I'd Hate Myself in the Morning. Lardner Ring
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sprang partly from the recollection of an American history class at our Great Neck grade school. My classmates, of whom there were never more than seven or eight, were the children of investment bankers, corporate presidents, and the like. Adapting herself splendidly to her audience, our teacher presented us with the heroic struggle of Theodore Roosevelt against the temptations of wealth and idleness. It was no big deal, she maintained, to work hard and make a name for yourself if you were born in a log cabin and you didn’t have any other choice. But when the heir to a proud name and a secure fortune dedicated himself to public service, it was sheer altruism all the way.
In 1928, our parents sold the house in Great Neck and moved to East Hampton on the other end of Long Island. In those days it was still a small town bordering the fishing village of Amagansett. A few socialite families and a smaller number of artists and writers had summer places there. My parents had joined with their closest friends, the sportswriter Grantland Rice and his wife Kate, in buying beach property and building adjoining houses on the dunes. Where the joint driveway separated, Dad had a sign made that said “Dixie Highway” and pointed toward the Rices, who came from Tennessee and Georgia respectively. The year of their move was also the year I joined John and Jim at Andover, so the beach house, where we spent our summers, was the only home we had from then on. During the shorter Christmas and spring vacations from school and college, we had temporary quarters in Manhattan, where our parents and David had lived eight months a year while he attended a private day school.
The main attractions of East Hampton for the four of us were the twenty-one grass tennis courts at the posh Maidstone Club and swimming in the breaking waves of the open Atlantic. We made a special point of going into those waves on the days the Coast Guard raised a red flag signaling that they were too rough for swimming.
In a poll of the two hundred boys in Andover’s class of 1932, I was not ranked in the categories Most Respected, Most Capable, Most Promising, Most Popular, or Best Student, but I took first place in Most Original, Wittiest, and Biggest Bluffer in Classroom; I came in second in Laziest, Windiest, and Hardest to Rattle. But my reputation among the classmates who knew me best rested on a series of entertaining campaigns against what I considered objectionable school practices and regulations.
There was a daily chapel service conducted by the headmaster, and on Sundays both a morning and evening service conducted by a guest clergyman. The morning ones tended to be quite lengthy and I chose to call attention to that fact one Sunday by putting an alarm clock in the drawer of the lectern, set to go off twenty minutes after the visiting preacher began to speak. By a happy accident, the drawer stuck closed, and the alarm continued to ring until it ran down.
Permission to smoke was granted to seniors only in one special designated area. I deliberately arranged to be seen with a pipe in my mouth by a particularly officious faculty member on a campus path that was not so privileged. It was a cold winter day, and the illusion that I was violating the rules was greatly enhanced by the fact that the air I exhaled resembled smoke. It was a pleasure to demonstrate to him that the pipe was empty and his was a false accusation.
There were Greek-letter clubs at Andover, imitations of college fraternities, and some of them made themselves especially sacrosanct by barring non-members from ever entering their premises. I led a nocturnal foray into one of these, leaving behind evidence that anonymous visitors had violated the shrine. If the perpetrators of a stunt like that had been discovered, we would have been placed on probation. I was also involved several times in offenses that could have resulted in instant expulsion. The Prohibition Amendment was in force at the time and speakeasies, being illegal, naturally didn’t require proof of age. I was one of a small group of venturesome boys who would sneak out of our dormitories on a Saturday night, board a bus to the nearby industrial town of Lawrence, and spend an hour or two drinking bootleg beer.
The most memorable event of my years at Andover was my four-story fall from a dormitory window ledge. I was standing on that narrow ledge holding onto a shutter because I intended to enter by window the locked room of a boy who had refused to share a box of goodies from home. I had my advance foot on his ledge when the shutter came loose, and I lost my grip, falling to a patch of lawn and fracturing my shoulder and pelvis. (My head missed a cement block by about six inches.) I spent the next six weeks in the school infirmary and a Boston hospital. Despite all this activity and inactivity, I managed to function as editor of the school literary magazine and to graduate with a decent academic record while garnering prizes for writing and speaking at commencement, where I also served as class historian.
The first political stand I can remember taking was to declare myself a Democrat in the early stages of the Great Depression, partly because I found the image of President Herbert Hoover displeasing and partly to annoy my parents, who were nominal Republicans, although they rarely bothered to vote. I had not yet turned sixteen when, at a bus stop between Boston and New York in June of 1931, I climbed onto the roof of the vehicle in which Jim and I were traveling home from Andover, and—at no one’s urging but my own—delivered an impromptu speech in support of New York Governor and presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
But by November, had I been eligible to vote for him, I would not have done so. I was spending my weekends touring the state of New Jersey as a member of the Socialist Club of Princeton University, and mounting soap-boxes to further the candidacy of Norman Thomas, Class of 1905, who returned to the campus twice a year to preach at a Sunday chapel service and meet in the evening with his political disciples in the student body. I can’t recall all the factors that led me to this conversion; certainly, one was the congressional candidacy of the Socialist ticket in Connecticut of Heywood Broun, a friend of my father’s who always gave us boys something to think about and laugh at. But he wouldn’t have had such an influence on me, I’m sure, if not for the bigger factor in my leftward migration: the growing severity of the Depression and what I assessed as the failure of both major parties to come to grips with it in their platforms.
The idea of going to Princeton originated with another family friend, Scott Fitzgerald, who described its virtues to me when I was about eight. My brothers and I liked Scott, who told us stories and performed card tricks for us. But it was Zelda, his wife, who made the greater impression on me at that age. I have never seen a photograph that conveyed the beauty I saw in her, or known another adult who seemed to say whatever came into her head without any discernible exercise of judgment.
Scott and Zelda moved to France after only a year and a half as neighbors of ours. During the Great Neck period, the friendship that developed between Dad and Scott was based in part on their joint fondness for alcohol. They were nearly twelve years apart in age and drastically different in ambitions and opinions, but they so enjoyed each other (and the whiskey) that they sometimes talked all night and needed a day or more to sleep it off before they could get back to work. Scott was a great conversationalist in those days, vain but charming, full of ambition and concern about his literary reputation. Dad was also captivated by Zelda, whose symptoms of mental illness were not yet manifest. “Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist,” he once wrote, “and Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty.”
Four years later, in 1937, I met a far different Scott at Dorothy Parker’s house in Hollywood, and saw him intermittently until his death in December 1940. In the intervening period, as described in his book The Crack-up, he had undergone a drastic personality transformation. He spoke little and without visible emotion, and he was able to stay on the wagon for longer stretches of time. But when he went off it, recovery was a much harder struggle. He was pessimistic about the movie work he was doing and about what had happened to his standing as a writer. He had to face the fact that his books were no longer selling, while his former protégée, Ernest Hemingway, had a smash hit in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Scott died without finishing his final novel, The Last Tycoon, and without any grounds for anticipating that he would be regarded as a literary pioneer and one of the great American writers of the century.
A classmate who became a close friend and my roommate my sophomore year was Herbert Bayard Swope, Jr., whose family had also lived nearby in Great Neck. Swope, Sr., had been editor of the highly regarded New York World, and I spent a good deal of weekend time at their family homes in Manhattan and Sands Point, Long Island, which were known as gathering places for the cream of New York literary society. One of the people I met through the Swopes was Alexander