In the fall of 1968, my parents drove me from Cleveland to New Haven on a trip that took nearly twenty hours. We reached the Yale campus exhausted. It did not help that my parents were already tense, having watched inner-city Cleveland burn that summer. As a Head Start worker downtown, my mother had seen the emergence of a group of black radicals floating among the government-run programs, establishing political ties, gathering information—and hoarding weapons. When riots finally broke out, snipers shot at the firemen from darkened windows in the empty, rotten buildings. The next day, army jeeps and personnel carriers patrolled the street. My mother was stopped at a National Guard check point, and she cried. The great upheavals that had haunted my parents’ dinnertime conversation had arrived.
Anxious as we approached the campus, my father wondered whether he should put on a sport coat. He was surprised to see large crowds of mild-mannered parents, many of them in T-shirts, carrying their children’s clothes into the dormitories. Out in the large quad where freshmen were housed, there was bargaining for the old dressers, desks, and tables traditionally sold by upperclassmen to new students. The young arrivals smiled and waved at each other.
Not everyone would adapt so easily. Early in my freshman year, a student dropped out after only three days—a much-celebrated case at the time and one I remember well because he was my roommate. He was from a small rural town in Pennsylvania, and his parents—an unfashionably stout woman in a rumpled dress and a bulky, fiftyish man, dressed in corduroy pants and a plaid shirt with a large grease spot—plainly were not prepared either for Yale or for the likes of me. On our first meeting, they stared for what seemed a good three minutes, in the incredulous manner that people from more cosmopolitan settings were rapidly learning to suppress in their encounters with blacks.
Even given this unpromising start, my roommate’s departure offered food for thought. If the problem was me, he could always have found other lodging. As I grew acclimated to Yale, however, other possibilities came to mind. For one thing, he had loaded himself up with science courses in a way that showed a familiar kind of arrogance that could well have been covering for a familiar kind of fright. Then, too, considering his air of silent, self-conscious uprightness, he might easily have been spooked by the availability, or rather the ubiquity, of drugs in our entryway at Wright Hall. Even by Yale standards, the pharmaceutical presence was extraordinary. I had never seen a marijuana cigarette before, but by the end of my first week I had had an opportunity to contemplate my first kilo—two plain brown shopping bags filled with something that looked like straw.
In my roommate’s case, the psychological dislocation caused by living amid this suburban contraband might have been intensified by the froideur, the preppy cool, with which it was regarded by those around us. I asked my dorm adviser about the legal jeopardy involved in having, by my count, ten tabs of acid in the open medicine cabinet of our communal bathroom. A self-assured, Asian-American law student, possessed of a tall, leggy black girlfriend, the adviser chuckled quietly, never breaking the reserve by means of which Ivy League graduates like him let freshmen from the Midwest know just how innocent they really were. After about a month at Yale, I came to see my departed white roommate as a secret sharer, and his frightened silence as a screen on which I projected my own terror.
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Yale would not go co-ed until the following year, but at some point during my second semester a week was devoted to hosting girls interested in attending as new enrollees or transfer students. By means unknown to me, my bedroom was commandeered by what seems to have been the most sexually active female undergraduate on the East coast—a judgment in which I persist to this day despite my awareness of how fierce the competition for that honor must have been in the spring of l969.
In her perpetual state of dishabille, this young woman was a fantasy extension of the weekending girls from sister schools who used to sit in the living rooms of our dorm suites with their short woolen skirts, in plaid patterns much as their mothers might have worn, rucked up to the thighs. Basking in the prestige of Smith, Vassar, Mount Holyoke, they glowed with the casual elitism of high SAT scores, radical politics, and a carefully cultivated illusion of sexual availability. “F—,” enjoined my dorm adviser at the end of one of his long philosophical discourses. He said it calmly, not licentiously, in the rational patrician manner in which, I supposed, the act itself was being performed by my classmates all around me.
In light of everything else that was going on at Yale, perhaps the most unexpected element in the school’s democratic “revolution” was the blacks. Hardly, it seemed, had America’s upper-middle-class whites absorbed the revolt of their own children, with the attendant disruption of every settled habit and expectation of life, than they were being forced to confront the new presence of African-Americans in their midst. In 1967, more than a hundred of America’s inner cities had burned, and the next years were no better. Power is holy in American life, and I suspect that the sheer force of violence wielded by blacks in those years had earned them a certain grim respect.
Still, anyone seeking to avoid blacks at Yale could do so, simply by declining to sit at any of the all-black tables that had quickly formed in the residential colleges and common dining rooms. And here we come upon one of the paradoxes of the time: by 1970, the white liberal class, even as it vociferously proclaimed its abhorrence of apartheid in South Africa, had made its peace with the similar arrangements springing up as if spontaneously in the great American universities. John P. Trinkaus, an eminent biologist who was the master of my college, would shock me by defending this reconstructed color line. In the new order, he explained, blacks had achieved an admirable autonomy, refusing to imitate those unctuous Negroes who would once do anything to make their way in the academic, political, and social worlds of the American university.
Nor was that the end of the paradox. What struck me most about the new racial dispensation was the undeniable attraction exercised by black radicals on upper-class whites, and vice versa. As a high-school senior, I had read E. Franklin Frazier’s The Black Bourgeoisie and been impressed by its thesis that the black middle class had created a play world completely imitative of bourgeois white society. At Yale, it was instead the black separatists who, in the end, would be tapped for membership in the college’s exclusive senior societies. A new game had begun, and these young black activists were playing it with a skill and cynicism that made most white young men look as politically and sexually impotent as the sassy roughness of Aretha Franklin’s songs hinted they were.
An article published in the Yale Alumni Journal during my freshman year quoted one well-known American black intellectual questioning the relevance of traditional education to African-American students. Another black leader cited in the same article fretted about balancing his black consciousness with his three-piece suit. At the time, I dismissed all this as a form of vulgar philistinism that had no place at a university. Looking back, I am half-charmed by the Babbitt-like chutzpah with which cultural nationalism, with all its repressions, came to serve the needs of an emerging black middle class displaced from its traditional centers of socialization.
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Whatever radical sympathies I myself brought to Yale were destroyed by the protests in May 1970 surrounding the trial in New Haven of the Black Panther leader Huey Newton. It was a week in which apocalyptic rumors of the imminent physical destruction of the Yale campus spread throughout academic communities of the East.
To the snickering of some of my peers, I had decided to go back to Cleveland to wait out the turmoil. As I was departing for the airport, I suddenly saw the family of one of my white classmates arriving from New York in their Volvo station wagon. Apparently, my classmate’s younger brother had insisted on coming up to take part in the adventure. Their mother, still slender in her forties, was dressed in a linen summer suit. Stepping out of the car to kiss her younger son, she dramatically placed both hands around his face in a show of concern. I was not moved. The stuffed briefcase I carried, with material for papers on Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot, was my answer to the upper-class Babylon I was beginning to despise.
Returning to Yale after a long weekend at home, I was met in my entryway by a close friend who informed me that in the heat of the spring air, a couple had copulated nude on one of the green billiard tables in the basement of Branford College. Whether or not it happened was beside the point; the rumor itself captured the atmosphere of lurid exhibitionism that had assumed center stage that week. The friend who conveyed the report, a shrewd, witty, gay student of comparative literature, seemed uncharacteristically taken aback by how far things had gone.
I could hardly pretend to be immune. Although I eventually managed to graduate from Yale cum laude with honors in English, I was too traumatized by the cultural and sexual derangements around me to concentrate on schoolwork for my last two years. My major activity was combing the stacks of Sterling library at night and devouring my finds—Blake, Whitman, Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Heine, Wordsworth, Yeats, Du Bois, Frost, Leavis, Trilling, Howe, Kazin, Auden, Roethke, Ellison, Didion, Auerbach, Sontag—in the huge stuffed chairs, surrounded by the refreshingly nun-like female graduate students who favored long woolen skirts, gray stockings, and plain, low-heeled shoes.
Of my few friends, most were Jewish, the sons of successful academics or businessmen. In the spring, we would occasionally spend weekends at a roommate’s summer house in East Hampton—digging clams, making chowder, riding the family cabin cruiser to the small harbor. I had never before drunk Cointreau, seen a Long Island summer home, smelled the Sound, or eaten raw oysters culled in the shallows with a rake. One late spring evening, I met a crowd of New York literati at a dinner party out there. Much of the conversation turned on whether the druggie motorcycle film Easy Rider was the American epic of my generation—an opinion I then rejected but which was true in ways that are painful to admit. Late at night I fell into a long conversation about Proust with a book editor, a quiet, smart woman with a slight British accent. Tom Wolfe was already making great literary havoc of these people and their ways, but in contrast to what was happening in New Haven, the image of their luminous civility makes up my most pleasant memory of my Yale years.
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On campus, questions of cultural identity had very quickly formed around static notions of blackness and whiteness. The crucial markers for blacks were soul music, black dialect, and other more evanescent points of racial style. No criticism was more damning than the suggestion that a fellow black was acting white. I began to see that the various personal estrangements described by my literary heroes—Joyce, Dostoevsky, Thoreau—were not just imaginative artifacts, let alone a beneficial vantage point on society, but something far more serious. Real alienation, I discovered, was loneliness and inner emptiness.
Among my most vivid memories of the time is a series of photographs, published in a student journal, of the Yale quads without a soul in them. Whether the photos were meant to evoke a feeling of serenity or to capture the sense of desertion experienced by an outsider at a school for insiders, what they pictured is what I saw from my window when everyone else was at a football game or some other big event. My quest for any kind of organized camaraderie had long since given out. In my unhealthy mental state, the crowded desolation of Yale’s campus was like a premonition of what it might finally mean to be a black in American society.
Of course, isolation of this kind was the price paid at the time by many blacks, in many different institutions. I had a shock of recognition when, in a New York Times Magazine article, I read that the distinguished psychologist Kenneth Clark, then a professor at the City University of New York, was feeing as paranoid as any other black academic who had the misfortune of being on record as an advocate of racial integration. At Yale I came to realize that my presence violated one of the deepest taboos in American life—the racial boundary hedged around the life of the mind.
I certainly felt a hint of this taboo when, in class, eyes would lift every time I found a Miltonic allusion in Wordsworth, a dramatic irony in a Joyce story, or a pattern of sound and sense in Donne. Like all scholarship boys, I took my hard-earned learning more seriously than those who had acquired it at home or in private secondary schools. But there was also something else going on in these looks of surprise and condescension. If, as the new orthodoxy held, blacks needed to immerse themselves in black culture for their emotional and psychological well-being, then I was engaged in a fundamentally sick activity.
Few blacks at Yale had negotiated this conundrum. One of them was the best student in my freshman English class. He had mastered the task of close reading long before me, and would go on to get a Rhodes scholarship. An excellent fencer, he was on very jovial terms with the other members of the team, exemplifying the kind of comradeship so conspicuously on display in the school’s beautifully illustrated brochures. Despite my attempts to engage him in conversation, he never said more than two or three words to me. When I moved into Yale’s all-black dormitory in my senior year, I found that none of my fellow students there knew of him. I envied him deeply—he had made his separate peace with Yale and kept his balance in what I increasingly saw as a psychological high-wire act.
Very little of the counseling that I got at Yale was useful. One therapist, a tall black man, encouraged me to attend meetings of the radical Black Student Alliance. He ferociously attacked the claims I made for my parents’ wisdom and accused me of making myself odd out of sheer perversity. Our sessions ceased after he shaved off all his hair and donned a gold earring.
More successful was the therapist who asked me about myself, looked up my academic record, bluntly inquired what I expected from life, and said I should wait a month before seeing him again. Seizing the glimmer of sanity he seemed to be holding out, I ventured that things could not be as bad as I thought.
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And indeed, during my final year, my day-to-day existence calmed. I met a number of black graduate students whom I still count as some of the brightest people I have ever known. One of them, a law student named Susan, flirted charmingly with me, and I followed her everywhere. Another, a recent graduate of Atlanta’s Spelman College, gave me a taste of the scorn that alumni of predominantly Negro colleges felt for black Ivy League arrivistes.
For the first time, too, I began to take an interest in the many well-known people who came to speak at Yale. One especially memorable event was a poetry reading by Robert Lowell. Elegantly dressed in a tweed coat and regimental tie, his high forehead wreathed with graying hair, Lowell was already a canonical figure. He walked slowly, spoke in measured tones, and gave every sign of the exhaustion one might have expected from reading about his disordered personal life. Already in the Indian summer of his eminence, Lowell at that moment possessed enormous personal dignity.
In the crowd were not only the literary types one usually saw at this sort of occasion but some seedily dressed radicals. Most of them were there because of Lowell’s role in the anti-Vietnam-war movement and the 1967 march on the Pentagon, done to a turn by Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night. In his book, Mailer had stressed the conservative aspects of Lowell’s character, career, and New England family connections—qualities that made everything he wrote seem instantly a part of American history. For the upper-class undergraduate radicals in attendance, there was another element as well: Lowell’s well-known sexual and psychological derangements had made him a sort of contemporary. The heavy burden of fame, the Harvard affectations, and the medication that stooped his shoulders and blurred his speech no doubt served to reassure any of them who might be hoping that their own, parentally subsidized roads of excess could lead to a similar palace of wisdom.
I noticed only one other black student among the nearly 200 people in the hall. We may have nodded to each other, but I do not think we spoke. At such events, looking for other blacks was an idle, almost automatic habit of mine, picked up from my mother. Whenever we would go to an art museum or concert, she would denounce Cleveland’s black middle class for its absence. But in the “enlightened” 1970’s, no one minded the absence of blacks, even at a reading by so acclaimed an American poet as Lowell. Were not blacks engaged in the creation of a new culture of their own? Their absence was to be seen not as a sign of delinquency but as the necessary consequence of having other fish to fry.
Lowell’s message was a tragic one, but it was tempered by an upper-class form of optimism or resignation. Great civilizations—Greece, Rome, Britain—had risen and fallen, and, he suggested, would rise and fall again. The waning of America was itself part of an organic process, an altogether typical stage in the life of an imperial civilization. The best and most accomplished societies would decline, their best and most sophisticated poets urbanely bidding them farewell.
For all of its questionable apprehension, Lowell’s view was a deeply civilizing one and, in its pointed elitism, rather comforting, too. There was much talk in the late 1960’s and early 70’s about the emptiness of tradition and all received ideas, but I suspect the real reason Lowell’s presence was valued so highly by his mostly young, mostly white audience lay precisely in the deep consolations of the classical literary tradition that he brought to the tumultuous present. He helped even the most frenzied radicals among us to accept the traumas of the day as part of the human condition. Moreover, he was an elder in the great city of learning who, on the page and at public events, treated his fellow citizens with grace and deference. Speaking to his audience at Yale, he implicitly affirmed the idea of the academy, then under ferocious and seemingly terminal attack from within, as a place where art, politics, and youth might not only coexist but thrive.
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A second memorable event of my senior year was a panel discussion featuring Kenneth Clark and Martin Kilson, the two preeminent black social scientists of the day. The evening began auspiciously, with a cocktail party at my residential college for the honored guests. As was the custom, a lottery was held to select the students who would attend. All of the winners, it turned out, were black.
I was particularly excited to have been selected. In Cleveland I had grown up with very few heroes, and Kenneth Clark was one of them. My mother kept a copy of Prejudice and Your Child on top of her bureau. She shared Clark’s view, most famously set out in the research cited in Brown v. Board of Education, that segregation had had an extremely destructive effect on the psychological development of black children.
Whether this was really true or not—my graduate-student friend from Spelman disputed it—I remained deeply sympathetic to Clark. In its own way, his analysis highlighted the deep fears and anxieties one sensed in the black middle-class students who were increasingly segregating themselves into separate lunch tables and dorms. Living in such a dorm during my senior year, I found no black nirvana but a middle class as parochial and nervous as I had ever known it to be in Cleveland. Clark understood that, for all their claims of pride and autonomy, the black separatists were implicitly re-creating the terms, and legitimating the idea, of black inferiority.
A slender, elegantly dressed man, Clark arrived at the cocktail party and quickly repaired to a corner for quiet conversation. Much more noticeable was Kilson, who was busily engaged in dialogue with a crowd of black students. An expert on African politics and Harvard’s first tenured black professor, Kilson had by then become a well-known commentator on African-American political, social, and intellectual life, writing for magazines like the American Scholar, Dissent, and Encounter. Though a firm opponent of the war in Vietnam, he was also a critic of the infantile Left, especially as it found expression in black militancy at elite universities. Despite the controversy swirling around him, he plainly loved the give-and-take of university life.
Clark did not speak up until we gathered for dinner. Clearly disgusted that he had been greeted by an all-black group of students, he held forth on the price that we paid for our voluntary separatism. Did we know that our white liberal teachers gave us A’s and B’s to keep us out of their faces? Could we imagine how much lower our entrance-exam scores had been than those of our white peers? By the time dinner ended and the two speakers made their way to the auditorium, their joint intention was clear. Both men had taken huge amounts of abuse from student radicals in the past few years, and tonight the tables would be turned.
The real fireworks were saved for the question-and-answer session, when the black nationalists who had drifted in during the proceedings rose to ask their predictably long, polemical questions. These young men were the bane of visiting black middle-class academics, whom they loved to intimidate with jargon and accusations of Uncle Tomism. But this was exactly what Kilson and Clark had anticipated. Kilson was direct and blunt, rising to an eloquent attack on black anti-intellectualism. Clark, with a nearly noble haughtiness, asked of one incoherent question, “Do I have to answer this?,” his forehead creased with the weariness of having responded to a hundred such questions at a hundred such events. Kilson concluded on a note of deep pessimism about the future. Clark, asked if blacks would survive, replied with a bitter smile that they would, as they always had, through the mother wit of their folk tradition.
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Kenneth Clark and Martin Kilson were attacking elements of black culture in the university that really ran through the whole of the radical student movement, white and black alike: its self-satisfaction, its parochialism, its moral cynicism, and above all its hard-core philistinism. Years later, I would read Clark’s sharp analysis of the black-studies programs through which young African-American militants had won undeserved academic concessions from intimidated administrators. I had already noticed how, coming into their brave new world, many blacks of my generation had, in effect, pledged that they would not violate the established intellectual turf but would instead create their own—and were welcomed on those terms. What was really emerging, Clark now wrote, was an updated form of white paternalism, one in which complicit blacks would be given “what they wanted,” only to be undone later by their own inadequacies.
This may impute too much cynicism to all of the parties involved. What is undeniable, however, is the fact that the American university was collapsing as an institution at the very moment when blacks were entering it en masse. This was a historical irony of truly tragic proportions. Despite the many high-achieving black students at Yale, the perception was unmistakable that formal academic standards had been changed to accommodate them. Yet these were the very same standards that, as a consequence of a widespread student “revolution,” were everywhere in the process of being scuttled or driven underground—the very same standards whose enforcement would have rewarded those blacks willing and able to work to meet them.
A still crueler irony was that the new notions of African-American “pride” had so little to offer to the black masses in whose ostensible interests they were being developed and publicized. During my senior year, I volunteered to teach at a small high school in New Haven run by a group of blacks from Yale. The first text I assigned consisted of selections from W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Eager to initiate my young African-American charges in the power of Du Bois’s thought, I began the next class by talking about the reading, only to be met with looks of utter incomprehension. I asked a student to read aloud the opening line of the first essay and quickly discovered the problem: he could not recognize half the words.
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