To a High School Friend

2011-10_05
Tucson, AZ

Dear Frances,

Thanks for the book. Looks like I owe you one.

After reading the chapter on you, the only woman out of nine personalities, I was struck by the similarities in our experiences during our early days as artists. The “competition” mentioned you encountered in high school was, at least according to my memory, was Shirley Soens and I. As for Sister Monica, she was a role model for me too, by example not word. If my memory is accurate she was the ‘Angel’ who told me that UW in Madison was a hotbed of godlessness and radical politics. This warning was, like for you, more a magnate then a deterrent. All things considered, Madison was art-wise not as fruitful for me as it obviously was for you. Grilley, Wilde, Zingale, others, did little for me. Dean Meeker was helpful. A few years later I got much more out of classes at San Jose State, when I, for some reason, was more receptive. At the California school things clicked for me. It was less formal a department and there was a lot of interaction between teachers and students outside the classroom. Dick Tansey, for example, the well-known Art Historian held forth every afternoon at a bar just off campus. (Given a chance he could have drunken Dylan Thomas under the table.) He was a kind of Samuel Johnson figure and the better students flocked to that bar in the afternoon. The interaction between students and staff was a real plus for me. In Madison I never attended a party where the two mixed. Maybe they did on a Graduate level; to that I can’t speak. I eventually shared a studio with my mentor, Fred Spratt, who was the major-domo at SJSC for decades. We later had a falling out over the war in Vietnam and he didn’t approve of my wife, but he was the guy who got me into teaching, as a sabbatical replacement at SJSC.

Where Madison did worked for me was in the non-art classes. I experienced an intellectual awakening, like Henry Pochman’s Am Lit. class and a philosophy class that dealt with Censorship of the Arts. In Pochman’s class I was introduced to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Transcendentalism, and to Herman Melville, who is still a cultural hero for me. The other class introduced me to Henry Miller and James Joyce. Meeting all kinds of people was also an invaluable experience in Madison.

Living in the Bay Area in the late Fifties and early Sixties was the place to be at the time. I saw “The Green Table” and Rudolph Nureyev dance. I heard Allan Watts in person a couple of times. I was a classmate of Robert Graham whose public sculptures are well known. My first date with Suzie was at a poetry reading in SF, Philip Whalen I think it was. I went to the Blackhawk to listen to Brubeck and Cal Jader, and to North Beach to hear Garry Mulligan and Sonny Stitts. I’ve been to City Lights many times and to SF MOMA lots of times with Fred Spratt. The shows I remember the best were two one-man shows, Max Beckmann and Kandinsky, the late works, which are my favorites. I saw my first Beckmann triptychs at the time. In sum, it was a stimulating place but I had to move on…

And let me tell you going to Las Vegas and UNLV was a shocking departure from the Bay Area, like going to the dark side of the moon. Madison had been staid, traditional, orthodox, not very experimental, and rather counter-intuitive. I departed in 1957. The Bay Area was the reverse, drugs, anything goes, radical politics, the beat revival, the sexual revolution—Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs—HOWL, ON THE ROAD, & NAKED LUNCH. Going to Las Vegas and UNLV was a dramatic departure from both Madison and the Bay Area. It was like entering a cartoon scenario of fantasy and Kitsch—like one of your husband’s comic prints. UNLV was only 5 years old when I got hired at age 29. The teachers were a mixture of older profs at their last posts and a bunch of raw recruits like myself, just starting out. The president of the University was from the world of advertising not Academe. The head of the Art Department was a life-long Mormon with 6 kids. Six weeks after I arrived on campus I was demonstrating against the war in Vietnam. He wasn’t happy about that. But the real death knell for me was starting the AFT Union on Campus, which I had joined the year I taught at SJSC. Both Tansey and Spratt were members. That was the unforgivable sin as far as the Administration was concerned, the backbreaker on tenure. By the end of 1969 I knew I had three options. One, a majority of the students wanted me to become Head of the Dept. Two, they wanted to hire me at Oregon State, where I had taught part time on leave from UNLV. The last option was I could quit and look for work outside academe. First of all, I could not see myself as an administrator. Secondly, I decided against OSU because the faculty was as dreary as the winter weather in Corvallis. The third option was it.

Several years later my daughter, who was sociology major at a university in Florida showed me a study of teachers who had come from a lower-income class. I had for years used the expression a “Stranger in Paradise” to describe my discomfort in academe—no matter how accomplished I might be I could never feel like I belong. The name of the study that Nasima gave me was called STRANGERS IN PARADISE. I discovered that 100s of other people felt like I had and used the same expression to express their feeling of estrangement. So leaving teaching and the university life, which no doubt can be seductive and cozy, was not in the cards for me.
The phrase in the beginning of the section on you used the description “class-structured” to describe Racine. I had a reaction to that and I’ll tell you why. I doubt I ever told you this before but Margot Andis, who I had been going with for a year or so, was instructed by her father to break up with me because I didn’t fit with the family image. I was “ too lower class and too crude.” That’s been a burr under my saddle for a long time. Because of it I carry a deep animus toward the rich.

I am sure all this is more than you expected or wanted to hear. But I am the type to let it all hang out.

Thanks again for the book.