An article remembering the giant Mark Van Doren, Dr. John Senior’s mentor and long-time friend. Thank you to Kirk Kramer for e-mailing this to me, it was a delightful read and lifted my spirits amidst grading student papers.
New Criterion, June 2000
Mark Van Doren remembered
by Jeffrey Hart
Above the columns of Butler Library at Columbia University, inscribed in the
stone frieze, you read permanent testimony that some writers are in fact
important: Homer, Virgil, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante,
Cervantes, Goethe, Spinoza, Aquinas … These names are representative of
importance, they are not a limiting “list” as relativists sneer. Butler Library
stands across a series of geometrical terraces and walks from Charles Follen
McKim’s Low Library, which dominates the whole scene with its ten Ionic columns
and low dome inspired by the Pantheon in Rome. The Columbia campus, designed
integrally by McKim, Mead & White, represents architecturally a permanent
defiance of the also permanent Scythians and Philistines. And you can argue that
this campus is more convincing architecturally than the neo-Gothic of Princeton
and Yale or the neo-Georgian of Harvard and Dartmouth.
To my college junior’s gaze, no professor was more in harmony with what all this
represented than Mark Van Doren. His principal course in 1950-51 was called “The
Narrative Art” which extended through the academic year and in which we read the
Iliad and the Odyssey, the Divine Comedy, Genesis and Exodus, Don Quixote,
Paradise Lost, The Castle, and The Trial. My fellow students in the course had
had the benefit of the year-long freshman course Humanities I-II, still required
at Columbia, which begins in the Fall with the Iliad and ends in the Spring with
a modern novel, often Crime and Punishment. (I entered Columbia as a junior
having quit Dartmouth after two years to work for a publisher. I was persuaded
to try Columbia, but had missed Humanities I-II.) As a student once put it
colloquially to me, in Humanities I-II and in Van Doren’s courses he was
confident he was dealing with the “first team.” And at the very least all
students felt that they were engaged with important matters. The thought that
held the syllabus together was Van Doren’s idea that all great narrative has in
it some representation of the divine. Of course in Kafka this is the presence of
the absent, the deus abscondita. And Van Doren confessed that he could not find
the divine in Don Quixote. I remember trying to argue that it is in the
transcendent calm of Cervantes’s prose, which looks with divine equanimity on
the hugger-mugger of all that passes below. I also had a bit of a run-in with
this favorite professor when he remarked in class that the Soviet Union was
“just like Elizabethan England.” I asked, no doubt a nuisance, about a Soviet
Shakespeare, even about a Soviet Spenser. He allowed that “just like” was a
mistake. He meant experimentation and productive chaos. But more of this in a
moment.
I took Van Doren’s courses as a junior and senior, and later joined him as a
colleague in the English department. A poet and critic with a wide general
audience–he reviewed frequently and was on the radio program “Invitation to
Learning” with Jacques Barzun, Clifton Fadiman, Irwin Edman, and others–he had
a considerable life outside the university. He was a public man, at the
university but not of it, not a don. He was a man of letters, and an exquisitely
polite gentleman. Indeed, he was even a country squire in Connecticut. In the
opinion of a great many students who went through Columbia, he was the best
classroom teacher they had ever experienced.
Though the term is difficult to define, Van Doren was conspicuously American. If
there is a touch of embarrassment about using that term, everyone will admit, I
suppose, that Anthony Eden or Jacques Chirac would not be mistaken for
Americans. Or that there would be no doubt about Whitman or Lincoln. Anyway, Van
Doren’s face was beautifully lined and he had strong farmer’s hands. You knew
that he was quite conscious of the way he looked, rather as you knew Robert
Frost was. They both used their appearance as part of their public power. I
sensed that Van Doren knew the effect of those farmer’s hands when he gripped
the top of the lectern. He was no city slicker. He had grown up in smalltown
Illinois (Lincoln, also of Illinois, was his principal American hero) and he had
gone to the University of Illinois. With the Midwest in his voice, he spoke
slowly enough so that you could think for a moment about what he had said. He
did not mind moments of silence in the classroom while he thought and we tried
to. He had written his master’s thesis at Illinois on Thoreau, and much admired
him, as he also did Emerson, and like Emerson he was good with an aphorism.
Yet, signally, Van Doren had written his Ph.D. thesis at Columbia on John
Dryden. It had been reviewed very favorably by none other than T. S. Eliot in
the TLS, and Eliot had incorporated much of this review into his Homage to John
Dryden. I once asked Van Doren what his favorite lyric poem was, and he did not
name one by an American but instead Dryden’s exquisite “To the Memory of Mr.
Oldham.” After all has been said and done in modern criticism, Van Doren’s book
on Dryden remains the best. I also rate very highly his books on Shakespeare and
on epic poetry. Considering that Van Doren had also won a Pulitzer Prize for his
own poetry, it was impossible for an undergraduate not to be in awe of this man.
A Van Doren class was not a lecture but a conversation. If, for the moment, the
students were not up to joining the conversation, it turned into a conversation
with himself. He taught with a certain relaxed casualness, as if continuing a
conversation that had already been going on somewhere else. He would draw an
individual student into it, and the student thus elected could not get off the
hook. Apparently simple questions had a way of turning into complicated ones. It
often seemed that he was actually able to create intelligence in a student.
Responding to Van Doren’s questions, the student would find himself saying
things he had never thought about Helen and Achilles–she invincible and he not
quite–or about the power of literature for Paolo and Francesca, or about
Abraham as a bargainer with God.
Van Doren favored the greatest writers for his courses. (No one in the Fifties
doubted that there were such things as great writers.) Part of the classroom
drama thus consisted of Van Doren measuring himself against them, trying to rise
somewhere near their peaks of intelligence. Not surprisingly, Van Doren wrote
splendidly about education. The following passage from his Autobiography (1958)
gives a sense both of the substance and the style of his teaching:
My purpose was to examine the ways in which the greatest tellers had put
divine things and human things together. The ultimate dimension, I
suggested, was given to narrative by the presence in it of gods or their
equivalent. In the case of Cervantes, I promised that it would be difficult
to say what the equivalent was, yet I promised it was there, or else Don
Quixote would not be the supreme novel it is. Reading it slowly in
preparation for the course, listening to every word of it in Motteaux’s
joyful translation, I had fallen hopelessly in love with it, as I continue
every year to do…. The Bible became for me a boundless world of wonder,
terror, wisdom, and delight. Dante and Kafka, the one finishing his
thought, the other unable to do so, I likewise discovered to be bottomless
in meaning as well as brilliant, with ten thousand details that cannot
tarnish. Homer, I need not say, remained for me what Dante said he was, the
sovereign poet.
I regret to say that there Van Doren nodded, as he very rarely did about such
things. In the Inferno it is Virgil, not Dante, who calls Homer the “sovereign
poet.” He was obviously sovereign for Virgil, who incorporated both the Iliad
and the Odyssey into the Aeneid, depending upon Homer’s presence to advance his
meanings through comparison and contrast. In the Aeneid, for example, as Aeneas
runs war-like Turnus through, homebody Hector is returning to kill Achilles.
Virgil votes for civilization, rejecting the endless destruction-creation of the
Homeric world. When Dante has Virgil call Homer the sovereign poet we understand
that Virgil has not had a chance to read The Divine Comedy.
I would like here to cite another passage about Van Doren’s teaching because it
establishes so well the relationship he was able to create with his students in
the classroom.
If I speak of the students last, it is not merely because they were the
crucial persons with whom I spent my time, as must be true in any college;
it is also because no way exists of describing what goes on in a classroom
once the door is closed. What goes on is a kind of secret between him who
stands and those who sit.
He continued with an important reflection that points to the essence of his
practice as a teacher:
From the beginning, I assumed experience in freshmen. Perhaps the chief
difficulty consisted in my assumption that nothing was too difficult for
the students. Freshmen have had more experience than they are given credit
for. They have been born, have had parents, had brothers and sisters, been
in love, been jealous, been angry, been ambitious, been tired, been hungry,
been happy and unhappy, been aware of justice and injustice. Well, the
great writers handled just such things, and they did so in basic human
language men must use whenever they feel and think. The result, if no
teacher prevents its happening, was that freshmen learned about themselves.
And so did the teachers, at least if they read and talked like men of the
world, simply and humbly, without assumptions of academic superiority.
This is a passage of apparent, but only apparent, simplicity. In truth it has
extraordinary richness. Van Doren had all the university standing anyone could
hope for. Yet he never assumed authority in the classroom; he earned it in every
session.
In his discourse, he talked “like a man of the world,” in “basic human
language.” That is why his favorite lyric was “To the Memory of Mr. Oldham,”
Dryden’s triumph of perfect lucidity. I’m sure that must have been a close call,
thinking of Jonson, Marveil, and Frost. Van Doren was a classicist about
language: the essence not the decoration–Caesar, Seneca, and Catullus, not
Cicero; Dryden, not Milton. He was uninfected by academic prose, and one can
imagine what he would say about the stagey decadence of much academic writing
today.
There was an American, even Lincolnian frontier feeling for equality about Van
Doren. I sense it, for example, in the following fine passage, both in the
language and in his relationship to the greatest story tellers, speaking as if
they were students in his class:
My great friends do not know me. Hamlet in the halls, Achilles by the
river, and Don Quixote Feasting with the Duke see no one there Like me,
Mark Van Doren, who grows daily Older, while they look not, change not, Die
not, save deaths their masters made.
I mentioned earlier Van Doren’s classroom remark in 1950 that the Soviet Union
was “just like Elizabethan England” and would like to add something to the
general sense that exists about Van Doren’s politics, namely that he was a
fellow traveler. I do recall his fury in 1950 regarding Truman, whom he
characterized as ignorant and unfit for the presidency. At the time, I was
unaware that he had supported Henry Wallace in 1948. I have since heard the
testimony of the poet and translator Richard Howard that Van Doren fervently
asserted the innocence of Alger Hiss after he had been convicted and I know that
he participated in the agitprop Waldorf Peace Conference in 1949.
When I got out of Naval Intelligence in 1956 and began to teach in the Columbia
English department, our relations were cordial enough and his sense of equality
genuine enough that he did not object when I asked him about all this. He
replied quite candidly that he had been “taken in.” Well, taken in by what or
whom? My own guess, for what it is worth, is by the powerful influence of his
close friend Scott Buchanan, president of St. John’s College in Annapolis, a
thoroughgoing classicist to be sure, but very far to the left politically.
Classicism can comport with the hatred of corporations and of business, and
certainly can be alienated from democracy. A comical history could be written of
fellow-traveling classicists, for whom the difference between Plato’s Republic
and Gosplan had somewhat blurred. But there was no indication in 1956 that any
of this persisted in Van Doren.
Ezra Pound once said that every man’s opinions should be tested one at a time.
No doubt Pound had special reasons to urge this, but it remains a good general
rule. I am not saying that, on the evidence, presiding as a Naval Intelligence
Officer over security clearances, I would have recommended access to top secret
material for Van Doren, but I do not think that his wild misjudgments during the
five years after World War II should be allowed to interfere with our judgment
of his excellences. I notice, for example, that in a very important recent
essay, William Pritchard pays particular notice to Van Doren’s book on
Shakespeare.(1) Van Doren probably began in gladness, out there in Illinois, but
I’m sure he did not end in madness.
It must have been in the early 1960S when I last saw him. On a warm spring
afternoon the window was open in my office in Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, which
looked out on the peaceful Van Amringe Quadrangle with its surrounding rectangle
of McKim, Mead & White brick and limestone buildings. The statue of Alexander
Hamilton in the foreground reinforced the sense of classical enlightenment.
Through the open window one of the numerous local pigeons had flown and now
walked on my carpet, strolling calmly back and forth. Then Mark came through my
door wearing his familiar floppy gray felt hat, rather in the older Max Perkins
tradition. He saw the pigeon, grinned, said to me, “Saint Francis.” This is the
closest I will ever come to sainthood.
Mark Van Doren’s health began to fade unexpectedly in the early 1970S, and he
learned that he was dying while his last volume of poems was in the press.
Rather characteristically, he entitled the volume Good Morning. Earlier, he had
written:
Eternity is now or not at all Waited for, a wisp: remembered, shadows,
Eternity is solid as the sun: As present; as familiar; as immense.
(1) William Pritchard, “The Shakespeherian Rag” in Talking Back To Dickinson
(Massachusetts, 1998).
—–
TO THE MEMORY OF MR OLDHAM
Farewell, too little, and too lately known,
Whom I began to think and call my own:
For sure our souls were near allied, and thine
Cast in the same poetic mold with mine.
One common note on either lyre did strike,
And knaves and fools we both abhorred alike.
To the same goal did both our studies drive;
The last set out the soonest did arrive.
Thus Nisus fell upon the slippery place,
While his young friend performed and won the race.
O early ripe! to thy abundant store
What could advancing age have added more?
It might (what nature never gives the young)
Have taught the numbers of thy native tongue.
But satire needs not those, and wit will shine
Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.
A noble error, and but seldom made,
When poets are by too much force betrayed.
Thy generous fruits, though gathered ere their prime,
Still showed a quickness; and maturing time
But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rhyme.
Once more, hail and farewell; farewell, thou young,
But ah too short, Marcellus of our tongue;
Thy brows with ivy, and with laurels bound;
But fate and gloomy night encompass thee around.
– John Dryden
