Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2008/03/04/_the_sweetness_of_not_dying.php
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
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.
The Princess Casamassima is the story of a sensitive young man, Hyacinth Robinson, who has been raised by a foster mother in a London slum. He takes up a career as a bookbinder, where he is drawn into the radical politics that were characteristic of that occupation in the 19th century. He particularly admires one member of that radical movement, Paul Muniment, and in consequence he makes a vow to the movement to commit any revolutionary act that the center may ask of him. In the meantime, his foster mother dies, and she bequeaths to him a sum which, when matched by a contribution from an avuncular neighbor, will allow him six months’ travel in France and Italy.
The experience of travel transforms his outlook. Visiting Paris,
a sudden sense overtook him, making his heart sink with a kind of desolation—a sense of everything that might hold one to the world, of the sweetness of not dying, the fascination of great cities, the charm of travel and discovery, the generosity of admiration. The tears rose to his eyes, as they had done more than once in the past six months, and a question, low but poignant, broke from his lips, ending in nothing. ‘How could he—how could he—?’ It may be explained that ‘he’ was a reference to Paul Muniment; for Hyacinth had dreamed of the religion of friendship.
What Hyacinth Robinson found in travel was very much what I found. The world is too fascinating, too complex, too stupendous, too real a place to try to reduce it to little formulas. Robinson begins to be disillusioned with Muniment, but the religion of friendship is a hard one to leave.
When Robinson returns to London, the center gives its orders for the mission he had vowed to undertake. It’s to be an assassination, which will almost certainly result in Robinson’s death or execution; shirking it would be simply a death sentence from a different quarter. Despite entreaties from Robinson’s friends, Muniment refuses to release him from the vow. Robinson chooses suicide rather than revolutionary action. I was lucky, and Larry wasn’t as smart as Paul Muniment. Robinson had made a vow, but however much I thought of Larry as a friend, I’d done no such thing. I was free to go on growing, as Hyacinth Robinson was not.
In fact, I’d been dubious of foreign travel before I left for Europe. But as I looked at Europe from the plane window as it landed, I was drawn involuntarily into Hyacinth Robinson’s—or for that matter, Henry James’s—state of mind. I found that the German I’d learned in a few years of high school study proved eminently serviceable, and with Latin I could hack my way through enough French to get by, though the francophones winced each time I spoke. I could even manage some Italian, and after that, due to my courses at Dartmouth, a little Greek.
Since my best language was German, though, I spent a lot of time in the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire. I’ve loved trains since earliest childhood, and since I was riding them so much, I began to pay attention to what I was seeing. Out the coach window on any day, you could still see the austerity-design steam locomotives that had carried the Wehrmacht to the Eastern Front, and the six million Jews and six million others to the ovens; if not those, you could see examples that had been delivered to the Allied countries as reparations following Versailles, and others yet that had simply been left, willy-nilly, in other countries by the retreating Germans, taken over by their hosts as trophies of war.
It was much like Hyacinth Robinson visualizing the guillotine at the Place de la Révolution. History was close enough to touch. Much of it, I began to realize as I moved at the pace of steam-powered local trains through the countrysides of central and southern Europe, was Christian history, and much of that was Catholic history. All of it was Jewish history. And not a whole lot of it was to be found in the courses available at Dartmouth. I wandered past churches; I developed an interest in their architecture; sometimes I peered inside.
I was probably at a stage in my maturing process where I was ready to turn outward anyhow. There can be few better places to do it than Europe. Even so, I couldn’t escape from Dartmouth completely: that fall of 1968 there was a violent demonstration in Hanover against Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of Defense. A crowd of students surrounded his car, shook it, and wouldn’t let him leave; as I recall, he had to climb out a window and get onto the roof, to be rescued by police. However, this episode has gone so completely down the memory hole that it doesn’t come up on internet searches. I read about it in the European papers.
When I returned in January 1969, the atmosphere was seething. I didn’t seek Larry out; we met only once before we graduated. But I could see that he was in the middle of the anti-ROTC agitation. We ran into each other one day on the Green and couldn’t avoid saying something. “Well,” I said, “I guess we’ve wound up going in different directions.” He grimaced in the way he had over anything unpleasant, nodded emphatically, and went quickly on his way. Since I didn’t resume my relationship with him, it also meant I didn’t re-establish contact with the Dartmouth drug scene, and many of the people I’d associated with had graduated the year before anyhow. My involvement with drugs was over.
The faculty voted that month to eliminate course credits for ROTC courses—something which, in my view, was entirely reasonable given the utter lack of intellectual content that I’d seen firsthand. Controversy continued that winter and spring. Eventually the faculty, responding to implied threats of violence from the SDS, modified its position to recommend phasing out the program—reserving it, however, long enough for students currently enrolled to graduate. This was important, since juniors and seniors in ROTC received stipends, which many relied on as part of their financial aid. Discontinuing the program immediately and thus removing that financial aid could have placed the College in breach of contract. This wasn’t enough for the SDS, which was clearly trying to create an issue on which the College could not compromise. It demanded that the ROTC program be terminated immediately.
That May, a few days before the Parkhurst takeover, there was a meeting in one of the lecture halls. The students who were in favor of a takeover to resolve the ROTC issue had called it to discuss options—the only one worth considering, of course, being the takeover. My career at Dartmouth was winding down; the College to my delight had introduced the pass-fail grading option for certain courses, and I was coasting and enjoying the spring weather (notwithstanding, my GPA was the best I’d had). But I was interested enough to attend the meeting.
Some members of a student version of the Black Panthers, or some similar group, were insisting that procedurally, there was no reason either to discuss or vote on whether to occupy Parkhurst. They were, of course, completely correct, since the people in the hall, students, faculty, and others, were representative of nobody and had no authority to approve or disapprove anything. Nevertheless, they were shouted down by those who wanted at least the appearance of deliberation. A debate of sorts ensued.
Almost every speaker, student, faculty, or other, was for taking over Parkhurst. The only dissonant note came fairly late in the evening: an older professor, gray hair awry, tweed jacket askew, mounted the podium. Apparently many in the hall knew him; I didn’t, and I never caught his name. He spoke in a heavy European accent, though I couldn’t place where it came from. “Those of you who know me understand that I’ve seen—shall we say—quite a bit of politics in my life,” he began. “Perhaps, at my age, quite enough of politics.”
There was a small murmur, but he went on. “The only thing I have to say about this meeting is—and let me be clear, I’m not accusing anyone here of being an agent provocateur—but I can only come to one conclusion about what is being broached on this agenda. That is, that if anyone here were in fact an agent provocateur, he would in fact be advocating exactly what is being decided here tonight.” I bent forward to listen. It was a voice from the world I’d just recently come to know.
There was a brief, stunned silence, then some shouting from the front rows. “Let me say it again,” the professor said, “I’m not accusing anyone here of being an agent provocateur, only that if one were here, he would be advocating exactly what is being urged on us.”
There was a somewhat longer silence, then some more murmurs from the front of the hall and an exchange among those standing near the podium. “The question has been asked,” said the professor to the hall at large, “just what is an agent provocateur?” There was a chuckle here and there in the audience. Apparently some of the SDS needed a refresher in Revolution 101. “An agent provocateur is someone hired by the party in power to bring about an act that will provoke retaliation, a crackdown. The assassination of Kirov, for instance... the burning of the Reichstag...” But at that point, the audience would hear no more. They shouted him from the podium. The motives of all those in the hall were simple, honest, clear, understandable, and pure. If you’d polled them, likely only a few could have identified Kirov—certainly not Larry. Maybe half, I would guess, knew about the Reichstag.
They took a vote. It was meaningless, of course. But they voted to take over Parkhurst Hall as they’d planned to do all along, satisfied with themselves that they’d been democratic about it. n