Harriet the Spy, Or How I Put My Yenta-Self to Good Use

—for Mo

Research is a mysterious thing. When it is working, the research finds the researcher. This does not mean being passive; but it can contain an element of passivity, letting things arrive. A kind of alchemy.

When I started writing Larry Eigner's biography, I had little "formal" experience. In college, I took a class with my dear teacher, Mary Powers. Powers was a Joyce scholar, and she required that we go to the library and select an article to use in a paper. My other important interaction with library research came years later when I took a workshop on the history of little magazines with the poet Lisa Jarnot. As part of the workshop, Jarnot suggested we visit the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.

Coincidentally, my journey in researching Eigner's life began back in this very collection. My first visit to the Berg was daunting. This was before trips to Stanford University and the Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, two of the many other archives which house Eigner materials.

At this point, it was safe to say that I had no idea what I was doing. Of course, when one has no idea what they are doing, every event takes on equal importance. The first thing I found in the Berg Collection was a number of letters to Eigner from someone named Vance Morgan. In this, I became driven to figure out that story behind the person named "Vance Morgan." Later, I found that of the approximately the 200 people with whom Eigner corresponded, ninety-five percent were involved in the poetry world. He only corresponded with a sliver of other folks, including family members and a handful of non-literary friends. Morgan was one of the latter. An internet search told me that there was a dentist somewhere in the Carolinas by that name. I called the dentist's office, but clearly it wasn't the same person. [Eventually, I located him—but that is all of the story I am going to tell for the present.]

The second Eigner mystery in the Berg collection was a stack of uncatalogued letters from Cid Corman to Eigner from the 1990s, with a few from the 1950s thrown in the mix.

In his letters, Corman writes that he has made a rare trip to the United States to teach at the summer program at Naropa University. This was 1994. Corman describes his frustration at having to leave Japan, even temporarily. He had hoped that his wife Shizumi would make the trip with him, but at the last minute, she lost her ticket (already paid for) and passport.

Strangely, that was the same year my path briefly crossed with Corman's. While he was writing the details of his trip to Eigner, we were sharing the same space.

In 1994, I was a student in the Naropa summer program. I had a small stipend to attend, but I did not have a place to stay. For the first few days, I stayed with Eleni Sikelianos and Laird Hunt, but my room was soon taken by Barbara Guest. The school was providing housing for Corman in the other of the two-bedroom apartments they owned, and the second bedroom was empty. Corman was resistant to sharing the apartment with anyone, let alone a student. After some begging and pleading, he agreed to let me use the extra bedroom for one night.

That summer, each student was allowed to have one meeting with a visiting writer. I picked Corman. At that point, I was a big fan of Lorine Niedecker's work, and I imagine I asked him a lot of questions about her. In retrospect, I wonder what Corman thought about the fact that I have cerebral palsy when he had been and continued to be so deeply involved with Eigner and his work. He definitely wasn't put off by the palsy, although he was certainly annoyed by everything else about me. I can't recall if he mentioned Eigner or his work. If so, this would have changed my life, and it was a missed opportunity. Perhaps he did speak of Eigner, and as filmmaker George Kuchar says, "In one eye, out the other." I was 24.

Back at the Berg, I was still trying to process the saucy content of Corman's letters, which included some outright sexist comments about women poets, Josephine Miles in particular, and constant pleas and complaints to Eigner about money. He asked Eigner's mother Bessie to loan him money numerous times. He was annoyed with Eigner for giving his letters to George Butterrick, the Charles Olson scholar. It is my guess that Butterick was collecting these for an archive to go with Olson's at the Dodd Research Center. Corman wanted his letters returned so that he could sell them to collectors at what seemed like delusional prices, and he called Butterick some not very friendly names.

In addition to letters, I was also looking at relevant books, ones that Eigner wrote or read or otherwise may have been important. Events that I cannot completely recall led me to a book called Children Handicapped by Cerebral Palsy, by Elizabeth Evans Lord. Published in 1937, Children Handicapped by Cerebral Palsy was based on studies conducted at the Massachusetts Children's Hospital in Boston. Eigner was nine when the studies were done, and he was treated at the hospital at the exact time that the studies were being conducted. This is a lead that I had to follow as the timing was too perfect.

For various reasons, I have never been able to get Eigner's childhood medical records (or adult medical records for that matter). I called the hospital, but was unable to retrieve any information. Next, I tried the publisher, The Commonwealth Fund. The history of the Commonwealth Fund is pretty interesting in itself. Their website describes the purpose of the fund as leading "to the development of the field of child guidance and ...the emergence of progressive public health departments in communities around the country." It is important to note that Eigner was treated in one such progressive program, and Bostons Children's Hospital housed possibly the first pediatric neurological clinic. However, the Fund did not have individual records of the study, and if they had, they would not have been able to legally share them. I was not able to find out the exact treatments he received, but with this book I was able to piece together some interventions and therapies Eigner may have had.

Probably the most interesting part of my research was to be found in a box in Richard Eigner's study. Eigner, who lived a few blocks from his brother for the last twenty-six years of his life, died in 1996. Upon his death, most of his papers went to his archive at Stanford University. Just for fun, I decided to attempt to track down the remaining books from his library. I got this "brilliant" idea from Charles Olson, who attempted to recreate Melville's library. Butterick did the same for Olson's own library, which now lives at the Dodd Research Center. I was never able to track down any of the books because they were given (or sold) to Serendipity Books in Berkeley. Unfortunately, the owner, Peter Howard, died in 2011, shortly after I began to look for the books, and the history of Eigner's library went off into the yonder with the library itself.

However, I had the box from Richard’s study. In addition to numerous photographs, it held Eigner's social security card, magazines and chapbooks with his work, and his "Baby Book." Having a record from Bessie Eigner's point of view was crucial. I was able to determine whether his cerebral palsy was diagnosed from infancy, as palsy commonly is not, and Bessie's reactions and plans. Of course, in writing a book about an able-bodied poet, details such as their first word and first step are amusing at best. For Eigner, these events were seminal. With records of Eigner's Pidyon haben and bris, I was also able to begin to trace the thread of his connection to Judaism, which has been no easy task.

In Eigner's photos, there was a mysterious photo of him foisted atop a jungle gym with no adults in sight. The note on the back of this photo attests that it was taken at "Robin Hood's Barn." It turns out that this was a camp in Vermont Eigner attended as a child. The camp's program was based on the idea that “fear” was “too much a part of life” for children with cerebral palsy: fear of physical discomfort, falling down, or being misunderstood because of their speech or mannerisms. Adapting “the world” to the children in order to create an environment in which they felt safe was its primary goal. The counselors encouraged relaxation over the rigorous "muscle training” that the hospital provided, and they used play, music, and poetry as therapeutic tools. The Barn had another quirky side to it that was a good fit for Eigner. The camp was based around the literature of "Robin Hood," a perfect fit for a young boy who longed to be a poet and grew up reading Longfellow and such.

At a certain point, Richard Eigner asked me to choose an archive for his brother's last materials. I chose the Dodd Research Center at Storrs. I made this choice for personal reasons: it is the one closest to my house and the director Melissa Watterworth Batt is a wonderful librarian. The mere fact that Eigner's materials would be with Olson's, as Butterick intended, was a good choice spiritually and practically. In the interim, he shipped three boxes to my house. As these items sat in boxes in my closet, I reflected on the significance people assign to objects.  It was an interesting experience to be living with the same kind of materials, if not the same ones, that a few months earlier I had to put on white gloves and signed away my first born in order to peruse for an hour. This felt like the story of a young me standing and having tea with Corman minutes before he would disappear into his room to write Larry Eigner the letter that, twenty years later, the middle aged me would read in the Berg Collection of my new home, a city called New York.