St. Paul's School

At fifteen, I was sent off to school to St. Paul’s, where my father had gone, and my grandfather, and his father as well, and where I could find my own name engraved on one of the “founders” pews in the chapel from my name-sake great-great-great Uncle Ned. It took me three years before I realized that both Jimmy Evarts and Alex McLane were my second cousins. I quickly found out I wasn’t terribly adept at French conjugations with Monsieur Jacques or Latin grammar with Bill Matthews, but I did learn that, in the late sixties, people were writing literature very different from what I read at home. I read Camus and Sartre, the Evergreen Review, Jean Genet, Ionesco, Brecht, Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Frank O’Hara, Henry Miller, William Carlos Williams, Candy, The Story of O, Baudelaire. I also learned that I could write. I learned, observing schoolmates like Andre Bishop and Peter Garland that, as a Paulie, I was expected to be able to create.

So I wrote poems, stories, plays; I joined the Concordian Literary Society, and was tapped to become co-editor of the Horae Scholasticae. It was an interesting time; I was turning eighteen years old, but also, in the midst of the struggles for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, St. Paul’s School seemed to be, oddly, a fulcrum point for the dynamic forces at work. I watched my housemaster Gerry Studds, teach history and politics to the sons of the Secretaries of Defense and the Army during the day, and then co-manage Gene McCarthy’s New Hampshire campaign in the evenings and knock Lyndon Johnson out of a second term in the White House. It was a time to question how the egalitarian rhetoric of the Episcopal Church could possibly square with the obvious elitism of the School, and, as the first coeducational exchange took place with Concord Academy, it was a time when we, individually and as a school, struggled with our sexual identities.

Editing the Horae, Bob Rettew and I would spend our evenings in George Carlisle’s apartment selecting manuscripts and spreading galleys all over the floor. George Carlisle, the master who advised the magazine, had been working on a novel for years, and loved the idea that he was advising a nephew of Max Perkins as he began his publishing career.

My classmate Charlie Scribner pointedly suggested that Grove Press might be the more appropriate venue for my tastes. My literary tastes at the time were mostly formed by The Evergreen Review, and Bob and I tried to push in an avant-garde direction, using varieties of display fonts and psychedelic illustrations. I now realize we didn’t have a clue what we were doing, and we broke the Horae production budget for a couple of years, but I admire the youthful vigor of the issues we produced.