Stan Persky, who has died at 83, was British Columbia’s philosopher jester.
A book reviewer for this newspaper once described him as “one of Canada’s premier intellectuals,” an assertion proved by voluminous writing ranging from the erotic to the esoteric.
“He was thoughtful and intelligent,” the author Alberto Manguel said for this obituary, “and had the courage to treat the body with as much consideration as the mind.”
Mr. Persky was a poet and pundit, an author and activist. Generations of college students learned philosophy from him, while older generations of conservative politicians were targets of his barbs.
Born in Chicago, the navy veteran and merchant mariner arrived in Vancouver in 1966, a time when the gritty, working-class port city was being transformed into a hippie haven by young drifters and Americans fleeing the Vietnam War draft. They gave birth to the Georgia Straight underground newspaper, as well as to Greenpeace, not to mention burgeoning movements for equal rights for women and gays.
Stan Persky in an undated photo. Mr. Persky, who was a poet and pundit, an author and activist, has died at the age of 83.Supplied
Vancouver’s mayor and police sought to repress the youth, actions which led to the emergence of an unofficial government, which declared Mr. Persky to be the hippie mayor. He was arrested and jailed three days for loitering.
As a turbulent era of protest faded away, Mr. Persky persisted as an unrepentant socialist radical, though his Marxism was leavened with humour. He was influenced as much by Groucho as Karl.
A trip to Poland during the rise of the anti-authoritarian Solidarity trade union led to publication in 1981 of At the Lenin Shipyard, a magnificent journalistic account of populist opposition by workers and intellectuals to an oppressive Communist government. The author would return to Eastern Europe often following the collapse of the Soviet Union before eventually retiring permanently to Berlin more than a decade ago.
In 1991, his Buddy’s: Meditations on Desire, named for a hustler bar he frequented, described the experiences of his milieu as a gay man during the years when AIDS devastated the community. “This book is about understanding pleasure in the middle of a plague,” he told BC BookWorld. “It’s about bars, hotel rooms and gyms. It’s about desire and darkness. One the one hand, if you’re gay, you’re often in the presence of death, dealing with friends who are living with AIDS. But on the other hand, life has to go on. Eros winks while Eros weeps.”
In 2010, he was named the seventh winner of B.C.’s Lieutenant-Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence.
“His grace as an essayist, his curiosity and independence of thought as a critic and newspaper columnist, and his exuberance as a civil rights activist and a leading voice of the gay community, has enriched us all,” said jury member Terry Glavin, a previous winner of the award. “Stan Persky is our Socrates.”
The award recognized a writing career that ultimately included more than two dozen books, as well as poetry chapbooks, newspaper columns, book reviews (including a stint as a featured book reviewer for this newspaper) and online writing, notably at DooneysCafe.com, which he co-founded with long-time friend Brian Fawcett.
Mr. Persky brought a certain bonhomie to his observations, whether literary or political. A fleshy, balding figure in later life, he seemed to punctuate every other sentence with a quip and a laugh. A sharp wit highlighted a razor-sharp mind, a wisecrack serving to soothe the sting of a withering criticism. Mr. Persky carried a confidence in his critiques and a certainty in his own opinions.
A lack of self-doubt was perhaps imbued from youth. As an inexperienced and unknown teenaged poet, he was anointed as the new voice of the Beats by no less an authority than Jack Kerouac.
Stanley Joel Persky was born in Chicago on Jan. 19, 1941. He was an only child for the former Ida Malis and Morris Persky. His American-born mother (an “affectionate stranger,” he would later write) sold goods at a bakery, while his Russian-born father, whose first language was Yiddish, was a superintendent at a grocery wholesaler.
The boy was taught to read at a young age. When the family entertained guests in their apartment, a proud father had the precocious preschooler spell a handful of childish words like c-a-t and b-a-t before correctly spelling i-d-i-o-s-y-n-c-r-a-s-y, which the author later described as his first “parlour trick.”
At Austin High, by which time the family was living in an apartment in the enclave of Oak Park, a suburban village just west of Chicago, the teenager appeared in a student stage production and worked on the school newspaper.
At 16, he was invited to jump to the University of Chicago on an accelerated program. Instead, he chose adventure and, with the blessing of his father, a naval veteran, joined the U.S. Navy, completing his training in San Diego and serving overseas in Italy at Capodichino, an American naval air base near Naples. He did not return to school until his early 20s when he enrolled at San Francisco State College.
As a teenaged admirer of Mr. Kerouac’s On the Road, he sent the Beat writer and the poet Allen Ginsberg samples of his poetry. Mr. Kerouac responded with a typed card, reading: “I say you’re the great new young poet we’ve all been waiting for (Ginsberg, me, other cats) for 3 years now ever since we’ve been ‘discovered.’” He encouraged the youth to send one of the poems to the Evergreen Review.
After completing his naval service, Mr. Persky settled in California’s Bay Area. In 1959, the new arrival had two poems published in Beatitude, a weekly mimeographed magazine. The edition also included contributions from such beatnik luminaries as Mr. Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Richard Brautigan and ruth weiss. (Like the latter, Mr. Persky rendered his names in lowercase letters, a conceit he later dropped.)
He also fell in with a group of poets known as the San Francisco Renaissance, some of whom hung out at a North Beach bar, Gino and Carlo. He was mentored by the great Jack Spicer and became a lover of Robin Blaser.
In 1965, Mr. Persky shared a stage with Mr. Ginsberg to read poetry to raise money for an early anti-Vietnam War protest. The Hells Angels motorcycle gang threatened to beat participants for being unpatriotic until Mr. Ginsberg won them over by sharing copious amounts of LSD and marijuana.
Ties between the San Francisco poets and the Vancouver poets involved with the journal TISH, including George Bowering, were well established by the time Mr. Persky came north with Mr. Blaser in 1966.
Registering as a student at the University of British Columbia, he covered tuition with money from the GI Bill, while also working as an essay marker, a library clerk and a research assistant in sociolinguistics.
Mr. Persky became a central figure in Mayor Tom Campbell’s crackdown on otherwise peaceable youth. Police armed with 17 blank arrest warrants rounded up Mr. Persky and other longhaired hippies lounging around the fountain at the courthouse, which now serves as the Vancouver Art Gallery, before taking them into custody for a strip search. After receiving a prison haircut, the writer was released when he finally agreed to sign a peace bond.
“Loitering – what a perfect crime for a would-be social critic to commit,” Mr. Persky told Tom Barrett of the Vancouver Sun several years later. “I was going to further my career,” he quipped, “go into jaywalking, littering. I saw the possibility I could become a master of minor crime.”
An act of civil disobedience brought him before the courts again in 1986 after he smashed a bottle of red wine from South Africa to protest the B.C. government’s decision to continue selling the product despite federal sanctions imposed in opposition to apartheid.
“It’s better to spill wine than to collaborate in spilling blood,” he told reporters alerted to the protest, as he assisted staff in cleaning up the mess. He was disappointed to be granted an absolute discharge.
By then, Mr. Persky was a well-known figure in a province where detractors dismissed him as a leftist gadfly. He wrote a funny, popular biography of Social Credit premier Bill Bennett, the son of former premier W.A.C. Bennett, which sold an astounding 10,000 copies. Son of Socred was released by New Star Books, a publishing house with production facilities in the basement of a former communal house of which Mr. Persky had become a part owner. It was said he typeset the bestselling, mass market paperback himself.
The success of combining politics with punchlines led to a sequel (Bennett II), a look at the Vancouver mayor’s “edifice complex” (The House That Jack Built), and the premiership of William Vander Zalm, who owned a Bible-themed roadside attraction (Fantasy Government). He took on a bigger, more target-rich environment by tackling American imperialism in America: The Last Domino.
Other works were more serious in their intellectual pursuit. On Kiddie Porn, co-written with John Dixon, was nominated for a Donner Prize for best Canadian book on public policy in 2001 for what the jury described as “an excellent job of setting out the issue in the context of individual rights versus the need for protection of children.”
Mr. Persky’s The Short Version: An ABC Book, an eccentric and engaging work that offered a road map to his thinking, won a BC Book Prize for non-fiction in 2006.
He followed Buddy’s with Then We Take Berlin (Knopf Canada, 1995) and, inspired by a crude ship’s anchor tattooed on his left forearm, Autobiography of a Tattoo (New Star, 1997) to form a Boyopolis trilogy about gay desire. Xtra Magazine described the Berlin book as “a post-modern tour de force whose strength lies in its seamless transitions between the subjective and the objective, the journalistic and the philosophical, the aesthetic and the sexy.”
Over the years, Mr. Persky edited and contributed to several mimeographed sheets and journals in San Francisco (Cow, Open Space, Whe’re: #1) and Vancouver (Iron, Pacific Nation, Magazine of Far-Out Studies), as well as such literary journals as Caterpillar, Ephemeris, and The Floating Bear.
He also managed to coax $45,000 from the British Columbia labour movement’s Operation Solidarity, named in homage to the freedom-seeking Polish workers, to launch a weekly newspaper in 1983. The province was teetering toward a general strike in reaction to Mr. Bennett’s anti-union bills and austerity budget. In just 10 days, Mr. Persky and a young staff of reporters managed to report, write and design an inaugural 24-page issue, which was released in time for a mass march through downtown Vancouver. The short-lived weekly had a press run of 20,000 copies.
For more than two decades, Mr. Persky taught sociology, anthropology, labour history and, most notably, philosophy at community colleges in Terrace, Nanaimo and North Vancouver. A television report on the instructor’s 40th birthday shows him removing a shabby jacket before turning his back to the class to write on a chalkboard, the tie he is wearing backwards now visible to the students, who chuckle.
Mr. Persky died in Berlin from complications of cancer surgery, kidney collapse and diabetes on Oct. 15. He leaves his companion, Damian Muecher.
Earlier this year, he wrote to long-time friend Tom Sandborn about his circumstance: “When, many years hence (I hope ‘many’ years), the obit writers come around to collect reflections, you can assure them that my period of semi-retirement, featuring a 20-year or so relationship, was a happy ending.”
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