The Headmasters Papers (25 page)

We are forever in the stands, kid. Sorry. We love and loved you.

Dad

Val and Frank,

Jenkins has mercifully turned on the gas.

This is not a tragedy. I am used up—Meg in December. You were family and I love you for it.

J.

Mrs. Dorothy Weimer

Editor, 
The Wells Quarterly

Cibbs House Annex

Wells School

Wells, Connecticut

Dear Dottie,

Enclosed is a submission for the Spring number. I know we don't print poems as a rule, but since there will be no Headmaster's Letter, maybe you could work it in.

Best to you,

John

A SCHOOLMASTER CONSIDERS SCHOOL

Like the seasons but wordier

History teaching history

A dark road stretching back, back

And I have stepped aside

Just long enough to think about it

And its memory

Is big and drab and urgent

There is something old-fashioned about it

Of oak desks and ink wells

Waxed floors and the cane

Of footsteps along cold stone walks

Hurtful days, stained through

With some pulsing infatuation

Days, just days

Fright of first days, waiting days

Proud days, prize days

A sudden recognition

Of cruelty or some small excellence

Days, dressed for school days

Tom Brown's schooldays

Every school day that ever was

Romeo's, Cicero's

All Hellas at their little lyres

A bright road opening wide to me

Ghost children chanting something

About verbs

They are cheering in waves

Hymns from voices clear and sad

And gone as bells

Hurrying bells, evening bells

School bells banging me back

To school.

When Richard Hawley's novel,
The Headmaster's Papers
, was first published in 1983, the author was himself a headmaster; he was a teacher and the director of the upper school division of the University School, an independent school in Cleveland, Ohio. The Headmaster's Papers is an epistolary novel – a form I much admire, chiefly for the difficulty of writing a novel with such a limited structure.

The best writer of fiction in the epistolary form is Alice Munro, and I told Alice once that two things prevented me from trying to write an epistolary novel, which I have long been tempted to do. One is that Alice has already written better in this form than anyone likely will, and two is that Richard A. Hawley wrote
The Headmaster's Papers
, an epistolary novel so heartbreaking that no one is likely to surpass its emotional effect in letter form. I sent a copy of the novel to Alice; she liked it very much. We had a further conversation about epistolary novels, and I told her that I thought Hawley's novel was so moving that he establishes a virtual rule for future epistolary novels: namely, the last letter in the novel to be a suicide note. Nothing else will do.

The Headmaster's Papers
is entirely composed of one man's letters – John Greeve's, the suffering headmaster at an all-boys' private school. His name is well-chosen. In Hawley's journal, before he began the novel, he wrote: “Imagine a good man whose props have fallen away.” That is John Greeve – a very good man, whose life has been to guide others but who finds himself, in his middle fifties, rudderless and at sea. His letters are to friends, to the angry parents of boys dismissed from school, to his own son – lost to drugs and wandering Europe, or (the reader presumes) most likely dead. Also, included among Greeve's “papers” are his public addresses to the boys and faculty of his school, and his heartfelt (occasionally too heartfelt) poems, which he submits to various small magazines.

From his letters, we see how impossibly “good” Greeve's standards are; we also see his own efforts to maintain himself, with dignity and grace, slipping. His wife is dying of cancer. When she dies, Greeve gives up. In his last letter to his lost son, Greeve writes: “We are forever in the stands, kid. Sorry.” In his suicide notes, to old friends, he writes: “This is not a tragedy. I am used up.” But he's wrong; The Headmaster's Papers is a tragedy, a fine one.

I implied earlier that the last letter in Hawley's novel is a suicide note, but this isn't exactly true – the suicide note is next to last. The last letter is a kind of P.S. to the suicide note, or a different kind of suicide note from the first one – call it suicide note number two. Greeve submits a poem to his school's quaterly magazine. To the editor, he writes: “I know we don't print poems as a rule, but since there will be no Headmaster's Letter, maybe you could work it in.”

The poem itself is one of John Greeve's best, the closing lines of which can be read as suicide note number three.

A bright road opening wide to me
Ghost children chanting something
About verbs
They are cheering in waves
Hymns from voices clear and sad
And gone as bells
Hurrying bells, evening bells
School bells banging me back
To school.

Back in 1983, the novel received a fair amount of well-deserved attention – especially for a first novel, and for a small-press publication. The Boston Globe compared Hawley to Louis Auchincloss, and Mr. Auchincloss himself wrote in praise of the novel – as did I: “the headmaster is a character ripe with nobility, and with personal failure and hopelessness.” I wrote, “Mr. Hawley has the poise and vision of a writer who can create a whole world.” Whatever narrative limitations are imposed on an epistolary novel,
The Headmaster's Papers
demonstrates that a good man's suffering can be felt in his letters as keenly as in any other form of storytelling.

John Irving

To date I have received over “a thousand letters from readers of
The Headmaster's Papers.
Nearly every one of them has been interesting, and a great majority of my correspondents (I have answered the letters) have shared touching and serious concerns. I had no idea when I wrote it that my novel of letters would actually
generate
epistolary activity, but with hindsight the response makes a certain kind of sense.

If a reader assumes that I am, if not John Greeve, at least sympathetic to his approach to life, then it is fair to conclude that I might like to write and to receive letters. Greeve gives the impression that he is the kind of man you could write to—although some readers wonder whether he is the kind of man you could talk to. In any event, readers have written letters, some very clearly to me, some seemingly to Greeve. Where there is a chance of intruding into a correspondent's privacy I have withheld his or her name.

From my standpoint as author, the most artistically reassuring letters came from actual school hands. These responses were also the most personal, some of them almost urgent in their concerns. A letter from the head of one of the nation's great boarding schools began as follows:

I've just finished your book. A friend of my wife's last evening left it on the backstairs but only after saying to [her] “But don't take it seriously, my giving it to you is not a message.” But, of course, it is a message, if not to my wife, at least to me. I'm fifty-seven, don't think my spirit is very right for what I face right now, doubt that I am giving widespread satisfaction, and to be honest, am feeling low and sorry for myself almost purposefully. My wife said, What's it like? and like a fool I said, Read it, it's about me, except that you don't have cancer and our children came out of the marijuana culture and are doing fine. Bad.

Most responses from school heads were lighter in tone. Mark Segar, then head of the Common School of Amherst, Mass., confided that “some of the letters could have come from my own files!” There was a similar response from Don Werner, headmaster of Westminster School (Conn.):

All of the messages in the book hit home here. Indeed as I got well into the book I began to feel a little paranoid as if you had somehow been watching this small Connecticut school by means of satellite. The Wells School's Director of Studies, Plant Superintendent, parents and students could well be ours.

Frank Ashburn, retired and much revered headmaster of Brooks School (Mass.) is himself the author of a fine biography of Croton School's founding headmaster, Endicott Peabody. Like John Greeve, Ashburn has turned his hand to poetry, and he knows how fundamentally dependent “strong” leaders are on their mates.

So much of it might have been written by Frank Ashburn. I, too, had a Meg. It was emphysema with her, not cancer, but the trauma was the same. The shattering effect of her loss is still vivid.

I could not help wondering what would have happened to John Greeve had he had my incredible luck. While I was still bewildered and lost, I found Jean, and she picked up a crumpled heart and put it together again. I knew many of the problems that Greeve had, but I found a new lease on life, and was able to go ahead with a new fresh existence.

Ashburn's sympathy with Greeve is not universal. From the young head of a fine school in the American southwest, came this decidedly hard-edged analysis:

Greeve's consistent resistance to overtures from those outside of Wells to conduct studies and workshops on the campus seems ostrich-like, in the manner of the emotionally-ill individual who takes down the mailbox as a way of shutting off the outside world. Likewise, his increasingly self-righteous correspondence with the chairman of the board suggests an ever-diminishing sense that he is indeed in the right, as he takes greater and greater pains to convince himself in writing of his rectitude. But most alarming of all is his sense that he is indispensable—that the school has gone to seed in his absence, and that all the dissolution he perceives around him is objective (inherent in the physical conditions of the school and the boys—rather than subjective (inherent in newly-developed defects in the emotional lens of the observer).

Reed Estabrook, writing from his perspective as longtime chairman of the board of Avon Old Farms School (Conn.), found less fault with Greeve than with the trustees whose duties include supporting the headmaster.

I think the tragedy of your story, which is so well done, lives in John Greeve's relationship with William Truax, the Chairman of his Board of Directors. I know a little something about the relationship of the Headmaster and President of the Board and know that a school cannot succeed without the best of mutual supports, respect and friendship between these two most important persons in the life of a school. The relationship between those two is the most important relationship on a campus, and if there is a lack of support, in any way an antagonistic relationship, then one of them must leave quickly. I can't see that Truax ever visited the school, and he did not in any way evince a knowledge of the character and fiber of his school, and he did not in any way support John Greeve. Had he supported him, had he done half the job that he is supposed to do as head of the Board, the several small things during the school year which precipitated the final crisis, would have remained small things. Again, you have drawn a strong picture of the school's fabric.

One New England boarding school head praised my rendering of the “whole fabric” of school life, incidentally seconding Estabrook's point that trustee support was essential to a headmaster's personal well-being:

. . . Moving and authentic. My wife is giving a copy to each of our five kids so they'll finally understand their father's work. I'm glad [my school's] trustees aren't like Truax and Co.!

It was a passing gladness; the writer departed his school—and the profession—within the year.

On the opposite coast, Robert Clements, head of California's Hillbrook School, felt that the authentic ring of some of the novel's events may be due to my lifting them wholesale from actual schools.

Let me be more specific. I think you get the tone of the head's morning remarks just right. The “flapping of invisible wings” speech, in fact, is one I'd swear I heard Seymour St. John deliver some 25 years ago at Choate: it rang so true it alarmed me. The description of Meg's death you unfortunately also got right—you've either seen it happen or had long talks with an oncologist . . .

As discussed in the foreword, there were no long talks with oncologists until
after
the novel was written. Moreover, there could only have been extrasensory communication twenty-five years earlier between Clements' headmaster and thirteen-year-old Richard Hawley of South Junior High School, Arlington Heights, Illinois.

As for Choate's Seymour St. John, he did not accuse me of using his “flapping wings” story, but he did feel the book conveyed something of the weight of school leadership:

It evokes, of course, reminiscence—and the fact that a boarding school headmaster without a great wife is a paraplegic.

Above all it rings true. The author has been through it, well understands it. And clearly he knows that Meg would never have let John put himself in a position of no return, had she been there to support him.