Gus Blaisdell Collected

A Chronology

∙ 339 ∙ a Chronology exCavateD By niCole BlaiSDell ivey ■ “This is the West, sir. When legend becomes fact, print the legend.” —from John Ford’s classic 1962 western film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Gus’s life was like jazz.The improvisation depended greatly on the depth of the cats he was playing with and the audience of the moment.Besides being a philosopher, poet, publisher, editor, essayist, critic, and teacher, Gus Blaisdell was a collector. He collected stamps, comics, autographs, ideas, experiences, quotes, books, music, art, and friends. And he took notes on all of them. His complexity and the improvisational quality of his life make it hard to know what he would deem most important. He thought of life (books, art, film, friends, wives, children) as moments and serendipitously interconnected pieces on his path from here to there. In a letter to his son, Luc, he writes,“If I could give you anything I would give you my luck. But luck, it now occurs to me is not passive. Good sense can be made out of believing we have a hand in our luck, we help make it happen, get ourselves in shape for it and ready ourselves to receive it.” Luck would have it that after Gus died I moved back to Albuquerque and became the guardian of his forty-plus boxes of papers. Boxes filled with friend’s manuscripts, screenplays, poems, and stories; his own manuscripts, letters, and journals; writings of and on Basho, Monk, and Wittgenstein, Altman, Matisse, Utamaro, Blake, and Brubeck. Within this paper life live several different threads of Gus Blaisdell’s life from which I weave this one semichronological interpretation.There are no straight lines here. He writes, “The past is there, flat as an overturned headstone, bearing no legend, and as smooth.” 340 ∙ a chronology A favorite and fitting quote from Gus’s archive is by Charles Olson on Melville: “His reading is a gauge of him, at all points of his life. He was a skald, and knew how to appropriate the work of others. He read to write.” 1935 Born Charles Augustus Blaisdell II in San Diego, California on September 21, the only child of Captain (later, Commander) Norman Earl Blaisdell of Foxboro, Massachusetts, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, and Mary Ann Hebert, an amateur pianist and a Bachelor of Arts graduate from Mount Saint Mary’s College, Brentwood Hills, Los Angeles. The couple is often mentioned in the San Diego Union Society pages as entertaining “at the cocktail hour for their many friends.” 1937–1940 Norman moves the family to Arlington, Virginia, where he becomes Communications Officer on the USS Craven. In 1939 he studies at the Post Graduate School in Annapolis in Applied Communication. In Mary’s scrapbook, along with photos of a happy Gus and his parents rolling Easter eggs on the White House lawn, is an invitation that reads: “Mrs. Roosevelt requests the pleasure of the company of Lieutenant and Mrs. Blaisdell on Monday afternoon December the ninth [1940] at four o’clock. Music: Miss Virginia Lewis, Soprano; Mr. Mieczyslwa Munz, Pianist; Mr. William L. King, Accompanist.” 1941–1942 When World War II breaks out, Captain Blaisdell is immediately deployed. He eventually serves in the Pacific as Fleet Communications Security Officer on the staff of Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. Later Gus writes, “My father, a career officer in the Navy, disappears from my life simply by reporting for duty.” So Mary drives young Gus from Virginia back to San Diego to live with her Irish Catholic mother and French Protestant father. Gus is allowed to take his comic book collection, which fills the backseat and footwells of their car. 1943–1945 Mary sends Gus at age eight to boarding school at Brown Military Academy (against his father’s wishes) while she joins the Red Cross. Gus is known as a good “little soldier” until he leaves Brown and starts public school three years later. He sees his father once during the war when a chronology ∙ 341 Kamikazes damage his ship and it returns for repairs. When the war is over his father does not return. He becomes part of the occupying forces sent to Japan under Admiral Nimitz. 1947 Gus receives a reply from Commander Edwin T. Layton answering questions about the sword maker and the history of the Japanese samurai sword that Gus’s father brought back to him...