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The following provides a bird’s-eye view (why do I think of Marlowe's Faustus being flown  above the world by Mephostophilis?) of my life between Fresno and Borehamwood.  At another time I’ll probably flesh this out.

During my first semester at Fresno, on December 28, 1965, I married for the first time, to Sherrl, at a San Francisco home.  To please her orthodox father, we had a rabbi, and though he would have been happy to pay for a relatively lavish wedding, as I remember it we arranged a quite modest affair.  I dittoed *the invitation at the Fresno English deparment, and we asked that instead of giving us presents people make a donation to Friends of SNCC.  I think a lot of people did—though I doubt we had more than 40 guests.  My parents flew from NJ for the event.  I wrote a poem about penguins mating; Sherrl and I had this childish thing going about being penguins.  During the reception I gobbled many deviled eggs which I had managed to have included with the inexpensive catering we arranged for.

I doubt I loved Sherrl, but I likely married her because I was 23 and it seemed a good thing to do to fit in and be ab adykt.  (Certainly I didn’t consciously say that to myself.)  We I lived for two years at 1503 Oxford St. in Berkeley.  In 1966-67 I attended the English graduate program at Berkeley, where I had always wanted to go.  I had a troubling academic year which I’ll describe elsewhere, and dropped out in June (actually, I took a leave of absence, which the department urged me to do to make it easier to return, though I didn’t think I’d be back).  Whatever adjustment problems I had, I did pass the MA oral exam required of all Ph.D. candidates, regardless of whether they already had an MA, although my committee was dismayed that for a modern poet I chose A. E. Housman (which I did because I felt I could master his relatively brief oeuvre in the short time I had to prepare).  We stayed in Berkeley another year while Sherrl completed her undergrad degree. 

In late summer or maybe fall, 1968, we decided to live in Paris, where there seemed nearly to have been a revolution during May and June.  We had a flat in the 9th arrondissement, probably for six months, and then moved to London.  There, we separated and I began a relationship on which I still look back fondly, with Bretta.  She and I first lived in her flat in Vincent Square (the same building, I was told, that housed Tom Stoppard, though I never saw him) and then moved to a one-bedroom flat with shared bathroom in Kilburn. 

In spring of 1969 I got a teaching job for a few months in a boys' state secondary school in Tulse Hill, South London.  On the whole, I don’t think I did well there.  While it is no fun to remember or recount the following (and I feel myself breathing heavily as I type the words), I will do so in service of relatively full disclosure: One time at Tulse Hill I got so out of control with the class that I took a loose wooden desk top and smashed it multiple times against the top of an empty desk, perhaps splitting the loose piece.  At another time, infuriated with the repeated use by and my repeated correction of students of "different to" (which I have since come to suspect is a legitimate usage in British English, which only makes me feel more wretched when I remember my inexcusable behavior) that I screamed at a student and maybe grabbed him by the collar.  I think on one occasion my department chair passed my closed door and glanced in the small window to see me out of control.  He was a very nice guy, and had I been him I wouldn't have wanted a me who behaved like that teaching in his school.**

I can remember a time when two normally good buddies***, huge guys who dwarfed me but by whom I never felt personally threatened, got into one of those arguments that will sometimes alienate young friends for awhile.  In their case, I knew that they were prone to violence, and as they stood almost nose-to-nose, I put a hand gently on the forearm of each, spoke in a gentle voice, and felt them relax.

I also had some kind of salary dispute at Tulse Hill, about which I remember nothing but which is revealed by a few documents from that time.  The following extract from a letter I include elsewhere in these pages seems to summarize the situation.  ("The letter" referred to in the first line is the Fresno reference letter.) 

While at Tulse Hill, I applied for jobs in further education, was interviewed at Borehamwood, and was appointed as lecturer in English and Social Studies. 

Having acknowledged the mixture of troubles at Tulse Hill--a salary issues that sounds as though it was no fault of my own plus teaching behavior that was--and ready now to turn to the struggle I had at Borehamwood from mid-fall 1969 to summer 1970, I can see that this background may color readers' responses to what I narrate.  Whatever.  I would note that my memories of my behavior in Borehamwood classes never ended up with my being out of control--even though at times some of my classes there (in proportion to the lower academic level and expectations of a group of students) were themselves out of control and I was at a lossabout how to manage them.  In this case, though I had supportive help and advice from colleagues, and (perhaps because I was dismayed by how I handled myself at Tulse Hill) I was willing to welcome it.  In the teaching job after Borehamwood, North London College of Further Education (across the street from Holloway Prison), I managed quite well; so perhaps I was working hard to learn.  Certainly none of the Borehamwood problems ever had to do with class discipline, and as you willl see if you follow the events on succeeding web pages, my administration would have jumped at the opportunity to use that against me.