New Moon (50 page)

All of this was spelled out incontrovertibly in issue after issue of the
Worker.

“What takes the cake,” Paul pronounced with a whimsical shrug as we crossed Route 9 en route to dinner at Valentine, “is that even at our fair, supposedly liberal institution, most of the peons fall for the dog-and-pony show. What do you think happened to you in James? Indoctrinated zombies imitating other indoctrinated zombies!”

I was ripe for radicalization. My father had unmasked himself as a prototypical capitalist—greedy, anti-union, contemptuous of others, philandering and abusive as well. But it wasn’t just him. Seemingly the whole generation of my parents was as blind to our nation’s exploitation of the goods and labor of Third World countries as they were to the atrocity of Hiroshima. These items weren’t even on their daily drawing board, and they would have considered anyone who gave them more than a moment’s consideration a communist.

Those first months at Phi Psi changed my political as well as my aesthetic philosophy, my baseline sense of the world. I saw the James Hall harriers, the Miami Beach playboys, and the opulent teenagers at Grossinger’s as oblivious agents (and dupes) of the same unspoken conspiracy. Of course I had been uncomfortable all my life. But it hadn’t just been personal madness or trauma. I had been raised in decadence and corruption too. My parents, my counselors, my bunkmates, even many of my friends were bullies, mindless exploiters of the weak and disenfranchised. Meanwhile Tripp was exposing most of the thinkers and novelists I had admired as mediocre poseurs and formulaic intellects.

I was beginning to see a world beyond Grossinger’s as my fallback identity, though it would be years before I gave it a form or figured out how to commit to it. Our lives mattered! They weren’t just foils or riddles with clues. They mattered for themselves. Otherwise,
“ … dead or dying … ”
for sure.

Paul was a member of the House jug band, a clique that sat around his suite many evenings dialing in WWVA, Wheeling, West Virginia, a country-and-western clear channel, and joining the jamboree. Even Jeff approved of that, switching to bluegrass on his guitar:
“Will the circle be unbroken, / bye and bye, Lord, bye and bye…. ”

“It doesn’t get any better than that,” he said, as faraway fiddles, autoharps, and mandolins disseminated a sepulcher sound.

“They might be right-wing hillbillies,” Paul guffawed, “but they’ve got the rebel spirit.”

“Moonshine
is
politics,” Jeff effused. He was right. I couldn’t imagine anything more antithetical to Amherst than the hayseed preacher introducing the next song.

During Phi Psi’s public meetings, with Jeff’s encouragement I took to debating some of the stodgier seniors, once by prepared doggerel as he openly applauded my line about a toilet that hadn’t been flushed for many moons. Then he remarked with a chortle, “You guys have been nailed by a mere whelp.”

I proposed that we scrap our vestigial link to the fraternity system and go it alone as an independent enclave. “We’re just a bad imitation Phi Gam,” I declared. The seniors shouted me down, while Jeff strummed his guitar as a strophe between rounds.

Yet I got traction. For years on Thursday nights Phi Psi had provided free jelly and glazed doughnuts and apple cider for its members. Now we threw “coffee hour” open to the Four College community. Soon we were running poetry readings and forums for an audience of townies and non–Phi Psi students, even a few attendees from UMass on the other side of town.

Virtually every night Paul and I trooped to Valentine together, perfect company for each other on the topic of magical girls and unconscionable men. Paul had his own Betsy—a co-ed of the same name from Bennington whom he had met during the previous spring break at a work project in Springfield—they had sheet-rocked and painted the inside of a ghetto house together. Afterwards she had driven him and a friend back to Amherst. All last summer in New York they had, if not “dated,” at least hung out. But now she was being pursued by a married grocery heir named Huntington
Hartford—innuendos of my father and Helene. Her latest message to Paul was that their worlds were too different for romance.

“After all,” he said, chuckling, “I’m the son of two people working in the welfare department of New York City, and I was almost tarred and feathered out of college freshman year for distributing
Socialist Worker
pamphlets at dinner. She’s peerage with a social conscience, slumming.”

So I wasn’t the only freshman who had brought the wrath of jockdom on himself. In fact, Paul had heard about my “room burning” and written a letter to the campus newspaper at the time. “I accused the college, meaning the moneyed alumni, of utilizing students as their accomplices,” he recalled, “while wielding frat power to enforce their oligarchy.” I had missed that issue because I had been visiting Swarthmore, so he pulled it out of a drawer for me; his column had been sardonically retitled “Wasteland of Hypercriticism?”

During the following weeks we filled in our lives for each other. With the attentiveness of a Psych major he heard out my accounts of my dual family. Then, as I offered a blow-by-blow rendering of my summer at Grossinger’s, he whistled and said, “Boy, your father sounds like a real winner. Just the type we imagine running corporations. It’s almost too good to be true.”

I addressed his own vicissitudes by tarot, dream analysis, and freelance surrealism. When he was about to call his Betsy for a date, I suggested he go there by balloon, taking off from the Phi Psi yard, passing over the mountains, landing, visiting, and returning in similar fashion.

“Balloons are cool,” he laughed. “I like the idea of going by balloon. Or even better: I could charter a blimp. Take that, Huntington Hartford!”

When Bennington Betsy responded by suggesting they rejoin the work gang in Springfield and repair some more houses, he was deflated. “You did go by balloon,” I told him. “Now you’re back. Your next move is to hire a private army to storm the grocery chain with bows, arrows, and catapults. Phi Psi could provide water-balloon support. We could flood them out.”

His roommate Toby thought this was hysterical. “I can just picture the ice-cream cartons floating down the aisles and everyone looking bewildered. That’d get rid of our turkey image on campus fast.”

Paul glanced quizzically at me, then said, “You’re pretty good at waking me up and making me look at myself.”

“What do you expect?” I half-shouted. “I’ve been telling myself the same stories all my life. I’d like to send that same army down to Florida when they’re done and blast all the crystal and silver on Pine Tree Drive into the sea.”

Paul’s motto was “the greatest good for the greatest number,” and I soon adopted it as my new credo for myself. In early October I startled everyone in Phi Psi by proposing at a House meeting that the whole fraternity transfer to Cal/Berkeley en masse as a political statement. I argued so persuasively that Paul and I were put in charge of a steering committee to draft a letter of application. Most of the members signed it, though only as a symbolic gesture against Amherst College. It was doubtful that any of them would go to California in the unlikely event we were accepted.

Paul and I were intoxicated with our plan. We fantasized an article in
Time Magazine
explaining that the artists, writers, musicians, and many of the best students were fed up with Amherst’s elitist social system and consumerist education, its gang rapes and book-burnings. Yes, there was a parody book-burning at one of the fraternities. The event may have been lampoonery, but the books and fire were real.

Tripp was thoroughly disgusted. “It’s bullshit … the wrong issue. You don’t want to have to do with
any
college. They’re all bunk. Why draw the line at Amherst?”

But I was stubborn and zealous. I even took the step of signing up to make a farewell speech in Chapel. Required morning chapels, like those at Horace Mann, were not religious services but occasions for the community to gather and hear speakers of different persuasions, much as at a New England town meeting. When my time came I stood at the podium and, drawing on my newfound pluck, attacked the “cowboy cool” world in front of President Plimpton and an array of students and faculty. I satirized Amherst’s phony critical intelligence, its gentleman jocks whom I characterized as
provincial, anti-intellectual, and anti-women, contributing to violence and exploitation.

In retrospect, my speech reads like liberal clichés and adolescent utopianism—a disappointment to my memory of the charge I felt running through me at the time. Its sentiments were far less heartfelt and singular than those I had expressed two years earlier at Horace Mann. Yet I thought of myself as awakened, liberated. I wanted to re-cast “Elmer the Cow” as spokesman for the masses.

I compared the local milieu to Horace Mann, where Bob Alpert stood against the war-makers and Clinton directed our attention to the veil of life and death. Then I invoked Swarthmore, where, I said, with stagey elegance, “Girls and boys sat under trees dropping flower petals into one another’s philosophy books.” I closed by quoting the dying Malone.

I hadn’t earned the voice I spoke in. A novice politico riding borrowed enthusiasm, I must have seemed naïve and churlish to most of the audience. Yet I captured an energy, a mood that was prevalent if indeterminate and unarticulated at the time. The speech was well received in some quarters, and I picked up many new friends as well as raised Phi Psi’s profile as Revolution Central.

After my freshman-year buddy Marshall Bloom asked me for a copy, without forewarning he printed it up and distributed it on campus—an imperious deed blamed on me to this day. Soon after, President Plimpton invited me into his office to discuss the matter. He said that I had raised a number of good points, ones that were being considered by the administration, and he hoped I would stay and contribute to the college’s transition. He thought it would be character-building and offered his assistance.

“My door is open,” he said. “Just come by.”

I thanked him, but I imagined then that I had an appointment with destiny. I didn’t see how transferring was as much a fantasy as interstellar travel. I never pictured what it would be like to enter a large public university on the other side of the country.

One morning a group of us stood on Paul’s balcony when a row of grade-schoolers passed with their teacher. “Look at the men up there,” pointed one little boy.

“Ooo,” shuddered Toby as he giggled, “he called us men.” But that’s what we were.

With the freedom to choose most of my own courses for the first time that fall, I felt like a pilgrim in a treasure trove: the book-sized Amherst catalogue with its pages upon pages of intellectual adventures organized by department. I expected college life to improve, but the fates continued to confound me at every turn.

I signed up for creative writing and found myself in a class that so little resembled Mr. Ervin’s it might just as well have been Martian cribbage. It was taught by an aged poet named Rolfe Humphries. In the early part of the century he had been Amherst’s only football All-American and, unknown to me before I enrolled, he relished filling the roster with current players because, as he put it, athletes were the most disciplined writers. Much of the team was in the course to pick up a gut “A.”

Humphries disliked my work as much as it was possible to dislike anything politely. “You’ve got a lot of succulent imagery,” he jibed, “but I doubt there’s any meat on the bones.” Everyone snickered in solidarity against an upstart too big for his britches.

After a while I stopped reading my work aloud and simply listened to him adulate ballads of the locker room and fine-tune students’ translations of French surrealists.

My Shakespeare teacher, Mr. Baird, was a grandiose replica of Mr. Metcalf. At the first class he told us that all students were ignoramuses and he hadn’t heard an original idea in forty years. Then he confined our written assignments to single paragraphs cobbled in class: “The less of your idiocies I have to endure, the less cranky I’ll be when grading you.” He also delegated us passages from
Hamlet
to memorize and then tested us on our recall. I couldn’t resist commenting, as I handed in my transcriptions: “Sorry I didn’t think of anything original.” He chased me out of the room with a quavering fist. Probably just high theater, but my stunt made the campus rounds.

My European literature course had a spectacular reading list (Camus, Sartre, Malraux, E. M. Forster—stuff which I had looked forward to for years), but another arrogant, self-important teacher,
a younger man named Guttmann, wrote “No!” all over my papers and gave me D’s on every one. My formulations of symbols and cosmic mysteries were rejected in single red slashes, as though no further explanation were necessary. Still I refused to tailor my writing to his pedant’s reduction of art to sociology. Freshman year had burned grade consciousness out of me. I thought of myself as a rebel in search of greater truth. Forster’s soliloquy in
Howards End
defined me to myself:

“Only connect!… Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.”

“Only connect” became my adage alongside “the greatest good for the greatest number” and words of the indefatigable Beckett: “I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows.”

My other subjects were psychology, geology, and American Studies. Unfortunately, Introductory Psychology had nothing to do with Freud. It was mainly statistical. We read books on sensation, perception, and memory, and, for a term paper, were asked to make up our own personality tests. I devised a scale of “salty,” “sandy,” and “oinky” through which I proposed an evolution of consciousness based on Abraham Maslow’s spectrum of self-actualization (its ninety calibers included amethyst-salty, strawberry-sandy, papoose-oinky, tobacco-saltless, cellophane-sandless, buckle-oinkless, etc.). It was the same romanticism that Tripp and Marx decried. But I couldn’t thrash through my ritual coronation of Betsy to anything more cogent, so I wallowed in its preciousness. It was emotionally all I had, and it kept me going.