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It is a quite splendid site. It was there the Hollywood people went, during the school's summer vacation, to shoot the early chapters of
The World According to Garp
, which readers will recall focused on the childhood of the protagonist and his energetic mother, who served the school as chief nurse. All that
Garp
evoked in a boys' school—tradition, civility, a great beauty of surrounding natural circumstances—is there. If you drive from Poughkeepsie past the town of Millbrook, where Timothy Leary ran a kind of anti-Mill brook School for drug users until the city elders finally ran him out (and he himself saw the light of day; do you remember the premonitory refrain in
Hair
?—"Now that I've dropped out/Why is life dreary, dreary/Answer my weary query/Timothy Leary, dearie"), toward Amenia, and you look out over the north, you can spot it there, in the dairy country, well over five hundred acres, with a dozen buildings, a church spire, a quadrangle, a few weathered buildings for the masters, the covered hockey rink. Only the old barn and the house across the way were there when the emphatic young man from England, married to Lucy Leffingwell, daughter of the senior partner of j. P. Morgan & Company, resolved that nothing would do but that he must start his own school.

Why? Edward Pulling is one of the most articulate men in the history of American education, but he cannot really give you an answer to that, short of the answer he would not give you, which is: manifest destiny. Some people were born to discover transistors, others strange lands; now and then there comes along someone whose personality is so overwhelming he cannot satisfy himself with anything less than an entire institution to absorb it. Edward Pulling had gone to schools in England and served as a young midshipman in the Royal Navy in World War I, then had attended Princeton, gone on to teach at Gilman School in Baltimore, and then to Groton under Endicott Peabody, who would influence him mightily, if it can be said of an Original Man that anyone influenced him. But here he was, in a huge country, in his early thirties, in the middle of the Depression, and he suddenly discovered that he must start his own school. At age eighty-three, at the school's fiftieth anniversary, he gathered there with six or seven hundred alumni and their families and celebrated one of the few institutions that can carry the imprint of a single personality on, often through, generations. They can say many things about Millbrook, never that it could have been the creature of any other man than Edward Pulling.

I had myself previously experienced only a single headmaster, and then only briefly. He was a Jesuit, at St. John's, the preparatory school for Beaumont College in Old Windsor, on Runnymede, a few miles from Eton, where my father had sent me (and my sisters to a nearby convent school) at the age of twelve—because, he mentioned to my mother after dinner in the presence of his spirited, amused, but cautious brood who never quite knew when my father's hyperboles would become the active agents of family policy—because, he said, as he reflected on it, at least five years had gone by since he had understood a
single word
uttered by any of his ten children. ("Oh, Father!" the groan went up. There he went again on one of his crotchets, about people who speak indistinctly.) But the next thing we knew, five of us were on shipboard to Great Britain, an educational experiment cut short by a world war. Father Sharkey had been a small man, of considerable temper, strict but affectionate, shrewd and understanding, with a highly developed sense of humor. When, eight months later, I left him, I had made a lifelong friend.

Then, for another year, we went back to the status quo ante, a house with tutors and visiting musicians and voice teachers. Half the year in Sharon, the winters in Camden, South Carolina, to which two tutors were shuttled. During that year my own thoughts were mostly on sailing, horseback riding, and the piano, my festering inability to master which probably compounded the natural unruliness of a fourteen-year-old. And so the word went out that the following fall I would enter Millbrook School. This meant that I would be interviewed by Edward Pulling, as my older brothers had been.

There cannot have been a more imposing figure in any educational institution. I am aware of the enormous literature describing a grown man's disillusioned meeting with the mincing figure of a headmaster he once feared and stood in awe of. I last saw Mr. Pulling this summer, and he is no less august or imposing than when I first saw him, as a fourteen-year-old, in all his massive, angular, self-assured, commanding completeness. He was six foot three, weighed, say, two hundred pounds; his light blue eyes penetrated you, and, incidentally, the room; his questions were kindly composed and patient, but there was an instant no-nonsense that prevented you, say, from suggesting impulsively that you both go out together to buy a popsicle. Anyone interviewed by Mr. Pulling was, so to speak, permanently interviewed by him.

Both of my brothers, who had graduated, were most enthusiastic about the school, though they spoke about it with that blasé moderation one expects from truly urbane teenagers. My brother John was passionate about sports, and Millbrook—much influenced by the British tradition— was heavy on sports, which were prescribed for everybody, every afternoon (oh, those endless afternoons). My brother Jim was interested primarily in nature, and he had discovered in Millbrook a man called Frank Trevor, whose insatiable interest in the animal and vegetable worlds greatly exceeded any interest in any other subject, save possibly the necessity that the United States go instantly to war against Hitler.

Now Mr. Trevor, R.I.P., also left his mark on the school. It is only fair to say that later in life he developed nervous difficulties, if that's what you call it when you arrive at a faculty conference with a demand to make, and with a loaded pistol in front of you. In any event, Mr. Trevor had a genius for evangelizing his love of nature and animals. To the horror of the younger members of the family, my father announced the summer before my matriculation that he, my mother, and the three oldest members of the family would be spending July and August in Europe, and that he had invited Mr. and Mrs. Frank Trevor to preside over the Sharon household (seven children, a governess, two nurses, two music teachers, seven servants, two grooms) during their absence. Mr. Trevor would teach us about nature. . . .

My father returned to find—somewhat to his chagrin, we were pleased to note—that our property now harbored probably the largest zoo this side of the Bronx. The entire summer had been given over to making leaf impressions in white clay, building pens, and feeding snakes. And dinner conversation was usually on some such theme as how horses (which we loved) were actually responsible for more deaths than snakes (which Mr. Trevor loved), the poor little misunderstood creatures. It was not until much later, when I sat opposite him in class at Millbrook, disemboweling a pig, that it occurred to me that, unlike horses, no one attempted to ride snakes; and I like to think that Mr. Trevor more than any man developed polemical instincts in those of his students who, unlike my adoring brother Jim, believed that somehow our Maker had managed, in creating man, to transcend nature.

Sports, nature. What else?

Community Service. A sacred conception for "The Boss," as Ed Pulling was (is) universally known, a datum that had come quickly to the attention of Senator Moynihan.
Non sibi sed cunctis
was the school motto: Not alone, but together. As I reflect on this I find a latent inclination for collectivization there (Mr. Pulling is a liberal); but, really, it wasn't that. Mr. Pulling believed that by and large, boys who went to boarding schools were a privileged lot, and that privileged people must know about the needs of the community. The war was soon on us, and that meant that perforce we would need to perform such duties as the first generation of Millbrook students hadn't done—make up our own beds, clean the halls, serve the tables (there was no longer any unemployment, in that area or anywhere). And the war brought on such a scarcity of manual farm labor that we were asked to volunteer to pick apples in a neighboring orchard, at thirty-five cents an hour. It was a desperate dilemma for me every time, because I loathed picking apples, but I loved to smoke cigarettes, and in the isolation of a neighboring orchard one could do this with impunity. (Sixth-formers could smoke at designated times, twice a week. Boys caught smoking at other times were usually expelled.) A dreadful ritual of every Saturday morning, after a prayer and a singing of the morning hymn, came when the headmaster made the daily announcements. He would read out the names of the boys who were to report in the late afternoon to the Jug, as we called it, for commonplace delinquencies, like lateness or disorderliness. The miscreants spent their time picking up stones from one pasture, and bringing them together along a line where a stone fence would eventually spring up. The distinctive horror for me of landing in the Jug was that because it was scheduled late in the day on Saturday, it postponed, and even entirely threatened, my precious weekend at home. I remember Mr. Pulling's quandary when it was brought to his attention that the removal of stones as a form of punishment interfered with his concept of Community Service (one or more afternoons per week), during which other chores of public benefit were undertaken, e.g., Athletic Records, Biology Assistants, Bird Banding, Blackout Committee, Commons Room Committee, Confiscation Lockers, Electrician, Exhibits Manager, Fire Department, Flag Officer, Greenhouse, Meteorology, Receptionists, School House, Stable Assistants, Squash Court, Store Committee. Fie thought about it, and revealed his transformation of the Jug. So as not to contaminate the noble idea of Community Service, the Jug henceforward would be held not in the late afternoon, gathering stones for a new wall, but in the early evening, copying out the encyclopedia—during the hour the weekly movie was shown. I missed
Casablanca
on that one.

But it was the academic part of Millbrook in which Edward Pulling took the greatest pride. Up until the time I left (1943), no one who graduated from Millbrook failed to be accepted by the college of his first choice (my brother John's class: two to Harvard, five to Princeton, one Yale, one Rutgers, one University of Arizona). Granted, now and then a boy would be encouraged not to apply to too exalted a college. And it was only after reading the charming autobiography
Musical Chairs
by Schuyler Chapin, now Dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia University, that I discovered that the diploma ceremoniously presented to him on commencement day at Millbrook was merely a certificate of attendance.

But Mr. Pulling was deadly serious in the matter of academic excellence. Teaching senior English, he gave out his very first A in 1942. He took undisguised pleasure from any academic accomplishments by his students. I desired to pursue the study of Spanish, but since the language was spoken at home I was advanced. Never mind: Mr. Pulling directed his Spanish teacher to conduct a special class—for a single student. Under Nathaniel Abbott (father of the present headmaster) music was seriously pursued, through a student orchestra, a glee club, visiting teachers, trips to hear artists (I was driving back from a concert by Rachmaninoff when the radio reported an attack on Pearl Harbor). Although Mr. Pulling did not himself easily manage this, retaining a residual aloofness proper to his station and harmonious with his personality, he encouraged close relationships between the masters and the boys, like Mr. Trevor's with my brother Jim, John McGiffert's with my brother Reid (McGiffert would read aloud Reid's short stories to his guests), my own with Mr. Abbott (who took me to Tanglewood to hear Koussevitzky rehearse the Boston Symphony). By nature an authoritative man, Mr. Pulling nevertheless assembled a collection of young masters to whom he gave full rein. The wife of the teacher of Latin and football taught two of us (or attempted to do so) musical harmony. Henry Callard, the gentle assistant head-master, beloved of all the students, was incongruously the chief disciplinarian. He taught American history, and by emulation he taught the virtues of Quakerism; he left to become headmaster of the Gilman School my senior year
(his
son is now the headmaster of Hotchkiss). Mr. Prum, from Luxembourg, taught the physical sciences and cultivated a kind of exaggerated, narcissistic authoritarianism. ("Sir, do you know the answer to Problem Five?" "I know zee answer to
oil
zee prroblems.") Mr. Hargrave Joyous Bishop, my dormitory master as a fourth-former, was an avid francophile. I remember, in conversations with my roommate, guessing at his age. We rounded it off at sixty-five. He was in fact thirty-five, and a fairly recent graduate of Princeton. His ecstasy came when French diplomats or artists would come to Millbrook to speak (Mr. Pulling had a way of drawing people to his school to perform)—preferably if they could speak only in French (to advanced French students), so that he could utter "
Tiens!
" every moment or two, signifying that he had understood everything. The patrician Arthur Tuttle, whose brother was master of Davenport College at Yale, taught math. A genuine highbrow, with the reputation of having a considerable private fortune; tough, but with a soft streak. Frederick Knutson (Latin, football) was so carried away by the military spirit of the war that he took to marching his athletes to the playing field in accents so martial they were not otherwise heard between Millbrook and West Point. One day my roommate Alistair Horne, in a yelp of enthusiasm, leaned out from our third-floor suite and in a perfect imitation of the Führer's (Mr. Knutson's underground nickname) accents, ordered, "ReVERSE, HARTCH!" whereupon half the undergraduate body reversed its line of march, all but mangling the Führer, who conducted a feverish campuswide investigation, but never found the voice of the impostor.

Alistair Horne would seriously study the martial ways of the Germans and the French. In those days he was also studious, but always there was room for the spontaneous outburst. It was his turn to wait on table, one day, and his fate to be assigned The Boss's table. As he put down the large platter of chow mein he managed accidentally to drip it right down the length of the headmaster's tweeded sleeve. The ten boys (ten to a table, one master) watched with horror at this slow-motion profanation. It was only after he had set down the platter that Alistair recognized the enormity of the offense. So he turned and said, "That's all right, sir. It won't hurt you externally." He smiled nervously, and went off to fetch a rag. Mr. Pulling's reaction to student insolence was not easy to predict, because there were insufficient instances of it to make for reliable statistical generalization. But he let this one go by.