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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“I think you’re bluffing, goddamn it,” he said, his voice shrill and nervous. “I’ll call you. Show your stinkin’ hand.”
“Oh, not so stinkin’,” Allen replied lightly. “I’ve got four of a kind, all of ’em kings. Let’s see your three deuces.”
He tossed down his hand, and Hugh slumped in his chair at the sight of the four kings. He shoved the pile of chips toward Allen. “Take the pot, damn you. Of all the bastard luck. Look!” He slapped down his cards angrily. “A full house, queens up. Christ!” He burst into a flood of obscenity, the other boys listening sympathetically, all except Allen who was carefully stacking the chips.
In a few minutes Hugh’s anger died. He remembered that he was only about twenty-five dollars behind and that he had an hour in which to recover them. His face became set and hard; his hands lost their jerky eagerness. He played carefully, never daring to enter a big pot, never betting for more than his hands were worth.
As the bets grew larger, the room grew quieter. Everyone was smoking constantly; the air was heavy with smoke, and the stench grew more and more foul. Outside of a soft, “I raise you twenty,” or, even, “Fifty bucks if you want to see my hand,” a muttered oath or a request to buy chips, there was hardly a word said. The excitement was so intense that it hurt; the expletives smelled of the docks.
At times there was more than five hundred dollars in a pot, and five times out of seven when the pot was big, Allen won it. Win or lose, he continued cool and calm, at times smoking a pipe, other times puffing nonchalantly at a cigarette.
The acrid smoke cut Hugh’s eyes; they smarted and pained, but he continued to light cigarette after cigarette, drawing the smoke deep into his lungs, hardly aware of the fact that they hurt.
He won and lost, won and lost, but gradually he won back the twenty-five dollars and a little more. The college clock struck eleven. He knew that he ought to go, but he wondered if he could quit with honor when he was ahead.
“I ought to go,” he said hesitatingly. “I told George when I said that I’d sit in that I’d have to leave at eleven. I’ve got an eccy quiz tomorrow that I’ve got to study for.”
“Oh, don’t leave now,” one of the men said excitedly. “Why, hell, man, the game’s just getting warm.”
“I know,” Hugh agreed, “and I hate like hell to quit, but I’ve really got to beat it. Besides, the stakes are too big for me. I can’t afford a game like this.”
“You can afford it as well as I can,” Mandel said irritably. “I’m over two hundred berries in the hole right now, and you can goddamn well bet that I’m not going to leave until I get them back.”
“Well, I’m a hundred and fifty to the bad,” Winsor announced miserably, “but I’ve got to go. If I don’t hit that eccy, I’m going to be out of luck.” He shoved back his chair. “I hate like hell to leave; but I promised Hugh that I’d leave with him at eleven, and I’ve got to do it.”
Allen had been quite indifferent when Hugh said that he was leaving. Hugh was obviously small money, and Allen had no time to waste on chickenfeed, but Winsor was a different matter.
“You don’t want to go, George, when you’re in the hole. Better stick around. Maybe you’ll win it back. Your luck can’t be bad all night.”
“You’re right,” said Winsor, stretching mightily. “It can’t be bad all night, but I can’t hang around all night to watch it change. You’re welcome to the hundred and fifty, Ted, but some night soon I’m coming over and take it away from you.”
Allen laughed. “Any time you say, George.”
Hugh and Winsor settled their accounts, then stood up, aching and weary, their muscles cramped from three hours of sitting and nervous tension. They said brief good nights, unlocked the door—they heard Allen lock it behind them—and left their disgruntled friends, glad to be out of the noisome odor of the room.
“God, what luck!” Winsor exclaimed as they started down the hall. “I’m off Allen for good. That boy wins big pots too regularly and always loses the little ones. I bet he’s a cold-deck artist or something.”
“He’s something all right,” Hugh agreed. “Cripes, I feel dirty and stinko. I feel as if I’d been in a den.”
“You have been. Say, what’s that?” They had almost traversed the length of the long hall when Winsor stopped suddenly, taking Hugh by the arm. A door was open, and they could hear somebody reading.
“What’s what?” Hugh asked, a little startled by the suddenness of Winsor’s question.
“Listen. That poem, I’ve heard it somewhere before. What is it?”
Hugh listened a moment and then said: “Oh, that’s the poem Prof. Blake read us the other day—you know, ‘Marpessa.’ It’s about the shepherd, Apollo, and Marpessa. It’s great stuff. Listen.”
They remained standing in the deserted hall, the voice coming clearly to them through the open doorway. “It’s Freddy Fowler,” Winsor whispered. “He can sure read.”
The reading stopped, and they heard Fowler say to someone, presumably his roommate: “This is the part that I like best. Get it,” Then he read Idas’s plea to Marpessa:
“ ‘After such argument what can I plead?
Or what pale promise make? Yet since it is
In women to pity rather than to aspire,
A little I will speak. I love thee then
Not only for thy body packed with sweet
Of all this world, that cup of brimming June,
That jar of violet wine set in the air,
That palest rose sweet in the night of life;
Nor for that stirring bosom, all besieged
By drowsing lovers, or thy perilous hair;
Nor
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