One was different. Kicked out of its national for admitting a black in the fifties (as unlikely as that sounds today), Phi Alpha Psi had abandoned rushing. It didn’t engage in pledging—selective admittance to forge a collective identity—only a voluntary sign-up sheet left on a living room table until its quota was reached. More by fortuity than design, Phi Psi became the safety valve of the system, siphoning off Amherst’s rebels, progressives, and outcasts. The membership was a potpourri of rock musicians, poets, political activists, motorcyclists, early conceptual artists, and theatrical improvisers as it ran the gamut from Phi Beta Kappa physicists to the first druggies and hippies of the sixties.
A three-storey Georgian mansion directly across College Street (Route 9) from Valentine dining hall, Phi Psi included a large field along the road and a parking lot in back. Down behind the lot was “The Glen,” a small patch of remaining forest in a ravine with a stream running through.
At the time Amherst was a small rural town, so there were no extra-collegiate avant-garde institutions or watering holes. Phi Psi served as a hostel, a hangout for artists, including college dropouts in the area and eccentric recent alums like Eric the Rat, a fabled renegade who lived in the woods near Belchertown. In this guise, the house appeared in short stories in The New Yorker and Playboy.
Since Phi Psi was well under its quota I joined despite my application to Berkeley. During the remainder of the spring term I spent many an evening in the manor’s parlor rooms where activities ranged from discussions of Wittgensteinian philosophy and campus politics to poetry readings, string quartets, and a touring jug band and skiffle trio—their pianist and songwriter had attended Amherst as a recent member of Phi Psi. Another alumnus-led piece of performance art consisted solely of improvisations around the word “striations.”
The downstairs featured two large living rooms, a library, and two student domiciles. The windowless basement was a social room with a ping-pong table and makeshift bar, complete with a Budweiser sign that was plugged in on Saturday nights concomitant with the treasurer ordering a keg (not necessarily Bud). Its darker rear had tables, chairs, and open space for dancing. A permanent stale-beer odor prevailed.
Most student billets were on the second floor, including two singles and a coveted triple with a balcony—luxury quarters compared to the dorms (after all, the building was modelled on a New England estate house). The third-floor attic had two student flats, but most of it was gigantic unfinished, unheated sleeping rooms. It was the custom to keep beds out of social space downstairs so that there would be more public territory. Each of these bed quarters was an end-to-end unfinished, unheated section of attic with rows of beds. Each bunk was covered by an electric blanket. Their tiny reddish lights dotted the nights—Massachusetts was pure Arctic by early November.
Phi Psi had space for forty residents, so when I realized I was coming back I wrote ahead and was amazed to be offered an accommodation on the second floor because someone had just dropped out. I was told I would have the room to myself and, upon arrival, I arranged it after my taste from local shops and antique stalls: a cheap coffee table, a butter churn to keep papers in, Sandy’s portrait of Betsy centered on the wall above ears of decorative maize.
Then, just before classes began, a transfer student named Greg showed up out of the blue and joined the House. The verdict of the Phi Psi council was that I share my room with him. A short, husky, Shakespearean actor with a booming voice, he was appalled by my lack of taste and was in the process of relocating my belongings in the closet when I first laid eyes on him.
“What’s going on here?” I demanded.
“Just accommodating my stuff, that’s all. You can’t take up the whole room anymore.”
After we chose halves, he countered my Betsy/butter churn sector with a busty Renoir in a gilt frame over a straw hamper containing three artfully triangulated bottles of French wine. As he stood there admiring it, I pondered the incongruity of our forced domicile—we couldn’t have been more opposite in style or spirit. Jointly, though, we bought used desks and a faded green couch, likely in its twelfth or fifteenth student room.
Those last days before classes I spent as many hours per day as I could bear alternating between Salty and Sandy and The Moon on my electric Smith Corona, as Greg stormed in and out in obvious irritation. “This is absurd,” he finally erupted. “You think you can monopolize the space like a private studio.”
“I’m finishing a book.”
“I’m finishing the great American novel,” he mocked in singsong. Then he proposed that we negotiate for private hours, in particular Saturday-night use of the room, because, as he put it, “I need to get my social life going.”
Since I wasn’t dating I conceded that option, a munificence I soon regretted, for he arrived early each Saturday with a different lady and locked me out for the remainder of the evening. I sensed the event was usually a failure, for he was in a permanent foul mood.
Next door was Phil, the president of Phi Psi, a physics major with one of the highest grade-point averages in the school. He was elegant and handsome, with a bit of the Kennedy look, engaged to a pretty senior from Smith.
Further down the hall was an intimidating character: a very tall Rasputin-looking junior with fierce eyes, bushy brows, and a long beard, one the few at Amherst. Jeff Tripp played the guitar continually, as he matched notes plunk for plunk with records of Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk. His favorite song was “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” which he performed so often and with such studied care that for a long time I thought he was in the process of composing it. I tried to avoid him because he was contentious, but I had a reputation from my freshman-year antics and Greg was the younger brother of a friend of his, so he became an early inspector of our room.
At first he lampooned my “decadent” reading tastes—Robert Penn Warren; T. H. White, The Once and Future King; Hamilton Basso, The View from Pompey’s Head. Though daunted by his presence, I was eager to learn adult stuff—so I didn’t defend myself.
One of his amusements was to prod me to confess my escapades in pop America. As he heard about Arista Teen Tours, he wickedly satirized “the rich kids on safari.” He admired my talent with tarot (bumming fortunes for himself and a train of girlfriends) and laughed aloud over my story of meeting Paddy Chayefsky. “The cat wrote one good line,” he said. Then he performed it theatrically: “‘I don’t hate your father; your father is a prince of a man!’”
When, on request, I tried to summarize The Moon, I ended up saying it was about a town in Florida, using cosmic and unconscious forces to explore inner worlds. Tripp couldn’t stop laughing.
“This is the twentieth century, man. Next time someone asks you what your book is about, say it’s about sex and death, because those are the only things it could be about and the only things worth writing about. If it’s not about them, then it’s about avoiding them.”
Within a few weeks he had me reading Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov, as he tried to teach me the difference between sappy melodrama and more radical modes of perception. “They’re advertising men you’re glorifying, not artists; they don’t know anything about the mysteries.” He intoned the word dramatically—“the missss-teries.” Committed to the droll absurdities of Molloy and Malone Dies, he loved to burst into my room at odd moments quoting Beckett lines that turned the universe upside-down:
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
Come on, we’ll soon be dead, let’s make the most of it. But what matter whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely dying, I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am, nor if I am.
As Tripp’s soliloquies rattled the walls, I stood in admiration. Nihilistic irony and stark minimalism were faces of the universe that I had missed entirely: the bare existential fact of our existence, without overlay or metaphor. These texts broke with my prior aesthetics and gave me a blunt, toug
h, philosophically charged target to shoot for in place of the metaphysical aphorisms and sentimental lyricisms I had been adulating. Beckett was wry and casual, street-wise and fierce.
“Oh, Grossinger, you’re so goddamn young,” Jeff sighed. “You know nothing; I have to teach you everything.”
I wondered why he thought I was worth it.
Yes, a little creature, I shall try and make a little creature, to hold in my arms, a creature in my image, no matter what I say. And seeing what a poor thing I have made, or how like myself, I shall eat it. Then be alone a long time, unhappy, not knowing what my prayer should be nor to whom.
Much of what Jeff taught me was social information: don’t chatter; don’t tell dumb stories; speak with style … just the right amount of irony. When I participated in house meetings he accosted me afterwards with his critique, telling me what I did that was good and what was horseshit. “Jive, man! Don’t whimper. When you jive you’re as good as anyone here. When you whimper you’re fucking Elmer the Cow.” He mocked my excitement over Grossinger’s, my offhand acceptance of its aristocracy, celebrity fuss, and corny uses of fun, and he especially despised the portrait of Betsy hanging in my room. “You’ve got this two-bit American cheerleader hanging in a virtual shrine!”
Tripp drove a black Porsche, which was a sacred car in the house lot. He brought back splashy actresses and dancers from Smith, Mount Holyoke, even Radcliffe. So far as I knew no one else had ever ridden in the vehicle. When Greg asked him for a lift to Mount Holyoke, Jeff stared him down hard: “Look here, man; this buggy is to tote cunt. Got it?” The beginnings of a smile froze on Greg’s lips. Then as he felt the full rush of shame, he slinked away.
One night a bunch of us from the House gathered at a table in Valentine where a senior named Dave, who was short on money for the weekend, mused about selling his post-mortem body to a medical school for a couple of hundred dollars. When Tripp challenged him, Dave kept saying, “What’s wrong with it? Just tell me what’s wrong with it, Jeff.”
I waited anxiously for his answer, but he turned to me and intoned: “My student will respond.”
I gulped, my mind raced for a second, and then I said, “Because it’s making too big a separation between life and death.”
He broke into a big smile and, putting his arm around my back, said, “Exactly!”
Across the hall from Jeff, in the big triple with the balcony, was a senior named Paul Stern. He was no older than me but had gained two years by accelerating through public schools on New York’s Lower East Side. A tall, ungainly, stork-like kid with glasses, Paul had no social poise or sense of irony; he was artless and endearing, and he grew into my best buddy.
Unlike me, Paul came of age in a politically articulate family. His parents were union folks who worked for the City and subscribed to the Socialist Worker; he was reading its columns back when I was learning about symbols in dreams. Once he realized I was unsophisticated on global issues, he took to selecting articles for my education. I learned about how the U.S. looted Third World nations while oppressing its own lower classes. From high-school friends like Bob Alpert I had leftward instincts, but they were vague and uninformed; I had never seen the facts so convincingly put forth. Communist propaganda had always seemed to me brutally simplistic, like a “B” movie; capitalist propaganda I had overlooked. I now realized it was even more insidious with its bribes and hoaxes, for capitalism itself was propaganda as it camouflaged the plunder of its underclass in deceptively benign idioms adulating “The Free World.” I had not understood any of that during the Cuban crisis or beneath rote denigrations of the Soviet Union validated by Khrushchev’s crude bellicosity.
“Of course the Russians fight us differently,” Paul explained. “They’re poor; they have a less developed social system. The proof is in the results: how many fascist dictators do we support? How much of the resources of other nations do we consume through the sham of a laissez-faire marketplace? People say, ‘Well, they have only one party and no real elections,’ but we have only one party too: the capitalist party. We run two candidates and offer a supposed choice, but it’s smoke and mirrors, a pretext to keep folks tranquilized, imagining they are in charge of things. Communism may use thugs and armies to enforce its power, but capitalism uses the marketplace; it’s far cleverer: it enslaves us in our fabricated desires.” He paused for effect. “We are much shrewder propagandists than they are.”
All of this was spelled out incontrovertibly in issue after issue of the Worker.
“What takes the cake,” Paul pronounced with a whimsical shrug as we crossed Route 9 en route to dinner at Valentine, “is that even at our fair, supposedly liberal institution, most of the peons fall for the dog-and-pony show. What do you think happened to you in James? Indoctrinated zombies imitating other indoctrinated zombies!”
I was ripe for radicalization. My father had unmasked himself as a prototypical capitalist—greedy, anti-union, contemptuous of others, philandering and abusive as well. But it wasn’t just him. Seemingly the whole generation of my parents was as blind to our nation’s exploitation of the goods and labor of Third World countries as they were to the atrocity of Hiroshima. These items weren’t even on their daily drawing board, and they would have considered anyone who gave them more than a moment’s consideration a communist.
Those first months at Phi Psi changed my political as well as my aesthetic philosophy, my baseline sense of the world. I saw the James Hall harriers, the Miami Beach playboys, and the opulent teenagers at Grossinger’s as oblivious agents (and dupes) of the same unspoken conspiracy. Of course I had been uncomfortable all my life. But it hadn’t just been personal madness or trauma. I had been raised in decadence and corruption too. My parents, my counselors, my bunkmates, even many of my friends were bullies, mindless exploiters of the weak and disenfranchised. Meanwhile Tripp was exposing most of the thinkers and novelists I had admired as mediocre poseurs and formulaic intellects.
I was beginning to see a world beyond Grossinger’s as my fallback identity, though it would be years before I gave it a form or figured out how to commit to it. Our lives mattered! They weren’t just foils or riddles with clues. They mattered for themselves. Otherwise, “ … dead or dying … ” for sure.
Paul was a member of the House jug band, a clique that sat around his suite many evenings dialing in WWVA, Wheeling, West Virginia, a country-and-western clear channel, and joining the jamboree. Even Jeff approved of that, switching to bluegrass on his guitar: “Will the circle be unbroken, / bye and bye, Lord, bye and bye…. ”
“It doesn’t get any better than that,” he said, as faraway fiddles, autoharps, and mandolins disseminated a sepulcher sound.
“They might be right-wing hillbillies,” Paul guffawed, “but they’ve got the rebel spirit.”
“Moonshine is politics,” Jeff effused. He was right. I couldn’t imagine anything more antithetical to Amherst than the hayseed preacher introducing the next song.
During Phi Psi’s public meetings, with Jeff’s encouragement I took to debating some of the stodgier seniors, once by prepared doggerel as he openly applauded my line about a toilet that hadn’t been flushed for many moons. Then he remarked with a chortle, “You guys have been nailed by a mere whelp.”
I proposed that we scrap our vestigial link to the fraternity system and go it alone as an independent enclave. “We’re just a bad imitation Phi Gam,” I declared. The seniors shouted me down, while Jeff strummed his guitar as a strophe between rounds.
Yet I got traction. For years on Thursday nights Phi Psi had provided free jelly and glazed doughnuts and apple cider for its members. Now we threw “coffee hour” open to the Four College community. Soon we were running poetry readings and forums for an audience of townies and non–Phi Psi students, even a few attendees from UMass on the other side of town.
Virtually every night Paul and I trooped to Valentine together, perfect company for each other on the topic of magical girls and unconscionable men.
Paul had his own Betsy—a co-ed of the same name from Bennington whom he had met during the previous spring break at a work project in Springfield—they had sheet-rocked and painted the inside of a ghetto house together. Afterwards she had driven him and a friend back to Amherst. All last summer in New York they had, if not “dated,” at least hung out. But now she was being pursued by a married grocery heir named Huntington Hartford—innuendos of my father and Helene. Her latest message to Paul was that their worlds were too different for romance.
“After all,” he said, chuckling, “I’m the son of two people working in the welfare department of New York City, and I was almost tarred and feathered out of college freshman year for distributing Socialist Worker pamphlets at dinner. She’s peerage with a social conscience, slumming.”
So I wasn’t the only freshman who had brought the wrath of jockdom on himself. In fact, Paul had heard about my “room burning” and written a letter to the campus newspaper at the time. “I accused the college, meaning the moneyed alumni, of utilizing students as their accomplices,” he recalled, “while wielding frat power to enforce their oligarchy.” I had missed that issue because I had been visiting Swarthmore, so he pulled it out of a drawer for me; his column had been sardonically retitled “Wasteland of Hypercriticism?”
During the following weeks we filled in our lives for each other. With the attentiveness of a Psych major he heard out my accounts of my dual family. Then, as I offered a blow-by-blow rendering of my summer at Grossinger’s, he whistled and said, “Boy, your father sounds like a real winner. Just the type we imagine running corporations. It’s almost too good to be true.”
I addressed his own vicissitudes by tarot, dream analysis, and freelance surrealism. When he was about to call his Betsy for a date, I suggested he go there by balloon, taking off from the Phi Psi yard, passing over the mountains, landing, visiting, and returning in similar fashion.
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