NIALL MacKENZIE May 20, 1996 Mame Warren, interviewer MacKenzie: On the phone, she happened to toss out some passing question as to whe-:re...was I thinking of going to college, because it was around that time in my life, and I mumbled something about Washington and Lee, whereupon she exploded in enthusiasm. So coincidences like that began to snowball. Therein I thought, "Fortune is attempting to tell me something." There were a few others, but I won't trouble you with them. Warren: I find them very enchanting. MacKenzie: There was one man who had died by the time I was applying to colleges, but whom I had known into my teenage years, who was the husband of my mother's best friend. He was an architect, a very prominent architect in New England, and we learned, after I started looking at Washington and Lee, that this gentleman had gone to Washington and Lee as an undergraduate, and the fact that he was remembered by me then, and continues to live in my memory as one of the courtliest, most genial and decent and brave men I've ever known, this strengthened my favorable impression of W&L. Warren: So you applied, and what was your first impression when you came here? Did you come for a visit before you decided to come here? MacKenzie: I came here. I visited Lexington, sort of drove around the school and whatnot. It couldn't have been more than a couple of hours before I had registered 1 my application, I think, or had lodged my application. But sometime in there, within twelve months, let us say, before December 1988, I made an appearance here in Lexington and sort of reconnoitered the place. Then after I applied, one day in February or March of 1989, I was at a friend's house and the phone rang. I picked up to hear my mother on the other end telling me that she had just received a telephone call from Mimi Elrod at Washington and Lee. Mimi was inviting me for an honor scholarship interview. I think I've got that story wrong. I think when the phone rang at my friend's house that afternoon, it was not my mother but it was Mimi herself. My mother had given her the phone number. So Mimi rang my friend's house in Canada, where I was lying around unsuspectingly, drinking a beer or something. So it was Mimi exuding all the graciousness and charm which one associates with Mimi. She invited me to an honor scholarship interview. This would involve a free plane ticket and all that. So I came down here and spent two or three days being interviewed and participating in all sorts of, no doubt, intensely scrutinized paneled discussions and whatnot. I liked it very much, and I, in fact, was offered, I dare say, a princely scholarship as a sequel to that weekend of interviews. The school's generosity, scholarship-wise, was a weighty factor in my decision to come here. Warren: Who participated in the interviews, and what was that process like? MacKenzie: Well, thrown into the whole weekend was just a straight admissions interview over in the f dmissions rfouse with, I guess two-it was a sort of two-on- one thing-two regular admissions officers conducting what purportedly was just the usual admissions interview format. That seemed a bit superfluous, given the school had flown us all down there, so we figured that we at least were in. The rest of the weekend, on the first night I recall meeting [W.] Lad Sessions, who was my first advisor here, now a dean of the university, I believe, then a very 2 ,t)> popular philosophy professor. He and Lou Hodges, an ethics expert and gunsmith, I am told, conducted this sort of large group discussion of a very difficult ethical question that was pressing upon the social conscience of that time, or was promising to impress itself upon the social conscience at that time, and so they seemed to be probing our weaknesses then. Perhaps I am being too cynical about the extent to which we were under observation through all this. I certainly felt very much like a would-be courtier at Versailles who was desperately trying to remember all the lessons of Poly___ and how to bow and scrape before the king in hopes that he would receive a small court appointment. . I remember that group discussion. There was an interview, a special honor scholarship interview, done in the office in the basement of the Cl' School. Several offices were being used for this purpose that night, in each of which offices there were, I think, three Washington and Lee professors. There were at least twenty of us candidates there that weekend, probably more than that. Each of us was only interviewed by one trio of professors. Among mine was Ed Craun, who went on to . BW5t+ --ro ~M, \I become one of my favorite and most influential teachers here. I brn~bed with them, ~ I can't recall who the other two were. There was another daytime panel discussion in which a politics professor was involved, and that is as far as the formal tests of our quickness on the draw went that weekend. Warren: At that point were you asked what your area of interest was going to be, or was it just random, what kind of professors were doing this interviewing? MacKenzie: I can't recall whether the professors into whose presences we were ushered were professors who necessarily had anything to do with what area of interest that we were indicating a tendency to lean toward, so I'm sorry I can't shed any light on that question. I don't recall being harried about my interests and my projections for my own future, unfortunately enough, because those are questions to which I can still stammer incoherently in response. These interviews were 3 designed much more to explore our general manner and intelligence, in as far as intelligence can be measured by such superficial encounters. Warren: How many of you who came that weekend actually came to Washington and Lee? MacKenzie: I think this was not the only such weekend. I think there were at least two weekends, perhaps two weekends, in a row in which this was done. I think when Mimi rang me, I was sort of offered an opportunity to select a weekend best suited to my schedule. At that weekend, as I say, there were two dozen, maybe more, of us-well, around there somewhere, at least two of whom, in addition to myself, went on to appear at Washington and Lee my freshman year. One of them became a very good friend of mine, and another I knew quite well. There was a third person, a specific person I have in mind, who was certainly in my class at W&L, and I think he was there that weekend, too, but that could be a trick of memory, I'm not sure. Warren: It sounds it like you had it very rigorous academically that weekend. What about socially? Did they try to introduce you to what the social life was like here while you were here? MacKenzie: We were put up in dorm rooms by freshmen or maybe dorm counselors. Anyway, we were put up in the freshman dorm buildings. Warren: At Gaines? MacKenzie: No, that is upperclassmen housing. I was in a room in the Graham- Lees complex, where I ended up living my undergraduate year much to my delectation. A wonderful place to live. And so we had this sort of anchor in the student body that weekend, as anchors were. We had a tie to the student body. I socialized-if that is a correct verb-a little bit with my host, whose name I don't recall and who was a decent guy. 4 There was a comedian, actually a very high-profile, big-name, sort of MTV- frequenting comedian, who was appearing in the Warner Center building. I went to that. I went to a couple of fraternity parties. It all became quite sociable, really. I mean, a group of us rivals for honor scholarships were able to put aside our stilettos long enough to enjoy each other's company and to sort of go from fraternity party to fraternity party. And indeed, I must say, the W&L students whom I encountered were enormously magnanimous in their show of hospitality and whatnot when we sort of stumbled upon fraternity parties. I suppose it had something to do with wanting to sink their teeth into prospective early rush-type purposes and this competition among fraternity houses. But whatever motive lay behind it, the world is governed by deeds and not motives, and many a good deed was paid us that weekend. Warren: So you came. MacKenzie: Yes. Warren: So tell me about arriving as a freshman. MacKenzie: Well, being a Canadian, I was designated a foreign student-correct.,!y > enough, I suppose, but this sort of got me into all sorts of affiliations with students from various Third World counties and whatnot who were felt to require special treatment to become oriented-I think is the phrase-at Washington and Lee. So I was invited down early. Most freshmen were told to arrive on Day X. I was asked to ~ arrive on Day X Minus 5, or something, to take part in these special orientation prggrams not solely designed for foreign students. Every foreign student was invited, and then there was a sprinkling of kind of regular Americans who were invited to help in the-some of kind of new-fangled anthropologies words are entering this soliloquy-this sprinkling of real Americans was added to help in the acculturation process. So there were a couple of straight Americans there, some of whom have remained friends of mine for the duration of the W&L thing. 5 I only went really because after a phone call with one of coordinators of this program, I was let in on the useful knowledge that this would give me the chance to take care of post office boxes and bank accounts and what have you before the rush, so I came and participated in these things. It was useful to get sort of a foretaste of Lexington life. I think they took us down to the mall in Roanoke on one occasion. All good fun. Do you know, I can't recall how my social life got going. It got going swiftly enough. I mean, I went out to various women's colleges and did sort of social things with some of the young men whom I met through this preliminary orientation-scheme affair. But that became marginalized very quickly. I guess my memory of my earliest block of friends at Washington and Lee were my fellow pledges in a fraternity I ended up pledging, them and a few people on my hall in Graham-Lees who remain good friends of mine. But what drew me to that fraternity and how I sort of fell into that group of people and not the people at my hall-how I fell in with them is obvious, but the others, is entirely submerged beneath memory's oily slick. I have no idea what happened. Warren: Well, it's been a while. I'm really looking forward to when the freshmen arrive in the fall so I can sort of go through this with them and see what it feels like and see what they do. Once upon a time, and I'm not quite sure when it stopped, they did something called Freshman Camp. I presume that was long since over by the time you got here. MacKenzie: Unless they've revived it, I think that's right. Nothing of the kind occurred during my years here so far as I know. I'm aware of the idea. Other colleges to which I applied had such a thing going on, and I know of other colleges that do this. Warren: And what year was it you got here? '89? 6 MacKenzie: Yeah. Warren: So that was the year the first class of women were graduating. Were you aware of that? Was the sense that women were still new here, was that real by the time you came, or were they taken for granted? MacKenzie: I arrived in late August of 1989. The first women had graduated the _ previous J~ne. I met at least one-no, more than one of them; I met a handful of them. That honor scholarship competition weekend I mentioned, one of them drove me from the airport and back to the airport, and I became better acquainted with her and acquainted with others in the course of the weekend in between those two airport drives. They were all interesting women, really, as indeed most of th! women I have known at Washington and Lee. There was a lingering awareness of the fact that women are new here, mostly in the form of it's just sort of rhetorical reflexes that fraternity students would fall into, a kind of misogynous arrogance. Yes, there was, to an extent, a somewhat ghettoized mentality among many of the women I've known at Washington and Lee. It persisted through to the end of my senior year and very likely persists to this day. Warren: Do you think that's because it is Washington and Lee, or do you think that's the times? MacKenzie: I think the fact that it is Washington and Lee colors that mentality in a way that renders it unique among communities of ghettoized, harried women across the country. Certainly this is a bad time to be a woman in the United States, a bad time to be anything but more than a usually fortunately-born white straight male in the United States. But at Washington and Lee, the character of one's sort of Q.aN" sClo Lr.) self-,Qonsci@nee alienation if one is a woman here, I suspect, is my impression, the character of that alienation is shaped by the sort of things peculiar to Washington and Lee social life and Washington and Lee's history. 7 Warren: And why do you think it's peculiar? Tell me what you think is unique about Washington and Lee's social life. MacKenzie: Well, few all-male colleges in the land can have had five-the number, I think, is five-I am just reviewing it in my head. Yes, five private women's colleges all within roughly an hour's-drive radius, give or take. The old structure of Washington and Lee social life, which was a continual sort of sloshing back-and- forth of boozy students between these schools, in which Washington and Lee was very obviously and unabashedly the planet, with all the gravity, and the other schools were the kind of satellites that existed to set off the planet handsomely on the map of the heavens, that tradition of women sort of busing themselves in here brought a great deal of arrogance which has not been cleansed from Washington and Lee, the collective mentality of Washington and Lee manhood, a great deal of arrogance indeed, and a certain blase attitude about matters of date rape and generally a very sort of primitive view of proper relations among the genders. Warren: Were you this aware while you were in the middle of it? MacKenzie: I think I was this aware when I was a student. I tiptoed away from the middle, I think, during my student years. Certainly, as a student, I never had a perfectly detached view of these matters. As a very wistful and nostalgic alumnus, I still cannot lay claim to a perfectly detached-the legendary objective view is not mine. But, yes, as a student, especially as a student who was spending a great deal of his time in the company of women at Washington and Lee and women of a more than usually higher grade intellectually and politically at Washington and Lee, spending a lot of time as I did in the company of such women, one cannot escape being made aware of faces of reality here which tended to wear a mask when one was inside a fraternity house consuming beer via a funnel, doing back flips off mantels and other amusements which keep us of the streets. Warren: Well, those of us who are on the streets are grateful. [Laughter] 8 MacKenzie: Rightly so. Warren: I had an interesting conversation with a very thoughtful student last week, and one of the things he said was that it's just extremely stressful to be especially an upperclasswoman here, because her social life is almost nonexistent, at least with Washington and Lee men. Is that the kind of thing you are alluding to? MacKenzie: I have heard that said. I must say it has not been my experience. Upperclass women at Washington and Lee are at a disadvantage, certainly-if a disadvantage you choose to call it-in terms of the amount of attention which is showered upon them by Washington and Lee men compared with the amount of attention which Washington and Lee men shower upon freshmen women and women from the neighboring women's colleges. There is an imbalance there. Most of the Washington and Lee women I knew well in my years here were by no means isolated and lonely and despairing. They seemed to me to have fulfilling lives. One hears a lot of this talk, this sort of self-pitying thing, coming from Washington and Lee students who have not quite fit the mold, the archetypical Washington and Lee student-you know, various socialists and people with long hair, people who like poetry and people of unorthodox sexual enthusiasm. There is this sort of ragged fringe of such students at Washington and Lee, a fringe in which I spent a great deal of time, passed a great many high-spirited hours. Every once in a while, people who are exiled, or exile themselves, to this fringe, will wax self-pity and sort of moan about how homogenous it is here and how lonely it is for them. And after listening to this for a few minutes, when they run out of breath, one will ask them, "How many friends do you have here, just within the student body, people whom you go and have dinner with and slug down a bottle of wine with and have recreational sex with? What is the size, the core, of your social circle?" And without fail, offhandedly they will attempt some figure between seven and fifteen or something. 9 My question is, what do these people want? I mean, do they think they would have a larger core number of friends at NYU or something? I mean, interpersonal dynamics, such a forbidding phrase, the way people interact with each other has a logic that tends to keep numbers, the size of close circles of friends, at about that number. And so the answer, certainly in my years here, there is enough diversity at Washington and Lee to accommodate practically any social point of view which I am aware of, at the end of a life of keen observation of deviant points of view. This is a many-colored tapestry, no matter how uniform it may look at first glance. Warren: I wonder if that sense of having a small circle of friends comes from the contrast of the fraternity system, where you look at these houses that seem to be these monstrous units of friends. MacKenzie: Well, perhaps contemplation of a house full of, these units, these blocks of eighty or sixty "brothers," contemplation from afar may feed a person's sense that they're isolated, if they want to sustain that sense. If they crept any nearer the fraternity system, I think they would find that impression of battalions of good friends unjustified. I, myself, was a member of a fraternity, and from inside the bowels of that system, one is under no illusion about the solidarity of these fraternity houses. I mean, each fraternity house has its pockets of little groups of friends, seven to fifteen people in number each, and there is amicability among these pockets usually, not always. But the fraternity system has not created- fraternities have not invented some new paradigm for human interaction which has widened the spectrum of intimacy in a way that thousands of years of social evolution have been unable to do. Warren: I'll bet from the outside, though, if you are feeling left out, I'll bet it looks a lot more golden than it probably is. MacKenzie: Well, that may well be so. 10 Warren: Especially if you tried to get and didn't. MacKenzie: I never spent a great deal of time in the company of people who idolized the fraternity system and yet were unable to worm their way inside it. I suspect there are not many such people. There are fraternities here that will take just about any quality of candidate. Some of them are so desperate for survival in the new fraternity regime, they will reach very far down the barrel indeed. I knew very few people who are not in fraternities at Washington and Lee who really rued not being in fraternities. Most of the people I knew who were not in fraternities and who said anything about not being in fraternities, I'm talking about men, were given this sort of rhetorical posture of contempt for the fraternity situation. An attitude of contempt towards fraternities would be very difficult to reconcile with an attitude of self-pity about not having as large a block of friends as the average brother in a fraternity house. Warren: So were you in a fraternity all four years? MacKenzie: No, I withdrew at the end of my sophomore year, with no acrimony. I remained very good friends with the brothers in my house, and I continued to carry on a fairly colorful social life under the aegis of that house. Warren: And so where did you choose to live then? MacKenzie: Well, I had never lived in a fraternity house, actually. I lived in Graham-Lees dorm in my freshman year, as I have noted. Thereafter, I lived in town, in privately rented accommodations in town. Two different sets of them. In my sophomore year, I lived in one place. My junior and senior years, I lived in a different place, one place for both of those. I spent two years in one place. Loved it. Those were great two years. Warren: So while we are still on somewhat social things, let's finish that series of questions. Fancy Dress. Was Fancy Dress important to you? 11 MacKenzie: I never failed to go .to Fancy Dress, and I never failed to have a splendid time there. Warren: Tell me about it. Take me to Fancy Dress. Tell me about it. MacKenzie: Mame, I may take you up on that, literally. All years but my senior year, or could it have been-yes, that's right, all years but my senior year, I participated in Fancy Dress as a full-fledged fraternity worker-bee participating in all the rituals and enjoying the hell out of them. Although, well, allow me to hedge. My junior year, I was dating a dance major from one of the nearby colleges. She did not quite fit the pigeon-hole of stereotypical fraternity-guy's date. So that Fancy Dress weekend was rather off kilter in a charming way from a mindless fraternity participant's point of view. But in general, those first three Fancy Dresses were weekends full of nonstop, prodigious, Viking-like consumption of alcohol and the wreckage of these poor tuxedos which had never done anything to offend one, and all sorts of exuberantly reckless sexual behavior. Great fun, really. Being kind of a shirker by nature, I didn't quite get into the unifying force which gathered within each fraternity house as Fancy Dress approached and as elaborate measures had to be taken and hundreds of hours of real sweat-off-the- brow labor had to be- Warren: Doing what? MacKenzie: Covering fraternity houses in sawdust to make a plausible desert island setting for a certain party, things like that. I mean, hauling bamboo, lifting kegs, setting up, quite a great deal of work. Generally I contrived to sit in a director's chair such as the one to my right, and sort of give instructions and sip on a minted julep. And so few students at any other college in the United States can say that in their college days they took their ease with a minted julep in hand, but at Washington and Lee, it is not an eyebrow-raising statement. 12 Warren: I actually went to Fancy Dress this year. My husband kept looking around and saying, "Were they all born in country clubs?" I've never seen so many beautiful people who were so at ease in tuxedos. It was quite a do. MacKenzie: Yes. However many lamentations one hears from certain sectors of the Washington and Lee student body-shrinking sectors, it would seem-of the Washington and Lee student body and certain ever more indigent sectors of Washington and Lee alumni community, however many lamentations one hears from these people about the decline of Washington and Lee from a really kind of uniquely southern institution into just another face in the crowd of private liberal arts colleges, each trying to attain the cachet of-what school has enviable cachet? I don't know. Middlebury? No. Bowden? We don't feel inferior to any of these places. However many lamentations one hears about how indistinguishable we are coming from these places, there remains a great deal that is durably unique here. These aspects of Washington and Lee life are not just cant that is spewed forth by nostalgic old-timers. I recall reading a piece by William Styron, in which Styron was reminiscing about a tour of Virginia campuses which his father took him on late in his teenage years. Although William and Mary was very close to where Styron lived, William and Mary was written off at once because of a prevailing air of intellectual fatuousness, in Styron, Sr.'s phrase, which Styron, Sr. said had prevailed at William and Mary since the establishment of Phi Beta Kappa in 1776. Other campuses were visited; each was dismissed with acerbic commentary such as that. Washington and Lee was instantly bewitching to the young Styron but for the very reasons which caused Styron, Sr. to drag his son away in disgust. He described this sort of ocean of seersucker and mint juleps and this kind of self-consciously aristocratic air of smugness and contentment about the place, which are as endearing to those of us who have some foothold in it as, no doubt, these aspects are 13 appalling and infuriating to those who remain outside either voluntarily or because they have had the door shut in their face. Warren: I need to turn the tape over.