Erik Donald France to Wallace Fowlie, October 24, 1987 (Part II)

[Though earlier I'd donated to Duke letters from Wallace Fowlie (1908-1998) to me, more recently, in sorting through my files, I came across photocopies of at least some of the letters I wrote to him. Here's another one of them (typed), from when I lived just off Little River Church Road in Hurdle Mills, North Carolina. He was residing at 17D Valley Terrace Apartments, 2836 Chapel Hill Road, Durham, North Carolina. This is Part II of the October 24, 1987 epistle. Ellipses indicate slight editing (deletion of a few personal details). Extra paragraph breaks added for easier reading. For his other letters, please see Wallace Fowlie Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Here's a link to the collection guide.]

I wanted to tell you, as well, [h]ow the Doors really did act as doors of perception for me from age seventeen . . . 

I believe in the strange quirkiness of coincidence and chance, beginning with the proximity of my birthday to Morrison's . . . That John Lennon was shot and killed on the 8th . . .

I spent my sixth birthday in Justice, Illinois, south of Chicago; my eighth in St. Paul, Minnesota; ninth in Durham; and eighteenth in Lexington, Virginia, at the Virginia Military Institute as a Rat. 

One of my roommates, a guy from Connecticut [Carl], turned me on completely to Morrison & the Doors. My elder sister, Vickie, had a couple of their albums from the late sixties, and I had loved, for as long as I could remember, "Light My Fire" and "Riders on the Storm," but VMI provided the right atmosphere for me to be completely won over by Morrison. 

"No one can scream like Jim Morrison" was my roommate's boast. 

I hated VMI and left after a semester. . . I transferred to UNC-Chapel Hill . . . growing beards and shaving them every few months, wearing dashikis, etc. -- until making a decision to head for Europe with a history class. 

I made a new friend on the trip and dragged him [W] along with me to see Père Lachaise and especially "Jim."

There it was, a modest site stuck between elevated stone markers, graffiti on all the neighbors' tombs. 

I read No One Here Gets Out Alive and was struck by the fact that there was no marker whatsoever, just unmistakable signs ("JIM---") & drunken, bizarre visitors.

By the time we got back to the USA, I was reading more voraciously and wildly.

Another friend of mine [K] had also been tuned into Morrison & the Doors simultaneously. 

Vickie sparked my interest in Jack Kerouac & the Beat Generation and also, since she had majored in French Literature at NC State University, French lit. 

I have been scrambling ever since, reading in translation Balzac, Gide, Camus, Sartre,  Céline, Jarry, some of Proust, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and recently, Lautréamont, Apollinaire, Arp, Breton, and Russians (Dostoevsky especially), your Age of Surrealism (which was highly recommended by Judy Hogan), and your study of Lautréamont.

I remember . . . working at Pizza Transit Authority, reading Baudelaire & Rimbaud aloud with [K] & hooting with laughter . . . laughing about gnawing the ends of rifle butts and centers radiating universal stupidity, which is how we looked at our absurd jobs at the time delivering pizzas. 

[End Part II. Conclusion in next post.]