Editor’s Introduction
I first met Hoffman a number of years ago when I moved into a cheap rooming house near the University of Minnesota’s Minneapolis campus. As I handed my check to the landlord he suddenly mentioned (“Oh! By the way. . .”) that the gentleman living above me was, well, a little crazy. At that moment Hoffman rumbled around the corner in the tiny hallway and grumbled, “Crazy? I’ll show you crazy!” Believe me, he has. But I can see why. Born in Wisconsin, Hoffman had a grandfather who was wounded at the Chicago Haymarket Riot in 1886. As love would have it, his other grandfather may well have been the man who shot him. No one knows for sure.
He left home as a teen, understandably, and eventually became involved with the floundering International Workers of the World. A pretty comrade named Emma (pictured on the front cover of this volume, eighth from the right) convinced him to take her to the Wobblies International Conference in Rome, where they were immediately arrested. Then, as Hoffman tells it, a “very nasty man” said to him, “You may keep your principles or you may keep your ‘apparatus.’ It’s of no consequence to me either way, but I encourage you, join us and fuck!”
During World War II he was captured by British troops in North Africa, and returned to the United States where he was imprisoned for conspiring with fascists. He served three years and was released. In 1947 he married Liza Waters, who five years later committed suicide in a fit of depression after Hoffman was again imprisoned, this time for having been a Wobblie.
| | Bereaved and disoriented, Hoffman wandered the world for a hazy decade or two after his release (“A voice crying in the Wilderness!” he says). He finally discovered his niche on the West Bank in Minneapolis where he conned gullible, hero- seeking students into buying him drugs and liquor. When I met him he lived on the East Bank, but not much else had changed. To this day intent young scholars still visit Hoffman to inveigh against violence and environmental poisoning as they smoke and drink themselves into vomiting stupors. I wish them all well.
Hoffman likes dogs, cats, birds, fish, lizards; ferns, and beetles and has at least one specimen of each residing in his room. He paints, makes frames, composes dreadful hammered dulcimer music, and writes “poetry” on cast-off photocopies that he tosses to the floor for his menagerie to play with. Some survive.
--Kevin Brixius |