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By Laura Simon
Baha’i Temple
In and about that time, surely over fifty years ago, Victor Perlmutter, artist and instructor at the JCC on Devon, took us painting outside the Bahai Temple in Wilmette, where I quickly set up my easel at the edge of the river listening to the sounds of the water. We were there for religious stimulation, for the making up of our souls to see how far it would get us with paint and brush or knife. I plunged in with a large circle, a smaller one on top and a dome that touched the sky.
“We’re all one humanity, one people. It was the dream of one man, one religion for the whole world,” Victor Perlmutter said.
“So what kind of kasha did you stir up this time, Laura, with your acrylics? Two oriental women with a stained glass flower between them? Bahai is the gateway to heaven. So paint
intuitively about religion and love. Just let yourself go. Or maybe you should go back to bowling.”
So I knifed it out with sculpturing paste to start over again. Coming up with two oriental women admiring a stained glass flower blossoming in their hands, and the Bahai Temple above
them. Using sculpturing paste then oil to put prayer right into their hands. Sticking seeds to paper with flour and water had a way of coming back to me every once in a while and how my teacher belittled me. Sometimes coming out as a springboard thoughts jumping from childhood to old age.
Boulder, Colorado
Mannie wanted me with him all the time but I had to go out to seek new acreage.
I was going to be a writer. I wanted to see the world, to get away from my narrow beginnings.
Mannie would warn me, “Laura, I’m worried about you.”
With all that I had learned had my life been that narrow, without meaning? Mannie tried to help me out of that thought. “You don’t realize it yourself, Laura,” he said. “You are so naïve. I don’t want anything to happen to you.” All I saw then was a chance to get away to a writing conference in Boulder, Colorado.
There in a classroom, Philip Wiley is pacing up and down wildly. “I’m going to write enough,” he said, “to satisfy the thieves. One day, I’m sitting in a theater and there’s my play unfolding before my eyes and no producer wanted it.” He could not discourage me.
Mannie’s on the phone pleading, “Laura, come home. Don’t go down into ghost towns. It’s ridiculous. You’ll fall into a hole.” It was something I had to do. I wanted to have a career. I wanted
to be a writer. Eventually he would see it my way. The importance of knowing frontier days: People. Wagons. Excitement. Adventure. Buffalo. Indians. Gold and Silver and I’m going to go by the Denver, Rio Grande. I’ll be crossing the Continental Divide and seeing glistening mountains, all that
view flashing by from the upper deck of the train, more than I ever saw on Potomac Avenue.
It’s midnight when we get to Glenwood Springs. A young man watching crowds getting off the train is calling out to everyone, “Are you Mrs. Simon? Are you Mrs. Simon?” A friend at Boulder had already alerted him and he drove me to the Jerome Hotel where I saw the original artifacts of
the frontier days.
I hired a student from a college in North Carolina for $16 a day through a touring company.
Together, in the mountains, we discovered a ghost town called Independence. They celebrated the 4th of July with a bang. They had found gold only to turn into debris when the mines had to close.
This was the time of William Jennings Bryan when silver dropped, collapsing everything in a heap, causing a deep depression. What happened to all those people? Where did they go with all their wagons?
The trip through the mountains was scary. The road so narrow. I thought the car would topple over at any moment. The best he could do was leave me on a huge boulder on the top of a valley. “I’ll turn the car around,” he said, “and come back for you,” leaving me in this vast wilderness. I heard the singing aspens and a sizzling noise at my feet. Animals? A snake? I wasn’t naive any more as Mannie said. Just plain dumb. What was I doing here? Why did I ever want the
frontier days? It’s all debris as I learn of debris now at my tape recorder and the times we are living in with terrorists tearing us apart. Never occurring to me what if something happened to my driver? I’ll be left alone with snakes sizzling under me, just waiting for one to come coiling up at me. And I’ll be waiting on top of that boulder forever. I have heard of writers going to the north pole, to the south pole, tracking back into Biblical times to find out how the Bible was written, how the sea parted when the Jews crossed over from Egypt, the women playing their tambourines. Now petrified waiting.
Finally there’s my student driver in the rattling car. “I thought you went back to North Carolina,” I’m yelling, jumping up, ready to hug and kiss him. The animals around here hiding in the trees. Who is she anyway in our valley? Lions, wolves? I’m lucky they didn’t take a nice big chunk out of me. Almost sorry I didn’t go climbing Pike’s Peak with the others at Boulder. Afraid of the height. Saying to my friend, “Oh, look at those cabins on the slope!” as though I were looking at a king’s palace. He’s pointing out how they hug the mountainside to avoid the harsh winters. “And this could have been a horse’s stall,” he said, when we got there. “A few broken logs partitioned off in the main cabin.” We walk the wagon tracks and then back up into the cabin. Inside we tore pieces
of St. Louis newspapers that were stuffed in between the rough logs to keep out the wind and cold. “Look, wooden pegs instead of nails.”
We managed to climb down a broken ladder under the floor to see smashed whiskey bottles.
“We eatin’ this son-of-a-bitch stew again?” Smash go the bottles against the wall.
We left the broken cabins to go looking for the ruby mine that we heard about. Finding a cabin alongside a river an old man with a patch on his eye came out. “We’re looking for the ruby
mine. Which mountain pass? Where?” And he said, “If I knew where the rubies were, I’d be there myself.”
I had a camera with me only to find out later that the shutter was broken, which was very disappointing. We drove near the Roaring Fork River, deciding it’s best to get back to Aspen before dark. And I was already making my plans to get back to my writer’s group in Boulder and to May Sarton and the others. I had May first at Middlebury College and now again in Boulder. She was pleased with the manuscript and gave me much time to talk about it. From then on, every Christmas
I received a poem from her.
These frontier days are in great contrast to our frontier days – marshals with guns in airports, ID cards to be issued to avoid lengthy searches. What if they’re lost or stolen to give us worry about hijacking and terrorists?
Breadloaf
One day when Mayo came home from college, after I complained that I had nothing to do, he said, “Why don’t you write, Mother?”
I said, “How can I write if I don’t know anything?”
“All you have to do is put a piece of paper in the typewriter, Mother, and memories will come back to you.” And that’s what I did. I read. I studied. To learn more about immigrants, going to the downtown library to read foreign newspapers on film, translated into English by the WPA workers during the Depression.
Who were they? Those immigrants? Where did they come from? They came into our neighborhood before 1914. I remember their struggle with learning English, suspicious if we laughed. Unwanted? Were they taking away our jobs? My mother’s cigar factory at our kitchen table? Hat makers? Shoe
makers? House cleaners? Then they were called “greeners.” I was the “green” one. I thought I knew why they left their homes.
I wrote. Not short stories. I’m starting at the top. A book! Some days writing from early morning and still in my nightgown – “Five o’clock, already?” A fast change into other clothes.
“What would you like for dinner, Mannie? Chicken, fish or what?”
“I don’t think you will ever get the money back for your typewriter ribbons, Laura. Look at all that stuff that’s stacked up.”
What made the immigrants leave their relatives, their friends, and all their belongings? Maybe never to see them again, with the war about to break out.
Some months later, with a manuscript under my arm, I’m going to another writing conference, at Middlebury College in Vermont, at Breadloaf, founded by Robert Frost. I was on my way to John Ciardi, Saul Bellow and May Sarton.
I was lucky to have my manuscript given to Saul Bellow, one of the lecturers then. Walking along the path, looking for a bench with my manuscript under his arm, he said, “What you should
do, Laura, is pick out the gold and throw away the tin. And if you belong in the kitchen, you should be writing from the kitchen. Don’t be writing from the parlor.”
“What's gold, what’s tin?” I am thinking. “If you can write from the parlor, Saul Bellow, so can I.”
Before I left, he called his publisher. “I’m sending up Laura Simon with her manuscript.” With all that, I thought my book was going to be published. Not so soon! After leaving my manuscript with his publisher for a couple of weeks, I came back there.
“You didn’t have to hurry, Mrs. Simon. We don’t want it, anyway.”
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John Ciardi came to read his poetry. With all these famous poets, I thought I was in a different world. I still have his book of poetry, “As If.” When I open it I read, “For Laura Simon,
best wishes and warmest congratulations. We’ll be looking forward to the book.” Autographed “John Ciardi, Breadloaf ’55.” Almost 50 years ago.
Another happening at Breadloaf. A Mr. Swenson of W.W. Norton & Co. called me in a restaurant where I was having lunch with some women. “Laura Simon, I just finished reading your manuscript. We will have it. On your way home, stop in New York at our office and we’ll talk about it.”
I called Mannie, long distance. “You see! You see! I’ll get the money for my typewriter ribbons!”
When I got to W.W. Norton’s in New York, Mr. Swenson greeted me. “I’m very sorry, but our board did not want your book.”
Later, I received the following letter from Mr. Swenson, dated September 30, 1955:
Dear Mrs. Simon
I have been having the devil’s own time with your book, reading and rereading, getting two other opinions here, and discussing it at length. In the end I am frustrated and sorry to say the decision has gone against an offer of publication.
The problem is this: You have written about a depressed time and place, and people who search, mostly without permanent success, for love and peace and security in a very depressed world. This is magnificent material for a novel. But it is also difficult material, because it gives the reader no personal reason for wanting to read about it; in fact, it is the sort of material most readers shy from because it serves to remind them of the parts of life they prefer to forget. This is true – unless the author does an overwhelmingly compelling job of involving his readers inescapably with the lives of the people of the book. A writer who writes of the things you do has to be a better writer, to find an audience, than does almost any other kind of writer. (A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN, for all its flaws, succeeded because it involved its readers emotionally and completely in a girl who was more exciting than her environment, bigger that her society, and full of humor. It was this latter which served to absorb readers into the sort of life few would willingly enter.) In this I don’t think you are yet fully successful. First of all, the book – perhaps because of its manner of writing over a long period and through your own learning period – is still a staccato series of scenes rather than a narrative. It is a sequence of almost unchanging mood pieces instead of a growing story or portrait. This is reflected in
the ending, which has the air of what it must have been – an afterthought added in order to give the whole an= integration it otherwise lacked.
All these are the reasons we feel the book falls short. But your virtues as a writer still made the decision against an offer very difficult. You have a truly fine simplicity, a way of underwriting which makes your readers construct strong moods, scenes, and people. Your sense of what not to say and of the precise word and phrase that will make the reader do the conjuring is sharper than that of many, perhaps most, of the successful novelists being published. It is only in the concept of the book as a whole that you fail.
There is no question in my mind that you should go on writing. I suspect you should move on to your next book now. Although you may well place this book as a whole, you might consider trying to place some of its parts as short stories. I think especially of the old people in the park – a superb piece.
Many thanks for bringing me the book. I think perhaps you know how hard it is for me personally to turn it down and how much I hope I will see something new from you before too long.
Cordially
Eric P. Swenson
The never forgotten May Sarton, her book of poetry, “The Land of Silence,” in my hand now, autographed, “For Laura Simon with love and faith.” Signed “May Sarton, Breadloaf, VT. Aug 1955.” I wish I could tell her now, October 24, 2003, that her faith was not wasted on me. She would now see: “Of these, the most memorable award was the second-place certificate conferred by the (San Diego) Press Club upon Laura Simon, a 97-year old, legally-blind, writer who has been
dictating her memoirs.”
Breadloaf is very memorable to me. Especially Robert Frost. On a Saturday night he would come to read his poetry. Once, suddenly stopping in the middle of a poem, “I see someone coming down the aisle,” he said. “From out of my past.” We were seeing a great poet in one of his deepest thoughts. Who was it, we all wondered? Who had he longed to see? When invited to his nearby farm one Sunday morning, I remember him coming through the trees. We all gathered around him and he was saying, “Words are all so worn out.”
That words are all so worn out, Mannie understood, saying “And all those writing conferences, I know you want the education, the adventure. But don’t you think you ought to stop?”
Sitting up at my tape recorder, remembering what Robert Frost said to us would-be writers at Middlebury. Words don’t really wear out, words used, reused, recycled all over again in different contexts, maybe, as I write in long hand from my voice on tape. We are still with words, more words now than ever.
Now in retrospect I even understand Robert Frost a little better, that evening when he had that vision of a dearly loved one, somebody in the distance held him spellbound. I didn’t have the insight then and could not as yet comprehend, as we used to say, that you can’t put a young head on old shoulders. I was too young in experience and too young in age, 45. Now, as I’m writing this and I’ve lived a few years longer, I feel the certain force in the universe. You have allowed me to keep
my memory so close to this century of living where others waste away in nursing homes not even knowing where they are. I can say, “Thank you, God, for still allowing me to work.”
Willie Ley
On those same dates in 1955 at Breadloaf, I met Willie Ley in a wide-spread garden of petunias of every color. We were comfortably seated. It was on a Sunday morning and we seemed to be alone on campus. In the distance, we could see the autumn foliage covering the mountain, shaped as a loaf of bread.
Willie Ley had lectured the night before about his plans for man going to the moon. He spoke with a deep German accent. “I’m not sure you are going to be interested in what I’m going to tell you, Mrs. Simon.” Rather shyly he said, “I was a professor in a university in Berlin many years ago and one day I said to my colleagues, ‘I think I go away for the weekend to London to study, to rest, to work and I see you Monday morning when I come back.’ I went home to my wife and said to her ‘I see the handwriting on the wall, my dear. We must leave Berlin at once!’ I took my briefcase with my valuable papers about the moon, a few books, and with five dollars in my pocket, I dared not go to the bank to take out any money nor pack any clothes in a suitcase. My wife and I stood outside
the door, took one last look and turned the key.
“We went to London. Left all our possessions, our family and friends behind. And never returned. Someday soon, you will see, they will really be going to the moon. I’m sure of it!”
I don’t know how much longer it was, some time later, after the first landing on the moon, I saw an article in the paper that Willie Ley had died. His wife indicating how wonderful it would have been for her husband to see that exploration. I learned from that incident and from the first landing on the moon, that all the world is Creation, all life is Creation, and I had enough time to think about it. That my whole life has been creating – my paintings, my writings, my experiences – all Creation.
Baby Doe Tabor
I was deep in thought while working on my collage, Lucky Lady. Perhaps it was the feel of pieces of velvets and silks, samples from the yard goods store that I combined with the acrylic painted rice paper. As if from some kind of deja vous, in my imagination, I see once again.
Remembering back fifty years to Baby Doe Tabor (Elizabeth Bonduel McCourt) and the time I walked by the opera house where Baby Doe was being performed in Central City. It was, however, closed that afternoon. I envisioned jeweled women walking up that long wooden staircase to the second floor. Carefully seating themselves in their silks and satins, bowing to people beneath them from their boxes.
With big handfuls of bits and pieces of emerald greens, golds, silvery silks and multi-colored rice paper I brought Baby Doe back from poverty to lucky lady, a millionaire she once had been. Just as I had done with Rosie, the rag lady, in my mind, from her trash in her trash bag. Using artificial flowers and strips of yarns, I dressed Rosie up in colorful shawls and pictured her all dressed up to go to a yard party; transformed into a garden lady.
As I created Baby Doe, I envisioned other women who would have liked to be redone into lucky ladies. Lucky ladies seeing themselves in crystal chandeliered ballrooms wearing big hats
covered with flowers. I always thought about going into the wilderness and researching closed gold mines. I’m a
writer, I thought then, and that’s what I wanted to write about – the frontier days, especially when I heard about Horace Tabor hitting it rich just by grubstaking a mine, first having a grocery store then becoming the first mayor of Leadville, Colorado. Later to become a millionaire, a senator, then to
drop to poverty when silver dropped, closing the mines. Baby Doe, his mistress, dying in poverty near Leadville with her feet wrapped in burlap and a shotgun in her arms, protecting the last goldmine.
Perhaps a reminder of our Great Depression. Millionaires became paupers. There were those who threw themselves out of windows, some went to Sing Sing.
Before leaving Central City, I was with friends, to meet them at their car. I stepped into a saloon, a replica of the old days, thinking of a good steak. The mirrors all around me as I sat high on a stool doubled and tripled the whiskey bottles and me, the smart bartender saying, “Why don’t you go some place else to eat?”
I never got to write about frontier days as I had planned. But the essence of my adventures is still with me. Writing conferences really didn’t teach me how to write. Living through the debris of a lifetime taught me endurance and that taught me how to write.
I do my writings as collages of my life as I do my collages of images in paint.
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Editor's Note: Today San Diego Jewish World continues the-weekly serialization of I'm Still Here by Laura Simon, a San Diego resident who is still going strong at 103. She wrote this book to mark her 100th birthday. 