Author’s Afterword

This, the fourth volume of the Difficulty at the Beginning quartet, bears only a tenuous relationship to the version of John Dupre’s story previously published as the second half of Cutting Through (General Publishing, Toronto, 1982). It has the same cast of characters, but they have grown and changed enormously since their first appearance in the world, and their stories have changed just as much. I regard the Cutting Through version as little more than an uneven collection of rough preliminary sketches and notes, mostly now abandoned; what little I did retain, I have developed and elaborated far beyond anything implied in the original writing. Although I also read even earlier drafts now housed in the archives at the University of British Columbia library, I used hardly anything from that stratum of unpublished writing. So easily ninety percent of the writing in Looking Good is entirely new, and it must be considered as a new work.

Looking Good is fiction, and the content is not autobiographical. The main players in this story are entirely fictitious and are not based upon real people. I have, however, tried to be true to the times, and many of the political events and some of the off-stage people mentioned in the book are real. I feel that any curiosity some readers might have about what I made up and what I didn’t is perfectly legitimate, and I will try to satisfy that curiosity.

Although Zygote and the Biweekly Weasel resemble types of “underground” newspapers current at the time, they are fictitious, as is the organization called the Boston Radical Women’s Collective. Members of Harvard SDS did not, of course, work for a fictitious newspaper or take it over. Pam’s recollections of the Columbia “action” are based upon those I found in various sources, the most useful of which were Richard Rosenkranz’s Across the Barricades (Lippincott, Philadelphia and New York, 1971) and the excellent report compiled by Jerry L. Avorn and the staff of the Columbia Daily Spectator, published as Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis (Atheneum, New York, 1969).

Although my accounts of the Harvard bust and the Harvard Square riot are fictionalized (sometimes highly so), they were based upon real events. When I was constructing my story of the Harvard bust, I found it very useful to read two accounts from highly divergent viewpoints: Roger Rosenblatt’s Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969 (Little Brown, Boston, 1997) and Lawrence E. Eichel, Kenneth W. Jost, Robert D. Luskin, and Richard M. Neustadt’s The Harvard Strike (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1970). For the Harvard Square riot I found many fascinating and useful details in accounts published in the Boston Globe, the MIT Tech, and the Harvard Crimson.

For all matters pertaining to the Students for a Democratic Society, I consulted Kirpatrick Sale’s meticulously researched SDS: Ten Years Towards a Revolution (Random House, New York, 1973). An account of Bernardine Dohrn’s praise of the Manson family at the SDS National Convention in Flint, Michigan, in December, 1969, appears in Sale’s book (pp. 626–629) and has also been widely documented elsewhere.

It was rumored in Boston leftist circles in 1970 that Weatherman had prepared a hit list of enemies who were to be “offed” when the revolution began, but I have found no evidence that enabled me to either confirm or deny those rumors. The particular Boston Weatherman cell I have described—with its lurid acid-driven fantasies of political murder—is entirely fictitious. “The Fork” is the name adopted by a Weatherman cell in New York; I have borrowed it for my fiction. The imposition of “revolutionary consciousness” on the members of Weatherman by the use of “criticism, self-criticism” sessions, however, has been widely reported; an excellent account appears in Mark D. Naison’s White Boy: A Memoir (Temple University Press, 2002).

While writing this book, I read or consulted a large number of sources, both primary and secondary, and it would be pretentious of me to list them all. I do, however, want to mention Todd Gitlin’s excellent, detailed, and magisterial work: The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Bantam, New York, 1987).

I feel compelled to comment on my use of the word “motherfucker.” I.considered not using it at all, but it was a characteristic of the speech of black nationalists, white radicals, and “underground” types at the time, and was, in fact, used so commonly and so often that it eventually lost nearly all of its shock value—as I hope it will for anyone who persists in reading this book all the way to the end.

Many of my characters hold opinions that were typical of the late 1960s; I have tried to express their ideas in language that they themselves would have used. I have also tried not to give any of them opinions that would have been impossible or unlikely for anyone to hold at the time. The extent to which sixties radicals felt alienated from mainstream American society cannot be overemphasized; many of them believed that everything they had ever been taught was, at best, a web of pitiful delusions, and, at worst, a cleverly assembled system of malevolent lies designed to maintain an intolerable and utterly mad social order. That conviction led to an assault, not only on social institutions, but on the very structure of “reality,” forcing radicals to attempt to reinvent all human knowledge from the ground up—no mean task for kids in their twenties—and no idea, on the face of it, was too nutty to be considered, at least for a while.

Readers attempting to orient themselves should remember that, with the exception of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (first published in an English translation by Jonathan Cape in 1953) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), none of the books that would now be considered to be classics of mid-twentieth-century feminism had yet been published; even the use of the term “feminism” (as applied to a contemporary position) was quite new, and one heard “women’s liberation” far more often. It was very much a do-it-yourself period in the Women’s Movement, and young women were making up feminist theory on their own, coming up with new ideas every day. The huge energy and excitement of that intensely creative period was readily apparent even to men who were watching from the sidelines.

The writings of the Situationist International were not widely known in the United States at the time, but Guy Debord’s La société du spectacle (1967) and the opening of Raoul Vaneigem’s Traité du savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations (1967) were available in English translation and were taken quite seriously by a very small number of American radicals. Of Carlos Castaneda’s many books, only the first, The Teachings of Don Juan, a Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968), had been published, and it was still possible for a reasonable person to believe that Castaneda was an anthropologist and not, as he later proved to be, a novelist.

Pam’s attempts to put anorexia nervosa into a political context is not as far ahead of the times as it might appear to today’s readers; after the publication of R. D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience (1967), all forms of mental illness were easily seen in a political context, and, of course, some New Left radicals attempted to put everything into a political context.

Although its recent notoriety might make crystal meth appear to be a twenty-first-century drug, it was available in the underground in the late 1960s and popular enough that one saw impassioned editorials against it appearing in the alternate press.

“Androgyny,” or, as it was more commonly called, “unisex,” did have a large impact on the world of fashion in the early 1970s. Zoë does not remember the exact wording of the quotation she cites; the original is: “This spring girls will be looking like boys who dress like girls. And boys will be dressing like girls who dress like boys.” It appeared, not in Ingenue, as Zoë mistakenly remembers, but in Eye (February, 1969).

Just as I have described in this book, American leftists were, by 1970, suffering from that constant and corrosive anxiety commonly called “paranoia,” and it eventually became difficult or impossible to make even a good guess as to what was real and what was not. Since then, we have learned that phones were indeed tapped, files on radical activity were indeed kept by various government agencies, and radical organizations were indeed infiltrated both by agents and by agents-provocateurs. When the Nixon Administration finally came tumbling down, we learned that even the wildest fantasies of the New Left hadn’t been quite wild enough.

It should be obvious that I am sympathetic to my characters, but I have also tried my best to absent myself from the debate. Whether I have succeeded or not is another matter, but it was my intention that readers should confront my characters as directly as possible without the author getting in the way.

The earliest writing that I incorporated into Running, the first book of Difficulty at the Beginning, dates back to my high-school days; the most recent writing is what I was doing yesterday. I am astonished when I consider it, but I have been at work on this project, off and on, for nearly fifty years. Writing is a social act, and I could not have done it without the help I received along the way from many friends who did everything from commenting upon my manuscripts to paying the rent. A complete list would go on for pages, but I cannot bring this work to an end without mentioning at least some of the people who have been essential to my writing life.

When I really was having difficulty at the beginning, I could always count upon Mark and Maxann Kasdan, Steve Savitt and Mary Lynn Baum, Ginger Eckert, and Jon Supak. My old pal and mentor David Omar White taught me what it means to work at one’s craft. In my early Vancouver years, I relied upon Bob Harlow, Tony Simmonds, Annie Simmonds, Bonnelle Strickling, Michael Williamson, Rhoda Williamson, and Judi Saltman. Much of my writing career I owe to Ed Carson who published five books of mine, edited them superbly, put up with me when I was nuts, helped me out in countless ways, and is still my friend after all these years.

More recently, my students at UBC have been a constant inspiration. My daughters, Jane and Elizabeth, have helped me out, daily, by simply being around, being themselves, and sharing their lives with me. I could not have completed this project without my wife, Mary, who, at various times, has played the roles of editor, business manager, publicist, agent, gadfly, and coach. (“Don’t worry, just write it.”) Thanks, kid.

Finally, I must mention two people whose impact upon me was absolutely central to this writing. The impulse to revisit the John Dupre material first struck me with undeniable force one night in Charleston, West Virginia; at the center of that powerful psychic event, the catalyst for it, was my host and my friend, Gordon Simmons. Difficulty at the Beginning could not have appeared in the world without the enormous energy, enthusiasm, and incomparable editorial skill of Lee Shedden at Brindle and Glass.

If I got it right this time, I must offer my thanks to all of you and to everyone else I haven’t been able to mention, but the responsibility for anything wrong with this writing rests entirely on me.

Denk, es erhält sich der Held, selbst der Untergang war ihm nur ein Vorwand, zu sein: seine letzte Geburt.
—Rilke

Keith Maillard
Vancouver
May 14, 2006