The title of Morris Dickstein’s memoir alludes to an often-quoted line from Robert Lowell’s epilogue to his last book of poems, Day by Day. “Yet why not say what happened?” is Lowell’s question to himself as he prays for “the grace of accuracy.” Dickstein, emeritus professor at CUNY Graduate Center and the author, most recently, of a cultural history of the 1930s, takes Lowell’s question as a personal challenge. Why not say what happened to a man who has lived “a slightly suffocating life” in a Jewish family in New York’s Lower East Side and Flushing, Queens, and who then came to maturity in the distinguished academic purlieus of Columbia and Yale? The “sentimental education,” as he calls it in his subtitle, has less to do with Flaubert’s dreary masterpiece than with a cultivation of the self as instanced in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” a poem Dickstein loves: “An education of the feelings as well as the mind” is what he hopes to have explored in thinking and writing about his past.
Perhaps the first thing to note about his book is how much Dickstein must have enjoyed writing it, confronting his past and turning it into a satisfying story. His enthusiasm and high spirits are pervasive, whether he is remembering postwar block parties on Henry Street, a few blocks from the East River, or studying the Talmud at the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School, where he stayed through the 12th grade, “at first perfectly content, then . . . increasingly restive, and finally in continual rebellion.” But the rebellion was never total. He continued to live with his parents in Flushing while an undergraduate at Columbia, and, as an observant Jew, kept kosher for long afterwards. When he and his wife (referred to as “L”) are tempted by Parisian cuisine, L breaks kosher with a baguette viande froide while Dickstein remains chaste, still following the rules of a way of life that had “nurtured and sustained” him.
His undergraduate years at Columbia, which he describes as “a college full of brilliant teachers and ravenous students,” were of special interest to me, as I had, in a single year of graduate study there, observed what Dickstein accurately calls the “rough-and-tumble classes” customary at the college. Even the least rough-and-tumble of professors, Lionel Trilling, whose undergraduate class I audited and about whom Dickstein writes with penetration, had the challenge of putting up with, and probably enjoying, the questioning and irreverent students. (This was before the late 1960s, of course, when irreverence became the fashion.) Trilling, who, to Dickstein’s perception, “seemed to be of two minds about everything,” took it upon himself to provide an alternative mind to the single-minded ones in his classroom.
Dickstein took the course that Trilling famously wrote about in his essay “On the Teaching of Modern Literature.” But when Dickstein later read Trilling’s essay, he was shocked by how it distorted the class as he remembered it. Trilling had claimed that, when confronted by the “abyss” of modern writers like Joyce, Kafka, Eliot, and Proust, the students took it all too easily in stride, writing capable papers that seemed untouched by the assaultive genius they had encountered.
For Dickstein, however, the essay was a caricature of the actual, combative class that had found—or at least, in which Dickstein had found—those writers “as unsettling as they had been to [Trilling’s] generation almost forty years earlier.”
The portrait of Trilling, along with similarly sharp ones of Dickstein’s other professors—among them Jacob Taubes, Peter Gay, F. W. Dupee, and Sidney Morganbesser—made this reader feel that, however one might put on rose-colored glasses in viewing the academic classroom of five decades ago, Dickstein’s education at Columbia College was the real thing, perhaps even a thing not to be encountered again.
Some of the most engaging pages of his memoir concern the year he spent in England at Cambridge, after passing his oral exams for the Ph.D. in English at Yale. Cambridge proved a relief from what he calls “the dull throb of professional training” that characterized graduate work at Yale. At Cambridge, the main figure in his education was the just-retired F. R. Leavis, who had been invited by Clare College, where Dickstein lived, to help undergraduates prepare for the “dating” section of their exams. Leavis’s single and notorious method was to confront students with unsigned, undated passages: paragraphs and lines from English writers, which the students would attempt to place historically and give reasons for their decisions. They were aided, and usually corrected, by the master, who not only knew the answers but could furnish compelling stylistic and moral reasons for why the passage belonged in one period rather than another. Dickstein also read Dickens with Leavis, who at that moment was revising upward his opinion of the novelist he had early patronized as an “entertainer.”
When Dickstein brashly introduced himself to E. M. Forster while Forster was peering into the River Cam, the novelist invited him to visit him in his rooms at King’s College. About to leave Cambridge, Dickstein never took up the invitation. But earlier he did call on John Gross (a fine critic, once editor of the Times Literary Supplement), responding to what he thought was a warm invitation, only to be turned away rather brusquely—from which he concluded that welcoming Englishmen don’t always quite mean what they say. In one of the few less-than-worthy but forgivable things he does in this memoir, Dickstein later encounters Gross and “cuts” him with a “deft British slight.”
It may be that my appreciation of the academic aspects of this memoir is biased because of my own, in many ways similar, education. (D. H. Lawrence appealed to both of us as an aid in supplanting the “deeply implanted repressions” of our upbringing.) But such pages work because of the nearness and concreteness—the words are I. A. Richards’s—that may guard against sentimentality.
Too many of Dickstein’s responses to writers, places, and works of art are prone to more abstract and potentially sentimental formulations. In his travels he “fell for Paris at first sight.” In London museums he “fell in love with the British Romantic painters . . . with the tempestuous Turners at the Tate Gallery, teeming with a wild energy.” He is “humbled and uplifted” by the Sistine Chapel. Reading Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” “unfailingly brought tears to my eyes, tapping into a deep well of bittersweet recollection.” In Florence, he and his wife “lost themselves in the paintings at the Uffizi Gallery.” For days they “breathed in the sculpture of Michelangelo and Donatello, the spirituality of Saint Francis, the designs of Brunelleschi.” In the 1960s, “The Beatles, Dylan, and the Stones came as a revelation” to this high-culture adept, while he read and taught Blake, “awed by his seemingly childlike lyrics.”
In passages like these, the question “Why not say what happened?” may admit of a less than affirmative response and bring to mind Henry James’s warning, in his preface to The Ambassadors, of “the terrible fluidity of self-revelation.” This is likely to occur when Dickstein writes about Walter Pater-like adventures of the soul among masterpieces. It also comes out in his habit of referring to “colorful new friends” at Columbia by identifying them with only a first name or first name plus initial, as in “Sam” or “David R.” It’s hard to get interested in “Marshall,” who is “as rotund and rubicund as Sam was lean and pallid,” though I would like to know more about Marshall’s girlfriend, “the darkly voluptuous but emotionally unstable Rita, an exotic but deeply troubled young woman.” There is also a question of how much the narrator’s physical difficulties bear recounting: an attack of dysentery in Rome, other problems with the digestive tract, fear of an ulcer, or a “brutal cold.”
He takes us on a whirlwind trip through the 1960s: the polarizing effects of Vietnam, the Columbia riots of 1968, the Kennedy assassinations, and other disasters. Meanwhile, he taught at Columbia and, having finished his dissertation, found himself gravitating “toward more public forms of criticism—toward literary journalism and cultural commentary,” which he practiced effectively in the pages of Commentary and Partisan Review. Put up for tenure by his colleagues in the Columbia English department, he was turned down for what looks like no good reason, but he eventually found a happy home at Queens College. Yet the book ends with a heartfelt salute to Columbia for having been formative in shaping “an education of the spirit.” Leaving the place produced mixed emotions, but also “an underlying exhilaration, a heady whiff of maturity.” If the sentimental education has concluded itself, what he hopefully calls “the god of new beginnings” may take charge.
William H. Pritchard is Henry Clay Folger professor of English at Amherst College.
