Time and Change

Time and change shall naught avail
To break the friendships formed at Yale.

We learned a lot in class, for sure, and in the books we read—both those we were assigned and those we found on our own. In our research, a discovery narrowly sought led us down dim corridors toward unimagined illuminations. We learned that learning is a labyrinth, and our teachers taught us, offering themselves in example, the exhilaration of exploring it. That was the greatness of our Yale: endless opportunity to learn, and a culture of confidence. Yale taught us to believe in our best selves, in our quality of mind, to believe that we were almost uniquely blessed with ability.

That sense of superior gift made many of us arrogant, and hypercompetitive. But in that time of a young man’s life every day brings change, and the friction engendered by competition and conflict soon began to wear down our sharp edges. Argument became less angry, more fun. Fierce individualists found that companionship and cooperation—Yale values of old—might achieve more than heroic struggle did. From our singing groups to the Yale Daily News, from WYBC to the student laundry, from college crew to the Dramat, certainly there was always competition, it kept us fresh and alive, but being at Yale often meant doing things together.

It took me a while to realize that a Yale education was as much what you learned from your friends as what you learned in the classroom and your reading. My Mississippi Delta father could wade into a room full of Yankees and make friends in moments, glad-handing his way through rank or resistance, but I hadn’t inherited his social ease. My high school guidance counselor in Memphis, deep-Southern and shy himself, had warned me that Yale was going to be full of snobs, so I was primed to frame the foggy somewhere-elseness of one of my freshman suitemates, Simon Whitney, as the expected due of a reputed two-hundred-IQ genius. Another, Rick Platt, I decided quickly, was a snob: Andover, Greenwich, money, manner, and oh such ancestry—direct descent from the Richard Platt who in 1641 lived across the street from what wouldn’t be Yale until seventy-seven years later—which somehow, I managed to know before Christmas 1965. Soon more depreciation was to come, in the form of H. Jefferds Wheelwright, Jr., who with his gang of St. Paul’s et al. all-knowing cynics flung insulting evaluations loudly across the tables of Commons as to anyone’s sweater, shoes, haircut, posture, height, weight, or qualities so abstract that only they knew what they were. They all had cute nicknames. Jeff’s was Wheels. He was tall, athletically lank, with an air of utter self-assurance, curly blond hair, and a predatory grin.

Of course, I was wrong about all three of them. Jeff, Rick, and Simon all knew Yale and its innumerable folkways well—it virtually ran in their blood—and they also knew cluelessness when they saw it. Rick never acted the pedagogue, simply was a gentleman. I listened and watched, we talked till all hours, he took me home to Greenwich, and I met his mother and father, who became lifelong “other parents” to me. Wheelwright never stopped laughing at my naiveté—in fact he’s still doing it—and it was a good year before I realized that he had taken me under his wing. His mockery veiled his kindness. Simon remained impenetrably mysterious, and so weirdly funny that his sense of humor sometimes demanded pondering. One day I sat reading for at least two hours until it was time to go to dinner, and when I went to the closet to get my coat, there was Simon, smiling mildly at me. He had been standing there in the dark all afternoon just waiting for somebody to open the door. Simon invited me to family Thanksgivings in Scarsdale, where I met his uncle Hassler Whitney, one of the great mathematicians of the century. Uncle Hass advised me never to run or even walk on an escalator, because staying stationary offered one “a good moment to think.”

A lot of Yalies, regarded from a certain distance, did seem to have the classic Dink Stover swagger, with the jutting chin, the scarf floating behind on the breeze, and a debonair disdain of study—tough, and some of them shockingly dumb. But the guys in my orbit weren’t like that at all. They were strong, really you had to be, but they were also surprisingly gentle. Jeff Graham, who after Exeter had had an extra year of school in Switzerland, seemed to know everything about everything, but when you didn’t—and I sure didn’t—he had a way of talking with such modest self-deprecation that you found yourself absorbing his worldliness as if by osmosis. You would have to pry it out of him that he was also a squash champ and a soccer champ—he didn’t look particularly athletic—and a tutor to New Haven kids, and president of the Yale Key Society.

Bob Danly was forever chattering in Japanese with his tape recorder till emerging with the exhausted confession that he couldn’t keep up, he would never learn the damn language, everybody else in the department was so far ahead of him. No, he couldn’t go for pizza with us. “Mal du siècle,” he would sigh, with a theatrical swipe of the hand across his brow. I had never seen anybody work as hard as Danly-san did. It seemed as if the only other thing he ever did was go to church, every Sunday bright and early. His doctoral dissertation was published straight out of the typewriter into a book—In the Shade of Spring Leaves, the life and a gossamer translation of Japan’s first modern woman writer, Higuchi Ichiyo, who died at twenty-four. It won a National Book Award. A brain tumor killed Danly-san in 2000, and pancreatic cancer took Graham out in 2003.

Bob Works seemed to me to embody the Yale Man beau idéal. He was sensationally good-looking, with long eyelashes, tousled hair, always just the right clothes worn just the right way, perfect manners, leggy fashion-model dates, and a deep, resonant voice that was at the same time so soft that I almost always had to ask him to repeat himself. He spoke in whole sentences, with a majestic certainty, about Le Corbusier, Palladio, and Louis Kahn. I spent more time with him than with anybody else, but it was only over time and many drinks at the Fence Club bar—where I’d never have been but for Wheelwright’s patronage—that I learned how anxious and uncertain Works was. I still didn’t know why, until very late one night in junior year when Works appeared at my door, red-eyed and drunk, and said, Mac, I have to talk to you. And proceeded to tell me he was gay.

The top of my head nearly blew off. He talked for hours. He told me way more than I wanted to know about his secret life, the secret life that being gay at Yale required, cruising in the darkest streets at two a.m.

“Okay, okay, Works, enough!”
“Mac, no, you’ve got to hear me out.”

And so, the night wore on. And so, one’s Yale education continued.

Not only had I never known a homosexual before I came to this daunting place, I’d never known a Jew. Well, a couple of haberdashers, and my father’s best friend from childhood (yes, in Mississippi), but nobody my own age. It didn’t particularly occur to me that Barney Brawer was Jewish, because we had so many other things to talk about. I’d had no personal acquaintance with anti-Semitism, either, though it wasn’t long before I discovered that too (dropped into some dining hall conversation as casually as a Red Sox fan’s deprecation of the Yanks). At some point I began to realize that everybody I’ve been talking about so far was kind of conservative, not necessarily a prep school graduate but still kind of Americo-Etonic, and Brawer definitely wasn’t. He was passionate, political, polemical, excited, and exciting. Freshman and sophomore years, opposition to the Vietnam war was not yet widespread in the student body, but Barney was there, man, and fierce about it. I followed him apace. As for the civil rights movement, I was there ahead of him. It had been in full swing for years, and I think the kid from New Jersey was somewhat taken aback that the kid from Tennessee—all-white public school, white and colored water fountains in the stores, black children furloughed to pick cotton in September—had been marching since he was fifteen, was spat on, and was a couple of times in danger. From there on, we developed a reciprocal fascination with each other’s background. And it began to dawn on me—duh—that some of the wisecracks I’d been hearing in the dining hall from some asshole or another were quite viciously anti-Semitic. That kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen in our realm of enlightenment. I can still see the smile of sympathetic pity on Barney Brawer’s face.

So, if I’d never known any Jews in my own cohort at home, you can be sure I didn’t know any black kids. I had formed a picture nonetheless of the black guys I was going to meet at Yale—an image defined first by antithesis to the country club waiters, falsely respectful laborers, and outright poor boys whom I observed, dimly, across the great divide in Memphis, and, second, by an imagined paragon that was pretty much Dink Stover painted brown. Note that the positive imagining was even less individuated than the negative. Note also, please, around the next corner, the ongoing theme of cluelessness alleviated not in the classroom but in friendship. Enter Earl Miller.

Earl did not enjoy representing a race, I think, but as one of the few members of his in our class he was stuck with that. One thing that made it hard was that he wasn’t brown. I figured this meant he had at least one recent white forebear, but no, his family had been uninterruptedly African American since before the Civil War. Now, lo, his mother was from Memphis! And her father had been, too—a doctor—a founder of the Memphis NAACP and the son of freed slaves from Mississippi. One of those slaves had been half white, child of the ex-master, so there was Earl’s pale skin. (I mused, but didn’t say: Small Chance, but could that Mississippi planter have been my own great-granddaddy?) Earl’s grandfather and uncle, also a doctor, both had farms outside Memphis where Earl as a boy would visit and drive the tractors. So, there we’d been in the very same years just a few miles apart, so very far apart.

Hence, common ground: even the distance. Now we had new common ground, and we had a lot to talk about. Earl was thoughtful, reserved, acerbic, not a little cynical. At first, I felt overeager and naive in his presence, intimidated. A mistake I had made before, I was reading shyness as something harder. Once again, type melted away to reveal the person. I had known racism well, but from the top side; Earl had known it from underneath. Yet we found ourselves, surprised, to be more alike than we had imagined. We discovered further common ground in writing. Earl and I both ended up, senior year, as Scholars of the House, he writing a novel, I poetry. Robert Penn Warren was my advisor, and Warren was among Earl’s supporters when he went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

Other friends belong in this picture, teachers and fellow students. Bart Giamatti and Red Warren believed in my fragile work, Malcolm Brown exemplified generosity of spirit, Mike Bouscaren showed me the mind of a remarkable athlete, David Quammen and Chip McGrath taught me what intellectual discipline was. I could go on for pages more, but—enough.

What finer place, what finer time, what finer friends could there ever have been?