Perhaps it was intimations of that burgeoning relationship that brought Marian hurrying across the Atlantic. Throughout the course of the academic year, the pair had exchanged anguished letters of varying degrees of devotion and reproach. Friends in the United States reported that Marian “feels you are losing interest in her and is preparing for the inevitable subsidence of the relationship.” In March, she wrote to Arthur to say she no longer loved him. He replied, “OK, we’re finished.” She immediately wrote back to say she had changed her mind. When Marian eventually made the trip across the Atlantic in June, the couple stayed with Arthur’s Cambridge friend Charles Wintour, who was horrified at the relationship. “She does seem considerably older than you in her behaviour,” he observed, reminding Arthur that “you said that ‘The strain is telling.’ ” Wintour’s advice to his friend “without any politenesses” could hardly have been any clearer. “It seems damn priggish advice to tell anyone that they are not old enough to marry,” he wrote, “but perhaps it’s not so bad if I say that I do not think you’re old enough to marry Marian.”6
While Arthur fretted about his love life, others were more concerned about his academic prospects. Theater, occasional debates at the Union, writing for Granta, and an enthusiastic love life had not left him much space for work, and for the first time in his life, Arthur had neglected his academic studies. He did attend lectures by high profile academics such as I. A. Richards (“a very nice man” who “wasted a sharp and original intelligence”), F. R. Leavis (“at once engrossing and distasteful”), and G. E. Moore (“gentle reasonableness”). But it took him over a month even to make an appearance in the University Library, leading one friend to quip, “For the first time Arthur looked out of his element.” It was easy to see how it all happened, as on the typical occasion when “all plans for intensive studies were destroyed” by a request, acceded to “with considerable reluctance and under strong pressure,” to direct a production of The Infernal Machine. If Jean Cocteau’s version of the Oedipus myth prompted any thoughts of “castration anxiety” in Arthur, they may have been heightened by his father, at home in the other Cambridge and seeing Junior’s book to publication, rebuking him for a lack of industry. When the proofs he had sent to England for his son to correct were not returned, he fired off a note of distress tinged with sarcasm: “Two days ago I received your note of contrition in regard to the footnotes, etc.,” he wrote, exasperated, in February, “but I judge that the proof did not make the same boat since it has not arrived. I do not know how much longer I can hold on to the page proof.” Perhaps it was symbolic that during that term, Arthur was a teller for the “ayes” at the Cambridge Union for a debate on the motion, which carried, that “This house despairs of books.” That Arthur’s book was published on time two months later had more to do with Arthur Sr. than his son, but as Perry Miller, writing to congratulate the new author, conceded to him, “I suppose all this is to the good, because it shows you are a human being as well as a scholar.”7
Schlesinger and Miller had been active on Arthur’s behalf to secure a prestigious berth for him at Harvard. The Society of Fellows had been established in 1933, with twenty-four junior fellows who were given the opportunity to spend three years working on any project they liked for a handsome stipend and privileges at Eliot House. Pushing back against the tyranny of the PhD and its attendant professionalization of academia, the Society forbade its junior fellows from taking formal courses and discouraged teaching. The objective, wrote Samuel Eliot Morison, was “to enable each to contribute his peculiar gifts to the cause of learning when still young and vigorous.”8
Some at Harvard expressed concern about whether Arthur might even be too young for the Society. “I, of course, have tried to meet that objection in advance,” Schlesinger informed Arthur, but inevitably there would be “a very keen competition and the Senior Fellows may feel that you should wait another year.” There was also the difficulty that “it has been the usual practice of the Senior Fellows not to elect a Junior Fellow without a personal interview,” but again Schlesinger was able to intercede, drawing from the senior fellow, Arthur Nock, the Frothingham Professor of the History of Religion, the reluctant admission that there had been “exceptions to this rule.”9
While Schlesinger worked behind the scenes, Perry Miller was the public face of the campaign. Asked to speak on Arthur’s behalf before the Society, Miller “gathered very quickly that your election was a foregone conclusion.” However, “we went patiently through all the conventional motions and all did what was expected. . . . The questions were lengthy and my answers were longer, but in general I said Yes and they seemed to have agreed.”10
Harvard sent the formal letter on April 24, 1939, the day after the New York Times published Columbia historian Henry Steele Commager’s glowing review of Orestes Brownson. “Mr. Schlesinger’s study of Brownson is a masterly one,” Commager wrote. “It has technical brilliance—a sure control of materials, an affective handling of background, a skillful use of colors and a certain bravura of execution. It has, in addition, sincerity and integrity, sympathetic understanding, and an astonishing maturity.”
These were intoxicating times for Arthur, but Perry Miller, his former tutor, urged him to guard against complacency. Think hard about “whether or not the Society will be a good thing for you,” Miller advised. Most fellows would “consider their three years a brilliant success” if they produced a book out of them. But he had already jumped that particular hurdle and “the act may lose something of its charm for you.” For Arthur, then, “the chief problem you will now have to face will be . . . keeping yourself going for three years on your own steam.” The year in England, now drawing to a close, had been a waste of time. “I suppose it is all education,” Miller wrote dourly; “nevertheless, I [hope] you will be spending time more profitably and enjoyably in Cambridge, Massachusetts.”11
Arthur himself had a more nuanced view. He wrote from England to A. C. Hanford, the dean at Harvard, that the year had been “a most happy and profitable one.” Half a century later, writing to another beneficiary of the Henry Fellowship, Jacob Neusner, Arthur told him, “I look back on my years as a Henry Fellow as a time that started so many things in my life.” As he pointed out when proposing the toast before a dinner of the Harvard Club of Cambridge in May 1939, “The change from one Cambridge to another is deeper than mere names imply.”12
There were many reasons why the Henry Fellowship “started so many things” in Arthur’s life. Not the least of these was that it got him physically out of the orbit of his ambitious father, who could be at best directive, at worst suffocatingly controlling. Cambridge and Peterhouse gave Arthur a new kind of independence and confidence, but also helped him learn to take himself just that little bit less seriously, even to be silly and frivolous. But if 1938–1939 was a year of discovery and optimism, it was also “the twilight year” for Arthur and his generation. Throughout 1938 and most of 1939 he had been a firm isolationist, telling his parents in March 1939, after Germany invaded all of Czechoslovakia, that he remained “very suspicious” of the view that “America’s frontier is on the Rhine.”13 But reviewing the whole experience the following year, 1940, in his journal, he wrote:
The central fact of the year is the war, which has changed our world for us—particularly for Charles . . . and Anne. The invasion of Holland and Belgium finally awoke me to Nazism. Hitler is no mere imperialist conqueror, somewhat nastier and gaudier than the Kaiser. . . . His [is] not a war for markets and colonies. It is a revolution and a crusade. The analogy is not the first world war. It is the spread of Mohammedanism. Hitler will not be controlled by the motives which controlled Cecil Rhodes, say, or even Napoleon. He is the prophet of a new religion, and like all prophets who believe their faith with sufficient intensity, he is out to convert or destroy.14
Arthur took the boat home in the middle of August, arriving back in Cambridge, Massachusetts just in time to hear the news on the radio in 19 Gray Gardens Eas
t that Britain was at war. “It is democracy or Nazism,” he wrote grimly, “a world divided.” That Manichean struggle would eventually take him back to England in 1944, not as a scholar, but as a soldier and a spy.
“MANY THANKS FOR YOURS, stating that the ‘European situation grows darker every day,’ ” Charles Wintour wrote in September 1939.15 “I always said (or will in future) that much of your reputation for intelligence came from putting the obvious just a little more forcefully than your neighbours.” It was a stinging example of what Arthur called that English “suave raillery which trips neatly and wittily along and leaves the younger country aghast.”16
Yet if Arthur was aghast by the fall of 1939, it was not due to his friend’s caustic wit, but more to that sense of being on the periphery when his friends were in the eye of the gathering storm. While Arthur resumed his Harvard routine, Wintour, now in uniform with the Royal Norfolk Regiment, was writing frankly that “It’ll be a bloody miracle if I’m around for long after the invasion starts” and, with his “taste for self-dramatisation,” wondering whether he would be able “to find some suitable exit line, some satisfactory attitude which would help to compensate for being shot off unexpectedly.” When Arthur tried to weigh in with his own thoughts on the war, they often drew a sharp response. “Hitler may be on a crusade, but that’s no reason for your adopting the rhetoric of a Fifth Day Adventist,” Wintour mocked. “I am terrified at indications of loss of mental balance.”17
Arthur’s life had slotted back into its all too familiar groove on his return to Massachusetts, with apparently diminishing returns. There were, of course, the advantages of free board and lodgings, an annual stipend beginning at $1,250, and use of all the university’s facilities. Once again, he took up residence in Adams House, occupying a pleasant suite of rooms handily placed near the swimming pool. Each Monday, he would troop over to Eliot House, home of the Society, for a formal dinner of senior and junior fellows. At the first one, the new intake had been primly reminded of the need to be “courteous to their elders and helpful to their juniors.” There was also lunch twice a week just for the junior fellows. Orville T. Bailey, a neurologist who overlapped with Arthur, recalled that at these lunches there was “more license given to the direct shock of interests and personalities” than at the formal dinners. Arthur demurred. In comparison to his British friends preparing for war, the whole experience seemed tame in the extreme. It was telling that he abandoned writing his journal for the entirety of this first academic year. There seemed nothing to write.18
Instead Arthur’s year began with work on an essay about Richard Hildreth, the author of a neglected six-volume history of the United States published in the 1850s. In many ways it was a strange choice of subject. Hildreth, as Arthur admitted in the resulting essay in The New England Quarterly in 1940, was “one of the more enigmatic figures in American intellectual history,” someone who was “much more confusing than convincing.” Moreover, he was the opposite of the prototype that Arthur had outlined in his undergraduate cri de coeur about the life of the intellectual. In 1937 Arthur had expressed his fear that academic life was too “insulated from most of the currents that electrify vital life” and that “the problem of my future” was how to reconcile “the study of American civilization” with the avoidance of “cutting myself off from the only way of life that would give my work any particular depth, any philosophical significance.” Now in 1940, he picked as his subject a historian whose life seemed to exemplify the sterility of history that was disengaged from the experience of life.19
Hildreth, Arthur wrote, “moved little with the great of his day. He does not appear in their autobiographies and receives only the most casual mention in their letters and journals. . . . Pictures remain of him working silently at the Athenaeum in Boston, a tall, austere lonely man. . . . When he went to New York, he made no indelible impression there.” Even his own city behaved “in Boston’s usual way—by forgetting him.” In contrast stood Arthur’s distant relative, George Bancroft, whose rival History of the United States of America was a critical and popular success, making him money and winning him fame. Poor Hildreth became “increasingly bitter” as repeated frustrations “made life harder and more disappointing,” leaving him helpless to do other than “watch the applause going to [Bancroft].”
Yet this contest was about more than fame and personal rivalry. Instead it was the encapsulation for Arthur of a troubling philosophical question about exactly what kind of historian he wanted to be. In “The Problem of Richard Hildreth,” Arthur identified what he did not respect in the work of one professional historian, and in the process was able to develop his own philosophy of history based on the ideals he prized most. The fact that Hildreth, like Arthur (and Bancroft), was an Exeter and Harvard man made the “problem” even more autobiographical. Much of the question turned on genuineness, what Arthur identified as “the essential insincerity of Hildreth’s writings.” The History was characterized by its “infrequently-relieved dryness and the almost Olympian remoteness.” Yet in personality, Hildreth was far from the remote or detached figure his historical works would suggest. He was a disputatious and vehement character, whose political pamphlets and newspaper articles often drew angry responses. “The subdued, cold tone of the History, then, is to be explained by Hildreth’s suppression of his normal emotions for the sake of complete impartiality,” Arthur wrote. The “emotion” of his pamphlets and journalism “drew forth all his gifts of irony, epithet and vigorous statement.” But in the History “all emotion and viewpoint were specifically banned, and his writing instantly lost the artistic merits that go with them.” The result was “dull, bald, commonplace, humdrum in rhythms, and starved in imagination.”
“How,” Arthur asked, getting to the heart of the matter, “could a man with so generally philosophic a cast of mind write such pedestrian and annalistic history?” The answer was that Hildreth’s work was “almost entirely lacking in either flow that comes from a consistency of emotion or the unity that comes from a consistency of viewpoint.” Thought and feeling were expelled, so that “Hildreth gained a kind of objectivity, but it was at the cost of readableness and of historical significance.”And so finally Arthur drew the inevitable moral from the “problem” of Hildreth:
He suppressed his thoughts as successfully as he did his feelings, a procedure which made most of his work a dry chronicle. It would have been no better (in fact, much worse) had he written his History to illustrate a preconceived theory; but if he had allowed a scheme of organization to rise—so far as he was aware—simply from the study of the facts themselves, he might well have written a work of much more enduring importance.
It was as much a manifesto for Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as a judgment on Richard Hildreth.20
Work on Hildreth had been meant as a prelude to something bigger for Arthur: a biography of George Bancroft. His distant relative represented almost everything that he now wanted to achieve as a historian, although if the boy born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger now regretted abandoning his own middle name for that of his father, he did not speak of it. (However, by 1968, with his father having passed away, Schlesinger would admit, “in retrospect, I sometimes wish I had stuck to ‘Bancroft’ since I do feel a sort of intellectual and political kinship with old George.” 21)
Not only was George Bancroft, like Arthur Jr. and Hildreth, another Exeter and Harvard man, he was also someone who had managed to combine consequence as a historian with engagement in public life. In 1845 he served as secretary of the navy under President James K. Polk. He established the US Naval Academy at Annapolis and was instrumental in the acquisition of California during the buildup to the Mexican-American War. His stints abroad included success as US minister in Berlin, where he was cultivated by Bismarck, whom he considered to be Europe’s George Washington. Bancroft was “the first consequential American historian,” Arthur later reflected. “He was also a Democratic politician, a presidential ghostwriter, a cabinet officer and a diploma
t, all of which I dreamily aspired to be.” Yet throughout it all, Bancroft “worked steadily away at his monumental History” and “kept on dividing his life between politics and history.” 22
Bancroft offered Arthur a model in how to live the life of an action-intellectual. He was “one of the last of America’s universal men,” whose dramatic, democratic style offered his young adherent a lesson in writing for the broadest possible audience. The contrast with Richard Hildreth, the “cold, subdued” historian who wrote without the sincerity of a viewpoint, was pronounced. Yet having decided that he wanted to be like Bancroft and write like him, Arthur, over the course of doing early research and writing his essay for the New England Quarterly, came to the conclusion that the best way to achieve those ends was not to write about Bancroft. “As I labored away at the Massachusetts Historical Society,” he wrote, “the biography of Bancroft began imperceptibly to give way to an exploration of broader Jacksonian terrain.” The proposed biography of the nineteenth-century historian was set aside for a project about the ideas that animated one of the most disruptive eras in American democracy. As it dawned on Arthur that Bancroft had his own stake in that transformation, he began to articulate what many later would judge the most important and far-reaching research question of his career: “whether Jacksonian democracy did not have an eastern and intellectual dimension that had not been fully recognized.”
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