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If I were to think of the difference between my experiences at Harvard and Yale, I would associate Harvard with great teachers and Yale with great teaching. Unfortunately, I did not study with many of the great professors at Harvard; many of them had been trained in Europe. Irwin Panowsky’s series of lectures on Flemish painting, later published, prompted three of us to form lifelong love affairs with painting. I also audited many other classes, and I studied closely with one of the best of these professors. During my last term at Harvard, I wrote to Yale’s Cleanth Brooks, whose Well-Wrought Urn, among other writings, I much admired. In my letter, I mentioned my association with I. A. Richards. Brooks soon came to Cambridge to visit his old mentor, and I was invited to join the two of them for dinner. Within a week, Brooks invited me to New Haven to meet other senior members of Yale’s English Department. Along with seven or eight beginning colleagues, I was immediately offered a job as an instructor in a new series of multi-disciplinary courses. At 29, having finally learned how to be a good student, I went with some surprise back to school and learned how to be a good teacher.

My friends at Yale were less outrageous than the ones I had made at Harvard, but just as valuable. Throughout my eight years at Yale, my friendships with Kenneth Connelly, George and Mary Dimock, Bob and Suzy Petersson, and Martin and Mary Price, among many others, deepened and enriched my life. Gene Waith and his wife afforded me on many occasions a second home in New Haven. The Prices set the standard for my thinking and reading.

Except for Levin and Richards, Yale, as I soon discovered, took teaching undergraduates far more seriously than Harvard did. In the Yale of the Fifties, English was one of the most popular majors, even though most of these majors eventually went into business, law, medicine, or other high-paying professions. Throughout this period, Yale was a center of the New Criticism. As at Harvard, I found this approach essential for those like me for whom love of literature itself was primary.

In my second year, I was invited to become a Fellow of Pierson College, and for the next seven years this association proved very valuable. Compared with those in Winthrop House, my quarters were so lavish that I began living far less sparely. As at Harvard, I enjoyed both maid and janitorial service, as well as full access to the dining hall. These services seem unbelievable and incredibly indulgent to me now. My spacious and well-furnished suite was made for party-giving, and over the next several years I gradually became a good host, more welcoming and outgoing.

I rapidly gained a reputation as a very good teacher, and this distinction soon brought me to the attention of people in the upper echelons of the university, including the dean of undergraduate studies, whom I would otherwise never have known. Mere teaching skill would not have been similarly acknowledged at Harvard. In 1955, I was elected to Manuscript, a recently-formed senior society devoted primarily to the arts, the first and last in-group that I had ever joined. For a while, I foolishly thought that Harvard and Yale might lead, not merely echo, popular opinion. But I soon discovered that Yale was as homophobic as Harvard. Both universities reflected values that were no more enlightened than those of the society at large. Surrounded by young males, I surrendered myself again to celibacy. Once more, all sex was secretive and darkened by guilt.

Throughout my years at Yale, I felt the perpetual need to prove to myself and to the world that I was an able—perhaps even outstanding—teacher. In class, I devoted my full attention to the text. I wanted the students, like me, to have their books open to the relevant page, so that they could follow the author’s lines as I spoke them aloud—the eye and ear working together, as a Prologue says in Henry V. In this way, I hoped that the students could savor the full power of the language. I later realized that I had been trying to imitate the brilliant and word-perfect lecturing style of Harry Levin. Unfortunately, despite my continuing habits of over-preparation, my stage fright before my classes continued to be unrelenting. Introverts have to labor hard to become public figures, and I had to face each new audience with the fears of a beginner. I had reasons for my apprehension about my status at Yale. Year after year, the department fired one or two of the colleagues with whom I started teaching, and I was afraid every spring that I too might be “terminated.” Later I found that Yale’s denial of tenure (the appointment to associate professorship) to its younger faculty was one of the most prolonged in the country.

Because of my religious background, it was natural for me to become an impassioned teacher. I wanted to give students the illusion of living inside works of art by conjuring up the chief characters and situations and reading aloud as vividly as I could—attempting, like Richards, to make each reading an explication, always giving much attention to detail. Like him, I felt that a great deal of the emotion and many of the meanings in poetry and drama—which later I chiefly taught—can only be clarified when it is read aloud, slowly and carefully.

Despite Levin’s strong influence, I was not often solely a lecturer. The students and I were participants in ongoing and exciting conversations, and our classes were often like rapid games of tennis. A few bright young men, quicker than I, occasionally supplied missing threads when I was stitching my ideas together; and I frequently incorporated their suggestions into my commentary. In my fifth year, I was put in charge of a new series of seminars funded by a gift from Paul Mellon. Incredibly, I did not realize that this was a significant mark of departmental approval, and that I had better return to my Ph.D. thesis to expand and deepen it in book form. But I permitted my teaching and social life to distract me from work I knew was inevitable. The longer I postponed it, the more formidable became my writer’s block.

For the new seminars, I prescribed an extremely difficult reading schedule, from the Iliad to The Brothers Karamazov. My colleagues and I goaded each other on to set “high standards.” It took me months to realize that many academic sins have been covered by this euphemistic term. As Richards had taught me, great literature cannot be assimilated in speed-reading classes. In my later years at Yale, I was given an ideal schedule and few courses. Despite the regimen of hard work and arbitrary discipline I imposed upon my students and myself, I did not again find classes as exciting or rewarding until over a decade later, when I taught at San Francisco State.

I knew at Yale that I was one of America’s few privileged teachers of college English. When in small classes I was afforded close interaction with good students and professional trust, I was able to transcend some of my intractable self-doubts, hone my skills, and operate at the top of my form. I was competitive and wanted to make sure that my students could match any others. Students nearly always seemed ardently interested and even affectionate, eager to share an experience that I tried to make as significant and moving as I could. Several of my students won prize essay contests of the kind I had won while teaching at Harvard; and a few later published a great deal, some becoming excellent professional writers.

At the end of my third year, after submitting a prospectus expanded from my Harvard thesis for a book on Shakespeare’s Histories, I won one of Yale’s newly established Morse Fellowships for a year’s leave. I was thus given time to work on my own book, although nothing was ever said about my professional writing. Unfortunately, just before I left for Europe, I was assigned to edit Henry V for the new Yale Shakespeare series. I found the editing of Shakespearean texts unexpectedly troublesome, even though my assigned play had few serious textual problems. Since I was neurotically afraid of making errors, I could easily be lost in details. I unwisely permitted this nettlesome project to consume much of my leave of absence. Nevertheless, although I should have been working on my planned book, the year 1953-54 would become one of the most lustrous of my life. I once again found totally mutual love.

Roy Fisher in the 1970s

I had met Roy Fisher in the summer of 1951 in Cambridge when I was on a visit from Yale to take an exam on my dissertation. He was still a graduate student in Fine Arts at Harvard. It was love at first sight. He was a slight man, with a thin, aristocratic face and deep brown, all-seeing eyes. We commuted twice a month back and forth between Cambridge and New Haven to be together. These were magical meetings. In the fall of 1953, I left for Paris on my fellowship, since I had already arranged to meet with other friends abroad. I now feared that I might never see him again. But we wrote each other faithfully two or three times a week, and in this way we slowly shared our innermost secrets, becoming ever-closer friends. By December, Roy too had won a six-month Harvard Fellowship in Art History, half of which could be spent in or near Paris. This was the lucky break we had devoutly hoped for, Roy’s first trip to Europe and my second. We took an apartment together in Montparnasse, under the studio in which Fernand Léger had once painted. Being in love, we inevitably found Paris the most beautiful city in the world, scarcely an original view. I was surprised and delighted to find most of the central city on the Right Bank designed in the same stately, elegant style. I was later to learn that Baron Haussmann, by tearing down dozens of square city blocks in Paris and designing the grand boulevards, had created this urban marvel. In Paris with Roy, I was too happy to do much academic work. Through Notre Dame and a visit to Chartres, we began to appreciate a few of the greatest achievements of the Middle Ages—the magnificent, exalted, and daunting cathedrals.

Had I known how rare such shared enthusiasms were to be in my life, I might have thrown my project into the Seine. But I tried, ineffectually, to combine work and play, and both suffered as a consequence. After Roy returned to the States, I was suddenly very lonely and for weeks I fought a persistent flu. Paris was cold and dreary, as it can be in the winter. But absence can make the hearts of lovers grow fonder, and our correspondence was redoubled in frequency and intensity. I moved to Rome for the last months of my fellowship. Rome soon became my favorite city, with its brilliant shades of orange and yellow, its piazzas designed like huge outdoor rooms—most of them adorned with sculpture, elaborate fountains, and Classical and Baroque architecture, many of them by Bernini or Borromini. The visual genius of Italian artists was everywhere. I was exhilarated and walking on air.

In January of 1954, my annus mirabilis, I met a young Roman named Aldo Nigro in the Piazza Esedra, and we gradually became soulmates. Aldo and I visited many of the great sites in Rome and environs together, and on each trip I was his eager pupil. He was a painter who, in order to survive, became a student and then a teacher of law. I never again had a comparable year of double blessings in glorious settings. To my amazement, when I returned to New Haven, I found that Roy had been given an appointment to teach at Yale. Miracles can happen. When Roy moved to an apartment near Pierson, our lives were far easier. We stayed at times at his place, and at times in Pierson, where I pulled down all the shades and withdrew for a while from public life. I knew how inimical the academic climate was for gays, and I introduced Roy to very few straight colleagues. Roy naturally resented my isolating him from my social world. I could not possibly know that after I left Yale, Roy’s love and loyalty would repeatedly be tested to the limit, in ways that were dangerous for him.

As I discovered later, Yale’s English Department had assumed that I would be writing a book on Shakespeare during my leave. But I was so overwhelmed by my pesky editing and my two experiences of mutual love that I returned to Yale with little work done. And now when school began, I was so preoccupied with and even consumed by my teaching and social life that I worked only fitfully on the book. When other colleagues spoke of their involvement in long-term projects, I realized that I had scarcely begun such a project, and that I had never thought, even after several years at Yale, about building a “career.” My chief attraction to the intellectual and scholarly life was that I was insatiably curious. My key question was always why, far more frequently than what or how. Shakespeare afforded me rich opportunities for endless speculation—indeed, far too many. I had great difficulties in conceptualizing and organizing my projected book.

In teaching, I always needed the mediation of a controlling text—the poem, play, or novel that we were studying. I regarded myself primarily as a medium or transmitter, always ancillary to the author being taught. I think my approach worked well for many students, but it was not that of a publishing scholar. I remained too close to the text, at times seemingly inside it. I found it hard to maintain the esthetic distance necessary for a large project. In retrospect, I see that I was experiencing a failure of nerve.

Near the end of my sixth year of teaching, I confronted the most-feared deadline of my life. At a precariously late date, I changed the subject matter and focus of my long-delayed book from the Histories to the Tragedies, to a world immensely larger—in effect making it impossible for me to finish my project in the allotted time. At its request, and in a benumbed state, I sent the committee on tenure parts of a new manuscript that I had written. It was almost a parody of my best writing. A week later, Chairman Moody told me that the committee had not found in my work the potential book that they had hoped for. I could thus be kept on only one more year at Yale. I was more shocked than surprised. Because of close supervision by their Yale professors, the colleagues of mine who were eventually retained had successfully turned their Ph.D. theses into books for the Yale Studies in English. With mixed feelings, I suggested to Moody that teaching was more important to me than writing. I had in effect admitted that I was not primarily a scholar.

In not completing my book, I feared I had thrown away my professional life. For the next several months, I started drinking heavily, off and on, until I left for Europe in the summer. Only much later did I realize that my leaving Yale was a blessing. Perhaps my unconscious was prompting me. I would have been very defensive and overpowered had I stayed at Yale in the following period of the deconstructionists and their ilk. Perhaps too, after 13 years in college housing, I realized that I had been waited on like a privileged don in ways that delayed my growing up. I now very much needed to be on my own. But my overwhelming feeling at the time was one of failure.

Unaware of it at the time, I was teaching near the end of the era of Richards, the New Critics, and their followers. My overwhelming emphasis upon feeling evoked by characters and plot had once again made it difficult for me to maintain a critical stance. The new schools of deconstructors would soon increase the critics’ distancing from the text, and their approach was anathema to me. Looking back, I have been grateful that I was teaching at Yale when literature itself was paramount, well before the dismantling of texts became fashionable, before criticism seemed to become more important than poetry.

I would gladly have paid in money, as I did in spirit, for the privilege of teaching Yale’s bright young men. I think that for many teachers, straight and gay, the erotic element in teaching, always indirectly expressed, is one of the most powerful of all motivators. It began before Socrates and the young men in the Symposium. The subject of Eros in the classroom is rarely discussed, except in terms of girlhood crushes. But for many gay and bisexual teachers, the effects of male students’ good looks, attractive personalities. and intelligence greatly increases their joy in teaching. In my teaching at private schools, sexual sublimation through art was frequently all that was possible. But that didn’t make my yearning any less intense.

At both Harvard and Yale, the students kept their private lives to themselves, and I did not invite confessions. I never became intimate with a Yale student. Without my continuing relationship with Roy Fisher, my personal life, like that of several colleagues, might have been one of hopeless longing. Roy and I made short periodic trips to New York for necessary escapes. I developed a very controlled public demeanor, playing the part of one of the presentable, seemingly sexless dons living in the colleges. By and large, the homosexuality of many colleagues and students could be quietly assumed, but it had to remain hidden. One of my students called the college’s great number of gays “Yale’s dirty secret.” As I watched the streams of extraordinarily handsome men coming and going around me, my fears of losing control at times prompted me to seem detached, a defensive characteristic I observed in other gay teachers, some of them married. On the other hand, a few straight colleagues were thoroughly accepting and affectionate toward their gay friends. The few gay students I knew in Pierson seemed to be as starved for intimacy as gay members of the faculty were. In my time, most gays of all ages had to be content with crumbs. Many students (at the height of their sexual powers) and junior faculty members across the sexual spectrum must have resented being trapped in the rich and enticing closets of Harvard and Yale. Gays could only express themselves privately, or in groups that had to be as closely guarded as Communist cells had once been. After I left, nearly all of the same-sex institutions became co-educational, and this resulted in far greater liberalization. Today, both Harvard and Yale have lively and open gay organizations and publications. Recently, I have published in what was previously the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review.

Coming to Yale from my austere background, I became overly impressed for a while by colleagues and friends who had more prestige and money, and moved in circles very different from my own. In Utah, I had almost exulted in what Jane Austen calls “the inverted snobbery of the poor.” But my conviction that a vast gulf separated me from the rich and powerful had to be radically revised to enable me to function in the more privileged worlds of Yale. I very early became a close friend of George and Ruth Lord, both from old and distinguished families in a culture in which lineage seemed to matter. Ruth recently published a sensitive portrait of Winterthur, her childhood home, and what is now regarded as a great museum of Americana. This thorough and moving book is essentially a biography of her father, Henry DuPont. We spent many weekends together, and they brought me into their social circles. Ruth and I became lifelong friends. Thirty years later, after Ruth and George were divorced, Ruth and her new partner, John Holmes, and I stayed a month for two summers in Florence that enabled me to experience rural life in Tuscany. I had always paid little attention to dress, but now I began to spruce up and polish my manners. Looking back after years of being housebound, I am happy that I was able to enjoy for several years a vigorous and satisfying social life among people I would otherwise never meet. But I found it very demanding.

In my last two years of trying to lead a double, or triple, life at Yale, and with my inability to finish my book, I began to feel that I had stepped from a solid mountain onto a cloud, and that I was about to fall. I knew that I had always had a somewhat porous or permeable nature, often too influenced by the personalities of those around me. This had begun in Salt Lake City, with my invasive and dominating parents. At times, as I moved from social group to group, I resorted to a chameleon-like adaptability. Since I thought these worlds incompatible, I compartmentalized my various lives. I often felt giddy, as though I were only acting, not truly engaged in my numerous roles. These were warning signs. I soon realized that I did not have the solid core of self-belief or endurance to live so complicated a life.

Not all of my life at Yale was so sedate. There were more than a few moments of unabashed hilarity. At one point, a group of students—all friends of mine—decided to establish a free weekly film series in one of the larger halls at the university. When the school interviewed a prospective director for the series, a minor critic from New York, I decided that after his interview I should give him a party at Pierson College. He turned out to be an utter scoundrel. He seemed to have decided that it might be amusing to create a little havoc at an Ivy League school. He invited over ten of his friends to the party—among them the English comic, Hermione Gingold—and I invited several colleagues of my own. Hermione was a delight, but the others were a nightmare. Unfortunately, my suite was adjacent to Pierson’s court, in which, to my amazement, the college chorus and guest singers were concurrently performing a musical version of The Devil and Daniel Webster. Pierson’s Georgian red-brick walls were luckily very thick, and I closed my blinds and curtains to further block the sound from within. The New York group soon got drunk and belligerent. At some point that evening, I was told that both of my bedrooms had been occupied by busy couples—a man and woman in one room, and two men in the other. The men had apparently not seen each other since the war. Meanwhile, the four spouses of these happy fornicators were fuming in my living room. I tried to keep the mayhem indoors, but two or three times, a few drunken guests would stagger out and pretend to listen to the opera. As far as I know, the audience outside was unaware of the ongoing orgy being held in my apartment. Inevitably, this was the last time this critic ever appeared at Yale, and the film series was postponed for several months until a more suitable candidate could be found.

The high point of my public life at Yale was an occasion on which I was chosen by students to lecture on Charlie Chaplin before an audience of over six hundred. This event in my last year was to inaugurate a new film program at Yale. I had the chutzpah to speak before the showing of the films, thus presumptuously delaying the students’ seeing the Master. I was so devoted to Chaplin that I forgot my self-consciousness and gave an apparently rousing lecture about Chaplin’s phenomenal ability to play endless variations upon human predicaments through his expressive face, body movements, a few props, and (later with talkies) his voice. I was surprisingly free and exuberant during my talk, almost floating on air, perhaps because I was speaking on a subject—mime and comedy—that I had thought about at Harvard and that was unfamiliar to others. The laughter and enthusiastic applause afterward were very flattering. To my surprise, I one-upped the wit like a professional whenever I could. I realized again that I loved to make people laugh. Afterward, I wished that I had done more public lecturing, but Yale had few large lecture classes or courses. Although he did not recognize me as the speaker, one student told me months later that this lecture on comedy had changed his life.

At the end of the spring term of 1958, still stunned and defeated by my failure to gain tenure, I left Yale. Luckily, through Robert Petersson, a former Yale colleague, I received a good offer to teach as associate professor at Smith College in western Massachusetts. But I was still yearning for New York, and I feared being relegated to the provinces. Fortunately, I had great consolations; my friendship with Roy continued. And in teaching, I had found in Shakespeare an immense world that wholly engaged and nourished me. Leaving Yale, my students and friends, was the most painful loss I had yet endured. I little knew that within two years my academic career in the East would come to an abrupt halt.