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Authors: Wallace Stegner
Tags: Fiction
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aspirants worked and hoped.
We knew that vision was only partly true. Some of our superiors were indeed men of brains and learning and disinterested goodwill, but some were stuffed shirts, and some incompetents, and some timid souls escaping from the fray, and some climbers, and some as bitter and jealous as some of us were at being inadequately appreciated. But still there they were, up in the sunshine above the smoke, a patch-elbowed tweedy elite that we might improve when we joined it but that we never questioned. Especially during the Depression, when every frog of us was lustful for a lily pad.
Early in our stay in Madison Professor Rousselot, who was much admired by his junior faculty for his elegant stone house, his snow-white handkerchiefs, his way of taking razor-thin slices off a baked ham or turkey, his mots and aphorisms, his quotations for every occasion, and his summers in the reading room of the British Museum, gave me a hint of how things were. We were talking about one of my fellow instructors who had a sick wife. “Poor Mr. Hagler,” Professor Rousselot said. “He has only his salary.”
Ah, yes, Professor Rousselot. Many of us understand. Poor Mr. Morgan, he too has only his salary, and comes from the boondocks besides. There are several like poor Mr. Hagler and poor Mr. Morgan. Poor Mr. Ehrlich, for example. He has only his salary, and he comes from Brooklyn, and hates it. He tries hard—harder by far than poor Mr. Morgan, who is a little arrogant in his barbarism. Poor Mr. Ehrlich has labored to benefit from what he was taught by Tink and Paul Elmer More. He smokes the right mixture in his Dunhill pipe, he works on his profile, he wears the right flannels and tweeds, he can recommend the right nutty sherries. But he gives himself away, like the Russian agent who ate jam with a spoon.
Neither of us may in fact make the club, but poor Mr. Ehrlich is in even worse shape than poor Mr. Morgan, for Mr. Morgan, besides being a little arrogant, is uncomplicatedly upward-mobile, whereas Mr. Ehrlich is bent on tearing down the demo-plutocracy whose airs he affects. He snows you with his Yale-Princeton superiorities at the very moment when he is trying to sign you up in the Young Communist League. He seems to Mr. Morgan to be hung up halfway between the British Museum and Red Square, paralyzed by choice.
I spend a minute on Marvin Ehrlich not because he matters to me, or ever did, but because that evening, by his failure to make it into the junior version of what we all coveted, he emphasized my own euphoric sense of being welcomed and accepted. Maybe we were all anti-Semitic in some sneaky residual way, but I don’t think so. I think we simply felt that the Ehrlichs didn’t permit themselves to be part of the company.
Marvin never did get over his flushing resentment at being shushed by Charity. And when, after the music, she stood in the middle of the room and blew a police whistle and ordered us to get ready for square dancing, the Ehrlichs didn’t know how and refused to learn. Dave Stone coaxed them with some real hoedown music on the piano, and Charity told them how easy it was, Sid would call only the very simplest things. The rest of us formed a square and waited. No go. Since Dave was needed at the piano, we were one short. After a while we replaced the rug and accepted the songbooks that Sid passed out.
Brand new, my mind said to me. Ten of them. I peeked at the price on the dust jacket of mine. $7.50. Seventy-five dollars for songbooks, just for one evening.
The Ehrlichs didn’t sing, either. They sat with the open book between them and moved their lips and made no sound. Maybe they were tone deaf, maybe they had grown up to other kinds of songs. But their eyes burned with resentment and reproach.
Certainly what we sang could not have evoked their scorn. None of your “Home on the Range” stuff, nor bawdy ballads, nor tunes remembered from Boy Scout campfires. No no. We sang things that
We knew that vision was only partly true. Some of our superiors were indeed men of brains and learning and disinterested goodwill, but some were stuffed shirts, and some incompetents, and some timid souls escaping from the fray, and some climbers, and some as bitter and jealous as some of us were at being inadequately appreciated. But still there they were, up in the sunshine above the smoke, a patch-elbowed tweedy elite that we might improve when we joined it but that we never questioned. Especially during the Depression, when every frog of us was lustful for a lily pad.
Early in our stay in Madison Professor Rousselot, who was much admired by his junior faculty for his elegant stone house, his snow-white handkerchiefs, his way of taking razor-thin slices off a baked ham or turkey, his mots and aphorisms, his quotations for every occasion, and his summers in the reading room of the British Museum, gave me a hint of how things were. We were talking about one of my fellow instructors who had a sick wife. “Poor Mr. Hagler,” Professor Rousselot said. “He has only his salary.”
Ah, yes, Professor Rousselot. Many of us understand. Poor Mr. Morgan, he too has only his salary, and comes from the boondocks besides. There are several like poor Mr. Hagler and poor Mr. Morgan. Poor Mr. Ehrlich, for example. He has only his salary, and he comes from Brooklyn, and hates it. He tries hard—harder by far than poor Mr. Morgan, who is a little arrogant in his barbarism. Poor Mr. Ehrlich has labored to benefit from what he was taught by Tink and Paul Elmer More. He smokes the right mixture in his Dunhill pipe, he works on his profile, he wears the right flannels and tweeds, he can recommend the right nutty sherries. But he gives himself away, like the Russian agent who ate jam with a spoon.
Neither of us may in fact make the club, but poor Mr. Ehrlich is in even worse shape than poor Mr. Morgan, for Mr. Morgan, besides being a little arrogant, is uncomplicatedly upward-mobile, whereas Mr. Ehrlich is bent on tearing down the demo-plutocracy whose airs he affects. He snows you with his Yale-Princeton superiorities at the very moment when he is trying to sign you up in the Young Communist League. He seems to Mr. Morgan to be hung up halfway between the British Museum and Red Square, paralyzed by choice.
I spend a minute on Marvin Ehrlich not because he matters to me, or ever did, but because that evening, by his failure to make it into the junior version of what we all coveted, he emphasized my own euphoric sense of being welcomed and accepted. Maybe we were all anti-Semitic in some sneaky residual way, but I don’t think so. I think we simply felt that the Ehrlichs didn’t permit themselves to be part of the company.
Marvin never did get over his flushing resentment at being shushed by Charity. And when, after the music, she stood in the middle of the room and blew a police whistle and ordered us to get ready for square dancing, the Ehrlichs didn’t know how and refused to learn. Dave Stone coaxed them with some real hoedown music on the piano, and Charity told them how easy it was, Sid would call only the very simplest things. The rest of us formed a square and waited. No go. Since Dave was needed at the piano, we were one short. After a while we replaced the rug and accepted the songbooks that Sid passed out.
Brand new, my mind said to me. Ten of them. I peeked at the price on the dust jacket of mine. $7.50. Seventy-five dollars for songbooks, just for one evening.
The Ehrlichs didn’t sing, either. They sat with the open book between them and moved their lips and made no sound. Maybe they were tone deaf, maybe they had grown up to other kinds of songs. But their eyes burned with resentment and reproach.
Certainly what we sang could not have evoked their scorn. None of your “Home on the Range” stuff, nor bawdy ballads, nor tunes remembered from Boy Scout campfires. No no. We sang things that
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