The Chair ... Regarding Chuck Kinder, Diane Cecily, and S. Clay Wilson

Working the Internet so that 'great souls' ('The only riches, the greal souls'--D.H. Lawrence) may be more widely known.

With Diane and Chuck, as they moved into 73 Fair Oaks, Noe Valley, San Francisco, October 1975. Photo by S. Clay Wilson.

In 2021 I wrote for author Nicola Manupelli in Italy a remembrance of Chuck Kinder and Diane Cecily, as Nicola’s book about Chuck (and Diane) was published. Beneath ‘The Chair’ (Ha-ha-ha) is an assemblage of Links that I hope will let folks more appreciate Chuck, Diane, and S. Clay. I hope this assemblage helps to expand how WE use the Internet.

The Chair

The chair was perch for lounging cat. That cat was itself Medieval glamour—imperial orange for its base and striated black for further, delicate distinction upon its aloof but dependent strength. Ah, her chair.

The chair was purchase for the Chanson Lady to hook her knees, whil’st still a squirt and fascinated by illimitable foreboding of the Great Outdoors beyond picture-windows and into Forests and Mountains patrolled by her father. Mountains named Rattlesnake and Bitterroot.

Diane brought the chair to her marriage with Chuck. There it sits, next to the three of us at top of the stone stairs to 73 Fair Oaks in San Francisco’s Noe Valley, this Edwardian flat the “great place” passed along to Chuck and Diane by Scott and Annette Turow, as Scoot has left Stanford to begin Law School at Harvard.

The War is over—isn’t it? Surely Nixon is gone as President. That Tricky Dick no longer speaks to the Nation with his Sharper Lawyer’s Stoop. He waved good-by sometime during her and Chuck’s courtship.

Courtship? Combat! Well, Roller-Coaster through the Wilds and Wiles of Far-Out Missoula, that was certain. And still there regularly arose a Plenty of Boozing and Bumping and Showing of Knives and real anguish of proving that the root of love both knew was true.

The chair stood for something. Many things, really. The chair was hers from the age that she fit in it. She, a wide-eyed cat, eager to be loved by father first of all, and embroidering glamour to everything she read.

Everything had been Break-Up, Shake-Up for couples in Missoula and in Chuck’s Bay Area, as the United States completed its defeated decampment from Vietnam in the very Helicopters had not been able to conquer peasants. The couples from Stanford who had put out the Place quarterly to succeed (Random House bet) the Whole Earth Catalog were almost all separated and scattered. Couples years married and tied to Missoula’s University had likewise come a-cropper after affairs and hangovers.

She, Diane, “Trigger”, had had quite a ride! She knew something about Marriage wracked. That first man—first love, really—was her father mirrored in rigidity but not nearly strong enough to be tender. Ray—well, Ray got to her heart—she would be his harbor—but she would not wage the war that might sacrifice that score-of-years marriage and two children with his teen-aged sweetheart, his root, Maryann, ... whom she in fact liked.

Ray had been a bridge. When Chuck came with that Carload of the Desperate to Missoula, as late Spring changed the Mountainsides— Chuck from that stopgap refuge with Place people in the Chinese-built Sacramento River Delta town of Locke—when she saw his Handsome Posing and his deep, deep—proud, proud hurting in the Bars and would- be Honky-Tonks, ... well, she knew this was one she had to try.

This was a Whale would roll her round. This was one she’d roll back again.

They might fulfill Glories of the Chair. All this Crowd lived through Romantic Fantasies nurtured and pastured in Painful Childhoods. The more pain as child, the more Romantic the pursuits and redoubts of those who refused adult stability. S. Clay was perfectly like that. “Wilson” took this photo of Don Paul, Diane, Chuck and the chair that moving- day. Anyone who looks closely at “Wilson’s”—at “Clay’s”—at “Steve’s”— art for Zap and Last Gasp must register that his distorting demons were no joke—they were entrées and outlets from pain—as the same time as his craft and gifts merged into spectacles as perceptive and visionary as the Medieval satirists and the, yes, Romantic painters of Battles and Seascapes bigger than Rooms. While Don Paul was a Knight who would die rather than divert from His Own Way ... whatever that Way might be this Year or this day.

The Chair this Saturday was something for a celebratory smile. Like Lawrence and Frida, it had come through. It was Cézanne and Mont Sainte-Victoire, a mosaic of colors and imagination deepening over years, and of course it was Madame Cézanne there at the source, too. It could fly. It could still whirl among a Tea Party above those Mountains. It was hers to carry with this bearded and behatted, hootin’ and hollerin’ and above all gathering-round-the-kitchen-table Makings of a Rough Prince.

Rock, her chair. Rocket, her chair. Root, her chair. Always the Fitting Part, their chair. Laugh at the luck!

Don Paul, July 5, 2021, for Nicola Manupelli.

RELATED APPRECIATIONS

Diane

Chuck and his Hot Jewels

Donna Merdith’s Profile of Chuck in the Booktimist

From the Booktimist—’Chuck Kinder is the author of four novels—Snakehunter, The Silver Ghost, Honeymooners, and Last Mountain Dancer—and three collections of poetry—Imagination Motel, All That Yellow, and Hot Jewels. West Virginia University Press has just published new editions of Snakehunter, his first novel, and The Last Mountain Dancer: Hard-Earned Lessons in Love, Loss, and Honky-Tonk Outlaw Life, his latest novel. Here, Donna Meredith, associate editor of the Southern Literary Review and award-winning author of The Glass Madonna, The Color of Lies, Wet Work, Fraccidental Death and Magic in the Mountains, explores Kinder’s remarkable career.’

S. Clay in The Comics Journal

‘The Most Influential Artist of his Generation’ by Patrick Rosenkranz

Interview by Bob Levin

In the First Circle of Hell, an overview by Patrick Rosenkranz in 2011

S. Clay with us in Palo Alto and San Francisco, 1970s.

From the WeAreRevolutions web-page firstly about Chuck’s Hot Jewels.

From Patrick Rozenkrnanz’s ‘First Circle of Hell’ overview.

‘Over the next forty years he created a copious stream of work that continually explored the extreme boundaries of human nature. His draftsmanship and literary skills increased in complexity and subtlety, as his fertile imagination guided his archetypal characters through lustful intrigues and convoluted plotlines set in a mythic place somewhere between the Wild West and the Barbary Coast.

Wilson had a, u’hm, a fantastical imagination. He said in 1977 that I was “kind of the model” for this 6-page ‘Travelin’ Assassin’ comic-strip. That year I lived in Morgan City, LA; Ann Arbor, MI; San Francsisco; Thorne Bay, AK; Dar es Salaam; Vancouver, BC; Seattle; and Beaumont, TX, with stops in New York City and London.

Below, an instance of Wilson’s magic apprehension of the more-than-real, I think

Thank YOU! Let me know if this kind of far-flung assemblage from what we have available on the Internet is going in a good, connecting and liberating direction!