What I had been reading outside of class—Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, James’s The American, Melville’s The Confidence-Man—was more interesting than the books like A Tale of Two Cities and The Scarlet Letter that we were made to read for class. The very fact that they had been assigned made them unreadable.
The teachers were just teachers, not writers or poets or artists, but the best were intelligent, well-meaning, and decent. Many had left behind or had failed at fulfilling their own dreams and were making their way through life honorably. All the same, I resented sitting at a desk like a baby in a high chair being spoon-fed processed, sanctioned culture.
About my attitude, John said, “You don’t have to like the system or the institution. But pay its dues to get what you want in the long run. Feel above it if you like, drop out again, but the institution will be there long after you are gone.”
I was stuck in high school, but I was sure I still had a few years left to be Rimbaud, to have a creative and adventurous life, to travel, to live free and with some elegance and meaning. When would that happen, though? I sent my poems all the way to Manhattan, to the magical, avant-garde publisher New Directions. One poem began: “Kyphosis of the mind / Is no crime.” No question, the editors there would be impressed by the unusual use of the medical term “kyphosis” in the literary context I had placed it. I received a little handwritten rejection note. It meant they took me seriously! It felt like I was on the track to the wider artistic world, one that was sure to include love.
I often dreamed about Molly, the model at the Art Students League, and had never stopped thinking of her beautiful body and her tenderness with me. “I will miss you,” she had said. Maybe she was thinking of me, too, missing me now as I had missed her. I often imagined I would see her again—maybe invite her out for dinner in a little Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village, one with checkered tablecloths and a candle stuck in an empty bottle of Chianti. I had yet to go to such a place.
One day John said, “Go see her. Start small and ask her out for coffee.”
“She’s twenty-one. She’ll laugh at me.”
“I bet she won’t, Freddy. You have to take chances sometimes.”
I did not tell John that I did not want just to ask Molly out for dinner or coffee; I wanted to ask her to come to Paris and live with me. I would devote myself as never before to painting and become a great artist—and maybe even a valuable poet. Molly and I would sit in our café and read and draw on the paper tablecloth and later meet fellow artists and poets for dinner. Afterward she and I would walk arm in arm at night along the glistening Seine to our little apartment under the eaves, the moon thick in our window. Molly and I would live every hour, every day with passion and joy.
One Saturday, I took John’s advice and subwayed down to the Art Students League. I sat in the little alcove waiting for the class to break, in the hope that Molly would come up for a cigarette, as she always had. Several times I was on the verge of running away before I could make a fool of myself. What if she didn’t even remember me?
After a while the students wandered in, chatting, giving me glances; the models followed, surrounded by clouds of cigarette smoke. Molly was not among them, but the redhead Sally was, and she walked right over to me, giving me a big, warm smile and a kiss on the cheek.
“We all wondered what happened to you.”
“I decided to go away and paint on my own,” I said, as if I had sailed to a faraway exotic land, as one of my heroes, Gauguin, had done.
“Do you want to sit with us awhile?”
“I have to rush,” I said. “I just wanted to say hello to you and Molly.”
“She woulda loved seeing you, but she’s left.”
I tried to mask my disappointment, but not well enough, because she said, “I’m sorry.”
“Well, I’ll come by again. Please let her know I was here.”
“Of course, if she ever comes back.”
“To work, you mean?”
“No, to America. She went to live in Brazil with her boyfriend.”
“Oh!”
“I see,” she said. “Well, she had a little crush on you, too, in case you want to know.” I was sure she heard the disappointment in my voice.
I dragged myself back into the sad street, into the sad sunlight, and went to the sad corner of sad Seventh Avenue and sat in the sad luncheonette with a cup of sad, watery, burnt American coffee and imagined Molly standing by a palm hut on a green sea, smiling happily, her hair even longer. She was waving to me.
Tables and Whales
The Bronx, Parkchester,1953
One evening I came to John and Anita’s for dinner and found in the dining room a new, gleaming, ash-blond wooden table.
“When did you get that?” I asked.
“I made it,” John said with a kid’s pride. People build tables and all sorts of things, although I never yet had met any who had. John’s table was sturdy, smooth, elegant. There was nothing crudely homemade looking about it. John said he learned how to make it from library books. He bought the wood, paid a local carpentry shop to use their equipment, and, presto, there was the table.
“There is nothing you can’t learn,” he said. “There is nothing your mind can’t do.”
I was almost sold on the idea, but building a table wasn’t strong enough proof I needed to keep me painting. I was losing the will, the belief in myself to devote my life to painting and perhaps, at the very best, only to end up a decent artist whose skill never matched his vision. Years later, I realized what a fool I was to surrender because of an idea of perfection—how many middling artists and poets and writers are minnows who swim as whales? They appear impervious to self-doubt, their egos seemingly ironclad. They use what little they have to will themselves to success, or at least to fool others into believing in their worth.
Post Office or College
The Bronx, Parkchester, 1953
I finally got off my very rickety high horse long enough to get my high school diploma. But now that that was done, John said, “You should go to college.”
Even though I had balked and railed against formal education, strangely the idea appealed to me. I understood that in college, unlike high school, I could read anything I wanted and, I had been told, no one was made to go to classes. College had an added appeal: no one in my family had ever finished high school, let alone gone to college. I would be the first. What else spoke for the American dream?
But to what college and with what money? My grades were so poor that a scholarship was out of the question. The only place that might take me was a rich kid’s fun-house school where grades were overlooked. Of course, I did not have the money for such places. I had never heard of college loans.
John said, “Freddy, I’d give you the money if I could.”
I knew that. I knew he was hardly making the rent, and he would be down the drain without Anita’s salary. As for family money, my mother depended on what I could give her, and that prompted me to find work with a steady income and job security. “The post office,” my mother suggested. “It’s permanent work with a pension and paid vacations.” She had had long talks with our postman, an Italian who had found security in America delivering mail three times a day and once on Saturday. His son had various pseudonyms, among them Evan Hunter, because he had gone to Evander Childs High School and Hunter College; he was better known as Ed McBain, one of the country’s leading crime writers.
“The postman’s son’s very famous,” my mother said. “Get a steady job like his father and have a family and give your children a chance for success.”
The Letter
Manhattan, The City College of New York, 1954
In 1954 the City College of New York was tuition-free but only for those with grade averages well above the 90s. If you did not have the necessary grades, you could take a test open to anyone with a high school degree, but the word was that you had a mouse’s chance of scoring high enough to be accepted.
&
nbsp; John said, “Take the exam, Freddy. There’s nothing to lose.”
One cold fall morning with hundreds of others in the Great Hall of the college’s Shepard Building, an old, cathedral-like Gothic stone pile—Kafka’s impenetrable castle come to life—which even from a distance gave me chills, I took the exam. I skimmed through the math part because I had failed at algebra—a mystery to me—and I had to beg the principal to be allowed to take it again in summer night school. The higher reaches of abstract thought were beyond my grasp, in spite of John’s claim that one could learn anything.
The entrance exam lasted three hours. When we all left, I heard, “That was a breeze. Are they kidding?”
I thought I had done well but not brilliantly enough to slide in. On the subway home I wanted to die and be over with my empty future before I had worked all my life to get there. But in the spring I received a letter saying I was accepted to one of the City University colleges, of which there were five in ascending reputation and importance, with the City College of New York, then called the Proletarian Harvard, at the pinnacle. I was to come for my assignment to one of the colleges.
I returned to the Great Hall. Behind its stage stretched the mural by Edwin H. Blissfield called The Graduate, a celestial, golden light of success glowing on a graduate in full academic gown and mortarboard about to be handed his diploma. One day I, too, would stand there bathed in that golden light, diploma in one hand, a paintbrush in the other, my mother one of the assembled thousands looking on with tears of pride.
The man at the reception desk looked me up on a huge printout sheet, rose, and extended his hand. “Congratulations, you’ve made City College.” My pride inflated me like a Thanksgiving Day balloon. I could hardly squeeze through my apartment door, and I floated above my cot for three nights.
John and Anita were thrilled for me.
“See?” John said. “It never hurts to take a risk. Come over next week. I have a present for you.”
“I can’t wait, John. What is it?” I was hoping it would be one of his grim prison drawings that I thought held as much truth as Goya’s paintings of madhouses.
“Hold your horses. Come over and find out for yourself.”
Anita came to the phone. “Congratulations, handsome. Maybe now I can find you a date.”
“Anita,” I said, “what does John have for me? I can’t stand the suspense.”
“It’s a Japanese print,” she whispered into the phone. “A Hiroshige print he’s been saving for your birthday. But don’t let him know I told you.”
Overcoats and Penmanship
Manhattan, The City College of New York, 1954
Within weeks I was already disappointed with college. It felt like an extension of the high school nullity, like I was once again in the student’s baby high chair. I returned to my old rebellious, childish tricks. I walked out in the middle of the class to go to the bathroom for a smoke and took my time daydreaming. When I finally returned I sat tilting the chair back on two legs. This was my mixture of insult to authority and my insolent attention getting. The professor seemed oblivious to my antics. In some ways he seemed oblivious to the class.
The professor, Norman Schlenoff, had asked us each to write an in-class essay about ourselves, especially what we had read and cared to read. As a writer-poet who was in correspondence with the esteemed New Directions publishers and who was asked to submit to them more of his work, I was packed with resentment and wished to let the professor know who exactly he was dealing with. I wrote boastfully about my artistic aspirations and my desire to live in Paris. About reading, I mentioned Rimbaud, Hemingway, and Joyce, and I added Henry Miller for shock effect. A week later I got back the essay with a grade of B– and a note that Dr. Schlenoff would like to see me in his office.
The office was a cubicle barely large enough for one, with a dim overhead fluorescent light, and a small desk with a gray, rubbery top. This was not what I had seen in movies set in an Ivy League or a fancy Oxford University office, and there was no sherry. For a free education you got the genteel reform school spartan look: the toilets had no doors—no one seemed to know why, unless it was to prevent us from masturbating in public; a pane in Schlenoff’s class window was missing and one was cracked, and the room was kept freezing, so we wore our overcoats indoors; the radiator pipes clanged and banged like swords on a shield. At the time, all of that was expected, part of the small price for paying nothing to be at the Proletarian Harvard.
Dr. Norman Schlenoff did not appear to notice his icy classroom or the dreary little office where we sat almost knee to knee. He had a swan’s beak and an indefinable foreign-accent honk. In class he smiled with his every sentence and smiled at everything we said. He always seemed on the edge of telling a joke to a cloud floating high above the window. Everything was ironic: he was in a secret, ironic relationship to the class, to the chalky blackboard, and even to the banging radiator pipes.
He pulled my essay from a little stack of blue books and said something I did not understand, then said it again. I finally got it. “I don’t know French,” I said.
He seemed disappointed. But then, very gently: “Perhaps you would like Rimbaud more if you had read him.”
“I have read him,” I said, hurt, as if being accused of lying.
“You have read him in translation, I suppose.” I nodded. We turned to the matter of my little blue book essay.
“You’re interesting, Mr. Tuten, but your prose is less so.” And then he pointed out why: the least of my flaws were grammar, syntax, spelling, punctuation, and organization. He didn’t mention penmanship.
“Why do you use the possessive as if you were translating literally from Spanish? You say ‘the house of my uncle’ instead of ‘my uncle’s house,’ for example.”
Somehow I believed that the Latinate possessive had weight, dignity. I had gotten that idea from my uncle Umberto, who would say, “Have you just come from the house of your mother?” I had always thought that my visit was made all the more glamorous by his elocution.
All my big sense of myself, all the grand thoughts that had made me feel special—where were they now? How had I ever gotten into this college? On orientation day, in the Great Hall, we were all congratulated for being accepted: “You are all exceptional,” the academic dean had said. “Now, look to your left and look to your right. You may never see these people again.” The standard for admission was high; so, too, was the standard for our remaining there. If you let your grade average slip too far, you were sent back to the street. And from there, where? The gutter?
We went over the essay, and with each comment and correction I fell lower and lower until I crashed back to the earth, a mere boy. On the saving side, Schlenoff seemed impressed that I had read as much as I had, and not just the standard literature; he was touched, he said, by my wish to be an artist and to live in Paris.
“Have you ever been there?” I asked with undisguised admiration.
“Oh, I have spent some time there. You would like it,” he said. “Actually, you should be there now.”
Only when I left his office and sped downstairs to the cafeteria did I consider the double meaning of his sentence. By the time I entered the warm, safe haven of the cafeteria, I felt twice deflated: I was both a worthless student and the fool of grandiose dreams.
I told my friends about the conference with Schlenoff. They laughed. “He must love you, with a B-minus.” That helped a bit but didn’t keep me from feeling down.
“He’s a strange bird,” another said. “He doesn’t even have a doctorate in English but some weird degree from a French university.” The idea of his having a weird degree—that he himself was a weird item in a conventional academic world—made me like him, even though I was afraid of his Olympian distance, the way he seemed to be mocking everything on earth, especially my naïveté.6
* * *
6ADVICE
Norman Schlenhoff (1915–1983)
While Norman Schlenoff did not have a
n American doctorate, he actually had a degree from the Sorbonne, a Docteur d’État, a diploma with Mention Très Honourable, the French equivalent of summa cum laude. His thesis, written in French, was on beauty. He defended his thesis orally before a committee of five specialists in the field. I understood finally why his colleagues always approached him with a kind of friendly deference. He later wrote and published books on the French neo-classicist Ingres and on Romanticism.
In 1964, when I began to teach at City College, I went to my first department meeting and Schlenoff came to sit beside me. The topic for the meeting was whether to change the number of a Composition Class from 1.1 to 1.2. Considering the subject, the meeting was strangely heated. Schlenoff turned to me and said sotto voce, “If you stay here long enough, you’ll never write a word.”
Some four years later, I ran into Dr. Schlenoff at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I watched him stand before a painting, studying it for a long time. It might have been a Poussin. I went over to say hello and he greeted me warmly and even remembered my name. He had long left teaching and was a private art dealer, specializing, I think, in pre-nineteenth-century and earlier European art.
I boasted that I was writing a lot about art for Arts magazine and volunteered that I was especially fond of the Pop painters like Lichtenstein. “I am surprised,” I said. “I have never seen you in the galleries, especially at Castelli, where all the new painters are showing.”
He gave me a kind look, but one that also suggested that I was something of a fool. “There are galleries where one must never be seen,” he said. “Only the most vulgar people go there and only the most vulgar nouveau-riche collectors buy that work.”
My Young Life Page 10