The Ghosts in the Ivory Tower: History Haunts Harvard Rooms

The fading summer in Harvard Yard is something else. It evokes another time and place.

Inside the aged brick walls and wrought iron gates enclosing the buildings and grounds, these days seem to settle back down into something reminiscent of small Southern towns at the turn of the century: a kazoo-and-jew's harp band winds its way through sultry afternoon gatherings, while dogs run squirrels up trees and stray couples sit or lay spaced out over the lawns beneath the branches.

Outside pressed uptight against the same walls, is Harvard Square in all its rampaging paranoia.

But within the calm of the Yard in early September, there exists a second, separate peace of mind. Harvard undergraduates have inhabited this inner sanctum, this zonky womb, since 1640; and at the end of spring term year after year, the sudden departure of each freshman class-themselves and their books causes, their broken freshman furniture and egos-gives rise to the spirits of past classes who gradually, carefully, reclaim their former abodes, not to be dislodged before the Fall.

Room 5 in Hollis Hall is under lock and key until later this month, when members of the Class of '74 will break it in all over again. Sunlight falls across the bare desk and plank floorboards like giant, felled sequoias. Ralph Waldo Emerson lived there in 1820, and he lives again these days, as does Henry David Thoreau in Hollis 23, where he roomed a decade later. Two doors down from him lived the early 20th century philosopher Santayana. John Hoyer Updike '54 spent freshman year in Hollis 11.

Thought-Bubbles

What accumulates in the halls over the years, then, is a pile-up of spirits and vibrations-thought-bubbles stacked to the ceilings. For Emerson and Thorean and the luminaries of four centuries not only slept here, but studied and wrote in these rooms. (Thomas Sterns Eliot wrote The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock the winter of 1909, his senior year.)

Despite the fact that nearly a thousand men and women from colleges across the country were living in many of the halls during July and August, the former rooms of famous wonks and writers will face no serious cerebral threat until, perhaps, this Fall. The Harvard Summer Session is not noted for its intellectualism. As rendered by a pleasantly unattractive co-ed from Ohio: "I didn't give a damn about the courses. I just came to have a good time."

Some new comers to the Yard this summer, however, were really sort of interested in its history.

Urinals

One New York City girl who defiled Henry Adams' quarters in Holworthy 5, confessed to a modicum of curiosity about the previous occupants. "I sort of started wondering," she observed, "when I went into the bathroom and saw the urinals."

Others, frankly, were impressed. Recently in Thayer 12, where Tom Rush (long-time Cambridge bluesman) crashed ten years ago, several women from various universities responded enthusiastically to that revelation.

"I'm impressed," stated one.

"I never really thought of anyone else being here before me," confided another.

"The room's dirty," said a third.

Yet the people truly impressed by the presence of blue blood in their room lineage seem to be undergraduates at Harvard themselves.

Brent Dechene '70 was informed a week after graduation that the room in Stoughton Hall be frequented freshman year had-40 years before-been that of a kid from Council Bluffs, Iowa, named Nathan Marsh Pusey.

"Oh Christ!," he roared, and nearly fell off his bicycle.

"No, Pusey," corrected his friend (awit) who had waited for the reaction. "Christ didn't go here."

There exists, moreover, at least one account of a Harvard student actually zonking out over the thought of a noted predecessor. Honoring his family's request that he remain anonymous, the freshman in mention discovered that several hundred years before a totally undistinguished poet had resided for a term in his study. He immediately charged out every volume of the man's work in Widener Library (two). purchased a third or fourth-hand frock coat from Joe Keezer's on Mass Ave., and for the duration of the winter did become that poet. Devotees of the Harvard Union dining hall three or four years ago will recall him striding through food lines, volumes under arm, or rising without warning from the table to rip off a couplet or two.

Back in Hollis Hall now, Ralph Waldo's room is packed John Dos Passos '16 and Edward Estlin Cummings (i.e. e. e.) '15 have come over from Thayer 29. stopping on the way in Thayer 15 for James Agee '32, co-author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Meanwhile up in Thoreau's, William James '02 (Matthews 41) and Arthur Schiesinger Jr, '38 (Thayer 7) are listening to Oliver Wendell Holmes 1829 (Stoughton 31) tell Horatio Alger 1860 (Holworthy 7) and William Randolph Hearst 1885 (Matthews 46) about the time he played a trick on Wendell Phillips 1831 (Holworthy 24). Not listening are Rush and Pete Seeger '36 (Harvard Union) who are trading songs, and Norman Kingsley Mailer '43 (Grays 11) who sits in a corner writing about it.

Once during the summer, and it must have been a staggering moment, conversation suddenly halted, and the rooms cleared. From the far side of the Yard came the distinct, persistent, shrill stab in the night of a young girl's loud voice.

"Do you really think it's Tom Rush's bed?" she was asking her roommates. "That'd be something to write home about."