Three from the Seventies

By Leon Hampton

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669853077

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Copyright © 2022 by Leon Hampton.

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

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

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

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Cover illustration Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art

Rev. date: 11/09/2022

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CONTENTS

The Picture of Berthe Morisot

A Fools’ Pavane

McGruder’s Heaven

Well thanks for the Seventies, and for their being over and done with. Anyone thinking they remember them with fondness is misled or faking it.

They were years of sulfuric unrest, doubts of all toward all, and hope clipped not by clippers but by detergent. Each decade has its own travails, the seventies were mine. They didn’t inspire at the time but after some decades they instruct. There were of course moments of inspiration and illumination that now prevail beyond the muddles of conflict, social resentments sometimes misdirected, mistrust reaching deafening levels, and friends lost to suicide or war.

The seventies were a VW Bug with a hole in the floor; rip up the rubber padding, and through it you could see to the road below.

Years later I found notes in a crawl space; I offer them here as chronicle. In these three pieces are incrustations I hadn’t noticed earlier, and a self-awareness likewise long forgotten. They reappear as old friends. Friends’ friends are not necessarily friends, but here are these, anyway.

Yes, there was some recent editing — not to obscure the context, but to make it more visible by removing bends in paths long since paved over.

In the Seventies we read Flaubert, Rimbaud, Baudelaire (along of course with Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, and the now much forgotten Richard Brautigan). No wonder the Japanese loved France and vice versa. The world would be impoverished without both. Seeming echoes of Proust in these three pieces may be false trails, since I had read only Combray at the time. But the permanent versus the temporary, the shearing off of imposed patterns to life or thought, the absurd as canon — all French in nature — I acknowledge now as lifted, though I never noticed it at the time. These elements belong to all of us, only the anecdotes are mine.

Here is not a manifesto or dedication, just recognition of strands coming from elsewhere. The strands don’t weave the stories, but sometimes are embedded. Unavoidably. This is not erudition, just recognition and gratitude to others.

The stories are just stories. No meta-, signifié, subtext… Maybe only Henry James can talk convincingly about his own. The rest of us just tell them. In them, as Verlin Cassill said, can be found wisdom. If anywhere, I would add.

Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, permanence in moments: not as conceit but as the value, the meaning of living. If you’re alert enough to notice. No penalty if you aren’t, but rewards if you are.

A Word on Berthe from Years Later

Let me now override previous modesty and try to do the Henry James look-in-the-mirror thing. Hardly a Bildungsroman, Berthe lifts a veil on the sort of adolescent turmoil we remember in retrospect, but only from outside. It might have been called, The Sorrows of Young Steven.

No wonder Goethe’s troubled little narrative of 1774 provoked its rash of suicides in Europe over the decades, and that Napoleon kept it as his only book during his — ahem — excursion to Egypt and Syria,1798-1801. Goethe’s greatness was to carry into adulthood some precise memories of adolescent energies. Never mind Eros, that’s the easy part. And to call it rebellion from is a coward’s shorthand. The burning in the adolescent’s soul has not yet been nailed down or even named; it exists only in anecdotes as far as I can tell, and has no fancy Greek moniker to tag it. Something about the energy — not yet tamed by "education’ — drives human aspirations both to advancement and ruin. They say physicists and mathematicians have their real ideas only before age 20, then lose their edginess and brilliance after.

Writing Berthe was pretty easy back then, arduous to edit years later.

Note the gloom within, well, how could you not. Remember from the seventies the limits which seemed contrived at the time. Life was poised to bestow on us what the Enlightenment called happiness, but instead did the opposite. We aspired, we despaired, we knew all was wide open, but something was off. Society was (nothing new there) broken and in evolution, the drifting described at every fin de siècle since writing was invented. The unknown scared everyone and still does, but especially adolescents who had any awareness. We knew what we didn’t want and didn’t know what we did. But that’s the tiresome refrain of generations each seeking to be more unique than the others. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny endlessly, each of us reenacting the fish struggling onto the beach.

Classicism, Romanticism, bwah. Both mark fearsome power within and make for ruinous dramas. Classicism’s aesthetic straight jacket intensifies, does not limit, the warring ... (feelings? tendencies? drives? ambition? narcissism? blockage? embers? unbridled spirit? soul? energies?) ... whatever you call them. Go find a word for it, but don’t seek to harness it, you’ll never make it work.

Not that Berthe was all that skillful in evoking the restless adolescent’s soul, let’s just say it drew upon it. Salinger and Gide would have called it honesty, but it goes beyond that. Dalliance of the privileged may seem self-indulgent from the outside, but from the viewpoint of the characters, they can be hard as Phèdre herself.

And now to clear the palate, a tale mainly of energy and despair mixed as before, maybe less ponderous. Remember, this was the case of Richard Brautigan, who best captured the Seventies. Never heard of him? Go and correct that.

In the preceding and following, clearly a French influence. Radiguet, Alain-Fournier, Rimbaud, and later in this volume I leave only the bare bones in Pavane, deleting redundancies and also a few of the false cues tossed into the original.

Here can be found the Three Unities, but that would be for another discussion.

The Picture of

Berthe Morisot

I

In autumn of my second year, I took bike trips to the country. Sometimes I left early in the day. On those mornings I sensed the cooler air around me, imagining waking up to church bells in a foreign country. I pedaled as far as the train tracks. Beyond, an orphanage stood like a factory of asymmetry on a hill that was the only elevation in the area.

Sometimes going in the opposite direction, I got as far as the cemetery. I would leave the bike somewhere along the path to that silent city, examining its lanes and alcoves on foot. Wind coming off the corn field would slap against my legs.

When it rained on weekday mornings, I made my way through glossy streets to my early classes. Rainy mornings meant a thick day throughout. The only fix was to sleep through whole parts of the afternoon.

One such morning it cleared a little; after the noon organ recital I walked around campus. Wind and clouds brewed up underminings. I turned away from the library; I knew I wouldn’t be able to work there that day. Heading for the music building, I remember times of the year before when there’d been music to lift me out of complacency.

The conservatory was quiet that afternoon; the weather brought out somberness from inside the building. Flashes of sunlight played against a wall where, on a spring day the year before, young leaves had reflected from the trees above as I’d studied on the College green.

Chords of a piano sonata broke the quiet, from the small amphitheater in the building. I put aside my books and jacket and found a stretch of wall to lean against as I listened. Through the latticed door to the hall I could see the pianist alone inside. An echo hung on the piano sound like age. The notes dropped into a great distance in the chilly hall.

A student sat balanced at the instrument like a horseman. Frail body, magnified hands — occupational deformity - linked him to the piano.

I listened from the back of the room, the street urchin taking in whatever he can from the outside.

I was curious who the player was but left in the middle of the piece. At the College, you could see, or avoid, anyone you wanted.

I began dropping in the music building during the following weeks — not so much to hear the same performer, as to see about recapturing elements that had intersected that rainy morning before. I followed announcements and reviews, sat in on recitals, then noticed there was to be an open rehearsal of the Jupiter symphony. When I went to hear it, I didn’t know the conductor would be the pianist I’d heard before, playing alone in the amphitheater.

On the evening of the rehearsal, the student held himself in the background while musicians circulated and caught up on the business of the week. At a random moment he tapped the baton and they went to work. He hoisted his pants on a boney frame, then gave the downbeat.

Duhm, he stopped to correct a rhythm, cutting in before the momentum of the phrase had stopped, Dadayadayadaya duhm. They started again, playing the phrase this time cleared.

It wasn’t the perfect Jupiter; at the end of the rehearsal the young conductor’s face showed the kind of discontent I learned to know in coming months. As I passed him on the way out he nodded to me, as if recognizing me or mistaking me for someone else he knew.

Because there were fewer people at the College than at a university or city, the landscape of familiar faces was greater. Meeting the known ones meant shifts in temperament and stance. One would have a nickname from a late-night study wake; another was politically earnest, calling for antennae and commitment on the part of everybody. A few were unknown, sitting across library tables from one another and telling about themselves.

The musician and I became familiar faces to each other. I read in the afternoons, then in the evenings wandered like a Goliard through abandoned streets. When I went to see films at the town’s only theater, I would go to the second showing, looking at the faces of the people on their way out to find out if the movie was worth seeing.

After dinner I went to crowded places; on cool nights I would look through a window into room filled with laughing folk dancers. Other times I went to the only bar in town, viewing conversations through a beer mug. Sometimes classmates joined in; we would take up the issue of The Sophomore’s Place in the World. The musician showed up a couple of times, though he stayed out of the others’ reflections on the topic.

Saturday afternoons were different. After visits to the library, my head would swim and legs sweetly ache after long hours. The already cooling air would snap, and fast dusk wrap everything in the dissipating heat.

Late October I cooked potatoes and corn over the grill back of the dorm, even when there might always be a light snowfall. In cleared patches on the ground, I would maneuver gusts of smoke at my Vulcan’s anvil.

I saw the musician in the area, invited him to the grill for corn and potatoes, and got his name: Steven. Turned out he lived a floor below me, in the same dorm building. I stopped at his room a couple of Saturdays later, after early dinner. We found that my bicycle rides in the country roughly matched his to the stadium at night to see the stars. I tried to be the good listener in his room: he played excerpts of orchestral pieces for me at the altar of his stereo, applying an anti-static cloth to each record as a sacrament. During rests in the music, he would say why a certain passage was well or badly executed, or how he would have done it differently.

A few Saturdays in a row, I made half-hour calls on Steven. For him, my visits were just the hiatus before the next plunge into work. Some meetings we planned in advance, others were accidental, in the library or the dorm lounge. I began avoiding the library stacks, those catacombs. I spent more time in the main reading room — a bustling acropolis by comparison — where people found one another and whispered through an evening or afternoon.

If a few days went by without a chance encounter with Steven, I’d make a point of visiting him a few minutes before dinner. We would listen to records and talk, and he would damn for me musical hypocrisy and incompetence.

In November Steven began traveling into Marfield to see Louise, while I discovered Berthe.