Remembering Denny, by Calvin Trillin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993). Roger D. Hansen, the most prominent and promising member of the Yale class of 1957, a student so successful and attractive that Life magazine covered his graduation, killed himself in February 1991. When Calvin Trillin, his friend and college classmate, saw his obituary in the New York Times, he couldn't believe it. Trillin had been one of many Yale students who joked about the positions they would occupy in the Hansen administration when inevitably their classmate was elected president. Trillin, who rather a short time later would be writing presidential speeches, was promised the assignment of writing the first paragraph or two of Hansen's addresses—“Just the jokes. The warm-up. Not any of the serious policy stuff,” Hansen kidded him. These were lighthearted fantasies, but they were fantasies that a large number of people remembered for more than thirty years. Like Edward Arlington Robinson's Richard Cory, Denny Hansen's public personality inspired admiration and his suicide awe.
That public personality appeared less frequently over the years, and although he became a successful scholar of international relations, published a major work in that field, and briefly occupied an important position in the Carter administration and then an endowed chair at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, his achievements disappointed him and many of those who had known him in his youth. (In college, when others had talked of the presidency, Denny himself had spoken, more modestly, of the governorship of California.) While attending Hansen's memorial service and a less formal gathering of old friends, Trillin realized there were “a lot of things I hadn't known about Denny. … I had begun to wonder whether back in the fifties…we might have made up a life for Denny to live.” So he decided to learn about the real life.
The book that resulted has been praised by reviewers as the best work of one of America's best all-around writers. It is a book of particular interest to psychoanalysts. Trillin's point of view is not psychoanalytic—he claims that his home town used to have a sign on its outskirts saying, “Psychoanalyst, don't let the sun set on your ass in this town!”—but he has spent many years “poking around in other people's lives,” as he puts it, and like a good psychoanalyst he has listened well to what people say and to his own feelings and associations. His U.S. Journal pieces in The New Yorker, and the books into which they have been collected, are some of the best accounts of who Americans are and how their lives fit together. Remembering Denny is especially satisfying because so superbly personal. This is a work which, like a good psychoanalytic case study, includes a deeply felt and candidly expressed revelation of the countertransference. The analyst reading it will feel close to Trillin as he struggles to think his way into another person's life and in the process discovers some important things about his own. Trillin, a particularly reticent writer even in his humorous works, tells more about himself in this book than is usual for him, and the way he does so stands as a model to us all: revealing what is essential without obscuring it with sensational details, direct or disguised boastfulness, self-abnegation or self-pity. With the same skill he has used to capture the essence of individuals, groups, and their conflicts, he finds here what is essential about his own history and character that illuminates, and is illuminated by, the fate of his friend.
After Trillin and Hansen themselves, the two most interesting characters in the book are the two men's fathers. Trillin's is described in the spare, marvelously revealing details we have come to expect from his son, while Hansen's is almost absent. In about 1921, Trillin's father reached a crucial decision. “While he was growing up—in a poor family of Russian-Jewish immigrants in St. Joseph, Missouri—he read Stover at Yale. He wasn't able to go to college himself, but even before he married he knew that his son would go to Yale. Although we never discussed the subject directly, I have always assumed he named me Calvin, which neither he nor my mother could ever bring themselves to call me, because he believed, incorrectly, that it would be an appropriate name for someone at Yale. In the tiny grocery store where he began his business career in Kansas City, he put aside the money that one of the bread companies offered for prominent display and quick payment: it was a fund for Yale. (The bread company would have received its money promptly without any incentives. My father paid his bills on the day he got them; if you had explained some of the advantages of the float to him, I think he might have just shaken his head sadly at the sort of thing some people would do.)” His parting words when his son first left for New Haven were, “You might as well be a mensch.”
Hansen's grandfather puts in a brief appearance and seems to have had some long-lasting effects. Among the rather meager personal possessions left after Denny's death were some paintings of large sailing ships in the living room and an illustrated book entitled Windjammer, by a British author who had shipped out on a huge, Finnish-built barque called the Moshulu, which just before World War II was still hauling grain under sail from Australia to Great Britain. An inscription in it read, “Moshulu—last of the great barques. Under the command of Captain Lauritz C. Hansen.” When Trillin mentioned Hansen's parents to one of Denny's “closest friends at Yale, he said simply, ‘His family was not part of the whole thing.’ Denny's friends from various periods of his life all got the impression that he had not been raised in a home full of great nurturing and love. Clarence Hansen—one of five children of Lauritz, a Dane who ran off to sea as a boy and raised a family in Alameda, California, and became the last skipper of the Moshulu—was, according to what everyone who knew him says, a sweet, rather passive man who didn't have much to say.” Besides being passive and silent, Clarence would have been away from home a good deal during Denny's childhood, as he too was a ship's officer. In addition, after Pearl Harbor, when Denny was about six, he and his brother were sent away from home in Hawaii to stay with an aunt and uncle for a few years. Denny's mother was chronically and severely depressed.
These facts, it must be said, are selected from an account rich in material for all kinds of speculation, which Trillin himself keeps to a minimum. He does offer the opinion that a lack of real self-confidence was an important part of Denny's tragedy, but many other themes are touched on, including the burden of great expectations (besides the Life article, Denny was Phi Beta Kappa, won a host of scholastic and athletic awards, and was a Rhodes Scholar); prejudice against being gay, which he was, which occasioned a long struggle, including an apparently unhelpful analysis, against his homosexuality; his rejection by the Foreign Service, probably because of a rumor of his gayness; the increasing complexity and difficulty of American life, for which an overoptimistic 1950s education was poor preparation; and—Denny's own explanation—the effects of severe and chronic back pain.
More speculatively, it might be said that the brilliant high school and college career was the high point of an attempt to use a false self as an escape from a horrible insecurity—an inability to
find meaning in his life. Even during the glorious college days, Denny was morose when not engaged in the academic work at which he excelled—but whose value he doubted—or in being charming, a talent he ultimately came to scorn. He was also hypochondriacal, a condition that persisted and worsened throughout his life, and could be self-righteously disapproving of those who failed to live up to his standards. The years at Oxford were not as successful as the ones in high school and at Yale, and for the rest of his career few things ever quite worked out. He was brilliant, creative, at times productive, but he had an inability to work with others. His time as a senior staff member at the National Security Council lasted only seven months and was unsuccessful because he could not compromise or build consensus. As a professor he was rigid and disapproving of much that went on around him. One of his colleagues at the School for Advanced International Studies said, “He had rigid views of what was moral and what was immoral, what was principled and what was not principled, but the criteria were not easily inferable. It was not easy to know which way he'd jump.” In general, Trillin writes, “He was thought of as overly punctilious, and suffering from a scrupulosity so strong that anyone who was a point or two off the absolutely straight and narrow could be dismissed as a hopelessly corrupt human being.”
This judgmental attitude, discernible even in his glorious youth, was not ordinary self-righteousness. He was as doubting of himself as he was of everyone else. Over the years, he let various people know that he felt like a fake. Driven hard by ambitions, he was through superior abilities able to realize many of them, but he had a tragic inability to enjoy his success or even to believe in it. His apparent enjoyment at being the center of attention during his schooldays was part of an ambition that meant less to him as time went on: to be popular. The life the book suggests is dominated by an attempt to interest and please the depressed mother and to find an ideal father to be close to. It seems a reasonable hypothesis that Denny learned very early that his mother was too depressed to be excited for him in his enjoyment of life, but that she could be excited for herself when he was able to call her attention to the fact that she had a terrific kid whom others loved and were impressed by. She felt he was part of her, and that she was worthwhile because he was. His sense of being an impostor would then arise from the fact that his ambitions were his mother's and not his own, and from their being based more on other people's reactions than on their being truly meaningful to him.
Had his father been available, he might have escaped this predicament by idealizing him and, ultimately, by internalizing ideals that could guide his life and give it a central meaning. His brother, fifteen months older, seems to have managed in this way, though not without difficulties and delay: “His ex-wife … says he was always more interested in his boat than his career, and he cheerfully agrees. For six or eight years he drove across the mountains every morning from Santa Cruz to Los Catos, so he could continue to live close to the ocean while working in an aunt and uncle's auto supply shop; when they said that he should take over the business someday, he quit. He worked as a mechanic in the Lipton tea factory near Santa Cruz for fifteen years, but always resented [time away from] his boat, which he had begun sailing in trans-Pacific competitions. ‘Finally,’ he recalls, ‘I said, “Wait a minute. Life's too short.” So I took early retirement, paid my boat off, and now I'm cruisin’.’” Maybe Denny's interest in international affairs and particularly his wish to join the Foreign Service were his version of the same thing, but Denny seems to have become one of those embittered people constantly disappointed by those around them. They want them to be ideal but must continually prove that people are not good enough—a defense against the wish to idealize, and ultimately against the longing for a good parent.
If this is on the mark, it would explain why Denny lacked any cherished and sustaining ideals. For a time he was successful, in large part because it seemed it might cheer his mother up or at least earn the approval of someone (or a whole group) who substituted for her. When that failed (probably at Oxford), he still behaved well and in accord with strong principles, but they were negative ones. He did what he did and not otherwise because to act differently would have been shameful, not because what he did meant that he was living up to his ideals.
Trillin, reflecting on what he has learned about Denny's real life, returns frequently to his own memories and to the way in which his father's aspirations have continued to direct his life. Denny had become so completely cut off from his family that at the time of his death he didn't know whether his mother was even alive. His father had not likely imparted to him the equivalent of “You might as well be a mensch”—or if he did, Denny was so alienated from him, probably by disappointment, that he couldn't hear it. The remark meant a lot to Trillin because his father had lived in accordance with ideals that meant something to both of them. To be a mensch is not an ambition but an aspiration—one that is real and unexaggerated, if ultimately unreachable.
At their Yale commencement, where Denny led the procession carrying the class banner, Trillin was the one who gave the class history. Needless to say, it was facetious. At the end of it his father said, in young Trillin's presence, “If I thought he believed any of that I'd have him shot.” That sort of remark, though likely to alienate a son temporarily from his father, is likely also to reinforce the son's identification with his father's character, and that seems to be what happened. Unlike Denny's mother (at least in speculation), Trillin's father was not so interested in his son's being prominent and admired as he was about his seeming to scorn cherished values. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of their graduation from Yale, a friend observed to Trillin that reports on the lives of their classmates made it sound as though many had become their fathers. “And me?” Trillin asks, “Had I become my father? He raised me not to become him, of course, but it had often occurred to me that a reporter could do worse than aspire to a standard of behavior reflected in my father's approach to being a grocer—give good weight, refuse to buckle under to pressure from the chain stores, treat with contempt the wartime temptation to get rich by cutting a few comers.”
Trillin remarks that families can give a child a sense of being a cause. The child's ambitions are important and real, and the meaning of the child's success goes beyond any pleasure it affords, either personal or familial. The success serves something greater than any individual. For generations of Jews, and for other groups as well, each boy (to be realistic) was a cause because he served to ensure the group's survival and prosperity. Being smart, studious, assertive, and honorable were not the objects of a narrowly personal ambition but cherished ideals that cemented the generational tie. Surely Denny's lack of such a tie contributed greatly to his death.
Today, unfortunately, fewer and fewer children seem to lack that sense of being a cause. Both Trillin and Denny were the grandchildren of immigrants, but Denny's father and grandfather seem to have achieved careers that met their aspirations. By contrast, Trillin's father seemed to feel that he was only halfway toward achieving success for his family and that his son would be the one to reach the goal. Parents who have achieved their family goals, not to mention those who have concluded that such goals are unattainable, are unlikely to help their children toward meaningful ideals unless in the process of acculturation they have evolved values that allow them a degree of comfort with their new situation, and with their children's need to idealize them regardless.
These remarks, perhaps a bit presumptuous, go a fair distance beyond Trillin's more modest speculations. In the end, giving good weight and refusing to cut corners, he comes only to the sad conclusion that he hadn't really known his friend.