My point is that New Haven was my home, I lived there, and Yale was simply a place where I attended certain classes, as few as possible. My life of the mind took place partly on campus but my life of the sense was located entirely off. I was very much of the town, but the gown they insisted I was born to just never did fit me well.
I’ll tell you how much I resisted their gowns. When the time came for me to graduate I couldn’t face the business of renting and actually putting on one of those silly robes. I went to the dean and told him I couldn’t make the commencement exercises because the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union was about to go on strike along the Eastern Seaboard and I’d gotten myself a job as a picket captain.
The dean did not take kindly to my news. He said it was an unpromising sign that I couldn’t wait to begin my troublemaking until I got my degree. I said it was the stomachs of the seamstresses in the sweatshops that had caused the trouble by not getting enough to eat on sweatshop wages, I was only trying to help them solve the problem by advancing to a better diet. He said it was out of the question that a fellow bent on such mischief should be excused from the academic routine, I wouldn’t get my diploma if I didn’t show up for the ceremony and that was that. He added that if I was making such a fuss because it cost a few dollars to rent the cap and gown he himself, personally, was ready to lay out the rental fee.
I was so taken with the idea of one of these cultivated heads footing the bill that I agreed. I told him the rental agency charged five dollars where in fact it charged only three, so I made two dollars on the deal. I didn’t put up too much of a fight because in truth I didn’t have that picket-captain job with the ILGWU, I’d made a bid for it but all the openings were already filled. Things were so bad that I couldn’t even get work going on strike.
Town, I’m saying, always loomed larger in my head than gown and mostly shoved gown aside. Town was my habitat, where I drank my beer and hung my hat, gown just a uniform that didn’t conform to my true contours. That brings me back to the matter of my never living on campus.
You’d be right if you observed that I didn’t have the money to live in a dormitory but you’d be dead wrong if you concluded that that was my reason for not living there. If I’d had the money of a Ford or a Rockefeller (there was a Ford in my class, Henry III, and a Rockefeller too, Winthrop, maybe, I never was clear on that) I still wouldn’t have moved into a dormitory. I was delighted to live in furnished rooms in or near the ghettos, on Dixwell Avenue, Elm Street, College Place, Ashmun Street, Lake Place, Crown Street, Asylum Street, Davenport Avenue, and be where my friends were, and come and go without being checked by entry guards.
Yale’s officialdom could not understand someone who was in their community but not of it, who was not a joiner. In their minds admission to their churned circle was such a boon and a blessing that anybody so honored had to embrace all that was offered. They couldn’t make sense of my not wanting to march in their commencement parade and they had to misinterpret my reasons for living off campus.
They saw me as one more of the underprivileged townies. There were these deserving-but-poor scholarship lads out of the city’s ranks who were dying to belong all the way but couldn’t scare up the loot for all the privileges available on campus, starting with that of living in a college-unit dormitory. We paupers who were condemned to live away from gown, in town, among the peasants, the ivyless somaticists, had to be sorry. Yale set out to make us less sorry. Whether we liked it or not.
They have the residence-college system at Yale, Pierson being one closed unit, Calhoun another, and so on. Each college has its own dormitories and dining hall, its lounges, library, seminar rooms. The plan the officials came up with was to assign each off-campus student to the roster of one of these college units, on the theory that even if we couldn’t sleep among our fellows we at least would have visitation rights, the opportunity to eat with our peers, participate in the college’s doings, use its facilities. I was made an associate, or non-resident member, whatever it was called, of Calhoun.
The idea behind this insultingly social-work gesture was to make us feel wanted. What I felt was truly overlooked, I mean, not recognized, not made room for.
I felt violated. That they could have imagined for a minute I’d go for their insipid English roasts, served by a lot of underpaid black women in starched uniforms, most of them my neighbors, some of them the mothers of my friends, when nightly I enjoyed those fine pork-chop sandwiches smothered in hot sauce that they featured in the hash joints along Dixwell Avenue, and had the bonus of my real friends eating with me—that I took for the wildest sort of arrogance.
The bureaucrats of the Wasp-élite world don’t read the minds of bottomdogs as acutely as they think. They suffer from the social-worker’s fallacy that the lower a man is on the social scale the more of a stereotype he is and therefore more of an open book to sophisticated high-individuation minds like their own. They are victims of what has been called occupational psychosis (also known as trained incapacity)—a blindness that comes from too much stilted insight.
I never set foot in Calhoun before I was coopted to its membership list without my permission, and I never did after. So much for the ability of the University, that beehive of explorations in humanistic individualism, to spot and give scope to this or that individual.
Maybe if I’d gone to Yale in good times I’d have responded to its ways better and fitted into its life more. But I started college in 1931, when people all over the country were standing in lines, sometimes at soup kitchens, sometimes at banks that were about to close down without returning their depositors’ hard-earned savings.
I remember the Bank Holiday the way other Yale graduates remember ski holidays at Klosters or Bad Gastein. I had to miss some of my classes because I was needed to spell my mother in the line that stretched clear around the block from her bank on Temple Street. The bank was about to shut its doors. It had announced that it would pay off its depositors a few cents on the dollar while its ready cash lasted. (I wondered what its unready cash was up to.) My mother wasn’t able to stand in that line for two whole days. She had a job scrubbing floors somewhere—depressing, how often the soap-operatic note appears in American biographies—and she couldn’t miss work.
So, as I say, I missed some classes, mostly in Chaucer, which I didn’t mind—The Canterbury Tales didn’t have much to say to me at a time when the moneys you’d scraped together to put in what you took for a bank appeared to have been dropped into a hole with no bottom, though you suspected somebody was down there filling his sneaky bags. My mother had something better than $100 in her account, saved up over many months. What the bank deigned to give us was $20 or so.
You can see why I couldn’t view Yale as something separate and apart from the Depression. I had to take the University and the Panic as different facets of the same slimy, howling mess. More than once the thought crossed my mind that in ways I wasn’t yet smart enough to figure out Yale was a central component of the whole system that was diverting my mother’s earnings as a slavey into somebody else’s anonymous pockets.
I graduated from Yale in 1935, and left Graduate School in 1936, years in which there were almost daily riots at relief offices around the country, some of which I took part in as an organizer for the National Unemployed League. In short order after entering the world of work, I was informed that the only employment around was for body laborers, and precious little of that. However, Yale had disqualified me for any sort of employment but head employment, of which there was none. Everywhere they were drawing the hard-and-fast Manichean line across the windpipe and announcing that everything above that line was perfectly splendid and worth endless leisurely cultivation and everything below it was for lesser, less endowed people to concern themselves with, mostly non-Anglos, certainly non-Wasps, until, of course, the Depression came along and it was a buyer’s market for bodies and a lot of them had to be dumped.
Rooted in town as I was, I had no way of relating to a life all gown. Most of my classmates could hole up and never see the