WRITTEN WORD 55 – Debating and Writing V - Payoff

I was still shy, and speaking hesitantly, and not winning as often as I thought I could. But Dmitri took me aside, in an act of great kindness, and pointed out that I did not need to worry about performing badly in these outlying towns since no one who saw me in practice debates in small New Hampshire high schools was likely to ever see me again. I should just speak right out, he said. I should keep in mind that I had nothing to lose.

So I started booming out my arguments at these practice debates. My voice suddenly stopped cracking. It was moving down into baritone and towards bass. To my surprise, people told me it was resonate like a radio announcer's. Me, 15, the weakling outcast. Suddenly I was winning.

Moreover, debating took me inside our sister School, St. Mary’s-in-the-Mountains. Four of us were driven up there late one afternoon by our English teacher and debate coach, Joe Abbey, so we could stage a debate for the St. Mary’s girls.Their English teacher, who had nice breasts and wore fluffy sweaters, was considering starting a debate team with the girls. The rumor was that she was dating Joe.

The debate went well – here in this soft feminine place. As well as my debates were going in raw-bone high school rooms. We came, and we orated, and we had sandwiches and cocoa, but we left without any one-on-one contact with any of the girls. Though I did notice during the debate that a brown-eyed girl was looking my way even when I was not speaking.




Two months later, I went along in freezing cold in a school van to an early Sunday evening dance up at St. Mary's, which was in the White Mountains, where mysteriously in the summers I was as popular as I was unpopular the rest of the year in school.

St. Mary's, now in this northern winter, feels like a warm place. The room where they have the dance, it is all soft colors and gentle lights – not at all like our school’s place for rare social gatherings, which is a room in Livermore Hall where there is almost no color, a cold linoleum floor, harsh lights and black leather chairs.

Now, from one end of this girl-like room at St. Mary’s we boys burst in from the cold. And we see at the other end these girls in girl clothes, some, like Joe’s teacher friend, with soft sweaters that follow their girl shapes, including, sometimes, as with Joe's friend, actual breasts. It is art and it is poetry and it is music!

But I might have been crossing a dangerous mountain pass to get to that end of the room where the girls were standing, looking unconcerned – where this girl was standing. Smiling. Brown hair and brown eyes. Chubby, which was okay. Actually nice. Big sad eyes that she turned to me and then averted. White teeth. The girl who had watched me so closely during the debate.

She asked me to dance. That was the way it was done here. The girls would do the asking the first time around here on their home ground.

She came over and said, "My name is Cindy." I said, "I'm Fred." She said, "Would you dance with me?" Otherwise, we did not speak. I followed her out to the dance floor area, which seemed suddenly a really glamorous place though it was just the floor of St. Mary's big lounge room with the tables pushed back.




It quickly became clear that this girl with the averted eyes and the new breasts knew things people like us had to learn outside the formal white-glove dancing classes to which parents like ours had sent us on Friday evenings back in Connecticut.

Without conversation now, my outstretched left arm and her outstretched right arm gave way at precisely the same time. Her right hand, which had no glove on it, was now turned and cupped in my left hand against my school blazer shoulder. My right hand was way out of dancing-class position, way down her soft back. Our bodies were together – and this “cheek to cheek” thing began, me leaning down and she pulling herself up. And the fingers of her left hand, oh God, touched the back of my neck. And as we swayed, her leg went between mine and pressed against me.



The next week I overheard one of the popular athletes say, "Speedy’s in love… Speedy has a pig…. The girl who necked with Marty last year." But I was becoming just confident enough now to see at least a small element of jealousy. For it was rare now that they used that nickname “Speedy” that had haunted me until I began to seem a winner.




I saw Cindy again when there was a joint Holderness-St.Mary's glee club concert at Plymouth State Teachers College. It seemed magical, though I had to watch from the back of the darkened hall because the Holderness glee club director, Mr. English, had rejected me. But I did speak to Cindy and invited her down to our spring dance weekend, which was one of only three such Holderness weekends with girls each school year.




By the spring I had behind me a debate before the entire school against last year's New England championship team from Portland, Maine. We not only won but the judges, members of the Plymouth branch of the League of Women Voters, named me "Best Speaker." Something unprecedented for a third former. And soon afterwards I was on the team that won this year's New England championship at Boston University.




For the moment I had stopped thinking about my debating career. Cindy and I now were in the old school gym, which had been decorated with blue and silver-like bunting, our school colors. All the boys were in dinner jackets, rented from a place on the edge of Plymouth across from a shoe-tree factory, and all the girls were in formal gowns. The girls all had gardenia corsages, which had been given out at the door. The smell of gardenias overwhelmed the usual fart and sweat smells of the gym.

And here I was with Cindy for a second time. This time Cindy was in a dress held up by what looked to be flimsy strings. Her leg was between my legs again, her leg frankly against my hard penis – my hand now sliding down her partially bare back, her fingers linked at my neck – her gown such that when I drew back just enough to look down as we swayed it was easy to imagine my real life had begun and I was with an actual naked woman. I was a very long way away from cold hard debater's facts.

But it seemed certain to me that without debating I would not be in this position. With cold logic, I attributed Cindy to my increasing success with cold logic in debating.

Debating was taking me out that hollow shell in which I had felt trapped all my life, and Cindy, it seemed, had been waiting for me outside the shell. It really seemed like it was my ability to be coldly logical that got me here.

WRITTEN WORD 54 – Another Try at Fiction

In this desperate time, I went to the old version of Abercrombie & Fitch – which was in its last days costuming members of the camp and cottage world for things that would look like adventure. It was close to Ivy League-inspired Brooks Brother’s on Madison, near Grand Central and the Biltmore, where the last young men preparing for these declining worlds still met their dates under the clock. I went to Abercrombie's to get ominous tinted glasses, which seemed to be something that would give me cachet in the old movie scenes I planned to stage on the Eastern Mediterranean – the wily Levant.

I was going in and out of the city from a small cottage on the water in Northport, Long Island, where I had retreated without a phone and without a car, for good reason, in this time I had been getting to the parties with the famous people but making desperate phone calls all over the world late at night.

"Hi," said a man in the private elevator, holding his hand out -- "I'm Dave Rockefeller."

And with Bill Moyers, who was on the spring list with me at Harper's Magazine Press, I picked up on a conversation about Singapore that we'd begun a week before over beer with our mutual editor, and then with another Texan I heard how Johnson had kept spies in the war room because he thought so many of the generals and admirals were dangerous crazies.

At Abercrombie & Fitch I bought a tan bush suit and canvas shoes. Then I went to the new editor of Harper's Magazine – an unassuming man who had been brought in recently when the owners fired the untameable Willie Morris, whose patronage had taken me to front tables at Elaine's. I sold the new editor on the idea of a story about Beirut as the romantic new center of the Levant, scene for devious complications involving picaresque people from all corners of the world – the equivalent, I said, of the pre-Nasser Alexandria of the Lawrence Durrell novels that I liked so much.

I got a tiny advance from my book editor at Harper's to get working on another novel of my own. Then through a dubious agent who had handled my previous pseudonymous Bangkok After Dark, Taipei After Dark and Manila After Dark, I signed a contract to write Beirut After Dark – this in the declining days of not just Abercrombie's, Brooks and the Biltmore but also soft core porn.

(I signed even though I knew better, for I had once been in Beirut and had had trouble getting a hotel room because my girlfriend and I were not married. I had found Beirut crowded and small minded, and Alexandria I knew as a gone-to-seed backwater, but that was not what I told the editor - or myself.)

Sometimes I would stay over in the city at the Statler Hilton, partly because the idea of Hiltons offended the good-taste people, and partly because it was an efficient place from which to buy tickets, send cables, put things in storage.

From a pay phone in Northport I contacted Marian, recently divorced from my friend John: she was playing the ingénue to Jane Russell's lead in the Stephen Sondheim musical Company. I went in, slept through the show (I'd been drinking on the train) but picked her up backstage in my bush suit and tinted glasses, and was pretty certain people were staring at me, not just at Marian, as we walked over to Sardi’s.

Marian. A contract to start another novel. A foreign correspondent assignment. Tinted glasses. A soft core paperback deal in overvalued U.S. dollars. A bush jacket. I headed to the airport on the day I was supposed to be addressing the Breadloaf Writer's Conference. I had hoped Breadloaf would be full of lithe literary groupies, but recently I had been told otherwise. Now, I decided, I would regain my fortunes in Beirut. At this time I still believed in fiction.

WRITTEN WORD 53 – Me and Not Me

Time-Life took me on because I gave them text blocks for a picture essay that turned out to be a test given to many applicants – a competition that, to my discredit, I won – a spread about the life of the awful Eisenhower, in which I made him appear almost heroic, at least crazy like a fox, in his bland deviousness, as if I were really unconscious of how detached and unscrupulous, and how blinded by ambition and how reactionary he was. This horrified me, that I could write in such a way that made Eisenhower (whom I knew Time-Life would still like) appear to be someone admirable.


The prize was a job as an in-house free-lancer that would lead to a full staff position. The wanted me to stay, which had played into why I was in Bangkok ahead of schedule. The mere mention of my staying was enough to make me run, as if fleeing for my life.



In this time, turning 30, after newspaper work and after writing unpublished novels in Indianapolis, Atlanta, Slovenia and Greece, I’d been fired from a job said to have a future at a quite prissy New York City place called American Heritage, which produced books and a magazines that said nice things about grim American people and places of the past, including nice things about the violent American Old West and just about every American president and every American. war.


The day I was fired at Heritage I walked up a few blocks and was taken on by Time-Life Books, which paid much more than anyone else, and had constant catered parties – caviar and roasts carved and served by polite uniformed waiters while other uniformed servants mixed drinks and poured wine – a different universe from the one in which office parties meant Lay’s potato chips and warm drinks served in water cooler cups.

And moreover it seemed that writers, who here had offices with views from Rockefeller Center all the way into other boroughs or New Jersey, were tacitly expected to sleep with researchers, who had their desks and book cases in corridor areas that were at least more specious than the cubicles forced upon people in lesser companies. The writers were almost all men, the researchers almost all women, who tended to be sharper than the writers and seemed to have been hired on looks as well as ability.

And my life was complicated enough already. In the East Village I got the crabs from a least likely source, who I had loved but left, and there was a girl living near my ground floor Waverly Place apartment whom I had just missed when I left Greece two years back a month before she arrived there but now was back and living on Greenwich Avenue - and we began to make up for the missed connections. Not to mention girls picked up in a range of low-life places. And not to mention the sexiest women in the world, who was from the South – a friend’s wife when I met her, an affair that now spanned everything else that had happened. I was in bed one morning on Waverly Place with the girl I had almost known in Greece when the sexiest woman in the world came in a window with a wild, determined if ironic, look.

Everything was false in those six months of often erotic drifting and drinking that seemed like six years. Everything I wrote in the two or three hours a day I put in – arriving late, and then off early to a long boozy luncheon with other Time-Life people – everything I wrote was about people and places and I had never seen – not just Eisenhower but also Outer Mongolia and Venezuela – wrote from material provided me by researchers who were so unimportant that they were sent out to see what should be seen and conduct any interviews that were needed. So unimportant that they had to deal with actual experience.

This is not me. I don’t want to be what I seem to be. I am not really here in this place.



So here I was in Bangkok – having gone off into a snow storm to Idlewild one January day. A graceful, green-eyed Time-Life co-worker, to whom I might have been loyal for life if life were less bizarre, had vanished while I was closing my suitcase, leaving a note that said she could not take another goodbye. And I wanted to go to Bangkok, and when I got there I wanted to stay – those bright green rice fields on the outskirts and then the canals and the river and the graceful and big temples with their sloping roofs and bright red and green tiles and gold leaf – and the grandiose night clubs and bars and massage parlors – and the river, the Chao Phrya, where I had a house that could be reached only by water.

Time-Life had refused to let me resign. The main editor (a gracious man who also wrote his own books) had said that they were giving me an indefinite leave of absence, it apparently being inconceivable that anyone would leave Time-Life in that lush time in its history. Eventually I told them by mail that I was never coming back, and they sent me what, since I was operating in Bangkok with over-valued dollars, was quite a large check which they said was because they had decided to grant me profit-sharing retroactively, even though I had been an in-house free-lancer who did not qualify for benefits.

Before then I knew I wanted to stay in Bangkok, which was nothing like how it was described in either the very few non-academic books out on Thailand (most of them written by CIA people or by embassy wives) – neither those books nor anything in the special research packets that I had ordered up from the Time-Life research department.

I wanted to stay in Bangkok but I did not know about the Time-Life check that would come. In a great hurry I had sent letters to everyone I knew in New York looking for something that would keep me afloat. The result was a steady stream of contracts in the years I was in Southeast Asia, for quite genteel books aimed at school libraries, books giving more or less straight accounts of countries of the region – Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia. And at the same time, this being just before there was hard core porn available in America, books for a big paperback house, Macfadden-Bartell, that were soft core but with hard core hints – Bangkok After Dark, Manila After Dark, Taipei After Dark – and paid more than hard core ever would.


This did not seem like real writing yet but I was getting closer. It was a far cry from Time-Life, for I did my own research, even in the middle of the night. Often now I was telling myself this is me, this time, this is really me here in this rich and wild tropical place. This is me now, even though my books were never quite accurate in the crucial sense of filling in context.


And it was a far cry from the writing to which I aspired. And also it was a time I would look back on with longing – in every area of a man’s life except spiritual. I would look back a couple of years later, after I had done that Bankok novel I thought would change everything, and it has been published by a major house, and then I found myself in the claustrophobic, anti-Semitic Middle East, where I kept telling myself, this is not me, this has nothing to do with me.

WRITTEN WORD 52 – The End of a Life

I was suddenly in that place where nothing I loved – except for pretty girls who would appear only on weekends in this gray male bastion – was honored. The air was not filled with poetry and music. No one, it seemed, openly wrote or painted. Most students were little old Republicans in their politics. And usually drunk. As was I – not the Republican part. The English professors stressed cold analysis and went to enormous lengths to kill off any reason for being moved by literature. The fake Oxford-Cambridge Gothic buildings had all the discomfort of England and none of the charm. English style casement windows that let in the cold air, creating that subtle British combination of being stuffy and chilly at the same time. On the surface, Harris tweed and Oxford Gray flannel. Below the surface, communal basement lavatories and showers with mildew and slippery floors that never dried, and for meals the undergraduate “commons” where the meat was blue when it was not green.

Then in an otherwise not very interesting freshman English class I read a portion of the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, from an anthology you had to buy that was edited by the young professor who taught the course. It seemed at first a happy story.

Mill had succeeded when ridiculously young in doing what I even now, in the face of malaise and paralysis, still hoped to do – get everything in its place. His father was James Mill, an influential political philosopher in the early 19th century. The elder Mill and his best friend, the more renowned political philosopher Jeremy Bentham, decided they would home school the boy, using all the progressive ideas they had developed about education.

Bentham and the older Mill were the creators and chief proponents of what was called Utilitarianism and they and their followers were known as utlitarians. It seemed to me as I read about it the perfect vessel to contain all that might be good in the world. It seemed to me the sort of idea that had saved me when I was a weak and ridiculed adolescent, apparently doomed forever to the an object of schoolboy sadism.

Their central idea was that all action should be directed towards achieving the greatest good – in 19th century language they called it "the greatest happiness" – for the greatest number of people. They looked to the utility of any action or plan or program, which meant always keeping in mind this idea of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. And they were leading increasingly successful fights in Parliament to, among much else, get rid of child labor in mines and factories, clean up the open sewers that ran through city streets, stop the widespread executions carried out in England for small financial crimes.

Just like me, I thought, a 16-year-old socialist and pacifist coming out of the most unlikely place, New Hampshire. So very much like me, this John Stuart Mill, a voice calling for justice, and actually getting recognized – like me, the New England debating champion.

I read on. Just as the Utilitarians thought social conditions could be improved, so did they believe that education could be revolutionized. And Bentham and James Mill decided they would prove their theories by taking over the education of James' son, who would be home schooled.

I had learned to read late, taught by my mother because I could make no sense of school. But otherwise my education has been entrusted to institutions. I read now John Stuart Mill’s account of how, though he never thought of himself as being particularly brilliant, his father and Bentham never pushed lessons that did not interest him; they helped him follow up his interests, and let him drop or postpone what bored him. Young John could read classical Greek by the time he was three. By the time he was eight he had mastered the Greek and Roman classics and all important historical literature. By the time he was 12 he had added economics, philosophy and mathematics. He also learned all the main modern European languages, and covered all the principal works of literature, as well as the science of the day. While still a teenager he was writing and publishing learned articles. He himself had become an important leader in the thriving Utilitarian movement by the time he reached twenty. Just what I had wanted to be.

Then it all fell apart – rather like, it seemed now, the new life I had built up had all fallen apart in my final year at school, the year before entering this intensely unsympathetic, ivy-strangled college. How like me, Mill coming to the end of the road. And how awful that the reasons he gave seemed so clear.

For now my heart sank as I read about what he called his crisis. At the very time he was on top of the world, he asked himself if everything he wanted, all the changes in laws and institutions and education and politics, everything to which he looked forward, suddenly became just what he wanted would this be “a great joy and happiness?” And he found he had to answer no. And he knew he had nothing left to live for.

This knowledge of what lay so close to the surface stayed with me for decades. And it seemed yet another reason explaining why all I had achieved in ambition-fueled prep school days had come to seem so minor that in my last year I had walked away from everything good in my life.

I did not feel my life was over. And in fact there was some real happiness and agreat deal of excitement, not just depression, in the years ahead. But it all felt fragile. Immediately I was in a dark, intense depression, fueled by the alcohol that was so much a part of this university’s identity. What happened immediately would in another setting have been called a nervous breakdown, as would what happened to Mill if the context had been different. A nervous breakdown, with suicidal overtones.


I did not look at the Autobiography again for thirty years. One afternoon I had gone, just before a class at the Art Students League, to my local library in Chelsea to look up the painter Joan Miro, whom I was coming to admire. I wasn’t reading much about art but I was doing an amazing amount of looking, night and day, in museums and galleries, and then for a year and a half in studios in every art school in town and many private drawing sessions, starting my day early at the League and ending it around midnight drawing models in a Soho basement. For some reason I had been thinking about Miro, and wondering if I were wrong that Miro was a man, since the first name was Joan. One of those small nagging things that get into your head. So I went to the “ “Mi” pages in Collier’s Encyclopedia, and by mistake opened to the John Stuart Mill entry.

And I read now what I must have read in the past without it registering on me of how in his dark suicidal period Mill began to see that happiness was not, as he had been taught, something you could get by going after you thought you wanted directly. It had to be a byproduct of something more. And he sensed what that something more would be, and so, as the encyclopedia writer put it, he set out to revive his “atrophied emotions.”

He was drawn for the first time to poetry for pleasure, not to complete an education. He was drawn especially to the Romantics. And he was drawn into nature not for botanical and biological studies but for the pleasure of it. And so too he was now drawn to painting and to music.

He did not change all his views – suddenly move to political conservatism and side with the rapacious English rich – none of that nonsense promulgated later by the possibly drunk Winston Churchill that anyone with a first rate intelligence is liberal when young and conservative when old.

But the change was much greater than any movement across a political spectrum – and this time around, 35 years after Mill had hurled me into a black void, I realized that, without consciously trying, what he did was much like what I was finally doing now.

WRITTEN WORD 51 - A Mentor

As I was coming into my story it was not just my version of the family I came from that changed. For example, I was a person who, for good reason, stayed clear of academic worlds. For further example, for years my profile in Twentieth Century Authors had me down as atheist/agnostic.

I went to Boston College to take a three-week intensive summer course that intrigued me. It was given by David Tracy, a liberal American theologian and priest widely celebrated in theological circles and beyond. His picture had recently been on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. I did not know the terminology of theological studies and I was often lost in the specifics of his lectures. Although I had been doing a lot of reading, theology was new to me, and these lectures were full of terms – such as hermeneutical – that at that point meant nothing to me. What came across, however, was David Tracy’s pastoral presence, a truly good and empathetic man, who had not let logic overwhelm his pastoral bent. He was more interested in life than logic. And so too were the others in the big class, who were of all ages and many backgrounds and not at all what I would have expected in academia.

At the end of the Tracy course there was a paper due on the subject of “God Talk.” I did not know where to start. And anyway I was no longer a writer. Others spoke of doing such subjects as “God talk in narrative” or “God talk in the synoptic gospels.” Well, there was no reason why I had to write if I had nothing to say. This experience so far had been like day to the night of my college years, when having nothing to say would never have gotten in the way of writing nonsense that echoed a professor's bias.

I was enjoying myself and I was game. I drove up to New Hampshire to take a look around the scenes of my deep past. I came back. I sat down to write. I had a portable typewriter with me for I had been absent when computers finally took over – that was how remote from writing I had become.

I sat down, wondering what to write, and then suddenly I was in the Roman room at the Metropolitan. And I had my subject - visual God talk.

I had been affected so deeply by that visual experience in the Met, that visual demonstration of a people who had come to a dead end, that I was now immersed in theology – something I had never thought about before in any way except to dismiss it. It is true that shortly before going to Boston I had been talking about the time in the Roman Room. But I had never brought the experience to light in the way I did in this supposed academic paper that had become a piece of memoir. I was there finally in that room I had managed to pass through without seeing, there looking at those faces staring out of a cruel ancient world that were as familiar to me as the faces of all the people I knew and, worse, all the people I had wanted to know.


Not having been raised in a Catholic place or by Catholic people, I had missed a lot but I had been spared exposure to the strain in Catholicism that entailed memorization of catechisms and hatred of sexuality. I had never met a nun who wielded her ruler like an instrument of torture. I now knew beautiful nuns, artistic nuns, freedom fighter nuns, nuns you might not know were nuns. The Catholic world I had entered recently at a Hudson Valley retreat center, and now in Boston, was a world of new openings that was the reverse of catechism set-piece nonsense. It was not my first experience of this kind of Catholic world. Upon examination it turned out I had been getting glimpses for many years of worlds that went beyond my set piece stories.

The paper that I wrote - visual God talk - was circulated at Boston College, with a note that it came out an advanced theology course that by mistake this neophyte had joined. The theologian Thomas Groome, who was a celebrity in these circles, asked to see me. I had a mentor – a real mentor – something that had never happened in this way. I had had something like that relationship in my Southeast Asia years with Jack Jones, author of A Woman of Bangkok, but that was about as far as you could get from an academic setting.

And I was invited to stay on at Boston College, and I let what had started with what was meant to be an academic paper continue – letting my life unfold now on the page.

And then in one of Tom’s classes he said that poetry would be as acceptable as a formal academic reflection or research paper.What I would have thought of as the least likely of all places to do real writing turned out then to be just right.

I was surrounded by faces that never would have made it as cold Roman art.

I did not come here to place myself in the tradition of famous authors,from Graham Greene to Walker Percy who had converted to Catholicism. And anyway I did not think that this was the only source of revelation. It was the source I found most congenial. I was, thankfully, operating without a master plan. And I suspected that eventually when I wrote there would be no more outlines to get in the way of whatever might unfold from mystery.

WRITTEN WORD 50 - Stories That Never Change

I was in a deserted, deteriorating colonial hotel on a mountainside halfway between Djakarta and Punchak Pass and a poisonous centipede was clacking across the tiles. Alone in a no-man's land, usually with a tropical fever, practically no human contact except with a bluff Chinese owner and elderly Javanese houseboys in native dress who brought huge bottles of local beer and replicas of colonial Dutch food - the only other human contact being with an intense, bespectacled Soviet "journalist" who was obviously a spook and thought I was a spook and had been assigned the job of traveling up here to find out what I was really up to.

Part of this end-of-life feeling that engulfed me here in this non-place came from my having no good story to hide from the Eastern bloc spy. No story that was good in the sense that it followed a plan.No story that went according to plan. No good reason why I was here. No story that was as it should be. And no such life either.

I was so far down it was as if I had nothing to lose, which may be why when I started to write, cross-legged on the tiles, I could not follow a plan and so went, as if guided, to scenes on the Chao Phrya River across from Bangkok where so much of my recent life had come into focus. A time cut off in time which had ended in near violent boozy chaos with the end of what I had hoped would be my ultimate love affair. A smooth, willowy, sometimes troubled, sensual, sometimes brilliant young woman it seemed I would never see again. There in Bangkok among beautiful people in a land of sweeping temples and palaces, electric green fields, and sparkling fresh water canals. So far from prettty paid girls in fever-ridden back allies in the fetid unending slum city Djakarta. An open wound. Scenes from Bangkok I did not know went beyond safe surface beauty until I wrote them. Scenes that did not fit any of my plans for novels. And it was some of the best and toughest writing I had done up till now.

Though it was far from the only writing I did in that deserted hotel. I wrote to an old friend from New York who was now in the Philippines telling him about my recent adventures a thousand miles up the Kapuas River, like something out of Conrad, in Indonesian Borneo. I wrote to another old friend, this one from happy days in Athens,who now lived and wrote in Frankfurt, telling him not that my life seemed at an end but that it was one continual adventure. I wrote what I thought were amusing notes to friends still in New York, assuring them I would be back there soon and meanwhile my life was on track - partly devoted to adventure and partly to writing about adventure.

I was pleased about how the Bangkok scenes were coming out, but I hoped this would be a prelude to something much more. Something that really counted. Stories that would be so solid I would only have to write them once. Stories that would never change.Like the stories I tried to tell in lying letters

WRITTEN WORD 49 - Without Embalming Fluid

My non-writing time was at an end but I did not know it for sure until I began to work with Tom Groome – Thomas H. Groome – this wonderful Irish raconteur and theologian who is the world’s leading theorist and practitioner of religious education. He does it in the context of amazing wit and spirituality and caring and natural poetry.This was at Boston College’s Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry. This part of Boston College was not a place to get a doctorate in English or an MFA – it was far too creative for that.

I had found myself drawn to Boston and theology in the time I was living outside verbal realms. I was not finished with the art schools, but now there was something else that was just as surprising and just as powerful and seemed all of a piece with this opening into mystery that was opening up my life.

So here I was at an actual academic institution – something I never would have gone near if I had managed, as in my writing years, to keep ideas in the head intact by keeping them away from full reliance on intuition and emotion and the unfolding of mystery. Those days when I could take a chunk of remembered reality and pump it full of intellectual embalming fluid in proper literary fashion so as to keep these thoughts in my head looking like life. I may have been right in the first place about the limits of academia. But this was different.

Tom became my spiritual director and also my academic adviser – a combination that would horrify orthodox academic people. I also took all his courses. And I took him up on his suggestion that maybe for me a pure academic paper was not the thing. And so now I was really writing about my life.

And almost immediately I was 15 years old, not 56, and I was in New Hampshire, happily lost on the page to an even a greater extent than I had been happily lost on canvas.

I was in New Hampshire, where one day from a makeshift diving board by a sluice way I, in swimming trunks but wearing a canvas fedora, saw, across the pond, the Grout sisters, who had just come from the train with a cousin visiting for the first time – a smooth girl with new breasts and skin tanned the color of maple sugar. And now I saw across the pond from the diving board that the girls were walking into the water – a scene I knew I would never forget. She was laughing. She was splashing.

I was so excited I dove in, showing off, plunged in with my canvas hat on, and I swam underwater, and I came up, with my hat still on, beside this amazing new girl – Kitty.

And then there was another scene that had almost been over-ridden, almost drowned in constructed forgetfulness. It was a weekday afternoon at White Pines and the place was as empty as death. Through French doors at the living room end of the 80-foot main room I could see bird baths and flowers, but there were no people in the view – which stretched across iron streaked rocks, and blueberry and thorn fields, out to woods owned by my grandparents – leading to the high mountains, which rose so sharply they seemed to cut off the sun –

Inside, no one is ever around in mid-afternoon – except today. I am here. And Kitty is here. This girl named Kitty who I'd met while I was showing off at a swimming place –

Now at this end of the long room at White Pines I have my blue leatherette portable dorm room record player – still called a Victrola in this house where there is no other record player of any kind. Kitty has brought LPs. 'Twenties songs. The 'twenties revival in the 'fifties. Boop boop a doop. And the Charleston. Everyone she knows at home (where she is about to go into 10th grade at Greenwich Country Day), everyone is doing the Charleston, she says. The 'twenties are back. And she'll teach me.

And there I am, now flicking my feet out, operating with hands on knees like Ray Bolger in the movies, as if my legs are rubber and also can cross through each other. We are doing the Charleston.

Peter, my twin, strides through the room, throwing out a new set remark. "I see," he says, "Miss Kitty's Dancing Class. Heh Heh."

But we keep going! Although I cannot really believe that White Pines is a place for such music,

Maybe not. Or maybe it is.

The Charleston, the Charleston. There'll be a back number when the Charleston, the new Charleston, down in South Caroline... The Charleston... the Charleston.....



So there I was, the past still alive,with Kitty again. But to many stories that appeared were hardly Kitty stories. These other stories that has once seemed safe now became horror stories when I got them out of my head and onto paper. Context was being filled in now, and the stories were changing.

Often now parts that had stayed in the head led, when written, into dark and dangerous territory. But also, it turned out, non-written stories in my head could leave out the most warm and life-giving versions, as in some Kitty times, of what was in the landscape of my life.

Either way, frozen stories are dangerous.