The Publisher (6 page)

There were spells of seasickness, homesickness, and sheer boredom: “It is too hot to play, let us read, & doze, read & doze, & doze & look or
rather gaze into nothing, into everything—infinity of space,” he once wrote. Later he confessed to his parents: “I am excelling in the art of loafing.” But even at the end of the long, uncomfortable voyage, he continued to absorb new sights and new experiences with enthusiasm, if not always admiration. Port Said, Egypt, “was the rottenest port yet, and the vilest hole on earth … full of sin.” Naples and Genoa, the first European cities he had ever seen, were, by contrast, almost indescribable. A church in Naples was, he said, “by far the most wonderfully beautiful building that I have ever seen…. Italy, even the little that I have seen of it, beats everything yet except the States & Wei Hsien.”
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He arrived in England in mid-December. To his dismay (because it meant seeing nothing of London), the missionary family that had been looking out for him dispatched him immediately to the St. Albans School north of the city, to the tutor he hoped would cure him of his stammering—an affliction of which he later said that “nothing in the world could possibly be more painful.” The lessons, which began with great optimism (“Mr. Cummings doesn’t think I’ll need more than a month”), turned out to be of little use. Cummings told him his problem was “absolutely imaginary” and an “evil habit” that he could easily break; their sessions turned into long, pleasant, but essentially purposeless discussions of politics and literature. Harry’s father tried to encourage his son. Mr. Cummings “only seeks your good,” he said, evidently in response to his son’s disillusionment. But the real solution lay, he argued, in Harry’s own efforts. “The whole question, of course, is of your getting
control
of your speech again,” he wrote. Daily “practice in reading aloud and lip-movement … might facilitate your recovery.” Luce ignored Cummings’s advice but slowly improved his ability to control his stammer nevertheless.
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Not surprisingly Harry soon turned his attention to other things. Cummings offered him a place in his school, but Harry was uninterested in enrolling. Four years of English boarding school in China had undoubtedly been enough. He spent the time between lessons working on various self-improvement schemes. He experimented with a new handwriting (a “business hand,” he called it); he sent for a mail-order course from the Pelham School of the Mind, which suggested how “one can train oneself to … a high pitch of brain perfection” simply through “concentration” and “observation.” He studied Buddhism, read Caesar and Dickens, wrote poems, and “took German lessons twice a week … polishing up for Hotchkiss.” He played tennis and chess with the boys from the school. But most of all he traveled. He bought a bicycle,
taught himself to ride it, and cycled through the countryside around St. Albans the way he had once ridden his donkey around Shantung, visiting villages and churches and farms. He took frequent trips into London by train, where he resumed his now-habitual sightseeing (Saint Paul’s, he said, was the “greatest Christian Temple I have ever seen”), observed a session of Parliament, and attended a Chefoo reunion.
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In January he learned that his mother, sisters, and brother would be relocating temporarily to Switzerland the following summer, where the girls would attend a French-speaking school. His father would be in England within a few weeks for a brief stopover en route from China to a fund-raising sojourn in America. “What news!” he wrote back excitedly, giving elaborate instructions on packing, tipping, and sightseeing, and outlining plans for showing his father the sights of England. When his father arrived in early February, Harry took him on tours of London, Oxford, and Stratford and on visits to several palaces and great country houses before seeing him off on a ship to New York. A few weeks later, after a last frantic round of sightseeing on his own in England, he left St. Albans and took the ferry to France alone.
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Harry’s letters from Europe, where he spent the next six weeks traveling, reveal a young man who was already accustomed to being on his own—and who compensated for his loneliness with relentless, methodical sightseeing and disciplined efforts at self-education. They also reveal an increasingly visible characteristic of his personality: a voracious appetite for knowledge and experience, a consuming curiosity, a determination, it sometimes seemed, to see and know everything. During his few days in Paris, he crisscrossed the city on foot visiting sight after sight—the Louvre, the relatively new Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Montmartre—before leaving for Lausanne, where his mother and siblings were to arrive a few weeks later. But the pleasant, quiet city quickly made him restless. “The days are at times long without a companion,” he wrote of his time in Switzerland. He adopted a regimen that he thought would help him deal with the tedium. “Now that my English lesson books have come the inter-eating hours will doubtless pass quickly enough,” he assured his father. But his time in Lausanne was brief, because he had already planned (with his father’s help) a monthlong trip through Italy, which he would take entirely on his own. “Guidebook in hand and camera on my little finger, I go out to make investigations,” he wrote from Rome, which he visited with the same frugal efficiency he had displayed in London and Paris. He stayed in a small, inexpensive hotel and spent
several days trying to move into a smaller, even less expensive room—partly to preserve his very limited budget but also because his lodgings were of so little interest to him. He was utterly preoccupied with sightseeing. He moved methodically through the city, as if checking off the obligatory attractions. “In the seven days I have been here,” he boasted, “I have seen all the principle [
sic
] sites. The only things that are ever visited & that I will not have seen, are a few miscellaneous & uninteresting churches (comparatively) & a few galleries that are absolutely eclipsed by Florence’s exhibition—& to Florence I am bound!”
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Harry traveled this way because he believed that systematic investigation was more likely to deepen his knowledge than casual or impulsive methods, and he apparently derived real satisfaction from his deliberate sightseeing style. “I believe that I have carried away with me some parts of Rome that can never be taken from me,” he wrote happily as he prepared to leave the city. “Whether I wish or no the remembrances and impressions of that great city will always hold their place in my memory & that tenaciously.” His father heartily approved. “Once one has arrived at a place,” he advised, “it is worth while seeing it well.” “Not many fathers,” he added, would have permitted a son to travel alone at this age, but Harry “had never failed me yet.”
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In Florence, Harry was befriended by a professor of German—“an exceedingly nice man”—from Wells College in Aurora, New York, whom he met while touring the Baptistery. “We have hit it off and have agreed to continue our wanderings as much in conjunction as possible. We leave for Venice Monday 6:20 a.m. & are deliciously indefinite how long we shall stay there,” he wrote, adding that “my newfound friend … insisted on presenting me with tickets [to a film].” For whatever reason, the relationship does not appear to have lasted very long. A few weeks later, after a whirlwind tour (again alone) of Bologna, Milan, Turin, and Genoa, he was back in Lausanne, reunited with his mother, Emmavail, Elisabeth, and Sheldon—and already thinking ahead to his journey to America.
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As if to confirm his passage to maturity, he bought his first adult clothes in Switzerland—long trousers, cuffs, and stiff shirts, the standard uniform for young middle-class men in America. He complained about the “daily torture,” but he wore the uncomfortable new outfit diligently until he got used to it. In the meantime he embarked on a new round of sightseeing in Switzerland and studied ferociously for the Hotchkiss admissions exams. In August, he joined Harold Burt, an English friend from Chefoo, for a two-week trip of “concentrated sightseeing” down
the Rhine to Strasbourg and then to Brussels—before finally going to Hamburg to meet his father, who had returned to Europe a few weeks earlier. Several days later father and son boarded a ship for America.
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It must have been clear to his parents, and perhaps also to Harry himself, how profoundly their relationship to their son had already changed in the months since he had left China. Harry still loved his family and enjoyed his time with them; his relationships with his parents and siblings remained the most important in his life. With his father in particular he still had an unusually close and warm relationship. But his home—wherever it was—was clearly no longer with them. He was now a visitor in their lives, dropping in for a few days or weeks as they themselves moved restlessly around the world. Their time together was affectionate and intense. “You are 14, & I am 44,” the older Harry wrote his son after they spent a few days together in Europe that summer. “I don’t feel that difference, & I hope you don’t. This is because motive and outlook are similar, & the fact is a great joy to me.” But such times were almost always brief, with Harry or his parents leaving after a short while for other obligations or other adventures. During their months together in Europe, there had been few moments when the entire family was in one place. And there would be very few such moments at any subsequent point in Harry’s life. “Of course, I long for a house, where I could gather you all, especially at the dear Christmas time,” his mother wrote him from Germany, “but that seems to be withheld, and it is a hard thing for us all to bear.” Emmavail once complained, “We seem not to belong
anywhere
,” and her mother agreed that “it seems to be our fate to be in a continual state of uncertainty.”
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But such laments were rare from any member of the family, and rarest of all from Harry. This was the common lot of missionary families, and their members learned to accept it as a necessary price of their unusual and, they believed, privileged lives. “I know that God will take care of it all, and will give us our hearts’ desires in just so far as they are in harmony with His will for us,” Elisabeth wrote her son. “It is a strange life we are leading,” his father echoed, “but I do feel that God is leading us and blessing us.” Harry simply forged ahead, spending time with his family when he could, but focusing intently on what he liked to call the “task at hand” when he could not. He adjusted to his new independent life with little apparent difficulty and with no evidence of the loneliness and homesickness about which he had so often complained at Chefoo, even though he was now far more alone than he had been then. Instead
he eagerly embraced the “great adventure” of pursuing experience and knowledge. It was a willed replacement—in many ways, it turned out, a permanent one—for the intimate personal attachments that had once anchored his life.
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Harry arrived in New York in mid-September 1913 and got his first glimpse of “the great city” that would be the center of so much of his life. He was soon alone again, for his father was called away on fundraising business shortly after their arrival. But Harry was undaunted. As he had done in Paris and Rome, he traveled from one end of Manhattan to another, trying to see as much as he could in the few days he had. On a bus trip up Fifth Avenue, he passed the city’s already famous skyscrapers as well as the “‘big bugs’ roosts”—the lavish hotels and mansions surrounding Central Park. A few days later he was in Lakeville, Connecticut, singing “My Country ’Tis of Thee” in front of a gymnasium filled with jeering boys who were initiating him into the life of the Hotchkiss School.
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Hotchkiss was founded in 1892 through the awkward intersection of two very different people. One was Timothy Dwight, the august president of Yale, who in the 1890s was busily trying to transform his institution—once a small, insular college—into an academically serious university. And like the presidents of other universities experiencing similar transformations, Dwight feared that the nation’s public schools were failing to produce students that met Yale’s newly heightened standards. As a result he had begun to consider founding a new private school that would prepare young men for Yale. As luck would have it, he discovered a wealthy and somewhat eccentric widow—Maria Hotchkiss—who was looking ineffectually for a way to memorialize her recently deceased husband (a successful industrialist and the inventor of the machine gun). Dwight persuaded her to finance the construction of a private high school for boys in her hometown, Lakeville, Connecticut. It became one of a wave of such institutions—known now as “preparatory” schools—that opened their doors around the same time and for the same purposes. Among them were Lawrenceville, Groton, Taft, Choate, Middlesex, Deerfield, and Kent, all created with the encouragement, and sometimes the active involvement, of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and other elite universities. Older private schools, such as Exeter, Andover, and St. Paul’s, greatly expanded in these same years.

The creation of these schools served not only the needs of the universities that promoted them but also the desires of the newly wealthy
families of the industrial age. Prep schools were among a broad range of developments—including the growth of affluent suburbs, country clubs, summer resorts, lavish Protestant churches, and elite men’s clubs—that marked the emergence of a distinct, national upper class. Not all the boys at Hotchkiss, not even all the nonscholarship boys, came from the new aristocracy. But most were at least from prosperous, solidly middle-class backgrounds. The school represented, therefore, both the ideals and the social customs of the upper class and the aspirations of many middle-class families to rise in the world.
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That was one reason why relations between Mrs. Hotchkiss and the school that bore her family’s name were tense from beginning to end. She wanted an institution that would serve the needs of poor children from the community; Yale wanted one that would train the sons of wealthy families for the university. They reached an uneasy compromise by setting tuition at six hundred dollars a year for the vast majority of boys—a sum far beyond the reach of all but the relatively affluent—while establishing a handful of scholarships for less wealthy students from the area. But Maria Hotchkiss remained unreconciled, and her support of the school ended at its founding. It flourished without her, since it soon was able to rely on the many enormously wealthy families whose sons it educated.
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