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| Cornell, with Cayuga Lake in the background |
PART 7: HIGH AND
HIGHER (EDUCATION)
Cornell University, with Cayuga Lake in the background
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Everything I expected
Cornell to give me, it gave me in larger quantities than I could handle.
Edgewood hadn’t challenged me intellectually, I was looking forward to taking
courses taught by professors who knew more than I did and attended by students
who knew almost as much. My parents and Edgewood treated me like a prodigy, and compared
to my high school classmates, I was; how could I have known that the sampling
was defective, that I was more than a bright kid with a second-class secondary
education?
In fact, my only talent that
was in any way prodigious was spelling. I was told that I had been the best
speller in the first grade, while we still lived in California, and had won a
spelling bee, of which I had no memory, but because I read all the time, I did
have a lot of vocabulary to flash around. At Edgewood, I once called my
roommate a lugubrious dolt, just to impress the other people in the room, and
the tag caught on; kids were calling each other that for months. I set all the
trends. When I got interested in photography (my parents had given me a
Rolleicord for my birthday), everyone at school started asking their parents to
buy them cameras. When I got my ham radio license, the entire boy’s dorm would
gather around my Hallicrafters receiver (my Dad wanted to encourage my
technical inclinations) to listen to the inane argot of amateur broadcasters
all over the world. Someone in Texas would drone, over and over, “CQ DX, CQ DX,
this is W2XYZ calling CQ DX on the 20-meter phone band.” (Translation: I seek
you if you’re some distance away for a chat by voice, not code.) Someone in
Finland might reply, always in English, though heavily accented. Did these
conversations herald the coming of the internet? No, they were even more inane.
All the other hams did was describe their equipment to each other, down to the
last vacuum tube.
But college academics were much more demanding than I had
expected. Spelling and using big words (like sesquipedalian, which
means using big words) failed to impress; the first was taken for granted and
the second was dismissed as an affectation. I wrote well enough to get an A in
English 101 in my first semester, but I hadn’t acquired study habits at a high
school where studying was unnecessary. I barely squeaked through geology, the
favorite required science course of people in the humanities, in which we had
to do not much more than recognize and identify rocks. I can still picture both
orthoclase and plagioclase feldspar, about as useless a piece of knowledge as I
possess. And I failed my first exam in Professor Simon’s European
history course. A single essay question – “Define the ‘medieval synthesis’ and
support your definition with examples.”
” -- counted for 70%. I had
no idea what the medieval synthesis was, though it must have figured
prominently in Simon’s lectures, and in the readings, to both of which I
thought I’d been paying attention. I knew what “medieval” meant, and that
“synthesizing” was about combining things, but what things? The answer Simon
was looking for was “faith plus reason,” which was not among the guesses I
made. I got all the short answers right, but my grade on the exam was 59 – an
“F.” I was devastated. Years and years of undeserved self-esteem fell away, as
I realized that my native gifts, such as they were, wouldn’t suffice to get me
a real college education. So, for the first time in my life, I buckled down.
So diligently did I study that I missed out on most of the
important extracurricular activities that make the college experience
meaningful. I’d acted in high school, but it never occurred to me to audition
for the Cornell Drama Society. Though I would never have made the varsity baseball
team (the first-base position was always given to whatever football player
wanted it), what would have been the harm in trying out for it? I could certainly write better than most
undergraduates, but I never submitted anything to the Cornell Widow (the humor magazine) or the Daily Sun. There were dozens of clubs,
societies, and interest groups available to me, in which I’d have met
interesting people with common interests.
Instead, I joined a fraternity. It wasn’t just loneliness that
drove me into the Greek world; living in a frat house sophomore year, as a lot
of people did, was cheaper than the dorms, and offered three meals a day and a
place to sleep and study. Living in the frat house was like living in an army
barracks; everyone slept upstairs in bunk beds stuffed into one giant
dormitory. The food better than just all right and there was a lot of it; the
most popular lunch was what everyone called “gunge” – macaroni and sliced up
hot dogs in tomato sauce. Vegetables were in short supply, but no one
complained.
The arrangement was bearable for a year, after which it expired to
make room for the incoming sophomores, and I resigned from the fraternity along
with about half my pledge class. I had made some friends, and gotten my studies
under control, but the prefabricated social life I had entered, though it
spared me the bother of creating one for myself, didn’t suit me. Pi Lambda Phi
had a reputation for being a bit more subdued and liberal (if that word has any
meaning in the Greek universe) than the other fraternities, partly because
though it was mostly Jewish, it had a sprinkling of minority members – a couple
of black guys, an Arab, a Latino or two. But it was still a frat house, which
meant parties every weekend at which people got shitfaced on the local beer
(Genesee; it was awful) and milk punch, (which was worse: imagine mixing milk
and cheap Scotch and drinking that for an entire evening.) It wasn’t as raunchy
as Animal House, but I hardly drank
at all during the year I lived at Pi Lam, and the available girls who turned up
at those parties weren’t interested in young, nerdy, inexperienced guys like
me. It turned out that the non-Jewish fraternities (which we Jews called the
“white houses”) was where the action was, or at least that was what their
members bragged. Nice Jewish girls in the 50’s didn’t put out, but the shikse sorority girls, according to rumor, did. One of my
frat brothers overheard a conversation in which one of the latter said to her
friend, “Boy, did I grab a handful of balls lasgt night!” Still, Jews have been
known to have sex. Spring Weekend was the traditional occasion when your date
or your girlfriend or your fianceé was supposed to come across. But the
University took a dim view of premarital relations, and it was rumored that
they sent spies to the police the festivities. “Keep it in your knickers,”
admonished Pi Lam’s president at lunch on the Friday of the big weekend. There
happened to be a girl present, someone’s date who had arrived early, and she
turned the color of a ripe tomato in August.
By this time, I had a steady girlfriend, a relationship that
lasted throughout college but ended almost immediately after.
Sue was sweet (though at the time, I’d have preferred edgy) , and
as innocent, as she looks in her picture. We were introduced by my friend East
Hampton friend Sue Tonkonogy, on whom I’d had a crush since I’d met her on the
beach, but she wanted to see if she could snag a lifeguard, so we remained just
friends, and indeed, it was nice to have someone I knew up there when I
arrived. Sue Itkin was one of her roommates, and I didn’t so much fall in love
as fall into a relationship that worked for me. We liked the same people, the
same food (there was an awful Chinese restaurant downtown, where they put bread
and butter on the table when you sat down) and a not-half-bad Italian red-sauce
joint, the same films (there were four movie theaters in Ithaca whose names no
one could be bothered remembering, so they were universally referred to as the
Near Near, the Near Far, the Far Near and the Far Far). Sue thought of me as
the sophisticated New Yorker and I thought of her as provincial since she came
from Brooklyn, though in fact, I probably learned more from her about the world
than she did from me. She was more open to new experiences than I was. She took
two courses taught by a Russian emigré named Vladimir Nabokov of whom I had
never heard, and ignored the raves she and other students bestowed on him until
one day I condescended to audit one of his classes and was transfixed. His courses
were mobbed; in addition to the registered students, there were dozens of transients
like me, standing in the back of his 300-seat lecture hall. It won’t surprise anyone now to learn that he
was a brilliant, witty and iconoclastic lecturer, who sight-translated passages
from Anna Karenina that revealed the
shortcomings of the text we were reading, and whose tastes in the novelists of
the recent past seemed, and still seem, highly idiosyncratic: He hated Dostoevsky
(and Mann, Balzac and Faulkner) and loved Tolstoy (and Jane Austen). The next
semester, I registered for his course in the European novel, but Lolita had just been published and he no
longer had to teach to earn a living.
Sue had grown up in Midwood, a residential section of Brooklyn
that couldn’t have been more different from my Upper West Side except for the
preponderance of Jews in its population. It had a suburban feel to it: I had thought
everyone in New York City lived in an apartment building or a brownstone, and
when I first saw Midwood, I was disconcerted to find street after street of row
houses, comfortable and spacious but in no way fancy, jammed so closely
together that there was hardly room for a driveway to the garage in back.
Sue's block in Midwood
All the smart kids who grew up there, including Sue, attended
Midwood High School, which was a Cornell feeder school. Unlike me, she had a
support group; four of her classmates arrived in Ithaca with her.
Hardly Animal House! Sue and I are center rear at this Pi Lam formal
Sue was no more religious than I was, but her parents were less
culturally assimilated than mine, and they seemed a little unhappy about her
dating a boy who was from Manhattan, had never been inside a synagogue, and
seemed to think he was better than anyone else. My mother happened to meet them
at some function connected to the school, and wrote me an awful, snobbish
letter about what vulgar people they were, which Sue found, read, and was
deeply wounded by.
We
spent a romantic night in a hotel on the Left Bank when our paths crossed in
Paris during the summer of 1957, but I Paris had more to do with that than either
of us, and I had no intention of getting married at age 20. Too bad in some
ways, because we were perfectly compatible, and might have had a very satisfactory
marriage, but I wasn’t ready and I knew it. After we graduated and left Ithaca,
she for her parents’ home in Brooklyn and me for my mother’s apartment in New
York, the logistics of our relationship, particularly transportation, were daunting,
and though she seemed content to stay on the same footing as always, all her
college girlfriends were marrying their boyfriends, and I felt a lot of
unspoken pressure from them and from her parents. So I ended it. Well, like
Rick and Ilse, we’d always have Paris.
My grades improved as the
semesters went past. I squeaked through the non-elective requirements, like psych
and sociology, the easiest social science courses offered, and satisfied my
science requirement with geology, as did many Arts majors. I can still spot the
difference between orthoclase and plagioclase feldspar, which was one of the
questions on the midterm exam. By my junior year, I had begun to study what
interested me. My major, of course, was English, but I had a double minor in
art history and philosophy, the latter a hot topic on that campus in those
days. Cornell was an outpost of Logical Positivism; its founder, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, had almost literally died in the arms of Norman Malcolm, the
Philosophy Department’s chairman. My best friend by that time was Jerry
Ziegman, a philosophy major, with whom I would argue about such things as
whether, if someone said to you “I feel a pain in that light bulb,” you would
have to accept the statement as valid. Wittgenstein would have said it was.
Jerry came from Omaha, which is not thought of as an incubator of metaphysical
thought, but it had other charms for me. When I visited him there one summer, I
thought that at last I’d discovered America. It was like a preview of American
Graffiti – an car-based culture in which sixteen-year-olds drove
aimlessly around in their parents’ Buicks, stopping at hamburger joints where
waitresses on roller skates hooked your tray to the driver’s side window, after
which you went “whipping through Memorial,” which was driving the twisty roads
of a large park just close enough to the speed limit not to get pulled over. Jerry’s
father owned a bowling alley cum steak
house; the prime ribeyes came from the family’s own dry-aging room,and I’ve
never eaten beef that good anywhere else.
By my senior year, I could
choose to take only the courses in which I was interested, and I was getting
all A’s, finally making Dean’s List and graduating in the top third of the
class of 1959 –a barely respectable record, certainly not a distinguished one.
There were some wonderful professors in Cornell’s English Department when I was
there. My advisor was Meyer Abrams, editor-in-chief of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, who was still an active
scholar fifty years after I graduated. There was Walt Slatoff, my favorite
creative writing teacher, who sent one of my stories to an anthology published
every year of the best American undergraduate writing; they turned it down
because they said it didn’t have enough plot, but Walt told me that plot was
the least important thing about narrative fiction -- perhaps a premonition of
postmodernism on both our parts. There
were Arthur Mizener who wrote a great book on Fitzgerald; John Senior who
taught us The Way Down and Out; and
Robert Martin Adams, whose researches into James Joyce’s youth I had aided
through Brian Callahan. It was in Adams’s class that I almost enjoyed my
fifteen minutes of fame. He was talking about Joyce’s incredible powers of
retention. “Take this word, sjambok, which
appears in Ulysses,” said Adams to
the 100 or so students in the room. “No one in this room, in this university,
in this state knows what that means.” He paused. “Am I wrong?”
He was wrong. I knew what it
meant, or thought I did. I seemed to remember that somewhere, somehow, I had
read that a sjambok was a whip made
by tribespeople in South Africa out of the dried foreskin of a rhinoceros’s
penis. But how sure was I? If I was right, I might have become a hero – wasn’t
my reputation at Edgewood based in large part on my vocabulary? But if I was wrong
– if a sjambok turned out to be a
Belgian wafflemaker – I might have become the laughing stock of the campus: “You
know what this guy said in Adams’s class this morning?” I sat on my hands. “I didn’t think so,” said Adams. “A sjambok happens
to be a whip made by tribespeople in South Africa out of the dried foreskin of
a rhinoceros’s penis.” I had simply lacked the guts to do what a girl sitting
next to me in philosophy class did later that semester. She happened to be
knitting when the youngish, smart-ass professor broke off what he was saying
and said to her, "Miss Nieman! You're aware, aren’t you, that Freud called
knitting a displaced form of masturbation?" There was an audible gasp from
the rest of us; people didn't talk like that in class then. Miss Nieman put
down the scarf she was working on and said to the professor, "Dr. Shuster.
When I knit, I knit. When I masturbate, I masturbate." That shut him up.
She became my hero, and briefly famous on campus, the story spreading as
quickly as if social media had existed to broadcast it.
During the spring of my junior year, my father died, suddenly and
unexpected, of a massive heart attack. He was 60, and had never had any heart
problems. His mentoring days were over when I left for boarding school,
and we no longer knew each other very well by the time of his death – though an
eerie thing happened the night before: he telephoned me (something he rarely
did) and in a conversation that must have lasted an hour, we got everything
settled. All the little areas of conflict, the arguments, the misunderstandings
that had gone unresolved for the past few years – going back to my resentment
at being shipped off the boarding school, and including his anxiety that in
pursuing a major that prepared me for a career as a writer (or a copywriter), I
was on a path to making all the mistakes he had made – all of it came out, and
we reached a kind of understanding and acceptance of each other that we hadn’t
enjoyed in years. He ended the conversation by saying, “Goodbye, son.” He never
called me “Son,” and “Goodbye” had a ring of finality about it that struck me
as odd. The next day, I got a phone call from Sidney Ross, a family friend, telling
me that Dad had had a coronary during dinner at his apartment. It didn’t
surprise me that it wasn’t my mother who called to break this news; she always
disliked “scenes,” by which she meant any personal interaction marked by strong
emotion. I flashed back instantly to “Goodbye, son.” I thought – and still
think – that perhaps Dad had had had symptoms or warnings that he hadn’t shared
with my mother but had hinted at to me.
I flew to New York that
afternoon, and was met at La Guardia by Sidney Theo Bennahum, another friend of
my parents. I knew when I saw their faces that my father was dead. “Gone?” I
asked, and they just nodded, as we trudged through the terminal. I couldn’t
hear anything; my ears were clogged from the cabin pressure or lack of it, and
they stayed that way for two days, so that everything came through muffled, as
at a distance. When I saw my mother, I thought she looked quite composed,
waiting for me back at the apartment where Dad had died. We hugged, but didn’t
have a lot to say to each other. Of course, the fact spoke for itself. There
was no funeral, which bothered me, but
in truth I couldn’t wait to get away from New York. I was experiencing not
grief but numbness, which persisted until I’d gotten back to Ithaca. When Sue
put her arms around me, I started to cry, and to miss my father fiercely, but
at the same time, I was consoled by that last conversation, grateful that all
those ends were no longer loose.
And of course, I missed him,
but his physical absence from my life was nothing new; except for summers, we
hadn’t lived in the same place for seven years. My memories were all childhood
ones, when I was closer to him than to my mother, to the point where our
relationship was almost conspiratorial; she’d be out, doing something with her
friends, and Dad and I would be, as he called it, “batching it.” This was the
period of my life when I thought I’d be following his engineering bent, and
we’d sometimes try solve mathematical puzzles. I remember running into the
living room, where he was reading the post, and shouting, “Dad, I’ve trisected
the angle!” He knew perfectly well that there was no way to do that, but he
listened patiently to my cockamamie theory, happy just that I interested enough
in mathematics to try. He couldn’t quite explain to me where I’d gone wrong,
but he suggested I try it out on Mr. Scala when got back to Edgewood, who set
me straight but shared my father’s fond amusement at my clumsy efforts. Or Dad
might explain to me how the internal combustion engine worked – we both thought
crankshafts were the neatest invention ever. These conversations were sometimes
fairly abstruse, but I loved bathing in the fountain of his knowledge. He was
very happy when I became interested in amateur radio; that summer, with his
encouragement, I sent away for a kit from a company called Heathkit, from which
to build an FM radio. I bought a soldering iron, and puzzled out the
schematics, which are maps that indicate what gets attached where. These days,
circuit boards for electronics like computers’ CPUs come pre-assembled by
robots; you just slide the whole board into a slot until it docks with a click.
Back then, before computers, there were dozens of wires, identifiable by the
color of the insulation which covered them, which had to be partially stripped
at each end so that they could be soldered to wherever terminal they were
supposed to connect with. There were capacitors and resistors to be attached to
each other and to the sockets of the vacuum tubes that were the forerunners of
silicon chips. You poked the wire through a tiny opening, gave it a half turn,
heated the joint with the soldering iron and then touched it with the end of
the coil of solder, leaving a tiny molten dab. Too little and the joint wasn’t
connected; too much and the solder could drip onto some other component and
short it out. When I finished it at last, Dad and I turned it on expectantly,
and it didn’t work. I was disconsolate; I had no idea how to troubleshoot it.
But Dad took it down to a place on Amsterdam Avenue that fixed radios, and they
discovered I’d made a single, easily-corrected mistake: a wire that shouldn’t
have been grounded was touching the chassis, and the guy just pushed it away
with his finger, plugged the radio in, and Mozart came pouring out. Dad said
the shop owner was very impressed by the quality of my craftsmanship, and had
sent me a message that I could have a job in his store any time. I don’t think
Dad was ever more proud of me than he was that day.
Another accomplishment of
mine that made both parents proud was my acting. Both my father and my mother
took the train up to Greenwich to watch me in school plays, in which I always
had the lead: I played the Pirate King in The
Pirates of Penzance, the Mikado in The
Mikado, and – my triumph – Malvolio in Twelfth
Night. I forgave my mother for never schlepping up to the Greenwich YMCA to
watch me play basketball, but I was disappointed that my father wasn’t
interested enough to have put in a token appearance at one game. No one else’s
parents attended either, of course. I wasn’t very good at either basketball or
acting, but I was more proud of my turn-around jump shot than I was of my stage
gravitas.
After my father’s death, my mother, who thought that money was the
currency of love, became more indulgent of me. Apparently, she didn’t share my
father’s penury, or perhaps the family finances weren’t in such bad shape after
all. She offered to buy me a car to take
to school, which I knew would widen the boundaries of life in Ithaca immensely.
She invited me to join her and her sister Eve on a trip to Europe that summer,
but as it happened, Jerry Ziegman and two other guys were planning just such an
excursion, so she let me go with them instead. And after graduation, when I
couldn’t think of anything else to do but keep on going to school, she agreed
to subsidize a year in a Master’s program. I was hungry to get back to New
York, so my choices were Columbia, New York University, or the brand-new University
Graduate Center, which I was much too snobbish to consider. I applied to
Columbia, and was accepted – though without any scholarship or fellowship help.
My advisor at Cornell, Professor Sale, whom everybody thought of as a
curmudgeon but who was in fact one of the mentors I so needed after losing my
father, had taken a shine to me in his Conrad seminar, in which I was one of
three men among fifteen women, because only I knew what else besides a sextant
you would need to navigate the Indian ocean. The answer seemed obvious to me,
though to no one else: a clock. It wasn’t quite in the same league as knowing
what a sjambok was, or trisecting the
angle, but it impressed Sale, who was always insisting that our reading of
fiction be grounded in real-world knowledge, particularly in the case of a
writer like Conrad, so many of whose heroes were seamen. Sale had reluctantly
written for me the letter of recommendation to Columbia that got me accepted,
but he was adamant that I shouldn’t go.
“Columbia is a terrible place,” he told me. “It’s a
degree factory; no one will care about you; you’ll have a miserable time.” On
his own initiative, he wrote to the chairman of the English Department of NYU
about me, who in turn sent me a cordial letter, telling me I’d be very welcome
to enter their graduate program. How nice was that? Perversely, I ignored both
Sale’s advice and the letter of welcome. NYU did not then have the cachet it
now possesses; it was a solid, second-rank commuter school. Columbia had Lionel
Trilling, Mark van Doren, and Jacques Barzun. I passed on NYU and took myself
to Morningside Heights. It was one of the biggest mistakes of my life. In the
seven years I spent at Columbia, I caught only occasional glimpses of those
luminaries, who taught only the undergraduates in Columbia College. The
Graduate Faculties traded on the College’s reputation, and its atmosphere was a
mixture of snobbery and self-satisfaction that would have been more at home at
Oxford or Cambridge. Columbia treated its grad students with disdain, as if we
didn’t deserve the second-rate education we were receiving. I didn’t know anyone
in the doctoral program who was having a good time there; we simply weren’t
meant to.
I would be coming home to
the city, there was that. But it would be a very different home than the one
I’d left ten years earlier. The prospect of Life with Mother was not entirely
pleasant, but it seemed do-able – until she plunged a stake into my heart by
moving us from West 67th Street to a much smaller and less
charming apartment all the way east on 79th Street and 1st Avenue. Mom had heard a rumor that 2 West would be
going co-op, and she realized that buying our apartment at the insiders' price
would be a good investment. But instead of consulting a reliable source to
confirm the rumor, she called the managing agent, who of course lied to her,
assuring her there was no chance of it happening. One more tenant down; one
more unit that could be sold at market value. Even I could have told her that,
but she never consulted me. And so ended the first of my two periods of
residence on the Upper West Side.
Columbia's campus, facing north toward Low Library
I would be coming home,
there was that. But it would be a very different home than the one I’d left ten
years earlier. The prospect of Life with Mother was not entirely pleasant, but
it seemed do-able – until she plunged a stake into my heart by moving us from
West 67th Street to a much smaller and less charming apartment
all the way east on 79th. She had heard a rumor that 2 West would be
going co-op, and she realized that buying our apartment at the insiders' price would
be a good investment. But she instead of confirming the rumor from a reliable
source, she called the managing agent, who of course assured her there was no
chance of it happening. One more tenant down; one more unit that could be sold
at market value. Even I could have told her that, but she never consulted me.
And so ended the first of my two periods of residence on the Upper West Side.
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