Promises Unpacked

By Stefan Kanfer

TITLE: REMEMBERING DENNY

AUTHOR: CALVIN TRILLIN

PUBLISHER: FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX; 210 PAGES; $19

THE BOTTOM LINE: A posthumous account of promise gone wrong, told by a master of insight and irony.

Early in Remembering Denny, the author tips his hand: "It has been my experience," he writes, "that almost anyone who asks to speak at a funeral or memorial service wants to talk about himself." So it appears; this luminous valedictory centers on the late Roger ("Denny") Hansen. But it is as much about Calvin Trillin as it is about his classmate, the golden boy of Yale, '57.

Back in the Eisenhower era, as one undergraduate put it, Yalies viewed the future as "Stairway to Heaven, moving up through the clouds on a blissful escalator." Trillin, a strangely appealing mixture of Jewish arriviste and Midwestern hick, entered college without ever having heard of Dostoyevsky or Greenwich, and he figured to stop ascending early in the journey. Denny was expected to keep on climbing. Champion athlete, top-ranking student, Rhodes scholar, subject of a Life magazine piece, he was discussed seriously as a potential candidate for the presidency. Forty years later, after a life of obscurity and pain, the golden boy sat back in a car and inhaled carbon monoxide until his heart stopped.

What went wrong? Trillin, a New Yorker staff writer, sets out to find the truth, armed only with his wit and a handful of clues. En route Trillin recalls a time when striving was considered something a gentleman just didn't do. After all, why should he? Postgraduate privileges were guaranteed to go along with his Yale sheepskin. And then came the '60s: the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle, the sexual revolution. "There is a common feeling among people my age," Trillin says, "that somehow the rules got changed in the middle of the game."

Trillin candidly describes his own fumbling attempts to adjust: "I was remarkably easy to fool." Others, like Denny, never found their feet again. His jobs grew less significant, and influential friends dropped away. He never married. At a Big Chill session, one mourner suggests that the deceased had "unreasonably high standards." Another concludes that he was a suppressed homosexual. Still another observes that despite the scholar-athlete's "million-dollar smile," he was an emotional basket case, suffering from clinical depression.

Trillin follows these leads as he traces Denny's parabola from college through abortive attempts at journalism to a slow decline in academia. Along the way he provides a superb portrait of an individual, a group and a vanished sensibility.

Ironically, it is one of Denny's recent acquaintances who offers the most discerning epitaph: "You have a knapsack, and all the time you're growing up they keep stuffing promises into the knapsack. Pretty soon, it's just too heavy to carry. You have to unpack." As the author acknowledges, almost all of Denny's generation have found themselves bent with expectations that will never be realized. Unpacking, Trillin provides a class act in every sense of the word.