The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (7 page)

The fraternity divided pretty much into two groups: the commerce-and-finance majors preparing for business careers or law school and those in the sciences aiming for medical school; there were a couple of engineers and, aside from us three, only a handful of liberal-arts students. Before emerging literary interests forged my alliance with Pete Tasch and Dick Minton, the Sammy whose company I’d most enjoyed was a C&F student, Dick Denholtz, a burly, assertive, dark-bearded boy whose jovial forcefulness I associated with those peculiarly Jewish energies that gave my Newark neighborhood its distinctive exuberance. Dick came from the Newark suburbs, and perhaps what accounted for our strong, short-lived affinity was that his family’s American roots were like my own in urban Jewish New Jersey. Together we could be the coarse and uninhibited performers who ignited whatever improvisational satire flared up in the living room after dinner; the Sammy musical skit for the interfraternity Mid-Term Jubilee—a telescoped version of
Guys and Dolls
improbably set at Bucknell—had been written and directed by Dick Denholtz and me and starred the two of us in raucous singing roles. Our spirited low-comedy concoctions—the kind that I had thought unlikely to find a responsive audience at the Theta Chi house—constituted SAM’s single, unmistakable strain of “Jewishness”: in the ways that the extroverts made fun of things, and the ways that the others found us funny, Sigma Alpha Mu came closest, in my estimation, to being a Jewish fraternity.

I never knew how the predominantly Protestant student body perceived the Jewish fraternity. Almost two-thirds of Bucknell’s students were from small towns in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, while the preponderance of Sammies came from New York—most of them from Westchester County and Long Island, a few from the city itself. Of course there must have been coeds whose families preferred that they not date Jews and who willingly obeyed, but as there were barely twenty Jewish women on the campus, and about eighty Jewish men, the dates I saw at Sammy parties were mostly gentiles, many from communities where there were probably no Jews at all. Over the years Sigma Alpha Mu had staunchly sought, and frequently won, the interfraternity academic trophy, and though there weren’t enough Sammies playing on varsity teams to give the house an athletic aura (in my time just two basketball players and two football players), the sensational
social
event of the early fifties was our brainchild. The nature of the event suggests (as did the brazen Jubilee
Guys and Dolls
) that going along like sensible assimilationists with traditional campus socializing conventions was not the primary motive of the Sammies’ leadership. The aim was to make a mark as a distinctively uninhibited, freewheeling fraternity.

The idea for the “Sand Blast” was not original to our chapter but borrowed from a fraternity at some larger university like Syracuse or Cornell, where the motif of an indoor winter beach party was supposed to have inspired a colossal success of just the sort the Bucknell Sammies hoped would elevate them to the forefront of campus popularity. The rugs and the furniture, the trophy cabinets and the pictures on the walls, were all to be removed from the downstairs rooms, and the first floor of the house—dining hall and two living rooms—was to be covered with about three inches of sand and planted with beach umbrellas. The floor would have to be braced from below to bear the weight of the sand; what’s more, after the sand dumped inside proved uninvitingly clammy, it had to be heated with strong lights in order to reduce the dampness, which had dangerously increased the weight of the load. Required dress was a bathing suit (in March), and the entire student body was invited. To spread the word, signs were posted all over the campus, and one afternoon a small plane flew low over the campus issuing the invitation through a loudspeaker.

During the planning stages I expressed uneasiness with the expense and the vastness of the effort and with what seemed a clownish misuse of the physical structure itself; though by no means an architectural showpiece, the building possessed its own lumpish, sturdy 1920s integrity and served, after all, as our collective home. I assured the brothers that I was as delighted as anyone by the prospect of producing this pornographic tableau within our familiar walls, and of course charmed by the idea of all those Bucknell coeds lying around on the sand in their two-piece swimsuits, openly contravening the strict dress code enforced by the Honor Council (a group of esteemed women students who tried infractions of conduct among their peers and handed out punishment when a coed was found, say, to be walking on a college path in a pair of Bermuda shorts half an inch shorter than prescribed). I was no enemy of the flesh, I said, but I reminded my brothers that when the party was over and our house, if it was still standing, had again become a home, we would be chewing sand in our mashed potatoes for semesters to come. I was roundly shouted down.

Among those few who argued that the plans for the Sand Blast were too grandiosely whatever—childish, ostentatious, imprudent, crazy—Tasch, Minton, and I were the least enamored of all; we were by then trying to put out four issues a year of a new magazine, inspired by Addison, Steele, and Harold Ross, and felt ourselves being swallowed up like extras in a show-biz production by Mike Todd.

Despite throngs of students who dropped their coats and shoes and scarves into a vast pile in the basement and then came upstairs to disperse themselves, nearly nude, across the indoor beach, the Sand Blast came off without a cave-in or an invasion by the university police. Had there been a chance of anything like an orgy developing, ninety percent (more!) of those who had showed up would have left for The Spit (as the crummy local movie house was known on campus) without even the intervention of the authorities, and I, along with my date from Chester, Pennsylvania, would probably have gone with them. Fantasy was of course less bridled than if the girls had arrived corsaged and swathed in taffeta, as they customarily did for a fraternity’s annual lavish party, but in the fifties Bucknell, with its freshman hazing and its compulsory chapel, its pinning ceremonies and heralded “Hello Spirit,” was still a long way from Berkeley, 1968, and Woodstock, 1970, let alone from the hanging gardens of Plato’s Retreat.

The strain of Dadaesque Jewish showmanship that manifested itself a decade later in cultural-political deviants and cunningly anarchic entrepreneurs—mischief-makers as diverse as Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, the Chicago Seven defendants; William Kunstler, the Chicago Seven lawyer; Tuli Kupferberg, the Fug poet and a leading contributor to
Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts;
Hillard Elkins, the producer of
Oh, Calcutta!;
Al Goldstein, the publisher of
Screw;
not to mention Allen Ginsberg, Bella Abzug, Lenny Bruce, Norman Mailer, and me—was hardly what was germinating at the Sammy Sand Blast. Though a spark of defiant impudence had perhaps ignited the first fraternity meeting where so outlandish an idea was considered seriously, the stunt was engineered finally by conventional, law-abiding fraternity boys in training for secure careers in orderly middle-class American communities. The Sand Blast’s underlying erotic motive may have spilled out more playfully, with more imaginative flair, than what fired the campus panty raid later that year, but what prevailed was the poolside spirit of the suburban country club.

Actually, the mob of freshman and sophomore men that came surging off the Hill one April night—hoping to break in on the nightgowned coeds and steal their underwear—produced a far more orgiastic version than the Sammies had of a Sadean scenario. The exhibitionistic extravaganza plotted and bankrolled by the socially competitive Sammies, though as bold a challenge to standards of communal decency as any mounted in Lewisburg during my years there, had, in fact, less to do with the suppressed longings that would culminate in the sexual uprising of the sixties than did the rowdy testicularity of those spontaneous spring panty raids that seemed meaningless to me at the time.

*   *   *

“L
ET’S START A MAGAZINE
 … fearlessly obscene.…” The mockingly inspirational line was from E. E. Cummings, whose poetry I’d begun reading (and reciting to friends) under the influence of Robert Maurer, a young American-literature instructor in the English department, who was doing a Ph.D. dissertation on Cummings and whose wife, Charlotte, had been William Shawn’s secretary at the
New Yorker
before marrying Bob and arriving with him in Lewisburg. With an M.A. from Montclair State College and his incomplete Wisconsin Ph.D., Bob was probably being paid about half as much as my father had earned struggling to support us on an insurance agent’s salary, and one of the first things that I came to admire about the Maurers was their pennilessness; it seemed to confer an admirable independence from convention without having turned them, tiresomely, into fifties bohemians. Our bohemian—or the closest you came to one in Lewisburg—was the artist-in-residence Bruce Mitchell, who taught painting classes, loved bop, drank some, and had a wife who wore long peasant skirts. The Maurers seemed to me free (in the biggest and best sense), levelheaded Americans, respectable enough but unconcerned with position and appearances. They had their books and records, their old car, and a little brick house rather bare of furniture; Bob’s droopy old jacket was patched at the elbows for other than ornamental reasons—yet what they didn’t own they didn’t appear to miss. They made being poor look so easy that I decided to follow their example and become poor myself someday, either as an English professor like Bob or as a serious writer who was so good that his books made no money. Bob, a butcher’s son, was very much a Depression-honed city boy, originally from my part of industrial New Jersey. He was so lanky and small-headed, however, that in his oval spectacles and fraying clothes he looked more like an educated hayseed, some string-bean farm boy who had struggled semiconsciously toward freedom in a Sherwood Anderson novel. His direct manner, too, seemed to be born of the open spaces, and some twenty years later, after he had got fed up with teaching and had quit his professorship at Antioch, he earned his living writing for
Current Biography
and
Field and Stream.
He wound up, all on his own and seemingly quite happy, coaching boys’ baseball for the Peace Corps in the wilds of Chile. He died of a heart attack in 1983, at the age of sixty-two. At his funeral his son, Harry, who’d been born in Lewisburg while I was a student there, read aloud from Bob’s favorite Hemingway story, “Big Two-Hearted River.”

Charlotte had her own brand of unadorned down-to-earthness, which filtered attractively through a faint Florida accent; she was psychologically more delicate than Bob and from a slightly more prosperous background, and to me her unorthodox Antioch College education and her time at the
New Yorker
made her seem terrifically urbane. She had a prognathous, fresh kind of freckled good looks that was as appealing as her speech, but it wasn’t until I’d graduated from college and spent a week with the Maurers in their primitive cabin on the bluff of a tiny Maine island that I allowed myself, on the walks we took together, to fall for my professor’s wife. At eighteen I was thrilled enough just to have been befriended by them and to be asked to their house occasionally on Saturday nights to hear their E. E. Cummings record and drink their Gallo wine or to listen to Bob talk about growing up gentile in the working-class town of Roselle, New Jersey, during the twenties and thirties.

I talked freely to them about my own upbringing, a twenty-minute drive from Bob’s old family house in Roselle, which bordered on Elizabeth, where my mother’s immigrant parents had settled separately, as young people, at the start of the century. Along with Jack and Joan Wheatcroft, another young English-department couple who soon became confidants and close friends, the Maurers must have been the first gentiles to whom I’d ever given an insider’s view of my Jewish neighborhood, my family, and our friends. When I jumped up from the table to mimic my more colorful relations, I found they were not merely entertained but interested, and they encouraged me to tell more about where I was from. Nonetheless, so long as I was earnestly reading my way from Cynewulf to
Mrs. Dalloway
—and so long as I was enrolled at a college where the five percent of Jewish students left no mark on the prevailing undergraduate style—it did not dawn on me that these anecdotes and observations might be made into literature, however fictionalized they’d already become in the telling. Thomas Wolfe’s exploitation of Asheville or Joyce’s of Dublin suggested nothing about focusing this urge to write on my own experience. How could Art be rooted in a parochial Jewish Newark neighborhood having nothing to do with the enigma of time and space or good and evil or appearance and reality?

The imitations with which I entertained the Maurers and the Wheatcrofts were of somebody’s shady uncle the bookie and somebody’s sharpie son the street-corner bongo player and of the comics Stinky and Shorty, whose routines I’d learned at the Empire Burlesque in downtown Newark. The stories I told them were about the illicit love life of our cocky, self-important neighbor the tiny immigrant Seltzer King and the amazing appetite—for jokes, pickles, pinochle, everything—of our family friend the 300-pound bon vivant Apple King, while the stories I
wrote,
set absolutely nowhere, were mournful little things about sensitive children, sensitive adolescents, and sensitive young men crushed by coarse life. The stories were intended to be “touching”; without entirely knowing it, I wanted through my fiction to become “refined,” to be elevated into realms unknown to the lower-middle-class Jews of Leslie Street, with their focus on earning a living and raising a family and trying occasionally to have a good time. To prove in my earliest undergraduate stories that I was a nice Jewish boy would have been bad enough; this was worse—proving that I was a nice boy, period. The Jew was nowhere to be seen; there were no Jews in the stories, no Newark, and not a sign of comedy—the last thing I wanted to do was to hand anybody a laugh in literature. I wanted to show that life was sad and poignant, even while I was experiencing it as heady and exhilarating; I wanted to demonstrate that I was “compassionate,” a totally harmless person.