by Roger Ebert
My parents took me to my first home game in Memorial Stadium. We entered a vast hall with ramps leading overhead. We emerged into a dizzying expanse of space, 63,000 people all focused on the field below. The Marching Illini were playing “Hail to the Orange.” Opposite us, intricate designs were being formed by the Block I. “This was the first card formation in the country,” Daddy repeated before every game. “Illinois also had the first homecoming, the first forward pass, the first huddle. I was here on opening day and saw Red Grange running for seven touchdowns against Michigan.” After the game we walked past the university Armory, beneath “the largest unsupported roof in the world.” The university had the first, the biggest, or the best of everything.
When I was older, I rode my bike around the campus, a solemn kid, ignored and invisible, studying the students. There were Indian women in saris. There were Asians, Africans, Sikhs in turbans. One day Mr. R. V. Willis, my mother’s boss at the Allied Finance Company, took me over to the University Library (“the world’s largest,” my father explained). We walked upstairs past a glass case containing a first edition of Audubon. “A page is turned every day,” Mr. Willis explained. “It’s one of the rarest books in the world.” He showed me the Reading Room, a towering open space surrounded by books and lined by long tables with students bent over their three-by-five cards. We went to the main desk. “This is the boy’s first visit to the library,” Mr. Willis said. “I’d like him to see the stacks.” A librarian asked me what I wanted to see. “The first issue of Life magazine,” I said promptly. We entered into a labyrinth so awesome that now I picture it when reading Borges’ “The Library of Babel.” Floor after floor extended above and below, visible through steel catwalks. In cubicles students hunched over their work. We walked down a narrow corridor and found every issue of Life.
When I was a senior in high school, Principal R. H. Braun said he was recommending some students for the university’s early entrance program. For the spring semester, I would take my first morning class at the university. This was Verbal Communications 101, taught by A. Tress Lundman, sweet as she sounds. I shyly entered the most magnificent of all university buildings, Altgeld Hall, built in 1897 as the first library. Its thick stone walls were intended to be fireproof. Its first architect was Daniel Burnham, fresh from masterminding the World’s Columbian Exposition, later replaced by Governor John Peter Altgeld after a disagreement over design. In spirit and the medieval stones of its walls it resembles Louis Sullivan’s Auditorium Building in Chicago, both lacking steel frames and held up by the stones in their walls. The tower with the University Chimes rises from it. I joined a class of students who were no more than six months older than I was. We learned to debate, recite, and declaim. It was a new world, and many of the students spoke with confident Chicago accents.
That summer I was back on full time again at the newspaper, going out to a field south of campus where the Assembly Hall was under construction. This involved building a massive circular base on which would rest a matching dome. The dome was supported from within by heavy scaffolding during construction, but then five hundred miles of steel cable would be wrapped around the rim, compressing it so it would stand in place entirely without interior columns. I was sent to the construction site to interview Max Abramovitz, the architect. “So this will be the world’s largest rim-supported dome?” I asked him. He looked at the fearsome project. “It will be if it doesn’t fall down.”
Illinois was known as the Greek Capital, because it had more fraternities and sororities than anywhere else. We didn’t have money for me to live in a fraternity, but I could pledge one as a townie and continue living at home. I made the rounds during Pledge Week, deciding on Phi Delta Theta and its handsome stone house on Chalmers. This was the top house on campus at the time, and in my senior year had the captain of the football team (Mike Taliaferro), one of the greatest scorers in Illini basketball history (Dave Downey), the president of the Student Senate (Larry Hansen), and the editor of the Daily Illini (me).
As a Phi Delt I could take meals, hang out to “study,” and engage in the joys of Hell Week. We’d gather to serenade sororities. The song “Phi Delta Theta Girl” never struck me as particularly complimentary (If you were the kind that sold, you’d be worth your weight in gold). The house plunged me into undergraduate life. I memorized the names and years of all the upperclassmen, the names of their girlfriends, the names of the Founders, and much more arcana, and during Hell Week, desperately sleep deprived, I earned myself a night of sleep by winning the raw egg eating contest, with twenty-six. Some years later, when I saw it, the egg scene in Cool Hand Luke rang a bell.
Hell Week was an abomination, a bonding ritual in which pledges were worn down with a mental and physical sadism I believe has now been outlawed. All led up to the last night of the week, in which each candidate was led for the first time into the Chapter Room in the basement, now candlelit and with a medieval theme. I’m not certain the active members wore dark hoods, but that’s how I remember them, like medieval torturers. The final test, which had been darkly hinted at for days, was called “Nails.” We were placed barefoot on a tabletop and looked down in the dim light to see a plank with nails driven through it, facing up. There was about enough space for your two feet. Then we were blindfolded. The idea was to jump down to the plank and miss the nails. I believed this absolutely. The member chanted “Nails… nails.” One of the members had reportedly been taken to an emergency room the year before after not missing a nail. I couldn’t do it. I hesitated. I was terrified. I hadn’t had two hours a night of sleep in days. How could I do it? If I didn’t, I would never become a Phi Delt. I was eighteen years old. Becoming a Phi Delt had become the most important goal in my life. I jumped. The nails were rubber.
This ritual struck me then as cruel, and strikes me now as bullshit. It was useful in helping me understand military basic training. The idea, at an early age, is to enforce bonding. Your loyalty to the group is more important than any ideas from the outside world, any ideas of reason and values you may have carried to the moment. In my case, Nails created an anger toward the house. I didn’t express it. When I stopped going to the house it was for other reasons. But that’s why I only attended one homecoming event at Phi Delt.
A turning point in my life came at 8:00 a.m. on the first day of classes at the university, when I walked into English 101, taught by Daniel Curley. He would become my mentor and the friend of a lifetime. I’d never met anyone like him before. He had a Massachusetts accent, wore clothes from the Sears catalog (walking boots, chinos, corduroy pants, work shirt), carried a book bag at a time when knapsacks weren’t universal, had a haircut that looked as if it had been administered by trimming around a bowl on his head, was a noted author of fiction, had been one of the editors of the university’s famous Accent literary magazine, and loved fiction and poetry with an unconcealed joy. Here in the flesh was one of those guys with his feet up on his desk, reading a book.
I was to take every class Curley offered, including Fiction Writing, where one of the other students was Larry Woiwode, then obviously already the real thing. Curley read our stories aloud anonymously, to encourage open discussion. There was never any doubt who wrote Woiwode’s. Curley introduced me to many of the cornerstones of my life’s reading: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, The Ambassadors, Nostromo, The Professor’s House, The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury. One day he handed out a mimeographed booklet of poems by E. E. Cummings, and told us to consider the typography as musical notations for reading the poems aloud. Cummings ever after was clear to me, and I know dozens of his poems by heart. He approached these works with undisguised admiration. We discussed felicities of language, patterns of symbolism, motivation, revelation of character. This was appreciation, not the savagery of deconstruction, which approaches literature as pliers do a rose.
Curley walked everywhere. I walked with him. I sat in his office in a dormer under the ro
of of the English Building. Remembering my father’s ideas of English professors, I asked him one day if he’d ever smoked a pipe. “I tried to take one up, but it was no go.” He always spoke to his students as equals. He observed instead of instructing, delivered information in asides, said such things as, “During the war the English fled to Trollope as a means of escape.” He lived in a house on Professor’s Row in Urbana with his wife, Helen, and four jolly daughters. One bedroom had become the office for Ascent, the literary quarterly he began when the English Department’s J. Kerker Quinn called it a day after twenty years of Accent, during which Quinn had been early or first to publish such writers as Eudora Welty, William Maxwell, and Flannery O’Connor. Curley’s home was lined with bookshelves. Sometimes I dropped off a class assignment and we sat in the living room, dark and comforting, drinking tea and discussing our reading.
My early role models were my father and Dan Curley. He appeared in my life almost precisely when my father died, and it occurs to me that he must have known that. Did he understand the need he began to fill? He spoke to us once of the “first-rate second-rate writer,” someone who was good but not quite that good: John O’Hara or Sinclair Lewis, perhaps. In my junior or senior year, filled with myself, infatuated with my weekly column in the Daily Illini, I reviewed his latest novel A Stone Man, Yes and described him as a first-rate second-rate writer. How could I have done this? How could I have been so cruel to a man who had been so kind? I had been his student for twenty-six credit hours. He was my friend. I did not possess the right to publish such a thing. Sherman Paul, another professor I idolized, stood next to me at the coffeepot in the English Seminar Room and drily observed, “That must have taken some nerve.”
Curley never discussed it with me. I should have apologized but lacked the courage. A year or so later at a crucial moment he made a course correction on my life. I had become a cocksure asshole. I was editor of the Daily Illini, president of the U.S. Student Press Association, still working for the News-Gazette, winner of a Rotary fellowship for a year of study at the University of Cape Town. In 1964, I applied for admission to the graduate program in English and would begin classes in the autumn semester before spending 1965 in South Africa. There was a technicality. My grades weren’t good enough. The problem was French; I had failed it semester after semester. All my life I’ve been able to absorb stories and repeat them nearly verbatim, and all my life, I have been unable to actually memorize. This may have begun with the multiplication tables. I’d had my appendix removed while the class learned them at St. Mary’s, and had to catch up. I capsized on the sevens and nines. Daddy wrote out the tables on a shirt cardboard and sat me down in the living room night after night until I learned them. This I could not do. My tears made the ink run. Eventually I got them, but either something broke, or I was born with it broken. I am a failure at rote memorization.
Thus it was with French. I can read it pretty well, speak badly, and understand it when pronounced by someone sensible, say a Vietnamese. I can get by at Cannes. But I could not get a passing grade in college, and although the English faculty was agreeable to admitting me into the graduate program, I didn’t quite clear the grade-point bar. Curley did the math: If I took two credit courses in summer school of 1964 and got A’s in both, I could be admitted. This was a done deal. One of my professors would be Richard Wasson, a brilliant hotshot who was the coming man. He liked me, but I tried his patience. I was insufferably full of myself. One day in class I disagreed with him, I have no idea what about. Our words grew heated. This passed the accepted limits of classroom discussion, and Wasson threw me out of the class. A day later I ran into Curley on the steps of the library: “If I were you, I’d make it right with Wasson. It seems as if you may have been in the wrong. He’s willing to let you back in. If you don’t get into graduate school, you may be in Vietnam before you go to South Africa.” I made it right with Wasson, I was accepted into graduate school, I went to South Africa, I returned to graduate school, and I was accepted as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago, hired by the Sun-Times, and here I am today. The link in this chain of events was Daniel Curley, the first-rate second-rate man.
During my years at Illinois it seemed as if I followed a path laid out for me in childhood. “Someday you will go here,” and one day I did. I loved the university. It took me from childhood to my life. My senior year coincided with the university’s centennial, and I pitched an idea to the University of Illinois Press: I would leaf through one hundred years of the back issues of the Daily Illini and compile an informal anthology of items reflecting university life during the century. I returned again to the stacks where I’d discovered Life magazine and commenced this foolhardy project. I couldn’t begin to read everything, but I made serendipitous discoveries, like a classified ad with Red Grange trying to sell his car (“goes like sixty”). This eventually became my first book, An Illini Century. As a wild shot, I wrote to the poet and professor Mark Van Doren, born and raised in Urbana, and he agreed to write the introduction.
There are a few classes I remember vividly. Although I was no good at science or math, I found myself fascinated with physical anthropology, and that set off my lifelong fascination with the perfection of the theory of evolution. I took a class on William Faulkner and Willa Cather and was introduced to the power of Cather’s stories and the clarity of her prose, as clear as running water. I had a typography course down in the basement of Gregory Hall with Glenn Hanson, in which I learned about typefaces, page design, and the history of printing. We composed full-page advertisements or broadsides, set them into type, conformed them, locked them up, and printed them out on an old flatbed press. One of my classmates was Jill Wine Volner, who not many years later was one of the Watergate prosecutors. I studied “The Organic Tradition in America” with Sherman Paul, one of the best-known academics in America, who wove together Thoreau, Emerson, Louis Sullivan, Veblen, Randolph Bourne, and others into an American voice distinct from Europe. He was a precise lecturer, giving the impression of an intelligence barely contained by speech, and a spellbinder. Once again, none of the stupidity of modern academic theory. He held the romantic notion that in order to study a text one must read it.
During these years my liberalism took clearer form. John Kennedy’s run for president in 1960 was the occasion. I joined the Young Democrats. I was in the crowd that filled the Quad for his speech from the steps of the auditorium. I ran next to his convertible as it drove him away from the campus. A student from England, Si Sheridan, convinced me the Daily Illini was shamefully right-wing, and that it was necessary to start a liberal weekly in opposition to it. He suggested the name Champaign-Urbana Spectator, and I used my basement as our office. The paper appeared weekly for a year, and then I sold it for two hundred dollars at the beginning of my sophomore year and I went to work for the Illini as a columnist. Si Sheridan turned out to also be named Simon Hartog, a confusion involving his family matters, and in 1967 we met again in London when he gave me a dinner at one of the new psychedelic clubs named, I think, the Round House. Years later we met again at Cannes; he was now the buyer for the state television network of Mozambique. Years after that I heard from his brother, who said he had died. You meet someone glancingly in a lifetime who has an unforeseen influence; the Spectator gave voice to my liberalism, I learned from his opinions, and the weekly got me the column on the Daily Illini. So much of what happens by chance forms what becomes your life.
Liberal life for undergraduates centered on a smoky den named the “K Room,” in the basement of the YMCA. It had a short-order grill and tables jammed together, and there a crowd of undergraduate leftists would meet for coffee, read the papers, read to one another from such books as Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman. On Thursdays we held the liberal Lunch Club, dominated by Rennie Davis, later to become one of the Chicago Seven. I was never that radical. One of the stars of the K Room was his girlfriend at that time, a chain-smoking young woman named Liz Krohne, who I recruited as a c
olumnist for the Daily Illini. As a writer she had a gift and a clear voice, and we thought her destined for remarkable things. After we all moved to Chicago she disappeared from my life. There were reports she had moved to the South and was active in the civil rights movement, organizing and writing. I remember her vividly for her radicalism explained with a confiding smile.
I lacked the courage to commit myself by going south. Brendan Behan said critics reminded him of eunuchs in a harem: They see it done nightly, but are unable to do it themselves. I could argue with that, but in many ways I used journalism to stay at one remove from my convictions: I wouldn’t risk arrest but would bravely report about those who did. My life has followed that pattern. I observe and describe at a prudent reserve. Now that life has deposited me for much of every day in a chair comfortable for my painful back and I communicate largely by computer, I suppose I must be grateful, for I seem to have been headed this way all along.
The autumn of 1966 was a conscious leave-taking from the university. Many of my friends were gone. My graduate courses in English had a new seriousness and could no longer be finessed without actual work. I had the good fortune to enroll in a class on Shakespeare’s tragedies, taught by G. Blakemore Evans, who was a legendary Shakespearean. It was then that Shakespeare took hold of me, and it became clear he was the nearest we have come to a voice for what it means to be human. I confessed to Wasson that I hadn’t read most of Shakespeare, and he observed that the plays were not terribly long. If you read a play every Sunday morning it would take thirty-eight weeks. I started, and after I went to Cape Town I plunged in deeply, in reading that was a form of prayer.