How I became a writer, c. 1962 (Part 3)

Part 3 of a memoir about the author's years as a Brandeis undergraduate in the early 1960s.

Junior year, Creative Writing 101a was taught by Allen Roberts, a balding, 40ish bachelor who lived suspiciously alone in an apartment on Beacon Hill. Mr. Roberts (a pseudonym, like all the names mentioned here) lacked tenure. He had published no books. The campus writing heavyweights eschewed him; but my classmates did include the editor of the school paper, a fellow who had sold a story to MAD, and a theater arts major who had slept with Mary McCarthy's brother. There was also this blue-green-eyed brunette.

When the sign-up sheet came to me, I noted her name. Back in my dorm, I looked Adele up in the student directory. She was a senior who lived in Brookline.

That, I thought, was that.

I was not very good with girls. I couldn't talk to them, for one thing. My best topics, guy-wise— Philadelphia high school basketball and doo-wop groups— did not get me far. And girls had little in the experience bank to interest me. They had not seen The Wild One four times or spent Friday nights cruising county-to-county, six to a car, looking for parties to crash. They lacked hitchhiking stories or drunk-and-puking stories or stories about stealing Josephs from Nativity crèches on Christmas Eve.

I'd lost interest with every girl I'd ever dated"“ or she with me"“ after a few evenings, and consequently I'd never gone steady.

I was at my best drunk. Then I could be charming, witty, flirtatious. But if things developed as I hoped (which, I should admit, was seldom), being drunk could lead to humiliations of another sort. I'd never gone steady.

Plus, the whole 1950s double-standard, virgin-whore thing still maintained a grip on people's minds and groins. Unlike most schools, which did not even allow girls in boys' rooms, at Brandeis, if you had a girlfriend, you could practically live with her; but, otherwise, to get laid, you hoped to score at a nursing school mixer or get lucky on a trip to Bennington or arrange a "study" date with Mary Ellen Plotkin, the campus nymphomaniac. (Yes, we still had nymphomaniacs in 1962.)

A Class-A girl

Brandeis was a small community, and I couldn't help picking up information about Adele. She had worn a huge engagement ring the year before; she wore no ring now. She roomed with Beverly Isaacs, an attractive, pixie-cut Dean's List pre-med from Evanston, Ill., who was having an affair with a brilliant young intellectual history professor. Adele hung out with the guitar-and-book-bag crowd, but had played first singles on the tennis team. She had dated the heir to the Reddi-Whip fortune, as well as the lead in the campus production of Ubu Roi.

Any number of my friends would have given up a minor digit to have gone out with her. Once Don Nussbaum had shooed a bee away from her when she was sun bathing behind the dining hall. "You're the greatest thing since sliced bread," he told her.

"Usually they say, "'Peanut butter and jelly'," she replied, and rolled onto her other side.

"'You have talent'

I had spent the summer as a swimming instructor in the Poconos. In the evenings, I had written stories in a three-ring binder. The first story I turned in to Mr. Roberts concerned a young man who gives a ride to a stranger who dies in his car. "You have talent," Mr. Roberts wrote in the margin.

Adele came up to me in the library and told me how much she'd liked my story.

I finished the semester with my first A— the only one in the class.

One night, during finals, I sat on the floor of the Bio Sci Building, the only building on campus open 24 hours. Fortified with an orange soda and peanut butter crackers from its vending machines, I was studying for my exam in African politics. I was a politics major, with an unshakable C+/B- average. I had chosen that major because it seemed appropriate for someone who intended to go to law school. I wanted to go to law school because I admired Clarence Darrow and "The Defenders" and thought freeing the unjustly accused would be a gratifying career.

But how, I wondered— in the grip of the Brandeis ethos that one's grades determined one's identity— could I hope to succeed with such a mediocre GPA? To lead a meaningful life, it seemed to me, one had to excel at what one did.

I perused my list of African political leaders: Talfala Balewa, Nmedi Azikwe, Moise Tshombe. I realized that if the exam consisted of nothing more challenging than matching a column of first names to a column of lasts, I was unlikely to sparkle.

I returned to my dorm. I told my roommate I was not going to law school. I was going to write.

My first real writer

Second semester, I had two courses with Adele: Creative Writing 101b and Modern American Lit. Both were taught by Mark Harris, author of The Southpaw and Bang the Drum Slowly and, as such, the first "real" writer I had met. I absorbed everything he said: "Wrapping yourself in the flag doesn't mean you're well-dressed." "Someone who would write the same book twice could not write it once."

My first story for Harris dealt with a young man who tries to pick up a girl at a party and is told she hopes to become a nun. Everyone liked it "“ especially Adele.

One morning, she sat next to me in Am Lit. The next class she did it again. The following class I sat next to her. After that class, she asked if I wanted to have breakfast at the snack bar. She had an English muffin and tea; I had grilled cheese and tuna.

I was not a total fool. I was working up the nerve to ask her for a date. I planned to ask after the next Creative Writing class.

She came wearing a black sheath skirt and black, mink-trimmed Persian lamb jacket. She looked like she was being picked up by Porfirio Rubirosa. That set me back several weeks.

And the winners are.…

That spring, Brandeis began a literary magazine. Folio gave special consideration to submissions from undergraduates, graduate students and alumni. I attended the meeting where selections were announced. It was in Ford Hall, a brick building where I had panicked during a Soc Sci I exam and failed to correctly identify what had happened in 1066. Ford Hall was also where I had taken Math 10, the only course to lead me to consider whether it would be wiser to jump from a window and break an arm than to take the final.

I sat in the back row. Three dozen others were present, none of whom had I played ball with or gone into Waltham for a pastrami sub. Two stories by undergraduates were accepted. One was by Virginia Fass, a Phi Beta Kappa who had made her name freshman year by blistering John Steinbeck in a review in the Boston Globe. Her effort was a surrealistic narrative, the first half of which occurred within the womb.

The other accepted story was about a guy who tries to pick up a girl at a party and learns she wants to become a nun. When that author's name was announced, no one on the editorial board knew who he was.

Adele sends a signal

One morning in May, I loaned Adele a dime for her English muffin. That afternoon I was walking past her dorm when she called. "Hey, B-awb, want your money?"

We sat on a rock. She told me how she and Beverly would sit in the bar at the Ritz Carlton and let old men buy them drinks. About the experiments her cousin Richard and his Harvard colleague Timothy Leary were doing with something called LSD. About the guy in the T-bird who had offered her $1,000 to model, allegedy for Playboy, when she was 16. About her ex-fiancée, a Harvard law grad.

I'd never met anyone like her. Once school ends, I told myself, you may never see her again. I asked her to the second night of the folk festival, Saturday, at the gym.

Saturday afternoon, I drove into Waltham for a pint of Gilbey's gin, a six-pack of Schweppes, a lime. When I got back to the dorm, Teddy Zook told me Adele had been looking for me.

Shit, I thought.

"You won't believe me," she said, "but I am psychologically incapable of going on dates." We sat on a sofa in her dorm lounge. The tip of an ice cream cone lay in an ashtray on the table before us. "For months, I wouldn't even make a date. Now I make them but break them."

In movies there are moments when someone points a gun at someone. The person at whom the gun is pointed has an instant to make a decision and act. If he makes the right decision, he lives and becomes the hero. If he makes the wrong decision...

"Let's not call it a date," I said. "I'll come by around seven. If you're here, we'll walk down to the gym." How did I ever think of that?

I left early so my phone wouldn't ring.

We sat back-to-back on the floor through The Jim Kweskin Jug Band and Jackie Washington. The headliner was Pete Seeger. He sang "Guantanamero" and "John Henry." "Now I'm going to sing a song by a young man who performed here last night," he said. Then he sang Dylan's "A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall."

I had never heard anything like it. I had never felt anything like I felt that evening. I felt a new world being born. ♦

To read the next (and final) installment, click here.
To read the first installment, click here.