In the not so long ago era of rural weekly papers, the name ‘Paul Smart’ was a familiar byline in our region for more than 30 years. He landed almost by chance beside the Esopus in Phoenicia after flaming out as an indie film producer in 1987, began writing for the Catskill Mountain News and went on to edit and report for a dozen or more publications, all now gone. (Some of us knew him best from Woodstock Times.) He covered everything but the porcupines. (Or maybe he covered those, too.) Town meetings. Local profiles. Fires. Car crashes. “The Watershed and floods and weird crimes,” as he writes in an email from his current home in Mexico. He had a gift for explaining our neighbors and our conflicts to us that we could feel a bit better about small-town life.
“Deep country, upstate New York. Editing a local paper, circulation a few thousand. Town board meetings. Party lines. A zoning-board member shows up in pajamas. An entire room of elected officials falls asleep in a town clerk’s overheated kitchen,” he writes in a new memoir brought on by the pandemic lockdown. “People yell at each other, then linger near their cars, laughing in the chilly air as it starts to snow.”
Yet he has led a peripatetic life. Nineteen moves before he finished college, including schools in England and Vermont. Sixteen since. Jobs that have ranged from planting trees in Alaskan clearcuts to teaching Hasidic students in Brooklyn. Highs like dinner with the Rolling Stones versus lows like a Fourth of July spent in the Sullivan County jail. “At my 20th high-school reunion,” he writes in his memoir, “classmates asked how I changed. ‘I reinvented myself,’ I answered. ‘Several times.’”
Well, Paul Smart has reinvented himself once again, or if not himself then his prose style to produce a memoir that reads like the distilled wisdom found in poetry, With Different Eyes: A Covid Waltz in Words and Images, which includes over two dozen art works by Richard Kroehling, a longstanding friend and filmmaker (Published by Moutains and Rivers, 120 Station Hill Road, Barrytown).
We all have our Covid stories, but Smart has aimed for and achieved something more lasting and profound.
In February 2020 he returned from covering a fashion show in Milan with his wife and teenage son. At the time they lived in a brownstone they’d renovated in Albany, a place with chandeliers and fireplaces and velvet curtains that framed “a streetscape that’s equal parts 19th century aspiration and 21st century blight,” as he writes. They’d left the Catskills for their son to get an urban education. Smart continued to freelance for Woodstock Times, worked at the Albany library, and helped manage a community radio station, another form of local media close to his heart.
The morning after their return his son threw up at school. At first, Smart felt fine until he got whacked by aches and pains. In the emergency room he got the royal treatment, swabs up the nose, a nurse dressed as if for bio-warfare, but he wound up diagnosed with the flu. Back home he began blogging about the lockdown for the Hudson Valley One website that replaced Woodstock Times. But for him, as for many or us, the front lines of the lockdown were the couch, the home office, the house suddenly crowded with a grumpy family with nowhere else to go. No matter. He knew how to churn out entertaining copy and had plenty of stories to tell.
I was charmed by the blogs, which read like first takes for a memoir of a large and eventful life. One day he wrote about the solace of walking in cemeteries. Another, the Bohemian spirit he found on the Rondout waterfront in the 1990s. A third, the heartbreak of losing a brother to East Village heroin addiction. The blogs read like a daily gift from a raconteur who might ramble on forever.
After the lockdown ended, Smart and his family moved to Mexico, a dream they’re carried through the worst of the pandemic, and he assembled these blogs into what he hoped would be book. What happened next might best be described by advice Smart once gave his father in the hospital. “I scolded my dad for trying to make his doctors like him,” he writes. “’Don’t joke,’ I’d say. ‘Use your time to impart and glean information.’”
Under the editorial guidance of his good friend Kenneth Wapner, Smart drastically pared down the blogs to get to the essence of what he had to say. Gone the charming anecdotes, the raconteur’s talent for filling up column inches. Instead, Smart developed a brevity akin to poetry, his first love as a young writer in New York City, when Allen Ginsberg “said I’d do better riding the MTA than studying towards an MFA,” while Galway Kinnell let him audit his class. Then “I got sidetracked,” he writes. “Off-Off Broadway, independent film. Then life. Lost my voice and many other things along the way. I’m working to find what I misplaced.”
That early, early poetry he long ago dismissed as “whiny words.” But his prose in With Different Eyes shows a poet’s mastery at distilling life’s passages into words that resonate with wisdom. Whereas the daily blogs risked sounding dated, this book reads like a timeless consideration of deep truths.
At the start of his blog, Smart wrote, “I feel cozy when sick. I try to stare mortality down.” What happens in With Different Eyes is mortality stares back. Guess who wins.
Written in brief but memorable vignettes, the book interweaves between scenes of lockdown life in Albany, a stressed household with his overworked wife and his teenage son being a teenage son, and reflections upon his own many-chaptered life. Both parents, divorced forty years earlier, have recently died, leaving a complicated emotional legacy. His own marriage, which came rather late and quickly — he proposed within a week after their first night together — has included couple’s counseling that began before their wedding. Their desire to have a child turned into an ordeal with a dozen failed adoption attempts before they got a call to pick up their two-day-old son. Nothing valuable has come easily.
For me, the haunting figure in the book is the father, clearly the model for Smart’s life of writing and reinventions, but also the voice of belittlement that can be crippling to a son.
“The first piece I ever published, ‘Sanded Men,’ was about learning insomnia from my father,” Smart writes. “About listening to him justify his tumble into divorce from my mother.” His father went on to be an English professor at women’s colleges. “The hip teacher with a beard and motorcycle. Later, he dated one of his shrinks. Married one of his students.”
“Dad’s was a generation of literary-minded hard drinkers. Every thought, all experience was heroic and possibly a book. Like those he taught,” Smart writes, as he considers what to do with all of his father’s saved correspondences. “I won’t open his boxes again. My father’s mocking tone lives within me: I never apply myself. I think things are owed to me. My attempts to impress him seem feeble? Don’t I know what a failure I am? I described lives he showed no interest in. He dismissed me as sentimental, self-serving. ‘Just like your naive mother.’ I’m ready, at last, to toss it all.”
This book can feel incredibly intimate to read, at least if you’ve met Smart and his family, yet it’s written without self-pity or remorse. Out of the blunt honesty on the page arises a feeling of genuine tenderness towards the people in the book and all they go through in this challenge called life. The heroism Smart’s father sought in drinking and women and revering great literature turns out in Smart’s life to be the heroism of a husband and a father committed to his family.
With Different Eyes is more than Smart’s memoir, however. It’s also an art book with thirty works made by Richard Kroehling during the pandemic, a striking collection that includes ghostly abstract figures, cartoonish masks and faces, and collage elements that suggest the forgotten past. A veteran filmmaker with an affinity for art and poetry and experimentation, he befriended Smart when they lived in New York City in their twenties, “a perfect young man’s drinking companion,” as he writes in an email, then shared the experience of living in rural corners of the Catskills before starting families. He paints as a respite from film making and likes to “build a few provocative picture elements” that “bring the images up to the very edge of narrative,” an approach not unlike Smart’s spare but evocative prose that lets readers fill in most of the story for ourselves. Unlike Smart in Albany, however, Kroehling spent the lockdown “like a hermit on a hill overlooking Cold Spring — going from the edit room to a room with paint cans all over the floor. A lucky man.”
Near the end of With Different Eyes Smart writes, “I scribble a note: ‘Great art recognizes the loss we carry. Or renders it so others can recognize a sense of loss within themselves.’
“’What is your loss?’ Fawn [his wife] asks as I stare ahead, book open but unread before me. I’m not sure I want to know. Though I am getting closer to being able to render it for others.”
Amen.
Paul Smart and Richard Kroehling will read from and present With Different Eyes, A Covid Waltz in Words & Images at 8 p.m. Sunday, July 10 at Green Kill, 229 Greenkill Ave, Kingston (to be simulcast);at 6:30 p.m. Friday July 22 at CREATE Council on the Arts, 398 Main Street, Catskill; at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, July 27 at Howe Library, 105 Schuyler, Albany; and at 2 p.m. Sunday, July 31 for the Golden Notebook at the Petersen House at the Bearsville Center, 297 Tinker Street, Woodstock.
Join the family! 
