Life - My Generation

Life: Part Three

Chapter 3: My Generation

Preface

Matriculation at Dartmouth is a ceremonious affair, wherein each entering freshman files up into the Tower Room of the Green's showpiece, Baker Library, for a brief but personal audience with the College president.

Or so Charlie might have chosen to begin the story of his college days, in his naive desire to "be a writer" immediately upon graduation. He did heed the advice of his mentor, Professor Bien, that to fulfill such an ambition it is necessary first "to live"; and so he headed to California in the spring of 1972 with thirty dollars in his pocket and ambitions of joining the blue-collar ranks of "the working class." Soon finding himself with time on his hands, however, working the graveyard shift at a Berkeley gas station, or long empty days in an air freight office, he decided to shortcut the tedious requirement to live what he interpreted as life in the workaday world; he would indeed begin straightaway to capture the heady days and nights of "the campus revolution" while the experience was still fresh.

Taking his cue from The Who's famous rock anthem of the era, he gave his would-be masterpiece the pertinent if unoriginal title My Generation.

We can hardly even call that raw effort "a novel," by any post-modern definition; though young Mr. Ash did have the inspiration - one that proved an abortive impulse - to frame his narrative in the fictitious voice of a certain dead infant, one Robert St. John Gray (the last name presenting an altered sense of "Ash"). The narrator, if further developed, would have been the little brother of the protagonist of the undergraduate tale, a character named William Nowick Gray, Jr., after their father.

Robert's own stance on the possible variations of his chief character's name was to be expressed thusly: "You wanted, then, to be called Willie, to distinguish yourself from Bill or William, our father. In our magnanimous station outside the egoistic strivings of life, we shall grant you that whim. Not that it matters, as in your narrative innocence you opted for the first-person point of view."

Already we can see here the workings of a nascent irony, as Robert wants, even before the game has begun, to endow his older brother with narrative powers of his own; conveniently forgetting that he himself is but a fey creature of 22-year-old Charles Ash's imagination. Or maybe his intent is a practical one, as he seeks merely to circumvent the unconventionality of maintaining a long narrative skein in the second-person voice. Or perhaps ageless RSJ had other star-fields to plough, and he thought that having midwifed Willie into the world, he would leave him to his own narrative devices.

All these things considered, we shall dub the result with the dubious compromise, "a semi-fiction"; assign it another label which may curiously be considered nowadays a chic advantage rather than an editorial liability - "uncut"; and commit it now into the hands of our readers; duly taking our own leave (as we prepare to depart from, say, India).