My Story for Philip

Watercolor and gouache painting of original handmade book from 1969-70.

Imagine you are an eighteen-year-old male college freshman and a package arrives in your campus mailbox. You open it and take out this little handmade book. Bound in purple velveteen, it has watercolor and ink illustrations on the cover and hand-lettering throughout. Taken completely taken by surprise, you realize immediately that you are the Philip in the title. Not only is the book an unexpected gift, but it is a story for and about you. Someone you know only slightly has a crush on you. You SO did NOT ask for this.

That was in late fall, 1969, more than fifty years ago, when social life was unmediated by online platforms or electronic communications. Almost all interactions–and risks–were in person. They were immediate, face to face. Sometimes they occurred through the still crucial (asynchronous) mode of letter-writing. Or, you might receive a phone call on the single line shared by the entire floor of your dorm. Whoever happened to pick up the ringing receiver had to find you to let you know. Then your conversation took place in public, standing in the open alcove near the elevators where the phone was tethered to a wall by a long cord. Phone posture was a performance art. You positioned your to muffle the sound as you mollified a former high school sweetheart or to project it across the open hallway as you reported a recent test score to an over-attentive parent.

I was seventeen, suffering the hideous social hell of my first year at the University of Rochester. I lived in the “progressive” co-ed dorm where men and women were distributed according to a then unquestioned binary, on alternating floors. The demographics of the student body included a high percentage of New York and Long Island residents. The students were socially savvy, affluent, academically bright, and more or less ambitious within the terms of middle class American suburban culture. I felt alienated among them. They all had copies of The Prophet and Siddhartha on their bookshelves while I had Thomas Mann’s novels, works by Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, biographies of the Bloomsbury group, and Brontë juvenilia. My literary pursuits were a defense against a deep sense of social inadequacy.

This was the era of student protests, SDS activities, long hair, loudly professed radical revolutionary thought, bell bottoms and counter-culture activities. The conformity of all these individuals who thought they were thinking independent about social revolution was terrifying. Really we were just college students, eager to experiment with sex, drugs, alcohol, and behaviors that had been circumscribed in high school and family homes. The protocols of 1960s flirtation were fairly tame even if birth control and social pressure supposedly promoted easy promiscuity. A sidelong glance (yes, alas, that cliché), a querying eyebrow, a hand slipped onto a thigh in a darkened room where jug wine was being passed were the initiating gestures. Dormitory behavior I was too shy to enact.

            Whether out of pity, good citizenship, or just some basic humanity, a fellow classmate, Meg, had befriended me. She was kind, perceptive, possessed of a certain social savvy and grounded-ness from which she reached through my isolation. As in all bounded social groups, the cruel hierarchies of dominance had quickly become established. We all knew our place in the pecking order and mine was dubious. But Meg’s roommate Sue had dynamic star power. She was a gifted artist and posted sketches on her door that outstripped the skill of anyone else on the dorm floor. They had dramatically distorted perspectives, brilliantly executed shadows and form, dramatic flourishes and graphic sophistication. Her father was in advertising, a marketing and publicity professional, and some of her polish and drive might have come from him. Outgoing, sure of herself physically and socially, she had a feisty dynamism that made her attractive in disproportion to any physical features.

Roommates had been assigned randomly. Mine, a shrill Long Island girl, Ronnie, campaigned aggressively for me to date a nice Jewish boy since her intended was already at Yeshiva. She could not understand why a certain Leonard, in his pale green slacks and argyle pullovers, had no appeal for me. When the poor fellow damaged an ankle on the ice and had to use crutches to maneuver, he looked like nothing so much as a caterpillar larva suspended on two sticks as he swung his plump green body between the snowbanks that reached nearly above our heads. Poor Leonard had no chance as a swain, even had he been inclined, which likely he was not. My diffidence and awkwardness combined with the freshman pudge were not appealing, even to him. Nor was my commitment to secular skepticism. Late adolescence was an extended sentence to various forms of humiliation and failure for many of us.

The Philip who was the object of my attentions was the “friend” of the dynamic Sue. Too sincere to trifle, he refused to be absorbed into the “boyfriend” role with its expectations and commitments. He played by stricter rules than many of our classmates, his own code of ethics always evident. His lithe form was the epitome of youthful free spiritedness, his long hair and modest wardrobe, along with his commitment to fresh food and vegetarian diet, were conspicuous signs of deliberate choice about values and ethics. He was well-spoken, sensitive to the needs and difficulties of others, mature in ways that touched me as he managed the mess in which I had put him. Because whatever else, the gift required a response, an encounter, some acknowledgement. But in what form?  

Days went by after I sent the package. Nothing. Thanksgiving holidays? Some hiatus occurred. I was in agony. Returning to school, I ran into him. We had a moment of conversation, in passing, almost incidental. “Did you get something from me?” He confessed he had, but that he no idea what to do, what to think. That I was thinking of him in that way, some way, unspecified, but clearly understood, that was something he had not imagined. He certainly did  not reciprocate my interest. “Not” was the operative word in that brief exchange. What had I hoped? That the book might make him see me differently, be intrigued enough to engage with me, get to know me and some fantasy would unfold. That was not to be. He was quite kind, but clear about boundaries and limits.

And the book? The story describes a boy who is dancing, which Philip often was. The cover image shows a young figure, limbs in graceful motion, surrounded by dancing leaves.

“Come quietly within the grove here,” the text begins, inviting the reader to observe the sunlight on the leaves “and think as you watch the changing patterns, of how he learned to dance by watching them.” The boy is momentarily confused, and the wind tries to seduce him, speaking in soft words. The leaves move in its currents and the child pleads with them, “Teach me leaves to dance as you do!” At first they refuse, and then he asked the birds, and they also refuse, each “knowing the consequences” that would ensue. Then the sun made shadows through the branches of a tree whose movements Philip copies. Angry, the sun brings clouds to cover itself, again with a sense of foreboding. But too late. The seductive force of the wind catches Philip and his voice becomes as high pitched and shrill as the sound of the wind itself. He whirls in a blur of motion until he fades into a shadow “blown easily by the wind.” In the final sentence, the reader is admonished not to listen to the wind’s “easy words, for you are not quite so young as Philip, and you would not be so gently made a shadow, and you would not learn so quickly how to dance.” On the end sheet, a single leaf floats above the shadow it casts on the page.

How many times did I make a book as a means of flirtation? Create a unique object and then offer it to someone in whom I had taken an interest, thinking it might succeed in a bid for attention? An awkward mode of seduction, at best, these efforts always crashed and burned. Only a handful were ever completed and delivered. In the case of A Story for Philip, I made a second copy, this one, realizing that I loved the object and its making perhaps as much as I longed for the person I thought I desired. What he did with the book I have no idea.

The opening epigraph might well have been, “A story by Johanna, who was writing.”