I simply want to tell the story of my numerous experiments with truth. — Mahatma Gandhi
If a fool persists in his folly, he would become wise. — William Blake

I BECOME A POET

Since my grandpa was a communist, you’d think we’d have subversive literature all around the house, but the main reading was the New York Daily News and an occasional Reader’s Digest. Also an illustrated Webster’s Dictionary, full of interesting drawings and information, which I sometimes leafed through. A Bible which went unread. And Elbert Hubbard’s Scrapbook, which my mother occasionally opened. That is where I first encountered poetry, including working class poetry, some with a radical slant.

Hubbard (1856-1915) was an American Transcendentalist, a follower of William Morris, kind of a mountebank utopian anarcho-socialist, active in the Arts and Crafts movement, and founder of Roycroft, an artisan community. At that time Hubbard’s Scrapbook was popular among people of my family’s social level, who were striving to join the lower middle class, and it was my introduction to Whitman, Blake, Wilde, Emerson, Lindsay, Thoreau, Coleridge, Yates, Shakespeare, et al.

Alongside many standard classic poems, the Scrapbook included radical verses such as Louis Untermeyer’s, “Caliban in the Coal Mine,” Albert Edward’s “Comrade Yedda,” Evelyn Underhill’s “The Lady Poverty,” William Morris’s “March of the Workers ,” Thomas Hood’s “Song of the Shirt,” Edwin Markham’s “The Man With the Hoe,” Mary Carolyn Davies’s “The Dream Bearer,” as well as excerpts and snippets from George Eliot, Madame de Stael, Henry George, Thomas Paine, John Brown’s address to the court, and many more.

These were the early years of the cold war and the McCarthy era, when ideas considered subversive by the status quo were banished from classrooms and teachers who strayed from that message were in trouble. My parents told me to never repeat anything anybody said at home, and I understood that to mean anything political or related to social justice issues, which were considered subversive ideas in school. That my grandpa was a communist and spoke with an accent, and my dad was a postman, made us very vulnerable.

We lived at the fringe of a more affluent neighborhood, near the school district border. My family was towards the low end of the local economic spectrum. A block away, I would have gone to a school that was more of a holding tank, rather than preparing kids for a higher education.

In my elementary school, PS 187 Manhattan, they taught that America was based on freedom and democracy, that we had just defeated fascism at great cost. Yet what they practiced at school was discipline and authority. I hated the school system and felt they were trying to break me, to break all the kids, to make us subservient. But I rebelled and swore to myself that I wouldn’t be broken. I had friends who felt similarly, and our common oppression brought us together. I became friends with the rebels and outsiders.

Feeling oppressed at school was made worse by the contrast with my summers in New Jersey, where I roamed free all day with a neighborhood pack of country kids, running across the fields, wandering trails through the pine forests, biking down the road to a swimming hole at a bend in the creek. But then a developer bought the land along the creek, built a concrete dam, flooded the forest to create a lake, and sold lots for vacation cottages. I had thought that the forest and the creek were as eternal as the sky. Now one man had the power to destroy them, and destroy them he did.

The regimentation of school in the winter and the loss of my country summer getaway, led me to conclude that too many things were wrong in the grownup world. Maybe my grandpa Sam was right, maybe some things needed to be rethought.

I hated third grade so much I quit. I knew my parents wouldn’t like that, so I didn’t tell them, and just started going to the park. After a few days, I was caught by a truant officer. Forced to recognize their superior power, I decided to play along with them for a while in order to survive.

PS 187 Manhattan became the setting of my novel Maroon. The school, the kids, the teachers and the principal were all pretty much as I describe them. The character of Henry was based on a real life friend, who is now deceased. The fictional clubhouse was a real place, in a forgotten space under a real apartment building, and the forbidden empty lot we called the Little Woods, has today been preserved as Cabrini Woods Nature Sanctuary.

A couple of my first poems were printed in school newsletters in maybe fourth and fifth grades. Then when I was graduating, one of the English teachers of the school took me aside, told me I was a poet and encouraged me to continue with it. That was the first time anybody other than my mom ever said that I had a talent. Being told I was a poet felt liberating in part because poetry didn’t require money or resources. I Just needed a pencil and a piece of paper. And I didn’t even need those, I could just make up a poem in my head.

Today I want to thank you, Miss M. Devanny, for telling me I’m a poet, although I hated your rigid teaching methods and rebelled against them. You gave me the first D that I ever got, in grammar. You made us memorize definitions of all the parts of speech. I thought that was the stupidest thing I had ever heard, and refused to do it at first. I still remember those definitions, and they have been helpful countless times over the years. In my novel, Maroon, I satirized you and your sister, the spinster English teachers. It probably sounds heartless to satirize the first person who told me I was a poet, but your disciplinarian nature epitomized everything I hated about school.

THE SAILOR AND THE SHOWGIRL

On a shelf in my parents’ bedroom closet, when I was little, sat a cardboard box of old photos from when my mom worked in showbiz. Nearby hung and one of her glittery, scanty costumes and my dad’s old sailor suits, a white one and a heavier blue one.

They met around 1933 on a beach in San Diego. He was with a group of sailors on leave, and she was with a troupe of dancers working in a traveling show. As my mom told it, she didn’t know him very long when they got married, and she thanked her lucky stars that he turned out to be such a nice guy.

Both had arrived in San Diego by ship from New York City, through the Panama Canal, and up the west coast. She had been entertaining in night clubs in Panama City with her troupe. He was an electrician’s mate on the USS Memphis, a warship that patrolled Central America and the Caribbean protecting “American interests,” which meant the United Fruit Company, during the Banana Wars. His ship was stationed off the Pacific coast to provide logistical support for the Marines fighting against the Nicaraguan revolutionary guerrillas led by Augusto Sandino. Shelling the coast was a standing threat if the rebels tried to take over the port city of Corinto or the railway from there to the capital, Managua. But Sandino never did, and eventually FDR initiated his “Good Neighbor” policy and brought the troops home.

Somehow my parents wound up together back in New York City. My sister came along a while later, and I was born three days after Hitler unleashed the Blitz during the Battle of Britain. We lived in Washington Heights, tucked up next to the George Washington bridge. Everybody was afraid the bridge would get bombed, so anybody with any money moved out.

When I first knew my parents as a little kid, she was a housewife and he was a letter carrier in the post office. She’d grown up mostly in rural New Jersey, he in small town Pennsylvania.

He almost never spoke about his time in the navy, except for when he showed me his certificate from when he first crossed the equator in December, 1932, at age 22, and underwent an initiation ceremony into the Solemn Mysteries of the Ancient Order of the Deep. At the top of the certificate was a drawing of the god Neptune wearing a crown and holding a trident, riding in a chariot through the waves, with fish, shells and mermaids on the sides, and signed below by Neptune and Davy Jones, whose locker at the bottom of the sea was the final home for drowned sailors.

Mom and my aunt Bunny, a couple years older, were both raised mainly in farm country in New Jersey, where my grandpa and grandma tried to start a chicken farm. He had come to America in 1900, at the age of 12, penniless, from a shtetl in what was then Romania, and she came over a couple of years later, from Austria. He became a furrier in the garment district. His union, mostly Jewish immigrants, was promoting the idea of “five acres and independence,” which for many was the fulfillment of their American dream. He saved his pennies and bought seven acres of land in Bennett’s Mills, New Jersey, hoping for the independence promised.

But the Great Depression destroyed their farm and American dream before it ever had a chance, and they retreated back to New York City, where he returned to the garment district sweat shops, and my mom and her sister found work in show biz as dancers. The old farm became a retreat and his retirement plan. My family used to spend summers there. We had no electricity or running water. We used kerosene lanterns for light, a wood stove for cooking, an ice box for refrigeration, pumped water from an outdoor hand pump that we had to prime each morning, and used an outhouse. Every twilight the crickets sang and the whippoorwills cried.

My family never kept any political literature in the house. I absorbed my working class identity from them by osmosis. Among my Mom’s heroes were Mahatma Gandhi and Harry Bridges, leader of the 1934 San Francisco general strike. When I wasn’t acting properly, she’d admonish me to “be a mensch.” She never explained what that meant, but I understood that a mensch always did the right thing. Although she was not great at carrying a tune, Mom used to sing old Depression songs around the house, like, “The best things in life are free.”

My dad’s side was a volatile mix of Anglo Protestants and Irish Catholics, rival groups with centuries of bad blood, who had met again on this shore of the Atlantic in the coal mines and silk mills around Scranton in my grandparents’ generation. My grandpa Howard had been working as a foreman in a silk mill owned by one of his brothers, when he met my grandma Elizabeth, a worker in the mill, which mainly employed girls from Irish immigrant families, many of whose brothers worked in the mines. The Catholic Bonners were from County Donegal, in the Irish Republic today, and the Protestant Curls hailed from County Antrim, about ninety miles away, in Northern Ireland today. My near-namesake John Curll, Jr, with double ll, was born there in 1760, and died in Chester County, Pennsylvania in 1795.

My Irish grandma died when Dad was sixteen, and he and his brother bounced between her Catholic side of the family, and my grandpa’s Protestant side. Each side damned the other to the eternal fires of Hell. So my dad married a Jewish girl.

Although the Curl surname is Anglo, according to my DNA I’m actually only six percent English. Besides being half Jewish and a quarter Irish, I’m also an eighth Scottish, with the rest divided between French and German. As far as I can figure, Curl is a variant of Carl, and comes from the Old English churl, or ceorl, meaning a “free” peasant, who of course acts churlish. In addition I am also 3.2 percent Neanderthal, probably at least three or four times more than you, and maybe that explains why human society has always seemed extremely strange to me.

IDENTITIES

Neither side of my family had much schooling. If my mom ever stepped inside a high school, she never mentioned it to me; her education started in a one-room rural school and, as far as I know, ended there. My dad briefly attended a Catholic seminary. From him I learned to value honesty and work; from her I learned to value art and culture.

Besides being a dancer, Mom had also worked as an artist’s model, and we had two beautiful large framed pastel sketches of her on our living room wall. Near the bottom right of one of them was written, “To Jeanne, the modern Venus, from her admirer, P…” He had an Italian name, but I don’t recall it precisely.

The only other artwork I remember were two prints of famous paintings, cut from glossy magazines, hanging on a wall of our little country house. I’m sure that they were chosen by my grandpa, because they fit his personality: Gaugin’s Tahitian women bathing “By the Sea,” and Bruegel’s “The Wedding Dance.” On another wall was a montage Grandpa had made from photo clippings of some of the great heroes and villains of the 1930s, with newspaper headlines. Political folk art.

I had no family religion passed down to me. My parents told me I needed to figure that out for myself. We never went to any Christian church services, although we celebrated Santa and the Easter Bunny. The only passage I knew from the Bible was the 23rd Psalm, which the principal at public school read every week at assembly. Although my sister and I were Jews according to Talmudic matrilineal tradition, and certainly Jewish enough for Hitler, we weren’t initiated in the usual ways, and didn’t participate in any Jewish customs. We came to school on Jewish holidays, along with only a few other misfits. My Jewish grandpa was an atheist. The first Passover Seder I ever attended was when a high school friend invited me over to his house.

In school when I said I was half Jewish, sometimes kids would say, “You can’t be half Jewish.” If I insisted that I’m part other things too, they’d say something like, “If your mother’s Jewish, you’re Jewish. Don’t you want to be one of the Chosen People?” I learned to tread lightly while talking about religion and ethnicity. People were sensitive about it. One day when I was around seven or eight I was playing outside on the stoop with a little Catholic girl who lived in my building, and she started telling me horror stories about how God punishes people who don’t believe in the Virgin Mary. I eventually got tired of listening to her and exclaimed, “Oh, Connie, you and your religion!” She ran upstairs and told her parents, and I was in trouble.

My first real summer job was as a busboy in a Jewish Catskills hotel, and on Shabbos when they wanted to turn the lights on or off, the bosses would yell, “Get the goy,” meaning me. I had my first real romance with Muriel, a neighborhood girl. I still remember her cute little dimples. Her father told me to stay away from her, “because you’re not Jewish.” They made assumptions because of my name, and I never corrected them. I didn’t like always explaining my complex ethnicity, often let people think whatever they wanted to think, and distanced myself from people who treated others according to their ethnic group.

Out of curiosity I began delving into religious texts on my own as a young teenager, both the Old and the New Testament. Then since there were a number of other religions out there, I decided to check them all out and try to figure out what all the fuss was about.

FAMILY POLITICS

Politically my parents were New Deal Democrats, at least when I was little. My Grandpa Sam, my mom’s dad, whom we lived with after my grandma died, worked as a furrier and called himself a communist. I don’t know if he was ever actually a member of the Party. He was also an environmentalist, with a deep love for wild beaches and the natural world. My other grandpa, Howard, was a Republican who worked as a doorman, played the ponies, never won anything, but was sure that he would win big someday, and when he did, he didn’t want some Democrat taxing it away. You’d expect that my communist and Republican grandpas to be an explosive mix, but they liked each other, joked around at Thanksgiving dinners, drank schnapps, had a good time, and never talked politics, even though these were the beginning years of the Cold War and the McCarthy era.

Today few people would wear fur, but a century ago fur was at the height of the industry, and furriers were among the most skilled workers in the rag trade. The leader of the fur workers union was Ben Gold, a household name in my family. Gold was openly a member of the Communist Party. When my grandpa first started working in the garment district, it was all sweat shops, and bosses’ goons would beat up union organizers. Once he told me about gun battles in the streets during the 1926 furriers general strike that shut down the entire industry, but the International Fur and Leather Workers Union persisted, and in the end they won a contract for a 40 hour week, a big wage increase, and a closed shop system. He became a shop steward, which meant that he was the union rep in his shop.

But from the stories he told when he came home from work, even though the union had won, my grandpa was clearly still in a very oppressive situation. He had won but lost at the same time. Nonetheless, he believed in something he called “Progress” and thought he was just being realistic when he asserted that someday soon the workers would take over all the industries and run them to benefit everybody. He held onto a utopian fantasy of the USSR which he shared with numerous other leftists of his generation.

Working in the post office meant that my dad had it better than my grandpa, since the government was a kinder boss. Even though the Postal Service hadn’t yet been unionized, Dad could just put in his time and plan to retire on a pension someday.

My political education continued with an incident when I was twelve, which gave me a glimpse into some of the inner workings of the system. My dad was working his way up in the post office, took a civil service exam, did well, and was up for a promotion to a station management position at the time of the 1952 presidential election. This was also the first election that I participated in. With Truman termed out, it was Democrat Adlai Stevenson, progressive governor of Illinois, vs Republican Dwight Eisenhower, war hero. I handed out some flyers for Stevenson. The war hero won easily, and the Republicans geared up to take over the reins of government. All civil service promotions were frozen. Dad got a phone call telling him that, if he wanted his promotion, he needed to come down to the local Republican club and discuss it. A lifelong Democrat, he did what he thought he had to do, and joined the Republican Party. He got his promotion and I got a lesson in democracy in America.

After my first miserable job experience as a busboy, and after a stint at the post office as a temp during Christmas rush, I swore that I would not be an employee all my life, and get trapped there like my dad and grandpa were.

Besides district high schools there are specialized high schools in New York City, and I was accepted into the Bronx High School of Science. I started there in the fall of 1954. Although I was interested in science and math, It didn’t take me long to realized that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life surround by only science and math majors. There was a literary crowd there, but I didn’t hang out with them. I wrote a few poems for assignments, but nothing more than that. There were quite a few other “red diaper babies” at Science, although most of us kept a low profile in those years. I mostly hung with the frogs on the swim squad, but could never quite break 30. My most memorable course there was the History and Development of Science, or HDS, where I learned the old saw that “half of what science thinks is true is false, but we just don’t know yet which half.” I learned to question and probe everything, for which I am very grateful. The most useful tools I learned to use, were the scientific method and critical thinking.

I MEET SALVADOR DALI

The best thing to happen to me in high school was playing football on the Riverside Tigers. We were a neighborhood team in a city-run league. We basically organized ourselves, and it worked out just fine. We learned cooperation by cooperating, which was quite a contrast to school, where competition was stressed. We were several ethnic groups and attended two or maybe three different schools. The team consisted of Big Mo Aron, the other John, Jackie Egenhauser, Lennie Cohen, Apostle the Greek, Coco from the island, Bobby F, me, and a few others whose names I can’t recall. Our coach, Ed, was just a few years older than us. The other John was our quarterback and offensive captain, Big Mo played half back, and I was center linebacker and defensive captain. We lost most of our games, but it didn’t matter. We got to know each other in ways we never would have otherwise. I learned how to fling myself into a block or a tackle without worrying about getting hurt, and I learned how to disperse the energy into a roll. Besides football, we also hung out at the wall, played banker-broker and 8-ball, wrapped up in the Mummy’s shroud on Halloween, and broke for the stairs when the inevitable Friday night fight broke out at Carl’s pool hall above the Lowe’s Rio.

Until then I had no personal connection to the New York cultural world, beyond my dad delivering mail every day to a dive bar where the playwright Eugene O’Neal hung out. Mom would sometimes take us to matinees at the Apollo. She had been a dancer and a showgirl on Broadway in her youth. I have some old photos of her in George M. Cohan’s “Forty-Five Minutes From Broadway.” She sometimes reminisced about when she worked with Abbot and Costello before they went to Hollywood. I imagine that she was one of those girls who brought out props and was their foil in skits. She said that offstage Abbot liked to hang out with the chorus girls, but Costello was retiring and shy. Mom always spoke highly about the people she met in showbiz, and admired the way many of them faced life.

It was through the other John on our football team, that I had my first personal encounter with fame—with more than fame—with genius, and somehow it opened up possibilities in my life.

Johnny’s parents were having a holiday party and he invited Mo and me. His father happened to be Lee Strasberg, director of the Actors Studio, which taught the Stanislavski method of acting. We were sixteen.

The Strasbergs had a sprawling flat overlooking Central Park West, as I recall. Mo and I arrived at the party early, and hung out mostly in Johnny’s room. Mo went out to look around the party, then came back and said that Salvador Dali was out there, and several famous actors and actresses, so I went out to see. Sure enough, they were standing right there in the hall, each speaking to just two or three people.

I tried not to stare, but the moment felt surreal. They looked just like their images. She was standing right there, the perfect fantasy glamorous platinum movie star, barely tucked into a sparkling white dress. I watched her fleshy lips move as she smiled and bantered, and through the party din I could pick out the intoxicating lilt of her voice. My knees buckled.

Dali, on the other hand, was one of the most unusual people I had ever seen. Although I didn’t really understand a lot about art at that time, I knew who he was and I was awe struck. He was very small, and wore a black cape. Always the showman. His mustache with its long curving upturned ends was elegantly waxed. I waited my turn, took his outstretched hand, and looked into the pools of his eyes. They were the strangest eyes I had ever looked into, kind of scary. Even now I don’t think I’ve ever looked into eyes like that again. I’m sure neither Dali nor I said anything memorable. Then someone else spoke, and Dali turned away.

But touching his hand, exchanging a few words of small talk, and looking into Dali’s oceanic eyes from a hand’s breadth away, left me feeling that no distance was too great to be crossed and now suddenly anything was possible.

I stepped back and looked over at the movie star, who was laughing with a few guys. I watched her unearthly beauty for what felt like eternity. What could I say to her? What could a sixteen year old say? I stepped toward her. I sniffed her perfume. I realized I had nothing to say.

I drifted back to Johnny’s room, where I joined him and Mo on the bed singing folk songs with a guy with a British accent. He was teaching them a schoolboy song called, “Lloyd George Knew My Father.” After he left, Mo told me he was Richard Burton, mostly known until that time as a Shakespearean actor. He’d been bored with the grownup party and sought refuge with the kids.

Everybody in Bronx Science took the test for New York City College. I didn’t even apply to any other school. Making financial demands on my family was out of the question. I got accepted into CCNY, with a state scholarship. But I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go to college at that time. I wanted to see the world first.

After graduation, I walked the New York docks that summer trying to land a job on a ship. If I found one, I was prepared to ship out and postpone college. But there was an excess of unemployed seamen, and nobody was interested in a raw kid. Nobody would hire me.

I couldn’t think of anything better to do, so in the fall of 1958 I started college.