Captain Kentucky, aka Ed McClanahan

(Ed McClanahan & Wavy Gravy, 2004; photo by Pat Mackey)

Tucked away in their cells of good living and almost invisible to the global economy are Guy Davenport, our leading man of letters; Jonathan Greene, poet and publisher, Dobree Adams, weaver, at Riverbend Farm; Guy Mendes, photographer; Ed McClanahan novelist-- there are many many more. Kentucky produces home-grown eccentrics: Henry Faulkner, Sweet Evening Breeze, Bradley Harrison Pickelsimer come to mind. And lots of country artists: the great wood carvers Edgar Tolson and Carl McKenzie; Minnie Black, who made critters out of gourds until she was nearly 100. And who knows what goes on in the little towns like Sugartit, Decay, Viper, Chicken Bristle, Red Hot, Hippo, Shoulder Blade, Nada, Crum, Bugtussle, Ruin, Awe, Stop, and Monkeys Eyebrow? Maybe Kentucky is too strange for the industrial/military complex?

--Jonathan Williams, Spring 2004

Kentucky, home of straight bourbon whiskey and the Kentucky Derby, is also home to poet Wendell Berry, novelist Bobbie Ann Mason, and the final resting place of Thomas Merton (at the Abbey of Gethsemini in Bardstown, where he spent 27 years as a Franciscan monk). This extended roll-call of individuals is meant to illustrate the unique variety of Kentucky genius: in the hills and hollows of what so often gets disparagingly called "backwoods Appalachia" is a native intelligence that any other region of the country would be hard to equal.

Ed McClanahan, born in Brooksville, now 75, has a lengthy and varied writing career that itself finds little comparison. The gadfly McClanahan has published in college journals, Esquire magazine, literary quarterlies, Playboy, Rolling Stone; published collections of short stories, two novels, and teaches today at Northern Kentucky University not far from Cincinnati. Yet this brief resume merely hints at his role as a participant in, and observer of "the Sixties," as the decade is so designated these days, quotation marks included. His stint at Stanford University, beginning in 1962, followed an academic arc from classes with writer Wallace Stegner (meeting William Styron, Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov) into his own transformation as -- well, as McClanahan describes it:

It was an exhilarating time to be at Stanford. The anti-war movement and the civil rights movement and the Free University movement and the hippie movement and what we might call, in retrospect, the General, All-Purpose Up Yours movement were all flourishing, and I was ardently attached to each and every one. By the mid-sixties I was industriously insinuating myself into every sit-in and teach-in and be-in and love-in that happened along. I was also going around the campus in a knee-length red velvet cape, accessorized with a mod-bob haircut and granny glasses and Peter Pan boots. "Captain Kentucky," I styled myself, while Daniel Boone turned over in his grave.

Stegner graciously maintained a friendship with this "psychedelic eyesore," even to sharing his office space. They discussed the inevitable cultural chasm that began to open around the University, and for McClanahan the course was set. There were friendships with Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady in 1964 (though a still, small voice told him "he'd missed the boat" by not joining the Merry Pranksters on the "Furthur" trip east -- he was a family man by then), Richard Brautigan, Robert Stone. He taught writing at Oregon State, the University of Montana, the University of Kentucky.

He was early -- 1964 or so -- in the elect of the new, hip writer, as designated by Esquire magazine. Perhaps this was due to the novella he had under contract, then called "From a Considerable Height." The literary establishment was shifting; the old lions were being shuttled to Squaresville. "Little old unpublished me," McClanahan wrote in Famous People I Have Known. "Suddenly wallowing right up there cheek-to-jowl with the biggest fish in the biggest pond of all: Mailer! Styron! Baldwin! Salinger! Bellow! And . . . McClanahan?"

The very next issue of Esquire contained a letter demanding to know who the hell McClanahan was, and what he had to show for himself. What happened, between the writer's early canonization and the publication of that novella years later (in 1983) at the age of fifty-one, was what McClanahan called "the best and worst thing that could have happened to me." He got a case of writer's block on the novel that wouldn't resolve itself until 1980.

As his writing became more personal -- "following my nose, my muse, and sometimes my muse's nose" -- there were rejections. A 1985 piece commissioned by Esquire called "Where I Live" was turned down for the reason that it was "not upscale literary New York enough for this magazine."

Country people are more trusting -- therefore more generous and kinder -- than megalopolitans, suburbanites, and other backward races because, if you'll pardon the tautology, they're more secure. Here in Port Royal we're here among friends. One tries to pull one's weight, of course; for a while there I cut tobacco and bucked hay and forked manure and castrated calves like a very son of the soil. But in the ledger where such accounts are kept, we'll never get our books to balance because our friends just keep right on being good to us. Not that folks hereabouts don't set great store by their independence. Consider, for example, my friend and nearest neighbor, Kelsie Mertz, a farmer, trapper, beekeeper, occasional fiddler, and pretty fair Sunday painter, who takes his independence very seriously: ask Kelsie to sell you one of his pictures and he's liable to tell you to go paint your own if you like it so damn much. "Some people," says Kelsie indignantly, "think that if you've got something nice, they ought to have it!" Just so.

Yet a completed novel eluded him. By the mid-1970s the novella with the lofty title "From a Considerable Height" grew into an unfinished novel tentatively called A Hell of a Note. In early 1980, almost complete, McClanahan referred to it as Stepeasy. Then in a tangle of nerves, in March 1981 he rewrote the novel -- from first-person to third-person -- and the novel was finally published as The Natural Man. His friend Tom Marksbury wryly commented: "Maybe shit just happens, but magic takes some marinating."

By 1985, in what looked deceptively like rapid sequence, McClanahan published Famous People I Have Known. Its centerpiece -- a meditation on Little Enis Toadvine of Lexington, the self-appointed All-American Left-Handed Upside-Down Guitar Player -- had appeared in Playboy eleven years earlier. Then, in 1996 came a collection of three long stories titled A Congress of Wonders -- stories tugging at him since 1962. McClanahan, the anointed "new kid of 1964," found himself in the literary game for the slow-motion long haul.

In 1998 he published another collection of magazine pieces and stories -- My Vita, If You Will -- that indicates there will be even more McClanahan fables from far and near. It includes his memorial to Neal Cassady, early stories from his student days at Miami (Ohio), and two new pieces -- "Great Moments in Sports" and "Another Great Moment in Sports." He writes -- faster. He has developed a surer hand about writing, that trick he describes as "performing brain surgery on yourself." His website promises he's working on a a sequel to The Natural Man, called The Return of the Son of Needmore. Wait for it.

(McClanahan's collection of boots; photo by Jonathan Palmer)

McClanahan, still "out there" off the cultural grid in Kentucky, likes it that way. Again, from the rejected essay "Where I Live":

Ah, but the compensations! Our TV reception's not too good, and we almost never have to go to the movies. John Y. Brown, Jr. and Phyllis George have moved to New York, and that's been a great comfort. There are no sushi bars in Port Royal, no Volvos, no Hairless Krishnas, and hardly any joggers. We have more cows than people -- a social order in perfect balance. The world our children grow up in will be circumscribed, but they'll know it inch by inch; their society will be small but it will last them all their lives. As long as they behave themselves, they'll never run out of friends.

(BellemeadeBooks is taking a brief break this month. This post originally appeared in 2008.)

The buried temple: opium and the Romantic writers

DeQuncey's opium nightmares, by Christophe Huet

One of the most obvious effects of opium addiction on a writer's powers is that it induces indolence, absence of feeling, a state in which the power to observe is detached from the power to sympathize with what is observed. At it's very outset, this state of mind can be useful to a poet; there are times when he needs detachment. But in the long run it is deadly. The dislocation of objects and events from the feelings which they normally arouse is in the end destructive of poetic truth.

-- Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (1968)

In the 21st century, writing about drugs -- when it does happen -- seems to center around two conflicting poles: the confessional tell-all of the reformed, or the boosterism of the pharmaceutically relieved. The power of big pharma has ruled out most other approaches to the role of drugs in our collective health, mental, physical, or otherwise.

Back when the term drug culture meant different things to different people, however, the role of drugs (most of them now illicit in America and Europe unless under the care of a physician) on the imagination was a topic of some debate. Alethea Hayter's Opium and the Romantic Imagination is a rich study of literature's most famous, mostly British, users of opiates. Her book, published forty years ago this year, is a careful examination of a group of writers who had little in common besides their daily doses of opium, usually in liquid form or in combination with alcohol available as a pain-killer called laudanum.


Coleridge, about 1810

As the opening quote above suggests, Hayter found nothing to really surprise the general reader of Romantic literature. Although she finds that the regular ingestion of opiates created in the individual writer a paradise-like state of reveries and dreams, she does conclude with a creative paradox for the writer: Though opium may then present him with unique material for his poetry, it will take away from him the will and the power to make use of it.



In other words, the artist may fall under the spell of fantastic ideas and visions induced by drug use and then, in a diabolical twist, the drugs themselves take away the ability to transcribe these ideas through the resulting indolence and detachment. Hayter is also quick to describe the majority of Romantic writers associated with drug use (de Quincey, Crabbe, and Coleridge especially) as prodigious procrastinators -- victims of their own drug use. Creativity may be a gift, but industry is a virtue: whether or not their opium use made them indolent, the combined output of these writers is, substantially, not of the first rank:

It is the great plans that are destroyed. Writers can still write, and in fragments write well, when they have been addicted for many years; and this is not necessarily only during withdrawal periods. ... But the holding-together has gone, the great luminous images which shed light and pattern across all the wide tracts of a writer's imagination do not radiate any more. The images are still there, but some are darkened, some are luridly spot-lit, all are enclosed. The effect (is) what Baudelaire called the 'paysage opiace' ... some of these images -- the fairly obvious poppy, the honey-dew, the temptress, the buried temple -- may be conscious or unconscious equivalents for opium itself.

Fragments written well: the most famous being Coleridge's Kubla Khan (1815), which the author describes as "a vision." The writing of the poem was interrupted by a visitor, and when Coleridge sat down to resume writing he found the images had vanished. There are more detailed experiments, and expressions of the opium dream, from other lesser-known writers. Erasmus Darwin's recreation of an opium dream in The Loves of the Plants (1789) is based on his medical knowledge and is an outline of what became familiar to many readers as the imagery of opium visions:
Sofa'd on silk, amid her charm-built towers,

Her meads of asphodel and amaranth bowers,

Where sleep and silence guard the soft abodes

In sullen apathy PAPAVER nods.

Faint over her couch in scintillating streams,

Pass the thin forms of Fancy, and of Dreams;

Froze by enchantment on the velvet ground,

Fair youths and beauteous ladies glitter round;

On crystal pedestals they seem to sigh,

Bend the meek knee and lift the imploring eye. ...

Flushed with new life, descending statues talk,

The pliant marble softening as they walk,

To viewless lutes aerial voices sing,

And hovering lovers are heard on rustling wing ...

The pinnacle of the book is an imaginative leap: Hayter describes a creative mind under the influence of opium. She imagines a writer inside Piranisi's 1790 Carceri di'invenzione (Imaginary Prisons). The result is a horror story, all the scarier if one imagines the daily frame of mind of Coleridge, de Quincey, and other addicts in their advanced state of addiction. For some this was a considerable burden, rather than a relief from pain: Hayter quotes a contemporary of Coleridge, who estimates his opium usage at "a hundred drops a day" in 1801; in 1814, when the writer was receiving surreptitious supplies from a local chemist, this was as much as two pints a day -- the equivalent of 20,000 drops of opium!

The success of Hayter's imaginative description she details in the book's postscript: "I was often asked while I was writing this book whether I had completed my researches by taking opium myself. No curiosity or wish for new experience could nerve me to enter such a world of wretchedness ... Their (the addicts') paradises may have been wholly or partly artificial; their hells were real."

Filled with great detail and an eyebrow-raising theory or two -- did Coleridge really create homemade heroin? -- Hayter's well-researched and entertaining book is a scholarly look at drug use and its role in the creation of Romantic literature. By looking at the settings, theory, and practice of drug use through the 18th and 19th centuries, Hayter provides historical context to an otherwise loosely-grouped list of writers: the careers of de Quincey, Poe, and Baudelaire are examined in detail as well as lesser lights such as Francis Thompson and Wilkie Collins. Published in 1968 when interest in the culture of drugs and their uses and effects were at a peak, this book is certainly an artifact of the period, but Hayter's research is thorough enough to remain an excellent source of material, as well as debate, on the value of drug use in art.

BellemeadeBooks will be taking a short break during the month of November. This is a post from the 2008 archives.

"Highgate Cemetery," by Aelred Down : a poem for Halloween season

The tombs are packed in and tiled

by mosses; smothered in ivy. By law,

there were no trees planted here

and yet the place is wild with them.

Over run. Near forested. They have

brought themselves in to this cold,

more fertile soil; leaning at angles

their roots split and lift the great, raw

tonnage of the sepulchers; the piled-

on generations piled on generations:

the vacancy of the real; the ruin and

stubbed out ends of days extinguished.

Upturned torches cast on heavy doors.

There are no spirits here. No memory

or doubt. No truth or honesty. And I

am unsure how I feel.

Our tour guide has

been in the profession for thirty years,

man and boy. His speeches hymn a

dry and brittle song that occasionally

reaches down inside into a dirty mirth

that has the echo of confession. He

has lived in hat-tipped silence for too

long. He points to facts and to then

to rumours; to the broken humour and

final pages of exhaled none too distant

ages. We stop and examine the fallen.

Jadis et naguere. Broken branches

spell the Cedar of Lebanon in its own

runes while Tommy Sayers the bare

knuckle boxer, the world's first heavy-

weight, who walked in a stove pipe

hat with gloves and cane, lies there.

He once fought The Tipton Slasher

for sixty one rounds. The Little Wonder

they called him then: 'The blows came

as from a catapult.' His mastiff, Lion,

in marmoreal calmness, guards him still.

They are but shadows now, of dry

stone on foliage; of broken steps

and pilgrimage. They are but dust

and clay and we, the ghosts of the

dead, eternal optimists, circle the

unlikely trees, the rings within them

measuring marriage of earth to that

beneath, and, emerging in to the white

noise of the day, we breathe. Exist.

Aelred Down lives in Gloucestershire, England, where he is currently working on his first poetry collection. "Highgate Cemetery" originally appeared at the Literary Kicks website.