Was I in a cocoon, or a bubble? I don’t know if there is a “right” word to describe a place at Yale in the late 1950s. It was a respite in time. The post-war years were drawing to a close. Our certainties not yet fully touched, let alone shaken to the roots as they would be.
We were prepared to leave the comforts of these years. Some to Vietnam, some to Africa and many to the cosmopolitan worlds of finance and commerce.
I spent my four years at Yale largely enthralled by what I came to understand as a secular version of Christianity. Coffin was at Battel. Sunday preachers included Tillich and Niebuhr, with a visit from Billy Graham and Martin Luthor King. We read and discussed the intersections between world hunger, racial injustice and a moral universe. I know now the extent to which in religious circles I was escaping conflicts with sexual drama and expression.
But it was more than that. We shared a world of answers, for which the questions were simply formal introductions. Perhaps it was a safe beginning for lives that would be buffeted by events to which we had no introductions. Soon we would have to replace certainty by confidence. And confidence was what I lacked. Looking back, I was needful. I had limited ability to form friendships and I compensated by pushing myself too hard in all directions.
Yet I wonder whether most of us were relying on performance in those days. Others, however, had learned the scripts, the tone of voice and the right “fit” in social interactions. I think now that a genuine confidence in oneself was a necessary stage of development for all of us. It would be necessary as the world would not be all that we expected.
Did “reality” conform all that well to what we were taught? Perhaps it did in the arts, as we studied 20th century poets and architecture, and in the sciences for those with a vocation. I remember a biologist at a Davenport College reception saying that the floor of the ocean had as much mystery as the heavens.
Cushing Strout in class said that the most important questions for “man” (I’m sure it was for “man”) was the existence of God. Certainties like that, that we were asking the right questions, were part of the reassurance of a Yale education. Because we knew the answer? Or thought we did? Or hadn’t yet discovered they were the wrong questions?
And clearly, we were shown that the world was in the grasp of competent diplomats and leaders, some of whom visited Yale. Many of whom were fathers or uncles of classmates. My brief political interest in shouting down Adlai Stevenson in a crowd of Yalies in front of Strathcona Hall as a Freshman subsided, until a rising passion for social justice coincided with a walk across campus with Stevenson in 1960. By then obviously a convert. But to what?
I had little doubt as to America’s place in the world as I traveled to West Africa with Crossroads Africa. Coffin was one of the group leaders that year, and then eventually I became part of the Teachers for East Africa project in 1961. It was for most of us a secular mission.
The God that we worshiped was “modernization,” or science, or just a “free choice” list of enlightenment values.
Yale was a steppingstone, a passage toward what I felt was consequential. Toward how I wanted to live.
And yet seeds were laid. I grew restless, a predator for experience. I remained for a long time primarily self-centered. I did find work as a teacher. Indulgent, I now know, to be paid to stay intellectually alive and have younger people look up to you. Not paid very much of course, but what mattered in those days didn’t cost all that much. I was good at most of what I did, from holding the attention of a class, writing passable poetry and playing softball on local teams. Big fish; small pond. Middle size fish, really, I guess.
Yale had helped. It gave me confidence in who I was. It eased what might have been the self-doubt of a gay man in the mid 20th century. It all now seems consequential. Oddly so, as I feel less entitled and more cautious in what I have to say with the passing years. But I write more and probably still think better of my ideas than they deserve. All that standing in front of students in a classroom! What all my life many have caution me to change, my “lecture voice,” seemed to fit that role. I have though become more at ease in private conversations.
And I do feel that my years at Yale were essential to who I have become.
For all of us it has been a long passage from the immediate post-war years to well into the 21st century. Perhaps only now we can see the pattern, or a pattern.
I find myself remembering a line from Longfellow, perhaps a strange memory for a Yale American Studies major. “A verse of a Lapland song Is haunting my memory still: ‘A boy’s will is the wind’s will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.'”
When they are spoken in green court yards amidst the gothic towers of a Fall Day in New Haven, Connecticut–however awkwardly, by someone who wants to be understood, and play a positive role in life, and find a friend.