Arthur Garvey Ulm was a poet and writer of the play Rome and novel Get With Child a Mandrake Root. Later in life he was an employee of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, serving as Resident Secretary at the writers' retreat Xanadu. He was described as "short and had a big nose", similar to Vonnegut's friend Bernard V. O'Hare[1]
Career[]
Rome played for one night on Broadway, and its first amateur production was performed by the North Crawford Mask and Wig Club. Ulm attended rehearsal without revealing his identity and at the dress rehearsal declared his love for Melody Lovell, who was playing the lead role of Bella.[2]
Ulm met Eliot Rosewater at a party in New York City. Stating he wanted "to be free to tell the truth, regardless of economic consequences", he received a check for ten thousand dollars. Shocked, Ulm asked him what he should write about, but Rosewater told him to pick his own subject and "be good and fearless about it". Ulm, who had once been a migratory fruit-picker, suggested a cycle of poems about the misery of fruit pickers. Rosewater loudly proclaimed, falsely, that his family was the founders and majority stockholders of the United Fruit Company, much to Ulm's horror. When he asked Rosewater about his favorite poet, he replied with some lines he'd once seen written on a bathroom wall. Rosewater's wife Sylvia thought Ulm so traumatized that for months she feared "opening small packages, lest one of them contain [his] ear. "[3]
Fourteen years later, Ulm published his first novel with Palindrome Press, the 800-page Get With Child a Mandrake Root, which he dedicated to Rosewater. He wrote a personal letter to Rosewater declaring that he had finally taken his advice to tell the truth about "this sick, sick society of ours" regardless of consequences. From Rosewater he learned that words for telling the truth "could be found on the walls of restrooms. " Rosewater, however, could see little truth in the novel, which opened with a sex scene[4] and subsequently featured "a judge… damned for never having given his wife an orgasm", an advertising executive who "got drunk, locked his apartment doors, and put on his mother's wedding dress", and the executive's fiancee's "seduction of her father's chauffeur."[5]
Appearances[]
- ↑ Timequake, Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1987-1997, pp 641-642.
- ↑ "Rome", Complete Stories, pp. 426-437.
- ↑ God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Vonnegut: Novels & Stores 1963-1973, pp. 238-240.
- ↑ God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Vonnegut: Novels & Stores 1963-1973, pp. 240-241.
- ↑ God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Vonnegut: Novels & Stores 1963-1973, pg. 245.