Briggs interview

[Begin Tape 1, Side 2]
Warren: You've used the word magic several times. A lot of people use that word
around here. What is it? What is it about this place?
Briggs: Well, essentially it's unreality, I think. There was a time when there was a
lot going on in the country. We didn't know much about it. We were sort of

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happily out of it. I never remember any drugs, apart from Dexedrine to stay up all
night to do a paper. There was no drug culture, there was no significant anti-war
culture, though I think there were plenty of liberal faculty and liberal students, of
which I was one. I don't recall being terribly troubled by what was going on in the
world.

         People flunked out. Friends of mine flunked out and got drafted, and you felt
this enormous sadness for them when they left. One friend of mine, one fraternity
brother of mine, was the son of Lewis Puller, the most decorated soldier of World
War II, maybe a Marine. He came down, and he was very sort of nerdish, even
more nerdish than I was. He was in my fraternity, pledged my fraternity house, and
was obviously very troubled by his relationship with his father. He just had not
been the son his father wanted. He spent a lot of his time playing bridge, I
remember, just playing bridge all the time and not doing much work, and he
flunked out after our freshman year.

         We had a wonderful visit by "Chesty" Puller to the fraternity house on
parents weekend, which was joyous because he told us, I remember him saying that
it only took eight pounds of pressure on your hand to pull someone's ear off, so if
you wanted a good way to get a psycho-he had a burr cut and that sort of round,
biggish head. He said, "Boys, if you want to get a good psychological advantage, pull
a man's ear off and shove it in his mouth. It's good for you." We were terrified.

         He said, "Well, I've got to go to the head now." He went to this door and
opened this door. It was off the kitchen and near the dining room, so it really
should have been a bathroom door. He opened it up and looked at us, as we were
all sort of staring at him, and said, "Hell, boys, you never buy beer. You only rent
it." And he took a step, and it was the basement, the cellar, and he tumbled down
the stairs of the fraternity house. We were all too scared to go help him.
Warren: He'd pull your ear off.

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Briggs: Yeah, who knows. He came back up and said, "Where's the head, boys?"
[Laughter]

         "It's down that way." It was terrible.
         Lewis [Jr.] went to William & Mary for a while, and then he, for incredible
reasons, decided to enlist in the Marine Corps, and went in and in his first battle he
stepped on a mine and was basically-it blew off about everything that could be
blown and still have him survive, legs and arm and fingers on the one hand. But
he came back and rehabilitated himself, which I think the rehabilitation was worse
than the trauma in Vietnam. But anyway, he did that, and he wrote a memoir
called Fortunate Son[: The Healing of a Vietnam Vet] and won the Pulitzer Prize
one year. But he still struggled. He wrote me one summer, the end of the summer,
and then he killed himself about six months after that. It was very sad.
        But anyway, in this book, I don't know if this is useful, but in the book he
talks about his-and all the reviews said what an honest, the reviews in the
obituaries all said, "What an honest book. He doesn't step back from the full-length
mirror. He shows the whole detail." He never mentions that he came to W&L,
never says he was here, never says he flunked out, and yet he remembered to write
me and ask how people were doing and what had happened to friends of his and so
forth. His was really the saddest case. I'm glad he got the Pulitzer Prize out of it.
         He also did a very noble thing on Veterans Day, whatever the year that was,
'93 or '94, something. Clinton was speaking at a Veterans Day rally, and the
veterans were heckling him and razzing him because he hadn't gone. Lewis went
up to the podium while they were heckling and said, "He's my president and he's
your president, and we're going to listen to what he says." They all got quiet. Just a
really wonderful thing. There's a scene in Roman literature that's a little bit like
that. I thought that was a wonderful thing.

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         But I've had plenty of others who flunked out. It made you so sad that they
were leaving this wonderful experience, this wonderful place. It simply was not the
real world.
Warren: Was anybody really cognizant or thinking about the fact that you were
living in this very all-white place in a time of civil rights upheaval?
Briggs: I can't on the one hand say that I was aware of really overt racism. People
from more rural parts of the South that I knew, racism sort of popped into
conversations unpleasantly, sort of like a bodily noise. But then I wasn't nearly as
aware of it here as I am today in South Carolina, where racism is just rampant.

         I think there was a great deal of sympathy with the civil rights struggle, which
was still nascent. Dr. King was still alive and so forth. But there really was this
sense that Leyburn described of Athens, that we were basically a homogeneous
student body, that we're here for our own purposes, that we had always been here
and were sort of honored by time, and Athens was essentially a homogeneous
population, and so were we.

         That's certainly not to say Leyburn was a racist, and it's certainly not to say
that he wouldn't have welcomed blacks in at the time. I am not aware of that. We
all had black houseboys, I remember, at the fraternity house, and we had a
wonderful guy that we just loved. He would take us to these black concerts. We'd
go to hear these Motown people at Roanoke. I remember seeing Major Lance, and
David took us to that. We had a wonderful-we were just really close. I don't
know. I don't think I'm aware of that sort of thing.

         We were very much aware that there were segregated Jewish fraternities, and
Phi Psi, my fraternity, my junior-senior year brought in a Jewish member, which
caused some discussion. He was a football player, John Wolf, who I think is now a
big deal in alumni. I seem to see fund-raising letters signed by him or something
like that.

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Warren: I met him the other day. He's the chairman of the alumni fund.
Briggs: Yeah, that could well be. Is it Philadelphia or some place like that?
Warren: I'm not sure. I just met him the other day.
Briggs: He was the first Jewish member ever of our fraternity. I think maybe that
was where we made our gains in that area. But, boy, other houses would not think
of-I think the Southern houses, and we were basically a Northern house. The
Southern houses, I think, were very opposed to having Jewish brothers. So, yeah, I
was sort of aware of that, but very much a sense that that was in order that people-
you never heard the Jewish fraternities complain about it that I knew about.
Warren: Just the way it was.
Briggs: That's the way it was, yeah, status quo.
Warren: One of the things I learned about you in looking at the Calyx is that you
were a columnist of the Ring-tum Phi for four years.
Briggs: Oh, just movie reviews, basically.
Warren: Oh, yeah?
Briggs: Yeah. I was very interested in movies. I worked up at the Lyric Theater for
Ed Side [phonetic] for about three years, which was a wonderful experience. I sold
refreshments. Ed Side was just really a great character that everybody knew. He was
from New York. He was a little Jewish guy from New York. He looked like a
cartoon of Nixon, sort of. He had that sort of prehensile jaw and always a five
o'clock shadow. He could never be really clean-shaven.

        He could bring five movies to town in a year-The Great Escape, Casablanca,
The Magnificent Seven, One-Eyed Jacks, which he would play four or five shows a
day for a week, and Brother Rat. He would play Brother Rat in the week after W &L
was gone, but VMI was still here. And he could pay his bills for the year on those
five movies. As a result of this, he got all kinds of wonderful sort of art movies and
odd old things that he loved. He was devoted to the movies, and he was a

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wonderful, wonderful character. I thought he was just great, and very warm and
friendly to the students, a nice guy.

         I just essentially reviewed the movies that were playing at the Lyric, which
used to make Ralph Daves [phonetic], '43 or whatever he was, he was an alumnus
who owned the other theater in town, angry, because he would give passes for the
reviews and then we never reviewed any of his movies, because they were all Elvis
movies and they were all these drecky movies. I mean, that's what I did, just that.
Warren: And you were in the Troubadours?
Briggs: I was in the Troubadours, until the selfsame meeting of the NCAA
tournament. A man named Jones was the director. This was also to be his last year,
too, with the Troubadours. He was the director. He was an enormously histrionic
type.

         I was cast in "The Merchant of Venice," I think, and I had it all perfectly
coordinated between soccer practice and rehearsals and the games, and then the
performances started two weeks after the last game. I was out of breath constantly,
but I had it worked out so it would go. And then it got down to the season was over
and we got the bid to the NCAA, the top four teams in the country.

         I went to Ed Atwood, who was the dean of students. I was terribly troubled by
the situation. I had to make a choice. I simply had to make a choice. I don't know if
it was the Apollonian Dionysian inside, but it certainly seemed like the male and
female sides that I was choosing between. It went to Atwood and I said, "Look, I've
got this terrible problem." I showed him my schedule I had made up. "I did this in
good faith, but now I'm on the horns of a dilemma. You've got to help me. You've
got to intercede. I don't care which one of these I do, but I think it would be in the
University's interest, since I'm the starting goalie on the soccer team, that I go to the
tournament. Help me out with Jones, because I don't want to face him."

         Atwood said, "I'd be glad to. Certainly. Let me just make a call."

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         He called up, and he said, "Yes. Well, no. Yes. I know. Well, certainly,
certainly. Well, I'm glad we understand each other. Thank you." He hung up and
he said, "He'll be glad to see you right now." He didn't do a damn thing for me.

         So I had to go down there and face this guy. He strutted up and down the
stage about how unreliable people could be and we live in a world of perfidy and
irresponsibility, but the theater is no place for that, and he was smoking all the time,
demonstrating with a cigarette. He finally flashed the cigarette down on the floor
and said, "Because regardless, if I have to play every role myself (which I think was
his secret desire), if I have to play every role myself (barn! he stomped out the
cigarette with his foot), there will be 'The Merchant of Venice' next week."

         I was happy to get on with my life. Then I sort of beat a hasty retreat.
         Then Lee Kahn came in, and I did some more. I liked Lee Kahn hugely. He
was very nice. He helped us make-I was in Oscar Riegel's movie class, and Oscar
Riegel, we called him Commander Riegel, because he had been in the navy, I think.
This was one of the first classes I think in the country where he wanted you to make
a movie, actually go out and make a movie. We talked about the history of the
cinema a lot, and I was utterly into it at that time.
         I was going to make a movie about a man being caught by a fish, and the idea
was that a fisherman was out there and he sees a can of beer on the shore. He drinks
it, and then all of a sudden a hook appears in his jaw, and then he's sort of drawn
out into this lake. I prevailed upon a friend of mine to be the actor. But Lee helped
us make the prosthetic for the hook and all that stuff. He was very helpful.
         The nice thing about the troupe, there were a lot of faculty wives who would
play with us and so forth. It was lovely, but it was a small operation. It wasn't like
what it is now.
Warren: I'm intrigued at your obvious ease that you knew all these professors on a
first-name basis even while you were a student. Was that normal?

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Briggs: It was pretty normal, because if you'd ask the faculty about this, they'd say,
"Well, the students are just much more interesting than their colleagues," and I
think that was probably true. I think the professors enjoyed talking to us. You got
this real sense that they really thought we were interesting.

        I remember they did an amazing production of Marat/Sade one year, and
Jimmy Boatwright played Sade, I think, as I recall. There were other faculty
involved in it, too. It was a tremendous production. It was really great. I remember
us all having dinner. The nights of the rehearsals, we'd all have dinner together. It
was just a matter of course.

         I remember when they built the new student union, then new, they had all
the booze out, and then they had a separate room of booze for faculty. The faculty
were just furious about this. They didn't want a separate room. They wanted to be
with us, and, indeed, that did happen.

         I remember Leyburn said he felt that the school was in dire straits when there
were more eccentrics on the faculty than there were in the student body. He felt
they were all becoming cut out of the same cloth too much.

         Some people, I guess, were trying to polish the apple, but most of us just
looked at them as real friends, more intelligent, more educated, helpful friends. It
was a huge part of the experience, absolutely without question. It helped being in a
small town. The social life was very close. If you had a party, you invited faculty,
sure. It was very common, common indeed.
Warren: How about being in a small town? What was Lexington like in the sixties?
Briggs: It was very small and very isolated. I don't know, it was-I mean, it seemed
sufficient to us. I don't remember people having to go away a lot. People at
Davidson, Davidson was a suitcase college. People just left every weekend for the
weekend. They'd just go someplace else, because it was in the middle of nowhere.
It's only about 20 miles from Charlotte, but people would just leave.

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         There wasn't much of that here. One of the things I remember is, you could
still rent an antebellum house to live in, sometimes in the country, as friends of
mine did. This contributed to the unreality of things. You just don't live in
antebellum houses with great staircases carved as snakes or the snake's head with
red eyes on the newel posts so that the slaves wouldn't go upstairs. I myself, my
senior year, lived in the Stonewall Jackson house. It was owned by a man in
Charlottesville. My roommate, who was two years younger, met the guy, and he
said we could have it for $100 a month, we could live in there.
Warren: You had the whole house to yourself?
Briggs: We had half of the house, the upper stories of the house. There was still
furniture from-now, this is above the part that I think is now the gift shop. We
had access to the whole house. There was still the furniture that Governor Letcher
had loaned Stonewall Jackson in there from the old days. I remember this
incredible dining room table that sort of went up and on a cam and cantilever and
stuff.
Warren: So this was after it had been the hospital?
Briggs: Yes.
Warren: And then someone bought it?
Briggs: Yeah. I don't know the exact history, when all this had happened, but
somebody in Charlottesville owned it and we rented from him. Downstairs was an
insurance agency, I think, some kind of business. As I say, this was not the whole
house, but it was two floors of the building on that side, and it was all of Stonewall
Jackson. That was fun. It was magical. You'd just open a door and just literally
walk into the 19th century. It was terrific. It was a lovely place to be. I mean, that
made it sort of unreal and unusual and magical to be able to do that.

         It was unreal to sort of get away with public drunkenness and traffic offenses
and things like that, because Murph would come in and just sort of get you off. I

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think in a lot of ways, though you were learning and though you were becoming
skilled, it was really a prolongation of adolescence, because you really were protected
and you were really-you were cherished. Faculty were not these distant
taskmasters. They were like uncles or older brothers. Contact was very close and
agreeable and helpful, and that helped you learn how to act like an adult, being with
those guys. Maybe that's why it was so pleasant, so nice. And then when you got to
graduate school, it was really kind of a shock, because you got into the real world of
the sixties, and things changed in '68 when I was out. You had serious
demonstrations and problems, and '68 was a horrible year. But then you realized
what real working class was like and what was going on, that there were some real
issues out there to be worried about. So I think the dream was over.
Warren: So why did it take you so long to come back? You were gone for almost
twenty years. There are guys here who we can barely shoo them away.
Briggs: I know. One of my classmates came back shortly thereafter and is still here.
I'm just amazed whenever I see him still here.
Warren: We have some very well-educated carpenters in this county.
Briggs: And you can imagine what Chapel Hill is like. Boy, they're all over the
place in Chapel Hill.

         I sort of had personal reasons for not wanting to come back to Lexington. It
was just a stage I think that I just wanted to get behind me for a while. I'd come back
a couple of times when I was in graduate school. I was going to go to film school
after I got my M.A. I called up Commander Riegel. I had to make a movie to get
into film school. I said, "Can I borrow a camera?" And I got Lee Kahn's children
and I got to use the church, the R.E. Lee Church, and all this kind of stuff, made a
movie here and got into film school. I ended up not going. So I did come back sort
of shortly thereafter, but then, I don't know, just sort of moved on.

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         Then they invited me back for something. I was happy to come back. There's
a point at which your life gets so involved with sort of reality. I would come back
here and say, "This isn't-you know, I had friends who were living here. I said,
"This isn't life. This isn't the world. You can't live this kind of antebellum dream
here, so abstracted from problems of the world, race riots and all this horrible crime
and stuff that's going on."

         They would say, "Why not?" That was the end of the conversation, I guess.
Warren: I have a lot of those conversations myself these days.
Briggs: Yeah. It's a heavenly place.
Warren: Well, this has been really terrific for me. Is there anything more you
would like to talk about? I mean, I could ask you lots and lots more questions, but I
think I've gotten a lot of gold here.
Briggs: Oh, well, I can just go on. Gosh, I don't know.
Warren: Any other teachers you'd like to talk about?
Briggs: We all had favorites and we all had-there are certain teachers who were
beloved, for various reasons. There were people who liked Keith Shillington, for
reasons I didn't understand myself, but then, again, I didn't do chemistry.

         I wish I knew more about Commander Riegel. He was wonderful, and he
showed back up at my lecture last year. I said, "Commander, I can't believe you're
here," meaning, "I thought you were dead."

         He said, "Where did you expect me to be?" meaning, "Did you think I would
be dead?"

         Whenever you see old W&L people, one of the names that always, always
comes up is the name of Dave Futch in history, who gave really just lectures of a
sort that I guess maybe to an extent I've also tried to sort of model. He just saw
history as a series of anecdotes, and mostly racy anecdotes. He gave a famous lecture
on openings weekends, when you'd bring your best girl from high school over.

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This was when we had Saturday classes, and you'd bring her over. This was his
story of the loose alliance of countries around Prussia, Germany, in the years before
World War I. This was known as the famous cordon sanitaire lecture, and this
alliance was called the cordon sanitaire. But this was the most trope-laden lecture
I've ever heard.

         My first year was his second year here, and his first class, in fact, you met in a
chemistry room. He was so fastidious and obsessive and so forth. The chemistry
class had left sort of the room a mess, so he was trying to fix everything up. The bell
rang, it was time to start, and all these drawers in this desk were open. So he was
standing at this desk and going like this, trying to close the things with his feet and
moving like this. Everybody was just sort of laughing. We didn't know what this
guy was doing. He said, "You don't know how difficult it is to lecture with your
drawers open." That was the first thing he said to us, and everybody just fell out.

         But anyway, he would give this famous cordon sanitaire lecture, and he'd
have a map and he'd say, "What is this, the cordon sanitaire. Who can translate the
term, cordon sanitaire? Can anybody translate this for us?"

         Some bright spark would always say, "The sanitary belt."
         He'd say, "That's right, the sanitary belt. What was the purpose of this
sanitary belt? Well, it was to stanch the periodic bloodshed that was staining Europe
at the time." He'd go on like this. Well, I mean, he's had twenty-five years to
perfect this lecture now, so God knows how packed it is.
         I'm telling you, on openings weekend, in this little duPont annex he lectured
for a while, they would put chairs on the porch outside so people could look in the
window at this lecture on openings weekend, it would be so crowded. It was
screamingly funny. Of course, it would be immediate prosecution today if he did
the same. I mean, his lectures were great. He's a name everybody remembers. A
couple of years ago, he came down to Raleigh to lecture to the alumni club on

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Herzegovina or something. Impossible. The place was jammed. People came from
Georgia because he was going to talk. So, I mean, he was one of the real campus
characters.

         Jimmy Boatwright was a great figure, who, again, really guided a lot of
students into how to be sophisticated about literature and about dealings with
people and so forth. He was a wonderful mentor and friend.

         Those were the ones that I was sort of aware of, that I took. Some day when
we write the secret history of W&L, there'll be lots of other stories to tell.
Warren: Well, the secret history gets less and less secret all the time.
Briggs: Well, maybe so. I bet. I did a book of biographies of six hundred American
classical scholars. I would write to people for information, and they'd all say,
"Here's what you can publish, but then here's the aside." I've got plenty for a secret
history if I can ever produce it.

         Let's see, [shuffling papers] [unclear]. I don't think I thought anything very
noble. No, I didn't. That's about it. But, I mean, Leyburn and Lyles, that's W&L to
me.
Warren: You know, there's one name you mentioned that nobody else has talked
about, Harry Pemberton. Who is Harry Pemberton?
Briggs: Harry Pemberton was a Platonist-is-and he reveled a little too much in
the Socratic method. He convinced us that the Socratic method as used by Socrates
was a means of arriving at the truth, but that didn't mean that the Socratic method,
as practiced in our classes, always ended up with the truth. He influenced a lot of
people.

         He was, again, one of these charitable, friendly, honest, faculty members such
as you just rarely, rarely find. He remained a friend, and he had a large influence in
the sixties on people in my class. The two main influences sort of in my circle were
really Boatwright and Pemberton. They were really the people who students came

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to as sort of repositories of how you wanted to be. You wanted to be able to argue
like Harry Pemberton and master the sort of gentlemanly dialectic that Harry did.

         I'm not sure it was always terribly profitable and that people learned a lot
about Socrates from Harry, but he had a big effect in my era. He's remained a friend,
who I've seen since I've been back. I mean, he just so thoroughly identified with
Plato. His classes were not lectures, they were sort of Socratic sessions with people.
You often might feel embarrassed in front of the class, but you never felt
embarrassed in front of Harry. In other words, Harry could run rings around you, I
guess, if he wanted to, but you always felt that he loved the exercise and that that's
what it was about and not trying to best a student. I have colleagues who say, "Well,
if I can just dazzle my students, that's all that counts." That doesn't count for
anything in my book. Harry made you realize that this was something that could be
loved and that you would be a good person if you did love it, and that helped a lot.
That had a big effect.

         The other thing was, Harry really lived it, and Boatwright really lived
modern poetry, the life. He was very much into the life, editing Shenandoah and
going to receptions and bringing important people down here. He was really into it,
and that was really appealing, that was really attractive. They were both very
attractive people, so that was very nice.

         But, yes, I think, particularly in the sixties-I mean, Pemberton was kind of
the William Sloane Coffin of W&L. He was really in this time when everybody was
questioning values. Harry was giving people tools to do it. So a lot of people
became philosophy majors, went into the ministry. That was the kind of thing that
was done in that era, but I think Harry made encouraged them, too. He was really
influential.
Warren: Okay. Well, I see my little light flashing again. Any last words, last
farewell?

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Briggs: May history just treat us all kindly. That's all I hope for.
Warren: Oh, wow. I don't think that's part of my job description.
Briggs: No?
Warren: It's part of my nature, but it's not part of my job description.
Briggs: Well, the emperor Antoninus Pius said, "Happy is the era whose annals are
brief." The annals are probably fairly brief. The next four years after I left, I think,
were crowded with incidents and trouble.
Warren: They were indeed. A lot of angst and well illustrated, too.
Briggs: It is remarkable how well the identity has changed. One thing I do notice,
when I go to alumni meetings in Columbia, South Carolina, or Wilmington,
Delaware, to greet people, the freshmen who are entering W&L, how across the
generations everybody looks the same and they're dressed the same. There's no sort
of blue-jean era and overall-and-batik and tie-dyed and three-piece suit era. They're
all just perfectly the same, which is another way of saying W&L has really kept its
identity. It's remarkable that it weathered the sixties. Maybe this magical isolation,
this sort of Brigadoon quality or something, has really helped it keep its identity. It
sure seems to. It's a wonderful place to come back to. That's all I will say.
Warren: Thank you.
[End of Interview]

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