First Love

WHITE GODDESS, BLACK GODDESS

Returning to Goshen College after my summer in New York was an inevitable and crashing down. I was jaded and world weary. I couldn't keep my mind on my studies. Having discovered that with only slightly more effort than I had put into my high school work I could keep my head above water, I looked for ways to entertain myself.

Now that I was a mascot and darling of the campus intelligentsia, I wrote book reviews of avant garde novels for the student newspaper:

William Burroughs' The Ticket That Exploded
Norman Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam?

J. R. Burkholder had an office up in the attic of the old Spouter Inn where he collected radical publications. In a Ramparts magazine article I discovered the poet Rimbaud, whom the magazine was likening to Bob Dylan, or the reverse.

In a bookstore in Elkhart, a small city about 20 miles away, where I bought my weekly copy of the Village Voice, I found the New Directions edition of A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat translated by Louise Varese:

“Once if I remember well, my life was a feast
where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.
One evening I seated Beauty on my knees.
And I found her bitter. And I cursed her.”

Entrancing! What an attitude! Just the way I felt! I read the introduction, then devoured the Enid Starkie biography and the Wallace Fowlie translation of the complete works, feeling more and more that I had finally discovered a magical kindred spirit. If I was not (yet) a poetic prodigy, I was at least precocious. Like Rimbaud, I had renounced my religion and provincial town in disgust and run away to the big city to debauch myself. But it was the magnificent attitude, the pose of ennui and loathing which I cultivated:

“Really it's stupid, these village churches
Where fifteen ugly brats dirtying the pillars
Listen to a grotesque priest whose shoes stink
As he mouths the divine babble”

- Amos Stoltzfus (to be continued)