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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For weeks the campus buzzed with talk about the Prom. A dozen men who had been detected flagrante delicto were summarily expelled. Many others who had been equally guilty were in a constant state of mental gooseflesh. Would the next mail bring a summons from the dean? President Culver spoke sternly in chapel and hinted that there would be no Prom the coming year. Most of the men said that the Prom had been an “awful brawl,” but there were some who insisted that it was no worse than the Proms held at other colleges, and recited startling tales in support of their argument.
Leonard Gates finally settled the whole matter for Hugh. There had been many discussions in the Nu Delta living-room about the Prom, and in one of them Gates ended the argument with a sane and thoughtful statement.
“The Prom was a brawl,” he said seriously, “a drunken brawl. We all admit that. The fact that Proms at other colleges are brawls, too, doesn’t make ours any more respectable. If a Yale man happens to commit murder and gets away with it, that is no reason that a Harvard man or a Sanford man should commit murder, too. Some of you are arguing like babies. But some of you are going to the other extreme.
“You talk as if everybody at the Prom was lit. Well, I wasn’t lit, and as a matter of fact most of them weren’t lit. Just use a little common sense. There were three hundred and fifty couples at the Prom. Now, not half of them even had a drink. Say that half did. That makes one hundred and seventy-five fellows. If fifty of those fellows were really soused, I’ll eat my hat, but we’ll say that there were fifty. Fifty were quite enough to make the whole Prom look like a longshoreman’s ball. You’ve got to take the music into consideration, too. That orchestra could certainly play jazz; it could play it too damn well. Why, that music was enough to make a saint shed his halo and shake a shimmy.
“What I’m getting to is this: there are over a thousand fellows in college, and out of that thousand not more than fifty were really soused at the Prom, and not more than a hundred and seventy-five were even a little teed. To go around saying that Sanford men are a lot of muckers just because a small fraction of them acted like gutter-pups is sheer bunk. The Prom was a drunken brawl, but all Sanford men aren’t drunkards—not by a damn sight.”
Hugh had to admit the force of Gates’s reasoning, and he found comfort in it. He had been just about ready to believe that all college men and Sanford men in particular were hardly better than common muckers. But in the end the comfort that he got was small: he realized bitterly that he was one of the minority that had disgraced his college; he was one of the gutter-pups. The recognition of that undeniable fact cut deep.
He was determined to redeem himself; he had to, somehow. Living a life of perfect rectitude was not enough; he had to do something that would win back his own respect and the respect of his fellows, which he thought, quite absurdly, that he had forfeited. So far as he could see, there was only one way that he could justify his existence at Sanford; that was to win one of the dashes in the Sanford-Raleigh meet. He clung to that idea with the tenacity of a fanatic.
He had nearly a month in which to train, and train he did as he never had before. His diet became a matter of the utmost importance; a rubdown was a holy rite, and the words of Jansen, the coach, divine gospel. He placed in both of the preliminary meets, but he knew that he could do better; he wasn’t yet in condition.
When the day for the Raleigh-Sanford meet finally came, he did not feel any of the nervousness that had spelled defeat for him in his freshman year. He was stonily calm, silently determined. He was going to place in the hundred and win the two-twenty or die in the attempt. No golden dreams of breaking records excited him. Calvert of Raleigh was running the hundred consistently in ten seconds and had been credited with better time. Hugh had no hopes of defeating him in the hundred, but there was a chance in the two-twenty. Calvert was a short-distance man, the shorter the better. Two hundred and twenty yards was a little too far for him.
Calvert did not look like a runner. He was a good two inches shorter than Hugh, who lacked nearly that much of six feet. Calvert was heavily built—a dark, brawny chap, both quick and powerful. Hugh looked at him and for a moment hated him. Although he did not phrase it so—in fact, he did not phrase it at all—Calvert was his obstacle in his race for redemption.
Calvert won the hundred-yard dash in ten seconds flat, breaking the Sanford-Raleigh record. Hugh, running faster than he ever had in his life, barely managed to come in second ahead of his teammate Murphy. The Sanford men cheered him lustily, but he hardly listened. He had to win the two-twenty.
At last the runners were called to the starting-line. They danced up and down the track flexing their muscles. Hugh was tense but more determined than nervous.
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