Memoir Resurrects Ghosts of Harvard’s Past

Jay Cantor ’70 says that “nine-tenths of the people in your Harvard class who are acting like self-important little monsters will grow up to be nothing but perfectly average self-important monsters. A small percentage will grow up to be the artists that they’re acting as if they already are.”

It’s impossible to know whether Cantor himself was a “little monster” in his Crimson days—but he certainly has grown up to be an artist.

His new magnum opus, the 704-page epic Great Neck, centers around a group of friends who grow up in the prosperous Long Island town of the same name and go on to participate in the political opposition movements of the 1960s. Much of the novel is loosely based on the history of the country and of Cantor himself.

Cantor, now an English professor at Tufts and a MacArthur fellow, was raised in the New York suburb that once knew the debauchery of The Great Gatsby and later saw another kind of wealth—one which flooded in from Queens as second-generation American Jews did well for themselves after the war.

Cantor’s undergraduate years at Harvard, which coincided with perhaps the most tumultuous period in the history of the University, are also reflected in the novel, as four of the six Great Neck kids move to Cambridge for college.

Myself a Harvard student from Great Neck, I had lunch with Cantor at the Hi-Rise Bread Company near Radcliffe Quad. He describes the café as a second home for his family, who lives just down the street.

Even the “Amazing Grace” sandwich, Cantor claims, is named for his daughter.

Over lunch, Cantor discussed the relationship between the fiction and reality of Great Neck and about Cantor’s time at Harvard.

Cantor, who is also a Crimson editor, says many of the most outrageous events described in the book are based on actual historical record.

Beth, the character around whom much of the action revolves, is a member of the Weather Underground, a group of revolutionary communists who did not shy away from violent protest.

The book also explores Mississippi’s Freedom Summer, the 1964 campaign to enfranchise black voters, from the perspectives of both black leaders and white volunteers. Cantor says that as far as he knows, his description is true.

“The organizers of Freedom Summer knew that when they invited white people down to help, there would be white casualties. I mention that because it seems shocking to many people, but it really was the case,” he says. “The people in Mississippi knew that without white casualties, the whites weren’t going to notice.”

In the novel, Cantor depicts an incident in which Beth’s comrades accidentally detonate an explosive within their own headquarters in New York, resulting in the death of many Weathermen. In reality, March 1970 saw the explosion of a Greenwich Village townhouse in which members of the group were killed.

Despite its accurate portrayal of the past, the novel is not directly about history, but instead “about the fantasies that made the history,” according to Cantor.

But history is a major theme within the book, especially as it relates to guilt, Cantor says.

Cantor describes Great Neck in the 1950s and 1960s as “exuberant.” The town’s residents were moving up in the world, and, according to Cantor, “they spent their money with vulgarity and delight.”

Hovering over the joyous atmosphere, however, was the spectre of the Holocaust. Just like the ceremonial breaking of a glass at a Jewish wedding, the Holocaust was a constant reminder to the town’s inhabitants that “the world is sad and needs healing.”

“That [feeling] is in the middle of Great Neck, in the middle of this festival, which makes it an interesting place for a writer,” Cantor adds.

But his book moves beyond the city of Great Neck to explore Harvard life as well.

The University was an important battleground in the youth movement of the 1960s, with the most significant battle being the 1969 takeover of University Hall. People who were part of the opposition, however, “suffered from self-importance,” according to Cantor.

“The whole world conspired to make us feel very self-important,” Cantor says. “I was on The Crimson and I could hardly go to the newsroom without meeting some Times reporter who wanted to find out what books we liked, what new sexual positions we had discovered and what drugs we were taking.”

Cantor did not himself participate in the struggle in the Yard. He was already on probation for sitting in at a Faculty meeting to consider whether Reserve Office Training Corps should remain on campus. Cantor, a veteran anti-war “poster-maker,” protested outside of University Hall rather than risk expulsion.

Students had no choice but to be more engaged in those days, he says.

“Whatever was happening in the world was happening right there in front of you day to day. Your life was in the balance. Some of that was fictional,” Cantor admits. “Your life really wasn’t in the balance...but you felt like it was.”

There was a sense, Cantor remembers, that students, as individuals, were capable of enacting great change.

“This sense, illusory and having much to do with our youth, that the whole world could be different was inspiring and terrifying,” he says, “like the drugs we took at the time.”

That idea was a relatively universal one and not confined to Harvard. The self-importance of the radical students was similarly widespread. However, Harvard itself injects its students with an ego-booster shot that is not necessarily negative, Cantor argues.

“The idea that you have somehow been chosen by history to do something very important allows you to take the risks that may eventually lead to you doing something important and also leads to those losing bets that so many lives end up as,” he says. “If you didn’t think that you were chosen in that way, you wouldn’t make the wager in the first place and nothing would happen.”

Although Cantor grew up in Great Neck, where almost all children attend public schools, his mother insisted that he enroll at Horace Mann in New York City. “I think my mother had read somewhere in the Talmud that there must always be a better school somewhere,” he explains.

Harvard, however, escaped her scrutiny.

“Actually, Harvard was fine with her,” he says. “I could stay there. I think she felt Oxford was on the decline. Quite right.”

—Staff writer Alexandra B. Moss can be reached at abmoss@fas.harvard.edu.