Harvard: A Convent of the New Middle Ages?

The following article appeared on April 11 in the Cairo newspaper, "La Bourse Egyptienne." It was taken from the first of two articles published in the monthy French literary magazine, "Les Lettres Nouvelles," under the title of "L'Ete Americain." The author attended the Summer School here last year and upon his return to France wrote what is apparently a very popular and easy-to-sell type of report. "La Bourse Egyptienne" headlined the article: "Harvard University, New Convent where alchol is prohibited but psychoanalysis is familiar, and where students work for the pleasure of earning money." The editor printed the excerpts because of their "new point of view, not tainted by political color-blindness nor preoccupied with propagandistic purposes." (Translation was done by Gavin R.W. Scott.)

In America, college life is one of exemplary ease. I liked Harvard for its naive display of an idealized Anglo-Saxon world, engendered by the memories of emigres, for the dazzling colors in the humid warmth--halls, monuments and lawns arising from a deluge in which European civilization would have perished. At Harvard, white and blue bulbous bell-towers of the dormitories, with their splendor comparable to English chateaux, the Anthenian or Napoleonic-styled libraries, the trees sprayed with D.D.T. every week, Memorial Hall (which is a miniature Westminster), all appear to have been constructed to reassure young Americans of the existence of a past there is not American.

Heavenly Commandments

The size of a spacious city of 15,000 inhabitants, [Harvard] is built like an imaginary city in an eighteenth century Dutch of French painting, set in a decor of the Russian opera. The trees and walls are real, and the buildings are built of wood--like all houses in New England; but the wood is laquered, and waxed and varnished. Harvard may well have had a two or three hundred-year history, and the list of alumni may grow longer on the plaques in the Houses: but no one fears the past. The four million books in Widener Library--the largest university library in the world--may well relate this past: but no one really believes in it. American history itself only began in 1780. From the colonial period, only architecture, which has been jealously preserved, remains; from the first colonists, or the "Pilgrims" (and it wasn't Christopher Columbus but the passengers of the "Mayflower" who discovered America), only Puritanism and its heavenly commandments to the New Promised Land survived: "You will have no other desire than that of earning money, which will be the only lawful and pleasing thing in the eyes of God." And it is true that other passions, such as those which lead us to the sins of the flesh, remains condemned by human law. In New England and in other states, an adultress or an unwed mother can go to prison. The simple sin of fornication--denounced by the family and neighbors of a girl who has one or two lovers--is punished in the same way.

The absence of history and the absence of passion is visible on the unwrinkled, calm faces of Americans--the simple food, the lack of fresh meat, which is too expensive for every-day fare, the meals taken at odd moments and carelessly served, form the slim and often beautiful bodies, the naive faces, and the empty glances. Alcohol, strictly speaking, could remedy this situation. And it is true that after six o'clock in the evening, at parties and in bars, cocktails, whiskies, and gin-and-tonics--which, everyone knows, has a quinine base--plunge three quarters of the population into a euphoria which gives to young people a daring that they normally lack and to grand-mothers an illusion of perpeual youth. In this policed, Puritanical society, one must have an "out"; alcohol is one. And drink must not be heavy ... but sufficient to stimulate the nerves and quicken the blood for an hour, without leaving any after-taste or memory. Thus the [young] girls can let themselves be caressed by the boys, and the old ladies can either dance frantically or stand there very dignified, completely stiff because they are dead-drunk. No punishment follows this sort of excitement, which is less dangerous for body, soul and social order than sensuality, intellectual passions, coquetterie, or jealousy....

Punch with Tchaikovsky

Alcoholism has not reached Harvard. In the summer, each week, the students gather in the Yard--a word which be special privilege replace the "campus" of other colleges--to drink fruit punch and listen to the symphonies of Tchaikovsky of Brahms.

While Harvard is a masculine university, Summer School brings boys and girls together under the ardently defended priciples of "co-education." Three thousand students (in winter there are sixteen thousand) forego vacation. Most are here because it is easier to get into Harvard than in the winter: it's just a matter of paying. This is a way of obtaining in two months a "semi-diploma" which allows acceleration of studies, and, above all, an opportunity to stay active. As for leisure, weekends and long evenings are adequate. One gets the impression, however, that in America one never takes a vacation unless it is for the purpose of taking a rest; there is, of necessity, a kind of "professional" attitude towards relaxation, or towards going to Europe once in a lifetime, or even traveling to Mexico which provides the nearest violence, poverty, and antiquity. Professors find something to teach in another university. In a pinch, they can cross the United States, from East to West--according to that law which demands that one "Go to San Francisco," which is the liet-motiv of American dreams, like the Moscow of Chekov's Three Sisters,--while westerners can think only of the East.

The old anti-aristocratic notion that there is nothing dishonorable in working, which is never held in Europe, is put into practice every day in the United States. No student would feel humilated by working in university positions filled elsewhere by paid help: waiting on table, washing dishes, begin office boy or librarian, etc. . . . At any rate, whether rich or poor, whether professor or student, all have the same clothes, the same leisure, and the same automobile--which costs, second hand, as much as a motor scooter.

The similarities in clothing, automobiles, leisure, and most of the personal people--the smile, the kind word, the interest each person is supposed to take in his neighbor by using first names--hide poorly the great barriers of prejudice. Let's not elaborate upon the Negroes, who are strictly excluded from the lives of whites, killed in the south and shunned in the North, and who, practicably speaking, have never vote nor representative in government . . . . This segregation is of a political, psychoanalytical, and meta-physical nature. In a land which is so proud of what it calls "social mobility" which becomes more and more mythical as things become stabilized an according to unwritten law which ten to assert once and for all the supremacy of Nordics, of whites over blacks, of Protestants over all the rest--each ethnic group owes it to itself to prove its often imaginary purity. The government has in vain stepped up publication of its propaganda posters and buses shows three new-born babies, with the inscription "Just born all Americans. Do not poison