The Brown Reader

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  I expected to be academically challenged, but I had no idea how much of my education would spring from the atmosphere and ethos of campus life. Brown in the early 1970s was an ideal setting—both sheltering and stimulating—to be young, indignant, and inspired. The nation was reeling from war and revolution, and campuses from Kent State to Columbia had been torn apart by protests and strikes. In the wake of these upheavals, Brown took a wise, innovative path that absorbed and channeled conflict in healthier ways. In essence, it threw out the rules and gave students the freedom to study, express, and experience almost anything that didn’t kill them.

  Of course, the freshman dean of Pembroke College, as it was still called then, was far from pleased when I vanished from campus for a week during my first semester. I had run off to Cape Cod with a bunch of long-haired strangers for an instant introduction to Miles Davis, John Fahey, Anaïs Nin, Antonin Artaud, peyote, tequila, Luis Buñuel, the Dalai Lama, and other icons and indulgences of the time. I remember writing a lot of poetry on the walls of a seaside cottage, but not much else. This wild escapade provided a cathartic bridge between girls’ boarding school and a brave new world.

  Having gotten that out of my system, however, I quickly realized that Brown offered just as much opportunity to learn and explore as a psychedelic romp on the beach. Most specifically, my classmates and I were the immediate beneficiaries of the Magaziner Report and the New Curriculum, which did away with the traditional academic point system and gave students the option to take any course, in any department, for a grade of Satisfactory/No Credit.

  That notion may sound quaint in today’s hypercompetitive, money-conscious era, when many students hunch over laptops like robots and demand to know why they didn’t get an A. But although some of us back then misused this license by coasting through semesters of astrology and music appreciation, for most it was a wonderful, liberating spur to intellectual curiosity.

  In my case, it meant venturing outside my academic comfort zone, signing up for psychology labs and urban planning seminars, and attending lectures in constitutional law and Soviet studies by infamously brilliant but tyrannical professors. Knowing I didn’t have to memorize treaty dates and legal opinions allowed me to enjoy pondering questions such as what three-fifths of a man really meant, or whether the policy of “to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability” was a nobler ideal than democracy.

  I also took every writing and literature class I could squeeze in. I read Joyce and Yeats, Faulkner and Wolfe, Isak Dinesen and Frantz Fanon, Pablo Neruda and Eduardo Galeano. I wrote bad poetry, pretentious film reviews, and earnest papers on public housing and urban riots. The best piece of work I produced in four years, though, may have been this twenty-five-word limerick: “The natives of tropical Amazon / Cavort without any pajamas on / And what’s even worse / I’ve heard they write verse / With no semicolons or commas on.”

  Amid this heady academic feast, I discovered my muse and my calling. It was in a small seminar on writers of the Great Depression, which included Steinbeck, Faulkner, and the great USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos. The book that took my breath away, and that would ultimately become my bible, was James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It was a lyrical journalistic portrait of poor white tenant farmer families in Alabama in the 1930s—and a memoir of a young Northerner’s self-conscious and aching efforts to connect with them.

  Most Americans know Famous Men because of the accompanying photographs by Walker Evans—stark black-and-white portraits of people with pinched faces, haunted eyes, and flour-sack clothing that became instant, iconic emblems of rural poverty. But although I was moved by Evans’s images, it was Agee’s prose that gripped me like a potent cure for an ailment I had never been able to name. Like me, he had been a driven young student, full of theories and searching for a cause. I reread and underlined the book until I knew whole passages by heart.

  Agee’s gift was to find beauty and pathos in the mundane objects and activities of invisible lives. He wrote tender descriptions of cracked plates, rusty tools, and plastic vases on a farmer’s fireplace mantel. He drew an excruciating portrait of what it feels like to pick cotton by hand, stooped over for hours in the sun, dragging a heavy sack by one shoulder, pinching and pricking your fingers on sharp bolls a thousand times in a row.

  His few brushes with black Alabamians produced sharp insights into the harsh racial realities of the Deep South. He followed a young woman to ask her a polite question, but at the sound of his footsteps she instinctively jerked and “sprang forward into the first motions . . . of a suddenly terrified wild animal.” He squirmed with horrified embarrassment when a white landowner ordered a group of dignified black men on their way to church to perform several sassy minstrel tunes for the visitor’s entertainment.

  By the time I read this book, the civil rights movement had shattered traditional Southern life. Fear and hostility still smoldered, but hope and change were on the rise. I yearned to follow Agee’s journey, and Brown offered an opportunity to do so; the university established a student exchange program with Tougaloo College, a small, historically black liberal arts school in Jackson, Mississippi. I signed up to spend a semester there, but in the end I didn’t go, partly because I was deeply immersed in college life and partly because my family disapproved. It was a decision I always regretted.

  Without leaving Providence, though, I found more modest outlets for my budding journalistic ambitions and antiestablishment proclivities. One was the cooperative housing society, started by a group of students just ahead of us. Under an experimental arrangement, the co-op leased two houses owned by the university, which students occupied, managed, and maintained.

  For three years I lived in Carberry House. It was a creaky old clapboard mansion, named after Josiah Carberry, an imaginary Brown professor of psychoceramics. There were about twenty residents divided among a dozen rooms, which we often repainted in fits of creative inspiration. Everyone had to sign up for a schedule of shopping, cooking, and cleaning. Dinners were communal, and the cuisine was dominated by spaghetti and tomato sauce. There were frequent group meetings to air grievances (no loud music at three a.m.) and suggestions (more variety in the dinner menu).

  The cast of co-op characters ranged from studious to revolutionary to Carberry-esque. There were science majors whose class notes looked like mysterious scribbles and flower children who slept until noon. There was a waterbed room and a permanent rollicking soundtrack from the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead. There were sign-up sheets for every possible cause, from recycling campaigns to protests against Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia. My parents visited once from Connecticut, smiled politely, and fled. I was never happier.

  The other institution that consumed my energy and ambition was the Brown Daily Herald. One day during freshman year I wandered into its shabby office, with the old horseshoe-shaped editor’s desk, and it became my after-hours haunt for the next three and a half years. The BDH was a semi-grown-up outlet for the campus zeitgeist of the day—irreverent and indignant but grammatically correct. I wrote book reviews and headlines and editorials, pasted copy after dinner, and occasionally drove the pages to our printer in Massachusetts at midnight.

  My most enduring contribution to the Herald was an infamous senior-year poster, aimed at wooing subscribers, in which I and three male editors—one of whom went on to enjoy a vertiginous career in the financial stratosphere—appeared to be wearing nothing but copies of that day’s edition. Alas (but not really), that poster from four decades ago is still the first thing people mention whenever I attend a Brown-related event, no matter how properly I am attired for the occasion.

  Our years at Brown came during a relative lull after a period of explosive events that shook the nation and defined our generation—the rash of antiwar riots and protests in 1968; the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy the same year; the Woodstock concert in August of 1969; the shootings at Kent State University in May of 1970. I rem
ember feeling frustrated that at eighteen, I had missed all the action while stuck in boarding school—that I had been born just two years too late to be part of the impassioned crusades of my era.

  I needn’t have worried. The reverberations from those spasms of conflict and creativity spread through the East Side like a drug. Music floated from every dorm window and suffused the campus with raucous harmony. Today, when I close my eyes and picture sitting on the Green between classes, I hear “Uncle John’s Band” and “Blue Sky” wafting happily through the air, with an occasional jarring blast from the late Jimi Hendrix performing “Purple Haze.”

  There were peace petitions in the Ratty, political speakers in Sayles Hall, and occasional trips to downtown Providence or Boston to hear Jefferson Starship or Vietnam Veterans Against the War. At Brown, we felt safely ensconced in a carefree, counterculture cocoon—free to criticize the university president, join a strike by cafeteria workers, break china laughing, or kiss the sky.

  Occasionally, reality pierced our sanctuary in the form of official, legal, or medical consequences for our behavior. One of my boyfriends, who had ignored numerous letters from his draft board, was detained during soccer practice and put on a bus to Fort Dix. Another got busted for trying to buy some marijuana from an undercover policeman at a campus party. Although the university health service provided low-cost contraceptives, one of my friends became pregnant and underwent a painful abortion. Another, who was studying to be a dentist, had her front teeth knocked out when she fell during an antiwar demonstration.

  Eventually, most of us recovered in time to graduate, get haircuts, and turn to professional pursuits. During senior year I typed out application letters to more than three hundred daily newspapers across the country. That summer, I headed out in my 1970 Dodge Dart to visit as many of them as possible. It was a glorious excuse to tour America. In Birmingham, I visited the church where Dr. King had preached. In San Antonio, I visited the Alamo. In Berkeley, I stood on the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets, surprised to see sidewalk craftsmen using credit card machines. In Oregon, I stayed with friends in a cabin in a dripping forest and encountered a solitary moose, silhouetted in the fog of a mountain highway at night.

  Heading back east, I stopped in Chicago for an interview at the Tribune, then drove to the Lincoln Park Zoo to see the gorillas. When I returned to the parking lot, the Dodge was gone, along with my nice clothes, my résumés, and a trunk full of newspapers I had carefully saved to document my job search. The police assured me the car would eventually turn up, but I was shaken and despondent. I took a taxi to the home of a friend from Brown, and when I rang the doorbell, her entire family was riveted to the TV. Nixon was on the screen, resigning.

  The next day, I accepted the first job offer that came in. A month later, I was a cub reporter at the Evening Capital in Annapolis, earning $125 a week. Still determined to become the next James Agee, I stole away from zoning board meetings and sought out social problems to chronicle. For the next decade, at a series of newspaper jobs, I wrote about alcoholics and mental patients, garbage collectors and tobacco pickers, refugees and runaways.

  I reached for Agee’s lyrical framing of the mundane, his eye for detail, his search for redemption amid suffering and failure. And occasionally, I came close to achieving these things—for example, in my portrait of a brilliant, haunted journalist who fled the superficiality of TV news but delved too deep in his quest for reality and became a homeless street addict. What drew me to stories like this, I finally realized, were the same tragic contradictions that had attracted me to Agee, a tormented genius who drank too much and died at forty-two. They were contradictions I also feared in myself.

  One day in 1983, I was offered the chance to become a foreign correspondent in Latin America, which opened up a vast new canvas of life-and-death struggles—revolutions, dictatorships, natural disasters, and dire poverty. Over the next twenty-five years, I reported intermittently from more than thirty countries, mostly in the third world. I burrowed happily into the seething shantytowns of Port-au-Prince and Lima. I covered the tumultuous rebirth of democracy in Chile and the Philippines. I traveled with tides of ecstatic Hindu pilgrims and met shaken survivors of Taliban market bombings.

  Always, though, it was the rare encounters with personal stoicism, faith, or kindness that inspired my best word portraits: the Indian family who took me on a journey to the Ganges to baptize their infant son; the Afghan teacher whose humble home contained the only library in a war-ruined village. When I sat down to re-create these experiences, Agee was always there.

  But on another level, during all those years of far-flung and often dangerous travel, it was my father, Cheston Constable, who provided me with the moral support to go on. Whenever I called from some new disaster zone, he always answered with a calm and reassuring voice, no matter how awful it looked on the evening news. As I learned how cruel and selfish the world really was, I outgrew my adolescent disdain for his upper-crust ways and began to appreciate the quieter pain of loss and aging; the values of frugality, dignity, and compassion he upheld; and the strength of character that was his true legacy to me.

  Several years ago, my father and I shared a unique experience at Brown that meant more to both of us than I can easily put into words. In the spring of 2009, my thirty-fifth reunion and his seventy-fifth fell on the same day. By then, Dad was in his nineties and one of the few surviving members of his class. He had always been a loyal supporter of Brown but rarely visited in his later years. The frailties of old age were shrinking his horizons, and arthritis made it painful for him to walk. I knew he had little interest in attending his own reunion, but I had been asked to speak at mine, so I invited him to join us. Somewhat to my surprise, he accepted. Neither of us said so, but we both knew it would be his last trip to Providence.

  We drove up from Connecticut that morning, and the class gathered under a tent on a Pembroke lawn. I had arranged to have Dad seated at the head table for the luncheon speech, but there was a cocktail party first, during which everyone mingled on the grass. Dressed in his jaunty jacket and tie, he insisted on standing the entire time, although I could see that he was in pain and barely able to keep his balance on the uneven terrain, while trying to hold a wineglass to boot. Someone offered to bring him a folding chair, but I knew he would refuse it.

  I can hardly remember what I said at lunch, but I can still see Dad standing there on the lawn, stoically leaning on his cane and looking dapper as ever in his green linen jacket with a yellow silk handkerchief peeking from the pocket. Four years later, when he passed away at ninety-six, I was grateful to be at my father’s side, having gone to his alma mater, traveled the world, and come back home—no longer young, but more indignant than ever, and still just as inspired.

  And Yet Again Wonderful

  ALFRED UHRY

  I was in the class of 1958 at Brown. I remember that there was a photo spread on display, during my graduation weekend, of the class of 1908, in celebration of their fiftieth reunion. There were all these photos of young men wearing straw hats and high starched collars, smoking pipes and clowning around and apparently having a high old time. They seemed as remote to me as Mathew Brady photographs from the Civil War. And I wonder now if the pictures of my time at Brown would seem as archaic to current undergraduates as those pictures did to me.

  I came to Brown from a high school just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. There were two more local boys in my freshman class, and no other Georgians enrolled as undergraduates at the university. It was a long way from home. We were met at the train by upperclassmen and bussed up the hill. They handed out little brown beanies that we were supposed to wear. I don’t remember if we did or not. Hurricane Hazel arrived in Providence not long after I did. I remember stacking sandbags along the Providence River. People made fun of my Southern accent. I was homesick. I wasn’t sure why I was there. I knew that this was what you did; after high school you went to college. But why? And why all the way up here? I w
as used to rolling green lawns and brick houses set well apart from one another. I thought Providence was hideous—all those frame Victorian houses mashed up against each other. And it rained all the time. And eventually snowed! I remember walking out of my dorm in the first snow and immediately falling on my rear end. I developed a crush on a girl named Barbara. She was a blue-eyed blonde and she had a pixie haircut like Audrey Hepburn. I never got up the nerve to talk to her. She went to study at the John Hay Library every night, so I did too. I mostly fell asleep there. I had terrible study habits; I flunked logic, but that figured because I was completely illogical. I don’t remember feeling unhappy, or feeling anything really. I was just dazed.

  There were three or four first-run movie houses in downtown Providence. I walked down the hill many afternoons and saw whatever movie was playing. And a few times I took the train to Boston to see whatever musicals were having pre-Broadway tryouts there. One of them was a Rodgers and Hammerstein show called Pipe Dream. I think it was their only flop.

  I lived on the second floor of North Hope College, right on the main campus. It was a handsome nineteenth-century edifice and the room was large. There was a nonfunctioning fireplace and three big windows, all with window seats. There was a row of rusty showers two floors down in the basement. There was a pay phone in the hall outside the room. I think it was the only telephone in the building. My roommate was Mike from Pittsburgh. He was athletic and easygoing and popular. I was none of those things, but I liked him very much. I emulated him as much as possible, trying desperately to lose the Southern accent and sound like him. Of course, being from Pittsburgh, Mike had his own unusual accent, but I wasn’t aware of that at the time. All Yankees sounded pretty much the same to my Georgia ears.