Dad kept winding the length of rope around his hand.
“Dad, can you please stop that? This is crazy.”
“Well, then, I’m in the right place, aren’t I?” Dad said, putting the rope back in his pocket.
We started walking again, and we actually had a normal conversation. I told him about school, how I was majoring in English and taking pre-med courses.
“Don’t study too hard like Johnny did. He was so set on getting summa and beating out Uncle Jim that he didn’t make time for a social life. Have you joined a final club? I was in the Fly Club, you know. Made lots of great friends there.”
“No, I haven’t joined a final club. It’s different now than when you were there. But maybe I should reconsider. You had fun?”
“Lots of fun. Of course, I had hockey, too. Those four years were some of the best of my life. I hope you make your years there as good as mine. Or better.”
“Well, I do have good friends. And I have fallen in love with English. Samuel Johnson, in particular.”
“Who’s he?”
“Amazing man. He was like a psychologist before there were psychologists. But he was really troubled himself. Depressed, ugly, but a genius. I have this great professor who makes Johnson so real, it’s like I know him personally.”
“I can see you’re excited,” Dad said. “That’s good.”
I was still feeling totally weird, just having talked about Dad’s hanging himself and now having this seemingly normal father-son conversation. But I shouldn’t have felt weird, as this was pretty much in keeping with my relationship all along with my father. I knew him, yet I didn’t know him. He was great with me, taking me to Red Sox games and fishing, but most of the time he was absent and distant. He never talked about Mom, or what had happened. He never talked about my years in Charleston, and he never talked about his years in the war. He did give me advice, though, like not to study too hard as Johnny did, and when I was ten he told me about wet dreams, which felt totally awkward. He was good to me. I just always felt like he held back the important stuff.
We kept chatting, normal father-and-son style, until we got back to the unit. Before I rang the doorbell, I had to ask, “Dad, you’re OK? No more thoughts of killing yourself?”
“No, none at all. I’m sorry about that.”
“I’m going to have to tell your doctor anyway, OK? Just so I won’t worry?” I felt like a tattletale, but I couldn’t leave without telling someone.
“Sure, OK. Thanks for being such a good son.”
We embraced rather than shaking hands, and I rang the bell.
38.
As I told my dad, I fell in love with the works of Samuel Johnson sophomore year. Not knowing the course would grab and hold on to me as no course ever had before, I innocently signed up sophomore year for The Age of Johnson, taught by Walter Jackson Bate.
Jack Bate was a legend, but at the time I didn’t know that. The first day the lecture hall in Emerson 105 was packed. Bate—tall, thin, with tufts of hair sprouting all over his head like white feathers—walked up onto the stage and started to talk, waving his arms a lot. He spoke rapidly and passionately, but also efficiently. “You don’t need to waste too much time on James Boswell. If you took this course at Yale, it would be all about Boswell, but here, at Harvard, we know better. We will introduce you to the real Samuel Johnson. We won’t bother with calling him Doctor Johnson, as that is pure affectation put on by his admirers. He certainly earned the title, don’t misunderstand me, writing the dictionary was a herculean task, but the people who refer to him as Doctor Johnson treat him like a pompous old fossil. He was anything but. He lived a life of constant pain and struggle. Anything he got, he got on his own. He battled two prolonged episodes of deep depression in an era when people didn’t understand depression at all. He wrestled with his religious faith, and even though he was a straightforward Anglican, at the end of his life he begged God to forgive and accept his late conversion. He was terrified of death, which probably explains his antipathy toward Milton. In other words, Johnson was a real and complex man, not just the brilliant talker we see in Boswell’s biography of him. To be sure, he was the greatest talker in the history of the English language, but he was so much more than that.”
And so began my exhilarating ride into the world of Johnson, courtesy of Jack Bate, leading me to write my undergraduate thesis on the religion of Samuel Johnson.
Bate was the lead reader of my thesis and gave me a summa, calling it the best undergraduate thesis on Johnson’s religion he’d ever read. To this day, that is the accolade of which I am the most proud.
Johnson gripped my imagination as no writer ever had. He had a dark core and yet his life was bursting with love—of people, literature, conversation, underdogs, competition, fellowship, food and drink, walking and exploring, embracing impossibly difficult tasks—in short, of anything and everything his hungry mind and the world around him offered up.
Even though he struggled with depression his entire life and suffered two prolonged bouts of it, and even though he was terrified of death and harbored deep insecurity about his faith in God, and even though he exhibited a host of odd mannerisms and tics to the point that he often ate behind a screen lest others observe his slovenly manners, he triumphed over all of that, becoming one of the great geniuses in the history of English literature and one of the most astute commentators on human nature who ever lived.
Despite all that he suffered, he was, as Bate said, above all else, sane.
Having lived with Johnson for a year, at the end of that year, as an English major I had to find someone to be my tutor, just as Johnny had found Bill Alfred and Harry Levin. I took a chance and asked Professor Alfred if he’d be willing to take me on. “Yes,” he said, “I’d be glad to.”
What luck. For two years I met with Professor Alfred in his study on Athens Street, which was an easy walk from my dorm, Dunster House. Junior year, we focused on plays, and read three hundred of them, about ten a week. Of course we couldn’t discuss every one, but I got a large dose of drama, from Euripides to O’Neill.
I never knew who’d be sitting in Alfred’s living room when I arrived. One day I couldn’t help but take notice of the presence of a beautiful blonde. It was Faye Dunaway, who, having acted in his play on Broadway, had developed a deep personal (though not romantic) relationship with him. Another day, Robert Lowell was there. Alfred called him Cal, as did most of Lowell’s friends. Alfred was instrumental in looking out for Lowell’s mental health. He said to me, “When the gin hits the lithium, watch out!”
Alfred was friends with so many—with T. S. Eliot, with Gertrude Stein (or “Miss Stein,” as he called her), with Lillian Hellman, with Mary McCarthy (whose last name he pronounced “McCarty,” I guess in the Irish tradition), with Lowell’s second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, with Elizabeth Bishop, with Robert Frost, with pretty much all the important literary figures of the day. But Alfred could not have been more modest. In our sessions he never boasted or dropped names, but he would tell wonderful stories about all of these people by way of bringing them to life, rather than leaving them as frozen icons in my mind.
A devout Catholic who went to mass every morning, Alfred was the son of an Irish bricklayer from Brooklyn, a man who’d turn up in his Athens Street house every couple of months. Alfred’s mother, Mary, had died some years before I met him. He was clearly devoted to her, once telling me the story of how she’d saved up money to buy him a Royal typewriter after, as a ten-year-old, he’d announced he wanted to become a writer. “She lugged it on her hip almost a mile, and it weighed a ton.” He took such good care of his father, I believe, in part out of loyalty to her.
Now and then he’d invite me to go “slam a gate,” which meant go to the Parthenon, a Greek restaurant a few blocks down Mass Ave toward Central Square, or, if other people were joining us, to the Athens Olympia in downtown Boston. Happily, I loved Greek food. Alfred, true to his Irish roots, would always order meat and s
puds, the Greek version being lamb and roast potatoes. Both restaurants had white linen tablecloths on top of pads, so there was a cushioned, luxurious feel as you rested your arms on the table.
The dinners always began with martinis and appetizers. I loved taramasalata, and both restaurants made it especially well. It’s hard to find good tara, as I called it. But the martinis stole the show. Mr. Alfred and I usually had at least three apiece. By the time the main course came, we were very well lubricated, talking up a storm, laughing about faculty foibles, politics, the Irish (“You need to know two things about the Irish,” he’d say; “first, they are basically insane, and second, they harbor a fundamental hatred of life”), campus protests (“Pusey was a fool,” he said, “but the protesters acted like moral jocks, as if they and they alone knew the truth”), education (“The worst thing Harvard or any college can do is fill students full of stupid wonder”), T. S. Eliot (“He could be quite catty—one day we were being driven in a car and I told him we had our mutual friend Jonathan Griffin’s new play in the trunk, to which Eliot replied, ‘Well, then, we should have a very smooth ride’ ”), and love (“You can’t explain falling in love, it’s just if you like the cut of her jib”). By the time we waltzed our way home, we’d slammed a gate for sure.
Alfred dressed nattily, but in order to have more money to give away, he bought all his clothes used, at Keezer’s, a legendary Cambridge consignment store near his house where JFK and many others used to sell their old clothes.
My senior year, he took in a homeless teen who’d been in trouble with the law. Sometimes he’d call me in the middle of the night to drive him to a jail “to bail out the boy.” Alfred did not have a car himself, nor could he drive.
His faith in God was unshakable. One day during our session he pointed to the Franklin stove in his study and said, “I am as sure there is a God as I’m sure that stove is sitting there.” But he was anything but pious. He hated the religious hypocrites who sullied religion. At the same time, he would never write anything in his plays that might offend a priest.
When B. F. Skinner’s book Beyond Freedom and Dignity came out in 1971, Alfred said to me, “Beyond freedom and dignity? That’s what B. F. Skinner is.” Alfred took concepts such as freedom and dignity seriously, and arguments against them personally, having seen people die to protect them when he served in the Army tank corps during World War II.
At one point during a tutorial, we got to talking about my plans after graduation. I was thinking of medical school, but also wondering about graduate school. “Maybe I should go on and get a Ph.D. in English,” I said.
Without pausing even a second, Alfred instantly responded, “Oh, no, don’t do that, you’ll end up hating books!” So rare, a teacher counseling a student not to do what he had done himself, not to follow in the steps of the mentor. “Become a doctor and a writer. Medical training is great training if you want to write about life. Lots of great writers were also doctors. Keats, Chekhov, Maugham, Williams, to name a few. You’re much more a doctor than an academic,” he said.
I was so grateful to him for giving me that advice. If he had urged me to go on and get a Ph.D., I might well have done it, if only because that would have been by far the easier route for me.
Toward the end of junior year, I had to decide on a topic for my undergraduate honors thesis. Alfred and I batted around some ideas: maybe write about A Long Day’s Journey into Night, because we both loved O’Neill and the play reminded me so much of my own family; maybe write about T. S. Eliot’s literary criticism and tap into Alfred’s personal knowledge of Eliot; maybe write something about the theory of comedy, as Harry Levin’s course on that had really turned me on; or write something about my favorite novel, The Great Gatsby. But again and again, I kept coming back to Johnson, whom Alfred also loved. “The only problem with writing about Johnson,” he said, “is that it’s hard to write about someone who’s said it all already himself.”
“I guess so,” I replied, “but I’d like to try.”
“Well, then you might look at his religion,” Alfred said. “Get into his psychology. Start with that great line in The Vanity of Human Wishes, ‘the secret ambush of a specious prayer.’ ”
So I was off to the races.
I would delay a year, because, after waiting tables at Pate’s Restaurant in Chatham at night during the summer and tutoring high school kids in math during the day, I’d saved enough money by mid-October to take a year off and go to London.
Waiting tables itself had been an adventure, learning how to carry trays laden with lobsters on the palm of one hand held high above my shoulder, making friends with Joe Kublicki, a big, tough guy who showed me the ropes, arguing with the racist bartender who insisted blacks were such good athletes because they had “an extra tendon, like monkeys,” waiting on customers who got so drunk they’d either leave without paying the check, and I’d have to chase them out into the parking lot, or they’d leave a tip so huge I’d have to ask them if they really meant to do that (otherwise they’d only cancel it the next day), and then, after work on Mondays, going down the road to another bar and watching the new show Monday Night Football on TV, being entertained by Howard Cosell, Dandy Don Meredith (who’d spar with Cosell), and the classy Frank Gifford, who’d mediate between them.
Once in London, I rented a flat just over the Hammersmith Bridge in Barnes from a flamboyant playwright named Paddy and her not flamboyant barrister husband. Paddy would talk to me about writing and tell me to be sure to have a job that would generate income so as not to have to rely on writing to pay the rent. Or marry someone who had such a job. For such a flamboyant playwright, Paddy was also practical.
I fell in with a circle of writers, including my friend from Exeter and college Jon Galassi, who was at Cambridge on a fellowship (and went on to run Farrar, Straus & Giroux and become one of the country’s premier editors as well as a poet and novelist in his own right), the poet Judith Thurman, whom I’d met through Bill Alfred (Judith went on to write a biography of Isak Dinesen, which was turned into the movie Out of Africa, and one of Colette, and to write regularly for the New Yorker), Jonathan Griffin, who wrote that weighty play and was an excellent poet, and another playwright, David Pinner, a rotund Falstaffian figure whom I came to adore. We would meet almost weekly for parties, readings, dinners, and general good times. Judith and David I’d see almost every day.
My brother had given me an introduction to the chemist and novelist C. P. Snow. I will never forget meeting in his extremely spare sitting room in London. (Was the spareness an expression of left-wing politics? I didn’t know.) We talked. Lady Pamela and Lord Snow were congenial, but I was never invited back—maybe because I wasn’t my brother Johnny, or I had not yet read any of Lady Pamela’s novels, or both.
While in London I fell in love with a wonderful woman. She was the epitome of style: elegant, witty, and beautiful. She wasn’t trying to cast a spell but I fell under it nonetheless.
It was romantic love at its most blind. Not that she wasn’t worthy of being adored, she absolutely was. But even though she gave me no encouragement in the physical realm of our relationship—we never even made out, never mind going to bed together—I summoned up my nerve, or lost my mind, and asked her to marry me. She gracefully, tactfully, and ever so gently declined. That she did so without saying “Are you completely crazy?” testifies to her immense kindness.
After I returned to the United States we kept up a correspondence that gradually petered out. Around that time, I learned from Jamie, who knew her as well, that she was sexually more interested in women than in men.
I suppose she might have told me before I more or less made a fool of myself, but on the other hand, I understand why she didn’t. She wasn’t leading me on sexually in the least—why should she tell me she preferred women to men as romantic partners? Whatever, I treasure the time we spent together and feel nothing but warmth toward her now. I also, once again, shudder at my naïveté.
Wit
h the money I had left, before returning to the States I took a trip by myself to Greece. The nights I spent on Mykonos would have been perfect had I been with a woman. Being only with myself, they were depressing. A healthy young single male depressed in Mykonos? Go figure.
I cut my trip short and took the Orient Express from Athens through Belgrade, Vienna, Innsbruck, Zurich, Paris, and Calais and thence back to London. I almost didn’t make it, though, because I got off the train in Belgrade to get a snack and a cocktail. When I reboarded, like an idiot I got on the wrong train.
My passport, my luggage, my traveler’s checks, everything, was on the other train. Here I was in a Communist country in 1972 with no ID, no money, and no language other than English and a little French. Mercifully, God smiled on me and directed me to a conductor who spoke English. He told me to get off at the next stop and wait. “Be sure to get on the very next train that comes into the station, heading in the same direction as this one. That’s your train.” I wanted to hug him.
As I stood on the barren concrete platform in a small station in Yugoslavia, I wondered, what if he was playing a trick on the stupid American, or if he’d misunderstood my question? What if I’d misunderstood his instructions? I watched stray papers blow across the track and felt a chill as I prayed that my train would soon come.
Those fifteen minutes were the longest of my life. I paced. I kicked an empty Coke can that rolled my way out of nowhere. I chain-smoked six or seven cigarettes. Finally, the next train pulled into the station. I jumped onto it like a life raft and frantically started looking for my compartment.
Within a minute I found the group I’d been sitting with, including the European mother figure who immediately started scolding me as if I were her son. “Where have you been? We were worried sick! You left everything here on the train! Do you know how much danger you were in? You could have been arrested and left to rot in jail! Do you even have a brain? You have no idea what you put all of us through.”
Because I Come from a Crazy Family Page 16