Newspaper Article

BOOKS AND BUSINESS; GATSBY AT THE B SCHOOL

Coles, Robert, Robert Coles, a child psychiatrist who teaches at Harvard University, is the author of ''The Moral Life of Children'' and ''The Political Life of Children.'

1987

Overview

Mr. [Walker Percy]'s fiction affected a number of those young men and women in important ways - to the point that some of them kept telling me that Binx had become a part of their everyday consciousness: ''I smile at some of the hustle-talk I hear and wonder what in hell a lot of this push, push, push is about. I'm going to be in there competing with everyone else, but I don't think I have to trip everyone in sight. It's Percy's humor you can't forget. It's his message to you - and it stays with you, his tough look at a lot of our frantic materialism.'' Another student, more tersely, told me: ''Sometimes Binx's sardonic smile crosses my face, and I have to work hard to look serious, no matter what I'm thinking.'' Not that Binx was undermining these future executives. Again and again the students insisted that Binx's bemused, if not critical relationship to our culture was not going to undo or unnerve them. What, then, would be the consequence of a reading of ''The Moviegoer''? ''I think of Binx,'' a student told me, ''when things get wild and absurd; and so I'll hope not to lose my common sense and the kind of larger perspective Percy has - I guess you'd call it a moral perspective.'' Self-deception is also at the heart of Flannery O'[Connor]'s cleverly narrated ''The Displaced Person'' - an account of what happens to a Southern landowner as she tries to run a tighter business operation. In hiring Mr. Guizac, the ''displaced person'' (a post-World War II refugee from Eastern Europe), Mrs. McIntyre in turn displaces a family that has hitherto worked loyally for her, thereby setting in motion a chain of events that causes her to become ''displaced,'' that is, morally confused. O'Connor's story is not [William Carlos Williams]'s immigrant chronicle, though in each the same observations are made with respect to covetousness: it can entail loss as well as gain - and diminished self-respect that seeks expression in a person's daily life. Mrs. McIntyre takes to her bed the way some of [John Cheever]'s characters take to booze and Binx Bolling to the movies: a manner of dodging the ethical implications of one's life. When a huge sum of money ($30 million) was given to the Harvard Business School - by a former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, no less - for the express purpose of encouraging the teaching of ethics, we had extended discussions on what Harvard should do with the money. The suggestions were fascinating: the money should be given outright to ''the needy''; some practical, service-oriented relationship with poor youth should be established whereby business students would teach in high schools and encourage students to aim for business careers; the entire curriculum should be shaped differently, so that the fierce competitiveness would be lessened and an end put to the ''forced curve'' (a provision that in most classes a certain number of students must be designated as the poorest academically). Many students were actually quite cynical about the gift - interpreted it, in the words of one student, as an ''expression of guilty hand-washing.'' He elaborated: ''A big-deal financier gives a big-deal gift to a big-deal university on a temporarily big-deal subject, ethics - so we're supposed to relax, because everything goes well, after all!'' In a wonderful tribute to Walker Percy and John Cheever, another student came to see me and suggested that Harvard buy thousands of copies of their books and distribute them not only to every Business School student, but to corporate officials across the land. We did agree, however, that the then famous (and maybe, puzzling) $30 million would not thereby be much dented. FOR me those two years of teaching ''across the river,'' as it is often put on the occasionally self-important Cambridge side, were both edifying and gratifying. I was not only impressed with, but surprised by the idealism and decency of many of the students I met, with the yearning they had to join with Binx in his moral search, to link arms with [Johnny Hake] as he shook his world upside down in such a dramatic and unsettling way. I had acquired over the years all sorts of stereotypes about those students - quite wrong-headed notions, I slowly realized. Once, sitting and listening to a wonderfully alert, sensitive discussion of Cheever's stories, I remembered - perhaps to let my patronizing self off the hook - a comment of the cranky Dr. Williams, expressed through a rhetorical question: ''Who the hell is without some kind of prejudice, I ask you?''

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: BOOKS AND LITERATURE / Cheever, John / Coles, Robert / Ethics / EXECUTIVES AND MANAGEMENT / Fitzgerald, F Scott (1896-1940) / Hake, Johnny / PERCY, WALKER / Percy, Walker (1916-1990) / Stechers, Joe / Williams, William Carlos