WAS

In March of 1888, the worst blizzard in U.S. history killed four hundred people on the east coast. All the world was told about that, and is still told about it. But the 1888 blizzard I was told about happened a month earlier in Des Moines, Iowa, and I was told about it because that blizzard killed my grandfather.

His name was Peter Martin Hansen, and only a few years earlier he had arrived in this country from Norway, hoping to become an artist. He'd helped paint the decorations inside the new Iowa State Capitol building. But such jobs were scarce. He had a wife and four children to feed and clothe and shelter. So he took what work he could, and in writing up his death, the Des Moines Register called him "a laborer."

The morning after the storm, his little wife Bertha had reported him missing, and the police went searching for him, and found his body frozen in the ice of the Des Moines river. In his shirt sleeves. No overcoat to keep him warm. And where were his gold shirt studs, his wedding band with the little diamond in it? Bertha was sure he had been robbed and murdered.

He hadn't. The police tramped patiently through the snowdrifts, tracing his movements on the fatal night. And located the overcoat, the gold studs, and the ring. At a grocer's, who had accepted them from a young immigrant already drunk, in payment for a bottle of whiskey. How soon after that Peter Martin Hansen headed for home no one could say, but there was a bridge to cross, and in the whirling snow he missed the bridge, and toppled down an embankment into the river.

He was thirty-four years old.

CHARISMA, CHARACTER, & COMMONSENSE

The fall of beautiful James McGreevey had nothing to do with homosexualty, a word that makes good headlines, and everything to do with character, a word that rarely makes it into the news at all. McGreevey's accomplishments lift my spirits as I read them. He fought as hard for gay partnership rights as to save watersheds and make the rich pay their fair share of taxes. When he resigned last week as Democratic Governor of New Jersey, I was sorry to see him go: liberals are thin on the ground, these days.

On the other hand, he made mistakes. The one he chose to highlight in his resignation speech was only the first. He hired a State Police superintendent with a criminal record. A campaign fundraiser, once a high school buddy of McGreevey, offered to help a farmer sell his land in return for a contribution. The Governor's commerce secretary resigned amid charges he'd been favoring his family's businesses with State contracts. There were more. Tacky stuff, mostly. Dumb.

No less tacky and no less dumb was his hiring of a cute young Israeli called Golan Cipel. On the day after inauguration day. To fill a post McGreevey created for him: State Homeland Security Adviser. With a salary of $110,000 a year. Ignoring howls of disbelief from the media and from Washington, Jim hied off with Golan to rent a pricey condo for the new appointee near the McGreevey family home. When he stopped to catch his breath, he got the message: a foreign national cannot hold a Homeland Security job. The Governor tried to console Cipel by making him a $35,000 a year "consultant" but Cipel soon left. And like the baddest of bad pennies, turned up last month.

What happened? The Governor's people say Cipel asked for millions to keep quiet about the Governor's homosexualtiy. Cipel is denying this. But plainly McGreevey believed it. He reported it to the FBI, then figuring all was over, went on TV to tell the voters that he had done a horrible, inexcusable thing, and had no right to be Governor any more. Maybe. But surely not because he is homosexual. When it came to sex, Bill Clinton's brains flew out the window, but no one, not even he, blamed it on his being straight. James McGreevey won high office because he had charisma. He lost it because he lacked commonsense and, more seriously, character.

CHURCH & STATE

I had arrived in England on a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts with the idea that I would write a novel. I did. But not there. Not then. It was October, 1974. Sir John Wolfenden had just become Baron Wolfenden of Westcott, and before I had time to turn around, I was part of a boistrous demonstration of gays that gathered in Trafalgar Square and marched to 10 Downing Street with a petition demanding reform of the laws that still only feebly reflected those called for by the Wolfenden Committee twenty years earlier.

That was the day I met Denis Lemon. Denis, who became a friend, and published some of my stuff, is half the reason I am writing this piece. The other half is Francis Crick, who with James D. Watson, discovered the double-helix (DNA) in 1953, won a Nobel Prize, and died the other day. Denis Lemon founded Gay News, a lively tabloid weekly, in London in 1972, and kept it going until Her Majesty's Government jailed him for blasphemy in 1975.

No, Denis, a lanky, sardonic, handsome young man with a resolute Cockney accent, was not given to curses beyond what's common among the writing-publishing crowd everywhere. But Denis wrote and printed in his paper a longish set of verses that more than suggested Jesus Christ was gay.

Now you and I know freedom of the press is as much a British fixture as it is a fixture in the USA. But the UK is a monarchy. Henry VIII, worn out with battling the Pope of Rome for the right to divorce wives that didn't present him with male heirs to the throne, seized the church, its treasure and its lands, and in 1534 declared himself head of the Church of England. All British rulers after him have held that title. And in 1975 Queen Elizabeth II still held it. Her Majesty's government proved in court that by claiming in the public prints that Jesus Christ was homosexual (where is it written that he wasn't?), Denis Lemon had committed the crime of blasphemy.

Henry VIII was not presiding over a democracy. Elizabeth II by grace of parliament is. And the imprisonment and effective silencing of Denis Lemon it seems to me showed that trying to mix religion with government of the people, by the people, for the people is unworkable. America‘s founding fathers saw that and opted for separation of church and state. That this facet of the First Amendment is constantly being hacked at by Fundamentalists,including the President, who demand the laws conform to their professed religious beliefs, disturbs those of us who prefer rationality to faith, which is belief in the empirically indefensible.

This brings me at last to Francis Crick, and a paragraph written about him by his partner Watson for TIME magazine's issue of August 9, 2004. "Crick had no truck with truths arrived at by religious revelation as opposed to observation and experimentation. Upon learning that Cambridge University's science-dominated new college was planning to build a Christian chapel, he resigned from the rank of its Fellows. ‘Perpetuating mistakes from the past' was not Crick's way to move forward."

Hey! It is a proven way to disaster. But who is listening?

TEACH IF YOU CAN

As a little kid, on one of my father's numberless Sunday drives across the prairie that stretched away in every direction from our South Dakota town, I saw the University. Why they built it in Vermillion beat me. It was a small sunburnt, windlashed town so raw the campus had to be fenced to keep the cattle off it. There were turnstiles to let the students in. Why the name? Simple. The local Sioux painted their faces with a flaming red pigment (mercuric sulfide, the dictionary says) that impressed the French explorers.

My next encounter with the University of South Dakota held off for forty years until, in Los Angeles, I stumbled on a copy of the South Dakota Review. By that time I had published a couple of poems about my South Dakota childhood in Saturday Review and The New Yorker. But the short story I'd written along the same lines no one would print. The SDR didn't look like much, and no place inside did it say anything about paying its writers. I sent it to Vermillion anyway.

John R. Milton wrote back, saying "Mourner" was the best whiteboy-and-Indian story he'd ever seen and he would print it. Matter of fact, he liked it so much he reprinted it twice, once in a big anthology, The Literature of South Dakota (1976), and again in the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of SDR. Milton (1924-1995) had founded the magazine in 1963 to show "vertical" New York that there was life and art out on the "horizontal" prairies. And with very little money from the university and only a couple of students to help him assemble it, he sent it off into a mainly uncaring world four times a year.

After that, John printed most of the poems and stories I sent him. I didn't send a lot. By 1970 I'd turned the corner as a writer from small-time paperbacks to big-time hardcovers, and novelizing used up most of my hours at the keyboard. When John accepted anything of mine, I felt proud and happy. He was a shrewd, sensitive editor. And a true friend. We connected. Other writers have said the same. He cared deeply about the art and imperatives of writing and also about those of us who worked at it. When cancer, earthquake, the death of my wife combined to knock me around in the early nineties, he wrote me wise, strong, supportive letters.

So it saddened me when his spirits flagged, and he'd lament that he'd wasted his life editing the magazine and teaching in classrooms when he should have been writing his own stuff. The file of South Dakota Review back-issues, each with his taste and intelligence stamped on every page, will last as long as libraries stand. As to teaching, not everyone can do it. Not everyone should, but on the evidence of his gifts not only as editor but as writer (five books of poems, an arresting novel, and some splendid stories), I'd say he must have been a great teacher.

To leave behind a shelf of honest books is, I hope, a respectable legacy. But books can't cry out "Read me!" And books unread are merely ink on paper. The uncommon lucky youngsters in John Milton's classroom form a living, breathing, breeding, writing, maybe even teaching legacy, which, whether he thought so or not, figures to be uncommon lucky for the world to come.