Stay with me, I’ll get the hang of it. I think we can begin. . . .
CHAPTER 2
New Haven. Say it again, New Haven. No haven. No haven at all. No haven first of all from New Haven.
That gangling thin-muscled mopy perennial adolescent of a town, head cozied on West Rock, knees hooked over East Rock, groggy from too many pizzas and steamed clams, slow to grow up or get up, fuzz of Gothic spires at its middle for an uncordial pubic hair. The flinty headquarters, made up of unused bell towers and unnoticed turrets, would of course be the University, which is in the business of quartering heads.
The municipality is built around and revolves around, snaps to the orders from, dances to the tune of, Old Blue. There under the catastrophically out of place Olde Englishe steeples and parapets is the area’s nerve-center. Its old brain and its new brain too. Should you not feel at home around seats of learning there’s no place for you to sit down.
Spilled out there on scummed Long Island Sound east of Bridgeport with its foundries and aircraft plants, west of New London with its submarine yards, south of Hartford with its insurance companies and state government offices, New Haven has no great factory, no teeming naval base, no major business at all but Yale. Yale is the focus of its enterprise as of its anatomy.
It’s not good for a town to be appendage to a center of higher learning. The high visibility and vast wingspread of the school make it look as though there’s nothing lofting in life but learning. The impression is given that heads are what count, cultivated ones (that is, those that can afford cultivation), and bodies are of value chiefly to help the cultivation along. In practice that means town, the body, gets the menial chores done, the brawn and leg labor, so gown, the soaring head, can be free to ideate. Those who do the hauling and hammering in the neighborhood can’t help feeling that worthiness lives elsewhere than in them, somewhere around the thrusting filigrees of stone they see only from a distance when they look up from their hand work.
New Haven is an extravagantly and doggedly Manichean community—its prime industry is the care and feeding of heads. The body that needs care and feeding too will find itself a shutout or a reject around here; at least it did back in the Depression, when bodies were often more pauperized than minds.
The University dominates all of the city’s downtown, rolling out for blocks both west and north from the central Green, taking up precious acres that otherwise would be packed with houses, stores, factories and hangouts. The University therefore sidetracks or stops cold the natural laws of urban development.
We know what those laws are now, we’ve been learning. Left to unfold by its internal logic, the inner city has to suck all the pariahs and human dregs unto itself, all the expendables in the local population, while those with money and standing and mobility pack up and entrain for the outskirts, hoping they can keep a few steps ahead of the core’s overbrimming blight.
The overlooked and shoved aside can’t fulfill their urban destiny in New Haven. They can’t crowd into the city’s hub, can’t take over all the way as they do in other places, even when the fugitives from their massing presence take off. The University does not encourage invasions of overwhelmingly body people into the precincts of the cultivated heads.
Universities should by rights be on the outer edges of cities, to point up the peripheral place of mind in a body-focused culture. In New Haven the University’s focal position suggests a role for the intellect and the spirit which they don’t truly have in the real world, the world just outside the campus; and memorializes the fiction by Gothically filling land that by natural law should be ghetto, a body-terrorized place.
It can’t eliminate ghetto. It is all but ringed by ghetto. Ghetto touches Yale to the northwest and to the southeast. Ghetto not only abuts it, it pushes hard against it. The University pushes back with all its Gothic bulk.
To the west the body-obsessed hordes from the Dixwell-Ashmun ghetto are fended off by the Sterling Memorial Library, the Payne Whitney Gymnasium, the Law School, $50 million worth of stone from another, meaning-drained time. To the south the swarms from the Grand Avenue ghetto are kept out by the Hospital, the Medical School, the Institute of Human Relations. Proving, it would seem, that even those departments of the University concerned with the human body are more concerned with some bodies than with others, concretely, with the bodies of the well-off, which need the least attention.
The bodies of academics get the very best care in the academic world, though incidentally to the care of mind. The bodies that fill the ghettos on two spilling sides, though infinitely needful of all the kinds of attention there are, both physical and mental, are major threats to an institution that fosters the cultivated life of the mind. They have to be repelled—by the great stone edifices devoted to medical science, physical education, the law, human relations, etc.
This disfiguring of town by gown, this enthroning of mind values over a whole community with an accompanying downgrading of the rest of the human corpus, may not be as apparent in New Haven today as it was in the early and middle thirties when I was in college. But neither has it been altogether corrected. That would take a physical removal of the University, if not its junking.
Consider that Dick Lee went on from his job as publicity man for Yale to become the long-term mayor of New Haven. For his bold programs of urban redevelopment, which gave an entirely new face to the downtown areas, he won national and even international acclaim. In his extensive rebuilding he was always mindful of the interests of Yale and the local businesses affected, but his renewal specialists couldn’t stop to worry about alternate housing and other community facilities for all the blacks displaced from the razed ghetto areas; there isn’t enough money in federal allotments to cover everything; there have to be priorities in city planning; profile comes before people. As a result, New Haven, that backwash to the nation’s tumults, that hive of tweedy nonchalance and buttondown good manners, got her ghetto riots when Detroit and Newark got theirs. It got its Bobby Seale trial, its Black Panther convocations. The spires and parapets remain firmly rooted in the 15th century but the people living in their shadows finally slammed into the 20th, with torches and guns.
When they built those Gothic mausoleums to entomb a past that was never really our past, back there before the Depression, the University’s architects ran into a problem—the plaster they used on the internal walls appeared spankingly new, and therefore wrong. They hit upon a remedy, they mixed a soot of bone dust and other powders in with the plaster, to give a surface that looked ancient enough to belong to some time not this. That could tell us a lot about why Bobby Seale, a man very much of our times, a man rooted in no century but our own, finally showed up in New Haven.
The architects had another headache: the outside stone of these buildings looked brand-new too, suggesting that contemporary hands had something to do with the construction, and contemporaneity is death to venerableness, as everybody knows. Their solution was to treat the stone facings with some sort of chemical that made them look weathered by the centuries. Which gave rise to another puzzler: this treatment made the seals permeable, so that the walls leaked something fierce when it rained. No doubt this difficulty has been resolved too, thanks to the wonders of modem chemistry, a development since Gothic times.
This preoccupation of adult minds with the techniques of how to make new stone look old without the walls leaking also may throw some light on why Bobby Seale came to town. He was visiting with his friends and associates along Dixwell Avenue and Ashmun Street, an un-Gothic stone’s throw from the Yale campuses, in a neighborhood where houses leak for more 20th-century reasons, such as lack of money to make repairs.
I went to Yale for five years but I never spent a night on its premises.
I’ll have to take that back. There was the night I was reading in one of the uterine alcoves of Linonia & Brothers and dozed off. I’m not sure, but I think I was reading Lady Chatterley’s