"Oh," he replied, "about an hour and a half or two hours." The Socialist Worker turned pale. "What about you?" he said finally, turning to the unaffiliated rad, who I guess he hoped would either top the guy from PL or suggest that he was a liar, in either case letting the questioner off the hook.
"I don't do it by time," the unaffiliated rad said loftily, suggesting by his intonation that anyone who did so had absorbed the work ethic of monopoly capital as to be worthless for whatever revolutionary purpose he professed to serve. "I do it by length. Thirty-three and a half pages a night. I count pictures as half a page." One-upsmanship goes on at Harvard, too, and this conversation would not have been impossible at a Harvard demonstration. But it might have been less likely, just as there were probably fewer people at Harvard than in many other places who denounced demonstrators for their violence when they broke windows in an attempt to stop the presumably nonviolent Indochina war.
ONE OF THE things I found most difficult to accept at Harvard was that someone could be a scholar, maybe even genuinely a scholar and not just an assistant dean gone wrong, and yet not be an attractive person. My first term I audited an English class whose professor, when he found he had not used up as much time as he'd intended, fell back on quoting large chunks of Oedipus at Colonnus in the original Greek; but I decided I didn't like him anyway. It was disillusioning. Similarly I have taken a class by one Nobel prizewinner, and the single moment I enjoyed most in his course was his discomfiture when the rap session into which he had self-consciously turned one of his classes got out of his control. As a baldingly rationalist would-be hippie should, he had set himself to prove that those of his students who professed to believe in God and those who professed to disbelieve actually shared the same belief, presumably some sort of Siddharthian, soothing idea about the unity of the universe, so he had picked out five atheist and five theist volunteers.
"Now," he said fussily to the first theist volunteer, "What do you mean when you say you belive in God?"
The first theist volunteer, whom I knew slightly because he also came from Pennypacker, took a deep breath. "I believe that Jesus Christ the Son of God came down on earth for the redemption of the sins of the world," he explained," and I know that this is true because He has told me so."
THE PROFESSOR looked a little dazed. "Well," he hazarded, turning to the first atheist volunteer, "probably you would not agree with that statement." The first atheist volunteer allowed that this was so. It was moments like this, I am convinced, that led Herry Adams to say that "disappointment apart, Harvard College was probably less hurtful than any other university then is existence." Disappointment apart, it is possible that it still is. At least by the beginning of my second year I no longer felt compelled to tell myself, when for example a dedicated member of the Harvard-Radcliffe Young Republicans assured me that the President was a highly moral man because he probably hadn't slept with Pat in ten years, that I thought all points of view merit equal consideration and are equally valid. Maybe they do and are, but as Robert Frost once said, it didn't seem as if. I doubt that this is clear, so I am going to stop after one more story, and since I started with a drunk I guess I will end with one as well.
This happened at one of the last Ford Dinners held in Kirkland House last year. A Fore Dinner is funded by the Ford Foundation and includes a famous visitor, and I believe all the Houses have them or something like them. In the course of the year I missed any number of Ford Dinners at Kirkland House. Among the famous people I did not see were B.F. Skinner and Leonard Bernstein. For the last dinner of the year the guest was to be I.A. Richards, a famous literary critic, none of whose books I had ever read or knew anything about. Despite my ignorance, it seemed to me it was about time I went to a Ford Dinner, so I asked several people who I thought would know about I.A. Richards to tell me about his theories. I even offered to read one of his books in advance of the great day if they would recommend one which was interesting and important.
None of the people I asked had read any of I.A. Richards's books, and none of them knew much about his theories. They all assured me, however, that he was a very famous literary critic whom it would be an honor and a pleasure to see--a few of them were planning to attend themselves--so I compromised by not going to the Dinner, which was oversubscribed anyway, but going to the reception afterwards instead.
I.A. Richards turned out to be a highly entertaining talker, and although I must still confess that I have not read any of his books and know nothing about his theories I have no doubt that his reputation is well deserved, Eventually be began to talk about a friend of his, whose grandmother used to recite peotry when she wanted to make him sleep. The conversation had touched on Sir Walter Scott's chapter headings, or something of the sort, and I.A. Richards was discussing the transformations folk ballads undergo.
"So she would recite," he said, leaning back and beginning to speak from his full chest (I had no idea so deep and resonant a voice could come from so small a man)--
"White was the sheet that she laid for her lover..."
But before he could begin the second line, a student began to wave his arms and shout, "I know a poem like that." After a moment the student subsided, and I.A. Richards went on.
White was the sheet that she laid for the lover.
White was the sheet, and embroidered the cover.
But far whiter the sheet, and the canopy grander.
When she lay down to sleep where the wild wolves wander.
The company sat quietly, absorbing the lines. "Quite a poem to have your grandmother read you," someone remarked, and someone else nodded piously. "I know a poem like that," the drunken student repeated and as everyone stared at him in amazement, he began to quaver a song:
Bla-a-ack is the color of my true love's co-o-ffee, White is the lump of su-ugar on her spoooooon...
"Ah, well," I.A. Richards observed tactfully, "you're right, of course, about the colors." And, of course, he was right about the colors. I.A. Richards wouldn't have said it if he hadn't believed it was true, any more then the theist or atheist volunteers of for that matter the cat who would not refrain from clawing the furniture when he thought that was in the nature of cats. So I decided and still decide that I liked I.A. Richards, and I liked the theist an atheist volunteers, and I liked the cat, and with all its failings I even like Harvard. And if this still isn't clear you will have to try it for yourself, because this is the best that I can do.