Sarah Lawrence Panel Can't Find the Handle

As Eric Larrabee '43 remarked in his keynote address, it could only happen in America. The managing editor of American Heritage made his observation as he surveyed the 50 students and Sarah Lawrence faculty members who assembled last Saturday on the Brouxville campus to solve the "problem" of leisure.

Larrabee made a great deal of sense in his opening remarks, but he was one of the few who hit the target during the whole long day. Most of the general sessions and panel discussions engaged themselves in a wild chase after a definition of leisure, usually concluding that intellectuals are incapable of distinguishing between work and play.

In his address, Larrabee said that leisure is "frightening"--"it forces a man to define himself." Leisure is especially problematical in "our conscience-ridden society," Larrabee said. "We can't recapture innocent hadonism."

A work-oriented society in which there is more and more time for leisure makes the U.S. the first country to worry actively about leisure, Larrabee said. He cited the need for balance between work and play, and for avoidance of the extremes of the Madison Avenue type who carries his business to every cocktail party and the horse-around who pulls practical jokes all day at the office.

"The end of leisure is the fine arts," Larrabee concluded. "The beaches may soon be filled, but there are many more poems and books to be written."

All of which was fine, but it soon became obvious that Larrabee, or someone, should have defined leisure. The student panel that followed more or less decided that, for the student and for the intelligentsia, the distinction between work and leisure is a false one. In a way, it is, but you can't have a conference about leisure if you won't admit that it exists.

On the student panel, a representative from Princeton in a four-piece suit distinguished himself by reading from a staggering pile of books nearly all the world's literature on leisure. Emma Liewellyn of the Sarah Lawrence faculty was so alarmed at two panel members who said, "I don't have time for leisure," and "I feel guilty when I'm not working," that she accused them of being "little machines" and suggested bird-watching.

The final panel, on "Leisure is Suburbia," was a bomb. Bosley Crowther, movie critic of the New York Times, leered at one of the female panel members and sniggered suggestively at his own off-color jokes, before piously denouncing over-sexed movies. Paul Goodman, author of Growing Up Absurd, fought with a Commissioner of Planning about whether Puerto Rican children should be allowed to swim in Westchester County pools.

It was hard to see what the Consumers' Union, cosponsor of the affair, got out of it. Nobody talked about the best kind of mop dryer or anything like that