Amherst Magazine Spring 2016

S P RI SP R I NG N G 2 016 016 01

EXPLORING CUBA, ONE DIAMOND AT A TIME

A month ahead of Obama, a group of Amherst baseball alumni came together in Cuba for a unique barnstorming tour.

This was no weak, fantasy-camp team. They could play.

IN THIS ISSUE Spring 2016 Volume 68 No. 3

14

A Writer’s Tour From famous names to forgotten figures, a trip through r Amherst’s literary past and present. | By Rand Richards Cooper ’80

24

The Week That Baseball Won A team of baseball alumni went to Cuba to play former pros. | By John Hereford ’87 and Rob Born ’90

30 Terrible Enough Ivan

LJST Professor Lawrence Douglas covered the “last great Nazi war crimes trial.”

34

Shakespeare in Prison Teaching Hamlet in jail, a professor wonders if the years behind bars might be precious. | By Ilan Stavans

James Merrill ’47 was a doodler. He sketched all over this poem draft, now part of the College’s Archives and Special Collections.

ONLINE amherst.edu/magazine

3 College Row A physics breakthrough in an Amherst lab; how to find fi a mascot; the economics of poisoned water; new faces in the Octagon mural; the First Folio arrives; and more 12 The Big Picture Springtime at Valentine 39 Beyond Campus GOALS / With a new heart, J.P. Dunn ’79 set out to run a halfmarathon BIOCHEM / Christopher Lim ’12 is a grad student doing research on how HIV tricks human cells NEUROSCIENCE / Catherine Kerr ’85 studies how people perceive sensations in their own bodies QUESTIONS / Andrew Hacker ’51 makes a case for rethinking high school math CRIME / Malcolm C. Young ’68 wants to help newly released prisoners adjust to life on the outside

Video l A student-run lecture series brought six longtime professors to a College residence hall to give talks on Amherst’s history and defi fining characteristics. Topics included 1960s activism, PIONEER FACULTY WOMEN, Amherst poets and more.

l In a panel moderated by Warren Tolman ’82, two LJST professors—Austin Sarat and MARTHA UMPHREY—and Y former U.S. Supreme Court clerks Jeff ff Bleich ’83 and Andy Nussbaum ’85 discussed the Supreme Court vacancy.

More News l Life is a Dream, by composer and music professor LEWIS SPRATLAN and librettist and Spanish professor JAMES MARANISS, has an unusual history. Completed in 1978, it won a Pulitzer in 2000 but was never fully staged until 2010. Now, it has won an opera prize.

l Emmy and Tony Award winner KEN HOWARD ’66, who died this spring, was known for his role in The White Shadow and for his leadership of the SAG-AFTRA union. At Amherst, he is also remembered for his teaching.

Photos fi nine l Forty years ago, on June 6, 1976, Amherst graduated its first women. To mark this anniversary, visit an online exhibition of 20 photographs related to COEDUCATION AT AMHERST.

“

45 Amherst Creates NONFICTION / Midnight in Broad Daylight, by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto ’84; Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder, by Claudia Kalb ’85 PAINTING / Tiny treasures by Eleanor Ray ’09 “suggest a reverse hubris.”

CRITICS / Amherst’s place in American reviewing THEATER / Hillary Blanken Gallo ’88 works behind the scenes on Broadway

† DONNA BRAZILE, political strategist, speaking on campus. Page 10

52 Classes George Bria ’38 signs off ff as class secretary

EDITOR

112 In Memory

ALUMNI EDITOR

120 Amherst Made The Amherst story behind the New York Public Library lions

W

e live in a moment when we as citizens somehow abdicated the right to choose politicians. It’s our duty and responsibility as citizens of this country to get out there and be a part of it.”

Emily Gold Boutilier (413) 542-8275 magazine@amherst. edu Betsy Cannon Smith ’84 (413) 542-2031 DESIGN DIRECTOR

Ronn Campisi ASSISTANT EDITOR

Katherine Duke ’05

MAGAZINE ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Ann Hallock ’89 Darcy Jacobs ’87 Ron Lieber ’93 Meredith Rollins ’93 COVER

Rob Born ’90 chases down a pop fly against the Mayabeque Huracanes. Photo by Ben Gundersheimer ’89

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU

Amherstt welcomes letters from its readers.

Please send them to magazine@amherst. edu or Amherst Magazine, PO Box 5000, Amherst, MA 01002.

Letters must be 300 words or fewer and should address the content in the magazine.

Amherst (USPS 024-280) is published quarterly by Amherst College at Amherst, Massachusetts 01002-5000, and is sent free to all alumni.

Periodicals postage paid at Amherst, Massachusetts 01002-5000 and additional mailing offices. ffi Postmaster: Please send Form 3579 to Amherst, AC # 2220, PO Box 5000, Amherst College, Amherst, MA 01002-5000.

VOICES

BILL KEITH’S BANJO Reading about Bill Keith ’61 (“Rewriting the Book on Banjo,” Amherst Creates, Winter 2016) brings back the nostalgia of our days together at Chi Psi. I remember sitting for hours in Bill’s room, listening as he did amazing things with the banjo, and I can still hear him playing for my present wife and me at the house’s traditional pinning ceremony. Hank Fieger ’62 was the singer, with Bill accompanying him as Hank sang “More I Cannot Give You” to celebrate the occasion. I had lost track of Bill and his career, but I am not surprised that he went on to make an indelible mark on music history.

DAVE NICHOLS ’62 Bellingham, Wash.

ILL-DISGUISED HIT PIECE In his ill-disguised hit piece on Trump in the Winter 2016 issue of Amherst, James Warren ’74 is too clever by half. Warren accuses Trump of being a “flatulent, fl ego-mad blowhard” and “far-right candidate” who supports “anti-immigrant nativism and racism” and “fear-driven politics.” No, wait, he only supportively quotes Scott Turow ’70, John Kasich and Thomas Dunn on those points. Innuendo and indirection are the refuge of cowards. Warren expresses hope that the elitist Republican establishment will eventually “make [it]self known with money, credibility and clout.” Does Warren not realize that the credibility of this establishment (albeit not its money), as represented, for example,

by Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, was blown out of the water some time ago?

A one-sided, race-baiting attack in the guise of analysis, the Warren piece sets a new low for Amherst. Perhaps in the works for the next issues will be a balancing dissection of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party by Michelle Malkin?

STUART H. HURLBERT ’61 Del Mar, Calif.

THE MASCOT DECISION For the past year, I have been a vocal opponent of the elimination of Lord Jeff ff as 2 Amherst Spring 2016

SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS The cover story on Thai Lee ’80—co-founder, CEO and primary owner of SHI International—was the most-read article in the Winter 2016 digital edition.

@MEGHANNWOOSTER:

Fascinating article on @SHI_Intl’s Thai Lee, @AmherstCollege alum and self-made female billionaire in Amherst Mag.

@MTZRICHMOND:

To have made such a detailed life plan and then followed it. Pretty amazing!

@MEGHANNWOOSTER:

To be so customer-focused you won’t even ask them to speak with reporters is unique for an #IT company.

@MEGHANNWOOSTER:

Given @SHI_Intl’s CEO’s extreme wealth and modesty, would be interested to hear her thoughts on #philanthropy.

@EDMACKSHI:

@MeghannWooster @SHI_Intl Among the many philanthropic endeavors Thai quietly supports, she is esp. interested in human rights organizations. @MEGHANNWOOSTER:

@EdMackSHI @SHI_Intl Very cool, and makes sense given her family history.

the Amherst mascot. Proponents of the change have relied too heavily on historical revisionism and overzealous condemnation of Lord Jeff ff, whose personal war experiences and inner motivations remain basically unknown. Many of us have lamented the refusal of students to appreciate that Lord Jeff ff and the “Lord Jeff ffery Amherst” song have considerable sentimental signififi cance to alumni. Shame on the students for their unwillingness to give greater deference to the feelings of their predecessors during the process of advocating change.

But, to some degree, shame on us, too, for our intransigence and unwillingness to consider the concept of change advocated by a new generation and the Amherst faculty. As Cullen Murphy ’74 eloquently stated on behalf of the Board of Trustees, the mascot should be a uniter, not a divider. Since all of us are benefi ficiaries of a liberal arts education

second to none, there should be a collective capacity to seek common ground.

For proponents of change and those of us who have opposed it, that task should be achievable.

The mistakes from which lessons should be learned were made by the entire community, including the administration, faculty, students and alumni.

The failure at the outset to propose a viable alternative, as opposed to a moose, served to polarize the debate and fueled an uncivilized exchange from both sides.

This should have been anticipated.

The elimination of Lord Jeff, ff in the end, is a sigh of change—and hopefully one for the better. Further discussion should prioritize selection of a mutually acceptable new mascot and eliminate both vilifi fication of a historical figure and fixation on the way we were. The goal for the entire College community should be a 119 TELL US WHAT YOU THINK Please go to amherst.edu/magazine to take a brief survey about the stories in this issue. Your answers will help ensure that Amherstt magazine gives you the types of stories you want to read.

NEWS AND VIEWS FROM CAMPUS

5 The Flint water crisis has drawn new attention to an economist’s work.

College Row

8 An artist returned to the Octagon to add new faces to an inspiring mural.

Knotty DISCOVERY

A physics breakthrough in an Amherst lab represents a major step forward in understanding quantum fields.

3

FACULTY U Physicists have long predicted the possibility of tying knots in quantum fields.

But no one has been able to make or observe a three-dimensional quantum knot—until now.

Inside the lab of David S. Hall ’91, Amherst’s Paula R. and David J. Avenius 1941 Professor of Physics, scientists have found a way to create knotted solitary waves in a quantum-mechanical field. This represents a major step forward in understanding the nature of quantum fluids.

“First we cooled a gas of rubidium atoms down to billionths of a degree above zero,”

Amherst Spring 2016 | Photograph by Ryan Donnell

“We don’t know what this discovery might lead to,” says Professor Hall, “but the possibilities are exciting.”

COLLEGE ROW

HOW TO FIND A MASCOT

Each knot is approximately 10 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair.

Hall and his colleagues have now tied hundreds of knots in his basement laboratory in Merrill Science Center.

They published their results in Nature Physics. Among the co-authors is Andrei Horia Gheorghe ’15, who assisted Hall and Möttönen as part of his senior thesis.

The next step is to experiment with the knots and study their properties, to see what the quantum knots can do. Fundamental research often has the potential to revolutionize people’s lives in ways that are impossible to predict, Hall says: “We don’t know what this particular discovery might lead to, but the possibilities are exciting.

When scientists invented lasers, they certainly weren’t thinking about grocery store scanners.” RACHEL ROGOL

The first job of the new student-alumni mascot committee is to create a process that’s transparent, that maximizes participation and that builds community.

SPIRIT U How will Amherst choose a new mascot? This spring a committee of students and alumni began to answer that question.

The Mascot Committee held its first three meetings in April. Most of its 17 members (whose ranks may grow) are drawn from two existing groups—the Student Traditions Committee and the Alumni Executive Committee’s Mascot Task Force.

“Our job is to create a process that’s transparent and that allows our various constituencies—alumni, students, faculty and staff—to ff express their opinions,” says Alumni Executive Committee Chair Annette Sanderson ’82, who serves on the new group. “It’s our goal to listen, and to be inclusive.”

So far, the group has endorsed a set of guiding principles.

These state that the decision-making process must ensure transparency, build community, maximize participation and create connections among students and alumni.

The other alumni members are Joe McDonald ’58 (chair), Tania de Sousa Dias ’13, Aimee Carroll Flynn ’99, Steve Gang ’72, Mike Mulligan ’68, Ace Roesch ’08 and Tom Sullivan ’78.

Student members are Brianna Cook ’16, Harrison Haigood ’18, Virginia Hassell ’16, Sam Keaser ’17E, Olivia Pinney ’17, Siraj Sindhu ’17, Micayla Tatum ’16 and Association of Amherst Students President Tomi Williams ’16.

College Archivist Michael Kelly is also a member.

“We don’t want it to be top-down,” says Keaser. “We’re all very committed to the College, to finding a new mascot and a process that works—one that’s democratic and open.”

The committee will propose to President Biddy Martin later this year its recommended process for engaging the community in the choice of a new mascot.

The committee came into existence following the January Board of Trustees statement, which noted the importance of convening a group that would involve as many people as possible in finding “something—something organically associated with Amherst, refl flecting our collective history— that we can all rally around.” EMILY GOLD BOUTILIER

THEY DO EXIST

ALAN LI ’15

This figure illustrates part of the peculiar structure of the quantum knot.

There are actually an infinite number of rings, each linked with all of the others exctly once, to generate a doughnut-like structure. Physicists have long predicted that quantum knots are real. Hall and his colleagues are the first to create these knots in a three-dimensional space.

4 Amherst Spring 2016

For updates and background, go to amherst.edu/alumni/ mascot. Contact the committee at feedback@amherst.edu.

HENRY AMISTADI

says Hall, who, with Mikko Möttönen of Aalto University in Finland, led the team that made the discovery.

The cooling process created “a superfl fluid—a tiny, wellordered environment,” which the scientists then exposed to a rapid change of a magnetic field, “which tied the knot in fi less than a thousandth of a second.”

Mathematically speaking, knots are closed curves in three-dimensional space. A quantum knot consists of an infi finite number of rings of quantum matter, each linked with all the others exactly once, to generate a doughnutlike structure. Previous experiments have identified fi knotlike structures only in one and two dimensions, where the curves do not close.

The new three-dimensional knots exist within a tiny droplet of superfl fluid just barely visible to the human eye.

THE ECONOMICS OF

Poisoned Water

The lead crisis in Flint, Mich., has drawn new attention to a professor’s research.

FACULTY U Professor of Economics Jessica Wolpaw Reyes ’94 was a Ph.D. student at Harvard in the late 1990s when she began researching the societal effects ff of childhood lead exposure. She was also an expectant mother “living in a really old house.”

“I started reading the literature on lead, and I realized lead was actually really, really bad, which is not news to most people in the public health community but was news to me,” she says. “That’s how I got started on this long search for data.”

The patterns Reyes has uncovered during her long search drew new attention this year, when both the state’s governor and President Obama declared a state of emergency in Flint, Mich. The city had switched two years ago from using treated water from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to using water from the Flint River. In addition to its visible pollutants, the corrosive properties of the river water started leaching lead out of aging pipes and into residents’ sinks and bathtubs. In 2015, researchers found that the percentage of young children with elevated levels of lead in their blood had more than doubled in certain areas of the city—mostly socioeconomically disadvantaged areas.

Reyes wrote her dissertation on “The

SHANA SURECK

Impact of Lead Exposure on Crime and Health.” She went on to publish a widely lauded study linking the Clean Air Act’s removal of lead from gasoline in the 1970s to the dramatic nationwide drop in violent crime in the 1990s.

A paper she wrote on Massachusetts schoolchildren argued that “public health policy that reduced childhood lead levels in the 1990s was responsible for modest but statistically significant fi Jes JJe eessssi sic iic ica ca Wo ollp olp paw aw Re Rey R eyes es ’9 ’94 ’94 94 improvements in test performance in the 2000s,” especially in low-income areas.

Most recently, she’s found that “even moderate exposure to lead in early childhood” can increase the likelihood of teen pregnancy, criminal activity and other “antisocial and risky behavior.”

Though the effects ff will vary from person to person, Reyes’ re-

Illustration by Keith Negley

search suggests that Flint’s lead-exposed children will, on average, struggle more with academic performance, impulsivity and aggression throughout their lives.

And, she points out, the problem isn’t confi fined to Flint: there are numerous places where lead levels are even higher.

Luckily, her research also shows that lead-related policy interventions can be very eff ffective—and relatively inexpensive. She estimates, ffor instance, that for only $100 per child, Massachusetts’ lead policies have reduced the failure rate on a major standardized test by 2 percentage points. Early childhood education programs such as Head Start, she says, can help compensate ffor the damage lead does to toddlers’ brain development.

Reyes is part of the Massachusetts Governor’s Advisory Committee for the Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. At Amherst, she’s recently taught “Health Economics and Policy” and served on the faculty of the environmental studies major. Now she’s on sabbatical, researching links between lead mining, homicide and infant mortality in 19th-century Britain. KATHERINE DUKE ’05 Spring 2016 Amherst 5

COLLEGE ROW

LESSONS FROM

LitFest

Amherst’s inaugural literary festival celebrated new partnerships, great writers and the written word.

WORDS U Go out and fail. That was Michael Chabon’s message when he came to campus in March to give the headline talk of Amherst’s inaugural literary festival.

“Our greatest gift as humans is to pay attention to our failures,” the novelist told the Johnson Chapel audience.

Chabon—author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay—read from a work he said he’s never read aloud before: Fountain City: A Novel, Wrecked, a four-chapter annotated fragment off an unpublished book project that he began and later scrapped.

“I believe in failure,” he said. “Only failure rings true.”

The three-day LitFest drew some 850 people to campus for master classes, receptions, readings and Q&As with authors. Aimed at “illuminating great writing and Amherst College’s literary life,” the event was organized by The Common literary magazine; the Emily Dickinson Museum; and the College’s Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Department of English and Office ffi of Communications.

An Idea Is Not a Novel 2015 National Book Award fiction finalists Angela fi Flournoy, nominated for The Turner House, and Lauren Groff ff ’01, nominated for Fates and Furies, opened LitFest with a conversation moderated by Deborah Treisman, fi fiction editor of The New Yorker.

The talk centered on the authors’ writing processes and literary influences. fl “An idea is not a novel,” Flournoy said. “You need a character to be the engine that drives the idea forward.”

The authors touched on the problems of labeling their fiction as “domestic” or, in Groff ff ’s case, “gothic.”

Groff ff said, “Ideally you would never call yourself a writer of anything in particular. You’re just a writer, and the stories come to you, and you write them as best you can.”

6 Amherst Spring 2016

Angela Flournoy

Harold Augenbraum

Lauren Groff ’01

Michael Chabon

OM

Deborah Treisman

From Caves to Kindles Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the National Book Foundation, spoke about the history and future of the book business, starting with narrative cave paintings and traveling through time with stone and clay tablets, papyrus, the printed book and e-readers. “All publishing is an exercise in hope,” he said.

How Fiction Gets in The New Yorker A talk with Treisman, hosted

by Jennifer Acker ’00, editorin-chief of The Common, centered on Treisman’s work fi as The New Yorker’s fiction editor. An audience member asked how submitted stories come to her attention. “If the top of the pile is where a story belongs, it will get there,” Treisman said. “I’ve had stories come in through friends of friends, teachers, agents, the writer directly. ... Everything does get read.”

author of, most recently, The Witches: Salem, 1692.

Schiff ff gave advice on how to choose a project: “You have to like your subject, but you should never love him or her.”

Being “under the spell of your subject” means writing a lesser book, she said.

When interviewing sources, Bowden said, “I can promise them that they and their point of view will be accurately refl flected in the story I write,” but he can’t promise they’ll like the final story. “If you’re going to think critically and write honestly about anyone,” he said, “you’re going to ffend them.” off

The Place of the Arts LitFest marked the debut of Amherst’s partnerships with the National Book Foundation and The MacDowell Colony. These collaborations will bring authors to campus every year for talks and readings. “Our goal,” said Professor Martha Umphrey, who heads the Center for Humanistic Inquiry, “is to generate an intellectual and aesthetic energy that reminds us of the invaluable place the humanities and arts have, and should continue to have … in a world we all want to inhabit.”

It’s OK to Offend ff Your Sources Cullen Murphy ’74, chair of the Amherst Board of Trustees, moderated a conversation with Mark Bowden, who wrote such books as Black Hawk Down, and Stacy Schiff, ff

Jennifer Acker ’00

What is

HOME? Two students will travel around the world to witness the effects of political and ecological turmoil.

NEXT STEPS U How do two of this era’s most significant issues—political upheaval and climate change—affect the most vulnerable? Two seniors will soon embark on global journeys to find out.

Aleksandra Burshteyn and Benjamin Walker are among 40 young people selected as 2016 Thomas J. Watson Fellows. Fellows receive $30,000 for 12 months of travel. This year’s fellows are going to 67 countries.

A citizen of the United States Aleksandra and the Russian Federation, BurBurshteyn shteyn grew up hearing stories from her family about the fall of communism in the former USSR. She will spend her Watson year visiting countries undergoing similarly sweeping transitions, or where such changes are part of recent memory.

Burshteyn will travel to the Czech Republic to learn how it left behind both “Czechoslovakia” and communism, and to South Africa to learn about life after apartheid. Her travels will also include time in Northern Ireland, to learn how people grapple with compromise and reconstruction amidst unresolved tensions, and in Mongolia, where urbanization is often at odds with a traditionally nomadic way of life.

“It is easy to announce that communism or apartheid is over, that a ceasefire is begun, but another thing to implement that reality on the ground,” she said in her application. She wants to understand: “How do people grapple with memories and experiences of a world, of institutions and cultural values, that suddenly no longer exist?”

Walker channeled his experiences growing up among the rich and poor of Philadelphia into activism around workplace and immigrant rights.

He plans to immerse himself in several communities displaced by the eff ffects of climate change in Kiribati, Fiji, India, South Africa and Bolivia, spending time with farmers, families, activists and slumBenjamin dwellers. He plans to explore how Walker people forced to migrate because of environmental upheaval understand “home.” Walker hopes to spend his career advocating for those most aff ffected by climate change. WILLIAM SWEET

Spring 2016 Amherst 7

COLLEGE ROW

2

1

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

18

22

11

23

24

27

14

12

21

19

17

10

20

15

16

25

26

28

13

HISTORY ON

THE WALL

ROLE MODELS U Kevin Soltau ’01 will not soon forget the week he slept in the Octagon. It was the summer before his senior year, and after months of research, he was painting a mural of black alumni who’d inspired him. On a ladder, brush in hand, he worked all day and into the night.

“Security would come by, and I’d say, ‘In a couple of hours I’ll be out of here,’” Soltau says, but when he got too tired, he simply rolled out a sleeping bag and closed his eyes.

This winter a new generation of students approached Soltau with an idea: Would he come back to the Octagon and add more faces?

“At first I was hesitant,” says Soltau, a lower-school art teacher in Atlanta, who majored in fine fi arts at Amherst. “My original idea was that it would continue to live on through otherr people.” In fact, it had: over the years, two artists, including Renata Robinson-Glenn ’04, had added eight new faces.

But students wanted to meet Soltau, and he was drawn to the symmetry of their request: In selecting people for the original mural, which fills fi one wall in the Octagon’s Gerald Penny ’77 Center, he’d spent time 8 Amherst Spring 2016

Students asked Kevin Soltau ’01 to come back and paint three more portraits.

on the phone with African-American alumni, hearing their stories. He agreed to come back on the condition that current students pick the new faces.

“We wanted people we had personal connections with,” says Ajanae Bennett ’16, a member of the Black Student Union’s executive board.

Soltau arrived in February to add the images of Professor Rhonda Cobham-Sander, Dean Charri BoykinEast and the Rev. Timothy Jones ’05E—each of whom has inspired current BSU members.

Jones—the Hermenia T. Gardner Bi-Semester Christian Worship Series Fellow at Amherst—was on vacation when he heard the news.

“I started screaming, ‘I’m on the wall! I’m on the wall!’” Jones says. “I can’t express how humbled I am.”

Bennett researched the many people in the mural for a Special Topics course on the Amherst black experience. “It means a lot,” she says, “to see black alumni who have done so much for their communities.”

She hopes to see herself there someday. “It’s beyond inspiring,” Bennett says of the artwork. “It makes me realize what I can do after Amherst and who I can become. It’s propelling me.” E.G.B.

FROM TOP: KEVIN SOLTAU ’01, LILY HUNTER ’19 (2)

In the Octagon, an alumnus added new faces to a mural that has inspired many.

ON VERY OLD PAGES, WHO’S WHO ON THE WALL 1 ONAWUMI JEAN MOSS retired

15 RHONDA COBHAM-SANDER

in 2006 as associate dean of students at Amherst. She is a wellknown storyteller.

is the Emily C. Jordon Folger Professor of Black Studies and English at Amherst.

2 CAN YOU identify this person?

16 DR. CUTHBERT SIMPKINS II ’69

Email magazine@amherst.edu.

is a trauma surgeon and professor of medicine who also wrote a biography of John Coltrane.

3 BONNIE JENKINS ’82 is coordinator for threat reduction programs at the State Department.

She served in the Naval Reserve and on the 9/11 Commission.

a San Francisco Bay Area sightseeing service.

18 HAROLD WADE JR. ’68 wrote

Email magazine@amherst.edu.

Black Men of Amherst, published in 1976, two years after his death.

6 LISA EVANS ’85 is scientific fi workforce diversity officer ffi at the National Institutes of Health.

7 CAN YOU identify this person?

Email magazine@amherst.edu.

8 MARGARET VENDRYES ’84, now

19 SONYA CLARK ’89 is an awardwinning artist who chairs the craft and material studies department at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts.

20 ANTHONY JACK ’07, a sociologist, studies the experiences of low-income, first-generation undergradutes at elite schools.

an associate professor at York College, was Soltau’s adviser on the mural.

21 CAN YOU identify this person?

9 TARA (FULLER) LAMOURT ’80 is an oil painter who launched the company Handmade By Design.

as vice provost for student affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University.

10 EDWARD JONES, class of 1826,

23 WAYNE WORMLEY ’72 has a

he College’s fi first African-American graduate, became principal of the Fourah Bay Christian Association in Sierra Leone.

11 DR. CHARLES DREW ’26 discovered the chemical method for preserving blood. As a leader in his fi field, he protested racial segregation in blood donation.

12 WILLIAM HASTIE ’25 was the

Email magazine@amherst.edu.

management consulting fi firm and is interim dean of professional studies and workforce development at Bunker Hill Community College.

24 UTHMAN F. MUHAMMAD ’70, P’99, ’02 (formerly C.P. Ward) is an educator and a community, political and Islamic (Mu’min) activist.

25 WILLIAM CLARENCE ROB-

13 MERCER COOK ’25 was the first fi

pastor at Community Baptist Church in New Haven.

14 CHARLES HAMILTON HOUSTON, class of 1915, was the legal architect of Brown v. Board of Education. He was known as “the man who killed Jim Crow.”

Without the First Folio, 18 of the Bard’s plays could have been lost forever.

22 HENRY G. RHONE ’68 is retired

fi African-American to serve first as governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands and as a federal judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals.

American ambassador to Gambia. He was also ambassador to Senegal and Niger.

Amherst is the only location in Massachusetts to host the First Folio on its cross-country tour.

17 JESSE WARR ’69 is proprietor of

4 CAN YOU identify this person?

5 ALLISON MOORE-LAKE ’82 is deputy director of the Westchester Children’s Association.

HAMLET ARRIVES

INSON III ’68 was a real estate broker.

26 TIMOTHY JONES ’05E is senior

27 CHARRI BOYKIN-EAST is Amherst’s senior associate dean of students.

28 GEORGE JOHNSON ’73 is dean emeritus of the Elon University School of Law.

To mark the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, several of the Bard’s original 1623 First Folios are in the midst of a cross-country tour. In Massachusetts, Amherst College is the only stop for the traveling exhibition.

The First Folio is on display at the Mead Art Museum May 9–31, and the exhibition is free and open to all. Visitors can see the book itself, which is turned to Hamlet’s “To Be or Not To Be” monologue.

One of the most influential books in the world, the First Folio includes 36 Shakespeare plays, 18 of which had never been printed before— r including Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night and The Tempest— and might otherwise have been lost forever. Compiled by Shakespeare’s friends and theater colleagues, the First Folio was published after the Bard’s death.

The traveling exhibition is made possible by Amherst’s Folger Shakespeare Library, which was founded by Henry Clay Folger, Class of 1879, and his wife, Emily.

It’s fitting to bring the First Folio to Folger’s alma mater, “given the passion and curiosity for Shakespeare he cultivated during his college years and then upon graduating,” says Michael Kelly, head of Amherst’s Archives & Special Collections, which is presenting a small exhibition, through May 31, about Folger’s time at Amherst. CAROLINE HANNA Spring 2016 Amherst 9

COLLEGE ROW

SPEAKING

Their Minds

Donna Brazile THE VETERAN POLITICAL strategist spoke in Stirn Auditorium on Feb. 18 on topics ranging from the presidential candidates, to poverty in America, to race relations.

After joking that her primary-season visits to Iowa and New Hampshire “doubled the black population in both states,” Brazile got serious, highlighting the disparity between the hundreds of millions spent on campaigns and lackluster voter turnout numbers.

“We live in a moment when we as citizens somehow abdicated the right to choose politicians,” said Brazile, a Democratic superdelegate who worked on every presidential campaign from 1976 to 2000. “It’s our duty and responsibility as citizens of this country to get out there and be a part of it.”

10 Amherst Spring 2016

Charles Krauthammer

Anna Deavere Smith

THE CONSERVATIVE PUNDIT pulled no punches in his criticism of President Barack Obama. But Krauthammer, who spoke in Buckley Recital Hall on March 9, also credited the commander-inchief and his “intellectual and ideological ambitions” with sparking a beneficial fi national discussion.

“Over the last seven years, just about every major debate we have had as a country—from the stimulus to ObamaCare to foreign policy to deficits fi to debt— have all been, and can all be, subsumed under a more general question,” Krauthammer said: “What is the proper size and scope and reach of government?”

“It is a privilege to live in a country where that is the essential question of one’s time,” said the Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator.

Krauthammer spent an hour and a half answering questions from a group of students prior to the talk.

He gave full, thoughtful answers, Emmanuel Osunlana ’18 told The Amherst Student: “It wasn’t just rhetoric or buzzwords.” Krauthammer also held a long Q&A with the audience after the talk.

THE PLAYWRIGHT AND actor has interviewed people from all walks of life, using Walt Whitman’s idea “to absorb America” as inspiration for her one-woman program. In Buckley on April 13, she transformed herself into some of these people, delivering monologues in their voices. Speaking as U.S. Rep. John Lewis, she told of his meeting with a former Klansman: “‘Mr. Lewis, I’m one of the people who beat you on May 9, 1961. I want to apologize.

Will you forgive me?’” Lewis did so. In the Q&A, Smith said she does not believe she can know what anyone is thinking: “All I can do is try to sing the song they’re singing.” As one questioner said, “This reminds me why I want to commit my life to acting and social justice.”

Chris Abani THROUGH HIS WRITING and public speaking engagements, the award-winning Nigerian author has become an internationally respected voice on topics related to humanitarianism and ethics.

His sentiments on humanity and inward refl flection served as the basis for his talk in Stirn on Feb. 24. From personal anecdotes about growing up with four brothers in the Igbo culture of West Africa to a chilling tale about an interaction with a police officer ffi who pulled him over late one night in upstate New York, Abani’s talk investigated the various roles that race, culture and language play in fashioning our sense of self and our perceptions of others.

“The most powerful technological invention ever is language,” he said in an interview before the talk. “We are creatures of metaphor.”

MARIA STENZEL (3); SHANA SURECK (SMITH)

Spring semester brought several big-name speakers to campus.

Here’s what some of them had to say.

With Professor Robert H. Romer ’52, Alyssia Bailey and family explored her local roots.

AMOS NEWPORT’S

AMHERST LEGACY COLLEGE HISTORY U Growing up in ican side—of her lineage. “I went and a large adoptive family full of multiracial Googled this name, Frederick Dwight children like herself, Alyssia Bailey did Newport,” she says, and up popped a not wonder much about her original fam- 2010 Amherst magazine article by Robert ily. “Then I got into my 30s,” she says, H. Romer ’52, professor emeritus of phys“and I suddenly wanted to know.” ics, on “The Untold Story of Newport While combing through online geHouse.” nealogical records, Bailey uncovered As the article explained, Amherst rethe surname of some of named the former fraher maternal ancestors: When an Atlanta woman ternity house in 1984 Newport. When she in honor of Frederick Googled the name of her Dwight “Doc” Newlocated and had dinner ancestor, up came an with her birth mother, port and his son Edshe asked about the ward Foster Newport, article from name. “I did see that beloved athletic trainAmherst magazine. there was a Newport ers who worked at the House at Amherst, but College from the midwhen I asked [my birth mother] about it, 19th to the mid-20th century. (They were she acted like she didn’t know anything,” also founding members of the Town of Bailey says. “So I felt like I must just have Amherst’s Hope Community Church.) the wrong people.”

Those men, Romer wrote, were diLater, though, the births of her own rectly descended from Amos Newport, fied Bailey’s curiostwo children intensifi who was “born in Africa about 1715, capity about that side—the African-Amertured as a boy and taken to America on a

CAROL LOLLIS (2); HENRY AMISTADI (NEWPORT HOUSE)

NEWPORT HOUSE The former Phi Delta Sigma house (and before that, Phi Delta Theta) was renamed in 1984 for two descendents of Amos Newport. Enslaved in Hatfield, Mass., Newport sued for his freedom. For Professor Robert Romer ’52, the dorm’s name is a reminder of a time when slavery was widespread in area.

slave ship.” Sold in 1729 to Joseph Billing of Hatfi field, Mass., Amos Newport sued for his freedom in 1766; the suit was unsuccessful but “probably contributed in some small way to the gradual ending of slavery in Massachusetts.”

This article led Bailey to Romer’s 2009 book, Slavery in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts, and to further Newport family research by Eric W. Weber ’70.

Bailey decided to email Romer.

“I didn’t think he’d respond!” she laughs. In fact, they traded information over the next 15 months, and, with help from Weber, confi firmed that Bailey is indeed a direct descendant of the Amherstarea Newports.

Romer describes their correspondence as “the kind of event that authors like me dream about!”

On Feb. 5, Bailey—who lives near Atlanta—traveled to Western Massachusetts with her adoptive sister and niece.

She met Romer and Weber in person for the first time, and they toured the Hatfi field home where Amos Newport had been a slave. Then they attended a packed reception at Newport House, where photos and articles about the Newports were on display and Bailey met other Newport descendants. Romer spoke about Amos’s legacy, and Resident Counselor Caryce Tirop ’17 presented Bailey with a copy of the professor’s book inscribed by students currently living in the house.

Bailey says she now feels a deep connection to Romer, to Amherst College and to American history. She’s pleased to know that her family springs from “people who fought back” against slavery.

“Look at these people that were able to survive this and thrive,” she says. “For my kids, I’m very proud that I’ll be able to tell them who they are, what they come from.” K.D. Spring 2016 Amherst 11

COLLEGE ROW

THE BIG PICTURE IN THE WORDS OF EMILY DICKINSON, “A light exists in spring / Not present on the year / At any other period. / When March is scarcely here // A color stands abroad / On solitary hills / that science cannot overtake / But human nature feels.”

e Jessica Mestre ’10

e If you would like a reprint of this photo, email magazine@amherst.edu with your name and address, and we will send you a complimentary copy.

A WRITER'S TOUR }

AMHERST COLLEGE

BY RAND RICHARDS COOPER ’80

14

AMHERST SPRING 2016

FROM FAMOUS NAMES TO FORGOTTEN FIGURES, A TRIP THROUGH AMHERST'S LITERARY PAST AND P R E S E N T.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1976, just a few weeks before matriculating at Amherst, I went to Manhattan to see Julie Harris in her celebrated one-woman show, The Belle of Amherst. Watching Harris’ luminous performance as “Squire Dickinson’s half-cracked daughter,” awed by the magical way she brought the poet’s lines alive on the stage, I felt a curiously literary pride.

Other colleges might be known for football, but how much better to be headed to a place famed for poetry!

Reckless booklove traces to the conception of the College, in 1821, when a group of renegade faculty absconded from a certain otherr college in remote Western Massachusetts and rode east, toward civilization, to found

Amherst—taking half the library with them. That literary heist may be apocryphal, but I like the story anyway, cueing up as it does T.S. Eliot’s remark about how good writers borrow but great writers steal, and bespeaking the priorities of an institution that would prize literature above all else. And indeed, in the 19th century, while Squire Dickinson’s daughter nursed her secret love of language in the stately brick house on Main Street, the college just a few paces to the south was regularly visited by giants of American literature from Emerson to Twain.

Amherst didn’t just prize literature but came to produce it as well, through the efforts ff of the poets, novelists and story writers over the last hundred years or so—faculty and graduates alike—who have left the College’s mark on American letters.

The names are many, but a few loom larger than others. I’d make the case for three in particular: a trio of writer-artists, spanning the 20th century, whose innovations altered literary forms and influenced generations of critics and fellow artists.

First and foremost, of course, is Robert Frost, winner of four Pulitzer Prizes, inaugurator of a U.S. president and creator of poems that colored the fabric of American life. f His 1916 hiring at Amherst was part of President Alexander Meiklejohn’s eff ffort to transform the College from the training ground “for young men of piety and talents for the Christian ministry” specified fi in its charter into a modern institution where intellectual inquiry would be exalted, and living writers might be as welcome as dead ones. And so Frost was invited to give a reading—“a sturdily built man in his early forties,” as one English professor described him, “wearing rumpled clothes and a celluloid collar, with unruly brown hair, blunt features, and eyes of seafarer’s blue.”

Thus began an on-and-off ff association that would span four decades. As a teacher, Frost was, to put it mildly, unconventional. A poetry writing class might meet in the evening at a fraternity house, the poet sprawled in an easy chair, the “boys” arranged around him, and last until midnight—Frost discoursing on sundry topics, dispensing peremptory judgments, gossiping about faculty colleagues and asking provocative questions about the point (or pointlessness) of a college education. Mischievously he advised his brightest students to drop out, setting his own chronic rootlessness (and lack of college degree) as a model for any bold enough to follow.

16 Amherst Spring 2016

In the pantheon of American writers, Frost was a great bridge-builder, like Whitman or Twain or Faulkner, marrying “unliterary” vernacular to traditional forms in a way that made the local universal, and vice versa. In Lives of the Modern Poets, English professor and Frost biographer William H. Pritchard ’53—who, as a young faculty member, squired the elderly poet about campus— argues that the “presumed simplicity” and “folksy charm” Frost acquired in the public mind hardly does justice to a poetry that possesses “the larger ambitions and risks of a major writer,” evidenced in such subtly challenging and rewarding works as “Mending Wall,” “Home Burial,” “Two Tramps in Mud Time” or “West-Running Brook.”

Pritchard makes a case for the “playful, complicated, devious” Frost. That complication, as critic I.A. Richards observed, reflected fl the fact that Frost “had an unusually theoretical mind, and liked to talk about language and meaning”; the deviousness included camoufl flaging this hermeneutical bent in a deceptive folksiness. Frost was far more modern than he was given credit for, a deviser of poems, as Pritchard writes, that work on us slyly but insistently, “as if something in ourselves had been called forth to participate in a fresh realization of the nature of things.”

THE SECOND TITAN OF AMHERST LITERATURE could hardly have been more unlike Frost. Born to enormous wealth, an aesthete deeply versed in the arts, James Merrill ’47 practiced a cosmopolitan poetry of profl fligate formal inventiveness.

Merrill’s jewel-like poetry gleams with wordplay in multiple languages (he spoke five, fi and read Latin and Greek), far-fl flung cultural allusions, complex eff ffects of rhyme and meter, and displays of incorrigible cleverness. Take for example “Domestic Architecture,” which describes a poet’s life as haunted by ghosts “exiled to the poem’s attic,” and closes with this punning advice: “Stick to the parlor, Reader, where it’s brightest,/ Though even here—! Foul drafts and dragging feet/ Haunt this house once white as a blank sheet.”

The precocious gymnastics that marked Merrill’s early poetry yielded to the less showy mode of his mid-career poems, refl flecting a confessional impulse akin to that of Lowell or Plath, in which Merrill’s formally elaborate style was increasingly augmented by feeling. My favorite is “The Broken Home” (1966), his moving account of the domestic unhappiness of a childhood lived amid his parents’ alcohol-fueled acrimony: “a marriage on the rocks,” he writes with typical mordant wit. The poem contains trenchant lines about his father, the financier Charles E. Merrill, class of 1908: My father, who had flown fl in World War I, Might have continued to invest his life In cloud banks well above Wall Street and wife.

But the race was won below, and the point was to win.

g Stark Young taught at Amherst until 1921. He gets credit for having been the one to urge President Meiklejohn to hire Frost. Young had ulterior motives in doing so, and his plan backfired doubly.

}

ROBERT FROST

As a teacher, Frost was, to put it mildly, unconventional. A poetry writing class might last until midnight—the poet discoursing on sundry topics, gossiping about faculty colleagues, dispensing peremptory judgments.

Illustration by JOHN S. DYKES

Spring 2016 Amherst 17

And, two stanzas later: Each thirteenth year he married. When he died There were already several chilled wives In sable orbit—rings, cars, permanent waves.

We’d felt him warming up for a green bride.

MERRILL'S EVOLUTION REFLECTED CHANGES IN AMERICA AND IN AMERICANS, FREED UP FROM TRADITION AND OPEN TO THE IDIOSYNC R AT I C A L LY SPIRITUAL.

{

JAMES MERRILL

He devoted the latter part of his career to the mother of all quixotic projects: a 17,000-line epic poem of occult communication with spirits and angels, channeled during years of sessions at a Ouija board with his partner.

Illustration by VIVIENNE FLESHER

He could aff fford it. He was “in his prime” At three score ten. But money was not time.

The poet’s memoir, A Different ff Person (1993), relates the scandal that erupted when his father discovered Merrill’s undergraduate affair ff with his Amherst teacher, the Greek scholar and translator Kimon Friar. After threatening to sue the College, as Merrill tells the story, his father consulted a psychiatrist for advice “on sexual matters,” and also “sought opinions about my poems.” One opinion was that of Amherst president Stanley King, class of 1903 —“and on hearing from the president of Amherst that [the poems] met, or even surpassed, ‘professional standards,’” Merrill writes ruefully, his father “gave them from then on his full if never wholly comprehending approval.”

Professional standards: after spending years as a poet meeting them, James Merrill went on to transcend them, with a vengeance. The latter part of his career was devoted to the mother of all quixotic projects—a 17,000-line epic poem of occult communication with spirits and angels, channeled during years of sessions at a Ouija board with his partner, David Jackson, and various friends, in his apartment on Water Street in the quaint Yankee village of Stonington, Conn. The results were published in the three books that make up The Changing Light at Sandoverr (1976–1980), which poet and critic Dan Chiasson ’93, in a perceptive New Yorker essay, judged “the most ambitious American poem of the past fifty years ... [a work] that has few analogues in literature.”

During those years of Sandover, as Merrill and Jackson manned the Ouija board, I was just down the block on Water Street, spending my summers working in the ice cream shop my mother owned.

One day Merrill came in for f a cone, and when I summoned the nerve to mention that I was an Amherst student and hoped to be a writer, he courteously invited me to stop by at his home. I didn’t know it, but he was already reading Sandoverr aloud to the “summer people”—“retired naval offi fficers and frisky elderly Brahmin ladies,” as Chiasson puts it—who were his Stonington neighbors; if I’d been bold enough to take up his off ffer, I might have witnessed the unveiling of one of the signal accomplishments of modern American poetry.

IT WAS SURPRISING, GIVEN MERRILL’S PATRICIAN pedigree, how his evolution as a poet over the decades reflected fl changes in America and in Americans themselves, freed up from tradition and increasingly open to the idiosyncratically spiritual and the therapeutic. Such terms also describe the last and most recent of my trio of Amherst literary luminaries, David Foster Wallace ’85, author

fi Jestt and other unclassifi fiable of the novel Infinite works of genius, including quirkily brilliant essays on topics ranging from rap music, to John McCain, to the ethics and aesthetics of eating lobsters. Wallace’s restless mind recognized few boundaries. At Amherst he wrote not one senior thesis but two—a Pynchonesque novel, The Broom of the System, and a critical inquiry into the work of philosopher Richard Taylor—and graduated with a double-summa degree.

The Broom of the System was published soon afterward, and New York Times book maven Michiko Kakutani praised “its young author’s rich reserves of ambition and imagination” and the novel’s “portrait, through a combination of Joycean word games, literary parody and zany picaresque adventure, of a contemporary America run amok.” For a reader, Wallace isn’t so much an acquired taste as an overwhelming force. Much of his writing took place where madcap scholarship (expressed in a mania for footnotes), wanton narrative inventiveness, a tenacious philosophical bent and a readiness for self-interrogation converge. Need I say that this marked off ff a sui generis sensibility? His literary m.o. betrayed a touch of the idiot savant.

Wallace suff ffered from depression and took his own life in 2008, but his literary rock-star status survives him; a recent lecture at Amherst by his biographer, D.T. Max, drew a standing-room-only crowd. Max calls Wallace “the foremost writer of his literary generation, the one who forged the newest path and from whom the others, directly or indirectly, took their cues.” Some of this influfl ence was purely literary; Wallace helped purge American fiction of a lingering minimalism via prose notable for its baroque extravagance and jubilantly wonky obsessiveness. But there’s also a zeitgeist component to Wallace’s grip on the imaginations of Millennials and his emergence, in Max’s phrase, as “representative of a generation.”

His sensibility concocted irony and sincerity, joining a slacker/stoner cool to polymath aptitudes and interests, intellectual intensity and a capacity for moral indignation. A virtuosic writer who refused to be satisfi fied with producing a merely wellmade thing, he instead habitually questioned the point and purpose of the undertaking.

He always paid attention to the man behind the curtain, even (or especially) when the curtain was in his own head. There was a cost. Where Frost would have parried, and Merrill transformed pain into gleaming and poignant wit, Wallace went inward; at times his voracious mind presented the prospect of genius devouring itself. It was a hard way to become his generation’s F. Scott Fitzgerald.

TWO CULTURE-BEARING YEOMEN OF LETTERS, both of the World War II generation and both, remarkably, still alive and working, belong in any accounting of the College’s contribution to AmeriSpring 2016 Amherst 19

can literature. David Ferry ’46 is a poet and translator whose renderings of Horace and Virgil are celebrated by critics and fellow poets alike. Ferry’s own poetry has been infrequent but noteworthy: his 2012 book, Bewilderment, won the National Book Award and was praised by W.S. Merwin for conveying “complexities of feeling with unfailing proportion and grace.”

Four years ahead of Ferry at Amherst was Richard Wilbur ’42, perhaps the most celebrated poet whom Americans, by and large, have never heard of. Pulitzer Prize winner, National Book Award winner, U.S. poet laureate, translator of Racine and Molière, Wilbur writes lyrics of everyday life touched with wisdom, wit and melancholy, not a few of them bearing a trace of Frost. Wilbur’s best-known poem, “The Beautiful Changes,” tenderly joins nature’s cyclical renewal to the act of imaginative renewal and the power of love: Your hands hold roses always in a way that says They are not only yours; the beautiful changes In such kind ways, Wishing ever to sunder Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

Wilbur’s formal deftness and relatively sunny outlook—his dedication to “joy in life and art,” as he said in a 1977 Paris Review interview—kept him out of the mainstream of the darkly confessional free verse that defi fined his postwar generation of poets. But his contribution has been large. Wilbur’s “brilliantly affirmative” ffi approach, as critic Adam Kirsch has described it, has yielded what a friend of mine calls “poems that just make things better.” And who doesn’t need more of those?

While Frost and Merrill have escaped being buried by time, and Wilbur and Ferry continue to defy it, other Amherst writers require excavation.

Oblivion distorts our sense of the dead; we imagine, because they are not now remembered, that they never really lived. But rediscovering these forgotten figures sets us bobbing on the current of life, and literature, as it was then.

One such figure is John Erskine, who taught at Amherst from 1903 to 1909, then went on to a multifaceted literary life in New York City, publishing more than 100 books of fiction, fi criticism,

20 Amherst Spring 2016

essays and memoirs. A noted bon vivant, Erskine was romantically involved with Anaïs Nin; Nin was obsessed with Erskine, and their fl flirtation inspired the first ecstasies of prose in the diaries for which she later became famous.

Another is Stark Young, who taught at Amherst from 1915 to 1921, and whose magnolia-scented Southern novel, So Red the Rose, was a precursor to Gone with the Wind. Playwright, novelist, painter, critic, translator and essayist all in one, Young was the chief theater critic for New Republicc and The New York Times. At Amherst he gets credit for having been the one to urge Alexander Meiklejohn to hire Frost. Young had ulterior motives in doing so, hoping to persuade Frost to smooth the way for a volume of Young’s poetry with editor Alfred Harcourt at Holt. His plan backfi fired: not only did Frost give Harcourt a thumbs-down on the manuscript, but he came to despise Young in what clearly seem to have been homophobic ways, and continually plotted to get him fired. fi Perhaps the most tantalizing of these forgotten figures was Frost’s protégé, Joseph Moncure March ’22. An editor at The New Yorkerr at its 1925 inception, March helped create its “Talk of the Town” section, a proving ground for generations of American writers to come. He himself achieved notoriety for a long narrative poem, “The Wild Party,” which told the racy story of a vaudeville dancer, Queenie, who throws a booze- and sexfilled party in Greenwich Village. Slaloming past obscenity laws, “The Wild Party” became a noted succès de scandale, a proto-Beat narrative that Louis Untermeyer celebrated as “uncompromising, unashamed and unremittingly powerful.” It was a favorite of William S. Burroughs, who called it “the book that made me want to be a writer” and enjoyed chanting its opening lines, with their Vachel Lindsay-esque tom-tom beat:

}

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Where Frost would have parried, and Merrill transformed pain into wit, Wallace went inward; his voracious mind presented the prospect of genius devouring itself. It was a hard way to become his generation’s F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Illustration by POLLY BECKER

Queenie was a blonde and her age stood still, And she danced twice a day in Vaudeville.

Grey eyes.

Lips like coals aglow.

Her face was a tinted mask of snow.

The poem has enjoyed a long afterlife: a 1975 Merchant-Ivory film fi adaptation starred Raquel Welch; a version illustrated by Art Spiegelman came out in 1994; and a pair of musicals brought the poem to New York stages in 2000. As for March, he followed up The Wild Party’s success with another long poem, The Set-Up, about a washed-up black boxer, then went on to become a documentary filmmaker and magazine writer. He died in 1977, but his legacy persists in those two poems, praised in their time by Edmund Wilson, Conrad Aiken and James T. Farrell, who described them as “written with such force that [they] remain part of your own remembered past.”

g Joseph Moncure March ’22 achieved notoriety for a long narrative poem, “The Wild Party,” which told the racy story of a vaudeville dancer, Queenie, who throws a booze- and sexfilled party in Greenwich Village.

Spring 2016 Amherst 21

TO WRITE WITH SUCH FORCE THAT YOUR WRITing becomes part of your reader’s remembered past: space won’t allow me to discuss all the Amherst writers whose books, in my estimation, have cleared that high bar. The roster includes such one-hit wonders as Theodore Rosengarten ’66’s All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, an oral history of an illiterate black Alabama sharecropper, which beat out All the President’s Men and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for a nonfi fiction National Book Award in 1975. Or James Guetti ’59’s undeservedly forgotten 1971 novel, Action, the best book about gambling that I ever expect to read. Or Katherine Min ’80’s 2006 novel, Secondhand World, whose pained account of growing up in the household of Korean parents explores the identity gulf separating immigrant parent from assimilated child.

The roster of Amherst writers also features faculty members who came and went too quickly, like Sonia Sanchez; her brio as poet, essayist, playwright, scholar and activist for racial justice led Maya Angelou to call her “a lion in literature’s forest.” It contains unexpected curiosities—like Philip Eastman ’33, better known to my admiring young daughter as P.D. Eastman, author of Go, Dog. Go!, Are You My Mother? and other exuberantly Seussian children’s books. (Those books are Seussian because Eastman, as an Army inductee in 1942, was assigned to the U.S. Signal Corps Film Unit headed by none other than Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss.)

It features acclaimed authors whose writings combine literature with other pursuits. Scott Turow ’70 took a career in law and ran it through the fiction-writing machine to produce a string of wildly popular novels, beginning with Presumed Innocent, that pioneered the legal thriller. Julie Powell ’95 took a culinary obsession and ran with it online, starting a blog about her attempt to cook 22 Amherst Spring 2016

every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Its popularity led to a book and Hollywood movie, and in the process showed the new power of digital media, the blogging tail wagging the publishing dog.

And the list includes—of course—Dan Brown ’86, no mere writer but a one-man pop-cultural marketing tsunami, with 200 million books in print. The Da Vinci Code and Brown’s other page-turners adroitly serve up a world of ancient portals, clues coded in Latin anagrams, magic Dürer squares and human skulls hidden beneath the Capitol. His brand mixes the sinister and the scholarly in equal measure, its hermeneutical heroics joining lowbrow and highbrow in a never-ending series of murky crypts and encrypted messages.

See what an Amherst education will do?

It’s Indiana Jones meets Paul de Man. Any literary look back at Amherst unavoidably refl flects the fact that, for a century and a half, this was a college for men, and overwhelmingly for white men. Today, Amherst is one of the most diverse liberal arts colleges in the nation, and this diversity is increasingly apparent in the busy cadre of contemporary writers with Amherst diplomas who continue winning fans and racking up prizes: Chris Bohjalian ’82, a novelist (and two-time Oprah’s Book Club alumnus) who has pulled off ff the magic trick of getting better with every book; best-selling mystery writer Harlan Coben ’84; Rafael Campo ’87, physician, poet, memoirist and advocate for gay rights; Nuar Alsadir ’92, whose 2012 book of poems, More Shadow Than Bird, won comparison with Emily Dickinson; Pushcart Prize-winning story writer Nalini Jones ’93, author of What You Call Winter, about a Catholic community in India; Dan Chiasson ’93, whose writings in The New Yorkerr and The New York Review of Books are unfailingly lucid, resourceful and surprising; Deanna Fei ’99, whose 2015 memoir, Girl in Glass, explores the harrowing complexities involved in giving birth to a severely premature baby; and Lauren Groff ff ’01, whose debut novel, The Monsters of Templeton, was deemed “a magical experience”

by Stephen King, and whose latest effort, ff Fates and Furies, was a National Book Award finalist.

I can only mention current faculty members who moonlight as writers of imaginative literature, including poet David Sofield, fi novelists Lawrence Douglas and Judith Frank, and story writer Ilan Stavans. And then there is the glittering list of poets and novelists brought to the College as visiting writers over recent decades: Robert Stone, Mary Gordon, Caryl Phillips, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Tillie Olsen, Susan Kenney, Henry Bromell ’70, Alan Lelchuk, April Bernard, Amy Clampitt, Glyn Maxwell, Brad Leithauser, Claire Messud, Alexander Chee and Amity Gaige.

g The roster of alumni writers contains unexpected curiosities, like P.D. Eastman ’33, author of Go, Dog. Go!, Are You My Mother? and other exuberantly Seussian children's books.

ANY LOOK BACK REFLECTS THE FACT T H AT F O R 150 YEARS, THIS WAS A COLLEGE FOR MEN, M O S T LY WHITE MEN.

As an undergraduate I was lucky enough to be taught by Robert Stone, best known for his Vietnam novel, Dog Soldiers, and for his escapades with novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, captured in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. A dozen of us in his fiction writing class would sit in a seminar room in Johnson Chapel, discussing our stories and monitoring the intense and enigmatic presence of our teacher, who chainsmoked cigarettes as he spoke, the smoke wreathing his head and amplifying the oracular quality of his utterances. Bob’s approach to literature was lofty, his principles summed up in Joseph Conrad’s description, which he recited to us in class, of “the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—before all, to make you see.”

To make you hear, feel and see: it is the writer’s challenge, and Amherst teaches literature in a way I can only call profoundly writer-friendly. In the first English class I took at Amherst, English 11, we wrote a lot—short papers, every other class or so, calisthenics for the writing muscles. The comments on those papers aimed to shake us out of how we had learned to write about literature in high school, that confi fidently “objective” recitation of big themes, and into something new.

Recently I unearthed my old English 11 papers to see how Amherst English remade my way of encountering literature. My teacher, John Cameron, rejected the dutiful trotting-out of literary terminology in my response to a Tennyson poem, advising me to stop being “fussy about imagery, personifi fication, etc.” and try instead to “move with the poem—for the sake of the reading.” He wanted me to be less secure, less certain. And more personally invested.

“For the sake of the reading” turns out to be another way of saying, “for the sake of the writing.” In pinpointing what is so writer-friendly about Amherst, one can trace a line all the way back to Frost and his emphasis on performance

and surprise, his insistence that, quoting Hamlet, “the play’s the thing.” All good writing, Amherst English taught, was a performance that captivated and surprised; the challenge in responding to it was not to squash that performance with the steamroller of what my teacher Bill Pritchard called “grad-school English,” but rather to keep it in play a little longer. Good writers were never boring, never dull; why should you be? You had to answer style with style. As he reflected fl in his memoir, Pritchard encouraged students to “put a high premium on literary performance as something to admire, both in works of art and in the critic’s sentences about those works.”

The approach was encapsulated in the recurring question put to us in English 11: “What is the experience of reading this passage?” That question baffled at first; today, I can hardly imagine a more apt one. It insists that a novel or poem is not merely a compilation of themes, not a message or argument or idea, but a work of art. And art is an experience. The point is not to explain what it means, but to engage what it does. Amherst pushed you toward being the type of reader you needed to be in order to be a writer—the kind who, for better or for worse, was going to be seduced by what Wordsworth called the “grand elementary principle of pleasure … a pure organic pleasure in the lines.”

It’s one thing for a college to use a worldfamous writer who once taught there as a kind of brand. But in Frost’s case it’s fair to say that his particular view of literature and art shaped Amherst English for many, many decades. In his pithy essay “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Frost wryly noted how “scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they diff ffer” in their approach to poetry. How, he asks, can a poem “have wildness and at the same time a subject that shall be fulfi filled”? He answers by asserting that “it should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can.”

That seemingly innocent observation has big consequences; it insists that any act of literary art “must be a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader.” To drive home what he meant by this, Frost reached into his magic bag of fi figurative tricks and pulled out a tantalizing metaphor. “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting,” he wrote. “It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.”

Freshness, free play, wildness, surprise. This is what writers live for, what they aim at every time they sit down to work. How lucky we were to learn that at Amherst. k

p Alexander Chee is among the glittering list of novelists and poets brought to the College as visiting writers in recent decades. Chee’s new novel is The Queen of the Night.

g Nuar Alsadir ’92 wrote More Shadow Than Bird, a book of poems that won comparison with Emily Dickinson.

She is among a busy cadre of contemporary writers with Amherst degrees who continue winning fans and prizes.

Rand Richards Cooper ’80, author of The Last to Go and Big As Life, is a contributing editor at Commonweal Magazine, where he writes a twicefi has appeared in weekly online column. His fiction Harper’s, Esquire, The Atlantic and elsewhere.

Spring 2016 Amherst 23

It was a lot to ask, inviting middle-aged men to get in shape for a béisbol barnstorming tour against former professional players. But this was Amherst— and Cuba.

The Week That Baseball Won

By Rob Born ’90 and John Hereford ’87

25 AMHERST SPRING 2016

The players spanned the classes of 1962 to 2004. Most had not played l since college.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROB BORN

One of Pinar del Rio's finest pitchers of all time is staring down at Erich Wefifing ’89 as he

Hereford rediscovers his form against the Matanzas Cocodrilos.

Page 25, back row: Mike Levy ’93, Larry De Respino ’82, Erich Wefi fing ’89, Whit Griffi ffinger ’00, Mike Thaxton ’87, David Lawrence ’62, Mark Manning ’80.

Front row: Ben Gundersheimer ’89, Brandon Cody ’04, Rob Born ’90, David DeVellis ’94, Mitch Edelson ’87, Hereford, Mayo Noerdlinger ’89

steps into the batter’s box at Estadio Viñales in the western part of Cuba. At firio Pérez was an intimidating presence on 6-foot-5 with a lanky frame, Porfi the mound in the 1970s, when he pitched ffor the Forestales in Cuba’s top baseball league. Had he been born in the United States, he likely would have been a major leaguer.

Wefi fing digs in, sweat dripping off ff his brow in the stifl fling tobacco-country humidity. Pérez is almost regal as he winds up to pitch with his long arms and legs synchronized in perfect balance. He hides the baseball well into his delivery, and the ball starts toward Wefi fing’s elbow with surprising velocity.

As Wefi fing pulls his lead arm to his body to avoid getting hit, the ball darts back over the plate just before smacking the catcher’s glove.

The umpire emphatically shouts, “Huaaah!,” signifying a called strike. It is as good a slider as Wefi fing saw during his Amherst playing days more than 25 years ago. And Pérez is in his 60s.

This February, a team of Amherst baseball alumni traveled to Cuba for a unique barnstorming tour, where we played five games against teams consisting of former Cuban professional players. Rob Born ’90 came up with the idea. Having traveled to Cuba twice to play organized baseball, he reached out to five former teammates, who in turn each reached out to five additional teammates, sometimes from diff fferent graduating classes, and so on until we achieved critical mass across decades of Amherst baseball players. Inviting middle-aged men to get in shape and devote a week to playing serious baseball is a big ask. But Cuba, with its forbidden-fruit mystique and storied place in baseball history? Well, that was an alluring and altogether diff fferent proposition. After two years of navigating the Kafk fkaesque Cuban sports bureaucracy, visas were finally secured and games and guides arranged through Cuba’s National Institute off Sport, Physical Education and Recreation (INDER).

In 1866, seven years after Amherst defeated Williams in the first fi intercollegiate baseball game, American sailors introduced baseball to Cuba. Since then, baseball has become a central symbol of Cuban national pride. Cu-

26 Amherst Spring 2016

STUDENTS IN CUBA

A Chance to Pause Rachael Abernethy ’16 spent four months in Havana, living with a family of three—a mother and her two adult sons—and taking courses at the University of Havana in Spanish language, Cuban cinema and AfroCuban studies.

Through the program Spanish Studies Abroad, she arrived in Havana in January 2015. “Cuba had been in the back of my head,” says the black studies major from San Diego, “but I didn’t think it was possible to actually go there.” Bewildered friends and family asked: Why not go to Spain?

At Amherst, she says, “I don’t often find myself pausing. In Cuba it was the opposite. There’s a general culture of taking the time to stop and get to know people.

“I’d sit on the seawall and watch the water, and the people fishing next to ‘No Fishing’ signs. I learned to be flexible, to not have a schedule, to just be at peace with myself.”

Twice weekly, Abernethy tutored an 11-year-old girl in English. “She often interrupted our lesson to teach me about the history of her country.

It’s a country with such a strong culture and sense of self. Cuban people are resilient; they’re creative. A lot of them became like family to me.”

While Abernethy encountered few Americans, she met tourists from Russia, Germany and Costa Rica.

One favorite memory is of playing soccer at José Martí Park. “There were Americans, Germans, Italians, Cubans. All of a sudden two people with trumpets came up and started playing Cuban jazz. That was just an afternoon in Cuba.” E.G.B.

STUDENTS IN CUBA

A New Trend Cuba is an increasingly popular destination for Amherst students who study abroad.

To Hereford, the notion of reuniting with college teammates and playing competitively for the first fi time in decades appealed on many fronts.

WHAT’S YOUR CUBA STORY?

Tell us at magazine@ amherst.edu.

bans live, eat and breathe the game. And they are good. Very good.

The Cubans approach the game with a wonderful Latin flair and gusto.

But they are technicians, and highly disciplined as well, a result of INDER, the Soviet-inspired government athletics institution that systematically trains and funnels promising youths up to Cuba’s version of the major leagues, Serie Nacional de Béisbol. Cuba’s success in international play is legendary. In the 1990s the national team compiled a stunning 152-game winning streak. Cuba won nine consecutive World Cup titles from 1984 to 2005 and has claimed three gold medals and two silver medals in the five fi Olympics since baseball was added to the games in 1992.

Several of the Cuban players responsible for that extraordinary record are our opponents for the week.

The connective tissue among Amherst baseball players is strong, in large measure because of the shared experience of having played for Bill Thurston, one of the most exacting and successful college baseball coaches of his era. Our team is composed of former players from the classes of 1962 to 2004 and, with a few exceptions, we have not played baseball at any level since college.

The prospect of playing against former professionals and the fear of getting embarrassed in front of former teammates provide ample incentive to get in baseball shape prior to the tour. Skills have eroded, some beyond reclamation (pitching velocity), but others are reawakened (hitting and fielding) with practice and patience. In the winter months leading up to our departure, several of us frequent batting cages for the fi first time in decades, giving us a chance to interact with younger players who are both amused by and amazingly supportive of our quest to regain a level of baseball profifi ciency.

Many of us commit to the trip as a means of marking our entry to middle age. The notion of traveling to Cuba to reunite with former college teammates and play competitive baseball for the first time in 25 years is appealing on multiple fronts. It represents a new life f experience, a physical challenge that encourages goal-oriented training and a chance to reconnect with some treasured old teammates and friends. Indeed, the trip seems to address all of the essential conclusions of the seminal Harvard longitudinal study on aging and happiness: keep it fresh, remain physically active and stay socially connected. But we are not here to get embarrassed either. Our demand-

Between 2008 and 2014, only five Amherst students studied in Cuba.

In 2015 alone, three studied in the country, and this spring semester, four more arrived.

“As a political science and black studies double major, I couldn’t imagine a better place to be,” says Christin Washington ’17, pointing to Cuba’s history as a 1960s refuge for U.S. black activists, its long strife with the United States and the nations’ budding reconciliation. She is in the final days of her stay in the country.

In addition to politics, Janna Behrens, Amherst’s director of education abroad, attributes the increase to the appeal of locations that are off ff the beaten path.

“You could go to rural China or rural Ghana and still have decent cell phone access and internet access,” she says. “You’re not going to get that in Cuba. Students have an opportunity to really disconnect, which helps them connect more with their experience on the ground and with each other.”

Last year, Behrens sent three professors—Ethan Clotfelter (biology), Sara Brenneis (Spanish) and Jeffers Engelhardt (music)—to evaluate study-abroad programs in the country. They focused on the two in which Amherst students participate: Spanish Studies Abroad and Sarah Lawrence Study Abroad in Havana.

The country was “fascinating, lively, friendly, contradictory and crumbling all at once,” Brenneis says. “For the right student, an opportunity to study in Cuba right now is educationally invaluable.”

Christine Croasdaile ’17, a black studies and Spanish major, is also there now. After developing an academic interest in Afro-Cuban postrevolutionary art, she says, she “yearned to learn more about AfroCuban culture as a whole, with a full immersion experience.”

Croasdaile says she’s learned to have patience and to appreciate solitude. “It has equipped me with a newfound independence and strength that I think nowhere else would have provided me.” E.G.B.

Spring 2016 Amherst 27

STUDENTS IN CUBA

Full of Art, Full of Problems

The Matanzas team featured three former Olympians, including catcher Juan Manrique (foreground) and outfielder fi Lázaro Junco (fi fifth from front).

ing college coach insisted that the game be played right, and the burden of those expectations has not faded much in 30 years. We take the training seriously, and it resurrects latent Amherst Baseball IQ and muscle memory.

Because we are older, we get injured while training. But the preparation pays off ff. And when we take the field in Cuba, we are not a lame fantasy-camp team. We can play.

Just not like the Cubans.

During our tour, we play two games in Viñales, one in Guanajay, one in Matanzas and one in Mayabeque. Some of these venues are not frequented fi are beautifully maintained, often by outside visitors. The rural playing fields and the grandstands of the stately if slightly crumbling stadiums hold boisterous local crowds. In two of the games, the locals fl fly both the Cuban flag and the American flag in center field and play our respective national anthems at the outset. In the smaller venues, the nearby schools are let out to allow the students to attend the games. Everyone is curious about the team from a place called Amherst.

While we hold a lead at times in each of the five games, and all but one game is close in the end, it quickly becomes clear that the Cubans are playing these games like a bullfi fight—and we are the bull. We jump out to a lead, scoring runs off ff their marginal pitchers, some of whom are pushing 70 years old. They follow with a recently retired professional pitcher, who is effectively unhittable, and he shuts us down. Back and forth until the bottom of the ninth, where we are likely facing a former national team member or Olympian, armed with a metal bat, and now fully focused with the game on the line. Even when it’s inevitable, the Cubans have a flair fl for the dramatic win. The final record for the Amherst squad: 0-4-1.

On the field, the Cuban players are cagey and competitive, laughing and hustling at the same time, with a constant rapid chatter that tests even the most fluent Spanish speakers on the Amherst squad.

After the games, we get to know some of the opposing players better over dinner—and way better over bottles of rum. We learn about their impressive baseball accomplishments. Some of them would have been Hall of Famers had they been allowed to play professionally in the United States. Lázaro Junco, who homered off ff us in the third game, is the number-two career home-run leader in Cuban baseball history, with more than 400. If not for the cash-starved Cuban government’s sale of his baseball services to a Japanese team late in his career, he would hold the country’s all-time home-run title.

28 Amherst Spring 2016

Diego Recinos ’16 went to Cuba to study the country’s politics. He left with a much broader interest.

“I realized that politics doesn’t tell the whole story,” he says. “The best things about Cuba are all around you, in the lives of the Cuban people.

I found a country that was full of art, full of music, full of life, but at the same time full of very complex problems—economic, social, racial.”

Recinos—a double major in political science and economics—spent the Fall 2014 semester in Havana, taking courses on photography, cinema, economics and the history of migration in Latin America. He was struck by the ubiquity of art galleries, theaters and music.

“I struggled with how I was going to deal with living in a politically oppressed country,” he says. “But for most people, the problem is not that they feel repressed. For most Cuban people, the biggest problem is economic: What am I going to do to feed my family? What am I going to do to live a good life?”

Some days there was no coffee; others, no rice. Artists couldn’t always get paint. “There was always something missing. The water would run out. The lights would go off. ff Toilet paper—when you go out in Cuba, you can’t find toilet paper. You have to carry your own. On top of that, the average salary of a Cuban worker is not enough to support a family.”

Back at Amherst, Recinos, who is from Guatemala City, took a course on Cuban political extremism with Professor Javier Corrales, whose parents are from Cuba and who has led alumni trips there.

“Going to Cuba reinforced my interest in Latin American politics and made me personally invested in U.S.Cuba relations,” Recinos says. “I have friends there. I’ve seen the problems they face. And I know the potential that normalizing relations can have on the Cuban people.” E.G.B.

A few of the players cautiously share with us some of the realities of life

+

MORE STUDENT STORIES:

amherst.edu/ magazine

under Castro. One player comments, “Fidel proporciona todo excepto el desayuno, el almuerzo y la cena” (“Fidel provides everything except breakfast, lunch and dinner”). We learn that the average salary in Cuba is about $20 per month and that taxi drivers often earn more than doctors and lawyers because they receive tourist tips. And we learn that despite the glaring disparity in our abilities and achievements and circumstances, we all share a love ffor the game and a hope for a brighter future.

Other experiences are equally memorable. After a morning game in Viñales, we load our bus with duff ffel bags of donated Little League baseball gear from our respective hometowns and drive farther into the countryside. After an hour, we stumble upon a remote, picturesque village called Pons. It’s set amidst expansive tobacco fields and steep-sided limestone hills called mogotes. In the heart of the village, we fi find a stunningly beautiful baseball field fi with a richly colored red dirt infi field and a perfectly imperfect white picket ffence. Despite the obvious poverty in the area, the locals have clearly sacrificed fi to create and maintain the field.

Minutes after we exit the bus, several children come over to meet us.

The crowd grows rapidly when the donated baseball gear comes out.

An informal game follows as the children are eager to test out their new equipment. We laugh at what these Cuban kids would do to our children’s Little League teams. Even the 9-year-olds have long, elegant batting strokes, and they swing hard at everything. We drive away at sunset wondering if some future baseball superstar will someday emerge from this remote Field of Dreams.

One afternoon in Havana, we break up into small groups and wander through back streets. The music, the architecture, the dance and, of course, the Cuban people all contribute to a magical mosaic: pulsing salsa in alleyways; passionate sports debates on sidewalks; kids playing stickball in the streets; and the smell of freshly cooked rice, beans and plantains coming from the home restaurants known as paladares.

The crumbling façades and 1950s-model Buicks and Chevys create an authentic charm. But this is a poor and, in many ways, dysfunctional place. The half-fi finished infrastructure projects, abruptly halted following the Soviet Union’s collapse, provide stark symbols of Cuba’s continuing struggles.

On our way to the airport on the final day, we are exhausted and banged up and humbled by our collective good fortune to have remained fit enough to undertake this trip. Our guide, Elias, who had enjoyed watching us compete against some of his favorite Cuban baseball idols, informed us that Cuban national radio had just reported that a “master class team of baseball players from a university in America” had played a series of competitive games against former Serie Nacional de Béisbol players.

Elias was quick to point out that the broadcast had graciously not provided the final record of our tour. Then he paused for a moment, smiled broadly and proclaimed, “You see, my friends, no particular team won this week. It was baseball that won.” k

Rob Born ’90 is vice president of corporate development at Vocera Communications, a health care IT provider. He lives in Santa Cruz, Calif.

John Hereford ’87 is founder of Oak Leaf Energy Partners, a Denver-based renewable energy development firm. fi Combined, they played baseball at Amherst from 1984 to 1990, and in 2016.

STUDENTS IN CUBA

First Cuba, Then a Thesis As a political science major with an interest in the Spanish language, Josh Thompson ’17 knew that when he studied abroad, he wanted to be in Latin America. “Spain is crawling with American students,” he says.

“When you’re around a lot of English speakers, it’s really tempting to speak English.”

He sought advice from Amherst alumni. One advised him to study in a place where he couldn’t otherwise visit or live. Thompson—who is from Greensboro, N.C.—settled on Cuba.

He spent the Fall 2015 semester taking courses in Cuban art history and the political economy of capitalism at the University of Havana.

American news coverage of Cuba is one-dimensional, he says. “You read about a place that’s frozen in time—old cars, old buildings.” While it’s true that Cubans are very limited materially, he says, the country is culturally rich.

His study-abroad experience has led to his thesis topic. With Professor Javier Corrales as his adviser, he’ll be writing about “the driving forces behind the recent changes in U.S.–Cuban relations and what’s likely to come from them.” E.G.B. Spring 2016 Amherst 29

TERRIBLE ENOUGH IVAN

AN OLD MAN STOOD ACCUSED OF ASSISTING IN THE MURDERS OF 28,060 JEWS AT THE SOBIBOR DEATH CAMP. ON THE FIRST DAY OF THE TRIAL, LJST PROFESSOR AND WAR CRIMES EXPERT LAWRENCE DOUGLAS WAS AT THE COURTHOUSE. FOUR EXCERPTS FROM HIS NEW BOOK, THE RIGHT WRONG MAN

I. MUNICH, NOV. 30, 2009, 7 A.M. THE CITY IS QUIET AND THE early morning sky still dark, but the plaza in the Nymphenburgerstrasse teems with TV and radio trucks, their generators humming. Hundreds of journalists and spectators gather outside the courthouse, all of us bundled against the cold. Yesterday’s Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that press accreditations have been issued far in excess of what the courtroom can accommodate, and as the crowd swells, the jostling begins. A man in a tuxedo and kipah walks along the perimeter of the crowd, silently handing out candles; Noah Klieger, a retired Israeli journalist and Auschwitz survivor, turns to me and dryly observes,

“These trials bring out the crazies.”

A press release issued by the court had announced that doors would open for accredited journalists at 8 a.m., but a Polizist who is handed the statement stares at it blankly, as if seeing it for the first time. Another policeman shouts inaudible instructions. Although the police have had six months to prepare for this, the opening day of the trial of John “Ivan” Demjanjuk, they appear utterly bewildered, improvising on the spot. Soon the only topic of conversation among the journalists is not the trial about to start, but the staggering absence of organization.

A letter of protest, hastily drafted, is passed through the crowd.

SPRING 2016 AMHERST 31

Demjanjuk lived d in a quiet suburb of Cleveland and became the only person in U.S. history to lose his citizenship twice.

II. JOHN “IVAN” DEMJANJUK WAS BORN IN THE UKRAINE IN 1920 and entered the United States in 1952, settling in the Midwest and becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1958. By the late 1970s, American prosecutors had come to identify the Ford machinist living in a quiet suburb of Cleveland as a former Treblinka guard—and not just any guard. This was the man whose wanton acts of sadism had earned him the fearful sobriquet Ivan Grozny, “Ivan the Terrible.”

In the most highly publicized denaturalization proceeding in American history, Demjanjuk was stripped of his citizenship and extradited to Israel, where he stood trial as Treblinka’s Ivan Grozny. Convicted in 1988 and sentenced to death, Demjanjuk idled in an Israeli prison for five years, while his appeals ran their course.

Then, in the summer of 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court tossed out his conviction. Newly gathered evidence from the crumbling Soviet Union made clear the Israelis had the wrong Ivan. Demjanjuk returned to the United States a free man, bringing to a close one of the most famous cases of mistaken identity in legal history.

But it hardly spelled the end of Demjanjuk’s legal travails.

Resettled in suburban Cleveland with his American citizenship restored, Demjanjuk became the subject of a fresh denaturalization proceeding. While Demjanjuk might not have been Treblinka’s Ivan the Terrible, evidence showed that he had nonetheless been a “terrible enough Ivan” who served at Sobibor, an equally lethal Nazi death camp. In 2001, Demjanjuk earned the distinction of being the only person in American history to lose his citizenship twice.

Lawrence Douglas is the James G. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought. This article is excerpted from The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Triall and is reprinted by permission. © 2016 Princeton University Press

32 Amherst Spring 2016

Still protesting his innocence, he remained barricaded in his middle-class ranch house in Seven Hills, Ohio, while American offi fficials searched fruitlessly for a country willing to accept him.

After Poland and Ukraine declined, Germany, which had long resisted accepting alleged Nazi collaborators from the United States, somewhat surprisingly said yes. Demjanjuk was flown fl to Munich, arriving on German soil in the spring of 2009.

III. I WAS DRAWN TO MANY ASPECTS OF THE DEMJANJUK CASE. Primary among them were how the vectors of law and Cold War politics converged in Demjanjuk’s trials, and how the case brought into stark relief the efforts ff of three diff fferent domestic legal systems—the American, Israeli and German—to address the vexed issue of collaboration in Nazi genocide. I was also ff interested in how the trial threw into stark relief the difference between treating state-sponsored extermination as a special challenge—one demanding legal innovation—and treating it as an ordinary crime. Finally, I wanted to explore how legal systems develop and learn from their mistakes, how doctrine responds to the pressures of politics, and how law accommodates, digests and frames the conclusions of history.

My interest was less with Demjanjuk the person. No one familiar with the case can seriously doubt that Demjanjuk served as a camp guard—not just at Sobibor, but at Majdanek and Flossenbürg, too. All the same, no evidence has ever been adduced to suggest that Demjanjuk distinguished himself by his cruelty, and I am prepared to believe that he did not. I can also readily imagine how, by the end of his life, he had come to view himself as a victim—of the Germans, who took the young Red Army soldier as a prisoner of war, impressed him into guard service and ultimately brought him to trial; of the Israelis, who demonized and nearly executed him in a badly handled case of mistaken identity; and of the Americans, whose dogged determination to see him brought to justice must have looked like prosecutorial vindictiveness to an old man with deep reserves of self-pity.

It is true that Demjanjuk never chose to be taken prisoner of war by the Wehrmacht or trained by the SS to become a death camp guard. But it is equally true that once assigned to Sobibor, Demjanjuk had a meaningful opportunity to avoid assisting in genocide. Life, particularly in times of historic upheaval, often thrusts us in situations not of our making. In such situations we must ask ourselves whether a diffi fficult, or even terrible choice is the same as having no choice at all.

IV. AFTER FOUR HOURS OF DELAY—FIRST THE INTERMINABLE wait in line, then screenings and pat-downs—I finally manage to enter Gerischtssaal 101. A windowless octagon with seats for 147 observers, its vaulted ceiling bears a Brutalist touch: massive decorative blocks of poured concrete loom overhead, seemingly ready at any instant to jar loose and crush anyone sitting below.

PAGES 31 AND 33: JOHANNES SIMON/GETTY IMAGES

“We, the undersigned, regret the absence of professionalism….” But to no avail. Two hours pass. A correspondent for Bavarian radio calls out, “As of 9:45 we will return fire!”—an fi allusion to Hitler’s words announcing the start of the Second World War. Instead of creating cordons and an orderly queue, the police now inexplicably herd the crowd into a crude funnel, its mouth ff the leading to a single courthouse doorway. A sign marks off Demjanjuk Sammelzone—the Demjanjuk Collection Zone. Is this someone’s idea of a joke? The Nazi era left the German language contaminated, inflected fl with dreaded associations, and Sammelzone suggests the collection areas where Jews were ff to the killing centers. “The only thing sent to be packed off missing,” comments one observer stuck in the throng, “are the train tracks.”

For some, the fact that a crowd containing numerous Jewish journalists and several Holocaust survivors is being shoved toward a single narrow portal creates resonances that cannot be ignored. But others, and perhaps especially the Germans themselves, find reassurance in the disorganization. The SS, after all, was terrifyingly efficient. ffi Not so the Munich police. See, we have changed.

The courtroom is abuzz with correspondents from around the globe hustling to interview Nazihunting luminaries and other leading members of the European Jewish community. Serge Klarsfeld, the Frenchman who helped capture and prosecute Klaus Barbie, chats with Efraim Zuroff ff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem office, ffi the world’s leading organization for tracking Nazi fugitives, which had listed Demjanjuk at the top Demjanjuk emerging from court. of its most-wanted list. Journalists hover close by, His defense sought to unmask the scribbling down snippets of their conversation. proceeding as a political trial, The chatter in Gerichtssall 101 dies down as a door attacking at every turn the at the side of the chamber swings open. Flanked by motives, purpose, justification two medical orderlies and a court-appointed doctor, and fairness of the case. the defendant is maneuvered into the courtroom in a wheelchair. A sky blue blanket drawn to his chin covers his legs and body, and a blue baseball cap juts low over his brow. His eyes are closed—it’s unclear whether While motions alleging prejudice typically are brought he is asleep or just fending off ff the explosion of camera flashes. against a specifi fic judge for harboring a personal bias against Photographers, cameramen and videographers clamor in front the defendant, Busch’s opening salvo is directed against the of the wheelchair, shooting away in a frenzy, as if Gisele Bündentire German judicial system. It is an accusation he will repeat chen had just sashayed into the Munich courtroom. Demjanover and over: the German legal system is trying to make good juk’s mouth hangs open; he appears to mutter words or moan on its pathetic record of dealing with Nazis by trying a man who in pain. Cameras flash. A helpless octogenarian, wheelchairis not a German and was never a Nazi. The charges against his bound, grimacing before a relentless onslaught of publicity: it client, Busch angrily declaims, represent a moral and legal douis not a sight to burnish the criminal justice system’s reputation. ble standard, a distortion of history and a bald violation of the fly slips from Demjanjuk’s feet, revealing a pair German constitution. What of all the SS higher-ups who were The blanket briefl of incongruously jaunty Puma sneakers. either acquitted or never even charged in the fi first place? Let us At 11:15 three robed judges, accompanied by two “jurors” not forget, Busch cries, that his client was taken as a prisoner of and two alternatives, shuffle ffl into the courtroom and find their war by the Wehrmacht. The killing of Red Army POWs was the places behind a raised semicircular table of dark walnut. We first Holocaust! Ukrainian auxiliaries and death camp guards are instructed to take our seats, and the presiding judge, a bald had no more freedom of action than the Jews themselves! His 60-year-old jurist named Ralph Alt, politely calls the court to client was never on the radar of German prosecutors until order. “I apologize in advance for the delay,” he begins. “We Americans forced them to take the case. New standards are were unable to calculate the length of the entrance procedure.” being used against his client. The rules of the game are being Derisive laughter ripples through the audience. changed.

Bearded and bespectacled, Alt is soft-spoken and seemingly Busch’s words tumble forth in seemingly tone-deaf fashion, unaccustomed to speaking into a microphone, pressing the and the parallel he draws between his client and the Jewish “on” button with needless vigor. A passionate chess player, victims of genocide leaves spectators and journalists alike he is known as a thorough, intelligent jurist with a strong unmurmuring their disapproval. But his opening barrage clearly derstanding of white-collar crime. But he has never before outlines the defense’s strategy, which is to challenge the very presided over a trial involving Nazi-era crimes, least of all one legitimacy of the proceeding at the most fundamental level. attracting international attention.

In normal criminal trials, the law operates in a safe zone in Through the entirety of the Demjanjuk trial, he will remain which the motives and purposes of the prosecution and the intent on treating it like any other criminal case before an orrationale for the imposition of a sanction remain beyond the dinary German court. Whatever the shortcomings of such an terms of dispute. Criminal law draws a line between violence approach—shortcomings revealed in the court’s very failure to permitted by the state in the form of a punishment and vioplan for the first day’s throngs—they can hardly be described lence prohibited by the state as a delict; and in the overwhelmas idiosyncratic. Since the Federal Republic’s assumption of ing majority of criminal cases, this distinction is never called sovereignty, its legal system has tenaciously insisted that Nazi into question—nor is the state’s authority to draw it. Not so with atrocities be treated as ordinary crimes, requiring no special political trials. Political trials blur the distinction between statecourts, procedures or laws to bring their perpetrators to justice. authorized and state-prohibited force; they interrogate the It is an approach that will be tested, challenged and attacked purposes and procedures of prosecution. Busch will seek to unat every turn by Demjanjuk’s defense. No sooner has Judge mask the proceeding as a political trial, attacking at every turn Alt apologized for the logistical snafu than Demjanjuk’s chief the motives, purpose, justification fi and fairness of the case. counsel, a towering, bearded and choleric criminal defense Clamorous disorder; the dramatic entrance of a suff ffering, lawyer from Ratingen (on the outskirts of Dusseldorf ) named wheelchair-bound defendant; and an infl flammatory openUlrich Busch, is on his feet. The indictment has not even been ing challenge by the defense: It is 11:50 a.m. Little more than read, and Busch is seeking dismissal on the grounds of Befanhalf an hour old, the trial has already delivered exactly what a genheit—prejudice. t global news cycle craves from a legal spectacle. k Spring 2016 Amherst 33

Shakespeare WHILE TEACHING HAMLET AT THE LOCAL JAIL, AN AMHERST PROFESSOR WONDERS IF THE YEARS BEHIND BARS MIGHT BE PRECIOUS.

BY ILAN STAVANS Illustration by Barbara Ott

in

“WHY, THEN, ’TIS NONE TO you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison.” Try this line—Hamlet — , Act II, Scene 2—not in a regular classroom, but inside the prison system itself. You’ll be stunned by its unforeseen resonances.

I currently have about 30 students in a course I’m teaching on Shakespeare at the Hampshire County Jail in Northampton. Half of them are inmates, all men between the ages of 22 and 45, black, white and Latino. The other half are mainly from Amherst College, with a few Five College students in the mix. The combination of these two populations is conducive to deep knowledge.

At the outset, the inmates, who average a high school

Prison | 34 | Spring 2016 | Amherst |

“The life of the mind behind bars needs to be more fertile,” writes Stavans.

“Literature, I’m convinced, holds a key.”

diploma or its equivalent and whom I refer to, in the classroom, as “inside students,” at first fi looked intimidated by their counterparts from the outside, all clearly wellequipped for academic research.

And vice versa: the outside students felt like novices in contrast to the inmates’ experience in the art of living. Happily, it took no time for anxiety to give place to conviviality. Soon this brought levelheadedness. The way the two student bodies complement each other feels magical.

Teaching in state and federal penal institutions these days is largely oriented toward earning a high school equivalency diploma.

College courses have faced immense hurdles since 1994, when

LETTERS TO STAVANS While teaching the Shakespeare course, Stavans has

collected emails and handwritten letters from students. Here are three, condensed and reprinted with the students’ permission.

What would change if we knew more?

Hi Professor Stavans, I’ve been meaning to write to you about a conversation we had in class two weeks ago. You asked: Would your opinions about Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets change if you knew more about him?

Particularly, if you knew he was an asshole?

In response, I said that my opinions would change. I brought up Tiger Woods and explained how his career came crashing down almost overnight when the scandal broke about his aff ffairs with multiple women. Others in

36 Amherst Spring 2016

the class disagreed and argued that one’s merits as a writer, actor, singer or sports player should only be based on their abilities in that particular field.

I couldn’t help but think about my opinions about the inmates. I asked myself a tough question: Would my opinions about some of these men change if I knew what crimes they committed? We are only allowed to interact with the inmates on a depersonalized level. We know nothing about their criminal histories or families or upbringings. I wonder what would

change if we knew more. What would change if, prior to enrolling in the class, we were given a sheet with their names and crimes written next to them?

In the podcast we listened to, the narrator described his own experience finding out about the criminal pasts of the actors he worked with while putting on a production of Hamlet in a highsecurity prison.

He described how strange and confusing it was to find out that someone he had come to know and like was a murderer.

He explained, “It felt like they have

betrayed me. But strangely, I felt that I had betrayed them too.”

I wonder if I would experience the same thing.

Would these people I have come to know and like become different people entirely? Would they, like Tiger Woods, transform overnight? I’d like to think that I would give people the benefit of the doubt, but I just don’t know. And that’s a bit sad to me. Should we learn to judge people less on their past actions and more on who they are now? Should we have more faith that people can change?

Best, Maggie

Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which overturned a section of the Higher Education Act of 1965, thus taking away basic higher education grants to prisoners. The solution has been to fund these eff fforts independently. Mine is paid for by Amherst.

All of those enrolled, without exception, get college credit. Several of my Amherst colleagues— Barry O’Connell, Martha Saxton and Kristin Bumiller—have taught before me at the Hampshire County Jail, among the nation’s most progressive prisons of its kind when it comes to curriculum.

They were trained through the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. They, in turned, have taught me.

As a literary scholar, I am usually interested as much in textual analysis as I am in the ethical, cultural and ideological implications of text. My syllabus focuses on Shakespeare’s later plays ((Hamlet, King Learr and The Tempest), t as well on as his sonnets. We also take a tour of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, the King’s Men and Europe at the dawn of the 17th century. In addition, I invoke responses to Shakespeare by commentators such as Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

Frank Kermode and Helen Vendler, as well as by non-Europeans like Jorge Luis Borges and Ismail Kadare. Students watch Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet and Helen Mirren as Prospero on screen, scrutinizing their every move. They survey Renaissance London in various ways, including through the eyes of British playwright Tom Stoppard, who co-wrote the screenplay of Shakespeare in Love.

Assignments include performing memorized segments of one of the dramas and writing in the creative mode: plays, stories and essays. There are cameras in the room recording at all times. The class meets on Wednesdays for two hours. I have three Amherst students who serve as TAs; they transport the outside students to and from the jail and have tutorial sessions with the inside students twice a week, in which they help with the reading and writing.

Along the way, I keep on asking myself: Does the Bard teach us how to live?

Not surprisingly, among the constellation of characters (Lear, Prospero, Ophelia, Gloucester, Miranda, Ariel and Caliban), the Danish prince is the indisputable favorite. The play, written a few years after Shakespeare lost his only son, Hamnet, and around the time his own father also died, is about fathers and sons, a theme everyone in my class has something to say about. Other themes are electrifying too: succession, ghosts and, especially, revenge.

But it is the question of Hamlet’s madness—or the way he pretends to be mad—that incites the most heated reactions. Can criminals understand his mindset better than the rest of us?

I asked this question after everyone listened to episode 218 of NPR’s This American Life. It describes an eff ffort to stage Act V of Hamlett with inmates (several of them rotating the role of the prince) at the high-security Missouri Eastern Correctional Center.

My version of hell on earth Hi Professor Stavans, Hope you are doing well.

I have been thinking about the discussion we had in class about Act III in King Lear being the closest Shakespeare comes to describing hell on earth.

You asked what our version of hell was. Some students spoke about darkness and the lack of human contact.

Others spoke about chaos and being around people all the time. My version of hell is something that I have seen play out in my life. I am terrified of being a burden to my family and having a negative rather than positive presence in their lives.

A couple of years ago, my family and

I found out that my grandfather had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

It started with little things: misplacing objects around the house and forgotten appointments here and there. Slowly it began to be more obvious. Every time I went back to Mumbai I would meet my grandfather. He’d say, “Oh, Khushy.

You’ve become so tall. You must be taller than I am.”

He’d take me by the hand and lead me to the closest mirror and compare our heights. I did indeed grow taller and stronger, while my grandfather was shrinking with age.

But there came the time when he’d follow that same ritual of greeting two days in a row. And then

One of the interviewees in the show asserts, in a nutshell, that it indeed takes a felon to know a felon.

Fittingly, my students, inside and out, were of two minds about this statement. They empathized deeply with the prince’s dilemma—one of them, an inmate, even argued in favor of vengeance (“Eye-for-an-eye is law in the hood”). Others thought acting is acting: in make-believe, you don’t have to kill in order to act like a killer. “Before and after the crime, we are always actors,” said an inmate to me.

Hamlet’s statement that nature is empty of morality and that it’s the mind’s eye that makes things good and evil is equally fruitful. All of us converge in the same classroom having made decisions that

twice on the same day.

The last time I went home, he hugged me with the same love and aff ffection he has always shown me. However, he didn’t compare our heights. Later, when I was sitting with him, he asked, “So, Arati, you must be married now?” Arati is the name of my aunt, his daughter.

I don’t know if he remembers me any longer, if I am somewhere buried deep within his memory.

Hell to me isn’t going to a place where I will suff ffer alone and isolated.

It is being alive and watching my family suff ffer. Having them watch as I lose my memory, my identity, while still

being around them physically. Having them suff ffer the heartbreak of watching me turn into a shell of my former self, changing the fond memories they have of me.

Perhaps that is what drove King Lear to insanity, seeing his daughters betray him during his lifetime. When he meets Edgar disguised as a madman, suff ffering, he asks him, “Didst thou give all to thy two daughters, and art thou come to this?”

Going through his own personal hell, he cannot imagine a worse condition to be bestowed on any other person.

I’d love to hear more about your thoughts on this.

Best, Khushy

led us there. What we get from the classroom may help us better understand those decisions.

Among the most memorable aspect of teaching at the Hampshire County Jail is the writing. An Amherst student wrote a splendid essay on her father’s betrayal of trust when he had an affair ff that broke the family apart. Another refl flected on the fact that she seeks distance from her mother even as she perceives her as a role model.

A third compared Hamlet’s histrionics to Don Quixote’s.

In turn, an inmate rewrote Hamlet, relocating the action among rappers. Another crafted a masterful story about a homeless man, who, after being repeatedly beaten by the police, desperately looks for a bathroom in which to shower, to cleanse himself from Spring 2016 Amherst 37

the pain. A third chronicled his life of heroin addiction and the degree to which the drug is the only freedom he truly cherishes. I am dumbfounded by the high quality of some of the writing.

A couple of inmates are now in the process of turning their writing into novels. Another one is writing a memoir. The facilities at the Hampshire County Jail don’t allow for Internet access. And the time they are allowed to use a computer is limited. Still, they take turns.

And they share their drafts with one another.

All this is to say that literature palpitates uniquely in this setting.

It feels alive, full of possibilities.

Inmates read passionately: they exercise their freedom by delving into a text with gusto. This is a medium that allows them to study human behavior scrupulously.

The common, mistaken, perception is that penal institutions are where felons go to rot. Somewhere in the future there is a promise of redemption, but it is just a promise. In my experience, inmates, for the most part, recognize themselves at fault for their present condition. That isn’t the issue. The issue is how not to rot, how to mature while in confinement. fi Literature, I’m convinced, holds a key. The inmates’ minds need to grow. They have all the time in the world. And at least those I have in the classroom are eager to become critical thinkers. They want to recalibrate themselves. We all know that as soon as they leave the jail, some will relapse immediately.

Others, a minority perhaps, will position themselves anew. Either way, the life of the mind behind bars needs to be more fertile. It

Through your eyes, I glimpsed my true self Professor Stavans, Who would have thought that we— inmates—could contribute and even excel in a classroom with such gifted Amherst College and other college students? I guess the short answer to that question is you. You made it obvious that all of your students would be equals, and as equals would be held to the same standards.

As we made our way to the visit room for our first class, there was nervousness and anxiety—worry about fitting in, fear of being overshadowed by the welleducated college students. Ah, but on the way back—I

38 Amherst Spring 2016

wish you could have observed the shift in perspective: conversations about paper topics; laughter over input from specific students, both “inside” and “outside”; and confidence.

Perhaps the most important education we received from your course is the knowledge that there is a world—outside of these barbed-wire fences and concrete walls—that accepts us and wants to hear our opinions.

For some of us, this was the first time we realized we have something of value to off ffer, and that society would be willing to hear us. For others, we realized that our records will

only matter as much as we allow them to, that there are kindhearted, goodminded people who will give a chance to those willing to work for it.

Me, I receive all of these gifts, plus one more. Through these classes I have been able to see myself through the eyes of an educated stranger, one who has willingly overlooked my past and responded to me as I have presented myself to you today.

Through your eyes I have seen myself as intelligent, respectful and respectable.

As hardworking, approachable, opinionated and a good listener. As a leader, and as a person.

Through your eyes

I glimpsed my true self: capable of success and rehabilitation and, most important, deserving of a chance to grow to new heights. Who knew?

You did, Professor Stavans, as did Professor Bumiller, Professor Saxton and Professor O’Connell. Thank you for this program, for your belief in us as redeemable and for making us see ourselves as you have seen us from the very start—as equals.

The term “gentleman and a scholar” seems at once overly cliché and completely fitting here!

Forever in your debt, André

doesn’t matter what comes next: in and of themselves, the years in prison might be precious. If just one felon is able to achieve a single, lasting epiphany from reading Shakespeare, and if from that epiphany a single outside student considers how humans who lost their liberty learn from its absence, the effort ff is worth it.

In any given ecosystem, each individual learns diff fferently.

Teaching, in my view, is less about lessons than about creating an atmosphere where heterogeneous minds inspire each other, about showing people how to ask questions, how to turn information into knowledge—and knowledge into wisdom. Inside the jail, those tasks have a distinct urgency.

Interacting with Amherst students shows inmates, in tangible ways, an existential path closed to them before. And the other way around. Not long ago, I asked the entire class if they believed the interaction between inside and outside was helpful. Outside students said that at the Hampshire County Jail they fashioned a side of themselves diff fferent from who they are on campus. Similarly, inmates stated they got permission in the course to be brainy, less rough.

“These two hours a week make me intelligent,” one said.

The Talmud says the best way to learn is through example. It is foolish—nah, stupid!—to think of the incarcerated as ignorant and of the rest of us as intelligent. To fully explore the intricacies of our world, it is crucial to appreciate the magic of one’s own intellect. Shakespeare is a superb conduit for such an endeavor. It is true: “Why, then, ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” k Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst and publisher of Restless Books. His latest book is Quixote: The Novel and the World (Norton), a finalist fi for the Marfi field National Award for Arts Writing.

40 After his heart transplant, J.P. Dunn ’79 set out to run a halfmarathon.

43 Should kids have to take algebra?

Photograph by Beth Perkins

ALUMNI IN THE WORLD

Beyond Campus

Ph.D. student Christopher Lim ’12 is studying how HIV uses its viral proteins to evade the defenses of the human body.

Spring 2016 Amherst 39

BEYOND CAMPUS

While recovering from a heart transplant, an alumnus set a goal: running a half-marathon within the year.

BY KATHERINE DUKE ’05 GOALS U Starting a race is a

heart-pounding moment for anyy runner. When J.P. Dunn ’79 took his first steps in the Philadelphia Half-Marathon last fall, the heart that beat in his chest had been there for less than a year.

40 Amherst Spring 2016

Setting His Heart on It

COURTESY J.P. DUNN

Dunn was on the soccer and track teams at Amherst and ran his first marathon at age 31. During fi the San Francisco Bay to Breakers race in 1990, he suddenly found he could run no more than 100 feet without getting “completely exhausted.”

He was diagnosed with cardiac arrhythmias, which worsened in subsequent years. His mother had the same condition—hereditary cardiomyopathy, the result of a rare gene mutation. She died not long after her heart transplant, as did a cousin who was awaiting a transplant.

Dunn received his first pacemaker in 2003. “But then, after the last marathon I ran, in 2008, I rapidly went downhill,” he says. His cardiologist told him he’d eventually need a transplant.

He was placed on a heart transplant list in July 2014. By the following month, he was too weak to continue his ophthalmology practice.

On Halloween night he got the call: a donor had been found. His transplant, performed the next

day, was initially a glowing success. Dunn found it “easier than a root canal,” and among his first fi questions was, “How much can I exercise?”

Ten days later, though, the sac around his new heart began to bleed, and he faced another eighthour surgery and five fi weeks in the hospital. To motivate himself through recovery, Dunn set a goal: “running the half-marathon in Philadelphia within a year,” ideally in under three hours.

His doctors were supportive.

His wife, sister and two daughters promised to run with him. So did his Amherst roommate, soccer teammate and fraternity brother Peter Friedrichs ’79, a minister living near Philadelphia.

Dunn’s training progressed from walking the hospital hallways to running 10-mile “slogs,” but there were setbacks, including infections and kidney failure.

The race took place on Oct. 31, 2015—364 days after the transplant. “I was really worried that

Peter Friedrichs ’79 (left) had never run more than a 5K when he promised to run 13.1 miles with Dunn.

J.P. Dunn ’79 MAJORS: LATIN AND PSYCHOLOGY

His training progressed from walking hospital hallways to running 10mile “slogs.”

I was not going to finish,” says Dunn. But, even after pulling a hamstring near the end, he did: “Peter; my sister; and Cindy, my wife—we all finished, all together, in two hours and 57 minutes.”

Friedrichs, who “had never run more than a 5K” before committing to train with Dunn, describes his friend’s feat as “one of the gutsier performances I’ve ever seen.”

At the finish line, Dunn thought about all the people who’d helped him through the transplant. “I had unbelievable doctors and nurses, and I had tremendous support from friends and family,” he says.

And, of course, he had a donor— an anonymous woman six years his junior—toward whose family he feels tremendous gratitude.

Since the half-marathon, Dunn says he’s been “constantly sick,” struggling with bronchitis, shingles and gout. But he’s set a new goal: Within three years, he’d like to run the mile in the World Transplant Games.

BY EMILY GOLD BOUTILIER BIOCHEM U When HIV infects human cells, it manages the sneaky feat of employing its own enemy.

The virus creates tiny proteins that hijack human cells and distract them from their usual work.

“Basically,” says Christopher Lim’12, “HIV tricks our cells into being little virus factories.”

Lim—a Ph.D. candidate in the molecular biophysics and biochemistry department at Yale—is trying to figure out how this happens. Working in the lab of Yong Xiong, he is studying how HIV uses its viral proteins to evade the defenses of the human body.

“The terms we use is host-virus interaction,” he says. Specifi fically, he is trying to determine the threedimensional structure of the viral proteins.

Lim credits an Amherst biochemistry class and its professor,

Sheila Jaswal, as his main influfl ences in choosing this area of study. He says the junior-level course taught him that, whether in basic biology research or in drug design, it’s essential to understand the structures of proteins. “That class informed the way I think about biology,” he says.

His Amherst thesis project with Anthony Bishop also sparked his interest in structural biology.

Now in his second year at Yale, Lim is part of the Medical Research Scholars Program, in which Ph.D. students in the basic sciences take extra courses—similar to those taken by first-year medical students—and seminars with doctors and medical students.

“We ask them about the medical needs that basic science can help with,” he says. The program’s goal is to understand how basic scientists can discover the unmet needs of physicians and bring that knowledge to the lab.

Christopher Lim ’12 MAJOR: BIOCHEMISTRY

“HIV tricks our cells into being little virus factories.”

Lim’s career goal is to conduct research at the molecular level, but with medical needs in mind.

In fact, while Lim’s career goal is to conduct research at the molecular level, he hopes to do that work with medical needs in mind.

Because of his experience at Amherst, he says, he is thinking about pursuing a career in academic teaching. “Amherst informed how much I care about good instruction,” Lim says.

For now, in addition to his classes and lab work, Lim is working to increase diversity in STEM fields: He is co-founder and copresident of the Yale chapter of oSTEM (Out in Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics).

“Our main purpose is to increase the visibility of LGBTQ scientists here,” he says—to demonstrate by example that one can have a productive career as an out scientist.

“Career-wise, my ambition is to be that role model,” he says. “I aspire to be that visible person in the department.”

BETH PERKINS

Hijacking Human Cells In the lab, he studies how HIV evades the defenses of the human body. Outside, he’s making STEM a bigger tent.

Spring 2016 Amherst 41

The Mind Controls the Brain

BY KATHERINE DUKE ’05 NEUROSCIENCE U How do people perceive—and screen out—sensations within their own bodies, such as touches on their fingertips?

Catherine Kerr ’85 presented a lecture and slideshow in December on the neural mechanisms involved in these perceptions. Sitting next to her was an elderly man in a robe and spectacles, who occasionally interjected comments and questions with the help of a translator, while assistants brought him water and tea. The man was Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama.

He was learning from Kerr at the Sera Monastery in Karnataka, India, along with an audience of thousands of young Tibetan Buddhist monks.

Kerr’s talk with the Dalai Lama (now on YouTube) was “like having a conversation with a brilliant grandfather,” she says, “and he asks really smart questions”— 42 Amherst Spring 2016

In true liberal arts fashion, brain science reminds her of a line from Hamlet.

Catherine Kerr ’85 MAJOR: AMERICAN STUDIES

A diagnosis of multiple myeloma led her to train as a neuroscientist.

mostly about how the latest fi findings in neuroscience relate to Buddhist concepts of the connection between mind and body. “He’s asked the great monasteries to incorporate scientifi fic training into the monks’ training,” she says. “and that’s an incredibly novel and exciting thing.”

Kerr, an assistant professor of family medicine at Brown University, spoke at the Sera Monastery as part of a conference on “Perception, Concepts and Self: Contemporary Scientific fi and Buddhist Perspectives.” The conference was put on by the Amherst-affiliated ffi Mind & Life Institute, where Kerr is a fellow.

It may seem surprising for modern Western science to intersect with an ancient Eastern religion in this way, but Kerr has long studied the brain from an interdisciplinary perspective. She earned a Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins in 1996. A diagnosis of multiple myeloma while she was a Harvard

COURTESY CATHERINE KERR

Mindfulness can alter the way people perceive sensations within their own bodies.

postdoc sparked her interest in studying patients’ understandings of the medical system. That led her to research the placebo effect ff and train as a neuroscientist. Seeking ways to cope with the stress and fatigue from her cancer, she also embraced qigong, a Chinese mindfulness practice involving meditation, breathing and movement.

She has spent the past decade investigating the question, “How does mindfulness change the brain?”

Her Harvard research team published findings in 2011 suggesting that training in mindfulness—in directing specific fi attention to their own bodily experiences—can give people greater “control over the neurons in the primary somatosensory cortex, which is where sensations enter the brain from the body.” This can allow people to “turn the volume up or turn the volume down” on their perceptions of each sensation.

That same year, Kerr arrived at Brown, where she is now director of translational neuroscience for the university’s Contemplative Studies Initiative. Today, her lab studies the eff ffects of mind-body exercises on the neural systems and immune systems of breast cancer survivors.

Kerr sees this interface of mind and body, and of science and spirituality, as a promising frontier, with potential implications for the treatment of depression and pain, and even for our understanding of how the body regulates its own temperature.

“There are a lot of phenomena that some of these Eastern practices have explored that have not been talked about in Western scific settings,” she says. In true entifi liberal arts fashion, she notes how this reminds her of the line from Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Every year millions of high school students need to solve for x.

Should they?

BY EMILY GOLD BOUTILIER QUESTIONS U Why does every U.S. high

school student have to take algebra, geometry and precalculus?

Ninety-fi five percent of jobs don’t need them, says Andrew Hacker ’51, a professor emeritus of political science at Queens College.

And, he argues, those courses “don’t help us make sense of the federal budget or the economics of corporate America.” What’s more, “there’s no evidence that mathematics makes you more thoughtful in other areas.”

“I kept asking the why question, which goes back to Amherst,” he says. “I’ve always thought that the center of the liberal arts is that three-letter word.” No answer convinced him. So he asked a second question: Is there a better way?

Hacker—whose political science research relies heavily on the use of numbers—went to the math department at Queens College a few years ago and asked if he could teach, experimentally, one of the introductory courses. He’s now taught the class for three semesters.

In it, he covers mathematical literacy, also called numeracy. Students learn to analyze election results, for example, and to interpret demographic data.

Hacker’s new book, The Math Myth And Other

A political scientist, he went to his college’s math department and asked to teach a course.

Andrew Hacker ’51 MAJOR: POLITICAL SCIENCE

Algebra doesn’t “help us make sense of the federal budget or the economics of corporate America.”

AISHA HASSAN/QUEENS COLLEGE

Is Algebra a Waste of Time?

STEM Delusions (The New Press), makes the case that more harm than good comes from making all students complete a prolonged mathematics sequence in high school and college. He believes this leads students to drop out, and that failing math prevents many otherwise-talented students from completing college.

“Mathematics, both pure and applied, is integral to our civilization,” he wrote in a 2012 New York Times op-ed. “But for most adults, it is more feared or revered than understood.”

And as he points out in a February 2016 Times op-ed, “The Wrong Way to Teach Math,” even after all those years of school, 82 percent of adults in a national survey could not compute the cost of a carpet when told its dimensions and price per square yard.

Hacker recalls the last math course he took as a student. “Freshman year at Amherst, we all had to take a new course combining calculus and physics,” he says.

“Our teacher, Robert Breusch, was heroic.”

Hacker started teaching college courses in 1955, inspired by Amherst political science professor Earl Latham. “Not only was I entranced by his classes but, essentially, I wanted to become him,” Hacker says.

“He was the consummate teacher.”

Sixty-one years later, Hacker continues to teach two courses a year. “I figure I’ll keep doing it as long as I can remember my students’ names,” he says.

Spring 2016 Amherst 43

BEYOND CAMPUS

“A Better Way to Bring People Home”

BY KATHERINE DUKE ’05 CRIME U When the U.S. Sentencing Commission reduced the prison terms for certain federal drug crimes, and ruled that these reductions can be applied retroactively, thousands of federal prisoners became eligible for early release. In the coming years, as many as 46,000 of them will be released early—about two years earlier than g anticipated, on average.

Malcolm C. Young ’68 is heading a new effort ff to help hundreds of these people move back into the wider world.

“Currently, when a person leaves the federal system, they’re passed off ff to federal probation, which provides supervision.

Federal probation is overworked ffed,” says Young, a and understaff Washington, D.C., lawyer. “Within a matter of months they’re left on their own.”

The new wave of early releases will stretch the probation system even thinner.

Project New Opportunity, which Young founded last year, will “remedy some of the deficiencies fi 44 Amherst Spring 2016

in reentry and demonstrate a better way to bring people home,” he says.

Project staff ff will work with each inmate starting six months to a year before the early release date, figuring out what social support the person will need on the outside and connecting him or her to family members, social workers and faith-based aid organizations.

Funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and run through New York’s Center for Community Alternatives, the project will launch this spring in eastern Virginia, among other areas of the country where there are especially large numbers of early releases or a shortage of halfway houses for them. Young would also like to focus on categories of prisoners who are particularly vulnerable, such as women and military veterans.

A lot is at stake politically in how well these people readjust to life outside of prison, Young says.

Politicians and citizens who oppose sentence reductions fear that inmates released early will return to lives of crime and pose a threat to public safety.

Those who support the shortening of sentences, including Young, fear the same thing, because such

Those who oppose sentence reductions fear that inmates will return to lives of crime.

Those who support early releases fear the same thing.

Malcolm C. Young ’68 MAJOR: AMERICAN STUDIES

“Within a matter of months they’re left on their own.”

recidivism could give sentencereduction “a bad flavor” and prompt judges to halt the trend.

“I personally object to the term ‘early release,’ because the original release date was arbitrarily imposed in the first place,” Young says. “There is research that shows that longer sentences seem to be followed by increased recidivism, not less.”

Young has been concerned with matters of sentencing for decades.

In 1986, building off ff previous work with the National Legal Aid & Defender Association, he founded The Sentencing Project. Now a research and advocacy organization, it works to address racial disparities in sentencing and advocates for alternatives to incarceration.

Young is also leading a research and writing project at the Campaign for Youth Justice on the mistreatment of juveniles prosecuted as adults in Mississippi.

Young describes Project New Opportunity as a sort of bookend to his earlier work. “Thirty years ago I started The Sentencing Project to help keep people out of jail and prison at the front end,” he said in a recent edition of the Amherst class notes. Now he’ll be there to help them as they emerge on the other side. k

COURTESY MALCOLM C. YOUNG

A lot is at stake politically in how well former prisoners adjust to life on the outside.

46 A historian follows one Japanese-American family through World War II. 49 A journalist leads a reader to some truths about mental illness.

Photograph by Peter Ross

ARTS NEWS AND REVIEWS

Amherst Creates

With several solo shows, Eleanor Ray ’09 has established herself as a burgeoning painter in the contemporary art world of New York City.

Spring 2016 Amherst 45

AMHERST CREATES

THE PATRIOTS A historian follows one Japanese-American family from Depression-era Seattle, to the internment camps, to Hiroshima. | BY NICHOLAS MANCUSI ’10

MIDNIGHT IN BROAD DAYLIGHT: A JAPANESE AMERICAN FAMILY CAUGHT BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

By Pamela Rotner Sakamoto ’84 HarperCollins

The dramatic climax comes when Harry is set to invade the main island of his ancestral homeland, where he may have to confront members of his own family.

46 Amherst Spring 2016

Clockwise from top left: Harry Fukuhara (in glasses) interrogating Japanese prisoners of war; Maj. Gen. Percy W. Clarkson pinning an award on Harry; Harry’s parents, Katsuji and Kinu, on their 1911 wedding day in Seattle (their marriage having been arranged in Japan through an exchange of photos); Harry with his brothers Pierce and Frank and their parents; Frank, Harry and Pierce in Kobe in 1945.

NONFICTION U Midnight in Broad Daylight, by historian Pamela Rotner Sakamoto ’84, follows one Japanese-American family from their prewar years on the American West Coast to the irradiated ruins of Hiroshima. This journey is so thematically freighted and robustly researched that one imagines it could have been stretched, if she willed it, to four different ff books: one covering the quintessentially American work ethic of the Japanese immigrant class on the West Coast in the 1930s and their struggles during the Depression; one covering the

shameful indignities visited on that class during their forced internment in wartime camps; one on the unique experience of the Japanese-Americans who enlisted to fight for their country as infantrymen and interpreters; and one on the family-level eff ffects of the dropping of the atomic bombs.

Harry Fukuhara was born in Seattle on Jan. 1, 1920, to Kinu and Katsuji Fukuhara. As the child of Japanese immigrants, he was known as nisei, along with his siblings, Frank, Victor, Pierce and Mary.

Although systematic and bureaucratic prejudices

Photographs courtesy of Harry Fukuhara (4) and National Archives and Records Administration (top left)

“

made life more diffi fficult for them as immigrants, the children had a fully American childhood. The town of Auburn, Wash., embraced the family as upstanding. However, after the Great Depression corroded the family’s finances fi and Katsuji succumbed to an illness, Kinu made the wrenching decision to move her children back to Japan.

For Harry, though, home would always be in America. He and Mary moved back to the United States after just a few years in Japan, parting with their mother and other siblings. Forced to fend for themselves, Harry and Mary made ends meet.

That is, until the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the antiJapanese sentiment that infl flamed the country and the establishment of the internment camps.

If the injustice and irony of the camps can be expressed in a single image, perhaps best would be a photograph of the residents of the Tulare Camp— into which Harry found himself forced— organizing a Fourth of July festival, including a “threequarter-mile-long parade, sumo and judo contests, relays, and a tug of war,” Sakamoto writes. “World War I veterans marched with pride. A parade offiffi cial read the Declaration of Independence and the audience sang ‘America.’”

Residents of the internment When the call went out among the camps for intercamp held a preters fluent in both JapaJuly 4 festival. nese and English, Harry Vets marched knew that he was perfectly suited, and he enlisted with with pride. honor. He quickly set himself apart as one of the best in his class and found himself sent to the front lines of the “Island Hopping” campaign, despite the fact that he had almost no military training.

During this time, in alternating chapters, we see the story of the family members who remained in Japan, as conscription looms and the situation on the home front quickly deteriorates.

The dramatic climax comes when Harry is set to invade the main island of his ancestral homeland, where he may be forced to confront members of his own family clothed in the enemy’s uniform.

That Sakamoto is able to tell such a long and multifaceted story with readable omnipresence is a remarkable achievement, and is clearly the product of many years of research and interviews. But more than just an engrossing tale of a family riven by war, this book is a valuable document that captures the lived experience of a group of Americans, patriotic despite the treatment they received from their government, who deserve as thorough a chronicle as our historians can offer. ff Nicholas Mancusi ’10 has written for The New York Times Book Review and many other publications.

REBECCA CLARKE

SHORT TAKES

This spring, the books bounce from Detroit to Jericho, from public housing to higher learning, and from grandfather to grandkids. BY KATHERINE DUKE ’05 Start by Reclaiming Travel,l with Ilan Stavans, the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture, and Joshua Ellison (Duke University Press). Study The Battle Over Peleliu: Islander, Japanese, r by Stephen C. Murray ’66 (University of and American Memories of War, Alabama Press). r by George Grab onto Rachmaninoff ’s Cape: A Nostalgia Memoir, Rousseau ’62 (Virtuoso Books). Witness The Battle of Jericho, by Walter Marks ’55 (Top Tier Lit). Try Dreaming Out Loud: African American k edited by Horace A. Porter ’72 (University Of Iowa Novelists at Work, Press).

Suddenly there’s a Surprise: The Poetics of the Unexpected from Milton to Austen, by Christopher R. Miller ’90 (Cornell University Press). Ilya Somin ’95 reaches out with The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain (The University of Chicago Press). Elaine Chiew ’91 serves you a story in Cooked Up: Food Fiction d (New Internationalist). Aimee E. Newell ’92 from Around the World presents The Badge of a Freemason (Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library).

Lila Corwin Berman ’98 introduces you to Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroitt (The University of Chicago Press).

Richard F. Teichgraeber III ’71 edits The Higher Learning in America: The Annotated Edition: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, by Thorstein Veblen (Johns Hopkins University Press). Coeditor Lawrence J. Vale ’81 takes on Public Housing Myths: Perception, Reality, and Social Policyy (Cornell University Press).

Finally, environmentalist and TV personality David Suzuki ’58 pens Letters to My Grandchildren (Greystone Books).

Spring 2016 Amherst 47

AMHERST CREATES

TINY TREASURES An alumna’s paintings “suggest a reverse hubris, a pride in how much she can do with so little,” says one art critic. | BY RACHEL ROGOL

SOLO EXHIBITION Eleanor Ray ’09 Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects

“Each mark plays a bigger role in the overall image on a small painting,” says Ray, whose next show runs May 14–July 19 in Los Angeles.

PAINTING U Eleanor Ray ’09 names two artistic infl fluences: 20th-century painters Pierre Bonnard, a Post-Impressionist known for his intense use of color, and Giorgio Morandi, who specialized in still lifes. With pops of color and calming scenes of interior spaces, Ray’s own paintings acknowledge these infl fluences while inhabiting a world entirely their own.

Originally from Gainesville, Fla., Ray has established herself as a burgeoning painter in the contemporary art world of New York City. Her fi first solo exhibition at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects (SHFAP) impressed renowned art critic Jerry Saltz, who included Ray’s show in his list of the 10 Best Art Shows of 2013.

That same year, critic Jed Perl cited Ray’s work in an article for New Republic. “You have probably never heard of the young painter Eleanor Ray, but she is a virtuoso, no question about it,” he wrote.

“The sizes of the panels on which she paints … suggest a reverse hubris, a pride in how much she can do with so little.”

Described by art critics and journalists as “tiny,” “delicate” and “intimately scaled,” Ray’s works are

made on surfaces smaller than pieces of notebook paper. One of her largest oil paintings, Nora’s Studio, measures just 7 1/4 by 8 inches.

“The small size is important to me right now,” Ray says. “Each mark plays a bigger role in the overall image on a small painting, and the painting exists more quickly on two levels—as an image when seen up close, and then more abstractly when the viewer steps away from it.”

When she arrived at Amherst, Ray, who double majored in English and studio art, had no plans to one day make a living as a painter.

“I didn’t come to Amherst planning to study art,” she says, “but the studio faculty was one of the best parts of my experience there, and I got hooked.”

Her third, and most recent, solo exhibition at SHFAP included nearly 40 small works based on scenes Ray painted while visiting France, Italy, Scotland and Iceland, and around her home in Brooklyn. “I’m painting places that have been particularly memorable to me,” Ray says, “and places that I’m curious to see painted.”

From museums and friends’ studios to churches that house Renaissance fresco paintings, Ray says she’s interested in painting places with specific fi relevance to fellow artists. “Painting has such a long history, which is partly why I was always drawn to it,” she says. “Its past is still alive and shifting in relation to the new.”

Rachel Rogol covers the arts for the Amherst Offi ffice of Communications.

l ONLINE See more of Ray’s paintings at www.eleanorkray.com.

AMHERST CREATES

WAS LINCOLN DEPRESSED?

ANDY WARHOL WAS A HOARDER: INSIDE THE MINDS OF HISTORY’S GREAT PERSONALITIES

By Claudia Kalb ’85 National Geographic

Kalb carefully negotiates the narrow path between sensationalism and skepticism.

“

NONFICTION U You know how hard it is, when you’re sitting with the psychiatrist, to suss out the right diagnosis for your problem, or a loved one’s, so you can get the insurance company to cover the treatment?

Never happened to you? That comes as a surprise, because, as Michelle Obama recently wrote, “roughly one in five fi adults—more than 40 million Americans—suff ffer from a diagnosable mental health condition like depression or anxiety. These conditions aff ffect people of every age and every background: our kids and grandparents, our friends and neighbors.”

That descriptor, “diagnosable,” is at the heart of Claudia Kalb’s delightfully mistitled new book, Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder: Inside the Minds of History’s Great Personalities. The cartoonish title is an indirection, but one carried out with grace, to lead an unsuspecting reader to another truth about mental illness: it is treatable.

Belying the caricatures on the cover (of Princess Di, Einstein, Lincoln, Marilyn Monroe and the pop artist), Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder is neither poppsych nor mental-illness-of-the-moment memoir.

A more poetic title might have been Chaos of Delight. Charles Darwin, one of the 12 historical personages Kalb reports on in the book, suffered ff from something that looks very much like a disorder we would call anxiety. He wrote that “the mind is a chaos of delight.”

Kalb also could have Kalb humancalled her book Twelve Ways izes the lives of Looking at Mental Illness, and an Equal or Greater of Einstein, Number of Ways to Heal and Lincoln, Help. But isn’t George GerPrincess Di. shwin more entertaining fi disorthan attention deficit der? Wouldn’t you rather read about Marilyn Monroe than about borderline personality disorder?

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders describes “Borderline Personality Disorder: 301.83.” Your insurance company insists on that number, 301.83, in order to pay for treatment.

A number is abstract; Kalb reminds us, gently, that Norma Jeane Mortenson was woman of flesh fl (!) and blood, not just a number, a diagnosis or even the fabulous “MM” millions thought they knew.

Kalb humanizes the lives of celebrities as diverse as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Howard Hughes, Christine

MEGAN BROWN

A seasoned journalist leads an unsuspecting reader to some truths about mental illness. | BY PAUL STATT ’78

Jorgensen and Frank Lloyd Wright. Reading that list, Mrs. Obama might ask: Do only white people suff ffer mental anguish? The absence of people of color is unfortunate. Racism haunts American arts and culture, and an analysis of, say, Billie Holiday’s mental health would be fascinating. Careful as she is to consider nature (genetics) and nurture (family), Kalb pretty much avoids political or sociological explanations for her subjects’ suff fferings.

Kalb is the best kind of inquisitive journalist. She writes with style. She gets opinions from all (reasonable) sources. Her skills sharpened by a long career at Newsweek, she carefully negotiates the narrow path between sensationalism and skepticism.

There are plenty of honest questions, for instance, around Mrs. Obama’s one-in-fi five estimate, and Kalb notes that “diagnosing what might be nothing more than a troubling habit raises alarm bells.”

Some cultural critics might say of our fascination with the mental health of celebrities and ourselves—without apparent irony—that we live in a Culture of Narcissism. Others might argue that we’re running for the shelter of mother’s—or father’s or sister’s or brother’s—little helper, looking for that magic pill.

But the drugs and talk therapies that Kalb describes—they work. They save lives. The shame of mental illness prevents too many sufferers ff from getting help. The subversively titled Andy Warhol Was a Hoarderr doesn’t belong on the tell-all shelves; it’s about real science. But if she reaches more readers with the tabloid title, Kalb will have gone some way toward ending that stigma.

Paul Statt ’78 is a Philadelphia-based writer.

Spring 2016 Amherst 49

AMHERST CREATES

COLLECTING CRITICISM OF MUSIC AND MUSICIANS

By William H. Youngren ’53 Impress

WRITING TO LIVE: COMMENTARIES ON LITERATURE AND MUSIC

By William H. Pritchard ’53 Impress

50 Amherst Spring 2016

In books on music and writing, two classmates showcase Amherst’s place in American reviewing. | BY THEODORE IACOBUZIO ’76

CRITICS U Here are two books that put into high relief the best of what Amherst represents in the criticism of music and letters.

The late William H. Youngren ’53, for many years professor of English at Boston College, obtained a second doctorate, this one in music, from Brandeis. He wrote about music in The Atlanticc and elsewhere, along with reviewing new recordings for Fanfare magazine. His classmate William H. Pritchard, Amherst’s Henry Clay Folger Professor of English, Emeritus, and an instrumentalist himself (he plays piano), has gathered some of Youngren’s criticism in a book, Of Music and Musicians.

There are illuminating and unexpected judgments on nearly every page, often stiffened ff by Youngren’s training in musicology: that Paul Whiteman was no deep-dyed villain or mere vulgarisateur, and certainly didn’t drive Bix Beiderbecke to drink himself to death; that “Strange Fruit” was the ruination of Billie Holiday; and that, after Louis Armstrong lapsed into a mere—mere!—entertainer, any one of his recordings can recall momentarily the glory of his best work.

Youngren’s range was enormous: Red Norvo and Mildred Bailey, Monteverdi’s and Haydn’s operas, Alban Berg and Elliott Carter. Youngren “wrote long,” Pritchard notes, and the eff ffect is both scrupulous and loving, as when Youngren shows that the recordings of dress rehearsals of Arturo Toscanini’s 1946 La traviata are better than the broadcast, or in his consideration (playfully titled “Serious George”) of the symphonic and

operatic Gershwin.

There are cavils. Was it necessary to end the book with Youngren’s long and dolorous account of the end of his friendship with the great music critic B.H. Haggin? The latter certainly doesn’t come off ff well, but it is no way to end the book.

THAT CAVIL, THEN, IS WITH THE compiler, Pritchard himself, who for his own part has just published Writing to Live, a collection of his own recent criticism— book reviews, mostly.

If this book were washed up on a cannibal island, the reviewer likes to think he would recognize its author as one of the most

tolerant, skeptical, urbane, rigorous, humane and humorous critical voices around. But since it was in Pritchard’s classroom (full disclosure) that that same reviewer learned the standards of discrimination that go into the making of such a judgment, the fancy is circular.

Never mind. The book is a terrifi fic guided tour of the territory covered by one of the great teachers and critics currently in business. Over the years, Pritchard has taught and written about Shakespeare; he’s been a lively and acute reviewer of contemporary fiction; he’s been a sharp observer of the current critical scene. All are represented Illustration by Adam McCauley

INTERVIEW

Theodore Iacobuzio ’76, an analyst in the financial fi services industry, writes from suburban New York.

Behind the Scenes on Broadway From The Color Purple to SpongeBob, math major Hillary Blanken Gallo ’88 has pulled together the technical details. | BY KATHERINE DUKE ’05 There’s much more to live theater than performers delivering lines on a stage. A fully captivating experience requires scenery and props, lighting and sound, costumes and makeup and more. Someone has to pull all of these details together in the months before opening night.

Enter Hillary Blanken Gallo ’88.

Though she majored in math at Amherst, Gallo spent a lot of time with the theater and dance department, serving as stage manager for numerous shows. She also took a semester off ff to work as a production assistant on a tour of Les Misérables, which led, after her graduation, to a career behind the scenes on Broadway.

“I decided that what I really loved about theater was setting everything up, which was production management,” she says. So, in 1998, she founded Juniper Street Productions to coordinate and supervise the technical aspects of plays and musicals. “I get to work with the smartest and most creative people in the world, and what I do for them is to help get their vision onstage.”

The six-person company has now worked on more than 100 shows, on Broadway, across North America and in London, including these recent and upcoming productions.

Fun Home 2015, Broadway “It’s in a little theater that’s in the basement of an off ffice building. It’s also a theater in the round—the only one on Broadway. Because it’s in the round, you can’t really have traditional backgrounds. We basically took out the entire stage floor and put in six lifts to bring the scenery up and down.”

The Color Purple 2015, London “We do a lot of big musicals, but The Color Purple was challenging, because basically it was a musical done as a play. It was a one-set show, very simple. And because the house is small, costs were tight.”

Fully Committed 2016, Broadway “It’s set in the basement of a fancy restau-

“II deccideed that a what I real reallyy lov o ed abo about u theeate aterr was a set se tin ting eve v ryt y hin hing g up p,”” G Galloo say ays. ss.. Shee st start arted art e a compan com ompan p y that pa tha hat at has worked wor worked wo ke on o more more tha t n th 100 sh shows ow too d ows date. te te

COURTESY HILLARY BLANKEN GALLO

“

here. The reader can also fi find reviews of the correspondence of the departed greats (Cather, Eliot), and of books on music, too (the piece on Duke Ellington is especially fine). fi Two of the best pieces in the book are a talk (nott a book review) on Robert Frost and a review of a recent biography of Ben Jonson.

The first piece sets about making the case that Frost is the greatest of modern poets, and though Pritchard doesn’t quite close the sale for this reader, if there is a case to be made, Pritchard makes it.

The Jonson piece is especially valuable because it recalls Pritchard’s classroom procedure.

When Pritchard teaches, the author in question is the focus of the composition; but arrayed in Pritchard the negative makes the space around that author are case that Frost is the the critics (in this case Edgreatest mund Wilson, of modern T.S. Eliot and poets. the author of the biography under review, among others), who serve no other function than to render the poet’s diction and movement with even greater intensity, in this case the sometimes massive grace of Jonson’s occasional and lyrical verse.

Pritchard manages, movingly, to recall an emergent occasion when Jonson’s verse was absolutely the right thing, in retrospect the only thing, to say at a public function at this college. I won’t give away what or when it was; you’ll have to buy the book to learn. It’s the best argument for the permanence of the work of this wonderful poet—work that, to the casual eye, or ear, can sometimes seem rebarbative. And you’ll get all this other richness thrown in. What’s not to like?

rant, and the back wall is a wall of wine racks.

We spent a lot of time talking about: How are we going to make sure the wine bottles don’t fall? How are we going to get them onto the wall? How much is it going to weigh? There’s also a ‘tornado of chairs’: all the restaurant chairs are hung in a swirl over the stage. So that was challenging—to figure out how to connect the chairs and not see the connections.”

The SpongeBob Musical 2016, Chicago “No, they’re not putting actors in big, puffy ff costumes. (That was my first show, Rugrats— they all had big heads.) They’re trying to bring the audience underwater, into the world of Bikini Bottom. The design is fun and crazy, with real objects: hula hoops, beach balls, swimming pool toys. There’s a piece of scenery that’s made out of sponges. In the front of the house, there are two Rube Goldberg machines.”

Tuck Everlasting 2016, Broadway “That show is about a family that lives forever, and they live in the woods, so the designer made this huge tree to go up on stage that’s whimsical and sculptural. The actors climb the tree and go all the way across the stage.

A branch lowers down so that you feel like you are up in the trees with them.” k Spring 2016 Amherst 51

VOICES

e CONTINUED FROM PAGE 2

to do better the next time a controversial issue arises. Amherst gave us the capacity to do so.

STEVE KRAMER ’75 Medfield, fi Mass.

For a long time I have thought of Lord Jeff ffery Amherst as a bad guy because of his use of smallpox-contaminated blankets as a weapon against the Native Americans. But until the recent debate about the Amherst mascot, I never gave it any deeper thought.

Perhaps Lord Jeff ff should be judged by the standards of the time in which he lived, and not by today’s standards.

I would say the same for others. How about Teddy Roosevelt, who was involved in the slaughter of the great American bison herds that provided food, clothing and shelter for the Plains Indians? Should he be removed from Mount Rushmore? We could also ponder the status of Harry Truman after his decision to use the atomic bomb. The list is long.

I won’t miss the mascot, but I will miss the songs. Nostalgia is not the only reason we support the College, but it is a strong reason.

ROBERT W. DOWLING ’50 Wapiti, Wyo. AS IF IT WERE A NOVELTY In a letter in the Winter 2016 issue, a member of the class of ’73 boasted about putting Frost Library on tap, as if it were a novelty at the time. Alas, perhaps because he was a TD, or because of your word limit, he neglected to credit Phi Gamma Chi for showing his crew how to do it. Phi Gam did the same thing, better, two years previously, on March 1, 1971.

Your correspondent as a sophomore may even have been among those enjoying our beer.

My chronicle of Phi Gam’s escapade, naming names, is unfortunately way beyond your word limit. But among other things, for some reason I noted at the time that “The TDs were flabbergasted.”

You can see pictures in the 1971 Olio and read about it in the March 4, 1971, Amherst Student.

I expect no less than an abject apology.

LAURENCE N. WESSON ’71 Blue Bell, Pa.

Familiar Faces in the Stands Familiar faces in the stands at the Amherst game in 1952? Yes. Sitting in the lower right corner, pointing left, are my brother Stephen H. Brown ’65 and me, Anne H. Brown. I was age 10 with Tam hat, and Stevie was 9, to my left (class notes photo, Fall 2015, p. 51).

Our father was Dr. Stephen Brown ’28, a World War II Army Air Corps captain and a pediatrician in Northampton who had been a part-time physician at the College since 1935 and head since 1949. He was probably on the bench. In 1953 he became the College physician and Parmly Billings Professor of Physical Hygiene.

His family, with wife Elsa (Smith ’35) and four kids, moved to 58 Woodside Ave., as Dean Eugene “Bill” Wilson’s family downsized out. There were eventually five children. It was our home for about 20 happy years.

We went on to attend many games at home and away, and Stevie and I played football ourselves at the lot at the end of Woodside near the gates, with other faculty brats and old Amherst helmets. We also worked the reunions selling newspapers.

I married Robert Gordon Keith ’62, son of E. Gordon Keith ’27, in 1964, and we rarely miss a 1962 reunion. We got acquainted playing cello together in the Smith/ Amherst College orchestra.

ANNE BROWN KEITH

New Gloucester, Maine

INCLUSIVENESS, THEN AND NOW I enjoyed “Mansions in our Midst” (Spring 2015), about the 13 former fraternity houses, but I noticed two errors. The national fraternity that expelled its Amherst chapter for pledging Thomas Gibbs ’51 was Phi Kappa Psi, not Phi Alpha Psi— the name adopted by the independent local.

Similarly, the reference to Theta Xi omits its later name, Alpha Theta Xi. I have asked two of my classmates, members of Alpha Theta Xi, about this. They tell a story similar to Phi Psi’s.

In 1957 Amherst’s Theta Xi chapter pledged African-American James Jackson ’60. The national did not expel the chapter, as happened with Phi Psi, but instead suspended it for three years, until Mr. Jackson graduated. The chapter could be reinstated if it committed no similar “off ffense” in the interim. The chapter declined to accept those insulting terms, preferring to become independent with the name Alpha Theta Xi. These name changes remind us that questions of inclusiveness were alive at Amherst long before the recent campus

tensions. The fraternity-centered 1950s surely look peculiar to today’s students, as they did to many of my contemporaries even in our student days. The intervening decades have brought a vastly more heterogeneous group of students to Amherst. Issues of inclusion are more subtle than they were in the mid-20th century.

In 1991 then-Harvard President Neil L. Rudenstine observed, “The problem of how individuals and groups establish and assert their own identity, without being tempted to repudiate or diminish the identity of others, is one of the deep riddles of our time.” Another Harvard president, Charles W. Eliot, remarked in 1869, “A good past is positively dangerous if it makes us content with the present, and so, unprepared for the future.”

Rudenstine’s puzzle remains unsolved.

Though Amherst certainly has a “good past,” the College fortunately shows no signs of being “content with the present.” Amherst’s current discontent is a hopeful sign for the future.

CHARLES W. HUSBANDS ’61 Lexington, Mass.

Spring 2016 Amherst 119

AMHERST MADE

THE LIBRARY

LIONS

MELVYN LONGHURST / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

There’s an Amherst story behind two of New York’s most beloved creatures.

THE two lions that guard the entrance to the New York Public Library’s main branch on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street are among the most famous statues in America.

They’ve appeared in children’s books and in countless tourist selfi fies. They had a cameo in the movie The Wiz. They’ve even been recreated in Legos.

Their sculptor was Edward Clark Potter, class of 1882, who spent three semesters at Amherst before leaving for art school. He earned $8,000 for the commission. Well-regarded among his peers but little known to the public,

120 Amherst Spring 2016

Potter specialized in animals, especially horses.

He is the artist behind a Paris statue of George Washington on horseback, for example.

But the two male lions, carved from pink Tennessee marble, brought him mostly grief. “When

they were still new arrivals,” reported The New York Times in 2011, “passers-by complained that they were ‘squash-faced’ and ‘mealy-mouthed and complacent.’” One letter writer “said that they looked like ‘a cross between a hippopotamus and a cow.’”

Six months after the library’s May 23, 1911, dedication, The New York Times described Potter as “sculptor of the much-criticized lions of the New York Public Library.”

When Potter died

in 1923, he most likely considered the lions “a humiliating failure,” according to a book about the library’s architecture.

Yet in time, they became treasured landmarks.

A lesson can be gleaned from the names bestowed on the lions in the 1930s by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who, according to the library, wanted to name them “for the qualities he felt New Yorkers would need to survive the economic depression.” Those names: Patience and Fortitude. E.G.B.

My time at Amherst

has been most profoundly influenced by those with ith whom h I share h this th community, and asI have come to learn, our community expands beyond Western Massachusetts. The Amherst community extends to alumni across the world who have a vested interest in seeing their alma mater remain exceptional; it extends to faculty who bring research from all corners of the globe into the classroom with their students; and it extends to the parents of current and past students. It is my hope that future students can share in and become a part of this special community.

TOMI WILLIAMS ’16 Political science major Outgoing president, Association of Amherst Students

GIFTS OF ANY SIZE TO THE ANNUAL FUND have an immediate impact and support every aspect of the College—fi financial aid, student life, academic programs, faculty and facilities. Please make a gift before June 30! Amherst.edu/give

AMHERST PO Box 5000 Amherst, MA 01002

“ALL I CAN DO IS try to sing the song they’re singing.”

Anna Deavere Smith, Page 10

“Career-wise, my ambition is to be that

“IN AND OF THEMSELVES, THE YEARS IN PRISON MIGHT BE

PRECIOUS.” Ilan Stavans, Page 34

“EACH MARK

ROLE MODEL.”

PLAYS A BIGGER ROLE IN THE OVERALL IMAGE ON A SMALL PAINTING.”

Christopher Lim ’12, Page 41

Eleanor Ray ’09, Page 48