Memoir

Memoir 1938-1997

Roy Lisker

Introduction

This 80 page memoir was written as a commission for the Gale Biography series, to which I'd been warmly recommended by the great champion of poets and poetry, Jack Foley of Oakland, CA.

After the memoir was written and submitted, I was informed by one of the editors at Gale that, since the class of libraries with my books on their shelves has measure zero, Gale intended to renege on the sum of $1000 promised on completion of my part of the contract.


Support letter from Howard Zinn

Letters of protest from influential persons, several of whom are lucky enough to have their books prominently displayed on library shelves, led to negotiations which resulted in my receiving a "kill fee" of $800. This was very important at the time, as I was moving into the apartment which I've held ever since, and needed several months rent up front. The memoir does not appear in the Gale Biography series. One generally has fame, or money, or (in most cases) , neither. It is very rare indeed that one knows both money and fame together.

I have refrained from posting this memoir on the Ferment Magazine website until both of my parents were deceased. My father passed away in March, 2006, at the age of 87, after a brief bout with pneumonia and with little apparent pain. Most of us can be considered lucky to have such a death. My mother died about a decade ago, after several years of living in intense pain from osteoporosis.

Posting the memoir on the Internet while they were living might would have injured their reputations. This reservation no longer applies. Certainly they injured me, and I want the world to know about it.

Preface

Even though much of my writing has been in the first person, it turns out to be very difficult to write about my life. I seem to have been born a spectator: I go through periods of compulsively recording all my experiences ,reading and thinking. Relishing both lived and intellectual adventures , there seems to be little time left over to say much about myself . Art demands this sacrifice : one finds that even the most seemingly personal of authors has learned to rise above his own emotional needs, transmuting his inner world through universal symbols that speak to the world. When I have spoken about myself it's usually been done through the vehicles of fiction, fantasy, poetry, and music, that medium alone capable of saying all things which cannot be said with words, that is to say, most things.

Vestiges may be sufficient. A great deal can be learned about me from the inventory of my creative work : published, completed ,in progress, abandoned in mid-stream or still-born , buried somewhere in notebooks, irretrievable, permanently lost. The outline of this catalogue will be placed at the end of this memoir. My feeling is that anyone who is interesting to others only by virtue of the list of his manifested accomplishments has probably not had an interesting life. Whatever else may be said about me, I have had one.

I was not far into this project before realizing that writing about one's life poses singular dilemmas: if honesty be virtuous elsewhere, in this context it is doubly so . It will not be possible to avoid touching on deeply personal matters. If such an account is to be of any relevance to others , I will have to reveal things I've done and intentions one would normally be ashamed to acknowledge. I see the reader's eyelids flicker, his cheeks begin to flush. At last , he thinks , I really want to read this ! Simple literary vanity, if nothing else, does not permit me to disappoint him.

By opening up certain chapters in my life the risk is run of alienating friends, relatives, supporters, and other persons whose affection and esteem I wish to retain. Naiveté being indeed its own defense, it is oftentimes also the gravest of errors. The wisest course does not always consist in relating the unadorned truth of things better left hidden.

Yet what are the alternatives? Should I fill these pages with an insufferable panegyric to my own self-imagined virtues? Or with interminable justifications for my own behavior? Hurling vindictive accusations and bitter reproaches against enemies , real or imagined ? I 'm acquainted with people who do that sort of thing. They imagine they're changing the world yet, when all the dust settles down, it turned out that everyone has been laughing at them. Even the people to whom they exhibit the most injustice and ingratitude, so much so that they regret what they'd done for years afterwards, will merely sigh, put the book aside and think : "What a silly fool." One thinks in particular of the great mathematician, Alexandre Grothendieck, whom I've written about and whose 2000 page memoir, Recoltes et Semailles is this sort of thing.

Like every artist anxiety to maintain his integrity, I find myself in a constant state of war with the established culture. There is some pressure , for reasons of so-called artistic politics , to emphasis only those events and achievements which others will admire. The temptation to treat this essay like any other grant application is considerable. In that kind of writing it is normal to pass oneself off as an over-achiever, paragon of responsibility , conformist to every passing whim and fancy, opportunist, etc.

I can assure you that I am none of these, and do not know how to feign pretension to them. The problem is rooted in the fact that I have never been able to be competitive, even in contests in which victory was assured. In dealing with serious rivalry it has generally been my policy to let others win. This has been enormously beneficial to me in reducing all the difficulties attendant on survival in our society , leaving me with lots of free time to devote to reading, study, thought and creative work : prose fiction , poetry, journalism, scientific research in mathematics, physics and psychology, musical composition and performance, political activism and travel.

In a few words , I consider myself much too fascinating a human being to be satisfied with the enumeration my good points. In all the articles I've written over the decades about the prominent and the famous, they've not been dishonored by an exclusive concern for their virtues! Why should I be less generous to myself? Why should I cheat myself in this way?

Memoir

I grew up without a father in a tough neighborhood. 3 women raised me : my mother Sara , aunt Sophie and grandmother Rose . My grandfather Isaac Starekow , a powerfully built, lusty peasant type with black beard who rocked back and forth on his heels and smoked reeking black cigars, must also have had some influence on me. He spent most of the day presiding over the cash register in the family grocery store that connected to the house via a doorway , and we didn't see much of him. My mother was unable to control me and I wandered about freely in the blighted Kensington district of North Philadelphia .

Between the ages of 2 and 10 I was subjected to more than my share of attacks and molestations from men and boys ; some of them might be characterized as rapes. at that age there is no sharp line between abuse through force or through ignorance. It is perhaps because of such experiences that I now feel that homosexuality is not a political cause: when black people achieve their rights, their sense of humiliation is replaced by pride. This does not happen with homosexuals, since humiliation is the cornerstone of their lifestyle. That being said, the same is true of almost all heterosexual relationships.

Individual and group violence, vandalism, rock fights, public degradations , gang assaults and similar activities were familiar sights . These being the local amusements I participated in them, yet they were out of character : I was born physically weak, with poor muscular coordination and bad eyesight. My thick glasses for nearsightedness date from the age of 6 . My disposition, furthermore, has always been studious. For people like myself, Kensington was not an environment with much growth potential. Fortunately my mother remarried in 1947 and we moved away from there.

Incurable peculiarities persist from this period. Normally covered by a thin veneer of middle-class respectability, they surface under stress: swearing like a truck driver ; talking to myself at all times save in the obvious presence of others (in several persons, (1st, 2nd, 3rd, Singular and Plural), differing volumes and voice tones ) on topics ranging from the deeply profound to infantile silliness; and a certain rudeness and obstinacy of conduct that clashes somewhat incongruously with my normal persona of the cultivated intellectual. ( "I have within me something splenitive and rash, which let thy wisdom fear" ) My roots in the American urban jungle have also revealed themselves in the rare incidents of violent and destructive behavior in episodes of serious mental illness.

This rather special lifetime came into the world on September 24,1938 as the son of Sara Starekow and Leroy Savery Weber, Jr. My name at birth was Leroy Savery Weber III. It was changed to its present form on February 19, 1948 when my step- father legally adopted me . My mother , who was 19 when she married , met Leroy while enrolled as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He was 7 years older than she , with a reputation as an accomplished craftsman in wrought-iron work. I only knew my natural father for a few years and remember nothing of him, but there can be no doubt that he had a decisive role in shaping my ambitions , my perspective on the social order, and my views on human nature.

Not the least of the things I have inherited from him is his wanderlust. My grandfather was a vice president of the Reading Railroad , and Leroy held a lifelong pass entitling him to free travel on all American trains. He seems to have used this pass to live in a way that would have aroused the envy of Jack Kerouac. He married again and divorced again; I have a half-brother I've never met living in Portland, Oregon . Leroy died in the 1970's of tuberculosis complicated by alcoholism.

Apart from a single telephone conversation with my natural grandparents in 1958, all that I know about him is based on the biased stories of my mother and her sister, my aunt Sophie Starekow Edelson. Sophie lived in California from 1947 to her death in the 80's . It was from her, during a visit she made to Philadelphia in 1956, that I learned that Leroy had been a chronic alcoholic . This mysteriously shook me , so much so that my mother quarreled with her for not consulting her before telling me things that might upset me . They rarely needed much grounds on which to start a fight. My mother never speaks about aunt Sophie in tones other than those of denigration and ridicule . But she did sit down with me then and told me a number of stories about my father:

She claimed not to have known that he went on alcoholic binges until after they were married. Determined to believe in the integrity of their parents, children soak up such ridiculous justifications as unquestionable truth, and one can never totally rid oneself of one's faith in them.Some examples:

When I met them in 1992, my California cousins believed every word of the story aunt Sophie told them, to the effect that our grandmother Rose was a highborn Romanoff princess fleeing the Russian revolution.Having spent the first decade of my life in daily proximity with both aunt and grandmother, I was in a position to correct these strange fabrications.

I was not free of the delusions of childhood. For many years I implicitely believed that, in all disputes about money matters, it was my mother's own hard-earned money that was at stake. In fact, apart from a few sales of batik work in the 60's, she never earned a penny of her own after her second marriage in 1948. Her husband earned the money and she administrated it, as she did all other things in the household. She was the uncontested decision-maker. This often led to some bizarre situations indeed. It's the ancient dispute over whether "possession" consists of ownership or administration, a dispute I do not intend to try to resolve here

The colorful stories my mother told me on that occasion filled me with dread not unmixed with admiration, as one often feels in reading accounts of the lives of wild, weak, unprincipled and gifted artists. One night he brought home another alcoholic, a prostitute from the bar , and informed my mother that she was going to live with us for awhile. She slept on the couch in the living-room for a month , ( presumably alone ) , until either she left or my mother was able to get her out. Or she and Leroy may have quarreled; he was belligerent when drunk.

The worst incident occurred one afternoon when he went out to buy groceries . He bought a bag of oranges then used the rest of the money to get drunk. Returning to the house, he pushed open the door and began throwing the oranges around the room, some of them aimed at me, still an infant in the crib. My mother picked me up, ran into the bedroom and locked the door.

Soon afterwards that she did the only sensible thing, which was to put together a few belongings, bundle me up and hop on the elevated back to Kensington and my grandparents' grocery store at 2nd and Cumberland . It would be our home for the next 8 years .

My natural father did not seem to have cared for me very much, as he never did anything for me and made no effort to contact me. There are many chapters to this story of which I remain ignorant of: was he required to give child support? If so, did he shrug it off and tell us to go stuff it? Was there perhaps, given that his behavior had been demonstrably threatening to both our lives, a restraining order on him preventing him from coming into our neighborhood? Is it possible that, tired of my mother's domineering personality - she is always on the battlements - he told her to get lost and took up with another woman? These are all interesting questions, I doubt that I'll ever get answers to them. All that is certain is that his coldness and indifference to me has been reciprocated by my attitudes: I've never been able to interest myself for very long in the project of tracking him down and confronting him.

This may have been a mistake; yet the fact is that from my teens I've been telling myself that this attitude is mistaken, yet the most that was ever done about it was to call up my grandparents in Reading, in 1959 , and talk to them for about half an hour.

My mother's parents came from shtedls in the Ukraine. In 1923, when Isaac ("Saki") and Reuchel ("Rose") Starekow left the Soviet Union they were living in Odessa. Both grandparents were secularized though not totally secular Jews. Saki himself was a dedicated Socialist. On the day that he announced his liberation from orthodox Judaism by shaving off his sideburns his father slapped him in public. They kept the high holy days, my grandmother went to synagogue on Yom Kippur, ( My mother once let slip that her father used the day to go to a burlesque show ) , and kept a kosher diet , though not a strict one.

In the early 1920's the Bolsheviks started rounding up and executing political rivals. One day Saki was told to come down to the police station to pick up the suit of a friend who had been shot earlier that morning. Utterly petrified he went to retrieve the suit. On his return he locked himself in his room and didn't come out for several days. The family held a meeting at which it was decided to collect funds to send Saki , Rose, Sara, (age 5) and Sophie, (age 3) to America. They rested up in Riga, Latvia for a time before going on to Ellis Island. From there they headed out to relatives in North Dakota .

The winters proving too severe they moved again, first to New Jersey, then to Philadelphia where they lived out the rest of their days. My mother still retains memories of the early days when her father operated a pushcart in the old colonial city, the area around Bainbridge Street not far from the waterfront, ironically the same neighborhood, now thoroughly renovated and decidedly upper upper middle, in which my parents have been living for the last 20 years.

Shortly after the family's arrival in Philadelphia, Saki went for a medical checkup. The doctor identified heart trouble. Saki was told that if he continued to smoke the big black stinking cigars he was fond of he had less than a year to live. If he stopped he might live another 3 years. He continued to smoke them and lived for another 20 .

Credentialized doctors of the psyche might characterize my whole family, of which it is to be presumed I'm a member, as mentally unstable, but with my aunt Sophie the manifestations were more overt and more crippling : agora-, acro- , xeno - , claustro- and all the phobias, fear of just about everything , walking alone in empty spaces or in crowds, going into elevators, crossing the street against traffic, entering strange buildings. Her fear of doctors probably had something to do with her conversion to Christian Science. She also cultivated a rich fantasy life that confounded dreams with real events. Her handicaps gave her charm of a certain kind , but they also made her unable to function independently.

I picked up traces of several of them from her , suffering panic symptoms on heights, bridges, in elevators, in wide open spaces , and so forth . From my mother I absorbed a penchant for spontaneous and hysterical temper tantrums. They ruined many of my childhood friendships but were brought more or less under control by my teens.

Between these 3 women I was thoroughly spoiled. Anyone who imagines that this is an enjoyable way to spend a childhood should be cautioned : my every whim was complied with, but in exchange I was obliged to satisfy the very heavy emotional demands placed on me : my grandmother's relentless possessiveness, the savagery of my mother's craving for power, my aunt's intention of living permanently in a dream world.

Grandfather Saki died shortly after the end of the Second World War. Aunt Sophie's reaction to this was a devastating nervous breakdown. She lay in bed most of the day and could not leave the house. I myself began experiencing hallucinations, hearing voices and imagining that savage dogs were wandering about the corridors and through the rooms . Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night, crying and screaming. My mother and grandmother put in the middle of the bed they shared and calmed me down when these fits occurred.

This was a time of major changes in all our lives . Aunt Sophie recovered and went out to California.She worked as a graphic artist, designer and creator of props for Hollywood studios. The evidence indicates that she was a far more gifted graphic artist than my mother. After all, she held her own for 40 years or so in the highly competitive arts world of Los Angeles. My mother, either by intention or circumstances, never had the opportunity to submit her work to the judgement, however wrong-headed, of any kind of public. To listen to her talk, of course, Sophie was a mere amateur compared to her, but this is just typical, if I may say so, of certain inbred attitudes common to the Philadelphia milieu. Many creative people there,in order to justify their reluctance to take their chances with New York, Los Angeles,or other artistic centers in Europe or the US, work under the assumption that since their innate talent is so great, no purpose would be served by doing so.Whether or not my mother would have shown herself to be as endowed as her sister, had she gone to these places and struggled to make a career, can never be answered of course.

Be that as it may, Aunt Sophie converted to Christian Science, became Mrs. Edelson, and had 3 children , my cousins Steven, Corinne and Robin. They're all married. As in a Shakespeare comedy, everybody gets married-except me. Yet I am, at most, the exception that proves the rule, as will be seen.

My mother married Leigh Lisker, the pages of his Ph.D. dissertation in Acoustical Phonetics still wet from the printers , in the fall of 1947. Grandmother Rose invested the money from the sale of the grocery store in a 3-storey rooming house at 10th and Pine in downtown Philadelphia . She, my mother, my new father, his father and I , all moved in together . It was my home for about 2 years, '48 and '49.

All of the principal directions of my intellectual development up to the age of 9 were stifled in the new household. My father imposed an academic and scientific culture upon us that was not without virtues in itself ; yet the manner in which it was done created a permanent, well-nigh incurable rift between opposing sets of values. The conflict generated through this created the great crisis at the age of 17. For the decade or so after that it more or less tore my life to shreds. I am not arguing for the superiority of either one or the other of these outlooks. I would not be what I am today, for better or worse, were it not for the combination of all factors from every period .

Before 1948 the major influences on my life were painting, crafts, such manifestations of folk culture as jazz, folk music , B- movies, Disney cartoons and comic books, and psychoanalysis . My mother, natural father and aunt all worked at some aspect of the visual arts. Painting was the family profession. I might myself have become a painter, although never showing any special talent in that direction . Parenthetically I should add that one of the problems that has hounded me throughout my career has been that my areas of exceptional ability have generally not been well correlated with my ambitions or needs. Encouraged by the example of my mother and aunt, I was always sketching, drawing, working in watercolors, experimenting in crafts such as rubber, plasticine, plaster of Paris, ceramics, bead and leather work, costume design, knitting, and so on.

While we lived on Cumberland Street in Kensington we listened to both jazz and what was then called folk music : Burl Ives, Richard-Dyer Bennett, John Jacob Niles, Paul Robeson, Ledbetter, Woody Guthrie, Yma Sumac : the names return to me unaided over a stretch of 50 years. I've always been musical . For a short time in my 9th year my mother sent me to a piano teacher. My fond memories of her may have some connection with the fact that falling in love with music teachers has been something of a hobby of mine since the age of 16 . There was no piano at home , no way of practicing and the experiment was abandoned. The memory of my student recital is bathed in white light : I was dressed all in white and my hair was at that age still brightly blond ; and it was summer. In my recollection the piece was well played .

Not for nothing is the alphabet a Canaanite invention : in generic Jewish households everyone reads voraciously ; all that I needed to know about reading and writing was picked up from my environment. This must be counted among my blessings. The methods for teaching reading then employed at my first elementary school , located in the terrible neighborhood around Mascher and Dauphin Streets , would never have awakened any delight in the written word: it was the painful era of "See Spot Run" books, narrowly regulated vocabularies, unintelligent content and no practice in the use of phonic rules.

Childhood's wonder, hope and trust were soon to be contaminated by psychoanalysis with its ignorance and filth. I am not unique in this respect. Though its origins lay in Vienna and Zurich, psychiatry's despotic impositions are characteristically American. It is we, not the Europeans, who had adopted it as a state religion. It is our gimmick for curing the mind.

For a number of years my mother was in analysis with a Dr. Tedrow. Her faith in pseudo-science did not prevent her, at the same time, from consulting astrologers and Ouija boards for projections of future events. From what I can judge, the only benefit she ever derived from his therapeutics was in the acquisition of a Freudian vocabulary which she used to win arguments. Her adversaries often found themselves confounded through the exposure of the malevolence of their unconscious motives.

My mother brought me along with her to visit Tedrow a few times. All the symptoms of the states of alienation only to be expected from the kind of childhood I was being subjected to were coming out . I told the learned doctor that I felt like paper. He later informed my mother that this indicated my desire to escape my body ; ergo commit suicide. The sessions stopped when she remarried, presumed evidence of 'the cure' .

My childhood experiences with doctors generally left me with a healthy distrust of the medical profession. A misdiagnosis of rheumatic fever at the age of 9 resulted in my spending months in bed , then in a loathsome children's hospital in Atlantic City called the Seashore House. I grew up convinced that social workers were ogres, psychiatrists depraved fools, medical doctors by and large incompetent. My contempt for the social sciences is in part inherited from the prejudices of the math-physics community with which I've been associated most of my life .

I recognize this and, as an adult, realize that it is easier to fault doctors than it is to face the realities of sickness, suffering and death. It's been my good luck to fall into the hands of very skilled doctors at certain times when my survival depended on them. I do believe that the profession as a whole is granted much more authority than is warranted from its' track record. ( A short novel written in 1992 centers about Franz Anton Mesmer and the transfer of sacerdotal power from the priest to the doctor at the time of the Industrial Revolution of the 1770's. )

The principal ethnic groups of our neighborhood in Kensington were Eastern Europeans, Irish and poor whites from Appalachia. There was a black neighborhood that everyone was afraid of to the north , above Allegheny Avenue. Jews were greatly outnumbered and we received our share of anti-Semitism. I didn't take it personally : in that community there was enough hatred to go around whatever your ethnic origins. Really grievous anti-Semitism was encountered at the Seashore House. A dear old lady came regularly into our ward to present a kind of puppet show about the life of Christ. She always singled me out as one of the Jews who killed him. This gives one a good idea of the general tone of the place.

One sees 1945 to 1947 was an incredibly troubled period, with much uprooting : my grandfather's death; my aunt's psychotic episode; my own psychic disturbances ; the enforced invalidism of a misdiagnosis; the pervasive violence of a poor immigrant ghetto; the indignities of the Seashore House; the need to adjust to a strange, ( though essentially welcome ) , new father.

These factors combined to generate a spectrum of paranoid traits. I flew into rages when called any kind of name or nick-name, even flattering ones. I refused to share my possessions. I talked down to classmates and in other ways exhibited a childish arrogance. Combined with my physical weakness and incompetence at sports, there was little risk that excessive popularity might go to my head.

For 3 summers, from 1945 to 1947, at the worst stage of this time of emotional distress, I was sent to Camp Hoffnung , a Jewish summer camp in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The other kids treated me badly, I myself had turned into a little porcupine. For most of my life I've had the feeling that it was here that my sensitive child's soul received its most mortal wounds. This may come as a surprise, given that my neighborhood was one of grim poverty, whereas the environment of Camp Hoffnung was mostly middle class. From the perspective of 5 decades I suspect that, our being Jews and with the world yet under the omnipresent mantle of World War II , it was only to be expected that our behavior would reflect the echoes of the catastrophe that had engulfed our people.

Shortly after my mother's remarriage the new family took up residence in the new house at 10th and Pine. As in Plato's Republic, the artistic ferment of the "Cumberland street Renaissance" was reduced to a barren shadow. Something very similar happened to Jean-Paul Sartre as a child, as is described by him in Les Mots, where it is used to justify his pointless rejection of the sciences. Neither comic books nor popular music were allowed. My father had some feeling for classical music, but appears to have considered it immoral to listen to anything else. That he wasn't really musical can be seen from his censorship of jazz and other forms of popular music. Like myself, he studied then abandoned several instruments, violin, cello, flute and piano. Unlike myself he never made a fool of himself going out and playing them in public.

The panoply of arts and crafts my mother, aunt and myself had experimented with on Cumberland Street- leatherwork, beadwork, pins, jewelry, weaving, oils, watercolors, charcoal drawing,ceased, to be replaced by crystal sets, home made telegraphs, model airplane kits and electronics.

As stated before, this was not a bad thing in itself, only in the way it was done. There was no official censure against the graphic arts, ( presumably it would be uncivilized to suggest such a thing) , but , wilting perhaps from the frigidity of a climate inimicable to it, my mother did very little in the way of graphic art work for another 20 years.She herself told me that she was unable to recover the old enthusiasm until her 40's, when he husband's money ( or hers, depending on one's interpretation) was invested in a course of study for a degree in textile design at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art.

She did quite a lot of work, some of it very good indeed, in the period in which the Liskers took up residence at 22nd and Spruce. When, during the late 60's, the parents moved to a charming townhouse,( constructed largely to my mother's specifications) , a studio on the first floor was incorporated into the design.She used it for a few decades, then once again put aside her brushes and did not return to them again.

After her death, we made an inventory of the work in the studio. There was very little that had been done before the 60's. Almost all of it was concentrated in the period between the 60's and the 80's. Sara Lisker, 5 Watercolors

In my new household only the reading of serious books was tolerated. My stepfather had, despite the Depression, already accumulated hundreds of these and I was exposed to a range of authors going from Herodotus to Mark Twain to Jacob Wasserman to Hans Reichenbach. Everyone in my family, including my peasant grandparents, was/ is a voracious consumer of books, Obviously there was some merit in his animus against popular art, for I am now a writer of these serious books. My new father, (whom I called Len, even as my mother has always been addressed as Sara) , did put me on the violin. His thoroughly reasonable, yet just as thoroughly mistaken, notion was that his abilities as a phonetician could, like technology transfer to the Third World, readily be applied to the alien universe of music . It was that much the more unfortunate that he had been trained by his father, Harry (Ephraim) Lisker, a man who had shown exceptional musical ability in his youth.

Harry , who had been given letters of recommendation from eminent musicians like Thaddeus Rich and others, might have become a professional violinist . He'd relinquished his ambition under the pressure of having to support an immigrant family with many brothers and sisters. This frustrated dream hung over his entire life like a corpse in suspended animation, transmuted into the form of a unrelenting self-pitying whine of nostalgia, his appetite for commiseration glutting itself on a diet of flashy virtuoso pieces by composers like Wieniawski, Sarasate , Bazzini, Borowski, Rafael and the like ; any violinist will know what I am talking about. Bacon grease does have its place in cooking, though not as the sole entry on the menu.

There are other points of view : had it not been for the lamentable exercises in dogmatic musical mis-education received from Len and Harry , I might have grown up knowing nothing at all about great music. I've also contracted my own version of Harry's illness: why did the gods not make me a professional musician I cry, loving the art as I do? For many years, Harry Lisker traveled around the country as a garment salesman. Then he and two partners formed a company that prospered for awhile. It appears that my stepfather Len grew up in a well-to-do neighborhood. The Great Depression of the 30's was an unmitigated catastrophe for them . By the time the debris settled, Harry Lisker was working as a clerk in a state liquor store; his wife, my step-father's mother, had become incurably insane; she lived out the rest of her life incarcerated in a state mental hospital. My stepfather was about 14 at the time. These misfortunes explain much about him, but do not excuse his treatment of me.

40 years later, sometime in the 60's , Len mentioned to my mother that his father had been contacted by the asylum and been told that his wife was dying. In their two decades of marriage Len never bothered to tell any of us that his mother was still alive. Neither he nor Harry had been out to see her in 30 years. They told us that since she didn't recognize them, visits eventually became pointless. They did go out to see her one last time, just before she died. Talking the situation over later with my mother, she confided in me that she had always realized that there were dark things in Len's past and character. Even after 20 years of marriage she could not claim to understand him.

Although it would appear that art and poetry were, if not totally extinct, chilled in this new home by the imposition of a frigid sneer, my new father did - very responsibly - take charge of my education, encouraging precocious scientific abilities in me. Over the course of his career he worked in phonetics, linguistics and teaching He had a working or reading command of many languages; his abilities as a polyglot were impressive. During WWII he'd been a translator of German for the Allied command in North Africa and Italy.

Shortly after getting his Ph.D. he began teaching the Dravidian languages of South India, Tamil, Telegu, Kannarese, Malayalam and Tulu in the department of South Asian studies at the University of Pennsylvania. From his undergraduate work in the 30's until his retirement in the 80's, his entire career was accomplished at Penn. Now Emeritus Professor (note: circa 1997) , he retains a bit of office space in the linguistics department, where he returns almost every day, as protracted contact with my mother's tongue-lashings, outbursts and roster of demeaning slights is insupportable for more than a few hours at a time .

She was hardly pleasant to live with over any extended period of time. Then again, Socrates "married" himself to hemlock, so there must be some benefit to it. She never forgot an insult, slight or humiliation, real or imagined, nor did she forget the way in which she'd triumphed over someone else, many, many years before, by humiliating them. Our next door neighbors in West Philadelphia during the 50's were very pleasant, if conventional people, who sometimes did clumsy or awkward things to communicate a friendly intention.

In the 1990' my mother suddenly burst out at the dinner table with an attack on the mother of this family. She'd woven a patchwork quilt which she'd offered as a present to us. Now, 40 years later, my mother cackled about the stupidity of the woman and the ugliness of the quilt, letting us know that she's known how to put this woman in her place.This example is paradigmatic of a persistent character trait: humiliating both the gift and the giver.

She also had the somewhat unpleasant habit of encouraging you to confide in her when you were in some difficulty, then invariably taking the side of your antagonist against you. It gave her power for a short time, but did not noticeably increase her ability to win friends and influence people.

When inflamed by stress and suspicion, these traits could become dangerous. In 1956, while I was a sophomore at Penn, she suddenly got it into her head that I'd stolen money from her purse. Without consulting anyone, she went directly to the administration, had me called into the President's Office, and accused me in front of administrators, secretaries and staff, of stealing from her! Was that a way to treat the campus math prodigy? This was a shattering experience. I would be in the Enbreeville mental hospital less than a year later. It turned out that the money had been stolen by the maid.

Leigh Lisker was not always angelic himself. In this atmosphere of paranoid accusation and ridicule, he developed a means for revenge: with the benefit of his many years as an academic he was able to forge a gift for pedantry into a keen, cruel instrument of sadism. Their interactions could be studied profitably by a playwright wishing to add another act onto Sartre's No Exit .

I do not mean to imply that he was a bad scientist: quite the contrary. In addition to his study and teaching of Dravidian languages, he worked for many years at the Haskins Laboratory in New Haven as an researcher in acoustic phonetics. He was highly esteemed in this field, and deservedly so. (An obituary written by Arthur S. Abramson, appears in the professional journal Phonetica for September,2006. It provides an excellent overview of my father's work in Acoustic Phonetics. See Obituary)

Under his severe tutelage the focus of my interests shifted from Disney and B-movies, popular music, crafts and psychoanalysis as interpreted by my mother and aunt, to mathematics and physics , the violin , languages , and serious reading : all very good things. Community service or political engagement were as foreign to this household as they had been among the Starekows, although it was my grandfather's socialism which drove him out of Russia. This may have something to do with the fact that the families on both side had fled Russian persecution and oppression, and deemed it wise to have nothing to do with the politics of their adopted land.

My mother and new father were civilly married in August of 1947, and held an additional traditional Jewish wedding in November, at which several of my parents' friends I would come to know over the years were present. My sister Carol was born in May, 1948. The elementary school in my new neighborhood resembled the one I'd left , although the ethnic composition was different: Afro-Americans, Jews and Italians, all musical peoples. Despite my reputation as being both brainy and chicken-hearted I surprised others, and myself, by strange feats of daring. Neither hitch-hiking nor pan-handling held any fears for me . I used them to get around within the downtown area until receiving a stern and salutary lecture from my mother. I wandered about the neighborhood late at night, although it was only marginally safer than Kensington.

It was also the time for blockbuster feats. I taught myself typing in a single 12-hour marathon. It gave me an important skill at an early age, yet in so handicapped a form that it can only be used for personal purposes , not for any job. My typing is very rapid but there are errors in every other word. The months in which I was laid up with pseudo-rheumatic fever were invested in devouring the complete works of Mark Twain.

My teacher for the 5th grade was a conscientious, over-worked woman, no less confused than myself . In the second term I staged a minority-of-one revolt against her rule. I tore up the test she handed us , would not do any other classwork and remained standing when ordered to sit down. She sent me down to the principal's office with a note. He set up a meeting for the next day with my parents and myself and sent me home.

We were extremely lucky: he turned out to be a real educator, not unknown yet not too common among persons in his position. He sensed that I was already too advanced for the 5th grade and skipped me up to 6th, effective immediately. My punishment for willful disobedience was reduced to a public apology to the 5th grade teacher. This was not difficult: my mother has trained my two sisters and me to say 'I'm sorry' at least once in every verbal interchange. It's an unnerving habit- I apologize for it! As an aside, these evidences of my parents' autocratic rule have not been deduced from an examination of my own personality .Obviously my impressions are too subjective. It is from observing the behavior and attitudes of my sisters that I've acquired the confirming evidence that we were raised under tyranny.

The man in charge of the 6th grade was a gifted teacher of mathematics. My enthusiasm for the subject may have had its origins in his class. Credit must also be given to my step-father, who proved successful in communicating his love of science to me. They introduced me to the subject in which I might have excelled had I not rebelled against it in 1955.

In 1950, while Rose Starekow remained in center city living off the rent from her tenants at 10th and Pine , the rest of us moved across the city 6 miles to West Philadelphia, and a spacious house of our own on 57th and Pine . Harry Lisker and my mother didn't get on well together and eventually he moved back to 10th and Pine. At the time that we moved West Philadelphia was a middle-class Jewish enclave. It is now a middle-class black enclave. Ours was a two-story house with attic , and wide front porch covered by an overhang that one could step out onto from the second floor windows.

Sam Moses, a friend of both my parents who lived on the same block , was an avid record collector, and he and I spent many hours in his living room listening to his collection. This systematic exposure to the symphonies and quartets of Beethoven, the Mozart operas, the Bach keyboard music and other standard masterpieces gave me a solid appreciation of classical music.

My father's career received a strong boost in 1951, when he was granted a Fulbright scholarship to live for a year in Madras, India to compile the materials for a grammar of Tamil . We all went with him . Lisa, my younger sister, was still lingering on in a previous lifetime and would not come on board until after our return, in 1953. This year, filled with excitement and adventure, was the next in the series of dramas, most of them sad, even tragic, that shaped my growing up : the loss of my first father, the death of grandfather Saki, my aunt's breakdown, the ugly time of the Seashore House and Camp Hoffnung, the acquisition of a new father whose qualities were strongly positive and negative in about equal measure. The experience of foreign travel would herald in the first truly beautiful phase of my existence.

Passport photo: father, mother, self, sister Carol

Treasured memories adorn every station of the voyage, beginning with the days spent on the Holland-American ship, the Veendam.

On board the Veendam.Carol, mother and self.
Bovril in the afternoon.

The arrival was delayed and we spent our first night in France in a hotel down by the docks in Le Havre. The next morning I had my first encounter with croissants and cafe au lait ; I can still taste every precious drop! The train took us to 2 weeks of sight-seeing in a sad, war-ravaged Paris. Our hotel , unfortunately, was on the Right Bank in the neighborhood of the Madeleine. I would not come to know the vitality of the Latin Quarter until 17 years later, when I came to live in Paris on my own. We visited the usual tourist attractions and were invited to dinner by friends of theirs, a French woman with an American husband, in Montmartre.

On to Vienna, via the Orient Express. For one week the family stayed in the Schoenbrunn Palace. Vienna in 1951 was still divided into zones by the occupying Allied armies. Schoenbrunn was in the American sector and its rooms were being rented out to tourists. The bedroom Carol and I shared had large bay windows that opened out onto a splendid view of a rococo Palestra at the far end of magnificent decorative gardens. It was the time of the full moon. In the depths of night its beams, floating through the cosmos as if from some infinitely distant source, gilded lawns and gardens and all the objects around the room in a magical silvery and golden dust. I also recall strolls through the Schoenbrunn zoo, the guided tours around the great hall holding the mural of the child Mozart performing at the court of Maria Theresa, and our attendance at a performance of Stravinsky's Petrushka at the Vienna Opera House.

Our landlady, Frau Nemeth, unpacked her sturdy lode of war stories for our benefit. My father translated for us from her German . ( He must have felt in his element; it was only a few years since he'd done the same thing for the Army) . The Russians were the first to occupy the city. Her husband had been killed and she had been raped by Russian soldiers. For months the fabled metropolis had survived on Russian rations of dried peas riddled with worms. She considered herself lucky to be in the American zone. Frau Nemeth took a liking to me, so much so that she offered to take charge of me in Vienna while the rest of the family went off to India. Had her offer been accepted, I might now be a professional musician rather than the shiftless unrecognized scrivener I've become. To a large extent we do not determine our lives but merely serve as witnesses to them.

From Vienna we proceeded onwards to Rome. The train was delayed overnight in an Austrian border town, Vilach, which is remembered because it was the only European small town on our itinerary , ( and that by accident), and because I became enamored of the landlord's daughter. The era of hopeless infatuations was still a ways off in the future.

Just 3 days in Rome, which I remember because of a horror story and a crime. The horror story consisted of my experience of going to the airport bathroom. The stalls were in a long row, without doors, the toilets mere holes in the floor, and a busomy wise-cracking woman, churning out what were probably obscenities , was going up and down the length of the stalls giving out handfuls of toilet paper. The crime was my theft, from the Forum, of a brick cornice with Roman numerals on it.

I celebrated my 13th birthday on board the BOAC plane taking us to Cairo, Bahrain Island and thence to Bombay. Two airline stewards brought out a chocolate cake ringed with candles. This incident is important insofar as it exactly fixes the dates of the journey. We must have left New York at the end of August, arrived in France around September 1st, and flown from Bombay to Madras in the first week of October.

The streets of Bombay teemed with homeless refugees from the partitioning of India and Pakistan. They lived right on the sidewalks, in tents or exposed mattresses, or squatted on the barren concrete. The sight of such wanton display of public sufferings on the streets of a major city was something of a rough shock to a teenager whose life had previously been restricted to a few Philadelphia neighborhoods.

Despite this I see the year in India, in retrospect, as the revelation of the power of an unsuspected world. As an academic family benefiting from a munificent Fulbright grant, we were free to regard it with the detachment of wealthy tourists who were not obliged to share in the miseries of a great nation that the vagaries of history have brought to its knees. Yet there was also the fascination with a society both more civilized and more primitive, whose millennial grandeur and ancient ways of awe-inspiring beauty stood in stark contrast to the barbarities of Third World squalor.

The famous banyan tree in Adyar, Madras

Two weeks after our arrival in Madras I came down with typhoid fever. While laid up in the hospital my sister was also admitted there for a diabetic condition. A few months later my step-father went through a serious bout with dysentery. Except for my breaking my wrist near the end of our stay, there were no other major illnesses. On our arrival we stayed at the Connemara Hotel. Then we learned that the dancer Uday Shankar, brother of the musician Ravi Shankar was planning to go on tour for a year and was looking for someone to whom to lease his estate at 14 Boag Road in the Saidapet district.

Scenes from Saidapet:
(i)Father with sister in bungalow compound
(ii)Saidapetians
(iii)Home/studio of Uday Shankar

Close-up:3 children from Saidapet

We visited Pondicherry, Tanjore, Trichinopoly, Trivandrum, Conjeevrum, and Mahabalipuram. My parents went off alone for a brief visit to Cochin on the Malabar Coast, where they were the guests of the old landed Jewish families who'd been there since the 6th century without ever knowing a day's persecution or prejudice.

My father worked with informants and put together his grammars while I studied South Indian music and the esraj , an instrument something like a cello combining frets and a bow. After a few months in Madras they sent me to a school run by American Baptist missionaries located in Kodaikanal in the Nilgiri hills just south of Madura. I was placed in 8th grade.

Kodaikanal, Lake

The habit of self-study being thoroughly ingrained by now, both through personal disposition and the encouragement of my father , all of my free nights were spent studying in the library. Here I taught myself high school algebra and French, and did lots of reading: Lost Horizon, Passage to India, the Good Earth, the Mahabharata, an abridged version of Schweitzer's biography of Bach, Fox Strangeway's treatise on Indian Music. There was no time for poetry, a form neither appreciated nor understood in any of the environments I'd known . The art scarcely existed for me , a characteristic ignorance shared with most Americans and which our culture is only now beginning to remedy. Nor did I do any writing, my interests being dominated by science. These endeavors were pursued at the expense of classwork which I found irrelevant and tedious, poor marks being the result.

Eighth Grade.I am at the far right

Close-up

Memories of this charming setting are densely steeped, as by a scented cloud, in a profound romanticism . The village of Kodaikanal, also known for its astronomical observatory, is perched atop a 2500 meter mountain. The school sits over a lovely lake teeming with wild birds. With its spectacular mountain vistas, its bustling trade, coolies, strange beggars hunched in doorways, restaurants and bazaars, the village streets have the allure of a fairy tale. Hikes arranged by the school took us over mountain trails and through forests thick with eucalyptus trees and tropical flowers. The weekend hike made with the 8th grade remains a cherished memory.

Kodaikanal,Pillar Rock

These were the earliest stirrings of adolescence, that period which in contrast to my barren childhood, was destined to amplify into terrible devastation, like the march of an invading army over a helpless land, yet which would, at the same time, be ecstatic in its beauty and power.

It was here in Kodaikanal that I underwent my first lovesick infatuation, the gateway to many decades of similar involvements. The wounding suffering of hopeless, even abused, love constituted my primary spiritual nourishment from the age of 13 until about 37, after which, with some minor but not unimportant deviations, a thoroughly hum-drum mental health rooted in common sense has taken up residence in my soul.

The girl was in the 9th grade and she started it by asking me out on a date! In this charming little Switzerland this meant a chaperoned walk through the woods bordering the lake. It lasted the time I was at the school and was forgotten soon after my return to the plains. The writing of this memoir led me to look at a photograph of her in the Kodaikanal student magazine Eucalyptus of 1952. She was indeed very much of a sweetheart .

Cultural historians employ the word 'romantic' in a technical way; and indeed, reminiscences of Kodaikanal are constantly being rekindled through the poetry of Blake, Wordsworth , Keats, Heine , the music of Schubert, Schumann , Brahms, from philosophers such as Rousseau and Kant or writers like Hesse, Keller, Hugo, Villiers de L'Isle Adam , Hawthorne or George Eliot, and by certain Impressionist paintings.

Surprisingly a further nostalgia is most acutely evoked by the Expressionists : Edvard Munch, van Gogh, Strindberg, Lagerlof, Buchner, Kokoschka, Berg, Schoenberg. In my private vocabulary, ( we all have one ), the word 'romantic' is often used as a synonym for pantheism, the mystical worship of spiritual forces in nature, which was to exert so powerful force upon me over the next 6 years.

Church attendance on Sundays was obligatory. The religious overtones were otherwise indirect and there was no indoctrination. I was the only Jew , not even a religious but an ethnic designation, and one Catholic. The two Indians who had to be admitted in fulfillment of a government quota, were undoubtedly Baptist converts. Ideas become incorporated into the soul through subtle means. Little things reveal my upbringing in a Polish-Irish Catholic neighborhood . Likewise I now imbibed a considerable amount of Protestant ideology from my surroundings . Over the next 6 years my mental complexion turned Protestant without subscribing to any of its creeds, a Protestantism thickly leavened with Greek paganism, Wordsworth's pantheism, Sartre's existentialism and Freudian pseudo-psychology. The Buddhist synthesis that emerged at about age 21 was broad enough to accommodate these various components and render them mutually intelligible.

Trafalgar Square
July 1952

We returned to Philadelphia in August, 1952. By age 14 my scholastic level was already that of a college sophomore. By 16 I was every inch the graduate student. The series of psychological and religious crises that overwhelmed me between the ages of 13 and 20 lifted me to a regime far beyond the rubrics of the standard educational systems. From that time to the present, with only brief interludes, I've lived on the fringes of all of our cultural institutions, habitually destitute and unemployable, yet fired by an undiminished sense of purpose.

Soon after its return from India to West Philadelphia, my family joined the white rout to the suburbs. My parents were no better nor worse than their friends and neighbors. Like most academic people they are reactionaries who imagine themselves radicals. They are not prejudiced, in the sense that they do not go out of their way to shun black people. At the same time my mother's hatred of the working class, to which most black people belong, is something she can be quite vocal about. She probably needed to keep stoking this collective hatred in order to escape the immigrant ghetto, although one would think that after so many years she would have loosened up a bit. Over the decades both parents have become very adept in the manipulation of liberal rhetoric; but nothing they've done has ever revealed any solidarity with its ideas .

One can tell quite a lot about the real political beliefs of people from their personal relations. The least ingratiating traits of both parents come out in the practice of a form of collective vilification. They will gang up on anybody, family, friends, strangers, who is naive enough to express faith, support or belief for any cause. In the company of a devout Catholic they will loudly denigrate Catholicism. Expressing belief in any religion at all brings out volleys of rant against all religions. For a few years my sister Carol saw meaning and value in celebrating the Passover with a seder. My mother rather liked this: it gave her a platform from which to hurl her niggling sarcasms. In fact, my parents did espouse a religion of sorts: the religion of misanthropy

Likewise for the expression of political beliefs. During the time that I was very active in the anti-war movement my father would bluster hurtful diatribes against the god-damned pacifists. They themselves have never done as much as join a single protest march for anything; they may sign a petition once in awhile.

My mother also enjoyed poisoning our minds against our friends. In 1992 I was introduced to some relatives living in California. Visiting with my parents a few months later I made the mistake of mentioning that we'd taken a liking to each other. This prompted a host of negative reflections. Inevitably she mocked a present which one of these relations had sent her, evidence of her lack and taste and general stupidity. As this failed to impress me, she started calling her a whore. I was so disgusted by this whole business that, when the relative mounted a 'pastry-cake' wedding later that year and invited my mother to give away the bride, I wrote to her suggesting that she might want to chose someone more suitably. My mother was invited anyway and, by all the evidences, piled on the sugar,sweetness and light appropriate to this classical scenario of marital blackmail.My mother could have been told , ( but wasn't, of course), that I knew much more about whores than she did and that they were not at all like her pejorative image of them.

It is deeply wounding to the souls of children to find the expression of all cherished belief ripped to tatters beneath grime-incrusted fingernails. My two sisters and I suffered grievous psychological damage from this blood-sport of theirs. It made its contribution unquestionably, to the succession of nervous breakdowns and psychotic episodes suffered by me between the ages of 18 and 30, with a brief relapse , of minor severity, in France in 1988.

Our new home was a small estate of a few acres, bordered on the right by a great field, at the edge of an enclave of half a square mile or so named Florida Park. The nearest town, only a few miles away, was Newtown Square , 25 miles out of Philadelphia on the West Chester turnpike.

In the same summer that our family was packing its bags to escape the black onslaught I found myself skipped from the 10th grade in Central High School into a program in graduate mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. The discipline of self-education, the rich endowment of a bi-millenial Jewish tradition, had persisted after our return from India. Self intruction had, by the second term of 10th grade given me a command of Trigonometry, Analytic Geometry, Calculus, Functional Analysis, Complex Variable, Fourier Analysis and the basics of Number Theory. Language studies were not so fortunate. My father had done his best to interest me in other languages, among them Spanish, Hebrew, Hindi, Tamil, even Norwegian. Neither aptitude nor inclination seem to be oriented in this direction.

More attention was given to the violin. The conductor of the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra recognized the presence of musical talent and persuaded my parents to enroll me at the school that had rejected Marian Anderson for reasons of race, the Settlement Music School. Coincidentally it was at the same time that her nephew , Jimmy dePriest, now an internationally acclaimed conductor , and I were enrolled at Central High.

Edgar Ortenberg was my violin teacher for about 3 years : a nice man, not a good teacher. To give him his due I would never have made it as a violinist. The discipline is lacking , my interests are too diverse. He might at least have corrected the bad habits inculcated in me by my father and grandfather, but he never did.

Despite whatever is said about me it is simply untrue that I've always rejected the normal way of the world: job, possessions, car, rent and mortgages, marriage, family, degrees, career ladders, tenure tracks. Repeated attempts to conform to the standard model via the proper channels have been made , to no avail. Time and again I find myself booted into the ditch. Nor has overt defiance , other than broadening my horizons , done much more for me , having led to asylums, jails, shelters, the highways and the streets. Wide experience in many environments has however resulted in the accumulation of an arsenal of urban guerrilla tactics that has won the admiration of many persons committed to lives of internal exile.

I already knew at age 15 that one ought to prepare oneself for the job market. The summer of 1954 was passed operating a desk calculator at the Johnson Foundation for Biophysics and Biochemistry. In 1954 its labs were located inside the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. It moved to a building of its own sometime in the 60's. Britton Chance was its director. Chance was my first encounter with a certain kind of bullying autocrat not infrequently to be met with in the world of science. He was nice enough to me: I was just a bright high school kid, happy to work for next to nothing. I didn't know any better. Because it was indeed my first real job in science, the arrangement was satisfactory . There was also little danger of my ever doing the kind of research that might arouse the temptation, to which he so often yielded, of having it published under his own name. Not everyone hated him but few praised his virtues, the most virulent outcries against him coming from the lab assistants whom he treated like unwashed coolies.

At the Johnson Foundation one could rub shoulders with biologists, chemists, physicists, crystallographers, electrical engineers, computer scientists. This environment encouraged my mathematics studies and it was inevitable that a visit to Penn's math department would be made to ask for assistance in certain problems I was having in Fourier Analysis. The secretaries directed me to the office of Dr. Anderson, a topologist. Impressed by my youth and ability Anderson decided, rather too quickly, that the gods had dropped a prodigy into their province . Within a few days he'd organized a faculty committee to get me out of Central High and into a graduate program in mathematics.

University of Pennsylvania, Age 16

Four factors facilitated this:

  1. My father had been associated with Penn since the 30's. If he did not yet have tenure, it would not be long in coming. This put him, and his family, within the orbits of the Old Boy's Clubs.

  2. Children of faculty members were entitled to free tuition.

  3. Penn's math department during the 50's contained a fair number of distinguished European refugee scientists, many of them Jewish: Dr. Schoenberg,( related to the composer); his brother-in-law Dr. Hans Rademacher, married to his sister , a pianist; Dr. Emil Grosswald, number theorist; Dr. Pincus Schub, a rabbi and mathematical historian. These scholars were products of a different tradition, one that in many ways would have been better suited to me.

    The situation has no doubt altered in recent times, but the classical European university did not emulate the rat race, nor put students on assembly lines, nor dedicate itself to the mass production of certificates and degrees. While it is true that the lycée and the Gymnasium are much stricter than our high schools, it was understood in European culture that one's college years were best employed in the assimilation, at a reasonable pace, of the accumulated knowledge of the civilization. Classroom attendance was not required , graduation was dependent solely on passing final exams. It was not a disgrace to fail: examinations could be taken over again, several times if necessary.

    This system seems to work well for individuals with some special ability who, like myself , do not respond well to classroom routine. Einstein would never have made it in our system. Nor Goethe. Nor Shelley. Nor Shakespeare, Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart, Maupassant, Poe, van Gogh, Emily Dickinson.......

    When these refugee scholars took the decision to enroll me at age 16 into a hybrid curriculum of graduate courses in mathematics, and undergraduate courses in all other subjects, they worked under the assumption that this would give me the opportunity to attend lectures at the level of my mathematical knowledge and ability. They did not anticipate that I would be forced onto the treadmill of what commonly passes for 'graduate school' in America.

  4. Mass consciousness in America was still basking in the penumbra of McCarthyism. Cold War hysteria ran deep. Technological and scientific supremacy over the Soviet Union continued to be the paramount concerns of the Eisenhower administration. The Russians exploded a prototype H-bomb in August, 1953. A full thermonuclear bomb was tested in November, 1955 . All the sirens were ringing from Washington goading the universities to beef up their science programs, dig up geniuses wherever they could find them and enroll them in the holy cause of inventing yet more weaponry of Armageddon to throw at Godless Communism.
The story of my undergraduate years at Penn, which began in 1954 and were not completed until 1963, has been savagely depicted in my novel, Getting That Meal Ticket , published by Editions Rene Julliard in 1972 under the title, Je Suis Trop Intelligente, Moi!

Prize of the Class of 1880

I acquitted myself well in my freshman year, taking 3 graduate courses in mathematics , undergraduate courses in 1st year German, English composition and French literature, with an elective in Anthropology. My only poor grade was in English composition. There is a special irony in this, for in less than two years I would accept no future for me other than that of a writer. It's not all that difficult to understand: it has always been my way to be indolent and mediocre in subjects which do not directly relate to my focus of interest , while being fired up with zeal towards those that do. Writing well meant absolutely nothing to me in 1954, a failing shared with many scientists, as anyone can readily see by inspecting the prose of any science journal.

Yet, even as I was preparing myself, responsibly , for what was believed to be my future calling , the seeds of its demise had been sown years before, to arise soon enough in the fullness of time. One must go back to the year in India , to the first of the religious crises that were to grow steadily in power to my 20th year, when they found some expression in the earliest short stories I 've considered worth saving. Such experiences included:

A mother dreams of her son's career

My first creative period , remarkable for its stamina and the quality of its inspiration, now began . To it I brought that single-minded intensity always given to whatever happens to be in my focus of interest. Arising early, I sometimes had breakfast with my grandmother before taking the #42 bus out to the University of Pennsylvania . Sitting in the smoking alcove under the great iron staircase of the university library , I put in 10 to 12 hours days , combining writing with reading of works of literature relevant to my projects. From this time date my first short stories, poetry, and essays.

One day each week Dr. David received me at his office for indoctrination into that lurid mausoleum of gloomy superstitions, the psycho-analytic Weltanschaung rooted, like all ideologies, in total contempt for the scientific method . His ideas were worthless , his intentions somewhat better. It did help me that some kind of professional earpiece was being paid to worry about me. Exposure to the beliefs of his cult got me interested in the history of psychology and psychiatry , an interest which has over the years been translated into numerous essays and works of fiction.

Someone along the line, during one of our sessions, David gave me a long lecture to the effect that the heavens themselves did weep when I decided to waste my life by leaving mathematics. This was at a time when every salvageable second was being given over to literary activity. I imagined that sooner or later he'd be telling me that Edward Teller was God's anointed prophet.

Reading was systematic and voracious : the Greek myths, most of the plays of the Greek tragedians ,Theocratius, Virgil, Hesiod, Spenser , Shakespeare , Dickens, Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Sir James Frazer, William James, Michelet, Claudel, Cocteau, Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Wordsworth....

I did no mathematics: apart from isolated instances in 1964 and 1969, no real energy would be devoted to mathematics study and research until the 1980's . The research projects begun at that time have yielded their valuable harvest and are still on-going . What has spurred me into this activity is an irritation, that eventually became intolerable, towards literary people who denigrate science while understanding nothing about it. It appears that I am not a bad mathematician. The wild sightings of an Unidentified Flying Prodigy ( In hindsight I think they believed me to be another Erdos, which is emphatically not the case - thank the many Gods! ) must be put down to the acid trips of swivel-chaired sages.

In the summer of 1959, in pursuit of a female flame I'd been attracted to a few years earlier , I returned to Woods Hole . Dr. David had given his approval: as a general rule psychiatrists think that finding ' a relationship' is a cure for most psychic ills. Her family actually put me up for awhile. We parted good friends though, as is so often the case, we didn't exchange more than a dozen words the whole time I was there.

My vocation as a writer now established, it would never be relinquished: Painting , Mathematics, Music , Politics , Physics , all of these have come and gone, with the irregularity of chaotic weather patterns , infecting me with strong, though temporary, enthusiasms before fading away, often to the keen disappointment of myself and others. Only towards Letters have I maintained fidelity , turning out compositions in every genre from some profound underground source : stories, novels, theatre, poetry , essays , writings on science, history, music, politics, travel...

From Woods Hole I went to Cambridge. Ideas about the structure of unconscious thought processes, originating in my recent experiences and my reading in Philadelphia were further developed there. These emphasized the phases of the adjustment mechanism in situations of emotional stress . The results of this research were gathered up in two large essays: Hypnosis and Reality and Life and Life Energy . Hypnosis and Reality dealt with fixation, shock and trance. Its observations were scattered and the manuscript has not survived. Life and Life Energy has gone through several revisions , and a new one is contemplated for the coming year.

I lived in student rooming houses in North Cambridge. There was adventure in coasting along on a variety of unskilled jobs, dishwasher, factory worker, department and bookstore clerk, museum attendant . These jobs were in Greater Boston and its suburbs. My free time was spent writing , in my room, along the banks of the Charles , in the poetry room of the Lamont Library , or in the great reading room of the Widener Library , both at Harvard . There was always some friction in my dealings with the academic community: If I wasn't a student then what were my career goals? If a student , why wasn't I taking courses ? The suggestion that scholars in English, Musicology or Art History draw fat incomes for their mediocre commentaries on the productions of artists who suffered great hardships to create them , cut no slack here. My work wasn't serious and that was the end of it .

In 1959 I worked briefly for a company in Cambridge that handled research contracts from the Air Force . The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was used as reference. WHOI sent back a recommendation stating that Roy Lisker was a bright researcher but had "serious problems with immaturity" ! One of the job requirements was a Top Secret security clearance ; the FBI dispatched its agents all over the map to uncover traces of past subversive activities . Within a few years later these would be on the front pages of all the newspapers , but at that time my record was clean. I didn't make it through the security clearance process. My letter of resignation written after a month on the job stated that I would never again engage in weapons research.

Family turmoil, unhappy love attachments, poverty, lack of recognition and overt hostility took their toll. In the spring of 1960 I spent a week on a retreat at the Trappist Monastery in Spencer, Massachussetts. The monks treated me very well and I was grateful to them , but what I saw of monastic religious life did not impress me. There were admirable people among the monks , but my overall was impression that they were covering over the storehouse of neuroses we all carry about with us by with a punitively ascetic lifestyle that left them unrecognized and untreated.

About a month later a Theravada Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka on fellowship at the Harvard Center for World Religions, granted me an interview in the Widener Library. It quickly became apparent that he'd been sent from Asia's monasteries to the West to expose to us our true character as antediluvian throwbacks . In a dialogue of about an hour , filled with all the intensity of my history of religious crises, I was shown the utter barrenness of Western religion and psychology , the full extent of my own moral corruption , and given convinced evidence of the scientific validity of Theravada Buddhism. It was brought home to me with irresistible force that a life in the pursuit of truth demands the highest standards of chastity, non-attachment and non-violence. That I have so often failed to live up to these high standards does not mean that I don't believe in them. My own experience could now verify the observation made by the great mystics , to the effect that the spiritual light is excruciatingly painful to those whose eyes are not used to it.

Perhaps I should , then and there, have sought admission in some Buddhist monastery. My feeling is , for those of us who have not had the misfortune to be a victim of its hideous wars, that the 20th century is just too thrilling a time in human history to be stuck in a monastery. The feeling that I'm missing something in science, art, travel, adventure , the exercise of the intellect or the imagination is always present in me : a seminar , the delight of a new musical language, an Ibsen play, some avant-garde extravaganza in the Village, a new idea for a book or country yet unvisited, a conference in cosmology , or some political demonstration against an increasingly criminal government.

Then , too, a sense of responsibility towards 40 years of accumulated manuscripts, almost all of them unpublished, together with the pressures of ongoing projects make it very unlikely that I will be withdrawing from the world to concentrate on the attainment of that Enlightenment in which I firmly believe.

There was much to absorb one's energies in Cambridge. It must have been some sense of obligation towards the past that caused me to return to Philadelphia in the fall of 1960. I stayed close to home: my room in a slum apartment building at 11th and Spruce was around the corner from my grandparents. There were odd jobs to be had, some teaching in a remedial preparatory school down the street, a brief but interesting experiment with a literary newspaper. Journals recorded the life of the district. Communication, for better or worse, was reopened with the parents out in the suburbs, whom I visited from time to time. The central project of this period was a large novel , Chronicles of Nin , about an anti-Utopia whose class structure is determined by longevity. This book would have important consequences for me in the near future.

That fall I applied for re-admission to the University of Pennsylvania. In my judgment , this was my greatest single career miscalculation. My professional ambitions were no longer of the sort that are well served by a university. I crushed my developing talent and knowledge of the world with another 2 years of painfully irrelevant courses, merely from a shabby desire to normalize my situation relative to my family, society, and the ostensible job market.

Continuing as a math major had the advantage that no more courses in mathematics would be required. Rebellion marked every day of my re-entry into the system. In the first term of my junior year I got in trouble right away by objecting to a translation assignment in 2nd year German because of its silliness, The teacher was an old-fashioned Prussian and his remedy was simple: translate or flunk, so I gave in . Then I complained to the biology department about certain experiments because of their overtones of animal cruelty. They absolved me of biology lab with the understanding that I couldn't get a higher grade than a C. Upbraided a psychologist for his research on drug addiction using dogs almost led to my arrest. My one effective act of academic civil disobedience was walking out of a creative writing class given by a Dr. Haviland. The class had waited with mounting impatience as he loaded us down with a tedious yarn about how he published his first story in the Saturday Evening Post. Snickers and boos accompanied my exit ; but no-one has ever confused Penn with Berkeley.

I remain unapologetic of my gesture. A few months later the novelist Kay Boyle became writer-in-residence for the year. She was so smitten with the novel that she pulled strings to get me a full scholarship for the summer of 1962 at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. At that time I was the youngest person ever to spend a summer at MacDowell. My cabin had been occupied the year before by James Baldwin. She also arranged for Chronicles to be sent to Harding Lemay ,an editor at Alfred Knopf.

Haviland was soon to be mortified once again. Through the grapevine learned that Kay was telling people at faculty receptions that, were she the president of the university she would make Roy Lisker the chairman of the English department!

So I broke the scale twice : first as a "mathematics prodigy", then as a "brilliant young writer" ! At the same time I racked up what may well be the worst college transcript in the entire history of the University of Pennsylvania.

Some of the time at the MacDowell Colony was spent making revisions of the novel. More valuable for my future development were innovative experiments with poetry, chant , New Novel techniques and serial techniques from music. Several distinguished composers were staying at MacDowell that year,Louise Talma, Nikolai Lopatnikov, Larry Austin, Bob Lombardi and Leonard Bernstein among them , and their example encouraged me , once again, to study Composition.

The novel was submitted to Alfred Knopf in 1963 and rejected. It was revised in 1970 in France and re-submitted to several publishers, including Gallimard. They all turned it down. Gallimard's editors were kind enough to send along a letter in which little space was wasted in telling me what was wrong with it. The book was put aside until just a few years ago. Re-reading it in 1995 I immediately discovered , that although the underlying conception is solid and there is a well developed story , the writing itself is unbelievably bad: monotonous, repetitive, banal, replete with clichés, howlers, digressions, trivia . There must in fact have been a pronounced deterioration in my literary standards between 1959 and 1962 . The stories and essays of 1958 evidence much more competence and craft. So much for the miracles of prodigious youth! I'm re-writing the novel : Hercules would not trade places with me.

At some point in 1962, my father and mother called me out to Newtown Square for a consultation. My mother informed me that unless I became an education major and picked up the credits for teaching primary school, they would refuse to send any more money to support me while living at my grandmother's. When I objected, she screamed that mathematics had been my only ticket to a career,and that I was useless for anything else. I dumbfounded them to saying that I intended to major in Comparative Religion. In fact, I continued the math major because I didn't have to take any more course material in that subject.

Heartsick and bitter, I stayed away from my matriculation ceremonies in the fall of 1963 . Friends later told me that my name had been singled out for special mention. The University of Pennsylvania is a paleontological fossil , not psychotic like Yale nor a rich man's club like Princeton, yet with none of the intellectual life of Cambridge nor the radicalism of Berkeley. It isn't necessary to chronicle all the absurdities of my long undergraduate career in this document . They are comprehensively pilloried in Getting That Meal Ticket.

My animosity may be misplaced. The administrators guiding my unique trajectory probably realized that Penn, a conservative hothouse geared to the shopping lists of the corporate world, was not the right kind of place for a bright kid who just needed a bit of time and space to dream about everything from Tensor Analysis to The Magic Mountain for 8 years.

Another 6 months lingering in West Philadelphia , tutoring and studying math , auditing a course in music improvisation given by George Rochberg. Then back to Cambridge ; I was still going back and forth between places familiar to me , and at that time there weren't very many . My preferred company was that of runaways , street people and drug addicts. Political activism being very much in the air I became involved with the civil rights and anti-war movements. September of 1965 saw me living in New York for the first time , working with the major antiwar groups with headquarters at 5 Beekman Street : War Resisters League (WRL) , Committee for Non-Violent Action(CNVA) , Fellowship of Reconciliation(FOR) , NY Workshop in Non-Violence(WIN) , Catholic Worker(CW) , Student Peace Union)(SPU) , and others.

Left to Right: Tom Cornell, Marc Edelman, myself, David McReynolds. At the far end to the right, AJ Muste

On November 6th, 1965 , in a demonstration in Union Square that made international headlines, activists Jim Wilson, Tom Cornell, Mark Edelman, David McReynolds, and I burned our draft cards . Photographs and articles of the event filled the front pages of all the New York dailies and many other papers across the nation. Our defense team was put together by the ACLU. Its lawyers advanced the argument that burning a piece of federal pasteboard worth about $0.25 was a form of "symbolic free speech" protected by the First Amendment. Hearings went on through 1966 and into 1967. The case against David McReynolds was dropped. The rest of us were given 6 month sentences in federal penitentiaries.

The appeals dragged on another year, by which time I'd gotten tired of waiting and went off to France. Although a New York state circuit court reversed the judgment handed down in the city, the Supreme Court thought the whole matter a waste of its time and refused to consider it. In consequence there is now a precedent for arguing that symbolic free speech is not protected by the First Amendment. This may be a bad thing if and when the Bread and Puppet Theatre ever get into trouble. It also means that the Congressional zealots of flag-burning amendments continue to have a free hand.

The remainder of that year in New York was divided between political organizing and the study of musical composition. So much time was invested in studying music and going to concerts that I was evicted from my hovel on the Lower East Side for non-payment of rent. The Catholic Worker gave me a room in one of its buildings near its soup kitchen in the Bowery on Chrystie Street. The summer of 1966 found me in London, Ontario , working on the translation of a former German soldier's memoir about his years in a Siberian prison camp.

New York had not agreed with me, and in fact I've always been unhappy there. This failure to meet a crucial requirement for success in the arts in America has all but guaranteed my elimination through natural selection: one has to like living in New York.

My next stop after London, Canada was Philadelphia's black South Street ghetto and the political groups and activists located there. There was enough to occupy me over the next year : (1) A seminar series on the epistemology of physics ,given under the auspices of a Marxist 'Free University' using the classrooms of Penn ; (2) Another series on the history of psychiatry; and (3) a lecture sponsored by the Ethical Culture Society on the French New Novel. I studied ear-training and continued to compose. Political involvements continued, though on a modest scale in comparison to New York.

For two years I was involved in setting up and running the "Angry Arts Against the War" exhibitions and performances. In the first I submitted some Sumi-brush paintings to an exhibition. Nothing remarkable: they combined vague figures with a kind of hieroglyphic alphabet I'd been developing .

My mother visited the exhibition. Jealous and angry that she could not hang her paintings in a show which was distasteful to her politics, while her obviously amateur son had the connections to do so, she confronted me in her house at 22nd and Spruce. After berating the work itself ( which made no claims of professionalism), she reflected, her voice rising to a scream, that I was on my way to becoming the most intelligent bum in Philadelphia.

France 1968-72

Parisian Photo-ID's
(i)American Center for Artists and Students
(ii)Carte de Sejour
(iii)Library Card

A brief visit to Montreal in the winter of 1967 inspired me to go to France. It was my home for the next four and a half years, together with trips to Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Austria, England, and , through the fall and winter of 1969 , Dublin Ireland. Travels within included Normandy, Burgundy, Alsace, the Bourbonnais, Provence, the Cote d'Azur and the Rousillon. It remains true up to the present moment that France is the only place where I've known a true literary career. As all my activities there have had important consequences , they will be described in 6 categories: Jobs; Street Crafts; Studies; Politics; Love Life; Publications

  1. Jobs: My best energies have always been reserved for creative work and I tend to short-change my employers. In my defense , almost all of this creative output has been produced with little hope of remuneration. It's not clear which is the more to blame, myself or the economy, but so long as the arts continue to be dislocated from the principal cascades of the society's waterfalls , there is not likely to be any improvement.

    Yet the excitement of living in a foreign county that has been the world capital of arts and letters for 3 centuries. raised my zest for living to a high pitch , with consequences both good and bad, and I really was willing to work at just about anything. In April , 1968 a Catholic agricultural school in Pierrefonds, near Compiègne hired me to teach English. My subversive activities and abrupt dismissal from this job at the height of the student uprisings in May, 1968, became the subject of an ARTICLE given to Les Temps Modernes in 1970.

    By July work had been found as a dialogue coach for actors who needed to speak English in French movies. My employer was Maya Films, run by a colorful Franco-American called Henri Lange. These jobs took me to Spain, Belgium and locations all over France - consult the sizzling Film Diary from Ainay-le-Chateau. The scripts were all low mentality gangster movies with some pretensions to being avant-garde art. The loose mores of the cinema world demoralized me ; not, as one might think, for their license, but for their stupidity. There came a point in fact in which it seemed as if my mental equilibrium would be threatened by continuing to work for the film companies. I quit at a time when I owed a month's rent in my hotel and had no other source of income.

    There was lots of literary hack-work: translations of advertising brochures, dust jackets, cinema reviews, textbooks, even some physics papers. Traveling through Burgundy one could find part-time unskilled labor jobs , weed picking , harvesting grapes, unloading produce at markets and so on. People helped me out, and there never was a time when I risked being locked out on the street or did not have a roof over my head.

  2. Street Crafts: I began by manufacturing beaded bracelets which I sold in cafés . Then I realized that with a plastic soprano recorder one could make enough money playing on the Boulevard St. Germain to cover one's hotel rent. Cheap hotels were still to be found then in the Latin Quarter. My room in the Hotel du Luxembourg on the rue Royer-Collard near the Luxemburg Gardens, cost 13 francs, (about $2.60 ) a night.

    Attempts to sell La Quinzaine Litteraire and Jeune Afrique on the boulevards of the Latin Quarter ended in failure. On the other hand, an experiment conducted during the time of the student uprisings in May was so successful that it frightened me. I'd submitted the notes of my Philadelphia physics lectures to the Que Sais-Je series, ( popular educational books), a division of Les Presses Universitaires with offices on the Boulevard St. Germain. Soon after the manuscript's rejection by the house, I took it with me down to the boulevard, together with a piece of posterboard stating that I was a philosophy student forced to live on the streets because Que Sais-Je had rejected my manuscript. I squatted down beside the wall of the publishing house and solicited donations. The demonstration lasted 3 hours and made about $60. One could see by the antics of persons standing behind the grill covering the entranceway that my presence was causing a disturbance in the house. Hanging out much longer would probably have gotten me arrested, so after awhile I left and did not return for a repeat performance. The French cops were not known for their gentleness at that time, or at any other time. The story gains added impact when one considers the stuffiness of so many Que Sais-Je texts.

    Street music turned into a major source of income and a valuable vehicle for all future travels : recorder, guitar, voice, violin. With basic technique acquired from violin studies, I taught myself classical guitar. In 1959 I arranged 50 folk songs for voice and guitar, composed about a dozen others, and wrote numerous etudes, some of which were published by Editions Max Eschig in 1972 in a collection entitled Treize Etudes Pour Guitare . My expenses during the Avignon Theatre Festival in the summer of 1970 were covered by violin and guitar performances in the public squares.

  3. Studies: Putting together my notes for the physics course at the Free University had resulted in two research papers. These were shown to the French philosopher of science, Costa de Beauregard. He read them and arranged for my enrollment at the Institute Poincaré , the theoretical physics institute at the Sorbonne. Its programs in relativity and quantum theory were excellent , and I greatly appreciated deBeauregard's efforts on my behalf. France was then giving me the only literary career I've ever known, and there was no time for serious study of physics; yet much of what I learned would be of value to me in the research of the 1980's. I also studied French literature, audited a course given by Roland Barthes and, as mentioned, worked at composition and guitar.

  4. Politics: The US government thought that I had no business being in France at all . My sentence had been sustained by the Supreme Court in May. Mark Karpatkin of the ACLU sent a letter to my address in the Latin Quarter instructing me to show up at the federal courthouse in Foley Square on a certain date . Because of the general strike spontaneously generated in solidarity with the student demonstrations , the letter didn't get to me until July. It was read, and put aside: it was not the right time to order me home. I could see no potential in my country for my professional goals . I still don't.

    The Events of May 1968 rather turned me off. The Maoist leaders who led them had been inspired by the 'glories' of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. There is little doubt in my mind that if they had gotten their way, France would have suffered through some comparable orgy of atavistic devastation. One hesitates to call such leaders as Danny Cohn-Bendit and Alain Geismar embroyonic Pol Pots, although the exploits of the gauchistes who continued in their footsteps over the next decade were consistent with this projection.

    A few demonstrations brought me down to the streets and into the marches , notably those protesting police brutality . The organizations I'd worked with in the United States were all anarchist, civil rights oriented, and pacifist. We viewed Trotskyist or Maoist groups such as Progressive Labor, the Militant Labor Forum, the Spartacists and others , as disruptive, foolish and dangerous. Yet it was organizations of this persuasion that were at the head of the French student movement.

  5. Love Life: From ages 14 to about 30, with a few exceptions, the characteristic response mode to all of my romantic aspirations was rejection. Personal anguish reached its lowest depths during last two years and college and final year in Philadelphia, between 1962 and 1964 . Some of these attachments were quite strong; each turned out to be more hopeless than the previous. It seemed as if all that women were eager to share with me was their hostility, or at best their indifference. This unvarying pattern became a cause for acute mental and psychological distress, affecting my happiness, my self-esteem and the simple desire to go on living.

    Granted that , from the cradle , we all imbibe via popular culture an obscene lactose of ignorant prejudices, banal and even vicious stereotypes, and unhealthy attitudes and assumptions in all matters having to do with relations between the sexes. Beyond these there sexists a standard of normal expectations that most of us imagine essential to our fulfillment. Buddhist beliefs advised me that sexual involvements weren't worth anything anyway , yet I could not help but feel myself unwanted, humiliated and despised.

    Literally from the first week of my residence in France I encountered a complete reversal of the situation that had come to be considered paradigmatic. It turns out that men like myself are very popular among French women , and it was not long before there were more complications involving girlfriends than I knew how to deal with . Between 1968 and 1972 , in addition to a diverse assortment of one-night stands, there were 4 serious love- affairs : a French housemaid; a college student in Dijon; an Australian globe-trotting prostitute who lived with me briefly on the Cote d'Azur; and the French- Canadian woman who in 1971 became my fiancee , Geneviève Manseau. What had begun as a welcome change of scene degenerated within a few years into a irresponsible degraded promiscuity. In 1969 I began going to prostitutes, altogether about 20 of them in 4 European cities. It is hardly surprising that this mode of existence led straight to the mental hospitals in 1974 .

    I have since wondered if my pathetic fidelity, often for years, to hopeless relationships, whose only gratification lay in the sense of moral superiority that accompanies unjustified rejection, and the exaggeration of my lecherous conduct once given the opportunity , were not the electron and positron of the same particle singlet. It may be that my habitual pseudo-asceticism came from the puritanical chill of my second household, while the demented hedonism that manifested itself there had its origins in my early childhood as the indulged darling of mother, grandmother and aunt.

    The love-affairs and the casual café pick-ups were voluntary , in some sense of the word, but when it comes to prostitution one touches on the domain of a particularly hideous crime, and I cannot now believe that I could have freely contributed to an industry so destructive of body and soul to so many people. It is my conviction today that , if there is a chance of 1 in a million that such behavior under these circumstances might lead to the death of an infant abandoned in some dark alleyway, then one may be charged with the intention of bringing about that result . Stupidity is not a defense against the consequences which one has been too stupid to envisage.

    But growing to maturity is always done at the expense of other people. The accumulated poison of years of rejection must have blunted some moral sense present in a healthy mind. Given the chance to show myself as base as those I condemned, I took it. Be that as it may, it is still true that all I've ever sought in my romantic involvements is the same dull banality cherished by every other bourgeois: home, family, job, place in society. This simple ambition , along with most others , has been consistently denied me.

  6. Publications: Soon after my arrival in Paris I was invited to stay in the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore as a guest of its owner, George Whitman. These two weeks were used to visit the offices of Les Temps Modernes , the magazine then edited by Jean-Paul Sartre , Simone de Beauvoir, Claude Lanzmann and Andre Gorz . The first article I gave them , an exercise in New Left rant, was rejected; the second , which was accepted, was a long description of the New York anti-war movement . Although it paid little, Les Temps Modernes was the most prestigious magazine in France at the time . Between 1968 and 1979 it brought out 4 articles of mine. The last , on the Einstein Centennial Symposium in March, 1979 at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, was mailed to them from the United States.

    As mentioned, Editions Max Eschig brought out my guitar studies in 1972. Having tried without success to interest European publishers in my earlier writing , I wrote 3 novels between 1968 and 1971. The first , given my new perspective on life, was pornographic and was eventually destroyed. The second Harvest of Chains centers around the milieus of the visual artists of Dublin in the 70's. Getting That Meal Ticket is a savage farce based on my college career at Penn. It was presented to a sympathetic editor, Anne Rives at Editions René Julliard . Meal Ticket aroused so much enthusiasm in the house that it went through 12 preliminary readings by different editors. It was therefore decided that since they couldn't make up their minds they might as well go ahead and publish it. Thi entailed breaking with the standard policy of Julliard , never to publish a book written in a foreign language which had not been previously published in that language. They gave it to one of the best literary translators in France, Marie Roucayrol, known for her translations of James Jones, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer and others. By the time the novel finally appeared in the fall of 1972, under the title Je Suis Trop Intelligente, Moi! , I was cooling my heels in the penitentiary at Allenwood, Pa. , serving my 6-month sentence for draft card immolation.

    Lesser publications at this time included articles and book reviews in Dublin magazines, 2 articles in an English travel magazine, translations of film scripts, among them Robbe-Grillet's "Project for a Revolution in New York" and Luis Bunuel's adaptation of Matthew Gregory Lewis' classic novel, "The Monk". Other writings of this period include 2 film scripts , many short stories, and journals . Musical composition , intensively pursued in France, died away, as "drowsy tinklings lull the distant fold", a few years after my return to the US. I have never understood the strange connections between music, poetry and prose in the evolution of my creative opus.

This completes the survey of the major developments of my first half-decade in Paris. It will now be necessary to back-track a bit in order to lead into my return to the United States ,August 1972 . Geneviève Manseau and I met in Paris in the fall of 1971. She'd married a French husband, Jean-Pierre, a few years before in Montreal , then returned with him to France. Jean-Pierre was quite far out on the pathological spectrum; his mounting crescendo of physical and psychological violence towards her forced her to flee and take refuge in a Catholic women's residence. At the time that we met she had already begun the complex process of filing for divorce. This is very difficult for women in France , where the Napoleanic code still weighs heavily against them.

Genevieve Manseau, circa 1972

Aiding her case considerably was the fact that Jean-Pierre had done something that even the French deem unspeakably caddish: entering a suit against her for adultery . Under archaic laws women can be sent to jail for this offense. The punishment for men is a small fine. The law is so ridiculous that it is almost never invoked. The offending couple must be caught in flagranto delecti by two impartial witnesses. ( Guy de Maupassant gives us such a scene in Bel-Ami with the specific intention of underscoring the total rottenness of his villain. ) Needless to say, Jean-Pierre never did find a way to get the evidence.

She was, and is, a sensitive, generous woman with a love for letters and music, strong political convictions, a Russophile, outwardly secular but Catholic under duress . Although she was still officially married , we became engaged.

Following negotiations with the ACLU and the FBI , I flew to JFK Airport in the summer of 1972 and, by pre-arrangement, was arrested. The FBI gave me 24 hours in which to put my affairs in order, and I surrendered myself at the Foley Square courthouse the next day. The holding cell in which they place me held a soft-spoken, educated individual who'd paid an FBI informer to assassinate Nixon. Then I was transferred to the old West Street jail where my sister Carol , who had just broken up with her first husband and was living in New York, paid a visit. They shipped me to Danbury Penitentiary, soon to attain the media limelight because of Watergate, a month later.

The celebrité du jour was Phillip Berrigan. He'd organized the dozen or so anti-war activists doing time there, and I fit right in . Soon enough the government dispersed us to different institutions . I was sent to Allenwood Penitentiary , near Williamsport, Pa. My fellow inmates there included several Quakers , Jehovah's Witnesses and others convicted of war resistance; also Clifford Irving, Ralph Ginzburg, Carmine DeSapio, and Roger Delouette, a UN diplomat doing 5 years for his role in the French Connection. Being the only inmate fluent in French, we carried on long conversations from which I learned many details of Castro's Cuba and the drug-running operations of the French secret services.

Geneviève came out to Williamsport and found work as a governess and house-keeper. Allenwood is a minimum security prison , and she was allowed to come to see me several times a week. To the consternation of the Jehovah's Witnesses, she tended to be demonstrative in her expressions of affection. The time passed at Allenwood composing music, practicing guitar, and singing with a black gospel group that was allowed off the grounds on Sundays to perform in the nearby black Baptist churches.

Upon my release in January of 1973 Geneviève and I went to Philadelphia to spend a few days with my parents. Although the terrible fights of my late teens had had little effect on them, my activities as a war resister shook them to the core. My mother outdid herself in the quantity and intensity of her outbursts of temper , screaming at everyone, us, my father, and even my grandmother now a very frail woman in her 80's , and Geneviève and I quickly left for Montreal. The crisis in my mother's behavior may have been caused either by the strain of dealing with her son's fiancée , or because my 6 months service in the name of a deeply felt political cause threatened her cynical disbelief in everything, more likely a combination of both.

Over the years my parents have explained to me many times what was really going on between the antiwar movement and myself . My mother's picture is that of a gullible young innocent being callously manipulated by the publicity-hungry lawyers of the ACLU. My step-father tells me that I wanted to spend some time inside a jail to collect material for my writing.

Geneviève 's divorce came through in 1973. She went back to France to attend the hearing, using the few weeks she was there to contact and visit mutual friends. By consensus, the judges concluded that Jean-Pierre's conduct had been so obnoxious that she was granted a divorce in the first sitting, Jean-Pierre being charged with the court costs.

In the 3 years that we were together Geneviève could not do enough for me. In France she had found me in deplorable mental and financial shape and rallied my spirits. She had walked me through every tedious bureaucratic procedure required to put my papers in order so that I could continue to reside in France as a political exile. She had helped me with all the details of arranging for my return. Montreal being her hometown, she used her connections with brothers and cousins everywhere to find me a job as a freelance radio programmer for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Even after we were estranged she found me a job as an organizer of seminars for the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme. She herself founded and managed the Quebec branch of Amnesty International.

My way of repaying her devotion was to take up with another woman whose moral worth , relative to hers , was like cheap tinsel to gold sterling , holding this rival up to her as a model of every virtue before walking out on her . A situation that was perhaps too protective had been exchanged for one that was hopeless, that is to say, something I was familiar with. This final mindless act of irresponsibility ( we might have broken up anyway; it was in the way it was done ) opened the door to my collapse into psychosis in September of 1974. My present feeling is that sensual desire and attraction cannot be a basis for human relationships, and I still cannot figure out what it is that holds marriages together. Then again, why do people keep smoking when they know it's killing them?

My work for the CBC was unexceptional. I was a beginner at radio journalism and did not stay with them for very long. I don't think I would have enjoyed being a radio journalist. There is that " hunger for the conspiracy " which is really silly, and inimical to the scientist in me that takes delight in the dispassionate examination of facts. In one way or another, it seems that every professional area of literary work has turned me off: academia, show business , movies, journalism, advertising. I don't know why I persist in it.

My new choice of girlfriend was also an American working for the English language division of Montreal CBC. We made the cosmic blunder of collaborating on a documentary about a day-long celebration of the accomplishments of Daniel Berrigan , then in residence at Montreal's Loyola College. She, I and the CBC became embroiled in a grand tragic-comic opera over this program. It was in the context of this quarrel that the classic symptoms of megalomania began to emerge in my behavior . I fought the producers of the CBC on every point, no matter how trivial. They, not realizing that I had gone mad, took me seriously. Some of these disputes were won , and resulted in an additional $1,000 for her and myself , payment for a program I never gave them. Although it is an article of my faith that it is almost always right to beard the capitalist beast , it should not be done at the price of your soul.

The ladyfriend expressed her gratitude by having me thrown in jail on trumped-up charges. The burlesque reached its pinnacle when I failed to show up in court. To be specific, she'd punched me full in the face then gone down to the police station to file a complaint against me for assault . The cops took me to jail for a day, then released me with a note giving the date of the court appearance and a warning to stay away from her. Which should indeed have been my own policy : she was poison. This being said, I do feel sorry for her and recognize that she was dealing, often courageously, with serious personal difficulties : ' serious problems with immaturity', as the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute would say.

A hitch-hiking journey the previous summer had taken me through New England, Toronto, Detroit and Chicago. For a month or so I'd worked as a peach picker on a farm in LaPorte, Indiana. In July of 1974 I returned to this job. It was there, as part of a team that included 3 saintly Mexican braceros that the last vestiges of my sanity were lost. Though able to make it back to Montreal, within 3 weeks of my return I was in a strait jacket, strapped to a bed in the psychiatric ward of the Montreal General Hospital. My parents were contacted and they brought me down to Philadelphia and put me into the Philadelphia Psychiatric Institute.

To relate , in detail, the story of my psychotic episode of July, 1974-July, 75, ( it lasted a year exactly ), would produce a fascinating document of several chapters all filled with incredible episodes. More pages would be needed than are being given to this entire memoir. Before it was over, I would go through 5 different hospitals. The climax to this was a hitch-hiking journey out to Pittsburgh in the dead of winter, coasting through flophouses and missions. Finally I ended up wandering through a small town called Beaver Falls, stranded, penniless , filthy and in rags. The owner of the local concession of Logos Books encountered me seated at a restaurant counter over a cup of coffee gotten through pan-handling. Before taking me down to the Beaver Falls mental hospital, a progressive institution by mental hospital standards , he made a call to my parents to ask them if they would send the money to put me on a bus back to Philadelphia. From my knowledge of their attitudes at the time, and its consistency with what this man told me, I've concluded that my mother gave him her standard lecture: that I was a man in my 30's who could look after himself and they were tired of throwing good money away on me. What do you do with damaged goods?

Hospitals around Pittsburgh kept me under observation for 2 months before returning me to halfway houses in Philadelphia. My parents did not meet me at the bus or make any attempt to find out where I was, nor offer any help with the difficulties life in the halfway houses. However , after I checked myself into the Philadelphia General Hospital they did make an attempt to visit me. By one of life's cruel ironies, because I'd asked for voluntary commitment , the doctor in charge of my case, a kid with a new MD , had diagnosed me as a mama's boy using mental hospitals as a refuge from the world. So he told them that I had told him I never wanted to see them again , and he told me that they had told him they never wanted to see me again! Because of the stupidity of this man we would be out of contact for 2 years.

After a month in another halfway house in University City, during which real improvements in my developing return to sanity occured , I boarded a bus to New York and, from there, to the communal farm of the Catholic Worker organization, then in Tivoli, New York. Although no- one had anticipated my coming, it was the natural place for me to go. My long convalescence there lasted 4 years.

Dorothy Day saw through the mental wreckage , recognized me as the antiwar activist of the 60's and used her personal authority to guarantee my right to live at the CW Farm. Given the frenzied infighting that characterized the organization in the last years of her life , this was essential to my stay there. In the late 70's the Catholic Worker filled up with serious mental cases , and most of the healthy minds were pressured out of the organization. This happened to me when I came back for a visit in 1981. The pathological cases made it clear to me that I was no longer welcome. Since the early '90's the CW farm, now in Marlboro, NY, has been under the charge of Tom Cornell, my old colleague of draft card burning days, and I've been out to visit them several times.

Daily life at the farm was a drowsy as an bottomless cup of Sleepytime tea. Through the accumulation of neuroleptic drugs injected into me over the past year I suffered from acute spasms that made it impossible to stay in any given posture for too long. These confined me to a chair in the front parlor for a few months , unable to do anything but read. To my surprise , an intensified diet of detective fiction was very helpful in re-establishing my connection with reality. The detective genre reduces society to an limited assortment of stick figures caught up briefly in stark dramas. Most of these novels were pulp; undemanding to both intellect and heart, they rekindled my interest in the surrounding world.

Yet restoration to mental health was not to be so simple: before my full recovery which didn't occur until the fall of 1976 , a number of wantonly destructive acts were committed : vandalizing a house and a bookstore ; defacing the interior of an apartment in Manhattan; robbing the places where I worked of money and merchandise, which I either used or resold; a variety of petty thefts ; episodic drunkenness ; and many other lesser infractions . My climb back to sanity seemed to require me to give full expression to the juvenile delinquent I might have become if I hadn't been discovered as a math prodigy. No excuses are made for this behavior. The door on this period in my life is shut. Some mistakes could be corrected and were. One can do no more than learn enough from such incidents not to repeat them. The destructive animus died away in late 1976 and has never returned.

By that time all of my traditional areas were being actively pursued : prose, poetry, mathematics and mathematical physics, musical composition and performance . A (relative to scale ) titanic struggle with the administration of Bard College in Annandale , NY , a few miles down the road filled up the years 1978 and 1979. We fought over education , racial integration, nuclear power and the responsibilities of a rich college to the depressed area in which it happens to be located. Its president , Leon Botstein, to whom the application of the term phony liberal is shameless flattery , certainly a hypocrite, more than likely just an upper yuppie class crook , had me thrown in the Dutchess Country Jail in Poughkeepsie 5 times.

In spite of these tedious (though sometimes life -threatening ) distractions I audited and completed courses in quantum theory, modern American theatre and musical performance, performed in the string orchestra directed by the gifted cellist, Luis Garcia-Renart, and organized the only political advocacy group on campus, the Nuclear Power Study Group. This gave my presence on the campus some outside support: the proliferation of nuclear power plants was a fear that in the mid-70's radiated through the Hudson Valley . A civil rights lawyer at Bronx Legal Services supported me in winning a lawsuit against the college . Under its terms I could not be denied access to the campus to attend federally funded events. This was a major victory : Bard was banning everyone in Dutchess County who didn't wear a suit or speak only when spoken to. Among the groups permanently banned from its grounds were the Catholic Worker, Reverend Moon's seminary in Barrytown, and the Amtrak crews repairing the tracks between Rhinecliff and Hudson. The fight with Bard was just the right thing for me at that time in my life: it provided an easily recognizable enemy, one not too evil, yet wicked enough to set the adrenaline flowing, reawaken my morale and bring me back to reality.

I returned once again to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1980 to begin a fruitful relationship with MIT. The worse that happened was a morning's incarceration and a limited ban of only one year: the charge against me was that I'd brought the offices of the Institute to a grinding halt for 24 hours. Details furnished on request! Yet MIT , as most of us realize who aren't connected with Bard , is bigger than Bard College. It has lots of smart people, less pretension, little provincialism and , in a few words , we worked out our differences. I was also banned from the New England Conservatory because I was picking up free-lance violin jobs from its bulletin boards, but friends on the faculty were able to get me reinstated in less than a week.

No institution is perfect, but the great universities and colleges of the Boston area are aware of the existence of a larger society. Bard College is a self-infatuated ship of fools. Despite my eagerness to court arrest by defending my right to be on its campus, I've been unable since 1981 to whip up any other purpose for going there .

Settled in Cambridge, the first of my newsletters , New Universe Weekly , now made its appearance. The name refers to the fact that Boston calls itself the new universe's hub . Its' subscribers were in and around Cambridge and at Harvard , MIT, Boston University, Brandeis, the New England Conservatory, and other schools and individuals in the wider catchment area. By the end of 1980 the subscription list held about 300 names, including a few paradigms like George Wald, E.O. Wilson, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Milton Babbitt , and Thomas Kuhn. Having so many subscribers in the schools was convenient because there were no mailing costs. Each week I dropped off the new issue in the departmental mailboxes. 70 issues were produced between 1980 and 1982 , few of them larger than 4 closely typed pages. The final issue however, a report on the Casals Music Festival of June, 1982 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, was over 40 double-spaced pages.

After Puerto Rico my next stop was Boulder, Colorado , to attend a Beatnik jamboree honoring the 25th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road". Returning to the East Coast I stayed with friends in New Paltz , New York.

Selling Ferment Press books
New Paltz bus station 1987

It was around then that the profitable association with Clare Danielsson, the director of a human services center in nearby Highland named Boughton Place, began . The center combines the state mediation offices for Ulster and Sullivan counties, a theatre for psychodrama studies and performances , a conference center, and rented apartments . This working relationship has held up well over 17 years. W e have had our differences, among them a serious rupture in 1990 that almost proved fatal to our friendship, but neither of us anticipate that such a situation will arise again.

Colorado Daily. June 1985

The summer of 1983 saw me back in Boulder once more. Several major science conferences were being hosted by Colorado University. For the International Congress of Mathematical Physicists (ICMP) I organized two seminars on social responsibility. The first raised embarrassing questions about the role of the physics community in the ongoing arms race. The second turned into a 3 hour workshop on behalf of Russian refusenik scientists .

The articles about the ICMP appeared in my new newsletter: Ferment. It has since become a monthly of 20 to 36 pages. From 1983 to the present I've produced about 160 issues. Its subscribers are found around the country, mostly in university towns. A lift to San Francisco , offered by 3 young ladies enrolled at the Naropa Institute , took me to San Francisco .

Berkeley, California 1983-87:There was to be no remission of the iron law whereby I can find almost no outlets for my work in my own country. Even so, the years at Berkeley constitute, to date, the most creative period of my whole career : issues of Ferment came out on a regular basis , poetry in many forms, short stories , notebooks and essays.

Performance Artist
San Franciso Dada Festival 1986

It was also my first period of sustained research in mathematics. Other activities in Berkeley included the study of mathematics, physics and violin, street performances of music and poetry, numerous radio appearances , energetic vagabonding through California from San Diego to Mount Lassen, and employment by the University of California as a reader for the mathematics and physics departments from 1985 to 1987.

Music in Sproul Plaza

Poetry in Sproul Plaza

The family of Harold and Shirley Raffill invited me to move in with them in 1985. They soon came to figure among my dearest friends.

Picnic lunch,1986.
Shirley Rafill is at the far right.
Many guests are members of the Berkeley mathematics department.

Harold died in 1994. Returning to Berkeley for a 4 month visit in the fall of 1996, I stayed with Shirley and their son, Tom.

A paper on the algebraic structure of causation written in 1984 became the basis of an invitation to the 11th General Relativity and Gravitation Conference in Stockholm, Sweden, in the summer of 1986. My savings from the reader job at UC Berkeley covered the round trip ticket and a Eurorail pass. All the other expenses of my travels around Europe were covered by violin playing on street corners in Paris, Cologne, Hamburg, Copenhagen and Stockholm.

Dinner Invitation, GRG11,1986

My repertoire was based on music transcribed from Music Minus One (MMO) records onto cassette tapes .These are recordings of accompaniments by piano or orchestra in which the solo part is missing. This repertoire grew, enormously , between 1985 and 1989 to include recital pieces for violin , flute and other treble instruments, opera arias , lieder , classical concertos by Bach, Telemann , Vivaldi, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn , standards like Humoresque and Brahms Hungarian dances , sonatas , serenades. Dozens and dozens of pieces, all from memory. It is a tragedy that my technique remains incurably mediocre . There are few things more depressing to me than the fact that my career as a 3rd rate street fiddler has been more successful than that of my writing , which has gone through so many creative phases, and in which I have invested years of labor. One must develop a sense of humor about these things , and there may even be some deep message is buried in these perverse economics. If I could but find it out !

My paper,Causal Algebras was presented at the GRG 11 in the form of a poster session.I then returned to Berkeley for the school year 1986-87.

Invitation from Evadne Mela (with plane ticket) to a party in
Sarasota, Florida 1987

In September, 1987 I went back to Boughton Place in August of 1987. The bus trip across the country was interrupted by a 5 day stay in Cincinnati to attend a conference on Fractals and Chaos given by Benoit Mandelbrot . This time the bureaucracy worked for, not against me : 6 months later I received a $300 travel reimbursement from the National Science Foundation . The money covered the cost of a round-trip ticket to Europe.

In April, 1988 I landed in Brussels, then went onto Holland to visit Dolf and Yos van Rede , friends made at GRG11. As usual, Paris was my ultimate destination. Dolf passed along some information that , a few months later, lead to two translation commissions from the scientific publishing house of Ellis Horwood, Ltd. in Chichester, England. The work was done in France.

Before taking up residence in Paris I searched out and befriended the very famous, reclusive, mentally unstable mathematician, Alexandre Grothendieck. Encouragement also came from another great French mathematician, René Thom. Knowing such people in the 50's might have kept me in mathematics. Perhaps; this may be like saying that the "butterfly" should have been content with its cocoon. (But holding fast to the "umbilical" cord would be a "catastrophe"!)

This second extended sojourn in France was characterized by none of the irresponsibility and ignorance of my first visit. There was a single very intense involvement that might well have ended up in marriage had there not been a short, though acute, return of the psychotic symptoms of 1974. Travels throughout southern France with violin, tape recorder and MMO tapes , gave me plenty of material for future Ferment issues.

St Louis.MO.
Riverfront Times, June 1991

Caption enlarged

In 1990 I returned to Clare Danielsson's center at Boughton Place. We quarreled and I again set off on the road: first to Woodstock , NY , then to Colorado between September '91 and the summer of '92. In 1993 Cambridge beckoned for the 4th time in my life. Christine Connaire, an arts administrator and former theatre director well known to the Boston area , put me up first as guest, then as tenant at a low rent. Contact with Clare was renewed and once again I am a frequent visitor at Boughton Place, though there are no plans to live there.

Apart from a visit to California between October 1996 and April 1997, Middletown, Connecticut has been my home since November of 1995.

"Dr Einstein"
Science Day in the Children's Section
Russell Library, Middletown, 1996

It is of course only one of the many places in the United States and Western Europe that can be called home . The network of contacts is maintained through Ferment. E-Mail the Macintosh computer -and the DVD! - give me all I need of modern technology. Middletown has many advantages : it possesses one of the finest music departments in the world at Wesleyan University ; it has a good arts community ; it is conveniently situated between Boston, New York, New Haven, Albany, Hartford, Amherst and New Paltz. This is important for someone who does not own a car, and is adverse to contributing to the future destruction of the natural environment by learning how to drive one.
Note: Almost 10 years have passed since this memoir was conceived. Important things have happened since then, which I will be relating at some future date.

Family Portraits

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