I was eighteen.
Here’s a pretty accurate chronology based on one we prepared for the year and a half that straddled my nineteenth birthday, starting from the summer before, covering my father’s death, and ending a year later.
In June 1960 when I was eighteen, because of disagreements over school policy with the administration, I cut my graduation so as not to be present to receive the school creative writing award. My father was ill. My parents did not understand. I probably made little effort to explain it to them. But a few days later, at the beginning of July, with the son of a downstairs neighbor, Peter, a talented banjo player a year older than I and with whom I had gone to summer camp some years before, I drove up to the Newport Folk Festival, where we attended concerts in the evening and slept on the beaches at night with thousands of other young people. The notebook I filled over the four days there was typed over the next weeks to become an eighty-page memoir of the trip, whose title, The Journals of Orpheus, I rolled around on my tongue for weeks, for months.
A few days later, I left New York City by Greyhound for the Bread-loaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vermont, where I’d received a work scholarship at the recommendation of an editor from Harcourt Brace, on the strength of one of my several adolescent novel manuscripts. (One was called Those Spared by Fire; another, Cycle for Toby.) Along with a half a dozen or more young people who’d received similar scholarships, I supplemented the partial tuition by working at the conference as a waiter. My roommate was a young black poet, Herbert Woodward Martin. The late afternoon in which I got back to New York City, my father came out to the living room, in his blue pajamas and robe, to sit listening, with my mother, to my accounts of my summer with Robert Frost, John Frederick Nims, Allen Drury, and X. J. Kennedy, smiling at my anecdotes, now and then hawking into the galvanized zinc pail Mom had set by his slippered feet, with a little water and detergent in it — till, in the midst of something I was saying, he rose and walked back into the bedroom; and I realized just how sick he’d grown.
In September, I began classes at the College of the City of New York: Greek, Latin, and English, along with Chemistry, Speech (a required freshman course), and Art History. I joined the staff of the college literary journal, The Promethean. At the end of that month, my father went into the hospital — as I’ve told. I also resumed weekly therapy sessions with a psychologist, Dr. Harold Esterson, which were to continue, somewhat intermittently, through the early months of 1961.
In the last days of October, after Dad’s death, I moved in with Bob Aarenberg, a nineteen-year-old friend who lived, as my family and I had since I was fifteen, in Morningside Gardens. He had taken a small student apartment on the third floor of a grimy building on West 113th Street, the St.-Marks Arms. Bob was an amateur shortwave radio operator, and the place was jammed with ham equipment. Upstairs in the same building lived science fiction writer Randall Garrett, whom I met, with whom I became friends, and to whom I showed some of my early (non-SF) novels. That Halloween, dressed as Medusa and Perseus, Marilyn Hacker and I, with a friend named Gail (Medea), hiked through a chill Washington Square evening to a costume party at New York University’s Maison Française, where a number of our friends, among them Judy (dressed as Comedy/Tragedy), were celebrating. Our regalia was inspired by a verse play of Marilyn’s, called Perseus, whose sections she had read to me over the phone, some weeks before, day by day as she’d written them.
Over this same period (September, October, November), during which I started school and my father died, I produced translations of Brecht’s “Vom ertrunkenen Mädchen,” Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre” (also a pastiche of his sonnet, “Voyelles”), and Catullus’s “Vivamus mea Lesbia,” as well as an original English version of “The Song of Songs Which is Solomon’s,” and some of Chatterton’s “Middle English” Rowley forgeries — using various English texts as cribs, such as Stanley Burnshaw’s international anthology The Poem Itself (purchased while at Breadloaf) or a recent paperback translation of “The Song of Songs”: no, my French, German, or Latin (not to mention Hebrew) was not up to the job unassisted.
On the day before Christmas Eve, a City College companion, who shared both my Speech and my Art classes and whom I’d nicknamed “Little Brother” when we became friends in the first days of school, came over to spend the night with me at my mother’s apartment. At about three o’clock in the morning, an hour after we’d stopped talking and were, presumably, asleep, he suddenly sat up in his underwear at the edge of his bed and said, “I have to go home. …”
“Hm?” I said, sleepily, from mine. “Why …?”
“Because if I don’t,” he said, “I’m going to try and get in bed with you.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Come on.”
“I don’t think you understand,” he said, softly. “I want to go to bed with you.”
“Sure I do.” I held back the covers for him. “I want to go to bed with you, too. Come on. Get in.”
And, a moment later, he slid down beside me.
The next afternoon, when he left, I wrote some dozen rather jejune sonnets about it all — though I did not see him again for some three or four years. When the Christmas break was over, he did not return to school.
Christmas passed, and on that snowy New Year’s Eve, I went to a party of a young musician and composer, Josh Rifkin, where the two of us went upstairs and, secreted in Josh’s room, listened to carefully and analyzed for hours the Robert Craft recording, just released, of the complete works of Anton Webern, while people celebrated downstairs.
Midnight passed.
In January 1961, I began my second term at City, continuing with Latin and Greek, dropping English, Speech, and Art, and adding History, Calculus Two (I’d received advanced placement in math, allowing me to skip Calculus One), and an obligatory Physical Education course. I became The Promethean’s poetry editor.
In February I directed some friends, Eric and Esther, and myself in Marilyn’s Perseus: An Exercise for Three Voices. Marilyn was then a student at NYU: she had been my close friend since our first year together at the Bronx High School of Science. Shortly, David Litwin replaced Eric. Perseus was performed in the Grand Ballroom of the Student Center of City College on a Wednesday, once in the afternoon and again in the evening. It ran just under fifteen minutes.
In March I was spending little time at my schoolwork; rather I would devote desultory bursts of energy to my own writing. I all but ceased attending classes. Here and there at various places in the Village, I played with the folksinging group I’d pulled together around me, the Harbor Singers (who rehearsed through the whole period at Dave’s mother’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen regularly on Tuesday evenings) and sometimes with downstairs neighbor Pete. I was an indifferent singer, but a passable guitarist. Probably in that month, rotund Randall Garrett took me to a party in Greenwich Village, possibly at John and Ann Hamilton’s, at which I met SF writer and critic Judith Merril, whose work I was familiar with through her anthologies and stories.
From a September letter to Merril six years later, here’s my attempt to recall that night for us both:
… Randy, a terribly sentimental guy, decided to take me to a party in the Village. I hadn’t thought about writing SF at the time, and was not even a proper fan. I was told before we left that you would be there, though. You I had heard of. You I had read and much liked, both reviews and your too-few stories. (Randy was wearing his opera cape that year and, en route to the party, dived head first into a snow bank and shed blue velvet in swirls across the snow as the neon lights of the bar went coral and azure over our heads.) You sat in the back room most of the party, we talked — you were sleepy? And went to sleep. The party left, came back at about five in the morning, whereupon you wakened. I volunteered to come up [town] … with you.