Memoirs: Chapter One

[There are twelve chapters of these Memoirs. Because of the way Blogspot is set up, it may be hard at first to retrieve the later ones--but they are here, lurking. If you wish to read the whole thing, look at PREVIOUS POSTS on the right sidebar. Call up the chapters individually. When you have looked, as a stand-alone item, at Chapter Ten, check PREVIOUS POSTS. It will refer you to the remaining chapters (and some other material as well).]



Early Years


I doubt the common view that childhood sets the course of one's later life. Rather, I subscribe to the existentialist concept that one creates oneself. Of course we must all confront various obstacles and contingencies that inevitably arise along the way. We cannot simply decree what we will be, but must achieve maturity through a continuous process of negotiation.

For better or worse, I am the one who has made me what I am.

What is personality and how is it shaped? Broadly speaking, there are two opposing models. The first stresses the dominance of our genes, upbringing, and social circumstances. These are the factors that rule. The other model is the individualistic one that emphasizes our freedom of choice. The sky's the limit - or so it seems.

Let me put it to you in another way. Either we are robots, responding to our programming - and nothing more - or angels, living in a utopian state of complete freedom. I lean more to the latter view, but with considerable qualification. At all events, lots of things in my life and conduct were not exactly angelic.


BACKGROUND: THE BASICS

As a rule, genealogy bores me - though I am not averse to acknowledging biological elements in human behavior.

Here is what I know. My ancestors have been on this continent, mainly in the American South, for several generations, dating back to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Chiefly of Protestant Irish stock, they were neither Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, nor were they privileged Anglicans.

Both my biological parents came from farming families. The Conways, my father’s folks, maintained a large dairy farm near Fort Worth, Texas. The Colemans, my mother’s less prosperous family, grew cotton at a place called Fate, east of Dallas.

Brant Brown Conway (1907-2002), my biological father, had a knack for the natural sciences. He studied physics at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. My mother Jean (born Mary Geneva Coleman; 1909-1979) came to Fort Worth to work as a secretary. She met my father when she took some night classes at the university. Unlike my dad, however, she never completed her course work. Throughout her life, though, she continued to have a strong interest in literature.

In an influential 1959 lecture, the British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow introduced the contrast of the Two Cultures. Snow maintained that "the intellectual life of the whole of western society" was split into the titular two cultures — namely the sciences and the humanities. In their separate but equal ways my father and mother combined to illustrate this contrast.

In any event, I was born on August 23, 1934 in Fort Worth, Texas.

It was the middle of the Depression, and times were tough for my father. After a brief stint teaching, Brant found himself unemployed. Eventually his luck changed, and he landed a respectable, well-paying job that played to his intellectual strengths as a guided-missiles specialist for the US Navy. He really was a rocket scientist. Unfortunately, he was a person I rarely saw.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, my parents divorced when I was three years old. My mother then sent me to live with my paternal grandparents on their dairy farm, where I was surrounded by a happy throng (or so it seems to me now) of aunts and uncles.


"GO WEST, YOUNG MAN, GO WEST"

This idyll ended in 1939. My mother had decided to remarry and to go and live with her new husband in Southern California. So she collected me from the farm, and we went by train to San Diego, where Grady Dynes, the new husband, met us. First we lived in San Bernardino, and then in Los Angeles.

It didn’t seem so at the time, but moving to California was probably much to my benefit. Later I took my adoptive father’s surname, changing from (Robert) Wayne Conway to Wayne R. Dynes.

It turned out that my stepfather, who had been educated at Pomona College, had been a Communist in the 1930s. Eventually, he converted my mother to these beliefs, and ipso facto me too. Yet fortified by reading the writings of Arthur Koestler and George Orwell, I rebelled, becoming an “ex-Communist” at the tender age of 14. (See Chapter Four, for more information on my political wanderings.)

On only one occasion (the funeral of my grandmother) can I ever remember being taken to a church. My parents were atheists, a creed I found arid - and an excuse, most years, for denying me Christmas presents. So this upbringing boomeranged. It had an effect contrary to the one intended, giving me a strong interest in religion. Young people find things that are taboo inherently attractive. Yet this counterparental straying was not strong enough to make me convert to a particular faith.

When I was six years old, a neighbor boy Jimmy, who was about twelve years old, inducted me into his male harem. Gathering in his parents’ garage, we would take our clothes off and play with each others' penises. Some would say that these early experiences--which were enjoyable and never exposed to public knowledge--”made me” a homosexual. That I doubt.

Was it pedophilia? No, because we were just kids. And there was no penetration.

We all have our own personal horrors. One of them, for me, is the idea that a child might be forced to undergo penile penetration of the mouth, anus, or vagina.

What I experienced with Jimmy and his charges was erotic play, but not sex in any fundamental sense. It was more akin to “playing doctor.”

In my view one of the problems with the current concern with pedophilia, from whatever side it stems, is that it tends to conflate degrees of involvement that need to be carefully distinguished.


LAKE ARROWHEAD

My stepfather’s alcoholism kept him from providing properly for his family. Accordingly, my mother took a job at Camp Haan, a burgeoning army base located in the vicinity of Riverside, California. There was a war on. She soon rose to a position of responsibility in the personnel department, where she often had to work overtime. Since she felt that I could not be left at home alone after school, she found a friendly family living in Lake Arrowhead, a resort in the mountains, who would take me in. I was eight years old.

At first troubled by this exile, I soon adjusted to it. There were two other kids boarding with this family, a boy and a girl, both ten years old, but with different parents. Donny and Joyce were two years older than me. Yet Joyce and I were from stable, well-educated families. By contrast, Donny came from a broken home. Interacting in this dynamic gave me my first crash course in playground negotiation. As an only child I was at first unequipped to compete. Nonetheless, I learned the ropes quickly. Since two of us inevitably paired up, one was always left out in the cold. Gender, age, or personality often determined who was linked to whom in our little game of musical chairs.

At Lake Arrowhead there was swimming in the summer and skiing and tobogganing in the winter. As there were so few of us, school was taught in an old-fashioned schoolhouse, with all six primary grades grouped together in one class. In those days there was much sympathy for the Chinese as victims of Japanese aggression, so our teacher chose China as the subject of a year-long project. In this connection we all learned to make pots out of clay. (The Chinese were of course the inventors of porcelain). Once the piece had been fired, what a thrill it was to hold in my hands the finished product of my own endeavor! Today I collect ceramics. The experience was also the beginning of my life-long concern with Chinese culture - literature, art, and calligraphy.


LOS ANGELES

In the spring of 1943 I rejoiced to learn that I would be welcomed back to live with my parents, who had moved to Los Angeles. Grady, my stepfather, seemed to have conquered his alcoholism. As far as I could tell, he remained sober for a good many years, though late in life he reverted to the old ways. Handicapped by this problem, he had failed in his earlier attempts at establishing himself in several professions. Finally he found a job with the US Railway Postal Administration, sorting mail on the trains that plied back and forth to Flagstaff, Arizona. Writing, his first love, was of necessity put pretty much on hold, but he adored the trains.

Grady had received an excellent education at the elite Pomona College. He particularly revered James Joyce. For a while my parents hosted a writer's club in their home, where participants would read their writings for an instant critique. From my point of view, Grady was an excellent stepfather who never beat me or even administered a harsh word. From him comes my interest in writing.

At first we lived in a small apartment in Hollywood. I went to Cahuenga Elementary School nearby. Many years later I was to learn that Harry Hay, eventually to become the founder of the American gay movement, had attended that same school twenty years before. I like to think that in some occult way his spirit had lingered on that spot where it ministered kindly to me.

At all events we scraped together some money and bought a house near Venice Boulevard and Crenshaw in LA, then a respectable middle-class district. Even though the mortgage payments were low my parents struggled to meet them. The reason was my mother’s mental illness which set in a while after after we had moved. To this day I do not understand her exact condition, but she was incapacitated and had to be moved to a series of institutions over a period of about a year. To finance these stays, my stepfather (whose loyalty to my mother never wavered) borrowed money from various shady loan firms, Years of scrimping and saving were needed to pay these debts off. Thus burdened, our status went down - from solid middle class to genteel poverty. As a rule I had only two pairs of pants, wearing one while the other was being laundered. One year the pants shrank, but I had to wear them anyway. My mother excelled at preparing economical dishes, some of them barely edible. Sometimes I was sent out to buy horsemeat from the pet store.

During most of these years we couldn’t even afford a car. Being carless was not as bad as it sounds, because in those days LA had a surprisingly good public transportation system. By the time I got to high school, though, our lack of wheels was an embarrassment, for not only did other families have cars, so did many of my peers, other teenagers.

My mother and stepfather had generally sensible views about parenting. They made me eat my vegetables, and retire at an early hour (for a long time at 9 PM). In the fourth grade Maxwell B., who became my best friend, introduced himself by saying: "I see you have a vitamin mother too." We both had sandwiches made out of wheat bread, instead of the awful white stuff the other kids received.

Faced with their own problems, my parents left other things pretty much up to my (immature) judgment. Photographs reveal that I was an unkempt urchin with poor hygiene. I suppose that mom and dad thought that in due course I would correct these faults - as I did, eventually. But the damage was done. I was a loner, and my naive uncouthness intensified the isolation.

My unpopularity increased as it became apparent that I needed to wear glasses to correct my nearsightedness. For a while I had a progressive condition in which the correction - and the thickness of the glass - had to be increased every year or so. This condition made me a "four-eyes."


INTELLECTUAL INTERESTS

The world of reading was my refuge of choice. Starting in the sixth grade I became an avid consumer of science fiction. My stepfather had begun bringing in copies of Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, leading examples of the pulp magazines that were then the main vehicles of this genre. Basically, I was drawn to the trend known as space opera, where an intrepid adventurer, brainy but brawny as well, confronts challenges on an interplanetary or interstellar scale. In this category my special favorite was the Captain Future series in which the hero is accompanied by several interesting companions, including a robot and an android. My favorite, though, was his counselor Simon, who was just a brain in a box.

Science fiction had great appeal for nerdy teenagers. For me, though, it also served as a kind of bridge connecting the two cultures of science and the humanities.

The covers of the magazines often showed scantily clad women in transparent space suits. Sometimes they would be threatened by the dreaded BEMs (bug-eyed monsters). Yet inside the mag there was nothing sexual; in fact any notice of the subtleties of human character was minimal, for the yarn was the thing. Finally, in 1948 Arthur C. Clarke’s early masterpiece “Against the Fall of Night” showed that science-fiction novels could in fact be more ambitious. But I was ready to move on to other things.

Other reading fare beckoned. At first I responded to books on astronomy (as one might expect), and on architecture and city planning, but in due course it emerged that the humanities were more my bent. I developed a strong interest in history, reading popular biographies of such figures as Cleopatra, Genghis Khan, and Frederick the Great of Prussia.

I also became interested in languages. My bible in this area was Frederick Bodmer’s Loom of Language (1944). Although it was a popular work, this book did provide a good deal of useful information on the principles of linguistic analysis, together with starter accounts and vocabularies of major tongues, most of them European. For more solid information I turned to the works of Otto Jespersen, a Danish linguist, then at the top of the field. Among other things, Jespersen was involved in the cause of artificial or international languages. The best known of these was Esperanto, which I studied for a time. Dr. Lejzer Ludwik Zamenhof, a Polish-Jewish oculist, had created it in the 1880s by combining features of a number of European languages. Yet these were not his only source, for later when I went to Turkey I recognized that Esperanto had borrowed the principles of word formation found in Turkic languages.

In his youth working in the alfalfa fields in California, my stepfather had become fluent in Spanish. I began the study of that language in junior high school. However, I was never much taken with Spanish, and decided to teach myself French. While I read French books with ease now, I never took a formal course in the language. Much later the Spanish came in handy during my travels in Latin America.

I also became interested in fine literature - the classics. In the aftermath of World War II, Goethe was being promoted as the model of a “good German.” He was also hailed by Lancelot Law Whyte as a “unitary process thinker.” I got hold of a volume of Goethe translations ostensibly selected by Thomas Mann. These renderings were so wooden that I couldn’t make much out of them. I only learned German later, when I was in college.

From the public library I took out a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Since I had been raised in a purely secular household, the religious message of the Italian writer seemed strange and transgressive--as if I had somehow wandered into an opium den or porno palace. For a while I could not accept that Dante, clearly a very intelligent man, actually believed what he had written. I thought that the Commedia was a satire. Prompted by the example of Leo Strauss, some scholars have maintained something like this view for Plato and a few other eminent thinkers, though not I believe for Dante Alighieri.

With all this book-worm stuff it was almost inevitable that I would go to work at the Los Angeles Public Library, where I served as a page, beginning when I was in the ninth grade. The pay was meager, 75 cents an hour, and I devoted most of what I earned to buying books. This was the beginning of my book mania: I now house some 14,000 volumes in my New York apartment.

I also became involved with classical music. This connection began casually. When I was in the fourth grade our school did a production of Hansel and Gretel, the opera by Engelbert Humperdinck. I was in the chorus. This was in the middle of World War II, so we were told that the two kids were not German but Dutch! This is the earliest example known to me of revising history in the interest of Political Correctness.

In those days Los Angeles had an excellent music station, KFAC, and I would listen late at night when my parents thought I was asleep, my ear glued to the tiny radio. At first I could make almost nothing out of it. One night though they played Robert Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony, and all became clear. I had arrived at an intuitive understanding of sonata form and the pattern of movements--fast, slow, fast--that governed a typical symphony. To this day I am grateful to Schumann (or rather his shade) for providing this beneficial lesson. Later, I came to dislike most of the other romantic composers, preferring baroque and modern music. Broadway musicals, such a gay favorite, never had much appeal for me. I tried several times to learn to play the piano, but since my parents couldn't afford a teacher I failed to progress.

With my interest in literature and classical music, I was well on the way to becoming a confirmed “culture vulture.” What I didn’t anticipate is that this proclivity would migrate to the visual arts, the field where I was ultimately to earn my living.


CONCLUSION

At the beginning of this chapter I dissented from the view, still rife in some quarters, that childhood experiences are decisive for the course of one's later life. Rather, I emphasized the creative role of the individual in responding to circumstances.

The circumstances to which I responded show certain patterns. On reflection it seemed to me that some variety of situation - in my case differences of geography and the familial constellation - is stimulating. There must not be too much variety, though, for that is destabilizing. The contrasting appeal of the two models, science vs. the humanities, also helped, even though I ended up choosing the latter. While I ultimately rejected both atheism and Communism. this exposure helped me on the way to thinking for myself - and not just accepting the conventional wisdom, an all-too- common stance in those decades of conformity.

Memoirs: Chapter Two

Hapless in High School


Not long ago I discovered a curious item, a kind of sub-Proustian madeleine, bound in plastic and teeming with little black-and-white photos. It was my 1952 yearbook from Los Angeles High School. Instead of consigning it to a pile in the urban equivalent of a garage sale, where it probably belongs, I let the book trigger some memories.

First let me step back a bit. In the ninth grade, at Mount Vernon Junior High in Los Angeles, I had experienced a Roger Peyrefitte-like episode of attraction to a cherub two years younger. This amounted to no more than puppy love, and it didn’t touble me very much at the time.

What happened in high school was another matter. First, of course, was the overall setting that simply teemed with healthy, energetic, even radiant boys. In those days, such paragons of young virility were untouched by drugs or alcohol, vices that intruded in the following generation. As one could freely ascertain in gym classes, the boys had naturally splendid physiques, in no way resembling the shaved, pumped-up icons of today’s popular erotics.

High standards of hygiene were enforced. Showers were required after every gym period, which was every day while school was in session. The length of boys' hair was an aspect of grooming that was strictly controlled. "Long-hairs" or "musicians" would be sternly instructed to get to the barber as soon as possible. A few of the more adventurous boys tested this restriction by allowing a small tuft to grow down at the very back of the head, known as a "duck's ass," or D.A. That was as far as one dared go.

Throughout the building, it seemed, the boys' hyperactive pheromones diffused an aroma of subtle intoxication. Anyone who had the slightest bit of gayness in him would have to be really dull not to be drawn to this all-environing pulchritude. Looking back, I wonder how I managed to get through the day without suffering a continuous hard-on. Of course the situation called for restraint, and substantial penalties awaited those who could not or would not manage a proper display of indifference. So at least it seemed in that age of conformity.

Of course it was not all sweetness and light. Occasionally, one of the tough boys would threaten to beat me up after school. I was, after all, a four-eyes and fair game. Oddly enough, though, they never actually did beat me up, but the threats were unsettling. I longed to be an adult, for my parents I was sure never got threatened in this way.

When they were in the all-male settings of gym and shop classes, many of the boys were given to cacolalia, the compulsive repetition of dirty words. Actually, it was only one such word: "shit." Perhaps this departure from taboo reflected a revolt against the imposition of order and cleanliness--imperatives later to be defied by the hippies. This four-letter word never crossed my lips. In fact, my parents never used such words, nor did they tolerate ethnic slurs.

Oddly enough, one taboo word was never heard; that was "fuck." For that monosyllable, it was usual to substitute "sexual intercourse." This could even be used as a verb: to sexual intercourse. Once I was hanging out with two jocks I vaguely knew. One said, playfully I suppose: "Lets go over to Dynes' house and rough him up." No, said the other: "His dad might be a big mother." For quite a while I puzzled over this expression; how could a man be a mother? Eventually, I caught on. They had used a current euphemism that suppressed the second half of the compound, "-fucker."


THE LARRY CHRONICLES

The sexually charged environment of high school fostered a general seductiveness in which the male form was generically imprinted on my being. Yet there was a more specific agency. In the tenth grade I fell head-over-heels in love with one Larry Smith, a boy I scarcely knew well enough to speak to. What vagabond Merlin could have snared me with this enchantment?

Later, examining the matter soberly from a photograph taken at the time, I noted that Larry had fairly conventional Waspish good looks, with a clear complexion and a square jaw. His grades were, I reckon, little better than average. He could do sports, but did not excel in any of them. These things didn’t matter to me, though, for above all Larry was comfortable in his skin--as I, fretful and anxious, was not. He was not striving to be something, he just was. In his tranquil form, being triumphed over becoming.

In several of his short stories Thomas Mann has analyzed the lure happy youths like Larry pose to lonely outsiders, Even though I did not know it at the time, there was a certain typicality in my fascination. It had been heard of before.

Larry was in several of my classes, and getting through the academic year was torture. Finally, the spring term was over. I would not see Larry for a full three months! Surely, I thought, the grip of the enslaving passion would loosen, and I could at last be free. But it did not, for Larry’s remembered visage continued to torture me all through the summer. I would lie and writhe on the grass, in a vague Whitmanian hope that this would help to cure me. No such luck. In the fall I saw Larry again, and the passion flamed up even higher, prompted by the immediate visual stimulus of his revered form. I was doomed

Ultimately the enchantment began to fade, though I still had feelings for Larry. In fact I was not alone in my response, for my homophile buddy Richard W. noted Larry’s good looks in a remark to me. I was too embarrassed to respond.

My inability to shake this passion made clear to me, once and for all, that my nature was homosexual. (I did not know the word “gay” at the time.) The connection sealed my fate in another way: for some time henceforth I would be attracted mainly to straight men like Larry. Obviously, this was a recipe for unhappiness. Up to a point, the arrangement could work, as it later did with Neal M. and Charles S., if there was an element of gayness in the other person’s otherwise primarily heterosexual nature. Neal was probably two thirds straight (quite intensely so) and one third gay. Charles never really quite found himself--not surprisingly, I suppose, considering his seemingly inevitable downward glide path littered with drug paraphernalia and beer bottles.

I was spared one possible consequence of the Larry entanglement. That is that I was not destined to be caught up in a perpetual fixation on 15- or 16-year old boys (his age at the time). I was not to be a boy lover, thank goodness. In due course, I could move on in a measured way to older types.


ANOTHER CONNECTION

Another set of high school episodes highlights the difficulty that an incipient gay boy would, almost inevitably, experience in those Dark Ages of conformity and ignorance. In the quasi-military exercises of ROTC, a sullen boy, trading comments with a confederate, insulted me with a sexual epithet. (He called me a penis; a compliment, I suppose--at least in different circumstances.) In this embarrassing situation--there were others present--I didn’t know how to respond.

Some weeks later I was sitting in the Assembly balcony. I had gone early to attend some event, and the vast hall was practically empty. What should happen, though, but that Mr. Sullen (I can’t now recall his name) should come up and sit right next to me. Almost fawningly, he made it clear that he had no hostility but wanted to be friendly. He did not apologize for the previous incident and, still repulsed, I did my best to shun him.

Some years later Chuck McC., who had belonged to a surreptitious circle of gay boys at LA High, told me that this sullen youth was in fact homosexual. No doubt the boy was struggling with conflicting feelings. His initial verbal attack may have reflected internalized homophobia. And then maybe he was trying to get my attention, and didn’t know how to do it otherwise. Clearly, he craved some kind of relationship; hence his approach to me in the Assembly. Clumsy though that strange boy may have been, he had figured me out better than I had figured out myself.

Had I been able to suspend my aversion to the kid (who was OK looking, but nothing special), our prospects would have been inauspicious. For I too was struggling with conflicted feelings. In contrast with heterosexual adolescent courtship, our milieu provided no models for two men to link up as “more than just friends.” Any relationship of that kind was perilous, because gossip would ensue, followed by ostracism. To the best of my knowledge, McC.’s circle of five or six youths did not include any couples--they were all just friends together, it seemed. A male couple, on the other hand, would elicit hostile attention. So it is just as well that I didn’t go any farther with Mr. Sullen.


HIGH SCHOOL IN RETROSPECT

As I bade good-bye in the summer of 1952 to the halls of “Rome” (as we grandly called our high school), I was but dimly aware of the daunting challenges that awaited me. Somehow I must make contact with established homosexuals, a little older than me, who could offer counsel. In so doing I would need to defend myself, as best I could, from the cynicism and negativity that so pervaded the gay world at that time. Up to this point I had had hardly any sex. I would have to learn how to find partners, and also to learn which modes suited me. How did one perform gay sex? Mutual masturbation was about as far as my imagination extended in those days. Put a cock in my mouth? How very unsanitary. Apart from this prudishness, I had somehow to avoid the danger of public labeling--what we now term outing--for as a person with very little in the way of personal or family resources, the ensuing pariah status would have been very hard to sustain.

And yet, I did manage.

In retrospect, I have concluded that what I learned from LA High was that I could survive (after a fashion), even as a contrarian.  How was I a contrarian? First, just being a “four eyes” (I wore thick glasses) barred me from any hope of joining the “in” crowd. They didn’t have contact lenses in those days.


CULTURE ADVOCACY

I also did things that set me apart--provocations as it were. I opposed the dominant pop trends by seeking to promote high culture, especially classical music. Yet opera--or so I was told--was “stuffy.” The expression “it sucks” was unknown then. Mozart was my god. (Later I became almost physically ill when I read a mediocre British novelist’s dismissive comment about “filthy old Mozart.”)

At LA High I took an excellent music course taught by an Englishwoman named Beatrice Fall. She had been trained as a concert pianist, but was not quite good enough, so she became a teacher. Her course was organized around Richard Wagner's Ring cycle. She carefully illustrated each of the many leitmotifs that the composer had so artfully embedded in the work. Through this analysis I gained an overall sense of the structure of this vast tetralogy. Later I took up the avant-garde fascination with the Second Viennese School, especially the works of Arnold Schoenberg. Here too there was an underlying structure made up of the serial sequences (or "rows" as they were sometimes termed). It seemed to me that this twelve-tone stuff was the only proper music of our time. Today, though, I can scarcely bring myself to listen to it.
I was big on modern poetry and modern art, especially Picasso. Their hermetic qualities made them opaque to most people, which was just fine with me. On my own, I consulted works of explication at the public library, and with these cribs I was able to hold forth on the symbolism and formal values that distinguished these highbrow productions. I liked to go to the movies, but shunned the latest Hollywood products in favor of classics of the silent era. Later I was to gravitate to the European films of the "art houses."

My parents couldn’t afford a TV, or so they claimed. A critic might say that in pushing high culture I  was making a virtue of necessity. I didn’t have access to the fare on the idiot box, harmless rubbish that provided common themes for chatting in the cafeteria and during recess klatsches. By way of compensation, I became the apostle of something so very, very much superior!

This sense gained reinforcement by my reading of "The Revolt of the Masses" by José Ortega y Gasset.  Stimulated by the Spanish thinker's elitism, I evolved a simple typology based on the high school students I knew. On the one hand, there were the "aristics," a select body of self-disciplined devotees of culture and philosophy.  There were not too many of these, perhaps only myself and my sidekick Paul H.  Over against us, who constituted the happy few, stood the vast unwashed, the demotics, who were vulgarians only interested in the latest tin-pan alley tunes, popular movies, sports, and the like.  Reading Friedrich Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" reinforced this snobism.


In the late ‘forties an enterprising small publisher secured the rights to a formerly lost manuscript by Ezra Pound, “Patria Mia.” In the ad, above a fierce photo of the bearded poet ran the caption “the most antisocial writer of our time.” Whee! That guy was for me. Almost feverishly, I started reading Pound, who quickly replaced Ortega and Nietzsche in my affections. My interest in Pound was partly sparked by my ambition to become an avant-garde poet. In fact I was a kind of proto-beatnik, but fortunately I pulled back, because I couldn’t face the life of poverty such a career path would entail. I wonder what became of the poems, mostly pastiches, that I produced during my high school years.  Not a great loss, I fear.

When I showed my copy of “The Cantos” to one of my teachers, she remarked: “well, er, isn’t he p r e j u d i c e d?” As I noted, that was an age of verbal circumspection.

I did not share Pound’s anti-Semitism or his admiration of Benito Mussolini. Later on, when I lived in Italy, I came across old-timers who still revered the Duce, but I was never able to make much of this enthusiasm.

Our high school was about 30% Jewish and these students were my natural allies, because, as a rule, they respected culture and learning. By definition the rednecks did not. Still, the Jewish students strove to fit in--to do OK at sports and to avoid the role of missionary culture-vulture, which was my thing.

With a few exceptions, I did not find the Jewish boys sexually compelling. As a sociologist might say, there was “not enough distance.” That is, being similar, we were not complementary enough. With the hunky redneck guys it was different. They might not have much upstairs, but we could always live downstairs--or so I fancied. If only I would shut up about Mozart and Picasso. But I just couldn’t.


DANGEROUS LIAISONS

Still, as long as I wasn’t too aggressive about it, being a culture-vulture was fairly innocuous; not so, sexual unorthodoxy. In high school there were definite limits, and coming out as a proud homosexual would have been way out of bounds. In fact it was inconceivable. I suppose a Freudian would say that my culture-vulture engagements were a form of sublimation in response to my sexual frustration.

Of course, in those pre-pill days most het boys and girls felt sexually frustrated too. For the most part they were obliged to restrict their encounters to petting--no penetration. Because of their deprivation, the boys were reputed to suffer from time to from attacks of the dreaded “blue balls.” During an attack of this malady almost any mouth would do that might offer the necessary relief. I never got a chance to test this hypothesis, though.

Sublimated or not, I found nonconformity welcome, even alluring.

All the same, from my parents' far-left orientation I also learned that concealment and guile (being in the closet, if you will) were sometimes well-advised. As a postal worker, my stepfather could have lost his job, given the anti-Communist atmosphere of the era.  Guided by my reading of Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon, and other works), I came to reject my parents' political beliefs, but the lesson of caution remained.

All things considered, LA High was a hostile, or at least indifferent environment for me.  So it was that in 1952 I breathed a big sigh of relief when I got to UCLA --so much more congenial to my love of high culture.

Perhaps it is not too much of an oversimplification to say that subsequently my life has unfolded between two poles.  In my academic career as an art historian, I largely adhered to the cooperative mode.  That was prudent.  However, when it came to the turbulent gay movement of the 1970s I reverted to being a contrarian, my high school stance. As a result I was subjected to repeated efforts to marginalize me. Of that there will be more later.

Memoirs: Chapter Three

College


I turn now to the UCLA years (1952-56). These were more congenial than the previous three in high school, in large measure because most of the rowdies elected not to go to college, leaving the cohort of more serious students as my classmates. Their were older students on GI Bill scholarships, strongly committed to making something of the gift of their college years. Because of the effort it took to get there, out-of-state students and foreigners were also likely to be serious.


MY STUDIES

Having abandoned my earlier interest in the natural sciences, I targeted the humanities, with the aim (ultimately achieved) of making a career by qualifying as a professor in that realm. I began by majoring in classics, then switched to history. Only in my third year at UCLA did I settle on art history, a field previously unknown to me. This major appealed to me not as an artist (here I was only a dabbler), but because of the rich interdisciplinary vistas it revealed. At first I was strongly drawn to Chinese art (and still am), but I ended up becoming a medievalist, a choice responding to a certain muffled spirituality in my make-up.

Apart from my formal studies, I learned a good deal through conversations with advanced students in the social sciences, especially sociology and anthropology. Ultimately, I found sociology unrewarding because of its reductive tendency to regard human beings as little more than mirrors passively reflecting contents projected on them by society. In those days of conformity, "adjustment," that is, accepting one's lot, was held up as the ideal. This dismal imperative suppressed human agency. I couldn't go along with this, because active intervention on my own behalf was essential I felt that I must go beyond the constricting setting of Southern California and even the US. This task would call for a big effort.

Of course, with such works as "The Lonely Crowd" by David Riesman et al., sociology enjoyed much more prestige then than it does now. I can't say that I regret the decline of this discipline with its endless platitudes, not to speak of the many studies replicating what experience had already abundantly shown to be true.

I thought better of anthropology. This connection led to my reading of a paper by Claude Lévi-Strauss, who was then quite obscure. The French scholar has proved one of my lifelong guides. Recently I began reading him once again. I was impressed by anthropology's ambition to provide a comprehensive description of an entire society - indeed of many societies. Having previously been an enthusiast for Arnold Toynbee, I was drawn to such portrayals. In the last analysis, though, I wanted them to address high cultures. Europe beckoned.

By way of outreach, I continued to assuage my culture-vulture penchants by forming a college humanities club, called “Investigations.” Meetings were not very popular, and I had to dragoon attendees. Such was the work of culture mongering--hard, but somebody had to do it.

Be that as it may, I’ll omit any further recitals of these scholastic details. They were part of my intellectual development at the time, but nowadays not exactly riveting. Instead, I turn to my sexual and social development. I will approach this matter indirectly.


SEX AND FRIENDSHIPS

Some years ago David Halperin, a gay professor of classics at the University of Michigan, decided to offer a course on “How to Be Gay.” This announcement provoked consternation, leading to a hostile discussion in the state legislature. What I think Professor Halperin had in mind was an exploration of the fact that becoming gay is inevitably a process. One does not achieve this identity all of a sudden, emerging fully developed like Athena from the head of Zeus. The AHA! moment simply does not occur, either at the point where one acknowledges one’s orientation to oneself, through introspection, or at the point of declaring oneself (coming out). Instead, there is a complex process of negotiation, extending over some years, in which one gradually adjusts one’s expectations to social and psychic realities. Much as we would like to, we cannot shape our own situation just as we wish, but must work within the parameters of what is possible. All the same, our response must be active, and not just passive and accepting. I will illustrate this truism by discussing two gay circles, one of which became known to me after the fact, the other being one I actually participated in.

In my previous chapter, "Hapless in High School," I have already alluded to the clandestine gay circle in LA High. in my previous chapter, It flourished under my very nose. Only when I got to college did I learn from my friend Chuck McC. of the true nature of this bunch. As it formed something of a contrast to the group that I actually joined at UCLA, I will now say something more about this earlier group, as it formed (retrospectively) a benchmark for my later experiences.

Chuck’s high school circle was essentially democratic. The boys either took part in group sex (generally jerking off) or made themselves available to others, if you will, as fuck buddies. While some members of the group were more prominent than others, there was no clear leader.

Above all, the binary differentiation between confirmed gays (queens) and “trade” (men available for gay sex, but not stereotypical) had not taken place. Some members of the circle probably assumed that they would “turn straight” one day (as Chuck ultimately did). There was a silver lining, for the boys probably felt that, with their ready access to a form of sex that quenched their raging hormones, they were better off than most of their heterosexual peers, who had to be content with mere petting. The situation combined hedonism with flexibility.

How did the pattern prevailing in this group originate? Was it something ad hoc, like the Nicaraguan village of deaf mutes who invented their own sign language? Probably not, in that some of the boys had probably previously engaged in sex play with younger boys in circle jerks and similar gatherings.


THE QUEENS' CIRCLE

I turn now to the main theme: the gay circle I joined at UCLA. The fluidity of identity characterizing the high school circle (which had of course disbanded) yielded to a fixed personality type, that of the queen. For many the new guise proved a lasting one. Most of the individuals who had come together in the UCLA circle continued to see one another regularly after graduation, evolving into a social amalgam they called “the Loved Ones” (an ironic reference to the Evelyn Waugh novel). I was a peripheral member of the group, but once I moved away in 1956, had no further relations with it.

At UCLA the daily gatherings of the circle were charged with powerful underlying currents of cynicism and acerbity. These corrosive solvents surely reflected internalized homophobia, a condition difficult to escape in those years of conformity. Turned inwardly, the negativity served to consolidate the norms of the group. And in fact much of the dishing was of each other, and of other gays who did not conform to the circle’s norms.

Internally, a hierarchy was generally recognized. What was this hierarchy based upon? First, it depended on looks and “endowment." They were all size queens. While most didn't have much to offer in that department, this deficiency did not prevent them from making catty comments about the skimpy "meat" of men they saw. So looks mattered most, facially and in terms of genitalia. Grotesquely, this criterion was called "standards." In fact the group had only the faintest idea of what might actually constitute standards.

Only with great difficulty could a homely person occupy one of the higher spots in the pecking order. Under exceptional circumstances this status could be achieved by marshaling the resources of the second and ultimately decisive resource. That was the ability to dish and give attitude. We did not use the term at the time, but attitude was indeed the key. It emerged in the verbal sallies that qualified (dubiously) as wit, and in the hauteur of a challenging gaze that ostensibly summed up the confrontational stance of the group. "She for he" put downs were common.

Under circumstances less benign than the 1950s college setting, group members would have been repeatedly beaten up. Their bravado was hollow - but as it was never put to the test, they could continue to nourish their illusions. And of course to keep “camping up a storm,” the latter-day gay version of the venerable bohemian practice of “épater le bourgeois.”

The solidarity of the group, such as it was, was reinforced by a pervasive scorn and belittling of outsiders. Sometimes these targeted individuals were the subject of “reading” in which their pretensions to heterosexual normality were ostensibly exposed as a sham; they actually were gay, but were just not willing to acknowledge it. In reality this process of reading was counterproductive, because in applying it across the board, the pool of desirable males would inevitably shrink. Thus tarnished, the object of this scorn, could no longer serve as a sexual object. We did not want to sleep with people like ourselves. By the way, such ascriptions were not always inaccurate. I remember scoffing when I heard that Rock Hudson was gay. I should not have.

By now it will be clear that the Loved Ones could not boast many positive features. Puffed up and preening because of their sense of being special, the members had little incentive to change their ways. Yet the group showed one remarkable distinction, one that would have been less likely before and after: it was salt-and-pepper--that is, it consisted of about ten black members and ten white members. In that era of the Supreme Court decision known as Brown v. Board of Education and the rise of the civil rights movement, the times were achangin.’ Even in liberal Southern California, though, there were many who remained uneasy about “race mixing.” We played on this uneasiness. It was another way of skating close to the edge.

A serpent was loose in this Eden, compromised as it was, in the form of the Vice Squad of the Los Angeles Police Department. By and large, this insidious organization did not operate on the UCLA campus. But when members ventured out into the city for sex, they faced the likelihood that eventually they were going to be arrested. I do not know of any of these men who escaped this fate. Their prissiness and attitude availed them naught when they were entrapped in this way. Evidently, the cops were particularly hard on black guys who were found with white partners. As I noted, racial animosity lurked just beneath the surface in the LA of those days. Probably it still does.

Unlike the high school circle, there was no intragroup sex, as all the members of the band were “sisters.” To have sex with each other would be incestuous.

Functioning as a kind of pseudo-family, the group carefully controlled admission, and those who did not measure up were either relegated to a suppliant position on the fringe, or excluded altogether. I was one of those men assigned a marginal status.

My polar opposite was Victor S., an überqueen, who affected long hair, heavy make-up, and gender-ambiguous clothing. He majored in French, naturally. Victor’s high-pitched shrieks were a startling ostinato punctuating the gatherings of the group, which regularly occurred in one of the school’s cafeterias. Eventually, the college authorities forced Victor to clean up his act. In retrospect it seems that he was ahead of his time, a prefiguration of later trends in advanced gender bending. But that is not the way he was received in those days. This strange creature was basically antisexual rather than gay. All the same, Victor expended a lot of energy putting down other gays as being less brave than he was for not being proud and open, and failing to conform to his peculiar criteria. In short he was a scold. Nonetheless, Victor served the group as something between an idol and a mascot. He symbolized our defiance.

With all the negativity that festered in this UCLA group, why would anyone want to join? Well, it was the only game in town, or so it seemed at the time. Otherwise, one was condemned to a desert of loneliness in which one had only straight acquaintances with whom one could not really discuss one’s feelings. All the same, the apprenticeship this group provided to an emerging gay person was seriously damaging.

BROADER PERSPECTIVES

To what extent was the UCLA queens group typical? At the time I did not know any other such circles, so that I could not judge from personal experience. However, the late John Grube, a Canadian scholar, interviewed a good many older men of this period. His research indicates that such circles--replete with hierarchy, rule enforcement, and constant bitchiness--were common, probably the norm.

Later I acquired some evidence of my own of the prevalence of the corrosive banter and putdowns, for in 1968 I saw Mart Crowley’s dismal play “Boys in the Band” on off-Broadway.

Here is how one character dissed another in the play. “You’re a sad and pathetic man. You’re a homosexual and you don’t want to be, but there’s nothing you can do to change it. Not all the prayers to your god, not all the analysis you can buy in all the years you’ve go left to live. You may one day be able to know a heterosexual life if you want it desperately enough. If you pursue it with the fervor with which you annihilate. But you’ll always be homosexual as well. Always Michael. Always. Until the day you die. “

Note the date: 1968. The Stonewall riots happened one year later, signaling a new era in which gay pride would supplant gay shame. It was about time.


THE MATRACHINE SOCIETY

Above, I implied that the UCLA queens group was the only game in town. Maybe that was so for our college campus, but it was not true for the larger world of the city in which we lived. In 1951, a year before I went to college, Los Angeles gave birth to the first successful US gay-rights group, the Mattachine Society. To be sure, these folks had some issues of their own: they were much too respectful of the views of psychiatrists, for example. Still, the Mattachine Society signaled the rise of a new type of homosexual assertion, one based on pride and not marinated in self-pity and internalized homophobia as the UCLA group regrettably was.

I did not participate in the rise of Mattachine in those days, because ignorant UCLA queens warned me to stay away from it. But no matter, for later I was to become friends with the heroic band who started the movement that redeemed gay people--with Dorr Legg, Don Slater, Jim Kepner, and Harry Hay. I would not have missed this company for the world. And their cause was destined ultimately to triumph, putting the self-hating faggots our of business. A very good thing.


BECOMING AN ART HISTORIAN

It was stimulating to monitor these developments. All the same caution became my watchword. Retreating into the closet was a necessity if I was to make a career as a college professor. But in what field? Arriving at UCLA I opted for classics. Not having done Latin in high school, I quickly realized that that would be a long road with uncertain prospects at the end. So I switched to history. Those opting for that major were encouraged to have a related minor. I decided to try art history--and was immediately captivated. I had not realized that such a field actually existed. (Some don't acknowledge it even today--or else they opine that it should not exist.)

In my general enthusiasm for the visual arts I even toyed with the idea of becoming a painter. I knew just what kind I would be. I would practice a West Coast version of Abstract Expressionism, the New York School that had risen to prominence with such figures as Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, and Franz Kline. Probably, I thought, De Kooning with his brilliant colors and slashing brush strokes would be my model. Early in 2012, I went to the huge retrospective of De Kooning, the Dutch-American painter, at the Museum of Modern Art. I hated his (to me) misogynistic works collectively called "Woman" and found the later Alzheimer-blighted canvases pathetic. But the big abstractions of the late 'fifties still seem to me right on target.

At things turned out, I was never to take a studio course in painting, satisfying myself with a few amateurish experiments at home. I rightly judged that the academic path of art history was best for me. Why then did I decided to emphasize the medieval period?

Several factors converged. First, the overall society kept hammering at the idea that we would be stronger in our battle with world communism if we had an ideology of our own. That, it seemed, must be Christianity. (This was long before the fad for ersatz Asian religions spawned by the Counterculture.) The Catholic scholars Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, who regarded the works of Thomas Aquinas as the answer to everything, were widely acclaimed as sages, even by non-Catholics. I had several goes at reading the works of Thomas, but always got bogged down. For their part, the Luce publications promoted their own version of this pro-Catholicism. Clare Booth Luce was an enthusiastic convert to Roman Catholicism.

There was also a “lite” version, if you will, in the form of Anglo-Catholicism, which was actually high Episcopalianism. This was the tendency that T. S. Eliot, once my idol, championed. For his part, the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, then much in vogue, seemed to favor it in making religion a major factor in the unfolding of civilizations.

I knew that I wanted to become an art historian, so choosing medieval art seemed a good way of fulfilling these spiritual aspirations.

Two other factors were more serendipitous. At UCLA I had a charismatic professor of art history, Carl Sheppard, whose main field was the middle ages. While he never published much, Sheppard was a spell-binding lecturer. His other field of interest was modern art. I was interested in that too, and the affinities many detected between the medieval and the modern seemed genuine.

Finally, there was a not very honorable motive, though a a lesser one. Showing an interest in Catholicism and the middle ages annoyed my parents, who remained staunch atheists.

Memoirs: Chapter Four

My Evolving Political Views: An Interlude


Departing from strict chronology, this chapter deals more comprehensively with my political views, which have elicited puzzlement in some quarters. I have found that, in discussing these views with others, my politics tend to be met either with indifference (because they are eclectic) or disparagement (because they fit no particular established pattern). That said, let me see if I can clear a few things up.

My parents brought me up in a far-left political sect, the Communist Party USA. We tempered our consumption of the “bourgeois” press with a subscription to the Daily People’s World, the West Coast counterpart of the Daily Worker, Like many intellectuals of the thirties my stepfather had adopted the vulgar Marxism rife during those Depression years.

In our household I don’t remember any airing of such key issues of Marxian economic theory as surplus value or the purported progressive immiseration of the working class. In the immediate postwar period, when plumbers and truck drivers began to earn more than professors, this stuff about the plight of the poor workers would not have had much traction. We were told, of course, that another Depression was just around the corner (which it was not). The main thing I remember absorbing from those conversations and readings was a Manichaean view of the contemporary global situation in which the valiant “progressive forces” (that is, the Warsaw Pact nations dominated by Moscow, and Mao’s China) were arrayed against the evil nemesis of capitalist plutocracy headquartered in Wall Street. Without question the US was always the arch-villain in this process, a view that I have found wearyingly replicated over and over again in later dissident movements. This is so even now that the Soviet Union is dead and gone. As far as I can see, the unending flood of screeds produced by Noam Chomsky simply mimics this hoary and simplistic sheep-and-goats doctrine.

Some averred that the only hope for change was the presidential candidacy of Henry Wallace, who ran in 1948 under the aegis of a third party. In fact, the hapless Wallace, whose main expertise lay in agriculture, was manipulated by his Communist and fellow-traveler advisers.


BECOMING AN EX-COMMUNIST

At that time though, I got off the bus, the Comintern Express. The precipitating event was the defection of Marshall Jozef Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia from the Soviet orbit in 1948. Then a precocious fourteen-year-old, I wrote a long letter, a kind of cri du coeur, to the editors at the Daily People’s World, asking how a former stalwart champion of the people (Tito) could so suddenly turn into a “social-fascist beast.” No answer came. Of course the excommunication simply reflected the fact that Tito had had the temerity to defy Stalin. and got away with it. Stalinism, enforced by the party line, pulled the strings that made all the puppets, including my foolish parents, dance.

I then deprogrammed myself by reading two authors, George Orwell (1984; and Animal Farm) and Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon). I later came to find Orwell a narrow and simplistic puritan, hobbled by misogynistic, homophobic. and other suburban prejudices (he denounced "pansy" poets).

Koestler, a man of many parts, eventually returned to his first love, the history of science. I followed him in this interest, as seen most notably in his brilliant treatise, The Act of Creation. Two recent biographies have highlighted Koestler's personal failings, rehearsing charges that may well be true.  No one is perfect.  But for me his life was one of the most emblematic trajectories of the twentieth century.

Any perceptive person can benefit from off-track experiences such as my Commie education, tossing out the dross (lots of it) and retaining what still seems of value. So let me say something about the latter. In keeping with their beliefs my parents sought out and made friends with black people, then known as Negroes, whom we sometimes entertained in our home. Another thing I gained from this misguided though formative political education was a healthy skepticism about our two major parties--or rather the Demopublicans. Their alternating pattern of dominance is simply a series of switches from Tweedledum to Tweedledee and back again. The reason, of course, is the Permanent Government ensconced in Washington DC, staffed by venal career bureaucrats, ruled by lobbyists awash in money, and abetted by a disgraceful, toadying media. Today the truth of this principle seems to be affirmed once again, as the Obama policies more and more mirror those of George W. Bush. Only the rhetoric changes.

From time to time a third party arises, only to fall by the wayside. By and large the Anglo-Saxon political system does not permit such pluralism. We are resolutely binary. Does this acknowledgement lead to despair? Not necessarily, for there are some rays of light. I note the success of movements organized around particular goals, as seen in the civil-rights, women's, and GLBT movements. I write the acronym reluctantly, as it fosters a degree of fragmentation ("diversity") that is not helpful, in my view.


SEARCHING FOR A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

In college I took a worthless course in that misnamed discipline Political Science. It was only in the 1960s that I began to read on my own in this field. As a medieval scholar I found, curiously enough, succor in that remote era of Western history, which invented the concepts of separation of powers, representative government, the common law, and the just war. (The latter, however, gives me pause, for the criteria for determining which wars, if any, are just, seem elastic, all too conveniently so.)

My own views have been marked most profoundly by the writings of Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek. (I attended Popper's seminar in London). My gay "libertarian" friends claim the same heritage, but in fact most of them, I have sadly concluded, are simply neocons with some surface camouflage. Still, If pressed for a label, I would say that I am a libertarian anarchist - but not entirely, since I retain Popper's hope for a better world, which can only be realized with the aid of "partial planning." (See Chapter Ten, for an account of how I came to libertarianism.)

I also maintain a strong dose of political Realism, honed by my readings of Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. Time devoted to such towering figures is never lost.


MOSCA, PARETO, AND MICHELS

Here are some observations regarding three less well-known thinkers in the Realist vein, Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels. Reflecting on his experience in Italy, the Sicilian Mosca (as early as 1893) posited that all societies, whatever their formal constitutions and public rituals, are controlled by a political elite. This harsh dynamic acknowledges only two social categories: the rulers and the ruled. Mosca’s ideas, and those of his contemporaries Pareto and Michels, differ from those of Marx in that the ruling group is composite, rather than unitary, and therefore not a class in the strict sense. In my view, Marx’s idea of the ruling class was more traditional, in that he envisaged a kind of pseudo-kinship group modeled on, though not the same as, the traditional nobility.

Conventional wisdom assigns Mosca, Pareto, and Michels to the Right. However, a similar point was made by Sidney Webb, the Fabian who, together with his wife Beatrice Webb, ranks as one of the founders of the British Labor Party. Sidney noted, "[n]othing in England is done without the consent of a small intellectual yet practical class in London, not 2,000 in number." Edwardian England was both centralized and close-knit, and probably one has to assume a somewhat larger, more diffuse elite in other countries.

As Vilfredo Pareto emphasized, the pool of the ruling elite is being constantly refreshed, as new recruits find access. Yet the absolute number of players is small - it cannot be otherwise. This changing configuration, whose instability is only apparent, not real, refashions itself by a continuing process of minute adjustments. In this way the Participatory Illusion flourishes. "If an outsider like Henry Kissinger could make it to the pinnacle of power, then maybe I can too." In fact, this outcome is very unlikely, perhaps fortunately so for those of us who are ruled.

Robert Michels aptly summarized this situation as the Iron Law of Oligarchy. This principle applies to all kinds of societies, whether they be nominally democracies, monarchies, or authoritarian states. Moreover, size matters. The bigger the society, the more necessary - or at least convenient - it is that this ruling elite should control matters.

In the old USSR this situation came out into the open (after a fashion) in the concept of the Nomenklatura. The term derives from a confidential list (always hard to access) of privileged Party members who make all significant decisions. Oddly enough, in that respect the Soviet Union was more transparent than the US is today. As we have seen, however, the social mechanism is generally applicable - above all to societies like our own, where regrettably the mechanisms are obfuscated as much as possible.


SOME TENTATIVE CONCLUSIONS

Does this reality mean that individuals who do not belong to the ruling elites can expect to have no influence at all over policy decisions? On the whole that is just what it does mean, though there are some marginal exceptions. If they are wise, elite members in good standing will occasionally consult associates who stand outside the magic circle of power. If, however, these seemingly consultative players seek to promote a policy that goes counter to the collective wishes of their comrades, they will be instantly overruled. If it is a project that the group has already decided to undertake, the advice of the kibitzer is superfluous. At the end of the day, then, the actual influence the outsiders can bring to bear through this lateral intervention is highly circumscribed.

It is said that non-elite individuals can make a difference by joining together to form pressure groups. In union there is strength. Even here, though, the leverage accorded to non-elitists is exiguous. In many cases, the officers of pressure groups are usually themselves members of the elite, whose bidding they are more likely to do than that of their members.

For a time at least mobilization efforts such as those of the civil-rights and women’s movements can effect change. Another example, more narrowly focused, is ACT-UP, which has had a beneficial effect on medical policy. Given enough “testicular pressure,” those who manage the elites will yield, though only up to a point. Their overarching goal, which they pursue ruthlessly and with only the most minimal deviations, is to maintain power.

Occasionally there are popular upheavals, as in the massive opposition to the Vietnam War. Yet when it came to deposing president Richard Nixon, that change was deftly managed by a few key players on the inside, who had made sure that one of their more pliable colleagues, the dimwitted Gerald Ford, would take the place of his disgraced predecessor. The king is dead, long live the king!

I do in fact see hope in the rise of the blogosphere. A few of the bloggers are very widely read and quoted. Most though are not. The Iron Law of Oligarchy, it seems, extends its pall even over the blogosphere. Yet at least the blogs hasten the process of the circulation of elites. Andrew Sullivan is in; David Broder is out. Fresh faces may mean better policies. Or so we may hope.

In closing, two objections to the above sketch of the Iron Law of Oligarchy may be noted. First, the analysis seems unduly bleak and pessimistic. In fact, we may easily observe contemporary societies much worse than the managed one we live under now. Examples are the kleptocracies that dominate much of the Third World, especially in Africa. Pareto might well have agreed with Churchill that elitist democracy is the worst system in the world - except for every other. Still, it makes sense to go about the world with our eyes open.

The second objection is that my views amount to a conspiracy theory. Along these lines, there have been attempts to pinpoint the loci of the elite conspiracy: the Club of Rome, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bohemian Grove clique. Yet my theory differs from pinpointing of this type, for it posits a set of arrangements that are looser and pretty much out in the open, if one will simply look to see. There is no need to leave the living room. Watching C-Span TV on a regular basis shows the ruling-elite folks doing what they do best, talking to each other. Like some privileged prisoner, one can witness this spectacle, but is not allowed to participate.

In my short summary of the Iron Law of Oligarchy I have presented an ideal type. What would be needed to put flesh on these bones would be a series of case studies. One might begin with certain think tanks, such as the odious Council on Foreign Relations and the Rand Corporation. Doubtless such studies exist; the task would be to correlate them.

Rereading this chapter in 2012, I have begun to have glimmers of a sense that the Iron Law of Oligarchy may not triumph after all, at least not always. I am cautiously hopeful about Occupy Wall Street, which started on September 17, 2011 in Zuccotti Square at the lower end of my own island of Manhattan.

Memoirs: Chapter Five

New York City: 1956-58


I had not been out of California since I was a child. For some of my college friends residing in that state for the rest of one’s days seemed just dandy. But not in my case, for in my last year at UCLA it had become clear that I must come East for my graduate education in art history. From my new base I could at last visit Europe, beckoning as the Promised Land.

My teacher Professor Carl Sheppard had gone to Harvard University so naturally that was my first choice. I applied for a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship there. Harvard agreed to admit me, but without any scholarship funding - an impossible prospect for a poor boy like me. For its part, the Institute of Fine Arts (IFA) of New York University did offer some money. I got free tuition plus $100 a month. In those days $100 was enough to live on even in New York City, though just barely. Still, I was able to supplement this amount with part-time employment in the Institute library.

During the summer of 1956 I traversed the country by bus in a series of stages, stopping at various major cities along the way to see the museums. Once I arrived in NYC I stayed briefly at the 34th Street YMCA, and then took a small apartment on West 85th Street in Manhattan, which I was to share with my best friend Chuck after he returned from his European sojourn.

The depictions of New York City that I had seen in the movies had not prepared me for the reality. The city was much grittier than I expected, and the people tougher. Most apartments were dismal, shabby holes with plasster peeling from the walls- - something out of Beavis and Butthead.

The city was also more diverse ethnically than anything I had experienced. In California the main ethnic division was this: were you Anglo or Hispanic?

New York was dominated by the groups that had begun to come in the nineteenth century: Irish, Italians, and Jews. Even though I was nominally Irish I felt no bond with the East Coast Irish, who were Catholic, prone to drinking, and generally anti-intellectual. My commitment to art history induced a sentimental attachment to the Italians. But I felt the greatest affinity with the New York Jews, who accepted me as a fellow striver and seemed, at least those I met, sincerely desirous of gaining more education and culture.

An unexpected element was the Puerto Ricans. In high school I had become fairly proficient in Spanish, but did not find this knowledge very useful, as Spanish did not rank as an academic language. Some of my gay friends were sexually involved with ‘Ricans, but communicated with them in English.


GRAD SCHOOL DAYS

In September I started my classes, which were held in the old Warburg town house at 17 East 80th Street just off Fifth Avenue. Quite an address! Most of them were taught by wonderful German Jewish scholars, individuals we would now term refugees from the Holocaust. We did not use that last term then, but we knew what their fate would have been had they stayed behind. The faculty had been formed through a wise decision of the founder Professor Walter W. S. Cook, who saw a precious opportunity in recruiting these remarkable figures after Hitler had dismissed them from their posts. Basking in the results of Cook's far-sighted policy, the Institute of Fine Arts became the leading center for the study of art history in the United States.

At first I had trouble understanding my professors' accents, which differed according to the part of Germany they had come from. But once I got the hang of it, I fell into a kind of sacred trance, which repeated itself day after day. Each course generally began with a discussion of the state of scholarship. This was a new concept for me; I thought that if one was going to study, say, Renaissance architecture, one started right out with the buildings. Not at all: the buildings changed kaleidoscopically depending on who was interpreting them and according to what principles. Some term this variability perspectivism.

The star was the archaeologist Karl Lehmann, who ranged through classical antiquity from the Greek Archaic era to late Roman Art. In addition to his profound knowledge of ancient art and archaeology, Professor Lehmann seemed to have memorized the whole of Pauly-Wissowa’s Realenzyklopädie, the ultimate source for classical studies - all in the German language of course. To meet him on the street Lehmann seemed a small, almost insignificant man. Yet once the lights went out (as was customary in such lectures) the contents of his marvelous brain unfolded almost magically, or so it seemed to me. The lectures were scheduled for a length of two hours, from eight to ten in the evening, but no one stirred if Lehmann went on, sometimes for an hour longer.

At one point, fairly soon into the series of lectures, I detected a minor error concerning Archaic Greek sculpture. During the break I had the temerity to mention it to the great man. He struck his brow and said “Ach, my boy, you are right!” Lehmann commenced the second part of the lecture by generously acknowledging the point that I raised, admonishing us always to bring mistakes to his attention. Imperious as he was, he was also an honorable man.

I diligently took notes, and was at the library when it opened, staying to close it at night. Many of the recommended readings were naturally in German,  with which I struggled (having had only a semester of that language at UCLA). To keep up, I began private German lessons with Edith Weinberger, the spouse of one of the faculty members. With her long cigarette holder and dated clothing, she seemed something out of a Kurt Weill musical. But she was immensely simpatica. On one occasion, noting that I was thin and pale, she offered to lend me money. I was greatly touched, because I knew that she and her husband did not have very much themselves.


THE GAY SIDE

With all this studying, I found a little time for pursuing the gay life. I proceeded very carefully, as I knew that establishing myself in academia meant adhering to closet rules as much as possible. This cautious policy paid dividends, for in my second year of graduate study at IFA I was invited to live in the building as the sole resident student; my tiny room was rent free. Before taking up this post I had heard a story, possibly a legend, about a predecessor who became a noted academic, who held a gay orgy in the IFA building. At this event, apparently in 1943, the police came. Walter Cook, the director visited the hapless grad student, saying that he would spring him from jail if he agreed to marry. Cook had already picked out a young woman, another student, who was amenable to the arrangement.

Two or three times I had tricks up to my room, but I was very careful. Because of my straightened finances I could only visit the gay bars occasionally. With their wide- open windows and mafia-dominated atmosphere, these bars were different from the ones I had known in California. Still I met a few older men who invited me to their apartments, giving me an idea of the way that ordinary New Yorkers lived. I also became infatuated with two fellow students. One was already “taken,” as he was being supported in his studies by an older benefactor with whom he lived. I had a brief affair with the other guy, but he turned out to be a hopeless neurotic.


A SPECIAL VISIT AND A NEW FRIEND

I now digress to another interest, not connected to art history. During my high school years I had started reading the works of Ezra Pound, attracted by his outlaw status. As a resident of Italy during the interwar years, Pound had become a fervent admirer of Benito Mussolini. During World War II he agreed to broadcast for the Axis on Radio Rome. The US authorities monitored and transcribed the broadcasts, so that after Pound was apprehended towards the end of the war he was brought back to America under indictment for treason. This was a capital offense, but Pound cheated death by being judged insane. He was then confined to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C.

I was in New York City, an easy, cheap bus ride from the nation’s capital, so I wrote Pound and asked if I might visit him. He agreed, and I visited him twice on a weekend visit. St. Elizabeth’s turned out to be situated in pleasant grounds dotted with old trees--almost a country club. The interior was almost equally agreeable, and the poet held court in his own alcove. There were ten or twelve visitors, and we paid close attention to Pound’s every word, a somewhat challenging task, as he changed topics suddenly and without warning. Some of the other visitors were young students like myself, drawn to Pound because of his rebel reputation. Also in attendance were Pound’s English wife, Dorothy, who seemed quite bewildered by the scene, together with his artist mistress, who (it was alleged) was permitted to pay conjugal visits to the old man at the asylum from time to time.

One of Pound’s main disciples at the time was John Kasper (1929–1998), a far-right activist who took a militant stand against the racial integration fostered by the growing civil rights movement. Educated at Columbia University, Kasper corresponded with Pound as a student. After running a bookshop in Greenwich Village he moved to Washington, D.C., where he befriended Pound, setting up a shoestring company, known as Square Dollar Books, to publish some of the poet's works, as well as those of other writers he admired. Absorbing Pound's right-wing ideas, he formed the Seaboard White Citizens Council immediately after Brown v. Board of Education in order to oppose desegregation. Kasper came to national prominence because of his opposition to the integration of Clinton High School in Tennessee. After dodging the law on several occasions he ultimately served eighth months for conspiracy in 1957.

At the St. Elizabeth’s gathering, I heard crude expressions of anti-Semitism, but I kept my dissent to myself. For his part, Pound was freed in 1960 and returned to live in Italy.

I must have made a good impression on the poet - though not for my political views.  In all events, after I returned to New York he instructed several of his other younger admirers to look me up. One was a Chinese American, David Wang, who had organized a White Citizens Council in New York. When I asked how a non-Caucasian person could fulfill this role, he said that he was only acting as a place saver until some real white person came along to take his place in the organization. As far as I know none ever did, and I never learned of any other members.

The most consequential introduction was with Jack Stafford, a troubled young man who had dropped briefly out of Ohio State University to come and work in the city. I was attracted to him sexually, but nothing came of it, as Jack was in the closet and was soon to return to Ohio. Yet we kept in touch, and eventually he became a librarian, working at the main branch of the Queens Library in the city. After I returned from England in 1967, Jack Stafford became my best friend.

Not long after Stonewall in 1969, Jack joined gay liberation. He was one of the people who started the Gay Task Force at the American Library Association. He recruited me to the group, and I joined him in working on a bibliography on gay studies, commissioned by Barbara Gittings, who headed the effort. When Jack was murdered on the street in Queens in 1973, I was able to rescue the manuscript of the bibliography from his apartment. Before sending the original on to Barbara, I made a photocopy for my own use. In those days I little realized that this text, short and rough, was to be the seed of my later commitment to gay bibliography, and gay studies in general.


EUROPE AT LAST

I return now to 1957. One of my fellow IFA students, a young woman from Maine, invited me to go abroad that first summer, as an assistant in her parents’ business, which was to escort college students, mostly young women who were thought to need chaperoning, on a European tour. We went first to England, then to the Netherlands and Germany. The longest stint was in Italy, which I liked best. We concluded in Paris. I passed the whole summer in a state of giddy excitement, and I couldn’t wait to spend more time across the Atlantic.

A year or so later an opportunity presented itself. I had been doing some part-time work translating for a major New York publisher. McGraw-Hill had undertaken to produce the English-language version of a big new art encyclopedia, which was being organized in Rome. They were so impressed with my work - and with my seeming knowledge of Italian (partly simulated) -that the McGraw-Hillites invited me to move to Rome as their editorial representative. Those were the days when Italophilia was at its height, the era of the espresso bar, the Vespa, and Italian neo-realism in film, so I accepted with alacrity.

Memoirs: Chapter Six

Italy


The Rome office of the New York publishing firm (McGraw-Hill) was run by a lesbian couple, one partner  butch and dragonish, the other motherly and helpful. We never discussed our sexual orientations, as discretion was the rule in those days.

At all events, our small office was just one room nested in the larger enterprise known as the Istituto per la Collaborazione Culturale. This for-profit organization (owned by the Sansoni firm) was devoted to producing encyclopedias. The then-current one was a fifteen-volume Enciclopedia dell'Arte Universale, to be sold on a subscription basis. McGraw-Hill had undertaken to translate this work into English as the Encyclopedia of World Art, with a few supplementary articles and adaptations. When I arrived nothing had yet been published, so I was in on the ground floor. In the ensuing months and years there were many delays, owing to the complexity of the project and (for us) the fact that the Italian texts were often rhetorical and florid, to the point of vacuousness. The impoverished writers were paid by the word, and logorrhea was supreme.

I had been hired because I combined art historical knowledge with proficiency in Italian. Moreover, I suppose that being young and accustomed to living as a student, I was cheap, at least by American wage standards.

In reality I had never taken a course in Italian. I had had three years of high school Spanish, though, and had a certain flair for languages. As far as reading went, it was fairly easy to convert the Spanish knowledge to Italian, watching out for the usual hazard of false friends. My reading was almost all in art-historical texts, where a general knowledge of the subject matter helped a lot.

Yet speaking and understanding when I was spoken to were other matters entirely, A few days after I arrived, the election of a new pope was concluded. The Italian in the office gathered around a little portable radio as the results were announced. I could hardly catch anything. Someone told me that the new pontiff had chosen the name of John XXIII. I remarked indignantly that there had already been a John XXIII, because I had seen his tomb in Florence on my earlier trip. It turned out that this man was an anti-pope, and didn’t count by the Vatican’s reckoning.


LIFE IN THE ETERNAL CITY AND A BOYFRIEND

It was sink or swim, and daily communication with the Italians in the office helped. What really made me fluent, though, was my 19-year old boy friend--the first live-in lover I had had. He knew hardly any English, and not being very educated spoke colloquial Italian, without the embellishments and fancy vocabulary of my coworkers. After I made some progress in the language, people started saying; “How well you speak Italian.” This was a diplomatic untruth. I learned that I was truly speaking it well when no one took the trouble to comment: we just talked “a quattr’occhi” - four eyes, as the expression went.

Not long after I moved to Italy, my landlady and I decided to experiment with bleaching our hair. My locks had always been a kind of dirty blond, but with the bleach it became almost blindingly blond. I should have just gone with a few highlights, but I couldn't resist keeping the total blondness, quite a rarity in Italy. Of course the dark roots kept showing. To be fair to myself, this was probably my only excursion into personal vanity. For most of my life I have felt that, while good grooming is important, we need to stick which what nature has given us.

I got around Rome on my Vespa scooter.  I was particularly keen on seeing the archaeological sites and other monuments that had been prominent in my courses at NYU.  At first I experienced loneliness, as my Italian colleagues were reticent about inviting strangers into their homes.  While she was there, I palled around with an Ecuadorian girl.  There was no sex (I think she "had my number.")

There were of course same-sex contacts. For a while I was content to go with some of the hustlers I met on the Via Veneto. But there was a more significant attachment as well. I had met Enzo C. when he was a bell boy at the pensione, or boarding house, I lived in after leaving the landlady's premises. Then, after I had moved to my own apartment on a hill top in Trastevere, the 19-year old came to live with me (he had been fired from the pensione). Enzo adored Americans, and was what we now term “heteroflexible,” so we got on pretty well in bed. I tried, though without too much success, to curb my lust. He was gorgeous, though.

The whole affair lasted only about eight months. He got involved in a serious auto accident, and panicked out of fear of possible legal consequences. So he ran off to join the French Foreign Legion, and was lost to me. We corresponded for several years, and finally, in 1963, had an unsatisfactory reunion in Corsica, where he was stationed.  I don't know what became of him.


THE ITALIAN FASCINATION

While Enzo was with me, and after he left as well, I took incessant trips throughout the Italian peninsula. I would get up early on Saturday morning and take the train, spend the night at Assisi or Naples or wherever, and return on Sunday evening. Visits to northern Italy and Sicily required more time, but this could be managed during the holidays. My reason was primarily to see art historical sites, mainly churches and museums.

But there was something more. The American fascination with Italy was then at its height. In many ways the country, especially Rome where I lived, had replaced Paris as the place where everyone wanted to expatriate himself. Italian films were all the rage, and I went the the movies a lot. This was the period when Federico Fellini made La Dolce Vita, a 1960 film that captured a lot of what I remember in the Rome of those days. Generally speaking, Italian movies did not have subtitles - even the US ones were dubbed - so the experience did a lot to advance my fluency in colloquial Italian.

Above all, the country was cheap. Even ordinary restaurants were pretty good, and I could afford to eat out twice a day. Italian boys were often very sexy, and it didn’t hurt to give them a few dollars after the coupling. Sometimes, of course, the general poverty was overwhelming, as when I went to the flea market at Porta Portese and saw the stuff that people were forced to sell. Still, there was hope. As President Kennedy remarked, a rising tide lifts all boats. In Italy in those days the tide was rising, slowly to be sure, but it was rising.

My later experience in visiting developing countries points to a general rule. As a society begins to emerge from dire poverty (and remember that Italy was prostate after World War II), the people experience a sense of relief, almost euphoria at being able to have some economic security and to acquire a few creature comforts. Even though these benefits are spartan by later standards, the recipients are generally content and quite pleasant to be with. Later on, they come to take these advances for granted, and simply focus on getting more, This happened to Italy in the sixties with its dreadful political rancor, punctuated by many strikes. Even today, when the country is truly prosperous, the malaise continues.

Some foreigners in Italy were unable to break the spell, and stayed on after their jobs ended. I could tell that some of these expatriates were reduced to leading a hand-to-mouth existence, So when my employers in New York asked me to come back and work in the home office on Forty-Second Street in Manhattan I complied.

Memoirs: Chapter Seven

The Early Sixties in New York


Traveling by PanAm, that wonderful airline that no longer exists (except as a TV show), I stopped off in London for a week.  Among other things, I wanted to immerse myself in the illuminated medieval Bible in the British Museum that I had chosen as the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation. Then in late March it was on to New York City, where I went immediately to my new home, a large apartment on Riverside Drive in Manhattan that I was to share with two other young men.

Perhaps Rome had spoiled me, but the city seemed less welcoming than before. In fact as I sought to reacquaint myself with familiar haunts, New York came to seem downright grim. To be sure, I had been aware of the grittiness during my previous sojourn, but then it had simply underlined the authenticity of the place. In short it wasn’t so much that the city had declined, but that my personal situation had changed, and along with it my point of view.

I continued with McGraw-Hill's Encyclopedia of World Art, where I became Translation Editor. The problems seemed endless, often requiring me to work late without any extra pay. With little experience in such entanglements, I found office politics hard to navigate.

Outside the office I detected little interest in my recent stay abroad. I became something of an Italy bore.  Still, there were entertaining social occasions, and I picked up the basics of holding cocktail parties in the apartment.

To be sure, big challenges lay ahead for the city and the nation, but in 1960 these did not yet loom very large. To be sure, the Civil Rights movement was coming to the fore, with other social issues emerging as well, including a growing crime problem. Yet there was great optimism among the chattering classes because of the election of President John Kennedy in November. Not sharing the euphoria triggered by "Camelot," I had nonetheless voted for Kennedy because I did not want Nixon to win. The Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis underscored the fact that we lived in dangerous times.

One of my roommates was active in the reform wing of the local Democratic Party.  One evening he came home from a meeting and announced that they had adopted an ideal New York state ticket: one Italian, one Jew, one Puerto Rican, and one black.  I didn't remember that kind of ethnic politics from my days in California, and found the idea of such "balancing" divisive.  Little did I suspect that this was the way things were going to be in the near future.

At first I went often in the evenings to the Institute of Fine Arts, my academic locus on the East Side. Yet I found it hard to gin up my Ph. D. dissertation, for the work at McGraw-Hill was quite draining.


CULTURAL INTERESTS AND GAYDOM

I developed a new interest in plays. This was the heyday of the Living Theater, an avant-garde outfit run by Julian Beck and Judith Malina on Fourteenth Street. Two productions particularly impressed me: The Connection, about drug use, which was not yet very common; and The Brig, graphically exploring the rigors of a Marine prison. Other Off-Broadway theaters featured the work of Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet. The latter’s The Blacks captured the racial tensions that were beginning to gather force. In those days Off-Broadway seemed miles ahead of the flashy and expensive Broadway extravaganzas, which I rarely patronized.

I studiously consulted The Village Voice as a guide to the Bohemian pleasures on offer in the city. In those days the paper stayed away from gay topics. Disappointingly, the Counterculture, at least in its New York version, did not seem to interface much with the gay scene, which remained clandestine.

Of course I could hang out in the gay bars in the Village, an amenity (if that is the proper term) Rome lacked. However, the cops, who had long been on the take, began to harass these somewhat seedy establishments.  Ultimately the politicians closed them all, ostensibly to clean up the city for the World’s Fair, which opened in Queens in 1964.

On several occasions I went to meetings of the Mattachine Society of New York, which gathered in premises on West 40th Street. This group was a branch of the gay-rights group that had appeared in Los Angeles in 1951. I also had a habit of picking up copies of ONE, a monthly magazine “from the homosexual viewpoint” that was published in Los Angeles. Little did I realize at this point that gay activism and scholarship would ultimately change my life.

Oddly enough, I did not go back to Europe during my short summer vacations, preferring to visit California. I would go first to LA, to see my mother and old friends, and then generally swing back via the Bay Area. In Berkeley I enjoyed the hospitality of Chuck McC. and his wife Katherine, who were graduate students there. Chuck was studying philosophy, then in its high Analytic phase. Once we went at the University to attend a special lecture by the visiting Oxford philosopher H. H. Price, who specialized in perception. Even Chuck conceded that the banalities espoused by this luminary could easily be replicated by almost any perceptive adolescent. After I returned to the Gotham, I got hold of some volumes on analytic philosophy, books by J. L. Austin and Gilbert Ryle. I found the trend simplistic and overrated, but at that time I couldn’t get much farther in formulating my critique.

Many years later, after wandering in the seductive lotus land of Plato and the grimmer precincts of Aristotle - not to mention subjecting myself to the lengthy, only occasionally insightful disquisitions of Kant and Hegel, as well as the fairly predictable banalities of British empiricism - I concluded that the only book of philosophy any sane person needs is The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. An astute student and commentator, the Roman ruler summed up the entire harvest of ancient philosophy, making modern thought pretty much superfluous as well.  Is this view Philistine?  So be it.


PSYCHING OUT PSYCHOANALYSIS

I also confronted another current orthodoxy: Freudian psychoanalysis, then at the height of its prestige and influence. There was considerable social pressure to start seeing a shrink regularly.

One of my college friends, Bob G., had gone so far as actually to become a psychoanalyst. Towards the end of his training, Bob dropped by to see me at my office on 42nd Street. In our conversation I proffered various theoretical objections. Bob acknowledged these, but countered that one must concede that in fact it works. In other words, Freudian psychoanalysis was a kind of black box: the mechanism might be opaque, but the therapy was effective all the same. I glumly agreed.

Later, when I had settled in London, I learned that the British psychologist H. J. Eysenck had thoroughly discredited the black-box theory. In a massive empirical study he showed that mentally troubled individuals who sought the help of a psychiatrist did not get better more quickly than those who received no therapy at all. In fact there was some evidence that people in the benign-neglect group in fact recovered more quickly. Eysenck’s study, which engendered great anger in the psychiatric community, effectively disposed of the spurious claim that “we don’t know how it works, but it works.”

To return to my situation in New York, by my third year there, in 1963, I found my position at McGraw-Hill, the publisher, increasingly untenable. I didn’t get along with my new boss, an airhead, and it became evident that I was on the fast track to being discharged. I determined to take protective measures. I must quit before they could fire me.


A BIG CHANGE

A Fulbright Fellowship to England offered a solution. I chose that country as my base, specifically London, because the illuminated manuscript I had chosen for my dissertation was housed in the British Museum. I had been an Anglophile since my high school years, and two earlier trips to the British capital provided assurance that living there would prove congenial.

Once I learned that the application had been granted, in the early summer of 1963 I headed for Montreal where I took a boat for France. Still the preferred choice for budget travelers across the Atlantic, the ocean voyage, which took a week, allowed one gradually to build up anticipation. It is an experience denied most people nowadays, accustomed as they are to a quick jet flight.

Arriving at Cherbourg, I immediately went to Vienna, where I took a short summer course in illuminated manuscripts conducted by my New York adviser, Professor Harry Bober.  One weekend, the group went to Budapest, my first experience of a Communist country.  Once the course was done, I had a whole month left to travel about in Europe. I went first to Corsica, where my Italian boyfriend of Rome days was stationed in the French Foreign Legion. He had changed a good deal, and our reunion was not successful.

Then I traveled for the first time to Spain, still enveloped in the gloom of the Franco years. My high school Spanish came in handy - or would have if I could find someone to talk to for any extended period.  Then and later, I found the Spaniards a fairly reserved people.  As the summer drew to a close, it was off to London by way of France.