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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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Alex Beam '75 In his poem, “Waking in the Blue,” Robert Lowell described the “thoroughbred mental cases” with whom he spent time as a patient at McLean Hospital. The venerable psychiatric institution just outside Boston opened its doors in 1817, and by the start of the Civil War, it was treating a specialty clientele—the “Mayflower screwballs,” in the words of Lowell—the mentally ill members of Boston society. Alex Beam, a columnist for the Boston Globe, offers a look at McLean and its residents, from two brothers of Ralph Waldo Emerson to sibling folksingers James, Livingston, and Kate Taylor. Ray Charles spent time there, as did a group of writers Beam called “the mad poets' society”—Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. McLean housed so many Harvard men that one building, the palatial Upham Memorial, was dubbed the “Harvard Club.” And Yale was prominently represented by Carl Liebman, Class of 1922, a patient of Sigmund Freud. When Liebman died in 1969, he had been at McLean for half-a-century and had received “every form of treatment known to homo psychiatricus, “ says Beam. However, despite psychoanalysis, electroshock, hydrotherapy, and a minilobotomy, the “Man Who Knew Freud” was never cured. In fact, Beam portrays the hospital as sometimes little more than a well-appointed, well-landscaped (Frederick Law Olmsted, also a patient, designed the place), and well-meaning custodian of the worried and wacky well-to-do. “At the end of the day,” says Beam, “the hospital’s goal is to succor patients, or right them, or just make them feel confident enough to give the real world, with all its ferocity and vicissitudes, one more try.”
Harriet
Scott Chessman '79PhD It is Paris in September 1878 and Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt is starting a new series of portraits. Cassatt’s model is her terminally ill sister Lydia, and in Chessman’s graceful novel, the process of making art serves as a vehicle for exploring the relationship between the two women. Each of the five chapters revolves around breathing fictional life into the creation of one of Cassatt’s early masterpieces. It is a technique that has been used often recently, most notably in Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier’s best-selling evocation of the Vermeer painting. In Chessman’s book, however, the author appropriately employs deft Impressionistic brushwork in “painting” the two sisters and Lydia’s narrowing world. As was evident in her first novel, Ohio Angels (“In Print,” Summer 1999) Chessman has an eye and ear for the subtle details of day-to-day life. Describing the “rushing sound” of Mary’s skirt as she moves, Lydia observes that “I cherish the way the room fills with quiet, like a bowl filling with milk.” There are poignant accounts of love and lovers: Lydia’s fiancé, killed in the Civil War, is a haunting presence, as she looks back over a life in which circumstances and illness have made it impossible for her to have her “most ardent wish”—“to know another’s touch, and to have children of my own …” Yet there is no bitterness in this luminous novel. “I wish to throw my arms around the day,” says Lydia, “embrace it fiercely, make it impossible for it to let me go.”
Carl Zimmer ’87 In December 1831, a 22-year-old medical school dropout named Charles Darwin boarded the H.M.S Beagle, a 90-foot-sloop docked in Plymouth, England, to begin a five-year journey. The official purpose of the voyage was to test clocks and navigation techniques for the British navy, but Darwin had a slightly less lofty reason for being onboard. The unemployed son of a physician-turned-financier was on the Beagle simply to keep the captain company; unofficially, Darwin was to serve as ship’s naturalist. By all accounts, he became rather good at this last task. In the companion volume to a PBS series that aired last fall, science writer Zimmer takes readers with Darwin on his round-the-world trip and then explores how the concept of evolution took shape in the naturalist’s mind and how it has itself evolved to become the main organizing principle of biology. From a consideration of the evolution of sex to a study of the coevolution of insects and flowers, the author has put together a provocative look at what philosopher Daniel Dennett called “Darwin’s dangerous idea. the single best idea that anyone has ever had.” Twenty three years after the Beagle returned to England, Darwin made his case for evolution in one of the most influential books ever written. The seeds for The Origin of Species were planted during the naturalist’s collecting days when he looked at his specimens and realized that, contrary to the prevailing religious doctrines of the 19th century, plants and animals had in fact changed over time. Some had even become extinct. God was apparently not micromanaging creation. The notion that life, including human life, could evolve on its own by a process Darwin dubbed “natural selection” was profoundly disturbing to many in that era. As Zimmer shows, that uneasiness continues, with evolution often winding up in court—the most famous case is the Scopes monkey trial of 1922—or in politics, as occurred in 1999 when the Kansas State Board of Education attempted to purge evolution from the science curriculum. (That initiative, which in general was widely denounced, ended when its proponents on the Board were voted out of office the following year.) Zimmer demonstrates that there continue to be debates over the details of the evolutionary process, but he notes that for most scientists, any battle over the central fact of evolution has long been over. Darwin won. In The Origin of Species, “he promised his readers ‘a grandeur in this view of life,’” says Zimmer, “and now life displays far more grandeur than even Darwin appreciated.”
Elizabeth Alexander ’84, Professor of African American Studies, American Studies & English In her third book of poems, Alexander imagines the dream not as a foggy substance that diffuses at dawn, but as a constant force pulsing behind great change. The thread of the dream weaves through her poems, which touch upon moments on both the national and personal levels. Of the race riots in Philadelphia in the 1960s, she writes, “Did I see this yesterday? Did I dream / this last night? The city is burning, / is burning for real.” She also takes on the voice of a runaway slave in “Nat Turner Dreams of Insurrection,” where the dream provides a wellspring for spiritual endurance, even when basic physical needs are lacking: “Freedom: a dipperful of cold well water. / Freedom: the wide white sky. / Dreams that make me sweat.” Here, even though the dream causes distress of the night sweats, it serves as inspiration in a time of crisis to prod the dreamer toward the goal of survival and peace.
Brief Reviews Edward Bliss Jr. ’35 A journalist son tells the remarkable story of his father, a member of the Class of 1887 and 1891MD, who abandoned a promising career to answer a call to become a medical missionary—“doctoring and farming” in China for 40 years.
James Meyer '84 After World War II, a group of avant-garde painters and sculptors conceived an art form stripped down to the barest essentials. Meyer, an art historian, examines minimalism and the controversies that swirled around its practitioners.
William Storandt, Tutor, Bass Writing Program Crossing the Atlantic on board the aptly named sailboat Clarity, Storandt, who teaches writing at Yale, evokes life at sea as he recounts a classic journey of self-discovery.
Jessica Teich '81 and Brandel France de Bravo Two busy mothers advise parents to “do less, listen more,” and adopt an approach called “present parenting”—being “present in the moment."The authors contend that “our presence, our focus, is our greatest gift.”
Jeff Wheelwright '69 Ten years after the Gulf War, many veterans remain sick, suffering from a suite of ill-defined symptoms. Wheelwright, a science writer, investigates the controversial Gulf War syndrome and concludes that it’s real.
Dick Wimmer '59MA Novelist Wimmer follows the madcap adventures of a memorable lead character, painter Seamus Boyne, along with his daughter Tory and best friend Hagar, on both sides of the Atlantic in a trilogy that combines wit, philosophy, sex, and great storytelling.
More Books by Yale Authors Alita Anderson 2001MD Alexander Blackburn 1951 Jonah Blank 1986 Paul F. Boller Jr. 1939, 1947PhD Wickham Boyle 1981MPPM L. Perry Curtis Jr. 1953 William V. D'Antonio 1948, James D. Davidson, Dean R. Hoge, and Katherine Meyer David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor of History Lawrence F. Gall 1984PhD, Head of Systems, Peabody Museum, and Jacques Gauthier, Professor of Geology and Geophysics, Editors Gene M. Grossman 1977 James F. Hoge Jr. 1958 and Gideon Rose 1985, Editors Maggie Jackson 1982 Lawrence Kramer 1972PhD Robert Mendelsohn 1978PhD, Edwin Weyerhaeuser Davis Professor, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Editor Richard A. Posner 1959 Neil Rolde 1953 Robert S. Rosefsky 1957 Ann Satterthwaite 1960MCP Lucy Schaeffer 1999, Illustrator, and Cal Fussman, Writer John W. Streeter 1931, Annotator Jessica Teich 1981 and Brandel France de Bravo Calvin Trillin 1957 Susan Weiner, Associate Professor of French Robert E. Willoughby 1948MDiv
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