Our 1968

It was the best of times, and it was the worst of times, that first academic year (1967-8) abroad in London. It began with a bang--on the last trip of the Queen Mary I from New York to Southampton (David Gray, who directed Beaver College’s overseas programs, cannily noted that the new jet transatlantic service was freeing up many Cunard cabins renting at fire sale prices), and that annus mirabilis ended early in August, 1968--with our chewing our nails as the Warsaw Pact got closer and closer to the Czechoslovakia border while we were taking a two week NUS vacation there. (We got out just in time! See my report in “The Nation” September 1968.)

Most of our students flew into Prestwick a week later as we awaited them in Glasgow to begin their orientation to the UK with a leisurely ramble down to London: which in those be-Beatle’d times became known to the students as Hazard’s Magical Misery Tour. Early on the morning of their overnight flight, we booked them into Glasgow’s BBC studios to see a documentary on the decline of the butler in British life written by Birmingham U professor mass culture specialist Richard Hoggart. (I had just been hired as a consultant to Time-Life Films, charged with conducting weekly screenings in their New York HQ of the previous week’s BBC telecasts, to decide which programs we should import for use on PBS or in the schools.) The half asleep new visitors yawned in despair as my regimen for them began!

For lunch we moved on to Cumbernauld, their newest planned town where Glasgow U poetry professor Alexander Scott was booked to lecture post prandially on Hugh Macdiarmid, aka Christopher Murray Grieves, GU’s pet Communist and Scots’s Nationalist retriever of Lallans, the ancient Scottish literary dialect that Hugh was reviving almost singlehanded. On to Edinburgh where we saw the new docudrama “Aberfam”, about the recent catastrophic destruction of an elementary school in Wales by mining tailings.(We would later visit that beleaguered village itself as we hoovered the West—Devon, Land’s End, Exeter, Bath, Swansea and Bristol.)

After Edinburgh we pitstopped in Berwick on Tweed because Beaver College’s world famous Castle (by Horace Trumbauer ) was based on their(to my eye) esthetically inferior structure. The newly elected lady mayoress (the region’s first feminist breakthrough) jangled her symbols of office proudly! Then we took a quick look at Coventry Cathedral, moving on to Liverpool. I have the feeling that our boarding house was half whore, judging from the doors banging all night long as well as the eagerness with which the lady of the house boffed me on her office floor! High point of Liverpool was the Everyman Theatre which was putting on a Medieval Morality Play, with God orating in a gloriously Liverpudlian style. The troops were getting more and more antsy,as their fantasies of pub crawling in London seemed farther and farther away.We made one final stop—in Newcastle-on Tyne where the Geordie poet Tony Harrison simulated pubbery in his beatnik style.

Classes were held in The City of London College, a subway ride away in The City, next to the Barbican Complex. I tricked up my Am Lit survey by pairing our greats with Brit counterparts—Emily with Gerard Manley Hopkins, for example, a Great Pair, and Walt with Matthew Arnold, a lame one, Twain with Dickens, Henry James with George Eliot. It’s where I got the idea for International English–a mix of Am Lit and Commonwealth Lits. I booked guest speakers to give more substance to my trial innovation, e.g., A.D. Hope, the great Australian poet, and innovative critics ,like Marcus Cunliffe and D.A.N. Jones. The peak visit was a tape of Northern Ireland poets—James Simpson, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, all read, including some of his own, by the future Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, of whom I had never heard before he showed up at a small room on the edge of the Belfast Festival. (All my students couldn’t afford the train-ship-train trip so I asked the Festival management if they could recommend a good local poet/reader to tape a chrestomathy of Belfast poets into the Uher NPR had given me when I was Greyhounding around for an arts weekly out of Sewanee,TN. In came this aggie looking brute with cowshit clearly still on his boots. He read them really well,and then concluded with a few of his own. He read “Digging” (which compares working his Muse with his farmer Gramp digging for a planting. Zounds! My knees went wobbly, a sure sign my ears had just witnessed true Genius. I will wait until later to recall our ten day progress in 1970 from my old haunt in Trenton, NJ to Atlanta for the NCTE annual convention.

My Time-Life sinecure had led to my summarizing the preceding quarter for the British Film Institute’s journal, ”Contrasts”. Which led to invitations to BBC2’s “Late Night Lineup”, a clever closing slot on which a few cool heads would discuss a particularly pertinent program just aired. The trouble-making critic Ken Tyson had upset the BBC Blue Beards Upstairs by using the word “fuck” on the air. (I’m sure his motive was to bug the BBC BBU’s rather than the humbler home public.9 I joined the Daily News TV critic and Troy Kennedy Martin, the inventor of a pop cop series, ”Zed Cars”. Troy was a Mick from Trinity College, Dublin, and we had quickly bonded in the Green Room!

As we were about to enter the set, he whispered solemnly,” Remember, Patrick, no “fucking around”. “How about motherfucker,”I teased, as we sat down on opposite sides of the table, where the audio man was checking our sound levels. My diction, be assured, remained Holy Rosary Academy “dickless” throughout our semantic ramble. Later in early 1968 I organized a TV Film retrospective, “Unseen American Television” for the Royal College of Art, to show them PBS programs, national religious series, and local commercial station public service specials like Bob Herridge’s weekly half hour “Camera Three” on WCBS-TV. We called it “24 Hours of Unseen American TV” (“24 Hours” was the name of BBC2’s evening news hour); an art student designed a knockout poster of a TV set enchained across its tube!

The mechanics were managed by the Television Information Office in New York by their chief Roy Danish and his hyper-efficient secretary Claire King. They had tried out this format in 1964 when The Modern Language Association held its annual convention in New York where the NBC-TV satirical weekly “That Was The Week That Was” was hot stuff. We invited a Museroom full of nine satire specialists (Columbia U sociologist Herb Gans and Webster III’s lexicographer Philip Gove were the two most interesting guests) to have dinner during the broadcast in General David Sarnoff’s private dining room in the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. (It was rumored that his color TV was the only one really working at the time all across America!)

After the broadcast, all the talent sat down to dinner in the General’s parlor and kibitzed with us professors. I especially remember David Frost’s lecturing Gove on the “scandal” of allowing four-letter words into Webster III. Shall we just say that Frost was somewhat overpowered by the greatest lexicographer of the twentieth century. In 1968 when David invited me to lunch at his club in London, he giggled nervously, recalling his overwhelming intellectual defeat at Gove’s gentle hands! Roy Danish was a great Columbia educated, second generation Jewish intellectual running a publicity outfit brilliantly. His example attested to my belief that humanism and mass culture were compatible. I was deeply saddened when both he and Claire died without warning a few years later. Our London students of course were urged but not required to participate.

The was another pertinent TW3 episode that year. I was always curious,as a professional TV critic, about how working class Brits responded to that program. When the BBC English as a Second Language announced a party for teachers from all over the world who had been studying that subject that summer, I appeared uninvited with my wife Mary, also a new PhD in English from BrynMawr. We were introduced to the ad hoc MC Paddy O’Connor,the first Irish Mayor of Camden Town,where the BBC HQ was.(His day job had been a bus inspector.) He introduced me to a social worker for Camden seniors, one Phyllis O’Leary, a divorced woman with one teenage kid. She invited a passel of her blue collar neighbors to TW3 in her Regent’s Parlk flat. (Public Housing in London is sometimes Regal, especially for the canny. Phyllis was more than canny. She was my fair lady redivivus! Her brother the taxi driver lived one floor below in rooms full of Borax furniture. Her place was from Habitat, and her diction from Oxbridge. Eventually she would take me places like the Whitechapel Gallery and deliver ad lib lectures on the PreRaphaelites! And I became her overnight lover, including that first TW3!

Four years later, Time-Life Films held a BBC salesman seminar in London, which if I can gently mock my boss Peter Roebeck was meant to make the Brits sell harder and the Ams to become more civilized. I lost my sinecure that day we went to Ealing to see Jacob Bronowsk’s rushes for his new series “The Ascent of Man”. (I hadn’t worn a tie! Peter always ran scared of Oxbridge types and resented my easy familiarity with them.) We used to begin our weekly screening sessions in New York by watching the latest Monty Python. One day ÜPeter came barging in shouting, ”I’m not paying you a $1000 a month to look at that shit, Hazard!*- I chided him gently, explaining,”That’s what my constituency wants, Peter!” “Bah!” he reasoned. Anyway, we finally persuaded WTTW/Chicago to carry Monty, and my only contribution to American Civilization was secure: Breaking the Monty Python Boycott!

I wanted my BBC egghead friends to see if I had been dreaming in the case of Phyllis O’Leary, Camden Senior Servant. There was Stephen Hearst, head of Radio Three, and Martin Esslin, inventor of the concept of absurd drama, both refugees from Nazi Vienna. TWO MORE VOTES FOR PHILLY. They couldn’t believe their eyes, or ears. And not just her sounds. It was the sense she made in her conversation! There was Beatle Promise in the air.

Take the cultivated Christmas in France Mary and I had carefully devised for our three teenagers, Mike, Cathy, and Tim, 15,13, and 11, respectfully! I went over early partly to visit French broadcasting,but mostly to palaver with a mentor, Richard Hoggart, on temporary loan to UNESCO from the U of Birmingham. His book, “The Uses of Literacy,” was critical in my Carnegie Postdoctoral Fellowship at Penn in 1957, creating a new course on “The Mass Society” for the Department of American Civilization. Create it the first year. Teach it the second. In the middle of the second year Walter Annenberg gave Penn two millions to found a graduate school, and faute de mieux I became the gofer for President Gaylord Harnwell to the business media and to the old J Schools. A blue collar Phd from Leeds, Richard understood my Detroit working class parameters, just as did that other Brit blue, Raymond Williams from Jesus College,Cambridge.

Alas, when Mary came across the Channel with the kids three days before Xmas she brought horrible news; Benton Spruance had died without warning. He was my only intimate at Beaver. He was a great lithographer and his literate awareness of all phases of Culture was unique. I had been promised a return to Annenberg if my invitation to head the Institute of American Studies at the East West Center in Honolulu didn’t work out. (They slashed my pay by $3000 the first week, assigned without my okay Seymour Lutsky as my number two who had been since an Iowa PhD in the CIA spying on left wing Academics from both Asia and America, and we were squeezed into a sabbatical’s tiny apartment while we had bought two years before an AIA awarding house in Philly. Dean Gilbert Seldes (whom I had nominated for the job) conceded when we were reconciled some years later (watching Goldie Hawn Saturday nights at his New York apartment) that he succumbed to pressure from Vice Dean Charles Lee (ne Levy) and Annenberg that I was a troublemaker. (I am!! But a promise is a promise in a civilized society to which those two JASP’s Lee and and Annenberg never belonged. Ben was my only pal at Beaver. His death crushed me. I remember praying for the first time in 20 years in Chartres Cathedral for strength to deal with my loss.

We went to Midnight Mass at Mon St. Michel. Christmas Day we hit Versailles and a teenocratic revolt: They had to be back in London on Boxing Day for a great film, title unknown! We succumbed, turned in our rented car, and took the Channel ferry back to Dover. The film? “A Hard Day’s Night”! The little twerps were right, after all. The Second semester was like the first, except for our August trip to Czechoslovakia where the Russian Bear missed us by two days. That story is in “The Nation” (September 26, 1968.) It was the worst of years, and, finally, the best as well!