THE LITERARY HERITAGE OF A (STILL)

YOUNG liKETER

Ijy Maxwell Reif

New Humanity Publications

•Sis Ij-terary Heritafre Of A (still)

Yoimfc V/riter

by Hsooirell lieif

copyright 19^5

New Huitianity Publications

Tb The Writers Of The New Humanity

the literary heritage of a(STILL) YOUNG WRITER

by Maxwell S. Reif

a journey of renewal, from theconfines of Western literature,to the universe of time andspace, and back again

When I speak of my literary heritage, I speakin terms of literature as real influences, meaninginflusions of energy. At thirty-six, I feel thatin some ways, looking back over it, my heritage isvery poor, in other ways extremely abundant. Ihave gotten what I needed, in literature and life,that I can say. I do not see how a man in thisworld can claim to be both frank and well-read at thesame time, considering how much there is to read, andI do not feel I am well—read. But I read steadily,for what it is worth, what I find useful to me.

I was born into a world of the 1950's and early*60's in which forms of thought were very calcifiedand solidified in the strata of American societyin which I grew up. There were writers, somewhereout on the fringes of things, pouring their energyback into society, but by the time this energy reachedme in the place in upper middle—class suburbia whereI was ensconsed, defenses, my own and society's, hadrobbed it of most of its subversive fire.

The reigning Tiumverate in American lettersat that time was, of course, Hemingway, Faulkner,and Fitzgerald, with Steinbeck behind them andwriters like Dos Passes, Thomas Wolfe, and others,there in the wings. J.D. Salinger was a littledifferent; his Catcher in the Rye was so articulate in its expression of discontent that it practically reached me and made me question thingsfor a few days.

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Hemingway, I liked, not so much for histhemes, which were practically incomprehensibleto me, but for the activities his characters

engaged in, trout fishing, deep-sea fishing,and bullfighting. 1 had the illusion that because his style was "simple," 1 could understandhim. He was, of course, almost universally imitated by selfstyled writers. Faulkner and Fitzgerald were much more difficult on the surface

and 1 suffered no illusions that 1 understood

them.

In poetry 1 was acquainted with ee Cummingsand his curious experiments in punctuation,shocking enough to pierce my veil a little,and homespun Robert Frost, whose apparent sim-plicty of a situation would take you, likeHemingway, to your own depth of understanding.

Most of the writers of the time had a

tragic view of life, but their themes scarcelyreached me where 1 was ensconsed in the cocoon

of my upbringing. The sense of the themes ofliterary tales being connected with one's ownlife, and of one's own life being the stuffof myth and change and oneself a center of experience as valid as any character in any tale,was remote.

Then there were the Classics, spun aboutus like warm threads of the cocoon. The unquestioned Shakespeare was far beyind my intimateinterest, both because of the difficulty of theElizabethan language, and because 1 had notexperienced enough of life to know what anyof these writers, ancient or modern, were talking about, or why they chose to say it.

Moby Dick (1 keep wanting to say "of course,"because many people living today grew up in thissame literary landscape) was to American classical letters what Shakespeare was to world literature. Plowing through Moby Dick, 1 scarcely

literary heritage ... 3

understood a word.

and of whom a bit of humor came through,rx ^^comprehensible Chaucer, filled in my world.ostoievski's Crime and Punishment in its shiny

paperback edition was prominent in every literarilyinclined bookstore, but it appeared too long andcomplicated. Tolstoi was out there somewhere, withhe monstrous War and Peace and some short stories

we had to read. The only book I can remember readingwith any enjo3Tnent was Huckelberry Finn.

In college there were new names. Jean-Paulartre was suddenly regarded as somthing of a god

in many circles. I was exposed, at NorthwesternUniversity, where 1 attended my first two years, toi»S. Eliot and "The Waste Land," in which 1 believecounted six different languages; Pound, Yeats,

James Joyce, and so on. All this talk about theHoly Grail and Tarot cards, which I had never heard

was as much like Greek to me, in "The WasteLand," as Eliot's inscriptions in some of his poems.All I got out of the whole thing were names toJrag around that made more impression on "educated"people. (1 had made a fool out of myself, or atleast it seemed that way, mentioning Robert Frostto an upper-class fraternity brother English majorat Northwestern.) I remained completely baffled,except for a mild sense of enjojnnent, to seeJ^es Joyce's regressive use of language in thefirst few pages of A Portrait of the Artist asa Youne Man, experimental use of language with theshock value of Cummings had had.

Nietsche was in the air in my philosophycourses — 1 wondered why he had gone mad if hewas such a great writer and philosopher — butthe feeling I got was something like "Everybody- about Nietsche, but nobody does anything

LITERARY HERITAGE ... h

about him."

In the spring of my first year at Northwestern I heard Allen Ginsberg read and wenthome to ny dorm room, inspired through my cocoonfor practically the first time in my life, towrite a poem, full of feeble classical allusions,about how I didn't fit in, either with the hippieswho'd sat on the stage with Ginsberg and chanted"Hare krisna ...," or with the clean-shaven academics who were devoid of any means of inspiringme. At least here, in the hairy Ginsberg, Ifelt, was something called poetry that was immediate and had to do with the celebration of life,our life, not the cataloguing of musty literaryand mythological references.

For the most part, I had to go through thedestruction of a great deal of my personalityfacade, which entailed enduring years of protracted and intense pain, before I really becameopen to literature as a living influence and —what we sometimes forget it is meant to be —a healing force. But my life picked up somewhat in intensity ny second year of college,1967-68, when I became involved in the antiwar movement and the "counterculture." I saw,perhaps, through slightly less thick blinders.

I developed a deep, though as yet, semiconscious, longing for a Primitive correctiveto my over-refined, dead sensibility. D.H.Lawrence came the closest to personifying thislonging in his writings, and reinforced my inarticulate sense of need, which I acted out, alittle, through use of marijuana. I also readSt. Exupery's The Little Prince at this time;it, too, pushed me onward in my sense that aquest for meaning in the modern world mightsomewhere be possible. I even tried to imitate,with no success at all, St. Exupery's simple,childlike style. Sigmund Freud, too, became an

literary heritage ...

conversations^whLh^mv'r"°^ directly, but throughfriend, DavriCatz ""O P°"I overheard. ' late at night, that

As my life continued slowly to intensifva rollercoaster thai- t intensityfor tragedv T wa headedthl ^ expelled from New Collegethe experimental school in Florida that I trfns-ferred to after my debilitating second yL^ atNorthwestern, and went to live in a house withhippies in upstate New York.

reading the Chinese 1 Chinsand the Tarot cards not in some watered-doIJil

of Ain,»% original. The youthof America had materialized the Counterculture,

at thf'i-? modest than we thoughtat the time, Heplian antithesis to the one-sid-edness of minstream American culture. Here itwas possible to begin to get in touch with the deepinstinctual side of our natures which had been suppressed in our upbringings.

1 suffered, however, from horrible "monsters"which had come to the surface of my personality during LSD trips, and was totally miserable and completely lost the whole time on the farm. At onepoint, wandering in search of help, I went to visitAllen Ginsberg at his apartment in New York'sLower East Side, but, although he tried to be kindand helpful, 1 was not yet ripe to confront directlythe personal nightmares of sexual guilt and shamethat had driven me mad on LSD and had left mesuicidally depressed when the drug had worn off.

In 1971, after spending a year in a secondchildhood at my parents' house back in St. Louis,1 was "artificially resuscitated" for a time by apsychiatrists' antidepressant pills. On a visit

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to an old Northwestern political friend in Chicago shortly thereafter, 1 had a bona fide

mystical experience, which began the process ofmy being led out of my personal wilderness.After that, through the writings of Meher Baba,the Indian master whom the experience had involved, 1 was able to contact more deeply ancientand still-living sources of real wisdom. (MeherBaba wrote extensively and meaningfully about love,a subject 1 had gone to the library to investigate in the card catalogue once, finding onlyone book listed. This had been in 1968.) 1also began meeting more and more people who wereliving this wisdom each in his or her own uniqueversion, and this enabled me to cease to feel that1 lived myth, meaning, and the quest for transcendence were things that had passed out of theworld and only lived on in obscure poetic allusions and their footnotes.

1 also learned at this time that literature does not exist for itself, as some kindof body of remote, sterile aesthetic objects,but for man. It should tell his story in a freshand rejuvenating way. If it does not, it hasdegenerated into the veneration of idols likea religious orthodoxy that has lost its livingspark and become merely a chorus of dreamersanswering the minister in their sleep. Ourfeeling-deadened age, which had been brought bymaterialistic science to an almost exclusivelyoutward-looking view of things, drastically needed an onrush of subjective meaning to balanceall that objectivity. 1 believe that it is scarcely possible for any man to see art whole, butthat each age takes what it needs from the pastand creates new forms according to its need, aswell. One of its functions, 1 believe, is tocorrect the excesses of the previous age in anydirection; perhaps a perennial, great artist

LITERARY HERITAGE ... 7

writes with such universality that there are sidesof him that appeal to any age.

Through Meher Baba, whose Discourses gives mepriceless pearls of insight into the deeper aspectsof practical and philosphical psychic life, I contacted traditions of world literature that had been

inaccessible to me before. 1 read the Sufi mysticalpoets of medieval Persia and other mystics from theMiddle East and India; Hafiz, Jal-al-ud-din Rumi,

Omar Khayyam (whose symbolism of "Wine," etc.,used the image of wine to connote divine love);Kabir, the fifteenth-century Indian poet and weaverwhom Robert Ely has retranslated; and others.

Kahlil Gibran, whose writings 1 had thought of aspap, suddenly appeared to me as a container ofthis great wisdom, and his drawings were vehiclesof sublimity, too.

Through all these poets 1 contacted a fountain

of living wisdom that was powerful enought to knockone off one's feet. The Western mystics, too, madesense to me now, and I enjoyed gems by and aboutSt. Francis of Assissi, Meister Eckhart, Blake,Thomas a Kempis, the stories of the Baal Shem Tovand the other Chasidic rabbis. They all seemd toexpress the same wisdom, much as Meher Baba hadsaid that they do, through somewhat different symbols in some cases. Thus, 1 was initiated to theperennial mystic belief that all spiritual traditions esoterically express the same truths anddiffer only in their outer trappings.

My view of literature was thus universalized.Instead of the narrow Western tradition, I hadsomething now much wider and, it felt, more whole.1 even heard Shakespeare had secretly been an

English Sufi.In 1974, through a course I took when I

LITERARY HERITAGE ...

re-entered college for my last two years atthe University of Cincinnati, entitled "EasternThought and American Literature," I was able tofind in some American writers the same transcendental wisdom and energy that I had found inthe Persians and Indians. Whitman, Emerson,and Thoreau had it, T.S. Eliot had some of itin Four Quartets, and again I found it in AllenGinsberg, Gary Snyder, and other modern avant-garde writers. In my English Literature courseI found some of the exhuberance in all of theRomantics, and a boundless voicing of it in Blake,and recognized that Dylan Thomas was saying intensely in his line "The force that through the

f fuse drives the flower .... drives my greenage, exactly what I had read in Meher Baba'sYeats had an expression

cnat 1 came across.

Western tradition'^^f^^™^ ^ rejected thelessly cut off fro^thr^ fiction as hope-ation, and saw thrt^a^^^ ? sources of inspir-insanity of so manv mnH <ieaths and thebeen due to the fact havingience suffered this i<sni and their aud-Nietsche and others hart t from unitary wisdom,to bouy up the saggiHf weightthat could only reallv h scholarship,prophets, and had broLn a"""® avatars and

It was not so ^ burden,times, but men and time Perhaps, as theanother, so it was reaii condition onebelieved in reincLnatJ^ f ^ seriouslyquite as hopeless as ii- "°t allbe back, and do better ®i»^ce they wouldthat practically a^ ^ learning2oih strength r " successful in20th century „as somehow the chaos of the

connected to a mystical

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or occult esoteric tradition: Yeats' Golden Dawn

and "Vision," Blake with his study of Boehme andthe Cabbala, Hermann Hesse — as faithful a writerto the soul, I believe, as there has ever been, toseveral eastern and western hermetic traditions;Kazantzakis, the great Tolkien, Allen Ginsberg, Eliotand his Christian-mystic and Buddhist sources thelist went on and on.

By '74 I had assimilated the fact that I livedin a meaningful universe: the "Waste Land" phenomenon was a subjective perception, not an ontologicalone. My personal fortunes still rose and fell asI worked my way through deep personal psychic blocksand guilts, but enough people had shown, and I hadseen myself, that in my periods of depression andunhappiness I was only encountering the veils overmy own eyes that prevented me temporarily frompenetrating ever deeper into the nature of things,the World-Mandala. The guardians at the gates ofnew realities were my own fears, and when these werereversed, I would enter. There was a lore of storiesto illustrate such points; St. Francis had met a leperand kissed him, and the leper had become Christ;the Knight at the Chapel Perilous on his quest forthe Holy Grail encountered a final Test where everything, including his entire Quest, appeared meaningless, just before reaching the Grail; and so on.It was not some deficiency of life itself, buta temporary and psychological barrier.

At one point my personal despair was so greatthat I thought I had brain damage, but a meeting withRichard Alpert ("Baba Ram Dass"), whose book. BeHere Now had influenced most of the people I knew,allowed me to feel that this was not so, and to

experiencing a breakthrough by sharing verballya number of sexual fantasies I had felt extremely

guilty about since childhood. The telling of thesesecrets to a truly loving and listening individual

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brought me back to a direct perception of life'senergy and the awareness that, as Hafiz, thePersian poet, had said, "You yourself are the veilover Self." W-ii-h n •_

i:«j.&ian poer, naa said, "You yourself are theover Self." With the Ram Dass experience, whichhe called "Guts" (meaning "we sit in aroom andyou tell me anything you can't tell me"), I wasf ® confirm the model I had received from

and literature, which

neL "demons" of one's unscious-to wid^n th consciousness was the waythis way ohp consciousness and grow. Inness ^ "chakras" of aware-"Tree of Life"" tL^W^ Eastern conception, or theuntil one beX an concept,infinite consciousnessaccurate one in exolaini f seemed anwere not interest<aH • what those of us whoing here ^^eartS sleepwalking were do-confirm this (Meher ®'^P®lence continues tofor twelve years nevo ^ steadilybut I believe this i«s t uses the word "chakra,"flashy trappings of People away fromloss not beoomr-s^irt?"" symbolism so thst itward the real essence" '"eterialism," and to-

"id-lQ^O's tillpoems are ecstatic mys^L^f "hosewhose "Dark Night o^t^ ̂ eelebrations, butonly a significant phraL remained for mepoem, the saint's rZ Ihe title of a

^ — an

the role of arfJ d (giving properRamakrishna, whose

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Gospel, recorded by one of his disciples, is oneof the greatest books I have ever read; and RobertEly, the poet who suddely appeared like a Pheonixflashing across the literary skies of America. 1heard Ely read on several occasions in 1974 andthe experience revolutionized my conception of whata poet is, branding several things unforgettablyinto my consciousness; 1) Here was a man t-iho listened to the audience reaction when he recited apoem, and if necessary, repeated the whole thingfor their sake, 2) Here was someone whose recitations of Sufi poetry left me feeling and evenseeing the light he released, a hundred yars awayas 1 was leaving the auditorium, and i) Herewas a poet who said "Don't Listen to me. Workon yourself." When he said this, ] left the

reading and went home to write poetry, causinga minor commotion, and the next night when 1came in a little late, Ely paused in his reading to say, "1 love that man." In several shortsessions he became an important literary fatherfor me.

Another, little-known major influence whosebrand of fire burned me for twelve years wasFrancis Erabazon, a crusty Australian poet whobecame a Sufi and then later a disciple of MeherEaba's. He wrote with the advantage of havinghad ten years under Meher Eaba's direct and powerful influence in India, but his epic poem. StayWith God, ruthlessly and accurately dissectedWestern civilization as a whole, and all the arts

separately. It is a great and major work, andthe only thing, 1 believe, that prevents it frombeing better known is that much of it is devotedto a retelling of the life of Meher Baba and a

celebration of the Master-Disciple relationshipas it has been known timelessly in the East, inthe tradition of Rumi; but if Meher Eaba is indeedthe Avatar of our age, as he says he is, then

literary heritage ... 12

Brabazon will someday get his audience. (An-o er disciple wrote a very fine book whichsomeone casually said "will be very popularin ree hundred years.") His ghazals, a Persianorm o mystical love poetry which he broughtinto English, are sublime, though I still preferfor rejuvenation of the form-breaking Fire ofStay With God.

... 1981 82 I haji good fortune to be the® named Lyn Ott, a

and wrii-AT'^ h blind and become a novelistand writer about an- * t. • n- i. iThe Quest For l metaphysics. His book,enriching tair^f-jf"^^ extremelyand influenced me T influences,homage to the grL? Paymg proper20th century in i'^® P®si ^hehad made the iumn ^ tells how he, too,twelve years of h* mysticism and for the lastcolorful works witK painted 500 blazingfigure of each o ^®Ler Baba as the centralpublished by Sher^* nothing else. His book,in certain ways Press, has some resemblanceworking through th account of an artistfo the East for ^®stern tradtion while goingby Jose Arguelies^'^^''®^* The Transformative Vision,

D

period May of 1984. At thistion Parabiia'''^K^^^® that illustratedof thp* asni^ necessary isola-have to^'pSTJ "Wherrtre^?®or something Ground it L^t'^ong, you it bur^Han elephani- the ^hen it growsbe over and knock it k"ay because even

^ bbie - appears tomy own Western

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forbears with new eyes. I have an enormous respectfor the terse style and tragic vision, at this point,of Hemigway, whose "A Clean, Well-lighted Place"comes to mind immediately as a masterpiece of thepoetic short story; for F. Scott Fitzgerald, whoseTender is the Night is a vivid and serious, albeitdepressing account of his times; for Faulkner, whom1 have begun to read a little and enjoy; for JackKerouac, whose exhuberant prose led to an earlydeath after years of depression and drinking.

I have a new respect for these writings andfor the somberness of many of them. They nolonger appear to me merely as unworthy, incompletevisions, but as honest tellings of great courage,as far as they go, penetrating as deeply as it wasgiven to these authors to go. That is, was not givento many of them to live in a complete spiritual regeneration, but rather to die in the Wasteland, doesnot really lessen them in my eyes. They were knightswho died on the quest. Success and failure bothappear transpersonal now in my eyes. I am personallysecure, now, in my belief in the poetic ("karmic")justice of everything that happens in this world,from an intuitional and not merely theoreticalstandpoint. ("Belief in injustice is a measureof one's ignorance," Richard Bach.) 1 am securein my personal belief that all these writers willindeed be back to do greater work. 1 can now, forthe first time, see, 1 believe, death and life, tragedy and ecstasy, as points of view of which bothpoles have their relative validity. Oedipus theKing, who puts his eyes out in the first play ofthe cycle, comes back in the third as a Sage:that is the way of things in my own life, and inexistence, so far as 1 can see.

1 can survey the 20th century, its charredand battered landscape, the very "Wasteland" itself, with love; my own writing is entering new

LITERARY HERITAGE ... 14

areas with new force, hopefully to do its partat some time in the renewal of our civiliza

tion; I am curious to see where life and literature will take now.

Maxwell Stanton Reif

St. Louis, MissouriMay 28, 1984.

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