What William Alfred Taught Me

What William Alfred Taught Me

By Peter Grudin

William Alfred taught me a way to remember what the pathetic fallacy was. "There was one of those little italicized blurbs in The New Yorker," he said. "It was a little poem, called 'To the Crocuses,' and went something like this:

Now you stick your sweet little pink heads out of the ground!

And now you stick your sweet little purple heads out of the ground!

But look out! Look out! The cold March wind is coming. Look out!

Then the font reverted to the standard:

‘Yes, get back down! Get back down! You silly sons-of-bitches!’"

I think he told us that story the first time he visited my section of his Anglo-Saxon poetry course. His demeanor took me aback as much as his comment on “To the crocuses” had. His loping gait. The shabby green book bag. The fedora clapped to his forehead in such total defiance of gravity that it might just as well have been floating in mid-air. The kindness and humility in his manner. His mild eyes.

We were reading The Battle of Maldon. We sat at tables arranged in a square on the second floor of Sever Hall. Turning to the closest student on his left, “Please read, starting here at the beginning,” he said, the tremor in his voice suggesting that what he might say next might be too sad for words—or too funny. And the student began to read the stark Anglo-Saxon lines and then stopped, relieved I thought, after his quota of ten. “Now, please translate,” said Mr. Alfred, and the student did, and when he was done, the teacher smiled and nodded and turned his kind eyes to the next in line.

I was in my first year, amazed to be at Harvard after undergraduate study at a second-tier university. I was overwhelmed by Harvard, sure that I was nothing more than a filing error committed by a departmental secretary and I was more than a little daunted by all the theory I was reading in my comparative literature classes.

The hour was almost over when my turn came. I read. When I had finished, Mr. Alfred was silent long enough for me to imagine the worst kinds of rebuke for some mispronunciation or violation of meter.

“You read that beautifully,” he said.

Half the students in the room assumed puzzled stares. Could the way one read verse aloud really matter? I stared at my hands, simply overjoyed.

I had not been that happy in a year. The memory of what Mr. Alfred said makes me happy even now, retired after forty years of teaching and counseling and somewhat disabused of the lofty notions I once held about academic life. Never so disabused, however, as to miss a chance to celebrate the best teacher I have known.

“Now translate,” said Mr. Alfred. When I had finished, he nodded and smiled, and turned to the next student. Just as she was about to begin, however, he interrupted her. “You know,” he said, launching into the kind of non-sequitur that made his students smile, “I had a classmate who was a German woman. She was brilliant and very beautiful, and she married one of my other classmates, a man from Ohio, who took up German with a vengeance and got so very good at it that you could hardly tell he wasn’t a native. Yet he insisted, even after being corrected repeatedly, on translating ‘augenblick’ a dead metaphor that now means ‘an instant’ as ‘the blink of an eye’”.

After class, I was halfway through my pastrami sandwich at Elsie’s before I realized that this remark was not a non-sequitur at all. The realization stung. It took away half of the joy his compliment had given me. Yet, now, 40 years later, I have to reconsider. Maybe the very way he couched his criticism of my translation was, in fact, a second compliment. Surely it was a kindness. Had he recognized how much his compliment meant to me? Well, I think he understood enough to fashion his subsequent criticism so that I would have to translate it and then absorb it like some time-release medication.

The next year he needed an extra teaching fellow for his Hum VII course and enlisted me. I worked for him for the next three years. Section leaders were not required to attend his lectures, but I never missed one if I could help it. Let me tell you why.

One day--it might have been 1968--he came into class with a little more tempo than usual to his lope. We were reading King Lear. Although I was sitting several rows back, I noticed that his hands were trembling as he unfolded a wrinkled clipping from some newspaper or journal.

“It says here,” he said, his voice a bit raspy with emotion. “It says here,” he repeated, more emphatically--and the buzz in the hall subsided a bit-- “that there is really something to be said for Goneril and Regan.” He waited for silence.

Then he went on. “Please listen to me carefully and please try to remember what I am going to say. There is NOTHING to be said for Goneril and Regan.”

His tone was passionate, even angry, and it stopped my thinking dead in its shallow tracks as he began the lecture. “Good God,” I thought, "he really cares about these characters in a play. As though they were alive. They--and what they represent--matter to him in some vital way“. And I left the room a changed man (or should I say graduate student?). Here was the suggestion that there might be more to the study of literature than learning to command opaque terminology or to analyze character or meter, something more than wielding the kind of flair I had for recognizing patterns. The more I thought about what he had said, the more I learned from it. As you can see, I have obeyed Mr. Alfred to the end. I have not forgotten. That lesson has informed my own moral development and teaching over 40 years.

Strong as his emotion was on this occasion, he was never passion’s slave or fashion’s for that matter. He studied his languages, and he wrote his plays in graceful verse, and he wrote beautiful lyric poetry as well. He taught his students, and he looked after them. He believed firmly in a hierarchy of the things that matter; he believed in constants that had to rule no matter what contemporary variables—valuable or worthless—were at large.

And he was so generous. There were those late afternoon gatherings in his house on Athens Street, heterogeneous groups that might include some world-famous scholar as well as a few poor rats of graduate students like me. Harry Gotoff, a brilliant young classics professor, was often there, and once he brought his own mentor, the great classicist E.J. Kenney, to meet Mr. Alfred. Most of the time, however, we were just a few students and young faculty.

Our host would give each of us a tumbler with one or two rather puny ice cubes in it and then drown them in excellent whiskey. And if some neophyte made the mistake of taking a generous first gulp, our host would be back on his feet to refill his glass. We were poor, limited in our daily existences to Gallo, brown rice, and the occasional shred of meat. This was a trip to the land of milk and honey.

One evening Gotoff was there and Eva Ungar, then my fiancée, and a few others I can't remember. The afternoon grew old. We knew it was time to go home. We were hungry, but much too happy and a bit too drunk to leave. “Let’s go to the Acropolis,” said Mr. Alfred, hungry himself no doubt and much too kind to hint that we might have overstayed our welcome.

“I’ll drive,” said Professor Gotoff, the only one there with a car, as he struggled to his feet with rather indifferent success.

“Let me call a cab,” responded Mr. Alfred, quickly and as though he hadn’t heard him.

We were eating our first course. “Look over there, the third booth over there,” he said. “That’s where we sat when T.S. Eliot took me to dinner.” Of course he was proud of that. But if the old Acropolis is still open, and I take some favorite student there some day, I will be prouder yet. I will point out where, forty years ago, I had dinner with William Alfred.

He, Harry Gotoff, and I were all connected to Kirkland House, Mr. Alfred as honored faculty, Harry Gotoff, another great teacher, as a resident tutor, and I as a non-resident tutor. One night, in Harry's rooms, Mr. Alfred told us about how he had nearly died while giving a tutorial.

He was only in his twenties at the time of the story, I think. He was conducting a tutorial with an earnest young man, eager for approval and advancement it seemed. I don't remember what the topic was, but let's say it was Great Expectations. The young man sat down in Mr. Alfred's office and began to explain his reading: that the novel was just like a map of London (somehow). As the ambitious young man launched into his argument, poor Mr. Alfred suffered a mild heart attack. He lost consciousness for what must have been half-an-hour. When he finally came to, it was to return to the seemingly uninterrupted drone of the earnest young man as he concluded, unperturbed, "And that is why I think Great Expectations is like a map of London." William Alfred laughed as he concluded this story, and yet I got the sense that his amazement at the event was still with him.

Eva and I, newly married, left Cambridge in the summer of 1970. I finished my dissertation that summer and was back and forth between Cambridge and Williamstown frequently. Once the thesis was accepted, I took some time to revel in my new habitant, a place of hills, woods, and fields. We bought a Labrador retriever, “Dmitri” and a golden, “Emsworth,” and adored them in the extravagant way childless couples adore dogs.

“You must come to visit,” I said to Mr. Alfred.

“Well, I am not all that fond of the country." he responded. “Let me tell you a story.” He told me about a visit he had made to rural New York with two friends. Both of them were noisily enthusiastic about all things rural.

One day in early spring the three were walking and came downwind of a freshly manured field. “Ah,” said one of the enthusiastic friends, inhaling deeply, “even that smells good."

That was too much for Mr. Alfred. “It smells,” he said, “like what it is.”

We never persuaded him to visit and then we fell out of touch. Awful how this happens. I regret it very much. But it must have been around 1973 when Eva was in Cambridge and ran into Mr. Alfred in Harvard Square. I don’t think either of us had been in touch with him for over a year.

“Oh, how are you, Eva? And Peter?” he asked. “And Dmitri? And Emsworth?”

He allowed his students to be informal with him. This was all in the late sixties, and many of them called him “Bill.” I couldn’t. It would have suggested a kind of equality that simply wasn’t there. It’s not there yet, and no matter what I have done for my own students. I have no hopes that it ever will be. Could I see him now, it would still be “Mr. Alfred.” Nor, as you see, was I comfortable in calling him “Professor Alfred.” The title seemed somehow to limit him, to set boundaries on his interests, his sensitivity, and even—since this was Harvard—on his humility and to his kindness.

He taught me that a man could be fully sympathetic and discriminate, pious and yet irreverent. He taught me how to find the line between sentiment and sentimentality. He taught me that moral seriousness without humility could repel and helped me to develop some sense of self-irony. He taught me never to impose meaning on a work of literature but rather to expose that meaning. He taught me to show students all the kindness I was capable of, to look upon them kindly and remember how frightening it is, sometimes, to be a student. He taught me how to criticize effectively but only in a way that fostered learning. He taught me that no position justifies pretentiousness and that the best response to success is humility. And that the very worst responses to human suffering are self-absorption and indifference.

Finally, he impressed upon me just how powerful narrative could be, not just to enchant or amuse but to communicate important truths. He did this both through his lectures on literature and through his mode of educating us when literature was not the subject.

I think he was the greatest teacher I have known and the kindest person. I wish I had known him longer, had been able somehow to do something for him in return for what he had done for me.

Well, I am trying now.

I have taught my students about William Alfred whenever I could find or create the occasion over the last 40 years. I talk to my wife, Dana Wilson, about him, and I tell stories about him to old friends and to my daughter, Sophia. Bear with me, and I will tell you one more.

Mr. Alfred told me a story about a tea he had attended. I guess the hostess was fabulously wealthy. In any case, the China she brought out for the occasion was beyond price, something sui generis, delicate and from the 18th century, and it was a perfect and complete set, the sort of thing one might see in a major museum.

One of the guests, who was somewhat clumsy, tripped on the edge of the carpet. His teacup slipped from his fingers and shattered on the floor. For a moment there was silence as the more sophisticated guests tallied up the cost of the event.

The hostess was at the unhappy man’s side in an instant. “Oh please don’t give it a thought, Mr. ___,” she said. “Things like that happen all the time with this old stuff,” and, even as she spoke, carelessly she tossed her own cup at the stone hearth.

An example of elegance and style? Perhaps. I don’t know anything else about that hostess. But for Mr. Alfred I think the story was about goodness, about generosity. It illustrated the difference between things and people, the difference between objects and subjects, the difference between what is like and what is unlike: it expressed the distinction between what is not kind and what is.