Sometimes he went to the Greek bar across from campus to get hot soup or ordered coffee and a bagel at the student cafeteria. He always paid with a quarter, and they would accept it regardless of the cost of whatever he’d eaten. He paid the amount that his consumption had cost back in the seventies, when he first arrived, from what they said, as a graduate student, before he sank little by little into inactivity and poverty. He never begged, just found coins that had been dropped in the street, and that was one of his tasks over the course of the day. He would walk along the sidewalk near the curb, combing an entire block, and could always find fallen coins. During the thaw, when the sun melts the snow, is when he finds the most money; he stops at drains, and all he needs is a scrap of cloth or some wire mesh to fish out enough for him to survive for several days in his economy of the past. Everyone there knows him and lets him do it, and no one bothers him. “They’re friendly if you’re friendly, they’re frightened if you’re frightened, they smile if you smile at them”: that was one of his conclusions on the workings of social life.
I quickly realized that there were two well-defined groups within my seminar: one consisted of two girls, Yu Yho Lyn and Carol Murphy, both very studious and shy, and one boy, Billy Sullivan, who basically always seemed angry. They went around in a state of some confusion because they were first-year students, just beginning their postgrad seminars at the university. The other group was a trio made up of John Russell III, Mike Trilling, and Rachel Oleson, a girl originally from Sweden, very athletic and intelligent. They always moved as a group and were advanced students who’d already had their thesis proposals approved. The brightest was John III, Ida’s young heir apparent, who had the look of a student at Oxford (which was indeed where he’d sprung from) and was writing his thesis on The Monkey Wrench Gang, the novel by Edward Abbey with illustrations by Robert Crumb about a gang of fugitive punk anarchists who defend nature by killing the people who are ravaging the forests and by destroying bulldozers, steam shovels, and chainsaws. He was taking my course on Hudson because he saw a prehistory of modern environmentalist movements in those books exalting the Argentine Pampa. Everyone said that John III was Ida’s favorite and at the same time—they predicted with satisfaction—her future rival. There was news of disagreement and conflict because Ida had been opposed to his dissertation project (“It’s stupid and backward to write your thesis on a single book in this day and age”), but John III held firm and arrogantly defended his plan to work on a fictional text of violence and gore that, according to him, picked up the traditions of country songs and rural banditry. As for Mike, he was the classic lower-middle-class Yankee from Philadelphia, a young guy with a broken nose and a buzz cut, more serious and respectful than the others, and so polite that I came to believe that the tension behind his manners was that typical of people who’ve done time in jail. Mike had been a long-distance truck driver (“Yes, I’m one of the ones who read On the Road in high school”) until he finally made up his mind to apply for graduate school. They accepted him because he’d published a short story in Stories journal and because he submitted a very fine piece on the autobiographical tradition in the American novel. Now he was in his third year at the university and was writing a thesis on blue-collar culture in the Beat Generation. He was forging an academic career but didn’t believe in the university except as a place to earn one’s living comfortably. He admired Thomas Wolfe, Jack Kerouac, and Ken Kesey because, according to him, they weren’t fussy East Coast intellectuals.
Rachel was a descendant of scholars and diplomats—her mother was a New Yorker who taught French literature at Vassar and her father had been the cultural attaché at the Swedish embassy in Washington—and she was very energetic and attractive. Her project was on the feminine bildungsroman; she was the teaching assistant in Ida’s courses and was in love with John III, who in turn was in love with Mike, who of course loved Rachel. That invisible, fluid comedy of entanglements was enough to distract me from my worries, and I observed it with the same pensive interest that Hudson used in studying the birds of the Argentine shoreline.
John III, Mike, and Rachel had a habit of coming to my office in the late afternoons to talk about their projects and theses. The three would be waiting for me in the hallway together, exhibiting the joyful camaraderie that young people experience when they study and spend all their time in each other’s company (I must say that for some time I imagined they were all going to bed together as well). I’d chat a while with each of them in my office and then go out for coffee with all three at Chez Nana, the French café in Palmer Square. I remember that one afternoon John III insisted we go to see the nearby house where Hermann Broch had lived, on College Street. A touristy guided visit intended for the literary types who came to the university, which also included a few photos of us, taken in the garden of the residence. Broch had written his novel The Death of Virgil upstairs in the house, and in fact he’d died at the hospital in town. The novel was published in English in
