking class. Student and head of the Cinema Club David Axlerod was our unofficial film department.  His Student preview of Jules and Jim referred to what he called the "lively fatalism" of the French New Wave, a fine description.

These plays and movies in particular inspired new reading: of the plays themselves, and others by the same authors (Pinter and Albee were especially popular at the time, and in Knox theatre for the next few years, along with Ionesco and Beckett).

 I also read the novels by Alan Sillitoe that were the basis for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and a film I liked even better that the Cinema Club would eventually present, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.  Their protagonists were British working class young men but they were familiar enough as a version of my future that I had escaped, or perhaps only modified.

As for the French New Wave, I not only saw many of the films repeatedly over the years but I eventually collected at least 20 books on the subject, including illustrated scripts of  a number of the films, especially Truffaut and Godard.  I interviewed Truffaut for Rolling Stone in 1979, and in 2002 I reviewed a book on the French New Wave for the San Francisco Chronicle.  It all started at Cinema Club 1965--which I mentioned in the first paragraph of that review.

The college literary magazine, the Siwasher, published two issues this semester, in February and May.  Jay Matson was the editor.  The February issue contained fiction by Vicky Jones and Gayle Waag, a literary essay by Jim McCurry, poems by Gordon Benkler, J.R. Lewis, Jim McCurry, Robert Misiorowski, Virginia Myers, Mary Lou Primozich and Judy Varland, with photos of art works by John Bohan, Mary Lou Primozich, and Donald Waddell, and Gary Sweatman's actual photographs.  The Knox Student reviewer noted a trend towards more poetry rather than the fiction that had dominated past issues.

The May issue contained poetry by Benkler, McCurry, Matson and Misiorowski, and also Nancy Burton, G. Locklin, Skip Peterson, Gerald Roe and Dennis Stepanek.  There was a play by Maria Gerrard, and stories by James Campbell and Glenn Schiffman.  Art work was by Dorrie Campbell, James Campbell, Keith Davis, Donald Waddell and Neva Willard, as well as Sweatman and Bohan.  John Bohan's cover reminds me of the painting that used to hang high on the wall in Sam Moon's office, but probably it isn't the same one.  Sam was the magazine's adviser.

This semester saw the dawning awareness of the Vietnam War.  Contrary to his campaign promises, LBJ greatly expanded the number of American troops and in March, began the bombing of North Vietnam.  In May, a debate between administration officials and a group of professors was seen via video in the Recital Hall.  It was, the Student story noted, dubbed a "teach-in."  More would soon follow.

For the amusement of our tech saturated era, the Student also published a story that spring about a digital computer constructed by two students (junior Phil Petit and senior Bill Weiher) to tabulate results of the Student Senate elections.  In May, a Student story by Barbara Cottral revealed that President Umbeck and several faculty members would view the operation of a $10,000 video tape recorder.  "The list of possibilities for the new recorder is unlimited," she wrote.

Of course, that semester I also took classes. I subjected myself to the second part of my Spanish inquisition language lab course, but couldn't also continue math and remain sane.  Speaking of which, after my successful experience with intro to sociology, I thought I'd try psychology.  But after a couple of classes I found the brand of academic behavioral psychology on offer to be coldly arrogant, mechanistic and small.  I dropped the course.  It would be decades before I discovered (through James Hillman, in Jung and related psychology) what I had been looking for in 1965.

I quickly substituted a political science intro course.  I don't remember much about it, or what we read (probably a text.)  I don't even recall the professor, but I do remember there were a lot of students in the class, and it was the only course I had at Knox with a teaching assistant, or "tutor." Her name was Ginny Radatz, who late that spring received the first annual John Quincy Adams Prize from the Political Science department.  I remember her as tough, smart, engaging and funny.

I did a brief paper on a new edition of Neustadt's Presidential Power. The only other element of this course I recall is the mock U.S. Senate that was part of it, though held on a Saturday and theoretically open to the public.  I was Senator Robert Kennedy of New York.

My other two courses would be of particular importance to me, so I will indulge myself in two more posts on this second semester of my first year--with maybe more about my reading than this post directly discusses.   Next time: my first writing course and Harold Grutzmacher, plus Sam Moon and the Robert Creeley experience.  Then my first philosophy course, and the controversy over Fred Newman that consumed the campus.