Plympton Peripatetic

A stone slab on Plympton Street attests to the age and tradition of Apthrop House, the fine old example of colonial architecture which is the official residence of the Master of Adams. When the new Housemaster was chosen this summer his instructions were that in redecorating Apthrop he was to retain the traditional style of the official rooms but could decorate the private rooms as he chose. In consequence, visitors still find only somber propriety, unless perchance they should glimpse through an open door the Master's private dining room with its intricate gold patterns embossed on walls of vivid Chinese red.

Housemaster Reuben A. Brower, professor of English, is a subdued, modest man whose outward propriety obscures a vibrant originality. The casual visitor to his study or classroom is often initially disappointed by Brower's lack of flamboyancy, but after several visits invariably gets a good, long look into a sparkingly alive mind.

Many of his colleagues and students feel that Brower's dropping of his upper level courses this year in order to take on an elementary Humanities course and the myriad duties of a Housemaster is a great loss to the English department and the College. They think it rather strange that a man at the peak of his teaching career should choose this path.

"It's less surprising to me and my friends at Amherst that I'm doing this," Brower says. He feels the man here who best understood his motives was Eliot's John Finley, who wrote, "You now prove not to have lost Amherst for Harvard, but to have regained it, so to speak, within Harvard."

Having come from Amherst only a year ago, Brower thinks he is in large part plunging himself back into an atmosphere in which the teacher is concerned with the student's whole life. "I'm interested in this job for the same reason I'm interested in teaching. To me they're not at all competing interests, because I don't think of the academic side of a man as separated from the rest of him."

Brower is intensely aware of the implications of what goes on in the classroom for the life of his students. "Without turning the classroom into a Sunday School, I think of a choice of poems as a choice of lives and, conversely, of any non-academic choice, such as that between two movies, as closely related to what happens in the classroom."

Besides Amherst, Brower has two distinct models for a Harvard house. One, Kenneth Murdock's Leverett House in the thirties, was "a marvelous experience" for him, then a young member of its tutorial staff. The other is the English college and specifically Christ's College, Cambridge, which he vividly recalls from his two years there after graduating from Amherst. "It was a revelation. The college is a wonderful institution, really the center of the student's intellectual life."

If Brower seeks a shift of some of the emphasis from the classroom to the house, he still regards himself primarily as a teacher. Though a recognized scholar in both English and Classics and the author of one book and numerous articles, he insists "everything I've done academically stems from my teaching."

When Brower says teaching, he means "preparing the student for a job of his own, in imitation of the job which I am doing. I want a minimum emphasis on rehearsing what I said and a maximum stress on preparation for doing what I did." He is not against the lecture system. "There is definitely a place for the presentation of the best sort of professional job of which a teacher is capable. The lecturer goes wrong as a teacher only when he is not most concerned with the student's imitation of that job."

He considers the chief influence on his thinking about literature, and especially poetry, to be his contact with Robert Frost. The two became close friends as teacher and student at Amherst and the friendship persisted when Brower became a graduate student here. Frost was among the contributers to a magazine which Brower started in 1932, called The New Frontier, "a little magazine with a social conscience whose only distinction was that instead of dying it just stopped."

Like Frost, Brower loves New England, loves particularly to take long walks along its country roads. He is an inveterate walker and at Amherst he often led a hiking group through the surrounding woods, spicing the ramblings with peripatetic philosophy. Early this summer he did some concentrated meandering on Cape Cod, "way down, you know, where Thoreau walked."

Brower's other main interest is the theatre. While a student at Amherst he was president of the famed Amherst Masquers with whom he did considerable acting. Now, though retired from the stage, he reads the theatre pages like others read the sports section, knowing the details of Broadway shows as baseball fans know batting averages.

With his two new jobs, Brower will have little time for walking and theatre going. But though he will certainly become as deeply enmeshed in his new position as he does in everything else, he has wisely decided to keep his house in Belmont as a "home for tired academics." There he can retire with his wife, three children and the Sunday theatre section and escape at least for a day the ceaseless drumming on the door of Apthrop House.