The night President Clinton announced to the nation his intention to invade Haiti I was sitting in the Tap Room of Princeton’s Nassau Inn. Four of the five overhead TVs were tuned to the president, one for every person at the bar.
The polished wood, the blue-and-white checked tablecloths, the video richesse were all a long way from that impoverished country in the Caribbean. The room, like the town itself, exuded a refined, coddling affluence untouched by the primal concerns of an unimaginable life somewhere beyond.
After the speech, I walked over to the framed pictures of former students lining one wall. They formed two long rows, as impressive a collection of mugs as can be found in any bar except, perhaps, an Irish one with literary pretensions.
John Foster Dulles ’08, James Forrestal ’15, Adlai Stevenson ’22, George Pratt Shultz ’42, James Addison Baker ’52, Ralph Nader ’55, Hodding Carter ’57, Bill Bradley, ’65. Looking slightly out of place: Brooke Shields ’87.
Absent were the two men most associated with Princeton: F. Scott Fitzgerald, who romanticized the place but never graduated, and Woodrow Wilson, whose portrait hangs in the faculty room of Nassau Hall. Wilson went from being a student at Princeton (class of 1879) to its president (1902-1910) to the first president of the United States to send troops into Haiti.
If Princeton seems untouched by the world, the world is far from untouched by Princeton. For more than two centuries (James Madison was in the class of 1771) the university has been educating young men-and, since 1969, young women-for lives of public service. It is telling that the works of one of the school’s most illustrious writers, Edmund Wilson, are revered less for their literary flourish than for their vast learning, sound judgment and overall instructiveness.
And if Princeton is a place where the young gather to prepare for life’s struggle, it is also a place old warriors come to when they make their retreat.
George Kennan, ambassador to the Soviet Union following World War II, has lived in Princeton for the past few decades, penning articles and writing his memoirs. A friend of mine recently told of running into him at the eye doctor’s, in much the same way someone in Los Angeles would talk of standing in a checkout line behind Tom Hanks. In fact, years ago another Princeton friend did stand in line at the supermarket on Nassau Street behind Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Stalin.
John Chancellor, who (as narrator of Ken Burns’ “Baseball”) may have become the new voice of baseball, recently retired to Princeton. Peter Benchley has lived here, safe from sharks, for many years. A somewhat different writer, Thomas Mann, fled to Princeton from Nazi Germany in the late ’30s, lecturing in the humanities department and joining his fellow countryman Albert Einstein, who had established himself a few years earlier at the Institute for Advanced Study.
In the late ’70s, when I worked at the nearby Trenton Times, I sat beside a woman who had grown up next-door to Einstein. (A brush with a brush with greatness.) She used to tell-as did probably every kid who grew up in 1940s Princeton-of sitting on his lap as a child (though her claim seemed somehow validated when, in 1980, her husband won the Nobel Prize in physics).
Now Einsteiniana was flourishing, in part because Hollywood had come to town early in the summer to make a romantic comedy based, obviously very loosely, on the life of the great physicist.
Landau’s clothing store on Nassau Street had filled one half of its window with a display of Einstein memorabilia. Posters with aphorisms (“Imagination is more important than knowledge”). Cartoons spanning six decades of The New Yorker (a drawing of “Einstein at the Bank” with a thought balloon above the white head containing the formula $(equals)mc2). Wonderful black-and-white photographs of the genius sitting on the steps of his Mercer Street home in extravagantly fluffy slippers. Or posing in baggy sweater and tousled mane with a group of clean-cut colleagues in jacket and tie.
By the entrance stood a glass collection box for donations for an Einstein statue, the model for which stood in the display window. Apparently someone connected with the movie was disturbed to find no tribute to Einstein in town, not even a street bearing his name. This in a place famous for its public sculpture, from Henry Moore’s “Oval With Points” to J. Seward Johnson’s “The Newspaper Reader.”
Letters to the editor now appear in The Princeton Packet opposing the statue, stating that Einstein specifically requested that no tribute be made to him after his death. They have the pleasing tone of people coming to the aid of a beloved and temporarily incapacitated neighbor.
“Nothing’s changed,” my friend Anna told me. “That’s the whole point of Princeton, I guess, that it never changes.” We were walking to lunch at Prospect House, downstairs, because Anna, a cataloguer at Firestone Library (4.5 million books), is not allowed to eat in the faculty dining room upstairs.
The day before, I had driven in on U.S. Highway 206 for the first time in five years and most everything had looked as I remembered it. The green fairways of the Lawrenceville School (total education for the future CEO), the old stone bridges, the two-story frame houses set back from the road, some of them freshly painted an egg yolk shade (what could almost be called “Princeton yellow”) with white trim and black shutters. The road dipped and curved under its leafy canopy past the red brick entrance to Jasna Polana and, farther along, the Hun School sign (how many headmasters have left in despair, never having gotten used to the nickname Attila?).
Classes were letting out and Anna and I walked through swarms of students, all dressed in the universal garb of summer campers: baggy shorts, T-shirts, sneakers. They carried their books in backpacks (straps around both shoulders), some leaning slightly forward from the weight. Hard, here, to pick out the future Forrestals and Bakers.
But when you got beyond the clothing, and looked at the faces, you found that a great many did wear a stern, almost old-fashioned purposefulness, most frequently manifested in a hard, bright intensity about the eyes.
At lunch, I asked Anna about old friends. Most were gone, teaching at schools around the country. Princeton stays the same but the players change. “It’s true,” she said, “it’s a very transient place.”
Still, Anna seemed relatively content. She was taking a course in linguistics, even though she was twice as old as the other students. As I walked her back to the library she showed me her weekend reading, a thick pile of Xeroxed pages with the enticing title: “The Domain of Morphology.”
I crossed Nassau Street, which separates the campus from the town. The word “campus”-Latin for “field”-was coined by Princeton’s sixth president, John Witherspoon, to describe the spacious expanse in front of Nassau Hall.
Witherspoon Street runs perpendicular to Nassau, straight down from the campus. They are the only commercial thoroughfares, turning almost imperceptibly from quiet leafy streets with houses into quiet leafy streets with shops.
Except for a few new coffeehouses, the businesses have not changed much over the years. Banks (above one of which sits the office of New Yorker writer and lifelong Princetonian John McPhee), a greasy spoon, a stationery, a couple of pizza parlors, haberdashers that always seem to feature Burberrys in the window.
The low curtains of Lahiere’s restaurant still reveal the tops of diners’ heads, a satisfyingly large number of which are indeed egg-shaped. (For years Lahiere’s was Princeton’s only elegant restaurant, the explanation being that those residents interested in fine food had their own cooks.)
I stepped into Micawber’s Books on Nassau Street. Princeton is also surprisingly short on great bookstores, possibly because those residents interested in good books have their own libraries.
It looked like rain outside, so I picked up the latest issue of The Hudson Review. (In Paris you sit at cafes, in Rome you stroll through piazzas, in Princeton you read quarterlies.) The clerk was telling a customer about a new book, excerpts of which had appeared in The New Yorker.
“Oh,” the customer said, withdrawing slightly. “I never read it now that that woman took over.”
The review carried a delightful essay by Joseph Epstein on Edmund Wilson’s book “The Sixties.” Reflecting on Wilson’s curmudgeonliness, Epstein wrote: “Nothing quite takes the joy out of life like having standards.”
And it occurred to me that Princeton is one of those rare places where you can have both: standards and joy. True, its unmitigated tastefulness and sense of propriety-swimmers in the indoor pool at the YMCA cannot float aimlessly but have to do laps like everyone else-give it an almost Disneyesque sense of unreality.
But it is a graceful place that honors the life of the mind. Yes, the town library now rents out videos, but includes in the service a collection of film classics in 17 languages (from Bengali to Yiddish). For those nights when you want to take a break from morphology.
PLACES TO SEE, THINGS TO DO IN PRINCETON
Getting there: Princeton is less than an hour’s drive from New York and Philadelphia. You also can take the train from either city, getting off at Princeton Junction.
Sites: Orange Key Tours of the campus are offered daily, but only in the mornings of days when there are football games. They are free and start from the back of Maclean House (just to the northwest of Nassau Hall). Students serve as guides, often to prospective students and their parents. Mine was informative but a bit too intent on getting in digs at Yale and Harvard.
The campus is a delightful mass of ancient trees and Gothic arches. “As much like Oxford as monkeys can make it” was reportedly Bertrand Russell’s observation. The chapel is the third largest on an American campus; gargoyles are so numerous throughout the campus that the bookstore (a good place for stocking up on orange and black sportswear) sells a pamphlet on them.
Just off campus is the famous Institute for Advanced Study and, a little farther, is the site of the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Princeton.
Lodging: In town, there’s the Nassau Inn (rates start at $155; 609-921-7500) and the Peacock Inn (just under $100; 609-924-1707; see personal best below). There’s a big choice of motels on nearby Route 1.
Eating: Lahiere’s (French) has been joined by a big bright Italian restaurant (Theresa’s) and a small bright Chinese restaurant (The Canton Grill). The Athenian is popular with students for pizzas and gyros. There are a few bars, but the town closes up early; much of the students’ social life is contained on campus.
Personal best: The Peacock Inn (20 Bayard Lane, Princeton, N.J. 08540; 609-924-1707) embodies Princeton’s quiet elegance while being more personal, and cheaper, than its only competitor in town, the Nassau Inn. It sits one block from the campus, a handsome 18th-Century house with a gambrel roof and, at this time of year, pumpkins and cornstalks decorating the front yard. Guests have included Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. A fine breakfast, included with the room, is served in the elegant dining room, which at night turns into a French restaurant. And with all this comes a welcoming, unpretentious staff. Rates start just under $100.
Information: Contact the Princeton Chamber of Commerce, 216 Rockingham Way, Princeton, N.J. 08540; 609-520-1776.
