606
PARTISAN REVIEW
I was an enraptured and determined consumer of Cambridge and
Boston 's music, theater, libraries, movies, and museums. Harvard
College seemed to me to be the academic capital of the world - and in
so far as the world had an academic capital, it was. I majored in History
and Literature, and we thought ourselves to be the elite of the elite. My
teachers were Perry Miller, F.O. Matthiessen, G.H. McIlwain , John
Livingston Lowes, Bernard DeVoto, Kenneth Murdock, Theodore
Spencer, Walter Houghton, and A.N. Whitehead. Pres ident Lowell
came for coHee in the Lowell House Common Room and explained
why it had been necessary to execute Sacco and Vanzeui, and a week
later Felix Frankfurter came to tell us why Lowell was wrong. I knew
Frankfurter was right but, mostly, I was impressed by being so near
famous men. It was a heady and exciting world for a young man from
Fostoria, Ohio. I became a good friend of Perry Miller and Matthiessen
and Kenneth Murdock, and spent weekends with them in the country
and many hours in Cambridge talking late into the night. The student
circle to which I belonged included G.L. Barber, Harry Levin , Dan
Boorstin, and Richard Goodwin, and our conversation was tireless and
intense in the finest tradition of o ld-fashioned humanistic discourse,
the best I have ever had in my life. I have never doubted that I had the
finest general education that anyone could desire, and I knew it at the
time.
As an undergraduate I had no time for politics and the world
outside the academy.
If
there was any radical politics at Harvard, I did
not know it. I was still a pacifist and a naive kind of socialist, and I
thought the world was progressing in the direction of freedom,
democracy, equality, peace and the end of superstition (i.e., religion). I
thought the League of Nations was a good thing and had no doubt
that Gandhi would force the British to quit India. But my deepest
concerns were personal, not political. What I wanted was to become a
professor, preferably at Harvard, since I had scarcely heard of any other
University. I thought that professors were better than other people!
They were urbane, cosmopolitan (they went to Europe), and disinter–
ested (or so I thought) intellectuals. Comfortably insulated from the
turmoil of the real world, we, their students, devoted ourselves, in
Mauhew Arnold's phrase, to the " disinterested endeavor to learn and
propagate the best that is known and thought in the world."
It
was old–
fashioned, but for me it was new, awesome, and delightful.
If
contemporary politics did not concern me much as an under–
graduate at Harvard, I did get some introduction
to
political thinking.
My two most interesting academic exercises were lengthy studies of
