More Lemon Sessions

By John Bruce | Saturday, December 8, 2007

Editor’s Note: TDR presents the next chapter of “The Dartmouth Conundrum,” a memoir. Those who want to read previous installments will find them on this newspaper’s web site. Some names have been changed, but the events are true.

One day I found an ominous note on Parkhurst stationery in my campus mailbox, summoning me to meet with Dean Seymour the following morning. It said nothing of what the meeting would be about. While my grades had declined as my preoccupations had increased, I was still getting gentlemen’s Cs, and I didn’t think that was worth calling me in. On the other hand, at least one student who’d gotten involved with drugs had already been separated from the College. I was fully aware of the possible consequences when I started taking LSD and other drugs, but naturally I wanted to minimize them if I could. If I were thrown out of school, I’d lose my student deferment, and I’d be in the Army in a matter of months. All that evening, I rehearsed what the Dean might say to me and what I might say in reply.

When I got to his office, Seymour, who was bullet-headed and physically imposing, reared up to his full height in his chair and roared, “WOULD YOU SAY YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR FATHER IS GOOD?”

This was a question that, like the unfinished sentence on Communist revolutions in the ROTC quiz, could have been answered with volumes. “It’s not what it should be,” I proposed. Relief! It was starting to look like this wouldn’t be about drugs at all. Instead, it was going to be a lemon session!

“Hrumph,” hrumphed Dad Thad. “Not what it should be. Not what it should be indeed.” He gave me a long look. “YOU ARE DELIBERATELY TRYING TO DO THINGS TO IRRITATE YOUR FATHER.” He had a copy of Eric Berne’s Games People Play, a pop psychology book that was current at the time, prominently displayed on his desk. I had a feeling it was a sort of prop, to forestall any quibbling, tergiversation, or sissified pettifoggery over his pronouncements. He knew all the games, you’d better not try any with him.

“Gee,” I ventured, “what makes you think that?” He didn’t like that question, but he more or less had to answer it. As best I could make out, my father had called Seymour at home several evenings previous. It appears that not only did Seymour resent the interruption, but my father was probably pretty well in the tank when he made the call. The tenor of the conversation, allowing for slurred syllables and conversational lacunae, appears to have been something like this: if Dartmouth is such a great place, how come my son isn’t making straight As? I would guess the actual words from my father’s side weren’t as coherent as Seymour was trying to make them—he had to have a reason to bring me into his office other than plain irritation.

For that matter, it wouldn’t surprise me if my father in his cups had first tried to get hold of John Sloan Dickey himself (he was quite capable of this) and been rebuffed. This would have made him all the angrier when he finally reached Dean Seymour—and for all I know, Dickey might have passed on his own irritation to Seymour, another good reason for the Dean to call me in.

If it were me now, I probably would make a reply to the Dean that went something like this: “Well, Dean Seymour, I’m very sorry you had that call from my father. I don’t know if he was at home or traveling, I don’t know what else was on his mind, and I don’t know how much he might have had to drink. You may want to investigate ways in which you can screen calls like that to avoid those sorts of interruptions at home. But I want to stress to you that on the evening when my father made the call, I was up here in Hanover conjugating irregular verbs, and I was simply not in a position to control his behavior. There was no way I could have revoked his phone privileges. In fact, people normally expect parents to control their children’s behavior, not the other way around, as you seem to have it. I’m not sure what else this meeting is about. Are we finished?”

I didn’t say that, of course. That could have gotten me separated from the College as surely as any confessions about LSD. We played a cat-and-mouse routine for half an hour, in which Seymour felt I was probably doing SOMETHING deliberately to tick my father off, and he was trying to find out what it was, so he could get ticked off about it too. And if he found anything at all, I had an intuition, the consequences wouldn’t be good—he could certainly tell that he had a strange one sitting in front of him. But I parried all of his probes, and the meeting ended without any real conclusion, except that I decided the Dean of the College was a bully. He never called me in again.

I wrote to my parents as soon as I got back to my room from my meeting with the Dean, trying to get their version of the conversation and asking, by the bye, that they discuss any problems they had with me before going to the Dean with them. My mother replied, saying there must have been some mistake. No such discussion with Dean Seymour had ever taken place. Right. That approach, I suppose, saved them from embarrassment.

But Larry, at least as far as I was concerned, still carried with him the original authoritative views on character that I’d imputed to Bill McMann. One day, in another lemon session, Larry finally hit me with all he had:

“I don’t know how you think you’ve come any distance since freshman year,” he said. “You still tell jokes nobody else thinks are funny. You still say things and do things just to get people’s attention. You still break in on conversations with something that’s completely off the subject, just to get in on the conversation.”

That hurt, because I knew he was right, and there wasn’t much I could reply to it. But what he’d told me was information I needed and wanted to act on. And nobody else was going to give it to me. To my way of thinking, Larry and his circle were something I would have to stick with until I got everything from them that I needed to get.

I can no longer say how far separated it was in time, but that frank exchange I had with Larry certainly was the immediate cause of the most important experience I had at Dartmouth. Suddenly one day, I began to dwell intensely and at length on the remarks Larry had made about my shortcomings. I realized I was criticizing everything around me—classes, classmates, ROTC, the Green Bummer, the guys in the circle around Larry, Larry himself, my parents—and in a basic way ignoring what wasn’t right with me, though the others certainly deserved whatever criticisms I was making. I had a very clear sense of my immaturity, my egoism, my need to be the center of attention, and I came close to despair that I could do anything about it. At this remove, I would characterize the experience as the onset of a certain kind of mature humility. For a long time I thought it was a result of the lemon sessions, or perhaps it was the kind of worthwhile experience you were supposed to get from LSD. I no longer think it was either.

Herman Melville gives a similar account in White Jacket of a kind of rebirth into humility. The narrator has worn a white canvas jacket throughout his voyage in the frigate Neversink, but at the end of the story, he falls by accident into the sea from the top of a mast:

I had fallen in a line with the main-mast; I now found myself nearly abreast of the mizzen-mast, the frigate slowly gliding by like a black world in the water. . . . I essayed to swim toward the ship; but instantly I was conscious of a feeling like being pinioned in a feather-bed, and, moving my hands, felt my jacket puffed out above my tight girdle with water. I strove to tear it off; but it was looped together here and there, and the strings were not then to be sundered by hand. I whipped out my knife, that was tucked at my belt, and ripped my jacket straight up and down, as if I were ripping open myself. With a violent struggle I then burst out of it, and was free. Heavily soaked, it slowly sank before my eyes. Sink! sink! oh shroud! thought I; sink forever! accursed jacket that thou art! “See that white shark!” cried a horrified voice from the taffrail; “he’ll have that man down his hatchway! Quick! the grains! the grains!” The next instant that barbed bunch of harpoons pierced through and through the unfortunate jacket, and swiftly sped down with it out of sight.

Even if I’d become a little more mature, I continued to have wrangles with Larry Burlingame over the direction things were going. Naturally, the only way I could really resolve the disagreements would have been to drop out of his circle, but for almost two years that took a degree of strength and resolve I simply didn’t have. The lemon sessions continued, and I was always It. But some things were changing.

The original version of hippie culture was essentially non-political, a mixture of hedonism and otherworldliness. The otherworldliness soon fell by the wayside, replaced with hipness. You could be rich and hip, but not easily rich and otherwordly. The traditional view in mystical religion was that politics, being worldly, was a distraction. Beyond that, the original intent of the bull sessions with Bill McMann had been inward-directed, skeptical, and tentative. But Larry and some others in his circle were moving into hard politics, absolutist and prescriptive. The personal, however incompletely formed and immature, was becoming the political.

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