My Mistake (6 page)

Then there is Helen North, who teaches a course called Classical Mythology in Art and Literature, a panoptic survey of the variations in and implications of the use of Greek divinities in Homer, Ovid, Dante, and many others—the reading list is a back-breaker—and in visual representations through the ages. She is a brilliant lecturer who seems to assume that we are all conversant with her references—and so we strive to be.

I don't know it at the time, but these humanities courses and seminars—demanding, deep, wide in their scope—constitute not only an intellectual but an emotional preparation for the work I will later do and the losses I will suffer. If you are lucky enough to be educated
well
in an ivory tower, it will help to prepare you to descend from that tower and deal with un-ivoried reality. When your heart is broken, Yeats will give the heartbreak a grand context. When there's a death in the family, Hans Bol's painting of a plowman with Icarus falling in the very distant distance may help to comfort you about the necessity of life to go on. When your work becomes tedious, Sisyphus will trudge along by your side. When you're praised, you will remember, prophylactically, Marc Antony's praise of Brutus. If you have children, Joe Gargery will coach you in good cheer. When you blame yourself mightily for a sin, the logical positivists may offer some small comfort with compelling arguments against free will. When you see your five-year-old daughter's marvelous painting entitled “Francis Dines with Claire,” with the couple sitting at opposite ends of a long table and a dog eating scraps below, your Intro to Psych course and reading of Freud will make you wonder about the separation, and Hedley Rhys will re-materialize to point out the childlike directness and distortions of some of Picasso's late work.

Everything in your life is enriched, everything has a more universal human context. And just when you are feeling pleased with your own shaky semi-erudition, Yeats will reappear to remind you that

 

On their own feet they came, or on shipboard,

Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,

Old civilisations put to the sword.

Then they and their wisdom went to rack:

No handiwork of Callimachus,

Who handled marble as if it were bronze,

Made draperies that seemed to rise

When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;

His long lamp-chimney shaped like the stem

Of a slender palm, stood but a day;

All things fall and are built again. . . .

 

And then, antidotally to this message of transience, you may read aloud to yourself the pure, sharp music of the line “Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back.” What daring is
that,
from a poet who started out writing about Celtic faeries!

 

Nineteen

 

At the end of my sophomore year at Swarthmore, I am about to enter the Honors Program, in which juniors and seniors have only two three-hour seminars a week, one in their major and one in one or the other of their minors. (Mine are, respectively, English Literature, and Art History and Philosophy. Not exactly vocational training.) I explain to Mr. Becker, the head of the English Department, that my soccer practices and games the following fall may occasionally conflict with afternoon seminars. He says, “We can't schedule morning meetings for one person, Mr. Menaker.” He adds, “Especially when the conflict involved could hardly have less to do with academic endeavors.”

The one time soccer does conflict with an Honors seminar—Problems in Modern Philosophy, which is all about positivism (A. J. Ayer and his “sense data,” Strawson, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Quine)—Professor Jerome Shaffer takes the whole class down to the soccer field on a beautiful fall day to watch the team play.

Professor Shaffer goes on to be the Chairman of the Philosophy Department at the University of Connecticut and then retires in order to learn and practice psychotherapy.

 

Twenty

 

Richard Nixon's Presidential-campaign motorcade makes its way through the town of Swarthmore. He's going to stop and give a short speech from a platform in the middle of town. He walks through the crowd, shaking hands, and a friend of mine, David Gelber, editor of the college newspaper, later to become a producer for
60 Minutes,
finds himself in Nixon's path. He dislikes Nixon. When Nixon sticks out his hand for Gelber to shake, he does so, involuntarily, but at the last second tries to express his distaste by muttering, sarcastically, “How's Checkers?” (Nixon's dog.) Nixon climbs up on the platform, thanks a few people for setting up the event, and says, “I especially want to thank that very nice young man in the crowd who was kind enough to ask after our dog, Checkers. I'm happy to say that Checkers is just fine.”

 

Back at school, I have a girl in my dorm room overnight. She gets her period and there is blood on the sheets. I forget that this is the day when the sheets get changed, and I certainly have no idea that the house mother of our dorm will be accompanying the maid on her rounds that particular sheet-changing day. The house mother reports me to the Dean of Men. I am scared shitless. He calls me into his office, but I say I can't see him until the next day—after an exam. I go out to the cinder track around the football field wearing shorts and sink to the ground a few times, lacerating my knees nicely. I wear the shorts when I go to see the Dean the next morning. I'm sure he knows what's up, but he just lets it go. Back at the dorm, I find that the maid has stripped the bed and washed the sheets. “I know how boys and girls is,” she whispers to me.

 

It's the spring of my senior year and I am taking Honors exams—eight three-hour written exams and eight oral exams, all administered by professors from other colleges. I have studied for these tests for three months in the spring, according to a lunatic-obsessive schedule I made for myself. The exams seem to be going well for me. During my oral exam in Baroque Painting, a stout, tweed-jacketed, thick-and-glossy-bearded professor from the University of Pennsylvania takes a copy of Rembrandt's late painting
The Descent from the Cross
from his small pile of such reproductions. He asks me to talk about it. I say what I know, including the comment from a recent article in a scholarly journal about the artist's use of “irrational” light sources in his late work.

“You read that piece?” the examiner says, smiling. “I'm impressed.” Then he goes on. “But the thesis about light sources is wrong. Look.” We look at the reproduction together, and he shows me that the lighting of the scene, though extremely dramatic, isn't, strictly speaking, irrational. He takes other late Rembrandt paintings from his little stack, and we discuss their brooding, luminous use of light and the possibility that the artist's failing vision may have affected this aspect of his painting. I mention that I've read that El Greco may have had astigmatism, which could account for the elongation of figures in his late paintings. The examiner says, “Also wrong, in my opinion, but arguable. Just because a professor or a scholarly journal says something doesn't make it right.” He smiles a merry and mischievous smile. “Now,” he says, “here's another Rembrandt, this one with some of the background painted by his apprentices.”

“No,” I say.

“Why not?”

Rembrandt didn't have any apprentices.

 

When the Honors-exams results are posted in the spring of my senior year, Mr. Hynes invites me and my friend Leo Braudy to have drinks and dinner with him and his wife. Leo gets Highest Honors, I get High Honors, and by God I will take it. When we arrive at his house, Mr. Hynes comes out and greets us. He puts his arms around our shoulders and says, “My boys!” I get so drunk that evening that I pass out on the couch in Mr. Hynes's study. The next morning, I get up with the worst hangover ever, and Mr. Hynes offers me a glass of orange juice. “This will cut the phlegm,” he says.

 

Twenty-one to twenty-three

 

I go to graduate school in English at Johns Hopkins on a teaching fellowship for two years and get a Master's degree. The first year, I rent a room on the top floor of a tidy marble-step row house near the Hopkins Homewood campus in Baltimore. A country-club bandleader named Billy owns the house and lives there with his mother and his girlfriend. He has an organ on which he practices and rearranges in the least imaginative way possible the least interesting big-band tunes and pop-song adaptations imaginable. He seems addicted to the Serendipity Singers' “Don't Let the Rain Come Down,” a pabulum crime committed against the words of the nursery rhyme that starts “There was a crooked man.” Billy attacks this song organistically again and again, late into the night, the “melody” to the refrain—“Ah ah, oh no, don't let the rain come down”—repeated with minuscule changes to rhythm and phrasing and “improvisation.” It is maddening. He keeps practicing this song even through the trauma of President Kennedy's assassination. His girlfriend, a blowzy woman with the daffy-lipstick look, weeps uncontrollably over this event. Billy takes a little time off from “Don't Let the Rain Come Down” to invite me to watch the funeral on his television. His girlfriend sobs on the couch. “You know, Audrey knew the Kennedys,” Billy says to me.

The American Literature guy at Hopkins, Professor Charles Anderson, requires us to buy his anthologies. J. Hillis Miller, a nice man who teaches Victorian fiction and is apparently a genius of literary theory, talks about Derrida's writing and other abstruse critical doctrines of the moment. I haven't got the faintest idea what he's talking about. I am deemed a good Freshman Composition teacher because on the day I'm “observed,” I answer a student's question with “It's a noun clause.” There are a couple of serene young Jesuit scholars in the graduate program who appear to know everything. An inch and a half of snow falls and hysterical Baltimore drivers abandon their cars in the middle of main thoroughfares. At least beer is cheap. I see women in bars giving their babies bottles with a little beer in them, as if out of a cautionary nineteenth-century temperance pamphlet. The second place I live, during the second year, features a Havishamian landlady the door to whose ground-floor apartment opens a crack whenever one of her boarders comes or goes.

It isn't for me. The
Lucky Jim–
ish Best Toady contest for thesis advisers, the danger of saddling up on a hobbyhorse like “subject-object relations” and riding it for the rest of my life, the booing of the Yankees when they play at Memorial Stadium—not for me. But I do read and study an enormous amount at Hopkins, especially about one of the literary-theory fashions of the time, point of view, which will serve me well in my professional life. And once again, I have some very good teachers, and German semi-learned, and a degree and two years' teaching experience that will guarantee me a job in a private school and another Vietnam War draft deferment.

Earl Wasserman alone is worth the price of admission, pursuing the Romantics like an eager tailor and jamming them into a one-size-fits-all theory with remarkable success.

 

Twenty-two

 

It's summertime and I'm home from graduate school. Pete Seeger gives a concert in Nyack, at the Tappan Zee Playhouse. My uncle Enge is visiting us, and he and I decide to go to the performance. Afterward we go backstage to say hello to Seeger—Enge says he knows him—but he doesn't recognize my uncle at all. Enge is humiliated and insists that they have met, that they called square dances together at the Henry Street Settlement, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This incident will have a surprising epilogue thirty-five years later.

Another summer weekend, Mike comes home to Nyack. My girlfriend is there, too. Mike and “Precious”—my mother gave her that nickname when she heard her use the word, with her Southern accent and all—want to go to Jones Beach, on Long Island. It's a long drive and I don't feel like going. I tell the two of them to go ahead.

They go, and they come back. Later, my girlfriend says to me, “Why did you let me go with him alone?”

“Why not?” I say. “I didn't want to go and the two of you did.”

“Don't you know anything? Didn't it occur to you that I might begin to fall in love with him if we spent that kind of time together?”

 

Twenty-three

 

Earl Wasserman, at Johns Hopkins, reads a paper on Bernard Malamud's
The Natural,
explicating its (pretty obvious) allegorical details. After the reading is over, one of my fellow–graduate students presents him with a baseball signed by various Baltimore Orioles. Embarrassingly close to an apple for the teacher, given by a grown man (a hefty grown man at that, and a Rhodes Scholar).

I go to Memorial Stadium, near the Homewood campus, when the Yankees play the Orioles there. In the bleachers, I keep my Yankee fandom to myself. Whitey Ford, the Yankee ace, is pitching one day, and the Orioles knock him out of the game in the third or fourth inning. A delighted guy sitting next to me takes a white handkerchief out of his pocket and waves it mockingly. “Goodbye, Mr. Edward Whitey Ford,” he calls out as Ford walks off the mound. “Goodbye, Mr. Edward Whitey Ford,” he shouts again, and claps me on the back.

These two years spent in Baltimore make me realize that, one way or another, I am eventually going to end up back in New York.

 

The “new journalist” Tom Wolfe publishes a piece in
New York
magazine called “Tiny Mummies,” a funny, caricatured picture of
The New Yorker
in all its crazy cultishness, and a close portrait of its editor, William Shawn. In the piece, Wolfe conveys the hermetic, self-involved, highly ritualized life of the magazine's staff in telling detail. And he distills his whole experience there when he describes what happened when he asked Shawn, in Shawn's office, if he could smoke. Shawn was apparently nonplused by the request and responded with a kind of frantic over-obligingness. He scrambled around looking for an ashtray, and when he couldn't find one, he offered Wolfe an empty soda bottle. Anyone who has smoked and tried to tap his ashes into a soda bottle knows that it doesn't work well, so Wolfe found himself trying with manual subtlety to get the ashes from his cigarette into this undersized aperture and watching as a kind of tutu of errant ashes formed around the base of the bottle—which he and Shawn pretended not to notice.