Representative Men by John Clellon Holmes

Author:John Clellon Holmes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

UPDATE

Gone in October 1973

ONE

Shirley and I drove down to New Haven for Ginsberg’s reading at Yale under clear high skies of blue. The trees had turned in the last days to full autumn, and the afternoon before (walking the fact into consciousness), I’d thought that it was apt that Jack had gone away in October, which was his favorite month, and that now it was one of those red and gold New England afternoons through which footballs used to loft in such brave arcs when we were young.

No more Jac/(, I repeated to myself as I drove, his death a fact too inexplicable, too final, to go down. I’d known him for half my life. Whatever sort of man and writer I’d become was due in no small measure to our friendship. As young men, we had shared those important, exuberant years that sometimes shape the rest of life. Damn him! I caught myself thinking. Why does he do things like this? I’d talked to him for an hour on the phone not ten days ago, and we had bickered as we often did when he was drunk, and he had challenged me to call him back in an hour, and I hadn’t done it, exasperated by his boozy monologues. And now the phone was permanently dead.

We parked near the Yale Co-Op, and walked through chilly streets to the Political Union Library where the students were holding a reception for Allen. In a paneled, upstairs room, twenty or thirty young people, drinking port and sherry, sat on the floor around the ringleted, Karl Marx beard spread out benignly on Allen’s chest, and his dome of balding forehead gave him the look of a worldly Talmud scholar who had retired to the Negev. Gregory squatted on his heels in an enormous, George Raft overcoat, working on a tumbler of sherry, and Peter, now a grizzled wrangler of bitter winters in upstate New York, stared silently out from under the three-inch brim of a hat of day-glo red. It was the first time that we had all been in the same room in over five years.

In the middle of a long answer about ecology, Allen waved, and Gregory came over, whispering, “What a time to get together, huh?” Allen finished, and he and Peter worked their way through the crowd of students, and we embraced. “I hardly recognized you in your tweedy-professor disguise,” Allen said, though actually I had on a red flannel shirt and a corduroy suit. “Well, old Jack’s dead, I guess,” he added, and we looked at one another, wordless with the fact.

“Yup.”

We straggled through the evening streets towards dinner with some of the students, arranging that the three of them would drive home with us that night, and we’d all go up to Lowell the next day for the funeral. Then on to the reading, which was held in a large, dingy, high-ceilinged hall, already filled with young people in their army jackets, beards, ragged blue jeans, maidenly

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