Friday, April 27, 2018
Thursday, April 26, 2018
The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-You Can’t Go Home Again, Damn It, You Can’t- With Thomas Wolfe’s Novel In Mind
The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-You Can’t Go Home Again, Damn It, You Can’t- With Thomas Wolfe’s Novel In Mind
By Allan Jackson
A story as told to Josh Breslin
[I don’t know Larry Larkin the subject of this piece but I do “know” Larry, his story and his plight part. This is one of the few sketches that I didn’t do more than a little light editing and a lot of conversation with Josh Breslin about where to head with the thing. See this is one of the few pieces that don’t necessarily have to do with classic rock and roll days and those like Larry, Josh and I who were washed clean by that experience so I let Josh go where he wanted on this once he completed his interviews with Larry. Still the subject is as intense today as it was back in those 1960s days when anything was possible.
Normally I would have taken a pass on doing an introduction to a piece like this because between Larry and Josh’s comments and stories they tell all that needs telling and I would add nothing. This one is different mainly because Larry’s not being able to go home again when the deal went down resonates well beyond the specifics of his story. More than a fair share of corner boys from the old working class, working poor Acre neighborhood in North Adamsville found they couldn’t go home again either just like Larry up in Olde Saco (and Josh too and someday I hope he will write up his story which will share some of the same angst that Larry faced as he explained to me one whiskey night after his long estranged mother had passed away).
Strangely, actually maybe not so strangely, the stories Larry and Josh have to tell did not surface until late adulthood. The same with the stories of corner boys like Frankie Riley, Johnny Callahan, Jimmy Jenkins and a fistful of others I have interrogated about the matter over the past few years. And me too. All of them, us have tales of estrangement and woes that never got resolved. Of course we know Markin’s, Scribe’s alienation and angst because we all think that contributed to his early and frankly weird demise but the rest of us worked under the working principle of the times, of the mostly Irish enclave of “not airing the family’s dirty linen in public.” That extended to talking out loud even to fellow corner boys about what was happening at home. Even Scribe seldom mentioned anything about anything except you could tell he was always brooding about something or was in a dither that you could tell automatically because he would suddenly say he had to go run off his anger (which made him a great high school trackman if nothing else).
I think we have enough material in the piece so that I don’t have to go on and on here about my own circumstances and maybe someday I will write a little something up but know this. I too was estranged from my family, never went to my father’s funeral, which was a mistake, or my mother’s which was not so line up. (Mothers by the way back then in that neighborhood and maybe elsewhere as well were the main adult harassers and despots fathers were too busy earning not enough money to come up for breathe except on some major thing and hence that father mistake which I regret to this day.) Allan Jackson]
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Larry Larkin wondered, wondered that night as 2012 turned into New Year’s Day 2013 why he had been fixated on that title from the long ago American novelist Thomas Wolfe and his damn book, You Can’t Go Home Again. Wondered too why over the previous five years, the five years since he initially tried to “go home, again” he had not realized the truth of that simple expression, had caused himself more grief that wisdom choking over every misstep in the effort. All of this wondering, aided perhaps by a few sips of white wine that he was sharing with his companion, Laura Hoppe, as the new year came in had been triggered by remembrances of the past year’s final (he hoped final) beating about the head over the matter when he had tried to attend his 50th anniversary high school class reunion of the Class of 1962 at Olde Saco High in the early fall at the Laurent Hotel , a place that back in the day had meant nothing but trouble including the location of his first marriage wedding reception. He had in the end wound traipsing with Laura into Big Sur canyons clear across the country on the weekend of the scheduled event. After churning it over in his head Larry thought, before the wine flowed too freely to his brain that he had better go back to the beginning, better go back to look how each step taken on that “go home, again ” trail had been fraught with portents of eventual failure. And that ebbing New Year’s Eve he at least knew that that road was now mercifully closed to him.
Sure Larry knew, knew way before 2007 when he caught the “go home” bug that he could not go back to the time of his youth in Olde Saco when even when things were tough, tough meaning the constant war between he and his mother, Delores (nee LeBlanc, descended from a long line of French-Canadian peasants he guessed they would be called, fellahin a friend of his, Josh Breslin also with French-Canadian blood in him on his mother’s side also LeBlanc although not related, trying to be smart called them, who came down from barren Quebec to look for work in the mills and never looked back), there were memories, maybe good memories, that sustained him in bad times.
So Larry did not believe that year he was going to go back to that “go home” but he did believe that he could at least settle on an “armed truce” with that past. A past which included a very long period of alienation and lost contact with his people back in Olde Saco, a period of no contact by his own finally frustrated choice. One day in the mid-1970s he just decided that he could no longer take the punishing contact with the family, that it was better all around to cut his losses and so went his own way. But humankind is funny, or at least Larry thought it was funny that one day in 2007, one fateful day as it turned out, he had an intense hankering to settle with his past, find out what happened to his family, who was left and maybe try to reconnect. That one day was ordinary enough since what had triggered his hankering (his word) was the fact that he had had to return to Olde Saco to obtain a copy of his birth certificate in order to begin the retirement process from his job as a middle-level civil servant up in Augusta. So down to old town town hall Olde Saco he went. Of course since he had spent the time and energy to travel down there he knew that he would just had to stop off at Olde Saco Beach after he had completed his task.
As Larry once again began walking Olde Saco Beach from the Pine Point far end he thought this stretch of ocean front held many memories for a man who loved the sea, had declared at one time or another that his homeland was the sea, was the mother, snarly and holy vengeance one moment, tepidly ripple running to shore and gentle splashes the next, who never abandoned him, draw what conclusions you will from that. Mainly that cold early April day in 2007 he thought about how many times when he had had some “unresolvable” beef (unresolvable then although now, having gone through the same set of experiences with his own kids he chuckled over that word) he would walk the mile to the beach from his shack of a growing up house over on Atlantic Avenue and endlessly walk until he calmed himself down (later in high school where he was a track athlete he would run that distance but the brooding walking followed, followed as day to night). The beefs always over wants, wants of one or sort or another usually over him wanting something, clothes, date money, tickets to something, could have been anything, and she, Delores, pulling the hammer down with the definite “no.” His hard-working hard-pressed shadow figure father in the background backing her up, backing her up without question. Other times the beefs were of a more serious nature, trouble nature, trouble at school, trouble after school hanging around with his corner boys, mostly thieving Irish kids, trouble with the law, mostly small unarmed felonies, trouble, trouble as he squandered half his young life gnashing his teeth against grabbing those from hunger want. It had been a close thing, a very close thing, indeed that he had taken the judge’s, old Judge Matthews over in the Arundel District Court, choice of enlisting in the Army over time at Shawshank, seeing afterward what had happened to a few of his corner boys, Clipper Johnson, George Kelly and the late Jimmy Dubois, as they edged their own paths to the big house.
No question, and here he was not giving into any false nostalgia, or at least he did not think that was but there had been some good times too, mostly early on, but still good times. Yeah, those trips to the beach with the family and the inevitable barbecues as his father gave his mother (and maybe himself) a break from cooking, her an indifferent cook at best harried by short father pay check money to feed five growing kids, he could still smell those smells now all charcoal and warmth. Those runs down to York Beach and the amusement park when he was fascinated by his first run-in with the corner boy pinball wizards who populated the arcades during the summer. Trips to Boston, trips to lots places in the area which made up, a little, for a nerve-wracking home life. Yeah, those early days held much promise before he came of age and the Delores wars started, started him out the door to hang around with the guys at Lebreque’s Drugstore (and later Jimmy Laurent’s bar where Jimmy did not ask questions about age but only the color of your money). So after walking the length of the beach for the umpteenth time in his life Larry got a small hankering. That hankering enlarged when he surreptiously drove pass the old growing up shack of a house on Atlantic Street and found that the house was no longer there but had been replaced by a high end three-unit condo complex. He did not bother to check to see if any unit belonged to Delores and Paul Larkin since no way could they have afforded such digs. Besides he was too afraid to go near the premises in that neighborhood in the unlikely case that some old neighbors might recognize him. Yeah, it was like that.
Then one day a few week later, out of the blue, he began a Google search of the old town newspaper, The Olde Saco Tribune, to see if any of his people other than the one outlaw older brother he was still in contact (and that relationship too had stormy no contact periods), William were still around. William then in assisted living quarters in Wells after a long career of petty armed robberies in Massachusetts and New Hampshire which produced a long career in various state penal institutions nixed any involvement in the search having his own dank memories and beefs. Yeah, Larry developed a hankering to see who was still around (including the extended family many of whom on his mother’s side had lived in the Olde Saco area after the huge migration out of the Quebec farms to work the mills and on his father’s side too, working the mills that is, including him). There the beauty of the Internet, even the now outdated capacities of the 2007 Internet came to the rescue. That search brought forth information from the on-line Obituary section that an uncle, Lawrence Larkin who he was named after, had died in 2005 after serving many years on the Kennebunk police force. That was his uncle, no question. More importantly, among those in attendance at the funeral was one Delores Larkin, although no mention was made of his father, Paul. Delores was listed as being from South Portland and so on a whim he checked on-line to see if a land-line telephone was listed in her name. Bingo, there was one listed under her name. Larry thought this whole exercise had been way too easy, he had been prepared to go to a detective agency if necessary and here without two hours he had located his mother.
Then the real crush began. Should or should he not made the call to confirm that identity. Larry literally held his breathe for a moment and dialed. An older woman’s voice (his mother would have been in her late 80s by then) answered and he made his identity known. As he found out later from a sister his mother had thought that he (and that brother in Wells) were dead and so she had been confused, not sure who she was talking to and told him to call back later when his sisters Maureen and Cecelia would be home. A couple of hours later even before he had a chance to call back his sister Maureen called him (another virtue of modern communications technology-caller identification) and in no uncertain terms asked him what the hell he wanted after all these years. The conversation, which lasted about an hour, or he thought it seemed that long, provided information about his father’s death in the 1980s and the deaths of other close and extended family members, including his other brother Prescott in 2003.
Beyond the family information Maureen expressed bitterness that Larry who had been able-bodied, had after all made something of himself up in Augusta (after he provided his own life information to her), and who had no good reason not to have been in contact should trouble (her word) their mother now. She and Cecelia had spent the time since their father’s death providing for their mother’s welfare, including the previous several years her living with Maureen and her husband. When Larry expressed an interest in seeing his mother Maureen cut him off at the knees. She, they, left the situation like this. She and Cecelia would explain the situation to their mother and if she wanted to see him then they would think about giving their consent. They would contact him if they did so. The old “don’t call us, we’ll call you” brush-off gave Larry a knot in the pit of his stomach, and a feeling, the first of what would be a long line of such similar feelings, that he would not be able to “go home” again.
And so it came to pass. In late 2007 he received a phone call from a cousin, Peter LeBlanc (or rather his companion Laura received a phone call because he was then down in Boston at a conference), telling him that his mother had passed away, had passed away a couple of days before in a Portland nursing home and that the funeral would be the following Saturday at Saint Anne in Olde Saco. (Peter had also used the Internet to find Larry since he too had been on the outs with his family, and with Maureen who refused to give him Larry’s telephone number. Hail Internet, for some things anyway.) Here was the hard part for Larry to take, he knew when neither Maureen nor Cecelia called back that time he would not get to see his mother alive but Peter made it clear that Maureen and the rest of the family under no circumstances wanted Larry or William at the funeral services. So the curse would extend to the grave, beyond the grave. Larry took that knowledge hard for a while, although he and William did visit the fresh grave of his mother (and the well-worn graves of their father and other brother) at the family plot in Scarborough and thought no more about it, or better, did no more, knew then he could not go that way home again.
Truth. Larry, smart enough to know that chapter was over, closed, still had this empty spot, or as he told Laura, this world-historic need (he really does say stuff like that) to dust off, to salvage some part of the long ago past, to make sense of the shut-out that he had just faced and what that meant to him. That is when he got to thinking about his old close corner boy from back in the days, going back to elementary school times on Atlantic Street, Kenny Bradley. Funny one night in early 2008 when filled to the brim with melancholia he thought about those times when his mother who had worked at Mister Jiffy’s Donut Shoppe in Biddeford for a few years filling jelly donuts to help make ends meet when his father was having trouble finding work after the mills started closing down and heading south, or wherever they headed to get cheaper labor used to give Kenny a bagful of day-old donuts to take home when he came over to the house. Even in high school when all hell was breaking loose in Larry’s life and it was that close thing about a life of crime that drove the main wedge between him and his parents Delores Larkin could do no wrong in Kenny’s eyes based on that childhood kindness.
He had thought to himself that night that he had been thinking about Kenny for a while, about what had happened to him, where he was if he was alive, ever since he had received an invitation to attend his 40th anniversary class reunion since graduation from Olde Saco High. He had hemmed and hawed about going to the event before backing off but that invitation had been the first time he thought seriously about getting in touch, although like a lot of things in Larry’s life he let it slide until the finality of his mother’s death brought lots of stuff to the surface. He would find himself softly singing a verse from old 1960s folk minute singer Tom Paxton’s song, I Can’t Help But Wonder, a song they both had loved back then, “I’ve got a buddy from back home but he started out to roam and I hear he’s out by Frisco Bay…and I’m going out to see him some old day, ” since Frisco had been the last place they had run into each other after Kenny had gotten out of the Navy and decided that he would start fresh in the West like lots of their kindred had.
And here is where modern communications technology came in again after Larry had been unsuccessful in finding out Kenny’s whereabouts through a member of that 40th anniversary reunion committee who had wound up as the secretary to the headmaster of Olde Saco High and privy to any information that might be easily accessible about him. He tried a straight Google search finding eventually that Kenny’s parents had both died and since he was an only child that kind of cut short some other possibilities. Along with the search for Kenny Larry was also in something of a memory writing mood putting together some small sketches remembered from his youth about high school dances, the lovers’ lane at Squaw Rock down at the isolated end of Pine Point, hanging out with corner boys, strange dating girls hassles, football rallies, all pretty much directed back to old high school days.
Frustrated Larry Googled Olde Saco High School Class of 1962 to see if he could get anything from that end. Eventually he got to a generic all-America, maybe all-world, although he never checked that far, commercial website which for a small fee would “connect” you with your class. Larry paid the freight and for his efforts found his class listed, and more importantly a list, a fairly current list of all the members from his class who had joined the site. And bingo once again there was the name Kenneth Bradley. The way this site worked is that you or whoever you were trying to contact needed to pay that damn fee to be able receive private e-mails and so Larry did pay and sent the e-mail with a short message to Kenny and a way to contact him. A couple of days later Kenny telephoned him from Boston where he was running his own contract painting company and doing quite well. They cut up old touches for a couple of hours agreeing to meet in Boston a week or so later when Larry would be in Boston for another of his endless conferences. They met at Joe’s American Café in the Back Bay and while they both had grown stouter, and had lost some hair, unlike many of Larry’s old acquaintances they easily recognized each other on meeting.
They had a good night with good food, good drink (they had been notorious drinking partners even in high school which got them both into more than one of those “trouble trouble” situations that dotted Larry’s youth. The highlight was that Kenny had brought his very own copy of the Olde Saco Magnet, their high school yearbook, and had many a nostalgic laugh over this and that. Of course Larry had been so alienated upon graduation, as well as having a few grand larceny charges hanging over him which would be resolved only by his taking the Army part of old Judge Matthews Army or jail options, that graduation night drunk as skunk he had thrown his copy in the Scarborough River and good riddance.
Larry and Kenny had been from elementary school days until that last time Larry had seen Kenny in Frisco as close as two guys could be without being brothers. The had laughed when Kenny made a comment at Joe’s that they probably were the only heterosexual guys in the class (maybe the school or town even) who people wondered about whether they were gay (or to use the term used then in sublime ignorance, “fags”). That Boston night had been the highlight of their reunion although they met several times after that over the next several months for dinner, to watch sports which Kenny was still addicted to, and a couple of times Kenny had joined Larry and Laura at concerts (one a Bruce Springsteen concert down in New Haven) but the old comradeship seemed to be lost, lost like that closeness vanished in the bay out there in California.
During this time Larry began grinding his teeth when Kenny would endlessly talk about his painting business, about the stock market that he dabbled in, graphic detail about his sexual conquests, more endless talk about sports and frankly stuff that Larry had either lost interest like sports or never cared to talk about and from his end would be reduced to bringing up some old time flame, caper or incident from high school days to fill the time. Larry sensed that maybe Kenny realized too that they had gone very far away on their separate ways, and after dinner one night in York Beach in early 2009 they had parted saying they would give each other a call soon to get together again. They never did and that “go home” episode passed into dust.
Although Larry felt the Kenny connection drifting away he still was producing those small sketches about life, mostly high school life, in the old days in Olde Saco and placing them on the appropriate section of the class website. Several of them, especially about the local custom of searching for “submarines” from the backseats of ’57 Chevys at Olde Saco Beach at night (the reader can be presumed to be able to be figure that one out), the infamous grapevine that provided much needed intelligence about who or who was no “going steady” centered in Monday morning before school talkfest, and the night life at the Olde Saco Drive-In and Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Main Street grabbed a great deal of comment and reply. Some of them so he heard later from a woman classmate who had read them at the time would become the talk of his class.
All done good-naturedly, all done with trying to fill some empty hole in him, and maybe them. Then the hammer fell. Misty Gordon, Class vice-president, head cheerleader, chair of the senior dance and prom committees, assistant editor of the school newspaper The Ocean’s Edge threw down a gauntlet, made a comment, very pointedly after forty years later like she had been holding it in for that whole period of time to the effect that who did Larry think he was, a guy who got into nothing but trouble as everybody in town knew and tittered over and never did anything to help his class now wanted to proclaim himself the quote “ bard of the class.” Now Larry knew this Misty, you could hardly avoid her and her well-publicized exploits in a small high school, vaguely but had never spoken two words to her and said so in his very public reply. But he also said that “yes” he was trying to be not THE bard but one and wrote a funny (some thought it funny in the comment section) sketch about how he was perfect for the job, had all the qualifications of former ne’er-do-well, drunk, loner and non-participant so that some decades later he was qualified, over-qualified for the job.
This created a firestorm for a while, a couple of months with the social butterflies, sports guys, and do-gooders siding with Misty and the misfits, nerds, loners, and outcasts giving Larry the nod. But he grew tired of an essentially useless argument with people he had not seen for many years and once again he had gotten that sinking feeling that this venture too was no way home and gave it up. For a while.
Larry let up, gave up trying to “go back home” for a while until near the end of 2011 with the 50th anniversary reunion the next fall (according to information that he searched on the Internet when he found the reunion committee had set up a private class website for the event) when seemingly undaunted despite the previous track record of failure he got some curious “mystical” sense that he could turn the tide this time. He made contact with the members of the committee on the website and offered to/asked to be on the committee. This is how the last indignity unfolded as told to an old classmate friend of his, Josh Breslin, one night who will at least tell it straight:
“This is the way Larry Larkin, my old friend and classmate from up Olde Saco way, told me his sad story over several meetings at one or another of our favorite watering holes a short while back where he felt he had to get something off his chest about his latest love interest gone sour, his, as he called it, last indignity about “going home” to the old home town, or rather making peace with his past. Through his activity on our high school 50th anniversary reunion committee we had communicated and met each other several times recently and he had carried me along with his enthusiasm about the event. Got me interested in the old days, and possibly going to the reunion. And he in turn confided in me about this love problem, wanted me to write something up about it as a form of therapy for him or something. I am no expert on the issue of love, or maybe better having been married three times and having had numerous affairs and flings I am as clueless as he about how to deal with the subject. In any case here are my recollections of what he had to say on that sad whiskey-filled night:
The last time Larry Larkin saw Merissa Pinot he was looking back at the headlights of her automobile veering off as dusk approached to go north on Route 133 just south of Amesbury along the New Hampshire border in the early spring of 2012. He did not know that that glimpse would be the last, the last physical time he saw her, although given the all-out fight they had had earlier that evening including an enraged outburst by him he suspected as much. But like many things in this wicked old world of romantic relationships that would not be the last of it, although that indeed was the last physical time he saw her. There were some final shots, some last metaphysical kiss-offs before the real end. And so as Larry had muttered to himself at some point during the last not so metaphysical dust-up whether 16 or 68 years of age the romance game never gets easier. And so this story, or end of story.
Let’s take a step back to figure out about the whys of that last headlight glance before we find out what happened after the subsequent fall and the last dust-up. Larry told me he had been thinking about his 50th class reunion at Olde Saco High since he had received an invitation to go to his 40th reunion back in 2002. At that time Larry had dismissed the invitation with much hubris because then he still thought that the bad luck that had followed him for much of his life had been caused by his growing up on “the wrong side of the tracks” in the old town. He told me, a number of times, that he had spent half a lifetime blaming that bad luck hometown affiliation on everything from acne to wormwood.
Subsequently through some family-related deaths that took him back to the old town Larry had reconciled himself with his roots and had exhibited the first stirrings of a feeling that he might like to see some of his old classmates despite his dismal failure to connect with our old classmate and his best friend Kenny Bradley. In late 2012, around Thanksgiving he, at least marginally savvy on such user-friendly sites, created a Facebook event page in order to see if anybody else on the planet knew of plans or was interested in making plans for a 50th reunion. One day, a few days after setting up the page, he got an inquiry asking what he knew about any upcoming plans. He answered in a short note his own limited knowledge at the time of any such plans but that his intention in setting up the page had been to seek others to help out with organizing an event if nothing had been established as yet. In that reply he had forgotten to give his name. And that is how the “girl with the pale blue eyes,” Merissa Pinot, came into view.
“Who are you?” asked Merissa returning his message, a name that Larry immediately remembered from his high school days although he did not know the woman personally. He shot back a blushed reply about being sorry for forgetting to include his name, gave it, and casually remarked that he had remembered from somewhere that she was a professor at a college in the Boston area. He asked if she was still there. She sent an immediate reply stating that no she was no longer there but that she had been and was still a professor at the University of New Hampshire, and had been for the previous twenty-five years. She also mentioned that, having access to her Ocean’s Edge, her class of 1962 yearbook, she had looked up his class photo, and said he was “very handsome.”
Naturally any guy from six to sixty would have to seriously consider anybody, any female in Larry’s case, who threw that unanticipated, unsolicited comment a man’s way especially since she sent her class photo back as well. That got them started on what would be a blizzard of e-mails over the next several weeks.
Frankly, after the first few exchanges Larry had been more than a little intrigued with Merissa, intrigued enough to think about further discovery. And as it turned out Merissa had been as well. They discovered they both had much in common academically, professionally, politically and personally. I won’t go into the specifics of those “things in common” because in looking over my notes from Larry that would take more time than necessary to make the point.
A point necessary to make though since it contributed to the fall was Larry’s “relationship” status which he introduced to Merissa after that initial blizzard of e-mails and phone calls. Here’s the gist of his response:
“…You know as well as I do that we both carry a lot of baggage, busted marriages, affairs, and so forth. On the other hand we are both old enough to have whatever level of friendship we want from just friends to an affair because we both as far as I know have no ties that would prohibit that, neither of us is married now. And even if we did in this day in age we could still have whatever relationship we wanted. As long as we both have our eyes open and know the score. That “know the score” part is what I want to talk about. It is nothing bad but it is a complication. And even if we decide to be just friends it is part of what is unfolding.
Up until a few weeks ago for the past ten years or so since the end of my last serious relationship I was just rolling along writing, doing legal work, doing politics, playing golf and all the rest. Doing all of that while living in the same house as the woman that was my last serious romantic relationship, Laura, who is still my closest woman friend. I have known her for over twenty- five years and about twenty years ago we bought this modest house in Bath together. As time went on though we had, as couples will, our problems until about ten years ago we decided that it wasn’t working. But we both wanted to keep the house and be friends. I won’t go into all of that now but you can ask me about it. So that is what we did. And there is nothing wrong with that people make such arrangements all the time….”
“…Then out of the blue you came along. You know how we “met” and all so I don’t need to go into that but what happened is that I was not sure where we were heading (at one point if anywhere) and so I made a point of keeping that “relationship” information to myself. Remember I made a point about just concentrating on us and not on other baggage stuff. Part of it obviously is that if we were not going anywhere then such information didn’t matter and if we were then that would just be an awkward situation that we would deal with. That is what a lot of my concern about expectations, the way we have met and all of that, has been about. I have told Laura about you in general terms (the only way to put it since we still have not met) and since this whole thing has been topsy-turvy that is where things stand right now.
If all of this seems like too much then so be it-but as for me I still say forward- if you don’t that is okay and we can work on some other way to be friends. I think we both strongly want to be friends and should be damn it if that is what we want. Later Larry.”
A couple more cell-phone calls and another round of e-mails got this pair to setting up the meeting in person, having a “date” like some hormonally-driven teen-agers. (Larry could not remember who suggested the idea first but neither flinched at that possibility all he remembered was that he would finally have a date with an Olde Saco High woman something that had eluded all through high school.) They both admitted to nervousness as they planned to meet in Portsmouth up in New Hampshire at a restaurant that she had selected (he was to be at a legal conference in Portland and that locale was the closest convenient city for both of them). Needless to say they hit it off remarkably well.
And Larry, with two divorces under his belt and that also untold number of liaisons, was also in his less lucid moments thinking along some just such lines as an affair with Merissa (who had also been divorced twice as well), maybe more. Except. Oh yeah, except here is where it got tricky, where Larry’s calculations sort of misfired. Larry was, as he learned as they went along, ah, still “married,” had been emotionally “married” for many years to Laura in his head although he was only beginning to realize that, although as mentioned in his e-mail to Merissa for a number of years past they had been living as “roommates.” Roommate meaning separate beds, mostly separate lives, and most definitely no sex. That hard little fact, that “marriage” fact, a fact that I kept mentioning to him as he got deeper into the human sink of Merissa. Naturally he would not listen at that point.
That left Larry in a quandary. He knew, just like Merissa knew, that he desired her, wanted to have sex, make love to her. But he also knew that once that happened that a bridge would be crossed, or so that was his thinking at the time. Still Merissa was there, still he wanted her so one Friday afternoon he called her up out of the blue and told her to meet him at a hotel in Portsmouth. And that was their high point, the acme of their thing. That was also the point where Larry, back-tracking, began to squirm a little both at what he had done, that bridge that he had crossed and that home he had left behind for a minute. The omens thereafter were not good, although he never spoke other than in general terms of those nights to me and I only knew that they had had sex from the notes he handed to me.
But Merissa was a fretter and a planner, not necessarily in that order so at some point between that Friday and their resumption of e-mail traffic the next day she, possessed of some dream future with Larry, tried to find out more about Laura, about that “roommate” arrangement and what was to become of her. See Merissa had certain rules as we all more or less do in that she took pride in her serial monogamous relationships. She was with a man, and a man was with her, or no dice. Once she finished with a man that was that. She told Larry that in a set of e-mail exchanges on the subject. He in a little panic over her hard and fast position kept trying to calm her doubts, kept trying to pass over his longtime relationship as some platonic boy-scout trip, kept trying to keep his head above water with Merissa. That night, that restless Saturday night, he tossed and turned trying to mull things over in his head and came up empty. Came up with the only conclusion that made sense-end the flirtation and walk away. He, and this is characteristic of Larry, “wrote” the thing out in his head first and then at the crack of dawn gathered himself from his bed and went to the computer to compose an e-mail which he sent later that morning. Larry never gave Merissa a chance to respond since a few hours later, maybe two, he called her up and begged her to forget what he had written and that they should keep on going as best they could but that he planned to do right by her.
So they went along for a while, sometimes happy, sometimes on edge with all that future talk business in the background. Probably though the end started to crumble the month before the end when a few days after coming back from a fateful Washington trip together Merissa took a big spill, a serious fall at a pool in Portsmouth where she swam to get exercise, that broke her hip bone requiring surgery and their budding romance came to a crashing halt as she convalesced and Larry took on the unaccustomed role of care-giver- general. Not so much that incident itself since it was an accident but what it did to enforce her idleness which left her too much time to think about how she wanted him with her, wanted him to leave Laura, wanted to make those 208 plans (roughly) that Merissa spent her waking hours doing in order to have him come closer to her.
Not a meeting between them in that period went by without some variation of the on-going argument. Although there were some nice times, (one time he drove her to their Olde Saco the sites of their youth homes both of which had been torn down since the old days and they had many laughs, and some sorrows, over that). Even when he had driven up in order to allow her to teach a seminar at UNH and then drove her the next day over to the Portsmouth General to get her cleared to be able to drive she/he/they argued over that same old, same old material.
The few days before the end had not been much better (really a few weeks Larry thought since that damn accident put her out of commission placed a damper on their affair as he became a care-giver and she a patient). The inevitable Merissa war cry of when was Larry going to leave his “wife,” when he was going to leave Laura, and what, get this, constructive steps he had taken to break with her had led to a series of arguments starting with the day that she was finally given the okay by the doctor in charge of her case at Portsmouth General to drive.
Naturally the e-mail and cell-phone traffic (actually the diminished traffic, significantly down from the days when they would sent blizzards of e-mails to each other when he thought about it later) reflected those unresolved tensions. She needed to spent that first week of liberation catching up on work, house, social chores and could only spare that next Thursday evening for them to get together and since she was going to be in the Salem (NH) area they decided to meet in Amesbury for dinner. Before that though Larry made what would be a mistake, a fatal mistake, of putting into writing some of his feelings about where they were at in their relationship. Thus he sent her an e-mail which was the final piece of evidence that things had gone drastically wrong.
They had a short acrimonious cell-phone exchange after she received that e-mail but again agreed to meet in Amesbury the next day to figure things out. That next evening things started well enough, after Merissa had ordered wine with her dinner. The net result of their discussions was that they would go on as friends for a while and see where that led. Of course to go beyond the friend stage Merissa gave no uncertain terms to the proposition that she could not go on, was “ashamed” to go on under the circumstances unless Larry got a place of his own, left Laura.
Merissa ordered another wine, unusual for her, and that must have given her courage to speak again of the e-mail. She said it read like a lawyer’s closing argument, that she had been hurt and that he was basically a bum of the month. He became incensed, yelled at her and threw money on the table for dinner and walked to the men’s room to fume. When he came back he tried to tell her his point of view but he was tired of arguing by then and just said “let it go for now.” They left, she put her hand in his arm as usual and he muttered that “they were in very bad place” as he walked her to her car. He looked at her shoes, the shoes she reminded him that she had worn in sunnier days down in Washington and he commented “that seems like a long time ago” as they arrived at her car. Rather than the usual kiss good-bye he yelled out “I’ll be in touch,” as he walked back to his own car.
Since Merissa was not good at directions (and the Google maps were helter-skelter on this one) Larry had consented to have her follow him out of Amesbury on Route 27 which she did until they got to the U.S. 495 South entrance. A couple of exits up she veered off onto Route 133 for home. As he shifted gears from fourth to fifth to push on up to speed in the U.S. 495 night after he saw her automobile veer off to the northern route home he breathed a sigh of relief, and of sadness. They never saw each other again.”
And the final nail, hopefully the final nail, had been driven into the idea that Larry Larkin could “go home” again.
Riverdale Blues-For Allen Ginsburg On The 60th Anniversary Of “Howl” (1956)
Riverdale Blues-For Allen Ginsburg On The 60th Anniversary Of “Howl” (1956)
By Lance Lawrence
A sad-eyed dope hung around the back of the old-fashioned framed schoolhouse lazily drawing the summer breeze (he lied since the school had only recently been constructed in the big post World II baby boom and he had gone to school here since the place opened-he lied for the sake of lying, lying to himself mostly especially about his sexual longing just then as he hoped to get some chick who was hanging out by the bushes to give him a hand job, give him one like Lucinda had given him that time at the movies when sitting up in the balcony she had unzipped his pants and let her hand move so fast he jerked off after about a minute he was so excited and she only twelve imagine what she will be like when she gives it all up but fat chance he would have to grab that piece since his quick spurt, his sperm, his cum, had gotten all over her dress and she was pissed off at him when it dried and got all crusty on the way home so some other guy would grab her cherry-that was only a matter of time), wished he could get “washed clean,” washed clean real clean which is what the guys around school called it when their Lucindas moved their hands fast, get his sperm count down, his hot flash temperature, whatever that was.
Cock sore, cock was what the guys called their hanging things, their pulsating penises, so he followed although he got flushed when some guy maybe Billy, Billy Bradley the guy who always seemed to be the first guy with the sex knowledge, first said the word and he had asked what that was-damn. Cock and cocksuckers, waiting on his corner boy, waiting on Billy, waiting on his secret comrade in arms the hazy night as he looked around over heaven’s nightshade (and the guy who would probably be the first to get into Lucinda’s panties since she had already given him her fast hand action and according to Billy something more although Billy wouldn’t specify but at least that action which is why he had, on Billy’s solemn advise taken Lucinda to the movies in the first place, had asked if she wanted to go to the balcony and when she said yes he knew he was going to get his clock cleaned-he just wished he hadn’t gotten off so fast with Lucinda since Billy’s older brother, Max, had given them a vivid description of what was what when you got a girl all wet and then stuck your stick in her and listened to her moan, moan like humankind had been doing for a million years, and he sure could have put his stick wherever she wanted it-probably laugh at him if he got off too fast-again).
Billy at first nowhere to be found, nowhere to be found that is if he did not want to be found and then the next thing you knew Billy, secret comrade in arms, came sauntering, his style just then before puberty would turn his feet around and he would thereafter walk like some Western movie cowboy would now sing his life-song, what did the poet, the old Solomonic poet call to the high heaven’s, oh yes, plainsong for a candid world, a world before massive bombings, massive unacknowledged deaths for shady ladies and other figment s of his imagination. Come sauntering in the bejesus night looking both ways to see some straggling ungainly girls, some young Lucinda who knew the score, knew if they had hung around that back of the school just then that they had heard about Lucinda, had maybe asked their older sisters or brothers what a hand job was and how to do that. They were eager if they were hanging in the shadows and the dope was hoping that some innocent would get moved by the Billy plainsong (he would learn later that plainsong was more religious that any old rock song even big bop doo wop song but by then rock and roll was his religion anyway) hovering around the fence waiting for something, anything to happen and then a word, a sullen word came off his tongue and the night’s work had begun, maybe a generation was on its way to immortality, was ready to break out of the quiet of the 1950s night without shame and without confession.
Tripping over “she’s so fine, so fine, wish she were mine doo lang doo lang” or the corner boys, the male version of He’s So Fine by the Chiffons, the big bopping song of 1956, the guys, including the dope, backing Billy up in the doo wop frenzy that had swept tween and teen just then and the scent of the jasmine coming from the girl-shadows by the harbor, the marsh’s fetid mephitic smell giving way to the night’s splendor, maybe stolen perfumes from mother’s dresser or some girlish bath-soap all fresh and dewy. Doo lang, doo lang along with Eddie, Jason, Frank and beloved Peter Paul slapping time and those wanderlust girls along the fences came drifting to the scent of Old Spice that the boys had splashed on father’s bureau, father’s time, father’s sweat but not to be thought of in the hazy summer night. And as the moon hovered against the sun the girls got closer and closer, one Lucinda’s younger sister, Laura, all the sisters in that family playing off mother Lottie having “L” –encrusted first letter names, aimed his way and he waved her over to head toward old dead sailors’ graveyard down the far corner of the school lot (oh what those sailors could have told those young bucks from their rotted graves and pock-marked burial stones about hand jobs and blow jobs too when the ante was up about what a girl had to come across with-and if out to sea some young sailor boy plaything but that latter knowledge would not click until later). A few minutes later the dope came back out of the sailor shadows looking like the king of the hill and Laura wiping her hand with a handkerchief with a faint smile (they had already agreed to meet that next night down at that sailors’ last rest, down among the mortal stone forsaking the last ship out and by-past the foreplay plainsong-the young learn fast so maybe those sailors would have been stating the obvious when the poured forth in their dank, damp waterfront taverns about blow jobs and hand jobs).
But hell all that was coming of age, coming of age in a time when things were moving too fast even for quick learners and the corner boys got further and further along in their primitive sex lessons and no more stupid thoughts of red scares, Uncle Joe’s scourge in Moscow town, and Cold War down in the basement hide your ass under some oaken desk and somebody said that was real, that was okay but that scent lingered against the jimson in the jeans from Satan’s tower, look homeward, look homeward angels. Ecstasy-pure ecstasy in the hazy night of some youthful dream.
Billy would declare (and the dope would secretly agree and write every word down to be passed around later like some latter day glad tiding-like some Mount Sinai-filched grainy stone tablet) that they were in a spin, the world was changing and although he had no empirical evidence, when did the king of the hill need hard-boiled evidence going back to Adam’s time, facts, he had heard from his oldest brother who already had graduated from high school that not only was the music changing, not only were people, and not just kids, starting to laugh at the idea that going down some rat hole of a basement and hiding under some rotten oaken desk when the big one came [the bomb] would do anybody any good. Started to challenge everything from the whole idea of the red scare night, the whole idea that everybody needed to live their ticky-tacky lives in dread of the reds, having a big ass finned gas-eating car and not “keeping up with the Jones.” Especially day to day the latter.
Billy didn’t get most of what that oldest brother said (and neither did the dope who dutifully wrote it all down anyway which he had “contracted” with his secret comrade Billy to do, to act as scribe which became his nickname at first resented as part of the price of Billy letting a dope hang around with him and his boys and through that circumstance to get to the girls already mentioned above) but he did get that the way things were couldn’t be the future, couldn’t be the way they would have to operate in the world. Couldn’t be the down at the heel existence that he, his family and all the poor bedraggled families that resided in the Five Points “wrong side of the tracks” neighborhood. His oldest brother, Jack to give him a name, the guy telling him all this stuff with the idea of making him wise to the world he was about to face in the not too distant future, had been something of the family rebel.
Jack was always heading to Harvard Square even in high school which was no mean task by bus and later by car when he came of age for a driver’s license, since that place was about forty miles from Riverdale to soak up whatever rebellion was going down (that family rebel designation would fall on Billy later in a very different way when it came his turn to figure out the freaking world and after a short attempt at a break-out rock and roll musical career turned to armed robberies and such eventually getting killed in a shoot- out with cops down in North Carolina trying to all doped up rob a White Hen convenience store). Jack was always talking about “beat” this, “beat” that, some kind of fraternity of rebels who wanted to turn the world upside down (and it was mostly a fraternity the women were mainly around for decoration and whatever sex they wanted to provide). Or maybe better resign from the “square” world and find a little breathing space to do their thing-to write, drink, travel, do dope, have sex but mostly to write for a candid world, a world where the rules didn’t make sense-no way.
One night when Jack was home for minute during summer semester break from college-he went on a scholarship, how else would the family get the money to send the first in the family to go to college, to Boston University, Class of 1959- he decided to tell Billy and his boys in an excited manner his latest tale “what was what,” the expression all the guys used then to signify, well, they had an idea of what was what. Tell them what it was to be a “beat daddy” (not literally a daddy okay but Jack had had to make the distinction because you never knew when somebody in the neighborhood might be a daddy having knocked up some older Lucinda and had to head out of town or get hitched under the sign of the paternal shotgun). Said it was all summed up, everything that was pushing the world forward in a poem, a “beat” poem not like those rhyming simon poems Mister Riley, the old-time Jazz Age English teacher at Riverdale High a would spout forth from some old Englishman’s pen, Alfred Lord Tennyson or Byron or Browning, guys like that, a guy named Ginsburg, Allen Ginsburg, a smart Jewish guy who was the chief propagandist for the beat-ness thing in a poem, Howl, that was making the rounds in Harvard Square and would have its fair share of legal problems but that was later. (Jack was not exactly right about who had been the “real” max daddy of the beats-influence wise it was probably Jack Kerouac when he boiled the 1950s youth nation with his wild men travelogue On The Road, the immediate post-war whirlwind adventures of him and his buddy, Adonis personified Neal Cassady with Ginsburg playing a bit role in that one. But Ginsburg was right in the mix with that fucking long mad monk poem-Brother Jack’s exact words remembered by the Scribe-written down).
Jack said that Ginsburg had had it right-had seen in the great American blue-pink western night stuff that would drive a guy crazy with what was happening to the world as the machine was getting the upper-hand. Ginsburg had had some kind of vision, one of the guys who hung around the Hayes-Bickford in Harvard claiming that it was dope, marijuana favored by the down-trodden cold fields braceros from old Mexico, or peyote buttons, the stuff favored by the Hopis and the “ghost dancers” out where the states are square that fueled the visions. Visions of an unkempt, unruly world where the philosopher-king was a guy named Carlo Solomon who had the whole thing down cold. Knew the West had been saturated, that there was nowhere else to go but the China seas and so he hammered home the idea that out in the Coast was where humankind had to make a last stand against the Molochs, against the fucking night-takers who have been with us forever. Only the righteous warrior-poets would enter the garden. That Hayes-Bickford clarion calling claimed Ginsburg was talking about the Garden of Eden before the Fall.
The madness, the sheer madness making everybody from the hunger days of the 1930s and the rat rationing days of World War II hustle to the sound of steel and iron and not the freaking sound of waves slashing timidly to shore. Started ripping up words a minute not all complete phrases and without some kind of formal pacing sense, although if you heard the thing out loud it would have its own jazz-like cadence somebody who was at the recital in Frisco town had been quoted in a newspaper as saying, jazz cadence and stoned on dope or liquor was all you needed that same source ventured. Ginsburg was not hung up on form, like those old fart Englishman who were totally hung up on form almost as bad as those sonnet bastards Riley made the class memorize but talking about post-war modern minds beaten down by the sound of industry humming away talking about a meltdown, talking crazy stuff about angel hipsters (portraying a sentence of 1940s pre-beat daddies hanging around Times Square hustling and conning an unsuspecting world), talking about Negro streets which they all knew as “n----r streets” over in the Acre section of Boston, a place to stay away from, talking about taking on the monster in the mist Moloch mano y mano, talking about the new heroes of the American night all-American swordsman Jack and secret love that dare not speak its name crush on Adonis of the New Western night courtesy of Laramie Street in mile-high Denver Neal Cassady to be exact the new model of the last cowboy standing. Neal some amazing cocksman to be envied and emulated screwing every honey who was not tied down to a chastity belt on farms, in the restrooms of diners and out in the back alley if the restroom was occupied. Damn.
Ginsburg had actually been in the nut house in New York someplace, had dedicated the poem to some fellow inmate who was crazier that he was or dedicated to all the crazies, the looney bin Jack had called the place like the place all the guys in Riverdale did when they talked about where screwballs and goofs, even Kerouac’s holy goofs learned about later, should have landed, so he knew what deal was going down, knew that America had turned into a cesspool even if nobody else saw the drain coming. Jack had made Billy and the dope laugh when he told them the reason Ginsburg was in the looney bin was he had been sent there by some judge after he got into legal trouble, committed or was present at some unknown crime, an event which made the pair respect this Ginsburg more since cons in the old Riverdale neighborhood were looked up to with respect and admiration, to try to get rid of his faggot-ness, his homosexuality, his liking boys and not girls. (They laughed not because they knew that Jack hated fags and queers which he did and had put paid to that idea having gone down to Provincetown where all the fags and queers hung out all dressed up and all leering at anybody who came off the Provincetown boat from Boston with his own boys and raised hell with them-more than once. Beat a couple up who were eyeing him too closely and one in drag whom he thought was a girl until he got close enough to see some slight stubble on “her” face. Seems that Jack was giving Ginsburg a pass on his sexual preference just because he was a beat guy-Billy and the dope wouldn’t have given the fucker the time of day even if the guy was a prophet if he hadn’t been a con when they talked about it later since they shared Jack’s hatred of fags-and dykes like every red-blooded guy did then.)
Jack knew what the unholy kid goofs were laughing about, about his seeing literary merit even if the guy was a faggot. The minute he said “faggot” he knew they would goof but he thought they should know what else the guy had to say. He told them a lot of good writers and poets were “light on their feet” and that was something you had to deal with if you wanted to read anything worth reading and let the faggot stuff slide, you don’t have to meet them in person anyway. So he told Billy and the dope to forget the stuff he said about Ginsburg’s queer as a three dollar bill situation and “dig” (that was the word Jack used) what he had to say to the world, to the young really. The stuff about machines devouring humankind and making the world crazier than it already was. That maybe the guys in mental hospitals like the ones who were his comrades at the time were the sane ones-that what they knew was too powerful to let them stay out on the mean streets for long. That the Molochs were in charge (“what the fuck is a Moloch,” Billy asked, interrupting, not comprehending what Jack was talking about as he droned on about stuff that seemed weird). Tried to tell the kids that this thing was Ginsburg plainsong, his way of putting in raw language his spiritual trip, his karma on the world. (the dope would run into Ginsburg later at an anti-war rally in New York City in his later incantation as a Buddhist so karma was the right word even though they were clueless about what it really meant in Buddhist traditions).
After about fifteen minutes Jack could see his audience’s eyes glazing over and so he stopped, stopped and told them that when they got his age they would be thinking about all the stuff Ginsburg laid out in that not-fit-for-public-school-classrooms poem. They laughed, snickered really and wondered what Lucinda and Laura were up to just then. The hell with Jack and his fucking homo poem.
The Bolshevik Revolution and Women’s Liberation
The Bolshevik Revolution and Women’s Liberation
(Quote of the Week)
On International Women’s Day in Petrograd in March 1917, a mass outpouring of working women sparked the revolutionary upheaval that culminated in the Russian October Revolution. The smashing of capitalist class rule brought unheard-of gains for women in all areas of public and private life. Despite economic backwardness and poverty, the young Soviet workers government sought to undermine the material foundations of women’s oppression, which is rooted in the institution of the family. The Bolsheviks understood that complete social equality could only be attained with the abolition of classes in a world socialist society. In a 1920 commemoration of International Working Women’s Day, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin underscored the fact that the fight for women’s liberation is inseparable from the fight for international socialist revolution.
Capitalism combines formal equality with economic and, consequently, social inequality. That is one of the principal features of capitalism, one that is deliberately obscured by the supporters of the bourgeoisie, the liberals, and is not understood by petty-bourgeois democrats. This feature of capitalism, incidentally, renders it necessary for us in our resolute fight for economic equality openly to admit capitalist inequality, and even, under certain conditions, to make this open admission of inequality the basis of the proletarian statehood (the Soviet Constitution).
But even in the matter of formal equality (equality before the law, the “equality” of the well-fed and the hungry, of the man of property and the propertyless), capitalism cannot be consistent. And one of the most glaring manifestations of this inconsistency is the inequality of women. Complete equality has not been granted even by the most progressive republican, and democratic bourgeois states.
The Soviet Republic of Russia, on the other hand, at once swept away all legislative traces of the inequality of women without exception, and immediately ensured their complete equality before the law.
It is said that the best criterion of the cultural level is the legal status of women. This aphorism contains a grain of profound truth. From this standpoint only the dictatorship of the proletariat, only the socialist state could attain, as it has attained, the highest cultural level. The new, mighty and unparalleled stimulus given to the working women’s movement is therefore inevitably associated with the foundation (and consolidation) of the first Soviet Republic—and, in addition to and in connection with this, with the Communist International.
Since mention has been made of those who were oppressed by capitalism, directly or indirectly, in whole or in part, it must be said that the Soviet system, and only the Soviet system, guarantees democracy. This is clearly shown by the position of the working class and the poor peasants. It is clearly shown by the position of women.
But the Soviet system is the last decisive struggle for the abolition of classes, for economic and social equality. Democracy, even democracy for those who were oppressed by capitalism, including the oppressed sex, is not enough for us.
It is the chief task of the working women’s movement to fight for economic and social equality, and not only formal equality, for women. The chief thing is to get women to take part in socially productive labour, to liberate them from “domestic slavery,” to free them from their stupefying and humiliating subjugation to the eternal drudgery of the kitchen and the nursery.
This struggle will be a long one, and it demands a radical reconstruction both of social technique and of morals. But it will end in the complete triumph of communism.
—V.I. Lenin, “International Working Women’s Day” (4 March 1920)
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** 'A TERRIBLE BEAUTY WAS BORN' -HONOR JAMES CONNOLLY AND THE EASTER RISING, 1916
*** 'A TERRIBLE BEAUTY WAS BORN' -HONOR JAMES CONNOLLY AND THE EASTER RISING, 1916
ALL HONOR TO THE MEMORY OF JAMES CONNOLLY, COMMANDANT- IRISH CITIZEN ARMY- EXECUTED BY THE BLOODY BRITISH IMPERIALISTS MAY, 1916. ALL HONOR TO THE MEMORY OF BOBBY SANDS, MP AND THE 10 MARTYRED LONG KESH HUNGER STRIKERS. ALL HONOR TO THE MEMORY OF THE 99th ANNIVERSARY OF THE EASTER UPRISING, 1916. ALL BRITISH TROOPS OUT OF IRELAND.
A word on the Easter Uprising
In the old Irish working-class neighborhoods where I grew up the aborted Easter Uprising of 1916 was spoken of in mythical hushed reverent tones as the key symbol of the modern Irish liberation struggle from bloody England. The event itself provoked such memories of heroic “boyos” (and “girlos” not acknowledged) fighting to the end against great odds that a careful analysis of what could, and could not be, learned from the mistakes made at the time entered my head. That was then though in the glare of boyhood infatuations. Now is the time for a more sober assessment.
The easy part of analyzing the Irish Easter Uprising of 1916 is first and foremost the knowledge, in retrospect, that it was not widely supported by people in Ireland, especially by the “shawlies” in Dublin and the cities who received their sons’ military pay from the Imperial British Army for service in the bloody trenches of Europe which sustained them throughout the war. That factor and the relative ease with which the uprising had been militarily defeated by the British forces send in main force to crush it lead easily to the conclusion that the adventure was doomed to failure. Still easier is to criticize the timing and the strategy and tactics of the planned action and of the various actors, particularly in the leadership’s underestimating the British Empire’s frenzy to crush any opposition to its main task of victory in World War I. (Although, I think that frenzy on Mother England’s part would be a point in the uprising’s favor under the theory that England’s [or fill in the blank of your favorite later national liberation struggle] woes were Ireland’s [or fill in the blank ditto on the your favorite oppressed peoples struggle] opportunities.
The hard part is to draw any positive lessons of that national liberation struggle experience for the future. If nothing else remember this though, and unfortunately the Irish national liberation fighters (and other national liberation fighters later, including later Irish revolutionaries) failed to take this into account in their military calculations, the British (or fill in the blank) were savagely committed to defeating the uprising including burning that colonial country to the ground if need be in order to maintain control. In the final analysis, it was not part of their metropolitan homeland, so the hell with it. Needless to say, cowardly British Labor’s position was almost a carbon copy of His Imperial Majesty’s. Labor Party leader Arthur Henderson could barely contain himself when informed that James Connolly had been executed. That should, even today, make every British militant blush with shame. Unfortunately, the demand for British militants and others today is the same as then if somewhat attenuated- All British Troops Out of Ireland.
In various readings on national liberation struggles I have come across a theory that the Easter Uprising was the first socialist revolution in Europe, predating the Bolshevik Revolution by over a year. Unfortunately, there is little truth to that idea. Of the Uprising’s leaders only James Connolly was devoted to the socialist cause. Moreover, while the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army were prototypical models for urban- led national liberation forces such organizations, as we have witnessed in later history, are not inherently socialistic. The dominant mood among the leadership was in favor of political independence and/or fighting for a return to a separate traditional Irish cultural hegemony. (“Let poets rule the land”).
As outlined in the famous Proclamation of the Republic posted on the General Post Office in Dublin, Easter Monday, 1916 the goal of the leadership appeared to be something on the order of a society like those fought for in the European Revolutions of 1848, a left bourgeois republic. A formation on the order of the Paris Commune of 1871 where the working class momentarily took power or the Soviet Commune of 1917 which lasted for a longer period did not figure in the political calculations at that time. As noted above, James Connolly clearly was skeptical of his erstwhile comrades on the subject of the nature of the future state and apparently was prepared for an ensuing class struggle following the establishment of a republic.
That does not mean that revolutionary socialists could not support such an uprising. On the contrary, Lenin, who was an admirer of Connolly for his anti-war stance in World War I, and Trotsky stoutly defended the uprising against those who derided the Easter rising for involving bourgeois elements. Participation by bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements is in the nature of a national liberation struggle. The key, which must be learned by militants today, is who leads the national liberation struggle and on what program. As both Lenin and Trotsky made clear later in their own experiences in Russia revolutionary socialists have to lead other disaffected elements of society to overthrow the existing order. There is no other way in a heterogeneous class-divided society. Moreover, in Ireland, the anti-imperialist nature of the action against British imperialism during wartime on the socialist principle that the defeat of your own imperialist overlord in war as a way to open the road to the class struggle merited support on that basis alone. Chocky Ar La.
A word on James Connolly.
They tell a story about James Connolly that just before the start of action on Easter Monday, 1916 he told the members of the Irish Citizen’s Army (almost exclusively workers, by the way) that if the uprising was successful to keep their guns handy. More work with them might be necessary against the nationalist allies of the moment organized as the Irish Volunteers. The Volunteers were mainly a petty bourgeois formation that had no intention of fighting for Connolly's vision of a Socialist Republic. True story or not, I think that gives a pretty good example of the strategy and tactics to be used in colonial and third world struggles by the working class. Would that the Chinese Communists in the 1920’s and other colonial and third world liberation fighters since then have paid heed to that strategic concept.
James Connolly, June 5, 1868-May 12, 1916, was of Scottish Irish stock. He was born in Edinburgh of immigrant parents. The explicit English colonial policy of trying to drive the Irish out of Ireland and thus created the Irish diaspora produced many such immigrants from benighted Ireland to England, America, Australia and the far- flung parts of the world. Many of these immigrants left Ireland under compulsion of banishment. Deportation and executions were the standard English response in the history of the various “Troubles" from Cromwell’s time on.
Connolly, like many another Irish lad left school for a working life at age 11. The international working- class has produced many such self-taught and motivated leaders. Despite the lack of formal education he became one of the preeminent left-wing theorists of his day in the pre-World War I international labor movement. In the class struggle we do not ask for diplomas, although they help, but commitment to the cause of the laboring masses. Again, like many an Irish lad, Connolly joined the British Army at the age of 14. In those days the British Army provided one of the few ways of advancement for an Irishman who had some abilities. As fate would have it Connolly was stationed in Dublin. I believe the English must rue the day they let Brother Connolly near weapons and near Dublin. As a line in an old Irish song goes- ‘Won’t Old Mother England be Surprised’.
By 1892 Connolly was an important figure in the Scottish Socialist Federation which, by the way, tended to be more militant and more Celtic and less enamored of parliamentarianism than its English counterpart. Later, the failure to gather in the radical Celtic elements was a contributing factor in the early British Communist Party’s failure to break the working class from the Labor Party. Most of the great labor struggles of the period came from the leadership in Scotland and Ireland. Connolly became the secretary of the Federation in 1895. In 1896 he left the army and established the Irish Socialist Republican Party. The name itself tells the program. Ireland at that time was essentially a classic English colony so to take the honored name Republican was to spit in the eye of the English. Even today the English have not been able to rise to the political level of a republic. Despite Cromwell’s valiant attempt in the 1650's and no thanks to today's British Labor Party’s policies this is still sadly the case. All militants, of whatever nation, can and must support this call- Abolish the British monarchy, House of Lords and the state Church of England.
In England Connolly was active in the Socialist Labor Party that split from the moribund above-mentioned Social Democratic Federation in 1903. During the period before the Easter uprising he was heavily involved in the Irish labor movement and acted essentially as the right hand man to James Larkin in the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. In 1913 when Larkin led a huge strike in Dublin but was forced to leave due to English reprisals Connolly took over. It was at that time that Connolly founded the Irish Citizens Army as a defense organization of armed and trained laboring men against the brutality of the dreaded Dublin Metropolitan Police.
Although only numbering about 250 men at the time their political goal was to establish an independent and socialist Ireland.
Connolly stood aloof from the leadership of the Irish Volunteers, the nationalist formation based on the middle classes. He considered them too bourgeois and unconcerned with Ireland's economic independence. In 1916 thinking the Volunteers were merely posturing, and unwilling to take decisive action against England, he attempted to goad them into action by threatening to send his Irish Citizens Army against the British Empire alone, if necessary. This alarmed the members of the more militant faction -Irish Republican Brotherhood, who had already infiltrated the Volunteers and had plans for an insurrection as well. In order to talk Connolly out of any such action, the IRB leaders, including Tom Clarke and Patrick Pearse, met with Connolly to see if an agreement could be reached. During the meeting the IRB and the ICA agreed to act together at Easter of that year.
When the Easter Rising occurred on April 24, 1916, Connolly was Commandant of the Dublin Brigade, and as the Dublin brigade had the most substantial role in the rising, he was de facto Commander in Chief. Following the surrender he was executed by the British for his role in the uprising. Although he was so badly injured in the fighting that he was unable to stand for his execution and he was shot sitting in a chair. The Western labor movement, to its detriment, no longer produces enough such militants as Connolly (and Larkin, for that matter). Learn more about this important socialist thinker and fighter. ALL HONOR TO THE MEMORY OF JAMES CONNOLLY
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