Two Teachers
When I attended Horace Mann — an elite private high school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx — in the early nineteen-sixties, I was vaguely aware that the school boasted many illustrious alumni. But, at the time, I took little interest in this history and did not derive any enhanced sense of my own self-worth from being there. Only much later did I come to appreciate the roster of writers, journalists, scientists, musicians, lawyers, and others — including Jack Kerouac, Robert Caro, William Carlos Williams, and Gil Shaham, and many others — who, as adolescents, had scrambled up the steps of Tillinghast Hall and swum naked in the Old Gym.
Far from feeling that I belonged there, I always felt like an outsider. In part, this stemmed from the fact that many of my fellow students came from wealthy families and many lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I found them entitled and smug, and I was always aware of the social divide. We lived in the much less affluent Washington Heights, next door to the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, where my father was a professor. However, my feelings about Horace Mann also stemmed from a deep sense of my own inadequacy. What positive feelings I had about the school were associated with a small number of classmates and a handful of teachers.
The teacher who had the most profound influence on me was our eleventh-grade English teacher, Mr. McCardell. With his red beard and close-cropped red hair and his tweeds, he brought to mind a landed gentleman from early twentieth-century England. There was also something nautical about his bearing, something about his precise gestures, which conveyed a sense of confidence and mastery. Maybe it was because in that year we read Lord Jim and Moby Dick with him that I could easily picture him as a ship’s captain, as an “old salt.”
Mr. McCardell’s style permeated everything about him down to the smallest gestures. As he led us through demanding texts, he would fiddle with his pipe and pipe-cleaning implements. Rather than distracting from the point he was making, somehow these gestures seemed to underscore his point. He also had a way of cocking his head back and to the side that he used to add emphasis to his words. These mannerisms were part of a repertory of gestures which all served to create a certain atmosphere and to show how totally in command he was of the material and his classroom. Without ever raising his voice, he managed to let us know that he was tough as nails. I found his distinctive mannerisms completely irresistible. He had such a well-worked out persona — he seemed to be so completely who he was — and it was this that drew me to him. His style was something that was constantly enacted. It gave him a presence, as if he were performing on stage. His repertory of behaviors, I can see now, enabled him to embody literature in his person.
Although he struck me as being so completely formed, it surprises me to realize that he was only thirty-two years old at the time. (The pipe, which was such an indispensable part of his style, may well have contributed to his dying of cancer at the relatively early age of sixty-three).
In his class we read Henry James’ The American, Conrad’s Lord Jim, and Moby Dick, as well as Hamlet, and poetry and essays. Mr. McCardell seemed so fully in command of these works that I wanted to possess that kind of mastery. He performed the role of mediating between us and these works, which, without his guidance, would have been hopelessly out of reach.
Given how enamored I was of Mr. McCardell, what I craved above all was his approval and admiration, without being aware that I craved it. But I was shy and lacking in self-confidence, and this was only heightened by the fact that, as a result of my having skipped the tenth grade, my classmates were a year older, and many were, in addition, temperamentally more self-assured. Beyond seeking his approval, I think I also wanted to see the person behind the consummate performer. On a rare occasion when I talked with him after class, he answered my questions succinctly and good-naturedly, but I felt that he remained remote and unreachable and that I was keeping him from his other activities. There was no hint of the person behind the persona.
I worked hard on the papers he assigned, hoping to do an outstanding job and to get an “A.” I had always been put off by students who were ‘grade-grubbers’ or who boasted about their high marks. However, in Mr. McCardell’s class it was of the utmost importance to me to be one of the elect — to be among the more grown-up students who seemed almost to be his peers. One assignment was to write a New Yorker-style profile of a personality we did not know but were to seek out. I wrote mine about a biochemist colleague of my father at Columbia. Reinhold Benesch had escaped from the Nazis and had emigrated to the U.S. Relatives of his had been sent to Auschwitz and died there. I interviewed him in his office at the medical center. He was a wonderful character — disarmingly direct and open, extremely rational but, at the same time, quick to show his emotions and impatience with questions from a naïve adolescent. All I had to do was let him talk and then transcribe and arrange his answers to my questions, adding a little bit by way of description and setting the scene. In retrospect, I don’t see how an eleventh-grader could have come up with a better subject or a more satisfying profile. But, in spite of my efforts, my profile came back with a B+ and only the briefest of comments from Mr. McCardell in red ink: “Excellent! Poor mechanics.” That was it. Except that the margins of the paper held a scattering of “p”s, “u”s, “k”s, and carets, the meaning of which, since there were no corrections, was obscure to me then and equally obscure to me now.
Another paper, on “Point-of-view in relation to artistic intent in Camus’ The Stranger,” also came back with a B+ and the comment: “A very clear and interesting analysis, but not one that really relies upon point-of-view exclusively.” I felt that my performance in the class was something to be ashamed of, because, in spite of my hard work and enthusiasm, I didn’t have the knack, as some of my classmates had, of getting A’s, and because I was not capable of eliciting more than a passing acknowledgement from Mr. McCardell. But, as was always true of me, if I didn’t get the adulation I was looking for, I felt I was nothing. My father had been delighted with the profile of Reinhold Benesch at the time. But, probably due to my disappointment, I erased any memory of it.
A few days after school ended, I flew to Paris for the summer with my family, and then on to Kobe, Japan as an exchange student at the Konan High School. After spending my senior year in Kobe, I was to go directly to college, rather than returning to Horace Mann. (In this way, I wound up spending only three of the normal six years at the school). In the totally new surroundings — living with a Japanese family, going to a Japanese high school, and learning the language — my feelings about Mr. McCardell quickly receded. What came to the fore and what sustained me was excitement about literature and writers. During the year in Kobe, I read James Joyce’s Dubliners, Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Possessed, Hardy’s Return of the Native, Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus, Typhoon, and Nostromo, and Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Pasternack’s Doctor Zhivago, as well as Junichiro Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata, The Tale of Gengi, The Tale of the Heike, and other works.
My impulse had been to take advantage of the exchange program to go as far away as I could from Horace Mann and immerse myself in another culture. I attended classes — taught in Japanese — on calculus, Japanese, physics, judo, German language, and calligraphy, and spent holidays traveling along the eastern coast of Japan with a classmate. And throughout the year I sketched and made prints from woodblocks.
In the fall of 1963 I started Haverford College, a small, progressive liberal arts college with an outstanding faculty and a student body totaling four-hundred and fifty. It was a strikingly relaxed place, where students could work out a course of study tailored to their interests and develop friendships with professors. The contrast with Horace Mann, with its formality and pretensions — a ‘country day-school’ for the upper class — could not have been starker.
At Haverford, I lived in French House on the edge of the campus, away from the dorms, which struck me as chaotic and infantile. Brad Cook, a professor of French, lived on the ground floor with his family, but, as students, our contact with him was limited to saying ‘hello’ in the entranceway. I had heard from a close friend, who was three years ahead of me, what an amazing teacher Brad was, and in the spring of my freshman year I started taking courses with him.
Brad was unlike any teacher I had ever had or was to have after him. He was handsome in a Cary Grant sort of way, with strong bone structure and black hair parted on the side and combed back. It’s hard to account for Brad’s powerful presence in the classroom since he was very informal and low-key. You never felt he was lecturing or consciously being Socratic, as so many other teachers were. He simply talked, occasionally flipping to a passage in the text we were discussing. And he expected us to talk, to venture to explain what we thought the author under discussion was attempting to do in a particular passage in the work. He took the contract between professor and student with the utmost seriousness. He had no tolerance for students who did not put in the required effort to come to grips with the material, or thought they could “wing it.” On the rare occasions when a student came to class unprepared, Brad would subject him to a withering critique of what this implied about his moral character, while the rest of the class sat silently, with eyes averted, for what seemed like an eternity.
One class I took with him was devoted to reading Proust, and in the course of a semester we read roughly half of A la recherche — those books, and parts of books, which Brad thought were most rewarding. At each meeting of the class, which met in the evening, Brad would assign the pages to be read for the following week’s meeting. And the three-hour class would be devoted to discussing the material for that day. Brad had little interest in the kinds of things that many professors or Proust scholars would focus on. He didn’t think in the usual categories and had little interest in the real-life sources of the novel. Rather, he would zero in on certain passages and scenes that revealed Proust’s way of seeing things, and he would explore the implications of what Proust was up to in these passages. One felt that he was taking us as close to Proust’s intent and to the ways in which he had realized his intent as it was possible to go. One of Brad’s standard questions was, “How does Proust achieve this effect?” He got us to look at the language and to examine our own reactions to the words on the page.
Brad believed that the text was accessible through an encounter in which the reader paid the closest possible attention to the writer’s syntax, choice of words, and tics and to their effects on the reader. Scholarship, historical and literary background, and criticism — which had their place — were secondary to the encounter with the text. He insisted that an understanding of a writer emerge from steeping oneself in the words of the author and not encumbering one’s approach with extraneous concepts, preconceptions, or jargon. He advocated an understanding from within. Above all, he was trying to get us to overcome sloppy, automatic thinking, and be aware of our own thought processes, while engaging with an author.
When we had to write a paper for Brad, which we often did, I would push myself to come up with something I thought would stand up to his scrutiny. In general, when I wrote papers, I would feel radically insecure about what I had to say, and my way of dealing with my feelings of inadequacy was to read the text over and over, marking what I thought were key passages and images and attempting to make connections and hammer out my own ideas. In writing for Brad, throughout this process, I was consumed by dread at not coming up with something good.
On evenings when I expected Brad to return a paper at the end of class, I would be filled with anticipation. If he liked the paper or had a lot to say, you would find comments in his sloping, open handwriting, starting below where your typescript ended and continuing on the backs of your typed pages. After the first few papers I wrote for him, my papers started coming back with several pages of comments. He would tell you what he liked about what you had written and then elaborate on a point of yours, or extend it in another direction, and he would tell you where you fell short. It was like receiving a letter from a long-standing friend or correspondent. I can think of no more beautiful image for the interaction between student and teacher than those pages of co-erasable bond paper or onion-skin covered on one side with typing and on the back with Brad’s words scrawled with his fountain pen.
His comments on one paper started with the words, “Je trouve tout cela excellent et admirable les pages 3–5 où vous arrivez au centre de la vision de Proust.” (“I find this excellent and admirable — pages 3–5 where you penetrate to the center of Proust’s vision”).
On another paper discussing a key pensée of Pascal, he wrote, “Vous avez excellemment exposé cette pensée. Votre langage — parfois un peu abstrait — est néanmoins nécessaire à l’exposé d’un passage où (comme vous l’avez vu) Pascal veut non seulement nous “impressionner” mais montrer avec une sorte d’exactitude mathématique notre position dans le grand Tout.” (“You have given an excellent analysis of this pensée. Your language — at times a bit abstract — is, nevertheless, necessary to analyze a passage in which, as you noted, Pascal wishes not only to make an impression on us but to show with an almost mathematical exactitude our place in the scheme of things”).
During my years at Haverford, I went on to take a number of other courses, as well as one-on-one tutorials with Brad — far more than with any other professor. Getting to design a private tutorial on topics of mutual interest — one on Pascal and another on Stéphane Mallarmé — and meeting once-a-week for a semester in his office in Founders’ Hall was — and I realized this at the time — a rare privilege. Occasionally, I would joke with friends that I was “majoring in Brad.”
After graduating, I would return to the campus periodically to see him and several other professors. We would exchange cards at Christmas time. Brad would invariably start with a greeting and then move on to express dismay or alienation from some aspect of contemporary life. But he was always interested and appreciative of what I was doing, and, eleven years after I graduated, in 1978, I sent him my book on Dostoevsky and got a warm response.
Twelve years later, he was retired and living in southeastern Massachusetts, and I was vacationing on Cape Cod. I called him from Woods Hole, and we arranged to meet for lunch in Mattapoissett, roughly half-way between the two places. We met at the Mattapoissett Inn on Main Street, where we ate on the screened porch and sat for a long time talking. Brad wanted to know about my work, and he was especially interested to hear about our three-year-old son. He insisted on paying for the meal.
In the year after our luncheon, Brad had, it seemed, gone from being healthy to being an invalid, wracked by unbearable pain from spinal arthritis. I had seen his obituary in the New York Times and had written to his wife, telling her how much Brad had meant to me. Marjorie wrote back telling me about Brad’s last months.
Brad’s obituary appeared in the Times on April 7, 1992. Immediately beside it was an obituary for Robert A. McCardell. The twin write-ups of teachers, whom I had had three years apart, were displayed side-by-side and were the same length, so that they appeared to form a single unit, as if they were the adjacent plots of two family members in a cemetery.
The write-ups efficiently packed the essential biographical information into a column of twenty-five lines: current title, age, positions held at different institutions, next-of-kin, and cause of death. All of these biographical details were of great interest to me for what they added to my personal knowledge of both men. But, at the same time, I was struck by how devoid both obituaries were of the slightest hint of what these two men were like.
What I couldn’t get my mind around was the fact of the two notices being published on the same day and paired with each other. It was as if fate, or some inscrutable agency, or Borgesian logic, had arranged for these two teachers, who had had such a profound influence on me and, yet, who were so essentially different, to be brought together for my benefit alone.
