Chapter One: Michael (Returning to origins)

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: Michael (Returning to origins)

Chapter Two: Margaret (Re-entering the college's life, 1965-1970)

Chapter Three: (Matthew (Preparing to preside, 1970-1976)

Chapter Four: M.S. Part One (Getting started, 1976-1979)

Chapter Five: M.S. Part Two (Making headway, 1979-1984)

Chapter Six: Martin (Arriving...and ending, 1984-1994)

Chapter Seven: Mirage (Postlude)

Some Works Referred to in the Text

It was Sunday in the middle of May.  For the first time in thirty years, Bodger was absent from commencement.  For the first time in eighteen years, he would not occupy the prime place in the procession, designated by academic custom as the rear.  He would not feel the reassuring weight of his academic hood on his shoulders.  He would not be fiddling with the angle of his mortarboard as he emerged from the robing room.  He would not feel the eyes of many on him.  He would not see the security officers watching the route.  He would not see family members of graduates with small children, wanting to be first to watch the colorful robes go by in a slow wave toward the gym.  He would not check, and check again, in his red folder, fearful that the text of his speech would be missing from it.  He would not experience again the panic at the lectern in front of three thousand people, when, despite all his checking, he momentarily would be certain that he was scriptless.

            Nor would he have that feeling of lift as he spoke his last remarks to the graduates, when all details, all anxieties, would dissolve--when the reality of the day would fly on the sentence he spoke.

            Four and half months before, he had walked out of the office of the president.  He had locked the door and had said, "The last time."  He had thought then that it would be appropriate to have a lump in the throat or a tear in the corner of his eye (ever the expert of occasion).  Neither of them had materialized.  He could have conjured up something fitting if there had been an audience.  But it had been nearly midnight on New Year’s Eve.  The new man would be arriving in town the following day.  The paramount demand had not been for theatrics but for the completion of cleaning and clearing out.  He had gone home tired.  After consuming most of a bottle of Zinfandel, he had dropped into bed, finished carrying Duty at last.

            Since that year-end departure, Bodger had not felt even once a pull toward what used to be.  Friends thought that he would miss the rush that they linked with the exercise of authority.  They knew little of the jaded nerves that developed after one has had the rush a few times.  He tried to tell them how ecstatic he felt in the days of January.  He would arise as before, hurry through shower and shave, and then saunter, unobligated, to his new office up the street, on the edge of campus.  That was the principal release: not to be obligated, not to feel the whole thing on his back in every waking second of the day.

            Now, however, in the middle of May, with rain falling softly, Bodger again felt the pull of things happening.  Sitting a few blocks away in his home, he involuntarily thought about the nearby campus, from which he had banned himself.  For the first time he wondered whether the new president was feeling all right about the event.  Surely the rain would be spoiling the procession and the picnic reception on the greensward afterward.  He wondered whether someone had remembered to check the platform microphone at the last possible minute before the start of the music.

            Someone wrote of Hitler that he came to believe in his insane goals in the very act of speaking to the Volk.  He persuaded himself by persuading them.  Bodger thought he understood that process.  His commencement talks could do that to him.

            He would write them usually near exhaustion toward the end of an academic year.  Never would he speak off the cuff.  Commencement scripts demanded special effort commensurate with the size of the audience involved.  He would whip up a set of ideas, usually second-hand stuff from some unacknowledged source.  Sometimes his speeches of years ago were the unacknowledged source.  It was another chore he had to do.  He would cast the talk in capital letters on the computer screen and print it in double spacing so that he could read it without glasses.  Then he would put it aside and wait until the day before commencement to rehearse.

            He would do that by speaking into a small tape recorder, closeted in his study so that his wife Margot or his son Kurt would not overhear.  The vulnerability of rehearsal somehow required isolation, even for a performance that the whole college would hear in just twenty-four hours.  He had that instinctive need for privacy because in those sessions he would be opening himself to the energy of his own words.  He was in an act of building conviction at the center of himself, where indifference seemed to be the default position.  The speaker the following day would be a man of conviction, for the length of the speech, anyway.  That was all that would matter to Bodger at the time.

            But not this May.  It was over.  He did not have to care.  Yet, he wondered again whether the microphone would be turned on when the music stopped and the board chairman stepped up to open the ceremony.

            His habit of running things was not quite gone.

 An offer of a job that looked like a dead end

             Michael would start his final semester at the college in the fall.  Like Bodger, he was a kid from Montgomery County, homegrown.  His acne was a trace of former days.  He was fleshy but supple with youth.  When he bagged Bodger's groceries at the supermarket, he moved speedily but treated the cans and packages as if they mattered.  He conferred his smile on Bodger frontally.  That gave him a seeming maturity that he did not possess.

            Michael told Bodger that he enjoyed Professor Akin's course in contemporary history.  "He tells us what he remembers about things we're studying."

            "Sometimes," Bodger replied, "what we think we experienced is not what they later say we experienced."

            "That's our course in historiography!" Michael said.  Discovery was happening at the check-out counter.

            "Who owns the past?" said Bodger.

            "Right!"

            "You like being a history major."

            "Love it."

            "Grad school?"

            "Absolutely--if I could ever afford it.  Probably won't."

            "What will you do if grad school is out?" Bodger asked.

            "I don't care.  I can bag and read.  Something might turn up.  Maybe not.  The way it goes."

            So spake Generation X.  Bodger thought favorably about Michael when he got home with his bags.

            The next time he went to the supermarket, Michael asked, "Do you really believe that what you think you experienced is not what you really experienced?"

            "Depends, I guess," Bodger said.

            "I got to thinking the other day.  About you.  What led to your becoming president?"

            "I'd have to think about that," Bodger said.  "You have bags to fill."

            "Later?"

            Why not, Bodger thought.  "Why not?"

            They met at the donut shop when Michael finished his shift.  To Bodger their meeting felt familiar and strange at the same time.  He was repeating something he had done a thousand times, chatting informally with a student one-on-one.  Yet, he no longer had the old purpose.  He no longer had to work at finding the fit between institutional imperatives and student wishes.  Bodger could detect the bud of a newly sprouted freedom as he told Michael the story of his coming to the college.  He had told it often over the years.  Students in time would push beyond formalities and, with their raw curiosity, ask him to tell them where he came from, how he came to be in this seat of authority.  Michael was one of a lengthy line.  With his new freedom, still dawning, Bodger could begin to feel less editorially cautious. 

            "It was 1964.  I was thirty-four and caught in the labyrinth of corporate America.  I was making a living for my family but feeling as if I was slicing off a small part of my inner self each day for sacrifice.  I was well liked in the company.  It was essential in the company of the 1960s to be well liked if you wanted to move up.  And no one would ever admit he did not want to move up.

            "I had a good deal in a way.  I was in the industrial relations department of the Philadelphia gas utility company, where we attended to the care and feeding, the hiring and firing, of the work force, several thousand strong, if memory serves.

            "I fancied myself as a writer.  I had finished my novel, the labor of my early adulthood, five years earlier.  I gave it to a college classmate who had become a literary agent in New York and waited for the verdict that would make me the famous voice of the new generation.  You can guess the outcome.  'Somewhere in Time seems to be the first novel Mr. Bodger had to write before writing his first novel,' said one of my friend's contacts who read manuscripts for a major publisher.  I started another novel, The Untimely Death of John Braine.  The overtones of self-destructiveness in the title were not accidental.

            "I stayed up late writing short stories.  In those days the big magazines that published popular fiction, Collier's, Saturday Evening Post, were crippled but not yet dead.  I could still have fantasies of becoming successful in print.  Print still was king--though its reign would soon end.  I wrote poems, and a couple of little magazines accepted some of them.  But nobody ever read little magazines except the other people whose poems appeared in them.  So, in terms of success, they added up to zero.

            "You feel you have to blame someone or something when you don't realize your youthful ambitions.  I became a champion at blaming.  I blamed mostly myself.  I also blamed having a family.  I blamed the organization men who imposed their conformist values on me.  I blamed the Cold War, the iron net that kept us imprisoned in a fear of obliteration.  I blamed my elders who had fought World War II against Germany and Japan and believed anything was possible, including defeating the Russians in the end.  I blamed them for expecting me to believe like them.

            "Our home was a neat little house in the Delaware County suburbs.  We looked young and attractive, and we behaved ourselves and cared about our son and daughter.  Yet, it was a torture of sorts.  Blame and resentment ran in several directions at once.  My unbounded and frustrated ambitions were a source of deep distress in our home.  I'm not even sure they were ambitions.  I felt driven to write.  I had fears I could not even name.  There were many days when I got on the Media Local and wished it would never reach 30th Street Station so that I would not have to deal with the company, or anything, for another day.  Writing was somehow like drinking; it made me feel better for a while, no matter what it led to.  My failure to write fiction seen to be good by professional people who judged such things commercially, however, made it the instrument for self-blame, which I played like a virtuoso. Anyway, Michael..."

             Bodger paused.

            "But you said you had a good deal in the company," Michael said.

            "I did--because my job was to edit the company magazine.  People still were calling such things 'house organs' in the early '60s--amusing.  I did other things too.  I wrote reports and did research projects for the general management.  The magazine, though, was my major responsibility.  It came out every month.  I thought of it as an art form.  I worked at articles on gas manufacturing and on the hobbies of employees as if they were pure poetry.

            "Today you can't imagine a time when Hemingway's idea was still fresh and important.  I had internalized it so that it pervaded what I was doing on the job without my being conscious of that until many years later.  It was a simple matter of doing a deed with purity, integrity, even when you knew that intrinsically the deed did not matter a damn in the world at large.  I got satisfaction out of writing and editing that magazine.  Management and the employees appreciated what I produced.  All the while the world ignored the other things I wrote, the important things, as I thought.  I imagined myself stuck in the grip of the company for life, working to produce elegant ephemera as if it were lasting, subject always to the tyrannous whim of corporate policy.

            "And then one day I got an unexpected letter in the mail.  It was from Dr. James E. Wagner, vice president of the college.  The alumni secretary was leaving to become a fundraiser for his seminary, and a couple of untimely deaths of faculty members created a need for someone to teach some English composition.  My name came up as someone who might fill the need.  Would I be kind enough to come out and meet Dr. Wagner?  I did not know what an alumni secretary was or did except to edit a journal for alumni (the college's answer to a house organ).  I had done a master's in English at Penn without ever having taught English to a college class.  I had had only cursory contact with the college since my graduation eleven years before.

            "What seemed to have attracted Dr. Wagner and the president, D. L. Helfferich, was an unsolicited article I sent in to the alumni journal.  It dealt with the 'creative minority' in American corporate life.  I suspected they liked it for the wrong reason.  It made me sound like a publicist for American business, but what I really cared about was the idea of a creative minority.  I saw creativity infiltrating the encrusted organizational structure of the post-war corporation and revolutionizing it from within.  Then again, as I soon learned, Helfferich cast himself at times as a flamboyant iconoclast in his own right.  He may have read my mind better than I gave him credit for.

            "When I arrived for the interview with Dr. Wagner and learned that he was the former head of the Evangelical and Reformed Church of America, I was discouraged.  When he told me that the president of the college played a prominent role nationally in the church, the situation looked even worse.

            "Throughout my four years at the college, I was what we then called a day student; you call yourself a commuting student today.  Same thing--no residency on campus.  In those days--I graduated in 1953--the college required all students to attend morning chapel except those who lived more than five miles from campus and who did not have a room on campus.  Our family lived in Mont Clare, four and a half miles from the perimeter of campus--I once measured it carefully in a car.  I always had a nagging concern that a dean someday would make that measurement and gig me for all the hours of morning chapel I had missed since matriculating.

            "I knew little about the practice of Christianity.  We had no affiliation in our family.  Churches made me nervous, owing to my unfamiliarity with what was going on and to a traumatic boyhood event.  My fallen-away Catholic mother now and then would drag me to a church.  She would become periodically conscience-stricken, I imagine, for not giving me a proper religious upbringing.  These crash experiences in religion did nothing to increase my understanding or empathy.  The incident that I could never forget happened because one Sunday we sat near the center aisle.  The priest came by swinging a container of holy water and dashed some of it into my face.  There were only a few drops, I am sure; but after I got over the shock of the surprise assault, I felt spooked.  Somehow, the water in my face assured that I would go to hell for failing to live up to some awful law I never heard about.  The uncomfortable sense of guilt and my ignorance of church practice came with me to the meeting with Dr. Wagner years later.

            "He had been the architect of a merger of the old German Reformed denomination of the college and the Congregationalists.  For a year or so he was a co-president of the newly merged organization.  'Then we got clobbered,' as one of the faculty, an ordained Reformed clergyman-philosopher, put it to me much later, after I came to work here.  Wagner was out.  A New Englander was in.  Helfferich then gave Wagner a berth doing public relations for the college and churning up what money he could from churches.  He was a churchman and therefore put me on my guard.  Still, before I left the interview I could see how his style would have been a powerful resource in negotiating something as momentous as the merger of two Protestant denominations.  He was ponderous but forceful, and he made me believe that he would help me in a storm.  I could tell he liked me.  Corporate life schooled me well in the art of making people like me.

            "The college invited me back for a second interview.  Dr. Calvin D. Yost, the professor who had been my English department adviser when I was a student, took me to lunch at Lakeside Inn.  I had always been grateful that he treated my thoughts about literature with interest, even though I was pretty sure they were half-baked.  He encouraged me to do an honors paper on F. Scott Fitzgerald and approved it for recognition at graduation.  It looked pathetically thin when I read it years later.  With Yost I was practicing my best behavior for the interview with the president, which would take place after lunch.  Lunch talk went well.  I could not have known it then, but Yost was probably putting on a soft sell to help persuade me to come to the college to work.  He must have guessed that an offer would be forthcoming and that the salary would no doubt be less than I was currently making.

            "It was a Saturday in the fall.  President Helfferich was going to the afternoon football game.  He met me for a brief interview beforehand.  We had never met through my four years as a student when he was a part-time vice president.  He ran a bank full-time before they made him president of the college in 1958.  He too, I felt, liked me.  Yet, I was apprehensive about his grand manner.  The vision of being a heathen among churchmen like him continued to nag me.

            "He was to me an old guy.  I had enough trouble in my company maintaining relationships with the assertive can-do men who fought in World War II.  It seemed to me that my experience would always be pale compared to theirs.  I spent my teenage years in their shadow during and right after the war.  Helfferich, in the college class of 1921, was from another generation even farther removed.  I learned from Dr. Wagner that Helfferich was in the air corps in World War I.  He wore a natty vest and a crushed hat on that Saturday afternoon.  It was easy for me to picture him in an open cockpit, scarf flying, wings wobbling, machine gun at the ready.  Truth is, I don’t believe he ever left the Texas training field for the fight in Europe.  He remained from another time, another experience, and that contributed to my discomfort.

            "Finally I had to tell him, as he was honing in on an offer: 'If I will have to do church or chapel duties, I really won't be able to accept a position.'

            "He fixed me with a bemused stare.  Either it did not matter or he was certain he could correct my shortcomings after I came into his orbit.

            "'Are you an atheist?' he asked.

            "'No,' I said.

            "'You'll be fine,' he said.”

            Michael asked Bodger whether the salary offer was less.

            "It was.  I nearly turned down the job.  When I went home and talked to my wife, she opposed the move.  She thought the job was a dead-end, and on its face it was.  I would be running a funny little alumni office with hardly any help and teaching a course I knew nothing about and doing other things for a man I was initially apprehensive about.  There was no promise of any perceptible future.  I did not have the standard license for higher education, since I left Penn before a Ph.D. was in sight.  Not auspicious circumstances, with a wife and two kids, one five and the other just a year old.  But she did not fully know how dissatisfied I felt in my company job--even though it looked like a good deal."

            Michael said, "And even though they liked you."

            Bodger continued, "In those days a husband's career was central to the family whether or not the wife had one of her own, and Margot did.  She was a music teacher, finished for the time being because of the birth of our second child.  She had good reason to think the move was imprudent.  But I prevailed.  Something in my gut said there was a promise here that was not showing on the surface.  I had a sense of returning to roots.  There was an unspecified rightness in my mind about leaving a corporate job and taking one in academia, especially since it was at my own alma mater."

            Bodger smiled and added that the rest was history--things worked out.  "Margot was long-suffering but stayed loyal and supportive throughout.  Men in those days were rarely grateful enough to their partners."

            Michael said, "It was a different time.  Gotta go.  Meeting my girl.  You didn't have to tell me all this.  Thanks."

            Bodger wanted to say, come back, there's more.  Michael saved him from having to say it.

            "I wanted to ask about something else," Michael said.  "I don't want to be a nuisance."

            "You're not," Bodger said.

            "Great," Michael said.

            "We'll get together again.  Come to my house.  We have a deck.  I'll give you a drink, if you're not underage."

            "I'm not."

            "Done, then."

 Work was a way of living

             They sat on the deck behind the Bodger house.  Michael turned his head so that he was not looking into the afternoon sun.  Bodger, glass in hand, welcomed the younger man's curiosity without wondering about its source.  Margot was shopping with a friend and would not interrupt.

            "What interested me," Michael said, "was your work.  Work itself.  I used to watch you, believe it or not.  I thought you had to be everywhere all the time, which was one thing.  Then I saw you one night leaving your office at one in the morning; and that was another thing.  I couldn't help thinking, that's hard work.  Right?"

            "It was hard work," said Bodger.  "But I didn't work any harder as president than I did as assistant editor of a house organ.  Work was compulsive for me.  It was almost like the tic someone has who is suffering from dyskinesia--I couldn't help myself.  Margot kept a book around the house for years, Living With a Workaholic.  She thought I would learn from it and reform my ways.  I never did, although as years went on I came to see dimly what upset her.

            "She probably never realized how much positive reinforcement I got from working.  The people I worked for loved it.  So did the people I worked with.  This was true of my subordinates, I think, after I became a president, too.  I think I relieved them of work because I was so eager to do it myself."

            "Did you work harder than other presidents, do you think?" asked Michael.  "Isn't it a killer of a job?"

            "Exhibit A: it did not kill me.  I have conflicting thoughts on my work compared to that of my peers.  Leave out the issue of productivity, and I have no doubt I worked at it more than many of them.  Did that make me more successful than they, more productive?  Surely not.  I always felt ambivalent about my powers of thought, especially the quantitative.  I never fully outgrew an irrational discomfort in social intercourse.  Since much of the work required me to present a position to a public of one kind or another, on paper and in person, I overcompensated by preparing as much as I could in advance.  As years went by, habits of leadership overcame some of that feeling.  I could operate a little less compulsively.  I could never feel completely natural in an impromptu action, though.  I must have wasted vast quantities of time others never had to spend.  They had more natural social ease.  They had better-disciplined minds.  Many nights, walking the streets of the town or shooting hoops alone in the gym, I would say, 'You're not meant for this!  Get out before it caves in on you!'  Inertia won, I'm afraid."

            "People would not believe you were self-doubting," said Michael.  "You were decisive.  Kids thought you were too much so.  Remember the Zeta Chi case?"

            "When I was young," replied Bodger, "self-doubt was my medium.  Lacking experience, of course I had no message.  That could explain my failure as an imaginative writer.

            "When you are older, and you look back on an actual working career, the message overwhelms the medium.  Experience is everything, no matter how or why you shaped it.  In retrospect, all the angst about self is so much smoke.  I suspect it was smoke even then.  Or, it was a component in a dialectic, maybe, which forces you forward.  You can see yourself, at my present stage in life, as a dupe of the system.  You were agonizing over life and love and wondering about your worth, and feeling terrible half of the time, while you went to work, filled with anger or fear, and beat the work to death.  Nobody cared how you felt.  They just accepted the results, thank you.  There was a lot of talk about the schizophrenic character of organizational life in the 1950s.  I guess I knew something about it.

            "It's old, dead stuff now.  I tell you about it only because you asked.  When I jumped from a corporation to a college, I thought it would be a liberation, and it was, in a way.  My product now was knowledge, not gas.  Friends joked about my having been a gasman.  That fundamental change of purpose never fully erased the compulsive character of my work, though.  The things people applauded me for doing on the job were the products of what I now think was virtually a psychosis.  At the time, I thought I was living out the destiny of the American male by striving and achieving in a challenging world.  Most people probably thought the same.  My wife knew differently, of course."

            Michael said, "In a contemporary American lit class, we dealt with American male values.  The lectures made your generation sound hopelessly phallocentric and detestable.  Hemingway's world came off as medieval.  I guess I wouldn't know how it felt before women's consciousness rose up." 

            Bodger thought a long time.  "When Kate Millett's Sexual Politics hit the nation, the direct confrontation with femaleness as a social and political reality violated taboos I learned growing up from the 1930s to the 1950s.  I can still be momentarily stunned when I come across an article by an academic speaking from a 'cliterary' perspective.  Still, it is almost as hard for me to remember as it is for you to know how it felt to live in a pre-feminist environment.

            "It comes back when I see black-and-white movies from the Depression years.  They seem like cartoons now but ring true to my memory.  Men worked.  Women had children and took care of the home, gave sympathy and support to working men.  As feminist research has shown, that was a truism, not reality, but it fixed the minds of my generation, whatever it was.

            "It's possible, even easy, for you, Michael, to think of alternative life styles.  You get that courtesy of your parents' generation, the baby boomers.  There was only one acceptable life style for my contemporaries and me, at least in the social space that we occupied.  There were alternatives, yes, but they were somewhere south of the border.  The pressure of family expectations was truly numbing, as I remember.  I did not want to bring embarrassment to my mother and father as a kid.  Something always pulled me to the edge.  I thought I was different, maybe because I read books and my buddies did not.  We lived near the Schuylkill River.  In my fantasies I could see myself in a small boat, going down the river into a strange world where you were free.  Huck Finn in Pennsylvania.  These were boyhood exercises but they stayed with me as I learned to do my duty.  You might say I never got to take the ride on the river and vaguely regretted it my whole life.  Instead I obeyed the instructions and learned to work.  I learned well.  The stars I got on my report cards were corrupting, you might say, from a Huck Finn viewpoint.  I knew I could live an alternative life but it always remained stuck in my head and could not play out in reality.  Just words, ideas, much of which I kept to myself, not sharing with anyone, not even my wife."

            Michael smiled a wry smile that seemed to Bodger to belie his inexperience.

            Bodger continued, "My point is that I grew up in a world of limited material means and limited options.  Being a man meant being a working man.  Mostly that meant working in a mill or factory, doing something with your body.  My father worked in a steel mill in Pottstown for more than thirty years.  That was reality.  Coming home tired and sweaty to a meal cooked by a wife was reality....having her wash clothes on Monday and hang them out in the back yard....listening to Gabriel Heater's version of the news on the radio in the early evening and going to bed early....getting up before dawn to get out to work....returning home in the late afternoon and cultivating tomatoes, corn, and beans in the empty lot next door....repairing the engine on a used '37 Oldsmobile in the driveway on Sunday afternoon.  Reality.  How would a kid growing up in our household know there were alternatives to men working and women helping them by their side?"

            Michael said, "You were lucky to be able to transfer this idea of men at work from the steel mill to the business of editing and then to managing."

            Bodger said, "Still, I was my old man's son in my valuing of work as a man's responsibility.  That did not make it normal for me.  It simply made it inevitable.

            "When I was in my early thirties, working in a corporation, remembering the ride on the river I never took, I was a bag of contradictions.  One of my poems was entitled The Suburban Monk.  I can't remember all the lines now but the gist of it was that the good life was bad for the soul.  I was an amusement in my angst then."

            Finishing his drink, Michael seemed to Bodger to grow ill at ease.  He appeared to detect unseemliness in a man of authority showing this much of the private side of himself.  Yet, he was a budding historian at heart.  In spite of himself, he asked why Bodger would have become a president with so many conflicting personal feelings about the system.

            They heard the door of the car slamming in the garage.  Margot was home from shopping.  "Another time?" Bodger said.

            "I'll come back," Michael promised.

 The head office became Bodger's natural habitat

             After Michael left, Bodger rummaged in the file cabinet for confirmation of his remembering.  The young man had further loosened the rope tying up the past.  Dimly remembered pieces of it were falling out.  He found the The Suburban Monk and read it with an amused expression:

This is my charterhouse.

Arbor Shade Lane, USA.

Mea culpa, mea culpa.

And no forgiveness, no absolution,

no prayers, no sacraments,

no rules, no ritual,

no bell, no candle,

no healing book (but books, yes books).

A hopeless monk,

and this my hopeless monastery.

As holy men give up to God,

I give up to hopelessness.

Some have mountain fastnesses,

slab beds, stone floors,

spare meals, short sleep,

rag clothes, crude sandals.

Here are township curbs and playgrounds,

Sealy mattresses, inlaid tile,

roast beef, long Sundays,

Botany 500s, Florsheims.

These too chafe the body.

But they destroy the soul.

            Bodger smiled at the tracings of his former self.  The Romantic Egotist, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s creation, had come to life again a generation later, far from the Ritz, in the flat, uncolorful world of Cold War suburbia.  "Michael," he said to himself, "I will spare you this."

            Then he realized the curiosity of the young man had been useful at just that moment when he could be developing post-presidency pangs.  He might spare Michael some details, but he would continue to peel his onion, now that he had started.

            Bodger thought further about Michael's curiosity about work.  "Of Bodger it is no fable, he is always ready, willing, and able."  He never forgot what the editor of the high school yearbook indited about him under his callow visage in the photograph.

            When, just out of college, he got to Mannheim, Germany, as an Ordnance Supply Specialist (MOS 1815) in the bitter days of January 1954, Major John J. Meyer seemed to see something in Bodger he did not see in the six other replacements just shipped in from the ZI.  (The military term for the Continental US--Zone of the Interior--had always made Bodger admire the baroque complexity of the metaphor of the world imagined into being by the United States government during World War II.)

            Instead of sending him to the shop, the major tagged him to replace Corporal Critelli as the chief clerk in the head office of the field maintenance unit.  The major's judgment proved sound.  Bodger worked hard and well.  As a game of sorts, he succeeded in imagining the major's responsibility in the convoluted organizational structure that made up the USAREUR Command headquartered in nearby Heidelberg.  That allowed him to anticipate the major's needs.  They derived mainly from his desire to survive as an active officer.  Like a Dantesque soul teetering on the brink, the major could look down and imagine himself getting a decommissioning order and being consigned to the reserves back home in the ZI.  Because Bodger was prompt with reports and accurate with the letters he composed for the major's signature, the major seemed to come to believe that his non-commissioned clerk could help save him.  He flattered Bodger and made his life in the office pleasant.

            For a two-year volunteer for the draft in Cold War Europe, the whole of military service felt like a postponement of living.  His satisfaction in the office contrasted with the pervasive unease of the military arrangement writ large. Bodger believed that, in that contrast, he discovered the paradigm for his subsequent working career. He would get a kind of satisfaction from doing work well within a system designed to make him a mere object of command.  He was a kin of Private Pruitt in James Jones's From Here to Eternity.  Sweet notes from Pruitt's bugle would envelop the parade ground, unconnected to the military machinery, with all its faults, that enveloped him.  Like Pruitt, Bodger would play the instruments of the military system without worrying about its larger purposes.

            One of Bodger's board members once characterized himself as a natural-born inhabitant of boardrooms.  "I'm really alive when I belly up to a table and line up support for a vote."  Bodger said he understood, because ever since his days in Major Meyer's office in Germany, he knew his native habitat too--the head office.

            At the gas company it was not long before the general manager saw Bodger's abilities.  The G.M., Charles G. Simpson, recruited him for duty in the little group around him who were conducting a political fight for life with city hall.  That work was on top of editing the magazine, with no extra pay.  Bodger read transcript by night, wrote tactical suggestions in the early morning, and occasionally sat in on meetings with the general manager himself.  Simpson could not have been more unlike Major Meyer.  He was self-confident, clever in a corny way, and combative.  Work was his passion.  He carried work home from the office in two suitcases each evening.  Although the prose he wrote for reports and speeches was often turgid it sparkled periodically with granules of his surprising insights.  Since he was on the public docket virtually every day during the most intense part of the battle with the city controller and the mayor, he welcomed any help available.  Bodger found himself drafting arguments, while he indexed the hearings and annotated them daily.  Simpson and his senior staff took Bodger's work and asked for more.  Bodger gave it eagerly, pleased to be pleasing the top man.  In the end they won the battle for a new lease for the company to operate the city-owned gas system.

 Bodger read Zen with his necktie on

             It was at the time of the fight with the city controller and the mayor that Bodger read Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki on Zen Buddhism.  Al Elseroad, an Army buddy who remained a lifelong friend and fellow adventurer in ideas, had led him there.  Commuting on the train, Bodger read for forty minutes in and forty minutes out each working day.

            The beatniks had made Zen a popular part of their iconography in the 1950s and 1960s.  Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums was a banner.  But Bodger read with his necktie on.  He never connected with the people who were connecting esoteric Eastern practice to peculiarly American impulses.  In the neurotic climate that made the building of back yard A-bomb shelters a rational act, the search for a radical style of personal release seemed equally rational to Bodger.  Those conducting that search, however, lay beyond the borders of his corporate life.

            Once, in Camden, he visited a writing friend, Ann Ellwood.  He had met her through the industrial editors' network.  She had another network of friends that touched that other world, where the beats were smoking, wearing something else, and looking for windows in the fortress walls.  When she invited him for spaghetti and wine in her hot walk-up apartment, not far from Whitman's Mickle Street house, he met some of them.  They were hip, and they talked smartly about the new writing.  Bodger mostly listened.  Well into the evening, Ann shook her head.  No, she said, Bodger was not ready yet.  She sealed his feeling of corporate entrapment.  He went home feeling low.

            But he read further, leaving the likes of Kerouac--and J. D. Salinger too--where they belonged.  He came to believe Ann did not know what it was really about.  He practiced in his own way, late at night, walking in the nearby woods, suburban traffic just audible over the hill.  "Dualistic thought" became the targeted adversary.  He thought he could see his contradictions and the maddening absurdities of the organization in a more tolerable light.  They would become manageable if he could stop the desire-driven world, as it were, and experience radical reality.  He did not care if this was an illusion.  After a while, he did not care if he really understood what Watts and the more challenging writings of D.T. Suzuki were telling the western mind.  He found a pragmatic effectiveness in his reading and in the imaginative journey to a Japan that he never expected to see (but, years later, did).

            Hui-neng, the sixth Zen patriarch (637-713), became the closet hero of the reclusive commuter on the 7:24 am Media Local.  He would keep his distance from his nameless companions on the platform.  He would find a seat as far from everyone as possible and bury his head in his book.  He would not look up until the train reached Suburban Station.  When he would get to the office, he would put Watts or Suzuki on the corner of his desk, a reminder that the company agenda was not the only agenda.  It also told his associates that here was somebody slightly strange.  Their curiosity was the surface of a lurking intolerance for the unknown, which, in the end, kept the company, and the great white-collar horde, in order.  Bodger instinctively felt the hazard of being identified as a potential source of disorder in the ranks.  That he had a master's degree in English from Penn and that his job was to write about the company helped him.  Without knowing how, he managed to avoid being stigmatized.  When they quizzed him, he somehow kept control.  They ended by thinking his reading was not a serious matter.  It was like someone's idiosyncrasy in wearing white socks with a dark suit, odd but harmless.

            Bodger did not want to flout their tastes or flaunt pseudo-sophistication.  Even a lifetime later, he could imagine himself back into the anxious, self-absorbed state that attended that stage of his life.  His fellow workers seemed to bear easily the combined responsibilities of bread-winning and being spouse and parent--but not Bodger.  Studying Zen happened along at a critical point.  Even now it looked like a happy accident that kept him from diving off the deep end.  A point of view from another world allowed him to break out of the world into which he had been indoctrinated and which on the surface he had come to know how to manipulate.

            When he met Michael next time, he tried to tell him about it.

            "It takes an effort to re-enter the intensity of such a past time," Bodger reflected.  "The books I was reading, however, I can return to, even now.   After we talked last, I went home and pulled the old books from the shelf.  They survived the cut of half of my collection when we moved out of the president's house on campus.

            "You forget what you have read after you internalize it so completely that it becomes a part of your behavior, the way you address a new day.  That's what I discovered the other evening.  There, on page after yellowing page, were Suzuki's reports on Hui-Neng's definition of enlightenment, and I read them as if they were from uncut pages.  Good Alan Watts's little paper back was coming apart at the stitching.  My red-penned underlines leaped from the brittle pages.  It was an entrancing new experience, as if I never had read them before.  At the same time, they reminded me how I used to crave for the unconventional turn of thought, the shocking phrase, which would explode the conventional stance that constrained me.

            "I knew once again that books are not building blocks in the scholarly build-up of an argument to support an hypothesis.  They are medicines, rather, that save you from life-threatening disease.  Dis-hyphen-ease, I mean.  Here, look at this."

            Bodger opened to a page of Suzuki and read the words of Hui-neng:

 All the Buddhas of the past, present, and future, and all the Sutras belonging to the twelve divisions are in the self-nature of each individual, where they were from the first...There is within oneself that which knows, and thereby one has a satori....O friends, when there is a Prajna illumination, the inside as well as the outside becomes thoroughly translucent, and a man knows by himself what his original mind is, which is no more than emancipation.  When emancipation is obtained, it is the Prajna-samadhi, and when this Prajna-samadhi is understood, there is realized a state of mu-nen (wu-nien), ‘thought-less-ness.’  (From William Barrett, ed., Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D. T. Suzuki.  New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956, p. 186.)

             Michael mused politely.  Bodger realized that he had proffered him a small slice of a long loaf of explanation of something virtually unexplainable.  He left it at that.  When Michael went home, however, Bodger looked at his private journal from the 1960s.  He had not read it for years.  He leafed through the yellowing hand-written notebook pages in search of a particular account.  When he found it, the date surprised him: Fourth of July 1967.    It was an all-American experience, colored in Oriental tones.  He had been working at the college for two and a half years.  He had been happy to leave corporate culture behind and had been trying to piece together the meaning of his new life at the college.  His familiar handwriting curled around his consciousness and tugged him back to that night.  To this moment, he was unsure about it.  On its face, it was merely a copycat imitation of the experiences he had been reading about, a psychedelic trip without drugs.  It felt right at the time, Bodger said to himself, whatever it was.  It felt like a smooth plane intersecting many planes of striation--the crosshatches of the stressful existence he had not yet completely escaped.  He found the following, dated Tuesday, 4 July 1967, written in a choppy hand:

Tonight while out on a walk I was indescribably freed of myself, and stood in a strangely erotic awareness of being in and of the all.  I cannot write about it now, so soon afterwards, while my whole consciousness is still drawn toward that unspecific reflection upon nothing and everything.  There is a danger of dramatizing the experience in language and cheapening if not destroying it.  Suffice it for me to say that this evening will be one of the two or three most important points in my life.  It was as if seven years of walking brought me to a cliff, and I was taken off it.  Perhaps later I can reflect on tonight.  Not now.  In truth, though, no talking about it afterward could possibly alter it, make it inefficacious.  It was, and is, that is the all-important fact: Tathagata realized, I think.

            He entered nothing more in his journal until 23 July 1967, when he returned to the experience:

I do recall a light rain falling, and all houses silent, and few cars passing.  No fireworks cracked, and the sky was very dark with the rain.  The street lights on Ninth Ave. shined mistily through green leaves bent low with the wet, and toward the bend at Heist's one shone as if at the end of a heavy low green tunnel.  I walked toward it, my steps growing light and unconscious and slow, as if I were walking automatically.  A glaze gradually came over my eyes: I did not see things very sharply, but was staring outward in the slowly building expectation that I would soon be capable of looking inward at something whole.  This happened in part--as if a door half opened--while I was on the return leg of my half-hour walk.  Then it passed, and I was walking down the driveway in front of the house.  Off to the left down the sharp slope of hill I could see the highway, with a wavering island from the street light, greenish and pale in the steamy atmosphere.  Beyond, where the Perkiomen Creek lay, a darker darkness could be vaguely seen, and beyond that a pool of utter blackness, the horizon--a mellow sweeping line on usual nights--obliterated.  Sky and earth might have been one.

            I paused to look, and at once my sight snapped out of focus, my knees bent slightly, my backbone became taut and I felt a kind of lifting of the weight of my own body.   I also felt goose bumps rising.  These physical sensations accompanied the significant experience: the lucidity.  I could not look at any particular thing adequately, but I was aware of my total momentary functioning, as it happened on the edge of my heartbeat, and as it partook of that which is conventionally thought to be outside oneself.  There was no outside myself: it was all the same.  I felt that my existence was the existence of all I was aware of around me, and the existence of that, whether it prevailed or was annihilated, was my existence.  I had a sense of lovingly leaning into all around me and ceasing to feel critical of it or able to discriminate it in its parts.  There was a marvelous ease about all this: no effort, no strain.  I could even think of not being in this ecstatic condition of awareness, and still hold to it.  It might have been like sky diving or surfing: while in the free fall, or on the face of the wave, all the trouble of getting up in the plane, or paddling out from shore, is behind one and forgotten.  One is in and of the air, or the wave, and all elements--including the ones in the body--harmonize.  A mere thought was incapable of cutting the fabric.

            How far away the Bodger of that epiphany was from the one reading it nearly three decades later.  Yet how near: he could not deny the freshness of those nearly forgotten moments, naive though they looked.  Did it matter whether or not he had correctly absorbed the subtle categories of Buddhist thought?  The important thing was that he had coped.  What he had felt that night made it possible to do so.  It had made it possible for him to live with the increasingly disciplined regimen that he had fallen into.

            Once opened, his old files yielded poems from the suburban years when he was first reading about Zen, before coming to the college in 1965.  Those pieces of evidence made it obvious that he had been warming up for some time for that night of epiphany:

 NIGHT WALK

 I'll not arrange from this night walk,

when snug behind a desk once more,

a pretty Vase of Images

for decorating idle talk.

Two moon-struck hounds begin to bay;

a muffled stranger scuffles by--

why magnify with poetry,

when there is nothing more to say?

I seek no pre-planned mood, nor hope

to squeeze from this experience,

like Joyce, a Paragraph, or Verse:

I walk; I do not interlope.

Thinking only what occurs,

measuring the length of night--

each by each, and all by all--

I join the mindless multiverse.

And if the moon is steely bright,

and traces shadows of the branches

on the path, like filigree,

without my Saying, it is right.

Not stepping with a poet's sight,

nor arrogant, nor reverent,

empty of intent (yet full),

I walk the silent way tonight.

            For a bizarre moment, he imagined a television screen on which he appeared in black and white.  He was reading this report from his restless night walking many years ago.  The foreground silhouettes of the cartoon boneheads who watched the B movies on Comedy Central, Mystery Screen Theater 3,000, jiggled and chortled.  And then the screen grew brighter, and it simply wiped them out.

            Alfred North Whitehead's paperback books--Modes of Thought, Science and the Modern World, Adventures of Ideas--preceded Bodger's reading of Zen.  In Whitehead he heard a paternal voice, which enjoyed the acclaim of the established world, artfully debunking the conventional reality by which Bodger felt bound.  It was Whitehead who seemed to assure him of a freedom to function beyond the conventional boundaries that he felt from every side.  Intellectually, at least, Whitehead legitimized an adventurousness that seemed always to lie elsewhere, inaccessible to him.

            "There is more than this," Bodger, the commuter, needed to say to himself.  Whitehead said it for him.  The universe is infinite; you have the right to grasp as much of it as possible; you will not grasp it entirely; that is reason for joy, not lamentation.

            It took Zen to gloss that Whiteheadian text.  The two lines of reading converged.  The convergence freed Bodger from a feeling of ironbound limits.  On walks in the night through the streets of suburbia and its residual wild patches, he could have the visceral sense that categories of thought--and their consequent social structures--did not have final sway over him.  He could even get beyond the very thought of thought on fortunate nights.

            Despite his discovery that an enlightened state of being could be possible, he always knew that, in believing he had attained it, he proved that he had not.  It was enough for him to know, at the edges, of a possible other way, even as he continued to toe the line and work like a dog and meet his deadlines.

            One of his thoughtful company friends was a committed Christian.  He was among the curious who saw Suzuki sitting on the edge of Bodger's desk at the company.  Unlike the others, he sought to know what Bodger was pursuing.  Bodger pointed to that possible other way, which had come to him painfully through reading about the ancient practices of China and Japan.

            "Well," his friend said, "you didn't have to go by such a roundabout route.  Didn't you learn the simplest Sunday school lesson?  You lose your life in order to gain it."

            Reflecting on his ignorance of Christian practices, Bodger said to him, with a touch of rue, how typical it was of him to do it the hard way.

 Literary good guys and bad guys in graduate studies

             "If you go to graduate school in history, you may not get a job," Bodger said to Michael the next time they were talking together.

            "I wouldn't go for that reason," Michael said.  "I just like it."

            "You like beer but you wouldn't drink it all the time."

            "I did get buzzed last night with my girl friend," Michael smiled.

            "Go if you can," Bodger relented.  "I went without knowing what it was or where it would lead.  I've not regretted it, but, of course, I quit before it was too late."

            "'Too late?'" Michael asked.

            "If I had stayed and gone for a doctoral degree, I always believed I would have been a very unhappy man.  I am glad not to have become a typical academic.  It was a fluke that, in the end, I later left corporate life in retreat to academia.  I suppose I never closed doors completely on possible alternatives when I was in my twenties and thirties.  The romantic side of academic life I never fully rejected, although the orthodoxy of scholarly discipline I instinctively found contrary to my liking.  I had a youthful vision of smoking a pipe through the late evening and discussing great ideas with a small group of like-minded people.  Such a vision, of course, had nothing to do with the reality of academia as it presented itself to me either at graduate school or on the job here.  But it may have explained why I was willing to jump in, despite Margot's doubts, and leave corporate America behind. Maybe it was prophetic that whenever I tried to smoke a pipe, before long the smoke would irritate my tongue.

            "I went to graduate school in English literature with very mixed feelings.  Throughout two years in the Army, from 1953 to 1955, right after my four years as an undergraduate, I started writing a first novel.  The thought of going to study English literature when I wanted to be writing the novel distressed me.  My wife thought I should be getting a job, not indulging in either of these two foolish fantasies.  I went through with graduate school because in late June, a month after I came home from Germany, the dean of the graduate school of arts and sciences at Penn notified me of a university scholarship.  It would pay my tuition.  I lived in the reflected shadows of World War II veterans.  So the GI Bill, a little modified, still was in place and paid me a subsistence stipend during my enrollment.  Combined with Margot's new job as a music teacher in suburban Delaware County, this and the free tuition allowed us to rent a third-floor walk-up apartment in Media.  It was an easy commute in late afternoons from there to West Philadelphia.  You would think I was set for a long and happy haul through graduate school.

            "Two weeks before I started, I came back to the college for a visit with Dr. Yost and other professors who had done their graduate work at Penn.  I got some good advice on the lay of the land in College Hall.  Still, I went home with a strange feeling of discouragement.  Something in their manner of speaking about Penn sounded sour.  The prospect of the hard struggle to reach what they had reached looked dispiriting.  One of them said 'poor fellow' almost involuntarily when I told him I was probably aiming at a college teaching career.  Another reacted when I said I did not want the high-spiraling world of business to suck me in:  'Perhaps you’re being sucked in no less by the high-spiraling world of higher education.'

            "'Be wary of the clerks in the grad school office,' Dr. Yost cautioned me.

            "The foreboding that I took from this encounter did not stop me, however.  By that fall, frankly, I had no alternatives ready at hand.  The experience was good for me intellectually.  But stress and strain filled our new life.  Married only two years, we were making our first real go at a non-military way of existing.  Domesticity was not my strength.  Working all day at teaching and keeping house by evening pushed Margot to her limit.  I was not providing her the rosy connubial life we had thought was ours for the taking.

            "I became certain after a few months that literary criticism in the academic mode was not to be my life's work.  I toughed it out from September until the following summer of 1956, overloading on courses so that I could at least pull a master's degree out of the experience before getting on with something else.  Many years had to pass before I could see the benefit of the experience.  While I was in the thick of it, I created a kind of black-and-white warfare in my mind.  The professional literary critics were the bad guys.  Creative literary artists were the good guys.  It was an egocentric thing to do.  I had gargantuan ambitions as a writer of fiction, even though I had produced negligible evidence of my abilities.  I was a good guy anyway.

              "The warfare had one good long-term outcome, however.  Without fully knowing it, I was cultivating an irreverence for the foundations of academic disciplines.  Only much later did I find that useful.  The disciplines seemed to pull the wagon of knowledge like a team of old plow horses.  The wagon is dead weight and keeps them plodding at a maddeningly slow pace.  Their common enterprise harnesses scholars together.  To be responsible, they have to reference the works of their peers.  That makes for rational discourse--or the appearance of it, anyway.  The drudgery of research obscured from me the inspiration that some of them, at least, felt.  The conformity to received critical opinion in the humanities I could not stomach.

            "I retained this critique of the academy until much later, when I came to the college.  I lacked credentials and had no track record as either a teacher or a researcher.  My secret critique of graduate school days gave me a voice in curriculum debates despite this lack.

            "When I read The Reforming of General Education by Daniel Bell of Columbia in 1966, it was as if I had discovered the tools, in one volume, to apply to the entire liberal arts curriculum.  It was a book I had prepared myself to read years before Bell wrote it.  The book gained in appeal because Bell was a one-man committee on curriculum revision, the only one I had encountered.  I always wished for the guts to appoint a similar committee.  Regrettably, Columbia exploded in the fury of the boomer revolution just as Bell was completing his report.  To my knowledge, it had little influence when students pushed raucously to relax requirements and, more deeply, to doubt the very foundations of established knowledge.

            "Bell saw that the university had evolved to the point where it could no longer preserve a traditional canon of knowledge, because in modernism innovation had become part of the tradition.  So, he went to the root of the disciplines and argued that the university had to teach their methods, the process by which they inquired.  This is a commonplace insight now but in the mid-'60s Bell's idea was fresh.  It was the foundation for whatever force I brought later to the curricular changes we went through during my presidency.

            "Graduate school made me feel that scholarship, in the humanities, at least, was a tyranny of conformity.  It also revealed that it was a made-up construct at the hands of the scholars.  This held out an opportunity for creativity that at that time I failed to appreciate.  A body of knowledge was a malleable corpus, and it took its shape from the rules in the hands of crusty seniors like the men at Penn.  I missed seeing the malleability because the hands wielding the rules were so overbearing.  When I was there, Penn people were powers in the Modern Language Association.  Though the New Criticism was supposed to be dominating the schools, I found at Penn an emphasis on literary history and the history of the language in a late-Germanic mode.  Nor did I find anything like an ideological critique of prevailing values, except in Morse Peckham’s course in Victorian literature.  If there was a Marxist line of thought, either I did not find the professors or it was too cryptic for me to discern.

            "As with the men I would work for over the years, so with my professors at Penn.   I was respectful at a certain level.  I was harshly critical of them at a different level, unknown, naturally, to them or the world.  I respected them and criticized them with equal sincerity.  I rationalized this as the ambivalent temper that I inherited with my generation.

            "One of those worthies sticks in memory as a special influence for the good side, Dr. Frank Laurie, my professor of modern British lit.  I liked him because he seemed able to prevail in the grad school ethos without yielding to its polite but cloying tyrannies.  In class, Laurie was an incurable romancer, a white-haired, fiery-eyed, self-styled 'old man' with a bouncing sense of wonder.  He did not prepare lectures like the others; he spun them, made a fabric of personal memories of literary figures and their works, the wonder-filled stories of other men and their creations.  It was doubtless a false reading, created by my biases, but I saw in him not the cold intellectual but the non-professional lover of life and writing.

            "I remember talking with him after class.  'It's not my job to teach,' he told me one time, 'but to unsettle your minds.  I need to throw out sparks, unanswerable questions on the nature of literary problems.  I want to see some of them catch in your hair and make a fire.'

            "I asked if that was the inspirational theory of literary criticism.

            "'Sure!' Laurie said engagingly.

            "'But you do agree, don't you,' I said, 'that the professional literary student should have a solid understanding of formal esthetics, so that his critical inspiration has a systematized foundation?'

            "'Sure, if that's what you think!' Laurie answered.  It wasn't clear to me what he thought.

            "'Take a course in esthetics--can't hurt!'

            "The old man had a leprechaun in his ancestry.  In the stuffiest of university halls, he insisted on trying to de-classroomize modern poetry and drama.  I applauded him for making me feel that the manic coverage and classification of vast glaciers of material did not constitute the whole enterprise.

            "Scouten virtually conducted worship over his dated lists of Restoration plays.  Spiller organized all of American literature around his cyclic theory, which scholars have largely forgotten.  Peckham's ambitious theory of romanticism bullied the most disparate works of nineteenth-century England into his designated place for them in the canon--although he delivered his critical ultimata with charismatic performances.  Leach was awash in the critical cross-tides of Arthurian legend.  Haviland's seminar in the Gothic novel kept airtight compartments for its American and English practitioners.  Shaaber pronounced on quality in sixteenth-century poetry as if he were reading weights and measures.  Chester Arthur taught research methodology the way a lenient company commander would shape up the troops.

            "Laurie alone sticks out in memory as someone who had it right.  He became ill toward the end of the course I took, and I never saw him again.  A decade or so later, when I ended up in front of a college class for the first time at the age of thirty-four, I may not have consciously remembered Laurie.  I think, though, I had internalized his example: make sparks.  From a pedagogical viewpoint, I had no idea what I was doing and yet I felt confident of what it was that I was aiming for.  I had Laurie to thank for that."

            Michael, while listening with interest, looked worried.  He ended the session abruptly.

            "I have to go and meet my girl."

            "Later," Bodger said.

            "Later."

 Bodger crafted a liberal humanist framework

             When he was alone, Bodger, flushed with remembered feeling, had to remind himself why he was dragging out of the dark some of these fragments of his Penn experience.  Combined with the canon rigidly delivered in his undergraduate years, they fixed in him an orthodoxy of liberal humanism.  They conferred on him a kind of literacy that allowed him to pass even where he may not professionally have belonged.  Without that quick and frantic year in College Hall, Michael would never have had reason to ask his question of Bodger, for he never would have become president anyway.  At Penn he completed a frame of reference.  The great Victorians and great nineteenth-century American writers lined up on one side, the esoterica of Arthurian legend and the Gothic on a second side, Dryden and the great prose writers of the eighteenth century in England on the third, and the heroes of American modernism on the fourth--especially Fitzgerald and Hemingway and, gradually, Eliot.  (Wallace Stevens, who died the year he entered Penn, did not have a place at all until years later when he read him on his own.) Henry Adams had a privileged place, an ornament in the frame, only because of his pivotal importance to Spiller's cyclic theory.  Adams's quirky attack on the meaning of his life in the context of national transformation would come to serve as a reference, if not a model, for Bodger.

            "Not altogether accurately," he said to Michael at a later session, "I have told students for years that I was mostly self-educated.  It was not altogether true, since I crafted a liberal humanist framework in college and in graduate school.  But within that frame there was not much content at the start.  I filled it up through years of reading on my own--much of it on the daily commute to the city to work.  Readers read the way they breathe, all the time, without even thinking they are reading.  For me reading was a desultory process, though, not an orderly movement in pursuit of a research question.

            "However, the fundamental question of artistic expression--what, at bottom, IS it--was never far from my attention.  That gave me some direction.  It also gave me openings into the fringe that flourished beyond the kind of graduate school environment I knew.  Besides Zen, I read Carlos Castaneda and Henry Miller.  I read at the edges of history, where the knowable disappears into something that cannot be parsed.  Yet, it is more than nothing.

            "When I became an administrator, and gave up the romance of being a committed writer of fiction, my interest in the creative process remained and shaped the way I tried to run things.  It was a foolish misapplication of the idea of art, I'm certain, but it gave me the impetus to do something that I think I was otherwise not well suited to do.

            "A last word on Penn.  When women finally identified the old boy network and attacked it, I knew they were right.  The old boys of Penn on our college faculty got me into the graduate school, and the old boys later eased the way toward my job at the college.  I even owed my first job after Penn--in an insurance company--to a fellow alum of the college who worked in its personnel office.  I learned only years later of this invisible pull.  I did not appreciate the power of the reference in those days.  But I have no doubt my life, lived over today, would be ten times more difficult, because the network does not have undiluted power anymore.

            "It's only in retrospect that I have come to see I was in a privileged position, male, white, with a last name that did not threaten or sound too strange.  It never occurred to me when I was young that obstacles moved out of my way owing to no merit or action of my own.  As a blue-collar kid from a small steel town, trying not to end up on the open hearth at the mill, I would have characterized myself as struggling.  I would have called myself handicapped by the lack of cultural depth in that background.  But looking back, I see a path that was easy for me."

            Michael said, "Getting into the system seems complicated now for me, no matter which direction I decide to go."

            "Different from years ago, certainly," Bodger said.

 The authenticity of growing up locally

             Later Bodger asked Michael where he lived in the region.

            "Eagleville, between here and Norristown.  Why?"

            "I was a local kid, like you.  People in academia mostly are itinerants.  I never got far from where I grew up.  I went to the college that was around the corner, like you.  Then, by a trick of fate, I returned to spend my working life here."

            Michael nodded yes when Bodger asked if he had time to take a short ride. They got into Bodger's car and drove three miles out of town, to Black Rock Road, just off Route 29.  Bodger parked the car by the side of the road and beckoned Michael to get out with him.  In the distance they saw the superbly designed campus and buildings of the newest drug research company to come to the town.  Apparatus on the roofs shone in the afternoon sun.  The high-tech labs, made of brick, commanded the landscape.  On the opposite side of Black Rock Road, a small herd of dairy cows looked at the two men as they walked around a discernible patch of ground in the larger corporate campus.  Bodger could remember staring at the dumb faces of Troutman's cows in that pasture nearly sixty years ago.  A Troutman stubbornly held onto the farming operation while the neighboring farms became corporate parks.

            "I would stand right here," he told Michael.  "You can see where the grape arbor used to be.  And I would look across the road and see the forebears of these very cows.  They had a vast importance to me that I could never understand.  The house was just over there, a few steps away.  You can still see the outline of the foundation if you look carefully.  The trees around the perimeter of the lawn still make a defined space, as you can see.  This is where the hand pump for the well stood, and there were benches on either side, with roses growing up."

            "How long did you live here?" Michael asked.

            "I was here, in residence, I understand, for a brief time just after my birth.  My mother and my Aunt Anne were sisters.  My father and Anne's husband, Bob, were brothers.  They made a menage in the little farmhouse with the two families.  With Anne and Bob, who had no children, there were my mother and father, my sister, who was seven years older, and I.  But this is virtually hearsay.  My only real memory of living here is probably authentic, although I could not have been a year old.  I remember spilling hot applesauce in the kitchen and getting burned on the arm.  Of course, someone might have told me the story.

            "My parents moved to Oaks and then to Mont Clare, villages only a few miles distant, as you know.  They seemed like far places from here when I was small.  When we visited here we would call it 'going up to the country.'  Aunt Anne, childless, would give me almost anything I wanted to eat.  She was the surrogate mother who never nagged me the way my mother nagged me.  It really was the country.  She and Bob had a vast garden and for a while grew chickens commercially.  The grape vines and sour cherry trees would be chock full in summer.  She had a way of flavoring her home-made ice cream with fruits."

            Behind the two men, the rush hour was beginning to crowd the road, once a high-crowned country lane.  Now it was wide and menacing with its overload.

            Michael said yes again when Bodger asked him if he had time for one more pilgrimage a few miles distant.  They drove to the canal in Mont Clare, and entered the old towpath, now paved, which led to the locks at Black Rock dam.  Leaving the car at the locks, Bodger led Michael along the water toward the dam in the distance, which cut the Schuylkill River at a wide bend.  They soon came to the face of the steep ravines, and Bodger pointed up through the trees at a promontory.

            "High Point," he said.  "The ultimate place when I was a boy.  You could see for miles.  The roar of the dam, so loud here, fades to a whisper up there.  When kids got older, they took their girls up there.  It's untouched, no different than when I went there as a boy of ten.  When I finished college and was about to leave for the Army, that was where I went to write in my journal.  It was the perfect place to record my humorless and wonderful anxiety as I looked at a lifetime ahead.  I still will come here when I can't find an answer to a problem.  It always refreshes me, and I go home knowing more than I did when I came.

            "The highway department, I've read, may some day run a bridge across the river at this location to by-pass Phoenixville.  So far, nothing’s happened.  If it does, I will lose something I thought I could never lose."

            Michael stared up a long time and then looked at Bodger a long time.  The generations, Bodger thought, catching him out of the corner of his eye, have a hard time knowing what matters most to the other.

            When he dropped Michael at the supermarket and went home, he ferreted out an old file.  He wrote about High Point twenty years before, when he was in his forties.  That was the moment when he began to realize that pursuing a professional life near his boyhood haunts had an unusual meaning for him.  It evoked a droll charm for him that he did not need to share with anyone.  On a certain fall day those twenty years ago, however, he had found himself sharing High Point.  He shared it with boys who had discovered what he and his boyhood friends long before had discovered.  When the old piece of writing fell out of the box, he read it as if someone else had written it:

             As I did hundreds of times in boyhood, I leave the shade and moistness of the woods and burst upon the light and transcendent view of High Point, the ultimate destination of every trip to the ravines.  I see again the river's wrinkled surface far below, the endless white foam of Black Rock dam, the farm fields in strips of green and burnt sienna across in Chester County, the Cromby stacks smoking on the horizon, the thin line of Route 113 slashing the middle distance between Tunnel Hill and Collegeville.  Except for a house or two I do not recall, the scene from High Point is the same as it was.  I have the sense of arriving at something too important to forget.  It is a thing of the senses, transformed into the shapes of memory.

            The brilliant blue bird at the level of my eyesight must be a quarter of a mile above the leaf-specked water.  If I stand at the outermost tip of High Point, where it is decked with crimson sumac, I can forget that my feet are on earth and imagine that I am hanging in the air with the blue bird, master of the space between us and the water.  I am reminded of something almost sacramental by this reenactment out of boyhood.  We would stand here and feel the pull to go out there into air and would transform that impossibility into the dangerous next-best thing, a climb down the nearly sheer face of the cliff to the flood plain below.

            Suddenly four sweating teenagers crash up the path to High Point.  They pause to catch their breath.  We exchange a brief, distant greeting.  They half-ignore me because they are looking outward.  I note familiar shapes in their faces and, when they tell me they are from Mont Clare, I am tempted to ask their parents' names.  But I decide that nothing would be served.  What would it matter to them that I know details of their lives?  Because they come to High Point and stop and look out, I guess that they know something light and lasting; because I am here when they arrive, they seem to take for granted that I, too, know.

            One, acne-faced and ragged, picks up a stone.   I remember what he will do.  He hurls it outward, and the four of them watch silently as it reaches its apogee and plunges downward.  Seeming to hold their breaths, they wait (I wait) to see whether the stone will reach the water or fall short on the bank.  We see a tiny, noiseless, white explosion a few feet out from the river's edge.  'Made it,' says one.  They think about this and then say good-bye and disappear.

            I know they are moving toward a decision: either they will go right into a path that leads toward farm fields, or they will go left over the edge of the cliff, in search of a downward route to the river.  They face two different afternoons--one controlled, sane, responsible, the other irrational, slightly mad, brought on by the desire to leave earth for a freer dimension.

            Nearly an hour later they return, puffing and heated.  There is victory in their faces.  I know the route they chose.

            As if I am not present, they sustain the surge of their feelings by throwing more stones toward the water.  One after another, over and over, they reach for stones--small ones, flat ones, big ones, round ones--and pitch as hard as they can into air.  At first they watch to see how far from the bank the stones strike, but soon they are absorbed in the sheer act of throwing.

            Finally they stop and sit next to me in a row and look out.  That I was still here when they returned seems now more than an accident.  Abandoning an earlier reticence, I ask their names.  Their parents, as I guessed, are former schoolmates or neighbors.  Through these faces and names, something is reconfirmed for me.  Those cues that I heed in coping with the day do not, after all, come merely from a private inner world.  They are enriched by a shared, mythic past, a set of performances remarkably alive even now.

             The next time Bodger met Michael, he asked him whether he had anything comparable to High Point in his boyhood experience in Eagleville.  He told Bodger of a hidden place along Skippack Creek, where the muskrats dug and deer drank.  "It was just a few yards from the traffic noise of Ridge Pike bridge," Michael said.  "That seems amazing now.  I haven't been back there in years."

            Bodger told him why his rootedness in the region grew important as his presidency enveloped him.

            "There was the constant feeling that inauthenticity would overcome me," he said.  "I had to bureaucratize to make anything happen.  Yet I hated it.  Couple that with the inherent need for academic people to deal in abstractions, generalizations.  I worked in what seemed at times a simulacrum rather than a real world.  One could make the stupidest errors because he took as real something that was a bureaucratized refabrication, which left reality itself lost in the mist.  When faculty members griped about the evils of the administration--a constant hum--I could empathize.  As small as we were as an institution, we were as vulnerable as the biggest organization to the dangers inherent in bureaucratic processing.

            "As long as I remembered where I was from, kept a sense of my growing up here, I could resist the constant pull toward what I think of as inauthenticity.  I don't think that would have worked if I had been from some other place, or if I had moved away and become a president elsewhere.  There was something subjectively important about my life happening in its entirety right here.

            "Daniel Bell said, 'Provincialism is a source of arrogance, and knowledge a source of humility.' (p. 152)  I define a kind of provincialism, however, which inoculates knowledge--the rational process, anyway--against the virus of Faustian arrogance, withdrawal from the facticity of life.  I'm sure my little experience is too meager an example for such a broad message.  Still, I have a feeling of having been protected against the hazards of professionalism by having been a kid from the county."

            Bodger paused and said that he hoped he had not laid more on Michael than he had asked for.

            Michael said, "No way.  I have it all up here."  He tapped his head.  "One thing's really clear."

            "What's that?"

            Michael said, "You don't get ready in college.  You get ready to get ready.  Seems as if you were putting it together because you were ready as it came along."

            After Michael left, Bodger sat on his secluded patio, musing on his recent exchanges.  He doubtless had outrun the young man's original curiosity about the presidency.  Bodger had seized on it at a personally needy moment.  He had identified in his conversations with Michael ingredients he thought were important in the make-up he brought into office later.  He had in common with other college presidents an overdeveloped need to give order and structure to an evolving process of reality.  He had learned how much he differed from them, however, in conversations at bars, in committee meetings, and in public forums where their academic rhetoric revealed a cast of mind he did not share.  Michael's conclusion from it all might serve him little.  But Bodger gained something he had not been expecting to gain and was grateful.

            A few days later Michael knocked on the door.  Bodger invited him in and they sat at the kitchen table.

            "I guess I came to ask for some advice," Michael said. "I found out yesterday that my girl friend is pregnant.  She's not sure what to do.  Neither am I.  We were thinking about getting married, but we don't have any money.  I still think I want to go to graduate school after I finish at the college.  She has a job, which doesn't pay enough to support us both.  If she has a baby, things would be that much worse.  What would you do?"

            Bodger fumbled through a set of questions and responses, the net effect of which was to dump the question back in Michael's lap.  He was never more painfully aware that the generations cannot walk in the shoes of one another.  Some time later, he learned that the girl friend had had an abortion.  Michael was going to go to graduate school in history.  It was not clear from the feedback whether he would take his girl friend with him.  He would ask him next time they ran across one another.

            "President Bodger!"

            Someone called from across the parking lot at the shopping center.  It was the parent of one of the graduating seniors.  He expressed his thanks to Bodger for helping his daughter with a scheduling problem in her last semester.

            "We got her through!" the parent said.  "Thanks to a lot of helpful people, including you.  I wish you had been able to preside at commencement, though.  Somehow it felt as if you should have been there.  It was a nice ceremony, anyway, except in the beginning.  Somebody must have forgotten to turn on the public address system."

END CHAPTER ONE, MICHAEL (Returning to Origins)

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5 November 2005 Richard P. Richter