The Headmasters Papers (19 page)

My good wishes,

John Oberon Greeve

IN VERMONT

It's not that it is old,
But that it's stopped.
Not appealing; arresting.
Yes, it engages:
It is easy to die here.

Aspects of it everywhere in magazines,
Used often to sell autumn,
One kind of Christmas card.
Easter does not come.

The storekeeper unrolling his awning
In no hurry in the morning light,
Saying “Mawnin', Elmer,”
Could very well be real.

A town drunk is possible.
He could loaf on a green.
A green is possible,
But still, shadowed.

Central and impervious, on higher ground,
An Inn offers its outsized porch;
Here, there, out of the cluster
A steeple enters autumn sky.

Against the afternoon chill
A town huddles itself together,
Grows heavy in its stone,
Still as a picture,
Half a notion.

2 February
Peacham Place

Mr. Philip Upjohn
Director of Studies
Wells School

Wells, Connecticut

Phil-

Have Arnold sweep the cobwebs out of the office marked
“Greeve.”

He is returning. No fuss or hoop-la please. I will cry and stutter.
(Just kidding about Arnold. I know he'd never do it.)

Should arrive the 5th, possibly before this card.

Best,

J.O.G.

6 February

R
EMARKS
T
O
T
HE
S
CHOOL

I have been gone so long that it actually feels a little strange standing in the old spot addressing you—strange, but better the longer I stand here. My job of course is to welcome you back after Christmas holidays, but I've forfeited that by quite a margin. Instead let me thank you for the wonderful welcome back you have given me. As you know from your own vacations, the longer you stay away, the harder it is to come back. I think I made it just in time.

I want to say just once, and briefly, although I will go on feeling it for as long as I live, that this school's support of my wife and of me during her painful illness and after is the most valued gift I have ever been given. Mrs. Greeve was deeply and happily devoted to this school from the day we joined it. On behalf of both of us, thank you.

Now there is some business that ought to be attended to. Due no doubt to my absence from the sidelines, the wrestling and basketball teams seem to have fallen, temporarily, on bad times. I have it on good authority from coaches Trefts and Tomasek that there is nothing wrong with our personnel, that with discipline, and with a few breaks, and especially with improved school support, there is not an opponent on the schedule we cannot beat. I like the sound of that. Let's do it.

Another concern is the state of our buildings: dorms, classrooms, library, and commons. The concern is that they are a mess. Even though snacks and beverages are not allowed in the formal commons rooms, I see potato chips tracked into the carpets and pop stains on upholstered furniture. These spaces are not only what guests and parents and prospective applicants see when they come to Wells, they are, more importantly, our living rooms. We live in them. The Wells I have in my head is an architecturally fine, sturdy, and, here and there, an
elegant
place, but the Wells I have seen since my return is tired and uncared for and uninviting. It has always been easy to let things go to seed during these grim February and March weeks, but we must not let it. I invite you to look over your rooms and the school's common spaces and see if you don't agree that we look a little uncared for. This is our job, our responsibility; we don't have any special staff to pick up after us.

Not unrelated to this concern is a reminder that this coming weekend is Parents and Alumni Winter Weekend. There will be more
than twice our usual number among us in classrooms, in the dining hall, wherever they choose to roam. Let's do our best for these two crucial constituents of the school. Let's give them our best courtesy and
show them our best face. That has been our tradition, and I am sure we are up to it.

Well, I am now feeling quite used to standing at this podium, and I daresay the novelty has worn off for you, too.

Have a very good morning.

6 February

MEMO

To: Phil Upjohn

From: J.O.G.

Confidential

Phil-

It occurs to me that my “spruce up” and Alumni Weekend remarks may have been ill-considered from your standpoint. I know you have done all the actual work setting up this weekend, and I should perhaps have checked with you before sounding this morning's curmudgeonly note. For God's sake, please don't take anything I said as
critical
of your heroic stewardship!

And let me know what you want from me in the way of speaking and general gladhanding this weekend.

J.O.G.

P.S. Could you please give me an update on the classroom performance of Ms. Armbruster? The schools placement services have come up with nothing, and Kurt Kohler has declined to do an encore, so we may be stuck with her for the duration. Will that be endurable? I'd appreciate whatever info you can supply me, as I've asked her to come over for an
evaluation this afternoon. I plan to break her defenses with sherry. If she can at least admit she's having a tough time, we might be a giant step towards conveying mathematics to boys. Help!

J.

8 February

Mr. and Mrs. Frank Greeve
14 Bingham Drive
Tarrytown, New York

Dear Val and Frank,

Somehow I am back. The New England Inns almost swallowed me up, but I slipped away at last, like Aeneas from Dido, at night.

I don't think anyone here has caught onto it yet, but I'm at sea (not like Aeneas, who had a destination). Oddly enough, the house is fine. It feels comfortable, and the familiarity of everything and the quiet
(the faculty is still observing an implicit quarantine) are lifesaving. I've moved back into the master suite, Meg's sickroom, and even that is fine. School's the problem.

I tried not to overreact when I got back, but I probably did anyway, to the depressing squalor I found everywhere around me. There isn't a clean surface of furniture on the campus. Even in our best “formal” rooms, there is hardly an upholstered piece that is not stained, greasy, or otherwise awful. A few routine calls on boys in their rooms have left me appalled, and my concerned visits to the quarters of their respective housemasters left me equally appalled. The old prod, “Do you do that kind of thing at
home
?” probably no longer applies. I am sure they do that sort of thing at home—and that their parents do, too, that no one is “hung-up” or “uptight” about it anymore, that women are “liberated” from it and men are “laid back” about it and that everybody is impervious to litter and grit and stick and mar and to haphazard, design-less rooms. Everybody but Greeve. They will haul me into their court and say, “Is that all you've got to think about in this age of imminent global catastrophe and spiritual impoverishment?” “No,” I will throw back defiantly. “Except when I see a mess.” Shot at dawn.

The struggle for even token decencies in an adolescent world is always a little Sisyphean, but I don't remember feeling before that the rock had rolled irretrievably away from me down the hill. I have gone so far as to pick up and to rearrange a few of the rooms myself, but the improvement is imperceptible.

There are other problems. I went yesterday afternoon to do a guest stint on some Frost poems for a fifth-form English class and was sorely troubled by the state of the class. I arrived to find a startlingly aromatic seminar of a dozen boys and teacher, most of the boys reclining almost horizontally around the table. For comfort, some of them had slipped out of their shoes. Lest you think I am a terrifying presence in the school, I assure you that no adjustments in posture—in fact few signs of recognition—were made as the headmaster entered the classroom. The teacher, reputedly a good one and very popular, introduced me and the day's business for about five minutes in one continuous, hopeless sentence, each imperfectly related clause connected to the last by the phrase “in terms of.” What has happened to speech? Without clear, logical speech, everything goes—writing, even thought. I started into Frost and got through little more than a read-through when up went the hands and out came the interpretations. I heard three or four different lands of jargon, including a heavy dose of psychoanalytic stuff. The teacher, apparently delighted by such precocity, beamed encouragement. In one of the poems a “luminary tower” housing a clock appears. This I was told was clearly a phallus. What, I asked, is a big phallus doing towering over this particular town, and what does it add to the theme of the poem, which seems to be loneliness? The boy faltered, but his teacher came to the rescue saying that in terms of the whole phallic
principle,
a protrusive tower, aggressively thrusting itself out of the town's order could be seen as a rejection of that order in terms of the kinds of things the narrator was experiencing. On we went in this vein for about an hour, the teacher reinforcing the boys' muddled talk and thinking whenever possible. At one point, in desperation, I began recording their interpretations on the chalkboard, stanza by stanza, so that the lack of coherence and some of the hilarity of what they were saying would be more
obvious. They were unfazed. They were perfectly willing to see Frost as a sower of great phalluses among a garden of unrelated literary devices. No one brought one of those
relatively straightforward poems
home to understanding. We made no contact with Frost. Afterwards with the teacher, I equivocated, speculated politely as to what I supposed the boys had tried to do with the poems, raised in an avuncular way the possibility of missing the
point
of a poem through too much sophistication. Etc. Sophistication! He told me that in terms of their critical understanding of literature, his goal was for them to “take risks.” I could think of nothing to do in the face of this but to drink, which is what I did.

I cannot even claim to be physically tired anymore. I get
loads
of rest, so much so that it is getting hard to sleep. I am sure this is temporary, but for the moment, I must confess I haven't got the heart for school. All you have to do is to tilt the lens the smallest bit and everything is transformed into a new, sinister clarity. Kids are revealed as furtive, unkempt, unhelpful. Faculty settle for unattractive behavior and for third-rate performance. The school food looks, smells,
is
horrible. And there is no way of changing any of it without changing all of it. For that matter, what did anybody ever
expect
with adolescents? They have throughout human experience been the most irritable, least governable class of person. Why hole up hundreds of them together? Why boys? I cannot answer any of these fundamental questions regarding my work. My experience does not convince me that adolescent boys are better off leaving their households, neighborhoods, and communities, where tentative self-identifications, relationships, and responsibilities have begun to be forged, in order to go off to rather oddly structured hothouses where those crucial processes are interrupted, in some cases never to be continued. I'm not saying that boarding schools don't know what they're doing; I'm only saying that I don't know what I'm doing. And what is more, I don't know anything else either. I have learned over the past couple of days that I have no special moral strength; in short, nothing has accrued.

Gloom. Self-pity. Noise. Disregard all of it. I'm in a new treatment program called Writing Therapy. My own invention, actually. Does wonders, but bores the relatives.

It's late. Good night.

Love,

John

9 February

MEMO

To: Phil Upjohn

Director of Studies

Phil:

My verdict is that Florence is human. With some departmental support and with our conspicuous presence now and then in her classroom, she'll get through the year, and mathematics will be taught.

Let's be nice to her.

J.O.G.

Mrs. Faye Dougan/PARENTS' VIGIL
1995 Wisconsin Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C.

Dear Mrs. Dougan,

I have only the sketchiest idea of what your organization does but I have been told that you have outreach centers abroad through which you try to locate missing and runaway children. If this is what you do, I would like to apply for your services.

My son, Brian Greeve, aged 22, took off on an open-ended trip abroad nearly a year and a half ago. He seemed to tour western Europe from hostel to hostel, for a month or so before gravitating to Spain, Portugal, and then North Africa. He wrote periodically for several months, asked twice for money. I last heard from him about a year ago. The letter was postmarked Cape St. Vincent, Portugal, which looks on the map to be a coastal village. I have since written to him there several times and received no response. A money order sent there has not been claimed. I have contacted U.S. embassies in Morocco, Spain, and Portugal, but they have found nothing.

Can you help? Have you got finding agents abroad? In the countries I have named? If you can help me, I will be glad to pay whatever finding fees are involved. Brian has been no stranger to drugs and their devotees. Centers of that sort of activity may be fruitful places to start looking.