Read Online The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography by Philip Roth - Free Book Online
Authors: Philip Roth
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Beethoven quartets whenever he wasn’t reading. His intense cultural passions could have been shared by no more than a dozen students on the campus and by hardly anyone at the fraternity house. In the winter of 1952, a little over a year after I’d enrolled at Bucknell, we three resigned from Sigma Alpha Mu and gave our devotion instead to Et Cetera, a literary magazine that we’d helped to found and then took over, under my editorship in 1952–53 and the next year under Pete’s, with Dick as literary editor.
The fraternity divided pretty much into two groups: the commerce-and-finance majors preparing for business careers or law school and those in the sciences aiming for medical school; there were a couple of engineers and, aside from us three, only a handful of liberal-arts students. Before emerging literary interests forged my alliance with Pete Tasch and Dick Minton, the Sammy whose company I’d most enjoyed was a C&F student, Dick Denholtz, a burly, assertive, dark-bearded boy whose jovial forcefulness I associated with those peculiarly Jewish energies that gave my Newark neighborhood its distinctive exuberance. Dick came from the Newark suburbs, and perhaps what accounted for our strong, short-lived affinity was that his family’s American roots were like my own in urban Jewish New Jersey. Together we could be the coarse and uninhibited performers who ignited whatever improvisational satire flared up in the living room after dinner; the Sammy musical skit for the interfraternity Mid-Term Jubilee—a telescoped version of Guys and Dolls improbably set at Bucknell—had been written and directed by Dick Denholtz and me and starred the two of us in raucous singing roles. Our spirited low-comedy concoctions—the kind that I had thought unlikely to find a responsive audience at the Theta Chi house—constituted SAM’s single, unmistakable strain of “Jewishness”: in the ways that the extroverts made fun of things, and the ways that the others found us funny, Sigma Alpha Mu came closest, in my estimation, to being a Jewish fraternity.
I never knew how the predominantly Protestant student body perceived the Jewish fraternity. Almost two-thirds of Bucknell’s students were from small towns in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, while the preponderance of Sammies came from New York—most of them from Westchester County and Long Island, a few from the city itself. Of course there must have been coeds whose families preferred that they not date Jews and who willingly obeyed, but as there were barely twenty Jewish women on the campus, and about eighty Jewish men, the dates I saw at Sammy parties were mostly gentiles, many from communities where there were probably no Jews at all. Over the years Sigma Alpha Mu had staunchly sought, and frequently won, the interfraternity academic trophy, and though there weren’t enough Sammies playing on varsity teams to give the house an athletic aura (in my time just two basketball players and two football players), the sensational social event of the early fifties was our brainchild. The nature of the event suggests (as did the brazen Jubilee Guys and Dolls ) that going along like sensible assimilationists with traditional campus socializing conventions was not the primary motive of the Sammies’ leadership. The aim was to make a mark as a distinctively uninhibited, freewheeling fraternity.
The idea for the “Sand Blast” was not original to our chapter but borrowed from a fraternity at some larger university like Syracuse or Cornell, where the motif of an indoor winter beach party was supposed to have inspired a colossal success of just the sort the Bucknell Sammies hoped would elevate them to the forefront of campus popularity. The rugs and the furniture, the trophy cabinets and the pictures on the walls, were all to be removed from the downstairs rooms, and the first floor of the house—dining hall and two living rooms—was to be covered with about three inches of sand and
The fraternity divided pretty much into two groups: the commerce-and-finance majors preparing for business careers or law school and those in the sciences aiming for medical school; there were a couple of engineers and, aside from us three, only a handful of liberal-arts students. Before emerging literary interests forged my alliance with Pete Tasch and Dick Minton, the Sammy whose company I’d most enjoyed was a C&F student, Dick Denholtz, a burly, assertive, dark-bearded boy whose jovial forcefulness I associated with those peculiarly Jewish energies that gave my Newark neighborhood its distinctive exuberance. Dick came from the Newark suburbs, and perhaps what accounted for our strong, short-lived affinity was that his family’s American roots were like my own in urban Jewish New Jersey. Together we could be the coarse and uninhibited performers who ignited whatever improvisational satire flared up in the living room after dinner; the Sammy musical skit for the interfraternity Mid-Term Jubilee—a telescoped version of Guys and Dolls improbably set at Bucknell—had been written and directed by Dick Denholtz and me and starred the two of us in raucous singing roles. Our spirited low-comedy concoctions—the kind that I had thought unlikely to find a responsive audience at the Theta Chi house—constituted SAM’s single, unmistakable strain of “Jewishness”: in the ways that the extroverts made fun of things, and the ways that the others found us funny, Sigma Alpha Mu came closest, in my estimation, to being a Jewish fraternity.
I never knew how the predominantly Protestant student body perceived the Jewish fraternity. Almost two-thirds of Bucknell’s students were from small towns in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, while the preponderance of Sammies came from New York—most of them from Westchester County and Long Island, a few from the city itself. Of course there must have been coeds whose families preferred that they not date Jews and who willingly obeyed, but as there were barely twenty Jewish women on the campus, and about eighty Jewish men, the dates I saw at Sammy parties were mostly gentiles, many from communities where there were probably no Jews at all. Over the years Sigma Alpha Mu had staunchly sought, and frequently won, the interfraternity academic trophy, and though there weren’t enough Sammies playing on varsity teams to give the house an athletic aura (in my time just two basketball players and two football players), the sensational social event of the early fifties was our brainchild. The nature of the event suggests (as did the brazen Jubilee Guys and Dolls ) that going along like sensible assimilationists with traditional campus socializing conventions was not the primary motive of the Sammies’ leadership. The aim was to make a mark as a distinctively uninhibited, freewheeling fraternity.
The idea for the “Sand Blast” was not original to our chapter but borrowed from a fraternity at some larger university like Syracuse or Cornell, where the motif of an indoor winter beach party was supposed to have inspired a colossal success of just the sort the Bucknell Sammies hoped would elevate them to the forefront of campus popularity. The rugs and the furniture, the trophy cabinets and the pictures on the walls, were all to be removed from the downstairs rooms, and the first floor of the house—dining hall and two living rooms—was to be covered with about three inches of sand and
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