I Confess: I was the Bishop
In one of the personal escapades of no interest to anybody outside an increasingly small percentage of the world, I once impersonated a long-dead Episcopalian minister in order to save a building.
Sunset Cottage is an unremarkable white clapboard and brick structure tucked in on the hill upon which Kenyon College (and now, an underground parking lot) is built. It has settled in comfortably to the hillside, floorboards sloping haphazardly creaking treacherously when you tread upon them, the air smelling of carpet and paper, reams and reams of paper, some older than you and some born just this year. There was a perpetual sense of heat, either summer heat coming in off the painted siding or winter heat coming in from the bowels of an old furnace like the engines of a ship. Its focal point was its library, which was at once snug and secure, yet opened up to the world through a wondrous bay window, often in the fall and winter admitting the sunset. I had many agreeable classes there, and a few beers. It was a place where words mattered, mattered damnably deep, and one as common as “sunset” could command a sort of gravity nearing that of the setting member.
Photo: Greenslade Special Collections. The title of this image, “Sunset with Men,” accurately sums up Kenyon College before 1969.
In sum, the building was old, cramped and in the way. Propositions were made to demolish it after consideration of its awkward homeliness in the midst of state science institute-esque structures proposed by a new architect. This all mattered very little to new English professors and old donors, who saw a handicap quagmire and a chance to name a new building, respectively. You would think you could trust professors who hem and haw over semicolons to get properly sentimental about a building, but no. “Sunset to Fall After a Century and Half In the Light” read a Collegian article September 2016. There is a uniquely bitter sort of wound, reading that sort of headline halfway around the world. In England, I was powerless, but nonetheless in England I was.
There is not much you can do abroad to mourn the impending demolition of a building not far from your childhood home, as old as your childhood home and which was in fact, your second childhood’s home, except go on a long walk. At the end of mine, I started my first and only change.org petition.
But not under my name. I was not respected at Kenyon — no one at the Collegian was, and you didn’t join the masthead to become popular, during or after your tenure, and additionally I had been a twit. There was nothing going for it than to take up the mantle of Philander Chase, Kenyon’s first president. This was a period before “fake news” had properly entered the lexicon, and fake identities were easily and even innocently had. It was a heady time, prime for corruption and excellence.
“… using the brains upon which they capably sit…” remains one of my finest lines.
The college, as it turned out, felt the same way about the intended plans for Sunset as Philander, although less verbosely. Some five-hundred and twenty-eight signees appended their names to his rather archaic petition to President Sean Decatur, who was and is a fine man, if not a little overwhelmed by the emotional baggage of the school he took over. It made such a fuss that President Decatur penned an op-ed to the Collegian and the Collegian in turn penned a Facebook message to me, or Philander, giving me the only validating bit of evidence for the whole affair I have.
The ensuing Collegian story by a flummoxed reporter whom I’d edited myself years prior cited the Facebook conversation with “Philander Chase, who refused to reveal their identity.” All and all, the event seemed to have sealed, for at least one generation, the continued existence of Sunset Cottage in its current place. At any rate, they did not knock it down as threatened, nor move it, which was used as an excuse to knock it down instead given the expense. I do not know if any efforts went into making it accessible so much as making it unnoticable, an embarrassing footnote during college visitations to the school’s unflappable sentimentality.
Still, its staying put was among the greatest deviations from the infamous Master Plan, which lurked like a Dickensian menace with infinite powers throughout the last decade. Sunset sits there still, a silent token of the past crowded but not pushed out by rising monoliths of larger academic buildings. And that warms my heart no matter where I find myself.
Philander Chase’s account, on the other hand, was reported and deleted a few weeks after it was announced the cottage would stay. I like to think it was a trustee.
