Ted Mooney

I wrote most of this back in June 2022, and submitted it for publication to Columbia Magazine (the magazine for all Columbia University alumnae and alumni) as well as Columbia College Today, thinking it a suitable item for either, given that Ted was a writer of considerable note.  But I haven’t seen it, so I am publishing it myself for what it’s worth.  (Ted didn’t graduate with the Class of 1973, as he transferred to Bennington in 1970, but he started with us.  Maybe this is why those magazines didn’t find room for an obit.) 

I was sorry to hear of Ted’s death.  He was of four guys in my suite in Carman Hall, the Columbia College Dorm.  A good guy, very smart, determined, and talented.  He and I got along well despite the wide gap in our cultures - mine middle-middle class, and a public school in suburban Long Island; his more privileged, and Exeter Academy.  I got to know a number of his Exeter buddies who had gone on to Columbia, and I liked them all.  Their academic and social sophistication was years ahead of mine! 

By wild coincidence for me, Ted’s father was Booth Mooney, who had worked for and was good friends with Lyndon Johnson, and LBJ’s biographer.  I read Booth’s book in 1964 as a thirteen-year-old, when LBJ was campaigning for the Presidency, and wrote a report for school. 

Even back then, in 1969 or so, Ted’s ambition above all was be a writer.  He was working on a novel he was going to call Good Bread.  I grasped the concept fairly well, as I had already read one or two of Richard Brautigan’s books, with their essential, sensual language.  Once when Ted was especially satisfied with a sentence, he came into my room to read it out to me.  From a scene with someone chopping wood, it was (if memory serves me well),“The wood spat xylem.”  So vivid, the phrase has stayed with me.  Ted was carving with words. 

I read Ted’s first two novels when they were new, and liked them very much. Ted certainly had his own voice.  I have only been prevented from reading the others by the likes of Tolstoy, Woolf, Lowry, Melville, Ellison, Humes, Pynchon, Sigismund Khrzhizhanovsky, Katherine Anne Porter, and many others of comparable merit. 

Readers of Easy Travel to Other Planets will not have forgotten the episode of sex between a woman and a dolphin.  As sensational as that sounds - and I read with eyes wide open - Ted somehow wrote it in a way that was utterly convincing and natural.  They may also recall the novel’s occasional “noises off” element, reports of a new “information sickness” that threatened to reach epidemic proportions.  Even back in 1981 this idea rang a strong chord in me, as I often felt bombarded and oppressed by a surfeit of information.  By now Ted’s invention seems no less than prophetic. 

I also recall an uncanny sensation somehow provoked by that book - whenever I picked it up to read, I felt my consciousness changing its level, slipping down to someplace deeper, more essential.

One afternoon, when all of us in the suite had been studying diligently for some time, without noise, music, or distraction, Ted arose from exasperation and staggered, in a Godzilla posture, into the room I shared with Mario.  Making excellent Godzilla noises and holding his hands like claws, he made the tour of the room, menacing our studiousness.  In his bare feet he climbed first on and up Mario’s bed, across his book-laden desk, then across the heater mounted at the big window, then across my desk, right before my eyes, and down my bed, and back to his room.  Mario and I could do nothing but giggle throughout the whole episode.  It was just what we all needed. 

Godzilla, Bennington, Class of 1973.

A memorable occasion was our trip to Washington, D.C. in November 1969 for the Moratorium against the war.  Four of us in a VW bug, we headed down, stayed at Ted’s family’s home in Bethesda - his folks were very simpatici to us young hippie-student radicals - and attended the rally, hoping thereby to “smash the state”.  (We never had insurrection in mind - in fact the event was more of a huge celebration.  We just wanted to put tricky Dick Nixon uptight and make him pull out of Vietnam). 

Another extramural activity was an impromptu car trip up the Hudson Valley, motivated by restlessness, for a night of camping during orientation week of 1970.  (Ted had already decided to transfer to Bennington, but he was still around, and we quickly assembled a carful.)  I was the only one without a sleeping bag, so I stayed behind to sleep in the car while the others found a place to roll out their bags in the woods not far away.  So I was only one present when, in the middle of the night, a state police car stopped to check out the car, which was perhaps not parked in a place designated for campers.  I awoke with a flashlight in my eyes.  The officer wasn’t unpleasant, but he asked me I was doing there, and I explained.  He also asked me if I had “any guns or drugs”. I wasn’t surprised that he asked me whether I had any drugs, but guns?  I really thought I didn’t fit the profile!  He patted me down, found nothing suspicious, and then went on his way. When he was gone, my friends emerged from the edge of the wood to hear all about it. 

The following I wrote to Ted soon after his novel The Same River Twice was published, in November 2010.

Dear Ted,
Congratulations on your new book; it sounds like a very fine novel.  I read about you whenever they review your books in the New York Review.  To get that kind of attention is a real honor.  I’ll certainly try to get around to reading it, although I must admit I was already one book of yours behind, what with all the other stuff worth reading.  (And you can’t be accused of over-publishing.) 

Your titles are very evocative.  Way back when Easy Travel to Other Planets was new, I didn’t think too much about the title, just that it seemed very oblique, something maybe having to do with consciousness, and perhaps the Lilly-dolphin business.  But sometime in the early 1980s I met a very perceptive guy from India - he had come to paint my apartment.  We had an interesting talk about matters of the spirit - yes, it was a long time ago - and he left me a little book by some guru whose name I don’t recall.  Inside was a list of his many other tracts, and one of them was Easy Journey…. *  But you know the end of that story. 

As for the new book, Diane Johnson says the title comes from Heraclitus.  But a few weeks ago a song was repeating itself in my head, and I heard the phrase “the same river twice”.  Could it be the Cowboy Junkies instead, or also?  (“Dragging Hooks”, from the CD “Open”, if you don’t know it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you do.) 

Allen 

* The book is by “His Divine Grace. A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada”, founder of ISKCON, better known as the Hare Krishna Movement.

Ted Mooney, from the jacket of his novel Easy Travel to Other Planets.

I should add that, besides his fiction, Ted was for many years the editor of Art in America.  Though a writer by vocation, he had an extraordinary sense of visual art, much better and more intuitive than many art critics.  I wasn’t a regular reader of Art in America - but I have no doubt that he left his mark.

Allen Schill, July 2023