An unlikely college bromance that’s lasted a lifetime
Many writers struggle to find their form: the genre in which they feel most free and productive — most themselves. Will Schwalbe once planned to be a playwright. His mentors included Larry Kramer (best known for his autobiographical play “The Normal Heart”) and Robert Chapman (the Harvard professor who helped bring “Billy Budd” to Broadway in 1951).
Schwalbe may have his own “Normal Heart” tucked away in a drawer somewhere. An early AIDS activist, he once labored on a play called “Traitors” about roommates who turn on a young man after he “lets down his guard,” a favored phrase. But — after dabbling in journalism, advancing to top positions in book publishing, starting a cooking website and co-writing a treatise on email etiquette — he seems to have settled with slight unease on the ultimate let-downyour-guard category, memoir, as if trying to get comfy on a convertible sofa.
Schwalbe had a bestseller a decade ago with “The End of Your Life Book Club,” which featured the literary works he discussed with his mother when she was dying of pancreatic cancer, following it with a collection of essays on books that had changed his life.
He isn’t a bookworm, he’s a bookaholic, and in his latest memoir, “We Should Not Be Friends,” he seems to be admitting he has a problem. Long before the smartphone became our universal social escape hatch, he’d carry around something between covers, Linuslike, “as a kind of security blanket,” he writes. “One of the best things about books is that they are always there for you; they will forgive you endless amounts of neglect and still be ready to greet you, unchanged.” Unlike, say, people.
A rocky friendship
“We Should Not Be Friends” traces Schwalbe’s unlikely and occasionally rocky 40-year friendship with Chris Maxey, a former Navy SEAL and founder of the ecologically oriented Island School on Eleuthera in the Bahamas (one of their several points of tension is Schwalbe’s unthinking use of plastic straws). The two men were both recruited for a secret society at Yale in the ‘80s, where
Maxey was a jock, a bulgingbiceped, extroverted wrestler who occasionally hurled homophobic obscenities, and Schwalbe an indoorsy classical civilization major with a perm and a penchant for Prince. When Maxey gives “Schwalbs,” as he nicknames him, a ride on his Yamaha 850 motorcycle, which he calls the Bitch, awkwardness doesn’t just ensue — it spews.
The society, never named but not Skull and Bones, taps 15 rising seniors who have nothing particular in common to dine together twice a week, with an unlimited account at the liquor store and a keg in the basement of their granite meeting hall. (Schwalbe likes drinking, he freely admits, almost as much as he likes books.) Membership will be “the best chapter in your soft, preppy, silverspoon, privileged life,” a recruiter swears to Maxey. The group bonds, they graduate, pursue their brilliant careers, pair up, procreate (or not), split