Stories
The First Leap:
from Neosho to New York
David Rounds
* * *
Arriving from my suicidal summer at Columbia in the fall of 1957, I found the college's "great books" program to my liking. But as time went on, although I loved New York, I came to hate Columbia. Most of the students lived at home and disappeared on weekends, leaving me and a few others alone in the dormitories. It didn't help, given my experience with suicide and depression that my namesake, another Columbia student named "David Bachrach" (my middle name) committed suicide while I was in college. And it took me several years to discover the girls at Barnard College nearby.
What I looked like when I arrived at Columbia in 1957
After my first year I went home to Neosho with lots of books to read, including Look Homeward Angel (which inspired me to be a novelist), The Golden Bough, and the Ernest Jones biography of Freud (which inspired me to be a psychoanalyst). I also took a series of odd jobs, including putting up election posters on the back rounds with our local Prosecuting Attorney Burt Hurn and serving as a night watchman at the huge underground storehouse converted from the old limestone quarries North of town. It was especially strange in the absolute darkness and silence of the caves at night to hear the whistle of the train and to open the huge doors and let it come underground! I still dream about it sometime. I got fired from that job later when, while loading freight cars during the day I went over the head of the foreman to complain about the carbon monoxide fumes from the forklifts.
In my second year, I took a pre-med program as the first step to becoming a psychoanalyst, but I hated it, and by the end of a semester, I decided to quit school, look for a job in New York, begin work on a novel and see a psychoanalyst to understand my depressive state, . The latter had not been helped by the suicide of another student who was my namesake, David Bachrach.
I had returned to Columbia for only one semester before I went to Rice Peak in the summer of 1960. Highly motivated, I wanted to major in every subject, trying, in succession philosophy, anthropology and English literature and poetry. I ended up graduating in English, but took mostly psychology courses my senior year with an eye toward graduate school in psychology, as well as taking a wonderful graduate course in linguistics. I recall a conversation with the Vice-President of the University, Lawrence Chamberlain, who thought that I had set something of a record for the most majors ever taken by an undergraduate.
I still have many of the papers I wrote at Columbia and some of them are still quite interesting:
The purpose of grammatical distortion in a poem by E.E. Cummings
Criticism and paraphrase of two paintings (in page-poem format!)
The influence of the moon upon the instinctual life of man (a short story)
The role of Roman Malinovsky in the rise of Bolshevism
The origins of the linear time model (to be followed many years later by a geometry of time)
Thy fearful symmetry (a short story)
Very often I tried to take a psychoanalytic perspective on my subject. For example:
The sense of guilt in Kafka
The unconscious in Brutus, Hamlet and Macbeth
Two phallic images in Wordsworth's poetry
The ontogenesis of symbolism
The demonology of Jesus
The latter was reprinted in the campus literary magazine, King's Crown Essays, and widely read and debated. I was honored when Dr. Wilbur told me that I had succeeded in this essay in a psychoanalytic understanding of Jesus where all others had failed. It is still a good read almost a half century later, so I attach a copy here.
What I looked like when I graduated from Columbia in 1957
Although I took courses from famous professors at Columbia like Lionel Trilling and Ernest Nagel, I did not really appreciate them. There was a brief but memorable series of classes with Theodosius Dobzhansky. And my favorite was Andrew Chiappe, who read Shakespeare, and who read and advised me on my first novel in a way that was quite supportive. He was short, fat and wall-eyed, but a frustrated actor, so he read Shakespeare with a passion that inspired me. The classroom had hundreds of seats. Because all he did was read from the book, most of the students stopped coming. But along with a handful of other students, I came to be inspired by his reading of the great bard!
In addition to singing at Riverside Church and in the Columbia Glee Club, I sang in the St Paul's Chapel Choir directed by a fine musician, Searle Wright, and and fell in love with a fellow chorister Susan Slack. Susan and I ended up traveling through Europe together the summer that I graduated, which was a wonderful introduction for me to the Old World. The scrapbooks from that trip and our letters, including many from Rice Peak, are full of fond memories.
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