The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition

  It was not that I was really studying hard or working hard: but all of a sudden I had fallen into a kind of a mysterious knack of keeping a hundred different interests going in the air at the same time. It was a kind of a stupendous juggling act, a tour-de-force, and what surprised me most was that I managed to keep it up without collapsing. In the first place, I was carrying about eighteen points in my courses—the average amount. I had found out the simplest way of fulfilling the minimum requirements for each one.

  Then there was the “Fourth Floor.” The fourth floor of John Jay Hall was the place where all the offices of the student publications and the Glee Club and the Student Board and all the rest were to be found. It was the noisiest and most agitated part of the campus. It was not gay, exactly. And I hardly ever saw, anywhere, antipathies and contentions and jealousies at once so petty, so open, and so sharp. The whole floor was constantly seething with the exchange of insults from office to office. Constantly, all day long, from morning to night, people were writing articles and drawing cartoons calling each other Fascists. Or else they were calling one another up on the phone and assuring one another in the coarsest terms of their undying hatred. It was all intellectual and verbal, as vicious as it could be, but it never became concrete, never descended into physical rage. For this reason, I think that it was all more or less of a game which everybody played for purposes that were remotely esthetic.

  The campus was supposed to be, in that year, in a state of “intellectual ferment.” Everybody felt and even said that there were an unusual number of brilliant and original minds in the college. I think that it was to some extent true. Ad Reinhardt was certainly the best artist that had ever drawn for Jester, perhaps for any other college magazine. His issues of Jester were real magazines. I think that in cover designs and layouts he could have given lessons to some of the art-editors downtown. Everything he put out was original, and it was also funny, because for the first time in years Jester had some real writers contributing to it, and was not just an anthology of the same stale and obscene jokes that have been circulating through the sluggish system of American college magazines for two generations. By now Reinhardt had graduated, and so had the editor of the 1935 Spectator, im Wechsler.

  My first approach to the Fourth Floor had been rather circumspect, after the manner of Cambridge. I went to my adviser, Prof McKee, and asked him how to go about it, and he gave me a letter of introduction to Leonard Robinson who was editor of The Columbia Review, the literary magazine. I don’t know what Robinson would have made of a letter of introduction. Anyway, I never got to meeting him after all. When I went to the Review office I gave the note to Bob Giroux, an associate editor, and he looked at it and scratched his head some bit and told me to write something if I got an idea.

  By 1936 Leonard Robinson had vanished. I always heard a lot about Robinson, and it all adds up to nothing very clear, so that I have always had the impression that he somehow lives in the trees. I pray that he may go to heaven.

  As for Review, Robert Paul Smith and Robert Giroux were both editing it together, and it was good. I don’t know whether you would use the term “ferment” in their case, but Smith and Giroux were both good writers. Also, Giroux was a Catholic and a person strangely placid for the Fourth Floor. He had no part in its feuds and, as a matter of fact, you did not see him around there very much. John Berryman was more or less the star on Review that year. He was the most earnest-looking man on the campus.

  There was not an office on that floor where I did not have something to do, except the Glee Club and Student Board and the big place where all the football coaches had their desks. I was writing stories for Spectator, and columns that were supposed to be funny; I was writing things for the yearbook and trying to sell copies of it—a thankless task. The yearbook was the one thing nobody wanted: it was expensive and dull. Of this I eventually became editor, without any evident benefit to myself or to the book or to Columbia or to the world.

  I was never particularly drawn to the Varsity show: but they had a piano in their room, and the room was almost always empty, so I used to go in there and play furious jazz, after the manner I had taught myself—a manner which offended every ear but my own. It was a way of letting off steam—a form of athletics if you like. I have ruined more than one piano by this method.

  The place where I was busiest was the Jester office. Nobody really worked there, they just congregated about noontime and beat violently with the palms of their hands on the big empty filing cabinets, making a thunderous sound that echoed up and down the corridor, and was sometimes answered from the Review office across the hall. There I usually came and drew forth from the bulging leather bag of books that I carried, copy and drawings which I put into the editor’s hand. The editor that year was Herb Jacobson, and he printed all my worst cartoons very large in the most prominent parts of the magazine.

  I thought I had something to be proud of when I became art-editor of Jester at the end of that year. Robert Lax was to be editor and Ralph Toledano managing editor, and we got along well together. The next year Jester was well put together because of Toledano and well written because of Lax and sometimes popular with the masses because of me. When it was really funny, it was not popular at all. The only really funny issues were mostly the work of Lax and Bob Gibney, the fruit of ideas that came to them at four o’clock in the morning in their room on the top floor of Furnald Hall.

  The chief advantage of Jester was that it paid most of our bills for tuition. We were happy about it all, and wandered around the campus with little golden crowns dangling on our watch chains. Indeed, that was the only reason why I had a watch chain. I did not have a watch.

  I have barely begun the list of all the things that occupied me in those days. For example, I gave my name to Miss Wegener at the appointments office. Miss Wegener was—and I hope she still is—a kind of a genius. She sat all day long behind her desk in that small, neat office in the Alumni house. No matter how many people she had talked to, she always looked unruffled and at peace. Every time you went to see her, one or two phone calls would come in, and she would make a note on a little pad of paper. In summer she never seemed to be worried by the hot weather. And she always smiled at you with a smile that was at the same time efficient and kind, pleasant and yet a little impersonal. She was another one who had a vocation and was living up to it!

  One of the best jobs she ever got for me was that of guide and interpreter on the observation roof of the R.C.A. building, Rockefeller Center. It was an easy job. So easy in fact that it was boring. You simply had to stand there and talk to the people who came pouring out of the elevator with all their questions. And for this you got twenty-seven and a half dollars a week, which was very good pay in 1936. I also worked in another office in Radio City, for some people who handled publicity for all the manufacturers of Paper Cups and Containers. For them I did cartoons that said you would surely get trench mouth if you ever drank out of an ordinary glass. For each cartoon I was paid six dollars. It made me feel like an executive, to go walking in and out of the doors of the R.C.A. building with my pockets full of money. Miss Wegener would also send me off on the subway with little slips of paper with the addresses of apartments where I would interview rich Jewish ladies about tutoring their children in Latin, which meant that I got two or two and a half dollars an hour for sitting with them and doing their homework.

  I also handed in my name for the Cross Country team. The fact that the coach was not sorry to get me is sufficient indication of one reason why we were the worst college Cross Country team in the East that year. And so, in my afternoons, I would run around and around South Field on the cinder path. And when winter came, I would go round and round the board track until I had blisters all over the soles of my feet and was so lame I could hardly walk. Occasionally I would go up to Van Cortlandt Park and run along the sandy and rocky paths through the woods. When we raced any other college, I was never absolutely the last one home—there were always two or
three other Columbia men behind me. I was one of those who never came in until the crowd had lost interest and had begun to disperse. Perhaps I would have been more of a success as a long-distance runner if I had gone into training, and given up smoking and drinking, and kept regular hours.

  But no. Three or four nights a week my fraternity brothers and I would go flying down in the black and roaring subway to and Street, where we would crawl around the tiny, noisy, and expensive nightclubs that had flowered on the sites of the old speakeasies in the cellars of those dirty brownstone houses. There we would sit, for hours, packed in those dark rooms, shoulder to shoulder with a lot of surly strangers and their girls, while the whole place rocked and surged with storms of jazz. There was no room to dance. We just huddled there between the blue walls, shoulder to shoulder and elbow to elbow, crouching and deafened and taciturn. If you moved your arm to get your drink you nearly knocked the next man off his stool. And the waiters fought their way back and forth through the sea of unfriendly heads, taking away the money of all the people.

  It was not that we got drunk. No, it was this strange business of sitting in a room full of people and drinking without much speech, and letting yourself be deafened by the jazz that throbbed through the whole sea of bodies binding them all together in a kind of fluid medium. It was a strange, animal travesty of mysticism, sitting in those booming rooms, with the noise pouring through you, and the rhythm lumping and throbbing in the marrow of your bones. You couldn’t call any of that, per se, a mortal sin. We just sat there, that was all. If we got hangovers the next day, it was more because of the smoking and nervous exhaustion than anything else.

  How often, after a night of this, I missed all the trains home to Long Island and went and slept on a couch somewhere, at the Fraternity House, or in the apartment of somebody I knew around town. What was worst of all was going home on the subway, on the chance that one might catch a bus at Flushing! There is nothing so dismal as the Flushing bus station, in the grey, silent hour just before the coming of dawn. There were always at least one or two of those same characters whose prototypes I had seen dead in the morgue. And perhaps there would be a pair of drunken soldiers trying to get back to Fort Totten. Among all these I stood, weary and ready to fall, lighting the fortieth or fiftieth cigarette of the day—the one that took the last shreds of lining off my throat.

  The thing that depressed me most of all was the shame and despair that invaded my whole nature when the sun came up, and all the laborers were going to work: men healthy and awake and quiet, with their eyes clear, and some rational purpose before them. This humiliation and sense of my own misery and of the fruitlessness of what I had done was the nearest I could get to contrition. It was the reaction of nature. It proved nothing except that I was still, at least, morally alive: or rather that I had still some faint capacity for moral life in me. The term “morally alive” might obscure the fact that I was spiritually dead. I had been that long since!

  IV

  IN THE FALL OF 1936 POP DIED. THE MANNER OF HIS DEATH was this. I had been on a geology field trip in Pennsylvania, and had come back, late one Sunday night after a long cold ride through New Jersey, back from the coal mines and the slate quarries, in an open Ford. The icy wind of the Delaware Water Gap was still in my flesh. I went to bed without seeing anybody. They were all in their rooms by the time I got home.

  The next morning I looked in Pop’s room, and he was sitting up in bed looking strangely unhappy and confused.

  “How do you feel?” I said.

  “Rotten,” he answered. There was nothing surprising about that. He was always getting ill. I supposed he had caught another cold. I said:

  “Take some more sleep, then.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I guess I will.”

  I went back into the bathroom, and hastened to dress and drink my coffee and run for the train.

  That afternoon I was on the track, in the pale November sun, taking an easy work-out. I came down the shady side of the field, in front of the library. There was one of the juniors who worked for the Yearbook standing behind the high wire fence, at the corner nearest John Jay, where the bushes and poplar trees were. As I came down to the bend he called out to me and I went over to the fence.

  “Your aunt was on the phone just now,” he told me. “She said your grandfather is dead.”

  There was nothing I could say.

  I trotted back along the field and went down and took a quick shower and got into my clothes and went home. There was no train but one of those slow ones, that ambled out on to the Island half empty, with long stops at every station. But I knew there was no particular hurry. I could not bring him back to life.

  Poor old Pop. I was not surprised that he was dead, or that he had died that way. I supposed his heart had failed. It was typical of him, that kind of death: he was always in a hurry, always ahead of time. And now, after a whole long lifetime of impatience, waiting for Bonnemaman to get ready to go to the theater, or to come to dinner, or to come down and open the Christmas presents, after all that, he had brooked no delay about dying. He had slipped out on us, in his sleep, without premeditation, on the spur of the moment.

  I would miss Pop. In the last year or two we had drawn rather close together. He often got me to come to lunch with him downtown and there he would tell me all his troubles, and talk over the prospects for my future—I had returned to the old idea of becoming a newspaper man. There was a great deal of simplicity about Pop. It was a simplicity, an ingenuousness that belonged to his nature: and it was something peculiarly American. Or at least, it belonged to the Americans of his generation, this kind and warm-hearted and vast and universal optimism.

  When I got to the house, I knew where I would find his body. I went up to his bed-room and opened the door. The only shock was to find that the windows were all open and the room was full of the cold November air. Pop, who in his life had feared all draughts and had lived in overheated houses, now lay under a sheet in this icy cold death-chamber. It was the first death that had been in the house that he had built for his family twenty-five years before.

  Now a strange thing happened. Without my having thought about it, or debating about it in my mind, I closed the door and got on my knees by the bed and prayed. I suppose it was just the spontaneous response of my love for poor Pop—the obvious way to do something for him, to acknowledge all his goodness to me. And yet, I had seen other deaths without praying or being even drawn to pray. Two or three summers before an old relative of mine had died, and the only thing that had occurred to me was the observation that her lifeless corpse was no more than a piece of furniture. I did not feel that there was anybody there, only a thing. This did not teach me what it taught Aristotle, about the existence of the soul...

  But now I only wanted to pray.

  Unfortunately, I knew that Bonnemaman was going to come in and tell me to look at the body, and soon I heard her steps in the hall. I got off my knees before she opened the door.

  “Aren’t you going to look at him?” she said to me.

  I said nothing. She raised the corner of the sheet, and I looked at Pop’s dead face. It was pale, and it was dead. She let the sheet fall back, and together we walked out of the room, and I sat and talked to her for an hour or so, while the sun was going down.

  Everybody knew that now this would be the end of Bonnemaman too. Although our family had been one of those curious modern households in which everybody was continually arguing and fighting, and in which there had been for years an obscure and complicated network of contentions and suppressed jealousies, Bonnemaman had been tremendously attached to her husband. She soon began to languish, but it was months before she finally died.

  First, she fell down and broke her arm. It mended slowly and painfully. But as it did, she turned into a bent and silent old woman, with a rather haggard face. When the summer came, she could no longer get out of bed. Then came the alarms at night when we thought she was dying, and stood for hours by her bed,
listening to the harsh gasp in her throat. And then too I was praying, looking into the mute, helpless face she turned towards my face. This time I was more conscious of what I was doing, and I prayed for her to live, although in some sense it was obviously better that she should die.

  I was saying, within myself: “You Who made her, let her go on living.” The reason I said this was that life was the only good I was certain of. And if life was the one big value, the one chief reality, its continuance depended on the will (otherwise why pray?) of the supreme Principle of all life, the ultimate Reality, He Who is Pure Being. He Who is Life Itself He Who, simply, is. By praying, I was implicitly acknowledging all this. And now twice I had prayed, although I continued to think I believed in nothing.

  Bonnemaman lived. I hope it had something to do with grace, with something that was given to Bonnemaman from God, in those last weeks that she continued to live, speechless and helpless on her bed, to save her soul. Finally, in August, she died, and they took her away and made an end of her body like all the rest. That was the summer of 1937.

  Pop had died in November 19:56. Already, in that fall, I had begun to feel ill. Still I kept on trying to do all the things I was doing—following my courses, editing the Yearbook, working, and running on the Cross Country Team without going into training....

  One day we raced Army and Princeton. I was not last, but as usual I was about twenty-third or -fourth out of thirty or so. When I got to the end of the course, I simply fell down and lay on the ground, waiting for my stomach to turn inside out within me. I felt so bad that I did not even mind what the people thought. I did not try to look brave, or to make any jokes about myself, or to hide the way I felt. I lay there until I felt better, then I got up and went away, and never came back to the locker rooms again. The coach did not bother to come looking for me. Nobody tried to persuade me to go back on the team. We were all equally satisfied: I was through. However, it did not help much to get rid of this burden.