1974

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

A few weeks ago, I read a book entitled 1974 by Francine Prose, a writer I’ve admired ever since I read her marvelous book, The Lives of the Muses, in the early 2000s. But her most recent book was very different. It was a personal memoir of the time when, still in her twenties, she was just beginning to find some success as a novelist. And, as she relates, it was also when she was spending a lot of time in San Francisco, having promiscuous sex – those were the days when we were still under the influence of organizations like the Sexual Freedom League, years before the AIDS epidemic occurred. But the main story she tells in her memoir deals with her relationship with a man named Tony Russo whose name may not be familiar to you, though he was well known then. So let me fill you in about Tony Russo.

He had been a close friend with Dan Ellsberg, the man who had brought the Pentagon papers to the attention of the world in 1971 – documents that showed that President Lyndon Johnson had lied to the American public about the war in Vietnam in order to find a justification for prosecuting the Vietnam War. The exposure of these falsehoods created an uproar at the time, and Ellsberg was soon tried, but was not convicted.

Tony Russo, like Ellsberg, had spent time in Vietnam, had interrogated many Viet Cong (the North Vietnamese soldiers), and soon learned the truth about what was going on in Vietnam. Moreover, he became determined that the American public should know the truth. So, he hooked up with Ellsberg, and, according to what he later told Prose, it was he who convinced Ellsberg to spend many hours photocopying the thousands of pages comprising the Pentagon papers. But Russo was not so lucky as Ellsberg.  He was sentenced to prison for a time and was beaten while a prisoner before he was released.

So, when Prose met Tony Russo, he was a sort of cultural hero to people who had been opposed to the war.  Prose was a bit in awe of him, being just a novice author herself, and admitted she was a little star-struck when she met him. Tony took a shine to Prose and they started to hang out. 

But most of the time they spent together, which was extensive, they just drove around San Francisco late at night while Tony fascinated Prose with his tales of his experiences in Vietnam and with what had happened to him since. He was a crazy driver, making sudden abrupt turns, thinking he might be tailed by government operatives who meant to harm him. Prose had a lot of sangfroid in those days, apparently, so she literally went along for the ride. Eventually, of course, they did have sex, in Tony’s messy apartment, but it was awkward and not satisfying. But they still spent a lot of time together and – skipping ahead to the end of their relationship – Tony turned out to be a paranoid schizophrenic.  The last part of his life, by which time Prose had to disconnect from him, is very sad to read about.  Ellsberg was still a hero – I have personal friends who knew him well – but Tony Russo became a forgotten man.

Reading Prose’s book, however, brought back many memories for me. I had been born in San Francisco and spent the first years of my life there. And later, when growing up, I often went to San Francisco.  Although by 1974, I was teaching in Connecticut, but, as it happened, I also spent a good part of the summer of 1974 in the Bay Area. Just as 1974 was a pivotal year in the life of Francine Prose, so it was for me – and for the country, still riven by protests against the war, which would culminate with the Watergate scandal and, ultimately, with Nixon’s forced resignation in August of that year. 

Musing on all this caused me to recall many memories of that year, particularly that same summer when my own personal and professional life underwent some momentous changes.  So, stimulated by Prose’s book, I decided to recount some of those events in this blog.  This was my life before I became involved in my work on near-death experiences, but what occurred that year, I can now see, were the necessary precludes to and helped to shape my forthcoming career as an NDE researcher. 

To set the stage for what is to follow, I need to backtrack  a few years.  In 1971, I had my first LSD trip, which was life-changing.  I have always regarded it as the most important spiritual experience I’ve ever had. I had a second trip the next year and also swallowed a psilocybin mushroom in my continued explorations of what was then called "altered states of consciousness."  But a key turning point occurred in 1972 when I attended a conference on the then nascent field of transpersonal psychology, which had been co-founded by Abraham Maslow, who previously had been one of the fathers of humanistic psychology. Discovering transpersonal psychology and listening to some of the then luminaries in the field, whom I was later to be befriended by, was a revelation to me. Once I became familiar with transpersonal psychology, I could see that was the field for me.  I returned to the university incredibly excited and began to offer courses with a transpersonal slant and write conceptual articles for The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology.

But the most important event in my early life as a transpersonal psychologist was when I was able to attend a month-long program in transpersonal psychology in Berkeley in the summer of 1974 that was co-sponsored by Esalen Institute and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology.  It was then that I was able to have first-hand exposure to the leading people in the field, such as Stan Grof, another one of the founders of transpersonal psychology, his then wife, Joan Halifax, Jean Houston, Charlie Tart, Arthur Hastings, and many others. All of the people I mentioned eventually came to be my friends and helped me enormously in my career. It was also then that I fell in love with Jean Houston, a beautiful and brilliant woman whose IQ I figured must be about 200!

But in addition to hearing these people speak about their work, there were also a great many extra-curricular activities for us participants.  They included a peyote ritual, a float tank experience, a session which taught us how to massage (I found I was good at this) and an exercise involving Grof’s holotrophic breathwork, which can induce profound altered states of consciousness.

By the way, it was during this program that Nixon was forced to resign. We hardly noticed.  

Of course, I got to know a number of the other participants in the program, and became especially friendly with a Canadian artist named Kay McCullough who shared my admiration for Jean Houston.  After Jean’s talk, we both went up to her and said, “Would you marry us?” (We meant we wanted to marry Jean, not each other.) Jean roared. (Later on, as you will read, I had much more contact with Jean, though I was never able to convince her to marry me. She claimed that her husband would object.)

Joking aside, that personal initiation into the world of transpersonal psychology and getting to know many of the foremost people in the field was of inestimable importance in shaping my professional career and preparing me to do my work as a near-death researcher, which would begin two years later.

When I returned to the university for the fall semester, I was somehow able to wangle the funds to create a new interdepartmental course, which I believe I called “The Nature of Consciousness,” or something vague like that.  How I even managed to get permission for such a course is left only for the gods to know.  In any case, it was held in a large lecture hall and was packed with eager students to hear the roster of guest speakers I had lined up for the course.

Since his was now fifty years ago, I don’t remember most of them, but I do definitely recall that Stan Grof and Joan Halifax were among them.  I no longer remember anything from their lectures, but I do remember two events that I have never forgotten. One was a frolicsome snowball fight they had down by a frozen Mirror Lake. The other was a special workshop on holographic breathwork where I met a woman named Linda whom I definitely fancied. As a joke, I remember I sent her a bagel afterward along with an invitation to meet me for lunch. She didn’t consume the bagel and also resisted my amorous overtures, but she quickly became my best friend and for many years thereafter was my confidant, meeting me every few weeks for lunch and gossip.  We’ve stayed in touch all these years, and she even shared my passion for Roger Federer. 

But I digress.

Another one of the speakers was Jean Houston, and I do remember talking with her afterward. I was still keen on her, and she seemed to enjoy my company, too.  She even invited me to her Foundation for Mind Research in New York for a two week-long workshop. By then, I had read her and husband’s book on psychedelics, so she didn’t have to ask me twice.  I was thrilled to spend more time with her.  I even toyed with the idea of writing her biography. I never did, of course, but she did appreciate my interest in her.

The workshop was experiential – it featured exercises from her and husband’s book, Mind Games, which I eventually used in my own classes. I also remember that she introduced us all to a new musical discovery, Pachelbel’s Canon in D, which I have since come to hate since you can’t even enter an elevator these days without hearing it.

I left still awed by this dazzling woman, and grateful for what I was able to learn from her.

That same semester, I also taught a graduate course in transpersonal psychology. It attracted a diverse group of students as well as a philosophy professor and a Catholic priest both of whom became good friends of mine. But I also recall a rather hard-bitten phlegmatic woman who seemed out of place in that class. The reason I remember her so vividly after all these years was because of her response to some excerpts from an article I read to the class.

The article was written by a psychiatrist named Russell Noyes and was called, as I recall, "The Experience of Dying." The term near-death experience hadn’t yet been invented, but that’s what Noyes was writing about. So, as I was quoting the first of these excepts, the woman I mentioned began quietly to sob. That’s when I first realized how powerful these experiences where. That planted a seed of interest in me, and you know how that seed grew in time to lead to my life as a near-death researcher – a woman’s tears did that. 

Perhaps needless to say, my burgeoning and all-consuming involvement in the field of transpersonal psychology did not only affect my professional life – and my life in my department (it’s a good thing I was a full professor with tenure then!), but also my personal life.  Especially my marriage.

My wife had been freaked out by my psychedelic experiences and the changes it had wrought in my personality and extracurricular activities.  I was now spending a lot of my time reading spiritual books, such as the classic, The Autobiography of a Yogi, spending time in Ashrams, going to talks of Eastern gurus, and consorting with any number of souls seeking enlightenment.  I also set up a little mediation room in my house complete with incense and candles.  

All this didn’t just perplex my wife; it frightened her. She wondered what had happened to the man she married.  

She became extremely depressed, so we eventually entered couples therapy to see if we could save our marriage from disintegrating.  

That effort failed. I was not coming back. But going into therapy was fateful – I am tempted to say, fatal – for other reasons because for a concatenation of factors I won’t have the space to detail here, it led to a woman coming into my life who effectively served to break up my marriage and draw me into a relationship that I would ultimately come deeply to regret. 

At the time, I was grateful to her for rescuing me from a marriage that had been very unhappy for me, even before my years of psychedelic exploration. But over time, I realized that I had been lured away by an enchantress who had cloven feet.

But to tell that story, even briefly, we need to return to that tumultuous year, 1974.

She came with a rope. At the time, I couldn't tell if the rope was to save me or to hang me, but before long I was clinging to it as my only hope of salvation that might lift me out of my pit of marital despair. 

  

She had magical powers – indeed she was bewitching and I was enchanted by her. She was not beautiful, but she was very striking looking. She was exceptionally intelligent and her verbal fluency was so stunning, I was often in awe of her when she spoke. She was the most psychologically perceptive person I had ever met (and she had had years of psychotherapy too; she could dance rings around anyone she worked with).  She appeared to see so deeply into my soul and to be so aware of my tormented life with my wife that within an hour or so I had become completely beguiled by her. She also seemed to have occult powers and her presence was both dazzling and mesmerizing.  

I knew she was my rescuer and, within a short time, I took the rope she had extended to me and followed her.

Over the next few months, having been both captivated and captured by this woman, I made the break she had urged me to effect (“I want you to be my lover”) and started living with her in her apartment south of Hartford.  (She was then working as a TV reporter for a Hartford-based channel.). Needless to say, this tore my family apart.

I had to leave all my children behind, including my daughter, Kathryn, at least to begin with. (A few months later, I came for Kathryn – the scene was out of Dostoevsky.)  It was the biggest rupture of my entire life, a mixture of the most intense excitement and the most searing pain of loss. 

No one in my family knew my whereabouts. I lived rather like an outlaw at that time. I took the back roads into school in case my wife tried to track my movements. Meanwhile at the university rumors circulated about me. (One that got back to me, I remember, was that I was living with two 14-year-old girls! Where that one came from, God knows!)  My colleagues kept their distance — I think they were a little afraid of me.  I was a dangerous man, living out something scandalous, a subversive to the official academic culture of scholarship and professional propriety.  

What followed was two years of hell.  This period of my life is still so painful for me to recall and fills me with such shame that I will spare both you and myself from the horror of those years. Suffice it to say that eventually I had to break free of her.  I cut the rope that had bound me to her and, with my daughter, I escaped and took refuge in the home of a professor friend of mine.

Epilogue

One of the things that drew me to her was my learning how much she had suffered in life.  She evoked a tremendous sense of pity in me. 

After I was living with her, she began to disclose to me a good deal of her history of personal suffering and loss, which moved me unspeakably.  She recounted many instances of cruel mistreatment and abuse in the course of her childhood and her continuing difficulties and resultant sorrows through her many failed marriages. As a person with very permeable boundaries, her life had often been unbearable and she had already survived several nervous breakdowns.

It was only later that I came across Stefan Zweig’s novel, Beware of Pity. Had I read it before meeting her, I would have been on my guard. But only a fool would think you can save another person from their demons.  I was that fool.

A few years after I had made my escape, she sent a letter of apology to my daughter and me. She had joined A.A. and was trying to mend herself.  I don’t know if she ever did.

The last time I saw her was almost thirty-five years ago.  I was at the movies in Hartford when a woman walked up to me in the lobby smiling broadly. She was on crutches (she had broken her ankle), and I had no idea who she was. When I was with her, she was svelte, red-haired and physically very arresting.  This woman was pudgy, grey-haired and totally unprepossessing. But when she continued to smile, I knew – to my astonishment – who it was. I could hardly believe it. We had a few laughs, and she called me by one of her old favorite endearments, Uncle Dudley. After an uncomfortable moment or two, she hobbled into one of the theaters in the multiplex while I looked on before heading my way into another theater.  I never saw or heard from her or anything about her again.

I’m happy to say that after surviving that ordeal, my life definitely took an upward turn, especially after I discovered my true vocation as an NDE researcher.  I had been able to grew close to all my children again, reconciled with my now ex-wife (we were both happier when we no longer lived together) and had found my true love, a woman named Norma, with whom I came to live in what we soon dubbed our house, The Near-Death Hotel.

So, it all ended well, but as for 1974 – it was a hell of a year (double entendre intended). 

Reflections on the Divided States of America

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

I’m sure that by now, many of you share my sadness and disappointment about the results of the election. And that you’ve already listened to or read enough post-mortem commentaries from the punditocracy.  So I won’t write at length here, but do feel the need at least to contribute something to the ongoing conversation.

First, if any of you reading this supported Trump, this is not for you. You probably won’t want to read what follows. But I suspect that most of you who read my blogs will know my own sympathies and share them.  So this is for you.

Musing on the dire election returns, I don’t recognize this country anymore. Given Trump’s decisive victory, I feel that I am living in a land now dominated by yahoos, fools, crazies, and hooligans who relish and thrill to Trump’s brand of bile and vitriol. But why waste time and words on mere name-calling? It serves no purpose and is not constructive.   

I thought that Kamala would win. I think if there had been no early voting, she might have succeeded, since her support seemed to be surging toward the end, but we’ll never know. And consider: She not only had to defeat Trump, but she was also the victim of misogyny, racism and being the VP of a very unpopular President — a lot to overcome.  And, obviously, in hindsight, too much. Moreover, she had only little more than a hundred days to introduce herself to an American electorate to whom she was not well known. Had she been able to secure the nomination much earlier, she might have prevailed, but, again, that issue is moot now. What we know is that all the support she received from women, from youthful voters, and from all the celebrities who rallied to her cause was not enough. To me, Kamala was an inspiring speaker and leader, but, still, she was not enough either.

I personally don’t have faith that the Democratic party itself is enough to turn the tide. Besides, the tide has already come in and swamped those of us who supported Kamala’s candidacy.  What to do now?

To my friends, I have joked that since we are not France, a coup d’état is not likely. Any kind of insurrection would be bloody and ultimately unsuccessful.  So, I have a third option that I think is our only realistic solution and hope: Secession. California, or preferably, the entire west coast, should secede from the union. That, it seems to me, is the only way forward to spare ourselves from the autocratic and corrupt reign of Trump II.  

If only --  but of course I don’t really have any hope for that outcome, much as I personally would prefer it.

To me, what we must depend on is not politics as usual. Our politicians have failed us.  We must put our trust in and bank our hopes on the public and its power to resist, to fight against the authoritarian cruelty and viciousness we can expect from Trump and his cadre of epigones.

Robert Reich has advocated the same course, and because he is a respected public figure, I urge you to read and heed his wise words.  You can find them by going to this link:

https://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/the-resistance-starts-now?r=r3468&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Thank you for reading this.

Thoughts on Nearing 89: A Bagatelle

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

If I survive the coming election about which I have a sense of anticipatory dread and then continue to live for another month or so, I shall reach the end of my octogenarian decade and turn, unless I can find a way to turn back, the age of 89, an age that I find entirely rebarbative.  The reason it so repels me is not what you may imagine.  No, it has to do with one of my many quirks – a hatred of prime numbers ending in nine.  It’s easy to think of them – 19, 59, 79, and the worst one of all, 89.  There must be a term for this, as there is, for instance, for the fear of the number 13, which as any literate person knows is called triskaidekaphobia.  Well, my webmaster, Kevin Williams, who knows everything, just told me.  I am a primonumerophobe .

Living so long also makes me wonder what I am still doing here.  My spiritual friends, never loath to resort to the nearest cliché, keep telling me that if I’m still here, it means that “my work is not done.” To which I think, though I will rarely utter the word aloud, “balderdash.”  

For years, I have joked that I have already entered my afterlife, that my life is over, and I now exist in a kind of interminable epilogue.  I mean, consider:  I can no longer hear well, my vision is even worse, and, having been crippled for years by a progressive case of spinal stenosis, I can no longer walk either.  Well, I can.  I do totter about my house being very careful not to fall, but I can’t really go anywhere.  A trip – hoping I don’t – out to my patio is about the limit of my excursions.  I haven’t been able to travel anywhere for years, and even going out to a restaurant is fraught with risk.  

Worse in a way is that I can no longer do any meaningful work.  I published my last two books earlier this year, and my blogging life is about to come to an end.  Partly because of my bad vision, but mainly because I have run out of ideas what to write about.  It’s hard for me now to read the kind of books I used to, which would not only provide fuel for what’s left of my brain, but give me topics, such as animal cognition, I used to love to write about.  No more.  I just can’t hack it.

So, what’s the point, Alfie? From my point of view, I am just marking time, like a prisoner waiting for his sentence to end, scratching off the days on the calendar on the wall of his cell.

Some of you know that when I was in my early eighties, I wrote a little book of mostly humorous essays I whimsically entitled Waiting to Die.  The conceit of that book was my goal of living to the age of 1000 – months.  That would get me out of here at the age of 83.  No such luck.  I blew past it and just kept on keeping on.  I sometimes joked that I just didn’t have the knack for dying.  I don’t understand why it’s so easy for so many people.  But where death is concerned, I seem to be an abysmal failure.   If I were to write a sequel to that book, I would have to call it Still Waiting.

I’ve always thought about when I would die – and always found myself disappointed when I didn’t.  My father died at 41, so after I turned 40, I thought the time of my demise was might be drawing nigh.  I remember spending a lot of time listening to the late quartets of Beethoven, thinking it would be the last time I would ever hear them.  Wrong again.

After that, but still thinking I might die young, I imagined that I might die at the age of one of my literary heroes at that time, George Orwell, who had died at 46 (though I mistakenly thought his death occurred when he was 47 – another one of those primes I love to detest).  But 47 came and went, but I didn’t; I remained.  I was beginning to lose faith in my ability to forecast when I would kick the bucket.

Eventually, after many years had passed without my having done so, I thought that I might die in the year 2012, at the end of which I would be 77 – a good time to die, I thought.  I actually had many reasons to think my time would come by the end of that year.  But I left feeling somewhat crestfallen at another failure to attain death.

I was beginning to think that, in this respect at least, I was like Freud who was very superstitious about death and, like me, had kept imagining he would die much sooner than he actually did (it was he who would die at 83).  He eventually came to fear that he wouldn’t die until he reached his mother’s death age, which was 95.  Well, I won’t have to worry about living to my mother’s age if I make it to 89.  She died at 88.

With the exception of my maternal grandfather, all the men in my family (at least on my mother’s side, and, to the extent I know, also on my father’s side) died young, none of them living longer than their mid-sixties.  What’s wrong with me?

I grew up a member of a quartet of male cousins. Two of them died around the age of eighty, and the third, the cousin to whom I am closest, is now 84, but has a terminal disease.  We joke about who will be the last cousin standing.  Anyone care to bet?

Well, I’ve given up trying to predict when I’ll die.  At a prophet, I have an unblemished record of failure when it comes to my own death.  But I’m convinced that if I pray long and hard enough, God will finally grant me release, so I still have hope, it not faith, I will get there in the end.  Wish me luck!

A Letter to My Father

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

Dear Dad,

It’s been seventy years since you left this world and more than eighty since you left me.  I have missed you my entire life, but for many years, as you know, I have felt your influence, indeed, your presence in my life, and I know that you have really never abandoned me.  I also know, as you are aware, that for a long time you have actually guided me and watched over me, as if you were my own guardian angel.  You know the evidence I have for that and how I learned some years ago how deeply you had loved me when I was a child.

At night, in my office, I often talk to you – actually, to the photograph I have of you that sits on my desk – and wonder where and how you now and ponder the quizzical fact that I am still here, now a very old man myself, while you were never allowed to live to reach the age of barely forty.  I hope before too long we will be together again, but for now I can only write to you and tell you more about how I have felt your presence in my life. 

I suppose I should begin by telling you about my return to California because that is when I began to feel your influence on me in an undeniable way.

However, to do that, I need to draw on some material I wrote about you in my book, My Father, Once Removed.  In that book, I tried to give an honest, but loving, portrait of you.  When I say honest, I mean to indicate that I was compelled to make some harsh judgments about your character for which I hope you’ll forgive me.  But as you will understand, some the character flaws I perceived in you I also find in myself.  Like father, like son.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote about you, Dad, after I returned to California thirty years ago….

After retiring from the university in 1994, I am no longer yoked to the academic year, so I can now undertake more extensive international lecture tours: to Germany, to Scandinavia and to Australia (twice). During my second Australian tour in March, 1996, I have a series of epiphanic experiences whose meaning gradually crystallizes for me: I must return home to California. Something is calling me there.

I heed the call. By the end of the year, I am living in California again, not far from where I grew up and went to school. Although I have visited California many times since I left it for graduate school, I have been away for almost forty years. “Forty years in the winterness,” I joke to my friends when they ask my reasons for returning to California. They wouldn’t understand the real reasons. In fact, I am not entirely clear about them myself. I only know that I needed to return. After a time, it seems I have been called back to childhood things, to those interests I had as a kid that I had to abandon when I left California and entered into the life that led to my professional career.

When I was a boy growing up during the Second World War, I discovered a book my mother had in her library that featured biographical sketches of the world great composers. I don’t remember its exact title, but I can still see the book in my mind’s eye and feel its heft. For some reason, even though I was not yet familiar with classical music, I loved reading about these composers, and since I had a head for dates, I soon memorized the years of their births and deaths. In those days, the great composers started with Bach and ended with Stravinsky (who was then listed as 1882 —), and seemingly constituted about a dozen in all. Early in my life, then, the stories of the lives of these men (and they were of course all men) impressed themselves upon me vividly. It’s odd—I don’t really remember many books I read as a child, but the memory of lying across my bed absorbed in my mother’s book about the great composers is still clear to me. From the outset, it seems, I was fascinated with the lives of composers.

The paragraph you have just read actually comes from the preface of a book I wrote some years ago that deals with three well-known composers, Leos Janacek, Peter Tchaikovsky and Edward Elgar, and the muses who inspired their work. In it, I was trying to explain to my readers how it happened that I came to write this book. I would like to quote some further passages from this preface next, even at the risk of some redundancy, because they will also serve to delineate the links in the chain of redintegration that reconnected me with you, Dad. 

At this point, I was describing my circumstances just after returning to California.

“I took some time to wind up my professional career, finishing a couple of books I had been working on, and then wondered what I would do next. I gave no conscious thought to music, but one day, during a period when I was ill for quite a while, found myself reading about Camille Saint-Saëns. In short order, I became completely engrossed in his life story about which I had not previously known much, and in my enthusiasm thought I might share a few of my thoughts about him in a little essay I would write just for the fun of it, mainly for my friends. Well, without recounting this whole improbable adventure, suffice it to say that I wound up writing an entire book about him, got it published by the sheerest fluke without even seeking a publisher, and even ended up collaborating on a screenplay about him. 

I had done all this really as something like a lark, but I found that writing about Saint-Saëns had triggered something in me— something new, and something old. I had become interested in composers again and felt a yen now not just to read about them but to write about them—despite having no professional credentials in music whatever, only the chutzpah of an academic who apparently had no qualms about venturing into territory where he had no right to tread.

There was more to it than that, however, though I did not realize at the time that these new stirrings were beginning to make themselves known to me.  To begin with, probably because of my interest in Saint-Saëns and his world, I became aware that I was now extremely curious about European history and culture, particularly in the nineteenth century—a domain that had never previously elicited any special appeal for me and that I had explored only cursorily when I had been a professor. Indeed, I had never even been to Europe until I was nearly fifty—though once I went, I found myself drawn back to it many times and came to love being there, almost no matter where in Europe I was. Now, however, I became very keen to inform myself about nineteenth-century Europe and somehow found it easy to imagine myself among the salonnières of Parisian cultural life in Saint-Saëns’ day. Doing so, I came to recognize that, despite having had a professional career as an academic psychologist, there was something in me that aspired to be identified with being an artist, especially one living in Europe—and that composers, for me, represented the very epitome of the type of artist I really longed to be and most admired.” 

It was then I thought of you again, and why you were so drawn to live and work as an artist in Europe after the war.

You see, what I haven’t told you is that when I was well into my forties, I began to have what I can only call some “intimations” of you. Not that I actually had a presentiment of your spirit, exactly, but, somehow, I felt you near to me after all this time. Despite my never having known you well when I was a little boy and having very few memorabilia of you (my mother always refused to discuss you with me and had discarded all of your paintings and destroyed virtually every photograph of you when she divorced you), I always felt that in my essence I was very like you. My mother, for example, was not at all musical, but the only artifact of yours still in my possession is a tattered copy of a piano score of Beethoven’s Rondo in G, with some annotations in your hand. Before an aunt of mine had come across it and given it to me, I had not even known that you played the piano, but obviously you did. Later, I learned that you even performed as a pianist in clubs.

In any case, as I was immersing myself in my musical researches for what turned out to be this book, I found I was having many more thoughts about you—almost as though your spirit was somehow trying to impress itself upon me. And then it hit—of course! I suddenly saw the connection.

When I had returned to California, to the area where I had grown up, and to the only place where I had actually spent time with you, I was, as it were, returning to what I loved as a child. Those composers were a part of it, you were a part of it, my artistic longings and aspirations were still in me. And you of course were an artist, had clearly loved music too, and had followed your passion for a life in Europe. The thought occurred to me that perhaps, if you had remained in my life, I would have followed an entirely different course in which art and music, not psychology, might have become my path, as it was for you, Dad. However, by returning to California, it was as if I were becoming your son again, feeling in myself your interests, having your tastes, and reconnecting to an alternative life you might have led me into. At the same time, I realized that it wasn’t too late—that I could enter into that life now, that I could still honor you, my father in me, and in that way draw close to you again. That perhaps over all these years you had been guiding me back to yourself, back to that boy who loved music and composers from the start, and, finally, back to my native soil where my soul had been forged and where I could at last resume the kind of life I had once seemingly been destined for. 

So, while it was my mother’s book I first recalled for you, it is really your world that seems to have called forth the work I have done here. In that sense, this volume is a kind of belated offering both to your spirit that still lives in me and to the life I might have been had if you and I not been parted from each other when I was young.

Before these realizations struck me, there had been other events that seemed almost “designed” to foster them. Some of them had to do with unexpected encounters with people from my past who suddenly turned up in my life again and came to play a critical role in my awakening to the more artistic side of my nature. One of these persons was a woman named Frances.

I first met Frances when I was a young professor and she was a graduate student, just a few years younger than myself. She took a course with me, and we had some very casual social contact afterward, but we had really never become friends and soon lost touch with each other. However, during the time I was working on my Saint-Saëns book, she was led to track me down, which initiated an email exchange between us. At that point, we had not had contact with each other for more than two decades. In recent years, however, Frances, who, like me, had become a professor of psychology, had developed an interest in native Americans and was spending a good deal of her time in the Southwest. Since I was now living in California, she had thought of me and had sought me out by asking my departmental chairman my whereabouts.

It turned out that Frances was extremely interested in my work about Saint-Saëns and classical music generally. She asked to read my manuscript and even other books that I had consulted in order do my research, which led to many stimulating discussions both through email and over the phone, and eventually in person, about my work and particularly about the world of Saint-Saëns and his circle. 

Like me, Frances had a deep interest in nineteenth-century French culture, and in a way we both came to live there. That is to say, we began to talk about the artists who flourished at that time almost as if they had become personal friends of ours. And for a time, we imagined ourselves as characters in that world. We would even write dialogues through email in which we had assumed distinct identities in the life of nineteenth century Parisian salons. She had become Francoise, an Irish-born Francophile, while I portrayed myself as a minor poet named Armand. We gave each of these characters a history and personality, and in our playful fashion we even inhabited them. 

Another person who had also come to play an important role in my life these days was Carolyn, my first girlfriend from more than sixty years ago when we were in high school together. Because we had not had contact with each other for so many years, much of our email was understandably devoted to trying to depict the kind of persons we had developed into since we were teenagers. At one point, I was having a very hard time getting Carolyn to understand how much I had come to identify a part of my personality with nineteenth century French artists, so I drew on my “Armand” character to try to make this clear to her:

I want to say just a little more about this artist-sensibility-in-Ken, however, just so you might understand this part of me better. First, I did not mean to imply—in fact I remember denying this explicitly in one of my letters to you—that I have any particular artistic talent. Truly, I do not feel as if I do. What I have is more of an identification with a particular type of artist. I can tell you more about him. He lives in Paris in the nineteenth century. He lives a rather dissolute life, probably as a minor poet. He has had a number of affairs, most of which have ended badly (think Musset), and, needless to say, he is very alienated from bourgeois society. He is into hashish (which, as you probably know, was the rage for a while among French intellectuals and artists of the nineteenth century), and suffers from tuberculosis from which he will die when relatively young. He is a frequent participant in the salon life of Paris, and he likes associating with the artists and philosophers of that time, as well as consorting with the denizens of the demimonde. He even has a name: it is Armand.

Now, I don’t mean that the Ken you know is this character. Of course not. Nor do I mean that I think I have been this guy in a past life. I’m not sure I even really believe in “past lives” as such. But when I read about guys like him, there is an immediate identification—I know this sort of raffish fellow and, in some way, I am like him inside.

This was something I never had to explain to Frances, however. As I was to learn, she had been aware of this side of me for a long time.

Because Frances and I were both psychologists, it was also natural that in our conversations and email correspondence, we talked a good deal about our families and our personal backgrounds—especially since we were really getting to know each other after so many years and had, in fact, never known one another well to begin with. And just as Frances had become engrossed in my nineteenth century preoccupations, she was also deeply interested in my character in this life. In this connection I vividly remember one telephone conversation we had in which she told me how she had perceived me when I was a young professor and she was my student.

What shocked me was her telling me that even then she saw me “as an artist, as a creative artist,” not a psychologist, which was to her mind just a role I had been playing as if it were a kind of performance. Therefore, it had come as no surprise to her that when I had discarded, as it were, my psychologist’s robe I had donned an artist’s smock. That’s how she had perceived me from the start, she said.

From her point of view, therefore, it was perfectly understandable—even fitting—that I had finally come to acknowledge how deep and abiding this aspect of my character was. And after I had come to tell her a good deal about you, she could see you in me, too. 

By the time I had completed my book on composers and their muses—another work in which my friend Frances had taken a great interest, so much so that she had almost become, I suppose, a muse of mine in the process—I found myself coming back to you again. Without really having been aware of it at the time of my writing that book, I had been dealing with you all the while. In a personal afterword to the book, I tried to express to my readers what I had found myself having to come to reckon with. It was not pleasant. In any event, I will let my closing words of that book conclude this blog.

“Perhaps I might be permitted one final personal reflection now that the work of this book is done. In the course of writing it, I did come to realize something about my father and how my feelings for him connect to the composers I chose to write about.

In a word, at one point I suddenly understood that in writing about them, I was actually writing about him. 

You see, from everything I have been able to learn about my father, he was in many respects like the composers I describe in this book—selfish, concerned mainly with his own work and career as an artist, a womanizer, and all in all, from what I have been told, not a very likable man. And like these men again, my father was clearly something of a Puer—intent on having his adventures and escaping as much as possible from the responsibilities of adult family life. Whether he acquired minions, as these composers all did, to help him escape from these onerous ties, I don’t know, but from all accounts I have of him, his art, his freedom and his amorous pleasures were indeed the ruling passions of his life. His proclivities remind me most of Tchaikovsky and Janacek, but there is even some suggestive resemblance to Elgar [who had in effect “married” his mother] because I understand that toward the end of my father’s life, and possibly earlier, he sought the favors of at least one older, maternal woman.

Yet, just as I am fascinated by the very artists whose lives I have researched despite, at the same time, often being repelled by their character, I feel the same ambivalence toward my father. I loved him, I’m sure, before I could know the kind of person he was. It makes me think that something of his ‘artistic personality” was imprinted on me early in my life and perhaps has led to my persisting interest in creative men who all too often turn out to be repugnant, self-seeking narcissists whose love for women is ultimately a form of ego-gratification. 

But discovering my father at the possible root of my draw to this kind of man wasn’t the only personal insight I had in the writing of this book. Ultimately, I could not avoid seeing something far more disturbing. It wasn’t just that my father was like these composers; it was that I was perhaps more like him than I had supposed, and that his effect on my life ran much deeper than simply my predilection for becoming engrossed in the lives of creative artists. So, it was not just my father’s ghost that I caught sight of here; it was my own shadow. 

Needless to say, this realization threw me into a funk for some time. But after brooding about this, I could see at least one way in which I was not merely my father’s son. However else I might be like him, I knew I wasn’t callous toward women. Indeed, I couldn’t help becoming aware that in writing this book I was no longer identifying so much with the composers themselves as with the women in their lives and with what they had suffered. After all, it is really to these women, not the artists they served, that this book is dedicated.

This gives me some hope that, notwithstanding my father’s undeniable influence on me and my nature, my search for him will serve to free me from blindly having to follow his blighted course to the end of my life. What this book ultimately was about for me personally, I now see, was not just my yearning to be reconnected with my father’s spirit but my own quest for redemption.”

********************

It must be said that however self-involved my father may have been, however centered on his own professional aims as he certainly was, and whatever the means he employed to reap the rewards he was able to extract from life, he was, at least toward me, a loving father. Whatever else may be said or speculated about my father, this has always been my enduring and ineradicable sense of him.  Somehow, I have always felt his love as the primordial fact of my life, even when he was forced to part from me, and even, especially, after his death.  Even now as I write these words.  And when I die, which must be soon enough now, I hope I will have my own confirmation of this when, at last, I may see him once more with his arms outstretched, waiting to welcome me home.

1968

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

It was not unlike our own turbulent and tortured time.  A deeply unpopular Democratic President, forced by circumstances to step aside, a hunger for new leadership that would inspire the restive youth of our country, a tumultuous Democratic convention in Chicago, a divisive foreign war, sparking massive protests at Columbia and on many campuses across the nation, and so on.  The parallels between that time and ours are as uncanny as they are undeniable.  That was the year, 1968.

         Who, having lived through it as an adult, could forget the year 1968? The sudden declaration by Lyndon Johnson that he would not run for president again; the assassination shortly thereafter of Martin Luther King, and within two months of that, of Robert Kennedy; the student and worker uprisings in Paris; the riots and police brutality at Columbia; the violence-plagued Democratic convention in Chicago (“the whole world is watching”); the contentious and bitterly fought close election that brought Nixon to power; and throughout that year, the dismal and divisive Vietnam war that was tearing the country apart. Indeed, the whole fabric of American society that year seemed rent in a dozen ways, and it was far from certain then whether or how it could ever be woven back together again. That was 1968, and the enduring images and memories that will always mark it as a nodal time in our country’s recent political history.

         And that was the backdrop to what was surely one of the most turbulent and eventful years in my personal life as well. Everything in my life, too, was up for grabs that year.

         In December of the previous year, I had turned 32—or, as I remember calling it, 2 to the 5th. That year, my birthday was orchestrated by a woman friend of mine, a graduate student named Marty, who was to play a pivotal role in my life in the year to come. Unbeknownst to me, she had organized a surprise party at my house, and when I walked in that night, thinking that there would just be Marty and a few close friends to celebrate with me, my house was packed with dozens of people shouting “sur-prise!” and then laughing their eyeballs out when I felt like dropping through the floor in embarrassment unto mortification. But I soon got over it, and had a great time dancing and carrying on with my friends. I remember, among other things, dancing with one of our graduate students in social psychology, Pilar, a lissome and raven-haired Peruvian of great beauty, who was said to be a princess and who always gave off an air of exotic mystery. The bedlam and mania of that party would be an augury for the new year just around the corner.                         

         It’s difficult for me now to remember the sequence of events that were soon to unfold, so I won’t try to narrate the story of that year in a linear way. Instead, I will have to settle for a more impressionistic account, although I can roughly date some of the specific occurrences I will describe. First, however, a little context.

         By then, I had long been separated from Elizabeth and was living alone in a three-bedroom duplex (the same house where Elizabeth and I had previously resided) with Kathryn who would turn 5 that year in March. I seemed to have had several girlfriends that year, though I was not sexually involved with all of them. My friend, Marty, was really my best friend and confidant, and I would see her often, dropping in at her apartment, frequently with Kathryn in tow. (Marty played the role of a sometimes surrogate-mother to Kathryn, too.) Marty had already introduced me to grass (i.e., marijuana), and was much more “hip” than I was. Then there was Juliet, a former student of mine whom I had wanted to marry. We had had an intense but brief sexual relationship, and I was extremely fond of her, but she was only 20 and didn’t want to get married. Still, she introduced me to the Beatles—and to Linda Ronstadt—and she remained my friend for a long time afterward. There was also a woman named Marlene—another graduate student and a friend of Marty’s, I believe—who lived in my house for a while (but with whom I didn’t have a sexual relationship). In addition, there was another former student of mine, who had graduated a few years previously, named Victoria. She lived in New York and worked at the Bronx Zoo. One of her duties was to bring animals to schools in New York, so, as a joke, I called her “the elephant girl.” (Although she never paraded elephants around and certainly didn’t look like one, though she did, come to think of it, have somewhat leathery skin.) And, finally, there was Maria.

         Maria, too, had been a student of mine, but I didn’t realize that when she had responded to an ad early in the year. I had wanted to find someone to live with Kathryn and me who could do some cooking and household chores and occasional babysitting in return for room and board. I was somewhat disconcerted when Maria showed up at my door one day—because she was black. Not that I had anything against black people, but, er, hiring one for a domestic role? I felt embarrassed to do so, but on the other hand, she needed a place to live, and she took to Kathryn right away. And she could cook. It wasn’t long before Maria became a part of the family. (By then, I think, Marlene had left so Maria occupied her room.)

         I don’t know how this happened, but somehow I got ahold of Maria’s diary, and I started to read it. (Shame on me, I know!) It turned out she was extremely perceptive and very intelligent, and had kept large parts of herself hidden. Plus, she could write—I mean, she had talent as a writer. When I saw into that side of her, my interest in her increased. She was a very complex woman, somewhat cryptic, but she was very good with Kathryn, and that also made her attractive to me. Physically, she was rather chunky and she wasn’t particularly pretty. She was a strong woman, though. (Later, after we had become lovers, I was to see just how strong she was. She tried to strangle me one night, and it took all my strength to throw her off me.)

         Well, as you see, Maria became more than just a domestic in our house. We did become lovers, but we were very furtive about it, and it was never a matter of public knowledge (whatever people thought). I confess that I would have been embarrassed to own up to this relationship openly, so I kept it on the Q.T. This wasn’t fair to Maria, and it became a source of resentment to her (and contributed to her attempt to strangle me in a rage one night when we had been making love).

         Maria was living with us when Martin Luther King was assassinated. That brought us closer for a time. I remember she wrote a letter to Kathryn about King’s murder that she wanted Kathryn to read in later years, but I don’t know what happened to it. 

         In any event, Maria lived with us only for a semester. By the time it ended, we had grown somewhat estranged, and, besides, I had already become enamored of somebody else. More than enamored, actually—I had met the girl of my dreams and started to pursue her like a madman. Maria could see what was happening, and she left without a word of farewell. 

         In June of that year, Marty was to be married in New Jersey, and naturally I was invited to the wedding and reception. Marty, knowing that I was beginning to tire of the life of a single father, was especially eager to have me attend because, as she advised me, there would be a lot of her women friends there, and several of them would be single. In particular, she had told me to keep my eyes out for one of her friends, Susan, who, she warned me, had informed Marty beforehand that she was keen to find a husband and was hoping to check out some prospects at the reception.

         Well, it wasn’t long after the reception started that I found myself sitting catty-corner next to a woman who turned out to be this very Susan. Clearly, Marty had told her about me because the very first words she said to me (and this I have never forgotten— we used to joke about it afterward) were: “Don’t marry me, Kenneth; I’m a slob.” She spoke the truth, as I was later to learn to my sorrow, but at the time I only laughed.

         But, actually, I wasn’t really paying that much attention to Susan. Someone else—one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen—had already caught my eye and had riveted my attention. She looked like an Italian Madonna (and, indeed, she proved to be both Italian and a mother), and I couldn’t help staring at her. Still, I was so overcome with feeling that I couldn’t bring myself to approach her, so I went up to Marty and pulled her away from her other guests in order to find out who this woman was, and whether she was married. “Don’t touch her, Kenneth,” Marty said sharply. “She’s one of my best friends, and she’s already married and has a child.” 

         “Maybe she’s unhappily married,” I countered.

         Marty gave me a look that was a stern warning—keep away.

         I did, but I couldn’t help thinking about her, and I continued to steal glimpses at her until she left (she was alone). 

         When the reception was over, and just a few of Marty’s friends and family members remained, I again approached Marty. 

         “I’ve got to talk to that woman, Marty. Can’t you at least give me her number?”

         Marty was adamant.

         But so was I. I wouldn’t take no for an answer, especially after Marty eventually disclosed that she knew that Renata (as I shall call her) was not in fact so happy in her marriage. 

         That was all the encouragement I needed.

         After I returned home, I called Renata. I don’t remember what I said, but in the end, it came down to this: I asked her if she’d be willing to meet me just once in a public place, and suggested a certain pond in Central Park. She was reticent, but I believe by then Marty had advised her that she might be getting a call from me and that at least I wasn’t a pervert. Before our conversation was over Renata, with great reluctance, finally yielded and agreed to meet me.

         Perhaps only a week later—indeed, I think it was the weekend after the reception—I found Renata waiting for me at the designated location. By then, I had worked myself up into a passionate frenzy about her and already regarded myself as in love with her.

         Again, I don’t remember exactly what I said to her—probably only that I had the deepest feeling for her and wanted to get to know her. I do remember Renata saying that she was Catholic, that she had never had an affair, and that it was out of the question that she would consent to have one with me. She was married with a six-year-old boy, was an art teacher, and was deeply connected to her extended Catholic family. And here I was, a wild, sexually promiscuous Jewish professor with a daughter of my own who lived in Connecticut. The whole idea was absurd. Besides, she couldn’t engage in deception.

         And so on.

         But despite all her arguments, I must have been persuasive because by the time our meeting had ended, she agreed to meet me again, if I could get to the town in Long Island where she lived. I said I would find a way.

         I called Marty—who did not approve, but she was still willing to try to help me. I needed a cover, and Marty suggested that I call Susan, who lived in New York, and who also was very close friends with Renata. Susan had a kid, too, Marty explained, and she and Renata often went to the beach together. Maybe Susan would be willing to act as a go-between.

         I called Susan and explained the situation. She was a bit taken aback, but agreed to serve as my cover. And more—she said that if I wanted to, I could come down to New York the night before and stay at her apartment. Then we could work out the arrangements more simply so that I could sneak off with Renata while she, Susan, pretended to go to the beach with Renata and their respective kids.

         When I could get down to New York again (the next weekend), I went to Susan’s apartment, which was little more than a hovel, really. Now, I need to interrupt the narrative to give you some background on Susan, who was then in her mid-twenties.

         Susan, who was also Jewish, had had a fractious time with her family, growing up in Long Island, and had—defiantly—married a black man a couple of years earlier. Her father completely ostracized her at that point, so she and her husband, Tony, were on their own. Susan quickly got pregnant and in time gave birth to a daughter, Elise. Even before Elise’s birth, the marriage had foundered and she had separated from Tony, who then was drafted, anyway, and went to Vietnam. At the time I met Susan in her apartment, she was scrounging a living working on a film about Martin Luther King. (No wonder she wanted to find a husband— and fast.) 

         Of course, I felt sorry for Susan when I learned all this, and since we were both single parents with young daughters, there was from the start a certain bond of affinity between us. And, besides, I was indebted to her because she was willing to put herself out for me so that I could pursue a relationship with Renata.

         The next day, I was able to meet Renata at a motel—in Hicksville, Long Island, of all places. She must have been thinking about me, too, because we didn’t waste any time. I was ravenous for her and we had what I can only describe as molten sex. I was incredibly turned on and, though you will laugh, I felt like a stallion then. I remember—though this may not have been the very first time—that we made love standing up in the shower. Oh, God, I was so ardently aroused my prick felt like a ram, and Renata was equally passionate. And she was everything I had imagined— she was beautiful beyond words, she was sensual, she was glorious, and I was living somewhere beyond ecstasy. To this day, I still think that was the most intense sex I ever had with anyone.

         Over the next few weeks, we were able to meet several times like this, with my always staying over at Susan’s apartment the night before. By now, I was crazy in love with Renata, and she allowed that she was in love with me. Of course, she had tremendous guilt over what she was doing. She could never have imagined doing this sort of thing, and yet....

         At that time, I was due for a sabbatical the following year, and I was already planning to spend it in California. Indeed, I was set to spend several weeks in California in August in order to scout it out since my sabbatical would actually begin in February of 1969. So I quickly came to formulate another plan: I wanted Renata to leave her husband and come with me to California, bringing her child.

         By then I had learned that Renata was quite unhappy in her marriage and that she really didn’t love her husband. And by then she did love me. I realized that it would be a wrench for her to leave her marriage, especially since, as she told me, there had never been a divorce in her family, but she would have more than half a year to work this all out. Besides, she seemed passionate about me, and I was wildly in love with her—and, well, it was 1968, after all, and everything was breaking up and all sorts of crazy things were happening in the country. The times couldn’t have been more propitious.

         Ultimately, Renata bit the bullet. She would not forego the love we had found or the ecstasy. She would leave the marriage. I was overwhelmed with happiness.

         A few weeks later, I left for California, land of infinite possibilities, to scope out my future. 

         A little more than a week after I had arrived in California, I received a letter from Renata. She was calling it off.

         Her reasons were cogent enough: although she didn’t love her husband, she did love her family all of whom lived close by and she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving them for a new life in California. Besides, if she did so, at least under these circumstances, it would cause a terrible scandal and break many hearts. She understood she would likely be breaking mine in writing this letter, and she apologized for it with sincere sorrow. She was sad, too. She had come, within a short time, to love me, but love wasn’t enough. She had to end it. The dream was over.

         I remember how I felt when I read the letter—numb with grief. I remember driving around, looking for a deserted road where I could park my car and just be with myself. I know I felt like crying, but I couldn’t; I was too sad. All the air had gone out of me. I had loved Renata with intense passion, and the thought of a life with her had filled me with anticipatory joy. Now all I felt was emptiness.

         Somehow, I knew it would be futile to try to talk Renata out of her decision. Perhaps I even realized that it was probably the right decision for her, even if it had blasted my dreams. Retrospectively, I understood I had been asking a lot of her, and I imagined at the time that once I had left for California and she had drifted back into her normal life, the pull of that life had become irresistible. Perhaps by then the life we had briefly contemplated only seemed like a fantasy to her, I don’t know.

         I don’t remember how I responded to her—I know we didn’t talk on the phone since I couldn’t call her. I probably just sent her a note of farewell without rancor. I knew she felt bad enough, anyway.

         I would never see Renata gain or have any contact with her. I only had my memories, and, obviously, I have them still. I don’t even have a photograph of her from that time—I wish I did.

         When I returned, disconsolately, from California, it was almost time to begin the new academic year, though I was hardly prepared to do so. (For academics, August is the cruelest month.) Under the circumstances, though, it was natural for me to get in touch with Susan since she had been involved in this affair from almost the beginning. And because of my staying with her, we had developed a kind of friendship of our own. 

         She was very sympathetic, of course, having become something of a confidant in the meantime. I remember we racked up very expensive phone bills during that September and October. I can also remember joking with her that if either of us didn’t find someone to be with by the end of the year, maybe we should just give up and marry each other. You should be careful what you joke about.

         But the fact was, I was both emotionally and physically exhausted as a result of all that had happened that year, culminating with the blow that Renata had dealt me. I really wanted to find someone who could be a mother to Kathryn and I no longer had the heart to chase after women or have multiple relationships with them. I wanted to get married again—and so, for her own reasons, did Susan. 

         I started thinking about Susan in a more serious way as a result of all the conversations we had been having. She was Jewish, she had spunk, her politics were radical like mine were at the time, she smoked dope, she didn’t have airs, and she was actually pretty good-looking. Plus, I liked her daughter (actually, better than I had taken to Renata’s son, the one time I saw him). All in all, it didn’t seem impossible that I could hook up with her.

         I invited her up one weekend in the fall with her daughter, Elise, who was four years old at the time. Kathryn was about five and a half, but the two of them really hit it off well. At one point, holding hands they pranced into the living room where Susan and I had been sitting, and announced, “We want to be sisters.” Susan and I laughed, and we probably gave each other a knowing look.

         Not long after that, Susan came up for another weekend, this time by herself. We made love a lot. She wasn’t Renata, but we got on sexually, and I liked her body and making love to her, too. She kept asking me, “Was I over Renata?” (She was always asking me that.)

         The fact is, I wasn’t. My sorrow over losing the dream of a life that I imagined with Renata was still intense. When I thought about it, it was like feeling stabs of pain in my heart. Susan represented something between a distraction and an anodyne—I needed to be comforted and feel the softness of a woman’s body—but she wasn’t enough to make me forget the passion I had felt for Renata. And though I was fond and appreciative of Susan, I wasn’t sure I loved her.

         I didn’t want to be dishonest with her— but I could tell it bothered her that I still had feelings for Renata. Eventually, to spare myself from her constant query, I told her that I was beginning to get over Renata, which Susan took as encouragement. The truth is, I was just getting worn down, and I could feel the pressure, not always subtle, from Susan to make a commitment to her. Plus, there were our kids to consider.

         By Thanksgiving, Susan and Elise were living with me in Storrs on a trial basis. We were pretty happy. The kids got along fantastically well. We already seemed to be a little family. Before 1968 was over, we had decided to get married—and we did early the following year.

         We went on to have a wretched marriage that lasted five storm-tossed and tear-filled years, but that is  perhaps an episode for another time.

         1968 was over, and worse, much worse, was to come.

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         There is a brief coda to this story.  You don’t need to tell me that I was a love-besotted fool, blinded by passion into pursuing an illusory fantasy, and doing harm to all concerned.  I came to rue and regret my actions, but I couldn’t undo them.  Still, I have never forgotten what I felt for Renata and would later understand why I had been struck by a coup de foudre when I first saw her.

Baudelaire and Me

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

My daughter Kathryn has urged me to stop writing so much about death. “Why don’t you write about life, Dad?” I said I’d consider it, only I don’t really have a life anymore. And, furthermore, I replied, I certainly am not going to write about all my troubles. Old men who natter about their difficulties are as tedious as Trump yammering about millions of immigrants flooding our cities and taking jobs from white folks.

Still, on reflection, it did occur to me that I once did have a life, so perhaps I could, after all, find something to say about that. For example, what the French poet, Charles Baudelaire, and I have in common.  But that will require a bit of a back story, so I’d better get started.

When I was in high school, I acquired my first girlfriend,  name of Carolyn. I won’t take the time here to describe our volatile relationship -- she was very religious while I was an atheist, and we fought all the time – but we managed to stay together until my first year at Cal-Berkeley.

When I was a freshman, within a relatively short time, I found myself very strongly drawn to the then just emerging “Beat culture” and began to identify with the lifestyle of what later came to be called “alienated youth.” I had gone from being a relatively conventional, clean-cut young man who used to attend Cal football games in a white shirt salivating after “pom-pom” girls (i.e., our cheerleaders) to becoming in effect a bearded slob, a kind of a caricature of a Jules Pfeiffer cartoon figure, who took pleasure in flouting the pretensions of bourgeois society and who came to view himself as a young existentialist. The Berkeley campus didn’t really afford a café society, much less a Left Bank, but if it had, I would have easily found a niche for myself as a denizen of that world. 

All this appalled and disgusted Carolyn, and before too long, she had decided she didn’t know me anymore and wondered how we could continue as a couple.

I myself have only very dim memories of those days and what I must have been like then, but in recent years after I had reconnected with Carolyn and began corresponding with her, she reminded me of them and told me how she remembered me during that period:

As you acknowledge, you were drawn to Beat culture. I remember a particular bar that you frequented. You took me there once and tried to pressure me into drinking a glass of beer that I did not want. Part of this Beat culture seemed to be aversion to bodily cleanliness. Instead of remaining lovers we were pulled into a destructive nagging mother/rebellious son relationship that was no fun for either of us. I was always after you to get a haircut, shave, wash your clothes, take a bath, and you responded with all the sarcasm that you are capable of. Furthermore, you just dug in your heels. I seem to remember a period where day after day you wore the same soiled clothes. I am sure that the pants were grey, and I think that the shirt was as well. The smell of sweat combined at times with the smell of beer made me gag. I wanted to cut the tie that bound us into this destructive relationship but was reluctant to hurt you. I hated not only what you had become but what I had become.

Carolyn finally broke it off—and broke my heart—but by then it was too late. I actually rued her loss in my life and mourned it for the next several years, but I was set on my course and would not look back.

I had become the alien. 

The question is, why had I been drawn to make such a drastic change in my behavior, to say nothing of the noisome attire that so repelled Carolyn?

The beginning of an answer takes us back to the men in my family.

I had grown up without a father.  Well, I had had one, and had been deeply loved by him, but he was unhappy in his marriage and left when I was six years old to go into the coast guard once the U.S. became involved in the war. Before he enlisted, however, I have a distinct memory of his taking me to the home of one of his mistresses.  Of course, I didn’t know why he left me with his lover’s little Scottie in the hall while he was apparently having a quickie with his mistress.

My father was an artist, and, as I later learned, was inclined to the life of a Bohemian once he began to live in Europe after the war. He was even a bit of a charlatan (he was in the habit of passing off his work as that of a more famous artist).  But during the war, I remember that my father would write me letters.  There is only one thing I remember his writing.  “Kenny,” he said, “whenever you go to a new place, tell people that it’s your birthday, so they will give a big party for you.” Such was my father’s Lord Chesterfield letters to his son.

My Uncle Bill, on the other hand, was a very different kind of man.

After a rather wild youth during which he rode the rails with hobos and tramps, mingled with criminals and other denizens of the demimonde, and eventually even married a hooker (who in time would leave him for a former boyfriend once her lover had been discharged from prison), he had temporarily settled down to the prosaic life as a gardener at a local college, only a few blocks from where we lived in Oakland. 

It was during this period—roughly 1943-4, when I was about 7 or 8—that I began to spend a lot of time with Bill and got to know quite a bit about his world of interests. Truly, in many ways, Bill was my first teacher and intellectual mentor.

He also loved to sing, and in later years, when I would ride around with him up in the Mother Lode country where he had joined his father for a time driving laundry trucks, we would spend many a day singing our hearts out.

Most of my mother’s siblings had finished high school, but not Bill. Because of his adventurous spirit, he had left home early and had managed only to complete the eighth grade. Yet, he had somehow come to acquire a great many books and was apparently an omnivorous reader. I can still recall his little gardener’s hut being crammed with books, which he would enthusiastically talk to me about and would urge me to read. I remember he had many books on what was then called “free-thinking” (i.e., atheism), on the materialistic-oriented science of the day (I can still remember one by the then-famous German biologist, Haeckel, he thrust upon me) and on socialism. I don’t think Bill himself was a member of the Communist Party, but I’m sure he was sympathetic to the Russian experiment, as of course many Jews were then. In any case, it was this worldview that Bill introduced me to, and for many years, it would form the bedrock of my thinking about religion and politics.

Bill, like other members of my family, married more than once – he had three wives.  So did his father, Bert, my grandfather. I grew up in a cohort of four cousins (including myself). One of them, an internationally famous jazz pianist, was married four times, and had had a Brazilian girlfriend. Same as me – I also had four wives and a Brazilian girlfriend along the way.  Similarly, for another cousin, who eventually became a well-known UFO researcher and author.  We were not a conventional family.

And then there was my stepfather, Ray, who was a military man with a temper.  He was never cruel to me (though I am sure I was trying to him), but he was bellicose and very controlling, used to giving orders and having them obeyed. Half-Italian and half-Jewish, with bulging muscles and tattoos, Ray was completely alien to me.  I avoided him as much as possible and felt rebellious much of the time I had to live with him and my mother.

A side bar here, but an important one. Although my entire family was Jewish, no one was religious; they had all rejected orthodox Judaism. So I never grew up with any religious indoctrination. Indeed, I wasn’t even aware that I was Jewish until I was seven years old. But, all the same, Jews are the archetypal outsiders. People often find us Jews “alien” and decidedly “other.” I remember Carolyn telling me, on learning I was Jewish, that she thought the only Jews were in the Bible and were called Hebrews.

You can see that with this background where I was likely to head and the kind of person I would become once I got to college.  But now, I must hasten to move this story along to the years when I was a young psychology professor at the University of Connecticut. By then, I had married another psychologist named Elizabeth who gave birth in 1963 to our daughter, Kathryn.

In those first years of my professional life, I managed to bury the remnants of my alienated youth and assumed a new persona. I was clean-shaven, I got along well with my students and colleagues, and I was advancing in my career. Within a few years, I had been elected chairman of my division of social psychology and I had begun to take my place on some of the important committees of my department. I was also promoted quite quickly to the rank of associate professor, and not long after that was awarded tenure. Professional life was good, too.

By now, I had given up my gin-guzzling ways, and was imbibing sherry and scotch at departmental parties like the proper academic I was learning to be, and settling for getting a bit tipsy rather than drunk. On the surface, life was pleasant enough.

But under the surface, things were roiling and I was heading toward some kind of crisis.

Gradually, I became aware of how inauthentically I was living. I was continuingly playing parts or assuming identities that I knew were false. I did not really feel like a professor. Instead, I was experiencing the truth of one of George Orwell’s dicta to the effect that every teacher sooner or later realizes that he is an imposter. Moreover, I was becoming disillusioned with my professional specialty of social psychology. I had become very critical of some of its then current practices and fads, and my graduate classes particularly gave rise to a kind of corrosive cynicism that my students could not help detecting. I felt that I was in the process of some kind of defection—but to what?

Most alarming of all, I became aware of how hollow my marriage to Elizabeth had become. It was as if I were play-acting the happy husband and father. Well, I still loved my daughter very much, but I realized I no longer loved Elizabeth and hadn’t for a long time. I was just pretending that things were solid between us when in truth they were fractured. I felt as if I were dying.

I developed—or imagined that I developed—symptoms. I found myself unable to think clearly. I thought I might have a brain tumor. I underwent a terribly botched spinal tap, which was inconclusive. The doctor put me on tranquillizers afterward. After taking just one of them, I vowed not to take another—and I never have. I was deeply unhappy, and I didn’t know if I could go on. I thought about resigning my position or at least asking for a leave of absence.

By then, Elizabeth had grown alarmed at my condition and my state of mind. We started talking about getting a divorce.

 

Around that time, a new post-doc student came into our department. She was blonde, beautiful and Southern—the first of several gorgeous Southern women in my life —and I fell for her.  I found myself cutting out some of Shakespeare’s sonnets and placing them in her mail box. Meanwhile, my marriage to Elizabeth was quickly unraveling, and it wasn’t long before we had agreed to separate. By then, it was understood that Elizabeth would move out and I would continue to take care of Kathryn.

Not long after Elizabeth had left, I was making love to my Southern belle. For the first time in years, I was feeling passion again. 

The affair didn’t last long, but there were soon other women in my bed. I was like the proverbial “kid in the candy store,” and suddenly I was free to pursue and consume whatever delicious sexual favors that came my way. And I did. I started sleeping around, mostly with graduate students or women I met at parties. I had a number of “one-night stands” in those days, and, to be vulgar, I had a ball balling those women. I was in my early thirties by then, and it was the first time in my life I was really able to enjoy sex freely. I made the most of it. 

My department, however, was rather scandalized by my behavior, once the word got around about me. Moreover, the divorce between Elizabeth and me was apparently the first one to take place in the history of our department, and many people were sad and even shocked about it since a number of my faculty members had liked Elizabeth and had thought well of me. Now, it was almost as if I had become—or had chosen to be—a pariah. 

Well, who cared? I had tenure. I would do what I wanted. Besides, by this time, I was feeling a lot better. Whatever had been troubling me mentally was lifting. Indeed, I can still remember the feeling of exhilaration I experienced when Elizabeth had left our house. Finally, I was free—free to be myself again!

When I had first arrived at the university, I had, like my colleagues, dressed up and gone to take my lunch at the faculty club where I would be privy to learned discussions about mortgages, investing, plumbing problems and departmental politics. It wasn’t long before I was thinking to myself—“Why I am sitting with these men? Is this really what professors are all about?” 

But after breaking up with Elizabeth, I found my friends elsewhere. I began to hang out with graduate students (and to sleep with some of them), and I started patronizing the cafes around campus that catered to what was then, in the days of the so-called “counter-culture,” disaffected academics of radical leanings and similarly inclined students. These were the sorts of people I felt a sense of kindredness with; I belonged with them. On Sunday mornings, I would sometimes bring Kathryn, who was perhaps only 3 or 4 years of age then, with me to one of these cafes where I would read the Times. Sooner or later, if I hadn’t already run into some of my friends there, a young woman would usually drift by, taking pity on a young dad, and help me pass the time. Or even go shopping with me to buy clothes for Kathryn.

And, in general, I was passing my time differently now, too. One of my girlfriends had taught me to smoke dope, and another had induced me to attend folk music concerts. I was making friends with Dylan, Joan Baez, The Beatles and The Stones, and Judy Collins, too (whose husband, I had heard, had once taught at UCONN). Even my once neatly trimmed hair was becoming as long as a hippie’s. 

By now, I would only wear casual clothes to class—putting on a suit always made me feel as if I were donning a costume, anyway— and I would frequently lecture while sitting on a small table rather than standing behind a lectern with my notes. “Call me Ken,” I would tell my students on the first day of the semester. I was Mr. Informal rather than Dr. Ring. I was never “cool,” exactly, but I was approachable, warm and humorous, and I was well liked by my students. 

My fellow colleagues, however, with only a few exceptions, had begun to look at me askance. They could see I had crossed over. I was a traitor. But I had found my way back to myself — no matter what the cost. 

Which brings me, finally, to the 19th century poet, Charles Baudelaire, the man who wrote the notorious Les Fleurs du Mal.

Early in my correspondence with Carolyn, she told me about the reasons we had broken up. As you might remember, they had largely to do with the fact that within a short time after becoming a college student, I had changed from a conventionally-minded, clean-cut teenager into someone who, in her eyes, had become a dissolute lout. She could neither understand nor countenance this drastic alteration in my personality and behavior, and given its persistence and my intractability, she soon dismissed me from her life. For my part, though I felt her loss keenly, I had no intention of trying to rectify my behavior for her sake or anyone else’s. To me, I was just behaving in a way that had quickly come to seem natural to me. I had already learned to identify with the radical fringe and alienated youths like myself. 

The question again is why.

You might think that I have already provided the answer. That is, you might simply assume, as I had in later years, that I had even then begun, however unconsciously, to embody and express the more artistic side of my nature and was drawn to outsiders like myself in what was an unknowing imitation of my father’s own proclivities. But as I was to discover, this could not possibly be the entire answer. This shift in my character didn’t just have to do with my father’s personality and lifestyle. Instead, it had everything to do with an incomparably greater artist: Charles Baudelaire.

Since Baudelaire’s life and work are so well known, I need only summarize some of the most basic facts about him. Born in 1821 in Paris, he was to become the most celebrated poet of his age and forever influence the course of French poetry. Regarded as the first true poet of modernity, Baudelaire was drawn to the seamy side of life. He lived with an uneducated prostitute for many years, and regularly consorted with the habitués of the underclass. Although born into well-to-do circumstances, he lived most in his life in wretched squalor and penury and died at 46 after years of misery and intense suffering from syphilis, which he had contracted at an early age.

He is best known for his seminal book of poetry, Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), which posterity would come to honor as the most important volume of French poetry to be written in the nineteenth century. But he was also celebrated as an art critic and a translator. It was Baudelaire, for example, who first translated many of the works of Poe into French and was responsible for creating the virtual cult of interest that the French were to have about this American author. He was also the friend and partisan of many of his era’s great artistic geniuses, such as Delacroix, Manet and Wagner. Overall, his work in the field of literature, as poet, critic and translator, during his brief and tormented lifetime was of incomparable value and significance.

But, for us, it is not Baudelaire’s work that is of primary relevance here. At least not for what is the real subject of this blog. Instead, we need to examine Baudelaire’s particular family constellation.

Baudelaire’s father, Joseph-François, was 61 when his son was born. Earlier in his life he had been a priest and a tutor to the children of an aristocratic family into whose lives he became deeply enmeshed. He was well educated, had beautiful manners, and had come to know a number of the leading intellectual figures of his day, such as the philosopher, Helvétius, and the philosopher and politician, Condorcet. 

Baudelaire’s father was also very interested in art, had a taste for and a modest talent at painting, and had artistic ambitions. When he was a student at the Sorbonne, he had also sought out the company of artists, and even after he retired, he devoted much of his time to sketching and painting. 

Joseph-François took an active and loving interest in educating his son to whom he was very close. This is how one of Baudelaire’s biographers, Joanna Richardson, describes it:

He had taught his son about art, as they admired the prints and pastels in the rue Hautefeuille, the statues in the Jardin du Luxembourg. He had no doubt taught him history…He roused his interest in music…and taught his son the rudiments of Latin…Joseph-François had himself written numerous pieces of verse…It was from him that Baudelaire inherited his love of literature and art, his patrician manners, his style and sensuality; father and son had a natural affinity that went beyond ties of blood. It was an irreplaceable relationship.

Unfortunately, it was not to last long. Joseph-François died shortly before Baudelaire turned six. It was a crushing loss to the boy. Afterward, he always carried a portrait of his father wherever his nomadic life took him. He was devoted to his memory.

Baudelaire’s mother, Caroline, was his father’s second wife, and she was much younger than he. Well-educated and intelligent, she had grown up as the ward of a very privileged family, the father of whom had long been good friends with Baudelaire’s father. After his first wife had died, Joseph-François elected to marry Caroline.

 

Caroline’s early upbringing, including the death of both of her parents by the time she was seven, resulted in her always suffering from poor health. In addition, she was a nervous woman, somewhat melancholy in disposition. Hypersensitive, too, she was given to emotional outbursts. In many ways, we can see in her the seeds of her son’s morbid personality structure. 

Although Joseph-François had been kind to his wife during their few years together, it is obvious that she had never loved him. She didn’t even see to it that he was properly buried, and his gravesite has never been located. The only person she had ever truly loved and doted upon was her son, and now he was hers entirely. From all accounts, it was especially after his father’s death that Caroline sought to bind Charles even more deeply to her, and for the rest of their lives they had a very powerful and complex love-hate relationship.

However, the time of their exclusive mutual intimacy was to be short-lived. Not long after her husband’s death, Caroline became involved with an up-and-coming soldier, got pregnant by him, and finally induced the soldier, one Jacques Aupick, to marry her. She was then 34, he, 38 and in his prime. Aupick would go on to have a very distinguished military career. For much of it, he was a general, and for that reason he is often referred to as General Aupick. Later in life, he became a diplomat, first serving as an envoy and minister to Constantinople and, after declining an offer to be ambassador to the London court, settling instead for the equivalent post in Madrid. During the course of their happy thirty-year marriage, Caroline became very submissive to her husband. He ruled; she obeyed. He was a soldier, after all, and a prominent one. One of his orders was that he didn’t want any children to hamper his life. Charles was farmed out, sent to boarding schools, dismissed. He never recovered from this abandonment. Within a year, he had lost both his father and his mother, and he had gained an enemy for life, someone he would actually later try to strangle and to whose existence he never became reconciled. He could never forgive his mother for what she had done.

Still, at the outset and well before their vicious and lifelong rupture, Aupick tried to befriend his stepson. He truly wanted to help him. However, he was incapable of seeing and appreciating who Baudelaire was, much less of nurturing the talents that would later turn his stepson into the greatest poet of his age. Again, Richardson is very good at summarizing the essential problem in their relationship that was to cause such terrible damage to Baudelaire and to alienate him forever from his stepfather:

The problem was that Aupick was guided by the military virtues of honor and duty, by piety and patriotism, by a bourgeois belief in regular hard work, in the value of paternal authority. Had Baudelaire chosen to enter a profession, Aupick was prepared to use all his influence to help him; but the single-minded officer from Saint-Cyr could not understand the artistic temperament. He could not comprehend a boy who showed small regard for discipline, and an early devotion to literature and painting. Baudelaire was patently the son of Joseph-François. Aupick could never give him what Joseph-François would have given him. Aupick’s rigid code of behavior, his lack of sensibility, were to bring much grief in his childhood. In his early manhood, they were to cause an irreparable breach between them. 

So how did Baudelaire respond to all this in his “early manhood?” He became a rebel, of course. He chose to disidentify completely with the values of his stepfather, and in fact to defy them, to mock them. Instead, he affiliated himself with society’s renegades, with its outcasts, with its artists and poets, and turned his back forever away from bourgeois values. He thus became everything that was alien to his alien stepfather.

That is the Baudelaire portion of this blog. Now, let’s come to me and consider the parallels.

1.  My father, like Baudelaire’s, was an artist.

2.  I was very close to my father to begin with also.

3.  My father left my family and me at almost the exact same age, around six, at which Baudelaire’s father had died.

4.  My mother never mourned my father’s departure; she had never loved him either. 

5.  She was, like Caroline, a hypersensitive and nervous woman. 

6.  She, too, forged a close and very intimate bond between with me after my father had left.

7.  Like Caroline, however, as soon as she could, she made a precipitate marriage to afford her security and protection.

8.  Like Caroline, too, she married a military man used to barking orders and having them obeyed.

9.  Just as Caroline had done, my mother became very submissive to my stepfather, who quickly came to dominate our lives, and she remained under his control until his death.

10.  I, too, resented my stepfather, and found him entirely alien to me.

 

Is it any wonder that I rebelled, too, in just the way I did?

There is seemingly a fundamental archetype involved here, having to do with initial closeness to an artistic father, an emotional but submissive mother, an artistically-inclined son, and an overbearing and dictatorial military stepfather. All this conduces to a response on the son’s part of rebellion, disidentification and an overly strong affiliation with the anti-bourgeois elements of society. 

No wonder, then, when I suddenly found myself for the first time with models of identification for my alienation, I quickly bonded to and started to conform to the youths of my generation who represented my father’s artistic and iconoclastic Bohemian values.

Now, it need hardly be said that in pointing out these parallels, I scarcely mean to be comparing myself to Baudelaire. After all, while both my personal and professional life might well be characterized as unconventional—some might even describe them as wayward, it not wanton —I have only an average and not very original mind and some modest talents; Baudelaire was a genius. It’s obvious that I don’t even deserve to be mentioned in the same paragraph as Baudelaire, so don’t think I am putting on airs. And of course there are many, many differences between Baudelaire’s life and mine. Cela va sans dire!

But what we have in common are some crucial features in our family constellation so that in that respect at least, we were led to follow a somewhat similar path of psychological development, our very different levels of intelligence notwithstanding. 

In any event, it was only by reading about Baudelaire’s family history that I was finally able to understand some features of my own development, the very ones that had appalled and puzzled Carolyn when I first began to manifest them. Now she will know why it was almost ordained that I follow the path I did in life, and so do I. 

And now you do, too.

***********************

Even though this is a very long blog, I still had to truncate the story of my early years and omit many crucial details that would have made my story more understandable.  But this is only a blog, not a book. The full story can be found in my book, My Father, Once Removed. But, alas, that book is not commercially available.  Sorry….

Still, I hope you found this blog of interest and at least you could learn a little about Baudelaire. But, then, I’m not altogether convinced it was wise or prudent to write this story about “life.” Maybe I should stick to writing about death?  You can let me know, preferably before I die.