Preface: William Alfred's Duty of "Delight"

The Duty of Delight

The Memoirs of William Alfred

The 1930s, The 1940s, The 1950s

It is not possible for a Christian man to walk across so much as a rood of the natural earth, with mind unagitated and rightly poised, without receiving strength and hope from some stone, flower, leaf, or sound, nor without a sense of a dew falling upon him out of the sky; . . . in much of the doing and teaching even of holy men, who in the recommending of the love of God to us, refer but seldom to those things in which it is most abundantly and immediately shown; though they insist much on his giving of bread, and raiment, and health, (which he gives to all inferior creatures) they require us not to thank him for that glory of his works which he has permitted us alone to perceive: they tell us often to meditate in the closet, but they send us not, like Isaac, into the fields at even; they dwell on the duty of self-denial, but they exhibit not the duty of delight.

John Ruskin, The True and the Beautiful.[1]

The following pages complete what we have of William Alfred’s autobiography. They comprise a sequel to those memoirs published in Fiction,[2] accounts which take us up to the mid-1930s. The accounts added here proceed with Alfred’s continued family strife and his studies at St. Francis Prep and Brooklyn College through the war years and into his first years at Harvard and the premiere of his first play, Agamemnon.

After entering Brooklyn College, William Alfred comes under the influence of a genial professor and works on the staff of a new periodical The American Poet. This begins his literary career. Meanwhile his parents continue to engage in the deep quarrels that are to wound and scar his growing up. Then in 1943 he is dragged out of Brooklyn to become part of the World War II. Deeply pacific, he is fortunate enough never to fire a shot. After playing a part in the tank corps that often crosses over into low comedy, he goes to language school and learns Bulgarian. Consequently the army, with the army’s peculiar logic, sends him to the south Pacific, where he is on duty in the Quartermaster’s Corps for the remainder of the war.

This is his grand tour, his introduction to the wide world. Raw recruit that he is, he is already armed with the strong moral courage he attributes to his mother’s influence. His depiction of wartime, moreover, carries with it a commentary. Implicit in the narrative is the idea that although leaders were often villains, solders were for the most part innocents. The nightmare vision he has towards the end of the war[3] suggests a moral seriousness elevated out of sight of patriotism or politics. If this war was “the good war,” it wasn’t good enough for him.[4]

He comes home to peace-keeping duty in the demilitarized zone between his parents’ lives and to his pursuit of a vocation. His mother, protagonist of his early memoirs, returns as the central beloved figure in his life. She and he go off on their own for a while and settle in Manhattan. There he finishes his degree at Brooklyn College. He describes himself as a desultory undergraduate (although the enthusiastic support of his teachers at Brooklyn College seems to belie that). He is accepted for graduate study at Harvard, and he is undisciplined enough during his first semester to risk flunking out. His turnaround is sudden, activated by a strong will. Although he understates the outcome, his oral exams are evidently a triumph. And, after one false start, he finds a thesis topic and settles on his field of medieval studies. His account of those early years at Harvard also includes the production of his Agamemnon at Sanders Theatre. Thus, his academic career and his career as a playwright are launched simultaneously. His story leaves off with Alfred as a section man in the English department and a tutor Kirkland House.

Alfred had a wonderfully robust and warm sense of humor and in these memoirs, he coins a kind of metaphor that I call “Alfredisms.” They are characteristically extravagant, employing so steep a hyperbole that they end up making fun of themselves. Some are relatively simple like this one: “I was always late. That cost a nickel fine for a “tardy slip” and a glare from the first period brother that could have dropped a charging wolf to its belly.” My favorite of all of them is more complex; it presents his attempt to explain to a class of undergraduates a new verse form, “. . . my innovation, the involute rhyme, which after an eye-crossing morris dance through the rhyme schemes left [the] class splay-legged in their seats like a Brady photograph of the field after the Battle of Bull Run.”

That sense of humor, which was often irreverent, easily coexisted with a deep religious faith. The happiness of this contrast was part of what he meant by “the duty of delight.” He went to Mass every morning. Readers of the 1950s chapter will get a sense of how strong his Catholicism was and, to an extent, why it was that strong. The ecstatic moment he experiences for a few moments in his 20s gives a final and indefatigable form to his devotion.

His faith did clash, however with the general spirit of the Harvard community, where a mild ambience of agnosticism ruled. He sees the dominant spirit of the place as contemptuous of his Catholicism, treating it as aberrant and provincial. This contempt for his beliefs causes him pain. It sometimes makes him very angry. This is something he expresses to some of his friends, but with his students he shows no sign of the conflict. His devotion is as unobtrusive as it is intense. Perhaps this is because he sees nothing exclusive about his faith. If he is heartened by his religious observances, he sees nothing wrong in those who do not believe as he does or even those who do not believe at all. Of all the rules of his religion, he seems to find the injunction against judging paramount.

And so it has to be, because it is his nature to delight in people, and that is apparent throughout his memoirs from his accounts of his early childhood friends through the strong bonds he shares with fellow soldiers and fellow students and through his establishment of a coterie of highly distinguished friends at Harvard and on Broadway. “Lillian Hellman used to say that I loved people as compulsively as dog-lovers did dogs. She was right.”[5] He celebrates his friends to create a special celebrity for both the famous and the obscure. Some of them are so well known that they require no identification on my part; others, sadly, seem to have their names “writ in water.”

Since his friends constituted a great joy of his life, and since it is clearly his intention to give some of them the fame and visibility that life denied them, I have made it my duty to identify them and their accomplishments. When he talks about the people he loved most, the rich lyricism of his prose gives him away. Clearly his early friendship with the poet Shirley Freisinger is of an extraordinary intensity, and I have found where some of her poems were published. I wanted to find out more about her but could not. His description of her, however, grants her a memorability to make up for her biographical obscurity.

. . .and I still can see her dashing in, laughing, petit and “saftig,” the bleached tin-tin cowlick of hair above her brow ablaze with the springdusk that caught the plastic bubbles she was the first at Brooklyn to sport rainbowing her fine heart of a face.

Other early friends die young, like the brilliant young Talbot, a classmate at Saint Francis Prep, who is killed in the war, and Martin Berman, a talented translator, who dies of disease, before making much of a mark. Then there is the child Helen, dead of peritonitis, whom he has fixed in my memory when he says he can still see her

sometimes, even now, when I'm doing something automatic, . . . racing Topsy past the Parade Grounds tree-roots, a winged maple seed on the bridge of her nose, her crisp hair bouncing as her heels hit earth.

His account seems to trail off rather than to end. He meant to go on, as his hand-written outline suggests.[i] That outline goes through his assuming the Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of the Humanities in 1980. The final chapter noted on the outline breaks the chronological order, shifting from chronology to topic: “Theater and Famous Acquaintances.” The emphasis thus created is not surprising. He has been fascinated by celebrity all his life. As a teenager, he opens a correspondence with Gertrude Stein. As a young soldier on leave he manages to interview Thomas Mann and has the thrill of a chance meeting with Marlene Dietrich and Jean Gabin. He closes the 1940s chapter with glimpses of Nelson Eddy and Greta Garbo[6]. Later at Harvard and with this success as a playwright he meets many more celebrities, and some, Robert Lowell and Faye Dunaway, for instance, and Lillian Hellman, become his close friends.

Had he gone on to write this chapter on celebrity, perhaps he would have left us some thoughts about his own. Given the ordeals of his childhood and the war and his lifelong fascination with fame, I imagine that the success of Hogan’s Goat must have delighted this man deeply. It is heartening to know that so beautifully kind and humble a man was eventually, finally, so rarely satisfied with his life. Could he ever, who in his youth “knew [he] had the chances of a cockroach in the Plaza ballroom of ever being respectable. . . ” have imagined so fine a success?

But the chapter lies unwritten. The text strands us somewhere in the 1950s with Alfred climbing through the lower academic ranks. He is a resident tutor at Kirkland House and a section-man in the English Department. He has had his quarrels with Harvard, but at the end of his account he seems to be at peace with the place and happy. I think that if this was not the end of what William Alfred wanted to say, it still has a ring of consonance, a sense of resolution, all dissonance resolved, to the tonic chord. Perhaps he stopped when his health sapped his energy, but maybe he took time to revisit that abruptness and, following his duty as a writer, made it into an ending at last.

A note on this text. What I submit here was first the mooncalf issue of a union I presided over between an Epson scanner and Microsoft Word. It arrived as a mishmash of crazy margins, great formless blotches, and fonts so outlandish that even Microsoft could not identify them, and generally in such a condition as might have made even Miss Havisham reach for a broom. Much of the editorial time I have spent on this manuscript, therefore, was in fact janitorial, if all the more necessary.

As to why I have taken it upon myself to edit these memoirs, I can offer only one excuse. I did not know William Alfred nearly as well as many others did. I was first his student, and then I worked for him as a teaching fellow and enjoyed his extraordinary generosity and company over a period of four years. Others might possess much more knowledge about him and thus might have undertaken to do a better job than I have. But no one has, and it seemed to me unlikely that anyone would. So I decided to take on the task. The ways in which it has enriched my knowledge of a man I greatly revered is more than payment enough for the time I have spent. I hope I have been instrumental in enabling William Alfred’s memory to persist if only to make it clear to any reader that a man of such generosity and kindness really lived.

Peter Grudin

December 2016

[1] Whether Alfred took his title directly from Ruskin is uncertain. In the archives is a copy of an essay by Rev. John Catoir, who mentions Dorothy Day’s frequent use of the phrase. She attributes it to Ruskin.

[2] Volume 18, Number 2, with memorable introductory essays by Mark Mirsky and Mark O’Donnell. Additional autobiographical writing by Alfred is included in The Immigrant Experience, Thomas C. Wheeler, ed. (Penguin, 1992).

[3] Encapsulated later in his Clytemnestra’s “. . . some default of faith too base for words,”

[4] His Agamemnon shifts Aeschylus’s emphases to one in which the sacrifice of a child for political ends is the crux.

[5] Perhaps more right than she knew because his descriptions of dogs and cats are some of the I have seen, He has a loving touch in these descriptions, but they are also comic, some of them reminding me of the best Booth cartoons.

[6] This fascination with fame bled into his early scholarship. His initial (and abandoned) choice of a thesis topic was a study of the diaries of Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery, who was not a writer but a friend to famous writers and whose diaries recorded conversations with them.

ⁱI My Mother’s Family

II Anna Maria

III St. Ann’s Academy

IV Holy Innocents School

V St Francis Preparatory

VI Brooklyn College

VII Harvard University

VIII Grading and Leading Sections

VIII Tutorial and English 10 91)

IX Instructorship

X General Education

Old English and Chaucer

XI Assistant Professorship through A. Lowell Chair

XII Theater and Famous Acquaintances

For some reason this outline makes no mention of his war years. Perhaps he had already written that section.