Our People     

The alchemical change wrought in me by the recent Smith conference has been so remarkably liberating that I remain puzzled about why I had to have this regenerative help from without and could not heal myself, ever so slowly, from within. It’s true that I did put my dubious reputation on a backburner for periods of time, but after 1960 I never felt whole. At the risk of some repetition, I would like to touch again upon some of the troubling characters and situations of my past to review the inheritance I brought to the Smith incident. If I had not been maimed in my earlier years, I believe that I could have transcended sooner my legal and professional indictments. But I did not have enough confidence to defend myself. 1960 compounded the difficulties I had experienced in my first four decades.

The Primal Struggle

My mother inherited from her father a courage and drive that none of her siblings possessed. Aspects of these qualities, nevertheless, crushed my sister, drove my father for long periods from home and family, and blocked me for several years from pursuing the career I hoped for. At first, mother seemed to encourage my hobbies, especially my movie-going and piano-playing. But as she found her own abilities in social services and nutrition increasingly rewarded, she pressed me ever harder to become a doctor. The disparity between her agenda for me and my abilities left me frustrated and baffled. I knew that I was her favorite, and I always felt that she believed I owed her the right to decide my future. I succumbed for a while, but I finally had to stand up to her and determine my own career. It was this career that became the core of my sense of self.

Mother’s strange story of my difficult birth reminded me, perhaps too often, that I was unusually indebted to her. I now believe that she thought first and foremost of her career, that she was unprepared physically and psychologically for childbirth, and that part of the difficulty of her first (still-born), and second (my own) births were related to her basic doubts about motherhood. In Salt Lake City, the center of Protestant fecundity, I’m sure that she couldn’t bare the shame of losing a second baby. Although she told us when we were older that her children were the “blessings” and the chief justifications of her life, motherhood remained for her a secondary role. Partly because she had worked hard to shape me, mother and I were very similar. And during my first decade and a half, I wanted, like my sister, to be like her in every way. I even wanted at times to live her life, since she was very successful in the small world of Salt Lake City. Despite my devotion, however, I remember moments when submerged feelings surfaced. One evening when she was putting on night cream before her mirror, I had a vision of my mother that was powerful and ominous. Earlier that afternoon, we had seen Frederic March in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. As I stood behind my mother and watched her in the mirror, I thought for a moment that her face was turning into that of Mr. Hyde. I was appalled by this brief vision, and I soon repressed it.

To save my self-respect, I never wanted anyone to know exactly how close mother and I were, and therefore how dependent I was. Once in my late teens when we were parking our old LaSalle downtown, she got out of the car first. She missed her step as she approached the curb and fell to her knees onto the sidewalk. Her glasses fell and broke. Meanwhile, I remained frozen behind the wheel of the car. A stranger approached and helped her to her feet. Luckily, she was uninjured. He called out to me angrily, “Can’t you even help her up?” At least once, I wanted to show the world that I didn’t jump at her beck and call. Mother and I, of course, never spoke of this incident afterwards.

My Two Fathers

In my freshman and sophomore years at the University of Utah, I was so depressed when contemplating my bleak future in medicine that I felt I needed an ally. I visited the chairman of the English Department (whom I did not know) and presented him with my dilemma: a life of service “to mankind” (as mother called it), or a life in (to her, self-indulgent) English. Dr. Neff gave me a wonderfully considerate reply, along with an anthology of poetry and prose that I dipped into for years. He thought that I could “serve the world” just as well through teaching, as I later discovered I could. But it took me a half year to summon the courage to quit pre-med and enter English, and yet another before I could do good work in my new field. This remarkable man very soon took a chance and offered me and two other students teaching positions in Freshman English.

Thus through sheer intuition, Dr. Neff set me, a middling student, on the course of my career. Coming from science, I had done poorly in Dr. Neff’s class. But despite my indifferent performance he had given me a generous grade. I am sure that if I had studied Shakespeare with Dr. Neff, who should by rights have taught it – instead of the eccentric B. Roland Lewis – I would have found my field in Utah instead of eight years later at Harvard. After I had taught for several months, Dr. Neff monitored my teaching and gently suggested that I must learn how to discipline my classes. I learned this lesson so well that I could later almost mesmerize students. Oddly, I responded to Dr. Neff’s kindness by biting the hand that had fed me. One of the most troublesome legacies my father left me was a hatred of older, male authority figures. I deprived myself of several enriching mentorships throughout life because my experiences with my father had been so wounding and bitter.

One curious instance of this transferred father-hatred occurred at this time. Before graduation, a small group of seniors and I staged a short farce, parodying members of the faculty. I wrote this thankless skit in haste. In it, among other follies, I ruthlessly mocked Dr. Neff’s tendency to weep in class while reading passages of Chaucer aloud. But on the night of the performance, my embarrassment was intensified when my father decided to attend my little skit. After the performance, because they were sitting close together, I unwisely introduced my father to Dr. Neff. In his most fawning manner, my father reached up and put his arm around tall Dr. Neff’s shoulders and chatted on about his talented son. Despite the eccentric behavior of both father and son, Dr. Neff remained a true friend. Memories of my father’s behavior continued to make me wary of older males, although at Harvard I did find the most influential father-figure of my life.

I justified my habit of lying about most things to my father because I felt that the vast gulf between our realities and points of view could not be crossed. We could not agree on any religious or moral topics. On the surface, I was the loner in this warfare, whereas his religious views were supported by the entire Mormon community. Of course, outside of Salt Lake City, he was the eccentric. To my father and other Mormons, smoking was as bad as taking heroin, and alcohol was the purest poison. As a dedicated Jack-Mormon, I had to smoke and drink at all parties, and then I had to hide all signs of both. This led to many altercations. Once when I drove some friends to Provo to hear the Roth Quartet, a friend’s cigarette ash burned a large hole in one of my father’s favorite blankets, which was on the back seat. When father found it, he brought the blanket into the house to shame me before the entire family, including visiting relatives. Another time, when mending a sport coat of mine, my father found grains of tobacco in one of the pockets. I had been caught red-handed, but I said flatly that I had been carrying a pack for a friend, or something equally idiotic. My father begged me to tell the cruel truth, but I oddly felt that he would have preferred a gentle lie. I soon quietly, but defiantly, went to my room. For a day or so, he immured himself in the basement. We heard him crying intermittently over my sins. I hated what these incidents said about both of us, but I wasn’t ready for a final break with him. The next afternoon, I read that I had won a scholarship to Harvard. Tobacco had apparently not rotted my brain.

During the war, between my teaching at MIT and my studying at Harvard, I felt lost and purposeless. In retrospect, I can see that I needed this fallow period of getting to know a circle of friends, of learning how to have fun with them, how to play. In my last years at the University of Utah, I had met a man slightly older than I who was descended from a long line of Mormon leaders. Despite his ecclesiastical blood, Claude Taylor Richards was a rebel to the core. When he was taking a leave from Harvard, he formed a circle of serious music-listeners in Salt Lake City. Claude was also Lord of the Revels, organizing every party and supplying food and libations. In Cambridge, I joined another group of somewhat older friends who taught me as much about life as they did about music. Its members were comprised mainly of students and graduates, and met on Saturday nights at the Sprague mansion for most of the next decade. It seemed to me that I learned about taste, quality and skill in many fields while discussing a wide range of topics with these friends. Our favorites were the chamber music of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann, and the piano concertos and operas of Mozart. Without these informal gatherings, I would have felt frozen in a prolonged limbo. Few of my later Harvard classes taught me as much about craft and art—which is what I most wanted to know—as these spirited evenings at the Spragues’. And these get-togethers initiated a self-tutoring habit that has lasted a lifetime.

The droning repetitiveness of my teaching the same short classes for five days a week at MIT was reflected in what had become a musical obsession, my humming or whistling the plucked cello passages of the third movement of Beethoven’s Third Razumovsky Quartet. The regular rhythm and the repetitions of its melodic line felt like the soundtrack to my boring weekday life. Most of us students did not own record players, and so we were all reliant on the equipment and collection of the Spragues. Some of Schubert's melodies haunted me so obsessively during this time that I could scarcely wait to hear them at the end of each week. They gave me such joy that they felt like infusions of new blood.

During my four years at MIT, I was increasingly conscious that I had no specialty like those of my friends who were further along in their careers. After the war, when I returned to Harvard, few classes sparked my interest until I took a course in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama with Harry Levin. Almost at once, I knew what I wanted to do. I didn’t simply want to like my subjects; I wanted to be in love with them.

Writing About Shakespeare

My early writing was ambitious and eccentric. Before I left the University of Utah, I attempted an outrageous thesis on the tendency of the arts in the early Twentieth Century to imitate and merge with one another—for example, in Stevens’ Peter Quince at the Clavier. This pompous project could never be finished, since my love greatly exceeded my knowledge. Fortunately, my later writing was more successful. I wrote a piece on Richard II in my last years at Harvard, which was later reproduced in anthologies and in the Shakespeare Quarterly. I also wrote several prize essays. For my Ph.D. thesis, I wrote on Shakespeare’s second tetralogy of English Histories, pursuing dominant imagery of excess and prudence, and concentrating on Richard II and Henry V. I came into my own at Yale in an introduction to Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, in the Twentieth Century Views series. In this introduction, I made a breakthrough from the Histories to the Tragedies by associating Falstaff with Cleopatra as life forces. Finally, I wrote an article on Antony and Cleopatra in How to Read Shakespeare that also appeared in a German Festschrift.

Confusing Self and Character

In writing about Shakespeare’s later tragedies, I did not have the self-awareness to separate subject from self, self from character. Those who write about Hamlet, that most subjective play, face similar dilemmas. Because sooner or later Shakespeare touches everyone’s inwardness, one is bound, without discipline and perspective, to be tied in one’s own Gordian knot. The hero’s dilemma becomes one’s own. Of the texts I taught students in Richards’ course in great books at Harvard, Lattimore’s translation of Homer’s lliad was one of the most powerful. Richards’ passionate reading of the character and context of Achilles and his world had an enormous effect on me. As late as 1957, my tendency to hero-worship (an obsession, of course, nurtured by my mother) carried over from Achilles to Coriolanus, although the two were perhaps 2400 years apart. When I began writing about this play, I was unable to see the character in the round and acknowledge his many faults. I knew that the play was very controversial. One Shakespearean critic felt Coriolanus’ faults so serious that he thought the play more satire than tragedy. But I felt that Coriolanus’ bravery, integrity and honesty, although naïvely expressed, were admirable qualities that cut through the cynical political maneuverings in Rome. The more other characters envied, feared and taunted him, the more I admired him. I was raging war against the theory of the “tragic flaw”: the flaw of the hero supposedly leads to the hero’s tragic end. But I always felt that the hero’s flaw was essential to his character, part of a cluster of characteristics that formed his basic nature. The lines between art and life were, however, even at my age, not sharply drawn. When I coached a drama student who was about to perform in the play at Bread Loaf, he roared like a lion and strutted like a peacock. I immediately began to see the limitations of my reading. Richards and I wanted above all for students to be moved by literature. What is, after all, the main purpose of art? Unfortunately, emotive power is not a scholarly preoccupation.

Something more intimate than Shakespeare was also at work in my interpretation of this tragedy. An excellent article on the play made me aware of my highly personalized reading: this drama was far too close for me to see that my mother had distorted my view of Volumnia and her relationship to her son. Unknowingly, I read Volumnia’s attempts to persuade her son in the light of memories of my own mother’s influence over me. Volumnia seems unaware that she is splitting her son in two, isolating him from both Rome and Antium and making his death inevitable. Previously, Coriolanus had forced both friend and foe to beg at his feet. But now, he is slaughtered like a wild beast. I can see why T.S. Eliot regarded this complex and painful drama as the greatest of the tragedies—certainly an unconventional opinion, but one with which I could deeply sympathize.

I could therefore not complete my book on Coriolanus, begun at Yale, for reasons that were part of my inner history. Like other projects, this failed effort caused me great anguish. Although I seldom discussed my work with others, I wished that a close friend had warned me of the dangers that lay ahead of me: “You are asking for trouble. You couldn’t have chosen a play more difficult for you to cope with: a powerful mother and a loving son struggling to please her, and yet driven by events to oppose her. How can you maintain any objectivity in writing about an Oedipal crisis so close to your own inner life? Volumnia is your Medusa; you will be frozen into impotence and unable to write. Because this mother-son relationship is behind your eyes, your own vision is obscured.” Incidentally, this play contains one of the most moving homosexual exchanges I have found in Shakespeare—the passionate speeches in which Coriolanus and Aufidius, lifelong competitors and yet admiring friends, pay each other affectionate tribute. I remember that this scene embarrassed and angered my more homophobic students.

Life vs. Art

For several years at Yale, I persuaded myself that I could combine a demanding social life with an intellectual one, but this combination turned out for me to be impossible. If I was to be a social creature, I realized that I should not have chosen Shakespeare—the richest of all writers—as my subject. Just when my social life was most intense, I should have withdrawn like a monk well before the deadline for my book. In the multiple intellectual and social worlds I lived in at Yale, I was often under great strain. I was lucky that the friends I made in these worlds were usually men and women of good will. But some of the assumptions my richer friends entertained about life were very different from those of my colleagues. Curiously, I never spoke of my wealthy friends to my fellow teachers, with whom I shared closer political and social sympathies. Nor did I speak of my closest companions to my richer friends. I could not cross social lines without feeling somehow false to myself, and I hid my gay life completely from both worlds. I compartmentalized my experiences even when partitions didn’t seem necessary, a habit characteristic of gays in those secretive years.

On one occasion, when a rich art collector asked me to invite an art historian and his wife to a dinner party, I saw with a shock the difficulty of remaining true both to myself and to my more wealthy friends. The day before the party, my hostess, insensitive and high-handed, suddenly asked me to “disinvite” the couple. Apparently, she had filled their places at the table with unexpected collectors from England. To my shame, as with my mother so many times before, I did what this woman commanded. My young colleagues very soon found out that they had been replaced and we never spoke to one another again. After this incident, I took pains to avoid being used by anyone.

After the deadline for my book came and went, Yale was soon taken over by deconstructors, neo-historians and other non-literary critics. In the Seventies and Eighties, disciples of these “schools of resentment” (as Harold Bloom has called them) fanned out into the country and took over many departments. These (to me) alien approaches would have overwhelmed me had I stayed at Yale, making it even more difficult to finish my own work. My departure from Yale and its social strata was, in the long run, a blessing. But Yale had offered me fertile ground for years of good teaching and the opportunity to focus on more manageable subject matter.

As I intuited at the time, leaving Yale and going to Smith were fateful for me in several ways. The scope and scale of my life seemed suddenly reduced. If I had been a traditional scholar, in the middle of a project I loved, I could certainly have adjusted to this new, (then very provincial) environment. I did, however, have an opportunity that might have worked. In the summer of 1960, my older Smith colleague, Charles Hill, offered to collaborate with me on a revision of The Complete Plays of Shakespeare, with introduction and footnotes. Earlier editions of this work were then still widely used in universities. William Allen Nielsen had been an excellent editor, and Hill, a very hard worker, never seemed to be bored by details. The anthology was especially good in its indicating variations from the copy or original text. With a lot of minute editorial work, I could have made a name for myself. But in 1955, my painstaking work on an edition of Henry V for the Yale Shakespeare series had warned me that as an editor I could far too easily get lost in details. Arrogantly, I wished that I alone could have written the introductory essays to the plays and to the volume, frightened though I was by the idea of having to master the corpus of Shakespeare in so little time. I knew that the editors of recent anthologies usually assigned each play to a different critic or scholar. With my uncertain work habits—scholarship always competing with teaching—I would have proceeded very slowly. I did not have much time, however, to muse over these possibilities.

Within a few weeks of Hill’s offer and my meeting with the staff of Houghton-Mifflin, I was arraigned in court for possession of pornography. Although Hill and the publisher generously kept the offer open after my trials, I was paralyzed and so isolated that I lost touch with them, letting the offer lapse. Other excellent editions of Shakespeare published in the early Sixties rendered this one unnecessary. In hindsight, I was grateful to be free from an overwhelming assignment. Under the circumstances, I could never have done my best work. Ironically, I later learned that during this same period, Arvin had finished his book on Longfellow, while he left his colleagues twisting in the wind. But I possessed none of his egoism or his detachment from the world, certainly not from people. And, unlike Arvin, I had not completed a series of biographies of major writers, a platform of achievement that probably sustained him through his trials.

Honor Among Spies

I have always been struck by the case of five gay Englishmen who converted to Communism as students in Cambridge. In the 1930s, painfully conscious of the evils of the British Empire, they and scores of their colleagues romanticized Communism and joined the party, often as an experiment. In later film and novelized adaptations of their story, I note that they all went to the greatest lengths to protect each other’s identity, not only as Communists but as fellow homosexuals. They guarded their friendships as Newton never did. In many of the filmed dramatizations of their case, they echoed Forster’s remark that the betrayal of one’s friend is far more serious than the betrayal of one’s country. But this was not the case with frightened Arvin. It was as though no time had passed between the Salem witch trials and his arrest in the Twentieth Century. Arvin’s guilt about his sexuality must have been as great as Hawthorne’s or Melville’s. But Newton had also written about Whitman, who must have given him a very different view of homosexuality. And he himself had been through a McCarthy-like investigation at Smith only a few years before our own indictment. He therefore should have understood the significance of betrayal. He didn’t have a clue.

Friends Vanish During the Crisis

After the Smith disaster, many of my gay friends disappeared, feeling that they had to protect themselves, as I understood they must. They saw that my publicity alone had been character-destroying. They kept their distance as though I had the plague. For years, they didn’t even phone or write. One friend believed I must have taken foolish and costly risks, because such rotten luck had never befallen him. Another later admitted that he had been “scared shitless” after my arrest and had himself consciously withdrawn from the world. A third told me that he feared that if he was identified as a friend of mine he might lose everything—his wife, family and important university position. Only one empathic friend, Robert Garis, wrote that he tried to imagine how I survived day by day. Others felt that their “very lives were at stake,” but Garis continued to identify solidly with me. Meanwhile, I found it pointless to try to explain, rationalize or account for my terrible predicament, and I never did.

There were a few marked exceptions to the general exodus, especially Roy Fisher and Fred Johnson, who kept me in touch with the world. Decades later, now that I have been “regenerated,” a few of these gay friends, all now seniors, have written to me, offering apologies. Most friends I saw during this period were therefore deeply sympathetic heterosexuals. Meanwhile I was a tabula rasa. After the prolonged legal process that left me numbed, I was simply stoic. In my isolation, I recalled childhood memories in which my father, perhaps encouraged by his wife, traveled by himself for months and lived alone in bleak hotel rooms. I began to develop far greater sympathy for him during these years. Both of us at times had lived lives (in Thoreau’s words) of “quiet desperation.”

Toward a Better Life

I have had brief periods of what I considered courage—especially the moment I decided to appeal my case to the State Supreme Court, the moment I first faced my family after my trials, and the moment I began my first large lecture class in Germany. But the key word for me was survival. The crisis had hit me like a violent kick in the groin, causing lasting physical injury. For months, I seemed permanently winded and in pain. Unbelievably, it took 40 years before a miracle occurred. When a new Smith generation had the courage to blast open the prison gates that had been slammed shut decades before, I could suddenly see color, hear music and enjoy other senses that I thought had died. Despite my invalid state, everything now seemed possible. In the intervening six months since the conference at Smith, I have been in less pain, especially in the central back. This observation makes me grateful, but also angry. How much of the severe physical pain I have endured for years is related to the Smith incident? I have congenital spinal problems, to be sure, but to what degree has my crisis contributed to their severity? I believe that I have many reasons to be grateful to Smith, to my current friends there, and to the student body of 2003.

Reassessments

In speaking of relationships with key figures at Smith College, Harvard and Yale, I have presumed to sit in judgement on several of them. But as a man very susceptible to the criticism of others, I am increasingly skeptical of my role as judge. “Physician, (or judge), heal thyself.” In Barry Werth’s writing about Newton Arvin in The Scarlet Professor, he repeatedly tries to be fair to this profoundly conflicted man. But for months I reacted negatively to Werth’s appraisal of Newton, and in my writing I placed Arvin’s spirit (with a grand mythical flourish), at the bottom of hell. It was Newton’s total lack of empathy, his devastating effect on my life, that I was judging. Arvin left me subject to a 43-year curse from which I could not free myself. I have always felt that part of the reason was related to my lifelong guilt about being gay, a burden characteristic of many members of my generation and earlier ones. I knew, of course, that the real culprits were the inhumane laws of the land and Smith’s homophobic authorities—especially the president and trustees. They too easily accepted at face value the “bad law” that prevailed at the time. From today’s point of view, they were far too timid, conventional and prejudiced, their opinions too easily influenced by the tabloids’ relentless attacks. The acts and judgements of the Pornography Squad had for a few months turned prejudice into law. Sitting then in righteous indignation, the trustees could not permit Sophia Smith’s noble name to be dragged through the mud. How heinous must have been the acts of these junior professors! I am sure that the lawyers among the trustees did no independent research to determine the validity of the case against us, whether it was responsibly argued, or supported by plausible evidence. No one questioned the absurdity of the basic assumptions of our case: photos of naked males are criminal.