Our People     

In my last months at the University of Utah, I won a small scholarship for graduate study at Harvard. At 22, in the late summer of 1941, I left Utah for Cambridge, Massachusetts, accompanied by a colleague in English and his family. We were fulfilling the dreams of our chief mentor in the Department, Louis Zucker, who had, without much evidence, spoken of Harvard as the best school for graduate study in English. I later often had reasons to question his advice. I was so frightened of the highly competitive environment at Harvard that my first term was a nightmare. Other graduate students, trained at better, or at least better known schools, were more prepared than I and far better disciplined. They were seemingly able to assimilate enormous masses of material in a short time. Deepening my fears, I found my professors remote and unforgiving. Most of them assumed that since we had already mastered the basic reading of our authors—a preposterous assumption—we should now concentrate only upon historical and other non-literary approaches. They seemed as indifferent to literature itself as many of today’s professors of English, who seem more interested in their critical approaches than in literature. My teachers read poetry and even prose aloud badly, for me a telling giveaway. They had not developed an ear. In my first term, my continuing eccentric study habits resulted in low grades in two courses. I was shocked and depressed, feeling as though I was betraying myself and those who trusted me.

My career was interrupted almost at once, in December 1941, when Pearl Harbor was attacked and the U.S. entered World War II. Young men left in droves for the Services. Because I had teacher training, a friend suggested I apply to teach at the Radiation Laboratory at nearby MIT, then the center of radar research. To my amazement, I was promptly hired, given draft-deferred status, and assigned to teach short and intensive classes running year-round in—of all things—elementary math. The purpose of the program was to train young women rapidly for the mass-assemblage of electronic parts for radar equipment. While at MIT, I lived in Victorian Felton Hall, once a Harvard dormitory, stately and dowdy. Like other very old apartments, mine had a painted metal tub, and several still had gas lighting. I felt that I was incredibly lucky to be in culturally rich Cambridge during the war, instead of becoming a victim of the mass slaughter going on in Europe and in the Pacific. In the early Forties, my 4-F friends and I were irresponsibly isolated from a world at war. I was living too intensely, and learning too much, to entertain the terrifying possibility that the Allies might lose.

A friend of mine, Theodore Sprague, lived in a large house near the Cambridge Common, where he would host weekly musicals for groups of friends, playing classical music from his large collection of rare 78s, particularly the HMV classical series of works from RCA Victor. Each night, we began with symphonic or operatic, and ended with chamber music. Theodore was partially blind, and his sister was almost wholly so. To provide company for his son and daughter, their father, a retired Harvard Business School Professor, had turned over their grand old mansion to lovers of music. These gatherings before a roaring fire combined serious listening and lively conversation with intermissions of wine and cheese. I was surrounded by friends in diverse fields, many of them older than I, from whom I could learn how to respond to music and life itself more knowingly and attentively. Far more than literature, music has repeatedly enabled me to make new and close friends. Interacting with discerning music lovers gradually gave me more confidence in my own taste and judgment in my own field.

I very soon established close friendships with Cedric and Ruth Whitman, who were studying Classics at Harvard and Radcliffe. I had never met anyone like Cedric. He seemed able to memorize poetry simply by reading it two or three times carefully. Cedric had a heroic, Nietzschean view of life and literature. This view later formed the crux of his excellent books on the Greek tragedians and Aristophanes, written after he had become a professor at Harvard. Cedric was the first person I had met who was passionately in love with words and literature, and he stimulated me to read and respond to my own studies with greater care and devotion. Cedric lived in the world of his imagination so vividly and persuasively that many of his friends, including me, were in his thrall. Ruth was a gifted and versatile poet, later well known for her verse portraits of famous women.

After having lived in the “provinces” for two decades, I felt that I was at last glimpsing the good life, Cambridge-style. Our mild Bohemianism made every day eventful. To celebrate birthdays and other occasions, my lively group of friends would take the subway into Boston. Since we could not afford Locke Ober's, we would start our evening with huge steins of Dawson's special brew at Jake Wirth's, eat heartily at Yee Hung Lee's in Chinatown or at one of the old Italian restaurants on Hanover Street, then end up (after the subways had stopped running) at Scollay Square, the skid row of the day, where we waited for a bus to take us back to Cambridge. One night, my old Utah mate, Claude Richards, and I were singing German drinking songs at the fountain in the Common when we were accosted by the Boston police, who were convinced that we were Nazis. Claude taunted them so vociferously that he spent the night in a Cambridge jail. After they hauled Claude away, I remember having a final drink in a nearby tavern where a drunken sailor called me a "Dirty Jap" because of the shape of my eyes. Many of us were closeted homosexuals or bisexuals, but in the buttoned-up world of New England of the early Forties, we could not share our secrets even with one another. Still under the spell of our early anti-sexual religious conditioning, we sought friendship rather than sex. Thus, my Eros continued to be music and close companionship.

I had moved from what I considered religious fanaticism in barren Utah to a flowering of art in a rich garden. I had finally found my true extended family, and with it a sense of belonging that earlier I could scarcely have imagined. Only when I started teaching literature at Harvard after the war could I begin to give back something of what I had learned. I thought of teaching as giving, and I was always compelled, like the Ancient Mariner, to share what I knew.

To a boy from Salt Lake, the historical and architectural wonders of Cambridge and Boston were a revelation. I began to realize that my obsession with architecture and art was an attempt not only to deepen my enjoyment, but to order the chaos within me. Coming from a town in which few buildings even dated from the 1850s, I now discovered houses and graves dating back to the early 17th Century. I remember crawling on my hands and knees in the cemetery at King’s Chapel, Copp’s Hill, and other burial grounds, searching like a ghoul for the oldest headstones. For the first time, I could believe in the reality and importance of early American colonial and revolutionary history. I gradually began to appreciate our long and distinguished past, with its remarkable group of founding fathers and later world-famous writers. I loved many of the handsome houses and Wren-like churches in Boston and Cambridge. The orderly restraint, uniform style, and classical echoes of parts of Old Boston and many towns and villages throughout New England appealed to me deeply. What a sense of style early Americans had—however puritanical!

Partly because of my sexual denial, I responded erotically and with heightened intensity to most works of art. Since much of the art of the most visually rich centuries in Italy, Flanders, and France was associated with religion, I also found myself deeply moved by many episodes of the Christian story—little of which I had known from Mormon Sunday School. My religious affinities were always more erotic and esthetic than spiritual.

Despite my concentration upon the arts, I kept up with the events in Europe until Germany’s surrender by reading the New York Times daily. I tried to convince myself that my work at MIT was my contribution to the war effort, but it didn’t assuage my guilt. I was grateful that my remaining in Cambridge made my return four years later to nearby Harvard far easier. So determined was I to return to Harvard before the Japanese surrender that I rejected the advice of my boss at MIT and resigned immediately following the Allied victory in Europe. I wanted to get back to graduate school before the demobilized veterans returned en masse on the GI bill. Had I been among the 600 graduates who registered for English classes at Harvard only a year or so later, I feared that I might get lost in the crowd, never able to make an impression on anyone. But returning to Harvard prematurely proved to be a dangerous move; I was almost immediately called up by my Utah draft board. Following the advice of friends, I presented a letter from a psychiatrist at my Army physical stating that I was homosexual. I was horrified when I learned that my official designation was: Constitutional Psychopathic Inferiority. During the war, scores of thousands of gay men were branded with this outrageous label. I was designated a 4-F, however, and could thus return to school.

Joel as graduate student

To avoid falling into my old habits of procrastination, I now decided that I would begin all assignments at Harvard soon after the term began. To succeed in Harvard’s fierce competitive world, I was obsessed with making up for my poor first term. Unfortunately, I turned from my earlier inadequate preparation to compulsive study, a habit that I retained throughout my teaching years at Harvard and Yale. On returning to Harvard, I was far less cowed by names and reputations than I had been before the War. And I began to see more clearly the indifference to the students of many on the faculty and the appalling dullness of their lectures. Stimulated by a new group of fellow graduate students, I discovered the excitement of learning to think more vigorously for myself.

The mere thought of the millions of volumes in Widener Library paralyzed me. Strangely, I did not realize that my hatred of studying in Widener was chiefly due to physical discomfort, having to sit upright on hard, oversized library chairs. My back was never adequately supported and I was nearly always uncomfortable. Though I tried to deny the fact, my spinal curvatures had greatly worsened since my teens. Avoiding Widener, I preferred studying in my apartment, or in some of the 24-hour cafeterias near Harvard Square. In these plain and spare eateries, I could sit for hours at a table in a corner and not meet anyone I knew. Over two or three barely drinkable coffees and a Danish, which I consumed in tiny sips and bites, I could keep my table and slowly get a great deal of work done. To ease my back, I could tip the light but sturdy chairs at many angles. Strangely, I never fell. At times I would stand or walk around my table. From the windows of Hayes-Bickford, I could look up at the scores of carrels on the dozen or so floors of Widener Library across the street. I was made anxious by the spectacle of numberless devoted scholars bent over their desks, but I maintained my own idiosyncratic ways of studying. Because of my nervousness, I needed to work against an irritant. In the cafeterias, the low hum of activity paradoxically helped me to focus on my work, and I was rarely interrupted. Absorbed in my studies, I perpetually re-adjusted my back and legs, and tried to ignore the growing discomfort in my back. In my apartment, despite increasing pain, I didn’t take the time to find the perfect chair for my study. Like other family members, I think I felt that studying should probably hurt; the words “comfort” or “pleasure” never crossed our lips. Looking back, I’m surprised that I kept at my studies for years so persistently, denying that levels of discomfort were a high price to pay.

Since most English classes at Harvard were boring, I was grateful for the inspired teaching of Harry Levin. I audited his course in Proust, Joyce, and Mann, very daring for Harvard at the time. Within a year, I had a series of lucky breaks. I was asked by Wallace Stegner to assist him in completing a book for the State Guide Series, Mormon Country. He acknowledged my role as a researcher in his preface: “And thanks to Joel Dorius, who did the dirty work.” My suspicious relatives were convinced that Stegner’s reference to me implied that I had attacked Mormonism. An older friend from Utah, Richard Scowcroft, also introduced me to Theodore Morrison, and I soon found myself teaching English A, in the company of teachers like Stegner and Delmore Schwartz, who were Briggs-Copeland Fellows. John Ashbery was one of several gifted students in my freshman classes who later became well known. I discovered again that I was able to work to the point of exhaustion for others but until now not for myself.

In the fall of 1945, when I first taught some of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in English A, I was so afraid of being thought gay that I told my class that the intimate terms (“master-mistress of my passion”) in which Shakespeare addressed his loved one were probably literary conventions. I never even referred to Shakespeare as bisexual. Astonishingly, there was a conspiracy of silence on the subject among the critics I read, and I too resorted to the scholars’ time-honored timidity concerning the obvious homosexuality in the poems. I realized, however, that readers of all sexual persuasions have for centuries identified with the speaker of the Sonnets: love is love, whoever the object might be. Not until Yale could I discuss the Sonnets more candidly. In the Sonnets, Shakespeare, or the “I” of the poems, variously adopts the roles not only of devoted and anxious lover, but also of pleading, even self-abasing, slave—both worshipper and victim. The wide range of emotional experience expressed by the writer of the Sonnets must have both liberated and reflected the depth and subtlety of the feelings also expressed by his dramatic characters.

I, of course, had to speak of the Elizabethan convention of casting boys in all of the women’s roles. As a gay man, I think that the actors and the audience must have been constantly titillated, as the attractive boys whom they had loved as heroines grew up to play the male heroes they admired. In attempting to understand the Sonnets and my own experiences, I gradually began to accept my own sexuality. Unfortunately, this was a process that took me decades. When, in 1944, I experienced the first sexual scare of my career, I saw why I had maintained so strictly the disguise of a straight man. When I was still living a drearily celibate life, someone (I’ve never found out who) told Chairman Morrison, without a shred of evidence, that I was homosexual. Morrison, whose naiveté and severity shocked me, called me on the carpet as though he were an officer in the army, asking me point black if this was true. Desperate to keep a position that I hoped might give me time and money to improve my status in graduate English, I strongly declared that the allegation was unfounded and absurd. I was very angry, and I redoubled my efforts at repression, already far too powerful. On this subject, even so-called “enlightened” universities were then as prejudiced as sectarian colleges in the Bible Belt.

When I moved to Winthrop House—Harvard’s English-elegant name for dormitories—I found an unusually creative and stimulating group of grad students. I always learned far more about the arts and life from this group of friends than I ever learned from my teachers, with one exception. Fred Johnson, my quick-witted companion in Winthrop, had an astonishing fund of knowledge and a larger circle of friends, many of them tutors and teaching fellows living like us in the residential houses. In our contributions to house life, year after year, Fred and I formed extracurricular student groups to study film and perform plays at Winthrop. One year, we rented films from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to study Chaplin, Keaton, W.C. Fields, and other seminal American comedians from the earliest and golden years of the medium. It was invigorating and limbering for someone with my dour background to be immersed in the world of these comic geniuses.

I.A. Richards, my mentor at Harvard

I had long wished to fall in love, to live at least for a while in the body as well as in the mind. But I was still afraid of physical intimacy. As in Utah, I could never make the first move or respond to others’ advances without trembling noticeably, as though I had a touch of the palsy. I still associated sex with aggression, and I was relatively passive. Like many people, I felt that I needed at least a slight advantage in age, status, or way of life to feel comfortable enough to fall in love. Most of my closest friends in the houses were gay, but in the Forties it took us months or years to share confidences even with one another.

In the summer of 1949, I met a graduating student who became one of my dearest loves—Phillip Holster. I knew at once that this was a miracle, but I had no idea how rare such miracles were to be for me. I at once found Phil irresistibly lovable. Our intimacy began when we were playing piano duets in Winthrop House. We stopped playing at the same time, and I thought of Dante’s lines about Paolo and Francesca: “That day we read no further.” I then enjoyed my first totally devoted and mutual love affair. When Winthrop’s gates were locked in the summer, Phil would climb over the high, spiked, iron barriers to visit me. It was like a legendary romance. He at once elevated my life to a different plane. Phil accompanied me to New Haven, and we found a flat at a safe distance from Yale. By loving me, Phil was enormously increasing my self-belief and improving my teaching. Indeed, while I was with Phillip, I had one of my most rewarding and successful years at Yale. But I realized that no non-tenured professor known as an active gay could survive a single year at either Harvard or Yale, and so I introduced him to few of my friends. And our affair was already otherwise doomed. Phil’s family was totally against our friendship, and his Boston therapist insisted that he return every three weeks for therapy. For me this was a devil’s bargain. Having been reared on army bases, Phil was too conformist to live an unconventional life. One day near the end of my first year at Yale, he told me that he was leaving me. For months following I was in deep depression. Had I not had to finish my PhD thesis that summer, I would have fallen apart. Years later, after Phillip had married and reared one boy and three girls, he acknowledged in our phone conversations that he still ached acutely for male companionship. Today, after an interval, we still correspond—53 years later!

As I left Harvard in August of 1949, I knew that I was leaving a unique group of friends that would never reassemble. I was also leaving the most intellectually invigorating period of my life. Learning and friendship had become one. To this day, my Harvard friends remain among my closest. Although I have since moved about repeatedly, every move has been painful, compartmentalizing my life. Only in writing these memoirs have I been able to lower most of these arbitrary partitions. By the end of my experience at Harvard, I had begun to thrive in a complex and multi-layered world.