Schlesinger

by Richard Aldous

  Looking back, it is clear that this was the moment when Arthur first began to conceive of a life, in Theodore Roosevelt’s phrase, as “a man in the arena.” He went home that evening to write a long journal entry that was in effect the cri de coeur of a public intellectual. “For a long time I have been feeling with increasing strength that knowledge and experience should be intimately related,” he wrote. “The only knowledge worth anything is grounded in experience.”

  Marian, the professor’s daughter, had given, “without malice or special purposes, a very scornful account of universities.” The ivory tower, Arthur now began to see, was “a pretty adequate metaphor,” because “a college professor is rather well insulated from most of the currents that electrify vital life.” But how to address the paradox of his life and ambition, “the problem of my future,” as it now stood? That seemed an insuperable riddle. “The only possible career,” he despaired, “is the study of American civilization: I cannot doubt my absorption in this, and the question of divorce from experience does not enter in at all.” But the only institutions that “would pay me to study American civilization are the colleges; and in sealing myself in them, I am cutting myself off from the only way of life that would give my work any particular depth, any philosophical significance.” It was, Arthur admitted, an analysis that “sounds very stupidly intellectual,” but no one should doubt that “the underlying emotions are very real.20

  Ironically, given that it was a rejection of college life in favor of real world experience, Arthur’s crisis of direction had the effect of shaking him from his torpor and jump-starting his rewarding final year at Harvard. Perry Miller had been on leave in England during Arthur’s junior year. His replacement, F. O. Matthiessen, provided a first serious introduction to Marxism but was not much help when it came to choosing a potential senior thesis topic. In the end, Arthur’s father took the boy in hand. The New York Times published a story during the 1937 summer vacation about a vandalized bust portraying a heavily bearded man that had been found at the foot of a pedestal next to the Hudson on Riverside Drive on New York’s Upper West Side. The inscription on the plinth declared this to be “Brownson, 1803–1876, Publicist, Philosopher, Patriot.”

  The difficulty was that no one seemed to know who “Brownson” was, with local police and officials pronouncing themselves baffled. Eventually the New York Public Library had helped identify the nineteenth-century intellectual and minister, Orestes Brownson, but it also admitted that of the nineteen volumes that the library held of his work, none was in circulation. Such, opined the Times wisely, is “the instability of fame.” But an important figure who has slipped into obscurity is often grist to the historian’s mill. Schlesinger gave his son a gentle nudge and “suggested that I look at the article on Brownson in the Dictionary of American Biography.” Whether or not Schlesinger was aware of his son’s current thinking, the prompt was expertly judged. Here was exactly the kind of intellectual, activist, and controversialist to capture the restless Arthur’s imagination.

  He wrote immediately to Miller, who warmly approved Brownson as a topic. This was the genesis of Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim’s Progress, which was published in book form in 1939. For all the importance of Marian’s disruptive innovation in Arthur’s life, here was another example of his father deftly restoring him to the academic track at the right moment. “A tutorial with a man like Perry Miller and love with a girl like Marian,” Arthur wrote brightly, “could do a great deal to enlarge my experience.”21

  Revivified, Arthur completed his final year at Harvard trailing the long predicted clouds of glory. Working with Miller again was a delight, not just because he was “one of the greatest teachers of history,” but further because “underneath the bluntness and irascibility he was also in unexpected ways a sweet and considerate man.” Researching the thesis among the elegant surroundings and capacious holdings of the Widener Library offered Arthur the excitement of writing his first extended piece of work. “Immersion in Brownson,” he wrote, “became immersion in the theology, philosophy, politics and intellectual ferment of the nineteenth century in America.”22

  Arthur’s study of “this stormy pilgrim” laid the foundations for his career to come in a number of important ways. Rather than focus on a particular phase of Brownson’s career, he chose to examine the life itself, locating it in a broader political and intellectual context, and then pulling the two threads together to make conclusions about nineteenth-century northeastern society. He would go on to use a similar method in chronicling various “ages” framed by the lives of American presidents. The undergraduate thesis also pinpointed the stock market crash of 1837 as revealing to Brownson, and to Arthur, how business interests worked against those of ordinary people. The question was as much ethical as financial. “As the Panic of 1837 deepened into a way of life,” Arthur wrote, “he [Brownson] gradually began to see that the complicated financial system had somehow burst the bonds of a personal morality.” This youthful take on a business elite he judged venal and antidemocratic provided a jumping-off point for later works on Jackson and FDR. But perhaps the most intriguing aspect of “Orestes Brownson” was the way in which Arthur unapologetically inserted himself into the analysis. “The measure of what is historically important is set by the generation that writes the history, not by the one that makes it,” he boldly declared in his opening sentence, continuing, “No historian can entirely escape from judging by the standards of his day. In some sense he must always superimpose one set of values on another.” That premise would frame Arthur’s entire career as a professional historian.23

  The self-discipline that dissipated during Arthur’s junior year had returned at full throttle. The day after his twentieth birthday, he admonished himself to guard against the personal sentiment in affairs of the heart that “has worked its way into my nervous system—which means that I shall be on my mettle as far as work is concerned.” That self-willed enterprise paid off. On a fine June day, with the novelist John Buchan as commencement speaker, Arthur’s parents watched proudly as their son graduated with highest honors summa cum laude, winning a Bowdoin Prize, one of Harvard’s oldest and most prestigious student awards. His reputation and prospects on leaving Harvard could not have been stronger. As his advisor, Paul Buck, wrote shortly afterwards, “Mr. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., is the most promising historian that I have met. This is a considered and unqualified statement.”24

  Arthur’s classmate Theodore White remarked of his own family and summa cum laude, “That was what they had expected” since his schooldays. The same might easily have been said of Arthur’s parents, who had been working toward this moment since at least the time when they had pulled the unhappy boy out of public school and sent him to Exeter. Now Schlesinger went into overdrive to facilitate the next stage of his son’s career, beginning with converting an undergraduate thesis into a book. He turned to his old friend, Bernard DeVoto, for a favor, asking him to send Arthur’s thesis to his publisher, Little, Brown. The publishers dutifully gave the book to readers, but remained lukewarm. “All thought favorably of it intrinsically,” Schlesinger reported to his son, “but questioned whether the company could get out of the book what they put into it. . . . They will lose money on the venture.” The company would be interested in whatever Arthur did next, so the exercise of making a useful contact had not been a wasted one.25

  Schlesinger Sr. would not be brushed off so lightly. He called DeVoto back into the fray, even though, as Schlesinger admitted to his son, “he has never seen the manuscript.” In the end, the company gave in, recognizing that it was a project that had to be accepted as a courtesy to a favored author. “He took an active part in urging them to take the book on,” Schlesinger Sr. reported to Arthur, pointing out the debt that was owed. Royalties were almost nonexistent, but there was no subvention to be paid. “Personally,” wrote the head of Team Schlesinger, “I think we are very much to be congratulated.”26

  The deal was a piece of academ
ic “logrolling” quite on a par with another example of paternal string-pulling in that period. For the other notable Harvard thesis to be published around this time was that of John F. Kennedy—the same age as Arthur, but two years behind him in the class of 1940—whose thesis, “Appeasement at Munich: the inevitable result of the slowness of conversion of the British democracy from a disarmament to a rearmament policy,” was subsequently published under the snappier title, “Why England Slept.” As well as using his contacts to help get the book published, Kennedy’s father ensured it became a bestseller, placing multiple orders for boxloads of the book, most of which were found years afterwards piled up in the basement at the family’s compound in Hyannisport, Massachusetts.27

  Schlesinger could not buy his son onto the bestseller list, but he had advantages to deploy, not least his experience in how to bring a book to publication. The timeline was tight, with the book due to appear in the spring of 1939. “The plan,” Schlesinger wrote the previous October after the contract had been settled, “will be to send you the galley proof but not the page proof. . . . I will make the necessary corrections in the page proof.” He would also supervise the compiling of the index.28

  Schlesinger’s strongly directional approach to what was after all his son’s, not his own, book was in many ways only a practical response to Arthur’s changed circumstances. Towards the end of his final undergraduate year, Arthur had been awarded a prestigious Henry Fellowship, which allowed Harvard students to study in England for a year. Arthur was accepted at Cambridge, so by the time his father wrote to him with the plan for the book, he was already in residence at Peterhouse, the university’s oldest college. Yet there was a doubt gnawing away about the extent of the professor’s dominance. “It began when Arthur went away to Cambridge for that year and suddenly was exposed to this completely new experience,” Marian Cannon recalled. “He discovered there were all sorts of other worlds out there, because, you know, I think Mr. Schlesinger had a very strong control over him.”29

  Arthur’s romance with Marian helped prompt thoughts of independence, but it was in many ways switching one controlling relationship for another. That segue prompted deep feelings of insecurity in Arthur. Inevitably the relationship was a tempestuous on-off affair. The summer before Arthur left for Peterhouse was one of raging arguments and emotional reconciliations. The couple split up midway through the summer. “She is no longer in love with me,” Arthur wrote at the beginning of August. “This is due in part to my strong pride which leads me into petty and selfish cruelties as a way of compensating for my own feeling of insecurity.” Marian left immediately for the family summer home in Franklin, New Hampshire, from where she wrote that “perhaps you’re right, darling, perhaps in an unspoken way we recognize that it must be the end.” Overcome with remorse, Arthur made an emotional dash to Franklin, where the two were reconciled. “I’m really awfully glad you came last week, dearest,” Marian wrote to him afterwards, “for in spite of our usual temperamental fluctuations, I, for one, had great pleasure in having you here: it’s wonderful to discover in reality you are not the devouring ogre which superficially you appear to be but in reality a sweet, reasonable and loveable pie.” Marian still believed that Arthur was “deserving of immensely better out of life than I seem to be able to give.” But when he left Boston for New York on September 1 to take the boat to Europe, Marian saw him off. “I love Marian so very much and want her so much and shall miss her so much—the prospect of not seeing her for ten months . . . fills me with horror,” he wrote once on board his ship. “She is the sweetest, loveliest, finest girl imaginable.” Within days, however, he was already scouting out a coed from Illinois called Ruth. “I could not bear to leave so fetching a girl alone,” he recorded, wondering whether thinking of anyone else but Marian was “blasphemous.”30

  Reading Arthur’s journal, it is hard to avoid the obvious conclusion that as he set sail he remained a boy, not a man. Leaving Boston, his parents had come “to the station to say goodbye [and] it was a distinct wrench to part from them.” Arthur was leaving home on his own for the first time. “We have appreciated knowing you these twenty one years,” his parents telegraphed to him on board the Niuw Amsterdam, “and now look forward eagerly to watching our pilgrim’s progress for another year until he returns to our wicket.” Although Arthur had spent two unhappy years at Exeter, he had still spent regular weekends at a home that was only forty miles south of the boarding school campus. The traditional rite of passage, leaving for university, for him had involved just a fifteen-minute walk to a college where his own father worked. Now in the summer of 1938, it was as if he were setting out for a university for the first time, with all the challenges and excitements that offered. At least he got off to a good start. On arrival in London he went through a traditional induction into manhood. “In the morning,” he dutifully recorded in his diary, “I went to Selfridges and actually bought myself some socks.”31

  CHAPTER THREE

  ANOTHER CAMBRIDGE

  Schlesinger arrived in London in September 1938 at a politically charged time. Coming out of the theater on his very first night in town, he discovered newspaper boys shouting out the late, breaking news. “People were clutching at newspapers that moment all through the West End,” he wrote in his diary. “Agreement has been reached at Munich—and this was the news, for the moment heartening and cause for rejoicing, but on reflection chilling cause for indignation.” Munich was a turning point in global affairs—the agreement between Hitler and Chamberlain to allow Germany to annex the “Sudetenland” in Czechoslovakia—and Arthur, in contrast to most, recognized the folly, not in retrospect, but at the time. The following day he wrote a blistering account in his journal that condemned the agreement as “disgraceful morally and highly questionable strategically.” The deal was nothing more than a “temporary peace” rooted “above everything,” he judged, in Chamberlain’s fear of the Soviet Union, whose Communism was “the main threat to the power of his own class.”1

  In the midst of these dramatic events, Arthur made his way to King’s Cross station, where he took the train to Bletchley (the center for signals intelligence during World War II precisely because it was the intersection for Oxbridge and London), and from there boarded the “Varsity Line” eastbound to Cambridge.

  In many ways Cambridge in the 1930s was a surprising choice. It was more detached both geographically and in spirit from affairs of the world. “It is difficult to grasp,” the Marxist Eric Hobsbawm recalled in his memoirs, “just how isolated and parochial the place was in the 1930s.” Schlesinger’s Henry Fellowship contemporaries, by contrast, all headed to Oxford, which most thought of as an altogether more worldly environment. Certainly when Arthur arrived in Cambridge he felt an immediate culture clash when confronted with a porter at Peterhouse every bit as truculent as Skullion, the Head Porter in Tom Sharpe’s comic novel Porterhouse Blue.2

  Arthur, it seems, had arrived a day early. Informed of this fact, he immediately lost his temper (never a good idea with the college porters) and did so with all the sense of entitlement of one who had wandered in and out of Harvard at will since childhood. “The business drew me into an instant rage,” he reported, not least as he was informed there would be a fine for the offense. “It had never occurred to one,” he spluttered, “that a penalty attached to arriving too early—too late, yes—but too early . . .”

  Eventually the porter showed him to his rooms at 16 Fitzwilliam Street, where he found waiting “a pleasant looking chap” who seemed to have had no difficulty coming up early. “This turned out to be one Charles Wintour,” Arthur wrote in his diary. This housemate was the first good thing that had happened since he’d arrived. In many ways it was an unlikely friendship. Wintour, the son of a major general, was a boy, unlike Arthur, of exceptional height and somewhat cool manner (later his nickname on Fleet Street was “Chilly Charlie”). Yet he was studying history and literature, as was Arthur, was ferociously clever (he graduated with a First
), and was the editor of Granta—the Cambridge equivalent of The Advocate and Lampoon combined. There would be moments of exasperation—“Your standards are too high for comfort, Arthur, too high both for my comfort and your own,” he fulminated on one occasion that year—but it was a deep friendship that would last six decades until Wintour’s death in 1999.3

  After the staleness and sense of ennui at Harvard, Arthur now threw himself into university life at Cambridge almost as if a first-year student. “My God, how time goes!” he wrote at the end of his first month. But whereas in the past such a comment might have applied to the labor of academic work, now it was a result of the pleasures of student life. He wrote for Granta—“a neutral territory,” observed Eric Hobsbawm, “for friends of different politics, such as the young Arthur Schlesinger Jr., whom I met there, then as later a consistent anti-Communist New Dealer.” The rest of the time he spent with members of the Amateur Dramatic Club (ADC) for whom, to his surprise, he ended up directing Frank Sladen-Smith’s one-act play St. Simeon Stylites. “I have had to learn to direct as I went along,” Arthur wrote, nervous but exhilarated. “It is fun whenever I catch myself up into the dramatic aspects of being a director, but I have some bad moments of rather unromantic despair.”4

  And then there was love. The Harvard years had been difficult. Now older, more confident and with the exoticism of being a Yank, Arthur unexpectedly found himself in demand. “I don’t think I’ve ever known so many attractive girls as well as I do this year,” he enthused. Poor Yvonne was dumped because she was “just too dumb,” as was Doris, who failed to make the cut because “there’s no particular point in coming to England to play around with her type.” Anne, on the other hand, was “an extremely pretty blonde, a rather amusing and faintly sensitive girl.” But another Anne, the daughter of a Liberal politician, Sir Frederick Whyte, was something else. It was Charles Wintour who introduced him to “one of the most prominent undergraduates.” By the end of his first term, Arthur believed “the foundation is about ready for passes to be made“ and thought Anne “more suited to me than any girl I’ve met save Marian, and in some ways more suited.” There followed over the next few months “a good deal of sturm und drang,” but by May week, amid the rounds of balls and drinks parties, Arthur reported that he had enjoyed “one of the happiest and one of the fullest weeks of my life. . . . Anne is a darling, and at present writing we are getting along beautifully.”5