THE NEW BARBARIANS

In shirt by Brooks In shorts by Brooks, In my demesne uplifted - Why should I frown If Town and Gown Go round unshod, unshifted?

These challenging lines were passed on to me in the quiet glow of the Hanover Inn Spirits Room with the compliments of one of Hanover's most discerning ladies and quite without her knowledge or permission I decided one very hot day last summer to make them a point of departure for what I hoped might prove a pleasant essay for this page.

I should assure you at the start that I was assured there was no personal reference intended either to the habits of the author of this column or to the frequent informality of its themes. As a matter of fact, I have never been one to object, on a hot day, if a gentleman wanted to remove his jacket or a lady wanted to appear somewhat more lightly clad than was her usual wont. Personal comfort in wearing apparel is not to be sneezed at and surely great strides have been taken in that direction in our day. I must, however, warn you at the start that as a late Victorian I find it a bit difficult to go very far in the direction of undress - in public, that is - and I still adhere, stuffily if you will, to the rule that a gentleman should suffer coat and tie, however light they be, when at dinner in a respectable public dining room. And by the same token, and also for reasons aesthetic, I believe that a lady in similar circumstances should wear a dress, and something more than sandals on her feet.

And this brings us to the nub of the matter, for if Hanover is a fair sample of American dress and manners the old rules seem much honored in the breach, and some tell me that in this rural Eden we haven't seen the half of it. We have often in this column noted how much alike and how much together town and gown really are and this generalization applies to dress and undress in public places. Hanover has had its share of "Peeping Toms" but that sort of thing isn't really cricket and I have reference only to what can be seen in places open to the general public, both town and gown - proletariat, bourgeois, and uppercrust; high school, undergraduate, and graduate.

It is hard to know where to begin but Hopkins Center is an easy target. On any warm day its corridors echo the patter of bare feet - five-toed feet not only unshod but unwashed. And bare legs, including muscular thighs, offer a wide-ranging subject for the pencil of the amateur artist. As for torsos, so far as I know no topless beauties have yet been reported but unshifted males are a regular sight, particularly on the sun deck which opens off the lounge. And the female midriff is common enough both inside and outside the building.

The Top-of-the-Hop at times resembles a flop-house. Boys and girls lounge and sprawl over chairs and sofas, in the most grotesque positions, for reading or study or conversation. Sometimes they do have the courtesy to kick off their loafers but since they seldom wear socks you now and then see a bare foot or two protruding over the top of a sofa. The problem exists also in the Hanover Inn competing as it is with the awesome sign seen in so many eating places, "Come as You Are." Some of our "New Barbarians" made such a mess of the lounge, watching TV, that Manager Jim McFate had to "take the damned thing out." And it seems sometimes they try to bring Coney Island, barefeet and all, into what we old-timers like to regard as the respectable quarters of this time-honored hostelry, but so far I think "Big Jim" is winning the contest.

Main Street, where town and gown are always intermingling, offers more grist for the mill. Here anything seems to go - short that is of complete nudity. We haven t had a Lady Godiva for many a year! Tanzi's store is at times visited by males clad only in bright colored bikinis and nothing else from head to foot except the beer or the pop they lug away. And even more common is coverage restricted to blue jeans or khaki trou hacked off roughly any where between the knee and the hip. In warm weather if by chance a shirt is worn it is usually open and flapping and the untucked shirt is common wear for both boys and girls. With the boys, beatnik style, wearing their hair longer and longer at the neck and the girls cropping it off in most bizarre styles, it is sometimes hard for us late Victorians to distinguish one sex from another, though we do, of course, recognize the beard as male adornment!

Last summer a close-cropped girl, bare footed and bare legged, appeared on Main Street in what appeared to be only a male shirt flapping in the breeze. The shirt was just long enough to make it appear she was nude beneath and quite a crowd gathered. She fooled them, however, by revealing a close-cut bikini and bra, but as one onlooker said, "You can expect anything these days."

I stole my heading from the title of a book written in the mid-1920's by a conservative Harvard professor. The phrase "The New Barbarians" seems in our day an apt characterization of many of our youth as judged by their public manners and incidentally by their dance movements. Don Herold wrote recently of "the urge to go Neanderthal." But why indeed should any of us "frown if Town and Gown go round unshod, unshifted"? Yes, why indeed? Our freedoms, so they say, are being taken from us by Big Brother Big Government and we are being told who to hire and what to pay him and how much of the residue to set aside for taxes. At least, then, leave us the freedom to stick our dirty feet in the next fellow's face, bare a virile hairy chest to the foe, and leave our shirt tails untucked.

The more conservative manners of the older generation, it seems, are merely a product of that stilted and repressed and hypocritical Victorian age. But as Charles Dana Gibson once remarked, "If I remember correctly, we had a good time then too." It does seem that in that benighted era both town and gown lived a bit more graciously, but we old-timers must wise up for as one kid said to me, "We sure go a lot faster these days."