“And the roses of electricity still open
In the garden of my memory.”
Apollonaire
 |
| photo by Paula Rhodes 1974 or 5 |
At the end of March 1974, after I returned to my Cambridge
apartment from my mother’s funeral and the eight weeks in Greensburg that
preceded it, I started a new notebook.
On the first inside page I wrote: “Write of other worlds,
not this one.” I didn’t attribute it, but it was (as only I knew) one of
the last things my mother said to me, in the midst of a stream of consciousness
goodnight.
I recorded my state of mind and the state of my affairs as
April began. Though I had many
acquaintances beyond my apartment’s walls, I was more alone within it than
ever. My last housemate was moving out,
to live with a new group of friends. My
time was untethered by any particular responsibilities other than the flexible
mealtimes of my cats. Various tensions
from those weeks at the hospital and then the funeral (the slow motion loss,
the guilty tedium, the sense of unreality in the midst of as real as it gets)
were releasing, accompanied by unpredictable physical ups and (mostly)
downs. Plenty of tensions
remained. Yet I was not unhappy, I
wrote--though too much was lost and was otherwise missing for happiness either.
I was still collecting unemployment checks for a few more
months, and had some savings left, so I resolved to work hard on my college
novel. I had worked out a plan and
written about 80 pages the previous year, and now I would write to that plan—25
pages a week was my goal: 300 pages by my birthday at the end of June. Though that still would be a fraction of the
plan.
I had plenty of doubts.
Could I? Should I? Was I crazy
to try, especially without support or encouragement of any kind? Could I find the necessary temperament, the
energy combined with the stillness? What could I draw on, in this Cambridge of
ambition and acquisition, of drive haunted by compromise, of ego and insecurity
and the reflexes of angst, of feckless frenzy and rolling confusion?
These doubts were never really resolved and haunted me from time to time. At other times I was entirely absorbed in what I was doing.
I was buoyed a bit by a used copy of a book titled
The
Rise of the Novel by Ian Watt, originally published in the late 50s and
kept in print by the University of California Press. It chronicled and analyzed the early English novel in the 18
th
century, of Defoe, Richardson and Fielding.
Looking at it again now, I feel the same excitement at the birth of
something new that was derived—and often improvised-- from many older sources,
yet was particular to the time.
Among the characteristics Watt named as distinguishing the novel
from other forms was especially relevant to my project: “…the novel, whose
primary criterion was truth to individual experience… which is always unique
and therefore new.” I was also
encouraged to learn that Daniel Defoe had begun as a journalist, essentially
writing his own periodical, including reporting on crimes, something else that
was relatively new in his time.
Another characteristic of these early novels, Watt writes,
is embedding the characters in a particular time and place. Fielding seems to have regularly consulted
an almanac to keep tracks of days and dates, as well as external events such as
the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. This is something I learned from James Joyce, and it was
especially important for my college novel, given that 1965 was so different
from 1967 as to be almost another planet.
Also important to me, perhaps indirectly but very strongly,
were the books about early to mid 20th century art in Europe,
primarily in Paris. I had art books
from Phoenix days and a few before that (mostly to do with Picasso.) Now in the many Cambridge bookstores I
searched for books of text as well as reproductions. I often got them used or from bargain bins and hurt books
tables. I was especially alert to
volumes in the paperback series Documents of 20th Century Art: Dore
Ashton’s book on Picasso, the memoir of a major modern art deader in Paris,
dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, Apollonaire on Art and a volume on Italian
Futurism. Dada and Futurism led me to French Surrealism, which had its literary
expressions and tradition.
Though the artist I was most drawn to—Magritte—worked later
and not in Paris, it was that sense of Paris as a willing home to an artistic
community that became important to me, especially when cobbled together with my
previous reading of Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s time there, Gertrude Stein,
James Joyce, and the Paris of Henry Miller. Janet Flanner’s collection of her
New Yorker “Letter From Paris” columns of the 1920s onward,
Paris Is
Yesterday, had recently been published in paperback. (I had Suzi Gablik’s groundbreaking book on
Magritte as well.) I also obtained Andre Breton's surrealist novel,
Nadja; I wanted to like it more than I did.
This became my dream community, superimposed on the cafes,
bookstores, newsstands and art print outlets of Cambridge. At the same time I was absorbing the poetry
of Paul Eluard and Apollonaire, who influenced the verse I was still
writing.
My identification with this place and period was both
vindicated and greatly strengthened when I came upon the name of Gino Severini,
as a painter and theorist of Italian Futurism.
When I mentioned him to my grandmother, she immediately recalled a
conversation she’d overheard many years before, among her husband’s Severini
relatives, about the black sheep of the family who had run away to Paris to
become a bum. The time fit pretty exactly,
and a penniless painter, even with famous friends (including Picasso and
Apollonaire) and future fame himself, would fit the bill as a bum.
Now it seemed I had blood in the game. I visited the Museum of Modern Art in
Manhattan (on a press pass) every time I was in New York. Besides buying one of the few books on
Futurism then (derived from one of their exhibitions) I could see several
Severini paintings, including the largest and most famous: Dynamic Hieroglyph
of the Bal Tabarin.
It was about this time that I added Severini to my byline
name (though at first only to my “literary” efforts), mostly to honor my mother
and her family—for that had always been more the family than my father’s—but I
was also linking myself to Gino. When
years later I read his autobiographical books, I felt even stronger resonance.
This—along with writing poems and plays, writing songs and
playing music—constituted my creative life. I pursued possibilities to extend
it, by going through the laborious process of applying for fellowships (I
recall going to the Harvard Square Xerox place to pick up my bound manuscript
for the annual Massachusetts Arts and Humanities Foundation grants, and seeing
under the harsh florescent light the stacks of other applying manuscripts the
night before deadline) as well as sending out poems and the occasional story:
except for a single prose poem published in a local literary magazine, without
success.
But I also pursued opportunities in the areas I had
established some credits, a kind of journalism. I knew little of
career-building, though I was soon to see how it could work as I watched
friends and former colleagues swiftly ascend to the heights, but I did intuit
(rightly or wrongly) one path I might follow: from writing for city weekly
periodicals to national magazines, and then to book contracts.
By this time I was mostly trying to write for magazines. I
had written for Creem (I have an undated letter from the legendary Lester
Bangs, probably from the previous year, encouraging me to re-start my
relationship there. “I think you’re one of the best writers who has appeared in
this magazine,” he wrote. I don’t think
anything came of this, though I’m not sure why.)
But I had also entered the big time magazine world with an
assignment from Esquire in 1972. I’d been called by a young editor there named
John Lombardi, who liked something I’d written for Creem (I’m guessing it was
my review of the early apocalyptic movie
Omega Man starring Charleton
Heston) and he probably found me through its editor, Dave Marsh. He wanted me to research and write a story
for Esquire’s annual college issue on one of Harvard’s better known dorms,
Adams House, that was now co-ed (radical for the time), and especially the
rumor that their swimming pool included nude bathing. Without ever actually witnessing such an event, I did some
interviews (yes, they said, but the nude swimming was no big deal), wrote the
story and it was published.
After I left the Phoenix in 1973, I learned from Dave Marsh
that Lombardi had moved to Oui Magazine, a new glossy from Playboy, and they
were assigning. I proposed a story on a singles cruise that advertised itself
as employing computer matching, a hot trend of the time. He
assigned it, and off I went that December.
It turned out to be
mostly bogus: the computer matching was a fraud (so much so that the guy doing
mine offered to “hand select” anyone who’d caught my eye) and the singles theme
hadn’t filled the boat, so there were families as well. But by the time I realized this, we were on
the water and I was trapped for the week. We hit rough seas in a relatively
small ship and this absurd floating imprisonment became a sickening one as
well. Still, I did get paid to visit
Puerto Rico and St. Thomas-- for an hour each, but a memorable hour.
I wrote the story but in early 1974 the magazine had wisely passed on
publishing it.
In addition to my excesses in response to the Phoenix and
other separations in 1973, I was walking a lot more and lost weight I’d acquired
from hurried restaurant meals, helped no doubt by the fact that for the first
time I was dependent on my own cooking.
I also quit smoking, which set off a series of revelations.
I discovered I was
less addicted than habituated, so I was able to wean myself off cigarettes by
concentrating on my primary smoking circumstances. So instead of a cigarette next to the typewriter when I wrote, I
kept a bowl of popcorn. To accompany
drinking, I chewed gum, or on Twizzler-type licorice. That these were awkward substitutes was part of the plan. I could soon do without them, though I kept
the popcorn for awhile.
In social situations I especially noticed the way smoking
cigarettes became part of people’s conversational style—the pauses for
inhaling, the cigarette itself “as a baton at the end of our gestures.”
So while I was in Greensburg those eight weeks, I wrote an
article about quitting smoking and these observations, and sent it out. By spring it had been rejected
everywhere. The dependence of magazines
then on the revenue from cigarette advertising I’m sure had nothing to do with
it. But this attempt did start
something in my professional life: the impetus for an article was my own
experience.
My most promising new contact probably came through Janet
Maslin, friend and former colleague at the Phoenix, who had been spreading her
wings beyond that paper when I was editing there. Now she was the regular music
columnist at a new magazine in New York called New Times (unaffiliated in any
way with publications of that name since.)
She was pals with the film reviewer who also was an editor at the
magazine, Frank Rich. She suggested I
get in touch with him—perhaps to review books.
I did, and in February I had heard back. They had more book reviewers than books to review, he said, but
he encouraged me to send article ideas.
I did but with no success yet that spring.
So while I continued to write pieces for the Real Paper
locally for a little income (and go through hell to get paid) I had little
excuse not to organize my life around writing those 300 pages of fiction.
And so I did—with days of lethargy and nights of elation, 18
hour binges of work and sleep, with stretches of numb despair and high
anxiety. But as the clock struck
midnight on June 30, 1978—my 28th birthday—I had produced those 300
pages, or near enough.
I recorded this in that blue notebook while sitting in the
place that had become the center of my life outside my apartment: the Orson
Welles Complex, specifically this time, the Orson Welles Cinema lobby.
I could say that the three overlapping, interacting,
competitive, conflicting and symbiotic parts of my life were creative,
professional and personal. I’m not
going into much detail about the particularly personal here, but it’s fair to
say that significant aspects of all three did their dance at the Orson Welles Complex,
especially in these years.
When I first arrived in Cambridge in 1970, the Welles was a
single-screen cinema on Mass Ave between Harvard and Central Squares. Cinema blossomed in those early to mid
1970s, with the availability of foreign films, the rediscovery (partly through
the enthusiasm of French New Wave directors) of past decades of American films,
a surge in creative Hollywood films and a growing recognition of film as
art. There was a surge as well in film
schools and courses (though I didn’t know it at the time, the Orson Welles
itself had a film school.)
My devotion was guaranteed in that spring of 1970 when as
part of a Godard retrospective, I saw Pierrot Le Fou three times, including the
last screening in a mostly empty theatre with only hardcore fantatics,
accompanied by the aroma of Gaulloises.
A few years later—certainly by 1973—the Welles Cinema
expanded to three screens, descending in auditorium size but not in quality of
viewing. This was also still the era of
the double feature, except for some first run theatres. So on any given day, there were six movies
playing at the Welles. At its height,
on Saturdays with morning screenings and midnight shows, there might be
ten.
So for the first five years of the 1970s, I had a cinema
experience and film education that is unimaginable now, just as it would have
been unlikely if not impossible before.
I saw probably hundreds of good if not pristine prints of a wide variety
of movies, well-projected, on big movie screens. I saw new movies there, though not the same ones at the Boston
commercial chain theatres. More like
Lucia,
a Cuban film, or
The Harder They Come, the Jimmy Cliff movie from
Jamaica that introduced reggae music to many, which ran at the Welles for a
year or so.
The Welles was one of four movie theatres in Cambridge, all
of them showing foreign films at least some of the time. But the Welles had the most films,
especially in organized retrospectives.
It was mostly there that I saw almost all of Truffaut and Godard
released to that point, a lot of Bergman, Fellini, Renoir, Kurasawa, and of
course Orson Welles. Cocteau’s
Beauty and the Beast, Orpheus, Blood of the
Poet. Hitchcock’s early British films, Chaplin from
The Gold Rush to The
Great Dictator, City Lights, Modern Times and
Limelight (which had
been banned until 1972.)
I saw what was available of the astonishing early French
filmmaker Abel Gance, the definition of innovator and the avante garde,
including a version of
Napoleon (with some scenes split into three screens) and the 1938 version of the antiwar
J’Accuse,
much of it shot in World War I, featuring a harrowing scene of men who were
really about to go into battle with many likely to die, essentially playing
their own ghosts. I believe there was a documentary on him as well, perhaps the 1968
The Charm of Dynamite.
Black Orpheus, The Blue Angel, Rene Clement’s
Forbidden Games, Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart, De Sica’s
Umberto D. Wuthering Heights, The
African Queen, Borsalino, Bicycle Thief, Savage Messiah, Straw Dogs.
There were Bogart,
Garbo and Brando retrospectives, the classic Cary Grant and Kate Hepburn
comedies, and in the full flower of their 1970s revival, all the Marx Brothers
movies except their first,
The Coconuts, not yet available then. There were comedy festivals, one which
included Richard Lester’s non-Beatles movies,
The Knack, the surreal
How
I Won the War, and the even more surreal
The Bed-Sitting Room.
 |
| Gena Rowlands in Faces |
Newer filmmakers were also featured: the early films of John
Cassavetes (
Shadows, Faces, Husbands) and Brian DePalma (the eminently
weird
Hi Mom and
Greetings, starring a very young Robert De Niro,
as well as his 1974
Phantom of the Paradise.) I saw the elder Robert
Downey’s wicked comedy
Putney Swope there, and the original X-rated
Flesh
Gordon. Features were often accompanied by contemporary short films,
and there were programs of silent movies, including Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
Stan Vanderbeek was
one of the experimental filmmakers who came to show and talk about their
work. Robert Altman was hot in the
70s—I saw The Long Goodbye and McCabe & Mrs. Miller
there. I remember documentaries on and
starring Henry Miller (The Henry Miller Odyssey) and Anais Nin (Anais
Nin Observed.) And I’ll never
forget seeing Night of the Living Dead for the first time there, and
hearing for the first time in any theatre the screams of adults watching it.
As part of my cinema enthusiasm, and especially under the
influence of Truffaut and Godard, who always showed books and characters
reading in their films, I started collecting film books, in the same way as the
art books. I was drawn mostly to books
on the French New Waves and its directors, but there was a lot of other writing
on film at the time.
I particularly collected book versions of film scripts,
which often included stills from the film, and sometimes interviews and
criticism. Most of these were in the
Modern Film Scripts series, but there were others. Bergman’s and Truffaut’s
filmscripts in particular became available in hardback and paperback editions.
I saw these books for the first time at the f-Stop camera store that was attached
to the Welles for awhile.
Though we had the privilege of seeing these films on the big
screen, we could only see them when the cinemas exhibited them—there was no
video of any kind, and foreign films were rarely on TV, almost never with
subtitles instead of dubbing. So these
script books were all I could keep. Now
with so much dependence on streaming and the disappearance of art film cinemas
and video stores, when once again most of these movies aren’t readily
available, these books are again all I have of them, unless I have the DVD or
they are on YouTube.
I was writing and editing at the
Phoenix when I met Larry Jackson, manager of the Cinema and the one who
selected the movies shown. Later he was the manager of the entire Complex, but
still programmed the films. (Martha
Pinson succeeded him as manager before she, too, moved to the administrative
offices upstairs, and Mary Galloway took over.)
 |
me at the typewriter some years later in that t-shirt.
Photo by Elizabeth Offner. |
While at the Phoenix I wrote about some of the movies, and I
especially recall writing a feature about a science fiction mini-festival,
which I headlined
“It Came From the Orson Welles.” Larry liked that so much that it put it on a
t-shirt. In 1976 he instituted an annual science fiction marathon, using that phrase as its title. It continued for 11 years at the Welles,
and afterwards at other Boston area theatres apparently to this day.
By the time I left the Phoenix we’d become friends, and he
continued to include me in Welles film activities. For instance, in 1974 I got
to hang around “backstage” with Peter Bogdonavich and Cybil Shepherd when they
introduced their film version of Henry James’ Daisy Miller, and accepted
some semi-silly award from Harvard students.
I saw fame from a different perspective: both of them were near-sighted,
so the crowds around them were mostly noise and a blur. I thought it was admirable how they could
keep their composure.
.jpg) |
| Orson Welles and Larry Jackson, 1976? |
I would tag along with Larry and other film friends to
screenings elsewhere in Boston, featuring question and answer sessions with the
filmmaker. At one such university
event, Larry leaned over to me and said, “There’s a lot of film students
here. One of them will ask what the
shooting ratio was.” Shooting ratio is
the number of film feet shot vs. the number used. Sure enough, the question was soon asked.
Another of these forays however gave me one of the greatest
cinematic experiences of my life: a 1974 screening, probably at Boston
University on a portable screen, of the as-yet unreleased new Cassavettes film
A Woman Under the Influence, starring Gena Rowlands in a transcendent,
bravura performance (which eventually led to an Oscar nomination.)
The lights came up
after this very powerful film to show Rowlands and Cassavettes standing in
front of the screen. For a mind-bending moment it
seemed she had just stepped out of the movie.
I asked a question from the crowd, struggling with emotion, and I saw
the empathy in Rowlands’ eyes.
Afterwards, on the sidewalk outside, I met them both.
 |
| Martha Pinson at the snacks counter |
Seeing films became an obsession. When I wasn’t watching I was sitting in the Orson Welles Cinema
lobby, living on coffee, popcorn and licorice, sometimes chatting with theatre
staff, which included young John Semper, Manny Duran, Murphy Birdsall in the
box office, as well as Mary and Martha.
John Rossi was usually there, but he seemed to be in a perennially bad
mood so I kept my distance. (Rossi was nevertheless mostly responsible for a
unique feature of the Welles: a mimeographed sheet for nearly every movie, with
full credits and excerpts from interviews and critiques. He didn’t seem to think much of me, but he
did include a long excerpt from one of my reviews.)
Most often I was just drinking coffee and starring off into
space or scribbling in my notebook, as I was at the clock struck twelve,
inaugurating my 28th birthday.
I was there so often that Mary or Manny would enlist me to
help take tickets when several movies were starting at the same time. My conversations upstairs with Larry
included my suggestions for films to program (my greatest triumph: the double
bill of Morgan! and Charlie Bubbles, two of my idiosyncratic
favorites of the 1960s British New Wave) and eventually led to becoming the
co-editor of the program book for the 1974 Boston Film Festival there.
I was not the only one to be obsessed with film—the cultural
moment might be indicated by the fact that Jon Landau gave up editing the
record review section of Rolling Stone and writing about music there, to become
its film critic. I recall at least one
movie we saw together at the Welles—it was a Welles in fact. He claimed to have seen 300 movies in one year. Thinking about it, I probably came close. I did have it bad. One Saturday, starting with the morning show
at the Welles, I saw 10 movies in one day, including a few on television… And then I was sick in bed for a week.
By late fall in
1970, the Orson Welles Restaurant opened. It seems to me the bar on the level
above it didn’t open until some time later.
In any case, when I wasn’t at the Cinema, I was opening the thick wooden
doors to the bar, which wrapped around and looked down on the restaurant below
street level. I ate at the Restaurant a
few times—almost always the duck with orange sauce—but that was for special
occasions. If I ate there it was in the
bar, where they served from the lunch and dessert menus. Together the cinemas, the restaurant and the
bar comprised the Orson Welles Complex.
The social life of film and the Welles continued there. In addition to Larry Jackson and Terry
Corey, who also worked upstairs, I met other film buffs, some of whom were
engaged in filmmaking. I even ran into David Axlerod, who started me on my
cinematic journey with the Cinema Club at Knox College; he was in Boston for
day or two, so naturally he stopped by the Welles.
 |
| David Helpern, Jr. Photo by Paula Rhodes |
Among the local filmmakers I met was one of the more
successful at that point: David Helpern, Jr., who became one of my closest
friends of my post-Phoenix days in Cambridge. He introduced me to others, including filmmaker and photographer Paula Rhodes.
David had just finished a one hour documentary film on
director Nicholas Ray, whose most famous films included Rebel Without A
Cause, Johnny Guitar and two Bogart films, In A Lonely Place
and Knock On Any Door. It was
called I’m A Stranger Here Myself, which the documentary noted was what
Ray said was the working title of all of his films, and appears as a line in Johnny
Guitar.
Nicholas Ray had a tumultuous and colorful career, often at
odds with Hollywood, but his movies were admired by film buffs, particularly
the critics and directors of the French New Wave (a short interview with
Francois Truffaut appears in David’s film.)
David had an even longer history with the Orson Welles Cinema
than I, having been (I believe) both a student and teacher in its film school.
(He was later co-editor with me of the 1974 film festival program.) He involved several people from the Welles
in making his film, including Murphy Birdsall (production assistant), and he
acknowledged Larry Jackson, John Rossi and the Welles in general in the
credits. His producer was Jim Gutman,
who had been the chief administrator of the film school.
To introduce his film, he got Nicolas Ray himself to spend a
few days in Boston. At the time Ray had been teaching at what was then Harpur
College (where my ex-prof William Spanos taught), and is now the State College
of New York at Binghamton. Much of the
documentary follows Ray as he works with students on making an actual film, part
of which was later shown at Cannes.
David invited me to tag along with him and Nick Ray, so I
was present for all his public events, his radio interview, and shared a couple
of meals with him. (One evening he and I were the last to leave the table. At the time, the price of sugar at the
grocery store was very high, so as we left I pocketed a few of the small bags
of sugar at the table. He was amused by this, and pocketed some himself.)
Ray was known as an especially sensitive director (he had a
close working relationship with James Dean) and a sensitive man. His talks were sometimes halting, but
concise and articulate. Hearing him
speak softly about the ideals of filmmaking and art in general to a scattering
of attendees after a very late screening in the Welles’ smallest theatre was
almost a religious experience.
I scribbled down one line: “Wherever you go in the world,
the principal concern is ‘Who am I?
Where am I? Why am I?’ We need
to find ways to say hello to each other and look one another in the eye. To dream and try things.”
He was 63 but seemed older, very weathered, but with a
corona of white hair and the remnants of a noble face. (He’d started as an
actor, and would soon appear in Wim Wender’s film, The American Friend.)
He smoked incessantly, but what I didn’t know is that he was struggling with,
or in the grips of alcoholism and drug dependence. A few years later he was diagnosed with inoperable lung
cancer. He died five years after his
days in Cambridge.
But the Orson Welles bar was more than a hangout for film
buffs and those engaged somehow in movies, with ambitions for some sort of film
career. It was presided over by a cadre
of waitresses, the most beautiful young women I’d ever seen in one place, and
they were there every night. I got to
know some of them to some extent, so Buffy, Celine, Emily, Emily, Kathy, Laurie,
Lori, Marie, Martha, Teri and others were my ambiguous Muses.
Cambridge was deep in the throes of absorbing new mores and
conditions brought on by the early 1970s women’s movement, known then as
women’s lib. I had many conversations with other young men there—some of them
complete strangers—about the confusions and ironies arising from that new
consciousness, which had become for some men a nearly paralyzing self-consciousness. We noted for example that while we were
supposed to be getting in touch with our feminine side, we were watching some
of the women of the Welles going off with men on motorcycles.
Meanwhile my professional life was reviving somewhat. In
August I got a letter from Frank Rich responding favorably to an article idea
for New Times, and book review assignments from Suzanne Mantell at the new
Harper’s Bookletter, a publication of Harper’s Magazine.
My New Times idea resulted from a report I must have stumbled on, of research that found a
biological basis for why some people like to stay up late, as I did, and it was
a revelation. The majority of people
are born Larks, who are energetic early and then fade; a minority are Owls,
whose body temperature rises slowly, so full energy doesn’t arrive until
later. I fit the Owl profile exactly—so
it wasn’t a character defect but a matter of biorhythms.
It got me thinking about other elements of the built
environment that affect people but aren’t recognized as having effects, like lighting
and temperature. I might well have been
thinking of my response to the awful lighting in the hospital where I spent so
much time, and how my father kept the house heated too high for my comfort that
winter. Relating all this to people’s
behavior and self-image, especially in the workplace, could be the basis for an
article. I don’t recall if I had to
write a formal proposal but I eventually got the assignment.
I did maybe a half dozen reviews for Harper’s Bookletter,
the most notable being a plea to get Paul Shepard’s Man in the Landscape
back in print. I complained—as I often did, and would again--that the editing had
taken out my writing voice.
I don’t think the Bookletter lasted very long, but I have
kept one with Lewis Lapham’s cover essay on “The Pleasures of Reading.” He was then the editor of Harper's. “On first opening a book I listen for the
sound of the human voice,” it begins. "Most books don’t have it, but there are still so many that do." It’s a long and lovely essay; I read Lapham
every month in Harper’s as well as some of his books. I met him briefly in his
Harper’s office in the 1980s, and he was a friendly generous and open man as
well as a writer always worth reading.
Books I was reading other than those I was paid to read
evidently (from notes) included: Don DeLillo’s first novel Americana; a selection of Kafka short stories, and Conversations
with Kafka by Gustav Janouch; a novel I loved entitled Imaginative
Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino, which I picked up off the
remainder table at Reading International. I wrote Sorrentino to express my admiration. He wrote a gracious letter in return, urging
me to keep writing despite the difficulties.
Also that year, Neil Young came to the Orson Welles with his
first movie,
Journey Through the Past.
I saw it at the press screening, and when the two weeklies panned it, I
wrote a letter to the editor to both papers. They were both music critics, and
suggested Young stay in his lane. I
suggested they both do the same, for it had cinematic qualities, however unconventional,
that they failed to mention. I praised the cinematography and especially the
sound, and called it authentic and surprising.
I recall Larry Jackson saying that I was the only writer who understood the
film.
But they carried the conventional wisdom, and today it’s
known mostly for the concert footage, especially from Buffalo Springfield, but
there are sequences with Hollywood actors and one very visual scene that came
directly from one of the director’s dreams.
During the screening I sat in the aisle seat of the third
row, and I could see Carrie Snodgress, Young’s partner at the time, and their
two year old son Zeke standing near the side curtain by the stage and the
screen. I was absorbed in watching the
movie when I felt a tug on the fringe of my jacket. I looked down to see Zeke, with Carrie close behind him, taking
him away.
I was wearing my
suede jacket with the fringe—I’d always wanted a fringe jacket like those I’d
admired on The Range Rider and other childhood TV heroes, though this one had the added
advantage of thick fleece lining against the Massachusetts cold. Neil Young wore a more classic fringe jacket
in some album photos. That’s what I
immediately thought of at the time—that Zeke had seen the fringe jacket and
headed straight for it.
 |
Neil Young, Larry Jackson and
Manny Duran in the OW lobby |
I met Neil Young in the theatre lobby (and found myself the
center of some buzz when I was mistaken for Graham Nash) and later, looking for
Larry in the Restaurant, I found him at a long table finishing dinner with
Young and his entourage. Larry invited
me to sit down. At some point I said to
Young I’d heard him live several times and I hoped he’d make another live
album. He shrugged and said, how many
times can you do “Southern Man?” I said
I was thinking more of “The Loner,” a song from his first album that I’d heard
lived in Boston. I loved that song:
"He's the perfect stranger, like a cross of himself and a fox. He's a feeling arranger and a changer of the way he talks. He's the unforeseen danger, the keeper of the keys to the locks. Know when you see him/nothing can free him/step aside/open wide, he's the loner." “The Loner,” he said,
considering it. He soon did release
another live album, and “The Loner” was on it.
After dinner, I was among the party that piled in a car or
two and headed up the coast to a roadhouse bar where a local band was
playing. Again we sat around a long
table, now drinking beer. I somehow
wound up playing pool with Neil Young, a game I know nothing about except that,
in my experience, a certain reckless confidence works wonders. So it was this time, and I won (though
really, only because he scratched.)
We were still there when the band ended their final set, and
one of Neil’s guys told them that Neil would like to jam. They refused. The guy put a $50 bill on the drumhead as they were packing up,
but the answer was still no. For some
reason they gave up the chance to jam with Neil Young (maybe they were pissed
that we made noise during their sets), and we lost the opportunity to hear him
so close up.
We headed for the car and the long drive back in the
dark. On the way, Neil spotted a lighted
cross on a hill or atop a church and said that kind of thing freaked him
out. Crosses were evident in his movie,
too, especially as carried by the Klan.
Back in Cambridge the Welles people and I were dropped off in front of
the Cinema. I tried saying goodbye to
Young but he was glowering straight ahead, somewhere else entirely.
I did have another rock and roll moment, though it was more in the nature of a non-encounter. Janet Maslin invited me to grab a sandwich with her and then go to the Bonnie Raitt concert at the Harvard Square Theatre. We ate somewhere in Harvard Square, and she explained that her husband Jon Landau was meeting with the opening act, a band starting to make some noise fronted by a guy named Bruce Springsteen. He was frustrated because he felt their first couple of albums, which didn't sell well, had been badly produced, and Jon had helped make Jackson Browne a star by producing his breakout album. But my conversation with Janet was so irritating and exhausting that I decided to just go home. I'd seen Bonnie Raitt several times so I thought it was no big loss.
A few days later the Real Paper published Jon Landau's column that began with the most famous words in rock critic history: "I have seen the future of rock and roll, and it is Bruce Springsteen." Some of the column was personal and heartfelt, but it was that sentence--bannered on ads--that has lived on. Landau's prophesy was a bit self-fulfilling, in that he did produce Springsteen's breakout album, Born to Run, and later became his manager. It would be several years before I saw Springsteen live, at a theatre in Pittsburgh, and it was amazing. But I missed my chance to be present for the concert that made rock history.
I returned to Greensburg in August for the wedding of my
sister Debbie and Jerry Boice. Their reception happened to be on the evening of
my high school’s 10th anniversary class reunion. So with two of my Central Catholic friends,
Clayton and his wife Joyce, who were also at the reception, I headed a short
distance down the highway to check out the free gathering in the bar of the
restaurant where the reunion dinner would occur. Since I had dated Joyce in high school, she reveled in the idea
that people would be wondering which of us she was married to.
I saw that the cheerleaders etc. of our class were now sleek
married women, and most of the guys were already overweight. I spotted one former friend who’d been timid
and socially backward who was now a prestigious professor with that ageless
middle-aged bearded look of the academic, standing aloof in the shadows, long
drink in hand. We didn’t stay long.
When I got back to Cambridge I found that my apartment had
been broken into. Among the stolen
items were various stereo components and, adding insult to injury, my
typewriter.
I continued to be absorbed working on the novel, completing
another two or three hundred pages of first draft by the end of the year. But money was getting tight. So I tried to concentrate on paying
work.
In late fall I was researching the Larks and Owls article
for New Times, finding relevant research and professional sources to talk
to. Except for the ensuing phone
interviews, I worked in the Widener Library at Harvard, with breaks at Harvard
Square cafes. Once at my favorite
Patisserie (as I recorded in a notebook), I could overhear two conversations at
nearby tables—a couple was talking about places they’d lived, while two women
were discussing scientific research articles.
One person at each table said “Berkeley” at exactly the same time.
I drafted a letter about a possible job to a friend who’d
recently been hired at Rolling Stone—possibly the most pathetic job-hunting
letter ever written, although I've had a few nearly its equal. “I need money, but I’m not up for another long-term
suicide mission like the Phoenix.” I
revised it a few times but to no avail.
In November, I
looked out “into the blue twilight of Columbia Street on Thanksgiving
afternoon. Little traffic, a few people
in the street. Bare branches, old
houses; it is, in repose, a European street.”
In fact even more international—along its lengths were new residents
like the Portuguese speakers, holdover Irish, Jamaicans, educated young whites
still experimenting and living on the margins.
 |
| me and my shadow. Photo by Paula Rhodes |
I noted the talismans of my blue rooms (teal bedroom and
reading room, lighter blue study)--my "alchemist den": Magritte, Cezanne,
Picasso, Klee, Gris, Matisse, Van Gogh, Vermeer repros from the Harvard Coop on
the walls, a cave painting, photo of a Turkish sculptural head, photos of
Groucho, Paul Eluard, George Harrison…a Cartier-Bresson photo of Brigitte
Bardot or a lookalike at a café, photo of a Liverpool girl in a graveyard.
On the mantle photos of my mother and
sisters, a Gino Severini card, a program from my college play. In the study, two photos of me—one as a
small boy, one in college, both with the same gesture; a Marx Brother poster
with an Einstein photo interposed as the fourth brother, photos of Catherine
Deneuve, Truffaut, Vanessa Redgrave.
“Books, colors, music, some furry animals, some food in the kitchen and
a tub for hot baths. My home.”
“I understand what I have to do,” I wrote. “Pay my bills to
keep my blue rooms, the nice heat, the nice hot water, the electricity for the
music, the nice food. I will be
commercial. I will be
journalistic. I will be a cross of
myself and a fox.”
.jpg)
