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| As a professor, Balcomb Greene is said to have had a significant influence on Andy Warhol. |
Revved up over an English class assignment to write a paper on "The Second Coming," by W. B. Yeats, I stayed up most of the night crafting it. I can almost remember thinking I had hit a home run with the paper.
Nonetheless, the VCU adjunct professor, an awkward sort of fellow in his mid-20s,
gave me a damn “C” on it.
Well, I was more than a little surprised, so I had to ask him to tell me what was wrong with the paper. In a conference in his office he told me
my analysis of the poem didn't jibe with what he knew to be the accepted school of
thought on what Yeats was saying. While admitting my writing and
analytical technique were fine, he fidgeted and explained that no matter how well-stated my case
might be, I was
just wrong.
That rubbed me the wrong way, so I
told him I
thought that ambiguity could open the door to the possibility of multiple meanings. Layers of meanings, maybe. That Yeats might have been inviting alternative interpretations.
Rather than defend his stance, the Yeats expert abruptly grabbed his face and broke into tears. Then he went into a rambling monologue about how his life was in shambles. His personal life! Worst of all, the distraught professor said his deferral had just been denied by Selective Service, so he would soon be drafted.
His thinning beige hair was oiled flat against his scalp. He was wearing a pitiful brown suit and the man looked nothing like an expert about anything. My original irritation over the bad grade started turning into disgust.
As I
remember it, I walked out of his office to keep from telling him what
I thought. Now, of course, I feel sorry for the poor schlemiel and I regret my impatience.
Anyway, a day or two later, when an unexpected offer came for me to expand my part-time job to full-time, I
took the leap. My chief duty was to schlep visiting scholars around
Virginia from one university campus to the next in a big black
Lincoln. At the time, it seemed better than college.
Each week, under the auspices of the University Center in Virginia -- a consortium of Virginia colleges and universities -- there was a new scholar in a different field. Somebody had to drive them to lectures, dinners, convocations and to hotels throughout the week. For the spring semester of 1969 that was me -- hauling scholars.
Some of the scholars were good conversationalists, so, for the most part it was a cool job for a semester. It didn't pay much, but I lived all week on an expense account.
*
Naturally,
in the crisscrossing of Virginia, the wiseguy driver and the
actually wise scholars had a lot of time to talk. Some of them kept
to themselves, mostly. In other cases we
got along well and had great talks.
Three of them stood out
as having been the best company on the road: Daniel Callahan
(then-writer/editor at Commonweal Magazine), Henry D. Aiken
(writer/philosophy professor) and Balcomb Greene (artist/philosopher
and art history professor).
Callahan
challenged me to think more thoroughly about situational ethics and
morality. He was happy I was reading Herman Hesse, Albert Camus and
others. He turned me on to “One Dimensional Man,” by Herbert Marcuse.
Callahan was quite curious about my experiences taking LSD, so we talked about drugs and religion. Click here to read about him.
Aiken
(1912-‘82) was then the chairman of the philosophy department at
Brandeis University, he loved a debate. He was used to holding his own
against the likes of William F. Buckley. Talking with him about
everything under the sun in the wee hours, I first acquired a taste
for good Scotch whiskey (which I haven't tasted in years).
From a ‘pragmatic’ point of view, political philosophy is a monster, and whenever it has been taken seriously, the consequence, almost invariably, has been revolution, war, and eventually, the police state.
-- Henry D. Aiken
Aiken,
like Callahan, agreed to help me with a project I told them about.
Inspired by popular new magazines like Ramparts, Avant-Garde, Rolling
Stone, etc., at 21-years-old, I wanted to jump straight into
magazine publishing, with no experience, ASAP.
That
dream
stayed on the back burner for 16 years, until the first issue of
SLANT came out in 1985. How I went about designing SLANT to be a
small magazine, mostly featuring the work of its publisher, flowed in
great part from my brief association with Balcomb Greene (1904-90). Of
the rent-a-scholars I met, he was easily the funniest.
The son of a
Methodist minister, Greene grew up in small towns in the Midwest.
He studied philosophy at Syracuse University, psychology at the
University of Vienna and English at Columbia University. Then he
switched to art, having been influenced by his first wife, Gertrude
Glass, an artist he had married in 1926. He became a founder of the
avant-garde group known as American Abstract Artists in 1936.
After
World War II, just as abstract art was gaining acceptance, Greene
radically changed his style. He began painting in a more figurative,
yet dreamy, style that fractured time. Click here to read about Greene and see examples of his work.
*
One
day I’ll write a piece about the visit to Sweetbriar with Greene.
It was a hoot collaborating with him, to have some fun putting on
the blue-haired art ladies of that venerable institution. This time
my mention of him is to get this piece to I.F. Stone. It was Greene
who gave me a subscription to I.F. Stone’s Weekly.
I.F.
“Izzy” Stone (1907-89) was an independent journalist in a way few
have ever been. In the 1960s his weekly newsletter was a powerful
voice challenging the government’s propaganda about the war in
Vietnam. Click here to read about Stone, and here.
"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out."Stone remains one of my heroes. At my best, over the years, I have emulated him in my own small ways. Thank you for the schooling, Professor Greene.
-- I.F. Stone
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