It’s time I spoke to one person. It’s good we’ve never met. I have a sense of you being fair to a fault, more patient than I am with opposing views. I trust your intelligence as far as I have been witness to it, principally on divisive political topics. I know you have read some of my work. This medium of expression is the best substitute for a conversation that should remain at one remove. It’s far from an ideal medium because it is so chronologically deterministic, committed to preserving the order in which posts are written, last first, which is an enormous obstacle to content that requires some first-things-first order at times. I’ve picked it because it has capabilities and tools in terms of linking that can at least partially offset its principal structural flaw.
What do I have in mind? My real résumé as a writer and a person. Which simply cannot be done in the form of a straightforward memoir. Why? Because I have always been a distortion factor in every environment I have inhabited or worked in. My life has been an extraordinary adventure, and it simply can’t be critiqued by ordinary means. When my first wife told me she was done with the marriage and I asked her why, she said, “You’re just too much. Too much of everything.”
She was not trying to be kind. She didn’t want any more of me. I understood and accepted what she meant. Over the years, good friends have expressed similar sentiments. As you read this, you may come to dislike me for various reasons, but I'm not writing to be liked. I am trying to provide a basis for understanding my work, which is vast and far beyond any reductionist dismissal. But I have lived through a succession of extreme experiences, immersions really, and I have learned from them, written about them, and continue doing so even now, at the age of 72 going on 150+.
Writing this a day after the message I posted in your Facebook page. Here’s the text of the letter I had begun to you before that:
Dear Jeffrey,
I am writing because I am facing some milestones and am trying to do what can be done.
I am 72 and still writing between 6 and 12 hours a day. My wife is 82, and she can no longer serve as my manuscript publisher for Amazon/Kindle. The curtain is descending on her, more rapidly all the time.
I need an agent to help me preserve my work against Internet oblivion. I am not very mobile at all, I have no money to speak of, and I am sitting on what could be a fortune for some innovative combination of agent and publisher(s).
Sorry for all the “I”’s, but that’s what it comes down to. I am unique, but I am old and I still have a gift to give my profession and the generations who will have to rebuild literature and philosophy in years to come. I am sitting on a mountain of product that needs to be packaged and sold into the marketplace.
But “I” is the problem. My life story is epically American. I am an archetype of the Baby Boom generation and so obviously symbolically American that the facts of the matter would sound fictitious if you made them up. In other words, I am my own best story, and autobiography is an odious — and wrong — approach to the packaging of me. I, I, I, I, I… Not necessary, given that I have written a great deal of it down. My total output in words alone is well north of 6 million. I have been a constant examiner of my own life and the America I have experienced for close to 60 years now. The older I get, the more it seems that my life has been an arranged thing, with necessary components timed deliberately out of order, for the purpose of ensuring my acquaintance with the broadest possible experience of both good times and bad, rich and poor, and always somehow in the center of whatever battle was being fought for truth, justice, and the American Way.
I was born in 1953, the first fear of the Eisenhower administration (also the year of the H-bomb), in one of the cradles of the American Revolution, Greenwich Twp NJ, which had its own tea-burning party in 1775, and spent a major part of my early years in nearby Salem County, where the Quaker John Fenwick signed a treaty with the Leni Lenape in 1675 under an historical oak tree that only fell to earth in 2018. My Scottish ancestors came to America in the 1740s, fleeing from retribution for supporting Bonnie Prince Charlie, and Lairds fought in the Revolution, the Civil War (both sides), and my father was a fighter pilot in WW2. My mother’s father was a captain of infantry under MacArthur in WWI, and his wife was a member of the D.A.R. I grew up in a country house that exemplified the American story, the original structure built in the 1730s, a large addition dated to 1815, and a frame structure that long served as our kitchen was built in the 1860s. The property also had a three-bay carriage shed with corncribs and an attic, as well as a huge crumbling barn with hand-hewn beams, and frame icehouse about the same age as the kitchen.
I was the third Robert Fisher Laird. My grandfather and namesake, R. F. Laird Sr., lived in Salem as did his wife and the other two grandparents, all of whom played different and crucial roles in bringing up me and my sister. I was the closest of his six grandchildren to my Grandfather Laird, who was my hero and mentor from childhood to the present day. My sister had an eye condition that required doctor visits in Philadelphia, and I spent hundreds of hours in his company. He was a great man and likely a saint. He, my parents, and a Greenwich millionaire organized the private elementary school my sister and I attended till it was time to go away to boarding school. During those elementary years, Boppa (as we called Laird Sr) served as Chairman of the board of Trustees of St. John’s Day School and St. John’s Episcopal Church, the original sponsoring organization. He died during my first year away at Mercersburg Academy, where my dad had gone before me, and Boppa came to me in my room after his funeral service. I promised him out loud that I would try to be a good boy, as he had taught me.
I tell you all these basics because they remain important. I spent four years at Mercersburg, three at Harvard (graduated early at 19), and another year and a half at Cornell Business School, and in all that time I never met anyone who had a childhood as culturally diverse as mine.
In the 200 acres immediately surrounding the house where I grew up (on 6 acres), the neighbors included a struggling third generation farmer, a glorified shack for his seasonal migrant help, a Communist water colorist and his wife, a spinster osteopath, one of the heirs of the Coca Cola fortune with his Soviet wife and five children, the Executive Director of the World Wildlife Fund and his frosty live-in housekeeper, a retired accountant and published mystery writer married to a delightful Canadian eccentric, a black hired hand caring for a mentally handicapped son, a Native American housemaid and her Moor husband, a shift worker at a local glass plant and his hard wife and two sons, and an insurance executive who spent weekdays in Connecticut and returned home Friday nights to his white-haired femme fatale wife. All of these people were part of our routine daily lives in this rural patch outside historic Greenwich (pronounced ‘Green-witch’ by residents of long lineage).
The two county area in which my sister and I grew up represented the same kind of melting pot ambiance traceable to the unique histories of principal towns. Cumberland County’s Bridgeton was Industrial Revolution all the way, large and small manufacturing plants built by WASP, Catholic, and Jewish entrepreneurs, whose children were my classmates at St. John’s Day School. Beyond Bridgeton there was Millville built mostly by immigrants from Eastern Europe, Poles, Slavs, etc. Another town nearby was Vineland, overwhelmingly Italian in my youth, with grand ambitions that were never fully achieved. The South Jersey Rainbow, all located below Exit 1 of the New Jersey Turnpike along with the shore of cape May County….
This is as far as I had gotten when I wrote the message on your page. I had been about to tell you something of the personal me who lived in these environs. I was going to show you the place Isent to be alone when I was just a kid, a patch woods called “Little Egypt” behind our house, about a quarter of a mile up a dirt farm track.
Or just start at the beginning and read. I like the first post a lot:
It’s all relevant. Reading in order is fine.
Also, a site not much hinted at in the Instapunk universe:
Quantum 19 (Scan and cherry-pick…)
I’ll obviously discuss other matters later on. All of my sites are in peril. All of my work. Why I’m reaching out.
No comments:
Post a Comment