My Life As A Man

was no small trial, however, particularly coming as quickly as it did upon that last triumphant year at Bass, when his only course but one, taken for nine hours’ credit, was the English honors seminar conducted by Caroline Benson. Along with Bass’s two other most displaced Jews, Zuckerman was the intellectual powerhouse of “The Seminar,” which assembled every Wednesday from three in the afternoon until after six-dusk in the autumn and spring, nightfall in the winter-on Queen Anne dining chairs pulled around the worn Oriental rug in the living room of Miss Benson’s cozy house of books and fireplaces. The seven Christian critics in The Seminar would hardly dare to speak when the three dark Jews (all refugees from the top-drawer Jewish fraternity and founders together of Bass’s first literary magazine since-ah, how he loved to say it-the end of the nineteenth century), when these three Jews got to shouting and gesticulating at one another over Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. A spinster (who, unlike his mother, happened not to look half her age), Caroline Benson had been born, like all her American forebears, over in Manchester, then educated at Wellesley and “in England.” As he would learn midway through his college career, “Caroline Benson and her New York Jew” was very much a local tradition, as much a part of Bass as the “hello spirit” the dean of men was so high on, or the football rivalry with the University of Vermont that annually brought the ordinarily respectable campus to a pitch of religious intensity only rarely to be seen in this century beyond the Australian bush. Tire wittier New Englanders on the faculty spoke of “Caroline’s day-vah Jew experience, it always feels like something that’s happened to her in a previous semester…” Yes, he was, as it turned out, one of a line-and didn’t care. Who was Nathan Zuckerman of Camden, New Jersey, to turn his untutored back on the wisdom of a Caroline Benson, educated in England? Why, she had taught him, within the very first hour she had found him in her freshman literature class, to pronounce the g in “length”; by Christmas vacation he had learned to aspirate the h in “whale”; and before the year was out he had put the word “guy” out of his vocabulary for good. Rather she had. Simple to do, too. “There are no ‘guys,’ Mr. Zuckerman, in Pride and Prejudice.” Well, he was glad to learn that, delighted to, in fact. She could singe him to scarlet with a line like that, delivered in that clipped Vermont way of hers, but vain as he was he took it without so much as a whimper-^every criticism and correction, no matter how minute, he took unto himself with the exaltation of a martyred saint.

“I think I should learn to get along better with people,” he explained to Miss Benson one day, when she came upon him in the corridor of the literature building and asked what he was doing wearing a fraternity pledge pin (wearing it on the chest of the new V-neck pullover in which his mother said he looked so collegiate). Miss Benson’s response to his proposed scheme for self-improvement was at once so profound and so simply put that Zuckerman went around for days repeating the simple interrogative sentence to himself; like Of Time and the River, it verified something he had known in his bones all along, but in which he could not place his faith until it had been articulated by someone of indisputable moral prestige and purity: “Why,” Caroline Benson asked the seventeen-year-old boy, “should you want to learn a thing like that?”

The afternoon in May of his senior year when he was invited-not Osterwald who had been invited, not Fischbach, but Zuckerman, the chosen of the Chosen-to take tea with Caroline Benson in the “English” garden back of her house, had been, without question, the most civilized four hours of his life. He had been directed by Miss Benson to bring along with him the senior honors paper he had just completed, and there in a jacket and tie, amid the hundreds of varieties of flowers, none of whose names he knew (except for the rose), sipping as little tea as he could politely get away with (he was unable as yet to dissociate hot tea with lemon from the childhood sickbed) and munching on watercress sandwiches (which he had never even heard of before that afternoon-and wouldn’t miss, if he didn’t hear of them again), he read aloud to Miss Benson his thirty-page paper entitled, “Subdued Hysteria: A Study of the Undercurrent of Agony in Some Novels of Virginia Woolf.” The paper was replete with all those words that now held such fascination for him, but which he had hardly, if ever, uttered back in the living room in Camden: “irony” and “values” and “fate,” “will” and “vision” and “authenticity,” and, of course, “human,” for which he had a particular addiction. He had to be cautioned repeatedly in marginal notes about his relentless use of that word. “Unnecessary,” Miss Benson would write. “Redundant.” “Mannered.” Well, maybe unnecessary to her, but not to the novice himself: human character, human possibility, human error, human anguish, human tragedy. Suffering and failure, the theme of so many of the novels that “moved” him, were “human conditions” about which he could speak with an astonishing lucidity and even gravity by the time he was a senior honors student-astonishing in that he was, after all, someone whose own sufferings had by and large been confined up till then to the dentist’s chair.

They discussed first the paper, then the future. Miss Benson expected him after the army to continue his literary studies at either Oxford or Cambridge. She thought it would be a good idea for Nathan to spend a summer bicycling around England to see the great cathedrals. That sounded all right to him. They did not embrace at the end of that perfect afternoon, but only because of Miss Benson’s age, position, and character. Zuckerman had been ready and willing, the urge in him to embrace and be embraced all but overpowering.

His eight unhappy weeks of basic infantry training were followed by eight equally unhappy weeks of military police training with a herd of city roughnecks and southern hillbillies under the equatorial sun at Fort Benning, Georgia. In Georgia he learned to direct traffic so that it flowed “through the hips” (as the handbook had it) and to break a man’s larynx, if he should wish to, with a swat of the billy club. Zuckerman was as alert and attentive at these army schools as he had been earning his summa cum laude degree from Bass. He did not like the environment, his comrades, or “the system,” but he did not wish to the in Asia either, and so applied himself to every detail of his training as if his life depended upon it-as it would. He did not pretend, as did some of the other college graduates in his training company, to be offended or amused by the bayonet drill. One thing to be contemptuous of soldierly skills while an undergraduate at Bass, another when you were a member of an army at war. “KILL!” he screamed, “KILL!” just as “aggressively” as he was instructed to, and drove the bayonet deep into the bowels of the sandbag; he would have spat upon the dying dummy too if he had been told that that was standard operating procedure. He knew when to be superior and when not to be -or was beginning at least to find out. “What are you?” Sergeant Vinnie Bono snarled at them from the instructor’s platform (a jockey before Korea, Sergeant Bono was reputed to have slain a whole North Korean platoon with nothing but an entrenching tool)-“What are you with your stiff steel pricks, you troopers-pussycats or lions?” “LIONS!” roared Zuckerman, because he did not wish to the in Asia, or anywhere for that matter, ever.

But he would, and, he feared, sooner rather than later. At those Georgia reveille formations, the captain, a difficult man to please, would be giving the troopers their first dressing down of the long day-“I guaran-fuckin-tee you gentlemen, not one swingin’ dick will be leavin’ this fiddle-fuckin’ area to so much as chew on a nanny goat’s tittie-“ and Zuckerman, ordinarily a cheery, a dynamic morning riser, would suddenly have a vision of himself falling beneath the weight of some drunken redneck in an alley back of a whorehouse in Seoul. He would expertly crack the offending soldier in the larynx, in the groin, on the patella, in all the places where he had crippled the dummy in the drill, but the man face-down in the mud would be Zuckerman, crushed beneath the drunken lawbreaker’s brute strength-and then from nowhere, his end would come, by way of the knife or the razor blade. Schools and dummies were one thing-the world and the flesh something else: How would Zuckerman find the wherewithal to crack his club against a real human patella, when he had never been able to do so much as punch somebody’s face with his fist in a schoolyard fight? And yet he had his father’s short fuse, didn’t he? And the seething self-righteousness to go with it. Nor was he wholly without physical courage. After all, as a boy he had never been much more than skin and bones beneath his shoulder pads and helmet, and yet in the sandlot football games he played in weekly every fall, he had not flinched or cried aloud when the stampede had come sweeping around his end of the line; he was fast, he was shifty-“wiry” was the word with which he preferred to describe himself at that time, “Wiry Nate Zuckerman”-and he was “smart,” and could fake and twist and fight his way through a pack of thirteen-year-old boys built like hippos, for all that he was a boy built like a giraffe. He had in fact been pretty fearless on the football field, so long as everybody flayed, according to the rules and within the spirit of the game. But when (to his surprise) that era of good fellowship came to an end, Wiry Nate Zuckerman retired. To be smashed to the ground because he was the left end streaking for the goal line with the ball had always been all right with him; indeed he rather liked the precarious drama of plucking a spiral from the air one moment, and then in the next, tasting dirt, as the pounds piled up above him. However, on a Saturday morning in the fall of 1947, when one of the Irish kids on the Mount Holly Hurricanes came flying onto the pileup (at the bottom of which lay Zuckerman, with the ball) screaming, “Cream that Yid!” he knew that his football career was over. Henceforth football was no longer to be a game played by the rules, but a battle in which each of the combatants would try to get away with as much as he could, for whatever “reasons” he had. And Zuckerman could get away with nothing-he could not even hit back when attacked. He could use what strength he had to try to restrain somebody else from going at him, he would struggle like hell to prevent damage or disfigurement to himself, but when it came to