The Publisher (7 page)

Hotchkiss was twenty years old when Harry (now 15) arrived, and the school had by then significantly reduced its always scant interest in recruiting poor boys from Lakeville. But it retained its scholarships and parceled at least some of them out to students whose backgrounds, if not their finances, seemed compatible with the character of its socially eminent student body. Harry—the son of a Yale-educated missionary and a graduate of a British boarding school—fit the profile well. Even so, the distinction between scholarship boys and everyone else was carefully and very publicly maintained. Harry’s early weeks at Hotchkiss became his first lessons in the American class system. He lived apart from the rest of the students, in a boardinghouse in the village, about a mile away from campus, where he shared a room with a nineteen-and-a-half-year-old farm boy from Kansas, who was also a scholarship student. The dormitories—complete with maid and laundry service—were reserved for the tuition-paying boys. He rose every morning at six and caught a ride on a delivery cart into campus, where he first cleaned and dusted the chapel before having to “scoot” into the dining hall for a rushed breakfast followed by waiting on the tables of the paying students.
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Even so, Harry had no doubt which side of the class divide he
wished, and expected, to inhabit. He got along with the other scholarship boys, but he did not really identify with them. He was a far better student than most of them (and in fact spent considerable time tutoring his roommate and others). But he did not accept their sense of being outsiders. “I will like to get away from the round of serving on table and to eat once again, not as hog, but as human!” he wrote as his first Thanksgiving vacation approached. “These scholarship fellows here are all fundamentally fine, but they lack certain qualities—especially noticeable at table—that one misses!” The “greatest burden of the scholarship,” he noted on another occasion, “is the school fellows I have to associate with. Many of them are still boorish, showing the trade of the farm or perhaps Brooklyn!” (The school apparently agreed. One teacher told him that “the Faculty was very dissatisfied with the calibre of the new scholarship boys—‘Present company excepted,’ he remarked!—and that therefore they were going to make an endeavour to advertise [Hotchkiss scholarships] … among a better grade of boys.”) The other students, in contrast, were “are all fine, nice fellows,” and he yearned to be one of them. In one letter to his family, he pondered his chances of being chosen to serve refreshments at an upper-class dance—an honor reserved for the popular and socially eminent people Harry called “pets.” “I can only hope that they allow me in on that feed,” he wrote, with a tinge of self-pity, “tho I might not add any lustre to the social glimmer of the evening & early morning!”
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But it was not only his ambiguous position in the school’s rigid class structure that set him apart. It was also a certain social awkwardness, a product in part of his conspicuous foreignness. He dressed differently, wearing jackets and trousers made for him inexpensively in China and Europe that looked dated and slightly shabby compared with the elegant American wardrobes of some of his wealthy classmates. He spoke differently, not only because of his continuing (if somewhat improved) stammer, but also because of his unfamiliarity with American idiom. His speech sometimes seemed formal, even slightly stilted, not because he intended it to but because he had never learned the relaxed, slang-heavy diction of American adolescents. He had little knowledge of American popular culture; he did not understand his schoolmates’ jokes; and perhaps most damaging of all in a boys’ school, he knew little about American sports at an institution where (according to a Hotchkiss graduate writing to Harry) the “big men” were athletes, their “friendship coveted by anyone [they] care to associate with.” (“I did not know a single rule of football when I came here,” Harry wrote ruefully to his parents in October.)
He went out briefly for the football team and later considered trying out for baseball, but he gave them both up quickly and chose instead to play tennis and to inform himself about the sports he did not know by covering games for the school newspaper. In addition to everything else he and his fellow students were obliged to learn, Harry had the task of learning how to be American.
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Despite all the ways in which Harry felt like an outsider at Hotchkiss, he loved the school from the beginning—loved it with an almost uncritical enthusiasm that was nearly as intense as his implacable bitterness toward Chefoo had been. “Hotchkiss is fine!” he wrote his sisters after his first days in Lakeville. “I have been forced to pinch myself several times to assure myself of normal senses.” For a time at least he forgave the school almost everything: the humiliating hazing of new boys by the seniors (“they gave us real solid advice & warm welcome,” he wrote, once the ritual was over); the harsh regimen of the scholarship students (they held a “high position” in the school, he insisted, because they had such important responsibilities); the demeaning rules for new students (although they could not speak to seniors, or even look at them, unless spoken to first, Harry simply anticipated the day when he would be the beneficiary rather than the victim of the customs). He even tolerated his hated nickname, “Chink,” attached to him in his first weeks at Hotchkiss when the older boys learned he had listed his hometown as Wei Hsien, China. (He “must have sneaked in thru Mexico or Canada,” the Hotchkiss
Lit
wrote in a humorous retrospective on the class of 1916.) He expressed admiration for the school’s stern and pompous headmaster, Huber Gray Buehler, whom he would later come to loathe. “Mr. Buehler is commonly called ‘the King’ & is a very fine man,” he wrote after their first meeting. “I met him first in the corridor, received according to his manner a very formal & dignified welcome.”
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What Harry lacked in social or athletic distinction, however, he made up for in academic and literary achievement. He emerged almost immediately as one of the most gifted students in the school—an especially impressive triumph since he had missed an entire year of formal education during his prolonged journey from China to America, while most of his classmates had spent a first year at Hotchkiss. But Chefoo had prepared him well, he grudgingly admitted. “I find that the easiest part of my life here will be my studies,” he wrote a few weeks into his first term, a view he never had occasion to change. He had no great difficulty excelling, and he ranked first in his class (“First Scholar”) in all but a few terms during his three years at the school. “I am awfully proud
of the way you have faced your first term’s work in this land,” his father wrote on hearing news of his marks. “It is a great joy and comfort to me to know that I have a son who can be trusted absolutely to do the right thing just so far as he has light.” Such praise only increased Harry’s determination to achieve and succeed.
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The curriculum at Hotchkiss was unusually narrow, even by the standards of its time. Harry took a scattering of courses in English, algebra, and Bible studies, but the vast majority of his academic work was in languages. Walter Buell, his father’s old teacher from Scranton—a formal, aloof man with whom Harry never became close—kept a close eye on the new boy and decided early that he had great potential. He persuaded Harry to begin studying ancient Greek—one of the more demanding language courses in the school. Harry was soon immersed in the strange, beautiful language, taking two Greek courses a term (along with Latin, French, and German), and, characteristically, already looking ahead to the public distinctions his newfound talents could bring him. Yale offered a prize to the entering student who could demonstrate the greatest proficiency in Greek, and Harry determined early that he would try to win it.
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In the meantime he had his eye on prizes more immediately at hand. In addition to striving perpetually, and usually successfully, to be “First Scholar,” he tried to excel in public speaking and debating—an unlikely ambition for a boy with a painful stammer, but one he embraced all the more intensely because of the obstacles he had to overcome. A few weeks after arriving at the school, he read a paper he had written—“Hannibal, a Leader of men”—before one of the Hotchkiss debating societies, as a kind of audition for membership. The next morning he wrote home excitedly: “I write principally this morning to tell you of the success of my essay. It was considered the best of the bunch—the first essay ever committed to memory in the Forum—And I am a member of that august society!”
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Since he could not become a “big man” at Hotchkiss as an athlete, Harry was determined to become an important literary figure on campus. In addition to debating, he began working for both the school newspaper (the
Record
) and the literary magazine (the
Hotchkiss Literary Monthly
, known to students as the Lit) in his first term. Both awarded places on the basis of strenuous and highly quantitative competition. Boys received points not just for the quality and quantity of their submissions but for selling ads and subscriptions, doing clerical chores, even cleaning up. Harry had great success in getting his stories and poems
published, but he did not stop there. He took every opportunity he had to pile up points, so that by the end of the term he could boast that his contributions to the
Lit
“have evidently been well thought of as I lead the competition of the whole school.” He was elected to the
Lit
in his first year. The path to distinction at the
Record
was longer and more difficult and therefore, to Harry, more desirable. “You ask why I want to make both papers,” he wrote his father in April, after “heeling” (competing like a dog following its master) for the
Record
for months without securing a place. “Well, first & foremost, because it’s quite some honor and quite something which very few if any others in my class will do. Secondly because it’s up to me to make good in everything I can.” Not until the middle of his second year—during which he worked almost maniacally for the newspaper to the slight (and temporary) detriment of his grades—did he finally win election. “My work on the Record has had quite a wonderful—not to say phenomenal—success,” he reported. “2500 odd points in 2 weeks has not been won since I have been at Hotchkiss.”
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Even though he was one of the poorest boys in the school, Harry managed to stay on a fairly equal footing with his fellow students while he was at Hotchkiss. During most vacations, however, he was conspicuously different from all but a few of them. His parents were usually far away—in China, in Europe, or traveling, with no fixed address except when they were in Shantung. (“I do not know where I shall be” at Christmas, his father wrote from Pittsburgh in mid-December, outlining an exceptionally complicated travel schedule, “but since I ‘commit my way to the Lord’ constantly, He surely ‘directs my path.’ So all is well.”) There were no close relatives left in America from either side of the family, and no relatives at all with whom Harry had any more than a glancing acquaintance. So each holiday presented him with the challenge of finding, largely on his own, a place to go and something to do. It was, on the whole, a challenge he confronted eagerly, even joyously. He undoubtedly missed his family, but he faced a world of opportunities for experience and advancement.
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His first such opportunity came from the old friend and devoted patron of the Luce family, Nettie McCormick. Harry had not seen Mrs. McCormick since his childhood visit to Chicago in 1906. But the family had remained in close touch with her, and Harry’s father had been a frequent visitor to her home on fund-raising trips to Chicago. Young Harry, whom she had once offered to adopt, was the member of the family
she remembered most warmly. She began writing to him even before he returned to the United States: “I am addressing the little boy I loved so well long ago!” she wrote in the spring of 1913, when Harry was in Europe. “It is only yesterday—as ages count—and as my memory counts it I would say it was last night sunsetting when I took your little hand.” She treasured the photographs of him that Harry’s mother occasionally sent. “I recognize ‘the boy of 1906’ in the picture more readily than you will recognize me when you next come to Chicago,” she observed. So perhaps it was not surprising that she invited Harry to spend his first Christmas vacation in the United States with her, an invitation Harry immediately and eagerly accepted, with his parents’ approval. “It will give you an opportunity to come to know some of the best people in the land,” his father wrote. His mother confided to her husband that she had decided to abandon a planned trip to New York and stay in Europe through Christmas so as not to interfere with Harry’s plans to visit Mrs. McCormick in Chicago. (He had shown no such eagerness, to his mother’s considerable chagrin, when relatives had invited him to spend Thanksgiving in Scranton a month earlier, and he had declined their invitation to stop in over Christmas as well. “Where do
we
come in?” his uncle wrote, only partly in jest, when hearing of Harry’s holiday plans.)
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Mrs. McCormick lived in a towering brownstone mansion on Rush Street in downtown Chicago (when she was not in her “country” home in the affluent suburb of Lake Forest). She was surrounded by servants but otherwise alone, visited occasionally by her wealthy but, to her, disappointing children. She welcomed the polite, intelligent, earnest young man from Hotchkiss with warmth, and she dazzled him with generosity. Suddenly Harry found himself in a social whirl unlike anything he had ever experienced. He was invited to dinners and dances and debutante balls at wealthy homes and country clubs. He went to the opera on Christmas Eve with the younger McCormicks and spent Christmas day on Rush Street, opening expensive gifts from the “great lady,” as the Luces always called her. (His modest gifts from his parents arrived at Hotchkiss by mail weeks later.) Mrs. McCormick’s generosity was not, however, restricted to Christmas. She “had four prs of fine silk socks laid out in front of my door one morning,” he wrote his mother. “Gave me $10 today for ‘incidental expenses’ and made me promise to take a taxi if ever caught in the rain—‘no matter what the cost,’ she said!”
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