Sallie Bingham, author of Little Brother: A Memoir published by Sarabande Books, discusses the life and early death of her younger brother Jonathan at the age of 21 in 1963, as well as the current epidemic of “deaths of despair” of young men from every class and culture that she calls a “universal tragedy.” She also does a brief reading from Chapter Eight of the book which is available directly from Sarabande Books, elsewhere online or at your local bookstore. (12 minutes). Recorded Fall of 2022 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Hello, my name is Sallie Bingham. I’m a writer, and I’m going to talk to you for a little bit about my writing. I’m speaking to you from my living room in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I’ve been living for 30 years. And it occurred to me to mention that yesterday a friend of mine asked to a group of people if anyone had ever been able to do what she thought she wanted to do when she was five years old. And I right away spoke up and said I was one of the very fortunate minority of women who has been able to do what I wanted to do because I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was five years old. However, I added that it’s never enough.
So the memoir I’m going to talk to you about today might also be subtitled “Never Enough.”
This memoir has been out now for five months. It’s called “Little Brother,” published by Sarabande Books. And it is my account of my younger brother, Jonathan Bingham’s brief life and death. He was born in 1942 and died in 1963. And it’s been always a subject that has been silent in the family, been silent. People hardly remember him now. It’s so long ago.
And I wanted to use this memoir to talk about who he was in the framework of the great difficulty that privileged young white men have in finding a role and a goal in life. It’s not a particularly popular subject right now in 2022. However, we do need to remember that these are still the group of men who run our culture, our government, our corporations, our politics. They are still men who were once privileged young white men. And so it’s important to know what the problems were that caused Jonathan to lose faith in his life.
We are now in the midst of an epidemic of premature deaths, particularly among young men from every class and culture. They’re being called “deaths of despair.” These are young men who may be very gifted, even brilliant, may have even been given what we consider a first-class education or may not. But whatever have been their advantages, they reach their early 20s without any sense of a clear goal.
Is it enough just to have money or to make money?
Is it enough to have a job that people think is a success?
Is it enough to marry and have children?
Or is there always some aching loss that these young men feel and from which they do eventually suffer and die?
I have begun to believe that the loss is an enormous spiritual vacuum. For decades now, we in the U.S. have lived without any moral framework. We live for ourselves if we are lucky or call ourselves lucky. We live to achieve, to pile up, to be noticed, to be recognized as important, all of which is empty in the face of what we all know we are going to come to, which is dust to dust, ashes to ashes.
I am hoping that my brother Jonathan’s story may shed some light on what is a universal tragedy, certainly in the U.S., probably in other countries, so that we, the unfortunate ones who have survived, can begin to think about the solutions, if there are any solutions. And if there are no solutions, some way to come to terms with this despair. Thank you.
Rather than beginning at the beginning, which is what I often do, I will begin in Chapter 8, which is towards the end of this short memoir. This memoir is about my younger brother. His name was Jonathan Worth Bingham. He died in 1963, which is ancient history for most of us. I have been thinking about him for many, many years.
And finally, thanks to my sister, who gave me what papers remain, if you die at 22, you don’t have very many papers, but whatever papers remain from Jonathan’s life, I have been able to transcribe something about what his experience was all those years ago. He was the fourth child in a very privileged family in Louisville, Kentucky, and he grew up in the midst of all the trappings of privilege—private school, boarding school, Harvard—and out of that came a sense of despair that we will probably never entirely understand.
One of the things that my sister gave me was the one journal that our brother Jonathan kept during his last few months of Harvard in the spring of 1962. So I’m going to read the chapter that is about this journal and include some quotes from it.
There are no letters from my brother Jonathan to our parents during the summer of 1961 and the fall of 1963 when he decided to drop out of Harvard at the end of his junior year. Something had happened the previous winter that Jonathan would not disclose to anyone in the family. Instead of his long, breezy, intimate letters to our parents, a tone he could no longer maintain, Jonathan began for the first time in his life to keep a journal.
In a small red-and-black record book, he wrote his private thoughts and experiences, beginning with an entry for January 25 through February 3, 1963. By this time he had begun what may have been his first intimate relationship with a young woman he calls “Tigger” or “Tig,” after the joyous, impulsive toy tiger in Winnie the Pooh.
During the weekend, he experienced, in quotes, “tolerable ease with Tig,” the usual problem, but I have gotten beyond worrying about it anymore. Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten around the thing itself, so it is at best an alleviation of symptoms rather than disease. I am annoyed and worried with myself for my last day’s stupidity.
The “thing” seemed so disabling, I write, that he referred to it as a “disease.”
Was it a result of the big scene the previous summer at home when Mother found Jonathan in bed with a girl? Was the “thing” a result of Mother’s harsh prohibitions against any sexual activity outside of marriage? Yet Mother had seemed to enjoy her three sons’ sexual adventures, calling them “rakes” with a bit of satisfaction.
Jonathan was comfortable with the restrictions of the parental rules at college, and parental attitudes meant that he was obliged to take a date back to her dormitory at a relatively early hour. Lack of privacy, except for the back seats of cars packed on lonely country roads, prevented a good deal of sexual experimentation.
Certainly, there were young men as well as young women who welcomed this protection, not yet prepared emotionally or physically to venture into intercourse. Without adequate sex education, Jonathan, like me, was probably given a book called The Stork Didn’t Bring You or other obscure explanations about birds and bees. We were completely unprepared for intimate relationships with their complex demands, difficulties, and dangers.
Abortion was illegal and unimaginable, leading to a fear of illicit pregnancies. The first contraceptive pill, Enovid, was approved and placed on the market in 1960, the research underwritten by a grant from Margaret Sanger. Although initially prescribed only for severe menstrual disorders, women desperate to avoid pregnancy found ways to secure it.
As with the advent of marijuana and later LSD, the birth control pill launched unprepared young people, like Jonathan, into a sea of possibilities and consequences.
This of course has become much more of an issue again today with the prohibition against abortion spreading through all the states or most of the states and even some question about birth control. So Jonathan was at the cusp of change, as many young people are today and every day, but he was probably curiously unprepared to deal with it.
It’s hard to believe that born in 1942, he was brought up really as he would have been brought up in the 19th century. Many things could not be mentioned, and I’m sure we all know what those things were. Many facts could not be disclosed, and the resulting silence, which was meant, I think, to impose a kind of peace and order, resulted in suffocation and ignorance. I think this is largely what went wrong for Jonathan.
I have no idea what had happened to him with Tigger, but whatever it was, it made the relationship for him impossible. It seems that she was quite heartbroken when he broke up with her, but for him it was impossible. And as a result of that breakup and of a very intense friendship with his Harvard roommate, he couldn’t stand the strain of these two relationships and dropped out of college.
When he went back to Kentucky, I felt it was a terrible mistake. That was a suffocating atmosphere that he knew too well from growing up in it, and he died six months later.
I’m hoping that this memoir, which seems to have touched a good many people, will help us to raise some of these questions again.
What is ignorance?
What is innocence?
And what is the price that we all may pay at some time or another for cultivating these particular aspects of our personalities?
To learn more about Little Brother: A Memoir, please visit the Little Brother page on this site, where you’ll find several more videos as well as many blog posts.
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