The Odd Couple

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Larry was, in fact, the padrone of the Dartmouth drug scene. I seldom had to buy any drugs; as with the early scene around Ken Kesey, the drugs were free for the taking at Larry’s place. The real price, as it was at Kesey’s, was that you followed Larry’s agenda. But by the time I got to Dartmouth, I’d had little besides someone’s agenda every waking hour of my life. Kesey’s authoritarianism is a theme running through The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Some who took part in Kesey’s early drug scene at La Honda observed, according to Tom Wolfe:

Kesey is starting to organize our trips. He hands out the drugs personally, one for you, and one for you. . . and just when you’re starting to lie back and groove on your thing, he comes in -- Hup! -- Hup! -- and organizes a tramp through the woods. . .

I was starting to see the same thing with Larry. Once, I laid out my dissatisfaction to Byron Guinn, another guy from the west coast who was quite close to him. Byron listened, but his only answer was “Larry is the hippest guy on campus. In fact, he’s the hippest guy I know. He’s the hippest guy I know anywhere.” And I really didn’t have an answer to that. If you were looking for qualities that might be really hip, that was Larry: a certain quiet smoothness, a certain ability to pass through the world like a fish through water, a certain ability to be outlandish yet not to be noticed, and a certain cheerful glibness. He was, in fact, Emerson’s boy sure of his dinner.
The other side of the coin, though, was the authoritarian problem. Hipness was also just a variant of etiquette. If you’re at a formal luncheon and pick up the wrong fork, you’re gauche, which is simply another word for unhip. In either case, all you’re demonstrating is an inability to display an easy, essentially unconscious, conformity to a set of arbitrary rules. Thus we have a contradiction in Larry’s view of the Green Bummer: the avatars of Official Dartmouth are things with which he personally disagrees, but he can also claim exceptions whenever it’s convenient, and it will be convenient, because Larry is basically an authoritarian.
With this we arrive at the peculiar odd-couple friendship Larry had with Hartmut H. Schlatter, who then was an up-and-coming associate prof in the Religion department. Dartmouth cites as an advantage of its small-college atmosphere the opportunity for students to develop friendly or mentoring relationships with professors, but there’s always the caution that such things can’t be guaranteed, and in fact I never had one. “You’re too intense,” a friend counseled around the time I left for college. “You expect too much of people. You’re always asking questions, and you’re never satisfied with the answers.” That, and a tendency to blurt exactly what I was thinking whenever I thought it, meant that I wasn’t going to compete with students who were less abrasive, more charming, and indeed better-practiced at subtle flattery. Larry, who was hip, didn’t have my disadvantages.
Despite his formidable name, Hartmut Schlatter was as midwestern as a sunflower, a Chicago Ph.D. I never tried to test his knowledge of German—you didn’t risk that with a prof—but it’s entirely possible that he didn’t speak any. He was tall, dark-haired, trim, with large ears, a cherubic face, and a cheap, badly-fitting hairpiece. He dressed in tight trousers, starched white shirts, and a sport jacket with narrow lapels; his tie was held in place with a tie clasp, an accoutrement of Nixonian dorkiness. He was clean-shaven, and he probably showered every day. Few people 18 or 20 years old can recognize a hairpiece, though, and I didn’t—it was only when I returned to Hanover in 2001 and saw his photo on a faculty book in the library that I suddenly realized the truth that had evaded me those many years before. At least the dark hairpiece had been replaced with a gray one, but it was just as cheap.
Schlatter specialized in Hinduism and Buddhism, but he was also a specialist in “myth and ritual,” an intellectual shantytown built against a first flimsy piece of quackery, namely Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Its Victorian biases and clear instances of fabricated data quickly discredited it in its original field, anthropology, but in spite of that, scholars in the humanities have continued to rely on it. Frazer’s most prominent emulators include Mircea Eliade, Northrop Frye, and Joseph Campbell. If you pull away Frazer, the whole collection of scholarly plywood, cardboard, and tarpaper embodied in later derivative works ought to collapse—it’s a major but unmentioned scandal for humanities scholarship that this hasn’t happened. But of course, Freud and Marx are still popular in humanities departments, too.
Hartmut Schlatter was a careerist to his fingertips—”My commitment is to the structures,” he told Larry more than once. I speak of careerism now having learned about such things doing hard time in graduate school. There’s no way you could expect a college sophomore or junior to have that sort of perspective on the material in intermediate-level college courses. In hindsight, I found many of Schlatter’s lectures impenetrable, and now I recognize that it was for good reason. I would guess he’d chosen mysticism as a safe field where he could plow his particular furrow and not be noticed. Then, in the 1960s, just as his career got going, the psychedelic drug movement seized on Hinduism and Buddhism as metaphors to explain drug-induced experiences. Schlatter, though, was no pioneer: he’d spent his time in grad school diligently kissing the bums of the usual suspects. It seems to me that there are two issues that might be raised with Schlatter’s approach to teaching Hinduism and Buddhism: I’m going to call them the naive issue and the sophisticated issue.
The naive issue is very simple, and a good example is Schlatter’s own mentor, Mircea Eliade himself. Between 1928 and 1931, Eliade left his native Romania to study Sanskrit and Eastern philosophy in India, including six months in a Himalayan ashram. In 1931, he returned to Romania to complete his Ph.D. “Wait a minute,” said my wife when I told her this story. “This guy went all the way to India to study Eastern philosophy, he spent six months doing yoga and meditating in a monastery, he’s learning all about ultimate reality, and the result of that is he decides to finish his Ph.D.?”
“He wrote his dissertation on how yoga sets people free,” I told her.
“Why didn’t yoga set him free from the need to finish his Ph.D.?”
“He wrote it in French,” I replied. But my wife was still unconvinced.
The naive issue with Hartmut Schlatter, mystical religion, and myth and ritual boils down to this: as my wife would put it, if you’re so smart, why are you such a dork? His lectures droned on about the ultimate knowledge to be found in mystical religion, but the key problem remained: if the ultimate knowledge is so worthwhile, why are we sitting around in the lecture hall just chatting about it? Should we consider heading off to the Himalayas and finding a guru ourselves? On the other hand, if it’s not worth doing, why are we wasting time with this chit-chat? Schlatter, clearly, was about as close to ultimate knowledge as he ever preferred to get: he had a steady paycheck and a cushy job droning on in the lecture hall.
This, I think, is the factor that drew Larry Burlingame and Hartmut Schlatter together: as best I can make out, the two of them got started on their friendship when Larry went up to Schlatter one day after a lecture and asked some less confrontational version of my wife’s question: if you spend all your time talking about ultimate knowledge, how come you wear a tie clasp and a hairpiece? Somehow both saw an opportunity, and the usual amenities of a faculty-student friendship soon developed. Larry became a frequent guest for dinner at the Schlatters.
The deal was that Schlatter wasn’t going to start dropping acid, and in fact he changed nothing—he still wore starched white shirts, narrow-lapel sport coats, pencil-thin ties, a tie clasp, and a cheap toupee. Neither, of course, was Larry going to consider an academic career parsing Sanskrit texts. But now Schlatter had a hippie sidekick, which made him seem much more au courant, while Larry had the attention and favor of a faculty member, in effect the approval of the Green Bummer. Little as it was on both sides, it was apparently enough.
The sophisticated issue with Hartmut Schlatter and Mircea Eliade actually isn’t much more difficult. I think I began to ask this question when I was taking one of Schlatter’s courses, and even thought about broaching the topic for a term paper. Good idea I didn’t, in hindsight. The topic I considered was, how do we actually know that Samadhi, the classically Vedanta Hindu name for the mystical experience, nirvana, the Buddhist version, and satori, the Zen Buddhist version, are the same experience?
It seems to me that anyone who’s had a few courses in philosophy ought to be able to say, with some confidence, that there’s simply no way we can prove they are or aren’t the same experience. A basic premise in discussions of such classically defined mystical experiences is that they are beyond the senses. If they’re beyond the senses, there’s no way we can say that each one has a purple border, you hear a certain kind of music, they taste like honey, they last for 18 minutes, or whatever else. Instead, all we get from those who claim to have experienced them is poetic, vague, or contradictory statements that aren’t much use in making comparisons.
But let’s wave a temporary good-bye to Prof. Schlatter as he and Larry Burlingame walk across the Green together, the charming hippie and the nerdy professor, their eager conversation punctuated by enthusiastic gestures. n

The Odd Couple

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