University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: September 1, 2005

By JESSICA KELTZ
Reporter Contributor

In the essays collected in his new book, "Late Friends" (2005, Center Working Papers, UB Center for Studies in American Culture), Bruce Jackson shares with readers his experiences with his late, great friends, with an eye to the particular—and sometimes enigmatic—aspects of their lives.

Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Culture in the departments of American Studies and English, is the author or editor of 22 books. He has produced documentaries, important folkloric recordings, and many articles in national publications addressing aspects of American culture, including indigenous music, prison reform, drug culture and racial politics.

In 2002, the French government named him Chevalier in l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France's highest award in the arts and humanities.

Jackson compiled this book of essays, he says, "as a way for me to sort of gather up my late friends and have them together."

He has an unusual cadre of deceased friends.

He has taught at UB for nearly 40 years, and over the course of his career, Jackson has gotten to know some of the most important and influential literary scholars of the past half-century. In other venues, he has gotten to know and often maintained friendships with a dog named Randolph Scott, notorious McCarthy era snitch Harvey Matusow, and famed boulanger Lionel Poilâne (Jackson himself is an artisan bread maker extraordinaire).

His late UB colleagues discussed here are distinguished French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, who explored the role played by power in shaping knowledge and greatly influenced virtually every academic discipline, and groundbreaking beat poet Alan Ginsberg, both of whom were visiting professors.

There is his colleague of 37 years, world-renowned Black Mountain poet Robert Creeley, former UB Samuel Capen Professor of Poetics, who had a major impact on poetry in English from 1962 to this day.

In "Leslie A. Fiedler: Newark, Jews, and the Boy on the White Horse," Jackson shares memories of one of America's foremost literary and cultural theorists of the last century. Fiedler was the Samuel Clemens Professor of English at UB and the author of many important books of cultural and literary analysis, including "Freaks" and "Fiedler on the Roof."

He achieved his greatest recognition with his most controversial book, "Love and Death in the American Novel," in which he argued that American male novelists are obsessed with death and whose female characters are "monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality."

Jackson notes that when Fiedler died in 2003—still one of the most prominent Jews in Buffalo history and the most important literary critic in America—his family couldn't have him buried from a city synagogue because he wasn't a paid-up member. Jackson calls it "a moment of perfect Buffalo Jewish loopiness" and says, "Leslie would have loved it."

In the process of discussing his colleagues, Jackson illustrates to a new audience why the UB English department was one of the most prominent and lively among American universities in the 1960s and 1970s.

He writes, as well, about late friends who were intellectuals or characters, and sometimes both: Mary Beth Spina, a rollicking, scratchy-voiced Tennessee native who was an idiosyncratic and unusually well-connected member of the UB professional staff; legendary civil rights attorney William Kunstler; popular Kennedy-era Buffalo congressman Max McCarthy; Herbert X. ("Brother Herb") Blyden, one of the leaders of the bloody 1971 Attica prison uprising that provoked prison reform throughout the country.

He gives us his personal take on Wassily Leontief, Nobel laureate in economics; James Card, film curator of the George Eastman House who rehabilitated the reputation of silent screen actress Louise Brooks; "Walking George" Beto, educator and notable prison reformer who had a profound impact on America's criminal justice system; and B.A. Botkin and Alan Lomax, fellow folklorists who collected and popularized indigenous American music.

The book also includes Jackson's recollections of Charles Désirat, lifelong political activist and co-author of "Sachso," the moving and horrifying book of personal recollections by French deportees to the Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Of Désirat, Jackson writes, "He was a man to whom terrible things had been done, (but who) remained all his life full of joy, optimism, care and love."

Some of the essays in "Late Friends" were written as obituaries; some for other purposes and all have been published previously.

The book is sprinkled with photographs of the subjects taken by Jackson and his wife, Diane Christian, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of English.

It ends with an essay about a group of pals who weren't people at all, but a series of family dogs, some funny, some noble, some tormented and some larger than life, not unlike the human friends Jackson honors here.

An early mutt named Fido, for instance, was a wary, long-suffering stray who came to sleep in the Jackson home every night. He spent most of his days in the house as well, but would not allow anyone to touch him. In fact, if anyone put a hand out to touch him, Fido jerked away.

"Then, two years after he'd moved in," Jackson says, "he came up to me while I was reading in my chair late one night. He stood there without moving, his head dipped slightly.

"I petted him. He wagged his tail, then moved his head under my hand so I would scratch his ears. When he had enough, he went over to the couch, curled up and went to sleep.

"I sat in the chair crying because this dog had accepted me.

"You can't live as long as I have and not have lost a lot of friends," Jackson says. All of them—human and pup—were great characters, he says, and all deserve at least a few pages dedicated to their memory.