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Brian’s Journal
APRIL 2, 1947. I returned to my post at Justin in January, and the winter term has been crowded with catching up. I determined, however, that I would spend the two weeks of the spring vacation alone at school and review my thoughts and notes on Dr. Prescott. Ten precious days have now gone by, and I am still in a quandary.
What do I do with these papers?
How can I use them so as to convey the smallest hint of his greatness, bound as I am to include the essence of Jules Griscam’s story? Not that I regard Dr. Prescott’s condition as a wholly unreasonable one. I agree with him that his failure with Jules was an important part of his record as a headmaster, and with Mr. Griscam that there was a “hard” period in Dr. Prescott’s life.
But my trouble is precisely that I am not interested in writing a biography. I am interested only in inspiring my reader, and I am much at odds with my century in believing that to demonstrate the best by itself is more inspiring than the best with the worst. I want to reveal Dr. Prescott resplendent in the pulpit with his arms, so to speak, outstretched and his great eyebrows arched. I want the little figures like myself who might turn up on preliminary drafts washed out of the final picture. I know that we live in an age where the homely or psychological detail is considered all-important. We like heroes in shirtsleeves, or, in other words, we don’t like heroes. But things were not always that way, and today is not forever.
The Francis Prescott who was Charley Strong’s boyhood hero certainly existed, and existed more vividly, to my thinking, than the Francis Prescott who failed to sympathize with Jules Griscam. I say more “vividly” because Charley Strong’s vision of God coincided, at least at moments, with Dr. Prescott’s own, and it was this kind of bridge, this kind of communication of the ideal, that seems to me the only part of the Justin story worth memorializing. To tell it otherwise is to record a failure, and why do that? Something remarkable happened on that campus, and there is no profit in dwelling on the unremarkable.
Of course, nobody knows better than I that in the end Dr. Prescott deemed himself a failure, but a contrary view seemed to be overwhelmingly borne out when the great coffin, draped in the school colors of red and gold, was carried by the prefects from the packed chapel through a double row of hundreds of graduates, for whom there had been no room inside, all singing at the top of their lungs: “The Son of God goes forth to war.” Behind came the Governor, the Bishop, four senators, eight judges and the headmasters of every boys’ school in New England. Was it simply, as he himself might have put it, that the survivors of his organization, now that he was dead and harmless, wanted to build a bonfire of glory in which they could warm their trembling fingers and forget their relief?
I think not. I think the demonstration came from the depth of many hearts. For I believe that Dr. Prescott’s true greatness lay less in his school than in his impact on individual boys. I even believe that he knew this himself, for he knew himself thoroughly, good and bad. He knew his capacity to be petty, vain, tyrannical, vindictive, even cruel. He fully recognized his propensity to self-dramatization and his habit of sacrificing individuals to the imagined good of his school. Yet he also saw at all times and with perfect clarity that his own peculiar genius was for persuading his fellow men that life could be exciting and that God wanted them to find it so. And having once seen and understood the good that he was thus destined to accomplish, how could he ever stop? How could he ever, even in moments of doubt, switch off his genius and leave his audience before a darkened stage?
Justin Martyr remains to us, as does the legend of Francis Prescott. In this early spring the awakening elms seem more glorious than ever and the brown craggy chapel tower more massive against a white sky streaked with blue. I walked through the empty dining room this morning to look at the Rand portrait. His hands folded uncharacteristically in his lap, Dr. Prescott gazed serenely over my head at the campus, which appeared in its entirety through the wide south windows. Listening to the purr of the lawnmower outside I had a funny feeling in that silent chamber that he might have been dead a hundred years.
Perhaps that is because I am less concerned now with the man than with the legend. Dr. Prescott was greater than the school which he created and by which he was ultimately disillusioned, and it is my ambition to distill for future generations of Justin boys some bit of the essence of that greatness. To those who would claim that I am contemplating a novel and not a history, I can only respond that the stories of all great men have been in some part works of fiction.
But I must stop rambling. I must cease my everlasting speculations. If I am ever to write anything, even if I give it my whole lifetime, I must still make a beginning. I must still make a mark on the acres of white paper that seem to unroll before me like arctic snows. And I must shut with a man’s firmness a journal which seems the softest of self-indulgences in contrast to the austerely empty notebook that now I open.
About the Author
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS was honored in the year 2000 as a “Living Landmark” by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. During his long career he wrote more than sixty books, including the story collection Manhattan Monologues and the novel The Rector of Justin. The former president of the Academy of Arts and Letters, he resided in New York City until his death in January 2010.
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The Rector of Justin Page 33
