Thanks to Patti.
The Sophomore, Barry Spacks (1969)
I read the Fawcett paperback twenty-five years ago, probably the same week I read Richard Farina’s Been Down So Long It Looks like Up To Me – the summer before I started college. When my subsequent college experience didn’t include daytripping through revolution in Cuba (Farina) or barricading myself inside the campus radio station to play “Night in Tunisia” continuously during an all-request program (Spacks), I just knew I’d missed out on the salad days of American higher education.
The book is still readily available via ABE; one seller offers this synopsis: “A fast paced and amusing lyrical novel telling of a few days in the life and crisis of a 23 year old aging college sophomore, neither square nor hippy, but caught between and confused.”
I remember wondering, while reading the book, if it wasn’t a product of the success of The Graduate – if the book wasn’t an assignment the publisher had handed to a writer who’d been producing house-name series paperbacks for them, and he’d taken this shot to produce something a little more literary, or at least closer to his own experience. That was how it felt to me at the time - a real professional writer's novel, compared to the loopy prose and plotting of Pynchon-classmate Farina.
I do not know if the Barry Spacks who wrote The Sophomore went on to become Barry Spacks, the American poet and teacher(thanks, internet), but I suspect it is so. Nevertheless, I prefer my original backstory --"Kid, I got something for ya! Put Nick Carter #238 on hold for a couple weeks!"
At any rate, I enjoyed the book every bit as much as I enjoyed the hipper, more celebrated Farina novel.
7 comments:
Joe-I read the Farina book. Saw him and his wife, Mimi (both now dead) at a coffeehouse outside of Boston in 1966. I was a college freshman. They were terrific.
That must have been great. I had one of their albums on cassette for a time. Mimi's voice was very much like her sister's, if memory serves, and Farina sounded like Mose Allison.
There were like Ian and Sylvia. She seemed much more shy than Joan.
If the book is half as entertaining as your review, it will be well worth the read.
Thanks man. I'm working from memory here, and apologize in advance if anyone tracks it down only to feel they wasted their time.
Barry Spacks is both the writer and teacher. He taught at MIT in the late sixties, and I took a special senior seminar from him in the fall of 1967. He had some sort of grant that enabled him to bring in an astounding array of authors to our weekly class. The group included Mailer, Lowell, Borges, Clayton Eshelman, William Gass (by phone since his plane was caught in bad weather), Lou Lipsitz.Since we were all more or less geeks, we didn't have the deference toward the greats that we probably should have. I remember one of my classmates asking Robert Lowell what he thought of John Lennon's writing. Lowell looked looked at him as though he had been asked to solve a quantum mechanics problem, then demurred that he really hadn't read him. Spacks was in the middle of writing The Sophomore at the time, and read us the first page or so of the opening. To me at the time, it seemed like a hipster from the fifties trying to talk to me, and I remember thinking that he would have no audience for the book. I'm glad that you liked it, and maybe it's a better memoir of the late fifties or so than I would have given it credit for. Spacks was a very good teacher. For whatever reasons, he liked my class essays and talked to me about going to Yale to become a scholar. Didn't happen though, but his class did let me see a tiny bit of worthwhile writing from the inside. Good memories all around.
Andy, my belated thanks to you for sharing this. It sounds like you did not miss the salad days of American higher education. That guest list is astounding.
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