Larry Osgood: The Writer As Wayfarer

"I like to do things I don't know how to do," said Larry Osgood. "To do something so new that I have to learn about it while I'm doing it."

Mr. Osgood was not talking about computer programming, but of kayaking down a white-water river in the Arctic Circle, writing deathbed scenes for soap operas, directing "Krapp's Last Tape," making a television program about a politically incorrect lemming, trudging three miles with a caribou carcass over his shoulders.

His has been a life of seized opportunities and prudence ignored. The kind of life many of us wish we could lead - except we don't have the guts.

After Rejections

It was an unsuccessful love affair in the late '60s, and a professional setback or two, that launched him upon the biggest adventure of his life, in the dark winters and endless summer daylight of the Arctic Circle.

Twenty years out of college - years marked by a series of ocean-hopping peregrinations dictated by death or other misfortune - Mr. Osgood had become part of the booming Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway theater world, with several short plays produced and two published in anthologies of new American theater.

His short stories had also found a receptive audience. But a full-length play met only with rejection, and so did a novel.

Even today, almost 30 years later, he has not forgotten. "My life seems to be full of small successes and large failures," he said.

A Complete Change

Feeling at a dead end, Mr. Osgood "wanted a complete change. It was time to get out, meet new people, do something active."

With happy memories of childhood summers on a Canadian lake, he sought out and joined the Kayak and Canoe Club of New York. A summer trip with the "new people" he met there led to a monthlong white-water kayak trek down the Coppermine River in the Northwest Territories in 1972.

Mr. Osgood discovered an affinity for the Arctic barrenlands, with its 24 hours of sunlight, unrivaled wildflowers, caribou, musk ox, wolves, waterfowl, and deep silences.

"Just being there was an absolutely ecstatic experience for me," he said. "I've never had a religious epiphany, but that's what it must feel like. I felt as if I had come home."

Canadian Arctic

Over the next six years he became more and more obsessed with the Canadian Arctic. He spent more and more time there, often with the same group of canoers, and when he wasn't there, he was reading, planning, and thinking about it.

"Finally, in 1977," he said, "we did a river that came out in Paulatuk, a village of 150 Inuit. No one had ever come down their river before - we were quite a tourist attraction."

Up to then, he had visited the Arctic only in summers. The next step was to stay a whole year.

Preparing for it, Mr. Osgood took his first solo Arctic kayak trip, down the Anderson River.

"It was very solitary. I found myself singing aloud to keep myself company." But he also learned that one travels with others for reasons other than companionship.

Narrow Escape

One morning he spotted a grizzly bear on the shore. As the bear hadn't seen him, he decided to get nearer, to take a photo. He had got quite close and was just focusing for his shot when the bear looked up and saw him. In a blur of movement, she plunged into the river after him.

"I really learned what fear was about - I made eye contact with an animal with death in its eyes - mine!"

Only by paddling furiously did he escape. Afterward, he was obsessed by the image of being mauled and left helpless and alone, with no one any the wiser.

Nonetheless, at the end of the trip Mr. Osgood ordered a year's worth of food and supplies, furniture, and a stove, and moved into a small shack in Paulatuk.

Everybody Stared

"Being a romantic, I also wanted a dogsled team, even though all the Inuit had snowmobiles. One Inuk told me that once, they had all come to stare at the only snowmobile. But now that all the dogsleds had gone, they all came out to stare at me."

On a recent afternoon, when mist swept down on the Amagansett dunes where the writer is renting a house, the dim afternoon light and the stubby windswept shrubs seen through the window could almost have been the Arctic tundra.

He spoke warmly of the cultural differences he had encountered during his years working with the Inuit (Inuk is the singular, Inuuk is two Inuit).

Cultural Differences

He recalled how children learn by watching rather than by instruction, the fierce sense of humor necessary to a hard life ("People would roar with laughter when someone got hurt - I could never quite adjust to it"), and the Inuit sense of time, known as the Mukluk telegram, whereby people know instinctively when it is time to do something.

Lacking this sense, Mr. Osgood spent much of his own time arriving either too early or too late.

His 50th year was the most active of his life: trekking for miles, living in spartan conditions, and learning how to hunt, shoot, skin, butcher, dress, and cook caribou and other game. But during the year he also became deeply involved in the political issues of Inuit land ownership.

Land Ownership

At the end of his Arctic year, Mr. Osgood returned to the U.S., applied for a working visa, and then went back to the region to work as communications officer for the Committee for Original People's Entitlement.

In the late 1960s, big oil companies had discovered vast reserves of oil and gas in the Canadian Arctic, and by the beginning of the '70s a drive to protect Inuit property and other rights was under way.

Among other successes, Mr. Osgood obtained Federal money to start linguistic research and brought linguists from Quebec to study the three local dialects spoken around Inuvik, the town where he was living.

Resurrected Dialect

"One of the dialects turned out to have been one that was thought extinct," he said. "The linguists were delighted - it was one of the oldest, if not the oldest dialect of Inuktun."

That job led to another, helping to teach the native language in schools. English had long since been the primary spoken language, but the Canadian Government had finally launched a project to save the disappearing Inuktun.

Over five years, Mr. Osgood and his team developed dictionaries and grammars for each of the three dialects as well as teaching materials for first, second, and third-graders and summer language camps for children.

"At the end of five years, working nine or 10 hours a day, I was totally burnt out," he said. "It was fascinating, but exhausting."

Inuktin For Children

He was disillusioned, too, he said, with general educational practices - teaching about Dick and Jane on the subway and other irrelevancies - and more and more convinced that there was a secret Government program of assimilation.

But hardly had he returned to New York City in 1985 when he had a call from the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation, offering him a job developing children's TV programs in Inuktun. It was an offer he couldn't refuse.

"It was a joy from beginning to end," he said of his two-year stint, during which he made 22 programs for 5 to 7-year-olds and trained writers and directors to continue his work.

"Swamped" As Freshman

Mr. Osgood had a ideal preparation for a life of Arctic adventure: "an idyllic Midwestern childhood" in Buffalo, home of six-foot snowdrifts. He entered Harvard in 1946, part of a huge freshman class with a preponderance of demanding and experienced World War II veterans attending college on the G.I. Bill.

From being a cosseted student and talked-about poet at his high school, he suddenly found himself a floundering 17-year-old among hardened adults. He was also beginning to worry that he was homosexual.

Given the era - gay lib was not even on the horizon - and older parents with an Edwardian outlook, he took it hard.

"I was swamped," he said. He dropped out for a "difficult but fascinating" year of psychoanalysis before resuming his studies.

Classmates And Teachers

The young poet could hardly have been in more stimulating surroundings. Frank O'Hara was a student, as were John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Robert Bly, and Donald Hall. Among the professors were Richard Wilbur, Richard Eberhart, and John Ciardi.

Harvard led Mr. Osgood to his lifelong involvement with the theater. There was the Veterans Theater Workshop on the one hand, and on the other Jerome Kilty's Brattle Theater Company, which performed classic rep featuring invited stars such as Hermione Gingold, Ian Keith, Louise Rainer, and Hurd Hatfield.

"I was able to see four years of classic theater - all the great plays."

Introduction To O'Hara

As to his sexual identity, fate intervened in the form of his roommate, Lyon Phelps, the gay grandnephew of a famous Yale professor, who introduced him to O'Hara. An intense affair ensued, ". . . and all the psychoanalysis in the world wouldn't have prevented it," said Mr. Osgood.

It was through Mr. Phelps, who started the Poets Theater in a church basement in Cambridge, that the budding playwright first saw experimental theater. The group's first production was O'Hara's "Try Try" and a short play by Mr. Ashbery.

"Frank's play was wonderful. But it was just so new, so different, that there was a lot of nervous laughter from the audience."

At intermission, Thornton Wilder, who had promised to make an appeal for funds, laid into the audience and berated them for failing to appreciate what they were seeing.

Hated New York City

" 'You have seen the theater of the future, and you can't recognize it!' " he shouted, to Mr. Osgood's delight.

With a stopover at the University of Michigan to get a master's degree in creative writing, as did Mr. O'Hara, Mr. Osgood's inevitable next goal was New York City. He rented an apartment in Little Italy for $11 a month, hung out with the poets and painters of the New York School, worked in a bookstore - and hated it, hated the grimness of it.

Then his grandmother's death (and a $2,000 bequest), followed by a series of other deaths, started him upon several years of zigzagging travels.

A Jamesian existence as a culture-hungry young American in Italy, France, and England was cut short by the sudden death of his mother, forcing a temporary return to Buffalo. No sooner did Mr. Osgood go back to Paris than a close friend, Thea von Ripper, a World War II Resistance fighter who had been an inmate of the Ravensbruck concentration camp, died as well. "Everything that was glamorous and cultured in a European woman," Mr. Osgood said of his friend.

Inured To Loss

He was in London, working on a novel after having had his first story published, when he received the news that his elder brother had had a nervous breakdown and was suffering from schizophrenia. That took Mr. Osgood back across the Atlantic to Buffalo, where he remained until he felt his father could manage without him.

Then he moved to Boston to be near V.R. Lang, a poet friend of O'Hara, and her husband. But she, too, died unexpectedly.

By now well educated in both culture and loss, Mr. Osgood returned to New York City. There, he worked for the McGraw-Hill publishing company, acted in summer theater, and settled down to write plays.

Gathered No Moss

He was accepted into the playwrights unit of the Actors Studio, run by Molly Kazan, and she agreed to stage one of his plays. And on the strength of an earlier play, "The Ox on the Roof," a comedy of errors set at a cocktail party, she invited Moss Hart to attend the opening.

But the new play wasn't a comedy, it was an experimental work about three women who meet on a vacant lot, strongly influenced by Ionesco, whom Mr. Osgood had met in Paris.

When the curtain came down, the impresario Hart turned to the young playwright and said stonily, "Just what, exactly, is this play about?"

World Of Theater

Over the years, Mr. Osgood has supplemented his income by writing for soap operas and teaching. It was in the '60s, while a member of the drama department of the University of Connecticut, that he first turned his hand to directing.

He did Restoration comedies, plays in French, and, in a newly discovered enthusiasm for Samuel Beckett, directed Ken Tigar in "Krapp's Last Tape."

"I was consumed with Beckett," he remembered. "It wasn't just that I admired his work - I wanted to BE Samuel Beckett."

The Next Adventure

When he finally came back from the Arctic for good, Mr. Osgood received a grant to work on a novel inspired by his years among the Inuit; he is now searching for a publisher.

Recently, he directed Ken Tigar in a one-man play about James Boswell.

"I sometimes feel a little guilty about not having pursued one career, as was expected of us when we were growing up," he said. "I've done all kinds of things at different stages, but that is what fascinates me."

"Now I'm waiting for the next adventure. It will probably be something completely different from anything I've done before. That's what I love."