A wicked wit.
A literary lion.
A collector of famous people. But once, just once, the
writer
felt the flicker of an emotion.
Recently, I lectured at Harvard on how we are shaped by the movies
we see while growing up. In preparation for the lectures, I watched The
Prince and the Pauper for the first time since 1937. Like most of the
movies that impress themselves on a child, the story is simple, but the
subtexts are disturbingly complex if one is the right age to be affected
by them. The prince and the pauper were played by Bobby and Billy Mauch,
identical twins who were the same age as 1--12. So there was I, in
surrogate, on the screen twice, not only prince but pauper, and the two
of them were so alike as to be interchangeable as well.
When I watched Prince and the Pauper the first time, I wanted to be
not one but two. A childhood desire to be a twin does not seem to me to
be narcissistic in the vulgar Freudian sense. After all, one is oneself;
and the other, other. It is the sort of likeness that makes for
wholeness, and is it not that search for likeness, that desire and
pursuit of the whole--as Plato has Aristophanes re-mark--that is the
basis of all love? The twin is the closest that one can ever come toward
human wholeness with another.
In any case, it was after I saw the film that I saw my other half
in Jimmie Trimble. It was thought best by my mother, Nina, that I board
during the week at St. Albans, an all-boys' school near Washington's
cathedral. I was allowed to come "home" on weekends. At midterm, Jimmie
became a boarder. We were friends immediately. I was one week older than
he. We were the same height and weight. He had pale blue eyes; mine were
pale brown. He had the hunter-athlete's farsightedness; I had the
writer-reader's myopic vision. I was blond, with straight hair. He was
blond, with curly hair. His sweat smelled of honey, like that of
Alexander the Great. At 17, when he graduated from St. Albans (I was
doing the same at Exeter), he was offered contracts to play professional
baseball with both the New York Giants and the Washington Senators; each
club would have sent him to college and kept him out of the war. Loyal to
his native city, he chose the Senators.
I had lunch with Jimmie's mother, Ruth Sewell, in Washington not
long ago, our first meeting in 55 years. Over lunch, we brought him back
to life, briefly, each for his own purpose. She had been disturbed by the
revelation in a magazine that the "JT" to whom I had dedicated The City
and the Pillar (about one boy's love for another) was Jimmie Trimble; and
the journalist made it clear, with no corroboration from me, that we had
been schoolboy lovers. Of Jimmie's death at 19, on Iwo Jima, the
journalist quoted me as saying, "He was the unfinished business of my
life." A response as cryptic as it was accurate.
She had given Jimmie's letters to a master at St. Albans, who was
aware of my interest in . . . what? bringing him to life again? in order
to . . . again, what? Discover who he was? As if I didn't once know him
as well as myself. But since we had been separated by geography the last
years of his short life, I suppose that I wanted--now--to fill in the
details. "I shall but love thee better after death," as Mrs. Browning so
stonily put it.
I tried to recall, as I looked into what proved to be Jimmie's eyes
across the table from me, what it was that we had talked about when alone
together. He was an athlete; I played nothing except erratic tennis. I
read everything that I could; he read as lit-fie as possible. But I am
intrigued by a letter he wrote his mother from Guam, in the South
Pacific. Would she send him Whitman's Leaves of Grass? This set off a
tremor. He and I had certainly lived out the Calamus idyll. Now
someone--a lover?-suggested that he read Whitman. Is this to be a mystery
story? Who was he, after all? Will I ever know now?
I remember him mostly in flashes. I'd go with him to hear Benny
Goodman at the Capitol Theater. He loved jazz, swing; played saxophone. I
liked "classical" music, played nothing. What we had entirely in common,
aside from each other, was the fact that each was already what he would
be when grown-up. He was professional athlete; I was writer. That was
that. Neither was uncertain about what to do in the future because each
was already doing it. The completeness set us off from our
contemporaries. As a result, neither was much of a success as a
schoolboy.
Mrs. Sewell laughed. "I remember Jimmie asked me, once, 'Did you
ever tell a man that he was beautiful?"' Jimmie had been shocked at such
a word applied to himself by a girl. But then, in those days before
Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando, males were taught to think of
themselves as coarse and brutish Calibans, on a lower level of evolution
than the fragile Ariels of the other sex.
Jimmie over flowed with animal energy, not to mention magnetism for
both sexes. Even so, at 12 or 13, I was delighted to be able to report to
him that I had had sex--if that is quite the phrase--with a girl before
Jimmie did. He was riveted; wanted details. The event had taken place in
the game room at my mother's Virginia home Merrywood, an airless chamber
in the cellar where game was hung and aged. On the floor, the girl and I
fumbled about, and I was almost as interested in what I was going to tell
Jimmie about the great mystery that I had at last--barely--penetrated as
I was in the earthshaking event itself.
Tags:
aristophanes,
billy mauch,
boarder,
boys school,
curly hair,
famous people,
flicker,
height and weight,
Jimmie Trimble,
likeness,
literary lion,
myopic vision,
pale blue eyes,
pale brown,
prince and the pauper,
st albans,
straight hair,
trimble,
wicked wit
