Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2007/05/14/bull_and_lemon_sessions.php
Monday, May 14, 2007
By John Bruce
Editor’s Note: TDR presents the next chapter of “The Dartmouth Conundrum,” a memoir. Some names have been changed, but the events are true.
In speaking just of Larry, though, I’m getting slightly ahead of myself, because I met him through another freshman, Bill McMann. I first ran into Bill during an officially sponsored discussion session of some sort in the Hinman Hall common room. My first impression was that he was too fond of second-hand opinions, which he mistook for his own. But after several more, unofficial, late-night bull sessions in his room, he began to grow on me. He was reading The Education of Henry Adams and Robert Graves’s Good-bye to All That in his freshman comp class. Some readers, of course, have found a certain facile skepticism in both books, and neither writer is Plato. But my first months in Hanover were pretty unexceptional. McMann, Henry Adams, and Robert Graves were the only interesting developments I’d run into so far.
Bill was a couple of years older than the rest of us freshmen. He came from a working-class Irish background in the Bronx, and he’d spent a couple of years clerking on Wall Street before he decided to go to college. The late-night bull sessions in his room usually centered on whether we and the people we knew were doing what we had theoretically set out to do—get an education, grow up, acquire our own independent views of the world. He and a few others, including Larry Burlingame, felt that most of our fellow students were too preoccupied with routine studying or conforming to various big, green expectations to do anything of much importance at Dartmouth. They had a point.
Along with the skepticism, Bill had a certain ability to see through people. In hindsight, this was mostly because he was older than the rest of us, and his street-wise background also helped. New Yorkers like Bill have always been impatient with suburban circumspectness. But beyond that, he had the parlor psychic’s ability to spot little clues and take advantage of them—if he saw prep school markers, like a crest or buttons on a blazer, he could say “You’re really proud that you went to Choate, aren’t you?” and his listener would be surprised and disoriented.
But he could also see through me, and I was impressed. “John, I think you said that just to get attention,” he said to me one night in one of those bull sessions, and of course that’s what I’d done. Nobody had ever seen into my motives that way. And this was important because, in the way of all late-night dorm bull sessions, everyone was trying to psychoanalyze everyone else. I think the uniform diagnosis was that we all had problems dealing with our fathers. McMann, seeing the success of his original observation on my need for attention, followed it up with something like, “...and it’s because you haven’t resolved your conflicts with your father.” (Don’t worry, my father will appear here in due course, and you can judge things for yourself.)
I think most young men who listened to the usual stuff about unresolved conflicts with fathers wound up simply going about their business not much the better or worse for it. Looking back, there were as many economic as psychological issues: a college student is struggling for independence, but is still dependent on parents to foot the bills. All kinds of conflicts will emerge in the maturing process, and most will magically disappear in a few years’ time when the student gets a job and leaves home for good. And nobody, at least in Hinman Hall, seriously entertained going into analysis.
The second thing I admired in him was his stoicism. While he was street-wise, he also had a kind of grace, and it was something I saw that I lacked as a suburban kid who’d in some ways had a better time growing up. Once, via an upperclassman, I’d gotten hold of a bottle of champagne, which I was saving for an important date. A group of classmates, including Bill, had come into my room. One of them found the bottle of champagne, started clowning around with it, dropped it, and broke it.
The whole idea of the champagne—likely pretty cheap, likely paid for with a hefty commission to the upperclassman who’d bought it, likely not to have the desired effect with a date anyhow—was pretty silly. There were all my glitzy expectations fizzing away on the floor amid the pieces of a broken bottle. I’d been running into little experiences like that all fall and winter, instructive vignettes that called my callowness to my own attention. I hated it. I started to rail at the guy who’d dropped my bottle of champagne, telling him he had to pay me for it, but hating myself at the same time for being that way.
Bill looked at me, pulled out his wallet, took out a dollar bill, and tore it up. Then he dropped the pieces in my wastebasket. If I wanted to be paid for the champagne, all I needed to do was fish the pieces of the dollar bill out and tape them together. That was a hard lesson for me because I had to keep myself from doing that, and it wasn’t easy. What Bill was teaching was that things often weren’t going to come out even; the only way you could survive and still like yourself was to keep a sense of proportion and a sense of humor.
I couldn’t help admiring someone with that attitude. I still admire that side of him. He smoked Camels, which at the time were unfiltered cigarettes, with no filtered version. No Joe Camel back then, no retro cigarette girls, just the camel on the pack. He smoked them with the label outward. I copied him (it took me ten years to break the smoking habit I picked up that way, too).
But what Bill was doing, with Larry Burlingame as his sidekick, was also a close cousin of “lemon sessions,” a preoccupation of girls’ finishing schools and Ivy League secret societies that Tom Wolfe discusses in his essay “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening”:
“In the girls’ schools these lemon sessions tended to take place at random on nights when a dozen or so girls would end up in someone’s dormitory room. One girl would become ‘it,’ and the others would rip into her personality, pulling it to pieces to analyze every defect. . . her spitefulness, awkwardness, bad breath, embarrassing clothes, ridiculous laugh, suck-up fawning, latent lesbianism, or whatever. . . Likewise, in the secret societies, they held lemon sessions for boys. Is masturbation your problem? Out with the truth, you ridiculous weenie! And Thursday night after Thursday night the awful truths would out, as he who was It stood up before them and answered the most horrible questions.”
If there was one frequent topic in our late-night discussions other than my inability to confront my father the way they felt I should, though, it was Albert Inskip Dickerson, Dean of Freshmen, whom we will eventually see in May 1969 being carried bodily in his chair from Parkhurst Hall by members of the SDS and their sympathizers. Bill and Larry hated Dickerson. They called him Inskip, after his middle name. If the subject of Inskip came up, they rolled their eyes in apparent reference to some common history, which they never otherwise explained.
I was never exactly sure why they hated him—I hadn’t even met the man, other than in a group meeting in our dorm’s common room. The river dorms housed mostly freshmen. Dickerson occasionally conducted town meeting-style get-togethers in the common rooms of those dorms. The discussions were freewheeling, anything could come up, and Dickerson, in late middle age, was often (as I saw it) sympathetic, gracious, and even entertaining as he traded ripostes. If a single figure in Dartmouth history is worthy of veneration, in fact, it’s probably he.
The animus that Bill and Larry felt toward Albert Dickerson took a precise shape, at least as far as I could grasp it, in one of those meetings. Bill was unhappy, apparently, that he had to get some minimum grade in freshman comp or take it again. It didn’t occur to me at the time that the source of Bill’s irritation was that he likely wasn’t getting the grade he needed to get—instead, he was treating this as a matter of principle.
Nobody should have to score any particular grade to get out of freshman comp, in Bill’s view. Nobody should have to take freshman comp at all. In the real world, you had secretaries to check your spelling and punctuation. Why were we wasting time with all this sixth-grade stuff? Henry Adams and Robert Graves themselves were even saying school was all silly anyhow. Why bother with education at all?
I think Dickerson did something like pull his pipe from his mouth with a wry grin and gently say something like “Why indeed? It was your decision to come here. What do you want to get from this place?” Bill just got madder, of course. The discussion turned into a long, pointless wrangle, and Dickerson finally said he really needed to get home and get to bed, but he’d be happy to come back at a time of Bill’s and Larry’s choosing to continue it. Bill and Larry asked me to be there when he came back, probably because I was more articulate than either one of them, though they’d never admit that was the reason. Looking back, it’s plain to me that if Dickerson had had only the two of them to deal with, it would have been checkmate in half a dozen moves or so. Inskip indeed.
But a few nights later, Dickerson did come back, specifically to shoot the bull with just the three of us.