The Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties

ОТЧЕТ ПО ПЕРЕВОДЧЕСКОЙ ПРАКТИКЕ

Выполнила: Чернявская М. В.,

Модуль 4, группа 09.3

Проверила: Ковалевская Г. М.,

старший преподаватель

Краснодар, 2013

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Essay..........................................................................................................................3

II. English text..............................................................................................................5

III. Russian Translation............................................................................................40

IV. Linguistic Analysis of the Text...........................................................................82

V. Bibliography........................................................................................................109

VI. Glossary..............................................................................................................112

СОДЕРЖАНИЕ

I. Эссе............................................................................................................................3

II. Английский текст.................................................................................................5

III. Русский перевод................................................................................................40

IV. Лингвистический анализ текста....................................................................82

V. Библиография....................................................................................................109

VI. Глоссарий..........................................................................................................112

I. Essay

For my graduation paper I’ve chosen some chapters from the book “Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties” (2007) written by American writer Robert Stone. This novel is Stone's recent memoir discussing his experiences in the 1960s "counterculture". It demonstrates Stone's knowledge and insight into a turbulent decade. The autobiographical work begins with his days in the Navy and ends with his days as a correspondent in Vietnam. The work features Stone's insights on Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac from his time spent traveling with them. Stone offers a candid look at 1960s drug culture including the use of marijuana, LSD, heroin, and peyote. The tale of Kesey’s rise and fall is one of the memoir’s most touching story lines. Stone writes about psychedelic culture, multicolored bus “FURTHUR”, Merry Pranksters and their travels across America.

The main reason why I decided to choose this book for translating is that it provides those who learn American literature and American culture with an interesting and important material. I am sure that it will be very useful for me in future because foreign literature is the area of my specialization. The main aim of this work is to prove my skills as a translator in the sphere of philological education.

The main body of my graduation paper consists of the English text and its Russian version. While translating the novel I paid attention to linguistic features of the original text. It is saturated by geographical and proper names, names of different companies and places, movies and books. The memoir contains a number of literary, cinematographic and journalistic terms. I also came across some interesting examples of false friends of translator, compound words, contextual synonyms, polysemy, borrowings and phrasal verbs.

To achieve the complete correspondence of the translation to the norms of the Russian literary language I had to use the following translation techniques: lexica-semantic modifications and contextual replacements such as additions and omissions, generalizations and specifications, antonymous translation, transpositions and rethinking. Of particular interest in the text are the emphatic structures. The examples are presented in the linguistic analysis of the text.

One of the main characteristics of the original text is the abundance of allusions, metaphors and words typical for the era of 60s. Nevertheless I faced some stylistic problems presenting this material in Russian language. The main difficulty for me was to find Russian analogues for translating idioms and some examples of slanguage. I had to read a lot of additional information to figure out allusions to different songs and quotations and to translate the plenty of titles of novels, plays, movies and the names of places. There was a great deal of overcrowded sentences so I had to divide such sentences into 2 or 3 not to violate the style of the original text.

Nowadays a lot of companies prefer hiring specialists with additional qualifications such as knowledge of foreign languages, computing literacy, etc. A growing number of companies are no longer satisfied with specialists who have no good command of foreign languages because a lot of letters, documents and correspondence is written in English. It is impossible to work in the international company without any skills in translating specific texts.

In conclusion I’d like to say that while translating this memoir I acquired a wide experience of a professional translator that will be of value throughout my future career. It has also let me understand the strengths and weaknesses of my English. But it is worth bearing in mind that mastering of professional English can also give me self-confidence. I believe the approach implying a detailed analysis of translating techniques is an efficient method for acquiring a profound mastery of good professional English. I am sure that my translating skills will help me in my study and job. I am studying in magistracy of Philological Faculty at the Department of Foreign Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies so my skills let me read original texts and analyze them.

Finally I’d like to stress the importance of the translated information, because it provides me with valuable knowledge about realities of American life and culture of 60s.

II. English text

The Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties

La Honda was a strange place, a wide spot on the road that de­scended the western slope of the Santa Cruz Mountains toward the artichoke fields along the coast. Mainly in the redwood forest, it had the quality of a raw northwestern logging town transported to suburban San Francisco. In spirit it was a world away from the woodsy gentility of the peninsula towns nearby. Its winters were like Seat­tle’s and its summers pretty much the same.

Kesey and his wife, Faye, had moved there in 1963, after their house on Perry Lane, in Menlo Park, was torn down by developers. Perry Lane was one of the small leafy streets that meandered around the Stanford campus then, lined with inexpensive bungalows and in­habited by junior faculty and graduate students. (The Keseys had lived there while Ken did his graduate work at the university and af­terward.) The area had a bohemian tradition going back to the time of the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen, who lived there at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Kesey, as master of the revels sixty years later, did a great deal to advance that tradition. There were stoned poetry readings, also lion hunts on the midnight dark golf course where chanting lion hunters danced to bogus veldt rhythms pounded out on their kitchenware. Drugs played a part, including the then legal LSD and other substances in experimental use at the VA hospital in Menlo Park, where Ken had worked. The night before the houses on the lane were to be demolished, the residents threw a demented block party at which they trashed one another’s houses with sledgeham­mers and axes in weird psychedelic light. Terrified townies watched from the shadows.

I first met Kesey at one of his world-historical tableaux, a reenact­ment of the battle of Lake Peipus with broom lances and saucepan helmets. (The Keseys’ kitchenware often took a beating in those days, though I can’t say I remember eating much on Perry Lane.) I attended in the person of a Teutonic knight. Ken, formerly a student at the writing workshop, represented Alexander Nevsky.

When the Keseys moved to La Honda, it became necessary to drive about fifteen miles up the hill to see them. Somehow the sun- starved, fern- and moss-covered quality of their new place affected the mood of the partying. There was the main house, where Ken and Faye lived with their three children, Shannon, Zane, and Jed, and several outbuildings, including the studio cabin where Kesey worked. There were also several acres of dark redwood, which Kesey and his friends transformed little by little, placing sculptures and stringing batteries of colored lights. Speakers broadcast Roland Kirk, Ravi Shankar, and the late Beethoven quartets. The house in the redwoods increasingly became a kind of auxiliary resi­dence and clubhouse cookout—a semipermanent encampment of people passing through, sleeping off the previous night’s party, hop­ing for more of whatever there had been or might be. It was a halfway house on the edge of possibility, or so it appeared at the time. Between novels, Ken had forged a cadre in search of itself, the core of which—in addition to Ken Babbs, who had just returned from Vietnam, where he had flown a helicopter as one of the few thousand uniformed Americans there—consisted at first of people who had lived on or near Perry Lane. Many of them had some con­nection with Stanford. Others were friends from Ken’s youth in Ore­gon. Old beatniks, such as Neal Cassady, the model for Jack Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty in On the Road, came around. Some of the locals, less used to deconstructed living than the academic sophisti­cates in the valley below, saw and heard things that troubled them. This would cause many problems later on.

As Wordsworth wrote, it was good to be alive and to be young was even better. More than the inhabitants of any other decade be­fore us, we believed ourselves in a time of our own making. The dim winter day in 1963 when I first drove up to the La Honda house, truant from my attempts at writing a novel, I knew that the future lay before us and I was certain that we owned it. When Kesey came out, we sat on the little bridge over the creek in the last of the light and smoked what was left of the day’s clean weed. Ken said some­thing runic about books never being finished and tales remaining for­ever untold, and I realized that he was trying to tell me that he had now finished Sometimes a Great Notion. Christ, I thought, there is no competing with this guy.

In 1962, he had published One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a liber­tarian fable to suit the changing times. It had been a best-seller on publication, and has never been out of print. The book had also been adapted for a Broadway stage production starring Kirk Doug­las, who then proposed to do it as a movie. Ken and Faye had gone to the opening night, in black tie and gown. Now, a few months later, he had another thicket of epic novel clutched in his mitt, and for all I knew there’d be another one after that.

He really seemed capable of making anything happen. It was be­yond writing—although to me writing was just about all there was. We sat and smoked, and Possibility came down on us.

Kesey was, more than anyone I knew, in the grip of all that the sixties seemed to promise. Born in 1935 in a town called La Junta, Colorado, on the road west from the dust bowl, he had grown up in Oregon, where his father became a successful dairyman. At school, Kesey was a wrestling champion, and champion was still the word for him; it was impossible for his friends to imagine him losing, at wrestling or anything else. Leaving the dairy business to his brother Chuck, Kesey had become an academic champion as well, a Woodrow Wilson graduate fellow at Stanford.

Ken’s endorsement, at the age of twenty-six, by Malcolm Cowley, who oversaw his publication at Viking Press, seemed to connect him to a line of “heavyweight” novelists, the hitters, as Norman Mailer put it, of “long balls,” the wearers of mantles that by then seemed ready to be passed along to the next heroic generation. If American literature ever had a favorite son, distilled from the native grain, it was Kesey. In a way, he personally embodied the winning side in every historical struggle that had served to create the colossus that was nineteen sixties America: An Anglo-Saxon Protestant Western American White Male, an Olympic-caliber athlete with an ad­vanced academic degree, he had inherited the progressive empower­ment of centuries.

Some years before Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken had written an unpublished Nathanael West-like Hollywood story based on Kesey’s unsuccess­ful attempt to break into the picture business as an actor. All his life, Ken had a certain fascination with Hollywood, as any American fab­ulist might. He saw it in semimythological terms—as almost an au­tonomous natural phenomenon rather than as a billion-dollar industry. (This touch of naive fascination embittered his later con­flicts over the adaptation of his novels into films.) However, it was as a rising novelist and not an actor or screenwriter that he faced the spring of 1963. There was no question of his limitless energy. But in the long run, some people thought, the practice of novel writing would prove to be too sedentary an occupation for so quick an athlete—lonely, and incorporating long silent periods between strokes. Most writers who were not Hemingway spent more time staying awake in quiet rooms than shooting lions in Arusha.

Kesey was listening for some inner voice to tell him more pre­cisely what role history and fortune were offering him. Like his old teacher Wallace Stegner, like his friend Larry McMurtry, he had the western artist’s respect for legend. He felt his own power and he knew that others did, too. Certainly his work cast its spell. But, be­yond the world of words, he possessed the thing itself, in its ancient mysterious sense. “His charisma was transactional,” Vic Lovell, the psychologist to whom Kesey dedicated Cuckoo’s Nest, said to me when we spoke after Ken’s death. He meant that Kesey’s extraordi­nary energy did not exist in isolation—it acted on and changed those who experienced it. His ability to offer other people a variety of satisfactions ranging from fun to transcendence was not especially verbal, which is why it remained independent of Kesey’s fiction, and it was ineffable, impossible to describe exactly or to encapsulate in a quotation. Fitzgerald endowed Jay Gatsby with a similar charisma—enigmatic and elusive, exciting the dreams, envy, and frustration of those who were drawn to him. Charisma is a gift of the gods, the Greeks believed, but, like all divine gifts, it has its cost. Kesey once composed an insightful bit of doggerel about his own promises to the seekers around him. “Of offering more than what I can deliver,” it went, “I have a bad habit, it is true. But I have to of­fer more than what I can deliver to be able to deliver what I do.” Kesey felt that his world was his own creature and, at the same time, paradoxically, inevitably, that he was an outsider in it, in dan­ger of being cheated of his own achievement. His forebears had feared and hated the railroads and the eastern banks. In their place Kesey saw New York, the academic establishment, Hollywood. When he was growing up in Oregon, I imagine, all power must have seemed to come from somewhere else. Big paper companies and unions, the FBI and the local sheriff’s department—he distrusted them all.

While in New York to see the Broadway adaptation of Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey had caught a glimpse of the preparations for the 1964 world’s fair. It didn’t take him long to dream up the idea of riding a bus to the fair, arriving sometime before the scheduled publication date for Sometimes a Great Notion. Somehow, he and his friends the sports car driver George Walker and the photographer Mike Hagen managed to buy a 1939 International Harvester school bus and refashion it into a kind of disarmed personnel carrier, with welded compart­ments inside and an observation platform that looked like a U-boat’s conning tower on top.It was wired to play and record tapes, capable of belching forth a cacophony of psychic disconnects and registering the reactions at the same time. There were movie cameras every­where. Everyone had a hand in the painting of the bus, principally the San Francisco artist Roy Sebern. A sign above the windshield, where the destination would normally be announced, proclaimed, FURTHUR.

By then there were a number of footloose wanderers loitering around Kesey’s spread in La Honda, ready to ride as soon as the paint was dry—just waiting, really, for Kesey to tell them what to do next. It was said later that one was either on the bus or off the bus— no vain remark, mind you, but an insight of staggering profundity. It meant, perhaps, that some who were physically on the bus were not actually on the bus in spirit. It meant that millions were off the bus, but the bus was coming for them. If you were willing to enter­tain Kerouac’s notion that George Shearing was God, that bus was coming for you.

***

Like everything that was essential to the sixties, the Kesey cross-country trip has been mythologized. If you can remember it, the old saw goes, you weren’t there. But the ride in Ken’s multicolored International Harvester school bus was a journey of such holiness that being there was instantly beside the point. From the moment the first de­mented teenager waved a naked farewell as Neal Cassady threw the clutch, everything entered the numinous.

Who actually rode the bus, who rode it all the way to the world’s fair and all the way back, has become a matter of con­jecture. The number has expanded like the opening-night audience for Le Sacre du printemps, a memorial multiplication in which a the­ater seating eight hundred has come, over time, to accommodate several thousand eyewitnesses.

Who was actually on the bus? I, who waited, with the wine-stained manuscript of my first novel, for the rendezvous in New York, have a count. Tom Wolfe, who did not see the bus back then at all but is extremely accurate with facts, has a similar one. Cassady drove—the world’s greatest driver, who could roll a joint while backing a 1937 Packard onto the lip of the Grand Canyon. Kesey went, of course. And Ken Babbs, fresh from the Nam, full of radio nomenclature and with a command voice that put cops to flight. Jane Burton, a pregnant young philosophy professor who declined no challenges. Also Page Browning, a Hell’s Angel candidate. George Walker. Sandy Lehman-Haupt, whose electronic genius was respon­sible for the sound system. There was Mike Hagen, who shot most of the expedition’s film footage. A former infantry officer, Ron Bevirt, whom everybody called Hassler, a clean-cut guy from Missouri, took photographs. There were two relatives of Kesey’s—his brother Chuck and his cousin Dale—and Ken Babbs’s brother John. Kesey’s lawyer’s brother-in-law Steve Lambrecht was along as well. And the beautiful Paula Sundsten, aka Gretchen Fetchin, Swamp Queen.

To Ken, to America in 1964, world’s fairs were still a hot number. As for polychrome buses, one loses perspective: the Day-Glo vehicle full of hipsters is now such a spectral archetype of the American road. I’m not sure what it looked like then. With Cassady, the bus perfected an uncanny reverse homage to On the Road, traveling east over Eisenhower’s interstates. Like On the Road, the bus trip exalted velocity. Similarly, it scorned limits: this land was your land, this land was my land—the bus could turn up any­where. If the roadside grub was not as tasty as it had been in Kerouac’s day, at least the grades were better.

Ken had an instinctive distaste for the metropolis and its preten­sions. He was not the only out-of-town writer who thought it a shame that so many publishers were based in New York, and he looked forward to a time when the book business would regionally diversify, supposedly bringing our literature closer to its roots in American soil. But the raising of a world’s fair in the seething city was to Kesey both a breath of assurance and a challenge. Fairs and carnivals, exhibitional wonders of all sorts, were his very meat. He wondered whether the big town would not trip over its own grandiose chic when faced with such a homespun concept. Millions were supposed to be coming, a horde of visitors foreign and domes­tic, all expecting the moon.

The bus set off, sometime in June. Nineteen sixty-four was an election year. To baffle the rubes along their route, Ken and Cassady had painted a motto over the psychedelia on the side of the bus—“A Vote for Barry Is a Vote for Fun”—hoping to pass for psychotic Re­publicans hyping Goldwater. The country cops of the highways and byways, however, took them for Gypsies and waved them through one town after another. Presumably, the vaguely troubled America that was subjected to this drive-by repressed its passing image as meaningless, a hallucination. Sometime around then someone of­fered a lame joke in the tradition of Major Hoople, something about “merry pranksters.” (Major Hoople—a droll comic-strip character at the time, the idler husband of a boardinghouse proprietress—was one of Cassady’s patron gods.) The witless remark was carried too far, along with everything else, and for forty years thereafter people checked for the clownish fringe at our cuffs or imagined us with red rubber noses.

Eventually, the bus pulled up in front of the apartment building on West Ninety-seventh Street, in New York, where Janice and I were living with our two children. Suddenly, the place was filled with people painted all colors. The bus waited outside, unguarded, broadcasting Ray Charles, attracting hostile attention with its de­mented Goldwater slogan. We and our kids took our places on top of the bus, ducking trees on our way through Central Park.Down­town, a well-fed button man came out of Vincent’s Clam House to study the bus and the tootling oddballs on its roof. He paused thoughtfully for a moment and finally said, “Get offa there!” That seemed to be the general sentiment. Other citizens offered the finger and limp-wristed “Heil Hitler”s.

There was the after-bus party where Kerouac, out of rage at health and youth and mindlessness—but mainly out of jealousy at Kesey for hijacking his beloved sidekick, Cassady—despised us, and wouldn’t speak to Cassady, who, with the trip behind him, looked about seventy years old. I asked Kerouac for a cigarette and was refused. If I hadn’t seen him around in the past I would have thought this Kerouac was an imposter too—I couldn’t believe how miserable he was, how much he hated all the people who were in awe of him. You should buy your own smokes, said drunk, angry Kerouac. He was still dramatically handsome then; the next time I saw him he would be a red-faced baby, sick and swollen. He was a published, admired writer, I thought. How can he be so unhappy? But we, the people he called “surfers,” were happy. We left the party and drove to a bac­chanal and snooze in Millbrook, New York, where psychedelics had replaced tournament polo as a ride on the edge.

The bus riders visited the world’s fair in a spirit of decent out-of-­town respect for the power and glory of plutocracy. They filmed everything in sight and recorded everything in earshot. Like most young Americans in 1964, they were committed to the idea of a world’s fair as groovy, which in retrospect can only be called sweet. Sweet but just the least bit defiant. Also not a little ripped, since driver and passengers had consumed mind-altering drugs in a quan­tity and variety unrivaled until the prison pharmacy at the New Mexico state penitentiary fell to rioting cons.

And, of course, the fair was a mistake for everyone. Now we know that world’s fairs are always bad news. In 1964 the fair produced nothing but sinister urban legends in unsettling num­bers, grisly stories of abduction, murder, and cover-ups. Children were said to have disappeared. Body parts were allegedly concealed in the sleek aluminum spheres. It was the hottest summer in many years. Some of the passengers were so long at the fair that they went home without their souls. Jane, the philosophy professor, insists to this day that she made it to the fair only because she had lost her purse on the first day of the trip. Back in California, she became a mother and went to law school. Kesey and Cassady went home too. Fame awaited them, along with the same fascinated loathing that Kerouac and Ginsberg had endured. We couldn’t imagine it at the time, but we were on the losing side of the culture war.

The sorry spectacle in Flushing Meadows in the summer of 1964 might be remembered as the last world’s fair. There were other, later, hyped-up gatherings of the sort, but 1964 was the one that some­how let the air out, the last attempt to generate enough fatuous fu­turistic optimism to float such a promotion. The parched sweating queues, the sinister rumors and paranoia, the bad news from South­east Asia and America’s decaying cities, all seemed to underline in irony a message that “the world,” as an entity, had little incentive for self-celebration.

In retrospect, it seems well that Janice and I chose that summer to get ourselves to Paris. Paris was where we would have gone a few years before, had we possessed the wherewithal. We had chosen New Orleans then, settling for a town that offered the advantage of being a Greyhound bus destination. By the summer of 1964 we had saved and borrowed the price of some transatlantic tickets. In July of ’64, along with several thousand other American tourists, we arrived at the Gare du Nord.

Our college friend Michael Horowitz was beginning his career as a dealer in rare books and had a job at Paris’s premier English-language bookstore, known in those days as Le Mistral. Its propri­etor, George Whitman, was of that generation of Americans who had settled in Paris right after the Second World War, a group that included the founders of the Paris Review George Plimpton and Blair Fuller, and writers such as James Jones, William Styron, and James Baldwin.

As some of us do, Michael fell heir to a destiny so incredibly un­likely that his future condition seemed to embody just about every element in American life that he then earnestly repudiated. In those days, however, he shuttled around Europe, buying first editions for the shop and sometimes literally minding the store when George was otherwise occupied.

Those of us who have the uneasy pleasure of knowing George Whitman are familiar with his mercurial disposition and his gen­erosity. When we arrived in Paris, through Michael, we were able to take up the offer that George sometimes extended to impecunious writers in the city, the use of a bed on the shop’s upper floor after its midnight closing time. The weeks we spent there were not many but they served as our introduction to what remained of the city people like us had so long daydreamed about. They also provided our slim but heartfelt Paris that should sweeten the youthful remembrances of any American writer.

In the summer of 1964, opposing Algerian factions were still ac­tively planting bombs on their fellow countrymen. Charles de Gaulle had instituted the Fifth Republic, ruling in the name of or­der, and the gendarmes, their capes weighted with coshes like the flippers of homicidal penguins, turned out regularly to brawl with the students who turned out regularly to protest whatever you had got.One day an American poet friend turned up at the store shaken. He had just rescued his small daughter from in front of a police charge outside the Luxembourg Garden, where she had been licking an ice-cream cone, oblivious of the oncoming juggernaut of law en­forcement bearing down on her like the Wrath of God Express.

It seems hard to believe that all this was something over forty years ago, as I write. If we could have looked back forty years then we would have seen the summer of 1924, Ernest and Hadley Hem­ingway visiting Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas on the rue de Fleurus, James Joyce dining at Lipp’s. But the Paris I remember from 1964 seems recognizably balanced between the way points, the decorous yet rakish , expensive city of Diane Johnson’s marital narratives.

About the time of our first stay George Whitman had changed the name of his establishment from Le Mistral to Shakespeare and Company. Quite appropriately he was assuming the imprint of Sylvia Beach’s bookshop on the rue de Seine which had played so im­portant a role in the expatriate scene of the nineteen twenties. As Shakespeare and Company, Whitman’s store has carried on Beach’s traditions, providing a hangout, sometime hostel, and lending li­brary for Anglophone writers and students of literature in English. For nearly fifty years Whitman’s Shakespeare and Company has been a daily destination for lonely English speakers making a home for themselves.

Today the neighborhood behind the bookstore is quite gentrified and spiffy. In 1964 it was a raw, heavily immigrant part of town where Arab music could be heard far into the night in narrow courts. The rue de la Huchette was then as now a nighttime draw for traveling youth and the odd juvenile delinquent, but the fast-food and pizza joints were yet to come. The appearance and feel of the streets back from the river was still a touch medieval, the rooftops inclining to meet over cobblestone streets in a manner to intimidate and beguile the imagination. The blocks of the student quarter and the gray buildings of the Sorbonne stretched inland toward the Pan­theon and the place Maubert. All through this part of Paris were dozens of cut-rate hotels, some of them charging as little as two dol­lars a night, all of them packed during the summer with North Americans equipped with Arthur Frommer’s travel books that pur­ported to guide the purchaser through his days in Paris at the rate of five dollars. Some of these places were truly squalid and literally ver­minous but others were clean and cheerful. The nice ones seemed al­ways to employ middle-aged ladies in blue aprons who could be seen each morning, their hefty frames filling the narrow stairwells, trudging up the stairs one step at a time, maneuvering trays full of fresh croissants and pots of coffee past the tight turns. That part of town had some of Paris’s most fashionable restaurants but there were also bistros where the steak frites cost a fraction of what the same menu might demand in New York. Good wine delivered to the door was cheap enough to lure the abstemious and ruin the indulgent. This I suppose would also have been the Paris of Godard’s Breathless, whose ultra-American ingenue-temptress, played by Jean Seberg, lived at the Hotel Californie and sold Herald Tribunes on the street. It was also a quarter that for the denizens of Shakespeare and Com­pany was presided over by the genius of Samuel Beckett, who we knew lived not far away in Montparnasse. One evening Michael and I set out to actually find the great man. What we wanted from his presence was unclear to us even at the time. Maybe we thought he would treat us to a Pernod and a line-by-line explication of Molloy. We had heard that Beckett frequented a certain cafe and it seemed that this might be the place to run him down. I think we further nourished a picture of the divine Beckett surrounded by his charac­ters, drinking plonk with Nag and Nell and Vladimir and Estragon and of how we might pull up a couple of chairs and join them to ponder the meaninglessness of life in opaque evocative aphorisms. We actually located the place on the boulevard Montparnasse and got as far as the door. At that point we registered that the cafe, with hedges and murals and glistening Bar Americaine, was not the sort of place that would have welcomed Nell or Estragon or us, or even Beckett perhaps, before he had copped his Nobel Prize. We returned to the bookstore that was home.

Talking to teenagers in contemporary France (I could probably say “modern” France to differentiate the present from the land of my antique recollections), I find they have trouble imagining how things were forty years ago. Staying in Shakespeare and Company in the early sixties was immersion in various quotidian aspects of Paris that were distinctly odd to the American sensibility. The building that houses the shop is now a model of renovation, a structure main­taining its medieval Parisian exterior while furnished with every mod con. In the days I’m recalling the plumbing was as timeless as the chimney pots, consisting of a deep sink that served all floors and a convenience with foot-contoured platforms that enable those occu­pied there to keep their balance over the bottomless hole in the floor. Bathing was surrounded with rituals that made it doubly appreci­ated, since it consisted of an expedition over the footbridge to the Ile St. Louis and the public baths and the modest expenditure of two francs.

In the store we browsed and chatted, waiting for closing time so we could go upstairs and claim our assigned sleeping spaces among the second-story shelves. This could on occasion assume some as­pects of a lottery if George, carried away by hospitality, had wel­comed one or two more indigent scriveners than there were beds. At least once our friend Michael found that the patron had taken pity on a homeless street dweller and assigned his space to the clochard.

We didn’t talk much about dreams so I don’t know if Michael had any. If he had I doubt they gave any clue to the future, a future in which he would have a beautiful daughter whom he would name Winona and who would become an internationally famous movie star under the name of Ry­der, and that her lovely face and form twelve feet high would be on display at the Cinema Odeon a few blocks from Shakespeare and Company.

Across the river, visible through the enor­mous window, was Notre Dame and we would feast our eyes on the beauty of the place, sipping wine, tripping on fond absurdities, and generally rejoicing in the good fortune that had placed us so wonderfully at the center of our childhood dreams. Life sometimes can be subsumed in magic, although the supply is not inexhaustible. One time it touched us was during that summer in Paris. A little of that shimmer will always flicker in our hearts.

***

The culture war got meaner as the world got smaller. Ginsberg and Kerouac, in the fifties, had been set upon by illiterate fea­ture writers concocting insulting lies about their personal hy­giene and reporting the clever wisecracks that famous people were supposed to have delivered at their expense. At the end of the fifties, Cassady, who was not exactly the Napoleon of crime, had done two years in San Quentin for sup­posedly selling a few joints. Sometime after Kesey’s return to California, in 1965, his house in La Honda was raided during a party. Ken and some friends were charged with possession of nar­cotics. Then, on a San Francisco rooftop one foggy night, while watching the Alcatraz searchlight probe the bay’s radius, he was ar­rested again on the same charge. At this, he and his friends com­posed a giggly, overwrought suicide note addressed to the ocean. Fleeing south, Kesey made it to the same area in Mexico where Ram Dass and other acid cranks had conducted their early seances.

In New York I got a telegram that declared “Everything is begin­ning again,” an Edenic prospect I had no power to resist. I had fi­nally finished my novel, but it would not be published for a year, and I was at the time employed by what our lawyers called “a weekly tabloid with a heavy emphasis on sex.” Nev­ertheless, I was the only person Esquire magazine could find who knew where Kesey was. By then, his work and his drug-laced adven­tures in San Francisco were well known. Esquire paid my way south.

It was the autumn of 1966 and Ken, Faye, their children, and some of their friends were staying near Manzanillo. In 1966, the Pa­cific coast between Zihuatanejo and Puerto Vallarta did not look the way it looks today. The road ran for many miles along the foot of the Sierra Madre, bordering an enormous jungle crowned by the Colima volcano itself. The peak thrust its fires nearly four thousand meters into the clouds. At the edge of the mountains, sand beach was so empty that you could walk for hours without passing a town, or even the simplest dwelling. The waves were deaf­ening, patrolled by laughing gulls and pelicans.

Today Manzanillo is Mexico’s biggest Pacific port and the center of an upscale tourist area. In those days, it seemed like the edge of the world, poor and beautiful beyond belief.

The Keseys’ home was a few miles beyond the bay in a complex of three concrete buildings with crumbling roofs, partly enclosed by a broken concrete wall. We called one of the buildings the Casa Purina. The name derived from the place’s having once housed some operation of the Purina company, world­wide producers of animal feed and aids to husband. We occupied our time seeking oracular guidance in the I Ching and pur­suing now vanished folk arts like cleaning the seeds from our mari­juana. (Older heads will remember how the seeds were removed from bud clusters by shaking them loose onto the inverted top of a shoebox. Since the introduction of seedless dope, this homely craft has gone the way of great-grandma’s butter churn.

Our landlord was a Chinese-Mexican grocer, who referred to us as “existencialistas”, which we thought was a good one. He provided electricity, which enabled us to take warm showers and listen to Wolfman Jack and the Texaco opera broadcasts on Saturday.

We were an unstable gathering, difficult to define. The California drug police, professed to be­lieve that we were a gang of narcotics smugglers and criminals, our headquarters hard to locate, perhaps protected by the local crime lords. In fact, we were a cross between a Stanford fraternity party and an underfunded libertine writers’ conference.

We had no nearby neighbors except the grocery store, and most people along the coast hardly knew we were there, at first. The Casa was far from town, and there was little traffic. It consisted mainly of the local buses, whose passengers might spot our laundry hanging in the salt breeze, or glimpse our puppy pack of golden-haired kiddies racing over black sand toward the breakers. Several times a day, the gleaming first-class coaches of the Flecha Amarilla company would hurtle past. With their crushed Air Corps caps and stylish sunglasses, the Flecha Amarilla drivers were gods, eyeball to eyeball with fate. Everything and everyone along the modest road gave way to them.

In appreciation of the spectacle they offered, these buses some­times drew a salute from Cassady. He would stand on a ruined wall and present arms to the bus with a hammer, which for some reason he carried everywhere in a leather holster on his hip. How the middle-class Mexican coach passengers reacted to the random in­stant of Neal against the landscape I can only imagine. Sometimes he brought his parrot, Rubiaco, in its cage, holding it up so that Rubiaco and the Flecha Amarilla passengers could inspect each other, as though he were offering the parrot for sale. Cassady in Manzanillo was extending his career as a literary character in other people’s work—Kerouac had used him, as would Kesey, Tom Wolfe, and I. The persistent calling forth and reinventing of his existence was an exhausting process even for such an extraordinary mortal as Neal.

Maybe it has earned him the immortality he yearned for. It certainly seems to have shortened his life.

People who live in the tropics sometimes claim to have seen a gor­geous green flash spreading out from the horizon just after sunset on certain clear evenings. Maybe they have. Not I. What I will never forget is the greening of the day at first light on the shores north of Manzanillo Bay. I imagine that color so vividly that I know, by on­tology, that I must have seen it. In the moments after dawn, before the sun had reached the peaks of the sierra, the slopes and valleys of the rain forest would explode in green light, erupting inside a si­lence that seemed barely to contain it.When the sun’s rays spilled over the ridge, they discovered dozens of silvery waterspouts and dissolved them into smoky rainbows. Then the silence would give way, and the jungle noises rose to blue heaven. Those mornings, day after day, made nonsense of examined life, but they made everyone smile. All of us, stoned or otherwise, caught in the vortex of dawn, would freeze in our tracks and stand to, squinting in the pain of the light, sweating, grinning. We called that light Prime Green; it was primal, primary, primo.

The high-intensity presence of Mexico was inescapable. Even in the barrancas of the wilderness you felt the country’s immanence. Poverty, formality, fatalism, and violence seemed to charge even un­inhabited landscapes. On cer­tain mornings when the tide was low and the wind came from the necessary quarter, you could stand on the beach and hear the bugle call from the naval base in the city. Although it had a brief section that suggested Tchaikovsky’s “Capriccio italien,” the notes of the Mexican call to colors were pure heartbreak. Those were the notes that had called thousands of lancers against the handful of Texans at the Alamo. Had the same strains echoed off the rock of Chapultepec when the young cadets wrapped themselves in the flag and leaped from the Halls of Montezuma? Gradually, as our presence made itself manifest, it drew crowds of the curious. Young people, especially, were fascinated by the anar­chy, the lights and the music.

In Mexico, we failed to interpret the developments on the drug front to such a degree that when a Mexican plainclothes policeman—Agent Number 1, as he described himself—appeared to make awkward probing conversation with us in the local cantina, we were more amused at his stereotypical overbearing manner than alarmed.

Some twenty years earlier, Cassady had brought Kerouac down to Mexico and revealed it to him as the happy end of the rainbow. In On the Road, Kerouac records the dreamy observations of Cassady’s char­acter, Dean Moriarty, as he provides his companero—Jack, in the role of Sal Paradise—with lyrical insights into a Land That Care Forgot, Mexico as a garden without so much as the shadow of a snake.

Sal, I am digging the interiors of these homes as we pass them—these gone doorways and you look inside and see beds of straw and little brown kids sleeping and stirring to wake, their thoughts congealing from the empty mind of sleep, their selves rising and the mothers cooking up breakfast in iron pots, and dig them shutters they have for windows and the old men, the old men, are so cool and grand and not bothered by anything. There’s no suspicion here, nothing like that. Everybody’s cool, everybody looks at you with such straight brown eyes and they don’t say any­thing, just look, and in that look all of the human qualities are soft and subdued.

In 1957, I had sat in the radio shack of the USS Arneb, a young sailor with my earphones tuned to Johnson and Winding, reading all this in the copy of On the Road that my mother had sent me. If it seems strange that my copy of this hipster testament came from my mother, it would have seemed far more improbable—at least to me—that I would one day be sharing the mercies of Mexico with some of the characters from the book. Nor would I have believed that anyone, anywhere, ever, talked like Dean Moriarty. I was twice wrong, and, as they say, be careful what you wish for.

As we sat in the cantina, watching Agent Number I grow more drunk and less convivial with every round, I began to see that Dean Moriarty and his author had been mistaken in some respects. In the bent brown eyes of the agent I beheld grave suspicion, and my own thoughts began to congeal around the prospect of waking up to breakfast in a Mexican jail.

There were working-class taverns in Mexico (and some pretty fancy ones too) where the drinking atmosphere seemed to change over a few hours in a manner somewhat the reverse of similar estab­lishments in other countries. For example, a customer might arrive in the early evening to find the place loud with laughter and conver­sations about baseball or local politics and gossip, the jukebox blar­ing, the bartender all smiles. Then, as time progressed and the patrons advanced more deeply into their liquor, things would seem to quiet down. By a late hour, the joint, just as crowded, would grow so subdued that the rattle of a coin on the wooden bar might attract the attention of the whole room. Men who had been exchanging jokes a short time before would stand unsteadily and look around with an unfocused caution, as though reassessing the place and their drinking buddies. These reassessments sometimes seemed unfavor­able, at which point it was time to leave.

Thus it went with Agent Number 1. He showed us his badge, and indeed it was embossed with the number 1, and he assured us that, as cops went, he was numero uno as well. He told stories about Elizabeth Taylor in Puerto Vallarta—how her stolen jewelry was re­turned at the very whisper of his name in the criminal hangouts of P.V. His mood kept deteriorating. He got drunker and would not go away. He told us that Mexico’s attitude toward marijuana was very liberal. His private attitude was too, though he never used drugs himself, no, no, no. Did we know that we were entitled to keep some marijuana for our own personal use? Quite a generous amount. I have come to recognize the phrase “your own personal use” em­ployed in a tone of good-natured tolerance as a standard police trap around the world; whatever you admit to possessing is likely to get you put away.

While I let the federale buy me drinks, my two companions teased him as though we were all players in Touch of Evil. Ken Babbs’s Viet­nam post-traumatic stress took the form of a dreadful fearlessness, which, though terrifying to timid adventurers like myself, would come in handy more than once. George Walker had a similar spirit. For my part, I went for the persona of one polite but dumb, an atti­tude that annoyed the agent even more than Babbs’s and Walker’s transparent mockery. For some inexplicable reason, I thought I could mollify him by talking politics. The agent was an anti­Communist and excitable on the topic. I now realize that in the con­text of Mexico in 1966 this portended no good. Eventually, having bought every round and rather fumbled his exploratory probe, Agent Number 1 climbed into his Buick and drove off toward Guadalajara. His hateful parting glance told us it was hasta luego, not adios.

We reported our encounter to Kesey, who was philosophical; he had been brooding, wandering the beach at night. In the morning, he would come down to sleep, exhausted, looking for Faye to lead him to cool and darkness, shelter from the green blaze and the reen­actment of creation that could explode at any moment. What was happening to Kesey? He didn’t seem to be writing much. It was im­possible to tell if we were witnessing a stage of literary develop­ment, a personal Gethsemane, or an apotheosis. Some fundamental change seemed to be taking place in the world, and as he smoked the good local herb on the slope of the sierra and watched the light­ning flashes and the fires of the volcano, he pondered what his role in it might be. Before his flight to Mexico, he had attended a Uni­tarian conference at Asilomar, on the California coast, during the course of which a number of people came to believe that he was God. He had spun their minds with unanswerable gnomic chal­lenges and imaginary paradoxes. Still, it was an especially heady compliment, coming from Unitarians. Kesey referred to the Unitar­ian elders, patrician world citizens in sailor caps and fishermen’s sweaters, as “the pipes” because they took their tobacco in hawthorn- and maple-scented meerschaums and used the instruments to punc­tuate their fireside remarks.

Local adolescents took to hanging out around the Casa. Some of them were musicians. On the anniversary of Mexican independence, we decided to hold what someone called an acid test. People ap­peared on the beach with rum and firecrackers. We put tricolor Mex­ican bunting up. By this point, Cassady had found it liberating to restrict his diet to methamphetamine. He went everywhere with Rubiaco, the parrot. So constant was their companionship, so exact was Rubiaco’s rendering of Cassady’s speech, that without looking it was impossible to tell which of them had come into a room. As for Cassady on amphetamine—he never ate, never slept, and never shut up. He also thought it a merry prank to slip several hundred micro­grams of LSD into anything anyone happened to be ingesting. No one dared eat or drink without secure refuge from Neal. To cap off our Independence Day celebration, a number of us went into the vil­lage market and bought a suckling piglet for roasting. Nothing roasted ever smelled lovelier to me than that piggy as we settled under the palms with our paper plates and bottles of Pacifico. We were, unfortunately, deceived. Cassady had shot the crea­ture in vivo with a hype full of LSD, topped off with his choicest methedrine. After two forkfuls of lechon, we were bug-eyed, watch­ing the Dance of the Diablitos, every one of us deep in delusion.

How the parrot survived its friendship with Cassady is beyond me; as far as I remember neither he nor anyone else ever fed the bird. Twenty-five years later, on Kesey’s farm, Janice and I woke to Neal’s voice from the beyond. (The man himself had died by the railroad tracks outside San Miguel de Allende in 1968.) “Fuckin’ Denver cops,” he muttered bitterly. “They got a grand theft auto. I tell them that ain’t my beef.” We rose bolt upright and found ourselves staring into Rubiaco’s unkindly green eye. If, as some say, parrots live preternaturally long lives, it must be time for some literary zoologist to cop that bird for the University of Texas Library Zoo.

The expatriation had to come to an end; Kesey would have to go back and answer to the state of California. In fact, his spell on the lam had been excellently timed. In 1966, the world, and especially California, was changing fast. The change was actually visible on the streets of San Francisco, at places like the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom. Political and social institutions were so lacking in humor and self-confidence that they crumbled at a wisecrack. The Esquire consciousness, however, held firm—they declined my copy. “For Christ’s sake,” an editor kept telling me, “tell it to a neutral reader.”

A few months later, Kesey crossed the border and went home. Over the years, my friend Ken became a libertarian shaman. Above all he loved performing; he loved preaching and teaching. He was a wonderful father, a fearless and generous friend, who always took back far less than he gave. Kesey was in love with magic. All his life, he was searching for the philosopher’s stone that could re­turn the world to the pure story from which it was made. He kept trying to find the message beyond the words, to see the words God had written in fire. He traveled around sometimes, in successors to the old bus, telling stories and putting on improvised shows for crowds of chil­dren and adults. If he had chosen to work through his progressively revealed mythology in novels, rather than trying to live it out all at once, he might have become a writer for the age.

Life had given Americans so much by the mid-sixties that we were all a little drunk on possibility. Things were speeding out of control before we could define them. Those of us who cared most deeply about the changes, those who gave their lives to them, were, I think, the most deceived. The LSD we took as a tonic of psychic liberation turned out to have been developed by CIA researchers as a weapon of the cold war. We had gone to a party in La Honda in 1963 that followed us out the door and into the street and filled the world with funny colors. But the prank was on us.

***

The day A Hall of Mirrors was published in New York I put in a couple of hours at the gallery and went to lunch at the Algonquin. Candida Donadio, my sainted agent, was with me. Joyce Hartman joined us to represent Houghton Mifflin, my publisher. The book had generous reviews. One, in the Sunday New York Times, came from Ivan Gold, another fa­vorable notice was from Granville Hicks. I received an encour­aging letter from Joyce Carol Oates that put me on the moon.

It was time for me to face the second book’s necessities, although I had nothing quite as substantial as a second book in mind. George Rhoads, a painter whose work I’d managed to place in the gallery over the objections of some of the comrades, told me not to worry. I’d written a book, George said. Maybe it was time for me to do something else. Learn a trade, maybe go to veterinary school or take up oil geology. George himself was at that time a Scientologist, one of those whose careers were supported by infinite time lines and in­numerable lifetimes. He could have been a court painter in one in­carnation, a gondolier in the next. I knew perfectly well I had one life to squander, that there was nothing other than writing that I wanted to do, nothing else useful that I could do reasonably well. I knew there would be another attempt, at any price. But where to begin?

When A Hall of Mirrors was published in London by Bodley Head, in 1968, we went over there, figuring to spend a few months. When work is due but not being done, writers are subject to fits of compulsive motion. To sustain an illusion of progress, any idle jour­neying or pointless change of circumstance will serve. That writers change publishers, agents, spouses, to dull the nerve that throbs when work stays unwritten is well known. Writers also change cities. Subject to this fidgeting, I now realize, I very nearly changed my life and fortune beyond all recognition or hope of deliverance.

We rented a flat in Hampstead. Its dining-room windows faced southeast, commanding a view down Haverstock Hill, over Kentish Town, Islington, and beyond. By night, our view presented a socio­economic chart of north London. The streetlamps lighting the hilly terraces glowed phosphorescent white. Down on the flats, the lights burned the color of red lead, refracted in the mist and reflected on the pavements, brightening the sky to a sort of insti­tutional brick color.

Our rent was reasonable; it was a time when London was still less expensive than New York. We were half a block from Hampstead Heath, and our kids learned to ride their bikes there. Most evenings, at about half past nine, six of us or so, Britons and American expatri­ates, got together and talked about the things we ought to be doing.

Every few months we would go to north Wales to the house of our friends Jeremy and Eleanor Brooks. Eleanor was a painter, doing landscapes and portraits that gave nothing away to the work I’d been seeing in New York. Her special dedication was and remains to the mountains and forests of Gwyneth, in north Wales; her works in oils and watercolors are among the most beautiful things I own. Her work has been shown in museums all over Britain and on the Conti­nent as well. Jeremy was a novelist and playwright, and later a col­laborator with the Russianist Kitty Hunter-Blair on some highly successful translations of Gorky. He was for some years during our time in London the literary manager of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

We gathered and talked about what we were doing and what we wanted to do. A group of Britons, Americans, Australians, colonials of varying sorts, South Africans, Israelis, Irish, we sought the same refuges to which we’d fled in California. A relentless con­spiracy theorist we knew, more than a collector—a connoisseur— justified his exquisite of plots, plans, and stratagems by getting himself registered as one of England’s tiny band of mari­juana addicts, a brave happy few, resurrected from the shades of De Quincey or Fitzhugh Ludlow, whose condition entitled them to a legal measure of bottled tincture of cannabis—this to be provided by prescription, courtesy of the Ministry of Health. It was lovely stuff; the bottle was true bottle green, “just,” as he lyrically put it, “like a carrion fly’s ass.” A touch to the gum and presto—hours of profound visual and psy­chic confusion. Filling a prescription was good for hours of talking shop with fellow devotees at Boots Pharmacy Ltd., Piccadilly, the sanctum sanctorum in London of psychopharmacology.

One of our London friends was the ex­patriate songwriter Fran Landesman, who wrote “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” a hip rendering of Eliot’s “Gerontion” that crowns many a cabaret act’s closing encore in every time zone from Ronnie Scott’s to the Cafe No Problem in Phnom Penh. She and her husband, the writer Jay Landesman, were responsible for the 1959 Broadway play called The Nervous Set. They then expatriated to Lon­don, where they held what must have been one of the hippest liter­ary salons in the world.

When Ken Kesey arrived in London, together with several of the California Hell’s Angels, we were able to introduce them to some long-distance admirers, including the Landesmans and the Brookses. Kesey and the Angels wandered the storied British land­scape, discovering people and occasions to celebrate: solstices, equi­noxes, the Raising and Burning of Viking Boats, dolmens, crop circles, witchery and horned men.

One day Kesey and I went down to Savile Row where the Beatles had their headquarters. Inside the Beatle Building was the location of an entity called Apple Corp., there were hoarse whispers about some kind of Prankster-Apple-Beatle amalgam. It seemed a liquidation was being conducted under the appearance of a potlatch, in a welter of flacks, agents, and bimbos, security guards, sadhus, bare-breasted Scottish girls in boots, riveted into their Shetland-hide breeches. There were English Hell’s Angels and Cali­fornia ones, a young woman who said she had climbed Annapurna solo, another who claimed she’d been shot in the wrist with a dart gun. People introduced their songs and disappeared forever. Or else were never thereafter to be out of sight or hearing.

There were many venues and charged sites—after Savile Row, the Round House, after the Round House, the Albert Hall, after that, Stonehenge. Kesey wanted to organize a trip to Egypt with the Grateful Dead. Something kept happening or, more precisely, kept going on, taking its course, as Beckett put it. Tabloids commercial and irregular kept trying to describe it. It might have been summa­rized as fucking, drug taking, drinking, press agentry, but above all it was not writing—nobody, nothing. Kesey not writing. Brooks not writing. Stone not writing. We were still young enough to enjoy ourselves.

For a while we left the Angels and Kesey in residence at the Hampstead flat. The generosity and good humor of our Redington Road neighbors in accepting our guests (who were themselves most gracious) was one of the great good things we were blessed with in that time.

When things settled down I found a middle ground between writing the second book and not writing it: freelance journalism and the occasional short story. Some of the journalistic pieces were celebrity puffs and travel pieces, but at the same time I was learning to execute the short story, a form for which I had been raised to have a crippling, exaggerated respect. I did begin to write some decent stories in London. Maybe I required the flakiness and time wasting to lose some of the awe with which writing was still surrounded for me. It’s hard to make that sound convincing.

I am not a writer who believes that journalistic writing is a way to learn “economy” or of “approaching essentials”. I don’t believe I ever learned anything at all, stylistically, from my years of newspaper and magazine pieces. Which is not to say I think they’re all without merit. Some I enjoyed very much, and doing them was doing the right thing for a change. The lessons to be learned from writing fic­tion and nonfiction—the lessons, I mean, to be learned about each from writing the other—consist in learning how to look at them.

So much can be said about the intersections of life and language, the degree to which language can be made to serve the truth. By the truth I mean unresisted insight, which is what gets us by, which makes one person’s life and sufferings comprehensible to another.

We take an experience, or a character, an event, and so to speak we write a poem about it. The experience, the voices and personalities, pass from primary process to language.

If instructors in journalism, editors and so on teach useful short­cuts, they may be earning their salary, but they’re no professional help to their writers. If, on the other hand, they insist on vivid and clear description, they are useful guides.

I might have served art and insight more perfectly if I had thought twice about what lay behind the possibility of movie deals. I was just back from Sweden, where I had been listening to four long-winded U.S. Navy deserters explaining the moral imperatives behind their jumping ship in Japan to protest the Vietnam War, when my London telephone rang. I think there’s a tradition that telephone calls from Hollywood come in the middle of the night. I was sitting up in the wintry dawn listening to the tapes I’d made of the sailors in Stockholm when the polite but insistent ring-ring of our battered black telephone sounded. Indeed it was Hollywood on the line. Paul Newman wanted to make a film of A Hall of Mirrors. Actually he was not speaking from California but from Westport, Connecticut, where he was between movies. While the sky light­ened over the city, I found myself talking what seemed sheer fantasy. Newman proposed to acquire A Hall of Mirrors and perform in it as one of the principal characters. His wife, Joanne Woodward, would play another.

The Newmans had always been known for their left-liberalism, and filming A Hall of Mirrors was seen by them and everyone con­nected with the project as a political gesture. The Vietnam War was beginning to sear the edges and seams of America; in fact, our conversation took place just a few months before a major news event of that war.

A Hall of Mirrors is, among other things, a catastrophic love story within a political setting. It’s about three white people, two rootless, one perhaps too profoundly rooted in the old soil. Their fortunes are acted out against the background of the struggle over segregation in the Deep South. I had been years working on it. Over those years I had run into many individuals in the saloons of various bohemias with novels-in-progress in tow. One knew with a dismal certainty that these works were bound to fade away in longhand.