Walter Kirn

by Lost in the Meritocracy (v5)

  I slammed the door hard enough to crack the casement and pounded down the stairs into the cold.

  I VOWED TO GET SERIOUS ABOUT MY STUDIES. I CHOSE TO major in English, since it sounded like something I might already know. I assumed that my classmates and I would study the classics and analyze their major themes and such, but instead we were buffeted with talk of “theory,” whatever that was. The basic meanings of the poems, short stories, and essays contained in the hefty Norton anthologies that anchored our entry-level reading lists were treated by certain professors as trivial, almost beneath discussion; what mattered, we were given to understand, were our “critical assumptions.”

  I, for one, wasn’t aware of having any. Until I was sixteen or so, my only reading had consisted of Hardy Boys mysteries, world almanacs, books on UFOs, a Time-Life history of World War II, and a handful of pulpy best sellers linked to movies (The Day of the Jackal and The Exorcist stood out), which I’d read for their sex scenes and air of general perversity. I knew a few great authors’ names from scanning dust jackets in the public library and watching the better TV quiz shows, but the only serious novels I’d ever cracked were Frankenstein, Moby-Dick (both sold to me by crafty high-school teachers as gripping tales of adventure, which they weren’t), and The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald. Gatsby I actually finished. Among my mother’s collection of mail-order leatherette masterpieces, it was the shortest, the least remote in time, and the only one narrated by a Minnesotan. The tale didn’t strike me as tragic or cautionary. To me, it was the invigorating chronicle of several high-spirited Midwesterners storming through the mansions of the East. Gatsby’s demise barely registered for me. I focused on the dancing and the drinking, the motorcar outings, the rich girls, the grand hotels.

  With virtually no stored literary material about which to harbor critical assumptions, I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself. I’d honed these skills on the speech team back in high school, and I didn’t regard them as sins against the Honor Code. Indeed, they embodied an honor code: my own. “Be Honored,” it stated. “Or Be Damned.” To me, imitation and education were different words for the same thing, anyway. What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?

  In my private Princeton honors program, the deployment of key words was crucial, just as the recognition of them had been on the SAT. Because I despaired of ever grasping these theory words, style of presentation was everything. “Liminal,” spoken breezily enough, and “valuational,” served up with verve, could make a professor shiver and drop his chalk, but if delivered hesitantly, they bombed. They bombed before they reached one’s lips, while still emerging from one’s throat. Unless they were spit out promptly and with spirit, such words could actually choke a person.

  This suffocating sensation often came over me whenever I opened Deconstruction and Criticism, a collection of essays by leading theory people that I spotted everywhere that year and knew to be one of the richest sources around for words that could turn a modest midterm essay into an A-plus tour de force. Here is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution by the Frenchman Jacques Derrida, the volume’s most prestigious name: “He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it.” On the same page I encountered the windpipe-blocking “heteronomous” and “invagination.” When I turned the page I came across—stuck in a footnote—“unreadability.”

  That word I understood, of course.

  But real understanding was rare with theory. It couldn’t be depended on at all. Boldness of execution was what scored points. With one of my professors, a snappy “heuristic” usually did the trick. With another, the charm was a casual “praxis.” Even when a poem or story fundamentally escaped me, I found that I could save face with terminology, as when I referred to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as “semiotically unstable.” By this I meant “hard.” All the theory words meant “hard” to me, from “hermeneutical” to “gestural.” Once in a while I’d look one up and see that it had a more specific meaning, but later—sometimes only minutes later—the definition would catch a sort of breeze, float away like a dandelion seed, and the word would go back to meaning “hard.”

  The need to finesse my ignorance through such trickery—honorable trickery to my mind, but not to other minds, perhaps—left me feeling hollow and vaguely haunted. Seeking security in numbers, I sought out the company of other frauds. We recognized one another instantly. We toted around books by Roland Barthes, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Walter Benjamin. We spoke of “playfulness” and “textuality” and concluded before we’d read even a hundredth of it that the Western canon was “illegitimate,” a veiled expression of powerful group interests that it was our duty to subvert. In our rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors—the ones who drank with us at the Nassau Street bars and played the Clash on the tape decks of their Toyotas as their hands crept up our pants and skirts—we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.

  For true believers, the goal of theory seemed to be the lifting of a great weight from the shoulders of civilization. This weight was the illusion that it was civilized. The weight had been set there by a range of perpetrators—members of certain favored races, males, property owners, the church, the literate, natives of the northern hemisphere—who, when taken together, it seemed to me, represented a considerable portion of everyone who had ever lived. Then again, of course I’d think that way. Of course I’d be cynical. I was one of them.

  So why didn’t I feel like one of them, particularly just then? Why did I, a member of the classes that had supposedly placed the weight on others and was now attempting to redress this crime, feel so crushingly weighed down myself?

  I wasn’t one of theory’s true believers. I was a confused young opportunist trying to turn his confusion to his advantage by sucking up to scholars of confusion. The literary works they prized—the ones best suited to their project of refining and hallowing confusion—were, quite naturally, knotty and oblique. The poems of Wallace Stevens, for example. My classmates and I found them maddeningly elusive, like collections of backward answers to hidden riddles, but luckily we could say “recursive” by then. We could say “incommensurable.”

  Both words meant “hard.”

  I grew to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they, too, were fakes. In classroom discussions, and even when grading essays, they seemed to favor us over the hard workers, whose patient, sedentary study habits, and sense that confusion was something to be avoided rather than celebrated, appeared unsuited to the new attitude of antic postmodernism that I had mastered almost without effort. To thinkers of this school, great literature was an incoherent con, and I—a born con man who knew little about great literature—had every reason to agree with them. In the land of nonreadability, the nonreader was king, it seemed. Long live the king.

  This lucky convergence of academic fashion and my illiteracy emboldened me socially. It convinced me I had a place at Princeton after all. I hadn’t chosen it, exactly, but I’d be foolish not to occupy it. Otherwise I’d be alone.

  Finally, without reservations or regrets, I settled into the ranks of Princeton’s Joy Division—my name for the crowd of moody avant-gardists who hung around the smaller campus theaters discussing, enjoying, and dramatizing confusion. One of their productions, which I assisted with, required the audience to contemplate a stage decorated with nothing but potted plants. Plants and Waiters, it was called. My friends and I stood snickering in the wings making bets on how long it would take for people to leave. They, the “waiters,” proved true to form. They fidgeted but they didn’t flee. Hilarious.

  And, for me, profoundly enlightening. Who knew
that serious art could be like this? Who would have guessed that the essence of high culture would turn out to be teasing the poor saps that still believed in it? Certainly no one back in Minnesota. Well, the joke was on them, and I was in on it. I could never go back there now. It bothered me that I’d ever even lived there, knowing that people here on the great coast (people like me—the new, emerging me) had been laughing at us all along. But what troubled me more was the dawning realization that had I not reached Princeton, I might never have discovered this≔ I might have stayed a rube forever. This idea transformed my basic loyalties. I decided that it was time to leave behind the sort of folks whom I’d been raised around and stand—for better or for worse—with the characters who’d clued me in.

  I soaked lentil beans in iron stew pots, formed falafel patties in my bare hands, harvested bean sprouts with pinking shears, and squeezed the moisture from slices of tofu between double layers of paper towels. My new housemates, all upperclassmen and Grateful Dead fans, believed that preparing and consuming food were sacramental acts. The kitchen was a temple, and the mood at our table was reverential. There, according to our leader, Greg, a bearded political science major with mesmerizing, unfocused brown eyes and sandal-strap tan lines on his feet, we “shared the good things of the earth.”

  Among these good things were the hallucinogenic mushrooms that Greg must have had some nearby source for, because they were moist when he shook them from their bags. Sometimes he shook them directly into the soup pot. Due to his knowledge of life in poorer countries and to his sympathy for their customs and folkways and religions, Greg thought of himself as a sort of village shaman. This gave him a lot of leeway in his conduct. One weekend I caught him sleeping with a girl who’d flown out to visit me from Macalester College. Instead of apologizing or scurrying off, he looked up from the bed—my bed—and said, “In some cultures, Walter, men share their women proudly.” Then, to my girl, whose head was under a pillow, he said, “It’s okay. Stay mellow. I expected this. At some stage when you trip on shrooms, there’s always a visitation from the shame realm.”

  There is no drug scene like an Ivy League drug scene. Kids can’t just get high; they have to seek epiphanies. They have to ground their mischief in manifestos. The most popular one around the veggie house held that drugs, especially psychedelic drugs—especially plant-based psychedelic drugs—helped to break down the rigid inner partitions that restricted one’s full humanity. This belief in creative derangement came down to us from Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and the Beat poets, but in my case it didn’t quite apply because my mind had few partitions in the first place. It was one big dark and empty room with scraps of paper strewn all over the floor.

  Our drug sessions were the opposite of parties; they brought on bouts of crushing introspection and spirals of anxious cerebration. One night Adam came over to the house for Thai spicy noodles and a square of blotter acid. After the bowls and chopsticks were put away, the smells of burned sesame oil and peanut butter and the climate of well-fed hippie piety drove us outside for a long walk. Our first stop was the Princeton chapel, which was closer in size and splendor to a cathedral. Something had drawn us there. As we walked down its infinite main aisle toward the gaudy holy end, Adam dropped to the floor—not kneeling, sprawling. He said an invisible force had knocked him down. He said it seemed to be displeased with us. We scrambled out of the place as though pursued and hid behind a sculpture by Picasso of a gigantic triangular-faced woman. It, too, had an angry force field, though. It, too, cast us away.

  “I feel punished,” said Adam as we wandered. “I feel like I offended. Did I offend?”

  “Don’t let those thoughts push in.”

  “They’re in. They’re here.”

  “I know,” I said quietly. “Me, too.”

  “But you didn’t quit premed,” said Adam. “You didn’t renounce tradition and leave the path.”

  “Maybe I was never on the path.”

  “You had to be. You’re here.”

  We ended up on the grounds of the Institute for Advanced Studies, a lofty think tank secluded in the woods. The place was best known as a haven for famous physicists, including Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, and through its lamplit windows we glimpsed the silhouettes of Nobel Prize winners, their heads surrounded by pulsing pink coronas that persisted even when we blinked. Now and then someone would pass us in the darkness, absorbed, we imagined, in algebraic reveries related to fusion reactors and plasma beams.

  Toward midnight we sat down under a tree—a benevolent presence that seemed to offer shelter from the sinister brilliance all around us—and reached the conclusion that Princeton was a portal for arrogant, Luciferian energies bent on the overthrow of God and Nature. It was a well-disguised weapons plant. An armory. The reason the chapel had repelled us was to prevent us from gazing upon its altar, which was probably dressed with a cross inside an atom. We decided to purify ourselves. We scooped up clods of mud and grass, smeared them all over our arms and throats and cheeks, and danced like druids, like dervishes. The idea was to whirl back to a time before telescopes and written alphabets. Loving presences would surely welcome us. They’d dress us in robes of softest spider silk and take us to meet the others who’d returned. Their numbers would astonish us.

  Our behavior attracted attention from a guard whose flashlight beam swarmed with photons the size of snowflakes. He asked us what we were doing. We tried to tell him. The guard seemed kind; not a guard at all—a guardian. He aimed his cone of fluffy radiance in a direction that struck us as the true one. We thanked him, he nodded, and we set out.

  “Back from your journeys,” said a bearded figure when, by a route impossible to map, we finally arrived in paradise.

  His name was Greg, we learned.

  He made us soup.

  Other trips ended badly.

  A self-proclaimed Marxist from New York City and part of the Joy Division crowd, Barry Lehrer was the only child of a classics professor and a nightclub singer. When we met, he’d just returned to Princeton from a one-year suspension for some infraction he claimed to be innocent of but wouldn’t talk about. I assumed it had to do with drugs. He wore his shirts unbuttoned to the breastbone, not to display his unimpressive chest but for the same reason he rarely flushed a toilet, wiped his shoes before entering a building, or pulled a door completely shut: his philosophical hostility to social niceties and common courtesies. They were forms of unpaid labor, he felt, which propped up a system destined for collapse.

  “Everything’s labor. Everything,” said Barry. We were sitting up late in my bedroom at the veggie house smoking pot and talking socialism. “Waiting for green before you cross is labor.”

  “What’s wrong with labor?”

  “Nothing. Labor’s noble. Unless it’s coerced, converted into capital, and used to manufacture the very chains”—he held his wrists together in front of him and mimed a failed attempt to separate them—“that bind us from the hour of our birth.”

  “The only reason I wait for the green light is so I don’t get run over by a car.”

  “It’s an act of submission. Face it.”

  “That’s extreme.”

  “I hold to a pretty high standard, I realize that.” He reached for the milk-crate bookshelf beside my bed and extracted what was, at the moment, my favorite book: an anthology of American poetry put out by a major textbook publisher.

  “Can you believe this corporate perversion? Wake up, Walt Whitman, you’re a commodity. Get with it, Emily Dickinson, you’ve been marketed.” He opened the book and flipped through its thin pages—I heard their fragile corners tearing—and read from a poem whose title I couldn’t see. “America why are your libraries full of tears? America when will you send your eggs to India?”

  “Who is that? I like it.”

  “Don’t get stuck on authorship.”

  “Tell me. Show me.”

  Barry closed the book.

  A few days later he pulled up to the house in a co
mpact car with mismatched tires. He looked to be on the fourth day of his labor-saving five-day shaving cycle. He invited me on an outing to New York to buy some cocaine from a “batshit party girl” whom he said he’d gone to high school with. He instructed me to bring cigarettes and cash. I had a little money for a change because I’d just cashed my first paycheck from my new job bartending at the Princeton faculty club. He jammed the bills I gave him in his back pocket and asked me if I was holding out on him. I was honest. “Yes,” I said. “I kept a few bucks for myself, if that’s okay.” He proceeded to lecture me on why it wasn’t, battering me with quotes from Marx. He even disputed the legitimacy of the term “myself.” He broke me down. My last twenty was transferred to his trousers, where it had belonged all along, supposedly.

  We drove to the Engineering Quad and picked up Barry’s friend, Jason, a pale computer whiz with all the characteristics of a bad stutterer except for the stutter itself. We shot down Route 1 past motels and pancake houses, entered a tunnel tiled like a bathroom, and emerged onto a downtown street full of police cars and the types they shadow. I’d been to Manhattan three or four times before, but always with Nina, to see plays, so all I knew of the city was Times Square and the plaza of Lincoln Center. From these visits I’d formed the impression that New York was largely populated by middle-aged couples who didn’t get along well and went to shows so they wouldn’t have to speak.

  This excursion was different; I got to look around. I saw that, in fact, most New Yorkers were lonely pedestrians preoccupied by their reflections in store windows. What also struck me, quite pleasantly, were the city’s angles, cuts, and edges—its thrilling, un-Midwestern jaggedness. I also liked its hollowness, which announced itself when our car drove over manholes, rattling their iron lids, and again when I poured the dregs of a papaya drink over a grating we were standing on and watched the liquid drip down into the gloom. How high the city stretched was plain to see, but I hadn’t appreciated how deep it went.