The Harrad Experiment

by Robert H. Rimmer

  “Of course, we’ll have opposition, and plenty of it,” I said. “But we would have several advantages. We would be operating with a thoroughly planned program, and would make no attempt to label it or publicize it as a whole. Properly conceived, those who disagree would find themselves boxing with shadows.”

  “You see, Phil,” Beth said, “if the first stages of our State-supported educational program are developed so they have popular appeal, and we believe they can, then subsequent social changes would grow out of this quite logically. Furthermore, we would operate, on the surface, by completely democratic means. But democracy as an instrument of social action never functions without direction. Most citizens of any society are disinterested. The personal processes of existence and making a living in our culture, coupled with inadequate education, produce a mass man who must be directed. Some group of individuals, or a specific individual, democratically elected, decides what they (or he) believes are the goals and purpose of a particular society at a particular time. Then, whether it be a Napoleon, a Hitler, a Roosevelt, or a Kennedy, the leader uses any means society permits to accomplish his or his group’s personal beliefs. While democracy is presumably the will of the majority, in recent years, the majority no longer means a substantial majority. When elections (and subsequent policies and changes in social direction) are determined by as small as a one or two percent majority, the democratic processes simply force an almost equally large minority into submission. I don’t believe we would be subverting democratic processes with our planned society. Our Utopian Group would simply be deciding what is best for the State, as politicians have done through the centuries, and then force these decisions into reality through the power of money and repetitive mass communications. We believe that the beneficent results of our planning would entrench the social gains that we would make. Which political party, ultimately had State power, would not matter, since, in any event, we would be careful not to identify our program with a particular political party.”

  Sheila tackled the problem of opposition from organized religion. “We have studied the State of X’s religious groupings very carefully. The total Catholic and Jewish faith is a minority. The large majority of the population is Protestant, and hence may be somewhat more receptive. Keep in mind that we would not be challenging any beliefs in God.”

  Margaret smiled. “But you would be in conflict with most theologies, particularly in relation to sex and marriage.”

  “That’s true,” Shelia said. “But we would not be offering a laissez-faire society. Once the educational aspects of our program are sold (and keep in mind even today we have a climate of much greater sexual freedom which the churches and religious leaders have already had to adjust to) it will be obvious we’re offering the basis of social strength and religious strength based on a strong family-centered system. The approach to marriage and divorce that we’re proposing could be easily assimilated into church doctrine. Whether our beliefs in man’s ability to raise himself higher on the evolutionary ladder are limited to man’s faith in his own ability or man’s faith in God, the goal amounts to the same thing.”

  Phil chuckled, “Margaret, we have done it!” he said enthusiastically. “It really doesn’t matter whether you kids make your pipe dream a reality. The important thing is that you can think creatively, and not be afraid to posit a different world. The truth is that Harrad has only begun to solve the problem. Man exists in society. If a few men could find the answers to the sexual confusion of modern times, and make people aware that hate and jealousy are not instinctive behaviour but learned reactions, then they will have at least created an outpost in the vast jungle of human inter-relationships. You’ll have to remember constantly that your group would be fighting an unceasing rearguard action. Intelligent men and women who have achieved a greater ability to reason are vastly out-numbered by the normal, the average, the great mass of people who will label them with rubrics and castigate them as deviates, and in the long haul they will wonder whether it is worthwhile to be the innovators in society.”

  “Phil. . . Phil” Beth interrupted him. “We know the words of your song by heart. It sums up to the fact that mass man, untrained and vastly uneducated, can do little with his hard won liberty except to eventually surrender it. But I’m disappointed in your reaction.”

  “Why?” Phil asked, puzzled.

  “You called our thesis a pipe dream, and inferred that we couldn’t make it a reality.”

  Phil grinned. “Considering the world as a whole, your approach is a little way-out with elements of youthful, wishful thinking.”

  Jack laughed. “You can say the same thing about Harrad College.”

  “If we are all nothing but your pipe dream, Phil,” Val said, “you better not stop smoking. I couldn’t stand the shock.”

  “You are all safe,” Phil said, chuckling. “I promise if I stop pipe dreaming, it won’t be until all my actors are one hundred and two years old!”

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF HARRY SCHACHT

  May, the Fourth Year

  Today, Beth and I were cleaning up our rooms chucking out a four-year accumulation of stuff we wouldn’t need in Graduate School. I came across my Journal in a bottom drawer. Looking back over the first years and the incredible amount of stuff I wrote, I read parts to Beth and I couldn’t help smiling. I haven’t written anything in these pages for a year. What happened to all the qualms and fears of Harry the Beast? Would I have ever believed it possible that Beth and I would be married, that she would be calmly walking around the room wearing nothing but my shirt and humming a happy little tune as she surveyed with great pride the new roundness in her belly, or that Stanley and I would watch with joy and laughter as Sheila and Beth, naked, compared their speed of maternal growth? In a few weeks this phase of our life will be over. What can I say that sums it up? In a few words I can only echo Beth: “Oh, Harry ... I am so happy. I love you. I love everybody!”

  It’s amazing to me how Beth and I, and InSix as a group, have developed such a fundamental rapport (really, an inadequate word) with each other. Last week is only one example I could multiply a hundred times. So here it is Phil, nothing important really, just a windup to this Journal of mine in case you want it, as you once said you did.

  Sheila insisted on treating InSix to tickets for the Metropolitan Operas on their Boston road showing. “If we are all going to live together in Graduate School,” she said, “I want to be sure that you are all willing to try to enjoy something outside your own interests. Jack and Stanley have made us experts on folk music, Beth and Harry play symphonies and concertos incessantly. Valerie has dragged us to jazz festivals. I like opera ... so you will all have to suffer.”

  Jack groaned that operas had some good music but damned silly plots. None of us really suffered. The girls were ecstatic over La Traviata. Jack, Stanley and I watched Anna Moffo through binoculars as she sang Manon. Between the acts of Manon, Stanley was admiring the blooming bellies of Sheila and Beth.

  “I can’t help it,” he kidded them. “I have fallen in love with Anna Moffo. That’s the way it is in opera. Love happens just like that! Manon meets Des Grieux. Five minutes later she runs off to Paris with him. Actually, you know the minute she meets Des Grieux, she can’t wait to wiggle out of her knickers for him.”

  “Opera is opera,” Sheila said. “You don’t confuse it with life. Tragic opera gives you an emotional catharsis, maybe even deeper because of the addition of music, than any Shakespearean or Greek tragedy.”

  Jack disagreed. “Most of the popular operas were written nearly one hundred years ago. In these days adultery, spurned love, rabid jealousy and uncontrolled hate were even more than now the modus operandi of life. Today, we are more sophisticated. We can’t believe Lucia de Lammermoor would marry someone she didn’t love. She’d just tell her brother to go to Hell.”

  But when Joan Sutherland sang the “Mad Scene” from Lucia, all of us stood up. Tears in our eyes, we cheered and clapped. clapped.


  “See,” Sheila said unabashedly drying her eyes. “For a moment you believed!” For a moment you felt all the longing and terror of Lucia gone mad for love.”

  Back in our rooms at Harrad we were still arguing about it. “I wasn’t crying for Lucia,” I said. “I was emotionally involved with Joan Sutherland’s voice as she led the orchestra, reaching feelings beyond the power of any man-made instrument. I listened truly spellbound.”

  “Which proves a point,” Jack said. We had all crowded into Sheila’s and Stanley’s room and were drinking champagne in glasses we’d expropriated and carried off in bulging pockets from the Music Hall’s Champagne Bar. “If the Harrad experience is valid, and ever becomes a large factor in the world, a large portion of what we label our cultural heritage in literature and in the dramatic arts such as Shakespeare, opera, classical literature, as well as ninety-five percent of every drama, and novel written in the past fifty years will have absolutely no meaning.”

  “It’s a good point,” I agreed. “Given an entire society educated as we have been, the common fare of the dramatic arts or literature, based as they are, on adultery, jealousy, hate, war, murder, sexual sadism, sexual abberations, petty misunderstanding and the simple inability to communicate ... such material will only have antiquarian interest. It will seem as dull and boring as the medieval astrological writings.”

  “My God,” Beth said. “I don’t know as I would envy such a world. The long history of man’s arts, his quest for beauty and truth in the world is the only stable thing that we have left. The plot of Lucia, for example, may be silly by today’s standards but the idea of love and the heartbreak of Eduardo’s bella inammorata, in fact all of Donizetti’s music represents the tragedy of man caught in his own circumstances, destiny, fate ... call it what you will. If you wipe out the idea of Laocoön, man struggling to rise above the evil in himself, you have wiped out the essence of man as he knows and understands himself.”

  Jack smiled. “After four years at Harrad, do you still believe man is of necessity a dualistic creature doomed by his very nature to always have good and evil in conflict within him?”

  “No, I don’t,” Beth said. “But in our future Utopian world with no conflict, with everyone in full accord finally, with no wars, no murders, no hate, no jealousy, what in heaven’s name will be the subject matter of the arts? Not to harp on Lucia ... but it is a good example; what forces in the world will inspire a Donizetti to create his music, or a Sutherland to sing it? I’m sure that man, no matter how good he may be and how much he is in control of his emotions, needs the purge and sudden realization of his insignificance that a great dramatic tragedy can give him.”

  “There’s a thousand subjects,” I said. “Imagine a drama and literature built on the principle of Greek drama. Man not against himself but against the gods. For us in the twentieth century the gods are the unknowns. Man against disease. Man against premature death. Man against mass hatred. Man crying for security, or solitude, or love. Man against war or poverty or misunderstanding. Man against greed or corruption. Man against his own desire for achievement. Man trapped on this planet and yearning for the stars. Man against his own ignorance. A new kind of Faust. In this kind of drama and literature the individual good man, the protagonist, the hero, would once again assume his heroic stance. His failure against unknowns, and not the failures of his own petty personal misfortunes, would assume all the grandeur of real tragedy.”

  “I think you may have something,” Valerie said. “A modern Donizetti could write a modem Lucia. Lucia could be a southern white girl in love with Eduardo, who could be a negro. Lucia’s brother could be a white supremist. With these elements, you could write a new tragic libretto to Donizetti’s music.”

  “Or a new Donizetti could write new music,” Stanley chuckled.

  “In the new Harrad world of the next hundred years,” Jack grinned, “when all of us are coffee colored, and the Negro-White problem has passed into history, that conflict will be just as antiquated as the present Lucia.”

  “Isn’t that a point?” Stanley asked. “Man should use his arts to express the strivings that have meaning for his time. We need new literature and new arts to point the way. Valerie’s idea is cantemporary . . . but there will always be Harry’s universals.”

  Beth just walked over and sat in my lap. “What are you writing?” she asked. “May I read it?”

  When she finished she kissed me. “Feel my belly. I’m so proud of it! Aren’t you?”

  I admitted that I was.

  And that’s Harrad, Phil. Millions of things to wonder about and discuss, and new lives eager, if we will help them, to pick up where we leave off. Right now, Beth is waiting to continue this discussion, in a somewhat lower key, with me inside her, and her new belly pressing against me. I’m afraid our conclusions, if any, may never get written down!

  A LETTER FROM BETH SCHACHT

  December, after the Fourth Year

  Dear Margaret and Phil;

  We received your letter asking for news of the first class to graduate from Harrad. As we told you last June, we decided somehow that InSix would hang together. Like other couples that grouped together at Harrad, the six of us seem to have developed a built-in unity that seems to sustain us. As secretary of InSix, I have been elected to bring you up to date.

  First and most important, Sheila and I gave birth to baby boys, Arnold and Abraham, respectively ... born within ten days of each other. Valerie is five months pregnant, but (Jack to the contrary) it seems dubious at the moment whether she will agree to suffer through what happened to Sheila and me at delivery time.

  But to go back. When Harvey and I were accepted at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, Sheila decided to do graduate work here in music. After some juggling, Stanley switched from Harvard Law to U. Of P. Law. Valerie gave up Western Reserve and is here working in sociology, while Jack is doing graduate work in economics at Wharton.

  It sounds simple when I write it but it took a whole summer of juggling and argument to get us all settled in one spot for another four years. Then it took Sheila, Val and I at least two months of heated disagreement to settle on a house where we could all shack up together. InSix is now the proud owner of an old ten room house in a convenient but run-down section of this City of Brotherly Love. The house cost InSix a down payment of five thousand dollars, and was all hell to work out with the staid Philadelphia bankers who looked down their long noses but finally succumbed to Jack’s financial genius. If they knew the whole truth, and not the simple fact that we are poor but deserving students, I fear the sky of Philadelphia would be lighted with the word SIN in red neon; to guide and warn the faltering steps of the good progeny of William Penn and Benjamin Franklin, against a similar immoral course. No, not old Ben! ... He was a gay dog. I’m sure that if he had thought of it, you and Phil would have been several hundred years too late with Harrad. What a different world it would have been!

  I was about to say that Val, who under Harry’s tutelage, made an excellent midwife to Sheila and me, is not sure that she wants to be the next “victim”.

  Safely ensconced in our own beds, Shelia and I had our babies at home. It was no picnic, and it was none of this natural childbirth stuff. It was just plain rugged, but now, as we recall it, neither Sheila nor I can help smiling. We are twentieth century heroines in a world where most births are cut and dried, where mothers labor on a production line, carefully planned for the convenience of doctors who so far as possible keep normal working hours. Our future citizens come into the world in the most modem aseptic conditions. Healthy and antiseptic I suppose, but definitely lacking something so far as the “poppa” is con cerned and maybe even the “mamma”. Keep in mind that none of us are advocating a return to primitive child bearing. Sheila and I are still deep admirers of modem hospitals. Only, as Harry pointed out, the modem birth process omits one very vital phase of child bearing ... the male love, his interest, curiousity and identity with his wife and chi
ld at the moment of birth.

  Try as he would, Harry could not persuade the doctors, the hospital or the medical school that he and Stanley should have the privilege of witnessing the birth of their children ... and maybe even hold my and Sheila’s respective hands as we labored on our joint productions. It simply would not be possible. No hospital with their crowded labor rooms was set up for such sentimentality. Oooh, did that word make Harry mad. He gave the doctor an extended dissertation on the difference between love and sentimentality.

  It didn’t take Harry and Stanley long to figure out a simple solution. All Sheila and I had to do was to sweat it out. Inevitably we would give birth. Frankly, about this time Sheila and I were beginning to have doubts. With his usual thoroughness, Harry jumped ahead in his medical studies and stayed up night after night becoming an expert on obstetrics and every facet of childbirth. Then, just to make sure, Harry assured the doctor who was looking after Sheila and me that he would be summoned if the blessed event arrived suddenly and without warning.

  When I awoke at four in the morning on October fifteenth, no one had to tell me I was in the first stages of labor. Harry suddenly changed his mind and was going to call the doctor and rush me to the hospital, but I crossed my fingers and told him that I was game if he was. After all, I assured him, I had acquired such a thorough knowledge of what was going on inside me that I really didn’t want to be an inert, half-conscious, contracting lump of flesh. My brain wanted to know what was really happening to the rest of me. Little did I know, what I was in for.