PART 13: THEM THAT CAN'T, TEACH

                               Lehman College, where I first taught when it was known as Hunter College in the Bronx.

“Them that can, do. Them that can’t, teach” runs the old maxim (which closes, “Them that can’t teach, teaches teachers.”) Well, it wasn’t so much that I couldn’t do – couldn’t hold a real job, that is. I’d hardly tried. But if graduate school was my refuge from the “real world,” which in my limited and privileged case didn’t mean coal mining or selling haberdashery or playing professional basketball, but rather lawyering and doctoring and investment banking, the prospect of joining it was unappealing. Yet, of course, graduate education is vocational training of a sort. Why would you undergo it if you didn’t want to teach?

But did I want to teach? During my second year, Richard Freedman, who, after the Firestones and I parted company, had become my best friend at Columbia, announced to me one day over lunch, “Well, my boy, it’s time to lose your teaching cherry. ‘My Last Duchess,’ Tuesday at two, 2105 Hamilton.” He was proposing -- no, decreeing – that I meet one of his classes in his survey of 19^th-century English literature, 200 years removed from my own field and light-years away from anything in which I was interested or prepared. I had read Browning’s dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess” without thinking much of or about it at Cornell. The prospect of teaching it was daunting, but I couldn’t think of a reason not to do it. After all, if I became a professor someday, I’d have to widen my range to include standards like that one. My qualms were performance anxiety,

So I went home and reread the poem, looking for some hidden subtext that I could open with, something the students wouldn’t have noticed. And I found one. In My Last Duchess,” a medieval Duke negotiates with the emissary of another nobleman to arrange a marriage with the other man’s daughter, and what he lets spill, as he’s ostensibly discussing a painting of his former wife, is that he had his last Duchess killed because she displeased him in a number of petty ways. But I’d have to sell this interpretation to the class, and having no experience in the art of persuading post-adolescents, I didn’t know what to do if the students disagreed with me? What if they couldn’t care less, and spent the hour dozing? What if what I was saying was so obvious to them that they took it for granted, making further discussion unnecessary? What if they simply failed to accept that I had any kind of authority? I was all of 22, only a year or two older than they were.

The dynamic of my early life had been shaped by the fact that I was always the youngest kid in the room; now I would be, for a change, the oldest kid in the room, but still just a kid. I had too much respect for other peoples’ authority back then, and too little faith in my own – until I acquired the necessary gravitas. By the time I was a 30-something tenured professor, my control over my classes was all but absolute. In fact, many years later, when I was teaching at NYU, I was asked by the chairman of the English department to take over a course being taught by a tenured female professor some years older than I who was being bullied by one of her students. He thought that my age, and my gender would work for me. And, I guess, my size; just as you’re supposed to make yourself look good if you’re confronted by a mountain lion, the fact that I was over six feet tall probably quelled the rebellious urges of any number of anti-authoritarian youths over the years. Whatever it was, it did the job; I couldn’t even figure out which boy in the class had been her intimidator.

But I hadn’t acquired that knack on the day I took over Richard’s class, and, as 2 p.m. rolled around, I sat on a bench outside Hamilton Hall, trying to control my stage fright. Rivulets of flop sweat were beginning to form at my hairline. How was I even going to introduce myself? “Hello, I’m Professor Horwich?” They might burst into raucous laughter when they heard that title. I’ve since realized that they wouldn’t have done that s a group; the academic hierarchy enforced certain behaviors, one of them being that if you’re sitting in a seat facing the blackboard, anyone standing and facing you is entitled at the outset to a modicum of respect – even if he looks like your roommate. Maybe someone would guffaw into his hand. But it would have helped to be armed with the aplomb that my friend Albert Goldman (a professor before he became a writer) exhibited when he taught his first class at Columbia. A good-looking girl walked in a few minutes late, as Albert was distributing syllabi, and he said to her, off the cuff, “I told you to wait in the car; I’ll be out in a minute.” The girl blushed; the rest of students cracked up and they were his for the semester. That was the kind of ice-breaker I needed.

At two minutes of two, I marched myself up the stairs and into the classroom. Twenty students regarded me with mild interest. Oh, well, here goes. “Good afternoon,” I said to them, “I’m Richard Horwich. I’ll be filling in for Professor Freedman. Let’s get right to the poem. When the Duke says, ‘I gave commands,’ to whom was he speaking, and what commands were they?”  And that was all It took. Six or seven of them raised their hands. Those eager Ivy League English majors were interested in the poem, they had thought about it, and they came up with a variety of answers. After a few minutes, they were arguing, not with me but with each other! That’s a highly desirable classroom situation: I didn’t have to lecture or persuade, just moderate a debate. At ten minutes to three, I thanked them for their attention – and they clapped! Maybe just out of politeness, but I felt like I’d just hit a walk-off home run. By the following fall, I’d be finished with my coursework, and I could apply for an adjunct teaching job. I had found my life’s work.

Not everyone agreed. Columbia’s Graduate Faculties provided some of its graduate students with positions in Columbia College, pompously called “preceptorships.” Most of them went automatically to those who had graduated from the College, but they were theoretically open to anyone. My friend Michael Rosenthal had one, which he parlayed into a lifelong career on Morningside Heights. So I went to the office of Quentin Anderson, the department chair, and filled out an application. In due course, I was summoned to an interview. Anderson was not known for his considerate treatment of his subordinates; he is said to have fired someone while standing next to him at the urinal. “Well, Mr. Horowitz,” he said to me, “I assume that you aspire one day to become a professor of English. Tell me: what, in your view, does it mean to profess English literature?” 

I was flummoxed by the question, and I still am. I knew that some facile response was required, something that addressed the quibble between the different meanings of “profess.” I stumbled and fumbled, and came up the distinction between elucidating English literature and advocating for it. After I got home, I looked the word profess up; one of Merriam-Webster’s definitions reads, “archaic or humorous teach (a subject) as a professor: a professor – what does he profess?” Perhaps that’s where Anderson had gotten his bullshit question, but I don’t think he was looking for a humorous answer. After a short time, without asking me any more questions, he thanked me perfunctorily for stopping by and turned dismissively away. I didn’t get the job. Nor was I informed that I hadn’t gotten it; I had to phone the department secretary weeks later to find out.

A few weeks after that, on some forgotten errand, I was strolling down Lexington Avenue, and when I passed Hunter College, I thought, why not go in and ask how to apply for a job next fall? I found the English Department, and before I could speak, the secretary said to me, “Are you here for the job interview? Go through that door and take a seat.” It was the vestibule of an inner office, and through its closed door I could hear muted voices. Eventually, a very tall man in his 30’s and a guy about my own age emerged, shaking hands, and the tall man held the door open for me. I sat down across a desk from Leonard Lief, the department’s Director of Composition, who was friendly and not in the least threatening. He asked me if I’d ever taught a writing class and I said no; he asked if I had any ideas about how to go about it. Though this was a variation on “What does it mean to profess English literature?” I felt at ease enough to say, “I guess I’ll just figure it out as I go along.” “That’s what everybody does,” he replied. “Okay, I can offer you two sections of English 101, at our Bronx campus, meeting three days a week. It pays two thousand a semester.”

Leonard Lief, after he became president of Lehman College

  

I had no idea Hunter had a Bronx campus. Part of the reason I had begun my search there was its central Manhattan location. But here was an actual job being offered to me! I accepted, and Leonard (everyone called him that, even after he’d become president of Lehman College, which is what Hunter College in the Bronx turned into) gave me a course description, a couple of sample syllabi, and an order form from the College Bookstore. “Ask your friends what books they’re using,” said Leonard, and since I did know other grad students who were teaching at various branches of the City University, I that’s what I did, ordering a book of essays for the students to read and write about. When my desk copy arrived, it was addressed to “Professor Richard Horwich.” I swelled with pride.

The essay with which I started my teaching career was George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant,” because that’s what everybody starts with, because it’s short, readable, and a perfect illustration of the principles Orwell outlined in his other famous essay “Politics and the English Language. Student-writers tend to start their essays with something along the lines of “Man, down through the ages, had always. . . .” – not exactly an attention-grabber, especially if the paper is about where to get the best egg cream in the Bronx. (Once in a while, they came up with a gem, albeit unwittingly, like “I was born of poor but Jewish parents.” Orwell’s first sentence is ““In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.” No one resists reading the rest after that beauty. Eventually, I also assigned “Politics and the English Language,” which is about writing concretely, along with pieces by Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin and Gloria Steinem. In high school they’d been force-fed The Scarlet Letter, Gulliver’s Travels, Julius Caesar, and Of Mice and Men. These works bored and baffled them; they were about people they didn’t know and couldn’t imagine. They didn’t universally acknowledge, as Mrs. Bennet proclaims in Pride and Prejudice, that “a young man in possession of a sufficient fortune must be in want of a wife.” If any of my male students had been in possession of a sufficient fortune, he would have been in want of a Chevy Corvette. 

During my first three semesters at Hunter, I taught two sections of English 101, but after that I was offered two sections of English 251 as well, “Writing About Literature,” in which I could assign Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, and The Great Gatsby. Teaching four courses was a pretty heavy workload for someone studying for doctoral orals, particularly for $8K a year, but by now, I felt completely at home in the classroom, particularly teaching literature. I always threw in “My Last Duchess” at some point, out of sheer nostalgia. I usually started them out with can’t-miss short stories like Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home,” Carson McCuller’s “The Jockey,” and Stephen Crane’s “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” which raise such absorbing questions about narration, point of view and language that we could easily have spent two weeks on each. I actually think that’s what all those book clubs out there should be reading – short stories. How far into Madame Bovary or the latest Jonathan Franzen are you going to get in an hour and a half? But Salinger’s “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” will, I promise you, generate such interesting conversations that you might forget to show the other members of the club the latest pictures of your grandkids. I suggested this last year to the woman who runs a book club my wife attends, and her answer was, “We’re not college professors.” What she meant was that discussions in her club should be not analytic but evaluative -- about how much they liked the book, not about why. At least the teenagers rating a record on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand had criteria -- “I liked its style, it had a good beat and you could dance to it; I’ll give it a seven.”

On the first day of my career at Hunter – just turned 23, dressed in the default tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows -- I walked into my classroom and looked around. The campus, off Mosholu Parkway, had originally been built in 1931, but my department was in a new building which hadn’t yet acquired the academic patina of chalk dust and grime, and the desk-chairs weren’t bolted to the floor. The cinderblock walls were painted a bright yellow, and the blackboard was green. The students were a fairly uniform looking group, mostly white, and by today’s standards, very well dressed, because there was a dress code in effect throughout the City University: no jeans, no tees, dresses below the knee for the girls except on snow days. Those rules, not surprisingly, were  the first target of opportunity when the culture wars began around 1968.

At Hunter, I discovered almost immediately the perk of being a young male teacher in a co-ed school. Unless you’re dwarfish or misshapen, the girls in your classes develop crushes on you. I felt flattered when the flirting started, but really, as the “Me too!” movement is making clearer and clearer, it’s more a variation of the Stockholm Syndrome: young women feel cowed, dominated and/or flattered by older male authority figures, and are therefore ripe for exploitation. I never took advantage of the occasional propositions that came my way -- some of them clearly bribes for higher grades, but some of them springing from the conviction, held by a small subset of female English majors as the roaring 60s turned into the sensual 70s, that their education was not complete without at least one affair with a professor. David Mamet’s cautionary play Oleanna notwithstanding, not all the predation flowed from male to female and from older to younger. And it didn’t always end badly; I know of three or four men who married their students, and didn’t live to regret it. (I also know of a couple who regretted it a great deal.) But there’s a huge difference between a sophisticated and experienced female senior living off-campus at an Ivy League college and a bewildered freshman virgin who still lives at home, and almost all my students fell into the latter category.

That doesn’t mean nothing went on. The parameters of my (fantasy) sex life in that first class were set by Maxine and Mary Ellen. Maxine was an Orthodox Jew, very bright and alert, quite pretty in a completely unsexual way, and with no experience of the world outside the urban shtetl in which she lived. She’d show up at my office hour regularly (hardly anyone else did) and make small talk. She quickly established that I was Jewish, but that, of course, was a dead end. Socially, I was from a different world – a secular one she knew that her parents would never allow her to enter. And she would never be strong enough to break away from the constricted ghetto life – wearing a wig, being separated from her husband at weddings, taking ritual baths to purify her when she had her period --that awaited her. Perhaps she had a fantasy of me saving her from it, but I couldn’t have if I’d wanted to. And though she looked at me with big brown adoring eyes, she had no idea how to flirt. There were no sidelong glances, no display of cleavage, no sitting close as we went over an essay so that her breast touched my arm -- all the little games and tricks I encountered until I was in my 40s, when I became invisible to female undergraduates.

Mary Ellen was a different story. She must have been a couple of years older than the rest of the students, and she carried herself differently. She dressed according to code, but barely; her skirts and sweaters were all a size too small, and she wore a good deal of makeup, unlike Maxine, who wore none. And she didn’t flirt, either. She dealt with me in a brisk and forthright manner. A couple of weeks before the end of the semester, she plunked herself down in the chair beside my desk and said, without preamble, “Where do you live?”

           

“Far, far away,” I replied.

“No, seriously,” she said. “I have a car, and maybe I could give you a lift home sometime if it’s in the right direction.”

“I doubt if it is,” I said. “I live in Manhattan, on the West Side.”

“No problem!” said Mary Ellen. “Meet me in front of the library after class.” At 3:00, against my better judgment, I walked with her to her parking spot and we got into her cute little Toyota.

“You’re sure this doesn’t take you out of your way?” I asked her as we tooled down the Henry Hudson Parkway. She cocked her head at me and smiled knowingly, and I began to regret my decision. We exited the parkway at 96^th Street, and I said, “You can let me off here.” 

“Oh, come on!” she smiled. “Afraid to have me find out your address? I can look it up in the phone book, you know.”

“A hundred and fifth off West End,” I grunted. Things seemed to moving too swiftly. When we drove up to my door, she stopped and waited. I knew what she was waiting for. “I don’t see a space,” she said. Uh, oh.

“Mary Ellen, thank you for the ride,” trying to sound innocuous. “But I think it would be a good idea if we said goodbye now.”

She looked at me with bewilderment. “Then what the fuck am I doing here?” she demanded, in a voice I hadn’t heard before. “I live in Riverdale!” I shrugged my way out of the car, and as soon as I had closed the door, she floored the accelerator and screamed around the corner. She didn’t come to class for the next week, and when she did return, she made a point of not looking right at me. I gave her the grade she had earned -- B -- and, after the last class, never saw her again.

After my second year of teaching, Hunter offered me a real plum: a summer session course in Shakespeare that met at the Park Avenue campus. How thrilling was that for me? A little less so when I arrived on the first day and found a class composed almost entirely of people in their sixties and seventies and a sprinkling of octogenarians. How would I connect with all these bubies and zadies? hen I wanted to focus on Prince Hal, Hamlet, and Juliet, my students wanted to talk about King Henry, Polonius, and Juliet’s father. What’s more, they thought these geezers were the heroes of the plays. Polonius, whose inability to shut up tries the patience of the Danish court and eventually gets him killed, who contributes to his daughter’s madness, who gives the King terrible advice, and whom Hamlet calls “a tedious old fool,” was a particular favorite. “He’s so wise!” said one lady. She was referring to the collection of platitudes he unloads onto his son ad infinitum, almost causing him to miss his ship to France – “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” etc. etc. Neither temperament nor life experience quite prepared me for this response. But what was I going to do? Make their summer frustrating and miserable by tracing for them in detail how Shakespeare constructs most of his old men (there are hardly any old women) as targets of satire, butts of practical jokes, clueless and miserly fathers? I learned a few things about ageism that summer – Shakespeare’s and my own. 

I made good friends at Hunter in the Bronx, whom I kept after my three-year stint was up and according to CUNY regs I had to move – this time to the Baruch School on East 23rd street, which was the business arm of City College. Though the commute was easier, teaching there wasn’t nearly as much fun; there were no lit courses, so it was four sections of freshman English every term, each with an enrollment of thirty. That meant 120 papers to grade every week. In those pre-computer days, many students couldn’t type, and you couldn’t ask them not to submit hand-written (make that hand-scrawled) essays. In addition, tired of penury, I rashly took on a fifth course at Rutgers’ Newark campus, teaching – what else? – freshman comp. I was driving a friend’s car across the Hudson twice a week, until I figured out that mass transit was quicker; I could grade papers on the train. My whole life that semester seemed to consist of grading papers.

My Rutgers students were all junior-high school shop teachers, earning extra credit for promotion­ -- nice enough middle-aged people, but without much interest in either reading or writing. And the course was really only about grammar and syntax; all the exams were multiple-choice, prepared by the department. One of the students – a fiftyish Greek man who asked me on the first day whether I was interested in a bargain stereo if one should happen to fall off the back of a truck, kept failing the exams and began to harass me, though I explained to him that his grades weren’t up to me.  One night, there was a glob of frozen spittle on my windshield, then a nail hammered into a tire. When he inevitably failed the course, he sued me and the university for defamation of character, claiming he’d been branded a failure, and I found myself in the office of the university’s president along with the student and two lawyers. A deal was hammered out: I’d state publicly that I didn’t regard him as a failure. What I regarded him as was a nut, and a scary one at that, but I went along and the problem was solved. My next teaching job would be at Brooklyn College in 1967, a full-time tenure-track position that I occupied for thirty years, until I retired as a Professor Emeritus.