Of Ponderosas and Heinekens

*Speaker: *Lewis M. Greenberg

A memoir, like beauty, is in the eye (mind)) of the beholder. Its
credibility is invariably determined by the inevitable distortions of
memory and personal perception as well as the quality of documentation
and the corroboration of others.

In the last two issues of /AEON/ (II:6 and III:l), its readership has
been questionably enlightened by the excerpted self-focused soliloquy of
Alfred de Grazia ("Cosmic Heretics") and the self-hating vitriol of
Leroy Ellenberger ("A Velikovsky Potpourri").

Ordinarily, I would refrain from commenting on such material and let the
reading public draw its own conclusions. But, the various negative
comments made about me in those two potboilers requires an appropriate
response in order to set the record straight. Canards unanswered tend to
become canonized truth.

My earliest direct encounter with de Grazia did indeed take place in
Philadelphia on Dec. 11, 1975. Warner Sizemore, who was also there, had
brought de Grazia to meet me thinking that the latter might be able to
help /KRONOS /which was then in its infancy. /KRONOS/ I:3 had just been
published and we were still financially strapped. (In those days, Warner
was always bringing someone to meet me in the hope that we would find
our "angel". Invariably, that someone generally turned out to be a
pompous blow-hard with nothing tangible to offer.) The first thing de
Grazia proposed was a $500,000.00 microfiche project to deal with
"revolutionary primevalogy", among other things. /KRONOS/ was to broaden
its base and be overseen by a newly formed Executive Board. In other
words, /KRONOS/ was to be used for de Grazia's ideas, and the journal's
editorial policy was to be determined by others. Needless to say, I balked.

/KRONOS/ was founded, with no apologies, to deal with Velikovsky's work.
If de Grazia wanted a forum for his own theories, I felt that he should
start his own publication. Of course, that would have required serious
effort. Furthermore, de Grazia was quite vague about the funding for his
proposal and we had our own financial difficulties, without looking for
new ones. Besides, I was highly suspicious of de Grazia. It was one
thing for /KRONOS/ to be associated with a high-profile heterodoxy. It
was quite another to be linked with its outer limits.

Made-up words and phrases such as "quantavolution" and "revolutionary
primevalogy" gave me pause (it was hardly paranoia as de Grazia claims);
and I decided it would be best for all concerned if we went our own
separate ways. Velikovsky many times said that made-up words were a sure
sign of pseudo-science.

Additionally, there was something elusive about de Grazia's personality.
I was never sure as to who or what I was really dealing with and was
wary of his motives. Years later, when /Cosmic Heretics/ appeared, my
instincts were confirmed. For there, in the pages of /CH/, the reader is
treated to a trio of de Grazias -- de Grazia himself, Deg (an acronym
which, at first, made me think of DeLaurentiis entertainment group), and
Joseph Grace (middle name combined with English transliteration).

As Lynn Rose so aptly put it in /KRONOS/ XI:3, p. 58:

    Part of the pervasively distorted perspective of /Cosmic Heretics/
    can be attributed to de Grazia's focus on himself. As if one de
    Grazia were not enough, we must deal with at least a trinity of de
    Grazias: (1) the author, who usually writes in the first person; (2)
    "Joseph Grace", who carries de Grazia's middle name and supposedly
    serves as a devil's advocate; and (3) the mysterious "Deg", who
    appears to be the same as de Grazia and the author, except that both
    Deg and de Grazia are at times said to be in disagreement with the
    author! If this were /The Three Faces of Eve/, we might see some
    point to these multiple personalities. Here, it is just a frivolous
    distraction.

When the entire "Quantavolution" series finally appeared more than a
decade after my initial contact with de Grazia, I felt fully vindicated
in my earlier assessment of that individual and his contributory
potential. Laden with errors, written in turgid prose, and highly
speculative at best, the series has failed to attract noteworthy notice.
This, despite the quoted accolades of de Grazia's coterie. When I once
pointed out a serious inversion of Velikovsky's sequence of catastrophic
events in de Grazia's published work, he merely shrugged -- even though
that sequence was somewhat crucial for his own scenario. This, from a
man who is more concerned with my purported "profligate telephoning" --
a subject de Grazia has fixated on in his writing -- which was none of
his business and for which he contributed nothing. Our phone bill was
properly paid; and the telephoning produced orders of magnitude more
than the far costlier global hip-hopping of de Grazia who spent more
than a decade criss-crossing the continents in search of
"quantavolutionists".

The daily running of /KRONOS/ was an international operation with an
international staff, existing in pre-pc and pre-fax days. Perhaps, I
should have used smoke signals to make de Grazia happy.

What only a select few know, and I shall now reveal, is that I was not
only Editor-in-Chief of /KRONOS/, but its subscription & renewals dept.,
its billing dept., and bookkeeping dept., among other things. I was also
one of the major fund raisers, contributing profits from my editing of
/KRONOS/' book publications directly back to the journal. All this,
while being a full-time College Professor and dealing with a
multiplicity of /dramatis personae/ of the Velikovsky movement ranging
from Velikovsky himself to a host of others.

Ultimately, /KRONOS/ was weakened /not/ "by its top-heavy reliance upon
Velikovsky's case", as de Grazia foolishly supposes, but by the sheer
exhaustion of doing the job for /thirteen continuous years/ and allowing
the journal to be marketed for a ridiculously low price. Some
subscribers who objected to our $20.00 per annum subscription price
thought nothing of plunking down six times that amount, sight unseen,
for later publications. So much for human nature.

De Grazia also mentioned that "friends like Sizemore come mostly in
fairy tales and epic poetry". This is true; and Velikovsky did indeed
take Sizemore for granted as he also did with so many others. Warner is
a most amiable and decent fellow, but discretion is not his strong suit.
In a moment of /gemutlichkeit/, he would sometimes say things in private
that others, lacking propriety, would repeat in print. What de Grazia
fails to divulge is the fact that, in the end, it was he (de Grazia) who
violated Sizemore's trust and destroyed the long-time friendship that
had existed between himself and Warner.

As for de Grazia, during the better part of the 1970's and 1980's he
acted as a "free-agent" doing his "own thing" -- a relatively minor
player in a movement in which he now pathetically pretends to have
played a major role.


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