Re-orientation/Part two

But the key to my serendipitous Memphis experience was a new book on the Mississippi-- by the recently retired the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s diplomatic correspondent, Marquis Childs. (Free copies of the book had been given to the first twenty five families visiting the new museum on its July 4th opening day.)

It was a wonder. Childs was a river rat, from Clinton, Iowa, and he had started the book fifty years ago as he began his journalistic career. An early success, he had to postpone the book's completion—until his retirement! It had this splendidly double vision from the slow maturing of the manuscript. I read it on the bus to Philly, and sent the Chron a review over the transom.

When I got back after Labor Day to my girlfriend Mary’s place in Camp Meeker, CA (outside Santa Rosa, a former Methodist summer camp, now “declined” into a low rent hippie village), my bedroom door was covered with post-its from the Chronicle. They wanted the annual calendar feature I had done for Becky Sinkler at the Inky, which they had peremptorily rejected when I first arrived in the Bay Area in May.

I readily agreed, but asked “How about the Marquis Childs’ “Mississippi”?” “It’s running Sunday,” Alix, Book Editor Pat Holt’s Girl Friday, promised. Whew! I thought. Two assignments, and a promise of more! Things were suddenly looking up. The truly serendipitous angle was that Mr. Childs had passed through San Francisco a few days after my review slipped through Pat Holt’s transom. Otherwise I might have just given up, and enjoyed a passive retirement.

I was thus in an upbeat mood when a few weeks later I read in the New York Times about a study group going for a six week Mandarin course in Shanghai over the Christmas Holiday! Ouch. It turned out to be run by an academic who had been a student Christian activist over China and other international political issues in the 1950’s and the head of Chinese study groups had been his “adversary”.

But he liked the American’s integrity! I signed up immediately. I also had read that the Shanghai Museum of Art was making its first foreign exchange exhibition—in San Francisco in May. Hmmm. How do you spell Scoop, I wondered. S C O O P! I immediately got in touch with the editor of San Francisco FOCUS, the monthly magazine of Jim Day’s KQED-TV, to me the most interesting public television station in the United States.

I got a promise of a cover story if my piece sang. So while I applied myself conscientiously to the metaphysically impossible task of learning Mandarin in six weeks, my real motivation was that SCOOP! (I did get the cover!) And another assignment on the bounced Waco TX preacher who moved to the Bay and opened a library bookstore on Jack London!

As an American Studies Ph.D. I had long been discontented with the navel gazing aspect of that discipline! In my last years of teaching I created new courses at Beaver College on Black Lit, then African Lit, and finally a rubric I called “International English” which in effect was Commonwealth Lit plus U.S.

Alas when I explained this new rubric in the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature, I was accused of acting CIAishly. No matter that it was the exact opposite! I had founded the Center for Internationalizing English in London the summer of 1972 (with the initials CIE) with the alleged purpose of undoing the damage done by our CIA by spreading poetry in International English. That a Canadian would level this absurd Cana(dia)rd was especially painful because I had grown up in Detroit across the river from Windsor, Ontario, and from early and massive metabolisation of CBC radio, considered myself spiritually a Cannuck.

International English motivated me to make study trips to North and West Africa, Oceania, and Anglophone Asia. I wrote an essay on this internationalizing away the parochialisms of American Studies for Marshall Fishwick’s groundbreaking anthology,”American Studies in Transition” (1964). Marshall’s shtick was Mcluhanism, which was all right by me, having met the Master on a Ford Foundation New York fellowship (1955-56) long after reading his visionary pieces in “Commonweal” magazine that led to “The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man”, a formula he said he devised to understand the “foreign” culture of his freshman students at St.Louis University.

My McLooneyism came from my participation in the tiny Catholic avant-garde that surrounded the lay Catholic magazine, Commonweal, a way station on my transition from the Jesuit University of Detroit to the post-Catholic authoritarians of the “National Guardian” as well as inspirations like I.F.Stone.