below me named James Hickham. We started spending a fair amount of time together, mostly because he was the only kid I knew who liked foreign movies, and occasionally I wanted to see Truffaut with someone who wasnât my sister. I didnât like to admit it, but Hickham intimidated me; he was younger than I was but he had already almost certainly read more books. He had already read both of Tolstoyâs big booksâor claimed to, but I think he was probably sincere. When we met I was ahead on Dostoevsky, having read Crime and Punishment and about half of Brothers Karamazov , but by the winter of his sophomore year, he had read both of those plus The Possessed . One of the more backward kids at school called him a âJew,â which in addition to being racist did not really make a great deal of sense, given that his name was James Hickham, though Hickham explained to me later that all of his grandparents were Jews who had changed their names. I could see it a little bitâhis features were rather Mediterranean. He looked a lot like a younger Jean-Paul Belmondo, albeit one whose nose had been smashed.
As much as James liked to read, it was not particularly interesting to talk to him about books, because he was obsessed by two grand theories, one dull, the other repugnant. The dull one had it that men do everything that men do, from waging war to reading books, for one purpose only: to get laid. This was more or less what everyone thought already, but for some reason James considered it his solemn duty to proclaim this belief to anyone who would listen and to many who wouldnât. If he couldnât get a listener to sit still for the boring belief, he would move on to the repugnant one (itself no less boring or clichéd): all women secretly long to be raped. He would use this theory to spin long, usually boring interpretations of classic texts ( Hamlet was about Hamletâs conflict over whether to fulfill Opheliaâs desire for him to rape her). I knew it was a terrible idea to talk to Emily about this, but Emily was my primary confidant at the time, and I couldnât help but tell her about this horrible, frankly somewhat evil theory. I was absolutely horrified when she said that she thought it was interesting. She was barely fourteen at the time and I suppose that I still thought of her as for the most part asexual, and the fact that she would find something like this intriguing made me worry. One time, Hickham came back to the apartment with me and he started chatting with Emily. He started in on Hamlet and Ophelia and then said something about how Penelope had to wait twenty years to be raped by Odysseus, and he even touched Emilyâs arm at one point and that was the end of my hanging out with Hickham.
I wound up going to Yale, amusingly enough, out of an attempt to defy my father. Yale by this time was run by Kingman Brewster. Brewster had been a good friend of my fatherâs when they were undergraduates at Yale together, but my father had never truly forgiven him for opposing American entry into the Second World War. My father had wanted me to go to Harvard or Princeton. So Yale was, yes, my teenage rebellion.
I should say here that something was happening to me in the middle of the sixties. My awakening did not exactly track that of the rest of the country. I had been used to thinking that there was something wrong with the way that society was structured, and specifically with my privilege within that society, but somehow, oddly, I did not like to learn that other people seemed to be beginning to agree with me.
This is how I came to have a series of conversations with George Bush. Leftist magazines and blogs like to caricature me as âa George W. Bush crony since their days at Yale,â but this is not accurate. He was a year ahead of me at school, thatâs true, but I hardly knew him. Yes, both his father and my father were Skull and Bonesmen, but so was Yaleâs
As much as James liked to read, it was not particularly interesting to talk to him about books, because he was obsessed by two grand theories, one dull, the other repugnant. The dull one had it that men do everything that men do, from waging war to reading books, for one purpose only: to get laid. This was more or less what everyone thought already, but for some reason James considered it his solemn duty to proclaim this belief to anyone who would listen and to many who wouldnât. If he couldnât get a listener to sit still for the boring belief, he would move on to the repugnant one (itself no less boring or clichéd): all women secretly long to be raped. He would use this theory to spin long, usually boring interpretations of classic texts ( Hamlet was about Hamletâs conflict over whether to fulfill Opheliaâs desire for him to rape her). I knew it was a terrible idea to talk to Emily about this, but Emily was my primary confidant at the time, and I couldnât help but tell her about this horrible, frankly somewhat evil theory. I was absolutely horrified when she said that she thought it was interesting. She was barely fourteen at the time and I suppose that I still thought of her as for the most part asexual, and the fact that she would find something like this intriguing made me worry. One time, Hickham came back to the apartment with me and he started chatting with Emily. He started in on Hamlet and Ophelia and then said something about how Penelope had to wait twenty years to be raped by Odysseus, and he even touched Emilyâs arm at one point and that was the end of my hanging out with Hickham.
I wound up going to Yale, amusingly enough, out of an attempt to defy my father. Yale by this time was run by Kingman Brewster. Brewster had been a good friend of my fatherâs when they were undergraduates at Yale together, but my father had never truly forgiven him for opposing American entry into the Second World War. My father had wanted me to go to Harvard or Princeton. So Yale was, yes, my teenage rebellion.
I should say here that something was happening to me in the middle of the sixties. My awakening did not exactly track that of the rest of the country. I had been used to thinking that there was something wrong with the way that society was structured, and specifically with my privilege within that society, but somehow, oddly, I did not like to learn that other people seemed to be beginning to agree with me.
This is how I came to have a series of conversations with George Bush. Leftist magazines and blogs like to caricature me as âa George W. Bush crony since their days at Yale,â but this is not accurate. He was a year ahead of me at school, thatâs true, but I hardly knew him. Yes, both his father and my father were Skull and Bonesmen, but so was Yaleâs
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