The Plastic Age by Percy Marks (e book reader pc .TXT) 📕
Description
The Plastic Age can be read as an exposé on the moral failings of undergraduates in Jazz Age New England, as described through the four-year experience of a young man at the fictional Sanford College. Students enroll at Sanford to “acquire culture,” and do so at an age when they are “plastic” in the sense that they are changeable and meant to be transformed by the experience.
But, not all of the lessons of a college education are in the curriculum. To a student reader of the 1920s, Marks’ novel would have looked more like a moral tale, critique, and guide to navigating the challenges, pitfalls, and possibilities of higher education. Marks was an English instructor at Brown University at the time of publication but also had experience teaching at MIT and Dartmouth from which to draw his descriptions of campus life.
The book was popular, the second best selling novel of 1924. It inspired two motion pictures. But it was also controversial. The novel was banned in Boston and Marks was removed from his teaching position at Brown the next year. College administrators saw the novel’s setting as a thinly-veiled version of their own school and the novel’s portrayal of college life hit too close to home.
A Sanford English instructor seems to convey the author’s view when he says: “Some day, perhaps, our administrative officers will be true educators; … our faculties will be wise men really fitted to teach; … our students will be really students, eager to learn, honest searchers after beauty and truth.”
But what Marks sees instead are uninspired teaching and advising, superficial learning, pervasive smoking, prohibition-era drinking, vice, gambling, billiards, institutionalized hazing, excessive conformity, and a campus life that molds its students into less serious people. The author seeks elevation but sees regression.
Some of the norms and expectations of the 1920s may seem dated to the modern reader, but important themes endure. Marks went on to write 19 additional books and late in his career, returned to teaching literature at the University of Connecticut.
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- Author: Percy Marks
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“It isn’t bugs,” Pudge contradicted flatly; “it’s got sense. You do lose something as you grow older, but you gain something, too. Wordsworth admits that. It’s a wonderful poem, and you’re dumbbells if you can’t see it.” He was very serious as he turned the pages of the book and laid his pipe on the table at his elbow. “Now listen. This stanza has the dope for the whole poem.” He read the famous stanza simply and effectively:
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.”
There was a moment’s silence when he finished, and then Hugh said reverently: “That is beautiful. Read the last stanza, will you, Pudge?”
So Pudge read the last stanza, and then the boys got into an argument over the possible truth of the thesis of the poem. Freddy finally brought them back to the task in hand with his plaintive plea, “We’ve gotta get going.” It was two o’clock in the morning when the seminar broke up, Hugh admitting to Carl after their visitors departed that he had not only learned a lot but that he had enjoyed the evening heartily.
The college grew quieter and quieter as the day for the examinations approached. There were seminars on everything, even on the best way to prepare cribs. Certain students with low grades and less honor would somehow gravitate together and discuss plans for “foxing the profs.” Opinions differed. One man usually insisted that notes in the palm of the left hand were safe from detection, only to be met by the objection that they had to be written in ink, and if one’s hand perspired, “and it was sure as hell to,” nothing was left but an inky smear. Another held that a fellow could fasten a rubber band on his forearm and attach the notes to those, pulling them down when needed and then letting them snap back out of sight into safety. “But,” one of the conspirators was sure to object, “what th’ hell are you going to do if the band breaks?” Some of them insisted that notes placed in the inside of one’s goloshes—all the students wore them but took them off in the examination-room—could be easily read. “Yeah, but the proctors are wise to that stunt.” And so ad infinitum. Eventually all the “stunts” were used and many more. Not that all the students cheated. Everything considered, the percentage of cheaters was not great, but those who did cheat usually spent enough time evolving ingenious methods of preparing cribs and in preparing them to have learned their lessons honestly and well.
The night before the first examinations the campus was utterly quiet. Suddenly bedlam broke loose. Somehow every dormitory that contained freshmen became a madhouse at the same time. Hugh and Carl were in Surrey 19 earnestly studying. Freddy Dickson flung the door open and shouted hysterically, “The general science exam’s out!”
Hugh and Carl whirled around in their desk-chairs.
“What?” They shouted together.
“Yeah! One of the fellows saw it. A girl that works at the press copied down the exam and gave it to him.”
“What fellow? Where’s the exam?”
“I don’t know who the guy is, but Hubert Manning saw the exam.”
Hugh and Carl were out of their chairs in an instant, and the three boys rushed out of Surrey in search of Manning. They found him in his room telling a mob of excited classmates that he hadn’t seen the exam but that Harry Smithson had. Away went the crowd in search of Smithson, Carl and Hugh and Freddy in the midst of the excited, chattering lads. Smithson hadn’t seen the exam, but he had heard that Puddy McCumber had a copy. … Freshmen were running up and down stairs in the dormitories, shouting, “Have you seen the exam?” No, nobody had seen the exam, but some of the boys had been told definitely what the questions were going to be. No two seemed to agree on the questions, but everybody copied them down and then rushed on to search for a bona fide copy. They hurried from dormitory to dormitory, constantly shouting the same question, “Have you seen the exam?” There were men in every dormitory with a new list of questions, which were hastily scratched into notebooks by the eager seekers. Until midnight the excitement raged; then the campus quieted down as the freshmen began to study the long lists of questions.
“God!” said Carl as he scanned his list hopelessly, “these damn questions cover everything in the course and some things that I know damn well weren’t in it. What a lot of nuts we were. Let’s go to bed.”
“Carl,” Hugh wailed despondently, “I’m going to flunk that exam. I can’t answer a tenth of these questions. I can’t go to bed; I’ve got to study. Oh, Lord!”
“Don’t be a triple-plated jackass. Come on to bed. You’ll just get woozy if you stay up any longer.”
“All right,” Hugh agreed wearily. He went to bed, but many of the boys stayed up and studied, some of them all night.
The examinations were held in the gymnasium. Hundreds of classroom chairs
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