Rowdy's Boy

Jim Levy's father was a Freudian psychoanalyst in Beverly Hills, his mother an aspiring writer, and the struggle between them defined his sensuous and troubled path to manhood. Although he had a privileged childhood, he sought out "real life" in this teens by prowling the sleaziest parts of Los Angeles and hopping freight trains to San Francisco. Rowdy was both his dog and his preferred behavior. Rowdy's Boy is a memoir of the author's first twenty years: childhood growing up in Bel Air, adolescence at an intensely academic boarding school, and young manhood at Pomona College and in Europe. Levy goes from being, in his own words, a big slow kid whose interest is in girls and sports to a sensitive, at times morbid poet in Italy and Spain. The transformation is subtly portrayed as he describes his physical and psychological development. The author is emotionally sided with his mother, but intellectually with his father. In a close examination of his father's worldview as it is revealed in a monograph from World War II, he discovers a refutation in Joseph Heller's Catch 22. From Rowdy's Boy In Taos, New Mexico, where we spent five summers, Mabel Dodge Luhan wrote to my mother: "If Jimmy rides his horse through my cornfield one more time, I'm going to evict you." As a Freudian family, we were never angry at each other; we were hostile. We were not confused; we were ambivalent. His office had masks and figures just like the Master's except these were replicas rather than originals. At first I was in awe but as a young teen, I plopped myself down on the couch and said, "shrink me Dad. I walked rather than ran up the final slope, reached the pueblo, and threw myself down with my back against a house. A Hopi elder came over and thanked me for participating. Finally, humbled, I had a small understanding that I had engaged in, even served in something more than a competition. On the drive to Flagstaff, my father said, "You may be the only non-Indian to ever run in that race." Mom didn't think I had much of a mind and I suspect she wasn't so sure of my morals either; she feared that I would end up a rascal or worse. This didn't reduce her love one bit. For a year Colin Wilson's The Outsider was my Michelin Guide to every disoriented, pissed-off, alienated writer in the western world: Nietzsche, T. E. Lawrence, Nijinsky, van Gogh, Sartre. When a fleshy peasant girl joined us, the old man grinned and poked me, waved his arms inviting the girl and me to get together. Two teeth missing, ripe, half- asleep, she was willing. The moon rose and had a shining ring around it. We agreed, we had never seen anything like that before. In the glow of the moon and the brandy, we looked at each other with affection. We felt romantic, almost like sophisticates, sitting in the plaza de Zocodover in Toledo, Spain.