Secular education, however, was not in my parents’ eyes as important as Donald’s and my religious education. This took the form of selected reading and interpretation of the Bible and memorizing certain Psalms and passages from the New Testament. But such indoctrination was not as compelling for me as it had been for my father. I did not then rebel against it intellectually; I was only uninterested and unmoved. When I reached 12 and we were at Oberlin, Ohio on furlough, my parents made it clear that, having attained the age of reason and therefore being competent to make a conscious, rational choice, I should declare my decision to be a Christian and be baptized. Because they were Baptists my parents considered sprinkling of infants, practiced by such as Episcopalians, to be at best an evasion of Jesus’ injunction on baptism. For me it was to be total immersion, and before the whole congregation of the church.
Although I felt no elation over the decision confronting me, it was unthinkable that I should decline to go through with what was so earnestly expected of me. Yet I had no sense of original or even more recent sin needing to be washed away. I also cringed at the prospect of appearing so conspicuously before a host of strangers, proclaiming a belief in saving grace, descending into the baptistery to be submerged backwards by the preacher and then, with all eyes focused on me, sloshing off with my drenched white shirt and pants clinging to me and water from my matted hair dribbling down my face. I went through with the ritual and it was about as I had feared. But it made my parents happy.
Henry L. Mencken and The American Mercury came into my life three or four years after my baptism. We had moved to Shanghai where I was enrolled in the American high school there. Among the periodicals in the library was The American Mercury. The subject matter of the magazine and Mr. Mencken’s use of the English language were quite a departure from what I was accustomed to. Much taken by the debunking, satire, and Mencken’s lambasting prose, I made no attempt to conceal my newly found enthusiasm from my parents. Rather than being angered by my irreverence, they were troubled and hurt. My father, who was fundamentally more a man of reason than of temperament, tried to be open-minded and understand the Menckenian outlook. It strained his Christian charity; clearly he could not approve of it.
The Experimental College at the University of Wisconsin, which I attended in 1927–29, widened my intellectual interests. It was created and presided over by Alexander Meiklejohn as a two-year school, the first year of which was devoted to the study of classic Athenian civilization, and the second to nineteenth-century United States. Meiklejohn was one of those rare human beings—Père Teilhard de Chardin was another—who radiated warmth, composure and wisdom. His approach was Socratic: we students had to come up with our own answers. And we were encouraged to explore and discover ideas without fear of ridicule or censure.
My fellow students were disparate personalities, many of them new kinds of people to me. Victor Wolfson from New York, bursting with creative talent and enthusiasm, produced Electra in the Agricultural School’s cattle-show pavilion, a production in which I unpersuasively acted the role of Orestes. Then there was Carroll Blair, a gnarled and bitter little native of Wisconsin who later became a Communist Party functionary. Sidney Hertzberg from New York was a Norman Thomas socialist, deliberate, orderly and temperate. There was also the fellow from one of the more prestigious military academies for boys who had done everything by bugle, could not adjust to the independent study and therefore spent most of his time looking for bridge and poker partners.
What I got out of the two years at the Experimental College was, I suppose, the development of a fairly open and, at the same time, skeptical outlook. Unlike some of my schoolmates, I did not, unhappily, store up a fund of knowledge. But the philosophical and aesthetic values to which I was exposed did make an impression on me. They did not, however, bring me closer to the theological beliefs of my parents.
While at college I wrote to my father suggesting that he read a magazine article extolling the cultivation of beauty as a substitute for religion. He replied:
I suppose it is true that the present student generation does not ascribe as much authority to the Bible and the Church as mine did . . . they are at best but means for bringing us to God. Some people are more loyal to them than to God himself. What is needed is devotion to the Heavenly Father— through the Bible and the Church if possible—but through aesthetics rather than not at all. If you were spurning all thought of God I should feel grieved because it would seem that we were parting company in the most meaningful sphere of life. But as long as you are making an honest earnest search for God, I feel that we are all the more drawn together for that is what I have been doing. Personally, I am convinced that we have revealed to us through Christ and the Bible a definite Plan of Salvation. It is confessedly a straight and narrow way, and the only way . . . I must obey the light I have, and not only walk in this way but also try to induce others to do the same . . . I have a hunch that God will somehow accept many who are not on my particular road. But hunches are not proper criteria, so I must hew to the line, and also remember than I am not to judge others but to bear my testimony by words and by life.
My father was right in assuming that I had not spurned all thought of God. I was open to persuasion, but I did not find his theology persuasive. I did, however, respect his fidelity to belief and conscience.
One morning in June 1928, Alexander Meiklejohn read to us a passage that moved me more than anything else I heard or read at Madison. It was from Epictetus.
This Priscus Helvidius, too saw, and acted accordingly. For when Vespasian had sent to forbid his going to the senate, he answered: “It is in your power to prevent my remaining a senator, but as long as I am one, I must go.”
“Well then, at least be silent there,” said the Emperor.
“Do not ask my opinion,” he replied, “and I will be silent.”
“But I must ask it.”
“And I must speak what appears to me to be right.”
“But if you do, I will put you to death.”
“Did I ever tell you that I was immortal? You will do your part, and I mine. It is yours to kill, and mine to die intrepid; yours to banish, mine to depart untroubled.”
What good then did Priscus do, who was but a single person? Why, what good does the purple do to the garment. What else but to be beautiful in itself, and to give example of beauty to others.
CHAPTER III
MY ITINERANT EDUCATION
A native restlessness propelled me from Madison at the end of my two years at the Experimental College. I decided to take my junior year of college at Yenching University, near Peking, and then return to the United States for my senior year. Gordon Meiklejohn, my classmate and Alexander Meiklejohn’s son, joined me in the adventure. As a first step, I drew on Gordon’s and my slight resources and ignorantly bought in Gary, Indiana a secondhand Stutz. It had three bullet holes in the back. Because of these blemishes and, as we later discovered, incomplete documentation, the price was appropriately and conveniently low.
In this scarred vehicle we drove to Kansas where we briefly labored at harvesting wheat. When we had earned barely enough to fuel us to California, we resumed our journey and arrived in San Francisco nearly penniless. There we were befriended by a diminutive and effervescent Irishman named Albert Bender, friend of the elder Meiklejohns, and patron of Golden Gate arts. He put us up and induced the Dollar Line to sign us on as ordinary seamen aboard the President Pierce. After squeegeeing our way across the Pacific, we jumped ship in Japan and proceeded to Peking.
Yenching University, to which Gordon and I were admitted, was supported mainly by American missionary institutions, although Harvard and, to a lesser degree, Princeton had connections with it. The faculty was Chinese,