The Ideal of Culture

by Joseph Epstein

  “I won’t be here,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I’m going to Europe for the summer. I’ll be back in time to take the comp [the six-hour examination given at the end of the College’s year-long courses, an exam that counted for one-hundred percent of your grade].”

  I gulped and said no more. At the end of the summer, there he was, seated for the exam, and looking a lot more confident than I felt.

  The course itself, I should say, was most impressive. The first two-thirds were pure logic in which no numbers were mentioned (“if p, then not q equals?”). The last third was analytical geometry, and, based on what one learned in the first two thirds, seemed easy.

  The College at the University of Chicago was devised of fourteen year-long core courses, in all of which one took a single comprehensive examination, known as “comps,” at the end of the year. (By the time I arrived at Chicago, one also had to declare a major outside the College.) Some kids were so well prepared and good at taking examinations that, during placement exams on entering the school, they “placed out,” or got credit for, fully two years’ worth of courses. No attendance was ever taken in any of the College courses. Essays might be assigned, but one’s grades on them counted only to show students how they were doing. I recall no quizzes. Most mystifying of all, one’s teachers, like tutors at Oxford and Cambridge, did not grade students. Something called the College’s Examiner’s Office did. This simultaneously removed the whole matter of playing up—sucking up—to teachers, and it gave one’s grade a more objective feel. During my own university teaching days a few decades later, I longed for an Examiner’s Office, so that all emotion would be divested from grading my own students. I think especially of those perfectly mediocre students who nonetheless tried so very hard that giving them a grade less than B- seemed an act of cruelty. On such kindly emotions has the current endemic phenomenon of grade inflation been built.

  At the University of Illinois I was a member of a fraternity, Phi Epsilon Pi, the leading Jewish fraternity on campus. Fraternities and sororities in those days at most schools were strictly segregated by religion, an arrangement about which no one complained. The University of Chicago had nine fraternities and no sororities whatsoever. I moved into one called the Phi Psi house, not as a member but as boarder, because an acquaintance of mine who was a member told me the fraternity had plenty of extra rooms, which it rented out for $35 a month. (Tuition at the University of Chicago in those days was $690 a year; at the University of Illinois it was $90 a semester.)

  Phi Psi was a shambles, less a fraternity than a hot-sheet joint. People moved in an out. A fellow in medical school lived there with a beautiful biracial girlfriend with the wonderful name of Arizona Williams, who audited the occasional course at the university and was said to dance at a black-and-tan club on the edge of the Loop. Another graduate student, working on a PhD in bio-chemistry, lived with his fiancé and a German Shepherd. A few fellows at Phi Psi were in their middle twenties and who dropped out of school but didn’t want to leave the university’s Hyde Park neighborhood, an enclave, an island, of culture in philistine Chicago. Years later, I had a call from a man named Robert Lucas, a Nobel Prizewinner in Economics, asking me for a donation for our class gift. “What do you mean ‘class’?” I said. “There were no ‘classes’ at the University of Chicago. You entered at 15 and left at 27, often without a degree.”

  An enormous fellow, perhaps 6’5”, a Korean War vet at the university on the GI bill named Bob Bruhn, held a full-time job at Commonwealth Edison while going to school, boarded at Phi Psi. He once came into my room to ask if he might use the phone. During his call, to his recently divorced wife, he listed all their possessions that he no longer needed: furniture, appliances, linen, and ended by saying, in a plaintive voice, “If you still have that recording of ‘Tenderly,’ I’d be grateful if you would save it for me, sweetie.”

  A scruffy bohemianism obtained among University of Chicago students of those days. On campus, an even moderately well-dressed person would have looked strikingly out of place. A militant unkemptness ruled, as if to divagate from the pursuit of truth and beauty for the mere niceties of respectable grooming were to demonstrate one’s puerility. The university, I used to say, had a single quota, that on attractive young women: among undergraduates only four were allowed in at any time. A joke of the day had it that a panty raid on Foster Hall, the women’s dormitory, rendered a field jacket and a pair of combat boots.

  In later life I met a number of my teachers at the University of Chicago—a few sent me manuscripts for the American Scholar, which I then edited—and none recognized me as a former student. No reason they should have done. My classroom strategy was to hide out. Not coming from a bookish home, I did my best to conceal my ignorance, which was substantial, and looked above all to avoid embarrassing myself. The possibilities for embarrassment were manifold. Had you not seen nor heard them before, how would you have pronounced the names Thucydides, Proust, Wagner? No doubt wrongly.

  Most of my classmates seemed confident in their views, aggressive in their opinions. Many of them were New Yorkers, and, it later occurred to me, were probably reading the Nation and the New Republic from about the age of thirteen. Their parents and friends no doubt argued about Trotsky, Bakunin, Max Schachtman, the Moscow Trials, the Soviet-Nazi Pact. In my family, politics wasn’t a serious subject; all politicians were crooks until proven innocent, which, in Chicago, few were. Many of my fellow students had doubtless been in psychotherapy. I recall with a slight shudder during the course called Social Science Two, when we read Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, a classmate blithely describing her own experience with menstruation and comparing it with those of the women of the Kwakiutl Indian tribe. Many among my fellow students also had a fair amount of musical culture, whereas musical comedy was as high as musical culture reached in West Rogers Park. In her memoir A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton notes that the great thing as a young person is never to be considered promising. So many of the promising young men of her acquaintance who began life soaring, under the burden of their early promise, went down in flames. I qualified nicely here. Promising is not something I was ever considered.

  By my second year at the University of Chicago, I had a acquired a modest cultural literacy. I remember sitting in a modern poetry class taught by Elder Olson, and his mentioning Baudelaire. By then I knew that Charles Baudelaire was a French poet, nineteenth century, dark in subject matter, author of Les Fleurs du Mal—and that exhausted my knowledge of Baudelaire. Olson began to chant, “Hypocrite lecteur!—mon frère, mon semblable . . .” when he was joined in his chant by Martha Silverman, the girl sitting next to me. Which meant she, Miss Silverman, not only knew Baudelaire’s poetry, but had it by memory and in French. At that moment I felt the sharp stab of hopelessness, and wondered whether they might be taking job applications at Jiffy Lube?

  Among students at the University of Chicago, brilliance, not solidity was the goal. Three names of notable students at the school, George Steiner, Allan Bloom, and Susan Sontag, all somewhat older than I, might stand in as representative University of Chicago graduates, each brilliant, all crucially flawed. How many Chicago undergraduates went on to distinguished careers I do not know. Not so very many, I suspect. Too many, perhaps, were promising.

  I never tried for brilliance myself, and wouldn’t have come close to achieving it if I had done. My body may have been in the classroom, but my mind frequently deserted it. I remember concentrating a fair amount of time on the perilously long ash of Elder Olson’s cigarettes. Another teacher might remark on the way one’s eye follows a certain sweep in a painting, though my eye never did. A teacher might set out eight reasons for the Renaissance, and I wondered what possessed him to buy that hopeless necktie. For grades I received chiefly Cs with a light scattering of Bs, and, best memory serves, not a single A. I have since come to take a perhaps unseemly delight
in great figures in literature and philosophy who were less than stellar students, some indeed dropouts: a roster that includes Pascal, Tolstoy, Henry James, Paul Valery, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others. Mike Nichols, from whom I take my epigraph, entered the University of Chicago in 1950 as a pre-med student, and dropped out in 1953 without a degree.

  I did better outside the classroom with the bookish offerings at the university. One of the best things about the College was that no textbooks were used. So one didn’t read that “Freud said . . . ,” “Plato held . . . ,” “Marx stipulated . . . ,” “J. S. Mill believed. . . .” Instead one read Freud, Plato, Marx, and Mill. Heady stuff, for a nineteen-year-old with only A Stone for Danny Fisher, The Hoods, and Knock on Any Door under his belt. I remember the deep aura of gloom I felt while reading Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents and the excitement of noting the dazzling connections made by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

  Everywhere through the undergraduate curriculum at Chicago in those days one ran into Aristotle and Plato: The Poetics, The Rhetoric, The Ethics, The Politics, The Phaedrus, The Symposium, The Crito, The Apology. When it came time to declare a major, I decided on English, only to learn that the university’s English Department in those years was heavily Aristotelian in its approach to literature.

  In my last year at the university, looking for a soft fourth course, I signed up for something called “History of Greek Philosophy.” Thales, Prythagoras, Democritus, Heraclitus, I figured, learn a few of their key concepts, fill in the rough dates of the narrative of the history—how tough could it be? First day of class the teacher, an exceedingly tidy-seeming man named Warner Arms Wick, announced that there really isn’t an impressively coherent history of Greek philosophy before Plato and Aristotle, so we would chiefly be reading Plato and Aristotle during the quarter.

  Harvard, it was said, was tougher to get into than the University of Chicago, but Chicago was tougher to get out of. (Another saying had it that the University of Chicago was where fun went to die.) No soft spots anywhere for an undergraduate at the University of Chicago in those years. In the English Department, which might have been thought such a soft spot, undergraduate students, along with their regular course work, were examined at the end of their junior and senior years on two extracurricular reading lists that contained perhaps seventy-five items each. The items on the lists were precisely those that any young person should prefer, if at all possible, to avoid reading: Hobbes’s Leviathan, Milton’s Paradise Regained, Spenser’s The Faery Queen, Richardson’s Pamela, Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government. A better organized student than I might have read them over the regular academic quarters; I needed to forfeit my summer vacations to do so. In fact, I only finished my second, or senior, reading list while in the Army, and took the examination on it on a pool table at Headquarters Company at Fort Hood, Texas, proctored by an ROTC second lieutenant from Alabama, the passing of which allowed me to graduate, A.B. in absentia from the university in 1959.

  What the University of Chicago taught, even to a student with little preparedness and a wandering mind, was a standard of seriousness. This standard continued long after my departure from the school. In my early thirties, I became a close friend of Edward Shils—I would not have been prepared for him any earlier—for decades one of the great figures at the university. I recall Edward saying, “You know, Joseph, I fear that my colleagues on the Committee on Social Thought labor under the misapprehension that Richard Rorty is an intelligent man.” (This at a time when every university in the country was seeking Rorty’s services.) On another occasion, Edward said, apropos Hannah Arendt, “No great chachemess [wise women], our Hannah.” Toward the end of his career, Edward brought Arnaldo Momigliano, the great historiographer of the ancient world, to teach at the University of Chicago. After the loss of a gifted graduate student to Princeton, Arnaldo, himself Jewish, noted: “A Jewish boy. The Ivy League beckons. He is gone.” Teachers such as Edward, Arnaldo, Christian Mackauer, Enrico Fermi, Leo Strauss, many of them Europeans, gave the university a cosmopolitan tone and serious feeling unavailable anywhere else.

  No trivial books were taught at the University of Chicago during my time there. The only books by living writers I encountered were in a course on the modern novel taught by Morton Dauwen Zabel: Howard’s End by E. M. Forster, Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, and A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh. This was of course long before multiculturalism, feminist studies, political correctness, and the rest kicked in, and so there was no need to teach, or for students to read, secondary writers to show they were on the side of the progressive political angels.

  The University of Chicago in those years favored, in Max Weber’s distinction, “soul-saving” over “skill-acquiring” education. If there were then undergraduates majoring in economics, I never met them. The university in those days seemed outside the orbit of capitalism itself. A graduate business school was housed in the main campus quadrangle, but in the era before the MBA became the golden key to open corporate doors, it seemed anomalous, besides the point. The knock on the University of Chicago Law School then was that it was “too theoretical,” which really meant too philosophical; if one’s aim was to get a job with a Chicago law firm, it was said one did better to go to Northwestern Law School.

  Job-getting wasn’t what the University of Chicago was about. Only careers in the arts, scientific research, politics practiced at the highest level, with, at second remove, the teaching of artists, scientists and statesmen also being acceptable, were thought worthy of serious people. A conventional success ethos, such as Santayana discovered early in the last century at Yale, was never in force at Chicago. To be lashed to money making, even if it resulted in becoming immensely wealthy, made a person little more than one of Aristotle’s natural slaves, a peasant raking gravel in the sun. No surprise, then that great economic success has not been notable among the school’s graduates. Not without reason has the University of Chicago, compared with other major universities, had a comparatively small endowment.

  In the mid-1960s, while working at Encyclopaedia Britannica, I would occasionally meet Robert Hutchins, under whose youthful presidency (begun in 1929 when he was twenty-nine years old), the radical institution that was the University of Chicago College had been set in motion, and found him an immensely handsome but weary and sad man. Hutchins had earlier ardently wished to become a Supreme Court justice, a job Franklin Delano Roosevelt dangled before him but cruelly withdrew. He had instead since 1959 been running the Ford-Foundation-Fund-for-the-Republic-sponsored think tank in Santa Barbara, California called The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions—also known derisively as The Leisure of the Theory Class—which wasted its time on such hopeless projects as devising a constitution for a world government. At lunch one day at the Tavern Club in Chicago, he, Hutchins, knowing I had gone to the University of Chicago, asked me if I knew whether they had restored football there, a remark witness to his sense of defeat and disappointment and suggesting that his one great accomplishment, founding the College with its Great Books centered learning, had also come to nothing.

  I should have but neglected to assure him that, as far as I was concerned, it had come to a great deal, at least for me. Under the influence of Robert Hutchins’ College at the University of Chicago, I set out on a life of high culture, which I may never have attained yet never regretted. Because of the values fostered at Chicago, I determined to become a writer with a confidence in the rightness of my decision that I was unlikely to find anywhere else.

  Not long ago my son reminded me that when it was time for him to go off to college, I told him that I hoped he would be able to get into a school that the world, “that great ninny” (as Henry James once called it), thought a good school. He would, I told him, probably discover that the school wasn’t so good as all that, but at least he would not spend his life feeling that if only he had gone to a good college his life woul
d have been happier. This advice was of course based on my own experience, except that I found the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s better than I had ever imagined, and owe it more than I can hope to repay.

  “Little Rock, Sergeant,” why not the University of Chicago, out of such rash decisions are lives shaped.

  Part Two

  Literary

  Eric Auerbach

  (2014)

  T. S. Eliot thought that the first requisite for being a literary critic is to be very intelligent. The second, I should say, is to have a well-stocked mind, which means having knowledge of literatures and literary traditions other than that into which one was born; possessing several languages; and acquiring a more than nodding acquaintance with history, philosophy, and theology—to be, in brief, learned. To be both highly intelligent and learned is not all that common. Eliot claimed for himself—and this by implication, for he was a modest man—only the former.

  Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) had both great intelligence and great learning. Born in Germany, Auerbach, along with other Jewish scholars of his time, was another of Adolf Hitler’s intellectual gifts to the United States. After being expelled from his academic post as professor of Romance Philology at the University of Marburg during the Nazi purges, he spent eleven years, between 1935 and 1946, at the University of Istanbul. Arriving in the United States in 1947, he first taught at Penn State, was briefly at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and ended his career at Yale.

  While in Istanbul, Auerbach wrote Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, which is the greatest single work of literary criticism of the 20th century. Auerbach worked on the book between 1942 and 1945, and it was first published in 1946. Part of the mythos of Mimesis has been that he wrote it without the aid of a serious library. This is somewhat exaggerated. The University of Istanbul was far from academically primitive, and Auerbach was in touch with friends who could send him such literary materials as he required.