Mary McCarthy

by Thomas Mallon

  The extremists of the progressive side found nothing to criticize in this statement; either a return to first principles or no field-period at all was the slogan that governed their voting, and here they were in conflict with the moderates of their own tendency, who felt obliged to defend the field-period as it had actually evolved, abuses, academic papers and all, against this two-pronged attack, to show how, in certain circumstances, the preparation of a note-topic might contribute to self-development, in short, to invoke the arguments of traditionalist education and disparage the very axioms on which Jocelyn was founded. The whole question was further complicated by a material factor: one of Jocelyn’s great attractions for its faculty was precisely the winter field-period, the four free recuperative weeks in deadly February which could be spent in travel, literary composition, private research, or simply in rest and enjoyment. The less scrupulous of both sides, therefore, making up every year a plurality, voted shamelessly for any motion that would save their precious vacation. Those who went so far as to admit that the student got nothing from the field-period justified it on the grounds that some hiatus was necessary for a faculty drained to the lees by the exactions of individual instruction. “I don’t care what you call it,” declared Ivy Legendre of the Theatre (Theater?) Department, in her deep, bellicose, lesbian voice. “Call it Faculty Rest or Florida Special, if you want, but get the little bastards out of my yellow hair.” Mrs. Masterson of the Psychology Department, a spinsterish, anxious little widow with a high, thin voice, had compiled some very interesting figures on the relation of rest-periods to efficiency in factory work which she proffered to the faculty as relevant to the “vital discussion we are having”—it was this same little lady who had made a comparative study of the wages of teachers and garage-attendants in her busy Hudson coupé.

  Henry Mulcahy, naturally, had electioneered for the field-period with white, bitter, tight-drawn lips, smiles of commendation for its supporters, glances of hatred for its enemies. Though he did not believe at all in learning through doing or the instrumental approach, he felt the issue as an extremely personal one and quarreled with his friend, Alma Fortune, who deprecated the field-period on principle; he was persuaded that she was trying maliciously to snatch from him a long-held, inalienable possession. To him it was an issue of immediate loyalty or disloyalty, and when he spoke, hissingly, of “the enemies of the field-period,” it was as though the vacation were a person under threat of physical attack. He was everywhere at once during the crucial period, behind the scenes caucusing with the scientists whom he had despised but with whom he now discovered more than one common aim, in corridors buttonholing middle-of-the-roaders, on the telephone, in a sibilant whisper, lest the party-wire be listening, at the door of the faculty meeting, adjuring, fortifying, counting the number present in the chamber and how they were likely to vote. When it was over and the faculty voted, as usual, for the field-period loosely construed, he had an exalted sense of public service, as if by superhuman effort and by not counting the cost to self, he had averted from the college a danger of which it was largely unconscious.

  In the same way, but on the opposite side of the fence, he had been busy in the undercover campaign against individual instruction, which just at this time was becoming the subject of complaint. On the virtue of small classes, everyone was agreed, but the more controversial part of the Jocelyn program, the so-called major project, or trial major project, had not worked out in practice quite according to Hoyle and was open, in fact, to the same kind of objections that had been made against the winter field-period. In brief, the system was this: the student was supposed to spend one hour a week with a tutor in his major field, this tutorial hour being the center of his education, accounting, theoretically, for one-fourth of his academic work and requiring a minimum of eight hours of preparation. This latter provision, the student, like all students everywhere, interpreted very freely: he put in as few hours as he could get away with. But the practicality of hoodwinking the tutor varied with different departments and thus gave rise to inequalities. For example, in sculpture, music, painting, or drama, and to some extent in physics and chemistry and zoology, the student was obliged to check in with the instructor for the requisite hours of studio or laboratory work and risked academic failure if he were not at least physically on the premises and engaged in a show of work. With the so-called “heavy” reading subjects, the situation was altogether different. A tutor carrying anywhere from six to eleven tutees—for the concentration varied from department to department—was in no position really to check up on how much reading was done, since each advisee or tutee was working, supposedly, in a different corner of a very wide field, a corner chosen by himself in accordance with his special interests. Thus a teacher of philosophy could not keep up with Heraclitus, Popper, Freddy Ayer, Pascal, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and James, say, all in a single week, nor a teacher of literature with Richardson, James T. Farrell, Ben Jonson, Dos Passos, Horace, Zola, Gogol, Longinus on the Sublime. However well or little he had known these authors once, he was simply not up to the detailed questioning and discussion required to keep a student half-way up to scratch. The same was true of history and, to a lesser extent, of economics and political science, whose bibliographies were somewhat shorter. What happened, therefore, in practice was that students with applied art or science majors tended to gold-brick on their reading courses, and students with reading majors neglected their major project in favor of time spent in studio or laboratory in connection with an ordinary course. This difficulty appeared to be inherent in the system and provoked many departmental jealousies, with the scientists and applied-art people taking a superior line (“We can get work from our majors; why not you?”), so that irritation with individual instruction was concentrated largely in the humanistic studies and was tinctured with a sense of being misprized. The students, it was angrily noted, had been made to feel by the whole muscular progressive approach that reading was somehow bad for them and put on very touching and pathetic airs when a solid assignment in history or the novel was set before them.

  But this was only one aspect of the question. In principle, the choice of subject within the field was left entirely up to the student. Within the realm of his major interest, he was at liberty to select any writer, period, movement, or phenomenon that struck his personal fancy. He could concentrate narrowly on a single exemplar or range over a whole epoch; he could study monotheism, Egyptian burial customs, Marx, Roman coins, land enclosure, English town life in the sixteenth century, the Maccabeean movement, the treatment of animals in primitive society, the history of absolutism, the phenomenological philosophers, war novels, Polynesian culture-heroes, Kafka, symbolism, naturalism, the rise of mercantilism, Steinbeck—anything he chose. The catalogue, which in some respects had not been altered since the founder’s day, contained an alluring account of this freedom and its practical effects on hitherto unresponsive clay, written up rather in the manner of the old dynamic advertisement, “They laughed at me when I sat down to the piano.” The classic case cited was that of a boy of religious temperament who was sent to Jocelyn after he had flunked out of two other colleges; his only interest was playing the organ in the chapel; after four years at Jocelyn, he was able to graduate, well up toward the middle of his class, having devoted his major project to a study of the influence of organ-music on eighteenth-century poetry. This manuscript, three times rewritten with the help of his tutor, was preserved in the library, together with the thesis of the girl who had come to Jocelyn unwillingly, wanting only to become a vet, and had finally made a niche for herself by comparing the role of the animal-as-magic-helper in Russian and German fairy-tales. Another boy (in this case a highly gifted student), fifteen years old, having an affair with a twenty-year-old girl, did a legendary paper not mentioned in the catalogue on the Older Woman in Stendhal and Benjamin Constant. A girl with a prostitute complex, so she maintained, had been helped to marry by studying her type in Manon.

  Other example
s, less curious, convinced the average entrant that he was not only going to be encouraged to express his individual bent, but that if he did not already have some personality-defining interest he had better work one up fast. Yet within the first few weeks he discovered that actuality did not jibe with these fancies—to his bewilderment he found himself pursuing a study, say, of Katherine Anne Porter instead of writing the radio serial he had come to college to do. Further and worse, when he went to the library to take out Flowering Judas, he learned from the librarian that all ten copies were out: Mr. Van Tour, his tutor, was giving it in Contemporary Literature, and several of his other tutees were making it their special interest. The librarian kindly offered to lend his personal Modern Library copy (he had done the same thing last year for several of Mr. Van Tour’s students), and he also recommended an article by Mr. Van Tour in Prairie Schooner on “Regional Elements in the Work of K.A.P.”

  Were the boy to change to Mr. Furness, he might have the same experience with Kafka; to Dr. Mulcahy, with Joyce. If lucky, last year he might have got old Mr. Endicott, a veteran of the department, now retired, who would let him study anything he pleased and report on it, while the old man smoked his pipe in comfort, with his hearing-aid turned off. Except for certain younger teachers, like Miss Rejnev, who made much of being conscientious, the faculty, in practice, had arrived at a quiet gentlemen’s agreement whereby each teacher offered two or three specialties, a limited choice, or else let the student roam, unsupervised, to some salt-lick of his own choosing. A student who did the latter was likely to get a high mark in Spontaneity but to rank low in Effort, Ability to Use the Tools of the Discipline, and Lack of Prejudice. The better students, in general, adjusted themselves without repining to what the faculty had to offer, pointing out to their juniors that it was better to allow Mr. Van Tour to teach you what he knew than what he didn’t, patently; but the poorer students complained constantly of having to study things in which they were not “interested,” i.e., those who had no real interests and no capacity for absorption but only passing whims with which they quickly grew bored felt genuinely deprived and disenfranchised at having to study a subject which someone else also was studying. They viewed the course of studies as a tray of sweetmeats held out before their greedy and yet suspicious eyes and cried out in fury when the tray was whisked away from them, still gluttonously hesitating, or when they were forced to accept a piece that another child had nibbled.

  The effect of these sulky accusations was to make a section of the faculty wish to withdraw from the catalogue all claims to individual instruction and to have advisees in the reading courses double up in the tutorial hour, as they were already doing in sciences and languages, without anybody’s saying anything to forbid it. But this proposal, though practical in one way, was in another sense, as everybody ought to have known, totally fanciful and heedless, since it was obvious that only individual instruction could justify the high tuition, which alone kept the college going. Hence the President and those close to the budgetary problem felt a real choler rise in them when anyone had the temerity to broach such a suggestion. To the men at the helm, in this hour of peril (the President, like all heads of institutions, was addicted to the nautical comparison), this was not a matter for free discussion, but savored, rather, of willfulness or mutiny on the high seas. And his face darkened as he said it; he would entertain no argument on the point. For he not only believed with all his heart in the merits of individual instruction but knew this belief to be necessary to his own and the college’s survival, so that those who questioned it seemed to him true destroyers. The perfect college they hinted at might exist on paper but it would never attract students, for it would have no selling-point, no gimmick, as they said in advertising, which for the unendowed or virtually unendowed college was the very heart, the pump, the ticker.

  Therefore, despite personal friendship, President Hoar experienced a nettled impatience with Miss Rejnev and other teachers of her ilk who were too stubbornly principled, on the one hand, and too eager for self-improvement, on the other, not to allow their tutees an absolutely free hand and indulge their own intellectual curiosity on the college time. He would not listen to criticism of the system from people who had no sense of proportion in the application of it; Miss Rejnev, Mrs. Fortune, and certain other members of the Literature department drove themselves too hard out of sheer whimsicality and caprice—some might even call it perversity—and then put the blame on the method, which others could handle with ease. And to a certain extent, President Hoar’s appraisal was correct.

  Although it was true that these critics of individual instruction were among the few who practiced it literally, their motives were somewhat dubious—did they really wish to make individual instruction succeed or to show that it could not do so? Second, did they really dislike it as much as they pretended? The fact was, that much as they decried the Jocelyn system as “intolerable” and “intellectually dishonest,” these people were, in their own fashion, extremely happy at Jocelyn, like all people everywhere who are working a little too hard on materials that are new to them. To be allowed, under the cover of duty, to pursue the world’s history down its recondite byways was, for Domna Rejnev, a pure nightly joy, a passion of legitimate conquest, and her students were quick to discover that they could not please Miss Rejnev better than by discovering a wish to study an author she had not read, preferably an old author, in some forgotten cranny of culture. Thus, though she and others like her, themselves trained in the classical order, protested on behalf of the student Jocelyn’s disorganized ways, it was the very lack of organization, the sense of teaching as a joint voyage of discovery or pleasure-trip, that made the college, despite everything that could be said against it, a happy place for its faculty. It was the faculty, paradoxically, that profited most from Jocelyn’s untrammeled and individualistic arrangements, the students being on the whole too disorderly or lazy or ill-trained to carry anything very far without the spur of discipline.

  For the faculty, as has been indicated, Jocelyn was by and large lotos-land. Those continuous factional disputes and ideological scandals were a form of spiritual luxury that satisfied the higher cravings for polemic, gossip, and backbiting without taking the baser shape, so noticeable in the larger universities, of personal competition and envy. Here, living was cheap and the salary-range was not great. The headships of departments were nominal, falling, by common consent, to the member with the greatest taste for paper-work. Such competition as there was centered around the tutees. The more ambitious teachers, as everywhere, vied for the better students, partly because these were more interesting and also easier to teach, partly because of vanity, and partly from the more insidious egotism of the Potter’s Hand, the desire to shape and mold the better-than-common clay and breathe one’s own ghostly life into it—the teacher’s besetting temptation, God’s sin, which Christ perhaps redeemed. Yet here, where such proclivities abounded, on account of the creative emphasis and the personal character of the tutorial relation, the danger was so manifest that defenses were erected against it. Strong influences were frowned on, academically, and those who wished to exert them were expected to do so off the premises, to the tinkle of the teacups or the cocktail shaker. In the assignment of tutees, impartiality was the order: anyone who wanted an A student agreed to accept two or three duds into the bargain. Since there were never enough A students to go around, inequities might have resulted, but for the fact that there were certain good-natured and easy-going teachers who, from long habit, preferred the inferior student, like a broken-in pair of shoes, and hence righted the balance—in fact, that diversity of tastes counted on by utopian social theorists to take care in an ideal society of the inevitable shortages of certain consumers’ goods, such as Rolls Royces, rubies, or good women, here operated in practice, so that the majority of teachers were personally content and just enough dissatisfied in conscience to make life worth living. The intellectual scruple substituted for the itch for gain by suggest
ing new incentives, opportunities for reform and improvement, second chances, either for the self or for the college, reasons, in short, to get up in the morning that seemed to be lacking to the student.

  The salary-scale here was significant. It ranged from three thousand to five thousand a year, not much, one would have said, by worldly standards, but adequate to the needs of the “creative” people who, as in most progressive colleges, made up a considerable part of the faculty and had another string to their bow. Most of the instructors were young and unmarried and did not grudge the few settled family men their professorial stipend, which went into bringing up children and not into conspicuous entertaining. Among the older married teachers, there were a number of those husband-and-wife “teams” that progressive colleges like to hire and others, for some reason, do not—for them the double income made a low salary practicable. And even such an instructor as Henry Mulcahy, tortured by debt, doctor bills, coal bills, small personal loans never paid back, four children outgrowing their clothes, patches, darns, tears, the threatening letters of a collection-agency, knew himself well off here in comparison to many an instructor at state university or endowed private college, where a stipend of twenty-five hundred would not be considered too low. Jocelyn, in this respect, followed the progressive pattern of offering a reasonable security to those in its lowest rank, while holding out few prospects of advancement or of juicy plums at the top of the tree. In this way, it had been able to recruit a faculty of poets, sculptors, critics, composers, painters, scene-designers, and so on, without academic experience and without, also, academic ambitions of the careerist sort—as well as beginners in history, science, or philosophy fired with the love of a subject and impatient of graduate-school norms; plus a certain number of seasoned non-conformists and dissenters, sexual deviants, feather-bedders, alcoholics, impostors.