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Paul Fussell, Ph.D. '52, had an agreeable childhood in California, signed up as a second lieutenant in the infantry in World War II, was shot in battle, and nearly died. He thereafter conceived a fury about war, baseless optimism, and lies, and hasn't yet stopped fighting them. His latest salvo is a memoir, Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (Little, Brown, $24.95). After the war, he finished up at Pomona and came to Harvard to study English literature. Although some of what he found in Cambridge he prized (Harry Levin's teaching, and Walter Jackson Bate's), much more made him angry.
At Harvard, in addition to melancholy, I encountered a number of things quite new to me. One was faculty snottiness toward entering graduate students, very like the snottiness with which senior officers in the army habitually treated their juniors. The army term for it was chickenshit. There seemed no analogous Harvard term, but the army one would have served. The implication was that graduate students on the GI Bill had had the impudence to violate the standard relation between a student's rich family and the university. The hated federal government was now in the act, and at Harvard discomfort with this new arrangement was unconcealed. Another cause of Harvard snot was the appearance of incoming graduate students who'd been prepared for advanced study in unprecedented ways. When I underwent my obligatory conference with the medievalist director of English Graduate Studies, Bartlett Jere Whiting, he laughed cruelly when I revealed that I'd worked up my French by correspondence course. He didn't quite openly sneer at Pomona College, or affect not to know what or where it was, but he did manage to suggest that preparation there was a highly uncertain basis for the eventual, if unlikely, earning of a Harvard Ph.D.....
Classes began, and disappointment set in immediately. Most of the professors, it seemed to me, conducted classes in the laziest possible way, openly reading from note cards, soliciting no comments or questions, maintaining a needless nervous or supercilious distance from the class. This was not at all true of the best I encountered, but it seemed sufficiently the Harvard style to embarrass that institution's pretenses to educational distinction. The language courses were taught by underpaid hacks, aged, unpromotable assistant professors with stooped shoulders, white hair, and an air of deep boredom. One read the newspaper while we recited in front of him, and all treated their students with something bordering on open contempt. I began to realize that the joy of learning was a meaningful idea only where joyous teachers affectionately encouraged uncynical students, preferably not in crowds but virtually one by one. The contrasting Harvard method seemed distinctly like the army. It was both comically and disastrously distant from all expectation.
