Paul Pines (1941-2018): the death of a poet and a friend

Yesterday I was saddened to learn that Paul Pines died after a two-year struggle to fight off lung cancer, including the use of immunotherapy that can have painful side-effects. He was 77 years old and determined to return to a normal life, including a visit to New York for a poetry reading.

I considered Paul to be one of America’s most outstanding poets as well as a friend. He was one of the few whose roots were in the great new poetry of the Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance that played an important part in the lives of young people in the late 50s and early 60s. Like Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder and any number of other new poets who eschewed the academy, Paul’s work came out of his lived experience as a fisherman, jazz club owner, merchant seaman and teenage juvenile delinquent.

I met Paul in 1961 when I was a puerile 16-year old freshman at Bard College. Paul was self-assured and relaxed, having transferred to Bard from some other school that was less congenial to a rebel like him. I have vivid memories playing ping-pong with Paul and Chevy Chase, who along with their good friend Kenny Shapiro of Groove Tube fame, were the best players on campus.

Paul struck quite an image on campus with a hairdo like those worn by the cast of “Grease”, well-developed biceps, tight black t-shirts, black motorcycle boots, and an unfiltered cigarette in the corner of his mouth. (I can’t help but think his chain smoking might have sealed his fate many years later.) I was always a little bit intimidated by Paul even though his general manner was at odds with his tough guy appearance. In fact, beneath the appearance was just another young person trying to develop a more spiritual side in a period when materialism was in the driver’s seat. The best thing you could have said about Bard College back then was its providing a nurturing environment for future poets and even a Marxist like me.

A year after Paul arrived, his brother Claude transferred to Bard as well. I couldn’t characterize my relationship with Paul back then as much more than an acquaintance but from the minute I met Claude, I knew that this was someone I really wanted to bond with. Claude was gentle, self-effacing, and wise beyond his years. After having lost touch with just about all my classmates, I tried to use the Internet to see if I could find any traces.

Some time in the early 2000s, I learned that Claude had been stricken with schizophrenia relatively late in life and was living in upstate New York, not far from where Paul was working as a psychotherapist and conducting writers workshops at a local college. I thought long and hard about getting in touch with Claude but lost my nerve after realizing that it would be a strain on me emotionally since my own brother had committed suicide after a psychotic break in the early 70s.

I continued to keep track of Claude through Internet searches until I was stunned to discover that he died of leukemia in 2006. After writing a tribute to him on my blog, Paul showed up to offer a comment:

Touching piece, Louis. Your observations are deceptively political in the fundamental meaning of that word as Aristotle meant it when he called man a “political animal.” By which I understand an animal connected to others of his kind by common interests and experiences that sometimes rises to the level of sympathy, the ability to feel with another. Your reflections on what mental illness can do, and does to many who a moment ago felt they had a unique destiny is in this sense profoundly political. In Claude’s case, his suffering was punctuated by laughter, and the wisdom that blossomed from his struggle with a mind that he found he could not trust. He learned, instead, to trust his heart. I also very much liked your piece on Barney Ross.

This comment, like everything Paul ever wrote, was suffused with a kind of humanism that has largely vanished from our world today. That led to a friendship with Paul that like many in recent years was mostly sustained in cyberspace. While staying in touch with Paul was a way for me to remember his younger brother, it also led to an ongoing commitment to tell my readers about each new book he wrote, including a powerful memoir titled “My Brother’s Madness”.

Just by coincidence, Paul was putting the final touches on the book when his brother died. It is a wonderful book that touches upon his struggles to provide emotional support for Claude as well as the world they lived in growing up in Brooklyn. When I came across the following paragraph, I got a better idea of how he developed his “look”:

Growing up a few blocks from Ebbets Field, Paul Pines was a true child of the 1950s, which was much more about looking tough than sensitive. This was especially true when you had to fend off rival gangs of Irish or Italian youths. As a perpetual truant and an unsuccessful car thief, Paul fit right into the neighborhood as this encounter with his high school principal would indicate:

We sit in straight back chairs. Bullethead [a nickname for the principal] tells us that he has been a cop and a trolley-car conductor and understands boys in motorcycle boots with ducks-ass hair welded in place by Dixie Peach. There are quite a few of us walking up Flatbush to Church Avenue every morning to the walled fortress spanning several blocks. Erasmus boils over with students in two overlapping sessions, out of which a small stream of elite students are siphoned off from the raging river of Irish Lords, Pig Town Tigers, Gremlins, and Chaplains into the top tier. I fall into the lower one, a Blackboard Jungle minus Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier. Three days a week I take in the triple-feature cowboy movies at the Majestic Theater on Fulton Street instead of going to school.

Paul thought of himself as a budding gangster, fed by fantasies inspired by the pulp fiction of Mickey Spillane and Harold Robbins. After his father sent him off to Cherry Lawn, a progressive private school in Connecticut, he still saw himself as a rebel without a cause, but one with roots in Lord Byron as well as the mean streets of Brooklyn. After reading Freud, he discovers that being able to use his mind fills him with elation. “I am a wet chick burst from its shell.”

Besides our email exchanges, I always took advantage of Paul’s occasional poetry readings in New York to chat with him and his beautiful and brainy wife. I also met their talented and beautiful daughter at a gallery exhibit for the photography of Josephine Sacabo, the wife of Dalt Wonk. Josephine and Dalt were very close to Paul and I am sure that they are grieving his death as if he was a family member. In our in-person chats, Paul always expressed a joie de vivre that was nourished by his family ties and the confidence that his poetry was written for the ages and would certainly outlive him.

I have tagged my five reviews of Paul’s books here. I invite you to read them and better yet to buy his books since you will not find better poetry being written today.

Paul Pines website

Gathering Sparks

Titled “Gathering Sparks”, Paul Pines’s latest collection of poetry convinces me that he is one of the U.S.’s finest poets. Since most of you are aware that I shy away from reviewer hyperbole, my recommendation is one that you can bank on. Now in his mid-70s, Paul is arguably the last poet working in the grand tradition of the new American poetry that emerged in the late 1940s and that is sometimes referred to as the product of the beat generation. But the poetry renaissance that was taking place in New York and San Francisco, as well as at places like Black Mountain College, had deep roots in the American cultural traditions going back to Walt Whitman. This was a literature that was deeply spiritual without being religious in the conventional sense and that was a cry in the wilderness against Mammon. In many ways, the changes that have transformed this country as the benign result of the Cold War winding down are as much cultural as political. People like Lawrence Ferlinghetti (still alive and kicking), Denise Levertov and Allen Ginsberg were its prophets. When Percy Shelley, a political as well as a cultural radical, wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, he had such people in mind. In this review, I hope to acknowledge Paul Pines as the latest such legislator.

Although a poem might consist of about as many words as you will find in the page of a novel, its value is not based on quantity alone. There are poems that you will read a thousand times and that will keep coming back to because they are like epiphanies. You know how a novel ends but there is no ending to a poem. Reading a great poem is like looking at a Van Gogh painting. You will never get enough of it.

“Civilization” is one of those poems. I have read it 5 times already and will likely return to it another 50 times before the year is up:

Civilization

The naked mole-rats
at the Philadelphia zoo
run blindly through their tunnels
with no imperial ambition to dominate any other colony
of their hairless kind
though they have a queen and are very ugly
they delight in feats of engineering
and their underground design

Not long ago, I told my wife that although old age has its drawbacks, particularly dealing with the typical medical complications of aging such as glaucoma, there is one asset that makes it all worthwhile. A lifetime of political experience and reading gives me a perspective that would have been impossible when I was an impetuous 25-year old. In tribal societies, the village elder had the respect of everyone. He or she had insights that were key to the survival of the community. I doubt that anybody would consider me anything except an old fool but I am sure that some young radicals will give me credit for saving them the trouble I went through when I was young and foolish myself.

What about poets? Paul Pines’s poetry is suffused with a lifetime of experience that never would have been known to someone who learned their craft at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He grew up in Brooklyn near Ebbet’s Field and passed the early 1960s on the Lower East Side of New York. He shipped out as a Merchant Seaman, spending August 1965 to February 1966 in Vietnam.  In 1973, he opened the Tin Palace, a jazz club on the corner of 2nd Street and Bowery-which provided the setting for his novel, The Tin Angel.

Every single word of a Paul Pines poem has the authenticity of having been written by someone who has lived life to the fullest. Forsaking the false complexity of most academic poets, Paul’s language is conversational—like listening to an old friend. A poem on the “Death of Carlos Castaneda” begins:

Seated at the window of the Kiev
surrounded by NYU film students
post-modern kids with ontological tattoos
rite-of-passage piercings

I spot ghosts on 2nd Avenue
Adam Purple who peddled through the 60’s
still on his bicycle (no longer in purple)
a new girlfriend in the wake
of his white beard

Like the other unacknowledged legislators, Paul’s antennae are finely attuned to the madness of our epoch. Drawing upon erudition gained from a lifetime of reading religious and philosophical classics, he takes on a prophetic tone writing about the terrible waste of life and treasure in the Middle East in the opening stanzas of a poem titled “Redness Remembered”:

Cardinals in the back yard
bring their redness to bare limbs
in a time of war when we are bombing Ur
from which Abraham
rose with his household gods
and left the flaming ziggurats
temple whores
that terrible lust
for death and renewal
their redness
after a long winter in the north
we can hear their song
before sunrise
whistling fills our ears
while elsewhere
missiles explode over the Tigris

Much of “Gathering Sparks” has an autumnal quality as questions of aging and mortality loom large. To some extent, this is to be expected from an author who is facing major health issues currently. But there is nothing morbid about these poems. They are a celebration of a life well spent and a testament to the nourishing spirit of the written word, both to those who hear them and those who write them.

My advice is to buy the collection from the publisher. If there’s anything that can be viewed as the total antithesis to Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, it is the world of small presses that make the invaluable work of a Paul Pines possible.

Message from the Memoirist

COUNTERPUNCH WEEKEND EDITION MAY 8-10, 2015

Saying No to a System That Would Crush Us

The Poems of Paul Pines

by LOUIS PROYECT

Fifty-four years ago when I was a freshman at Bard College, the Beat Generation was still a presence in our lives. In dorm rooms you could spot copies of Donald Allen’s “The New American Poetry” on the bookshelves of the “hippest” students, back when the term referred to the bohemian underground rather than the sort of clothing you wore (not that black turtleneck shirts were not de rigueur.)

Two years earlier I had read about Jack Kerouac in Time Magazine and had decided to join the Beats even if its energies were largely spent. Kerouac’s odysseys continued to inspire some Bardians to take a year off and ship out on freighters or to hitchhike across the U.S. as I did shortly after graduating.

Despite the school’s bohemian reputation, Robert Kelly was the only faculty member who had any kind of connection to the Beat subculture. In 1961 I was able to attend poetry readings organized by Kelly that featured writers in Donald Allen’s anthology, including LeRoi Jones who co-edited Fubbalo with Kelly, a poetry magazine out of the U. of Buffalo where the two men taught before Kelly came to Bard. Jones, of course, transformed himself into Amiri Baraka later on. You got an inkling of where he was going from what he read at Bard, “The System of Dante’s Hell”, a novel about Newark that revealed to me the depth of Black anger about American society.

read full article

Fishing on the Pole Star

My Facebook friends know that lately I have been posting poems on my timeline. It has been many decades, five at least, that I have read poems—let alone try to write one. After getting radicalized in 1967, my life took a rather prosaic turn.

Most of the poets I like to read are long dead, including Herman Melville who was damned fine even if he is best known for his prose. As might be expected, his poems share the subject matter of his best-known prose:

The Maldives Shark

About the Shark, phlegmatical one,
Pale sot of the Maldive sea,
The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,
How alert in attendance be.
From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw,
They have nothing of harm to dread,
But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank
Or before his Gorgonian head;
Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth
In white triple tiers of glittering gates,
And there find a haven when peril’s abroad,
An asylum in jaws of the Fates!
They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey,
Yet never partake of the treat —
Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull,
Pale ravener of horrible meat.

Just by coincidence it seems, I got a copy of Paul Pines’s latest book of poems titled “Fishing on the Pole Star” that also has a great poem about sharks:

Like Herman Melville, Paul Pines was not a product of the Iowa Writers Workshop but a life of wanderlust including time spent as a deckhand on merchant ships. In the introduction to “Fishing on the Pole Star”, he explains the book’s origin:

As a boy in Brooklyn I fished for crappies in Prospect Park with my brother Claude, and later bottom-fished on party boats out of Sheepshead Bay and Boston Whalers on Long Island Sound. When I owned a bar and restaurant, several of my staff, including our chef, Nathan Metz, fished out of Montauk for blues and stripers which we brought back to feed our patrons. While living in Belize my buddy Ted Berlin, a peerless hand-line fisherman and free-diver, showed me how to scour coral heads for crab, lobster, conch and snapper. But nothing can convey the mystery and challenge of those weeks at sea tracking the great marlin south through the out-islands of the Bahamas—and to those who opened that world to me, starting with my father, I will be forever grateful.

I never did any salt-water fishing but growing up in upstate NY, there were many days spent fresh-water fishing including on the Neversink River, one of the state’s legendary trout streams a couple of miles from my home.

But the fondest memories were of fishing for pickerel, perch and crappies (we called them sunfish) in Silver Lake in Woodridge, my hometown. My father was about as distant from me as could be imagined. Since I was born in January 1945 when he was off fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, he never bonded with me. I suppose even if he had been around, he still would have been a distant figure—that’s the way that Jewish men who lived through the Depression were so often. But when we were on the dock watching the red-and-white float bobbing on the surface, it was like a scene from The Andy Griffith Show, with me playing Opie.

Despite my overall prosaic mindset, there’s something that still touches my mystical inner eye when it comes to water. I don’t think I could ever live very far from the water. When I did so in Kansas City, I was miserable most of the time. Of course that was just as likely a function of belong to a cult that was forcing me to get an entry-level factory job at the age of 33.

When I croak, I will have my wife cremate me and dump the ashes into the Hudson River, for me an especially holy body of water—my Ganges in effect.

It is so easy to take water for granted. But did you ever stop to think about where it came from? When the planet earth was born, there was no water (and no god to create it either.) Although it is only a theory, there’s a good chance that it came from a water-laden comet or meteor crashing into our planet was responsible.

The other thing that intrigues me is our connection to the fish itself. While we are obviously far removed from them on the evolutionary ladder, they are our great-grandfathers and grandmothers. Despite our terror of the shark, they are in some ways our closest relatives since they are at the top of the aquatic food chain just as we are at the top of the entire food chain. Unlike us, the shark poses no danger to the survival of the planet, however. In a very real sense, the shark in “Jaws” was a lot less scary than BP or Exxon-Mobil.

I recommend the website of Thomas Peschak, a National Geographic photographer, conservationist, and author of “Sharks and People”.  Peschak has a few videos there, including one of the Manta Rays on a feeding frenzy in the Maldives, the same place that Melville’s poem was set in.

I have no idea how the world will end, whether with a bang or a whimper but I’d hold out hope that the sharks and other swimming creatures will survive our wickedness and give evolution a chance to start all over. Those beasts at least know how to participate in the great circle of being, unlike our own sharks on Wall Street who will certainly destroy us given the chance.

Paul’s very fine new book can be ordered from the publisher’s website. Not only are the words great, the accompanying seascape collages by Wayne Atherton are priceless. Paul dedicated the book to his late brother Claude who was a good friend of mine during the halcyon days before the Vietnam War. The book is a fitting tribute to Claude as well as a major contribution to the poetry canon by a true original. Waste no time. Buy the book and get spiritually elevated.

New works of poetry by Paul Pines and Daniel Marlin

This is a belated review of books by two of my favorite poets, Paul Pines and Daniel Marlin. The fact that I have know them for fifty years does not in any way influence my high esteem for their work. Both are part of the living tradition of the poetry renaissance of the 1950s and early sixties, whose impact lasts with me all these decades. Although sometimes facilely described as the poetry of the “beat generation”, it was much deeper and much more universal. It incorporated spiritual and philosophical motifs going back thousands of years, if not to our earliest collective memories as members of our human tribe.

Paul’s “Reflections in a Smoking Mirror: poems of Mexico and Belize” is a powerful engagement with the culture of the indigenous peoples, the Aztecs in particular. Part one, titled “Configurations of Conquest”, is exactly what the title suggests: reflections on the Spanish colonization and genocide of the native peoples. In his own words:

Reflections in A Smoking Mirror is a crazy quilt of historical and personal material knit by themes unraveled over the last thirty years. I first went to Mexico in the 60s, before there was a paved road between Mexico City and Yucatan, and most of the archaeological sites referred to here were still covered by bush. I went again after returning from Vietnam when the remains of lost civilizations and the legacy of conquest drove me to search for what might be reflected in the Smoking Mirror, both as volcanic lake, and metaphor. During that time I’ve come to understand what I may have done beyond my intention, to let the ancestors speak in ways that have not always been apparent to me, except for the blood-smoke on these pages.

In 1959 Jack Kerouac wrote “Mexico City Blues”, an attempt to write poems in the same way a jazz musician improvises. Paul Pines’s poems bear up well in comparison to Kerouac’s, no surprise since he was deeply involved in the jazz scene in NYC in the 70s as owner of the Tin Palace, a groundbreaking venue for avant-garde musicians. Today he hosts the yearly Lake George jazz festival.

One of my favorite poems in the collection comes from part three, “The Belize News”. Titled “Rum Point Sutra”, it pays homage to the local scene and the late Paul Blackburn, one of the greatest poets of the 1950s renaissance. (My apologies to Paul for not getting the poem’s typography right since MS Word is hostile to those kinds of esthetic considerations, but the words should suffice.)

RUM POINT SUTRA

Another rainy day,
cobalt clouds along the peninsula
turn sand grey.
Bananas I bought
last week in Mango Creek
are turning too.
It will be
a challenge to eat them
before they go black.

Also I am out of propane
and must dispose of fruit
in the fridge
I brought back
from San Cristobal
two weeks ago.

No,
this is not a poem
about domesticity
unless that be the place
one contemplates

the implications
of what is
or will become
indigestible.

No!
this is
the song of an idiot
who can’t let go,
a lover with a stomach ache
waiting for a dial tone

No! no-
body on the other end
no reason to pretend the heart
is not a fruit
shriveled by
desire.

No!

this is about fire,
a Sutra
in which the senses
are sutured like old wounds.
No pain,
but a refrain
by Blackburn

(composed three months
before
he died)

contemplating his coffee cup, he wrote:

EMPTY AND ALIVE!

Reflections in a Smoking Mirror can be ordered from Dos Madres, the publisher.

Daniel Marlin is a Yiddishist, a socialist, an artist and a poet. What more can you ask for, nu?

In the introduction to “Amagasaki Sketchbook”, Daniel states:

From 1999 through 2009,1 spent roughly half of each year, late December through late June, living in Amagasaki City, between Osaka and Kobe, Japan. This collection includes some of the art I made on walks past fields in Mukonoso, Sonoda and Itami, and along the banks of the Mukogawa and Mogawa rivers. I painted the colors of the darkening western sky at dusk, sketched as I rode trains and lingered at Hankyu Umeda station, and at intersections nearby, where I was fascinated by the relentless, fluid landscape of crowds.

As an outsider, I used writing and art as quiet portals of entry into Japanese life. These disciplines helped me to overcome isolation, as did the friends I made, Japanese language study, involvement in the local anti-war movement and in Amnesty International, and a walking temple pilgrimage on Shikoku Island.

Trees and clouds were indifferent to my artistic attention, but at close quarters in train cars, I needed to be discreet, and thus discovered a method which permitted me to observe other passengers indirectly, without being noticed. Sitting at the end of the car, my pad and pencil hidden behind the backpack placed on my lap, I learned to sketch my fellow passengers’ reflected images in the glass of the adjoining door or opposite window. Or, I simply peered into the next car, whose riders never looked my way.

A drawing of weary Japanese train passengers, filled with the humanity that pervades all of Dan’s work:

Despite Dan’s claim that trees and clouds were indifferent to his artistic attention, I suspect that their souls were more than pleased with his beautiful watercolor renditions.

And finally, here is one of my favorite poems in the collection, “Crow Log”, a most enchanting homage to one of nature’s least enchanting creatures:

CROW LOG

In the neat rows of a field of spinach and green onions, shiny silver DVDs and hand mirrors hang from stakes, their glare intended to repel foraging birds. Nearby, two rubber facsimiles of crows have been tied by their feet, limp heads inches above the soil. The message,”Woe to ye who trespass here!”

Working its way down an unplanted furrow nearby, a large crow takes awkward, plodding steps in soft dirt, stopping occasionally to inspect debris and peck a stray seed, then passes under its own lynched image without a glance or tremor.

With three barks,
barrel-deep like a seal’s,
crow lands
at the temple gate

Crow glides from an old tree, bearing a persimmon in its beak, lands on a dark, tin roof. Cocking its head with what seems both pride and confusion, it lays the bright orange fruit down, and begins poking it—as if expecting it to flee, or fight back.

Perched on the aluminum rail of the apartment house parking lot, crow is engaged in conversation, a low-key, hollow, two-note call. When I approach, it’s tone changes suddenly, to a single sharp “Crahh!”

Is it a look-out while its partner
nearby breaks into someone’s minivan?

Inquiries on purchasing “Amagasaki Sketchbook” should be directed to Daniel Marlin.

Other posts about the works of Paul Pines are at https://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/11/07/last-call-at-the-tin-palace/ and https://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/11/26/my-brothers-madness/.

And Daniel Marlin: https://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/08/01/isaiah-at-the-wall/ and https://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/heart-of-ardor/

My Brother’s Madness

In the course of looking up long-lost friends on Google a few years ago, I discovered that one of my closest from Bard College had developed schizophrenia. An article that originally appeared in the upstate New York Glens Falls Post-Star took my breath away:

Claude Pines spent his days in the mental hospital smoking cigarettes and staring at a clock, thinking about how life would be different when he got out.

How had he fallen this far?

He was a smart guy. He went to Columbia University. He had been a medical student at Einstein College of Medicine and even did a term in psychiatry. Now, he was one of them.

He had fallen into a different class of people. He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and depression. The symptoms of his disorder could be treated with medication and therapy. The stigma of having such an illness, however, would not be as easy to get away from.

As much as I would have liked to contact Claude and be a friend to him once again, I simply lacked the will to follow through. Since my own brother had killed himself after a brief struggle with schizophrenia, the disease remained a source of some personal anguish. About a year ago, I discovered that Claude had died of leukemia at the age of 63. Compounding the original shock of learning about his battle with mental illness, the news of his passing left me at a loss for words. After a day or so I wrote a tribute to him on my blog.

Soon afterwards his brother Paul left a comment there:

Touching piece, Louis. Your observations are deceptively political in the fundamental meaning of that word as Aristotle meant it when he called man a “political animal.” By which I understand an animal connected to others of his kind by common interests and experiences that sometimes rises to the level of sympathy, the ability to feel with another. Your reflections on what mental illness can do, and does to many who a moment ago felt they had a unique destiny is in this sense profoundly political. In Claude’s case, his suffering was punctuated by laughter, and the wisdom that blossomed from his struggle with a mind that he found he could not trust. He learned, instead, to trust his heart.

Claude’s illness was a deep mystery to me. In the three or so years we were friends, I could not think of anybody saner, especially at a place like Bard College where emotional torment was the norm. Claude always seemed to know what he was about and never suffered the kinds of depression that afflicted the average student, at least on an outward basis. Apparently, the disease was always there but I could not recognize it.

When Paul wrote that note on my blog, he was in the final stages of a memoir about his brother and himself. Titled “My Brother’s Madness,” it recounts his dysfunctional family background and his struggle to provide emotional and material support to his younger brother. Despite the enormous frustrations he had to put up with in looking after Claude, Paul does everything possible to be a loving and dedicated brother. If this story was simply told as a straightforward narrative, it would be compelling enough on its own terms.

But as a highly respected novelist and poet, Paul elevates the memoir into the ranks of fine literature. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, it is marked by the author’s courageous effort to be honest with himself and the reader. Most of all, it is carried along by his unique voice, a mixture of Jewish hipster and spiritual voyager.

Growing up a few blocks from Ebbets Field, Paul Pines was a true child of the 1950s, which was much more about looking tough than sensitive. This was especially true when you had to fend off rival gangs of Irish or Italian youths. As a perpetual truant and an unsuccessful car thief, Paul fit right into the neighborhood as this encounter with his high school principal would indicate:

We sit in straight back chairs. Bullethead [a nickname for the principal] tells us that he has been a cop and a trolley-car conductor and understands boys in motorcycle boots with ducks-ass hair welded in place by Dixie Peach. There are quite a few of us walking up Flatbush to Church Avenue every morning to the walled fortress spanning several blocks. Erasmus boils over with students in two overlapping sessions, out of which a small stream of elite students are siphoned off from the raging river of Irish Lords, Pig Town Tigers, Gremlins, and Chaplains into the top tier. I fall into the lower one, a Blackboard Jungle minus Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier. Three days a week I take in the triple-feature cowboy movies at the Majestic Theater on Fulton Street instead of going to school.

Paul thought of himself as a budding gangster, fed by fantasies inspired by the pulp fiction of Mickey Spillane and Harold Robbins. After his father sent him off to Cherry Lawn, a progressive private school in Connecticut, he still saw himself as a rebel without a cause, but one with roots in Lord Byron as well as the mean streets of Brooklyn. After reading Freud, he discovers that being able to use his mind fills him with elation. “I am a wet chick burst from its shell.”

After graduating from Cherry Lawn, he attended Boston University but spent more time hanging out at Harvard University, where the top minds of the 1950s where holding forth, including Eric Fromm. He began writing poetry and befriended a budding novelist named Russell Banks, who would go on to write “Continental Drift,” a powerful tale about the fateful encounter between an out-of-work boiler repairman from New England and a Haitian boat person.

As was the case for many young people in the late 1950s, the beat generation was a deep influence on Paul. After “devouring” Kerouac’s “On the Road” and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Coney Island of the Mind,” Paul dropped out of Boston University and headed off to San Francisco. Unfortunately, most of the famous poets he wanted to look up were no longer on the scene. He does drop off a collection of poems with Ferlinghetti at the famous City Lights bookstore, only to get the following feedback: “Keep writing. You have not found your voice.” One might hope that Paul would send off a copy of “My Brother’s Madness” to Ferlinghetti (still alive at 88), since he has clearly found his voice and then some.

Eventually Paul wound up at Bard College, which in 1961 was suspended between two bohemias in time. The beat generation was pretty much over, even though its writers were still making headlines. Most had been college students during WWII and the more successful had settled into writing careers. We also predated the 1960s counterculture, which would be fed by the Vietnam War radicalization and psychedelic drugs.

Paul’s brother Claude showed up at Bard the following year, a refugee from Antioch College, a place that he found pretentious. Claude was two years younger than Paul and much less prone to wanderlust. Not long after meeting him, we became the best of friends. Even though Claude was only 2 years my senior, he seemed much more mature and self-assured. I had skipped my senior year of high school and came to Bard in a state of adolescent turmoil. With his tweed jacket and pressed chinos, Claude came across as a psychiatrist in the making and always had patience for my Sturm und Drang. Indeed, he planned to go to medical school and become a shrink, inspired by a desire to help people as well as by ambitions to enjoy the good life. His father, who had died two years earlier, was a successful surgeon and Claude hoped to follow in his footsteps. After spending two years at Bard, Claude transferred to Columbia general studies since it had a better track record for placing graduates in medical school.

After I graduated Bard and moved to New York in 1965, my contacts with Claude fell off. I was preoccupied with staying out of the army and he was up to his eyeballs in school work. I later discovered from another Bard graduate that he had gone off to medical school in Belgium and had even learned French in order to keep up with classes. Soon afterwards, I got involved with Trotskyist politics and lost touch with everybody I knew at Bard, including Claude.

In late August 1987, Paul persuaded Claude to check himself into the psychiatric ward of New York Hospital in White Plains after a year of mounting crisis that had reached the breaking point. Claude could not hold down a steady lab technician job (the medical profession had proved too stressful) and was sure that people were watching him and saying disparaging things about him behind his back, the classic symptoms of paranoia. In a few brief sentences, Paul provides more insight into mental hospitals than a hundred pages of Foucault:

Dr. P apologizes for not being able to spend more time with me this afternoon, but will be sure to see me when I come again. Claude, he reflects, is a particularly interesting case, judging by what little information he has: “Not an acute psychosis but one resulting from prolonged morbidity, developing for a long time into a florid delusional system. He states this with the satisfaction of an angler who has just boated a prize marlin. We will discuss my brother’s situation next time, after he has observed Claude more closely. Dr. P. pumps my hand, then disappears.

I pace the dilapidated corridor, stopping to copy numbers from two public pay phones in the hall. Posted between them is a “Patient’s Bill of Rights,” and the number of a lawyer specializing in patient advocacy. Besides it, on the wall, are names and numbers scribbled by a dozen anonymous hands like the enigmatic graffiti of a lost civilization.

Eventually Claude wound up in Glens Fall, New York in the Adirondacks where Paul had become an adjunct professor at the local community college and married a local woman, an accomplished opera singer. They were raising a baby girl who was the apple of their eye. For most men in their fifties, this would represent a satisfying climax of a life filled with ups and downs.

But this idyllic scene was disrupted by Claude’s appearance. Claude lurched from one mental or physical crisis to another. Like many schizophrenics, he dosed himself with cigarettes and alcohol which at least had the merit of not inducing the shakes, as his prescribed anti-psychotic medications did. Despite his disability, Claude was in many ways as clear in his perceptions as he was when I knew him at Bard. After he takes a job checking groceries, he complains to Paul about the humiliation but is not sure what he can do: “I feel like a medieval philosopher defining God in the negative. I say, ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to bag groceries, mop floors, or be a janitor.’ I don’t know what I want to do. I don’t know what I can do.”

Eventually Claude discovers that he can speak effectively to mental health professionals at conferences around the country. With his unique combination of medical school training and mental illness, he becomes an advocate for more sensitive treatment, especially on using psychotropic drugs. Despite their often terrible side-effects, they at least would deliver him and fellow sufferers from the perpetual fear that torments them. At the end of one lecture, Claude recalls a David Frost interview with futurist Isaac Asimov: “Frost asked what he thought would be the greatest breakthrough of the coming century. Asimov answered: understanding of the human brain. Strides over the next fifty years will make the answers of today seem primitive.” Paul writes that “the intensity and duration of the applause” for his brother blows him away

As grim as all this sounds, I can report that “My Brother’s Illness” is also a triumph of the human spirit. Even if Claude Pines had been a total stranger, I would have found this memoir gripping for in the final analysis his brother has turned their lives into literature as this finely honed excerpt would demonstrate. It is an account of a dinner with their mother, who–like Claude–was a source of pain and pleasure throughout their life:

Claude’s letter reminds me of a dinner I had with Charlotte at the Copley Plaza during my freshman year at Boston University. It was the only time she visited me there and it came at a point when I felt miserable in my situation. I spoke openly about my impatience with the academic drudgery and social isolation, and my plans to move to San Francisco to live among the Beats. When I finished, she gazed across the linen tablecloth and told me that she loved me. At first I thought this a touching affirmation. She went on from there to confess that it had taken every ounce of her will power not to actually seduce me.

My heart stuck in my throat. Confused by my own responses to my early images of her posing like Venus fresh from the bath, I felt a wave of guilt and desire. We finished the meal in silence. In front of the elevator, she held the back of my head tenderly. I kissed her cheek and left.

Claude’s letter brings the evening back. I replay the conversation at the Copley, then decide against writing Claude about it. It will only muddy the water. But as I consider Charlotte’s revelation, her words that evening are more redolent of the confessional than seduction; I hear in them the unaddressed longing I had glimpsed as a child under the piano when she played her violin. What could I say to make it clear to my brother what he has never seen for himself? The woman he had encountered at the hotel in Geneva and I at the Copley in Boston had surfaced briefly from a hidden depth. It had been Thai’s speaking.

Interview with Paul Pines on NPR’s Leonard Lopate show.

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Paul Pines website