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96 pages

English

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"Three" challenges the canard that any value came of the turmoil of the 1970s in America. This is neutral news - not good, not bad. The flavor came mainly from the quests; of those there were plenty.

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Publié par	Xlibris US
Date de parution	13 novembre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781669853077
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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THREE FROM THE SEVENTIES

Leon Hampton

Copyright © 2022 by Leon Hampton.

ISBN:
Softcover
978-1-6698-5308-4

eBook
978-1-6698-5307-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Cover illustration Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art

Rev. date: 11/09/2022

Xlibris
844-714-8691
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CONTENTS
The Picture of Berthe Morisot
A Fools’ Pavane
McGruder’s Heaven

Well thanks for the Seventies, and for their being over and done with. Anyone thinking they remember them with fondness is misled or faking it.
They were years of sulfuric unrest, doubts of all toward all, and hope clipped not by clippers but by detergent. Each decade has its own travails, the seventies were mine. They didn’t inspire at the time but after some decades they instruct. There were of course moments of inspiration and illumination that now prevail beyond the muddles of conflict, social resentments sometimes misdirected, mistrust reaching deafening levels, and friends lost to suicide or war.
The seventies were a VW Bug with a hole in the floor; rip up the rubber padding, and through it you could see to the road below.
Years later I found notes in a crawl space; I offer them here as chronicle. In these three pieces are incrustations I hadn’t noticed earlier, and a self-awareness likewise long forgotten. They reappear as old friends. Friends’ friends are not necessarily friends, but here are these, anyway.
Yes, there was some recent editing — not to obscure the context, but to make it more visible by removing bends in paths long since paved over.
In the Seventies we read Flaubert, Rimbaud, Baudelaire (along of course with Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, and the now much forgotten Richard Brautigan). No wonder the Japanese loved France and vice versa. The world would be impoverished without both. Seeming echoes of Proust in these three pieces may be false trails, since I had read only Combray at the time. But the permanent versus the temporary, the shearing off of imposed patterns to life or thought, the absurd as canon — all French in nature — I acknowledge now as lifted, though I never noticed it at the time. These elements belong to all of us, only the anecdotes are mine.
Here is not a manifesto or dedication, just recognition of strands coming from elsewhere. The strands don’t weave the stories, but sometimes are embedded. Unavoidably. This is not erudition, just recognition and gratitude to others.
The stories are just stories. No meta-, signifié , subtext… Maybe only Henry James can talk convincingly about his own. The rest of us just tell them. In them, as Verlin Cassill said, can be found wisdom. If anywhere, I would add.
Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, permanence in moments: not as conceit but as the value, the “meaning” of living. If you’re alert enough to notice. No penalty if you aren’t, but rewards if you are.
A Word on “Berthe” from Years Later
Let me now override previous modesty and try to do the Henry James look-in-the-mirror thing. Hardly a Bildungsroman, “Berthe” lifts a veil on the sort of adolescent turmoil we remember in retrospect, but only from outside. It might have been called, “The Sorrows of Young St even.”
No wonder Goethe’s troubled little narrative of 1774 provoked its rash of suicides in Europe over the decades, and that Napoleon kept it as his only book during his — ahem — excursion to Egypt and Syria,1798-1801. Goethe’s greatness was to carry into adulthood some precise memories of adolescent energies. Never mind Eros, that’s the easy part. And to call it “rebellion from” is a coward’s shorthand. The burning in the adolescent’s soul has not yet been nailed down or even named; it exists only in anecdotes as far as I can tell, and has no fancy Greek moniker to tag it. Something about the energy — not yet tamed by “education’ — drives human aspirations both to advancement and ruin. They say physicists and mathematicians have their real ideas only before age 20, then lose their edginess and brilliance a fter.
Writing “Berthe” was pretty easy back then, arduous to edit years l ater.
Note the gloom within, well, how could you not. Remember from the seventies the limits which seemed contrived at the time. Life was poised to bestow on us what the Enlightenment called “happiness,” but instead did the opposite. We aspired, we despaired, we knew all was wide open, but something was off. Society was (nothing new there) broken and in evolution, the drifting described at every fin de siècle since writing was invented. The unknown scared everyone and still does, but especially adolescents who had any awareness. We knew what we didn’t want and didn’t know what we did. But that’s the tiresome refrain of generations each seeking to be more unique than the others. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny endlessly, each of us reenacting the fish struggling onto the b each.
Classicism, Romanticism, bwah. Both mark fearsome power within and make for ruinous dramas. Classicism’s aesthetic straight jacket intensifies, does not limit, the warring . .. (feelings? tendencies? drives? ambition? narcissism? blockage? embers? unbridled spirit? soul? energies?) . .. whatever you call them. Go find a word for it, but don’t seek to harness it, you’ll never make it work.
Not that “Berthe” was all that skillful in evoking the restless adolescent’s soul, let’s just say it drew upon it. Salinger and Gide would have called it “honesty,” but it goes beyond that. Dalliance of the privileged may seem self-indulgent from the outside, but from the viewpoint of the characters, they can be hard as Phèdre her self.
And now to clear the palate, a tale mainly of energy and despair mixed as before, maybe less ponderous. Remember, this was the case of Richard Brautigan, who best captured the Seventies. Never heard of him? Go and correct that.
In the preceding and following, clearly a French influence. Radiguet, Alain-Fournier, Rimbaud, and later in this volume I leave only the bare bones in “Pavane,” deleting redundancies and also a few of the false cues tossed into the orig inal.
Here can be found the Three Unities, but that would be for another discus sion.
The Picture of Berthe Morisot
I
In autumn of my second year, I took bike trips to the country. Sometimes I left early in the day. On those mornings I sensed the cooler air around me, imagining waking up to church bells in a foreign country. I pedaled as far as the train tracks. Beyond, an orphanage stood like a factory of asymmetry on a hill that was the only elevation in the area.
Sometimes going in the opposite direction, I got as far as the cemetery. I would leave the bike somewhere along the path to that silent city, examining its lanes and alcoves on foot. Wind coming off the corn field would slap against my legs.
When it rained on weekday mornings, I made my way through glossy streets to my early classes. Rainy mornings meant a thick day throughout. The only fix was to sleep through whole parts of the afternoon.
One such morning it cleared a little; after the noon organ recital I walked around campus. Wind and clouds brewed up underminings. I turned away from the library; I knew I wouldn’t be able to work there that day. Heading for the music building, I remember times of the year before when there’d been music to lift me out of complacency.
The conservatory was quiet that afternoon; the weather brought out somberness from inside the building. Flashes of sunlight played against a wall where, on a spring day the year before, young leaves had reflected from the trees above as I’d studied on the College green.
Chords of a piano sonata broke the quiet, from the small amphitheater in the building. I put aside my books and jacket and found a stretch of wall to lean against as I listened. Through the latticed door to the hall I could see the pianist alone inside. An echo hung on the piano sound like age. The notes dropped into a great distance in the chilly hall.
A student sat balanced at the instrument like a horseman. Frail body, magnified hands — occupational deformity - linked him to the piano.
I listened from the back of the room, the street urchin taking in whatever he can from the outside.
I was curious who the player was but left in the middle of the piece. At the College, you could see, or avoid, anyone you wanted.
I began dropping in the music building during the following weeks — not so much to hear the same performer, as to see about recapturing elements that had intersected that rainy morning before. I followed announcements and reviews, sat in on recitals, then noticed there was to be an open rehearsal of the Jupiter symphony. When I went to hear it, I didn’t know the conductor would be the pianist I’d heard before, playing alone in the amphitheater.
On the evening of the rehearsal, the student held himself in the ba