“There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.” ― P.G. Wodehouse
This is the second in a series of reflections on friendship that I shared with my men’s group known as “Brothers on a Journey” that meets at All Saints Episcopal Church every Monday night. You can read the others at:
A lot of my friendships in college and grad school centered on my dream of
becoming
a writer and a poet. In 1967, I went to Boston University after a checkered high school career. I took classes in Greek at Princeton University and was editor of Princeton High School’s literary magazine, and I had the distinction of being the first student busted for pot. One of my friends at this time was Arkie Kempton, son of the journalist Murray Kempton. We shared a passion for Motown music as well as for pot. Arkie was also an excellent writer who wrote a book with the cool title: Boogaloo: the Quintessence of American Popular Music. When I got to Boston, I started hanging out with Arkie and his friend Roy Campanella, Jr, son of the baseball player. In a darkened Harvard dorm room we smoked hashish and listened to bebop jazz and I became a devotee of Charlie Parker. I was also using acid on a regular basis and my brain got so fried that I checked into Mass Mental to detox, much to the dismay of my parents. When I was released, I began seeing a therapist but my confidence in my sanity was shaken for many years. This stint in mental institution would help me later when I became a student of a poet whose career started in a mental institution.
a writer and a poet. In 1967, I went to Boston University after a checkered high school career. I took classes in Greek at Princeton University and was editor of Princeton High School’s literary magazine, and I had the distinction of being the first student busted for pot. One of my friends at this time was Arkie Kempton, son of the journalist Murray Kempton. We shared a passion for Motown music as well as for pot. Arkie was also an excellent writer who wrote a book with the cool title: Boogaloo: the Quintessence of American Popular Music. When I got to Boston, I started hanging out with Arkie and his friend Roy Campanella, Jr, son of the baseball player. In a darkened Harvard dorm room we smoked hashish and listened to bebop jazz and I became a devotee of Charlie Parker. I was also using acid on a regular basis and my brain got so fried that I checked into Mass Mental to detox, much to the dismay of my parents. When I was released, I began seeing a therapist but my confidence in my sanity was shaken for many years. This stint in mental institution would help me later when I became a student of a poet whose career started in a mental institution.
One of my best friends in college was a rock
musician named Jeff Pitcher, a long-haired bass player from New Jersey with a
lisp and a hip way of speaking that expanded my vocabulary. We roomed together
for year. In this kaleidoscopic world of sex, drugs and rock and roll, my
interest in classics faded, but my dream of becoming a writer intensified.
Living in the slums, hanging out with street people and artists, seemed fodder
for writing the great American novel or poem I felt I was destined to write. In
my shabby apartment on Symphony Road, not far from Symphony Hall, I wrote poems
influenced by dead poet like Rimbaud and Ezra Pound, trying to make gems out of
broken wine bottles.
In my junior year, I had was given the chance
to realize my dream of becoming a poet when I was accepted to the poetry
workshop of Anne Sexton. There I made friends with some of the most gifted
neurotics in New England, and my life was never the same.
Two of the most memorable members of Anne’s
workshop were Suzanne Berger and Ellen Bass, both very different. I became more
or less friends with both of them. Ellen was a feminist poet who went on to
write many books like “I’m Not Your Laughing Daughter” and “No More Masks.”
While I was in grad school, I invited Ellen to give a poetry reading at
Rutgers. Suzanne wrote intense, personal, imagistic poetry very much in the
spirit of our teacher Anne Sexton. I
haven’t seen Suzanne since college but I’ve learned that she has been taking
part in annual memorials for Anne at Forsyth Chapel in
the cemetery where Anne was buried. A newspaper account from 2006 quotes
Suzanne as saying:
"Anne
wrote very stimulating poetry. She was very vibrant and very serious inside the
classroom. She launched a lot of poets.”
That’s
very true. Despite or maybe because of Anne’s brilliant poetry, and crazy life, she encouraged
a lot of us to try our wings as poets. In fact, the last time I saw Anne, I
told her I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with my life. “Why not become a
poet?” she said, smiling at me with her large, intense eyes. I will always
cherish these words of encouragement. For a couple of years, I tried being a
poet. Now I have settled for simply letting poems come to me like butterflies
that arrive unexpectedly in my garden.
I don’t know what happened to all the amazing poets
that I met during this two-year period. We had beautiful, intense friendships
but like fireworks that shoot across the sky, they didn’t last. I’ve been thinking of a poem by the French
poet Francois Villon who wrote a famous ballade about beautiful women, all of
whom have melted away, like snow. Ou sont
les neiges d’antan? Where are the snows of yesterday? I sometimes wonder:
Where are the friends of yesterday? It would be wonderful to have a reunion
someday, but how this will happen, I have no idea. The only poet from that
period I still am in touch with is Henry Stimpson, who co-edited Boston
University’s literary magazine with me. He started a PR business but still
writes and publishes an occasional poem. We’ve stayed friends and occasionally
correspond via Facebook. When I was working on my novel set in Boston, we had
dinner together at Legal Seafood. I like him better now than when I knew him in
college. He seemed dull back then, compared with the stellar poets who were in
Sexton’s workshop. Now Henry seems like what he actually is: a nice guy with a
flair for writing clever verses.
After college, my father died and I went on the
road, following the example of Jack Kerouac, although I paid for my train fare.
I took the Trans-Canadian Railroad across Canada, stopping off in various
cities along the way. I ended up in Gastown, the Greenwich Village of
Vancouver, and met a lot of interesting artist types while writing for
underground newspapers. One of them, Jim Cooper, became a lifelong friend. Jim
was raised Mormon, but he abandoned his faith and became an artist. He was
fascinated with the I Ching and composed illustrations for it. He presided over
a household full of artists, hippies and spiritual seekers where I lived on and
off for a year. The year I spent in Vancouver was one of the happiest of my
life. It was year when I connected with God and felt as if God were as real as
an intimate Friend. I haven’t always been faithful to this divine friendship, I
have been neglectful and preoccupied with lesser things, but my Friend has
never forsaken me and I am grateful that He is and always will be at the center
of my life.
Jim and I collaborated on various spiritually
based art projects before I left to go back to Princeton. Over the years Jim
and I stayed in touch off and on, but the really precious moment in our
friendship happened five years ago. I got word from him through Facebook that
he had cancer and was utterly alone and friendless. His divorced wife and child
had rejected him completely. He was living on welfare and eking out a living
with occasional art projects. I called him and we talked and renewed our
friendship. I also prayed for him. Then something amazing happened. He found
that he had fathered a daughter that he knew nothing about because the young
woman he impregnated was a Mormon and her family prevented her from having
anything to do with the father of her child. She kept this secret and only in
the last few years did the daughter realize who her real father was. She
reached out to Jim and they met for the first time on Easter Sunday five years
ago. It was an incredible experience for both of them. In fact, it was nothing
short of a miracle.
I was glad to be Jim’s friend during this
period and felt the presence of the Spirit as he joyfully shared his story with
me. He seems to be doing much better with his life since connecting with his
long lost daughter.
In 1974, after spending time in Canada and
going to Greece, I returned to Princeton to be with my widowed mother and
sister and figure out what I was going to do with my life. I did odd jobs but
found nothing satisfying until I started substitute teaching at an all-black
inner city school in Trenton, NJ. I was moved by being part of a school very
different from what I had experienced in Princeton, a school where students
struggled with economic issues much more serious than my family ever did. I
really enjoyed teaching and decided to go back to school and earn a teaching
certificate. At this time, I met my first wife, Maureen, the daughter of a
Presbyterian minister whose brother had been a friend in junior high (he was
another odd ball, as PKs often are). Maureen and I got married when I was 25
years old. I spent the next seven years earning a Masters and doctorate from
Rutgers in 1982, the same year Maureen and I got divorced.
I made a few friends during the years I worked
on my doctorate and taught college, but these professional friendships didn’t
last. We were too busy competing for grades and jobs, and we didn’t really had
time for deep friendships. I made some memorable and very strange friends at a
Catholic High School in NJ where I taught for a year, but writing about them
would involve a novella, if not a novel. And it would be X-rated!
At Carleton College in Minnesota, where I
taught for two years, I made friends with a professor named John Tallmadge who
had a passionate love of nature and was very different from the other profs
there. He was down-to-earth and deeply spiritual in a way that I resonated with.
In 1997 he published a memoir called “Meeting the Tree of Life: A Teacher’s
Path.” Reading the blurb for this book reminded me why I valued John’s
friendship so much:
“Tallmadge was a child of the late sixties with a Yale
doctorate in comparative literature under his arm and an empathy for nature in
his soul. As a young idealist, he sought the authenticity, power, and
possibility of the wilderness by following the intellectual and physical trails
blazed by Henry Thoreau and John Muir. His memoir is an attempt to discover
another, more private, inner landscape.”
John wasn’t a Quaker, but he had a Quaker heart
and soul. Just after he was let go from Carleton, he wrote a Pendle Hill pamphlet
called “Therefore Choose Life: The Spiritual Challenge of the Nuclear Age.” Not
only is this a theme I can resonate with, Pendle Hill is the Quaker study center where I spent a year
learning about Quakerism and where I met and courted my wife Kathleen. After
leaving Carleton College, John and I went our separate ways, but I still feel a
spiritual connection with him. Inspired by writing this reflection, I looked
him up on Facebook and found that he is living in Cincinnati. I sent him a
friend request and hope he’ll respond. It would be wonderful to connect with
him again.
My real and lasting friendships began in 1984
when I discovered the Religious Society of Friends. I was 35 year old. Looking
back, I realize that I didn’t know anything about spiritual friendship until
this point in my life. My friendships up to then were mainly based on shared
interests and emotional affinities. When I became a Quaker, I learned how to be
a friend at a deeper level. Over the past 33 years, I’ve come to know hundreds
of Quakers in a way that I never knew anyone before. That’s because we’ve shared
our lives together, much like what we do in our Brothers on Our Journey
gatherings. We gather for worship sharing. We listen to each other’s stories.
And we’re committed to each other and to the Religious Society of Friends for
the long haul. Even when we have conflicts and drive each other crazy, we still
try to stay Friends. Being a Quaker has also helped me to become spiritual
friends with people from other faiths. I now feel as if I belong to what Martin
Luther King called the “beloved community,” a circle of friends who are deeply
committed to each other, to our Divine Creator, and to justice and peace.
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