The Crimson Letter
Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
In a book deeply impressive in its reach while also deeply embedded in its storied setting, bestselling historian Douglass Shand-Tucci explores the nature and expression of sexual identity at America's oldest university during the years of its greatest influence. The Crimson Letter follows the gay experience at Harvard in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing upon students, faculty, alumni, and hangers-on who struggled to find their place within the confines of Harvard Yard and in the society outside.
Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde were the two dominant archetypes for gay undergraduates of the later nineteenth century. One was the robust praise-singer of American democracy, embraced at the start of his career by Ralph Waldo Emerson; the other was the Oxbridge aesthete whose visit to Harvard in 1882 became part of the university's legend and lore, and whose eventual martyrdom was a cautionary tale. Shand-Tucci explores the dramatic and creative oppositions and tensions between the Whitmanic and the Wildean, the warrior poet and the salon dazzler, and demonstrates how they framed the gay experience at Harvard and in the country as a whole.
The core of this book, however, is a portrait of a great university and its community struggling with the full implications of free inquiry. Harvard took very seriously its mission to shape the minds and bodies of its charges, who came from and were expected to perpetuate the nation's elite, yet struggled with the open expression of their sexual identities, which it alternately accepted and anathematized. Harvard believed it could live up to the Oxbridge model, offering a sanctuary worthy of the classical Greek ideals of male association, yet somehow remain true to its legacy of respectable austerity and Puritan self-denial.
The Crimson Letter therefore tells stories of great unhappiness and manacled minds, as well as stories of triumphant activism and fulfilled promise. Shand-Tucci brilliantly exposes the secrecy and codes that attended the gay experience, showing how their effects could simultaneously thwart and spark creativity. He explores in particular the question of gay sensibility and its effect upon everything from symphonic music to football, set design to statecraft, poetic theory to skyscrapers.
The Crimson Letter combines the learned and the lurid, tragedy and farce, scandal and vindication, and figures of world renown as well as those whose influence extended little farther than Harvard Square. Here is an engrossing account of a university transforming and transformed by those passing through its gates, and of their enduring impact upon American culture.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What Shand-Tucci (The Art of Scandal) attempts here is nothing less than a re-evaluation of American culture by looking at how it was shaped by Harvard-connected gay men. From Ralph Waldo Emerson (in love with fellow student Martin Gay) and Henry James (who apparently first had sex with Oliver Wendell Holmes) to poet Frank O'Hara and artist Edward Gory, who were student roommates, Shand-Tucci weaves together history, criticism and gossip to show how many of the sons of Harvard were not only gay but major culture machers. The material is often fascinating the discussion of philosopher Lucian Price is a deft examination of American culture and politics, and it is clear that Shand-Tucci has read widely. Unfortunately most of the information here is from secondary sources, and as a result the book feels slightly shopworn, a problem compounded by the author's off-hand, often sloppy style. But a greater problem is that Shand-Tucci, try as he does in the final chapter, "Hunting the Sensibility," fails to make the case that there is something about Harvard that generates a specific sexuality and culture. In the end the book feels like a collection of minutiae and anecdotes, not a cultural history.