I'm posting twice today because I'm arriving at a point (or you might call it a crisis) in my life where everything heats up and I move from a sedentary existence to one full of radical changes and action and even danger. My consuming love of books and reading still persisted over the following years but now it was intermixed with drugs and sex and crazy adventures, all very strange bedfellows, which makes this account so interesting to me and I hope to you.
Northrop Frye
I rented the middle room. The room towards the kitchen was occupied by a pretty blond, going to school like me, talkative and friendly when we met in the hall. I forget her name and major as I wasn’t there long enough to strike up an acquaintance. On the other side, toward the bathroom was another girl, dark haired, older than us and a real recluse. She would peek out her door to see if either of us was in the kitchen or bathroom and close it quickly if we were, to avoid all contact. She never said a word, sneaking swiftly down the stairs the few times we even caught a glimpse of her. Her appearance reminded me of the girlfriend of Sylvester Stallone in the first ‘Rocky’ movie, which had just come out that summer and which I saw on a date with my cousin, my single and solitary date in Toronto.
I was pleased with my new accommodations. I had a large desk, my record player and records, a blank book which I began to fill by copying out a Latin essay by Guillaume Bude ‘on study’. One night, listening to the radio I heard for the first time Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’. I purchased the record the next day. It’s still one of my favorites. As I read Homer that Fall the music seemed to accompany scenes in the Iliad to perfection.
My other courses were Euripides, (with only three other students) and a course on the few Greek and Roman romances, where I was the only student. My professor was very old but happy to have me when he found out I could read Petronius with ease, so we could ignore grammar and discuss the artistic merits of the book. All my teachers liked me but this was no Berkeley. Even the Homer class had less than ten students, all far behind me in ability to read Greek, and no one I wanted to befriend.
I’d wanted to take a course in Renaissance Latin and expressed this desire to several teachers. But no such course existed, never did, perhaps never will, another disappointment.
On the bright side there was a famous teacher, Northrup Frye, in the English department about to give one last course on Milton, before he retired. I wanted to take the course but being in a different department, it wasn’t allowed. So I went to his secretary (you couldn’t see him before her) and asked to audit the seminar. She told me bluntly he didn’t allow auditors. I wrote him a note, right there, folded it, handed it to her and asked if he could just glance at it, he might change his mind. The folding of it gave an intrigue to open and read.
In it I explained that I’d studied Greek and Latin at Berkeley and read the entire Beowulf in the original taught by Professor Renoir. Now Milton was one of the first Englishmen to have some acquaintance with that epic, so I was in a unique position to understand his epic well. She came out in a few minutes with a note typed and signed by Northrup, welcoming me in. I still have that note, a victory of common sense over rules.
I forgot to mention one incident that happened while at the graduate residence hall. I had a friend from Berkeley, Dennis, who lived with Phil O’Keefe in our third year there. We met and became friends. He called me that summer and said he’d be driving through Toronto and would like to hook up and, strangely enough, asked if there was anything in Berkeley that I’d like him to bring me. I told him, half-jokingly that some L.S.D. would be in order.
A little over a week later I return from class one afternoon and find posted on my door with a thumb tack (stolen off a nearby bulletin board) fifteen hits of blotter acid and the following note: ‘Sorry I missed you Rob. Here’s the acid you wanted. I’ll swing by later’.
I don’t know how many people had passed by it in that busy hallway. But I’m sure at least a dozen had read it. Graduate students are a race of avid readers. Miracle was nobody took the rare commodity. Most of my fellow students seemed pretty tame and timid. If I’d had any reputation to maintain I might have been angry. But having none I found it amusing and typical of Dennis the menace, always stirring things up.
We spent a pleasant evening together drinking beer. He told me he was set to visit people on the East coast but would be back here in October for a longer stay. Then he left.
I’ve never experienced loneliness to any great degree because my head is full of ideas and my habit of reading was always strong and ready to fill any vacant moments. But if I ever came close to that feeling it was in the following months. I wandered the streets alone. I ate in restaurants alone, visited a few bookshops and bars and met no one. The city itself, so new to me, added to this sense of being lost. I went to my classes but befriended nobody.
One thinks of loneliness as a feeling that descends upon someone sitting alone at night in a dim room, in dead silence. But it can engulf one even in broad daylight, in a crowd, and I remember some pangs of it in my classes as the others chatted away, a feeling of being different and out of place.
I enjoyed my course readings but not the analytic ways my teachers handled the subject matter, especially my Euripides prof. I resented it so much I told them so. This put me at odds with them and my fellow students, a black sheep. Great lit. was to be enjoyed, not dissected, a view which made all their labored studies and academic papers pointless. I remember them looking back at me bewildered as I said these things, and they had nothing to reply to that point, except that this was graduate school and expected of me. So I wrote this:
UNIVERSITIES
Oh what a blessed lot to live in lettered age,
When schools and books abound to make us sage.
When one may scribble,
And two may quibble,
And three can start a war or pilgrimage,
All without killing,
Or blood spilling,
In black and white upon a printed page.
We measure swords
By length of words
And lexicons comprise our equipage.
Grammar rules
Our fiercest duels,
Strong adjectives must vent our fettered rage.
Soliloquies
Bring victories,
We sink or sail on seas of verbiage.
All in one guild
We’ll live to build
In every city, town and hermitage
Vast libraries of tomes of persiflage.
I did enjoy re-reading Paradise Lost and attending Mr. Frye’s seminars. At this stage in his life he just wanted to point out and share the beauties of sound and sense in Milton’s epic, the uniqueness of its style and how he forged a language that took on a life of its own and seemed to breathe vitality. He gave me ‘new lights’ as we read it, enhanced my pleasure and appreciation of the work, new insights and whole new horizons to admire. Would that my other professors had handled their authors this way. I probably would have stayed.
The only other detail of this period that I look back on with happiness was the weekly Sunday pilgrimage I made by bus to my Grandparent’s house. They were both in fair health and good spirits in their late eighties. They took great pleasure in my company. They had other grandchildren in town but few came by. I’d sit on the veranda with them, telling them my weekly news, the classes I was taking and what I liked and disliked about my teachers.
Grandma would always shuffle off to the kitchen at some point and make me a sandwich so big I could barely finish it. Grandpa would listen judiciously to all I said and make comments now and then. I revered his judgement and showed it. The house itself brought back fond memories of many childhood visits. I felt it a duty to spend these few hours with them each week as they had few other visitors, for all the wealth of love they’d given me.
