Fermi’s Interaction
My father told me that the one thing he regretted in life was not taking up Harry Kemp’s offer to spend the summer with him and his girlfriend in Provincetown. Harry Kemp was a famous hobo, moocher and part-time memoirist, his Tramping on Life a classic in the genre. My father met him at a jazz club in the Village. Kemp got him to spring for drinks and a steak dinner. My father was a grad student at Columbia at the time, and when he told the story (which he did on several occasions) he lowered his eyes almost coquettishly when he mentioned the girlfriend. I suppose he was hoping I couldn’t comprehend the idea of the three of them sharing a bedroom.
He must have met Kemp several times afterwards, because he claimed to have a signed first edition of the book, though he couldn’t remember where it was. My father was working towards his Ph.D. in Chemistry, with ventures into bio-chem, and he was part of handful of students who were studying with Enrico Fermi, who had recently arrived at Columbia, a year after winning the Nobel Prize for his discovery of slow neutrons, the theory of Beta Decay. Fermi was young and vibrant, still in his thirties, grateful to have escaped the pernicious fascism of 1930s Italy.
When my kids were teen-agers, and deeply involved in musical theatre, they were the only ones who knew why the high school in Zombie Prom was named Enrico Fermi High. Zombie Prom was a terrible play about a high school student in the 1950s, who turned into a zombie after venturing too close to the town’s nuclear plant. In the musical, he returns to take the popular girl to the prom. It was really just one more remake of the Elvis story. My kids were frustrated that no one in the production, including the director and stage manager, cared about their connection, and they only made it into chorus.
When I finally read Tramping on Life — it wasn’t until I was in college that I managed to find a copy — I was struck by its self-congratulatory tone. “This innocence stuff is over-rated,” he wrote, and advised sending a college kid to a prostitute named Jennie, who had been hired by a fraternity to deal with innocents like him. Better Jennie than “horning in and jeopardizing” some good girl. Kemp seemed to have no qualms sleeping with other men’s’ wives, whisking them off to his shack in the dunes. He was responsible for breaking up a number of marriages, mostly those of his benefactors.
One of my father’s classmates was the sci-fi writer, Isaac Asimov. According to my father, he was still a teenager in grad school, who often took catnaps in an empty cabinet in the lab. They used to go out for pasta and chianti on Saturdays after long days in the lab scorching beakers and dipping pipettes. Asimov always covered the bill because he had extra income from selling his stories to Astounding Science Fiction magazine. Asimov never worked with Fermi, though he wanted to. And, according to my father, he was there the night he met Harry Kemp, though he left early. My father appears briefly in one of Asimov’s short stories. He doesn’t remember which one, though it would be hard to check because Asimov published over 400 short stories and it could have been unpublished. My guess is that it could have been “The Magnificent Possession” (1940), about a chemist who creates spray-on aluminum and has to deal with a patent-hungry mob and crooked politicians. In the end, his project has to be abandoned because it produces an unbearable stink.
In grad school, in what I now see as a misguided tribute to my father, I wrote a paper on Harry Kemp. We were studying marginalized writers — women, African and Native Americans and Latinos, gays — and I wondered what it would be like to write about someone who willingly chose marginal status, even cultivated it. However, I couldn’t stomach Kemp’s depraved self-revelations. How as a 12-year old, he seduced his even younger cousin while they were sharing a bedroom, his aunt shouting up the stairs, “Come to breakfast, lazy bones!” Harry Kemp and the carnivalesque, Bakhtin’s perfect “degrader figure.” A few days later, he found her body under the bed, her face and pretty white neck burned from the carbolic acid she drank. “Poor kid,” he wrote.