Composing a Further Life

students, and I was always in plays,” Jim went on. “I took the little boys’ parts in university productions, all the way until I went off to Exeter. I had to play the piano, too, from which I really rebelled. Oh, and another very important person in my life, through until I was about twenty-five, was my great-aunt, who was a painter. Aunt Virgie was the beautiful and rebellious one of four sisters—my grandmother being one of the sisters. One of my earliest presents was a small paint box and a little easel from her, and as a child of six and seven years old, I would go out and paint with her, which was fun. So the visual side of things has been very important to me.”
    Churchgoing was part of the family pattern also. “My father had been a choirboy at Trinity Episcopal Church in Iowa City. I have a wonderful picture of him at the age of, I don’t know, eight or so, with his brother, in their cottas, in the boys’ choir. So I always went with the family to church, which I loved, and I never went to Sunday school so I had no religious education, which I think probably saved me.”
    I laughed. “That was my mother’s theory,” I said. “You should take a child to church but not to Sunday school.”
    “Your mother hit the jackpot with me,” Jim went on. “My life in that little church in Iowa City was just wonderful. It was very much a family thing, friends too. I sang in the junior choir, was an acolyte, got confirmed, but never any Sunday school, which was marvelous. It was a very organic kind of thing. It was not this sort of credal business at all. And it was … it was what we always did. I was just a very happy person in church, so that was very, very important.
    “My father’s family was from New England. His uncles went to Andover and to Exeter, and that was dangled in front of me, so at the age of thirteen, I took my first trip by myself and went and had appointments at Exeter and at Andover.” As a child Jim was always building things and might easily have become an architect. “My interest in painting very early moved into more structural stuff like building a theater for marionettes. At the age of, I don’t know, twelve, I was looking at stuff, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright and Gropius and whatnot, and talking about studying architecture in college. One of my father’s great pals, by the name of Dick Baldridge, said, ‘Well, if you’re going to be in Boston, check out the architecture school at Harvard. Gropius is the chairman of the department and you really couldn’t do better than that.’ So I wrote to Walter Gropius at the age of thirteen and got a response back saying, ‘I’d very much like to talk with you, please come to Robinson Hall at eleven o’clock on Thursday’ whenever the hell it was. So indeed I met with Mr. Gropius at age thirteen. We talked about Frank Lloyd Wright and about the Bauhaus, his own work, and whatnot.”
    Jim was welcomed at Exeter and Andover, but both schools had already allotted their scholarships for the coming year, so he continued at school in Iowa City for another year and went to Exeter the following fall, for his last two years. Considering how school and college admissions are handled today, the sense of privilege in this narrative seems to me astonishing, reflecting a world in which university faculty, although they were not often wealthy, were definitely upper middle class and formed a network with linkages to the arts and the professions. Much of what Jim did later at St. John the Divine had to do with bridging those circles, which have split so far apart in American life.
    Already then, before Jim came east and before he started at Exeter, three key themes were established in his life: building, the arts, and the Episcopal Church. Already, too, Jim had become a performer. The next theme, social justice, was established at Harvard and developed in Jersey City and Chicago. The final theme, established after he came to the cathedral, was a new model of inclusiveness that took him far beyond the boundaries of the church in which he grew up and was ordained.
    “So, off then to Exeter, and I did my senior paper on Ibsen’s
Doll’s House,”
Jim went on. “I was in plays in the drama club at Exeter, but I also designed the sets for the plays—that was in the ‘frustrated architect’ department. I wanted to study philosophy, and I also, interestingly, wanted to take some religious stuff. I remember my father, once upon a time,