Remembering Denny

"I had heard that it was about the suicide of somebody who had gone to Yale, called Denny. And Jim, my late husband, had also gone to Yale and committed suicide. And when I read it, I was totally struck by the similarities: both these promising, academically incredibly accomplished men. Jim had a Fulbright, Denny was a Rhodes scholar. Jim did not really drink, other than a glass of wine once or twice a week. Apparently Denny did drink. Denny apparently was homosexual, and didn’t want anybody to know. I don’t believe Jim was. So not everything was the same. And yet I was struck by the similarities. Denny’s class thought that someday he might be president; students in Jim’s school also thought he had that kind of potential. Somehow the expectations were so very, very high – the expectations others had of them, the expectations they must have had of themselves. They were both these very promising men, these perfectionists, who came to think of themselves as failures. “I have a feeling that maybe for sons it’s even more important not to lose your Mum than it is for a daughter.” I imagine that Jim must have thought of himself as a failure. I remember he came home from work once, he worked for a big retail company, and was telling me that not he, but this man whom he thought of as a fool has been promoted. The other guy I guess knew either how to network or had street smarts or whatever it takes to get ahead in the world, I don’t know. Jim did not have that. He was a very gentle soul who did not, I don’t think, know how to maneuver out in the business world. During the war he’d been in the army. His job had involved putting a control system (or something like that) in place. And he did such a good job that his superior said to him: ‘You could have a bright future in business.’ And because Jim’s father had been a totally absent figure, this superior in the army became a sort of father figure to him. So when this man told him ‘business is going to be your area – you’ll do very well,’ it had a big influence. I think that’s probably the reason, because Jim had a full scholarship to Yale Law School waiting for him – and he never took it up . “Somehow the expectations were so very, very high – the expectations others had of them, the expectations they must have had of themselves. They were both these very promising men, these perfectionists, who came to think of themselves as failures.” Instead he went to Harvard Business School, where he did not have a scholarship. We spent years paying for that miserable education. I say miserable not because I mean to insult Harvard, but because I never thought it did Jim much good and I have a feeling that it wasn’t really his métier, although I’m sure he was very, very good at what he did. But I always had the feeling that he somehow chose the wrong path. No. We had two small children. I was not able to bring in any money really, ten dollars here, 20 dollars there. We had no money. And his mother, we helped support his mother too financially. So we really had no money. At some level he was stuck. Or must have felt that he was stuck. In Denny’s life there was something traumatic that happened to him when he was a kid. I think his mother died, or his mother left him, I forget. But I know in Jim’s life, he went to live with his mother when he was a teenager and his mother was, to put it mildly, mentally unstable. And I can’t imagine she was that much of a mother to him. It was more that she needed a caretaker than that she able to take care of him. Which is interesting because in William Styron’s book, which is another one of my choices – in his book as well, something happened to William Styron. When he was 13, his mother died and it was very traumatic for him. And I have a feeling that maybe for sons it’s even more important not to lose your Mum than it is for a daughter. I don’t know but I’m sure it is terribly traumatic for a kid to lose a parent. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The other interesting similarity between Denny and Jim is that apparently friends mentioned afterwards that Denny seemed to be very withdrawn. And I had the same thing. When I began to write A Hidden Life , I called everyone that I could get hold of that had known Jim, and they said he had become very quiet and very withdrawn. So each of them, Denny, Jim, was perhaps already in his own, closed, box."