{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/z60bv7bv42/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Borroff, Marie, 2008 January 31"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/013/original/yale-blue.png?1678220072","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Preferred Citation"]},"value":{"en":["Borroff, Marie, 2008 January 31. Oral Histories Documenting Yale University Women (RU 1051). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.\n\n https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/resources/2559."]}},{"label":{"en":["Source Metadata URI"]},"value":{"en":["https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/archival_objects/801859"]}},{"label":{"en":["Publisher"]},"value":{"en":["Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library."]}},{"label":{"en":["Rights Statement"]},"value":{"en":["Access to the materials is partially restricted. See Collection Contents for details.\n\nOriginal computer files may not be accessed due to their fragility. Researchers must consult access copies."]}},{"label":{"en":["Identifier"]},"value":{"en":["mssa.ru.1051 (EAD ID)","RU 1051 (Call Number)","ru_1051_2012-a-037_borroff_marie_audiorecording.mp3 (Digital Object ID)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2008 January 31 (Creation)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Description"]},"value":{"en":["The materials are open for research. (Accessrestrict)","Marie Borroff was born on September 10, 1923, in New York City.  She completed high school at the age of fifteen, after which she spent a year studying piano at the Chicago Conservatory and some time earning a living playing the piano in New York.  She earned her undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Chicago, where she won the James Billings Fiske poetry prize in 1943.   Before coming to Yale for her Ph.D. in English Literature and Philology, which she completed in 1956, she was a teaching assistant at the University of Chicago, 1946-1947, and then an instructor in English at Smith College, 1948-1951.  After completing her Ph.D. Borroff returned to Smith as an Assistant Professor, and then Associate Professor, from 1956-1959.   In 1959, she became the first woman to teach in the English Department at Yale, and in 1965 she became the first woman to be appointed as tenured Professor of English, and only the second woman to be tenured in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the university.  In 1991, she became the first woman on the faculty to be named a Sterling Professor.  Marie Borroff retired in 1994. \n\nDuring her forty years on the Yale faculty, Marie Borroff held many administrative and committee positions, most notably Faculty Counselor to the Presidential Search Committee, 1992-1993, in which she was charged with relaying the views of the faculty to the committee.  In 1984 she served as wordsmith for the seminal Crothers Report of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Advisory Committee on the Education of Women at Yale.\n\nMarie Borroff’s varied scholarly interests encompass the poetry of both the Middle Ages and the twentieth century.  In 1963, she published Wallace Stevens: a Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice-Hall) and Language and the Poet: Verbal Artistry in Frost, Stevens, and Moore (University of Chicago Press, 1979). She has translated three works by the so-called Gawain or Pearl-poet, Patience, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Norton, 2001), and is the author of two major collections of critical essays on the subject, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: a Stylistic and Metrical Study (Yale University Press, 1963) and Traditions and Renewals: Chaucer, the Gawain-poet and Beyond (Yale University Press, 2003).  Her translations of the remaining two Pearl-poet works, Cleanness and St. Erkenwald, will appear in 2008.  Her own collected poems, Stars and Other Signs, were published by Yale University Press in 2002.  In 1995 she was honored by a festschrift, The Endless Knot: Essays on Old and Middle English in Honor of Marie Borroff, edited by M. Teresa Tavormina and R. F. Yeager (Boydell and Brewer, 1995).  A distinguished teacher, her lectures were filmed for the Yale Great Teachers Series.  She was on the board of Yale University Press, 1988-1998, and the Yale University Alumni Association awarded her the Wilbur Cross Medal, the highest honor of the Yale Graduate School, in 1996.\n\nIn January 2008, Yale University established the Marie Borroff Professor of English in her honor.   Its first recipient is another woman and a fellow-medievalist, Roberta Frank. (Bioghist)","Marie Borroff begins by talking about the newly established Marie Borroff Professorship and its significance to her.  She pays tribute to her upbringing, especially how her father, a man of little formal education, encouraged independence and intellectual excellence, against the prevailing attitudes on the education of women.  Her mother was a talented pianist and from their earliest childhood playing the piano was a daily discipline for Borroff and her sister. She recounts her early discovery of poetry and the role of music in her life, both as a source of income as a young woman, and as an inspiration in her literary scholarship.  Borroff recalls the social and intellectual challenges of her student years at the University of Chicago, its unique Ph.B. (Bachelor of Philosophy) undergraduate program, and the influence and mentorship of two Chicago teachers, Norman Maclean and R. S. Crane.  Life as a graduate student at Yale is described: her experience of living in the women’s dormitory; her relationships with other graduate students including E. D. Hirsch; and how she was mentored by her exclusively male teachers, Helge Kokeritz, John C. Pope and E. Talbot Donaldson.  Borroff talks at length about the social expectations of women at Smith College especially the Ivy League “mixer” culture, and the effect of that culture on the first cohort of women undergraduates at Yale. Borroff remembers how she got her first job at Yale, how she secured tenure and what it was like to teach male undergraduates.  Much is said about the intellectual and social culture of the Yale English Department, her male colleagues and their wives, and her experience of being the only woman in the department for many years.  Borroff recalls her encounters with the sinologist Mary Clabaugh Wright, the only other tenured woman in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at that time.  The arrival of the first junior female faculty in the mid-1960s is addressed, and the extent to which gender became a complicating issue in the historic division between junior and senior faculty at Yale. Borroff talks about her experiences of mentoring the younger, junior women faculty, and her attempts to ameliorate what she considers to be the exploitation of several of them.  She describes her involvement in the Helen Hadley Hall Fellowship for women at Yale, and how she became a Fellow at Ezra Stiles College.  She discusses her work on the 1984 Crothers Report on the education of women at Yale; her views on co-education; feminism, discrimination and affirmative action at Yale; the challenges she faced as an interim Director of Graduate Studies; her contribution to the Presidential Search Committee, 1992-1993; and why she did not pursue an administrative career at Yale.  Finally Borroff considers the changing role of the humanities in American culture, and the growing place of women in academia. (Scope and Content Note)","https://preservica.library.yale.edu/explorer/explorer.html#prop:4\u0026amp;21f50943-c0b9-4dbb-9abc-c561a3d8a9eb (Other Finding Aid Note)","This material was originally acquired in 2009 as a direct network transfer from Yale shared network attached storage and artificial logical AD1 forensic images were created. AD1 images were extracted in May 2020 and resulting files processed. Audio files which had been originally recorded in short sequential tracks, were merged together into a single processed master wav file with fre:ac software. (Processinfo)"]}}],"summary":{"en":["The materials are open for research.","Marie Borroff was born on September 10, 1923, in New York City.  She completed high school at the age of fifteen, after which she spent a year studying piano at the Chicago Conservatory and some time earning a living playing the piano in New York.  She earned her undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Chicago, where she won the James Billings Fiske poetry prize in 1943.   Before coming to Yale for her Ph.D. in English Literature and Philology, which she completed in 1956, she was a teaching assistant at the University of Chicago, 1946-1947, and then an instructor in English at Smith College, 1948-1951.  After completing her Ph.D. Borroff returned to Smith as an Assistant Professor, and then Associate Professor, from 1956-1959.   In 1959, she became the first woman to teach in the English Department at Yale, and in 1965 she became the first woman to be appointed as tenured Professor of English, and only the second woman to be tenured in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the university.  In 1991, she became the first woman on the faculty to be named a Sterling Professor.  Marie Borroff retired in 1994. \n\nDuring her forty years on the Yale faculty, Marie Borroff held many administrative and committee positions, most notably Faculty Counselor to the Presidential Search Committee, 1992-1993, in which she was charged with relaying the views of the faculty to the committee.  In 1984 she served as wordsmith for the seminal \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003eCrothers Report of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Advisory Committee on the Education of Women at Yale.\u003c/title\u003e\n\nMarie Borroff’s varied scholarly interests encompass the poetry of both the Middle Ages and the twentieth century.  In 1963, she published \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003eWallace Stevens: a Collection of Critical Essays\u003c/title\u003e (Prentice-Hall) and \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003eLanguage and the Poet: Verbal Artistry in Frost, Stevens, and Moore\u003c/title\u003e (University of Chicago Press, 1979). She has translated three works by the so-called Gawain or Pearl-poet, \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003ePatience, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight\u003c/title\u003e (Norton, 2001), and is the author of two major collections of critical essays on the subject, \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003eSir Gawain and the Green Knight: a Stylistic and Metrical Study\u003c/title\u003e (Yale University Press, 1963) and \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003eTraditions and Renewals: Chaucer, the Gawain-poet and Beyond\u003c/title\u003e (Yale University Press, 2003).  Her translations of the remaining two Pearl-poet works, \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003eCleanness and St. Erkenwald\u003c/title\u003e, will appear in 2008.  Her own collected poems, \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003eStars and Other Signs\u003c/title\u003e, were published by Yale University Press in 2002.  In 1995 she was honored by a festschrift, \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003eThe Endless Knot: Essays on Old and Middle English in Honor of Marie Borroff\u003c/title\u003e, edited by M. Teresa Tavormina and R. F. Yeager (Boydell and Brewer, 1995).  A distinguished teacher, her lectures were filmed for the Yale Great Teachers Series.  She was on the board of Yale University Press, 1988-1998, and the Yale University Alumni Association awarded her the Wilbur Cross Medal, the highest honor of the Yale Graduate School, in 1996.\n\nIn January 2008, Yale University established the Marie Borroff Professor of English in her honor.   Its first recipient is another woman and a fellow-medievalist, Roberta Frank.","Marie Borroff begins by talking about the newly established Marie Borroff Professorship and its significance to her.  She pays tribute to her upbringing, especially how her father, a man of little formal education, encouraged independence and intellectual excellence, against the prevailing attitudes on the education of women.  Her mother was a talented pianist and from their earliest childhood playing the piano was a daily discipline for Borroff and her sister. She recounts her early discovery of poetry and the role of music in her life, both as a source of income as a young woman, and as an inspiration in her literary scholarship.  Borroff recalls the social and intellectual challenges of her student years at the University of Chicago, its unique Ph.B. (Bachelor of Philosophy) undergraduate program, and the influence and mentorship of two Chicago teachers, Norman Maclean and R. S. Crane.  Life as a graduate student at Yale is described: her experience of living in the women’s dormitory; her relationships with other graduate students including E. D. Hirsch; and how she was mentored by her exclusively male teachers, Helge Kokeritz, John C. Pope and E. Talbot Donaldson.  Borroff talks at length about the social expectations of women at Smith College especially the Ivy League “mixer” culture, and the effect of that culture on the first cohort of women undergraduates at Yale. Borroff remembers how she got her first job at Yale, how she secured tenure and what it was like to teach male undergraduates.  Much is said about the intellectual and social culture of the Yale English Department, her male colleagues and their wives, and her experience of being the only woman in the department for many years.  Borroff recalls her encounters with the sinologist Mary Clabaugh Wright, the only other tenured woman in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at that time.  The arrival of the first junior female faculty in the mid-1960s is addressed, and the extent to which gender became a complicating issue in the historic division between junior and senior faculty at Yale. Borroff talks about her experiences of mentoring the younger, junior women faculty, and her attempts to ameliorate what she considers to be the exploitation of several of them.  She describes her involvement in the Helen Hadley Hall Fellowship for women at Yale, and how she became a Fellow at Ezra Stiles College.  She discusses her work on the 1984 Crothers Report on the education of women at Yale; her views on co-education; feminism, discrimination and affirmative action at Yale; the challenges she faced as an interim Director of Graduate Studies; her contribution to the Presidential Search Committee, 1992-1993; and why she did not pursue an administrative career at Yale.  Finally Borroff considers the changing role of the humanities in American culture, and the growing place of women in academia.","https://preservica.library.yale.edu/explorer/explorer.html#prop:4\u002621f50943-c0b9-4dbb-9abc-c561a3d8a9eb","This material was originally acquired in 2009 as a direct network transfer from Yale shared network attached storage and artificial logical AD1 forensic images were created. AD1 images were extracted in May 2020 and resulting files processed. Audio files which had been originally recorded in short sequential tracks, were merged together into a single processed master wav file with fre:ac software."]},"requiredStatement":{"label":{"en":["Attribution"]},"value":{"en":["Access to the materials is partially restricted. See Collection Contents for details.\n\nOriginal computer files may not be accessed due to their fragility. Researchers must consult access copies."]}},"provider":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/aboutus","type":"Agent","label":{"en":["Manuscripts and Archives Yale University Library"]},"homepage":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/","type":"Text","label":{"en":["Manuscripts and Archives Yale University Library"]},"format":"text/html"}],"logo":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/013/original/yale-blue.png?1678220072","type":"Image"}]}],"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/public/images/audio-default.png","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - open-uri20210827-32762-o0ywtf.ttf"]},"duration":15324.768,"width":640,"height":40,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/public/images/audio-default.png","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-yalemssa.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/122/263/original/open-uri20210827-32762-o0ywtf.ttf?1630069481","type":"Audio","format":"application/octet-stream","duration":15324.768,"width":640,"height":40},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["ru_1051_2012-a-037_borroff_marie_edited_transcript [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER:\tI'm here with Professor Marie Borroff, at her home in Saint Ronan, in New Haven, and we're going to do an interview for the Yale Women's Oral History Project.  So Marie, I think it's fair to say that you have been the woman who has been longest associated with the Yale faculty, of all the women that I've encountered in doing the process.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAmong the living.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAmong the living.  (laughs)  But even ah, even beyond the living, I think you're probably -- your, your association with the university is longer than anyone else's.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tExcept the nursing school and perhaps the medical school, and then there was a woman I knew early on, who was in that fellowship with Helen Hadley Hall that I've told you about.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tConstance Welch.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnd she was attached to the school of drama and she taught elocution.  So I think she'd been there before I got here.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tSo.  In the faculty of arts and sciences, as far as teaching courses in the college, in the graduate school, is concerned, I am probably the longest time veteran for that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, yes.  I wonder if you're a battle scarred one.  We'll find out.  I would like to start not in the past but in the present, at the very present, because within the last couple of weeks, you have had a tremendous honor bestowed on your, which is an endowed chair in your name.  And I think --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI have indeed.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, and I think barring the Annie Goodrich chair in the School of Nursing, it may be one of the very few, if not a unique honor that's been bestowed by you on, on the women faculty.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd I'd just like to um, to start there and get a sense of what it means to you.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell, what it means in a sense is that some invisible hand has descended and patted my head, and a voice has said, well done thou good and faithful servant.  And it just validates everything I've tried to be and do at the university.  And as I did it, as the years passed, I just felt that I was, I was simply doing my very best.  I was doing the very best I could.  And now I see, that in retrospect, that has been good and it's been said to be good.  It's been -- I've been told that it's good.  The thing that I find the most -- thrilling isn't really a word I use often but I think it fits in this case.  You'll see the announcement when it comes up, the bulletin and calendar, and I've read it, and Rick Levin says, at the beginning that my name will be in the university forever, and that's quite a heady, amazing thought.  And for me, a very important part of that is the perpetuation of my father's name, because my father, though he was a very gifted man and a man with real intellectual aspirations, never really achieved anything much himself.  He was a salesman and he adored my mother, who was a superb musician, but he himself never got much recognition, and he died very early, at 61, which now seems extremely early to me.  So I like the idea that his name will be perpetuated.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat's an amazing thought.  He would be beyond delighted I would think, at the news.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.  He was -- I think this was very good for both my sister and myself.  I'm not sure he even got through high school, but he wanted my sister and me, and we were obviously very bright students.  He wanted us to get as much education as we possibly could, and the more we got and the more -- the better we were at it, the better he liked it.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=0.0,300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/2","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"So there was none of this message that all too many women get, silently or otherwise through their young lives, you mustn't seem too smart, you mustn't be too smart, because the men don't like it, and what you want to do is to marry a wonderful man and have a family, and if you're -- if you seem to be smart, that will put men off.  I think that was a very, very common message in the '30s and '40s.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI wonder where he -- I wonder what made him go against the grain of society?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell he was a -- just a very generous man, and a loving man, and he could see that my sister and I both had potentialities.  You mentioned my sister a little while ago.  She too went on and became a professor and became well known in her field.  So we both really fulfilled his dreams for us.  I can remember, whenever I would come home for a visit, I probably would be reading something that I was reading in course, and he would always come around and say, \"What is that?  What is it about?\"  And was interested and what I would tell him.  And he ah, and I can remember he, for a while, he sold paintings.  There was some sort of an art dealer who had in his stable, several not very well known painters, who might do a portrait or something, and then my father would try to sell these, and some of them were prints.  He once said that he liked a landscape very much that a painter had done, and he spoke to him about it and the painter said oh, \"It's no better than being there.\"  And that fascinated him.  That's a philosophical idea.  There's a theoretical nucleus to that, and he would have loved to explore that but his life never led him that way.  So, he was unfulfilled I would, I would say, except as a husband and a lover, but other than that, my sister and I really made come true, the dreams that he had, and I think I've said this to you before.  If he had ever known that I was a professor at Yale, never mind an honored professor or anything like that, I think he would have died of joy.  I don't think he could have believed it, that it would be possible.  So, I'm very glad the name Borroff, his name, is going to go on.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you ever feel anything other than a loving pressure from him?  You never felt that there was anything that you would have rather have done than follow what he clearly dreamt for you?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo, because really there was no pressure.  It was just something that I felt.  I can't really think of things that he said.  It was just that he was always very interested in whatever I was doing, and he um, when our family moved into New York City when I was maybe 12 or 13, he didn't want my sister and me to go to the New York public schools because he didn't think they were very good, justifiably or not.  He literally went to every private school in the city and saw the principal and would say, I have two daughters who are extremely bright, and they would be an ornament to your school, and but they need scholarships.  After quite a while, after he had visited quite a few schools, he found a school that would take us on a scholarship, and actually it was within walking distance of where we were living, and that was Friends Seminary in New York City, which is still going.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIs that a Quaker school?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.  The board of trustees was, at least, composed of Friends, but not the faculty, and I don't even think the principal was a Friend, but the school was under the auspices of the Friends and it had -- one of the buildings was an old, probably 18th Century, Quaker meeting house, where we would go to assembly sometimes.  The seats were very uncomfortable and wooden with straight backs, and sometimes there would be a Friends meeting held there that we would attending, and the -- you may know that what happens at a Friends meeting is that instead of any kind of service they sit, and someone is inspired to speak and rises and speaks, and so we saw some of that and we thought it was very strange and very eccentric.  Anyway, so we -- he insured that we went to a really good school, and from that school, Friends, I went to the University of Chicago because one of my teachers there thought that was the place for me to go, and if that teacher hadn't said that, I wouldn't have known what college to go to.  At Chicago, I met men who were tremendously important in my life; Norman Maclean for one.\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=300.0,600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/3","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And Ronald Crane, who was older than Norman.  He was the one who put me on to Yale, when I told him what I wanted to do at a higher level.  So all that came out of my father's determination that my sister and I should go to a private school and have a really good education.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd the education at the school validated and encouraged women to excel.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.  I think there was --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOr to be the best they can be, I think is the Quaker way isn't it?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.  I think so, yeah.  I think the school really treated -- I never had a sense that as a woman student, I was being any -- treated any differently from the young men.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd it was a mixed school.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI'm sorry?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas it a mixed school -- \r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- boys and girls?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes, it was co-ed.  I think there may have been a few more women than men.  It was very small at that time.  It's much larger now.  I think the classes had ten or twelve in them probably, and my class, the Class of 1939, fifteen maybe.  It was small.  Now that was good, because we got individual attention.  So that was my father.  He, he, he just made a list of every private school in New York, and he went and at about the tenth one, he found this man, the principal, who was willing to take us.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat must have been a difficult thing for him to do, to have to go almost cap in hand.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tHe was determined, it must have been, but he was so sure that we were right and we should have a good school, and he was a salesman, that was his profession.  So he sold my sister and me.  (laughter)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhere does your mother figure into all of this?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell, she was brought up to be -- perhaps I -- I'm sure I've told you this story, because it's part of the family mythology, that her mother had had two boys, and when she found herself pregnant again, she had two wishes; that her child should be a girl and that the child should be musical and play the piano.  So as soon as he knew she was pregnant, she cast about, and she found a teenaged young woman, a girl who was living not far away.  This was in Chicago, and she hired her to come and give her a piano lesson every day, all during her pregnancy.  You know, it's now known that the fetus can hear within the womb, at least after a certain point of development, it has ears and it can hear.  And then the minute that mother was able to sit up at the piano, she was placed at the piano and this same young girl taught her.  So she began playing from the very earliest possible time, and when that happens I think, as it happened to my sister and me as well.  As soon as we were old enough to sit up, we were placed at the piano, and there never was a time when piano was not a part of the day.  Mother said it was daily bread.  And when that happens, I think you don't struggle against it unless you're tone deaf or something, but if you're at all musical it's just a part of life.  So whether it was that early background or not I don't know, but my mother was a phenomenal pianist and she was a phenomenal sight reader.  By the time she was in her teens, she could read anything.  And every night her father, who was an attorney, would come home, and there was a music store on the way home, and he would stop in and buy a collection of piano music and bring it home, and then after dinner, he'd sit and smoke a cigar or two and mother would play through whatever book that was for him.  So she got to be an astounding sight reader.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas that the inspiration for your poem?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThe ah, Portrait of a Young Girl?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh yes, indeed.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.  There she sits.  I am Marie Vargason (sp?), I play.  I've never shown you a reproduction of that have I?  Maybe I have.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo.  Of the photograph?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo, I haven't.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI will at some point.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI'd love to see it.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBecause one of the things that strikes me about the poem, not just because it's about your mother, but the, the -- literally, the portrait you've given her is of tremendous self-knowledge and self-possession.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAbsolutely.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd I wondered if she carried that through into when she became a mother.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tImbued it in you and your sister.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell, maybe it was passed along.  I, I don't know.  I was the good child and my sister was the naughty child.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou're the older one.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI'm the older one, yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt's usually the other way around.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell, that may be, but I had a temperament that was very docile and as mother said, I was no problem at all as a baby.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=600.0,900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/4","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I never cried, and she wake -- she'd have to wake me up in the middle of the night to give me a bottle, which she thought she was supposed to do.  She always said I'd be like this, and I'd put the bottle, and then after a while would just go to sleep.  So I was the ideal baby.  I was most specially the ideal first baby, but when my sister came along she cried, she wanted attention.  They'd put her to bed and then she'd start to cry.  Finally, mother went to the pediatrician and told her -- and then someone would go up and turn the light out and the minute that happened she'd be all smiles.  But then put the room dark and go downstairs again and the crying would begin.  And the pediatrician said well, if you could get your husband to sort of hide in the room where the child is, so to be sure she isn't going to choke or something like that, then let her cry her cry out.  And that's what they did.  Daddy went in and hid on -- he crawled under the cot.  Then they put her to bed and then eventually she stopped crying, and then night after night he did that and the crying became shorter and shorter, and finally she didn't cry.  Now, whether that made her feel that there was no hope or it was bad for her psychologically, I don't know.  It may have been that she felt she was in an unloving world, where nobody cared whether she cried or not.  I don't know, and I don't know what the right thing to do would have been in that situation, but she was utterly different from me.  So, she was viewed in the family as the problem and therefore, I think her problem with self-confidence was totally different from mine.  She had to create self-confidence with this background of disapproval, implicit disapproval, and she would lie.  She would not tell the truth always, and then that would be found out and that would make it much worse than before.  So we were so completely different, that I think she has always had a harder time psychologically than I.  She said to me the, the other night, apropos but I know not what, \"You had a nothing sister\" she said.  And I was the star and she was the nothing, even though she herself worked hard, published books, became very well known and had a lot of young people who still are in touch with her, as their mentor and guru and so on, but it was harder, much harder for her than it ever was for me.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you ever feel -- maybe, I don't know whether it existed, but how did affect the relationship between the two of you, when you were young?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell, the relationship has always been uneasy.  She wrote her autobiography not too long ago, after she moved to her retirement home, where she is living now, and I read it of course and I was astounded to see that I came off in the autobiography as someone who had always been very supportive and loyal, because I don't remember always being supportive and loyal.  But she's kind of whitewashed that I think, and in retrospect, she sanitized it or something and made me into something that I really don't deserve to be.  She remembers me as having been loyal to her.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI think sibling rivalry is a very treacherous area.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh, indeed.  So she wants more of me than I can give, and when I say we have an uneasy relationship, there is that.  It never becomes explicit, but we talk twice a week on the phone, that's a regular, absolute, an absolute.  We have to, at a certain hour on a certain day, and we talk on Wednesday and we talk on Sunday.  Recently, and then once before, she said Wednesday to Sunday is too long.  But I can't accommodate another -- a third call during, during the week.  It's never come to that.  She's never asked me in so many words, can't we talk again on Friday or something.  If she did, I'd have to find a way of saying that I really can't do that.  She does call me between times, but the regular calls are twice a week, so.  And I've just always had a happier life and an easier time.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSometimes of course, being the older child means that you have a position where you know who you are in the family.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=900.0,1200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/5","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And what problems often arise is that the, the older child can often see the younger child as the interloper, the one who is kind of taking away the affection that the older one had exclusively.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnd I think some of that must have happened, though I can't remember it.  She came along two years after I was born and two things happened.  This is, I suppose, more for a psychoanalyst than for just an interview, but I had very, very beautiful hair.  It was sort of a red-gold color.  I still have some color left.  It's not dyed, it's my own hair, my own color, and curly, and then it grew out straight, and at one point I had to have it bobbed and have all the curls cut off and have straight hair, and I think that was a very, very difficult thing for me.  Ridiculous, but I think it's true, and mother would spend hours fussing over my hair and doing the curls, you know the long sausage curls.  So that and my sister coming along must have made things hard for me, but I don't remember it.  I do remember crying out for some reason or other, \"But I'm so plain!\"  Because I no longer had any curls and was a pretty, pretty young baby.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd yet the pair of you clearly have been so successful in your chosen endeavors.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes we have.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOf course my sister went into music, which was the family profession.  I didn't go into music but music has always been very important, and I think music has played a part in my scholarship too, even though it hasn't been about music.  It's been about sounds and rhythms and musical things.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  And I would imagine too, that your musical knowledge and expertise, this skill, brings something to the understanding of, of the written word because --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI think so.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  No, I...  You've told me a little bit about your high school, but the one thing that I think is also remarkable about your high school experience is that you graduated very, very early.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAt 15, because I had skipped two grades, but I was socially very, very immature.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.  So, I don't --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo you didn't make many friends or anything like that?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI made some friends yeah, but I don't look back on my high school days as happy ones.  I, I did make two or three friends, girl friends, as we used to say.  I didn't date.  I don't know whether it was good or not, but good or not, my father insisted that I wait two years before I went to college, and I spent those partly with music and partly, he insisted that my sister and I both go to secretarial school, because the Depression was still on, and he said now you will always be able to get a job.  So we -- I learned shorthand and typing, as Edith did, and promptly forgot the shorthand, I never used it, but the typing has been very good.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tSo, it took me a long time to become mature socially, and I think probably Yale helped immensely in that, because that gave me an environment where I intermingled with men and women.  At Smith it was so much a woman's thing, with mostly women on the faculty and all women students.  So I think Yale was just the making of me socially.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThere are not many women who say that.  (laughs) \r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo I'll be interested to hear, hear more about that in a little while.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI remember a dinner party I was at when I was first at Yale, and somebody was saying, I don't know what it was, about the Yale students and how wonderful they were and how attractive they were, and I said, \"Oh yes, water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.\"  (laughter)  And the man who was there said, \"Is that what you think?\"  And I said, \"Yes.\"  And he said, \"Well then I think that's too bad.\"  But I wasn't unhappy.  I loved teaching the Yale boys, but that -- but in a way you know, it was there they were and there I was, and I was 20 years older than they were.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=1200.0,1500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/6","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER:\tNowadays, at least in Britain, taking a rest or break between high school and university is very common, especially amongst the middle and upper middle classes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tGood.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIn, in Britain, and it's called a gap year.  What I find extraordinary is that you, you took more than one gap year.  Obviously you took the two years.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tTwo, to get me -- to get me the usual college age.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd I think, I think I could understand your father wanting you to be exposed maybe, to more of life.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tMaybe.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd develop other skills before going to university.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAlso, I took one year studying at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago and living in their dormitory, to find out if music was where I wanted to go.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnd that year showed me that it wasn't.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tBecause I, I was trying to practice four hours a day, and I found that very confining.  You know in German, they speak of the sitzfleisch, the sitting flesh, and you have to have it in order to be a concern pianist.  You have to be not only willing, but you have to really like it I guess, to just sit at the piano for hours a day.  My mother never did that because somehow, she had the mobility or whatever it was in her fingers, that enabled her to sight read things, and she really never had to practice a great deal.  And I just found that I, I didn't like it.  It was not congenial to spend so much of your time in music, as much as I love music.  Also, and I think this is very important, I never played as well in public as I did in private, and I think that's a sign that that wasn't my vocation, whereas I love to speak and to give lectures in front of people.  The larger the audience the better, I'm not in the least nervous, and I probably talk better than I do in private.  So I think one's vocation should be something that brings out the best in oneself in a pleasurable way, and music was not that for me.  I dreaded playing in public.  When the time came for me to participate in the annual contest -- the Conservatory had an annual concerto contest, and they would pick a classical concerto.  The year my sister won it, it was Beethoven, Beethoven's Third, but my year it was Cesar Franck's Symphonic Variations, and that was cruelly, cruelly difficult, and but I practiced it as best I could.  When I came to perform it in the first round, I came to the hardest one and I stopped and then began again, and I was eliminated.  My mother had won it and my sister went on to win it, but I did not win it.  I didn't even get to the second round.  So that wasn't meant for me.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tHow -- um, how did you feel, that you kind of fell at the fence?  Can you remember?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tHow did I?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tHow did you feel, not being able to perform it?  Was it relief, was it a sense of failure?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo, it was a sense of humiliation.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tHumiliation.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.  Mother had a friend who taught there, a very outspoken one, and ah let's see, how did this go?  Also, another thing that worked in there -- that situation, I think, was that my teacher was the same woman who had taught my mother's mother, now probably in her late sixties or seventies, and she, I think, thought that I was a replication of mother, which I wasn't, and I think she gave me things that were too difficult to practice.  I remember there was a Ravel toccata, part of a suite, that was just fiendishly difficult.  I learned it but I wasn't really on top of it.  I couldn't dash at all, but I did play it and I played it at some sort of recital that they gave at the Conservatory, where different students played different things.  And then later, I played it in the home of this woman, this rather outspoken woman who was one of these adjunct aunts.  You know, she was my aunt Ethel though she was no relation, and after I finished she said, \"Why didn't you play it like that at the recital?\"  Which embarrassed me deeply, but I knew that was true.  There was some sort of inhibition that took over somehow, self-consciousness, and you can't be self-conscious and let your fingers go you know.  So anyway, music was not for me and it took -- I took that year, the second academic year to find that out, and applied to the University of Chicago.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd you applied to, to major in English in --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.  I didn't know what I wanted to major in.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou didn't?\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=1500.0,1800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/7","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"MARIE BORROFF:\tBut at Chicago, the president of Chicago was a man whose name is not well known not but it was then; Robert Maynard Hutchins.  He became famous when he was dean of the Yale Law School in his thirties, and he was a prodigy.  Very handsome, very sure of himself, and then he became president of the University of Chicago, and he believed that every citizen should have a bachelors degree, which would be in liberal arts, meaning a variety of subjects, and it would be called -- he called it a PhB, Bachelor of Philosophy, and it was a very set program.  It lasted two years and you took eight courses, and most of them were prescribed; a humanities survey, a social sciences survey, a biological sciences survey.  I don't think we had to take physical science, as I suppose that would have been too hard, but I know we took those three.  A year of English composition and then sections of the lecture.  These enormous courses were divided into sections and each -- it's very much the way they do it here.  So you went to the humanities lectures but then you also had a humanities section that you attended every week.  And then, all your entire record for those two years depended upon eight comprehensive examinations, in which at 9:00 in the morning you went into a room with all the other students who had been in that course, probably dozens, and you checked -- your ID was checked with photographs, because people would hire people to go in and do it.  The exam lasted six hours and that was your entire grade for the course, and if you flubbed the exam that was it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt was sudden death?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes, yeah, and there were stories you know, such as the man who grew a beard and they wouldn't let him take the exam because they couldn't tell if it really was he.  And I did very well, but that was why my English teacher at Friends Seminary thought I should go there, because he thought I was you know, so smart that I could get away with these comps, these comprehensive examinations, and not have to go to all the classes, instead of which being so conscientious as I was, I went to all of the classes and did everything and got a lot out of it.  But then I -- everything depended on the comps.  It was really terrifying.  You'd sit there and the exam would arrive in a box, a locked box.  Maybe there's something like this in the U.K.?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOh yes, I -- this is all too familiar to me.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIt was locked and he would open it, and then he'd pass the exams out, and there would be an announcement; if you find any of the directives on the examination confusing or ambiguous, you must interpret them as best you can.  And that was it, and out they would pass that.  So that was Chicago for the first two years.  Then you got your PhB, or your bachelors, your liberal arts, and then Hutchins believed that every competent citizen should have such a college education for two years and then, those who did not want to go on would take some sort of vocational training or get a job, and those who did want to go on would spend three more years and get a masters.  So that was what I wanted to do and English would have been, if I had gone to one of the standard departments that would have been the one, but I saw in the catalog, that there was something that called itself the Committee on Comparative Studies and Literature in the Arts, which was really Comp Lit, and it was run by Ronald Crane, who was famous, and I knew how admirable he was, and I also knew that my great friend Norman Maclean was teaching in this program, so I applied for that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo Norman Maclean had taught you as an undergraduate?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes, yes, and there was another lucky chance.  My father knew somebody, a doctor in Chicago who had a son who had gone to the university, and I was over there one evening and Wilbert said to me, \"You've got to take Maclean.\"  He didn't say what course, it didn't matter, and so I enrolled in Norman Maclean's course in the analysis of poetry as a freshman, and that was how I first got to know him, and what a break that was.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBefore you got to university, during your gap years, not only did you go to the Conservatory, but you also spent some time just simply earning your living.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.  There was a school of ballet in the same building as the Conservatory, the Hazel Sharp School of Ballet, and Hazel Sharp hired me to play for her classes.  I was terrible.  She gave me no music.  She would just start them doing something; plié, elevé, battement, and then I would have to figure out some sort of music to play that went with that, and I wasn't always very good at doing that because I had no experience.  \r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=1800.0,2100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/8","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"But I made it all right and she, she I think was fond of me and sort of felt that I was a young girl of 16 or 17, trying to make her way.  So I made quite a bit of money.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd you also I think, did summer school.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnd I got a summer job --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\t-- at a camp, where they taught dancing, and I was one of two musicians that they had there.  So I spend my summers doing that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo your parents were obviously happy enough to allow somebody who was actually very young, and you said yourself that you were young socially as well, to go off pioneering.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell ah, mother had -- the first year that I went, it was the first job I ever had, and I was only 15, but the woman who ran the camp, whose name was Valeria, Valeria Ladd, taught in New York.  Here's another funny sequence of chance events.  My father didn't want my mother to work.  He wanted her to be free and not have to, not have to work, but she wanted to work and she wanted to make some money, and we were always very short of money after the Depression.  One time he was off on a trip as a salesman I guess, and she saw in the paper, that a teacher of singing was looking for an accompanist, and his name was -- well it wasn't, but the name that he went by was Ricardo Zapponi, Z-A-P-P-O-N-I, and it turned out eventually, that his real name was Richard Zapp, but in those days, you had to have an Italian sounding name in the singing realm, so he taught as Ricardo Zapponi.  So mother, you know we always said in the family, no others need apply; once mother auditions that's it, and so she began playing for him in New York.  He had a student who went to this dance came and knew that Valeria Ladd was looking for a pianist, and she asked mother if she would come and meet Valeria Ladd and play for her.  So mother began playing for this dance school in New York and then, Valeria Ladd began asking mother if she would please come and be one of the two musicians at the came, because she was having a very hard time getting somebody.  It was not an easy job because one of the things you did, for example every evening, from 7:30 to 9:00, you went down to what they call the pavalon, which is a big dance pavilion, much bigger than this room, probably twice or three times as big, with a very nice floor and an upright piano, and standing on either side of the keyboard, because there was no electricity, were two hanging kerosene lanterns, and that was what you read your music by, and you had to play for an hour and a half.  You could play anything you wanted and they would just dance to it, whatever it was, and you began with ragtime, ragtime pieces.  That was how I learned to play ragtime.  They had a great deal of music at that camp, on shelves, and you could use that.  And the teacher would say, now give me something with the mood of the sea, the breakers, and you'd try to -- have to come up with something that would...  Some of them were hard to play for and some of them were easy to play for.  But anyway, so mother said absolutely not because the outdoors was never mother's thing.  It was mine, I loved it but no, she didn't want to live in a tent, which she did, and she was afraid of insects, and especially you know, if you have a kerosene lantern, there are moths flying from all over the place.  So Valeria said, \"Can you think of anybody that could play?\"  And finally mother said well, \"I do have a daughter who plays very well, but she doesn't sight read much.  She's 15 years old.\"  And Valeria said, \"Well bring her in, we'll let her play for me and let me see what I think.\"  So I went in and I played a couple of pieces, after mother had played for the class, and she liked my playing.  She said well, there's a month after the classes are over, there's a month before camp opens, and if your husband would drive into New York -- we were living on Long Island -- one Sunday, on a Sunday because there would be less traffic, I'll meet him at the studio and we can put all our music into the car and he can take it out to you, and then your daughter can spend the month playing through all this music, which would improve her sight reading and also give her some acquaintance with the music we use.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=2100.0,2400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/9","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"So that was what happened.  My father brought this immense load of music back, and I just sat at the piano and played and played and played.  Mostly I had a very hard time with it, and one day I broke down completely and I began -- I burst into tears and I said, \"Mother, I just can't.\"  I said, \"We can't do this.\"  And she, to cheer me up, took me to dinner.  There was a Schraft's.  Being a Brit, you probably don't know about Schraft's, but that was a fairly nice but not too expensive restaurant, and one of the things they had, because we'd been there once in a while, was a London broil, which cost $2.75, which was a very large sum of money to pay for dinner in 1938 or '39.  So she took me to Schraft's for dinner and bought me a London broil.  It was a lamb chop and a kidney and a sausage, I think.  What's London about it I don't know, but that's what it was called.  So that cheered me up and I started again, and I went up there in June and she hired me for half the summer, five weeks.  She paid $10.00 a week plus your room and board or your tent and board, and the five weeks was to see whether I could do it, and then she hired me for the rest of the summer, so I stayed for ten weeks.  I made $100.00, which I used to buy a typewriter, which I still have.  (chuckles)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid -- what was the social, a bit like a camp?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell, it was all women, and that probably wasn't a good thing for me.  I probably should have been mixing around with, with men and boys, but it was all women and the school of dance had been founded by a woman who had died, and that her best students had taken over and formed a group and managed the camp.  But I, I absolutely adored it because I lived outside, lived outdoors and went barefoot.  At night we'd move the cots out of the tents and sleep under the stars and I thought it was all just absolutely great, and of course I loved all the music and I began to like the dancing.  I started -- when I wasn't playing there would be a class, and I would start taking class and it did a lot for me physically, you know in the way of coordination and made me a little less clumsy than I had been.  So it was good in many ways but I don't think it was good socially because it was just nothing but women.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo you completed your PhB.  It's hard to say that.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.  And it also, it is mistakenly called a PhD on my bio.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes, and I've been -- I've been introduced as one who got a PhD from Chicago in 1943, and another PhD from Yale in 1956.  Very misleading.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYour parents clearly encouraged you and taught you your tremendous discipline, you know just having to practice the way you did, tremendous discipline.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI suppose.  I don't think of it as that but the routine was that I was a very early riser in those days.  I no longer am, but I would practice from quarter of six to quarter of seven, and mother would get up and she'd be making breakfast, and then would come breakfast.  And that happened every single day and it was just taken for granted.  I never thought of it as discipline.  It was just what I did.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI suppose that's discipline.  Somebody recently told me she thought I had tremendous discipline, but I never think of myself as being particularly disciplined.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell certainly, I would have that impression, yes.  You have a rigor, and maybe that comes from that having to do it.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIt doesn't feel like that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell because um, it's so much a part of you.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIsn't it?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tExactly.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd you, you did say that there was one of the teachers at the Friends Seminary who clearly encouraged you to apply to Chicago.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWere there any other people in those early -- you know, in your teenage years, who encouraged you, who mentored you, who saw your potential and where it should go?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.  I would say not.  I had a piano teacher who ran a studio.  He had been a concert pianist himself, and his students would give what he called artist recitals, in his big apartment, and there'd be a lot of chairs and quite a big audience, and you'd play a recital.  But he -- I, I didn't -- I wasn't really crazy about him.  He was OK, but he was just somebody to go to, to have lessons with.  So I certainly wouldn't say he played any part in encouraging me.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=2400.0,2700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/10","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And this man, this English teacher who thought Chicago was the right place for me, I didn't have much of a feeling for him either.  It was just that he thought I was the person who could take those comprehensives that he had read about, at Chicago.  So no.  I would say it wasn't until I met Norman Maclean, that I found a real mentor.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnd then it was a poetry, it had to do with poetry.  Of course I had always written poetry, partly because of my father would go off on these trips as a salesman, and whenever he came back, he would have some children's books in his suitcase.  I don't know where he got them, but he must have found a bookstore wherever he was, and many of them were poems, they had poems.  Some time I'll just show you one or two of them, which I still have.  There was one absolutely marvelous one called, The Children's Punch.  I didn't know punch in those days, but this had a lot of the drawings that they have.  They used to -- I don't know whether punch is still going.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo, it's not.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo, but a lot of the drawings that they used to have in the adult version of punch, and it was an anthology of poems, wonderful poems.  Where are you going?  Up Lavender Hill, with a basket of dimity bags to fill...  I didn't know what Lavender Hill meant or what a dimity bag was.  I'll lay you open lavender, I'll lay you open lavender, and you'll sleep sweet.  I knew nothing about lavender but I loved the poem.  So that put poetry into me very, very early, and I had the poetry in me, no doubt, waiting to be encouraged.  So I had always written poetry and in my teens I wrote a lot of rather sentimental poems, and sent some to Edna St. Vincent Millay.  You know about her.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOh yes, yes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnd she never acknowledged them I'm afraid.  Now that I know more about her life, I can see that she wouldn't have.  But anyway, Norman Maclean just opened my eyes to what could be said about a poem.  I remember even some of the particular poems that he taught and some of the things that he said, and he taught -- one of the poems he spent a lot of time on was [William] Wordsworth's -- it is the sonnet beginning, It is a beauteous evening, calm and free...  And we got to, Listen! the mighty Being is awake, and doth with his eternal [motion] something, make a sound like thunder -- everlastingly.  And he pointed out that the five syllables of that word taking up so much of the line, was a way of implying a long stretch of time.  And I never thought about anything like that.  So the result of that was that I stopped writing poems, because I could see that everything I had written was just, just tripe.  But then I started again because I had to.  I couldn't not write poems, and I began writing some very, very you know, correct, straight- laced poems.  I was so afraid of being sentimental or being too gushy or something, and I began showing them to him, and he was very interested, and that was a the beginning of a long, it would have been 50 years I suppose, or more, over which he encouraged me to be a poet.  And when you read those letters, which I trust you will when this companion comes out.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI hope so, definitely yes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.  You will see that, I think in every letter, he speaks of my poetry, and that I must not stop writing poetry and that I had a -- he put it in his western gold mining terms.  He said we know -- we don't know how wide it -- let's see.  The vein, it was vein, like a vein of gold in a mine and, \"We don't know how deep it is, but we know that it is, as we say in the west, very high grade ore.\"  He would say things like that, so he -- that was very, very important.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas he -- did he encourage lots of students, or do you think that he'd singled you out in some way?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI think he singled me out.  I'm sure I've told you the story of how I first, as it were, encountered him.  I mean, I was in his class but I didn't think he even knew who I was.  He had given a test, and I knew I hadn't done well on it because I hadn't been preparing  and doing my homework as well as I should have, so I had a feeling I had done something rather mediocre on the test.  So he had -- at the end of the class he had all the tests in a pile, and he was talking with a student and the pile was here, and I thought I'd sneak up and kind of winkle my test out of the pile and get away without having to confront him.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=2700.0,3000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/11","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"But the minute I got there he swung around and he said, \"See here Ms. Borroff.  I don't expect work like that from you.\"  (laughs)  And that was thrilling, because he knew who I was and he knew he didn't expect work like that from me.  You know, it was a perfect pedagogical ploy, and so I worked like a demon after that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tHow as -- how did you find social life at the University of Chicago?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell there was some.  World War I had -- one.  World War II had started.  It started in the December of my -- the Pearl Harbor was December of my freshman year, and the men were gone.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight, of course.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThere were some men.  I knew a few men who worked in the -- in physics at the university, but what I didn't know was they were developing the atomic bomb.  You know, it was in Chicago that the first nuclear reaction took place.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tUnder the stands, under the athletic field stands, and I didn't know about that but I did know that these men were doing something very hush-hush.  And I remember a friend of mine and I, a girl and I went out with two of these men, and we were sitting at some night club or something, sitting around and one of the men -- the two men were talking and one of them mentioned graphite, and the other man said no, don't say that.  But I had no idea what graphite was but apparently graphite is a component of a, of a reaction.  It does something.  It inhibits.  It tends to inhibit the reaction.  So social life was rather limited for that reason.  I did know a few men and I got to know some women, women friends as well.  But I was, I was seriously interested in the intellectual side of things.  That was really more important to me than anything else, what I was learning about poetry and ideas and criticisms at some point, by teachers there.  I was leading the life of the mind because that was how I -- that was how I was.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd that was -- that's what made your day, as they say today, just that intell --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah well, we worked like hell.  I had one friend in particular, with whom -- who was the same, and the two of us just worked like dogs.  It was a very tough program.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut willingly.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes, oh yes happily.  At the same time, feeling that we were really working very heroically.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  \r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI wrote a poem, a ballad sort of poem that a rephrase -- had a phrase, Refrain.  Teach me to read a little faster please.  Every stanza ended with that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  Well that's something that I would -- I've always wanted to be able to do, is read a little faster all the time.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI know, yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDo you remember -- you've talked very movingly about Norman Maclean, and you've mentioned Ronald Crane, and I'd like to hear more about him, but I do wonder, were you aware or had contact with any women on the faculty?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tVery few.  The English Department had one woman, and I can't even remember her name.  I never met her and I can't remember.  Gladys Campbell?  And I never took a course with her, because she didn't teach some -- what I wanted to, to study.  When I did Comp Lit, when I went out into that committee on comparative studies in literature and the arts, I had studied German with Viola Manderfeld, a woman who taught the elementary German, and there's a lot of that here.  Women teach foreign languages often, at an introductory level, or they're what is called informants you know, if it's Burmese or some exotic language like that.  So Viola Manderfeld taught elementary German and I studied with her.  Then, when I got so I could read German, I read some German poems with a woman who was quite well known, though I didn't know that and I didn't know the difference.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=3000.0,3300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/12","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Anyway, Helena Gamer, G-A-M-E-R, who has died.  There is now a Helena Gamer reading room, I think, in Chicago, with her memory.  I don't know what she wrote, because I had no concept that that was you did as a faculty member.  But I would go to her, having chosen some poems out of a collection of German lyrics I had, and I'd read them aloud, and she would correct my pronunciation, which was in a very irritating way because it turned out there were two kinds of A; one was in A, name in German, but then there were also shorts As, and I didn't know why one would be long and one would be short, but that was as close as I got to any philological interest at that time, and I took a course in the history of the English language and I thought it was dullest subject I'd ever --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat's ironic.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIt certainly is.  I just wasn't ready for it I guess.  So I did -- so I had a little contact with women, but there were very few women at the university on the faculty, very few.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo you, you had --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tSo they weren't role models at all.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell that's what I was -- that's exactly what I wanted to --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- elicit from you.  Yeah.  So did you even think, at that time, in the midst of your studies on your pleasure, that this is something that you might be able to do professionally?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell, I knew I probably could do it and in fact, after I had gotten the masters degree, I worked for the Division of the Humanities.  I did various things.  I helped write the comprehensive exam, and I worked under a man who -- and in those days, this would never be true now, but there's an exam that consisted -- a lot of the exams consisted of multiple choice questions, and you used -- they gave you a number one black lead pencil, and you put something in a box that you thought was the right one, and then that could be electronically graded.  So I made up those questions and there had to be -- there was a statement and then there were four alternatives, and three of them had to be demonstrably false but plausible, and the fourth one had to be demonstrably true.  I worked under a man named Al Hayes and gosh, well of course this brought us intellectually that was.  I made up a whole series of questions on Plato's Phaedrus, which they read in English of course, and it was a very, very, very wonderfully difficult thing to do.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tA tough assignment.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tVery, very.  The whole questions leading along the whole argument of the Phaedrus, at various stages.  So I did that and then, as a -- what I was starting, really the reason that I went into this was that there was a man who -- Clarence Faust.  I think he was a dean, and he was a very good teacher and once in a while he'd go away, and I substituted for him in his section.  So that was the first teaching I ever did.  I'd go into the section and half the class would get up and leave.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.  They -- attendance was not required.  See, nothing counted except the finals, the comprehensives, so you didn't have to go to the section if you didn't want to, and they weren't about to sit in the section with some little girl coming in and trying to teach them.  So half the class would get up and go.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMen and women both?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tMm hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo it was pretty gender blind?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah, I think so.  Maybe especially because it was a woman they got up and went.  I don't know.  Maybe if I had been a young man it would have been different.  So I remember Clarence Faust saying I was stealing his class away from him or something like that and I, I obviously, I just was a natural as a teacher.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThat was where I belonged, at the head of the class, and I loved it and I could do it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo that, that self-confidence and poise that you had really as a youngster --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- carried you through.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI did.  I knew I was good.  I'm very lucky to have it I guess.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBecause it's something that women often struggle with.  That was a great lesson that you didn't.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIt was, I know.  So I knew I could do it, but I didn't know what I wanted to do and that I wanted to do that.  So I stayed on in Chicago after I got the MA in Comp Lit.  \r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=3300.0,3600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/13","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Then an older friend, who was interested in broadening my outlook, sent me to Istanbul, Turkey for a year, to live with an American family.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIstanbul?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tMm hmm.  And she made that possible.  She bankrolled it.  So I went there for an academic year and lived with this family, which had a young daughter.  At that time I was 24 and the daughter, Constance, was 14, and we're still best friends now.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tGosh.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNow that she's, what is she?  She's going to be 75 and I'm going to be 85, and the difference between us is nothing now, but then of course, 14 and 24, that was huge.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWere you deemed to be some sort of companion to her?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.  I was just living there.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou were just living there, yeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI had tutors.  I had a tutor in German and a tutor in French, and they'd come and I'd do that.  I was writing some poems.  I was practicing the piano because they had a piano, and at the end of the year, there was a man at Robert College, which is, I think it's more like a junior college in American terms, but it's for men only, up on the Bosphorus there are the ruins of what's called Rumeli Hisar, which is an old crusader castle.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes, I know it.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tDo you?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  I've been there, yes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell Robert College is there and so I'd take a ferry up the Bosphorus and see my friends, and there was a woman's college too, where I knew some women who were teaching, and I'd visit there and be a guest in a class sometimes with the women.  Anyway, there was a man at Robert College who was a pianist and a teacher of piano, and he had a two -- he had a studio with two pianos in it, and at the end of the year, he and I gave a recital together and we played two piano music, and I wrote a piece for two pianos for my hostess, Constance's mother, called The Istanbul Waltz.  I played -- that was the end, that was the final piece, and that was great fun.  It's quite good.  It's not perfect.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you enjoy living in Istanbul?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah, I did.  And of course what was fascinating was seeing an absolutely different world from the world I lived, and seeing the poverty in particular, seeing how people lived.  I remember I had a Turkish woman, a friend, Melahot (sp?), and Melahot and I were riding on the streetcar one time, and we saw there was a fire somewhere in the city and I said, \"Oh dear, oh dear\" and she said, \"Oh let it burn, it's slums, it should burn.\"  And that was an utterly -- an idea utterly unlike anything I could imagine, but she was a, she was a wealthy -- she came from a wealthy Turkish family and that was what she felt.  So it was an eye opener in many ways.  I think any such experience just shows you that there's more -- there's a different kind of world than the world you know, just as learning a foreign language, I think tells you that there's a different way of expressing the world than the one you know.  I had some very good times.  I knew a lot of the young Americans, and a man, a woman and I, the three of us went to Athens for eight days in the spring and lived in the rural Rotana Hotel, I think it is.  Have you been there?  Have you stayed there?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo, I have not stayed there, no.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnyway, we did that and we had a marvelous time, hilarious time.  I had a lot of fun during the year.  I was also very lonely because I missed America and my parents and my friends there.  But it was a very good thing.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tTremendous.  Given, that would have been in the mid '40s?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIt was in '47/'48.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, '47/'48.  Yet a time when the whole emphasis was getting women back into the home and --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI suppose.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- marrying and having children, and here were you, gallivanting around half the world.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI know, I know.  Well, as I told you before, I just never ever wanted to marry.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOr have children.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI didn't have the slightest interest in it and I gave at least one man a very hard time, because he was determined, but I, I really, I simply didn't want to.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhere do you think that came from?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI don't know.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBecause your -- I mean, your parents had a wonderful marriage.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThey did, they did.  I don't know, but it was a definite thing.  There never was any question about it in my mind.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=3600.0,3900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/14","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER:\tIt was part of your self-possession.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tMaybe.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo you never felt whatever pressures were there?  They kind of were not part of?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell I knew, without her saying it, that mother wanted me to marry.  She wanted Edith and me to marry and she wanted grandchildren, and neither of us gave her that.  Years and years and years later, she said well, she said, \"I'm reconciled now because I have friends and I've seen that children don't necessarily turn out very well and are not necessarily a blessing, and so I've decided that it was better that you should just each go your own way.\"  So I hope she really felt that, but I know she really wanted me to marry.  I didn't want to.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhen you came back from, from Istanbul -- \r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell then there was --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- did you -- had you any notion what you were going to do next?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell, I had to get a job and so teaching was the obvious thing.  I learned somehow, maybe from, probably from R.S. Crane, who was the older of my two best mentors there -- he was considerably older than Norman Mclean -- that there was a vacancy at Smith for which he had recommended me very highly and thought I could have the job if I wanted to, and so I took that job, and that was in '48.  I taught at Smith until 1951, when I resigned because I wanted to write more poetry and live independently for a while, and I still didn't really know what I wanted to do.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat's an -- again, that's a very independent thing to do.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI suppose.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIf not to say reckless.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell I had some money and ah, I could afford it.  I did some accompanying in New York and played for some dancing and some singing teacher and made some money that way.  But in the meantime, I had taught creative writing at Smith, and I had developed this interest which I speak of in that medievalist memoir.  My interest in the England language and the relation between linguistic and stylist qualities; linguistic facts and stylistic impressions and qualities.  So I knew I wanted to pursue that and in a way, it was that that led me into teaching, rather than wanting to teach and then having to have a PhD in order to teach.  I wanted the PhD, which represented the knowledge I wanted, and then that would lead me to a teaching job.  So that was the way it was.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThat's what happened.  And Crane said, \"There's a man at Yale who is interested in the same sort of thing.  He's a philologist.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWho is that?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tHelge Kokeritz, K-O-K-E-R-I-T-Z.  And he said, I think you should write him and go to see him in New Haven and apply to the graduate school, and so I did that, and then out of that, I went back to Smith, because when I was looking for a job in '56 --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThis is after you got your doctorate?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThis was after I got the PhD, but then I took a year off and I had an American university women -- American Association of University Women fellowship, and I worked on poets.  I had gone to Yale to learn the philology and to learn old English and middle English and the history of the language, but at the same time, I had become interested, while teaching at Smith, particularly in Wallace Stevens, because I got in touch with a very, very brilliant student, a senior, who wanted to do a senior essay on Wallace Stevens, and that opened Stevens to me.  And I had no idea of him before and I could see immediately, that here was somebody, a poet of tremendous importance, and so I wanted to go on working with him.  And I also, somehow, found Marianne Moore, and Frost of course was easy and was obvious, but Stevens and Moore were more of a door you had to find the key to.  So I spent a year, after I got my PhD, on an AAUW fellowship, living in New Haven and working on these three poets, and then I went back to Smith because I knew that -- I mean, in those days there was no question that a woman would teach anywhere except a women's college, no matter how good she was.  \r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=3900.0,4200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/15","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"So I interviewed Bryn Mawr and Connecticut College and Wellesley and Smith, and I forget where else; all women's colleges, and I liked Smith, I had been there before, I knew the country, and I decided to go back there.  So that's what I did.  And then the next thing I knew, Yale was after me and wanting to --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tLet -- I -- before we got on to you coming to Yale, how it happened, and that was -- you settled there.  I'm really curious about you as a graduate student here.  I'd love to get a sense of what it was like for you coming here, coming to this august, all male college.  Just a sense of what that was like in the early '50s.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOf course there were women in the graduate school.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes, and a considerable number I think.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes, but all male faculty.  Well, of course I was older than the usual run of graduate students.  I was about five years older, because most of them had just graduated from college and gone on to graduate school, which I always think is a bad idea.  I think a gap there is a very good thing.  I was tremendously disillusioned I remember, because I thought there would be all these exalted souls communing with literature and wanting to lead the life of the mind, instead of which I found they were quite ordinary, sometimes rather obnoxious people who weren't particularly intellectual.  I mean, they were doing it but that wasn't where they lived, you know I'd say, and so I was rather disappointed in that.  But then I finally found some people that were congenial and so that was fine.  Also, I was sort of taken over by John Pope and Talbot Donaldson, and so they became my mentors, and Kokeritz less, even though I had gone there to work with him, but it was John Pope and Talbot Donaldson that I really found, and they were men who thought about literature in much the same way that Norman Mclean and Ronald Crane had thought about it.  John Pope was a very great scholar and critic of old English poetry, and it so it was marvelous to know him and to work with him, though it was somewhat the same pattern as in Chicago, that was my male teachers that really meant the most to me.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tElizabeth Kirk, whom you know of course.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tMm hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWho was a graduate student a little later, I think about three or four years later.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah, I think so.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tShe came in '59.  She said that she paid tremendous ah, tribute to Talbot Donaldson, as somebody who was a true educator of women at Yale, and she was one of his graduate students.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThough he's been criticized as being a male chauvinist.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tBut that's not true.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  But I remember Elizabeth in particular saying, you know, such a -- giving him always such a positive press.  She also told me, and now I don't know whether you could verify this or not, but she said that he also, when he was DGS, that he pretty well automatically insured that the -- that 50% of his intake was women.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI think that's true.  I've heard that as well.  And he was very interested in seeing to it that gifted women got that higher education.  But he was also very male and very kind of gallant, and I think that irritated the feminists later on, and he wrote as a male.  He confessed, in a critical article, that he was in love with Criseyde, and of course that's a no-no.  You mustn't express yourself like that at all.  But I can remember, when I first went to his office and saw him one-on-one for the first time, to discuss my first paper that I had written for the Chaucer course, and he had a little sort of general advice to give me and he said, of course it's very easy, in the graduate school, to get carried away, to get too involved socially and not do as much work as one should, particularly when one is attractive.  (laughter)  But that was as far as he went.  I mean, there was never anything unseemly or, or anything that would put you off.  It was just that he was aware of women as women.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd liked them.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnd liked them, and liked a pretty woman and I was pretty.  So that's all right.  I mean, I don't see the harm in that, especially since being pretty, that helps too.  (chuckles)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd so he became -- would you say he became one of your mentors?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBecame a friend even.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell yes, and John too, John Pope, those two, and Kokeritz as well, though he was a somewhat melancholy and withdrawn and hypochondriacal man.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=4200.0,4500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/16","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And once he got his major work, Shakespeare's pronunciation, written and published, I think that was all.  He sort of not gave up after that, but he had done his thing by then.  And there were some critical reviews which he took terribly to heart, and he had a heart problem.  He would take me to dinner at the faculty club, he was a bachelor.  He would take me to dinner at the faculty club, which we then, it was on the green.  It was that white clapboard house that is now the initiation, the Yale place where you go and you get information about where the Carter Center is.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYou've been there I'm sure.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes, yes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell the faculty club used to be there, and it was a rather -- a failure.  I mean, very few people had dinner there and it was rather silent and tomb like and hushed, and all the white linen and the white linen -- anyway, Helge would take me to dinner and we'd sit down.  He'd look at me in a sort of sad way and say, \"My doctor tells me I must have a Manhattan before dinner.  Would you like one?\"  I'd say, \"Yes!\"  (laughs)  The poor man.  So anyway, he was also a friend, but I think it broke his heart though, when I decided that I wanted John Pope to co-direct my dissertation with him, because John had done a musical analysis of old English poetry, which I thought was right on target.  I knew it was.  Helge would say to me, \"Now Marie, you are a pianist, you are a musician, and that's just fine, just fine, but I can assure you that there is no connection between music and meter.\"  And he's all wrong of course but that, he completely believed that.  But I wanted to do a musical analysis of the meter of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and I knew that it was John who would help me with that.  So poor Helge.  I think he was very unhappy about that.  I didn't even think about it.  I knew I wanted John.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAs a female graduate student, where did you live?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI lived in Helen Hadley Hall.  No I didn't.  It hadn't been built.  I lived in the graduate woman's dormitory, which is now offices.  It's on the corner of Temple and Grove.  It's a brick building.  I enjoyed that.  I made a lot of -- knew a lot of the people who lived there and we had a communal kitchen so it didn't cost as much, because you could buy food.  We had big iceboxes that a lot of us shared, and if you became kitchen chairman, which you did, it rotated, it was your job the week you were kitchen chairman, to look at everything that was in the iceboxes and throw out everything that was past its prime, which was a pretty terrible job, because we didn't have a disposal, so the garbage just had to be put in plastic then thrown away.  But it was fun.  I like living there, but the year that I had the AAUW fellowship, I had a little apartment on Lake Place.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you get a sense of where women were in the pecking order at Yale, as a graduate student?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI always felt that Talbot and John admired my ability, and that being a woman really had nothing to do with it.  So I felt singled out and praised and approved of.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tApart from not being -- I mean, there were women who thought the opposite.  I remember there was one woman named Jean Buchard. (sp?)  I don't know where she went to teach, but she was convinced that women were discriminated against all the time and she said one, I remember that she had a fellowship.  She said, \"I have a woman Sterling.\"  There was a Sterling fellowship, and it was less than the man's Sterling, but I think the fellowships I got were fine.  They were, I think just as good as ah, as the men's, as far as I knew, but I just have led a sort of charmed life.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=4500.0,4800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/17","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I mean, one day in old English, the old English class which John Pope taught, we came to a rather poignant passage and he said, \"I think Ms. Borroff should read this aloud to us.\"  So I read it aloud and then I fell silent and there was a moment's pause and he said, \"Beautiful isn't it?\"  And then the class went on.  But we shared, we completely shared the beauty of it, and I couldn't say a word, I was overcome as I kind of sunk down in my seat.  I think I shook my head a little bit.  I didn't know what to say, but it was a wonderful moment, complete rapport, and most of the rest of the class just hated this stuff, but I loved it, I loved it.  And I had a pal named Jackie, who was -- who you know, she worked and she did all right, but she didn't fall in love with it all the way that I did.  And we went into the final exam and the papers were handed out and Jackie was sitting next to me and I heard this sotto voce, wipe this smile off your face.  (laughs)  And I just said ooh, here's the final exam.  I know every word of this, you know.  Oh dear.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt is a great --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tBut I didn't think about it.  I didn't think how exceptional it was.  I just thought everybody felt like that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt's a great privilege to discover a vocation.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tBecause I knew this was something that would occupy me the rest of my life and there never would be an end to it.  So I got a hundred on the final exam and this man named E.D. Hirsch, Jr., who you should know about if you don't.  He invented something called cultural literacy, with the idea that education should importantly consist of the acquisition of certain kinds of basic knowledge, and that education shouldn't be entirely about skills.  You had to have some content to use the skills on.  He's become very famous.  He's been much maligned and much attacked by the politically correct, because he, he published a dictionary of cultural literacy, so a little encyclopedic book of all the things that people should know.  For example, everyone should know who Hercules was.  Otherwise, what he said is you need to acquire the knowledge enabling you to read the front page of the New York Times.  Now there might be an illusion to Hercules, Herculean labors or something like that, and so you should know who Hercules was.  That would be an instance of it, and multiple that by several thousands and you have cultural literacy, a common language that everybody can talk.  But in this book, where he itemizes many, many things, he never should have done that because that had to be finite.  He had to leave things out as well as put things in, and he was attacked roundly by the politically correct, because there weren't enough blacks in it and there weren't enough women in it.  But he didn't -- he wasn't thinking along those lines.  He was thinking of what is likely to be eluded to that you need to know about.  So anyway, E.D. Hirsch was in my class and he was very ambitious.  He's wonderfully -- very, very bright, and made a big reputation for himself, and now he presides over this cultural literacy project, which has turned into a foundation, and some schools are adopting his -- he's published books; What Your Third Grader Should Know, What Your Fourth Grader Should Know, things like that, and there are school programs that have adopted his methods and are teaching his books.  So he's made it a big success.  He was a very good scholar before he did that.  He wrote about romantic poetry, and he's, he's just excellent.  I'm very fond of him and I'm a good friend of his still, and he also married a daughter of John Pope's, so Polly sort of reminds me of John, and I like to see them partly because of that.  Anyway, he went in to see John Pope and he said, \"How did I do on the final exam?\"  And John said well, you did very, very, very well, I don't know high nineties, but he said there was one student who did better.  John loves to tell me this story.  He's told it to me about five times now, and that was Marie Borroff, who got a hundred.  (laughs)  Oh dear.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=4800.0,5100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/18","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER:\tI mean, I've heard -- I've had other women that I've been talking to for the project say to me that it was that intellectual hot ice atmosphere of Yale that they find very, very difficult as women, but clearly it didn't bother you.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWhy would it be harder for a woman?  I don't understand that.  It was the intellectual, it was old English and middle English, all the words and everything else.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut maybe it comes back to this self-possession and knowing what you wanted.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tMaybe, maybe, but I didn't know I wanted that until I discovered it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut at that state even, it was poetry rather than ah, the middle ages.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah, and I wanted to know about the history of the language and what old English was and what middle English was and what early modern English was, and what the language was and how the language had developed.  My ideas about that are still somewhat taking shape, because Kokeritz taught in the old Germanic, European way and in Germany, philology had been taken over by the group that I think was called the Yung Grammatica, or the Young Grammarians, and they taught entirely in terms of derivation.  Now I'm making a big distinction that I learned later, between derivation and motivation, in the history of the language.  Derivation says that old English long A becomes middle English long A, but then becomes, in modern English, a tense vowel, which we think of as the long O, that isn't long any more, so that ham in old English becomes home.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tStan is stone.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tHmm?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tStan is stone, I remember from university.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.  Stan becomes stone and all that.  That's derivation.  You take the word and you apply to it, the laws of derivation that you have learned, and they are considered unalterable.  They are considered that you take them for granted.  They are ah, innocent unless proven guilty.  I mean, unless something interferes from the outside, which theoretically, very little ever does.  So that was how he taught it.  But -- and one thing that he particularly found anathema was sound symbolism; the whole idea that words, the sounds of words were themselves expressive.  He denied, absolutely flatly denied that there was anything to sound symbols, that no words were sound symbolically.  It was simply that we knew the word and we knew what it meant and we knew what it sounded like; therefore, we thought it sounded like what it meant, so that meow, for example, we think it sounds like a cat because we know what a cat says and we know that the words means that, and therefore we think it's imitative, whereas in fact it's obviously, it's imitative.  Meow and woof, they aren't perfect replications, but their sound structure is influenced by the thing in the outside world that they refer to, but Kokeritz would have none of it.  He absolutely flatly denied it, and I think the fact that he didn't really appreciate the musical side of poetry, maybe those two things are akin, but in more recent times, and but it isn't that recent though.  Let's say in the '60s and '70s and on, because I was studying with him in the '50s.  Historians of the language began to see, more and more, how important this other principle called motivation is, and in fact, it's essential.  Every word, as the language goes on -- the English language is today what it is today, but the sum of all the choices everybody makes among words, as the day progresses, helps determine what the language is going to be, and you choose a word or a form because it's useful to you, because you find that it expresses what you want to express, and part of that is sound symbolic.  If you go by derivation, you start with an infinitive of a verb and in fact, there are several laws that might apply to it.  For example a noun.  Let's say the noun cradol, C-R-A-D-O-L, in old English, and the noun -- let's see, what would be a better -- another example?  Well, I don't know what the word cradol is but the plural, cradolas, of cradol; this is the word cradol, it becomes -- all right.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=5100.0,5400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/19","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"The singular, by derivation, should become and does become cradol, but that law that says that the A in that position in the word, and what's called an open syllable, is going to lengthen, does not apply to a three syllable word.  So the plural, cradolas, will not, the A in that will not become long.  So this gives the possibility of modern cradol or modern cradol, and cradol was the one that was chosen, and that has got to be because more people used it and it crowded out the other possibility, and that's motivation, that's not derivation.  I mean, the long A is derived from the fact that a short A and an open syllable in a two syllable old English word is going to -- the A is going to lengthen.  But why didn't the plural form take over?  Now saddle developed with the short A, and so each -- there are myriad forms on which derivation operates differently, and the choices among them are made.  For example, let's say the word cradol is more likely to be used in the singular; therefore, the singular form is what the development comes from, because there's one cradol in the house, whereas apple, there are always many apples, so that remains short, and that's motivation.  That's what is used, the choices that are made, and on a sound symbolic level, the same sort of thing happens.  For example, one of the people who writes about this offers a choice between burned and burnt, for the past tense of burn, and then gives this example.  She went to near the hot pan and suddenly it burnt her hand, and the choice between burned and burnt in that sentence, and people choose burnt, because it's sudden, and burnt is shorter and ends on a voiceless consonant, whereas burned is more prolonged, whereas the fire blank all day long, they'd be likely to say burned all day long, and that's a sound symbolic choice, motivated by sound symbolism, and that determines the direction of many, many words.  For example, the old English word, lytel, L-long Y-T-E-L, lytel, should have developed into lytel or lytel, and there isn't any lytel.  Whoever has that name had an ancestor who was small and was named because of that, but little sounds littler.  So sound symbolically, derivation counts for far less than motivation and really, I think motivation is a much larger and more inclusive principle.  When you think of the vocabulary, so many words are -- many, many words are invented all the time, and some of them catch on and some of them don't, and they catch on if they seem to -- if people like them, if it expresses what they want to say, and so there are just thousands, thousands of them.  I was thinking the other day.  I just happened to think of the expression birthday suit, meaning naked, and somebody invented that, somebody thought of it, and then someone else heard it.  This is what I call the first, second and third speakers.  The first one is the originator, but there have to be the second and third and then on infinitely for the word to make it, and that expression made it, and the language is constantly eliminating and expanding.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnd that's all motivation.  Derivation does a good deal no doubt, but derivation tells us that a long O in British English becomes more like ow.  So that's derivation, that's fine, but the whole content of a language, at all levels; the colloquial level up to the learned level, it goes on, it perpetuates by motivation.  Things are either repeated and kept or they're eliminated.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt's a much more dynamic view of our languages and words.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIt is dynamic, it's a living thing in a sense.  So anyway, that -- I graduated, I evolved from the Kokeritzian way of looking of language, and when I first taught the history of the language, I taught it in that old way, but more and more, I emphasized this, this other aspect of it, the motivation.  And that also, it makes you and me and everybody, you're a citizen of the language, with voting rights, and you vote all the time by the words you choose.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=5400.0,5700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/20","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"So it's a kind of attractive concept --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\t-- in that way.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt makes the language democratic in a way.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tMmm, very much so.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOr demotic is a democratic.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tDemotic, that's a good word.  That's a good word for it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  When you were a graduate student, clearly the teachers that influenced you greatly and you respected were men, senior men in the English Department.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThere were no women.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat's what I was -- were there any women at all?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.  No teachers.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo teachers.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo teachers.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut I, I suppose like other places like Chicago, there were instructors in language, maybe in French and German.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell yeah, yeah.  I had them in Chicago, Viola Manderfeld in German and Helena Gamer and Mademoiselle in French, whose name we never knew.  And the one lone Gladys Campbell, the one professor of English who was female, but really a very, very small minority.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  And entirely visible if it existed at Yale.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tEntirely?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tInvisible.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.  I mean, maybe in the nursing school and the school of drama, and I don't know where else.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tCertainly not in the ah, faculty of arts and sciences, but Talbot Donaldson said to me one time, and we were just talking about something or other but he said, I know you could teach boys.  And I had no idea what that was relevant to.  I know now.  He was thinking that I could join the department.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?  So he -- even as a graduate student, he had your, he had you --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tHe had the idea that I could -- of course I was older than most of the graduate students.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tRemember, I was five years older than most of them.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI was in um, let's see, I was born in '23 so I was in my late thirties, mid to late thirties, and I was older than most of the students.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tShould we take a quick break?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell, I could go to the bathroom.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\t[BREAK IN AUDIO]\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAll right, we're recording again.  Yes we are.  I'm always a little anxious that it ah -- \r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIs it taking?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  Otherwise, it's a great embarrassment to me.  We've been talking about your time at Yale Graduate School and your encounter with poetry and language, and the history of language in particular, and also something too about the social, cultural aspects of living in -- as a woman here at Yale, as a graduate student.  So I would -- now I'd like to kind of go back to something that you had mentioned earlier, which was that from Yale you went back to Smith, to a position there, and I think I'm understanding you correctly, saying that at that time, there really was no notion that a woman would ever teach in anything other than a woman's college.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tA woman's college.  And even at the women's colleges, I would bet that the majority of the faculty were male.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI would think so.  There were lots of men who taught at Smith; men who couldn't get jobs at Yale and such places, and so the women's colleges hired them.  So I don't think even at -- maybe at Mount Holyoke there may have been -- they may have made a point of having mostly women faculty, but I don't think there was any thought that women needed role models, because most of the Smith girls weren't going to on.  They were going to get married, that was the prevailing idea.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat reminds me --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThat was when Sylvia Plath was there.  I don't know if you had read her journal --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\t-- and know about her, you know that that was the mystique that she had imbibed, that she was supposed to be -- her idea was to get straight As and be the editor of the Smith magazine, and also have heavy dates on Saturdays always, always have a date.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes of course um -- \r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThat was perfection.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt reminds me of that remark of Margaret Mead's, who I think did come to, to Yale from time to time, that women could be educated like a man but are taught to prefer marriage.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes, exactly.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd I think that must have been the prevailing post war attitude.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIt was.  Every year, the Smith seniors gave a show, a sort of vaudeville show with skits, and one of them, I remember, I'll never forget it.  The curtain parted and what you saw was a group of girls all sitting at typewriters, facing the audience.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=5700.0,6000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/21","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And in the back was a sign that said Katharine Gibbs, Katie Gibbs as it was called, was the secretarial school in Boston.  So you either married, you either were engaged by the time you were a senior, and you had met a lot of your brother's friends from Yale and your cousin's friends from Harvard.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd no doubt you'd have gone to the Yale mixers.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh mixers.  Anyway, so they were all at Katie Gibbs, because they were among the ones who had not become engaged and therefore, what they did, they went to Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School and then they got a job as a secretary, and then they met mister right.  You know that expression?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm hmm, yes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThey're always looking for mister right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOften the boss.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.  It might be the boss or conceivably, it might be a fellow worker who was a little higher in the hierarchy than you.  So they were all sitting there typing together, and they're chanting, and they chant, \"We are just as attractive as the girls who are getting married.  Shift.  We are just as attractive as the girls who are getting married.  Shift.\"  (laughs)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOh dear.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnd that was it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYou know, the girls who didn't marry felt inferior to the ones who did, because they weren't as attractive.  I had a friend that went to Wellesley and she just -- her heart just was broken several times there because those were the days of the blind date.  And some boy was brought over from some college that a friend of hers knew, and he left her flat in the middle of the weekend.  She couldn't make the small talk and the banter, and she was very attractive but not in the superficial kind of way.  You know, there used to be -- well you know that now, there's something called Facebook online, but then, there were -- every freshman class, there was a pamphlet published that had a picture of every girl in the freshman class, and by the time they arrived at Smith, some of them would have phones ringing off the hook, because they were pretty in the way that was acceptable.  So she wasn't among them and she just ended by feeling she'd never married, that she wasn't attractive enough, and yet marriage and children were what she wanted.  And eventually she met a man and she's had a marvelous marriage, and her life has been very happy and fulfilled; fulfilled in the sense in which you were taught that that was fulfillment.  But she had a terrible time at Wellesley because of that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou exclaimed, when I mentioned the word mixer.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.  Well, the --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDo you --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThe mixer was such an institution, and you either were a wallflower or you weren't, and you were chosen to dance.  I was not among those who were chosen first by any means.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas this at Yale?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo, this was at Chicago.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAt Chicago.  So they had them in Chicago as well?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI thought it was, it was ah -- \r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIt was per -- it was everywhere I think.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tPervasive, yeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.  But the trouble is, you see the -- it's all so superficial, because the reason you are chosen is because you looked pretty, you looked like somebody who could make the right kind of talk.  I've told you, have I, about ah, the creative -- stories I'd get in creative writing, the pattern that they would have?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell, the typical story, very -- I got many of these stories, and with variations.  The archetypal plot was that the heroine, who was representing the girl who wrote the story, she is sitting with her date in Rahars, which was a hangout where you could get beer, in Northampton, and they're talking and she is secretly thinking what a lout he is, how crude he is, and how she really doesn't like it very much.  And he's belching and spilling his beer and playing with it with his finger, you know things like that.  But she knows that when he drives her back, they will kiss, he will make a pass, and that was an important thing, and she was to respond as much as she finds him to distasteful.  She has to.  So either she slaps his face or something happens at the end, but that was the basic story.  Well, when I got to Yale, I didn't teach creative writing, but a number of the students would show me stories they had written, and one in particular, I was his director for something called Scholar of the House.  Did you ever hear of that program?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell it's gone now, but students would apply and if they qualified, they were allowed to spend their senior year on some research project, or in his case, it was a creative writing project.  He was going to write a book of short stories and I was his director.  He showed me a story in which a man and a woman are dates.  They're sitting at the Taft.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=6000.0,6300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/22","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And the man is the one whose consciousness you participate in, and he's thinking how vulgar this girl is.  She's putting lipstick on and powdering her nose, and he just thinks she's -- he really doesn't like her particularly but he knows that it behooves him to make love to her, try to make love to her before the date is over because otherwise he isn't a man.  You know?  So it was exactly the same story, but told from these two different points of view and representing, in both cases, the stereotype of what a date is and what a date is based on; mainly sex, and how important it is to -- for either one of them (1), to be attractive and (2), if it's a man to be virile and to want the woman.  So I realized that that was the pattern, and I think that's gone.  I think that stereotype is gone and the date now is not -- has gone, in the sense in which it existed while I was in college, and even when I taught at Smith.  Namely, the man pays everything and then his remuneration for that is to be allowed to make love to -- they do some necking at the end of the evening.  I think it's gone and if it is, it's well riddance I would say, because it's all based on the wrong -- it's very superficial, literally superficial, because it's not based on, wasn't.  It was based on appearance and a sort of superficial kind of attractiveness and glamour and so on.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut not necessarily respect?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.  No respect I would say.  So mixers were one aspect of that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI know that I've read -- not actually heard this from anybody that I've spoken to, but I know I've read it in a number of books.  I think the Pepper Schwartz book when co-eds came along, it ah, when co-education happened at Yale, the mixers continued and that --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tFor a while.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tFor a -- yeah, for a while.  I think it was really quite a short while, but for that while it was incredibly difficult for the women undergraduates here because they were seen as second class citizens in this mixer culture.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell what -- the impression that I have is that the first class of women who came, they were the transfers, and they came in '69, and they came as juniors, from Smith and other colleges, and they were thought to be too smart, abrasive, aggressive, overly intellectual, overly smart, and the boys really wanted none.  Many of the young men didn't want that kind of woman.  They wanted the kind of woman they met at the mixers and who would be complacent and attractive.  So I think the women who came, and I, I remember talking to one of them, whom I happen to know in quite another way, and it turned out she was one of that very first group of transfers and she said they had a very hard time --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\t-- for that reason.  But ah, as it went on, it all became very natural, and now I think the date, instead of the date, there are casual meetings on meetings and you'd form into groups or couples and then don't, and it's all very casual, much more casual and much more kind of natural now.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd certainly much more fluid.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tFluid, absolutely.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd I think to some extent, that is based on, on some sense of equality in the relationships.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI think so.  And there's a lot of sex and a lot of necking, but it's more -- I think it's less emotionally fraught, less romantic now.  Maybe I'm wrong, but I've known a lot of couples here, and they just seem to take each other completely for granted.  Their relationship just seems very, almost like old married you know, and they're kids.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI've forgotten where we were.  We were talking about the um, the review, the Smith review were just attractive as the ones --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes, yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo you went back to Smith.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah, and I went back to Smith with the idea that that was where I would spend the rest of my life.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnd I, I was completely reconciled to that.  If that was the way it was going to be, that was the way it was going to be.  My mother was always very Scandinavian and -- in her outlook.  She was not a religious woman and she didn't live particularly idealistically.  She just thought that what was to be was to be, and you just, that was your life and you accepted it.  And so that's what I thought about being at Smith and fairly early -- well, I don't know how early it was.  I think it was actually in my third and last year there.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=6300.0,6600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/23","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I was -- they were interested in having me being dean of the college, and I hadn't done anything with scholarship.  I just put my dissertation away and hadn't thought about it.  So if Yale hadn't made the move, that's what might have happened.  I might have been dean of Smith and that might have been what I would be, and that would have been all right I felt, but actually what happened was so much better and so much happier I think, for me.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat happened?  Tell me --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell coming to Yale.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes I know, but how did it happen?  How did it come about?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh.  Well, I think --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tEspecially since there was no tradition of hiring women at Yale.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo, but one very important aspect of it was my interest in philology, because at that time, when I was a graduate student, there were very strong philological requirements in the graduate school.  You had to take a year of Old English, no matter what your field, your designated field and the field you thought you would enter was.  And then you had to take more philology than that.  You had to take what some disgruntled students call the year of Kokeritz, because he was not a good teacher and they didn't enjoy the subject anyway.  So, when Kokeritz went away on a sabbatical they asked me to teach, and I commuted from Smith.  I taught two courses at Smith and this course in the graduate school, which was Renaissance English, and that would fulfill that additional year of philology.  Well that course went over big and the students really liked it a lot, whereas they never liked Kokeritz' courses.  So I think the English Department or Talbot and John particularly, who were interested in the earlier periods, felt here was somebody who could successfully teach philological courses which were required, and I think that played a part.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThey needed you.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah, yeah.  I filled a, a gap but then, not long after I went to Yale, all that was diminished and now I think -- I don't think there's any philological requirement.  People are urged to take Old English and Middle English, and we have good people here.  We have Roberta Frank for example.  We had Fred Robinson and ah, we have Alistair Minnis now in medieval so we -- our, our policy has been to get very good teachers, who will attract students into this field but not have requirements.  But when I was hired it was a requirement and for several years, I actually taught Old English, the required course in Old English.  I team taught it with John, and then he went away and I taught the whole thing myself, which was -- that was a real job, because it was about 40 students.  We had a very large entering class then.  We have 30 or 40 students come in every year, and we could get them jobs then.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhen was this?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIt was '60s and '70s.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tGosh.  That's unimaginable.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.  So I have two sections of 18 or so students each and every day we read another passage of Beowulf, and then hands would go up and there would be grammatical questions and cultural questions and many questions that I couldn't answer, but that's what I did.  So I think that was -- that was one important factor, in the department wanting me.  Not that I was not -- but there also were a couple of people, I think Louie Martz was one, and I think Maynard Mack maybe was another, and certainly John and Talbot because they knew me and were very gung ho on me.  But I think Martz and Mack really thought that the time had come to get some women into the department.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid they ever articulate that, or was it just a feeling you had?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.  I have that feeling though.  I think the time had come.  It was the right time.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDo you think there was any resentment in the department, that a woman should come in?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNot that I ever knew.  I had a couple of -- I had one rather snide report on my dissertation but I know who it was.  It was a man who had been an associate professor.  At that time we had a number of associate professors who never were made full professors, which I think is unconscionable, and we don't do that any more.  If you have tenure you become a professor.  I never knew any.  I was thinking that it seems to me that for a woman, when this all began to happen, that Yale has been rather like the elephant in the fable you know?  The four blind men who were shown an elephant and then each one was asked, What is an elephant like?  And one of them said well, an elephant is like a pole, because he had felt the leg.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=6600.0,6900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/24","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And somebody else said well an elephant is like sort of a hose, and he had felt the trunk, and another one like a building because he had felt the -- and I think Yale is like that.  What Yale is, is the part of the elephant that you happen to come in contact with.  And for me it was great but for others not so great.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  So clearly you were coming into a department, at least you knew for certain that some people were very sympathetic to having a woman there.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd were welcoming.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnd my friends, John and Talbot.  I don't think Helge was there.  I think he had become ill by that time.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhen -- did you think much about coming to Yale, or did you, did you ask amongst your friend and acquaintances whether this would be a good move or not?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tEspecially since there's clearly a deanship on offer at Smith.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell, Ronald Crane at Chicago had always said to me, you belong in a university, and I took that to heart.  I thought that was probably true.  And then my best friend was at Hartford and this meant I could be near Hartford.  I had always liked New Haven and Yale, and so it just seems a risk because there was no guarantee that I would be hired after that visiting year, but it seemed a risk worth taking.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat was the culture like at the department when you came in, in '56.  Was it '56, I think it was?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI came in -- see, I got my PhD.  The degree, I got the degree in '56.  I spent '56, '57 in New Haven on that AAUW fellowship, and then I went to Smith in '57, came to Yale in '59.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t'59, yes.  What was the -- what was the culture of the department like at that time?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell I never was a part of the camaraderie, to the extent to which it existed in the department.  I never had lunch with my colleagues.  I never was a part of groups that went to the pizza place or anything like that.  I, I was very much, I lived very much to myself, and I've never been a particularly social, sociable person, a social person, yet I get along with people and I like people, but I'm perfectly happy being alone.  And I was trying to write and I was trying to publish and I was trying to prepare my classes, and I had my friend in Hartford and that was sort of it.  And I don't think there really was much.  There were men who were friends.  I know Talbot and John were great friends and probably Louie Martz and Maynard Mack were very good friends.  There were friendships but I don't think it was very clubby or palsie walsie in the English Department.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThat's my impression but I can't say for sure.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBecause certainly there were other parts of Yale which I think was very clubbable.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tMm hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAt least that's the impression I have.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.  I don't think the English Department was so much.  I mean someone like Harold Bloom just went his own way and didn't pay any attention to anybody else.  And there would be dinner parties.  Those were the days of the dinner party, which has largely died out now.  I gave a few myself and I got invited to them sometimes, but not very many.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd there were no other women at all in the department at that time?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI don't know when another one came in.  I can't remember even who it was.  No ah, you know, I thought now this is two, because there was Mary Wright in history as well as me.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes, yeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnd then there would be four and then there would be eight.  You know, what do they say exponentially.  It would have been -- it was very, very slow.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  And certainly, when we come to talk about your um, ah the things that you did at a, at a college university level, like the ah, Crowther Report in the '80s.  That's the message that comes across even in the '80s, that the ah, intake of women at a senior, tenured level was pitifully slow even at that time.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI think that there was a big prestige difference between the tenured professors and the ones who might or might not make tenure, but there was a kind of expectation that they probably wouldn't.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=6900.0,7200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/25","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And the philosophy was, the university policy was that when there was a vacancy, when there was a slot, it would be in a certain field and there were certain defined fields; Milton, 17th Century, 18th Century, 19th Century, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and you would then, if a vacancy in any of that, any of those opened up, the university was responsible and the department was responsible for finding the very best person in that field, the best scholar, and inducing that scholar to come.  And now for one thing, the concept of field has all become blurred and muzzy.  We have Margaret Homans now.  I don't know if you've talked with her, but she's feminist.  So feminism is a part of the definition of her field, though she teaches, I think she teaches 19th, 18th --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI think she's Vic -- she's a Victorian.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tVictorian fiction for example, but that's not really her field in the sense in which you get a Victorianist before.  So the whole concept of field has changed.  Every year, at the very beginning of the year, there would be a meeting of the whole department in HGS 211.  Do you know that room where there are two portraits down at the front of the room, and a lot of lectures and things are done in there.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.  I've not been in it, no.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh yeah well, on either side of that room is a row of armchairs, stuffed, great big overstuffed chairs, and a couch or two.  And it was understood that the people who would sit in those were the tenured professors.  So Wimsatt would stride in, seven feet tall, and Maynard Mack and Cleanth Brooks and all these famous people would come, and they would sit in their dignity along the sides, and it was understood that no non-tenured person would dare sit in one of those chairs.  It was just known, a known fact, and the chair of the department would be sitting in the front of course and he would announce the names of the new people each year, and each one would stand and as he stood, the chair would read where he had gotten his PhD, and what the subject of his dissertation was and what, if anything, what book he was working on other than the dissertation which, it was assumed would be published as a book.  That would be the first book and then, in order to get tenure, he'd write the second book and be well along with the third book probably, and so it was a scrutiny thing.  He'd rise, very self-conscious, and everybody would look him over and hear what he was and where he had come from and what he was doing, and in particular the gods on either side of the room would look.  But that's gone.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDo you remember that happening to you?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI suppose it must have.  I don't remember it but I, I'm sure it must have.  We used to have a departmental directory every year, done by rank.  Here are the professors, the associate professors, the assistant professors, and even the instructors.  There were even instructors in those days.  Now, if we do have a departmental, it's just alphabetical and you don't know what anybody's rank is.  From it, you have to look them up in the directory to find out what they are.  So it's all different.  Mack and Wimsatt and Brooks and Robert Penn Warren and Louie Martz were all dignitaries.  They were famous.  They were the top grade and they commanded a kind of awe that I don't think is felt now so much toward the professors.  It's different in that way, very different.  Do you feel that?  I mean, do you think that ah -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI think that maybe is a reflection of maybe the status of universities within general culture.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tPerhaps.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThere just isn't -- it doesn't have the same status, I don't think any more.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThere were giants in those days, as the saying goes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, or the giants of yesteryear.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOne of the things that I was really struck by when I came to Yale first last year, was that photograph, which I think Lanny showed me, Lanny Hammer showed me.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=7200.0,7500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/26","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"MARIE BORROFF:\tYes, and there I am sitting among them all.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  You were this lone woman in a sea of men.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tEspecially, is it, is it --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThe front.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  And I think it's Wimsatt that's actually, he's towering over you.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh yes, oh yes.  He was over seven feet tall.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  Well he certainly -- they placed him behind you.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI know.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI mean, it just kind of so intimidating.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIt's just unreal.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tHow did you cope with all of that?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah, I didn't feel in the least intimidated.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.  (chuckles)  I knew I was a good teacher and I was doing some interesting work, but it also never occurred to me that I was one of them.  I thought I was like them.  When I became a sterling professor, I didn't think of myself as -- I mean, I thought they were the real sterlings were around.  They were Peter Gay for example.  He was a real sterling, and I was sort of a bogus sterling.  I didn't quite know why, nor do I know why this professorship has been established.  I think it's really surreal.  So in a way, I felt very sure of myself, but in another way I, I -- it wasn't that I wasn't sure of myself.  It was that I just thought of myself as more an ordinary person.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  I wonder if that had anything at all to do with the fact that you were a woman or nothing to do.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI don't know.  I really don't know.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMaybe there had been a time when, when Brooks and Wimsatt and all the others felt exactly the same in relation to the seniors -- \r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tMaybe.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- when they were juniors.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah, that may be but it's hard to imagine.  You know, one things of Wimsatt as having emerged from the brain of Zeus ready made, already great.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell of course the Yale School of English was formidable in its reputation wasn't it?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIndeed.  It certainly was.  I was terrified with Cleanth Brooks, who was the sweetest and gentlest of men who would find out that I had been a student of Ronald Crane's at Chicago because Crane and the Chicago critics, as they were called, just looked down on the new critics at Yale, as, as -- they were all wrong.  They, they -- that they weren't worthy of, according to the Aristotelian standards that they held up.  And Crane wrote an essay which he entitled, Cleanth Brooks; Or the Bankruptcy of Critical Monism, and I was so afraid that Brooks had seen that and he would know I was a student of Ronald Crane's.  Actually I don't think he cared a hoot, wouldn't care a hoot whose student I was.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo when you came into the department then as a member of staff, on the faculty, it was a place that ah, was pretty formal.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tMm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAs well as being a formidable intellectual group.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWith a cast, a cast system you might say.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tA cast system.  Did you not find it very isolating, or were you --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI was isolated but I wanted to be isolated.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou wanted to be, yeah.  And were there -- I mean for example, did you get to know Mary Wright?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.  She was very aloof.  I didn't find her particularly inviting and I never made any overtures and she certainly never made any to me.  There was one faculty meeting that I probably told you about, at which we were debating the question, the -- this was in the late '60s, when the students were being very ah, you know they all wanted to run the department.  They wanted to be on all the committees and they wanted to participate in admissions and promotions and everything.  They would -- we met in Connecticut Hall and they'd be outside with bullhorns, and in particular they wanted ROTC to be banished from the campus; ROT-C, as John Wilkinson, who was then the secretary of the university used to call it.  So the meetings were very fraught and I was secretary of the college then, and so I had to takes notes on these meetings.  But this was before I became secretary.  I was new, fairly new, and the faculty was being pressured to evict ROTC, I think it was, and Mary Wright and some friends of hers had written a motion which was very florid in language and rather detailed, too detailed, because it you want to present emotion, if it's too complicated, people will object to this part and that part and the other.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=7500.0,7800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/27","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"So they had presented it but it was being picked at, and finally I said, I raised my hand.  I rarely spoke in faculty meetings because I was terrified to be the center of attention, and I said, it seems to me there are two things, two issues here.  One is that -- let's see, that we are not unsympathetic to this desire on their part, and we may well vote the way they want us to, but the second thing is that we must pre -- somehow I found myself using this phrase, that the integrity of the deliberative process must be maintained and we mustn't be -- in other words, we mustn't be stampeded.  So the dean immediately looked and me and he said, \"Is that a motion?\"\r\nAnd I said yes, not having intended to make a motion at all, and I heard second, second, second, second from all over the place and he said, \"Well would you repeat that please?\"  So I said, \"We believe that the integrity of the deliberative process should be maintained.\"  I just could hardly get my tongue around those words.  Well it passed by a unanimous vote because it was not complicated and pretentious like the thing that Mary Wright and company had presented.  So I left.  The meeting broke up and I was going across the old campus and I was alone.  Mary Wright and some friends of hers came by and she looked over at me and she said, \"Nice going Marie\", in not too friendly a tone I would say.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah, because I had kind of stolen her thunder, but I had just simplified it that's all.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo there wasn't exactly a sisterhood?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut maybe the few women that were around had to work so hard just to maintain their position.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh yeah.  Well there is this philosophy.  I made it, let her work for it.  I worked, let her work and make it if she can, that, that idea.  Not extending the hand of let me help her along, not at all.  Eric Stanley, who used to teach here, and maybe you know him or maybe you know of him.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI know of him.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tE. G. Stanley.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell of course Alistair would know.  He is very donnish and he still has ideas rather like this, and he has twice said to me, I guess -- we correspond and so I told him about this professorship and when he heard about it he said well, he said it reminded him that the fact that -- he said, I suppose that the fact that it's a woman is thought desirable by some; something like that, but he said he remembered that Helen Gardner and Kathleen Tillotson, and there was one other name I can't remember, all very famous women.  Helen Gardner, who was the -- Dame Helen Gardner, she was so famous.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tKathleen Tillotson and somebody else.  Anyway, but they all used to say that any woman could make it if they had made it, that a woman, if she worked she would make it.  And my response to that was well that's fine if you're Helen Gardner or if you're Kathleen Tillotson, if you're of that level of work then of course you'll make it, but if you're not...  And many men who have made it are not of that order of excellence.  Of course, if you're Helen Gardner you're going to make it, and I would think now in retrospect, if you're Marie Borroff you're going to make it.  If you are really outstanding and obviously so, you'll make it.  But there are those who aren't yet outstanding or who need to be helped to be outstanding, and now there's more of a feeling that they should be helped, and I have tried to do a little of that with the younger women once I became established.  I would -- I would always tell them the same thing, which is do the work that only you can do, be yourself.  Do not try to be what you think they want because that may not work, and you don't really know what they want, and if you do everything that you think they want you to do, and there were women who undertook all kinds of very time consuming administrative jobs.  At that time we allowed non-tenured people to be head of the big courses; very time consuming and we didn't you know, the fact that this would have given time to write the other book that they needed to write, nobody paid any attention to that.  And if you do that and then they don't keep you on, then you've lost everything and you've lost yourself.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDo you think women were, are more prone to do those sorts of things in the attempt to please the maybe junior men?\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=7800.0,8100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/28","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"MARIE BORROFF:\tI think they -- I think they were.  I think they were more apt to, and they were probably very good or they wouldn't have been hired in the first place, so they were very capable of doing these, these laborious, multifaceted jobs.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou've talked about these eminent men in the English Department, and the fact that there were, from time to time, dinner parties; that's really what constituted the social aspect of the department.  What were the wives like?  Because I'm assuming most of them had wives.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes they did, and the wives made it possible for them to be them.  Margaret Wimsatt, whom I came to know very well and admired immensely, she did everything.  She paid the bill, she ran the house, she did the cooking, she did the laundry or she took care, saw that it was done, and he was W. K. Wimsatt, and that was the division of labor if you can call it that.  They made the husbands possible.  Mrs. Cleanth Brooks, Tinkum Brooks, was like that, Jean Pope was like that.  Elizabeth Donaldson was the exception because she was a very strong willed woman and she loved everything that he hated and hated everything that he loved.  She loved the country, he hated the country.  They had a house in the country.  She loved animals and she was always adopting animals.  He hated animals.  He once said to me, \"She isn't supposed to be taking care of dogs.  She's supposed to be taking care of me.\"  (laughs)  But she was an exception.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tHow did they --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThey were the professional wife.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo what did they think you were?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell harmless.  I think they thought I was harmless, because I was obviously not about to have any affairs or flirtations.  I had opportunities but I never wanted that.  So they knew I was safe, and that made them like me better than they might have if they thought I was a threat.  There were a couple of husbands that were interested.  I remember one of them sort of cornered me at a party and wanted me to go to some retreat or something that he was going on, and when I said I wasn't going he said, \"Oh damn you.\"  But within two seconds his wife was right there talking with both of us.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat was obviously not an unfamiliar situation to her.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI think not, it wasn't.  I think some of the husbands had a wandering eye, but I think the wives were enabling the husbands.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd yet probably most of those wives were accomplished.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell Margaret Wimsatt certainly was.  She was a brilliant woman and she, even, even while he was being W. K. Wimsatt as I say, she did a little reviewing for Commonweal.  She was Catholic, they were both Catholic.  And then after he died she went out and taught at the University of Arizona, and she taught some sort of course in writing or something.  She could have been equal to him, and Mrs. Thomas Greene could have been equal to Thomas Greene, Lillian Greene.  I don't know if you know her.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI know of her.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tA French woman.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThey could have the equal of their husbands but they chose instead, to enable their husbands, and that kind of wife is almost gone.  I really can't think of any examples of it now in the English Department anyway.  Now we hire the two career family, but I think that puts great pressure on some women, because they are given to understand that they really have to do it all and be it all, and I think that's a great burden.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWere you familiar -- this would be in the -- I can't remember when it was published, but it was a book, Tell the Time to None, by Helen Hudson, who had -- it's a nom de plume of Robert Lane's wife.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh yes, yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThere were some monstrous egos in that.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI have never read it but I'm told that it created great fury among those who felt themselves to be portrayed.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell I --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell I think it is a (inaudible).\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell I certainly read it.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI know Helen.  I know Helen Lane.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd I read it and it seemed to me that it was indeed that.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAh, what's it called?  I should read that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt's called, Tell the Time to None.  There is a copy in the sterling library.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tTell the Time to None.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI must remember that, to get that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  It's just these monstrous men.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\t(laughs)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd these pitiful women.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI've got to read that.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI must take that with me to the hospital.  That would be perfect hospital reading wouldn't it?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell it --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI'll get my research assistant to see if she can find it.  I can probably buy it secondhand on Amazon.  I'll bet I could.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=8100.0,8400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/29","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER:\tAnd I, I tried --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tTell the Time to None by Helen Lane.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  I think I looked at abooks.com and I couldn't find a copy of it.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo maybe, maybe Amazon does but yes it is, it's a terrific good read, especially if -- you'll probably have to spot all the ah, all the people.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh I must read that, I must read it, but it's probably there in political -- he was in political science.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tSo probably there isn't too much English Department types.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI don't think so.  I can't recall but --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI don't know.  Oh I must get that.  I'm glad you mentioned that because I'm sort of on the lookout for a good dish kind of read.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  Did you ever have to feel --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI'm sorry, Mrs. Mack, Maynard Mack, Florence Mack, she was another one.  All the same.  They did everything except write articles and books.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you feel that Yale at that time, in the -- really, I'm talking I suppose about the early '60s and all those enormously influential critics were here, that it was a -- that Yale was a kind of a place of kind of intellectual glitz and polish.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.  I felt that I was sort of at the center of things.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIn terms of literary criticism.  I think we really were at the top in that way, and we stood for interest in literature itself and in close analysis, close readings in the new critical fashion.  For example, Talbot Donaldson had something of a feud with a man at Princeton who believed that medieval literature -- Alistair would know, D. W. Robertson.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOh, I remember having to read -- plow my way through that.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.  And he believed that all medieval literature was Augustinian and --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAllegorical.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.  And so that was the kind of thing Yale didn't do.  We didn't do that.  We were interested in Chaucer's art and his subtleties and his ironies and that sort of thing.  So I think, I think Yale was a bastion of the best kind of critical readings, and some historical background.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas there a sense too that in a way, you had to carry that learning lightly, almost like that was a renaissance spretzatura?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI don't think so.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThere are stories, anecdotes that went around.  For example Fred Pottle, Frederick Pottle was one of the greats, and the story of him was that he took his orals and then spent the rest of the day in the library.  There were various stories of that kind that, in which the thing that was touted was the intellectual interests of the man and how hard he worked.  Wimsatt had the reputation that he was one -- somebody who read everything.  Now, no one would even dream of trying to do it or have the reputation of doing it because it wouldn't be true, because there is too much.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThere are more journals, more specialized journals.  When I wrote on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight there was one book on it in English, one, and a lot of stuff in German, all of which was derivation stuff and (inaudible) and traditional, and now there are dozens, dozens, and Wallace Stevens.  There's now a Wallace Stevens journal.  There's so much more and also, the whole academic machine is based, more and more, or began to be based or was based on amount of publication, not quality of publication.  One thing that I think we tried, I tried, insofar as I participated, to emphasize quality rather than quantity, and I think it's wrong to emphasize quantity over quality.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo you didn't feel, when you first came into the department, a desperate pressure, which is on young faculty nowadays, to publish or perish?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.  Because I had published.  When they brought me down in '59 they said, if you will revise your manuscript of your dissertation and if Yale Press would publish it then we can hire you.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=8400.0,8700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/30","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"MARIE BORROFF:\tSo I had done that and I had no book in mind, no particular book in mind.  I remember going to Talbot Donaldson and asking him -- telling him that I thought it would be nice if I could be promoted from associate professor to professor, because I had tenure.  He was very helpful and he just sort of shook his head and he said, \"Well it would be nice if you were about to publish another book, but you're not.\"  I mean, he knew I didn't have a book in the works.  But I did become a professor, on the strength of some articles that I had published.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnd the reputation I had gained from the book on Sir Gawain.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou said earlier on that you really enjoyed teaching -- I think that comes across very, very strongly -- and that Talbot Donaldson had also said that he knew you could teach boys.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tMm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat do you think, looking back, especially in that period before the university went co-ed, teaching the boys.  Did you teach in any different way do you think, from your male colleagues?  Not in a self-consciously different way but do you think because you were a woman, you did teach differently?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell, one of my students in the very first course I taught was talking to me and he said do you know, \"Do you realize what you're doing?\"  And I didn't know what he meant and asked him and he said, \"Well you are getting us to say what we think.  You're not laying down the law, telling us what we should think, but you are eliciting our own views.\"  And I thought that was what teaching was, and that was the best teaching I ever experienced had been, and certainly it was true at Chicago.  So that was kind of a revelation to me, but that's what he said and I don't know, I think the best teachers must always have done that.  But anyway that's what he said.  He seemed to think that it was different because I was a woman.  Maybe women are more -- make better listeners or are more willing to entertain somebody, allow somebody else to express their views.  I don't know.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat does raise a question in my own mind, that I wonder, in academic life, which is highly competitive by its very nature, that sometimes the problems are not so much gender based, but because there are people, and in your day it would almost never be men, just don't want rivals.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWhat -- I don't get your point.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDon't want rivals.  You know, that the problem --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh, oh yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou know the problem is about rivalry rather than any other.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.  I hear about that all the time.  Older men, males, and I use the term advisedly, who are established, if they see a very, very talented younger man or a woman who is doing the same, is working in the same field as they, they sometimes see to it that that person does not stay.  That isn't as uncommon as one might think.  But I wasn't really doing anything that anybody else was doing, because I was always doing the style and language stuff, which was partly philological and just didn't particularly interest anybody else.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  So in a way, almost fortuitously, you had placed yourself in a position where you weren't vulnerable.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI think so, but also, a man like Louie Martz, was very, very generous and he, at that time, he was every issue of the Yale Review or almost every issue of it, would contain a what do they call them?  A review by him of a number of new books of poems, and when he went on leave, he recommended that I do that, and so I did it for a while, but I found it too much.  I couldn't -- I never had -- I always had to have a lot of sleep and I didn't have a great deal of energy, leftover energy, so I didn't go on with it, but he was very receptive to that.  Cleanth Brooks, I remember him saying to me one time that he hoped I would published a lot and that we were a kind of team you know.  I just got such -- I was so well treated by that department.  I believe the elephant was --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas a good bit.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWas a good elephant.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t(laughs)  Yeah, yeah.  I think that's a wonderful picture you've drawn.  When you came into the department as a member of staff, you said very clearly that there weren't any other women there.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=8700.0,9000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/31","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Do you recollect the first women coming in?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI'm trying to think who it must have been.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWould that have been Sunny Miskimin or before Sunny?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIt might have been.  Certainly she was one of them, wasn't she?  Have you talked with her?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI have, yes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tHas her bitterness come through?  I think she was very bitter about the department.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI think she um, I think she had a difficult time.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah, she did.  She did.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI just wondered when -- if she was the first one or, or --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tShe may have been.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOr Dorothy Metlitzki might have been another one around the same time.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.  I think they were two of the first.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, because they must have been around '64.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah, probably.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut you would definitely then -- you were tenured in '65.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI think so.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  So you would have been, by that time, a very senior faculty.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd one of the things that people have talked to me a lot, and not just in the English Department but right across the university, that um, the -- if there was a divide, the biggest, deepest, widest divide was between junior and senior faculty.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAbsolutely.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBetween those who were tenured and those who were not.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAbsolutely, yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd to that extent, it was gender blind.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tRight.  I think that --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDo you think that's fair?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI think that's absolutely true.  I do think so, though, if a woman didn't make tenure, she might feel that it was because she was a woman that she didn't make it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  And in fact, somebody told me that ah, in the English Department, there was certainly one or two senior faculty members who really pretty well refused to have anything to do with junior faculty because, because he said, why should I make the investment?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tMm hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThey're going to leave.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah, right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDo you think again, that was to do --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThere was a presumption that you would not get tenure.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tMore than there is now.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  And that's a very different --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tBut I think that's a rather cynical way of thinking about it.  As I have told you, I tried to instill the gospel of be yourself as much as I could, to women.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat's an incredibly difficult thing to do it you're trying to understand the politics of a place.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou say that with a lot of feeling.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIf you aren't -- as I used to tell them, if you try to make yourself into something that you think they want, it's like the people I used to hear about and I don't know whether they do it any more, look and see the subjects, on what subjects is most publication happening, and then choose them to write about, rather than the thing that they were really, really interested in writing about.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhen women started to come in, whether or not it was Sunny -- do you want to stop for a moment?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo, no.  No, no.  Yeah?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI think by the mid '60s, certainly there were women coming in as instructors and lecturers and maybe as assistant professors, before the tidal wave, such as it was, began in the mid '70s.  Did you find that the junior women on the faculty would seek you out?  Would you in any way assume a position of mentor, just as Talbot Donaldson had been a mentor to you?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell, I did what I could.  I didn't have much spare time and I didn't have much spare energy, but I remember for example, having a luncheon here for six women, and we just sort of talked together and hashed over our situations.  I spoke my peace, and so I did that, kind of a reaching out, and I remember having Marjorie Garber here for lunch and giving her the sermon, and then she went to Harvard you know.  Do you know about her, Marjorie Garber?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell, I loved her book on ah, on cross dressing.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI loved that.  I thought it was such fun.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tShe's up there, and she was not -- she was dismissed somewhat lightly here as not a heavyweight, and I'll bet they think her book on Shakespeare is not a truly deep, deeply profound intellectual effort either.  I'll bet you any money they didn't.  Trendy.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=9000.0,9300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/32","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER:\tTrendy, yes.  (laughter)  Yeah.  Let's get to tenure.  You said that -- I think you said, just a few moments ago, that I think Martz told you that you would get tenure in a rather airy fashion.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tHe was sure I would.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tHe was sure.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tBut he said of course I can't guarantee it.  It is a risk.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight, yeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tBut that was misleading I think, and I think a lot of women were misled.  There was a very attractive and capable, able young woman here named Suzanne Keen.  She's a very good teacher, very interesting writer.  She had some original ideas and so on, and she also wrote poetry, and I got to know her some when she was untenured.  I was giving her my usual advice and she said, whenever I talked with a tenured man and he says oh, we're surely going to watch you.  We wouldn't want to lead you -- to lose you.  She said, I say to myself, get thee behind me Satan, and she was very wise, and she left before she had to and took a tenured job or a job that quickly became tenured, down at Washington and Lee, and she's been there ever since and has led a very happy life.  She's married, she has a son.  She's published a book of poems, she's published some other books, and she accepted that that was the level to which she could belong, to where she could stay, as a very wise person who does that, who is willing to do that.  This is not the academic, in the academic world, but there was a wonderful man who had a radio show here, from Hartford, years and years ago.  Bob Steele was his name and I just thought he was great, and but he never sought to become a national figure.  He recognized that he belonged where he was, in the Hartford community, that he could be there, be recognized there, and but that was it.  He rose to his level of fame, I guess you would say, and I would have been content to stay at Smith and accept that as my destined level, and the other just befell me.  But I think it's very wise if you can, to not always seek to -- but the American way isn't that.  You always try to get higher than you are or as somebody said, you rise to your level of incompetence.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOr as Oscar Wilde said, \"He rose without trace.\"\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWho said?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOscar Wilde.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd one of his aphorisms is he rose without trace.  (laughter)\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tBut I think you have to accept what fate decrees to some extent, and not always be seeking to rise in the world.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo Louie Martz said that you would almost certainly get tenure but you couldn't -- he couldn't guarantee it.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tMm.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo what was it that guaranteed --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnd I knew that, I knew that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes, but what guaranteed the tenure in the end?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI was offered, out of the blue, the presidency of Connecticut College.  That must have been in '64.  So I went -- when I saw my friend at Hartford over the weekend, Louise, I told her this and she said, you go to see Louie the Schwartz.  For some reason she always called Louie Martz, Louie the Schwartz.  You go to see Louie the Schwartz and you tell him that, and don't smile.  (laughs)  Because what I would have done, left to my own, I would have said Louie you know I've had this, but of course I don't want to do -- I don't want to do that.  I just want to stay here.  So that's what I did and the next thing I knew, I had tenure.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  But of course that's sound advice to anybody, get a job, an offer elsewhere and suddenly you become a commodity.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI know.  That's the way it happens more often than not, and it just happened, it just befell me.  Sunny Miskimin, I would have to say, is not a distinguished scholar, was not.  She was a protégé of Donaldson's and she used his method to edit a text that he hadn't edited, and she did not use it with the finesse that he had and she got bad reviews, and she was not kept on.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=9300.0,9600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/33","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"But I think that was probably just, but she had been exploited because she had been allowed to be a lecturer for many years.  I don't think we do that any more.  I hope we don't.  She and Dorothy Metlitzki both, and I've told you I know that I went to see Hanna Gray, who was the provost at that time, and I told her there were these two women who were in this limbo of being lecturers and that if the department could hire them both, could put them both on the ladder, which would require the allocation of two additional slots, that it could be understood that when either of them retired, that slot would disappear, so that it wouldn't be a permanent increment to the department but it would enable these women to get a fairer status, and she agreed.  But that set the wheels in motion because what the department then did was to put them both through the tenuring process, and that involved and still involves writing out letters to all these authorities in the field; where would you rank this person and publications and so on, and the returns that came back for Dorothy Metlitzki were great because her book, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England, that is the book that won't be replaced.  That is an encyclopedic book, and if you want to know anything about that subject, you turn to that book and you look in the index and you find what you need, and it's very good scholarship, not breathtaking but it's very, very good and she's very learned and she has the linguistics.  She knows Arabic.  She knew Arabic and Hebrew and German and Russian.  She was amazing.  And the returns that came back for Sunny, especially from one man that I thought would give her a very good review, were very bad.  They criticized her book and her scholarship and the whole thing, and so she did not make it.  So I was responsible for that.  I don't know whether she knows that or not, and I sort of hope she doesn't because it never occurred to me that the result of that would be having her leave, because they terminated her.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat must be a great burden for you.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell, I'm very sorry about it but I meant well.  I meant to get her into the department and I just thought she -- they'd be assistant professors or associate professors or something, but this clanking machinery operated on them and one of them it brought in and the other one it spewed out.  I remember going out to see her when the -- when she got the news, because I felt I had to.  We were friends, and I went into her apartment and she greeted me and kept up a very stiff front, and she -- then she thrust at me, a newspaper review, a very bad review of her book.  I looked at it and I read it and she said, \"What is his problem?\"  The reviewer.  And I couldn't say well, his problem is that your book is vulnerable to criticism unfortunately, despite its virtues.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut I think too that, as you said, that kind of gives it the impersonality of a machine doesn't it?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhich doesn't --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIt is machinery.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  But machinery of course, is always operated by human beings.  So that's where the, the treacherous things creep in.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell there were men in the department who didn't like Sunny and didn't want her.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOne of them said to me, \"I don't want to see that face week after week at the table.\"  Of course she was rather forbidding and not particularly smiley.  So I think there was -- they welcomed, they were very pleased when the letters came in not in favor of her.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd yet there were other times where you were able to make the machinery work for you I think.  I think it was --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWith Metlitzki I certainly did.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  I seem to recall Elga Wasserman telling me that ah, when you were in the graduate school -- I can't remember what capacity you were.  You'll be able to put me straight on this, that --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh, I was the Director of Graduate Studies.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat's what it would have been, DGS.  I think the rules were pretty clear that ah, there couldn't be part-time PhD students, but that you were able to swing it.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=9600.0,9900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/34","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"MARIE BORROFF:\tI brought it about that one woman was allowed to do that.  I did do that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tShe was a mother with children and she lived in Middletown, and I saw no reason why she shouldn't be allowed more time and get the degree, and now she's teaching at Wesley and is happy as a clam.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tHow did you get the rules changed to allow her? \r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI don't remember.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas it an ad feminam or was it --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI think I must have gone to the dean of the graduate school, and I must have made the case for this woman in particular.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  It was ad feminam so to speak, yeah.  Yeah.  It's difficult though, to negotiate those sorts of things.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell in that -- in the case of Gertrude Hughes, I knew I had a horse that would run.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnd as you probably -- you've read the Crowther Report I'm sure.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes, yes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnd we made a lot of recommendations that were never picked up on, about part-time, that a woman should -- the calendar should be lengthened for a woman with a child and things like that, but I don't think much of that ever happened.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell, I --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI think it's a little better now.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  I know one of the things that struck me, and maybe I've become immune to it now, but when I first started to do the background research for this project, looking at reports, going right back to the, I suppose the late '60s was the first one that I read, right up to the latest Women's Faculty Forum Report, is that how often the same, the same as it were, buffet of problems and recommendations is put out.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes it's true, it's true.  (laughter)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd as if it were the first time.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.  Yes I know.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThe progress is very slow.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell there's less prejudice against having two faculty members, even in the same department.  That never used to be allowed.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  I did want to ask you about nepotism rules.  Were there formal rules or was it just assumed?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI think it was assumed.  Now we have poor Jill Campbell.  Do you -- have you -- I haven't seen her.  I invited her to the same tea that I invited you and ah -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI think we'll just switch it off at this point.\r\n\t[BREAK IN AUDIO]\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRecording again.  I'd like to -- I'm sort of taking this in as chronological an order as I possibly can.  We're up to around the time of co-education and the events when campus was in turmoil and everything else.  We talked about how you were helpful to you know, some women like Gertrude Hughes, to kind of get around the rules; a very '60s thing, to get around the rules, so that she could continue with some graduate work.  But I also wondered, and this was something that you said to me a long, long time ago, that despite that being director of graduate studies was not easy for you because of the way that people expected the rules to be broken, that you had a reputation as -- you were called something really -- that you were always saying no.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThe year before I became Director of Graduate Studies, Richard Ellmann, who was here, the famous biographer.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tHe had been Director of Graduate Studies, and in the middle of the year his wife had a very, very severe stroke, and he spent the rest of the year at her bedside really, and at her wheelchair side, and pretty much abandoned his job.  The result of that was that the staff of the department took over and ran it, and they didn't run it and they didn't hold to the rules.  For example, we had rules that you had to pass -- had to have passed a language examination, let's say by the end of the second year.  I don't remember what the rules were.  And also, they didn't do a very good job admitting the next class of students because Ellmann just really gave up on it.  So I took over and found this very mixed bag of students, some of whom were really mediocre, and all these students who had not fulfilled the requirements.  I have a very literal mind and I thought they should have, and so I did my best to correct that, and that's how I -- if I got that reputation, that's how I got it.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=9900.0,10200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/35","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"But it was, it was a special situation.  I mean, we had not had a DGS, a faculty DGS for about a term, a whole term, and so I inherited a mess.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid that convince you that you didn't want to be an administrator?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell I've never wanted to be an administrator.  I think, to speak frankly, I think I'm quite good at it and I've had success at it, but it's certainly not something I ever liked.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBecause one of the things that struck me about Yale, is how many women have very, very successfully moved from faculty positions into central administrative positions and done extremely well here.  And that goes back to the early '70s.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes, I think so, and I think probably the kind of woman that makes it at Yale and that Yale wants, is a very capable kind of woman, so that's probably true.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd of course a number of them have gone on to, to be presidents of universities.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh indeed they have.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tHere and abroad.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI know.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI, I --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tBut I never wanted it.  I just wanted to be a scholar and a poet and a teacher, but I did what I felt I should.  I mean I felt -- I think everybody has to do something.  You can't just refuse.  I think Margaret Homans has pretty much refused.  Maybe she's done administrative things that I don't know about, but when the time came, when I might have been made chair of the department, my best friend at Hartford was fatally ill and was dying by degrees really, and I had to -- I had to spend the summers with her and I had to be up there every weekend, all weekend.  I had to run the show.  I had to hire women to come in and to be with her in her house around the clock, and all that takes an awful lot of time.  So I simply could not have been chair of the department.  I would have been willing to do it if it hadn't been for that, and I know I was wanted to do it but I couldn't and I've always felt sorry but I didn't, because I think it's a service that one ought to pay, ought to give if one is capable of it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd the opportunity didn't arise again?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo, because when was that?  She died in '82 and then I took a year off, and then I don't know who all began.  I think by then there were women who were very good and who could do it, like Linda Peterson, who was a carrack administrator; a very poor (inaudible) on troubled waters.  So it never came about again and I certainly never put myself forward for it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou once described yourself, and I think it was to me.  I don't think I read this someplace, that when it came to some of the administrative tasks that you were involved in, that you sometimes felt you were like, and I quote, \"A cockroach on your back.\"\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThat was upside down, waving his legs in the air.  Well that was after department meetings I would sometimes feel like that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tEric Stanley, whom I've spoken of before today, was talking with somebody and he said, there's one person that the department just doesn't listen to the way they should, and that is your director.  And that was me.  I was the director.  I was never a ah, what I used to think of as a professional professional.  In other words, going to all the meetings and knowing everybody, and doing a lot of reading.  I just didn't have the energy.  My friend took up too much of my time and my energy, and I didn't -- I didn't read what was being published in my field enough because mostly, I wanted to do my own thing.  I never was able to gain from reading other people's writings, but I should -- I think I should have read more widely.  When I published the book called Language and the Poet, Sandy McClatchy, who reviewed it for the Yale Review, called it this determinedly unfashionable book.  But I just couldn't do it.  I didn't have the energy to do it.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=10200.0,10500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/36","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I wish I had been able to cast my net a little wider but it just didn't -- I did the one thing that I knew I could do and wanted to do, and that was what it was.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd yet clearly, there were other times when you, if you haven't been overtly political, you're playing the game, the professional game as you've described it.  But there have been other times when you've been very effective politically, and I'm thinking her of being on you know, some of the senior committees in the university.  In particular, I'm thinking of the time the committee was convened to look for the next president in '92, after Benno Schmidt resigned.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh yes.  Yes indeed.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo tell me how that all worked, and your place and role within it.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.  Well that was quite wonderful actually.  Well, the ah -- Benno Schmidt, as you know, had been a very unpopular president and a very poor president.  He ran Yale as though he were the CEO of a business, and you cannot treat a bunch of egos such as Yale at its tenured level consists of.  You can't do that.  You can't get away with it.  What I heard was that Schmidt came in as the candidate of one member of the, of the what do they call them, the incorporators I guess.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThe Yale Corporation?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah, the corporation, one member of the corporation.  I'm trying to think who it was.  But anyway, he was put forward by this man as the white haired boy, and so they went for it and that turned out to be a big mistake, and it was kind of a disaster.  He got a very bad reputation and in fact, do you know the expression that is sometimes bowdlerized as stuff happens?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnd you know the original word for which stuff is substituted.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell I can imagine, yes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell apparently there was a proverb, Schmidt happens.  (laughter)  Someone I know saw a student wearing a tee-shirt that said, \"Benno Happens.\"  So that was all very bad and the corporation wanted to be sure that that did not happen again.  So with a view of that, they constituted the best committee they could, from various places.  A member or two of the corporation, Bob Lynn (sp?), who was the chair of the committee and was a corporation member, and faculty members for the first time.  There never had been faculty members on a, on a committee --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\t-- to search for the president.  It was a very, very good committee, and there was a professor of law on it.  But then they felt the need of someone who wouldn't be actually on the committee, but who would serve as liaison between the committee and the faculty, and would speak to the various members of the faculty and search them out as to what they felt was needed, the kind of person they felt was needed to be the president, and thought was wrong and should be fixed, and they picked on me.  So the first I knew of it was, I was up in Maine and the phone rang.  This was June and I had just gotten there a week or two before, and a man's voice said, this is Bob Lynn.  I had never heard of him.  He explained that they wanted someone who would do this, who would talk with the faculty and relay the views of the faculty to the committee, and not actually be a member of the committee but attend all the meetings of the committee, and would I do it.  The title of this person would be faculty counselor.  And so I was quite overcome by that and it really sounded like a marvelous thing to do, because I wanted there to be a good president, and so I said yes I would do it.  Then what I did was to -- then we had a lot of money.  We had an office and a secretary and the whole thing; we had stationary and so I wrote a letter, I composed a letter to the faculty in general, saying how important this was and that I really wanted to see people in that what they said would, if they wished, be kept in confidence.  So I suppose it had to be somebody that people thought was honest and I hoped they would come and see me, and I would have office hours on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays in 2730 HDS from 1:00 to 4:00, and they could just come in at those hours or they could make an appointment through the office of the search committee.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=10500.0,10800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/37","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Then, in addition to that, I wrote a personal letter.  This went to every member of the EFAS, and I wrote a personal note on the bottom to everybody I knew at all and said, I really do want to see you.  Please do come in and I look forward to talking with you.  Then I had this sent first class mail to everybody, not posted, not in the bullet in a calendar but that way.  And that seemed to me to be the way to really get people to come, and the result of that was that I saw about 100 people in the course of my, my work, and a number of them wanted to be anonymous and so I would give them assumed names and make notes, and I would report to the search committee on what I had heard from these people, which was sometimes to the disadvantage of people who were sort of what you'd call hot tickets, who were natural, people you would naturally think of as candidates.  And I never used a gender word when I spoke about such people.  I never used he or she.  I always said my informant.  I remember there was one episode in which a highly respected person spoke about Judith Rodin, who was one of the hot tickets.  You know, she went and became president of the University of Pennsylvania.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tShe was provost here.  This person said believe me, if you are writing something about her or reporting on her, you had better make her look good or else you'll get -- there will be revenge taken of some kind.  So it was not a good report at all and there were some people on the committee who were very strong on her.  I think she was one of our frontrunners at one time.  When I gave that report, Abraham Goldstein, who was the Professor of Law who was on the committee said, \"Who said that?\"  And I said I'm sorry but this informant wishes to -- wishes that the information remain confidential and he said, \"Well I can't put any credence if I don't know who it is that said it.\"  And I said, \"Abe, this is someone that you would respect very much\", because I knew who it was, and he said well, I can't set much about chitchat.  And that really annoyed me and so I spoke to Bob Lynn about that and he said why don't you go and tell him that and ask him to apologize.  And I did and he did apologize.  I said I'll go back to the person and ask, but I feel sure the result will be the same, and it was so.  But that was a great help, that information, and there were other similar things.  So and so seems to be very nice but really, he or she is less than so.  So that was how it was, and I went to all the committee meetings and it was very exciting.  One time we were all driven down to New York because Rich Franke, have you ever heard of him?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tRichard Franke, F-R-A-N-K-E.  Well in the library you'll find the Richard Franke Reading Room, for example.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tHe's a great philanthropist, a wonderful man, and he was CEO of a company named Nuveen I think it is, a big important company that had office down, I think in one of the trade towers, and we were all driven down in stretch limos to meet there and went up to his office, very exciting.  At one time we went to Washington because one of the committee members, who I think was a corporation member, was Senator Boren, who no longer is in the Senate.  He became president of the University of Tulsa, went on to that.  So he was a Senate -- Senator, and we went and met in his office in Washington.  So it was very exciting and wonderful.  I had a wonderful time in that committee and made friends with Bob Lynn, who was still a good friend and whom I see in Maine because he has a summer home in Maine, so that was, that was great.  I loved that I think I was a help to the committee.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut it was clearly what made you quite possibly a powerful figure even though you weren't a member of the committee, was the fact that people could trust you.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.  They must have and felt they could.  And I would always, at the beginning, I would say now do you want to be off record or -- off the record or on the record.  They knew I would keep my word and so that was what made it possible.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhen -- listening to people's views on what they wanted, what they felt the university needed and what had been wrong in the past, did you yourself form a strong view of what kind of president the university needed?\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=10800.0,11100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/38","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"MARIE BORROFF:\tWell not exactly that way but as the year evolved, we began with a portfolio of candidates that was that thick.  We thought if we brought in everybody, anybody and everybody who might be possible presidents of everything, all the institutions around.  And at the beginning I was thinking in terms of a magnificent figurehead of the university; a handsome man, a leonine head you know, who would be a wonderful speaker, as Bart Giamatti had been.  I remember hearing him talk and I was going out and some alumni (inaudible), and one of them was saying that oh, how that man can talk.  He had a golden tongue.  But more and more I began to see that what we really needed was someone who was not necessarily like that at all, but someone who had the smarts but who would be willing to delegate, as Bart never had done, and I don't think Benno did much of it either, and who would be equal to the tremendous nervous strain of such a job, and it turned out that was Rick Levin.  Not a terribly handsome man, not a magnificent speaker; a lot of his stuff is written for him, but he has the smarts and no nerves and no vanity, and that's what we needed I thought, and that's what we got.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo you're obviously quite -- you, you -- even if you didn't have any kind of public profile in the administration, you clearly had some clout within it.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI think I had a reputation, yeah, and in that ah, you'll be reading the, I think the next calendar is going to have a thing about me and the professorship, and one -- and Richard.  I don't know whether Rick Levin is quoted as talking about that but it's in there, the council of the faculty business.  He says I was a citizen, that my performance as a citizen of the university is a part of, a part of this.  So that's something to make one very proud.  By the way, this has not been announced and I don't know whether it's confidential or maybe you even know or Alistair knows it.  Roberta Frank is the first Marie Borroff professor.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  I know Roberta is, yes.  (laughs)  In fact it was Roberta that told me.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI think she's pleased.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI think she should be pleased.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell I think she is.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt seems entirely appropriate as well.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnother woman.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes, another woman and a woman who knows this --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tA medievalist.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\t-- old language, a medievalist.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo, I think it's fabulous.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tShe's very pleased.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, yeah.  I know we've leapt a little bit ahead of ourselves, into the early '90s.  I'd like to go back 20 years I suppose, to the early '70s, when -- well it would be '69, the first -- as you said, the first co-eds came in, they were transfers.  What were those girls like, because I think you were -- (phone rings)\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI guess that was me.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIs that the phone?  Do you want me to answer it?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo, I'll do it.  I think I can get there in time.\r\n\t[BREAK IN AUDIO]\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, it should be all right now.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tDire predictions have been made.  In the first place, no work would get done.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBecause of the women?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tBy the men because of the women, and I can say now I guess, he's long gone.  Louie Martz said, and I respected him a lot.  He said you know, the way it is now, these girls come for the weekend, which is certainly true, very influx from Smith and Connecticut College and Holyoke.  The girls come it's true, but then on Sunday night they leave and these guys roll up their sleeves and they go into the library and they get to work.  And of course with women here all the time, nobody would -- none of the men would get any work, but that has proved totally false.  Then the other thing was that the girls wouldn't say a word in class, partly because they were intimidated by the men and partly because of this idea that a woman should not show off her brains, and that proved totally untrue.  So all I became aware of was that I now was teaching some very, very smart women, who had made a great contribution to the class, and when you discussed a poem, poetry, love poetry or whatever, it's good to have both genders' viewpoint.  It isn't the same viewpoint.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=11100.0,11400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/39","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"One sees it from a man's standpoint and one sees it from a woman's standpoint, and the two compliment each other and it's a very good thing.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt's -- I mean one of the things that interests me about the whole education project -- well there are two things.  First of all, in the mid '60s, I think it was Inky Clark wasn't it, who --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tHe began reaching out a more diverse --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tTo a much broader demographic.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAbsolutely.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd my understanding from what I've read anyway, in Jeffrey (inaudible) book and indeed in the Yale records themselves is that yes, it was reaching out to young men but I don't know that women were ever within that, seen as --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.  I think with Inky, as he was called, Inslee Clark, he reached out to more racial diversity and more social diversity, but among males.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  That was my impression.  I wanted to see if that was true.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.  When he -- I don't know what his terms of tenure were, but I doubt if he was here before -- as late as 1969.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tHe was a Brewster appointee.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  So there's that, and women didn't seem to figure in that, yet there was clearly this need and desire to broaden the student body.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes, and very rightly too.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd secondly, the other thing which I, I think I heard from Elga, that in fact Brewster did say, he did talk about Yale's duty to produce these thousand male leaders and that women were just assumed not to be leaders.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThat's right.  They wouldn't be president, they wouldn't be Senators, they wouldn't be prominent lawyers, they wouldn't be this or that, but none of that is true now.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  So you were involved in selecting that first cohort of young women, were you?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWas I?  No.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou weren't?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.  I was on the admissions committee one year, but that was before women started to come.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?  Yeah.  I, I -- somebody had told me that you had been part of the admissions.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI don't think so.  No I don't believe I was.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut certainly they were a remarkable group of young women.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh indeed.  They were wonderful.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat was it like to teach women for the first time in many years?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell what I liked best is the mix, and I taught all women at Smith and I taught all men at Yale.  I did both of that for some years, but having the two cohorts there is the ideal thing I think.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid it make you feel more like a woman?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI think I felt exactly the same way I had always felt.  I never felt like a woman.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI just wondered you, suddenly with all these women around, that you --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI suppose I was impersonal or something.  I don't know.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo when affirmative action, I mean the law was promulgated I think in '72, that the equal opportunities had to extend to, to educational establishments, and that was when the pressure was on to start appointing women to faculty big time.  I wondered what your take on affirmative action was, given that you had been there and done it without any aids.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.  Well, this makes me think back to the Crowthers committee and the aftermath of that, and the word that kept coming up again and again was quotas.  Most of the men, I really think most all of the men, just didn't want there to be quotas, and the way I figured it out and the way it seemed to me was that affirmative action, when it came to gender, should take the following form.  That if there were two candidates and one was male and one was female and they were equal, that then the woman should be given the preference.  That was, I thought that was, that was my -- the principle as I worked it out for myself, and when -- after, this was after the committee had finished its deliberations and the report had been submitted and unanimously acclaimed by the faculty and then forgotten about as far as practical consequences were concerned.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tBut I wrote a long letter to Benno Schmidt, in which I set this forth.  Also, I proposed that there be an ombuds person at Yale who would have status an office, a phone and a rank and compensation, and would be allowed to give up a certain amount of teaching, and that this would be known to be a person whom any non-tenured member of the faculty could come for advice and support.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=11400.0,11700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/40","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And of course that meant particularly women, though it was not -- it was not too explicitly stated.  I did my best.  I just put into that letter, all the eloquence and all the persuasiveness I could muster but he didn't buy it.  I don't know who probably would be, of course who would we find to do it.  Who would want to do it, who would have the prestige we wanted?  It wouldn't be me.  I didn't want to do it.  Then who do it, so that was the problem, one problem with it I think.  But anyway, it never -- it never flew.  It was a flying machine that never flew, and that was the last that I really meddled in all that or tried to, but that was my idea of affirmative action; all things being equal, bring a woman in.  The trouble is they never are equal and nowadays, field has become such a fluid concept, as I was saying earlier.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThe ah -- \r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnd is feminism a respectable field?  Is women's studies a respectable field, and then there are those who don't think it is.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  Well of course feminism has become, in some places, gender studies and ah, and it's no longer -- so it incorporates men and women.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI know, I know.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd beyond.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnd now sexuality has come into it and so now we have gay studies, the history of, what do they call it?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tGay, lesbian and transgender?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  And sexuality studies.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAll that has come in.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes, yes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAll that has come in, and there is mixed opinions about it.  I'm not sure if a gay studies major is a good thing.  I think it tends to degenerate into -- well, we were talking about Cronin's book and I think he's right in saying that in studies of that kind, people tend to become spokesmen or representatives rather than free agents in an intellectual discussion.  And I remember agreeing with you that it was too bad that there were no -- there weren't more women in his bibliography and all that, but that what I feel his discussion of political correctness is, is very good.  Anyway, but I think a lot of that has yet to be sorted out.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell there's going to be, I think a conference here next year, on the 40th anniversary, is it the -- no, 30th anniversary of the establishment of women's studies here.  I think it's next autumn, and I'm sure a lot of this will be up for discussion, because I think opinion is very, very divided as to what direction it should go.  I haven't interviewed as yet, anybody who is involved with the setting up of women's studies here.  I think Hazel Carby is maybe the only one that's around now, and I know that she's going to be around for a while, so I haven't, I haven't ah, been in touch with her.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tFelt any urgency.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo.  Well she's, you know she's still very, very far from retirement.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhen the -- do you think that when affirmative action, when Yale, as every other university and college in the country had to do, had to begin the whole process of hiring women, where they may not have done.  Do you think that Yale, from your stance as a tenured faculty member, embrace that or dragged its feet?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI think it depends entirely on the departments.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYou can't force the departments to do things that they don't want to do, and I think some departments had much more of an entrenched male cohort than others.  The English Department didn't, and these matters in general don't as much.  But I think it just has to be left up to the departments administratively.  I don't think the administration can compel the department to do things, and the form it has taken, for the most part, as far as I know about it is that in seeking a candidate, you do your best to insure that there is no distinguished woman overlooked, no woman of Yale potential is overlooked in the search and there are all these women candidates as well as male candidates.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=11700.0,12000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/41","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And that can become completely corrupted.  I heard a story about -- from someone who knew something about what was going on at Harvard.  A woman was being considered for some job and this friend of mine, who is a woman, went to the lecture she gave and saw nobody there of the department that was going to hire her, and she spoke about this to the man and he said oh well, we have to have her on the list but we don't have to take her seriously do we?  You know.  And that's cynical and I think there's a certain amount of cynicism about it.  But I mean who can be against it?  It's like motherhood or something.  You do want to consider good women and find them, just as you want to find and publish good works, literary works or artistic works by women.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd of course especially in the humanities now, and I'm thinking here particularly of English.  At least 50% of graduate students probably are women.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tMm hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid the -- when a large group started to come in, in the -- around the early to mid '70s --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIt would have been in '71 that the first freshmen women came.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  I'm thinking now of faculty women.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh, faculty.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo women like um, let me try to think here, Margie Ferguson and --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell, the women's forum, faculty forum, when did that start?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt was about '72 wasn't it, '71?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tReally?  Was it that far back?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell there was some form of it anyway.  It may not have been called exactly the same thing, but there was certainly in the English Department, because I -- Chip Long gave me a list of --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tMm hmm.  He was responsible.  He was sort of the officer in charge.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  He certainly gave me a list from you know, '73 or '74.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tHe would record every year.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  It was one of those lists that he gave to me as a kind of, just as an indication of which women were around at that time, which has helped me greatly for my research, and in all the departments, English had by far, the most, even though it was still not a huge number.  And I just wondered if those young women often, I suppose married or in relationships, producing babies particularly.  I wonder how that, if it did, alter the culture of the department.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah, I suppose it enlarged it somehow.  I'm trying to think who all had babies.  Margaret Homans did, didn't she?  She had a child.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI think so.  Well the ones I'm thinking of, Toni Healey.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tToni Healey, yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  Maureen Quilligan I think.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOr Margie Ferguson.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMargie Ferguson did.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI think she had artificial insemination if I'm not wrong.  She didn't have a man but she was the mother of the child, I think.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd there was Elizabeth Francis had a child.  She had several actually I think.  Maureen Quilligan certainly had a, had a daughter while she was here.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.  I know it.  It just was -- it meant there were more possibilities, more patterns, but whether that altered anything else, I mean it just enlarged the place.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  And of course none of them stayed for one reason or another.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThat's true.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI think tenure was the, was maybe the issue for a great number of them.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI don't see how a woman has the energy to be a mother and raise a child and also be as productive as you need to be and get tenured here.  It's beyond me, but there are women.  There was a new breed of woman who is strong, stronger, more ambitious, more willing to think that she can make it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  I think that is maybe very much a generational thing isn't it?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOne of the things that's come up again and again and again, when I've been talking to women of your generation as opposed to women who came through as young faculty in the '70s, the affirmative action women I call them, is that they express in different ways but I think what they're expressing is that well, we came into it actually with very few expectations and we think of ourselves lucky that we got as far as we did.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tMm hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI wonder if that's -- if that chimes with your feeling?\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=12000.0,12300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/42","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"MARIE BORROFF:\tI would think it was not felt as much now.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo it's not, definitely not, no.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tBut I suppose in those early days it would have been.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOne of the things I didn't ask you about and I should have done, was the Helen Hadley Hall Fellowship, because I think you're the only person that I know for sure who was part of the --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWas Elga not part of it?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tElga I think went to one or two meetings, but she wasn't particularly active in it.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI see.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd I just, I think it's really important just to fill in the historical record because there's next to nothing about the fellowship.  If you could give me a sense of what it was like, why it came about, and what its status was I suppose, vis-a-vis the rest of the colleges.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI don't know who originated it.  I do know that there had begun in the '60s, to be pressure on the male fellowships to co-educate, with much resistance, because I think a lot of them really were drinking clubs, where they sat around and told stories, not all of them particularly flattering to women.  So I don't know who had the bright idea.  Someone in the administration must have thought it up, and then there must have been money, some money given because we had funds and we could invite visiting lecturers.  I don't know how long it lasted.  My guess would be two or three years, but I don't really know.  And the ah, the positive thing about it was that you met such extremely interesting women, which you never could have met in other ways, because it was very difficult for a woman to meet other women.  So that was great, and then the guests we brought in were fascinating; Lillian Hellman and Anna Freud and Eudora Welty and I forget who else, but that was wonderful.  So I enjoyed it immensely in that way, though I always felt it was, as I used to say, separate but unequal, because of our paper plates and our plastic you know, not like the colleges.  We didn't have that kind of funding.  But it was very interesting and it was a unique opportunity to meet other women, interesting women.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI suppose it must have started to fade away once women were accepted into the colleges.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh it disappeared.  Oh yes.  I think once the colleges co-educated, it just vanished.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  And I wonder too, was it about '65, '66, that ah, women were finally admitted into the colleges, faculty women.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tMm hmm.  It must have been in the mid '60s.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, I think it was around that time, because I know I have a list somewhere in my notes, of the first, the first seven.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell it was beginning to -- it was in the air that something was about to happen.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnd ah, Richard Sewell, who was in the English Department and a lovely man, was Master of Ezra Stiles, which was a fairly new college, and he was all for it, but he was very soft spoken and gentle, retiring kind of man and so on the Council of Masters, he didn't have much of a -- he didn't have much clout.  But then John Hersey became the master of one of the colleges, I don't remember which, and he was a very dynamic, forceful, could be kind of forceful person, and very, very strong on admitting women to the fellowships, and once he got into the Council of Masters, that was when the move was made, and it took the form of each master surveying his fellows and asking whether they would like this to happen.  And as far as I know, every college went for it.  I suppose different ones went at different times, and I think Stiles was one of the first.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd that was the college that you went to?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes, because I knew Sewell and he wanted me, and I think he wanted Dorothy Metlitzki as well, and we both got in.  So the majority of the fellows voted in favor of it, but it didn't have to be unanimous.  Sewell told me, and I've probably told this to you, that one of the men wrote and said, I'm not in favor of this personally, but should the charming creatures be admitted to our company, no one will be second to me in paying them attention and making them feel at home.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo, you haven't told me that one before.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnd I said, \"Who said that Richard?\"  And he wouldn't tell me of course.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tCould you take a guess?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.  I don't know who he was.  (laughter)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOh dear, that's wonderful.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah.  I'll run ahead and open the door, you know that's been -- that's become a kind of symbolic thing in feminism, hasn't it?\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=12300.0,12600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/43","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Should a man open the door for a woman?  Should he help her on with her coat?  A very smart girl I had as a student, probably in the mid '70s, she said that she felt that she was very popular and very attractive, and she ended up becoming the, what was it, the treasurer of the Yale College football team.  And at first, she was refused because she was told that no woman could do that, and I think she either sued or brought pressure, and she got there.  But she said to me that she dated a lot, she knew a lot of men and she said, \"I really don't think men know how to behave.\"  They really don't know whether a woman wants them to open the door for her or help her on with her coat or see her into the car, and they really didn't know how to behave, how to act in this transitional period of flux, and it would be very difficult to know what to advise.  You would want them to be highly intuitive and sense whether the woman, the particular woman you were with wanted that or not, because some women I know that umbrage of that.  You needn't open the door me, I can open the door perfectly well for myself.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt was -- though I think women were admitted in the mid '60s as you say, but I think it still took some time before women were admitted into the masterships.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah, I guess that's so.  I don't know who the first -- I know Bart felt very strongly that the ah, that a woman should not be the master of a college.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tBecause what the students wanted, needed, was role models of a married couple, or else a man, and a woman, a single woman would not be a good role model for the students.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tEven in a mixed college?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tMm.  Well, when was Bart president?  I guess we were co-educated by the time.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tHe did not.  I think it might have been that I might have been asked to do it.  I never would have wanted to do it.  I would have been an example of a professor who would have the academic clout that they want in a master, but Bart would have none of it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah the um, the two, they certainly weren't the first but they were near the beginning, were Phyllis Curtin and --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- Cathy Skinner, both of whom I've spoken to.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThere was somebody before --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI helped Phyllis Curtin as well.  I remember her very fortunately.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI haven't spoken to her for a while but she seemed well when I spoke to her.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tGood.  Good, good.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRosemarie somebody, I think was the first one.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tRosemarie.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut I can't remember her second name at all.  There were other groups around the campus and indeed, I think they, in the English Department in particular, and I wondered what you knew about them.  One that comes to my mind immediately is the Boys Friendly.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh yes.  Well, that was a group of English professors who had lunch every day, every Monday at Maury's, and a lot of the men, who I knew well were in it.  I mean John Pope was a member of it and Richard Sewell and Talbot Donaldson.  I think it's still going.  I think Claude Rawson is still there.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes he is.  I think so yes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tFred Robinson was in it but resigned because he heard some anti-gay talk, which is interesting because Fred is very straight and not particularly sympathetic to gays, but he didn't want any part of that.  And you probably know that the Boys Friendly is something that happens in Episcopal churches.  There are boys groups that are always called the Boys Friendly.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tSo they took their title from that.  I don't think it ever occurred to any of them to bring a woman in.  I have the feeling that there should be groups composed entirely of women and groups composed entirely of men, if that's what they want.  They should be able to be by themselves.  I belong to a women's club and I wouldn't want men in it, and I'm sure the Boys Friendly wouldn't want women, but there are some who have resented it I think.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOne of the reasons that's been given to me for that resentment was the sense that at one time or another, there was a feeling that that was actually the par base of the English Department, that these senior men who would meet together and --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tMake the decisions.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- make the decisions, and so by its very nature, women were excluded.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=12600.0,12900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/44","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"MARIE BORROFF:\tThe same thing was said of Maury's, before it became co-educated, that departments, there would be department meetings there, and the decisions would be made.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas that true?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah, I think it was.  I don't quite see how it's -- I don't know.  I find it very hard to, to think that the Boys Friendly should co-educate.  I think they should just stay by themselves if that's what they want.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou talked about being a member of a women's group.  What sort of group is that?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell it's a quasi social, quasi intellectual group.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIs that the Saturday Morning Group?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes it is.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt is.  So that is something that's still very much alive?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes, oh indeed.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMm hmm.  But is that an exclusively Yale group or is it a --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt's a New Haven --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo, it's town and gown.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIs it?  Yeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAnd even, we have some non-resident members.  And I also belong to something called The Club, which was originally all male, but co-educated in probably the '70s, and I got in then.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd what's that?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThe same thing.  We meet every other week or so and someone presents a paper.  So it's quasi intellectual and quasi social.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd the Saturday Morning Group is also -- is that again, got an intellectual?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes, yes.  Someone presents a paper when we meet.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.  I understand, yeah.  Something I came across was the Center for Independent Study.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat is -- is that relevant to the woman's story at Yale?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI don't know when that started, but it started out as an entirely -- as composed entirely of women, mostly wives who wanted to do something, unlike the professional wives, as I call them, who wanted to do nothing but enable their husbands.  And a lot of women, they wrote or they wanted to write a novel or they wanted to do some scholarship, and so they banded together, and this in turn really is part of a larger movement, whereby independent scholars, both male and female, are given a place.  I think in the MLA now, there's a place for them and there's a program of theirs.  It's going quite strong.  I think I was asked to be an honorary member or something and became one.  I don't know that I am any more.  I thought it seemed condescending to me, to be a member of this group.  But anyway.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd it wasn't exclusively women but I suppose it must --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAt first it was just women but now some men have joined.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, because there are male --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThere are some male independent scholars.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAbsolutely yes, yeah.  Increasingly, I think is ah, women are appointed to faculty jobs and they've got a trailing spouse of some sort or another.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIt can happen in either direction.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes it can.  That's been a big change hasn't it?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIt has.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWere you ever aware of any salary discrepancies based on gender?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell, when the chairmanship of the department changed, my salary went up rather startlingly.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhen was this?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWhen would it have been?  The '60s maybe, '70s, and the man -- you know, there's something that they call raising the base of a salary, not just raising the salary.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThe salary somehow is calculated from a base.  Don't ask me how it works.  I've never been chairman so I don't really know.  So you can raise -- the salary gets raised every year for inflation, to combat inflation, and then I think the chairman has some discretion as to how the raises are going to work.  But there's also the possibility of raising the base, and this chairman had raised the base for me and he said he was appalled when he looked at my salary in comparison with the others.  I had no idea.  I didn't think about it at all.  So he raised the base and did me a great service financially by so doing.  So I guess at the beginning, I was paid less than what men were for doing the same work, as they say.  So I think there is a certain amount of that, but I hope there's less and less as the chairmen become more enlightened.  But it's really up to the chairman I think.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=12900.0,13200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/45","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER:\tYes.  I think it would be harder to get away with it nowadays, even in a private institution.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tMm hmm.  See our salaries are not made public.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo, because it's a private institution.  In the public sector of course they are.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah, they do.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes, yeah.  It's much more difficult, and it is, I noticed, one of the most carefully guarded secrets of the university.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIndeed, indeed.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt's very British in that respect.  I think we're probably getting near the end.  You must be glad.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI want you to learn everything that you can.  I can't imagine I have anything else to say.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThere was one thing that you mentioned to me once before, and this is another Benno Schmidt story.  It may be again, an illustration of how the politics of the place work and how you work in a political way, and that was over something called the Rosencrantz Fellowships.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh yes.  (laughs)  Yeah.  Benno knew an author named Ved Mehta.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOh yes, yes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWho is, I think supposed to be legally blind or something.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat's right, yes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIn fact there's a very funny story about him.  Now what was it?  There was somebody who didn't believe he really was blind, thought he really could see, and was going to test that out.  And he said next time I meet him at a party I'm going to do that and see if there's any reaction.  And so he did it to someone he was talking to, who had been -- he thought was Ved Mehta, and he went to somebody and he said see, I did that and he never batted an eye.  And somebody said that wasn't Ved Mehta, that was somebody else.  (laughter)  Anyway, Benno thought he was doing the English Department a great favor, because he found someone who would sponsor this Rosencrantz writers fellowship, for a writer to come and teach writing, and but Ved Mehta would be the first person to hold it because Ved Mehta was a friend of Benno's.  So there was a kind of cabal or collusion.  So this was presented to the English Department.  Here, you have a freebie, you get an additional slot, but you also get this one person.  Well, the egos in the English Department were appalled at this, that they were actually told who they were to choose as a writer, and they would have none of it, and a lot of ill feelings generated and probably the chairman wrote a rather huffy letter to Benno.  I think John Hollander was the most appalled by this and the most wounded in his pride by the idea of this.  So Benno called me up.  I probably told -- I must have told you this story.  He called me up and I came in, and he told me that he had met with a lot flack as a result of this, and I said, \"Yes, I did know that.\"  Well then he said, \"What do I do now?\"  And I said, \"Well, if you can bring yourself to do it, call John Hollander on the phone and call him in, and ask his advice.\"  So that's what he did and the result of this was that a committee, of course, was formed to decide on it, and there would be a committee every year and it would be a term thing, and then the committee would decide who was going to be the next person to hold it, and that was how it was resolved.  I happened to be with John Hollander at a social occasion and ah, that subject came up and John said, \"Yes well, there was a little uncomfortableness about it, but Benno called me and brought me in and asked my advice, so then it was all resolved.  I told him what I thought should be done.\"  (laughter)  I told this to somebody and she said you know, that bears out the adage that you can get anything done at all, provided that you don't want to necessarily be known as the person who did it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd that was a way you liked to operate?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThat I liked?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou liked to operate?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.  I just thought it was right, that's the thing to do, to tell Benno to do.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThat what he had to do was to eat crow in front of John Hollander and placate his ego.  But it wouldn't have been -- you know, it wouldn't have done for Benno to say now Marie Borroff has told me to call you.  That wouldn't have been the way to do it at all, regardless of me.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut he wouldn't have looked so good would he?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=13200.0,13500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/46","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER:\tDo you think um, do you think there's a lot of power games that go on in academic life?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tA lot of?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tPower games.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh, I'm sure there are but I know very little about them because I don't think the English Department has been as prone to them perhaps as some other departments.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tEven despite those years of turmoil in the theory wars?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI suppose.  For example, I don't know how it was that Hillis Miller became chair, and he was certainly a player in that.  And then Jeffrey -- he and Hartman and Paul de Man and who else?  Were all very much a group as far as teaching and theory went, but now Jeffrey has gone into Judaic studies much more and Miller has left, and so I think any cabal that there was at that time has fallen apart.  I don't know how the department is operating now.  I just don't know.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you, did you ah -- \r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI mean, I felt, when I was participating in meetings, that there were people who were more conservative and people who were more new trend, and that they were at odds sometimes in discussions, but I never felt that there were manipulations going on, but maybe I just didn't know.  I was not part of it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo you very much stayed on the sidelines --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- when these guys went into joust.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThat's where I wanted to be.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes, yeah.  What about feminism?  Was there ever a time when you began consciously to think about feminist issues and indeed, by extension, taking a feminist approach in your work?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI don't consider myself a feminist at all.  I had to um, I was asked to give a lecture on poetry by women, and this was -- I was invited by the Yale Teachers Institute.  You know about that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIt's a link between Yale and the schools, the high schools, and they have money and they invite teachers to be fellows every year, high school teachers, and they get time off and they get brownie points and they get some money, and they come and then there are seminars that they go to that faculty members are chosen to lead.  I'm trying to think what faculty members have done it.  Thomas Whitaker was very active in it I know, for a while.  Anyway, I was invited to give a talk to the teachers, the New Haven teachers who had come, on poetry by women.  And the way I saw it, the way I worked it out -- this must have been in the '70s because I began with Mary Ann Moore, who wrote in the '40s, and some of my own poems that I wrote in the '40s, with the idea that whether you were a woman or a man, you used the pronoun he.  And when Mary Ann Moore writes a poem about the hero, she uses the masculine pronoun, and when she writes about courage, she uses as a metaphorical exemplary, the caged bird; though he is captive, his mighty singing says satisfaction is a lowly thing and it's very cryptic, like Moore, but her figure, her exemplary figure is male and she uses the pronoun he.  And when I wrote a poem about writing poetry, which is in my poem, it's in the early poem section, I wrote he who would frame the corded liar must take not of his bone but some steadfast thing.  It never would have occurred to me to say they, because for me, he was simply anybody.  I didn't think of it as a gendered word.  It became foregrounded as a gendered word later but it wasn't when I first was writing and reading.  And then, the feminist consciousness came into poetry in the 1960s, and I think of Adrienne Rich in particular, and a lot of women who wrote poetry wrote -- took what I call an adversarial stance.  They wrote anti-male poems or pro female poems.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=13500.0,13800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/47","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And I remember one, and I can't remember the name of the woman who wrote it, but she was a fairly well known poet, and she writes this anecdotal poem about being at a party.  You're at a party and a man comes over to you and starts talking with you and seems very interested in you and ah, your eyes meet and it gives you a little frissau (sp?) and then however, you drift apart and he's starting with somebody else.  And then at the end of the party, you're leaving and he's at the bottom of the stairs looking up, and you think he's looking at you and smiling, and so you're about to smile back and maybe hook up with him or something, but then you see that he's looking beyond you, at a beautiful blonde, who comes down the stairs and they, the two of them go off together.  So the feeling is that he sort of betrayed you by seeming to be interested in you, but then he really isn't interested in you, he's interested in this bimbo.  Do you know that word?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes, I do.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIt's a terrible word but you know.  But when you read that poem, if you ask yourself the question why did that happen or why did the man do that, you think the answer, implicit in the poem, is because he's a man.  That's what men are like.  This is a typical male way of behaving.  So that's why I call it an adversarial poem, and a lot of poetry was written of that kind, poems foregrounding women who have been neglected, like Adrienne Rich's poem about the sister of the famous astronomer.  I can't remember her name.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tCaroline Herschel.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tRight, that's it.  That's another example of the same thing, and that -- a lot of poetry like that was written in the '60s and '70s, and then also there's Adrienne Rich's very programmatic lesbian love poetry.  But it seemed to me that in more recent years, women poets were beginning to, as it were relax.  I wouldn't say that, but they were simply writing poems about their own experiences, including experiences that only a woman would have; poems about childbirth and poems about being a mother and an infant and so on, without necessarily doing it in an arrogant or defensive way, but just it's part of being alive, being a woman and being alive, and that seemed to me to be the best of all possible worlds, that men and women should simply write poetry about their lives and their experiences and of experiences that only a woman could have but not ah, meaning that women are better than men or that men are mean to women or anything like that.  I read a couple of poems aloud which had been written by a woman I had liked and admire very much, who is a professor of philosophy and a poet, at Pennsylvania State.  I'm going to block on her name.  Her husband is Robert Edwards, who Alistair would know about because he's a medievalist.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWhat is her name?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWe'll think about it afterwards.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI know.  Anyway, she has a beautiful poem about being pregnant, and she likens the child to a ship and when she delivers the child, she is sort of saying little boat, you're free of me now and float away on the waters and good luck to you.  It's lovely.  And then she has a love poem about her husband's body and that again is something new, because the typical poem is by a male about a woman's body, and so feminists accused the woman in men's poetry of being just an empty shell, a nothingness, which he imagines.  He projects his imagination onto the female.  But she speaks of lying in bed beside her husband and wanting to touch him and seeing his chest, and then very beautifully and very delicately she speaks then of regions further down, mysterious regions she might touch but then again she might not.  It's a beautiful love poem really, about the male body, and I read that.  So that was how it went, and then I saw that feminism and poetry had come in, in that sense, really in the '60s, with Adrienne Rich and Ann Sexton and to some extent Sylvia Plath because of the way her life went, but that I thought and hoped that it was now reaching a point where there need not be defensiveness or aggression from either side.  So I never experienced the feminism.  I saw it, I witnessed it, but it was not part of me, because I had never suffered for being a woman, I felt.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=13800.0,14100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/48","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And I had grown up in a household where the woman was the center of everything and was the adored one and ran the show.  So I had that in my bones and in my background.  Well then a very funny thing happened, because a lot of these teachers were people of color naturally, the New Haven schools being so constituted, and there was a question period and some polite questions were asked.  But then, a black woman who was sitting -- this was in the cafeteria, so they were all sitting around at tables for four or for six, and she looked very mad and she was looking down and she said, \"Well I didn't hear anything in that speech about my people.  There was nothing in that speech that meant anything to me.\"  She was angry and so I got down from the podium and went over to her and looked down at her, and she did not look up at me, and I said well, \"I know what the faculty of the schools in New Haven is, and I know that there are many people of color on those faculties, and it wouldn't have hurt me to cast my net a little wider and find some poetry written by women of color, but I didn't, and to the extent that I failed to do so, I'm sorry.\"  But she didn't want to look at me, she didn't want to smile or anything, so that went -- that fell upon stony ground.  Anyway, so I returned to the podium and then everybody began saying -- and then somebody said, \"Well I'm Chicano and I didn't hear anything about my people in this talk.\"  Finally it reached the reductial out of sortem, where somebody said, \"Well I'm a Native American...\"  (laughs)  All these people kept talking about it and finally, a black man, he raised his hand and he said well, I have a mother and that mother is in a convalescent home, and when she read that poem about visiting her mother in the convalescent home, that poem really touched my heart and I say, that if a poem speaks to your experience and speaks to your heart, then it doesn't matter whether the color is white or brown or whatever.  Well with that, everybody that had been very bored by all these people who -- began to applaud and there was a real ovation for him.  (laughs)  So he sort of saved that day.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tActually that makes me think of the --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThere's one more bit.  It turned out -- I hadn't known this but it turned out that several people at that meeting were sponsors of this school's program, and they thought it was just wonderful, the whole thing, because people had been open and they talked and they had argued and finally it had all resolved, and they thought it was just great.  (laughs)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou were a bit inadvertent weren't you?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI was the catalyst that caused it to happen.  I'm Chicano and I didn't hear anything about my people, and that talk.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt does actually remind me um, or brings to mind the first time I actually ever heard you speak, which was last year.  After I came to Yale, you did a public lecture on in defense of humanities, Diving Beneath the Wreck.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd I think it was, you said there that the -- why the humanities are important, why poetry is important, is it by connecting people rather than diving people, and everything else that we have in our contemporary life tends to divide us.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut to do the humanities is about human experience and human understanding, human experience.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tHuman.  Not male not female but human, which includes both male and female.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat did you -- obviously, when feminism, you hit the academy and there were women wanting to teach women's literature and all those things.  Did you have any input at all at the ah, at the faculty level?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.  There were -- the winds of change were blowing and the sand was being carried, and so in came black studies and Afro American studies and then came women studies, and they became programs and then gradually they began to be departments, and then came gay studies and then came film studies, and it just all, all changed, but I had nothing to do with it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  The academy is very different now isn't it?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.  And what I want is richness of meaning.  Give me that and I don't care who produced it, but that's what I want.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=14100.0,14400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/49","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  Yes again, I remember you talking about that in that lecture, that it's about meaning.  You became -- you were made a sterling professor in '92.  Were you the first woman to be a sterling professor?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYeah, in the FAS, I think I was.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIn the FAS yeah, another first.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.  There was somebody in the medical school I think.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas Dorothy Horstmann a sterling professor?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI think it may well have been.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas she?  Yes, yeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tShe was a very distinguished person as you know, but I think I was the first woman in FAS.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat sort of comments did you get?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tHmm?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat sort of comments did you get, congratulatory comments, because it really is the ah, exclusive club isn't it?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI know it.  I got a letter -- a note from Peter Gay.  You know who he is?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes I do, yes.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tSaying welcome to Yale's most exclusive club.  I don't know.  I suppose my friends were happy but ah, people tend to resent such things too.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tThey don't necessarily -- their noses may be out of joint, thinking it should have been me.  I'm sure a lot of people would feel that when they hear about a professorship.  Why wasn't it me or X or...  But then one has one's friends and there are generous people in the world too.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSometimes you sound as if you're completely surprised and aren't aware how far you've come.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI am.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAre you?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.  It is quite remarkable.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell it certainly is.  You've been, maybe in some ways plowing a lonely furrow, and that you've stuck to your guns in terms of what you like to write and talk about.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI've fulfilled my own dictum, do what only you can do and let fate decide the rest.  I just happen to be in a very wonderful place, where that sort of thing is rewarded, at least in my case it was.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd yet though, 30 years or more after affirmative action, I think, I saw the figures somewhere.  Yeah.  The latest report which has just come out from the Women's Faculty Forum, that's January, 2008.  It's going to take until 2038 before women will be half the faculty at Yale, at present progress.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tDo you think it will?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI'd be interested.  I mean, one wishes one could be able to be there to see what would happen.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI won't be there but I hope it comes true.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, yeah.  In '82, women were less than one fifth of the total faculty and now they're one third, but nevertheless, that that's still, you know the increment is so slow.  That brings me in a way, to the kind of final questions or things that I'd like you to consider, and that is what some have called the feminization of the faculty.  What does that mean in terms of Yale specifically, but I think the academy in general.  You know what -- how can one interpret that?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI think two new types of people, academicians, have developed, and they aren't in the majority by any means but you do see examples of them.  One is what I think of as the new woman, who is the sort of Hillary Clinton of the academic world in a way.  I mean, the alpha male kind of woman.  I think of Annabelle Patterson as one of those; very, very strong, very self-assertive, very well aware of her own worth, and also a sexual being and married, they were loves, with children and all that.  I think of her as one of those, and I think they're rare because that kind of energy and ability, that combination I think is rare.  You've probably talked with her, but she to me is one of the new breed of women, and some of the young women who are coming along, I think have that same kind of strength and indomitableness and ambition, because now they feel that they can make it.  They feel much more confident that they can make it, I think, than they did.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=14400.0,14700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/50","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"So that's one type that I've become aware of, and the other type is the more feminized man, in a very, very good way.  The nurturing parent man, the man who really helps with the housework, who really helps raise the children and who benefits thereby and becomes a softer kind of person, a more admirable kind of man.  I've known some of those too, and I still think both are in the minority.  I think that kind of man is still rare, and I think much, a woman's happiness, I think in assuming women get married in general, I think it really depends, to a large extent, on the kind of man she marries, and she may not find out for quite a while but she will find out eventually.  I remember your saying of Alistair, \"He liberated me.\"  You said that.  So I think you're one of the lucky ones.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  I think I am.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tBut not every woman is that lucky and if she finds herself in a bind and in an unhappy position, I think she's pretty helpless because it's much less easy for a woman to find a new male partner.  And maybe, if she's really unlucky, she has no profession, she has no training.  A lot of women are in that position.  They're unhappy in their marriage but they haven't got anything else, or widows who haven't anything to turn to.  So I would hope every woman would have some sort of intellectual interests and abilities.  So I still think that things are sided against them in society.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tSomewhat.  And I still think there is a difference between the general attitude toward a man who plays around; he's a Lothario, a gay blade, and a woman who sleeps around, she's a slut.  I think there still is a certain amount of residue with that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI think there's maybe a social ambiguity about women and ambition as well.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes, I agree.  Unfeminine.  And probably there are people who think Annabelle is kind of a determigent or a beldame or something.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRather than an Amazon.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tA virago.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  The other thing that I wonder about, and I've certainly heard and read this, that as more women enter the academy, it's like the church, the status goes down.  It's not such a desirable place because women can do it.  (laughter)\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tGroucho Marx said, \"I wouldn't belong to a club that would have me as a member.\"\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  \r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI never thought of that but that may be.  That may be so.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut it might be sour grapes you know.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tMm hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI do get a very strong sense from what we've been talking about, that you feel that you were treated well by Yale.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI was.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tEspecially --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI mean, maybe my salary was low at the beginning, until that chairman came in and raised the base, but I didn't know anything about that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  And that you also felt, you said very fortunate that you landed up in a department, in a subject where it maybe was easier to be a woman.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.  I think that's right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd you had men, senior men who supported you --\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tOh yes indeed.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- all the way through.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tAll the way through.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tI did.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDo you think though, that your experience was typical of women at Yale?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIn my department?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNot in your department necessarily.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut from what you know.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.  I, I would go back to the elephant.  I think a lot of women get the tail of the elephant.  I think it just all depends; who is chairman in the department that you happen to be in, and what the faculty, established faculty, the bastion of your department, how that cohort thinks.  It just all depends.  But I think more and more, the faculty is getting more and more enlightened as younger people come into it, and I'm sure that trend will continue.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=14700.0,15000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/51","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"So what was true in the English Department in the '60s, I think is getting more and more to be true of other departments now that we're in the 21st Century.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI think you probably have answered this question already but I'll ask it anyway.  You are looking back on your own life and your life's work in particular, do you think women can have it all?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell I didn't.  I didn't marry and bring up children, so there's a gap in me certainly in that, and there are times when I feel I have never made a man happy as a woman can, but I did a lot of other things and what I did I enjoyed immensely.  So I was a very fortunate person, it seems to me, but I can't say I had it all because I didn't have that part, and that's what the new woman is having; she's having it all.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou think she's having it all?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell, I think she's -- thinks she should or believes...  I think an ideal came in at some point, and you saw her on the covers of magazines and on the cover of the New York Times Magazine; the woman who gives dinner parties for eight and has five beautiful children and an adoring husband, and is also on the board of several corporations, and she is kind of a mythical being, this woman who had it all, but I think in fact, human energy is a quantum and most people have only so much of it, and if you put your energy into something, there's less energy for something else, and I think that remains true.  In many cases it may be that this woman who has it all is a kind of a façade and you're not really hearing the truth about her life.  But there are immensely energetic people who probably can do it; energetic, attractive and talented people, and if there's a woman who has all of that, then I think she probably can.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDo you think it's true that men can have it all?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell it's easier for a man but ah, by having it all for a man, I would have to say I think he also should have a softer side, that it could be the new male I spoke about; not effeminate but feminized in a good sense.  I think Norman McClain was like that.  He had great tenderness, was a wonderful teacher and was also very masculine.  He wrote a couple of wonderful books late in life.  He wrote, he said himself, he doesn't think there's any part of him, any big part of him that didn't have a chance to come out.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat's amazing to be able to say about your own life.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.  And I think most of what I had -- I once saw an epitaph which I always thought would be a very good epitaph for me, and that was, \"She hath done what she could.\"  (laughter)  I think I can claim that.  I did what I could.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  How would you like to be remembered?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell, I'd like to be remembered as somebody who had a fun side and had a musical side and who liked to play ragtime as well as classical music, and who enjoyed watching television.  I'd like to be remembered as somebody who, not in solemn terms, I think in reverential terms.  When I had an opportunity to vet that article that's going to be in the calendar, I stuck in two references to music that weren't there.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIs there something you regret not having done?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tYes.  Not having made a man happy -- I was speaking of that -- as a wife.  On the other hand, I don't know whether I could have done that and then all the other things that I did, and I had a beloved friend whom I really took care of in the last three or four years of her life, so I did that.  I haven't really lived for myself because I don't really think one should.  I think one should -- I think love is the most important thing there is.  I love my work and I love poetry but I also loved other people and did what I could for them, and I think that's very important, all important.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd love doesn't always sit easy with ambition does it?\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tNo.\r\n\t","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=15000.0,15300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263/transcript/31924/annotation/52","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER:\tThank you very much indeed.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tWell, it's been very interesting to hear myself talk.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell I've been very interested, and I just think this is an amazing story.\r\n\nMARIE BORROFF:\tIt's amazing to me.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  I wish I can do half of it.\r\n\r\n[END OF INTERVIEW]","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48956/file/122263#t=15300.0,15324.768"}]}]}]}