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You Can Always Tell A Harvard Man
by Richard Bissell
Chapter One
Yes, Virginia, There Really Is a Harvard
There are several ways of approaching a big subject like Harvard. One is to take the subway cars from Park Street or South Station, getting a fine view of the Carter’s Ink sign as you cross over the Charles River bridge. A fluvial attack on this tantalizing topic is also possible via rental canoe from Watertown on the Charles River. (Each canoe is equipped with a pamphlet of instructions giving advice on laundry and all the college cheers, plus a complete set of the Harvard Classics.)
Harvard is the oldest college in the country; founded in 1636, it is 65 years older than its rival, Yale, and 289 years older than Jack Lemmon, Harvard ‘47. Yale is a nice school located at New Haven, Conn., near the football stadium, but visiting potentates from foreign shores usually ask for the conducted tour of Harvard.
“Did you go to Harvard?” is the first question your average royalty asks on meeting an American and if the reply is in the negative his chagrin is often quite comical to witness.
This attitude is a source of irritation to Yale men and causes them to recite in loud voices many very naughty jokes at Harvard’s expense. But Harvard is not so slow at repartee even if it is located only twenty-five miles from New Hampshire, and comes right back at Yale with some funny ones of her own. Like “When a Yale man is sick, the authorities immediately assume that he is drunk. When a Harvard man is drunk, the authorities assume that he is sick.”*1
*1 Note to reader: Cheer up, this is the last Harvard-Yale joke in the book. I think.
From far-off Scotland, source of a nourishing beverage much in favor with the Harvard undergraduate and graduate, comes a typical comment of a sort to make the Yale man blanch, stamp his foot, and crush a defenseless grape:
We have no equivalent in Britain to the Harvard man. He is part of the American mystique. He keeps on cropping up in novels and plays. When you say of someone, “He’s a Harvard man,” the expression is full of status undertones. To be a Harvard man is something much more significant than to be a Yale or a Princeton man, or even an Oxford man or a Cambridge man or a Neanderthal man. Exposure to life in Harvard apparently has a mysterious influence on your metabolism and social prestige. Although Oxford and Cambridge, not to mention our Scottish universities, and many public schools are much older than Harvard they do not invest their products with the same universal significance. If you say that a man is an Etonian, a Wykehamist, or a Balliol man, it means something, according to what you think of these foundations, but the indication is a low pressure rather than a high pressure yardstick which it has when applied to men who studied where, among others, William James and George Santayana taught.*2
*2 The Scotsman, Edinburgh.
But Yale should not pout, feel neglected, or write a rude letter home. Yale actually has many advantages over Harvard. Such as:
1. The Yale student does not have to bear the brunt of criticisms leveled at “another crazy Yale man in the White House and all those Yale eggheads around him,” because instead of being in the White House all the Yale men are down on Wall Street, although the President of the New York Stock Exchange is G. Keith Funston, Harvard M.B.A. ‘34. This constant parade of Harvard Presidents is getting to be embarrassing, even though Harry Truman, Field Artillery School, Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Class of ‘18, says “Eggheads can be very useful in Government. In fact we need them.” No egghead he. Dwight D. Eisenhower, B.S. U.S. Military Academy, ‘15, LL.D. Harvard, ‘46, when President of the United States filled a number of top positions with such Harvard graduates as Winthrop W. Aldrich, ‘07, Clarence B. Randall, ‘12, James B. Conant, ‘14, Marion B. Folsom, M.B.A., ‘14, Sinclair Weeks, ‘14, Robert Cutler, ‘16, Amory Houghton, ‘21, Henry Cabot Lodge, ‘24, Charles H. Haskins, ‘36, and C. Douglas Dillon, ‘31.
Warren G. Harding attended Ohio Central College.
2. The Yale student does not have the idyllic Charles River with its welltended grassy banks covered with lovely Radcliffe girls and cute waitresses laying around in abandoned attitudes; but he doesn’t have to try to cross Massachusetts Avenue several times a day either. This hazard to life and limb has existed since the earliest times and the careful reader will find several references to intolerable traffic conditions in Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702). It was undoubtedly a contributing factor in his resignation as a Fellow of Harvard in 1703. He had taken his A.B. in 1678 and twenty-five years of dodging taxis and Lewandos laundry trucks just wore him down. Nathaniel Bowditch also got the traffic treatment, being crunched in a howling mob trying to get a look at the Marquis de Lafayette, who had arrived to get an honorary Harvard degree in 1784. Bowditch himself, a seaman with no schooling, subsequently also received an honorary degree for his Practical Navigator (1802) and apropos of the ceremonies is said to have remarked, “What does all that Latin mean?” And only recently Professor Howard Mumford Jones referred to “the nightly dangers of going home from work through the rush hour in Harvard Square,” and also mentions the seasoned Harvard professor’s “skill in dodging motorcycles, Radcliffe girls on bikes, and M.T.A. buses charging at us from three or four directions at one time,” and he adds, “Dorothy Parker once remarked that the automobile has divided the human race into two unequal parts, the quick and the dead. She must have been studying life in Harvard Square.”
3. If you live in Bridgeport you can save a lot of carfare by going to Yale instead of Harvard. This does not apply if you live in Gloucester, Mass.
4. Yale has good taste. When Sinclair Lewis was an undergraduate there, nobody could stand him. Later on, when he gained world fame, it became unanimous.
5. The Shubert Theatre, where the Broadway-bound shows try out, is only half a block from the campus. For a lark the Yale student can don rubber-soled shoes, tiptoe into the Taft Hotel next door to the theatre, watch the greats of Show Biz eating breakfast in the grand dining room, and listen to them praising the coffee.
6. The Yale lads are very fond of outdoor sports and usually have a better football team than Harvard. The Harvard chaps like sports but bruise easily.
So there you are. At least six good reasons why Yale has got the edge over Harvard. I hope the word gets to Scotland.
But what is Harvard? Is it a large group of academic buildings surrounding Mike’s Club, or is it America’s most distinguished University? Are the malteds and hamburgers at Mike’s only an offshoot, so to speak?*3 Let’s try to put it in its proper perspective and decide which has advanced the glory of the Bay State and the United States the more, Mayor Curley, Governor Curley, and Senator Curley, or Eliot, Lowell, Conant, Pusey, and Co. To some Harvard graduates, memories cluster around rainy afternoons, cue in hand, at Leavitt and Pierce’s pleasant pool hall, with the gaily colored pool balls kissing each other coyly, and white-haired Billy ever ready to ‘Rack them up again’; to others it’s sticky kisses and wet feet, promises of all sizes and shapes, six million books and twenty million footnotes, and to others it’s a girl who lived in a room on Pinckney Street off Louisburg Square, Gypsy Rose Lee peeling off her long gloves at the Old Howard, and Ann Corio’s mincing gait, or the forty-yard pass that beat Yale with seconds left in The Game. (The times the forty-yard pass hit the receiver on the head and bounced into the end zone we try to forget.)
*3 See Crimson editorial, Oct. 19, 1961, “The Great Hamburger Blight.”
Harvard has no drum-majorettes with cute pink knees. It is swarming with adorable Radcliffe girls, all equipped with knees but dreadfully preoccupied with the pursuit of knowledge. Harvard is being hotly pursued in the national race for scholastic supremacy, but she is 326 years old and operates on a budget of $85,000,000 a year and that adds up to just about as much culture as one town can stand. Whether the competition likes it or not, Harvard is Harvard. There is only one Ringling Bros., no matter how many elephants the other shows add to their rosters. There is only one Mount Everest, and you can’t knock it down with a tack hammer.
Scholastically Harvard stands in majesty unchallenged (do I hear shouts of “No! No!” from New Haven and New York, from Chicago and the sunkissed shores of California?) and in its relentless search for the truth of things falls to with the broadsword. No drum-majorettes have we, but even the dullest Harvard student (and we have some dandies) knows that Widener Library is the greatest college library in the world and that it belongs to him; it’s his, he owns it. Even if he’s a dope he can go right in and say, “Let me see the box-office receipts for Hamlet written in Shakespeare’s own hand. And while you’re at it, I’d like to hear that original tape of Charlemagne talking to Lady Guinevere.”
However, having a Harvard degree does not always strike Mr. Average Bystander as a real keen biographical note. Certainly not to be compared, for example, with having shaken hands with Gregory Peck or owning outright a home-run baseball autographed by Roger Maris, who stated, when asked how come he was seen in the Art Institute in Chicago: “There was no game that day and our wives were in town. So they wanted to go to this museum. It was all filled with old pictures.” In fact non-Harvard people have even been known to take what might be interpreted as an unfriendly attitude toward America’s Greatest University. (Note: This book is slanted.) Or, in the words of a captain of Marines, who addressed John Marquand quaintly thus:
“You really wouldn’t be a son-of-a-bitch at all if you weren’t a Harvard man.”
The meaning behind this forthright statement is clear to me because I’ve been on the receiving end of similar compliments and it can be briefly summed up thuswise: “You are a pretty good guy and I like you OK but us tough guys we gotta save face. I hear this Harvard is all full of bigdomes and sissies. Even if it ain’t, Harvard is funny, see? It’s a good joke.”
Another more ambiguous version was served up to me piping hot during my adventurous years when I was pilot of a greasy old tugboat on the Monongahela River (versatility is our middle name, us Harvards). The mate on watch came up to the pilot house, set my coffee down, and stated:
“Cap, did you really go to that there Harvard? Jee-sus!”
That’s the way it goes and we get used to it.
Apropos of the Marine captain, Marquand goes on to say:
“It did not appear to occur to him that I might still have been what I was if I had gone to Dartmouth or Cornell. I like to think he meant that I speak with a broad a, and obviously many people feel that all Harvard graduates should. But a few experiences such as this have taught me one great truth. If you have ever been to Harvard, you will never be allowed to forget it. . . .
“Actually I have found that I can get on very well with most people until they discover this error in my past. Then there is a slight pause in the conversation, a lifting of the eyebrows, an exchange of meaning glances, and someone always says, ‘You never told us you were a Harvard man. . . .’ A mental picture has arisen and an iron curtain has descended.”
That’s very true, John, and the trouble is there is no use to try and conceal the facts; it is just like having done time at Sing Sing for falsifying poultry receipts — your record will always catch up with you and it will follow you to the tomb. There is no use when applying for work to cheat on your application and put down ‘North Dakota State Teachers College’ under Colleges Attended. Everything will go along smooth as silk for a while and you meet this nice girl in the accounting department and buy a little cottage by a waterfall and baby makes three and you have a good fallout shelter about half built when one day you receive a message to report to the Personnel Manager.
“Close the door, Freebey,” says the Manager, looking plenty somber.
“Freebey,” he says, “is there something in your past that you’d like to tell me about?”
That night you are stowed away in the chain locker of a tramp steamer bound for Yokohama and Molly has to meet the mortgage payments and the bill from the lumber yard for the bomb shelter by going onto the streets and it is all the time raining and getting her hat damp and her feather boa wet and mud on her kid boots.
Five years later you have risen to mate on a sampan in the China Sea and the captain (played by Warner Oland) calls you into his cabin and says:
“Please to shut honorable door, Mister Mate . . .”
And while Mr. Marquand is talking about mental pictures I am trying to fix one in my mind of Marquand at Dartmouth, as he mentions in his little piece. I just couldn’t see him in a parka leaning against an ice statue and talking over the latest developments in ski wax with his date, a cute trick in stretch pants up from Goucher for Carnival Week. Neither could I see him at Cornell, in the stadium up by the waters of Lake Cayuga, yelling “Come on you BIG RED TEAM!” and planning a hot week end in Rochester. He was just kidding around when he said he would have been the same person if he had not gone to Harvard. Anybody else — OK. But taking Marquand that far away from Back Bay and Wickford Point and the Ritz Hotel — why, that would be worse than sending like Miss Natalie Wood to work in the Wilson Bros.’ shirt factory in South Bend, Ind. It would have bent and warped his character until he looked like a pretzel and where would that leave George Apley and Bo-Jo Brown at? Definitely up the Charles River adrift somewhere in the neighborhood of Watertown, without a paddle.
No, it wouldn’t have done at all. Boston would deny it because he came from Newburyport, which is a long trip for a Bostonian, but actually John Marquand was about the most Bostonian boy I have ever met except perhaps for Charles Morton of the Atlantic, who hails from Omaha. But, unlike the traditional Bostonian Harvard graduate, Marquand was able to look at both Boston and Harvard with the detached eye of an observer from Lower Slobbovia, and moreover, praise God, with a sense of humor. He was terribly involved with a disintegrating Boston, with a falling-apart-at-the- seams Newburyport, with the swan boats in the Boston Public Garden, with the old bricks and the Parker House, with Atlantic Avenue and the North Shore and Topsfield and Ipswich and the Somerset Club and snow falling on Charles Street and young people who arose, knocking over the teacups, when he entered the room. He was a gentleman and he had that accent.
Well, here we are at ‘the accent’.
Although there are a lot more Bill Kings at Harvard than there are Harry Pulhams, the fiction about the broad a persists. George Ade said that his Alma Mater, Purdue,*4 to which he was fiercely loyal and a generous benefactor, “gives you everything that Harvard does except the pronunciation of a as in father.” Walter Prichard Eaton, a classmate of my father’s in ‘00, at Harvard, says, “George did not intend this remark to be complimentary to the university on the Charles, but as a matter of fact it is, for it points out one of the chief reasons for Harvard’s greatness,” and he adds: “. . . the fact remains that for the best speakers of the language as a whole, on both sides of the Atlantic, it is standard; it is the pronunciation which has brought the music of Shakespeare most magically to our ears, whether spoken by Edwin Booth or Ellen Terry or John Gielgud or Walter Hampden. It is the pronunciation which has trumpeted the noblest prose in our language from the loftiest pulpits, and without which even Isaiah loses some of his rolling majesty. It is a kind of hallmark of oral dignity and of English style; it is a syllabic sound around which cluster the associative ideas of richest dignity and least provincial scope. . . .”
*4 (1) Lafayette, Ind. (AP) November 1, 1961. “Do hogs, like human beings, worry themselves into having stomach ulcers? Purdue University has been given $45,000 to find out.”
(2) “During these college years [at Purdue] I continued attending church, thinking it was expected of a campus Big Wheel, and it was a nice place to take a date.” — I Met Christ on the Campus, by Nate Krupp.
It is hard to get Mr. Eaton stopped once he gets going.
Come come, Mr. Eaton, and also tut-tut. This may all be true enough, but why call it a Harvard accent? Who at Harvard has this accent except the Bostonian boys who were born with it and who are stuck with it? My intimate friends at Harvard spoke (a) New York English, (b) Down-East Maine English, (c) Winnetka, Ill., English, (d) South Boston English, (e) Nebraska English, ( f ) Texas English (if we stretch a point and call that English at all), and I myself speak Iowa English. My accent has been compared to scraping a broken beer bottle over a poorly laid cement sidewalk. It’s true that a fellow in my class in English 28, representative of one of New England’s noblest ancient families, spoke with the rolling majestic accents of Walter Hampden and Edwin Booth. But as he suffered from very poor projection and had almost nothing to say about Shakespeare or anything else, his influence had little if any effect on the rest of us, who continued to speak with the oral dignity of Mickey Rooney. Sonny Tufts, incidentally (yes, Sonny Tufts), for whom I coxed on the crew at Exeter, had one of the finest ‘Harvard’ accents I’ve ever heard. He was also the funniest guy I ever knew and I followed him around like a dog. I weighed eighty-three pounds. With his ‘Harvard’ accent he went on to Yale.
