How Did You Get That Way?

Someone asked me not long ago how I became an outgoing and inveterate talker. The scene was a conference having to do with blindness and more to the point it was during the question and answer part of my keynote address on blindness and creativity.

No one who writes literary prose or poetry can say with any certainty how they became a writer but the odds are that in nearly every case it has something to do with poverty or deprivation in a writer’s young life. We are all the children of Dickens in some way or other.

My childhood was a lonesome affair. I’ve written about the isolation of a rural New England boyhood with my long attic sojourns and all my provincial hours of solo play. Yet for all that forced inventionI can’t say that I was in any way unique. My friend the poet Sam Hamill was essentially an orphan. The poet Kenneth Rexroth grew up for all intents and purposes as an orphan alone on the streets of Chicago in the years just after World War I. Writers are forced into early solitudes and they learn how to talk because they have to get out of jams.

I told the conference that I once gave a shelled acorn to a kid who was bullying me on the playground. I told him it was a walnut and suggested he try it. Of course an acorn will ruin your mouth and the kid couldn’t talk or spit and yes I outran him. And given the social psychology of bullies it wasn’t long after that incident that the boy became relatively friendly in my presence.

So that’s the other effect of a writer’s childhood: a rule breaking saucy quasi-belligerant outspokenness mixed with irreverence. I for one never felt like I belonged in a proper group and that has worked out rather well for me. I have always adored this poem by Kenneth Rexroth for indeed, though I never shat on a golf course, I might have done so given half a chance.

Kenneth Rexroth

Portrait of the Artist As a Young Anarchist

1917-18-19,

While things were going on in Europe,
Our most used term of scorn or abuse
Was “bushwa.” We employed it correctly,
But we thought it was French for “bullshit.”
I lived in Toledo, Ohio,
On Delaware Avenue, the line
Between the rich and poor neighborhoods.
We played in the jungles by Ten Mile Creek,
And along the golf course in Ottawa Park.
There were two classes of kids, and they
Had nothing in common: the rich kids
Who worked as caddies, and the poor kids
Who snitched golf balls. I belonged to the
Saving group of exceptionalists
Who, after dark, and on rainy days,
Stole out and shat in the golf holes.