Chapter 3 - III
We were driving up to Black Mountain. The buildings the college had managed to rent for a mere song belonged to a church, a set of huge white buildings on top of a hill looking over the Blue Ridge Mountains, magnificent views, a perfectly beautiful place. Anyway, we were driving up there and we met this car with a couple of students in it coming the other way. The students in my car hailed these other students, whom they knew, and sitting in the back of the car was this tall, thin young man who was looking down rather menacingly. I learned afterward it was just because the sun was in his eyes and he couldn't see very well. He were introduced rather hastily, and then we passed each other and left. I was told afterwards by the students in the car David was in that David had said after we'd passed: 'Very attractive young faculty girl there -- I think I'll make some time with her.' They all hooted with laughter, and that was that. Later on, David told me that he did see me very clearly and he even remembered the hat I had on. But here we disagree, because he said I had on a silly hat with a feather in it. I think I had on a large, plain, black, rather- Sarboesque job, just a plain black hat, one of the soft, floppy Ones. No feather, it was quite plain."
-- Peggy Bailey

Even if it had been love at first sight, neither David nor Peggy was the sort of person likely to admit it easily, if ever. Even if it had been love at first sight, neither David nor Peggy was the sort of person likely to admit it easily, if ever. Love aside, considerable intimacy was inevitable among the faculty and students at Black Mountain, since it was isolated, small (22 students, 10 teachers, and assorted spouses and children), and close-quartered (all but a few faculty families lived in the college's main building, which also held the classrooms and offices).

Peggy, then 23, was the youngest faculty member, and one of only three women instructors. At first she taught a single course, Victorian Literature, but later, despite her lack of experience in almost any phase of the theatre, she was drafted to direct a college production of Congreve's "The May of the World,' the first play she ever directed (not counting those she put on with the coerced cooperation of her siblings). Finally, her duties included serving as an advisor to students, and one of her advisees was David Bailey, who was also in her Victorian Literature class.

"I happened to be chosen to be his advisor, I don't know why, they just picked sort of at random, and I was his advisor," Peggy recalls (but Martin Duberman, in his history of Black Mountain, reports that the students chose their advisors, so perhaps David was already "making time"). "It was hard for him to write papers, he took a long time about writing them, and he had to be sort of pushed, though they were good when they were written. He was a good student, but he wasn't always interested in what was going on. I remember one time when I was talking about something and he was reading a newspaper. I told him not to read the newspaper, but he went on. So I told him to leave the room, and he did. This was long before I got to know him very well. I just felt that I couldn't have him doing that. Actually, he read the newspaper because he was always so very interested in contemporary affairs and kept abreast of everything. Later on he came to my study, and he apologized. He didn't read the paper in class after that." [Duberman p.35; Peggy Int 9.82 p.19]

At first, David planned to stay only one year at Black Mountain. Then, if his health improved and his studies were sound, he would return to Harvard, which would please his father. Eroding that decision was his dislike of Harvard, fed increasingly by the contrasting institutional freedom and intellectual ferment of Black Mountain. He was influenced, too, by John Rice, especially the philosophy of self­questioning and self-discipline that he emphasized in his course on the 18th Century (which David took). And there was his developing relationship with Peggy. Towards the end of that first year, not surprisingly, David decided to stay at Black Mountain for a second year. But to appease the family as best he could, he also decided to take summer courses at Harvard. He asked Peggy to come to Cambridge with him and, when she agreed, he made arrangements for her to live with a friend of the family there. They spent a lot of time together that summer, usually meeting on the steps of Widener Library. [Peggy Int, 9.10 p.20-21]

Peggy was first drawn to David by his "enormous charm, a very quick, intelligent mind, and an enormous aesthetic capability and appreciation of music and art.

 

for it was that summer that David first began discussing starting his own school.

Peggy was first drawn to David by his "enormous charm, a very quick, intelligent mind, and an enormous aesthetic capability and appreciation of music and art. He was musical himself, he sang in a little group they had at the college. And he was terribly interested in art, Josef Albers had a great influence on him at Black Mountain, though he himself didn't draw. And then he had an extraordinarily wonderful sense of humor, and he, too, had been rather traditionally educated, that is a great many of the classics and things I'd read, he knew, too, they'd been part of his upbringing. And then, of course, there was his interest in other people which was all consuming -- other people, all kinds, all ages, all grades, all ranks of society." [Peggy Int 9.82 p.25-26]

During his second and senior year at Black Mountain, David's interest in other people led him to volunteer as a student teacher at The Cottage School on the college campus. Organized by by a faculty member for the younger faculty children, the school also accepted local children (according to Peggy: "the children of the really rural people,, who lived up in the hills around us, who came to school barefoot and all this kind of thing"). David was intrigued by the whole experience, his first as a teacher, and he was particularly fascinated by the children's names, 'Like Arlanda, which seemed to him almost Shakespearean. But being an openv freewheeling Black Mountain experiment, the school soon reached limits beyond which the local children were not .'Ilif-jg -- or allowed -- to go. When discussions of Darwin's theory of evolution came up, the local enrollment dropped off. [Peggy Int 9.82 p.20$26; Duberman p.72]

By the spring of 1935, David and Peggy had decided to marry, which they did in September. In the meantime David passed his finals -- which included an all day oral exam by an outside examiner, which anyone at the college could observe --and graduated from Black Mountain.

For the next ten years David and Peggy Bailey lived the life of itinerant teachers. They went first to the Miquon School near Philadelphia, where David taught fifth grade and Peggy first for three years. The school was going through some hard times then and it ware both of them down. David was frequently sick with bad colds and bronchitis, and Peggy eventually resigned with exhaustion.

In the fall of 1938 they returned to Black Mountain College, Peggy to teach English and David to do public relations. The college had never had anyone to do public relations and David persuaded the Board of Fellows to let him uo it. By then Black Mountain had already gone through the first of the many purges that pu.ntuated its 23-year history. The founder, John Rice, whom David had admired so much and whose philosophy had so influenced his own, had been forced to leave the college the previous year. Although Rice returned in the fall, he no longer ran the place but was more like an exiled ruler in his own land. With no one else at Black Mountain ready or willing to offer strong leadership as rector, the college chose Robert Wunsch, a rather uninspiring theatre teacher of whom David was much less enamored.

For the next three years they lived in New Haven, close to Peggy's parents at Yale. Even though Black Mountain had changed considerably from the place David had loved so much just three years earlier, he worked hard and travelled widely throughout the fall, wearing himself down, until he had to be hospitalized in Washington in mid-winter with pneumonia and pleurisy. "Those were the days when they put great heavy bolsters on either side of you to hold the lung in place," Peggy remembers. "That was when they first told him that he shouldn't smoke. Of course nobody knew anything about emphysema in those days. He tried to stop smoking by chewing gum instead, but then Mr. Rice objected to this, oddly enough, so David went back, very eagerly, to smoking. Oddly enough, Mr. Rice himself smoked a pipe, and he too died of cancer."

At the end of that school year, Wunsch let David go, but he didn't tell David himself, he told Peggy, and left it to her to break it to her husband: "It was very hard for him. He was very good about it, but it obviously had hurt him a lot. I don't remember what David said. I remember his just sitting, listening while I was explaining to him. I think his being ill had a lot to do with it, you see, because obviously he couldn't take the strain of this constant traveling. And then some of his ideas were quite innovative, and there was a certain element of the college that didn't approve."

For the next three years they lived in New Haven, close to Peggy's parents at Yale. David taught in the grades at the Foot School, which catered primarily to the children of Yale faculty, whom David remembered as the brightest children he ever taught. Peggy did not teach during that time, though she tutored some. Her energies were directed mostly to their son and only child, Peter, who was born in May 1940.

The Baileys moved to northern New Hampshire in the fall of 1942, where David had his first job at a boarding school. They all had a terrible time -- Peter had pneumonia, David was hospitalized with bronchitis, and then Peggy was hospitalized for exhaustion. On top of that, they were unhappy with the school: there was no library, faculty quarters were meagre, the school was poorly run, the faculty were uninspiring, there was a kind of timidity about the whole place.

And if all that weren't enough, Peggy recalls, "There was a terrible accident. David was out supervising a group of boys who were sledding on an icy hill and one of the boys turned over and the sled had those long runners and one of them went right into his head and David had to take care of him. I remember David's coming home with blood all over the front of his coat. David's not good at that sort of thing. He was very good at the time, but I think it must have been a horrible strain. The boy lived, but I think the sight in one eye was permanently damaged. He came back to school eventually, and all the kids applauded him, but I think there was something wrong with him. It was terrible. But I don't think that's what made David leave the school. One of the interesting things about David was that he could go through some of these experiences and they would leave a deep mark on him, but they didn't seem to erode him, whereas those experiences +or me, such as the five days in the hospital while David was dying, left a permanent mark on me. It will always be there. Now I sometimes felt that with David, he could put those kinds of things behind him and they didn't interfere with what was ahead, which of course was a very good thing to do. He had a resilience which I don't think I have." [Peggy Int 6.21.82 p.3/11-13]

The school wanted David to stay, offering him a raise and better accomodations. He was popular and effective with the students, the sort of teacher who can get kids to do almost anything. But he didn't want to stay, so he was without a iob again -- which could have been worse, since it meant that the Baileys spent the summer in Vermont, at David's mother's house in the hills of Pomfret. For Peggy, "it was a rough summer because there was so much uncertainty. Although David was anxious and concerned, I don't recall it's ever -- that's one of the extraordinary things about David -­I don't recall it's ever making him bad tempered, irritable, taking to drink, or anything like that." [Peggy Int 6.21.82 p.3/12-13]

Quite the contrary, in fact, for it was that summer that David first began discussing starting his own school with his friends the Deakes, with the two couples to comprise the entire faculty at first. But David was offered a job at Lawrenceville and Stan Deake went into the Navy, so the plans were shelved for the time being -- though Stan told David that if he should somehow get a chance to start a school of his own, he should go ahead with it. Impelled by his increasing dissatisfaction with the traditional stuffiness of Lawrenceville, that's just what David did. [DWB tape I p.7; Holden int notes p.1]