The Publisher (10 page)

Hotchkiss graduation was a difficult moment for Harry. Most of his classmates were surrounded by proud parents and siblings. He spent the day in the company of a distant cousin he barely knew. He had been named class poet and read a short ode at the Class Day ceremony, but the position of class orator, which he had particularly coveted, went to Brit instead. He finished his senior year not first in his class, as he had almost always been, but second, “beaten by a terrible greasy grind! I wish somebody had had the time or opportunity to beat him out.” In a class poll he received no votes at all for “most likely to succeed;” he ranked high not only as “brightest” and “most energetic,” but also in such categories as “most absent-minded” and “most eccentric.” In the class yearbook, he was mildly ridiculed for having used “stolen” yearbook photographs in the
Lit
. He was, in short, confronted by his own hidden self-image and how he appeared to others. When it was over he expressed relief but little exaltation.
“It is done
,” he wrote flatly in his first
letter home after commencement. “For the last forty-eight hours I have been capable of no other thought than ‘It is done.’ My school boy life with all its many failures and few half-successes is over.” He left Hotchkiss looking unsentimentally ahead, as always, to the next step, to a new life once again, “without illusions, romance, high flown talk or sentimental teas.”
⁴⁶

A
t eighteen years of age, dispatched from Hotchkiss and bound for Yale, Harry was at once remarkably mature and strikingly naive. He was more traveled and more knowledgeable of the world than almost any of his peers—a gifted student, an accomplished linguist, and at times an unusually sophisticated writer. Thousands of miles from his family, with no expectation of seeing any of them for months and sometimes years, he had learned to make his way alone in a country that not long ago had been almost entirely new to him; and he had learned to handle aspects of his own life—finances, travel plans, doctors, housing, vacations—that most adolescents of his background still left to their parents.

In other respects, however, Harry was still very much a boy. Even when dressed up in the formal suits that young prep-school men donned for portraits and formal occasions, his thatch of reddish brown hair always seemed slightly tousled, his clothes slightly wrinkled and ill fitting, his gaze somewhat too studied in its seriousness. Away from school he still sometimes wore the knickers he had grown up with in China. He was tall, nearing the six feet he would soon attain, but thin (usually just under 150 pounds) and slightly gawky. He had begun to smoke, but tentatively and self-consciously, insisting it was only to ease his discomfort in public and that it would never become a habit. (In fact it became a lifelong addiction that eventually helped to kill him.) And perhaps most painful to him of all, he was socially awkward and sexually inexperienced.
His Hotchkiss classmates, in their senior poll, ranked him ninth in the class as “worst woman-hater.” One of his friends, writing to him of the attractions of summer in Nantucket, noted that “the dancing is fine (but that doesn’t interest you!), the girls—(but there again I forget who I’m writing to).” Both the maturity and the naiveté were visible in one of the most conspicuous aspects of Harry’s personality at this turning point in his young life: his intense ambition. He had been a diligent striver for years, working desperately to prove himself to his father, his teachers, and his classmates. But his ambition to succeed in school was only a prelude to his much greater ambition to lead an important life. As he looked forward to Yale, he was planning once again an assault on the honors and privileges available to him as a student; but he was also beginning to look beyond—to a larger world he hoped to find some way to shape.
¹

Harry was an avid, if only modestly talented, poet at Hotchkiss. Many of his poems for the
Lit
were purely descriptive—for example, his sentimental account of life in Shantung, a poem he liked so much he tried in vain to have it published in a national literary magazine. Other poems expressed his emerging view of his place in the world. In one of them, “Mankind,” he wrote of the tension between two human impulses: the “doubt and fear” that leads individuals into safe, small lives in “huddling valleys,” and the drive to ascend to something greater, to “the billowy wind-swept hills” from which one can see the world more broadly. He left no doubt that he had resolved that tension for himself: “Ah! Let me climb my little hill, / And make achievement own my will. / Let all the lowland mark me high, / And praise me once before I die.”
²

Harry prefaced his poem with a quotation from “Henry W. Luce”: “Too often we fear the greater vision.” It was an appropriate inscription, because the shape of Harry’s aspirations owed much to those of his father—a similarly driven man who had committed himself to a kind of life that, in his own youth, had attracted many ambitious men hoping for greatness and glory. The elder Harry was deeply spiritual. But he also coveted the worldly rewards associated with his missionary calling and agonized over his frequently thwarted ambitions. He never achieved his dream of being elected to the presidency of Shantung Christian University. Once it moved to the new campus at Tsinan that his fund-raising had made possible, his hopes were thwarted by rivalries between the British and American missionaries and between Presbyterians and Baptists. But his hopes were also dashed by the very intensity of his own ambition and the abrupt, confrontational style he sometimes adopted
when his own plans and visions faced opposition. He recognized this flaw in himself (“I have been hyper-critical and antagonistic where it was not vitally necessary…. I have possibly ‘felt’ too deeply often more than the occasion called for”). And he was perceptive enough to see in his son some of the same tendencies and to warn him against them. (“It is the kind and unselfish man who attracts….
People like to be agreed with
.”) Rev. Luce’s own ambitions did not subside, however, and for the rest of his own active life he strove for advancement within his world and suffered from the animosities his aggressive personality sometimes aroused.
³

Harry agonized over his father’s disappointments, but he gave no evidence of absorbing their cautionary lessons. The problems in Tsinan and Beijing, he always insisted, were a result of the pettiness and selfishness of others, not of any flaw in his father’s own behavior. (“I fear me there is trouble in the State of Denmark,” he wrote in response to his father’s penitent description of his own flaws. “Perhaps the cause of Christian missions has enlisted more rotten eggs than its heroes can make up for!”) For a time he at least claimed to want to follow the missionary path himself, perhaps to vindicate his father’s struggles through his own future triumphs. “I know that [the missionary life] is the most honourable calling in the world,” he wrote his father from Hotchkiss. And while he confessed to be pondering other paths for himself, he continued to insist that he was not “aiming at rather paltry ambition for the chances are 99 to 1 that I become a prof (!) in S.C.U. I have now no greater ambition than to be of use in the Foreign Field.”
⁴

But despite his very real admiration for the career his father had chosen, Harry was already charting another course for himself, one no less ambitious and, in his view at least, no less likely to provide him with an opportunity to add value to the world. “I am just about coming to that stage,” he wrote shortly before leaving Hotchkiss, “when the world of fact and of ideas is intensely interesting. And I hope that I may attain one thing: ‘to wear life as a mantle.’ Until one can do that, I believe no man can really be said to live.” The best route to “the world of facts and ideas,” he was rapidly coming to believe, was journalism. He had already decided to enter the arduous competition for a place on the
Yale Daily News
. But even more significantly, he had arranged—entirely on his own—to spend the summer working for a small newspaper in central Massachusetts, the
Springfield Republican
, “perhaps the most famous paper in the country for its size.” It had an impressive history, edited in the nineteenth century by Samuel Bowles, a founder of the Republican
Party, a strong antislavery advocate, and a leading liberal of his time. The twentieth-century
Republican
, small as it was, aspired to sustain its illustrious history. The paper had hired him to work in its business office, which would, he said, “offer limitless possibilities for experience, and that, as varied as possible, is what I’m after.” But he hoped over time “to creep into the reportorial department somehow.”
⁵

The summer began poorly. Springfield was a place “where I really don’t know any one,” Harry lamented, and he was sometimes almost paralyzed by loneliness. He took a room in the YMCA and spent most evenings there by himself, reading, writing letters to his family, and fighting “severe attacks of the ‘blues.’” At the
Republican
he was assigned to the subscription desk alongside two other young men who, unlike him, depended on the jobs for their livings and feared he would take their places. The work was menial and repetitive (“a great deal of entering, checking, noting, billing, etc. etc.,—which makes it quite overpoweringly complicated for a beginner”), precisely the kind of work on which Harry had always had difficulty concentrating, as his run-ins with Buehler at Hotchkiss had demonstrated. Even so, he tried to make a virtue out of the experience. “Now red-tape is all right for men like Dickens to harangue against,” he wrote his parents, “but a certain amount of it is very necessary,—and woe betide the poor ass that so much as tangles the silken cord by one small strand.” As the days and weeks wore on, however, his lack of fitness for clerical work became ever clearer. “I don’t seem to be progressing at all well in my office work. I keep on making ‘error’ after ‘error,’” he noted after his first six weeks on the job. The work was a “grind,” he complained, “babyish” and “boring.” And the indulgence of his supervisors, who consistently took responsibility for his mistakes, only deepened his unhappiness.
⁶

Eventually, however, Harry found himself drawn into the larger work of the newspaper, and his spirits rose accordingly. He did no actual reporting, but he began accompanying reporters as they worked on their stories, and was recruited at times to help rewrite copy. “I am learning lots of things, that one takes for granted that everybody knows, but which, I guess, very few do know,” he told his parents. “I never saw a cell before. I never spoke to a prisoner. I never saw a brave tear-stained mother come to bail out her son, held on sure charge of forgery. These things reveal the Christ who said, ‘I came not to the righteous.’” He was awestruck by the reporters who befriended him, envious of their free-and-easy way with strangers (a talent he himself would never master),
and mesmerized by their self-serving descriptions of their profession. He was particularly impressed by one of the
Republican’s
“star reporters,” who had traveled with Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson and who, Harry recounted, “broke away from his taciturn self the other day, and said ‘Damn it all, anyway, even if I do say it, there’s not a game on the face of the earth that requires more manhood of every kind than the reporting game. There’s hardly a firm in this city, respectable or otherwise, that I don’t know a good deal about. And not one of them takes the physical, intellectual or nervous energy that a man simply must put into the reporting business, if he doesn’t want to quit at it.’” Once in a while Harry even managed to write small “notices” of his own and slip them by the city editor. He excitedly cut them out and sent them home to China.
⁷

By the end of the summer he was filled with admiration for the people he had met at the
Republican
, and filled also with pride at his own performance there. “Have had fine experience,” he reported as he prepared to leave Springfield. “Feel like I could run a paper!!!” And he was more than ever attracted now to the world of journalism. “I believe that I can be of greatest service in journalistic work,” he wrote his parents late in August, “and can by that way come nearest to the heart of the world…. Having made this absolute statement at last—have I met with your approval?” By the time he received their guardedly positive response, he was a student at Yale.
⁸

The Yale Harry encountered in the fall of 1916 was a very different place from the college his father had entered twenty-eight years earlier. For one thing it was more secular. The evangelical fervor that had inspired the Student Volunteer Movement and that had made conspicuous piety a common and respected characteristic of college life in the 1880s was now spent. Religion had become a routine but far from fervent part of student culture. Harry’s own faith was almost certainly stronger than that of most of his classmates, but he usually gave scant evidence of it. “All this publicity of Christianity, this carrying Christ around in public like a circus side-show, is highly repulsive to me,” he wrote after a first meeting at Dwight Hall, a campus religion center. “And young men that talk too much about the man Jesus—I wonder, do they know of what they talk, or are they only religiously drunk?” The “fervid Xianity [Christianity]” of the meeting, he added, “has completely alienated my friend Brit Hadden from its holy halls.”
⁹

Yale was also a very different place academically from what it had
been a generation before. Like colleges and universities across the nation, it had transformed itself in response to the burgeoning of new scholarly interests, which were, in turn, arising out of the rapid social and economic development of the United States. No longer were American colleges simply finishing schools for gentlemen, educating them in the classics, theology, and languages. They were becoming training grounds for the professions and the new economy. They were offering instruction in the social sciences and the natural sciences alongside the traditional disciplines. Faculties were organizing into “departments,” and many universities, Yale among them, were now offering graduate degrees. Although traditional requirements remained, there were now also many new choices open to undergraduates—including the choice of concentrating in an area of knowledge of particular interest or value to the individual student.