George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  PETER MATTHIESSEN George was a good student. I had evidence at one time: a report card from the school, and it showed that one of us had 95 or 96 in Latin, and that wasn’t unusual. When he applied himself, George was very bright and got good marks.

  BUZZ MERRITT We had a couple of cutups, including George. I remember one time some scatological stuff had been written in the toilet, and Mr. Jenkins announced that there’d be no more of that. He was going to inspect it. One day, Plimpton and another fellow got the idea of putting soccer shoes on the top of the door, and leaving the door a bit ajar, and balancing a full cup of water on it, too. We were all happily doing our homework one evening when suddenly Mr. Jenkins came into the room and then walked purposely into the locker room. The next thing we heard was a great clattering, and out came Mr. Jenkins, soaked with water. Terrifying event. George was quite instrumental in that. By and large, though, he was in the mainstream. I mention this prank because of course he diverged considerably from the mainstream later on.

  PETER MATTHIESSEN George cut the same figure from start to finish. In photographs, right to the end, he mostly had that inquisitive, pointy-nosed, mischievous look that I seem to recall from when we were little boys.

  BUZZ MERRITT A great event at St. Bernard’s was the annual Christmas Shakespeare play at the Heckscher Theatre, which used to be on 104th Street. The play was chosen in the spring, and we had to learn our lines during summer vacation. Our mothers will never forget. We were given progressively bigger parts as the years went on. George was a good actor and always had very significant parts. My senior year we did The Tempest, and he was Prospero. I was Caliban. That was a very, very good show. Of course, it was absolutely terrifying, but you realized that everyone who had gone before you had done it, so you could, too.

  TOBY WHERRY, JR. St. Bernard’s is where that famous story comes from, which I’ve heard over and over again, about George being discovered as a writer by my father. George had written a short story; I think it had something to do with the chauffeurs’ race, the annual Field Day footrace for the chauffeurs that many St. Bernard’s families employed in those days. He’d gotten a C on it, I believe, and my father ripped it from his hands. I’m not sure if he read it then and there, or they read it out loud, or whatever, but he angrily crossed off the C and wrote an A, and said something like “You’re a real writer.”

  PETER MATTHIESSEN Our paths split in the fourth or fifth grade, and years would pass before George and I saw much of each other again. However, we must have stayed loosely in touch because when I was in Paris in the early 1950s, and the time came to find someone to edit the as-yet-unnamed Paris Review, I knew where to find him.

  EXETER

  BUZZ MERRITT I went to Exeter because George and so many St. Bernard’s boys were going. I guess George started it because of his father’s and grandfather’s connection. His father was president of the board of trustees, as his grandfather had been before him. The “Plimpton playing fields” tell the rest of the story. We were pretty young. I had just turned thirteen.

  TIM SELDES Exeter and Andover were brother and sister schools. We always thought that Andover was where the rich boys went and Exeter was more democratic, but I would imagine that the average income of parents of Exonians was fairly high.

  BUZZ MERRITT The first big thing, which occurred when we were freshmen, was when George became interested in taxidermy. That summer, he had gone on a trip with the Cleveland Museum to California, where they were collecting rodents, which they skinned and stuffed. When they got back to New York, there were a lot of extra skins, so George said he’d take them, and he brought them back to his room at Exeter. He had them scattered all over the place and was practicing taxidermy on them from a book. I remember a whole lot of rodents with cotton sticking out of their mouths. We had maids in those days who came in and made our beds and cleaned our rooms, and one of them opened the door to George’s room and screamed and ran down to the dorm master, who went to investigate and encountered all of George’s rodents with cotton sticking out of their mouths. George thought that was a lovely prank, even though he hadn’t really intended it.

  Dear Mother,

  Sorry not to have written for such a long time, but I thought I would summarize all the things that have happened in just one letter.

  I joined up with the Exonian today, to my great surprise, with [Warren] Leslie. My first job as a heeler was to pick a penny off the floor.

  A few days ago, the Blue team (which I am on) played Emerson. We beat them 19–0. . . .

  I have not yet found a birthday present for Sarah. I went shopping the other day but Exeter is not New York.

  I hope you will come up soon.

  My first job for the Exonian is to write a, quote—n’everything—unquote. This is an article in the Exonian which is filled up with curious happenings in and about the school.

  I think the first quote—n’everything—unquote, I shall write is as follows: Two enthusiastic juniors, Buzz and myself, were seen kicking field goals (sometimes) under the light of the moon.

  My radiator had quite a few visitors last night. It seems as if the radiator is not turned off the whole way it begins to knock all the other radiators to bits. So a few masters broke in at four o’clock a.m. and turned it off.

  My subjects have been going along fairly well except for Algebra. I am a little careless, but I am sure that I will improve.

  Boys almost fall over at the sight of my rattlesnake. I am so glad I brought it up.

  If my squirrel skin is ready, that is with no flesh on it, please send it up. (In laundry bag.)

  Grandma called while I was seeing a football game and I could not see her. She left me a basket of apples. Do thank her for me. . . . [no date]

  FARWELL SMITH I first met George at Exeter in 1941. He had come with a crowd of St. Bernard’s and Buckley kids, who were pretty fast for my Chicago speed. George wasn’t one of the fast, though. Maybe I’m hard on New Yorkers, but at the age of thirteen and fourteen they were kind of clubby and looked down a little bit on the outlanders who came from other parts of the country, particularly the Midwest and the West. But George was less snooty. He was also a wonder to behold because he was very tall at a fairly young age. One of my first vivid memories of him was of him at six feet three playing the maid in a play at Exeter. He was very noticeable, and he was funny. He had a way of tripping across the stage, and although it was a small part, it was a very memorable one. He got write-ups on it because his whole manner of doing it was enhanced by his gangly size. He was sort of like a shaven Abe Lincoln.

  GORE VIDAL We sat next to each other at chapel. I remember he was a rather uncouth-looking boy and always sort of on the outside of things. Of course, he had the cachet of the Plimpton playing fields, which had been given by his family to the school, where games were played and where, you can count on it, I never set foot in four years.

  TIM SELDES Most of us were ordinary boys, and George was extraordinary. He saw things in his own wonderfully imaginative, idiosyncratic way. And especially compared to the rest of us insecure ragged little muffins, George always seemed to be sophisticated. He and Gore Vidal seemed to be the two who knew the great world in a way that none of us did at all and could barely aspire to.

  BUZZ MERRITT I was athletic, and George was athletic, so it was easier for us. None of us were any good at football, though. We played club football, and with a great friend of ours, Ted Lamont, we all finally ended up in the Exeter band, where I played the cymbals, and George beat the bass drum, and Ted Lamont carried the bass drum.

  TIM SELDES George and I were the two pitchers, and even at this late date I cannot help but say that I was the number one pitcher. George used to envy my accuracy because I could also throw the ball quite fast. George had this absolutely gigantic curveball. This great angular figure would be almost parallel to the ground and this great arm would uncoil and this enormous curve would come. And on the prep team, the freshman team, we were the two pitchers.
I think we were the only freshman team in Exeter’s history that ever placed higher than fourth. We finished first. It was a triumph that George and I were largely responsible for and inordinately proud of.

  BUZZ MERRITT Of course, the war was very much in our minds. I remember on Sunday, December 7, George and I were over in the gym playing pickup basketball, and we ended up walking back to our dormitory, and everybody was yelling, “They bombed Pearl Harbor, they bombed Pearl Harbor!” We all gathered in our social center, the Butt Room, where you smoked downstairs. I remember everybody just being in stitches about the Japanese navy. What are these people doing when they had absolutely no navy? It showed a real gap in our knowledge of the Japanese. The Germans were supposed to be on their way to bomb New York. We couldn’t figure out how they could get their planes there. That was all in the flash of the moment, but then things simmered down. School went on, except that we were obviously engaged in the day-to-day progress of the war.

  TIM SELDES Exeter was an academic pressure plate. The first thing that comes to mind about that tension is that they marked us on an A, B, C, D scale, except they would go below that. You could get an E, or in a worst-case scenario you could get an E-Q, which meant not only that you were irredeemably stupid, but also that you didn’t even care. I doubt that George had very good grades, except in English. In English, he was remarkable even then.

  BUZZ MERRITT Exeter had a famous phrase—“There are no rules at Exeter until you break one.” And George pushed the edge of that envelope, considerably. He was getting into a little trouble here and a little trouble there. Just generally raising hell on the edge of dorm discipline—fooling around in the halls when he was supposed to be studying and that sort of thing. But George was always a bit of a rebel. He liked to trick authority figures, you know. People who got away with things like that had a certain cachet. As at all schools, there was a faculty versus students rivalry. George played to that, but I think some of it was, frankly, that his mind was not set up for strict schedules. It was his innocent vagueness. In fact, I think his nickname at school was “Vague,” “Vague George.”

  Francis Plimpton to George: resolutions for success at Exeter.

  From the collection of George Plimpton.

  SARAH GAY PLIMPTON He didn’t do very well at Exeter, and he talked about the letters Daddy sent him. “Work hard. Do this, do that”—one of them with a fifteen-or twenty-point program to follow, everything specified from the type of paper he should use to rules on how to concentrate. Toward the end when George was on probation, Daddy demanded that George write him a short letter—all on the same blue stationery! every day!—accounting for his time. And George would sit down to try and do all this, and of course he couldn’t.

  Dear Daddy,

  Passed a very lazy Sunday. Heard a very poor preacher at the Phillips Church. His sermon pointed straight at me though, but that doesn’t surprise me anymore.

  Wrote my Exonian story in no time flat, cleaned up the room so it looks unbelievable.

  Saw the Dean tonight. He says he[’s] glad to have me back, and thinks I can do it. I know I will satisfy him.

  Followed schedule perfectly. [ January 9, 1944]

  Dear George,

  The two blue envelopes I found on my desk downtown this morning were a welcome sight. I’m glad that things have started out all right—now let’s have them go right along the same way.

  Suggestion no. 1 is that you send letters up here to the apartment, for Mummie is just as interested in them as I am. Suggestion no. 2 is that you write them in ink. A letter in pencil inevitably looks sloppy and blurred, no matter how carefully you write it.

  I’m glad that the dean thinks that you can pull through. So do I, if you pull. That is something you must do yourself—it’s up to you and no one else.

  We never did finish talking out whether or not you should resign from the Exonian, but I think it’s all right for you to keep on if you’ll do your work on it efficiently and promptly, and not waste time fiddling around. Indeed, you must train yourself to be efficient about time—I don’t like the sound of a very lazy Sunday; it’s all right if the laziness means no sports, for that’s OK until your ear mends, but let’s have no lazy minds ever!

  I’m delighted to hear that the room is cleaned up—now let’s see you keep it that way. I know that I find it ever so much easier to work and think and live if things are neat around me. If they’re neat I know that I’m their master, but if they’re a mess I’m never sure who really is in charge here, to quote Mr. Darrow’s cartoon.

  Affectionately, Daddy

  [January 11, 1944]

  Dear Daddy,

  I have been a little slow on starting off my everlasting stream of epistles but I thought I’d wait until I got back all those tests that I was studying violently that weekend. So from now on, your letters come in daily.

  Believe it or not I knew my Greek well enough to get an 80 on the test, an eighty. Mr. Phillips is shocked, and so am I. That gives me a C in Greek. Got a C-in the English theme, but [the English teacher] is going to give me an incomplete because I missed two very important tests.

  I got a C- in the second History test, which will give me a D in that course. And finally a D in the French test, which will give me the same mark. Mr. [Bull] Clark is pleased, but won’t take me off any of my restrictions. I guess he wants better, and I’ll be fighting to give it to him. . . . [February 9, 1944]

  Dear Mummy,

  . . . I suppose I might start off with the bad news to make you feel happy. Apparently the crime of staying out after eight is a great deal more serious than I had ever dreamed of, and especially with regard to me. The faculty put me on disciplinary probation:—now all the loopholes are closed, and I must be very careful. So much for the bad news. I feel most wretched about the whole thing, for it was so completely needless. I apologize—that is my first apology.

  I have never worked so hard in my life as I have this last week. Three nights out of four I have stayed up almost the complete night. I fell asleep at my desk at 3:00 o’clock this morning, and was found there by Mr. Clark, who remarked somewhat stoically that I looked like a ghost. . . . I should get a C in French, perhaps a C in history, and if [I] get a 100 on a Greek test, which I am setting as my mark, I will get a B in Greek. English is my worst, somewhat of a shock when [I] realize I am the class poet. My chances are rather dim for passing this marking period.

  Baseball is in full swing now, and I think I’m doing very well. I have not been doing a great deal of pitching, but I think Mr. Clark is pleased. I missed [getting on] the squash team by a hair. I’m playing in the Lockett Cup tournament, and may get my letter if I win. . . . [February 11, 1944]

  BUZZ MERRITT The key figure in George’s career at Exeter was Bull Clark, who coached football, hockey, and baseball. He taught math, and he was not very good at it, but he was a very good coach. He saw George’s potential in baseball early on. He wanted George to go out for the team in his second or third year, but George didn’t like the idea of all the practice and the running around the track and so on, so he opted for tennis instead. Tennis at Exeter was the big catchall for the people who couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything athletic. You could go to the court and bat a ball around and tell stories. From there, you’d either go back to the Butt Room or just screw around. George did that once or twice, and Bull Clark heard about it and took it badly. He was already unhappy that George wouldn’t go out for baseball. I must say that Bull Clark, who was a great friend of mine, was very hard to get along with. Most people didn’t like him. He was a blue-collar guy from Amesbury, Massachusetts, an old mill town. He had cauliflower ears. He had been a very big athlete himself, on scholarship at Dartmouth. He was a really gung ho coach who couldn’t understand why some people might not want to be on the varsity. He wanted to win.

  Bill “Bull” Clark, Exeter housemaster, teacher, and coach.

  Courtesy of Phillips Exeter Academy.

  FARWELL SMITH He was kicked
out in the spring of 1944, somewhat prior to graduation. George never could sit still, and, as I remember, he wanted very much to go to some lecture or drama meeting or something like that, but he was on probation already and he got caught. Exeter had no tolerance for anything like that. The motto then was either sink or swim. Of the class that I went into, about a third of it never graduated. George was deeply upset when his father called and dressed him down. I think he was hoping he’d get some sympathy.

  BUZZ MERRITT As luck would have it, in his last year George had found himself in Bull Clark’s dormitory, one of the most prestigious. It had circular stairwells between both floors, and therein lay George’s undoing. Someone had given George a Revolutionary musket, and one night, after lights out, they were having a battle in the ground-floor hall. When George heard the noise, he grabbed the gun and ran down the stairwell, and as he did he heard someone coming up and thought it was a student. So he came down the spiral pointing the gun and yelling, “Bang bang! You’re dead.” It was Bull Clark coming up to see what the excitement was about. According to George, Clark yelped in fright when he said “Bang bang!”—a very unmanly reaction. He said that Clark knew that George knew that Clark had yelped. As who wouldn’t—the man was probably scared out of his wits, all keyed up. Well, the end of that story is that a faculty committee voted on the matter (the principal was a marvelous man named Lewis Perry who left discipline to the faculty) and asked George to leave right away, not many weeks before graduation. And even though Clark “prosecuted” George before the committee, the rumor is that he recommended that George not be thrown out.