Remembering Denny

Rating:
Summary: A Cheeveresque rumination on unfulfilled potential
Review: Calvin Trillin's "Remembering Denny" is a Cheeveresque rumination on the unfulfilled potential of Trillin's Yale classmate, Denny Hansen. While at Yale, Hansen was so highly thought of that he was profiled in LIFE magazine and his classmates used to kid each other about which cabinet position they'd fill once Hansen had been elected President. After Yale, however, Hansen failed to live up to the high expectations everyone--friends, family, teachers, coaches--had for him. Trillin's book is a delicate examination of what that meant, both for Denny and for his constellation of friends and well-wishers.

Denny doesn't come alive as vividly as might be hoped here, but Trillin does an outstanding job of sketching this young man's life in terms of a larger picture about America. In a country where success on every level is much prized, Trillin subtly but thoroughly plumbs the reasons why Denny didn't succeed--at least not to the extent everyone thought he would. This uncharacteristically somber book is absorbing and thought-provoking, even if it doesn't quite reach the goals Trillin seems to have set for himself in the beginning chapters.

Rating:
Summary: Leaves a bad taste
Review: On the surface, this is a book about Roger Hansen. Below the surface, it's about how great Calvin Trillin is. That might not have been the author's intention, but the rather smug tone conveys that message. However unintentionally, Trillin's success is juxtaposed to what he sees as Hansen's failure. Despite some thoughtful reflections on the effect of expectations, Yale in the 50s etc., the whole thing leaves behind a bad taste. My advice: skip this and read one of Roger Hansen's books instead.

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Summary: "Big Chill" at Yale
Review: The book is a whatdunit: what caused an Ivy League golden boy with a million dollar smile to commit suicide at age 55.

The boy was Denny Hansen. His family was lower middle class and lived in the San Francisco Bay area. At a public high school, he became all-everything. He attended Yale from 1953-57 where he became good friends with the author, Bud Trillin. There, he was a fifties hero: scholar-athlete, a student leader. and all-around good guy. He was a member of swim team, Deke fraternity and the Elizabethan Society. During his senior year, he was tapped by Scroll and Key. He graduated magna cum laude and was admitted to Phi Betta Kappa. Life Magazine published a photo essay about his graduation. He was selected as a Rhodes Scholar and studied two years at Magdalen College at Oxford. He received a master¹s degree from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, Not bad for a young man with his background.

Denny Hansen became Roger D. Hansen. On the career level, he worked briefly in broadcasting, the State Department and at the National Security Council in the Carter administration. He wrote several books on foreign policy that were widely praised. But the Foreign Service rejected his application. Eventually, he was appointed to a chair at the Johns-Hopkins¹ School for Advanced International Studies in Washington. He was a member of the Cosmos Club and the Council on Foreign Relations. On a personal level, Roger never married. He became estranged from his family, his relationships with a few women soured, he gradually alienated his friends from Yale. He became a chronic complainer. He became very depressed. But he always defended right conduct. Near the end of his life, he lived a clandestine gay lifestyle. He bequeathed his pension to his former girl friend, and the remainder of his "huge" estate to Yale.

What caused Roger to commit suicide in 1991?. His friends and colleagues offer various explanations. During conversations after Roger¹s death, his Yale friends discovered that they did not know Roger and may have never really known Denny. Trillin¹s explanation is that because of ³poisonous template of the fifties², Roger could not accept his sexual orientation. A reader can interpret his explanation as an attack on values of the Fifties. To me, the most persuasive explanation is an application of the backpack analogy. When a boy is born, he is wearing a backpack. Other people put their heroic expectations for him in the backpack. The more the boy succeeds, the more expectations are put in the backpack and the heavier it gets. Eventually, the loan becomes unbearable and the boy reaches a crisis. In Roger¹s case, instead of emptying the backpack, he chose to kill himself. He had a house, but not a home. Remember, the line from a Robert Frost poem, "Death of the Hired Man"., ³Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/ They have to take you in.² Neither Denny nor Roger had a place where they had to take him in.

The details of the book are fascinating. Trillin describes college life at Yale during the 1950s and the careers of many of Denny¹s classmates and friends.. Of course, Trillin¹s writing is excellent: clear, powerful and sometimes humorous. In a way, the book is a mid-20th Century sequel to Owen Johnson¹s Stover at Yale.

Trillin suggests that the ³poisonous template of the fifties² was the major cause of Roger¹s death in 1991. But change is not equivalent to progress. Sex does not explain everything. Each reader must decide for himself whether, based on the circumstantial evidence, the template of the Fifties enabled Roger to carry his backpack of expectations for more than 30 years, or whether it was the templates of later decades that poisoned the golden boy from California with the million dollar smile.

Rating:
Summary: rumination on lost hopes
Review: THis is a very good story of the American dream gone wrong, of an Ivy leaguer who failed to live up to his own expectations and promise and who had many secrets. Take it or leave it, depending on your taste, but I loved it.

From my own school experience, I knew lots of kids like this: they assume the world is waiting for them and make some grim discoveries about how hard it is to make it out there. For Denny, because the story at school occured largely before the questioning of the sixties, the descent to mediocrity was much much harder. (The historical asides on Yale in the 1950s are a fascinating subtheme of the book, as is the building of a career.) Many people will experience a kind of Schadenfreude at his story - handsome wonder boy losing - but it was tragic to me.

Trillin is a wonderful writer, perceptive and sensitive, funny, ironic. He deserves his place in American letters.

Warmly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: College life, the 50s and the weight of great expectations
Review: Trillin sheds dazzling light on college-days in the 50s, at Yale among his peer group of gifted students, athletes, class leaders -- the nation's wunderkind -- there assembled in New Haven. Most remarkable of them all ,Trillin writes, was Roger D. Hansen, "Denny" whose undergraduate life serves as the central metaphor of his classmates, aspirations and dreams for the future. Trillin offers a sharp focus in memoir form of Denny who was much-admired but little-known. Denny's life following undergraduate years becomes increasingly cryptic and desperate. Trillin repeatedly asks the question for us, "Who was Denny?"

Rating:
Summary: A sad remembrance of lost, youthful hopes
Review: Trillin turns serious and reflects on a Yale classmate who seemed to have it all: a "dazzling smile," charm, brains, athletic talent. LIFE magazine covered Denny Hansen's graduation. But things didn't work out for Hansen, the expected future President, and he died a lonely, obscure professor in 1991. Trillin, in investigating Denny's path through life, draws larger lessons on larger themes than one man's life: struggling with closeted homosexuality; adjusting oneself to expectations that can never be met; growing up in the 1950's when the US in general and pedigreed white men in particular held all the cards. The book is many things: a biography, an autobiography of trillin, a social history, a remembrance of a tragic friend and a not-so-distant, but utterly vanished, era.