A September piece in the L.A. Times entertainment section reported that a grant from film producer App was financing construction of new lodgings at Sanctum. The architect: a twenty-four-year-old Japanese-American prodigy named Claude Hiroshima, whose last project had been the refurbishment of all the lavatories in a Madrid hotel.
“At Sanctum,” he said, “my goal is to be true to the essential consciousness of the locus, selecting materials that provide a synthesis with the prevailing mental and physical geometry. There are several log structures already on the property, and I want the new buildings to be indistinguishable from them.”
Log structures.
Either Lucy had read about the retreat or her brother had told her about it.
December, another Publishers Journal squib: Paperback publication of Command: Shed the Light was canceled and sales of Lowell’s backlist—his previously published books—had bottomed, as had prices for his canvases.
March: The Village Voice ran a highly unfavorable retrospective of Lowell’s body of work, suggesting that his place in history be reassessed. Three weeks later, a letter from someone named Terrence Trafficant of Rahway, New Jersey, attacked the article, labeling the author a “bloodsucking, motherfucking nematode” and hailing M. Bayard Lowell as “the dark Jesus of twentieth-century American thought—all of you are just too fucking blocked and preternaturally dense to realize it, you asshole-fucking New York Jew revisionist Pharisees.”
July: Completion of construction at Sanctum was announced by Lowell in the L.A. Times Book Review. The first crop of Sanctum fellows was introduced:
Christopher Graydon-Jones, 27, sculptor in iron and “found objects,” Newcastle, England.
Denton Mellors, 28, former doctoral candidate in American Literature at Columbia University and critic for the Manhattan Book Review; “Mr. Mellors will complete work on his first novel, The Bride.”
Joachim Sprentzel, 25, electronic music composer from Munich.
Terrence Gary Trafficant, 41, essayist and former inmate at the New Jersey State Prison at Rahway, where he had been serving a thirteen-year sentence for manslaughter.
Next day’s paper cared only about Trafficant, describing how acceptance as a Sanctum Fellow had hastened the ex-con’s parole and detailing Trafficant’s criminal history: robbery, assault, narcotics use, attempted rape.
Jailed almost continuously since the age of seventeen, Lowell’s protÉgÉ had earned a reputation as a combative prisoner. With the exception of a prison diary, he’d never produced anything remotely artistic. A photo showed him in his cell, tattooed hands gripping the bars: skinny and fair, with long, limp hair, bad teeth, sunken cheeks, a devilish goatee.
Questioned about the appropriateness of Trafficant’s selection, Lowell said, “Terry is excruciatingly authentic on smooth-muscle issues of freedom and will. He’s also an anarchist, and that will be an exhilarating influence.”
Mid-August: Sanctum’s opening was celebrated by an all-night party at the former nudist colony. Catering by Chef Sandor Nunez of Scones Restaurant, music by four rock bands and a contingent from the L.A. Philharmonic, ambience by M. Bayard Lowell “in a long white caftan, drinking and delivering monologues, surrounded by admirers.”
Among the sighted guests: a psychology professor turned LSD high priest, an Arab arms dealer, a cosmetics tycoon, actors, directors, agents, producers, and a buzzing swarm of journalists.
Terry Trafficant was spotted holding forth to his own group of fans. His prison diary, From Hunger to Rage, had just been bought by Lowell’s publisher. His editor called it “an intravenous shot of poison and beauty. One of the most important books to emerge this century.”
The New York police lieutenant who’d arrested Trafficant on the manslaughter charge was quoted, too: “This guy is serious bad news. They might as well light a stick of dynamite and wait for it to blow.”
The next few citations on Lowell turned out to be cross-referenced interviews with Trafficant. Describing himself as “Scum made good, an urban aborigine exploring a new world,” the ex-con quoted from the classics, Marxist theory, and postwar avant-garde literature. When asked about his crimes, he said, “That’s all dead and I’m not an undertaker.” Crediting Buck Lowell for his freedom, he called his mentor “one of the four greatest men who ever lived, the other three being Jesus Christ, Krishnamurti, and Peter Kurten.” When asked who Peter Kurten was, he said, “Look it up, Jack,” and ended the interview.