. 5. Bohemia on the Mississippi

In later years: amid the bones of bohemia

Once I began publishing poetry and some criticism in the 90s, I had hopes of finding the sort of bohemian literary community I had known a decade earlier when I had worked and rather starved in the Dinkytown neighborhood of Minneapolis for a number of years in my early thirties.  I first turned to a scattered, loosely-organized community of poets, the New Formalists, developing an extensive correspondence with several of them for a year or two.  To a man they were courteous and often amusing and I will always value their friendship, letters and advice, but bohemian they certainly were not.  As a movement they liked to characterize themselves as outsiders, as existing apart from academia, but most of the ones I met were in fact professors.  They thought of themselves as mavericks,  as literary gadflys,  and so they were – but in terms of their circumstances, the ones I knew seemed very comfortably set up and thoroughly bourgeois. 

I also looked seriously at several writing programs, hoping for a remnant of the old bohemian spirit, which was like looking in a brickyard for butterflies, but I was unemployed at the time and the prospect of paying my way through a quick program by teaching, and being able to teach afterwards, was just too attractive.  I applied to and was accepted by two programs, one at Washington University in St Louis, and the other at Arkansas in Fayetteville.  I was well-impressed with the several writers I met in both places, but their highly-structured programs put me off.  I knew I could never write in such circumstances, or talk about my work and aesthetics in the ways that I would be expected to.  Imposing such a highly organized structure on the creative process seemed contrived and forced.

I also tried joining several online communities of writers and poets when the internet first got underway in the early 90s, but this arrangement also seemed contrived.  Not even writers can communicate by words alone.  Actual friendship was impossible — there was no shared hardship -– mostly what came through was impatience and rudeness and offended feelings.  After several centuries of the evolution and refinement of coffee-house communities, mankind had taken a giant step backward with the online discussion list.  Of all the places where I had hoped to find a living writers’ community, this was the least successful.

Bohemia on the Mississippi: early visits

I might have been less dissatisfied had I not previously lived within an actual bohemia for several years.  I had begun visiting Dinkytown, on the edge of the Univ of Minnesota in Minneapolis, in the late sixties or early seventies when my brother Richard began his graduate studies at the university.  Dinkytown formed half of the bohemian center of the twin cities, with its sister neighborhood located just on the other side of the Mississippi.  To walk from one neighborhood to the other meant crossing the  high bridge over the Mississippi where John Berryman had taken his last leap.  My memories of Dinkytown in those times seem almost golden at this distance.  My brother and I had just entered our twenties and although we had already chosen very different roads, with he plunging ever deeper into professional responsibility (Piaget-based research into infant cognition) and me having already spent some years as an itinerant knockabout (divorced, jobless & broke), we both still shared some sense of the wide world opening with promise before us.  In so many ways I must have alarmed and appalled him, but he never let on, never passed judgement.  Instead he always just opened his home to me (it being 1/3 of a basement, walled-off, mattress on the floor, chest of drawers, desk, stereo & albums – lovely), often slipped me a small stash to use as I liked, once procured tickets to a David Bowie concert, always provided as much food and alcohol as I might want, and even money if I needed it.  It was all simply his idea of hospitality.  I would never again have such a friend.  Years later when the world would fall in on me and I would find myself completely alone, he would be at my side, without my ever asking for him.  There  would be at least two occasions when I would not have survived had he not shown up unbidden, from half a continent away, at just the right moment.

My visits to my brother were not exciting by anyone’s standards, but I wasn’t seeking excitement or distraction.  Dinkytown was full of bookstores, new and used, and as Richard pursued his research in a campus office, I would browse their shelves to my heart’s content.  For some years I had been reading, along with countless others of my generation, the full range of Beat literature, Basho and the other haiku poets, Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, — Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, Henry Miller, Hesse, and Mann, and listening endlessly to Bob Dylan.  The several small bookstores in Dinkytown in the very early seventies catered perfectly to this taste, and offered far more besides, so that I was always exploring.

Interlude: marriage, wilderness exile, wanderings, the asylum, among the Muses

In the fall of 1971 I was married briefly to a nineteen-year-old Irish beauty, Vickie O’Dell, but was divorced within a year.  She left me with three lifelong gifts: a love for Wuthering Heights, the music of Joni Mitchell and a love for cats.   Many years later I learned that, as Victoria Dickinson, she had become a notable folk and rock singer in the northern Illinios/ Chicago circuit during the late 70s, early 80s. I knew she could sing only from having heard her singing along with Joni Mitchell albums when she thought no one was listening, as she washed the dishes. Only once did I hear her sing on her own. It would have been around 1972. We were having a little party for some old friends in our Rockford apartment, one of whom was Robin Zander, before he had made a name for himself. He had brought along his guitar and at a certain point he and Vickie unexpectedly broke into a song together, he playing and she singing. I don’t remember what the song was, only how extraordinarily beautifully she sang it. Everyone was rather stunned.    

Shattered at losing her. I took to the open road and spent the whole of 1973 as a sort of dharma bum in the wilderness of coastal Washington where I lived in a lean-to, wandered along the coast and deep into the forest, ate a lot of peyote, read Han Shan, Basho, Jeffers, Snyder and Kesey, worked in cedar mills and as a cedarbolt cutter in the woods (see Along a wild stretch of the Calawah: wandering after Han-Shan).    

After a fall, winter and spring of this primeval idyll, I again hit the road for several months of penniless vagabonding through Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Nevada and Oregon with a young cat for company.

Returning to northern Illinois and in the mood for something completely different, I took a job as a night nurse on a locked ward for the criminally insane for a year and a half, found a charming garden apartment on the Rock River, and spent my days sleeping and reading Dante and Shakespeare, the Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite poets, Baudelaire, Tennyson, Swinburne and Yeats, and traded in Dylan for Debussy.  On my nights off I would stroll for four and five hours at a time through any of several neighborhood cemeteries shadowed by another young cat, smoking hashish and writing one howlingly bad poem after another in labored rhyme and meter.

Return to Bohemia

I also resumed visits to my brother who was still living in his basement room on the edge of Dinkytown.  These were the times I valued above all others, particularly so now because of two new feminist friends of my brother: Christine Mack Gordon, a poet and graduate student in Shakespearian studies, and Christie Wirth, a graduate student in psychology at Stanford.  They were both very gentle and indulgent about my bad poems, reading Keats with me for hours, while trying unobtrusively to steer me in the direction of Eliot and the other Modernists. Christine also suggested that I join the “Loft”, a kind of poets’ community located above Rusoff’s Bookstore, but I shied from any sort of hobnobbing with established poets and academics, by whom I would only be told to “stop writing nursery rhymes” (which is how my early Tennyson- and Housman-inspired lyrics were described on more than one occasion). The only poets I wanted to spend time with were those who were still excited by first discoveries and still open to all periods and styles. All the older poets and scholars I had met seemed jaded to me, and dismissive of everything I loved.

If Christie & Christine were gentle towards my poems and literary tastes, they were less indulgent regarding my views towards women, which they considered excessively romantic.  In spite of this, there was a flare-up of mutual attraction between Christie and myself, and for several months I was in a state of complete inebriation, making the six-hour drive to Minneapolis as often as I could manage, skipping work and classes to do so.  But our lives were taking us in very different directions and there was probably never any question but that we would have to break it off.  Yet even now, after more than three decades, I cannot think of her without a pang of regret.

Interlude: literary studies, marriage to a poet, difficult times

Now skip ahead six or seven years.  After several years of irregular study at Rockford College, majoring in English literature with a strong minor in Western philosophy, I had dropped out of college, married Virginia DeCourcey, a brilliant, brooding poet, journalist, epistimologist and classicist (see submerged in the waters of Lethe), and after several troubled, difficult years in Illinois, followed by a desperate year in Colorado, we arrived in Minneapolis in an ailing Datsun with $500, several hundred books and not a job prospect between us. These were to be years of deepening darkness ending in tragedy, and I am not yet ready to recount them.  From the first day there was a cloud over our life there.

Return to Bohemia: more difficult times, life among the nocturnals

Richard had by this time married and moved to Pittsburgh, and Christie was long gone, and with their absence something essential and vital seemed forever lost from that world.  Nevertheless I look back on the subsequent and darker phase of my time in Minnesota with a certain rebellious affection, particularly for the several years I spent as a clerk in one of the oldest used-bookstores in Dinkytown, working six or seven days a week, 11 am to 11 pm.

It was not the job itself for which I harbor affection, but for the nocturnal world it made me a part of. Those evenings were filled the regular appearance of a whole cast of writers, musicians (in particular the perennial and kindly Jerry Rau, for whom Virginia & I would always try to muster up a few coins), street people and incorrigible characters, though it is the poets I most remember.  Two in particular come to mind, as they were the first poets I ever met who, like me, worked in traditional forms.  As far as I know they have both passed into obscurity.  I don’t remember the name of either.

John Macoubrie

The first was a small, slight, hunched man who appeared to be in his sixties, though his circumstances were so hard that he may have been younger than he looked.  He was very much of the genteel, high-culture school of Wilbur and Hecht, and his knowledge of prosody was so much extensive than my own that I never mentioned to him that I was a poet at all.  He was known to all the older established poets in Minneapolis and was well respected.  I was working as a clerk in a bookstore at the time, and he would come in most nights (we were open until midnight) after he got off his shift as a dishwasher.  He rode an old-fashioned 1950s-vintage bicycle, and was always under-dressed for the weather.  He had a cough, and seemed cold and frail.  I had heard that he had been living in a tiny rented room for as long as anyone could remember.  On every visit to the bookstore he would always purchase a book, but never more than one, and never for more than a quarter or fifty cents.  This restricted him pretty much to used copies of the old paperback Laurel series of pocketbook poets.  Most of the time he would conclude each such purchase with some lines from that particular poet which he had by memory.  The extent of poetry he could recite at will was something wonderful, and in that particular neighborhood, it was an ability which was widely admired. 

UPDATE: Since first posting the description above, two other poets who frequented Dinkytown in those years have reminded me that the poet’s name was John Macoubrie ~~ Marjorie Buettner, who was waitressing at the Valli at the time ~~ (she relates that Macoubrie would write sonnets it to her while waiting in a booth for his supper, and recite them to her) — and Jonathan Sisson. I am grateful to both of them, and also to Chester Graham, who knew him as well. From these three I learn that Macoubrie died in 1982. There was an effort by some of his friends to publish a collection of his poems, but that the search to find a publisher was unsuccessful. Some of his poems and reviews appeared in the North Stone Review. I recall seeing a feature about Macoubrie: a small collection of his poems, together with a short biography, in some review or other, but whether it was the North Stone, I can’t remember.

Note: Visit the newly-installed
John Macoubrie page where reminiscences, poems and photos of John will be collected. If you knew John, please contribute a memory.

The interant playwright

The other poet was in his late twenties or early thirties, I would guess.  He was in most ways completely the opposite of Macoubrie, being full of nervous, aggesive energy and he was very brash and outspoken.  When I was in a certain mood I found him intolerable, but usually he was worth enduring, simply for his originality.  Like the older poet, he rode a bicycle, but it was an expensive racing machine.  He worked as a janitor by night, and read and wrote for most of each day.  I have no idea if he had any formal education.  All he wrote were blank-verse plays, in a dense but vigorous Elizabethan style, and what he wrote was remarkably strong.  He wrote every day, a hundred lines or more, but what I saw of his work was always highly crafted.  He would hang around the bookstore at odd hours, and when a literary-minded customer would come in, especially if he happened to be a professor from the university, my friend would thrust some pages under his nose and demand his opinion.  He was never quite so obnoxious that I had to eject him from the premises, and even at first glance his writing was impressive, so I just sat back at such times and watched the encounter with interest and amusement.
~~~ As he was my own age, more or less, and we were both in similar economic straits with no professional prospects, I showed him some of my poems.  He was only mildly impressed, and criticized my lack of prosodic rigor, but he approved my adherence to antiquated forms and since, like me, he had received nothing from editors and other poets over the years but admonitions to write in free verse, he accepted me as a fellow-sufferer.  He was a vagabond, just travelling through, as he said.  I don’t remember where he had come from prior to stopping for several months in Minneapolis, but the time came when he no longer dropped in at the bookstore and I never heard from him again.  Somewhere in the cavernous recesses of my old house, among hundreds of boxes, I have a typed copy of one of his plays, but I haven’t seen it in years.

James Naiden

Regularly James Naiden, a stout, hardy-looking gentleman in corduroy coat and carrying a rugged leather satchel, would stop by to sell a handful of literary titles.  They were always very good titles from the store’s point of view, and always in new condition.  When I asked about them once, he said they were review copies.  I learned later that he reviewed books for the Minneapolis Star and for his own literary journal, The North Stone Review.  As it chanced we both favored a tiny cafe at the end of a covered alley about a block and a half from the bookstore.  It was situated between Gray’s Drug, above which Dylan had quartered in the late ’50s, and the longstanding Varsity Theatre, which had shown many a worthy ‘art film’ over the years.  The cafe was owned by two young sisters, Kris and Gretchen, who were tolerant toward writers and did not pressure them to move along if they wished to sit and write for an hour or three, taking up space and spending little.  JN always sat in his preferred corner, back to the wall, his satchel, books and papers spread out beside him.  Often I joined him at his table, but more sat off by myself, or with Virginia.  In the midafternoon the cafe was often nearly empty and as it was so small, we could converse easily back and forth without raising our voices.

James had a very brusque exterior, did not suffer fools at all and was accustomed to dealing with writers’ inflated and easily-bruised egos, for which he had no patience.  I would guess that he was heartily disliked in many quarters.  Of his past I could glean only that he had been a smoke-jumper for a time in the Canadian wilderness, and also that he had been a speechwriter for Eugene McCarthy.  James was the first true man-of-letters that I had met, but which I mean one who supported himself solely by his pen, by writing and editing, without resorting either to teaching or to hackwork.  He appeared to live modestly, drove a beat-up old station wagon, and seemed always to wear the same worn coat.

As he had evidently been in the Minneapolis literary scene for many years, James seemed to have stories about every writer in Minnesota, large or small, living or dead.  He was unimpressed by reputation or celebrity and with a single phrase or word could cut through a mountain of hype.  I recall acerbic comments or stories about Robert Bly on several occasions, though Bly was a poet he published from time to time.

While I cannot recall any specific stories about Bly, I do remember very well a story he told me about John Berryman:  Once, many years before, Berryman stopped by Naiden’s apartment when James happened to be in the shower.  As the door was unlocked, Berryman let himself in, which he had done on past occasions.  As he was waiting on the couch, thumbing through a book, the front door flew open and in stomped the landlord, loudly shouting out for JN and demanding two months back rent.  Berryman rose up from the couch and blustered back, shouting, How much does he owe?  — A hundred bucks.  Berryman pulled out two fifty-dollar bills, shoved the landlord out the door and threw the bills after him.  It all took place while James was in the shower.  By the time he emerged the landlord was gone and the rent paid up.  James promised he would pay Berryman back as soon as he could, but Berryman refused to take his money.   That’s the gist of the story as I remember it, though after all these years I may have gotten a detail or two wrong.

Naiden could be a tough character.  Once he returned to his parked car to find a tow-truck driver with his arm though a partially rolled-down window.  The tower was from a local universally-hated towing company with predatory methods, and he had failed to notice James’ German Shepherd in the back seat, which now had his jaws locked on the tower’s forearm. James responded as though he were a thief trying to break into his car, and refused to order the dog to release the scoundrel until the police arrived, though he was bleeding and clearly in pain.  When the police arrived, James called off his dog.  The tower threatened to sue, but James never heard from him or his company again.  The police took no action.

Another side of James’s character is revealed by the following story.  During one especially bitter winter, he chanced to form a friendship with a homeless Vietnam vet, an Indian, Henry Walking Bear.  James was concerned about his sleeping in the open on nights when the thermometer was falling well below zero, and tried to arrange for shelter for him.  When such efforts failed, James would invite him up to his apartment for a game of chess and a sandwich, just to get him out of the cold for a spell.  This happened on more than one occasion.  One afternoon I found James in the cafe drinking coffee.  As I sat down across from him, he told me Henry Walking Bear had been found frozen to death in an alley, a kitten in his arms.   In his pocket was a piece of paper with James’ name and address.  James knew of Walking Bear’s death because the police had contacted him and asked him to come down to the morgue to identify the homeless man found frozen with a kitten on the street.

Late hours at the Bookhouse

The graveyard shift in the book store was a perfect place for meeting wierd, highly-literate characters.  One  dashing young gent, Emmett Smith, in sweptback hair and sunglasses, used to drive up in his 50s-vintage pickup from somewhere miles to the south where he raised goats on his farm.  I never inquired about his education, but he spoke in elaborate perfectly-formed sentences worthy of Dickens or Trollope, though his figures of speech were closer to Donne in their reliance on startling juxtapositions.  He just spun this language out off the top of his head in a kind of nonstop drunken reel:  long oratorial periods declaimed in a loud barroom voice with irreproachable grammar, the whole effect being rendered all the more surreal by his subject-matter, which was goat husbandry and long meditations on the Bedouin and TE Lawrence, punctuated by Persian proverbs in melodious Arabic, for he had sometime earlier in his life spent years in the middle east with the Peace Corps and the experience had crazed him in some deep essential way.

There were many other literate characters around Dinkytown and they all seemed to pass through the bookstore and to pause for conversation.  The owner of the store, James Cummings, had over 100,000 titles, but there was scarcely a “popular” title among them.  The store’s descriptor was “used and rare scholarly books” and that is all he carried.  It wasn’t the sort of bookstore you ducked into for five minutes on your way to the airport, looking for the latest John Grisham.  The usual patron of the bookstore spent a half hour or more, just browsing, and frequently commenting — to whomever might be in earshot — about whatever author happened to come to hand.  I had studied literature and philosophy intensively for years in college, but I got a wholly different humanistic education by working nights in that bookstore and listening for hours to the rambling near-soliloquies of patrons (most of whom were not professors).  In some cases they had known the authors personally and had stories about them, or had read them so thoroughly that they might as well have known them.

The nights I spent in that bookstore soon numbered in the hundreds, and by  the end had exceeded a thousand.  Literary  conversations begun in the store might be continued on the street, in the cafes or in bars, and I grew to believe that such a high level of literacy was a common state of affairs.  I forgot what a relatively rare and fragile a thing it was.

A few years later the critic and poet Dana Gioia would write a worthwhile little essay entitled  ”Towards a New Bohemia” in which, amid many other ideas, he suggests that the “old urban bohemia” had died out after the sixties due to a rise in real estate prices.  This was certainly an accurate description of Minneapolis in the mid-1980s, though I would argue that bohemia around the university was far from dead.  Virginia and I were only just barely subsisting, and after the first year made the questionable decision to move well out into the country where we could rent a place for a fraction of what it cost in the city and heat with firewood.  We continued to work in Dinkytown for several more years.  Many of the writers and artists we knew around Dinkytown were struggling through those years, and some, such as ourselves, eventually vanished.  

At the time of his essay, which was some years ago, Dana Gioia could still find hope in the proliferation of small independent bookstores across the country which were hosting poetry readings and forming literary communities around themselves, but in the intervening years, with the rise of online commerce, most such small bookstores have gone under.   In any case, single bookstores can’t sustain a community by themselves.  In Dinkytown in the early 80s, there were still a good many poor literate individuals living marginal lives: poets, painters and street musicians, working as janitors, laborers and dishwashers.  Rather than a circle of individuals centered around a bookstore, it was a community living in a neighborhood.   It is the disappearance of such communities that Gioia acknowledges in his essay.  Unfortunately none of the succeeding “bohemias” have been actual communities, but only ghosts of the real thing.

The poets I knew in Dinkytown in the early 80s were unconnected to academia or the marketplace.  They lived close to the street, to the crumbling edge.  The price of their independence was often poverty and obscurity.  The “starving bohemian artist” may be a dated cliche, but I have known a number of flesh and blood individuals who fit the description, and most of them, perhaps a vanishing remnant, still lived around Dinkytown in the 1980s.

the worst of times, the best of times

It is easy to romanticise bohemia, though less so if you are living it.  It can be a terrible life.   It wears you down, erodes your health and personality, and is absolute hell on relationships, but it leaves you free to read and write exactly what you wish, without obligation to anyone or anything, and that is not a small matter.   

Those early years as one of the nameless nocturnal writers of Dinkytown left an indelible mark on my self-image as a writer, on my understanding of what a writer is and does.  To write has nothing to do with theory or intention or profession.  It has nothing to do with the classroom.  It has everything to do with hunger, the hunger for beauty, the hunger for love, the hunger for quelling the gnawing within.

Since knowing such poets – none of whom were professors, and few of whom lived in comfortable or secure circumstances – I have found it all but impossible to feel any essential kinship with academic poets — and academic poets seem to be the only poets left.   Looking back on my years in bohemia – the hardships of which I cannot yet bring myself to enumerate, but which cost us our marriage, and Virginia her sanity and ultimately her life — it was nonetheless the only place where I knew poets who, despite terrible cost and with no advantage to themselves, were poets because they could be nothing else.

~~~~~

Note:  Recently James Naiden offered this melancholy update of changes to the Dinkytown landscape, and the passing of certain long-time habitués:  

“Kohler’s is long gone & on that site now is a newish apartment building. Gray’s Drugstore is gone & that building has a bar & restaurant,as with what was once Bridgeman’s across the street. … . The Anderson sisters, whom you alluded to in passing, sold their Deli business in 1996. Kris, the petite redhead and younger of the two, finally married her boyfriend Tedd, but then died at 48 from a brain aneurysm in November 2006, and Gretchen has a career as a pharmacist & is married with a daughter. Another steady customer, Mel Jensen, died suddently in early 2002 at 72 . . . . “

James Naiden offered this additional update in late January, 2011:

James Cummings, Jr., lost his Dinkytown bookstore just doors south of “the Bookhouse” in December 2010. Larry Dingman,who was proprietor of Antiquarian Books in the old College Inn Hotel space on the second floor, died in December 2010. Larry was in his seventies and had retired from the book business. Loss of a friend, and loss of another friend’s livelihood. The Bookhouse is now the only viable bookstore in Dinkytown. The Bookhouse is sponsoring a reading for John Berryman and his poetry on 17 February, a Thursday night, I believe, at the Loring Pasta Bar, where Gray’s Drugstore used to be. Check the Bookhouse website.

I have two novels to be published by an outfit in Maryland, Publish America, sometime later this year. More to come. Those pages you saw me working on back in the Eighties and Nineties, Bradley, will finally appear for a slavishly appreciative readership, I trust. “Don’t worry about those who don’t read,” Berryman once said. “They usually go off starting wars for other people’s children to die in.” Then, after I refilled his glass, he stared at me and said: “Treat each new poem as you would a flower. It will last longer if it’s good. The flower won’t.” A few weeks later, John was dead. The winter of 1971-1972. Room #44 on the third floor of the College Inn Hotel where where I lived for two and a half years. The building is still there, but mostly empty above the first floor.

Additional note, May, 2011:

James Naiden’s novel, Scuttlebone, is now available through Amazon, as well as his Summer Poems (click on links below).  A shorter novel, Crystals, will be available soon.  Then later this summer or early fall, another book, Secular Bible Sonnets.