by P. F. Kluge
I was isolated, shipwrecked, stranded. I was on an island. And that, it turned out, had been the point, back in 1825, when the college’s founder, Episcopal Bishop Philander Chase, selected this hill as the permanent home for the college-seminary-grammar school he’d founded near Columbus the year before. A mural on the Gambier post office wall depicts the founder’s first visit: two men on horseback pausing in a wooded clearing, one carrying a map and the other, Philander Chase, pointing toward a rolling green horizon, a river, a valley, distant undulating hills. “Well, this will do,” Philander Chase said that morning the college was born here. Chase was a passionate, imperious man, larger than life. Opposed by rival prelates in his plans for an Ohio college, Chase journeyed to England to raise money from aristocrats. The town, the college, its streets and buildings carry their names, and something of their style. And something of his style, too: heroic beginning, heartfelt commitment. And bitter ending. In 1831 he left the college he’d built, the place he’d called “the Star of the West,” ousted by an alliance of faculty and trustees. “Bishop Chase never could believe that any way was so good as his way, or that those who opposed him did so from motives entirely pure,” writes a college historian. Leaving Kenyon, Chase wintered in a run-down cabin in a neighboring county. From his exile, he headed to Illinois, where he founded another college near Peoria, Jubilee College. It didn’t survive. Its grounds, a state park, include Philander Chase’s grave.
After Chase’s departure, through the rest of the nineteenth century, the college’s growth was anything but steady. Power struggles, intramural Episcopalian disputes, chronic money shortages, and up-and-down enrollments brought Kenyon to the edge of bankruptcy. The college entered the twentieth century with just thirty-three students. There was vitality in the place, there was quality. There was also chronic poverty and frustration. And a dismaying series of accidents.
In 1905 a vigorous young president, William Foster Peirce, had just been installed. With the support of Mark Hanna and other Midwest industrialists, the college was poised to grow into a heartlands Princeton. But on Saturday evening, October 28 of that year, Stuart L. Pierson, a Kenyon freshman about to be initiated into Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, was placed on a railroad trestle and run over by an unscheduled train. Did he fall asleep on the tracks? Did he awaken, disoriented, and lurch toward his death? Or was he tied, unable to move off the tracks? The college’s history, otherwise lucid, gets vague and speculative on this point, finally concluding that the sleep-deprived Pierson ran, staggered, fell into the train’s path. The tabloid press surmised otherwise, concocting “Perils of Pauline” illustrations that showed a bound victim about to go under the wheels. “Newspapers in America and in foreign lands continued for months to speak of it,” the college history reports. “Some eminent preachers told of it in their sermons; parents declared that never should their sons be sent to a college where it was the custom to tie freshmen to the railroad track. The enrollment at Kenyon immediately fell off, and not until ten years had gone by did it fully recover.”
In 1949 Kenyon made the papers again, the only time a Gambier, Ohio, dateline has appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Old Kenyon, the massive pile of stone and timber that was the heart of the college, was destroyed in a fire that took the lives of nine students. The lightly endowed college diverted funds, scrambled for donations, and managed to rebuild Old Kenyon, stone for stone, but the fire remains “by far the greatest tragedy ever to strike Kenyon College.”
The death on the railroad tracks was ancient history when I arrived in 1960. So was the Kenyon fire. They were the stuff of ghost stories, local color. But on May 8, 1956, there had been another sudden death, that of Kenyon’s fifty-two-year-old president, Gordon Keith Chalmers, from which Kenyon had still not recovered. An intense, beetle-browed authoritarian, Chalmers arrived at Kenyon in 1937 and set about turning a likable, genteel college—a place where students played polo and faculty played bridge—into a first-rate institution. Indifferent to balanced budgets, inept at fund-raising, frequently at war with the faculty he hired and fired, or attempted to fire, Chalmers built Kenyon’s reputation with star recruitments, with an advanced placement plan that became a national model, and with a flurry of activity in Gambier, speeches, symposia, conferences. Above all, he hired the poet-critic John Crowe Ransom to teach at Kenyon and to become founding editor of a new literary quarterly, the Kenyon Review.
There’s nothing like a writer—the right sort of writer—to spruce up a neighborhood. Robert Lowell came to study under Ransom, Peter Taylor to teach, Randall Jarrell to teach and coach tennis. Other poets and writers followed: James Wright, Robert Mezey, William Gass, E. L. Doctorow. And then there were those summer conferences, the foundation-funded Kenyon School of English, which brought together murderers’ rows of literary critics, Barzun, Bentley, Burke, Brooks, Empson, Kazin, Mizener, Rahv, Schorer, Tate, Warren, and Winters.
It’s tempting to make too much of this. The Kenyon Review’s circulation never exceeded 3,000, and it had little contact with students. The rigorous, text-oriented “New Criticism” associated with the Review was soon supplemented, if not superseded, by other approaches to literature. Ransom abandoned it himself by the mid-1940s. Those glittering summer conclaves lasted only three years. The whole literary-critical culture was in fact a subculture, temporary and fortuitous, a college within a college. Later, E. L. Doctorow described himself and his cohorts as “the exotics,” a tiny cabal in a student body characterized by “the drinkers and the jocks and the proud C-average second or third generation Kenyon men who wore grey flannels and white bucks and school sweaters in the monarchial colors of purple and white.”
Granted, Kenyon under Chalmers was no Camelot. The president was opinionated, headstrong, obstinate. He spurned psychology, a pseudo-science, inappropriate for Kenyon. Ditto sociology. His abrupt firings galvanized the faculty, some of whom were obsessed by hate for him. And there were always money problems. Visiting Kenyon in the forties, the University of Chicago president, Robert Maynard Hutchens, praised Chalmers. “Don’t ever let him balance the budget,” he advised. Alas, Chalmers kept the promise. His last years were fiscally grim.
Still, Chalmers had succeeded in his drive to make an obscure place important. People still speak of him in Gambier: Chalmers making a point to spend at least half an hour, one on one, with every Kenyon student; Chalmers saving money by taking the upper berth on night trains to New York; Chalmers inviting a college janitor who wrote poetry to have dinner with Robert Frost. Chalmers serving hot mulled wine to the college faculty on Christmas Eve.
When I arrived in 1960, the place had a feeling of—what to call it?—aftermath, as though I’d gone to Paris, searching for the Lost Generation, in 1935. Chalmers’s successor, the gentle, ineffectual F. Edward “Buck” Lund, had come to Kenyon, he later confessed, “looking for a place to put my feet up.” On arrival in 1957, at a welcoming dinner, he’d sat through a speech that old-timers still talk about, a long, lethal performance by John Crowe Ransom. The poet-critic warned the new president that Chalmers’s style of arbitrary leadership wouldn’t work anymore: the faculty ran Kenyon. It was the sort of testing speech that demands a retort. It never came. Instead, people recall, Lund gave a speech in which he mentioned William Butler Yeats. Only he pronounced Yeats as though it rhymed with Keats, or beets. “It was all downhill from there,” someone tells me.
Kenyon’s years of congenial adequacy, of being a pretty good place, comfortable and clubby, had been interrupted by a quality-driven president who thought of Kenyon as first-rate, “an eastern college misplaced.” The place had enjoyed a few seasons of glory, and, though much of that was over now, the reputation persisted, like a nickname you can’t shake. And what you do with reputations is a tricky business, a thin line between living off of them and living up to them. That was Kenyon’s predicament, and mine.
We’ve had a long day of driving in August heat, but now conversation perks up again. My
wife senses my excitement, and my dog Max does, too. Comatose on interstates, he awoke the first time I flipped the turn signal, and now he stirs and sniffs. I imagine the scents that will be coming to him: fallen pears and apples, dormitory smells and dining commons smells and classroom funks. Though my wife will come and go—her job is in Chicago—Max will stay with me in the year ahead, while I teach where I once learned.
I remember my Kenyon professors, not my courses. Who keeps college notebooks, all those years of stenography, context fading, handwriting indecipherable, memories and morals turning into mulch? Likewise, those big-ticket textbooks gather dust, those pages of underlining, exclamation marks, and marginal notes that remind you of an earlier self, some too confident hunter roaming through print with a ballpoint pen, marking, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. You remember the professors.
I remember Denham Sutcliffe, an English professor. He knew me before I knew him, knew me before I knew myself. I can picture him now, a round, florid man, who limped as he walked—a hunting accident had lamed him. I can even smell him, a not unpleasant combination of sweat and books I detected whenever I cruised by his office, hoping he’d throw me a word, a compliment. And I can hear him, sardonic and ironic, skewering a student who’d used wise as an all-purpose suffix—”how are you doing, sex-wise?” —or reciting long chunks of Pope’s “Essay on Man” from memory, or addressing us at the college’s opening banquet our freshman year. He talked about the college’s founders, dead Episcopalians whose portraits lined the walls. He advised us on study habits: “Do not have her photograph in view.” He told us it was sin to crack a book’s spine or deface its pages. Then he told us how Kenyon College was beginning its 136th year, a long time as time was measured in Knox County, Ohio, and Harvard was beginning its, say, 300th year, which was certainly a long time in America, and Oxford was beginning—I’m guessing now—its 1,200th year, and that was a long time anywhere. Suddenly this small hick college was part of a great, timeless enterprise. Sutcliffe was like that: he put here into there. Your coming, and your staying, made sense.
A lot of the time, of course, I was miserable. Being miserable was an art form in isolated, all-male colleges, a theatrical melancholy spawned in dormitories that stank of unwashed clothing, spilled beer, masturbation, in hangdog February classrooms, all tracked with mud, at fraternity parties where the chance of romance was extinguished like a lit cigarette plunged into a handy bowl of cheese dip. At the end of my sophomore year, I’d had enough. Part of it was about women. If you had a scholarship, you couldn’t have a car, because that meant you shouldn’t have a scholarship. And if you didn’t have a car, you needed to be able to borrow a car, to pick up your woman at the Columbus airport, or the Mansfield bus station, or a neighboring college: neighboring, as in forty, fifty, eighty miles away. Fraternity boys had the cars and the connections. So on those big dance weekends, fall and spring, I wandered from party to party, casting myself as an observer, sardonic and—you’d better believe it—unattached, moving from one fraternity lounge to another, three lounges per building in three buildings, the nine circles of hell and I was Dante. Sure: if Dante were a virgin from New Jersey.
Women were only part of it. Tolerated, liked, even spoiled, I still sensed I was an outsider, a New Jersey boy in Ohio, an agnostic in Episcopalia, a working-class kid among the upper class, a first-generation German-American among long-settled WASPS, an independent at a place where 90 percent of the student body joined fraternities. I felt like a foreign student, sometimes. I could sense it the way some of the old-timers checked me out; I could guess what they were thinking. “Scholarship . . . New Jersey . . . is that a vowel at the end of his name? . . . not our type exactly. . . . You say he’s doing well?”
I was doing too well, acing courses, flirting with a four-point. Much was made of that, much was made of me, and that bothered me too. Life was a series of increasing challenges, I’d been told. In grammar school, I was warned about high school, a regional high school that drew from five communities, some of them with lots of Jews. What a killer arena that was going to be! I’d be lucky if I passed wood shop!
And then in high school, when they’d sorted us into college prep and vocational ed types, sorted us like apples, some mashed into cider and applesauce, others polished, wrapped in tissue paper, crated and marked for export, I was cautioned about life-and-death combat in college. In college, they’d take me down a notch or two, all right, and high time!
Now, at Kenyon, I discovered the first truth about college. It was easy. It was easy if you worked, and it was negotiable even if you didn’t work. That was the meaning of the gentleman’s C: minimal effort, moderate attendance, in exchange for a middling grade. I worked. I worked because my parents worked, because my machinist father got up while it was still dark to drive to a factory he hated and my mother earned tuition money as a cashier at a high school cafeteria. But those other students amazed me, the ones who bagged lectures—lectures that their parents were paying for, you could figure it out, so many dollars per slept-through class! They weren’t upset, they didn’t feel guilty, they weren’t even worried. No, they walked the campus with a certain air of entitlement, relaxed, controlled, proprietary. They seemed content at Kenyon, and Kenyon seemed content with them.
Now I was getting cocky. Throwing immigrant caution aside, I applied to Yale, applied for admission and aid, and got both. Then the agony began. Four letters, four envelopes, four stamps: to Yale, yes and no, to Kenyon, I’m leaving, I’m returning. My bewildered, heartsick parents couldn’t advise me. They just wanted me to be happy. Was that so much to ask? In the end, I mailed the letters that told Kenyon I was returning, told Yale they’d have to get by without me. I wasn’t out of the post office parking lot before I’d convinced myself I’d made the wrong decision, the cowardly, minor league, big fish–small pond, play-it-safe, bird-in-hand, chicken shit German-American decision, but I could not imagine the look on Denham Sutcliffe’s face when he learned of my desertion. The next two years of my life were his.
If I could cast him as Mr. Chips and leave it at that, I would remember him less well. But I learned there was more to him: streaks of bitterness and anger, working-class anger, something that savaged piety and hated wealth and chafed at the life of the local hero, his life. I recall a lecture he gave and the person who introduced him lingered on his accomplishments, which, though not insubstantial, fell short of major book-length scholarship. “Thank you,” Sutcliffe said when he arose to speak. “At one time I would have said that the person you describe sounds like a promising young man.”
Sutcliffe taught everyone who came to him, but he lived for exceptional students. They redeemed him. They atoned for rage. A Rhodes Scholar, Sutcliffe had ambitions for me and for another English major, Perry Lentz. It was hard to see how he could miss hitting the jackpot with one of us, maybe both. A reserved, diligent Alabaman whose shyness was often mistaken for hauteur, Lentz was a solid, thoughtful, conservative, Episcopalian DKE. He was writing a novel for his honors thesis, and, what’s more, he played soccer. I was the scholarship boy, the campus critic, churning out two hundred pages on Edmund Wilson and John Dos Passos for my honors thesis. One establishment student, one anti. The Rhodes people could take their choice, Sutcliffe must have thought. I hoped that we would both succeed. Or . . . both . . . God, please! . . . fail.
My senior year, I pulled all-nighters, every night, reading while the dormitory slept, reading not just books but whole careers, Orwell, Lawrence, Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, orgies of reading, night-long roller coaster trips. Maybe, later, I got wiser, but I was never faster, smarter, more receptive. I watched dawn roll in from Pennsylvania, lighting up barns, birds starting to sing, and there’d still be an hour before breakfast, and I’d walk around, exhilarated, all full of what I’d been reading, greeting the night watchman on his last round, watching the flag-raising in front of the post office, that flagpole that was the epicenter of this small island, the point from which distance was measur
ed: faculty weren’t supposed to live more than ten miles away from that pole, that was as far as anybody was supposed to go, and then I’d head into Peirce Hall, the first customer for their breakfast, which was my supper, and then one morning, it all fell short, fell apart, because Dean of Students Tom Edwards walked in and quietly announced that Sutcliffe had died the night before.
Lentz and I were pallbearers. We’d both missed the Rhodes, after all. Sutcliffe died before I could bring myself to ask for help on this multiple-choice question I was having trouble with: whether I had failed Kenyon, or whether Kenyon had failed me, or whether something else was wrong. There was a lesson in all this, and with Sutcliffe dead, it was something I had to work out myself. The lesson was about Kenyon: that success in a small place doesn’t lead to triumph elsewhere, doesn’t transplant, doesn’t compound. There were limits to being a local hero. Sutcliffe was my professor and my guide, and I thought he had it all figured out for me, my life’s design and purpose. But toward the end, I’d started wondering if he hadn’t just wanted company inside this small trap of a place. I was beginning to have doubts, beginning to sense what Sutcliffe must have known, all along, the way pride and despair accompany each other in a small place, the way love and anger, trust and treason, come together on a college island. Returning now, middle-aged, I detect a surge of nostalgia and—is it coming from inside the jeep?—a whiff of doubt.