Jeff Gundy: How did I never get to know this guy? Some of his friends, mentioned in the book, are people I know—John Kampen was dean here at Bluffton for a while, and I’ve had some conversations with Tim Nafziger.
DB: I don’t know, exactly. I suppose space and time are two big factors that affect whether our circle in the Venn diagram will overlap with someone else’s. I first ran into Dale at Leonida’s 24-hour restaurant at the Newton, Kansas train station in spring 1975. Students from nearby Tabor, Bethel, and Hesston College—at least those who fancied themselves borderline intellectuals—liked to congregate at Leonida’s, preferably after 9 pm. It was a place to virtue-signal how many books you were reading while consuming the rancid coffee. If you were a Mennonite stuck in the middle of Kansas, this was your Left Bank. Dale at the time was an administrator for Mennonite Voluntary Service, then headquartered in Newton. He was a regular at Leonida’s. In fact, one could say that throughout his life, Dale’s favorite places for Socratic dialogue were greasy spoons—Leonida’s, Newell’s Truck Stop in Newton, and later on, the trifecta of diners in Chicago that would be the setting for many of his most important conversations: the Melrose and Medinah in Lincoln Park, and the Hilltop in Lincoln Square.
As John Kampen says with sublime simplicity in his essay in this book, “I have been talking with Dale Suderman since 1969. I have never had a boring conversation.” It is that incandescent power of dialogue that I tried to recapture in editing this collection of Dale’s writing. And in some of the previously unpublished essays, letters, and journals that I discovered in Dale’s papers archived at Bethel College, I believe we can detect the magnetism of Dale’s voice. My favorite would have to be his 1996 essay, “Figuring Out the Male Condition at the O’Hare Ramada Inn.” Dale charts his experience going to a weekend men’s retreat in Chicago. The result is a hilarious, irresistibly detailed piece in the vein of the best New Journalism. Dale’s essay about meeting Allen Ginsberg at Wichita State in 1966 deserves attention, too, as does his long essay that goes down the road of demythologizing Carl Jung. Ditto the inspired journal entry from the early 1980s that Dale titled in his ragged, late-night entry, “Of Cocks, Contras, and the Cubs.” This is the kind of gonzo journalism we associate with the likes of Mike Royko.
After 1979, when Dale turned thirty-five, he spent most of his life in Chicago, first running a bookstore and then working as an addictions counselor. The time he spent in official Mennonite circles, either academic or church-related, was not significant. He suffered a stroke at the age of sixty-three, and less than a year later he moved back to Kansas where he spent the rest of his earthly existence in a retirement village.
JG: Say a little bit about Dale’s life in the U.S. Army during Vietnam. During Vietnam I took the road more traveled (by Menno boys I knew), only really considered going CO or resisting altogether; I got #355, so it became academic. I also never did anything nearly so adventurous as going off to Vietnam as a soldier, even one behind the lines.
DB: Dale was not drafted into the U.S. Army; he enlisted in 1965, following graduation from Tabor College. He served in the Army three years—the first two at bases in Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri and then Fort Rucker in Alabama, giving him a deeper understanding of the American South. In year three he was flown to Saigon to serve in the 125th Transportation Command. When he landed, the Tet offensive was in full bloom.
I was never fully satisfied with Dale’s explanations of why he enlisted in the military. Already in his early adolescence, he was well aware of the pacifist tradition as the preferred Mennonite Brethren path and he had heard all the arguments for alternative service. He details these conversations at Ebenfeld M. B. Church with a certain degree of cynicism. At the same time, he was experiencing the blunt, unreflective homophobia of his home community—which was pretty standard across America at the time. I believe the combination of these factors gave Dale something he wanted to prove. What better way of demonstrating you’re a man than enlisting? Here we also perhaps glimpse some of the salient early experiences that would determine Dale’s lifelong interest in the discipline of men’s studies.
JG: He certainly has a fresh way of seeing the world!
DB: One could argue that Dale led a life so multifaceted and bizarre that he deserves to be listened to. But Dale also understood that you have to express yourself with a degree of eloquence to deserve an audience. This might be one reason he was so fascinated with the work of literary historian and critic Paul Fussell, who also served in the military but was interested in combat veterans with an ability to give full verbal expression to their experience. As Fussell argues in The Great War and Modern Memory, World War I was a special literary motherlode because so many of the combatants had university degrees and possessed the vocabulary and language to express the inexpressible horror of war. By contrast, modern American wars are fought principally by high school graduates (if that) with very little intellectual capital to understand what they’re going through, let alone give it intelligent expression.
JMW: What’s most exciting about this book to you?
DB: Introducing Dale Suderman to new audiences through his published and previously unpublished writing makes me most excited. Briefly, here’s a thumbnail sketch of his life and career: Dale Suderman (1944-2020) was a Mennonite writer, peace activist, bookseller, and addictions counselor. He grew up on a farm near Hillsboro, Kansas. After graduating from Tabor College, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in Vietnam as part of the 125th Transportation Command based in Saigon, where he witnessed the Tet offensive and the war’s overall devastation. He returned to the United States in 1968, earning a master’s degree in religion at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary and began speaking out against the war. He subsequently worked as associate director of Mennonite Voluntary Service before moving to Chicago where he assumed ownership and management of the Logos Bookstore in Lincoln Park. In the final phase of his career before he suffered a stroke in 2008, he served as an addictions counselor at the outpatient clinic of Harbor Light Freedom Center and at the Salvation Army Correctional Services Program. To his friends and colleagues, he was a wit, a raconteur bursting with ideas and insight, a prophetic voice who never took himself too seriously. In both conversation and writing he came to terms with his gay identity, and in choosing to join Alcoholics Anonymous, he found a path toward sobriety. He spoke of his enduring commitment to the sacrament of Christian communion in the Episcopal Church. This volume collects his best writing from various sources: published journalism, letters to friends and family including correspondence from Saigon, selected columns from his regular “View from Afar” feature in the Hillsboro Free Press, previously published essays in The Mennonite, Post-American, Books and Culture, and The Common Review, and also previously unpublished essays that include “Figuring Out the Male Condition at the O’Hare Ramada Inn,” “A Meditation on Carl Jung,” and “The God Who Provides Parking Places.” The final section of the book, “Interpretations,” contains reflections on his life from eight essayists who knew him well: Keith Harder, Elva Suderman, John Kampen, Ben Hartley, Tim Nafziger, Ruth Harder, Clint Stucky, and Delbert Wiens.
JMW: Do you see this book as a new departure for you, a continuation of earlier work/themes, or some combination?
DB: “Yes!”
Dale was my co-author of a hardboiled crime novel, Unpardonable Sins (2021), which we published under the shared pen name David Saul Bergman. We had also discussed in some detail, already in the late 1990s, a sequel to that book tentatively titled Prodigal Sons, and I am currently working on that book. When Dale died in 2020, I knew I would be reviewing his archive housed at his request at Bethel College in North Newton, since he had made me executor of his estate including his collected papers and journals. The archive does not disappoint—and I should mention here that part of it is to be kept under seal until 2029 at Dale’s request. When it is opened, I expect a bright scholar will be able to step in and write the full biography of Dale Suderman. I hope that The Essential Dale Suderman Reader establishes at least some of the key elements, the arc of Dale’s thinking, for a more ambitious interpretive work.
JMW: Do you see your work as “Mennonite,” and how or how not? (We know this is a ridiculously broad and fraught question, so feel free to respond in whatever way seems right to you.)
DB: My membership at Lakeview Mennonite Brethren Church in Chicago lapsed in 1982 when I moved East to manage a bookstore in New York City. I was active in the Manhattan Mennonite Fellowship for several years and then became a member at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, a liberal and radically ecumenical congregation affiliated with the United Church of Christ and the American Baptists. (Judson at least since World War II has been a bastion of support for the arts and the avant-garde in New York, including theater, literature, dance, and the visual arts.) Later, in Ohio, where I taught for ten years at a small liberal arts institution called Marietta College, my wife and I joined the Unitarian Universalist Society. It was a church where I occasionally preached.
Now living in Chicago since 2001, I consider myself a backslidden Unitarian. I suppose that puts me in the same company as Ralph Waldo Emerson, although I have a few problems with Ralph at this point, too. All I can say is that having grown up a preacher’s and missionary kid in the Mennonite Brethren tradition, it’s hard to purge entirely those influences from my worldview. At Tabor, Katie Funk Wiebe used to invoke the hoariest, most enduring cliché of all in her writing classes: “Write what you know.” To the extent that I write what I know, I suppose at some level my work can be characterized as “Mennonite.”
For Dale, the Mennonite upbringing was always close to the surface, though as he grew into his Chicago identity, I think his involvement in the addictions counseling community, AA, the gay community in Boystown, and his involvement with SCUPE in Chicago (Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education), and various other subcultures became equally important to him. It is also worth noting that Dale found great solace and comfort in joining the worldwide Anglican communion. However, it was his wish to be buried in the Ebenfeld Mennonite Brethren cemetery in Kansas, where one finds his headstone.
JMW: What themes, issues, techniques, and/or other authors were most in your mind as this project came into being?
DB: I had one principal goal: collect the best writing Dale did, both published and previously unpublished, so as to better present his legacy to new readers. One of the endorsements of this book comes from Adam Schrag, who teaches at the University of Minnesota. I think he aptly states it: “The Essential Dale Suderman Reader offers a much-needed distillation of the life and mind of one of the great underground intellectuals to emerge from the American Anabaptist tradition. The writings and interpretations gathered here serve as the nearest approximation of what it was like to sit for hours with Dale in some greasy spoon, his agora, engaged in the co-construction of his two favorite things: deep conversation and abiding friendship.”
JMW: What part(s) of your writing process might other writers find useful, either to imitate or to avoid?
DB: Write when you’re most awake. That varies from individual to individual. For me it’s the early morning. Get into a daily practice. Ask your trusted readers and critics for feedback when you have a draft ready to go. Be prepared to rethink what you’ve written. Then revise and revise until you’re happy.
JMW: Is there a brief excerpt, or a poem if this is a book of poems, that we can reprint as part of this interview?
DB: Here’s an excerpt from Dale’s essay on meeting Allen Ginsberg in 1966, “Ginsberg (1926-1997)”:
The performance was vintage Ginsberg, beginning with thirty minutes of chanting and gong playing. Then he read a new, long poem, Wichita Vortex Sutra. In essence, this was a stream-of-consciousness narrative of his recent drive from Wichita to Omaha, Nebraska and back. I was stunned as he described the same gas stations, oil refineries, and darkened farm houses which I had seen my whole life, but never through the eyes of a poet. He compared them to his visions of the villages of Vietnam—which he had seen, and I had not yet seen. He went on to say that young men in the farm houses in both villages bore each other no real malice and both lusted for life, for sex, something I could not dare say.
Somehow later in the week, I crashed a birthday party of someone I knew through contacts at Canterbury House and sat on the floor and chatted with Ginsberg, his partner Peter Orlovsky, and their “pet person,” a mute childlike waif of a man whom they treated as “their baby.” Ginsberg admitted he was also crashing the party. Somehow, I expected him to continue in his mad poet mode, but instead he rambled about rents in New York City and the difficulty of finding parking spaces.
There is a later, more hazy memory of talking with Ginsberg and Orlovsky on a sidewalk in New York City at some unknown date. He recalled his trip to Wichita, saying “lots of good poets come from Kansas but they all move away first.” Aside from a brief visit to City Lights Bookstore in the Bay area at some other hazy dream time, this is the extent of my physical encounters with Ginsberg and his milieu.
Over the years, from snippets of scanning media, I picked up that Ginsberg had struggled with his homosexuality, had taken a white-collar job, and started psychoanalysis. His analyst told him, “Your only real problem is that you are gay, otherwise you are fine. Stop pretending and use your natural gifts and you will do well in life.” This story, based on my reading a later autobiography, is only a very rough approximation of what really happened.
Someplace I read Howl: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by / madness, starving hysterical naked . . .” It was a screaming critique of Fifties conformity. Bits of information about Ginsberg kept reaching me: he was “the Gay poet” and the “anti-war poet who wishes to levitate the Pentagon.” And there was literary gossip: “but did he really have sex with the heterosexual Kerouac?” and strange stories of skullduggery at the Naropa Institute and obscure Buddhist cults.
I pick up again on the Ginsberg story when my bookstore in Chicago goes bankrupt and I am unemployed, exhausted but with free time, enough time to read a new biography of him. Here is a man who does not fit. He challenges the literary avant-garde at Columbia University for being too readable, too explicit, too passionate. He reads Howl to a rich, hip audience in Southern California and, when heckled, strips off his clothing while screaming at the heckler, “my poetry is being naked and I challenge you to do the same.”
He is passionately involved in the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era but also expelled from Czechoslovakia (where radical students had made him King of the May ritual), and he has joyous sex with student activists from Cuba and France. He is not really a gay icon, not really a left icon, perhaps not really a great poet.
I suspect him to be, or subjectively assign him, more to the school of Walt Whitman. Both loved males, Whitman hiding this love in his general love of land and nation, Ginsberg more explicitly stating his love of the soft down on a young man’s stomach. Neither limited their love to “being” a homosexual or loving homosexuals, but to loving all men. This is why neither Whitman nor Ginsberg are true, in-house heroes to the modern gay community, but they retain their discomfiture for heterosexuals.
Certainly Ginsberg does not fit as an icon of the Left. He wanders off too much into spirituality, he is too much equally concerned with freedom in Prague and Havana as well as Paris and New York.
If Whitman wept for Father Abraham and loved the land and industry of America, so Ginsberg loved America as his uneasy home. “America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel” is how he concluded one of his greatest poems, America, in which he described his anti-war stance as both a raging critic and yet true son of the Republic.
Although HarperCollins has reprinted huge editions of his collected poetry, I have no idea whether he is a great or even good poet. Sometimes I suspect he scribbled, used a tape recorder, chanted because he had no choice but to contain the inner and outer voices which flooded him and threatened to drown him as they had his schizophrenic mother.
The New York Times will do an extensive obituary, The New Yorker will give him space in “The Talk of the Town,” and the remaining left press will note his passing, but with a certain incomprehension. I suspect that Ginsberg will be better remembered and understood in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan. If his doorways of perception were often chemically entered, he seemed always able to remain focused on the vision, rather than the entrance. He remained focused on the spiritual journey.
Obviously this is a most subjective reminiscence. Of whom am I writing, the knowing will ask. But is this not a fair tribute, that one man’s journey causes us to see our own?