—
My teachers had all been women. In prep school they were men, born towards the end of the nineteenth century and graduates, largely, of Eastern colleges and universities. They were men of strong principles and prejudices. The Latin teacher, he and his subject both feared, was Mr. Nagle, a demanding, wry bachelor with gingery hair, inflexible habits, and a green fountain pen the cap of which he would ceremoniously unscrew to make a note. His humor, laced with scorn, and lofty standards made him a favorite. Automatic failure, he warned, for mispelling Nagle.
History was a required course for all six years, and the American history teacher was a Mr. Martin, another titan, white-haired, commanding, with chalk dust on a habitual blue suit. He was in the habit of correcting term papers while listening to the radio. It would be hard to say exactly what one learned from him. In addition to history he instructed in a version of anthropology, personal hygiene, and morals. “Never swallow it” was one of his admonitions — he was speaking of phlegm, but the wiser boys in back tittered. This brought up what he knew was a constant preoccupation. “Keep your mind off the subject as much as possible” was his droning advice; “disease isn’t worth it. The worst thing is the books,” he cautioned. “They’re much worse than the pictures.” His classroom was on the side of the building facing the athletic field where early in the morning, before class, we played a game without rules, often damaging to clothes, called rip-ball, one against all, one darting hare against the trailing pack until he was exhausted or brought down. It was the field on which I recall Kerouac in shoulder pads and cleats, stocky and hard-running in games against Peddie and Blair. In football uniform, short-legged, he seemed a kind of thug. He would drop back to handle punts and, catching them, go like the wind.
The school, Horace Mann, was in Riverdale, the northern suburbs of the city. Its tone was essentially Anglo, there were only boys, and the overriding ethic was that we were responsible for our own destiny and for fulfilling our obligations to society. There was none of Büchner’s or Ibsen’s determinism, the doctrine that acts have resistless causes. We were not what unknown forces made of us but rather what we made of ourselves. In the mornings, in the auditorium, we sang “Men of Harlech”—“would you win your name in story?”—and, as the school was affiliated with Columbia, “Roar, Lion, Roar.”
What effect this had, I cannot say. I was a decent student and lagging athlete, an unknown at track and substitute on the football team. I remember a youth of friendship and no foreboding, though miles away, in Europe, war had already started. Not far from where we lived, in Yorkville, they were showing German propaganda films, Sieg im Westen, and later, Feldzug in Polen, and women in the lobby of the theater held out cans collecting for German War Relief. Battle’s distant sound. We sympathized with the British, naturally, and read with excitement, in newspapers that no longer exist, of the trapping by British cruisers of the pocket battleship Graf Spee in a South American estuary. Inspired, we invented our own warship game, brilliant as only schoolboys could make it, with complex rules for movement, engagement, damage, and resupply, maneuvering fleets of slender model ships on the bare wooden floors of apartments in endless fights, often with diagrams and accounts written up afterwards, word of it passing down, so that years after, people who had never seen but only heard of it asked to have it described.
Kerouac was only one of the postgraduate students, “ringers,” brought in every year to man the school teams. Older, less fine, with faces already showing the shadows of manhood, they were the heroes of the school and at the same time outsiders. I never spoke to any of them; there was nothing to say. A year or two ahead of us, they drank beer, carried their books carelessly in one hand, and knew how to drive. Kerouac astonished us by submitting stories to the literary magazine, for a ringer an utterly unconventional act. He never came to the magazine’s offices, however. That would have been too out of character.
The athletes had girlfriends, usually back in the small towns they had come from. We had girlfriends ourselves or, rather, knew girls. Some attended the sister school, Lincoln, some were their friends, a loose coterie of New York girls, well-off for the most part, closely watched over by their parents. They lived in the Seventies, Eighties, or Nineties, some more distant, one beauty in a building with an iron fence in the West Sixties. At school dances in the city on Saturday night a portion of them were likely to appear, and there were parties on Park Avenue with fruit punch in the dining room, the rug rolled back, and parents out of sight in a distant bedroom or at a movie.
The ennui of those parties, the schoolboy sophistication and dancing in darkened rooms. There were no passionate moments or slamming of doors. We did not have love affairs at that age. There were no notes from fifteen-year-olds that said, I love you. I will give you anything. Such notes as there were were teasing or clever. As boys we dreamed of the prescription quantum vis, “as much as you please,” but there was never that. Nor were there many real couples. It was all too formalized and familiar.
I carry within me, however, the memories of those girls, the last of a breed, their freshness and animation, their refusal to be lured. I pass the buildings where they lived, where they live, those who went away, who married, the one who didn’t, the one who went insane.
Among those schoolmates who achieved some notoriety there is Julian Beck. Foppish and unathletic, he was the object of ridicule behind his back and was probably aware of it — he followed Cocteau’s dictum, whatever you are criticized for, intensify it. Bony-wristed, he floated through schoolboy theatrical productions, a long-nosed, fruity Hamlet, and fifteen years later, having abandoned a try at painting, he was director of an underground theater, metamorphosed into a visionary bringing a vivid and disturbing play, The Connection, to the stage. The theater was makeshift, up a narrow flight of stairs. I was astonished by the coolness of a play about drugs and failed to recognize its foresight, but it shone like a diamond. I met Beck several times afterwards but the level was superficial; in a real sense he declined to talk. He had stepped over me and was unwilling to be confronted on the old terms.
With Kerouac, though I never saw him again, it was the same. I recognized his photograph, sensitive down-turned face, in a bookstore window on the jacket of a thick first novel. It was The Town and the City. I read reviews of it after, filled with praise. By then I had tried to write a novel myself and failed. His was lyrical and repetitive and, to me, crushing. What he had done staggered me.
In an interview read later I saw the side of him that had been so unsuspected. He was asked about haiku and enthusiastically said, Yes! Then, before one’s eyes, he proceeded, like a man peeling an apple in one unbroken strip of skin, to compress an incident — a leaf blown onto the back of a tiny sparrow in a storm — into three succinct lines through trial and error, crossing out words in midair, so to speak. I remembered sitting in the classroom while a favorite teacher tried to kindle our interest in the haiku and its seventeen syllables, but the essence of it, large things evoked by small, was beyond us.
Richard Wooster was the teacher’s name. He was young and had a wide, unnerving smile. Kerouac did not know him nor did Wooster, I think, know the swaggering Lowell boy. Among the teachers, Mr. Wooster was the one to whom I felt closest. When he went into the navy during the war he wrote to me as if to an equal. In the life after, I went to see him when I had published a novel. He was married by then and had four or five children. He was gray but still smiling. We sat in the living room of the large, disorderly house he no doubt had dreamed of. I meant him to see that his faith in me had been confirmed, but I am not sure what he saw — his smile was one of not quite remembering. His children had replaced me and life now crowded in. As if the school years had been a vine and something cut them and they fell.