I'd Hate Myself in the Morning. Lardner Ring

fact that I had made some kind of mark, at least socially, was indicated two years later in the yearbook of the graduating Class of 1936. Amid photographs and membership lists of all the standard extracurricular organizations was a page with a photo of several of my classmates and the unexplained initials “L.O.L.A.” Unknown probably to anyone but them and me, the letters stood for “Loyal Order of Lardner Admirers.”

      What I clearly had not yet achieved was any record of academic accomplishment or any other benefits sufficient, by my reckoning, to justify the drain on Mother’s reduced income as a result of Dad’s death. John and Jim had already dropped out of Harvard. Now she acceded reluctantly to my decision as she had to theirs (and would later to David’s to leave Yale). In my case, she squeezed five hundred dollars out of her budget for a summer in Europe before I embarked on a career. I arranged cheap steamer passage on the Hamburg-Amerika Line, which many people were boycotting because of Hitler’s accession to power, and a tour of the Soviet Union at the lowest Intourist rate of five dollars a day, which was to cover travel, hotel, and meals.

      A few days in Hamburg and Berlin and, on my way back from Russia, three weeks in Munich left me with a highly unfavorable impression of the New Germany. In Munich, I stayed with an architect’s family, getting into a number of debates with one of the young men of the household, who was a member of the Hitler Youth Corps. “We really have nothing against the Jews,” he assured me. Nothing, he went on to say, except their disproportionate representation in the ranks of lawyers and doctors. A fairly polished and cerebral spokesman for the new order, he gave the Jews credit for intelligence and hard work, and lamented that many Germans were not as industrious. But the bottom line of his analysis—the point that struck me, anyway—was his relentless need to distinguish between Germans and Jews. That the one could not also be the other seemed to go without saying.

      My reaction to Soviet Russia, on the other hand, was enthusiastic. My own country was paralyzed by unemployment, want, and fear. Western Europe was stricken by the same miseries. In Russia, I saw construction everywhere and planning for the future on a grand scale. Despite the language barrier, the feeling I got, even from people seriously deprived by American standards, was one of hope and optimism at a time when most of the world seemed to be bogged down in stagnation and gloom or, like Germany, marching ardently backward toward barbarism.

      It may come as a surprise to modern readers that in those days Socialism and Communism were associated with new, radical trends in social behavior, sexual relations, and art. This had begun to change under Stalin, and in the two subsequent decades of his dictatorship, would wither into the moral and social rigidity that lasted right up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. But one manifestation of the revolutionary spirit that still survived in 1934 (and was certain to strike an eighteen-year-old American boy as radical indeed) involved swimming along the Moscow River. The waterfront was segmented into four separate, fenced-off beaches: male nude, female nude, mixed in bathing suits, and mixed nude.

      In a matter of months after America’s belated recognition of the Soviet Union, the University of Moscow had established an Anglo-American Institute for English-speaking students. One of them was the former president of the Socialist Club at Princeton. I called on him the day I reached Moscow. The next day, I canceled the rest of my program with Intourist, moved into a dormitory at the university and enrolled myself in Sociology II or “Crime and Punishment in the Soviet Union.”

      The Americans at the Institute had gone to Russia, for the most part, under the aegis of the decidedly left-wing National Students Union. Two members of the Dartmouth delegation were to be among my closest friends in Hollywood, Budd Schulberg and Maurice Rapf, both sons of important movie executives. Two and a half year later, Budd and I were a writing team for David Selznick. Maurice went on to teach film at Dartmouth, where, as a student in the early thirties, he was a founder of the film society.

      Of the three of us, Budd was the most ideologically committed. I was viewed, by contrast, as something of a rightwinger. I nearly got thrown out of the country, in fact, for a frivolous deed that I committed in cahoots with a Canadian student named Mark. A group of our peers had put up a “wall newspaper” whose leaden seriousness prompted the two of us to post one of our own. Our comic intent was, we believed, unmistakable, so we were ill-prepared for the reaction of one Professor Pinkevich, a robust scholar with bushy eyebrows who had been selected to run the Institute despite his flimsy command of English. Summoned to a meeting called for the purpose of critiquing our work, we found that he had provided himself with an interpreter in order to prevent misunderstanding. As Mark and I entered the room, Pinkevich rose and greeted us formally. Then he sat down again while the interpreter opened the proceedings: