Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  Please don’t make definite plans for next year until you see me. I have very definite ideas as to what I want to do and as to what I think will be best for me. Mr. St. John [the headmaster] wants me back here next year, but I don’t think I want to come back and I don’t think it would be best for me. I can’t possibly tell you the things I feel or why I feel them in a letter but I can talk them to you when you come.

  This year for the first time in my life I’ve begin to think. I have done some thinking and reading which has changed my idea about life very considerably. They probably won’t agree with yours for the simple reason that we are of different generations.

  As it turned out, his winter quarter exam grades were not as good as he had hoped, with the worst of them in English, his favorite subject. With graduation approaching, he dove back into his studies and stayed at school to work on weekends.

  Headmaster George St. John wrote Alan’s parents urging them to let him stay on at Choate for a postgraduate year, especially in light of his young age and his promise. He stressed how well Alan had done and what a great joy he was to them. If he remained another year, he could study advanced English and more French, history, biology, art, and music appreciation, and do so on full scholarship because of his “splendid work.” Several of his teachers and the headmaster’s wife also urged him to remain, as he was such a pleasure to teach. But his mother had recently become ill, and Alan put the extra year at Choate aside and proposed forgoing college entrance exams to Harvard to stay at home with her in Dallas. He would study Latin on his own, improve his writing, and learn the techniques of poetry, which he said had “brought me to the brink of the greatest enjoyment of my life.” A year at home was not an acceptable plan to his father, however, but with his wife growing sicker and his financial problems increasing, they worked out a compromise in which Alan would attend the University of Texas at Austin for his freshman year, where he would also be close to home, and then would transfer to Harvard. He graduated from Choate eighth in a senior class of eighty-two students.

  The fall term of 1930 at Texas began badly for Alan. He was bored by his roommate and struggled with a teacher he didn’t like, with the result that his grades in English began to suffer. He loathed the fraternity world, and threw himself into writing a daily column, “In the Day’s News,” for the Daily Texan, for which he selected odd events of the world and wove them into an ironic narrative. This got him selected for membership in Scribblers, the writers’ group, and by the end of the year his grades made him eligible for Phi Beta Sigma, the freshman honorary society. He wrote a few editorials for the paper, but resigned when the editor refused to publish his editorial against the pope’s encyclical opposing birth control.

  At the start of the spring term of 1931 he moved to the house of a mathematics professor, where he roomed with Walter Goldschmidt, who would later become one of the leading anthropologists in the United States. Goldschmidt recalled meeting Alan and discovering that he was “frighteningly smart, probably classifiable as a genius,” though he also remembered him suddenly exploding one night while studying and crying out, “Damn it! The hardest thing I’ve had to learn is that I’m not a genius.”

  The students Alan called his friends set themselves apart from the campus: among them were Charles L. Black, who went on to became a professor of constitutional law at Yale and Columbia, and was a major figure in the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case; and Harold Preece, who later became a folklorist, author of western books, a political radical, and a man who dared to criticize Zora Neale Hurston for the conservatism of her racial politics. “Race and culture were central topics of discussion among the students we knew then,” Goldschmidt said, “and Texas was at the bottom on those issues at the time.”

  Music was Alan’s entrée into the lives of black people, as it was for many like-minded people his age at the start of the 1930s. Whatever the barriers that kept the black community separated from the white, music was a ticket in for the outsider, and people of color were hardly surprised that whites would be drawn to their arts. Alan first found his way to Austin’s black-owned record shops and, hearing the music from the loudspeakers that played the latest songs to passersby, began buying blues and religious recordings, especially those of Blind Willie Johnson, a street singer whose heroically strained voice and descents into false bass were the most passionately intense singing he’d ever heard. He wore out that first Johnson record, he said, carrying it around with him wherever he went: “It wasn’t a matter of folklore. It was the way I felt.”

  He took his dates to the black section of town to visit the home of Ruby, “a woman who played blues guitar and whose husband was a powerful blues pianist. We drank bootleg beer, and listened to the music with the blinds drawn. [She] represented the real South to me.”

  In visiting Ruby’s place, of course, I was risking expulsion, but in that I was no different from a whole generation of southerners who have gone across the tracks for adventure and for friendly contact with the race they do not wish at all to shun. I was a part of a generation of college students who furtively called at Ruby’s little unpainted three room house, and heard the real blues.

  I used to try to get Ruby to talk, to tell me how she felt about the town and her life there. She could only throw back her head and laugh long, long, and show her mouthful of gold teeth and tell me, “Lissen, boy, you wants to know too much. You like the man had the finest Jersey cow in the world, give him more milk than any other cow even been heard of. Then he get the idea he want to send that cow to college. But you think she would go up and register. That old cow balk and stay right where she belong. She appreciate herself just the way she was.... Now wouldn’t you ... like to send out for more beer? I got another blues you never heard yet.”

  In late May, his mother died suddenly. “I was numb,” said Alan. “It was like a natural disaster or as if fire had suddenly burned up the whole town. I couldn’t cry, couldn’t express any feeling. I was struck with shock and horror.” His father was even more distraught. The Depression had cut into his bond sales, and he had been suffering from various ailments. Following his wife’s death he spent much of the summer in bed, with Alan tending to him.

  Alan’s grades for the first year were A’s in every subject except for a C in English in the fall term, which he received before he could transfer to another teacher’s class. By then he had met some of the philosophy faculty and students, and he wrote his friend Mike Bullard that he was thinking of staying at the University of Texas because he had been converted to Nietzsche. But his father remained set on his entering Harvard, and began writing his own former teachers, Le Baron Briggs, now dean of Harvard College, and Lyman Kittredge, to ask for their aid in helping Alan transfer there for the fall 1931 semester. The problem was that Alan needed a scholarship, for which transfers were not eligible. So on a visit to Harvard in March, Alan had sought advice from Kittredge, then applied to Harvard and was given the entrance examination. Shortly afterward, Alan received a letter from Henry Pennypacker of the Committee on Admission at Harvard informing him that he would soon receive a letter of acceptance. A few days later he learned that by some creative accounting Harvard had found a way around their rules on transfers’ scholarships and that he would after all be awarded $850 toward tuition and board—enough that with some care it would get him through the year.

  He entered Harvard with confidence, bolstered by his successes at Choate and Texas, and by having met some of the key faculty through his father. He was admitted as a sophomore, with the proviso that he take one additional course a year in order to assure that he would graduate in three years. By then, Alan had made up his mind to become a philosophy major, especially as he was now at one of the centers of philosophical thought. His teachers included C. I. Lewis, a pragmatist, a philosopher who also had a passion for aesthetics, and one of the leading logicians of the time. The courses Alan took included “An Introduction to Philosophy” and “A Theory of Knowledge,” in w
hich he wrote papers on “Theories of Value” and “Bertrand Russell’s Lectures on Logical Atomism” and read deeply into George Herbert Mead, whose social philosophy and personal engagement with political issues appealed to him. Alan’s adviser was Raphael Demos, a specialist in classical philosophy, with whom he had a yearlong tutorial. Continuing a friendship he had made with a Texas faculty member, Alan also did an informal long-distance reading course with Professor Albert P. Brogan on Plato and the Pre-Socratics. He made a half-hearted stab at campus life at Harvard by getting a goldfish and a white rat as pets for his room and writing odes to them, as well as by attending a Gilbert and Sullivan festival and seeing Aimee Semple McPherson preach at a revival in Boston. He also tried out, unsuccessfully, for the swim team.

  He knew his way around, having visited Cambridge and Boston several times, but now he wandered more widely, especially into the ethnic neighborhoods and the slums, poking around in restaurants and shops. He increasingly withdrew from the campus itself, seemingly unimpressed by Harvard’s aura. In his letters home, Alan said that he found many of his classmates detached and shallow, and he judged some of the faculty as reactionary and “warped by their environment.” His daily life was so finely detailed in these letters that his description of a champagne party with three Vassar girls incited his father to ask him to please exclude “the sordid details of college life.” But Alan insisted that he wrote about everything that was happening to him only out of respect and closeness to his father, and even hinted that his grades would be disappointing. In truth his father was sometimes so moved by his observations of Boston life that he forwarded one of Alan’s letters to the dean of Harvard and asked that it be considered in the face of his falling grades.

  However, his letters soon began to dwindle, and then stopped altogether, leading his father to write Professor Pennypacker and ask him to talk to Alan and give him encouragement with his studies. Pennypacker replied that he would speak to him, and when John heard nothing back he wrote again, and learned that the professor had sent a note asking Alan to come by to see him but had never heard from him. When Alan did begin writing home again, his letters seemed distant and his references to campus life began to fade, while his talk about social unrest and communism increased.

  Now his father stoped writing. It was a while before Alan learned that Republic National Bank and Trust Company had started to founder, like other banks in the Depression, and John had been ordered to sell the bank’s bonds at any price, to anyone who would buy them. But there were no buyers. Even worse, he had to face associates and friends in Dallas whom he had encouraged to buy these securities, which were now worth only half what they had paid for them. John was forced to accept an unpaid leave of absence that fall. He told no one that he had lost his job, went home to bed in an empty house, and quietly suffered a breakdown that lasted months.

  When the seriousness of the situation became clear to Alan, he wrote his father about a summer plan that he and some students at MIT had for selling magazine subscriptions, something his brother John had once done with considerable success. He hoped his plan to follow his brother’s example in becoming self-sustaining might cheer his father. The extent of John’s needs was becoming a burden in the face of his own doubts about his future in the university. Just before Christmas, he wrote home with another idea that he thought might solve his father’s problems and, incidentally, also get him out of Harvard:

  For your own good and happiness I believe that your ballad-collecting and distributing per the lecture platform is the best was to earn money. With your uncanny ability to make friends with anything and anybody and your quiet, friendly way with folk less prosperous in life, and your own intense enjoyment of people and what they’ve got to say it seems to me that you are made before you start in ballad-collecting. You know more about ... folk-lore than anyone else.... If you think I could help you with it, let me lay off Harvard for a year and help you get it done. We would both enjoy it and I might be able to be of some use to you.

  John Jr. had been working for his father’s welfare as well, and had encouraged him to let his son make arrangements to get him back on the road lecturing again. John Jr., who had also recently lost his own job in the City National Bank in Corpus Christi when it went into receivership, moved home, offering to be his father’s driver if he did decide to go on tour. That plan would enable Alan to stay in school.

  In February the Scholarship Committee at Harvard turned down Alan’s request for financial support for the following year because of his grades. Though his marks in mathematics and Greek were A’s, he had earned only C’s in philosophy and physics. He had successfully petitioned to transfer into the physics course out of Professor Kittredge’s English class, in which he had a C average, an embarrassment to both himself and his father, but he was still required to attend the class without credit. Kittredge was quoted endlessly by John Sr., but Alan had not found him the lion of American literature that his father remembered. In fact, he thought the professor had cast his father as a “superior inferior” by telling him that he should collect folklore but not analyze it. Alan found himself sitting through Kittredge’s class bored and resentful.

  Just after midterm exams Alan contracted pneumonia and was sent to the university’s medical facility to recover. He asked his father for permission to go to Bermuda for his health over spring vacation, arguing that he could afford it with his magazine earnings. And if that were not possible, he said, he would rent a car and “go to Kentucky and investigate the conditions of the coal-miners there.”

  Harlan County, in eastern Kentucky, his proposed destination, had become a pilgrimage site for students on the left, much like Mississippi and Alabama would be during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. Alan was now the head of a student organization at Harvard that was raising money to send the miners food, and he worked his way around nearby colleges, collecting from them as well. In 1931, labor organizing by the National Miners’ Union had seriously resumed in Harlan in the wake of the Depression, and a strike had been called. The mine owners, insisting that Communists were behind the organizing, resisted their efforts with armed force, evicting miners’ families from company houses and bombing the homes of those who refused to move. If the local press dared to write about the situation, they too were threatened. In April 1931 Theodore Dreiser invited a group of writers and intellectuals to his home in New York City to urge them to help, and the result was the formation of the Writers’ Committee to visit Harlan and see for themselves, a group that included Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, and Malcolm Cowley. When they arrived in Kentucky and began gathering testimony, all of them were arrested. In 1932 another writers’ committee was organized for an investigative visit and the mission of providing food for those out of work, this time including Edmund Wilson, Waldo Frank, John Hammond, newspaper writers like Mary Heaton Vorse, and newsreel photographers. Many of them were again arrested, but this time the events were filmed and spread across the country by reporters. It was this trip that Alan had proposed to join, but in the end he was unable to go.

  When he wrote his father of his spring plans he repeated his wish to go collecting with him in the coming summer. He cheerfully added, “By that time I shall be partially soaked and soaking in theoretical communism. My arguments will then floor you, pin you down, and hog tie you. I shall be able to run Johnny up a tree in theoretical economics and Johnny, I am sure, will be able to run me up a tree in practical economics by means of his hard, hard hand.”

  He followed this letter with another:

  Dear Father,

  This summer you need me to drive you to your lectures. I shall do that gladly. But next summer I want you to help me get a job on a boat—(manual labor preferred) and ship me off to Shanghai, the Mediterranean, or India. I feel the desire to do something with my hands. As I look at these sheltered Harvard professors and the doubly-sheltered Harvard students, I think their life is very warped, that it lacks the exuberance and sharp brief pai
n that comes from laboring with other men to move a ship or build a ship or somehow fit parts of the world together to be useful. What would I do, I wonder, if a world ... war destroyed our delicately balanced civilization or if Communism came and abruptly asked me to produce something for my soup and black crust? My environment, if changed, ever so slightly, would devour me.

  An epistemologist, a man who knows what terms like “togetherness” & “time” really mean (if they mean anything) would be the first to starve, the last to get a strong woman to help him and to bear him children.

  I have learned this year at Harvard to converse with apparent learning on any deep subject; I have learned some of the complicated technique of the game of philosophy; I have learned to be obscurely witty and superficially profound in company (that is what the present tension-strung generation admires most in conversation); I have even learned to act like a perfect ass on occasion (some bitter people will say that I have needed no practice); But all these things only serve to repress all that is animal and frank in me. These things teach me little about how one can live with the people the world is made up of; I only learn to despise such things. I turn into a pale shadow lively only when intellectual winds blow down the plane of learning. I satisfy none of man’s primary needs: physical labor, strong drinks, food, and women. Rather am I becoming so highly conditioned that soon they will all be too strong for my palette? Self consciousness is developed to the point of frenzy, for here one is either stupid, self-conscious, or a man of force (genius).