Composing a Further Life

had said to me, ‘Have you ever thought of going into the church?’ And I said, no, I really hadn’t.”
    Harvard had recently instituted its general education program—the same one I encountered when I went there—to prevent students from overspecializing. Jim delighted in these courses, taking a famous course nicknamed “Rice Paddies,” with Crane Brinton, Edwin Reischauer, and John Fairbank, which was his first real exposure to Asian culture. “Oh, also, in my freshman year, in my general education course, in which we read Marx, I became an atheist and so did not go to church,” he told me. This, too, was part of the Harvard experience for many young people.
    In spite of the effort toward general education, however, there were still people on the faculty (as there are today) who had very narrow ideas of what students should do, and this led to a crisis in Jim’s sophomore year. “There was this man named Norman Newton—he didn’t want students to study any history of architecture, ‘Because,’ he said, ‘if you do that, you design like them.’ In other words,” Jim explained, “he had taken the Bauhaus reality and made a dogma out of it. There was no question I was modern, modern, modern, but I wanted to see it in a bigger context. And also, they didn’t want any kind of philosophy or any of this religious stuff, except he did allow me to take a course on Plato, which I enjoyed, with Raphael Demos, and I took Social Relations I with Gordon Allport.”
    Gordon Allport was a psychologist who studied personality and was involved in the postwar effort to combine the behavioral sciences into a single multidisciplinary department, called Social Relations, which eventually deconstructed itself. In effect, the subtext of Jim’s description of his Harvard experience was an effort to avoid narrowness and rigidity, an insistence on being allowed to cross boundaries and make connections between fields that was part of the intellectual history of the times and remained a theme throughout his life.
    “It became a sort of crisis situation for me,” he said. “It went into full bloom in my junior year. By then I had done all the mathematical and engineering stuff that was required, and Newton said, ‘You’ve got to take the behavioral psychology course,’ and I said ‘I’m not interested in that.’ I didn’t take it. I wanted to do some history of architecture. Finally I was allowed to take a course, which I loved, with Kenneth Conant. He was very interested in the great church of Hagia Sophia, which was built by the emperor Justinian I in the sixth century”—the Church of Holy Wisdom, I remembered, mother church of the Orthodox tradition, which was turned into a mosque for five centuries after the fall of Constantinople and is now a museum—“and in the monastery buildings at Cluny.”
    At this point Jim had a stroke of good fortune, for he met a professor of architecture named John Coolidge and asked his advice. “I’m at a kind of crossroads,” he said. “I’m having a really difficult time in architectural sciences because Norman Newton is not allowing anyone to do any history of architecture.” Coolidge said, “Oh, he’s a very dogmatic guy. Listen, why don’t you just shift from architectural sciences to history of architecture in the fine arts department, and I will be your tutor.” Jim said, “You solved everything.” He was still planning to go to architectural school but to follow a different route.
    Jim acted in plays and sang in the Harvard Glee Club, and then in the summer he got a job in construction in Houston. “I was part of a building crew—doing very basic stuff, but it meant seeing how things are built. It was great.” At the same time, he was taking a painting course. He paused in puzzlement. “Oh, I know what I was leading up to. Just for the hell of it, I thought I might go back to church in Houston. I had been absolutely overwhelmed at Harvard by Beethoven’s
Missa Solemnis
, which I had sung with the glee club at Symphony Hall. And I went out and I bought the record, and I remember listening to that and sort of welling up, just listening to this music.… So I went to the Episcopal church in Houston and enjoyed it. And the very smart rector, whose name I do not remember, spotted me and said, ‘Would you like to have lunch?’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ So I had lunch with him one day. So there was that. That and the impact of the Beethoven.
    “One of