Great news! You’ve won the chance to interview anybody who’s ever been. The time-taxi awaits. Destination, please.
Jesus, Julius Caesar, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson, Thoreau, who will it be? Lincoln – or Jefferson – or TR? Jane Austen? Emily Dickinson, if she’d let her hair down? Dickens? Bach? Beethoven? Mahler? Michelangelo? Your first girlfriend?
Too many to pick one? Not for this lucky winner. Take me, driver, to New Haven, Connecticut, spring, 1970 – I could retrieve the day and hour. It’s shirtsleeves weather. Shorts? Did students wear shorts then, or only jeans? Yale’s Old Campus is strewn with scraps, bottles, posters, its venerable walls spray-painted with slogans. Shaggy students meander vaguely, as if after a debauch. It’s the last week of classes before exams – but is the university in session? Or have protesters shut it down? Professors have been told to make their own decisions whether to cross the picket lines and teach. Is it culpable to relish one’s studies?
The undergraduate we’re looking for is a slender beardless white kid, book-bag over his shoulder, his big hair confident but little else. He’s trying hard to pretend it’s a normal school day, because if it’s not, what is it? How should he be?
Professor Ellmann is giving his final Ulysses lecture in Linsly-Chit. Richard Ellmann’s the world’s foremost James Joyce scholar. He’s leaving Yale for an Oxford professorship, so these lectures are now or never. A gentle soul, Professor Ellmann’s big mind is busy in Dublin June 16, 1904, far from New Haven, 1970. He’s elected to lecture, not to protest the protests, but because teaching is what he does, and he owes his students this summation. Truly, this whole brouhaha puzzles him. What does James Joyce have to do with Black Panthers or the war in Vietnam?
The slender beardless freshman intends to attend Professor Ellmann’s final – doubly final! – lecture. Demonstrators block the entrance to Linsly-Chit, three deep. Carll, for it is he, isn’t making any statement by attending class, just doing what he came to Yale to do – and loves doing – learn. He recognizes among the demonstrators an old schoolmate, who was forever skipping classes and smoking weed. (He subsequently flunked out of Yale and died of a drug overdose.) Carter (call him) sneered at Carll’s devotion to his studies. “Tuck the Suck” Carter called Carll, such an easy rhyme. Carll wouldn’t have minded smoking more weed and getting it on with the girls, but he’d rather study – and play his music – and it was hard doing both.
Spying Carll with his bookbag edging into Linsly-Chit, Carter whooped like Mephistopheles, “Well, if it isn’t Tuck the Suck – what a surprise!” Carter grabbed Carll’s shirt to stop him. Carll had never punched anybody, hadn’t a notion how, but he did now, a frightened fist, pow, in Carter’s jaw, sending Carter sprawling, and opening Carll’s way into Linsly-Chit. Carll’s pulse was pounding so violently he missed Professor Ellmann’s first fifteen minutes.
That is the guy I want to interview, that confused jut-jawed isolated yearning boy, putting on a brave face, never admitting his lostness, especially to himself. Part of him pined to join those dropouts with their weed and whooping and sex, only how stupid of them to brandish their objections by trashing their educations! Carter didn’t give a fig about Bobby Seale, Carll was certain, just welcomed this chaos as a chance to skip exams he’d have flunked. Carll envied and loathed Carter. Carll’s the historical character I’d like to know better, to understand his relation to the person he became.
Our current campus confusion brought this forbear to mind.