We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  Ed Wade, the museum’s assistant director under both Stephen Williams and Karl, explained that Karl started as the golden boy in the department, but he quickly developed a reputation for being impossible. Ed remembered Karl as a very angry man who tried to maintain his power through intimidation rather than respect. He would explode at people. Stephen Williams often caught the worst of it. By the mid-’70s, a few years after both Stephen and Karl had achieved their promotions, their relationship had tectonically shifted. Karl’s was so far from the professional behavior Ed expected from his colleagues, he said he lost his taste for Harvard.

  Father Carney Gavin, the former head of the Semitic Museum, which was across the street from the Peabody, said that even when Karl had been firmly established as a powerhouse at Harvard, he would get jealous of anybody he understood to be trespassing into his domain. As someone in charge of a museum associated with the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Father Gavin’s work overlapped with Karl’s, and it hadn’t taken long for competition to build to resentment. “Karl would be pretending he was reading scientific magazines in the foreroom to my little office and listening to my phone calls,” he said, still incredulous. “He was mean to people. He was horrible to longtime employees. He was an ambitious, very political administrator. And he was hard on his students,” Gavin added. “He really was a thug.” (Karl would later respond that he thought they’d had a fairly good relationship. “I had no feelings of competition with the rather smaller operations of Carney Gavin.”)

  Gavin, who had grown up in Harvard’s ecosystem—his uncle had been dean of one of the graduate schools—had a nonheroic view of how power worked in the institution: Whoever secured funding secured power. Karl, who traded on his charm, was a better fundraiser than Stephen Williams. “It takes energy and martinis to raise that money,” Karl quipped. His success was reason enough, according to Gavin, for Harvard to overlook any flaws.

  Several people I spoke to described Karl as a lazy scholar. John Terrell, who started out as Karl’s graduate student, remembered one class where he, with utter confidence, accidentally taught an important archaeological sequence upside down. Terrell, unsurprisingly, came to distrust his scholarship and decided not to put his future in Karl’s hands. To Terrell, Karl’s storytelling seemed like more than just disinterest in the details. “We all tell stories about ourselves. But some people seem to be, well––living them out more.” He couldn’t tell if Karl wanted others to believe the stories he told about himself, or if Karl believed them, too.

  Another former graduate student told me that even the professors who had helped tenure him saw through the charade eventually. As the student remembered, one of them “would laugh about him and kind of admit that, ‘Yeah, at the time it all seemed very exciting and very wonderful, but he did turn out to be more of a bullshit artist than otherwise.’”

  Not everyone was so critical. Peter Dane, who had also dug at Tepe Yahya with Jane, recognized the role that luck played in Karl’s career, but also credited Karl’s success to his intelligence and leadership. He could see that Karl had his own quirks—“I mean like all of us”—but he thought that Karl exemplified the kind of person he wished all tenured professors would be: a good guy and an extraordinarily open-minded academic who always wanted all of his students to do well.

  To Peter, Karl’s sweeping narratives demonstrated a commendable willingness to share the glamour of archaeology with the masses. “It never occurred to him that he was diminishing what he was doing in any way by talking to anybody at all. He would go and talk to a Rotary club.” Phil Kohl, another member of the 1968 expedition, also valued Karl’s ability to tell a story: “He would paint big, exotic pictures that would fire up your imagination, and even if they were proven wrong, it nonetheless was a stimulus.”

  From this perspective, Karl’s penchant for sexy-sounding ideas and interesting hypotheses wasn’t the mark of a glib attitude toward scholarship, but a boldness of imagination: Karl may have initially misjudged Yahya’s Carmania connection, but he had the courage both to hazard a guess and then to admit that he was wrong. And this enthusiasm and charisma had a huge impact on generations of archaeology students; even as recently as a few years ago, when Karl would sit behind his desk and hold court, people would come just to listen. As Ajita Patel, a research assistant in the department, told me, “Karl is a dying breed. You need the captivating teachers. The ones to sell the big story. The ones to draw in the students.”

  But some students put forth much more serious allegations. A few told me he had a history of changing his mind and leaving people in a bind. Bruce Bourque recalled that Karl had once promised him a teaching scholarship and then turned around and offered it to another graduate student even though Bruce was on full financial aid with a kid, while the other one was well off.

  Another student, Elizabeth Stone, had a similar story. When Elizabeth was a senior at UPenn, the Assyriology department approached her and said that they had one fellowship, good for four or five years, that they would love to offer her if she was definitely going to accept. (If they offered it to her, and she declined, then the department would have lost that fellowship funding.) Elizabeth responded that she was likely going to Harvard, provided they offered her a similar scholarship. UPenn called to check, and Karl gave his assurances that she would get the Harvard offer with funding. This was all communicated verbally; still, Elizabeth would later explain, “I thought at the time people were honorable and kept their word,” so she turned down the opportunity from UPenn. But when Harvard’s official admissions offer came through, Elizabeth was shocked to find that it was only for one year of funding. When she later confronted Karl about it, he told her he had gone back on his word because he knew that after forfeiting UPenn’s offer, she’d be left with no alternative.

  “He was unabashed about this?” I asked.

  “He was,” she said.

  (Karl later denied having the power to make these financial decisions. “I have nothing to do with how much money the university offers or what kind of a fellowship or scholarship.” He added that the decision about Bruce Bourque was made by committee.)

  Elizabeth said that it wasn’t her first troubling interaction with Karl. She had still been an undergraduate at UPenn when she met him. He and a few other Harvard scholars had come to UPenn for a visit, and she had gone to a party with them. Elizabeth had danced with Karl “a fair amount,” but she had meant nothing by it. “I didn’t really think that much of it, but other people obviously did,” she told me. When the UPenn scholars visited Harvard a little while later, Elizabeth went, too. Martie, Karl’s wife, walked up to her at a party. She took Elizabeth by the chin and examined her. “You are lovely, aren’t you,” Martie said.

  But Elizabeth grew to respect Martie. She remembered watching Martie convince a drunk, angry Karl to punch the wall instead of punching a graduate student. (As Elizabeth remembered it, Karl broke his hand.) Besides, Martie might have had reason to be suspicious. Karl had indeed ended up at Elizabeth’s place one of those nights at UPenn—just not with her. According to Elizabeth, he had been with her friend.

  Ruth Tringham

  RUTH TRINGHAM HAD BEEN AN assistant professor in Old World archaeology at Harvard in the 1970s. Karl had, in large part, been responsible for bringing her there. In 1971, he helped her beat out twenty-six other candidates for the position by writing a hearty letter of support to the permanent members of the Anthropology department. According to Karl, after a six-month search process, there was no question that Ruth was the best of the potential new hires. When we first spoke on Skype, Ruth, now a tenured professor at Berkeley, said that she’d largely had a good experience at Harvard and with Karl—until the final six months she was there. But she didn’t want to talk about that over the phone.

  A few months later, I met her in a café near her home. She had biked over to me, and her cropped hair was mussed from pulling off her helmet.

  Ruth had never been
one to bother with glamour or pretense. In 1978, when Harvard didn’t give her tenure, she wrote a letter to Henry Rosovsky, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, that said she would not be coming back to Harvard even when she became a superstar. Her British accent gave her refusal to be proper an extra glint of mischievousness.

  I came armed with three letters I had found in Karl’s archive and showed them to her, hoping it would coax out whatever she hadn’t wanted to say to me on the phone.

  The first was that 1971 letter of support from Karl.

  The second was a 1975 letter from her to him. She read it out loud.

  “Dear Karl,” it began. “This really is going to be only a very short letter. I am just at the climax (?!) of preparing my paper for Santa Fe.”

  She laughed, a little embarrassed. “I’m very, very personal, aren’t I? A very intimate conversation.”

  She continued reading. In this part of the letter, she narrated an imaginary story between Karl and Gordon Willey, one of the older archaeology professors: “Karl’s attention begins to wander, he thinks of the Great Heights he’s about to attain.”

  She was taken aback by her directness. “I can’t believe I’m writing this to Karl. We must’ve had a very good relationship at that time, where I felt like I could be doing it.” She checked the date of the letter. “This is when he was still promising things.” Karl had assured Ruth that they would try to find a way to turn her appointment into a tenure-track position.

  Then I slid the third letter across the table. I was pretty sure she had never seen it before. Ruth leaned back in her chair to read.

  “The snake,” she said. “I never should have trusted him.”

  It was a 1976 letter from Stephen Williams to Karl in which Stephen reprimanded Karl for his remarks about Ruth to the Permanent Members of the Anthropology department. Apparently Karl’s statements about Ruth’s excavation project and her involvement in it had been so negative that Stephen felt compelled to ask Karl to present a correction.

  “Why would he—” I began to ask.

  “Why would he do that?” she finished my sentence. Because she was coming up to the time when they were going to have to decide about her tenure, she explained.

  “And he was threatened by the idea that you might become tenured?” I still felt like I was missing something. “There was no precipitating moment where your good relationship switched—”

  “Like did he make an advance and I rejected it?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “It’s possible he did and I didn’t know. I’ve always been so naive to those things.” I could almost see her mind moving, making little leaps from one consideration to the next. “Why would he get jealous? He had tenure. He had nothing to lose.”

  She thought more, until she eventually said: “He’s a snake. You know. That’s what he is. Maybe all that opening up to me was all a play or a ploy. I mean in the end, he, um”—her phrasing became staccato, but her voice maintained its volume—“that was suddenly after the evening when our relationship went sour.”

  The 180 from just moments before was jarring. Perhaps she had needed to keep it tightly compartmentalized all these years. Even that day in the café, she was conflicted and careful to qualify that it was only in retrospect that she wondered if she had miscategorized benign behavior in the first place.

  In the fall of 1977, more than a year after Stephen Williams had chastised Karl for his negative statements, Ruth had done Karl a favor by letting an archaeologist colleague of his stay at her apartment. The colleague had a reputation of being difficult—abrasive and insulting when it suited him—and Ruth hadn’t found that to be an exaggeration. The sweat marks on her bedsheets weren’t the worst of the stains he had left behind. Ruth had complained to Karl, and Karl, one night, had come over to say sorry.

  At this point in the story, Ruth’s memory got a little hazy. She wondered whether she had consciously blocked it out. She remembered Karl apologizing for his colleague and then “there was suddenly a moment when that changed, in which he was speaking about my personal life and my future career in ways that seemed overfamiliar and which made me feel uncomfortable, upset, uneasy. I can’t remember anything specific that was said. We were not sitting down, we were standing face-to-face, quite close; he had his back to the window, where it was beginning to get dark, so that he was kind of silhouetted. There was no physical contact, I’m sure of that, but I do remember wanting him out of my apartment.”

  I asked if he had made his support of her promotion seem contingent on her responding a certain way that evening.

  “No,” she said. “There was nothing explicit. No, nothing.”

  Eventually Ruth said it was time for Karl to go. When he left, she still felt she had his support. But after that night, Ruth remembered, “it all went downhill.” Karl “kind of became no longer my friend.”

  A few months later, it was announced that Ruth would not get tenure.

  (Decades later, Karl, too, would remember that evening and a conversation about the tenure process that she may have found anxiety-ridden. But he believed they were still on good terms after it. As for her tenure, “There’s a difference between friendship and the professional responsibilities one has when it comes to that friend.” Plus, her denial was a departmental decision; they voted not to advance her even to the ad hoc committee stage.)

  Ruth could have stayed another academic year, but she left Harvard as quickly as she could. She wrote that letter to Dean Rosovsky but didn’t explain why she was leaving. She never confronted Karl about that evening or about her disappointment in not getting tenure.

  “That’s not what women did then. You move on, find something else,” she said.

  Ruth looked at me as if she had just traveled back from forty years ago and remembered we were there in that café because of Jane. She agreed that Jane’s story was likely a way to warn students and colleagues about Karl. “It doesn’t really help you with understanding what he might have done to Jane but there is a pattern that he’ll suddenly drop you…You know that even if he isn’t the one responsible, it could so easily have been. That’s the kind of person he is.”

  Richard Meadow

  WHEN DETECTIVES ASKED RICHARD MEADOW, who had been to Tepe Yahya with Jim and Jane, about the possibility of tension on the dig in Iran, Richard refused to grant that line of inquiry an inch.

  Detective Davenport asked whether there was any jealousy as a result of finds on the expedition.

  “There certainly was not,” Richard said. He also denied any “woman trouble.”

  “No jealousy existing between—” Davenport began to ask, but Richard answered before he could finish.

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Right,” Davenport said. “Now do you know of any bad feelings which have come up among this group since they returned to Harvard, including yourself?”

  “No.”

  Later, Davenport asked Richard why his hands and legs were shaking.

  “I’m physically nervous,” he said.

  Dan Potts

  THE PERSON I MOST DREADED speaking to was Karl’s former student Dan Potts. (It was his son Morgan who first told me Jane’s story.) Though I always operated as if everything I said was going to end up straight in Karl’s ear, talking to his most loyal protégé felt particularly dangerous. Dan had put together Karl’s festschrift—a collection of essays and remembrances by colleagues, friends, and students, assembled toward the end of a professor’s illustrious career—in honor of his sixty-fifth birthday. Festschrifts were a strange academic tradition, sycophantic and awkward by nature, and Karl’s was no exception. Titled “Ingenious Man, Inquisitive Soul,” it both dripped with adulation and was stuffed with academic publications that doubled as homages.

  Dan Potts’s own essay—“In Praise of Karl”—lauded the professor for fostering an atmosphere “charged with energy, anticipation, and the unabashed enjoyment of intellectual endeavor” and for drawing one into
his “vortex of creativity.” Dan chose as the opening image a photograph of Karl, handsome and smiling, his hair lightly mussed, his pants cuffed. He’s holding up a scale bar against the backdrop of a sandy dune; his sleeves are rolled up past his elbow. The consummate archaeologist at work.

  I emailed Dan under the pretense of speaking about Tepe Yahya since he, too, had spent many years digging there, and I had heard from his son that he was as meticulous about data as Richard Meadow. Morgan wasn’t wrong. Dan was happy to reminisce, and his details were so vivid that I felt like I was right there with him. He told me it was so humid in Bandar Abbas, the closest coastal town, that people would literally wring sweat out of their pants.

  After about half an hour, I eased into talking about Karl by asking what Dan thought about my taxonomy of archaeologists—dividing them into Storytellers like Karl, and Scholars like Richard Meadow, Jim Humphries, and himself. Potts added “Boy Scout” to my categories, but he agreed with my general classification. He also emphatically agreed that Karl was the exemplar Storyteller: “He’s almost the kind of person who would say he’s not going to let a few facts stand in the way of a good story.”

  The conversation broke open almost immediately. Suddenly, this man—who his son had warned me was so put off by gossip that he had never said more than a few words about the Jane Britton story—let fly decades of pent-up anger.

  “When I think about some of the really great scholars who were at Harvard, with whom I could have studied had I not fallen in with him, it just sort of kills me.”

  Dan brought up the festschrift he had compiled for Karl without my needing to ask about it. He said he had volunteered for the job because he felt that if he didn’t do it, no one else would. Even Karl deserved one, he thought. But “I don’t know if I’d do it today,” he said.