"The Holdovers" and How I Became a Writer

An Oscar-nominated film about misery in New England stirs happy memories of my time there during the same era.

I was not a preppy. My experience of preppies at college was that they generally arrived ahead of the game versus the public school kids, mainly because they knew how to write a polished essay. But by junior year, the public schoolers, of whom I was one, had caught up and began to surpass them.

There were some little things about The Holdovers, a recent Paul Giamatti movie set in a New England prep school, that caught my eye and ear. My wife and I saw it last night at the Austin Film Society, and this morning the Academy nominated it for Best Picture, Best Actor (Paul Giamatti), Best Supporting Actress (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), and Best Original Screenplay (David Hemingson). One of the teachers in the story was named “Endicott,” which was my mother’s middle name. One of the buildings shown was at Deerfield Academy; I slept in it once after I spoke there. And Paul Giamatti’s father, Bart, was an English professor when I was majoring in that subject at Yale. I never took a course with him—I suspect because I was not a fan of Edmund Spenser, the Elizabethan poet he specialized in teaching.

But mainly the movie made me remember two very different moments when I was at Yale. The first one, in 1976, made me think about who I was; the second, a year later, perhaps showed me who I was going to be.

That first moment began when I went to lunch one day in my junior year. It was early, maybe 11:30 a.m., and there was only one other student in the dining hall. I didn’t know him well, but he was sitting and silently weeping, so I sat down across from him and said, “What’s going on?”

He looked at me and he said, “Tom, everything about Yale works for you. You belong here.”

“And?” I asked.

He replied, red-faced, “I don’t belong here. I’m only here because my dad owns an NFL team.”

He was right, both about himself and me. I think he left a month or two later.

Meanwhile, Yale was indeed my playground. I was besotted with the women, smart and witty; with the more than dozen libraries on the campus, from little leathery reading rooms to the quiet dignity of the divinity school; with free entertainment every night, from poetry readings (notably, a memorable one by W.S. Merwin) to foreign films and rock and classical concerts. Being without cost was important to me, as my budget was $17 a week, all of it made by me working at the front desk of Yale’s main library. (My father was a college professor with six kids.) I looked the famous and mighty in the eye. One morning in the breakfast line I watched former prime minister Ted Heath spray orange juice on his shirt as he tried to work the drinks machine. I lunched with Gerald Ford, who was pleasantly dull. I dined with Joe Biden, who talked non-stop for about an hour and didn’t say much.

The second moment came in my senior year. That January, I had gone into my last semester with a plan. I decided that I should focus on enjoying the hell out of my last months at college. My approach was built around going to parties and dances and “mixers” and movies and concerts every night, retiring no earlier than 2 or 3 am, or later. To that end, I signed up for four seminars, each one held from two to five in the afternoon, one each on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. This schedule enabled me to sleep until 12:45 p.m., which was just in time to get dressed, grab a meal and then walk across campus to that day’s seminar. But each seminar carried a requirement—a long paper of 15 to 20 pages. To get the work done, I planned to write all four of them during spring break.

So, unlike the left-behind children in The Holdovers, over Easter recess I stayed at school voluntarily. I was not consigned there by my parents. I wanted to be there, alone, for fourteen days. The dining hall was closed but the libraries I needed were open. As in the movie, it snowed much of the time.

The plan went great. I lived mainly on English muffins and canned soup. I spent half my waking hours reading and the other half writing. It may seem odd, but I never had any doubt that I could do it. As it happened, I got an “A” on every paper, except the one for Harold Bloom, on which I got an “A+.” (But I was told later that he did that with a lot of people)

The surprise to me was how much I enjoyed those solitary, wintery days. Looking back now, I think that’s when I became a writer.