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By Root 3639 0

memoir, Ben Graham describes himself as a loner who never had an intimate friend after high school: “I was cut out to be everybody’s friend but no one’s bosom pal or crony.”1 “Nobody cracked his shell. Men all admired him, they all liked him, and they all wanted to be his friend more than he wanted them to be. You came away feeling terrific about him, but you never got to be his pal.” Buffett would later call this Graham’s “protective coating.” Even his partner David Dodd never became an intimate. Graham had great difficulty in understanding and empathizing with others. People found him almost painful to talk to—so cerebral, so erudite, so clever. He was not relaxing to be around; people had to keep their wits about them all the time in his company. While he was always kind, he quickly tired of conversing with his fellow human beings; the “real friends and intimates” of his life were his favorite authors—Gibbon, Virgil, Milton, Lessing—and their subjects, which, he said, “had far more significance for me and left a greater impression on my memory than the living people around me.”

Born Benjamin Grossbaum,2 Graham passed his first twenty-five years in a period when the country experienced four financial panics and three depressions.3 His family’s fortune dwindled after his father’s death when Ben was nine; his worldly, ambitious mother lost most of her own small stake in the stock-market panic of 1907, and she wound up having to pawn her jewelry. One of Graham’s earliest memories was standing at a bank teller window, trying to cash his mother’s check as the teller audibly asked a colleague whether Mrs. Grossbaum was good for five dollars. During this time, Graham recalled, the family was saved through the charity of relatives “from misery, though not from humiliation.”4

Nonetheless, Ben excelled throughout his education in the New York City public schools, where he read Victor Hugo in French, Goethe in German, Homer in Greek, and Virgil in Latin. Upon graduation, he wanted to attend Columbia University but needed financial aid. When the scholarship examiner visited the Grossbaums, he turned Ben down. Ben’s mother was convinced that he did so because the family still clung to a few Louis XVI chairs and some other fine pieces of furniture, despite its reduced circumstances. Ben, however, was sure the examiner had detected a “secret deformity” in his soul: “For years I had been struggling against something the French call mauvaises habitudes [bad habits, a euphemism for masturbation], and which a combination of innate puritanism on my part and the hair-raising health tracts prevalent in those days had raised to a moral and physical issue of enormous proportions.”5

Graham and his bad habits wound up at tuition-free City College, bereft and broke, convinced that a degree from this school would not advance him in the snobbish, cultivated world to which he aspired. The last straw came when two borrowed books were stolen from his locker and he had to pay to replace them. He had no pocket money at all. He dropped out, got a job assembling doorbells, and recited the Aeneid and the Rubáiyát to himself as he worked. Eventually, he reapplied to Columbia and this time was given the scholarship that had earlier been denied him—through a clerical error, it turned out. At Columbia, he became an academic star, even while working at a variety of menial jobs to help pay his expenses. Checking waybills, he would mentally compose sonnets for distraction. On graduation, he turned down a scholarship to law school as well as offers from three different departments—to teach philosophy, mathematics, and English—in order to follow his dean’s advice and go into the advertising business.6

Graham’s sense of humor always tended toward irony. His first effort at writing a jingle for the nonflammable cleaning fluid Carbona was rejected as too frightening to customers when he produced this limerick:

There was a young girl from Winona

Who never had heard of Carbona

She started to clean

With a can of benzene

And now her poor parents bemoan