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PARTISAN REVIEW
defenseless on Christmas Eve!" She ran into my bedroom. She
hugged me. She said, "Oh Bobby, it's such a comfort to have a
man in the house." "I am not a man," I said, "I am a boy."
Bo
y--at that time this word had private associations for me;
it meant weakness, outlawry, and yet was a status to be held onto.
Boys were a sideline at my Brimmer School. The eight superior
grades were limited to girls. In these grades, moreover, scholarship
was made subservient to discipline, as if in contempt of the male's two
idols: career and earning power. The school's tone, its
ton,
was a
blend of the feminine and the military, a bulky reality governed in
turn by stridency, smartness, and steadiness. The girls wore white
jumpers, black skirts, stockings, and rectangular low-heeled shoes. An
ex-West Pointer had been appointed to teach drill; and, at the mo–
ment of my enrollment in Brimmer, our principal, the hitherto staid
Miss Manice, was rumored to be showing signs of age and of
undermining her position with the school trustees by girlish, quite
out of character, rhapsodies on the varsity basketball team, winner
of two consecutive championships. The lower four grades, peaceful
and lackadaisical, were, on the other hand, almost a separate estab–
lishment. Miss Manice regarded these "coeducated" classes with
amused carelessness, allowed them to wear their ordinary clothes,
and ... carelessness, however, is incorrect-Miss Manice, in her
administration of the lower school, showed the inconsistency and
euphoria of a dual personality. Here she mysteriously shed all her
Prussianism. She quoted Emerson and William James, disparaged
the English, threatened to break with the past, and boldly coquetted
with the non-military American genius by displaying movies illustrat–
ing the careers of Edison and Ford. Favored lower school teachers
were permitted to use us as guinea pigs for mildly radical experi–
ments. At Brimmer I unlearned writing. The script that I had
mastered with much agony at my first school was denounced as
illegible; I was taught to print according to the Dalton Plan-to
this day, as a result, I have to print even my two middle names and
can only really
write
two words: "Robert" and "Lowell." Our in–
struction was subject to bewildering leaps. A performance by the
quaint Venetian glass-blowers was followed by a tour of the River–
side Press. We heard Rudy Vallee, then heard spirituals sung by
the Hampton Institute choir. We studied grammar from a formidable,
