Reflections

On Harvard Knowles: A Personal Essay

By David Margolick ’70

Photo: David Margolick ’70

When John Updike died in January 2009, two people immediately came to my mind. The first was Ted Williams, whom Updike wrote about so memorably in his classic New Yorker piece, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” half a century earlier. The second was Harvey Knowles. It was he who’d introduced me to Updike in his English class 10 years after that.

So when I wrote a tribute to Updike and his article, I got Harvey’s email address from Jim Rugen, and sent the piece to him. It was really an excuse to tell him I was thinking of him. Maybe, I thought, he’d feel a smidgen of pride that a former student of his could string together a few respectable sentences. Besides, it would be nice to be back in touch with him.

Like others in my class, I’d heard a lot about Harvey Knowles when I first got to Loomis, long before I’d ever met him, courtesy of Mr. Stevenson, whom I had for freshman English. He talked about Harvey even more than about his favorite butter rum Life Savers. There was much commentary from him about the wart atop Harvey’s head. I came to know he hailed from Skowhegan, Maine. And, like most of us here, I suspect, I knew his name spelled backwards was Selwonk. Who says we never listened to our teachers?

In our day it was a bit unfashionable to like teachers any more than was absolutely necessary. A few were exempt; they were charismatic. Harvey was different: at first blush, he didn’t stand out. But in his own quiet, determined way, he won our respect. By the end of our time at Loomis we’d come to know how special he was, which explains why The Loomiscellany our year was dedicated to him. Our yearbook has taken its licks at this reunion for deviating from the time-honored norm – all the usual, solemn Deford Dechert mug shots – but in this respect, it was “spot on,” as Harvey himself might have put it.

Opposite that dedication ran the picture you see here. I’ve always loved it, and not just because I took it, sometime in the spring of 1970. (I can tell because on the same roll are pictures of Batchelder Road flooding.) I love it because it captures the essence of Harvey Knowles. His gestures, like his thinking and his diction, were sharp, crisp, precise. I loved the intense and determined expression on his face, and the firmness of those pointed fingers. Maybe it’s because I knew him, but I also see in it his joy, and wit. He was having a good time teaching that day, and so were those of us learning from him. Just look at the expression on Phelps Gay as he raises his hand, and Rick Horan huddling over his notes.

I brought a copy of this picture to give to the school. Like most of us, I don’t know anyone here any more, and I was going to say I hope the folks who run the place hang it somewhere in Harvey’s honor and now, as of this past March 24, his memory. Then I noticed there’s already a picture of him hanging in the row of distinguished teachers in Founders. But with all due respect, this one is better. As foreign as he may now be to everyone here, Harvey Knowles is eternally relevant: he was everything a teacher should be, including durable. He taught me well at Loomis, and even better after I left.

I liked and admired Harvey here, but we weren’t especially close. The truth was, I always found him a bit intimidating. Though he’d once praised a poem I’d written — part of a conscientious teacher’s mandate is to spot even the faintest glimmer of promise in a student, and tell him or her about it — I worried that I had nothing of consequence to say, or write. Once, a

few years after we'd both left Loomis, I spotted him walking by as I sat outside Lincoln Center, but pretended I hadn’t seen him. Only long afterward did he reveal that he’d seen me that day. And that he still remembered that poem of mine.

But then Updike gave me a second chance with him. An old teacher may be like a parent, but there’s one difference: they don’t have to take you back. Harvey, though, quickly did. “It is good to hear from you,” he wrote back. In my original note, I’d mentioned Rabbit, Run, the Updike novel we’d read in his class. He'd continued to teach it at Exeter, he said, and explained why. “It’s not an easy book for adolescents, but books that pose tough questions, and Updike always does, and drive us inside ourselves for the answers are not designed to be easy,” he said. I could see he hadn’t changed, that those qualities apparent in the picture were still intact.

He thanked me for my piece, though without offering any opinion on it. So he was still tough, too. He then suggested that when I was next at Loomis, I introduce myself to the newly named head of school, Sheila Culbert. He’d backed another candidate for the job, he acknowledged, a former Loomis student of his, in fact, but when he’d learned Sheila was in the mix, “I knew the old boy was up against tough competition.” “She’d have been perfect for Exeter, and that’s precisely why they would never have hired her,” he added cryptically. Some time when we saw one another, he promised, he’d tell me why.

That prospect — seeing him, not hearing about the politics at Exeter — pleased me. “I am glad that Jim gave you my email address,” was how he closed. “I am alive, very well, and a tardy respondent, but a responsible one.” What a gracious way to say he’d like to hear from me again.

So, a few days later, I wrote back. I confessed that my copy of Rabbit, Run was disconcertingly clean, like all those books in Gatsby’s library. And I told him about something I’d hoped to write: a piece on Lucifer With a Book, the scabrous 1949 novel about Loomis by John Horne Burns that some upperclassman had whispered to me about freshman year, the one which, nearly twenty years later, was still banned from the old library, the one I’d never stopped thinking about afterward. But the archives, I lamented, were pretty much bare on the subject. “I wonder if it was all tossed,” I wrote him.

Burns had left Loomis long before Harvey got there, but of course he knew all about Burns and his book, just as I’d have predicted he would. “You can be sure they did have lots of stuff about him, but it was destroyed or put somewhere in sealed files,” he speculated. “I go with the latter possibility because so many people there were very angry at him.” He then said he’d long been meaning to visit Sag Harbor, where I told him I lived and which figures in Moby Dick, a book to which he’d regularly devoted an entire semester at Exeter. When he came by, he promised, he’d buy me lunch.

That would be nice — another barrier broken. But there was one slight hitch: in my note to him I’d called him “Harvey” but he'd signed off as “Harvard.” So which was it? Such things matter when you make that difficult transition from “Mr.” to first names. I stuck with “Harvey” on the next round, but now with an asterisk attached. “Please let me know if you prefer ‘Harvard’ or if I’m grandfathered in with ‘Harvey’ (which probably dates back to Mr. Stevenson),” I wrote at the bottom.

He fielded my awkwardness amicably. “Steve and Helen Stevenson (and Joel Sandulli) always called me Harvey; most people have always called [me] either Harv or Harvard,” he replied. “The latter is more common at Exeter, partly I suspect because so many students, obsessed with Harvard, find my name a great source of amusement.” He quickly moved off that and onto Katharine Brush, then to a piece I’d written eight years earlier. Turns out he’d been reading me all along, and remembering. I was flattered.

We were now up to March 2010; now it was J.D. Salinger who had just died. Maybe it’s macabre, but to me every literary death was an excuse to write him. “I just re-read Catcher in the Rye, and enjoyed it more than ever,” I said. “Does this mean I’ve never grown up?” “It doesn't mean you never grew up,” he assured me. “It’s that the book is finally an adult novel after all.”

That June of 2010, he came to our 40th Reunion. Seeing him there, I wrote him afterward, had been one of the high points of the experience for me. Again he didn’t pick up on that, but he told me how special Loomis had always been for him. “It was a great place to learn how to teach, and for most of the students I suspect it was a great place to grow up,” he wrote. “It was a very forgiving place in lots of ways.”

I wonder what he meant by that, but I knew I felt something similar — that as prep schools went, Loomis was humane and tolerant. The cruelty per capita was low. Teachers like him, Ben Meyers, Al Wise, Mo Brown, and Bill Westfall, to name just a few of my favorites, embodied that. It’s why I’d come here in the first place: even at 13 years old, I sensed it. And why, incidentally, John Horne Burns, an Irish Catholic who’d been told by the headmaster of Andover — where he’d finished at the top of his class,

just as he went on to do at Harvard — not to bother applying for a teaching job there or at any top New England school. Better to apply in the Boston public schools, he suggested: that’s where the Irish went. But Mr. Batchelder had hired him anyway. It makes me proud of this place.

When another book of mine, about the Little Rock schools crisis of 1957, came out, Harvey quickly bought himself a copy, and touted it to his friends. And then, in February 2012, he arranged for me to give a reading at his favorite bookstore in Exeter. Making it even more special, Sam Stevenson joined us. It was quite a feeling for me to look out that night and see two men who, so many years earlier, had tried to teach me how to write listening to me read from something I’d written.

We had a great dinner, but the next day something thing gnawed at me. “These are special bonds — so special, filled with so many memories for me that I fear, in my exuberance, I got a little bit catty and mean in some of my comments on old Loomis figures,” I confessed. “I felt bad about that afterward and hope you can forgive me for that.”

“No need for any apologies,” he quickly assured me. “Jane Austen taught us long ago that without gossip morality is compromised, for what saves most of her heroines is information from a steady stream of gossip. Neither Steve nor I heard anything mean in what you said. Indeed, we had a great evening, and I am happy you did too.”

Imagine forgiving someone, while imparting some literary history and wisdom in the process. As if that wasn’t enough, he added one final thought. “I hope you are thinking about another visit to the Bookstore when the Burns book is published,” he said.

In our ensuing exchanges, Harvey played many roles. When I asked him to suggest a book to read, he not only recommended one but specified the proper edition of it, which he described as “cheap and attractive.” He gave travel tips: he’d just spent a weekend visiting the homes of Edith Wharton and Melville in Western Massachusetts, he related, and suggested I do likewise. And he told me how to spend my summer productively. “Wherever you are, ‘stretch out and haul in,’ as Henry James said,” he counseled.

That December, I wrote him to say I’d finished a draft of the Burns book. “I forget: did I ask you whether you’d be willing to take a look?” I added. “What good news,” he replied. “I would love to.” And he recruited Mr. Stevenson — “He is a superb editor, and over the years he has saved me much grief,” he said of him — to read it, too.

Harvey had already gone through a big chunk of the book, and promised he’d quickly read the rest. “I am still responding to holiday mail, but will get back to the book soon,” he wrote on New Year's Eve. “I am deliberately avoiding reading it in short stints.” When I didn’t hear back from him immediately, I panicked. “Did I say something wrong?” I asked him anxiously 10 days later. “Did the manuscript suddenly take a nosedive? Are you celebrating all twelve days of Christmas and then some?” I derived great pleasure fashioning such phrases for him, while taking care not to write anything too ornate or showoff-y. I knew he wouldn’t have approved. I never stopped trying to meet his high standards.

He soon finished, and told me he liked the book, but spared me the empty praise. Instead, he addressed my concerns, like a complaint from another reader (a Loomis grad, in fact) that I’d quoted from Burns’ letters excessively. “Burns has so many problems, is so tormented, so thoroughly unpleasant to so many people, that it is best to let him define himself,” he wrote. “And you did that.”

He elaborated in a second email later that night. “I have to say I found Burns a difficult personality but biography has to work with what it’s got,” he wrote. “The book is a sympathetic portrayal and especially about his homosexuality and his deep struggle with it. The irony of his trying to disguise what he reveals so blatantly suggests how little control he had over his life.” Even now, I marvel at that sentence, which was so much better a summary of the man than anything I’d written. Equally impressive, even moving, to me was the compassion and sympathy he had for someone so unsympathet-

ic. Harvey was as open-minded and decent as he was keen.

When I revised the book, he asked to read the revisions. He studied, and commented upon, the photographs, offering his analysis of the young Burns’s posture, and smile, and eyes. When I complained of having finally to let go of the manuscript, he counseled, “Your wistfulness will pass and then you’ll expand to the joys of your new creation.”

Finally, I sent him the finished book. I don’t remember my inscription, but I’m sure I labored over it and hoped it worthy but worried that it wasn’t. He didn’t mention that, but said he’d been “reading around” in the book since receiving it. So he was still pondering it, and probably mulling over how it could have been better. He had kind words for the unorthodox title — could there be better ammunition for an unfriendly reviewer than calling a book Dreadful? — and the cover. But what pleased me most was that he thought it fair.

“Thanks again for sending me a copy and too for allowing me to play a very small part in its production,” he concluded. Imagine: him thanking me. Eight minutes after he’d sent that note to me, I forwarded it to my mother. Then I wrote him back. “In an experience with many of them, having you involved in this was one of my greatest pleasures,” I told him.

Our correspondence slackened after that. But when my one of my French teachers at Loomis, Barrett Dower, wrote me in July 2013 with a correction — the American poet I’d mentioned in the text was Edwin, not Edward, Arlington Robinson — and then added, “I’m surprised Harvey K. didn’t catch that!” I thought Harvey K. should know about what Mr. Dower said.

A year later, I informed him the paperback edition was about to come out, and would include a photo I’d take of Mrs. Adams, the person who’d allegedly barred Lucifer from the Loomis library. “I can’t wait to see the picture of Winnie,” he replied. Feeling a bit sorry for myself, I complained of laboring over improvements no one would ever notice. “You and I think alike,” he observed. “We need to be prepared for the guy who will notice. When you have been trained in a rigorous prep school, you learn that all details matter.”

Three years later, I came across a reference to the Housman poem “To an Athlete Dying Young.” “Wasn't it in your class that we read this?” I asked him, in September 2017. “Funny how poems read when young touch you so: in another class (I don’t remember whose) we read ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ and I never forgot that one, either.”

“You probably did read the Housman poem in my class,” he promptly replied. “I also did ‘Dulce et Decorum est.’ Both great works. Incidentally, when on my walk this morning the Housman poem fell into my head, and I discovered that I had lost some of the lines, so once home I pulled the book down from the shelf and committ[ed] it to memory again.” He’d long since retired, but still felt he had to keep up.

We actually spoke in March 2019, when I began exploring a piece on Sewall Arnold, the guy we’d all have been clustering around these past 24 hours had he not died young, and brutally. “I always liked him,” he told me that day. “He was just wonderful company, witty and full of laughter. Now a kid can be in a dark place and doesn’t have to be there all by himself the way Sewall probably thought he was.”

“I'm glad we talked,” he wrote me a few days later. “Let’s stay in touch.” And I tried. In November 2020, a few months after our first aborted reunion, I wrote him again. I said I hoped he was well and staying safe, wherever he was. I added that I still fantasized about what Charlie Pratt or George Adams or Squirrel Norris or Tom Finley might have told me about Burns had I caught them in time. And how I still hoped to write something about Sewall, though it would be hard journalistically and maybe even ethically, to do. “If we ever see one another, I’d enjoy discussing it with you,” I said. “Also, there’s a great essay in the current New Yorker on Faulkner and race,” I noted. “You’d enjoy it.”

Only, I soon learned, he could no longer do that. Or answer any more of his emails.

According to the obituary on centralmaine.com, Harvey Knowles was asked once if it saddened him that he’d never had children. “But I have had children,” he replied. “Thousands of them. And all from my classroom.” I was one of his children at Loomis, and then, years later, he gave me a second childhood with him.

How lucky was that?

David Margolick is an author and longtime contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He has held similar posts at Newsweek and Portfolio, and he was a legal affairs correspondent for The New York Times for 15 years. His books, including Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns and his most recent book, The Promise and the Dream: The Untold Story of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, are in the LC Authors Collection of the Katharine Brush Library. A first edition copy of Burns’s novel Lucifer with a Book is also part of the LC Authors Collection.

Members of the Class of 2020 launch floating lanterns on the Cow Pond during their long-awaited class celebration on June 4, two years after the pandemic forced the campus to close for their senior spring. Photo: Defining Studios

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A crew of Loomis Chaffee community members works with bee expert Steve Rogenstein ’88 to build insect hotels and

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