Walter Kirn

by Lost in the Meritocracy (v5)

  I would have to be myself.

  MY CLOSEST FRIEND AS A JUNIOR WAS V., A PAKISTANI boy who’d disappointed his family—and even, as he told it, his nation’s leaders—by leaving his intended major, electrical engineering, for philosophy. He claimed that his decision was purely intellectual, but I suspected a social motive. Among the campus’s tastemaking elite, philosophy was in vogue just then, especially the arcane linguistic variety that allowed one to brandish Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, whereas engineering was deemed unsuitable for anyone other than indentured third worlders whose governments were paying their tuition in return for future work designing missiles and irrigation projects.

  This had been V.’s deal. Once he broke it, whether out of conviction or in deference to fashion, he couldn’t go home again. That made two of us.

  I met V on one of my rare visits to the labyrinth of open stacks housed in the bombproof trio of subbasements beneath the Firestone Library. The place was designed like an iceberg, with most of its square footage buried and a fortresslike outcropping on top. Standing on the plaza near its entrance, lighting yet another cigarette as a way of postponing going inside, I could imagine a legion of the literate aiming crossbows from the parapets at onrushing armies of hollering barbarians. The confrontation might end in countless casualties, but the books would survive, civilization would endure. Not me, though—I’d probably be slaughtered. Firestone intimidated me, breeding a sort of cultural vertigo whenever I found myself in its vaulted lobby presenting my puny ID card to the guards. When the battle for civilization finally came I’d probably be stranded outside its walls.

  I went there that evening not to read but to listen to tapes of illustrious dead poets reciting their best-known works. The tapes were a bit of labor-saving luck that I’d heard about from an older English major who was even lazier than I was. You weren’t allowed to enjoy them in your room, though; you had to consume them in the library, through pairs of gigantic cushioned headphones that might have been surplus from NASA Mission Control. I chose Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell that night because I was in the mood for doomed New Englanders. Plath’s voice, pressured and brutal, frightened me because I could truly imagine her alive, which helped me picture her killing herself, too, while Lowell’s voice was so antique and magisterial that I couldn’t believe he’d ever lived on earth. After hanging the headphones on their hook and signaling the attendant that I was finished, I decided to ride the elevator downstairs and look for a volume of Lowell’s poetry with an author photo on the jacket. I wanted assurance of his materiality.

  About an hour later, while waiting in the checkout line to present my dubious credentials as a trustworthy borrower of masterpieces, I fell into a conversation with V., whom I found instantly engaging. He was the first brown person I’d ever spoken to on an approximately equal basis, and I liked the slim symmetries of his face and figure. I also liked the way he dressed. His dark V-necked sweater, though slightly pilled and stretched into shapelessness at the cuffs and hem, seemed effortlessly collegiate. His black shoes were stout and nicely scuffed. His pants were proper pants, not jeans. He dressed as I fancied the young Lowell had dressed, and as I wished I dressed, with offhand British elegance.

  Immanuel Kant was the topic that broke the ice for us. My knowledge of the impeccable old German came from a philosophy class whose internationally respected professor taught that Kant, with his clockwork daily strolls and monastic temperament, was the last in a line of ambitious eminences who’d sought to “ground” ethics, morals, and metaphysics in a realm of changeless “authenticity.” Kant had almost succeeded in this feat, but the fact that he hadn’t proved, said the professor, that the whole endeavor was futile and ought to be abandoned for the pursuit of a humbler form of wisdom: “the conversation.” This was fine with me. Never did I consider it bad news when someone who’d devoted decades to mastering a knotty subject reported that the subject, in the end, wasn’t worth devoting decades to.

  Our chat about Kant saw V and me across the Firestone plaza to Nassau Street and down the staircase of the Annex. We found a table near a wall, close enough to the crowd to feel its warmth but far away enough to hear each other speak. I felt invigorated in V’s company. Whatever the schools were like in Pakistan, they clearly did a better job than ours in instilling analytic agility and at least the beginnings of erudition. Given no more than a phrase (“the conversation,” say), V could cite a set of classical precepts that were both plausible and graspable, good for hours of heightened interaction. I felt, in his company as in no one else’s, that my bullshitting was a defensible activity, a circular approach to real enlightenment. And I felt flattered when he listened to me. Here was a young man who represented the best of the best of an entire country—of an entire people, as I saw it—and I was holding his attention.

  Drugs played no part in our relationship. Ours were purely sober colloquies, fueled by aspiration and affection. We walked through the leaves, past sunlit spires of stone, attacking the roots of language and understanding with hatchets of iron skepticism. Reality softened around us. We came to regard ourselves as lonely Nietzscheans who’d cast off thick veils of prejudicial nonsense and emerged as unencumbered wills. “I’m leaning over. I’m picking up this rock. I could throw it,” I said, “and break that window, but instead I’ll hold on to it. Because I’m free.”

  Later that fall we sat by a canal and watched the crew team row past in its trim vessels. By then we’d declared ourselves “phenomenologists.” I wasn’t sure what this required of us besides a refusal to meet the gazes of students who were still mired in what we termed, dismissively, as “consensual certitude.”

  “After you graduate,” I said, “how long will they let you stay in the U.S.?”

  “Indefinitely, I hope. Provided, of course, that I find secure employment or continue with my studies.”

  I nodded, chilled. I’d given not a single thought, I realized, to the question of what I might do once I left Princeton.

  “I’d like to teach someday,” V. said. He reached for an acorn, pried its cap off, and tossed it into the canal—another one of our little shows of freedom.

  “What subject?” I asked him. “Philosophy?”

  “Perhaps. Though I’m not convinced it can be taught. Philosophy may be over. You?” he said.

  “Maybe poetry.”

  “Teach it?”

  “No, just write it.”

  “For whom? For what sort of audience?”

  This stumped me. I sat on the grass and watched the boats slide past.

  “I’m sorry,” said V.

  “It’s fine.” I fingered an oak twig.

  “All poets have the same audience. The Silence.”

  One keen winter night we set out down Prospect Avenue with the intention of crashing a party at one of the eating clubs that wouldn’t have us. The spring before, in a process known as “bicker,” the five remaining selective clubs—Ivy, Cottage, Tiger, Colonial, and Cap and Gown—had interviewed and chosen new members. This ritual had occurred without my knowledge. I only found out about bicker afterward, when I glimpsed a Joy Division friend of mine crossing a quad one afternoon with a pair of hearty-looking new pals. I made inquiries. I learned that my friend now belonged to the Tiger Club, the ale-drenched, reactionary redoubt of Princeton’s most stalwart young misogynists. Not only was the all-male Tiger fighting a headline-making lawsuit against a rejected aspirant named Sally, but a number of its members had been implicated in the unwitting videotaping of a drunken female guest during a sex act that might have been coerced. That someone I knew had sought favor with such brutes shocked and astonished me at first, but I couldn’t blame him once I’d thought about it. They’d made him feel wanted, apparently.

  V seemed serene about having been shut out by the campus’s high-society gatekeepers. He took his meals in a campus dining hall with a trio of other students from the subcontinent, as he’d taught me to call his geographic homeland, w
hile I’d joined the bitterly nonconformist Terrace Club, home to Princeton’s proudest rejects. Though the nearly bankrupt Terrace took all comers, we (the wounded seventeen of us who ate beneath its leaking roof and danced on its warped linoleum floors) considered it exclusive anyway. We construed the fact that the place conferred no status to mean that status didn’t concern us, which made us rare individuals indeed. I subsidized my membership by working part-time in the club’s anarchic kitchen, helping concoct inexpensive meatless meals at the direction of the stoned head chef, most of whose dishes were inspired by recipes in the Moosewood Cookbook, a best-selling guide to taste-free dining. Assisting me in the task of blending hummus and garnishing it with sprouts was Edmond, a neo-pagan extrovert who liked to strip naked when the room got hot, exposing the food to casual contamination by his freely streaming armpit sweat and abundant body hair. Far from regarding this practice as unsanitary, Edmond believed it to be nourishing, since food, as he told me many times, ought to absorb the spirits of its preparers.

  On the way to the party V. and I talked Wittgenstein, loudly, so others could hear us in the dark. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” We also debated “the purpose of love.” V. held that love had no purpose—love just was—while I asserted that its purpose was to induce in the lover a condition of “dual-beholding,” whatever that might be. Girls went by as we spoke, but not a lot of them, and few who were available to our kind. Just twelve years after Princeton had gone coed, the campus gender ratio still favored males by a considerable margin, placing a premium on pretty women that only rich boys and quarterbacks could pay. Our shape-shifting, agile, approval-seeking brains may have entitled us to live and study with the children of the ruling class, but not to mate with them.

  This was the system’s great flaw, and it enraged us. A pure meritocracy, we’d discovered, can only promote; it can’t legitimize. It can confer success but can’t grant knighthood. For that it needs a class beyond itself: the high-born genealogical peerage that aptitude testing was created to overthrow.

  So far, the experiment hadn’t worked.

  Somehow we slipped past the door into a room jammed with handsome, arrhythmic dancers wearing a unisex wardrobe of khaki trousers and pastel polo shirts with turned-up collars. A few of them danced as couples, shouting at each other over the music and tossing their heads back in showy gaiety, but most of them aimed their movements at the whole group. When V and I tried to join the fun, the crowd contracted and squeezed us out in a kind of collective immune response. V wandered off somewhere, but I persevered, managing finally to find a gap in the jiggling collective. After being battered by the broad chest of a red-faced, hostile-looking athlete with a much-autographed cast on his right arm, I retreated to a smaller hole. I fixed a lunatic smile on my face and bopped to the beat in perfect isolation, thinking that if I kept the act up long enough someone would let me be her partner.

  It didn’t happen. All female backs stayed turned. I slunk off to the professionally staffed bar, and in no time I was drunk and plotting revenge.

  I targeted a girl with pearl earrings whose solid, columnar figure, husky voice, and rubber-banded sheaf of wheaty hair held no physical attraction for me but aroused my inner revolutionary. Like a frustrated stableboy in an old novel, I wanted to seduce and ruin her. Amazingly, we ended up alone on the floor of an empty upstairs room. The girl lay under me in a white bra heavily armored with wires and foam padding. She kissed me with an aggressive suction that actually drew blood from my chapped lips. She tugged at my zipper and uttered bold obscenities. Her passion was frank, elemental, and overwhelming, permitting me no illusion of domination. I was servicing a fair-haired warrior goddess, bred to lead and to give birth to leaders.

  But she was drunker than I knew; as the act began in earnest, she fell asleep—a total power outage. Should I press on? Here was a chance to vent a primal fury on a symbol of everything that tortured me.

  I couldn’t do it. I fled downstairs, found V, and made him leave with me. On the walk back to his room he said, “What assholes.”

  “We’re just as bad,” I said. I didn’t explain.

  We sobered up in V.’s room by drinking coffee. As he tended to when pressured by strong emotion, he launched into one of his disquisitions on language, and I chimed in with my own thoughts now and then, though my mind was on the girl back at the club. V.’s point, I gathered, was his usual one: words referred to other words, not to the world, and the finest, grandest words, such as “nature” and “God,” referred to nothing. Or maybe I misunderstood. It hardly mattered. It had been years since I’d known what I was talking about, and I no longer expected such conversations to be conclusive or enlightening. They were catechisms, incantations. They reminded me of a short-lived high-school class in which we’d tried to learn German phonetically by repeating sentences from tapes.

  Tonight, though, I couldn’t bear the posing, and I understood why V.’s government was mad at him: he might have built great public-works projects for them, but now he was incapable of building anything. I excused myself to use the bathroom. I filled a glass of water from the tap, looked in the mirror, and beheld an absence—nothing but the reflected door behind me and a bathrobe hanging on a hook. Where was my face? I knew it still existed because I could feel it with my fingertips, but I couldn’t find it with my eyes—a hallucination in reverse.

  “I need a doctor,” I told V. when I came back. “How late is the clinic open?”

  He ignored me. He’d been holding a thought about Hegel all this time and was writing it down so that he wouldn’t forget it later. I left him and walked back down Prospect Avenue, thinking that if I could find the girl I’d left there and share a normal human word with her, it would help me see my face again. But the party was over and the door was bolted.

  I didn’t have to wait long for my crack-up.

  DURING A CHAUCER LECTURE THE NEXT SEMESTER I LOST the ability to discern the boundaries between spoken words. Professor F., a venerable medievalist who was one of my favorites among the faculty because of his clarity and wit, opened his mouth and out flowed streams of nonsense with no meter, no structure, no definition. I closed my notebook, which I rarely wrote in, and managed to isolate a few short phrases from the slushy, garbled flow. But I couldn’t link them into sentences. My sense of time disintegrated, too. From the moment the lecture turned to mush to the moment students left their seats, several hours seemed to pass. I couldn’t believe, when I exited the building, that it was still light out.

  “Allotherwalt,” I heard someone say.

  I scrammed.

  I bought a cup of coffee at the student center, avoiding conversation with the cashier, and wandered around the campus for a while, thinking that what I needed was fresh air. The winter sun was dull and silvery, the snow on the ground a layer of crunchy filth. When I saw somebody I knew I changed direction, convinced by the formlessness of my inner monologue that my linguistic incompetence had deepened. Just outside the gates, on Nassau Street, I stared into the window of a shop at a mannequin of a model undergraduate dressed in a toggled wool coat and a wool cap. The figure was holding an old edition of Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, which I understood—incorrectly, it turned out—to be a pure celebration of Princeton’s goldenness. I wished I had money to buy the coat. It looked like a garment a boy could hide in, with a hood that would cast a shadow over his face and pockets in which to conceal his trembling hands.

  Someone touched my right elbow: Adam. He spoke. I smiled. He spoke again, at length. I held the smile. His eyes narrowed with what I gathered to be concern. I rubbed my brow in some vague, all-purpose excuse, and before he could inquire further, I darted across the street and set a course toward the Princeton Theological Seminary, where I felt confident I’d be left alone. Wrong. While I was resting on a bench there, Professor R. appeared beside me. He gestured bizarrely with a bent thumb, scratching at the air.

  He wanted something.

  I
figured it out when I saw his unlit cigarette.

  He was the last person I wanted to see. A poet in the Creative Writing Department, Professor R. was my junior-paper adviser and my only real friend among the faculty. The purple dents beneath his eyes, his powerlessness over coffee and tobacco, and his kindly, doleful manner had persuaded me that I could trust him. It helped that he was in his early thirties and looked like a student, just a very tired one. We met periodically in his small office to review my progress on my paper about John Berryman’s Dream Songs, a harrowing cycle of poems about rage, but within a few minutes the topic usually shifted to something broader. These discussions allowed me to flourish arcane concepts picked up from my bull sessions with V, but if Professor R. ever caught on to the thinness of my borrowed ideas, he was careful not to show it. With him, I was the thinker I hoped to pass as, skeptical, ironic, and unconventional. We drank our coffee black with sugar and let the ashes from our waving cigarettes fall where they might, on the floor and on his desk.

  There was a fair chance I loved the man.

  I read his lips as he thanked me for a light. My “You’re welcome,” though scrambled to my own ears, didn’t appear to alarm or disconcert him. His manner remained easy, casual. Judging by the shapes his mouth made and my memories of our last conference, I surmised that he was talking about Berryman; about his “melodic strategies,” perhaps, or, it could have been, his “misanthropy.” I devised a remark that allowed for most contingencies (“I’m still assessing that”) and then, in response to the thoughtful-sounding statement which then came forth from him, I said, “My instinct is you’re on the mark.” Any further than this I couldn’t go, though; my throat was swelling shut with panic. Worse, the faint creases between my teacher’s eyebrows had darkened and turned severe, suggesting, perhaps, that I’d been sorely mistaken about the nature of his utterances. What if he’d been remarking on the weather?