The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told Read online

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  The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told: A Memoir

  Copyright © 2015 by Richard B. Eberhart. All rights reserved.

  All cover photographs are the property of their respective copyright holders and all rights are reserved: table with objects © Giuseppe Porzani/Dollarphotoclub; lamp © Zerbor/Dollarphotoclub; hat © JirkaBursik/Shutterstock; coat rack © Robyn Mackenzie/Shutterstock. Cover and interior paper background copyright © Lost & Taken. All rights reserved.

  Designed by Jacqueline L. Nuñez

  Edited by Jane Vogel

  Published in association with the literary agency of D. C. Jacobson & Associates LLC, an Author Management Company. www.dcjacobson.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Eberhart, Dikkon.

  The time mom met Hitler, Frost came to dinner, and I heard the greatest story ever told : a memoir / Dikkon Eberhart.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-4143-9984-3 (sc)

  1. Eberhart, Dikkon. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3555.B463Z46 2015

  813’.54—dc23

  [B] 2015002513

  ISBN 978-1-4964-0686-6 (ePub); ISBN 978-1-4143-9985-0 (Kindle); ISBN 978-1-4964-0687-3 (Apple)

  Build: 2015-04-23 11:19:20

  This memoir is dedicated to my poet father.

  Dad’s sense of humor is shown by his reaction to the Greek philosopher Plato, who famously kicked all poets out of his perfect Republic.

  Plato kicked all poets out of his perfect Republic because the fire of their verses showed their closeness to divine ecstasy.

  Closeness to divine ecstasy, Plato believed, was dangerous to his settled Republic.

  “Probably a good thing, after all,” said Dad.

  “We’re devil and angel,” he sighed, “devil and angel.”

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Part One Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Two Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part Three Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Part Four Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Part Five Chapter Thirty-Four

  Epilogue

  Notes

  PROLOGUE

  I woke up.

  It was Sunday. It was March. It was windy and cold on the coast of Maine.

  I had no idea how to solve my problem.

  “I guess I’ll try the church across the road this time,” I said to Channa, my wife. I sighed. “There’s got to be an answer. Somewhere there’s got to be an answer.”

  Channa was still in bed. She was propped against pillows with a coffee cup and a book. She pulled the blankets higher. Her glance was affectionate but without anticipation.

  “You go. I’m too shy.”

  “Shall I need a tie, do you suppose?”

  “This is Maine.”

  I swung out of bed. The floor was cold. I hurried to dress—collared shirt but no tie. From up the road, the church bell rang.

  “Tell me all about it,” Channa said.

  “Back soon.” I bent and kissed her. “How long can one more church service take, after all?”

  I went downstairs. I didn’t see the children. Someone had eaten cereal and not cleaned up afterward.

  I was too tense to eat.

  I pulled on a winter coat and stepped out the door.

  Watch out!

  Here comes the Jew.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  I am Adam Eberhart.

  At least, that’s who I was in utero.

  Then, on the way to the hospital in Boston, my mother—who knew her husband well—asked my father one last time if he wanted to change his mind, to which Dad replied, “Well, if it’s a boy, I guess we’d better name him after me.”

  So instead of being Adam Eberhart—which is primary, euphonious, and individual—I became Richard Butcher Eberhart, son of Richard Ghormley Eberhart.

  When I was brought home, Dad and our next-door neighbor were philosophizing upon the event.

  “What will you call him?” our neighbor wanted to know.

  My father was Richie to my mother and close relatives, and Dick to everyone else. So those names were used up. “How about Little Richard—but in Middle English: Diccon?” Dad suggested.

  The neighbor, who was a Greek scholar, scribbled on a piece of paper, considered it for a moment, and then said, “The name would look better, aesthetically, if you used the Greek k instead of the English c. Thus: Dikkon.”

  And so it was.

  Not a great name when you are in junior high. You can imagine the taunts. So I was Richard in seventh grade and Rick in eighth and ninth grades. Dad’s academic-gypsy life gave me the liberty to remake myself with abandon every time I changed to a different school. (I attended seven of them during twelve years.)

  During my seminary years, people often misunderstood me to be “Deacon” Eberhart, which, while it led to a funny explanation, did little to affirm my sense of identity. During the 1970s, when I was living in Berkeley, the daikon (a Japanese radish) rose to prominence, leading people to wonder if perhaps that was how my name was supposed to be pronounced. (So you’ll know, it’s pronounced Dick-On.)

  Try introducing yourself as Dikkon Eberhart at a noisy cocktail party. What people hear is aggressively German—Dick von Eberhart.

  Later, during my career as a salesman, I discovered that my name was a benefit after all. Customers often forgot my name after a sales call, but they did remember that they liked to buy from that salesman with the strange name. They would call my employer. Send me the guy with the odd name.

  During Shakespeare’s time, Diccon was a famous character in many plays about bedlam—madness. Diccon was used by many playwrights as a disruptive trickster, who stole and jabbered and kept the farce moving along, presumably to laughter and to ridicule from the audience. And in Shakespeare’s own Richard III that wicked king is called Dickon by his scheming supporters.

  These were not the sorts of Dikkon I desired to be. When I was young, though, Mom introduced me to a different sort of Dickon—in Frances Burnett’s The Secret Garden. Burnett’s Dickon is a wild boy from the moors—yes, as he sometimes was in the bedlam plays—but here, Dickon is also a spiritual guide. It is Dickon who assists Colin and Mary in the secret garden and helps them to heal.

  At last! Here was a namesake
who was neither a bedlam trickster nor a humpbacked king who may have smothered his own nephews (and did, according to Shakespeare). A vast improvement. I must have read that salubrious book a dozen times while growing up.

  During the years when separating myself from my father was a big issue for me, I used to long after that fellow Adam. I had almost escaped! Surely Adam would not have had any of the problems Dikkon had!

  You see, my father was a poet, and he was very well received—indeed, famous—in America and England during the half century between the early 1930s and the late 1980s. My parents knew and were close friends with most of the poets who were publishing during those years—Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Robert Lowell . . . the list is long. Most of these people were casual droppers-in at our house, largely, I believe, because my parents were cordial and were pacifists when it came to literary war.

  Dad and Mom delighted in almost every poetical voice, regardless of who had recently snubbed whom, or whom the critics were making eyes at just then. The critics appoint themselves to be the door wardens to literary immortality—they hold the keys to what many poets want most. The struggle for approval by the critics might simmer for years, as one group seeks to advance in critical attention against another group.

  Literary battles can be fierce, but some of them provide us with great one-liners. For example, when I was young, debate had been ongoing for decades about the value of what is called free verse. Writers of free verse avoid conventional structures of poetry such as rhyme and meter and punctuation and any set length of line. Instead, they write their verse in open form anywhere on the page and believe they have creatively freed both themselves and their readers from stodgy old constraints in favor of greater beauty and inspiration.

  One of Dad’s friends, Allen Ginsberg, was often looked upon as a master of free verse. Several times I heard Allen proclaim his allegiance to free verse. But another friend of Dad’s, Robert Frost, came up with the best line. Frost said that writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net.

  Granted, many a young man has a father who looms large in his life, particularly in his early life. I became aware of Dad’s professional success later—the prizes, the awards, the laureateships, the honorary degrees, his many books, etc. What I was aware of as a boy, however, were his passionate words themselves—their hot rhythms and their vibrant inflections.

  Dad was an ardent lyricist. When Dad read his poems aloud (or rather sang them, as I thought it), his particular words, in their particular order, seemed to me to have hung in the air forever, indelibly, from the moment of Creation itself. This impressed me mightily. In our living room, or from a stage somewhere, there came cosmological and literary perfection, and it was modeled for me by my dad.

  If I had been a different boy (if I had been Adam, for example), my life would have been easier. For if I had been a different boy, I might have aspired to be an astronaut, or a quarterback, or an FBI agent, or something else—certainly not a poet! But in my soul, I knew that I was like Dad. I, too, was a word-smithing guy.

  And Dad . . . well, Dad cast a decidedly long literary shadow.

  From the day I was born, from the very giving of my name, I had been molded as a literary artifact. Perhaps that moment with Dad and our Greek-scholar neighbor was like what happened in Eden when God paraded His newly created creatures before Adam to get their names.

  What shall we call this new thing, and why? That was the question God asked of Adam.

  Adam said, It’s a dog! Because he is loyal and brave and will fight for us.

  Dad (and his friend) said, It’s a Dikkon! Because he shall absorb his father into his very soul on the chance that one day, like a chrysalis, he may emerge from his cocoon with his own wider and radiant wings.

  I was—at once—positioned for literary potential, yet at the same time saddled by Dad’s own literary achievement. It was a weight under which I would stagger and chafe for decades.

  Without intending it, my father and his Greek-minded friend had sentenced me to a lifetime of worry and self-doubt. I could never claim victory in the war I launched against myself to defeat that doubt. I was much like another Greek, the mythical King Sisyphus, who was sentenced by Zeus to spend eternity pushing a giant boulder up the side of a mountain, only to have it roll back down again each time the boulder was just inches from the top.

  Growing up, I sat at our dining table with literary “gods” beside me, and I passed the peanuts to them at cocktail parties. I delighted to run in my imagination, to catch up with their quick talk and with their perfected allusions. I was aware that I was not of them, yet I observed that my parents delighted in them. I thought that someday I might word-smith, too, and then I would be of them.

  They impressed me, not because of their literary renown—I was indifferent to that because they all had literary renown in the same way that they all had faces or feet—but because of their oddities.

  The seemingly delicate poet Marianne Moore excited me with her baseball interest—and was chosen later to throw out the first pitch during the 1968 baseball season at Yankee Stadium.

  The urbane southern poet Allen Tate delighted me when he argued at length with Dad about the language of human sexual intercourse. Is it always making love (Tate’s view) or can it legitimately be described as . . . well, a word with an f (Dad’s view). Vital info for me at fifteen!

  The Majorcan poet, novelist, and mythologist Robert Graves—in the States to assist the filming of his Roman novels I, Claudius and Claudius, the God—who declined to discuss with me his experiences in World War I, and wanted instead to laugh with Mom and Dad about the unhappy fate of his bohemian grocery store—he was amusing both for his erudition and for his mouse-skin cap.

  The tweedy Sir Osbert and the long-nosed Dame Edith Sitwell—she with the diamonds as big as ice cubes on her fingers—excited my imagination. Though brother and sister, they were my first knight and lady. Dame Edith asked novelist Evelyn Waugh to be her godfather when she converted to Roman Catholicism. The author of Brideshead Revisited, Waugh was a favorite of mine.

  Angular Ted Hughes and pretty but strained Sylvia Plath were, after Plath’s suicide, the protagonists in a literary and feminist furor over the contents of Plath’s roman à clef The Bell Jar. I remember Hughes, not Plath, although I probably met her because she was a Cambridge-based, literary-minded, Smith College girl not unlike my mother, although eighteen years her junior. What I do remember is my parents’ concern for them at the incautious shortness of time between their meeting and their marriage—only four months.

  Encounters like these were endless, but I could empathize with poor old King Sisyphus. It’s no small task perpetually breaking bread with greatness, trying to keep up with greatness’s chatter, but coming up short of it time and time again.

  Greek mythology also tells us that King Sisyphus was guilty of murder.

  For years, I believed I was too.

  Here’s what happened.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dad was born in 1904, in Austin, Minnesota, the seventh generation of Eberharts in America. We count our line as commencing with Paul Eberhart, who was born at sea in 1727, while his parents were en route from what is now Germany to Philadelphia. As was the case with most eighteenth-century immigrants, the Eberharts came to this country for greater civil and religious freedom and for greater financial opportunity than they had in the Old World.

  They emigrated from Wurttemberg, which is now part of Germany, anchored by its capital city, Stuttgart. If you go to Stuttgart today, you will find statues there of our ancestors, among them Eberhart the Noble, Eberhart the Groaner, Eberhart the Fat, and—this is the one I like the best—Eberhart of the Rushing Beard.

  Once our family came to the New World, we pressed ever westward from Philadelphia through western Pennsylvania, Illinois, and finally into Iowa.

  Dad’s grandfather was Jeremiah Snyder Eberhart, a Great Plains circuit-riding Methodist
preacher possessed of—it was said—a fiery passion. Jeremiah had three brothers who were ministers too. One of those minister brothers was Isa Eberhart, who also became a published poet. So when Dad was a young teenager and the assignment at school was to produce a poem by the next day, and in an ecstasy of excitement, Dad produced five poems, the Eberhart family’s explanation was that, of course, Dad was merely following the lead of his great-uncle Isa, the minister-poet.

  My father’s father was born in Albion, Iowa, about sixty miles west-northwest of Cedar Rapids. His full name was Alpha LaRue Eberhart, but he was always known by his initials, as A.L.

  During A.L.’s youth, there was virtually nothing in northern Iowa and southern Minnesota save for acre upon acre of black-earth prairie, on which the American Indians had once resided along with flights of killdeer and herds of buffalo. At first slowly, and then with greater rapidity, frontier homesteading farmers arrived, which meant that towns were built, churches were planted, entrepreneurialism flourished, the law made its first inroads, and a rough-and-ready frontier ethos became the norm.

  In this way, the American prairie was tamed and usefully transformed—as the nineteenth century would record it—into the production of wheat, corn, alfalfa, soybeans, and especially of hogs, steers, and chickens.

  There were a lot of hungry mouths in the cities of the East, and those mouths needed to be fed. That need created a generation of strong farmers on the Midwest plains, who plowed, and harrowed, and winnowed, and threshed. It was a time when young men weighing no more than one hundred pounds came of age by mastering two thousand–pound Percheron horses—sometimes, indeed, four of them at the same time. The terrain was flat and vast. Young men were out there alone on the land, controlling their teams with the flick of reins and a whistle.

  A.L. left school at age fourteen and began his career as a farm laborer. But he had bigger ideas than that. Chicago was the place where a young man with drive could succeed, and so, a year later, A.L. made his way there. During the next six years, he managed to save enough money to open his own store, selling men’s fashions. But he was too restless for retail, and he sold the store and went out on the road as a glove salesman.