Ode to a Drunkard

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 Ode to a Drunkard: Paul Newman, the actor, the entrepreneur, and the student



Last Tuesday, Rory and I journeyed to the Special Collections Archive, where we discussed how best to arrange our display. We had a myriad of data at our disposal, yet we struggled to determine what should and should not be remembered. By determining what memory should and should not be remembered, we understood that we were simultaneously determining what memories will and won’t be canonized. It was a difficult role to perform, and there was some discomfort over our decision. How could we know how a person wanted to be remembered? How would an audience react to our display? In one of the articles I read from the Kenyon Alumni Magazine, for example, former Kenyon alumnus, Paul Newman wrote that “the most barometric incident in my college life was entrepreneurial, not theatrical: it was my laundry business” (Kenyon Alumni Magazine). Two key findings can be interpreted from this passage: (1) there is a college life and a non-college life; (2) he considers his entrepreneurial endeavors to be more noteworthy than his acting pursuits. Regarding the second finding, we lacked any photographic or material evidence regarding his laundry business, other than a passage from The Collegian. What pictures we did find of his college life were in three forms: graduation pictures, acting pictures, and pictures of his life on campus. For this blog post, I chose a picture in which Paul Newman was in company with the Alpha Delta Phi group in 1946. Newman, in the white shirt near the center of the frame, is holding onto an abnormally large glass of an unspecified beverage, laughing with the members of the fraternity. Paul Newman was never a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity. The location of the picture is unspecified, and we, as a modern audience cannot discern what the emotions of the time were. Most members were drinking alcohol or posing for the camera, while a few stared off into an object outside the frame. Rory and I, as researchers, lack the information as to why the picture was taken and why it has been preserved, but we do have the power to determine whether it continues to be remembered.

In her text, Canon and Archive, Aleida Assmann writes about how archives are the basis for what can be said in the future about the present when the present has become the past (335). It is, therefore, the job of the historian or researcher to interpret the archived object and give it new meaning. There is no law in determining what can or should be pulled out of the archive. Our work as sociologists is, as she writes, “highly selective and built on the principle of exclusion” (337). 

In our work commemorating the notable alumni of Kenyon College, we are not only commemorating the individual but how the individual represents the College. We chose to depict Paul Newman, the actor, and Paul Newman, the student. Paul Newman, the actor, reached incredible heights and even won an Oscar. Paul Newman, the student, was a young man who, following the horrors of the Second World War, pursued a drama and economics degree from Kenyon College. In determining how to depict and celebrate such an accomplished individual, Rory and I knew we had to give the audience a more complete image of the actor and entrepreneur. He was not always Paul Newman, the actor, and our collection seeks to explore that. We are exploring his image and likeless not as a myth, but as someone who attended the College. In that fashion, a group photo of Paul Newman with his friends seemed fitting. We do not know why the picture was taken, but we appreciate that it has been preserved for so long (there is also a framed picture of it in the Squire’s Room in the Ganter-Price Hall!).


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