www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/27/reviews/010527.27good.html
May 27, 2001
That 70's Show
Kathleen Norris remembers a New York of sex,
drugs and poetry readings.
By ERICA GOODE
THE VIRGIN OF BENNINGTON
By Kathleen Norris.
256 pp. New York: Riverhead Books. $24.95.
Kathleen Norris was an unlikely Bennington girl.
A Midwesterner who had spent her adolescence in
Hawaii, she arrived in Vermont for freshman
orientation at the apex of the 1960's, knowing a
lot about church choirs and libraries but little
of sex and illicit drugs. Bookish and shy, she
was unprepared for a place where students slept
with their professors, viewed politics as a
choice between Lenin and Trotsky and cultivated
neurosis so fiercely that a professor at the
University of Michigan once taught a course on
abnormal psychology using mostly Bennington
stories as examples.
For a while, Norris retreated into herself. ''I
felt that I had died, and considered other people
dense for not recognizing this, and for treating
me as if I was still alive,'' she writes in ''The
Virgin of Bennington.'' The title of her book was
a nickname bestowed by her more worldly-wise
classmates. (They also called her ''Norris the
Nun.'')
But immersion more often than not leads to
influence. And by her senior year Norris had
become close friends with, among others, the
feminist Andrea Dworkin and begun writing poetry
in earnest, taking advantage of the college's
very real devotion to serious art. She also
embarked on her own affair with a professor.
Though it ended predictably when he dumped her
for a younger student, through him she found a
job after graduation, working on the Upper East
Side of Manhattan for the Academy of American
Poets and its forceful executive director,
Elizabeth Kray.
The story of a naive Midwestern girl colliding
with Bennington's hothouse variant of East Coast
sophistication (in her freshman literature
course, Norris writes, she advised a
speed-popping fellow student that it was perhaps
not a good idea to take so much aspirin) is
fertile ground for a memoir, particularly when
addressed in the lucid, often startling prose
that made three of Norris's earlier books,
''Dakota,'' ''Amazing Grace'' and ''The Cloister
Walk,'' nonfiction best sellers. But Bennington
is just a starting point for Norris. She wishes
to approach larger questions of how a writer
finds her voice, for example, or how a spiritual
''virgin'' sorts illusion from authenticity,
growth from surrender.
Indeed, Bennington is the setting for only the
first chapter of this book. It goes on, in
somewhat haphazard fashion, to chronicle Norris's
several-year sojourn in New York City, the poetry
scene of the early 1970's and, most centrally,
the author's admiration for Betty Kray. In her
role as the academy's ambassador, Kray nurtured a
generation of poets while working tirelessly to
bring poetry to a wider audience. Norris was
among those who benefited from Kray's firm and
unstinting tutelage. She eventually met her
future husband and decided to leave New York,
finding her voice, her roots and a path for her
religious yearnings in South Dakota.
Like ''The Cloister Walk,'' which focused on
Norris's experiences at a Benedictine monastery
in Minnesota, ''The Virgin of Bennington'' is
both intimate and detached, written from the
perspective of the guest at the party who mingles
and, at the same time, observes coolly from a
spot next to the punch bowl. Its organization
overturns many conventional notions of how
nonfiction should proceed. Discussions of
theology pop up in the midst of recitations of
academy programs. Stanzas of poetry appear
unexpectedly in sections of biography.
Halfway through ''The Virgin of Bennington,'' an
episode begins with a transvestite offering
Norris makeup tips in the bathroom during a
drug-filled party in Hell's Kitchen. But within a
paragraph it becomes a meditation on Philo of
Alexandria, an early Jewish philosopher. (''Be
kind,'' he advised, ''for everyone you meet is
fighting a great battle.'')
This patchwork quality is not always welcome.
Vivid narrative scenes -- all-night carousing
with the Andy Warhol crowd, for example, or a
nightmarish mescaline trip that Norris
experienced -- give way to tedious passages
encumbered by detail, and infused with language
about as compelling as that of a promotional
brochure. (''An innovator by nature, Betty was
never happy with maintaining the status quo.'')
And ultimately, a point of view that succeeded in
her book about the lives of monks only struggles
to succeed when transposed to the lives of poets.
In ''The Cloister Walk,'' the reader encountered
faith through the eyes of an inquisitive doubter
and was led to understand it better. But here,
Norris is tripped up by her own attachments. Her
desire to pay homage to Kray, who died of cancer
in 1987, confounds the effort to describe a
spiritual search.
For those who are familiar with the names, places
and events that Norris describes, or who have an
abiding interest in how poetry in the United
States moved from Robert Frost to Denise
Levertov, ''The Virgin of Bennington'' is
worthwhile reading. But others may find it a book
that, though filled with small and sparkling
epiphanies, cannot decide, finally, what it wants
to be.
_______
Erica Goode writes about human behavior for The
Times.
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