Fear of Success

About the Artist

"Beauty: it curves, curves are beauty."
Leoplod Bloom.

In 1944, I and another Cub Scout learned to draw by tracing pictures of fighter planes, bathing beauties and underwear models from popular magazines. Our wicked indulgence was its own reward. A timid craving for the pretty girls of Ferndale, Michigan defined my adolescence. Pretty girls still delight me (I’m finished with fighter planes) and I continue to trace and copy. However, I now strive to sublimate my fascination with gamine allure and to fashion unique images with a simple visual language where design comes first—yet hints of cuteness linger.

What I call art is an elusive awareness of an aliveness in inanimate things. An aliveness that, even while I know it isn’t real, provokes a little thrill of recognition. And sometimes an urge to invent.

And beauty? A separate reality better explained by poets and philosophers.

My aim is to draft confident lines and plumping shapes that hang together in comfort and harmony. With whimsy and sometimes a touch of color. I like the simplicity of pencil on paper. Each drawing should look easily accomplished despite that getting it right was earnest work. Each hopes for appreciation with the patience of a shy daisy in the vast and various garden of human creation.

I am mostly inspired by photographs I find in newspapers, magazines, library books and on the Internet. Life is too quick for my wondering eye.

I sometimes make more than one final drawing. Usually because an earlier version was sold. So, each rendering may be one of a very small edition of the same image. However, all are originals.

The following people have acquired one or more of my drawings. It might seem immodest to list them but I am fond of my fans. Mostly they are unknown to each other and to me, but gathered here they make up a little club of those who liked my drawings enough to take one home:

Joseph Abela, San Francisco, CA.
Elizabeth Anderson, Santa Monica, CA.
Karl Anderson, New York, NY.
Ronald Anderson, San Francisco, CA.
Anonymous buyers from CITY ART gallery in San Francisco. (14)
Anonymous buyers of drawings donated to good works fundraiser auctions. (5)
Edward Ball, Atlanta, GA.
Bert Baylin, San Francisco, CA
Loan Beguelin, San Carlos, CA
Gina Blus, Burlingame, CA.
Amy Bonetti, Ross, CA (2)
Linahay Brown, San Francisco, CA.
Stacey Cassella, San Francisco, CA.
Chris, West Falmouth, MA.
Christine Corso, San Mateo, CA.
Natalie Cook, San Francisco, CA.
Mary Devereaux, San Francisco, CA.
Sarah Elson, South San Francisco, CA.
Diane Feissel, San Francisco, CA.
Mark M. Gettys, San Francisco, CA.
Jim Giles, San Francisco, CA.
Katie Gilmartin, San Francisco, CA.
Michael Guinnes, San Francisco, CA. (2)
Ashley Hamlett, Berkeley, CA. (4)
Kathenne Hewetson, San Francisco, CA.
Karen Hildebrandt, Farmington Hills, MI.
Laura Hull, San Francisco, CA.
Brad Irby, Oakland, CA.
Doug Jack, Palm Springs, CA.
Sharon Johnson, San Francisco, CA.
Jennie Jordan, San Francisco, CA.
Barney Keamey, San Francisco, CA.
Joe and Liz Killian, San Francisco, CA.
Eugene Kim, San Francisco, CA (3)
Marilyn Koral, San Francisco, CA.
Marlene Lee, New York, NY.
Nina Lescher, Kentfield, CA.
Anne Leschin, San Francisco, CA.
Jerry Lewis, San Francisco, CA. (2)
Adam and Felicia Lipansky, Oakland, CA.
Richard Marracie, Redwood City, CA.
Catherine Matteucie, San Francisco, CA.
Charles Mercurio, San Francisco, CA. (2)
Susan Murphy, Philadelphia, PA.
Emmanuel Noel, San Francisco, CA.
Betsy Odell, San Francisco, CA.
Paul P., San Francisco, CA.
Richard Patel, San Francisco, CA
Kristine Pimentel, San Francisco, CA.
Alan Porter, San Francisco, CA.
Bonnie Preston, San Francisco, CA.
Ilysse Rimalovski, Maplewood, NJ.
Chris Ruedy, San Francisco (?), CA.
Lucy Salter-Robinson, San Francisco, CA. (2)
Lynn Segal, San Francisco, CA.
Sisters of the Presentation, San Francisco, CA.
Pat Snyder, San Francisco, CA.
Elena Sweda-Neff, San Francisco, CA.
Tom Swift, San Francisco, CA.
Michelle Thomas, Sonoma, CA.
Kelleigh Trowbridge, CA. (?)
Dave Tureaud, San Francisco, CA.
Kevin Urda, San Francisco (?), CA.
Steven Walters, Castro Valley, CA.
Seamus Whitley, San Francisco, CA.
Michelle, Wilcove, San Francisco, CA.
Rebecca Wilson, address unknown.
Anna Yen, San Francisco, CA. (2)
Victoria Zitrin, San Francisco, CA.

About The Writer

"Who if not an author is bound to speak the holy truth?"
Nikolai Gogol

The writing of Fear of Success: Memories From America’s Half Century has occupied me for almost twenty years. It is the only story I have to tell, want to tell, have the skill to tell. I am an amateur. I'm not an autobiographer, but rather a memoirist—even though I’ve always thought memoir sounds a bit Frenchified. Webster’s calls autobiography: “the biography of oneself;” and memoir, “a narrative stressing personal experience and acquaintance ... often anecdotal or intimate in tone and whose focus is usually on the persons, events, or times known to the writer.” Two genres—both rooted in memory. The first, autobiography, sounds too scholarly. The second, memoir, fits me better: my progress my in time, place and company—my story.

Fear of Success was encouraged by Gogol, Joyce, Nabokov, Whitman, and Proust—an all-star team. Gogol’s Dead Souls showed me a beautiful story about almost nothing at all; Joyce demonstrated that endless tinkering with detail might end as art (even for an amateur); Nabokov shattered conventions; Whitman told it was OK to write and rewrite a single tale over and over (even unto a deathbed edition) and Proust was my wonder of wonders. And then, in apostrophe, Celine: if Celine could dot … then I might dash—which affectation I initially employed to excess but tried in revision to restrain. I also tried to restrain my inclination to use old-fashioned words and sentence constructions. I don’t know where I picked up the habit. Maybe from reading so much old-fashioned fiction. Maybe trying to impress myself.

Being an amateur didn’t mean I would settle for less than my very best. On the contrary, I strove all the harder. And no matter how immodest it might appear, it was by old fashioned lovers of Gogol, Joyce, Nabokov, Whitman, and Proust that I wanted to be read. (Want still—for so far, I’ve had few readers of any kind.) I don’t, of course, pretend I’m in that league. I don’t want to be compared—but rather appreciated as a good sandlot softball player might be by a Yankee fan.

In drawing pictures, another amateur activity, I claimed my goal was unerring lines and confident shapes. I felt the same about writing. I wanted my words and sentences to follow smooth trajectories and to fashion fertile images. I wanted Fear to be appreciated as a re-definition of reflective memoir. To establish new rules. My task was not to uncover the past but rather to record every persistent memory that I had lived with over the years. Every memory told—every memory telling. Recollection would be my sole resource. Even if a memory had become tainted by time, that alteration itself was part and parcel of its present reality. True to myself—right or wrong. Besides, past truth in general is elusive. As various as all its reinterpretations: from recollection to recollection, time to time, person to person.

While I did not begin to write my story in earnest until the late 1980’s, I felt its first stirrings in 1979 when, for a poetry writing class at San Francisco Community College, I composed:

What I’ll want
at the end of the line
is not fame, but a biographer.

To account
for all the thoughts I’ve saved
and some I sought to hide away.

To condense
events stretched out in time
into some more favorable form.

And to relate
the wholeness of my life
to each who had a part to play.

Robyn, a very pretty young woman in the class who signed her poems, "oiseau," remarked that it was unlikely I would have one, a biographer, without the other, fame. Probably she supposed neither, though she didn’t say so. Pretty oiseau. Half my age. The kind of girl who painted her toe nails a very bright red and ran barefoot on summer city sidewalks. She passed around her own poems, scribbled on wrinkly scraps of paper, and read them aloud with tender passion:

Sorrow sweeps my soul
    Your fingers feel the flow
    Of fallen Fear
    That fills my tear
    The touch of a man who seems to know.

I praised oiseau's pretty verse to Robyn's pretty face. I shyly imagined my fingers feeling … me, myself her man who "seems to know" .I wrote:

While you read rhymes
    Of fear and flow
    I was filling
    In your O’s:

-●--●- ------ -- -●--
    -●-- ------- ---- --- --●-
    ●- ------ ----
    ---- ----- -- ----
    --- -●--- ●- - --- --● ----- -●--●-

I hadn't, but wished I had, the courage to read aloud and show my verse to so very very pretty oiseau.

Several years after Robyn’s sobering forecast (as she predicted, I was not approached by any biographers) I resolved to write my own story. I envisioned something like a scrapbook or souvenir collection of all my persistent memories of people, events, places, emotions, ideas, dreams and fancies, which, taken all together, I would put into plain words. The person I thought myself to be remembering the life I thought myself to have lived. And I might just the bar for American memoir. End with art. Not despite being an amateur, but because of it.

My memories were there for the harvesting, I was introspective, honest and persistent.

I began. I was neither secretive nor modest. At a party in 1991, on the day that America first invaded Iraq, I proclaimed to Sarah, the birthday girl, that how American autobiography was written would never be the same after Fear of Success. That same evening I began a rubber band ball by using all the rubber bands we could find in Sarah’s flat. The ball grew year after year with help from two of Sarah's guests, Pat and Bob. By the late 1990’s, R.B. Ball, as it was known, had grown to almost the size of a soccer ball and was auctioned off at a fund-raiser for the PTA at Elizabeth’s high school.

While I enjoyed the labor of writing and revision, I felt my composition skills were wanting. I enrolled in an evening class at San Francisco State College called, Writing Autobiography. Our instructor was an accented young woman named Brughild Nina Holzer. I always called Nina, Nina, despite her expressed preference for Brughild. I found her attractive and didn’t think Brughild very feminine. Nina encouraged my writing—but nothing more. A fellow student said my style was modest and Nina countered, “Not at all.” I was flattered by her recognition of my simply trying to be candid. My crush went up a notch.

At work, in far less time than expected, I taught myself to touch-type with a typing-tutor computer program. I became competent—neither fast nor very accurate, but steady. I hadn’t really expected I could learn at all. Then I bought an IBM-XT clone PC from a storefront computer assembler whom I nicknamed, “Compatible Dave.” Dave was a dashing fly-by-night tech-whiz with a customer friendly, super-skinny-pretty, blond pony-tailed wife named Loreen—spelled just as my stepdaughter spelled her Loreen. Compatible Dave installed complementary copy of Word Perfect on my XT because I paid him cash in advance. Then, guided by a manual I photocopied at work, I taught myself the basics of word processing. Without a the aid of a computer I would have never been able to pull together even a longish story, let alone a book-length reminiscence.

I wrote, rewrote, and revised whenever time and freedom from work, family, daydreams and chores permitted. My concept was grand; the drafting of it alone would surely take over a decade. Longer than Joyce took with Ulysses; longer even than Proust spent on Remembrance.

I first undertook to compose a chronological record of my night dreams. The content was ready-at-hand in thirty years of orderly morning-after notes. Dreams had interested me long before I set my sight on memories. Both, I believed, were bedfellows in the same accessible regions of my subconscious, both had a similar appearance when recalled to mind and authoring my dreams would be good practice for the larger effort. I made a near literal transcription of my notes and recollections and then rewrote, without emendation, aiming for simple clarity and charm. I was so pleased with the result that I became swellheaded and took a wrong turn.

I plotted to publish my dreams first. They would, with my urging, capture the interest of some psychology academic who in turn would publish an arresting analysis my erudite account. Then, having acquired repute for dreaming richly and writing well I would be empowered to leverage my memoir into the literary marketplace.

I added a few drawings to my dream manuscript (to show off my illustration skills), titled it simply Night Dreams and made twenty copies. Seventy-six single-spaced pages. Each bound by myself under a whimsical cover. A smart little package. Then, deluded by my thirst for acclaim, I went even further. I took an ad in the June 6, 1992 New York Times Book Review:

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

FASCINATING DREAM CHRONICLE

Handsome 37,000-word manuscript
    Spans thirty years—illustrated.
    Send $15.00, etc.
    Great Summer Reading—Erudite.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

This one-column-inch announcement in the Small Press Directory section of the Review cost me $295.00.

I received two orders! I was indeed a small press!

So, to tally up: I had spent $75.00 to have a poet friend proofread my work, $20.00 for copyright registration, $104.07 for photocopies and $295.00 for advertising. Total $494.07. So, to fill each of my two $15.00 orders cost me $247.04. Plus postage.

Of my pair of patrons, one asked if the author, me, would inscribe his copy with a personal message. I was flattered and did.

How wrong I had gone. I sent two of the remaining eighteen copies of Night Dreams to friends and then ten more to several dream scholars and literary luminaries. I don’t recall how I located them. My most coveted academic addressee was Professor Alan Hobson at Harvard who wrote The Dreaming Brain and who had responded, rather vaguely, to an earlier correspondence that included a few dream samples. I also sent a copy to Norman Mailer, who made a cameo appearance in my manuscript as a tiny genie emerging from a small bottle in a dream of my second wife, Joan—which dream I had included among my own. I sent another copy to the venerable literary critic Leon Edel who’s Stuff of Sleep and Dreams I had also read. My source for Mr. Edel’s address noted his very remote date of birth, which almost changed my mind. But feeling somewhat guilty, I sent a cover letter that first admitted my ageism and then congratulated myself on overcoming it.

After a month, one of the distinguished scholars answered with a thank you note and a bunch of his own dream stuff. Another returned my manuscript, apologized for being only a chemist and wondered if I had confused him with some one else. Nothing from Professor Hobson. Nothing from Norman Mailer. Nothing from Leon Edel.

In sum: two copies sold, two sent to the copyright people in Washington DC, two for me, eleven wasted on academia, and one read by my friend, Dr. Joe, who replied that he thought my dreams were interesting but, at best, raw material for something more.

So much for back-door success. I returned to earth and writing my story. My whole story, from beginning to end, in which my dreams would doubtless find their proper place.

I made a plan: Fear of Success in three parts. First: memories from childhood. Last: grown up memories. Dream stuff in the middle: like the night-town section of Joyce’s Ulysses—an apocryphal cleavage between the old and new testaments of my life. As I progressed with my composition other good stuff came to mind. A Conclusion; excerpts from Letters (both to and from); pithy Aphorisms; and an extensive narrative Bibliography. If Nabokov could add a gossipy index to Pale Fire I could include a chatty account of all the books I’d read. I would tell my daydreams too—as an appendix to night dreams. I had spent a substantial portion of my life in idle rumination and to deny those fancies would leave my story wanting. And then, scattered throughout, I ought to include my ideas about life and art, political economy and morals. Like those science and philosophy chapters in Moby Dick, or the way Dickens, Tolstoy and Butler had done in their novels. I would express such ideas and opinions lightly because that’s how I held them. And all of it with lots of footnotes. Footnotes being their own little story—running along the bottom from page to page. My chronicle became as a wide, meandering flatland river with various tributaries and countless eddies along the margin and snapshots of the ever changing landscape.

However, after several seasons of struggle I was forced to make concessions. My ideas about art, life, political economy and morals didn’t read nearly so well as I had hoped. I didn’t know enough about such stuff to save myself from embarrassment. Someone said my daydreams were boring because everyone’s daydreams were more or less the same. The footnotes didn’t stand on their own, but were rather a distraction. Aphorisms were an unsound idea I had gotten from Kafka—fine for him, silly for me—I hardly knew one when I saw it. And my Night Dreams made no sense in the middle because they were mostly about people who were introduced in the second half of my story. An overhaul was in order.

Ideas and Aphorisms fell by the wayside. Footnotes were kicked out. My Conclusion seemed OK, but ... well, I would decide later. I would keep both Daydreams and Night Dreams—despite advice to the contrary. I kept Letters too, and the Talking Bibliography. And I added this little essay, About This Book, as an apology for the whole effort. And so it remains.

I sat at my keyboard and peered inward. The simple fact that a memory had kept itself alive was its passport into my story. My memoir would be artless. A clear window. Camouflage and veils would surely bait invention. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but my truth—so help me Hannah. An occasional trespass against another might be necessary. I hoped to be forgiven. The plot was given: evolution—how I became me. I found that my memories lay close to the surface and ready to mind. Some were schematic. Such skeletons I enlivened by recalling their circumstances. Each and every anecdote. Tell all. An embarrassment struck from the record would leave it gap-toothed. I am the story: memory after memory after memory.

“Style is everything,” wrote Flaubert, Celine and no doubt numerous others. For Fear I chose simple first person past tense. A wide-eyed I. I promised myself to never, well hardly ever, allow the present to take advantage of the past or permit the author to browbeat the narrator. No whining or weaseling. Easier said than done.

I wasn’t an efficient compositor. I hadn’t been taught how to write. My brain wasn’t very quick. As I composed I had trouble keeping together both what I wanted to say and how to say it—often loosing my grip on one or the other. But my memories were patient. All things past were easily aroused. As I went about each day I thought about my story and often stopped in the middle of something or other to make a note of this or that. I learned to not put off this note taking because I might forget what it was I had thought important. I drafted and re-drafted and arranged and rearranged and repaired and revised and edited over and over until each paragraph seemed, at least in the moment, to make good reading. Sometimes it was hard to stay interested because I had come to know my story so well.

Then I took another wrong turn. Someone had warned me against submitting a half-baked manuscript to an agent because nothing once rejected ever get a second reading. Regardless, I sent a far from final draft of Fear to New York literary agent, Molly F. Molly was an intriguing name. I imagined us on either side of her desk—being as taken with Molly, brilliant and smartly dressed, as was she with my story. But she, or one of her readers, turned me down with a firm but thoughtful note. She suggested that my story hadn’t enough, “…edge.” Not edgy! Molly! I hadn’t wanted to be edgy. My life hadn’t been so. Most lives weren’t. I had shunned edginess. I had aimed for kinship with my readers rather than to awe them. Wouldn’t some appreciate that? Americans were over exposed to edgy entertainments. Wouldn’t some like a relief? Mightn’t Fear have some success without perversity? Over the long run? I didn’t understand publishing. My feelings were hurt. I was sure there was not another story quite like Fear. And few as good. Comfortable candid stories made from the stuff of ordinary life. I thought of myself as a pioneer. A new kind of memoir might flourish in my wake. Drat!

The world and Fear of Success weren’t ready for each other. Well, at least Molly F. hadn’t advised me to save my story for my children—the unkindest cut to a would-be-artist-memoirist.

Over several years I read passages from my work-in-progress to the San Francisco Writers’ Workshop. This congenial group had been gathering every Tuesday evening for so long that no current member knew its beginnings. Sometime in the early fifties, “longer ago than any other group west of the Mississippi.” Half a dozen to twenty of us, some regulars, others transients, each read his or her offering, up to six double-spaced pages of anything at all, and then listened without argument to what others had to say. My readings were often complemented. But one member of our group said my story had too much, “glide,” and not enough “grit.” He didn’t mean grime, but rather specificity. I countered that some gliding was in the very nature of remembrance and that I strove to fend off enhancements. No make believe. However, I did recognize that he, Laurence Lasky, pen named Laurence Cloud, author of The Berkeley Lesbians (very gritty), had a point. I needed to keep in mind that my reader was alone out there on the page and without my grip might drift away. He or she wanted to be made to see. Joseph Conrad was right. I had recorded some of my recollections too sparely—just as I first found them—without having dug about for missing parts. Not invention, mind you, just more detail. If some nit and grit was there I needed find and fit each bit into its proper place on my pages. More work to do.

The most common advice I received was to leave out the slow stuff. That my story was publishable if I did, not if I didn’t. Pretty much what agent Molly F. had said. I considered, but didn’t take, the suggestion. I kept it all. Fast and slow. Just like my life. I did want appreciation. But from readers with a ruminative digestion.

As I wrote, I also learned to write. Bit by bit. Not writing in general—I knew my limits. I would never attempt a novel. But I learned how to better and better write this story. Which became a quite long story because I worked at it for a long time. I went over every part time after time. The more it grew the better I liked it—bigger and bigger—wanting more and more attention at every turn. Professional writers seem to know when something is finished, find a publisher, and move on. Except perhaps Whitman who published often yet endlessly polished. I’d like the published part.

As I wrote, rewrote and revised my story I recognized several selves. The I who wrote my pages became a new me: a composite of the past me who had lived the more or less ordinary life and the I who remembered it now. And the I who wrote the story became a different person from the me who had only intended to. All of us held in thrall by America’s half-century.

I wrote Fear of Success: Memories From America’s Half Century for my mother who encourages me still and who gave me my title; for my survivors as they may, or may not, care; for my memories themselves because they wanted recording; for each who had a part to play, willing or not; and for my own present personal pleasure in making the effort. As a memoirist approaching the end of the line I have enjoyed impersonating my self.

About the Person

To learn my entire story you will need to read my memoir, Fear of Success: Memories From America's Half Century. Unfortunately (for both of us) no one has yet come forward to publish it. Meanwhile you may, by reading Part 1, here on this Internet site, explore my first twenty years. You may also peek into the corners of my nature by examining my drawings. Forgoing all that, here is a very brief summary of my life to date:

I was born on February Fourth, (4 is my lucky number) 1935 in Detroit, Michigan. I quit my orthodontist before my teeth were entirely straight. High school drop out. Four years in the Coast Guard and four more in college. I completed law school but failed the bar. Socialist atheist (more, however, in reflection than courage). Married three times. Three children. Quite a few cats, one dog. I worked 28 years for the Social Security Administration. Retired to fix-up an old house, draw pictures, read pre-modern fiction and write a post-modern memoir. I volunteer two afternoons a week for San Francisco Court Appointed Special Advocates and fiddle with my computer.

Here are two snapshots of me and mine:

Me, about 2005 at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Karl, me, Ronald, Claudia and Elizabeth about 1984

Links

www.cityartgallery.org A San Francisco cooperative in which I was an active participant for several years.

www.theartexplosion.com A cooperative art studio where I had a work corner for a year or so after leaving City Art.

www.artspan.com San Francisco's ArtSpan coordinates the annual month long Open Studios and conducts art programs for children and youth.

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