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| Carol and me with kittens from Stuff's litter at our Cambridge apt. |
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| 13 Ellery St. |
It wasn’t until I’d gone to college in the Midwest that I heard people give city directions in terms of north/south, east/west (cf. “Go north three blocks and turn west.”) In western Pennsylvania as in most of the northeast, cities were ordered by the borders of serpentine rivers and eccentric coastlines, as well as hills and ridges and valleys. So while Cambridge is vaguely north of Boston, it is connected by Mass Ave in a way that defies the compass. Orientation reverts to directions like left and right.
So emerging from the tree-shadowed Ellery Street to busy, noisy Mass Ave puts Central Square (Cambridge) and Boston to your left, and Harvard Square a few long blocks to your right. While I was living there the rest of that summer, the first commercial building to the right on Mass Ave housed several businesses, including the F-Stop camera store, Cheap Thrills records, a music and musical instrument store, and the Orson Welles Cinema. At the time I first saw it, the Welles was a single screen, so-called “repertory cinema” showing foreign and offbeat American movies. (It had a film school as well, though that was not immediately obvious to me.)
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| Orson Welles at the Orson Welles |
Carol had gotten interested in film, too, especially after she read The Film Director as Superstar by Joseph Gelmis, a collection of interviews (Kubrick, Bertolucci, Lindsay Anderson, Richard Lester, John Cassavettes and a very young Francis Ford Coppola, among others), a book I’d left with her when I was at Cummington.
We emerged from one of our first movies there when I saw a familiar face in the lobby. It was Steve Goldberg, formerly of Knox College, who turned out to be the theatre manager. He remembered me, and in the course of our conversation, suggested I try writing for the local weekly paper called the Phoenix. I laughed before I nodded an acknowledgement. I didn’t see where I would fit in. I knew nothing about Boston or Cambridge, and though I’d seen the Phoenix a few times, I still didn’t have a handle on it. It was more seriously journalistic than an underground newspaper, but it wasn’t like a daily either. A few years later in his defining New Yorker piece, Calvin Trillin would describe the growing number of such journals as “sea-level” newspapers. Today, their descendants are usually lumped together as “alternative.”
(As if meeting a former Knox student there wasn’t coincidence enough, I soon after walked into the music store next door to see behind the counter someone I’d known at Greensburg (PA) Central Catholic High School. Paul Lenart had been a year ahead of me, and had gone off to Columbia University on a football scholarship, which made him a subject of my envy since that was my aspirational and unaffordable first choice school. But he’d been injured early on, lost his scholarship and was now a guitarist in a regionally popular band that sometimes played at Jack’s bar near Central Square, famous then for featuring Bonnie Raitt before she went national. Eventually he sold me my next guitar.)
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| Pierrot Le Fou |
The huge Harvard Coop had a big book section. There were more bookstores on Brattle Street behind it, including one of my favorites, Reading International. Across from there and below street level on Mt. Auburn St. was Passim, a bookstore during the day, and a music venue at night—it had formerly been Club 47, where Joan Baez first sang in concert, among many other luminaries of the folk revival 1960s.
I was soon reading Henry Miller for the first time, and his rhapsodizing descriptions of Paris bookstores suggested that this might be my Paris. That feeling was reinforced by the cafes, some with outdoor seating, an anomaly in America at the time. There were not varieties of coffees available on every corner in the 70s, but in and around Harvard Square there were coffees closer to their foreign origins, such as the Turkish coffee in a dark café buried in a complex of shops.
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| Harvard Sq 1970. BK photo. |
The riches of the cafes included the newspapers left by patrons and strewn around, not only the Boston Globe and the counterculture and political papers but the New York Times and Washington Post. There were magazines of all kinds from everywhere at several of the bookstores, with walls of them at the Out of Town News just outside the Harvard Square subway entrance.
The apartment on Ellery Street was large and well kept, though mostly empty. It was on the top floor, with easy access to the flat roof, where a lot of sunbathing had gone on all summer, and continued while I was there. But with fall, the sublet was up, Carol’s friends returned to school, and we had to look for another place.
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| Repainted and gentrified, 325 Columbia St. now. First floor apt. was ours. |
We painted our room teal blue, with lighter blue around the sort-of bay windows. We painted the living room in shades of sea green and violet. The previous tenants had left a lot of psychedelic posters, which I cut up and affixed to a wall in the narrow hallway as collages. (Through unforwarded mail and some detective work, I learned that this apartment had been the gathering place for poets and others in the antiwar movement, and that poet Denise Levertov had often been there. She confirmed this in an exchange of letters. We had met my senior year at Knox.)
I moved on to Henry Miller, whose style I found enthralling despite the sometimes questionable content: the novels Tropic of Cancer (my sun sign) and Tropic of Capricorn (Carol’s), his narrative nonfiction (The Air Conditioned Nightmare, The Colossus of Maroussi) and essays (The Books in My Life and The Wisdom of the Heart, in which he described his Zen-like approach to writing.)There was soon something of a Henry Miller boom in the 70s, and at the Orson Welles I saw an autobiographical film on him, and another on his compatriot Anais Nin (I also acquired and read some of her volumes of diary entries which were then popular.)
I tried reading William Burroughs, whose theories of writing—especially his cut-up method—fascinated me, but I didn’t match up with his resulting fiction. There were others, but I most recall Kerouac’s ecstatic discoveries as reflecting the flavor of those first few months for us on Columbia Street.
I was still attracted to poetry with a surrealistic flavor. I read Robert Bly’s translations of Pablo Neruda, more of Bill Knott (who I’d encountered in New Haven) and a new poet, James Tate, who I heard read and met in Cambridge. (He had exasperated tales of trying to help Knott just get through life and empty the garbage.) I’d admired Jon Anderson’s first book of poems, Looking for Jonathan, in 1968, and now the harder edged Death and Friends in 1970.
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| Gino Severini self-portrait |
At the same time I also discovered Dorothea Tanning, the only American and only woman enrolled in the Paris Surrealists. She was a native of Galesburg, Illinois, and (as I later found) a Knox College student who preceded me (by several decades) as an editor of the college literary magazine. My fascination with this place and period, which had begun with the expatriate writers like Joyce, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, brought me around through the painters to other writers, particularly the French poets Guillaume Apollinaire (another friend of Gino) and Paul Eluard.
I continued reading about ecology, including Paul Shepard’s second anthology, Environ/Mental. I don’t remember what precipitated it, but I began reading Buckminster Fuller obsessively. The autobiographical sections in Ideas and Integrities grabbed me—his despair at his lack of worldly success and acceptance of his ideas that drove him to the edge of Lake Michigan, contemplating suicide. That resonated. But even navigating his strange vocabulary I saw him as literally a sailor (he’d served in the Navy) who knew what he was talking about with his concept of Spaceship Earth—that all we needed to live was aboard, but we were limited mostly to what was on the ship.
I got hold of a new anthology for students called Worlds in the Making, which related ecology to the future. I was already looking at the future as a subject, and even collected these strange paperbacks that came out every year in the early 70s, with professional psychics (a lot of them from Florida) who predicted events of the coming year. There were always several predictions that Fidel Castro would be assassinated. Years later, when the CIA plots to kill Castro were exposed (including one involving an exploding cigar), it seemed that these were less seers than spooks, or at least they knew some. Fidel probably outlived them all.
Carol and I were also reading ostensibly more serious books in the psychedelic/countercultural vein, including on astrology, and we got our charts done (I’ve lost mine but I still have Carol’s.) I was nervously consulting the I Ching, which never quite assuaged my frustrations at my lack of worldly progress, probably not the best attitude.
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| J.T. & Carole King |
There were also free concerts, including a few in the Cambridge Common, just beyond Harvard Square. Carol and I heard the distant music one Sunday in Harvard Square and walked over there. We passed a smiling young woman coming the other way and asked her who was playing. “It’s a beautiful day,” she said. We agreed, it was a beautiful, sunny day. But who was playing? She laughed. “It’s A Beautiful Day.” Yes, there was such a group—I remember staring stoned at their album cover a few years before in Galesburg.
Inspired by Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, I resumed constructing collages, as did Carol. I briefly continued my Cummington experimentations with painting. And I devised and physically made a board game—the Cambridge Conspiracy Game. It was arranged like a Monopoly board but with Cambridge sites. Its purpose however was as a kind of anti-Monopoly. The object was not competition. The only way to win was for players to cooperate. Everybody won, or everybody lost.
Columbia Street extended down from Mass Ave on the Boston side edge of Central Square a considerable distance before it got to us. Our building was a bit run down, and so was the immediate neighborhood. It was not fashionable or even recognizably Cambridge. It evidently had been Irish and (a bit further on) Italian, but was now mostly Portuguese.
We shopped for major groceries at the Purity Supreme supermarket in Central Square, but we also explored the shops in Inman Square: a walk down Columbia St. for a long block in the opposite direction from Mass Ave, and then the streets to the left that eventually led to the Harvard Square area.
My impression was that Inman Square had once been the Italian area, and there was a very good but decently priced Italian restaurant there, that we could afford occasionally. There was also an authentic German bakery, and a large deli restaurant called S&S, that is apparently still there.
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| Inman Sq. early 1970s |
This end of Cambridge was noisy and sooty, as urban a place as I’d ever lived. But we also belonged to a co-op that every week delivered organic vegetables from nearby farms (in the revolution talk of the day, it was called the Food Conspiracy.) We also were asked to work in the fields periodically, which I remember doing once. For awhile Carol and I tried the brown rice diet recommended by John and Yoko, so we wouldn’t be “sampaku” (supposedly you were if there was white all around your eyeballs, and it wasn’t a good sign.) We gave that up pretty quickly, and I wrote a song about it.
I extended my ecology commitments to the household, perhaps a little too much (a succession of housemates weren’t thrilled.) But I was motivated to do kitchen cleanup and some of the cooking. Carol made amazing Irish stew I still remember.
One day I awoke to find that Carol and our housemate Andrea had panicked when they thought Stuff wasn’t delivering properly, and had rushed her to the vet who said she was fine, but that adventure caused Stuff’s labor to stop. We had to take her back to induce birth, and by then I was the only one with the nerve to be present for the actual births. Stuff had six kittens of various hues and combinations, including a silver gray male. We decided to keep him, and named him Gray. Those three cats—Stuff, Muk and Gray-- would be under my care for the next twenty years.
All this may sound idyllic but of course it wasn’t quite. We both had demons to work through, and after the initial overriding bliss, we had each other to get used to. Neither of us had anything but vague direction, and so along with the freedom of exploration, we had anxieties. Plus the complications of family pressures, housemates, and a few neighborhood and apartment problems, etc. But complications is all they were. We had what Carol would later describe as a good little life.
The main Cambridge post office building was nearby, and it may have been an employee having lunch at Brigham’s that alerted Carol to job openings at that post office. She took the Civil Service exam and was quickly hired, perhaps as a temporary for the Christmas season rush, but she was kept on afterwards. To my surprise she liked it there, especially her co-workers, and she visibly began to open up again to the outside world.
I “took in” typing, edited and rewrote graduate school papers, and had temp jobs, such as working in college bookstores during textbook rush or doing inventory, and painting the vast interior of a former Harvard eating club preparing to become a restaurant, Grendel’s Den on Winthrop St. and across Brattle from my Patisserie, near Harvard Square. It’s still there. (Though I thought I did good work on those walls and ceilings, I was fired for insubordination, for sticking up for a colleague being bullied. He probably thought I was a dope for doing so.)
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| hawker later in 70s (not me) |
Unlike most alternative weeklies since, these papers weren’t given away, but sold. Both had gained initial circulation with free classified ads, personals mostly. The next attraction was coverage of the kinds of arts and entertainment that appealed to young readers, including the hordes of college students at the many colleges and universities in the Boston area. The writers were also young, and spoke the same language, unlike the stodgy dailies. That applied to the cultural and political coverage and point of view of news stories. There was a huge potential readership that had nowhere else to go locally.
For some reason lost to history, I gravitated towards selling Boston After Dark. I took the T (Boston area’s subway/light rail system, which Carol likened to amusement park rides) to the Boston printing plant, picked up and paid for the number of papers I was gambling I could sell, and transited back to my Cambridge corner.
There were a lot of hawkers. Every corner in and near Harvard Square was taken, and often enough, one or two of the corners near me were also claimed. There were occasional turf wars, but generally hawkers respected the claims of regulars. Where I was, the clientele came from surrounding office buildings, usually at lunchtimes. My best customers were young women from those offices, who bought their copy from me with their friends watching from the floors above.
Since I didn’t always sell them all, I had lots of opportunities to read what was in them. I read the Phoenix as well. Meanwhile, I fantasized my own publication, complete with articles I’d like to see in it. Eventually the light bulb went off, and I realized I might pitch these existing publications with those ideas. That took a surprisingly long time.
I’ve found the notebook from this time which contains my first draft of a long poem called “Ears.” I remember it as inspired by a Kenneth Koch poem on the theme of eyes that I heard him read, but I can’t locate that poem and don’t remember where the reading was. A version of “Ears” as well as several other poems and a prose piece of impressions of Cambridge, appeared in a one-off publication called Words Cambridge in spring 1971. The people who appeared in it put the publication together, assembling and binding it in the offices of the Orson Welles cinema. Another version of “Ears” would appear at the end of the year in a more professionally produced though also short-lived literary magazine, Cotelydon.
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| Carol 1968 at Knox. Bill Thompson photo. |
So I was not unduly concerned when Carol went for tests at Mass General, after my repeated urging. Her health had always been somewhat shaky, but there had been two recent incidents in which she’d been overcome by fatigue. We’d attended a screening at the Orson Welles and met the filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek, who was about to show one of his films beamed by multiple projectors onto the inner dome of a building—the Moviedrome at Stony Point in New York state. The audience would be lying on the floor looking up. The film would last for several hours—a truly immersive experience. We signed up for the bus to go, but when the day approached Carol suddenly felt extremely tired, so we cancelled.
Another wave of fatigue prevented us from meeting up with some Knox friends. We were literally out our front door when she said she had to go back. The prospect of a long bus ride to the Moviedrome had been daunting, but this outing was not going to be so strenuous. It seemed more serious.
I was back in our room when she returned from her visit to Mass General. I asked her what the doctor said. She brought up something else that had us both laughing. Then I asked her again what the doctor said. She suddenly burst into tears.
After initial tests she had been sent to a doctor in the hospital who diagnosed her with what was then called Hodgkin’s Disease (now Hodgkins lymphoma.) Through her tears, and fear that she would die, she provided what turned out to be an accurate account of what the doctor said (I’ve unfortunately forgotten his name.)
She repeated the words but did not seem to believe them until I repeated them back to her. Part of her despair resulted from a stop at a library or bookstore on the way home where she read that the disease was usually fatal. But soon she accepted the assurances she brought back from her doctor. Later I did what research I could, which confirmed what she’d been told.
In the early 1970s, it seemed most cancers were mysterious and fatal. Not many years before that, the word “cancer” was not even uttered in polite company (comedian Billy Crystal had a routine that reflected this.) I was becoming a little familiar with the radiation and chemotherapy treatments because my mother had recently undergone some, and would undergo more, after Carol completed hers. But I wasn’t around for most of my mother’s, and my parents were generally secretive about such things, so I was somewhere between discreet (not wanting to embarrass my mother) and frightened. It was very different with Carol.
I was there with her completely, every moment, every step. I was at the hospital for her spleen removal operation, and her initial treatments. Sometimes, instead of remaining in the waiting room, I would spend the estimated time outside on Boston Common before returning. Carol waited her turn in an area reserved for patients, where she befriended a few regulars also waiting for their treatments, and heard their stories. Some had much less hopeful prospects. Later, when she felt stronger and self-reliance was important to her, she bolstered her confidence by going to the treatments on her own. She found her courage, partly in making it ordinary.
At home, I took care of her as best I could. We talked about everything involved, what she thought and how she felt, and I tended, however watchfully, to follow her lead. She needed to comprehend and cope with what was happening to her. A part of her body was cut out, and the rest of it subjected to the damage (including to her beautiful hair) caused by radiation and chemicals, as well as the eventual healing.
I could also offer a different perspective. “You felt your body broken,” begins a poem I wrote to her, “but I saw it whole/with such/ joy at its aliveness/its softness and beauty/that the tubes hanging out/were proof only/that your loveliness/was present/transcendent…”
She wanted above all to be not sick, so we tried to keep things as normal as possible. She had taken up knitting, as did her friends at the hospital, to pass the time before and after treatments. She knitted at home as well, including a six foot long, blue and green scarf for me—not often very practical (except for Doctor Who conventions) but beautiful. I still display it. When effects of the treatments accumulated, we watched a lot of TV on our small black and white set, and she began painting, as well as making rude sculptures out of play dough.
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| Carol on one of our visits to Cape Cod. BK photo |
Looking back through our earlier correspondence, a pattern of precedent emerged from the previous year—particularly Carol’s series of inexplicable fevers and fatigue. She had been hospitalized in Galesburg months before I arrived, and one of the reasons she didn’t want to go back was her fear that she would die there.
Over the years I’ve wondered what fate led us to Boston, where this disease could be treated. Though the treatments themselves had serious medical consequences for her years later (they are no longer done in the same way), and both the disease and the treatments may have led to her final illness, she nevertheless had another fifty years of what might even be characterized as a fabulous life.
Jeremy Gladstone visited us in Cambridge, on his way back to Europe (he didn't finish his dinner with us because he was "shrinking his stomach" in preparation for being on the road.) He and Carol had a previous relationship (they’d lived together in the same house in Galesburg and the same rooms as I had the year before) and they remained friends. They corresponded when he was in Lausanne, in French-speaking Switzerland. He assured her that she could teach English there, and urged her to at least make a long visit. Carol was intrigued, and having the goal of a European trip helped her through her treatments.
By the end of the year I’d published two book reviews (including one of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar) and an article on Norman Mailer in Boston After Dark. Meanwhile, I was in touch with Dave Marsh, editor of the Detroit-based magazine Creem (actually, their address was Walled Lake, Michigan.) Though the now-legendary Creem was mostly a rock music magazine, it published more. I may have published a review of The Greening of America there, but the first I recall of a flurry of pieces for Creem—a review of the movie “Omega Man” starring Charleston Heston—appeared in December.
Suddenly the apparently random aspects of my life seemed to be coalescing in these opportunities—the aimless observations of counterculture in Boulder and Berkeley, the seemingly wasted hours watching movies, listening to the latest music and discussing it all in perilous detail, and the instinctive reading and cultural curiosity, as well as the years of unread writing, of absorbing and searching for forms and expression.
Now I was suddenly getting published regularly and meeting new people, especially at Boston After Dark. But Carol still felt intimidated by what she perceived of that world, which was becoming my world. And then she felt well enough, and it came time for the dream of Europe to become real.
I went with her to Logan airport and saw her off for her first trip to England, Greece and France (sending me a pile of postcards) before settling in Switzerland. She worked part time while taking French courses every morning, and she learned to drive. Eventually, true to Jeremy's prediction, she was hired as an English teacher in Lausanne. She came back for visits and follow-ups at Mass General a couple of times. At the end of one of these visits of several weeks (including a trip to see her parents in Chicago), I put her on the train to New York, where she would get a direct flight to Switzerland. But before the train left I impulsively bought myself a ticket to New York (it was all of $10 then) and joined her, intending to return on the next train back. On the way she decided to stay longer, so we spent a few days in New York (hosted by Michael Shain) and Cambridge and again in New York, before she flew back to Europe.
I have many blue airmail letters from those first years she was in Switzerland. Early on, there was some thought of my joining her there or in England, but as my involvement in Boston increased and her attraction and commitment to Europe solidified, those thoughts faded. Years passed, and eventually she wrote that she was getting married to someone she met there. I could only wish her well. I didn’t hear from her for many years not long after that. It was clear that she blossomed in Europe, just as we both suspected she would not be fulfilled if she stayed. Our roads and our lives diverged. But we always had Cambridge.
