The Headmasters Papers (2 page)

Adios, love. Longing to speed to the airport when you give the word.

J.

30 August

Mr. Jake Levin

R.D.# 3

Petersfield, New Hampshire

Dear Jake,

This is a moment I savor at the end of every summer: a post-midnight hour or so before the business of term really begins: a brown-study's eye of the scholastic hurricane. I actually
am
writing from my, if not brown, at least not very clean, study. All the appropriate mood elements are present—bright moon, crickets, tower bell (electronic, I'm afraid) tolling the hours, even a heightened sense of isolation due to Meg's being away at the Cape another week.

I feel badly about not having written sooner. It's easy to let little fussy business get in the way. I suppose, too, that despite my old-shoe, genial-headmasterly approach to middle life, I let myself be hurt by your no doubt genuine lack of interest in my poetry ms. Odd thing is, I knew when I sent it that you wouldn't like it. Although, despite a few obvious outward trappings,
we
are rather alike, our respective
oeuvres
(yours recognized and official, mine private and skimpy) are irreconcilably different. I know exactly what you mean when you advise me to “pull my oars in” with respect to language, but I don't really know how to do this with my intentions; the “recurring note of adolescent striving” you mention might be less an approach to poems than an approach to life. This would of course explain my vocational destiny as well as my literary limitations.

So how are you? My picture of you up there in the New Hampshire hills is mighty attractive. I'm sure there are lovingly managed near-the-earth routines like hewing wood, stoking fires, and brewing big crude pots of coffee and stew. Seems awfully tempting from my standpoint—especially on the brink of School. I also envy you the time and the quiet to write, to actually get at it. You can actually feel and think freely—and big. By that very fact, though, the writing then has to matter, doesn't it?
It
pretty much has to stand for what you are—which in your case works out happily but which in my (hypothetical) case seems terrifying. Is it nice there? Do you still see/hear from Susanna?

Do you remember you are invited to give another reading and be a classroom guest one day this winter? Expenses of course and all the honorarium I can muster. It will be great to have you here. I don't think Meg's seen you since the last reading. I'll check the date, but I think it's mid-February.

I hope you are well. If I can reconstitute my pride, I'd like to send you some more poems from time to time, as they come up. I would also like to know what you are reading now, at least the nourishing stuff.

I'm off now—must review my opening remarks to the faculty and boys. Right tone must be set, don't you know. Stiff upper lip, most important years of your lives, oldest and most venerable profession in the world (but one) ha ha ha—Christ. Another year like the last will kill me.

I don't think I'll say that.

Best,

J.

3 September

O
PENING
D
AY
R
EMARKS
T
O
T
HE
S
CHOOL

To the boys and to the ladies and gentlemen of the faculty and staff of The Wells School—a warm and joyful welcome into our one hundred and sixth year. And to those of you—more than a quarter of you—who are new to Wells this fall, a special welcome. We count on our older boys and staff for continuity, but we rely on our new boys for novelty and vigor.

I suspect there will be plenty of vigor from this new third form, who are ninety strong and who are possibly the most able and most talented class to have been admitted since I have been at the school. Have I said that before? Pardon me. I really do hope that all of you old-timers will extend yourselves a bit and make not only the third form but also the new upper formers feel at home. It shouldn't take much for most of you—perhaps just a brief recollection of how you felt upon arrival here. Let's also give a special welcome aboard to our two new boys from overseas: Helmut Fuerst, our ASSIST student from Cologne, West Germany—will you stand, please, Helmut?—and Paul Conniston from the Westminster School in London. Paul is our English Speaking Union Exchange Scholar. Will you stand please, Paul? Both Helmut and Paul are playing football, or
soccer
as we for some reason call it, and I understand they are doing us no harm. Welcome to Wells, both of you. I hope your year with us is rich and full.

For that matter, I hope this year is rich and full for all of us. I am confident, at least, that it will be full. It always is. Among other things, our board of trustees has charged me to prepare a study to be called “The Wells School: The Next Ten Years and After,” to be completed by April first. This report, which will require the efforts of all of us in every area of school life—from studies to athletics, to maintenance, to dorm life,
food,
fuel consumption, the arts—is supposed to be a thorough self-study of what we are now, upon which we can build a viable, healthy Wells for both the short-term and long-term future. If I've made that sound a rather big and vague assignment, that's because it seems that way to me right now. There will be more—I'm sure a great deal more—on that later.

For the most part, we are going to have our hands full with School as Usual, although I'm not sure that school is ever usual. Instead, I'm afraid, School is the opposite of Usual. It's a planned disequilibrium, all obstacles, all challenges. You know a little algebra after last year, so now we'll see if you can know geometry, and if you think you've got that down, trig—and so on. If you thought you were good in third-form English, how about a term paper, a
twenty-page
term paper, with footnotes and a bibliography, an honest bibliography? So you finally moved up the tennis ladder and were playing third singles last spring; how will you fare against the three—or is it four?—nationally ranked new boys? You did all right in introductory French; are you ready to speak it, and nothing else, in class this year? Will you make it into the Group? Will you stay in the Group? Will your roommate work out? Will you be able to face your friends when they come up against you in Student Court? Will the girl you met and liked so much in July remember you when she is back in the lively co-ed company of her local high school or at Middlesex? Are you ever going to reach six feet or five feet eight or five feet six? You are on academic probation; are you going to make it? You are third in your class and captain of everything; are you going to make it? Into Harvard or Duke or Stanford or Williams?

As I said, all challenges and obstacles. But I think it would be a great mistake to try to make school any other way. Except for the challenges and obstacles, how could we find out what sort of persons we are? How would we ever learn which of the prizes are worth having and which don't matter? School—at least Wells School—insists that you
measure up
to things: to mathematics, to composition, to dramatic or musical or athletic challenges, to getting along in an intense, changeable, rather small world of adolescent boys and their teachers. School—at least Wells School—insists that there are worthy things, true things to measure up to. In a way, the school measures you by assigning you this or that grade or by placing you on a first or second team, but more importantly you measure yourselves against past performance, against your more gifted, less gifted, equally gifted fellows, against the system, against the odds.

School can be very intense, and as many of you know, it can make you feel tense, but it also makes you feel alive, sometimes—when you are trying hardest, when you are most engaged—almost
supernaturally
alive. This feeling, rare as it is, is worth pursuing. I think you'll find that it is most likely to occur when you pursuing or “measuring up to” what is good in its own right: for example, excellence, rather than an ‘A' or a victory. Of course real excellence often coincides with ‘A's' and victories, but it is a fatal mistake to confuse the two. They are not the same thing.

At any rate, I hope each of you will take on the challenges and obstacles of this school with enthusiasm. Each of you is different and will quite rightly take on school in a different way. But in one important respect you are exactly alike, perfect equals. And in this one respect we will expect the same thing from each of you. I am talking of course about the moral side of things, besides all those other particular challenges, this school is also going to insist that you measure up to basic honesty and decency. As we have explained to all of you before, new and old boys alike, we are going to insist on your telling the truth and on your treating each other and us teachers as you yourself would like to be treated. These challenges are obvious, ancient, and often very tough. None of us is worth a damn without them. They are not, however, very hard to understand. The quality of this school depends on your meeting them, and so does the maintenance of civilization. There is no way to avoid these challenges, either. They will commence as soon as you leave this hall, if they have not commenced already.

As I was putting these remarks in order last night, it dawned on me with some irony that they were not, really, very original. I'll bet their equivalent were said, certainly more eloquently, by Ionian and Athenian schoolmasters on opening days 2500 years ago. The descendants of those Greek schoolmasters without question told aristocratic Roman boys the same thing five hundred years later when Rome's empire was in the ascendant. And I happen to know that such words were spoken by headmasters Guarino and Vittorino to their Italian pupils fifteen hundred years later still, during the Renaissance. The same things were said, perhaps more forcefully than ever before, by certain great English schoolmasters just over a century ago. So my remarks to you this morning have been terribly unoriginal, but perhaps for that very reason terribly important, too.

The idea that there are eternally worthy and true standards which men can understand and which they ought to measure up to, while very ancient and at times thought to be the very foundation of civilization, is not in style at the moment and has not been in style for a good part of this century. The opposite view—that there are no provable external standards and therefore no obligations to them—takes thousands of forms and is very much among us. If there are no true standards to measure up to, according to this view, the Self is free to do as it pleases. The Self, after all, is supplied with a mixed bag of feelings, some of them marvelously pleasurable, and with standards out of the way, these may be pursued without interference. But, maddeningly, without interference, the pursuit of pleasurable feelings leads to unutterably bad feelings. People get impatient, careless, bored, gross, gouty, alcoholic. They seek remedies from the bottle that caused the sickness. People overdose themselves with liquor or drugs or with sex or with power or with things—even when there is clear evidence that these pursuits are the cause of their dissatisfaction in the first place.

The decade recently passed has been called the “Me, Decade,” and I certainly hope it is over. I say this not because I am a puritan who hates to see a Self out having a good time, but because of a certainty—maybe my only certainty—that in the long run the Self can't have a good time in pursuit of its own satisfactions. Few of us with the perspective of several decades' time have observed any net increase in energy, productivity, or happiness during the Me Decade. It's been, frankly, a flat and anxious decade. Even the anti-war and ecology sentiments expressed at the beginning have quieted, mainly, I think, because these were movements aimed at measuring up to standards, like justice and world peace and healthy environment. The pursuit of standards and the pursuit of the self are incompatible.

If we're honest, we admit to feeling driven both ways. If we're honest, most of us will also admit that the selfish drives are stronger; we might
know
better, but it's so easy to do what we feel like doing. Without help, we always do just that.

The help is training. Training. We get it in good families, we get it in enduring religions, and, if we stick to business, we get it in school. It's not always fun, but it really isn't supposed to be. Nevertheless, I think that if you can commit yourselves to business, to “measuring up,” you will be surprised, at least if the history of Wells School is anything to go by, at how often fun tends to crop up, often when you least expect it.

Well, I've gotten rather near a sermon, haven't I? But I risked doing it because I wanted so badly to say that I hope you measure up—and that you
want
to measure up—this school year. Incidentally, I hope that I measure up. The fun, I am sure, will look after itself. It always does.

At this point Mr. Upjohn has a few instructions about this morning's meetings, about schedules, and about books. The real business of the day.

Have a very good morning.

4 September

Mrs. Margaret Greeve

Little House

Ticonsett Lane

East Sandwich, Massachusetts

Dear Meg,

Lousy news about the tests. The only thing worse about being in a hospital overnight—even one with a view of Buzzard's Bay—is being in a hospital overnight far from home. I wish I believed that their marvelous instruments could actually isolate the cause of your feeling fluey and run-down. My own dark intuition is that it's the equivocal tap water of Little House. I don't even trust it with toothpaste and have, as you know, come to treat it cautiously with bourbon before swallowing it. But what do I know? You have probably been fighting swine flu, and they have just the thing for it.