The Brown Reader

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Two thousand eight; 2009; 2010. I gradually forgot about it. I returned in May of ’11 for my five-year reunion. There, incredibly, it was.

  “RED ALERT! A PHYLUM IS COLLAPSING—”

  What could possibly enable a writing in chalk to last five years? Whose hands have touched it up? I have, to this day, never found out who has been maintaining the message—just as they presumably cannot know who first put it there. (Or where it came from: amazingly neither Google nor Amazon seems to know the line is Mohammad’s.) Maybe this essay will make the first half of that introduction.

  I went back through Providence just this year, the winter of ’13, now seven years after my own graduation. Finding a parking space on Waterman, I walked past the greenhouse toward Lincoln Field. A living palimpsest, its own faded and faint iterations beneath itself.

  “RED ALERT! A PHYLUM IS COLLAPSING—” It stands as a kind of testament to my time at Brown:

  What I took to be endless was fleeting.

  What I took to be ephemeral continues.

  CAMPUS LIFE

  The closest I ever came to an orgy . . . was at a student dance at Brown around 1922. I did not suspect it was an orgy until three days later; in fact, at the time it seemed to me decorous to the point of torpor and fully consonant with the high principles of the Brown Christian Association, under whose auspices it was held. Attired in a greenish Norfolk jacket . . . I spent the evening buffeting about in the stag line, prayerfully beseeching the underclassmen I knew for permission to cut in on their women and tread a few measures of the Camel Walk. At frequent intervals, noisily advertising an overpowering thirst, I retired to a cloakroom with several other blades and choked down a minute quantity of gin, warmed to body heat, from a pocket flask. Altogether, it was a strikingly commonplace experience . . .

  —S. J. Perelman (’25)

  I loved the fact that the bucolic Brown campus was in the middle of this very gritty city with tremendous sort of ethnic legacies, and corrupt or quasi-corrupt politicians and an active mob, and diners literally on the wrong side of the tracks. As a young journalist there was a lot to observe on the margins of campus and beyond campus.

  —David Corn (’81)

  A Campus Tour: My Life in Poetry at Brown

  NICOLE COOLEY

  The Rock

  On the first floor of the Rockefeller Library, in the reference section, I sat alone in a wooden study carrel, Cotgrave’s Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues from 1611 open on my lap. I loved the book’s age, loved its dustiness, its smell, the way its pages threatened to crumble in my fingers, and the fact that, more than 350 years after it was written, I could hold it in my hands.

  For hours, with the help of the ancient dictionary, I worked through French poems. I read and reread the dizains—dense ten-line poems—by the Renaissance poet Maurice Scève, who was the subject of my undergraduate comparative literature thesis. I wrote list after list, French and English, side by side. The words of the poems were objects I could touch, stones I could slip into my pockets. Translating was crossing a bridge into another world. Every word I wrote was a step across, from French to English, from my childhood to my life as an adult.

  Learning to read and speak French for the first time at Brown as a freshman had brought me to poetry in a new way. I loved the range of French classes, from “The Inaccessible Object of Desire” to “Nerval, Baudelaire, Valery” to “Four French Poets of the Renaissance.” I took as many French poetry classes as I could.

  I was nineteen, and I believed I’d found my most sacred space: the Brown library—those carrels in the reference section full of my beloved dictionaries.

  The Henry Moore Statue on the Green

  We gathered there, on top of it, on its blackened bronze, on the grass surrounding it, with our books of poems, our notebooks, our pens, our imported French cigarettes. The Henry Moore was a destination and a gathering place. The bronze statue, given to the university in 1974, was our place for poetry.

  As young poets at Brown, we took ourselves too seriously in all the best ways. We wanted to be intellectuals. We read Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, French feminist theory. It was the mideighties but we fashioned ourselves as characters from Jean-Luc Godard’s films about the student revolutions in Paris in 1968 that none of us had experienced. We’d seen glimpses of the era in semiotics classes, and that was enough.

  Sitting on the Henry Moore, with our packs of Gitanes cigarettes, in our thrift shop coats, we talked urgently about poetry and politics. We were eighteen, we were nineteen, we were twenty. We felt both unbelievably young and unbearably old and we were neither, in the way that you can only experience that contradiction at the end of your childhood and the beginning of your adulthood.

  On Meeting Street

  My friend, a graduate student in creative writing, wanted to show me his latest poetry project: he had written poems all over his car. A large, used Oldsmobile, faded blue, his car was covered in letters, in language, on the hood, the doors, the trunk, the windshield, and the wheels. As we stood on Meeting Street in the late-afternoon fall sunshine and he showed me his MFA-project car that he was turning in instead of a paper manuscript, instead of typed-up poems, I understood poetry in a whole new way. Poetry was a force of pure liberation. Poetry was absolute freedom.

  French House

  I started French at Brown as soon as I arrived and in my sophomore year I moved off campus to French House. To be accepted, you had to pass an interview in French conducted by current residents. On East Manning Street, behind Brown’s campus, French House consisted of two houses, beautiful stone buildings. The rooms, full of dark wood, were large, with high ceilings. The biggest and most important part of living in French House was French Dinner, served twice a week, a meal during which we were only allowed to speak French. When I moved into French House, I was the weakest French speaker in the group. To practice, I read French poems out loud, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Valéry. If I read enough poetry, I believed I could do the practical things: I could speak in French at dinner.

  The IHOP on Thayer Street

  My freshman year, the International House of Pancakes across from campus was where I wrote all my poems. The waitstaff would let me sit in a booth all day, with a bottomless pot of coffee, the restaurant’s claim to fame, and the occasional buttered muffin or piece of toast. The IHOP was where I began my lifelong love of writing in ugly places, preferring diners and doughnut shops to luxurious cafés. In the IHOP, the pressure was off. I watched the spinning glass cylinder of pies and read and scribbled in my notebook and didn’t care if the poem I wrote was good or not.

  That spring, I was taking a poetry workshop with Philip Levine—later to become the poet laureate and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize—who was teaching at Brown for one semester. Writing classes at Brown required an admission test: you showed up on the first day of class and did a writing exercise in a blue exam book and later found out if—based on the quality of that work—you were admitted. On the first day of Phil’s class, he told everyone who showed up that they could stay in the class. Our class was composed not only of undergraduates but also a professor from the psychology department and a songwriter who played his poems on his guitar.

  Phil encouraged us to write about what mattered to us, to think about how we could explore the most important things in our lives in our own poems. In the IHOP, I hunkered down and wrote my family secrets, my deepest fears and wishes, the stories of the people I’d loved who were dead and gone.

  The Rare Book Bindery at the John Hay Library

  My job on campus was saving rare books of poems.

  In the basement of the John Hay Library, I assisted master bookbinder Daniel Knowlton, constructing covers out of wood and cardboard and vellum for volumes in the John Hay’s collection. Most of what was wheeled down on carts to the bindery was poetry, as the John Hay has one of the largest collections of rare American poetry books in the nation.

  I loved my job. I smoothed down
vellum, cut out cardboard to fit around each book, and learned to use the iron letterpress to stamp out words in gold. I folded and refolded pink marbled papers.

  The object, as Mr. Knowlton explained it, was to make the box that held each book as beautiful as the text inside. The best part: before I made each box I read a little of the book to determine how the box might reflect the book’s content. In cool silence, I sat at a desk in the bindery and imagined: What kind of box should Wanda Coleman get? Or William Blake? Or Allen Ginsberg?

  The Blue Room

  Before it was beautifully renovated, the Blue Room was a coffeehouse with grimy windows, unwashed walls, and a slanting floor that made everyone’s chairs scrape loudly over the tiles. And of course I loved it; the Blue Room fit all my teenage fantasies of a place where writers would gather and dramatic events would occur. The light was bad, the music full of static. When my first college boyfriend broke up with me there one night, over Styrofoam cups of coffee, I thought, in the midst of my sadness, This is a good place for the end of a relationship. If we were to break up in a French movie, it would have to take place here. And, in fact, I met my French tutor there each Thursday morning and we drilled verb tenses for French conversation.

  Pembroke Hall

  I attended the poetry reading with a fellow student from my poetry workshop, and we were two of only three people in the audience. The poet was Robert Mezey.

  For me, it was a perfect date; after the reading, the Q & A with the poet was an intimate conversation. Robert Mezey talked to us, the three young poets in the room. He asked us about our work, shared his writing process with us. It was a wonderful evening.

  Years later, the boy who had brought me to the reading would die in the bombing over Lockerbie, in the terrorist act that killed four Brown students. I would always remember that evening, sitting beside him in the classroom, sharing the spirit of poetry.

  Michael Harper’s Office

  Professor Harper gave us index cards in an envelope at the end of each poetry workshop class. I’d wait to open my envelope until I was halfway down the stairs of the classroom building, where my fellow writing students could not see me. I’d pull the cards out of the envelope like they were winning lottery tickets.

  “Poems to write” was the heading on each card and Professor Harper tailored the assignments to suit each of us and our backgrounds. That spring, Michael Harper wanted me to write a poem titled “Huey Long.” He wanted me to write a poem called “The Rhetoric of Women’s Poetry: A Polemic.” Neither was even remotely like the poems I’d been writing for his class. He challenged us to write in new ways and to break our writing habits.

  I was twenty years old, so I would beg for reasons. I wanted him to explain the lists of titles to me. I wanted secrets, shortcuts, clues to fix the careful poems I’d been writing, poems that I wanted him to praise.

  He’d never tell me.

  All of us in the workshop were learning a difficult lesson: we had to figure out our own poems on our own terms. We had to decide for ourselves what a poem was and what kind of poem we wanted to write.

  Waterman Street

  Graduation day: I was leaving Brown. With my boyfriend and my best friend, I was driving away in the U-Haul, heading to graduate school in creative writing, to my MFA degree, to what I believed would be the future that would teach me to write poems. The three of us stood outside the apartment on Waterman Street, truck packed and ready. And yet I was already ready to write my poems; I’d learned all my lessons about poetry at Brown.

  The Day President John F. Kennedy Died

  SUSAN CHEEVER

  It was one of those sunny autumn afternoons that smell of apples and falling leaves. Thanksgiving break was just a few days away. I checked the date as I walked out of Miller Hall and headed for the Thayer Street market. November 22, 1963.

  I was happy at college, but I didn’t know that then. Fear of what seemed like a hellish future eclipsed my good feelings. I knew I had to get married, but my attempts at dating were spectacularly unsuccessful. I was hoping to find a career, but the only things I liked doing were sleeping and reading. How would I manage? My delight in the campus—my friends, the solace of books, skating at Aldrich-Dexter, and exploring Fox Point—was dulled by anxiety.

  My dread was part of a collective terror. Many of us thought the world would end soon in World War III. In grade school we had been taught to hide under our desks when the bombs dropped. As freshmen in college we toured a bomb shelter in downtown Providence with shelves of canned goods and a crank to filter radiation out of the air after the inevitable nuclear holocaust. When turned, the crank made a shrieking, metal-against-metal noise; I heard that noise in my dreams. When family neighbors in Westchester got drunk at cocktail parties, they confessed that they had armed themselves against others who might want to use their bomb shelters—sorry, but they wouldn’t be able to share. As sophomores during the Cuban missile crisis we had listened to our young, handsome president telling about the risk he was taking by challenging Nikita Khrushchev. “Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right,” he said as we listened to the scratchy radio in the lounge of Bates House. Would the Russians back down? Some classmates headed for home to be with their families at the end.

  We stayed up late debating whether or not it was better to die in a fiery flash, be captured by the Russian soldiers who were waiting off the coast, or slowly starve the way characters did in On the Beach by Nevil Shute, which was set portentously in 1963. In late-night conversations we quoted the elegant despair of Edna St. Vincent Millay—My candle burns at both ends / It will not last the night. In class we studied the elegant despair of T. S. Eliot—I had not thought death had undone so many. The question was how we would survive. The answer, my friend, was blowin’ in the wind. Would it all end with a bang, or with a whimper, as Eliot wrote? Fire or ice, as Robert Frost wrote? One thing we knew: it was going to end, and end soon.

  So that sunny November afternoon when I saw a girl from my class sobbing as she stumbled down Thayer Street, I wasn’t surprised to find the world indeed coming to an end. The president had been shot. The president had been shot in Dallas in a motorcade with the governor of Texas. The president was at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Jackie’s chic clothes—her pink suit and pillbox hat—were covered with blood. They were giving the president transfusions. By the time the afternoon sun sent its long shadows across the lawns in front of Sayles Hall, the president was dead.

  In those days the only publicly available television on campus was a small black-and-white set in the Blue Room, where on that day it seemed the whole student body had crowded in, all of them standing or sitting on the floor and draping themselves over the few chairs to watch the long, sad four-day weekend of national mourning. The picture was grainy, the images tiny, but the little box seemed to hold the whole world. There was the young Walter Cronkite with his heavy black glasses and mustache, choking up as he announced that the president had been pronounced dead. There was CBS reporter Tom Pettit in the chaotic basement of the Dallas police station trying to keep up with the jumble of events. A pale Lee Harvey Oswald was saying he hadn’t done anything as he was pushed toward a man named Jack Ruby. Then there was a popping sound, and the next minute Oswald was dead and the screen was filled with a shoving crowd of men.

  Before that weekend, television was where we watched the Mouseketeers and I Love Lucy. Now our history was unfolding in miniature before us, in black and white, with the tinny sound turned up as high as it would go. There on-screen was little John-John saluting his father’s coffin, and there was the weeping widow, with her sad face and lovely clothes, standing entirely alone with her two children. There was the riderless horse, bucking in the autumn sun. I watched. I went for walks. I came back to listen. The clatter of hooves drowned out the guns of the funeral salute.

  * * *

  As terrible as that November day fifty years ago may have been, its memories have not entirely overwhel
med those of my days and nights at Brown. My first days as a college freshman were passed in a haze of anxiety. My roommate was a beautiful blue-eyed princess from the Midwest who had special study clothes, date clothes, and classroom clothes—all pink or baby blue—and who read sitting up straight at the desk on her side of the room. The desk on my side was piled with papers, books, coffee cups. I read in bed, often under the covers, and I tried never to change my clothes. Trapped together on an upper hall of Andrews facing the back, we seemed helpless in our opposite ways. Soon we had gathered a few more helpless freshmen who huddled with us under the high ceilings of the cafeteria and made tea on hot plates brought from home. To get to class I would wander down the steps of Andrews and out past the Pembroke Library and down Brown Street.

  In the fall of 2012 I returned as a visiting lecturer. I hadn’t been back for more than an evening or an afternoon since graduation. As a teacher walking that same sidewalk down Brown Street last fall, I had vivid, nostalgic flashbacks: of sitting on the grass with friends; of watching from the high windows of the Pembroke Library as a boy I had a crush on walked up Meeting Street (did he know he carried my heart in his pocket?); of buying my first yogurt (then a new, strange thing) at the Thayer market; of splitting a piece of cherry cheesecake at Gregg’s (now Au Bon Pain); of spending that weekend in the Blue Room watching television. Nostalgia! Gone is the anxiety that killed my ability to appreciate the beauty of the place and the luxury of having nothing to do except learn. These shimmering images of the past seemed more alive than memories—I was reliving my experience at Brown, only this time I was reliving it joyfully.

  Nostalgia is the bittersweet memory of the past, literally an ache for homecoming—the bitterness is the passing of time, the sweetness is our survival. The Brown campus, it turns out, is nostalgia central for me. Returning to it was like having a romance with an old friend. I reveled in the past that I can enjoy now. I did get married; I did find a career. Recently, dozens of academic papers on nostalgia have been published at universities from the Netherlands to South Africa and the United States. Nostalgia is a good thing, the psychologists all agree. We use our longing for the past to give our lives meaning. Nostalgia makes us feel more important and more generous: “It serves a crucial existential function,” says researcher Clay Routledge of Britain’s University of Southampton. British researchers have developed the Southampton Nostalgia Scale. (How often do you experience nostalgia? How significant is it for you to feel nostalgic?) I scored a seven out of seven. We’ll always have Paris!