What is it that makes a former gypsy turn scholar? Let me know so I can pass it on to Brian.
My good wishes,
John Greeve
27 September
Mr. Samuel Weintraub
Department of Educational Psychology
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, Massachusetts
Dear Mr. Weintraub,
I have been out of town for the past two weeks and have only just now seen your letter proposing Wells School as one of the sites for your study correlating school structures and adolescent values.
I am afraid I must decline on the school’s behalf. It is no doubt a sign of my antediluvian education, but I do not happen to believe that real values can be detected by a questionnaire. Adolescents, including our boys, are increasingly savvy about saying the appropriate things, not only on questionnaires but also in forums for free discussion. But the boy who can reason in a clear and sophisticated fashion through a hypothetical moral dilemma in print or in discussion does not necessarily, at least in my experience, behave in a related fashion when confronted with a similar dilemma in his dormitory life. Similarly, the boy who may tick the appropriate columns in the answer forms to indicate that he is tolerant of interracial activity does not necessarily do anything in his daily life to promote it. You would get to know us and our values better by spending a few days here participating in and sharing school life than you would by administering an anonymously taken questionnaire. Moreover, our boys are rather at their limit of standardized tests as it is: D.A.T.s, S.A.T.s, pre- S.A.T.s, Achievements, Advanced Placements, etc.
But while your proposal is not for us, I wish you luck in carrying it out elsewhere.
My good wishes,
John O. Greeve
28 September
Brother Thomas Merriam
Headmaster, The St. Francis Priory
Storrington Rise, Connecticut
Dear Brother Thomas,
Thank you for your letter apprising me of the vandalism done there and of your feeling, no doubt well founded, that Wells boys were involved. I am appalled by all of it and can relate with special sympathy to the theft of your sign. We have lost dozens since I have been here, and some have been very costly. That yours was so beautifully carved in Carolingian script makes the loss doubly annoying.
The fact that the incident occurred on a weeknight may help us limit our search. We will begin by checking our upper formers’ late sign-ins for last Thursday, and I shall begin my own sleuth work. I suspect whoever pinched your sign wants to have it.
I plan to address the school on the subject and will keep you posted on what follows. Have you thought, too, about Storrington High School boys? My own imperfect intelligence tells me that the passion of their rivalry with St. Francis is unbounded, whereas ours is only borderline pathological.
Let’s stay in touch.
Faithfully,
John Greeve
29 September
ANNOUNCEMENT
For Chapel and both lunches
Then to be posted at dormitory landings
It has come to Mr. Greeve’s attention that the field house at St. Francis’s was spray-painted and their sign removed from its footings last Thursday night, sometime between 10 p.m. and midnight. There is good reason to think that Wells boys were involved. The missing sign is one of a kind, valuable, and an important tradition of St. Francis Priory.
If any Wells boys were involved in this vandalism, they are invited to make themselves known to Mr. Greeve today or tomorrow. Whoever does so will be placed on disciplinary probation for the rest of the term, will be responsible for cleaning the field house, and will be required to return or to replace the sign. If Mr. Greeve, through his own efforts, identifies a Wells boy or boys as the offenders, that boy or those boys will be dismissed from the school.
30 September
Mr. and Mrs. Frank Greeve
14 Bingham Drive
Tarrytown, New York
Dear Val and Frank,
Sorry for the tardy correspondence, but school has been proceeding just as if my life were not in disarray. It is my mature feeling as a schoolmaster that over the centuries during which schools have been established to pass on the culture to adolescents, the cumulative gains have been exactly zero. Every single boy seems to have to try being a laggard, thief, cheat, lunatic, solitary, etc., for himself. That you and I and millions of others have already learned these lessons matters not at all to these hell-bent tabulae rasae. This evening as I was walking from my tidy school study to my untidy home study, a dorm master presented me with a badly shaken third former who had escalated some dorm room rivalry by urinating copiously into a balloon and then chucking this dreadful missile through the open door of his enemies. Are there appropriate words of rebuke for such an infraction? What, if anything, shall I write the parents without their losing all hope? The boy won my heart, though, by offering absolutely nothing in his own defense. Sometimes I think of my Prize Day speeches or Addresses to New Parents about the beautiful mission of youth and about my own beautiful mission to youth, and then I think of things like flying balloons full of urine.
The plant and the books are greatly appreciated by Meg. She is for the moment reasonably comfortable at the clinic. She has made the decision to have no surgeries, and this has been awfully hard for her. I agree with her completely, although the decision carries with it the certainty that she will have less time and probably more pain, sooner. One thing we had not thought of was that given the nature of this particular kind of cancer and of its medications, she has virtually no immunity or resistance to anything else. Among other things, this means that the possibility of homestays, even on a temporary basis, is doubtful. This hurts, as it’s the thing Meg wanted most. She says she can’t imagine being scared of anything at home in her own bed. We shall have to see. For the time being, she seems to be managing well. She has little interest in food, but she reads voraciously between jabs and intrusions from the nurses, and her conversation is still in top form. She asks after you without cease. For my sake, too, I hope your projected New England run works out. It would be good for you to see her while she is still relatively strong.
Thanks, Frank, for helping me wrestle with the Brian problem. It’s maddening when there is no promising starting point. I have no idea what country he’s in—or even what continent. I find this makes me so irrationally angry at him I can’t sleep. Then I begin torturously to imagine all the sad and vile things—including the worst—that might have happened to him. Nevertheless, if he should cruise in casually six months hence all hairy and rumpled with another incomprehensible companion in tow and learn that his mother is dead, that would be a guilt and a sadness I would like very much to lighten. We shall see.
I think I’m glad school keeps me preoccupied. It’s quite different this year: running very powerfully down wind with a wobbly, undersized tiller and no other point of sail possible.
Hope to see you soon.
Love,
John
1 October
Separate copies to the parents of:
Toby Witherington (6th)
Tom Foster (6th)
Charles DeMas (5th)
Dear Mr. and Mrs._____________
By now ________ has possibly told you that he has, along with two companions, been placed on disciplinary probation for the remainder of the term for a Major Infraction: spray-painting a wall of the St. Francis Prior field house and removing and concealing the school sign. This foray behind St. Francis’s lines also entailed signing out falsely, thereby violating the school’s honor code—an infraction every bit as serious as the vandalism.
“Vandalism” may sound harsh, but I am going to retain the term. What the boys had in mind, frankly, was something of a lark. And that, in our opinion, was what it mainly was, although I don’t think I’ll tell them that. For your information, no harm was finally done. The boys will experience the decidedly appropriate humiliati
on of two long weekend afternoons scouring and repainting a large fieldhouse wall, and they have already returned undamaged the sign from its place of concealment.
You can be proud of the forthright manner in which they confessed—albeit under a fairly stern ultimatum from me. They are good boys who have each put together a creditable record of achievement and service here. Please be assured that this stunt, provided its like does not recur too often, will do nothing to mar that record.
I hope you will not hesitate to write or call if I can be of any further assistance or if I can clarify___________’s disciplinary status at the school.
My good wishes,
John O. Greeve
1 October
Brother Thomas Merriam
Headmaster, St. Francis Priory
Storrington Rise, Connecticut
Dear Brother Thomas,
Thanks very much for your warm note. I’m glad you had a chance to meet the boys, and that your facilities will be restored to order by next weekend. Justice done, I think.
Yes, they are good boys—but maybe not that good. They have received a just penance and an opportunity to confront the likes of you, which they will always, with a little trepidation, remember. I don’t know whether to say they had their cake and ate it too, or that they had two cakes and ate neither of them. I’m sure you will see what I mean.
Anyway, thank you for not being so regardful or timid or busy as to let the thing drop. You have given three promising rascals an important experience.
For your information, we’ve wired up our own sign to lethal voltage. Pass the word around.
Faithfully,
John Greeve
3 October
Mr. Jake Levin
R.D. 3
Petersfield, New Hampshire
Dear Jake,
Thanks very much for A Grief Observed. I have very mixed feelings about it. First, that you, staunchest of pagans (or so I had always been led to believe), should send me a reflection by a popular Christian apologist is a phenomenon worth thinking about. I read the book straight off, but if I hadn’t I would have wondered what you had in mind sending me Lewis’s reactions to a dead spouse, when life is all we are letting ourselves think about here. But you were absolutely right to send it. I guess you know, although I don’t know how, that it is not the process of Meg’s dying that I fear. I hate that, but I don’t fear it. What I fear is afterwards. Being married, having been married for twenty-nine years, the expectations, obligations, routines of being married, that great shared backlog of experiences, humor, etc.—this has always fueled and consoled me more than anything else in my life. My closest friends here say I am a schoolaholic, an updated, rather more reflective Mr. Chips, but they are dead wrong. As I’ve often told you—and meant it—I have retained my objectivity about, and respect for, school as well as I have chiefly because something deep within me still dreads school, is afraid of it and its demands. My thirty-two years’ accrued experience has produced only the thinnest, most uneasy kind of confidence. Like a farmer who has not yet lost a harvest but who is working an ancient flood plain, I know that the worst can always happen. I have seen it happen in a classroom, and I have felt it threaten, but not quite bring down, a whole school. It begins in some hard-to-define chemistry of morale: bad feelings between faculty or between faculty and some students. Then some dramatic events may occur. They can be unrelated, like an accidental death or a fire or a disciplinary crisis. And then suddenly—poof! Nothing feels right at school. Nobody is reassuring or believable. If you’re on the bottom, people on the top seem nervous and tentative. If you’re on the top, you feel unsupported and unappreciated. There is no longer the corporate confidence that is so necessary to personal confidence and growth. That is what seems always to be lurking just below the surface of school life, and that is what I would be perpetually afraid of, were it not for Meg, whose company is more reliable, more familiar, a balm. School, although through the gate and along the path, is Away. Meg is Home. So again, what I fear is the loss, not the losing, which is still practically having. And this is what Lewis addresses directly.
My perspective is perhaps not right just now, but isn’t this an odd piece for Lewis? I have always liked his voice very much. He has always represented to me the hearty, thinking, man’s-world Englishman with his pipe. But the voice in A Grief Observed is not only muted and bereft, it never picks up. He still seems lost at the end. I suppose I read the piece thinking he is going to put the Event in a framework that makes everything mean something, and through that meaning, more comfortable. But he doesn’t. Maybe he does, but I am too numb and lazy these days to work through any theology, even his. In spite of my deep, unworked-through conviction that our skeletal religious services at school add something important to school life, I have never managed to bring myself face to face with proper religion. I let my childhood church-going habits erode away, without regret, in college, and that pretty much has been that. Occasionally a good writer will puff something numinous into an old ember, but I don’t let it come to much. I suppose I know that to take the Western faith seriously, I would have to reorder my relationship to everything, and I feel too old and too weak for that—but not too wise. Moreover, I think that to seek heaven’s comfort at this particular moment, given my sustained lack of interest during good times, would be rather too much like the grasshopper and the ants. I know I would feel as pitiful and wretched as I am sure that pack of grasshoppers feel who ran out from under Nixon when he was finally turned over. I don’t think I want to be Born Again. I only want to live properly.
Actually, honestly, the only thing I am really committed to now is seeing Meg through this thing. After that, I have no ambitions. Doesn’t sound as if Lewis had any, either. Incidentally, she is hanging in there nobly, although it is depressing to be enervated and ill for such a long time. She has been without real energy for several months now. Still no eating, her weight is in the nineties, and there’s some real discomfort in her guts and lower back. I know she is still sustained by reading and corresponding. A Levin letter ranks highest in her postal intake.
We still cannot find Brian, which is her major (unstated) worry and disappointment. For my part, I move in and out of cycles of paternal worry and depthless anger—which is possibly why he is continents apart. I think I still love Brian, at least love my composite recollection of him. I do not love his generation, its style, any of its novelties and contributions to the culture. I don’t even know, for instance, if his prodigality is based on family tensions, or on unknowable archetypal rites of passage, or on drugs. Of course it lets me off the hook to believe it is in large measure the latter, but I really think that is the case. I do. Meg and I have of course been guilty of parental excesses, mainly excesses of ambition for Brian, but surely these have been excesses within the normal range. After all, we’re not freaks. Everybody agrees we are pretty nice. My nephew Hugh, an exact contemporary of Brian, thinks I am infallible. I half expected Brian’s acting out in school, even urged him not to attend Wells, and urged him several times to leave it, but he was adamant. I have never minded anger much, or open rebellion, or even looniness from him, but what has paralyzed both of us has been his fuzzy-headed, hip passivity. Baxter, our school shrink, says its Passive Aggression. I think it’s passive aggression extended chemically by his damned pot and God knows what else. As a young man, Brian is a poorer reasoner— simpler—than he was as a twelve-year-old. Whatever part drugs have played in Brian’s development, they haven’t helped. And although I haven’t mentioned this to Meg, I am sure he has found his narcotic heart’s desire in North Africa. If drugs had been around (perhaps they were), I wonder if the real prodigal son, or Absalom, or any of them would have come back.
What a long, irritating, self-centered letter I’ve written. Sorry, but thanks.
Tell me what you are reading, and send me some poems. I am working on a long, slightly shapeless piece I want you to see. It’s about having cancer, interior view. I’ll
send it along as soon as there are any contours. It is still O.K. not to pull any punches. I’ll write and tell you when I’m too tender for that.
Best,
J.
5 October
Mr. Frederick Maitland
Headmaster, St. Ives Academy
Derby, Connecticut
Dear Fred,
Thanks for your letter.
Having said as much as I have already said on the subject, I cannot see the point of going over the situation again. I can’t determine whether you don’t see my point or whether you merely don’t agree with it. I think I have stated our position clearly.
Dewey Porter has called me to say he will be glad to put a uniform code of athletic conduct at the top of the Seven Schools agenda in November. As I indicated to you earlier, I think such a discussion should be promising and is somewhat overdue.
You are mistaken, I think, to assume that it is a Seven Schools decision whether we drop St. Ives from our athletic schedule. While that prospect may well be a Seven Schools concern, it is a Wells School decision. It is a decision, moreover, that we have already, reluctantly, made. We have made arrangements to play St. Francis Priory both home and away next fall, instead of just once, and that fills our fall program. Although you have every right to protest this at the Seven Schools meeting, I assure you our decision is firm. You may want to cover your own schedule for September as soon as possible, as I am sure you know how frustrating it is trying to drum up fall contests, especially football games, after the season has passed.
I am sorry the Wells-St. Ives rivalry has had to be interrupted in this manner. Doing so is unsatisfactory in many respects. But I still maintain the principles at issue warrant the decision, and it is one I will be glad to justify to any and all concerned.
As a courtesy to you, I am informing you of our decision to cancel, for an indefinite period, our athletic contests with St. Ives before announcing it to our student body and larger school community. I think it would be a shame for you somehow to “hear” what we have done.
The Headmasters Papers Page 4