American College 1916

It often seems to me that our years in school and after school, in college and later in the army, might be regarded as a long process of deracination. Looking backward, I feel that our whole training was involuntarily directed toward destroying whatever roots we had in the soil, toward eradicating our local and regional peculiarities, toward making us homeless citizens of the world.

In school, unless we happened to be Southerners, we were divested of any local pride. We studied Ancient History and American History, but not, in my own case, the history of western Pennsylvania. We learned by name the rivers of SiberiaObi, Yenisei, Lena, Amur-but not the Ohio with its navigable tributaries, or why most of them had ceased to be navigated, or why Pittsburgh was built at its forks. We had high-school courses in Latin, German, Chemistry, good courses all of them, and a class in Civics where we learned to list the amendments to the Constitution and name the members of the Supreme Court; but we never learned how Presidents were really chosen or how a law was put through Congress. If one of us had later come into contact with the practical side of government-that is, if he wished to get a street paved, an assessment reduced, a friend out of trouble with the police or a relative appointed to office-well, fortunately the ward boss wouldn't take much time to set him straight.

Of the English texts we studied, I can remember only one, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," that gave us any idea that an American valley could be as effectively clothed in romance as Ivanhoe's castle or the London of Henry Esmond. It seemed to us that America was beneath the level of great fiction; it seemed that literature in general, and art and learning, were things existing at an infinite distance from our daily lives. For those of us who read independently, this impression became even stronger: the only authors to admire were foreign authors. We came to feel that wisdom was an attribute of Greece and art of the Renaissance, that glamour belonged only to Paris or Vienna and that glory was confined to the dim past. If we tried, notwithstanding, to write about more immediate subjects, we were forced to use a language not properly our own. A definite effort was being made to destroy all trace of local idiom or pronunciation and have us speak "correctly"-that is, in a standardized Amerenglish as colorless as Esperanto. Some of our instructors had themselves acquired this public-school dialect only by dint of practice, and now set forth its rules with an iron pedantry, as if they were teaching a dead language.

In college the process of deracination went on remorselessly. We were not being prepared for citizenship in a town, a state or a nation; we were not being trained for an industry or profession essential to the common life; instead we were being exhorted to enter that international republic of learning whose traditions are those of Athens, Florence, Paris, Berlin and Oxford. The immigrant into that high disembodied realm is supposed to come with empty hands and naked mind, like a recruit into the army. He is clothed and fed by his preceptors, who furnish him only with the best of intellectual supplies. Nothing must enter that world in its raw state; everything must be refined by time and distance, by theory and research, until it loses its own special qualities, its life, and is transformed into the dead material of culture. The ideal university is regarded as having no regional or economic ties. With its faculty, students, classrooms and stadium, it exists in a town as if by accident, its real existence being in the immaterial world of scholarship-or such, at any rate, was the idea to be gained in those years by any impressionable student.

Take my own experience at Harvard. Here was a university that had grown immediately out of a local situation, out of the colonists' need for trained ministers of the Gospel. It had transformed itself from generation to generation with the transformations of New England culture. Farming money, fishing money, trading money, privateering money, wool, cotton, shoe and banking money, had all contributed to its vast endowment. It had grown with Boston, a city whose records were written on the face of its buildings. Sometimes on Sundays I used to wander through the old sections of Beacon Hill and the North End and admire the magnificent doorways, built in the chastest Puritan style with profits from the trade in China tea. Behind some of them Armenians now lived, or Jews; the Old North Church was in an Italian quarter, near the house of Paul Revere, a silversmith. Back Bay had been reclaimed from marshland and covered with mansions during the prosperous years after the Civil War (shoes, uniforms, railroads, speculation in government bonds). On Brattle Street, in Cambridge, Longfellow's house was open to the public, and I might have visited Brook Farm. All these things, Emerson, doorways, factory hands and fortunes, the Elective System, the Porcellian Club, were bound together into one civilization, but of this I received no hint. I was studying Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit and the Elizabethan drama, and perhaps, on my way to classes in the morning, passing a Catholic church outside of which two Irish boys stood and looked at me with unfriendly eyes. Why was Cambridge an Irish provincial city, almost like Cork or Limerick? What was the reason, in all the territory round Boston, for the hostility between "nice people" and “muckers"? When a development of houses for nice Cambridge people came out on the main street of Somerville (as one of them did), why did it turn its back on the street, build a brick wall against the sidewalk, and face on an interior lawn where nurses could watch nice children playing? I didn't know; I was hurrying off to a section meeting in European History and wondering whether I could give the dates of the German peasant wars.

I am not suggesting that we should have been encouraged to take more "practical" courses-Bookkeeping or Restaurant Management or Sewage Disposal or any of the hundreds that clutter the curriculum of a big university. These specialized techniques could wait till later, after we had chosen our life work. What we were seeking, as sophomores and juniors, was something vastly more general, a key to unlock the world, a picture to guide us in fitting its jigsaw parts together. It happened that our professors were eager to furnish us with such a key or guide; they were highly trained, earnest, devoted to their calling. Essentially the trouble was that the world they pictured for our benefit was the special world of scholarship-timeless, placeless, elaborate, incomplete and bearing only the vaguest relationship to that other world in which fortunes were made, universities endowed and city governments run by muckers.

It lay at a distance, even, from the college world in which we were doing our best to get ahead. The rigorous methods and high doctrines taught by our professors applied only to parts of our lives. We had to fill in the gaps as best we could, usually by accepting the unspoken doctrines of those about us. In practice the college standards were set, not by the faculty, but by the leaders among the students, and particularly by the rich boys from half-English preparatory schools, for whose benefit the system seemed to be run. The rest of us, boys from public high schools, ran the risk of losing our own culture, such as it was, in our bedazzlement with this new puzzling world, and of receiving nothing real in exchange.

Young writers were especially tempted to regard their own experience as something negligible, not worth the trouble of recording in the sort of verse or prose they were taught to imitate from the English masters. A Jewish boy from Brooklyn might win a scholarship by virtue of his literary talent. Behind him there would lie whole generations of rabbis versed in the Torah and the Talmud, representatives of the oldest Western culture now surviving. Behind him, too, lay the memories of an exciting childhood: street gangs in Brownsville, chants in a Chassidic synagogue, the struggle of his parents against poverty, his cousin's struggle, perhaps, to build a labor union and his uncle's fight against it-all the emotions, smells and noises of the ghetto. Before him lay contact with another great culture, and four years of leisure in which to study, write and form a picture of himself. But what he would write in those four years were Keatsian sonnets about English abbeys, which he had never seen, and nightingales he had never heard.

I remember a boy from my own city, in this case a gentile and a graduate of Central High School, which then occupied a group of antiquated buildings on the edge of the business section. Southeast of it was a Jewish quarter; to the north, across the railroad, was the Strip, home of steelworkers, saloons and small-time politicians; to the east lay the Hill, already inhabited by Negroes, with a small red-light district along the lower slopes of it, through which the boys occasionally wandered at lunchtime. The students themselves were drawn partly from these various slums, but chiefly from residential districts in East Liberty and on Squirrel Hill. They followed an out-of-date curriculum under the direction of teachers renowned for thoroughness and severity; they had every chance to combine four years of sound classical discipline with a personal observation of city morals and sociology and politics in action.

This particular student was brilliant in his classes, editor of the school paper, captain of the debating team; he had the sort of reputation that spreads to other high schools; everybody said he was sure to be famous some day. He entered Harvard two or three years before my time and became a fairly important figure. When I went out for the Harvard Crimson (incidentally, without making it) I was sent to get some news about an activity for which he was the spokesman. Maybe he would take an interest in a boy from the same city, who had debated and written for the school paper and won a scholarship like himself. I hurried to his room on Mt. Auburn Street. He was wearing-this was my first impressions suit of clothes cut by a very good tailor, so well cut, indeed, that it made the features above it seem undistinguished. He eyed me carelessly-my own suit was bought in a department store-and began talking from a distance in a rich Oxford accent put on like his clothes. I went away without my news, feeling ashamed. The story wasn't printed.

Years later I saw him again when I was writing book reviews for a New York newspaper. He came into the office looking very English, like the boss's son. A friendly reporter told me that he was a second-string dramatic critic who would never become first-string. "He ought to get wise to himself," the reporter said. "He's got too much culture for this game."

In college we never grasped the idea that culture was the outgrowth of a situation-that an artisan knowing his tools and having the feel of his materials might be a cultured man; that a farmer among his animals and his fields, stopping his plow at the fence corner to meditate over death and life and next year's crop, might have culture without even reading a newspaper. Essentially we were taught to regard culture as a veneer, a badge of class distinction-as something assumed like an Oxford accent or a suit of English clothes.

Those salesrooms and fitting rooms of culture where we would spend four years were not ground-floor shops, open to the life of the street. They existed, as it were, at the top of very high buildings, looking down at a far panorama of boulevards and Georgian houses and Greek temples of banking-with people outside them the size of gnats-and, vague in the distance, the fields, mines, factories that labored unobtrusively to support us. We never glanced out at them. On the heights, while tailors transformed us into the semblance of cultured men, we exercised happily, studied in moderation, slept soundly and grumbled at our food. There was nothing else to do except pay the bills rendered semi-annually, and our parents attended to that.

College students, especially in the big Eastern universities, inhabit an easy world of their own. Except for very rich people and certain types of childless wives, they have been the only American class that could take leisure for granted. There have always been many among them who earned their board and tuition by tending furnaces, waiting on table or running back kickoffs for a touchdown; what I am about to say does not apply to them. The others-at most times the ruling clique of a big university, the students who set the tone for the rest-are supported practically without efforts of their own. They write a few begging letters; perhaps they study a little harder in order to win a scholarship; but usually they don't stop to think where the money comes from. Above them, the president knows the source of the hard cash that runs this great educational factory; he knows that the stream of donations can be stopped by a crash in the stock market or reduced in volume by newspaper report of a professor gone bolshevik; he knows what he has to tell hi trustees or the state legislators when he goes to them begging for funds. The scrubwomen in the library, the chambermaids and janitors, know bow they earn their food; but the students themselves, and many of their professors, are blind to economic forces and they never think of society in concrete terms, as the source of food and football fields and professors' salaries.

The university itself forms a temporary society with standards of its own. In my time at Harvard the virtues instilled into students were good taste, good manners, cleanliness, chastity, gentlemanliness (or niceness), reticence and the spirit of competition in sports; they are virtues often prized by a leisure class. When a student failed to meet the leisure-class standards someone would say, "He talks too much," or more conclusively, "He needs a bath." Even boys from very good Back Bay families would fail to make a club if they paid too much attention to chorus girls. Years later, during the controversy over the New Humanism, I read several books by Professor Irving Babbitt, the founder of the school, and found myself carried back into the atmosphere of the classroom. Babbitt and his disciples liked to talk about poise, proportionateness, the imitation of great models, decorum and the Inner Check. Those too were leisure class ideals and I decided that they were simply the student virtues rephrased in loftier language. The truth was that the New Humanism grew out of Eastern university life, where it flourished as in a penthouse garden.

Nor was it the only growth that adorned these high mansions of culture. There was also, for example, the college liberalism that always drew back from action. There was the missionary attitude of Phillips Brooks House and the college Y.M.C.A.'s, that of reaching down and helping others to climb not quite up to our level. There was later the life-is-a-circus type of cynicism rendered popular by the American Mercury: everything is rotten, people are fools; let's all get quietly drunk and laugh at them. Then, too, there was a type of aestheticism very popular during my own college years. The Harvard Aesthetes of igi6 were trying to create in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an after-image of Oxford in the i8gos. They read the Yellow Book, they read Casanova's memoirs and Les Liaisons Dangereuses, both in French, and Petronius in Latin; they gathered at teatime in one another's rooms, or at punches in the office of the Harvard Monthly; they drank, instead of weak punch, seidels of straight gin topped with a maraschino cherry; they discussed the harmonies of Pater, the rhythms of Aubrey Beardsley and, growing louder, the voluptuousness of the Church, the essential virtue of prostitution. They had crucifixes in their bedrooms, and ticket stubs from last Saturday's burlesque show at the Old Howard. They wrote, too; dozens of them were prematurely decayed poets, each with his invocation to Antinous, his mournful descriptions of Venetian lagoons, his sonnets to a chorus girl in which he addressed her as "little painted poem of God." In spite of these beginnings, a few of them became good writers.

They were apparently very different from the Humanists, who never wrote poems at all, and yet, in respect to their opinions, they were simply Humanists turned upside down. For each of the Humanist virtues they had an antithesis. Thus, for poise they substituted ecstasy; for proportionateness, the Golden Mean, a worship of immoderation; for imitating great models, the opposite virtue of following each impulse, of living in the moment. Instead of decorum, they mildly preached a revolt from middle-class standards, which led them toward a sentimental reverence for sordid things; instead of the Inner Check, they believed in the duty of self-expression. Yet the Humanist and the Aesthete were both products of the same milieu, one in which the productive forces of society were regarded as something alien to poetry and learning. And both of them, though they found different solutions, were obsessed by the same problem, that of their individual salvation or damnation, success or failure, in a world in which neither was at home.

Whatever the doctrines we adopted during our college years, whatever the illusions we had of growing toward culture and self-sufficiency, the same process of deracination was continuing for all of us. We were like so many tumbleweeds sprouting in the rich summer soil, our leaves spreading while our roots slowly dried and became brittle. Normally the deracination would have ended when we left college; outside in the practical world we should have been forced to acquire new roots in order to survive. But we weren't destined to have the fate of the usual college generation and, instead of ceasing, the process would be intensified. Soon the war would be upon us; soon the winds would tear us up and send us rolling and drifting over the wide land.