Crowded by Beauty

Author:Schneider, David
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520247468
Publisher: University of California Press

FIGURE 11. Philip in army uniform with his sister, Velna, 1944–45. Estate of Philip Whalen, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

After a last scare about European deployment in November 1945, he finally felt in January 1946 that discharge was in sight. “They’ll cut the orders & I’ll be on my way . . . possibly in a week . . . ten days at the most. Just think! A civilian! No more merd de poulet . . . no more saluting . . . no more details, chow lines, forced association with idiots, morons & sex fiends. Hot dawg.”4 It took longer than hoped, but Philip was discharged in February, having served three years, a month, a week, and a bit.

His technical teaching brought him into association with educated students—soldiers who could by dire necessity express themselves clearly and well, even under pressure. Additionally, several were active readers, and from them, Philip learned of books and authors he’d previously not known, the most important of which was Thomas Wolfe. “I felt great affinity for Wolfe, because I too came from poor people in an obscure part of the country, and yet was aware of the great natural beauty of that section and of the peculiar lives and speech of the people in that region, and so I began to try to write novels in the manner of Thomas Wolfe. I never got too much beyond 40 or 50 pages of it, and it was always pretty much the same. But I thought that was really what writing was about, was to write novels.”5

From among his new acquaintances, several had literary or musical ambitions of their own, and over time these connections grew into real friendships. The longest-lived of these, a young composer named Stanworth Beckler, one day went to find out who was “painfully outlining” chords on the chapel’s grand piano. There sat Philip, “bent nearsightedly into a volume of Debussy’s preludes . . . a plump young man in khakis which fitted him like lampshades. A crimson-patched broad face, terribly Irish features, with owlish spectacles, & a modest precise part in his rug of hair . . . head tilted almost imperiously. I instinctively associated him with a stern scholar. When he spoke, he seemed stilted, reserved—speaking through a protective wall of poise & indifference, not speaking down, but speaking around, vastly serious. . . . He had a salty, self-sufficient air.”6

As Beckler worked on his music, also around his army day job, he involved Philip in it. He told how “together we finished the second movement of the sonata. His moral & intellectual sustenance is immeasurable. He is so well-read & retentive, a stickler for accuracy and sincerity—and a demon attacker of preciousness, pseudo-intellectualism & other forms of musical & literary drivel.”7

Philip too held Stanworth (whom he called Dan) in high regard. He admired his music; more important, he learned music from him. Beckler introduced him to branches of composition he hadn’t known and showed him how to read scores, including the orchestral scores he himself was studying.

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