New Moon (51 page)

“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:

“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:

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.

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.

From friends in North Dorm I heard of another strategy. Many students had procured the last two years’ freshman picture books from Smith and Holyoke. These provided hometown and high school of each girl next to her photograph. Guys had gotten dates simply by phoning dorms and asking by name for a girl selected from her mug shot, then asking her out. I tried to interest my friends in this method, but the response was a flurry of horrified looks and “Not me’s.”

Two years earlier I had simply picked up the phone and called Jill. Now the same inner troll would not leave me in peace until I tried this foolhardy stunt. I wanted to risk my new articulateness. I considered myself daring and radical like Tripp, but still unborn. Jeff was fully socialized, past baby fat, a glamorous man. “What’s a phone call to get a date,” I teased Paul, “compared to the greatest good for the greatest number!”

He chuckled and comically wagged his noggin.

I sat in the House library beside him, turning pages of the Smith Class of ’67 book, girls who had entered one year behind us. I finally selected a pretty face from Music and Art in New York—someone from more or less my own background. Tripp, passing by, smiled beneficently. “Grossinger,” he said, “I can remember when I took my own first puny chances.”

Surrounded by muttering cohorts, I acted from an
esprit
of group
heroism, playing my role to the hilt. I told them to give me space, then swallowed hard and dialed. When the phone was answered I asked for Amy. There was a torturous pause, then the clatter of her approach … a questioning “Hello?”

I said who I was … and would she like to go out Saturday night?

“Sure, why not.”

Just like that.

When I reappeared in the hallway Paul was so excited he could hardly contain himself.

“Now,” I insisted, “someone else has to try.” But they all ran away.

That Saturday afternoon the first blast of hot nectar from the shower was like a shot of eternity. “God,” I thought, “so much has already happened, I’ve been alive so long.” I tended to drift numbly and hyperactively from day to day, to quell the past and its glimmerings. But a rush of anticipation and holy water sent memories flowing from my heart … treasure hunts in Central Park, the shower room at Horace Mann, my dates with Jill. With a sudden buoyancy I began to howl:
“You’re lovely, / Never never change…. ”
And then Olson:
“Hail and beware the dead who will talk life until you are / blue in the face…. ”

“What a medley!” proclaimed Jenkins, our jug-band director, from the adjacent faucet.

In myself, there was something almost happy, almost enough joy and wonder, enough camaraderie, to get myself through this life.

I ran to the hitching corner at College Street and flagged a quick ride from an upperclassman.

Amy was red-haired and sprightly, a prospective painter. We kept up a lively conversation all the way to Amherst with ample ties of shared interest—subway routes and Manhattan prep schools, modes of aesthetics, disappointments in our respective colleges. We spent much of the evening in the Phi Psi basement, occasionally dancing, talking to my housemates. We went up to my room when Greg left and continued our conversation, chastely and formally; then we hitched back.

The evening had been a success, but there was no tension between
us—flirtatious or intellectual—no reason to call Amy again.

The next time I switched to the Mount Holyoke ’67 book. But the moment I saw my date in person my heart sank. She was less animated and far chubbier than her picture, and she was hackneyed, politically conservative, and patrician. We had a hard time finding anything to talk about and hitched back at nine. I was so relieved to be rid of her that I didn’t try the picture books again for two weeks.

On my third go-round I returned to the Smith book—and good old New York. I called a girl named Susan who had gone to Riverdale. “Since when does someone from Horace Mann ask out Riverdale?” she griped perkily. I was momentarily flustered. Then she said, “I’ll go out with you. I dig Phi Psi.”

Leaping out of the stairwell I shouted, “I’ve tied Jim Brideweser’s record!” He was a Yankee utility infielder who had gone three for three on the last day of the 1953 season—his only three at-bats of the year (outside my armory game).

Susan was a field-hockey player—heavy-boned and sinewy; she was also witty and argumentative, her savvy and poise moving faster than I could dodge. To her I probably seemed tight and unfledged, wet behind the ears. She was primed for the big time.