History of My Reading: Summer Reading 1968

My summer of 1968 functionally began with the murder of Senator Robert Kennedy in early June, and ended with the police riot in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention in late August.  In between these iconic indicators of the contextual chaos, I traveled: to Iowa City, Chicago, Galesburg, Greensburg (PA), Boulder (CO), Libertyville (IL) and Hamilton, Ontario--some of these several times.

I flew, drove, rode trains and buses, and hitchhiked.  I was simultaneously trying to arrange my attendance at the Iowa Writers Workshop and its financing in the fall, while dealing with draft boards, doctors and draft counselors.  I was certain to be called for a draft physical soon, which made any other plans as well as my future highly uncertain.

And almost incidentally, I was also completing two independent studies, my last courses at Knox College, in an effort to obtain more credits towards an elusive BA degree. One of them was fiction writing for Robin Metz.  The other--which I'd completely forgotten about until recently reviewing letters from that summer--was a paper on Thoreau for Doug Wilson.  So in all that fraught and frenetic summer, the still point in my churning world was Walden Pond.

I must have done most of the reading and writing in midsummer, when I was back home in Greensburg. While not exactly Walden, it was relatively quiet, and I had hours of solitude.

I now realize that a surviving manuscript I previously thought was for my Emerson/Thoreau course in my junior year must be a rough draft of that summer of '68 paper.  It consists of an introduction and three sections: "Utility As Purification," "Towards an Ecology of Feeling" and "What the Body Thought."  The first section was based mostly on Walden; the following sections on Thoreau's journals--or mostly the journal entries contained in the selection H.D. Thoreau: A Writer's Journal by Laurence Stapleton.

So that summer I re-read Walden and the Stapleton book, if not more.  I apparently began by noting page numbers of journal entries of interest, then marked which ones I would use in the paper. I marked a half dozen references to sound and music, though I didn't use any in the draft I have.

My introduction shows a continuing influence of  my spring reading on philosophy of science, not mandated by any classes but in response to two of the science courses I took (supposedly for non-majors), one in which I got an F and the other an A.  There were also references to the Two Cultures debate from the very beginning of my Knox years.

The relationship of art and science, or more particularly intellect and feeling, as methods of ascertaining reality in Thoreau's exploratory writing was the general topic. "Reason is that faculty which is quite fond of producing reasons," I wrote. But intellect infused with feeling was Thoreau's solution.  Feeling came from the physical (the body's) response to the physical (nature.) Yet feeling was also formed and informed by the mind, by thought.  I'm immediately reminded  now of the work of Jung, James Hillman and others I came upon later, in which intellect and feeling, body and mind, are among the orchestrated elements of the human soul.

Looking at this draft now without the academic fuzz, I see some 1960s concerns, such as revolt against the conventional and the trivial, and against meaning defined by money, as well as countering the cold rationalism that justified the Vietnam War. These included pressing personal concerns, particularly the prospect of a life about to be wasted on the inessential and the ignominious. ("Woe be to the generation that lets any higher faculty in its midst go unemployed," Thoreau wrote.)  I quoted in particular a journal entry that Thoreau wrote on a December night, after he made a fire and "endeavored to return to myself....I wished to ally myself to the powers that rule the universe.  I wished to dive into some deep stream of thoughtful and devoted life..."

In the midst of a highly political year, in which issues of great pith and moment seemed to require group action and engagement,  I was attracted to "live, ah! as far away as a man can think."  To the relative isolation and solitude, the living deliberately of Walden.  And it would turn out that I fled from one of these opposites to the other for the rest of my life.

But what I didn't write about is also interesting.  The Stapleton book is titled "A Writer's Journal," and so it contains Thoreau's thoughts on the practices and purposes of writing, something of particular interest to me, especially at that time. The book itself impressed me enough that years later, when I thought I'd lost my copy, I found a more recent edition (and then the old one turned up.)  But that summer, I also looked to another book for guidance, or at least solace.

After finishing my independent studies I returned to Galesburg and Iowa City in July, and then flew off on a borrowed half-fare card to Boulder to join Joni, who was taking classes at the University of Colorado campus there.  (I must have flown from Iowa City because I remember a short flight in Iowa with so few passengers that I saw one of the young stewardesses--as they were then called-- watching the sunset from a cabin window.)

My digs for those weeks were a couple of rooms on the first floor of an otherwise unoccupied house still under construction, located conveniently next door to Joni's apartment. (She'd charmed the builder, who was also her landlord, into allowing this.) There I set up my typewriter and tried to write, though I often reverted to reading the book that had been a kind of Bible since my senior year: Richard Ellman's biography titled James Joyce.

Joyce was not much of a naturalist, but "silence, exile and cunning" and his absolute devotion to his work were not terribly far from Thoreau.  Joyce's example was enlarging, focusing and also eventually toxic.  But I kept reading largely because Ellmann's biography is so well written.  (It became the model for literary biographies, at least for awhile.)  And at age 22, the romance of it overwhelmed less salutary aspects.  With my own identity as a writer unmoored, it was a kind of anchor.

I remember other books of a literary nature I read in those years, but only one other I associate with that summer, and I'm not even sure the association has exact basis in reality.  But I'm pretty sure it was that summer that I read Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Mother Night.

Slaughterhouse Five and Vonnegut's rocketing fame were still months in the future, but I'd been hearing about him my senior year from Robin Metz, who was at one time his student at the Iowa Workshop.  Such is Vonnegut's enormous presence in that period that it's a bit startling to be reminded that he became instantly ubiquitous only in the early 1970s, beginning in 1969. His influence--particularly as an anti-war novelist and spokesperson--seems to blow back into 1968 and 67. So when I associate reading Vonnegut's short stories in the collection Canary in the Cat House with my senior year residence on First Street, it may or may not be accurate.

But I'm a little more confident that I read Robin Metz's own hardback copy of Mother Night when I stayed at his house on Broad Street in Galesburg for a time or two during that summer.  It was a compulsive, riveting, powerful reading experience.  Its roots in popular literature were clear, but its voice and point of view were unique.  I looked forward with anticipation to his "big book" rumored to be coming out the following year.

I returned to Chicago in August in time to visit Bill Thompson in Libertyville, and (with Mike Shain) drive him and his new wife to Hamilton, Ontario, where he would attend graduate school and, not incidentally, be safe from the draft.  Why I did not take the Canada option remains a mystery to me, though it probably had something to do with my incompetence at even conceiving of how to survive. Yet it seems now that had I given it seven minutes of consecutive thought, I should have seen it as the best of my alternatives.  But thinking clearly about any of this, and not being overwhelmed by conflicting emotions, was not easy to come by.

Instead I returned to Libertyville with Bill's father's car and trailer, saw the police riot on TV, went to Chicago as described elsewhere.  Then eventually to Iowa City and the famous Iowa Writers Workshop.  However, as it turned out, briefly.