HIGH LITERATURE, TOILET PAPER & GREEN TEA

One day in the Spring of 1979, while sitting with my friend Steffan in a San Francisco Chinese cafe having green tea and egg rolls, he asked me quite bluntly:  "Who is the real Ben Douglass?"

Steffan often waxed philosophical about the world and its primary players, especially when he had a bit too much to drink.  This was the first time, though, his philosophical searchlight directed itself at me personally.  I was intrigued by the question and after a deliberate and measured pause, I decided to play the game.

I told him that the state of my soul at the time was rather complicated and couldn't be adequately explained to another without reading first three novels that had had a moving anf profound influence on my life.  These novels were:  Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov; Knulp by Hermann Hesse; and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft by George Gissing.

Goncharov's Oblomov tells the story of a wastrel member of the Russian gentry class who spends his whole life dreaming and wanting to be happy like other people but dies a very lonely man, passed over by friends, his first love and life in general.  Hesse's Knulp was the author's spiritual autobiography so to speak.  It tells of a wandering tramp who never does settle down to the domestic life like his former classmates and friends, but always in search of freedom on the road.  In the end he's speaking with God and re-evaluating his life and finds that he couldn't have lived any other way even if he had wanted to.  While he lay dying in a snow drift, babbling to God about his life, he finds true freedom.  Gissing's The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft is simply about failed literary ambition. 

I told Steffan if he would just take the time to read and try and understand each of these novels, he would fully appreciate the hopes, dreams, failures, and the philosophical condition of my soul.  Later that evening I let him borrow copies of these three novels.

Several weeks later we found ourselves at the same Chinese cafe having lunch.  Steffan had brought the books along with him.  I was eager to know his opinion on my reading material and he didn't disappoint me.  He had only gotten half-way through Goncharov's Oblomov before tossing it aside.  He claimed he came very close to using the novel as toilet paper.

While going on and on about the novel in particular and Russian literature in general, he used phrases like "moral bankruptcy," "spiritual illness" and "tragic oneupmanship."  I remember him leaning across the table and wagging his finger in my face and saying quite loudly so everyone in the cafe could hear, "Keep on reading this crap and you'll end up just like them."  He then gave me a big wink.

I immediately felt quite insulted and reminded him rather tersely that when he asks to peek into a man's soul he should be prepared for anything-and if not-don't be asking in the first place.  After a dramatic pause on his part and a thousand yard stare, he grabbed the Russian novel, tore out several pages, stuffed them in his back pocket and smiled saying:  "I need something to wipe my ass tonight."