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Compass: Experiences that Launched Lives is a growing collection of stories from alumni about pivotal experiences that shaped their life direction and set the course for who they have become or the success that they have achieved.
James Quay ’68
When I was at Lafayette, W. Edward Brown was a bachelor in his mid-’60s, thin, graying, with kind eyes and formidable erudition. Undergraduate rumor credited him with knowledge of 26 foreign languages and a hand in the cracking of the Japanese naval code in World War II. Every year, at the end of the two-semester course in world history, he was asked to give the summary lecture. No one thought it either futile or presumptuous.
My senior year I wrote an honors thesis under his supervision. One day during the turbulent spring of 1968, I came to his office for our weekly meeting and told him that I’d been unable to work on my thesis, that I was sick with anguish about the war in Vietnam and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Instead of a rebuke, Dr. Brown gave me a gift. He talked of the anguish he had felt when a graduate student in the 1920s, as he watched fascism rise in the European countries whose literature he studied and loved.
When a professor is willing to share what’s in his heart as well as what’s in his head, a very special kind of education occurs. I was fortunate to receive that kind of education in the classrooms (and living rooms) of several gifted literature professors—James Lusardi, Edward McDonald, and Sheldon Liebman among them.
I have been fortunate to spend my life working in and advocating for the humanities and I’ve read poetry in both my work and my leisure for decades now, but it was a memorable moment in one of Dr. Brown’s classes that first demonstrated the powerful connections poetry can make in a way that has never left me.
It is a warm fall day in 1966 and I am sitting in a comparative literature survey course taught by Dr. Brown. The course is a two-semester survey of European literature from Homer to Samuel Beckett and on this day, he is reading a poem by the Roman poet Catullus. In the poem, the poet speaks to his dead brother. Dr. Brown reads it first in Latin, then in English translation. It’s a short poem, fewer than a dozen lines, but midway through, his voice begins to moisten and catch. His voice wants to throw itself down on the ground and weep. Two thousand years later, a brother is dead, again, and again a brother grieves. His voice wants to give itself over to grief but we students are here, his brother is here, listening. And so he makes his unsteady way through the poem, until his voice collapses over the last word and falls back inside him.
I have never forgotten the silence that followed, as we students paid silent tribute to the power of human emotion, and the power of poetry to convey it.
James Quay ’68
English Graduate
Executive Director (now retired), California Council for the Humanities, San Francisco, Calif.
M.A., Ph.D., English Literature, University of California-Berkeley
1 Comment
James, thanks for this retrospective tribute. I know three out of the four teachers you mention, all but Edward McDonald, and had the very memorable experience of taking a course, basic English/writing with Sheldon Liebman. I did have the pleasure of hearing both Professors Brown and Lusardi on various occasions, including guest lectures they gave that were recommended by professors I was taking courses with.
Professor Liebman was a gifted, intense, funny, complex man who had a definite take on American culture, and of course, its literature. He was an “event,” ready to take on any and all of the range of “just out of high school” outlooks, and common American “motifs” that one would hear from our entering class of 1972 – so that was 1968, our years just crossing.
Liebman was a striking presence in the front of the classroom, a living cultural contradiction when I had him in 1969 or 1970, I forget the exact year. He had shoulder length dark hair and a beard to match, but wore, as one student caustically noted the contradiction, “Brooks Brothers Suits.” His existential jousting matches with some street wise, cynical New Jersey bred students who weren’t quite convinced that Hawthorne’s short stories could teach them much of value for their future life in America are still memorable, some remarkably fresh and spontaneous verbal repartee given at lightning speed – I think the student was named Mr. Panapinto, or something close to that, I’ve got the sound of it if not the spelling. I want to say, if my memory is still correct, that he was from Jersey City, and in my environmental career I came to love and admire the feisty citizens it bred, and to become a defender of its beloved Liberty State Park. In some famous public hearings on the fate of that park, I heard the same qualities spontaneously erupting from the audience, just like the exchanges I heard in front of the classroom. Never thought about the connection of the two before this, but there they are.
Liebman was always defending the life of the mind, the complexity of Hawthorne and his penetrating insights into human nature. But it wasn’t a philosophy course, despite this spectacular dialogue with unhappy, restless students: he was teaching us to write and he had a pretty good “cook-book” method of looking closely at a text, taking careful notes on characters, noticing repeated language and themes, and then looking at what one had found like a detective looking for patterns and clues. I don’t know what it did for other students, but it was just enough guidance to help me along, to get confidence in my own thought processes guided by real evidence from the text, and then something to be worked into an essay by one’s life bouncing off what the author was saying. It worked for me and I’ll never forget the effort I put into an analysis of “My Kinsman, Major Molineus,” nor the magical qualities of that story itself, of youth’s baptism into the fallen world of society and politics, its attention to nature’s patterns, of moonlight and clouds, contrasted with the raucous spectacles of humanity below.
I learned to write at Lafayette College, not just in the two demanding freshman year English courses aimed at precisely that, but in later courses with Professors Heath, Welch and Gendebien in the history department. And writing became a big part of my professional life at NJ Audubon Society, where I was Director of Conservation during the 1990’s, writing quarterly for the magazine, writing and editing a periodic journal called the “Green Gram,” and tossing off essays and testimony by the bundle over the same years. I did the Green Gram for ten years by myself; late in that effort I read Henry Mayer’s spectacular biography of the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (“All on Fire”) and the Liberator newspaper he published for thirty five years, weekly, beginning on January 1, 1831, and not ending until December, 1865. Garrison’s memorable words of that first edition were an inspiration to me, and a pretty close description of what I had been feeling throughout my career – and maybe my life: “‘ I am in earnest – I will not equivocate – I will not excuse – I will not retreat a single inch – AND I WILL BE HEARD.'”
And it hasn’t stopped, even now in the very tough economic times. I have written the equivalent of four long volumes – but in the form of long essays, 30-120 pages – a “citizen’s” history of the great financial crisis and the state of the American “political economy,” which includes the fate of our democratic republic, and what it has become.
That’s all I’ll say for now: it’s for others to judge the value of my work. But this is the time an place to say that whatever my former teachers who taught me to love the life of the mind to set some of it down on paper might think of my work now – they planted the seed gave me the early tools to nurture it.
Interested alums and others can find a sample or two here and here…thanks for the chance to share some memories, good ones, but ones that have a lot of sweat equity woven into the memories:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/06/05/1304714/-The-bittersweet-American-Dream
http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2014/07/field-notes-from-lagging-indicator.html
Best to the college and all its teachers and grads
Bill Neil
Rockville, MD
class of 1972
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