Years as an Undergraduate

The following account is written from memory except for such detail as might be readily verified or supplied, chiefly by published sources and by a selection of private papers, the latter courtesy of Suzy (Suzanne Snell Tesh). D.W. Litscher obligingly answered a few questions from his long acquaintance with many of those named.

* * *

Upon arriving at Harvard Square in the late morning of 23 September 1931—date and time from a letter home—I lugged my leather suitcase up from the subway to the sidewalk. After looking about, I took a few steps to the nearest gate and walked out into the Yard, and across toward Weld Hall, a plain 5-story red-brick Victorian structure (1872). From where I stopped to look, the view was much as it had been for two generations! On the stone steps of the central entrance stood the janitor, Mr. Green, waiting for his tenants to straggle in. When I came up, he checked my name on a list, then gave me a key to a third-floor double room (No. 17) in the south entry.^[1]

My roommate was already settled: John Cornell, from Buffalo, about five foot ten, well fed, with sweet rounded face and musical voice. He lent me sheets for the first night. The next day my new trunk arrived.

We had a good-sized study, with double-hung windows looking out on the long walls of Widener Library and south to the gray cut stone of Boylston Hall. As reported in an early letter home, the room was furnished barely: two desks, a round table, bookcase, two or three Harvard chairs, all of well-worn hard wood. A floor lamp had been left by the last occupants. We added a 3-way table lamp, wastebasket, small rug, odds and ends. John hung a couple of etchings (or lithographs). Each had his bedroom, with closet, single bed (springs and mattress), and chest of drawers. There was one lavatory to a floor (including two W.C.’s and a couple of shower stalls), none too large in the morning for nine of us.

By Friday, 25 September the entire class had arrived, to be registered at Memorial Hall. Nearly all had been settled in the Yard, the first class so treated. The next week, as the year got under way, we began taking our places.

John “went out” for the Advocate (the Lit’ry magazine) and, more seriously, the Dramatic Club. His ambition was to produce and direct plays, and more generally, to be associated with the Theatuh, perhaps stimulated by the example of his celebrated actress cousin Katherine (“Kit”) Cornell. At the Dramatic Club he of course began by manhandling, painting, and repairing scenery.

Inevitably we saw each other almost daily. At our desks by the east windows, we talked now and then of what we were doing. John might say something about strange Jim Agee, top writer for the Advocate, or about a play in production. We had different classes but sometimes exchanged a word about assignments or exams.

Our study served once as a place of meeting, one of neighbors convoked in early fall to listen to a “talk on sex hygiene” by Prof. Alfred Worcester, an ancient white-haired physician. His talk was of a kind familiar to most Freshmen, who will have had one (or more) from some coach. (At Central High School the coach that taught “personal hygiene” had even held “short-arm” inspection for our class.) Such a talk, horatory in tone, was not—was not meant to be—informative.

The single organized activity in the entry was a poker game that convened once or twice a week, usually in the study of Fred (George Frederick) Stork, on the next floor up. Fred, a husky angular humorist from Philadelphia, a graduate of old Penn Charter School, had rented an upright piano, on which he played popular songs, with facility if raggedly. And he played the banjo and mandolin, later leading the instrumental club on those instruments. He liked to write verse—words to songs, lines on some occasion—and was to write our class song. He had a good tennis game and was a serious soccer player, who would go on to be captain of the outstanding college team.

Others taking a hand, all from the fourth and fifth floors, were narrow faced Bill (Willard E.) Ingalls, first-class tennis player, from Winthrop, to become a mainstay of the college team; sedate John V. Hallet (Jawn), from Whitman; blond, phlegmatic heavy set John H. Ferguson (Fergie), from Marblehead; and tall wry Robert K. (Bawb) Morse, from New Bedford, good at basketball—with their several shades of the common regional speech. Our game—dealer’s choice, the choice rather wide—was relaxed; stakes were low; comment seldom lacking.

We might meet again at the Harvard Union for meals, without plan. Morse worked there as a waiter; quite often a couple of us sat at his table, at far left near the wall, by the door to the farther dining room. The Union was informal, though jacket and tie were expected, as I found after wearing a favorite brown suede windbreaker one cool fall morning.

I paid few visits outside the south entry of Weld Hall. One came to know classmates while going to and from lectures, or standing about in the Union or at Harvard Square, but such acquaintance remained casual. Another Freshman from Grand Rapids, Frank (Francis H.) Brown, from South High School (in Gerry Ford’s class), lived in Thayer Hall, the first north of University Hall. I went to see him a few times, meeting his new friends, among them Les (Leslie G.) Mitchell, very much from Down East Maine, though often inattentive to the convention that men from Down East are to say little, that to the point. Frank did badly in studies and did not come back in the fall of ’32, perhaps for want of a scholarship.

During the fall and early winter I saw others from Grand Rapids. There were visits from and to Dan (Daniel W.) Litscher, ’34, known for several years. Once I saw Bob (Robert ?) Irwin, a cheerful junior thoughtfully doing his duty; once, Bob (Robert H.) Denham, a friend from East Grand Rapids, down from Dartmouth; and once, in Boston, Jack Blodgett (John W., Jr.), the richest alumnus in Western Michigan (his grandfather had been a lumberman, and shrewd investor). Jack (class ’23, A.B. ’26) always urged new boys to make something of themselves at Harvard socially, in my case, of course, in vain. The qualifying event for outlanders that might hope for invitations to coming out parties was a fall series of Brattle Hall dances (“junior Brats”); I threw away the announcement. I did switch to Jack’s brand of cigarette, Virginia Rounds (Benson & Hedges), smoked them for years.

In the south entry of Weld Hall I came to know a few classmates not in the poker game. Next door lived a tall, fair, urbane Scot of euphonious speech, Sandy (Alexander) Thorburn, from Peebles, the country town of a shire of the same name) south of Edinburgh. He shared the suite with Lucius Wing, a pink-cheeked, stubborn, ingenuous graduate of Andover, from New York City, who planned to practice medicine, like his father. The two teased each other, Sandy (I thought) having the better of it. For example: Lucius: a Britisher is someone that, after a fast game of tennis, washes up, then draws on again the same underclothing. Sandy: By experiment, Lucius has just established that when you are turning a car, the rear wheels follow a different path from the front wheels. (Lucius recently had had a mishap pulling out of a parking space.)

Sandy was excellent company, and it was a loss to us all when he left after sophomore year for the University of Toronto; his widowed mother lived in Toronto. To be sure, it was not evident how, or why, he had come to be at Harvard; perhaps at his mother’s wish; she had been born and brought up in the States, in Washington, D.C.^[2] Lucius, among other things, wished to please his father by making Hasty Pudding (as in the event he did).

By chance I might stop on the second floor to greet, perhaps call on Tom (Thomas Gideon) Ratcliffe, an amusing figure from St. Louis, well connected, socially adept, and, like John Cornell, stage struck. He was just taller than I, but well able to carry off a certain pudginess of face and figure, with something of the presence of an actor, authority of a director, lively fancy of a playwright—always on stage. Less often I saw Tom (Thomas C.) Collier, from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a big slow-moving, shortsighted teddy bear educated at Exeter (X-a-tah), son of an old Yankee family of modest means. He was grateful for company and once invited me for a weekend visit in Portsmouth, then a genteel decayed town looking back. His widowed mother went with the town.^[3]

I also dropped in on Jack (Jack N.) Wright and Tom (Thomas M.) Breen, two sharp-featured Irishmen, on the third floor at the head of the stairs, both from the same Jesuit school in Brooklyn. Their chief occupations, they proclaimed, were picking up girls and drinking, disputation running a poor third. Wright, the leader, already 20 years old (the previous February), looked the worse for wear; he was secretly married by the end of the school year—according to his roommate. They drank almost anything, it appeared: sacramental wine, spiked near-beer, so-called “Golden Wedding Rye,” bay rum, home brew, or dago red and its delicious distilled residual, grappa. Late one night, Breen shouted obscenities and screeched so loud and long out the window that the Proctor^[4]—in Breen’s phrase, “prick the Proc”—took note. The next day Tom had a dressing down from one of the “baby deans.”

I may have been their only visitor. They liked to go back over elements of scholastic philosophy they had picked up; they were bright boys and I kept them at it. But that was just to kill time between toots. Not surprisingly, one or the other often ran short of funds. I once lent Wright $25, then a considerable sum for me. He paid it back a few weeks later, explaining that he had borrowed the money from a girl picked up at Revere Beach—most considerate of him.

It seemed to me, and probably they had an intimation, that they were not long for Harvard. Wright dropped out after a year; he was to die in the summer of 1934,^[5] reportedly from an overdose of some drug. Breen stayed a second year and, at the last word received, was still with us.

Most others in the entry one greeted, at times stopping to talk, but that was all, except for Pierre Washington Irving, a rugged agreeable squire from Irvington-on-Hudson, a graduate of St. Paul’s and a loner in his room on the fifth floor. We met at the poker table; he asked to join the game two or three times. He was lost at sea in the summer of 1933, sailing off Nantucket.

Freshmen had to register for exercise twice a week. In the cold months I played squash, a satisfying game for the duffer, at the courts a short way down Linden Street; tennis in the warm months, over the Charles at Soldiers’ Field, walking a country mile. (It’s hard to say with whom I played; sometimes, it would seem, with Doug Scott, a pleasant chap from Long Island.)

I tramped down again with the crowd on Saturday afternoons in the fall to cheer the football team in its home games. Unforgotten remain moments, names of some players from that fall, especially the loss to Yale 0-3, on a field goal late in the game—a 30-yard (?) drop kick^[6]—by little Albie Booth, well down the field to the left of the Harvard cheering section, somewhat to the other side.

Such hours of relaxation were sandwiched in between others spent studying and in class. On the average I must have put in about six hours a day—seven days a week—studying, in two or three stretches. Each of my five courses met three times a week for an hour, section meetings (in lecture courses) included.^[7] All told, studies took 55-60 hours a week.

The courses were these:^[8]

Freshman composition (English A-1)

Basic French reading (French 1)

Introduction to geology (Geology 4¹, 5²)

Introduction to political “science” (Government 1)

Types of English literature (English 79)

Freshman composition (not credited toward a degree) was required of all that had not passed a College Board examination in English; applicants with good records from public schools generally were accepted without taking College Boards. And graduates of private schools that failed even one College Board were not likely to be accepted. In effect the course was for Freshman from public schools.

The section I attended, which met upstairs in Boylston Hall, was taught by Lyman Butterfield, of whom more later. To write a theme a week, as tradition demanded—“rhetoric” had once been required of most students—kept me scratching for ideas. But it was good to write for a teacher ready and able to criticize to some purpose. Perhaps on that account, I don’t seem to have resented the imposition of Freshman English.

Four (out of some thirty) topics of weekly themes follow: The Education of Henry Adams (assigned, I believe);^[9] S.V. Benet, John Brown’s Body; with early memories of Dr. M.A. Shafer, Mother’s father, beloved companion of my childhood; and my friend Camilla.

In order to acquire (and demonstrate) a reading knowledge of a modern language (in addition to the reading examination in Latin taken, and passed, soon after arrival^[10]) I decided on a French course. Two years of “intensive” study in high school (with Florence Powers) had provided a firm foundation in grammar and vocabulary, but slight experience in reading. I have forgotten the name of our young section man in French 1, reddish hair, genial, sturdy, recently returned from a year in France. Examinations consisted of passages, and a few isolated phrases, to translate at sight. The quantity of reading assigned, chiefly short pieces of fiction—e.g. “Le curé de Tours” (Balzac), “Boule de suif” (Maupassant)—and the length of examinations encouraged development of a certain facility. Painlessly French 1 taught far more than I should have learned in two more years in high school; that’s not to justify language instruction in college.

The year (two half-courses) in geology was my choice to meet the “science requirement,” as more congenial, for example, than a year of chemistry or physics—the latter encountered in high school. There were weekly section meetings, also afternoon “field trips” once a week in fall and spring, to examine Roxbury conglomerate (at Nahant?), the Sudbury syncline, Quincy granite, and the like—rather fun, though afterwards we had to write short reports on what we had seen and heard.

But lectures were the main thing. Professor Kirtley Mather, then in his early forties, had a large audience in the University Museum. He was a smooth popular speaker, vulgarly known as “Courtly Blather.” What he said was purely expository, as was our text—Pirsson (?) and Schuchert. Above all, we learned something about rocks and rock formations; processes by which they are created, deformed, reduced; and conclusions drawn from all that as to the history of the earth (and life). We heard (and read) little about disputed views and open questions. It was nonetheless useful to have had an introduction to geology, which still serves as background though in so many ways superseded.

The course in government was informative, if hardly enlightening. It was given in New (now Lowell^[11]) Lecture Hall by Professor Arthur N. Holcombe, then in his late forties. Emphasis was on constitutional questions and selected issues of “public policy,” and on such related developments as administrative law. Little was said about the political process: the ways in which politicians (including judges and justices) mediate conflict and face—or evade—challenges. Of course only so much can be done in an introductory course, and students expecting to go on to more advanced courses have needs different from those students (in this case far more numerous) taking just the one course. But it was—and remains—my impression that the course was quite unrealistic in emphasis. That may explain, or excuse, the boredom that often set in during lectures and in weekly section meetings.

It was for a time a question whether it would have been better to take History 1—“European history from the Fall of the Roman Empire till the Present”—most popular option for “working off” the “social studies” requirement. One had to allow for the way in which it was taught, a reflection of the grandiose scope of the course, custom, and—for the first term—the inclinations of Professor Roger (“Frisky”) Merriman: in terms of set pieces, catch phrases and all-too-tidy formulas, names and dynastic relationships, battles and border changes, and, to be sure, dates. One might then have been no less dissatisfied, for analogous reasons. The effect of the course is suggested by a story of the time: a notorious section man, Paul Cram, asked on what sort of paper the November hour exam—the first—would be written, replied: “Should be on toilet paper, for all the crap you guys’ll be giving me.”

The course in English literature (often taken by Freshmen and Sophomores to meet a requirement in “humanities”) was conducted by Hyder Rollins, a short, chunky, mincing professor of about 40, audibly from the Southwest, said to live with his mother. (His assistant was R. Gale Noyes, popular tutor from Dunster House.^[12]) Professor Rollins’ lectures, in Emerson Hall, were by far the best heard that year. His rising reputation had been acquired by preparing “definitive” scholarly editions of collections of English Renaissance verse—“Tottel’s Miscellany” (so-called) (1557), “A Paradise of Dainty Devices” (1576), “A Handful of Pleasant Delights” (1584), black letter broadside ballads—not in that order.^[13] There was something disconcerting—as the girls then said, “offputting”—about him, but his approach, analytical, cynical, circumstantial, kept me alert and amused, and curious. Central High School had not prepared one for the discovery that the study of literature could be of such interest. Perhaps one was the more alert to the (implicit) lessons: read closely in the light of the writer’s experience, the culture, the tradition, yet remember: they were men like us; react, reflect. And note: most were practiced writers; watch how they do it.

As told above, I worked steadily, ready to learn and—what is more—to show that in this specialized way I was as good as I thought. Dan Litscher had kindly advised me: “Eddie, I know you are used to being top man in the class. But there are a lot of smart fellows at Harvard, and you’ll have to settle for doing creditably.” (Conventional wisdom; I was to say something of the sort to my freshmen classes.) Well, that was a challenge. Work evidently would be needed—and I hadn’t extended myself in high school—but the thing was “to get what they were driving at.” I qualified, no doubt, as a “grind”—if not a “greasy grind,” given the ethnic allusion—but studying seemed to me more of a game and less drudgery than the term would suggest. As I was to try to get across to tutees, without success, you have to learn to see “how it all looks to an insider.” In this connection Ed Cooper was to speak of “low cunning,” but it seemed to me not at all subversive to “get inside the subject,” rather what teachers often hoped one might do. To be sure, they didn’t trouble to explain what that was—may have given up trying—though there were signs that at least Professor Rollins was relieved to see someone catching on.

From the first, it was clear that high academic standing as an undergraduate might have little to do with “success in life,” a proposition suggested by what I had seen and heard in Grand Rapids. There was, however, lively immediate satisfaction in struggling to meet the challenge—and it was a struggle at first—and to make a record that would be a source of gratification to my parents—Father chiefly; Mother was soon more concerned that I had so little social life and was taking no part in college activities, as was only too evident from my letters. Doubtless I could have been more discreet. It’s hard to write home so often as I did in that first year without revealing essentials.

A very few undergraduates managed to combine a suitably impressive academic record with outside activities, mainly—it seemed—by doing without leisure, time to kill. In any case, there was nothing I was eager to try. Working on the Advocate or the Lampoon, in principle a congenial activity, was ruled out by lack of sympathy with the cliques from Eastern boarding schools that ran both magazines, as soon became evident. There seemed to be no pressing need to explain that at home, though I may have alluded to it.

A more fundamental reason, recognized if not put into words, was reluctance to give anyone a prior claim on my time. (Else I might, for example, have tried out for the Glee Club; singing is great fun, and the Glee Club was not at all “social”.) That may seem to be a “personality trait,” taking hold again as soon as I went back to work after the war—except that circumstances enter in. I hadn’t behaved at all in the same way in high school, probably should not have at the University of Michigan (which Mother would have had me attend, I believe); or later on, if I had been drawn into a functioning “society,” while doing work in which I didn’t have to prove myself several times over. To be sure, as already observed, there can be great satisfaction in proving oneself, and the satisfaction may help to convert learned behavior into need, and habit.

A reality underlying these considerations was of course that I had just enough “energy,” even as an undergraduate, to follow the course chosen. To do so I needed relaxation as well as food and sleep—plenty of the latter. The limits on my energy may be at bottom “psychological” or “physical,” a hard question if indeed resolvable. To be sure, I enjoyed the best of health, but—I had concluded—on condition of living within the limits of my energy.

Along in the spring—early in April—the Dean’s Office asked me to come in to receive a “detur” prize—Detur pro insigni in studiis diligentia^[14]—mine being a four-volume set of Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets…, by Samuel Johnson (London, 1794, octavo, 4th edition), bound in contemporary calf, in the best condition. The pleasures of reading, handling, and just looking at those volumes may have had something to do with my beginning, a few years thence, to buy old books.

I was acquainted with none of the four other Freshmen receiving this award,^[15] so I can’t say much about how they worked, or why. One, George Haskins, son of a Harvard history professor recently retired, lived in the south entry of Weld Hall. We never so much as exchanged a nod, though I had a passing acquaintance with his roommate “Joe” (César Lombardi) Barber, his schoolmate at Exeter. (They roomed directly beneath Wright and Breen.) Already it could be seen that Haskins was ambitious to distinguish himself in as many ways as possible—in an effort to come to terms with his severe father?^[16]

Soon it was time to decide on a “field of concentration,” in which one would take the equivalent of at least six courses and undergo (in the spring of the senior year) a “general examination.” I chose English literature, a field in which one would be examined also (in the junior year) on a knowledge of the English Bible, Homer (in translation), and Shakespeare.

It seems to have been an easy decision: I can’t recall making it. Professor Rollins’ course will have suggested what one could do in studying English. In some fields of possible interest—e.g. economics and history—one could expect to spend the undergraduate years mostly with lecture notes, textbooks, compilations, the occasional learned article, in effect mastering received opinion and a standard data base. In English one would deal also, from the very first, with much of the raw material of the field. One could see—even conclude—for oneself. Looking back, I know how desirable that was—then as later.

To be sure, it was an easier time for students, easier than it has since become, in English as in some other fields. Taking much for granted, beginning with ourselves, we could treat empirically what we found. One was led to look for some order in (or I might have said “to make some sense of”) the European, especially the English, past that weighed on us. One was free to use, but might at discretion ignore Marx and Freud, and their followers, J.L. Lowes and convention, Ogden and Richards and semantics, and the like. We knew we were stuck with abstractions; as Dumby says of words (in Lady Windermere’s Fan), we had nothing else with which to express ourselves. We understood, too, that the thought implicates the thinker, his generation and society. And so on. But of “formal explication” we remained innocent, or nearly so, a blessing for which we were never properly grateful, being hardly aware of it (as so often of blessings).^[17]

Other fields of study that offered much the same possibilities as English would surely have proved less acceptable. Philosophy could easily have become a bore in a year or two. (The “history of ideas,” on the other hand, might have been irresistibly attractive.) The study of French literature imposed pieties at which I should have balked before long. In the hybrid field “History and Literature” one was likely to learn more than in English—if only because of the very high standard of tutorial work. But I should have been put off by the oh so fashionable aura and by the open careerism of many initiates, in training for brilliant futures (with the encouragement, at least the tacit approval, sometimes indeed the example, of tutors). Just as well to have followed my nose.

I can’t have spent much time wondering whether, or how, my studies would help in earning a living; that doesn’t seem to have come up until a couple of years later—oddly enough. For it had long been a question what on earth I should do with myself when “grown up.” I had expected to leave home, to do something not visible in Grand Rapids. What? remained a secret. So far, the first year in college had not helped, the future as blank as ever, and I was too busy to be actively concerned. Several classmates of my acquaintance had formed ideas: “business,” law, medicine, even the ministry and (as already noted) the stage. A few were proposing to teach (and write learned articles). I had to be content to let others—Father notably—assume that I, too, must have that aim in mind. At worst, it appeared, one might be reduced to an academic career for lack of suitable alternative. Except as pis aller it was not a choice.

No more did I expect to “write,” as some contemporaries surely did. I looked forward to writing a fair amount, in one way and another, as an undergraduate, and expected to hone some of the requisite skills. But it seemed likely that I was unsuited to “creative writing,” not up to living with—and for—a vision of what can go on (and go wrong) within people (and between and among them). Journalism, on the other hand, even “upper Grub Street,” meant living too much on the surface, in the current. But that I wouldn't—couldn’t?—have told to anyone.

John Cornell remarked in the spring of ’32 that I seemed likely to be a resounding success or a dismal failure. Seldom does anyone come out with such a reading, and it led to some reflection. I still expected, with luck, to “do all right,” though Mother would go on worrying. (One knew that luck would enter in, as yet unaware how much can depend on it. Just as well.)

Another decision to be made in the spring of ’32 was to state a preference for assignment to a “House” beginning in the fall. After the brief ceremony in which Dean A.C. Hanford awarded a Detur prize, he introduced me to President A. Lawrence Lowell, who asked what House I had chosen.^[18] “Eliot House,” I said. “Why not Lowell House?” he then asked. I was put off by the question and don’t remember my answer, inadequate in any case. A pity, for it was the only time we were to meet, even for a moment, though the President was a familiar figure in the Yard, walking his ancient silky haired spaniel Phantom (in contrast to Mr. Conant, who would appear there, so far as one could tell, only for official occasions—quite in character, to be sure).

Of course the reason for choosing Eliot House was that Dan Litscher was there. There was small need to think twice about it, for he was my one good friend in the class of ’34. Compulsively sociable, he would be on terms with many of those already in residence. Very likely I looked forward to extending acquaintance, in variety as in number, and Dan could help (as indeed he was to do). I remained willfully oblivious to the known differences among the Houses in social composition, or I might have considered applying for another, except Dunster House, which vied with Eliot House as the most “social.”^[19]

I can’t recall talking over the matter with anyone; had I done so, I might have had a ready answer to President Lowell’s question. In the same way, without a word to anyone, I decided to room alone, so as to be free to study when, and as long as, desired. In that respect as in others, John Cornell and I had got on well, but one had the impression that he might rather go his own way.

As it turned out, he did, also without raising the subject, agreeing with a few friends on Lowell House. Four of the regulars of the poker game settled, as if by understanding, on Adams House, the old “Gold Coast.”^[20] (The Gold Coast had its points, including a swimming pool, where chubby, petite dancer/actress Ann Pennington was said to have bathed nude.) Four others from the south entry I was to find the next fall in Eliot House: Phil Dur,^[21] Sandy and Lucius, and Tom Ratcliffe; also Les Mitchell from Thayer Hall. Before starting home I had a few furnishings and my well-filled trunk moved to the basement of the House for the summer, with the help of the janitor, Jimmy Mongoven (or his helper? perhaps already Jimmy Mazza).

Soon after I arrived at the farm, penny postal cards began to appear with results of courses; one could slip a self-addressed card into one’s blue book for the purpose. It turned out that I had all A’s except for a B in the first term, in Geology 4, thereby earning a place in Group I for the year (one-half B just admissible), and eligible, by a wide margin, for a scholarship covering tuition without showing a need.^[22]

In 1931/32 Father had laid out $100 a month to cover room and board, something for incidentals, plus $400 tuition (besides what Mother had spent outfitting me and buying a trunk). His recorded outlays for all purposes, transportation included, came to $1,361.85.

Tuition being covered by a scholarship, my annual expenses at school in 1932/33 and thereafter could be expected to run at somewhat more than $1,000, allowance made for the additional cost of a private room, though not for other new outlays or new economies. It still seemed to me rather a lot in the Great Depression, given that there were two boys to educate and that Father was retiring (in June ’32), though Mother told me not to worry. (She would chide me gently for traveling by bus at Christmas, beginning in sophomore year, and catching a ride, when possible, in June.)

Eliot House, the farthest west of the four Houses along the Charles, reachable from the Square by Dunster Street, was one of those newly built, in institutional Georgian. It had five floors and nine entries, with living space for more than 275 (when fully occupied),^[23] making it the largest House. Most suites were occupied of course by undergraduates, with a scattering of graduate students, Junior Fellows,^[24] and resident tutors. Non-resident tutors also kept suites for use as offices; on occasion one or another might stay overnight.^[25] Each suite had a bedroom per tenant, along with study and bathroom, these both larger in suites intended for two or three (never more). Every House had its own dining hall and library, also a common room and a junior common room; in design all much alike from House to House.

In Eliot House I soon made a few close friends. One was J.D. (John Dwight) McVitty of the class of ’35, diffident, slight, fair, of medium height, with a narrow head. Dwight (or Mac,^[26] as sometimes called) was the child of privilege; his parents were at home in Princeton, in the summer at Falmouth. I was to pay short visits at both places. His father A.E. McVitty was a rentier and art collector, especially of Rembrandt etchings, of which he had a notable collection. (Most of the money, as I recall, came from his wife’s family.^[27])

Dwight had gone to Choate School, which sent a good many boys to Harvard. He seemed to see but little of his schoolmates, except perhaps two in Eliot House: Vic Kramer, a squat, genial outlander (from Cincinnati) and future lawyer; and Billy Pyles, a slender blond round-headed, short-sighted, quizzical fellow (originally from Philadelphia) destined for medicine. Indeed, Dwight saw little enough of anyone in college. He spent much of his time in Boston, at nightclubs and other joints—including some of those in Scollay Square—and at a favorite whorehouse. He had a respectable friend, Anna, daughter of a Boston banker, but she was at Vassar, not often available. (I never met her.)

As nearly as Dwight could be summed up in a word, one might call him an “aesthete.” With his refined tastes, rackety habits, and hostile Doberman called Baraks (phon.), he might well have been more at home in the experimental 1920’s than he was in the political 1930’s. The one teacher at Choate that he mentioned often was an English master, encountered in sixth form, Dudley Fitts, a well-regarded minor poet and translator of classics. The two or three schoolmates Dwight spoke of were “intellectuals.” The most notable at Harvard was tall J. Laughlin IV (Jones & Laughlin Steel), class of ’36, widely known since the latter ’30’s as a publisher of the avant garde New Directions.^[28]

In Dwight’s chosen field of study, philosophy, his special interest was in aesthetics, the subject of his young tutor David W. Prall. (Dwight and I once had dinner with him, perhaps in the fall of 1934, at Hartwell Farms, an admirable country restaurant not far from Lincoln. Prall was a charming, quiet man whom, as so often, I did not know how to draw out.)

McVitty’s earliest interest was in painting. He had spent at least one summer, all too young, in the art school at Woodstock (in the Catskills). He went on painting in college, rather well, it was said; as I recall, his work was American post-Impressionist in inspiration. Then one day he announced that he had destroyed the lot, perhaps reacting to insufficient enthusiasm on the part of someone whose opinion he valued. Apparently he never took brush in hand again. His talent and training would later be redirected into the study, and for a time the practice, of architecture.

He occasionally talked about books, a few, to which he had been introduced by his older brother (A.) Edward (Jr.) or by Dudley Fitts. (A couple of friends, including J. Laughlin, may also have influenced his taste.) The included The Enormous Room by E.E. Cummings (1922, his first book); early works of Ezra Pound; a tale or two by Franz Kafka, a few stories by Hemingway. At someone’s suggestion, he had read novels by one “Stephen Hudson” (Sydney Schiff, a friend of Proust), all apparently bearing people’s names as titles (e.g. Richard Curt, Céleste), worldly in background, poetic in intent, thin in texture.

More absorbing was Dwight’s jazz collection. He and Edward had collected “race records” in South Philadelphia, and Dwight had a good many, of other origins, too (all 78’s, of course). To minimize wear, as then customary among discophiles, he played them using a thorn needle, which often had to be sharpened. At times he might invite me to listen to some of these records. I enjoyed hearing what was already “classical” jazz and picked up from him a modicum of lore (mostly derived from Down Beat and the writings of Hugues Panassié and J.H. Hammond). Once Dwight took me to a club in Boston to hear Chicago jazz, introduced me to sad-faced Pee Wee Russell, who played elegant clarinet (or was it natty Bobby Hackett, band leader and no less refined horn player?).

A most influential friend made in Eliot House was Ed (Edward Nathan) Cooper, class of ’34, the son of East European immigrants settled in Cleveland. Ed’s father, a small contractor, was a socialist by conviction; had, for example, voted for Debs, very likely for other socialists, if less wholeheartedly. The elder Coopers were stocky, well below middle height, pleasant, reserved. The family was very close; Ed later would put his younger sister Sophie through college. He himself had been a high school radical as well as top student and concert master of the school orchestra.

He was at Harvard on scholarship, which he supplemented by running a student laundry service—a competitive business—in partnership with a classmate called Robinson, who came of a good New England family in reduced circumstances. Ed once said, “Robbie is the perfect partner. When the fellow at the laundry meets us, he’s inclined to trust Robbie, may even think he can get the better of him, though Robbie’s plenty sharp. Me, I’m easy to deal with, but the guy sees that Jew, he’s looking for a fast one.” Ed had indeed keen features and an acute, smiling expression—the appearance of a traditional scholar and artist.

He and I had the bond of inquiring minds and open futures. Devoted to families and loyal to origins, we were hoping for some occupation over the horizon, in his case something other than “the typical Jewish profession.” By his last year, he knew he wanted a career in industrial management.^[29] Later, when he had saved the money, he would come back to the Business School across the Charles and take his M.B.A. But he didn’t find a job in industry. Like me, he ended up in Washington, disappointing expectations of others close to him. His true vocation was friendship; he was to make hundreds of fast friends.

Ed’s field of study was economics, and I began to pick up ideas from him about both economics and politics, ideas perhaps influenced by his tutor R.V. Gilbert. Richard Gilbert, a pipe smoker, short and understated, had been brought up in a socialist commune (in Eastern Michigan), but gave few signs of residual faith in doctrines, including those of economics. Of wide interests and acute understanding, he was a questioner.^[30] Ed, by the time I met him, had much the same approach. Coming back once from vacation, he reported that several high school classmates that had made fun of him had themselves turned to the left—and remained as little sympathetic as ever. “They’ve switched sides,” said Ed, “but they’re no smarter than they were.”

Another new friend, also of the class of ’34, was C. (for Charles) Malcolm Watkins, from nearby Winchester. Malcolm’s^[31] appearance, very fair, below middle height, with a “roamin’ nose,” suggested to the egregious Sam Sonnenfield the epithet—“Ooh, whi’ mouse!” shouted whenever Malcolm entered the room.^[32] (I used to greet him thus when he came to visit in the 1950’s—until Tee observed that he winced.) Malcolm had an arresting voice—which has deepened—his speech clipped and authoritative, not at all like the genteel St. Grottlesex delivery; rather the old clean educated speech of the area, to be heard, with different individual notes, in the voices of his parents.

His father, short and compact, an insurance underwriter, with a Boston office in (or near) State Street, may have realized himself most fully as toastmaster and raconteur, with a sure touch, light, sparing of words, drily humorous, almost without malice. A former president of the amorphous Boston Harvard Club, he remained in steady demand to preside over dinners, introduce guests of honor.

Malcolm’s mother, born Lura Woodside, the daughter of a minister, was knowledgeable about music and old American glass (on which she was to write a book) and furniture. As a boy Malcolm had been used to musicales, the presence of guests playing in the Boston Symphony—then almost all European, very down to earth, according to Malcolm—as well as collectors and antiquarians, and old things.

An agreeable household. Dan and I, Dwight also, were occasional guests in Winchester and at the Watkins summer place at Annisquam (on the river, and just up from the harbor, of the same name), inland a short way from Gloucester.

No clue appeared to what Malcolm might do after graduation. What he was studying mattered so little that it was seldom if ever mentioned. Deceptively mild and unassertive, he had his father’s gift of dealing briskly, when he chose, with a variety of people and situations. One could imagine his growing into his father’s insurance business. But there would be small reason for surprise when he instead followed up on his mother’s interest in old American household goods, the same personal gifts proving quite as useful, indeed indispensable, in that career, capped with a responsible position in the Smithsonian.^[33]

These three friends—McVitty, Cooper, and Watkins—seemed to have little in common, in interests and abilities, in background and outlook. Yet each was, like me, a loner, member of no set or clique, devotee of no organized “activity.” A good many others, to be sure, answered the description. What Dwight, Ed, and Malcolm had besides—each in his own way—was a delicacy, a refinement, of perception that greatly recommended itself. For good measure, they were disinterested, more than fulfilling the definition of a gentleman by Yeats’ father, as one “not wholly occupied with getting on.”^[34]

Over the three years in Eliot House, I of course became acquainted with a good many others of the two hundred and some undergraduates living in the House at any time. One might make acquaintance “in Hall” by joining one or two friends at table, thereby meeting whoever else was there. Mainly in this way I was introduced to many of Dan’s class as well as of my own, fewer of those from the classes of ’33 (and later) of ’36 and ’37.

And there was the odd graduate student, one being Tom Henderson, a subdued student of philosophy from McGill and the Black Watch. He called my attention to A.N. Whitehead, who after a career as mathematician and don (and opponent of relativity) and another as administrator, had continued at Harvard (from 1924) a third as informal, non-rigorous philosopher.^[35] Henderson had quarters, as I recall, in D entry, first floor, across the hall from me; needless to say, we never met there.

Indeed, most of those met at table one did not see elsewhere. Many, of course, one did not meet at all—the “social” element and other self-contained groups. One fellow already a center of interest was Dan Boorstin, ’34, a Wunderkind that after a year in biochemistry had, characteristically, changed over to History and Literature, at which again he was doing extremely well. He was also a figure of fun in Dan Litscher’s crowd because of his total absorption in himself. Once they had a phone call placed as from the Copley Plaza, ostensibly by a U.S. senator from Boorstin’s home state (Oklahoma),^[36] asking to see him. Dan, it was said, raced off to Boston, without checking. He has had the last laugh on all those many that have been put off by an unfortunate manner (not wholly unlike that of Widmerpool in Anthony Powell’s long Dance…).^[37]

The dining hall still looked brand new, like the rest of the House: a panelled room, spacious, with high ceiling, seating up to 250 at dinner.^[38] On one long side were doors to the service area; on the other, one could look out tall windows, fluted pillars between them, south of west across a low paved terrace bordered with a strip of grass, bushes, and a balustrade, to the almost triangular courtyard about which the House was built. Along that side, at “High Table”—at our level: that is, not on a dais as at Oxbridge—sat tutors, Junior Fellows, and their guests. (The Master seldom dined “in Hall.”) Other tables, seating four, could be pushed together for groups.

The waitresses were such as might be seen in any suburban restaurant, generally relaxed in dealing with undergraduates, many scraggy or weathered, one or two young and zaftig enough to be teased (and, by the adventurous, dated). At dinner,^[39] the day’s printed menu lay on the table, the work of dietician cum PRO. The food was, alas, a comedown, in good part, it was thought, because hot dishes were prepared in a central kitchen, then moved through tunnels, and stored, on steam tables. It hardly need be added that beer and wine were never served, though they became legal in the spring of ’33.

A small group, principally of “regulars,” one might find after dinner in the “Junior Common Room,” rather like the lounge of a small private club: heavy drapes by the windows, a dark thick patterned rug, facing the fireplace a sofa, a table back of it, another sofa by a window on the courtyard, several easy chairs, a portrait over the fireplace, perhaps another painting (or two) on the panelled walls, a grand piano—a comfortable place for taking a break.

After dinner a large urn filled with hot coffee would be placed on the table, along with cream, sugar, spoons, and demitasses. We helped ourselves. When as many as a dozen were present, the company was likely to break up into groups. Those in attendance were unlikely to have “social” status, or ambitions, in terms of Harvard. At any time someone might be reading one of the magazines of which the current issues lay on the table: the American Mercury, Vanity Fair, The Illustrated London News.

For the time I played the piano often before lunch or dinner. Then one day there was an anonymous postcard, from someone (easily identified) that had heard the Pathétique Sonata too often. Dan was furious, as happened quite often over displays of bad manners, as he perceived them—offenses against his quixotic view that we were all of one fellowship; I was only embarrassed. In the bell tower was a small sound-proof room with a piano; from then on I went up there to play when the desire came.

After dinner Dan often played “standards,” favoring, as ever, the songs of Jerome Kern. Sometimes Martin Grabau, the young tutor in physics, would perform, always contrapuntal music in the mode of the Barock of the Evangelische Kirche, uniformly fast and loud, while a cigarette dangled from his lips, which seemed to retain their usual sceptical, not to say scornful, expression. How much he remembered, how much extemporized, I couldn’t tell; it all sounded alike. He didn’t stay to talk.^[40]

Sometimes, Carl Bingham, an atypical Exeter graduate, an emaciated, self-conscious rich boy from Chicago (Highland Park), with an expression not unlike that of a disgusted parrot, would play more briefly, one or two familiar tunes with harmonic distortion or inappropriate borrowed ending. Carl, who had a fair-sized suite (with a piano) to himself (in B entry?), came often, usually with a quiet friend Jim Snitzler, also from Chicago, a watcher.

Once (or twice) we had a short performance by Jinks (Elmore H.) Harbison, a tall, urbane hereditary Princetonian, dark and handsome, exiled to Harvard to take a doctorate in history. He had been a member of the Triangle Club and gave us from a recent show verses about Harvard. (He may have written them.) The chorus (to the main part of one of the college football songs):

So I’m sending you to H--vid

To learn philosophy

And French and Greek and Sanscrit

And how to poah youah tea;

So you’ll go to deah old H--vid

To learn the H--vid joys

And come back from deah old H--vid

Just one of the H--vid boys.

I don’t know how to represent the long sound in the first syllable of “Harvard” as rendered in the common regional speech, a flat nasal sound—the main point also of the verses, beginning:

Y’ cahn’t p---k y’ c--- on P---k Street

Or anywhere near the Y--d,

Y’ mustn’t say hi to strangeuz

For feah of the Watch and W---d…

I wondered why someone of Harbison’s sort should spend so many hours with a mixed lot, mainly, of undergraduates, not grasping that he was a displaced person. That was to be brought home much later by a one-time Georgetown neighbor^[41] Jack (married to Hattie, son Peter) Kennedy, also a graduate of Princeton. He told us that Harbison, generally expected to be named president one day, had missed out through unwillingness to be exiled, a second time, to assume for a few years the presidency of a small college, thought to be useful practice. At Princeton, according to Dan Litscher’s recollection, he retired as head of the history department.

Another graduate student among us (also in history) was John Coddington, reddish blond, squashed-in face, and a big mouth; not a bad sort in spite of a coquettish manner and a flagrant upper class voice production. He lived in E entry across the hall from McVitty. John would have been an assistant in some advanced history course. In the mid-1930’s he left to teach at Olivet College, a small liberal arts school (coed, Congregational) in south central Michigan. He thereby established a special link with Dan: Not only was the new president of Olivet an acquaintance of the Litschers, one Joe (Joseph H.) Brewer, a “financial wizard”^[42] from Grand Rapids. Also a student at Olivet in the latter ’30’s was to be Laura Nind, from Grand Rapids, whom Danwas to begin courting and, finally, to marry. The subject of Olivet must have come up before John left to teach there, but what exactly was said?

An abiding interest of Coddington’s was the Almanach de Gotha, “the stud book of European royalty,” parts of which he apparently had committed to memory. (When I was next to hear of him, after the war, he had what should have been a congenial occupation, working on the State Department’s biographical register.) He seemed generally to be in a good humor, but turned crimson (one was told) over an incursion of McVitty’s Doberman, screaming at Dwight: “Your dog has peeeeed on my floor!”

Also distinctive among the regulars was Vic (Victor Horsley)^[43] Kramer, already mentioned as a schoolmate of McVitty. Vic seemed to have something both of an Old Testament prophet and of a vaudeville comedian. He probably had developed at Choate his latent abilities as buffoon, less in self-defense than as a means of imposing himself. At Harvard much of his time went into “activities,” but we saw the performer. A familiar set-piece was a rendition of “Frisky” Merriman’s pathetic evocation (in History 1) of the penance of the Emperor Henry IV at Canossa (1077), humbling himself in the snow before Pope Gregory VII (details legendary). Another was a soliloquy of W.C. Fields (in Mississippi), in part, “…with my Bowie knife, I hacked my way through that wall of human flesh…”

Once Vic set up a bizarre scene in his room, then registered the responses of those entering, all the way from “My God, Victor, what…?” to coy refusal to take notice. Later we heard about it.

Several years after, upon finishing Yale Law School, Vic went to Washington, following Thurman Arnold, a favorite professor, just then named head of the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department. In 1943, having enlisted in the Navy (where he would become Pharmacist’s Mate), Vic was to perform a last civilian duty, arguing a case before the Supreme Court—in his monkey suit! Truly a Victorious appearance (though I can’t recall whether he won the case).^[44]

Another regular in the common room was Hervey Smith, a beaming eager pretty boy, malicious and careful, from Springfield (Mass.), tolerated rather than welcomed, if at times amusing. An instance: Once a year, residents of the House would put on an English renaissance play “in Hall” (I never attended). In 1932/33 “Frisky” Merriman, the Master, took a small but honorific part, that of the King, in “The Shoemaker’s Holiday” (Dekker). “Frisky” was tall and overbearing, his manner and tone doubtless modeled after Oxford (Balliol).. (His field was Spanish history; according to a dependable source, Spanish historians called him The Great White Boar of Brattle Street.) Hervey, busy in House affairs and sometime actor in House plays, took an enlarged glossy print of Frisky in the royal robes and showed it to an Irish busboy, asking, “Do you know who that is?” The busboy hesitated, “Could it be the Cahrr-din-ahl?”^[45]

A steady visitor was Denis Winston, an architect from Liverpool, in Eliot House while appending a year (or two) studying at Harvard. Denis was the complete middle-class Englishmen—his father was a dentist—self-limited to “practical” matters, at the same time easy (for us) to get along with him. He was a short fellow, with a giant stride; walking with him, one worked to keep up. He and Jinks Harbison hit it off, each—I thought—appreciating the other as a perfect example of his kind.

During these sessions in the common room, Ed Cooper, sitting with me on the sofa by the window, went on with my initiation in politics and economics, from the campaign and election of the fall of 1932 through the early New Deal in 1933-34.

Then there were a couple of evenings in which Carl Bingham expressed his views as a rich boy. Once he tried to persuade me that the “conspicuous consumption” of the rich was the source of prosperity and progress, and seemed to be perfectly serious. On another occasion he explained that you would have to be rich yourself to see the expenditures of the rich in a proper light.

Tom Ratcliffe brought us Brattle Street gossip. One report (“in Hall” or in the common room?) had to do with the removal of a young clergyman of a church near Harvard Square for tiresome homosexual antics, which I shan’t describe, with teenage boys. It was again, I believe, from Tom that we had the story of the radical intellectual with the old Cambridge name and showplace. His homosexual rendezvous there, it was being said, had finally brought the city fathers to the point of threatening prosecution, which he had avoided by promising not to live in his mansion, to visit it only in daylight hours. (In 1939 or 1940 I was to be presented to this local notable, who showed me about the place.)

The senior participant in our evenings was Marston Morse, professor of mathematics and resident tutor. Professor Morse, then comparatively young, was destined to move on to the Institute at Princeton; he seems to be best known for his work on the calculus of variations. His conversation was confined to commonplaces, and one could understand his avoiding the fluent, competitive company of his peers in the Common Room (often called “the senior common room”).^[46] Recently divorced (as I recall), he will have been lonely. Our society was perhaps diverting. One remark of his left an impression: what a pleasure it had been during that academic year to have “a mathematician” among his tutees.^[47]

A half-dozen others came less often or were less active. Among them was Phil (Philippe François, long since Philip Francis) Dur,^[48] who had been in the south entry of Weld Hall (on the top floor), distinctive there for the rapid tattoo beaten by his heels (click, click, click) descending the stairs one step at a time. Short, his square head rounded on top, receding hair worn en brosse, he smiled or chuckled in contempt of anything not Gallic and Catholic. Intense, disciplined, he was compiling an excellent academic record (History and Literature). With him was usually an obese smirking hanger-on (and, I assume, roommate), sententious Ed Hartley.

In 1934-35 we sometimes saw “Giggles” (Robert?) Remsberg, plump future Lutheran minister from Wittenberg College, a sectarian school at Springfield, Ohio. To him we seemed to be an exotic lot; he could hardly get over it. If memory serves, he was a graduate student in philosophy. What did he make of the year’s study? Too bad we never asked him.

An occasional visitor was Johnny (John Cecil) Haggott, a short, engaging chap, with open mobile face, interested in the stage; he would become president of the Dramatic Club in ‘34/’35. He was down-to-earth, ready for any topic; one could guess why and how he had passed a summer working in a carnival.

Another forceful personality was John Bovey, from Minneapolis, his family a connection of the Pillsburys (flour milling). He often came with Carl Billman, from nearby WInchester, tall, blushing, modulated speech, a delicate realist. John had a slightly nasal drawl that suggested a background in the southern Plains states; I don’t know the explanation. He cultivated a bored, inactive appearance, as if he were understudying Eustace Tilley.^[49] Yet he was a serious student, of literary and academic inclinations, and would return in 1937 (as I recall) for a spell of graduate study and teaching English A. Finally, like Phil Dur (who had first taken a Ph.D. in history), he went into the foreign service, which seems to have suited him well (as it did Phil).^[50]

I should not forget to add Don Cherry, a blond tallish, slender graduate student from California, who shared with Jinks Harbison a suite facing the courtyard in D entry on the ground floor (I was across the hall, but we never exchanged visits). Don had grown a moustache while teaching in private school, in order to look older. He seemed to be not so much young as simply inoffensive.

In Eliot House I went on working as hard as ever, but had only four courses, which generally met but twice a week; and began to go less regularly to lectures (absence a privilege of honors students). Writing, studying textbooks, and reviewing for exams I did in my small, heavily shaded room on the ground floor across the courtyard in D entry (D-12), as noted, with windows on much traveled Boylston Street and the clanking subway yard.^[51] Besides the study, furnished with desk, chair, bookcase, lamp, and rug, there were a bedroom and tiny bath, small closets in both study and bedroom. I spent in D-12 as few waking hours as possible.

Much of the reading for courses I did in the House library, close by in C entry, a large panelled room looking out on the intersection of Boylston Street and Memorial Drive, the Andersen Bridge in the background. The room was pleasantly furnished: a large Persian (?) rug in the center, tables and study chairs about, and easy chairs. It was always quiet, seldom crowded. The shelves were filled with books undergraduates were most likely to use, and a good selection of reference works—about 10,000 volumes (or titles?). The librarian was a short irascible graduate student in English, red-headed Joe (Joseph McGrath) Bottkol (“McJoseph McGrath McBottkol,” Dan called him)^[52].

The courses taken in the sophomore year were these:

English composition                                            (English 31)

English literature of the

      18th century (two half courses)                     (English 7¹, 52²)

History of French literature from the early                                                                                                         17th century                                               (French 6)

History of Western philosophy                           (Philosophy A)

English 31 was taught by Bernard DeVoto, then best known as a writer of popular stories (Red Book and The Saturday Evening Post): besides he had published three novels. At Harvard he had been a tutor for a year when in 1930 he inherited English 31.^[53] From the outset he had attracted, among others, students with some hope of living by the pen (or typewriter). It was in such terms that DeVoto taught. He was well qualified, having published not only a good deal of fiction, for a man in his early 30’s; soon there was to appear the opening instalment of his first work on Mark Twain (Mark Twain’s America, published in book form in 1932). He had to his credit as well numerous articles in Harper’s, The Saturday Review, and the American Mercury and was to go on editing the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine for another year—until relieved after provoking excessive contention. He attracted, seemed to court, opposition, aroused also by Mark Twain’s America, as by much else he would write. At the same time, his energy and acumen were often acknowledged.

In 1932/33, the third year of his conducting English 31, about twenty of us met in Sever Hall at two in the afternoon, twice a week (Tuesday and Thursday?). As a teacher, DeVoto was only by chance abrasive, as when his criticism of an unnamed student’s work caused tears (in the front row).^[54] But his was clearly a troublesome personality, one quite out of the ordinary, and we let him do the talking. We began to see how much of a loner he was: anticommunist, anti-intellectual, no friend of the “establishment,” partisan of no cause—as yet. I recall one remark unrelated to these themes: that Harvard would continue to function, with all the faculty gone, so long as the women in University Hall stayed on the job.

Short, heavy set, he looked pugnacious: a slightly bulging head, pendulous lips. He is said to have thought himself ugly, and it’s easy to see why. He seemed to be made to play the old hard-boiled city editor: glasses pushed up on the forehead, head inclined, a challenging—yet inquiring—gaze, profane, a soft touch.

To describe his outlook then might have been trick: a nativist, it may be. (He was never to travel outside North America.) He had been born in Ogden, Utah—a thriving small town in a beautiful Alpine setting—of an Hispanic father and Mormon mother, had grown up there as odd boy out, somewhat of a highbrow himself, if also ambitious to figure as athlete and outdoorsman. His interest had settled on the 19th century U.S. frontier, the subject of three ambitious historical works he was to write, one source of his proprietary interest in Mark Twain, inspiration of the long campaign he was to wage for conservation.

He was in effect a “spoiled intellectual.” For his text, in the early 1930’s, he took the works of Vilfredo Pareto,^[55] who dwelt on the irrationality and unpredictability of human behavior, individual and collective. DeVoto might refer to Pareto in class, in passing, not to win converts.

As a teacher of writing, in the Harvard tradition, he was critical, not prescriptive, usually in quite specific instances: as of the slipshod, highfalutin’, or inane. His only advice was that to become a writer you must write.

I handed in both stories (sketches rather) and articles, and he made useful comments; once or twice he hinted I might have a writer in me. Apart from the challenge of working to meet his scrutiny, the course offered the pleasure of watching, and listening to, a teacher not under discipline, foraging for himself off the reservation; of the others I heard, or knew about, few could have done that so well and none had.

My only regret was of the lack of class discussion; there were two or three interesting chaps whom I should not see elsewhere, different worlds. I didn’t even know about the sessions the DeVotos held in their house at Lincoln, attended by friends on the faculty—chiefly from among those interested in American history and literature—and a few students. (To friends he was “Benny”.) I shouldn’t have asked to go anyhow, if only for lack of a car.^[56]

Less need be said about the two courses in the 18th century, called (let us say) The Age of Pope and the Age of Johnson. Both were taught by Professor C.N. Greenough, then in his mid-50’s, erect, a long head with very short white hair; soft spoken, in the precise vocables of old Boston. He shared in the filio-pietistic interests of his kind: a couple of years later, in answering a question of mine, he would mention that he was a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society. (He was also a former dean of the College.) I can’t say much about his lectures (in the Sever Hall auditorium); having collected the reading list, I generally cut class, my first experiment at that, on the whole successful. For the second course I wrote a term paper on David Hume, influential Scottish philosopher, presumably inspired by what was assigned in Philosophy A (see below).

Why choose courses on the 18th century? Perhaps in part because they were in the right “examination group,” different, that is, from examination groups of the two courses described below.^[57] It was not at all a bad choice; the 18th century left a great deal of highly readable prose. That may even have been a consideration.

French 6 I may have taken to find points of comparison with English literature. At least, from the distance of today, that seems reasonable: the course was suggestive as to “influences” and “characteristic” differences between the two cultures. Besides a few selected works (of drama and fiction) we read in an anthology, with commentary, very likely produced for an upper class of the lycée: Notre littérature étudiée dans les textes (M. Brunschwig), in two thick octavo volumes, blue on white binding, thin paper. French 6 was a lecture course; by choice or otherwise I ended in a section with lectures in English. Professor André Morize, darling of the Alliance française, was in charge and put in an appearance. For the most part we heard Dr. C.C. Webster, a tutor (in Eliot House) in his late thirties, of low status (instructor), rather shaky, apparently unwell. I wondered whether he was a more or less stabilized alcoholic. The lectures were not bad; even so I doubtless missed many of them. His section would have met in Boylston Hall.

French 6 confirmed in me the belief that it would take long to “enter into the spirit of” French culture (after Montaigne). One’s ambivalence seemed to be symbolized by examinations: instructions in English, questions in French, answers in English (larded with French).

Philosophy A was a popular alternative to an “introduction to” the calculus (Math A). The latter was given over to problem solving, as I had heard from several classmates. That was corroborated by Ed Cooper, whose instructor confessedly had come to understand the integral calculus only as he began teaching it. The course was taken, after all, mostly by such as pre-med students and future engineers, actuaries, and chemists, who in those days were thought to need at most a “cookbook” knowledge, only “a mathematician” requiring more, which he would of course acquire for himself.^[58] Though I had no doubt of my ability to do the course well enough, it hardly seemed to be worth the effort. Perhaps that was a mistake, but no matter.

Philosophy A was instructive, if indigestible. The great thing was that we read (mainly, of course, in English translation) several dialogues of Plato; a fair amount of Descartes’ Discourse on Method; some of Spinoza, Hume, and Kant; and Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and as Idea.^[59] The yawning gaps between selections were filled, after a fashion, by the lectures of Professor Ralph Barton Perry, an austere man of nearly 60. Lectures, and the weekly section meeting with young Dr. Kraushaar, hair going gray, the look of Liszt, were in Emerson Hall. Section meetings dealt chiefly with the philosophers whose works were assigned. To supplement our knowledge of the history of Western philosophy it was suggested that we read in various texts, all German (again, in translation), among them histories by W. Wundt and by W. Windelband and F. Ueberweg, and an introduction to “modern” philosophy by H. Höffding (a descendant of whom I should one day meet, an economist employed by RAND corporation).

The second year ended, like the first, with my qualifying for Group I, again with B in one half-course (English 52²). At most a half dozen in the class had managed that for both years.^[60]

In the sophomore year I began seeing a tutor weekly. Assignments by and meetings with tutors, though not the principal mode of instruction, as at the English universities from which the concept of tutorial had been borrowed, were nonetheless thought to be of value in testing, extending, and unifying the upperclassmen’s command of his chosen field.^[61]

Without my taking a hand, I probably should have been assigned to one of the two tutors in Eliot House representing the English Department, with luck to Theodore Spencer, otherwise to Ellery Sedgwick. Spencer (familiarly “Ted”), fair, tall, willowy, just turned 30, had done his undergraduate work (and been graduated) first at Princeton, then at the English Cambridge (Trinity College). He was a poet and critic as well as scholar, far far too cultivated for me. Very likely he was tolerant; I, less so. All the same, one could have learned much from him. Of Sedgwick, a young Bostonian,^[62] there remains just an impression of stiffness.

But I had asked to be assigned to my Freshman advisor, Kenneth Payson Kempton, then about 40, a self-contained, unassuming townsman from Down East Maine, friendly, dry. He had advised me to study less, go out for activities. And he had invited me to play tennis with him. Having taken a liking to him, I had decided without even looking into the possibilities in Eliot House. It was an implausible choice for a top student, presumptively ambitious, as K.P. Kempton of course understood. Whether I did is uncertain; I don’t remember thinking about it then. As you will have seen, decisions made without taking thought are in character above all in the implied preference for not examining possible consequences. For not only was K.P. Kempton an obscure figure in the Department; his active interests were in the composition course he taught (English A-2) and in his own writing (regional fiction), scarcely at all in the history of English literature, or even in current “serious” writing.

He was none the less conscientious: I read in areas not to be touched in courses, beginning with the sixteenth century, and we discussed such reading. In the first year, he kept office in Warren House, the clapboard dwelling, painted yellow, that served as headquarters of English A, across the alley from the Harvard Union, that is directly opposite the ‘Varsity Club. Once or twice in the spring of ‘33 we had group tutorial on the grass, probably down by the Charles, and drank beer (Miller’s, which must have tasted better then).

In the fall of ‘33 he acquired an office in Winthrop House, just down river from Eliot House (where Bernard DeVoto and, beginning a year later, J.K. Galbraith, among others, were tutors). In the winter we began playing squash. He was brown, lean, and fit; I, pale and overweight. I won most of (even all) our matches, as is hardly surprising, but they left me tuckered out, while he seemed to be fresh. He did far less to extend me academically; instead let me go ahead very much on my own. Was that not, after all, as I had hoped and expected: an unavowed reason for choosing him as tutor? (and was he not well aware of that?)

In the junior year all my courses were in English:

The plays of Shakespeare (a half course)                                    (English 231)

English literature of the 17th century                                          (English 50a1, 50b2)

The English romantic poets                                                           (English 72)

Historical and intellectual background

     of English literature                                                                   (English 78)

American literature,

     Hawthorne to James (a half course)                                        (English 922)

English 23 was an alternative to a year-long course (English 2) taught by the commanding historical figure George Lyman Kittredge on four plays of Shakspere (his invariable spelling).^[63] “Kitty” (as familiarly known) was always spruce: erect, with starched (bleached?) and trimmed white beard, wing-collar, light colored suit, with waistcoat. He had begun teaching at Harvard in 1888, after six years as Latin master (at Boston Latin School?). In the spring term of 1936—his last, for he had turned 75—I was to take his class in Beowulf. In his prime, it was said, he had smoked impressive cigars and regularly visited the burlesque in Boston. By the 1930’s he was a widower; an unmarried daughter, as I recall, kept house for him.

He was learned but not stuffy. Besides works on the Old Farmer and his Almanack (1904), Chaucer and his Poetry (lectures, 1915), Shakspere (an address, 1916), Gawain and the Green Knight (192-), and Witchcraft in Old and New England (1928), reportedly he had written one (so far as I know, unpublished) on the lore on outhouse walls in New England. He was an accomplished linguist—student of languages, not of Language—and had written on English and various dead languages. In 1936 would appear his long awaited one-volume edition of the plays of Shakespeare [sic].^[64]

It was his wont to speak the last sentences of a lecture while striding down the aisle, reaching the door at the stroke of the hour—a dandy in behavior as in appearance. A well-known anecdote told of his reply to the woman seated by him at dinner, who asked how it had happened that he was without a doctorate (of philosophy, he had two or three honorary degrees). He drew himself up and replied, “Madam, who would have examined me?”

I chose the alternative course for the very reason for which it had been started: to get through more Shakespeare, quickly. It was given then by Assistant Professor A.C. Sprague, of course a student of Kittredge, a roly-poly scholar in his mid-30’s, who would emigrate to Bryn Mawr in 1936 (and finally, ten years later would get married). His mother lived a way up Massachusetts Avenue, and I was surprised to hear him say, one day on his way to see her, that he had volunteered to go with the Ambulance Corps in 1917.^[65]

Beyond doubt the canonical 36 plays (37 in most collected editions) are a lot to read in one term, yet I recall most of them. It wasn’t a bad course to take, though one now and then regretted the glories of English 2.

The courses on the 17th century—perhaps the Age of Milton and the Age of Dryden—have left memories of some of the authors and their works—and of the large gray-green-covered anthology we used—but less impression that of any previous course: no recollection of the professor in charge, or of where we met.^[66] (Why? I wonder.) Suzy, checking over extant term papers, found one (undated, no course indicated) on Shaftesbury, author of Characteristicks of Men and Manners. Most of his writings date from the early 18th century, but the paper may well have been written for English 50b.

Professor John Livingston Lowes, small, dark, assertive, a resonant voice, had for years given the course on the Romantic poets (English 72). Perhaps because it had become so popular, it had been moved from Emerson Hall to the lecture hall in the Fogg Art Museum. His best known works—Convention and Revolt in Poetry (1910) and The Road to Xanadu (1927)—both dealing with Romantic poetry, were well worth the reading. (Did I read either for English 72?) His lectures, though of less interest, I attended fairly regularly. One item of incidental information recalled is of his long friendship with Amy Lowell, the large cigar-smoking Brahmin poet, no longer much read, even in the 1930’s. His assistant, a tall saturnine man in early middle age called McCreery, was said to be a penniless poet—without a B.A.—befriended by Lowes.

The study of the “historical and intellectual background” of English literature led to a mixed lot of reading, of which I can remember but a few titles, first among them Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages (translation published in 1924), a classic description of turmoil and suffering in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I also recall discovering that most attractive figure of the twelfth century, John of Salisbury, encountered in preparing a term paper on the origins of the University of Oxford. English 78 was conducted (in Boylston Hall?) by Associate Professor E.A. Whitney, Master of Kirkland House, a clear, organized speaker, handsome in the slightly chilly manner of a high church Episcopal minister, though not unsympathetic. He said no word in criticism of my term paper, well enough written but filled out with much that would better have been omitted. (He had played, incidentally, a small, possibly influential part in my coming to Harvard: as the speaker at a dinner held in the fall of 1930 by the Grand Rapids Harvard Club, to attract prospects, he had made an excellent impression on Father.)

The half course on American literature, which met in Sever Hall, was directed to writers—notably, of course, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, and Henry James—said to exemplify a special American sense of sin and of life as tragedy. Assistant Professor F.O. Mathiessen, who taught the course, was a driven, arrogant Yale graduate in his early 30’s, pious, a (then unavowed) homosexual, and a socialist. (At some point, he came to be known as “Matty”.)^[67] He was an intense lecturer, and friendly to and “supportive” of young men sufficiently high-minded and ambitious. For a short time he seemed to wonder whether I might be one. My term paper was entitled “Henry James and the Illuminati;” the reference is to a series of youngish critics that had contributed to the latest issue of Hound and Horn, an avant garde journal, devoted to Henry James. (More about this later.)

Through the first term I remained eligible for Group I (again a B in a half-course), and was almost unavoidably included in the “junior eight” elected to Phi Beta Kappa in the spring. Three of us, as it happened, had lived in 1931/2 in the south wing of Weld Hall—the other two being George Haskins and Phil Dur.^[68]

In June, however, I fell back into Group II, as a result of a B in English 72 for the year. On the evening before the final exam Howard Derrickson entreated me to help him prepare, a request no one else would have presumed to make, nor should I have acceded. Howard, an orphan^[69] from South Philadelphia, had emerged from an Episcopal Church farm school, in good part by virtue of optimism and forwardness. His fondest boast was that he could run faster than anyone else on the Varsity track squad at any distance other than his own. He was a member of the cross-country squad and helped to support himself by running on the treadmill at the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory (across the river in Alston). It was impossible to turn him down. We stayed up rather late. Perhaps as a result of fatigue, or failure to concentrate, I did not do quite well enough on the exam—but Howard took an A. I was vexed, if also amused. Apart from spoiling a record, it no longer made much difference, and served to make a point: under what carefully controlled conditions I had been preparing for an examination, as well one may for any contest or other ordeal.

Of course there had been relations aside from talk in the junior common room. Such visits, like those paid on Dwight, came off and on. As already suggested, most House members I knew exchanged at most occasional visits, usually by invitation. I don’t recall anything said about it and can only guess that privacy was prized. Of course there would have been exceptions.

I haven’t, by the way, recorded an impression of Dan, whom most of you will know: well set up though not athletic, with strongly modeled head, perhaps more characteristic of the Swiss German ancestry of his father than of the Scottish ancestry of his mother. Both his parents were independent, self-willed people; his mother, devoted to riding, rather formidable; his father Christian Litscher, an immigrant, self-made, a successful electrical products wholesaler, a man of the world and a charmer. His business Dan was to continue—and develop—with equal success, after the war.

Dan was the third of four brothers; a young uncle (on his mother’s side) also lived with them in Dan’s boyhood, a demanding school, for the other four were quite as full of themselves as the senior Litschers. Though living modestly enough, the family had a substantial income (at least through the 1920’s) and moved in local Society. Dan had finished high school early, in 1928, at age 15—a couple of months short of 16—spending a year or so thereafter in Europe, mainly in Paris, more or less under the wing of his uncle Cameron Macneil, who had his own service as a tour guide, flourishing through the summer of ’29. When Dan finally arrived at Harvard in 1930, he was a quite experienced young man.

Of his roommates, the more striking was Rudy Busse, a tall bluff chap from Nebraska, his widower father a landowner and physician (or surgeon?). Rudy was studying German, apparently out of an interest that came of growing up in a family and community mostly of German descent. Dan, incidentally, studied European history.

The two of them had made friends as Freshman, agreeing in the spring to room together with some third fellow. That turned out to be Willis Spencer, from Brookline, his mother a widow in modest circumstances. Dan and Rudy, arriving at Eliot house, had gone to the Master’s secretary, Miss Smith, who gave them Willis’ name, assuring them he was a “delightful young man.” “Delightful” he remained: an “introvert,” not without force or interest, though generally inconspicuous alongside Dan and Rudy.

Now and then one could glimpse how they got on. Rudy was one of a very few, then or after, that could safely presume to tease Dan, whom he sometimes addressed, for example, as “Litch, kitty-cat kitty-cat kitty-cat.” Willis, as already suggested, they both teased, probably not often, for it couldn’t have been much fun. And he had his own ways of asserting himself. When Rudy spoke aloud while dreaming, as he sometimes did, Willis might prompt him like a hypnotist with words and phrases, as I once watched and heard him do. Dan unquestionably led their collective social life, such as it was. Willis must have gone home often on weekends. Rudy regularly went out with his current girl. Dan spent hours socializing in the House. The two others, by the way, appeared seldom if ever in the junior common room.

Now and then there was a party. Dan and his roommates might invite a few up to drink their home brew, made in the bathroom. Once Lucius Wing and Sandy Thorburn had several of us in: Lucius’ father had supplied a half-gallon (?) of medical alcohol, which Lucius made into bathtub gin, regrettably with an overdose of juniper oil. The result was just drinkable with plenty of fruit juice, and we became very lively.

That was in the fall of ‘32. A few months later, people were singing:

Happy Days are here again,

We can have light wine and beer again,…

Spirits took a while longer.^[70]

Over the Christmas holidays of ‘32 we had a last fling before the end of Prohibition at the house of Holmes Ellis, a neighbor close by on Lafayette Street: a stag party on New Year’s Eve. During the fall and winter Mother and Father were then moving back to town, so that Art could practice and play with Central’s basketball team. I had only to walk round the corner to join the brawl, all of us drinking right along for a good two hours—mostly gin and whatever, as I recall—before going on to a dance at the country club, where liquor was, in principle, not allowed. There was a lot of toasting, with song: to New Year’s Eve, to Brother so-and-so, and on and on.

When we left, I rode with Bob Denham, mentioned earlier, a sophomore at Dartmouth. He agreed also to take Don Nichols, a sophomore at Michigan on the basketball squad (a fine tennis player, too). Don had a skinful and was soon out of it. It wasn’t a long ride north out Lafayette Street. When we arrived, Bob, a practical fellow, said, “He’s likely to puke when he comes to, so we’d better move him to another car.” I still seem to hear his pleasant dry voice, which echoed his father’s border state speech (Tennessee?). We moved Don, and that was the end of it, so far as I know. That New Year’s Eve comes to mind when I reread—or recall—the account of the dance early in Appointment in Samarra (John O’Hara’s first novel, 1934).

Our elders were of opinion that “something went out of” parties with the end of Prohibition, and there were indeed changes, some local. Bootleggers’ agents disappeared from Harvard Square. At Eliot House, if not attracted to the “night lunch” in the basement beneath the dining hall—and perhaps five minutes’ talk across the counter with Sully, short-order cook from Muskegon—one could finish the evening at the Square, having a beer and sandwich at the Wursthaus, inevitably called by Dan the Greasy Spoon.^[71] The last I knew, it was still there, enlarged from our day, but it may be gone by now, with other landmarks.

I don’t remember ever getting really drunk in those days. Still in high school, at a spring fraternity houseparty at Ottawa Beach, I had learned from George Quimby—long a well-known anthropologist, a special field the Indians of the Pacific Northwest—to stick a finger down one’s throat and throw up, if necessary in order to go to sleep; an ancient procedure, in any case hygienic during Prohibition. In Eliot House at most once or twice I was sick without any special cause; once after having not such a lot of applejack, newly marketed specialty of a company started by Richard Whitney.^[72]

Apart from conversation, my chief amusement at Eliot House was bridge. Dan and I had both played for some years; we got up a table with Ed Cooper and a well-heeled New York friend of his, Mark Hyman (who had a very good looking sister in medical school). Once in a while I went over to Adams House to take a hand at poker with the old gang from Weld Hall. There was a game going in Eliot House, but the stakes were too high.

It now seems that I saw few films as an undergraduate. I began of course by grudging the time. Besides, films (along with plays and musicals) had small part then in the lives of those I knew well, and I was (and would remain) disinclined to go alone. Still, we saw a motion picture now and again: with Mae West broadly burlesquing sex to our delight (as in “She Done Him Wrong”), with the fraudulent old buffer W.C. Fields (“Short subjects,” as I recall), and with the manic Marx Brothers (e.g. “Duck Soup”). It may also have been then that I saw the first of several “art” films at the Geography Building (on Divinity Avenue), Flaherty’s documentary “Man of Aran.” Surely we saw some that have vanished from memory. But change had set in: in high school the main thing had been to go to the movies, preferably to see something new; that was all. In Cambridge one found oneself going to see, in the main, films that had been well spoken of. And in those years there were no trips to Boston, as would come later, to see foreign films, at the one “arts” theater that showed them. Nor do I recall hearing a concert then in Symphony Hall, only once or twice at Sanders Theatre, with its wonderful acoustics, preferred by the Boston Symphony for recording.

It was the same with eating out. I might have a bite somewhere in Cambridge, usually at the Wursthaus, already mentioned, but not in these years at Boston restaurants, at Jake Wirth’s, at the Oyster House, even at Durgin Park. The exception was an occasion in ’34/’35 when Ted Uebel (introduced later^[73]) invited me to lunch at Locke-Ober’s, frequented by Harvard boys with money to spend.

Sometimes I played ping pong (table tennis, if you like) in the basement of the House. Apart from the odd game of squash with Mr. Kempton, that was at times about all the exercise I took. For days on end I might walk only from my room to the dining hall (and common room) and back, to the library and back, perhaps making a detour to the night lunch. As a result, I began to put on weight, reaching some 170 pounds by 1935 (present weight: 140-145).

The House offered chances to listen to European émigrés and other notables. A session might be held in the junior common room, on Sunday after dinner, dispossessing the regulars. I recall attending only two of these. One, on 17 February 1935 (according to the Yearbook), was with Serge Koussevitsky, influential director of the Boston Symphony. What remains is an impression of charm and adroitness, qualities doubtless helpful in persuading rich Bostonians to support the orchestra.

The other session was with Michael (for Mikhail) Karpovich, then Assistant Professor of History and tutor in Eliot House. He had held a minor portfolio in the Kerensky government, fleeing east after the October Revolution, finally reaching Shanghai and sailing to the United States. Thereafter he had been for some years attached to the Russian Embassy that remained in place in Washington, the Soviet government not yet recognized. His talk was chiefly of the odd experience of peering out on or scurrying about the familiar streets during the breakdown of public order in Moscow—shooting, rumors, shortages, the paralysis of indecision. Not at all eloquent or—in literary terms—evocative, his words were none the less persuasive, and moving, because he was in the act of recalling again. Professor Karpovich (who was later to sit in on a seminar I took with Arthur Lovejoy, visiting from Johns Hopkins) was much liked by all, including his tutees (who might refer to him as “Karpy”). Johnny Capron,^[74] one of the nicest and most acute of these, once imitated his tutor’s speech, describing some historical figure as “oon-prin-sip’-ulled mahn vidout scrupples.”

Another talk I remember was held “in Hall” after dinner, to a small group, by German ex-Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, who spoke English easily. Among other things he recalled two puzzling experiences. The first went back to his service in the World War as captain of a machine gun company: seeing the British soldiers come on, wave after wave, only to be mowed down, he wondered why? Why was it ordered? By whom? Why would they keep coming?

The other experience he had had while campaigning before the Reichstag elections in 1930, when crowds began to cheer, to his surprise, during and after his speeches. He knew, he told us, that he was no orator. But they cheered. He had wondered what was in the wind, what moved them. Terczi was to assure me that Brüning was a stupid man, and he seemed to take a modest enough view of his own abilities. Was a more “intelligent” man likely to have recalled such experiences for us? If he had, should one have remembered his ready explanations.

In 1932/33 we had a notable living in the House, the poet and critic T.S. Eliot (Harvard, ’09), who had been invited to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures on Poetry. A group gathered round him, the nucleus formed by F.O. Mathiessen (then Head Tutor), Theodore Spencer, and a few of their students, among them Harry Levin, then a senior, already a personage to reckon with.^[75] Our guest will have received their attentions with grave courtesy. He became a close friend of Spencer, whom he already had met in England.^[76] Professor Mathiessen, as an outgrowth of the visit, went on to write a study of the work of our guest, The Achievement of T.S. Eliot (Boston, 1935).

I took note of the distinguished ascetic profile at High Table but didn’t venture into the charmed circle. What may seem extraordinary, I went to none of the lectures either. Of course I had not then looked at anything by Eliot; in effect I wasn’t ready, certainly not for lectures on “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.”^[77] Acute, reflective, troubled, erudite, he remains for me a priest not in orders (in his case, High Church Anglican)—certain French contemporaries come to mind. Of course he said many good things, verses of his come back unbidden, and there is always his influence, first on poets in the 1920’s and ‘30’s, then on critics—for the “new criticism” was to owe much to his precept and example, as soon to be suggested in the above-cited work of Mathiessen. In this connection it is worth recalling that Eliot had rather more varied tastes and a wider curiosity than many disciples.^[78]

Slight indeed is my recollection of remarks we heard after dinner, while still at table, by Gaetano Salvemini, eminent historian and anti fascist. He spoke only too much, for us, in the manner of a former Deputy’s harangue to the assembled Chamber, and a flutter of amusement ran about as he explained, contemptuously, why he had left Italy and someone else (Croce?) had not: “I have no propriety” (in Italian, as in French, “own no land”).

In some experiences offered by the House I did not share. As already observed, I did not attend the Elizabethan play put on once a year by House members. Another such experience was to have tea or lunch with the Merrimans, who did issue, as officially expected, many invitations to undergraduates in the House—and recent graduates—to join the company. It seemed—as it still seems—perfectly natural that they did not include me; I should have been surprised and uneasy had they done so. But there is something to tell, as reported by a friend that was later invited to lunch, probably in 1940.

The guest of honor that day was the Prime Minister of Iceland, Mr. Jonasson. My friend passed on a couple of things perhaps worth recording. Early in the second course, he said, the guest of honor declared to all, “Thees feesh hass been dead at least ten dayss.” Later, Dora Merriman, helping to keep conversation alive, asked: “Do you have caribou in Iceland?” I didn’t think to ask Mr. Jonasson’s reply.

All in all, Eliot House offered a great deal: peace and freedom, facilities for study, amenities, and congenial company. A few years earlier nothing of the sort would have been on offer at any university in the United States (so far as I know). Today the old Houses are there, but not the old conditions. Of course, U.S. society has changed greatly, as has Cambridge (Mass.). Tensions building and conflicts breaking out in the nation and the town have had time to penetrate the University, and the Houses. (And so have TV sets and stereos; I can’t recall seeing or hearing a radio or phonograph in the House, though surely there were some.) The amenities were quietly allowed to deteriorate—and the Houses to become overcrowded—later administrations being less concerned than President Lowell’s with undergraduates and how they live. To be sure, postwar inflation, especially of the price of labor, would by now have made the amenities of the 1930’s far too dear.^[79] It’s extraordinary only superficially that such conditions as we enjoyed—“a golden age” ours has been called by Marion Cannon Schlesinger (Mrs. Arthur S., Jr.) in an issue of Harvard Magazine in 1983^[80]—should have come into being early in the uneasy ‘30’s, to be maintained for less than a generation thereafter.

It hardly came to our attention that Eliot House was all “Caucasian.” There were a very few black students then at Harvard; I met none of them. They lived “on the economy” (or at home).^[81] They would have fitted in easily enough, indeed—in those days— would have made themselves quite at home, as did the odd Middle Eastern or Oriental student. But the subject didn’t arise. It would come to my attention first as instructor in Freshman English; in 1936/7 I had an exceptionally sophisticated and attractive—and mature—black student (in fact, brown), Blair Hunt by name. How simple some things then seemed, to me, at any rate.

We were, on the other hand, well aware of living in an almost exclusively male society, even though most of us were more than willing to have it that way.^[82] One saw the “Goody,”^[83] who cleaned in the entry, and the waitress at the table. Off in the Master’s quarters were Miss Smith, his secretary; Dora, his wife; and sometimes a daughter (or two?), seldom glimpsed. On Sunday afternoon female visitors were allowed. Otherwise, women generally remained offstage, present only in imagination and as the subject of discourse, from dirty jokes and classic limericks (many first heard from Dan)^[84] to anecdote and reminiscence. Apart from McVitty’s special case, Rudy Busse was the only one among my acquaintance