The Bowdoin Orient

April 6, 2001
Volume CXXXII, Number 20

Two Years Beneath the Pines: A new landfall

by LUDWIG RANG, ALUMNUS CONTRIBUTOR

   After an inadvertently-long break, today we resume our series with the story of the author's final year at Bowdoin, and his apologies for having missed publication on March 9 due to a mix-up in dates.
   Thanks to efforts on my behalf by Professors Whiteside and Brown, another spell Beneath the Pines was made possible through a Rotary Club Scholarship. In return, I was to give talks at Rotary Clubs throughout the State of Maine, including the one at Brunswick of course.
   Before my talk there could go ahead, however, there occurred an embarrassing hitch. Having mixed up the dates (an innate failing it seems) for my planned appearance before this prestigious audience of local worthies, including College President Stacy Coles, who was to introduce me, I blithely went for a walk down McKeen Street at the appointed hour.
   After a frantic call to the fraternity from Stacy saying that the assembled Rotarians were waiting for me to address them, someone came running after me. Hotfooting it downtown, I arrived just as they were settling down to coffee and cigars after the luncheon I was to have shared with them as guest of honour.
   Out of breath and flushed with embarrassment, I stammered something by way of apology before starting my talk that luckily made them laugh. Turning serious, I, as always, discussed the artificial border between East and West Germany, one for which Winston Churchill in a now-famous speech at Fulton, Missouri, had coined the phrase "Iron Curtain." Little did anyone know that this was not to be raised for more than a generation.
   The scholarship covering tuition only, Old Nellie had kindly offered to defray my travel and living expenses. While continuing to take meals at the fraternity, I now roomed off-campus, sharing the top floor of a house on Union Street-appropriately enough owned by a Mrs. Lincoln-with Zal Colodny and Ed Povoll.
   Mine was the small room at the back with a slanted ceiling and a dormer window on the side of the lovely old clapboard house where "Jancy," the Jeep station wagon, stood parked, on loan to me from Bill Beckett, Nellie's adopted son.
   Bill and his wife Nancy now drove a brand-new Mercedes given to them by her as a belated wedding present. Not quite brand-new, actually, since I had chauffeured the old girl in it around Europe for six weeks in early '56, having picked it up in person at the factory in Stuttgart.
   In Madrid, Nellie came down with a severe cold and was confined to bed for several days with an alarmingly high temperature. A doctor I called was amazed to hear the patient was nearly eighty. Let's get the hell out of here, Lou, she defiantly said one morning, and so we did.
   Arriving in Rome on Palm Sunday, we parked opposite St Peter's. One would need diplomatic corps plates or Mafia connections to do that today. Walking across the colonnaded square, tiny crosses made from palm leaves were handed to us by smiling people just coming from mass.
   After several days in Florence, we moved on to Venice, invariably staying in four- or five-star hotels, and from there, we drove through the Dolomites to Vienna.
   Included in our program at Vienna were the Spanish Riding School, the Prater (with Ferris Wheel, famously used by Orson Wells in the "Third Man"), the wine village of Grinzing high up the other side of the Danube (no longer blue, alas), and the Opera House, just re-opened, with Beethoven's "Fidelio" being performed.
   At the end of the trip, I introduced Nellie to my parents at Bonn. Over dinner at the Hotel Petersberg-now a government guest house where the Queen, de Gaulle, and Breszhnev stayed during state visits in the sixties and seventies-overlooking the Rhine.
   Nellie jokingly asked them if she could take me back with her to America. Okay. Okay, my father laughed, about the only words of English he knew.
   In order to accumulate sufficient credits to qualify for a BA in English, I had been advised to attend summer school before returning to Bowdoin.
   Nellie suggested the University of Virginia, where I spent two weeks before transferring to Columbia University, my first choice, though not hers.
   A big city held too many distractions and temptations for a young man like me, she claimed.
   As usual, she was right of course. Though enrolled at Columbia for courses in 19th-century English literature-the novels I liked, the poetry less so-I was really studying at the University of Life.
   Such extra-curricular activities began on arrival in New York, a new landfall, with my friend Simon whisking me off to a room Nellie had reserved for me at the Plaza Hotel. Comparatively innocent though these were, they amounted to a fall from grace it would take a Victorian novel to describe, rather than a series of short, if entertaining, features nearing the end anyway.
   However, once safely back Beneath the Pines-out of reach of metropolitan distractions (though not necessarily temptation) as intended by the Puritan founders of Bowdoin-I wholeheartedly once more devoted myself to strictly academic pursuits.
   Among books not on the reading lists I devoured was a novel by Thomas Mann called Felix Krull, which described the adventures, amorous and otherwise, of a happy-go-lucky young man not for nothing called Felix, to whom "nothing human is alien."
   Something else I read, off and on, for most of the year were the Journals of André Gide. Starting one of my own, I copied appropriate quotations from his such as "What is more glorious than a soul when it liberates itself?"
    Visiting Gide's grave at Cuverville in Normandy not long ago made me think of how I discovered the great French author, who died in 1951, only a few years later at college. Likewise, I also read Henry James, about whose late novels and short stories I was to write an honors paper.
   Within the space of a few months, my life had profoundly changed in several respects-emotional as well as intellectual. For one thing, I had discovered physical love, though for the time being not the kind considered acceptable by the majority. However when eventually discovering the approved sort, I was to do so with a vengeance, as though wanting to make up for lost time.
   For another, I no longer wanted to be a politician, but an author. And still do. It's never too late, they say.