The Publisher (12 page)

As a result the next fourteen months produced relatively modest changes in Harry’s life and in the lives of most of his classmates. The routines of the college, the academic and social rituals, continued. The only major exception was a few hours a week when there was military training by officers of the special Yale unit—ranks of college boys doing calisthenics and marching up and down the New Haven Green dressed in pressed khakis and carrying rifles they almost never fired. About two-thirds of Yale’s students enrolled in the program, which took the place of one academic course. (The other third had already gone to war.) Harry still talked occasionally of leaving college to join the army, to work in military intelligence in Washington, or to do something else—anything else—that might put him in closer touch with the war, including a fanciful proposal that he go to China to help the United States recruit coolies to help in the war effort (a proposal the American consular service in
Shanghai brusquely rejected). In the end, he convinced himself that his best option was to stay at Yale “unless something turns up in which I can serve with my brains as well as my heels and hence educate myself in the act of service.”
²⁰

Once he made his decision, duty and ambition seamlessly merged. With the
News
competition over, he wrote, “another form of strenuous life is forced upon me.” Harry would contribute to the war effort by writing exhortatory editorials for the
News
“pushing Yale to a more and more intensive war-training life.” While doing so he could advance his fortunes on the paper by filling in for the older editors who were being “called away” to the war. In early June he was elected to the “emergency council” the
News
had established to run the paper in the absence of some of the more senior board members, and he predicted that his election as chairman for 1920 would soon be “railroaded through.” The council would work to sell Liberty Bonds and “keep Yale together.” Harry explained, perhaps slightly defensively, that “I may be of some service to my country here.”
²¹

So little did the war impinge on life at Yale that after a few weeks of ROTC camp in early June, the students scattered and began their normal summer vacations. Harry spent July and August working on the farm of family friends in western Pennsylvania, reading Homer, and making plans for “my conduct next year.” His priorities, he said in a letter to his parents a few weeks before returning to Yale, were to “give more attention to personal affairs, economy, clothes, correspondence, reading, etc., … to discharge thoroughly my college obligations,” and to tend to “the cultivation of ‘myself’ by all the cultural means that come in the course of the day’s work, from religion to friendly chatter.” He did not mention the war.
²²

By the time Harry returned to New Haven in September 1917, the war had become a somewhat more prominent part of life. “Here at college we are practically in government service. All members of the R.O.T.C…. are obliged to stay in uniform the entire time, except when they go out of town,” he wrote in October. Seeing an opportunity in the new military frenzy, Harry spent his first few days on campus serving as an agent for a local tailor who was providing uniforms for students. For days he could be seen running up and down the stairs of the freshman dormitories taking orders. His profits financed most of his sophomore year.

On the whole, however, Yale’s leisurely, gentlemanly approach to the
conflict continued for a while longer. Students spent a few more hours in military training than they had the previous spring, but their principal concerns remained largely unchanged. For Harry that meant excelling in his language, literature, and history courses; continuing to advance at the
News
and in the many other activities to which he found himself drawn; and consolidating his social life. He ran for a position on the student council, survived the primaries to become a finalist, but came in fourth in a race in which only three men were chosen (Hadden finished first). “I am just as glad that I didn’t get the election,” he wrote in a characteristic effort to rationalize his disappointments, “because it would have meant that in spite of my determination to have a ‘literatus’ year, I would once more be deeply plunged by another route into the trifling turmoil of collegiateness.” He won election to the Elizabethan Club, a literary organization for faculty and students that he called “a joy and delight.” He had another poem accepted by the
Lit
, which almost assured him election to the board. He and Brit Hadden recruited a table for one of the Yale dining societies, attracting “a nucleus of the best men in the class, … the most desireable [
sic
] ‘crowd’ socially.” In return, they received their own meals free “without scarcely turning my hand.”
²³

Most of all, however, he was preoccupied with the impending selection of new members to the Yale fraternities. And as always he wrestled with himself over what to do. Psi U “is the socially best, so, of course, I should prefer to get in that,” he said at the beginning of the process. But he was soon “soundly disappointed” to discover that there was no likelihood of his receiving an invitation there. The “social types,” with whom he still had awkward relations, had “blackballed me,” he explained, not just at Psi U, but at his second choice, DKE. That suddenly threw Luce’s view of the whole process into a different light: “The Junior fraternities at Yale do not seem to mean much,” he now wrote, and he had little “respect and regard” for them. Psi U, he decided, was no longer “the big fraternity,” for “this year there was a general stampede from it, because it catered strongly to purely social elements.” He finally joined Alpha Delta, which he now insisted had many of the “best men” in the class—among them, a year later, a recruit of whom Harry was particularly proud, “Frank Gould, who will be the richest of the third generation of Goulds.” Adding to his poorly disguised disappointment was his usual guilt about devoting so much time to what he feared his father would consider trivial things. “The social side of life—which I suppose is a necessary evil—throws one so completely off one’s trolley,” he wrote shamefacedly to his parents. “My room is in a terrible state, as are also
my finances and studies. In fact the first half of the first term ends to-day, and I shall have a ridiculously low average, and the only comfort I’ll get will be that it is probably higher than any other fraternity man’s.” Even so his grades remained within Phi Beta Kappa range, and he consoled himself for his social disappointments by insisting that he was certain to achieve “the three things I wanted most to: News, Lit, & P.B.K.”
²⁴

By the beginning of the spring term, military training had expanded to fill almost half the college curriculum, and there was talk of turning the campus over altogether to the military, of establishing a “West Point at Yale.” More and more students were leaving the university to join the military, and Harry continued to consider doing the same. Although he was only in the middle of his second year, he took to referring wistfully to “my last year under the academic aegis,” and to imagining himself a commissioned officer leading troops in France. “Well, so this college world gets along,” he mused in March 1918. “And a very happy and pleasant place it is. How soon shall it be but a memory.”
²⁵

One of the reasons Harry may have been looking beyond Yale so soon was a crushing disappointment he had suffered in January 1918. Because so many upperclassmen were away in the military, the
News
felt obliged to elect its 1920 board a year earlier than usual. Harry and Brit were clearly the two leading contenders for chairman. But by a single vote Hadden won. Publicly Harry dealt with the defeat calmly and graciously. He deflected a suggestion that the
News
create a special, unprecedented position for him—vice chairman—and agreed instead to serve as managing editor. He told everyone that Brit was an excellent and talented choice, which at one level he truly believed. But beneath his stoic surface was a profound sense of failure. “My fondest college ambition is unachieved,” he wrote his parents in a letter suffused with disappointment. “It’s been a hard pill to swallow. You can say such things are petty etc. etc., but just the same a man’s heart’s desire is his heart’s desire whether it be President of the U.S. or Chairman of the News. Not a soul, I think, has seen what this all means to me.”
²⁶

A few days later he began trying to convince himself that the decision might still be reversible. Hadden’s election, so far ahead of schedule, had been a result of wartime disruptions. Luce briefly clung to the possibility that there might be a second vote at the normal time, which he might win. Harry wrote his parents that the “final vote” had not yet been taken, and one of Hadden’s supporters told Harry that he was willing to switch and vote for him. But when the time came there
was no reconsideration of the earlier vote, and Hadden’s election was confirmed. Once again Harry was plunged into despair. “I could have been chairman of the News,” he insisted, had he pressed his supporters to reconsider the vote. But “in the greatest sacrifice of my life I signed away the possibility.” The whole story was too painful to recount, even to his parents, with whom he usually shared almost everything. “When a man fails, the less he had better talk of it,” he wrote dejectedly (and again with more than a trace of self-pity). “However, I hope you won’t think too harshly of me, nor believe that I have been irretrievably unworthy of you…. When I lie down tonight I shall be supremely glad that there are some that love me forever.” His parents did not underestimate the severity of the blow to Harry’s passionate ambition. From his mother he received an anguished letter of sympathy, praising him for his “great renunciation.” From his father came a letter comparing his son’s disappointment over the
News
election to his own disappointment in failing to gain the presidency of his college. “Usually the door opens to wider and richer experiences than if we had attained the idol of our hearts’ desires; and wonderful is the way the heart forgets the past and presses on.”
²⁷

More disappointment eventually followed. Harry was elected to the board of the
Lit
, on the basis of his fifth publication in the magazine, early in 1918. Several weeks later the
Lit
board met to choose its new leaders. At one point, according to Harry’s own accounts, the other members of the board voted to choose him as chairman, despite what he claimed was his own stated reluctance to serve. But “then the row started.” Several members of the board were enraged that someone who had never heeled the
Lit
and had played no previous role in its editorial processes should be chosen. In fact, during the entire previous year, Harry had done little more than submit an occasional piece to the magazine. “I decided that the Lit didn’t mean enough to me to go through with a public scandal,—which was impending. I therefore resigned from the Board. Finally I was persuaded to return to the Board, and the Board against its will, but because I said so, elected Andrews,” a more conventional choice—“typically ‘literary’ &—well, just a bit effeminate,” as Harry described him.
²⁸

The story as Harry told it is revealing whether or not it is wholly accurate. It seems clear, first, that having lost the
News
competition, he had at least flirted with the compensatory idea of taking over another, if slightly less prestigious, campus publication—just as he had edited the
Lit
at Hotchkiss while Hadden edited the newspaper. It is also clear that, as with the
News
, it was important to him to be able to claim that he had
in fact prevailed but had declined the position out of some combination of principle and self-interest. Most of all, however, the story demonstrates Harry’s desire to portray himself as a person of stature and authority, admired by his peers if at times resented by them for his talents, able quietly to curb their own excesses and steer them in the right direction. He had quelled a rebellion against Hadden at the
News
, he claimed, to ensure a smooth transition. He had turned down the chairmanship at the
Lit
to avoid a damaging controversy, and had dictated the choice of a responsible alternative. In this way he turned his liabilities into strengths, his failures into triumphs.

In spite of the elements of self-deception that lurk in these descriptions, Harry was in many ways unsparing in his assessment of himself. He knew that despite his prodigious intellectual talents, despite his formidable abilities as a writer and editor, he was somehow lacking in social skills—able to attract the respect but not usually the genuine affection of those around him. It was a failing that was particularly visible to him because it stood in such contrast to the great strength of his friend and rival. Hadden was a much less gifted scholar than Harry and perhaps no more talented as a journalist, but he used his charismatic affability to win genuinely loyal friends and admirers. Harry was often intimidating in his unrelenting gravity. Brit, by contrast, was relaxed, even somewhat flippant, gently derisive of those who seemed to him too serious. “Watch out, Harry, or you’ll drop the college,” Hadden once shouted mockingly at Luce, who was walking with grim purpose across a Yale quad. Harry was aware of this difference and at times was almost morbid in his descriptions of his tangled relations with his peers. In the anguished aftermath of the
News
election, for example, he described his relationships with Hadden in painfully cautious language: “I have the greatest admiration and affection for Brit, which in some measure at least, is reciprocated.”
²⁹

That these two close friends and colleagues were also very different from one another was not lost on their friends and classmates. They were almost constantly together, and they were also often at odds. “You never knew whether they were ready to fight or agree,” one of their classmates later recalled. Dwight Macdonald, who observed Hadden and Luce as a young Time Inc. writer in the late 1920s, described in retrospect the contrasts in their great friendship and rivalry: