Norman Holmes Pearson

Portrait of Prof. Norman Holmes Pearson by Deane Keller.

Norman Holmes Pearson (April 13, 1909 – November 5, 1975) was an American academic, author, editor, critic, and archivist; a leader of the American counterintelligence service (the OSS) who contributed to the founding of the CIA; and a prominent figure in establishing American Studies as an academic discipline after the end of World War II.

Career

A native of New Haven, Pearson attended Yale College (1928–1932) and was graduated with a B.A. in English. After a scholarship at Oxford, he was awarded a second B.A. and later an M.A. from Oxford. In 1937, while still a Yale graduate student, he and William Rose Bénet published the two-volume Oxford Anthology of American Literature and later co-edited five volumes on Poets of the English Language with poet W.H. Auden. He became a Yale faculty member, Instructor of English, at an early age, and later Professor of English and of American Studies; in the former position he became arguably the greatest Nathaniel Hawthorne scholar of his time and maintained close relations with major literary figures, especially including poets H.D. (whose daughter became his secretary in the OSS) and Ezra Pound, promoting their careers and helping Pound avoid a charge of treason.[1] "Throughout his life he played the role of the man of letters, encouraging poets, writers, painters, and schoars..." [2] He was twice a Guggenheim Fellow, in 1948 and 1956.

Like Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Pearson was recruited by Donald Downes to work for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), in London during World War II. By 1943 Pearson was working under James R. Murphy as part of the new X-2 CI (counterintelligence) branch that served as the link between the OSS and the British Ultra crypoanalysis project in nearby Bletchley Park. Working with British Special Intelligence (SI), X-2 is believed to have helped turn all of Germany's secret agents in Britain and exposed a network of 85 enemy agents in Mozambique; by 1944 there were sixteen X-2 field stations and nearly a hundred on staff. "In the words of Norman Holmes Pearson, who would lead the U.S. counterespionage effort in Western Europe, the British 'were the ecologists of double agency: everything was interrelated, everything must be kept in balance.'"[3] In addition, the Art Looting Investigation Unit reported directly to him; the 2013 movie "Monuments Men" concerns that unit. "Some of his best work, done for the OSS in its final months, were analyses of the intelligence services of other nations..." (Winks 248).[4] Following the war he was asked to help establish the successor to the OSS, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). To head counterintelligence for the new agency he helped recruit James Jesus Angleton, who had been a student of his in English at Yale (and a resident of Silliman College there) and then his "number two" in the OSS in London and head of X-2 Italy; Pearson was hailed as "the first to recognize just how good at counterintelligence the youthful James Angleton would be." In 1971 Pearson contributed the introduction to The Double-Cross System, Sir John Masterson's "authorized biography" of the activities of British intelligence and British-American counterintelligence cooperation, during World War II.

Returning to Yale, he co-founded and headed Yale's new American Studies program, in which scholarship became an instrument for promoting American interests during the Cold War. Popular among undergraduates, the program sought to instruct them in what the program viewed as the fundamentals of American civilization and thereby instill a sense of nationalism and national purpose. It was also used as a recruiting vehicle for foreign students who, after their return to their home countries, might be useful to US foreign policy objectives.[5] Also during the 1940s and 1950s, Wyoming millionaire William R. Coe made large contributions to the American Studies programs both at Yale and at the University of Wyoming. Coe was concerned to celebrate the values of the Western United States in order to meet the "threat of communism".[6] Pearson had realized "that the international standing of American Studies at Yale to no small degree depended on the attraction of the program for foreign students and on the continued ties between those scholars and the program ... Norman was Yale. There were many brilliant scholars and teachers, but he was the one who cared.".[7]

Archivist

Pearson worked with Donald C. Gallup to redirect the focus of the Yale Collection of American Literature, emphasizing archival collections of twentieth-century writers. It is through the extended concept of “archives” that the collection has acquired its extra-literary materials such as photographs, works of art, and memorabilia.[8]

Brenda Helt, in The Making and Managing of American Modernists: Norman Holmes Pearson and the Yale Collection of American Literature, based in part on Pearson’s unpublished letters, examines his role in developing that collection. He used his personal connections with authors like H. D., Bryher, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein to acquire major collections of their work for Yale. Reciprocally, Pearson used his authoritative position to further interest in and obtain publishers for the work of these modernists, securing their reputations for posterity and facilitating the success of some of their best work. He states that Pearson worked tirelessly as H.D.’s tactful editor, as well as her literary advisor and (unpaid) agent, roles that had a significant positive effect on the quantity and quality of her late work. Pearson promoted Pound’s work apart from his political involvements, helping to prevent it from being “disappeared" due to Pound's very unpopular World War II politics and consequent incarceration at St. Elizabeths Hospital (a psychiatric hospital operated by the District of Columbia Department of Mental Health).

Personal life

Pearson was the son of Chester Pearson and Fanny Kittredge Pearson, whose home on Elm Street in New Haven "was often the scene of serious discussions between the leading bankers, businessmen, and political figures of the town." He suffered from tuberculosis as a child and was confined to a wheelchair for much of his undergraduate career at Yale, which began in 1928. As an adult he was severely underweight and walked with a limp that developed into a shuffle. His doctoral studies were seriously delayed by an operation in 1938 and he did not receive his Ph.D. until 1941. Yet he celebrated V-E Day (the German surrender) by "climbing well up on one of the stone lions in Trafalgar Square" and was "the first American officer to enter Oslo after the German capitulation in 1945" and "refused to think of himself as handicapped" (Winks 251) and was well known for his vise-like handshake (Winks 264). As a Yale undergraduate he was an editor of the Yale Daily News and a winner of the Henry H. Strong Prize for American Literature for an essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne and thereafter realigned his studies from economics to English and American literature.

On February 21, 1941 Pearson married Susan Silliman Bennett (1904–1987), who had two daughters from a previous marriage, Susan S. Tracy (later Susan Addiss) and Elizabeth B. Tracy. Mrs. Pearson was the great-great-granddaughter of Benjamin Silliman and a direct descendent of Jonathan Trumbull, for whom Yale's Silliman and Trumbull Colleges are named; her grandfather, Arthur Williams Wright, had received from Yale the first Ph.D. in science ever awarded in the United States. The Pearsons' residence was located across from Albertus Magnus College and near the Yale Divinity School at 39 Goodrich Street on the New Haven-Hamden town line (now the headquarters of Promoting Enduring Peace), but during Yale's summer vacation they favored the family summer home on the Connecticut shore at Johnson's Point in Branford. In 1946 the couple drove from Hamden to the Yucatán in Mexico to help him recover from his war experiences: "because I want more than anything to see the Mayan ruins... ruins made by something other than bombs, and a civilization which has simply disintegrated, not blasted to hell. It may restore balance." [9]

Susan Pearson's remains are buried in New Haven's historic Grove Street Cemetery.[10] With tongue in cheek, Pearson once proposed to her this self-deprecating inscription for his own tombstone, from Stendhal's Rouge et Noir: "médiocre avec éclat" (brilliantly mediocre). His papers, the Norman Holmes Pearson Collection, are deposited with Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Honors

Selected works

Pearson's prolific output encompassed 164 works in 246 publications in 4 languages and 10,656 library holdings.[12]

The most widely held works by Pearson include:

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See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Kopley, Emily, "Art for the Wrong Reason: Paintings by Poets," The New Journal. December 2004.
  2. ↑ Winks p. 310
  3. ↑ Timothy Naftali, "Blind Spot", The New York Times, July 10, 2005."
  4. ↑ Winks, Robin W. (1996), Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961, pp. 247–321. See p. 248 regarding Sir John Masterman's account of X-2's activities, The Double-Cross System.
  5. ↑ Michael Holzman, "The Ideological Origins of American Studies at Yale," American Studies 40:2 (Summer 1999): 71-99
  6. ↑ Liza Nicholas, "Wyoming as America: Celebrations, a Museum, and Yale," American Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Sep. 2002), pp. 437–465 in JSTOR
  7. ↑ Quoted in Winks, p. 321; see footnote 87 for primary source.
  8. ↑ Willis, Patricia C. "Collection of American Literature," Yale University Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. February 11, 2005.
  9. ↑ Between History and Poetry: The Letters of H.D. and Norman Holmes Pearson edited by Donna Krolik Hollenberg, P. 50; p. 60, footnote 17; and p. 65, footnote 83.
  10. ↑ http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=Pearson&GSiman=1&GScty=23413&GRid=31477065&
  11. 1 2 3 4 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) et al. (1997). Between History and Poetry: the Letters of H.D. and Norman Holmes Pearson, p. 55; Winks, p. 321.
  12. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 WorldCat Identities: Norman Holmes Pearson

References

Archival resources


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