Fool

Further to the last. Dark and ironic are not necessarily something to aspire to, and it's not my first encounter.

About 45 years ago I authored a piece in the Horae Scholasticae, the literary magazine that was published at my New Hampshire boarding school. The Horae and the boarding school are both, at least by American standards, venerable.

The piece was a poem, based in part on a bet. I bet another guy - I'll call him Wisner - that I could get a piece into the Horae. My idea was that if I goosed up the language and staggered the lines and avoided rhyme, but kept it morally upright, they would publish. I showed him the piece. Wisner made the bet because he thought it was a crappy poem, but also because of my creative use of upper case at the beginning of each line, which he did not think would fool the Horae's Editorial Board. It's also possible he did not care if he lost.

I won the bet. Here's what came out in the next issue:

That huge "F" was the Horae's idea.

I was an instant celebrity in that small, fraught world. Although the Editorial Board may have missed the irony, the masters - as we called our teachers then - did not. My English master, a wonderful Brit who loved booze way too much - said, "The last guy who did this was on a train home that afternoon."

The Rector was not amused. An autere Episcopalian bishop, he called me in after consultations to which I was not privy. His offer, rather than to send me home, was to make me stay On Bounds (meaning you couldn't leave the premises) indefinitely, stay over two days into Spring vacation, and pay the republishing costs. I took the deal. It seemed to me, well, ironic that the most severe sanction was banishment, but the next one down was a kind of imprisonment on campus.

The poem was an ironic piece, if also adolescent and crude, and the local literati gave it a mixed review. The chair of the Editorial Board, no doubt miffed, said, "I can't believe you would do something so stupid." Another member of the Board was vague as to whether he had spotted the secret message and pronounced it the finest work ever printed in the Horae. In any event the edition was republished and the poem replaced with a drawing of a flower or a bucket or something. The originals were confiscated and, they say, burned. Except a few.

The poem derived not only from my bet with Wisner. About six months earlier, in the Fall of 1965, my parents had announced that they were separated. It was not really unexpected; my father had fallen rather conspicuously in love with someone else. Home in Ohio that Christmas, I saw him only for a little time, in a rented house. A sad holiday, and even I, the most hardened prep school toughie, came back to school hoping they would wake up and pull it together.

In February, hearing nothing, I called my sister, who was married and lived in Connecticut. I said, "Are my parents divorced?" She said yes. She thought it was terrible they hadn't told me.

I wrote out the poem the next week.

I'm sure I wasn't put on the next train home, and instead was roped to the school, because the Rector knew the history. He felt sorry for me, which I hated. But I did not hate him, and I loved my parents throughout. I was just blind-sided a little, and more careful thereafter.