For John
“You gotta accen-tuate the positive,
E-liminate the negative.
And latch on
To the affirmative-
Don’t mess with Mister In-Between!
You gotta spread joy up to the maximum,
Bring gloom down to the minimum,
And have faith, or pandemonium’s
Liable to walk upon the scene.
-Johnny Mercer
It was one of my dear friend John Daniel’s favorite songs. He was considered one of the coolest guys on the Phillips Andover Academy campus, because he was in the 8 & 1, the a capella singing group modeled on Yale’s famous Whiffenpoofs, but he didn’t make a big deal about it. He was from Texas, so everyone called him Tex, even though he disliked the nickname. He didn’t make a big deal about that, either.
He played the guitar, but he didn’t do cowboy or folk songs. Instead, he sang numbers from the Great American Song Book, using jazzy chords to back up his mellow baritone as he crooned Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” or “Blue Moon,” and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “A Cockeyed Optimist,” “Getting To Know You,” or “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught.” The last one, from “South Pacific,” is about racial hatred, and I first heard him sing it in 1960, during our senior year at Andover, when the Civil Rights Movement was just getting started. John may have been an optimist, but he sure wasn’t cockeyed. He saw bigotry for what it was, and he spoke – or sang – out against it. He also sang Woodie Guthrie’s song “Deportees,” about the Mexicans who picked California’s fruits; some of them tried to settle in the U.S. and were arrested and flown back by officers of the Immigration Authority.
Andover was a rough school when we were there. The students were being groomed to become capitalist moguls, titans of industry, legal eagles, and even generals. The Cold War was at its height, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general who had commanded the American Forces in the European Theater Of Operations during World War Two, was President of the United States. The Soviet Union, America’s ally during the war, had acquired nuclear weapons, and Ike was bent on increasing America’s store of atomic bombs to assure what his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles called “massive retaliation” in the event that the Russians struck first. We students knew we’d be drafted into the army sooner or later, but with the arms race in full spate, most of us thought the draft was a sick joke. What good were soldiers with guns, when Ike and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev were getting ready to turn the world into a radioactive wasteland?
Tom Lehrer’s cheerfully despairing song, “The Merry Minuet,” was popular among us. We believed that “some lucky day, someone would set the spark off, and we would all be blown away.”
A miasma of fatalism pervaded the atmosphere on campus. The combination of constant anxiety about nuclear war and the usual male adolescent tribalism resulted in a culture of savage competition, and the stronger students bullied the weaker ones mercilessly. “Weenies,” “wimps,” and “weaklings” who didn’t play contact sports were mocked and picked on, sometimes physically. Homophobia was rampant, of course, although some of our teachers – “masters,” in prep-school parlance – were predators who scared vulnerable boys into having sex by threatening to flunk them if they didn’t comply. The world was a cruel, harsh place, and social Darwinism prevailed at the academies where the future leaders of the free world were being forged into weapons against the Communist Menace.
But John never let himself be hammered into an instrument of American propaganda. Nor did he embrace cruelty or cynicism. He was, I think, more mature and wiser than the rest of us, and he believed to the bottom of his heart that human beings were fundamentally decent.
He not only admitted that he was a sentimentalist, he was proud of it. His favorite male singer was Bing Crosby, and he especially loved Der Bingle’s Christmas songs. He adored Doris Day, and he loved the movies she made with Rock Hudson. One of Doris’s songs, “Everybody Loves A Lover,” became part of John’s own repertory. “I’m a lover,” he would sing. “That’s why I love everybody.”
Well, not quite everybody, to be sure. He despised the bullies, and he had no use for the rich WASP snobs who assumed that just because they had been born into money and power, they were superior to other people. And despite his Texas upbringing, he detested racists. Nor did he have any patience for students who mocked other folks’ oddities. The food in Commons was swill, for the most part, and when John and I were seniors, and were allowed to eat off campus on weekends, we used to go to Benner House, a little eatery run by a man all the PA kids called Benner Bill. Bill was a large, gentle man who rustled up hamburgers, hot dogs, and French fries and served them with Cokes. He was a tad strange-looking: he had no hair anywhere on his head or arms, his light brown eyes had a pinkish tinge, and he spoke in a tenor voice so high it was almost contralto. Even I once made a snide remark about him, suggesting that he was queer. John set me straight. He said that Bill was an albino, and that he was married, with two kids. John was angry, and he hardly ever got angry. I said I didn’t know, and I apologized. He told me not to apologize to him, but to Bill. He went on to say that Andover students were too full of themselves. Every time Headmaster Kemper made a speech in assembly, John maintained, he told us we were the crème de la crème, so we would feel special and tell our parents good things about Victorious Royal Blue. That was the last line of the football team’s fight song. John had no more use for football that he had for any other form of physical violence. He preferred sports that didn’t involve beating people up, and he was pleased when I was permitted to quit playing football and hockey to learn how to fence, so that I could duel convincingly with a boy named Andy Teuber, who played Laertes to my Hamlet during the winter of senior year. The duel went according to Shakespeare’s plot on opening night, but the kid playing Laertes, who thought he should have been cast as Hamlet, lost his temper during the second performance, ignored the choreography, and attacked me in earnest. Fortunately I remembered my fencing lessons better than he did, and parried his wild lunge, riposting with a thrust that nailed him square in the chest. So he had to “die” before I did, and the plot survived intact. John was amused by Andy’s attempt to rewrite the play, and he suggested that the attack was motivated, in good Shakespearian fashion, by unrequited love. For Mr. Hallowell, the English master who directed Hamlet, had cast a girl who went to Andover’s sister school, Abbott Academy, as Ophelia, and Andy had a powerful crush on her. I already had a girlfriend, who also attended Abbott, but Andy didn’t know that. During Hamlet’s “Nunnery Scene,” in which the Prince repudiates Ophelia because her father, Polonius, has been spying on him for the fratricidal King Claudius, Mr. Hallowell directed me to embrace Ophelia passionately after I said, “I did love you once.” He thereby answered a question Shakespearean scholars had been asking about Hamlet and Ophelia’s relationship for almost four hundred years: did the pair have sex? Yes, and Ophelia was pregnant when Hamlet cast her aside. That fact, coupled with Hamlet’s accidental murder of Polonius, drove the poor girl mad. The flowers she doles out to Gertrude and Claudius, and keeps for herself, all have amorous connotations; fennel signifies marital infidelity; columbine, by contrast, means faithful love. Rue, on the other hand, is self-explanatory: she gives some to the Queen and keeps the rest. Of course Andy Teuber didn’t know anything about the language of flowers. He was driven almost as mad as Ophelia by the passionate kiss I gave her.
After Andover, I lost track of John for awhile. I went to Yale, and he went to Stanford, where he became a writer and, later, a publisher – “One For The Books,” as he described himself in a memoir. But he got back in touch with me in the late 1960s, and we began exchanging letters, brief pieces of fiction, and personal essays. He came up with the idea of a literary chain letter, and persuaded other classmates and friends to join it. Someone would write a piece, send it to the next link in the chain, inviting comments. That man or woman would comply, and send the piece on. Finally the original writer would receive a fascinating manuscript full of tales, anecdotes, and commentary. I suggested putting all the final compendia together and calling the collection “Mountain Gorilla,” after the magnificent, endangered primate celebrated by Dian Fossey in her book “Gorillas In The Mist.”
Meanwhile, John had set up a small self-publishing venture called “Daniel & Daniel,” which printed promising fiction the commercial publishing industry wouldn’t take, because it didn’t fit the very narrow criteria for instant best-sellers. He charged a fee, but he also provided canny editorial suggestions, which, when followed, often improved the material to such an extent that it was eventually picked up by a major publisher like Random House or Simon & Schuster.
He used some of the money he made from Daniel & Daniel to finance a non-profit venture called “NoDeadLines.” It published short chapbooks of stories and bits of memoir, and I still have a couple of issues.
John and I also exchanged excerpts from our longer works-in-progress, and I was particularly taken with his novel about his alter ego, a mellow guy named Casey, who played piano and took requests at a bar in the Bay Area. John had had the same gig, only with a guitar, not a piano, at a place called Wilbur Hot Springs in northern California. Think of Billy Joel, who started out as a lounge singer in Los Angeles. But John didn’t write his own songs about the job. If he had, I know they would have been a lot kinder toward the bar’s sad, nostalgic patrons than Joel’s were.
But everyone who knew and loved John knows about his musical and literary career after he graduated from Andover. He lived a rich, eventful life.
I saw John in person only once after our school days. He and his wife Susan came east to attend our tenth Phillips Academy Reunion, and my wife Patsy and I were there. We all got happily hammered at the reunion dinner in Commons The food was much better than the slop we were served as students, but of course we were alumni, and the school hoped we’d throw a lot of money at it in the years to come.
Even our hangovers the next morning couldn’t spoil the pleasure we took in seeing each other again.
Susan Daniel included a photograph with the email she sent me announcing John’s death. It was taken on a day when John was feeling less ravaged by his disease. He is laughing and his eyes are laughing, too. It was a privilege to have known him.