Our Gang by Hugh Fox
Introduction
In the spring of the 1968 I was finishing up my last year of teaching at Loyola University (now Loyola-Marymount University), Los Angeles, California. Mr. Academic, Mr. Square, Mr. Foreign Films. I’d had a critical study of Henry James published, had written all sorts of articles on South American history, including a book about Simon Bolivar (the George Washington of South America) and articles on Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, and Venezuelan novelist Ramon Diaz Sanchez.
I’d read all of Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Jane Austen, and the Spanish mystic-poet San Juan de la Cruz – Square. Square. Square.
And then one day I was out at a bookstore called the Kazoo, and I picked up Charles Bukowski’s – Crucifix in a Deathhand: New Poems, 1963-1965.
Total revolution.
Language like off the Chicago streets of my youth. Not even tough-guy stuff, but simple, straightforward reality.
Like this poem about a Mafioso dying of a heart attack:
I don’t know whether it’s Crete or
Sicily or Italy proper
but he’s lying there in the sunshine
and before he dies he says
“How beautiful life can be,” and
then he’s gone.
sometimes you’ve got to kill 4 or 5
thousand men before you somehow
get to believe that the sparrow
is immortal, money is piss and
that you have been wasting
your time.
(Loujone Press/Lyle Stuart Inc., NY, 1965, p. 88)
Simple, real but not really tough-guyish full-time like his chief disciple, my San Francisco pal, A.D. Winans.
I wrote to the publisher, Loujon Press in New Orleans. I told them I wanted to get in touch with Bukowski, write a book about him. They wrote back that he lived in Los Angeles “Just look him up in the phone book” which I did. He lived out in Hollywood, not in any mansion or anything, just this crappy motor court place as it turned out. He worked at the post office. I called him up, he invited me, and the wife, out, and we went out to see him. Told him I wanted to write a book about him.
He emptied off his shelves, everything he’d ever published; actually went into the closet and found suitcases to put the stuff in. Had to come back three times to get it all.
“And if you find any doubles, keep um, they’re yours.”
I did a bibliography, read everything he’d given me and wrote a book about him: Charles Bukowski: A Critical and Biographical Study, which was published by Abyss Publications, a small press in Somerville, Massachusetts headed up by a guy named Jerry Dombrowski.
In April of 1968, my wife, Lucia, then teaching at San Fernando State College (now San Fernando State University) found out about a big get-together of writers in Berkley. I got the names of the organizers – Len Fulton and Jerry Burns – and I wrote to them. Got a letter back asking me if I’d like to be on a panel about distribution and marketing.
Distribution? Marketing?
I had started publishing a little poetry magazine called Ghost Dance: The International Quarterly of Experimental Poetry and had gotten a few libraries to subscribe, but what did I know about distribution and marketing? Nichts! Which I told them, but they wrote back and said they wanted me on the panel because I was a university professor and all, it would give the panel more “weight.” So I said OK, and at the end of the month Lucia and I were off to Berkeley.
It was an experience that totally changed my life.
In Los Angeles, through Lucia, I had gotten to know the Chilean poet David Valjalo who would end up publishing one of my skimpy little books of poetry, Eye into Now under the imprint Ediciones de la Frontera (“Editions of the Border”). And, at the same time, Columbian Nadaista (“Nothing-ist”), Dukardo Hinestrosa, encouraged me to do my own little mag, like his mag Nada (“Nothing”), which was the push that got Ghost Dance started.
Now, in Berkeley, I was suddenly surrounded by the whole literary underground world of the 60’s.
There was this millionaire publisher-essayist from New York, Harry Smith: big, fat, bearded, loaded. He published books and a thick, impressive lit mag called, self-effacingly, The Smith.
Harry and I hit it off from the start. He invited me to New York to visit him, which I started doing, and before I knew it, I was visiting three of four times a year, working on his mag (and getting paid for it), spending maybe a month a year in New York – for a period of some twenty years.
His wife, Marion, was this Jewish-Austro-Hungarian millionairess whose family had gotten all their money out before Hitler, and they lived in this huge old mansion in Brooklyn Heights. Just to give you some idea of how loaded they’d been in Europe, their town house in Prague is now the U.S. Embassy.
Three kids.
I hit it off so well with Marion that after a year, one night after dinner at the greatest Jewish restaurant in the world – Junior’s in Brooklyn – she told the kids “From now on Hugh is Uncle Hugh, Ok? He’s my brother!”
So I became Uncle Hugh.
One of the greatest stylists of all time, Stanley Berne, worked on the mag and book publishing, with Harry, and so he and I also became good friends.
Harry would take everyone out to lunch every day, to a place called Suerkins, close to his office (which was down by City Hall), and I met everyone who was anyone in the “underground”/Smith group: poet-critic Richard Nason, the artist Jim Kay, poet-critic Richard Kostelanetz, poet Stanley Nelson, mystery writer Tom Tolnay and one of the editors of The Smith, poet H.L. Van Brunt.
The same thing happened in San Francisco.
I started going to visit sci-fi writer and madcap experimental poet, Richard Morris, every chance I got, between semesters, during the summer, over Christmas break. Sometimes I’d go to New York and San Francisco on the same trip and circle up to Boston from New York to see Jerry Dombrowski, the guy who had published my Bukowski book. I’d visit poets Sam Cornish, Ottone Riccio, Jean Laier and Bill Costley, before taking the cross-country flight to San Francisco.
That little panel on distribution at the last big get-together in Berkley had become COSMEP: the Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers. They were looking for a “coordinator” of the org, and who else but Richard Morris could have done the job; you know, advertising, getting new members, organizing conventions, handling the day-to-day money matters. Morris was the perfect one.
He was publishing a lot of books already on the big questions: how did the Universe begin, is there a god, or is everything just automatic, how did the “order” in the Universe get there if there isn’t a god, and right next to the big questions, he was writing all kinds of crazy-cat stuff, like poetry and fiction of the absurd.
Here’s an example from Grape-Nuts – The Board of Directors, volume 27 of my magazine Ghost Dance (Fall-Winter, 1976):
Van Gogh
VINCENT VAN GOGH sits writing a letter to his brother. The sun is setting. Night falls on his ear.
(p. 13)
Richard lived with artist Mary Van der Slice in an apartment on Pacific Heights, where I’d sleep on a couch in the living room at night. Somewhat of an intrusion, but I always felt 100% welcome.
When he died, of colon cancer, a couple of years ago, no other death hit me so hard. Mary called and told me he was dying. I called back, talked to Richard, told him I wanted to come out and be with him to the end.
“It’s better you don’t,” he said, “I’m resigned now, buddhistically calm. Seeing you would smash all the calm, get me to thinking as to what I’m leaving behind.”
For years, every spring, the board of directors of COSMEP would have a meeting in San Francisco and I’d stay for a few days in this plush old mansion of a bed and breakfast on Pacific Heights just a few blocks from Richard’s place.
Then there’d be the COSMEP conventions every fall, and the conventions got to be like old-home-week for me with Jeff Cook, Diane Kruchkow, Lynne Savitt, Lyn Lifshin, A.D. Winans, Glenna Luschei, Blythe Ayne and Curt Johnson around. I could go on listing names for pages.
There was hardly an underground poet and/or editor I didn’t know, and I began to get published everywhere; did an anthology I called The Living Underground: an Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, then a critical book called The Living Underground: A Critical Overview, then The Living Underground: A Prose Anthology. I did a book on perhaps the single most published poet in the U.S., Lyn Lifshin (Lyn Lifshin: A Critical Study) and another book (The Poetry of Charles Potts) on wild-man hippy poet Charles Potts (then known as Laffing Water).
Len Fulton, the editor of the Small Press Review, made me one of his reviewers and I’d have a stack of reviews in practically every issue of SPR; would visit Fulton in his mountain retreat in Paradise, California, up north of San Francisco, one of the most romantic, hidden away places in the world. Or I’d visit Glenna Luschei at her place in acres of avocados, separated from the ocean by merely the avocado grove itself.
Sometimes I’d dress up as “Connie” Fox, all black lace and black wig, and go out on the town with Blythe Ayne in San Francisco, or elsewhere, when there’d be a convention in, say, Santa Fe. Blythe always encouraged me to be whatever I wanted to be; the emphasis was always on being.
It was life just the way I wanted it to be.
Back in East Lansing, I became pals with poet Albert “Bud” Drake, and I’d be over at his house every week for a party. Diane Wakoski would be there along with Leonore Smith, Dick Thomas and all the poets from the mid-Michigan area. There’d be readings over at a used bookstore called Archives and Leonore Smith would always have a party afterwards at her huge, old Victorian mansion over by the university.
A writer among writers; I always had a chance to read my work and almost every day or so something was coming out somewhere. It was like being in Paris surrounded by Rimbaud, Verlaine and Baudelaire; like being part of the Hemingway-Fitzgerald-Gertrude Stein-Henry Miller-Anais Nin gang – like being inside of filmable history – always feeling that I should get it all down on tape, actually carrying around a video camera with me, most of the time; cassette cases surrounding me filled with hundreds of tapes of readings, conversations and interviews.
This was what I’d always wanted, to be in my own soup with my own kind of noodles, to be in my own sea with my own kind of sharks.
My whole life started centering around my being a writer amongst writers. I’d be in New York at Harry Smith’s place, or up in Boston, or out in San Francisco with Morris and Mary Van der Slice, A.D. Winans or Blythe Ayne around Christmastime or for spring break.
I published them, started to anthologize them, reviewed them; we became one big literary family, all of us defining each other, encouraging each other, bringing out the best in us that we had to give.
And that’s what this book is all about, our gang aging, coming to the inevitable last act.
***
Besides Richard Morris, some others of our gang have already escaped me. Dick Higgins, for example, this bouncy, belligerent super-genius who had inherited a fortune from his grandfather who had invented the elevator. Just recently, when I was visiting Jerry Dombrowski in Somerville, he gave me the story about Higgins: “Yeah, he was at this reading, started to read some of his poetry that called for screams, started screaming and screaming and had a cerebral hemorrhage, and that was it.”
Sidney Bernard is long gone, Sid with his long graying pony-tail working away like a madman, writing and re-writing his poetry (or essays), polishing, polishing, polishing. And the finished product always was perfect. Couldn’t have been better. When I’d come to visit Harry on one of my almost scheduled, very predictable visits, Sidney would always meet me with the same greeting: “Hey, Hughie, so you’re in town, huh? Where ya stayin’?” As if, in the twenty years I went to New York, I ever stayed anywhere else but Harry’s.
Menke Katz gone, too. The great Talmudic scholar from Lithuania who had lived for years in Safed, Israel, kind of the “home” of the Talmud. The greatest scholar I ever knew. I mean Harry and his wife, Marion, and I would go visit Menke in upstate New York. After dinner we’d go out for a walk in a nearby forest, I’d start talking to Menke like he was my father confessor, “I don’t know, Menke, I’m living with these two women, my legal wife and this Brazilian who is kind of ‘our’ – my wife’s and mine – girlfriend. Three kids with my wife, but we are trying to get the Brazilian pregnant.” A pretty unique situation, you’d think, but he’d always come up with “The Talmud says…,” and would start to quote the Talmud in Hebrew, then, when we got back to the house he’d go into his library, take down some thick volume from the set of Talmud volumes that covered one whole wall, open it to a certain page, and lo and behold, there would be the passage he’d quoted when we were out walking.
He’s the guy who figured out/intuited that my Czech grandmother was really a Jew; not just scholarship, but this wonderful, instinctive sense of intuition.
Jackie Eubanks is gone. Librarian at Brooklyn College in Flatbush. A lesbian most of her life, she got “normal” in middle age and died of AIDs. R.I.P.
Alexandra Garrett from Venice, California, one of the people who ran Beyond Baroque, the magazine and the gallery, one of my dearest friends who I admired so much that when Nona (wife number two) wanted to name our second child, she said to me, “Give me the name of the happiest, most fulfilled woman you’ve ever known.” No hesitation, not a second. “Alexandra Garrett.”
I remember her in her beautiful, little, yellow brick cottage in Santa Monica on the day she admitted to me, kind of hidden, under her breath, that she was Jewish, as if there were Nazis listening in the next room. And the day that I went to see her at Beyond Baroque, after I’d left L.A.; I was just back on visit, and she was in a meeting. I left, was out in my car, about to pull away from the curb when she came running out, “Hugh, how could you have ever thought of leaving without seeing me,” giving me the usual big hug when I got out of the car.
Dead maybe ten years already.
Norm Moser in Berkeley. The last time I saw him he looked all rickety and bent and grey, gone for a few years already.
Noel Peattie gone. The last time I visited him thinking he'd last another thousand years in California coastal heaven.
Larry Eigner, one of the greatest poets in our gang. I remember when I went to visit him in Masschusetts, in some small town outside Boston. No idea that there was anything wrong with him. I’d published him in Ghost Dance and he seemed normal enough, his work kind of Renoir transferred into words, pure, abbreviated impressionism;
trees
shadow
all angles
the space of birds,
in the space of planes
(Ghost Dance 26, Spring-Summer, 1976
I remember walking into his office and there he was all crooked and slanted, badly crippled, disfigured. “Bbbbbbbirth aaaaaaccccident,” He explained, picking up on my astonishment.
Dead a few years now.
Carol Berge out in Santa Fe. The last time I was out there she was in a bad, bad way. It had taken me two days just to track her down.
Not a word from her for years. I imagine she’s gone too.
So the people in this book represent a kind of hard core of closest friends who I’ve kept in touch with or have kept touch with me over the years.
Some people don’t want to be in this book.
Maybe it’s the title – Our Gang: The Last Act.
Lyn Lifshin has done everything she can to sidestep being here. I keep thinking of the last picture she sent me of herself not long ago, from the Washington Post: thin, long-haired, short-skirted, older - OK, but still very much on stage – Judy Garland, Lisa Minnell – who says it’s the last act anyhow?
There’s another magnificent writer whose pen name is Cridisque, real name is Linda Bohannon. I’ve never met her but I published her a lot in Ghost Dance, and checked out the French sources and references she gives in her poetry. I found that she is one of the deepest, more erudite and, at the same time, most original poets on the scene. But she’s been very careful in avoiding meeting me. No idea why.
Millie Mae Wicklund, another poet I published a lot, is another of the great talents, but is hiding out in Florida. I visited her once in Providence, Rhode Island, that was it. She is a schizophrenic lesbian who has, for years, been totally obsessed with Venezuelan pop artist, Marisol. Look in the Ghost Dance Anthology and maybe you can get an idea of why she’s also in hiding:
Wherever I go, I am noticed.
My parachute is the talk of the town.
People come to the door,
call me up on the phone.
They ask me why the parachute?
I answer nothing, knowing it is
my endgame. I tell them only I am
a poet. They accept me, pat my
parachute, don’t ask me to read
my poems. I have a parachute,
ragged clothes.
(From “Parachute Two,” Ghost Dance 42, 1986, in the Ghost Dance Anthology, Whitston Publishing Co., Troy, NY, 1944, p. 200)
There’s Duane Locke down in Tampa, Florida, who I haven’t seen for years, Todd Moore out in Albuquerque, Gary Curran (aka Karl Kvitko), gorgeous sex goddess Lynne Savitt on Long Island, sardonically witty Diane Kruchkow up in Maine, F. Richard Thomas, Al Drake, and Leonore Smith here in East Lansing/Lansing, all great writers and also chakers and movers in the literary scene here in Michigan… perhaps we need an Our Gang: The Last Act, Vol.II. But I think I’d better write this introduction now and get into print as much as I’ve done while I can still do it. For years I saw myself outside the stream of time, the eternal wunderkind/ boy genius. But ever since my prostate surgeries (hyperplasia), prostate cancer and coronary attack, the message has been loud and clear – it’s the last act for me too.
Genug! Enough!
What I’m hoping is that when the future literary histories of the U.S. are written (if anyone will be writing such things at all in the future) that Our Gang will figure prominently. For me the Bennetts and Johnsons, Andersdatters and Luscheis were the real core of American literature at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twentieth century.
I was the great blessing in my life to have been part of the whole swirl of things, to have been able to spend a month a year with Harry Smith every year for weenty years, to have seen Richard Morris at least two or three times a year, gone to all the SOSMEP conventions, gotten the stacks and stacks of books and little mags from Len Fulton that he always sent me for review in Small Press Review and Small magazine Review so that I was totally immersed in the Scene, even if I didn’t personally know all the authors (like Todd Moore).
So take this book as an entrance into a world you’ve probably never heard of before…
