Booklets

 

When I first met Fred, he always carried a small green binder, and he was constantly writing in it, mostly aphorisms. In the early 70's, I met Fred in New York, and we drove to Boston to visit Minor White. Fred and I shared a bedroom. Not long after I had fallen asleep, perhaps twenty minutes, as I recall having looked at the clock, Fred woke me. "Walt. Walt. Listen to this." In his robe and pajamas, with a brown felt sleeping cap that Frances had made for him, he read something to me from his green binder that he had just written. "That's good, Fred," I said. He apologized for waking me, but, of course, I needed to hear what he had come up with. After about half an hour, he woke me again. "Walt. It's better. Listen. It's better." And he read whatever it was to me. And, so the short night went, until dawn. I have no recollection of what it was that Fred kept working and reworking.

The way Fred combined and recombined ideas, as he did in his images or in cooking, can be seen throughout these booklets. Phrases repeat, by themselves or attached to something new. But always the context is at least slightly changed.

 
By the time we were working on this project, the memory of the green binder was gone. Even though I found it, empty, in the darkroom, it was part of distant past. Instead, Fred wrote on scraps of mat board which he kept stashed around his room, by the phone, behind books, on the table next to the daybed. Part of our problem was reading his handwriting, which got particularly difficult when written at two or three in the morning. Another problem was to decide on which of the revisions was better. When I had finished three booklets, A leaf falls/and we remember the season, A Gate Without an Inscription/Makes No Sense, and Only Chance is Fair, we decided to create more booklets by using material from previously published collections. I edited, designed and printed out sets of booklets which were tied together with red thread. About as fast as I printed and bound sets, he gave them away.

 

Fred wanted the booklets published and distributed, but without spending money or time. My printing sets seemed to temporarily fulfil his wishes. But we did talk about putting them on a Web site. Here they are as Adobe Acrobat PDF files. Click on the file name to see the PDF file. If you don't have Acrobat, download it for free by clicking on Acrobat Reader.

You may download and print out these files for your personal, noncommercial use.

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