Closing time

To gain entry into Norman O. Brown’s seminar on Finnegans Wake, undergraduates were handed a randomly chosen passage from the novel and asked to free associate to it - for two hours. Free associate? Perhaps I was the only one who understood the assignment that way, and turned in a spiralling rhizome of questions and sentence fragments rather than a coherent essay. Later in the term, we students suspected that knowledge of a foreign language (or, better, two) meant an automatic place in the class. Teaching at a state university in northern California in the early 1970s, and a counter-cultural one at that, Brown could not expect students to arrive with or to pursue the elaborate classical training he had received. Many of us had not yet read Joyce’s Ulysses, let alone Brown’s Love’s Body (whose title, we learned later, had come to Brown in a dream) or Closing Time, his study of the Wake. Some students had shown up only because of a story circulating around campus about the last time Brown had taught the Wake - that he had been carried in inside a coffin and had sat up suddenly, reciting paragraphs from memory. Our more Dionysian expectations ran up against Brown’s pedagogical demands - the importance of reading foreign languages in the original, of studying the most difficult texts, of being familiar with modern poets, of having an etymological dictionary always ready to hand.

The great classicist and philologue was no antiquarian. Etymologies were valued because, as in ‘The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words’ (the text of choice in the seminar), they were the road to the unconscious. In that class I learned that the only response to poetry was more poetry. The Wake class was also my first exposure to theory, to the idea that thought, like numbers, could be squared, so to speak - taken to a higher level; and that this was what made thinking worthwhile. But only with the understanding that you then had to bring it back to matters at hand, to the present, to what was happening. Parents attending the l975 commencement ceremony for which we had chosen Brown as our speaker were bewildered. Why was he talking about Portugal? What could an insurrection among Portuguese army rank and file - the end of the Salazar regime - possibly have to do with their young adult child’s impending integration into the world of job applications and a career?

Radical thought transversals of the kind Brown appreciated were not looked upon favourably at the East Coast graduate school I attended. ‘Well, you’ve certainly covered a lot of ground’, was the grudging professorial response I received to my first presentation, on Balzac, but which had suddenly taken a lurch and veered into a discussion of Mao Zedong. The terse evaluation, from a narratologist, was delivered in an accent striving to sound British. (Brown, who was British, sounded like he grew up in Ohio.) When I returned to Santa Cruz several years later, this time as a colleague, I heard several, possibly apocryphal stories about Brown. How, while delivering a public lecture, he had been wrestled to the ground by an agitprop Bay Area character of the era known as ‘The People’s Penis’ - in full costume. How a radical lesbian feminist author had erected a tent on his front lawn in Pasatiempo and refused to leave until he agreed to an interview. Actually, it was very easy to speak with Brown. He possessed an enormous curiosity about other people’s work, their projects. In fact, what we experienced as his generosity - his willingness to read what one was writing and ponder it - was really nothing more than the effect of that far-reaching and restless intellectual appetite. There were only two requirements. first, you had to rid your writing of any gratingly academic prose; temporizing or posturing phrases like ‘as I will clarify later on’ or ‘arguably the most rigorous’ would be viciously scratched out on the returned text. And second, you had to submit to a strenuous mountain walk to pursue your discussion.

A small, compact man of regular, moderate habits, Brown was in good physical condition well into his eighties. Younger, more dissolute friends and colleagues had a hard time keeping up with him in the forest. But he had no shortage of fellow walkers - anthropologists, philosophers, poets, political theorists, historians - mostly, I think, because you could count on a better response to your work than you could hope to receive from your own cohort of disciplinary specialists. Nobby, as he was called, knew the forest trails very well. He used the rhythms of the walk dramatically: waving his walking stick for punctuation, abruptly stopping short, sometimes hitting you squarely on the back between the shoulder blades - ‘You’ve got it!’ He delighted in those moments when the conversation mimicked the landscape; when, suspended between the vectors of poetry and theory, you looked down and found yourself negotiating a treacherous passage across a fallen redwood over a chasm. Or when revelation came in the form of an unexpected juxtaposition of texts and the rare mushroom he had missed the week before. But the walks had a narrative logic as well. They began with the estranging effect of having your own work refracted through whatever else Brown was reading at the time: Hesiod, Ivan Illich, a book on Shi’ite mysticism. By the return stretch, though, something like the proper ratio of Freud to Marx underlying your project had been ascertained. Looking back, I think it was mostly that: not enough Marx in some cases, not enough Freud in others. Go back to Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In the last walks we took it seemed that a heavier dose of Freud was always the answer.

Brown’s Freudo-Marxian theory of the l970s coincided with the most sustained critique in American history of what we used to call ‘the military-industrial complex’. That moment has now passed - in more ways than one. The names of Brown and his fellow travellers - Laing, the Black Mountain poets, Fromm, Merce Cunningham, Illich, Octavio Paz, Marcuse, John Cage, Denise Levertov - seemed to disappear quite suddenly in the late l970s, under waves of translations from the French. And within the shell or cage of today’s academic conventions, breeding ground for specialization and opportunism, it’s not clear that the kind of intellectual courage Brown stood for - thought pushed to the borders of possibility mediated by a powerful grounding in the materiality of the text - is much valued any more.

It’s not clear that a figure like Brown could exist in today’s university. Brown did not live what he wrote; those who wanted him to embody ‘polymorphous perversity’ were disappointed. But it was very hard to distinguish his thinking from his teaching. In this he exemplified a force and a moment in American intellectual life whose distance from us now can be measured by how little meaning the concept ‘American intellectual life’ seems to have at this moment.

Kristin Ross

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