Writers Give Away Tragic Ending of Their Teacher

When we talked about it in the light of hindsight, our writing group agreed on two points:

Our leader had remained fairly much a mystery to us, despite a 10-year association; and we could imagine him stepping in front of a speeding car.

Stanley Kurnik was a 19th-Century romantic and, long before we met him, he had given his life to art and literature, damning the consequences of being without a vocation. An intellectual and astute observer of life, he nonetheless stayed willfully blind to the practical details of living. For him, a thought was infinitely more important than a passing car.

He was a wisp of a man, maybe 5 feet, 6 inches tall, with a square, narrow forehead, short gray curls, a Leninesque beard and a perpetually worried face. We could only guess his age at something over 60.

Stan was struck by a hit-and-run driver Dec. 29, on the street outside his sister’s Hollywood apartment while walking to the bus stop. He spent four days on life support before he died. Word came to our group--eight of us, mostly in our 40s--through the Braille Institute, where Stan had long led a poetry workshop from which two of our members came.

We went ahead with our January meeting, mostly in his memory.

He surely had his aggravating side. Stan could be sanctimonious, pedantic and harsh. His own classically stylized writing (seldom did he read anything less than 15 years old) invariably led to arguments. He confused us with diatribes against commerce, which he called a “whore.”

But we could not begrudge Stan his bitterness.

As a critic, he was a joy. He read our work aloud, lovingly, with expert interpretation. He could speak with authority on any topic, and when he said, “This is your best writing yet,” we believed it implicitly.

“He was the most wonderful audience anyone could have,” recalled Helen Cline, who was Stan’s closest friend in our group. “Most of us, if someone is telling us something, part of you is waiting for your turn. He really wanted to know what you were saying.”

In many intimate conversations, Stan had absorbed minute knowledge about our lives. But he rarely volunteered details about his own, which seemed to connect into networks beyond our view.

We weren’t sure if he was of Polish or Russian descent. Someone thought Stan’s grandfather was a rabbi from Odessa who had emigrated to Kansas. His relations with his parents were murky. He had once lived in Mexico City as a Bohemian composer, but when and for how long we didn’t know. He had connections to the past literati of Los Angeles, and was a confidant of Anais Nin until she died.

We didn’t know that Stan had an adoring niece, Michele Rose. She arranged a memorial service Jan. 23 at a Unitarian Church in Hollywood where Stan had led another writing group for 20 years. All our group attended, hoping to find Stan’s hidden world.

The mystery wasn’t really so great. There were no literati, just others like us, mostly somewhat older. Of about 80 people crowded into a large room with a fireplace, perhaps half were blind or escorting the blind.

Thanks to a straightforward biography by Minister Linnea Pearson, we learned that Stan was 64 and had indeed been born in Kansas to Russian Jewish immigrants too poor to join a synagogue. Stan rejected materialism early in life and “had always lived on the edge of poverty,” she said.

Jane O’Connor, retired director of volunteers for the Braille Institute, said that she had recruited Stan in 1966, tracking him down over the pay phone backstage at the Evergreen Theatre, his home at the time. Over the years, Stan begged donations and used his own money to publish two volumes of poetry by his blind students.

His real work in life was to volunteer at the Braille Institute, Pearson observed, and that seemed about right, but limited. He was a patron and protege of anyone who wished to be a writer.

How gratifying it was to learn that students of 30 years ago had experienced the same mixture of reward and exasperation we did! They, too, had received his warm letters, his bouquets of roses--picked from yards across Los Angeles--and other odd gifts culled from a strange store of possessions he had deposited in numerous friends’ garages.

They, too, had chauffeured him, and sometimes resented the duty.

“I must have driven you 500 miles through the streets of Los Angeles,” wrote actress Belle Greer. But she also confessed, “You were disappointed I’ve only called once since I moved to San Diego. You deserve better. For as usual, every week I received a note from you.”

Separation may have spared these older friends the knowledge of Stan’s recent crises.

Over the past 10 years, members of our group had helped him move several times. After he lost his basement studio in Silver Lake, Stan found a back-yard bungalow on Mt. Washington, then a bootlegged apartment with an elderly Glendale couple. Conflicts ended each arrangement. He next moved to Park La Brea Towers to lodge with a sick old man who needed care and companionship. When the man died, Stan found an invalid in Studio City, who was over-demanding of his time, then an elderly man in West Los Angeles, who soon died.

His last metier was as manager of an apartment building in Silver Lake. The modest income hardly seemed to secure his future. He complained of rheumatism, wore heavy wool shirts even in the summer, developed a lisp and grew hard of hearing. Occasionally, he read tearful eulogies he had written for old friends from the Depression.

Once, he confided a dream to his friend Helen Cline.

“He wanted to live in San Marino, northern Italy,” she said. “He wanted an orchard. . . . He never could have had what he ideally wanted.”

I had often wondered what responsibility our group would assume for Stan’s old age. Would we disband when he could no longer carry on? Would we visit him in a rest home? If he slipped into the streets, would we rescue him?

In our meeting this month, we confronted the thought that self-interest could have guided Stan in front of that car. Unanimously we rejected it. For Stan, too, was writing a novel. Autobiographical, it told of the uncompromising pursuit of art and literature in a materialistic society. It was unthinkable that he would let so rich a story end with a car speeding out of the night.

Our group has voted to go on, not so much in Stan’s memory, but in the courage he gave us to be writers of literature.