Threes, the Third, at Bennington College

From the Diary of Joseph Kaufman.

It was at Bennington College, formerly an all-woman’s school gone co-ed seven years previous–450 women and 150 men at the time of my attendance–that I met my third great writing teacher, Nick Delbanco, and my third great friend, Marc Falcone. Bennington dorms were two-story, white New England clapboard houses abutting a baseball-large field on three sides. The fourth side had a middle distance view of the White Mountains and which ended at a small rock wall the students labeled “The End of the World”. The school resembled a Vermont village ala Grandma Moses and an atmospheric cross between a David Bowie concert, the Grateful Dead, and a 50’s beatnik hangout in the Village. It had a Black Music department, an extensive modern dance facility, no grades and no exams. Affairs were encouraged between faculty and students. Drugs, drinking, sex, various other forms of exotica, and remarkable hard work were all de rigueur.

Born in Pittsfield, one hour due south on Route 7, I was the only local at the school. The majority of the student body was from New York and Los Angeles, a smattering from Boston and Washington, a pittance from overseas. I was the country mouse to their town mice: I’d never attended private schools as they had, nor traveled, nor dressed, nor read the books nor seen the movies they’d seen. I didn’t even know what a cappuccino was. Yes, a country mouse filled with inchoate aspirations and no real sense of his own talent or predilections, a wildly desirous junior who searched for both transcendence and degradation all at once, a crazy, lusty mix of Henry Miller and the hallucinogenic and warrior ideas of Carlos Casteneda–remember him?

I wanted to live Siddhartha, Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac, Camus, Stendhal’s Frederick Morel all at once. Dig that. The vitality, the great force which sent me to Israel then through Greece and Spain, which kept me up late at night listening to Coltrane and woke me early to my Corona electric typewriter and my first taste of extended hard artistic work–I wrote two short novels, I wrote a book of short stories–this overwrought, wild life, this angst which visited me nightly, like a centuries-wandering dybbuk which finally found its best place to rest–this gorgeous untamed energy which I only ever found one other time in my life when I was first married and found my way to yeshiva, this energy enlivened me, brightened me, the hard work enlightened me, and I had much to speak about with Nick Delbanco who turned me on to Malcolm Lowry’s “Under The Volcano”, and much to speak about with Marc Falcone, who turned me on to Charles Ives.

He was great, Delbanco, with his corduroy pants, bald pate with the long strands pasted cross-wise over it, handsome Sephardi nose, coal black eyes, and a cool and sinuous manner and way of speaking that reminded me of confidence men in grade B movies. He was patient, patient, patient with foolishness–and just how did he do that, I wonder, as I look back. And he always returned papers on time, never late, and always with more remarks and comments and good cheer than even the best of them deserved.

And then there was Falcone, whose brother, Vinny was Frank Sinatra’s band leader. Marc would do an imitation of Sinatra, where he’d pinch my cheek and spit out in this Brooklyn twang, “Love ya, kid, now get outta here.” He was swarthy, moustached, handsome, talented, my first friend who had real taste. We lived together my second year at Bennington, in Helen Frankenthaler’s old studio. He got after me to wash the dishes; he got after me to read Joyce; he did wonderful imitations of golf announcers on television; he let me bum cigarettes; he loved me like a one-year younger brother; and I just sent him my book and I still love him madly back.