1942–1943
Incensed with indignation, Satan stood
Unterrified . . .
—John Milton
ON SEPTEMBER 5, 1942, THE society pages of the Hartford newspapers announced Grace Frick and Marguerite Yourcenar’s return from the island. They had quite a year ahead of them. Yourcenar, for her part, would start teaching part-time at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. Asked years later how she came to teaching, the author explained amusingly that during the war American universities opened their arms to any number of “vague European intellectuals” without the slightest qualification to teach, she being one of them.1 Judging from the testimony of some of her students, there was nothing vague about her, however!
Frick was faced yet again with running Hartford Junior College on a shoestring. When faculty members were reappointed for the 1942–43 academic year, they were warned that their continued employment was dependent on the success of fund-raising efforts then under way. Many agreed to a 25 percent reduction in their salaries, including Frick. By June of 1942 a $10,000 fund-raising campaign, despite support from many quarters, had yielded a grand total of $3,609.50. It was not an easy time to raise money, with urgent efforts being launched for the Greek War Relief Association, Russian War Relief, United China Relief, and so on. Hartford Junior College nonetheless continued to be held in high esteem by the senior colleges—Barnard, Colby, Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Wheaton—to which graduating students often transferred.2
Perhaps because of their small number and a sense that they were all in the trenches together, those students enjoyed a close relationship with their professors and a great spirit of camaraderie among themselves. The class history for that year’s freshmen provides a humorous students’-eye view of life at Hartford Junior College:
On opening day we listened attentively to a lecture given by Mr. Cheney on how to use our minds for the next two years, at least. By the end of the first week we had met all our profs, including Madame Yourcenar, our most dynamic teacher, and our own dear Dr. Neumann. By the time of midyears we all knew the idiosyncrasies of our teachers, such as Miss Frick’s continual reference to the D.N.B [no doubt the British Dictionary of National Biography] and unrelenting insistence on card notes; Dr. Neumann’s calisthenics while lecturing; Dr. Arnold’s lavender sports jacket; Madame Yourcenar’s Russian leather boots; Dr. Buell’s determination to fall off his horse; and Dr. Copeland’s demonstration of throwing his hip out of joint and talking like a duck.3
But for Dean Frick and the college trustees, 1942–43 would be a tension-filled year.
The chairman of those trustees, Howell Cheney, was Dean Frick’s almost exclusive interlocutor at the school. Born into a wealthy silk-manufacturing family and a graduate of Yale University, Cheney was a prominent businessman. He had spent some fifty years either working in or running his family’s textile mills. In 1915 he had founded a trades school in his hometown of Manchester, Connecticut, today known as Howell Cheney Technical High School. Cheney’s interest in education tended to be technical, vocational, and scientific. In a speech he delivered in 1910, Cheney called academic schools “hidebound by tradition,” urging more emphasis on vocational and technical subjects.4
I have already mentioned the economic language that Chairman Cheney used to express support for Hartford Junior College’s new dean in the spring of 1940, writing that “the Trustees desire to make your service here yield you the maximum of return and to stand by you in every way possible within their means.”5 As the new academic year began, those means were growing ever slimmer. But finances were not the only source of difficulty. Frick first obliquely referred to the way in which her educational philosophy differed from Cheney’s in a letter dated February 17 (1941).6 Speaking of herself and Yourcenar, Frick wrote in a typewritten letter to the board chairman,
Saturday my friend and I were invited to a delightful tea (given for us, apparently) at Miss Fannie Johnson’s. I would give a great deal to have some of our fledglings see a house like hers and meet people at all like her and her sister. My friend and I came away feeling a little mournful in the realization that none of the students of the generation now in college will ever grow into such women as those two are. You feel that these present day students have gained so much in modern science. I wish I could feel half so sure.7
Though Miss Johnson is not further identified, it is easy to imagine her and her sister presiding over tea in one of Connecticut’s colonial-era homes surrounded by books, heirloom furniture, and artworks. The “richness of background” that lent the scene its distinctive charm calls to mind the lushly integrated literary, artistic, and cultural program that for Frick constituted the essence of an education in the humanities. Which, as the energy she devoted to establishing a biology laboratory when she first took up her duties as dean clearly shows, was in no way to give short shrift to science. While she was not above bemoaning her students’ lack of initiative, Frick wanted them to feel “joy in the possibilities of learning,” as she went on to say. Never once does Cheney display the warmth, good nature, or enthusiasm about their joint enterprise that Frick’s early letters to him in particular exhibit. At the end of Frick’s first year as dean, for example, with commencement just behind them, Cheney wrote, without a word of thanks or praise,
Since you have asked me to do so, I list below the suggestions that occur to me in connection with the last Commencement exercises:
1. That the invocation should be limited to not exceed three minutes
2. That if a distinguished speaker is invited to speak, that the address should not exceed thirty minutes in length
3. That a marshall [sic] should be appointed for the academic procession
4. That if good music is available, more music be introduced into the occasion
5. That at some future meeting of the Board of Trustees the matter of the award of honors for excellence in academic standards at Commencement be definitively ruled upon and settled.8
One gets the impression from Cheney’s instrumental directives that he views Frick as the academic equivalent of a silk-factory foreman—a useful commodity, perhaps, but not an equal. Frick’s attempts to engage him fell on deaf ears.
On March 23, 1942, someone arrived on the scene who would disrupt the status quo: Mrs. Thomas D. Macmillan, née Eva Adams, was a 1915 Smith College graduate. Having worked at the Peking Women’s Medical College in China, she was hired as an executive secretary for Hartford Junior College and to assist the trustees with public relations.9 Frick had been hoping for someone to take over three of her own many functions, as registrar, admissions officer, and fund-raiser. She was pleased with Macmillan’s fund-raising abilities, as she wrote to Cheney on May 5, but she did not recommend that Macmillan be hired to fill the other two functions.10 By June 16 she was more direct: “Please take her away.”11 The precise nature of Frick’s dissatisfaction is unclear, but in the end Macmillan was indeed taken away.
Finally, the prospect was again raised of shutting the school down. Frick pleaded with Cheney not to let that happen: “Three years is not such a very long struggle in the history of institutions. Is it not worth a fourth attempt? Don’t say no, please.”12
On top of everything else, Yourcenar and Frick were giving extra help to two Hartford Junior College students—Norah Tapley, whose leg had been amputated above the knee, and Mary Lou Tucker, who walked with leg braces. “Much that was very real in terms of generosity and cooperation was given to the college in those years,” states an unpublished account of Frick’s tenure as dean.13 In a letter written sometime in 1942 or 1943, Yourcenar spoke of her own involvement with the school:
The French course was a personal contribution to Hartford Junior College toward the instruction of two very interesting students who had suffered serious handicaps in health. As for the History of Art last year, I should like to consider it as a gift to the college, for it is probably the most significant volunteer work I can do on education in these times, when the sympathetic understanding of different civilizations and cultures is of such vital importance.14
Needless to say, this was a conviction that she and Frick shared.
Another bone of contention between the board chairman and the dean involved the foreign film series Frick had launched at the college in the spring of 1942. Inspired perhaps by Chick Austin and his European artworks at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Frick brought Jean Cocteau’s 1930 avant-garde film Blood of a Poet, among other foreign titles, to Hartford Junior College. Yourcenar, of course, was personally acquainted with Cocteau and an admirer of his poetry. As one Hartford newspaper noted, “‘The Blood of a Poet’ is an allegorical presentation of the life of a poet. The film is famous chiefly for its attempt to translate the techniques of modern poetry and painting into the medium of motion pictures.”15 Given Dean Frick’s interest in modernism, it’s easy to see why she would be intrigued by this experimental work. But one suspects that Chairman Cheney and his board were not delighted by the prospect of exposing their coeds to a film containing possible anti-Christian elements, an opium smoker, and a hermaphrodite.
By early 1943 Howell Cheney was becoming exasperated with his dean. On January 22 he sought advice from Clement C. Hyde, who handled money matters for the college and often contributed funds of his own to keep it afloat. Cheney had spoken for an hour that morning with Miss Frick, “but frankly,” as he wrote to Clement Hyde, “I felt I had failed to make my points clear to her as she was so voluminous and expansive in her discussion of every point.”16
Three days later Cheney sent the following letter to Dean Frick:
My conversation of this morning left me with a conviction that I had failed to make any points clear to you.
They are as follows:
There are grave doubts whether the College can continue for another year. Since these doubts cannot be resolved before next June we recognize that you may now reasonably protect your opportunities to obtain an assured position for next year.
You advised me of your intention to take funds from the textbook account to pay for the expenses for the films representing the Art and the Life of Foreign Nations, and, if this was not sufficient, to pay for them yourself. You should do neither of these two things. No one has any authority to transfer means from one fund to another, without the approval of the Board of Trustees, or the Comptroller. I feel quite sure that the Board would object to your obligating yourself for these expenses or to your undertaking the project without its approval.
No new projects should be undertaken, and no allocations of funds made without the approval of the Trustees or the Comptroller, and this should be presented to them with the approval of the proper committee.
It is my feeling, which is shared by other members of the Board of Trustees, that you undertake to do too many things. Some of these do not properly come within your duty. In doing so you unnecessarily exhaust your energies and your more essential work suffers.
In your extreme anxiety to give of your utmost to the students, faculty, and the employees, you are so anxious to accomplish your objective that you overlook their interests, with a resulting injury to their relations to you and the College.
I have suggested to Mr. Hyde that he also give you a memorandum of certain matters which he feels are not being handled in a proper or business-like way.
Having said the above I would emphasize again our deep appreciation of the sincerity of your work and of your efforts to give of yourself unsparingly.17
Over the next two days, Frick wrote what Cheney would no doubt call a “voluminous” response—two and a half single-spaced typewritten pages—and put it in a drawer. A few weeks later, ironically, an article in Wellesley magazine saluted Frick’s accomplishments in Hartford. It offers a distinctly more positive assessment of her and her work than Howell Cheney’s: “Since 1940, Grace M. Frick, ’25, has been doing distinguished pioneer work in Connecticut as Dean of Faculty (and acting head) of [Hartford Junior College].” The article goes on to quote several Wellesley alumnae praising Frick, among them Katherine Haynes Gatch: “Grace Frick’s zeal and imagination, together with her concern for the individual student, have done much in the organization and initial stages of the college. The venture is itself a significant one in the field of education and Miss Frick has brought great ingenuity and insight to her task.” Most notable is the assessment of Hartford Junior College trustee Mary Bulkley:
Miss Frick has great strength of purpose and a vital interest in the educational welfare of the students. She has a fine quality of self-forgetfulness, as well as a high sense of academic standards, so that the college has grown in value to the community under her administration. She has shown much resourcefulness with few resources, has gathered together a distinguished faculty, and has made many contacts for the students by using imagination and persistence. I hope that I am expressing something of the appreciation of the Board of Trustees for Miss Frick’s fine work.18
One is almost tempted to ask, Will the real Grace Frick please stand up?
While all this was going on back East, Grace’s seventy-four-year-old uncle George LaRue in Kansas City was once again in precarious health. Though he had eventually recovered from the crisis that kept Grace from returning to Yale in 1933, Unk had never regained his former strength. He had suffered several strokes over the past five years, each of which left him progressively weaker.19 Frick and her uncle had always been close. Still, between her family’s unenthusiastic reaction to her French friend and her professional obligations, she had not been home for almost four years. LaRue had more than once expressed his wish to see her. Ever the dutiful daughter when it came to her family, Grace would normally have dropped whatever she was doing to fly to Unk’s bedside. This time she did not. Her center of gravity had shifted.
On April 2, 1943, Howell Cheney called Frick to his office and fired her. She had not mailed her long letter of January 27, fearing it was overly expressive of her indignation. On the day she was let go, she reread Cheney’s letter of January 25 and sat down to type another two-page missive. Not until April 13 did she communicate both to the board chairman.
Incensed by the idea that she might have mishandled funds, Frick starts off on April 2 by noting that “one glance at the books would settle any misconceptions” in that regard and asking Cheney to clear up those misconceptions before the Board of Trustees. Frick then writes,
I see now that I was wrong not to have sent my reply, however indignant, at once. It was naturally a matter of some shock to me that you could write a letter on finances in such an accusing tone without once mentioning the essential fact that for nearly three years now I have kept within a budget which most college administrators would find laughable. Academic and household expenses have been kept down not only to the figures set, but below some of the figures agreed upon, in order to help in payment of unforeseen expenses voted by the Board itself. I have tried not to trouble you with complaints about economies, and did not care to do so as long as the quality of the institution continued to improve. It is significant to me that your letter does not once mention the high academic status of the institution, nor the approval with which its individual instructors, whom you seem to respect, regard it.
This is, I believe, the first time that I have ever addressed you on the subject of the finances of the College, but I have often wondered just how you thought those extraordinary balances were achieved, how rugs could wear out and be replaced, how cleaning and repairs could be made without expenditure, how entertainment could be given without disbursement from the budget, how cleaning could be paid for in summer, how instruction could improve in number of courses and in personnel, and how the students could be protected from burdensome extra charges which prevail in most private schools. You declare yourself dissatisfied with an administration which you have been unable to finance.
You tell me that the Board is dissatisfied with my relations to the parents and to the high schools. He would be a daring teacher who would claim to be loved by students and parents alike, but I will readily challenge you to a showing of hands on that subject. I happen to care enough about the students and their parents, too, to see that they get something really good, and if the students do not recognize the fact at first most of them do by the end of the year. Work such as we do cannot be carried on in an atmosphere of mutual disrespect and dislike. Geraldine O’Connell’s mother told me last summer that Geraldine was most unhappy at the College. She is, honestly, the only case of the kind which I have to report. Her high school principal had a similar report from the mother when the girl was in East Hartford High School. As to the schools, I have tried to visit them when we had no one else to send, and have not always done so under the best conditions, therefore, but the visits proved enjoyable for me and have produced some lasting friendships, so that I am somewhat bewildered as to the basis of your charge.
You will be impatient of these details but I have not written without first taking some time and some quiet to think. I am one of the few people in the teaching profession who can afford to protest against what seems to me a most extraordinary method of dealing with an official who has too often been left to her own devices in a position of some responsibility. Is there any reason on earth why you could not have said to me outright, in January or before, that you thought that I was not fulfilling this post satisfactorily? I suspect that you could not do so because the Board itself has not been able to take full responsibility for the College.
It is a matter of real regret to me that you have never really seen the College for what it is, and that it has always seemed to you a rather shabby little institution which someday might outgrow its present humility. The thing is good, and if only you had faith in what it now stands for you would not be so apologetic about it in talking to others. Some of the Trustees are suggesting that we are giving a luxury product to relatively poor girls (a curious conception of education in a democratic country), but someone must reply that a good education is never a luxury for anyone who is able to comprehend it. Is it not a basic distrust of the value of liberal arts which makes for so many rationalizations about practical courses? And for these two contradictory views of the College as unsuccessful, and at the same time extravagant because non-vocational?20
If Howell Cheney had expected Frick to jump ship when he told her in January that Hartford Junior College might close, he obviously didn’t know who he was dealing with. “I realize that the doubts concerning continuation of the College ‘cannot be resolved before next June,’” Frick wrote on January 27, “but it seems to me the more necessary to strive for its continuance at this time, therefore, and the less desirable to divert my energies to the very absorbing matter of seeking a position elsewhere.”21 About her supposed misappropriation of funds in connection with the foreign film series, Frick was adamant, calling Cheney’s remarks “serious charges upon me that are not in accordance with the facts. . . . No existing fund has been touched in any way or transferred, nor have I power to do such a thing if I wished so to do, as you must certainly know.” Proud of her and her colleagues’ accomplishments, she continued,
It is quite true that more than one of us on the staff is undertaking to do too many things on behalf of the College, a condition true of many pioneer ventures. We are offering an exceptionally fine curriculum and an extraordinary social experience to some thirty girls a year on a very small budget, and that means work for all of us, and many kinds of work. Until the College can afford extension of the staff in both directions, that is to say, until it can afford both a president and a janitor, such pioneering problems can hardly be resolved, and it is mere pretending to say that they can be avoided.
To his credit, Cheney replied, “These letters fill me with deep regret.”22 A week went by between his receipt of Frick’s two letters and the day he responded. During that time members of the board of trustees may have tried to impress on him the value of what Frick had accomplished. Accounting questions were not paramount in the decision to terminate Frick’s employment, Cheney explained:
I shall always retain the memory of your unselfish services and your outgoing determination to give of your utmost even beyond your strength to the life of the College. I am sure that the Board of Trustees also share this feeling toward you. This has made it much more difficult for all of us to approach the decision which probably should have been made last year, but which out of recognition of your valuable contributions was postponed. It is with deepest regret to all that it could not be postponed any longer.
This letter is dated April 20, 1943. The next day in Kansas City, George LaRue had a massive stroke and died.23 Grace took only as much time away from her duties as she needed to travel to Missouri for her uncle’s funeral. Knowing that Marguerite—surprisingly, given her renowned independence during the prewar years—did not like to be alone, Grace arranged for their friend Erika Vollger, who lived in New York, to come stay with her while she was away. Alone, exhausted, and rejected by an institution to which she had indeed given more than her utmost, Grace can only have been wondering what the point of it all was.
Marguerite Yourcenar had her own challenges to deal with during this, her initial year of teaching at Sarah Lawrence College. She had to rise before dawn on Monday mornings and, laden with whatever she would need for the week, begin the trip by bus and train that would eventually deliver her to the village of Bronxville in New York’s Hudson Valley. Thursday afternoons she would make the same three-hour trip in reverse, returning to Hartford for the weekend. Sometimes Grace would rise “heroically” at four in the morning and drive her to Bronxville in a rental car.24 One winter there was such a bad snowstorm that Yourcenar got lost in the drifts walking home on Prospect Avenue and had to be rescued by firemen!25
Years later, shortly after her election to the Académie française, officials at the University of Hartford, into which the former Hartford Junior College had long since been folded, attempted to bestow on Yourcenar an honorary doctorate. Stephen Trachtenberg, president of the institution, wrote to her or her assistant about the matter several times.26 So eager was Trachtenberg to bring Yourcenar to Hartford that he offered to fly her there and back on commencement day in a private plane. Yourcenar declined the award, as she would decline another honor offered by the same institution in 1987.27 As she wrote to Beatrice Kneeland (a onetime Hartford Junior College trustee), at the time her connection to that school had to do only with helping Grace Frick: “It is to her memory that retrospective honors should come, if any.”28 Apparently unbeknownst to anyone at the University of Hartford, Yourcenar would never have accepted a tribute from a college that had fired her companion.
Not only had Howell Cheney given Frick the sack, he had enjoined her not to tell anyone about her dismissal. In early May Cheney expressed his wish to make a public announcement of Frick’s departure, as if the choice to leave had been hers. Frick would have none of it:
I do not authorize you to issue any statement about my resignation or withdrawal, since that is not the case. You may, if you like, say exactly what you said to me on April 2, for that is what I must say when people ask me, as they will, why I am leaving. Or you may say outright that you are replacing me by someone else.
A year ago, and again last fall, I offered to resign if Mrs. Macmillan were to be retained on the staff. At neither time, nor at any other time, did you give me the slightest intimation that the Board was considering my removal. The Trustees have not made an effort to understand fully how the College operates under present conditions and, with the exception of Mr. Hyde, have not helped in the problems of administration; yet without a word to me in advance, or inquiry by Committee, the Board met on April first, as I understand it, to vote on my removal. I see no excuse for this method of procedure and do not wish to be a party to any concealment whatsoever in the matter of public announcement.29
As far as the board’s explicit reasons for removing Frick from her position are concerned, they are stated in three sentences of the otherwise highly laudatory letter that Howell Cheney composed for inclusion in Frick’s Wellesley placement file. Cheney first acknowledges the challenges with which Frick had always to grapple. He then goes on to say, “At the end of her three years, even allowing for the difficulties, we feel that she has not proven herself a natural administrator. It is very difficult for her to delegate work to others and to refrain from having a part in every enterprise. Confronted with more things than one person could possibly do, Miss Frick tried to do them all, rather than to select the most important demands.”30
One member of the board of trustees, Dorothy Pietrallo, was later willing to comment on what happened between Cheney and Frick:
I think that Mr. Cheney felt that this new baby, this new college was his child, and he wanted so much to steer it that he steered it instead of helping to steer it. He was overanxious. He was so totally dedicated and committed to this institution that it just had to run right. And he had to know of day-to-day operations of it. I doubt if you would call him a good one to delegate authority. I think he, perhaps unconsciously, felt the need to share rather than to delegate. But he was totally committed to every facet of the college. I think he would deeply have resented it if you’d called him a meddler.31
There may simply have been too many chiefs and almost no Indians. Other factors may also have entered into Cheney’s and the trustees’ assessment of Frick’s suitability as dean, however. We have seen what happened to Chick Austin when he staged a play at the Wadsworth Atheneum that scandalized reactionary Hartford. Austin had also left his wife, Helen, a member of the Hartford elite, to move in with a male lover.32 It may not be purely by chance that when Cheney chose to pick a bone with Frick about her supposed misappropriation of funds earmarked for textbooks, it involved her decision to screen avant-garde films like Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet. Frick and Yourcenar’s closeness to Chick Austin at a time when he was not in good odor among Hartford’s leading citizens may have played a role, too; not to mention the fact that Frick herself was living with a woman and appeared to have no interest in changing that state of affairs.
There is no precise indication in the Hartford College Archives as to when a public announcement was made of Frick’s departure or what that announcement consisted of. She was still manning the dean’s office on June 8 when a long letter came from Cheney. Without Frick’s knowledge, the board chairman had taken it upon himself, shortly after she was fired, to inform the then president of Wellesley College, Mildred McAfee, that “the present Dean is retiring at the end of this year to finish her work for a Ph.D. degree.”33 Frick, of course, did not appreciate this misrepresentation of the facts and prevailed on Cheney to set things straight with the officials at her alma mater. For Frick, the prospect of being perceived by her many friends and mentors at Wellesley as someone who would give up on a pioneering educational institution for young women just because the going got tough was far more objectionable than being seen as an incompetent administrator.
Meanwhile, word of Frick’s dismissal got out. On June 14 a beautifully handwritten letter individually signed by the students of Hartford Junior College was sent to Howell Cheney:
We, the students of Hartford Junior College, would like to have you know before we leave the college for the summer, or permanently, that your impression that we did not like Miss Frick is false.
To us, Miss Frick is Hartford Junior College. The college, as we know it, is alive with her personality and her desire that every girl get the most from its limited facilities. Without money, the college must have ideals on which to function. These ideals have become a large part of Miss Frick’s life and it is her devotion alone which has seen them fulfilled.
The combination of devoted friend and cultured dean was found to such an unusual degree in Miss Frick that we wonder how anyone can take her place.34
Frick’s dedication to Hartford Junior College can obviously be judged by the extraordinary energy we have seen her devote to that struggling institution since the day she stepped into the deanship. But her greatest joy was teaching, of which the text she used to teach Hamlet in the spring of 1943 provides a poignant glimpse. Frick had received a review copy of the 1939 edition of The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare, edited by George Lyman Kittredge. At the top of page 2, she wrote, “Delight of taking a new text and marking it a) for the new year and its experiences (1943), b) in relation to what one has just been reading, Dr. Faustus, and perhaps c) a new editor, if very good.”35 The new year and its experiences did not turn out to be very pleasant ones. But what Howell Cheney and the board of trustees may never have known is that when they lost Grace Frick—and, with her, Marguerite Yourcenar—they also lost what would have been a big boost to the long-term financial well-being of their institution. So devoted was Frick to the mission of Hartford Junior College that she had initially made it one of the two ultimate beneficiaries of her estate.36 The establishment that Frick endowed instead would make out very well indeed.