I RESUMED MY STUDIES IN THE FALL. An elective was a course in Anthropology - my first - and somehow in some registration mix-up, this turned out not to be "Intro to American Archaeology 101" (as advertised, and for which I was all now primed) - but an intense specialty course in Eskimo Culture - given by the late John Honigmann, a dominant world authority on Boreal cultures. Honigmann had actually lived among the Sea Ice Eskimo. At first I was rather disappointed, but on looking back realize it was one of the most engaging courses I ever had in college. Sandwiched in with his often bawdy recollections of sleeping nine abreast in igloos at night, while the stone bowl passed back and forth overhead for collecting urine (needed for tanning!) and other customs and quirks of the quaint natives, he drilled us unmercifully on weapon types and skills of the boreal peoples - till we knew our leisters, grails, ulus, and umiaks versus kyaks forwards and backwards. An odd attainment, that (even odder) would stand me in good stead many years down the road, when once I was called upon in an Inuit Village on Kotzebue Sound and 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska itself - to identify certain artifacts there displayed!. Never say there is ANY knowledge of things which is "not useful."

I cracked on the books in Science - any science - this was my passion! Botany, biology, paleontology (vertebrate as well as invertebrate: a year of each), historical and structural geology. I couldn't get enough! My grades soared! I ventured into Philosophy - particularly the Philosophy of Science. I came under the sway of Paul Edwards, an authority on Bertrand Russell - whose pithy pro-science, anti-clerical views early-on jibed congenially with mine. And so it came time to declare in earnest. I MUST pick a Major!

(But first...Edwards was a Solipsist. The philosophical position that "I, and only I, exist! (All else is a product of my imagination)". Interestingly, this postion cannot be refuted by logic! This troubled me no end in those days. One morning as I was walking down University Place toward the Campus, (I used to get off at the Cooper Square Station on the IRT in my long Hegira in from Suburban Connecticut), I spied Prof. Edwards walking along the sidewalk ahead of me. A NYC bus suddenly emerged from the traffic pulling right into the curb ahead at high speed. For a moment the thought raced through my mind: "What if I were to push Edwards here , all unknowing of my presence just behind him, direct into the path of the bus as it pulls in to the stop?"

What then? If he expired on the spot and if he were right(!), then I, too, and bus and all - University Place itself - Mon Dieu! - would expire also! It seemed a most drastic measure to take - but then... he had taught us that logic alone cannot refute this position! "Action" is required somewhere. Ultimately. Well, Solipsism has remained one of life's great mysteries for me - but sometimes at night, I wake and ponder: did I "blow" a great opportunity here? Might I have been the one to go "down" (after Edwards, of course) in the history books with mighty Plato and all the rest as the "philosopher" who solved the ancient riddle of Solipsism?)

Now, I realize I shall never know...

Sigh.

The sciences - all of them - beckoned, but I could not decide! Profiling and tests revealed that my greatest skills were "verbal" and counselors urged me to "think about" a career in writing. A new "major" in fact, was being introduced that very year at NYU - "Creative Writing." This was given under the English Department, one of whose faculty in fact, Prof. Seymour Betsky, whose Basic Writing Course I had already completed, was personally recommending me in a group of hand-picked hopefuls to study under a visiting professor: no less than famed Irwin Shaw, author of the acclaimed Young Lions and other works. Shaw was newly arrived from his celebrated sojourn in Israel, newly arrived itself out of its war-of-creation, and the days and derring-do of the Irgun, Moshe Dayan and rifle-toting Sabras...

My Irish grandmother, whose vocabulary rivaled Webster's, was the only one in the family who ever thought I would be able to do anything - and she had always plumped for "writing." You "have the gift" she would say, and "...it comes down through the Irish". So I followed on and opted for a writing and journalism career. As an aside, my son has in his possession some parchmenty old papers with scribblings from one of these progenitors (who happens though in this case, to have been English not Irish - but I am not putting too fine a point on any of it... LOL) Christiana Rogers was her name, and I believe she was on my Grandmother's side. In fact, I believe her father owned a celebrated button factory in Early Industrial England - maybe in the mid- to late-1700's (?). Somewhere I have a sketch she once penned - of a peaceful old mill-type building by a stream... I intuit it may have been the very factory... Christiana at any rate, as all proper young ladies of the time - and the later Victorian Age - developed her Drawing Room skills to the max, and there are several pages with her tiny, fine, pen-and-ink sketches of spinning wheels, hearths, toddlers romping on the floor, and other glimpses of English domestic life at the time - to which little sketches she often appended what seem to be poems (I have tried to type in here right under her penned lines, what I think it is she wrote...). Thus, Christiana... perhaps her genes (as well as those of some garrolous (and doubtless quarrelsome) Son of the Old Sod) may course yet through my veins...

Shaw and I often clashed. He would read and dissect my copy before my peers and found, as Betsky, much to endorse. But the big drawback, he felt, was that I showed no inherent interest in the "human scene" - and wrote sort of set pieces built around Nature and Nature's backdrop. At the time, new-come from my adventures out West, I was writing about things like red ant mounds full of glass beads - which enthralled everyone, (http://www.bwpowell.com/without1/chp4bk3custer.html) but they and Shaw were always waiting for some dramatis personae to enter Stage Left and complete the scene, and somehow my pieces seemed complete to me without all this added artifice. LOL!

But I learned many things from this guy! He knew his craft forwards and backwards - and his tales of his personal friendship with John Steinbeck and Robert Capra (with whom he had done his coverage of the birth of Israel) were worth the admission alone!

The next semester, I took a fling at Journalism - an entirely different wordsmith world. Not even given under the English Department - but over in the School of Business instead. And gone were the romanticists, the would-be novelists with requisite Stage Left entrances: this was a hard-core no nonsense crowd - newspaper and future newspaper writers and hacks of all kinds. Too much of the course was devoted to mindless memorizing of the virtues of Peter Zwingli and the later attainments of the Ochs family (who owned the New York Times) and doubtless endowed some of the party line here... But again, I learned a lot more about what makes your real writer in the marketplace: he knows type, production, how to interview, and how to ferret out the actual storyline and not waste time - or money. Later, like knowledge of the Inuit, all to stand me in good stead, as they say.

A year or so later, I graduated with a BA in Creative Writing. And now I was put to the test: to find a job that needed a "writer." For months and months I scanned the Want Ads of the Big Apple papers but to no avail. I filled out endless forms and had endless job interviews, mostly in NYC and with job placement agencies. It seemed "writers' jobs" was not a clearly defined genre: it was a vast amorphous field with low-paying newspaper "entry" jobs; publishing house openings for "research assistants" and other "go-fer" slots; and way off somewhere if you had some kind of pull or "knew someone" - something called "advertising and Public Relations"... All pretty discouraging, and so to keep my hand in at something, I took a job in an oldtime, picturesque New England boatyard up a saltwater creek that drained into Greenwich Cove. I say job... actually, it was to work off my yard charges for storing my sloop there during the winter past, and related costs. I was pretty discouraged.

How I got a miraculous break one day and a job in publishing at long last, is really the subject of the next Book - Book Four in this Revelations - and so I will not repeat myself here. You may follow the path through the thicket of American Gothic if you will.

But I must alert you, I now share but a tiny part of Center Stage, in "AG," with one of the most intriguing characters I ever met - George W. Rhine, my first boss. For "AG" is really about him, but many others - including me - enter (and depart)Stage Left here, (Shaw would have flipped over George W. Rhine!), and this work does cover how I was at last launched upon the Sea of Letters, so is a valid inclusion in my Chronicle.