BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

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Chapter One
I discover Ralph Blakelock and Paul Auster

Dear Edgar:

Perhaps one of these days we shall meet. I came upon the Questroyal Fine Art Gallery when I read of a mad artist, called Ralph Albert Blakelock. He is mentioned in one of Paul Auster's early novels, where it is also mentioned that some his work is in the Brooklyn Museum. I was, and am, interested in Auster and as I was working on Remsen Street at the time, I thought I would go over and see the mad painter's work.

Blakelock was an American Painter of the Catskill School and during his lifetime was very popular. His specialty was blazing sunsets behind dour landscapes, sometimes with Indian encampments in the distance. He was in and out of straight-jackets and died near Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks, after two years at Middletown, an asylum of the day. His body was brought to NYC, where his funeral service was at Grace Church on Broadway. I believe that he is buried in Greenwood Cemetery.

I arrived at the Museum on a Wednesday, having told my boss that I needed an afternoon of aesthetic retreat. I was eager to discover this new painter, as I was a little mad too, and I thought there might be some fraternal cognizance.

When I arrived at the museum, I was told that Blakelock was not presently hung, his works were in the basement, one or two being cleaned, the others just resting, I guess. I knew a curator, a classmate, who was at the Metropolitan, a curator of Colonial American Furniture, and a few weeks later, through his good offices, another curator at the Brooklyn met me on the front steps, and I was taken down to the inner sanctum where I was shown three Blakelock works, two small, and very dark. Instead of the famous sunsets, two had a moonlit scene, one a lake, the moon obscured by clouds, the second, an Indian campsite , pressed up against a hill in the back ground, the moon again obscured, this time by smoke from the Indians’ campfires. The third painting was a watercolor of Blakelock’s wife, Cora, a serious woman, about thirty or so, mostly in gray, if I recall correctly.

These 19th century paintings added little to my understanding of Paul Auster, a postmodernist writer whom I still read and enjoy. I suppose, that for him, mentioning Blakelock was a little stage business in the novel, neither symbolic, nor an arrow pointing to a murderer. (Auster’s latest novel, “Invisible,” has just been published.)

At the time I was separated from my darling wife, to whom I have since returned, as I am a man who knows a good thing only when he puts it aside for a while. Perhaps like coming back to Moby Dick or swimming in the Atlantic. In a moment of weakness she accepted my return and a happy fate has been sealed ever since.

I was graduated close to the bottom of my class of 106, in June of 1956. Eleanor Roosevelt spoke at our graduation, whearing a hat, veil and heavy Cuban heeled shoes. I see her with a fox wrapped around her shoulders, but it was June, and that is not likely. She shook my hand and wished me well, and shortly thereafter, my advisor managed to find a place for me at a distant school, a college that no one who had been graduated from my school had attended before; and so, unsuspecting, the admissions office, decided to take a chance on me.

I found the first two years of college so easy that I rarely, if ever, studied, (similar to my habit in high school) instead I lived in the stacks of the library, where I read mostly the dustiest volumes in the bottom rows of the stacks in the cellar. It was my thought that I was duty bound to rescue them from lack of readership.

It was in those stacks that I first became knowledgeable about the holocaust. I also read the most obscure, though readable, poets, and delved into some history. Ohio Wesleyan had an important geology department, and many specimens were kept in heavy mahogany showcases in the halls of the library. I became interested enough to take a course in Geology, and had I really understood what life would be like I might have become a geologist, as it had an intellectual aspect, and was done outdoors.

But, I wasn't that smart at the time. High School, had prepared me well for those first two years and at college I found myself to be a four point student; though I did not get into the Advanced English course for which a test was given. I was to write an essay on Delmore Schwartz, but having never heard of him, I assumed that Delmore Schwartz was a name fabricated by the examiners in order to ascertain which of the aspiring writers taking the examination would detect the game. I criticized the poetry crudely, ignoring the fact that in Mr. Clausen’s first form class I had never grasped the concepts of either rhyme or meter, I pointed out with glee what I believed to be Schwartz’s many flagrant errors in rhyme and meter. It turns out that Delmore Schwartz was a Pulitzer Prize winning poet. But, tell me, who could have such a name?

The examiners understood my ignorance immediately and relegated me to steerage with the other illiterates. I found, however, that many of the other illiterates were, actually literate, and a few of us began to write for the College Quarterly, The OWL. I wrote mostly pseudo-abstract poetry and pulled the wool over the eyes of my readers. A few female fans of pseudo-ism elected me Editor at the beginning of my sophomore year. Studying was still unnecessary and I became a dishwasher in Monet Hall, the girls' dormitory.

A few years later, at an alumni function on Park Avenue in New York City, I introduced myself to the new president of the college as Michael Morris Monet III, allowing him to make his own assumptions. This was not first time that I assumed a name, nor was it the last.

It was at Ohio Wesleyan that I met Joel. I arrived at the dormitory on a promising September day, in 1956. I was eager to meet my future roommate and so I rushed to our room. Joel’s luggage was there: three or four suitcases each tied with clothes line to protect it from the possibility of a train wreck or of an accidental opening by the Rail Road Express Agency. There was also a steamer truck, and one suitcase marked “First Aid.” This was going to be interesting, as the last time I had seen a steamer trunk was in Queen Christina, the Greta Garbo film that had been shown at school in a “modern arts” class. There was also one in our attic that my parents had stored for their New Years’ trips to Cuba or Rio.

When Joel arrived to claim his place in our room, I had already taken the bed closest to the window, as well as half of the built in Formica covered desk. I kept all of my things on the widow side of the room, thus dividing the room, fairly, I thought, into two equal shares. November 2009

Chapter Two
Getting to Know, Really Know, Joel

Chapter Three
My Unfortunate Discovery that Studying was Necessary

Chapter Four
My Egregious Exit from College