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Oberlin and Boston, 1958–1959
- Northeastern University Press
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13 Oberlin and Boston, 1958–1959 I came to Boston in the middle of my senior year to study with Robert Lowell on a Gage Foundation fellowship from Oberlin College, where I had written for the undergraduate newspaper and also edited the literary magazine. I also wrote a series for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The metropolitan newspaper had hired me to write some columns from the vantage point of a college student. My little column, “Notes of a College Student,” largely consisted in holding up my end of a never-ending and feverish political exchange with my father, the writer Peter Drucker. The column was always due in on a Tuesday morning, and each Sunday night I called my father from the only telephone available in my dorm, at the Bell Desk, with the entire dorm listening in—or trying not to. My father was hopelessly conservative, I felt. “But Fa, Fa I have writer’s block,” I wailed. Then the cri de coeur: “You just don’t understand!” That was the worst thing then: “writer’s block.” Overtones of Freud! At that, Peter Drucker, the Official Great Advice Giver, sprang into action and began to pontificate. He couldn’t resist helping a Lost Cause. His daughter. This usually made me so irritated that the rebuttals sprang to mind. “You just don’t understand!” I cried again, after noting down everything he had said. I rushed to my room. And wrote my answer to him—the exact opposite of his advice and good sense—in a white heat of passion and righteousness. “Notes of a College Student” flew off my fingers, off the beloved Olympia typewriter I had bought myself with the first money I ever earned as a dog washer, wrestling large, smelly mutts twice my size into a bathtub and picking off the ticks and fleas that floated to the water’s surface. At the end of the year at Oberlin my columns had won the prestigious Gage Fellowship for “original views.” I still credit it to my father, and I might well have written “Seth (Peter) Speaks” (“And Kathleen argues!”) as well as the abbreviations “op. cit.” and “ibid.” throughout. My advisor thought I should use this money to study with a poet—any poet—in the United States. John Gardner had spent a semester at Oberlin, and I had studied fiction writing with him. This was in the late fifties, before the advent of the “creative writing programs” that later swept the country, producing a plethora of factory-made poets and poems. So there were not many pos- • With Robert Lowell & His Circle 14 sibilities: a few poets, forgotten, desperate, living on the edge of poverty and/or madness, scattered in remote parts of the country, scraping a little living from farming, mostly, and like Robert Frost, hoping to be published in England first. The “academic poet” hardly existed. I had been running a little writing class, also as part of my Oberlin College scholarship. At that time in the universities one could not even get a degree in American literature; it had to be in British literature—everyone knew we Americans didn’t have a real literature of our own after all: one survey course, a brief passage through Emerson, Thoreau—that was it. Hawthorne was too “risqué.” Emily Dickinson got a brief mention, but only because she was religious. Oberlin College, founded by missionaries, prided itself on being the “first institution of higher learning in the United States to admit blacks and women,” and therefore liberal. The Underground Railway ran right through the little town of Oberlin, Ohio, a green leafy village square with a bandstand, surrounded by cornfields. The college required compulsory daily chapel attendance, pious Protestant prayers, forbade interracial dating , and insisted on the kind of strict supervision of students that cried out for rebellion at every turn. In addition, the town was the bastion of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and its one “jukebox joint” served only “near beer,” a bitter, nearly non-alcoholic morass. At the time I received the news of my scholarship, Allen Ginsberg was in San Francisco. I was ready to leave Oberlin, to shed its prayers and rules, to fling myself at his feet the very next day. For I was wild to go to San Francisco , that city of sin and sex and topless bars and filthy “pads.” Although I had always, up until that point, wanted desperately to be “bohemian” in Paris, I would...