My Generation: Collected Nonfiction, Page 4

  I sat there alone for a long while on the nearly deserted, stale-smelling mezzanine, stranded in my bafflement. Finally only a single fireman shared my solitude. At last out of the conference room shambled the tired but friendly-looking chairman of the committee, a doctor of divinity who was also the distinguished chancellor of Vanderbilt University. His name was Harvie Branscomb. He was a good man. He extended his hand and offered his condolences, and then sat down beside me on the couch. As I may have known, he said, he had been a close friend of Bill Blackburn's when they both taught at Duke several years before; because of this connection it was all the more difficult for him, personally, to have had to pass me over.

  “It was because of you that we took so long,” he said in his fatherly, friendly voice. “We argued and argued about you for at least an hour. You see—your writing, those stories—they really were very impressive, we all thought, but—” He paused, then said, “We did want a creative person, but—” And then he halted.

  “I appreciate what you tried to do,” I said. “I'll always be grateful for that.”

  “I guess you know why we finally felt that we had to pass you over—”

  “My grades—” I interrupted.

  “Yes,” he went on, “it's not that you just flunked physics. Even the Rhodes scholarship doesn't demand perfection. One or two of the winners today had rather—well, shaky areas in their academic records. It was—”

  “You don't have to tell me,” I put in.

  The chancellor said, “Yes, to flunk physics not just once but four times in a row. And that final exam grade, the last semester: thirty-eight. We couldn't overlook that.” He hesitated, then gave a rueful smile. “One of the committee members said that you seemed to demonstrate a ‘pertinacity in the desire to fail.’ We had to consider how such a trait might appear to the people at Oxford…”

  I could say nothing. Finally, after a bit of a silence, the chancellor said, “You know, son, maybe this is really for the better. I mean, I was at Oxford over twenty-five years ago, and I've watched hundreds of Rhodes scholars come back to America and begin their careers and I'll be dogged if I can name a single writer—a single poet or playwright or short-story writer or novelist—that came out of the entire huge crowd. Oh, a lot of brilliant people and a lot of brilliant careers in many fields—but not a single writer worth the description. Funny thing, Oxford—it's a wonderful place for learning, the finest place of its kind in the world, and yet it has a way of tending to channel people, to fit them into a mold. If you really want to know the truth, I believe that if we had chosen you it may have been the end, once and for all, of your ambitions to be a writer. Most probably, you would have become a teacher—a doggone good teacher, you understand, but not a writer.” He stopped and looked out over the deserted mezzanine with its potted palms and spittoons. “A good teacher, mind you,” he insisted again, as if to stroke my bruised ego. “I'm sure you would have come back and begun teaching at Duke or the University of Virginia or Sewanee or someplace. It'd be a good life, you'd have been truly distinguished—but you surely wouldn't have become a writer.”

  The chancellor's eyes, glazed with a terrible tiredness, seemed to rest on a remote distance, and I have wondered recently when thinking of that moment, if in his touching and truly generous concern for me, he might have been brooding upon other possibilities in the theoretical career which my “pertinacity in a desire to fail” had caused him and his colleagues reluctantly to deny me: that is, for example, membership in the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, which, thirty-odd years later, in 1979, would bring me to this very hotel, ready for the familiar annuity of cerebral interplay, conventional tedium, painful politics, and the saving balm of various sorts of fellowship.

  But the chancellor and I bade each other goodbye then, and I terminated my stay in Atlanta with another dubious “first.” I had been since my early adolescence an imbiber of beer and beer alone; Budweiser had always seemed to be a beverage I could handle. But this night, on my way to the train station, I bought a bottle of Old Grand-Dad bourbon; it was, I remember precisely, a full half pint, which was a prodigious amount of booze for a young man of twenty—at least, I know, for me. I got gloriously drunk on the Southern Railway local that rattled its way all night up through the Carolinas, gazing out at the bleak, moon-drenched, wintry fields and happily pondering my deliverance. The chancellor, bless his soul, had really taken most of the curse off the bitter defeat I had initially felt there at the Biltmore. It really was better for me not to go to Oxford, I told myself, throwing in various Anglophobic injunctions: the food you wouldn't feed to a starving hound dog, the men were prancing homosexuals, the women all had foul breath, it was a moribund civilization. “Screw Oxford,” I remember saying aloud, and “Up yours, Cecil Rhodes!” Next year, instead of shivering to death in some library carrel, instead of—and “Get this, old fellow!” I heard myself cackling—instead of writing a paper on the hexameters of Arthur Hugh Clough, that old Victorian nanny, I would be in New York, beginning my first novel. It was with this fantasy in mind that I slipped off into a bourbon-heavy slumber, sleeping past Durham and waking up with a stupefying headache in Norlina, practically on the Virginia border, feeling (despite this dislocation and my hangover) amazingly happy.

  [Speech delivered to the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Atlanta, Georgia, December 1979.]

  A Case of the Great Pox

  Among the performances that helped make the movie Casablanca immortal was that of Claude Rains as the French police captain Louis Renault. Rains played the part with astringent urbanity and created a lasting model of the tough cop attractively humanized, Monsieur Nice Guy lurking behind the domineering swaggerer. I belong to the first of several generations that have fallen under the film's febrile romantic spell. By the late autumn of 1944 I had seen the film three times, and Rains seemed to me only slightly less crucial to its hypnotic unfolding than Bogart and Bergman. You may well imagine my amazement, then, when, in that wartime autumn, a veritable replica—the spitting image—of Claude Rains sat behind a desk in a doctor's office on the urological ward of the naval hospital at Parris Island, South Carolina. I stood at attention, looking down at him. A sign on the desk identified the doctor as “B. Klotz, Lieutenant Commander, Chief of Urology.” I recall registering all sorts of impressions at once: the name Klotz, with its pathological overtone, and Klotz-Rains himself, duplicated—somewhat narcissistically, I thought—as he posed in prewar civvies in one of several framed photographs on the wall. The other photographs, completing a kind of triumvirate of authority, were of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Admiral Ernest J. King, chief of naval operations. There was one notable difference between Klotz and Rains, aside from the doctor's white blouse instead of the gendarmerie kepi and tunic. It was that the actor, even when he was trying to be threatening, had a twinkly charm, a barely repressed bonhomie, while Klotz appeared merely threatening. I knew that this was not the beginning of a beautiful friendship. That morning, Klotz sat silent for a moment, then came directly to the point. No elegant British vocables. In a flat, mid-Atlantic accent, he said, “Your blood tests have been checked out, and they indicate that you have syphilis.”

  I remember my cheeks and the region around my mouth going numb, then beginning to tingle, as if my face had been dealt a brutal whack. Traumatic events powerfully focus the perceptions, leaving ancillary details embalmed forever in memory—in this case, the window just beyond Klotz's head, a frost-rimed pane through which I could see the vast asphalt parade ground swarming with platoon after platoon of Marine recruits like me (or like me until the day before, when I was sent to the hospital), performing the rigorous choreography of close-order drill. Dawn had not yet broken, and the men moved in and out of the light that fell in bright pools from the barracks. Most of the platoons were marching with rifles, a drill instructor tramping alongside and screaming orders that I couldn't hear but that, up close, would have sounded like those of a foul-mouthed
and hysterical madman. Other platoons remained still, at ease, shrouded in cigarette smoke or exhaled breath or both; it was a bitterly cold November. Beyond the parade ground and its clumps of marines in green field jackets were rows of wooden barracks. And beyond the barracks lay the waters of Port Royal Sound, roiled by an icy wind. All these things registered in my mind clearly, but at the same time they seemed to coalesce around a single word, uttered by the voice of Klotz: syphilis.

  “You will remain on this ward indefinitely for further observation,” Klotz continued. There was an unmistakably antagonistic tone in his voice. Most doctors in my past—the few I'd had contact with, anyway—had been chummy, avuncular, and genuinely if sometimes clumsily sweet-mannered. Klotz was of another breed, and he caused my stomach to go into spasm. I thought, What a prick. Before dismissing me, he ordered me to report to the duty pharmacist's mate, who would instruct me about the series of regulations I'd be subject to while on the ward, a regime Klotz referred to as “the venereal protocol.” He then told me to return to my bed, where I would wait until further notice. I was wearing a blue hospital robe, in the pocket of which I had thrust a copy of one of the first paperback anthologies ever published, a volume that had kept me company for at least two years—The Pocket Book of Verse, compiled by an academic named M. Edmund Speare. My legs had an aqueous, flimsy feeling. I lurched back down the ward, still numb around the mouth, gripping the book with feverish desire, like a condemned Christian clutching a Testament.

  —

  I should say a word about the great pox, so named, in the sixteenth century, to distinguish the illness from smallpox. Although syphilis had been regarded, since the late fifteenth century, as a plague that would never in any real sense yield to the strategies of medical science, it had been dealt a sudden and mortal blow only a year or so before my diagnosis. It was one of medicine's most dramatic victories, like Jenner's discovery of a smallpox vaccine or Pasteur's defeat of rabies. The breakthrough took place soon after American researchers—building on the work of Sir Alexander Fleming, who had discovered penicillin, in the twenties, and Sir Howard Florey, who had developed a technique for producing the drug—found that a one-week course of the miraculous mold could wipe out all traces of early syphilis, and even certain late-stage manifestations of the illness. (Penicillin also had a devastating effect on the other major venereal scourge, gonorrhea, a single injection usually being sufficient to put it to rout.) Since mid-1943, the medical authorities of the American armed forces had ordered doctors in military hospitals around the globe to discontinue a syphilis treatment called arsphenamine therapy and to commence using penicillin as it became available. Arsphenamine—better known, variously, as Salvarsan, 606, or the magic bullet—was an arsenic-based compound developed in 1909 by the German bacteriologist Paul Ehrlich. He discovered that his new drug (the six hundred and sixth version proved successful) could knock out syphilis without killing the patient; it was a remarkable advance after several hundred years during which the principal nostrum was mercury, a substance that worked capriciously, when it worked at all, and was for the most part as dangerous as the disease itself.

  Because the disease sprang from the dark act of sex, syphilis was not a word uttered casually in the Protestant environment of my Virginia boyhood; the word raised eyebrows around America even when it was discreetly murmured in Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, a 1940 movie starring Edward G. Robinson, who I thought was a pretty convincing healer after his parts as a ruthless mobster. Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet didn't make much of an impression on me; I doubtless was too young. But even if I had been older I would probably not have realized that the movie failed to tell an essential truth. While the doctor's magic bullet was a vast improvement over the forlorn remedy of the past, his treatment was shown to be sadly insufficient; the drug rendered patients noncontagious, but it wasn't a very reliable cure, and the treatment required dozens of painful and costly injections over such a long period of time—often many months—that a great number of patients became discouraged, and were consequently prone to relapses. So the epidemic suffered a setback but was not halted. It would take Alexander Fleming's surefire bactericidal fungus to produce the real magic. And I was in the vanguard of those victims upon whom this benison would descend. Or so it seemed, until, with a gradual dawning that was sickening in itself, I began to suspect that health was not so readily at hand.

  As a diagnosed syphilitic, I had good cause to think passionately about penicillin during the interminable hours and days I spent in the Clap Shack, as such wards were known throughout the Navy. But, from the first day following Dr. Klotz's announcement, I had the impression that I was a very special case. I was not an ordinary patient whose treatment would follow the uneventful trajectory toward cure, but one who had been hurled into an incomprehensible purgatory where neither treatment nor even the possibility of a cure was part of my ultimate destiny. And this hunch turned out to be correct. From the outset, I was convinced not only that I had acquired the most feared of sexually transmitted diseases but that I would at some point keel over from it, probably in an unspeakable cellular mud slide or convulsion of the nervous system. As an early-blooming hypochondriac, a reader besotted with The Merck Manual, I had a bit more medical savvy than most kids my age, and what my diagnosis actually portended made me clammy with dismay. I believed that I was beyond the reach of penicillin. I was sure that I was a goner, and that certainty never left me during the days that stretched into weeks of weirdly demoralizing confinement.

  My bed was at the very end of the ward, and I had a view from two windows, at right angles to each other. From one window, I could see the sound, a shallow inlet of the Atlantic, on the edge of freezing; from the other, I had a glimpse of a row of barracks not far away and, between the barrack buildings, concrete laundry slabs, where marines bedeviled by the cold—I watched them shake and shiver—pounded at their near-frozen dungarees beneath sluiceways of water. What nasty little Schadenfreude I might have felt at their plight was dispelled by my own despair at having been separated from longtime buddies whom I'd gone to college with, officer candidates like me—or like the person I had been before the onset of an illness that, because of its carnal origin and the moral shame it entailed, would prevent me from even thinking of becoming a lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps.

  Winkler, the hospital corpsman who had checked me onto the ward, returned to bring me these tidings. No way, he said, that you can get a marine commission if you've had VD. He had other awful news, too, most of it bearing on my health. After escorting me to my sack and telling me where to stow my seabag, he told me—in answer to my bewildered “Why the hell am I here?”—that my Kahn test was so high it had gone off the chart. “It looks to me,” he said with maddening whimsy, “like you've got a case of the great pox.” When I asked him what a Kahn test was, he replied with a counter-question: Had I ever heard of a Wassermann reaction? I replied, Of course, every schoolboy knew about a Wassermann. A Kahn, Winkler explained, was almost the same as a Wassermann, only an improvement. It was a simpler blood test. And then, as I recalled the endless trips I'd made in past days to the regimental dispensary to verify the first routine test, and the vial after vial of blood extracted from my arm, I had a foreshadowing of the stern warrant that Dr. Klotz would serve up to me the following morning. I must have radiated terror, for I sensed a conscious effort by Winkler to make me feel better; his tactic was to try to cast me as one of the elite. At the moment, he told me, I was the only syphilitic on the ward. Most of the patients were guys with the clap. And when, despondently, I asked him why he thought victims of syphilis, as opposed to those with gonorrhea, were such rarities, he came back with a theory that in my case was so richly inconceivable that it caused me to laugh one of the last spontaneous laughs I would laugh for a long time. “You can catch the clap a lot easier than syphilis,” he explained. “Syph you really have to work at to contract.” He added, with a hint of admiration, “You must have been getting a
new piece of ass every day.”

  After my interview with Klotz, which took place very early, before his regular morning rounds, I had a chance to sit next to my bed and take stock of my situation while the other patients slept. Winkler had explained the configuration of the ward. It was a warehouse of genitourinary complaints. On one side of the ward were a dozen beds occupied by clap patients. As a result of crowding in the clap section, I was lodged on the other side of the center aisle, at the end of a row of patients whose maladies were not venereal in origin. Most of these marines had kidney and bladder disorders, primarily infections; there was a boy who had suffered a serious blow to his kidney during one of the savage internecine boxing matches that the drill instructors, virtually all sadists, enjoyed promoting during morning exercises. There was an undescended testicle that Winkler said would never have got past the first medical screening in the robust volunteer days, before the draft allowed all sorts of misshapen characters into the Marine Corps. The marine in the sack next to me, breathing softly, his face expressionless in sleep's bland erasure, had just the day before been circumcised by Dr. Klotz; the fellow had suffered from a constrictive condition of the foreskin known as phimosis. Winkler's last task the previous night had been to swaddle the guy's groin in ice packs, lest nocturnal erections rip out the stitches—a mishap that obviously could never happen to a Jew, said Winkler, who was plainly New York Jewish, in a tone that was a touch self-satisfied. As for the marines with the clap, Winkler pointed out that in most cases this was not your standard garden-variety gonorrhea but an intractable chronic condition that usually came about as a result of the guys’ refusing, out of shame or fear—and often out of sheer indifference—to seek treatment, so that the invasive gonococci began after time to wreak havoc in the prostate, or became lodged in the joints as an exquisitely painful form of arthritis. Marines and sailors from up and down the Atlantic coast came to this ward for what was possibly last-ditch therapy, since Klotz was known as the best doctor in the Navy for handling such complications.