Memento Eli

Given that approximately seventy-five people have emailed me about the “Yale” episode of Gossip Girl, I suppose I should not be surprised by the fact that the episode was hot news on the Yale campus — hot enough, indeed, to inspire an article about the use of Yale in pop culture in the Yale Daily News.

I’ve never seen the show (though everyone tells me I’d love it), but it seems to follow the standard pattern of Yale-as-Exotic-Other. A college friend informed me that the thrust of the episode centered around figuring out answers to an impromptu quiz given by the dean of admissions at a private party — answers which would guarantee your admission before you even tendered an application. Senior Molly Fischer, who wrote the article, described it thusly:

“It is easy to grouse about factual inaccuracies — the dean doesn’t have a private admissions party! Skull and Bones doesn’t tap freshmen! The campus is neo-Gothic, not Beaux-Arts! — but it is not very interesting. More profitable, then, to consider the “Gossip Girl” Yale as a dream you might have if you fell asleep while reading the University’s Wikipedia page: there’s Handsome Dan, and something about Hillhouse Avenue, and Chuck Bass, looking oddly plausible in red pants and an ascot.”

The article then goes on to describe my own books as fan fiction about Yale, which I find a rather interesting way to look at it, and not entirely inaccurate. I’m a fan of Yale; I write fiction set at Yale; it utlitizes the tropes and settings and quintessentially Yale characters to tell a very Yale story. Sure. Sounds good.

“Diana Peterfreund ’01 has proved both more prolific and more successfully entertaining than the legendary [Natalie] Krinsky — she has written three zippy novels set at a thinly veiled Yale, and a fourth, “Tap and Gown,” will be released this spring. The “Secret Society Girl” series follows Amy Haskell’s adventures in “Rose and Grave,” a stand-in for Skull and Bones. “Rose and Grave,” “Eli University”: careful and pointless pseudonyms, are central to these books. The Rose and Grave tomb is on High Street, near the old art-history offices; characters do cups at “Tory’s” and buy burgers at “Lenny’s Lunch.” But this sort of strategy (also employed in “The Skulls,” which takes place at an unnamed university where athletic uniforms bear blue Ys) means that the anonymity actually becomes the point. The painstaking avoidance of Yale’s name seems intended to remind us of how daunting and dramatic and potentially dangerous Yale might be.”

That’s not an uncommon perception, but one that I think might be a generational thing. When I was at Yale, there were NO stories about Yale in contemporary popular culture. Harvard, sure, but I remember reading articles in the YDN about how fervently Yale protected its trademark — or maybe not “trademark,”  but something similar (moral rights, maybe? There was even a lawsuit going on at the time with Yale trucks, or locks, or something….). Harvard had movies filmed on its campus all the time, while Yale forbade it. The Skulls, which came out while I was at school, had several articles written on all the things they were forced to change by the Yale corporation. (Likely because of the very negative outlook the film takes toward its administration hushing up campus murders.) Harvard was where all the kids in movies wanted to go, Harvard was what everyone talked about. Yale was known mainly as the alma mater of the Simpson’s antagonist, Montgomery Burns. (Who always presents a very Dink Stover outlook in his flashbacks to undergrad).

The author discussing her first pop culture mention of Yale being during a 1th grade viewing of Lost in Translation: “Not everyone went to Yale!” the main character’s neglectful husband throws at her. Funny, my high school Yale-on-the-silver screen experience was the exact same line: except this time, it was a cabinet member throwing the epithet at a White House staffer in Air Force One. (Golly, I’m old.)

After I graduated from college, the Yale Corp.  seemed to change their mind. The Gilmore Girls moved to Yale, and either filmed there or created a pretty identical set. Harrison Ford set off for the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull from Yale. And suddenly it was Yale, and not Harvard, where all the teens on TV shows were setting their sights. I’m not sure what prompted the change. Perhaps it was George W. Bush’s campaign, where his Yale experience seemed so newsworthy, his subsequen place in the White House, his daughter’s matriculation, the Yalie vs. Yalie, Bonesman vs. Bonesman 2004 presidential race… Yale was all over the map.

But, growing up, my fictional Yale surrogate was Walden, of Doonesbury fame. For years, Walden U. had appeared, Yale-like, on the funnies pages, with its Yale-friendly storylines and its Yale-esque campus and deans. At Yale, I discovered that the strip had started out as a YDN comic, and when it was syndicated, the names (and associated Ys on, say BD’s helmet) changed to Walden. I thought it was cute and clever, and allowed Trudeau some latitude in his storylines he would not have had at “Yale.” So, I followed his example. Rather than being a “Yale” that didn’t act like one 9Hello, Gossip Girls!), I wrote an “Eli” that acted like Yale.

“Still, Peterfreund’s vision of Yale seems more founded in actual lived experience than Krinsky’s recycled tropes. The devices that move Peterfreund’s plots ahead are appropriately mundane. As one book chugs toward its climax, Amy attempts to write a paper: “But the words didn’t come, and the rereading-significant-passages phase failed to uncover any paper-worthy insights. This was going to be a painful one.” I find it winning that this is how Peterfreund applies pressure to Amy’s situation — by assigning her a paper or putting her on MetroNorth. These cumbersome trappings of Yale life in fact become the stuff of fantasy.”

I haven’t been to the Yale campus since the summer before my book came out. When I first came up with the idea for the series, I’d graduated a scant three years earlier (my husband, only 2), and still felt like a recent college graduate. I hadn’t held any one job for more than a year at a time, hadn’t lived in one place for more than six months or so. My four year tenure at Yale, therefore, was an anchor. It occurred to me recently that now, at thirty, in my fourth year living in the same neighborhood (indeed, I think I moved farther when my dorm went from being on Old Campus to being in my residential college), a wife, a homeowner, with a professional career as long as my college one, how very different I am from the current crop of college kids. I’m not a recent college graduate anymore. Next month, I’m going on vacation with a current Yalie, and I want to compare notes. I know Mory’s and the Doodle are closed — that my dean is now the president of Duke — and who knows how many other changes have taken place at Yale in the past eight years?

At least, at Eli, my Yale can live on.