THE 40TH--A REUNION FOR SURVIVORS

At the end of the week, evidently because I have a touch of the masochist in me, I’m heading East for my 40th college reunion. At the moment, New England is said to resemble a sauna with maple trees, hotter and far damper than present Southern California. How we suffer for our curiosity.

The 40th is actually a fairly nondescript anniversary. Even my university, which has raised the money-raising seduction of alumni to a high art, makes relatively little of it. The 25th is the big one, when the lads reassemble to see how much of their achievements they can convey without actually seeming to boast.

The tone of the 40th begins to be quite different, I’ve been told by earlier attendees. Survival has taken over as the achievement worth crowing about or being grateful for. Insofar as there are still competitive undertones in the conversations, the field of battle is said to have narrowed to who got to retire earliest and who does what good works. The achievements boasted about are those of children, or grandchildren.

I probably ought to wait for my 50th. Given the lengthening life span of the American male, there will probably be quite a gang back there in 1997. But I keep thinking of the line Will and Ariel Durant wrote in the next-to-last volume of their great history. There will be a concluding volume, they said, “barring lethal accident to the authors or to civilization.” There were none, and the volume appeared.

On the same stipulations, I will be glad to appear in 1997. It is just that, being poised for the 40th, with all that implies about your personal chronology, you do begin to feel like someone who is driving a used car with a great many miles on it; 140,000, let’s say. It has had those minor shunts along the way but been carefully and lovingly maintained.

But trade-ins are out of the question, and you know as well as you know anything that something is going to conk out sooner or later. The suspense becomes to learn what it will be, and when, and how reparable it is. Meanwhile, you stay out of drag races and pay respectful attention to all the suggested maintenance procedures, whether bran is your thing or not.

I did go back for the 25th reunion of the class, and I found it the stuff of novels, as John P. Marquand and other novelists have. The wastrels had steadied and become pillars of medicine and the church. The solemn pedants had emerged into extroverts and had now and again overemerged, as if to compensate for all the noise they didn’t make in college. The bores tended to be heavier, but still boring.

Some, like Marquand’s H. M. Pulham, Esq., may have wondered in the depths of their souls whether they had done what they really wanted to do or whether they had dutifully played by the wrong numbers and missed out on something precious if undefinable.

Yet on balance those who showed up seemed to me engaged with the world, active in education and the other professions, concerned about more than acquisition and still curious and hopeful about tomorrow.

It’s my own curiosity that draws me back. My class actually never knew each other well. We had begun in July, 1943, when Harvard was going year-round so we could at least have a taste of college before we went into military service. We arrived and left at various times, so that we’ve had the cohesion of a commuter crowd in Grand Central Station, and our percentage of alumni contributions is always the lowest in the history of the college.

But part of the lure for me, beyond curiosity, is homage. However glancing and intermittent the acquaintance was, the experience was more mind-expanding than any drug--an exposure to living theater, to movies with genuine subtitles, to Art Hodes and Mezz Mezzrow playing jazz in the dining hall, to poets, novelists, historians.

Academically it was like having to bench press an enormous weight with no warm-ups and insufficient prior exercise. I look back fondly, yet in some ways it is a glimpse of hellish insecurity verging on despair. My instant memories of college days, always, are not of the swell times but of dawn breaking grayly over my portable typewriter with my head resting on it, a 9 a.m. deadline for the essay and not a sentence that would come together decently. I saw later that it had been perfect vocational training, anxiety and all.

The real survival was 40 years earlier, but I’ll go back and see how we’ve gone on surviving.