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COLUMBIA FORUM
Mark Van Doren and
Shakespeare
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David Lehman ’70
PHOTO: STACEY HARWOOD
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In May 2002, at a used book sale, poet and author David
Lehman ’70 discovered a copy of Mark
Van Doren’s book The Noble Voice, about great
epic poems from Homer and Virgil to Milton, Wordsworth and Byron. He
read the book with growing excitement, and upon finishing it, read Van
Doren’s Shakespeare. When Lehman learned that the former was out
of print and the latter unavailable, he contacted the Van Doren family
and his literary agent, Glen Hartley. Lehman and Hartley obtained a reversion
of rights to the books, and Lehman began seeking a publisher for either
or both. Edwin Frank of New York Review Books “Classics” expressed
interest in bringing back Shakespeare,
and they clinched the deal in fall 2003. Last summer, Lehman wrote the
introduction. He visited the Van Doren family — Mark’s sons,
Charles and John, and their families — in Cornwall, Conn., in May
2004, “which was a great pleasure.” Lehman notes, “It
seems to me that while nothing can replace the living presence of the
teacher in the classroom, Shakespeare and
The Noble Voice give the closest approximation of what it must
have been like to study the classics of Western literature at Columbia
with Mark Van Doren.” Here, Lehman’s
introduction to Shakespeare, which will be published by New
York Review Books this fall.
Mark Van Doren had taught his Shakespeare course at Columbia University
for seven years when the summer of 1938 began and he, his wife Dorothy,
and their two young sons made the annual trek from their brownstone
on Bleecker Street to the farmstead they owned in Cornwall, Conn. The
formidable Raymond Weaver — best known now for leading the successful
campaign to vault the long out-of-favor Herman Melville into the canon
where he belongs —
had been nagging Van Doren, his Columbia colleague, to collect his
thoughts on Shakespeare and turn them into a book. It was during the
summer, on the rustic farm that he thought an “earthly paradise,” that
Van Doren got to do nearly all his writing. During the academic year,
his dedication to his students and his classes left little surplus
time. On the farm, he went each morning to his writing studio, an austere
little shack outfitted with a desk where he could hear the sounds of
waterfall and purling brook. Van Doren’s philosophy of composition
was simple: Waste no time. When he started a poem, he intended to finish
it on the same day, and he applied this principle to the drafting of
Shakespeare. Each play would get a chapter, and there would be an additional
chapter devoted to the sonnets and other poems. Each chapter would
be written in a sustained burst of concentrated energy. He kept his
students in mind as he wrote. “Things they had said to me, things
I had said to them and things they now might learn for the first time
as I myself was learning them” all went into the writing.
The poet Allen Tate and his wife, the novelist Caroline Gordon, were
spending the summer of 1938 in Cornwall, “and Allen often remarked
that I showed the strain,” Van Doren recorded in his Autobiography
(1958). “But once I had begun, I could not stop; wound up to
state if I could the essence of a given play, I could not relax until
that chapter was finished.” Van Doren wrote without airs or scholarly
apparatus, relying solely on his intimate relationship with the work.
There are no sources, no authorities, no footnotes. Even better there
is no academic double-talk, no professional jargon, none of the abstract
theorizing that has had so disastrous an effect on literary criticism
and the teaching of literature. In seven frenzied weeks, Van Doren
wrote what is arguably the best modern book on Shakespeare.
I am not alone in feeling this way. “Van Doren’s Shakespeare
got me through Harry Levin’s [Harvard] course back in 1951,” John
Updike writes. “Whenever I reread a Shax play, I reread what
Van Doren said about it.” In The Nation, when the book was new,
W.H. Auden made the case that “Professor Van Doren enlightens
us, not because he has any special knowledge or private advantages,
but because his love of Shakespeare has been greater than our own.” That,
I think, gets us close to the heart of the matter. The poet John Hollander
[’50], a Van Doren student at Columbia in the late 1940s, remarks
[on] an essential continuity between the teaching that changed students’ lives
and the critical prose in Shakespeare. “That book just defies
critical genre,” Hollander says, “because he’ll move
from giving a close reading of a speech to summing up whole vast realms.
Or he’ll launch into some of that marvelously weird stuff he
could sometimes do in class. I’ll never forget his saying to
me — he said it in class and I bugged him about it afterward — that
the reason Hamlet can’t kill the king is that it will put an
end to the play and it’s all so interesting. It’s too
interesting to put an end to!” Hollander, animated, pauses for effect. “Now
what kind of remark is that? That’s like Hazlitt. We could imagine
Hazlitt, who was a brilliant critic, saying something like that. Not
too many since.”
In 1938, the year Van Doren wrote Shakespeare, Columbia University’s
Morningside Heights campus teemed with ambitious young literary types,
writers-in-progress, future editors and publishers, serious intellectuals
in the making. Lionel Trilling [’25], who team-taught the “Colloquium
on Important Books” with historian Jacques Barzun [’27],
was not yet the publicly acclaimed author of The
Liberal Imagination (1950) but had already achieved renown among the Columbia cognoscenti.
Though the differences between them were many — Trilling struck
some as patrician in demeanor where Van Doren seemed ever the populist — the
two great professors inspired a rare filial devotion in generations
of Columbia students. It was inevitably either Mark Van Doren or Lionel
Trilling who was the favorite professor of students with a literary
vocation, and in time Columbia would name its highest teaching accolade
after Van Doren and its major award for scholarship after Trilling.
The author of Shakespeare was born in 1894, the son of a country doctor,
in Hope, Ill., a place “hard to find in any atlas,” Van
Doren wrote in his Autobiography, “though it still exists as
Faith and Charity, its sister villages named a century ago, do not.” Educated
at the University of Illinois, he joined the Army when America entered
World War I in 1917. After the armistice, he traveled in Europe before
settling in New York to teach at Columbia in 1920. It didn’t
hurt that he was the younger brother of the noted historian Carl Van
Doren, who had preceded him on the Columbia faculty and had enthusiastically
talked him up. Carl and Mark made a great alliance, and though there
were three other brothers, I like to think that Mark’s late poem, “My
Brother Lives Too Far Away,” is an elegy for the big brother
who died too soon: “He was I. / And still he is, though time
has turned / Us back to back, and age has burned / This difference
in us till we die.” Both Carl and Mark won Pulitzer Prizes. Carl
died in 1950, predeceasing Mark by twenty-two years.
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Mark Van Doren began teaching
Shakespeare at Columbia in 1931.
PHOTO: COURTESY ADAM VAN DOREN ’90 AR |
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The 1920s were a great decade for Mark. At Columbia, he had remarkable
students, Whittaker Chambers [’24] and Trilling among them. Van
Doren published scholarly books on John Dryden and Edwin Arlington
Robinson, served as literary editor of The Nation (where he met Dorothy,
née Graffe, also a writer) and edited an anthology of world
poetry that sold so well it enabled the Van Dorens to buy their house
on Bleecker Street in the West Village in New York City in February
1929, just months before the stock market tumbled and the “roaring” decade
ran out.
At a moment when Ivy League prejudice against Jews was not uncommon,
Van Doren acquired a reputation for philo-Semitism with an essay he
published in 1927 in the Menorah Journal, the magazine that years later
would be rechristened Commentary. In “Jewish Students I Have
Known,” Van Doren wrote perceptively and it turned out somewhat
prophetically about some of the gifted young men he was teaching at
Columbia. As Van Doren’s student, the great art historian Meyer
Schapiro [’24] already displayed the “passion to know and
make known.” Louis Zukofsky [’23] was “a subtle poet” with “an
inarticulate soul.” Clifton Fadiman [’25] impressed with
his tremendous fund of knowledge. About Trilling, who soon joined him
on the Columbia faculty, Van Doren was particularly insightful. The
young Trilling possessed “dignity and grace,” Van Doren
wrote, and whatever he elects to do “will be lovely, for it will
be the fruit of a pure intelligence slowly ripened in not too fierce
a sun.”
Always prolific, Van Doren won the Pulitzer for his Collected
Poems, 1922–1938. As a poet, he enjoyed a following wider than most.
When Rex Stout’s imperious detective Nero Wolfe picks up a book
of verse, the chances are that it will be by Mark Van Doren. (See page
1 of Stout’s superb And Be a Villain, whose title is lifted from
Hamlet.) In addition to poetry, Van Doren wrote stories, novels and
a good deal of literary journalism, reviews of books and movies. He
was known to the general public as one of the experts discussing great
literature on Invitation to Learning, a half-hour radio show that aired
on Tuesday evenings starting in 1941; the program was a surprise hit
with listeners.
But the reason Van Doren’s students loved him had little to
do with his relatively high public profile and even less with his poetry,
which many regarded as orthodox and lyrical at a time when modernity
itself seemed to require a rough assault on poetic convention. No,
the reason Van Doren exerted such a strong force on students, especially
those with big literary and intellectual ambitions, was that he had
no agenda, no outsized ego, and he treated them as grown-ups. He wanted
to talk to them, not compete with them. He sought not disciples, but
dialogue; not imitators but independent minds in the Emersonian tradition.
There was an attractive modesty in Van Doren coupled with a surprising
audacity. His teaching was grounded in the proposition that an intelligent
person of good faith needed no special qualifications to read Othello,
The Iliad or the Divine Comedy. You just needed to be attentive and
to use your intelligence. And because he treated the students with
respect and without condescension, he brought out the best in them — it
was his approval they craved, as you will see if you read John Berryman
[’36]’s verse account of his college years in Love & Fame
(1970). Van Doren recurs as a character in the book, never more revealingly
than when the young Berryman flunks an exam. The failure jeopardizes
Berryman’s scholarship. “And almost worse, I had let Mark
down.”
Berryman’s major contribution to modern poetry was the form
he devised and brilliantly exemplified in what he called his “dream
songs.” 77 Dream Songs (1964) won the Pulitzer Prize, and in
1968 the poet followed with a second (and larger) collection, His
Toy, His Song, His Rest. He dedicated the second book to Mark Van Doren
and the late Delmore Schwartz, the self-appointed “poet of the
Hudson River and the heights above it,” who had burst onto the
literary scene in a blaze of light but burned out, went paranoid and
became delusional. The risk of a dual dedication is that it may devalue
the honor in the same way that getting two ties for Christmas implies
that neither was a sufficient gift on its own. But in this case, the
dedication achieves a significance beyond the reach of most. It intimates
that Van Doren’s influence on Berryman was the equal and the
opposite of Schwartz’s, and a counter-balance to it. Schwartz
was Berryman’s contemporary, Van Doren his mentor. And if Schwartz
could be seen as standing for genius, madness, woe and an early death,
the professor from Hope, Ill., represented sanity, realism and the
natural order of the seasons. “If during my stay at Columbia
I had met only Mark Van Doren and his work, it would have been worth
the trouble,” Berryman said. “It was the force of his example
that made me a poet.”
For Thomas Merton [’38], Van Doren’s teaching merited
the term “heroism.” In The Seven Storey
Mountain (1948) — his
spiritual autobiography, which he wrote in a Trappist monastery — Merton
writes that in Van Doren’s classes “literature was treated,
not as history, not as sociology, not as economics, not as a series
of case-histories in psychoanalysis but, mirabile
dictu, simply as
literature.” (The problem Merton is describing exists today in
even more pernicious forms.) “I thought to myself, who is this
excellent man Van Doren who being employed to teach literature, teaches
just that,” Merton goes on. “Who is this who really loves
what he has to teach, and does not secretly detest all literature,
and abhor poetry, while pretending to be a professor of it?” The
writer and his old teacher maintained a faithful correspondence that
ceased only when Merton accidentally electrocuted himself while attending
a conference of Benedictine abbots in Bangkok in 1968.
In the 1940s, Van Doren’s Columbia students ranged from ecstatic
Beat Zen masters (Allen Ginsberg [’48], Jack Kerouac [’44])
to sophisticates of verse (Louis Simpson [’49 GS], Hollander
and Richard Howard [’51) Although Kerouac is not on record on
the subject, we do know that he got an A in Van Doren’s Shakespeare
course and decided in consequence to quit the Columbia football team
and take up literature instead. For Ginsberg, the great thing was that
Van Doren took him seriously when he talked excitedly about his “epiphany
experiences” and Blake-inspired visions: “Van Doren was
one of the few men of his time not to be made anxious by my near-incoherent
account of my own initiatory vision; on the contrary, he used the old
word ‘light.’ That gave me permission to believe my own
senses.”
Other students liked the way Van Doren compared shortstops and center
fielders to protagonists in Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare and even
Kafka. Donald Keene [’42], the eminent scholar and translator
of Japanese literature, recalls that Van Doren “spoke without
notes, pausing at times to ask our opinions or to listen to our questions.
When asked a question he would listen carefully, then think a moment,
often with his thumbs hooked into his lapels, before answering. This
impressed me especially. He was not only courteously attentive to each
question but managed to make it seem reasonable and even of importance,
by salvaging the one grain of sense from some foolish utterance.” Could
Keene give an example of a remembered insight? Yes, there was the day
Van Doren said that he “could not understand why Verdi made Othello
a tenor when obviously the voice is low” — a remark that
prompted Keene to turn to the chapter on Othello in Van Doren’s
Shakespeare, where this is said about the Moor: “His voice is
deep, his throat dusky, and strangely for one whose eloquence is so
overpowering his tone is difficult, reluctant, forced. His eloquence
overpowers and engulfs him. One whose life has been silent act poisons
his own peace now with bursts of speech, with the clangor of huge sounds.”
The editor and publisher Robert Giroux [’36], whose friendship
with Berryman began in Van Doren’s Shakespeare class, shrewdly
observes that Van Doren had a “technique of pretending that you
were his intellectual equal.” Perhaps it was just a technique;
many things go into the making of an effective teacher. But beyond
the insights he seemed to arrive at spontaneously in class, beyond
the pedagogical methods he used, you’re still left with something
that can be communicated but not satisfactorily summarized or explained.
It may have been said best by Charles W. Everett, who chaired the English
department in 1954, Columbia’s bicentennial year, and began a
capsule biography of Van Doren with these sentences: “Dr. Johnson
said of Burke that a stranger meeting him in a shed where both were
taking refuge from the rain would go away feeling that he had met an
extraordinary man. That is the first and major effect produced by Van
Doren, all the more for his own insistence that he has in him nothing
of the extraordinary, that anybody can understand anything he wishes
to, that anybody can teach great literature and philosophy.”
Of all Van Doren’s books, Shakespeare and The
Noble Voice (1945),
in which the subject is epic poetry from The Iliad and The
Odyssey to Paradise Lost, The
Prelude and Don Juan, seem to me the most continuous
with his teaching. Just as he spoke without notes in his Columbia classes,
so in Shakespeare he writes without an outline. He talks about each
of the plays with the freshness of one who is reading it for the first
time, yet with the insight and sensitivity to nuance that come only
from reading and rereading a work annually in the company of intelligent
minds that are not yet fully formed. To me, one of Van Doren’s
major strengths is his ability to criticize in the narrow sense of
that term: to do so frankly, unflinchingly, without prejudice, but
with no less love. Thus of Shakespeare’s sonnets we learn that “only
the 71st maintains its music to the ending syllable. The others die
as poetry at the couplet.” While not the first or only critic
to cite the closing couplet as the weakest element in a Shakespeare
sonnet, Van Doren does so with his characteristic generosity and candor.
He is not out to score points; he is merely holding up Shakespeare
to Shakespeare’s own standards. And the acknowledgment of the
defect doesn’t prevent the critic from a series of dizzying revelations — that
the sonnets “are not, finally, love poems,” that their
subject is “the greatest possible subject,” existence in
all its variousness, though looked at from another point of view the
poems seem to have a single subject after all. “The great single
subject of the sonnets is Time, swift-footed, terrible Time that writes
death on faces, roots out the work of masonry, fades roses, brings
winter after spring, and makes in general the music to which all the
world marches groaning to its end.”
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Van Doren gardening in the early 1940s at his farmstead in
Cornwall, Conn., where he wrote Shakespeare in summer 1938.
PHOTO: COURTESY ADAM VAN DOREN ’90 AR |
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With his comparative judgments, Van Doren enables us to see the playwright’s
career as an unfolding thing. Look how much he communicates in this
sentence: “If there is nothing more attractive in comedy than
a picture of two brilliant persons in love against their will, then
we shall like Much Ado about Nothing as much better than The
Taming of the Shrew as it is a better play by a maturer playwright.” When
Shakespeare fashioned the character of Richard
III, he “had not
yet discovered the secret of a true success in fables of this kind,” Van
Doren writes. But this failing in Richard III — a failing only
relative to the greater works that followed — lifts the critic
to eloquence: “For true success the villain must be a hero too,
must be a better man than we at the same time that he is worse. By
nature he must be incapable of inflicting death, as Othello and Hamlet
are, and as Macbeth must once have been. That is why his doing so will
terrify us — why Othello, for example, will seem so much more
destructive than Iago.” And here Van Doren widens his lens even
further: “The great stories of murder are about men who could
not have done it but who did. They are not murderers, they are men.
And their stories will be better still when they are excellent men;
not merely brilliant and admirable, but also, in portions of themselves
which we infer rather than see, gentle and godlike.” And finally
back to the matter at hand: “Richard is never quite human enough.
The spectacle over which he presides with his bent back and his forked
tongue can take us by storm, and it does. It cannot move our innermost
minds with the conviction that in such a hero’s death the world
has lost what once had been or might have been the most precious part
of itself. Richard is never precious as a man. He is only stunning
in his craft, a serpent whose movements we follow for their own sake,
because in themselves they have strength and beauty.”
This is prose as alive as the thinking mind. It is as if the author
had arrived at his ideas in the act of writing them down. If the best
criticism triggers off the most thought, here you have it: beautiful
prose, rich in possibility, shared with you, the reader, as if you
were the temporarily silent partner at a very good after-dinner conversation.
You are never bullied into accepting any particular ideas; big concepts
do not parade around as if it at a Convention of Capital Letters; no
grand theory commanding assent grabs you by the throat.
Of so many marvelous things, which to highlight? Something I’d
never noticed before reading Van Doren is the predominance of monosyllables
in Julius Caesar. The play “is more rhetoric than poetry, just
as its persons are more orators than men,” Van Doren writes. “They
all have something of the statue in them, for they express their author’s
idea of antiquity rather than his knowledge of life.” Orators
favor short words, Van Doren explains, “for an effect of artlessness,
of sincerity that only speaks right on.” And so we get such strings
of monosyllables as these: “ ’Tis good you know not that
you are his heirs; / For, if you should, O, what would come of it!” “But
here am I to speak what I do know; / And I must pause till it come
back to me.” “I kill’d not thee with half so good
a will.” In one place there are thirty monosyllables in a row.
Not that this is a strength; on the contrary, it makes it difficult
to distinguish one speaker from the next. Yet the “music of monosyllables” manages “to
pour into the ear an unimpeded stream of eloquence, a smooth current
of artful sound.”
The opening paragraph of the chapter on Hamlet is masterly, though
it is trumped by the maneuver Van Doren executes a few paragraphs later
when he offers a meticulous paraphrase of Act II, scene ii, to demonstrate
that though “such a synopsis is circumstantial and would seem
to be complete,” the fact is that “it leaves almost everything
out.” There is the unusual application of Aristotle’s rules
to King Lear: “[Aristotle] tells us a great deal about King
Lear when he remarks that tragedies have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
The first scene of King Lear is a beginning, but all the rest is end.
The initial act of the hero is his only act; the remainder is passion.”
Why is the best of Much Ado About Nothing in prose? There is only
one moment, Van Doren notes, when “Beatrice stands exposed as
the romantic young woman she is. Elsewhere she wears for protection
the impenetrable veil of wit. That may make her still more romantic,
but prose is the medium through which we should discover that this
is so, for the economy of prose is irony’s most faithful servant,
and epigrams take best effect in something that sounds like conversation.”
The writing here is as subtle as the insight. It’s as if each
sentence, each clause even, stands ready to be revised by the next,
with but and for to signal directions. It’s always smart, when
describing epigrams, to snap one off yourself, as Van Doren does here,
and again, just as brilliantly, in the next paragraph: “The prose
of Benedick and Beatrice is a brilliant brocade of artifice. But its
counterpoint of antithesis and epithet is natural to two such desperate
defenders of pride against the leveling guns of love, of personality
against passion. It is a logical language for persons who seldom say
what they mean, and who, since they love nothing better than talk,
must talk always for effect. It is the inevitable idiom for lovers
who would deny their love.”
Read Van Doren on the character of Falstaff (who “thinks only
of others, and of the pleasure he can take in imitating them”)
or Cleopatra (who “is still all mercury and lightness, all silk
and down” when she dies) or the difference between Rosalind and
melancholy Jaques in As You Like It. See if the discussion doesn’t
make you want to pick up the play and read or reread it immediately.
I make one last claim for Van Doren’s Shakespeare, and
that is that it illustrates the way literature can be and should be
taught. By being itself so comprehensible and clear, Shakespeare deepens
the conviction that Hamlet and The
Tempest, Henry IV and A Midsummer Night’s Dream belong
to all of us. Written by an adult for adults, without a specialized vocabulary,
devoid of condescension, the book demonstrates how to talk about great
works of literature. There is no wizardry, no mystification, just a superb
marriage of passion and intelligence in prose that is never less than
vigorous. If as Van Doren states, Hamlet is “that unique thing
in literature, a credible genius,” the author of Shakespeare is
in his way as singular a fellow: a professor with the heart and soul
of a poet, as humane as he is articulate, and on such intimate terms
with the greatest plays in the language that something of the magic is
bound to rub off on you.
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