New Moon

by Richard Grossinger

  “Balloons are cool,” he laughed. “I like the idea of going by balloon. Or even better: I could charter a blimp. Take that, Huntington Hartford!”

  When Bennington Betsy responded by suggesting they rejoin the work gang in Springfield and repair some more houses, he was deflated. “You did go by balloon,” I told him. “Now you’re back. Your next move is to hire a private army to storm the grocery chain with bows, arrows, and catapults. Phi Psi could provide water-balloon support. We could flood them out.”

  His roommate Toby thought this was hysterical. “I can just picture the ice-cream cartons floating down the aisles and everyone looking bewildered. That’d get rid of our turkey image on campus fast.”

  Paul glanced quizzically at me, then said, “You’re pretty good at waking me up and making me look at myself.”

  “What do you expect?” I half-shouted. “I’ve been telling myself the same stories all my life. I’d like to send that same army down to Florida when they’re done and blast all the crystal and silver on Pine Tree Drive into the sea.”

  Paul’s motto was “the greatest good for the greatest number,” and I soon adopted it as my new credo for myself. In early October I startled everyone in Phi Psi by proposing at a House meeting that the whole fraternity transfer to Cal/Berkeley en masse as a political statement. I argued so persuasively that Paul and I were put in charge of a steering committee to draft a letter of application. Most of the members signed it, though only as a symbolic gesture against Amherst College. It was doubtful that any of them would go to California in the unlikely event we were accepted.

  Paul and I were intoxicated with our plan. We fantasized an article in Time Magazine explaining that the artists, writers, musicians, and many of the best students were fed up with Amherst’s elitist social system and consumerist education, its gang rapes and book-burnings. Yes, there was a parody book-burning at one of the fraternities. The event may have been lampoonery, but the books and fire were real.

  Tripp was thoroughly disgusted. “It’s bullshit … the wrong issue. You don’t want to have to do with any college. They’re all bunk. Why draw the line at Amherst?”

  But I was stubborn and zealous. I even took the step of signing up to make a farewell speech in Chapel. Required morning chapels, like those at Horace Mann, were not religious services but occasions for the community to gather and hear speakers of different persuasions, much as at a New England town meeting. When my time came I stood at the podium and, drawing on my newfound pluck, attacked the “cowboy cool” world in front of President Plimpton and an array of students and faculty. I satirized Amherst’s phony critical intelligence, its gentleman jocks whom I characterized as provincial, anti-intellectual, and anti-women, contributing to violence and exploitation.

  In retrospect, my speech reads like liberal clichés and adolescent utopianism—a disappointment to my memory of the charge I felt running through me at the time. Its sentiments were far less heartfelt and singular than those I had expressed two years earlier at Horace Mann. Yet I thought of myself as awakened, liberated. I wanted to re-cast “Elmer the Cow” as spokesman for the masses.

  I compared the local milieu to Horace Mann, where Bob Alpert stood against the war-makers and Clinton directed our attention to the veil of life and death. Then I invoked Swarthmore, where, I said, with stagey elegance, “Girls and boys sat under trees dropping flower petals into one another’s philosophy books.” I closed by quoting the dying Malone.

  I hadn’t earned the voice I spoke in. A novice politico riding borrowed enthusiasm, I must have seemed naïve and churlish to most of the audience. Yet I captured an energy, a mood that was prevalent if indeterminate and unarticulated at the time. The speech was well received in some quarters, and I picked up many new friends as well as raised Phi Psi’s profile as Revolution Central.

  After my freshman-year buddy Marshall Bloom asked me for a copy, without forewarning he printed it up and distributed it on campus—an imperious deed blamed on me to this day. Soon after, President Plimpton invited me into his office to discuss the matter. He said that I had raised a number of good points, ones that were being considered by the administration, and he hoped I would stay and contribute to the college’s transition. He thought it would be character-building and offered his assistance.

  “My door is open,” he said. “Just come by.”

  I thanked him, but I imagined then that I had an appointment with destiny. I didn’t see how transferring was as much a fantasy as interstellar travel. I never pictured what it would be like to enter a large public university on the other side of the country.

  One morning a group of us stood on Paul’s balcony when a row of grade-schoolers passed with their teacher. “Look at the men up there,” pointed one little boy.

  “Ooo,” shuddered Toby as he giggled, “he called us men.” But that’s what we were.

  With the freedom to choose most of my own courses for the first time that fall, I felt like a pilgrim in a treasure trove: the book-sized Amherst catalogue with its pages upon pages of intellectual adventures organized by department. I expected college life to improve, but the fates continued to confound me at every turn.

  I signed up for creative writing and found myself in a class that so little resembled Mr. Ervin’s it might just as well have been Martian cribbage. It was taught by an aged poet named Rolfe Humphries. In the early part of the century he had been Amherst’s only football All-American and, unknown to me before I enrolled, he relished filling the roster with current players because, as he put it, athletes were the most disciplined writers. Much of the team was in the course to pick up a gut “A.”

  Humphries disliked my work as much as it was possible to dislike anything politely. “You’ve got a lot of succulent imagery,” he jibed, “but I doubt there’s any meat on the bones.” Everyone snickered in solidarity against an upstart too big for his britches.

  After a while I stopped reading my work aloud and simply listened to him adulate ballads of the locker room and fine-tune students’ translations of French surrealists.

  My Shakespeare teacher, Mr. Baird, was a grandiose replica of Mr. Metcalf. At the first class he told us that all students were ignoramuses and he hadn’t heard an original idea in forty years. Then he confined our written assignments to single paragraphs cobbled in class: “The less of your idiocies I have to endure, the less cranky I’ll be when grading you.” He also delegated us passages from Hamlet to memorize and then tested us on our recall. I couldn’t resist commenting, as I handed in my transcriptions: “Sorry I didn’t think of anything original.” He chased me out of the room with a quavering fist. Probably just high theater, but my stunt made the campus rounds.

  My European literature course had a spectacular reading list (Camus, Sartre, Malraux, E. M. Forster—stuff which I had looked forward to for years), but another arrogant, self-important teacher, a younger man named Guttmann, wrote “No!” all over my papers and gave me D’s on every one. My formulations of symbols and cosmic mysteries were rejected in single red slashes, as though no further explanation were necessary. Still I refused to tailor my writing to his pedant’s reduction of art to sociology. Freshman year had burned grade consciousness out of me. I thought of myself as a rebel in search of greater truth. Forster’s soliloquy in Howards End defined me to myself:

  “Only connect!… Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.”

  “Only connect” became my adage alongside “the greatest good for the greatest number” and words of the indefatigable Beckett: “I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows.”

  My other subjects were psychology, geology, and American Studies. Unfortunately, Introductory Psychology had nothing to do with Freud. It was mainly stati
stical. We read books on sensation, perception, and memory, and, for a term paper, were asked to make up our own personality tests. I devised a scale of “salty,” “sandy,” and “oinky” through which I proposed an evolution of consciousness based on Abraham Maslow’s spectrum of self-actualization (its ninety calibers included amethyst-salty, strawberry-sandy, papoose-oinky, tobacco-saltless, cellophane-sandless, buckle-oinkless, etc.). It was the same romanticism that Tripp and Marx decried. But I couldn’t thrash through my ritual coronation of Betsy to anything more cogent, so I wallowed in its preciousness. It was emotionally all I had, and it kept me going.

  “On to the peaks!” was my professor’s sole satirical comment. He gave me a B.

  Geology provided primordial images for The Moon—prehistoric volcanoes, rivers born in rivulets and churning in stone for millennia to form canyons, overflowing their banks and dying into oxbows like the lake of that name in Northampton. That was the main use I made of our curriculum: metaphors. Otherwise I found the ritual of lava and diastrophism sterile and formulaic, culminating only in the science of oil. We were being trained for Esso and Standard.

  At his instigation Leo Marx was my teacher again, this time for American Studies, his real specialty. There he was not nearly as receptive as in freshman English. He told me, even before the first meeting, that he wanted me to develop critical faculties this year at the expense, if necessary, of my creativity. When I handed in my poem “If They Bomb …” for an assignment to describe our political philosophy, he rejected it (“Political, maybe, maybe; philosophy, no!”) and asked me to try again. He also preached vehemently against Phi Psi. Because it was a fraternity—though a renegade one—he gratuitously prejudged it, calling it “undisciplined” and “indefensibly anarchic.” My pleas on its behalf convinced him only that I was being indoctrinated. “The lady doth protest too much…. Richard, the only place for a serious student is a dorm.”

  But Marx and I found a far more meaty bone of contention. During the fall I had begun corresponding with my former classmate Chuck Stein, now at Columbia, because I was reading the work of his literary mentor Charles Olson. I had considered Olson “Chuck’s thing” in high school. His poems were obscure riddles outside my range of intellect or interest, relevant only insofar as my friend used them to elucidate his own art. Though they had a spirit of bigness and cosmos, I preferred Robert Penn Warren, Faulkner, Nabokov, Hamilton Basso, even Stephen Crane—stuff I could get at and interpret by sublimation, displacement, and allegory, my neo-Freudian legacy. Part of me remained a pop psychoanalyst who hunted deft symbols and subterfuge meanings. Another part, like my lit-crit former girlfriend Jill, dismissed the postmodern perspective as indulgent obfuscation—gnarls of allusions cluttering in inaccessible screeds. But now, after my encounters with Tripp, discursion and open-field composition earned a free pass: gateways to a different kind of profundity. And that brought Olson back into my purview.

  First I bought his small blue collection The Distances. Like Malloy and Malone Dies, it was published under Grove Press’ Evergreen imprint, which drew the two outlier writers into cahoots. Then I used Chuck’s notes to forge a path through each poem.

  Olson was a plunge into the total unknown. He sounded nothing like Robert Lowell and Archibald MacLeish, the two most admired poets locally. Their lines were as smooth as butter, a marching band; his were jagged and jazzlike, alternating between the gruff vernacular and delphically esoteric. His proposition of words as things rather than symbols required a switch of focus and valuation, but it became a backdoor to the riddles of freshman English and history, as well as the mystery of the quantum hinted at in my physics course. The trick was to stop looking for lyricism, wistfulness, and evocation; Olson was more like bebop or high skiffle.

  There were plenty of multidirectional metaphors and levels of code in just the first couple of pages: kingfisher birds, the glyph “E,” Mao translated into French, translucent eggs and fishbones, and a large gold wheel of 3800 ounces—all arcanely strung together in rhythmic ciphers suggesting something as remote and exigent as cosmic rays.

  Though I couldn’t articulate it, I intuited what he was saying. It lay at the heart of Cro Magnon cave paintings, Neolithic myths, continental drift, and the voyages of Cabot and Champlain, a tapestry that was simultaneously astrophysical, etymological, Eurasian, Mediaeval, non-figurative, and avant-garde. The Distances was far more complex and integral than anything in the Amherst curriculum, for it approached the invisible backdrop to the whole shebang: culture, cosmos, meaning itself. That was a parley I could believe in!

  To Leo Marx it was the last straw. “He’s a lunatic,” he shouted at me in his office after summoning me for a meeting after class. “Even his own students don’t know what he’s talking about. Reading iconoclasts like that, you are going nowhere fast.” He was so exasperated by this fresh sacrilege he could hardly think of anything strong enough to invoke. “Ask Katey Carver what she thinks of him,” he finally screamed, dramatically throwing up his arms.

  I did, and my editor at Viking agreed emphatically, instructing me to seek more suitable reading material. As a start she sent me Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain-King, marking a few of the passages she had written for him, a playful slip of confession. I wondered why she hadn’t resorted to Bellow sooner, but I guessed that Olson was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I read the novel, but it seemed fake. It didn’t have to do with real Africans, real madness, or the local gods it feigned to invoke. By then I had come to accept Tripp’s judgment of most American novels: advertising slogans disguised in spurious narratives. At least Olson offered rogue and mutinous recourse, the possibility of a more radical map of reality, beyond the governing mirages of Western academia. His texts as well stowed no subterfuge plans or adult agendas for me (which Marx had in spades). He held out no promises, sought no adulation. No one else could have written his words.

  Olson was making me an offer, “Find me and you find yourself.” That was what I had believed since my initiation by Abraham Fabian, but I had never run across a matching text or anyone since to keep me company and show the way. The Distances did it by saying, in effect, “Truth is just as ambiguous and evocative and dangerous as it feels, so go to it and good luck to us all, because reality’s the same as a Minoan map or a Mayan zodiac and we are drawing our own figure on the world, on the universe and syntax too.”

  A sequence called me back to Betsy at the Yuma station but at a different frequency that had the power to pull me out of my perennial funk into true art. I posted it above my desk:

  O love who places all where each is, as they are, for every moment,

  yield

  to this man

  that the impossible distance

  be healed.

  “Yes!” I shouted inwardly. “Yes!”

  In the cusp of autumn 1963 I rode my bike along county roads, pulling into fruit stands, lugging back bundles of grapes and apples in its twin baskets. At twilight, pedalling to keep the headlight on, I glided through pumpkin and tobacco fields. Unknown spirits hung just beyond in the gloaming, providing voices for The Moon. At my desk among Indian maize and pumpkin gourds I wrote:

  The Moon was out, faint jigsaws on a faraway slice of light, the light pale down on the trees. And jigsaws were there if one looked closely enough. They were there as faint stains on a light that has been shining long enough to be stained, proof of mountains and valleys, deep and uneven, high and rocky, black as the space that separates planets.

  On Earth, when mountains rise and valleys cut into beds, vegetation grows lush and deep, and in the depths of vegetation is the dirt and mystery of the world. There in the dampness insects live their whole lives: some emerge, flutter about for a while, then return. Down in the depths of vegetation, water flows and mud rots; pollen flies up, and leaves die and disassemble, matted down into rusty sand. There are worms and bugs and moles and fish….

  But the Moon is ragged and craggy and empty and cold. It hangs in th
e sky, a lantern of emptiness, trying to tell us, playing its sterile fire on the burning vegetation, offering eternal life, an eternal answer.

  It is unheeded. It is too ghostly and full of mystery, too faraway to be understood by such as us. Its stains are too faint.

  Saturday nights at Phi Psi those guys with dates drank and danced, a tape deck serving as a continuous jukebox, the reels assembled from our various collections, mine among them. Others popped in and out, bullshitting, hanging around the keg. I sat in a corner with Paul and dateless others, listening to songs, sharing conversation, stuffing myself with pretzels and peanuts, refilling cups from the tap. These were the best friends I had ever had.

  Someday, when I’m awfully low,

  When the world is cold,

  I will feel a glow just thinking of you….

  So sad, so finite our lives against the great secrets, but so warm and friendly in the Phi Psi basement … until, weary and a bit high, I carted myself to the spaceship attic and crawled into my berth for the cold flight through the Galaxy.

  Early in the year, fraternities were invited to gatherings called mixers at Smith and Mount Holyoke dorms. I joined cars full of Phi Psi members and found myself in congested scrums in which a handful of girls were surrounded by guys from not only Amherst but more far-flung colleges like Dartmouth, Williams, and Yale. It was barely possible to cross the room, let alone find a female not already engaged in small talk. A tall, smiley Phi Psi junior named Fred was generous enough to pack his Rambler full of plebes. He attended every mixer just for the opportunity to add names to his address book. He considered an evening a victory if he garnered the phone number of one moderately good-looking girl—though who knew if he ever called them? I watched him snake his way through the landlocked masses, beaming and indomitable, like an autograph collector. I gave up after a pair of futile outings.