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 to have a regular date, from Radcliffe yet (and the only one besides Dwight with a car). Dan told once of an evening when he and a friend had taken out girls—both good-looking waitresses—for a ride in the country, presumably in the friend’s car. The friend and his girl had gone off with a blanket for what seemed to Dan an awfully long time. Tom Ratcliffe talked sometimes about picking up girls at Revere Beach; in Freshman year he had said something about mutual masturbation, a time-honored practice, with a girl back home. Necking and petting were the rule, however. According to Sandy Thornburn, Lucius, out with a girl on a cool evening, asked her to take off her sweater, explaining “I like the feel of the bare flesh.” (That one surely came direct to Sandy from the young woman.) Other stories at second at second hand figured, such as Dan’s recounting the experience of Bill, a friend back home, who had been visiting a recently married alumnus of his Princeton class. Bill had been taking a shower in the early evening when his hostess, presumably imagining him to be her husband, reached in and pulled his penis a couple of times, announcing, “Ding dong, Daddy, dinner’s ready.”

I saw girls only in Grand Rapids, at the usual dances, mostly over the Christmas holidays, and on very occasional dancing dates in the summer. We used to drive out to the Boat and Canoe Club, not far north of the city by the river, then a most pleasant location.^[85] A small band supplied music, no one else was there from our other life. These evenings are associated in memory with buxom, graceful Jean, my favorite partner—the one that said “That’s a thought” and “okeydoke”—and with two songs she came especially to like: “Stormy Weather” (words by Ted Koehler, music by Harold Arlen) and “Lazybones” (words and music by Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael). I was careful not to become “romantically involved,” aware of my longing for affection, having some notion (from my high school sweetheart Camilla) of the warm response possible, and fearful of “complications” until I should get a fix on what to do with myself. Various friends with a future as open-ended as mine went ahead anyway; it was at bottom a matter of temperament. (In time, I, too, fell in love, still not knowing what I should do.) McVitty once surprised me by saying in this connection, “I dunno, Ed, maybe you’ve got the right idea after all,” but he had been dejected, for it was soon after his regular girl at the usual house had confided, in tears, that she was in love with him.

One activity, unrelated to any above, I undertook under the influence—though not at the suggestion—of Ed Cooper: I formed a plan of study to make myself into more of a “generalist,” someone (I thought) able to absorb and analyze new information. I read in politics and economics, though not exclusively, turning aside to history, biography, and philosophy.

It isn’t easy to say what I read then—much of it in the junior year—what later. Of the following titles I’m fairly sure (listed by author in alphabetical order):

Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913)

A.A. Berle and G. C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1933)

John R. Commons (and others), sections of A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, 10 volumes (!) (1910-11)

Sidney B. Fay, The Origins of the World War (1928, 2nd edition, revised, 1930)

John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1921), and

                                                    Essays in Biography (1934)

Karl Marx, Capital (tr. 1886, 1907-9)

R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

Leon Trotsky, much (not all) of History of the Russian Revolution (1932)

Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)

A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925)

Such books I read in the Eliot House library, in hours free of course work (or in the good old summer time). Evidently, it did not constitute preparation for any profession: I wasn’t acquiring a solid basis of information, nor becoming familiar with current academic fashions and their champions. Worst of all I was not cultivating a patron. But it seemed thinkable that in the greatly changed world some were expecting—after the next war—it might serve to be an adaptable “generalist.” This program I was to continue after graduation; that’s another chapter.

Writing fitted in. Besides giving great satisfaction as an active, purposive occupation, which left a “deposit” and might get a reaction, writing was a skill that should complement the rest of one’s education, promising to be even more useful to a “generalist” than to a professor.

Harvard also taught an immense amount incidentally. One had just to be there, watching and listening. Participants learn to behave; observers, to reflect. Where many were preparing to get along, and ahead, in the established order—a few to deal with its “imminent collapse”—I tried to understand how it worked. Some of what I read helped to explain what I saw—and vice versa.

Evidently two kinds of learning were involved: of “skills” and of “human affairs.” In my experience they seem to go together. Wider reading and observation began to extend my ability to “conceptualize” both thought and the life of the world. Already we are back, you see, with “skills.”

The great lesson learned, indeed, was to try to formalize what one read and encountered, to reduce what one learned to a set of statements, not too numerous but comprehensive, and explicit enough to be readily corrected with more (or better) information (or skills?). Along with acquiring a “structured” understanding, as I began to see, one still needed specifics—critical instances, apt illustrations, famous or fashionable references and quotations, and a fair amount of bibliographical information. But I was preoccupied with the ideas and how they fitted together.

You understand, I didn’t start out with a program in mind, nor arrive then at such a tidy description. I was feeling the way, led by the habit of preparing for examinations by a review for rather long periods without reference to texts or notes, a practice extended in odd moments, taking a shower, walking alone, waking up early in the morning. The frequent give and take, especially with Ed Cooper, had the same effect. Of course, it helped to be at the age at which one wishes above all for clarity and universality, and at a time when so much was being reexamined.

It had been gratifying—and reassuring—to find that analysis and synthesis generally worked “like a charm” in English courses. Later on, I was to try to teach it to Freshmen and then to “tutees,” with little success, slow to grasp how few find it congenial to work in this way.

In the usual way, people have learned a well-defined field, often through patient apprenticeship. Whatever the defects in their theory and practice, these are for the most part common to competent practitioners of a generation. And clearly most people feel most at ease under such conditions. When you spread yourself thin and operate by yourself, you must rely more and more heavily on “structure” (or “system”), analysis (or “dialectic”), and self-correcting procedures.

At the time, what I said was: education is learning to think about what one doesn’t know. According to a witticism then current, academics learn more and more about less and less, and my idea was to learn “enough” about more and more. I was aware that one needed at least once to dive (or delve) deep in some subject—a view supported by William James, among others—but surely that would come (often enough, in the event).

As it now appears, after a half-century, I worked rather too much on my own. Granted, that approach led to greater self-reliance. It also left me a “loner.” Under favorable circumstances one can learn so much from others, especially older contemporaries. As Ed Cooper would point out, you can always learn by listening to people talk about something they really know, and they’re generally glad to talk about it.

What aroused my interest, apart from coming to know Ed Cooper? One thing may have been the influence of The Education of Henry Adams, read before coming to Cambridge.^[86] (As noted earlier, it was assigned in Freshman English as a subject for a weekly theme.) Adams, if at times wrong-headed, seemed to be mostly clear-headed, both in the highest degree. The main idea I kept was that in order to think for oneself one should educate oneself, and the other way round.^[87]

As the undergraduate years passed, I found no reason to change course. Wider acquaintance with my fellows only strengthened the conviction that the several worlds they expected to enter would have little attraction for me. Greater familiarity with the University, in particular with the English department, confirmed an initial disinclination to the professorate. Corroboration came from unexpected sources, Lyman H. Butterfield, my instructor in Freshman English, and his friend John D. Gordan.

Butterfield (to a few contemporaries “Butter”) had been very kind. In the spring of 1932 he had taken me, as teachers long had taken favorite students, to an “evening” of Charles Townsend Copeland (“Copey”), Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, perhaps already Emeritus. Copeland, a classmate of Kittredge and like him a mythical figure,^[88] had for a considerable period taught English composition (then still “rhetoric”), but his fame arose from “readings” in English literature, a volume of which had been published, and latterly his “evenings” at No. 11 in old Hollis Hall (1763). I didn’t see what the fuss was about—that would have been an accomplishment—but appreciated the intention; it was something to have done. The next year “Copey” was gone from Hollis 11.

On several occasions Butterfield, seeing I was in English, doing very well, gently asked me to think carefully about graduate school and the career of English professor. I appreciated that even more. He himself was losing interest. Whether he had then come to a decision wasn’t ever clear. In the event, after teaching out his six years (plus one) as a graduate student (1930-37), he was to leave without a doctorate. He would be none the less successful, and surely in the end better satisfied, in his extra-academic career, most of it as editor of papers of great historical and human interest.^[89]

John Gordan, perhaps of the class of ’30, for a time like Lyman Butterfield an instructor in Freshman English, was when I met him a tutor in Lowell House. A man of grace and charm, he, too, admitted to reservations of much the same kind, notably, as I recall, at lunch one day. He was in the end to take a degree, writing a dissertation on Joseph Conrad, but soon thereafter went to the New York Public Library as curator of rare books, as he was to remain through his career, likewise, it would appear, most congenial.^[90]

Besides the advice of these two older contemporaries, there was the frequent disparagement of the doctorate by more senior figures, much of which I seem to recall shrugging off as a typical attempt to “have it both ways.”^[91] One took note of such reservations, but could hardly afford to take them seriously.

One may speculate about the reasons why neither university teaching nor the other obvious careers attracted me. As stated, I had no “affinity” with the careerists I met, and none of the ranking professors I heard seemed to be acceptable as “role model” (and master). These judgments may be related to my low level of energy, already considered, with a corresponding shortage of enthusiasm and optimism, and of the social skills that may go with them. And I began to see that in order to thrive in academic life, one would need a great deal of energy—to teach, do “original research,” and take part in the endless committee work—all the while remaining open to new experiences and ideas. Another influence was my upbringing. Mother and Father, like most other members of their families, were as independent as they were cautious, discreet, and respectable. Against this background, academic life seemed to be too intensely—and competitively—social and political.

For the final year a special obligation of candidates for honors (in most fields) was to prepare a thesis. I have no recollection of deciding that my subject should be the fiction of Henry James. But papers that Suzy has brought me at least indicate when the idea must have come under consideration. A tutorial report dated 27 October 1933—early, that is, in the junior year—deals with “Impressions of Henry James.” It begins “I have read a few of Henry James’ important novels, and his published letters.” That was too much to have read on the side—apparently including eight novels—in the month or so since classes had started. I must have begun reading James in earnest at the latest in the summer of ’33.

The next surviving paper (10 pages, letter size, double spaced), also for tutorial, dated February 1934, is entitled: “Certain Damaged Ideas About Henry James.” It begins:

I say “damaged” ideas, though I don’t suppose the epithet applies precisely, because they have knocked about in my mind too long not to have had some of their paint rubbed off, if, indeed, they have suffered nothing worse. The purpose of setting down these ideas is to sketch in some sort of a map, whereby may be determined in a rough way the topography of a hypothetical honors thesis, a territory which has up to the present been untraveled by me.

So there it is, explicitly: to aim at a thesis. The paper closes by saying:

that fiction would do well to imitate little else than his [H.J.’s] high moral artistic seriousness, leaving his actual purpose and means to the few readers and writers who find in them such peculiarly intense satisfaction.

There is a suggestion in these short pieces for tutorial that I may have come to Henry James via his contemporary Henry Adams—“little Adams,” James called him. Neither could come to terms with the American scene after the Civil War—“the great barbecue.”^[92] Adams, as I have said, had aroused my interest in a reading of the Education before coming to Harvard. James is mentioned several times, as in Adams’ letters, also read at some point. Possibly that aroused my interest.

Another influence may have been a belief that H.J. had long fallen from such favor as he had once enjoyed; it would have been in character for me to swim against the current. If so, I guessed wrong. A series of avant garde figures—including poet Marianne Moore and critics Newton Arvin, R.P. Blackmur, and Edmund Wilson—contributed essays on James to the March 1934 issue of The Hound an Horn.^[93] I bought a copy and used the essays as a subject for the term paper in English 92, “Henry James and the Illuminati.” From Professor Matthiessen’s remarks at the end, it appears that I talked with him about making H.J.’s novels the subject of my honors thesis:

I hope you go back to James again when the bulk of Hound & Horn looms smaller. Wescott’s essay may suggest a starting point, if not for an essay, for your own thought as to what will be James’ ultimate significance.

Glenway Wescott’s “essay” closed with a plea for straight talk and explicitness, something James for the most part evaded, so one might conclude that Professor Matthiessen thought not very highly of his work. But that can hardly follow, for he was to devote several years to it.

Late in the spring of ’34, not long before or after going home for the summer, I ordered from Macmillan in London a set of James’ “novels and tales” in 35 volumes, thin paper edition, issued in 1921-23, then still in print. This edition included not only works he selected for the “New York edition” of 24 volumes that had begun to appear in 1907—in the revised form in which he chose to reissue them, with the preface he had written for each volume—but also the other novels and such other stories as had then been collected in book form. In the summer I finished at least a once-over of James’ fiction (with some second readings), a feat that now leaves me almost in awe of that 20-year old.

In the fall some things had changed at Eliot House. Of my friends of ’34, Dan Litscher was still about, in a suite in I entry, starting graduate school. He had in mind a teaching career, which he was to pursue for a time.^[94] Malcolm was to be seen now and again, for he was taking a couple of courses at the Fogg Art Museum. It must have been in the following year that he went to work in Southbridge, Mass. (south southwest of Worcester near the Connecticut line), cataloguing the collection of Albert Wells (the American Optical Company). Wells had acquired a great deal of old American furniture, tools, lamps, cooking utensils, and so on. His collection was to furnish the initial equipment of “Old Strubridge^[95] Village,” which Malcolm would have a major part in creating largely unrecognized, to my knowledge.

Ed Cooper, on the other hand, had left for Washington; where he went to work I don’t remember.^[96] And at some point, perhaps at mid-year, Dwight took leave; he would graduate a year late, then beginning studies at the newly reformed School of Architecture.

The swift passage of three years had also brought Art to Cambridge, as well as two others from Grand Rapids: Tom Quimby, a fraternity brother (and younger brother of the above-mentioned George), and Bob Benjamin from East Grand Rapids. Mother might have taken some pleasure in the circumstance, for she had known in youth Tom’s mother, born Ethelyn Sweet; and Bob’s father, Adrian Benjamin—both of independent, not to say eccentric turn of mind.

Art was assigned to Lionel Hall, back of Harvard Hall and Holden Chapel, along Mass Ave. One of his roommates, name forgotten, had a heavy winter overcoat, almost black, acquired at school, no doubt adjudged to be unsuitable for Cambridge. I paid him $10 for it, wore it in the coldest weather until the war. In Washington I was to have little use for it, finally pressing it on Jamie after his move to Binghamton.

Art and I saw each other far from often during the year, but I went to a couple of the games of the Freshman basketball team, on which he was a regular. In height, perhaps in speed and natural ability, there were others better able to stay in the graces of Wes Fesler, who doubled as basketball coach; his heart was in football. Art was thoughtful and stood out in concentration and determination, qualities that good coaches respect and that have continued to work for him. I can see him, hunched forward a little, arms hanging, knees slightly bent, ready to move into action.

Also worth mentioning is the arrival of Ted (Theodore) Uebel, a Columbia graduate living in the House while working for an M.A., after which he was to return to New York to teach in the public schools. He shared a suite in G entry, where two roommates (or neighbors) were Jim Gaffney (‘37) and John Reddy.^[97] Ted was outgoing, with an exceptionally vibrant, resonant baritone.

Along in the fall, when the House gave a rare formal dinner dance “in Hall” (on the evening after the Princeton game), he invited his quiet fiancée Kay, fair and pretty, for the weekend. They were my only visitors that evening. Dan invited Nancy Jackson, elder daughter of the late Dean of St. Mark’s (in Grand Rapids), a stylish Wellesley graduate a few years older. There followed a long night, probably more that one couple staying over till morning. It was Liberty ’all, no Goody being about on Sunday and women visitors allowed on Sunday afternoon. To keep a woman overnight was ordinarily an exploit; the only case I remember hearing about involved a junior, Frank Sweetser, who had the name of a scapegrace. (On one occasion, when Sweetser was the worse for drink, the Master in his most pompous manner pronounced: “In vino veritas, Sweetser, in vino veritas.”) Frank remains fixed in memory by a small circumstance: my meeting him a couple of years later in Times Square, then crowded though not, as it would come to be, “disreputable” (to use one of Mother’s preferred expressions).

Ted Uebel was to invite me to New York several times. Once, of an evening before he was married (probably in 1937/8) he took me to a seminar held at home by a friend of his for several youngish undergraduates of the newly opened Queen’s College (a branch of City College^[98]). I forget the topic, say, early 20th century French literature. The conducted entirely on their own an orderly entertaining discussion without showing much acquaintance with the works (and writers) in question, or with history and criticism. (But each one had a good grasp of the essentials of recognized political positions.) During the discussion and afterwards they saw undemonstratively to the needs of a cripple among them. An impressive performance, of a sort inconceivable at Harvard and never encountered elsewhere. It has helped to explain the New York literary scene.

During the war, to go even further out of sequence, when I dropped in on the Uebels for an overnight visit, they fed me steak tartare and scotch, and we stayed up late. I awoke feeling like a new man, though ’t’would hardly do to risk the treatment today.

Only three courses were prescribed for the senior year, preparation of an honors thesis counting as a fourth. The courses were these:

English composition                                   (English 5)

The works of Chaucer                                (English 1)

Origins of the English novel

         (?? a half-course)                                (English 32¹)

American literature of the

         20th century (a half course)               (English 95²)

English 5, which apparently went back to the 1870’s,^[99] was taught by Professor Robert (popularly “Bobby”) Hillyer, then nearly 40. He had begun as a poet,^[100] a fresh young face with soulful eyes. Sedentary years of eating and drinking—John Cornell recently had become one of his drinking companions—had left him well cushioned. In an English Department increasingly given over to scholarship, he was the eminent exception, for some years a director of English A-1—his principal responsibility—and soon to be named Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory.^[101]

In literature he was decidedly conservative, preferring stylish light writing. We nevertheless got on, chiefly, one must assume, because I wrote decently, developing my own ideas. Class was held in the early afternoon (2 o’clock) at his house a few doors off Brattle Street, a pleasant ten-minute walk out from the Square. No refreshments were served, but conversation was informal. Occasionally his hardly less well upholstered wife made an entrance, or exit.

Of those present I saw little outside class, with the exception of Joe (Joseph Viertel) Shapiro, ’36. Joe was even then writing a play about life at a military academy. He and I often walked back together to Eliot House, while he talked about his ambition to write and the disgust aroused by memories of the military school he had attended.^[102]

The impressive member of the class was Albert Guérard, Jr., a graduate student, son of a well-known West Coast professor, already marked as someone that would make an academic career as a proper avant garde writer.^[103] He had no time for any of us.

I did essays for Mr. Hillyer. Some ventured to write verse; I tried once or twice. Fiction and reminiscence seemed to be out of his line. Of the topics I treated only one remains in memory: an appreciation of Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, read in a thin paper reprint in one volume.^[104] Prof. Hillyer was taken with a choice of subject so outré, if hardly with a desire to read Doughty. He graded papers, by the way, after the English mode, with Greek manuscript letters.

It was in keeping, when I cited “Eliot” in some discussion, for him to ask, “Which one?” Could it be the author of the Gourvenour, the Apostle to the Indians, Miss Evans, the late President of Harvard, or “Wild Bill” the political scientist (called by George Pettee, Bob Benjamin’s tutor, a “cross between a Kentucky hillbilly and an Oxford Don”)? No, it could be only T.S., Mr. Hillyer’s elder at Harvard—by about eight years—so unlike in theory and practice, so much better known. “Bobby” just couldn’t resist a dig. Oddly enough—until you think about it—he seems to have been on good terms with Bernard DeVoto, another outsider in the scholarly English Department, then seeming to be ideologically compatible, in any case no competitor.^[105]

English 1 was no longer given, as it had been for years, by “Fritz” (professor F.N.) Robinson, but by his student Jere (Bartlett J.) Whiting, a Yankee in his 30’s. He would recall that in his boyhood reputable folk still had looked down on eating lobster, that scavenger. He was an amusing lecturer, and we found Chaucer lively, at times moving. Dr. Whiting passed on his master’s view: if Chaucer were to enter the room as I am reading these lines (had said Prof. Robinson), he would not grasp that his work was being read. We nevertheless acquired rudiments of the Middle English of the East Midlands, much increasing the pleasure. (Professor Hillyer, by the way, cited with praise an example of Chaucer’s versification.)

English 321 is a blank. As noted above, it may have been a course on the early English novel. About all there is to go on is a paper entitled “Theory and Practice in the English novel in the Eighteenth Century.” It’s a plausible supposition that it was written for such a course. And I read a fair number of well-known works of prose fiction from Moll Flanders to Evelina, whether in this connection remains uncertain.

English 95 was given by Bernard DeVoto, with Lyman Butterfield as assistant. Reasonably enough DeVoto included (with one exception) only writers that had begun their careers in the present century.^[106] It was good enough course for the time I had to spend, given my spotty acquaintance with recent writing. Later it became clear that it covered too much second-rate writing (e.g. novels of Cabell and Hergesheimer, work of minor poets), while omitting some “important” writers (notably Edmund Wilson, Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald) and touching on several others (among them E.E. Cummings, Allen Tate, Wallace Stevens) only in passing, as entries in the anthology assigned (Untermeyer’s). Hemingway’s novels (to date) were assigned, but none of the stories. And so on. Of course the selection reflected DeVoto’s knowledge, taste, and judgment—for the most part.” He did include the collected poems (none of the criticism) of T.S. Eliot and at least the early Cantos of Ezra Pound; options for the reading period included the poetry of Hart Crane and even Look Homeward, Angel, though he disapproved of Wolfe as a writer that didn’t finish his job.^[107] Apart from Wolfe’s novel, all these doubtless were included as the indispensable minimum of the detested avant garde writing, with which he may have had but slight previous acquaintance.^[108]

Not far into the second term, one’s attention became directed primarily to finishing the honors’ thesis and preparing for the general examination, the more readily because seniors were free of final exams in June.^[109]

The thesis I had finished drafting in good time (probably over Christmas holidays), submitting a clean carbon copy to K.P. Kempton in February, hardly later. He returned it with the comment:

I have read this pretty carefully. My suggestions are sometimes in the text, sometimes marginal. All are insignificant, pay no attention if you disagree with them.

I haven’t the courage to collate the draft with the text as submitted. But at a glance it becomes clear that the two are “essentially” the same, even to the title: “The Modern Fables of Henry James.” (The suggested corrections look reasonable.)

Later, talking with Kempton, I said (in effect): “It should be better than almost any of the others will do, but of course in a few years I shall be able to do much better.” He demurred, on both points. He may have been thinking only—or at least chiefly—about composition. Even in that respect the thesis probably stood out, at least as an academic exercise, by virtue of long practice and much reworking. But it’s also true that I haven’t learned much about composition since then, except perhaps not to try so hard.

As literary criticism, on the other hand, the thesis may well have been less mature than what several others—most of the in History and Literature—might have done. At the same time I, too, could reasonably expect to see—and fell—much more with added experience of life and letters. As it happened, experience was to leave me unable to appreciate and unwilling to reread the late fiction of H.J., widely agreed to be his pride and glory—in the words of F.O. Matthiessen, “the major phase.”^[110]

The best thing said about the thesis would come from one perhaps best qualified, Leon Edel, then still young but already recognized as a coming man in studies of Henry James. In 1937, recently returned from Paris to work in the James collection at Widener, Edel, writing a note to open relations, remarked that the thesis^[111] had at least the virtue of avoiding the mistakes often made in writing about Henry James.

The Department’s general examination came along in April—possibly in very early May. There was not much one could do to prepare, always aside from staying healthy and getting plenty of sleep the night before. But one felt the urge to do something, and I must have gone back over dates, names, titles, and other points of reference.

Of the examination itself I remember next to nothing, just that at the end I had to choose a quotation from (or about) Thomas Carlyle as a subject for an essay, knowing even less about the other choices. I had read—for tutorial?—Past and Present and had a summary view of Carlyle’s work, character, and reputation, from secondary sources. (Curiously, I had looked into Sartor Resartus as a small boy, while going through the book shelves at home. It had sounded arch and ponderous, even beyond other old books.) I sighed, and set to work; there was just so much time left.

From then on it was down hill all the way, hardly anything left to do. To help pass the last weeks, one of the seniors in I entry—slow-spoken Alden Harken?—started a blackjack game.^[112] We played for a couple of hours a day—mostly friends of his from the entry, also, among others, John Bovey, a good friend of Harken. In blackjack, the bank has a small advantage. Accordingly I bet the minimum while playing against the bank and raised the stakes whenever indicated while the bank was mine. All on the cuff, by the way, no money changed hands.

The first break came with a request to report one morning for an oral; one was given to every candidate for higher honors. Mine was held in a smallish room on the second floor of Longfellow Hall (Radcliffe), looking out on Appian Way, just down from Garden Street. (In 1937-41 I was to give tutorial conference on that floor, if not in the same room.) The examiners were Professors Kittredge and Rollins and one other, perhaps J.B. (“Jimmy”) Munn, who may already have been chairman of the Department.^[113] They were no doubt curious, not unfriendly, and I sensed that the examination was pro forma. As with the general examination I remember almost nothing, just this: Professor Kittredge, who sat to my left, taking up a comment of mine on the accuracy of some description, perhaps one of his, came back, “But the novels of Henry James are not really fables, are they?” “Of course,” I replied, “they are not.”

My attendance at blackjack was next interrupted, as I recall, by the news that The Modern Fables… had earned me a prize (what was it called?) of $200 or $250—and would be published by the University Press in the series “Harvard Honors Theses in English.” I took a copy to the Press, introducing myself. In the summer the Press would send me galley proof and page proof to be gone over.^[114]

Along about then I learned also that I was to be granted a degree summa cum laude. The deficiencies of my general examination and viva voce cannot have been so very serious. Eleven were granted highest honors: six of the “junior eight” and five others.^[115]

Not long after, I had a call to go to Warren House to see Professor Hillyer. He offered me a job teaching Freshman English—two sections, or two-thirds time, as usual—it being understood that one would go to graduate school half time. The stipend, $1,400 a year, seemed to be ample to cover expenses, including tuition. The available fellowships abroad, so far as I knew, were all for seniors in other fields; those in history, physics, and history and literature were the ones I heard about. And I had not made such a strong impression as to be invited to join the Society of Fellows; there was no indication that I was even considered, nor, one gathered, was anyone else from the class.

In any case, teaching suited me well. I looked forward to doing a good job. The assignment was renewable for another five years, long enough, in all likelihood, to take us at least until was would break out, and the United States would become involved. Hitler, who by then had held absolute power for two years (the last February), had recently reintroduced conscription and was openly rearming. It seemed clear that before long he would be ready to begin aggressive moves against only disorganized half-hearted opposition.

In the face of this threat, some were planning to sign up for officer reserve training (a few others of course already had done R.O.T.C.). Bob Benjamin’s father, a reserve colonel (who had attended both service academies), was later to advise me to do the same. Others were planning to rush ahead with their lives—making money, professional training, marriage. I decided to wait it out, see what happened, and, if a survivor, make a fresh start after the war, a course not particularly to be recommended, just in character. And it was something, once again, not discussed with anyone. As for taking a Ph.D., time would tell.

It’s quite true, just as I have told it, that the windup of the senior year seemed to be happening to me, not anything I was doing. I had worked four years to make it come out much as it had, but never thinking about what it would be like. Lyman Butterfield and John Gordan, having come that way, understood far better how it would be. So far as 1941 I still couldn’t imagine, didn’t try, even though I had a “concept.”

The first glimpse—to jump ahead—of where my path might lead would come in May 1946, when Ray Cline offered me a job in the Pentagon, in the OPD History Unit,^[116] saying that with a summa from Harvard, I should do very well. I thought so, too, with the varied reading and research—and writing—behind me, by then ten years of it, if a little rusty.

To be sure, a freakish piece of luck brought me to that point. I had come to Washington, cold, to look for what work there might be. (Tee privately wondered what I might be up to.) Jim Mathias, that good friend made in the Army, having finally taken a commission in the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) branch, was finishing his military service as a captain in the Pentagon. One weekend in April, on the train down from New York, he met Fred Kilgour, a classmate of mine—another that had been in the south entry of Weld Hall—and the connection came out in conversation. Jim told him I was looking for a job. Fred, who had dealt with Cline in OSS,^[117] told Jim about the new unit Cline was setting up in the Pentagon. That’s how I came to know of it.

It was what I was looking for, a promising alternative to getting a Ph.D. under the “G.I. Bill.” As a “family man,” I had small time left to waste. The war had left the notion that “imperial” Washington might offer the prepared “generalist” openings for research work on new material. The gamble paid off, not only in the job offered by Ray Cline but also in others that would follow, each one arising out of the one before. For a while Washington did indeed have places for trained generalists, above all in the months after the departure of a great many war-time employees. Given the good fortune to find one of these places, my congenial undergraduate education would begin to prove to be useful as well.

Back again at the end of May 1935, all I could see was that I had made a start and was about to move on, and I felt restless and let down. That may help to explain, not excuse, a decision reached—by default—not to stay for Commencement. Commencement, after all, is chiefly a social event—entertaining fiancées, big days at the clubs, the class ball, all foreign. What I refused to imagine was what attendance at the Commencement ceremony might mean to Father. However awkward logistical arrangements might have been in an overcrowded Cambridge, and however disoriented I might be, that would have made a trip worth while. It has long been disagreeable to be reminded of such a grievous sin of omission.

Perhaps it was as a result that Mother and Father later began—by their own decision—a series of drives to Cambridge in the fall to “take the boys to school,” stopping on the way in Ontario to see the cousins. Sometimes they came in the spring to bring the boys home. Along with side trips—including one to the New York World’s Fair and another to Washington, D.C.—they explored Cambridge and Boston on their own for a few days each time, and had a view of college settling in, or moving out for the summer.

One still had to arrange for a place to stay during the next academic year. By way of the blackjack game I had met Ed (Edward J.) Acomb, who shared a suite, as I recall, in I entry; he probably wasn’t in the game. He was to go to law school the next fall, and we agreed readily to rent a flat together.

Ed Acomb, quiet, solidly built, good-humored, modest and responsible, came from Waukegan, Illinois, north of Chicago. His father managed the local plant of the American Steel and Wire Company. Ed’s maternal grandfather had been a senior official in the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad (“the Q”). It was almost a foregone conclusion that Ed would end up in management (as he was to do, in the Ford Motor Co.). In his case, that did not seem to me a disqualification for sharing a flat. His chief amusement, by the way, was playing the fiddle (only, it turned out, in the Harvard Orchestra,^[118] never at the flat, at least while I was about).

Very likely it was from the housing reference service at the law school that Ed found out about a flat to let at 60 Kirkland Street, a red brick Victorian building on the south side at Ware Street, perhaps a 10-minute walk east from the lecture halls. On inspection it was seen to be a third-floor Pullman apartment about 13 feet wide inside: study in front, on the street; bed room with two single beds and a bureau directly in back (separated from the study by a curtain); then a door to a small open space for taking meals, with a narrow kitchen at the rear. To one side was an exiguous bathroom. In the “dining area” there was a door out to the fire escape. But the rent was only (as I recall) $35-$40 a month, heated, with utilities, basic furnishing. So we took it, paid a deposit and a month’s (probably the summer’s) rent in advance.

Then we found a friend, Ed’s friend Dutch (Wesley G.) McNett, to lend his car for moving our possessions. Mine had been augmented by a couple of scruffy upholstered chairs, maybe something else, received in nominal settlement of what I was owed at blackjack. The debtors complained that there were almost broke, but they had this furniture to dispose of…

With Commencement in the offing, I went home in early June, glad to be gone. Fittingly, in conclusion, I don’t recall the trip.

---

^[1]Weld Hall was redone after the war so as to provide each suite with a private bath; as a result the place became altogether different inside.

^[2]As noted by Sandy in a class report. By the way, after long residence in Canada, he retired to Peebles, as noted in a class report. Class reports and the yearbook have been helpful, refreshing dormant memories and adding detail.

^[3]Tom’s sole contribution to the 1985 report of the class was a list of his family’s most illustrious connections, some rather remote.

^[4]John Pratt (’30), then at Law School, for many years a judge of the US District Court for the District of Columbia.

^[5]According to the class yearbook; as I remember (surely an error), he left at the end of freshman year and died in the summer of 1933..

^[6]Goal posts were still on the goal lines.

^[7]Upper class courses met generally only twice a week (a third time “at the pleasure of the instructor”).

^[8]Here and below, course numbers (English A-1…), also text references to grades, are taken from a transcript furnished perhaps in 1946. The descriptions (English composition…) are sometimes from memory, otherwise mostly from S.E. Morison, ed., The Development of Harvard University/…/1869-1929, Harvard University Press, 1930.

^[9]Further considered below, pp. ** and pp. ***.

^[10]Imposed only on students that had not passed the College Board examination in Latin. Presumably the College Board e.g. in French similarly satisfied the requirement to show a reading knowledge of a modern language. (Those failing to meet the Latin requirement would receive a B.S. instead of a B.A.)

^[11]Appropriately renamed, for it had been funded from a then unattributed gift of President Lowell.

^[12]Then still Head Tutor of the House.

^[13]The first published, in 1924, was “A Handful of Pleasant Delights.” Later on he was to edit other collections, among them “The Passionate Pilgrim” (2nd edition, 1612) in 1940; Shakespeare’s sonnets (first published in 1609) for the Variorum edition, in 2 vol., 1944.

^[14]“Let it be given for marked application to studies.” Detur prizes are bought from a bequest by Edward Hopkins, Esq. (a figure of some note under Cromwell) left at his death in 1657, or so it is said. The words cited above are inscribed on a standard form (with my name, the Dean’s signature, and the year written in) affixed to the front pastedown of Vols. 1-3. Engraved in gold leaf on the covers are the Harvard seal (front cover) and (back cover) the Hopkins arms with the words “Detur ex testamento Edvardi Hopkins armig.” (Let it be given from the will of Edward Hopkins, Esq.) The practice of presenting books was adopted, it seems, in 1756, or soon after. In our time, a Detur prize has been given a student on first “making” Group I. For the history see David McCord, In Sight of Sever, Harvard, 1963. As he notes, “Detur” in this use is recorded in the N.E.D.; the first example given is from a letter of J.R. Lowell written as an undergraduate (1836). The usage is shown also in Webster’s International (2nd edition).

^[15]According to The Grand Rapids Press, 12 April 1932, these other four came from private schools. That is, a couple of their courses would have been somewhat more demanding, and taking only four, they could not have a B in one, as I did. See pp. *** below.

^[16]Another of the four may have been Phil Dur, for whom see pp.***, below.

^[17]The “new criticism,” though its origins were in the 1920’s and 1930’s, would establish itself only after the war. And the befuddling influence of such thinkers as anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, historian Michel Foucault, philosopher Jacques Derrida, and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan—all four French, you will note—awaited another generation.

^[18]Of the seven original Houses, all residential, the five newly built—architects: Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch and Abbott—were named for presidents of Harvard (Dunster, Eliot, Kirkland, Leverett, Lowell). The other two, both older buildings, for undergraduates, adapted to the new system, were Adams House, bearing the name of that remarkable American family—and Harvard family: six generations of students, two professors (1806-09, 1870-77), two Fellows of the Corporation (1887-94, 1898-1929), an Overseer (1881-1906)—whether of some one member I can’t say; and Winthrop House, called after John Winthrop, eighteenth century professor of mathematics, also teacher and experimenter in astronomy and physics (Natural Philosophy).

The new Houses—Dunster and Lowell finished in 1930, the others in 1931—were built with funds solicited by President Lowell and given by E.S. Harkness, who also financed construction of the Yale “Colleges,” similar in purpose: to provide centers of student life and closer relations with members of the teaching staff; differing from Oxbridge colleges above all in that “courses,” rather than “reading” with tutors, remained the primary mode of instruction.

Not having read anything about the establishment of the Houses, I don’t know who worked out administration, amenities, staffing, and the like; even who decided on the names. Little may have been written about the process. It’s a fair guess that President Lowell had a great deal to do with it.

^[19]J.K. Galbraith was assigned in 1934 as a resident tutor to Winthrop House. He tells that the House Master gave tutors a list ranking groups of students in desirability as House members. At the top were graduates of the “St. Grottlesex” schools (among them Groton, Milton, St. Mark’s, and Middlesex), followed by those of Andover and Exeter, those of other private schools, public school graduates, and—at the bottom—Jews from whatever school. See A Life in Our Times, Boston, 1981, p.51.

What Galbraith fails to note is that students’ choices largely determined the social mix in the Houses. Winthrop House, for example, was not at all “social,” as observed in an article in Time proudly quoted in the section on the House in the 1935 Yearbook. The preferences of House Masters will have affected only the selection of applicants for reallocation from Houses overapplied (among them Winthrop House, to judge from what Galbraith says) and their distribution among Houses underapplied. I don’t recall even being asked to give a second choice.

It’s quite possible that Galbraith understood all that, avoiding mention to keep from spoiling his point. Or it may be in character for him never to have looked into the matter. That would seem to be the case, for example, with F.O. Matthiessen, reported as saying, early in his term as head tutor of Eliot House, that he expected to get on with the Master (“Frisky” Merriman) “except that I will always be fighting to prevent his filling the House with nothing but Grotties and St. Markers.” This according to Harry Levin, in an address at the dedication of The Matthiessen Room, 30 January 1982.

I can’t recall reading anything else on this unmentionable topic, apart from a brief exchange in the Crimson offices as of 1929 over whether the University should (or would) standardize the social composition of Houses, in George Weller’s Harvard novel, Not to Eat, Not for Love, New York, 1933, 244-6.

^[20]John Ferguson, the other regular, lived outside college from September ’32. For various reasons, a fair number of upperclassmen chose to do the same, living either at home or on the economy.

^[21]For more on Phil, see below, pp. ***.

^[22]Harvard stopped granting such scholarships many years ago.

^[23]According to Harry Levin, the planned capacity of the House was 296, presumably inclusive of the Master’s quarters. Address given on 30 January 1982, cited above, dedicating The Matthiessen Room. Occupation in the early ’30’s probably was well below planned capacity.

^[24]Beginning, as I recall, in 1934.

^[25]In addition, an east wing along the river provided living quarters for the Master and his family and servants (and guests) and an office for his secretary.

^[26]His first wife, the spoiled goddess Joan Phillips, would often call him Mackey.

^[27]The Dwights of Church & Dwight, makers of Arm & Hammer Baking Soda.

^[28]Laughlin’s firm, at Norfolk Connecticut, has published an annual collection called New Directions in Prose and Poetry—volume 1 came out in 1936—and books by authors of more or less consequence, among them V.V. Nabokov, Ezra Pound, Delmore Schwartz, Tennessee (born Thomas Lanier) Williams, and William Carlos Williams.

^[29]For a time he hoped to get a job in the Dennison Manufacturing Company, in Framingham, which made paper products. The owner, Henry Dennison was a forward looking business man, who later collaborated with J.K. Galbraith; his son James, as I recall, a member of the class of ’34, in Eliot House.

^[30]Dr. Gilbert left in about 1936 to become economic adviser to Harry Hopkins. In 1940 he ran a team of speechwriters for the President, housed in the Commerce Department. Soon after OPA was established (1941) he became chief of economic research. For a decade or more after the war he was general economic adviser for Schenley Products. For a period in the mid- to late ’60’s, Ed Cooper worked for him in Dacca, where Dr. Gilbert ran a Ford Foundation team advising on economic development in what was still East Pakistan.

^[31]His father also being called Charles, he was Malcolm in the family, then to friends. Later on, in the Army Air Corps (and the Army Air Forces) he prudently would become Charlie.

^[32]Sam was treated with forebearance, partly because, work as he might, his grades never rose above B plus, a repeated disappointment. Not surprisingly, he was regarded as a comic figure, perhaps as he expected.

^[33]He began in 1947 as assistant curator in the Division of Ethnology (Department of Anthropology), in 1948 becoming Associate Curator. In the reorganization attendant on the opening of the Museum of History and Technology he became in 1957 Curator of Cultural History. In 1969, following the division of his area, he became Curator of Preindustrial Cultural History, then in 1973 Senior Curator of the Department of Cultural History. He seems to have retired in 1978. See Annual Reports of the Smithsonian Institution, also Guide to the Smithsonian Archives, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983, p. 102.

^[34]W.B. Yeats, Reveries over Childhood and Youth, Churchtown, Dundrum, 1915, p. 104. The poet’s father, J.B. Yeats, was a preraphaelite painter.

^[35]Also a remarkable personality. His “at home” evenings are recorded in Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, Lucien Price, Boston, 1954.

^[36]From Tulsa. His parents left Georgia in 1913 (the year before Dan was born), like most other Jews, after the lynching of a Jewish pencil manufacturer named Frank, (wrongfully accused of murdering a young female employee. Dan’s father, Samuel A. Boorstin, was well known in Tulsa as an attorney, stiffnecked, meticulous, who worked by himself, with the help of a single young associate. (A former associate, one of a long succession, is the source of this evaluation.)

^[37]His career began with a summa from Harvard, a Rhodes Scholarship, and a D.Jur. from Yale. It continued with a series of positions, mainly academic, finally a professorship at Chicago; great success in haute vulgarisation; senior positions at the Smithsonian (where for a time he was Malcolm’s boss; not hard to deal with, Malcolm would report); and finally, appointment as Librarian of Congress, a post from which he retired in the mid-1980’s.

^[38]At a dinner dance in the fall of ’34, 325 reportedly were served, goodness knows how.

^[39]And surely at other meals, too. Menus for the day were identical for all the Houses.

^[40]Dr. Grabau left in the mid-1930’s to work with Edwin Land. He dropped out, according to Jerry McCue, before Polaroid began to go big. I remember, after the war, seeing him pass once or twice in the halls of the Pentagon.

^[41]at 1524 31st Street in the mid-1950’s.

^[42]According to The Story of Grand Rapids, Z.Z. Lydens, ed., Grand Rapids, 1966, p. 330. Mr. Brewer was no less active as college president, setting up a regional “writers’ conference” in 1936 and inviting the residence of Ford Madox Ford, an original writer of distinction, well able to drop names in the arts from the pre-Raphaelites to the Lost Generation. “Old Fordie” (baptized Ford Hermann Hueffer in 1873) was by then feeling rather out of it, in London, as in Paris. He died in 1939.

^[43]Sir Victor Horsley was an eminent English surgeon and neuropathologist, the names selected reverently by the elder Kramer, himself (as I recall) a surgeon.

^[44]After the war Vic returned to the Justice Department for a few years, then went into private practice. In 1957 he joined the law firm of (Thurman) Arnold, (Abe) Fortas, and (Paul) Porter—now Arnold and Porter—a further offshoot of Yale Law School. After retiring, he taught for a time at Georgetown. Since 1979 he has been (at least through 1990) Law Alumni Professor, University of Minnesota Law School, one semester a year, except in 1980-81, while he was Counsel to the Attorney General.

^[45]Then, I believe, still William Henry O’Connell, in his early seventies.

^[46]Just outside the House proper, in the east wing (along the river) next to the Master’s quarters.

^[47]The “mathematician” would have been Herbert Robbins (‘35, PBK “junior 8,” summa cum laude). For his relations with Prof. Morse, see section on Robbins in Mathematical People, Profiles and Interviews, ed. Donald J. Albers and G.L. Alexanderson, Boston, Birkhauser, 1985. (I used, courtesy of Jamie, a reprint by Contemporary Books, Inc., in which the pertinent section is at pp. 281 to 299.)

^[48]Perhaps of Canadian descent, but born and brought up in St. Louis, where he seems to have attended the same day school as Tom Ratcliffe.

^[49]I daresay the allusion needs explaining. Eustace Tilley (so named by Corey Ford) is the dandy in top hat, tall stock, with monocle, shown in profile on the cover of the first issue of The New Yorker, February 1925, the work of Rea Irvin. See James Thurber, The Years with Ross, Boston, 1959, p. 42. The same cover was used (may still be used, for all I know) every February for the anniversary issue.

^[50]Not so long ago John reported to the Harvard Magazine that he was retired in France, president of the Paris Harvard Club. He has since moved to Cambridge, Mass. Phil reported teaching in the University of Louisiana. He retired in the spring of 1985.

^[51]The subway yard is gone; in its place, the Kennedy School of Government. The City Council took the opportunity to rename Boylston Street for John F. Kennedy.

^[52]House librarians received free board and room. Bottkol was succeeded in 1937 by bland I.B. Cohen, first year graduate student, New Yorker and one-time YiPSL (member Young People’s Socialist League), future historian of science, receiving the first doctorate given therein, 1947).

^[53]At the death of Byron Hurlbut, a teacher and early friend of DeVoto, and one-time dean of the College.

^[54]Almost certainly from Thomas Balmer, a schoolmate of McVitty.

^[55]Italian engineer turned sociologist. He had then a small following in the Harvard teaching staff, led by L.J. Henderson, arrogantly assertive biochemist, who had a leading part (along with President Lowell) in Harvard’s Society of Fellows.

^[56]Later on the DeVotos would move to Cambridge, where their circle would become more political, including, notably, “young Arthur” Schlesinger and J.K. Galbraith. Details on DeVoto’s life and writings from Wallace Stegner’s sympathetic biography, The Uneasy Chair, NY, 1974, dedicated to “the tribe of Benny”. I first heard DeVoto called “Benny” by Lyman Butterfield in academic ’34/’35.

^[57]Courses in the same examination group would have exams at the same hour on the same day.

^[58]That was the one course Harvard then offered in the integral (or “introduction to the”) calculus. In this respect, Harvard did less than the University of Michigan in the early 1900’s, when Mother was an undergraduate: she had had a choice between a course for engineers, given over to problem solving, and one for mathematicians, devoted to proofs.

^[59]As then translated. In German: Die Welt als Wille und als Vorstellung (1818). “Vorstellung” in this context may be rendered as, for example, “representation,” “concept,” “idea,” “image.”

^[60]According to the record of studies furnished me by the Registrar after the war, about 2 percent of students were in Group I in the early 1940’s. For the class of 1935, 1 percent would be about right, not necessarily the same students from one year to the next. (Had “grade inflation” already set in by the 1940’s?) Our Freshman class numbered about 900, of whom perhaps 600 were graduated in 1935.

^[61]Tutors at Harvard go back to the 17th century; from then through the third quarter of the 19th century (none was appointed after 1878) they were only junior instructors. The first tutors on the English model were appointed in 1914. See S.E. Morison, Harvard in the Seventeenth Century, Harvard, 1936, Vol. I, pp. 51ff; and ed. Morison, The Development of Harvard University, cited above, p. xli.

^[62]He will have been a son of the longtime editor of The Atlantic Monthly (1908-38), who bore the same name.

^[63]As in most of the few signatures of the poet/dramatist then accepted as authentic. The same usage was recommended by the NED (in 1914) and by Fowler (in 1926). See also Samuel A. Tannebaum, M.D., Problems in Shakespeare’s Penmanship, New York, 1927, a publication of the Modern Language Association. Spelling, not only of proper names, was casual in the English Renaissance.

^[64]Published in Boston by Ginn & Company, which will have insisted on the common spelling of the Bard’s name.

^[65]One story about A.C. Sprague had circulated a few years before: Not long after taking his doctorate, he had been listed in the phone book as Dr. Sprague. A couple of graduate students had the notion to call at night, “Doctor, my wife is in labor. Come quickly, please.” The listing changed the next year.

^[66]I wrote to the Registrar for information on this and on one course in 1934/35, but received not even an acknowledgement—in contrast, I may add, to the prompt replies and abundant information received from the Registrar’s Office of the University of Michigan, to which I wrote for information on Mother’s course of study.

^[67]Eliot House now has a Matthiessen Room, dedicated on 30 January 1982 by Harry Levin; among those in attendance was Joe Bottkol, professor (perhaps by then emeritus) at Williams and Mary (I think). A small volume on F.O. Matthiessen, edited by Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman, was published in New York in 1950, not long after Matthiessen’s suicide. It includes two later pieces by him and contributions by colleagues, former students, and other friends.

^[68]Six of the eight were from public schools; as already noted, Phil Dur had gone to Country Day School, St. Louis; George Haskins, to Exeter. Our fields of study: two in History; two in History and Literature; and one each in English, Government, Mathematics, and Philosophy.

^[69]He once mentioned an aunt, Helen Hokinson, who did cartoons for The New Yorker, always dealing with well-heeled middle-aged suburban women.

^[70]Till 5 December 1933, when the 21st Amendment passed.

^[71]Dan’s relish for naming extended to people. Dwight, for example, might be referred to as “McVittshit;” Malcolm, as “Datkins.” It was one way Dan had for “accessioning” people (and places) to his collection. He had other ways as well, such as telling an anecdote, mentioning a selected trait, or explaining a relationship. I have been identified (especially in Grand Rapids) as the son of his high-school teacher Mr. Snell.

^[72]President of the New York Stock Exchange, later tried and convicted of having used his clients’ accounts in the effort to prevent the collapse of the market in 1929.

^[73]See pp. 81ff, below.

^[74]Class of ‘34, of an old Harvard family. According to Russell Hale, he was killed in a plane crash in 1957 while working for the Far Eastern Commission in Japan.

^[75]He glances at his reactions to and relations with Eliot in the retrospective first chapter of Grounds for Comparison, Harvard, 1972, p. 7.

^[76]As recalled by Eliot in the first Theodore Spencer Lecture, published as Poetry and Drama, Harvard, 1951, pp. 3-5. Spencer had died, unexpectedly, in 1949.

^[77]Published by Harvard in 1933.

^[78]As shown, for example, in the criticism reviewed in two articles by Robert Craft, “Rediscovered Philosophy Criticism by T.S. Eliot” and “On T.S. Eliot's Criticism of Prose Fiction,” included in Present Perspectives/Critical Writings, New York, 1984, pp. 182-96 and 197-214.

^[79]The Bok administration has, however, begun a much needed rehabilitation of the physical plant of the Houses, with some small part of the funds solicited in the current “drive.”

^[80]Or, as Harry Levin had already said (following Wordsworth): “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.” From address on 30 January 1982, cited above.

^[81]The two black Americans in our class both came from Boston, might well have lived at home anyway. Both, curiously, studied foreign languages.

^[82]That attitude doesn’t seem to have changed much in the first decades after the war. In about 1965 the Grimson ran a poll, of which I learned courtesy of Suzy, then aiding and abetting the Crime; she sent me a subscription. The results; Harvard boys voted overwhelmingly against (Radcliffe girls similarly in favor of) “integrated” housing.

^[83]“Goody. 2. U.S. At Harvard College a woman who has the care of students’ rooms.” N.E.D. The earliest instance given of this use is for 1827-8. Doubtless from sense 1: “A term of civility applied to a woman, usually a married woman, in humble life…” That goes back to the 16th century. The special Harvard case is noted also in Webster’s International (Second Edition).

^[84]Most of the limericks I heard in Eliot House are to be found, with minor differences in wording, in G. Legman, The Limerick, New York, Bell, 1964. See, for example, nos. 60 (and 61), 313, 320, 463, and 1371. A few others are to be found in supplementary volumes. Legman’s earliest documented dates are generally later than 1935.

^[85]The club had been built in 1908; in 1929 it had become city property. V.V. Lydens, ed., The Story of Grand Rapids (cited above), p. 624.

^[86]Very likely as a result of having been given The Adams Family, by J.T. Adams (Boston, 1930, bound in red half morocco), by the Grand Rapids Harvard Club, in the spring of 1931, I suppose after my acceptance of Harvard.

^[87]For something more on the influence of the Education, see pp. ***, below.

^[88]And like Bliss Perry, as in nostalgic verses with the refrain “Kitty, Copey and Bliss,” by an alumnus of ‘12, published in 1936 in the “Tercentenary” issue of the Lampoon. See David McCord, In Sight of Sever, already cited, pp. 55-56, fn ***. See also Donald Adams, Copey of Harvard: A Biography of Charles Townsend Copeland, NY, 1960.

^[89]Butterfield (1909-82) came from a small town (Lyndonville) in Western New York state, where his father was high school principal. During his time at Harvard, on a summer in Europe, he met Elizabeth Anne (Betty) Eaton, daughter of Cleveland magnate Cyrus Eaton, to become widely known in the ’50’s for starting and supporting East-West conferences at Pugwash, Nova Scotia. They were married in 1935. I once met her at a cocktail party a year or so later. The Butterfields had two children, one of whom, Fox Butterfield, has become well known as author and New York Times correspondent. Lyman Butterfield taught in 1937-46 at Franklin and Marshall (a German Reformed college at Lancaster, Pennsylvania) as assistant professor; spent 1946-50 at Princeton, as associate editor of the papers of Thomas Jefferson; served three years as director of the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg; and in 1954 became editor-in-chief of the Adams Papers, his principal occupation from then till his retirement in 1980.

^[90]John Gordan (1910?-68) was from Virginia. His rich, attractive accent was said to be native to his place of birth. He was interested in rare books, and it seems to have been on a visit to the premises (15 E. 51st Street) of A.S.W. Rosenbach, well-known New York bibliographer and bookseller, that he met Phyllis Goodhart, his future wife. Miss Goodhart, a Bryn Mawr graduate, herself a bibliophile and scholar, was the daughter of Howard Goodhart, who had built up by far the greatest private holding of incunabula in America. Mrs. Gordan, after inheriting this collection, gave much of it to Bryn Mawr (in 1951); what she kept (with whatever she and John may have added) was still the outstanding private collection in America in 1964, the only one that Frederick R. Goff thought worthy of mention after listing the 25 principal institutional libraries )in which ownership is concentrated.” Incunabula in American Libraries/A Third Census…, New York, 1964, p. xvi. I was introduced to Miss Goodhart as John’s guest at lunch in the Harvard Union.

John’s services have had public acknowledgement. As Goff notes, op. cit., pp. xiv and xxi, John as president of the Bibliographic Society of America gave the impetus for the third census of incunabula in American libraries. Again, in a foreword to the “official” biography of Virginia Woolf by her nephew Quentin Bell (NY, 1972, p. xiv), he speaks of a “debt of gratitude” to John, who from 1958 had built up the Virginia Woolf “holdings” in the Berg collection, a notable part of the resources under his care. Briefer acknowledgements appear, for example, in the introductions to Volumes 4 and 5 of Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James (Philadelphia, 1969, p. 361; and 1972, p. 566).

^[91]Of course that doesn’t apply to the views of Bernard DeVoto, as in “Grace Before Teaching,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, March 1932, to which he referred once or twice in class. An unusual expression of high official opinion was President Lowell’s; he is said to have made fun often of the doctorate and eventually established the Society of Fellows; the selected Junior Fellows could pursue their own work, free of the onerous routine of the doctorate. More characteristic were remarks of Prof. C.H. Grandgent in 1930 on the pros and cons of the Ph.D., concluding: “Harvard has never made a fetich [sic] of the degree. Of the actual permanent staff in Modern Languages, twenty-one members are Doctors of Philosophy and twenty-eight are not. Two are not even Bachelors…” In S.E. Morison, ed., The Development of Harvard University… (cited above), pp. 102-3.

^[92]The phrase of “Colonel” Eschol Sellers in The Gilded Age (Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, Hartford, 1874). An Eschol Sellers having arrived at the publisher’s to complain and threaten to sue, in early 1874, not long after the book appeared—in two or three printings—the name was changed; in later editions it is Beriah Sellers. See, e.g. Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain/A Biography, New York, 1912, vol. i, pp. 501-2.

^[93]Founded by Lincoln Kirstein while still at Harvard. It shared his affections and support with the ballet. Contributions had been sought also—in vain—from T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein.

^[94]With Jack (John A.S.) Verdier, an erratic Harvard graduate (’28), he set up in 1935 the Kent County Day School, soon settled north of Grand Rapids on property owned by the Litschers. The school closed in 1939.

^[95][sic]: Stourbridge in England; Sturbridge in Massachusetts.

^[96]Later, after taking an M.B.A., he returned to Washington, worked in OPA (Office of Price Administration), through the war, afterwards joining the intelligence bureau (whatever it then was called) of the State Department, where he would remain until retiring in the sixties. He later worker in an economic mission to East Pakistan (as it then was); see footnote *, p. ***, above.

^[97]The father of one of the two—probably John Reddy—owned an interest in Ringling Brothers circus. Ted’s father, incidentally, was a contractor, a resident of Queens. Another neighbor was Dick Ober (‘37), son of the well-known literary agent Harold Ober.

^[98]Now, the City University of New York.

^[99]Being taught by A.S. Hill, Barrett Wendell, LeBaron Russell Briggs, and apparently one other instructor before the 1930’s.

^[100]And a successful one, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1923.

^[101]The chair was established in 1804, the first to hold it being the Hon. John Quincy Adams. The incumbent was entitled to pasture a cow in the Yard. Mr. Hillyer’s predecessors since at least the 1850’s (F.J. Child, A.S. Hill, LeB.R. Briggs, and C.T. Copeland) had also taught writing. But this criterion was abandoned in choosing his successor. Theodore Spencer, a poet, to be sure, but teacher only of literature. And in effect the teaching of writing has since been downgraded at Harvard.

^[102]A year or two later the play opened on Broadway, financed by Joe’s father, but soon closed. Joe, discouraged, “went into” real estate. By 1967, when Jamie entered Harvard, one of his roommates, Jack Viertel (accent on the second syllable), could report that his father (by then Joe Viertel) had made his pile and was writing again.

^[103]He was to teach for a time a Harvard, then Stanford. As of 1976 Guérard had written i.a. six well-received critical studies (of Conrad, Hardy, Lawrence,…) and six “Gothic” novels.

^[104]Reprinted twice in 1921 (by Random House in the U.S.), plates photocopied from the scarce original (1888), with introduction by T.E. Lawrence. I bought my copy, very likely remaindered at the Coop.

^[105]As reported by Wallace Stegner in The Uneasy Chair, cited above, pp. 190-1, passim.

^[106]The exception was The Education of Henry Adams, an alternative offered in the first assignment to The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens.

^[107]He was to express his disapproval publicly in “Genius is Not Enough,” Saturday Review of Literature, 25 April 1936, pp. 3-4. Cited by Stegner, op. cit., pp. 168-9.

^[108]Cf. English 95: “…he read fanatically to keep ahead of his students. Often in the car, driving in from Lincoln, and finished the hour with his last one used up.” Op. cit., p. 160. In laying out the course, he may have had help from Lyman Butterfield, better acquainted, in particular, with recent poetry.

^[109]Accordingly I had final grades only for English 5 and English 32¹, both A’s.

^[110]Of the three phases conventionally recognized—early, middle, late. It must have been Ford Madox Ford that spoke of them as “James the First, James the Second, and James the Old Pretender” (in allusion to the royal Stuarts of the name).

^[111]Published in 1935. See pp. ***, below.

^[112]Alden Harken, from Osceola, Iowa, son of a widower doctor, was a stout fellow, on the basketball squad and in the rugby club. A few years after graduation he was stricken with multiple sclerosis, which gradually left him helpless. He died at 39.

^[113]“Called” from Columbia, not noted for scholarship, but rich.

^[114]The thesis appeared as a thin octavio volume, 75 pp., in marbled wrappers over flexible cardboard covers, published in the summer of 1935 at $1.25. Reprinted in hard cover by Russell and Russell, New York, in 1967. Why? The Lord only knows.

^[115]One of the five was “Joe” Barber, so there had been four of us in the south entry of Weld Hall (Joe, Phil Dur, George Haskins, and I). Three of the five, by the way, were from private schools. The final division then was between six from public schools, five from private schools (two from Exeter; one each from Groton, Browne and Nichols [in Cambridge, Mass.] and St. Louis Country Day). Fields: two in History and Literature, two in Mathematics, and one each in Anthropology, English, Government, History, Music, Philosophy, and Physics.

^[116]In the Operations Division of the Army General Staff.

^[117]Fred had been in a position to meet the Clines in Cambridge. After studying chemistry, without distinction, he had begun in 1935 working full time in the Harvard College Library; the experience and training of those pre-war years would offer a starting point for his duties with OSS (as a Naval Reserve officer) and for his later career. Ray Cline and his future wife Marge Wilson had worked part time in the Library as undergraduates in ’35-’38, becoming friends of W.A. Jackson, bibliographer, new curator and future librarian and professor;, and, in all likelihood, coming to know Fred Kilgour as well.

^[118]He had served a term as President of the Pierian Sodality, the organization of undergraduates in the Orchestra.