Extraordinary Sydney H. Cox – notes on Msla’s loss, Dartmouth’s gain, Schulberg, Kurt Vonnegut & Marlon Brando
The Faculty and Troubles
During the fourteen years of the Clapp presidency only two difficulties with personnel occurred. One came when in 1926 Professor Sidney Cox, a most provocative teacher and a highly moral person, allowed the phrase “son-of-a-bitch” to be published in The Frontier, then a student literary magazine.[1][16] The Company press rose in horror and controversy spread. The President supported Professor Cox; the Chancellor disavowed University responsibility for the magazine. Newspapers proposed that the University be investigated for moral turpitude. At that moment Dartmouth College offered Professor Cox a professorship; he accepted it, and taught there, a much valued teacher, until his death about twenty years later. The controversy died down, but the magazine was under suspicion for some time. In 1927 H. G. Merriam took over ownership of the magazine and financial and moral responsibility.
The above is an excerpt from The University of Montana, A History, by H. G. Merriam, 1970.
So who was Sydney Cox?
It seems that Sydney Cox was a revered Professor at Dartmouth College. Dr. Cox began teaching at Dartmouth in 1926 after being fired at the University of Montana. An endowed scholarship/prize is given annually in Dr.Cox’s name for creative writing students at Dartmouth College. Budd Schulberg, the famed screenwriter, was apparently one of the students responsible for creation of the memorial to Sydney Cox – see interviews below.
1.Mention of Sydney Cox – in ‘Tribute to Budd Schulberg’
At Dartmouth College, in Budd’s day and my own, there had been an extraordinary professor of English named Sidney Cox. Now, in the early ’50s, some few years after Cox’s death, Budd thought there should be some sort of memorial to him. He assembled a small group — himself, myself, a half-dozen others — to go up to Hanover of a spring weekend to work out the details of such a memorial. Budd, as shooting neared on “On the Waterfront,” flew up to Hanover by way of a small airport in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
The above is a quote from Memorial
“Thanks, Budd, for everything, even for Sammy Glick”
By Jerry Tallmer
The Villager – Volume 79, Number 10 | August 12 – 18, 2009
2. Another Schulberg interview – From the Paris Review – Winter 2001
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/450/the-art-of-fiction-no-169-budd-schulberg
“INTERVIEWER Budd Schulberg, The Art of Fiction No. 169″
Interviewed by Kurt Vonnegut
How old were you when you wrote What Makes Sammy Run?
SCHULBERG
I started writing it when I was about twenty‑four.
INTERVIEWER
That’d be two years out of college. Were they able to teach you something at Dartmouth?
SCHULBERG
They did have one remarkable teacher. His name was Sidney Cox. He died maybe fifteen years ago. He was very intense, a little bit of a wild man. He had been kicked out of the University of Montana, I think it was—he had been the sponsor of some student publication there that had some bad language in it; he had supported the writer and got kicked out. The Dartmouth English department was afraid of him. He was eccentric, and they were all pretty tame. He couldn’t teach writing—as you know, nobody can really teach you to write. But he was so intense that when you came out of that classroom, you couldn’t wait to get back to your desk and write—to go deeper and deeper into yourself. “Is that what you really feel? Is that honest?” He drove his students kind of crazy. One kid, who was a mediocre writer—he didn’t really have it—jumped in the Connecticut River and committed suicide.
INTERVIEWER
Oh my God, because of Mr. Cox?
SCHULBERG
Well, the department blamed it on Sidney. I’m sure there were many, many other reasons. But they blamed it on Sidney—that he drove these young people to such extremes, that they were so frustrated not to be able to live up to his high standards.
INTERVIEWER
Was he himself a good writer?
SCHULBERG
Sidney wrote a book called Walks and Talks with Robert Frost that’s quite nice; he worshipped Robert Frost. As you know, Frost was associated with Dartmouth, and he would show up once in a while and come to our class. Then Sidney wrote a very interesting book about writing called Indirections, but as a teacher he was inspirational. I worked harder than I ever had before. He said I was the best student he had ever had. Sidney was really very important to me, more than anybody else in the college. Actually, the best class we had at Dartmouth was not a part of the curriculum. Friday night all of the would‑be writers or the writers of some talent would assemble and read their stuff. It was kind of a workshop, an informal workshop. That was really the best thing that I attended at school in terms of any writing help.
When I came back to Dartmouth after about three years in Hollywood—after some bad experiences, fed up with the way writers were treated out there—and started to write What Makes Sammy Run? I’d still meet Sidney all the time. We’d meet every Friday night, and talk. I considered him my mentor, really.
INTERVIEWER
He electrified you.
SCHULBERG
He made me want to write better. He made me feel I could do that but only if I worked very hard and went deep into myself as to what I really wanted to say and not look for—oddly enough, ironically—instant success. Don’t worry about being popular. That was his theme: Don’t worry about best‑sellers, just write what you really feel. Don’t write to please people, really just to please yourself.
INTERVIEWER
But he himself, in his own eyes, was not successful. Isn’t that so?
SCHULBERG
No, he wasn’t. A strange thing happened: At the same time that I gave him my manuscript of What Makes Sammy Run? he gave me his—a novel he’d been working on for years. Then he wrote a review of my novel in the Dartmouth alumni magazine, which was the most vicious attack I’ve ever had in my life! He hated the book. He identified the subject matter—Hollywood—with the book itself. He thought it was cheap, vulgar. Meanwhile Sidney’s book was absolutely the opposite of everything he’d preached. There was no life in the book. It was absolutely dead. It was boring.
INTERVIEWER
Has he figured in any of your novels?
SCHULBERG
No, he hasn’t. After that we had a very strained relationship. Very strained. We tried not to make it personal, but you can’t overcome such things. I was sore at him, and I was sort of fed up with his teaching all of a sudden, because he so obviously could not do what he taught. I wondered how he could criticize me, and not see how stillborn his own work was. Just the same, I have an enormous, deep feeling for him. I loved Sidney but what he did was unforgivable really; he just shouldn’t have tried to practice what he was preaching, he shouldn’t have tried.
3. Another interview – by Jerry Tallmer
The Villager –Volume 74, Number 27 | November 03 – 09, 2004
“Screenwriter Budd Schulberg, 90, reminisces on making ‘Waterfront’”
http://thevillager.com/villager_79/screenwriterbuddschulberg.html
One weekend, when that work had started with yet another rewrite of the script, Budd had to go up to his alma mater, Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, to plan a memorial for a great English teacher of his (and mine), Sidney Cox.
“Budd, where are you going?” said a panicked Sam Spiegel. Budd told him. “For how long?” Just till Monday, Budd told him. “How are you getting there?” By a small airplane, Budd told him. “But what about the script?” Don’t worry, Schulberg told Spiegel, I’ll have the script with me. “BUT BUDD — WHAT IF THE PLANE CRASHES?”
Most of the actors who were to gain immortality through “On the Water” were drawn by Kazan from the Actors Studio and the classes of Stella Adler. One was Karl Malden. Another was Marlon Brando.
4. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=80197887
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Sidney Hayes Cox |
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5. Interview with President Ernest M. Hopkins Dartmouth College
1
Reel E, Track#1
Interviewed by Laurance Schwartz (ʼ64)
Nov. 18, 1963
Student: Iʼd like to ask another question. President Hopkins, you mentioned
about attracting the faculty. Could you tell us how you built the
strong faculty that is in the process of retiring who we see all
around us today.
Hop: Well, you go about it in all sorts of ways. I had been presumably
something of an authority on employment management before I
came here and I found out almost immediately that nothing that Iʼd
experienced applied to getting a faculty. Well, there wasnʼt any
science to it as far as I was concerned. It was just simply an art of.
If you heard of a good man and had any reason to think you could
get him, you went after him, and there werenʼt any ethics about it or
anything else. [Laughter] You just went after him. And I can give
you two or three illustrations. Sidney Cox, who was one of the best
men here in English for years… Robert Frost asked me one time
the first year I was up here, he says Iʼve got a man I want you to
look up sometime, and he says, he taught with me over at Plymouth
when I taught over there and his name is Cox and heʼs teaching out
in Montana. And I just made a record of it and the next thing… It
was some years later, Robert Frost says, do you remember I talked
about Sidney Cox? And I said yes. Well, he says heʼs just been
fired from the University of Montana. And I says, what for? And he
says they have a censor of publications out there and Sidney let a
story get in that some of the editors didnʼt like, and out of the
discussion why they fired him. Well, Iʼd never met Cox and it was
wholly my dependence on what Robert Frost told me, but I
telegraphed him right off asking him to come to Hanover and he
came to Hanover and met the members of the English department
and they thought he was good and thatʼs the way we got one man.
Link to article in The Helena Independent
https://www.newspapers.com/image/11822208/