As the Blegen Professor I gave an inaugural lecture on Berlioz’s opera Les Troyens, which is based on Virgil’s Aeneid. Because the Metropolitan Opera was opening its season with Les Troyens, and since Berlioz was a fervent Latinist whose opera closely follows Virgil’s text with interesting variations, the topic was a perfect fit for a classicist who wanted to talk to a general audience of educated people. It went over very well, as the discussion that evening and random encounters in the subsequent weeks made clear. Not since my Stanford days had I been able to socialize so easily and well, as one can in a confined population with common interests, incomes, and intellects. The inherent insularity was offset by New York City only an hour and half away on a train line that ran along the wide scope of the Hudson River, endlessly beautiful, intimations of Frederick Church at every turn.
My arrival at Vassar coincided with the publication of my Apollonius book. It was a bittersweet moment for me, since my editor, John Gardner, died in a motorcycle accident on the very day of its publication. That was John, doing the sort of crazy and dangerous thing that matched his brilliance and literary daring. Typically, he had begun the series for Southern Illinois only to showcase his favorite authors, and because it would be fun for him to edit critical works on them. John was a novelist, but also an inventive critic and careful reader. He was also eccentric and a prima donna. Other than our initial lunch meeting the day he proposed the book, we were in contact only through the written word. Because his novel Jason and Medeia (1973), was based on the same material used by Apollonius, he had a certain proprietary take on the poem, which sometimes caused us much anguish. But I owe him so much. His initial reaction to what I had written was harsh and dismissive; he objected strongly to the timid, stiff style of academic circumlocution and evasion. I had been guilty of writing as though for Sterling Dow, I realized, wanting to make sure that nothing I said would raise the scholarly eyebrow. Gardner gave me permission—he was the editor, after all—to write what I really meant, go all the way, take risks. It changed me forever, and I could never again write with that scholarly distance. I well remember under his influence describing Augustus Caesar in the Apollonius book as “the man who made the trains run on time,” which seemed like an innocuous way to indicate his affinities with the ruling style of Il Duce, only to have some critic complain, “They did not have trains in ancient Rome.” I wish I had saved the letters from the next two or three years, John’s either berating me for my style or for surrendering to stodginess, mine exasperatedly pointing out where he erred in matters of fact, he apologizing for his angry outbursts, claiming late-night drunkenness, I thanking him for pushing me further. It was a great collaboration, and I grew to love him. But when I arrived at Vassar I was tired, the book was out, and I had postpartum depression and could do little more than lie on the sofa of my twee little cottage and read in a completely desultory fashion various titles that caught my eye in random sweeps of the shelves of the college library. Slowly I began the more concentrated reading that I needed to do for what I wanted to write next, a book on the Apollonian element in Virgil’s Aeneid. Sad to say, by the time I retired I had only managed to write four chapters, which I then summarized in a longish essay, “Virgil’s Apollonian Aeneid,” which was published in a variorum collection on Virgil.
Into the swamp of my despond came cheery reminders of the good things of life: my younger son, working at the Ritz, had the funniest stories of life in that kitchen; my younger daughter, who had recently spent a year in Kenya and was now studying geology at Boston University, had endless stories of life in the bush alternating with days in Nairobi; a former Stanford student on his way to becoming a major ancient historian sent me a book that he had dedicated to me and Ted Doyle (who had died of a heart attack in 1966); a woman who had been a member of my seminar in Athens wrote to tell me that she was turning her exquisite dissertation on Apollonius into a controversial and interesting book on Apollonius and Callimachus and wanted to dedicate it to me along with her father; another member of that seminar, who was curating the Greek vase collection for the Joslyn Museum in Omaha, invited me to write a contribution for the catalogue she was preparing, and got me a gig at the museum to lecture.
It was about this time when I thought up the idea of taking each one of my children on a trip of their choosing, when we would have the chance in their early maturity to reconnect. For one it was theater in Manhattan, for another restaurants in London and Paris, for the third a week in Maui, and finally the fourth chose geology in Iceland. This kind of concentrated dose makes up as best it can for the geographic separation so endemic to the American family.
In the summer of 1983 I came back to prepare for another academic year; ah, more of the same old dreary same, I reckoned, and metaphorically bent my head, like a peasant heading into a strong rain—at least that is how I would have translated my feelings into art. One drizzly winter day I was stumbling through mounds of broken ice to reach my home, when I slipped and fell—nothing hurt but my dignity, that and sensing right away that I was now wet through. Then I was home and in and out of a hot shower, sitting moodily in front of the fire when the phone rang. It was the head of the classics program at Lehman College, one of the liberal arts colleges that make up the City University of New York, this one being in the Bronx. He was an old friend who had often invited me to lecture in his humanities program at Lehman. His wife and colleague I had known since she was a freshman at Stanford, always recalling the sweet moment when the dear seventeen-year-old had excitedly informed me at the end of her first semester that she was going to major in Latin.
“Charlie,” he demanded in his heavy Bronx accent, “how would you like to get a chair, become Distinguished Professor of Classics out here at Lehman?”
He explained that the New York state legislature had mandated a sum of money to endow each one of the branches of the City University with a super-salaried professor in one of the disciplines taught at the place. One might imagine that in this modern world a professor of some branch of science would be the immediate first choice. But my friend was a power with the college president who was in any case predisposed to favor the humanities. “Think it over,” he counseled, “and let me know.”
“I have, and I am letting you know,” I replied. “I would like to be considered.”
“Well, when can you come down for an interview?”
“Tomorrow”—I laughed—“if that does not sound too crude and pushy.”
“We thought you’d be in a hurry to get out of there.”
The next fall I was installed at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York as the Distinguished Professor of Classics with a salary more than double what I was making at Boston University. Those who invited me were candid enough to admit that I had not been their first choice, and I did not have ego enough to imagine that I was in any way the equal of the candidate who declined them. They also shared the gist of the letters of recommendation, including one from a very sour martinet of a man who had survived the camps, who declared that appointing me would be a “travesty.” Still and all, a later friendship with a man in the central office of the provost, through whom these appointments were processed, gave me the chance to learn that they were all very impressed “at Eightieth Street” with my previous accomplishments. We all need our doubts satisfied from time to time.
They say that when I called my dean at Boston University to announce my resignation, he called President Silber, who called Bill Arrowsmith, who had left the university a few years earlier in despair of my ever going, and within hours Bill had accepted another appointment as professor at BU. God moves in mysterious ways.
When I came to New York to rent an apartment I discovered that Natasha, a former student from Boston University who, last I had seen her, was off to her native land and London University for an advanced degree, had returned to the States to study for a PhD at the Graduate Center. “Couldn’t really stand England anymore; wanted New York,” wa
s her explanation. I immediately enlisted her to house-sit for me so that I could spend the three summer months in Cambridge. This transaction caused us to become very good friends, an important detail in the ongoing saga of the arrival of my future prince. When I returned at the end of August, I had a solitary dinner at a nearby Chinese restaurant, where my fortune cookie read, “You are going to be happy for the rest of your life.” True enough, so far—I add a caveat thinking of Solon’s well-known dictum that no man can be called happy until he is dead, when there is no longer a chance for disaster. After a year I bought a co-op apartment on West Fifty-seventh Street, a busy enough street to ensure that there would be people around when I came back from the theater, since this was the mid-eighties and the city was still considerably crime-ridden.
My initial experience of Lehman College was from the seventies, when, as I said, I lectured on classical literature in their humanities program. The course was popular; the two hundred people filling the auditorium were always a serious audience. It seemed that they were all earnest young Jews whose ambition to move into the professional class was as obvious as their belief that a knowledge of classical antiquity was the sine qua non for bourgeois society. I loved talking to these youngsters; they were so dedicated and intense that once I even flew back from Rome for a couple weeks of lectures at Lehman.
Over the years people in classics at Lehman saw their enrollments dramatically falling; certainly the audience for these lectures declined. There was dramatic, swift change in the ethnicity of the students at the college as much of its Jewish enrollment was replaced by Hispanics. This reflected the changing demographic of the borough as the original Irish American, Italian American, and Jewish American populations began to leave the borough or concentrate themselves in the giant Co-op City designed in one small island of land to hold sixty thousand people. The Dominicans and Puerto Ricans who replaced them were from rural backgrounds, much poorer people with fewer resources for economic advancement, and the once-elegant Bronx became remarkably changed. The art deco Grand Concourse remained, but the walls of the buildings were covered in graffiti. The construction of the hateful Cross Bronx Expressway and other systems of moving automobiles cut through the borough, which was a tragic blow to its physical and social integrity. Landlords confronted with an unstable and poor population began to empty their buildings and torch them to collect the insurance. The Bronx grew to resemble a bombed-out city. Tour operators ran buses of Europeans through the Bronx, so they could marvel at the irony of ruins not unlike what they remembered of their own immediately after the Second World War.
The faculty of Lehman were predominantly Jewish, a first generation up from an immigrant working class. Many of them were bitter or in despair at the change in their student population, but just as many were political liberals who welcomed the chance to display the fruits of education to a hitherto unsuspecting population. I who am so conscious of my WASPiness was startled at being asked all the time, “You Jewish?” and I realized it was simply because I was white. Bronx shopkeepers and landlords were Jewish. I well remember visiting a clothing store owned and operated by Orthodox Jews, where the clerks were all young African American boys perfectly attuned to the African American clientele. The delightful oddity of the place was that customers had to inquire about prices, as none were displayed, and the boys turned to the owners and spoke to them in Yiddish, whereupon a discussion of what the customer could possibly pay took place. Black teenagers speaking fluent Yiddish is not only a delightful curiosity but is also a lesson to those tiresome people who fault blacks for their limited intellectual attainments. If there is a need and an interest the student will respond. The greatest problem to my mind was that so many of the students arrived with a high school diploma from one of New York’s public schools, where they had been so poorly and minimally instructed that they could scarcely read and write, and yet they proudly thought of themselves as “college students.” How often I thought, If these poor kids could know what their counterparts in other parts of the country are achieving. I never finished the sentence, because they were not going to know.
But then I started teaching in the Honors Program, a kind of oasis of excellence where the bright and ambitious could refresh themselves. In my second year at Lehman I had the fourth of my four extraordinary moments in my forty-two years of teaching. It was my honors course in American film, something completely different from my usual experience. Since I was the holder of a chair, I could offer whatever I chose, and I determined to do something with film. I had been surprised in another course when at every reference I made to films in black-and-white—almost the only kind that a cineaste snob like myself would mention—my students drew a blank. Just saying “black-and-white film” made my students shy away as though I were offering broccoli to my children. It turned out that no one in the class had ever seen a film in black-and-white! I determined to offer a course entitled American Film 1930–1950 and rounded up the usual suspects—Stagecoach and Notorious, for example. I asked them to write a short paper on each film, giving their critique of what they had seen. I wanted them to think of them as “film” rather than simply entertaining “movies.” How pretentious can you get!
The experience was extraordinary for me, both for the interesting students who enrolled and for the ideas they expressed. The fact that the films were in black-and-white distanced them for these students, as though they were looking at a remote and unknown culture. They brought an almost anthropological analysis to their viewing, which made for acute observations of a society that they did not for one minute associate with the world they knew from the Bronx. They did not know they were watching what nowadays many critics call a Jewish Hollywood version of the United States. Those movie men, all immigrants, imagined what goyish Middle America wanted to see of themselves in the movies. This added another level of irony to the interpretation, my students being another alien audience doing their imagining of the first set of aliens, the filmmakers.
Whatever it was, I found the papers as stimulating as the classroom comments, always a minefield of ignorance, prejudice, and crudity, as well as sharp, shrewd perceptions, perspectives that skewed my traditional understanding of the film in question. I would have been happy to teach this course on and on forever. I began to question why it seemed to be different from other classes, and I found my answer in a course I offered on ancient epic and its derivatives in contemporary film. I started with the Iliad, obviously enough, with bits of War and Peace thrown in, and then later on showing the students Il Gattopardo and Gone With the Wind. I wanted to demonstrate the tragedy of the overthrow of a great city or civilization (Troy, the South [Atlanta], Sicilian Bourbon aristocracy [Palermo]), set into the drama of a love interest that was either comic (Tancredi Falconeri and Angelica Sedara) or tragic (Ashley Wilkes and Melanie Hamilton, Hector and Andromache). Gone With the Wind turned out to be an embarrassment that had not occurred to me when I was planning the course. Many of my black students were offended or uncomfortable with the depictions of Mammy and Pork and Prissy in the film, and were understandably offended by my focus solely on the tragic theme of white supremacy destroyed. I began to extrapolate from that to a general listlessness I had noticed in the last decade, perhaps, toward the literature I had on offer, to wit, the masterpieces of ancient Greek culture, as well as some highlights of Roman, like the Aeneid. A lightbulb went off in my head, stupid me. The literature of antiquity is all seen from the perspective of the ruling class; its characters are exploiters, controllers, conquerors. There is where the sympathies of the narrator invariably lies and it is the elite audience for whom the author is playing. The victims by and large have walk-on parts; they do not matter. That is the truth of the slaves in Gone With the Wind, no matter that Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar for her forceful portrayal of Mammy in the film. The slaves are so unrealistically portrayed that no one with the slightest knowledge of the sociology of the antebellum American South could possibly consider the characters identif
iable. Think of Theresienstadt, the so-called model concentration camp.
Then it was that I began unconsciously to find my lifetime’s subject matter unpalatable. The glorification of cruelty, the self-pity of the exploiter and despoiler, these were the stuff of ancient literature, and adopted easily by ruling classes throughout history. Our obvious spiritual ancestors, the English aristocracy at their Greek and Latin at Eton and Oxford, the German Junker class, were then embraced by the bourgeoisie in both those countries and in the United States as a means of empowerment. Children of this class could reinforce their notions of superiority by recourse to identifying with Aeneas or Achilles or Hector and their consorts. Historians have often noticed that our earliest forefathers on these shores established schools to teach the young the legends and culture of Greece and Rome while absolutely ignoring the myths and culture of the Native American peoples who surrounded them. Nowadays, when the American people are so polyglot, products of so many backgrounds, so many of them tortured, poor, and desperate, classical literature courses increasingly grow unpopular unless they are tarted up to pretend to be something about the women or gays or slaves and their struggles for independence, better yet “identity,” when in fact those literatures record a very definite effort to push these marginal figures right off the stage.
My Husband and My Wives Page 23