Writers' Teacher

In the top rank of U. S. writers is a large and loyal cult whose members are bound together by a common axiom of composition that they had to memorize in college: "Individualize by specific detail." They were all students of Yale's famed Professor John Milton ("Johnny") Berdan. Last week Johnny Berdan's former students, now heavily concentrated in Hollywood and Manhattan, as one man rattled their teacups (a Berdan way of saying they were unnerved). They had just learned that Johnny, after 38 years, was retiring from Yale.

To Yale men this was an event only less newsworthy than Professor William Lyon ("Billy") Phelps's retirement in 1933. It was also of interest to U. S. letters, to which Johnny Berdan gave Sinclair Lewis, Stephen Vincent Benet, Thornton Wilder, Philip Barry, Walter Millis, many another notable author. Said Yale's President Charles Seymour, announcing "with regret" the professor's retirement: "The U. S. never produced a teacher more skillful in the field of English composition."

Famed is Johnny Berdan's course in Daily Themes. Each morning, five mornings a week, generations of Yale men have dropped their themes in a box outside Professor Berdan's foul-smelling office. The door is always open and Professor Berdan, smoking an overpowering Latakia tobacco in a meerschaum pipe loves to invite his students in, insist that they smoke a strong Cuban cigaret, talk to them for hours on end. He makes it a point to read every theme (200 a week) himself. In class he rips the themes to pieces, likes to make his students angry so that they will fight back. Once he asked his class for their opinions of a theme he had just read. Said his students: "Awful. . . . Horrible." Said Professor Berdan: "Well, gentlemen, I wrote this theme."

Short, jut-jawed, gimlet-eyed, Professor Berdan always marches into class with a huge armful of books. Flinging them down, he scrawls an almost unintelligible message on the blackboard (e.g., "Vivify by range of appeal"), then proceeds, with illustrations and gestures, to make his meaning clear to the dullest students. To nip stilted, labored styles in the bud, he opens each year's course by shouting fiercely, "The less work you do in this course, the better." Students like to mimic his lecturing methods. Once, at a Yale Lit dinner, a student representing Professor Berdan came in with a load of books, and raising one aloft, announced: "Gentlemen, this is an exceedingly rare edition. There are only two copies in America left." Thereupon, in the professor's best dramatic classroom manner, he ripped the book in half.

Fabulously absentminded, Johnny Berdan's behavior caused his friends to form "A Committee for Johnny's Health," which made it its business to see that he wore a hat and coat in cold weather. On one occasion, when Johnny and his wife left hurriedly for Europe, New Haven police phoned him in Manhattan to tell him that he had left his house with the front door and a safe wide open. In his house he has kept from time to time Siamese cats, a snake, a large turtle, a dog, white mice, a complete stock of Italian furniture, antiques, pictures, old books, crockery.

Said Yale's Professor Walter Prichard Eaton: "He's the kind of teacher you talk about ten years after you get out of college." Said former Berdan Student Philip Barry: "I do not believe for one minute that Johnny Berdan is retiring. . . . It is another of his sly and very impractical jokes."

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