“You want my olives? I can’t eat them anymore.” Richard Bray, literary causemeister and author of Guild Books, settled exhaustedly into a booth at the Seminary for lunch. Three weeks earlier he had been laid open like a book on an operating table at Michael Reese while doctors did some preventive maintenance on the clogged plumbing of his heart. Bray ordered a postoperative lunch of lox and bagels (hold the cream cheese, no salt). He looked pale and dismayed–perhaps at his own weakness, perhaps at the prospect of 40 years of drinking decaf coffee. “I’m wiped,” he moaned.
His friends and colleagues would have had their eulogies ready in any event. Says Reginald Gibbons, editor of TriQuarterly magazine, “Richard put too much of himself into Guild.” Michael Anania, poet-professor, says, “Richard is a quotidian revolutionary. He’s still driven by the old impulses.” Kurt Vonnegut, who knows about old impulses, has said that Guild and Bray have helped “keep the culture alive.”
Guild’s shelves offer a syllabus of 60s causes, from farm workers to third world interventionism, from racism and sexism to ecological murder. The mood is didactic. This week, in the window where the Cubs posters ought to be, Guild is likely to display a roster of banned books. Next week the store will hold lectures on what a publicity flier calls the FBI’s “current plot to spy on patrons of our libraries.” The week after that it will stage a benefit art exhibit “in commemoration of the 1980 Spanish Embassy Massacre in Guatemala in which 32 people were burned alive by the government security forces.”
Is something happening here, and we don’t know what it is? In an interview published last summer, Noam Chomsky also claimed to have detected a spontaneous, unstructured movement of dissent in the U.S., not populated by the young, as in the 60s, but by women, the poor, eco-freaks, the working class, and nonwhites. While it is true, Chomsky explained, that the 80s turned most Americans into morons, the rest were becoming rebels. Folk singers are again making money singing about poverty, students are reading Camus, and the alternative media are again carrying the work of what Chomsky called “couriers–people who have been somewhere else and say what is going on there.”
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“It all came into focus when I went to San Francisco State in 1968,” Bray said. He was an indifferent student (“I had to take dumbbell English twice”), but more attentively tended to the lessons outside of class, where students organized one of the era’s bitterest campus strikes.
The result is a personal politics that is less ideological than cultural. Some critics take issue with the scholarship of Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, others with Bloom’s taste in rock and roll. Bray faults the book on political grounds, seeing it as a refurbishing of the stereotypes that dismiss the unwhite and the un-middle-aged as vulgar, even barbaric.
It’s another author’s event at Guild. The man onstage is Jonathan Kozol, author of Rachel’s Children, a plea for the homeless in U.S. cities. Perhaps 60 people are in the store on this particular Sunday evening; it is hard to tell how many of them came here looking for Kozol and how many simply found him here. A few people pull books off the shelves nearest them and leaf through them as Kozol speaks (“I suspect that we’ll see housing riots in this country in the next couple of years”). Kozol looks like a man who’s crossed the country four times in as many weeks. He’s not pushing a book but a cause; Frederick Douglass once said, “Power concedes nothing without demands,” as Kozol reminds the crowd, but today he might add, “or book tours.” His publisher (Fawcett) and the American Booksellers Association selected a single bookstore in each of the 50 states to deliver a copy of Rachel’s Children to their respective governors on George Bush’s inauguration day; Illinois’ emissary was Guild.
