Remnants of Bohemia: Dinkytown's literati in the early 1980s

 

Book House Nights ,  by BJ Omanson.  Illustrated, 26 pp.  (Monongahela Books, 2022).  $10.

Excerpt:

          I look back on my time as a used-bookstore clerk with mixed emotions.  The pay (as has always been the case with bookstore jobs), was far from sufficient, and the hours long—yet the afternoons and evenings I spent in that bookstore were one long panoply of offbeat characters with whom I never tired of talking: hoarse-throated street musicians, poor independent scholars and morose writers of every stripe, a surprising number of highly literate janitors and other bookish workmen—even an ex-Hell’s Angel turned bibliophile—though it is the poets who most clearly stand out in my memory. 

John Macoubrie

       One of the most memorable was a small, stooped poet named John Macoubrie who looked to be well into his fifties, though such were the daily hardships of his life that he may well have been younger than he appeared. He was decidedly of the genteel, high-culture school of Wilbur and Hecht, and his knowledge of prosody was so much more extensive than my own that I decided never to mention to him that I was a poet at all. He was known to all the older established poets in Minneapolis and was well-respected. He would come into the bookstore most nights after he got off his shift as a dishwasher. He rode an old-fashioned ‘50s-era bicycle, even in winter, wearing a thread-bare tweed jacket, coughing into his sleeve and perpetually hunched against the cold. Word was that he had been married once or possibly twice, suggesting a prior state of stability—but was now in reduced circumstances, maintaining a bare subsistence in a tiny rented room. On every visit to the bookstore he would purchase a book, but never more than one, and never for more than a quarter or fifty cents. This restricted him mostly to used copies of the old paperback Laurel series of pocketbook poets. Frequently he would conclude his purchase with some lines from that particular poet which he had by heart. On one occasion, as he paid a quarter for the Laurel Edition of Longfellow, I commented that it was heartening to see that there were still one or two readers of Longfellow left in the world. He replied that Longfellow was unjustly under-rated and, to prove his point, recited on the spot, from memory, several stanzas from “The Jewish Cemetery.”  The extent of poetry he could recite at will in several languages—from Goethe to Valéry to Lowell—was something wonderful and, in Dinkytown in those days, it was a gift that was widely admired.

James Naiden

          James was brusque, did not suffer fools at all and was merciless in dealing with writers’ inflated and easily-bruised egos, for which he had no patience. His reviews, though generous at times, were unsparing and in conversation, to your face, he could be downright insulting. I am sure he was heartily disliked in many quarters. Of his past I could glean only that he had been a smoke-jumper for a time in the Canadian Rockies, as well as an actor, and had worked as a speechwriter for Eugene McCarthy. James was the first true man-of-letters I had ever known, by which I mean one who supports himself solely by his pen, by writing and editing, without resorting either to teaching or hackwork. He lived frugally, drove a beat-up old station wagon, and always appeared in the same worn coat.

         As he had been a part of the Minneapolis literary scene for many years, James had a large store of anecdotes about Minnesota writers, minor and major, living and dead. He was skeptical of celebrity and, with an incisive phrase or two, could cut an inflated reputation down to size. I recall acerbic comments about Robert Bly on one or two occasions, though Bly was a poet he had published.

         I remember very well a story he told about John Berryman. Once, many years before, Berryman had stopped by Naiden’s apartment when James happened to be in the shower. As the door was unlocked, Berryman let himself in, which he had done on many previous occasions. As he relaxed on the couch, thumbing through a book, the front door flew open and in stomped the landlord, huffing and shouting for Naiden and demanding two months’ back rent.  Berryman rose from the couch and blustered back,  
        

What does he owe?
— A hundred bucks!

Berryman pulled out two fifty-dollar bills, shoved the landlord out into the hallway and threw the bills after him. It all took place while James was in the shower. By the time he emerged the landlord was gone and the rent paid up. James vowed he would pay Berryman back as soon as he was able, but Berryman refused to accept his money.

Naiden could be a tough character. Once he returned to his parked car to find a tow-truck driver with his arm though a partially rolled-down window. The driver was from a local, universally-hated towing company with predatory methods, and he had failed to notice James’ German Shepherd in the back seat, which now had his jaws locked on the poor man’s forearm. James responded as though the driver were a thief breaking into his car, and refused to order the dog to release his grip until the police arrived, though the man was bleeding and clearly in pain. When the police finally showed up, James called off his dog. The driver threatened to sue, but James never heard from him or his company again. The police took no action.

Another side of James’s character is revealed by the following story. During one especially bitter winter, he chanced to form a friendship with a home-less Vietnam vet, a Lakota named Henry Walking Bear. James was concerned about his sleeping in the open on nights when the thermometer fell well below zero, and repeatedly tried to arrange for shelter for him. When such efforts failed, as they always did, James would invite Henry up to his apartment for a game of chess and a sandwich, just to get him out of the cold for a spell. One afternoon I found James in the café drinking coffee. As I sat at his table, he told me that Henry Walking Bear had been found frozen to death in an alley with a kitten, still alive, curled beneath his coat. In his pocket was a piece of paper with James’ name and address. James learned of Walking Bear’s death when the police contacted him and asked him to come down to the morgue to identify the body of a homeless Indian found frozen in an alley with a kitten under his coat.

The itinerant playwright

          Another poet who came regularly into the bookstore (and whose name I have long forgotten) was in his late twenties or early thirties, I would guess. He was in most ways the complete opposite of Macoubrie or White, being full of nervous, aggressive energy, brash, and outspoken to the point of rudeness. When I was in a certain mood I found him intolerable, but usually he was worth enduring, simply for his colorful, ranting monologues. Like Macoubrie, he rode a bicycle, but it was an expensive racing machine. He worked as a janitor by night and read and wrote for most of each day. I have no idea if he had any formal education. All he wrote were blank-verse plays, in a dense but vigorous Elizabethan style, and what he showed to me seemed remarkably strong.  He claimed to write every day, a hundred lines or more, but what I saw of his work was always highly finished. He would hang around the bookstore at odd hours and, whenever a literary-minded patron entered the premises, especially if he looked as though he might be an academic, my friend would thrust some pages under his nose and demand his opinion. He was never quite so obnoxious that I had to shoo him out the door, and even at first glance his writing was impressive, so I just sat back at such times and watched the encounter with interest and amusement. It was surprising how many of his professorial victims actually took five or ten minutes to read a half-page or so, rather than sending him to the devil. His nervy, off-the-cuff spiels disarmed and bemused them, and sparked their curiosity.

          As he was my own age, more or less, and we were both in similar economic straits with no professional prospects, I showed him some of my sonnets. He was only mildly impressed, and criticized my lack of prosodic rigor, but he approved my adherence to antiquated forms and since, like me, he had received nothing from editors and other poets over the years but admonitions to write in free verse, he accepted me as a fellow-sufferer. He was a vagabond, he told me, and was ‘just travelling through.’ I don’t remember where he had come from prior to stopping for several months in Minneapolis, but the time came when he no longer dropped by and I never heard from him again. Somewhere in the cavernous recesses of my old house, among hundreds of boxes, I have a typed copy of one of his plays, but I haven’t seen it in years.  

James C. White

          Sometimes Macoubrie would be in the company of a friend of his, also a poet, a tall, fine, patrician-looking gentleman with a splendid shock of white hair, whose learning and kindly manners matched his friend’s. He looked for all the world—in his manner, dress and speech—like a retired professor, but I seem to remember that he was in fact a railroad man. I had many conversations with him about poets, especially Yeats and Auden, but I never learned his name—nor he mine, for that matter. I remember him standing in profile, a little distance down the aisle, reaching up, pulling down a book, turning a few pages at leisure and offering a comment on its author—not to me, necessarily, but to anyone who might be within earshot, or to no one in particular. He frequently purchased a book, or several, and he usually came in with a book or two under his arm—dog-eared, stuffed with papers—and once, when I watched him thumb through one of his books for some reference or other, I saw that it was heavily annotated on every page, above and below the text block and in the margins, with no white space left at all. He clearly used his books hard, and made them his own. ~~~ Years later I learned from James Naiden that his name was James C. White and that my memory of his being a railroad man was correct: he worked as a switchman for the Great Northern Railroad.

Bert

          And then there was Bert, a great shambling inscrutable bear of a man, loaded down with books, papers and God-knows-what-all overflowing from the oversized satchel that was a permanent part of his attire. Yet for all his bear-like attributes, Bert Brock was a master of invisibility. He could somehow slip by you on the street or in a crowded hall as inconspicuously as a cat. Settled into his chair behind the counter in the corner of the bookstore, he was as quietly magisterial as one of those cloud-hidden mountains on a Chinese scroll, existing always at an indeterminate distance, shrouded in silence and mist to the point of disappearance. I could never decide what Bert thought about anything. He was never vague or evasive—not in the least—but invariably what he said was never what I was anticipating. Now and then I would attempt to comprehend his taste in literature. I would ask him about Dickens, for instance, and he would bring up the long description of London fog at the opening of Bleak House. He liked that, liked it very much indeed—but that was the end of Dickens. Mention Housman and he would immediately quote ...the cherry now / is hung with bloom along the bough. He liked that very much as well, but the rest of Housman was of marginal interest. I decided (without any real evidence), that Bert didn't read books like the rest of us, but consulted them like oracles, landing on obscure random passages by a mysterious process known only to himself. I came to believe that, for Bert, a turned page was like an overturned tarot card, a glimpse into the workings of the cosmos. But I had no idea, really.

 

McCosh

          One of the great old characters of Dinkytown, the bookseller Melvin McCosh, was no longer there by the time we arrived, but I had heard about him so often (James Wright had been one of his regulars in the late ‘50s), that his presence was still palpable. And he was still alive. The owner of the Book House, Jim Cummings, had known McCosh for many years and still had dealings with him. Every so often Jim would drive out to call on McCosh, and I sometimes rode along with him. Some years earlier, McCosh had closed his Dinkytown shop and purchased a great old decommissioned, decomposing sanitarium of some sort, a number of miles outside of Minneapolis. There were two or three stories, each with dozens of rooms ranged along a central hallway that seemed to go on forever, and all of which McCosh filled with thousands of books. It was a bibliophile’s paradise, or nightmare, depending on your perspective. McCosh himself was a full-blown crank and character with something of a reputation for lechery and looking like a leftover from the 19th century, with a long flowing Whitmanesque beard, shabby clothes and crazed rheumy eyes. I remember rambling conversations with him, sitting at one of the long stainless-steel tables in his great high-ceilinged institutional kitchen, about the size of a small gymnasium. The talk was always of books, though on one occasion I asked him about Dylan, who had lived in Dinkytown during the time that McCosh had his bookstore there. As I recollect, McCosh was dismissive of Dylan, whom he remembered mostly as a minor nuisance, hanging about and taking up space, but never spending much money—not someone he would have remembered at all, but that so many people had asked about him over the years.

Late hours, peculiar patrons

          As in any used bookstore, the later the hour the more peculiar the patrons, and the Book House was open later than any bookstore in Minneapolis. One of the most peculiar was one Emmett Smith, a rather dashing gentleman in sweptback hair and sunglasses with the air of a 1920s film star who, incongruously, would drive up in his early-‘50s pickup from somewhere miles to the south where he raised goats on a small farm. I never inquired about his education, but he spoke in elaborate, perfectly-formed sentences worthy of Dickens or Trollope, though his figures of speech were closer to Donne in their reliance on startling juxtapositions. He would reel out these extended syntactical showpieces extemporaneously in a kind of tumbling drunken spiel: long oratorial periods declaimed in a loud carnival voice with irreproachable grammar, the entire effect rendered all the more surreal by his subject-matter, which was primarily goat husbandry, the Bedouin and T.E. Lawrence, interspersed with Persian proverbs in melodious Arabic—for he had sometime earlier in his life spent years in the Middle East with the Peace Corps and the experience had crazed him in some deep essential way.

Remnants of Bohemia

       A few years later, the critic and poet Dana Gioia would publish a worthy little essay, “Notes toward a New Bohemia,” in which he suggests that the ‘old urban bohemia’ found in certain cities across the country, had largely died out after the 1960s for a whole host of reasons, including changing cultural tides and rising real estate prices. Dinkytown was a typical case in point. I had first come to know it in the late ‘60s when I would drive up from Illinois to visit my brother Richard, a grad student at the university who shared a small house with several other students along Dinkytown’s northern margin. By the time I was working there a decade and a half later, many of the small bookstores and coffee houses of that ‘old bohemia’ had already vanished, along with a number of the older writers and artists themselves, some of whom, like James Wright, had been around since the late ‘50s.

       At the time of his essay (1994), Gioia could still find hope in the proliferation of small independent bookstores across the country that were hosting poetry readings and forming literary communities around themselves but, in the intervening years, with the rise of online commerce, most such bookstores have gone under and, in any case, a solitary bookstore cannot by itself sustain a community.

       The most basic requirement for a bonafide bohemia is an adequate supply of cheap habitations and informal gathering places. An analogy might be made to an old, undisturbed woodland with enough standing dead trees full of snug cavities and enough hollow logs, burrows and brush piles that a community of birds and small mammals could survive through a harsh Minnesota winter.

       In the years I was at the Book House, there were still enough footloose writers and intellectuals frequenting the bookstores, cafés and odd crannies of Dinkytown, and foraging in its small corner groceries, to justify its designation as a true bohemia, but the tide was turning. The number of cozy niches of conviviality and conversation were decreasing by the year, replaced by loud, bustling pizza joints, sub shops and the first video arcades, all catering to a more restless, impatient generation of students and regulars possessing a very different sensibility than their predecessors.

       It is easy to romanticize bohemia, though less so if you have known it at first hand. It can be a terrible life. It wears you down, erodes your health and perhaps your personality, and is absolute hell on relationships, but it does leave you free to read and write exactly as you wish, on your own time and in your own way, without obligation to anyone or anything— and that is no small matter.

       The poets I knew in Dinkytown in the 1980s will never be found in the Norton Anthology, or discussed in graduate seminars. But they existed all the same, and led lives as dedicated to literature and the arts as their more widely-published academic counterparts, filling their notebooks with original, even brilliant work, most of which was destined never to see the light of day. They were closer to what 19th-century Parisians knew as “garret poets” —threadbare literati living in spartan surroundings with none of the respectability or comfort of the bourgeoisie, distinguished by discouragement, doggedness and persistent rasping coughs.