COSMIC CONSUMPTION

 I’ve been reading Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith by John Szwed.

 

I’ve always been fascinated by Harry Smith, whose I first encountered as an avant-garde filmmaker.  Only later did I realize that he was an anthropologist, maker of field recordings, artist, collector, the man behind The Anthology of American Folk Music, and a man regularly referred to as a polymath.

 

He started out looking like this:

and ended up the way he looks on the book jacket.

 

I don’t know that Smith was actually insane but he certainly displayed some difficult, dangerous and self-destructive tendencies, and he destroyed a lot of his own work, often in a fit of pique. He was often, in some literal sense, homeless, though he always seems to have found somebody to give him shelter, and he was staggering good at extracting money from individuals and institutions.  Allen Ginsberg was an especially resilient and long-suffering supporter.

 

But what about his eating habits? Well they were as eccentric as everything else about the man, as the biography reveals.  There was also a tremendous intake of alcohol and drugs, but I reckon that’s outside the scope of this blog.

 

The first reference to food comes early in the biography when Harry was living in Berkeley, 1945-7.  The book tells us, ‘Harry had begun what would be a lifelong practice of radically narrowed food preference, at that time eating only sugar and butter, which left him weak and bedridden.’  This was when he was in his early twenties.

 

In 1949 Harry went every night to a place called Jimbo’s Bop City in San Francisco, an after hours jazz club, where he sat making notes and ‘sketching the music.’  The owner was John ‘Jimbo’ Edwards who became Smith’s patron. Szwed writes, ‘He (Harry) was kept in food by him (Jimbo), though sometimes it was the only thing he was eating at the time, like casaba melons, and the restaurant was always stocked with them.’ 

 

Much later, in the 70s, Smith took on Charles Compo as an assistant who is quoted thus, ‘When we were particularly flush, we would go to Cedars of Lebanon or A Taste of India to eat.  He usually ordered a Black Russian (vodka and coffee) and soup.’

 

That’s not my idea of what’s in a Black Russian but so be it, but I do wonder what kind of soup Harry ordered.  What goes with a Black Russian?  This is a menu from Cedars of Lebanon which refers only to ‘soup of the day.’

 

In the winter of 1986-7 Smith lived in Brooklyn in a borrowed apartment, ‘living on little more than milk and aspirin.’

 

Then he was in the Andrews House ‘a Franciscan flophouse’ on the Bowery,   where Ginsberg found him and reported ‘all he could eat was certain kinds of pea soup and mashed bananas.  And eating at the table with him he gurgled up all the saliva.  It was horrifying.’

 

By the early 90s Dr. Joe Gross ‘a practicing  psychiatrist and researcher of drugs’ let him stay in his uptown apartment where ‘he appeared to be living on Skittles; later on Jell-O, capers and pickled herring, still later on yogurt.’

 

At the very end he was living in the Chelsea Hotel in New York, and Szwed reports ‘he’d been surviving on NyQuil, Alka-Seltzer, flu medicine, Zand Insure Herbal Immune Support, instant mashed potates, ginger ale and coffee.’ He died in fairly horrible circumstances on November 27^th 1991. 

 

Despite an amazingly rickety life he survived to the age of 68.  My own father who lived and ate very carefully for all his life, only lived to be 64.  Go pick the moral out of that one.