Kennedy remembers the first time Ciardi talked with him. "I held one of those fellowships that required a young writer to eat with and be nice to the paying customers." Ciardi warned Kennedy as follows: "Don't get too smart around here--I've read a lot better stuff than yours."Very nice.
Meantime, in a letter to poet-humanist Read Bain, Ciardi complained: "$1000 a year to direct a headache is not an inducement.... [But] B.L. is the best goddman two-week house-party in the western hemisphere. If I had the money, I'd underwrite it myself."
Ciardi wrote a verse letter to Paul Cubeta on August 25, 1960, while at Bread Loaf. Cubeta was there--indeed he was Ciardi's assistant director.
What are you going to be when you grow up?
I am going to be a cow-inseminator!
I am going to be an assistant pickle-taster for Heinz!
I am going to be a child vivisectionist!
Yes, those are all nice things to be, but
I am going to be an assistant director....
Robert Frost remained a Bread Loaf fixture, making an visit each summer between '58 and '62. He gave one evening lecture and it was the highlight--at least from the paying participants' standpoint--each time. In 1960 outsiders poured into the theater and filled up all the spaces; many of the paid-up Bread Loafers, and even a few staff, were unable to attend. (In '61 Ciardi figured that one out: he issued--and of course sold--tickets.)
Ciardi recruited "name" faculty to attract customers. The 1960 roster included Allen Drury, Edward Wallant, and Glorida Oden. (Ralph Ellison had been there in '59.) Some of young people there that summer would emerge much later--e.g. Samuel "Chip" Delaney who roomed across the hall from George Higgins, later a novelist (Higgins was just 20 years old then, a senior at Boston College who had won The Atlantic's college contest in fiction; his job at BL was to sling hash.)
Drury was a big deal in '60. His Advise and Consent was the number one best selling book of fiction that year.
Back to Kennedy and the Old Ways. Kennedy in '60 was told "that nobody was to come into the Treman Cottage except the staff and the fellows." Ciardi had hired Avis DeVoto (widow of the literary journalist/critic Bernard DeVoto) to be an etiquette supervisor. 1960 was her first summer and this helped to enforce custom. In '59 Alan Cheuse, who had been invited by Bill Sloane to attend the '59 conference as a waiter, led a disorganized lot of the Young in a movement against Ciardi's social orthodoxy. Cheuse was then "a vaguely Bohemian kid." During a sing-along at one of the BL parties, the partiers sang "Old Black Joe" while Ralph Ellison was standing there holding his drink. Cheuse went wild with anger at this. Leaped up and knocked over a huge trash bin full of beer cans and stopped the party. The gang of waiters and other young writers derided Ciardi's authority, smoked pot, held unauthorized meetings (my god!), and bolding invited themselves to the faculty-only/fellows-only parties. This culminated in '59, the summer of the "Old Black Joe" incident. And then, for '60, Ciardi found ways to restore social order and literary hierarchy. All was well at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference for a long while.
Above: X. J. Kennedy (left) and poet Claire McAllister with Robert Frost at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, August 1960
Is '60 the moment when the end of the end of the Old Left had been reached and the New Left began to emerge? Is it the final ascendancy, in certain scenes at least, of poetic postmodernity? Surely the publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry that year suggests this, but then again--once again--we look back on "New" here and see continuity. The rhetoric of the Kennedy-Nixon contest made much less of a dent than everyone (at the time as well as since) claimed, so one wonders why were such great claims made? 
Had we come to expect "1960" to be truly ubiquitously modern in a way that the 1950s really were not--not quite? And what specifically does "modern" mean in the Kennedyesque talk then and now about the torch being passed to a new generation, etc.? The First Lady really meant "modernist" when Camelotians said "modern." What about the others across the new young cultural leadership? I've been surprised by how frequently the 
"Beat movement" was covered in 1960 in the mainstream press. I was expecting a fair measure but I've found tonnage. 1960 was the year when the figure of the beat was beginning to find acceptance, although still 80% of these stories are mocking, rebels-without-cause condescension. For anyone whose analysis made an impact nationally, do these antipolitical adolescents count as part of the "new young cultural leadership"? No, but rather than the two being opposites, they fall along a Continuum of the New American. Now that's a change for '60.
