John Finley

Once upon a time there was a colorful section man in Hum 2. "He's not teaching anybody anything," complained another teaching fellow to John Finley, the lecturer in the course. "He's the closest thing to a mad man I know." "Ah," said Mr. Finley, "but he has flair."

There are competent people about--students and section men alike. But Finley, for 25 years Master of Eliot House, reserves his highest praise for those who possess the elusive and transcendent quality of flair. His own, of course, is legendary. In appearance he combines the best traits of Henry James' English gentleman and Robert Frost's New England farmer. Custom tailored three-piece suits with cuffs that really button set off a lined, craggy face. The white hair is long, sometimes over the collar, and the flaring bushy eyebrows suggest now an urbane devil, now a hoary Puck.

Finley's hallmark is his verbal legerdemain. To wit:

* On the appearance of two Radcliffe companions: "It is like the friendship of an armored tank and a lettuce leaf."

* On a doctoral dissertation: "Sometimes a thesis is a thesis; sometimes it is the length and shadow of a temperament."

Undergraduates sometimes suspect an elaborate show designed to dazzle them. But Finley's show does not play to special audiences, and it is continuous. Recalls Professor Cedric H. Whitman, a colleague in the Classics Department: "I hadn't seen John in a year. Then one day I met him on the street. His very first words to me were, 'Humanities 2 is like a mulch pile. Each year I throw in a few new ideas, and they sink down to the soil.'"

Ensconced in his panelled study, surrounded by teacups and undergraduates, Finley takes unabashed delight in describing the advantages of an earlier time, the time of which his entire manner is a gracious remnant. "In my day," he says, "college was like a dirt country road with grass growing in the middle. Now it is like Route 128, and graduate school is like a turnpike. But what if you don't want to go to Albany?"

Despite his distaste for modernism (Carpenter Center, he once said, resembles two pianos copulating), Finley himself works at mental urban renewal. Cambridge--Central Square and all--becomes "a jewelled necklace strung along the Charles." A stream of metaphors and classical allusions lends a rosy grandeur to what is, recasting it in more congenial form.

His favorite theme is O What a Wonderful World. "Life is a choice between goods--not between good and evil," he pronounces with genteel optimism.

Finley divides his time between two such goods. After graduating from Harvard in 1925 he became an instructor and finally a full professor in the Classics Department.

Since 1942 he has been, in addition, a Master of Eliot House--some would say Eliot House itself. As he tells incoming sophomores at the fall House Dinner, "Harvard is the best place in the world, and Eliot House is the best place at Harvard--so let's all be happy."

Even Finley, however, is not perfectly content. Within each of his two roles are tensions and ambivalences. And, the tendency over the years has been for the Master character to shove the Professor character off stage, to the regret of the latter. "I sometimes think I've scattered myself too thin," reflects Finley, who is now 63. Twenty-five years ago, he was a meticulous scholar. His three essays on Thucydides, soon to be republished as a book, are, says Glen W. Bowersock, assistant professor of Classics, "the most important articles on Thucydides in the last century." But Finley is now famous for his spirited performances in Humanities 2, where he has taught the first half, on the epic, since 1946.

The spectacle features Finley's distinctive double-clutch lecture shuffle: from the podium two steps to the left, a pause, an extension of the right foot accompanied by a sweep of the hand, a snap of the microphone cord, two steps back to the right, a resting of the right arm on the podium and a flourishing of the left arm in a classic pose. Some are amused. But by the end of the fall term, only 200 of the 500 students in the course were attending lectures.

The lectures are models of diffusion and infusion, delivered in a free-wheeling metaphoric style. Literature and life dissolve in a curious amalgam. At one time or another this fall, the peripatetic Finley was inspired to comment on pre-med students, suburbs, roller skates, Barbar the Elephant, and Vietnam. He has a peculiarly personal and philosophic view of General Education (he was chairman of the Gen Ed Committee from 1960 to 1965) as the wholesale marketing of truth and insight. But as one student protests, "Take a Finley-Finleyism like 'Tragedy is the brandy to the wine of epic.' Fine. It's beautiful. But what does it mean? Does one take the epic with dinner and tragedy with dessert?"

At times, Finley himself reflects upon the disparity between his present method and past achievement. After rereading the Thucydides essays, he commented. "The immersion into detail! How much I used to know."

But the doubts are transitory. He enjoys being grandiose. And the stance as mentor carries over to the role of Master. "When you have been Master as long as I have," he muses, "you tend to create a metaphysic about it." For him Eliot House is like a mediaeval orrery where students and tutors spin by in differential sequences like so many planets and constellations. Students take three years, tutors five to seven. "Why do all these men want to come to Harvard?" asks Finley rhetorically. "Ah, because the man won't be lost in the mass. This is what these Eastern things stand for."

For Finley the essence and strength of Harvard is the House system, the College's defense against the pressure and particularization of the University. "Berkeley shows how good Harvard is. Those fellows out there have no connection with anything." A bit of brick-and-ivy security, "Eliot House is the village within a metropolis."

Finley has created for his House an image which, like a thesis, is the length and shadow of temperament. Wrote e. e. cummings of John Finley, "he generates a particular precision of vitality which our fathers called 'character.'" Eliot House has a vision of itself as a good and distinctive place, a mixture of Greek excellence diluted by the leisurely style of Romantic and Victorian tradition. The image attracts a certain type of boy who likes to think of himself as reserved, safely aristocratic, and casually intellectual. "The president of St. Paul's School has been here since time immemorial," says one senior. Not everyone fits the image; perhaps no one does. But it exists.

Reality, bears only traces of it. To be sure, on Spring Weekend, Finley's boys play at cricket and bowls in the courtyard, and the excellent House Chamber Music Society performs woodwind and trumpet concerti on the lawn. Apart from Finley, however, the House seems tame and ordinary. There is no literary magazine, drama review, seminar program, serious artistic production--not even a psychedelic light show-dance happening. Instead, the House Committee sponsors a movie series which includes such favorites as Bad Day at Black Rock and The Americanization of Emily. Even the number of preppies has been vastly exaggerated. Of the juniors and seniors in Eliot House 47 per cent come from private schools, compared to 40 per cent for the College as a whole.

Finley holds fast to the image, even though the House does not measure up to it. He attempts to ensure quality by taking inordinate care in selecting the boys he wants.

His prerogative in the selection process was challenged last year when officialdom proposed that each House should contain a cross section of the student body. Finley's eyebrows still snap at references to the arbitrary plan of placement. "We mustn't have the authorities shunt men about. The Houses will be driven to uniformity." Eliot House seniors steeped in the Finley tradition of taste and style are equally opposed to random selection. Says one Eliot House upperclassman of the sophomores admitted under the new system, "You can see a certain sloppiness now in the dining hall. You know, the Winthrop House High School Harry type."

Finley speaks fondly of his boys, "this wonderful stream of undergraduates. Students are fun for me, pure unadulterated sunshine. Rather than sit next to a Mrs. Jones at some second rate dinner party, I much prefer to talk to the crazy nut from Topeka who drives a motorcycle, and is bright but is getting an E in Physics 112."

Finley makes a point of learning the name of each incoming sophomore. Every year he writes some 150 letters of recommendation for seniors applying to foundations and graduate schools. The elegantly phrased epistles (one senior was termed "a veritable Apollo") are enthusiastic and effective.

A few years ago, after the House crew had won an initial victory at Henley, the oarsmen received a telegram from the Master: "Hurra for brilliant prothetic start." Like a gracious Alfred Hitchcock, Finley plays a cameo role in every House Christmas' production. He always concludes the evening's festivities with a ritualistic invocation: Floreat domus de Eliot.

These manifestations of concern can inspire great loyalty in undergraduates. In 1953, when Finley was rumored to be a possible choice for the presidency of Harvard, one enthusiast climbed a tree and announced that he would not come down until Finley was selected. (Pusey was chosen; so far as is known, the boy climbed down.)

But Finley may have lost contact with his boys, just as students in his course say that he has lost contact with them. That is, "the nut from Topeka" is more the creation of his willful imagination than a reality. To achieve color and unity in his perceptions, Finley tends to latch on to a misconception or simple trait and then create an entire character around it. "Finley does not talk with you," runs the frequent complaint, "he talks at you." Says one senior. "I hope I never lose the capacity to listen."

Cloistered Eliot House has only one entrance. The House Committee has to struggle each year to obtain Finley's permission to leave open a gate leading to Memorial Drive. The main archway is guarded, fittingly enough, by a superintendent in a three-piece suit with a gold watch fob. Within this protective and comfortable setting, Finley has become a self-conscious anachronism who, though he may sound like a broken gramaphone at times, serves an important and colorful function as a symbol of Harvard past. He enjoys the role. "I sometimes see myself as a tree under which the arcadia of Harvard life takes place. When you reach a certain stage in life, you are cast in the role of a perpetuator. I try to perpetuate the institution and do what I can for the young."

There is a story about Finley, probably apocryphal. Out for a brisk morning walk along the River Charles, the Master espied two Cantabridgian fisherman. Flinging his arm up in a classical pose, he saluted, "Salve pescatores." One of the unbelieving townies turned around and growled, "Screw you, Mac." But, after all, Eliot House is surrounded by walls and sheltered by tradition. There are no windmills in the courtyard and the archway is guarded. "He's a proud lion," says one Eliot House senior in a rare Harvardian burst of sentiment. "I respect him."