New York in the '50s (5 page)

Van Doren had become a prototype of the American author-scholar-sage as college professor. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his
Collected Poems
in 1940, he had influenced such gifted students as John Berryman and Louis Simpson (as well as young renegade poets still to be heard from, like Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti), the critics Maxwell Geismar and Lionel Trilling, the editors Robert Giroux and Clifton Fadiman, and the novelist Herbert Gold. He appeared in Whittaker Chambers's political autobiography,
Witness
, and in Thomas Merton's spiritual autobiography,
The Seven Storey Mountain
. After getting an A in Van Doren's course on Shakespeare, a football player named Jack Kerouac quit the Columbia team to spend more time studying literature. Before his retirement at the end of the decade, Van Doren would be described by
Newsweek
as “a living legend.”

When I saw Van Doren in class that morning for the first time, his hair was gray and I had no idea of his age (fifty-eight), which was anyway irrelevant for he didn't seem old but ageless, like the visage of one of the presidents on Mount Rushmore. His face had that craggy granite look of being hewn or chiseled by hard-won experience and knowledge, but it wasn't grim or set in a stare of stony, locked-away wisdom. His eyes gave off a love of his work (which included the students seated before him) and the world, and he had a playful and wry sense of humor. To Allen Tate he was “the scholarly looking poet who always looks as if … he were going to say grace, but says instead damn.”

The Noble Voice
was the title Van Doren gave one of his books, and it was also an apt description of his own way of speaking—mellow,
thoughtful, dignified without being formal. His voice was familiar to radio fans across the country, who heard him discuss great works of literature on “Invitation to Learning.” Van Doren retained a flat midwestern accent (he was the fourth of five sons of an Illinois country doctor) that made me feel at home. He wasn't afraid to sound his
r
's, and he spoke at a measured, leisurely pace, letting the words come out without being clipped at the end or hurried along like the New York traffic. He anglicized foreign words when he pronounced them, speaking of
Don Quixote
as “Quicks-ott,” with the
x
sounding, rather than in the Spanish manner of “Key-ho-tay.” He said with a wry smile that if we followed that style, we would have to call the capital of France “Paree,” and he preferred plain “Paris.”

Hearing that plain midwestern accent, as well as the plain thinking behind it, bolstered my confidence, proving that people from the hinterlands could make it in East Coast literary circles. It gave me courage to speak to some of my new classmates, jostling down the steps of Hamilton Hall after a lecture.

“Hey, Van Doren's great, huh?” I said.

One of them shrugged, and in a nasal New Yorkese said, “I dunno, he's a little too midwestuhn.”

“Yeah, that's it!” I blurted out.

It was not just the familiar accent that made it easier to knock at the door of Van Doren's office and introduce myself later that semester. It was also the kindness in the older man's eyes, in his whole demeanor.

“May I come in?”

“Please.”

Professor Van Doren greeted me as a fellow midwesterner and fellow lover of words and stories. I told him about the impact of reading his essay “Education by Books” and mentioned that a friend of mine from high school, John Sigler, had been one of his student hosts when he gave a reading at Dartmouth. Van Doren said he wished he'd known: “I would have told him you were a student of mine.”

I left his office in Hamilton Hall not only feeling welcomed and acknowledged but somehow made safe in that alien place, intimidating city and sophisticated college. I had the reassuring sense that
because such a man was here, no deep-down harm could come to me, no malevolence invade the grace of his plain goodness.

A student whose poetry Van Doren had encouraged (this was four years before I met him myself) came running into the office of the Columbia English department saying, “I just saw the light!” Most of the professors there thought the student's claim of a visionary experience meant he had finally cracked. The only one who wanted to hear about it was Mark Van Doren. More than forty-five years later, that former student, Allen Ginsberg, tells me, “At Columbia I found nourishment from Van Doren—spiritual nourishment. He had a spiritual gift.”

Van Doren's kindness to students did not equal sentimentality, or excuse sloth. One morning in his poetry class he called on a student who confessed he had failed to read the assigned poem. Van Doren's face transformed, tightening, turning a deep and outraged red, and the voice, still measured and controlled, but stern as that of a ship's captain charging mutiny, ordered the student to leave the room. In the breath-held silence that followed, the hapless, hangdog fellow fumbled together his books and fled.

I downed a cold chocolate milk at Chock Full O' Nuts on Broadway to calm my anxiety after class, for I hadn't read the assignment myself, and I wondered what I'd have done if he'd called on me. From then on I was always prepared, but I wondered more deeply if the anger of this good man was an aberration or a part of his personality, a necessary component of being a great professor. I knew I'd learn the answer; Van Doren would teach me.

A hush of respect and excitement came over Van Doren's Narrative Art class when he said he was going to take time out from the great books we were studying to discuss a story written by one of our own classmates, Ivan Gold. Heads turned to Ivan, who slumped down in his seat just in front of me as Van Doren explained to the class that Mr. Gold's story, “A Change of Air,” which had won the fiction price of the student literary magazine,
The Columbia Review
, was worthy of our attention.

The story was about a promiscuous young woman from the Lower East Side who voluntarily engaged in sex with members of a
teenage gang. She was so traumatized she was sent to a mental hospital, saw a psychiatrist, and eventually returned to her neighborhood a transformed person who politely refused to have sex with any of the old gang. “That must have been one hell of a psychiatrist,” one of the boys remarked with wonder.

Van Doren wanted to know what the force or power of change was behind this story. He educed or drew out of us (for that was his method of education) the realization that this new force in the world was psychiatry, which now was our accepted system for effecting change, just as in the writers of the past we had studied, like Homer, Dante, and the authors of the Bible, God was the source of transformation in people's lives.

Through our own classmate's story of a teenage sexual trauma, Van Doren taught us something not only about writing and literature but also about one of the major shifts in modern man's understanding of himself and his world, a shift just being recognized and acknowledged in my own generation.

“I didn't know what the story was about until Van Doren told me in class that day,” Ivan Gold says. “I thought it was about these guys pissing away their time, but he showed me it was about the girl, and what changed her.”

Ivan later learned that Van Doren had sent the story to an editor he knew at
New World Writing
, a prestigious literary periodical of the day, where it was published at the end of that year, 1953.

“Jesus was the most ruthless of men,” Van Doren said in a tone as hard as a struck bell, and I came to tingling attention. The modern image of Jesus, Van Doren said, was of a man almost unrelated to the one described in the New Testament as a strong and stern leader, ruthless in following his conception of truth and iron in his will. “He was not,” Van Doren said, “an easy man to follow. He was certainly not like our ministers now who try to be one of the crowd and take a drink at a cocktail party to prove it, or tell an off-color joke. That seems to be their approach today.” The professor paused for a moment, and then he said, “Maybe that's why we hate them so much.”

I remembered Van Doren's anger at the student who hadn't done his homework, and I realized it was no aberration but that Van
Doren, too, was ruthless in his teaching, and respected those who demanded the most of the people they led. I quoted some of his comments on Jesus in an article I wrote a few years later in
The Nation
, “Slick Paper Christianity,” and sent Van Doren a copy. I enclosed it with a letter in which I acknowledged the gift of his teaching, and recalled the New York student's saying he was “too midwestuhn.” He wrote back thanking me for telling him of the student's judgment: “I was afraid I had changed.”

I waited until my junior year to take a course with Lionel Trilling, fearing I wasn't yet up to the intellectual level of this professor, who was described by his peers as “the most intelligent man of his generation” and “the intellectuals' conscience.”
The Liberal Imagination
, Trilling's book of essays published in 1950 which dealt not only with literature but also with Freud, Kinsey, and American society, had became a touchstone of the decade. I was equally impressed with his novel,
The Middle of the Journey
, especially when I learned the main character was based on his former student Whittaker Chambers, the controversial ex-Communist.

Trilling himself was as elegant as his prose. He looked the part of the aristocratic critic as he stood before us at the front of the class in his three-piece suit, his hair already a distinguished gray at forty-eight. He had the darkest circles under his eyes I had ever seen, so dark they reminded me of the shiners produced by a well-placed punch in a street fight. I assumed these circles were results of the deep study he engaged in, the heavy-duty intellectual battles.

Professor Trilling took a significant drag on the cigarette he inevitably held, sometimes gesturing with it like a wand, sometimes holding it poised just beyond his lips, like people did in the old movies of New York high life, where all the men seemed to wear only tuxedos or dressing gowns and subsisted entirely on caviar and champagne. Twin streams of smoke flowed from his nostrils, like an underlining of his words.

“We shall not read any criticism of the work of the poets we are going to study this semester,” he announced. “We shall only read the work itself—
all
the poems written by Wordsworth, Keats, and Yeats.”

There were intakes of breath as we absorbed the shock of hearing
that our most distinguished literary critic wasn't going to assign us any criticism. When Trilling said we were going to read all the poems of Wordsworth, Keats, and Yeats, he didn't mean just once. “Until you have read a poem at least a dozen times,” he explained, “you haven't even begun to get acquainted with it, much less to know what it means.”

Ideas became as real as stories in the poetry of Yeats, as I learned to read it in Trilling's class, and by the end of the term I had other lines of verse running through my mind than the ones that I brought to college from childhood. “Little Orphan Annie came to our house to stay / To wash the cups and saucers and brush the crumbs away” had been replaced by “Those Dancing Days are Gone.” The comforting time “When the frost is on the punkin / and the fodder's in the shock” was replaced by the soul-shaking vision of a world in which—as I recited to myself in the roar of the hurtling IRT express and in the early morning hours in the dorm after studying Marx and Freud, Kierkegard and Nietzsche, in our course on Contemporary Civilization—we were slouching toward “The Second Coming” that would rock the roots of western civilization.

If Van Doren's course introduced me to poetry, Trilling instilled it in me, making it part of my consciousness, accessible for the rest of my life. Though the two teachers were different in style and manner—Harold Kushner describes Van Doren as “the populist” and Trilling “the aristocrat”—their approach to teaching was much the same. It made sense when I learned years later that Trilling had been Van Doren's student. It wouldn't have occurred to me in college, for both men looked to my youthful eyes like contemporaries; I assumed the great men of our faculty all sprang from the womb as full professors.

The only undergraduates who were barred from studying with Trilling, Van Doren, and the other stars of that golden age of Columbia's English department were the Barnard students. Women were not yet first-class citizens in academia, and college classes were segregated according to sex—though on isolated occasions a Columbia boy brought a girl to sit in on a popular professor's class like a date.

Marion Magid, who was a student at Barnard in the fifties, says, “We weren't allowed to take the famous Columbia courses—in retrospect, it's the only thing I feel resentful about. You never questioned that Trilling was for the boys and you were a girl, so you had to make do. Barnard was its own little world on the other side of Broadway. One was aware that high-class thinking was going on across the street.”

Lynne Sharon Schwartz—who would write a brilliant novel,
Disturbances in the Field
, which followed the lives of three Barnard students through middle age—says that as a student she didn't take any courses with Van Doren or Trilling because “I felt that was for the men. I felt very cut off from all that, what was going on across the street.” She believes that Barnard's hiring of two young working writers as faculty members—Robert Pack, a poet, and the novelist George P. Elliot—helped nurture a creative “outburst” in fiction among Barnard students of the late fifties, whose literary ranks included Lynne herself, novelists Rosellen Brown, Joyce Johnson, and the late Norma Klein, poet Judy Sherwin, and dance critic Tobi Tobias.

Though Trilling's donnish manner made some people think him aloof, he was always accessible and supportive of his students, especially the aspiring writers. On a spring day in 1953, Trilling walked in the park along the Hudson River below the campus, holding the hand of his four-year-old son, James, and talking with his student Ivan Gold. Ivan was going to graduate in June, and wondered, if his goal in life was to write fiction, whether he should go to grad school for an M.A. in literature, which would also get him a draft deferment from service during the ongoing Korean War (or “conflict,” as it was called), or whether he should go ahead into the Army. Trilling admitted that he, too, wanted most of all to be a fiction writer, and said he regarded the literary criticism he did as secondary to the novel and short stories he had written. He didn't see academic life as the best route to Ivan's goal. “If you want to write, Mr. Gold,” he said, “stay away from graduate school.”