In the mid 1980s, thirty-five years ago, I was in residence for a week at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., researching an article on one of the lesser English Renaissance dramatists -- a pleasure as well as a condition of employment. The article turned out to be not a bad piece of academic prose, if I do say so myself, but not something for the ages either. It was a mere twenty years since I had completed my degree in "English and American Language and Literature" at a Large Eastern University, specifically Harvard. I was not drawn to the Folger for professional reasons only. It was a delight and a great privilege to hold in my very own hands and to read dozens and scores of four-hundred-year-old ephemeral books that -- more than the canonical literature -- helped me to understand the age of Shakespeare. Sermons by the wagonload, biblical commentaries, almanacs, political pamphlets, poems by minor and unknown versifiers, broadsides, medical textbooks, collections of jokes, how-to-write-a-letter-in-Latin trots, schoolbooks. The library possessed inexhaustible troves of such material. The Folger's plenty licensed my dilettante brain to follow its own naturally wayward inclinations.
While doing my duty and also having some fun, I fell in with a fellow Folgerite named Boyd Berry who was visiting from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Over cups of coffee, Boyd and I discussed some of the less well-known writers of the period in whom we shared a mutual interest. I remember that we also talked about the teacher's perennial frustration at engaging the interest of our sometimes less-than-enthusiastic students. I do not remember what prompted me to ask Boyd this question: "what was the worst course that you ever took either as an undergraduate or graduate student." He replied, without hesitation, "Douglas Bush's lecture course on Milton at Harvard in 1961." I was flabbergasted, in part because I hadn't guessed that Boyd had been at Harvard during my years there, but more because I had enrolled in exactly the same course -- same time same station same year -- and because Douglas Bush's Milton course was also my own nominee for the worst course ever. Parallel lines had accidentally and miraculously met, so to speak. Although Boyd and I were the same age, he was one year behind me and had taken the course as a senior undergraduate while I had been a first-year graduate student. It seemed an astonishing coincidence, but then, the universe of students of English Renaissance literature is a small one. Nevertheless, the fact that we shared the same opinion about Professor Bush's course was comforting and, as they say, "validating." Boyd said out loud words that I had only speculated upon in petto. Perhaps I wasn't the only outlier.
Why were we in such accord? The obvious answer is that Professor Bush, then in the tail end of his much-celebrated career (he had uttered his infant cries during Grover Cleveland's second presidency), was tired and bored by his teaching and put little heart into the work. In brief, he droned, unconscionably. Not only did he drone, but it seemed as though there was an invisible shield between his podium and our seats. He didn't speak to us -- he addressed the empyrean. His lectures consisted of a superficial running commentary on Milton's poems. "There's a particularly lovely passage starting on line 695," -- as if a challenging idea would be beyond our collective capacity. If a student broke into the drone to hazard a question, Professor Bush's characteristic answer was, "Well, that seems self-explanatory." But Bush's classroom style was not the only reason for my unhappiness; I had more substantive concerns.
Let me interject a few words about Professor John Nash Douglas Bush. Although almost forgotten today, Bush was by all odds the most formidable and learned literary scholar of his generation. He knew everything there was to know about English, Romance, and classical literature and had written a dozen comprehensive critical and historical books. If the gossip can be trusted, he greeted the dawn of each new day by reading two hundred lines of Latin poetry and a hundred of Greek. I am sure that he knew more about John Milton than Milton knew about himself. He had edited the volume of Milton's complete poetry (English, Latin, Greek, and Italian) and, astonishingly, had memorized the entire twelve books of Paradise Lost. He was an exacting scholar and a stylish and witty writer. Moreover, he was a kindly, gentle man, cordial and generous to his students -- even to me. If he had flaws of character, I didn't know of them. To my mind, he was an unimpeachably excellent person and scholar -- and at the same time a teacher from whom I learned just about nothing.
I was once invited -- along with a clutch of my ambitious graduate-school classmates -- to some sort of reception at Professor Bush's Cambridge residence. His home was exactly as it should have been -- that is to say, if one were making a movie about a distinguished Harvard professor, one's location scout would not rest until he discovered the Bush quarters. It was a spacious and civilized home presided over by gracious Mrs. Bush, who was also exactly as she should have been. I remember that the giant main room in the house -- which must once have been two or more large rooms that had been sutured together, was Professor Bush's enormous study. It was more like an institutional library than something to be found in a private home. Just as one would expect, the study was lined floor to ceiling with handsome wooden bookcases chock full of an enviable display of publications in many languages, some of which I could identify. I remember being served sherry, I think, and also something preternaturally green and fishy on an unfamiliar but I'm sure very elite kind of cracker. This dream of an academic utopia filled me with envy. It also scared the living blazes out of me. Why? Because for all Professor Bush's elegance and his library, and his lovely deferential wife, his movie-set home struck me as soft, fey, self-satisfied, and bloodless. I was dazzled and intimidated by its splendors but at the same time wary and resistant. Only five years beyond crowded Erasmus Hall High School in darkest Brooklyn, I knew myself well enough to know that, however seductive, his style of life was not for me. I would have to find a more appropriate path.
Now I want to step further back and report on two cases in which I was in conflict with Professor Douglas Bush. Actually, the conflicts were only on my side; Professor Bush, Olympian and serene, did not notice -- nor should he have, frankly. These incidents continue to haunt me to this day, sixty years after the fact. Both occurred not in the Milton course, but in an "advanced" seminar called "Science and Humanism in the Seventeenth Century." I must explain that the word "humanism" did not carry the meaning that it does today, as in the phrase "secular humanism" -- an approach to the natural world that is allied with agnosticism and which sometimes resolves into pure atheism. Professor Bush's humanism was the altogether different "Christian humanism." It was, in brief, the noble but ultimately unsuccessful Renaissance attempt to fuse the "inspired" and "revealed" truths of Christianity with the thoughtful, upstanding but unfortunately natural morality of the Greeks and Romans. If "Christian Humanism" could be distilled to a sentence, it would be Desiderius Erasmus' daring speculation -- that he would like someday to be able to say, "Sancte Socrates, ora pro nobis", or "Saint Socrates, pray for us."
I was a humanist of the secular variety -- by birth, inclination, education and because in my brain there was no place, not even a lone neuron, where "faith" or "prayer' or "worship" might in more standard heads be lodged. Bush, on the other hand, was not just a scholar of Christian Humanism, he was an honest-to-god trapped-in-amber Christian Humanist -- and a devout one, deeply rooted and entirely comfortable in late medieval/early renaissance thinking. In his seminar on Science and Humanism, humanism was right and just, and science, its antagonist, was, if not altogether bad, at minimum a very dangerous alternative. Did not both Bacon and Descartes assert that "nature" -- the real world -- could be studied directly, on its own terms, rather than as an entity infused with god's being and majesty. That we mortals might study nature not to reaffirm the goodness and omnipotence of god, but to accumulate objective knowledge and to reap practical material benefits. It's a fact that the separation of nature from the "truth" of religion has over the centuries unquestionably led to the marginalizing of Christian thinking and therefore, according to Bush's view of the world, to the steep decline of civilization. The world, no longer driven by revelation, has been going to hell in a hand basket, as Professor Bush said or implied every Tuesday at 4:00 pm.
Regular readers of this blague as well as Dr. Metablog's family and friends will recognize that Youthful Me did not accept Bush's premises. In fact, in those days, I was probably even less open to religious ideas than I am now. And therefore, each Tuesday was a day of discomfort.
And then, one afternoon, Professor Bush began the allotted two hours by launching a surprise assault on the then-new and controversial Third Edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The Third had shocked traditionalists. Until 1962, dictionaries had been "prescriptive "-- that is, they explained how language "should" be used and they stigmatized as colloq. or subst. [substandard] those words or expressions that fell below the bar. The Third forsook tradition and was not prescriptive but descriptive. It aimed to record the language as it was really used. The Third therefore included many words hitherto banned as slang or vulgar and it was loose and permissive with regard to "shall" and "will", and "imply" and "infer," etc. For Professor Bush, the Third was a plunge into darkness -- another example of the collapse of Western Civilization as we know it, or should know it. So he excoriated the new dictionary and its editors and its supporters. The tirade having been completed, he turned mildly to the class and asked if anyone present had a different opinion. Now I had learned a little about modern linguistics at Cornell, and I was a descriptivist both by education and democratic instinct, and I knew that Bush was completely out of step with contemporary thought. I was astonished to discover that I knew more about this particular field of knowledge than he. But, alas, I was totally intimidated and did not open my mouth. What abject cowardice on my part! Nary a word did I say, and so the class segued to a discussion of the Cambridge Platonists and their vain attempt to tame and assimilate Descartes and Spinoza. I still wonder if any of the other 2G's around the table were aware of my shame. Probably not -- did my peers, the late Arthur Oberg, the late Jake Mills, the late Brian Hepworth, the late Terry Logan, the late Bill Godshalk, and others whose names I have forgotten, notice my moral collapse? I suppose that it's too late to worry. Nevertheless, my failure to raise my hand and voice still humiliates me, still rankles.
Another Tuesday, another surrender. In 1961, William Empson published his innovative study, Milton's God. While Empson was not as learned as Professor Bush (no one was) he was a much more imaginative and challenging reader. Some say that after Johnson and Hazlitt, Sir William has been English literature's most insightful critic. Empson was an intellectual and social dissenter (he had been banished from Magdalen College, Cambridge when a condom [horrors!] was discovered among his possessions). He had written two highly influential critical books that every serious mid-century student of literature studied -- the first on ambiguity, the second on pastoral. Empson read Paradise Lost through a very different lens than Bush. He was not a Christian; in fact, he confessed himself anti-Christian because he judged there to be a serious moral flaw at the heart of the religion -- that the sacrifice of Jesus was a highly elaborated form a scapegoating. About Paradise Lost, he concluded that God (that is, the character God in the epic) was confused and contradictory, repeatedly tying himself into logical and rhetorical knots in order to justify the unjustifiable. He also argued that irrespective of Milton's intention, the character God became more complex and interesting when he became less ideological and more dramatic; more, so to speak, human. He revered Paradise Lost, but for his own, not Bush's, reasons. Milton's God was trashed by Professor Bush, who dismissed Empson as a simple "village atheist." I was stunned. True enough that Empson was an atheist, but true also that he was a powerful thinker, not someone to be given the back of the hand with a flippant ad hominem. Bush's review came out in The New York Times on a Sunday; the following Tuesday, our teacher was lauded by my fellow seminarians. He basked in their admiration. Did my young colleagues genuinely agree with Bush, or were they egregious sycophantic toadies? I don't know and will never know. And then, after the celebration, Bush asked, as if he were open-minded, "Does anyone here have a different opinion?" If Empson had been summarily dispatched, what chance had I? So once again, I fled the field, remained mute -- and slunk deeper into my thick leather chair.
Oh Vivian, while you were flagellating yourself for not speaking up, I was protesting, "but you were the person whose opinion I trusted in matters of right and wrong!"
(In my "autobiography," I also dwell on how the need to conform to the customs of the time/place, misled me from my authentic self.) Youth is hard!
I do admire your eloquence!
Posted by: Mary K. Wakeman | December 05, 2020 at 01:17 PM