Strephon Kaplan-Williams Books

There are a lot of military schools from the past like Onarga that are no longer operating. Why? Less need for war personnel? It is true that the Second World War was fought by huge armies of individual soldiers with far less fire power than today's smaller, professional army that has technologically much more fire power. But I think there is another reason. See the structure? The regimental parade? Onarga was full of special boys like myself, but worse, who frankly did not get along at home, even boys from rich, military families in South America. Here you get yelled at, slapped in the face, made to stand at attention until you nearly dropped, made to parade in the cold of winter, made to keep away from the town girls our age, made to study in the day and in study hall at night, and get slapped around, as I did, one of their best students, if you misbehaved, like passing notes back and forth with your friends to have some fun, for God's sake!

Yet I loved the parades and the drill. I was on the drill team and rifle team. The point was to drill perfectly in shouldering your rifle, do present arms, I still hear the shouted command, and so on. Be proud to be a little soldier. I got medals for almost everything, and would have got a lot more had I stayed longer. I felt proud at age thirteen to be elected president of my class. One year they awarded me out of the whole school the American Legion Medal of Honor. It was for outstanding character. You never knew who would get what awards. You wanted also the guardian cord. Had I stayed another year I would have gotten it.

My nemesis was Cadet Major Stauffer. How I hated that boy. He was in the senior class my last year. During the year he had had several of us boys severely paddled bare-assed with a wooden paddle ten times. My God! that hurt, and was totally unfair since we had not done what he accused and convicted us of. He got his due punishment.

Picture this as the final parade of the year with all the parents there and the top class graduating. There are three companies of cadets, speeches and medals, the band is playing marches. It's a nostalgic time. Stauffer is graduating! He is the cadet major, the highest cadet rank. He is to shine at parade in front of all his "troops," with saber in hand. Only he can't hold his saber. He fell two weeks earlier from trying to cross the gymnasium metal struts high up, hand over hand. One of the boys did it and dared him. I was there watching. Lordy! His hands slipped and he fell to the wooded basketball court floor. Broke his right arm and his foot, I believe. Two casts. He was hardly fit to lead the whole cadet corps in the graduation day parade in front of the towns people and all those proud families. He couldn't walk! The next in command had to do it for us while Stauffer sat and watched, cadet major in name only. What comes around goes around. I always wondered if he survived being in the Korean War. I was too young to go myself, being two grades lower. Besides, I became a pacifist and did alternative service, working two and one half years in a hospital. After, military school I didn't want to kill anybody. Neither did I want to be ordered around. The time in history of great generals was over. Battles were now won by technology and not brave men or inspiring leaders who knew how to motivate their warriors to fight. Major Stauffer would have been a disaster in real war. In real life the bad guys do get punished. That's for sure!

In these pictures I am around fourteen in my new uniform, having transfered from a charity school in upper state New York, Greer School, Hope Farm, where I was for six years from age six onward. The new school is Onarga Military School in Illinois, now vanished.

In both pictures I am outside on the terrance of 35 Water St. where we can see the East River and across to the other side. Snow in New York City at Christmas time, brass buttons on my military coat. My mother likes uniforms and wanted a school with better academic teaching, and that they could still afford. Probably the large sales of The Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, which first came out in original edition in 1946, was bringing in more money to pay for my schooling. I felt so dependent then. They had to buy the uniforms as well as pay for the living there. And they had to give me an allowance.

Some say I look sad in the lower picture, and should I not look sad? I am home only for two weeks once a year. I am in a brutal school where the older boys beat up on you or otherwise try and terrorize you. My new sexuality has no loving, playful outlet. There are no girls around since it is an all boys school. Mostly school planners have tried to put a boy's boarding school next to a girls boarding school, but no such luck here! We are not allowed to date the town girls, though we have to march into town every Sunday to attend church services at a church of our choice.

Sometimes there are fights with the town boys. We take the large wooden curtain rods from our room doorways and go out after ten o'clock curfew as a gang of us to encounter the town boys. I do this once or twice with the military boys but nothing comes of it. Our two gangs are good at threatening each other but don't seem to have heart enough for an all-out fight with weapons.

My father looks so proud of me in the upper picture. I can't look him straight in the eye. I don't know it yet, but I have deep feelings of being betrayed by him. My mother rules the roost. It is she who sends me to boarding school and talks about it, who talks about how they are artists and not parents. Now looking, I kind of think my father loves me and would like to see me around, take me to visit his Jewish brothers, sisters and their children in Brooklyn, but my mother is against it. There is an incurable rage against other family members in them. They do not tell me about my father's father, brother and sister living in Brooklyn. They don't care if I never see or know about my Jewish grandfather who mostly only speaks Yiddish. My father speaks Yiddish. He grew up with it as his first language until learning English.

He looks at me. What must he be thinking? He doesn't tell me he was brutalized and beaten up as a kid, or that his mother died horribly when he was sixteen. His boy is fourteen here and growing up and he shares nothing about his own boyhood at those same ages. I could have learned from him! I could have appreciated him, and him me.

He looks at me. I don't tell him I have been beaten up at Greer school and now at military school. I don't tell him I am lonely and don't feel cared for by anybody. I can't fall into his arms there, and crying, ask him to protect me, protect me from my mother who has insisted that I go to horrible, alienating boarding schools. I can't tell the truth about myself. He looks at me and I want to cry, all the unsaid things pushing at my throat like so many lost souls trying to get up through the cellar door.

It is horrible, yet I smile. We both smile, the two males that are so far apart. I am maybe smarter than both of them but I can't show it. I can't show them my learning, my understanding of philosophy and literature, of the kids around me, of history. Too competitive here. Not enough openness to learning, and sharing.

There's snow in New York City. Come! Christmas to celebrate!

Is that a scared little boy there? I don't know. I have no memories from that period. Am I only three here? I don't know. This does look like my father. At the time he would be still an advertising executive making lots of money and having a Chinese male servant who helped take care of me.
No, I don't know Chinese as far as I can recall! But it would be interesting if this amazing language and philosophy is in there somewhere touching my soul. I practice Spiritual Aikido to this day, which I helped originate out of the modern Japanese martial art, Aikido.

Age three? Where is my mother? Father is there, but where is my mother? Jessie Wilkinson, my father's woman friend after Gene's death, told me when Oscar died that my mother had been in a mental hospital for a year and that my father said she got out when she got bored with mental hospital life. I can believe it! Gene Derwood would rather be called eccentric than mentally ill. She never told me about being in a mental hospital. She did say that when a rich person is kooky they call them eccentric, but when a poor person is off mentally they call them crazy.

When I moved to California at age twenty-one and my father visited me and universities to give poetry readings, he told me that 'California is where all the kooks go'. This means 'crazy'. I still can't figure him out, but to suggest that he had a 'hard knocks' attitude. You weren't supposed to have mental problems then in the 40's and 50's. An adult deals with mental or physical suffering by being tougher than that which was trying to do you in. Is this how he treated his wife, my mother?

One summer I was home for a few days at age thirteen before being sent off to summer camp. I am in my father's room, mine for the moment, reading a novel assigned to me by my mother. The large skylights above go dark. Almost suddenly a summer thunderstorm erupts with a giant KAA-BOOM!!!, lightning flashes as if giant splinters of light have fallen through the dark clouds, and a pitter-pelter of rain dances on the glass overhead, quickly followed by the thump, thump, thump of heavier rain drumming across the two large skylights in waves.
I'm terribly excited, stop my reading, run out into the main room, yelling out, "Gene, Gene!" but she is nowhere to be found. She has not gone to the bathroom, and there are only two rooms to the cold-water, penthouse apartment, as they used to colorfully call it.

Gene Derwood, my mother, has vanished. She is simply nowhere to be found. I venture out into the hallway, and then through the apartment doorway which is partially open, and there find Gene Derwood sitting on the hall stairs, crouched with her hands over her ears. I sit down beside her. We do not touch. I am in shock. She looks up and explains she is afraid of thunderstorms. I for my part have experienced some fierce ones in the country boarding school I am now leaving, especially at camp in the woods there. I love them. I love the power of nature and the excitement of nature thundering at us that "I AM STILL IN CHARGE!!!"

I try and tell my mother there is nothing to be afraid of and a lot to enjoy, but it doesn't work. I have found her out and she continues to hide there on the old building stairs for at least the half hour it takes for the thunderstorm to pass beyond us. The liquid wet of ozone is very much in the air. I am used to sitting with troubled children at boarding school. Now I sit with my mother.

She doesn't care to talk about it after, and lights up cigarette after cigarette. Beside the smell of her smoke there is the stink of fear. My mother has lost some authority by me. Despite her assuming the role of always being right, in this case she has lost face with me, her son. Now she is the lost one, the one who doesn't know how to handle something about herself. I have won ground. I have something over her.

Nos lucror ex parentes ut adveho in nostrum. We win from the parents to come into our own. She will not like it that I have found out her vulnerability, something she would not willingly share with me unless she has to. I have compassion also. It is nice to see that I am in fact stronger. I have benefited from her early training to be the little hero before she sent me off to boarding school at age six.

I know mental illness. As a psychologist later, I have worked with and helped some people not go into mental illness and helped some to come out of it. So at age three I lost my mother for a whole year and had my father and our Chinese houseman as my two fathers. Then at age five I got my mother back, so I had her for two more years from four to six.

At age five in 1939 my father quit advertising to write poetry again. He looked around to find the latest poets and poetry and could find no good anthologies, and so he started putting one together. This became the War Poets series printed year by year during World War Two.

Oscar didn't earn much money and my mother did not work out in the world but stayed home and wrote poetry and painted. Thus I was a liability. They could no longer afford a big apartment or a house servant. I went to boarding school at age six, never to return home to live. My father's brother, did not want me either since his wife thought I would be too much to handle when I had a one day visit alone with them and their two sons.

Here is the child, Strephon. I am in love with him myself! He clings to his father and has to face the big lens in the mirror of the photo automat in New York City's Grand Central Station, or at a big department store like Macy's. You put your coin in, maybe a quarter, and you set yourself up, seeing yourself in the photo mirror. Then in ten seconds the camera flashes four times with a second in between each shot, and, after a minute or two processing, it spits out your images in a strip which you have to cut into four pictures yourself. It seemed pure magic for me to get captured on paper this way for all time. I liked the smell of vinegar and sweet honey I thought I smelled from the magical machine.

I'm maybe not really sure what is to happen and so cling to my father. In the picture, see his strong nose and chin? See how my hand clutches? See my wonderful Little Lord Fauntleroy hair? Frances Hodgson Burnett's story. Actually, the little lord was older than I am here.

My eyes are keen. I am nervous and need the closeness of my father. In the second photo I am looking at this hand coming in and the camera goes off again! Is that my mother's hand trying to do something? Fix me up?

I was an only child. What was I like? I have no memories from that period. Nor did my mother tell me anything about then that I can remember. She may even have been in the mental hospital at the time. Was that the Chinese house servant's hand? I'm getting confused, just like in the picture!

Obviously these adults have my fate completely in their hands and I can only wonder what is going to happen next, and when I will have free time again away from the adult's direct supervision of all my activities. The child rides in the lap of fools, as the saying goes. In simplified Chinese: 孩子乘坐在膝部傻瓜. Did I write I didn't know Chinese? In Latin, which I did know from boarding school: Parvulus veho in sinus fossor.

Oscar Williams never took photos well in my opinion. How many times have I seen his body go into erect position when a camera was in somebody's hands nearby. It seemed as if suddenly war conditions would prevail! A camera was about to shoot at him! So into his literary persona he would go.

This is a rather good photo. Since it is in large format, it must have been a professional studio photograph for one of his anthologies, taken when in his fifties. The books in this photo are his anthologies, not his much slimmer books of his own poems.

The bow tie is typical. Oscar always tied his own bow tie, and wore it everywhere, even to the Cony Island beach, where eventually he would be overcome by a superior sun's rays and he would have to take off both jacket and tie.

Oscar Williams loved signing his books, and so this is a true-to-life picture for him. He would look at you, ask your name, write 'for So-And-So', and sign his name. Suddenly in the brief seconds an experience of immortality would unroll, because in the literary field an author signature makes a book last and last. And there on the same page is your own name, the nomenclature of your equally short existence here.

All writing and book publishing is humanity's defiance of death. Inside the covers of that book he is holding, ready to give it back to you, are mostly dead poets' words, written while alive, and passed on to you to enrich your life, and the life of friends, while you are still here in existence yourself. With a signature and a look right in your eyes by Oscar Williams you have become briefly immortal!!!

The following Elegy written for my mother is of course fifty years later, since when she died I was only twenty.

Yes, it has taken almost a lifetime to come to terms with my spiritual mother and honor her in this true way.

Embedded within the elegy are some of her life themes as I knew her. The loss, the hurt, even her madness, as when at my age three she was confined to a mental hospital. She left it after a year out of boredom. My parents never told me this story. I had to hear it from my father's woman friend, Jessie, after his death.

It is a formal elegy, as maybe elegies should be. I recite the elegy also in formal manner, with the proper inflection of word sounds to emphasize meaning and simple nobility. It is something of course that I would have liked to have recited at her funeral or graveside. But, alas, even that is gone to me now.

I know not, these fifty years later, where her grave site is now. Does she even sleep there still, my father by her side these forty years later? Or have they, the living, removed the last remains to make room for others? In essence, the poetry says it more, hers and mine and his, than a piece of simply earth with stone marker. Let us build all our significant graves in the hearts of the living. Then, let us ourselves move on ...