|
THE LITERARY HERITAGE
In college there were new names. Jean-Paul Sartre was suddenly regarded as something of a god in many circles. I was exposed, at Northwestern Universtiry, where I attended my first two years, to T.S. Eliot and "The Waste Land," in which I believe I counted six different languages; to Pound, Yeats, James Joyce, and many other modern literary icons. All the talk in "The Waste Land" about the Holy Grail and the Tarot cards, which I'd never heard of, was as much "Greek" to me as the epigrams in some of Eliot's or Pound's poems. All I seemed to get out of my literature courses were names to drag around and use to make an impression. Prior to those courses I'd made a fool of myself, or at least it had seemed that way, mentioning the good, grey--and passe'--Robert Frost (the only poet I'd been able to think of) when an upperclass fraternity brother had spoken of poetry once. I remained completely baffled, except for a mild sense of enjoyment at James Joyce's regressive use of language in the first few pages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man--experimental use of language with a shock value similiar to Cummings'. Nietzsche was in the air in my philosophy courses. I wondered why he had gone mad if he was such a great writer and philosopher. The feeling I had though, was that "Everybody talks about Nietzsche, but nobody does anything about him!" In the spring of my first year at Northwestern I sat in a huge, filled auditorium to hear Allen Ginsberg shamanically chant his poems. Afterwards I went home to my dorm room, inspired through my coccoon for practically the first time in m life, to write a poem. Full of feeble classical allusions, its subject was how I didn't fit in, either with the hippies who'd sat on the stage with Ginsberg and chanted "Hare' Krishna" as he played the finger cymbals' or with the clean-shaven academics who were devoid of any means of inspiring me. At least here, in the man reporters often called "the hairy Ginsberg", poetry was something immediate that had to do with the celebration of life--our life--not the cataloguing of musty literary and mythological references.\ I had to go through the destruction of a great deal of my personality facade, which entailed enduring years of protracted and intense emotional pain, before I really became open to literature as a living influence and--what we sometimes forget it is meant to be--a healing force. During my second year of college, though, 1967-8, my entropic life gained some forward momentum. I became involved in the anti-Vietnam movement and to a degree, the Counterculture. I saw, perhaps (perhaps not) through a slightly less thick set of blinders. I developed a deep, though as yet semi-conscious longing for a Primitive corrective to my dead sensibilities. D. H. Lawrence was the author who came the closest to portraying such longings in his writing. His novels Sons and Lovers and Women in Love reinforced my inarticulate sense of need. I acted out my primitive drive a little through marijuana use and my first truly sexual relationship. Around this time--actually, when that relationship ended--I read St. Exupery's The Little Prince . It, too, pushed me onward in my sense that a quest for meaning in the modern world might somehow be possible. I even tried, with no success, to write a story in a similar, childlike style. Sigmund Freud became an
influence at this time--not directly, but through conversations which
my roomate and my mad poet friend, David Katz, would have late at night.
They also threw around intriguing names like Rilke and Jung, next
page back
|