[Guest Author Note: I recently had the pleasure of coming across The End of the Evening - a board game created by Kenneth Koch - at the New York Public Library's Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection. What follows are reproductions of the game, courtesy of the New York Public Library and the Kenneth Koch Literary Estate, and reflections by Kenneth Koch's daughter Katherine.]
JJ: So this object is amazing and brings to mind so much of the excitement of being around your father. I am thinking most especially of the combination of inspired zaniness and extraordinary learnedness that one experienced with him (and also reading his poetry!). Did you ever actually play The End of the Evening -- what was it like? What were the rules? Who won? This is three (maybe four) questions!
Katherine Koch: I was my father’s eleven-year-old test subject for The End of the Evening. He wanted it to exist as a real, playable game with the satisfaction and fun of games, the surprise and uncertainty that can come out of a very simple structure.
My father always loved and was confident about trying new things, new forms, new ways to find an audience to surprise and exhilarate them. This was 1967, an exhilarating moment in our culture, very much so in New York City. All kinds of social and generational barriers were being broken down and all kinds of money started being available for projects in the arts, the wilder the better. So, the idea of making and finding a market for poetic board games—he wanted to do more than one—seemed possible—why not?
As with many different forms he tried out, he wanted to subvert it at the same time as he followed its rules. He loved making up palindromes, for instance, but only if they were ridiculous and required an equally ridiculous backstory. At one point he felt he’d successfully “destroyed” the palindrome when he came up with things like, “Anna Anna Anna Otto Hannah Otto Anna Anna Anna.”
One subversive thing he does in The End of the Evening is he tricks the player. I’m not sure this would have gone over so well if it had been played as a real game: if you land on the square “HOPELESS NEUROSIS—advance 8 spaces,” you land on DIE, and are out of the game. After the first time you played this wouldn’t be much fun. The Old Age section of the board consists of four squares that say DIE, one square that says “LIVE—Move backwards one roll,” and one square that says “LIVE IN ITALY CROSS BRIDGE GO TO COMINCIA.” It’s kind of funny and means that old age is almost impossible to navigate, but it’s unfair if you’re actually playing the game.
On the other hand, if you land on PSYCHOANALYSIS and have to go back 18 spaces, you end up back in childhood, back at the square called SLEEP. This is witty and more fun, since you get the chance to keep playing.
As an eleven year-old I played board games all the time; my friends and I had played them since we were little, starting with the great Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders, moving on to Monopoly, The Game of Life, Clue. My father and I had played board games and card games in the evenings after dinner for years—giving my mother some time off after working a full-time job and cooking dinner. He was a great and keenly competitive lover of almost any kind of game, games of skill and games of chance, board games, card games, games like tennis, baseball, bowling, ping pong, gambling at casinos. He loved magic, the magic of cards and coincidence.
So one evening in the winter of 1967 my father sat me down at the dining room table with this piece of paper on which he’d started a game not unlike Life or Monopoly in the sense of showing the course of a life in sections from childhood to old age. Instead of moving through events like starting a family, getting a mortgage, buying property, going to jail—it showed stages of life not unlike the stages of my father’s life! The life of a poet—there were squares like WRITE A POEM, THE UNIVERSITY, GO TO ITALY, LITERARY REPUTATION, PSYCHOANALYSIS, and MAKE LOVE.
I am not sure why he thought Kenneth Koch’s life story and dreams would be interesting to a game-playing public, but he had vast confidence that what he loved and found funny would appeal to a wide audience. Besides, he did include the simple universal stages of babyhood—EAT, CRY, NAP, PLAY—followed immediately by DEVELOP UNDERSTANDING, then, as adolescence begins, THE BEACH. Of course, the beach. ADOLESCENT PIMPLES, one of my favorite squares as an 11 year-old (before I myself fell victim to them), came right after THE BEACH.
As my father began showing me The End of the Evening, I thought it was hilarious, and also moving, even when I didn’t understand what was going on. The themes were very Kenneth Koch: Italy, psychoanalysis, literary reputation, love; the strangeness was, too—the last squares being different stages of the evening. That bit of sehnsucht, yearning for the sublime.
He appreciated my appreciation. We laughed a lot while he pointed out various squares and lovable juxtapositions (KISS ME followed by WRITE A POEM INSPIRED BY ITALY), his sometimes abrupt sense of humor (GIVE BIRTH TO A CHILD, then OBTAIN POWER, then BUY SAILBOAT AND GO TO MEDITERRANEAN) but he also wanted to get down to business: how to make the game fun to play. Because it’s one thing to look at the board appreciatively, another thing to step into the dance.
So, a few times, we started out at START, throwing a die to advance along the squares, and using counters, probably pennies. He liked pennies, symbolic in his childhood of the magic of money and magic tricks. It was fun to play, but my father the strategist wanted to make it make sense all together: the events at the different stages of life; and the squares where you follow special instructions; and the bridges between life and Italy, between Italy and Evening; and does the final square, “The End of the Evening—victory” give the winner enough strange poetic joy?
He also needed my help as an artistic and visually precise kid to make the final, central section of five squares, Evening. I measured and drew the squares with a ruler, and that’s my handwriting.
I liked the game, partly because I adored my father, and it was an interesting and puzzling variation on the games I’d played all my life. He kept changing it around after we’d played it a few times: you can see how he made the decision to replace the instructions in about five squares with “EAT.” I don’t know if you were supposed to literally eat something if you landed in those squares or if it’s merely descriptive, as MUMPS and COLISEUM—FALL ASLEEP are. He also added complexities involving THE MEDITERRANEAN and GREECE which didn’t quite get integrated into the game.
Oddly, he signed and dated it: at the lower right, it says “Finished March 30, 1967 K.K.” I guess it was complete for him as a work of art, though it never quite came to life as a game—which is just as well! Better to devote his psyche to poetry than to figuring out how to make a board game work.
JJ: I am of course struck by the "life within a life" -- I mean the Italian life -- that seems to be going on in the inner loop in this game. What was it about Italy that appealed in this way, do you think? Was it Italy itself or your father's particular experiences there or both? (surely both! but how?)
Katherine Koch: As you see, Italy is super important to the game: you can only get there by narrowly escaping death from old age, and the only way to win, to reach Evening, is to go through Italy.
You’re right that it must be both the qualities of Italy itself and my father’s own experiences there that gave him the idea to make Italy into a kind of paradise within the game.
I think he felt an intense kind of longing, nostalgia, for the beauty and peace of Italy because it was where he’d had some of the happiest times of his life, times that were cut short by a tragedy.
He and my mother lived there, mainly in Rome, on their year-long honeymoon, and that’s where I was born. After a year or so back in New York City, we took an ocean liner to Florence, where my mother had gotten a Fulbright to study Italian literature. My parents both talked about the months in Florence as a kind of lost eden. My mother had gotten pregnant shortly after starting classes there and was delighted at the prospect of a having a second baby. Meanwhile the three of us would do things like take walks together in the countryside beyond our house on the other side of the Arno—at age two I always wanted to go further and further, and would have to be carried home. Years later, back in Florence, my father burst into tears showing me the gate we would go through as we started out on our walks.
When she was six months pregnant, in April 1958, my mother suffered an almost fatal miscarriage. She would have died if my father hadn’t raced all over Florence begging for blood for transfusions—her blood type was fairly rare, it was Rh negative; and it was Easter week, when most businesses were closed.
We went back to busy, gray New York as soon as we could, and my parents’ marriage was never the same afterwards, to hear them tell it.
So that is the serious background to the Italy loop of the game, the very Kenneth way in which he wove sadness and loss into sweetness, silliness, and, lest we forget, into The End of the Evening—VICTORY.
Brilliant post! "As with many different forms [Kenneth Koch] tried out, he wanted to subvert it at the same time as he followed its rules": totally true. I'd love it if someone created the board game. To use pennies is a nice touch. What a wonderful thing Kenneth created here! Kudos to all concerned. -- DL
Posted by: The Best American Poetry | October 24, 2018 at 02:11 PM