AFTERNOTE: Seeking the Truth About Bern Porter

AFTERNOTE: Seeking the Truth About Bern Porter

by Joel Lipman

Over the years that I’ve broadly researched Bern Porter’s life and work, I’ve been troubled and intrigued by nagging questions of fact, standards of professional behavior and personal patterns. There remains much to clarify and resolve in determining whether Porter warrants recognition as a significant mid-20^th Century creative contributor who repositioned the boundaries of poetry. He was a peripatetic, idiosyncratic, colorful eccentric, and a man who avoided categorical binaries and ripped off great tales. That we know. 

However, for poets, artists, scholars and others concerned with the concrete circumstances of Porter’s life, work, creative thinking, oeuvre and influence, there are critical but unresolved, fancifully mythologized or inadequately examined aspects of his record that remain to be unvarnished and studied. 

Following is a Baker’s Dozen of 13 briefly noted issues, threads and implausibilities regarding Porter’s life’s work worthy of consideration, argument, gritty research and further investigation. 

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Catalogue Raisonne

1.  Much of what we know about Bern Porter relies on archives he attentively established during his life and upon uncritical interviews and they reflect Porter as he wished to be viewed and preserved. He constructed his record as a Sciartist, doing so by a pattern of archival holdings spread across no fewer than eight institutional archives. What motivated Porter to establish all these archival relationships? The over-110-box Porter archive at UCLA is partially catalogued – and the dozens of uncatalogued UCLA Bern Porter Collection boxes may now be accessible to scholars who contact the staff and make arrangements. Porter archives at Colby, Brown, Bowdoin, MOMA, Maine State Library, Houlton, and Belfast are accessible. Lesser holdings are in collections from Ohio State University to Guam. Porter’s work is housed in libraries, special collections or historical societies (MOMA Library, in the case of that institution), not art museums – noting museum collections that hold his work would be a useful addition to Porter scholarship.

If Porter’s work is unique and artistically durable, and given the institutional resources dedicated to his materials by the various archives, a comprehensive Catalogue Raisonne locating and cataloguing his known work is an essential beginning.

James Shevill’s Papers

2.  Because of Bern Porter’s aggrandizing, hyperbolic propensities, his dedication to self-historification, and the largely self-generated life stories and myths surrounding him, particularly due to James Schevill’s highly readable, often fascinating “as told to” biography, only when everything Porter left is available and systematically studied will it be possible to perhaps separate truth from the theatrics, deadpan exaggerations, lies and omissions of Porter’s storytelling, as corroborated or as accepted by Schevill. Given the state of American political discourse, it’s a prescient time to re-examine Porter’s life, to separate lies and distortions from objective truth and to come to terms with fact.

With respect to the origin of and research for his Porter books, Schevill’s papers are at Brown and should be revealing. I’ve not studied them. Someone should.

FBI Surveillance, Files & Mental Health

3.  Then there is the substantively entangled matter of Porter’s psychiatric health and his extensive, heavily redacted FBI file. What we learn about Porter’s life, mental condition, psychiatric diagnoses, and work relationships from this government security and investigative dossier remains sketchily studied and poorly understood. Porter literary executor Mark Melnicove has worked with dedication to gain access to and post much of this material on-line. It’s time for a psychologically skilled scholar to seriously engage these files. 

Why was Porter the object of systematic government surveillance? How does one assess Porter’s life and artistic thinking given a history of mental breakdowns going back to his stressful withdrawal from Brown, his paranoia, uncertain family and subsequent human relationships, his father’s arrest for and history of pedophilia? Is there something revealing in his relationship with his mother that helps to understand his gross importuning of women later in life? A credible psychological analysis of Bern Porter would illuminate understanding both the man and his founds. Similarly clarifying would be a dedicated study of all determinable aspects of Porter’s FBI file. Who quite knows where these lines lead?

Manhattan Project Inconsistencies

4.  Porter, after apparently departing the Manhattan Project (MP) in 1945, works on-and-off well into the 1960s for US defense contractors, and on at least one occasion holds “Secret” security clearance, demonstrating an extensive pattern of employment seemingly at odds with his moral despair and professed guilt over MP participation. We must ask anew what Porter did while employed within the Manhattan Project.

He possessed a tainted Master’s, not a research-oriented PhD.  While my prior research accepted Porter’s narrative of having worked professionally with Albert Einstein, it seemed a not-uncharacteristic boast. Porter did not work with Einstein on the MP, as he asserts in several interviews – it was not possible. It’s well documented that US government security concerns barred Einstein from any involvement with the MP. In an undated typescript to Mark Melnicove, Porter writes of being employed by the MP as an “Engineer under Director C.D. Shane,” and that he “supervised 7 physicists.” What employment data, scientific records or supporting documents validate what he did? A self-important storyteller, one would be gullible to accept Porter’s statements as fact. There are significant holes, dramatizations and deceptions in his MP narrative.

Fabricators invite suspicion and doubt, and what follows is a considered, but unsubstantiated leap – considering Porter’s past and the flaws in his story, the internal staff realities of wartime security and the post-war dates of FBI file entries, there remains a possibility he served as a US informer within the MP. Vigilant surveillance was ever-present within the MP. Shevill notes matter-of-factly “…because the Manhattan Project had not officially come into existence, there is no record of Porter being drafted for military research. He became a civilian under control of military security.” Given the preeminence of the WWII years in the Porter narrative, it would help to independently verify what constituted his MP work.

So, before accepting Porter’s account of the years from 1940-1945, during which time he was involved in the most security conscious enterprise in the country, there are real questions to address. How and why was he able travel the country, to visit with and publish Henry Miller, a notorious expatriate and anti-war writer, while working as a physicist for the MP? Why, given Porter’s constant professions of guilt and post-WWII travels to bombed Japanese cities, does he continue employment with defense industry contractors until 1968? Why did the FBI systematically investigate him? Given that Porter assiduously built his archives, why, other than pre-MP materials from his years at Acheson Colloids, are the archives apparently devoid of any work, income or employment related records. On several levels it just doesn’t add up. 

Consultancies & Defense Industry Employment

5.  After the MP, Porter rarely held a job for long (often just weeks or months). He writes of frequent self-employed periods of months or years. Knowing whom he represented and what he did as a self-employed consultant would clarify and concretize how he spent time and formulated ideas. It appears Porter finds intermittent professional employment as an engineer or as a technical writer. 

Given Porter’s lack of association with any literary movement (other than his slight connection with NY Fluxus), if his founds have durable significance, then the question of how he matures as a poet while self-employed or working within the Military-Industrial Complex from 1945 through the 1960s needs to be understood. Examining this period of his life will provide insight into his practices, revealing the sources, presumptions of ownership and appropriative graphic poetics behind his found poems.

Women

6.  Porter & Women: There’s much to consider here, as sex and women motivated Bern Porter in utterly unexplored ways. The various archives, along with incidental materials, offer files of numerous and at times strangely repulsive, letters to female correspondents. Married thrice, Porter maintained an unrequited lover’s correspondence with Dorris Moore, his Colby College sweetheart, throughout his life. His letters, many available at Colby, are not infrequently catalogues of sexual titillation, inquiry, and graphic enumeration couched as personal instruction. Voyeurism and peek-a-boo porn is part of his personal game, as evidenced by his correspondence, pages of Porter’s shipboard journals and anecdotal accounts. 

Time changes cultural attitudes and norms, and Bern Porter did not live in today’s environment of gender equity. That said, the important place of and impact of women and sexuality upon Bern Porter’s life and in his work is largely unexamined.

Cruises & Seaboard Journals

7.  Porter’s transoceanic global cruises and artfully crafted seaboard journals need to be studied and understood. The cruise journals offer distinctive gatherings of Porter’s fusion of scrapbook, collage, caption, script, founds, documents and poetry. How did they inform his self-image, poetry, social and artistic thinking? 

Porter’s ocean liner cruises were frequent, lengthy, expensive and entailed crafting and presenting a remarkably different persona than the one he maintained in Belfast, Maine. In a dinner jacket his attire transformed, as did his demeanor. He presented himself as and responded to Dr. Porter and occasionally sat at the Captain’s table. For a man who frequented Belfast’s soup kitchen and charity providers, there are complex contradictions between his extravagant, near-annual cruises and his professed personal economy as that of a pauper. 

Bern Porter Books

8.  Porter’s concept of publishing and his record as a publisher under the Bern Porter Books imprint, warrants scrupulous inquiry. What comprises a BP Books edition? Are his publishing numbers reliable? Was he an honest publisher? How did he meet his responsibilities toward authors? How did he market and distribute editions and pay writers? His publishing relationship with Kenneth Patchen went badly. Henry Miller praised Porter’s early efforts to publish him, referring to Porter as “a most ardent disciple of mine” for whom publishing “is his hobby and excitement” [Letters to Anais Nin], but by 1945 Miller wrote him off, considered him an untrustworthy amateur, and had nothing more to do with him after then. With respect to his impact and record as publisher of other writers, the various Porter archives offer enormous untapped opportunities. He first publishes under the BP Books imprint in 1944 and continues to do so throughout his life, but it’s unlikely he was ever financially successful as a publisher [or gallery operator]. Where did the funds to publish come from? Where did the copies go?

A clear record and understanding of his vision and craft as an independent, small press publisher is necessary if we are to understand Porter and the role of BP Books in Sciart and found poetics.

Brown University

9.  Awarded an MA in Physics from Brown University, the circumstances were fraught. Though he was torn between science and art, Porter was apparently a strong graduate student until caught stealing money from students in the gym, being placed under psychiatric care and withdrawing from Brown. The impact that the termination of his studies and departure from the university for theft had on Porter’s self-image, psyche, self-loathing and guilt, goals, creative criteria and professional opportunities needs study.

Sciart

10.  Was Sciart conceptually important, substantive, intellectually and artistically unique or was it a concept in the air and a part of popular discourse? Was Sciart Porter’s ‘50s manifesto and coined term for an inspired effort to make something personally palatable and artistically creative out of a physics background and literary hobby? What was Sciart’s cultural impact, its reach? Was Sciart Porter’s prosaic ars poetica, his unifying theory or Porter’s performative theater? 

The Institute of Advanced Thinking
11.  Just what was The Institute of Advanced Thinking all about? Similar in name to Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, any academic legitimacy of Porter’s Institute, which shared an address with and was also his Belfast home [a “think tank for drop outs”], is questionable. Was it a tax dodge, a hodge-podge, a means to invite women to his house, an institute in any way but name, hype? What shaped the institutional relationship to invitees? What defined its existence? Are there scholars, papers, documents, reports, statements, personal accounts and letters and what do we learn about Porter, his principles and vision, from Institute records?

Exaggeration

12.  Porter habitually aggrandized and exaggerated. He inflated his Master’s degree status, presenting himself as “Doctor Porter.” His friendship with Anais Nin, judging from correspondence, was neither intimate nor close. Though he published a pornographic memoir about a one-night stand with Nin, the story is a complete fabrication. Whether he truly attended Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon or substantively met Stein, Alice Toklas and others of Stein’s circle needs verification – research strongly suggests Porter’s travel time in Paris doesn’t coincide with the schedule and seasonal pattern of Stein’s salon, nor does Stein mention him. A photo of Porter in “Bern! Porter! Interview!,” claiming to depict Porter and Stein, is not of Stein, but one of Porter’s relatives. Though Porter claimed acquaintanceship with Buckminster Fuller, Fuller disputes this [letter, 5/7/1976], writing he “does not know or know of Mr. Bern Porter,” also stating that he is “not a member” of the Institute of Advanced Thinking, nor “do I know of any institute.” Go figure.

Many Bern Porters

13.  Were there numerous Bern Porters? Porter the obsessive autodidact, who cut-and-pasted thousands of published and unpublished images. Porter the academic-anti-academic outsider graphic poet who had been embarrassed by science both at Brown and by the MP and tries to define and straddle a third rail, Sciart, and make art out of science. Porter the pauper Belfast poet. Porter the white jacketed cruise ship habitué.  Porter the Republican candidate for Maine governor. Porter the physicist. As a young man was Porter an insecure aspirant who worked in life-draining employment and who then, during the last third of his life, relished a theatrical persona as an eccentric seer, curmudgeon, relentless litigant and found poet who offered scant insight into his work, was a Sciartist who avoided personal technology [no phone, car, TV, computer] and lived in provincial Maine? 

There are so many contradictions, deceptions and inconsistencies with Porter that offer fascinating opportunities for accurate, independent scholarship, knowledge and truth. While some might argue Porter’s founds are enduring examples of 20^th Century cultural practice regardless of the details of his life, I would demur and argue for the literary clarity that results from setting the record right. The implausible, self-generated Bern Porter narrative that’s been accepted over the years needs verification. Much of it just ain’t so.

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Found Poetics

Perhaps these 13 probes would be less critically pertinent had Bern Porter not been a found poet, had he been more mainstream a poet, adhering to conventional literary norms rather than practicing a unique, distinctively appropriative poetics, one that doesn’t begin with the clean white empty page but instead with a previously printed and published page. Scavenger-like, you stay attuned and use what’s around. Nothing need be obsolete or wasted. 

Perhaps, as has been said about science, found poetics is aesthetically amoral, sort of a finders-keepers-losers-weepers approach to artistic privilege. Found poetics views ownership, origin, copyright, creative property and similar brandings with a wink and a shrug. Porter characteristically composes a poem out of something he finds and he declares it’s his work upon re-presentation. The changes, juxtapositions and shifts might employ the slightest of refabrications. These are the ready-made understandings of found poetry. 

Bern Porter’s founds have engaged me some 50 years, and over time I’ve been increasingly aware of the troubling inconsistencies peppering the narrative of his life. So, as fresh inquiry into Bern Porter’s life replaces the fabrications, shaky presumptions and insecure boasts routinely accepted as fact, it’ll be possible to more clearly value and assess his life, his character, and his art.

Joel Lipman

Northport, Maine/Toledo, Ohio, 2018