Bowdoin Beata: 50th Class Reunion

When a letter arrived announcing the 50^th reunion of the Class of 1959 at Bowdoin, I quickly realized that my retirement income wouldn’t allow me to contribute the amount our reunion committee had suggested as a basic pledge from each member. As a consequence—and perhaps out of embarrassment—I decided not to attend. Yet I was torn. Although I happily participated in our class’s 25^th reunion and I’ve visited the College on annual trips to Maine, it has been many years since I’ve reconnected with classmates and friends, several of whom have died in the interim. And of those who were still alive, I wondered what we would have to say to one another, considering that my own life has hardly been what I or my classmates might have expected. Under those circumstances, what sort of account could I give of myself?

But the reunion was not about success or failure—it wasn’t even about expectations (except perhaps for the College’s need in a time of economic crisis to depend upon the generosity of graduates to strengthen the endowment and contribute to its many innovative programs). The reunion was, as Judy, my ever practical and consoling partner of twenty-two years, suggested, an opportunity, perhaps one of our last, for the surviving members of our class to reconnect with each other after half a century apart.

“Wouldn’t it be fun?” she offered. “Besides,” she added, “I’d like to go. I want to meet your old friends. Let’s treat it like a mini vacation.”

So we signed up and I pledged what I felt I could afford to the Alumni Fund before falling back into my daily life of writing, political meetings, emailing my children, my addiction to television news, and the long walks Judy and I take each day by the ocean that has sustained me ever since I came home to Gloucester and decided to live and work here—again, much to my surprise.

Of course, the reunion was great fun. Once we were safely inside the College gates and had registered and been assigned our dormitory suite (no less), we began to feel part of the swing of things. Students chauffeured old grads around in golf carts from dormitory rooms to parties and dinners. Everybody you met exchanged the famous “Bowdoin hello.” The liquor flowed, as we did, from one reception to another; the food was, as always, superb, the hospitality legendary. In short, I felt back home in college again.

The best part, however, was meeting up with old friends, many of whom I had not seen since our 25^th reunion—and some of whom I hadn’t laid eyes on since graduation. The laminated tags we dutifully hung around our necks with our names and graduation pictures helped us to avoid the embarrassment of not recognizing each other. Though it was amazing to consider than many of us hadn’t changed that much, give or take some hair, the addition of a beard (I noticed many more of those since our undergraduate days, when few of us dared to go unshaven), and a little extra weight (I vainly tried to walk some of mine off before reunion, to little avail).

Members of our class have distinguished themselves as physicians, lawyers, scientists, artists, writers, photographers, teachers, pastors, scholars, public officials, business executives and investment bankers. We’ve started companies, gone into politics, sat as judges and served our country in the military. We even have a brigadier general in our midst. One of our classmates has practiced Yoga for many years while also involved in holistic healing; another developed a well known ski resort and wrote a book about it. Some returned to the small towns of their origins, while others have lived and worked all over the world. All of us have had interesting lives, and it was amazing to hear classmates share their insights and experiences over the far-too-brief weekend.

What was incredible, though, was how much we remembered about each other, not only from fifty years ago, but from the class notes we’d been sharing in the alumni magazine in the intervening time. In fact, we knew a lot about what each of us had been up to in the way of children, grand children, great grandchildren, second marriages, vacation or retirement homes in Maine (in Brunswick even). There was a moving service in the Bowdoin Chapel on Saturday afternoon to remember those of us who are no longer alive; and among those of us who made it back to Brunswick, there was a great deal of serious conversation about what we’d done, where we’d been and how we felt about it all.

I had several talks with classmates about attitudes like homophobia that were often prevalent when we were undergraduates, prejudices that we have since regretted and tried to outgrow. In fact, we paused to reflect upon what it must have been like for our gay classmates in those far less tolerant times, not to speak of the very few people of color who were present on campus. We talked of class, too, and of the social and ethnic backgrounds so many of us came from in small Maine or Massachusetts towns, from families among whom we were the first to attend college. There was, we agreed, a pressure on those of us from immigrant families to succeed, just as those students from upper class families were held to certain norms of behavior and social expectation.

The College was small in the 1950s, fewer than 800 young men, and the campus was pretty much centered around the original quad, with athletic buildings and playing fields, along with most of the fraternity houses, on the periphery of the college grounds. Since then the College has expanded incredibly. There are residential towers on campus, a huge new student union, new rinks and field houses, and many new dormitories built to house a student body that is equally comprised of men and women, nearly 1800 in number. Who could not feel this change around one, returning to the campus after so many years away? And who could not also feel an immense sense of privilege after touring state-of-the-art laboratories, class rooms and lecture halls, a newly renovated museum displaying world-class works of art, a stunning new library; privilege, also, after meeting members of this new student body, so attractive and self-possessed, so worldly and articulate, as if chosen for those very qualities, even though some of those students may still come from Kezar Falls, Maine or Norwood, Massachusetts.

Though it offered an education of the highest quality, the Bowdoin we matriculated at was a small, provincial liberal arts college, located in a quiet Maine community. Today’s Bowdoin is all of that and much more. It seems far more sophisticated, indeed an elite educational and social environment, just as Brunswick itself is no longer the run down mill town it was during our college days. With its upscale boutiques and restaurants, its bed and breakfast inns, its farmer’s market, Brunswick has become as gentrified as the College. One must suppose this change, reflective of the changes in the larger world, is for the better. One also wonders what qualities of intimacy in student relationships and the classroom experience—the educational encounter—may have been exchanged for it.

By the same token, when our class entered Bowdoin, in 1955, we met many older students, some married with children, others who had fought in Korea or served elsewhere in the military before matriculating. The presence of such students with broader life experience was a benefit, both in the classroom, where their maturity enhanced discussion, and in the relationships many of us cultivated with them in our fraternities, in clubs or in simply joining them for coffee between classes. One would hope that the College has continued this tradition of admitting older students or those with a background of diverse non-academic experience. I can also imagine the benefit of having students on campus who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Though I felt a bit shy as we all marched in straw skimmers, wives and partners alike, to Convocation, the ceremony itself, at which President Barry Mills ‘72 spoke and Dr. Michael Fiore ’76 received the Common Good Award, was moving; and the reception our class received at our fifty year mark was memorable. Not one of the formal events was overbearing, all having been planned and executed by our class reunion committee and the College Staff with a light touch, another of the welcome things I remembered about college life, even those sometimes onerous daily chapel services, which many of us endeavored to avoid as students.

Underlying the entire weekend was the theme celebrated at Convocation, that of the Common Good, which has expressed the philosophy of the College since it was initially articulated, in 1802, by Bowdoin’s first president, the Reverend Joseph McKeen, who urged his students to commit themselves to lives “in the interest and for the benefit of society,” disregarding personal gains in wealth or status. With some of the greediest decades in American history hopefully behind us, it is not such a bad idea to be reminded of the principles we were taught at Bowdoin, though from what I heard and learned from the classmates I met at our 50^th reunion I think those ideals have animated the lives of most of us since we first came to Bowdoin.

Jonathan Bayliss (1926-2009)

(Photograph by Mark Power)

I met Jonathan Bayliss 47 years ago this month. We were invited by Charles Olson to read at Gallery Seven in Magnolia, a contemporary art gallery that sponsored readings by poets and writers. On that unseasonably warm April night, I read first from a novel I’d been working on, set in Italy. John Keyes, a New York poet, then living in Gloucester, read from a long Olson-inspired poem about his hometown of Washington, D.C.

The final reader was a youngish, balding man of thirty-six, wearing a business suit. Olson introduced him as Jonathan Bayliss, a novelist and playwright, who worked as a market analyst at Gorton’s, having moved with his family to Gloucester in 1956. Jonathan had with him the thick manuscript of a novel-in-progress, set in Berkeley and San Francisco; and he proceeded to read from the beginning, titled appropriately “Prologos:”

Michael Chapman had not cherished any of his three sons before they were born nor had he hoped for them before they were conceived. Ruth Chapman the wife and mother agglomerated them licked them into shape and bred them up for his approval. Except when gripped by a universal pathos of babyhood he had been nearly careless of each undifferentiated babe in the cradle. But he found that humankind’s uniqueness entered his history as engagingly as any less casual father’s. In every case the gathering person of a child’s incorporated him against his will as if without warning.

At first I thought, “Well, this is quite old-fashioned,” but as Jonathan read on, I and the rest of the audience became spellbound:

In the years of growth as the new people in the family nourished their possibilities partly on the father’s protein his own possibility continuously diminished. One by one they joined their mother in pruning and oiling the plumage by means of which he personally might have fledged. It was not in themselves that they embarrassed him, not by virtue of existence or intention, but by the statistical fact of their economic connections. Their organic requirement prevented further exfoliation on the father’s part. At the age of thirty-three all he had left to himself was the inner man.

Not only was Jonathan’s prose stately and beautiful in its exquisitely formal cadences, it was humorous, and it was subtle. On the surface it seemed to reflect, even mimic, the prose of certain 18^th century British novels—Sterne’s Tristram Shandy came immediately to mind—yet there was something quite modern about it, indeed Modernist, in the sentences’ paucity of punctuation, the irony inherent in their diction, the inflation of the domestic subject into myth. Jonathan continued:

Yet there was nothing unsure about his love for the three who loved each other and both parents. His love was crescent and irreversible, a moon that never waned and always grew, even when obscured by clouds of annoyance or despair—not like the moon of his love for the mother, which in the course of the years waxed only haltingly, with countless fluctuations, magnified chiefly by complexity of perception.

As he entered more deeply into his narrative, a sense of the form of this book in gestation, the trajectory of its narrative, began to take shape. The longer Jonathan read in a quiet, sometimes faintly audible voice, the more I realized that his was not an old-fashioned book at all. In fact, it was revolutionary. I could hardly contain my excitement.

After the reading that night at Gallery Seven, after Olson had introduced Jonathan and me; after Olson had been heard to exclaim that Bayliss’s novel might be one of the most important then being written in America; and after some of us had repaired to Olson’s house at 28 Fort Square for the first of many nights around that kitchen table, which Olson referred to as my “graduate school,” Jonathan and I initiated one of our countless talks that would spread over 47 years and be among the greatest delights of my life.

We felt an immediate affinity, Jonathan and I, not only because we were both engaged in the writing of novels, but because we discovered that we were attracted to many of the same writers—the great British novelists of the 18^th century, and some of the more eccentric ones of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, George Gissing, Ford Madox Ford; not to speak of Europeans like Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, whose novels inspired both the reach and the structure of Jonathan’s. We also had William Butler Yeats in common, on whose plays, in particular, Jonathan had done graduate work at Berkeley. Then would come Melville, Jonathan’s deep study of whose novels and poems benefited me immeasurably in the years to follow.

That first night at Olson’s we agreed to meet and read to each other from our ongoing work. And we did so each Friday night in Jonathan’s study, secluded on the top floor of his house at 165 Washington Street, overlooking Oak Grove cemetery. In that book-lined room, redolent with the smell of his pipe tobacco, where Jonathan wrote at a heavy, dark-stained wooden table on an old manual typewriter, we took turns sharing with each other our latest chapters. As Jonathan expanded his narrative, I began to understand the complexity of its structure and of his own mind, which I could only marvel at. Ultimately, we came to realize that we were, or were going to become, quite different writers. Encouraged by Jonathan, I began to find my voice as a social realist, while Jonathan evolved into one of our great maximalists, his novel exfoliating from a bourgeois family story to the vast Pythagorean structure it became, as it expanded to include the systems of ritual and myth as they mirrored the systems of science, cybernetics and business. But I think we helped each other in those early years before our personal lives diverged. Certainly Jonathan helped me, not only through the education I received listening to his evolving novel, but through our talk about books, politics and philosophy.

Jonathan had—and Olson firmly believed this—one of the finest minds in America. Olson also claimed that Bayliss, as he always referred to him, was “the only person in the country who understands me,” while Jonathan, in his unerring candor, was one of the few who dared stand up to what he sometimes referred to in person and in the margins of Olson’s books as Charles’s “BS.” Compared to Olson’s monumental assaults on knowledge, Jonathan’s scholarship was patient and circumspect, though no less deep and thorough, as befitted the Harvard student, who followed his great teacher, the scholar, critic and biographer Mark Shorer, to Berkeley after the war.

As to Jonathan’s demeanor in those years, he was often quiet, reticent, even shy. Who could be otherwise around Olson and Vincent Ferrini, confronted with the drama of their personal lives, the agony and ecstasy of creation, the endless dialectics that sometimes exhausted the rest of us as we talked and drank far into those starry Gloucester nights?

Let me share one story: We were at Jonathan’s on a stormy early winter night, Vincent, Charles and I, sitting around the dining room table, as we often did, Doris and the children all in bed by then. There was talk of JFK and the recent Cuban Missile Crisis, of the direction of the Democratic Party, Charles having spent years in the thick of Washington politics. The subject turned to Joyce, not a favorite of Jonathan’s or Charles’, veering then to Jonathan’s novel. In a characteristic gesture, Charles stood up, gripped the table and said to Jonathan, “I’ll do whatever I can to see that your book gets published.” Embarrassed, as he often was by compliments, by any attention paid to him, Jonathan demurred in the face of Olson’s mounting enthusiasm. Offended, Olson stopped short in his praise. He slammed his glass down.

“Bayliss, I’m leaving your house,” he said, turning from the table to put on the huge overcoat, which Jonathan would later describe as “the mantle of [Olson’s] respectability.”

“No, Charles,” Vincent and I shouted. “Stay, stay! It’s only a misunderstanding.”
But Olson left in a huff, stomping out into the snow, as we watched his massive form disappear down Washington Street.

“I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings,” Jonathan said, after we resumed our places at the table. Vincent and I quickly jumped in to reassure him that he had done or said nothing wrong. We attempted to return to our conversation, but Olson’s absence created a void that we three could not fill. At once, Ferrini got up. “Let’s go to Charles’,” he suggested. So the three of us traipsed out into what had now become a blizzard. We slogged through the driving snow from Jonathan’s house, across the railroad tracks, down past Washington Square and Gould Court, past Joan of Arc and the Legion Hall, and onto Commercial Street. When we reached Fort Square, the plows had not yet come through and the snow was a couple of feet deep.

Up Olson’s flight of steps we charged, wind and snow lashing our faces. Ferrini knocked on the kitchen door and Charles, wrapped in a big blanket, answered. At first he scowled, and then, warmed by our attempt to succor him, he let us in. The heat from the gas-on-gas stove melted the snow from our coats. We hugged; Jonathan apologized for seeming to reject Charles’ generous offer; Charles forgave him. We sat down at the kitchen table, littered with Olson’s daily mail yet unread. A bottle appeared and the night continued as if there had been no interruption. And all through this, Olson’s wife Betty and their son Charles Peter slept soundly.

Jonathan has been characterized in his obituaries as being as committed as a writer and business executive as he was as a father. To this I can attest, having spent so many hours in his house on Washington Street with his family at impromptu dinners at which the famous “Spaghetti Bayliss” was featured, or on quiet evenings of unmoistened talk. Jonathan read to his three children, Cathie, Vicky and “Geeka,” as I knew them then. He took them to the movies and to concerts and plays. This man, who carried a shirt pocket full of used punch-cards on which to record the rush of his ideas, was ever accessible to his children.

Flaubert, the father of the modern novel, insisted that writers “Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you can be violent and original in your works.” Jonathan was the most gentle and self-effacing of men, polite, deferential, thoughtful and considerate of friends and family. He dressed and lived conservatively, frugally, almost invisibly: the complete bourgeois. He was a lifelong Democrat. He confessed to me that he’d once voted for Henry Wallace and immediately regretted it. He opposed the war in Vietnam, yet he continued to support Lyndon Johnson; and once, when I pressed Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man on him, he returned the book with a quiet, though dismissive, shake of his head—“He’s a Platonist,” Jonathan said, and that was the most devastating rejection anyone could receive from him.

And yet in the writing Jonathan soared. He grappled with complex ideas, he explored archaic and post-modern structures, and, like Joyce, he pushed the English language to its limits. The diction of his novels is not your demotic American. In Jonathan’s hands our native tongue becomes a richer medium, precise yet imaginative, playful yet knowing, “not by simplifying the complexity of English,” as his narrator in Gloucestertide explains, “but by fixing more dimensions of abstraction.” For Jonathan, the novel was still “our quintessential medium of experience.” In the end, the games of words and identities he posed, the structural puzzles, the myths and counter-myths, systems and meta-systems—indeed, the counter-factuality of reality, as he limned it—were only one level of the play of Jonathan’s remarkable intelligence, an intelligence that had for long been missing from most American fiction. The other level is the writing itself—for Jonathan was a writer above all else—often breathtaking in its lyricism. I will close with one such example from Gloucestertide, one of his evocative descriptions of the city that became his actual and spiritual home and the source of his work:

Between every two beaches here on our stone island, between harbors and coves, wherever the land stops the sea, those tawny anfractuous rocks are a jagged pathway of choices. At chaotic elevations, with footholds on irregular cusps at all angles, no step is predictable until your foot is in the air, no step is determined by habits of graceful continuity. From ledges and pinnacles, on whalebacks and whalejaws, you fling yourself across one crevasse to another in jerky motion, sideways and forward, sometimes switching back to descend a crag or traverse a tidal gorge, sometimes down to a tongue of popples, at the lower tides always keeping above the slippery seaweed. Each imbalance is corrected by the next…It feels as if you’re rapidly covering great distances. Your dazzling way is bleached by salt and sun. It’s impossible to stop and think. Yet all the while you are both spectator and center of attraction for surf below, clouds above, and boats in the offing.

(This eulogy was delivered on April 27, 2009, at a memorial service for Jonathan Bayliss, at St. John's Episcopal Church in Gloucester, Massachusetts.)

Broken Trip: A Review by Richard M. Amero

Broken Trip (Glad Day Books, 2004) by Peter Anastas consists of ten short stories that are tied together because they interact with the professional activities of Tony Russo, a welfare case worker, who provides his clients with shelter, food, medical treatment, and pats of encouragement. Reading the book is something like drinking a martini. At first one feels the astringent taste and then the BANG hits you. Not all the stories have the same punch, but as a group they pack a stunning wallop. There is so much agony, suffering and loss among some of the characters that they remind me of sinners in Dante’s Inferno, whose obsessions were similarly painful and everlasting. Perhaps a saving factor in this collection of down-and-out stories is that they end, as poet George Oppen puts it [in an epigraph] at the beginning of the book, in a place where all human emotions ultimately founder.

While the book has a Gloucester setting and most of the characters are involved with the demise of the fishing industry, there is more to the book than Gloucester, for its basic theme is poverty of body and mind, a poverty that reaches across America and the world. Some of the people depicted are as horrible as human beings can get, short of Buchenwald. While not an intellectual novel on the surface at least (remember the delayed reaction), nurses Amanda and Rochelle, in “The Psyche Unit,” represent opposite points of view regarding the question: Is it mind or is it environment that dictates human behavior? Since so many of the damned are dope addicts, the answer would seem to be environment and the treatment DETOX. Yet, by itself, the treatment doesn’t work, so the force of consciousness can be brought into play. That is why nurse Rochelle grieves over the suicide of Terrence, a junkie, who demonstrated insight but could not control his destructive urges.

The most interesting character in the book for me is Larry, Rochelle’s understanding husband. For all his good will, Tony functions as a device. It is through him that the stories are told in a concise reportorial manner that shifts from inner thoughts and outer taunting dialogue. Tony may understand the world, but Larry sustains his wife Rochelle, who has had to cope with abuse from her dope-afflicted mother and Roy, her mother’s lover, and her murder of Roy. Why does Roy act as he does? Why do most dope addicts act as they do?

The Gloucester emphasis appears most prominently in “Skag,” (heroin). Here the most unlikely of trios go out to sea in a once-in-a-lifetime trip to catch cod on the Stellwagen Bank. The miracle is that they succeed. There is a wisp of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea in this section, but the wisp soon merges into a story of victory not over the sea but over self. All three men—Shitter, Frankie and Jimmy, but principally last-minute replacement captain Jimmy—achieve a victory that is more substantial than Terrence’s defeatist views of himself. Like the hired man in Frost’s great poem, Jimmy prepares to die with the sense that at sea he has at least conquered—or forgotten—his demons. Perhaps here is the answer to why men, from time immemorial, have gone down to the sea in ships. In doing so, they escape from the exactions and turmoils of land for work that is so bracing, energetic and dangerous that they forget themselves. This is the HIGH addicts don’t have and the reason they go to sea instead of to the lab.

There are many surprises in Anastas’ book. His criticism of the Department of Public Welfare, now changed to Department of Transitional Assistance, is justified at least for people who accept the burden of being their brother’s keeper. It is not Gloucester alone that produces a class of half-civilized or worse people. Anastas doesn’t dwell on the people in the barrooms and on the belt lines in fish factories; but these nameless people are as lonely, bored and unhappy as the principals and spend too much of their time sniping about the actions of their neighbors.

One of the bigger surprises is that the drugs that infest Gloucester and, for that matter, all of the Massachusetts North Shore, do not come from the fishing boats—though some do—but from dealers in Boston. The book does not propose a cure for addiction, unless it be through methadone, therapy and analysis. Except perhaps for Tolstoy, there is no reason why a writer of a naturalistic work of fiction should try to solve all the world’s problems.

Finally, “Has Gloucester changed and not for the better?” The “Broken Trip” is when a boat returns without fish. Anastas does not give alternatives; but certainly the 19^th and 20^th century fishing town of Gloucester has changed. As counselor Julie in “Getting Straight” says to Jade, who claims she never gave her long live-in companion “Doc” love, “Love is a lot of things.” By the same token, some portion of the degraded, desperate and deranged underclass in Gloucester may, like Rochelle, arise from the wallow, the filth and the stench. As Dante has written, after the Inferno is Purgatory. For most of us Paradise is out of reach.

(Richard M. Amero is a writer and historian, who lives in San Diego. A Gloucester native, Amero attended Black Mountain and Bard colleges. He was a prime mover in the restoration of Balboa Park and has written extensively on the park, on San Diego and California history. His writings, including essays on Melville, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Hart Crane, James Joyce, Dostoevsky and the Gloucester novelist and playwright Jonathan Bayliss, can be found on his website http://www.balboaparkhistory.net)

What Holds us Together

(The Western Shore, by Fitz Henry Lane)

In the name of saving Gloucester, some of the very people who are promoting growth and development are destroying or destabilizing the one thing that makes Gloucester what it is—the primary quality that renders life at all tolerable and special here. And that is a sense of community.

Like many other natives, I’ve discovered the meaning of community as a result of living away from Gloucester. When I lived in Florence, Italy or among the Penobscot Indians of Maine, I responded, often as consequence of missing my home town, to a sense of community I felt in those quite separate cultures and places. What I experienced was a quality of shared institutions, of tradition, heritage, history and architecture. Along with these attributes, I found a sense of interdependence, of mutual responsibility; of people taking care of each other.
At bottom, this amounts to what some have called “a sense of place.” It is a combination of physical and spiritual qualities. It’s a chemistry between particular people and a unique landscape. It has to do with the way people react to that landscape, how they feel about it and themselves as part of it.

Often the place we live in, our very community, becomes invisible to us because of our long habit of simply being in it, of taking it for granted. We take the light of Gloucester for granted, as we do the configuration of buildings along the waterfront, the skyline above Main and Rogers streets: the hue of West End red brick, the reflection of the sun off the water of the inner harbor, or the way Ten Pound Island seems to loom closer to the land than it actually is on certain days of hazy sun or fog.

We take each other for granted, too. We think that fishermen will always be part of our lives here, that the waterfront will accommodate them because it always has. We take the availability of jobs for granted (or at least we did before the collapse of the world’s economy), of housing we can afford (or once could). We expect to wake up each morning and find the objects we take our bearings from—the flowering shad bush at the edge of Dogtown in the spring, the gulls in the harbor—in their habitual places and observing their special rhythms of appearance. We expect to do what we always do, to be who we think we are.

But the immediate world around us, or the sense of community we derive from simply being here—from our comfortableness with the ever-recurring patterns of life that are as precious to us as the blood flowing in our veins—doesn’t exist undisturbed or unchangeable forever. Community must be nurtured. It must be stabilized by good planning, enhanced by proper growth. It cannot be allowed to languish or deteriorate like an abandoned house. By the same token, it cannot sustain radical social, physical or economic change without suffering in ways both obvious and subtle. For when you destroy neighborhoods by driving long-time residents out; when you undermine deep-seated cultural traditions, like those which have accompanied maritime life; when you destabilize long-existing local businesses, you destroy a sense of community. You dismantle it piece by piece.

A case in point was the closing of neighborhood schools, beginning in the late 1970s. During the fight to save those schools, which formed part of the lifeblood of this community, proponents claimed that those who wished to keep them open were backward-looking. The wave of the future, they said (or at least the way under Proposition 2 ½) was to centralize. Ironically, the school department later regretted the closing of those five crucial neighborhood schools.

But the damage was done. Life in those neighborhoods was never the same as it was when the children walked to school and their parents could drop by and check on their progress or just visit. The intimate person-to-person experience of the neighborhood school—the small classes, the manageable environment—gave way to the anonymity of the large institution. The walk became the bus ride. And we’ve yet to ascertain the effects of these dislocations on the children themselves.

Community is a number of things, both visible and invisible. It is buildings and people, jobs and homes, traditions and values, all held together in a special kind of suspension. Community is the speech of the people. It’s the way we look and sound to each other and outsiders. When you are a part of the community you feel alive, secure. You know who you are and who your neighbor is. When you are away from community you realize what you miss. When you see change, or when inappropriate change seems imminent—when the real gives way to the fake; when a working community becomes little more than a bedroom for commuters, who have scant investment in that community—you begin to feel disoriented. The quality of your daily life is diminished.

Community is hard to define. But ultimately it is the “glue” that holds everything together in a place like Gloucester. And when that glue becomes unstuck, as it threatens to do with the development of a massive shopping center that is certain to undermine downtown businesses or the push to build a luxury hotel on the industrial waterfront, both of which run counter to everything a place like Gloucester stands for, all that it holds together comes loose or disintegrates. Community disappears and so do we and what we stand for along with it.

Some Thoughts about John Updike

John Updike (1932-2009)

If, as John Donne wrote, “each death diminishes us,” the death of a writer should have a singular impact upon living writers. The recent death of John Updike has affected me more than I expected, considering that I’ve not been a great fan of Updike’s writing, though I’ve always respected his industry and admired his envious productivity. Like many writers who made their living by writing alone, Updike produced his share of novels and stories that seemed composed more out of necessity than inspiration. Indeed, he tended to over-write both in quantity and in the quality of his prose, which I often found excessively ornate, if not tending toward the precious. But write he did; and while many of us were compelled to make a living by teaching or other means, Updike produced book after book, while his stories and reviews appeared regularly in the New Yorker.

Updike was not “our one great writer,” as a eulogist has recently suggested, comparing him to Henry James. Though he doubtless traveled farther and more widely than James, Updike had neither James’ breadth nor his worldly experience. And Updike simply did not produce a novel of the depth of James’ late great masterpieces, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove or The Golden Bowl. Nor do his stories, as technically adroit as some clearly are, have the subtlety of James’, or, for that matter, Hemingway's. If there is one great living writer in America he is Philip Roth; and during his lifetime that honor would have gone to Saul Bellow, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. Bernard Malamud can’t be dismissed either; and for sheer visionary reach, not to say formal invention, Updike pales in comparison to Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and, more recently, David Foster Wallace.

As a critic, Updike was fluent, but he lacked the range and adventurousness—along with the languages—of Edmund Wilson. He didn’t share John Aldridge’s polemical edge or Alfred Kazin’s Talmudic intelligence; neither did he exhibit the dialectical rigor of James Wood. At bottom, Updike was not really a critic but a sensitive reviewer, able to lead non-specialist readers through the work of writers as diverse as Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Chinua Achebe. There was a mildness to his non-fiction, an apparent geniality in his character, as described in his obituaries, that carried over into his critical insights. He appeared never to attack a writer or book under scrutiny, not an unlikable characteristic in a reviewer, though he himself admitted to have refused books that he felt he couldn’t review positively.

That said, I almost always turned to his reviews and other non-fiction in the New Yorker. I found them more interesting than his fiction, often solider, more absorbing because he seemed to have a way of leading you through a book or a writer’s career by describing his own encounters with each. As for his art criticism—art reporting is probably a better term for what he published in the New York Review—I found it often amateurish. The potted history and biography he included in the pieces seemed culled from Wikipedia and his insights had none of the incandescence of the reviews I enjoy in Artforum. Like his book reviews, his art writing seemed directed at a literate readership, subscribers who’d probably taken a course in art history, but, like spectators one encounters in museums plugged into digital docents, still wanting to be told what to see in what they were looking at. In that respect Updike delivered, but not with the power and the energy, or the deep knowledge and understanding, of critics as diverse in their politics or approaches as Robert Hughes, Arthur Danto, John Berger, or Jed Perl.

But then, from the very beginning, I always had the impression that the principal readership for Updike’s fiction was comprised of suburbanites of his own generation, Ivy League graduates who’d studied some literature, probably under the aegis of the New Criticism, and had therefore been taught that a novel, story or poem was a system of symbols they were required to identify and decode. On that basis, Updike satisfied them amply. His use of easily recognizable interior monologues or his employment of a modified stream of consciousness narrative in novels like Couples—indeed, the seamless way he appeared to mimic Modernist techniques in his fiction—didn’t alienate them the way Faulkner’s denser narratives or time shifts may have, not to speak of the stringencies inherent in the novels of the American experimentalist Robert Mc Elroy, or the fine intelligence of William Gaddis’s fictions.

Was Updike a realist, as claimed? One of his eulogists wrote that Updike looked unflinchingly at American life and rendered it with utmost precision. What I found in Updike was an often cloying lyric interference with the real. Adam Gopnik called it a “lyric surface.” And it was this often distracting poetic patina that seemed to create a dissonance, if not a disconnection between what was being described and the way it was rendered. For example, in the early pages of Updike’s 1965 novella Of the Farm, he describes a rural mail box as standing “knee-deep in honeysuckle.” Mail boxes don’t have knees. Furthermore, this mail box has “a flopped lid like a hat being tipped.” Simile or not, mail boxes are not hats, nor can I observe any correspondence between them. Across a meadow “buildings waited on the far rise.” Again, people wait, inanimate objects don’t. While the poetic fallacy of this sort of description may indeed constitute “lyric surface,” what it calls attention to more often than not is the author’s cleverness, not the actual attributes of the things described, their inherent or implied meaning, so that, in the end, the reader’s attention is almost always on the writer not the thing or person being written about. In this sense, Updike could have learned something from objectivists like William Carlos Williams who insisted upon “no ideas but in things.”

Compared to the prose of the great American realists like Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell and Sinclair Lewis, Updike’s can hardly be seen to be realistic. Rather, it verges on the magically real or surreal. And if the prose diverges often wildly from the object or scene it attempts to render (one critic described Updike as “trying to kill a mosquito with a howitzer”), what about the authorial vision itself? Is Updike indeed looking unflinchingly at the reality of American life or is he refashioning it into a hyper-real version of itself? As for realism itself, there are few contemporary American novels that can compete with the truly harrowing narrative trajectories of Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road or The Easter Parade, not to mention Yates’ own stories, recently collected. And compared to Yates emotionally, Updike remains in adolescence.

With respect to narrative itself, Updike could have learned a lot from Raymond Carver and the later minimalists. He claimed to have benefited from an early reading of Hemingway’s stories, but I never found Hemingway’s concision or his characteristic narrative and descriptive restraint in Updike. Rather, there is too much exposition in Updike’s fiction, too much “sheer writing” as Norman Mailer noticed early on. Too often he tells the reader what the characters are thinking and why, instead of letting us gather up the clues as we read, making us partners in the narrative journey, thereby increasing its tension and our suspense. By the same token, Updike tells the reader what to look at, how to interpret the behavior of a character, rather than letting us discover it for ourselves.

His slick use of the present tense, especially in the Rabbit novels, often trivializes the subjects, making both character and action seem superficial, with little concomitant depth or resonance in the narrative, only forward motion. Events flit past, don’t stick; seem more cinematic than real. The attempt is clearly to re-enact life’s flow, but ultimately it’s here and gone, with no profundity, all glitter and show, all “look what I can do with language!”

In this sense, Updike has always seemed to me the high school show-off, as he once described himself, clever but not a member of the in crowd. And like that outsider, he’s always trying to insert himself into the conversation with wisecracks and bright locutions, to impress, although he apparently didn’t have to impress his teachers—the novelist and critic, Albert J. Guerard, who was Updike’s writing and literature professor at Harvard, called him one of his most brilliant students. By way of compensation, he seems to have built an entire literature on adroitness rather than on depth of feeling or breadth of experience (Updike once confessed to a group of students at Brown University that his greatest regret was that he’d never worked for a living--hence, the lives of his working class characters, including Rabbit Angstrom, who becomes declasse` through marriage, seem more researched than directly experienced). Moreover, what I find particularly lacking in Updike’s fiction is any sense of the tragic, as one finds it in Hawthorne or Melville, the sense that there is an inexorable will to destruction in the human character, to self-destruction, even, and the destruction of those around us; a death wish, if you will, deeply engrained in our nature, leading to acts of monomania like Ahab’s, or Faustian bargains like those entered into by Hawthorne’s blighted scientists; a sense, finally, that human beings seem doomed to repeat their mistakes. There exists no Portnoy in Updike’s oeuvre, pushing the envelope of his sexuality, no Herzog, so monumentally sympathetic in his failure. Granted, as a practicing Christian, another of his cloying characteristics, Updike didn’t appear to believe in the tragic—he believed in redemption and salvation, in transcendence, for what that was worth in Richard Nixon’s or George Bush’s America. Updike also supported the war in Vietnam—our only major writer who did; and his apology for his position and the war itself, in Self-Consciousness, betrays an incredible political naivete.

The four Rabbit novels have been seen as Updike’s greatest achievement. Some eulogists have gone so far as to call them the most important fictional achievement of our time. Compared to Philip Roth’s masterful trilogy of our national life from the 1930s to the present--American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and Human Stain—Updike’s novels fall far short. Nor has Updike produced anything with the intellectual depth or sheer experimental reach of Roth’s Zuckerman novels. Apart from the Rabbit books, which tracked the life of an uneducated lower-middle class small town Pennsylvanian, who might well have been a high school classmate of the author’s, Updike’s principal subject, like John O’Hara’s and John Cheever’s, both of whom influenced him, was suburbia, in particular the small town life of educated professional couples—the life he and his first wife appeared to have lived in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a life of boozy parties, restless social striving and dreary adulteries.

Which brings me to the sex in Updike. Hailed by some as a pioneer in writing openly about sexual experience (as if D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller had never lived—or in our time, Norman Mailer), Updike always seemed to me to write from a position of sexual repression. He often describes the sexual act as if from a voyeur’s perspective, acts that appear furtive or blown out of proportion by his prolixity; in Of the Farm he describes Joey Robinson’s intercourse with his wife Peggy as involving cities, countries and castles—whole landscapes—rather than the conjunction of genitals and desires. At bottom, I have always suspected a deep ambivalence on Updike’s part toward women. The female genitalia are often described as dark, hairy, unclean, hidden; women are commonly degraded in terms of their motives and intelligence; and there is frequently, it seems to me, an attempt to shock with explicitness, again the high school show-off vying for attention. Sex, especially in its adulterous liaisons, seems an attempt at escape from stultifying marriages entered into by couples who, as Updike noted, were “children when they had children.”

All this could be the subject of major fiction—Evan S. Connell successfully attempted it in the Mr. and Mrs. Bridge novels, and no one has written better about adulterous sex than Andre Dubus, with far greater realism than Updike. But in Updike’s hands it seems overdone, willed, the driven writing of an obsessive overachiever: Dickens scribbling away until death, Joyce Carol Oates turning out one mediocre novel after the other, rather than the art of a Flaubertian master. Think of Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, James Salter’s Light Years, or the exquisite novels and stories of Gina Berriault.

Still, there is something quite moving about Updike’s achievement, and not, as Norman Mailer suggested, solely in terms of the writing itself, whether one is attracted to it or not. Returning recently to Rabbit Angstrom, I found the novels more engrossing than they had previously seemed to me, often addictively so, especially when Updike sticks to what’s at hand and doesn’t allow himself to get lost in flights of fancy writing, though the political issues he alludes to have worn thin, and Updike’s attempts to situate the narratives in their own time seem now superficial, as if his primary sources had been the weekly news magazines. Yet in the end, merely describing city streets or the parking lots of supermarkets and shopping malls, listing consumer products by brand or the names of television programs, does not constitute an analysis of their reality or its social or political context. That crucial analysis is sadly lacking in the novels, indeed in most of Updike's fiction.

Nevertheless, every day Updike sat down to produce a minimum of three pages. He wrote stories, essays, reviews, memoirs, novels, children’s books, light verse—and all of it was published, as if there were an inexhaustible hunger, a readership that couldn’t wait for the next installment. To have created such a readership is an achievement in itself; indeed to have a single magazine whose editors cherished your work and paid well for it, a publisher, who, without hesitation, produced every manuscript you submitted. How many writers have shared that munificence? And Updike was, according to those who knew him, a person almost entirely without pretension, unfailingly generous, friendly to younger writers, self-effacing, a gentleman of the old school.

Yet, even though he wrote compulsively millions of words, he seemed, at some level, to have held back. There appeared to be some part of him he never revealed, for all the talk of psoriasis, of stuttering and asthma. For all the lavish prose, all the incandescent images, I find an absence at the center of his work, and maybe equally in the writer himself. It may not on the surface appear that way--and his most devoted readers would doubtless disagree. Nevertheless, I can't locate the man in all the words, all the books. He seems to be avoiding himself, escaping in the rush of words. It's as if the writing, the very prose itself, were a mask to hide the man from himself and from the reader, if not the world. There is no depth in Updike, only the illusion of depth; and I wonder if, in the end, Updike ever lived an authentic life, or did he merely write as a substitute for living? Was he, finally, like Hawthorne, who, having fled the world, once confessed that he had not lived but only dreamed of living?

Postscript, February 25, 2009: In a 2006 review of Updike's novel Terrorist, David Walsh examines Updike's work from a political perspective sadly lacking in most Updike criticism. Here is an excerpt. The entire review, along with an important analysis of Updike's life and work in the contect of the Cold War, can be found at http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/updi-j29.shtml

Novelist John Updike dead at 76: Was he a “great novelist”?

By David Walsh
29 January 2009

Updike remains an enormously gifted writer. Very few Americans have ever put words together as effectively as he. However, an artist is not free to do as he or she pleases and works, in fact, under definite historical and historically shaped intellectual conditions. Updike, born in 1932, grew up in the small town of Shillington, Pennsylvania (near Reading in the southeastern part of the state), son of a high school science teacher and grandson of a Presbyterian minister, and came of age during the Cold War.

The need to champion the "free world" against "communism," of course in a sophisticated and literate fashion, stayed with him. (His first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), in part, is a rather mean-spirited attack on the welfare state and any attempt at "socializing" American life.) In Rabbit at Rest (1990), one of Updike's finest books, his long-running character, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, remarks laconically, "Without the cold war, what's the point of being an American?" (The comment, interestingly, was cited by Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations, in Foreign Affairs magazine in 1997.) However ironically intended, the words shed considerable light on Updike's evolution.

On the basis of liberal anti-communism ("blacklists, congressional show trials and meaningless, redundant loyalty oaths for a time gave patriotism an ugly face," he later wrote), Updike was able to explore "the whole mass of middling, hidden, troubled America" (his words) with some degree of honesty in novels such as Rabbit Run (1960) and The Centaur (1963). As the name of his most prominent character, "Angstrom," suggests ("angst" = anxiety or apprehension), Updike, a lifelong churchgoer and student of Christian theology, was initially influenced by thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century melancholy Dane, and theologian Karl Barth.

As to the latter, a commentator writes, "The principal emphasis in Barth's work...is on the sinfulness of humanity, God's absolute transcendence, and the human inability to know God except through revelation. His objective was to lead theology away from the influence of modern religious philosophy back to the principles of the Reformation and the prophetic teachings of the Bible." Not very attractive, and Updike weaned himself from Barth's influence to a certain extent in middle age, while remaining a devout Protestant.

This is not the occasion for an in-depth accounting of Updike's religious philosophy, if such an accounting be warranted. What strikes one most forcefully about the novelist's "theological" concerns is the extent to which they form part of an overall cultural regression in the postwar period. Updike speaks of a certain "religious revival" in the 1950s, but such a phenomenon could only have taken place as part of a serious intellectual falling off, made possible in large measure by the purging of left-wing ideas from American cultural life.

After Twain, Mencken, Dreiser, early Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, early Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis (for all his limitations), Richard Wright of Native Son, the Harlem Renaissance members, and Steinbeck, O'Neill, Sherwood Anderson and Faulkner, for that matter, as well as other lesser figures, are we to arrive at this: "an unavoidable, unbearable, and unbelievable Sacred Presence," which Updike believes we will find in his fiction; "the yearning for an afterlife [which]...is love and praise for the world we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience"; and the demand that we "examine everything for God's fingerprints"? It's the concentrated provincialism, self-limitation and, to be blunt, banality of many of the concerns that is most disturbing, and, in the end, has proven most harmful to Updike's art.

Updike's explorations of certain aspects of small-town, lower middle class American life in portions of the Rabbit Angstrom series are irreplaceable, as is his encounter with the surreal hideousness of Florida's Gulf Coast in Rabbit at Rest (admittedly an easy target). However, and this is a great inadequacy, Updike has rarely been able to truly empathize with (and recreate artistically) anyone who does not resemble himself in important ways, in particular in his search for and belief in the "transcendent." (This quality, in fact, is what saves Ahmad in Terrorist, unconvincingly.)

A thorough consideration of "middling, hidden, troubled America" would have required a far different, more critical starting point. In Rabbit Redux (1971), a contrived consideration of 1960s radicalism (one of Updike's bête noires), Harry Angstrom announces that he has learned the US is not perfect; however, "Even as he says that he realizes he doesn't believe it, any more than he believes at heart he will die." The general acceptance of the status quo has had a paralyzing effect on the American literary arts and cinema over the past half-century.

In Updike, one sees a certain cultural process in concentrated form: the accumulation of great formal, technical skill at one pole, and the severe weakening of the artist's understanding of history and social organization at the other.

PROCESS is here!

Process is a Gloucester lit mag with a post-Olson awareness, and many of the writers they've published were directly influenced by him.--OlsonNow

The first issue of Process, a new literary journal, is now available. Edited by David and Lisa Rich and published in Gloucester, Process offers cutting-edge poetry, prose and drama in a stunningly designed format. The intention of the editors is to present work by new and established writers world-wide; work completed and work in process. Contents for the first issue:

FICTION & DRAMA:

Edward Dahlberg: Previously unpublished letters to Louis Zukofsky and Fanny Howe; poem entitled "For Louis Zukofsky;" and an excerpt from his 1934 novel Those Who Perish.

Peter Anastas: Excerpt from the unpublished 1962 novel Until the Axle Break.

Jonathan Bayliss: Excerpt from the forthcoming novel Gloucestermas, last volume of the Gloucesterman Trilogy.

Michael Rumaker: Excerpt from the controversial play Queers, previously printed only in German, produced only in Germany and the Netherlands.

POETRY:

Clayton Eshleman: "Dali," "Inner Parliaments," translation of "The Eternal Bum in the Heart of Bohemia" by Czech poet Milan Exner.

Alan Davies: "Once in a Blue Moon," "Slooping Down the Long Slope Toward," "We're moving forward down the then."

Diane Wakoski: "Black Ship Drawn Up On A White Beach," "On Leonard Cohen's Greek Island," "Proust Askew: Poem Using A Line From John Wieners."

Christopher Rizzo: "East Meditation Suite."

Jerome Rothenberg: from "Fifty Caprichos, After Goya."

James Cook: "Companion to the WPA Guide to Massachusetts," translation of "Confusion" by Federico Garcia Lorca.

Nathaniel Tarn: "At the Funeral of a Child Too Old to Die."
Ewa Chrusciel: "Invasion," Of Wonders," "Undoing Paul Celan."

Pierre Joris: from "Meditations on the 40 Stations of Mansour Al-Hallaj."

Nancy Kuhl: "N is for the Nightjar," "[Some Words from that Letter]."

Janet Rodney: "There Are No Accidents."

Saint-Pol-Roux: "Alouettes," translated as "Larks" by Lisa Rich

John Mulrooney: "2007, Fragment After Wieners," "Heard at Oakes Cove."

Price: $15 (order from the editors; also on sale at many independent booksellers)

Email contact: process.journal@gmail.com

The editors can also be contacted at P.O. Box 1268, Gloucester, MA 01931-1268 and http://gloucesterboattrain.blogspot.com/

http://processliteraryjournal.blogspot.com/

The Lights are Still on at Gloucester's Waterfront

(Photograph by Ernie Morin)

The industrial waterfront is the defining characteristic of the city we all love and cherish. It is an engine that drives a significant part of our economy and brings people to Gloucester from all over the world, visitors who are fascinated by the work that goes on here and by the beauty of the harbor and the city itself. Without a working waterfront there really is no Gloucester, at least as those of us who have spent our lives here understand it, including residents who have arrived more recently, drawn by the city’s special quality of light, a rugged granite-girded landscape, our stunning architecture reaching back to the town’s colonial origins, the diversity of our people, an experienced workforce, broadening employment opportunities, two thriving industrial parks, and a quality and authenticity of life that only a real place like Gloucester can offer.

Fishing has been a way of life in Gloucester since the Dorchester Company of Puritans landed here in 1623. For almost 400 years, Gloucester Harbor has been the center of one of the country’s most important commercial fishing communities. Even with the strictest federal regulations ever imposed on the ground fish industry, Gloucester is still a vital working port and a regional hub for the New England fishing industry. Many millions of pounds of fish and shellfish are being unloaded every year in Gloucester—last year alone 94.4 million pounds, bringing in 46.8 millions dollars; and the year before, 117.4 million pounds at 47.3 million dollars. Boats from Gloucester and from other ports in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and Rhode Island are unloading in Gloucester (and some seek temporary dockage here, to fish from Gloucester for periods during the year); there are two fish auctions, many critical shore side support businesses, other key elements of commercial fishing infrastructure; businesses like Neptune’s Harvest are thriving and growing, while new businesses are starting up.

Gloucester is not a dead seaport; neither is the fishing industry “moribund” or the waterfront “stagnant.” In 1978, the Gloucester harbor became a “Designated Port Area” in order to protect the viability of the harbor for marine industrial usage. Given the ongoing intensive efforts to rebuild ground fish stocks by 2014, the evolving character of the fishing fleet, modernization of the shipping industry, seafood processing trends, growing demands for boat repair and construction of energy efficient vessels, and other marine trends, the Port of Gloucester will continue into the future to be an important regional hub port for commercial fishing (for ground fish and other species) and for other marine related industries and activities. Essential to this is the maintenance of the Designated Port Area, which Vito Giacalone will be addressing tonight, in order to ensure a continued, expanded, and re-invigorated commitment to marine related industries and activities, and, in particular, to commercial fishing, in the port of Gloucester. But, it is a fact that Gloucester also faces new challenges and opportunities.