LETTERS: 1986: 43 - 44
43.
April 7,
1986
Dear friend
Singh,
Your letter
of December 16 contained much of especial interest. At that time you had no
definite word from Nigeria but were having misgivings about the advisibility of
going there. As I wrote you, my Bennington friends spent two years there in an
outlying bush school and were miserable and came back no richer than when they
went. Furthermore, they were able to beg
funding for coming back only by pretending it would be a furlough, after which
they would return.
I deeply
sympathize with your anti-Establishment attitude. I feel that the Reagan
administration is moving us faster and
faster toward a world split between Rich and Poor even more than in the
past, and that to safeguard his friends he has risked a military buildup that
guarantees anti-Americanism throughout the world, and will likely bring on the
World War we have all been fearing.
To write
poetry has become a luxury that I can hardly afford. For two years, I’ve
devoted most of my energies to exposing our Bennington grassroots corruption.
At my own expense I printed a 60-page booklet BENNINGTON POLITICS AND THE
SCHOOLS bringing the story up to
December 7, 1985, and this week will come out a 10page postscript. I sell the
books at cost through a local bookstore.
Even so, I don’t get back all I put in.
I enclose a
Xerox of a letter from Raaj Prakashan that reached me in February. Though I wrote back asking for a copy of my
book, I’ve not got one. I was supposed
to have gone to North Yemen this month
to sit on a committee for their first graduate school candidates in English,
but I had to withdraw my acceptance of their invitation when Amy had three
slight strokes beginning December 7. I would not wish to be away from her so long.
If you know
anything about Raaj Prakashan, and have any way of finding out whether my book is actually issued, I’d be grateful for
information.
Our youngest
daughter now in Jamaica, West Indies, has just married a Jamaican (very black,
she tells us). We have not seen him. She is having trouble now persuading the
American Embassy to issue a permit for him to enter the U.S. He would
like to become a citizen.
Our April
weather has turned cold again after two weeks of summer weather. Now we are back in March. Yesterday a blanket
of snow. The birds coming north were
baffled. I threw out handfuls of corn.
I hope to
have your news.
Your
friend,
Lyle Glazier
44.
August
12, 1986
Dear
friend R.K. Singh,
Your letter
of April 21 has been reread and often in my mind. The two photographs of your children and you
and your wife are scotchtaped on my study wall
where I can always see them as I sit at my typewriter. I wish I could have you for a visitor. After all my years of travel, I sit now here
and travel sometimes in my mind, or my dreams—as last night I was back in
Instanbul visiting friends, and for some reason making an elaborate play for
them to have a memorial dinner for me after I left to come home. Why would I dream that? Has it become time to dream of memorials? I
hope I have some time left for traveling in my mind. As Thoreau said about his
life a hundred miles east of here, “I do most of my traveling in Concord.” I do most of my traveling in Bennington,
particularly the past two years when I have devoted so much energy to the local
scandal, which is a small capsule condensation of the political scandals
throughout the world. President Reagan
has had too much influence. I suppose he
thinks of himself as a Messiah sent to deliver the world from Communism. His deliverance is terrorism, both domestic
and foreign, for he has changed the United States from a upward mobility
society to a society where the masses of
people are worse and worse off. He has
no sympathy for farmers who lose their farms that have been in the family for
years, for steel workers whose jobs are
lost because the owners want money more than production and merge with some
company making computers or farm out the raw ore to companies in Asia, where
common labor can be hired for $.50 an hour, instead of the $12 to $14 that our
steelmakers used to enjoy. He has
destroyed the labor unions beyond the havoc they wreaked on themselves with
their bosses who became mobsters. And of
all this Bennington is a microcosm.
My criticism
has not been written without price—both the effort required for holding in my
mind all the small events and going back
to what happened two years ago in order to comprehend what happened yesterday,--
both that effort and the tension that comes from knowing that several times
there has been an effort to trap me. Enough
people know about my bisexualism so that there were two or perhaps three
elaborate attempts to catch me in an incriminating situation that could have
been flaunted in the BANNER: “Lyle Glazier arrested at the corner of Bradford
Extension and County Road and accused of offering to commit an obscene act.” There would have been no chance for
establishing innocence. By the time the
case reached out, trial by newspaper would have persuaded most readers of my
guilt. Each time I saw there the plot
and outwitted it.
I sympathize
with your desperation over being sentenced to teach there is Dhanbad. I wish you could have some of the freedom I had
from traveling to Turkey and India and Yemen.
I doubt if you are more miserable than I was for years at Buffalo.
Meanwhile your
children are growing up. They do. Mine, all three girls were here two weeks ago.
They are now 46 (Laura), 42 (Susan) and 39 (Alice). Laura couldn’t make a living from music, and
is a computer programmer for the Federal Reserve Bank on Wall Street, feeling
herself a drone in one of those heartless corporations. Susan, married, has a farm in the country,
and looms for weaving. Alis is an
assistant next year in the Education Department of the U. Massachusetts, trying
to find work for her new Jamaican husband, a shy man, gentle. They will be
visiting us Saturday and Sunday.
Over for a
letter from a publisher about my novel SUMMER FOR JOEY.
All best wishes,
Lyle Glazier
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