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Letter from John Butler
Sat Aug 1 1998 By the time I arrived at graduate school, I knew exactly what activities I wanted to improve at (literary criticism), and I knew what ones didn't particularly interest me (scholarly pursuits). Right from the start it was clear that my teachers seemed to be all in favor of my working hard at improving my performance as a literary critic: they gave me free reign, and applauded my performances, and didn't fail to criticize when the occasion arose: I fell way short on a paper at the end of the first semester, and it was given a B-, which is the graduate school equivalent of an undergraduate's D-. Because I felt that I no longer needed the kind of careful guidance I'd received as an undergraduate, I considered myself blessed, and was happy to work like a dog on my own seven days a week at an activity I loved. So when I saw what I considered to be glaring deficiencies in my teachers, although I always thought, scornfully, "This couldn't have happened at Amherst," I never _cared_ that it was happening now. It robbed me of a moment of pleasure -- the fun of being well-taught -- but it didn't hurt me in the slightest. A poor moment of teaching struck me as a curiosity to be looked at in wonder, but certainly nothing to be upset about. What kinds of bad moments remain in my memory? I'll describe four, starting with one that is unutterably trivial. In a junior-senior lecture course in the Modern Novel for 150 students, we graduate students -- there were four or five of us -- sat off to one side in our own special row. One day before class I was chatting with the woman next to me when she asked me whether I knew how to spell the name of T.S. Eliot. I said yes, and told her. She said "No, I think it's Elliott." I knew that spelling was wrong, but wen I told her, gently, se argued. Our professor just happened to be approaching our row, handing out duplicated copies of something, so I said, "Wait a second! Let's ask Prof. Bloom!" When he arrived at our row, I asked, "How do you spell 'Eliot' in T.S. Eliot? Single or double 'l' and 't'?" "Both double" he said without pausing. I wondered, "If he doesn't know, why doesn't he say 'I'm not sure'?" Graduate students were invited to take Honors Courses for juniors and seniors in which the undergraduates received double credit, thought the graduate students didn't, a very difficult arrangement for us older folks. One day a young professor who had been substituting for our regular professor for a couple of months in a Romantic Poetry seminar ended our weekly session by saying, "So Burns is worth studying because not only was he a great poet but a great man." That startled me; I knew that Burns, the son of a rather poor Scottish school teacher, was a great poet, but my (somewhat deficient) understanding was that in real life he was a farmer, or something similar, certainly not a Great Man in a class with Churchill or Roosevelt or Milton or Chaucer. So I followed the teacher out of the room into a mailroom cubbyhole reserved for English teachers between classes, and asked him whether I could speak to him for a minute. He said yes. "When you said at the end of class that Burns was worth studying because he was a great poet, I agreed, but when you said he was a great man, I was puzzled. Wasn't he just a farmer?" Referring to the professor he had been substituting for, he said "Well, you'd have to ask Professor Capstan about that." Naturally, I let the matter drop. In my third year, I signed up for a seminar in Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne, taught by a man who was an internationally known Hawthorne scholar. We met for two hours once a week, and discussed just one book in each session. To me that arrangement was heavenly bliss, since in my other courses we had seldom spent more tan fifteen minutes talking about a particular work. One afternoon was scheduled to be devoted to Hawthorne's best novel, 'The Scarlet Letter,' a short book that takes no more than an hour and a half or two hours to read. I was ecstatic over such an opportunity. We would really dig into that great book! At one point in the middle of the discussion, when I had an argument with a fellow student about a particular scene in the novel tat we couldn't seem to settle, I turned to our famous teacher and said "Professor Stewart, what do _you_ think this scene shows?" He waved his hand and said, diffidently, "Oh, Mr. Butler! I haven't read this book in _years_!" We all laughed. I did have an extremely conscientious teacher, who worked hard at what he was doing. His field was the English Renaissance, which he considered to have ended in 1700, a reasonable though not universally accepted supposition. Once during class when we were discussing poets who wrote short poems (among other things) mainly in the 1690's, an extraordinarily fertile period in English literature, I had a bright idea about one difference between those fabulous poets (Spencer, Shakespeare) and the comparably but different fabulous poets (Donne, Herbert) who were writing in the early 1700's I put up my hand and was called upon. I said "Mr. Bradner, do you think that one of the differences between these poets and the poets who were writing ten years later was that ... ? I spelled out the possibility I was seeing, and everyone in the class sat up straight. I had stumbled onto a very big idea, that the earlier poets _described_ while the later ones _dramatized_. When I finished, we all turned to our teacher with high expectations. Mr. Bradner leaned forward over the seminar table, frowned, and said "I don't speculate! My area of expertise ends at 1700!"
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