Unfulfilled Expectations

...While hardly a disgraceful situation, it is a definite letdown for the achiever once celebrated in Life magazine, with pictures by Alfred Eisenstaedt...

...As one memorialist puts it: "A disquieting tension between past and future began to emerge...

...What about the suspicious stutter he is said to have developed at Johns Hopkins...

...But some who knew Denny after Yale describe a moody, unsociable figure the author had never known...

...You can see on the dust jacket the "astonishing" smile (at least I assume it is that smile) Trillin repeatedly rhapsodizes upon...

...Trillin concludes in a eulogistic gush: "I think he [Roger Hansen] was worthwhile...

...Trillin shrewdly keeps his distance...

...The son writes that "it has often occurred to me that a reporter could do worse than aspire to a standard of behavior reflected in my father's approach to being a grocer?give good weight, refuse to buckle under to pressure from the chain stores, treat with contempt the wartime temptation to get rich by cutting a few corners...

...Was it the excruciating back pain that afflicted him for most of his life, the one explanation Denny himself offered for his suicide...

...If there is one thing Trillin has proved he is capable of in his many years of traveling the land for the New Yorker, it is finding the fascination in stories that sound as though they began as items in local newspapers...

...Maybe too much happened to Denny too quickly, too many accolades at too young an age...

...Toward the end of his book Trillin, un-typically, succumbs to garden variety earnestness...

...Like a good detective, he avoids committing himself prematurely...

...Unfortunately for this mystery, the sleuth never does come up with the solution...

...And Trillin manages to fit Denny into this admirable household: "What Denny's colleagues saw as scrupulosity is not far from my father's way of judging people...

...Denny is much described and analyzed but only dimly captured, and the passages on the 1950s, that much chewed-over decade, don't have much juice...

...Denny was not quite sure why so many wonderful things happened to him...

...With a sharp and tolerant eye, a lot of old-fashioned reporting and a controlled, clear, amiable style, he opens up characters and digs into actions, telling a good tale along the way...

...But in the course of doing so Trillin takes the opportunity to write about himself, his career, his father, even passingly his daughters, who have now enjoyed Yale careers of their own...

...Now that he has done his duty to Denny and Dad, maybe Trillin can go back to work...

...The memorial service is a setup...

...All right...

...Paying tribute to an old school friend also gives the author an occasion to deliver a tribute to his father, a Jewish businessman from Kansas City who had "a first-generation dream of surpassing corniness"—sending his son to Yale to be an American success story...

...Where," he asks, "was the Denny Hansen who wowed everybody's parents at graduation...

...Was it something else, or everything combined...

...but F. Scott Fitzgerald could just as easily have served: "There are no second acts in American lives...

...Although he applies his skills in Remembering Denny, the subject is not quite there...

...Writing about the private-school lads who made up most of his Yale class, he recalls that when one of them told him his family no longer dressed for dinner, "I actually did think he meant that they were allowed to come to the table in their undershirts...

...Was it being rejected by the Foreign Service...

...The author is trying to find out, or figure out, why Roger D. Hansen, remembered as the athlete, scholar (Rhodes scholar) and all-purpose golden boy of his college years (the mid-'50s), committed suicide in 1991 at the age of 55...

...Despite his being unfailingly respectful to the distinguished eulogists (the names dropped in these pages are heavy with distinction), Trillin is aware of the banality of the general theme—that Denny was a victim of unrealized expectations...

...But his friend's portrait, as he acknowledges, remains fuzzy...

...A tag offered here is out of Cyril Connolly: "Whom the gods would destroy they first call promising...

...We create enormous expectations fortalented people...

...But many of them might have been written (albeit not as well) by the army of sociologists who have inspected the silent generation, organization men and other-directed specimens...

...when I don't consciously temper that voice from Kansas City, it's not that far from my own way of judging people...

...He is not merely a writer appreciated by those whose appreciation signifies success...

...The admission, early and late, that "wereally didn't know him," although anticli-mactic for a mystery, might not matter much if the observations about the 1950s or about Yale had more surprises...

...The observation can be applied to Remembering Denny...

...Maybe his association with the Nation has gotten to him...

...He even drags in the Salem witch trials...

...Reflecting on Denny's unexpressed homosexuality, he says: "Men of our age grew up in a period in which someone who felt a homosexual attraction was likely to believe himself afflicted by a heinous maladjustment whose cure was unknowable—particularly unknowable to someone who couldn't bear to mention the condition to another human being...

...Encountering this fit of self-indulgence from so accomplished a practitioner of keeping-oneself-out-of-it reporting is like watching a subtle actor suddenly make a play for the gallery...

...Was it Denny's homosexuality?not an easy thing for an all-round campus hero of the '50s to deal with—that made his life a secret torment...

...A considerable part of this short yet padded work is set at and around a memorial service for Denny, We soon learn that instead of becoming President of the United States, as his friends and admirers at Yale were betting he would, he ended up occupying a chair at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies...

...Reviewed by Walter Goodman_ "It has been my experience," Calvin Trillin writes early in this rumination on the life and death of a friend from Yale, "that almost anyone who asks to speak at a funeral or a memorial service wants to talk about himself...

...The summation is as much about his father, presented as a man of stiff standards, as about Denny...

...As Trillin lets us know in his undemonstrative way, he is his father's dream come true...

...Trillin just lays out the known facts, not many, and the lines of speculation...

...he is a Yale man who attends reunions, keeps in touch with classmates (including some big shots) and has wound up as a trustee of the institution his father had to pinch nickels for him to break into...

...He tells us that the explanation he likes best for the 1950s generation's animus for the 1960s generation is that "the mid-'50s cases suspected the world of rebellious students included lewd and excessive sexual activity, and the thought of having missed such goings-on by only a few years was driving them to distraction...

...In the manner of academics, such commonplaces seem to be drawn as much from snappier phrasemakers as from the specifics of Denny's life...

...Indeed, Remembering Denny is not without asides of the sort that make Trillin's relatively recent stage offerings so enjoyable...

...I think my father would have felt the same way, even though he would surely have regretted the fact that Denny failed to use that million-dollar smile for so long that it eventually faded away...

...Do we ask too much of our most able young people...

...It is to Trillin's credit both that he was concerned enough over Denny's fate to undertake this inquiry and that he was inhibited enough not to pry into Denny's tastes in sex...