Young, Restless and Fired Up in the Cool Gray City of Love

1974: A Personal History, by Francine Prose

Francine Prose married young, in her final semester at Radcliffe. The match was imperfect, and she and her husband both suffered. The cultural winds blew against them. The great music emerging from the car stereo was zero help. “The music we loved had come to seem like a reproach, a reminder: Someone is in love, but it isn’t you, and you will never feel like that again,” Prose writes in her new memoir, “1974: A Personal History.”

Monogamy, she adds, “seemed embarrassing, hopelessly square and old-fashioned. The culture encouraged, expected and all but insisted upon erotic restlessness. Sex was free; sex was everywhere, a source of wonder, pleasure and heat without the chilling effect of familiarity and repetition.”

Within three years she was divorced. By 1974, when she was 26, she was spending more time in San Francisco and less time in Cambridge, where she had been in graduate school. Out west, she felt unfettered and alive (she was a Joni Mitchell fan). She lived with a bohemian older couple. They all existed on good coffee and “avocado sandwiches on San Francisco sourdough bread with mayo, black pepper and alfalfa sprouts.”

That year, at a poker game in the apartment, she met Tony Russo. Along with Daniel Ellsberg, Russo leaked the Pentagon Papers, which laid bare America’s perfidy in Vietnam. Published in The New York Times in 1971, the papers, in Prose’s summary, “confirmed what the antiwar movement had never been able to prove: Our presence in Vietnam was unwanted. We’d committed war crimes.”

Russo was a countercultural and free-speech hero. He had spent 47 days in jail for refusing to testify against Ellsberg. He worked for NASA and later the RAND Corporation, where he was involved in a study of how Vietcong prisoners were interrogated, and some of their stories moved him deeply. By the time Prose met him, he was paranoid and unemployed. “An aura of unease surrounded him,” Prose writes, “the faint distressing buzz of an electrical panel with a burnt fuse and some wires pulled loose.”

Russo was charismatic, though, a Virginia-born charmer with a Southern accent. Prose had a thing for bad boys. Here was antiwar royalty. He was 10 years older. Before long they were riding around in his old, putty-colored Buick and talking all night, while he chain-smoked Camels.