The Athens of America

James Atlas

 

THAT IT HAPPENED in Boston was unsettling—more so than if it had happened somewhere else in America. New York and Washington, D.C., made sense as targets for the hijackers: the centers of financial and political power. But Boston was “the Athens of America,” as it was known during an earlier phase of its history—“a city of great statesmen, wealthy patrons, inspiring artists, and profound thinkers,” according to the historian Thomas O’Connor. Its claim to being a bastion of civilization was visible in its monuments and institutions: the Boston Athenaeum, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Massachusetts statehouse. Its history was visible to anyone who walked the streets. Bunker Hill, the Freedom Trail, the Old North Church: it was here that the American Revolution had been fought.

It also boasted the largest concentration of colleges and universities in America. The most famous of these, Harvard, situated on the other side of the Charles River, had produced generations of leaders in business and politics over its nearly four hundred years in existence. But it was the “leaders” in literature that I cared about. I had arrived as a freshman at Harvard in 1967 with the ambition to become a writer but unaware of how many of my literary heroes had gone there: T. S. Eliot, James Agee, E. E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, Norman Mailer. Some were there at that very moment, as I had learned from the course catalogue that arrived at my home in Evanston, Illinois, that summer. Robert Lowell, widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, was teaching an advanced poetry course; so was Elizabeth Bishop, who had served as U.S. poet laureate, and Robert Fitzgerald, the translator of The Odyssey.

Lowell’s world was Boston, where he had grown up among the Brahmins of Back Bay; his family had a townhouse on “hardly passionate Marlborough Street,” as he wrote in Life Studies. In “For the Union Dead,” he described a statue to the Civil War dead on the Boston Common:

 

Parking lots luxuriate like civic

sand piles in the heart of Boston.

A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin-colored girders

braces the tingling Statehouse, shaking

 

over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw

and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry

on St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief,

propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.

 

There were also poems about Cambridge, where Lowell had once lived in an apartment on Ellery Street. His roommate was Delmore Schwartz, who wrote a poem titled “Cambridge, Spring 1937”:

 

At last the air fragrant, the bird’s bubbling whistle

Succinct in the unknown unsettled trees:

O little Charles, beside the Georgian colleges

And milltown New England; at last the wind soft,

The sky unmoving, and the dead look

Of factory windows separate, at last,

From windows gray and wet . . .

 

It was this world that I would come to know as my own over the next decade, from 1967 to 1977, where I spent my undergraduate years, got married, and wrote my first book.

Were there more bookstores in Harvard Square than anywhere else in America? Maybe Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley had as many; maybe Book Row, the street of used-book shops on Fourth Avenue in New York. But they were long gone by now . . .

One day not long after my arrival in Cambridge, I stood outside a tiny bookshop on Plympton Street looking through the plate-glass window. There was a sign overhead:

 

GROLIER POETRY BOOK SHOP, INC.

EST. 1927

 

In the window display were books of poetry, old and new, and announcements of local readings. I pushed open the door and entered the shop, a single room lined with book-crammed floor-to-ceiling shelves. On a table in the center of the room were more books, piles of them; on the walls above the shelves were framed photographs of every major American poet of the century, from Robert Frost to Conrad Aiken, Archibald MacLeish to Ezra Pound. Seated in the corner was an elfin white-haired man whom I took to be the proprietor. I went over and introduced myself—“I’m a poet”—and he gave me his name: Gordon Cairnie. (Did he have an Irish accent? I can’t remember.)

I would get to know him well during my college years. Whenever a poet came to town, the Grolier was the first stop. In the late afternoon, the Cambridge poets—there were many, though not, as Yeats said of the Rhymers’ Club that met at the Cheshire Cheese in London, “too many.” Impossible: Cambridge was a poetry-besotted community. You could go to the Woodberry Poetry Room in Lamont Library, put on earphones, and listen to Eliot recite The Waste Land in his funerial voice; you could visit the back room of a restaurant with brick walls on Mass. Ave. that I forget the name of and listen to local poets recite their often terrible verse, or get up and recite your own; you could drop in at 21 South Street, the white clapboard home of the Advocate, the college’s literary magazine, and listen to undergraduates recite their work; or you could buy a ticket to a reading by a major poet at Emerson Hall. (I heard Robert Bly give a thrilling recital of his anti–Vietnam War poems there.) And it wasn’t just a Harvard culture; the poets who gathered at Charlie’s Kitchen, off Harvard Square, after readings were Boston poets, Somerville poets, Cambridge poets. I was twenty, and had arrived at the center of the world—a world of civility and grace and literary fellowship. (Also—why be naïve—one that displayed resentment, competitiveness, crude ambition, and other unpalatable human qualities. But how could it be otherwise? “Culture,” the nineteenth-century critic Matthew Arnold famously declared, “is the best that has been thought and said.” And the worst.)

Then there was Schoenhof’s, on Mount Auburn Street, which specialized in recondite foreign titles—the books on display in the window tended toward members of the Frankfurt School, the Structuralists, and Continental philosophers like E. M. Cioran and Roland Barthes. Mr. Schoenhof, the shy, slight, bespectacled proprietor, had exacting standards. If you asked for a book that he disapproved of—which happened, in my experience, more often than not—you would know because he didn’t have a copy on hand, and would have to order it, which he did with an ostentatious show of reluctance, muttering to himself as he filled out the invoice. I spent hours in Schoenhof’s, reading and not buying the books. I don’t know how he made a living; others also browsed for protracted lengths of time, only to leave the store empty-handed. But he seemed not to care. Unlike every other bookstore owner I’ve ever known, Mr. Schoenhof was a fanatical reader: he would sit behind the counter, head bent over some thick volume, and react with irritation if someone approached him with the apparent intention of purchasing a book. It was all he could do to ring up the sale.

There were others, too, that I could name, such as the Starr Bookshop, at the base of the strange, pseudo-medieval castle known as the Lampoon Building, which had two wooden bins out front where you might come across, as I once did, a complete set of Byron’s journals (I still have it). Like Schoenhof’s, the Starr was almost belligerently naïve about its function as a business; the prices penciled on the inside cover were so low that they made you feel guilty about buying the book.

I didn’t just frequent bookstores; I wasn’t as high-minded as all that. There was the legendary Club 47 behind the Coop, where Joan Baez, Tom Rush, and Taj Mahal performed; the Algiers coffee house (still there) and Peasant Stock, where you sat at long wooden refectory tables; the Plough and Stars, not far from Harvard Square, which served Guinness in pint glasses; the brick, barnlike Brattle Theatre, where you could watch Casablanca at midnight in the company of an audience that knew the entire movie by heart and recited the dialogue aloud.

And if I tired of Cambridge, I could jump in my bright red VW Beetle and drive across the Mass. Avenue Bridge to Boston—the glittery rectangular tower of the Prudential Building (“the Pru”) rising in the night sky, the old-fashioned lights on the bridge aglow, the headlights of the traffic on Mem. Drive streaming—and go to Durgin-Park, at Faneuil Hall, with its red-checked tablecloths and flamboyantly rude waitresses; or to the Union Oyster House, where the wives of John Hancock and Samuel Adams had dined while their husbands were off at war; or to Anthony’s Pier 4, on the harbor, for lobster fresh off the boat.

And if I tired of Boston . . . But I never did.