An Interesting Life, So Far

ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

Table of Contents

Preface An Interesting Life; an autobiography

Chapter 1: Family Stories

Chapter 2: Fleeing

Chapter 3: The Big Apple

II

III

IV

Chapter 4: Beginner’s England

II

III

Chapter 5: New England

II

Chapter 6: The Golden Years

II

III

Chapter 7: Lecturing and Professing

II

Chapter 8: Swinging Sixties, Drugs and Graves

Chapter 9: Wandering Scholars

II Zaria

III Columbia, Missouri

Chapter 10: Paris Once More and After

II Stirling

Chapter 11: Trying to Begin Anew

II

III Florence, Alabama 1983–86

Chapter 12: Poetical India

II

III

IV

Chapter 13: In Adele’s Footsteps to Middle America

II

III

Chapter 14: Unholy and Holy Lands

II

III India 2 1988

Chapter 15: An influential Conference

II Walcott and Paris 1990–91

III Paris 1990–91

Chapter 16: My Derek Walcott Decade

II

Chapter 17: India III Two More Visits 2005–2006

II 2006

Chapter 18: Home

Chapter 19: Second Home

Chapter 20: Summer Home

II Hvar

Chapter 21: Reprise andan Unconclusive Conclusion

Bruce King: List of Publications

Series editor

Books edited

Preface

An Interesting Life; an autobiography

My title comes from a time when Adele, my wife, was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer and was told by the surgeon that she had only a few months left to live. She said something to the effect that it had been an interesting life. She need not have been so resigned. After telephoning friends and other doctors around the United States we found in the same city and hospital a surgical team that decided it was best to do an emergency operation and removed one of her lungs. That was over two decades ago and she is still living, swimming, dancing, having sex and I think enjoying life.

I had not much thought about our lives before that, but I began to see that it could be regarded as interesting, especially as over the past decade friends have suggested that I write an autobiography. They included a Nobel prize in literature laureate, and one of the most famous black professors of literature in America. A well-known professor of English and black literatures in France said I was the best scholar of my generation (which seemed ironic as I was then as often unemployed, without any university job) and knew famous writers from around the world (which was true). I had taught at universities in England, Scotland, Canada, Nigeria, France, Israel, New Zealand and the United States and written or edited some early books about Indian, Nigerian and Caribbean literatures. I sometimes even heard from people who remembered my earlier books on English seventeenth-century literature, and there were a smaller group of scholars who claimed to have been influenced by an article I had written about West African High-Life music (supposedly the first essay on the topic).

I could not see how to write about my life, as I did not want it to consist of bragging about people I had met or the self-justifications and complaints that fill many autobiographies. I was not a celebrity, a rock, TV or movie star, I avoided limelights. I was known in several small areas of research, but not too many people. I was a literary critic and who would want to read about that and my seemingly endless futile attempts to fit into the academic life.

Besides, I wanted to write about other sides of myself that I considered more important, such as my life-long involvement with music or that somehow my social dancing was highly regarded wherever I lived. African women would tell my wife that I was a great dancer; on the streets of Indianapolis, New Orleans, and Paris there were people who stopped us to mention that they admired our dancing recently at some club. Even in our eighties when slow and arthritic we would be asked by young couples to change partners and dance with them. I thought of ourselves as the Old Smoothies. We had been asked were we retired Broadway dancers. How could I write about that or even about my cooking of which I was proud. In Paris we knew the best new inexpensive restaurants and some of the best chefs. Young Parisians said that they would never know Paris as we did. That was my new accomplishment, but it was not the sort of thing for an autobiography.

I tried several times. Once I began with the years when I was a student at Columbia College and would regularly sit in as a drummer at Felton’s Lounge, Harlem, with the great blues musicians Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry. That was a decade before other young whites began playing with black blues musicians, a period soon followed by many famous white blues bands. I thought I would tell about when Brownie’s brother Sticks thought I was trying to steal one of his women and threatened to cut off my balls. “She’s bread, man, bread”.

The story would continue with me a student in England going to a party in London where Brownie was being feted and my annoyance that the drummer would not let me play. Didn’t he know I was Brownie’s drummer? I did not know that I was annoyed with Charlie Watts, soon to be famous as the drummer for the Rolling Stones. Decades later Brownie was performing at a white folk club in Detroit (I was then teaching at Windsor University across the river). He said to blind Sonny something like do you remember Bruce that “white boy” who used to play drums in New York. Then the story would move on to Auckland New Zealand when we had to return from holiday to Christchurch where I was a professor of English and my daughter Nicole was in school. Brownie and Sonny would arrive for a festival a few days after we left and my daughter stunned me by asking why I thought I should have stayed on to greet them at the airport. She was not born when I knew them in New York.

Still later I was working on a biography of Derek Walcott and interviewing a black patron of the arts in Harlem who mentioned that she was born, I think it was, above Felton’s Lounge. I told her I regularly sat-in there during the early 1950s and was asked what a “white boy” like me was doing there. I thought it would make a good way to start a “white boy’s” autobiography, but when I looked up on Google some of those whom I thought of as very minor musicians I had played with during that period I discovered that they were not so unknown and had later opened for the Rolling Stones in New York and were often written up in the New York Times. Had all the seeming minor characters in my life later become famous? I felt deflated and gave up.

Some years later I tried once more to write my autobiography. An important friend in my youth, who had introduced me to Sonny, Brownie, and other musicians, was a black trumpet player with whom I had gone to school and who had tried to blow up the Statue of Liberty and been sent to Sing-Sing. This seemed a good way to begin an autobiography. I remembered that I had known two other revolutionary “bombers”, but as I tried to recall the other two I once more felt this a dead end to pursue.

One, almost comically, was a Scots who placed explosives in postal boxes in sympathy for Irish Celtic nationalism and spent time in prison for it. As I had met him so briefly in Mallorca, where we were spending the summer as usual in Deia (yes the Deia of Robert Graves and other writers as well as such groups as The Soft Machine and Gong), he really could not be included. The other, a South African who fled to Israel, where you guessed it, I was a visiting professor, was now married to an American, had children and was a respected university professor of African literature, an expertise we shared as I had taught at three different Nigerian universities for a decade and edited the first book about Nigerian literature. My South African friend no longer seemed revolutionary, although the American government continued to regard him as a threat and would only grant him visiting visas to speak at conferences. I invited him to speak on my Modern Language Association special panel about Nadine Gordimer, which formed the core of a book I edited, and dedicated to him, by which time he had died.

To explain his story would have involved the stories of others including a famous labor historian who had been his revolutionary leader, whom I had met when we were both giving lectures in Amherst, and the complicated relationship he had with his family. I now knew the son, a poet and translator, in Paris where I lived. As for my trumpet player threat to the Statue of Liberty I became so befuddled trying to trace his life after his having served prison time, and the ways in which he had become an unlikely hero of American Black revolutionaries, that I felt this was not the way to go. Either I did not really know my famous people or I knew them for a short time and was puzzled trying to see them in more depth.

Then not long ago when I was finishing my third book about Indian literature (which for me means literature written in English) and wondering whether to move on to Pakistani literature, several younger people I knew said that I should write about my life. I kept saying that I had tried and failed. While retelling a story about Allen Ginsberg and the Beats reading in Paris during 1958, which I attended, in which I had a different, minor, part than that portrayed by literary historians, I could see that my listener’s eyes were widening; this was a fabulous time before she was born. Aha, how to start that autobiography. So I began with that and intended to move on to another amusing story about asking Ginsberg in Tel-Aviv about his Calcutta contacts as I was returning to India to do research for my second book about Indian poetry. As Ginsberg was surrounded by admirers I, streetwise, got behind him and whispered what I wanted. He appeared to ignore me but at the end of the evening he nodded to me to follow him and his friends to a café where they were eating. I quietly sat at the end of table until he told the person across from him to make room for me. After telling me who to see in India he said that space is needed for others and I was dismissed.

This would move on to stories I was told in Calcutta about him drinking tea while his well brought up Indian literary friends learned the ways of prostitutes. There also could be related stories about a minor but culturally significant group of Indian Bengali writers, the Hungryalists with whom Ginsberg became involved as had I. Later while my wife was teaching at a university in Muncie Indiana I had unintentionally assembled the largest collection of Hungryalist materials that writers kept sending to me. The main significance of this movement was that it represented the provincial lower classes outside of Calcutta. They wrote badly in English, a language they did not know, as a protest against the literary and cultural refinement of the Bengali elite. I had become the one who knew their history, had interviewed them, and had copies of their works. I had even attended a seminar in Calcutta concerning their social significance.

One day I had a letter from a student at Bowling Green University who to my amazement was writing an undergraduate dissertation about the Hungryalists—his teacher Howard McCord edited some of the obscure American literary magazines that had published Indian literature during the 1960s. I told him I could not take time or afford to photocopy everything. Later he turned up at our door with a taxi waiting to take him to a photocopy shop and then back to the private airplane that (I forget) he rented or owned, which I thought would be a proper American conclusion to my story of the impoverished Hungryalists protest movement’s afterlife in the American mid-west.

But, always but, as I began to write about the Ginsberg and the Beats poetry reading in Paris I felt I had to explain why I was in Paris, that I was then studying at Leeds University, England, why I was at Leeds after leaving Columbia, and soon I was writing about my high school teachers, my home town, my family, origins, a regular Victorian biography of a kind that I had often mocked, but what I could I do? This was the story that would become my autobiography whether I wanted it or not. I knew enough about writing to know that when material starts coming you do not block it, do not even question it; later you can edit and try to structure it, but once a dam burst open you would be flooded and had little choice of what was given unless you lied. Even someone like me can imagine he has been seduced by a muse, perhaps rather the muse of foolishness than poetry.

What follows is the result. It has much more about origins, social distinctions, pride, fears, and about being a Jew than I would have chosen, but that is of interest even though it lacks the texture of fiction. Writers I know claim that the borders between fact and fiction have become indistinct, but not for me.

Bruce King

Hvar-Paris

Chapter 1: Family Stories

I twice heard Mary McCarthy tell of an Italian family she knew that progressed in three generations from immigrants, through Mafia, to proud parents of professionals including a university professor in the Humanities. Although the stages were not identical (we belonged to no Mafia, but a distant relative was said to have worked for them as an accountant and ran off with a million to France; he was a wanted man), and it took two rather than three generations, our family story is similar, a passage from impoverished Jewish immigrants to university professor, with the earning of money and the rise in social position on the way. I would not have seen it that way until I started to write this chapter. It is the kind of story that Saul Bellow and Philip Roth wrote novels about earlier when I was too engrossed in my own life to read them.

I hardly knew my father who died of a blood clot after a long illness when I was twelve. Before then he and my mother worked day and evening in the pharmacy and after closing we would sometimes drive to a White Castle for oniony hamburgers which we would sit in the car and eat. Other meals often were prepared by the cleaning lady; my mother worked in the pharmacy downstairs. My parents were very different from each other. My father was a short unattractive man who wore his dark brown hair in an Adolph Hitler lick in front. His old fashioned neckties, although patterned appeared brown to me as did his shoes and eyes. He followed the horse races (which he listened to on the radio and on which he bet and early taught me to bet), liked to play poker with fellow Jewish pharmacists, and I am told was a good dancer when young. He wanted to be a medical doctor but chose pharmacy since the course at Temple University in Philadelphia was shorter and less expensive. He also wanted to be a writer and sent some stories to journals that specialized in detective and crime tales. He mailed copies to himself to prove authorship, but no one ever wanted them.

One of my memories of him was his making up stories that he told me when I was very young. I also learned from him to get a second medical opinion and not to bring food into a men’s room. As an old fashioned pharmacist he concocted medicines from varying ingredients when doctors wrote a prescription. He had cures for such problems as the phlegm brought on by winter colds and sinus infections that felt as if they were going to choke me, concoctions I wish I could get from pharmacists today as I suffer from chronic sinusitis and spend parts of every year complaining about my doctors who futility prescribe antibiotics in an attempt, I suppose, to create the ultimate superbug. I did find one of the medicines that my father would give me and was told that it was now banned as dangerous.

People say my father was a gentle and good man, but my lasting memory is of him kicking me repeatedly after I had fallen and tried to protect myself on the floor after some argument. The quarrel had something to do with my waiting on customers at our soda fountain in the front of the pharmacy. I did not make up the being kicked which remains in my mind, but I may have made up the cause as I was always under pressure by older teenagers to give them larger servings of ice-cream, not charge them for cokes or cigarettes. If you are a ten-year-old, one of the few Jews in a small town, and feel an outsider you are easily intimated by those in their late teens threatening to beat you up and seeming to jeer at you. I was not toughened by the experience, I was becoming afraid. I hated being told to serve at the soda fountain and many decades later I remain uncomfortable when asking people to pay their debts.

My father was born off Staten Island on a ship of Russian Jewish refugees. I do not know his original family name and assume that an immigration official renamed the family “King”. I would sometimes overhear him telling my mother about pogroms in Russia or strange burial customs in Eastern Europe, but he would have heard about them from his parents. He was born in America. Similar to many Americans I have little information about my father’s past except that he sometimes spoke of violent fights between various ethnic groups when he was growing up. There was a synagogue in Gloucester where Jews from outlying towns sometimes came together. I remember nothing about it except that one year my father read in Hebrew from sacred scripture, a privilege for which he had to pay. I seem to remember there was a competition, even bidding, for the right, although I may have imagined it. My mother was then proud of him. He must have learned Hebrew as a child; I had no Hebrew or other religious instruction in my youth and did not wish for any. I would be puzzled by people saying that they had gone to this or that church and only felt I had missed out when I saw that they had learned to read music to sing in the choir, a skill I lacked and never really learned, despite my increasing interest in music as I grew older.

One year my father bought our first car, a small, undistinguished Plymouth. That summer we took a trip to New York and Rhode Island. We stopped outside a building on the lower east side of Manhattan that had some association with my father’s youth. (Perhaps a decade later I sometimes saw a Barnard girl who lived in the same Jewish immigrant area and whose brother graduated from Harvard and Harvard Law School at an impressively young age. They seemed an exotic foreign branch of what could have been my family tree. ) We also visited Coney Island where I burnt a hole in my trousers on a dangerous slide. During one summer we sought a motel in northern New Jersey that did not have any sign saying “No Niggers or Jews Allowed”. Instead we stayed at a hotel in the New York borsch belt. There were kayaks, which I had not heard of previously, games such as shuffleboard, and I got lost, wandered around the paths for seeming hours and was afraid of being eaten by a bear; I sat on a bee and was warned that I could die if I sat on another. I only over-came that fear after having been stung by a wasp; I survived easily although with pain.

Most of those years exist as free-floating fragments in my memory. I am puzzled by how we had gasoline for our car to take vacations during the war; I can recall a family trip to Atlantic City when the train was packed with soldiers. I cannot understand why my father allowed notorious anti-Semitic literature to be sold on the shelves of the magazine rack in the drugstore, or what I thought I was doing collecting (was it?) aluminum foil or searching with a flash light the sky at night for enemy airplanes. Those years make no sense to me now. Did I really belong to a group of school children trying to do something for the war effort? I remember my parents objecting to paying its dues; they felt that those who worked in the local shipyard were earning more than them and often expressed resentment about this. We might not have been very middle class but we were middle class professionals and they were working class, although they had more liquid in more than one sense. They were heavy drinkers, often drunk at nights in the local bars, while my father occasionally had a quiet whiskey among friends. My mother did not drink. I was stunned when Irish neighbors, whose children I sometimes joined in games, told us that anti-British they were pro-German. Were they really Irish or did we just term them that because of their family origin? I also cannot make any sense of some national radio program in which I was honored for supporting the armed forces and was quoted as saying when I grew up I wanted to attend West Point. What could this have been about, my Victory Garden, some attempt to sell war bonds by school children? That must have been the height of my patriotism, perhaps explainable by Army and Navy then having the best national football teams, even better than Notre Dame. When the war in Europe ended I took a bus to Philadelphia and joined the celebrating crowds and watched women kissing solders. A few years later, perhaps when I was 14 rather than 12 years old, I was already an alienated intellectual who felt that real life was among the prostitutes, alcoholics, and artists of Paris. I had somehow got my hands on books by Henry Miller.

My father’s family consisted of bright intellectuals who at the social events I was made to attend discussed Zionism, the Bund, Israel, and varieties of Marxism while eating what seemed to me strange smelly foreign foods, and drinking tea from samovars. I would now consider such a family a privilege, but I was an American boy, living in a small provincial town, and I wanted nothing to do with such alien exoticism, which in my mind somehow seemed dirty, Jewish. I could not help, however, but be impressed by an uncle—I think I was partly named after him—who taught at one of the better schools in Philadelphia and who was said to have written an MA thesis of such length that he was told he would be granted a doctorate if he enrolled at Temple University (where my father’s family went as it was public and far less expensive than the University of Pennsylvania) a further year, which he refused as having no need for a doctorate to teach History in school and as it, a common theme, would cost too much.

There appeared even more exotic creatures I was to learn about on that side of the family. When my father was alive we visited Cape Cod one summer and I recall going into a large netted enclosure on the ocean in which fish had been trapped after the tide retreated. I was afraid of a small squid or baby ray that I thought was a poisonous stingray. My aunt’s husband was a card carrying Communist, who after she died, moved to California to raise chickens, one of many Zionist socialists who thought that God would redeem Jews who returned to the land in California. He next thought Guatemala could be a socialist paradise but his new wife refused to go. He later moved to Israel where he once more failed as a chicken farmer. It is easy to mock him but he had progressed during his life from a non-English speaking immigrant from Poland who began during the 1930s as a peddler in Cape Cod carrying what he could on his back.

Over the years members of that side of the family would turn up and for a time be part of my life. There was Dorothy who worked as an administrator at the WMCA and as a translator of foreign movies in New York. Was she the one who much younger played saxophone boringly at one of those to me seeming interminable family gatherings? She had a rebellious brother who rejected his mother’s married name, returned to being a King, left for California, then as exotic for me as Timbuktu, to become a radio disc Jockey and who I was told became later big in the recording industry.