The Headmasters Papers (26 page)

Peter Sipple, when he was head of Connecticut's Salisbury School, wrote to say he appreciated the book's accuracy, but appreciated even more the extent to which Greeve's circumstances veered away from his own:

As the headmaster of an all-boys boarding school in Connecticut, I found that parts of
The Headmaster's Papers
read like my diary. Fortunately not all, since my wife is doing fine and is much engaged in the life of the school. But the novel rang so true that, quite frankly, I've not urged it on her as we normally do for one another with books we find particularly compelling.

I was touched by the concern that my novel might upset a headmaster's wife's sense of well-being, although letters
from
headmasters' wives suggest they are a resilient and durable lot. From a boarding school not far from Sipple's, the headmaster's wife wrote to say, “I got so attached to John Greeve that I could feel his tweedy coat on my face as I hugged him in my mind.”

Readers farther removed from private school life, writers in particular, tended to range more widely—some of them eccentrically—in their responses. Louis Auchincloss, whose fictional chronicles of American patrician life include a fine school novel,
The Rector of Justin,
startled me somewhat by seeing political ideology at work in John Greeve's decline:
“Headmaster's Papers
vividly describes the nightmare of a teacher who tries to form the mind and character against the hopeless odds of, not a ship, but a
fleet
of ‘liberal' fools.”

John Irving has written vividly about school life in such widely read novels as
The World According to Garp, Hotel New Hampshire,
and
A Prayer for Owen Meany,
as well as in occasional reminiscence about his own schooldays at Phillips Exeter. He was generous in support of
The Headmaster's Papers
from the start, and he had helpful things to say about my abiding fears that the fictional events in my novel might bear uncomfortably on my colleagues and friends:

Don't be impressed with what people who are a part of a subject for a novel have to say about your treatment of the subject; that is, your friends in school life. It is almost impossible to do anything well (in a novel) without exposing it. I surely don't mean that every novel muckrakes its subject; most good novels have more sympathy and compassion in them than does most social work, or even most teaching. Yours certainly has great sympathy and compassion.

But people who see themselves as mocked are too often being simply short-sighted; they're just protecting their own endearments—in the manner of people who identify so sharply with school that they are poisoned for life regarding such trivial things as colors (that is, “I went to Yale; you can't beat blue and white. Crimson reminds me of those Harvard snots; green those Dartmouth animals”). There are many fine and important values to be learned in school; but no one ever wrote truly about a subject without making the subject uncomfortable.

Jean Harris is former headmistress of the Madeira School. As I write, she is still serving in prison for the much publicized killing of her lover. In some respects she has a rare affinity for school heads in distress, but her extraordinary circumstances also permit her a special objectivity about the consuming dramas of school life. She has on occasion compared school life to prison, not always favorably. Her clear sympathy for Greeve raised an intriguing possibility in my mind: that John Greeve would have liked Jean Harris very much; moreover, that they might have had healing things to say to each other. From her confinement, she wrote, in part:

I suppose my first impression was one of deja vu. There is a deep and abiding sameness about some of our schoolmaster and schoolmistress experiences. I felt for John every step of the way—and remember how glad I was to be out of it. Oddly enough, I was only disappointed with him at the end. I spent several years of my life wishing to be dead, and finally, determined to be just that. It seemed logical and correct for me. I can't quite accept it now for John. A really tragic ending for him is to go on living. Maybe you didn't want it to be quite that sad.

Poet Linda Pastan was less taken with particulars of the school milieu. Instead she saw universal themes, including important ethical ones, at work in John Greeve's story:

The book left me in tears. I was particularly moved by the brief but quite marvelous passage you wrote about marriage. (Every year at Bread Loaf I feel like some sort of dinosaur—one of a dying breed that still believes in fidelity, even at a writer's conference. The young almost had me convinced that I was some sort of coward.)

Lawyers and litigation are not represented very attractively in
The Headmaster's Papers,
so I was surprised and also pleased that Robert Duvin, certainly among the toughest labor lawyers in the country, found John Greeve a man worthy of respect.

I am so sick of reading about wars and strikes and organized crime and even tough management labor lawyers, that I was truly pleased—proud—maybe even moved to read about somebody decent.

I took special care—please believe me—to use nothing specific from my own work with the boys of University School. Nevertheless, parents from my school, including those friends, wrote to confide that they saw through my ruses.

Your presentation of the boys, all the way from “Brian” to “David” hit so close to home from our own experiences and those of our friends. Although the other characters are fictional, many of the separate traits seemed to be plucked from those of our acquaintance.

Of all the unexpected responses I received, the most welcome by far was from a long and distant high school girlfriend. My wife has suggested, with too little humor at work in her face, that my entire fiction-writing enterprise may be no more than an elaborately indirect way to correspond with former high school girlfriends. This is so silly. Nevertheless, it is my hope that every practicing writer whose experiential capital includes former high school girlfriends may one day receive a long, closely-reasoned letter, concluding: “What magic! I can't tell you how much pleasure it gives me to discover that the boy for whom I had such affection has become a man of accomplishment, sensibility, and . . .”

Within limits, a writer is usually granted room to establish his characters' own tastes and knowledge. That room, however, is narrower than I thought. For instance, my account of a student's drowning elicited the following response:

I am certified in CPR. You state, “Feeling a pulse, but detecting no respiration, Froehling and Kreble began to apply two-man cardiopulmonary resuscitation.” I checked this statement in my Red Cross CPR manual (page 1-27) “If the person is not breathing but
has
a pulse give mouth-to-mouth breathing. If the person is not breathing and does not have a pulse, cardiopulmonary resuscitation.” Do you wish to check the fact?

A university librarian who liked the book but thought Greeve was too hard on marijuana (and that I should try it) complained about the headmaster's joking dismissal of Philadelphia.

A few remonstrances. Assuming Greeve speaks for a good part of you, I must object to his hatred of Philadelphia, where I lived for six years. Of course, the character can have any prejudices he wishes, but still, it is just tossed off as if readers
should
understand. It is one of the greatest cities in the world.

My tax attorney, a meticulous man, found fault with what may have been Greeve's principal forte, letter writing.

Mr. Greeve is an appealing figure, although his aversion to the telephone borders on the pathological. His failure to use zip codes is another egregious flaw: some of his drug miscreants must be home a week before Greeve's letter arrives.

One of my former students, while praising the book, chided me for using his name for Greeve's lost son, Brian.

By the way, I devoured the fast-moving book in two nights. No critical analysis, typed and double-spaced, here, though. Suffice it to say that I really enjoyed the book, and saw a lot of you, and your ideals, in Greeve. But why in God's name was that unfortunate, heartbreaker-of-a-son named BRIAN? Why not Dick, or some such appropriate name? (People named Brian don't do things like that.)

Not every reader who saw his name assigned to one of my characters was so light-hearted. Seven years after the book's publication, a man unknown to me pulled me out of a luncheon conversation at the Breadloaf Writers Conference to tell me that I should think twice before using a person's name in a book. He was furious, to the point of saying that if it weren't for the crowd, he would be inclined to punch me in the mouth. When he first spoke, I held out my hand and introduced myself, but he made no similar gesture. I was in a double bind, unable to remember his name so that I might apologize for using it. Later, I learned he was a college contemporary, and I had used his name—utterly unconsciously—for a boy in the novel who was involved in a disciplinary scrape. The name was fairly common, and I have since taught two boys bearing it. Nevertheless, I am sorry for any trouble I caused him, and I am glad I wasn't dining alone when he found me.

The two most recurrent reader concerns were (1) the relationship of Greeve's story to my own and (2) the validity of the novel's conclusion. I never imagined that Greeve's troubles would arouse worries about my own well-being, but some letters, like the following from a teacher in New Mexico, gave me pause.

For now, it's probably enough to say that I have the strongest intuitive sense that Hawley is in no danger whatsoever of becoming Greeve, any more than Updike is in danger of becoming Angstrom. I'm relieved to sense this because when I read the short stories of John Cheever or John Kennedy Toole's
A Confederacy of Dunces
I am eternally alarmed by the sense that the writers' views of their characters afford self-portraits whose tragedy the writers don't fully sense.

My concern deepened when readers were
certain
they saw me in Greeve. From the mother of one of my students:

And it is in his position as headmaster that we parents can discern the autobiographical overtones—our own headmaster's administrative philosophy, his drug abuse policies, and his contemporary poetry.

And then there is the question of the ending. It made some people mad, including the Memphis woman who wrote:

Perhaps there is some message there that I'm not getting. If so, I'd surely be grateful to know what it is. If all you intended to convey in your beautiful (up until the last few pages!) book is the supremacy of injustice and futility and that Nice Guys Don't Win, then why bother to waste your talents writing at all?

And from a literary agent in Texas:

Why did you do that to me? In the end you could have had John O. try to fill the life of Ms. Arbruster, more empty than his own, go squirrelling off to Walden Pond or taking off for Europe to make a personal hunt for Brian. Instead you pulled a passive-aggression on me, and on all innocent readers who trusted you with our time. I did not know I owed you anything! You do not know me well enough to pull that kind of a trick!

I did not know Reginald Cook well enough either, yet he wrote the book's publisher as thoughtful a response to the book's conclusion as I received. The late “Doc” Cook, former director of The Bread Loaf School of English and a much beloved professor emeritus of American Literature at Middlebury College, was suffering himself when he wrote.

I've been having some physical difficulties. After five months of bothersome back and hip pains the diagnosis is not very good. It appears I have Paget's disease, a deterioration of the bone, and the best that seems possible is to arrest the progress of the deterioration. There is no known cure, so we must make the best of it. This is never a pleasant thought for one who likes to walk and see what is going on in the progress of the seasons.

From this perspective, Cook appraised Greeve under duress:

My only demurrer, which is wholly personal, concerns the protagonist's choice of options at the end. I don't think we can say that Hawley tried to shock us unduly. Yet, in a way, he does. Everything in John Greeve's life had indicated the capacity of a man to confront troublesome situations. Of course, he is not always able to resolve these with satisfaction. A case in point is his son's apparent alienation, and another is, of course, the fatefulness implicit in his wife's illness. In a nice phrase that I recall there is always “a mystery in motivation.” Hawley chooses to turn to this mystery in John Greeve's puzzling option; so, in the last letter, we are brought up short, but there is as much logic in this option as there might have been in John Greeve's sticking it through.

Other writers were generally satisfied with the book's grim conclusion. Poet Robert Wallace found it credible, if uncomfortable:

I was almost unable to believe Greeve's—
Greeve!
—suicide. Devastating. I wanted him to keep on, stern and graceful. But the ending's truth settled in, a bitter satisfaction in having been spared nothing, like ripples fading on disturbing water.

A woman from Gape Cod wrote suggesting that had her schoolmaster father-in-law not pulled out of the profession, his fate might have been no better than Greeve's.

. . . , the book reminded me of my father-in-law's experience at one of Connecticut's distinguished private schools way back in the early 1900s.

He spent most of his life as a bank teller, having indignantly refused to alter a failing grade for the son of one of the school's wealthy supporters. (I wish he had had your John Greeve as his headmaster—but then, he and John might have sunk together, no?)