Dan Brown visited my English class. It happened in the spring of 1998, when I was a senior at Phillips Exeter Academy. One day, our English teacher, Mr. Terry, announced that we’d be hosting a special guest: some guy, apparently named Dan Brown, who had just published his first novel, “Digital Fortress.†I can’t say that we responded with particular enthusiasm. None of us had heard of Brown, or of his book, and we were also annoying, arty little snooty-snoots. Why would we want to talk with the author of a “techno-thriller†about computer hackers (sample line: “Meet the kamikaze of computer invaders… the wormâ€)?
The intelligence we gathered wasn’t promising. We learned that Dan Brown was the son of Richard Brown, one of Exeter’s math teachers, and that, before becoming a novelist, he may have taught in the English department for a time. He was an alumnus, and, we speculated, may have had Mr. Terry as an English teacher. In the computer lab, a Web search—probably using some now-extinct, pre-Google search engine—revealed that Brown’s only other book had been called “187 Men to Avoid: A Survival Guide for the Romantically Frustrated Woman,†and had been co-written with his wife, and published under the pseudonym Danielle Brown. And we discovered that “Digital Fortress†was about the N.S.A.’s quest to break an unbreakable code that threatens, because of its invincibility, to undermine the agency’s spying programs. This sounds very au courant nowadays, but, back then, it excited only one of us, a math and cryptography enthusiast who went out and bought a copy, hoping to get it signed. (I wish I’d thought of doing that: today, an inscribed, first-edition copy of “Digital Fortress†goes for one thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars on eBay.)
At the end of the class, Brown did, in fact, sign my friend’s book, inscribing it to “my fellow cryptographer.†But I know this for sure only because, in the past few weeks, I began interviewing my classmates about Dan Brown’s visit, thinking it might make for a funny piece about a long-ago brush with a famous writer. It turns out that, over the course of the last fifteen years, the visit has become one of those fractured, inconclusive, “Rashomonâ€-like memories. None of us remembers it the same way. I now know that the story of Dan Brown’s visit is also a story about memory and its tricks.
For most of us, the main problem seems to be a kind of over-remembering, a piling on of incidents that make sense individually but, taken all together, seem improbable. People tend to think of recollections as fading over time, but memories also grow like manuscripts being revised. In remembering, we add and fill in—and the more often you remember something, the more you change it, by committing to memory your own imaginative acts of recall. That’s why, eventually, our memories take on the glow, drama, and swiftness of fiction.
That’s certainly the case for my own memories of Dan Brown’s visit. In my version, he arrived wearing a navy blazer and a green turtleneck sweater. Sunlight filled the windows of our little seminar room, and lightened the wood of the floor and the table. Brown spoke for a few minutes about his career, explaining how he had transitioned from music—his first profession—to novel-writing. Then he passed around a handout of ten numbered writing tips. In my memory, the tips were extraordinarily general: “Set your story in an exotic locationâ€; “Make your characters interesting people with secretsâ€; “Have lots of plot twistsâ€; “End each chapter with a cliff-hanger.†Then I recall Brown using a boom box, which he had brought with him, to play us a track from “Angels and Demons,†a pop album he had recorded; the song, he told us, had lyrics taken from the Matthew Arnold poem “Dover Beach,†and had been played during the opening ceremony of the Toronto Winter Olympics. As the song wound to a close, the classroom, with its blackboards and posters, its scuffed wood floors and hulking seminar table, was lit by the setting sun. I remember it being very quiet, and I recall being extremely sleepy. I don’t remember a single detail of how the class period ended.
It goes without saying that I have very little faith in these recollections. For one thing, Toronto has never hosted the Olympics. For another, I envision the whole scene not from the table, where I must have sat, but from the doorway, as though it had been filmed by a camera. At certain points, when I picture what Dan Brown looked like, I see him in the blue blazer and green turtleneck—but at other times, I see him in a tan jacket with a black turtleneck. Yesterday, I realized that that’s what he wears in the photo on his Wikipedia page.
My classmates, meanwhile, back up some of my recollections, dismiss others, and propose entirely foreign incidents that I don’t reminder. A number of them recall that Brown read from one of his books; one woman, now an attorney, remembers that he read from something that took place in Rome, and had lots of Christian imagery. That can’t be right, since “The Da Vinci Code†had yet to be written. Then again, I don’t recall him reading anything at all, so what do I know? Some people say that he gave a talk to the whole school. Others have no memory of the list of writing tips, or of the pop song. Only one friend, now a successful rock musician, remembers the day exactly as I do. When I asked him if he remembered Brown’s visit, he replied, “Of course I do. The first rule of any great story is to start with an exotic location.†He confirmed that the “Angels and Demons†album really existed, and also remembered that Brown played a song from it, although it may or may not have been the song that quoted “Dover Beach.†(Later, he said, he had met someone who owned the album, and had listened to it so many times that he could still remember the words to the title track.)
It was reassuring to learn that someone else shared my memories when so many other people didn’t. Even so, it’s possible that we’re just misremembering in the same way; perhaps we’d compared our inaccurate notes at some point in the past, and then forgotten about it, thereby editing our own memories. And I couldn’t help but wonder about the small number of my classmates who had no memory of the visit at all. “I don’t even really remember him coming,†one woman, now a doctor, wrote to me in an e-mail; “So sorry.†“Honestly, no recollection,†wrote another, a financier here in New York. It’s sobering to think about how their otherwise-agile minds had swallowed the incident whole. Who needs conspiracy novels when memory is its own conspiracy, always rewriting and erasing the truth?
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Still, there are consolations. The passage of time has made that day more comprehensible in other ways; looking back, a lot of the things we found surprising or weird now make sense. Take Dan Brown’s list of writing tips. When he shared them, it seemed like a strange thing to do—why give a bunch of arty high-school kids advice about how to write cheesy thrillers? Now that I pay the rent, in part, by writing, it’s clearer to me why Brown’s advice was so practical. As one classmate put it, he wanted to tell us “how to write for a living,†something he himself had only just discovered after years of struggling as a musician. We were all such aesthetes back then; now we’re all lawyers and accountants. Many people seem to take pleasure in making fun of Dan Brown’s literary banality, but how many of my classmates wouldn’t love to have a career as a writer of best-selling thriller novels?
And it’s also more obvious why Brown visited our class in the first place. At the time, it seemed completely random; I, for one, assumed that Mr. Terry had somehow run out of steam, and had brought in Dan Brown in more or less the same way that, toward the end of the year, a teacher might bring in a movie. Now, looking back, his visit seems connected to a broader series of events that were unfolding then. In fact, the kindly, white-haired, bow-tied Charles Terry wasn’t our original English teacher; he was a replacement for a beloved man with a bushy gray beard named Fred Tremallo, who had died mid-year. One day, after a few months of class, we had arrived to find a sign on Mr. Tremallo’s door saying that class was cancelled. Shortly afterward, over the phone, a few of us found out that Mr. Tremallo had terminal lung cancer.
I might not remember Dan Brown’s visit very well, but I can recall with perfect clarity the time around Mr. Tremallo’s death. The night we found out, those of us who’d heard the news walked around campus to find our classmates and tell them in person. It was a beautiful night—still, cold, dark, and quiet, with fresh, luminous snow. A few days later, we visited Mr. Tremallo in the hospital to say our goodbyes; several of us, including me, spoke at his memorial service in the school chapel.
Mr. Tremallo had been an unusual, exciting teacher. While the kids in the other English classes were reading Robert Frost and “A Separate Peace,†he had given us “White Noise†and “The Waste Land.†Kindly, white-haired, bow-tied Mr. Terry, who had come out of retirement to take over our class, was more traditional, and had a hard job. We were silent, unhappy, resentful, and withdrawn. We didn’t want to talk about books, and to enjoy ourselves in class felt like a betrayal of the man we’d admired. Dan Brown’s visit, I’m now convinced, was part of a campaign to cheer us up. His cheerfulness might be the one thing that all of us remember. “Dan stayed positive,†one classmate told me, “even though it must not have been the easiest fifty minutes for him.†He was generous, humble, upbeat, and optimistic. He may have played us a song, possibly with lyrics borrowed from “Dover Beach.†Only now does it occur to me what an appropriate choice that would have been. In the poem, Arnold listens to the waves on the beach, which “bring / The eternal note of sadness inâ€:
It’s not just that the passage of time distorts what you remember; it’s that the present reshapes the past. Looking back, my memory wants to tell the story a certain way, as though Dan Brown, a soon-to-be-famous author, visited our English class to talk with us about writing. But at the time, Dan Brown, age thirty-three and unfamous, was just a regular guy, a kind person doing something nice for a group of unhappy kids. In some ways, the simplicity of the past is as hard to recapture as its complexity. In writing this essay, I tried to get ahold of Dan Brown, to find out what he remembers. Perhaps because he’s busy doing publicity for “Infernoâ€â€”which was just released around the world, in thirteen languages—he never got back to me.
Photograph by Peter Kramer/NBCU/Getty.
