When I graduated, I had a manuscript: Economic Development and Women’s Labor Force Participation, i.e., my honors thesis. Not what I’d expected when I’d first transferred to Brown, but in retrospect it was absolutely right. This background gave me the credentials to land a job on Wall Street, doing the kind of economic analysis I’d worked with for my thesis, but this, in turn, financed my writing and made my parents happy. Eventually, I’d publish enough to leave my day job. And the coup de grace? I eventually returned to Brown to teach writing.
This last election season, I was even called upon to do some political writing for Salon, and I wrote a New York Times op-ed, “My Asian Dad and Mitt Romney’s Muffin Tops,” a satire not at all out of step with Babbitt. For my fiction, my vestigial interest in medicine has been transformed into a novel about a doctor struggling to fit his practice within the capitalistic confines of consumer-based medicine. At one point, I even wore a white coat and was embedded with the Brown medical students on their ob-gyn rotation. I have an abiding regret that my father is no longer alive to see that I did, in my own way, finally make it to medical school. The novel has demanded years of immersing myself in subjects traversing literature, nanotechnology, biomedicine, history, and finance. This very much includes my economics study as well as being literarily indebted to a little-known Sinclair Lewis novel about medical education, Arrowsmith, that I probably would not have discovered if I hadn’t encountered Babbitt in History 52.
I tracked down three additional alums who’d been in that singular class, and even though it was more than twenty years ago, they all remember that course we took in the spring of 1985—and have lively memories of the novels, the outstanding TAs, and how, on the first day, the dignified professor grabbed our attention by blasting Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.” He then asked us to take a moment to think about what the experience of being born in America meant to us personally and in the larger context of history.
Currently on leave from Brown, I am teaching at an institution that has a rigid core curriculum. I can appreciate the benefits of a shared body of knowledge, a personal intellectual toolkit, and many students desire and need that structure. But it also puts my Brown experience in context; my four History 52 classmates (an English professor, a lawyer for the Inter-American Foundation, the director of leadership programs in continuing education at Brown, and Phi, an elementary school teacher) and I have our own personal cores that seem to stay bright and polished with constant use—I wink at my Brown education every time I use a phrase like “the new Gilded Age.”
We also all remember reading The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Anyone who makes it to Brown is already at home with questioning conformity, but my classmate Paul Zimmerman (’88) recalls that “reading the Flannel Suit triggered a strong feeling in me, and I think many others, of, ‘Yeah, I am so not going to be him.’ We wanted to find or create our own way to navigate the world.”
My parents continued to be upset about my career choices, especially after I left my last financial position, at Goldman Sachs. They called weekly to lobby for graduate school (any graduate school, at that point), even after my first novel was published. However, some years before my father’s death, on seeing how I was absolutely at the place I needed to be in my life, with my degree from a school they hadn’t heard of in Korea (and assumed, wrongly, wasn’t very good), he queried, “How did you know? How did you know not to listen to us?”
My father’s question was a welcome validation of my scary, uncertain, but exhilarating decision to go to Brown, and my Ahab-like certainty that Brown would help me become the writer I wanted to be and that on the way, if there wasn’t an established path to my dream career, Brown would give me the inner resources I’d need in order to create it.
This initially chaotic, mapless, planless journey has also led me to a most delightful and serendipitous twist: while I am still the slow, wordy writer I always was, the publisher of the house that is issuing my next novel, a doorstopper that was almost a decade in the making, is none other than Jonathan Karp, who was my editor at the Brown Daily Herald.
Your Dinner with Susan Sontag
JOANNA SCOTT
It’s a typical April day in Providence in the year 1984, and you’re an eager, impatient first-year graduate student enrolled in the writing program at Brown University. You’ve been telling yourself that you must be a sponge and absorb whatever there is to learn, but so far you haven’t been satisfied with anything you’ve written. Your wastebasket is overflowing with false starts. One moment you feel defeated, the next, exhilarated. Everything matters too much, or too little. You are in a hurry to get on with life. No, you want to slow it down. You want to make every moment count. You type too quickly and read too slowly. You tell yourself that for every window you’ve ever looked through, there’s a story to tell.
You live off campus, in the third-floor apartment of a boxy, yellow, Federal-style home on Governor Street. Last night, you went with friends to a Violent Femmes concert at RISD; all agreed that it was a blast, though one of your friends got a bloody nose while slam-dancing in the aisle. Back in your bedroom, you fell asleep to the sound of rain against the window.
When you blink awake, the morning sunlight has turned the fog drifting through the Fox Point neighborhood to gold. You hear a robin in the garden. You hear your landlady in the driveway declare that Narragansett Bay is beautiful this time of year. You hear a man blow his nose—you look out the window and see him there, dressed in red jeans, holding his car keys as he listens to the landlady.
You get out of bed and shuffle between books scattered across the warped pinewood floor, navigating through Homer, Dante, Goethe, Dickens, Fielding, Auerbach, Hardwick, Gadamer, Carter. There is a stack that includes Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes—the subject of an essay you’re supposed to write for Professor Henkle; The Phaedrus—bookmarked at the passage when Socrates compares the soul to a chariot; and paperbacks by Handke, Chekhov, and Gass—recommended by your current writing instructor, Susan Sontag, or the Duchess, as she’s known among you and your classmates.
What an honor it has been to study with the Duchess, one of the country’s leading intellectuals. You’ve read every word she’s published. You are starstruck. You hang on all her comments. She makes a point of having dinners with her students, and it’s your turn tonight. You are praying you won’t say something unbearably stupid.
You shower, brush your teeth, part your hair with a comb, then set out on your morning walk, ambling along Wickenden Street, inhaling the good smell of sweet bread wafting through the open doors of the Portuguese bakery. The breeze off the Seekonk River makes your face tingle. On the wall next to the restaurant Rue de l’Espoir you see a poster for Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love opening at Trinity Repertory. You memorize the production dates.
Back in your kitchen, you have breakfast with your roommates. Jen, an applied mathematician in the PhD program at Brown, pours cereal. Sloan, studying graphic design at RISD, heats up milk. You prepare the coffee.
You pack your book bag and walk up George Street, stopping in the English department to check your mail. There is a note from your instructor from last semester, Robert Coover, who besides teaching you about writing also generously gave up several hours of his free time to teach you how to use that fancy new machine called a computer. His letter is an addendum to a conversation you had with him the day before about a word processing program: “If you type RECEIVE the next time you’re logged on, you will have improved up-front material. Not a bad idea to type RECEIVE each time you log on, for that matter. Best, Bob.”
You spend the morning in the basement of the Rock writing what looks like chicken scratch and supposedly is the beginning of a novel. A few minutes before eleven you head to your part-time job at the Hay, where you spend two hours making catalog notes about Bromo-Seltzer song pamphlets from the 1890s. After work you grab a quick onion bagel from the Blue Room, which you eat in your Romanticism class while a fellow
student presents a paper called “The Quest for Forgetfulness in Byron’s Manfred.”
All day, you worry about what you will say during your dinner with Susan Sontag. She is a formidable woman, precise and passionate, never, like you, at a loss for words. You imagine her asking: How can you aspire to be a novelist when you’re always at a loss for words?
The afternoon speeds on. As you are walking back down George Street, it starts to rain again. You feel defeated, useless, misled by your dreams. You rehearse what you’re going to record in your journal: I am a drive-in movie theater and the parking lot is empty because of the rain, but the film still flickers on the screen, like a school of silver barracuda in the gulf off Key West. This is wretched writing, you have to admit. At least you haven’t written it yet.
You change from your sweatshirt and jeans into a skirt and sweater. On your way out, you meet your landlady, who is repotting her night-blooming cereus. She promises that on the night the cereus blooms, she will have a party, and you and your roommates are invited.
You take it as a good omen that the unreliable alternator of your Volkswagen Rabbit is functioning properly, and you drive to an Armenian restaurant in East Providence. There is a neon Schaefer sign in the front window, and the restaurant is empty except for the waitress and the cook, who grills meats over open coals. You wait on a bench for the rest of your group. Laurie arrives first, then David pulls up in his Dodge coupe, with the Duchess in the passenger seat.
At the table, you and Susan Sontag share a bowl of pistachios. She tells the waitress, “We are going to be here a long while,” and orders two carafes of Valpollicella wine. “I. Am. Having. A. Difficult. Time. Keeping. My. Wits,” she announces once the wine has been poured. Then she launches into a story about a thirty-odd-year-old friend of hers who recently confessed that she’d slept with her own thirty-odd-year-old brother. The friend made a plan with her brother to meet in a city far away from family and friends; they had dinner and went to a hotel.
Susan Sontag sips her wine and continues: “I asked her what she felt. She said, ‘We just lay in bed and giggled. Thought—if our parents could only see us now.’ ”
You don’t know whether to laugh or express horror. Luckily, your friend Laurie takes the risk and laughs first, then David laughs, and Susan Sontag laughs, so you are safe to join them.
Susan Sontag talks about many things. She talks about famous writers she has met over the years. She tells us about their secret scandals, their obsessions and peccadillos. About one she says, “I know someone who had an affair with her in the 1940s, but she doesn’t know that I know.” About another she says, “His wife is a slave, and he dictates all his books to her.”
She talks about meeting Nadine Gordimer at a writers’ conference. “Nadine approached me in the hotel lobby and said, ‘Susan Sontag, I really admire your work.’ And though I am usually irreproachably honest, I said, ‘Nadine Gordimer, I admire your work so much,’ though I had never read a word of it.” She pauses, stabs at her food. “We became fast friends,” she recalls. She explains that for a week she and Nadine shunned other conference delegates and ate breakfasts and dinners together and talked through the night. The whole time she was worried that when she finally had a chance to sit down and read Nadine Gordimer’s work, she wouldn’t like it. But she did like it, in fact was overwhelmed by it, and now Susan and Nadine are good friends.
You can’t help but be enthralled. On she goes, talking about how she lived in China and Tucson and Southern California, how she married when she was seventeen and divorced when she was twenty-six. She loves New York, she says. She has a duplex on East Seventeenth Street, and the man at her local deli tells her, “Susan, I got a name for your next book—The Life of a Deli Employee. No, here’s a better one. The Death of a Deli Employee.”
She says it’s easy to make friends in New York. She says that everyone in the Soviet Union hates the government there. She says that John Updike will never write a great book, but he has a great prose style. And after finally noticing the waitress dozing in a chair across the empty restaurant, she says, “They want to close up here,” and puts on her coat.
Back in your own room, you call your boyfriend, who is studying in a graduate English program at another school, two hundred miles away. It’s after eleven p.m. and the rates are low, so you talk for an hour. You talk about his paper on Wallace Stevens and your paper on Joseph Conrad. You discuss arrangements for the upcoming weekend. You tell him all about your dinner with Susan Sontag.
It is still raining when you climb into bed. You scribble something in the spiral notebook you use as your journal, but language strikes you as inefficient. You wish you could make your words sound like the rain. You consider all that you have learned since the morning. You can’t include everything, so you try to anticipate what you will want to remember years from now, if you ever set out to tell a story about a typical day in the life of a Brown graduate writing student, circa 1984.
The Place of Lucky Accidents
DAWN RAFFEL
Late in the seventies, I became an accidental semiotics major—I mean, concentrator. To be honest, I didn’t know what semiotics was. I had transferred to Brown, sight unseen, after two years at a well-known journalism school. For a would-be writer, j-school appeared to be the practical path. Given that I had graduated from high school roughly five minutes post-Watergate, it was also a popular path. The school was hot; the city was freezing. Worse, the longer I stayed in journalism school, the more I wanted to write fiction, and the longer I stayed in the Midwest, where I’d been raised, the more I yearned to go someplace new. But where?
Several East Coast schools made it clear that to transfer would be to lose all of my journalism credits. “Trade school,” sniffed one admissions officer. “Well, why don’t you look at Brown?” said another. Brown! The creative writing faculty was—forgive me—storied, and the have-it-your-way curriculum meant that Brown would accept credits from classes like Reporting 101 and “Introduction to Advertising.” “We’ll call those semiotics,” said an angel of mercy in the admissions office. Journalism was connected, sort of, to the classes I’d be taking in creative writing, linguistics, theory, and comp lit. I could even toss theater into that happy basket. If. The if was: Brown didn’t take many transfers, and the odds against me that year, I later learned, were worse than one hundred to one. At the welcome reception for the tiny handful of newbies, an admissions officer told me that what put my application over the top was the “hilarious” writing sample. Alas, it wasn’t intended to be funny.
Feeling like I was pulling a fast one and wanting to meet people, I signed up for a yearlong, five-day-a-week acting class. It was fun; it was pass/fail; and since I had no illusions about ever acting professionally, it was as stress-free as a college class could be. “Don’t be afraid to fall on your keister,” our professor, James O. Barnhill, said to us.
So I wasted no time in bruising my metaphorical backside, in acting class, in Production Workshop, in my writing classes. I learned to peel my keister and my ego off the floor and have another go. While hanging out in the theater department, I read—and memorized—Chekhov and Pinter and Ibsen and Beckett and Shepard and Stoppard, in no particular order. Without realizing it, I learned to write dialogue. Absorbed how actors use space and applied it to the page. Studied timing. Picked up the ability to stand in front of people and not visibly freak out. Ditched a thick midwestern accent, at Professor Barnhill’s insistence—an insistence that initially offended me and that I soon realized might have been the best advice I’d ever gotten. I learned how not to sound hilarious when I meant to be serious. And I learned how not to be so serious.
Decades later, Brown’s loosey-goosey, roll-with-it curriculum—that Escher-like jungle-gym structure—has proven to be the most practical education I could have possibly gotten.
I’ll still thank you for not asking me to explain semiotics.
A Doctor Poet?
CHRISTINE MONTROSS
I would not be a doctor were it not for Brown. I don’t mean that with hyperbolic nostalgia, as in: Brown made me what I am today. Nor do I mean it concretely, as in: I went to medical school at Brown, ergo Brown transformed me into a doctor. What I mean is that I can’t imagine I would ever have gotten into medical school were it not for Brown.
After majoring in French in college I went to graduate school for creative writing and then took a job teaching high school English to support my entirely nonlucrative life as a poet. I was one of four faculty members in the first year of a new charter school in California. Which is also to say that at twenty-four years old, I was a high school’s entire English department. To fill the student body, the school’s founders had accepted a large number of students who had been expelled from other public schools. Many had spent time in juvenile detention centers. Many were on legal probation. I had never taught high schoolers before. It was, perhaps, not the arrangement most likely to foster a love of teaching.
Nonetheless, it did give me insight into the weighty and numerous issues that the fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds in my classroom were juggling as they tried to read the books I had assigned them.
“Ms. Machine,” they would call out to me, because my last name reminded them of the Spanish word motor, “if Holden Caulfield has two parents and a fancy school and all this money, then why does he spend so much time bitching about his life?”
“Yeah, or at least why do we have to read all his snively, pansy-ass bitching?” another would chime in.
“If I met him near my casa I’d give his spoiled white ass something to bitch about!” a third would shout out, at which point the class devolved into laughter, clapping, and congratulatory fist bumps.
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