Tag: Olney

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Quarantine, 1968

 

I was “dry-o” when I emerged from quarantine in Liberia. Here with Arthur, summer of 1968, 125 lbs

I spent most of May 1968 in quarantine on the campus of Cuttington College in upcountry Liberia. I had contracted infectious hepatitis “A”. I like to imagine it was from drinking water from the Niger River on the way back from Timbuktu a couple of months before. 

I was couped up in a empty house on the edges of the campus in middle of the bush with another Peace Corps teacher, Jim, who was an economist and who had been diagnosed with the same affliction. We had separate rooms and were brought food and boiled water twice a day by Roosevelt, my then houseboy, who was deemed to have already survived it and therefore not susceptible.

Roosevelt, 1968

Otherwise, we were completely isolated. Jim and I were not even supposed to interact. In any case, we were both confined to bed and didn’t have a lot to say to each other, lost in our separate deliria. 

Until the fever broke, I had little interest in food, reading or anything except self-pity. But after I improved and began to suffer boredom, I was delighted with the arrival of a stack of the New York Review of Books going back to 1967. James Olney, the chair of my English Dept there, had sent them along with cheerful greetings. He had been an early subscriber and they had been delivered via slow post to Liberia. I was delighted when I found James again at UC-Irvine in 2010 and discovered that he still subscribed.

I read through the pile voraciously just as news began to reach me via shortwave radio and weekly arrivals of the onion-skin-like international edition of Time about the assassinations in the US and surreal events on the streets of Paris. News about Vietnam was no longer news to the males in our little cohort at Cuttington. We had ended  up in Liberia in part because of calculations around the draft. Without the least idea how things would work out, we were all planning our post-African lives around that stupid war.

On top of the stack was the notorious issue whose cover depicted a diagram with instructions to make a molotov cocktail.

The 24 August, 1967 issue of the New York Review of Books

Suddenly, I felt I had reason to live, not because I seriously intended to construct such a device, but because I momentarily felt there was an intellectual culture out there to which I could honorably belong, even though I already knew I would be leaving America behind.

1968 didn’t turn out at all as we  youthful rebels hoped and I have to admit I am doubtful that by 2021, or whenever the covid pandemic runs its course, the world will yet have learned a thing.

Still, it is with more than soppy nostalgia that I look at that ancient NYR cover and reimagine the state of mind I entered once I left quarantine. 

Imagining post-quarantine is surely a useful mental exercise for us all in the present moment. Not because things will change, rather because our wanting them to change is part of who we are. 

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Tell Me, James

These were the speaking notes for my brief eulogy of James Olney delivered at his home in University Hills, Irvine, on February 26, 2015. As they reveal, at several crucial points he had a major influence on the course of my life and career(s).  I didn’t see him much in the last few years, but his absence is palpable.  Here is his academic obituary.

  • Laura asked me to speak to James’s pre-Irvine life. So many memories from those years, beginning in 1967 at Cuttington College, in upcountry Liberia. James was first a mentor, then a friend. “Modest” even “reticent” are words I’ve heard applied to him. I would say “succinct”.
  • And generous towards others, even when critical. As one of our young colleagues there, Lois Johnson, wrote to me last week: “Those of us in the English department at Cuttington were the better for his encouragement and his willingness to trust our judgment regarding curriculum, and his respect for our opinion, especially considering how very green our own understanding was.”
  • Tell Me, Africa, was the fruit of that sojourn for him. It is being republished next month in Princeton UP Legacy Series. More important to me is that over forty years later African colleagues and friends still say to me “Olney got it right“.
  • It was at this time, in 1969. that I had to make a major decision, and James was my mentor in it. I was in Liberia not only to avoid the draft, but to avoid Grad School, about which I had misgivings. His words, engraven in my memory: “George, if you read and study and write, you’ll be happy enough, even in Canada“. He was right.
  • James was a mentor in many other fine things of life: food, wine, table conversation, but even animal husbandry. At one point I even baby-sat for a week with his pet spider monkey, Harriet.
  • But back to food and wine. Lessons in high hedonism, epicurianism, plus a network which lead to the five years I spent in the French import wine business. In Liberia, in Paris on furlough from Africa in the winter of 1968, and then after we left Liberia, in Solliès-Toucas, and in restaurants in Provence. I have this indeliable memory of returning late one night from some amazing meal, crammed between James and his brother Richard into the backseat of a small French car of yogurt-pot shape and size. His words that night: “If you’ve had a lot of wine for dinner, do not forget to put a glass of water at your bedside.”
  • I did keep in touch with James after the 70s. He had wonderful penmanship, and in those days letters were composed by hand. Around 2000, he wrote he had met and married Laura, that Marina was on the way, and that he was retiring to “some place in southern California”. Those weren’t his words, but mine: I didn’t know then where Irvine is. Only when I arrived here and stumbled across that envelop bearing his address on Los Trancos Drive, did I realize he lived only a few blocks away. You can imagine my delight.
  • In a kind of throw-back to earlier years, James and I were somehow on the same shopping schedules, crossing paths at Albertson’s or Bristol Farms instead of at Joseph Eid’s store-front grocery in Gbarnga, Liberia. So his mentoring continued, about where to get this wine or that cheese, but also how to age gracefully, and never lose your sense of humour.
  • Tell Me, James: now that would be a proper title for this short piece. James was a man of words and, apart from his beautiful, whimsical eyes, I remember him most for and through his words. Read, study and write. Don’t forget a glass of water. For 45 years I haven’t forgotten that glass of water. And I shall never forget James.