Our People     

I have mentioned that two years after my troubles at Smith College, Harvard’s Harry Levin secured for me what became a two-year guest professorship at the University of Hamburg. Because my spirits had not improved in New York, I wondered, even as I was packing my bags, whether I should be lying low, keeping close to friends, instead of leaping into an unknown where I knew no one. My therapy had not been helpful, however, and I desperately wanted a chance to get out of the country and free myself from my recent past. European travel, I felt, was the only activity that could shock me out of my brooding and seize my imagination. Because of endearing Germans I had known and admired in America, I could not have foreseen that Northern Germany would at times deepen my despair. With feelings of hope and apprehensiveness, I arrived in Germany in the late fall of 1962, still numbed after my zombie years. In Germany, I continued to feel like an outsider, but it was liberating to be totally unknown. I was now among people who often saw themselves as victims of both Hitler and the conquering Allies, people who had suffered far more than I.

Germany had long been a country of the mind for me. In Salt Lake City, I had read a good deal of German literature in translation, and I couldn’t have survived without German and Austrian music. And on another level, I had been interested in tales of the romantic friendships between boys in the Jugend groups of the Weimar Republic and other sexual freedoms that Auden and Isherwood, celebrating nudity and nature, describe in their accounts of pre-Hitler Germany. But I was too wounded to take full advantage of what might have been an enriching experience in an old and distinguished city. I was surprised by the disparity between the muted and somber people I met, worn down by the terrible war years twenty-odd years before, and the “Aryan master race” of Nazi propaganda.

I have often oriented myself in terms of opposites—irrational but deep-seated and conflicting affinities that partly formed my views of the world. Although I knew that this polarizing tendency distorted my judgment, I couldn’t abandon it. I think this dualism started in early childhood and was rooted in my hatred of my Scandinavian father. It had the character of an unexamined obsession that for many years I didn’t allow even my increasing admiration of great Scandinavians—including a posthumous love for my father—to alter. For me the North was bad, a land of ice, danger, and death; and the South was good, a land of sun, creativity, and life. Hamburg was definitely of the north. It was incredible that the gravely serious people I met, deadened by what they had been through, could have considered themselves potential conquerors of the world. In the performing arts alone, however, I knew that my intuitive polarities broke down. From the work of Henrik Ibsen to that of Ingmar Bergman, I knew that great dramatic and cinematic artists had richly humanized the Nordic world. Of course, as I discover repeatedly, there are always marked exceptions to all the generalizations I enjoy making, but I still love to generalize.

Like my father, I have always been as over-stimulated as a child whenever I embark on new ventures. To widen my knowledge of Europe, I approached Hamburg in stages. When my plane first landed in August 1962, in the colorful city of Lisbon, I felt suddenly free and exhilarated, as I did in visiting a few cities in northern Spain, especially Toledo. In contrast, I soon found much of Hamburg oppressive and dull. I did not know until the end of my stay that Allied bombs in 1943 had nearly destroyed it, killing at least 42,000 people in firestorms that devastated perhaps eight square miles, similar to the destruction in Dresden, a far more beautiful city. Hamburg felt like a recently resurrected city of the dead. So this was the result of the devastation of people and property that the United States in World War II had inflicted on others, but had itself blessedly missed! Because I found the rebuilt city ugly, like much of seemingly Americanized new Germany, I did not fully appreciate the achievements of the Germans in having reconstructed their cities in a little over a decade and a half. Looking at the dark and soulless buildings (I think original) along Lake Alster, I greatly missed the brilliant forms and colors of the South.

I was greeted warmly but formally by Professor Ludwig Borinski, the brilliant and eccentric head of the English Department. He had heard of my arrest from Harry Levin, but regarded the entire affair as an event characteristic of a puritanical culture. Germans seemed to me then not to be troubled by the moralistic obsession with sex that still weighs on many Americans like a curse from the Puritan Jonathan Edwards. I soon planned to be away from gloomy Hamburg as much as possible. The harpsichordist, Ralph Kirkpatrick, whom I had known at Yale, was on a tour in Europe playing Couperin and Scarlatti, and when he passed through Hamburg, I met him again. His excellent German shocked me into realizing that I had an unexpected block against speaking a language that I had studied and enjoyed in Utah. This barrier made my meeting and socializing with Germans strained. Ralph too was gay, and he urged me to keep an escape route open to Europe. He also encouraged me to write my story. But throughout my stay in Europe, I was in no mood to write anything but countless postcards and letters.

German professors were then and perhaps still are a highly privileged breed, treated with exaggerated respect by their peers and students. I found the academic atmosphere chilling. Students would bow slightly upon meeting me and, as a gesture of respect in large classes, tap the floor with their feet as I entered the room. Whenever the younger German colleague who was closest to me, Peter Funke, walked with me, he would always insist on remaining on my left and slightly behind. Although I joked about this, I could not break him of this habit. Some students and many teachers at the university still seemed stunned by the war, although no one ever referred to it. I cannot praise the students highly enough. They were a selected lot, compared to their counterparts in far more open and egalitarian American universities, and their English was often as good as mine. I was grateful and somewhat daunted when I was offered a huge lecture course in American literature at the end of my first year. Except for a few writers, I had known almost nothing about my own country’s writing, which the Germans then greatly admired—perhaps because of its mythologizing tendency. But I took a library of books with me to Germany, and I read widely in the major writers so that I would have something to say.

At age 43, I finally learned to love and respect our best poets and prose writers, and—encouraged by my students—I felt pride in being an American. The enormous amount of work necessary to prepare new courses while I was teaching them gave me focus and purpose. I don’t know how I could have survived without this discipline, for I always felt threatened by bouts of depression. Many of the students were auditors, including many Arabs, who were practicing their English. Some students, expecting Oxbridge, complained about my funny accent. I rarely got to know any of my students well. Their reserve deepened my shyness, and I missed the vigorous student feedback that I had always enjoyed at Harvard and Yale.

In Hamburg, the sharply pointed spires of the churches, still black from the firestorms—and the pinnacles of the restored Gothic city hall—seemed to stab the restless sky. I too felt stabbed by these dark spires and I was perpetually agitated by the crosswinds that raced between the North and East Seas, with the Elbe River flowing northward between them. I was only fully comfortable with my colleagues, the Funkes, and they lived out of town. My stay in Germany was thus lonely and at times desperate. I greatly wished I had had an informed companion to help me explore the city and environs. Like a lost soul, I remember wandering the empty streets on short, cold winter days, more lonely than I’d felt in New York. To comfort myself, I hummed melodies from Schubert’s haunting song cycle, Die Winterreise—a revealing measure of my low spirits. My long black coat and Russian hat, my aggrieved manner, and my halting German put everyone off. I looked like an abandoned refugee.

I lived near two superb Konditoreien, and I would take luxurious but excessive comfort in visiting these posh bakeries, choosing rich chocolate pastries from glass cases and drinking excellent coffee. The stout female clientele wore what resembled men’s hats, and seemed, like me, to be making up for many disappointments in their lives. I could not even escape to find familiar solace in movie theaters, because all films were dubbed into idiomatic German. My only delightful movie experience was attending a screening of Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, subtitled in English. I had never seen the boundaries between the sexes crossed and re-crossed with such farcical humor and brilliance as in this riotous film. It made me homesick for American spontaneity, openness, and energy.

Like other visiting American teachers, I was invited to lecture in high schools for Amerika Haus, the informational arm and library of the U.S. Government. I greatly enjoyed these public lectures for younger students, with whom I felt freer to crack jokes and teach America’s humorists, like Mark Twain and Thurber. Indeed, I felt closer to them than to the gravely polite older men and women at the university, people who had lived through too much horror. Suddenly word came through from Washington, however, that I was to be stricken from the list of speakers. No reason was given, but I suspected that my past was catching up with me. My being officially cast out again seemed to prove that the long arm of American law could reach me anywhere on earth.

I soon experienced another event uncannily reminiscent of my arrest in Northampton. I had met a friendly older gay German by Lake Alster, and he and I had several good talks in coffee shops. Without warning, I soon received a notice from the German police that I was wanted for questioning. What had I possibly done? Apparently, my friend, whom I did not know well, had been arrested for giving books by Gênet to an underaged boy. When the boy’s parents pressed charges, my friend was convicted of “corrupting a minor.” His address book, like Newton Arvin’s, was confiscated, and it contained my name. My friend was put on probation. Recently, German law had resurrected for a few years the infamous Paragraph 175, one of the provisions of older law codes which Hitler had vigorously revived and which made homosexuality illegal and “degenerate.” I was arrested simply for being gay, once again guilt by association. I appeared before an intelligent officer who, to my surprise, questioned the severity of the law, but he had to do his duty. Later, when a gay American friend was in town, I was visited unexpectedly in my apartment by this officer, and I felt as though I were on probation. After the officer left, to my dismay, my friend implied that I was not telling him everything, simply because nothing like this had ever happened to him. His naivete and lack of trust prompted me to drop him at once from my list of friends. Through a German acquaintance, I hired a lawyer, who had the case dismissed in court expensively but quietly through bribery. In two countries, I had now been indicted for my sexual identity! What lay ahead? At least this time there was no publicity. The lame ghoul from my childhood nightmares had somehow chased me halfway across the globe. Again I felt helpless, and I hid my rage behind another wave of melancholia.

Searching for psychiatric help, which I felt I badly needed, I narrowly escaped a new danger. When a colleague referred me to “one of the best analysts in Hamburg,” I was shocked when this 65 year-old gentleman wanted to prescribe an experimental treatment which involved taking LSD, then a new drug. Apparently he had connections to Sandoz, the large Swiss pharmaceutical concern. As with another dubious German doctor I met, I wondered what activities they had engaged in during the war. When I told him, in my broken German, that I thought his therapy could not work, he tried to reassure me by saying that he had a “padded cell”—one of his few English phrases—in his home. Needless to say, I wasn’t comforted by this piece of information. The thought of trying to recount my complex history to a man who barely understood my language was appalling. I fled from his office, and never sought another therapist in Germany.

When my old German friend from Harvard, Robert Benedict, visited Hamburg, which he had once loved, I met other gay Germans, including Hans Heinsohn, a gifted painter, a pupil of Kokoschka, and the son of a former mayor of Lübeck. Hans had in his youth been hung by his fingers when the Nazis discovered that he was gay. All of this time I was living almost across the street from the Bundeswehr, which under Hitler had been one of the local headquarters of the German army. What blood had been shed on my very block?

My saddest hours were those that followed Kennedy’s assassination in November, 1963. After his speech at the Berlin Wall, Kennedy was an idol for young Germans. We in Germany had no idea what had happened at this critical time. Was it a right wing or Communist plot, or a mob conspiracy? I was so dumbfounded by his death that the next day I gave the lecture I had already prepared for my class. The hall was packed. But I did not dare to refer to this tragedy, since I did not trust my feelings and was afraid of breaking down completely. I remember the bitter silence and the baleful looks with which the students left the lecture hall that day. Was this American made of stone? Later I felt that I had missed an opportunity to help many disturbed young people at a grave historical moment.

The holidays in German universities were then long and frequent, and I used them all to get away to places that I knew I would love. To make up for my disappointments in Hamburg, I traveled tirelessly and exuberantly throughout much of Western Europe. To begin my journeys I visited Munich, Salzburg, and Vienna—magical cities with what seemed to me lighthearted people and superb Classical, Baroque, and Rococo architecture. An English friend characterized the colorful exuberance of the details and designs of these churches and royal residences as the energy of the South meeting the resistance of the North. After the sobriety of Northern Germany, I loved these brilliant, usually Rococo edifices, rich in marble statuary and gold-leaf embellishment. The church interiors are painted pastel shades of many colors—chiefly blue, green, pink, white or gray. To Americans, they might look like glorious ecclesiastical boudoirs.

I realized how vividly the Catholic-Protestant divisions of Germany are reflected in their different building styles—the exuberance and even extravagance of the southern Counter-Reformation contrasted with the spare discipline of the northern churches—all bathed in what Bergman might call “winter light.” Protestantism’s underplaying of color, and their rejections of what they termed “graven images,” made me feel that the North had repressed the senses, although it boasted magnificent artisans and artists. Hamburg itself epitomized the new materialistic Germany that Fassbinder portrays so ruthlessly in his films.

To end my travels, I took the train south to several areas of my beloved Italy—to Genoa, Turin and Milan; Venice, Padua, Verona, and Vicenza; Florence, Sienna, Pisa, Bologna and Revenna; and especially Rome, with its beautifully proportioned domes—the opposite of dark northern spires—and Arezzo and Perugia. I shall always regret missing the strikingly varied towns and cities of north central Italy—Mantua, Ferrara and others—each with its characteristic architects and painters. But the chief monuments I missed were in France. Aside from Paris and Chartres, I neglected the great Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals of French cities and towns. I think I was afraid of the awe they inspired. In recent years, however, thanks to TV, I have since come to love the architecture of the Middle Ages.

My furloughs from Hamburg were restless and driven, but they were deeply satisfying—even triumphant—and they provided me with my happiest experiences since teaching at Yale. I had wanted to explore Europe since my youth in Utah. As a child, even my constructing buildings out of blocks and Tinker Toys, and my later drawings of haunted castles, could not have primed me for the splendor of the great churches and civic architecture of southern Europe. When I finally saw them, I found them far more stimulating than anything I could have imagined. Like any passionate tourist, I felt I had to see everything I’d heard or read about, and my pace was exhausting. I also felt I had to sharpen the eyes and ears that had been impaired, almost deadened. by my crisis. I had been in a state of anhedonia for so long that it seemed liberating at times to be irresponsible and improvisatory, to slow down, to watch and listen, and to savor my experiences.

I’m now grateful for every mile I rode on the sleek and sumptuous TEE trains. I felt that life was indeed making up to me for what I had been through, offering extraordinary cultural experiences I had never had. After observing other displaced Americans, however, I feared that if I stayed in Europe, I would end up in an isolated American colony, with the heavy drinking, clannishness, and the prejudices against resident populations that I saw at the consulates in Hamburg, Paris, and elsewhere. Most Americans didn’t often mix with the natives, much less even take the trouble to learn their language well. And Washington apparently didn’t want our diplomats to see the world through foreign eyes. Despite my rich experiences, I soon found that travel alone couldn’t heal me. I slowly came to understand that I could only be restored from within through creative work, building my own castle, even though it might prove to be a shanty.

I shall never forget the close friendships I formed with the career officer at America Haus, Jeanne Pryor, and with the teacher of art and an authority on Leonardo’s contemporaries, Professor Christian Isermeyer and his lively boyfriend. They gave me a rousing send-off, with a boat trip across the Elbe to a unique, 18th century church, with an ancient pipe organ.

In July 1963, my lawyer, William Homans, phoned from Massachusetts to tell me that after almost three years, I had finally won my case. I was immensely relieved, but still doubtful that even this victory could expunge my name from the list of outcasts. As soon as my case was won, Elizabeth Drew at Smith wrote on my behalf to colleagues she had known personally—among them, the heads of English Departments at San Francisco and Los Angeles State Universities. Despite many doubts, I finally saw that I might return to America to teach.

I soon heard from Caroline Shrodes, the chairwoman of the English Department at San Francisco. Never had I been wooed so ardently, sight unseen. My family had been living in the Los Angeles area since the war, and my brother Kermit had designed a stylish modern house for our mother there, thus fulfilling another of her lifelong dreams. I also had an offer from Los Angeles, but, wary of the proximity of my mother and sister, I chose San Francisco as my new home.

In August of 1964, Robert Gericke and I set sail from Bremen for New York. My anxiety about returning was expressed by a prank we played: Bob and I neatly clipped two words from a newspaper headline about a decline in the stock market. We carefully inserted these words in the space reserved for the ship’s daily weather report, SLOWLY SINKING. This gave us naughty pleasure and the passengers much consternation until it was removed. When I arrived on the West Coast, my irritability and fear were obvious to everyone. I first flew to Los Angeles to reassure my family about my moral integrity and to show them that I was still alive, if damaged. I had told them almost nothing about my crisis, and I could not do so now. I merely showed them that I was a survivor, and they asked no questions.

When I arrived in San Francisco, I at first felt like a Mafia Don returning from Sicily to be indicted. Europe had only postponed my having to face myself and my situation as an ex-con, as I thought of it. But Caroline Shrodes offered ingenious antidotes for all of my fears. She and I soon became intimate friends, and I spent many afternoons and evenings at her hilltop home in Sausalito—all redwood and walls of glass, with Chinese red-and-black interiors. She never grew tired of hearing my droning Ancient Mariner’s story.

Friend Peter Garland & Lifesaver Caroline Shrodes

Caroline’s combination of gentle prodding and trust began to have a powerful and rejuvenating effect on me. My frozen exterior began to thaw beneath her sun. Because of her support and love, I felt that I was a Lazarus rising from the grave. In a large state institution, I also found that I needed a friend in court, as she pointed out. I was astounded by my good luck: as a gay man with a criminal record, I had incredibly been restored to my profession by a superb gay woman! Before she retired, Caroline went through my letters of recommendation, written by sympathetic friends and mentors in the East, and erased all references to my legal troubles, lest the documents get into the wrong hands.

To lessen my paranoia, Caroline put me on several committees and kept me so busy that I couldn’t withdraw and mope. It was an excellent strategy, although she often worked me to the point of exhaustion. Gradually, I realized that my colleagues had never been, and were not now, interested in my past. My teaching soon became so satisfying and rewarding that I gained new strength and confidence. I found once again that only teaching could make me happy. After Germany, I found American students surprisingly responsive and affectionate.

In the fall of 1968, however, my academic world again unpredictably fell apart. The season of civil rights demonstrations and Vietnam War protests had begun. After the strikes at Berkeley, the protests at State centered on the students’ demand for a Black Studies program. Many faculty members joined the striking students, and many classes were cancelled. Strike lines of sympathetic faculty formed around the university, and President Hayakawa, appointed by law-and-order man, Governor Reagan, to quell the disturbance, called in the police. Aware that I could not bear to be arrested again, I was forced to teach in nearby churches. One day, in order to understand the violent feelings all around me, I compelled myself to stand for half an hour or so between long lines of hundreds of outraged students and, about ten feet away, the lines of members of angry Tac Squads in their heavy Martian uniforms. I saw that there could be no meeting of minds. I soon decided that I had to leave State, at least temporarily. Over 400 students were arrested that day, including the well-known author, Kay Boyle. I had come to know all too vividly the chaos within myself, and I felt that I couldn’t live through further chaos without. And I couldn’t cope with my own long-repressed feelings of anger in such a warlike environment.

I wrote letters to my friends in the East describing my predicament. In response, I received an invitation to teach summer school again in the delightful mountain retreat at Bread Loaf. As someone from the Bay Area, I was soon asked to speak before the assembled students about the strike at S.F. State, a warfare that Bread Loafers had only read about. I felt like a reporter from the front lines. In California, I had also written to dear Harvard friends, Robert Garis and Beverly Layman, and they invited me to serve as a guest professor at Wellesley College for the year 1969-70, immediately after Bread Loaf.

Both opportunities seemed like answers to prayers, freedom from the disorienting anger and violence in San Francisco. I once again felt very close to my students, and I made new friends on both faculties. I also made two half-hearted attempts to get jobs in the East, but while there I still felt too close to potential exposure and horrid memories. As I discovered on meeting several tactful old friends again for the first time, everyone in these academic communities knew my gloomy tale in one form or another. I was away from California for over two years, part of it on sabbatical. When I returned to S.F. State in the fall of 1971, much had changed. Caroline soon retired. I never recovered from her retirement and the loss of her support and inspiration. She had enabled me to teach well when I was most self-doubting.

I slowly gave up hope for further affairs of the heart. Love between men seemed to me too close to fear and danger. But fortunately, I met at State in the mid-’70s an irresistible graduate student whose more formal dress and manner reminded me of my students in the East. Jerry Lubin had attended two of my graduate courses, and my fondness for him had been building for some time. While he was preparing for his M.A. exam, Jerry was appointed as my teaching assistant, and then a lecturer. We began to meet privately, and we became so close that we could finish one another’s sentences. For the first time, I indulged in passionate kissing and groping sessions in my office. Although we were deeply committed to one another, the affair didn’t go further because of the difference in our ages. When Jerry left San Francisco to teach in the Midwest, I realized that I still loved him and owed him a great debt: his love had enabled me for two years to transcend the bitterness that followed the strike.

Despite the still raw wounds of the early Sixties, I decided to hold tight and await early retirement. The badgering chairman who succeeded Caroline soon retired, and I began once again to enjoy teaching, although without my old enthusiasm.

However, in the late Seventies, I suffered a series of further personal losses. I seemed to take the deaths of family and friends far harder than others who maintained less intense relationships. My family and I also seemed to become lightning rods for trouble. My mother, sister, and sister-in-law died within three years of one another, my sister agonizingly. Two of my brother Kermit’s children were also in a nearly fatal automobile accident. I also lost two close young colleagues, one to suicide. As with my sister, I blamed myself severely for not having saved him. With each death I felt as though I were losing part of myself. These events paralleled a period of decline in my own health. I had increasing back pain, which as usual I tried my best to ignore.

In the late Seventies and early Eighties, I made several restless trips to New York and Europe, vainly seeking peace of mind or new enthusiasms. But now each journey to Europe ended in illness. I had hoped that travel might again shake me out of ongoing depression, but I had apparently become allergic to it. During the fall term of 1980, I taught another semester at Wellesley. But something of the magic of New England, where I had been both happiest and most desolate, had now somehow vanished. On this visit, New England’s white colonial towns, with their central greens and formal city planning—in many ways unique in the world—struck me as cold, too frozen in tradition. Returning to Massachusetts this time (cursed ground for me until 2003!) made me again aware that the ghosts of my arrest would not vanish by themselves. I had to take a more active role in exorcising them.

New York, however, seemed as rewarding as ever. Roy and his new partner, Betsy Hamilton, repeatedly provided me with an Eastern home in what again became my favorite city. I loved Betsy so much that it was easy to “release” Roy to her. Roy and Betsy would later visit me in San Francisco, further helping me to tie my bi-coastal lives together. We created the kind of affectionate threesome that I had formerly enjoyed with Cedric and Ruth Whitman at Harvard, and George and Ruth Lord at Yale. Betsy and I have remained in weekly contact since Roy died. We have become essential for one another’s survival and well-being.

Having had increased difficulty with my European travels, I hoped that domestic travel might prove easier. Since I had stayed repeatedly with Betsy and Roy in New York, I wanted to invite them to San Francisco for their dream vacation. So in the early Seventies, Roy, Betsy and I set out for a much-anticipated automobile trip to Yosemite. Unpredictably, but often hilariously, our trip seemed hexed from the start. After we’d finished packing the trunk of my old VW bug, my car was blindsided by a hit-and-run motorist and we had to rent a car. That night, perhaps 25 miles from Yosemite, the red engine light came on, indicating that we were out of oil and overheating. Almost instantly, the car began to sputter. Betsy, who was only comfortable driving, coasted down the hill and pulled off at a deserted clearing called Crane Flats.

As night came on, Roy thought he heard a bear breaking through the nearby underbrush. Betsy locked herself in the back seat of the car and read a mystery novel with relentless intensity. Roy and I meanwhile tried to flag down a passing car. But in the dark and on a sharp curve, no one would stop. After about three hours, someone finally slowed down and we asked the driver if he would notify a nearby garage. An hour later, a tow truck arrived and towed us to a service station near the Ahwanee Lodge in Yosemite Valley, where we had reserved rooms. The next morning, with an enormous sense of relief, we ate a good breakfast in the huge glass-paneled dining room. We then rented another car and proceeded to explore the wonders of the valley, especially Glacier Point, with its astonishing views of Half Dome. That afternoon, we set out to return home the long way, via Lake Tahoe, where we found splendid quarters on the North Shore. That evening, after an hour or so of dedicated gambling, we fell into bed. In the middle of the night, when I got up to go to the restroom, I found myself standing in a foot of water. We quickly assembled our wet luggage and were moved to another room.

The next morning, we were shocked when our car wouldn’t start. A local mechanic told us that we had a broken fan belt, and that he wouldn’t be able to get a replacement part for two days. Giving in at last, we finally decided to take a bus home. Although many might have regarded these experiences as harrowing, after the initial shock of each new crisis, the three of us were often in stitches. The only other trip I took with Betsy and Roy that was as rich in catastrophe occurred some years later, when we took the train to Fire Island. We had just settled into our somewhat posh summer rental when the hurricane siren indicated that a huge storm was imminent. I remember my astonishment when, as I turned over the lawn furniture and closed the storm windows, Betsy took great pains to wash her hair. If she were about to meet her Maker (or Mischief-Maker), she wanted to look her best. Very soon, we took the ferry to the mainland and caught the train back to Manhattan.