by Roth, Philip
I sat up late at the little desk in my room, a stack of hotel stationery at the ready for recording my “thoughts.” I replayed over and over the conversation with my father in the hotel elevator, adding a line of my own that I would not have had the self-control to say to him face-to-face but that I was able to write freely and exuberantly on a sheet of the Lewisburger’s paper. I felt a buoyant sense of having survived the worst while preserving unimpaired the long-standing preuniversity accord that would seem to have made us an indestructible family: “And now we won’t have to have that terrible fight—we’ve been saved by Bucknell.”
Over precisely the issue that had been simmering since I’d begun college—my weekend whereabouts after midnight—my father and I did, of course, have the terrible fight, when I was home from Lewisburg for my first midyear vacation. And it was worse than I had foreseen, however banal the immediate cause. Along with my mother, my brother—who fortunately happened to be in from Manhattan, where he was beginning to establish himself as a commercial artist—made every conceivable effort to act as a peacemaker and, with an air of urgent diplomacy, hurried back and forth between the two ends of the apartment, where the two raving belligerents were isolated. And though, after two days of histrionic shouting and bitter silence, my father and I—for the sake, finally, of my desolated mother—negotiated a fragile truce, I returned to Bucknell a shell-shocked son, freshly evacuated from the Oedipal battlefield, in dire need of rest and rehabilitation.
* * *
AN ATTRACTIVE WHITE Christian male entering Bucknell in the early fifties could expect to be officially courted by about half the thirteen fraternities. A promising athlete, the graduate of a prestigious prep school, the son of rich parents or of a distinguished alumnus, might wind up with bids from as many as ten fraternities. A Jewish freshman—or Jewish transfer student, like me—could expect to be rushed by two fraternities at most, the exclusively Jewish fraternity, Sigma Alpha Mu, which, like the Christian fraternities, was the local chapter of a national body, and Phi Lambda Theta, a local fraternity without national affiliations, which did not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, or color. A Jewish student who wished to take part in fraternity life but was acceptable to neither was in trouble. If he couldn’t bear being an “independent”—taking meals in the university dining hall, living in the dormitories or in a room in town, making friends and dating outside the reigning social constellation—he’d have to pack up and go home. There were a few reported cases of Jewish students who had.
The Jewish fraternity had nothing much that was Jewish about it except the wholly sanctioned nickname by which the members were identified, at Bucknell and at every other campus where there was a chapter of Sigma Alpha Mu: as easily by themselves as by others, the Jewish brothers were called Sammies. Had the fraternity been christened Iota Kappa Epsilon, people might not have tolerated Ikeys so readily, but no one seemed to have ever considered Sammies an even mildly stigmatizing label. Perhaps its purpose was prophylactic, preempting the attribution of diminutives less benign than this friendly-sounding acronym, which carried in its suffix only the tiniest sting. I, for one, never became accustomed to hearing it and never could say it, but probably I had been sensitized unduly by Budd Schulberg’s novel, which I’d read in high school, about the pushiest of pushy Jews, Sammy Glick.
Certainly the Sammy kitchen, where three meals a day were prepared for the sixty-five or so members, smelled more like the galley of a merchant ship than like the sanctum sanctorum of a traditional Jewish household. “Cookie,” the chef, was a local Navy veteran, a grim-faced, tattooed little man with a loose lantern jaw bearing a day or two’s dark stubble; he wouldn’t have been out of place frying onions on the grill of a back-road diner anywhere in America. Eggs with ham or bacon was the staple for breakfast, and pork chops and ham steaks showed up for lunch or dinner a couple of times a week—fare no different from what was served in the other fraternity houses and at the student dining hall. But you didn’t join the Jewish fraternity to eat kosher food any more than to observe the Sabbath, to study Torah, or to discuss Jewish questions of the day; nor did you join because you hoped to rid yourself of embarrassing Jewish ways. Most likely you came from a family, like my own, for whom assimilation wasn’t a potent issue any longer—if it had been, you wouldn’t have come to Bucknell to begin with or have remained very long. This isn’t to say that their Jewish parents would have preferred a university decree that these Sammy sons be allowed to join the otherwise Christian-dominated fraternities. No, in 1951 Sigma Alpha Mu suited everybody. The Jews were together because they were profoundly different but otherwise like everyone else.
As it happened, an opportunity to be the only Jew to pledge a gentile fraternity was offered to me when I arrived, as a sophomore, in September of 1951. I was rushed not only by the Jewish Sigma Alpha Mu and the nondenominational Phi Lambda Theta but also by Theta Chi. For reasons never entirely explained to me, Theta Chi had among its sixty-odd gentile members one Jew already, a senior with a gentile name and un-Jewish appearance who was also the fraternity president and who worked hard to entice me into the house, though my own name and appearance weren’t likely to fool anyone. I took the invitation seriously and during the rushing period ate there as a guest several times. If I was joining a fraternity—and I figured that penetrating student society as a sophomore outside a fraternity might be nearly impossible—then didn’t it make sense for me, with my democratic ideals and liberal principles, to capitalize on this inexplicable breach in a tightly segregated system?
Membership in Theta Chi certainly sounded more adventurous to a boy from the Weequahic section of Newark than slipping predictably in with the Jews. As for the nondenominational fraternity, whose unpretentious house on a back street was home to nearly a hundred young men, it seemed to me, after a quick appraisal, that the members I met were either innocently upright in their devotion to their principles or shy and socially a bit uncertain, boys who could indeed not have had anywhere else to go. I might have had this wrong, but I was struck by an air of charity and virtue about the place that was more purely “Christian” than anything I’d run into in a nominally Christian but essentially areligious fraternity like Theta Chi—something smacking a little of the goodness of the Salvation Army. Everything else aside, I believed I would need a slightly more profligate, less utopian atmosphere in which to realize even a tenth of the nefarious erotic prospectus that—as my father correctly surmised—I had been secretly preparing for years. The estimable goals of the Phi Lambda Thetas made the house too much like home.
At all costs my choice had to have nothing to do with my parents’ preference, since establishing my independence was the point of coming away. In a series of letters home I laid out the problem in a scrupulously maniacal presentation worthy of Kafka. Instead of replying instinctively to what must have sounded to them like so much foolish naïveté, they were sufficiently intimidated by all my pages to seek out the advice of the Greens, Jewish friends in the clothing business whose daughter had manifested a similar urge a few years earlier. The line they took over the phone wasn’t without wisdom: they said they wanted me to do what would make me “happiest.” If I thought I would be happier with boys whose backgrounds were unlike my own, then I should of course choose Theta Chi; but if in the end it seemed as evident to me as to them and to the Greens that I would be happier with boys like Marty Castlebaum, whose backgrounds resembled mine, then I should choose SAM. They would be happy, my mother told me—it was she, whose touch was lighter, who’d been assigned to speak for their side—with whatever choice was sure to make me happy … and so on.
Had I joined Theta Chi as their new Jew, the chances are that challenging convention might well have proved invigorating for a while and that discovering the secrets of this unknown community would, at the start, have yielded some genuine anthropological excitement. It probably wouldn’t have been long, however, before I found the exuberant side of my personality, the street-corn
er taste for comic mockery and for ludicrous, theatrical speculation, out of place in the Theta Chi dining room with its staid, prosaic, small-town decorum that had struck me as somewhat cornball. Probably my career as a Theta Chi would have been even shorter than my career as a Sammy was to be. I wasn’t afraid of the temptation to become an honorary WASP but was leery of a communal spirit that might lead me to self-censorship, since the last thing I’d left home for was to become encased in somebody else’s idea of what I should be. Eventually I came round to understanding that joining Theta Chi could wind up being a far more conformist act than taking the seemingly conventional course of being with boys from backgrounds more like my own, who, just because their style was familiar, wouldn’t have the power to inhibit my expressive yearnings. Coming from backgrounds like mine, a few of them might have similar yearnings themselves.
A few did—two, to be precise, both sophomore English majors: Pete Tasch, from Baltimore, and Dick Minton, from Mount Vernon, New York. Pete, who later became an English professor, was a very highly tuned boy with a strong strain of bookish refinement that set him apart not only from the regular fellows at the fraternity but even more blatantly from the kids calling to him for their Cokes and fries at the Sweet Shop, a local hangout where he clocked afternoon and evening hours in order to pay his living expenses. Dick, who eventually became a lawyer, was more unshakable, a straight shooter wholly without airs and with a very good brain, who listened to Beethoven quartets whenever he wasn’t reading. His intense cultural passions could have been shared by no more than a dozen students on the campus and by hardly anyone at the fraternity house. In the winter of 1952, a little over a year after I’d enrolled at Bucknell, we three resigned from Sigma Alpha Mu and gave our devotion instead to Et Cetera, a literary magazine that we’d helped to found and then took over, under my editorship in 1952–53 and the next year under Pete’s, with Dick as literary editor.
The fraternity divided pretty much into two groups: the commerce-and-finance majors preparing for business careers or law school and those in the sciences aiming for medical school; there were a couple of engineers and, aside from us three, only a handful of liberal-arts students. Before emerging literary interests forged my alliance with Pete Tasch and Dick Minton, the Sammy whose company I’d most enjoyed was a C&F student, Dick Denholtz, a burly, assertive, dark-bearded boy whose jovial forcefulness I associated with those peculiarly Jewish energies that gave my Newark neighborhood its distinctive exuberance. Dick came from the Newark suburbs, and perhaps what accounted for our strong, short-lived affinity was that his family’s American roots were like my own in urban Jewish New Jersey. Together we could be the coarse and uninhibited performers who ignited whatever improvisational satire flared up in the living room after dinner; the Sammy musical skit for the interfraternity Mid-Term Jubilee—a telescoped version of Guys and Dolls improbably set at Bucknell—had been written and directed by Dick Denholtz and me and starred the two of us in raucous singing roles. Our spirited low-comedy concoctions—the kind that I had thought unlikely to find a responsive audience at the Theta Chi house—constituted SAM’s single, unmistakable strain of “Jewishness”: in the ways that the extroverts made fun of things, and the ways that the others found us funny, Sigma Alpha Mu came closest, in my estimation, to being a Jewish fraternity.
I never knew how the predominantly Protestant student body perceived the Jewish fraternity. Almost two-thirds of Bucknell’s students were from small towns in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, while the preponderance of Sammies came from New York—most of them from Westchester County and Long Island, a few from the city itself. Of course there must have been coeds whose families preferred that they not date Jews and who willingly obeyed, but as there were barely twenty Jewish women on the campus, and about eighty Jewish men, the dates I saw at Sammy parties were mostly gentiles, many from communities where there were probably no Jews at all. Over the years Sigma Alpha Mu had staunchly sought, and frequently won, the interfraternity academic trophy, and though there weren’t enough Sammies playing on varsity teams to give the house an athletic aura (in my time just two basketball players and two football players), the sensational social event of the early fifties was our brainchild. The nature of the event suggests (as did the brazen Jubilee Guys and Dolls) that going along like sensible assimilationists with traditional campus socializing conventions was not the primary motive of the Sammies’ leadership. The aim was to make a mark as a distinctively uninhibited, freewheeling fraternity.
The idea for the “Sand Blast” was not original to our chapter but borrowed from a fraternity at some larger university like Syracuse or Cornell, where the motif of an indoor winter beach party was supposed to have inspired a colossal success of just the sort the Bucknell Sammies hoped would elevate them to the forefront of campus popularity. The rugs and the furniture, the trophy cabinets and the pictures on the walls, were all to be removed from the downstairs rooms, and the first floor of the house—dining hall and two living rooms—was to be covered with about three inches of sand and planted with beach umbrellas. The floor would have to be braced from below to bear the weight of the sand; what’s more, after the sand dumped inside proved uninvitingly clammy, it had to be heated with strong lights in order to reduce the dampness, which had dangerously increased the weight of the load. Required dress was a bathing suit (in March), and the entire student body was invited. To spread the word, signs were posted all over the campus, and one afternoon a small plane flew low over the campus issuing the invitation through a loudspeaker.
During the planning stages I expressed uneasiness with the expense and the vastness of the effort and with what seemed a clownish misuse of the physical structure itself; though by no means an architectural showpiece, the building possessed its own lumpish, sturdy 1920s integrity and served, after all, as our collective home. I assured the brothers that I was as delighted as anyone by the prospect of producing this pornographic tableau within our familiar walls, and of course charmed by the idea of all those Bucknell coeds lying around on the sand in their two-piece swimsuits, openly contravening the strict dress code enforced by the Honor Council (a group of esteemed women students who tried infractions of conduct among their peers and handed out punishment when a coed was found, say, to be walking on a college path in a pair of Bermuda shorts half an inch shorter than prescribed). I was no enemy of the flesh, I said, but I reminded my brothers that when the party was over and our house, if it was still standing, had again become a home, we would be chewing sand in our mashed potatoes for semesters to come. I was roundly shouted down.
Among those few who argued that the plans for the Sand Blast were too grandiosely whatever—childish, ostentatious, imprudent, crazy—Tasch, Minton, and I were the least enamored of all; we were by then trying to put out four issues a year of a new magazine, inspired by Addison, Steele, and Harold Ross, and felt ourselves being swallowed up like extras in a show-biz production by Mike Todd.
Despite throngs of students who dropped their coats and shoes and scarves into a vast pile in the basement and then came upstairs to disperse themselves, nearly nude, across the indoor beach, the Sand Blast came off without a cave-in or an invasion by the university police. Had there been a chance of anything like an orgy developing, ninety percent (more!) of those who had showed up would have left for The Spit (as the crummy local movie house was known on campus) without even the intervention of the authorities, and I, along with my date from Chester, Pennsylvania, would probably have gone with them. Fantasy was of course less bridled than if the girls had arrived corsaged and swathed in taffeta, as they customarily did for a fraternity’s annual lavish party, but in the fifties Bucknell, with its freshman hazing and its compulsory chapel, its pinning ceremonies and heralded “Hello Spirit,” was still a long way from Berkeley, 1968, and Woodstock, 1970, let alone from the hanging gardens of Plato’s Retreat.
The strain of Dadaesque Jewish showmanship that manifested itself a decade later in cultural-political devia
nts and cunningly anarchic entrepreneurs—mischief-makers as diverse as Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, the Chicago Seven defendants; William Kunstler, the Chicago Seven lawyer; Tuli Kupferberg, the Fug poet and a leading contributor to Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts; Hillard Elkins, the producer of Oh, Calcutta!; Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw; not to mention Allen Ginsberg, Bella Abzug, Lenny Bruce, Norman Mailer, and me—was hardly what was germinating at the Sammy Sand Blast. Though a spark of defiant impudence had perhaps ignited the first fraternity meeting where so outlandish an idea was considered seriously, the stunt was engineered finally by conventional, law-abiding fraternity boys in training for secure careers in orderly middle-class American communities. The Sand Blast’s underlying erotic motive may have spilled out more playfully, with more imaginative flair, than what fired the campus panty raid later that year, but what prevailed was the poolside spirit of the suburban country club.
Actually, the mob of freshman and sophomore men that came surging off the Hill one April night—hoping to break in on the nightgowned coeds and steal their underwear—produced a far more orgiastic version than the Sammies had of a Sadean scenario. The exhibitionistic extravaganza plotted and bankrolled by the socially competitive Sammies, though as bold a challenge to standards of communal decency as any mounted in Lewisburg during my years there, had, in fact, less to do with the suppressed longings that would culminate in the sexual uprising of the sixties than did the rowdy testicularity of those spontaneous spring panty raids that seemed meaningless to me at the time.
* * *
“LET’S START A MAGAZINE … fearlessly obscene.…” The mockingly inspirational line was from E. E. Cummings, whose poetry I’d begun reading (and reciting to friends) under the influence of Robert Maurer, a young American-literature instructor in the English department, who was doing a Ph.D. dissertation on Cummings and whose wife, Charlotte, had been William Shawn’s secretary at the New Yorker before marrying Bob and arriving with him in Lewisburg. With an M.A. from Montclair State College and his incomplete Wisconsin Ph.D., Bob was probably being paid about half as much as my father had earned struggling to support us on an insurance agent’s salary, and one of the first things that I came to admire about the Maurers was their pennilessness; it seemed to confer an admirable independence from convention without having turned them, tiresomely, into fifties bohemians. Our bohemian—or the closest you came to one in Lewisburg—was the artist-in-residence Bruce Mitchell, who taught painting classes, loved bop, drank some, and had a wife who wore long peasant skirts. The Maurers seemed to me free (in the biggest and best sense), levelheaded Americans, respectable enough but unconcerned with position and appearances. They had their books and records, their old car, and a little brick house rather bare of furniture; Bob’s droopy old jacket was patched at the elbows for other than ornamental reasons—yet what they didn’t own they didn’t appear to miss. They made being poor look so easy that I decided to follow their example and become poor myself someday, either as an English professor like Bob or as a serious writer who was so good that his books made no money. Bob, a butcher’s son, was very much a Depression-honed city boy, originally from my part of industrial New Jersey. He was so lanky and small-headed, however, that in his oval spectacles and fraying clothes he looked more like an educated hayseed, some string-bean farm boy who had struggled semiconsciously toward freedom in a Sherwood Anderson novel. His direct manner, too, seemed to be born of the open spaces, and some twenty years later, after he had got fed up with teaching and had quit his professorship at Antioch, he earned his living writing for Current Biography and Field and Stream. He wound up, all on his own and seemingly quite happy, coaching boys’ baseball for the Peace Corps in the wilds of Chile. He died of a heart attack in 1983, at the age of sixty-two. At his funeral his son, Harry, who’d been born in Lewisburg while I was a student there, read aloud from Bob’s favorite Hemingway story, “Big Two-Hearted River.”