Brush with Greatness

by J.D. Scrimgeour

At the end of summer in 1982, my family drove me from our home in New Milford, Connecticut, a town of 20,000 in the southern Berkshires and helped me unload my meager belongings—a few bags of clothes—in Carman Hall, the freshman dorm at Columbia University. While I had been to the city a few times, living in the frenzy of Manhattan was an adjustment. One time that first year my family joined me in the city to watch a basketball game, and when they returned to their car, they discovered that someone had broken into it. The thieves had stolen a couple ratty sleeping bags and a few of my siblings’ high school textbooks. The following year, two students in Carman Hall found a rolled-up rug in a dumpster and carried it back to their room. When they unrolled it, they discovered a corpse inside, a man who had been shot twice.

It wasn’t just the grittiness of New York in the 1980s that left me disoriented; I had to adjust to being around so many people who had lived lives so different from what I had known. As someone who had attended public schools, I was fascinated by all my classmates who had attended private boarding schools, places I’d only read about in The Catcher in the Rye. And Columbia was cosmopolitan. I remember going for ice cream during orientation week with students from Italy and France, hearing languages and accents that were foreign to my ears.

Another adjustment was that there were so few women. My class, the class of 1986, was the last all-male class at Columbia, a fact that I’d hardly registered when I decided to attend. I knew that Barnard was just across the street, and I had assumed that the students all took the same classes. They didn’t. In order to meet the women from Barnard, I would go with friends to the campus pub where we’d drink pitchers of beer. At some point, I’d muster courage to saunter up to a stranger and ask her to dance. She usually said no, and I’d slink back to my table and pour another into my plastic cup. It seemed simply impossible to meet a woman. Even if a conversation were to begin amid the too-loud music, what was I supposed to say?

I was adrift, and even the routines that I developed were those of someone who was lonely: playing hours of pick-up basketball in Levien Gymnasium and watching David Letterman’s late-night show in the TV lounge at the end of our floor. I got a kick out of Letterman’s sardonic humor, his stupid pet tricks, and his “Brush with Greatness” segments, in which members of the studio audience shared comic stories about how they crossed paths with celebrities. Having a brush with greatness may have been one of the reasons I chose to attend Columbia. Being in New York held the possibility of seeing famous people, and, in fact, I walked past Letterman himself in Midtown one afternoon as he was filming on the street.

That first semester I’d take The Odyssey or Euripides’ plays out to the campus lawn and lie reading in the sun, hardly registering the words, dozing off more often than not. My classes all went well enough, except for the class in my declared major, Math. Before the semester started, I met with an advisor to help choose my classes. “Wouldn’t you like to take a class with a world-famous mathematician?” he asked, and so I decided to take the test to place into a theoretical calculus course taught by a professor named Lipman Bers. The test was like the SAT, and I did well enough to get in.

Lipman Bers was old, from eastern Europe, with a thick moustache and a thick accent. He had us buy a book with more equations than words. Unlike my math classes in high school, we never had to turn in homework. It wasn’t always clear what our homework was.

It was a small class, a dozen students in a musty room. Although a seminar table filled the space, we didn’t sit around it exactly. A blackboard ran along one side of the room, and Bers would lecture in front of it, so we would sit in two rows on either side of the table, facing the board. I sat in the back corner, the table in front of me. In the front center sat Daniel, the thirteen-year-old with a bowl cut of black hair and just visible fine dark hair above his lip, the beginnings of a mustache. Daniel was, I’d heard, the captain of the U.S. math team, whatever that meant. I don’t think he was enrolled at Columbia; he was just taking this one class.

It seemed like Daniel was the only person, besides Bers, who spoke in class. He’d raise a scrawny arm and ask a question that I didn’t understand. Bers’ eyes would light up. “That’s a very interesting question, Daniel,” he’d say, and the two of them would engage in a long dialogue while the rest of us—or maybe it was just me—sat in befuddlement. Eventually, I began doodling in my notebook, rehashing my stats from my senior year baseball season or reviewing possible starting line-ups for the Knicks. I passed that class with a gentleman’s C, dropped down to a more standard Calculus class the next semester, and dropped that after I bombed my first test. I wasn’t going to be a math major.

I’ve told the story of that math class many times. It seemed a story about discovering one’s limits, though, to be honest, it involved pumping my ego, too—I was good enough in math to place into that class, after all. And the audience always got a kick out of my embellished description of how lost most of us were while Daniel and Bers held their abstruse conversations.

But recently, while writing about this event, I began to wonder about Lipman Bers. He really was, of course, a world-famous mathematician. He was born in a Jewish family in Riga, Latvia, at the beginning of World War I, and his early life was colored by the political upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century. He spent time in St. Petersburg and Berlin. While studying math at the University in Riga, he became a political activist who argued for human rights, an orator and columnist for an underground newspaper, defending democracy in the face of Latvia’s dictator. A warrant was issued for his arrest, but he escaped to Prague. He fled from Prague to Paris with his family, and then, just ahead of the Germans, he fled to the United States. Living as a refugee, he continued to work on mathematics. He eventually did math work assisting the allied war effort, and then went on to write many important papers in the field, known for their elegance and clarity.

He was admired by his students and fellow mathematicians, and a recent book, Lipman Bers: A Life in Mathematics, celebrates his achievements. Mathematician William Abikoff writes this about Bers:

Lipa possessed a joy of life and an optimism that is difficult to find at this time and that is sorely missed. Those of us who experienced it directly have felt an obligation to pass it on. That, in addition to the beauty of his own work, is Lipa’s enduring gift to us.

Bers had a way not just with numbers, but with words. I laughed aloud when I came across his line that “Mathematics is a collection of cheap tricks and dirty jokes,” though I don’t know enough about math to really understand it. Throughout his career, he also continued to advocate for human rights. Here’s Bers himself, speaking about human rights in 1984, when he was awarded an honorary degree from SUNY-Stonybrook:

By becoming a human rights activist ... you do take upon yourself certain difficult obligations. ... I believe that only a truly even-handed approach can lead to an honest, morally convincing, and effective human rights policy. A human rights activist who hates and fears communism must also care about the human rights of Latin American leftists. A human rights activist who sympathizes with the revolutionary movement in Latin America must also be concerned about human rights abuses in Cuba and Nicaragua. A devout Muslim must also care about human rights of the Bahai in Iran and of the small Jewish community in Syria, while a Jew devoted to Israel must also worry about the human rights of Palestinian Arabs. And we American citizens must be particularly sensitive to human rights violations for which our government is directly or indirectly responsible, as well as to the human rights violations that occur in our own country, as they do.

Bers retired from teaching at Columbia in 1982. The class I took with him may have been the last he ever taught.  

I wish I could claim that Bers and his vision, expressed so eloquently above, had an impact on me, but it’s only through the lens of time that I see more than myself in that room—those other students may have been getting a lot more from the class than I imagined. And, having learned a bit about him, I can better see Bers, a man brilliant and committed, see the spark between him and Daniel. What did I know?

It was my first semester, and I was a lost boy. I needed grounding myself to see others. I went on find circles of friends at Columbia, to find a girlfriend when I lived in Barnard dorms my sophomore year. Eventually, I no longer needed David Letterman’s late-night company. And my junior year, I started to put my own words down. I took classes with the poet Kenneth Koch and legendary literature professor Wallace Gray, early steps on the path to becoming a writer.

That same year, I took to the cold March nights to join students who blocked the doors to Hamilton Hall, a main classroom building, demanding that the University divest its financial holdings in South Africa and South African companies. Some of my friends scoffed at the protests, and their cynicism made me doubt my conviction, but, ultimately, I could do the math.

I was usually alone those nights, one of the crowd. Many of those around me were people who, I had been taught, did not look like me. I sat among them all and listened to the speeches, the music, the drumming.

I took in the world, and the world took me in.

Writing this essay, I became curious about Daniel. Perhaps discovering Bers’ words, his insistence on being aware of all others, made me wonder about Daniel and his life. I googled “Daniel, mathematician, born 1970,” and I discovered Daniel, a mathematician at an Ivy League university. I thought the thin face, something about the nose, looked familiar, and so I sent an email. Sure enough, it was him. He read the essay and was gracious and self-depreciating. He confirmed the bowl haircut; he didn’t recall the table. He said he had read some of Bers’ papers and built on his work. I hope that in my own way I’m building on Bers’ work as well.

J.D. Scrimgeour is the author of three books of poetry and two of nonfiction, including Themes for English B: A Professor's Education In & Out of Class, which won the AWP Award for Nonfiction. Recent essays have appeared in blackbird, Solstice, Sport Literate, and The Woven Tale Press.

Recordings

by J.D. Scrimgeour

I was named after my grandfather, John Harold Scrimgeour, a man who was over seventy by the time I would be old enough to preserve any memories of him. My mother said once that she wanted to name me “Jonathan”” and spell my name the less conventional way—J-O-N—but my father said no. Like his father, I would be “John”—J-O-H-N.

I hardly remember my grandfather. By everyone’s account, he was a kind man. In some tapes I made with my Uncle, also named John, before he died of a brain tumor, my uncle said that my grandfather “had an acceptance and love of others as they were. He wasn’t concerned if you were a success or not, he just wanted you to be happy and be yourself.”

My grandfather worked most of his life driving a truck for his brother’s electric company, though he could have taken an easier, higher-paying office job. My father and John have told how he used to take the neighborhood kids for rides to the swimming hole in the back of the company pickup truck after he got off of work.

My grandfather lived in a decrepit house in West Boylston, Massachusetts, with his mentally troubled wife, who almost never left her bedroom. In my childhood, my family lived in Illinois, and so we didn’t visit often, maybe on Christmas if we came back east. There was always a clutch of cats around the house, and I remember the grimy kitchen smelling strongly of tuna, an unwashed can sitting in the sink.

The bedroom was not small, but seemed dominated by a huge bed that my grandmother always lay on. The headboard was against the wall perpendicular to the door, so that someone lying in bed could turn her head and see down the hall that ran through the center of the house. The curtains were closed, the light faint and dusty. The floorboards were thick, and dusty, too.

It was the bed, though, that remains in my memory, the blankets aged, like the spreads over the sofa in the living room, like everything in that house, colored a dull brown like dirty light, like there was no such thing as color. The thick smell of unwashed life rose from the sheets.

I rarely saw that bed without my grandmother in it. Sometimes when our family would visit after my grandfather had died, we’d peek in and see her sleeping, or almost sleeping, coming to consciousness in response to my father’s shouts of “Ma! Ma!” when we pushed open the unlocked front door. If she was awake, she’d be sitting up against the headboard, her mat of dingy hair pressed behind her, looking like a round loaf of grey bread.

Once or twice I was told to go into the room and “say hi to Grandma.” She’d look at us, smile tiredly, ask a few questions. I was glad when we would be released and could go breathe the outside air.

What was it that kept my grandfather minding her all those years before he died? Love? Duty? Fear of change? Kindness? Kindness.

---

One evening when my son came home from a baseball practice, he told me, frustrated, that he had done poorly in a running contest.

I sighed. “You’ve got to get faster,” I said.

“I know,” he said, turning away from me, and I caught in his voice a slight tremor that told me he was fighting back tears.

My parents happened to be visiting, and my father, sitting on our second-hand sofa, didn’t miss a beat. “I never could run fast,” he said. “I don’t know why.”

It was a helpful line, letting my son see that his lack of speed may have been inherited—he was not to blame—and letting him know that someone else had endured the same failure. Unlike my comment, it would hold off tears rather than bring them on.

My father isn’t always a particularly sensitive conversationalist. In fact, he often misses beats, even whole conversations, too engrossed with a Sudoku puzzle or with the newspaper. But thinking about his comment, I realized that he had been a parent who never said anything mean or cutting to his children, who never made them feel that they were a disappointment, who rarely let his own frustrations show.

I love this about my father, this gentleness: how, knowing what words could do, he wielded them carefully, seriously. Perhaps it’s the reason that I took after him and became a writer.

---

My grandfather died in 1976 in West Boylston, in that house that smelled of tuna and dust. A few months before his death, my father had sat down with him and recorded an hour or so of conversation about his life.

As a child, one of my favorite toys was a tape recorder. We had it for years—almost all black, save for the red “record” button. My brother, sister and I would fill tapes with various imitations of the grown-up world: sports talk radio interviews about the baseball game in the cornfield across the street, or “albums” by our made-up bands, one of us slapping an old, un-tuned guitar, another pounding on our chipped xylophone, making up lyrics on the fly.

The tape my father made somehow ended up in the shoebox that held all of our family tapes, and when, two years after my grandfather died, we moved back to New England, it was tossed in the moving van with all our other possessions. A few years later, my father came across it and rattled it into the family tape recorder, which he had set down on the kitchen table.

The tape began. The quality was poor, the hiss of ambient sound loud. The recording was especially hard to listen to because my grandfather had been quite deaf, so my father had shouted all his questions. As the tape unspooled, we would turn the volume up and down, depending on who was speaking. Still, it was hard to catch many of my grandfather’s words. It felt as dusty and drab as that house where the recording had been made.  

Suddenly, there was the sharp crack of the record button being pushed down, and the sounds of my siblings and me. We were singing, or talking, making the kind of noise we liked to record. The recording was much clearer and louder than the interview—a burst of life and laughter.

Disappointment flooded my father’s face when he realized what had happened, and I might have even seen a flash of anger. I don’t recall specifics—his response was mild—but I know there was a rebuke, and I know that I felt guilty. It was something that couldn’t be rectified. The interview, those words from a man now dead, were gone.

---

A few years after my grandfather died, I read my father’s poem about waiting in the hospital as his elderly father has prostate surgery. The poem made me think more about the man I knew—my father—than the mystery he had gone to visit. In the poem, my father looks out a window and sees the wind whipping up the lake beyond so that it looks full of dark fingers. And, after a moment of calm, the fingers reappear and, as he puts it, “wiggle seductively into question marks/ like worms/ on the hook.”

Reading that poem as a thirteen-year-old, I felt the presence of death: how we can’t escape it—those fingers return--how it looms beyond all words. The poem also gave me a sense of what writing was: lamentations, elegies, confronting brute facts. Writing should end tragically, perhaps because life ends tragically.

James Scrimgeour

Yet now I go back to that moment of calm in the poem’s center, when “the dark ripples die down/fade away into light blue.” I go back to how my father, in the poem, recalls talking with his father, John Harold, the previous night, how grateful he was to hear his father’s voice. And there, in the poem, are some words of my grandfather himself, words my father presumably transcribed, words not erased by a foolish son:

I think age is an illusion

We all fade into each other

Like colors in a rainbow.

---

J.D. Scrimgeour is a poet and nonfiction writer who coordinates the Creative Writing program at Salem State University in Salem, Massachusetts. His second book of nonfiction, Themes for English B: A Professor’s Education In & Out of Class, won the AWP Award for Nonfiction. Recent essays have appeared in The Quotable and Pangyrus. He has also published a book of poems, The Last Miles, a chapbook of poetry, Territories, and has released a CD of poetry and music, Ogunquit & Other Works. In June 2014, a musical, Only Human, which he wrote with his two sons, was produced in Salem’s Ames Theatre.