Boston and "The Fading Smile"

BACK in the '90s, when I was at my most ravenous about learning about poetry, I read a number of very fine memoirs about poets. Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth (with its unforgettable portrait of Delmore Schwartz) was one, Donald Hall's Their Ancient Glittering Eyes (Dylan Thomas!) is another. Both are classics, but my favorite may be Peter Davison's The Fading Smile, set in Boston/Cambridge in the late '50s as American poetry was going through an important transformation.

Only a few hours remain in National Poetry Month, but I'll put aside my instinct to mock these official cultural holidays and discuss Davison's wonderfully distilled memoir-of-sorts for a moment.

The Fading Smile's subtitle is "Poets in Boston, 1955-1960, from Robert Frost to Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath," and it's largely a series of profiles of the poets who flourished, competed and quarreled at a time when Frost was fading from the scene but holding forth on the outskirts of Harvard. Besides the poets above, it looks at Richard Wilbur (the most Apollonian of the bunch), the minister's son W.S. Merwin, Anne Sexton (!!), Plath (who Davison, a poet and important poetry editor, briefly dated before she fell into the burly arms of Ted Hughes), feminist "daughter-in-law" Adrienne Rich, the overlooked ad-man poet L.E. Sissman, and Stanley Kunitz (a generation older than the rest but just as tormented.)

Lowell of course acts as a cross between a maven who brings everyone together and a sort of Mad Hatter. Like many of the poets here, he went through a metamorphosis during this period, and his late-'50s work helps inaugurate a wilder, more visceral, less European, less New Critic-driven poetry that came to be called Confessional.

Of course, each figure had his or her own trajectory, as Davison's portraits make clear. He mostly stays out of the way of the action, except when his appearances are useful, resisting the urge to settle scores of make himself into the book's hero.

Part of what I like, too, are the well-chosen selections from each poet's work, and the sense of literary context that it all adds up to. That is, there was a back-and-forth between this scene with developments in the UK -- several of them put in brief stints in England -- as well as the Beat action in San Francisco.

I'll just close by recommending this book -- so soon after the tragedy of the Boston Marathon -- to anyone who cares about American literature. And now, go read some poetry.

Christianity and Tom Perrotta

ONE of my favorite-ever author meetings was a lunch interview with Tom Perrotta around the time of The Abstinence Teacher. (I was in New England and swung to the fringe of Boston to meet him.) The novel's film adaptation was already rolling despite the fact that the book hadn't come out yet -- credit the success of Little Children for that one.

The Abstinence Teacher, like his new one, The Leftovers, is partially about latter day Christians and the culture of the religiously devout, not often examined in literary fiction.

Perrotta and I spoke about a lot of things -- rock music, fatherhood, literary craft -- and especially his upbringing as a not-terribly-devout Catholic in New Jersey in the '60s and '70s, in the wake of Vatican II and other softenings of the church.

With The Abstinence Teacher, I was struck by the way Perrotta balanced satire with an unexpected empathy. Here's what I wrote at the time:

More than anything, though, his work is defined not by a type of character or a setting in the suburbs but by a tone of voice: cutting and observed with a kind of oracular detachment, but with forgiveness and respect for old-fashioned decency. It's also a tone, rooted in realism, that doesn't draw attention to itself.

In a funny way, the premises and the novels themselves seem to be rendered by a different writer.

"The setups to my stories are often more satirical," he said, "but the execution isn't. In the course of writing, my sense of the characters deepens, and the story becomes something different from what I intended."

HERE is that interview and profile. Looking forward to his new one.

The Twilight of the '80s with Richard Rushfield

FOR years before I met him, I knew of Richard Rushfield as this dark legend -- a nihilist wit who ran an underground humor magazine, an online savant with a Nixonian five-o' clock-shadow who had come into the LA Times to destroy the print world from within.

When I finally met Rushfield, at an art opening a few months back, I found him oddly innocent and charmingly bewildered, and I'm pleased to report that his new memoir has some of these same qualities. "Don't Follow Me I'm Lost: A Memoir of Hampshire College in the Twilight of the '80s" is about a time and place and a series of comic misadventures, but also very much the story of a dazed, Hawaiian-shirted Angeleno lost in a particularly decadent niche of East Coast culture. I spoke briefly to him about his experience.

Q: What made you want to go to Hampshire, which by the '80s was already a legendary hippie school?

A: I grew up here in Los Angeles, so I always thought about going back East for college. When you go to Crossroads [prestigious LA high school] you pretty much think, by 16, that you know everything you need to know. How dare any college tell me what to study? So the progressive education appealed to me. Going to school in the woods of New England was a kind of idyllic fantasy -- but this was kind of the "Mad Max" version.

Q: Your first night there was a pretty embarrassing welcome to the college experience.

A: My first experience getting drunk on red table wine included emptying the contents to my stomach on a hall which didn't much want me there in the first place. Their affection for me did not increase.

Q: I get a sense there was a real culture clash for you as a California kid?

A: It's a very different world there, and it got stranger as it went along. If you're from Los Angeles, you're presumed to barely be able to spell your name -- they speak very slowly for you. And the hippie culture doesn't really exist here -- prep school kids who didn't bathe, with heavy sweaters, driving Volvos...?

Q: It sounds like you eventually found your tribe.

A: It was a school of outcasts where I thought I'd fit in great. But I had to find the outcasts' outcasts. This was a group [known as the Supreme Dicks] whose response to the culture was to wholly check out, burning the bridges with society. The ethos came to be known as "the grunge era" years later, where to have any motivation or enthusiasm was the most uncool thing you could do. Ambition, relationships, goals, studies -- you'd never heard of them.

When the grunge era came around, it was the first mass movement with absolutely no agenda. It was Gen X's one moment of ruling the stage, in between the Boomers and their kids. And our moment was to say, Let's stay in and do nothing.

Q: Does reflecting on those years tell us anything about higher education, Miami Vice, the Reagan '80s, or generational change?

A: Certainly if I could look at myself at age 17, I could conclude that a 17-year-old should not be entrusted with his own eduction.

I also feel like we came at the end of this enormous party, from the disco '70s to the go-go '80s, before things became very earnest and political with Gen Y. We showed up at the party at 3 a.m., after the buffet had been cleaned out and there were just a few cheese cubes left. And the people right outside started this really earnest movement.

More Rushfield here.

John Updike vs. Witches of Eastwick

FOR a not terribly good book, "the witches of eastwick" has had quite an afterlife. not only did it become a popular, if faintly cheesy, movie involving cher, and a briefly lived stage show, but it's now set to become a television series. no, not a miniseries -- but a show that could run for years and years.

why? i'm still a bit confused about the whole thing. but HERE is my new piece on the book's unlikely journey.

for the story, i spoke to a producer on the show named maggie friedman, who pointed out that "men and women and sex" are important ingredients to making the book -- and her show -- work.

and i discussed the original novel's impact and sexual politics -- is it feminist? misogynist? an indictment of the counterculture -- with scholars quentin miller and sam cohen. the latter has a new book coming soon called "after the end of history: american fiction in the 1990s."

what do people make of the program of "eastwick?" i'm eager to hear from viewers. the show kicks of wednesday.