Harry Gotoff

The first time I read The Odyssey I could not comprehend the full import of what Achilles says within the gates of Hades: that he would rather be the poorest slave of the meanest man on earth and yet alive than king of all the dead.  What caught me up that first time was that Achilles, though dead, could still think, that he could express himself at all, that he could still move an audience, Odysseus in this case, and from then on, down the ages until he got to me. 

When Faulkner said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” he was thinking  of the past on a large historical scale. But his idea works on a personal scale as well. My past will not be past until I am.

On January 15th, 1956, Amherst lost a close game to Army. Harry had 33 saves. One “Cadet Leuders,” the Army goalie, had but 6, or twice the number of goals that Amherst was able to score. What  can one conclude from this is that Army had a strong offense and Amherst didn’t. There might be more to it. Maybe Harry had to save that many attempted goals because Amherst’s defense was deficient as well. But Army lacked a key component that Amherst was lucky enough to possess, and that was Harry.

In any case the game was an obscene mismatch, at least on paper. According to The New York Times Harry was “bombarded” by West Point‘s shots-on-goal. That’s not surprising. Army should have been by far the better team. After all, not only was Army a much larger college than Amherst but also it had admission standards that veered towards very different goals. I don’t think that future academics tend to go to West Point, any more than, in those days at least, future professional athletes chose Amherst.

Goalie is a lonely post. On average, much of the time not one member of his team or of the opponents’ is within 100 feet of him.   And so, Harry was alone, although on this day not nearly alone enough, given the frequent predatory sallies amassed by the foe. Harry was no Achilles, the great warrior who had Ajax or Diomedes or Odysseus at his back, not to mention that  murder of Myrmidons he brought along for the fun. Rather Harry was Hector, brave protector of home and hearth not to speak of net. The capacities of Harry’s teammates for thwarting those enemy attacks on goal might be compared to the ability of your average bottomless bucket to hold water over an extended period while being shaken violently.

I don’t think Harry felt the slightest dismay at the lack of support his team was giving him. They were, after all, overmatched. The game was lost before it even began. Think of a football game between Notre Dame and the Little Sisters of the Poor, and you’ll get the idea, or of a debate between Socrates and Elmer Fudd.

In a certain sense, how well--or in this case how poorly--his teammates were performing was not relevant.  Harry did what was needed,  and he did it diligently, skillfully, bravely, and on his own.

He was a good sport. He held no animosity towards those swarms of conspicuously athletic, militant young men trying to storm the net and sack  his sanctuary. His sole enemy was what it always was: the threat of performing badly.

Harry did not have good eyesight, and yet in the pictures I have found of him, bundled up in his goalie’s pads, he is not wearing his glasses. Goalies don’t as a rule. The possibility of smashed and splintered glass in the ocular region is far too great with that hard rubber puck coming at them at 100 mile per hour. How well could Harry see what was going on at the other end of the rink-- on what seem to have been the very rare occasions when Amherst was trying to score and anything at all was going on there? How  well could he follow the tiny, puck, skidding around the ice at speed?

It seems that he could. Goalies don’t accumulate saves by making blind stabs.

Then there is the question of why he was a goalie in the first place.  He told me about it, but I cannot remember all the details. No doubt he had quick reflexes.  But I do retain an impression, some whisper of memory about a self-effacing confession he made, a confession that conveyed the idea that Harry Gotoff might well have been the only player on his team who couldn’t skate. There are goalies who skate quite well, but they are like pitchers who can hit home runs. Skating isn’t really part of their job. In my mind’s eye, I can see him being towed out on to the ice by a clutch of teammates as though he were some dreadnaught battleship being positioned by a fleet of tugs to bombard an enemy coast.

[Harry: “Be more careful of your metaphors. Goalie is a defensive position, something you might have noticed if you’d thought about it a bit more.

I: Touché, but is that really what annoys about what I am saying?]

Then again, maybe he was a good skater after all. And my memory of the conversation in which he told me he couldn’t skate is one of those so distant, so vague, that I can’t tell for sure whether it occurred or whether I invented it. So why in the world should I bring up an instance from his life that is on the one hand less than complimentary and that on the other has a good chance of being less than true?

Sometimes what didn’t happen makes more sense, and carries much more meaning, than what did. Story can trump history because it can tell more about the essential: in this case, what Harry was like. Doing something well while relatively handicapped—like playing hockey when he could hardly see and couldn’t skate—was characteristic of him, so please let’s let the matter rest. Anyway, although I started to write all this for you, Leila, and for Margot and for Daniel, it seems as though, as I progress, I am writing it for Harry.

The way he defended his goal on that day in 1956 prefigured how he led the rest of his life. Just as his role as a superb athlete is salient given his intellectual focus, so was his brilliance and his courage among his peers. Even among liberals, he was often isolated by his strong opinions and an adherence to his own unbendable principles. If others--through indifference, self-interest, timidity, or stupidity--allowed lies to swarm and overwhelm the truth or evil to skid by quick and unnoticed and unopposed, Harry would not. Once in the fray he was heroic, unforgiving, exquisitely eloquent, fearless, and although not always the victor, always formidable.

I hear him laughing now.

[“What do you mean saying I didn’t always win arguments or that I couldn’t skate? I knew you when you couldn’t tell a passive periphrastic from an ablative absolute. Since when did you get my permission to rewrite my life? Nihil de mortuis . . . And I hope you have not become so mentally addled that you can’t even translate that.”

And I reply, “I am just trying to get to get a rise out of you, Harry, my dear friend, if only to assure myself that you are still there.”

Harry: “But I am not, you know.”

I: “O. K., Harry. Have it  your way. But if you aren’t there, then stop contradicting me. This is my story now.”]

                                                                 ***

There was a T.V. ad in the 60s. It shows a parked car with the window open, the keys on view and a “youth” strolling by rather slowly. The young man’s eyes shift to peer into the car. Of course, his glance falls on those forgotten keys, carelessly splayed across the front seat. He hesitates.

“When you park your car, take your keys,” drones the voice-over.  “Don’t let a good boy turn bad.” 

Harry was on this like a mongoose on a viper: “Oh, I see. He’s a good boy until he sees the keys in the ignition and then, guess what?” That sort of mollycoddle got nowhere with him. A good boy, in his opinion, wasn’t one who could resist the temptation to commit grand larceny. Rather, it was one who couldn’t even imagine such a temptation.

I have met people whose moral principles have been managed with such economy that they are condensed to only one. And that one is Opportunity. This is the type whose vague sense of right and wrong depends entirely on practicality.

1.Can the thing be done?

2. What are the costs, and what are the benefits?

3. What are the chances of getting caught?

These are the people Harry  despised most vehemently, these the merely ambitious, these with (as he liked to put it)“an eye out for the main chance.” He recognized the type right away, and they had no chance for his respect.

And so, in the late sixties when students took over buildings at Harvard and even threatened to destroy the Union Card Catalogue in Widener (with septuagenarian professors awake all night trembling and dozing on the steps of the building to protect it,) Harry, who sided with the students in opposing the Viet Nam war, was quick to notice that not all of them were sincere. He had no patience for these and little more for those who, having knowingly broken the law, subsequently complained about being arrested for having broken it. Breaking the law was the point, the way to dramatize opposition to a cruel and hopeless conflict. Getting arrested was as intrinsic to that goal as the initial infraction was.

I could leave it to your imaginations what he said about Robert Kennedy, but I won’t. Observing the support Eugene McCarthy had amassed as a presidential candidate against the Viet Nam war, RFK saw his opportunity lying in his path and bent over to snatch it up. He entered the campaign late, intent on siphoning off McCarthy’s support through the power of his own charisma and electability. Harry turned on him, riddling this former assistant to Roy Cohn with salvo after salvo, (if in absentia). (Of course, Harry, with the rest of us, didn’t let that criticism mitigate his dismay when RFK was subsequently murdered.)

Hotspur, one of my favorite characters in Shakespeare’s plays, is the epitome of bravery, honesty, and authenticity, and he can be very funny, too. Look at what he has to say to the bombastic and overly imaginative Welshman, Owen Glendower:

GLENDOWER

I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

HOTSPUR

Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?

GLENDOWER

Why, I can teach you, cousin, to command
The devil.

HOTSPUR

And I can teach thee, coz, to shame the devil
By telling truth: tell truth and shame the devil.
If thou have power to raise him, bring him hither,
And I'll be sworn I have power to shame him hence.
O, while you live, tell truth and shame the devil!

Unfortunately, paired with Hotspur’s authenticity is a recklessness that borders on the foolhardy. If he is not vainglorious, he is at times a “wasp-stung and impatient fool.” This part of his makeup leads him to disaster.

Harry was a Hotspur but with maturity and brains. He had Hotspur’s courage and his quick impatience with fraud, but he certainly lacked Hotspur’s foolishness. He could be quite fierce at times, ferocious, and I am sure he made many enemies. Perhaps a more politic approach would have gotten him the ranks and positions his abilities and accomplishments so clearly entitled him to.  He was, after all, a world-class scholar.

Harry was fair to everyone, but that did not make him friendly towards the more radical attempts to transform the discipline he loved. He did not want to see The Classics made slave to identity politics or diluted to the status of some area study. It is a demanding discipline, as demanding as any I can imagine, a discipline in which discipline is intrinsic. Diminishing that rigor and that scope would destroy its identity.

He had an extremely distinguished career. From what I can tell, he was as great a scholar in his field (the works of Marcus Tullius Cicero) as anyone in the world. He spent most of his time at a fine university, The University of Cincinnati.  There was no university, however--not Harvard, not Cambridge, not Oxford--that would have been too fine for him. He was brilliant, and he worked very hard. If those universities are the best in the world, his presence at one or the other would have rendered it better yet.

And so, as his career progressed, I met a couple of classicists who rolled their eyes when I said that he had been my mentor. If they went on to say anything about him that was negative, I shut them up quick. Such as they (“Isti” is the word Latin would recommend and there is no translation for it, although “low-life” with the proper intonation, comes close) could not imagine what he was really like. He frightened them. The brighter ones might have suspected that he was on the right side right and known that they hadn’t the talent or the guts to join him there. It is usually difficult to see the good side of something you are afraid of, especially when that fear is well deserved.

What his detractors (the few, the unread, the ignorant) could not even imagine about the ferocious Professor Gotoff was that he was as soft-hearted a man as ever lived. His kindness to anyone oppressed or in need was reflexive, immediate, and kinetic. His sympathy, an active sympathy that never faltered, for the poor and the suffering was the hallmark of his credo and of his character. 

And he was very shy. Shyness is a condition highly favorable for the propagation of virtue. It is a predisposition productive of self-analysis and self-criticism. It counters egotism. It had that effect in Harry. He did not find public activity easy, especially when he was young. I remember seeing him for the first time when he was a guest lecturer in a Harvard course taught by Wendell Clausen. I’d never seen a teacher so nervous. I was afraid he might just collapse on the spot. But of course he didn’t. He was nervous not because he was afraid of failure but because he believed so strongly in the importance of what he was doing. He was so dead set on getting it right. He took his work, his vocation, with a seriousness few religions could match.

I asked him to be best man at my wedding. In my youthful selfishness I gave no thought to how much I was asking of him. He had to fly out to Cleveland for the wedding. At that time, his annual income was around $7,000. That was in 1969 dollars, but it still was next to nothing. That trip cost him a nice chunk of it, but he never said a word.

I knew him first because I was his student. I still am. Even when I am not thinking of him in person, he is with me when I try to formulate an idea in a disciplined way or try to coax more grace into a written sentence. Throughout my career people of all sorts have asked me how they might become good writers. I respond by lying. I give them some blather about paying more attention to what they read and reading the works of good authors. Were I honest, however, I would simply say this: “It’s quite simple. Study Latin. And do this diligently for 9 or 10 years, and that should do the trick. Oh, and if you are really serious, take some courses with Harold Gotoff.”

Here I sit, writing about the man who taught me how.

The love that a student develops for a great teacher is something like his love for a parent, but purer. A great teacher is much more focused than a parent can be, the field of view is narrower. There is the subject and there is the student, and the simple imperative is to make the one familiar to the other.  If my DNA and aspects of my mind derive from my dear parents, my habits of mind, or the best of them, trace their ancestry to Harry.

I last saw him in 2015, at his place in Derby Vermont. I hadn’t seen him in 40 years. Why? Well, that’s a long story.

(Harry: All your fault, Peter.”

I: “Not entirely.”

Harry: “You were a lousy correspondent”

I: “There were things I will not mention that would have led to some bitter arguments. I didn’t want to take that risk.”)

And yet, during that long lapse, I thought about him all the time. I told my daughter about him. I remembered him with Eva. Still, the 40 years was a wound in my life, a terrible waste, the kind of thing that can never be undone.

But on that visit in 2015, I thought that perhaps it could. Harry and I tumbled right back into our friendship, perfectly at ease, our stale if cherished jokes, our memories, our discussions of literature, politics, and ethics, our dead friends. It was as though we were continuing conversations left off the evening before.

I reminded him of his retort to people who couldn’t understand his love for so isolated a place as Derby.

Well-meaning fellow academic: “I don’t understand why you want to live up there in the wilderness. Do you really want to be that far away from an academic institution?

 Harry [not even cracking a smile] “I am an academic institution.”

(Harry: “Is that when you coined a new name for my house? ‘Overbearing Manor?’”

I: “No.”

Harry: “What do you mean, ‘No’?”

I “Never did.”

Harry: “Did, too.”

I: “Did not.”

Harry: “Come on, Grudin.”

I:” Well if anyone else had said that, I would have slugged him.”

I cannot express how much I enjoyed that visit and seeing him again. I think of it all the time. It is a treasure. After knowing Dana only a few hours, he summed her up perfectly: “She knows exactly who she and is fine with it. That’s why she has no need for pretensions.”  That visit, the last, unfortunately, before his death,  made me realize just how much I loved him, the best of friends, my mentor, and as kind, brave, and upright a man as I can ever hope to meet.

Peter Grudin

March, 2021