Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind—

William Wordsworth, 1804

 

In late 1961 I paid a quarter to get in the door of Hailey, Idaho’s Liberty Theater to see the Elia Kazan film Splendor in the Grass, a story of young love thwarted. It starred Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood as high-school sweethearts who, according to Wikipedia, endure “feelings of sexual repression, love, and heartbreak.”

I was eleven at the time, but the film made a huge impression on me. Sexual repression, love, and heartbreak became the watchwords of my high-school existence. None of the girls I loved in high school knew I loved them. None knew when they broke my heart. I could tell you their names now, but I doubt very much if they could tell you mine.

Kazan’s film hinges on the sweethearts finding out too late that each was the love of the other’s life. They accept that they will never be together (marriage and children are in the way), and that their love will have to make do with what remains in their hearts. In the final scene, Natalie Wood quotes (in her mind) the Wordsworth epigraph above, and the credits roll.

 

As the saying goes, comedy is tragedy plus time. Things that caused me so much pain in high school seem mildly humorous now, at least when I’m not hiding under the bed, cringing at the thought of what my life would have been like if my high school fantasies had come true.

Young love thwarted means, with luck, that you’ll live to love another day. Broken hearts, even when self-inflicted, heal. True love can and does occur later in life, maybe at a time when you’re mature enough not to completely screw things up.

 

Wisdom puts the brakes on splendor. Even when you do find the love of your life in high school, time and experience transform that love toward the practical and the mundane. The phrase “oatmeal love” has been used to describe the kind of everyday affection that allows people to live together, put up with each other’s quirks and bad moods, and raise dogs and children without killing each other.

The kind of love that once allowed you to see your beloved as a god or goddess (and maybe feel like you were a god or goddess yourself) is gone, but that’s a good thing. Its evolutionary purpose is to get you children, and if it persists, you might spend more time rolling around in the grass with each other than making sure the kids are fed and not outside the cave playing with lions and tigers and bears.

However—and it’s a big however—if you’re in the midst of a mortgage, a soul-killing job, a car in the shop, dirty dishes in the sink, and septic-tank problems, you might start thinking that the love of your life was only for part of your life, a part long-gone, and you might try to regain, by any means possible, that delicious feeling of grassy splendor.

Don’t do this. It’s a mistake. You’ll spend your life as a divorced adolescent, and if you’ve already had kids, they’ll have a tough time of it.

Wordsworth knew there was a time for splendor and a time for wisdom, and so did Elia Kazan. It’s doubtful that Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood knew that because they were movie stars, kidnapped as children by the culture and raised as god and goddess, unchanging, forever young, preserved on celluloid.

 

A divine identity is hard on the human material. Natalie Wood died at age forty-three. She either drowned while drunk or was murdered, but she didn’t get old. She would have lived longer and better if she’d listened to herself quoting Wordsworth.

Warren Beatty seemed to have come around to realizing he is human, in the grass or out of it. At age fifty-five, he married the actress Annette Benning and has raised four children with her, having apparently grown out of immortality, at least as it can be manifested in a long line of youthful lovers. He’s eighty-four these days, and he has the sad young-old face of a god finally branded by time.

I realize that people don’t read my writing for material they could get in supermarket tabloids, accompanied by lots of unfortunate candid photos. But I haven’t forgotten the thought that started this story: if I could find a 1961 silver quarter, and if by putting it through the window of the Liberty Theater’s box office, I could suddenly be eleven years old again, in 1961, with my parents still alive and full of hope for all of us, I’d be tempted to do it.

Splendor was in the air in Hailey in 1961. I didn’t know it. My parents were wonderfully young. I didn’t know it. In three years I would be in high school, where splendor was complicated by sexual repression, but this time I would recognize them both and deal with each in turn. Heh-heh.

If this sort of coin trick works, it’s a good thing that silver quarters have disappeared from circulation and it would be next to impossible for me to find one.

If I suddenly disappeared to 1961, Julie would wonder where I went. After twenty-five years of splendid oatmeal love, she would miss me, and I would miss her.

No matter how much adolescent pain I could remedy by time-traveling, it wouldn’t be worth leaving Julie. I’m older than she is, and will likely die before she does, and I worry quite a lot about her being without me in this hazardous non-magical world, even though Julie is as strong and as self-sufficient as anyone I know.

That’s not the worst of it. If I was tossed back to 1961 and I knew what I know now, things would not go well. Something awful and demonic would hit the town of Hailey, a seventy-year-old mind in an eleven-year-old body, with an eleven-year-old conscience responsible for restraining that seventy-year-old mind. Innocent people would be hurt. Also, I’d probably get the crap beat out of me. 

 

Forty-two. That was the age when I became mature enough to have a strong, enduring, faithful, mutually-supportive relationship. Interestingly, forty-two is also the approximate age when heroin addicts either OD or kick the habit, and when psychopaths (except for politicians) stop hurting other people or get thrown in jail. It’s the age where humans who are possessed by one of Jung’s divine archetypes, the Eternal Boy, either die in accidents, or become terribly crippled and prematurely old, even as they continue with boyhood.

Jung’s concept of unconscious archetypal possession becomes easier to understand when you look at Splendor in the Grass as a film where Male and Female Meet and Mate, except they don’t, due to the awful repression of the Father, the Mother, the Church, the Draft Board, and College. Instead, they must accept their mortality and the loss of eternal love, and they have to make the best of the life they have left.

It’s a film about growing up. It’s hard to grow up if you’re a human surrounded by all these Capital Letters.

If humans are unlucky enough to avoid growing up, archetypal forces rip them apart, or devour them from the inside, leaving a withered husk. We can all name celebrities who died young, but we also have friends who died climbing mountains, who skied into avalanche paths thinking they were going to live forever, who succumbed to alcoholism or meth addiction, or who started new families in late middle-age, having left spouses and families for high-school crushes.

At some point you can either stop serving unconscious forces, or keep on obeying them—and becoming more grotesque the longer you live. One thinks of Gloria Swanson by the end of another film, Sunset Boulevard.

 

I spent a lot of my life as an Eternal Boy, bouncing around like a pinball in the Pinball Machine of Life, never once wondering about that dark slot at the bottom or where it might lead.

Eternal Boys spend their twenties and thirties hang-gliding or hanging off cliffs or bungee-jumping off bridges. They tend not to be faithful partners. They abhor getting tied down to a job or a relationship. Their garages look like museums of youth, full of skis and skateboards and kayaks. You can imagine how a Sprinter Van, with its promise of self-contained mobility, would spark their imaginations.

It’s a bad habit, but whenever I see a Sprinter Van, I check out the driver to see if he’s over forty-two, and if he is, how well he’s aging.

 

At age forty-two, I realized that most of my longer relationships had been with women whose fathers were either alcoholics or suicides. I realized further that if you like being needed, and I did, that nobody needs you quite like an abandoned child, and abandonment doesn’t get much better than alcoholism and suicide.

It usually felt good to be needed for about two weeks and then I would be miserable and claustrophobic, and I’d go looking for someone else. If I’d had a Sprinter Van, I would have been out of there and standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, as the Eagles have it, with seven women on my mind.

I hate that song.

 

I’m sharing too much, and I’ll quit as soon as I tie up a few loose ends. When Julie came into my life, she wasn’t needy. She’d been raised by two people who were there for her when she needed them and not there when she wanted to try things on her own. As a result, she has confidence in herself and an ability to be alone. She doesn’t look to other people to complete her, and because of that it took me a long time to fall in love with her. It took her a long time to fall in love with me.

Our life together began when I stopped needing her to need me, and I started loving her for the person of competent good will that she is. Her beauty, charm, and intelligence might have had something to do with it as well.

I’m not sure why she loves me. I don’t think it’s because of my cheerful outlook on the future.

About the same time I fell in love with Julie I started intuiting that the dark slot at the bottom of the Pinball Machine of Life was Law School. It seemed like a terrible fate for an aging boy, one which—if I was successful—would result in further archetypal possession by the Hierarch or the Judge. Instead, I made a conscious decision to continue to teach writing to first-year college students, something I was good at but involved the all-too-human drudgery of correcting huge stacks of essays. I had signed a series of one-year contracts at the College of Idaho, but when they offered me tenure as a professor of writing, I took it. If I’ve had a career, it’s represented by decades of students who can write a sentence that other people can understand.

After realizing that life with Julie wasn’t causing claustrophobia, I asked her to marry me and she accepted.

These were decisions that once would have made me feel imprisoned. But the world had begun to seem uncertain and full of pitfalls. Superhuman forces could destroy you in an instant. Wealth and power could evaporate into thin air. A relationship was about the only thing you could reliably gain strength from. The way you gained strength from it was by loving another human being and helping them out in life, as best you could.

 

The Liberty Theater still exists, but it’s run by a community theater group and it’s been a long time since anybody got in the door for a quarter. It does still allow entry to another world, one with intermissions and curtain calls, rituals that let you know you’re seeing a play and no matter how skilled the actors, it’s not real life. That doesn’t mean you’re not getting your money’s worth.