Wisdom of the Questioning Eye: Five books from the 1960s

In his 93 years on this Earth, he contributed to the invention of television, worked on the Manhattan Project and the Saturn V rocket, and made the acquaintances of Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Werner von Braun. He published Henry Miller, Kenneth Patchen, and Kenneth Rexroth, among others, and knew Gertrude Stein, Anaïs Nin, Allen Ginsberg, and many others you might name. He exerted a profound influence on the phenomenon known as mail art, traveled hundreds of thousands of miles on cruise ships, was married three times (once happily), spent several years in Guam, was an irascible crank, theorized a union of art and science called Sciart, was briefly committed to a mental institution, wrote more than 80 books including important bibliographies of Miller and F. Scott Fitzgerald, had a massive FBI file, lived and worked in Rhode Island, New York, Tennessee, California, Texas, Alabama, and Tasmania. At last he settled in Belfast, Maine, where he ran for governor, served on the Knox County Regional Planning Commission, called his house the Institute of Advanced Thinking, barraged the local paper with letters, and at the end of his life subsisted largely on soup kitchens and food gleaned from the munchie tables at art openings.

You'd think that biography would merit an obituary somewhere other than the Waldo Independent, a twice-weekly newspaper in Waldo County, Maine. Porter's passing, though, was largely unremarked; a few mentions in online poetry discussions and the single obit of a few hundred words.

It's not easy being an icon, and it was never easy to be Bern Porter. A bookish child in 1920s Aroostook County, he was labeled a "cold fish" by his mother, an incident that was still finding poetic expression as late as 1984 in "The Cold Fish Saga," from Sounds That Arouse Me: Selected Writings Escaping via college, as so many other bright Maine kids have, Porter went to Colby and did graduate work at Brown University and was considered one of the brighter physics students. But the artsy end of the college scene drew more and more of his attention. Then in 1933, he was caught stealing from students in Brown's Lyman Gym, where he was working to make ends meet, and his academic career ended. But former professors put in a good word for him and by the fall of 1935 Porter was working for the Acheson Colloids Corporation in New York. While working on the cathode ray tube, Porter also took art classes and hit the museums, where he first started to encounter surrealism and the found aesthetic. He had always tinkered with making sculptures out of found objects, including old lab equipment at Colby; now he found himself able to look at works by Duchamp and Alexander Calder every day.

By 1940 some of his graduate school work had caught the attention of what later became the Manhattan Project, and Porter was covertly drafter and sent to Princeton University, where he worked on the separation of uranuim isotopes.<

In the fall of 1937 Acheson sent Porter to England and then Paris, where he went to Gertrude Stein's house "on instinct," listening to what he later called "the carved, sculptural flow of her language," which would have a profound impact on his later performance poems. In subsequent years Porter would meet the artists who fled to Europe and ended up dropping by Peggy Guggenheim's weekly receptions: Chagall, Dali, Mondrian, Pollock, and others. By the late 1930s Porter was enough of a celebrity that the Portland Press Herald remarked on his return to Houlton for Thanksgiving in 1938. By 1940 some of his graduate school work at Brown had caught the attention of what later became the Manhattan Project, and Porter was covertly drafted and sent to Princeton University, where he worked on the separation of uranium isotopesÑand met Albert Einstein, whose simplicity of lifestyle made a deep impression on Porter. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who would later head the Manhattan Project, was also there at the time. Porter worked in Oak Ridge and Berkeley, and by 1943, because he hung around with poets, the FBI was compiling a file on him.

During this period, Porter was occasionally exhibiting photographs and sculptures and publishing a poem or two. He also began his career as a publisher, bringing out small editions of Henry Miller's antiwar essays, which in fact were Miller's first American publications. In the 1940s, Porter published Bay Area poets Kenneth Patchen, Parker Tyler, and Kenneth Rexroth.

The Belfast Historical Society museum has several of Porter's sculptures, a shelf of books by and about him, and two boxes of miscellany, including a pair of white leather baby booties. Pinette saw a lot of Porter, giving him rides to art shows or other events and sometimes finding herself on the receiving end of Porter-style generosity. "Bern would arrive with two shopping bags," she said, demonstrating with her arms held out from her sides, "and just start putting stuff around" in the museum. "Sometimes you didn't want to be around him," she said. "But he really was a visionary and a great thinker."

Porter was a relentless innovator. "In the heyday of the mail-art movement and of poetry," said Portland gallery owner June Fitzpatrick, "he was certainly a leader in the field, and young people flocked to him. A great avant-garde artist."

Along the way he also wrote some more traditional poetry, and it is here, when he is leaving his theories on the back burner, that a reader can get at the emotional core of Bern Porter. The deepest emotional attachment of his life was to Margaret, who died in 1975, shortly after they'd finally settled in Belfast. "He never got over that," Melnicove said. "Her death was sudden and unexpected, and it ripped him apart." "For me," said Sylvester Pollet of the University of Maine, "the crucial thing was his example of how to work outside the system, to publish whatever you want to publish, without asking anyone's permission."

Melnicove agrees. "If you just think of it in terms of Maine artists, I think he's one of the major Maine writers of all time. He's a product of Maine. He did incredible things in both science and art, and as an experimental writer, I think he's a major figure."

For years, Porter encouraged visiting "scholars" to come to the Institute of Advanced Thinking. University affiliation automatically disqualified an applicant, and many others were doubtless turned off by his refusal to let them use the house's kitchen or bathroom; nobody, in fact, cooked in the kitchen, since Porter used both refrigerator and stove to store papers and sculptures. Porter almost never cooked, preferring instead to loot sugar packets from restaurants or order a cup of hot water into which he would stir ketchup. He was also pretty free with other people's food, once walking into the house of an acquaintance and lifting her breakfast literally from under her nose.

Somewhere along the line he got interested in Wilhelm Reich's theory of orgone energy and built a platform for the accumulation of that energy behind his house. In addition, this man who played minor roles in the creation of television, the atom bomb, and the Saturn V refused for years to install a telephone.

Institute attendees were, however, welcome to put up found sculptures in the large yard, and a great number of those sculptures came and went over the years. Many of them are still there. A visit to Porter's house in 2004 brought home how very isolated he had become in his later years. Nearly three months after his June 7 death, his clothes were still heaped on a chair in one room along with a pile of children's toysÑat least some of which were purloined from the yard of the family across the street, who eventually got so exasperated with Porter's sticky fingers that they fenced in their yard. The refrigerator was covered with big plastic magnetic letters; in one corner of an outbuilding Porter called the "hotel," a pile of moldering mattresses was all that remained of the accommodations of the Institute for Advanced Thinking. The orgone platform was rotting away somewhere back in the woods, and the yard had grown up to obscure many of the found sculptures. Next to the driveway, a child's toy horse reared up out of the weeds.