Ever since I first learned how to string words together, I’ve enjoyed writing letters to my friends and family. When I was eleven, I was sent to camp in the North Woods of Maine, not so much for my pleasure, but because my mother and father were slashing their way through a vicious divorce that summer and didn’t want me or my younger brother around to witness the carnage. He was too young for camp, and they sent him to spend the summer with his paternal grandparents on Cape Cod. I wish I’d gone with him. Every week we campers had to produce a letter at least one page long, on camp stationery, or we weren’t allowed to spend the allowance money our parents sent us on candy, gum or soda at the camp store. Because most of the other kids considered writing home cruel and unusual punishment, the Solon who ran the joint deftly turned the weekly task into the sort of training routine people use on dogs. Do this, and you get a treat. Don’t do it, and you not only don’t get a treat, but you also get extra kitchen and latrine duty. Dogs don’t have to pay for their treats in cash, of course, but the camp was a pretty lavish operation (in addition to the usual canoeing, swimming, archery, hiking and Woodsy Lore, it offered horseback riding, sailing and riflery) and it squeezed every penny it could get out of the campers and their families. The weekly letter home was a vital part of the camp’s economy, which depended on regular raves from its inmates to the people paying for their expensive incarceration, to insure repeat business.
Well, I wrote home all right, and not just for the candy. I had a lot to say about the Camping Experience, and not all of it was complimentary. The activities were fine, and I enjoyed them, and I said so, at length. But the camp was very serious about Building Character, which meant that it was run on more or less military lines, like a Boy Scout camp but without the cool uniforms and badges. Reveille (or a cracked recording of it) sounded through the PA system at five ayem; we formed up in ranks around the flagpole and saluted as Old Gory was raised by a senior counselor, responded to a roll call, and got marched to the dining hall where we ate swill. For the rest of the day we exercised variously and strenuously, under constant exhortation to work better, harder, stronger, tougher. The counselors yelled at us exactly like drill sergeants. After a summer at that camp, Basic Training in the Army was dèja vu.
The problem was that Army drill sergeants are trained professional soldiers who are (mostly) very disciplined themselves, and (usually) know when necessary harassment crosses the line into egregious bullying, And our counselors were all college kids, mostly jocks and frat-boys, let loose with more or less absolute power over a bunch of children. The bullying went on constantly, and it didn’t stop with lights-out, because the counselors enjoyed it, and because it was at least tacitly encouraged by the camp owner.
For children of privilege in the 1950s (and I was certainly one), the kind of character-building that went on at the camp was no different than the social Darwinism which prevailed in the prep schools and élite colleges we attended later. We were all being raised to take up the reins of power as corporate executives, lawyers, bankers, politicians and occasionally actual career military officers, not to mention spies, in the titanic struggle against Communism during the Cold War, and it was a given that our young asses had to be kicked hard, wide and frequently in order to toughen us up. Wimps, weenies and weaklings had to be weeded out. Life was Earnest, Life was Real, and you don’t become CEO of National General Inc. or Director of the CIA by being warm and fuzzy.
So as with the British élite in the 19th century who endured very expensive sadism at their “public schools” to prepare them for ruling the world, we were trained by bullies to become bullies ourselves, at Camp Great Oaks From Little Acorns Grow. That was its name – I’m not imaginative enough to make up something so gloriously ridiculous.
But I didn’t like being bullied. Well, none of the boys in my squad did, either, but they settled for scrawling a few lines home, writing in enormous capitals to fill the page, saying they were fine, camp was fun, please send more money. But my first letter home filled several pages with complaints about the bullying, along with positive reports about the activities, particularly the riding and sailing (I’d already had some instruction in both sports and was good at them).
That letter introduced me to the concept of censorship. I was called out of the camp stable one morning just as I was about to step up on my horse, and ordered to report to the office, where the owner informed me that my whiney letter was a disgrace, and had to be rewritten on the spot, under his guidance. He made me cut all the stuff about cuffs on the head, kicks in the ass, slaps and punches. He vetoed the description of my whole squad-tent being rousted out of our cots at three in the morning by our drunk counselor (all the counselors had little stashes of beer and booze which they bought on their days off in the nearest town) to do laps around the camp perimeter because... well, because he could, since he was older and bigger and and stronger than we were. And the owner certainly didn’t want my gripes about the food reaching home, because at the prices he charged, he knew damn well my parents would be horrified to learn that he was serving us slop any self-respecting hog would have turned down.
“Tompkins, you have a negative attitude,” he said, “and we want to help you with that.” Mister B, as we were encouraged to call him, wasn’t really a sadist. He really believed that the only way to train young boys to become crew-cut Republicans fighting for the Right during that perilous era was to beat the crap out of them.
So the letter my parents got – I think only my mother read it, because my father had already moved in with his girlfriend by then – was just about the good stuff. Mister B was pleased, and told me I was finally showing Camp Spirit.
I went on writing letters, copiously, through my prep-school, college and Army days. By the way, even the Army didn’t censor my letters the way Mister B did – well, not until I was sent to my post-training assignment at a top-secret base in West Germany, but that’s another story. And when I became an actor, I kept writing letters, because I spent most of my career in various regional theaters or on the road. I’d always dreamed of becoming a fiction writer, and I continue, today, to grind away on short stories and novels. But fiction is hard, and writing letters is easy, as long as the person on the other end is more or less sympathetic to one’s notions, or even if he or she isn’t. You pick up on something your recipient wrote in a previous letter to you, and set your mind loose, letting your fingers do the walking – first, in my case, in longhand, later on a typewriter, and nowadays on a computer keyboard. It’s a chain of free association held together by precarious links of logic which, of course, often break, resulting in everything from mild bemusement through irritated bafflement to downright anger on the part of the people who mull over my missives.
Finally a friend named Alan Albright, with whom I had exchanged letters for a couple of years, told me about a small publication out of Portland, Oregon called Black Lamb, whose editor, Terry Ross, was trying to revive the art of the personal essay. He accepted no fiction or poetry, and although he allowed brief snippets of memoir, he discouraged self-indulgent navel-gazing. Alan already had a regular column in Black Lamb, in which he described his adventures and encounters as a modern nomad roaming the country in his house on wheels, which began as converted commercial van and eventually advanced to a fully-equipped RV. His column was slugged “Wayfaring Stranger,” and I admired his terse, muscular descriptions of a whole subset of American society, traveling people, gypsies without the clannishness and scamming mind-set of the actual Roma, who live under the radar of corporate America.
Alan had enjoyed our correspondence, and he told me that if I cut and polished my letters a bit, they’d be a nice fit for Black Lamb. So I wrote a new account, as if I were writing a letter to a friend, cut it down, cleaned it up a little, and sent it to Terry. It was called “Mugged,” and jumped off from my encounter with a gun-wielding crackhead to a meditation on the interdependent relationship between cops, robbers and victims in New York City. Terry accepted it, and asked me to become a regular contributor.
I had to come up with a name for my column. In England and America, from the 18th century through most of the 19th, highly literate people often kept what were known as commonplace books. These were not diaries, but collections of quotations from other writers, although some of the later examples began to veer into memoir and opinionating. I decided to write installments in a commonplace book for Black Lamb, sticking to the memorious vignette and opinion part of the term and leaving out the quotations except when they fit whatever essay I was writing.
Commonplace, as a noun originally meant a subject or topic familiar to most people, and only in more recent usage acquired its pejorative sense, as an adjective, of stale and trite. So I titled my column “Commonplaces,” and did my best to avoid banality. I hoped that anyone reading my essays might, at some point, connect with something I’d written, nod and think, “Yup, been there, done that.” Even my wilder rants, I figured, might at least get a reader thinking about his or her own opinions on my subjects.
Black Lamb’s gone now, alas, so I’ve started my own blog. I’ll be recycling some of the commonplaces I wrote for Terry in modified form (this piece is an example), but mostly writing new stuff. So welcome to “Ragbag Mind.” Hope you enjoy these scraps and patches from my life. I welcome comments of any kind.