Growing Up With A Funny Name

"Lunch is gonna taste awful!"




I had my first name legally changed in 1999. According to the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Social security Administration, my name is Alexander Kelley Dupuis.

But it wasn’t always.

I’ve been blogging for four years, but actually, I was blogging before there were any such things as blogs. I’ve kept a journal all my life.

There were no blogs in 1988. There was no Internet in 1988. But I wrote the following essay in Brasilia, Brazil in the late summer of that year.



I’m going to let you in on a little secret here. Actually, it’s not a secret at all, but a matter of public record. My whole family knows it; anyone who’s known me since I was a child knows it, the State of California knows it and I’m sure the federal government probably knows it, although I have made every effort to expunge all evidence of it from my personal records ever since I entered on duty with the government.

It’s simply this: “Kelley” isn’t my first name. It’s my middle name. I tell people it’s my first name and when they ask me what my middle name is, I tell them I don’t have one. If I’m pressed for my full legal name on an official form, I fill it in surreptitiously, covering the page with one arm so the guy standing next to me won’t see what I’m writing in that space marked “First,” right after “Last” and just before “Middle Initial.”

One time a highway patrolman pulled me over to give me a speeding ticket on Interstate 5 between Sacramento and Red Bluff, California. He wanted to be friendly, and after looking at my driver’s license he addressed me by my legal first name. “Please, be a nice guy and call me ‘Kelley,’” I said.

That’s right: you can take my license, you can run my plates, you can slander my name all over the states, (as long as it’s “Kelley.”) You can write me for going 70 instead of 55, but please, please don’t ever call me “Wirt.”

That syllable makes my neck flush. Every time I hear it (which is seldom anymore, thank God) suddenly I know how Hester Prynne felt. The very sound of it opens a floodgate of bad memories. I had it hung around my neck at birth and there it stayed until I was 15 and finally decided that I was tired of being made to feel like a visitor from another planet every time roll was called in home room. I exerted my adolescent will and forced everyone to the still relatively-unusual but at least not extraterrestrial sound of my middle name.

The transition was actually made quite smoothly. I think I had a lot of sympathizers. My father certainly sympathized; in fact he went so far as to tell me that he had wanted “Kelley” to be my first name to begin with. It comes from one of my dad’s old Border Patrol cronies, Rex Kelley.

My first move to make the change official came when I put in for my Social Security number. I filled out the form as “Kelley Dupuis,” and as far as the SSA is concerned, that’s my name until me and my SSN go up the chimney.

Now, I’ve told you how I came to be called “Kelley,” so I’ll tell you how I came to be called…that other thing. It seems my father just deferred to my mother on the subject. I was the second of three children and he had chosen my older sister’s name, so I guess he figured it was my mother’s turn to choose. She chose badly. She proceeded to stick me with the surname of a Protestant minister she admired, Dr. Williston Wirt. I doubt she had any idea that “Wirt” is the German word for “Tavern-keeper,” and that yoking a name like that to so thoroughly French a surname as “Dupuis” was perfectly idiotic. My mother is innocent of any foreign language, such that I remember one night over dinner she asked my father, who speaks both French and Spanish, the meaning of this word “merde” she kept coming across in novels. My mother wouldn’t say “merde” if she had a mouthful of it, and at the answer she blushed furiously. No, she couldn’t have known she was naming me Barkeep, but she wanted to give a warm fuzzy to the minister who had held her hand through a divorce in an era when women seldom divorced.

It should surprise no one that as soon as I became old enough, I became Catholic. And when I was baptised and they told me I could take a new name, I did. Later I just made it legal, taking my ecclesiastical name as my actual name.

The question I never got around to asking my mother was this: if she was so bound and determined to give Dr. Williston Wirt a warm fuzzy by sticking me with his absurd name, why “Wirt?’ Why not “Williston?” At least that way the kids on the playground would probably have called me “Will” or “Willis,” neither of which is the greatest name in the world, but either of them beats the hell out of “Wirt.” They are at least names used by other people who live on this planet. I’m sure either one would have saved me innumerable taunts, scuffles and fistfights.

I read in a Sunday supplement a few years ago that someone had conducted a study and found that children who are given oddball names at birth have a greater likelihood of growing up to be criminals than those who aren’t. Or if not criminals, at least social outcasts of various kinds. Dweezil Zappa, Cher’s daughter Chastity and Grace Slick’s son God were all spared this because, as the children of celebrities they’ve had to be accustomed all their lives to being set apart. Besides, as old Frank Zappa himself once pointed out, in the San Fernando Valley a name like “Dweezil” or “Moon Unit” isn’t going to get you a second glance anyway.

But if you’re just an average kid, and don’t have a parent who regularly turns up in People magazine, having a strange name hung on you at birth is almost like being born with an eye where your ear is supposed to be. From your very first day of kindergarten you have it drilled into your head every morning that you are strange, fundamentally different from all the other kids.

I can still hear my kindergarten teacher, a red-haired beauty named Cydne Roberts (she’d be in her sixties now) calling roll. Seaside Elementary School, Torrance, California. Autumn, 1960. “Jimmy Anderson?” “Sally Burnett?” “Tommy Condit?” “Wirt Dupuis?”

Pardon me while I have a hot flash. Well, at least Miss Roberts knew how to pronounce my last name. It was bad enough being called “Wirt,” but as often as not on the first day of school I would also have to listen to my American teachers mangling my French last name: “Doo-pwah,” “Doo-pew,” “Doo-pewis,” “Doopis,” “Duppis.” These mispronunciations invariably prompted a chorus of giggles and head-turnings in my direction, which in turn would make me wish I were “on some Australian mountain range,” as Bob Dylan put it.

I spent a lot of time during my young years wishing I were on some Australian mountain range or the equivalent.

My teachers thought I had an attitude problem. Jesus, wouldn’t you? They were forever complaining to my parents about what a sullen little smart-aleck I was. Well, yeah. I mean, what the hell did they know about it? Their names were all Donna and William and Robert and Larry and Betty and Diane. They had never been cornered on the playground by little thugs named Frank and Billy and taunted with cries of “Ha-ha, Wirt the squirt.”

Were they kidding with that “bad attitude” stuff? They’re lucky I didn’t grow up and become the neighborhood chainsaw slayer. Children get spanked, as well they should, when they make fun of handicapped people. But I never saw a kid get spanked for making fun of another kid's name, and if you ask me, having a goofy name is just a subtler form of being disabled. Forgive my strong feelings about this, but I think the little bastards should be boiled in oil, especially if their names are Frank or Billy.

I’m not trying to say that my name lay at the root of all the problems I had when I was growing up, but there were a few areas where being thus set apart from my peers made me feel that I was at an authentic disadvantage from the start and hence, my confidence wasn’t what it might have been.

And you know what I’m talking about now. Yes. Girls. Until I was in my twenties I could never get anywhere with girls. I think in high school I went out on one date. I skipped my senior prom, stayed home and watched The Tonight Show. Of course, by the time I was a high school senior I had already made the transition to “Kelley,” but the damage had been done long before. Imagine what it’s like to be in the sixth grade and in the throes of the first great crush of your life, and when you finally manage to muster the courage to walk up to the object of your adoration and so thoroughly take the ultimate fate of the universe into your hands as to utter a syllable to her, say, “Hello” for instance: “Hello, Patty.” “Hi, Wirt.” The exchange might as well have been “Hello, Earthling,” “Hi, Martian.”

It set the tone for the entire next decade. Until my second year of college all my relationships with girls were one-sided. I thought unrequited love was just going to be the way it was for me. My first name wasn’t solely to blame for this, but it was the little ur-embarrassment at the bottom of it all. Even after I became “Kelley,” “Wirt” remained my nerdy little Doppelgaenger, shadowing me everywhere, ready to jump out from behind a bush at any moment and whisper in my ear, “Who do you think you are, talking to girls, freak?”

The other boys interested in Patty had names like Bobby and Wesley. Wesley was the one she really liked. His father was the coach of the Ream Field Navy boxing team, and Wesley talked and acted just like his father. A little tough guy. He was always warning me to stay away from Patty. You’re damn right I was afraid of him, the little asshole. He needn’t have bothered with the threats, though. Patty had no interest in anything so exotic as a boy named Wirt. She had health oozing out of every pore, in fact it had spilled over and created a second one of her—she and her sister Penny were identical twins. I never could decide which of them I was crazier about. But Patty was in my class, so I saw her more often. Incidentally if you want to know the meaning of true suffering, and I mean suffering right up there in the big leagues with Van Gogh and Dostoevsky, try having a horrific crush on twin sisters, neither of whom will give you the time of day.

I used to watch Wesley and Patty walk off the playground together at the end of the day. To this day I wonder what they talked about; Wesley just barely had the power of speech. But there they were: Hans Hansen and Ingeborg Holm, if you know that story. Well, yeah, Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kroeger also had a “name problem;” I suppose being named “Tonio” in northern Germany 130 years ago was as bad as being named “Wirt” in California during the 1960s. But if you had given me the choice, there would have been no contest. As “Tonio” I would have been called “Tony” on the playground, and I had a friend named Tony who was quite popular.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably rolling your eyeballs by now. ‘He’s too sensitive,” you’re saying. “He’s too thin-skinned.” “He’s making a big deal out of nothing.” Well, let me put it this way: if I had been a champion debater or a hellacious quarterback or president of the student council, perhaps I might not be writing this now. Indeed, perhaps I might not have switched to my middle name in the middle of the 10th grade. I wouldn’t have found it necessary. But I was a kid who was average or below average in almost every way. I got B’s and C’s in most subjects at school, and F’s in math. The only subject in which I ever got an “A” was English. I was a substandard athlete and, in the pecking order of elementary, junior high and high school, I ranked somewhere down there with stewed prunes. I’m not saying I would have been a big man on the campus if my parents had named me James or Robert, but if you don’t have any particularly outstanding abilities to begin with, being stuck with a wacky name on top of everything else certainly doesn’t help any.

So what do you do? Some people compensate for their liabilities by becoming overachievers. I have wondered, for example, how much taunting millionaire Armand Hammer had to put up with as a child. I like to think that amassing his tremendous fortune was one way of getting back at the little schoolyard scumbags who no doubt danced around him in a circle chanting, “Baking Soda! Baking Soda! You’re a loada Baking Soda!” Now he could buy any one of them ten times over and sign the check “Armand Hammer” with a flourish (and a $1,000 Montblanc pen.)

A lot of people try to overcome a handicap by excelling at something. I read somewhere that Somerset Maugham took up writing novels because he had a speech impediment. But some people allow it to beat them, allow their “otherness” to snowball and bring them to grief. As my high school psychology teacher used to say, “It isn’t what happens to you that’s important,” it’s how you react to it.” Boy, would I like to meet the optimist who cooked up that line of baloney! The same guy, no doubt, who came up with the cliché “When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade.” I go with Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes on this one: when life deals me a lemon, I chuck it back and add a few of my own.

I wonder how many people actually succeed at turning their liabilities into assets? Stephen Hawking didn’t become a great physicist because he had Lou Gehrig’s disease, but in spite of it. But something like Lou Gehrig’s disease, or being born with no arms, or Somerset Maugham’s speech impediment for that matter, is an act of nature and there isn’t much you can do about it except carry on as best as you can. And I suppose the same can be said of being named “Marlwark.” But the difference, and what a difference it is, is that physical disabilities are acts of nature. Wacky first names are not.

Which leads me to my main point: WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH PARENTS? Don’t they realize what they’re doing to a child when they name it Dorcas or Cadwalladr? Sometimes I think it’s just sadism, pure and simple, and I find it disturbing that anyone could be rotten enough to give a newborn baby the appelatory equivalent of a hot-foot. But I’ve seen some cases that definitely smack of the seltzer bottle in the delivery room, such as the man named Dover whose parents named him Ben, and who moreover had a sister named Eileen. My mother had a friend who was unfortunate enough to have the surname Pigg, and her parents named her Ima. Who could hate a baby that much? Admittedly, babies are noisy and expensive and few people get a bang out of yellow poo-poo, but the kid didn’t ask to be born, and I think if you treat him/her like the rubber chicken in a vaudeville sketch, you’re not just a bad parent, but a sick s.o.b.

Yes, Jolly Joker parents are exceptions. Most people regard the birth of an heir as something simultaneously more solemn and more joyous than an occasion for some great gags. I think much more often parents just don’t think, or their good intentions are misdirected. Who among us, on first viewing that adorable little bundle who looks like Yoda the Jedi Master for the first few days, is consciously thinking about what day-to-day life is going to be like for the little tyke when he’s in the seventh grade? Not very many, I’ll bet. Surely not my mother, who was thinking of Dr. Wirt and not of me. I think usually parents are thinking along the lines of A. What name would sound good with Smith, Jones or Garcia, or B. Are we going to name this child after Great Uncle Willard so he’ll put him in his will?

My sympathies, for understandable reason, lie more with aesthetic consideration. But that, too, has its pitfalls, as in this particularly ridiculous case in point, which, as Dave Barry used to say, I am not making up. A girl with whom I went to high school got married three years after graduation. Her husband’s name was Steve Bourgeois. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being named “Bourgeois” unless you’re planning to go after Mikhail Gorbachev’s job. But when her first child came along, this young woman decided that, having acquired a French name through marriage, she would give the situation a good, solid underscoring in the naming of her new daughter. She decided to give the poor little girl a name as French as a plateful of escargot swimming in butter. Unfortunately, in choosing the name, she displayed all the taste of someone who buys a portrait of Elvis painted on black velvet.

“Desiree.”

Can you imagine? “Desiree Bourgeois.” Remember that scene in Woody Allen's Radio Days when Julie Kavner, eight months pregnant, tells her husband she’s mulling the name “Lola” for their daughter?

“Lola? What do you, want her to be a stripper?” he replies.

Eek. In 1988, the year this essay was originally written, that little girl would have been 12 years old (Desiree, not the kid in the movie) and it’s my fervent hope that she had a happy childhood, but I’ll bet you a personalized license plate that that name didn’t help any. Not only did it sound like one-third of a Las Vegas lounge act, but you can imagine what those dumbbell teachers did with it on the first day of school each year from kindergarten to senior year. I can just hear the roll call now: “Jennifer Adams, Jennifer Anderson, Jennifer Ashworth, Jennifer Bentwell, and so on down through the Jennifers and Ashleys until they got to “De-sire Bor-jiss!” And I can picture the poor little girl shrinking to the size of a pack of Gitanes or a Renault Le Car from sheer mortification.

I can’t say what impact that horrible first name had on the early years of my life, probably not very much in truth. Because the truth is that kids in general are little shitheads and if they can’t turn you into an object of ridicule because of your name, they’ll find something else about you to ridicule. But I have made one rather comforting discovery in the past couple of years, and I don’t know why it never occurred to me before.

It’s simple: we are legion, we “midnight masqueraders” who go by our middle names. I am just one of millions who find their legal name so unpalatable that they have substituted something else for it. I have a friend whose legal name is “Elzey,” and if you call him that he just might punch your lights out depending on what sort of mood he’s in. His name, by his own say-so, is “Bob.” And where I work, at the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia, we have a Clarence who goes by “Gene” and a Julius who goes by “Art.” I don’t blame either of them, nor do I blame the foreign service officer I knew in Frankfurt whose driver’s license said “Clyde,” but who signed his name “Buck.” If my name were Clyde, I’d want to be called “Buck” too. And I’m just as sure that if his name were “Wirt,” he’d want to be called “Kelley.”

Then there are those who start out in life with such strikes against them that they might just throw in the towel and head for Superior Court with that petition before they get the diapers off. Remember Ben Dover and Ima Pigg? I can top those. Not long ago my supervisor walked into the office waving a local Brazilian newspaper and called my attention to an article about a spectacular traffic accident. He was laughing, telling us we just weren’t gonna BELIEVE this. He opened the paper, found the article, ran his finger over to the spot and said, “Here! Read that!”
“Arthur, this paper is in Portuguese,” I said. “I can’t read Portuguese.” (Arthur has a Brazilian wife and speaks the local lingo)

“You don’t have to read Portuguese,” he said. “Just look there! Look at the name of that witness they’re quoting!”

I looked. Bracketed in quotation marks was an eyewitness description of the accident’s aftermath by a local resident who saw the whole thing happen. He was identified as “Hitler Mussolini, 46.”

Unless he was hiding from his wife under an assumed name…well, and I thought I had problems.

Papa's Got A Brand-New Bag

Godfrey Blow and Thierry Bisch, look out.

Yeah, I know you've never heard of them. You've never of me either.

They're PAINTERS. You know, people who paint. And I don't mean living rooms and bathrooms. I'm talking about ART. That about which none of us knows anything, but we all know what we like. Right?

Now, these two folks may be obscure, (I never heard of them either) but at least they're alive. One was born in 1948 and the other in '53. Two years before me, in other words. Same year as my wife. Obviously I didn't want to begin a blog posting with the words, "Leonardo da Vinci and Paul Cezanne, look out." Those guys are dead. There ain't nothing for them to look out for. Except maybe the mind-boggling price tags on their canvases when they go up for auction or get stolen from some museum in Switzerland.

That is correct. Old K.D. has taken up painting.

We will now pause for a moment while the art world shakes to its foundations.

Now, I've been dabbling in painting off and on for years. I'm one hell of a dabbler. At first I wanted to dabble in watercolors. That's because some of my favorite writers were watercolor-dabblers. D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, to name two. Lawrence was actually a pretty fair draftsman. He could draw. His watercolors are generally figurative and carefully-crafted. Miller, somewhat more to my taste, couldn't draw worth a damn and he didn't care. Some of his watercolors look like they were executed by a kid getting through a bad day at kindergarten. And I think he would be highly flattered to hear me say that. The angel was his watermark, exuberance his hallmark and "Paint as you like and die happy" his trademark. Miller painted for fun, and you can sure tell. He had nothing to say except S'agapo.

That's Greek for "I love you."

I'm with Miller. I just throw paint around. And I'm having a ball.

Down in my basement I have some of my old efforts. One or two aren't bad. There's a watercolor I excecuted in 1986, a still-life of my kitchen in Frankfurt, Germany. There's an oil canvas I did last winter, "Still Life With Radio," on which I toiled for three months. It's not very good.

The problem has been that I've been trying to do more-or-less traditional figurative art, and I'm not much better a draftsman than Miller. I can draw, I just can't draw very well. And it's not for lack of practice, either. Once upon a time I had a sketchbook and used to draw up a storm. But that was a long time ago.

I think the real problem is that drawing is work. If I want to work, I'll go outside and mow the lawn. When I paint I want to have fun.

So I decided to set figurative painting aside, for the moment anyway, and get a little crazy. I've executed two canvases in the past ten days. They appear above. To make up for the fact that I don't draw very well, I've incorporated collage technique into both of them, pulling recognizable images relevant to the theme I have in mind off the Internet, pasting them on the canvas and then painting around, and over them. Artists have been doing this for years. What the hell do I care that the idea didn't originate with me? I'm not looking to become the next Robert Rauchenberg. I'm looking to have myself a good old time on Saturday afternoon.

If you're interested, they do have themes, they do have ideas and they do have titles. I'm basically a writer. I can't tell a story without telling a story. The one predominated by bright reds, oranges and other colors is a tribute to the music of one of my favorite composers, Claudio Monteverdi. I call it "Homage to Claudio Monteverdi." Clever, huh?

The more subdued one, dominated by blues and greens and featuring collage-images of forests, rivers, great blue herons, the moon and stars is entitled "River Elegy." It's in memory of my younger sister Lynn, whose ashes were scattered in the Spokane River in Washington State in 2004.

And I must say that, original or not, I like what I've done so far. What the hell do I care if Art World wouldn't say the same? They can go choke on their pickled sharks and brie.

My sun room, which I use as an office, book depository, smoking room and now painting studio, is a cramped mess. It stinks of turpentine. I've already ruined the counter because I was dumb enough to put paint thinner in a plastic drinking cup and it ate right through the cup.

But clear the way nonetheless, all you gallery-mongers and chardonnay sippers out there trying to decide what the hell the person who stuffed that mayonnaise jar with horse dung and sunflower seeds is trying to say to the world.

My message to the world couldn't be clearer.

Paint as you like and die happy!

See ya.

Circle For A Landing

Boy, you sure can tell it's August, can't you?

Congress is on its five-week paid vacation, the nation's capital is wheezing through the dog days of limpid heat and violent afternoon thunderstorms, and the news media just don't know what to do with themselves.

I have some experience in journalism myself, and I can tell you that reporters go nuts in August for lack of anything to write about. In England August is known as the "silly season," the month when the papers will play up any idiotic story they can find just to fill space.

Just in case anyone has forgotten, (and I'm sure plenty have) the run-up to September 11, 2001 was a real snoozer. Right up until the moment those airplanes slammed into the World Trade Center, Pentagon and that field in Pennsylvania, we consumers of news were being tube-fed one shark attack after another, the vicissitudes of the Dow-Jones Industrial Average (it passed 10,000 for the first time that summer) and Chandra Levy, Chandra Levy, Chandra Levy.

Does anyone remember Chandra Levy now? We had her in 24-hour tape loop for weeks before 9/11. She was the Washington intern who vanished in Rock Creek Park, then turned up dead, and for a while (an endless while) all eyes were on the congressman she worked for, Gary Condit, whose priapic propensities were such that many wags called him "Gary Condom."

Then Al Qaida struck, and we all had something else to worry about.

Happens all the time. In the Soviet Union, coups tended to happen in August. With all the party big shots in Moscow out of town, swatting mosquitoes at their dachas in the countryside, August was the time to strike if you wanted to topple the government. I remember the last time it happened. I was swatting mosquitoes in Warrenton, Virginia, preparing to be transferred to my next Foreign Service post, Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire. August 19, 1991. The news cycle was in such a downturn that that week's issue of Newsweek featured a cover story entitled "Busybodies and Crybabies: What's happening To the American Character?"

Then the following morning, when the Washington Post was delivered to the door of my room at the Warrenton Comfort Inn, the blazing headline read that Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev had been deposed in a coup.

That coup collapsed after three days, but things sure were exciting there for a while. Then we all went back to wishing September would hurry up and get here, with its cooler temperatures and the NFL on Sundays.

I think I have identified the "shark attack" of 2008. Or the Chandra Levy, if you prefer.

A couple of weeks ago there was a story in the news about a Quantas jumbo jet having to make an emergency landing in Australia after a mystery explosion blew out a hunk of its fuselage in mid-flight.

Hot damn! Shark attack! Has anyone else noticed that in the days since, we have been virtually inundated with "emergency landing" stories? There was another one just this morning, about a plane having to make a forced landing at an airport in Orange, California after some sort of equipment problem.

Truth to tell, small planes probably have to make emergency landings more often than most non-pilots would guess. Generally such a thing would only make the news if it involved a Qantas jumbo jet. But this is August, and there ain't much else going on. And given the habit reporters have of reflexively (one might say slavishly) imitating each other, I'm going to go out on a limb and make a fearless forecast here: in the weeks between now and the time the autumn winds begin to blow (or something truly newsworthy happens, on the level of a terrorist attack, coup d'etat in Russia, massive earthquake in Pakistan or breast augmentation surgery for Paris Hilton)look to see lots and lots of stories about planes of all shapes and sizes making forced landings at podunk airports you couldn't find on a map.

Oh, and watch for that big interview Ted Koppel is going to have with his dog, Winky.

It's August, folks. Showtime.

The Soul That Barbed Wire Was No Match for

An interesting coincidence: last Sunday the world got the news of the death of Alexander Isaievich Solzhenitsyn at the age of 89.

When the news came about Solzhenitsyn, I was roughly three-fourths of the way through a summer re-read of Tolstoy's War & Peace.

I'd just reached the chapters where Napoleon's army has entered Moscow and the city is burning.

I have a message for all of my friends back in Russia who, on the occasion of Solzhenitsyn's death this week, would deride his memory, downplay his greatness, dismiss him as an eccentric and a scold, or in the worst case, vilify him as a traitor to his country.

I love you all. And you can all shove it up your shuba.

The title of this posting is borrowed from Solzhenitsyn's most significant work, the massive "experiment in literary investigation" which was published in 1973 as The Gulag Archipelago. The late Kenneth Tynan called it "The most devastating attack on a political system to be leveled in modern times." Gulag, published in English in three volumes, traced in minute detail the evolution of the Soviet Union's massive chain of forced labor camps and bore witness to the fates of the millions who were imprisoned in them. Solzhenitsyn himself was what Russians call a "zek," an alumnus of the Gulag Archipelago who spent eight years in the Siberian labor camps, was released, shortly thereafter survived cancer, and went on to generate a body of literary work that would be instrumental in bringing down the Soviet Union. The Gulag Archipelago was the centerpiece of that body of work.

Although Solzhenitsyn only dabbled in theater, among his works was a play entitled Candle In The Wind. When I heard that Elton John had borrowed that title for a song about Marilyn Monroe, I was at first utterly disgusted at such a vulgar gesture. Solzhenitsyn's play was concerned with much higher and more serious business than the fate of a blonde movie idol. But the more I thought about it, the more I was inclined to just let it go. I can't say to what extent Marilyn Monroe could be described as a "candle in the wind." Some say she was tougher than she appeared. But I do know this: "candle in the wind" was an appelation that could never be applied to Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn was a tower of granite in the wind.

He drove Leonid Brezhnev and the gerontocracy who ran the Kremlin from 1964 to 1985 absolutely bonkers. For that alone we should be grateful. Ultimately they didn't know what to do with him. They couldn't kill him or throw him back in prison; once he had won the Nobel Prize in 1970, his world fame was too great for that to be an option. Contrary to what some may think, the Soviets were concerned about world opinion, as would be anyone whose political system was based on a revolutionary, if crack-brained, idea that their ideology told them they were to spread to the world. He didn't dare go to Sweden in 1970 to collect his prize; he knew that the ancient thugs running the show in Moscow wouldn't let him come home if he did. He played a game of cat-and-mouse with them, and he was much smarter than they were.

But by 1973 the jig was up. Solzhenitsyn had intended to postpone publication of his enormous broadside against the Soviet security organs and their "archipelago" of prison camps spread over Russia's far east until the right moment. But he learned that the KGB had interrogated his typist and gotten hold of a copy of the manuscript. He had already smuggled copies of it on microfilm out of the USSR, and he gave the green light for it to be published, in Russian, in West Berlin.

Almost immediately he was picked up by the KGB, bundled into an airplane and exiled. His Soviet citizenship was revoked. He lived in Switzerland for a time, was the guest of German novelist Heinrich Boell for a short while, and then ultimately came to the United States and settled in Cavendish, Vermont. There he stayed in relative solitude for most of the next 20 years, emerging now and then to condemn both the totalitarian Soviet Union and what he saw as its probable victim, the morally spineless west, and got on with what he regarded to be his mission in life: chronicling the entire Soviet catastrophe.

That's the historical context, which everyone knows. But blogs are about personal context, and this is mine.

1973, the year in which the Russian-language edition of The Gulag Archipelago appeared in Berlin, was also the year I graduated from high school. It was the year I turned 18. For most of us, our teen years are the time of life when we are most inclined toward hero-worship. In our teens we're defining the sort of people we want ultimately to be, and we put our best models for that purpose on pedestals.

Solzhenitsyn was one of my heroes. In my pantheon of heroes he was right up there with Beethoven and Lord Byron.

I came of age during the cold war, and in my own eyes, no more fierce anti-communist existed in the world than myself. Also, I wanted to be a writer. One day when I was about 17, I was roaming the stacks in the old Chula Vista Public Library when I came across a title that somehow rang a bell: One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich by someone named Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I had never read a word of his, but somewhere, somehow, even at that tender age, I had heard of this book. No surprise there, as I would learn later. The publication of One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, in a single issue of the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir, had been hailed as a major event in the Soviet Union. Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschchev had personally authorized the publication of this searing novella about one day in the life of a prisoner in one of Stalin's forced-labor camps. Kruschchev had several years earlier embarked on a campaign of attacking the memory of the murderous Stalin, and the publication of Solzhenitsyn's first book was part of that campaign. No doubt I'd seen a reference to it in a newspaper somewhere.

In any case, I took it home and read it. As a dedicated anti-communist I was outraged by the narrative, and as a wannabee writer I was stunned by the tour-de-force of it.

As only a high-school senior can, I had a new hero.

Ironic though it may sound to some, I was both an anti-communist and a Russophile. As much as I hated the Soviet regime and everything it stood for, I had been fascinated by Russia and everything Russian since my early teens. When I was in the eighth grade I got some Russian-language phonograph records out of my school library and decided I was going to teach myself Russian. I didn't get very far, but it stood me in good stead a few years later when I enrolled in a Russian-language class in college and didn't have to bother learning the cyrillic alphabet; I already knew it. I read War & Peace (an abridged version) at age 13 and wrote a book report about it for my reading class. In the ninth grade, my friend Mark and I collaborated on a comprehensive report for our social studies class about Russia. We each addressed a series of topics and took turns making our presentations to the class. I remember one of my topics was the Soviet space program, which was a toughie because everything the Russians did in those days, they kept it a secret, and therefore information about the Soviet space program was hard to come by, but I did my best.

So I was a russophile, a commie-hater, and now a fan of Solzhenitsyn. In the months that followed I read everything by Solzhenitsyn I could get my hands on. Cancer Ward. The First Circle. The recently-published August, 1914, the first volume of his huge cycle of novels called The Red Wheel which would trace the history of the Soviet experience through the decades. A new biography of Solzhenitsyn appeared in the library. I greedily snatched and devoured it.

Most of my heroes were dead. This one was still alive and kicking, somewhere in Russia. With all the zeal of a 17-year-old fan, I wrote to Harper & Row, his American publishers, and asked if they had an address where I could send him fan mail. They answered in the negative of course; all of their dealings with him were in the third person.

It goes without saying that I kept an eye on the newspapers for anything having to do with my guy. When, early in 1974, I saw a headline in the old San Diego Union that read, "New Solzhenitsyn Book Accuses Secret Police," I grabbed it right away and read every word. Something big was going on.

Indeed. Just a few weeks later another headline hit the front page of the Union: "Soviet Exiles Solzhenitsyn To West, Ends Citizenship."

I carried that newspaper clipping in my wallet for years.

A few days later a wrenching photograph appeared in the paper, a truly great moment in photojournalism. Solzhenitsyn, eyes lowered in sorrow, faced the cameras, giving a press conference in Zurich. Immediately behind him, with a wrenching look of sadness and pity on his face, was his fellow Nobel Prize laureate and temporary host, German novelist Heinrich Boell, whose own masterpiece, Group Portrait With Lady, I had just recently read. I clipped that, too.

The Kremlin thought it had solved the problem of Solzhenitsyn by removing him and declaring him what George Orwell called an "un-person." Had the KGB assassinated him, the anti-communist cause would have had a martyr and Brezhnev knew it. So they flicked him away as you would a troublesome flea, hoping that he would sink into obscurity somewhere in the west and never be heard of again.

And oh, what an embarrassment he was to my liberal friends, accustomed as they were to glossing over or politely ignoring any criticism of the Soviet Union or of Communism in general. Since the 1950s, anti-communism had been perceived as a "Republican" thing, never mind that one of the most dedicated cold warriors of all time was JFK. To criticize Communism, liberals reflexively feared, would make one sound too much like a Republican. And besides, there was that thing going on in Vietnam. You wouldn't hear a Democrat mention the USSR unless it was in the context of a visit by the Bolshoi Ballet to the U.S. or of Van Cliburn to Moscow. Bring up Stalin and they'd change the subject, or remind you that the U.S. had once embraced him as an ally against Hitler.

But Solzhensitsyn was too big an elephant in the living room even for them to ignore. My former high school civics teacher, Mr. McLean, was a genuine '70s lefty, from the big sideburns to the vote for McGovern in '72. But I went back to visit my old high school that spring, and I showed that newspaper clipping about Solzhenitsyn's exile from Russia to Mr. McLean.

"We may differ on this or that," I said, "but don't you think this is revolting?"

"I think that's revolting," he said candidly.

Gradually, over the years, many of Mr. McLean's fellow lefties on both sides of the Atlantic would ruefully admit that Solzhenitsyn's case against the Soviets was too big to brush away, and sympathy for Communism, particularly in Europe, largely evaporated.

The news media rushed in. Solzhenitsyn gave a one-hour interview through an interpreter which was broadcast all over the non-Communist world. In the spring of 1974 my family formed a circle around the television set to watch it. There was my hero, on camera, talking to the world. I was thrilled. "What a charming man!" my older sister declared when it was over.

A budding poet, I sat down and wrote some verses. A Song For Solzhenitsyn. Lost now, thank God.

Later that spring, word came out that The Gulag Archipelago was soon to be published in English. With all the zeal of an 18 year-old, I called the book department at Walker Scott (no Amazon.com in those days, no Barnes & Noble either) and, unnecessarily, reserved a copy. On June 20, 1974 I drove out to Lemon Grove in my mother's old Chevy and picked up my copy of Gulag. I still have it -- a genuine first edition, so marked. 660 pages in all, in 1974 it cost $12.50 brand-new.

I took it home and plunged into it. I must say it certainly wasn't entertaining reading; the documentation was exhaustive, the case histories told in detail. Entertaining no, but harrowing. I stayed with it all the way through to the end and emerged from the experience an even more fiercely-convinced enemy of Communism than I was when I began.

By the following year Solzhenitsyn had taken up residence in Cavendish, Vermont, 147 miles from St. Albans, where I was born. Word was that he chose Vermont as a place to live because its plenitude of birch trees reminded him of home. (Russians consider the birch tree to be their national symbol.)

As the world knows, the curmudgeonly Solzhenitsyn had no interest in acclimating to life in America. He kept to himself, ventured out only now and then to give a speech like the notorious barn-burner he delivered at Harvard's commencement ceremonies in 1978, declined to become an American citizen, refused even to learn English. Clearly, he didn't see himself as an expatriate, but as a sort of Russian government-in-exile. And of course he became something of an embarrassment to his host government and to western liberals in general, because it turned out that he had no more particular use for bourgeois democracy than he had for Marx and Lenin. Solzhenitsyn saw the west as weak, decadent, morally flabby and no doubt destined to be overrun by the barbarous forces from east of the Iron Curtain if someone didn't do something about it. As far as he was concerned, someone was going to do something about it. He would. If the America of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter didn’t have the balls to stand up to the Soviets, Solzhenitsyn did. “How many divisions has the pope?” Stalin famously joked. Like the pope, Solzhenitsyn commanded no divisions. But he didn’t need them to fight his particular enemy. Solzhenitsyn wasn’t fighting the USSR’s military might. He was fighting the gigantic network of lies, lies and more lies that the entire communist edifice was built on.

Someone once asked Solzhenitsyn what he regarded as the world’s greatest evil. “Falsehood!” he snapped. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are the two political figures most often associated with the west’s victory in the cold war. But Solzhenitsyn was also a key player in that his relentless exposure of Soviet lies, oppression and injustice did much to undermine the moral authority of communism throughout Europe. Eurocommunism, a viable political movement in the 1970s and early ‘80s, gradually dissolved, while in eastern Europe, and even in Russia, democracy movements became bolder and louder until the velvet revolutions of 1989 and the spectacular fall of the Berlin Wall. Then finally the collapse of the USSR itself in 1991 brought about the final triumph of what an obscure mathematics teacher in a little town called Ryazan, 100 miles or so southeast of Moscow, had initiated when Novy Mir published a novella in 1962 based on his own prison experiences.

Like all oversized personalities, he was difficult. He had an almost messianic sense of mission (having applied the word “messianic” to Solzhenitsyn, one almost can’t help but smile hearing it applied to Barack Obama) and was focused on it to the exclusion of almost all else. He alienated friends, took people for granted, and was frequently downright rude. His old friend Lev Kopelev, the model for the character Lev Rubin in The First Circle, broke with him in 1985. He had simply had enough of his old friend’s prickly personality.

In 1990 Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev moved to have Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet citizenship restored. When I saw the announcement on the front page of the Washington Post, I went back into my notebooks and scrapbooks and dug up that other newspaper clipping, the one I had been saving for 16 years, announcing his 1974 exile from the Soviet Union. I scotch-taped the two newspaper clippings next to each other in my journal, the old one in black-and-white, the new one in color, and wrote underneath, “Change is glacial, but change is change.” (Again, I think of Obama and how he’s bandying about the word “change,” and I want to laugh.)

Solzhenitsyn had a contrarian streak in him. He was a Russian nationalist, some say even a monarchist. Russian liberals were disappointed by his approval of Vladimir Putin’s hamfisted rule. I have no doubt that, if Solzhenitsyn had ever stumbled upon H.G. Wells’ time machine, he would have climbed in, set the ol’ Wayback for 1812, and climbed out to go and fight for Tsar Alexander I against Napoleon.

“You were silly like us; your gift survived it all,” W.H. Auden wrote on the passing of William Butler Yeats. Solzhenitsyn, too, could be silly, and in a much more outsized way than “us.” Because he wasn’t “us.” No more than Tolstoy, Pushkin or Beethoven were. His life, personality, times and achievement were as big as theirs. He was called by his contemporaries in the 1960s, “our classic.” And he was the only one. He may have been the last one.