Barnard College

Heady Days

The professor who gave me the copy of “Tonio Kröger” had been the guest of Thomas Mann for tea at his Princeton home. The year was 1940, and the young academic had gone to discuss his dissertation with the master and indeed was invited back the next year to hear how all had gone with his work. Another professor, who became my advisor, heard Mann make his “Deutsche Hörer!” radio broadcasts to Germany during World War II. I was very close to almost first-hand acquaintance with the great man. Those were heady days at Barnard College, my home from 1970-74.

My major, the Program in the Arts, was new, and in 1972, interdisciplinary studies were new. Music, visual art, dance, theatre, and writing made up the five areas of the Program. We auditioned or presented a portfolio for the performance aspect of the program and for the liberal arts aspect, concentrated in one of the arts. I started college as a music major, progressing through the sequence of courses in music history and theory, but the Program suited me better as concentrator in music and flute. More so, we were asked to write essays in fields other than our own: I wrote on music in Cervantes and in another instance, on Dürer’s “Knight, Death, and the Devil.” It was fascinating, and I began to find my niche.

So remarkable about our faculty in the Program in the Arts were the performers, composers, and scholars they’d studied with and the inheritance they gave to us from those teachers. We had only an inkling of it at the time. Jeanette Roosevelt, a mother to us all, studied dance privately with Martha Graham, Hubert Doris, conducting with Pierre Monteux, and Kenneth Janes, in theatre, returned every summer to his native England for his Glastonbury festival. Most distinguished were Patricia Carpenter, a student of Arnold Schoenberg’s, and Barry Ulanov, who’d studied with Franz Boas (to name one) and who was the founder of the Program in the Arts. Barry was a generous, generous man. Everything interested him, everything was of substance and structure, and most of all, was human. He saw the possibilities in everything. For our senior seminar on Cubism, I said I’d like to write on Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. Certainly, he replied, and now was the time to do it. He was an English teacher at heart: "Only goes as close as possible to the word it modifies," and, one time in class, he asked us to write an essay without using the verbs to be and to have. And, in this connected world of Thomas Mann, Barry’s uncle, he told me many years later, had been the accompanist of Lotte Lehmann. My essay for the senior seminar, on the sources of Mann’s Doctor Faustus, was passed “with distinction,” an honor of which I am very proud.

The professor, Joseph Gerard Brennan, who’d had tea with Thomas Mann in 1940, wrote again to him in 1948, and received this reply:

Of course, the most eloquent tongue would be of no avail if there weren’t warm young hearts, thirsting for the good and the spiritual to respond to it. That they are there and that they gather around you so gratefully, is a beautiful, comforting sign. I personally am, naturally, quite moved by the news that these striving and receptive young people like to hear about my books and take pleasure in reading them. After all, we poets are all longing for a little immortality, and the sympathy of the young generation for our work is a guarantee that it will survive us for a little while.

Please give my kindest regards to your pupils, together with my best wishes for the success of their studies. By that I do not mean outward success, but I hope that the devoted study of what great minds, through their suffering and creativity, have contributed to the world, may form them into human beings which are able to cope with the difficulties of this confused period of transition.

We were striving and receptive, more than we might have known, possibly one of the last generations to go to college to achieve the greater kind of success that Mann describes. What came of a devotion to study were human beings very able to cope with difficulties and transitions throughout their lives. When I go to reunions, I’m always struck by the kinds of things my classmates are doing. We are industrious workers in whatever endeavor we choose and have enriched our hometowns and professions for it. Thomas Mann would be proud.