Stories
Arriving at Yale for graduate school, I had intended to give up my plans to be a novelist. But it was not so simple.
First came the Cuban missile crisis which began to awaken my political consciousness. Then came Joayne who brought me into a dream world of promised wealth that could be used for any purpose, including world peace.
When the dream world of Joayne crashed in the realization that it was only imaginary, I was left with the wonderful dreams that we had spun together. So I decided to make it into a novel. The first summer, in 1963, I worked on the novel in New Haven, often in collaboration with David Rounds, whom I had met the previous year in Paris and who was also working on a novel (see his photo with me in the section on peace activism). Poor David. His novel, about a love affair that had to overcome racism, and with wonderfully rich language, got a good review in the New York Times (which is quite rare for a first novel), but never made him any money, so his second novel, reflecting the bitterness of that experience, was difficult to read.
The second summer, in 1964, I went back to Rice Peak and wrote the full novel, engrossing myself in it as if in another world there on top of the mountain. In those days before computers and xerox machines, each new version had to be typed by hand. I still have a couple of copies of the novel on my shelf. An earlier version was called "By What Ways," and a later rewrite was called simply "Peace." Click here for a copy. Or click here to purchase a copy from Amazon.
On Rice Peak
My trip out to Rice Peak was preparation for the writing. I drove a little TR-4 convertible sports car belonging on Professor Michael Kahn and took as my passenger Patty Palmer whom I had met on my previous trip back from Rice Peak. She was going back to visit her family in Indiana, although the family home had disappeared along with the rest of their town under the waters of a man-made reservoir. Patty was a beautiful young actress training with Susan Strasberg's method acting school, the Actors Studio, that had trained such famous actors as Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe. In once asked Patty if she could cry at will. "Which eye?" was her response. I used to go out in New York with with Patty and her friend Dorothy Farrell who, after getting divorced from the great novelist, James T. Farrell, had started an acting career in her 60's. We were a pretty picture in the TR-4, me with my beard and wearing a French beret, and Patty with her beautiful blonde hair.
On the way, I visited peace groups in York, Pennsylvania, Gambier, Ohio, Des Moines, Iowa, and Denver, among others, to understand what people were doing, and then later on Rice Peak I wrote up the visits for a central part of the book. It provided a "snapshot" of the American peace movement at that time. Twenty years later, I would return to this theme with my book The American Peace Movements, written in 1985.
The hero of the novel (modeled after David Egger with whom I worked in Flynn's lab and later in his own lab at Yale) sets up a short-wave radio station for news of peace which becomes critical once an accidental nuclear explosion destroys a wide area in the American midwest. The novel begins with an imagined spy drama set at the Wall between East and West Berlin which reflected my own passage from one side to the other on my trip to Europe in 1962.
The famous editor, Angus Cameron who was one of the best in the business, told me it was a "good read" but that it could not be sold on the market that existed then. I found out recently (2008) that this is still the situation in trying to sell my newest book "I Have Seen the Promised Land".
But the theme of By What Ways would return again and again in my life, culminating in the International Year for the Culture of Peace.
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme