Authors: Philip Roth
I would very much like it if we could at least get together to take a walk—
I was going to write “to take a walk down by Wine Creek” but didn’t, for fear that she would think I was perversely suggesting that she might want to jump in. I didn’t know what I was doing by lying to her about noticing the scar and then compounding the lie by saying I’d doped out her drinking all on my own. Until she’d told me of the drinking in her letter, and despite the drunkenness I witnessed each weekend while working at the Willard, I’d had no idea that anyone that young could even be an alcoholic. And as for accepting with equanimity the scar on her wrist—well, that scar, which I had not noticed the night of our date, was now all I could think about.
Was this moment to mark the beginning of a lifetime’s accumulation of mistakes (had I been
given a lifetime in which to make them)? I thought then that it marked, if anything, the beginning of my manhood. Then I wondered if the two had coincided. All I knew was that the scar did it. I was transfixed. I’d never been so worked up over anyone before. The history of drinking, the scar, the sanitarium, the frailty, the fortitude—I was in bondage to it all. To the heroism of it all.
I finished the letter:
If you’d resume sitting next to me in History it would enable me to keep my mind on the class. I keep thinking of you sitting behind my back instead of thinking about what we’re studying. I look over at the space previously occupied by your body, and the temptation to turn is a perpetual source of distraction—because, beauticious Olivia, I want nothing more than to be close to you. I love your looks and am nuts about your exquisite frame.
I debated whether to write “am nuts about your exquisite frame, scar and all.” Would it appear insensitive of me to be making light of her scar, or would it appear a sign of my maturity to be making light of the scar? To play it safe, I didn’t write “scar and all” but added a cryptic P.S.—“I am moving to
Neil Hall because of a disagreement with my roommate”—and sent the letter off through the campus mail.
She did not return to sit beside me in class but chose to remain at the back of the classroom, out of my sight. I nonetheless ran off every day at noon to my mailbox in the basement of Jenkins to see if she had answered me. Every day for a week I looked into an empty box, and when a letter finally appeared it was from the dean of men.
Dear Mr. Messner:
It has come to my attention that you have taken up residence in Neil Hall after having already briefly occupied two separate rooms in Jenkins. I am concerned about so many changes of residence on the part of a transfer student who has been at Winesburg as a sophomore for less than a semester. Will you please arrange with my secretary to come to my office sometime this week? A short meeting is in order, one that I’m sure will prove useful to both of us.
Yours sincerely,
Hawes D. Caudwell,
Dean of Men
The meeting with Dean Caudwell was scheduled for the following Wednesday, fifteen minutes after
chapel ended at noon. Though Winesburg became a nonsectarian college only two decades after it was founded as a seminary, one of the last vestiges of the early days, when attending religious services was a daily practice, lay in the strict requirement that a student attend chapel, between eleven and noon on Wednesdays, forty times before he or she graduated. The religious content of the sermons had been diluted into—or camouflaged as—a talk on a high moral topic, and the speakers were not always clergymen: there were occasional religious luminaries like the president of the United Lutheran Church in America, but once or twice a month the speakers were faculty members from Winesburg or nearby colleges, or local judges, or legislators from the state assembly. More than half the time, however, chapel was presided over and the lectern occupied by Dr. Chester Donehower, the chairman of Winesburg’s religion department and a Baptist minister himself, whose continuing topic was “How to Take Stock of Ourselves in the Light of Biblical Teachings.” There was a robed choir of some fifty students, about two-thirds of whom were young women, and every week they sang a Christian hymn to open and close the hour; the Christmas
and Easter programs featured the choir singing renditions of seasonal music and were the most popular chapels of the year. Despite the school’s having by then been secularized for nearly a century, chapel was held not in any of the college’s public halls but in a Methodist church, the most imposing church in town, located halfway between Main Street and the campus, and the only one large enough to accommodate the student body.
I objected strongly to everything about attending chapel, beginning with the venue. I didn’t think it fair to have to sit in a Christian church and listen for forty-five or fifty minutes to Dr. Donehower or anyone else preach to me against my will in order for me to qualify for graduation from a secular institution. I objected not because I was an observant Jew but because I was an ardent atheist.
Consequently, at the end of my first month at Winesburg, after having listened to a second sermon from Dr. Donehower even more cocksure about “Christ’s example” than the first, I went directly from the church back up to the campus and headed for the library’s reference section to sift through the college catalogues collected there, to
look for another college to transfer to, one where I could continue to be free of my father’s surveillance but where I would not be forced to compromise my conscience by listening to biblical hogwash that I could not bear being subjected to. So as to be free of my father, I’d chosen a school fifteen hours by car from New Jersey, difficult to reach by bus or train, and more than fifty miles from the nearest commercial airport—but with no understanding on my part of the beliefs with which youngsters were indoctrinated as a matter of course deep in the heart of America.
To make it through Dr. Donehower’s second sermon, I had found it necessary to evoke my memory of a song whose fiery beat and martial words I had learned in grade school when World War Two was raging and our weekly assembly programs, designed to foster the patriotic virtues, consisted of us children singing in unison the songs of the armed services: the navy’s “Anchors Aweigh,” the army’s “The Caissons Go Rolling Along,” the air corps’ “Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder,” the marine corps’ “From the Halls of Montezuma,” along with the songs of the Seabees and the wacs. We
also sang what we were told was the national anthem of our Chinese allies in the war begun by the Japanese. It went as follows:
Arise, ye who refuse to be bondslaves!
With our very flesh and blood
We will build a new Great Wall!
China’s masses have met the day of danger.
Indignation fills the hearts of all of our
countrymen,
Arise! Arise! Arise!
Every heart with one mind,
Brave the enemy’s gunfire,
March on!
Brave the enemy’s gunfire,
March on! March on! March on!
I must have sung this verse to myself fifty times during the course of Dr. Donehower’s second sermon, and then another fifty during the choir’s rendering of their Christian hymns, and every time giving special emphasis to each of the four syllables that melded together form the noun “indignation.”
T
he office of the dean of men was among a number of administrative offices lining the corridor of the first floor of Jenkins Hall. The men’s dormitory, where I had slept in a bunk bed first beneath Ber
tram Flusser and then beneath Elwyn Ayers, occupied the second and third floors. When I entered his office from the anteroom, the dean came around from behind his desk to shake my hand. He was lean and broad-shouldered, with a lantern jaw, sparkling blue eyes, and a heavy crest of silver hair, a tall man probably in his late fifties who still moved with the agility of the young athletic star he’d been in three sports at Winesburg just before World War I. There were photos of championship Winesburg athletic teams on his walls, and a bronzed football was displayed on a stand back of his desk. The only books in the office were the volumes of the college’s yearbook, the
Owl’s Nest,
arranged in chronological order in a glass-enclosed case behind him.
He motioned for me to take a seat in the chair across from his, and while returning to his side of the desk, he said amiably, “I wanted you to come in so we could meet and find out if I can be of any help to you in adjusting to Winesburg. I see by your transcript”—he lifted from his desk a manila folder he’d been riffling through when I entered—“that you earned straight A’s for your freshman year. I wouldn’t want anything at Winesburg to in
terfere in the slightest with such a stellar record of academic achievement.”
My undershirt was saturated with perspiration before I even sat down to stiffly speak my first few words. And, of course, I was still overwrought and agitated from just having left chapel, not only because of Dr. Donehower’s sermon but because of my own savage interior vocalizations of the Chinese national anthem. “Neither do I, sir,” I replied.
I had not expected to hear myself saying “sir” to the dean, though it was not that unusual for timidity—taking the form of great formality—to all but overwhelm me whenever I first had to confront a person of authority. Though my impulse wasn’t exactly to grovel, I had to fight off a strong sense of intimidation, and invariably I would manage this only by speaking with somewhat more bluntness than the interview required. Repeatedly I’d leave such encounters scolding myself for the initial timidity and then for the unnecessary candor by which I overcame it and swearing in the future to answer with the utmost brevity any questions put to me and otherwise to keep myself calm by shutting my mouth.
“Do you see any potential difficulties on the horizon here?” the dean asked me.
“No, sir. I don’t, sir.”
“How are things going with your classwork?”
“I believe well, sir.”
“You’re getting all you hoped for from your courses?”
“Yes, sir.”
This wasn’t strictly speaking true. My professors were either too starchy or too folksy for my taste, and during these first months on campus, I hadn’t as yet found any as spellbinding as those I’d had during my freshman year at Robert Treat. The teachers I’d had at Robert Treat nearly all commuted the twelve miles from New York City to Newark to teach, and they seemed to me bristling with energy and opinions—some of them decidedly and unashamedly left-wing opinions, despite prevailing political pressures—in ways these midwesterners were not. A couple of my Robert Treat teachers were Jews, excitable in a manner hardly foreign to me, but even the three who weren’t Jews talked a lot faster and more combatively than the professors at Winesburg, and brought with them
into the classroom from the hubbub across the Hudson an attitude that was sharper and harder and more vital all around and that didn’t necessarily hide their aversions. In bed at night, with Elywn asleep in the top bunk, I thought often of those wonderful teachers I was lucky enough to have had there and whom I eagerly embraced and who first introduced me to real knowledge, and, with feelings of tenderness that were unforeseen and that nearly overwhelmed me, I thought of the friends from the freshman team, like my Italian buddy Angelo Spinelli, now all lost to me. I’d never felt at Robert Treat that there was some old way of life that everyone on the faculty was protecting, which was decidedly different from what I thought at Winesburg whenever I heard the boosters intoning the virtues of their “tradition.”
“You’re socializing enough?” Caudwell asked. “You’re getting around and meeting the other students?”
“Yes, sir.”
I waited for him to ask me to list those I had met so far, expecting he would then record their names on the legal pad in front of him—which had my name written in his script across the top—and
bring them into his office to find out if I’d been telling the truth. But his response was only to pour a glass of water from a pitcher on a small table behind his desk and hand it across the desk to me.
“Thank you, sir.” I sipped at the water so it wouldn’t go down the wrong way and set me to coughing uncontrollably. I also flushed fiercely from realizing that just by listening to my first few answers he had been able to surmise how parched my mouth had become.
“Then the only problem is that you seem to be having some trouble settling into dormitory life,” he said. “Is that so? As I said in my letter, I’m a bit concerned about your having already resided in three different dormitory rooms in just your first weeks here. Tell me in your own words, what seems to be the trouble?”
The night before I had worked out an answer, knowing as I did that my moving was to be the meeting’s main subject. Only now I couldn’t remember what I’d planned to say.
“Could you repeat your question, sir?”
“Calm down, son,” Caudwell said. “Try a little more water.”
I did as he told me. I am going to be thrown out
of school, I thought. For moving too many times I am going to be asked to leave Winesburg. That’s how this is going to wind up. Thrown out, drafted, sent to Korea, and killed.
“What’s the problem with your accommodations, Marcus?”
“In the room to which I was initially assigned”—yes, there they were, the words that I’d written out and memorized—“one of my three roommates was always playing his phonograph after I went to bed and I wasn’t able to get my night’s sleep. And I need my sleep in order to do my work. The situation was insupportable.” I had decided at the last minute on “insupportable” instead of “insufferable,” the adjective with which I’d rehearsed the previous night.
“But couldn’t you sit down and work out a time for his playing the phonograph that was agreeable to the two of you?” Caudwell asked me. “You had to move out? There was no other choice?”
“Yes, I had to move out.”
“No way of reaching a compromise.”
“Not with him, sir.” That’s as far as I went, hoping that he might find me admirable for protecting Flusser from exposure by not mentioning his name.
“Are you often unable to reach a compromise with people whom you don’t see eye to eye with?” “I wouldn’t say ‘often,’ sir. I wouldn’t say that anything like that has happened before.”