Paul Rudolph

The Ringling Museum is currently exhibiting a facsimile of a beach house by the architect Paul Rudolph done many decades ago.  The real beach house exists somewhere on a key in a rich man's grounds south of Sarasota.  I have now been three times to the exhibition; it is so beautiful a structure that I could go, nay, shall go many more times before it is taken down in the autumn.  Paul Rudolph who was a distinguished architect, pretty much started his career in the Sarasota area, although he is famous for buildings he designed later throughout the country and abroad.  There is a great sentimental draw as well.  I knew Paul but that is not so memorable as the encounter I had with his aesthetic when I first went to the apartment of the woman who was to become my second wife.  She was a student at the Harvard School of Design and steeped in the design theories of Bauhaus which the school's director Walter Gropius had made to flourish in America.  I had never seen anything like the decor she had imposed on the small basement room in which she was living.  It was so spare, the few areas for sitting were all built into the walls, the small room was distinct in its divisions without any physical prompts .  The space beyond the door where I stood upon entering was created by stringing raw leather thongs from floor to ceiling.  It was, I recognized, a sort of vestibule, but there was no wall, only the intellectual and aesthetic sense of one.  I had grown up in the Middle Western affluence of a surgeon's home, rooms full of tables, chairs, Persian rugs, embroidered cushions, things and more things and more.  And here in this Cambridge basement I was confronted with spare, empty, stripped down spaces.  Paul was one of the critics the last year of her studies, he had been a judge on her qualifying project; he was also a friend.  It so happened when we moved to New Haven for my appointment a few years later he was arriving as the Dean of the School of Architecture, and our friendship flourished.  We were on hand to witness Paul's transformation of the Elks clubhouse building into his residence, inspiring us again and again to eliminate, minimize, go for the bones of the design, geometry and coordination over careless sensuality and comfort.  It was so exhilarating.  The beach house at the Ringling has glass walls, and panels that can be lowered or raised over the glass to create darkness or light, rooms that mimic the measurements of the exterior glass panels, so that the occupants will feel themselves in a Mondrian painting.  When we moved to California for my Stanford appointment we lived in an Eichler house made by a mass market housing developer whose allegiance was to Bauhaus.  Every piece of furniture we installed in the living room was in some geometric relationship with every other, nothing was random.  And then suddenly we had four children approaching their teens, and Bauhaus was over.  We moved back East to a large rambling house filled with too much furniture, too many casual messes strewn all over the place, too many dogs, people, residents and visitors, hullabaloo.  So the facsimile of the beach house draws me back again and again to a memory of the early years of our marriage, and a kind of special sanity.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

We made it through the first act of the play by that name based on the 1967 film with Hepburn, Tracy, and Poitier.  We thought it embarrassingly outdated, and a plot so contrived--anyone not meant to be in the ensuing conversation left the scene conveniently enough if only to fetch another handkerchief.  Perhaps there are still  large parts of the country where ordinary polite middle class white people might be outraged that their daughter was thinking of marrying an African-American.  It was 1947 or 48 when my sister brought a black man to Sunday dinner, our black cook who served the meal had a hizzy fit and left the room, and mother had a melt down--this was in the American middle west.  I had taken up having sex with a black football star at our high school a needy guy who was prevented from dating white girls and was willing to settle for relief in the back seat of my car, and over the years we struck up a friendship of sorts.  When a daughter went on a semester study trip to Kenya I encouraged her to get a Maasai boyfriend for her stay.  They were so gorgeous and it would all be so unsensational an experience unlike in the States.  My oldest sister lived with a black male for the last ten years of his life, and I got to know him quite well since they came to visit at my seashore place often.  He was someone who has used the GI Bill to make it into the executive class at IBM, quite a social distance from his mother who was a domestic, as I discovered at his funeral.  His silence on his family was indicative of the artificial comity of our relationship.  There was the same wall between the footballer and myself during our many teenaged conversations.  We never brought up the fact that his fellow students who were so friendly and admiring of him never ever invited him to parties.  Once when we were in college, still sexual partners oddly enough ("can't break the habit,"said with a laugh) when there were black girls everywhere on campus, he took me and a white friend to a --to me strange-- encampment so to speak out in the woods near Cedar Rapids where there was food and drink for sale and a jazz band playing.  I never thought of it at the time, but I suppose that Negroes could not go into jazz clubs in those days.  He and I never talked about the social and political facts of our two races just as we never talked about the fact that I was a queer going down on him whenever he wanted it.  Once a black student came to my house in Brookline and afterward while cutting through on a path to the Roman Catholic Church was apprehended and arrested by a typical Irish cop who saw black and saw crime.  It was dreadfully embarrassing; I got a liberal lawyer who got him off, of course, although the arrest stuck at municipal court level to protect the cop, so the acquittal was at superior court.  The student and I could say nothing; he forbade it.  His anger at me for living in a fancy white suburb came out clear, but what was I to do?  I have not talked, I mean really talked, to a black person for years now.  My trainer at the gym who is Puerto Rican and volunteers at a center for children where the clientele is largely black urges me to take up reading there to the smaller youngsters whose home life is pretty bleak.  But a white friend of mine cautions me that the mothers are all suspicious of the motives of older white males and I am not ready to put my gayness out there and reel it back in with false charges of sexual molestation

Charm

Did my mother teach me to be charming or did I pick it up from studying her in action all the years of my childhood?  I am said to be charming, and, indeed, I recognize it in myself.  Independent testimony, in this case, from classmates from ten to fifteen years of observation, is unanimous in underscoring my mother's charming manner.  Charm and deploying my sense of humor got me through the teen age years when other boys were disarmed from being hostile toward me, the colossal freak queer in their midst; they never quite got it that charm is just as aggressive and often hostile as their instinct to toughness and bullying.  When I entered upon a professional life, first in graduate school studying for the PhD degree, and then when I started teaching it was difficult for me to adjust to the males who dominated this new world who for the most part were entirely impervious to my charm, were really ignorant of how charm worked, not expecting clearly enough to find or respond to charm in a male. The charm was tied into my sense of humor; that they sometimes got, although the chair of the Stanford department, himself an old line WASP and as such utterly alien to a sense of humor, used to ask colleagues if in fact perhaps I were a Jew.  The chair at Yale, Frank Brown, appreciated me for my bizarre points of view, in fact, invited me to come to Yale after a dinner party where we sat side by side and traded nonsense with each for several hours.  Yes, Stanford was a tough nut to crack; the department was small enough that I was at the table for all departmental meetings and never impressed but only mystified the literal minded, matter of fact elderly persons that it had pleased Fate to give me as colleagues. I was saved by another junior colleague, a man from the Boston working class Irish, and as such, mischievous and subversive of authority and tolerant of my manner if not always appreciative of it.  I traded all that for a stint as chair at Boston University charged with building up the department, where at first charm and a sense of humor were all I needed with the group of youngsters I assembled as colleagues.  I generally puzzled faculty from other departments who were often New York  liberal Jews who considered me irrelevant politically and socially naive.  Charm did not work on them, and a few years later it certainly did not work on the new president, John Silber, a man of ferocious aggression and bluntness.  Charm, perhaps, was going out of style.  Still, my husband who came into my life about the time I was wondering if I needed to rethink my social manner, was much taken with my charming ways, remarking often that this had not been on offer in his family home on Staten Island.  He was not only amused by it, but mystified at how much benefit it accrued to me, and sometimes annoyed that his open and honest ways were no match for charming Charlie, as for instance, as I think I have recounted elsewhere in this blog, the time a representative on a United Airlines desk setting up a flight to London from Dulles arbitrarily gave us two first class cabin seats after she had been subject to what Richard pointed out was a barrage of charm--and I thought I was just chatting with the lady to pass time!  Recently I had a fabulous, funny, and ridiculous conversation with the nurses making up the surgical team for my open heart surgery.  Clearly this was before they put me out.  It was a delight that these same ladies came to my room to bid me farewell four days later when I was released from the hospital.  Ah. fun and games!  Let the party continue.

Female Architects

In the April 13th edition of the New York Times there was an article about a number of women now gaining purchase as architects in a field hitherto solidly dominated by males and pretty much closed to the ladies.  I am interested more than a little because for two decades I was married to an architect graduated from the Harvard School of Design in 1956, a student of Walter Gropius and Jose Luis Sert, as he called himself then.  Her career had the inevitable set back in becoming a mother four times over in rapid succession when day care was an unusual remedy and stay at home moms were thought psychologically necessary (we both thought so, and in retrospect so do our grown children,  I might add), but once back at work she met resistance frequently when she was the only woman, for instance, on a design team.  This long winded prelude gets me to the Times article which was front page of the Arts section and featuring photographs of six rising stars in the business.  I use the word business because that is really what the news article is all about--women getting secure positions in a business, architecture, hitherto controlled and dominated by males.  I would have called this piece of news a fit for the Business section of the newspaper.  Furthermore, I am quite sure if they were profiling six rising males there would never been the photographs.  Overall the piece seemed completely sexist in its implications.  Female business achievement is not straight forward in some way, it has to be gussied up as a form of artistic endeavor, the area assigned to women and gays, by and large. The photographs were perhaps even a more egregious slap at women, since the decision to run them seemed to operate on the age old notion that males need to have the gaze when dealing with women.  "Lovely to look at, lovely to hold," sang Fred Astaire all those years ago, and women are still tortured by the imperative to look at them.  I remember my wife and feel guilty at how I tried to manipulate her. When I met her she generally wore an old grey flannel skirt, sneakers, a dull grey sweater with the collar of a man's shirt sticking out; it was her uniform.  After we were married I got her into thigh length skirts and dresses and black boots; you can't keep a gay man down when there is a chance to buy women's clothing!  Of course, at home she wore mu-mus covered with juice and cereal stains, but when she returned to work after ten years and I took over the household tasks because my teaching permitted the time at home, she took to wearing pants suits, elegant fabrics, minimal decoration, straight lines, and I don't think I ever saw her in a dress again.  I think of my sisters and my mother's constant admonitions on their clothing, on "how you look", something she never said to me or my brother.  We were all of us short people except one sister who loomed tall and big; if she had been a male, she would have been a football star.  As it was, her teenaged years were a torture of being an outcast, an ugly, clumsy, insecure, immediate object of fun, whose mother. fastidious and delicate, gave her no support.  There is a somewhat happy ending to this story when this sister moved to New York City, shed the pounds, became miraculously a tall, elegant, ravishingly beautiful woman, who now at ninety, at her birthday party showed herself to be the same majestic beauty.  But this story is ugly.  What about the person?  Who cares?  She is beautiful, worth looking at, that's all that matters in our male controlled culture.  Today's news is that one of Harvard's exclusive all male clubs declines to take female members because of the potential for sexual abuse.  As my wife used to say "if they can't control their dicks, they should cut them off."

Things Do Do in Sarasota (this is yesterday's blog, somehow not downloaded)

Yesterday evening we were listening to a performance of Brahms' Sonata in F minor for Viola and Piano presented by a group called La Musica, a group of musicians who  offer four concerts of chamber music in the opera house and then this one at another auditorium, always in the month of April, this being their the thirtieth year of performance.  Later in June there will be a series of chamber music concerts of faculty and students of a group studying in Sarasota.  During the winter Izaak Perlman runs a winter version of his Long summer camp for aspiring instrumentalists culminating in a charming orchestra group playing his orchestrations of chamber pieces.  Yesterday we could have stayed to hear Samuel Barber's Sonata for Cello and Piano in C minor, but both of us so awash in the ravishment of Brahms chose to leave while we were ahead.  Plus we were hungry and there was a great fish restaurant in the vicinity.  During the "season" we go to six performances of the Sarasota Symphony which does not have the most exciting programming but marvelous playing and sound, and to chamber music concerts put on by the chairs of the various instruments which are always much more interesting.  There are four or five operas on offer during the season where excellent principals as a rule mingle with relatively indifferent and poorly directed choruses.  The ballet in Sarasota is world famous right now garnering reviews in the New York Times for their performances of Ashton.  The Asolo Repertory Theater is sort of the Broadway of Sarasota catering to an audience of very old people who last saw a play, one senses in the Eisenhower era out in Ohio--it's a bridge and tunnel crowd you might say, that comes from all over the Midwest and Canada to escape the cold.  The Asolo's  student conservatory theater balances this by unpredictable and sometimes difficult pieces---I saw my first play by Annie Baker there;  then there is a black theater that puts on mostly musicals but this year also did three serious dramas ("Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," for example) not their strongest efforts, and a conglomerate theater company with many auditoriums which puts on a melange of musicals, comedy shows, in our estimation mostly shlock, and now the quite new and small intense Urbanite Theatre which devotes itself to edgy and difficult plays for which it has already developed a passionate following.  The jazz music is well represented in clubs and halls throughout the city, like the Friday afternoon two hour sessions at the Unitarian Church.  All of which is to say that there is usually something going on during the season.  (I did not even mention the summer season of the Banyan Theater.)  The curious feature is that for any given moment there is very little choice, and there are no sudden commercial shifts.  The art scene is far more institutional here, the result rarely random and unpredictable.  So as opposed to Manhattan the great feature about it all, I recognize and appreciate, is that it is predictable.  There is no desperate struggle for the almost sold out event of the must see artist.  Everything is plotted long in advance, the drive to the theater is easy, parking is plentiful, quality restaurants are waiting  in the near vicinity.  True enough, there is very little that makes you really tingle, throws you for a loop, leaves you shaken for days.  The audience is mostly beyond seventy and maybe those moments of strong emotion are just as well over.  And yet, and yet down twenty miles south the theater in Venice last November put on a production of "Hair" that was as strong as the one that opened on Broadway in 1968.

Viewing the Helmers Marriage

Last night my husband and I went to a performance of a modern version of Ibsen's "Doll's House," stripped down for twenty first century taste (eliminating the complications of the children, for one thing, which as any veteran of marriage will tell you, so radically changes the chemistry of husband and wife that this is basically no longer Ibsen's play).  As is always the case when the tensions of the power struggle between husband and wife are played out, and there is ample evidence of the acculturation which keeps women enslaved to the family, and obedient to her husband's outside power struggles, I grow guilty in recollecting my own twenty year marriage to the mother of our four children.  She was a trained architect, just out of school, and ready for her first job, when we married, I was in my second year as an instructor of ancient languages in a four year college commuting an hour three days a week from Cambridge where we lived. In the second year of our marriage she bore a baby boy, quite unplanned, as those things could be back in the days before The Pill.  Three more were to follow.  We both assumed that she would stay home and mother the child, and then again with the later arrivals.  I was frantic at the disruption of my routines; I had to prepare classes, read papers, write some damn book or another to ensure my future.  She was stunned at the loss of her personal life as the babies dominated her ever waking moment.  I didn't know what to do.  Yes, I could cook and did so, could diaper a baby, did that far less so; babies were breast fed, so that let me off that hook.  But me cooking and shopping made us both tense.  It was "time away from my career."  We both felt it, both uneasy, but she also angry because of the underlying perception unspoken that hers didn't matter.  For ten years she felt bitter and I felt guilty.  The children were the most adorable, beautiful, sweet human beings, we were so proud of them, so pleased to laugh and play with them, for me true to this day when they are all in their late fifties and visiting me in Florida (their mother alas having died in 2005).  But as youngsters they were always that burden and responsibility, that "other" thing, not what we were trained to do, supposed to do, which was working on our careers.  After ten years the children were all in school and the responsibility of other adults for long stretches of weekday time. I was successful enough to arrange my teaching and research duties so that generally I could operate from my office at home in their off school hours, and she went back to work full-time.  She had lost ten years as her classmates were gaining a foothold in the  profession.  She was a woman in a man's world.  I was reminded of that by the article in this morning's New York Times about women architects and the formidable challenges they face in a man's profession. My wife and I understood that when she returned to work nothing must stand in her way. And nothing did; she worked her way up to associate, the co- designer of major buildings around Boston, even from time to time out in the field as the site architect with her hard hat and boots.   I took over the cooking, a cleaning woman came for the cleaning, the children made their beds and oversaw the laundry.  It was an interesting role reversal as my children remarked on how in their friends' families it was the father who often had to work late at the office and the mother cooked dinner.  I became to all intents and purposes the main homemaker.  I suppose that anyone viewing this arrangement would say it all evolved naturally and comfortably from my being more gay than straight, even if this were an item unknown to not many more than my wife and myself.  We grew apart, my wife and I, for a variety of reasons, not the least because she liked being out in the world, giving architecture all her attention, hanging out with the boys, and I wanted to take sabbatical years in Europe with the family, and finally did so without her.  It was a divergence of interests, the sexual one becoming more pronounced as we developed in different directions. Nobody slammed the door, like Nora Helmer, the marriage ended not with a bang but a kind of yawn.

Monday Morning

From time to time people have asked me for more of my blog.  I stopped once and then again because I grew tired of the tyranny of having to compose a new one each day.  I was often asked "why do you feel compelled to do this every day?"  Well, that is my nature, is the obvious answer.  For someone who was required from early boyhood to be standing behind his chair at the breakfast table to await the moment of his mother's arrival at the table, and who cannot recall one single time that he or any one of his five siblings failed in that obligation, I guess writing the blog is just another hoop through which to jump.  I have been inching forward to resuming the writing, but my compulsion to frame things is so strong that I had to find the appropriate day.  It would have to be a Sunday.  Why?  Well, the week begins on Sunday.  Says who?  Some little voice in my brain still alive to serving as altar boy at the early morning service at our Episcopal Church.  Oddly enough in the years of retirement the days of the week have lost any significance except Sunday which is now marked only by the greater size and variety of sections of the New York Times delivered to my doorstep daily.  Like the Dowager Countess of Grantham I really have no sense of "weekend" anymore, although unlike Her Ladyship I once did indeed look forward to the weekend like a shipwreck sighting an arriving naval patrol boat.  Sunday April 10th was to be my debut in a third incarnation of blog writer.  Another opening, another show.  This Sunday, as I sat with my Times in my big comfy chair, there came out of the sky blue morning a strange crack of what I could imagine was lightening, and the lamp by my chair went out.  And thus my computer was stalled, and thus the blog was not about to be started, and thus the rhythms were off, and . . . . .Well, here it is Monday.  I shall start the blog, and pretend that Monday, the start of the work week for millions of people, is a good moment to begin another installment of what in my idleness I shall call a simulacrum of my life's work.  After all, in addition to teaching, I did write a lot.  In any case, this lovely Monday is a new beginning for someone whom I shall style a New Person, having just come through open heart surgery a few weeks ago.  As a raconteur I know that the phrase ought to guarantee the immediate attention of your audience except here in Sarasota open heart surgery is rather much a ho-hum procedure.  What else could one expect in a community which supposedly has the highest percentage of over eighties in the nation.  Eighty, now that's a word to conjure with!  A daughter just visiting remarked enthusiastically that it was like a miracle to look at me.  "You look eighty again!" she exclaimed.  Hmmmm . . . .