The Odd Pursuit of Teaching Books

By Roger Rosenblatt

Douglas Bush died on March 2 at the age of 86, after 46 years as professor of English literature at Harvard and a life of devotion to Paradise Lost. The obituary in the New York Times made him out a gentle crank, quoting a complaint of Bush's that too many students attend universities these days, and thus cannot be adequately educated--the sort of hackneyed wail that Bush himself would never have dwelt on or even considered right plucked from a greater, kindlier context. Bush's world was the greater, kindlier context. Like Samuel Johnson he knew everything worth knowing. Like Johnson, too, he was born to teach books. Few people are. It is an odd pursuit. Literary study stands at the center of modern education, but when one tries to determine what happens in the relationship among book, student and teacher, the teacher grows shadowy, eventually vanishes.

Of course, teachers of every subject suffer from obsolescence, that being almost a tool of the trade if one's students are to build on what they learn, even to the point of rejecting it at the onset of independent thinking. Good teachers yearn to be obliterated. Good teachers of literature have little choice in the matter. The Hamlet they pry open for the 19-year-old will not be the Hamlet that student reads at age 50. The play will have changed because the reader's experience will have recast it--the noble, tormented boy of one's youth reappearing in middle age as something of a drip.

But even at the moment that a teacher of literature is doing his job, the work is hard to put a name to. What precisely is it that you did, Professor Bush? Every teacher knows the boredom and terror of that question. A teacher of French teaches French, a teacher of piano, piano. But a teacher of Proust, Austen, Donne, Faulkner, Joyce? Are not the writers the teachers themselves? Oh, one can see the need for a tour guide now and then: notes, terms, some scraps of biography. But surely the great books were written for people, and if they require the presence of middlemen, then they could never have been so great in the first place. So goes the cant.

In point of plain fact, a teacher of literature may do several quite different things, especially these days when universities house their own schools of thought on the subject. Some teach the formal aspects of literature, some the sociology of literature, some the politics. There are those who teach because literature tells them what it means to be human; others who hold that literature means whatever one wishes it to mean; still others who say it means nothing at all. Defenders of each fort sometimes make the newspapers, where, in argument with one another, they sound like crazed religious warriors. In a sense, the answer to "What do you do?" is "This and that." And it may be that just as there are books and books, so are there various ways of apprehending them, and thus no core of the subject to teach.

Still, something central seems to be conveyed in the teaching of literature beyond a particular point of view, something in the attitude of the teacher toward both his students and the books: his concentration, his appreciation, occasionally his awe. Awe can be a powerful pedagogical instrument, the sight of someone overwhelmed overwhelming by refraction. True, the relationship of teacher to the work of art is that of a middleman, but in the best circumstances the middleman becomes a magnifying glass ("Do you see this?"). Instead of intruding between Yeats and his reader, he shows Yeats in the light, reveals not only poetry but how poetry comprehends the world, thus lending his students the eyes of the poet. At full strength, the teacher is an artist himself, and not just for restorations. Treating the book as an event, he manipulates it the way the writer manipulated reality, making of literature what the writer made of life.

Curiously, this high point is precisely where the question of the teacher's usefulness sometimes turns bitter. A book says something ennobling; a teacher makes that clear. It ought to follow that students are ennobled, but the opposite often occurs. In his essay "Humane Literacy," George Steiner brooded, "We know that some of the men who devised and administered Auschwitz had been taught to read Shakespeare or Goethe, and continued to do so. This compels us to ask whether knowledge of the best that had been thought and said does, as Matthew Arnold asserted, broaden and refine the resources of the human spirit." One might wonder why a teacher of literature should worry about being unable to regulate moral actions, when no such self-recrimination haunts the teacher of, say, physics. But a work of Literature, unlike a physical law, has moral content to begin with, and the teacher's inability to transfer that content may seem either a failure of his own understanding or a basic flaw of the craft. What concerns such a teacher, the scrupulous teacher, is that he is dealing solely with words--the words of others, which are not his property, and his own words in their behalf. The matter is abstract, thus unnerving. Every word is an idea, and that may offer consolation or encouragement. But ideas are also merely represented by words, and when the teacher, who is the purveyor and curator of words, strides into the classroom and spills the words on his desk, he has no control over them, no way to enforce intelligence, charity, love, wit, or any of the elements of which the books he values are made.

So what is it he does in that mysterious classroom when the thick wood door shuts behind him and the rows of too young faces turn and rise Like heliotropic plants, eager for a sign? "Today we consider Kafka." Is that in fact what "we" are considering today? Or are we considering the teacher considering Kafka, and if that is the case, what exactly is to be considered--the learned scholar stocked deep with information about "irony" and "metaphor," or the still deeper mind, which has confronted Kafka alone in a private dark, and which Kafka has confronted in turn? "How does one say that [D.H.] Lawrence is right in his great rage against the modern emotions, unless one speaks from the intimacies of one's own feelings, and one's own sense of life, and one's own worked-for way of being?" asked Lionel Trilling. The testimony is always personal. Behind the spectacles and the fuzzy coat, the teacher teaches himself.

In the end it may come to a matter of character. John Ruskin said that only a good man can make a good artist, but that notion is disproved all the time. Good teaching, however, is another matter. No one knows how virtuous a person Milton was, but the speculation becomes irrelevant when applied to Paradise Lost, which, like every work of art, assumed a life of its own as soon as it was finished. The writer let it go. But the teacher of Paradise Lost cannot let it go; he becomes its life. Whether he sees the work as a brilliant display of versification or as the story of man's fall from grace, the poem is a sacred text, the source of his intellectual or moral faith. His students thus behold the poem and the faith together, and are bound to Like Paradise Lost in part because they admire his strength of belief.

This faith in literature cannot be easy to acquire. A teacher of books must learn to live before becoming good at his work, since literature demands that one know a great deal about life--not to have settled Life's problems, but at least to recognize and accept the wide, frail world in which those problems have a home. The achievement of such perspective involves a penalty too. He who has gained that generous view inevitably moderates the books in his charge, domesticates their subversiveness, puts out the fire. As moderator he becomes a caricature, as teachers of English in fiction are always portrayed as caricatures. Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf s professor? The practice of giving apples to teachers may have originated as an unconscious mockery of their lack of experience and danger, of their apparent refusal to risk the loss of paradise.

And yet the power they generate can be enormous. Remember? One may not know exactly what happens in those classrooms, but one knows that it did happen, long after the fact, after all the classrooms and the schools are left behind. Two, perhaps three, teachers in a lifetime stick in the mind, and one of them is almost always a teacher of literature. He remains not as presiding deity but as a person, someone impassioned about words on paper. Perhaps he knows that words are all we have, all that stand between ourselves and our destruction. The teacher also intervenes. Robert Hollander Jr. of Princeton described a class of R.P. Blackmur's, who taught Hollander the Dante he now teaches others: "The lecture gasped, tottered and finally settled ruinously into total silence. He stood there, I thought, debating whether or not to chuck it all up, leave the room (with 20 minutes still to run before the bell), perhaps even to leave the earth." Danger enough.

Courage too, of a sort. Who but a teacher of books dares claim as his province the entire range of human experience, intuition no less than fact? Who else has the nerve? And what does he do with this vast territory he has staked out for himself? He invites us in, says in effect there has never been anything written, thought or felt that one need be afraid to confront. A teacher of books may favor this or that author or century, but fundamentally his work is the antithesis of prejudice. Take it all, he urges; the vicious with the gentle. Do not run from anything you can read. Above all, do not become enraged at what is difficult or oblique. You too are difficult, oblique and equally worth the effort.

It may be that such people remain with us because they were always with us from the start. Basically the enterprise of teaching literature is a hopeful one, the hope residing with the upturned faces. First faith, then hope. If words are merely words after all, then the teacher of books may be the world's most optimistic creature. No matter how he may grumble about life's decay, it is he who, year after year, trudges up the stone steps of old, dank buildings, hauls himself before the future, and announces, against all reason of experience, that "the World was all before them."

With those words, Milton approached the end of his long moral poem, and when Douglas Bush came to read those words aloud before his Harvard classes, there was nothing in his voice that betrayed a personal reverberation to the grand dismay the words contain. Bush showed none of Blackmur's visible force or Trilling's visible elegance, though like them he believed in the good that words and people are capable of. On the last day of courses at Harvard, it is the custom for students to applaud the teachers they most appreciate. After years of suffering this embarrassment, Bush would begin to pack up his books in the last minutes of the hour, so that he could time his exit from the room right at the bell. Thus when the moment arrived, and Bush was already halfway down the steps, it appeared that the students were clapping on and on for someone not there. But he was there.

--By Roger Rosenblatt This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.