Photographs of My Father

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Paul Spike. Photographs of My Father

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“I WAS THERE. I was the eighteen-year-old boy described in this book as the person who wrote poetry and studied French. Eight years after my freshman year at Columbia, when I was living in France and still writing poetry, I read Paul Spike’s Photographs of My Father and felt that my old college friend had written the book of our generation. A dead-on portrait of who we were at that early moment in our lives when American madness was everywhere around us and in us.

“Reading this book again forty-two years later, I am even more impressed than I was the first time. The account of the murder of Spike’s heroic father is unforgettable.

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The school is run on an ingenious foundation called the Credit and Demerit System. Every possible instance of misbehavior that could occur, from missing the first two minutes of breakfast to being caught drunk and in your skivvies on the roof of the chapel, has already been assigned a value in credits and demerits. Each boy is given one hundred credits. If he is late to a class, he can lose five. If he is caught smoking in his room, he can lose a considerable bit more. Losing credits is called a sting.

“I’m going to sting you ten for that.”

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