Roundtable

The Presumption of Youth

On boarding school and the coming-of-age fiction.

By Elias Altman

Thursday, September 11, 2014

Boarding school

Growing up is after all only the understanding that one’s unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares. 

—Doris Lessing

The reason so many coming-of-age tales revolve around boarding schools—The Catcher in the Rye, Dead Poets Society, A Separate Peace, Never Let Me Go—is that they are the perfect setting for the unique and incredible experience that Lessing says is a part of growing up. From that first walk across a well-watered quad, three thoughts arise: This is new; I am alone; what will happen? Overnight the world changes, shrinking in size yet swelling in possibility. The freshman has just been assigned an equal measure of freedom and responsibility, and will soon discover the pleasure specific to each—as well as the wicked delight in allowing the two to clash.

I was on a Greyhound headed north on I-91 when I finished The Catcher in the Rye, and as I watched the skeletal trees whiz past I said to myself, I’ll remember this feeling. I wondered if the real reason to read books is because of their power to embalm your present self for future reference: this is who I was when I finished you. The thought made me feel very original, and in that cold and cramped bus it occurred to me that at thirteen I, like Holden Caulfield, had come of age. My first semester of boarding school was over, and gone was the boy I’d been at the start of it. I was coming home to the dirt roads of Vermont a man; Massachusetts had changed me.

At Concord I had smoked cigarettes at a bend in the Sudbury River called Eden. My roommate and I had padded our asses with paperbacks before being beaten by a senior wielding the “Beating Stick.” I had begun to impress a bevy of sophomore girls who lived in Holmes House, making their giggles rise into the night air not yet invaded by the ringing of curfew bells. I chose what I ate. I kept track of all my assignments in a day planner and crossed out each one when it was completed. I was self-sufficient—showers, soccer, study hall.


Of course, the very incidents that made me feel so old then now only reveal how young I was. A few cigs by a river does not a man make; nothing screams arrested development quite like hazing; and can a giggle ever really rise into the air? That stuff is strictly for the birds. The insight that started my reverie wasn’t even original. Over 150 years before I finished reading The Catcher in the Ryeand believed it was written for me alone, Henry David Thoreau had speculated, “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.” The foundation of the cabin that Thoreau built to house that thought was still there on the shores of Walden Pond, not two miles from where I was going to school.

When we’re young we remember the times we feel old, and when we’re old we remember the times we feel young. Our judgments may be impaired at both junctures, but that doesn’t mean that either should be dismissed wholesale. I was young and stupid on that bus, sure, but am I now older and wiser, illusions lost and sentiments educated? Perhaps. But if Lessing is right, if what makes us grown up is the understanding that our unique experiences are universal, then it would still seem important to understand what felt so unique and incredible in the first place.

On the second or third day of classes I found myself enjoying a free period with two sophomores, Sam and Edward, when they asked if I wanted to sneak off the school grounds. “We’ll be back for the next class,” Sam assured me. That certainly addressed my second nervous question; my first (“Why are you inviting me?”) went, for the time being, unanswered.

We walked to the soccer field, cast a final glance behind us and, parting the thicket of vines and brambles, disappeared. With the sound of wind-rustled branches and birds filling our ears, we walked the well-trodden but narrow path to its end, an isthmus. Sunlight filtered through the oak canopy in slanted columns; the ankle-high grass was soft and uniform. Sam produced three Lucky Strikes, and we smoked them studiously. Afterward, we rubbed our hands on fresh, fragrant pine needles.

Here was a forbidden world. My stomach was aflutter, and I didn’t want the feeling to end. In some ways it didn’t. The strongest pleasures at boarding school were always forbidden—that was their root—and Edens were on offer if you looked for them. When I wore out the particular novelty of one, I later discovered a clever way to reanimate it: introduce it to someone new. So much for my first question.

When my roommate Will and I overheard our head of house, Jack, telling another senior outside our closed door that he was going to let loose the Beating Stick on us, we snapped into action.

"No, no, The Odyssey is too thick; it’ll be obvious.”

“What about Shakespeare?” I asked.

“Yeah, yeah, perfect. Put the sonnets sideways in your boxers.”

Jack burst in and told us to turn around, grab our ankles, prepare to die. He swung hard—our bodies shook—but it didn’t hurt much. It wasn’t just the Western canon and the padding on the PVC pipe that softened the blows—although they certainly helped. It was that we were thinking to ourselves, We are in boarding school. This is a rite of passage.

Will and I howled like wounded wolves for Jack, then did our best to remain silent after he left. We started laughing.

“He’s pathetic,” Will said. I agreed.

Jack should have beaten us harder, should have noticed the books; we lost all respect for him that night. We whispered whenever he conducted house meetings and starting calling him a pussy behind his back.

Not long afterward, when I was listening to music with two other freshmen in their dorm, a senior I didn’t know burst in with the Stick. I wasn’t prepared, mentally or physically, and he swung much harder. No hyper-awareness insulated me this time, and I cried during that beating. I felt truly pathetic walking back to my dorm that evening, and I felt even worse after it occurred to me that Jack might have spoken loudly outside our door that night on purpose.

Of all my first semester experiences, the nightly pilgrimage to Holmes House was the most unique and incredible. A few of us eager boys would unite post-study hall at 9:30 unfinished homework crammed in our backpacks, and walk the well-lighted and paved pathway to the most beautiful of the colonial houses. With a massive white-columned porch, it seemed less New England than old Savannah, Spanish moss and secrets lurking in the darkness.

I remember that sloping porch so well because the girls made us wait on it for so long. We horsed around, already jockeying for attention, until we caught a glimpse of them through the front-door window. Sarah, Elizabeth, Julie, Camilla, Jodie—they descended the staircase single file, their hands on the wooden railing as if it were the one thing preventing them from floating, free from the law of gravity. They joined us on the porch.
At the beginning what us boys made were jokes—fast, furious, and at the expense of one another. We vied hard for their giggles. Over time our statements became less ejaculatory, three or four sentences instead of one. The focus gradually shifted from ourselves to other subjects. And then we tried listening to them. Eventually, I think, we had conversations.

At ten o’clock the bells tolled and we were silenced. We had a minute before we had to be back at our dorms, thirty seconds of which were pure pleasure. One by one and without any special pleading on our part, the girls hugged us good night. The physical contact felt criminal—arms wrapped, chests flush. I didn’t even know the names of all the girls the first time it happened, but suddenly I was elect. All the other boys were too, but the experience was so good and pure that nothing was lost in the sharing.

I was thirteen on that bus, and those things that made me feel old were actually the best offerings of youth. “For there is such a little time that your youth will last—such a little time…Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!” Oscar Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray. And while Wilde’s Lord Henry may be right that youth fades, the feeling it affords need not. It mustn’t if we’re to stay alive while living, if we are to avoid, like Thoreau, the path toward quiet desperation. Growing up is as much about the innocence you lose as the innocence you keep. Isn’t that Holden’s plea, that we preserve a part of our young selves against the onslaught of phoniness?

The basic coming-of-age narrative suggests experience leads to knowledge; an event, or a series of them, gives rise to a fuller understanding of oneself, the world, and the relation between the two. Mistakes are made, but we learn from them. That’s a nice thought, a wonderful backbone for fiction, though it’s not always borne out in our own lives. As Wilde also wrote, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” Growing up is slow, even perpetual, and age doesn’t come after one heavy experience knocks the wind out of you. No, all the important mistakes in life are made at least twice. But coming-of-age stories allow both reader and writer the luxury of thinking that they have grown up. That’s what I thought on the bus, and the mistaken notion was the most adult thing about the whole experience. No child could presume so much.