The Amateur_An Independent Life of Letters

by Wendy Lesser

  I never took a course from Mr. Jones myself, but I couldn’t help being aware of his presence at Cubberley High School. For a few years he actually succeeded in changing the way the school was run.

  Ron Jones must have been fresh out of an education credential program when he first came to Cubberley— must have been, in other words, about twenty years younger than I am now. He had a blondish crewcut (an exception in those days of shaggy liberalism), intense, darting eyes, and a face that was simultaneously flat and mobile. If he hadn’t been a radical young teacher, he could easily have passed for a junior officer in the army or a recent graduate of a police academy. He was so fresh-faced that even we students, at fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, thought of him as young. Some even called him Ron, though to most he remained Mr. Jones.

  He soon became associated with the general air of disruption that was beginning to permeate our high school campus. This was in 1966 or 1967, after Watts and the Free Speech Movement but before the major demonstrations that shook college campuses across the country. Cubberley, perhaps because of its proximity to Stanford, Berkeley, and San Francisco State, felt the shock waves early. Kids gathered at recess to smoke dope in the corners of the playing fields. Attendance at sports rallies dwindled. Dress codes disappeared. David Harris— then merely the student president at Stanford, and not yet Joan Baez’s husband or a jailed draft resister—came to speak to us about protesting the Vietnam War. (The administration insisted that we invite another speaker at another date to represent the opposite viewpoint. Somebody from Young Republicans duly appeared, but nobody went to hear him.)

  Mr. Jones arrived in the midst of this and generated more of it. His history classes became famous for their unorthodox procedures. Students found wandering in the halls without the required passes inevitably announced they were on an errand for Mr. Jones. It got around that attendance at his history classes was voluntary—an incredible violation of high school discipline. However, the net effect of this strange rule was not a diminution in Mr. Jones’s class size. On the contrary, students were cutting their other classes to attend his sessions (lectures is not the right word) on contemporary world history. People were falling out the doors, squeezing into standing-room-only positions, to absorb his irregular teaching.

  One of his inventions, I recall, was a movement called The Third Wave, intended to educate his students about the crowd psychology of the Third Reich. For two weeks he required all his students to participate in a centrally controlled social structure wherein hazel-eyed people were considered a superior race. The society had its own hand gestures and salutes, its own official vocabulary, its own regulations of conduct. Two weeks can be a long time in high school, and adolescents are by nature fanatics, so The Third Wave rose quickly and powerfully. At the end of the second week, Mr. Jones—terrified by the fanatical obedience he had spawned, yet triumphant at the success of his pedagogical experiment—called a halt to the game. But the kids objected: they loved it; this was a society whose rules they could understand; they wanted to continue following their blond-haired, hazeleyed, idealistic leader. It was only through the most strenuous and lengthy discussions that Mr. Jones at last convinced his students they’d been led into a trap.

  I only heard about The Third Wave, but I was directly involved in another of Mr. Jones’s inventions, known as Idea Forum, or IF for short. Mr. Jones came up with the idea that every Wednesday afternoon all normal classroom activities on the entire campus should cease. (One can begin to discern a pattern, I now perceive, to his educational theories, but at the time each idea seemed new and separate.) In place of regular classes we would have a wide array of elective activities and seminars offered by students and faculty alike. There would be no set length—each session could occupy as much time as it required—and students would be allowed to wander from one event to another. The only rule would be that you couldn’t leave campus. A schedule published each week would detail the various offerings, from seminars on Bob Dylan’s lyrics to discussions of German philosophy to ceramics workshops and improvisational dance classes.

  Somehow, with the support of numerous students behind him, Mr. Jones persuaded the administration to allow this experiment. It must have been a bureaucratic nightmare: all regular classes had to be reduced to twenty-five-minute sessions in the morning to free up the afternoon, and rooms had to be found each week for a variable number of IF seminars, each running on its own schedule. Still, they gave it a try. “Perhaps if this one fails,” the greyer heads may have murmured to each other, “Jones will give up his nonsense.” Or maybe they were merely humoring him, stringing him along until they could find some official reason to oust him. In any case, IF lasted for about four weeks and then fizzled out without much opposition. Attendance was good, and people didn’t leave campus; the question was whether they were learning anything.

  Now that I am sometimes a teacher myself, I lean toward a rather authoritarian mode: lecturer standing in front of the classroom, guiding student participation with a heavy hand, disseminating opinions and information from a position of assuredly greater knowledge. (The students who like me may view this description as exaggerated self-parody; my detractors will insist I haven’t gone far enough.) I scorn alternative methodologies and revisionist canons and anything that smacks of Sixties technique; I believe in teaching literature, or anything else, directly and analytically, and I don’t think the subject matter should be limited to things the students can “identify” with.

  But I only teach very occasionally, and that’s the closest I ever come to holding down a job. The rest of my life is composed like a series of Idea Forums: oddly segmented episodes pieced together throughout the day that contribute to one activity or another, bringing in some income or using up some energy, producing a short piece of writing or contributing to a long-term project, usually on my own but sometimes with a small group of people. I have almost always been self-employed; I am what the high school psychologists might have labeled “self-motivating.” Did Mr. Jones’s Idea Forum determine my whole life? Probably not. Most likely I would have turned out like this anyway. Still, I remember what I learned in those Idea Forum sessions far more clearly than I can recall any details of junior-year English or senior History. Among other things, I learned in a drama workshop that I am far too self-conscious ever to be an actor; I heard phrases like “existentialism” and “categorical imperative” for the first time; and I read, for the first and last time, sections of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.

  But what taught me even more was Mr. Jones’s dismissal from Cubberley, which occurred the year after I graduated. Whether he was actually fired, or simply let go at the time of tenure review, remains shrouded in doubt in my under-informed memory. What I do know is that his departure had something to do with IF, The Third Wave, and all the other unusual things that took place under his supervision.

  Ron Jones landed on his feet: he got a job teaching at the San Francisco Recreation Center for the Handicapped (where, to the best of my knowledge, he still works), took up small-press publishing, and even wrote and published a few mildly successful books of his own, including an account—far more detailed and accurate than mine—of the Third Wave experiment. Cubberley Senior High School, on the other hand, was shut down about fifteen years ago when the shrinkage of Palo Alto’s student population made its continued maintenance economically infeasible. Such are the ironies, I suppose, through which the just eventually triumph over the unjust. But to the students who attended Cubberley during Mr. Jones’s era, the irony we were left with is quite another one: the one inherent in the fact that even the “best” school districts, when their backs are against the wall, will inevitably choose order over imagination. I am fond of order myself: my ways of thinking about art, about work, about friendship, are all premised on a combination of order and something that is not order. But orderliness is a good servant and a poor master. Order needs to be kept in its place, lorded over by wilder and more eccentric forces, mocke
d and even abandoned occasionally. Only under those circumstances can it remain satisfying and useful rather than imprisoning. Or so I learned from Mr. Jones, nearly thirty years ago. It is one of the few things from my high school education that has endured—that, and a little bit of Spanish.

  THINKING BACK ON HARVARD

  s a freshman I was assigned to a dormitory called Eliot Hall, which sounded to my Western ears like the name of the sort of person who would go to Harvard. Actually, it was one of the smaller, nicer, older buildings surrounding the Radcliffe Quad, and I was lucky to be among the ten or twelve incoming women who were housed there. The others included a Hyannisport Kennedy, a French Rothschild, and Benazir Bhutto, known to us all as Pinkie, who was eventually to become the first—and, to date, the only—female prime minister of Pakistan.

  I had never even met a debutante before I went east to college, but Pinkie made the run-of-the-mill Radcliffe debutantes seem coarse and ordinary by comparison. The soles of her feet were as smooth and unblemished as the palms of most other girls’ hands, for she had never in her life set foot outdoors without shoes on. Nor had she ever lifted the receiver of a ringing telephone before she came to Harvard; there had always been servants to answer the phone in Karachi. Her father, at the time she started college, was the foreign minister of Pakistan, and she already suspected that he might one day be president. What she did not suspect (how could she?) was that after his presidency he would be hanged by his political enemies.

  Pinkie and I soon became known as the dormitory’s champion loafers. We would lounge day and night in the centrally located living room of Eliot Hall, luring bypassers into our twenty-four-hour party of games and conversation. Pinkie taught me how to make batiks, and I in turn taught her to bake cakes from Betty Crocker mixes; she was so thrilled with this culinary accomplishment that she insisted on repeating it once or twice a week, with the result that we each gained about fifteen pounds during our first semester.

  At the time, and for years afterward, I thought of Pinkie as a version of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. (She herself, at sixteen, was fond of quoting Enobarbus’s description of the Egyptian queen, and I can still hear in my mind’s ear the imperious, self-mocking inflection she gave to the line “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.”) But now I realize that the Shakespearean character she most reminds me of is Prince Hal. For a long time she appeared to do nothing but play: having fun was her specialty, and she was good at it. When she first got to Harvard she seemed innocently giggly and high-spirited; in later years she developed a brassily ditzy, bubble-brained, Bright-Young-Things manner, as if the impulse to enjoy life had hardened into a mask. And then, long after I had ceased to see her, she all at once dropped the mask and became a serious, wily politician, her father’s rightful heir. The change seemed sudden; yet if you had asked me, even as a freshman, to guess who among my acquaintance would eventually become a world-famous political figure, I would not have hesitated to answer, “Pinkie Bhutto.”

  In my time out from playing Falstaff to Pinkie’s Hal, I became involved in curriculum reform. Why a seventeen-year-old from California believed herself qualified to tell a three-hundred-year-old institution what it should be teaching its students is not a question we need go into here. Suffice it to say that I threw myself into the effort with zeal. The major target of my opprobrium was Harvard’s General Education requirement, which furthered the school’s liberal arts principles by making the students take “Gen Ed” courses in science, social science, and the humanities. I can no longer reconstruct why I was so much against this; my argument had something to do with the admitted amateurism of the special courses, and something else to do with the restricted choice. My objection was certainly not based on my own Gen Ed experience, which was entirely positive: the geology course I had selected—taught by a very young associate professor named Stephen Jay Gould— was so good that I voluntarily enrolled in an additional semester of geology, even though I have never been able to tell one rock from another. (“Wendy! Stop hacking away at those garnets!” are the only words I can recall Stephen Jay Gould addressing to me, though I’m sure we must have had other conversations.)

  Whatever my reasons, I was determined to wean Harvard from its ill-conceived pedagogical plan. I joined a group of undergraduate curriculum agitators, and we got ourselves put on the agenda of a Harvard faculty meeting, which was held in Sanders Theater, inside the appealingly monstrous old Memorial Hall. As one of our group’s designated speakers, I was given three minutes to present my case. I can still recall the feeling of standing at the base of that huge bowl, with the semicircular rows of seats ranged in front of me, the lectern light shining on my pages, and my voice quavering out into the room. I had just reached the beginning of my last paragraph when I heard Nathan Pusey, the president of Harvard, announce from somewhere off to my left: “Time!” I read aloud my next sentence. “Time’s up!” he barked again. At this I turned my head toward him and said, in a tone of voice that was slightly harsh and clearly audible throughout the theater, “Please let me finish!” Which he did, possibly because he was too surprised to do anything else. For years afterward, when I met faculty members, they would tell me they recognized me: I was the freshman who had told President Pusey to shut up.

  This perhaps makes me sound more rebellious than I was. It was a generally rebellious time, and I was more law-abiding than many; I believed, for instance, that orderly, legal processes could bring about the desired changes. (To a certain extent I still believe that—or rather, I believe that change which does not come about through orderly, legal processes is not the kind of change I want to experience.) This is not to say that I did not take advantage of the pervading chaos. When a student strike in the spring of 1970 enabled us to skip our exams and get “incompletes” if we chose, I happily took the easy way out in all my courses. But in strike meetings and planning sessions for antiwar demonstrations I usually found myself battling the extremists, those hardliners who answered all attempts to distinguish between subtly but crucially different positions with the comment “That’s just a semantic issue.” Once I ended up in a large roomful of these people, all shouting to be heard over each other’s angry statements. I raised my hand. “Excuse me, can we have Robert’s Rules of Order here?” I asked.

  “Robert’s Rules of Order,” shrieked one of the angriest, “when babies are being burned in Vietnam?” All eyes turned toward me—condemningly, I thought—and I said nothing for the rest of the meeting.

  By the time I was a junior, political activity on campus had pretty much died down, and I had moved from the isolated precincts of Radcliffe to the more centrally located Dunster House, at Harvard. These distinctions between “Harvard” and “Radcliffe” would make no sense at all to a student attending the university now: they are all Harvard students, male and female alike, and they all start out in the freshman dorms in Harvard Yard. But when I started college in 1969, Radcliffe was essentially an old-fashioned women’s school, with strictly enforced curfews, special telephone etiquette for dealing with male callers, and Saturday night milk-and-cookies served to those girls unfortunate enough not to be out on dates. This all came as rather a shock to me, since I had assumed Harvard and Radcliffe were completely coed. I hadn’t realized that only the classes were mixed. (But then, what did I know about Radcliffe? No one of my acquaintance had ever gone there; I only applied because I had read about it in Helen Keller’s autobiography.) Luckily, reality caught up with my expectations in the spring of 1970, when a few hardy pioneers from Harvard moved into the Radcliffe dorms and vice versa. By 1971, when I moved down to Dunster House, coeducation was in full swing.

  I soon fell into a comfortable pattern which was to last for most of my final two years at Harvard. A habitually early riser, I would be in the Dunster dining room at the start of breakfast—say, 7:30 or 8:00—and would stay there for roughly an hour and a half, chatting with a gradually expanding group of my friends. Then I’d go back to my
rooms (my “suite,” as it was rather pretentiously called) and read until lunch, at which I would spend a full two hours talking with an even larger gathering. Ditto for dinner. In between I might have an afternoon seminar which required me to go out, but I tried to keep these academic engagements down to two or at most three days a week. I almost never took a morning lecture course—partly because that would have required me to leave home before lunch, and partly because lecture courses entailed exams, which were much less controllable than papers. A seminar paper, I had discovered, could be completed in four days: two days to do the reading and research, one day to write, one day to type. (I used an old pale-blue Hermes portable, which is still taking up space in my basement though I haven’t touched the keys in decades.) This meant that Reading Period—that sixteen-day stretch of time between the end of classes and the beginning of exams—could be used to complete the work for all four of my courses. And this, in turn, meant that I did no work to speak of during the rest of the semester. Instead, I talked. My memory of college is of one long, intermittently interrupted conversation.

  It sounds fun, but in fact we were all pretty miserable. Alumni would show up at times and announce that their Harvard years had been the best of their lives. “Jeez!” we said to each other. “If these are the best years of our lives, I hate to think what comes next!” Some people got so depressed they had breakdowns; the rest of us just muddled through, staying up half the night, drinking, lying around, and endlessly talking. This tedious but addictive routine would be punctuated by an occasional Early Music concert in the Dunster House Library (I particularly remember the golden quality of the late-afternoon light as it came through the tall windows and shone on the library’s mellow woodwork, an exact visual counterpart of the rich Bach or Corelli chords we were listening to at the time) or an even more occasional stage performance by Dunster House’s resident theater fanatics (including Christopher Durang, who wrote our Christmas pageant, and Al Franken, who starred in it as Saint John the Baptist). But these breaks in the routine were relatively rare. Most of us were content to do nothing day after day.