Harvard in 1956-60 was not the place for serious undergraduate or graduate study of Marxism. Nor is it now. In the study of English literature, my field of concentration chosen early in my freshman year, literary history and New Criticism, with some important insights from intellectual history, dominated inquiry. Nonetheless, I did manage to enroll in an advanced course in twentieth-century literature, taught by Howard Mumford Jones, in my freshman year and appreciated his fairly extensive survey of what he termed, following the usage of the 1930s, “Proletarian literature.” The honors program in English required that one course per semester be done by tutorial, so in my junior year I asked Professor Jones for a tutorial in Proletarian literature, but he was, although willing, clearly reluctant, and I instead had a tutorial in Henry James and Theodore Dreiser (the latter somewhat in the Proletarian camp) with Francis X. Murphy. One of the two readers of my senior honors essay on Hart Crane--“Uses of the Imagination in an Industrial Age”--was, I’m pretty sure, Howard Mumford Jones. The essay was directed by Albert Gelpi, who went on to a long career at Stanford.
Marxist criticism was considered fairly disreputable both then and in my later graduate work at Wisconsin, but at Harvard I did read the Communist Manifesto for the first time in Social Science 2 and wrote a good examination essay that was a Marxist account of the origins of World War I. I occasionally looked for socialist activity in the community but failed to attend meetings of the Socialist Club, which was at any rate, I was told, infiltrated and taken over by the Ayn Randians. I was still, in my freshman year, a fairly enthusiastic chess player, and instead attended chess club meetings or played in matches organized by the club. (I remember an especially humiliating blunder in a game jn a team match that we had with Philips Exeter, in which I had seemed to be moving toward an easy victory but miserably lost.) I do remember a debate in Boston between a former and a then current member of the CPUSA that I attended and that I could not find anyone else in my Harvard circle interested enough to attend. I did not see Fidel Castro during his well-reported visit to Harvard after the Cuban Revolution.
Harvard was in those days segregated by income in that room rentals varied according to the quality of the rooms or, in the Houses occupied by upperclassmen, by the number of flights of stairs one had to climb. The result was that scholarship students were clustered together, but this worked to my benefit by putting me in a group with some exceptionally bright and talented young men from whom I learned a great deal. We remain close friends. There were of course no socialists, and the standard wisdom, garnered from the faculty, was that Marxism was all right for the nineteenth century but had no relevance for the twentieth century. Nor were there any women in Harvard student housing, Harvard and Radcliffe not having yet been merged, despite the fact that Harvard men and Radcliffe women took all their classes together.
After my graduation from Harvard, my mother and I were pretty well broke, and I needed to find work as quickly as possible. Selling our house in Finn Town realized very little equity. Making the job search more difficult was the fact that prospective employers assumed that I would soon be drafted. But I managed to find a job in Cleveland, where we then moved, and I became a fidelity and surety bond underwriter for the Cleveland office of the Fidelity and Casualty Company of New York and its several associated companies. This was a time for learning about capitalism rather than socialism, but a co-worker loaned me his copy of Ray Ginger’s The Twisted Cross, the biography of Eugene V. Debs, the American socialist pioneer, which I liked very much. (Many years later, my wife and I would visit Debs’s home in Terre Haute.) The company sent me to a bond school in the Wall Street area of New York City, on Maiden Lane, and that was interesting too and allowed me to spend some time in the Village, where I heard a young singer called Bob Dylan at the Café Wha?
My mother, however, remarried, and I had to move quickly to find a graduate fellowship at mid-year. Harvard would have required me to wait for the fall, and I knew that as soon as I ceased to support my mother I would be 1-A for the draft. The University of Wisconsin obliged, and I enrolled there in January 1962. Wisconsin is the state in whose history both socialism and Joseph McCarthy play major roles, and the University of Wisconsin was quite unlike Harvard in the lively discussion of socialism that could be found. My fellowship was, however, only for one semester, and I would not qualify for a teaching assistantship until I had an M.A., so I was happy to be offered a one-year appointment as an instructor in English at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, which carried a draft deferment as did all college teaching positions at that time.
Spartanburg was in the old segregated south, and I saw for the first time the separate drinking fountains and waiting rooms, and the restaurants closed to African-Americans. You will not believe that I had a room in an old southern mansion, owned by two elderly maiden ladies, that featured tall white pillars in front and confederate battle flags in the living room, but I did. I made all sorts of Yankee blunders in this first encounter with Apartheid, but the other faculty were sympathetic to my feelings, which they to some extent shared. Among the older faculty, with long-time southern roots, I saw a kind of concerned paternalism directed at the families of their servants--usually one Black woman who cooked. I taught five courses per semester, but I did read a little more from Howard Mumford Jones’s list of Proletarian novels, some of them back in print in paperback.
Back in Wisconsin on a new fellowship after nine months in Spartanburg, I soon married Donna Jones, a graduate student in Speech and Theatre, whose family had experienced the Great Depression as family farmers who ultimately had their farm and possessions auctioned from under them. I attended a couple of meetings of the Socialist Workers Party, who had taken the leadership role in the Viet Nam-era anti-war movement, but, wearing a jacket and necktie--as required at Harvard--and sporting a crew cut and clean-shaven, I looked out of place in the increasingly hairy 1960s. No one at these meetings ever spoke to me; they probably thought I was FBI. I also found and subscribed to the newspaper of the Socialist Party but found little in it about socialism. My doctoral dissertation, on the impact of Humean skepticism on literary expression in Byron and Browning, was finished by June 1966, but with the arduous final typing ahead of us, and our flat in Madison plagued by bats, Donna and I left for Massachusetts, first to live in Peabody Terrace, Harvard’s married housing high-rise, in a summer sublet, and then to move to Williamstown, where I had accepted a position as assistant professor at Williams College.
Arriving in the tranquil purple valley of Williams just as campuses like Wisconsin were erupting in revolt over Viet Nam pulled us out of the main events of time, but there were some minor demonstrations against the war by the Williams faculty. We spent the summer of 1967 in London on a small grant from the college. We lived just off the King’s Road in Chelsea, the heart of what the media called “Swinging London,” and we attended the now legendary Liberation Conference at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, hearing Allen Ginsberg (whom I had heard in his famous first reading at Harvard) and Stokely Carmichael, but not R.D. Laing or Marcuse. That summer was the beginning of a decades-long pattern of life divided between England and the USA, and I was starting to learn a little about the British left, but I remember that the Tribune newspaper of one socialist tendency in the Labour Party disappointed.
Back at Williams, I taught a January interval course on the Literature of Social Protest in the USA in the 1930s and 1960s, an extension of my Howard Mumford Jones reading list, but I don’t remember it generating much excitement among the very able Williams students. In the meantime, at Christmastime 1967, I had accepted a new job as Assistant Professor of English at Michigan State University, East Lansing, and we arrived there in the summer of 1968. (to be continued)
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