My interest in university teaching was initially aroused by the leisure it promised. “Every century has its cushy profession,” the English poet Philip Larkin said. “It used to be the church. Now it’s academe.” Larkin was right. Do the math: assuming one does not teach in the summer—and the vast majority of professors do not—college teaching is roughly a six- or seven-month job, and during those months one generally goes into the office two or three days a week. Not bad, not bad at all.

I was thirty-six years old, and after holding a number of mid-grade editorial and government jobs I had begun writing as a freelance, a phrase the reality behind which comes nowhere near matching the dash and romance it seems to suggest. (Freelance: d’Artagnan off on a long weekend.) I had never held a position for more than four years, and did not so much plan my new jobs as flee my old ones.

Among the magazines I had written for was Dissent, the quarterly edited by the critic Irving Howe, and in the early 1970’s, when Howe came out to give a talk at Northwestern University in Evanston, he dropped by my apartment. Talking about my brilliant career, he suggested that teaching might not be a bad idea; it would give me health insurance and other benefits, and make it possible not to have to scribble under full financial pressure. The combination of teaching and writing, he said, had worked well for him. He offered to do what he could on my behalf.

Before Howe left town, I had a call from the chairman of Northwestern’s English department, asking if I would speak to the faculty and graduate students. It was to be an audition of sorts. I hacked together a half-hour’s worth on the subject of the Man of Letters. Although I blew no one away with my brilliance, neither did I utterly disgrace myself, and soon there came an offer to teach six courses over three of the four quarters of the next academic year at a salary of $20,000. I would have the title of lecturer. On the day I accepted, I called my mother to let her know I would now be teaching at Northwestern University. “That’s nice,” she said, with her typical sang-froid, “a job in the neighborhood,” and we moved along to more important topics.

Howe probably told the chairman of the department that I was a comer, and therefore a future ornament to the university. I held no degree more advanced than a B.A. in absentia from the University of Chicago, and although I had published a fair amount of intellectual journalism, and written a book that was about to be published on the subject of divorce, I had no real scholarly qualifications. Howe’s must have been an impressive sales job.

The year I started teaching was 1973. The student revolt was over, at least in its to-the-barricades phase, but the more long-lasting effects had begun to kick in in earnest. A new air of informality had become almost de rigueur. Teachers called students by their first names, and some students returned the favor. Among the faculty, now the objects of routine written evaluations by their students, pedants were out, democrat-activists in. Soon after I started, I asked a colleague if many professors slept with their students. “You mean,” he answered with a perfectly straight face, “many don’t?”

Out of sheer nonconformity, I chose to teach in a jacket and tie. I also decided to call my students by their last names, preceded by Mr. or Miss (later, more hissily, Ms.). These two items set my general tone, which was slightly formal, maintaining a distinct distance between teacher and students. My thought was that if you’re wearing denim and calling your students Chip and Muffy, it might be difficult to ask with a properly serious face what T.S. Eliot meant when he said that Henry James had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. I preferred to keep that properly serious face, among other reasons because it offered a much better launching pad for irony, oblique insights, even jokes.

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No training is available for teaching at the university level. One strains to remember one’s own best teachers and to borrow from them what one can. At Chicago, many of my most memorable professors had been Europeans; they had about them a grandeur that was foreign (in every sense) to their American colleagues, who had to fall back on precision and, among a lucky minority, wit. Some of my teachers deployed an impressive erudition, a commodity I did not happen to possess, and some a no less impressive passion for their subject, which I thought I could muster. I asked a friend who had been teaching for a decade or so if he had any advice. “Yeah,” he said, “never let ’em go outside. When the weather gets warm, they’ll want to hold class on the lawn, as in those sappy photographs in the brochures. Don’t let ’em do it.” In 30 years of teaching, I followed this sound advice to the letter.

I was never given a class of more than 40 students, and so I rarely had to lecture for a full period, filling the remainder of the time instead with questions to stimulate (the hope was) interesting discussion. I was grateful for this, for even at the start I sensed that the national attention span had, somehow, diminished, and that short of relying on a whoopee cushion, setting oneself aflame, or establishing an atmosphere of menace, to hold a class’s attention through 80 minutes could not be done, at least by me.

I say 80 minutes because I was permitted to hold two such rather lengthy sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays, an arrangement I much preferred to the standard three 50-minute classes on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I thought of myself primarily as a writer and only secondarily as a teacher, and the interval between Thursdays and Tuesdays would give me more time (or so I felt) for my real job.

Without the writing, would I have been a better teacher? I used to think so; at least I would have found more time to read up on my subjects, and more time to cultivate students outside class. But as the years went by, and my reputation as a writer began to grow, I also came to realize that from it derived much of my authority as a teacher lacking in the usual scholarly qualifications. Some of my students seemed quite as thrilled as I to see my name in print.

I could never accustom myself to being called Professor. Wasn’t the professor the little fellow in the derby who played the piano in a bordello (“Hit it, Professor!”)? And to be called Dr. Epstein was even worse. When so addressed, I was always tempted to reply, “Read two chapters of Charles Dickens, get into bed, and call me if things gets worse.” Nor could I long forget that, university teacher though I might now be, I had never been much of a student myself. I had little memory of doing homework in high school, and in college, where I had made a greater effort, I fell just short of mediocre.

The problem was that my mind never wanted to stay in the expected academic groove but sailed on ahead, or sideways. (Today, of course, I love to read about authentic geniuses who did not do well in school.) Now, a year or so into teaching, I began to see that my real education would take place as a teacher. I found myself reading books—chiefly novels, though also bits of criticism and philosophy—with a new concentration. In preparing for class, all the puzzling passages had to be puzzled out, the Latin tags and foreign phrases to be translated, other people’s interpretations to be considered. I read not only intensively but defensively, to avoid being tripped up, embarrassed, made to look foolish.

I had heard stories of teachers, famously good ones, who were so nervous before a class that they had to make a quick stop in the nearest lavatory to throw up. The late Robert Nisbet, who was known as a riveting lecturer, told me that he never entered a classroom without real trepidation. I was not in this league, but I did tend to nervousness, especially at the beginning, when my greatest fear was that I would never be able to fill those 80 minutes with my mini-lectures and my too often less-than-penetrating questions. Occasionally I had nightmares—pure anxiety dreams—about contracting to give a lecture to a large audience on, say, Hungarian literature and showing up without a single topic sentence in my head. Or I would be late and unable to find the classroom, or would be bringing the wrong notes for a lecture to the wrong class.

Part of the reason for my anxiety must have derived from the worry that, somehow or other, by my own incompetence or laziness, I would be made to look shoddy. If I were teaching the same novel two years in a row, I had to reread it fully each time lest I lose some small point that a student might raise to show me up (though none ever attempted to do so). As someone with his own low threshold for boredom, I also had a horror of communicating dullness to others. I worked up anecdotes, inserted bits of (to me) piquant literary history, told jokes where appropriate, and sometimes found myself doing goofy or slightly wild things. Once, in a class called “Advanced Prose Style,” I wrote out the phrase “to walk” on the blackboard and asked if anyone knew how to split an infinitive. When no one answered, I let out my version of a martial-arts yelp, leaped in the air, and hit the board with a chop. Whether I did this to stave off their boredom or my own is a close question.

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The year after I began teaching at Northwestern, I was offered a plum: the editorship of the American Scholar, the quarterly journal sponsored by Phi Beta Kappa (of which I was not a member). The pay was set at half the salary of a full professor, in those days considered to be $40,000. I continued to teach full-time for a few more years, then cut back to half-time, which translated into three courses over two quarters.

From this point on, I locked into a permanent repertoire: separate courses in Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Willa Cather, with one of the trio giving way in alternate years, and always a course called “Fundamentals of Prose Style,” my hardy perennial, for would-be novelists, poets, and essayists. I taught graduate students only once, and did not find it—nor, my guess is, did they find me—very rewarding. Their minds were set, they were in possession of a jargon, they had lost their amateur (or lover’s) standing.

I was able to teach what I wanted because, with the rise of literary theory—deconstruction, the new historicism, feminism, queer theory, and the rest—nobody else seemed interested. Meanwhile, I had also become mildly notorious in the English department on account of two articles I had published—one in COMMENTARY,¹ the other in Hudson Review—on what I regarded as the betrayal of literature by university teachers. This led most of my colleagues to avert their eyes when I walked past them in the hallways. I was left to teach what I wanted, then, also because I was a minor pariah, which was fine with me. My real life was elsewhere.

I never had, or really wanted, tenure. Instead, each year I would receive a letter from whoever happened to be dean of the arts-and-science college, inviting me back and offering me a token raise. The smallest such raise was for $400, offered by a dean whom I had insulted in a remark that happened to get into the newspaper. In the course of a talk in Los Angeles I had said that there were two cultures in America, one composed of those who had elected Ronald Reagan President by a large majority and the other of those, many of whom resided in the best universities, who would sooner have voted for Louis Farrakhan than for Reagan. To illustrate the cast of academic thought in those years, I mentioned that my own university was just then trying very hard to acquire the services of a Marxist professor of English named Frederic Jameson, and in the hope of persuading him to leave his current position it had also offered his wife a teaching job. Then I added that, according to a rumor I had heard, the university was even willing to kick in another $18,500 a year for the Jamesons’ dog to guard the gymnasium. That was what got into the Los Angeles Times and earned me my derisory raise.

Not having tenure meant not having to attend departmental meetings, which was no doubt for the best. I started teaching just as the ancien régime was giving way to the regime of the politicizers. The battle between the older guard and the young theorists of race, gender, and class came to be known as the culture wars, but the war was lost almost from the outset. Today, in most English departments, the two-penny Saint-Justes, Dantons, Marats, and real-life Madame Defarges reign without much interference. My negative feelings for them were quite explicit, registered through occasional writings on the subject—a fact, however, that also failed to win me friends among those who were still holding on, for the most part fearfully and surreptitiously, to the values of the ancien régime. One way or another, collegiality was not something that would be part of my experience as a teacher at Northwestern.

And yet I found myself greatly engaged by some of my students. The English department had instituted something called independent studies, in which undergraduates selected teachers to work with them on subjects of special interest. One of the first to approach me was an attractive girl from West Virginia who wanted to explore the roots of her own extreme shyness; she wrote a beautiful essay that opened with an anecdote of how, in the laundry room of her building, when a man asked if she was finished with the dryer, she, unable to tell him that she wasn’t, began to remove and fold her still completely wet clothes. Another young woman completed an essay titled, after Mary McCarthy, “Memoir of a Half-Catholic Girlhood”; this was about growing up in an intensely Catholic Chicago suburb with six brothers and sisters, about the falling-apart that took place after the reforms of Vatican II and the removal of her family to California, and about her own current tendency to wander into churches of various kinds—Buddhist, fundamentalist, you name it—in the all-but-lost hope of replacing the religious upbringing that had been so dear to her. Still another student wrote about the strains of alcoholism on exhibit in the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, showing how Fitzgerald had traced with precision the phases and manifestations of a disease long before it became a subject of medico-scientific interest. I thought this essay so good I published it in the American Scholar.

Of the few thousand students who passed through my classes, 30 or 40 impressed me with their seriousness and the heat of their desire to do intellectual or artistic work. Some of them went on to become journalists or editors or writers. Others, gifted in various ways but unable to decide what to do with their lives, drowned in what Kierkegaard called “the sea of possibility.” Still others, I have to assume, did not want it sorely enough. On an irregular basis, most have stayed in touch and have become friends. Some of the earliest are now approaching fifty. My friend Edward Shils, himself then in his early eighties, once told me of a visit from two former students of his, one of whom was then seventy-seven and the other seventy-five. “Nice boys,” said Edward. Only now do I fully understand what he meant.

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My aim as a teacher was to establish a setting of good will. I did not have it in me to be one of those tough guys—like the legendary Norman McLean during my own undergraduate days at Chicago—who can heighten the tension in a classroom through the application of useful fear. I say “useful” since fear is certainly one motivating element in education. If you ever want to test this proposition, just tell a class that you intend to give everyone an A, that attendance is not mandatory, and that no one need take careful notes. Things will fall apart on the instant.

My own modus operandi in the classroom was to be a (very) poor man’s Socrates, shooting out questions—“Ve haf vays of making you talk,” I would announce in my best Gestapo voice—but grilling students lightly, trying less to embarrass them than to engage them in the significance of the proceedings. I was constantly and very pleasantly amazed at how little my students seemed to have been affected by the current academic craziness. No student ever attempted to turn Derrida or Foucault on me. I was never accused of homo- or any other brand of phobia. For a brief spell in the early 1980’s, I felt the feminist pronoun police on my trail, ensuring that every “he” was followed by a “she,” every mention of Tolstoy accompanied by a nod to Virginia Woolf. One year, at the opening of my Conrad course, a student asked “how” we were going to read Joseph Conrad, by which she meant what suppositions we were going to bring to the task: Marxist, structuralist, deconstructionist, multiculturalist, and so forth. I said that we were going to try to discover what Joseph Conrad himself meant to convey in his novels and stories, and that this ought to keep us sufficiently occupied to fill out a quarter. All I really wanted was to convince them that there was something called the moral imagination and that, outside of the way it played in the world, it tended to be found most impressively highlighted in serious novels. Most of them seemed to buy it.

As for how successful I was as a teacher in general, I haven’t the faintest idea. Among those who took my writing courses, I could measure progress by how quickly their prose gained fluidity, shed itself of the most egregious errors, started to reflect the requisite degree of care and self-consciousness. But then I would hear from some of them a few years later and their writing would bristle with everything I had tried to knock out of them. Sometimes a student would confide that I and another professor were his two favorite teachers at Northwestern—the other guy being, inevitably, someone for whose intellectual quality I had a well-developed contempt. A girl who had studied Henry James with me told me, “I loved that course, but then I’ve always been a romantic.” Since James has not the least thing to do with romanticism, in either its historical or its emotional sense, I had to conclude that one of us had been asleep at the switch.

Student evaluations were of little help to me. In my 30 years, only one was technically useful: “He jiggles his keys.” (No longer, kiddo, I would think as I slipped keys and loose change into my briefcase before every class.) Although the assessments were preponderantly enthusiastic, generous, even sweet, they were also vague: “entertaining,” “knows his stuff,” and—vaguest of all—“interesting.” Only one of them sticks in my memory. It read: “I did extremely well in this course, for I would have been ashamed not to.” Good to know that if I could not or would not instill fear, I could at least inspire shame, at least in the right sort of student. Alas, my evaluator neglected to tell me how the trick was done, or might be repeated.

By my final year of teaching I had concluded that, although I could make good students a little better, I could do nothing to improve the mediocre or the uninterested. In fact, I believe I made some of them a little worse, by confusing them with my high-flown talk. “[T]he power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy,” Gibbon wrote, “except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.” At Northwestern, most of my students had already developed the habits of achievement, but even among them, with their high SAT scores and the advantages of their middle- and upper-middle-class homes, only a small minority burned with the flame that Gibbon calls a happy disposition. That disposition has to do not with IQ but with spirit, the source of which remains a mystery.

I always taught to the best students in my courses. I knew no other way. Of the three writers I concentrated on during my last ten years or so—James, Conrad, Cather—all were highbrows, with Cather perhaps more accessible than the first two but, in novels like The Lost Lady and The Professor’s House, formidable enough in her own way. Conrad’s novels I used to describe as Henry James for people who like the outdoors. As the years went by, I lightened the load of the James course until I was omitting all the works of the so-called major phase—The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl—and making do with something I thought of as Henry James Lite. James is the true test for the serious student of literature, and not many undergraduates nowadays seem able to pass it.

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Received wisdom has it that, each year, our students are growing dumber; one sometimes hears that they no longer read at all, but only watch television and fiddle with their computers. This is hardly a new complaint. As early as 1937, in a lecture entitled “Our Destiny and Literature,” the poet Paul Valéry remarked that the thick air of distraction in modern life had done severe damage to “the powers of attention, meditation, and critical analysis.” Today’s professors nevertheless seem to believe that their students are possessed of some special ignorance, and love to tell stories that italicize this ignorance: “I asked the class what event marked the end of Communism, and one of them said, ‘The destruction of the Berlin Mall.’ ”

I preferred not to go in for this kind of thing, remembering my own genuinely impressive ignorance as a kid from an unbookish home. Had anyone at the University of Chicago asked me, in 1956, who or what Diaghilev was, I might have answered, my voice atremble with uncertainty, “A city in the Ukraine,” while worrying that perhaps it was a trick question and that Diaghilev was really the name of a Polish sausage. College professors will now tell you that none of their students knows who Mussolini was. But, then, in the middle 50’s I did not know who General Foch was, I could not have told you anything about the Ottoman empire, and great swaths of American history were as hidden to me as the sun in January at the North Pole.

The chief difference between my day and now is that, though the ignorance may be commensurate, I do not sense the same embarrassment about it. Occasionally I would run a little cultural-literacy test, asking my students to name the dates of the Spanish Civil War or to identify Leon Trotsky, Gertrude Stein, and Nijinsky. What was sad was not the small number who knew but the even smaller number who seemed to care.

This seems to me to have something to do with the declining national attention span that I mentioned earlier. The more I taught my Henry James course, the fewer seemed the students who appeared able to stay alert even to the point of following the plot. The last time I taught James was four years ago, when I felt that only perhaps six out of a room of thirty could really return the Master’s brilliant American twist serve.

Toward the end of this course, I led off one of the three sessions devoted to The Portrait of a Lady by asking a nice young man to describe Gilbert Osmond, one of the richest characters in 19th-century fiction. “Well,” he said, without any malice toward me or any intention of shocking his classmates, “he’s an asshole.” (I suppose this marked an advance over the student who in a longish essay two years earlier had consistently referred to Osmond as Oswald.) Shocked his classmates may not have been, but I have to confess I was. Something, I realized, had changed in the nature of civilized discourse in America. I decided right then never to teach Henry James again.

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In his journals, the Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian, who during the Nazi occupation of his country had to earn his living by teaching, notes that “neither my students nor my ‘colleagues’ have taught me anything new.” In a strict sense, I have to say the same, at least about my students. They taught me nothing. What they did do, though, was remind me of the surprise of human possibility. I have taught courses that, so low was the intellectual voltage in the room, I felt the dismaying truth of W.H. Auden’s remark that a professor is someone “who talks in other people’s sleep.” (Another, more pervasively truthful definition of a professor is “someone who never says anything once.”) But throughout my years as a teacher—and especially in my writing courses—I was taken by surprise by students who displayed qualities I would not have expected to find in them.

This last quarter, one young woman, who wore punky reddish-pink hair and a razor blade on a silver chain around her neck, announced that she was tired of the nonsense of alternating feminine and masculine pronouns and in her own writing always used masculine ones—“and I make it a point to say ‘mankind,’ too,” she added, “never ‘humankind.’ ” She also wrote wonderfully and without the least hint of victimization about her complicated family, including an alcoholic father whom she had last seen when she was eleven. Another young woman with the perfectly innocent look of a Disneyland guide showed an astonishing mastery over language, and could sustain an extended metaphor over four full pages. A young man who rode a motorcycle and was a practicing rock musician wrote with terse but uproarious comedy about the zany behavior of otherwise intelligent people when they enter hardware stores. Still another young woman, with a fine smile and an ebullient laugh, handed in an essay about the treatment of migrants at the New Mexico border that was filled with lucid and persuasive political rage.

These were four members of a class of twelve that, for the nine weeks it met, caused me to walk into and out of it with a dance in my step. During our time together they were lively and bright, cheerful and receptive—everything one could desire from the intelligent young. In my closing words I said that if they wanted their final essays returned they would have to leave an envelope with their address on it in my departmental mailbox. “And I’m not talking about a self-addressed envelope, either,” I said, “for we all know, surely, that an envelope cannot address itself.” At the moment, it seemed entirely appropriate to end my 30-year teaching career with neither a bang nor a whimper but a small puff of pedantry.

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¹ “A Case of Academic Freedom,” September 1986.

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