During the interval—the two-hour seminar was divided in half—the female graduate students were expected to prepare and serve tea and cookies for everyone. There have been several scandalized comments on this practice since, but at the time nobody, including me, gave it a second thought. My Grade Five teacher, Miss MacLeod, had done the same. Betty and Veronica in Archie comics also dished up the cookies, minus the tea: it was no doubt cocoa in their case. Serving up the tea and biscuits was what women did, especially in a crisis such as the Blitz; and graduate school was always a crisis, in a slow-moving kind of way. When The Handmaid’s Tale was published, Jim is said to have quipped, “Hasn’t anyone said that The Handmaid’s Tale is about the Harvard English graduate program?”
Another memorable seminar was called “Literature of the American Revolution,” taught by Alan Heimert, a disciple of Perry Miller. Professor Heimert began by saying that there wasn’t any literature of the American Revolution, since everyone had been too busy revolting, so we would study the literature leading up to the revolution and the literature that immediately followed it. Thomas Paine, Franklin, and political pamphlets before the revolution, and then, after the revolution, various bemused essays in the equivalent of small literary magazines. The writers of these essays were wondering—now that the utopian New World vision was in full swing—when the Great American Painters and the Great American Novel were going to show up. These worries were so much like the despondent musings about Canadian identity that were going on in my country in the early 1960s that I was fascinated by them. Of course, when the Great American Novels did show up—Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter—the critics of the day didn’t applaud or understand them. This too was not lost on me.
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