EXTRACTS FROM A LIFE (INTERVIEW WITH LEIGHTON SCOTT)-
      THE COLLEGE YEARS

This was before he went to college, before, in fact, he had even found another preparatory school that would let him in:

He remembered his father, pretty sad, crying.

"What do you want to be, Ernest Hemingway?"

"Yes," he said.

Now Scott says he is embarrassed for putting his father through that, about a year before the man's death in 1956. And he says he doesn't really know why he s~id what he did. He didn't mean it. "Everyone knew even then that Hemingway despite legend was an overblown practicing shithead, vain and self-serving." Even Hemingway seems to have known that.* He Was  also at that point going downhill fast, and Scott had more in common with him than he thought, he now reflects, because neither was writing anything except memoires.

His dad wanted him to be a success. ~

Scott didn't know what he wanted to be when he grew up, but he certainly didn't want to be a grown-up any quicker than he had to. His was the first generation not to have clue what it wanted out of life. The generation of his grandparents tended to do what its parents had done. The generation of his parents wanted to survive the Depression, savor the fruits of righteous victory in World War II, and be prosperous and respectable, and live in surroundings that looked like country clubs.

One of his roommates used to sit facing backwards on the other's motorcycle, reading poetry and things like Sartre (alienation, baby!) in French, while the other drove at full throttle either to the bar or to the women's college a mile away. He was making a statement.

They were absolutely clear that theirs was the first insane generation, excepting maybe that of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Chris riding backwards and reading "culture" conspicuously was making a statement, several statements actually. He was defying - existentially, of course -- both death (about which none of them knew anything) and the gray-flannel suburban normality of their excessively diligent parents. Who were working. For a living.

That James Dean ("Rebel Without a Cause") had died a couple years before in a speeding Porsche only legitimized Chris' foolishness, rendered their lives more the stuff of legend.

This was the later years of the so-called "silent generation" all famous for their "alienation" and lack of belief. Their radical fringe,
 
 

to which Scott found himself attached was soon termed the Beat generation."* It dressed sloppy and was more into sex and non-conformity.

*For a fuller backgrounding on the culture of this era: John P. Diggins, THE PROUD DECADES (1988), especially pp. 198-272. On Hemingway's later years I consulted Carlos Baker, ERNEST HEMINGWAY.

  Scott describes their barroom center of fun and life as a murky, sticky hive of villainy where working stiffs threw darts with or at students, competing for rounds. A round, shot and beer, cost 50 cents total.

"Nobody watched much television then, even in the bar, and of course the students would have been astonished at the concept of having one in one's room," he says. "What the hell for?"

Women still went to separate colleges (Bryn Mawr for them, Haverford for Scott), and had to be checked in at a certain time at night, maintaining a propriety that was basically a facade. Late 50s sex life was different, rather more like the "60s," Scott says, than the hippies suggest.

/Author's note: throughout our interviews Scott maintained a certain truculence about the Age of Aquarius, the era following his. "The sixties never happened," he said at one point, but then told me "you don't have to put that in your write-up, do you?/

Even cultural histories like Diggins (264) suggest the PLAYBOY age was more talk than action, but Scott vigorously denies this. But what went on went on quietly, he says, "un-publically, and with at best 8aroque contraceptive technology, if you used anything at all." Couples that got pregnant were still expected to get married, and several of Scott's friends did.

Back to the motorcycle and Chris reading. Hunter Thompson has written that the difference between hippies and beatniks was that beatniks were still intellectual, readers and not stoned or tuned-out. (NEW YORK TIMES mag., May 14, 1967, reprinted in GREAT SHARK HUNT, p. 447) There's some truth in that. Scott and his crowd courted obliviousness through such old stand-bys as grain alcohol (Everclear). Marijuana was as yet virtually unknown, although someone one time brought some in from abroad. Scott says people were uncertain what it was for.

"But," he says, "Thompson's right. Obliviousness was not yet an abstract ideal the way it would become in the tune-out generation."

Theirs was not the "last reading generation" as Scott, with characteristic understatement puts it, but arguably was the last that valued the printed word WAY over the visual.

They were certainly influenced by movies -- especially Bogart, Dean, Brando. ("All that tough-assed alienation and cynicism.") But they certainly wouldn't be caught dead p}acing "film" on the same cultural level as books, and "video" was for boneheads, cowboys, comedians, Scott says.

Scott could remember authentic (real) prison shirts at college. A few of his friends, like Henry, whose father owned one of the most famous ad agencies in New York, had done a little time, not for trafficking, but more likely for some hind of ethical
   protest. Theirs included the first post-war generation of pacifists. Scott was not one. His older cousin Bill was a war hero captain attached to the British in Burma. Scott could still remember his ribbons on khaki amid the Christmas glitter. "I wanted to be HIM when I grew up (even before Hemingway)."

In autumn of 1957, Scott's freshman year, the Russians sent up Sputnik, confirming what they already knew -- that they were all going to die young! Jack Kerouac published ON THE ROAD, the "bible of the Beat-generation."

Literary editors were saying that ON THE ROAD would begin the definition of this generation "as Hemingway's THE SUN ALSO RISES had done for the Lost Generation." (Diggins, p. 269)

Just in time!

Scott's crowd lived by that bible. Pete, Linn, Eeb -- they all went around snapping their fingers and yelling "like wow, man "' and whomping guitars.

Their generation invented what students now call the "road trip." Theirs was the first generation to have cars that didn't automatically bust or boil over (in WW II all machine-priority went to the front -- maybe still does) They called it simply a "trip" in those days, because there was still only one kind. Just like Kerouac's bums they'd wind down the highway toward the ocean, passing jugs of red Famiglia Cribari wine and saying "like wow". Scott could still remember Roger (now a doctor) running a tollbooth on a New Jersey causeway at about 90. He could still hear the attendant's protracted shout in the blackness of night.

As far as anyone knew the concept of DUI as an offense was simply meaningless to a generation whose parents had weathered Prohibition.

To get arrested one would have had to kill somebody or "t least, as they did, transgress public order. Orderliness was important to their parents' generation, and so it was rejected out of hand now. "Why I was never arrested, I will never know," Scott says. "My friends were."

Back to the beginning of this account. There was another reason for his father's sadness.

In the previous year (1954) Scott had simply walked out of prep school, just like in Salinger's then popular CATCHER IN THE RYE (1951), another archetypal repudiation of 3Os and 4Os values. ("It's /all! phoney... I could puke.")

Scott had never heard of Holden Caulfield. "If I had heard of him, I probably wouldn't have done it. That's a key to me -- if everybody else thinks it's a good idea, I'm not likely to. I hate fads. Which is why me and the counterculture people parted company eventually, and why I never had much feeling for hippies in the sixties. But maybe my saga inspired Chris, because eventually he bolted college to join up with a Cuban revolutionary bandit named Fidel Castro. Maybe he even crossed paths with Hemingway in
   Havana. But he never got out out of Havana before Batista's cops  sent him home."

But the point is -- our sources, live (e.g. Scott) and printed, agree -- that revolutionary ideas and posturing were BIG in the late 50s, and people were acting individually on them, even with the result of making one's last road-trip to the slammer.

Health was unheard of. Something they taught in high school instead of sex. Nobody would have admitted to wanting health, Scott says. Indeed, if one were to express an ideal, it would be more like UN-health. Poets routinely died of TB, Lowrey and Faulkner of alcoholism, right? They all smoked -- cigarettes, that is. For Scott, little Camel regulars. Filters would be for women. Because their parents were all seeking suburban "privacy," Scott supposes, his gang was ostentatiously communal about everything, and it was fashionable to bum cigarettes. That's another place the counterculture and he weren't consonant, he says. "I like to have my own things, and I don't tend to idealize rip-offs."

/There is a slight source-conflict here: according to faculty friends, Scott to this day maintains a notorious cheap streak./

But people, he says, didn't really know what they know today: cigarettes kill. They killed his father and his uncle, and if he hadn't given them up, he believes, they probably would have helped kill him.

Anyhow, in college he was surrounded by people who wanted to be writers, and that was, accordingly, when Scott put that idea on hold. Jesus, they were everywhere. (Besides, there was too much work to do for courses. "It was different then," he says.) He didn't know what he wanted to do in life, anyhow. Party. Maybe read a little James Joyce, Shakespeare. Not to read these made you a dumb klutz.

Back in these days 22-year-old males got drafted. Scott had nothing against that concept. Theirs was not an idealistic age, he says. "We had nothing against the idea that the U.S. should be number one. pt least I didn't. Somebody would, after all, and I preferred it be the place where I lived." There was also not a tremendous amount of social consciousness alive in his college world. Scott says he smelled prejudice even in some Quakers. "The emphasis was to say the right thing, no matter what they thought. Brown v Board of Education was shaking up the country for sure,) but unevenly I remember writing a letter against segregation to a national news magazine in 1956 -- southern governors were having a hard time with the Warren court. I nearly got thrown out of my second prep school -- I was told by the headmaster that it made the school look bad to southerners (white ones), who did make up a substantial element of the student body.

  Social consciousness? Yeah, but it wasn't a posture the way
  it became. Ours was still -- liked to think of itself that way anyhow -- an individualistic age. Bogart's Rich in "Casablanca,.. you know?" Me first, baby. If I give my heart away, it's gonna be once. A couple of people don't amount to a hill of beans... "Well, hell," Scott says, "maybe we were more influenced by movies than we thought."

Yeah, the draft. Indeed, being a Pennsylvania hillbilly, he had remained conversational with firearms, and being young and stupid he supposed he could go through battle without being blown away. But 1961-2 was not a big era for conventional (infantry-type) military action, and a thickly-bespectacled boy running to overweight would find himself a clerk attached to a quartermaster's corps in Mannheim, Germany, handing out jock straps for two years. Scott was called up eventually, but was not saddened to be rejected. At that point he had a huge cyst on the base of his spine, for the third time in his life.

"Why don't you get that removed?" the examining doctor said.

"Why don't you draft me, and do it yourself?" he replied.

But that was later when he had gotten enthusiastically into journalism, and before he kissed the better part of a family fortune goodbye and gone to study history in Europe and all that stuff.

Meanwhile he graduated from college with an English major, and moved out into the urbanized ugly world of the American northeast - at which the Russians, people all understood, had scores of long range, hydrogen-bomb missiles pointed.

What would happen next?