Wry Martinis

by Christopher Buckley

  September 6, 1971, was gray, humid and horrible. Apart from the disorientation brought about by Orientation Day, I remember an extraordinary fear of the place and of the people, professors and classmates. Many of my peers must have felt the same fear, to judge from the number of visits I made to see them at the Yale Psychiatric Institute. By the time I graduated, I was familiar with the Thirty-Day ward, as well as the Ninety-Day ward, and knew some of the doctors by their first names.

  I will not be using we or us here. The dangers of the first person plural were made unwittingly and excruciatingly clear by Joyce Maynard, who matriculated with the class of 1975, but who left before graduating and eventually turned up in Vermont with J. D. Salinger.

  Miss Maynard wrote an article for The New York Times Magazine in the spring of freshman year entitled “Looking Back at Eighteen.” It was a well-written, sensitive piece about Growing Up with the JFK assassination, Vietnam, Nixon, the killings of RFK and Martin Luther King; all the rest. A subsequent piece in the “My Turn” section of Newsweek argued that we were all looking for heroes; and a third piece, which appeared in a fashion magazine under the title, “The Embarrassment of Virginity” was about how her freshman year roommates—while she chose herself to remain chaste—used to stay up all night swapping abortion stories, birth control pills and tales of Lucullan sexual repasts that seemed a letter from Penthouse than Vanderbilt Hall.

  This was only the third year of coeducation. There weren’t nearly enough women at Yale and the really sharp-looking ones had been made paranoid by the hormonal effrontery of the more than “one thousand male leaders” that President Brewster had alluded to in a recent speech. The King was crucified for that statement, and so was poor Joyce Maynard, for her defense of virginity and for her observations on behalf of her generation. She had said nothing especially controversial or offensive in any of her articles. It was the we’s that did her in.

  A generation likes to be spoken about—but not spoken for. Co-opt was one of the buzz words then (as in “The Movement has been co-opted by registered Democrats”), and I guess everyone felt as though his Weltanschauung had been co-opted by Joyce Maynard, because they (we) all came down on her pretty hard. Before a year had gone by, an article ran in the Yale Daily News Magazine entitled “The Embarrassment of Joyce Maynard,” a clever but nasty little bit of invective in which the author likened her to one Consuela de la Profunda Oscuridad, publisher of an insolvent Madrid periodical of the early 1800s known chiefly for her theory that the military power of the Iberian people depended on the traditional chastity of Spanish women. A few months later she left Yale and did not return. And that was the last time anyone in my generation ever used that goddam pronoun; unless it referred to a specific group of less than six people.

  Another casualty of the period was Erich Segal. Love Story had opened recently at the theaters, and the nation had its hankies out. His best seller had made him terribly famous, but at Yale his name invited ridicule. I give you the following, from the same issue of the YDNM. It ran beneath a wonderful caricature by Joel Ackerman, after David’s “Death of Marat”: “By dispelling the notion that to be a success in such diverse fields as track, popular writing and scholarship one has to be discerning and tasteful, Segal has given the student hope for a life after Yale.” He was denied tenure and left for Princeton, where I’m sure he does not miss Yale. He gave a very good course, The Satires of Juvenal, Latin 49b.

  At any rate, there was the Course Catalogue to contend with those first few days—the Blue Book: 412 pages of rules, descriptions of majors, and listings of courses. Concerning the first there didn’t seem to be much problem: only troglodytes flunked out, and since Yale did not admit troglodytes, no one flunked out. QED. Actually, two F’s meant you were encouraged to spend a semester away from New Haven reordering your priorities, or however the dean put it; but two F’s were hard to come by, unless you really asked for them. Dope was okay. No one was kicked out for smoking pot or dropping acid (coke was still more or less unheard of). The rumor was that New Haven cops had to notify the campus cops if they were going to bust any students, and that the campus cops always notified the student in time for him to clean out his room. I suspect this was nonsense. During the balmy evenings of that Indian summer of ’71 the smoke was so thick, in my entryway at least, that it once set off the fire alarm, causing an amok evacuation of McClellan. Soon people learned to ignore the fire alarms on the Old Campus, and they would go off all the time, unheeded. The campus cops got even by taking longer and longer to turn them off, until one of Yale’s first lessons had been learned: accommodation. But I don’t think anyone was ever busted. There was a sense of immunity and impunity behind the walls of the Gothic fortress.

  The Blue Book was carried everywhere in clammy palms the first two weeks. The number of courses led to a lot of impulse shopping, naturally. Six weeks into Anthropology 43b, Maroon Societies seemed less intriguing than they had at the outset.

  Some courses sounded irresistibly exotic: French 91b, Le roman Africain de langue Frančaise de 1950-1965: “A critical approach to the novels of Mongo Beti.…” English 29 offered readings in Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Racine, Molière, Goethe, Ibsen, Chekhov, Beckett, Brecht, Vergil, Dante, Cervantes, Joyce: from the Odyssey to Ulysses. What a long journey that was. I remember my feet propped up on the windowsill in Linonia and Brothers on a wet spring afternoon, magnolia and wisteria blossoms outside in the courtyard, reading Molly Bloom’s last lines, “… he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes”—the feeling of triumph that brought; and the feeling of doom sitting down afterward to begin a ten-pager on “Agenbite of Inwit.”

  Skill was needed in choosing a curriculum, and it was only after a few years of practice that one became adept at writing obsequious applications to the vastly oversubscribed Residential College seminars (Dear Mr. Cosell: My fascination with sports broadcasting goes back to the first time I saw you on television.…), or at spotting a good gut.

  Guts … no curriculum was well-rounded without a gut or two. It wasn’t until sophomore year that you became really good at spotting one by its description in the Blue Book. There were clues. For instance, the “(o)” next to the course title that meant no exam; the tip-off description, “… intended for students whose interests are not primarily technical …” or, “Enrollment limited to 100 students.” Word of a new gut was passed around as carefully as samizdat lest too many find out about it. Some departments offered guts as a way of inflating their budget allocations. For instance, I think there were less than two dozen classics majors each year, but Classical Civilization 32b, Greek and Roman Mythology and the European Tradition, otherwise known as “Gods for Bods,” drew over three hundred, mostly from the ranks of the football team, the hockey team and the Yale Daily News. The total enrollment of the Classics Department thus rose greatly, giving the department chairman a reason to petition the administration for more money with which to hire teaching assistants and, presumably, a new professor for The Satires of Juvenal. Thus Yale’s second lesson was learned: Pyrrhonism.*

  There were pitfalls in choosing a gut. One professor of a course all too famous for being a gut found himself on the first day of classes staring out at hundreds of eager faces. So he announced a twenty-five-book reading list (not counting the optional reading), weekly five-page papers, random quizzes, a midterm, final, and twenty-page paper. There was a stunned silence, and at the class’s second meeting the number of students attending had dropped to less than ten. The professor kept up the subterfuge for two weeks, until the deadline for course enrollment had passed, and then announced a change in course requirements from the above chamber of horrors to one five-page paper. The true-blue guts of my era were Rocks for Jocks (An Introduction to Geology); Monkeys to Junkies (Darwin and Evolution); TV 101 (Popular Culture); Pots and Pans (American Visual Arts, 1812-1870); Nuts and Sluts (Abnormal Psychology); an
d Moonlight and Magnolias (The Antebellum South and the Civil War, 1815—1865), this last one taught by the late, great Rolly Osterweiss. The ne plus ultra gut, which set the standard by which all others were judged, was George Schrader’s The Self and Others, Philosophy 49b, described in the Blue Book as an “Exploration of the structure and dynamics of interpersonal relatedness … with particular attention to the writings of R. D. Laing.” One three-page paper on your roommate.

  Guts mattered because the Yale of the early seventies was an academic pressure cooker. It may have been hard to flunk out, but it was a lot harder to get to the top, and the job market was at a record low in those days. The first campus-wide controversy I remember, one month into freshman year, wasn’t about Vietnam but rather a plan to cut back on the hours of Sterling Library. There followed such an uproar that it was withdrawn. May Day and the Panther Trial and the strike and the days of Abbie Hoffman were over (thank God), and it was once again important to get into law school, med school or Harvard Biz. A full-page ad taken out by Kodak in the Yale Daily read: Maybe the way to change the world is to join a large corporation.

  All this led to something called Weenie-ism, as it was dubbed by a Yale Daily columnist. A weenie was identifiable by a bluish skin pallor, a result of overexposure to the fluorescent lighting in the underground Cross Campus Library, thick glasses, pimples, a plastic shirt-pocket guard, a calculator worn on the belt, a shrill, whining lamentation brought on by the loudspeaker announcement that the library would close in fifteen minutes, and a right arm that automatically jerked upward during classes whenever a question was asked of anyone but him. It was not a pleasant thing to watch them come midterms trekking en masse up Science Hill, reciting aloud their ketone syntheses on the way to Orgo, the Homeric nickname for Organic Chemistry, the premed prerequisite that only the dedicated passed, and that meant the difference between a Park Avenue practice and … oblivion!

  This is not to say there were no weenies in the Humanities; quite the contrary Horror stories abounded concerning the likelihood of English and philosophy majors obtaining gainful employment in what was always referred to numinously as Life After Yale. A history teaching assistant mused woefully over coffee once that there were exactly two openings for history Ph.D.’s in the country that spring. There were academic skirmishes in the Cross Campus Library: staking out a study carrel before thy neighbor did; hiding Closed Reserve books where no one else could find them. President Brewster, looking more and more like his Doonesbury counterpart, took note and made a speech decrying “Grim Professionalism.” The term quickly entered the Yale consciousness and became a buzz phrase for all that was lowly, bourgeois and mean in human nature. “Grim professional!” replaced “Eat my shorts” as the epithet of choice. The deteriorating situation was not helped when the administration, discovering that something like half of the senior classes were graduating with some kind of honors, decided to toughen up the requirements for cum laude, magna and summa, as well as for departmental honors. The keening of weenies, an unearthly, mournful sound, was heard echoing through the stone courtyards long into the sleepless nights.

  There was a girl who studied even while walking between classes; when it rained, she covered her books in large plastic baggies so she could continue despite. When at graduation she was awarded the Warren Prize for the highest scholastic standing and it was announced she had gotten thirty-six A’s over the years, she was booed.

  At the same commencement, one of the Class Historians said in his address how much things had changed. He told the story of Gertrude Stein at Harvard turning in her exam booklet unused after five minutes to philosophy Professor William James, saying, “It’s too nice a day for taking an exam,” to which James replied, “Ah, I see you understand perfectly the nature of philosophy, Miss Stein.”

  “Well,” the Historian continued, “at Yale, during a recent exam, a proctor watched as a student bald-facedly copied off both people sitting next to him and consulted a crib sheet. When it was time to hand in the blue exam booklets, the fellow walked down to the front of the room where the table was already piled high with blue booklets. The proctor confronted him, saying she had seen everything. The fellow looked at her and said, ‘Do you know me?’ ‘No,’ she said, upon which he thrust his blue booklet into the middle of the tall pile of booklets and walked out scot-free.” The Historian concluded his remarks saying that the true spirit of the Yale class of 1976 had been caught by the anonymous scribbler who had written on a stall of the CCL men’s room, “God didn’t create the world in seven days. He fucked off the first six and pulled an all-nighter.”

  The picketeer and the patrons exchanged insults as the day progressed. Name-calling was fairly mild, however, with only such words as “pig” and “slob” being used.

  Yale Daily News

  January 24, 1973

  Mory’s had fired a waiter for trying to organize a union, and Local 217 had thrown up a picket line outside. Mory’s meanwhile had lost its liquor license temporarily over its refusal to admit women. The draft had just ended, the peace in Vietnam that had been at hand finally was—for the time being, and Yale had officially contributed twenty-one dead to the war. The Reverend William Sloane Coffin, looking more and more like his counterpart in Doonesbury, was taking a year off “to assimilate experiences.” Sophomore John Bobusack did seven thousand sit-ups at Payne Whitney to Kostelanetz’s “Light Music of Shostakovich.” Jimmy Carter, Governor of Georgia, spoke at the Political Union, and, according to the News, “predicted confidently that the Democrats will capture the White House in ’76.” General William Westmoreland had been prevented from speaking at the Political Union, as had Secretary of State William Rogers, who pulled out when the Yale administration announced it could not guarantee his safety. Drama student Meryl Streep was appearing in Major Barbara; undergraduate Sigourney Weaver in Woman Beware Woman. The Department of University Health had issued a warning on the effects of nitrous oxide; Ken Kesey had brought along a tank with him on his visit to Yale, and thanks to a complaisant night watchman at National Compressed Gas in North Haven, who would turn the other way for fifty dollars, laughing gas was very in, despite DUH’s warnings about hypoxia or blowing a hole through the back of your throat. A copy of Thomas More’s Utopia was stolen from the vault of the Elizabethan Club. The bursar’s office announced that tuition, room and board for ’73—’74 would probably go to the unheard-of five thousand dollars a year; and it was calculated that every class cut or slept through cost nineteen dollars, a ratiocination that nevertheless did not increase the number of classes attended. Timothy Dwight College announced it would hold an honest-to-God prom that spring. Ann Landers told an audience in SSH 114, apropos of admitting women to Mory’s, “If they don’t want you there, forget it.” Robert Penn Warren retired. Francis Donahue resigned from the News after fifty years. George and Harry’s closed after forty-five years. Wes Lockwood, a sophomore member of the Yale Christian Fellowship, a.k.a. the Jesus Freaks, was kidnapped by his parents and subsequently deprogrammed by Ted Patrick, which brought the phenomenon into the pages of Time magazine. Several Yale women were raped, ushering in the era of locked gates. The faculty voted to hold exams before Christmas, and an associate professor of theology was charged with having “deviate sexual relations” with a sixteen-year-old boy in a Long Island motel room.

  I suppose every generation of undergraduates should have at least one Divinity School scandal. Maybe it’s significant that this one went by virtually unnoticed. Deviate undertakings were scarcely confined to the Div School; they were in fact de rigueur. During spring of sophomore year I participated in my first and only Black Mass—for credit, in a psychology course. We (there were five of us) arranged to hold it in the beautiful little chapel at the base of Harkness Tower. We wrote up a liturgy, complete with a backward Lord’s Prayer, got the right kind of candles, arranged for a female sacrificial victim—she was awfully obliging about it—dry ice, Moog synthesizer, the works. It almost didn’t come
off, though, because one of us spilled the dry ice and water all over the chapel carpet and had to borrow a mop from the Branford common room, which at the moment was being used by the Party of the Right for one of their Homage to Franco or Edmund Burke soirées. They asked what the mop was needed for, and being in a hurry I just explained we were having a Black Mass over at the chapel and had spilled dry ice. They grew quite alarmed at this and were preparing to storm over in their pinstripes on behalf of Organized Religion, but the professor arrived and explained it was all for credit, which seemed to impress them and they went away.

  The Tang Cup Competition, for which Timothy Dwight’s best and brightest trained all year long and which involved swallowing eight ounces of beer in less than one second (I think the record was .8 sec.)— I will not go into. But I should mention the Yale Invisible Precision Marching Band, whose halftime shows Woodbridge Hall began censoring after its Salute to Birth Control one game. The alums were apparently unamused when the band assumed the shape of a coathanger and marched from end zone to end zone playing “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.”

  Acid use went up precipitously during winters, with some dealers barely able to meet demand, especially when Fantasia had its annual showing at the RKO on College Street. The first five rows were usually filled with drug-crazed youth, the rest of the theater with children and their mothers, who were trying to instill in them a love of classical music. Such were the winters of discontent in New Haven.

  But the film societies made midwinter bearable. You could go to a movie every night for seventy-five cents and see anything from Nosferatu to A Hundred and One Dalmations. Casablanca was so much a part of life that the posters didn’t bother to include the name, only the showing time superimposed on a grainy blowup of Rick and Ilsa on the foggy tarmac. We’ll always have Paris. A festival of films made by Yalies featured A Child’s Alphabet with Carnal References to DNA Replication in the Garden of Eden.