Literary Biography

April 2018: I just finished Pride and Prejudice on the Amazon Kindle and I was overcome with emotion as Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy were finally joined together as husband and wife, the betrothed couple whom fate and wayward circumstance sought to prevent them from enjoying a more natural union. I reflected upon my own courtships and successive love-affairs and playful matrimonies when I saw how Darcy confided to Ms. Bennett that perhaps he felt too much to make the depth of his feelings know to her. I am also reading, at 25% intervals, the collected short stories of Guy de Maupassant, my next book will be Gotthold Lessing's essay on the limits of painting and poetry, Laocoon. But the Maupassant has a very cynical and French in a Gothic style or weaving love stories that start with the ambitions of peasant who yearn for the trappings of the bourgeois lifestyles and encounter, at the climactic moment, the countenance of death - or else a gentle reminder that death can at best be forestalled by enjoying life in the present moment. Andre Gide wrote that he would love to have been acquainted with Jane Austen, saying that he would expect her to be a remarkable woman. I haven't read his Corydon as yet, but I would think the narrative voices of his speaking subjects reflect Ms. Austen's textual artifices a good deal. How I envy you, J.G., that you love a woman who is wife and mother to your family, that you are the provider and respected professor, whereas the image of my beloved take the form of a romantic fantasia -- cultural traditions that have since become outmoded in this era of unforgiving social media.=============================================== When I was young my grandmother gave me a list of rules to live by, one was "Never go on a date with someone who would not be a good mate." I thought I ought to follow this rule in my life, the problem was I saw every woman, girls more accurately it should be said, in the years of grade school the ones that most caught me attention were Nicole Ossman in elementary school, Cheryl Grant in middle school and Samantha Harvey in high school, after she moved away to attend Andover's private school, I was attached to Heather Lynch. My attentions were not restricted to these women, however; every woman captivated me, including the girls in class as much as the actresses I saw on television and in fashion magazines. I knew one thing for certain: I wanted to acquire experience with women and I feel that I have done so. One the one have I took to heart the Ernest Hemingway dictum that a man ought to know a lot of women before he becomes a husband and a father, yet on the other hand I always found myself falling in love with a girl from the merest exchange of looks. Like Mr. Darcy, I felt too much to make the depth of my feelings known to these women or to any others. I saw a number of women, but I always told myself that this is a special time for getting acquainted with the opposite sex and that it was only the foolhardy you plunged into close emotional or sexual relations. That changed after I had my head injury as a result of a car accident in which I sustained diffuse brain trauma and was comatose for a period of weeks. My girlfriend at the time of my car accident, Michelle Quinn, was very close to me and for a while I pretended to myself I was going to marry her but I thought she was too frigid. Missy Sullivan I have written about elsewhere on this blog. ============================ Debra Mandlebaum was a woman I met at Rockland Community College and I liked the she wore long skirts but she seemed sexually awakened. Much later, after my head-injury experience, when she had transferred to Vassar, she encouraged me to read Portnoy's Complaint by Phillip Roth. She was my first very sexual relationship, I graduated from Bard the year she finished at Vassar. Debra Mandlebaum was a woman who sought the status of adulthood and looked forward to sexual relationships as the guidepost of being an adult. When she was fifteen years old she voiced to her parents, Frank and Alex Bergman, that she wished to begin her sexual life and like forward-thinking modern parents (they came of age during the end of the sixties, the time of sexual revolution, a few years prior to my parents, who were born in the early forties, which was during World War Two and were married before the beginning of the Vietnam War - they didn't exactly synch with the baby-boomer generation, as their upbringing was shaded a little too much by the war-mentality) her mother made an appointment with a doctor, who put her on birth-control pills and the fifteen year-old Debra had her first experiences with a sixteen year old boy named Jack who was a grade above her at the all-white Clarkstown high school; however, she didn't have her second sexual experience until six months later, which should have told me how much she enjoyed it, but I was too jealous of the fact that she was permitted to have sex every Friday after school her mother gave her a few hours play time with her lover before she came back from her job as a social worker. Her father was one of the top cardiologists in Rockland County and perhaps had been convinced of the absence of God by his handling of cadavers during medical school. I was instantly attracted to Debra because she wore long dresses, heavy and dark, they made her look European to me, her overtly Semitic appearance beguiled me, too. "Debra's a feminist" I used to taunt her in Literature class and she, her lips half-curled in a friendly smile, gleamed back at me. =========================== Debra Mandlebaum, far from accepting my virginity as no big deal or viewing the hardships I had to overcome even to get to college, reproached me for not having engaged in sexual relations before her. If she had know my past history with Missy Sullivan, the religious spirit of love and affection and tenderness that had enveloped us, she would perhaps have had a glimmer into what was to me a very disturbing influence; I was as perturbed by Debra's disinclination for me to have been faithful to her as of she had asked me to betray my country or disavow my religion which, I suppose, is precisely what she was indeed asking me to do. ========================= After Bard, I moved to North Carolina to attend Wake Forest University to earn a Master's Degree in English in 1995. After WFU, I eventually moved to Rutherford, New Jersey to work at American Newswire in Jersey City NJ. After I left there I became involved in the securities business, first at a late-nineties version of the fabled Stratton-Oakmont brokerage at 711 Fifth Avenue and then at F.W. Leavitt at 2 Wall Street and later, I was involved in the insurance business with Manhattan Life at 120 Broadway and later, I branched out on my own thru We Achieve Wealth, which I operated on my own, using my apartment as a base of operations. I met Mary Ruggerio shortly before I left my brokerage house after a disagreement arose because they refused to give me my own rep number and I bolted. How I wanted to be a stockbroker! To me it encompassed a world of requited love, a certain means of obtaining women's affections and embraces, not to mention the power and prestige of money - but that was an afterthought. Perhaps the truth is that I just wanted experience, regardless of the outcome and it was not "girls" but women, mature women, who impassioned me and challenged me and inspired my ardor. I have had love affairs with women in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties and sixties and all this is before I "retired" to a Senior Center at the age of 39. I guess I am just really an introverted, book-wormish type, but someone who sought adventure when put under pressure, someone who was forced to seek out new and novel experiences and greedily accepting whatever came my way because, at the heart of it all, I knew I was disabled because my eyes are such a wreck and I was scared at having my health impeded to the extent that it was impossible for me to walk across the room on my own; I was in a wheelchair for a time back in the early 90s because of a generalized weakness that made me unable to support myself on my legs. [MORE TO FOLLOW!]