Customer Reviews

Remembering Denny

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Calvin Trillin's "Remembering Denny" is a Cheeveresque rumination on the unfulfilled potential of Trillin's Yale classmate, Denny Hansen. While at Yale, Hansen was so highly thought of that he was profiled in LIFE magazine and his classmates used to kid each other about which cabinet position they'd fill once Hansen had been elected President. After Yale, however, Hansen failed to live up to the high expectations everyone--friends, family, teachers, coaches--had for him. Trillin's book is a delicate examination of what that meant, both for Denny and for his constellation of friends and well-wishers.

Denny doesn't come alive as vividly as might be hoped here, but Trillin does an outstanding job of sketching this young man's life in terms of a larger picture about America. In a country where success on every level is much prized, Trillin subtly but thoroughly plumbs the reasons why Denny didn't succeed--at least not to the extent everyone thought he would. This uncharacteristically somber book is absorbing and thought-provoking, even if it doesn't quite reach the goals Trillin seems to have set for himself in the beginning chapters.

The book is a whatdunit: what caused an Ivy League golden boy with a million dollar smile to commit suicide at age 55.

The boy was Denny Hansen. His family was lower middle class and lived in the San Francisco Bay area. At a public high school, he became all-everything. He attended Yale from 1953-57 where he became good friends with the author, Bud Trillin. There, he was a fifties hero: scholar-athlete, a student leader. and all-around good guy. He was a member of swim team, Deke fraternity and the Elizabethan Society. During his senior year, he was tapped by Scroll and Key. He graduated magna cum laude and was admitted to Phi Betta Kappa. Life Magazine published a photo essay about his graduation. He was selected as a Rhodes Scholar and studied two years at Magdalen College at Oxford. He received a master¹s degree from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, Not bad for a young man with his background.

Denny Hansen became Roger D. Hansen. On the career level, he worked briefly in broadcasting, the State Department and at the National Security Council in the Carter administration. He wrote several books on foreign policy that were widely praised. But the Foreign Service rejected his application. Eventually, he was appointed to a chair at the Johns-Hopkins¹ School for Advanced International Studies in Washington. He was a member of the Cosmos Club and the Council on Foreign Relations. On a personal level, Roger never married. He became estranged from his family, his relationships with a few women soured, he gradually alienated his friends from Yale. He became a chronic complainer. He became very depressed. But he always defended right conduct. Near the end of his life, he lived a clandestine gay lifestyle. He bequeathed his pension to his former girl friend, and the remainder of his "huge" estate to Yale.

What caused Roger to commit suicide in 1991?. His friends and colleagues offer various explanations. During conversations after Roger¹s death, his Yale friends discovered that they did not know Roger and may have never really known Denny. Trillin¹s explanation is that because of ³poisonous template of the fifties², Roger could not accept his sexual orientation. A reader can interpret his explanation as an attack on values of the Fifties. To me, the most persuasive explanation is an application of the backpack analogy. When a boy is born, he is wearing a backpack. Other people put their heroic expectations for him in the backpack. The more the boy succeeds, the more expectations are put in the backpack and the heavier it gets. Eventually, the loan becomes unbearable and the boy reaches a crisis. In Roger¹s case, instead of emptying the backpack, he chose to kill himself. He had a house, but not a home. Remember, the line from a Robert Frost poem, "Death of the Hired Man"., ³Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/ They have to take you in.² Neither Denny nor Roger had a place where they had to take him in.

The details of the book are fascinating. Trillin describes college life at Yale during the 1950s and the careers of many of Denny¹s classmates and friends.. Of course, Trillin¹s writing is excellent: clear, powerful and sometimes humorous. In a way, the book is a mid-20th Century sequel to Owen Johnson¹s Stover at Yale.

Trillin suggests that the ³poisonous template of the fifties² was the major cause of Roger¹s death in 1991. But change is not equivalent to progress. Sex does not explain everything. Each reader must decide for himself whether, based on the circumstantial evidence, the template of the Fifties enabled Roger to carry his backpack of expectations for more than 30 years, or whether it was the templates of later decades that poisoned the golden boy from California with the million dollar smile.

THis is a very good story of the American dream gone wrong, of an Ivy leaguer who failed to live up to his own expectations and promise and who had many secrets. Take it or leave it, depending on your taste, but I loved it.

From my own school experience, I knew lots of kids like this: they assume the world is waiting for them and make some grim discoveries about how hard it is to make it out there. For Denny, because the story at school occured largely before the questioning of the sixties, the descent to mediocrity was much much harder. (The historical asides on Yale in the 1950s are a fascinating subtheme of the book, as is the building of a career.) Many people will experience a kind of Schadenfreude at his story - handsome wonder boy losing - but it was tragic to me.

Trillin is a wonderful writer, perceptive and sensitive, funny, ironic. He deserves his place in American letters.

Warmly recommended.

Trillin turns serious and reflects on a Yale classmate who seemed to have it all: a "dazzling smile," charm, brains, athletic talent. LIFE magazine covered Denny Hansen's graduation. But things didn't work out for Hansen, the expected future President, and he died a lonely, obscure professor in 1991. Trillin, in investigating Denny's path through life, draws larger lessons on larger themes than one man's life: struggling with closeted homosexuality; adjusting oneself to expectations that can never be met; growing up in the 1950's when the US in general and pedigreed white men in particular held all the cards. The book is many things: a biography, an autobiography of trillin, a social history, a remembrance of a tragic friend and a not-so-distant, but utterly vanished, era.

This book has haunted me for 10 years now. For Roger Dennis Hansen, there was the terrible pain of being in the closet for as long as he recognized he did not have feelings for girls that the other boys did, and that society said he should. And remember, in those days, you were some kind of monster for having same sex yearnings - take a look at the statistics.

And then there was the most basic indicator of failure, a deeply dysfunctional family life - no support, no love. One tries and tries to carry oneself with those external trophies, with the support of friends, employers and mentors, and that sometimes works for a while. But the basic perception of oneself is cast, and if there is no beaming, loving face in the mirror, no one is there really giving a damn about your welfare, you go as far as you can - sometimes you make it to the end of the road, but sometimes you crash before then. It is hard.

There is a little bit of Denny in a lot of us - I see him in me. I did not have the scholastic glory that this man had, which some of you think should have carried him through to ripe old age, but the similarities remain. This is not a book for ghouls, as Mr. "Jim Burns" opines, nor a treatise on how great Mr. Trillin is, as Mr. "A Reader" states. If anything, Mr. Trillin minces no words in how he failed Denny - I dare any of you to be that truthful about your own failings in your dealings with the humanity around you. A great book that transcends class and race lines, humor and ground floor truth an intoxicating mixture for me.

Calvin Trillin's great work 'Remembering Denny' was re-released in 2005. I read the original back in 1993. It has stuck with me ever since then. I found it to be a brilliant look at unfulfilled promise, as embodied by his Yale classmate, Denny Hansen. Trillin also expertly weaves in two other larger themes. First, as he comes to know of Hansen's homosexuality, Trillin discusses the homophobia of the era (they attended Yale in the mid-Fifties) and the ramifications of that on Hansen's path in life post-graduation. The second theme is the changing of America in the 60s and how that sea-change wrong-footed some 'All-American' boys like Hansen, who were unable to adjust accordingly.

I love the brilliant cover of the re-release, depicting a color photo of Hansen and his dazzling smile. It perfectly captures Hansen's then-promising future and why so many were smitten by him.

Trillin sheds dazzling light on college-days in the 50s, at Yale among his peer group of gifted students, athletes, class leaders -- the nation's wunderkind -- there assembled in New Haven. Most remarkable of them all ,Trillin writes, was Roger D. Hansen, "Denny" whose undergraduate life serves as the central metaphor of his classmates, aspirations and dreams for the future. Trillin offers a sharp focus in memoir form of Denny who was much-admired but little-known. Denny's life following undergraduate years becomes increasingly cryptic and desperate. Trillin repeatedly asks the question for us, "Who was Denny?"

Remembering Denny, by Calvin Trillin is pretty much the two-hundred page answer to a seemingly simple question. The question in question is this: Why did Denny Hansen commit suicide? And in trying to answer this question, Trillin managed to subtly weave in several complex themes while documenting Denny's life from high school onward, in a very small, but powerful package.

Denny Hansen, full name Roger D. Hansen, was a varsity-level swimmer, president of his high school class, and went on to become a Rhodes Scholar. He had a "million-dollar smile", a "rambunctious" spirit, and was viewed as the embodiment of what one should be when he was at Yale, in America in the 1950s. His friends joked that Denny would become the President and that may have been Denny's original plan. But when he got rejected from Foreign Services, Denny's life started to go downhill. He was known by his colleagues as Roger now, and as an uptight and complaining old man. He had back pains and had lost his smile.

The book is essentially a collection of richly detailed quotes and anecdotes about Denny from people who knew him, with personal anecdotes from Trillin about Yale, and speculations based on what he hears. One of the interesting things about this book is that Trillin himself knew Denny very well for a period of about four years; during their time together at Yale. So naturally, the beginning of the story is about Yale and the end is about Denny's work. At the beginning of the book, there were many personal anecdotes from Trillin, quotes that Trillin had from Denny, and lots of speculation and opinions made directly by Trillin. However, as the story progressed, Trillin began to include himself less, and by the end, it was just quotes from other people and Trillin's summary or analysis of them. Through this, Trillin was able to very subtly get across that he really didn't know "Roger", and that maybe no one really did.
But with over thirty different sources, Trillin was able to paint an accurate picture of Denny, and at the same time very thoroughly go through the reasons why Denny did not live up to everyone's expectations; reasons why Denny turned into Roger.

What Trillin seemed to be pointing at was the expectations themselves, more specifically, the promise that they guaranteed. At the beginning of the book Trillin included a very profound quote; something that epitomizes the overall theme, the overall reason for Denny's demise. "The way I see promise is that you have a knapsack, and all the time you're growing up they keep stuffing promise into the knapsack. Pretty soon, it's just too heavy to carry. You have to unpack." What this quote is getting at is that essentially, Denny couldn't live up to all of his friends' expectations. In the end, Denny was a people pleaser, one of the traits of a perfectionist. If things weren't exactly so, they couldn't work for Denny. If he didn't become President of the United States, in Denny's eyes, he had failed. And this realization, along with many others, was what made the book worthwhile. The little insights that Trillin so subtly left for the reader were able to make up for the sometimes awkward placement of portions of Denny's life, such as his time at Oxford. Though the rest of the book seemed to be evenly spaced out, the part of Denny's life at Oxford was very short, and cramped, even though it seemed to be the point where Denny actually began to fall apart.

At the end of the book, Trillin writes that he still does not know why Denny committed suicide. But at this point, whether Trillin himself knows the reason is irrelevant; even the reason is irrelevant. Instead, an even bigger point has been addressed: no matter how well you think you know someone, you probably don't.

One of the finest books I've ever read. Trillin writes with the unpretentious panache that is the "New Yorker" trademark style. Never does this sad story descend into maudlin victimology; it is sympathetic and touching, but still reserved. I recommend "Remembering Denny" wholeheartedly

Bound by Promise

by Alice Yin



Many depressed people believe that suicide is the only answer to their problems. They leave their old life behind, letting the usual cycle begin to spin- the shock, the denial, the guilt, the remorse... and the questions. Oh, the questions.

Denny Hansen's death created as many problems as it answered. His many "acquaintances," for lack of a better word, were perplexed. But soon enough, the world started turning again, and they moved on with life.

However, Calvin Trillin, haunted with longing for this old classmate he thought he knew, could not let this go. He painstakingly pressed every connection to Hansen he knew for clues to his death. Put it down in ink and paper, a few bindings and a eye-catching cover, and you have Remembering Denny.

This book's themes and morals itself are interesting enough- certainly not a light read for a lazy Saturday morning. Exploration of the 1950s' societal influences, the shattered dream of a budding student, and the fear of judgment is key in this story. We certainly can sympathize with Denny as he opens his eyes and tries to come to terms to what he has become, compared to what he should have become.

But as I read through this book, I could not sympathize with the author. He writes in retrospect about Denny's debilitation from a brilliant college student to a suffering closet homosexual. However, Trillin loses focus easily and begins to dwell on many uninteresting topics. There is a slight doubt of trust in the author as I read further and further, expecting to be able to unravel this mystery.

If this book was a question, then the question would be one simple word- why? Why did Denny Hansen, a once attractive, intelligent, and admired man, decide to kill himself? Every agonizing paragraph of ranting only tangles up my confusion further. I suppose it isn't easy trying to figure out the resolution to a question only a now-dead person knows the answer to; but if in the end, he couldn't do it after all, why keep going?

Too much of this book is centered around Trillin- his regrets, his pain, and his point of view. But his point of view is terribly fallible, and not at all helpful to move the story forward. There is much "fluff" that is thrown around in empty areas of the book to help fill it up. Many of the ideas are quotes are repeated variations of the original. His sources might have been diverse, but the quotes they put forth were more and less the same.

I get the feeling that Trillin did not in fact write this book in respect to his dead friend, but to instead help himself look at his reflection in the mirror. He did this to ease his guilt. Trillin convinced himself that he has ultimately helped Denny, and both of them may now sleep in peace.

The title, Remembering Denny, does both Denny and the book a disservice. None of this book "remembers" Denny the way that he was remembered. The Denny in this book seems offensively distant and one-dimensional. He didn't seem like a person. He seemed like a mere object that people analyzed and took notes on.

It is ironic that a much anticipated book about failing to reach expectations, has in the end also failed to reach my expectations.