The Intellectuals Or The Jocks?-With The Late Norman Mailer In Mind

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

Every school since back in Socrates’ time, maybe before, has had discernable social groupings within so that I was not surprised when I was asked recently what group(s) I hung around with, if any, at Carver High back in the mid-1960s. Here is my answer and I solicit yours as well…      

I did not then, nor do I now, know Fredda Kostoff (I think I spelled that right although it might be Kostov all I remember is that she was Russian and I don’t know if she came from there or some forebears did but my apologies to her if I misspelled her name),  Melinda Malloy ( I know I spelled that one right since beside her being smart I had a from a distance “crush” on her although the most I ever did about it was have her exchange yearbook good luck notes with me and so I did not “know” her), or Irvin Jack Stein (a wild man who made his friends laugh form what I had heard beside being what would later be called nerd or dweeb at MIT I think but by far the smartest guy in the class), fellow classmates at Carver High, Class of 1966, and among the class geniuses, the intellectuals. I don’t remember if my old “jock” running buddy Charles William Badger, Bill (nobody called him Charles, his drunken father’s name, not if you wanted grief about it so Bill), whose very existence learned after years of statutory neglect and recent reuniting prompted me to recently write some teary-eyed thing about him running amok on the back streets of Carver and down toward the Plymouth shores in the old days knew them or not, but it was with them in mind that I wrote the following. I, today, strongly believe that I could have learned a lot from that trio and maybe Bill believes that as well but you will have to ask him that question yourself. No way, no way on god’s good green earth in the year 2015 and while I am still breathing, old time “jock” buddies or not, am I going to vouch for that maniac. Here goes:

Every September, like clockwork, I am transported to a place called the beginning of the year. No, not New Year’s Day like any rational person would expect, but the school year for most students, younger or older. That is a frame of reference that I have not changed in all these years. And every year at that time, or in many of those years anyway, my thoughts go back to the road not taken, or really not taken then, when I ask myself the following question that I am posing in such a way here so that you can ask it to yourself as well: What group(s) did you hang around with in high school?

This question is meant to be generic and more expansive that the two categories listed in the headline. The “intellectuals” and the “jocks” were hardly the only social groupings that existed at our high school (or any high school, then or now, for that matter) but the ones that I am interested in personally for the purpose of this sketch. The list of other possibilities is long: white tee-shirt, denim jeans, leather jacket, engineer boots complete with whipsaw chain corner boy devotees; wanna-be gangster hoods hanging out one knee bent against the school wall menacing all who entered; the latest Seventeen magazine-attired social butterflies, girl social butterflies, populating the spirit and dance committees and come senior year that prized prom committee looking down their noses at us, the peasantry, below;  teases, male and female, also a sub-genre of social butterflies, avoiding furtive glances thrown their way and then “hurt” when no one pays attention to them after a while; school administration “brown noses” (really “snitches,” the bastards) who had been in that sorry condition since some ill-disposed elementary school-teacher made them hall monitor; nerdy four-eyed science nuts ready to blow the whole school up in order to satisfy some morbid curiosity (including one time I heard Irvin Jack but that might just have been just be a vicious rumor by some forgotten science bug who couldn’t make lemonade without threatening World War III); oil-stained auto mechanics grease monkeys forever talking about engine compression, riding around town in their customized ‘57 Chevys, and strangely leaving a trail of broken-hearted lovely foxy girls behind; incipient Bolsheviks just waiting for the word from Moscow; black-sweatered  faux “beats” ready to hang “square” on a candid world; choral music nation devotees (okay, okay glee club) ready to sing at the drop of a hat; could-care-less-if-school-keeps-or-not-ers, no explanation necessary; chronic school skippers; drop-outs, religious nuts, and who knows what other “social network” combines, maybe bowling. If any of these groups read like your experiences you can relate your own thoughts on behalf of your high school “community.” I have other thoughts this day.

You, fellow alumni from Carver High School, Carver, Massachusetts, U.S.A. may also feel free to present your own categories of hang-out groups in case I missed anything above like baton-twirlers, infamous band members (by the way the stories I have heard about what went on after practice in the band room shocked me, made me blush), square-dancers, bird-watchers, or stamp collectors, or all of them intertwined, if your tastes ran that way then. However, for me, and perhaps some of you, there was an unequal running battle between the two choices presented in the title. Or maybe the choice I wished I had chosen is a better way to put the matter.

I did not hang out with the intellectuals, formerly known as the "smart kids.” You know, the ones that your mother was always, usually unfavorably, comparing you to come report card time in order to embarrass you or get you to buckle down in the great getting out from under the graying nowhere working- class night and make something of yourself that she (and dad) could be proud of. Yes, those kids who could be seen at the library after school, and even on Saturday, Saturdays if you can believe that, and endlessly trudging, trudging like some Promethean wanderers with about forty- six pounds of books, books large and small, books in all colors, and here is the kicker, well-thumbed, very well-thumbed.

I did hang with the “jocks, to the extent I could be identified with any school group. You know, the guys and in those days it was almost exclusively guys (girls came in as cheer-leaders or girlfriends-sometimes the same thing) who lived to throw, heave, punch, pull, leap upon, trample, block, jump, pummel, everything in sight but, ah, books. You know too, mainly, the Goliaths of the gridiron, their hangers-on, wannabes and "slaves." The guys who were not carrying any forty-six pounds of books, although maybe they were wearing that much poundage in sports gear. And any books that needed carrying was done by either girlfriends or the previously mentioned slaves. Other sports may have had some shine but the “big men” on campus were the fall classic guys. Some sports such as cross-country and track and field, my sports, didn’t usually rate even honorable mention compared to say a social butterfly-driven senior bake sale or some high school confidential school dance in the school social pecking order.

Frankly, although I was in one grouping and thought about the other in high school I was mainly a "loner" for reasons that are beyond what I want to discuss here except it very definitely had to do with confusion about the way to get out from under that graying working- class nowhere night. And about “fitting in” somewhere in the school social order that had little room for guys (or girls for that matter) who did not fit into some classifiable niche. Little room for teen angst and alienated guys, 1960s shorts-wearing track guys, running the streets of old Carver to the honks of automobiles trying to scare us off the road (no “share the road with a runner” then) and jeers, the awful jeers of the girls, that space was very small. The most I could hope for was a “nod” from the football guys (or basketball in winter) in recognition that I was a fellow athlete, of sorts. Yeah, times were tough.

But as this is a confessional age I can now come out of the closet, at last. I read books back then. Yes, I read them, no, devoured them endlessly (and still do), and as frequently as I could (can). I LIKED reading, let’s say, “max daddy” English poet John Milton’s tangled Paradise Lost. I lived to read footnotes in arcane history books. You know, for example, the sources for the big controversy over whether in Cromwell’s time, the time of the 17^th century English Revolution that event was driven by declining or rising gentry. Yeah stuff like that.

Did you see me carrying tons of books over my shoulder in public though? Be serious, please. Here is the long held secret (even from Bill). I used to go over to the library on the other side of town, the Carver Commons side, where no one, no one who counted anyway (meaning no jock, of course), would know me. One summer I did that almost every day for at least part of the day. So there you have it. Well, not quite.

In recent perusals of our class yearbook I have been drawn continually to the page where the description of the Great Books Club is presented. I was unaware of this club, did not know it existed, at the time but, apparently, it met after school and discussed Plato, John Stuart Mill, Shakespeare, Karl Marx and others. (See below.) Fredda and the others were members. Hell, after I read the description of what went on there that club sounded like great fun. One of the defining characteristics of my life has been, not always to my benefit, an overweening attachment to books and ideas. So what was the problem? What didn't I hang with that group?

Well, uh..., you know, they were, uh, nerds, dweebs, squares, not cool (although we did not use some of those exact terms in those days). That, at least, was the public reason, but here are some other more valid possibilities. Coming from my “shanty” background, where the corner boys had a certain cachet, I was somewhat afraid of mixing in with the "smart kids." The corner boys counted, after school anyway, and if they didn’t count then it was better to keep a wide, down low berth from anything that looked like a book reader in their eyes. I, moreover, feared that I wouldn't measure up, that the intellectuals seemed more virtuous somehow. I might also add that a little religiously-driven plebeian Irish Catholic anti-intellectualism might have entered into the mix as well (you know, be “street” smart but not too “book” smart in order to get ahead in one version of that getting out from under graying working -class nowhere night my family kept harping on).

But, damn, I sure could have used the discussions and fighting for ideas that such groups like that book club would have provided. I had to do it the hard way later. As for the jocks I have not mentioned a thing about their long- term effects on me. And, in the scheme of things, that is about right. So now you know my belated choice, except to steal a phrase from something that I wrote recently honoring my senior English teacher, Miss (Ms.) Lenora Somos-"Literature matters. Words matter." I would only add here that ideas matter as well. Hats Off to the Carver High  Class of 1966 intellectuals!

This list is from a letter written in the early 1950s by the late American writer, Norman Mailer, and printed in The New York Review Of Books a few years ago, detailing his choices for "must reads" in the American literary canon. What would your ten choices be?

 

Norman Mailer

Ten Favorite American Novels

U.S.A.- John Dos Passos

Huckleberry Finn- Mark Twain

Studs Lonigan -James T. Farrell

Look Homeward, Angel- Thomas Wolfe

The Grapes of Wrath- John Steinbeck

The Great Gatsby- F. Scott Fitzgerald-1^st on my list

The Sun Also Rises- Ernest Hemingway

Appointment in Samarra- John O'Hara

The Postman Always Rings Twice- James M. Cain

Moby-Dick- Herman Melville

This would be my list as well sticking to Mailer’s early 1950s selection time period except instead of Moby Dick I would put Nelson Algren’s Walk On The Wild Side and instead of Huckleberry Finn I would put J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.