The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [160]
In the lecture rooms, despite himself, he drowses through class. The voice of the assistant professor with the steel-rimmed glasses and the bony scientist's face laps fuzzily at his ear. His eyes close.
Gentlemen, I would like you to consider the phenomenon of the kelp. Nereocystis lütkeana, macrocystis pyrifera, pelagophycus porra, he writes on the blackboard. They are a very distinctive form of marine life, consider this: they have no roots, no leaves, they receive no light from the sun. Under the water the giant kelp form veritable jungles of plant life where they live without movement, absorbing their nutrition from the ocean medium.
The bourgeois of the plant species, the student next to him murmurs, and Hearn is awake, startled by the chord of recognition, of excitement. He has almost phrased it himself.
It is only in storms, the professor says, that they are washed ashore; normally we must think of them as living in the dense tangle of marine jungles, stationary, absorbed in their own nutriment. These species had to remain behind when other aquatic plants moved onto land. Their brown color, which is an advantage in the murky under-seas jungles, would be fatal in the intense illumination of land. The professor holds up a withered brown frond with a ropelike stalk. Pass it around, men.
A student holds up his hand. Sir, what is their main use?
Oh, they have been used many ways. Essentially they are fertilizer. Potash deposits can be extracted.
But the moments like that come too seldom. He is empty and hungering for knowledge, the vessel that must be filled.
Slowly he gets around, meets a few people, starts going to places. In the spring of his freshman year he goes out of curiosity to a meeting of the Harvard Dramatic Club. The president is ambitious and the discussion of plans is elaborate.
It's completely absurd when you stop to think of it. It's absolutely ridiculous having us bat out these silly musical jangles, we've got to broaden our scope.
I know a Radcliffe girl who's studied Stanislavsky, someone drawls. If we had a decent program we could get her in, and have some decent training in the method. Oh, lovely, let's do Chekhov.
A slim youth with horn-rimmed glasses is on his feet, demanding to be heard. If we're going to shed the chrysalis, then I demand, I just demand that we do The Ascent of F-6. It's just kicking around, and it's not even being put on. I mean it's ridiculous when you stop to think of it, what a barrel of kudos it'll mean to us.
I can't agree with you about Auden and Isherwood, Ted, someone answers.
A dark-haired student, heavy set, with a deep important voice, is talking. I think we ought to do Odets, he's the only playwright in America who's doing anything serious, at least he has his feet in the frustrations and aspirations of the common people.
Boooooh, someone yells.
O'Neill or Eliot are the only ones.
Eliot doesn't belong in the same bed with O'Neill. (Laughter)
They argue for an hour and Hearn listens to the names. A few are familiar to him, Ibsen and Shaw and Galsworthy, but he has never heard of Strindberg, Hauptmann, Marlowe, Lope De Vega, Webster, Pirandello. The names go on, and he tells himself desperately that he must read.
He makes a start in the late spring of his first year, rediscovers the volume of Housman that nourished him in prep school, but to it he adds poets like Rilke and Blake and Stephen Spender. By the time he goes home for the summer he has switched his major to English, and he deserts the beach many afternoons, the Sally Tendeckers and her replacements, spends the nights writing short stories.
They are poor enough, but there is a temporary focus of excitement, a qualified success. When he returns to Harvard, he makes one of the literary magazines in the fall competitions, glares drunkenly into the spotlight at the initiation, and comes off without making too big a fool of himself.
The changes come slowly at first, then quickly. He reads everything, spends a lot of time at Fogg, goes to the symphony on Friday afternoons, absorbs the pleasant connotative smell of old furniture and old prints and the malty odor of empty beer cans in the aged rooms of the magazine. In the spring he wanders through the burgeoning streets of Cambridge, strolls along the Charles, or stands talking outside his house entry while the evening comes, and there is all the magic of freedom.