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COLUMBIA FORUMMark Van Doren and Shakespeare
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.
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.”
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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