A Literary Education and Other Essays

From A Literary Education: On Being Well-Versed in Literature

(2008)

Sydney Smith, the early-nineteenth-century clergyman, wit, and one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review, once remarked that, if the same progress as had been made in education were made in the culinary arts, we should today still be eating soup with our hands. Quite so. Sydney Smith’s simile holds up all too well in our time. New ideas and reforms continue to crop up in education—from the installation of the elective system more than a century ago at Harvard to the advent of digital technology throughout the educational system in recent years—each, in its turn and time, heralding fresh new revolutions in learning. One after another, these revolutions fizzle, then go down in flames, leaving their heralds all looking like some variation of what Wallace Stevens called “lunatics of one idea.”

Meanwhile, things continue to slide: standards slip, curricula are politicized and watered down, and, despite all the emphasis on schooling at every level of society, the dance of education remains locked into the dreary choreography of one step forward, two steps back. Education remains education, which is to say a fairly private affair. No matter how much more widespread so-called higher education has become, only a small—one is inclined to say an infinitesimal—minority seems capable of taking serious advantage of it, at any rate during the standard years of schooling.

Let me quickly insert that, when young, I was not myself among this minority. As a student in the middle 1950s, I attended the University of Chicago. No teacher in whose class I sat has ever remembered me upon meeting in later years, and this for good reason: My plan during my student days was to remain as inconspicuous as possible; I was sedulous only in the attempt to hide my ignorance, which was genuine and substantial. But more than mere ignorance was entailed. I somehow could not bring my mind to concentrate—to “focus,” as we say today—for long on many of the matters at hand.

A teacher in command of all the standard academic locutions—those “if you wills” and “as it weres,” with a mirabile dictu and other Latin tags thrown in from time to time at no extra charge—might stand authoritatively at his lectern setting out eight reasons for the emergence of the Renaissance. As he did so, all I could think was what induced him to buy that hopeless necktie he was wearing, and might that be a soup stain prominently in the middle of it, and, if so, made by chicken noodle or minestrone? At examination time, I recalled only five of the eight reasons for the Renaissance, and wound up with a C, which did not stand for charming.

Classrooms can, of course, sometimes kill great subjects, and also splendid books. Recognizing this, Willa Cather insisted that her own books not be made available in school editions, for she feared that students, reading them too early and under the duress of formal education, would never return to them in later life when they were more likely to be truly ready for them. As delivered in conventional classrooms and lecture halls, education is not available to everyone, including sometimes quite bright, even dazzlingly brilliant, people. Henry James was never very good at school, and neither was Paul Valery; Marcel Proust performed mediocrely at the Lycee Condorcet. W. H. Auden failed to come away with a First at Oxford. Sainte-Beuve said of Pascal, who was an authentic genius, that “it was easier for him to make discoveries for himself than to study after the way of others.” Was there something wrong with these men, powerful artists and philosophers all, or something wrong with education, as it is usually construed and practiced?

I had a cousin named Sherwin Rosen, who, before his death at the age of sixty-three, was the chairman of the Economics Department at the University of Chicago, a department that for more than thirty years now has been dominant in its discipline. At his memorial, one of my cousin’s older colleagues, Gary Becker, a Nobel prizewinner, remarked that Sherwin came close to being washed out of the PhD program in economics at the University of Chicago. The reason, Gary Becker said, is that my cousin was slow in response to questions in seminar rooms. He didn’t have confident answers at the ready; his replies tended to be halting, faltering. But then a day or two, sometimes a week, later, Sherwin would return to the professor who had asked him the question and quietly reveal the defect in its formulation. “What this taught me,” Professor Becker said, “is that too much in formal education has to do with quick response, with coughing up information quickly, and not enough leeway is allowed for reflection and brooding in the thoughtful way that serious subjects require.”

I like this anecdote because it subverts normal notions of how education should work. After thirty years teaching in a university, I came to have a certain measured suspicion, sometimes edging onto contempt, for what I called (only to myself ) “the good student.” This good student always got the highest grades, because he approached all his classes with a single question in mind: “What does this teacher want?” And once the good student decides, he gives it to him—he delivers the goods. The good student is thus able to deliver very different goods to the feminist teacher at 9:00 am, to the Marxist teacher at 10:00 am, to the conservative teacher at 11:00 am, and just after lunch to the teacher who prides himself on being without any ideology or political tendency whatsoever.

From A Virtucrat Remembers

(1988)

Well, I hope you think a little better of the world.

We mustn’t make up our minds too early in life.

Henry James, The Princess Casamassima

Famous American corners, permit me to name a few: Hollywood and Vine, State and Madison, Broadway and 42nd Street, Haight and Ashbury. Shortly before beginning this essay, I happened to be in San Francisco, staying with someone who lives in the Haight-Ashbury district, and over a three-day visit walked past the corner of Haight and Ashbury and along the street and in the neighborhood known as “the Haight” perhaps twenty times. I never did so without a rich stew of emotion boiling within me. If San Francisco was the spiritual capital of that period in recent history we think of with chronological inexactitude as “the sixties,” then nearby Berkeley was its Finland Station and Haight-Ashbury its Red Square. To alter my trope rather abruptly, if the sixties were your idea of a good time, the Haight was Ciro’s, the Chez Paris, the Copacabana; it was, baby, where the good times rolled.

Although some small changes have been made on the Haight—a few new shops have gone in, a few head shops have gone out—and although rising real estate prices presage other changes in the near future, I found myself surprised how little the street seemed to change, how very “sixties” it all still appeared, at least outwardly. Block after block of shops sell handcrafted jewelry, gay and feminist books (such as the Anarchist Collective Bookstore), used clothing, berets, (putative) health food, aggressively uninteresting paintings—in short, as Zorba the Greek might say, the full catastrophe. The street’s denizens are got up in sixties regalia: beards, long hair, dreary denim, backpacks, bedrolls, bandanas. Walking past the corner of Haight and Ashbury, I noted a man of perhaps my own middle years, red-eyed and in an advanced stage of scragglitude, who plunked his guitar and intoned, “Oh, ya drop dead in the street and they give ya a ticket for littering.” A block or so farther on, I heard, behind me, one man say to another, “Whaddaya say we go up to Montana, get hold of some shit, and take it down to Mexico?”

On the Haight I felt like I was Rip Van Winkle in reverse—as if I fell asleep and awoke to find not that it was forty years later but twenty years earlier. Except of course it wasn’t, and there was ample evidence to prove that it wasn’t. The young, blond, longhaired, be-sandaled girls who seemed so much a part of the counterculture fantasy—a pipe of pot, a book of Howl, and thou—are now older, gray, still long-haired and be-sandaled women, looking much the worse for wear. The man who sang about dropping dead in the street, the chances are, may do just that. While many of these aging hippies sleep in Buena Vista Park, where they are not disturbed by San Francisco’s highly tolerant police, others drop off on stoops before pastel-painted houses or in doorways. When they wake in the cool San Francisco morning, they are not a charming sight; they are, instead, a reminder of the good sense of Santayana’s remark that “the state of nature presupposes a tropical climate.”

As I walked along the Haight, I, who am perhaps about as square as one can get on this earth, felt no hostility directed at me. Yet I felt a good deal of my own hostility directed toward them, these sad and aging hippies, who seemed to be standing around awaiting a bus into the past. I felt about them a sense of revulsion, and loathing, and above all depression—the latter, especially, when I would notice a young adolescent who looked to me as if he might be a runaway come to the Haight to live the countercultural dream. Looking into the drug-besotted eyes of these people who are now pushing middle age, I thought, my God, the squalor, the waste, the horror! And I also felt, what good luck that the counter-cultural dream progressed no further than it did! Passing a clutch of these people, men and women, on the very corner of Haight and Ashbury, I muttered to myself, “What you do with your own life is your own business, but I’m awfully glad that, in the battle of competing visions, yours lost.”

But did it? The pathetic creatures lingering on the Haight are but the lost remnant of a now dead movement, people who bought the whole package of inchoate philosophy, quarter-baked politics, and sappy transcendentalism that made up the intellectual content of the movement. And yet in diluted form much of the spirit of the sixties lives on; and in some quarters it seems not merely living on but very nearly prevailing, even if not in the preserved-in-amber form one finds it in on the Haight. I find this spirit alive and all too well in the universities, for example. Those professors now in their forties, and hence dominant as full professors, department chairmen, and deans, were all in their twenties in the late 1960s. Wherever they actually went to school, the true alma mater for most of them is the sixties, when they were graduate students. One sees the sixties influence not only in their dress and ubiquitous beards—theirs is surely the first generation of full professors to teach in jeans—but in their chumminess with students, their readiness to subvert tradition, their rush to align themselves with what they construe to be virtuous causes. The generation of the sixties was above all the generation of virtue. They set out to make America better. America, unfortunately or fortunately, was not as good as they and, in their view, still isn’t.

Tell me what you think of the sixties and I shall tell you what your politics are. Tell me that you think the period both good and bad, with much to be said for and against it, and you are, whether you know it or not, a liberal. Tell me that you think the sixties a banner time in American life, a period of unparalleled idealism, a splendid opportunity sadly missed, and you are doubtless a radical, sentimental or otherwise. Tell me that you think the sixties a time of horrendous dislocation, a disaster nearly averted, a damn near thing, but a thing nonetheless for which we are still paying and shall continue to pay, and I shall tell you . . . well, I am not sure what you are precisely, but your views, friend, are close to mine and I am pleased to meet you.