The Headmasters Papers (12 page)

To such souls life becomes, even at a relatively early age, a holding action. Such lives are dedicated to replicating what patterns of order they have mastered: boyhood patterns with adult props. Thus we see actual, chronological adults living for their place in the firm or the club hierarchy. They are obsessed with their leisure and sports because these things are not diversions from their life's work, they are 
it.
 Fuzzing experience or hopping it up or slowing it down through our great American array of alcohol and narcotics is another way, a chemical one, of maintaining old patterns against the terror and the promise of new experience. It would not be a bad objective for Wells to be the kind of school that raised the suspicion among its students that the reward for submitting to disciplined thinking in school might be a sure place to stand in the staggeringly beautiful and complex swirl of creation. Insofar as the headmaster's musings are valid, perhaps it is an overall good thing that students are working hard. For our parts, we must be alert to any signs that it is uncritical, unplayful work or that it is unrelieved Pursuit of the Grade. (Although a little grade-consciousness, I've found, never hurt anybody . . .)

Athletically, we've had a mixed and really glorious term. 
Tim Shire's
 and 
Dave Tomasek's
 soccer and cross-country teams both cruised effortlessly—that is never strictly true—to Seven Schools championships, the third straight in soccer. Lineman 
Theo Lederer
set a new Wells record for season goals in soccer and was named, along with 
Rusty Drakeman
 and 
Chub Latta,
 to the all-division first team. (For more details and season highlights, see the Sports Wrap-Up, pp. 28-30.) The real athletic treat of the season—and for some of us, of our careers—came courtesy of 
Jack Kreble's
 not-so-winning, but explosive football team, which managed to close its season by “upsetting” (not my word) an undefeated Haverhill team, 20-12. A large, boisterous Wells crowd, most of them less prescient than their headmaster, felt our boys acquitted themselves admirably by staying within range of the awesome Haverhill, 0-12 at the half. But then. Few of the fans, and none of the players will forget it. The experience was framed by a glorious, cold, clear afternoon (and by Wells soccer and cross-country wins). How like storybooks for boys is life in a school for boys.

If I may labor the football business a little bit further, the Haverhill Weekend—specifically the 
fun
 of it—was an agreeable contrast to our season's opener at St. Ives, in which play got rough, tempers ruffled, and sportsmanship poor. Such circumstances often bring out the worst in spectator behavior, and in this case that happened. It is futile to try to assign fault. What was clear was that both sides—players and supporters—behaved badly. I am glad to say that the Seven Schools Association has taken steps to address the ancient issue of sportsmanship, and there is a real commitment on behalf of the member schools to stay mindful of our stated priorities in athletics.

There has, of course, been more than studies and sports this fall at Wells. 
Ted Burgermeister's
 Underformer Players gave us a crisp and hilarious 
Mikado
 the week before Thanksgiving, and the Dramatis Personae, also under Ted's direction, will stage Eliot's verse masterpiece, 
Murder in the Cathedral
 in Perry Chapel the week before Christmas Recess.

Recent alumnus 
Calvin Kingery
 returned for a special Long Assembly with the Yale 
Boolas,
 in which Calvin sings baritone and is responsible for a good deal of patter between songs. Students gave them a rapturous ovation for a deceptively casual, well-sung, decidedly racy program. “Sweetheart of Sigma Chi” was not sung. In what may sound in a more highbrow line, but which actually wasn't, the 
Rev. Clive Clague,
 Rector of St. Christopher's Church in Middlebury Center, gave us a slide show and lecture on the meaning of Gothic in the Middle Ages. Not only was the talk itself a popular success, our art cottage has since been virtually churning out stained glass, Carolingian calligraphy, ceramic gargoyles, ewers, and lank, angular statuary: a Gothic revival at Wells? We were also given an informative and thoroughgoing introduction to African politics by 
Professor Josef Ambioto
 of the National Institute, Malawi, and visiting professor in politics at the University of Connecticut.

We have imparted some culture as well this term. 
Severance Leach
 and the Wells Octet took a program of madrigals to over a dozen public and private schools in New England. They were reportedly received most warmly at some school—name escapes me—in Farmington, and have been asked back. Those of you who subscribe to 
Harper's
 may have noticed in the October issue that one of the contributors had a Wellsian ring to his name. That was 
Phelps Perry III,
 a fifth former whose essay, “Still Prep in the Eighties,” was a tart, penetrating view of independent-school life as he sees it. No school's name is mentioned, but a reference or two struck resonant chords on this campus. It is, incidentally, a fine article: beautifully written, generous, critical, but by no means trivial. Its concluding lines suggest that, on balance, the private school “can still open doors in the precious ‘old tie' (and increasingly ‘old skirt') sense, but it can also open doors into real scholarship, ideas, literature, and the arts. Privilege may still buy this boost, but it is undeniably a boost.” Highly recommended.

I would like to conclude with another excerpt of student writing. The author (name withheld) is a member of the Third Form Basic Composition section. From an in-class composition in September, titled “First Impressions of Wells”:

From the time you wake up and have breakfast in Hall and go to classes and then to lunch, and if you happen to play sports, you don't even get to think about what your doing until dorm study when the only thing left is bed. The work is hard, but this is good. The problem is everybody rushes around from this thing to that like they knew what they were doing. Not me yet.

Me neither.

Faithfully,

John Greeve

24 November

Mr. Jake Levin
R.D. 3
Petersfield, New Hampshire

Dear Jake,

I'm late getting back to you, not because of a crush of work—there's a little of that, dispatched now, I think—but because of the damned poetry. Truth of the matter is, I can't finish that cancer piece. It's not because of the symbolic “heaviness” of doing so, either (to finish it would be to bring it to death, thus bringing Meg, its inspiration, to death, etc.) It's not that. It's that I don't have anything more inspired to say about it. Some of the images of being ill and hopeless from the inside may be arresting in a morbid sort of way, but they are not on their way to 
meaning
 anything. It seems to me that the only poems that work are those whose meaning comes straight out at you. They are “overdetermined” like Freud's dreams. The good bits, the lucky images, etc., participate in the larger meaning. In that way too, I suppose, good poems, like dreams, are generated unconsciously, in the sense that they aren't consciously worked out or planned as wholes. This isn't to say that the writer of a great poem is not conscious of what he is doing; I happen to think that he is and that 
he,
 his personality, is responsible in large part for the results. The poem—the meaning—comes out of the poet's deepest knowing, but the poetics, within the limits of his training and reading, are largely a matter of luck, with better devices tending to attach themselves to better themes.

Anyway, my cancer poem doesn't have a meaning or a theme—and themelessness isn't a theme, although I'll bet you've taught many a bearded seminarist that it is. A pack of images organized around a voice do not a poem make, although this formula seems to cover 
every
 contemporary poem in every journal, except the Catholic ones, that I have read in the past ten years. Agree? We don't get themes any more in poems, we get voices. And since most voices, even tarted up with odd punctuation, surrealist imagery, and curious arrangements of print, aren't very interesting, there has been a premium on spooky voices. I suppose this is why practically every poem in the 
New Yorker
 or 
Poetry
 is in the present tense (in the 
New Yorker
 even the stories are in the present tense) and very likely in the 
second person,
 a hopelessly illogical and irritating device—

You wake to fog but there is
no fog you move to a mirror and
it is a window and through its fog
you see clearly
a light in a window
framing a man
standing at his mirror
lost in fog

Admit it. Admit that it is no better or worse than practically everything you have read in “little magazines” this year. It is not only bad, it's derivative. Robert Service was less derivative. There's a moral dimension to it, too. All this standing about, being a “voice,” reporting surreal nonsense or, worse, reporting the commonplace as if through the eyes of a dinosaur—

Her fingers alight on a pale ovoid,
Extract it from its half-hole.
It is cool on the pads of her fingers,
on her palm. Against black iron rim
She half-drops, half-holds it
Running, escaping now from its center,
She widens it, releasing a viscous pool
About an orange-gold sun,
Becoming, yet no longer, egg.

Fascinating stuff. Morally, if all this voicing and dumb gaping is taken seriously, it amounts to a kind of pantheistic tolerance of anything. I read a prize-winning poem this month about the clubbing to death of a dog—no esthetic or ethical framework, no canine “Out, Out —”, just a starkly rendered, highly specific animal mauling. Contemporary art. Onto which heap I don't care to throw my impressionistic pastiche of images about having a debilitating disease. There is of course a theme, a point to cancer, not only to cancer itself but to every particular cancer. But I don't happen to know what it is, haven't the courage or the intelligence to know, or whatever it takes. No poem in that, which isn't to say I couldn't win a prize.

I would like to know what poems you 
need.
 What do you, in your heart of hearts, go to for nourishment? I want the truth. The poem I have read with the deepest satisfaction this year is Arnold's “Thyrsis.” It is about resurrection and striving and hope. He believes in them. He half has it and teases you in after him. You must agree that if those themes are dead, we are dead—yet nobody is writing them. Too hard, I suppose, too big a risk. And no prizes.

Forgive the grousing. I feel I'm doing more of it these days. The headmaster is a crank and a reactionary. I am actually, strange to say, a little stir crazy. The boys have been gone for four days and won't return till Sunday PM. I've been in the study—crackling fire, brandy, dozing, desk work of a not too taxing land—usually just my kind of thing, but I'm finding it eerily unsatisfying. Outside the study is another world, quite divorced from mine, a uniformed little system orbiting around Meg. It covers front hall, kitchen, laundry, stairs, landing, upstairs sitting room, and master bedroom (Meg's). Anywhere outside that beaten path is all mine. It is strange that Meg's nurses and Meg seem to belong legitimately in the house, but I, for some reason, feel like a trespasser, sometimes even a shade, as I pad around in slippers, embarrassed to meet a nurse. Going out is worse, though. In a fit of laziness, I went out to lunch, to a popular restaurant hereabouts which features crepes of all sorts (crepes rhymes with grapes in our region). Terrible experience. I didn't know where to look. Never go to a restaurant alone without something fascinating to read.

Meg and I passed a quiet Thanksgiving together, both of us trying not to swell up with confusing feelings about Brian and extended family, with whom we normally spend our holidays. The fact of Meg's cancer is by now so pervasive that it has lost any power to frighten us. We can talk about it almost the way we can about inflation. In all, we have about an hour of concentrated conversation every day, perhaps a half hour at the longest single stretch. We talk about topical things, my news from school or the papers, hers from the nurses or from television. So sharp is Meg's intellectual acumen that she can derive amusement and generate good talk from watching television. I hate it in the abstract, but it has been a godsend for her. It is marvelous how her naturally literary approach to life transforms what she watches. Since nobody on those stifling daytime serials or on the talk shows seems to be credibly connected to a world of work or to flesh-and-blood companions off camera, Meg is able to speculate hilariously about what the physicians in the serials would be like in a consultation with, say, Arnold Lieber, the school's maintenance director, or how they might work alongside one of our household nurses. It is her feeling, based on fairly close viewing, that Johnny Carson is not nice. She notes how, when a guest is boring the audience and him, he mugs in that well-known way of his, but there is also a real, icey cruelty in his eyes. She finds him “lupine.” I admit to coming around to her point of view after watching him for a while in her company. He certainly couldn't maintain his stiffly jocular approach to life off the camera; the strain would kill him. He is undoubtedly cruel and lupine, if only to relax.

I was about to say that TV was not getting to the essential Meg or to me, but in reviewing that last paragraph, it is very clear that both of us have been deeply affected.

We have heard nothing from Brian, and if I don't hear something this week, I am going to step up my worrying. He has never failed to greet us in some fashion on a major holiday. It is hard on Meg to imagine dying without ever seeing him again, although I personally dread more conveying to Meg that something awful, including the worst, has happened to Brian.