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.
So there they were, my two abject failures of nerve.
Have I flagellated myself sufficiently?
But now I also remember a third Science and Humanism event -- the Tuesday that Professor Bush fell asleep.
The class routine was for members of the seminar to offer a ten-minute presentation on the topic of the day, after which Professor Bush would initiate discussion with the unfocussed inquiry, "Any questions, or comments? " At which point I would regularly yearn for my Cloak of Invisibility. One fatal day, the student in question was John Knott, a fine and intelligent youth but not a ball of fire, oratorically speaking. When he brought his effort to a close, there at the head of the table sat Professor Bush, eyes closed, breathing rhythmically, his large round head bobbling on his small round body, lost in blissful slumber. A few seconds went by, then some more seconds, a minute, a minute and a half. Thanks be to all the gods in the pantheon that he did not snore! And yet there we all were, arrayed around that splendid dark mahogany table, frozen. No one moved or even twitched, no one spoke, no one made eye contact with a fellow sufferer. No one breathed. It was unbearable. At last, after another twenty or so ticks of the clock, I had endured all I could endure, and I raised my Complete Poetry of John Milton into the air and was just about to let it slam, when Professor Bush opened his eyes, and without the slightest acknowledgement that something unusual had occurred, intoned the familiar words: "Any questions, or comments?"
I do not recall this event in order to nip at Professor Bush's revered heels. Every teacher is entitled, occasionally in a long career, to lose focus while a beginning graduate student discourses on a volume such as Henry More's Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (an important-in-its-own-day [1660] monograph eloquent in support of rational providentialism and of the preexistence of the soul). For all I know, Professor Bush may have been exhausted because he had been up past the midnight hour Monday night, possibly contributing more to scholarship in an evening than I did in an entire career. In hindsight, it was not the sleep itself that distressed me -- it was the passivity and silence of my fellows -- and the fact that when I remained silent I honored the charade, the falsehood, that Bush was not asleep. Faced with an emperor's-new-clothes opportunity, I punted.
Just as I had failed to defend modern linguistics, had failed to defend the "village atheist," so I failed to bang my book on the board -- an act which would have been forthright and honest and true to myself. The first two events were disgraces of an intellectual kind; the third was one of manners and, I think, of social class. The alliance of Bush and Harvard had overwhelmed me, taken from me my natural freedom of action. Let me confess that it was a secret guilty pleasure to have been accepted into Harvard's kind embrace. I feared banishment. Would I have still been welcome, would I have been worthy, would I have been a gentleman if I had noisily ended the nightmare. I felt, and I feel to this day, that all of us around the table were in an implicit, unacknowledged conspiracy not to notice the obvious so that we could protect the reverend professor and therefore defend the institutions that he exemplified. We contrived not to notice Bush's well-earned snooze because to do so would have punctured the balloon. It would been bad manners, barbaric manners, and to exhibit bad manners in a wood-paneled seminar room would mean that we were not genteel, not civilized, unworthy of Harvard and of the privileges it bestowed on us.
On the other hand, I myself had only twenty-two years on my scrawny back, and was just five years out of rambunctious Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush, where if a teacher were to fall asleep in class, he would within seconds have been met with derisive catcalls and a squadron of paper airplanes. And I admit that, although I conformed myself superficially to the ways of my "betters," I had enough of a residual catcall-and-paper-airplane soul that I have regretted my inaction now these sixty years.
Family, friends and stray internet pilgrims: perhaps you think that I'm making too much of these trivial long-ago-and-far-away events. Far too fraught, too melodramatic. Are you not, readers, skeptical of the idea that he (that is, me) honestly believes that the essence of his being was threatened by a seminar in seventeenth-century English humanism? Possibly you also think that I exaggerate the gap between Harvardity and Brooklynity. So let us return to early 1960s and re-examine the historical context of these events.
I have reported on Douglas Bush's theological convictions; let us now turn to his retrograde views on education.
Bush was, without question, an unapologetic elitist. I don't mean "elitist" as the word is now popularly used -- as an all-purpose insult to those who are presumed to think that they are better than we because they are rich or have studied to a prestigious college. I mean elitist as in "snob." Bush was an elitist because he felt that education was only for the elect. Once you admit ordinary, common folk, by golly, the end is near. He was blunt: "education for all, however fine in theory, in practice ultimately leads to education for none." He deplored the ungenteel idea that "students [would] come to college out of a desire for economic or social advantage." Let them stay in the places to which they were born! In a still shocking moment of undiluted social and racial snobbery, he pronounced that "the rising flood of students is very much like the barbarian invasions of the early Middle Ages." "Barbarian invasions"? His metaphor is "self-explanatory," is it not? Bush presented himself as a guardian at the gate, protecting Christian Europe from the wild-eyed, uncivilized incursions of Lombards and Visigoths. And how was I to understand the analogy? Did it not apply to me? Was I a civilized European or was I a violent Vandal? In theory, once I was admitted to Harvard's sacred precincts, I became an insider. But in reality, in my heart, I could identify only with the migratory hordes. Although I was camouflaged by my thrift-store jacket and tie, and I did not bring my seax to class, did not subsist on mare's milk, and felt no urge to sack Harvard, I knew myself to be, in essence, an interloper -- an Avar, or brutal Bulgar, or horrible Hun. Or, in my particular case, a member of the tribe of anxious Ashkenazim.
So now let us circle back to the beginning. Why was "Douglas Bush's Milton course" the worst class ever? For me, it was not just because Bush regularly lulled his classes to sleep. It was also because in his illiberal hands, John Milton, my John Milton, was diluted and distorted. I was, ante Bush, an admirer of Milton's courage and I was infatuated with his poetry. Milton is the only poet in the language, I believe, who was the equal of Shakespeare. Lycidas (written in 1636, the year of Harvard's founding) is in my opinion the world's single best poem. In tribute, I had memorized its 193 glorious lines. Moreover, Milton was a truly admirable human being. He was the furthest left, the most radical figure in the whole of English literature and perhaps in western literature. Did he not defend the execution of Charles I and the death of monarchy? Did he not argue that marriage should be based not on dynastic alliances, but on love and sexual compatibility. Did he not authorize every individual to interpret the Bible in his own way, without the interference of a church or its priests and ministers -- the "priesthood of all believers?" And was it not true that he composed the Areopagitica, a seminal, essential contribution to freedom of thought? But for Bush, I regret to say, Milton's impassioned advocacy of human dignity distracted from his poetry. He daydreamed in class about the poems Milton might have written if he hadn't allowed himself to be waylaid and distracted by politics. My Milton, on the other hand, was as much a public man as a poet. He had willingly given twenty years of his life and his precious eyesight to work for the radical transformation of society and for human freedom. Bush's judgment was in my opinion a major error, a disabling error, and it meant that the professor, however knowledgeable, was so blinkered by his conservative ideology that he missed the defining points of Milton's life. Just as I could not fully embrace Bush's Milton, he could not or would not ever fully grasp the greatness, the importance of my Milton. It therefore irked me to sit and listen every day, while Milton's contribution to world history was neglected, discounted, or dismissed. It hurt.
