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Morton Marcus: [Music] And with the strings of [unidentified] singing, [unidentified]. I welcome an old friend and a fellow Grecophile and that is Robin Magowan. Robin, welcome to the show.

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Robin Magowan: Pleasant to hear a hasapiko being played. Morton Marcus: Robin is a world traveler, a terrific travel writer, a marvelous poet who has been my friend, I'm delighted to say, for a long, long time, even before I moved to Santa Cruz,

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and who has just come out with a marvelous memoir called, "Memoirs of a Minotaur: From Merrill Lynch to Patty Hearst to Poetry," a very intriguing subtitle as well as title, certainly, but one which I think people out there will find very,

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very intriguing indeed. Tonight we're going to talk to Robin about his memoirs, about his family, about his commitment to art and how he almost got kidnapped by a terrorist group, which for around a year, I'd say, really reigned high in the

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international news. Tell us a little bit about your family, Robin. Robin Magowan: My family was an entrepreneurial family of very poor people originally, which is what one needs to get it going.

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My grandfather was the son of actually a surgeon, middle class but grew up in rural Florida in the post Civil War when no one had any money at all. And he became interested in making money, because there wasn't anybody in the family to make

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it. But it was basically, I mean, there's a book recently on him, which says the three great financiers in the history of America: Hamilton, JP Morgan, and him. Morton Marcus: And his name, of course, is Charles Merrill. And

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what did he do? And I think that, you know, we have to even name what he did, what that enterprise was is very interesting because it really has shaped America in the 20th century.

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Robin Magowan: Modern America, that- the whole fact that we're investing at all in the stock market that the government- is directly his contribution. Morton Marcus: And tell us again, what that enterprise was

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for the people out there. Robin Magowan: Yeah, he wanted to bring Main Street, or Wall Street to Main Street, and he wanted to do it to avert a socialist revolution.

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Morton Marcus: He did this by getting a group of small investors to be able to invest- if you've got a lot of small investors investing, you suddenly have big investments, and therefore the middle class would profit. And what we're

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talking about, what I'm trying to get Robin to talk about is the great financial house of Merrill Lynch. Robin Magowan: Right but Merrill- He had a firm called Merrill Lynch and he dissolved it in 1928, seeing the crash as

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it's about to happen, he didn't foresee the depression, but he did see the crash coming. And he tried to get President Coolidge to head up a firm on the notion that he could warn people about it, but nobody paid any attention to him. And he was

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just barely able to get his own money out, or make its own partners come out. But it left him with a lot of money, Morton Marcus: Now did he start the company up again? Robin Magowan: Yes, ten years later, the company turned it

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over to- how to decide how to repay him, they couldn't repay him. And he had to decide what to do with that company. And he'd always wanted to do a big brokerage house which he'd thought about it in 1910, even. He put together a very different

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type of business, which was designed to bring in all small investors and create a whole different scene. At the time of doing it, Wall Street was the enemy number one for FDR. And he also wanted to prove that capitalism rather than FDR could

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raise money, could transform the country. And this was his vehicle. Morton Marcus: And he had three children, I do believe, and one of them was your mother.

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Robin Magowan: Right. Morton Marcus: Another was your uncle Jimmy, tell us a little bit about uncle Jimmy because he had a big influence on you. Robin Magowan: You bet he did. He sort of basically made me, at

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least made me the writer that I am. He was my mother's half-brother and the son of a very intelligent woman who's still alive at over 101. They st ck some brains there, too. He as the most intelligent person I ve ever met. He was America's m

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st lauded poet during his lifeti e, he may not have been the be t, but he was very good at winn ng priz Morton Marcus: Exactly, enormous prizes because he was such a craftsman, as well as a- he was a marvelous poet, there's no two

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ways about that. Now, when he decided to become a poet, what was Charles Merrill's attitude towards that? Robin Magowan: He still grew up different from my father's towards me at this point, because he'd already won all

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sorts of prizes as a poet beforehand. He was published in poetry when he was 18, won their prizes then. So it was not altogether unexpected but there was a moment in which he was sitting with Jimmy at a polo match, which apparently was a

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sport then, or either it seemed ever and in a grudging way, Charlie put his arm around his son and said, "I'd rather have a poet as a son than a third rate polo player." Morton Marcus: Which is one of the great lines, I think; that

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really is a great one. And then he obviously- he went on to fame, not necessarily fortune since that was already there. Meanwhile, your father has come on the scene and tell us something about him.

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Robin Magowan: My father came from a very poor family in Chester, Pennsylvania. His father ran the railroad office, I think, and died when my father was 15 or 16. My father had to- got through Harvard, which he got to by typing other people's

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papers. When he got out of Harvard, he was- made a lot of money at Harvard and made something like $100 a week at the time, which seems like an incredible amount to make. But his own mind was totally focused on making money all this life.

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Morton Marcus: Whereas your grandfather's was focused on having fun, women, and money. Robin Magowan: And adventure, like well, he was more proud of his being a pilot in the First World War than he was in

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anything else, and died in his aviator suit. And he was really an adventurer, he sort of incidentally happened to do business. Morton Marcus: Back to your father, your father meets your

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mother when? Robin Magowan: In Palm Beach at a party for birthday, and then finds himself on the train going north with her. And then a little bit later, she finds her- her car breaks down in North

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Carolina. She's got nothing to do, with her friend, they see a sign advertising somebody who reads palms, she goes to this lady who tells her that she's going to sit next to the man that night whom she's going to marry. And fate is there, that

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man turns out to be my father at a party given for his younger brother. It was- she had no way not to accept it. Morton Marcus: Your father then goes to work for Merrill Lynch. And if you know, if we do say, you know that he was mostly

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concerned with money, the minute the war breaks out, what does he feel compelled to do? Robin Magowan: Oh, join the Navy. Morton Marcus: Absolutely. I mean, give it up and just, you

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know, just go in, yeah. Robin Magowan: He missed the First World War and having missing that he was not going to miss the Second World War. Morton Marcus: So he goes through World War II in the

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Navy, he gets out. And then what happens? He goes back to Merrill Lynch and then what happens? Robin Magowan: He finds like most people going back to a job that other people are doing what he was doing, and they don't

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intend to give it up. And it took him a long time, which you often considered leaving Merrill Lynch and my mother sort of kept him in there. And my grandfather was incapacitated with a heart attack and couldn't help him fight his battle. And it was

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only finally in 1949, that he got back the job that he had in 1941. The firm was put together, and then he was his number two investor. He'd already had money in the original Merrill Lynch. Morton Marcus: And then your grandfather, seeing the income

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offers him choice. Robin Magowan: Of running Safeway, or running Merrill Lynch, which my father called the greatest money-making machine that's ever been, and that's still to this day, I

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think. Morton Marcus: So, your father decides. Robin Magowan: On Safeway, there are more than 180,000 people. There's more to boss about, my father was really better at

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bossing people than planning, I think. Morton Marcus: But he does build a business, I mean, he really- It burgeons under him, doesn't it? It was a wonderful supermarket before but under his hands, it just really just

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becomes a huge global corporation. Robin Magowan: Yes, it also- Yeah, my father brought it to England for which he was duly knighted. But I think it really became a big corporation and a better corporation under my

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brother Peter, who cared about it more than my father did really, and worked harder and was more into food than my father was. Morton Marcus: And Peter is one of five brothers.

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Robin Magowan: Yes. Morton Marcus: And what's he doing now that listeners out there might know? Robin Magowan: He runs the- or is the official owner, there's

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twenty-six other ones, of the San Francisco Giants. Morton Marcus: Exactly, yeah. So this is a family that has many ramifications and interests for people out here. In Santa Cruz though, there's even a more specific one. And I'm thinking

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of the University of California in Santa Cruz. The second college there is called Merrill College. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that? Robin Magowan: So it was founded, or was patronized- It

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won its name, because these names get bought, of course, by a grant from the Merrill Foundation. When my grandfather died, he gave all of his money to the Merrill Foundation. And his fortune then was supposed to be worth, he'd calculated at 25

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million, they gave away over 100 million. And part of that, his son Charles, who had ran the foundation, became interested in a history college which taught history, and this small college being set up and sowmehow more resembled the English system. It

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seemed experimental. Morton Marcus: He also founded the Commonwealth School in Boston? Robin Magowan: Yes, yeah. Which he ran until very recently.

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Morton Marcus: And - I almost forgot what I've been saying here. The Merrill Foundation, tell us a little bit about this. Where did it dispense its money? Where does it dispense its money?

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Robin Magowan: Oh, it stopped. I mean, my grandfather did not want people being empowered and running it as their own fiefdom forever. He thought twenty years, that could get rid of the money. And he wanted it spread around between education,

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medical things, and general things, among different denominations. Morton Marcus: See, one of the reasons that that interests me is that there have always been the millionaires who have built

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up from nothing in almost every case, who have found like the Rockefellers, etc, that they give that money back to the country, the culture, the science of the country, and suddenly this has stopped. And it has become very, very

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noticeable by historians and social thinkers, that the new money that's being made now, people are just spending it on themselves with endless twenty-five cars, yuppie toys, and the money is not going back into promoting this other edge

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of American life, as it has for the first two hundred years of this country's history. Robin Magowan: My grandfather always felt that what you throw upon the waters comes back to you. And actually, he may have

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wanted to keep making money, unlike these very rich people probably aren't interested in having their companies prosper any longer, they are that rich. Morton Marcus: It is a change in American history. But anyway,

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again, these are like Horatio Alger stories, you know, and it's really great to hear them. But anyway, here we have Robin. And you are really slated by your father to go into the business and tell us what happens and what happens to

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Robin Magowan. Robin Magowan: Well, I was the eldest son and I was trained to go in there with the notion of, I went in there, all the rest of them would follow, so the pressure upon me was very

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intense. And I was- I was brought up to do that; I had no other education that I can see. And we're always trained around the dinner table by my father. I would resist something of it because I didn't like to be coerced, I also didn't like to

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be fed lies by him. I also knew by the time I was 14 or 15, that still I loved my grandfather and I could work for him and get along with him, I couldn't work for my father. And my father, if I'd worked for my father, I would have just been chained to

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a desk somewhere, been a figurehead of a certain kind, be pointed out to other people that he's there, imprisoned in this office, but I would never have had any power. And anything I'd done would have been second guessed.

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Morton Marcus: Now, what about your mom? Obviously there are these difficulties that were there between you and your father. Until the end, you and he sort of patched it up. Robin Magowan: Briefly, yeah. My father at last got sick when he

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was 70, 72 years old, about the time of the Hearst kidnapping. And he lived on until he was 85 but for 12 years, he was not a well person. And in order to stay in this world, he had to curb his temper. Yet he's also to start liking life which was

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inimical to him. He was obsessive, and he was achievement- business-oriented. And when you became this other person, we got along. Morton Marcus: Now what about your mom?

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Robin Magowan: She was very different, I mean a person of a different class from my father, I can hardly understand why they were married, in my sense except they were both the same- they both had the same level of energy, and that's the same

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level of energy that must have translated sexually as well. But she came from a divorced family, and she was- always felt that my father could walk out on all of us. And then any sort of fracas between us, or me and my father, she took his side.

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Morton Marcus: But you had a good relationship with your mom? Robin Magowan: Yeah, I did. No, but everybody has a good relationship with my mother. My father was the intractable, nasty, difficult person.

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Morton Marcus: Sort of a male role, right. Okay, so uncle Jimmy, now you're going to school in Switzerland. And what happens then? How does the life that both your mom and Uncle Jimmy give you, what direction does it take and what happens

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then? Robin Magowan: Yeah, when I was twelve I was considered too small, unlike you, for an athletic career, and it was realized that you only go to high school in order to play

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sport. So they decided to redshirt me by sending me to school in Switzerland for two years, for a year. And I've never been away from Southampton which I thought was the most wonderful place in the world, but going to Rapallo, which is

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where Pound lived and Max Beerbohm as well I think, it just blew me away. There, I started to learn Italian. There are all these hills against the sea. And at the end of the summer, my mother took me to school, Institut Le Rosey, which

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was on the Lake of Geneva, with a winter home in Gstaad. I thought that was pretty good. Morton Marcus: How many languages do you actually speak now?

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Robin Magowan: I speak French and Italian well, and I can dabble with German, and there's a little Greek, perhaps. Morton Marcus: And you've actually translated, you've translated Henri Michaux. I have a whole book of Michaux, in

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fact, which is very, very well-praised. I mean, a lot of people- I mentioned your name, they just said, "Oh, that's- yes, he did the Michaux book, I remember that." Anyway, I'm going- You know, it's twenty after and we haven't read a poem

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yet, would you like to read us a poem or part of the book or whatever you'd like to do? Robin Magowan: There's, yeah, I'd like to read the poem that comes out of the first pages of the book. I can preface it from

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the book itself, which is perhaps the way to do it. The first thing I remember about the ocean is my father, but on several occasions, long before I was ready, I recall him yanking me up and dragging me screaming into the surf. But when I was

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seven, the beach club lifeguard began teaching me how to cope with the surf. Soon I had a rubber mat with a rope so I could haul it. The mat's surface consisted of five inflated cushioning rails(?). I sticked my chin in the middle and let my

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arms hang in the water. Then when the right wave appeared, I kicked and paddled hard as I could. That by the way, is not a surfboard. And it's something we need because the waves in the Atlantic don't break like the

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Pacific ones, they break hard, sharply. Now the poem. Entering I stand, green as that beginning when wave first flowered into child, and I ran. My home, those white umbrellas

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way out there among the tumbling casks. Those waves may not be the night, but they come crying with night's full fire, and with their lit skins I have to ride, hurtling under foam, sand. When they're over me, its whole eons ago. Fish swim in my eyes,

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pebbles scrape me red, head bounces off the bottoms, stunned, gangplanked. When I surface, there may be another bearing down and I must gather my breath, make sure I dive flatter than a shadow onto the whole train's length that's

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thundered by. In the wreck insanity glitters, crawled out of you wave, I'm crawling my way back. Concentration is on this voice squiring me out through the slits in the breaking wall. I'm coming home, home where I once belonged. Ahead, a path

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opens, I must, I will, and chin down, I hop on my way, out of that vast dissolute cathedral, black, crack, moonlight, fleece and I'm out, floating in the froth mill, feeling the wind behind the shadow, behind the blade. Everything is teeth,

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savage, distant, subterranean. Mine are chattering but as hang on, I know what holds skier poised above a run, lovers he maneuvers his bulk toward locks under that tumbling shooting ecstasy when like sheep, the waves scatter and I shoot forth

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alone into the night. I want nothing more than to be the ark in that fire spoon and to this end I wait until a breaker looms at length. Long armed the night maniacal enough to ride. If not for this, why have I been out here? Spur to suddenly paddling

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ahead of the racing engine, then a wave and I collide and it's diamonds out as the mat jerks forward and I take it this wave house jelly-spattering me forth, barreling me on a cushion of foam on the land and a ride I never want to see end.

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Morton Marcus: And though that is not surfing California style, I think anyone who has ever surfed out there will certainly relate to that, though you've made that a great birth poem, continuous birth, and I think it contains some of the lines that

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you know, you live by, you know, I want nothing more than to be the ark in that fire spoon. And is to this end I wait until a breaker looms at length, long-armed at night, maniacal. Great. Yeah, that is the lyrical Robin and the Robin I know. Now

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I've seen this book in many different guises. And at first it was very, very lyrical and was very much like that poem that you read. What has happened in the book, and we're talking, by the way, for people who've just tuned in, we're talking

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with Robin Magowan, poet and travel writer and also author of the most recent, "Memoirs of a Minotaur: From Merrill Lynch to Patty Hearst to Poetry," a memoir by Robin about his life. Robin Magowan: Well, you saw that book 25 years ago.

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Morton Marcus: Was it that long? Robin Magowan: Oh, it could have been. I mean, it's been going on for all that time in a certain way. This took me that long to write it. It was a sort of- what you had was a sort of collected

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me. I want, there's no audience for poetry. There's no audience that I saw for my travel writing, so I wanted to create some sort of thing that would allow people to read me. This is not the way to write an autobiography. And I had to

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learn what an autobiography was, and I had to learn what prose was, which was- I had no idea. For me poetry and prose were basically the same thing. Morton Marcus: But you had written a book of criticism.

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Robin Magowan: Yes, but that was sort of lyrical prose. It was certainly not a psychological prose. Morton Marcus: Yeah. Okay. All right. I almost want to say why don't you read one more section. I don't know whether you know

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what page it's on. And the article that I've written on this book, I quote the wonderful, marvelous little anecdote about your mother moving to San Francisco. And to just- I call it, "Maternal Extravagance," and I don't know

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whether she'd ever forgive me for saying that, but-. And I thi k I don't quite remember where t is, I should have tipped you o f on this, and it ends the chapt r with your father's ca Robin Magowan: Oh, right, right there. Yes, I'm here. Yes.

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Even more characteristic was what mother did to her Pacific Heights house. She viewed well over a hundred before settling on her elegant palazzo with its Italian lodge and breathtaking views of the bay front thing on the top of Octavia, that steep

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winding roadway known from so many horror films, with the unattended baby and the baby carriage about to rattle down it. You all know that one. She had been in our new house a while when she noticed that it lacked what was for her a

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necessity, a cozy nook where she could lunch with a friend, so she acquired the house immediately below her on the hill and had it raised. That allowed her to tack on the ten feet she needs for a breakfast nook off the dining room. My

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father couldn't believe it. Morton Marcus: Howard just did that himself. Yeah, the book has got a number of those wonderful little anecdotes in it and told beautifully, just marvelous, crisp prose. And then there are

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moments of great lyricism and insight throughout the book. Well, we're going to take a break now. We're talking to Robin Magowan, the poet, he will read more poems, he'll read more from his memoirs, and we will talk about the strange and

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dangerous years that are coming up, and his feelings about them all these years after, because they are still not dead for you, they're very much alive in the way you've talked about Nancy Ling Perry and that whole era. So we will hear about Berkeley

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in the 60s when we come back. This is Mort Marcus again and I want to make some public announcements as we always do. First of all on November 16th, at the Bookshop Santa Cruz, Jamaica Kincaid, the acclaimed

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author of "Annie John," "Lucy," "At the Bottom of the River," et cetera, et cetera, will examine "Plants: Gardens and Gardeners She Loves and Doesn't" that is, doesn't love, focusing on her Vermont garden, on English gardens in England, her

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childhood home in Antigua, and other loves. So that's the very popular author Jamaica Kincaid will be at the Bookshop Santa Cruz 7:30 on November 16th. And going on right now from November 5th to the 21st at Cabrillo College is the great John

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Millington Synge play, "Playboy of the Western World," staged by Wilma Marcus Chandler and the Cabrillo drama department and that will be playing usually on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, check with the Cabrillo College community services and that is

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the fifth to the twenty-first. This was the first weekend and the opening weekend, so look for reviews in the local papers. And then From the Bookshelf which follows this program right after the Poetry Show, Billy Harris will bring Philip Pierce, the

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local actor and playwright reading the great D.H. Lawrence story, "The Rocking-Horse Winner," that follows the Poetry Show tonight. We are talking meanwhile, with Robin Magowan, whose autobiography, "Memoirs of a Minotaur," has just come out.

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And we have been slowly going through his life and we were finally hearing some of his writing, some of his poetry. We had gotten Robin up to the point that he was twelve years old and he suddenly had his life and his eyes opened by his uncle Jimmy,

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and his mother, to Europe and European culture and the world of art in general. And for those people who just tuned in, uncle Jimmy is James Merrill, the great American poet, and as you said, the most lauded poet in America since 1950 on I gather,

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yeah, I mean, so many awards, I don't think there's one poetry award he never won, he didn't win. Robin Magowan: It's because of his extraordinary technique that he had. As he said, he could write on anything.

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Morton Marcus: You know, and do it in verse forms. Robin Magowan: And also be lyrical and funny at the same time, which is a combination very few people have gotten away with.

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Morton Marcus: You went then, I will just skip right over this, but you really had what I call the classical East Coast education. And that is Ivy League from the beginning, probably the best prep school on the East Coasts, which is

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Exeter, which you- Robin Magowan: Well, I didn't like it at all. We weren't expected to like these places, and the school was to turn out lawyers, not free-thinking spirits.

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Morton Marcus: From there, you went to Harvard. And you got your BA there. And what did you major in? Robin Magowan: In history that was the only exclusive measure, so I took it for snob reasons. But I also needed to reorient

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myself after a couple of years in Europe to- to America, a country I knew nothing about. Morton Marcus: And were you writing at this time? Robin Magowan: I was writing from the time I was nineteen on.

00:32:31.270 - 00:32:51.760

Jimmy was starting a novel, which I'd seen when I was 16. I've seen some of the events of it about my family. It was called, "The Seraglio." And watching this happen every time I visited him was thrilling. And it helped get me thinking about,

00:32:51.760 - 00:33:08.260

you know, maybe there was a story to tell. Morton Marcus: Okay, and after Harvard, you went to-? Robin Magowan: I tried to work in business, I tried to do anything but re-enter the academy, I realized that it was

00:33:08.260 - 00:33:29.950

not the best thing for a writer, but no one would employ me. They kept asking why don't you work for your father? And I was at the end of it, I was stuck going back to college, I mean Columbia in this case. I tried to work in publishing and Bennett Cerf, who

00:33:29.950 - 00:33:55.630

ran Random House, told me that, "We only employ women and if you become a professor you have better vocations than you do in publishing and you make just as much money." Morton Marcus: You then do do graduate degree. From there, in

00:33:55.630 - 00:34:04.600

fact, you get your PhD at- Robin Magowan: At Yale in comparative literature. Morton Marcus: I mean, going from Harvard to Yale, I mean, this is rather sacrilegious, Robin.

00:34:04.600 - 00:34:16.000

Robin Magowan: I was not at the graduate school level. Morton Marcus: Everything's okay, then. Robin Magowan: When Harvard was not very good in English, for instance, Yale was the best in the country. Yale was the best

00:34:16.000 - 00:34:28.630

in the country in French studies, and all that same what's to offer me a lot and René Wellek was the best teacher I ever had. Morton Marcus: Marvelous René Wellek, yup, with theory of

00:34:28.630 - 00:34:48.160

literature, that book she and I forget who she did it with. It's a "he" actually. He, yes, yes, yeah. Then you also had Perry Miller as a teacher. And you describe him almost as though he himself is

00:34:48.160 - 00:35:01.570

Moby Dick. Robin Magowan: Well, physically it was as if he was the great white whale and he felt enthused by this whale, or distant- first, I was disenchanted of course, but you followed him

00:35:01.570 - 00:35:13.990

from one type of class to another, he taught American literature from an ideas point of view. Morton Marcus: Well, I can- in here, who was your best teacher? Who were the teachers that you really remember?

00:35:14.500 - 00:35:30.280

Robin Magowan: I think Jimmy was my best teacher far away because I had a classic apprenticeship from him like he was sort of my guru. It just took over my life and told me what sort of what to do with it. I've had my moments of rebellion of course but-

00:35:31.000 - 00:35:46.570

Morton Marcus: You described him as really sort of, at times you thought he made you out of nothing, just out of your, sort of your dreams, which are like butterflies in your feet on the Southampton lawn, which is very, very evocative and very magical.

00:35:48.670 - 00:36:01.570

So then what happened to you? This brings you to the West Coast. What happened after that? Robin Magowan: I was employed at the University of Washington, which was a great place to live and still is from what I gather,

00:36:02.530 - 00:36:18.400

and a friend of mine was denied a summer job. He had five kids, I got him his job. And when he resigned, I resigned also in protest, though I had nowhere to go. And Berkeley was the only one of forty places I wrote that offered me a job.

00:36:19.300 - 00:36:27.820

Morton Marcus: And what year is this? Robin Magowan: 1965. Morton Marcus: Okay, and this is of course, for anyone out there who knows, this is the big year. This is the year that Berkeley,

00:36:28.570 - 00:36:43.780

according to what side you're on, it either erupts or it blooms. And it is the year of free speech and Mario Savio. It's the year that Civil Rights,- everything converges in Berkeley itself. Tell us what Berkeley was like in those

00:36:43.780 - 00:36:56.830

years. Robin Magowan: Actually, I arrived a year after FSM [Free Speech Movement]. It's my experience of Berkeley was truncated by not having that experience, having been through

00:36:56.830 - 00:37:16.660

that the way everyone else had, I hadn't been politicized. It took Cambodia 1970 to politicize me. But I was politicized in a different way by the hippie outbreak in 1967. Morton Marcus: Now, tell us about that because you have some

00:37:16.660 - 00:37:33.160

thoughts on this whole hippie movement and Nancy Ling Perry, why don't you just talk about that for a while? Robin Magowan: Well, the hippie thing- I mean, we talk about all these movements of the 60s: Women's Lib, the anti-war

00:37:33.160 - 00:37:51.940

protest, black civil rights, as if, you know, that's what the 60s were about. But all the excitement was not there. They were sort of what came when all the excitement faded, if you want. The excitement was the hippie revolution and it wasn't

00:37:51.940 - 00:38:06.070

supposed to be a revolution, it was supposed to absolutely transform American values. And you see that it has transformed things in a place like Santa Cruz. Morton Marcus: Yes, I can vouch that being in the thick of it at

00:38:06.070 - 00:38:21.100

that time, this is what you really felt. I mean, you really felt that American society was going to change, that it was going to adopt values. I know that Levertov felt it that way, Ginsberg felt it that way, the Hell's Angels felt it that way.

00:38:21.430 - 00:38:37.780

Everyone was together and I was on the cusp. I was not a kid at that time, obviously, neither were you, and just got sucked right into it in feeling that this was really going to be a different America. It was going to be not only sexually raised

00:38:37.780 - 00:38:57.010

but spiritually raised. And it was going to operate on a totally different level. And for a lot of people [unintelligible] today to say, "have a good day" is a cliche almost to the corporation, but it was really coined as almost the code, the

00:38:57.010 - 00:39:14.140

password to change the American attitude of not greeting people on the streets and just having a hostile non-open personality, and this is what started to break it down so much so that within two or three years afterwards, AT&T was using it

00:39:14.140 - 00:39:28.500

and all the big corporations were having their operators and sellers greet everyone with, "have a good day." Robin Magowan: One of the problems with it, they'd be faced with that everybody co-opted it from the very

00:39:28.500 - 00:39:42.640

beginning, yeah. That sort of took away their authenticity and took away the spontaneity. Morton Marcus: We knew that in Haight-Ashbury because when, I think it was- I forget who it was from NBC News, or CBS News

00:39:42.640 - 00:39:57.070

came out and talked about the Summer of Love, everyone knew it was all over. And the first thing they did was they closed the bookshop on Haight Street. And I was there the day that they took the coffin around and walked with the coffin, and from

00:39:57.070 - 00:40:11.290

that day, people just began to scatter. And other people began to come in, but they were responding now to the media attention. But the original group that was there, it started to break up. And a lot of them are listening to this show right

00:40:11.290 - 00:40:23.740

now because they came down to Santa Cruz and they started to live here at that time. Come on, keep talking. Robin Magowan: Yes, I mean, one of the mistakes, we didn't realize it was a mistake at the time, the hippies hadn't- they

00:40:23.740 - 00:40:32.500

thought through a lot of their program, but they hadn't thought through the commune thing. And that tripped them up rather horribly. Morton Marcus: Tell me how.

00:40:32.590 - 00:40:47.310

Robin Magowan: But it was the problem of who runs it, I mean, what sort of authority do you have? Morton Marcus: And that has become one of the main bones of contention to any kind of thought in any kind of

00:40:47.310 - 00:41:00.840

institution that's forward-looking, especially educational. No one wants to exercise that authority. They think that it is, you're going to have a leavening and everyone is going to be able to do things on their own and will, without

00:41:00.840 - 00:41:12.450

any kind of authority or structure at all. Robin Magowan: But the hippie thing was like that, there was no leaders that any of us could see. And something new was happening every day. And it was all basically a kind of street

00:41:12.450 - 00:41:25.600

theater in which the revolution was something you carried in your clothes. And something sort of performed by you and your friends on every street. Morton Marcus: But that was an illusion because some of the

00:41:25.600 - 00:41:40.120

Artists Liberation Front, which I was involved with, we were doing a whole lot of things behind the scenes, the people from the San Francisco Mime Troupe were breaking off and forming clinics and forming a whole load of very important

00:41:40.120 - 00:41:59.890

sub-structures to really keep these kids in food, to keep them in medicines and health when they needed it. So there really was an infrastructure there, you see, but it was very limited and obviously could not take on the huge task of the great crowds

00:41:59.890 - 00:42:10.990

that finally began to arrive. Actually, they began to arrive when the Artists Liberation Front finally packed in. And that was the big party at the Polo Fields where there's only supposed to be around two hundred of us. And it wound up

00:42:10.990 - 00:42:18.100

being twenty thousand. Robin Magowan: Which everyone was there. No one saw each other at all that I know of. Morton Marcus: Exactly, exactly, yeah.

00:42:19.620 - 00:42:38.580

Robin Magowan: But what happened immediately afterwards was that from a movement being a street movement, an outdoor movement, the drugs, the hallucinogens, which were legal became illegal. And anyone dressed like a hippie was going to be strip-searched

00:42:38.610 - 00:43:06.570

by the police. And instead, the movement of the hippies had to move indoors. At the same time, it was also a place where you went for the music, you went to dance, when the harassments started, no one danced anymore, they just sat. And you could see

00:43:06.570 - 00:43:22.080

the change happening like that. But it also interests me that the SLA people themselves, they're all actresses. Morton Marcus: Now, when we're mentioning the SLA, because now we've now gotten to this point in the story, for people out

00:43:22.080 - 00:43:36.220

there this SLA means the Symbionese Liberation Army. Why don't you tell us something about them, and then obviously, your involvement there. Robin Magowan: So, my friend, Nancy Ling Perry, I call her

00:43:36.220 - 00:43:59.770

Ling, started the, or was the mind behind, the SLA. And she wanted to start a revolution, another kind of revolution than the hippie revolution clearly. And she wanted- she thought that a religion should start in the ghetto which she knew very well.

00:44:00.520 - 00:44:13.720

The people who had nothing to lose could unshackle themselves and that could also help us to overturn the corporations that were running our lives, or that she thought were running our lives.

00:44:13.750 - 00:44:29.740

Morton Marcus: Yeah and for younger people out there who don't know, after '65, after the hippie summer of '67, actually even in '66 there were race riots all over the country, especially in the ghettos, the risings in Watts, the risings in

00:44:29.740 - 00:44:46.060

Detroit, New York City, etc, etc. but also now, the demonstrations against the war in Vietnam had taken a clearly violent turn, they were not peaceful anymore. I'm not going to point the finger at why they were not, but certainly the

00:44:46.060 - 00:44:59.290

people who wanted to protest peacefully suddenly one day, because I was there, were finding that their heads were getting beaten and everything changed. And I think it's about this time that Nancy Ling Perry decided, and a lot of other

00:44:59.290 - 00:45:17.320

people with other groups, that there had to be a different kind of revolution. So now- Robin Magowan: Yes, she was annoyed by people trying to burn down wood in an ROTC building in broad daylight, when anybody

00:45:17.320 - 00:45:37.240

could have torched it, say, at night. There was she felt a certain hypocrisy in revolutionary protest. And she wanted, I think, to do the real thing. She was also, I think, motivated by being manic-depressive, at the time

00:45:37.240 - 00:46:02.890

that were no drugs to take care of that. And she didn't like her being down and she got on cocaine in order to extend her highs. And once she took herself off of cocaine to start the SLA movement, there was no halfway house for her to take her down,

00:46:03.190 - 00:46:19.960

so she felt very, very angry. And that anger exploded needlessly in the stupid, stupid murder of the Oakland Superintendent Foster, a movement that- from which the Oakland high schools have never recovered.

00:46:22.810 - 00:46:36.100

Morton Marcus: That was even to this day, and you again tal about it at length in the boo , a very, very stunning ac ion because it really just seeme to come out of nowhere and ad made no sense whatsoever, but that was just the beginn

00:46:37.990 - 00:46:54.730

ng. Your relationship with er was very, very intim te and character-changing, it se ms to me for both of you als . But then what did she do? B cause now the relationship betwe n you had been over for a year r so. What did she do after

00:46:54.730 - 00:47:14.180

that? After killing F Robin Magowan: The killing was not very well received by anyone. That was clearly a istake. And the SLA who were lready on the lam had to do omething to recover their

00:47:14.180 - 00:47:33.740

evolutionary credibility and hey decided on kidnapping. hey- whether they were going to idnap her and me strikes me as efinite possibility, but I fortunately was not around. Morton Marcus: You were in France at the time.

00:47:33.800 - 00:47:43.070

Robin Magowan: Yes. Morton Marcus: And you woke up one morning to find who knocking on your door? Robin Magowan: It was the police. I've asked- a certain

00:47:43.070 - 00:47:58.760

moment when no one knew where the SLA was. They thought that the woman who was staying with me might be Ling and they wanted to check that possibility out. Morton Marcus: And they actually wanted to protect you, however.

00:47:58.760 - 00:48:13.520

They had been, the Sécurité had been called by the FBI, as I remember. Robin Magowan: Right. My father was on the on the list of people along with Foster, along with Patty Hearst to be kidnapped. My

00:48:13.520 - 00:48:24.370

father couldn't believe it. He didn't see why anyone would want to kidnap a 73 year old man [unintelligible] you push off the bridge. Morton Marcus: But there was sense in there, wasn't there?

00:48:24.370 - 00:48:36.820

Because what they did do was they did kidnap Patty Hearst, and they see it in all the newspapers. And what was one of the things that they asked from the family? Robin Magowan: Oh, they wanted a food ransom.

00:48:36.820 - 00:48:49.900

Morton Marcus: Exactly. So there would be the tie in with your father, you see? Whether he could see that or not. If they weren't going to feed the ghettos in this way, then obviously the President of Safeway would have been the man.

00:48:49.000 - 00:49:04.420

Robin Magowan: When Hearst came to my father asking him if he would help with this. My father looked at it and saw a can of worms there and said no [unintelligible]. No endless problems with the giving away of food, but it also showed how

00:49:04.420 - 00:49:18.970

poor Americans were and how willing they were to stand in line for a ten or twenty dollar frozen fish handout. Morton Marcus: So anyway, they did kidnap Patty Hearst, and just give us the history after that.

00:49:24.720 - 00:49:43.680

Robin Magowan: What happened with the kidnapping of- she was eventually transformed of course from Patty Hearst to Tania and appeared with a gun during a famous robbery of the Hibernia Bank. And underwent that identification with her captors

00:49:43.680 - 00:50:04.680

as so many people who are kidnapped do. Whether- to what extent she was coerced or not is a moot point I think. But it does, I think, reflect the rather powerful personalities of her kidnappers. And they were risking their lives for

00:50:04.680 - 00:50:14.070

something, and she understood that that something they were risking their lives for was a lot more important than anything she had ever seen. Morton Marcus: And I think that's one of the ways in, you

00:50:14.070 - 00:50:32.550

know, you suddenly realize what these people are doing really could possibly make a real dent on the way the world's going and really affect a lot of people, possibly for positive ends. And you just suddenly start to beat yourself up and say, well, you

00:50:32.550 - 00:50:52.450

know, I'm not that important anymore, and they got you. Robin Magowan: Yes and you're not there to point out where this is all leading to, that what violence leads itself to, and a smaller and smaller thing that you end up being turned

00:50:52.450 - 00:51:10.090

into, that this revolutionary becomes very mean, finally. Morton Marcus: And then what happens to the SLA? They never- obviously, you are out of the picture by now, your father's out of the picture. Everyone is hunting Patty Hearst, everyone's

00:51:10.090 - 00:51:30.210

hunting the SLA. Robin Magowan: No, but they're on the lam. They've moved out of the Oakland area, right, down to Los Angeles. And they move into Watts for a couple of days. And they're noticed there, of

00:51:30.210 - 00:51:52.230

course, white people, or a number of them. But then the police get wind of them being there, and they surround the house that they're in. Normally, if you surround where terrorists are, you've got them, they can't get out. All you have to do is

00:51:52.230 - 00:52:13.740

wait them out. Sooner or later, they will, the whole thing will collapse. Instead, the police so feared terrorism, there was no terrorist movement at the time, that they torched the building that the SLA was in, in order to prevent a trial. They thought

00:52:13.740 - 00:52:24.990

they had Patty Hearst, they thought they had the Harrises, who weren't there. And they just wanted to silence the whole mob of them. And it's this effort to silence somebody that compelled me to write my book.

00:52:26.850 - 00:52:44.010

Morton Marcus: There was also a tremendous amount of firepower that was directed to the house. And I- you may have been in England at that time, if not in France, and all the major TV stations suddenly stopped showing the shows that they were

00:52:44.010 - 00:53:04.710

showing and went to LA to cover this massacre. I mean, it was- it was like Waco, but it was obvious, as I said to my then wife, this is an example to the American people and anyone who would dare think of any kind of revolutionary action. And you

00:53:04.710 - 00:53:20.130

just watched as this house was burned down, and no one was really allowed to get out. It was an amazing sight for television, the media and the government. And I don't think it was the LA cops, I think someone was telling them to do this from

00:53:20.130 - 00:53:32.340

a much higher position. It was an amazing thing to see, as you say, they had that house surrounded and no one was going anywhere. Robin Magowan: Yeah, so there's a hop of extraordinary paranoia

00:53:32.370 - 00:53:53.430

when you assign 5,500 FBI people to the Patty Hearst case. And the SLA, I think Ling, had tapped a very real nerve. Morton Marcus: Yeah and especially since that first murder had already turned any kind of public opinion against

00:53:53.430 - 00:54:06.960

her. It was open season after that, you know, as far as the government was concerned. Very, very interesting part of American life and it's been very interesting talking to you, believe it or not, we've already used up almost an hour of this

00:54:06.960 - 00:54:28.020

show. I would love you to read some more poetry. Can we play just part of that, we think it's a zeibekiko and have the best person I've ever heard write on Greece and really describe the emotion of dancing in a Greek Taverna is- Pardon me, it's

00:54:28.020 - 00:55:07.530

number six. This is a dance called a zeibekiko [unintelligible]. This is Robin's poem about dancing zeibekiko in a taverna, and I will not say he was sober when he did this.

00:55:10.330 - 00:55:29.350

Robin Magowan: An old peasant gets up, turns as his own hand-scuttled yard, he's breaking it, yard, fields, family, stone-roofed house, takes, steps on, next with his hands, fuse of a cigarette crackle, sing. And the ash of

00:55:29.350 - 00:55:54.640

his glass dancing before, around, white over which he stoops, hops twice, jumps, sizzle browns, blacks, flash of a horse whif stubble bride falling. Zeibekiko, says it, has hisses, he takes something round, shape of a palm and with

00:55:54.640 - 00:56:15.610

it hits, smashes, floor, trousers, shoes, one of dale, darkies scoops, slices, spins his manner, his hands, [unidentified] stone. Samantha says, "No, I'm not." Oh Kukuru, whose suncat shoes and washes the stones, numerous oxides of

00:56:15.610 - 00:56:38.290

nide and Stan's tango crow, flowback hands, shouting, ah! Hands, brain, calm looking for you, daddy, who gave me this name, worm. Giant fist, dances, sings, the travels or glasses descends, shoes, plates, hair, glittering phosphorescent shirts

00:56:38.290 - 00:56:59.500

through which he mosquito bride glides, white, dipping, moving over all the floor, moving, thrashing, sewing. I mean, he says, I burn the knife. I cry, wings sore and melt. The fire is aglow by hand.

00:57:13.820 - 00:57:32.960

Morton Marcus: And you can hear in that driving rhythm underneath the singers this sense of joy and yet rage, which is metaphysical as a poem that hung on my wall for years. And Robin has captured that in so much of his work, not only his

00:57:32.960 - 00:57:48.950

poetry but in his books, I've got one of them here, "And Other Voyages" If you're interested in reading Robin, certainly, the most recent book is, "Memoirs of a Minotaur," it's what we've been generally talking about tonight. There are several books

00:57:48.950 - 00:58:07.550

of poems out, selected books of poems, in fact, very interesting to have them all because you keep revising these poems. And again, marvelous travel writer. Again, a book that I prize that very hard to get now, Robin goes to the Tour de France and writes

00:58:07.550 - 00:58:20.270

one of the best books ever written on the Tour de France, which he followed for years. My friend, it's just great to have you on the show again, and we look forward to doing it again in a year two or three or five.

00:58:20.990 - 00:58:28.070

Robin Magowan: I'd love to do it. Morton Marcus: Great. Thank you very much. This is Mort Marcus, I'll see you in three weeks, Howard. Thanks for making the show possible.