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CHAPTER 2

OLD BLUE

New Haven. Say it again, New Haven. No haven. No haven at all. No haven first of all from New Haven.

That gangling thin-muscled mopy perennial adolescent of a town, head cozied on West Rock, knees hooked over East Rock, groggy from too many pizzas and steamed clams, slow to grow up or get up, fuzz of Gothic spires at its middle for an uncordial pubic hair. The flinty headquarters, made up of unused bell towers and unnoticed turrets, would of course be the University, which is in the business of quartering heads.

The municipality is built around and revolves around, snaps to the orders from, dances to the tune of, Old Blue. There under the catastrophically out of place Olde Englishe steeples and parapets is the area’s nerve-center. Its old brain and its new brain too. Should you not feel at home around seats of learning there’s no place for you to sit down.

Spilled out there on scummed Long Island Sound east of Bridgeport with its foundries and aircraft plants, west of New London with its submarine yards, south of Hartford with its insurance companies and state government offices, New Haven has no great factory, no teeming naval base, no major business at all but Yale. Yale is the focus of its enterprise as of its anatomy.

It’s not good for a town to be appendage to a center of higher learning. The high visibility and vast wingspread of the school make it look as though there’s nothing lofting in life but learning. The impression is given that heads are what count, cultivated ones (that is, those that can afford cultivation), and bodies are of value chiefly to help the cultivation along. In practice that means town, the body, gets the menial chores done, the brawn and leg labor, so gown, the soaring head, can be free to ideate. Those who do the hauling and hammering in the neighborhood can’t help feeling that worthiness lives elsewhere than in them, somewhere around the thrusting filigrees of stone they see only from a distance when they look up from their hand work.

New Haven is an extravagantly and doggedly Manichean community—its prime industry is the care and feeding of heads. The body that needs care and feeding too will find itself a shutout or a reject around here; at least it did back in the Depression, when bodies were often more pauperized than minds.

The University dominates all of the city’s downtown, rolling out for blocks both west and north from the central Green, taking up precious acres that otherwise would be packed with houses, stores, factories and hangouts. The University therefore sidetracks or stops cold the natural laws of urban development.

We know what those laws are now, we’ve been learning. Left to unfold by its internal logic, the inner city has to suck all the pariahs and human dregs unto itself, all the expendables in the local population, while those with money and standing and mobility pack up and entrain for the outskirts, hoping they can keep a few steps ahead of the core’s overbrimming blight.

The overlooked and shoved aside can’t fulfill their urban destiny in New Haven. They can’t crowd into the city’s hub, can’t take over all the way as they do in other places, even when the fugitives from their massing presence take off. The University does not encourage invasions of overwhelmingly body people into the precincts of the cultivated heads.

Universities should by rights be on the outer edges of cities, to point up the peripheral place of mind in a body-focused culture. In New Haven the University’s focal position suggests a role for the intellect and the spirit which they don’t truly have in the real world, the world just outside the campus; and memorializes the fiction by Gothically filling land that by natural law should be ghetto, a body-terrorized place.

It can’t eliminate ghetto. It is all but ringed by ghetto. Ghetto touches Yale to the northwest and to the southeast. Ghetto not only abuts it, it pushes hard against it. The University pushes back with all its Gothic bulk.

To the west the body-obsessed hordes from the Dixwell-Ashmun ghetto are fended off by the Sterling Memorial Library, the Payne Whitney Gymnasium, the Law School, $50 million worth of stone from another, meaning-drained time. To the south the swarms from the Grand Avenue ghetto are kept out by the Hospital, the Medical School, the Institute of Human Relations. Proving, it would seem, that even those departments of the University concerned with the human body are more concerned with some bodies than with others, concretely, with the bodies of the well-off, which need the least attention.

The bodies of academics get the very best care in the academic world, though incidentally to the care of mind. The bodies that fill the ghettos on two spilling sides, though infinitely needful of all the kinds of attention there are, both physical and mental, are major threats to an institution that fosters the cultivated life of the mind. They have to be repelled—by the great stone edifices devoted to medical science, physical education, the law, human relations, etc.

This disfiguring of town by gown, this enthroning of mind values over a whole community with an accompanying downgrading of the rest of the human corpus, may not be as apparent in New Haven today as it was in the early and middle thirties when I was in college. But neither has it been altogether corrected. That would take a physical removal of the University, if not its junking.

Consider that Dick Lee went on from his job as publicity man for Yale to become the long-term mayor of New Haven. For his bold programs of urban redevelopment, which gave an entirely new face to the downtown areas, he won national and even international acclaim. In his extensive rebuilding he was always mindful of the interests of Yale and the local businesses affected, but his renewal specialists couldn’t stop to worry about alternate housing and other community facilities for all the blacks displaced from the razed ghetto areas; there isn’t enough money in federal allotments to cover everything; there have to be priorities in city planning; profile comes before people. As a result, New Haven, that backwash to the nation’s tumults, that hive of tweedy nonchalance and buttondown good manners, got her ghetto riots when Detroit and Newark got theirs. It got its Bobby Seale trial, its Black Panther convocations. The spires and parapets remain firmly rooted in the 15th century but the people living in their shadows finally slammed into the 20th, with torches and guns.

When they built those Gothic mausoleums to entomb a past that was never really our past, back there before the Depression, the University’s architects ran into a problem—the plaster they used on the internal walls appeared spankingly new, and therefore wrong. They hit upon a remedy, they mixed a soot of bone dust and other powders in with the plaster, to give a surface that looked ancient enough to belong to some time not this. That could tell us a lot about why Bobby Seale, a man very much of our times, a man rooted in no century but our own, finally showed up in New Haven.

The architects had another headache: the outside stone of these buildings looked brand-new too, suggesting that contemporary hands had something to do with the construction, and contemporaneity is death to venerableness, as everybody knows. Their solution was to treat the stone facings with some sort of chemical that made them look weathered by the centuries. Which gave rise to another puzzler: this treatment made the seals permeable, so that the walls leaked something fierce when it rained. No doubt this difficulty has been resolved too, thanks to the wonders of modem chemistry, a development since Gothic times.

This preoccupation of adult minds with the techniques of how to make new stone look old without the walls leaking also may throw some light on why Bobby Seale came to town. He was visiting with his friends and associates along Dixwell Avenue and Ashmun Street, an un-Gothic stone’s throw from the Yale campuses, in a neighborhood where houses leak for more 20^th-century reasons, such as lack of money to make repairs.

I went to Yale for five years but I never spent a night on its premises.

I’ll have to take that back. There was the night I was reading in one of the uterine alcoves of Linonia & Brothers and dozed off. I’m not sure, but I think I was reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I never could get into that book, I’m not that much interested in gardening. A careless night watchman locked me in and I was stuck until they opened the doors for the bookworms in the morning. That was pretty spooky. It’s not good to be alone in the dark with so many books. Books properly are daytime companions. In the day you can keep your eye on them.

My point is that New Haven was my home, I lived there, and Yale was simply a place where I attended certain classes, as few as possible. My life of the mind took place partly on campus but my life of the sense was located entirely off. I was very much of the town, but the gown they insisted I was born to just never did fit me well.

I’ll tell you how much I resisted their gowns. When the time came for me to graduate I couldn’t face the business of renting and actually putting on one of those silly robes. I went to the dean and told him I couldn’t make the commencement exercises because the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union was about to go on strike along the Eastern Seaboard and I’d gotten myself a job as a picket captain.

The dean did not take kindly to my news. He said it was an unpromising sign that I couldn’t wait to begin my troublemaking until I got my degree. I said it was the stomachs of the seamstresses in the sweatshops that had caused the trouble by not getting enough to eat on sweatshop wages, I was only trying to help them solve the problem by advancing to a better diet. He said it was out of the question that a fellow bent on such mischief should be excused from the academic routine, I wouldn’t get my diploma if I didn’t show up for the ceremony and that was that. He added that if I was making such a fuss because it cost a few dollars to rent the cap and gown he himself, personally, was ready to lay out the rental fee.

I was so taken with the idea of one of these cultivated heads footing the bill that I agreed. I told him the rental agency charged five dollars where in fact it charged only three, so I made two dollars on the deal. I didn’t put up too much of a fight because in truth I didn’t have that picket-captain job with the ILGWU, I’d made a bid for it but all the openings were already filled. Things were so bad that I couldn’t even get work going on strike.

Town, I’m saying, always loomed larger in my head than gown and mostly shoved gown aside. Town was my habitat, where I drank my beer and hung my hat, gown just a uniform that didn’t conform to my true contours. That brings me back to the matter of my never living on campus.

You’d be right if you observed that I didn’t have the money to live in a dormitory but you’d be dead wrong if you concluded that that was my reason for not living there. If I’d had the money of a Ford or a Rockefeller (there was a Ford in my class, Henry III, and a Rockefeller too, Winthrop, maybe, I never was clear on that) I still wouldn’t have moved into a dormitory. I was delighted to live in furnished rooms in or near the ghettos, on Dixwell Avenue, Elm Street, College Place, Ashmun Street, Lake Place, Crown Street, Asylum Street, Davenport Avenue, and be where my friends were, and come and go without being checked by entry guards.

Yale’s officialdom could not understand someone who was in their community but not of it, who was not a joiner. In their minds admission to their churned circle was such a boon and a blessing that anybody so honored had to embrace all that was offered. They couldn’t make sense of my not wanting to march in their commencement parade and they had to misinterpret my reasons for living off campus.

They saw me as one more of the underprivileged townies. There were these deserving-but-poor scholarship lads out of the city’s ranks who were dying to belong all the way but couldn’t scare up the loot for all the privileges available on campus, starting with that of living in a college-unit dormitory. We paupers who were condemned to live away from gown, in town, among the peasants, the ivyless somaticists, had to be sorry. Yale set out to make us less sorry. Whether we liked it or not.

They have the residence-college system at Yale, Pierson being one closed unit, Calhoun another, and so on. Each college has its own dormitories and dining hall, its lounges, library, seminar rooms. The plan the officials came up with was to assign each off-campus student to the roster of one of these college units, on the theory that even if we couldn’t sleep among our fellows we at least would have visitation rights, the opportunity to eat with our peers, participate in the college’s doings, use its facilities. I was made an associate, or non-resident member, whatever it was called, of Calhoun.

The idea behind this insultingly social-work gesture was to make us feel wanted. What I felt was truly overlooked, I mean, not recognized, not made room for.

I felt violated. That they could have imagined for a minute I’d go for their insipid English roasts, served by a lot of underpaid black women in starched uniforms, most of them my neighbors, some of them the mothers of my friends, when nightly I enjoyed those fine pork-chop sandwiches smothered in hot sauce that they featured in the hash joints along Dixwell Avenue, and had the bonus of my real friends eating with me—that I took for the wildest sort of arrogance.

The bureaucrats of the Wasp-élite world don’t read the minds of bottomdogs as acutely as they think. They suffer from the social-worker’s fallacy that the lower a man is on the social scale the more of a stereotype he is and therefore more of an open book to sophisticated high-individuation minds like their own. They are victims of what has been called occupational psychosis (also known as trained incapacity)—a blindness that comes from too much stilted insight.

I never set foot in Calhoun before I was coopted to its membership list without my permission, and I never did after. So much for the ability of the University, that beehive of explorations in humanistic individualism, to spot and give scope to this or that individual.

Maybe if I’d gone to Yale in good times I’d have responded to its ways better and fitted into its life more. But I started college in 1931, when people all over the country were standing in lines, sometimes at soup kitchens, sometimes at banks that were about to close down without returning their depositors’ hard-earned savings.

I remember the Bank Holiday the way other Yale graduates remember ski holidays at Klosters or Bad Gastein. I had to miss some of my classes because I was needed to spell my mother in the line that stretched clear around the block from her bank on Temple Street. The bank was about to shut its doors. It had announced that it would pay off its depositors a few cents on the dollar while its ready cash lasted. (I wondered what its unready cash was up to.) My mother wasn’t able to stand in that line for two whole days. She had a job scrubbing floors somewhere—depressing, how often the soap-operatic note appears in American biographies—and she couldn’t miss work.

So, as I say, I missed some classes, mostly in Chaucer, which I didn’t mind—The Canterbury Tales didn’t have much to say to me at a time when the moneys you’d scraped together to put in what you took for a bank appeared to have been dropped into a hole with no bottom, though you suspected somebody was down there filling his sneaky bags. My mother had something better than $100 in her account, saved up over many months. What the bank deigned to give us was $20 or so.

You can see why I couldn’t view Yale as something separate and apart from the Depression. I had to take the University and the Panic as different facets of the same slimy, howling mess. More than once the thought crossed my mind that in ways I wasn’t yet smart enough to figure out Yale was a central component of the whole system that was diverting my mother’s earnings as a slavey into somebody else’s anonymous pockets.

I graduated from Yale in 1935, and left Graduate School in 1936, years in which there were almost daily riots at relief offices around the country, some of which I took part in as an organizer for the National Unemployed League. In short order after entering the world of work, I was informed that the only employment around was for body laborers, and precious little of that. However, Yale had disqualified me for any sort of employment but head employment, of which there was none. Everywhere they were drawing the hard-and-fast Manichean line across the windpipe and announcing that everything above that line was perfectly splendid and worth endless leisurely cultivation and everything below it was for lesser, less endowed people to concern themselves with, mostly non-Anglos, certainly non-Wasps, until, of course, the Depression came along and it was a buyer’s market for bodies and a lot of them had to be dumped.

Rooted in town as I was, I had no way of relating to a life all gown. Most of my classmates could hole up and never see the life outside. They could, if they so chose, arrange their lives so that they would never from year to year even brush against the squelched and squirming, untutored protoplasms surrounding their tight little island of cerebrators.

Going from dormitory to classroom to library to football field to happy Vassar weekends, you’re moving much too fast to notice the faceless mass out of whose systematic exploitation your fun and frolic get cushily financed. Occasionally, sure, you’ll leave a tip or a bauble for the black man who serves you your meals in the dining hall or the Polish lady who makes your bed up or the Irish guard at the dormitory entrance. But they don’t grow to human dimensions in your mind, which is too filled as it is with poetry and lacrosse schedules, they’re there mainly as props and devices, good ones, worth five bucks at the Yuletide season, certainly.

My mother was never one of those campus maids but that was just her bad luck. She’d applied many times for the job. There was always a long waiting list. She never had the luxury to wait. Of course I couldn’t reconcile town and gown in my life or in my mind. Every time I stepped on campus I had the creepy feeling that I was in enemy territory.

There are two ways you can handle a split life. You can just fall apart. Or you can keep your eye on your two halves and keep running back and forth between them, giving one enough spin to keep it going for a while, then the other. The second technique takes a certain agility, and you have to develop a good wind, but it can be done.

You don’t have to like the game. You can hold a low opinion of its rules, which they set up without consulting you. But if it’s the only game in town you’ve only got one choice, to play or not to play. In times of more flourish they put it, to be or not to be.

My father chose not to be, not to play.

For 19 years he’d had a good and secure job in a very large factory where they made all sorts of printing presses, some for branches of government like the Treasury Department—the Harris, Seibold & Potter Company in Shelton, 10 miles from New Haven. Starting out in the paint department, he’d risen to be foreman, but he never went over to the management side; he belonged to the workers’ union and when it went out on strike he went out. Management never got around to firing him for his union loyalty because when there was no stiike he ran the paint department well, besides, if they’d tried to fire him the workers would have gone out on strike over that.

Then came the Stock Market Crash of 1929. All businesses took a nosedive (along with a fair number of the businessmen), including Harris, Seibold & Potter. Maybe there was less demand for printing presses because in times of economic downturn there just aren’t many things to print except forms for overdue bills and eviction notices. In any case, the factory shut down, and my father was suddenly without a job.

He’d been living a split life all along. For one thing, there was a certain gap between his occupation and his desire to play the violin, which he did well. But with that degree of twoness he could cope, since for ideological as well as human reasons he enjoyed his comradeship with the other factory hands; also, he could play his violin evenings and weekends. Now came a much more serious fission—on one hand was his urge to feed his family, keep up payments on the house, and do something out in the world that he got some pats on the back for; on the other, his sudden termination of all function, his drop into a total vacuum, his loss, as they like to say these days, of identity, as much as he had.

Overnight he’d been broken to pieces and he had no desire to juggle the fragments. Any world that would do that to a man, he was profoundly convinced, was just not worth bothering with. He resigned from the human race and all its doings. He went into the bedroom, pulled down the shades, and there in the darkness sat on a chair facing the wall.

I can’t say I altogether blamed him. The way things were going, there really wasn’t much worth looking at Out There.

Still, you have to make the effort. Those are the rules of the game, the only one in town. If you don’t obey the rules they won’t call you a sensitive soul, a man with esthetic of such high order that you can’t take the vulgarities and obscenities out there on the street—no, they’ll pin the label of psychotic on you and lock you up.

They pinned the label on my old man not without reason, though I must say if they wanted to get a full picture of his sickness they would have had to look into the sickness of American capitalism too. They took him away and locked him up in Yale’s Institute of Human Relations where they had a psychiatric division devoted to the study of interesting cases. They judged my old man to be an interesting case. You don’t get many factory workers who are devoted to the violin.

He entered Yale’s Institute not long after I entered Yale. That gave my academic career a certain focus.

I’d been at a loss as to what field to do my honors work in. I definitely didn’t want to major in literature in an English Department that did not recognize the existence of James Joyce when he was knocking the whole literary world on its ear. Now, however, I saw a course of study that would make sense. I would concentrate on psychology, more specifically, abnormal psychology. At the same time I would fulfill all the pre-med requirements, and after graduation go on to medical school and become a psychiatrist, maybe a psychoanalyst.

If I couldn’t find out in Yale’s curricula what was wrong with the world or at least with literature, I could bone up on what was wrong with my old man. I could in fact make an occupation out of it.

The Psychology Department headquartered in the Institute of Human Relations, was, if I remember rightly, part of it. I visited there often to talk with this or that professor. On my side the conversation was often a little forced because I was aware of my father’s presence in another wing of the building and discussions of the mind’s gnarlings were therefore a lot less academic for me than the professor could guess. The professor, I mean, could speculate freely as to how the mind gets twisted one way or another—if he was wrong that was O.K.; he had no stakes in this. My stakes were high; if he didn’t know what he was talking about my old man was going to be cooped up in that locked room with his violin for a long, long time.

One of my instructors was a first-rate fellow named Florian Heiser. I took to him because my Marxism didn’t bother him, as a matter of fact he was something of a Marxist too, enough of one that after a while Yale told him to move on. I visited with him often. One day he packed up his briefcase and walked outside with me after our business was done with.

We went along Davenport Avenue toward the spot where he had his car parked. I happened to look up at the row of barred windows that marked the psychiatric wards. Behind one set of bars was my old man, just standing there testing, I suppose, if there was anything besides walls worth looking at. I don’t know if my memory is writing additional dialogue for the facts here but as I recall the scene he had his violin tucked under his arm.

Florian Heiser didn’t notice anything. He went on talking about some exciting experiments somebody was just then doing in conditioning aggression out of rats with electric shocks—socialization through traumatization, I think it was called. That was Florian’s field, experimental psychology. It’s the same snap-to treatment they’ve been using more recently on autistic children, who I suppose can be seen as rats for being so unsocial.

Florian was an instructor in why some people get things done and some get undone, and in general a right and sympathetic sort of guy, pretty much on my side, certainly not on the enemy’s, but there was no way to break into his impassioned talk about the new Pavlovian traumatizings of rats to say, “I don’t mean to change the subject, I’m really interested in all these things they’re doing to rats, but that skinny old geezer up there, he’s my father, he’s had some shocks recently too—they didn’t socialize him much—would have had more, in fact, they’d decided to give him electric-shock therapy and were wheeling him into the jolt room but at the last minute somebody thought to check his blood pressure, it was way up and they found he had an advanced case of arteriosclerosis, the voltage they’d been about to run through him might have killed him.” Nope, there was no way to work this information in, which, it seemed to me, said just about everything there was to be said, between clenched teeth and with gorge that wouldn’t stay down, about the discipline of psychology, the University, the country, the system, and the human how of it all down the line, some (only some) of which, to be sure the system’s not responsible for.

Outside there on the avenue, I slowed down a bit. Then I did the only thing I could think of under the circumstances, raised my hand in a snappy military salute.

My old man made the effort to smile. He returned the salute with the closest thing to jauntiness he could muster, like a man on his deathbed trying to go through the motions of the Charleston or the Suzie-Q. I got his message—carry on, trooper. He on his fronts would do his level best to carry on. He was issuing orders to me to keep the battle going on as many fronts as I could get to, and to make sure none of them was anywhere around his.

Sometime after this the psychiatrists at the Institute decided they’d exhausted all the interesting aspects of my old man’s case and he was accordingly transferred to the state mental hospital in Middletown. You can see what’s coming, you’ve watched enough television dramas to know all the plot twists, the crazy crossings of paths, the O. Henry surprises that life dishes out so much more ingeniously than do the television dramatists and the O. Henrys in general.

It was arranged for our class in abnormal psychology to make a field hip to Middletown to observe some of the more interesting cases they had up there. In anticipation of that outing, I suddenly recall after a lapse of 37 years, I sat down and wrote a short story, not exactly light-handed, about a college student whose class in abnormal psychology visits a mental hospital to have some of the weirder cases trotted out for their inspection, and one of them turns out to be his father.

It was a failure of my dreamery centers. Life is not that cliché-ridden. It simply has more imagination and far subtler turnings than television will ever have the good grace to acknowledge. When life decides to write a soap opera, as it does over and over, the thing may turn into grand opera, and not a posy, swoony one either.

My father was not one of the shells of human beings dragged into that amphitheater for the edification of Yale students in between weekends at Vassar. My father made no appearance in that vaudeville at all. But after the show, as we were walking back to our cars, I spotted him on a bench on the grounds, with his violin case across his knees. I went over and sat down.

“How you doing, Pop. Get to play the violin much.”

“Plenty, son. I keep busy here, don’t you worry about me. I’m even giving lessons, I’ve got five patients signed up already. One’s a very interesting man, he used to be an engineer and he has a plan to float icebergs down from the North Pole and melt them to make more water, he says the reason for the Depression is too damn many frozen assets and this is his scheme for straightening things out, unfreeze the water assets. He’s got a real knack for the fiddle, he’s already playing Schubert’s Serenade.”

“It sounds like he’s got talent, you teach them good, Pop.”

Pretty soon I caught up with our party in the parking lot. One of my classmates—his first name was Clay, he was from Grosse Point and his father was something big in the diplomatic service—was curious about my going off like that.

He said, “Who was that you were talking to?”

I said, “He’s my father.”

He said, “Come on, I don’t think that’s funny, you’ve got a warped sense of humor.”

Life is a very good writer. I’d give anything to be able to write dialogue like that. What an imagination.

Irving Fisher! Ever hear of him? The name doesn’t mean much nowadays but it was once to be reckoned with. He was for many years Yale’s most eminent economist. One study he put a lot of time into was ways and means to control the economic cycle, an undertaking at which, as revealed in the newspapers if not the history books, he was not conspicuously successful.

He did something to straighten out my personal economic cycle, though—my one-man economic cycle. It was Prof. Irving Fisher who created a job for me on my last visit to New Haven.

It’s very hard to figure out what you’re doing hanging around a college town when you’re no longer in college. The place where they catered to your head is best left far behind when you step into the world to do some paid-for work, otherwise all our categories, compartments for thinking over here, ones for doing over there, melt together, and you know what that can lead to—thoughtful action, activist thought, town-gown merger, the sort of thing that can get Mr. Agnew to seeing red in many more places than are so colored. There could even come out of the blending, the mind-body reconciliation, some worker-student joint ventures. Those aloof spires might eventually flop sideways and drop their frozen frills and inch into the spurned ghettos, metamorphosing into mobile libraries and medical checkup vans and consumer armories and strike headquarters and community action centers. Brain and brawn might get to belong to the same union and in fact talk face to face, exchange notes, listen hard. Finally, finally, people in the University might stop going on with their nonstop wind about alienation, and making it their field of expertise, and writing their doctoral dissertations on it, and moving on to other universities to teach it to other candidate-scholars of alienation, a thing more to be dodged than majored and lectured in. . . . Well.

Where was I. The next best thing to going to the college that rules the municipal roost is to work for it, especially since it hands out most of the jobs in the area. So I went to see one of the officials of the Sterling Library who’d been helpful to me when I was a student, Donald Wing. (I’d always had the utopian hope that one day they might build an annex to the Library and name it after him so it could be called the Wing Wing.) Donald said there was a parttime job open on the staff, that somebody was needed to come in and make order out of and catalogue all the Irving Fisher papers and memorabilia. Five mornings a week, 60 cents an hour, 12 bucks a week.

I took it. Next to nothing was in those days a lot better than nothing. On that kind of pay you could cough up three bucks for a furnished room and have enough left over for the 35¢ breaded veal cutlets at the Greek’s or the pork-chop sandwiches in the Dixwell Avenue greasy spoons.

Irving Fisher was an expert on tax structuring, fiduciary policy, how to keep inflation and deflation in line, interest rates, cash flows, balance of trade, what the Federal Reserve should reserve, and the like. He was forever going down to Washington to testify before Senate committees or act as consultant to government agencies, and often his services were called upon by foreign governments too. Then he began to be consulted less and less, and after a while not at all, and you could understand why.

The Great Crash and Panic of 1929 happened. For all his scholarly investigations into the reasons why boom economies go bust with such regularity, Fisher had never suggested to anybody that anything remotely like 1929 could or would happen. He had, in fact, ruled out any such possibility. After all, the Hoover people down in Washington were handling the system pretty much as he’d advised them to. His policies were specifically designed to keep us from going into decline.

Irving Fisher all his life considered himself the architect of prosperity, though it turned out he was more its wistful camp follower. It followed that any nation that used his blueprints would stay rattlingly prosperous. That’s the kind of thing that happens when gown gets such a swelled head as to imagine that it doesn’t have to go into town, just look it over from the highest University tower and through a bullhorn inform it what’s what.

Fisher wanted very much to know what had brought about the catastrophe all his ideas had been designed to prevent. He began to look about for etiological variables he might have neglected or underestimated. He found some dillies. Sunspots. It appeared that just before the Stock Market Crash there’d been significantly increased activity on the sun, where there had been spots were larger ones and where there hadn’t been any some showed up.

Looking over the terrestrial canvas more broadly, Fisher found other matters that seemed to rise and fall with the waxing and waning of solar spots, among them pregnancy rates, the incidence of coronary thrombosis, the number of highschool dropouts, crimes of violence, abortions, strikes, small-business failures, automobile purchases, gang wars, home foreclosures, divorces, any number of things. Prof. Fisher had hit late in life on the cosmic-cyclical theory of history and the cycles he suddenly turned up everywhere in human affairs he traced directly to the periodic variations in the sun’s acne. Again, that’s the sort of thing you see when you climb so far up those Gothic towers as to lose sight of the clutter of facts all about on the ground.

You can imagine with what mixed feelings the Hoover people down in Washington listened to Prof. Fisher’s strong new thoughts. In their innermost beings they must have felt a warm glow from top to bottom, an impulse to embrace the Professor and kiss him all over. After all, a theory that traced this economic avalanche to extra-terrestrial sources, sunspots or Halley’s Comet or the furthermost red stars or whatever, automatically absolved the Hoover Administration of all responsibility for the collapse, as well as the free-enterprise system it was constantly embracing and kissing. But they were just enough in touch with the pulse of the public to know that, however much they themselves cottoned to Fisher’s proposal to make economics a branch of astronomy, the American people wouldn’t buy it.

I’m not saying that overnight the nation had turned Marxist in its approach to economics, nothing like that. But with the pinch of very hard times, with all the belt-tightening, the scramble to eat, rudiments of a materialist interpretation of history had been planted in many heads, enough at least to make them look to the workings of the profit system for the culprit rather than to the sun’s sporadic discolorations.

Prof. Fisher, finding himself accorded the treatment a prophet usually gets in his own country, with all the other countries following suit, retired from his role as economist, in fact, retired from public life and teaching altogether. And he donated all the papers from his busy life to the Yale Library, thereby making work for me.

I was impressed by the reverse logic here. It was the Depression that finally divorced Prof. Fisher, the excommunicator of depression, from his function in the world, in short, eliminated his job, excommunicated him. It was the Depression that had eliminated all sorts of jobs for all sorts of people, including me. But it was in response to the Depression that the Professor gave all his papers to the Library, creating, finally, a job for me. Unless you’re a dialectician you’re just not going to understand much of what goes on in this dizzy, dippy, turnabout world.

This was early 1940. If you want to know what it was really like in those days let me sum it up by saying that I was making $12, a week and banking $3 out of it, and I wanted for nothing—nothing I wanted, outside of a job, a real one.