On First Coming to Harvard

One of the first things I told myself when I arrived at Harvard in the fall of 2006 as a Lecturer in History and Literature was, “don’t get colonized.” This was a bit like saying, right you before jump into a swimming pool, “don’t get wet.” Resistance to the swamp that is Harvard was futile, and reader, after eight years there I was good and soaked.

Nevertheless, my initial efforts to stay grounded and maintain a sense of balance amid the intimidating glamour of the Harvard aura proved moderately effective, at least at first. I was no damned historicist, no sir; I stuck to my theory guns and secretly poo-pooed all the vulgar American Studies types I found myself working with.

Still, a doubt nagged at me. Not only were they all better dressed than I; they seemed to speak a private language, an idiom of their own that they’d absorbed from their famous professors in Am Civ or History or even English. I was an outsider. A guy from the hinterland, who’d earned his doctorate at the University of Colorado at Boulder and worked on that most unfashionable of subjects, poetry. What did I have in common with scholars who worked on race relations during the Cold War, or the history of the NEA?

Defensive and unsure of myself, I sought to fend off this invasion of Harvardization, which I took to be a creeping mental poison, a slow spiritual death that led by degrees to an ever-more inflated sense of self-importance, entirely irrespective of one’s actual accomplishments or one’s dubious position on the greasy pole of academic hierarchy. When I heard a graduate student ask, in all innocence, and with more than a bit of disdain, “what is cultural studies anyway?” at a cocktail party I nearly flipped. How could these people be so naïve about the state of our field?

(Reader. she later became a dear friend – because, you know, Russians are the best.)

But the desire to fit in, to belong, is strong. And after a while, as I learned, historicizing adds a new dimension to literary studies which I soon began applying to my own work, even if, as a formalist, I remained skeptical of its claim to serve as an all-explaining matrix. My succumbing to the Harvard way happened in stages and really, I can only plead self-defense, an urge to camouflage myself, chameleon-like. First, I cut my usually long, unkempt hair a bit shorter. Second, I invested in a couple of good, all-purpose sport coats and dumped my stone-washed jeans for some higher quality denim from The Gap and Banana Republic. I credit my girlfriend at the time with invaluable fashion advice. Realy, it was all could afford at the time!

And while I was still an easy going guy with an open Midwestern manner among friends, in public, when strolling across the green square of Harvard Yard, or through the echoing marble spaces of Barker Center, I adopted a glacial stare of relaxed indifference or even mild contempt. My beard was a natural aid in this effort, lending me an air of gravitas while I kept my gaze fixed dead ahead on some point just beyond the rabble passing by, even if one of them was Stephen Greenblatt who, when not whispering secretively into his cell phone, wore a look of wry bemusement – his own protective armor?

I learned my technique from the master, Greenblatt’s colleague, Luke Menand, for whom I T-A-ed one semester. Menand had a way of gliding by almost invisibly; he walked with the air of someone determined not to get impeded (shanghaied) by some passer-by. An animated exchange with him was a slight nod or maybe some raised eyebrows and the ghostly suggestion of a nascent smile.

It was Menand who, one day when we happened to fall in together on our way to campus (he appeared, as if out of thin air, treading the narrow walkway through the old churchyard back of First Church, expertly picking his way – a path I had taken many times myself) and we actually had a chat. It was then he clued me in on one of the key mysteries of the Harvard way.

After discussing how much we still enjoyed Kerouac (on the syllabus that week) and how impoverished today’s students seemed for want of actual unplanned experience, he mentioned how no one at Harvard escapes the inexorable pressure to do more. He asked if I'd ever been on the campus of Johns Hopkins, No, never, Well it's the most intimatedinf place you'll ever see, he said. Even Luke Menand, winner of the Pulitzer, felt it. The pressure to produce was tremendous and bore down on everyone, it seemed. No wonder this bastion of liberal thought gave off such an air of desperation and anxiety. Harvard made everyone feel small and inadequate, only as good as your last essay or book. The massive marmoreal weight of its history and prestige oppressed us all, beginning scholars or accomplished geniuses.

But there were other things about Harvard that while they initially bewildered me, eventually became rather commonplace, even blasé. I found a way to inoculate myself against their contagion, a malaise driven by class-status and the kind of uber-organizational determination students brought with them straight out of elite prep schools. That’s not to say I didn’t have some truly wonderful and special students who somehow rose above all the bullshit. But I’ll never forget my first real “Harvard-type” student, the delightful and maddening R.

R. was a petite blonde, impeccably put together, unnaturally self-possessed; a terrifyingly sunny young woman who seemed determined to bowl me over at our first tutorial meeting in the Barker Center Café, which was flooded with sunlight but felt like a black hole. She had just finished “The Bostonians” and thought it “just” the very most brilliant thing, though of course perhaps not as good as “Portrait”, but then what is? What, indeed, I shrugged, suddenly needing something stronger than coffee. It was like being accosted by Tracy Lord in “Philadelphia Story.” Did all Harvard students carry on this way? I felt caught in some infernal Jamesian scenario myself, unable to parry, much less respond to this hyper-articulate display of sophistication.

I was soon to learn that it was all a sham. R. was a great talker of texts, a true champion, but when it came to actually writing coherent, persuasive essays about them, she was a mess. She procrastinated on a weekly basis, failed to turn in work on time and when she did, her essays were riddled with typos, wretched grammar, and weak, if not non-existent, arguments. Her idea of an essay was a glorified book report. I’ll never quite forgive her for making me suffer through Maugham’s ghastly melodrama, “Of Human Bondage,” which she chose to write her final paper on.

A snippet from my two-page report on her essay (the paperwork in H&L was horrendous): “You rely too much on terms like Dickensian, Victorian, and Bildungsroman, employing them as if their meanings were stable and transparent, rather than multiple and contested. Simply asserting a term in place of actually working through its implications and hidden conflicts does not an argument make. This tendency lends itself to a clumsy series of repetitions throughout the essay, the chief of which is the overworked term unconventional.”

Yet, unsurprisingly, she went on after graduation to not only publish a novel about her freshman year at Harvard, but to take up an assistant editorship at a major fashion magazine. And really all was forgiven by weekly by-line in the Crimson on student fashion which was so smartly observant and so funny -- well, it was impossible not love R.

Despite all my cavils and bitching, Harvard was, in the end, enriching. The dinners with Jorie Graham, Peter Sacks, Tim Bahti, Lyn Hejinian, Ann Lauterbach, and Michael Palmer were wonderful. Sitting across from Stanley Cavell at the Faculty Club. Meeting Jane Gallop and Virginia Jackson and Crisanne Miller at the English Institute. Hanging out with Fanny Howe and Christina Davis. So many more …

Then there was the time I went to the bar at the Faculty Club (a place that resembles nothing so much as a funeral home) and ordered a Negroni. The result was undrinkable.

And then there was that latter day Colossus, Bill Corbett, who held court every Monday around 5 during the semester in a designated back booth at Grafton’s on Mass Ave. It was very much a men’s club, all poets, who argued affably about the Red Sox or old movies, etc. Occasionally the rare intrepid woman would join us. Jackson Braider’s lovely wife, Lisa, was one – witty, unflappable, the very image of grace. Peter Sacks would stop by the table now and then and he and Bill would trade insults. “Oh that took the mickey out of you, Corbett!” Peter would crow.

It’s funny, as they say, the things you remember. I recall going with Ingrid to a party on Pearl St in Cambridgeport. I forget now who our hosts were. It was loud and wall-to-wall crowded with people twenty years my junior. In other words, hell. But for one moment all that went away when my office mate Karene Grad walked through the door, date in tow. I’ve never forgotten the smile she gave me. It seemed to lift me right out of my shoes. (Karene helped me get a gig in BU's Writing Program, which really saved my ass).

So many amazing colleagues, many of whom, like myself, were asking themselves what the hell they were doing here. People like Aaron Lecklider, Kim Reilly, Paige Meltzter, Amy Spellacy, Lisa Szefel, John Ondrovick, Karen Bishop, James Murphy, George Blaustein, Anna Deeny, Sarah Cole, Karene Grad, and Teresa Villa-Ignacio. Some of the smartest, funniest people I’ve ever known. We were all in it together and only our sense of the sardonic saved us from despair. Thought looking back now, in 2022, I think, for me, at any rate, despair still holds the high cards.