My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (22 page)

My discovery of this came about because I took up ceramics. The catalyst was an old artist friend who taught the use of the potter’s wheel at the Boston Center for Adult Education, which was lodged in an enormous old mansion on Commonwealth Avenue right around the corner from the center of this sex trade. So I more or less took up hustlers together with the ceramics, and along the way threw and fired an impressive array of pots, pitchers, and plates while having the experience of so many interesting, interesting young men burned into my memory. Since my office was a very short drive away I could indulge myself with something better than sex on the hoof, which, while it cost me more, also gave me a chance to lie back on my wonderful Victorian lounge chair to talk with these fellows as I had done with the boys of my youth. The delight of these encounters was that we had nothing to gain from each other that was not immediately obvious, and, more important, we had no roles to play. I remember so many great bodies, shining eyes, eager smiles, so many conversations. I think of a young African American from Atlanta who was taking a summer biology course before entering Harvard Medical School, who discussed with me the experience, so new to him, of the professed liberalism and veiled racism of the Bostonians who crossed his path. There was another fellow working on his doctorate in psychology with one of my Boston University colleagues, with whom I sat for more than an hour arguing the relative merits of teaching versus research. And then there was the very funny young working-class boy from Providence, Rhode Island, no student at all, only sixteen, who at first thought I was a detective and was going to arrest him. He talked fast and furiously about his life, how he and his buddies came to Boston once a month and made, as he said, “good money,” how his older brother used to come to Boston to hustle as well, but he had gotten married, and how he still urged his older brother to come along and earn a little extra money, but the brother would not. He came with me to my office, where we stripped and he proceeded to lower himself onto my erection, and it was all I could do to get him to stop talking, talking, talking. Then there was the young man I picked up on Commonwealth Avenue who was hitching, not hustling, who embarrassed me by his weary disgust with my proposition, so I quickly changed the subject, learned that it was his nineteenth birthday, that the next day he was sailing out on his first cruise as a Coast Guard recruit all the way to Puerto Rico. I enthusiastically supplied him with all the information I could muster from memories of my visit over twenty years earlier. We even pulled over so I could get paper and a pen from the glove compartment to write it all down. When we reached the neighborhood where I was to drop him off he surprisingly asked:

“You still want to suck me off?”

“What made you change your mind?”

“You ain’t like all those queers.”

Who knew what that meant? I brought the car over into the secluded shadows, where he pulled down his pants.

Boston University in 1966 was definitely a step down for someone who had taught at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. The institution nursed a profound sense of inferiority when it measured itself against the two giants across the Charles, not to mention Boston College, Brandeis, and Wellesley. It was founded by Methodist businessmen, a fact that itself was a blot in the eyes of snobs who evaluated things in Boston in terms of “old money,” membership in the Congregational or Episcopal Church, and a prep-school education where muscled boys went out for crew before becoming doctors or lawyers. Proud immigrant parents sent their first-generation American children off to Boston University with their lunch sandwiches in their satchels along with books and papers. As one administrator said to me, “We are educating people into the midlevel bureaucracies.” That was all changing when I arrived. Dormitories were being built, Jewish youngsters from the New York area who had trouble getting past the quotas at so many schools were applying for entrance because Boston University was not filling its freshman class each year. Jewish faculty who faced a similar discrimination as academics were eager to be hired, and there were places for them. Ironically, a decade or so earlier a petition to the trustees by the leaders of the Boston Jewish community to give support to a significant Jewish presence in the university in return for considerable endowment funds had been rejected. One began to hear the humorous appellation “Boston Jewniversity.” For someone who had once counted the possible Jewish names on a class list in the desperate hope that an interesting group of students would be in the class this was happy news, although the student I usually faced was more often a budding Brenda Patimkin than a Susan Sontag.

The great surprise was the contingent of offbeat youngsters who had somehow or another dropped out after their freshman year somewhere else, more often than not from one of the institutional elites. They had migrated to Boston because it was becoming the place to be if one was young. Surprisingly they more and more turned up in the Classics Department as majors. We were different, kooky maybe, certainly hip. Whatever it was, the best were as good as any I had taught at Stanford, and looser, more prone to thinking outside the box. They had something to say that provoked me in every seminar I taught. Anyone who reads the preface of my
Epic and Romance in the “Argonautica” of Apollonius
will note the names of the students from my Apollonius seminar at Boston University who were so damn bright, but what is more, who kept prodding me to put in print what my professional conditioning made me too timid to do on my own. This was the second, after Stanford, of the great teaching experiences in my forty-two-year career.

When I was being interviewed about coming to Boston University, the dean of the College of Liberal Arts talked about my becoming chairman “to make things new in classics.” “He means getting rid of deadwood like me,” said the retiring chair, who was sitting in on the meeting. This was the middle of the sixties, and I thought I was hot stuff, in my denims, my open shirt, the hair that came to my shoulders. I was as puerile as they come, reveling in a teenage sensibility that I never had when I was a teenager. I remember once out dancing with Penny at some rock-and-roll joint, shirt open to my waist, wriggling my ass in my tight, tight pants, and hearing someone in the crowd say, “My God, that’s a professor from BU.” Groovy!

Still, I had the goods, or so they thought; Doubleday had just published
The “Iliad,” the “Odyssey,” and the Epic Tradition
as an Anchor Books original, which was quite a prestigious label in those days; the reviews had been good both in the popular press and, surprise, surprise, in such academic journals as the English
Classical Review
, not to mention being put on the reading list at both Oxford and Cambridge. My Classical Civilization survey course was so oversubscribed beyond the two-hundred-seat limit that the dean in desperation asked me if, please, would I give it a second time on the same day. I calculated that an insignificant department like Classics should do what it could when it could so as to have the chits to call in later on. In a very short time the department faculty grew from three to nine and we were ensconced in our very own brownstone on Bay State Road with offices, seminar rooms, and a library. Budget problems were never ours. As the assistant dean who handled the money explained to me, “Oh, Lord, Charlie, compared to the other departments this little pissant operation hardly shows up on the books. Spend what you like.” The number of majors grew dramatically, and more important we were attracting seriously intelligent students who made class such a joy. As the hit song from 1968 began, “Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end…”

In 1971 the trustees of Boston University appointed John Silber president. He had been the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, where he had lost a power struggle with the powerful Frank Erwin of the Board of Regents, who found him autocratic, arbitrary, and insubordinate. Dr. Silber may have lost that round, but he was determined to win the next battle. The BU faculty and staff were no match for him and the crew he brought with him. It was like the Communist take-over of Eastern Europe, perhaps in more ways than one. I remember a meeting with all the departmental chairmen and the Presidential Search Committee when they were discussing the Silber candidacy. The alarm went off for me when one of them described in his sweet, feeble old gentleman’s way a telephone conversation he had had with his professional counterpart at Texas who prefaced the interview with, “Is this line tapped? Is this being recorded?” I registered the fear and paranoia in Austin, which all too soon became the tone at Boston University. Silber had a very specific idea of what he wanted to do, an identity for the university and a rationale for the college of liberal arts. His critics would say that he was brutal and ruthless in putting these in place. Anyone who has spent a life in academia knows that change comes at glacial speed; the structure of a university generally gives much more power to the faculty than, say, the employees in a corporation are given, so that administrations as a rule can only get what they want through enormous amounts of cooperation. Most would argue that this is a virtue, since the university is thought to be a
repository
of the collective wisdom. A leader who wants immediate change must have special talents. This one certainly blew me out of the water, and severely limited my role in the university. My reaction to him is there to read in Nora Ephron’s 1977
Esquire
article “Academic Gore,” for which I was interviewed extensively by her.

Among the figures in the entourage who accompanied him to the university was the very brilliant and electric William Arrowsmith, whose writings I much admired, and with whom I had always had what passed for friendly relations. His interests ranged over all ancient literature, his translation of the Latin
Satyricon
of Petronius being as accomplished as his several translations of Greek tragic drama. Another was the very prickly prima donna Donald Carne-Ross, who began his classical career back in the fifties as the producer of the
Third Programme
on the BBC, which broadcast a rich variety of classical literature, and who is best remembered now for encouraging Christopher Logue to make a translation of the
Iliad
, although he knew no Greek. Carne-Ross and Arrowsmith were passionate believers in the contemporary cultural relevance of antiquity, unmediated by criticism, academic or otherwise, or scholarship. That was an easier position for Carne-Ross to pull off, of course, who had no special degree in the field and thus was innocent of its scholarship. For instance, he read the poems of Pindar as a serious exposition of ideas of godhead relevant to us in the here and now. We could not have been more different. My take on Pindar is that he is the author of certain texts that date to the fifth century
B.C.E.
, written in a hard-to-understand dialect and style, needing a lot of parsing, that these texts reflect certain political and social realities of their time, and that they are most of all important as evidence for the attitudes that may have then been contemporary. As for Pindar’s so-called religious ideas, they seem to me so much decoration for complicated choral odes, danced and sung, that depend upon the obvious for an audience to comprehend. In any case, I subscribe utterly to Louis MacNeice’s dictum in the poem
Autumn Journal
: “It was all so unimaginably different, and all so long ago.” Pindar’s poems are of their time, and I can only hope to get a vague estimation of them through my imperfect learning and understanding of that period, as well as the inevitable subjectivity that informs anyone’s opinion on anything.

Arrowsmith and Carne-Ross—both notorious, not unlike their leader, for their quick tempers and exaggerated notions of their worth—swelled in anger whenever I suggested this point of view, as did Dr. Silber, who was intent on renewing American culture with a heavy dose of ancient learning. My caution that we knew antiquity so imperfectly that it was at best a very imperfect guide to life made him consider me a nihilist. Those gentlemen would have been only too happy if I had left the university. I had tenure, however, and while it was in their power to fire all the junior faculty I had assembled (which indeed they did), they were stuck with me. In the time-honored tradition of the academy, they proceeded to make my life as miserable as possible, so that I would be driven to seek employment elsewhere. This meant (1) ignoring me, for which I have always been grateful, since I thus had so much more time for my own work; (2) denying me pay rises, which I sued annually to be given and in each instance won; and (3) encouraging students not to take my courses, an iffy maneuver not usually successful, but to which I was impervious, having been an academic star too long to care.

I was lucky to get out of town for the first year of the Silber reign. It all started with a memo from the dean of the College of Liberal Arts in 1971 asking heads of departments to nominate an outstanding member of their faculty for an early sabbatical leave, that is, after six instead of seven years of service. Immediately I thought of myself and counted up on my fingers. I would be eligible for sabbatical no sooner than 1973–74. Was it not reasonable of me to consider my first years there as exemplary, my performance certainly outstanding? But would the dean think that I was too frightfully overbearing to nominate
myself
for this reward? No, not at all, was his genial response. (God love him!) I immediately applied for and received a sizable grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which supplemented the half-salary sabbatical I would be getting. I then shot off a letter of inquiry to our former landlady in Rome, the elegant marchesa, who replied that she was so taken with our previous tenancy that she would evict her current tenants, redecorate, and make the place even more splendid than before. The wonderful fact was that I had managed to save up some other money (what my older son always likes to call “serious coin”) from taking on part-time visiting professorships at Brandeis, Brown, and Wellesley; I had to figure tuitions for four children in private schools. So we were scheduled to spend the academic year 1972–73 again in Rome.