Because I Come from a Crazy Family

by Edward M. Hallowell

  “But the actual line in the play,” Mr. T. jumped in when I brought it up to him, “is not ‘Hell is other people,’ it’s ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres,’ which is not exactly the same thing. Sartre was getting at something more subtle, the impossibility of knowing yourself except through the distorted mirror of other people. And even if he did mean it the other way,” Mr. T. went on, “that’s not surprising, because Sartre’s childhood was pretty difficult. His father died when he was two, and he was raised by his mother’s father and his mother, who was ridiculously intrusive and overly affectionate. Plus, Sartre was short, ugly, and walleyed. Not a happy beginning.”

  “So you think his bleak philosophy is just because of his unhappy childhood?”

  “No,” Mr. T. replied. “Sartre was a genius and a great philosopher. I’m just saying his childhood must have colored his outlook on life. Just as your childhood has colored yours, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I’m sure it has,” I said, “I’m just not sure exactly how. My childhood was such a mixed bag of really good and kinda bad.”

  “You’re writing about it well,” Mr. T. said.

  “Thanks,” I replied. He had no idea how much praise from him meant to me. Or maybe he did.

  35.

  More than any other single event, the war in Vietnam dominated our teens and twenties. We didn’t understand why we had to go off to die. Some refused to go; far more just went, obeying the call, doing their duty, serving their country, making the sacrifice, whatever slogan rang true. About fifty-eight thousand of us died there, along with about a million Vietnamese.

  It wasn’t like World War II, when people faked their age and concealed medical problems so that they could go fight Hitler. Back then, like just about everyone in his generation, my father couldn’t wait to go.

  For better or worse, we were raised in a country that valued freedom and independence of thought, so when the government told us we should lay down our lives to fight a war that made no sense—no Pearl Harbor, no Hitler, no Nazis—we didn’t buy the propaganda. We didn’t fear the domino effect: the idea that if the United States didn’t prevail in Vietnam, totalitarianism would soon engulf us.

  In the 1960s, we began to learn of the whopping lies used to justify sending us off to war, and we were aghast. (I recall the great line from the film Casablanca, when the corrupt Captain Louis Renault says, “I am shocked, shocked to find there’s gambling going on in here!”) Waking up to the ways of the world, we protested. We learned why Vietnam was an unjust war, and when we protested, LBJ dug in so stubbornly that he lost the New Hampshire primary to Eugene McCarthy. Promising he would end this war, the idealistic candidate appealed to us kids.

  After his embarrassing defeat in New Hampshire, LBJ dropped out of the race. I will never forget the triumph and exhilaration I felt during my senior year at Exeter when LBJ announced on national TV: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

  The Vietnam War ripped through our nation, lit up families like a house fire, and set one generation against the next, in some instances permanently.

  My father had rushed to fight in World War II, captained a destroyer escort, fought battles against U-boats, and returned a hero, having given all he had for his country. “All he had,” it turns out, was an awful lot. The war cost him his sanity, his marriage, and a daily life with his three boys.

  My brother Ben attended the Naval Academy, graduated in 1960, became a pilot and flew jets from, ironically enough, the aircraft carrier Wasp before becoming a landing signal officer, the guy who waves in planes as they come in to land if the carrier is listing too much in rough seas. It’s a dangerous job but one my brother did well.

  Given the family history, then, what my mother said when I told her I didn’t want to go to Vietnam should not have surprised or hurt me as much as it did. “So you’re a coward,” she said. That was unlike her, and it caught me off guard.

  I don’t remember my reply but I felt completely misunderstood, as so many of my generation did when we were dismissed as cowards, draft dodgers, and un-American. Even the peace sign was ridiculed as resembling the footprint of a chicken.

  36.

  Like many others, I was caught up in the optimism of the Age of Aquarius, in the notion of universal love, and, naïve as ever, I was starting to envision a Big Change whereby people would stop trying to dominate others but rather come together in peace, harmony, and love.

  We were not all high on drugs. I actually hated the way pot made me feel, so I didn’t use it, and LSD scared me too much to try. My drugs were alcohol and nicotine. I developed a bad cigarette habit that would take twenty years to break. So it wasn’t drugs that made me see the world so rhapsodically.

  It was hope, the triumph of hope over thousands of years of human experience. I didn’t want to tear down “the system,” I was not a political activist. I really just wanted to take advantage of what Harvard had to offer, find a girl who liked me enough to go to bed with me, and find a way to get on with my life.

  Still, I did share that vision that we were going to change the basic conditions of life, never mind how, we just were going to do it. “You’ll see,” I’d say to older and wiser people, “a big change is coming.”

  I smile at myself now, at all of us believers and dreamers back then. But while I smile, it’s also true that my work as a doctor and psychiatrist harks back to what most people would call the craziness that got going inside of me, inside of millions of us, during those years. It rests on the power of one word: love. It was spoken so much then that it became hackneyed and trivial. It’s not spoken so much anymore.

  Some took the vision several steps further. Full of righteous rage, acting as if they owned a monopoly on truth, bullying the rest of us with the certitude characteristic of fanatics, they started making demands or else. One of my roommates had become active in SDS, while other friends told me I should get off my sorry butt and join the movement.

  I had no clue how deep the anger ran with some, on both sides, or to what lengths some would go, until Wednesday, April 9, 1969. Just after spring break, a group of students broke in and physically took over University Hall, the main administration building in Harvard Yard, designed by Charles Bulfinch, class of 1781. My dorm, Thayer, the same dorm Uncle Jimmy had lived in, was catty-corner, about fifty feet away. I had a bird’s-eye view.

  Not being political by nature, to me it seemed stupid to assault a building and the people in it as a way of protesting the war.

  My SDS roommate told me I should join in and take over University Hall, but I didn’t see that was worth getting kicked out of college. After I turned him down, he called me a coward. So I had my mother calling me a coward for not going to Vietnam, and my roommate, who’d been my friend all the way back to Exeter, called me a coward for not invading University Hall.

  I can still see the students escorting the deans out of that building, actually physically carrying one out, Archie Epps. A female demonstrator got up in his face and said, “You are responsible for killing people in Vietnam.” Epps replied, “I am not responsible for killing people in Vietnam. You are using methods here that I thought you objected to—violence and force.” The young woman’s response: “What the fuck do you know about it?”1

  Epps was among the first African American deans at Harvard and became my friend decades later. Turns out he’d just returned from his honeymoon a few days before being physically evicted from University Hall.

  The protesters’ demands, all aimed at getting us out of Vietnam or mitigating Harvard’s influence in Cambridge, were nailed on the door of Harvard president Nathan Pusey’s house and posted on trees around Harvard Yard: Expel ROTC from Harvard, divest from companies that in any way supported the war, lower rents in buildings owned or controlled by Harvard, and freeze rents in other buildings.

  We didn’t have to wait long to see what happened, and we should not have been surprised, had we
any idea of who Pusey was. A year or so before, he had issued a statement regarding student protesters: “Safe within the sanctuary of an ordered society, dreaming of glory, they play at being revolutionaries and fancy themselves rising to positions of command atop the debris as the structures of society come crashing down.” Pusey, apparently feeling that he had to act immediately and decisively because the students in University Hall had unlimited access to all manner of private records concerning faculty and administrators, not to mention a trove of other private material, made what in retrospect was a colossal mistake. He ordered a massive police invasion of Harvard.

  With a few hundred other students scattered throughout Harvard Yard, I stood outside my dorm, feet away from the center of the action. At three in the morning, under the cover of darkness, lit only by the nightlights of the Yard, some four hundred troops moved en masse into a place where they did not belong, and yet had been welcomed in by Harvard’s president, to perform an action neither they nor we understood. They were paid to do it, we were paying tuition to watch it, and none of it made any sense.

  Uniformed state troopers and Cambridge police joined forces as they advanced through the gates across the Yard from University Hall in a terrifying, widening phalanx.

  They were dressed in full riot gear, wearing helmets with visors, jodhpurs, boots, armed with pistols, sporting Plexiglas shields and billy clubs, along with mace, tear gas, and God only knows what other armaments. It was overkill in the extreme.

  As they got closer, I moved up the steps of Thayer Hall along with my friends. I didn’t want to get in the way of a billy club or get maced. We’d been advised to carry wet handkerchiefs in case the police used tear gas, which indeed they did.

  The ghoulish image still haunts me of that dimly lit bluish block of troopers and officers, faceless and inhuman behind their helmets, visors, shields, and gloves, marching mechanically, like a vast bubbling blob, pressing down relentlessly, unstoppably upon the gray stone University Hall in the dead of night. Their mission: to confront, overwhelm, and remove the resolute but ragtag, hapless students who were linking arms in a quixotic attempt to prevent this massive police force from squashing them. Foolish, reckless thinking, passionate intensity, and opposite poles of idealism drove both sides, but only one side had physical strength and force.

  Soon, police were clubbing and handcuffing students, dragging the intruders out of University Hall, as mayhem escalated while we looked on in horror. The police arrested 122 students.

  On the spot, a new cause was born; the students who were clubbed became martyrs. Most of the student body united in opposition to this police action in Harvard Yard.

  The psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim famously said that we students were working out our Oedipal strivings by attacking the Harvard administration, a defensible interpretation, albeit condescending and incomplete. The injustice of the Vietnam War certainly motivated the students, as well as whatever Oedipal issues were in play.

  But what feelings, I wonder, what conflicts was Nathan Pusey working out by sending storm troopers into the heart of the institution he was entrusted to care for?

  The following Monday, ten thousand students gathered in Harvard Stadium and voted to close the university down by going on strike. I didn’t understand how we could go on strike, since we were not employees but rather paid money to attend the college. Nonetheless, I joined in the demonstration and voted, with almost everyone else, to strike.

  During that strike, which would not last long, we met in groups, or we slept late, or both. Not wanting to cease teaching, English professor William Alfred gave a memorable discussion of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” under the trees in front of Kirkland House, which I attended.

  Alfred was a beloved professor, one whom my brother Johnny had raved about. He was the author of a 1965 Broadway hit, written in blank verse, called Hogan’s Goat, in which Faye Dunaway got her start. His reading of “Prufrock” was my first exposure to him.

  A poet himself, he read the poem almost as if singing. Pausing after bits of reading, he’d offer explication: “Prufrock is a man who is unable to love, that’s the heart of this poem.” As I would learn, Bill Alfred brought almost everything back to issues of love and loss.

  A week after, another large gathering of students convened in Harvard Stadium. We voted to suspend the strike and get on with classes.

  In the aftermath, one dean had a stroke and left Harvard, another left for ten years before returning, and twenty-three students were expelled. The terms of ROTC were changed significantly at Harvard, as were several policies regarding governance and community relations.

  In a humorous contrast, in reading the history of political activism in colleges, I learned that among the first, if not the first, student protest on a college campus in North America also took place at Harvard. It was in 1766. Despite the fact that the dining hall called the Commons was “the largest and most elaborate culinary establishment in New England,” the food served to the students—or the scholars, as they were called—was “as mean and insalubrious as ever, the puddings so hard-boiled they could be kicked.”2 The worst offender, though, was the butter. Imported from Ireland and stored for months, it became rancid. In the so-called Great Butter Rebellion, Asa Dunbar, future grandfather of Henry David Thoreau, caused a disturbance in the Commons by protesting to a tutor the poor quality of the butter. The tutor dismissed him, Dunbar did not take no for an answer, and one incident led to another, including hearings before an admin board, convictions, and suspensions, more hearings, and upper-echelon discussions. The rebellion dragged on for over a week, with some hundred scholars threatening to transfer, perish the thought, to Yale. Dunbar would write an epic poem about the rebellion in which one of the dramatis personae said, “Behold our Butter stinketh and we cannot eat thereof; now give us, we pray thee Butter that stinketh not!”

  * * *

  1. “The Occupation,” Harvard Alumni Bulletin, April 28, 1969, 22.

  2. Andrew Schlesinger, Veritas: Harvard College and the American Experience (New York: Ivan R. Dee, 2007).

  37.

  The only time I ever saw my father actively psychotic was when I was a sophomore at Harvard. One of my friends, Dave Halvorsen, and I decided to go on a canoeing trip on the Rangeley Lakes in Maine. En route, we stopped to spend a night at my dad’s and stepmother’s house in Derry, New Hampshire. At the time, Dad was teaching public school, the job he held until he died in 1978.

  Dave and I spent a pleasant evening with Dad and Hope, the ghostly, strange woman he’d married after meeting her in a mental hospital. The next morning, when we got up, Dad had left for work, as had Hope. But Dad left me a message written in spit on the mirror in the living room. It read, TAKE THIS MONEY AND HAVE FUN. On the table below the mirror was three hundred dollars in cash.

  Two facts tipped me off that something was wrong. First of all, Dad was one of this world’s tightest cheapskates. He never would have given me thirty dollars, let alone three hundred, were he in his right mind.

  Second was the writing on the mirror in spit. I remembered my mother telling me she could always tell when Dad was about to go crazy because he would start leaving her messages written in spit on the bathroom mirror.

  Not knowing what to do, I did nothing. I took the money, and Dave and I went off on our canoeing trip. When I returned to college, Jamie told me that Dad was in the Bedford VA hospital.

  The next day I borrowed a friend’s car and drove to Bedford, about a half-hour drive from Cambridge. Once I located the hospital and parked, I got out of the car in a daze. I was about to visit my father in a mental hospital. I didn’t know what to expect, or how to feel. Part of me felt curious, part of me sad, most of me confused.

  I was directed to the locked unit, a term I’d never heard of outside a jail. “Why is it locked?”

  “Because the people there can be dangerous and they can try to escape,” the woman behind the reception counter told me. “But don’t w
orry, you’ll be safe. And your father is getting excellent care.”

  “Thanks.” I appreciated the reassurance that I was not in danger more than that woman knew.

  I rang the bell next to the door of the locked unit. It looked like a doorbell, a black button in a brass saucer. After a few minutes, an athletic young man dressed in white opened the door. “I’m here to visit Mr. Hallowell. I am his son.”

  “Sure. C’mon in. He’s doing real good. You can take him out for a walk, if you’d like to.”

  He was sitting in a chair across the room, smoking a cigarette. Walking toward him, I called, “Dad!”

  He stood up and shook my hand.

  “How are you doing?” I asked.

  “They tell me I’m doing pretty well. I was stupid. I went off my lithium. Stupid.”

  Soon we were outside, walking around the beautiful grounds of the VA hospital. It was October, the kind of sunny, brisk autumn day New England produces better than anywhere else.

  We stood beneath a tree that looked perfect for climbing, with many available branches, when my dad produced a length of rope from one of his pockets. “I’m not supposed to have this, you know. They could take away my privileges. But I want to know, do you think I should hang myself?”

  “No!” I said. “Of course not! Why would you ask such a stupid question? Jesus Christ, Dad.”

  “I’d like to know how it feels to die,” he said.

  “C’mon, Dad. If you die you won’t know what it’s like to die because you’ll be dead.”

  “I’ve always had it in the back of my mind. I once asked Benjie if he’d like me to capsize the boat when we were out sailing in rough seas. Would have drowned us both. He was like you, said hell no, Dad. I asked him why not? He said ‘Because I want to live.’ ”

  “Good for him, Dad. I’m glad you didn’t capsize the boat. You’re not making a lot of sense, you know. Maybe we should go back inside.”