Finding My Own Direction
Jack McDermott
Professor of English
College students in the early 1950’s were known as the “Silent
Generation.” Obedient, compliant, totally accepting of the status quo.
I started out majoring in Accounting because my father had become an accountant
by completing a mail order course. He ended his career by becoming the West
Coast’s Chief Financial Officer for the Chevrolet Division of General
Motors and I greatly admired him. But soon I discovered things were not going
to be so simple for me.
For one thing, I always asked questions and issued challenges in class. This
was definitely frowned upon. When, in the final thirty seconds of a class, the
professor asked, “Are there any questions?” he meant simply “Is
there anything in the lecture I have just delivered which is unclear to you?” The
notion of a wide-open class discussion of the material was simply unthinkable.
The exceptions to this were in my English classes generally and in one Philosophy
class in particular. Father James Smythe, my Philosophy professor, was an Englishman
who ended up in Indiana because the French Worker Priest Movement, of which he
had been a part, collapsed. (Too many of the worker-priests had defected, becoming
part of the Communist Party.) He liked my questions and encouraged me to keep
asking them.
By the end of my sophomore year, I was mentally and emotionally exhausted and totally confused. I just couldn’t see what to do next. So I dropped out of college, moved back home, and took a job in the stockroom of a nearby department store.
We began meeting weekly to talk about things—any subject at all was OK
with him and he didn’t mind accompanying my rabbit mind in and out of its
various burrows. Occasionally he interrupted me to say that my question was exactly
what some famous philosopher had asked. Once he astonished me by saying he felt
I had just answered one of St. Augustine’s dilemmas. For about eighteen
months we met once a week and talked. Occasionally he would laugh at me and say, “You’re
so conservative!” I had no idea what he was talking about or how he
could so confidently make such a judgment of me.
At this time, paperback books were new. When I went to pick up textbooks,
there was a rotating display of paperbacks for purchase—just for the fun of it.
My first purchase was Lionel Trilling’s “The Liberal Imagination.” I
found it a revelation. Here was a whole way of thinking utterly unlike anything
I had encountered at home or in high school and yet it felt so nourishing
and comfortable. But then I started to feel alarmed. Increasingly I felt
I was not going to be happy as an Accountant and yet I had no idea what I
wanted to do instead.
In my English classes I discovered that not everyone read as I did. To me,
print had always been about the sound of human voices. From the moment I
learned to read I understood that one didn’t so much look at a printed page, one listened
to it. And then one could talk back to the voices, engage them in dialog. And
you didn’t just have to think about what was in the books. I was startled
and exhilarated one day when Mr. Ryan, my English professor, said “Why
is everyone always writing about these supposedly great topics that don’t
really mean much of anything to any of you? Why not write about the meaning
of Marilyn Monroe . . . or Elvis Presley?”
That was far too radical an idea for me to pick up on. Instead, I decided
to spend one workday with my father, observing and then writing about what
I saw. The professor gave me an A+ on the paper, but I had no real idea why.
How did one go about learning to critically evaluate something like my writing?
And didn’t everyone just see the sort of things I saw: that one could,
for example, spot my father getting angry before he openly expressed it?
Or that sometimes he and my mother had an entire disagreement without ever
mentioning the real sore point between them? And that not everyone lived
this way: that some of my friends did understand what they were feeling while
they felt it—and so did their parents. How did one cross over from
my psychological world to theirs? And was all this connected in some way
to the acts of reading and writing and discussing?
By the end of my sophomore year, I was mentally and emotionally exhausted
and totally confused. I just couldn’t see what to do next. So I dropped
out of college, moved back home, and took a job in the stockroom of a nearby
department store. The manager took me down to the basement the day I was
hired and showed me the entire subfloor of the building: an enormous assemblage
of boxes of merchandise scattered in steel bins. “We have no idea what
exactly we have down here and it’s impossible for us to get an accurate
inventory. You’re in charge—see if you can straighten it out.”
For six months I labored, beginning at the furthest end and arranging things
neatly, one bin at a time, sorting things by size and color, working my way
steadily across the floor. At the same time I dealt with new incoming merchandise
while sending up on the freight elevator the various requests from the sales
departments. As I sorted the incredible number of boxes, I found my mind
also sorting itself out.
There were still lots of puzzles. In the lunchroom the first day, I had sat
down with a black coworker since he was the person I had seen the most of
that morning. But no one else joined us and I realized I had broken some
taboo. Apparently I belonged with the white carpenter and electrician even
though we didn’t see much of one another on the job, so I sat with
them.
Once I had created order from chaos—the bins were all tidied up and
the supervisors praised me for making it so much easier for them to keep
track of inventory—I became intolerably bored. I just couldn’t
stand the idea of nothing to do except keep polishing the floor and dealing
with the regular flow of products in and out. I realized this was a metaphor.
What I enjoyed was confronting chaos. It was the confrontation, rather than
the resolution, that interested me.
I gradually became certain that I should major in either Philosophy or English.
I checked with Father Smythe. He laughed and said, “Around here you’re
going to learn more philosophy as an English major than you will as a Philosophy
major.”
That settled it for me. I returned to college, still uncertain what the future
would hold. But one day, after a particularly boring class in Metaphysical
Poetry, after the room had emptied, I walked to the front of the room and
stood at the lectern. I imagined what I would have had to say about the poems
we had just examined. I thought to myself, “I’m really not sure
if I’d be any good at this—but I know I can do a better job than
that guy just did. And I think I’m willing to do just about anything
it takes to get the chance to try.”
top of page | read another story