The Brown Reader

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  That’s one way into describing the work I do now, a few lifetimes later, as a writer and the creator of a public radio project called On Being. I’ve come to see the great religious and spiritual traditions as a conversation across generations about the large, interesting, essential questions at the center of life: what does it mean to be human, and how do we want to live? My experiences in Germany after graduation finally left me pondering the limits of geopolitical maneuvering. They left me longing to grapple directly with the mystery of the human mind, heart, and spirit.

  As I first learned at Brown, Bonhoeffer dreamed up the notion of “religionless Christianity” in the letters he wrote from a Nazi prison. He died in that prison and didn’t live to develop it. But there it has rested in the annals of Christian theology ever since. From where I sit, this phrase is coming into its own as religious and spiritual identities intersect with the twenty-first century’s global reformation of all of our endeavors. A third of adults under thirty resist conventional religious identity. But I have found so many of them to be ethically passionate and searchingly curious, theologically as well as spiritually.

  Just as important, I see that new generations at Brown and elsewhere don’t feel the need (as I did) to choose between curiosity about religion and politics or history or the arts or any practical sphere of action in the world. They don’t see intellectual and spiritual grounding, reflection, and social action as separate endeavors. They are asking large questions of meaning from inside every discipline.

  And here I am, uniquely equipped to trace their imprint on the world because of Brown’s gift to me of a follow-your-nose education. I spend my days working with the power of questions, Brown’s first great gift to me. In conversation with wise thinkers and actors—emerging Kierkegaards and Bonhoeffers of our day—I learn with ever greater nuance how we rise to (or fall from) the questions we are invited to meet. And I take delight in the paradoxical contrast between what I thought I was learning and the unforeseen ways the larger culture could use that learning later. In the world that has followed the Cold War’s startling end, religious and spiritual traditions are as “relevant” as ever before—politically, culturally, globally. Even as Brown was fueling my undergraduate doubt, it was equipping me to reckon with faith’s evolution in my own life and in the astonishing century that has unfolded.

  Did I Really Found Production Workshop?

  RICHARD FOREMAN

  Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.

  —José Ortega y Gasset

  When I graduated from Brown in ’59, it was a different and less progressive school than it is now. Back then, I had mixed feelings about my four years; I wasn’t aware of how much I was learning and growing. And I didn’t know that one day, I would be remembered as the guy who founded Production Workshop, Brown’s student-run theater.

  It’s true that when I first arrived at Brown, I already had a strong interest in theater. I immediately approached Professor Florence Vandewater, the advisor to Sock and Buskin, which was Brown’s theater club at the time. Back in high school, I had done lots of scenery and also acted in plays. So I asked Professor Vandewater if I could work in the scene shop.

  She said, “Yes, of course—but why don’t you come and try out for our fall production of Much Ado About Nothing?” So I did, and to my surprise, I got a big part. My fate was sealed. The next production was Death of a Salesman and much to everyone’s shock, I (a mere freshman) was given the leading role of Willy Loman. After that, all through my four years at Brown, I played many great leading roles—everything from Shakespeare to contemporary French theater.

  I soon became “known” at Brown. And one amazing benefit from this notoriety took place during freshman year, in my required French language class. In high school as well as at Brown, I had been an A student in all my classes—except for French, where I struggled to earn, at best, a C-minus. But the day after Death of a Salesman opened, I walked into the dreaded French class and my professor, a Frenchman whose name I have forgotten, announced to the class, “Gentlemen, we are honored to have a great artist with us. Last night I saw Mr. Foreman playing the lead in Death of a Salesman. What a wonderful actor!” What a shock it was to hear that from my haughty French professor. At the end of the class (it was winter) my professor came over to his C-minus student and helped him into his heavy overcoat! Needless to say, I passed the class.

  But the very best thing that happened to me during my Brown career was my accidental enrollment, sophmore year, in a comparative literature course taught by Professor Juan López-Morillas. The course I had originally applied for was full, so as a second option I chose López-Morillas’s course, knowing nothing about him. He was the most dynamic, stimulating, and inspiring professor I ever encountered either at Brown or during my graduate studies at Yale. He allowed me (as other Brown professors did not, in those days) to write very idiosyncratic papers for his class. He pulled the best out of me, and as an expert on the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, he introduced me to the work of that great Spanish thinker, which led me to a lifelong obsession with contemporary European thought.

  My gratitude to Professor López-Morillas goes beyond that one class. Shortly before graduation, when I was about to be married, he asked me if I was taking a honeymoon and where I was going. I told him my family had offered us a wedding trip to Europe, but I wasn’t really interested. Professor López-Morillas looked at me slyly and said to me gently, “Well, Richard—I really think you should go.” That persuaded me, thank God, for that trip truly opened my eyes and changed my life for good.

  What made it especially ironic in retrospect (given my struggles in French class) was that after my first trip to Europe, I became enamored of, and seduced by, Paris and by everything Parisian. That love is still going strong; so far, I have directed nine French productions, all in French, at major venues from the Paris Opera to famous state theaters.

  * * *

  But let’s return to my days at Brown and my legendary founding of Production Workshop. In my junior year, when I and a few friends generally avoided the offical dining hall and instead had long lunches with extended conversations in the cafeteria at Faunce House, some of those friends started showing me (the “Famous” Brown Actor) plays that they were writing for class.

  After reading a few, I said to myself, “I can do better than this.” So I switched from being an English major to being a creative writing major and I started writing plays.

  I was still acting, and in my senior year, as a member of the student board of Sock and Buskin, I persuaded them to schedule a production of Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle. Brecht was not well-known in America at the time, and unbeknownst to me, all Sock and Buskin choices had to be approved by the dean of the college. Well, there had never been a problem with this before, but we quickly got the message from the dean: “Brown is not going to allow performances of a play by a Communist!”

  Needless to say, I was upset by this. I had believed Brown to be more open-minded at the time (1958). And, in response, I resigned from Sock and Buskin.

  Where to turn? I went to the director of Faunce House and got permission to do a series of “art events” featuring readings of some of my own experimental plays. That all went well enough, and I graduated and moved on to Yale drama school as a playwright.

  It was only years later that someone told me, “Oh, you never heard? Derived from your Faunce House events, we started something called Production Workshop that is now the major producing organization at Brown, and you are remembered as the founder.” I was delighted, of course, that my efforts were apparently not forgotten, but I suspect that I’m getting more credit than I deserve.

  Certainly, it was thanks to Brown that I began writing plays and then mounting them myself. And now, in my seventies, I have begun a new career as a film director, following another interest that began at Brown. Despite the fact that I was so involved
in theater, I rarely went to films. But in my first two years at Brown, I began to review movies for the Brown Daily Herald. Now that my (very experimental) feature films are beginning to be shown at festivals around the world, I am somewhat shocked to remember that my obsession with film actually started at Brown when I accidentally “fell into the role” of film critic.

  When I think about it, I owe many things to Brown, and it has been illuminating to take stock of my indebtedness. Having returned a few times in later years to speak to classes, I am impressed at how much more sophisticated and intelligent the Brown students seem to me today. All to the good, of course. I now believe that Brown lives up to its reputation as a top-quality school, even though, in my perhaps arrogant and overly demanding youth, I was not at all convinced.

  Residential Life

  DAVID EBERSHOFF

  In the summer of 1987 I called my future freshman roommate—let’s call him Ryan—to introduce myself. He was from Green Bay, Wisconsin, and as I understood it, the Office of Residential Life had assigned us almost randomly. I remember only two questions playing a part in the decision: Do you smoke? Are you a morning or night person?

  If other information played a part in our assignment, I was never privy to it.

  “Do you play football?” Ryan asked on the phone. No one had ever asked me that question before (nor has anyone since). He told me that Brown’s football team had recruited him, but he quickly moved on. He asked what kind of music I listened to. In high school I was a devotee of the Smiths. I had cut dozens of photographs of Morrissey from magazines and Scotch-taped them to my bedroom wall. In one, he was clutching a dozen daisies to his bare chest. In another he wore jeans and no underwear. My parents tolerated these pictures with more compassion than I appreciated at the time, but what exactly they meant to me remained unsaid.

  On the phone Ryan admitted he didn’t know the Smiths. He liked Led Zeppelin and Metallica but expressed a genuine interest in listening to my CDs as well.

  Ryan was modest in a midwestern, irony-free way that I have always found endearing, probably because it reminds me of my parents. He didn’t mention that the football team was grooming him to be a future star. As long as I knew him—which would not be long—he never once discussed his considerable athletic talents. That phone call was in July, and we had no further contact until we arrived on campus in the fall.

  For three years I had been thinking of my arrival at college, and Brown specifically, as my own personal liberation. In my early teens I hated myself for being gay. I was lonely, distrustful, and certain the world would turn on me if it knew. The summer I was fifteen I felt especially isolated; I distanced myself from my friends, fearing their response to who I really was. For company I turned to books. I devoured every gay novel I could find at the public library and on the shelves of our local Waldenbooks. I read probably forty or fifty books that summer; it was one of the most powerful educational experiences of my life. I read Truman Capote and James Baldwin, Armistead Maupin and Rita Mae Brown, Gore Vidal and Edmund White. I read Oscar Wilde, André Gide, and the gayer books by Virginia Woolf. I tried to find the gayness in Marlowe, Melville, and Henry James. Some of this writing was beyond me, but it confirmed what I needed to know: gay people existed in the world and our truths were valid.

  One day that summer, I realized I had read every novel in the bookstore’s small Gay & Lesbian section. A certain satisfaction fell upon me. In that moment I saw a future where I was happy and finally accepted myself. I vowed to sit tight with this secret for three more years until college and then I would be free. This motivated me to study and it’s probably why I had the grades to get into Brown. I chose Brown because of its liberal reputation. I assumed the most liberal college in America would be the best place for me. Sometimes our decisions are even simpler than they seem.

  Our room on campus overlooked an alley and a Dumpster. It was ugly, with cinder-block walls and linoleum floor tiles, but I didn’t care and neither did Ryan. We arranged our desks to face each other like an old-fashioned partners’ desk. I taped up two or three Morrissey pictures and some poster board with lines from Joan Didion. Ryan didn’t decorate his side. He had very few possessions and made his bed with a prison-y brown blanket. He was about six-three and had the strong but lithe body you want in a quarterback. He was ginger haired and his face seemed a little pushed in. With my dreams of the poetic, nerdy 140-pound Morrissey, I didn’t find Ryan attractive, but I soon realized from the parade of young women who knocked on our door that many did.

  “I’m out of here,” he said that first day, throwing his backpack over his shoulder. The lock clicked behind him and I thought, This is it; my life can finally begin.

  The next day, I went to Arnold Lounge for the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Alliance’s welcome meeting. About a dozen people stood around nibbling Chips Ahoy! cookies. A small woman with short blonde hair and Doc Martens broke off from a conversation to greet me. I’ll call her Kathy. Almost at once she began stroking my arm and calling me sweetie, while sharing intimate details about herself. Kathy was bisexual and enjoyed masturbating while watching two men have sex. Kathy found my discomfort endearing and started calling me her little innocent. She introduced me to the others, most of them men, and I felt a certain gaze reminiscent of what happens when a stranger walks into a bar at two a.m. “Careful what you say around him,” she said, standing on her toes to cover my ears. “He’s very innocent.”

  The group was discussing a recent Wall Street Journal story depicting Yale as a haven for gay students, with a wide-reaching network among students, faculty, and staff—an environment I had expected to find at Brown. Yale’s president had publicly denounced both the article and its author, a Yale alum. The group in Arnold wondered if Brown would have handled it any differently. Someone said Brown’s president would never have dismissed its gay students so cruelly and someone else said, “Are you kidding me? When money’s on the line?” Someone else noted that no one would have written such an article about Brown in the first place.

  I left the meeting disappointed. Although I had met a handful of people who would become good friends, the open sexual banter and the cynicism didn’t sit well with me. I had probably walked through the door of Arnold Lounge hoping to find a skinny, vegetarian poet-musician with black eyeglasses, so my letdown was inevitable. Still, I was so hungry for companionship that the next day I dropped by the LGBA office in Faunce House. The LGBA had a custom of propping a large pink triangle in its window whenever someone was there. The university prohibited other student groups from posting anything in their windows but made an exception for the triangle’s welcoming pink beacon.

  “It’s my little innocent!” Kathy patted the sofa for me to join her. She was barefoot, her coltish legs tucked up beneath her. She touched my knee and said, “I know a lot of men who are dying to get in your pants.” I was both appalled and intrigued. A few others were there, organizing an AIDS rally, and one of the men, a senior wearing a SILENCE = DEATH button, indicated he was HIV-positive. I didn’t say much on that visit and felt separate from them and their activism. Before Brown, I hadn’t thought of being gay in any political or social terms; for me, it was personal: I just wanted a cute boyfriend. Still, Kathy and her friends were warm to me and asked nothing in return. I left the office both relieved to have spent time in a place where I felt accepted and, I’m afraid, feeling somewhat cool toward people who had been warm to me.

  During this time, the Brown Daily Herald published a story about the dean for freshmen and sophomores; he had been arrested at an I-95 rest stop in Attleboro for “lewd and lascivious” behavior with another man. Dean Donovan, a married father of two, was well respected on campus. He was a round-faced, red-cheeked, jovial recovering alcoholic with an admirable history of supporting groups that needed friends in the administration, including the LGBA. The arrest was the main topic of conversation on campus that week. A number of professors and students expressed support for Dean Donovan, highligh
ting his many professional accomplishments as a classics scholar and administrator and arguing he did not deserve punishment or ostracism for such a “mistake.”

  Dean Donovan found less sympathy than you might expect in the LGBA office, where there was a low-grade scorn for what they called closet cases. We weren’t without feeling for Dean Donovan’s turmoil, but we were hurt. We now knew our dean was one of us and yet many at Brown argued that all could be forgiven if he returned to the closet. The administration quietly reassigned the dean’s duties while he sorted out his legal troubles.

  Had Dean Donovan been in place (he eventually returned to serve Brown’s students with distinction for another seventeen years), he probably would’ve played a part in what happened next. Maybe his good humor and empathy would have infused the situation with a little more grace. But Dean Donovan was otherwise occupied when my own troubles began.

  One day Ryan said, “Hey, Dave”—he called me Dave, even though I never go by that—“a couple of guys on the team told me you were gay.”

  When I said it was true he said it was cool and didn’t bother him.

  “It doesn’t bother me either,” I said.

  Soon after this exchange, it dawned on me that some people on my floor were treating me differently. A few acted awkwardly, as if they didn’t know what to say when I passed them in the hall; others wanted me to know “it didn’t matter”; and for a couple of women, this news suddenly made me a potential best friend. One day, returning to my room, I came upon Ryan on the phone with his parents. He seemed tense and quickly hung up. He looked at me somewhat helplessly and said his parents were acting weird. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way but they don’t want me living with a gay guy.”