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I was born in Brooklyn in 1939. After my parents separated in 1941, I spent the next sixteen years living with my mother, brother, sister, grandparents and later my step-father in various apartments in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Fort Lee, New Jersey. I still count the eight and a half years—until age ten—spent with my grandparents in Manhattan as the happiest of my life. I attended five public schools in those early years, but I contend that then, as now (ten schools later), I learned far more out of school than in. For whatever it’s worth, I’m an almost totally self-educated man. Most of my teachers easily recognized my intelligence, but despaired of ever getting me to live by their rules. But it’s true that from my earliest years, I’ve been a difficult, disobedient, self-directed person—not a loner, but a willful non-conformist, hence a “failure” and a “misfit” in every cooperative enterprise I’ve ever tried to join. Reading books soon became, and remains, my primary escape from a world in which I have never found a comfortable sense of belonging—with one great exception: leading an expedition to Brazil, which is described in A Season in Paradise Gardens, as yet unpublished. As soon as I turned seventeen I left home to join the U.S. Navy, where the pattern of my anti-authoritarian temperament predictably repeated itself; I barely avoided serving brig time (jail) on a number of occasions. Apart from sporadic adventures with bar-girls in the Orient—Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines—the sole useable skill I acquired in forty-six months of naval service was the ability to type—which I still do awkwardly, slowly and with many errors. I credit the development of word processors—especially WordPerfect 6.1—with liberating my ability to write. In 1961, the year after my discharge from the Navy (honourable, despite everything), I traveled with a friend from San Francisco to Seattle to buy and fix an old car he had, after which we drove it across the country, via the southwest deserts, to New York. There I found a job repairing mechanical calculators, and began to write seriously in the evenings. I was twenty-one. Despite my usual difficulties with the job—I was fired after a year—as well as my loneliness and the dismal rooms I had to live in, I began to recognize in myself the beginnings of a command of English that I had never expected to possess. With much uncertainty, and many false starts, I gradually found that my reading had given me a large and rich vocabulary. In the summer of 1962, I began two more years of wandering: to Florida, to Mexico, to Galveston, to Houston, to New Orleans, to Kansas, to Michigan, and finally back home to New York and New Jersey in 1964. Many of my later journeys were by canoe, in central and northern Ontario—over 1,000 kilometers to date. In the summer of 1976, by canoe, carryall, train, bus and bushplane, I logged 3,600 miles, entirely within Ontario. I moved to Canada in 1968. Through hundreds of odd jobs—the best of which was as an outdoor photographer—and countless rented rooms, I continued to write, but in a most demanding and uncommercial manner, imitative of 18th- and 19th-century English masters. The finest of these antique geniuses was the historian, essayist and critic, Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859), whose output was voluminous, whose style was impeccable, whose earnings were fabulous for his time, but whose staunch, unyielding prose is as demanding for the average modern reader as a one-legged Marathon. Beginning in the early 1990s, two vastly different events rescued me from this ultimately downward spiral: I won a six-figure lottery, and after spending every penny on an expedition to Amazonia I moved into a shelter in Toronto, at age 56, simply to have the time to write. With a small pension, no demands on my time, and the free use of word-processors, I finished four books, and completed the better part of a fifth. By this time, I didn’t have to learn how to write; I just had to learn how to relax, and stop pretending to be Macauley. I now acknowledge that there can be as much strength, grace and clarity in contemporary prose as in that of the past, if readers insist on it. It is only to be regretted that they so seldom do. I have never forgotten a trenchant remark I once read in The Village Voice more than thirty-five years ago: “…we simply have to accept the fact that we live in age of bad art, and there’s nothing we can do about it.” I am determined to prove that this is not a universal truth. Despite my successes as a professional photographer, Squatter’s Rites is my first publication as an author. June 2005 |
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