I loved my Amherst experience. I came to the campus with a whole lot of baggage and my clothes packed in a single large black, brass riveted trunk-like suitcase my father (Joe Kingman III, class of ’49) had used when he came. Looking back I see that that first year on campus was marked by relationships with classmates on my first floor of James. Two seemingly unremarkable moments still stand out from that introduction to the college. John Foster was my next door roommate. He was the first person to pass me a joint (not sure where he found it).
It’s hard to believe, but even though I had attended “Happening 67” at the Minneapolis Auditorium with Jefferson Airplane and Buffalo Springfield, I completely missed the whole hippie movement and its concomitant awakening of consciousness. So after I inhaled a couple of puffs, I woozily wandered into the hall and back to my room.
I had a “single”—maybe 5 feet wide and 10 feet long. My desk was just to the left of the door as you entered. The window beside the head of my bed at the far end faced the old limestone Barrett Hall. I pulled out the captain’s chair, and steadied my reeling self by putting my extended fingers on either side of my brand new baby blue two tone Smith Corona where I was teaching myself to type by repeating the sentence The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
Suddenly something under my desk grabbed both my thighs and roared. Next thing I knew, I was standing in front of the window eight feet behind me. I remembered seeing my feet obscure the cork pinboard over my desk. John left the room in hysterics. I followed. “Did you see that John? Did you see what I just did?” Though I wished otherwise, I wasn’t much of an athlete. I’m not sure I could clear 8 feet in a running long jump. And I had jumped over my 3 foot tall captain’s chair eight feet backwards!
Sex was also new to me. I first had intercourse in that narrow metal spring cot-of-a-bed. Of course you couldn’t just do something as monumental as having sex and not talk about it! I recall one of the first conversations about sex. I don’t remember how many of us were gathered in Charlie Bergman’s room at the end of the hall, but it was a bunch of us. Charlie was handsome, tall, lean and athletic. He looked like Robert Redford at his prime with soft blond bangs combed over and a huge easy smile. The subject of oral sex came up and Charlie said, “Eew, do you know how much bacteria is down there?!” It never occurred to me.
Sophomore year I moved to Psi U. Chris Winslow ’74 chose me as his roommate. I ended up in a room with windows which opened facing south onto the balcony over the porch. When I described the room to my dad on the payphone, he replied, “That’s amazing, that was my room and your grandpa’s room.” I think his exclamation was intended to inspire endearment for the continuity of family history. Instead, it plummeted me into the depths of despair. I wondered if I would ever live my own life or if I was doomed to repeat family history.
That year most of my classmates, especially the premeds, seemed to be in high gear. I was still trying to find my way, orienting myself by the one comment I’d gotten that rang true: Don’t study the course, study the professor. I had already taken a history course with Henry Steele Commager. He was so enthusiastic about history, I loved him. My inquiries resulted in three names: Professor Emeritus of Modern English Literature, Armor Craig; Leonard DeLonga, a sculpture teacher at Mt. Holyoke; and the best dressed prof on campus, Ben DeMott on Shakespeare. All three changed my life.
DeMott changed my life in one simple private meeting that I had requested. The meeting followed a two hour written exam on Antony and Cleopatra which I hadn’t read. Night before the exam, I confessed to my friend and Psi U house mate Chris Holt (’74) that I hadn’t had time to read the play. “Oh my god,” he responded, “that’s a fantastic play. Let’s meet in the top floor conference room in Converse at midnight and we’ll enact some of the drama.”
On the way over, Chris asked if I had a magic marker. I shook my head. “That’s ok,” he said, “we’ll borrow one from the guy at the front desk.” He deftly laid out the story and focused on the part where Cleopatra came out on the ocean to watch the marine battle in which Marc Antony lost his entire navy because of his attraction distraction for Cleopatra.
Chris drew large theatrical eyebrows on my forehead with the magic marker. He illustrated the whole scene so vibrantly that to this day I can still see Cleopatra’s servants waving palm frond fans beside the gorgeous queen seated on her barge. We enacted various scenes until the sun came up.
The morning exam was like no other any of us had ever had. Three short sentences from the play were excerpted on a piece of paper inserted in the blue exam book. There were no instructions. I still remember one of those lines: “His pleasures were dolphin-like.” Everyone was looking around—their foreheads creased with doubts about how to proceed. Still emblazoned on my forehead were the jagged eyebrows Chris had drawn. As I started writing I heard people complaining to each other in tense, muted voices.
I got my exam book a week later with an A. It was the first A I had received at Amherst. You’d think I’d have been jubilant, right? But no. I was furious. How could I have gotten an A writing about a play I hadn’t read? I asked for a private meeting and got one. I immediately confessed to not having read the play and voiced my complaint. “How did you think what to respond?” DeMott asked. “I didn’t,” I replied, “I just imagined something.” “What did you think imagining was?” he asked me. “You mean imagining is thinking?” I asked, feeling absolutely astounded.
I had thought thinking (about Shakespeare or any other subject) required research into what published scholars had written and agreeing, disagreeing or modifying their expressions into something that sounded as though I’d come up with it. Somehow it never occurred to me that I could come up with my own original thoughts. This realization gave me a new confidence that I carried to other subjects.
I was a slow reader. Every week I was assigned more reading than I could manage. Never was this more obvious than when another teacher on my list, Armor Craig, assigned us to read the giant tome Ulysses in a week.
Stately plump Buck Mulligan never confounded a reader more than I. Me? I think it’s I. Anyway I was confounded. Vast sections of that tome contained words I didn’t recognize. Nor could I pronounce them. Page after page of phonetic garble gargle. And the book was so cumbersome. It was such a nuisance to carry around. So I borrowed copies whenever possible.
I noticed something odd. Every single copy, no matter the publisher, had one thing in common. Each chapter started with huge letters that occupied an entire page. Why did every publisher print the same anomaly? They must have faced some unknown rule. I wrote down the gigantic caps: S M P U L. Phonetically simple.
On the first page of the exam book I wrote: Ulysses is…, on the second page: S, on the third: M. On and on I went until I finally got to the L. Then I translated: Ulysses is simple. I snickered at myself and looked around. Everyone was writing. Heads bowed. I’d spent about five minutes. I twisted my mouth this way and that as I questioned whether I needed to say more. No, I really was done. It was a beautiful day.
“A-” and a note: “Please see me!” I learned from Armor Craig, the great professor of modern English literature and one of the most recommended profs on campus, that he had never noticed what I called to his attention. “I gave you an A,” he said, “but added the minus because I thought you could have elaborated a bit more. After all it is an English class, you know.”
Not every prof at Amherst valued original thought.
Sex and Politics was a lecture class offered at Smith by a panel of professors. It fit in my schedule and in my personal agenda of learning more about the first part of the subject. I figured we’d study how the sordid personal romantic affairs of political leaders affected governance. I mean what was Antony and Cleopatra about? The original Ulysses? Helen of Troy? I figured important stuff would be revealed.
The bus to Northampton took longer than I thought. Not every woman I asked knew where the lecture hall was. In the empty foyer I could hear the lecture in process. When I opened the middle door at the back and uppermost level of the jam-packed 300 seat auditorium I was only about ten minutes late. My plan was to slink in and quietly take a vacant seat. But the latch mechanism made a terrible metallic clanking sound that echoed and skidded on the foyer’s polished linoleum floor and banged into its brick walls from whence it bounced back and filled the auditorium.
Before I even stepped in I heard the voice stop and silence ring out. The recessed lights over the steep bank of seats were muted, but the bright lights on the panel of women seated at a long table down, way down at the base of the auditorium, illuminated every female head turned to glare at the interrupting intruder. There was only one intruder and he was a man, perhaps the only man in the cavernous room, a man alone, obviously and obnoxiously late. I felt like a guppy that had mistakenly swum into a school of hungry hostile female piranha.
Before I understood a word I realized I had improperly interpreted the title of the class. Over the course of the course I took odds with the pronouncements. First politely by raising my hand and waiting to be called upon when I begged to differ. After the gist of my differences became known, my hand seemed to become less visible. So I had to stop begging and clearly and loudly orate my objections.
The entire grade for the seminar derived from a 25 page typed term paper containing footnotes to the books we had been assigned. My paper was 27 pages and contained 9 citations to assigned reading which I had skimmed to find them. I got an F. A very big red F with an exclamation point in a circle.
The panelist who graded my paper was the wife of an Amherst professor. She wore a uniform throughout the seminar. It consisted of faded bib coveralls over a baggy white t-shirt with its short sleeves rolled up to the shoulder. The word truculent best described her inscribed expression. We met in her office in the Octagon.
The needle measuring the emotional content of our meeting pegged into the red almost immediately after I arrived. Before long we descended to calling each other slang terms for our genitalia. Even recounting our encounter constricts my chest and makes my heart race. I concluded my argument on a rational note saying she couldn’t fail me because I fulfilled the terms of the assignment. I’ll never forget her reply: “I’m failing you because you formulated your own hypothesis. You can’t do that until you’ve completed at least four years of grad school!” I retorted that she should have said that in the instructions. And just before closing her door, perhaps a bit too loudly, I threatened to take her to student court. On my report card I got a C.
Of course, it was impossible to take only the courses taught by the most highly recommended profs. My choices had to fit in my schedule with all my other choices. So it was that one semester I ended up in an advanced econ class for which I had no passionate interest, no recommendation on the prof, and no educational background support. I knew my goose was cooked when the prof drew a curve on the white board with a sweeping gesture of his hand and said, “Write down the equation of this line.”
At the end of class I stayed back and outlined my predicament. “Look,” he replied, “let’s go to my office. I’m in a predicament too. I’m a consultant for the railroads and I’m supposed to report on major trends in the industry as noted in this 18” high stack of industry magazines which I don’t have time to read. How about you read these and come up with a summary of what’s happening for me? You won’t have to come to any more classes. We’ll both win.”
So I learned you can make deals. But not all the lessons I received came from professors.
While I learned much from many of my fellow students, one simple encounter stands out. My senior year I got to know a classmate named Michael Mullins who was a French Lit major. Michael had a facility for languages. He hand wrote his senior thesis on Baudelaire. It was 500 pages. When he turned it in his professor shook his head as though startled and said, “Oh Michael, you didn’t need to write this in French!”
Michael was also the best artist I knew. I remember he once drew a sketch of me in about 10 or 15 seconds in which he captured in a few lines a look I recognized instantly as quintessentially me. We drew together on numerous occasions.
Michael taught me to love art history. He said that if I wanted to be an artist I had to go to Europe and study in the major museums. He said it was essential that I understand what the artists who preceded me had attempted and accomplished. It was on his advice that the year after graduation I went to France, Italy and Spain and made over 1,000 drawings, many of which were copies of the masterworks I admired.
While still at Amherst he stopped by my studio one beautiful afternoon of our senior year. He asked me if I’d like to go for a walk. I was painting an oil painting in my studio which I’d set up in an unused room in the vacant physics building. “Sure,” I replied and quickly set down my brushes. “Woah,” he said, “you can’t just leave your brushes like that.” “Sure I can,” I retorted. “No, you have to take care of your tools.”
Then he showed me how to wash my brushes. He removed the bulk of the paint with a turpentine soaked rag. Then he led me to the sink. “First you get the water nice and warm, then you wet your brush and lather it in the soap. Next swirl it around in the palm of your hand and rinse it repeatedly until the water runs clear. See how it feels good?!” He finished with a line that I have repeated countless times to young artists. “If you want to be an artist, you have to love every part of the process and take care of your tools.”
My senior year was a year of self-discovery for me. That fall I still hadn’t declared a major but I was contemplating declaring it to be Art. Understand that at that time, Amherst didn’t really have a studio art department. Every one of my adult male relatives had been or was either a banker or a lawyer. To be an artist ran against every grain of family tradition. I lacked the courage to make this declaration on my own. I needed a sign.
The sign came one classic fall day as I was driving towards Northampton on Route 9. At that time Northampton Road was still mostly bucolic. On the north side of 9, just west of University Drive, were cow pastures. In one lovely grassy field a stand of young poplar trees had grown up. It was late enough in the fall that the golden leaves were mostly down. And the grove of poplars was densely populated with a huge flock of iridescent black squawking grackles. I thought it would be interesting to hear them up close.
I pulled over, ducked through the three strand barbed wire fence and headed for the shimmering black grove. When I first entered the stand of birch-like trunks, many of the birds scattered so I lay down and covered myself with leaves. Almost immediately they returned and resumed their myriad squawking calls. I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of the world around me. Squawking.
Then, in the midst of the cacophony, I heard a melodic voice. At first it was faint. I could just barely hear it, but the more I listened the more clear the voice became. It was a single cardinal perched in a branch on the far side of the grove. At a certain point I realized that that one bird was singing in a voice that was as loud and clear as the thousands of birds around it.
That was the sign I needed. I was only one voice but hearing that cardinal so clearly made me realize I could make a difference. I could be heard by singing my own song.