Schlesinger

by Richard Aldous

  But intimacy also brought limitations. Arthur never experienced, for example, that moment of wonder on entering a new world that White and many of his other contemporaries enjoyed. He walked precisely one mile from Gray Gardens East to his freshman dorm at Thayer Hall, and did so without ever really leaving home. White may only have traveled into Cambridge from Boston, but his journey from the “ghetto” of Erie Street to Harvard Yard was a shift from one world to another. White recalled that he had emerged “from the subway exit in the Square and faced an old red-brick wall behind which stretched, to my fond eye, what remains still the most beautiful campus in America, the Harvard Yard. If there is a place in all America that mirrors better all American history, I do not know of it.” Arthur, in contrast, admitted ennui to his grandmother, Clara Bancroft, telling her in his first week that he had been “in no way anxious to return to America” from his travels abroad, and that the only real advantage of being back in Cambridge was “to have all one’s possessions in reach.” Unlike most undergraduates in their new environment, Arthur announced the day before classes had even begun that he already had “a sense of being settled.”4

  Sometimes that familiarity manifested itself as the “extraordinary sweetness and generosity” that Teddy White would remember. He was, after all, the gracious host making newcomers feel at home. At other times, however, he could seem a little too comfortable. Gardner Jackson, a former student of Arthur’s father, was so astonished by the boy’s high-handed sense of entitlement that he felt compelled to take Schlesinger Sr. to one side to warn him. “I talked with his father about this a good deal,” he recalled. “His father had been very frank with me about his distress over manifestations of arrogance.” It was not a characteristic that Harvard was ever likely to subdue, although Schlesinger’s friend Felix Frankfurter tried, writing gently to Arthur to remind him “how persuasive understatement and impersonality in argument are.”5

  Like most Harvard freshmen, Arthur took residence in a dorm on Harvard Yard for his first year. His roommate was a Midwest scholarship student from Chicago, Edward T. James, who would later edit three volumes of Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary. They lived in rooms in Thayer 7, one of the larger and cheaper dorms, across from the statue of John Harvard and convenient to the Widener Library, Harvard Square, and the subway to Boston. “My roommate and I have two rooms,” Arthur reported to his grandmother, “a bedroom and a study between us. The study is much larger than needful; indeed the whole building wastes space in the best Victorian manner and resembles more than anything else a barn.” First-years took meals in the elegant setting of the McKim, Mead & White Harvard Union building at the southeast corner of Harvard Yard. With its 14-foot-high fireplaces and the antler chandeliers reportedly donated by Teddy Roosevelt, it had by the 1930s become a rather grand freshman dining room. “The food seems quite good,” Arthur judged, apparently somewhat surprised. After the culinary disasters and poisonings of Exeter, it was a not unimportant comfort of his new student life.6

  After his freshman year, Arthur would spend the next three years at Adams House, again rooming with Ed James. He chose Adams primarily because his father was a fellow, although it was also the only house with a swimming pool. More resonantly, its B staircase included the rooms where the current president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had lived during his time at Harvard. The collegiate “house” system, established only a few years earlier, was based on the Oxbridge model of residential colleges with associated faculty as fellows. Adams was one of the physically darker, more sombre houses, but Arthur and his roommate overcame this deficit by occupying “an airy suite on the top floor of C” staircase. Although Adams was not as smart as houses such as Eliot, it had other advantages, including its proximity to Harvard Yard and its own kitchen, although the pool ensured it quickly became known as a “jocks” house.7

  Not surprisingly, Arthur’s extracurricular activities at Harvard were less those of the athlete than the aesthete. More surprising given his later interests, politics, whether on campus or nationally, did not much interest him. He did turn out to cheer FDR when the president came to speak at the Harvard Tercentenary in 1936. And he joined the Harvard Chapter of the American Student Union. The chapter was Communist-controlled but run under the banner of the Popular Front, which purported to bring together anti-Fascists of all stripes, uniting the hard Left and New Dealers. Schlesinger was put off by the strident tone and constant “name calling,” but he did make a lifelong friend in James Wechsler—then a Young Communist and later to join him at the forefront of the non-Communist Left. Instead Arthur’s inclinations were mostly cultural, with tastes that ranged from excitement at watching Stravinsky conduct his own works with the Boston Symphony Orchestra to seeing the original Broadway cast in As Thousands Cheer, by Irving Berlin and Moss Hart. The obsession with movies continued, with every film religiously detailed and reviewed in a movie logbook. These ranged from A-graded “Grand Hotel” (“Greta [Garbo] wins [against Joan Crawford and John Barrymore] in one of the greatest acting contests!”) to E-grades for “Alexander Hamilton” starring George Arliss (“history mauled”) and “Huckleberry Finn” with Jackie Coogan (“The book is butchered and what’s left isn’t worth it”).8

  It was Arthur’s enthusiasm for movies that helped him find a niche as a reviewer at the Harvard Advocate, the literary magazine founded in 1866, which had included the likes of T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens among its contributors. Later, Norman Mailer, who arrived at Harvard in 1939, would complain about the “bunch of snobs” who ran the magazine (although the story he published there, “The Greatest Thing,” launched his career). For Schlesinger’s cohort, those “snobs” were represented in the person of James “J.” Laughlin, the heir to a steel fortune, who was the personification of airy undergraduate sprezzatura. Already a protégé of Ezra Pound, Laughlin provoked a scandal with the September 1935 edition of the Advocate, which included a bawdy story by Henry Miller. Cambridge police confiscated the edition for being “obscene and degrading.” In response, Laughlin’s forward-looking father signed over to him on his twenty-first birthday securities worth around $100,000 (roughly $2 million today) so J. could start publishing literary modernism himself; the first volume of New Directions came out the following year. Arthur had mixed feelings about Laughlin, who, he noted in his journal, was “utterly charming and utterly unreliable; both adjectives are inescapable.” It was his first serious introduction to a patrician type: the “shrewd politician who has devoted most of his great diplomatic talent to one end—obtaining what he wants.”9

  These diplomatic and entrepreneurial skills were ones that Arthur—the smug, precocious boy who had so irritated fellow guests a few years before while on his world trip—soon began to cultivate for himself. Felix Frankfurter had quietly nudged him towards “persuasive understatement”; now in Laughlin he had an exemplar of how to achieve ends by deploying a ruthless charm. Laughlin had been able to talk himself out of trouble in September 1935. When Arthur wrote an article for the Advocate the following year that predicted the end of the Harvard “finals” clubs (“I forgot the power of snobbery,” he later reflected ruefully), he aroused fierce resistance from the Editorial Board, most of whose members were themselves entrenched clubmen. “And what did I do?” Arthur noted gleefully in his journal. “I turned on the charm and polish; and, without retracting or qualifying a statement in the article, I restored myself to their good graces with all the ease of an accomplished double-dealer. I seem to hunt with the hounds and run with the hares without any strain of conscience or intellect.” These same qualities helped get Arthur elected to the prestigious Signet Society, which, unlike the finals clubs, prided itself on admission through talent, particularly wit, rather than social standing—another example of “insider” merit. The society, with its own building at 46 Dunster Street, had a reputation for providing the best lunches in town, during one of which Arthur found himself seated next to a disconcertingly taciturn H. G. Wells. There
were other eminent disappointments too. Gertrude Stein was “most of the time incomprehensible.” Sean O’Casey made “such an ass of himself . . . [with] dirty personal remarks.” Even so, there was more than a touch of entitlement to his complaint about “very little of much interest going on here.” Presumably Wells, Stein, and Casey would not have been regular visitors to Iowa City.10

  For all his other activities, Arthur never forgot he was at Harvard to study. His letters are peppered with the constant refrain of the pressure of work. “As I remarked before,” he complained to his grandmother in Washington, DC, “I have been having to work all the time,” telling her at the end of the first semester that “the first night of the vacation I was so tired that I went to bed at eight.” Much of that work in Arthur’s freshman year was taken up with a broad swathe of courses and the fulfillment of requirements. “I am finding philosophy and economics the most interesting, and also the hardest courses,” he reported. “The history course I am taking is simply the assimilation of facts and interpretations discovered by other people and is not hard to understand. Biology, at present writing, interests me not at all.” The struggle with the science requirement showed up in his disappointing B grade for biology, a rare blemish in an otherwise perfect record of freshman A grades.11

  Arthur’s dismissal of History I as a class that was nothing more than “facts and interpretations discovered by other people” was an example of the lassitude that often overcame him at Harvard. The class professor, R. B. Merriman, a historian of Britain and Spain, satisfied one of the first obligations of any teacher when confronted with a roomful of undergraduates, many of whom were simply fulfilling a requirement. He kept them amused: “Merriman could entertain a hall of six hundred students and hold them spellbound,” recalled Teddy White, who sat in the same class with Arthur. “He paced the platform from end to end, roaring, wheedling, stage-whispering, occasionally screeching in falsetto and earning fairly his [Frisky] nickname.” That Arthur was less than charmed made no difference to his grade: he won the LeBaron Russell Briggs prize awarded annually to the freshman whose History I exam best combined historical analysis with literary style. “Schlesinger,” the Harvard Crimson noted, perhaps mischievously, “is the son of Arthur M. Schlesinger, professor of history.”12

  To keep an eye on Arthur’s studies, Schlesinger had arranged for one of his PhD students, Paul Buck, also from Ohio, to act as the boy’s formal advisor. Buck, a rising man in the discipline, would soon join the Harvard faculty and win the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for a book based on his doctoral thesis, The Road to Reunion, 1865–1900. Despite Buck’s gentle manner, Arthur Jr. recalled him as an advisor of “subtle and steely intelligence and a strong will.” He was also shrewd about Arthur’s ambition. Writing his freshman advisor’s report, Buck counseled any future tutor to give Arthur some rope but not enough to hang himself. The key, Buck judged, would be to remind him of the need to have “a sound grounding in fundamentals, and at the same time capitalize upon the boy’s eagerness for professional advance.”13

  For his major, Arthur picked American History and Literature, part of the oldest field of concentration at Harvard, although, as he reassured his family, “the bulk of my courses will be in history.” Over the period of his four years at Harvard, he would take nine history classes, including one with his father on social and intellectual history, and four literature courses. He achieved A grades in all but one of his history and lit classes, winning a John Harvard scholarship and numerous prizes. It would be satisfying to report that Arthur’s single B grade in history came from his father; but in fact, it came from Samuel Eliot Morison, whose early dislike of “smart-alecky” Arthur would harden as the years went on.14

  Another historian who got on Morison’s nerves was the historian of ideas, Perry Miller, with whom he would later have a very public spat about Cotton Mather. So doubtless it did not improve Arthur’s relationship with Morison when he became Miller’s advisee. Miller was the perfect foil to Arthur’s father as a mentor. Where Schlesinger Sr. was quiet and ascetic, the brilliant Miller was a boozy, macho figure. He was a magnet for precocious students such as the young Schlesinger or Edmund S. Morgan (a year ahead of Arthur and like him with a father on the faculty), who relished his terrorizing. “Luckily,” a terrified Arthur noted in his undergraduate diary, “my memory of Perry Miller’s onslaught on me in our first tutorial conference last October is revived every time I see him, and makes for excessive intellectual humility.” Looking back years afterwards, he judged that it was Miller who “taught me that glibness was not enough, a valuable lesson.”15

  Miller was often criticized for the severe complexity of his prose. “His work is written in a style that puzzles and even angers some readers,” Robert Middlekauff points out in an essay on Miller. “Much of the bewilderment and anger arise from a feeling that he is making history too difficult for understanding.” That Arthur did not fall into the same trap was due in no small part to another important Harvard influence. He had known the maverick Bernard DeVoto since childhood. The author of a delightful paean to the martini, The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto, DeVoto provided alcohol sourced in Canada for so many of the parties held at 19 Gray Gardens East during Prohibition that Arthur as a boy had for some considerable time assumed he was the local bootlegger.16

  DeVoto taught as a part-time instructor at Harvard, where he was viewed warily by many, including President James Conant, who saw his creative writing courses as somewhat beneath the dignity of the university. For Arthur, the class was an important corrective to Miller’s “style that puzzles.” DeVoto instructed his students to “write for the reader, never for yourself.” He was dismissive of Arthur’s early baroque efforts. “Your principal trouble,” he judged, “remains the vague phrase accepted without scrutiny.” Arthur did not take the criticism kindly, but he admitted the “seismic” influence that DeVoto had on him. By the end of the course, somewhat rueful at having been forced to abandon his more florid style, Arthur conceded that DeVoto had “improved (or at least changed) my style about 100%.”17

  At the end of his sophomore year, Arthur attended the last Harvard lecture given by Alfred North Whitehead, the eminent mathematician and philosopher. “Civilizations die of boredom,” Whitehead said as his parting shot. He may as well have been talking directly to Arthur, who was bored with life in general and the college in particular. “I have exhausted after two years most of what Harvard has to give me at this time,” he complained, adding soon afterwards that “the range of experience here in Cambridge is too confined to increase my knowledge much . . . I need a different life.”18

  But what kind of life? That was the dilemma with which Arthur wrestled that spring. Part of the answer was provided by another Cambridge academic child, Marian Cannon. Arthur still lacked confidence with girls. His small stature, pebble glasses, and already thinning hair made him self-conscious when competing with the Harvard athletes or the Byronic aesthetes. And his relative youth—he was still only twenty when he graduated after four years—reinforced his schoolboy looks with emotional immaturity. “It is,” he admitted in his journal, “exceedingly dispiriting.”

  Perhaps it was inevitable that success in the end would come from within the Cambridge academic family. Marian Cannon was the daughter of Walter Bradford Cannon, the Higginson professor and chairman of the Physiology Department at Harvard Medical School. He was in many ways a most un-Schlesinger-like academic. With a flamboyant touch in his work, coining the famous phrase “fight or flight,” Cannon matched his fine intellect with a physical adventurism that saw him become the first person to climb what is now Mount Cannon in Canada’s Glacier National Park. Alfred Whitehead described him as “a rugged, ruddy Midwesterner with a hearty voice, simple, direct and no nonsense” who was “freighted with honors which he wears invisibly.” Even his committed Unitarianism was more muscular. Aside from the Harvard and Midwest connections, not much else seemed likely to draw Marian and Arthur together, not least because, bo
rn in September 1912, she was five years older than he. But she hadn’t had much luck in love either. Like Arthur, she had traveled overseas but had stayed in Cambridge for her degree. When Arthur happened by the Cannon house on Frisbie Place, the Radcliffe graduate thought him “the brightest male I had ever come across” and “the kind of man I would like to marry.” For Arthur, too, it was coup de foudre. “If ever I fell in love at first sight,” he wrote excitedly in his journal in May 1937, “it was with Marian Cannon last week.”19

  “Her charm and her beauty” entranced Arthur, but even more so did her “wisdom” about life in Cambridge. A week or so after their first meeting, the two went to the cinema to see Busby Berkeley’s The Go-Getter (“abominable”). Afterwards they sat talking, listening to Benny Goodman, during which Arthur, perhaps for the first time, poured out his frustrations with Cambridge life. He felt “rather like a machine, all polished and charged and ready to go: but without a destination.” He had “not yet turned the corner” or “grown.” His “sense of discontent” had been “slowly working its way up from my subconscious and slowing finding formulation.” Yet at the same time he was apprehensive about the prospect of graduating the following year, as “I have been believing also that college life was ideally adapted to me.” Marian broke open the dam. Their conversation, Arthur proclaimed, “resulted in the complete destruction of [that] notion.” The “monumentally important” talk ranked as “one of the two or three significant evenings” of his life.