Читать книгу I'd Hate Myself in the Morning - Lardner Ring - Страница 8

The story of how I came to be a political prisoner goes back to my earliest years, when I displayed a compelling urge to shock people with unorthodox opinions, extravagant boasts, and wild exaggerations. At the breakfast table one morning when I was three, I threatened to commit mass murder. “If you say one more word to me,” I announced, addressing my next older brother, Jim, “I’ll kill you, Mr. Jimmie, and Mr. John [my eldest brother] and Mr. Daddy and Mr. Baby Brother.”

To which Jim responded, “Oh, nobody could kill baby brother bees he’s too little.”

“I’ll kill him because I’ll bake him in the oven and kill him,” I continued. “That’s what I think I’ll do.”

Those were our exact words as set down by our father in his Chicago Tribune column, “In the Wake of the News,” where he frequently described the family conversations at our house in Evanston and then, as we prepared to relocate to New York in the spring of 1919, in our apartment on Buena Avenue. We were moving east so that Dad, already known nationally for his You Know Me Al stories in The Saturday Evening Post, could write a syndicated column that would run in a hundred and fifty newspapers and make his one of the best-known names in America.

A skillful pianist and amateur songwriter, he was blessed with perfect pitch and an astonishing ability to render the way semiliterate Americans spoke and wrote. The combination of that remarkable ear and plentiful opportunities to listen to baseball players and other athletes as a sportswriter had produced a literary style all his own: “And he give her a look that you could pour on a waffle,” says the cigar-salesman narrator of “The Big Town” about the man who has fallen for his sister-in-law. Elsewhere in the same collection of stories (which were, along with You Know Me Al, as close as my father came to writing a novel), we learn about a pricey hotel on Long Island where “They even got a barber and a valet, but you can’t get a shave while he’s pressing your clothes, so it’s pretty near impossible for a man to look their best at the same time.”

My father didn’t want me named Ring and used his column to apologize for it:

When you are nicknamed Ringworm by the humorists and wits,

When people put about you till they drive you into fits.

When funny folk say, “Ring, ring off,” until they make you ill,

Remember that your poor old Dad tried hard to name you Bill.

Having his name made me particularly aware of how well known it was. During his lifetime (he died in 1933 at the age of forty-eight) and for a considerable time afterward, the response I got when introduced was either, “You’re related to the writer?” or “You’re the writer?” But by the nineteen-forties and fifties, the recognition was beginning to fade, and eventually people started saying, “Ring? What kind of a name is that?”

An impressive-looking man, he had high cheekbones and deep-set eyes and stood two inches over six feet tall, which was unusual in his generation. He didn’t talk a lot and almost never raised his voice, but what he had to say was always worth listening to and sometimes very funny—the more so because he didn’t laugh as he was saying it. H.L. Mencken, Virginia Woolf, and Edmund Wilson, among others, saw him as a literary pioneer; nevertheless, Dad thought of himself primarily as a newspaperman, and it was his standards of journalism that he sought to pass on to his sons. With four New York papers delivered to the house every day, mealtime conversation was often about which one had handled a particular story best. Only my brother John had actually begun work as a reporter before Dad died, but the rest of us also got our first jobs on New York papers, and we all benefited from his instruction.

His continued insistence on identifying himself with journalism was part of a general refusal to take himself or his writing too seriously. “Are you a humorist?” I remember asking him when I was a child, based on something I had read.

“If I said ‘yes’ to that,” he answered, “it would be like if somebody asked a ballplayer what position he played and he said ‘I’m a great third baseman.’”

In 1924, when F. Scott Fitzgerald sold Max Perkins of Charles Scribner’s Sons on the idea of a collection of Ring Lardner short stories, Dad had no copies of most of them and couldn’t remember where some had been published. After they had been dug out of various libraries and assembled, he accepted Scott’s title, How to Write Short Stories. Instead of a serious introduction, though, he wrote: “A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor. Personally I have found it a good scheme to not even sign my name to the story, and when I have got it sealed up in its envelope and stamped and addressed, I take it to some town where I don’t live and mail it from there. The editor has no idea who wrote the story, so how can he send it back? He is in a quandary.” Each story came with an explanation attached. “A Frame Up,” actually about a boxing prodigy, was described as “a stirring romance of the Hundred Years’ War, detailing the adventures in France and Castile of a pair of well-bred weasels.”

The year that first collection was published, my father offered his take on the European Dada movement, in the form of a play (never theatrically performed, to my knowledge) called I Gaspiri, or The Upholsterers:

ACT I

A public street in a bathroom. A man named Tupper has evidently just taken a bath. A man named Brindle is now taking a bath. A man named Newburn comes out of the faucet which has been left running. He exits through the exhaust. Two strangers to each other meet on the bath mat.

FIRST STRANGER

Where was you born?

SECOND STRANGER

Out of wedlock.

FIRST STRANGER

That’s a mighty pretty country around there.

SECOND STRANGER

Are you married?

FIRST STRANGER

I don’t know. There’s a woman living with me, but I can’t place her.

(Three outsiders named Klein go across the stage three times. They think they are in a public library. A woman’s cough is heard offstage left.)

A NEW CHARACTER

Who is that cough?

TWO MOORS

That is my mother. She died a little while ago in a haphazard way.

A GREEK

And what a woman she was!

(The curtain is lowered for seven days to denote the passage of a week.)

The mind that could conceive such disjointed nonsense was the same one that prided itself on its accuracy in reporting factual events. In his account of a World Series game or a conversation among his sons, Dad was equally scrupulous in providing the reader with his best recollection of the acts and words he had witnessed. In these further excerpts from his Chicago columns, I am now three and a half and known as “Bill.”

IN THE WAKE OF THE NEWS

BY RING W. LARDNER

CHARACTERS:

Le Père

La Mère

John, the eldest son

Jim, the middle-sized son

Bill, the son-of-a-gun

SCENE: Breakfast

BILL

I’m all through with my breakus.

LA MÈRE

Have you got a kiss for me?

BILL

I can’t be kissing people every day. Just Wednesday.

LA MÈRE

But this is Wednesday.

BILL

Just afternoons.

LE PÈRE

What kind of an automobile have you got, Mr. Bill?

BILL

I’ve got a dangerous automobile. It runs over big ladies.

JOHN

If you ran over ladies you’d get arrested.

BILL

It runs over policemen, too.

And in another installment:

BILL

But why didn’t I get something?

LE PÈRE

You did, you got a ball, but it isn’t your birthday. It’s John’s and Jim’s birthday.

BILL

It is my birthday.

JIM

It isn’t your birthday, bees you’re not anything old.

BILL

I am as old as you are, Mr. Jimmy.

JIM

You’re not, bees I’m five years old.

BILL

I’m one billion and thirty-nine years old and that’s old.

JIM

But you’re not even older than John bees he’s seven.

BILL

But I’m older than John because he’s seven and I’m God. I’m older than anybody in the world. I’m the oldest man in the world, I think.

JIM

Oh, think yourself.

JOHN

If he thinks he’s old, let him think he’s old. We’re older.

BILL

No, you’re not, Mr. Johnny. Because I’m older than anybody.

JIM

Oh, older yourself. Giants are older.

BILL

I’m a giant myself. I’m God, I think.

Though the column ran seven days a week, Dad somehow found time to take on an array of other writing assignments, including a six-day-a-week comic strip of “You Know Me Al” and the script for a 1925 movie, The New Klondike, which involved a baseball player caught up in the Florida realestate boom. (It was directed by Lewis Milestone, who would go on to make All Quiet on the Western Front.) By the mid-twenties, he had cut back on his newspaper work in order to concentrate on short stories. Even so, he managed to write revue sketches and song lyrics for Florenz Ziegfeld, contributing six numbers to the Ziegfeld-produced musical Smile, with a cast that included Fred and Adele Astaire. (“Someone gave me a rhyming dictionary for Christmas once,” Dad told a reporter who wanted to know what had caused him to take up lyric-writing. “I couldn’t exchange it for a tie.”) A source of particular satisfaction to him, after a number of unsuccessful attempts to write for the stage, was the play June Moon, which he co-wrote with George S. Kaufman. A comedy about the popular songwriting business, it became one of the bigger hits of the 1929–30 Broadway season.

The excerpts quoted, along with later family revelations and my own memories, all testify to my impulse to assert myself. The fact that I was overweight and uncoordinated increased rather than diminished that need. The best way to get the attention I craved, it seemed, was to express opinions that ranged from the unexpected to the outrageous. By the time I was twelve, I had proceeded from identifying with God to denying his existence. There was no such entity, I told a next-door neighbor. (Though his mother lodged a complaint with my mother, I am happy to say that the boy eventually recovered from the shock and became a Congressman.)

The most striking thing about our household was the absence of outward emotion. What we sought to express were our thoughts rather than our feelings. A raised voice was a rare and unwelcome event, and all of us were fairly adept at holding our tongues, though William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, described my brother David, the youngest of us, as “a little more open and a little more talkative than the other Lardners . . . ”

My brothers and I never had the traditional man-to-man talk about sex with our father. I doubt if he even considered it, since he would have been unable to say the necessary words. (They were quite literally unmentionable in our household.) Increasingly, in the last decade or so of his life, Dad realized that other people did speak them—indeed, that some writers found sex not only a permissible but a favorite subject. These peers, from his point of view, were unforgivably deficient in taste. In his own work, even as it grew deeper and more psychologically complex, there was never a suggestion of amorous passion; nor did he ever write anything that would normally be considered a love scene.

If roots in the New World were a defense, I would have been well-protected against the charge of Un-Americanness. Ancestors on both sides of my family had been here since the seventeenth century, and the Lardners as well as the Abbotts (my mother’s forebears) were double pioneers, originally settling in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, respectively, and then, in the mid-nineteenth century, in Michigan and Indiana. But their migration to the untamed Middle West is not to be confused with that of the propertyless pioneers in their covered wagons or the trainloads of European immigrants seeking free land—a hundred and sixty acres that, along with a lot of hard work, could support a family. The Lardners and Abbotts were looking for land, too, but in much larger quantities, as the best investment for their capital. As an added attraction, they were leaving metropolises with hundreds of upper-class people and heading for frontier settlements—Niles, Michigan, and Goshen, Indiana—where they would share their elite status with no more than half-a-dozen other families.

Dad’s maternal grandfather was rector of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Niles. My grandmother and aunt, both named Lena, played the organ in that church, consecutively, for a hundred and one years. The literalness of the religious faith in the older Lena can best be illustrated by a letter she wrote in 1898 to an acquaintance whose child had died:

Dear Mrs. Miller:

From my own experience I know how sad you are and how much you miss the bright child who was your sweet little companion in daily life. The only comfort for you is to try to realize that she is happy and safe. All that a loving mother could do for her does not compare with what her Heavenly Father has already done for her. After her brief suffering, she is safe and happy in His arms forever. It is by thinking of her joy that you can be consoled and with the Christian’s faith, you look forward to meeting her again.

Truly yours.

Lena B. Lardner

There were people even in those days who would have found such a message of consolation infuriating in its smug righteousness, but we may assume my grandmother knew her recipient and that it was received in the same warmhearted spirit in which it was written.

My grandmother was Dad’s only teacher until he was ten, when a private tutor took over his education and that of his two youngest siblings. So he was not subject to the kind of schoolyard talk, 1890s-style, through which children often gain some concept, however distorted, of the facts of life. He did, however, attend Niles High School for four years, and more significantly, after he became a sportswriter almost by accident, spent a decade in daily association with baseball players and other coarse creatures of the sporting world. Yet to a remarkable degree, he remained unaffected by these influences. As late as 1922, my brother Jim and I had our allowances canceled for a month for introducing the following sidesplitter at the dinner table:

Q: What was the longest slide in the Bible?

A: When Joshua went from Jericho to Jerusalem on his ass.

His old-fashioned values endured through the years that followed World War I, when styles of dress and speech as well as relationships between men and women altered so drastically. It didn’t matter that the two fields with which he was most closely associated were sports and the Broadway theater, or that a favorite friend was Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote stories about the Jazz Age and dedicated a book of them (All the Sad Young Men) to Ring and Ellis, my parents.

Two decades earlier, they had conducted a long courtship mainly by correspondence. They didn’t see much of each other because he was traveling most of the time with the Chicago White Sox or to other sporting events, while my mother, then Ellis Abbott, was an honor student at Smith College. After their formal engagement, she took a job teaching some of the faculty offspring at a military academy in Indiana, and he accepted one in St. Louis as editor of The Sporting News. His involved a raise from thirty-five to fifty dollars a week, but the main selling point he cited to Ellis and her family was that it would keep him in one place. After he quit that job, having discovered that his employer was a crook, he tried to sell Mr. Abbott on an offer he had received to become business manager of a minor-league baseball team in Louisville, Kentucky. But Ellis’s father, she reported in one of her letters, “thinks a ‘sporting man’ is a ‘sporting man’ and can’t change his sports, and that his daughters are delicate and rare things. And that they must not come in contact with that ‘damned sporting crowd.’” Dad responded by addressing Mr. Abbott directly, promising him that “Ellis won’t ever have to see a ballplayer or a ball game.”

Then came a surprising twist. The Boston American offered him forty-five dollars a week to cover baseball there, and his future father-in-law raised no objection. To the Abbotts of Andover, evidently, an association with Boston made anything, even ballplayers, more refined. Interestingly, Dad never advanced as an argument in his favor the possibility that he might sell stories to magazines and so become a professional writer, maybe because he hadn’t considered it. He was twenty-six when they were finally married in June 1911, and another three years passed before he wrote and sold his first piece of fiction to cover the expenses created by the arrival of his second son.

My mother was wise and charming as well as strikingly attractive, and we all derived as much from her as we did from our father. Besides the environmental influence, we got half our genes from the Abbott lineage. In all the important areas of parenthood, Mother and Dad shaped our attitudes. What they thought about books, art, music, theater, politics, people, and social behavior was what we responded to, usually affirmatively. With our father’s encouragement, we followed the big sports events and the Broadway hits, while Mother inspired us to read Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, her favorite authors.

Raised in a Presbyterian household in Goshen, Indiana, where the rules of speech and conduct were pretty much the same as the Lardners’s in Niles, Michigan, she was nonetheless better able to adjust to a changing environment. In her later years (she died in 1960), she could tolerate if not approve the idea of an unmarried couple living together. In his far shorter life, Dad never yielded ground at all. Confined to a hospital most of the two years before he died (with his attitudes hardened, perhaps, by ill health), he listened to the radio and wrote reports on the new medium for The New Yorker, focusing on the sexually suggestive lyrics of popular songs. In his day as in ours, most writers were trying to break the bounds of censorship. By contrast, Dad was calling on the network censors to come out of hiding and cleanse the airwaves of such provocative lyrics as “As you desire me, So shall I come to you . . . Let come what may.” Just on the borderline of acceptability, he wrote, was “Let’s put out the lights and go to sleep.” (Rumor had it, he told his readers, that “in the original lyric, the last word was not ‘sleep.’”)

His inflexible thinking about such things gave me a pretty accurate notion of turn-of-the-century standards in polite society. Now, at this new turn-of-the-century, when I note how those standards have altered, I find the change quite as drastic as the other great developments of the past hundred years. Each generation, of course, remarks on how much more freedom there is in speech, books, magazines, theater, and on other media, and each generation seems convinced that permissiveness has gone about as far as it can go. Just a few years after my father’s death, Cole Porter jokingly compared the “olden days,” when “a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking,” with the licentiousness of 1936, when, “Heaven knows, Anything goes.”

How would my father have reacted, I wonder, to the movies of the 1990s, with male and female frontal nudity, their almost obligatory intercourse scenes and, in dialogue, the forbidden word “fucking” as a leading modifier? Or to the recognition of gay and lesbian behavior as acceptable variations of sexual expression? During my early years in the movie business, the long list of words forbidden by the motion picture production code included floozie, trollop, tart, and at least a dozen other ways of describing a loose woman. There were also a large number of restrictions on what could be shown visually. These fell for the most part in two areas: first, explicit treatment of sex and certain designated parts of the human body; second, criminal acts or acts considered sinful unless the perpetrators were duly punished for them, usually by death. The cause of death, incidentally, could be completely unrelated to the offense. It was okay for a character to get away with robbery, murder, or adultery—with almost any offense imaginable, in fast, as long as you tacked on a scene later in the story in which he met a terrible end in an earthquake or some other chance disaster.

These days, characters are no longer required to do penance for their misdeeds, and there is no word that cannot be spoken on the screen. M*A*S*H, in 1970, was the first major American movie in which the word “fuck” was spoken. Although the script was mine, it was Bob Altman, the director, who added the expletive. After the picture received an “X” rating from the censors, the studio executives decided to fight it. In the end, they succeeded in winning an upgrade (or downgrade, depending on your perspective) to an “R.” Things have grown even more permissive between then and now, and you might be tempted to conclude, on the basis of recent releases, that there is nothing that cannot be shown on the screen today. Based on the record of the twentieth century, however, it is probably safer not to predict what will be allowed in the twenty-first.

Fame and its rewards affected us profoundly. The house we moved into in the East was a large one on a hill in Great Neck, Long Island. There was a series of terraces in front and artificial levels behind that dropped gracefully toward the waters of Manhasset Bay. The first of these, our mother’s territory, was a more or less formal flower garden with a circular lawn and a goldfish pool. The next contained a three-car garage, stables, and a vegetable garden. Then came a tennis court, which on a few choice winter nights could be flooded and converted into a hockey rink, and finally the largest level of all, accommodating a full-scale playground with an elaborate set of gymnastic equipment and a baseball diamond big enough for Little League play.

Two strong forces encouraged us to use these facilities to their fullest. There was Dad, a firm believer in the interdependence of a healthy mind and healthy body; and there was Miss Feldman, our Prussian-born, uniformed, trained nurse, who was even more partisan on the subject. Added to the familial entourage after my youngest brother David’s birth in 1919, she had come home from the hospital with Mother. Her then-comfortable live-in salary was seven dollars a day for as much time as she was needed, which turned out to be ten of the next twelve years.

Most employees try to limit the scope of their responsibilities; Miss Feldman only strove to increase hers. Her supervision became an increasingly dominant factor in our lives, more so than our parents realized because it was in her nature to move inexorably into any vacuum. Such vacuums were created in the main by two strong drives of Mother’s. One was to be with other people—to entertain and be entertained, to keep abreast of books and the theater, and to fill her guest bedrooms with as many Lardners and Abbotts and unrelated visitors as she could possibly coax into them. The other impulse (often in conflict with the first) was to be the most helpful wife she could be to an ever more famous man, assuming the roles of social secretary, business agent, and protector against his many admirers and his inclination to do favors for relatives and friends. These duties expanded steadily as his health and his resistance to alcohol declined.

The passage of time has not fully vindicated Miss Feldman’s approach to child-raising. Besides providing us with a diet packed with cholesterol and rigidly supervising our toilet visits, she was obsessed with the benefits of fresh air. The third floor of our house was occupied by servants, generally three of them, among whom Miss Feldman, as she frequently reminded us, was not one. The six bedrooms on the second floor should have been more than a reasonable number for seven people, but not the way they were actually allocated. Dad and Mother, at her insistence because of his drinking and working habits, each had a room; so did Miss Feldman, and there were two guest rooms. That left one room for the boys, but it didn’t even have a single bed in it; we used it as a dressing room. The four of us spent our nights, including the ones when we froze the tennis court, sleeping on a screened porch with awnings that could be lowered against anticipated precipitation. The unanticipated kind made its way through the screens with considerable freedom. I can recall lying awake while an inch of snow accumulated on the floor. Each of us waited in silence for a more enterprising brother to get out of bed and let down the awnings.

After entering the house to dress and have breakfast, we would be dispatched to the playground until the time came to leave for school. John, from the age of nine on, was regularly driven to a private school in a neighboring community and picked up daily by our current chauffeur-gardener. Jim and I, and eventually David, were transported in the other car to a different, expensive private school by Miss Feldman, relentlessly dressed in a white, starched uniform and matching nurse’s cap. Mother, who had driven during the first two years of her marriage, never took the wheel after a Chandler, with the standard soft-top of the day, overturned and John, then a baby, was thrown out unhurt. It was at Dad’s request that she gave up driving.

While all the other children had lunch at school, Miss Feldman, more days than not, arrived in uniform and cap to whisk us off to the superior fare she provided at home, and then, if there was time, to our private playground, before returning us to the afternoon session. The school day usually wound up with athletics outdoors: the colder the winter weather, the better the hockey on the school pond. Even so, we were invariably dispatched to the playground upon our return home. For roughly the duration of Daylight Savings Time, that was also where we went after supper until darkness impended. As for summer vacation, I doubt if we ever averaged more than two hours out of twenty-four indoors on a rainless day.

Our father didn’t communicate much with Miss Feldman directly, but when it came to exercise they were very much on the same wavelength. His own upbringing had been deplorably soft, he believed, and he didn’t want us to carry the same burden of indolence. One summer, he went as far as to hire an All-American end from Vanderbilt University to teach us basic gridiron skills. We devoted two days a week to our football studies for about a month, without any promising results. Jim, the only one of us with speed and agility, was too light for football, never reaching a hundred and fifty pounds. The other three of us were simply not the stuff of which athletes are made, and in this respect I was outstanding. Consistently overweight until my mid-twenties, I was also physically inept.

We certainly made use of the tennis court, the beach and, when we could gather enough visiting cousins or schoolmates, the baseball diamond. The start of one such game was briefly delayed when a visiting player noticed an unusual design on the ball and found, on closer examination, that it had been autographed by the entire New York Yankee team including Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. We loftily informed him that we always played with autographed balls, replenishing our supply whenever we visited a ballpark and the players came over to greet Dad and offer us their standard gifts. It was the one piece of sports equipment he didn’t have to pay for.

But the great majority of our outdoor hours were spent reading—horizontally, as a rule, perhaps because we inherited the nearsightedness of the Abbotts. At any given moment, two or three of us might be stretched out on the ground with a book. For days when the ground was too damp or too cold, there was a swing with two facing seats and a capacity of four. I have never found a better test of an author’s grip on my attention than reading in that swing on a really cold winter day. Dumas was the most dangerous, especially The Count of Monte Cristo and The Vicomte de Bragelonne. (Who decided that one name should be translated, the other not?) His novels so engrossed me that I’d forget to stamp my feet occasionally to ward off frostbite.

Did we become readers by inheritance or acquire the habit by imitation? Dad always had a book in hand, but the amount of time he gave to reading kept diminishing. His favorite author was Dostoevsky; his favorite book, read many times, The Brothers Karamazov. In the last years of his life, however, he rarely read fiction, opting instead for one book after another about the American Civil War. Mother, then and always the only college graduate in the family, spent about the same amount of time revisiting the classics as she did covering current fiction. Among the children, it was a matter of course that you were able to read and write by the age of four, and by six it was practically a full-time occupation. (We all began to wear glasses in our teens.) In first grade, I was detached from my peers and assigned to the third grade for reading purposes only. We each skipped a grade at one point or another, though David required special coaching for the purpose. His tutors were Jim and I, at ten cents an hour apiece.

If any considerable part of the reading and writing we did at home had been devoted to schoolwork, we could have been prize students. Regrettably, homework had a low priority among us. Our report cards fell into a predictable pattern: high marks in English and one or two other subjects we liked, just getting by in the rest. The lowest marks were likely to be for “effort.” Jim was the only one who shared Mother’s facility for mathematics, which, along with his English skills, kept his grades above the family norm until his first year at Harvard, which he devoted to songwriting.

I was regarded as the difficult one in the family and invariably got myself into the most trouble, out of a spirit of undirected rebelliousness. Perhaps some of that was a defensive reaction to having brothers one and three years older. If I felt put upon, and I did, the forces that united, in kindergarten and at home, to correct my natural left-handedness by instructing me to write and eat right-handedly only compounded the problem. Undoubtedly, this explains the scrawl I’m left with instead of respectable handwriting. My junior position in the hierarchy probably also contributed to a stutter that plagued me intermittently until boarding school, when I deliberately went in for public speaking and whittled the problem down to a mere speech hesitation.

Jim and I, only fifteen months apart in age, were a sharp contrast physically. I grew to six feet and at one time over two hundred pounds. He was slight though remarkably strong. He played rugby and lacrosse in college and became a New England intercollegiate wrestling champion, incidentally mastering the technique of tearing a Manhattan phone book in half. His mental processes were superbly logical, and I never saw him, as boy or man, display anger or more than the mildest sort of enthusiasm for anyone or anything. Some observers have noted similar mental and emotional patterns in me, but they’re a pale imitation of his.

Despite our differences, Jim and I found ourselves in splendid accord most of the time We liked the same books, games, movies, radio programs, and people. We had an appreciation of, and sensitivity to, each other’s minds that enabled us to divine in most situations what the other was thinking. This paid off for us financially when we partnered at bridge.

None of the four of us was ever enrolled in a public institution of any kind. When we completed eighth grade, the local high school was not even seriously considered. I didn’t question this policy at the time, and I thoroughly enjoyed my four years of boarding school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, the town where the Abbott family had settled in the seventeenth century. By the time my own children were ready for high school, however, I had developed a strong preference for public education. Happily, this evolution in my thinking coincided with a sharp drop in income as a result of the blacklist.

My educational biases sprang partly from the recollection of an American history class at our Great Neck grade school. My classmates, of whom there were never more than seven or eight, were the children of investment bankers, corporate presidents, and the like. Adapting herself splendidly to her audience, our teacher presented us with the heroic struggle of Theodore Roosevelt against the temptations of wealth and idleness. It was no big deal, she maintained, to work hard and make a name for yourself if you were born in a log cabin and you didn’t have any other choice. But when the heir to a proud name and a secure fortune dedicated himself to public service, it was sheer altruism all the way.

In 1928, our parents sold the house in Great Neck and moved to East Hampton on the other end of Long Island. In those days it was still a small town bordering the fishing village of Amagansett. A few socialite families and a smaller number of artists and writers had summer places there. My parents had joined with their closest friends, the sportswriter Grantland Rice and his wife Kate, in buying beach property and building adjoining houses on the dunes. Where the joint driveway separated, Dad had a sign made that said “Dixie Highway” and pointed toward the Rices, who came from Tennessee and Georgia respectively. The year of their move was also the year I joined John and Jim at Andover, so the beach house, where we spent our summers, was the only home we had from then on. During the shorter Christmas and spring vacations from school and college, we had temporary quarters in Manhattan, where our parents and David had lived eight months a year while he attended a private day school.

The main attractions of East Hampton for the four of us were the twenty-one grass tennis courts at the posh Maidstone Club and swimming in the breaking waves of the open Atlantic. We made a special point of going into those waves on the days the Coast Guard raised a red flag signaling that they were too rough for swimming.

In a poll of the two hundred boys in Andover’s class of 1932, I was not ranked in the categories Most Respected, Most Capable, Most Promising, Most Popular, or Best Student, but I took first place in Most Original, Wittiest, and Biggest Bluffer in Classroom; I came in second in Laziest, Windiest, and Hardest to Rattle. But my reputation among the classmates who knew me best rested on a series of entertaining campaigns against what I considered objectionable school practices and regulations.

There was a daily chapel service conducted by the headmaster, and on Sundays both a morning and evening service conducted by a guest clergyman. The morning ones tended to be quite lengthy and I chose to call attention to that fact one Sunday by putting an alarm clock in the drawer of the lectern, set to go off twenty minutes after the visiting preacher began to speak. By a happy accident, the drawer stuck closed, and the alarm continued to ring until it ran down.

Permission to smoke was granted to seniors only in one special designated area. I deliberately arranged to be seen with a pipe in my mouth by a particularly officious faculty member on a campus path that was not so privileged. It was a cold winter day, and the illusion that I was violating the rules was greatly enhanced by the fact that the air I exhaled resembled smoke. It was a pleasure to demonstrate to him that the pipe was empty and his was a false accusation.

There were Greek-letter clubs at Andover, imitations of college fraternities, and some of them made themselves especially sacrosanct by barring non-members from ever entering their premises. I led a nocturnal foray into one of these, leaving behind evidence that anonymous visitors had violated the shrine. If the perpetrators of a stunt like that had been discovered, we would have been placed on probation. I was also involved several times in offenses that could have resulted in instant expulsion. The Prohibition Amendment was in force at the time and speakeasies, being illegal, naturally didn’t require proof of age. I was one of a small group of venturesome boys who would sneak out of our dormitories on a Saturday night, board a bus to the nearby industrial town of Lawrence, and spend an hour or two drinking bootleg beer.

The most memorable event of my years at Andover was my four-story fall from a dormitory window ledge. I was standing on that narrow ledge holding onto a shutter because I intended to enter by window the locked room of a boy who had refused to share a box of goodies from home. I had my advance foot on his ledge when the shutter came loose, and I lost my grip, falling to a patch of lawn and fracturing my shoulder and pelvis. (My head missed a cement block by about six inches.) I spent the next six weeks in the school infirmary and a Boston hospital. Despite all this activity and inactivity, I managed to function as editor of the school literary magazine and to graduate with a decent academic record while garnering prizes for writing and speaking at commencement, where I also served as class historian.

The first political stand I can remember taking was to declare myself a Democrat in the early stages of the Great Depression, partly because I found the image of President Herbert Hoover displeasing and partly to annoy my parents, who were nominal Republicans, although they rarely bothered to vote. I had not yet turned sixteen when, at a bus stop between Boston and New York in June of 1931, I climbed onto the roof of the vehicle in which Jim and I were traveling home from Andover, and—at no one’s urging but my own—delivered an impromptu speech in support of New York Governor and presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

But by November, had I been eligible to vote for him, I would not have done so. I was spending my weekends touring the state of New Jersey as a member of the Socialist Club of Princeton University, and mounting soap-boxes to further the candidacy of Norman Thomas, Class of 1905, who returned to the campus twice a year to preach at a Sunday chapel service and meet in the evening with his political disciples in the student body. I can’t recall all the factors that led me to this conversion; certainly, one was the congressional candidacy of the Socialist ticket in Connecticut of Heywood Broun, a friend of my father’s who always gave us boys something to think about and laugh at. But he wouldn’t have had such an influence on me, I’m sure, if not for the bigger factor in my leftward migration: the growing severity of the Depression and what I assessed as the failure of both major parties to come to grips with it in their platforms.

The idea of going to Princeton originated with another family friend, Scott Fitzgerald, who described its virtues to me when I was about eight. My brothers and I liked Scott, who told us stories and performed card tricks for us. But it was Zelda, his wife, who made the greater impression on me at that age. I have never seen a photograph that conveyed the beauty I saw in her, or known another adult who seemed to say whatever came into her head without any discernible exercise of judgment.

Scott and Zelda moved to France after only a year and a half as neighbors of ours. During the Great Neck period, the friendship that developed between Dad and Scott was based in part on their joint fondness for alcohol. They were nearly twelve years apart in age and drastically different in ambitions and opinions, but they so enjoyed each other (and the whiskey) that they sometimes talked all night and needed a day or more to sleep it off before they could get back to work. Scott was a great conversationalist in those days, vain but charming, full of ambition and concern about his literary reputation. Dad was also captivated by Zelda, whose symptoms of mental illness were not yet manifest. “Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist,” he once wrote, “and Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty.”

Four years later, in 1937, I met a far different Scott at Dorothy Parker’s house in Hollywood, and saw him intermittently until his death in December 1940. In the intervening period, as described in his book The Crack-up, he had undergone a drastic personality transformation. He spoke little and without visible emotion, and he was able to stay on the wagon for longer stretches of time. But when he went off it, recovery was a much harder struggle. He was pessimistic about the movie work he was doing and about what had happened to his standing as a writer. He had to face the fact that his books were no longer selling, while his former protégée, Ernest Hemingway, had a smash hit in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Scott died without finishing his final novel, The Last Tycoon, and without any grounds for anticipating that he would be regarded as a literary pioneer and one of the great American writers of the century.

A classmate who became a close friend and my roommate my sophomore year was Herbert Bayard Swope, Jr., whose family had also lived nearby in Great Neck. Swope, Sr., had been editor of the highly regarded New York World, and I spent a good deal of weekend time at their family homes in Manhattan and Sands Point, Long Island, which were known as gathering places for the cream of New York literary society. One of the people I met through the Swopes was Alexander Woollcott, the dramatic and literary critic, essayist and radio star-to-be, who engineered my first professional writing assignment at the age of seventeen.

Launching a new magazine called Esquire in the spring of 1933, the editor Arnold Gingrich decided to commission an article from a representative of the college generation. Woollcott recommended me, having read my work in Princeton’s literary and humor magazines, and I eagerly accepted. It didn’t occur to them or me that it might be inappropriate, even arrogant, for a freshman with less than six months of campus experience to undertake such an assignment. (“Good God,” my father said when he saw my “Princeton Panorama” in the inaugural issue of the magazine. “Isn’t any one of you going to turn out to be anything but a writer?”) My story was advertised on the cover alongside the work of Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, John Dos Passos, and Erskine Caldwell. I was the only one of these luminaries, in fact, to receive a full-page photographic portrait. In the piece itself, I maintained that college was more important as a social experience— a place to make “contacts” and join in “bull sessions”—than for any knowledge to be acquired by the conventional academic means. I described Princeton as “one of the oldest and most refined gentlemen’s finishing schools in the country” and noted that “the curriculum is one of the best furnished in an American college, and is adequate for any gentleman.” A number of people commented favorably on my contribution, and I scarcely noticed that none of them was a Princeton upperclassman. After all, I hardly knew any Princeton upperclassmen.