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Authors: Daniel Menaker

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BOOK: My Mistake
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“Not that I know of,” I say.

“This is just one of the problems with people who don't go to church,” Dr. Roody says.

 

When I go to Swarthmore College to be interviewed, the Admissions person asks me if I know where I rank in my high-school class. I almost say “Third”—which is what I tell other, less official adults if the subject comes up, or if I somehow manage to make it come up. But at the last second, I remember to tell the truth: “Fifth.”

Does everyone tend to steal, cheat, and inflate this way, I wonder. What is wrong with me, I also wonder. I will never be able to answer that question fully, though I do later learn that my family's odd dynamics no doubt contributed to my dishonesties. I am talking about my parents' unequal marriage: my father's serious insecurities, my mother's psychologically seductive nature, her intellectual superiority. These dynamics lead me to shy away from real intimacy—especially after tragedy strikes—which in many cases will hurt others badly. I'm grateful that I don't seem to have passed such defects or emotional blockages on to my son and daughter, Will and Elizabeth. A little iconoclasm, yes. But certain symptoms of poor character which it has taken me a lifetime to try to repair? No. Knock wood.

When I apply to Swarthmore, I make my parents promise not to pull the one or two strings they might pull with the administration there. When I'm admitted, I ask them if they kept their promise. They admit that they didn't.

 

 

 

Part II

Regional Qualities; The New Sir

 

 

 

 

Seventeen to twenty-one

 

I wanted to go to Dartmouth, where Mike went, but my parents wanted me to go to Swarthmore, if I got in, because it was academically even more distinguished and intense, and because my father met my mother when he lived on the Swarthmore campus and she was at Bryn Mawr, nearby. Bryn Mawr ran in her family—three of her four sisters went there and majored in Classics. My mother will be able to read Greek and Latin into her eighties. The fourth sister went to Radcliffe, and my grandmother considered this to be prodigal. In the thirties, Swarthmore's faculty included a lot of radical professors, and my father, who had dropped out of Cornell after a year or two, felt at home there. He worked for a furniture company in Philadelphia called Charak, to this day in business, still well known. He sold furniture but also designed unique pieces, a few of which I still have, including a long, elegant drop-leaf mahogany dining table that now supports the flat-screen TV in our apartment, above which hangs a Reginald Marsh painting, a gift to my mother from the Ashcan artist, who sometimes did covers for
Fortune
, and who, I believe, had an affair with my mother.

So I go to Swarthmore.

The genuine part of this college's humility proceeds from its Quaker origins. Founded in 1864, the first coed college boarding institution in America, it was a big athletic school for a while, playing football and winning against such behemoths as Ohio State. Then a new President, Frank Aydelotte, who had been impressed by the seminar system at Oxford, instituted the Honors Program for juniors and seniors. Swarthmore's intellectual reputation grew quickly after that and has remained very high since.

The college has a great deal of money, Quaker money, which provides an excellent rationale for students to protest the low wages it pays its maids and cafeteria and grounds employees. These protests seem like training wheels for such impending national movements as Students for a Democratic Society. The college is even more tireless than most institutions in its fund-raising efforts. When I look at the size of its endowment, it sometimes seems that Swarthmore is a bank with students.

The annoying quietude of the Society of Friends is most succinctly expressed in some kind of student-faculty meeting in which a professor responds to an emotional plea for more liberal coed visitation rules, “Everything in moderation.” The student mutters, “Yeah, except moderation.” (Can you imagine? Men and women are allowed to visit each other in the dorms at Swarthmore only for a few hours on Saturday and Sunday, with the door open. A dean says, “There is no biological reason for college men and women to have sex.”)

Balancing that quiet Quaker gentility is Aunt Jane, one of my mother's four sisters, one of the Bryn Mawrers, who lives in Philadelphia and married a Quaker doctor named Maurice McPhedran, converted, and took up
thee
ing and
thou
ing. She once said to a social lingerer: “Thee may stay or thee may leave, but don't ooze!” She sometimes has the sort of sharp proverbial speech I associate with Benjamin Franklin.

A small, self-involved college, Swarthmore tends to flatten outside-world disparities in wealth and prominence. In a radical way, we are all the same. We believe—so wrongly—that we have left our families behind.

I just work so hard. At one point, when I'm a junior, I calculate that I study an average of seven hours every day. The school plays into the obsessiveness in my character and intensifies the competitive legacy of my relationship with my brother. I probably would be doing better, in a number of psychological ways, in a bigger place, one with more air, more students, a stronger relationship to the world at large. Swarthmore broadens my mind vastly. But it narrows me, too.

We live on an island whose population has a kind of mortality rate of twenty-five per cent a year. I look at my dorm room and think, I'll be gone and someone else, maybe with a slide rule and lederhosen, or a clarinet to drive his dorm mates crazy, or with Escher prints everywhere, or with crossed lacrosse sticks hanging up, or with a picture of his girlfriend at Antioch, or with barbells, or with a shrine to Buddha, will be take my place. More than most, I think, I feel the great sadness of undergraduate temporariness, a microcosm of the Great Temporariness, which has frightened me since I was four and comprehended the irremediable deadness of a dead squirrel.

In the cloud chamber of these brief college lives, men grow beards and then shave half of them off. A black woman may wear a turban or a peasant blouse or both. Two friendly subcultures—jocks and frat guys on the one hand and bohemians on the other—look at each other in mild incomprehension across a small social fissure. The girls coalesce into two parallel groups, preppy and bohemian. But enough of us fit into none of these groupings, or any other, to make the place feel pretty free-form. How could I possibly categorize George—quiet, mild-mannered, and undistinctive in every superficial way—who graduates in three years and goes on to the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton? Shortly before he leaves Swarthmore, he tries to explain to me how he reads equations, the way you are reading this sentence. “A kind of grammar,” he says. Or John, who wears a black leather jacket and plays the banjo, rides a motorcycle, and knits during poetry class? (The professor, Mrs. Wright, admits to gender prejudice and makes him stop.) Or Roger, who has an aristocrat's lisp and a shock of dirty-blond hair but sells hero sandwiches in the dorms at night? Or Lucinda, who conducts a psych experiment of getting a few volunteers to wear glasses that turn everything upside-down for three or four days, to find out if upside-down will eventually become right-side-up, and how long that will take.

A Swarthmore senior—the niece of a famous writer—tall and beautiful and shy and brilliant, is going out with a young, tall, blond, brilliant British philosophy professor of renown. With bedazzled freshman eyes, I occasionally see them driving around the campus in his Porsche convertible. But Swarthmore isn't the kind of place that draws celebrities' kids. They go to the Ivy League or to universities on the West Coast—Berkeley, USC, UCLA. But we do have the two Kelly girls—daughters of Gene and, better yet, Walt.

One class behind me at Swarthmore is a guy named Greg, one of the original leaders of SDS. He tells me and some other friends that when he was a little boy, his parents called his penis his “dignity.” We're all drunk, at the Tenement, an empty loft across the town line in Morton—Swarthmore is a dry town—which some seniors have rented so that we can go there and drink and dance to Ray Charles records. We all then confess our own parent-inflicted childhood nicknames for private parts and practically fall down laughing. You can stay sitting up, because no, I'm not telling you mine. But how appropriate “dignity” is for the member of a political idealist!

If Swarthmore gives me anything besides a superb liberal-arts education, enhanced academic OCD, and two doomed romances, it gives me a few wonderful lifetime friends and restores my childhood love of folk music, after Nyack's rock-and-roll explosion. (I have a doo-wop radio show on the college's station, which has so little range that you have to rig an antenna to a radiator to receive it at all, and even then you can tune in only within a radius of a few hundred yards of the signal.) Pete Seeger comes to campus and talks, at lunch, about the benefits of outhouses. Who remembers Bonnie Dobson, Canada's pleasant and low-voltage answer to Joan Baez? Blind Reverend Gary Davis sniffs the air as a girl goes by and says, “You lookin'
mighty
good today, child.” Ramblin' Jack Elliott, born Elliot Adnopoz, a Brooklyn Jew. The Greenbriar Boys, for whom, for a short time, Bob Dylan is the opening act. The performers include Doc Watson, best flat-picker ever. Ralph Rinzler, a Swarthmore graduate who went on to become the Smithsonian Institution's main folk-music guy.

Phil Ochs comes to the college's annual Folk Festival. Only a few people deeply in the know go to see him, plus a few more happeners-by. The happeners-by get so worked up about Ochs's bright-sounding guitar work and his Klaxon voice and politically defiant lyrics that they start running out of Clothier Hall and grabbing people off the paths and dragging them in to listen. About fifteen minutes after the performance starts, nearly a thousand people fill the place.

We try to latch on to all the roots we can find as we dig our way out of the conventions of the Fifties—Appalachian folk music, the blues, rock and roll, ragas, calypso, gospel. Nerds with slide rules play dulcimers and flail away on banjos and listen to Olatunji, Odetta, and Ochs. Ugly boys from Penn who have learned to play the guitar
really
well come out to Swarthmore and stand and sing on the steps of Parrish Hall, the main administration building, hoping to get laid by one of the free-spirited bohemiennes.

Marijuana for the middle class is just beginning. We disdain it, until we don't—which happens after graduation for most of the kids in my class, '63. But by the time I'm a senior, the Sixties are under way, with their mixture of rebellious music, radical politics, and drugs—serious stuff, but also stuff that socially awkward boys who don't play the guitar can use to get laid.

But my mini-generation, for which there are no letters, no nicknames, marches into Swarthmore studiously, wearing plaid shirts, khakis or jeans (only two brands—Levi's and Lee—and one style each), and sneakers, the ensemble often so ragged that a dress rule is instituted in the dining hall and I resign from the Student Judiciary Committee over this fascistic, anti-populist outrage.

But most of my energy goes to academic work. The professors are excellent. Samuel Hynes teaches the seminar in modern poetry. He flew fighter-bomber missions in the Second World War and by God, if he can like poetry, so can I. He must be one of the best undergraduate humanities professors in America. He starts a discussion of Yeats's “Leda and the Swan”—“A sudden blow: the great wings beating still”—by asking, “Where
are
we here?”

Then there is Hedley Rhys, who teaches the Baroque Painting seminar. A Welshman, precise and mannerly, an expert on Maurice Prendergast, he takes us on a field trip to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and when we emerge from the Renaissance and begin to look at the Baroque canvases, he asks, “What's different?” and like the child I still am in many ways, I say, “They're so much bigger!” and he is very pleased. He is also an expert in American accents. He goes around our seminar room—seven students? eight?—at the beginning of the semester and identifies each one accurately. “You're from the Midwest—Ohio, I think,” he might say, “but as you're a senior here, you're beginning to pick up some Philadelphia. Be careful.” He doesn't get me at first. Then he says, “Say these three words.” I remember only one of them: “chocolate.” Like the New Yorker I am, I say “chawcolate.” He gets New York on this second try, and from that day forward I say “chahcolate.”

There is Monroe Beardsley, a small, reedy-voiced philosopher who has written a book called
Aesthetics
which I later come to understand is still the subject's bible. I and thousands of other Swarthmoreans learn about his three measures of artistic achievement, which exist in a wonderful kind of tension with one another: unity, complexity, intensity. About “regional qualities.” About how aesthetic value can never be less than zero—there is no bad art, strictly speaking. And we go out into the world with a deepened understanding of the organizing and emotional power of the human mind and imagination, and a greater capacity to see, hear, read, and comprehend. And be caught up and moved.

BOOK: My Mistake
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