The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (8 page)

In those first undergraduate stories I managed to extract from Salinger a very cloying come-on and from the young Capote his gossamer vulnerability, and to imitate badly my titan, Thomas Wolfe, at the extremes of self-pitying self-importance. Those stories were as naïve as a student’s can be, and I was only lucky that I was on a campus like Bucknell where there wasn’t an intellectual faction to oppose my minute coterie, for its members would have found in my fiction a very soft satiric target. Then again, if there had been some sort of worthy competition around, I might not have produced these unconscious personal allegories to begin with. Allegorical representation is what they were—the result of having found myself far more of a cuckoo in the Bucknell nest than I’d been even as an adolescent on Leslie Street, let alone at Newark Rutgers, where, as a lower-middle-class boy from an ambitious minority in pursuit of a better life, I’d briefly played out the postimmigrant romance of higher education.

I don’t believe I ever found myself out of place just because I was a Jew, though I was not unaware, especially when I was still fresh from home, that I
was
a Jew at a university where the bylaws stipulated that more than half the Board of Trustees had to be members of the Baptist Church, where chapel attendance was required of lowerclassmen, and where the one extracurricular organization for which most Bucknellians seemed to have membership cards was the Christian Association. But then, after only a little while in SAM I felt no closer to my fraternity brothers than I had to those Christian Association members who had lived in my dormitory and spent a part of each evening playing touch football in the corridor outside the room where I was concocting the symbols for my stories of victimized refinement. Like the overprotected young victims in those first short stories, who stood for something like the life of the mind, I was turning out to be too sensitive, though not to religious so much as to spiritual differences at a university where the dominant tone seemed to emanate from the large undergraduate population enrolled in the commerce-and-finance program—students preparing to take ordinary workaday jobs in the booming postwar business world, which not only my literary ideals but also my loosely held suspicion of the profit motive had pitted me against since I’d begun to read the New York paper
P.M.,
when I was fourteen. The courses to which I was drawn typified everything that the marketplace deemed worthless, and yet here I was, living among its most enthusiastic adherents—the unrebellious sons and daughters of status-quo America at the dawn of the Eisenhower era—certain that mind and not money was what gave life meaning, and studying, in dead earnest, Literary Criticism, Modern Thought, Advanced Shakespeare, and Aesthetics.

In September of 1952, when, as juniors, I took over as editor in chief of
Et Cetera
and Pete Tasch as managing editor, the Maurers became our advisers. Bob was listed as an official literary adviser, and Charlotte became an unofficial adviser. Her influence on the opening pages of each issue would have been apparent to anyone familiar with the
New Yorker’s
“Talk of the Town.” Our own “Talk of the Town” was a two-page miscellany of putatively witty reportage, called “Transit Lines,” a heading we thought nicely appropriate on a campus where an engineering student was always out on one of the walkways sighting through a telescope. Stories began in the first person plural, invariably with a tone of droll breeziness that the editor considered urbane: “When we heard about the new dormitory inspection policy (men living on The Hill will have their rooms inspected every week by the ROTC department) we were prepared to see, lining the campus, signs screaming, ‘Down with the Military’ or ‘Keep the Fascista from Our Rooms!…’” “The other day we purchased a genuine undyed mouton pelt for the ridiculously low sum of five dollars.…” “One of our friends, a sociology major, if you’re interested, told us a story the other afternoon. It seems that he took the afternoon train out of New York on Sunday.…” Some pieces were deft and readable, others oozed with archness, and none accorded with Cummings’s prescription for a magazine “fearlessly obscene.”

The obscenity around, in “our” judgment, was the weekly student newspaper, the
Bucknellian,
to which
Et Cetera
hoped to propose a sophisticated alternative. Little more than a decade later, student dissidents would display their defiance of officially sanctioned campus values by promoting, in their publications, bad taste and outlaw behavior; in the early fifties those of us keen to exhibit our superior wit and offhand charm in these “Transit Lines” pieces were indeed the Bucknell dissidents, and yet it was purportedly to raise, not to drag down, the tone of the place that we struck our
New Yorker
ish poses. Realistically, nobody working for the magazine expected it to do anything other than make tangible the differences between the collective student sensibility and our own as it was quickly altering under the influence of the English professors whose favorites we were and who were teaching us to enjoy using a word like “sensibility.” But to me, at least, these differences seemed to reflect the national division between the civilized minority who had voted for Adlai Stevenson and the philistine majority who had overwhelmingly elected Eisenhower President.

The day after Stevenson was beaten, I stood up in Professor Harry Garvin’s English 257 (Shakespeare: Intensive study of a small number of plays) and, under the pretext of explicating a passage about the mob in
Coriolanus,
excoriated the American public (and, by implication, the Bucknell student body, which had solidly favored Eisenhower) for having chosen a war hero over an intellectual statesman. Even though his gaze suggested that I was wildly out of order, Garvin, perhaps because of his own similar disappointment, let me go on to the end uninterrupted, while a majority of the Shakespeare students registered either amusement or boredom with my tirade. Absolutely certain that I was right and that a moronic America was our fate, I sat down thinking that despite the very obvious classroom consensus,
they
were the ones who were the dangerous fools.

This outburst aside, it had never occurred to me to make a case for Stevenson on the editorial page of
Et Cetera
when my first issue appeared at the height of the presidential campaign in October of 1952. The magazine had “higher” purposes,
literary
purposes; besides, it was not the custom in those days for student publications to support candidates for public office. A year later the magazine did publish a page-long “prose poem” that I’d written over the summer vacation, a monologue by an unnamed coward too prudent to speak out against McCarthyism, which provoked no response at all, so it may well have been that an
Et Cetera
editorial supporting Stevenson wouldn’t have bothered anyone. But at the time, had I even thought of writing one, I would have assumed that it would violate the policy of the university Board of Publications, with which I was soon to collide anyway. I sported a Stevenson button in Republican Lewisburg and later, during the McCarthy hearings, I would come down off the Hill to the Maurer house at lunchtime and, according to a recollection of Charlotte Maurer’s, stalk up and down the living room, glowering, while Bob and I listened to the proceedings on the radio. That was as far, however, as my political activism went.

The cadences of the editorial that I did publish in October 1952 bespeak, alas, the influence of the “March of Time” on my polemical style; in retrospect the editorial looks a little like the budding of an incipient Kennedy speech writer, concluding as it does with the line “Let our generation not wait too long.” Written as an elegiac plea to my contemporaries to abandon their “high school values,” their “football-clothes-car-date-acne-conscious brains,” it was, in fact, a covertly condescending, less simpering version of my allegories about displacement. The editorial made the case, however naïvely, for a kind of robust, responsible maturity that was an advance over the prissy tenderness with which the author of the fiction had chosen to associate his manliness.

The editorial of the midyear issue was tame and informative and meant to be charming—a history, beginning in 1870, of the rise and fall of the Bucknell literary magazines that preceded
Et Cetera.
A laconic last paragraph quoted “Scott Fitzgerald.” “What is it Scott Fitzgerald said? ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’” The third issue, out in the spring of 1953, when I had just turned twenty, made me notorious, or as notorious as one could be who wore dirty white bucks and was on the dean’s list; it defined me (perhaps in my own mind, primarily) as the college’s critical antagonist rather than a boy who secretly still possessed enough of his own “high school values” to want to be popular and admired. Since the
Bucknellian
exemplified for me and my
Et Cetera
friends the lowbrow campus enthusiasms by which we felt engulfed, I put aside the self-protective writing postures with which I had kept my sense of estrangement in check and launched a heavily sarcastic attack on the banality of the weekly paper and its editor, Barbara Roemer, a well-liked, very amiable young woman from Springfield, New Jersey, who was the vice-president of the Tri Delt sorority and the captain of the cheerleading squad. As it was only the year before—while still a Sammy with a social identity outside the literary clique—that I’d unsuccessfully dated two pretty, clean-cut girls with ordinary American names wholly exotic to my ear,
both
of them members of the cheerleading squad, the reader is free to wonder how much of the animus directed against Barbara Roemer might have been inspired by my failure to impress either Annette Littlefield or Pat McColl.

“There is a theory,” began the barrage, “that if a thousand monkeys were chained to a thousand typewriters for an unspecified number of years, they would have written all of the great literature that has been set down in the world by human beings. If such is the case, what is holding up production on the
Bucknellian?
We do not expect Miss Roemer and her cohorts to turn out great literature, for, after all, they are not monkeys, but we do expect them to publish a newspaper.” The centerfold of the magazine was a satiric send-up of the newspaper, a facsimile front page burlesquing the
Bucknellian
’s editorial column and its newsless news stories, the work of someone seemingly more subtly endowed with aggressive skills than the insulting, ungrammatical editor in chief of
Et Cetera.
Without thinking too much about it, I had extracted from my taste for mimicry a rhetorical disguise more stylishly combative than the adolescent penchant for righteous contempt; transforming indignation into performance, I managed on the facsimile front page to reveal a flash of talent for comic destruction.

For delivering this gleeful one-two punch to an innocuous Bucknell institution, I was admonished by the dean of men, Mal Musser, and brought before the Board of Publications for censure. In addition, the managing editor of the paper, Red Macauley, knocked on the door of my dormitory room and, with his fists clenched at his sides, told me that somebody ought to give me what I deserved for what I had done to Bobby Roemer. Our argument in the doorway was heated, but as Macauley was acting, by and large, out of chivalry and in fact had no more of a taste for physical combat than I did, he never took the swing that my adrenaline was readying me for. Dean Musser talked to me about the meaning of the word “tradition” and invoked the “Bucknell spirit,” but as I had already heard him express himself on these subjects on numerous public occasions, I came away from that dressing-down feeling more or less unharmed. My appearance before the student-faculty Board of Publications must have been far more trying, for, as it happens, I don’t remember it at all and was only recently reminded that it took place by my former teacher Mildred Martin, whose writing tutorial I was taking that semester and whose senior honors seminar, later, was the backbone of my undergraduate education. At my request, some months back, Mildred—who is now eighty-three—sent me entries from her 1953–54 journals about the senior seminar and appended some random notes under the title “Memories.” One note reads: “After Roth was called up for reprimand because of an
Etc.
issue satirizing the
Bucknellian,
he came in distress to see me. I told him that any satirist in America would be subject to criticism.” I called Mildred, in Lewisburg, after reading this and told her that thirty-four years later, in my Connecticut studio, I had no recollection of the reprimand from the Board of Publications or of rushing off afterward to be consoled by her. “Oh, yes,” she told me over the phone, “when you came to my house you were nearly in tears.”

*   *   *

T
HE DECALS
I’
D AFFIXED
to the rear window of my father’s Chevy during the first vacation of my sophomore year—one proclaiming the name of my new university, the other the Greek initials of my fraternity—I scraped off with a razor blade a year later. My sardonic uncle the dry cleaner, who, when he’d seen the decals, had taken to calling me “Joe College,” didn’t seem to notice when they were gone, and to him I remained Joe College until I came out of the Army, in 1956, and got a job teaching freshman composition at the University of Chicago. From then on I was “The Professor.” But the professor had already begun to emerge by the time I returned as a twenty-year-old to begin my senior year, in September 1953. I had by then passed beyond the eventful semesters defining myself as the outspoken enemy of what seemed pleasantly acceptable to nearly everyone else, and had become a zealous student in The Seminar. This was the elite two-semester honors course, carrying a total of eighteen credit hours, presided over by Mildred Martin—“independent reading in English literature, from its beginnings to the present.” The reading list was ambitious—at least a couple of books a week, plus fifty pages of details to master in Baugh’s
Literary History of England.
There was also a long critical essay due weekly, and every word, spoken in class or written, was scrutinized for accuracy and for common sense by Miss Martin, a plainspoken, businesslike Midwesterner with short gray hair and rimless spectacles, whose crisp laugh and uncarping nature, along with her solid learning, made her exactly the humane intellectual disciplinarian I was ripe for. There were eight in the seminar at its peak, four men and four women, but discussion tended to be dominated, sometimes audaciously, by the
Et Cetera
editorial staff—Pete Tasch, Dick Minton, and me.