Potrzebie
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Shadow Waltz: Dave English as He Is Spoke
The world was warm and white when I was born:
Beyond the windowpane the world was white,
A glaring whiteness in a leaded frame,
Yet warm as in the hearth and heart of light,
Although the whiteness was almond and was bone
In midnight's still paralysis, nevertheless
The world was warm and hope was infinite
All things would come, fulfilled, all things would be known
All things would be enjoyed, fulfilled, and come to be my own.
--Delmore Schwartz
Among the fanzines I saw during the early 1950s, the drawings of Dave English always amused and impressed. Somewhere miles beyond the Saul Steinberg horizon, the lower-case signature "de" heralded fluid free associations and twisting, overlapping lines etched into ink-splattered mimeograph stencils spilling from cosmic trash barrels in the back alleys of the brain. Today, on the Internet, one can see a few, very few, of his drawings. Dig deeper, and you can find fiction written in English by English, a story titled "the little boy who bit people" (originally published in Charles Wells' Fiendetta).
Decades danced by before I finally met Dave English, and when I did, it was in the middle of a blinding snowstorm. A week later, they were selling T-shirts around Boston that read, "I survived the Blizzard of '78."
I had moved from Cambridge and was living in Somerville then. Someone at the Somerville public access television station pushed a camera to their studio window, better to capture snow flurries in the street below. To do a film review for Cambridge's alternative weekly, The Real Paper, I had to get through the snowfall to a screening of animated films scheduled for a showing at Harvard's Carpenter Center auditorium. The screening, however, was not at the Carpenter Center.
Instead, I traveled from Somerville's Lechmere station to the University Film Studies Center at MIT. Located at 18 Vassar Street, the Film Studies office was in MIT's historic, cavernous Building 20, a three-story, shingle-clad wooden barracks built in 1943 as a major site for radar research. It was a temporary structure, intended to be torn down after World War II, but for 55 years it housed a variety of labs, student clubs and academic departments until it finally was demolished in 1998.
Also in Building 20 was the Tech Model Railroad Club where members in 1959 wrote the early computer programs that set in motion the hacker dream and the personal computer revolution. See the opening chapters of Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Doubleday, 1984). Only two other journalists made it to the Film Studies screening. While the animated shorts unspooled, the wind began rattling a window. Someone entered the darkened room, and over the whir of the 16mm projector, I heard his odd, muttered warning as he left, "It's really coming down out there."
When I walked outside, I was stunned by the amount of snow piling up in white dunes. Trekking back to a snowbound Somerville wasn't a pleasant prospect. Better to simply go one subway stop into Boston, since I had a key to a friend's Beacon Hill apartment. Entering the Kendall station, I rode to Charles Street, where the streetlamps illuminated swirling clouds, sparkling like diamond dust in the twilight.
I walked two blocks on Charles through the gathering snowstorm, decided to get something to eat and went into a salad bar. Inside was a single customer. From plays I had seen, I recognized him as the Boston actor-mime Bill Barnum, who had given a memorable performance as Renfield in a local production of Dracula. ("Flies? Flies? Poor puny things! Who wants to eat flies? Not when I can get nice fat spiders.") Outside, snowdrifts began to bank against the front window. I said, "Bill, this is beginning to look like a genuine blizzard, so why are you hanging out here in a salad bar?"
His answer: "Oh, I was supposed to get together with Dave English. He should be here soon." When he gave this startling response, I decided I was in no hurry to leave. Some years earlier, the theater critic Larry Stark had told me that English lived in Boston and worked as a dishwasher in restaurants around the city, so I knew this was certain to be not just any Dave English but the Dave English. (Larry published A David English Sketchbook in 1958.)
"I'd like to meet him, Bill. Could you introduce me?"
"Oh, sure."
Ten minutes later, the door opened, gusts blew in, and so did Dave English, frost flying from his cap. He took a seat between Barnum and myself, settling in with an eager smile as I began sounding off, praising his fanzine drawings of the 1950s. When I was in high school in the early 1950s, I had assumed from the sophistication of his sketches that he was older, so I was surprised to learn that we were about the same age. As we discussed various fanzines, artists and writers, Barnum eventually fell silent, gave us a curious stare and asked, "Do you two know each other?"
When we stood up and stepped outside, ready to face the challenge, I was blasted in the face by a spray of frigid flakes. I expected Barnum and English to turn right and head for the Charles St. subway station. Instead, to my amazement, they turned left, which meant that they intended to slog across the Boston Common and then on to the North End, a staggering journey not unlike the perils faced by Scott of the Antarctic. I watched them walk away -- spectral ghosty men vanishing as they faded to white. Then, following the route of the ducklings in Make Way for Ducklings, I headed up the hill, a mini-Everest that would have left Robert McCloskey's ducklings sprawled on the sidewalk with ice-covered beaks.
A silent snow, secret snow fell while I dreamed in the darkness, and when I woke, the world had changed. I set out to meet some friends at the Hampshire House restaurant above the Bull & Finch Pub (the real-life Cheers bar) but had to circumnavigate a corner where the snow had drifted to a second-story height. With all vehicular traffic banned for a week, cross-country skiers left tracks on abandoned highways. Crowds of college students walked in groups through the middle of surreal Siberian streets.
I wrote the film review and somehow managed to get it to The Real Paper office in Cambridge. In Harvard Square so much snow was impacted over a narrow path between two buildings that walking the path actually brought one to a rooftop level. Some days later, a filmmaker phoned to congratulate me, pointing out that I was the only Boston film critic to get a review into print that week.
Dave English and I had exchanged mailing addresses, but I never saw him again. Where is he now? I don't know. Almost 40 years ago, English wrote chapters of his novel, The World Does Not Change (1970), which may or may not be influenced by Keeler. Sounds just like the kind of thing Fender Tucker might want to publish. So if Tucker can locate English and English completed The World Does Not Change, there's our happy ending. Meanwhile, I prefer to remember the Dave English who created mimeo magic with those dancing drawings of long ago. They drift softly through my memories. Where are the twilltone snows of yesteryear?
The world was warm and white when I was born:
Beyond the windowpane the world was white,
A glaring whiteness in a leaded frame,
Yet warm as in the hearth and heart of light,
Although the whiteness was almond and was bone
In midnight's still paralysis, nevertheless
The world was warm and hope was infinite
All things would come, fulfilled, all things would be known
All things would be enjoyed, fulfilled, and come to be my own.
--Delmore Schwartz
Among the fanzines I saw during the early 1950s, the drawings of Dave English always amused and impressed. Somewhere miles beyond the Saul Steinberg horizon, the lower-case signature "de" heralded fluid free associations and twisting, overlapping lines etched into ink-splattered mimeograph stencils spilling from cosmic trash barrels in the back alleys of the brain. Today, on the Internet, one can see a few, very few, of his drawings. Dig deeper, and you can find fiction written in English by English, a story titled "the little boy who bit people" (originally published in Charles Wells' Fiendetta).
Decades danced by before I finally met Dave English, and when I did, it was in the middle of a blinding snowstorm. A week later, they were selling T-shirts around Boston that read, "I survived the Blizzard of '78."
I had moved from Cambridge and was living in Somerville then. Someone at the Somerville public access television station pushed a camera to their studio window, better to capture snow flurries in the street below. To do a film review for Cambridge's alternative weekly, The Real Paper, I had to get through the snowfall to a screening of animated films scheduled for a showing at Harvard's Carpenter Center auditorium. The screening, however, was not at the Carpenter Center.
Instead, I traveled from Somerville's Lechmere station to the University Film Studies Center at MIT. Located at 18 Vassar Street, the Film Studies office was in MIT's historic, cavernous Building 20, a three-story, shingle-clad wooden barracks built in 1943 as a major site for radar research. It was a temporary structure, intended to be torn down after World War II, but for 55 years it housed a variety of labs, student clubs and academic departments until it finally was demolished in 1998.Also in Building 20 was the Tech Model Railroad Club where members in 1959 wrote the early computer programs that set in motion the hacker dream and the personal computer revolution. See the opening chapters of Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Doubleday, 1984). Only two other journalists made it to the Film Studies screening. While the animated shorts unspooled, the wind began rattling a window. Someone entered the darkened room, and over the whir of the 16mm projector, I heard his odd, muttered warning as he left, "It's really coming down out there."
When I walked outside, I was stunned by the amount of snow piling up in white dunes. Trekking back to a snowbound Somerville wasn't a pleasant prospect. Better to simply go one subway stop into Boston, since I had a key to a friend's Beacon Hill apartment. Entering the Kendall station, I rode to Charles Street, where the streetlamps illuminated swirling clouds, sparkling like diamond dust in the twilight.I walked two blocks on Charles through the gathering snowstorm, decided to get something to eat and went into a salad bar. Inside was a single customer. From plays I had seen, I recognized him as the Boston actor-mime Bill Barnum, who had given a memorable performance as Renfield in a local production of Dracula. ("Flies? Flies? Poor puny things! Who wants to eat flies? Not when I can get nice fat spiders.") Outside, snowdrifts began to bank against the front window. I said, "Bill, this is beginning to look like a genuine blizzard, so why are you hanging out here in a salad bar?"
His answer: "Oh, I was supposed to get together with Dave English. He should be here soon." When he gave this startling response, I decided I was in no hurry to leave. Some years earlier, the theater critic Larry Stark had told me that English lived in Boston and worked as a dishwasher in restaurants around the city, so I knew this was certain to be not just any Dave English but the Dave English. (Larry published A David English Sketchbook in 1958.)
"I'd like to meet him, Bill. Could you introduce me?"
"Oh, sure."
Ten minutes later, the door opened, gusts blew in, and so did Dave English, frost flying from his cap. He took a seat between Barnum and myself, settling in with an eager smile as I began sounding off, praising his fanzine drawings of the 1950s. When I was in high school in the early 1950s, I had assumed from the sophistication of his sketches that he was older, so I was surprised to learn that we were about the same age. As we discussed various fanzines, artists and writers, Barnum eventually fell silent, gave us a curious stare and asked, "Do you two know each other?"
Harry Stephen Keeler
I remember English talking enthusiastically about his favorite novelist, the pulp writer Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967), who had edited America's Humor during the 1920s and also edited 10 Story Book from 1919 to 1940. Keeler was ranked by William Poundstone as "one of the strangest writers who ever lived." An apt description, perhaps, when one encounters a pre-Dickian detour by Keeler in a passage such as this from his X. Jones -- of Scotland Yard (1936):
Keeler outlined his working methods for that kind of convoluted writing in his article "The Mechanics and Kinematics of Web Work Plot Construction" for The Author & Journalist. According to Larry Stark, Dave English also enjoyed reading Lovecraft, Samuel Delaney and Henry James. But I only recall him urging me to read Keeler, whom I had never heard of back in 1978. Today, the "Keeler Renaissance" gathers steam with websites and occasional mentions of Keeler's influence on Futurama and Neil Gaiman. Back issues of Richard Polt's Keeler News can be read online here.
Keeler's novels have been brought back into print by Fender Tucker's Ramble House (which has also published Dick Lupoff's Marblehead: A Novel of H.P. Lovecraft). Keeler's reputation continues to escalate. At this rate, he may some day fill the gap left when Richard Yates became too famous to still be called the best-known "least-known" writer. Larry Stark, however, finds the notion of a "Keeler Renaissance" so preposterous that he laughed uproariously for a full minute when I mentioned it to him.
At some point, I asked English where he was living. He answered, "I live beneath a North End theater in an upholstered chair accessible only by using wooden planks to avoid stepping in the water surrounding the chair." I may not have the quote exactly right, but it was a vivid image that has stayed with me for years, reminiscent of playwright Alfred Jarry's bizarre living situation, a claustrophobic crib where visitors could not stand because his apartment was only half the height of a floor in the building.
Through the window I could see nothing but pure ivory whiteness as the clock edged toward 9pm. By that time, only two women were still working, cleaning up, and one of them called out, "Okay, fellows, we're closing up now."
I remember English talking enthusiastically about his favorite novelist, the pulp writer Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967), who had edited America's Humor during the 1920s and also edited 10 Story Book from 1919 to 1940. Keeler was ranked by William Poundstone as "one of the strangest writers who ever lived." An apt description, perhaps, when one encounters a pre-Dickian detour by Keeler in a passage such as this from his X. Jones -- of Scotland Yard (1936):So, Jones says, for all practical purposes, in a world of space and "time," the "wrinkles" resulting from the "crime-stress" appear, in reality, as "deviations." Deviations in human conduct: deviations from normal habit, custom, and be likened to an explosion, or concussion, the force of which radiates out in all directions--not just into the future, he cautions--but also into the past!--definitely deviating the paths and conduct not only of the chief actors--but of all those who have intimate contact with them--and who, by that very relationship, are thus displaced in 4 dimensions from the chief actors. The maximum possible "deviation" in a murder is, Jones points out, that of the murdered man--whose course is deviated, for the first time, from living to being dead!
Keeler outlined his working methods for that kind of convoluted writing in his article "The Mechanics and Kinematics of Web Work Plot Construction" for The Author & Journalist. According to Larry Stark, Dave English also enjoyed reading Lovecraft, Samuel Delaney and Henry James. But I only recall him urging me to read Keeler, whom I had never heard of back in 1978. Today, the "Keeler Renaissance" gathers steam with websites and occasional mentions of Keeler's influence on Futurama and Neil Gaiman. Back issues of Richard Polt's Keeler News can be read online here.Keeler's novels have been brought back into print by Fender Tucker's Ramble House (which has also published Dick Lupoff's Marblehead: A Novel of H.P. Lovecraft). Keeler's reputation continues to escalate. At this rate, he may some day fill the gap left when Richard Yates became too famous to still be called the best-known "least-known" writer. Larry Stark, however, finds the notion of a "Keeler Renaissance" so preposterous that he laughed uproariously for a full minute when I mentioned it to him.
At some point, I asked English where he was living. He answered, "I live beneath a North End theater in an upholstered chair accessible only by using wooden planks to avoid stepping in the water surrounding the chair." I may not have the quote exactly right, but it was a vivid image that has stayed with me for years, reminiscent of playwright Alfred Jarry's bizarre living situation, a claustrophobic crib where visitors could not stand because his apartment was only half the height of a floor in the building.
Through the window I could see nothing but pure ivory whiteness as the clock edged toward 9pm. By that time, only two women were still working, cleaning up, and one of them called out, "Okay, fellows, we're closing up now."
When we stood up and stepped outside, ready to face the challenge, I was blasted in the face by a spray of frigid flakes. I expected Barnum and English to turn right and head for the Charles St. subway station. Instead, to my amazement, they turned left, which meant that they intended to slog across the Boston Common and then on to the North End, a staggering journey not unlike the perils faced by Scott of the Antarctic. I watched them walk away -- spectral ghosty men vanishing as they faded to white. Then, following the route of the ducklings in Make Way for Ducklings, I headed up the hill, a mini-Everest that would have left Robert McCloskey's ducklings sprawled on the sidewalk with ice-covered beaks.A silent snow, secret snow fell while I dreamed in the darkness, and when I woke, the world had changed. I set out to meet some friends at the Hampshire House restaurant above the Bull & Finch Pub (the real-life Cheers bar) but had to circumnavigate a corner where the snow had drifted to a second-story height. With all vehicular traffic banned for a week, cross-country skiers left tracks on abandoned highways. Crowds of college students walked in groups through the middle of surreal Siberian streets.
I wrote the film review and somehow managed to get it to The Real Paper office in Cambridge. In Harvard Square so much snow was impacted over a narrow path between two buildings that walking the path actually brought one to a rooftop level. Some days later, a filmmaker phoned to congratulate me, pointing out that I was the only Boston film critic to get a review into print that week.Dave English and I had exchanged mailing addresses, but I never saw him again. Where is he now? I don't know. Almost 40 years ago, English wrote chapters of his novel, The World Does Not Change (1970), which may or may not be influenced by Keeler. Sounds just like the kind of thing Fender Tucker might want to publish. So if Tucker can locate English and English completed The World Does Not Change, there's our happy ending. Meanwhile, I prefer to remember the Dave English who created mimeo magic with those dancing drawings of long ago. They drift softly through my memories. Where are the twilltone snows of yesteryear?
Click "memoir" for previous memoir installments.
Labels: bill barnum, dave english, delmore schwartz, dick lupoff, fender tucker, hackers, keeler, larry stark, memoir, mimeograph, richard yates
¶ 9:17 AM 5 comments
Monday, September 15, 2008
The Renaissance of Richard Yates
Soon we'll be hearing a lot about Richard Yates (1926-1992), labeled "one of America's least known great writers" by Esquire years ago. December 26 is the release date of Sam Mendes' film adaptation of Yates' Revolutionary Road (1961) depicting the American Dream askew. The film is already attracting media attention because it reunites Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Also in the cast are Kathy Bates, Kathryn Hahn and Zoe Kazan. Some writers have noted the influence of Yates on Mad Men, and commercials for the movie have been shown in Mad Men episodes.
I caught an item around 1985 that Yates and William Styron would be doing a reading at Boston University, so I went. On a warm sunny afternoon, I was surprised to find an audience of only about 35 people in a fairly large BU lecture hall. As I recall, the situation was that Styron would read Yates, while Yates would read from his screenplay of Styron's Lie Down in Darkness. However, it soon became apparent that Yates was a no show. This was a genuine disappointment, but Styron carried on solo, giving a magnificent reading of the entire first chapter of Revolutionary Road. Sunlight poured through the windows. As Styron's great voice echoed through the hall, Yates' characters came to life, dancing among the dust motes.
Here's a good Slate article on the cinematic cul de sac of Yates by Blake Bailey, author of A Tragic Honesty: The LIfe and Work of Richard Yates (2003).
Yates used to hang out at the Crossroads Restaurant on Beacon Street in Boston. Here Marty Jukovsky writes about meeting Yates at the Crossroads.
Interviewed in 1972, Yates commented on the meanings behind his title Revolutionary Road:
Revolutionary Road begins like this:
The final dying sounds of their dress rehearsal left the Laurel Players with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of an empty auditorium. They hardly dared to breathe as the short, solemn figure of their director emerged from the naked seats to join them on stage, as he pulled a stepladder raspingly from the wings and climbed halfway up its rungs to turn and tell them, with several clearings of his throat, that they were a damned talented group of people and a wonderful group of people to work with.
"It hasn't been an easy job," he said, his glasses glinting soberly around the stage. "We've had a lot of problems here, and quite frankly I'd more or less resigned myself not to expect too much. Well, listen. Maybe this sounds corny, but something happened up here tonight. Sitting out there tonight I suddenly knew, deep down, that you were all putting your hearts into your work for the first time." He let the fingers of one hand splay out across the pocket of his shirt to show what a simple, physical thing the heart was; then he made the same hand into a fist, which he shook slowly and wordlessly in a long dramatic pause, closing one eye and allowing his moist lower lip to curl out in a grimace of triumph and pride. "Do that again tomorrow night," he said, "and we'll have one hell of a show."
They could have wept with relief. Instead, trembling, they cheered and laughed and shook hands and kissed one another, and somebody went out for a case of beer and they all sang unanimously, that they'd better knock it off and get a good night's sleep.
"See you tomorrow!" they called, as happy as children, and riding home under the moon they found they could roll down the windows of their cars and let the air in, with its health-giving smells of loam and young flowers. It was the first time many of the Laurel Players had allowed themselves to acknowledge the coming of spring.
The year was 1955 and the place was a part of western Connecticut where three swollen villages had lately been merged by a wide and clamorous highway called Route Twelve. The Laurel Players were an amateur company, but a costly and very serious one, carefully recruited from among the younger adults of all three towns, and this was to be their maiden production. All winter, gathering in one another's living rooms for excited talks about Ibsen and Shaw and O'Neill, and then for the show of hands in which a common-sense majority chose The Petrified Forest, and then for the preliminary casting, they had felt their dedication growing stronger every week.
Go here to continue reading.
Soon we'll be hearing a lot about Richard Yates (1926-1992), labeled "one of America's least known great writers" by Esquire years ago. December 26 is the release date of Sam Mendes' film adaptation of Yates' Revolutionary Road (1961) depicting the American Dream askew. The film is already attracting media attention because it reunites Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Also in the cast are Kathy Bates, Kathryn Hahn and Zoe Kazan. Some writers have noted the influence of Yates on Mad Men, and commercials for the movie have been shown in Mad Men episodes.I caught an item around 1985 that Yates and William Styron would be doing a reading at Boston University, so I went. On a warm sunny afternoon, I was surprised to find an audience of only about 35 people in a fairly large BU lecture hall. As I recall, the situation was that Styron would read Yates, while Yates would read from his screenplay of Styron's Lie Down in Darkness. However, it soon became apparent that Yates was a no show. This was a genuine disappointment, but Styron carried on solo, giving a magnificent reading of the entire first chapter of Revolutionary Road. Sunlight poured through the windows. As Styron's great voice echoed through the hall, Yates' characters came to life, dancing among the dust motes.
Here's a good Slate article on the cinematic cul de sac of Yates by Blake Bailey, author of A Tragic Honesty: The LIfe and Work of Richard Yates (2003).
Yates used to hang out at the Crossroads Restaurant on Beacon Street in Boston. Here Marty Jukovsky writes about meeting Yates at the Crossroads.
Interviewed in 1972, Yates commented on the meanings behind his title Revolutionary Road:
I think I meant it more as an indictment of American life in the 1950s. Because during the Fifties there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs — a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price, as exemplified politically in the Eisenhower administration and the Joe McCarthy witchhunts. Anyway, a great many Americans were deeply disturbed by all that — felt it to be an outright betrayal of our best and bravest revolutionary spirit — and that was the spirit I tried to embody in the character of April Wheeler. I meant the title to suggest that the revolutionary road of 1776 had come to something very much like a dead end in the Fifties.
Revolutionary Road begins like this:
The final dying sounds of their dress rehearsal left the Laurel Players with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of an empty auditorium. They hardly dared to breathe as the short, solemn figure of their director emerged from the naked seats to join them on stage, as he pulled a stepladder raspingly from the wings and climbed halfway up its rungs to turn and tell them, with several clearings of his throat, that they were a damned talented group of people and a wonderful group of people to work with.
"It hasn't been an easy job," he said, his glasses glinting soberly around the stage. "We've had a lot of problems here, and quite frankly I'd more or less resigned myself not to expect too much. Well, listen. Maybe this sounds corny, but something happened up here tonight. Sitting out there tonight I suddenly knew, deep down, that you were all putting your hearts into your work for the first time." He let the fingers of one hand splay out across the pocket of his shirt to show what a simple, physical thing the heart was; then he made the same hand into a fist, which he shook slowly and wordlessly in a long dramatic pause, closing one eye and allowing his moist lower lip to curl out in a grimace of triumph and pride. "Do that again tomorrow night," he said, "and we'll have one hell of a show."They could have wept with relief. Instead, trembling, they cheered and laughed and shook hands and kissed one another, and somebody went out for a case of beer and they all sang unanimously, that they'd better knock it off and get a good night's sleep.
"See you tomorrow!" they called, as happy as children, and riding home under the moon they found they could roll down the windows of their cars and let the air in, with its health-giving smells of loam and young flowers. It was the first time many of the Laurel Players had allowed themselves to acknowledge the coming of spring.
The year was 1955 and the place was a part of western Connecticut where three swollen villages had lately been merged by a wide and clamorous highway called Route Twelve. The Laurel Players were an amateur company, but a costly and very serious one, carefully recruited from among the younger adults of all three towns, and this was to be their maiden production. All winter, gathering in one another's living rooms for excited talks about Ibsen and Shaw and O'Neill, and then for the show of hands in which a common-sense majority chose The Petrified Forest, and then for the preliminary casting, they had felt their dedication growing stronger every week.
Go here to continue reading.
Labels: dicaprio, mendes, revolutionary road, richard yates, winslet
¶ 7:09 AM 0 comments
