Words and Worlds Read online

  Almost every detail of our lives proclaimed our second-class status. Like poor relations or peasants, who might carry some contagious disease, we were housed at a sanitary distance of over a mile from the main campus, in comfortable but less grand quarters than those of our male contemporaries. Just to get to the Harvard campus meant a long walk—and during the icy Cambridge winters a very chilling one, since slacks were forbidden outside the dormitory. These were also the days before fleece-lined boots and tights: instead we wore buckled or zippered rubber galoshes over our saddle shoes, and wool knee socks or heavy, baggy cotton stockings that left many inches of frozen thigh exposed under one’s skirt.

  Though we took the same courses from the same professors, officially we were not attending Harvard, and we would not receive a Harvard degree. For the first year or two we would be taught in segregated classes in a Radcliffe building. Later we might be allowed into Harvard lectures, but once there we were invisible to many of our instructors, who continued to address the class as “Gentlemen” and would not see our raised hands during the question period. Possibly as a result, few female hands—or voices—were ever raised in a Harvard course. Most of us supported the status quo by keeping our hands in our laps. When a female classmate attempted to attract the lecturer’s attention, we raised our eyebrows or shook our heads; we considered such behavior rather pushy, possibly a sign of emotional imbalance.

  For, like most poor relations, we knew our place and accepted it with only occasional murmurs of dissatisfaction. It didn’t strike us as strange that there were no women on the Harvard faculty or that all our textbooks were written and edited by men. We didn’t protest because we could not use the Harvard libraries, join the Dramatic Club, or work on the Crimson; rather, we were grateful for organizations like Choral and the Folk Dance Society that were, for practical reasons, coed. In midnight heart-to-heart sessions we decided (and I recorded in my journal) that though girls were “just as important to the world” as men, they were somehow “not really equal.” But semantics says it all: we were “girls” and would be girls at forty, while every weedy Harvard freshman was an honorary “man.”

  Despite these disadvantages my friends and I were not unhappy in Cambridge. Most of the time we were in a mild state of euphoria. For one thing, even as poor relations our lives were luxurious by modern undergraduate standards, as well as in some ways extremely old-fashioned. (In case of fire, for instance, we were supposed to escape by climbing out of our windows and shinnying down ropes. We practiced this maneuver in the gym, and each room had a hook under the windowsill and a length of hemp coiled like a stiff, prickly yellow snake in the corner; but I doubt that all of us could have managed it in a crisis.) We had private rooms, cleaned and tidied by tolerant Irish maids; a laundry called for our dirty clothes every week and returned them carefully washed and ironed; we ate off china in our own dining room and sat in drawing rooms that resembled those of a good women’s club.

  We also felt lucky because, being female, we were not fighting in Europe or the South Pacific. World War II was a central fact of adult life—it began on my thirteenth birthday, and when it ended, I wrote in my journal: “Its not being war is hard to imagine. There’s a kind of childish haziness around it, so that being grown-up means there being war.” Gas, meat, butter, and sugar were rationed; I delivered my ration book to the house mother on arrival each term. Finding a favorite candy bar or a box of Kleenex in a store was an achievement. We vied for the wafer-thin pats of butter refused by girls who were dieting, and often had to make do with tasteless white margarine that could not legally be tinted yellow. Our obligatory skirts and the rest of our clothes were made of scratchy recycled wool, skimpily cut in styles designed to save material.

  Men were superior partly because they were, would be, or—later on and most impressively of all—had been in the war. Most of the boys we had gone out with during high school had joined the armed services, and those we met as freshmen usually vanished at the official draft age of eighteen and a half. As a result, many of us sat home on weekends rereading and answering V-mail. Harvard Square and Harvard Yard were full of V-12 Navy officers in training, whom I observed as “marching in the rain with frog-like noises,” and of ROTC students whose chant was mocked by us as “Hotsy Totsy, I’m a ROTC.” One of the Radcliffe dorms had been taken over by the Waves, whose tight, unflattering uniforms and evident discomfort as they drilled on our snowy quad evoked both pity and awe.

  As it is easy now to forget, we did not know which side was going to win the war. We all knew or knew of someone who had been killed in action, and there was always the probability that this list would get longer. If the Allies should be defeated, Cambridge and especially Radcliffe might be, as I wrote at sixteen, “doomed—considering the Nazi attitude towards educating women.” I put it melodramatically not only because I was an adolescent but because the possibility was so awful to contemplate: already in my first term I believed Cambridge to be—I still think quite reasonably—one of the most agreeable places in the world.

  Cambridge in 1945 was not the crowded, clamorous, glossy-chic shopping center it has since become, but a leisurely college town. When I read Gerard Manley Hopkins’s lines on Oxford—”Towery city, and branchy between towers”—I had only to look out the window to see them illustrated. Commercial development of the Square had been largely halted by the war; the “base and brickish skirt” that surrounded Harvard as well as Hopkins’s Oxford was still—like our own skirts—of very limited dimensions, and there were no concrete fortresses among the university buildings. The architectural elegance and natural charm of Cambridge were tremendous: the Yard in its dissolving fall gold or pale spring green (this was long before the invasion of Dutch elm disease); the lilac-overhung brick sidewalks and gray eighteenth-century or Victorian Gothic houses on Brattle and Garden streets; the clouds floating over the Charles River and the grassy meadows beyond. For anyone who had grown up in or near the average American city of that period, it was amazing to discover that a town, as well as the countryside, could be beautiful.

  Equally amazing was the discovery that a town might be based not on the manufacture and marketing of shoes, ships, sealing-wax, or securities, but on the dissemination of ideas. We saw that it was possible to center one’s life around knowing rather than around doing—to concentrate on understanding the world rather than on exploiting it. “Knowledge really is power in Cambridge,” I wrote in my journal—naively, but not entirely so.

  As it turned out, this axiom applied to us poor relations in a very practical sense. One of the most important things I learned in my freshman year was that there is a way over or under every wall. Many of my friends and I had come to Radcliffe intending to major in English. Now we discovered that if we chose instead to enter the then recently created field of History and Literature, we could get through the wall. We could take Harvard courses; we could range the stacks of Widener Library in a daze of excitement that I still remember; and we would have a Harvard professor instead of a Radcliffe graduate student for a tutor. As a result, many previously rather vague and arty young women suddenly developed an interest in history—an interest that, though initially feigned, often became real later.

  To have a Harvard tutor, as it turned out, was not always an advantage. Some professors were impatient with their young female tutees: my first, David Owen, dismissed my anxious and naive questions with the remark, “The trouble with you is you’re a worrier, like my wife.” He rapidly passed me on to Richard Schlatter, who (though I did not guess this) was far more worried than I, since he had just lost his job at Harvard and had not yet found another. Mr. Schlatter (we regarded it as vulgar to call our teachers “Professor”—or, worse still, “Doctor”) gave me weekly assignments on the most radical documents of English history, but withheld his own opinions of these and all other writings. “I shall never get to know him, he never has answered frankly or openly to any question of mine,” I wrote;
had I been more perceptive at eighteen, I might have been less cross.

  But in Joseph Summers, who became my tutor for the remainder of my time at Radcliffe, I was unusually fortunate, and knew it at once. We came from completely different worlds—he was a Southerner, a pacifist and a serious Christian—and I was his first tutee. But his knowledge of and enthusiasm for literature were so great, and his sympathy so real, that though then only twenty-seven he was already a magnificent teacher. To me and my friend Doris Wilk, he was known not as “Mr. Summers” but as “Tutor”—in other words, the real thing.

  History and Literature majors at Harvard in the 1940s also got to hear some of the most famous professors of the time. This was the age of the bravura lecture, and we went to our classes as if to a combination of theatrical performance, sermon, and political oration—to be entertained and inspired as well as informed. Our professors were larger-than-life, even heroic figures, who provided not only interpretations of books and events, but dramatic examples of different worldviews and intellectual styles. From among them we and our Harvard contemporaries formed our own views and styles. Clumsily but eagerly we adopted the opinions and imitated the manners of our favorite lecturers: the tense, passionate, personal commitment of F. O. Matthiessen; the scholarly brilliance and elegant flair of Harry Levin; the intense boyish seriousness of Henry Aiken. Some of us tried to combine two or more admired styles, for example the lively, gentlemanly romanticism of Theodore Spencer and the weary, gentlemanly sophistication of Kenneth Murdock. And these were only a few of our possible models; there were many more available, in many more departments—not to mention the large supply of eccentric and dramatic personalities among our contemporaries at Radcliffe and Harvard.

  Not all our courses were theatrical events. At times we sought out odd and recondite subjects, partly out of an interest in them, partly because it meant that the classes would be small. One term, for instance, my best friend and I studied the folk tale (“Fairy Tales 101” to us) with the celebrated Celtic leprechaun Kenneth Jackson, and cartography with the celebrated Hungarian gnome Erwin Raisz. As a result, I still know how to protect myself from witches and how to tell which way a river is flowing from an aerial photograph, should either necessity arise.

  Being unable to see into the future, I had not only no desire for a career in cartography but no expectation of ever teaching either folklore or English (here I was wrong). Like most of my classmates, I did not want to go on to graduate school (if we had, most of us would have been disappointed, since quotas for women were tiny or nonexistent). When I arrived in Cambridge I was already determined to be a writer—without, of course, having any idea of the difficulty of the task. Harvard compelled me to read the best poetry and prose of the past, in comparison with which my own efforts suddenly looked very shallow and shabby; only the optimism of extreme youth prevented despair. As for the writing of the present, it was not covered in Harvard courses: in our anthology of English literature the fiction of “The Contemporary Period” ended in 1922 with Aldous Huxley. Harry Levin’s course on Proust, Joyce, and Mann, introduced while I was at Radcliffe, was regarded by many as daringly, even dangerously, modern. Though fashions have changed, I think we were lucky not to have the writers of our own time predigested for undergraduates. We could feel that they belonged to us rather than to academia.

  Even less attention was paid at Harvard to teaching the writing of fiction. At first the only course open to Radcliffe students was English A-1, given in a lecture room in Longfellow Hall. Our all-female class sat in rows facing the teacher, Robert Hillyer, a ruddy, plumply handsome minor poet whose manner seemed to us courtly but curiously vague; we did not suspect that he had a drinking problem. For several weeks he collected our papers, but never returned any of them. Instead he spent the hour reading aloud to us from books he admired, very slowly but with much feeling. Finally one day he entered the room, pulled from his briefcase what looked like all the work he had ever received from us, heaped it onto the desk, and sat down. We waited expectantly. “Yes—young ladies,” Mr. Hillyer said, more slowly than ever. “Yer—all—such—nice—young—ladies. Only you can‘t write, y’know. Wasting—yer—time.” Then he put his head down among our papers and passed out.

  In my final year, however, Albert Guerard, who had just come to teach at Harvard, began to give what was to be one of the best fiction seminars in the country, and I was lucky enough to be in it. Among the other students were future novelists Alice Adams, Stephen Becker, Robert Crichton, and John Hawkes; I am sure that Guerard’s advice and encouragement had a lot to do with the fact that so many of us in that small seminar ended up as professional writers.

  Though History and Literature got us past the academic wall between Radcliffe and Harvard, other means were needed to scale—or illegally tunnel beneath—the social one. Radcliffe “girls” in the 1940s were separated from Harvard “men” both by custom and by law. Even as girls our status was low: the fashionable dogma was that we were all what would now be called “dogs”—ugly, charmless grinds. This view was constantly expressed in cartoons and humorous articles in the Crimson and the Lampoon, and was the source of many jests even on the part of those whose relationship with us was cordial. B. J. Whiting, the Chaucerian scholar, was so popular with the students in my house that we invited him to be the guest of honor at dinner. As he was seated, he looked at his plate, which was painted with a Chinoiserie design of grotesque exotic birds. “Ah,” he remarked. “At Harvard we have pictures of the buildings on our china. Here, I see, you have portraits of your alumnae.” Instead of resenting this, we all laughed appreciatively.

  A Harvard man who took out one of us poor relations was apt to be scorned or pitied by his peers. Quite evidently he lacked the personal and financial resources, or the spirit of adventure necessary to seek farther afield. He had been unable to procure a more glamorous date from Wellesley, Smith, or some fashionable junior college; he didn’t even know some hometown honey willing to travel to Cambridge to see him. This official attitude had more effect on our morale than it did on our lifestyle. Propinquity has its advantages, and most of the Radcliffe undergraduates I knew dated Harvard students; of those who married, three out of four married Harvard men—a statistic that was known to us and often quoted.

  As an institution Radcliffe made certain rather halfhearted attempts to maintain these figures. Every term each house held what was called, in an odd use of British slang, a “jolly-up”—it would now be described as a record hop or mixer. These occasions, for which invitations were issued rather indiscriminately, were nonalcoholic—though once in a while some guest would manage to spike the weak purple-pink punch. They tended to be unproductive of jollity, and girls who were already “going with” someone or had any pretensions to sophistication tended to avoid them—not always successfully, for our housemother and our social chairman pressed us to “be good sports” and “support the house” by attending.

  We were also encouraged to have weekend dates by the nature of Friday and Saturday night dinners. At these meals wartime rationing was much in evidence, and we were served dishes described ambiguously as Vegetable Timbales, Shrimp Wiggle, or Carrot Surprise—this last a very nasty surprise indeed. We were thus strongly motivated to go out, but only for a limited time. Freshmen had to be in by ten every night; sophomores and juniors could stay out until twelve on weekends, and seniors till twelve any night. In order to leave the house after dinner it was necessary to sign out in a large public ledger, noting one’s intended destination and time of return. At ten o’clock the doors were locked, and any “men” who might be visiting had to leave. Needless to say, men were allowed to visit only in the public rooms on the ground floor. Upstairs, the approach of any male—a plumber or electrician, for instance—was announced with warning shrieks: “Look out! Man coming!” It is not surprising that an unofficial anonymous poll taken while I was at Radcliffe disclosed that two-thirds of us were virgins.


  Harvard, more tolerant or perhaps only more cynical, allowed women in its undergraduates’ rooms, but only before six in the evening, and only providing that the door remained slightly ajar. The latter requirement was not always met; and even when it was, few Harvard proctors were ungentlemanly enough to shove a nearly closed door further open and peer within. The result of this system, predictably, was a generation of Harvard and Radcliffe graduates accustomed to making love in the afternoons—a habit that was to cause considerable inconvenience to some in later years. We often wondered about these rules; didn’t the Dean of Students know that sex could take place before supper? It only occurs to me now that they may have been intended to limit mating behavior on class principles, since they discouraged Harvard students from carrying on relationships with the young women who were secretaries at the university or worked in shops around Harvard Square.

  The Harvard and Radcliffe parietal rules, like the academic ones, were permeable to a combination of information and determination. Excuses could be invented, proctors could be eluded; confederates could sign a friend in at midnight and open the door to her later. In Eliot Hall, for instance, there was a student room on the first floor that had a window opening onto the back terrace. The window was covered by a heavy metal grating, but it could be unlocked from the inside in case of fire—or to allow ingress and egress after hours. Occasionally it was opened to admit a midnight guest. This room was much in demand by adventurous and independent young women; one of its occupants during my time later worked for a brief period as a high-priced call girl, while another became an English duchess.

  In one way or another, many of us got over or under the wall that separated Radcliffe from Harvard in the 1940s, when Cambridge was still a college town. The wall, however, did not fall down—indeed, it seemed as if it would stand forever—and none of us thought of Harvard as ours. Today the Square is a vortex of high-rise construction and commercialism. The wall has crumbled: male and female undergraduates share dormitories and dining halls, take the same freshman seminars, wear nearly identical clothes, earn the same degrees, and go on to graduate school together. Radcliffe students are no longer poor relations, but members of the family. When I tell someone in his or her twenties where I went to college, the usual response is, “Radcliffe? Oh, you mean Harvard.” No, I want to protest, and sometimes do, I don’t mean Harvard, but a quite different and separate institution, and one that—whatever you call it—no longer exists. For as it turned out, the Radcliffe I knew was in fact “doomed,” just as I had feared in my freshman year during the war—not by fascist invaders, but by the forces of time and change.