We climbed Marie’s long, wooden staircase through woods that would never see snow. The house felt almost like a tree house. Marie gathered us in and hugged my parents. Then she turned to me. She put a hand on each of my shoulders and looked me in the eye. “How old are you now, young Dick?”
She spoke as though she knew me, when she did not. “Twenty-three.”
“My goodness,” she said.
She turned and stood beside me. She had one arm across my back. She clapped me once, firmly, on the shoulder. Then she stood away.
She looked at Mom and Dad. “All those many years ago,” she said. And then she shook her head, and then she served lunch.
By dessert, we were relaxed and sprawling. Marie remembered: “When first I saw you, Dick, in your navy whites, when you and Betty knocked on our door. Weren’t we aghast!”
Mom laughed. “We hadn’t known how to dress. What does one wear to a beatnik party?”
“Not navy whites!”
“Handsome as they are,” Mom reminded us, twinkling at Dad.
“Yes,” Marie agreed. Then, speaking of her ex-husband, she went on. “And I could tell what Kenneth was thinking when you two were at the door. I could tell what he was thinking.”
Dad was happy to take Marie’s bait. “What was he thinking?”
“This—military man at the door,” she grinned. “He was thinking that this military man can’t be Eberhart.” Marie touched Dad’s arm. “You were supposed to be a cadaverous aesthete with burning eyes and the haunted air of a Baudelaire.” She broke off. “Hey—good!”
We all laughed. Dad was having fun. “Ha-ha!” he said in his grand-gesture way. “Ha-ha.”
“What Kenneth wrote about you, Dick—‘obviously the finest poet of his generation’—that’s what he said, Dick, and he meant it.”
Then, Marie’s face became more inward. She looked down at the table for a moment. Mom made her mmmm sound, her soothing sound.
Marie’s ex-husband’s poetry—Kenneth’s poetry—often burned brightly to illumine the transcendental quality of married love. Fine; that was good in itself, as a theme for poetry. But there is the human side to poetry, which can complicate the pure art of the words. This woman who had just fed us lunch was the second of what, in the end, were to be Kenneth’s four wives, each of them apparently his muse regarding the transcendental quality of married love.
I had much to learn yet about the beatnik way.
Then Marie took a breath and brightened and turned to me. “What about you, young Dick? Are you a poet too?”
“Um, I’ve written only one poem in my life.”
Dad explained, “Dikkon is here to get a master’s in theology at Berkeley.” This was factually incorrect, but it was more-or-less true enough—for a poet. I did not correct him. It would have been pedantic to insist that it was a master’s in psychology and religion at Pacific School of Religion (coupled with a master’s of divinity), and not at Berkeley but just up “Holy Hill” from that university.
“Good for you,” Marie asserted, “and to think that it all started in Inverness!” Then she looked at my mother and winked. “It was the lambs, Betty. That’s what I said at the time. The lambs!”
Everyone laughed, though I did so awkwardly—I knew the reference from before, from my mother.
Mom belted a laugh. “The lambs! Richie, remember? It was the lambs!” Dad responded to Mom’s effusion with a wave.
I felt torn. Of course, I desired to hear everything—every item in the backstory. But I feared that, hearing the items, I might become even more tightly wound inside our family saga than I already was, and from which, at my age of twenty-three, I was doing my best to be unwound.
I had newly moved from New England to Berkeley—yes, for the degrees—but more so to make a life of my own, with my new and sparkling wife. My new and sparkling wife was not the woman of the train accident, though that woman had attended our wedding with a gracefulness that spoke well for her character. My new and sparkling wife and I were both of us too young, it is true, but we were full of beans just the same.
Shortly after we arrived in Berkeley and set ourselves up in a student apartment on LeConte Street, here came my parents, for ten days, to see our digs and to renew old friendships among Beat poets as well as among many other poets who were not Beats. As I have said before, Dad and Mom did not particularly care which school a poet was considered to be part of. Dad and Mom loved all energetic writers and refused to participate in literary war.
Before my marriage, Mom had her doubts about the union, and she shared them with me. Not Dad. The evening before my marriage, Dad sat me down. I expected his paternal advice, which I suspected, from Dad, would be positive. Dad liked my bride. She was pretty and funny and spoke French fluently and knew literature well and looked lusty and was endowed, not only with your basic female skeleton, but with all that other fancy stuff that comes along with it too.
Instead of advising me, which I desired, here’s what Dad said: “You have more courage than I had when I was your age.”
I did not feel courageous. I was excited, of course, for the morrow, but I was scared.
Dad went on. “I could not have done what you are about to do. I did have a candidate when I was a little older than you. We were in love,” he smiled, “at least in an aesthetic way. But I feared that, if I had done what you are about to do, the poetry would stop.”
Not advice, this.
I already knew about Louise. I already knew about Dad’s and her two-year, epistolary love affair, across the Atlantic, between England—where Dad was at Cambridge University—and New Jersey—where she lived with her wealthy family. I already knew that Dad asked for “actual companionship,” as he put it, but that she avoided it. Once, the two of them happened to be in Paris at the same time. Each knew that the other was there. And yet still—even in the City of Light—Louise avoided a meeting. Letters were better.
At Dad’s insistence, finally, Louise did stage a meeting, this time on Sicily, at Taormina, on a particular esplanade beside the sea. She had thought it all out. She even went so far as to rename the two of them for their assignation. She would be Maia, and Dad must be Ricco. She would be standing watching the sun, wearing her special green dress, and he would approach her from behind, and she would sense his arrival, and she would half turn, and her hair would come free. . . .
Dad: “And the next ten days were heaven.”
It amused me then to picture Dad back in London shortly after his tryst. He attended a show of the paintings of D. H. Lawrence. Dad spent an hour next to the man, saying nothing, too shy to introduce himself. So there was the burly Midwestern football player, just back from ten days of aesthetics on Sicily, lurking over the diminutive novelist, who, just at that moment, I imagine—the timing is right—was probably dreaming up Connie Chatterley in his mind.
The literary world gives us such evocative snapshots, does it not?
I was susceptible to snapshots. I had inside me a whole scrapbook of snapshots. I treasured them with filial love. I loved Dad’s stories of his Asiatic and European adventures, but I was burdened by them too.
How on earth was I to become someone other than a derivative edition of him?
The evening before our visit to Marie’s, Dad wanted to introduce me to City Lights Bookstore. The store was thriving when we stopped by. It was lots of fun for Dad. I was happy to see Ferlinghetti, who owned the store and whom I had known and liked for several years. Then Dad and I ended our day at Fort Point in a soft San Franciscan fog.
Fort Point is underneath the massive south end of the Golden Gate Bridge. The Golden Gate itself is the narrow passageway through which all shipping must enter and exit the harbor. It is a spot filled with heavy tide flows, shrieking gulls, lolloping sea lions, and romance. It was romantic to me, anyway, because it was through this very passageway that Dad had shipped out forty-three years before, when he was almost exactly my own age of twenty-three.
Leanin
g against a post, Dad told me a little about the West Faralon, the cargo ship that he had boarded along the Embarcadero when he was an ordinary seaman with naught but a rucksack on his back, a copy of Shakespeare in his pocket, and the idea that he should end up eventually in England, at Cambridge. I had heard these tales before, of course, but standing as we were at the very spot where his adventure began, I was keen to hear them again.
By the time the West Faralon reached China, Dad could hand, reef, and steer (that is, work with the ropes, handle the sails, and steer)—he was an able seaman. The ship moved cargo from port to port, all up and down the China and Philippine Seas. My father learned how to stay out of the worst of port life—how to get a view of the mysterious East and not a knife in his ribs.
Moving heavy cargo is difficult, tedious, sometimes dangerous work. In Dad’s report, the crews who worked the cargoes and the derricks and the lines and did the chipping and the painting and the polishing of the brass were urgent only for their quayside whores and for their whiskey. In all his travels, among all the ships’ crews, Dad told me, he had met only one sympathetic, artistic soul.
As Dad talked about the quick dawns of the Southern Ocean, a big cargo ship loomed out of the fog, heading west through the Gate, her high steel hull passing not more than forty yards away from us. Her deck lights cast a liquid gleam along her rail. A seaman stood there idly, watching the shore as his ship departed. He saw us in the fog and raised a hand in greeting. We waved back.
Then Dad told again the old story of his captivity aboard a German freighter on which he had booked passage—as a passenger this time and not as a seaman—for his crossing of the Indian Ocean toward Africa and eventually Europe. That year was not so very long after World War I, and the German captain had not yet made his peace.
It was summer. The Indian Ocean was hot. The captain stripped my father—this Eengleesh—of passenger status and sent him below to chip and paint, to chip and paint, to chip and paint the ceiling of the engine room, all day, day after day. The temperature below the steel deck was so hot, Dad reported, that climbing back almost naked onto the dazzling deck was like stepping into a cold mountain pond.
Dad jumped ship in Port Said and made the rest of his way across the Mediterranean to France in a small coastal freighter. Shortly afterward, he landed at St. John’s College, Cambridge University, in the high intellectual pipe-smoke and claret tutorials of F. R. Leavis and of I. A. Richards, each of whom was formative of a then-important new posture of literary criticism called New Criticism. New Criticism advocated close study of the poem itself without any attention paid to the person or the context of the poet. Dad was then, and he remained, deeply skeptical of the efficacy of removing the maker from the made.
I never met Leavis, but during my college years, Ivor and Dorothy Richards would sometimes “cross the herring pond” to teach a course at Harvard, and they would come visit us in New Hampshire. We would all go out into the hills on snowshoes and brew cups of tea over small “barbies” while discussing what should become of poetry in the new world of the 1960s.
Among Dad’s pals at Cambridge were William Empson, another New Critic and later a knight, and especially T. H. “Teddy” White, each of whom was beginning to write. Dad and his friends would dash off to hear the latest of the traveling debates between the Christian G. K. Chesterton and the atheist-turned-mystic G. B. Shaw (you could hear every word of Chesterton, even from the back row; Shaw mumbled), or else they would go striding about upon the moors. I loved to imagine my father and Teddy White on windy walks, with mufflers and pipes. I loved this image of the two of them because I loved White’s Arthurian fantasy The Once and Future King, on which the musical Camelot was based.
After a time, Dad’s storytelling ceased, and we stood in silence, gazing out across the Pacific toward Dad’s old adventure. “And how are you now, Dad?” I asked after a time.
Dad looked at me. We were of the same height by then, he and I, with me perhaps a trifle taller if I flexed my toes. “I should say I am a reasonably happy man.”
Not what I had wanted to hear, at all, at all, for I was only just reasonably happy myself.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
My first wife and I arrived in Berkeley eighteen months after 1967’s “summer of love.” We were not ourselves flower children, but we were titillated to have found our way to what, only recently, a breathless media had made famous as the drug and sex capital of the universe. You could wander around the Haight-Ashbury district, eighteen months after “the gathering of the tribes,” and observe that the hippie scene was still extant in the way people dressed (or undressed) and the decor of the head shops. But there was beginning to be a grubbiness about it too—its fingernails were getting dirty.
We were New Englanders, my wife and I. What impressed us about the Bay Area were sensual things—the very light dazzled our eyes. The pavement of some streets in Berkeley was painted pink! There were flower baskets hanging everywhere, flowers whose names glided sensually across our tongues as we spoke them. And wine! You could go and watch people make it. You could sit in a garden beside a vineyard, and draw out a cork, and loll in the sunshine, and eat triangles of Roquefort feuilletés that your wife had just baked that morning.
My wife and I loved California’s physical beauty—the bones of the earth showed through its tan, dry skin. We loved fruit we had never seen before, beautiful as jewels. We loved striding down a trail up in the foothills and stopping to speak intimately with some fellow strider going the other way, until we noticed that no last names were exchanged. A last name points to a past. We striders, it seemed, had no pasts. I was troubled that we should consider ourselves motes and spindrift of the Universal Consciousness, with no actual history of our own.
As much as we delighted in the sensual, we were also impressed with intellectual things. You could wander across the Berkeley campus under the eucalyptus trees—with now and then a whiff of tear gas on the air, for this was, after all, the time of People’s Park and its riots—and you could stroll down Telegraph Avenue to Shambhala Books, where you could inhale the mystical incense that burned beside the cash register, and you could dip into volumes on tarot or volumes speculating about the religious consciousness of dolphins. When you were done with such esoterica, you could then leaf through volumes on theosophy, and you could make your way to pages describing the orgies of Aleister Crowley.
Living large!
Then you would stroll farther down Telegraph and wander into Cody’s Books, and there you would find volumes about British bohemians, some of whom your dad had met—though, as he told you later, with caution. They had an aura, though, those British Bloomsbury pals, all of them circulating around Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Their photographs in the books were black and white, which was soothingly dated to the eye, and which was unlike the still psychedelically vibrant colors that exploded among the hippies of our own time. Still, these British bohemians espoused free love and communism and pacifism and atheism and freedom from social convention, just as our hippies did.
My wife and I had on our coffee table Bloomsbury memoirs depicting the excitements of the 1930s. She and I were amazed. These bohemians would try anything, at first it seemed.
An example of what they would try was reported to us in literary form in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando. In it, Woolf toys with the eponymous character—who was probably based on her lover Vita Sackville-West. As Sackville-West’s son states in his critique of the novel, Woolf “explores Vita, weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her.”[2]
Everything was tolerable to the bohemians; especially tolerable was any sort of sex.
However, there was one thing that was apostasy. There was one thing which absolutely they would not tolerate: religious belief.
That particularly dark heresy pierced Virginia Woolf to the quick. When T. S. Eli
ot converted to the Church of England, Woolf cut him severely. To her sister, Woolf wrote, “I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was really shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.”[3]
So sneered this heroine of literary feminists . . . and future suicide.
While fascinated by my exposure to a more lurid sensuality than I had experienced before, I was troubled, too. Those bohemians left their suicides all over the stage, scattered around like the bodies littering the fifth act of a Shakespearean tragedy. All this was very confusing to me. What was I to do with it?
My fundamental belief was that it is good when someone discovers that he believes in God. To believe in God one must acknowledge that one has a history and an actuality of one’s own.
As a boy, I had not known Eliot well. When he would visit us in Cambridge during his trips back to the States from his adopted England, he was not one of the poets who found it easy to be pals with a child. He and Dad liked each other well enough, I could see that, and Mom once told me that Eliot admired Dad’s burning lyrics—because, as she said to me, he was too cerebral to have produced such language himself.
Mostly, I remember that there was laughter around the dining table about Britishisms. Later, when I was older, Mom would remember some of them for me. For example, Eliot once reassured Mom about the timing of a future appointment by saying that he would “just come around and knock you up.” Once, Eliot gave me a copy of his thin book of nonsense verse, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which I have always enjoyed, coming as it did from a man whose name has become synonymous with esoteric allusions to nearly every element of Western and Eastern language and art and philosophy. But the cats were just funny.
The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told Page 13