15 NOVEMBER, 2021

Dear Harry,

We're looking for refuge, Ellie and I. They say to switch it all off, to stop listening to the news, stop watching television. Disconnect from the Internet. But that's hard. You raised me with a sense of responsibility to know about the world and to do what I could to make changes where I saw them to be needed. Even at my age, I feel that tug of conscience: I can't just let it happen.

But there it is. It's happening, and we feel powerless to stop it. They also say that old people always look back to their younger days when things were so much better. But they were. Even with war raging, when I was a child, there was a common commitment to the survival/restoration of a society governed by mutual welfare, justice, fairness. There was some common agreement on what was factually true, and what was not. There were conservatives, yes, and socialists, and profound disagreements on the best course to take. But those disagreements were open to rational discussion and could be settled by compromise on either side. 

Those days are gone, Harry, at least here in America and increasingly throughout the world. There are so many human beings, some greedily consuming what they can while they can get it, millions of others just desperate for the basic food and water they need to survive. We are destroying the planet with our obsessive concern only for ourselves and our own needs. Here in America, the remaining voices of reason are shouted down by widespread anger and resentment and those eager to exploit it. Talk of violence proliferates, as does the sale of guns. We are manipulated by invisible overlords who steal our very lives for their own profit.

But where to go? Even if we found a place of refuge in some remote, disconnected part of the planet, we have family ties that we would never want to break. We feel stuck. I hate feeling like this, Harry. But that's how it is.

Sorry to disturb you in your place of eternal rest! 

With love, Peter

13 NOVEMBER

 I have come to the realization that this is not the place for the remaining letters in my "Dear Harry" book. It is now close to 350 pages, and complete in a third draft. I have published quite a number of the letters here, but I have reached a point where they become too personal and affect other people--not unpleasantly, for sure, but in ways that leave me feeling uncomfortable. They are better kept between the pages of a book. I hope to find some way to publish them in that format, and will certainly announce that here if and when it happens.

In the meantime... I woke thinking that the "Dear Harry" format cold also be repurposed. For years I have been putting out occasional, sometimes daily reflections on matters of personal, political, philosophical, even spiritual interest. Why not continue to do so under the guise of these "Letters to my Father." He is long gone, of course, but we can maintain the fiction. As in the following:

Dear Harry,

I wonder what you'd have thought if I had told you that here, in this country where I have now lived the better part of my life, there are places where people are permitted--encouraged, even--to walk around armed in public places with military assault weapons slung over their shoulders? To what end? For show, perhaps, to parade their macho credentials, to intimidate those who have political opinions other than their own... 

You'd think this was utter madness, no? I think so, too. Worse still, they get to use them. There is a man--a boy, really, 18 years old--who is currently on trial in Wisconsin for having killed two men and wounded another after bringing one of those weapons to a scene of violent social upheaval, with the intent, as I understand it, of "protecting property." He used it instead, he now claims, to protect himself. But what was this child, then 17, doing there in the first place with a weapon of this kind? Dropped off, for God's sake, by his mother. With his gun!

There is a madness in American culture. The gun is at the center of it. As is, it now becomes apparent, the cause of white identity. As in Germany in the 1930s--can you believe this, Harry?--we are beset by the threat of right-wing extremist bullies, fascists, really, fed with the delusional lies of a would-be dictator and ready to do violence to protect the white race.

Oh, Harry, you would be as appalled as I am.

Your son, Peter

3 NOVEMBER, 2021

Looking back at some of the letters that preceded this one, I think I understand more about what has discouraged me from posting them: they are too personal, affecting others than myself. I think/hope it might be easier to put them out into the world between the covers of a book. Meantime, be aware that I have skipped over quite a number of those letters before resuming here...

Dear Harry,

So I promised you more about Norman, the fellow poet whose friendship contributed to a huge, irreversible change in my life and the way I see the world.

It was that same summer. He was invited down to visit friends on a farm some way to the south, not far from Hannibal, Missouri, and asked me if I’d like to join him for the drive. Of course I agreed. I was free, after all, to do anything I cared to. The drive was a spectacular one, through lovely hilly, wooded countryside to a spot so remote, amidst the hills, there was no other human habitation anywhere in sight. To complete the dreamscape, Norman’s friends—a man and a woman with a horde of untamed children—came out to greet us in the flowing white garments of true flower children. I could have imagined garlands in their hair. Our supper was a simple one: artichokes, with a butter dip for the leaves. I had never seen this kind of artichoke before, let alone eaten one, and I found the taste delicious.

Was there bread? Wine? Perhaps. I don’t recall.

But I do remember the thunderstorm that followed, in the night. I promise, Harry, you have never experienced anything like a storm in the American Midwest. Our English storms are polite affairs beside these monsters, with lightning strikes that split the endless sky, thunder that roils the countryside, and often hail—sometimes the size of golf balls, sometimes even larger; on one occasion, in Iowa City, great chunks of ice came tumbling out of a black-green sky, so big that the bodywork of every car in the city unprotected by garage or carport was left badly dented). You would be awed, as I was, always, by these giant storms and by the threat of killer tornados they bring with them. I remember standing at the window of my room that night and gazing out in wonder, and perhaps some fear, inspired by the raw power unleashed by nature at its wildest.

The next morning arrived bright, still, serene, the grass and leaves still glistening from the rain the night before. Was there breakfast? I have no memory of sitting down with the family to eat—but I found Norman and his friend standing by the refrigerator engaged in some kind of serious debate, which was resolved only when they showed me a little tab and asked me if I’d like to join them on an “acid trip.”
br> Acid! While I had been smoking marijuana quite a bit that summer, I still harbored a good deal of fear when it came to drugs. I had heard about LSD, of course, who hadn’t? Psychedelics flourished, and not only in the music I had come to love. It had certainly never occurred to me that this might be the purpose of Norman’s trip; but now, confronted with a new challenge to my fears… I could not say no. I laid the proffered tab on my tongue and washed it down with a glass of water.

We walked out away from the farm, the three of us, down towards what I’d learned was called the Femme Osage Creek. There was the legend of some Indian woman involved, many years before. Perhaps she still haunted this lovely landscape… At first I was unimpressed. I thought that nothing much had happened, aside from perhaps a sharpening of color, a brightening of perception. I began to wonder what the fuss was all about.

But then it hit. I realized I was no longer in the world I thought I knew. I found myself sitting naked in the creek, gazing down into the shallows where crawdads darted along a bed of smooth, brown stones below the surface of the water. I could see Norman sitting way upstream from me, naked also, gazing like myself into the wondrous aspect of a world that had started to reveal itself, everywhere, in its true nature. Everything—trees, rocks, birds, fields of grass, wildflowers—everything was suddenly, vibrantly alive, and everything, everything was in the process of communication, all things with each other, and everything with me. The normal barriers of perception vanished; I could see, I could hear, and better still I could absolutely understand everything around me. We were one. There was no mystery, only glorious, all-embracing clarity. It all made sense. The sudden, scarlet flash of a cardinal against the lush green of the trees was a message I could readily understand, reflecting the inner untrammeled elation that I felt.

How long did it last, that feeling? I don’t know. It could have been hours. It was only later that day that I began to realize I had been separated from my friends. Where was I? Had they left me? The realization that I was all alone and still in this strangely altered state of mind began to translate into a gripping fear. I was cold. Darkness had begun to fall. I was disoriented, unsure which way would lead back to the farmhouse, back to other people in this vast emptiness. Had I lost my mind, along with my sense of direction? Something like panic started to set in as I looked around in vain for some recognizable landmark…

I walked and walked. I walked until I was so tired I was not sure I could walk further and only then, with inexpressible relief, caught sight of the farm we’d started from. Norman came out to greet me. “We were quite worried about you,” he said. “We wondered where you’d got to.” I fell into his arms.

Was this a kind of religious ecstasy, I ask myself in retrospect? Did you, Harry, ever experience anything of the kind? The reason I tell you about it is that the experience proved to be not limited to that one day. It left a profound and permanent mark on my understanding of the world and my place in it. I never again experimented with the drug. I never felt the need or the desire to do so, knowing that the change had already happened, that my perception would never again be quite as it had been before. I wrote s series of prose poems and gave it the title “Femme Osage.”

If you challenge me I will readily admit that there was something false, something artificial in this new sense of liberation I’d acquired. But there was also something profoundly true. Aldous Huxley wrote about it in “The Doors of Perception”, and while I have not read this book for many years, I know it was an effort to expand the realm of consciousness to areas as yet unexplored. I’ll have more to share with you about all this in due course, when I tell you something of my own (“religious”? “spiritual”?) conversion.

In gratefully remembered ecstasy, your son, Peter  

A NOTE

I see that it's nearly a month now since I posted here. I'm not sure what's holding me up. There's no shortage of letters. I think maybe it's the time it takes, and the distraction from what has become my main purpose: to make a book of these letters and find some further way to put them out into the world. Still, the "Dear Harry" blog has been on my mind. I intend to get back to it...

9 OCTOBER, 2021

Dear Harry,

I know you believed in what the church called “the sanctity of marriage.” I’m assuming that you observed the principle yourself. You belonged to a generation where divorce was still an unconscionable alternative, where it was spoken of amongst respectable people only in hushed whispers, not only a sign of a failure of character but also a family disgrace.

What a bitter, deeply distressing experience for you and Peggy, then, to know that the marriages of both your children ended in divorce.

There are matters too delicate and too hurtful still, after many years, to write about without due compassion and respect, so I want to keep this, insofar as possible, between you and me. I blame no one, and take full responsibility for own my part in these events, no matter how long ago they occurred.

You’ll remember that you came across to Germany, with Peggy of course, to officiate at the church ceremony where Liz and I were married. Flora and her new husband John were there too, as was my old Cambridge friend Hugh Welchman, my best man. It was a moment of mutual commitment, hope, and love. We spent what was, for me—I hope it was, too, for Liz—a wonderful week on honeymoon in Amsterdam. Returning to Düren, we settled into a downtown apartment for the first months of our life together.

Were we ready for the responsibilities or married life and, soon enough, of bringing children into the world? I wasn’t. For now, and for too many years to come, I allowed myself to drift along with little foresight and less planning. We were still in Düren when I first began to realize the need to get a real job and settle down into adult life (as though such a thing were possible for me, Harry!) and, impractically hopeful as ever, I wrote off in response to a three-week old announcement in the “wanted” column of one of the leftist New Statesman weeklies that Peggy used to forward me from England. A private grammar school in Nova Scotia, Canada, was looking for someone to teach English. They were offering a salary of five thousand dollars, wealth I had never dreamed of!

I applied at once. The response came in short order: unsurprisingly the advertised post had been filled already. But the school was now also looking for a French and German teacher. Was I interested?

I telegraphed my assent.

This is how I came to cross the Atlantic Ocean for the first time, Harry, putting an even greater distance between you and me.

We settled in Halifax, Liz and I. And Nova Scotia was good to us. As anyone who has traveled there will tell you, it is a truly lovely province with its wild, rocky coastline and scores of inland lakes where, in winter, I could enjoy the novel spectacle of car races on ice. It was cold, yes—colder by far than anything we’d ever known in Europe. There was real weather, blizzards in winter, hurricanes in the summer, a blaze of color as the seasons changed in the fall. We had a tiny basement apartment with a black and white TV set where we watched ice hockey every Saturday evening. We had a gray cat named Plato. We bought a brand new car—the first I’d ever owned, a tiny powder blue Mini Minor. Liz was seriously pregnant but I insisted foolishly on taking us out for a spin on our new car’s first day, despite weather forecasts predicting the imminent arrival of a hurricane. What did I care about hurricanes? They were only a word to me… (I learned only later that this was Ginny, a Category 2 storm, one of the most destructive to ever hit the Nova Scotia coast). Before we knew it we were in unfamiliar territory, lost in the rocky wilderness on a side road where the tarmac abruptly ended, giving way to a rough dirt surface, and the storm was hurtling all around us. I drove on. What else could I do? I was terrified, yes, by this time, but we were committed. Then suddenly, inexplicably, the road descended to sea level and we found ourselves driving alongside the ocean, dark and angry, with massive waves crashing down across the road. A wrecked cargo ship tilted at an angle on the rocks, not far distant.

We survived. My reckless insistence had exposed not only myself but my wife and our soon-to-be-born child to grievous danger. What saved us I will never know. Your God? More likely it was the little Mini’s front wheel drive, gripping the mud and pulling us valiantly through. When we finally reached the highway back to Halifax, I stopped to check on the car and opened up the hood. The entire engine of my beautiful brand new Mini was coated in a layer of thick, red, salty mud.

Hubris? I learned, at least, to pay attention to storm warnings in the future.

And then to our great joy our first son, Matthew was born.

All of which was fine, except that I had apparently forgotten the lesson learned at Rutlish: I was not cut out to be a teacher, particularly not at a secondary school for boys. It was a lesson I re-learned rather quickly at the Halifax Grammar School. It would be ungracious to complain too loudly. I was fortunate to have a good job. To be earning what seemed to us in those days a fine salary. And the school was a progressive one, with a well-qualified staff of committed colleagues and interesting, socially active parents—all good, compatible, caring people with whom Liz and I would socialize at evening events and on weekends at the shoreline where crabs and lobsters were thrown liberally into pots of boiling water and gobbled down with gusto on warm summer beaches.

We moved. We had no room for a baby in our tiny basement flat, so we found what I recall as a rather bleak modern apartment with an extra bedroom and a shared laundry room that came in handy with the diapers. We had a portable stereo with a collection of classical records that we loved, and French Canadian folks songs. (Ah, si mon moine voulait danser, A la claire fontaine… I remember them). We discovered the lovely, haunting voice of Joan Baez… I think, no, I’m quite sure that we were happy, just the three of us.

And yet, and yet… There was still that poet in me, “yearning to be free”; the one who kept nudging me to write and making me feel empty and unaccomplished when I didn’t. In fact I was writing poems at the time. I had belatedly discovered the work of e.e.cummings and my poems were heavily influenced by his whimsical play with language. Meanwhile, more and more, the hours I spent in the classroom reminded me that teaching was not a passion but a requisite, money-earning chore.

It was at the end of the first school year in Nova Scotia that the son of one of my colleagues arrived with his wife to spend the summer with his parents. We hit it off well. He was a poet, a well-known poet, a successful poet even—a concept I had previously never entertained. In my ignorance, I had not heard of him before; I had been writing poems in my own little backwater, uninformed of the greater world of my contemporaries. What I saw in Mark Strand, a tall, powerful man, confident in himself both as a writer and a man, was everything I longed to be and clearly was not yet. He was kind enough to read my poems, assuring me that he found them to be intelligent, interesting; they showed promise. Nova Scotia was no place for me, he said; I should be at the Poetry Workshop at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where he had a teaching job.

A poetry workshop! Here was a new concept, Harry! Iowa! Who would have ever dreamed?

Sadly, Mark died before his time, a short while ago. I owe him a debt of gratitude. He recommended me to Paul Engle, the poet, founder and at that time still the man who ran the Writers’ Workshop, and the rest followed with relative ease. I was offered a grant, and a teaching assistant’s job in the French Department which provided me with an adequate income for the family, and a place in the Ph.D. program in Comparative Literature. I was given an on-campus office of my own and low-cost graduate student housing in a Quonset hut just a short walk from the campus… It was everything I could have asked for.

I was thrilled with this unexpected change in my prospects that had fallen from the heavens into my lap. School-teaching was forever behind me, vistas of life as a genuine writer opened up. There were, I soon discovered, more poets per square block in Iowa City than I could have imagined possible. And the Ph.D, my new Comp. Lit. professors assured me, would be a breeze for someone with my language skills and a degree in languages and literature from Cambridge University.

I hope you were proud of your new son, Harry, when all this began to happen. Or did you, in your wisdom, already intuit disaster looming in the years to come? I’d love to have known.

Your all too often deluded son, Peter

8 OCTOBER, 2021

Dear Harry,

You’ll know by now how easily I lost my heart, and how much harm I left in my wake as a result. It would sadly take me many years yet to grow up and come to the understanding that love was something other than the satisfaction of my needs.

There followed many wonderful days and evenings in the new life I was creating for myself. Living in Winden, I was able to spend the better part of the day at my typewriter. I was gaining confidence, feeling more accomplished as a writer. Early evening I would take the bus into Düren, arriving at the Berlitz School in time to meet up with my new colleague for a cup of tea or coffee before classes started. I had not yet summoned the nerve to make my feelings known, nor was I sure of them myself. While I was aware of a familiar, powerfully physical attraction to this petite young woman with green eyes, dark hair, and a sharp and lively mind, I was content for once to take the time needed for us to get to know one another before trying to rush her off to bed. For her part, Liz was perhaps rightly wary of a man who was yet to earn her trust.

Still, we did build a friendship. After class, most often, we would go out to a nearby Taverne for beer and a bite to eat, Brat- or Knackwurst with Sauerkraut, or one of those breaded cutlets that German chefs do so well. I would sometimes order a big bowl of steamed mussels—a specialty at our favorite late-night haunt—until the memorable time when I must have swallowed down a bad one… I was so horribly sick, I scarcely made it home that night; so sick that I have never dared to eat another mussel in more than sixty years.

We had friends in common. There were Willi and Helle, two aspiring young businessmen with each a pretty girlfriend and a brand new car; and Dieter, a slightly older man, forty-ish, old enough to have been a member of the Hitler Jugend. The ravages of war were still a vivid memory in Düren, at the eastern rim of what had been the Battle of the Bulge; there were many people for whom the night of November 16, 1944 was still a recent nightmare, when waves of Allied bombers swarmed in the skies above to unleash a murderous storm of fire and high explosive on the city. Of the 22,000 human beings who once lived there, three thousand died that night, most of them trapped in cellars beneath the burning buildings, where they’d taken shelter.

We became close friends, Liz and I, as well as colleagues. We stood out as the only two young English people, foreigners amongst the natives. There was a mutual respect as well as a tenderness. It took me a good long while, as I recall, to tell her awkwardly that I loved her and soon to ask her if she would consider marrying me. Until that moment we had still done little more than kiss goodnight, but she said, Yes. It was kind and brave of her to agree to take me on, because I was not much of a prospective husband, with only a part-time evening job and vague hopes of eventually gaining recognition as a writer. I was impractical, penniless and—though I may have managed successfully to hide it—emotionally not much past my adolescence. As I look back on it, I wish that I could have been—your phrase, Harry!—more man for her woman. I was not.

She took me on anyway. Now many years later I continue to thank her for the immeasurable gift of love. It saddens me to acknowledge that I was unable to prove myself worthy of the trust that went along with it.

More of that later, Harry.

For now, your son, Peter

6 OCTOBER, 2021

Dear Harry,

After that moment of terrible suspicion, finding Marie with Barry at his flat on Rayners Road I never thought of him in the same way again. The long friendship in which I had shared with him the most intimate of secrets of my life, the darkest of my dreams, the most erotic of my desires was now tainted with an edge of distrust from which it never fully recovered.

With Marie, when we resumed our now tenuous relationship after her father’s death, the tables were turned. I became ever more possessive. The more I felt her slipping away from me, the more desperate was my need to keep clinging on. And then one day she told me she was leaving. She had accepted the offer of a job at one of the British military schools in then still-occupied Germany. Devastated, I realized belatedly that I could not conceive of life without her, and it took me only a month or two before I devised a way to follow her. Do you remember how I walked away from my good job in Wimbledon in the middle of the school year, Harry? How I sold that Ford Anglia you had helped me buy and reneged on my share of the lease in the house on Mercier Road? The pretext I offered to anyone who asked was that I needed to test my talents as a writer. I may have convinced even myself that this was true. The part-time evening job I had taken, teaching English to adult students at a language school in Düren, would allow me the time to write all day and every day, I told myself. Besides, I thought, it would be a huge relief to exchange my teenage tormentors at Rutlish for reasonable, grown-up people who signed up for classes because they actually wanted to learn.

I suspect that you and Peggy never knew the real reason for my sudden flight. You may not have been aware that Düren was a mere fifty miles from the military base where Marie was now employed. I could not imagine otherwise than that she would be delighted, impatient as I was to be back (in bed!) together. To my chagrin and surprise, it seemed she wasn’t. Through weeks of increasingly desperate telephone calls there was nothing from the other end of the line but excuses, prevarications, protestations and delays. Eventually I managed to prevail on her to drive down. I couldn’t wait to get her into bed, and made urgent love to her in the single room I had rented—the best I could afford on a part-time teacher’s pittance. As I strove mightily, repeatedly, to satisfy my need, I’m sure I failed to notice that her part in our love-making had turned from desire to tolerance.

Or rather, to be truthful, it was my choice not to notice this; denial was more acceptable to my anguished mind than was acknowledgment.

After that first weekend the length of time between her visits stretched out interminably. She bought herself a steel blue Renault Dauphine, an all too popular model at the time. Every time I saw one on the streets, my heart leapt with anticipation, followed at once by frustration, despair, and jealous rage. I was obsessed with thoughts of her submitting to the bestial attentions of all-too-charming British officers at her army base. On the increasingly rare occasions of her visits, I began to feel more like a supplicant than a lover. Then on one final weekend she told me she was pregnant. And the baby wasn’t mine.

Oh, Harry, believe me, your son had never felt so miserable. There he was, stuck in a tiny room looking out on a bland and frigid street somewhere in Germany, in mid-winter, pounding away on his portable Royal typewriter (a parting gift from Peggy) and churning out dreadful poems that no one would ever read. I had nothing but an immersion heater to make tea or coffee, and an electric hotplate to warm up a bowl of soup or make a melted cheese sandwich on a slice of thick German rye bread topped with a slab of Emmentaler.

I had fallen so far into despair, I could no longer imagine a way up or out.

And then there was Winden. I found a new place to live in a small village at the edge of the Eifel Forest with an endless view out over a long green valley to the edge of the trees, an easy bus ride from my job Düren. Reinvigorated by the springtime sun, I abandoned poetry and started on the novel that was guaranteed to bring me fame and fortune. Frau Hennes, a widow, was my landlady. Her husband was one of those tens of thousands of German soldiers who never returned from the Russian gulags after the war, and she treated me like the son she never had. I loved the meals she cooked, Sauerbraten, Rindfleisch, delicious “Eintopf” stews…

At work there was greater responsibility and better salary when I was made Director as the school expanded to serve more students with more classes and different languages.

And before long there was the arrival of my first new colleague. I fell in love.

Your ever-peripatetic son, Peter