Is the World Big Enough for Mary Duncan?

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MARY DUNCAN has nothing to declare.

That was the joke others told about the globe-trotting professor from San Diego State University who regularly bluffed her way through customs at Moscow's airport. Her suitcases were filled with books to stock her English-language bookstore, Shakespeare & Company, in the Russian city.
But in a life that plays out on a stage stretching from La Jolla to Moscow, and centered on Paris, Duncan indeed has plenty to declare. Much of it is revealed in a juicy, 167-page autobiography, Henry Miller Is Under My Bed: People and Places on the Way to Paris (Starhaven Press, 2008).
It's a tale of pushing the boundaries, a remarkable adventure of a woman overcoming a difficult childhood in National City to become a respected university department chair whose specialty, recreation administration, took her on an unlikely course to becoming an expert on terrorism long before al Qaeda became widely known. For years, Duncan was the go-to resource for San Diego journalists working on stories about international terrorism and "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland.

With San Diego as the formative base, she has pursued a personal journey to understand the world, a quest notable for its exploration of eroticism and feminism as well as its fascination with avant-garde writers including the late Henry Miller, whose expatriate life in Paris inspired Duncan. His long-suppressed novel Tropic of Cancer led to a 1964 Supreme Court decision finding the book, challenged under pornography statutes, to be a work of literature. Duncan owns an important collection of Miller memorabilia, including recordings of interviews with the author.

"She makes her dreams come true," says San Diego friend Jacque Lynn Foltyn. "Mary always finds a way to do what she wants."
Obstacles become challenges, including walking through a no man's land in divided Belfast.

Her second marriage, to Russian architect Yuri Loskutov, the son of a general and military scientist--along with her work on a Soviet-American committee and at the Moscow bookstore--led to suspicions among friends that she was really a CIA agent, which she adamantly denies. Others had suspicions as well. Shortly after the couple married in 1989 at a 24-hour wedding chapel outside Lake Tahoe, FBI agents visited Duncan, suggesting her new husband might be a Soviet spy. "He's no more KGB than I'm FBI," she assured them.

With not much to hold her back, Duncan has the knack of parachuting into seismic events of the human spectacle. From sexual liberation through the culture wars to the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the rise of global terrorism, Mary Duncan can say she has been there, sometimes at great risk to her life.

Elements from her book demonstrate the breadth of her experiences:

• Engaging in a long affair with the late pundit Max Lerner, a married man twice her age who also had relationships with Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe.
• Rummaging through Simone de Beauvoir's Paris flat after her death. Through her pioneering book on feminism, The Second Sex, "de Beauvoir had understood early on the problems of women living their lives as an extension of somebody else," Duncan writes.
• Going au naturel regularly in renowned Life magazine photographer Bradley Smith's La Jolla hot tub. One time, as she and a date joined others already in the steaming water, there was a surprise tub mate: "Apparently I forgot to tell you we decided to wear bathing suits out of respect for the mayor's new protocol officer," the hostess informed the naked couple.
• Befriending IRA partisans in Belfast while undertaking a research project. "That was when I learned that nice people could be killers," Duncan says.
• Arriving in Tehran to give a lecture and being told by a sympathetic American amid the turmoil at the airport, closed to ground traffic: "Lady, nobody's going to pick you up. We're in the middle of a damned revolution."

TODAY AN SDSU professor emerita, Duncan most recently founded a modern literary salon in Paris, where she lives in a small apartment in the 6th Arrondissement. She's a regular visitor to San Diego, returning to tend to a condominium overlooking La Jolla Cove and to visit friends. Her husband, Yuri, lives in Moscow, where the bookstore Duncan started remains open, though she is no longer a partner. The couple maintains a long-distance relationship aided by Internet webcam.

Duncan's formative way stations are familiar to many San Diegans: growing up near Kimball Park in National City; attending Sweetwater High and San Diego State; working summers for SDG&E and during college at an old Carnation restaurant on El Cajon Boulevard. Her father, a bus driver, died when she was 4, and her mother remarried twice. Heavy drinking and verbal abuse were fixtures in her family life.
"We never doubted that our mother loved us," she writes. "She worked hard, always encouraged us and did her best. ... She survived by getting married and working at various low-paid jobs. ... This instilled in me the drive to get an education and never be dependent on a man."
A streak of anti-authoritarianism lies at the heart of her personality, Duncan concedes. It may come from her childhood, where anyone wearing a suit or a uniform invariably meant bad news. "I am not sure why, but I love flouting rules--not in an outrageous, illegal or deceitful way but in a humorous, in-your-face sort of way," she says.

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