In Review: April 7, 1999
The education of Alvin Kernan
A battle-scarred veteran recalls the culture wars
In Plato's Cave
Alvin Kernan
Yale University Press, $25
Alvin Kernan, a former dean of the Graduate School and an emeritus professor
of English, is a veteran of both real war and culture war. He described
the former in Crossing the Line (1995), his compelling memoir about
life as a Navy enlisted man aboard aircraft carriers in the Pacific during
World War II. In Plato's Cave, which carries on where that earlier
narrative left off, recounts his more than 40 years in academic life. This
intellectual biography is largely about the clash of cultures and world
views as universities passed through the crucible of the 1960s and 1970s.
Like real war, this conflict also left scars.
Kernan takes his title from the philosopher's metaphor: men in a cave
trying to discern reality from shadows flickering on a wall. In the winter
of 1946, the recently discharged author left his home in Wyoming to attend
college on the G.I. Bill, convinced that if one were to read "the right
books and listen to the right people, think in the most intense and logical
fashion...all the darkness of Plato's cave of illusions would burn away
in the bright light of understanding."
Thus began a journey of discovery through academe as a student, professor,
or administrator at Columbia, Williams, Oxford, Yale, and Princeton. Shaped
by books and teachers but most of all by experience, Kernan's sense of reality
evolved over a career that witnessed "seismic changes in American higher
education." At the start of his journey, university administrations
ruled by fiat, and their faculties assumed the existence of an objective,
discoverable truth. At the end, the old model had given way to a new order,
one that was democratic rather than authoritarian and skeptical about what
the human mind can really know.
Within this framework Kernan spins a tale that is richly anecdotal, even
gossipy. He offers telling vignettes and full-blown portraits of a cast
of characters whose paths he's crossed, among them the affable Kingman Brewster,
the wise Bartlett Giamatti, the irrepressible Harold Bloom, the dyspeptic
Lillian Hellman, and the charmingly amoral Paul de Man, the discredited
dean of deconstruction.
The author's scholarly specialty is satire, and his descriptions of the
knaves and fools that inhabit even the most august institutions are almost
Swiftian. A cheeky Everyman named Smithers pops up here and there, often
in the form of a graduate student with an inflated sense of entitlement.
It is one such Smithers who confronts the author after Kernan has written
him an honest but less than flattering recommendation for a teaching post.
The incident occurred in 1973, Kernan's last year at Yale, a school that
had been rocked to its foundations by the political tsunamis of the Vietnam
era. Yale's problems were exacerbated by a protracted budget crisis and
hostile town-gown relations that reached their nadir during the trial in
New Haven of Black Panther Bobby Seale. As associate provost, Kernan was
a front-line officer at a university in a state of virtual siege. Burned
out and clinically depressed, he had recently suffered a heart attack. Smithers,
he recalls, "found me in my office after I had returned from the hospital;
he came up to the desk, looked me in the eye, and said, 'I wish you had
died.' I replied without thinking, 'But I didn't, and I'll live to piss
on your grave.'"
The story is a measure of just how uncivil campus discourse had become,
at least at Yale, and Kernan was soon off to Princeton. Here he found more
Smitherses but also relative peace. Yet Princeton, too, reflected the new
way of doing things. The university lawyer "was replacing the deans
as the arbiter of student discipline, and 'due process' as established by
the courts ...was replacing the inadequate rule books." The new dean
soon made enemies among the faculty, and he uses his memoir to settle a
few scores.
In 1977, Kernan resigned his deanship and returned full-time to scholarship,
but it offered no reprieve from the changes sweeping academia. He quotes
an old friend: "If you want to know what is actually disturbing a university,
visit its English department." Literary studies, writes Kernan, have
become "the Northern Ireland and Bosnia of the great culture war that
has been fought out in the universities since the end of World War II."
Kernan has much to say about the turmoil in Princeton's English department
as it struggled, not always successfully, to hold on to its traditional
values while embracing postmodern ideas and multiculturalism.
Kernan admits his "heart is with the old academic order." He
is philosophical about the changes he has witnessed, reflecting as they
do larger, and he believes mostly positive, currents in society. But he
notes that education "by its very nature -- the transfer of knowledge
from those who know to those who don't -- is ineradicably authoritarian
to some degree." He takes solace that "a few elite universities
and colleges" (Princeton presumably among them) "continue to occupy
the top of an educational hierarchy that stubbornly will not altogether
level."
-- J.I. Merritt '66
"A long walk after lunch"
An excerpt from In Plato's Cave:
In the fall of 1973 I took up a new position as the dean of the graduate
school at Princeton and learned some things I didn't know about academic
tribes. A friend who taught at Stanford saw the move from one Ivy to another
as no real move at all, no more than the 150 miles between New Haven and
Princeton; but that is a long 150 miles....
Tigers and Bulldogs are totemic animals, and all colleges and universities
are still tribes in which loyalty to and identification with the group are
paramount values. All outsiders are viewed with suspicion at Princeton,
even by its many Nobel laureates, particularly if they come from the hated
rival tribe, Yale. At Yale it is OK to come from Princeton -- it doesn't
really matter that much, it's considered a natural step up -- but you are
likely to run into problems if you come from Harvard, and vice versa. At
Princeton it is all right to come from Harvard, and vice versa, but not
from Yale. There are many ways of describing the differences among the Ivy
Big Three, but no one did it better than Bart Giamatti, soon to become the
president of Yale, who told the following cautionary tale. If things went
badly at Harvard, a national committee would be impaneled to discuss why
Harvard was not first and how much money needed to be spent to make it first.
At Yale, the faculty would meet, the professors would blame themselves,
confess their failings, and vow to work harder. At Princeton, two men would
go for a long walk after lunch.
There is much truth to this little story, at least as much as in the
theory that each of these institutions bears indelibly in all its parts
the stamp of its dominant religion, Unitarianism at Harvard, Congregationalism
at Yale, and Presbyterianism at Princeton. What it may tell you is that
things move more indirectly, perhaps even a bit more shiftily at Princeton,
where the term "pre-bicker," originally used in connection with
selection of eating club members, has great meaning, and a stranger like
myself had better step cautiously and circumspectly.
Presenting the concerto in stellar
essays
The Concerto: A Listener's Guide
Michael Steinberg '49 *51
Oxford, $35
No writer on classical music, past or present, is more distinguished
than Michael Steinberg '49 *51. His trenchant criticism in the Boston
Globe and the Saturday Review and his erudite but unintimidating
essays on the masterworks of the orchestral and symphonic repertories have
delighted and enlightened generations of concertgoers and record collectors,
this reviewer included, and the nearly three decades worth of program annotations
that he has written for orchestras around the U.S., including the Boston
Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and the San Francisco Symphony, have
now begun to reach an even wider audience, thanks to the long-overdue anthologies
of his writings that the Oxford University Press has at last begun to publish.
The Concerto: A Listener's Guide is the second such volume to
appear. (A similar collection, The Symphony: A Listener's Guide,
was published in 1995.) The title is, to be blunt, a bit misleading, because
this invaluable and useful tome is no entry-level book. Nor is the book
a complete or even a representative guide to the vast body of compositions
that either bear the title "concerto" or are important compositions
for solo instruments with orchestral accompaniment. Instead, Steinberg's
book is a carefully revised and expanded gathering of nearly 120 annotations
written over a span of a quarter of a century. A more accurate title for
this collection would be The Concerto: A Selective Guide for the Enthusiastic
Listener.
Once readers are aware of the raison d'être for the anthology,
however, the omissions no longer seem capricious or willful. The omissions
are significant nevertheless, and they are significant enough to prevent
the book from being the only such guide that knowledgeable classical music
buffs will want to have in their libraries. There is, for instance, no thumbnail
description of the concerto as a form, nor is there any history of its origins
and development. Apart from Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, his famous
D Minor Clavier Concerto, and his ever-popular Concerto for Two
Violins, no Baroque concerti grossi or solo concertos are included.
One longs, for example, to read Steinberg's analysis of and observations
on the Corelli, Torelli, Albinoni, and Geminiani concerti grossi, the Vivaldi
Four Seasons and L'estro armonico, and the Handel Organ
Concertos, Concerti Grossi, Op. 3, and the Twelve Grand Concertos,
Op. 6, but these essays, if he has ever written them, are not to be
found in this volume.
And the lacunae are significant in other areas, too. None of the Haydn
concertos is included. One searches in vain for essays on such "mainstream"
repertory pieces as the SaintSaëns B Minor Cello Concerto, the
Lalo Cello Concerto, the Dvorak Violin and Piano Concertos,
the Franck Variations Symphoniques, the Poulenc Organ Concerto,
the Richard Strauss Don Quixote, and the Weber Concertstück.
There are frustrating gaps in the essays on the concertos by major composers.
Only one of the Mozart Horn Concertos is discussed, and neither of
his flute concertos is examined. (Steinberg does, however, give Mozart's
middle name, correctly, as Amadè, not Amadeus, for which he is to
be thanked profusely.) The Bartók Second Violin Concerto is
the subject of an especially rewarding essay, but the early First Concerto
(admittedly not a major item in the repertory) is only mentioned in passing.
Conversely, if one did not understand how this anthology came to be,
the inclusion of such arguably "marginal" compositions (at least
to a book of this kind) as the Oration for Cello and Orchestra of
Frank Bridge, the piano concertos of Max Reger and George Perle, the violin
concertos of John Adams, Erich Korngold, William Schuman, and Roger Sessions,
and the Nobody Knows De Trouble I See for Trumpet and Orchestra of
Bernd Alois Zimmermann might seem equally capricious and willful.
But such cavils are churlish nitpicking and reflect unfairly on Steinberg's
carefully researched, superbly thought out, and brilliantly written essays.
Each page of this colorful book confirms the depth and breadth of his knowledge,
understanding, sensitivity, perspicacity, and aesthetic integrity. Even
the footnotes, and there are many, make for rewarding and entertaining reading.
There is no doubt that Steinberg has read extensively about music and
listened extensively to music, making him both well read and well listened;
in fact, it is unlikely that anyone in the field, past or present (and that
includes the great Donald Francis Tovey, who is one of Steinberg's acknowledged
role models as a critic and annotator), was, or is, better read or better
listened. Those who aspire to write on classical music or to be music critics,
therefore, would do well to study this book carefully. The essays on the
Berg Violin Concerto, the Elgar Violin Concerto, and the Grieg
Piano Concerto are models that all of us who toil in the same vineyards
should emulate.
Steinberg deserves our particular gratitude for carefully considering
and reflecting on recorded performances that come from the composers themselves
or from members of their immediate circles. Rare is the writer on music
today who will take the time, as Steinberg does, to listen to and comment
on Sir Edward Elgar's and Sergei Prokofiev's recordings of their own concertos
or Percy Grainger's recordings of the Grieg Piano Concerto. Few critics
or performers today, sadly, seem to be aware that such resources exist and
are available for study and listening enjoyment, and the standard of performance
and interpretation in our day would rise sharply if more musicians and commentators
followed Steinberg's laudable example.
There are the inevitable typos and tiny factual errors, of course, but
the lilliputian booboos and rare apparent oversights are teenytiny scars
that, to paraphrase another distinguished music critic of our century, Harold
C. Schonberg, one willingly accepts like the damage on the surface of a
Rembrandt panel. A serious and frustrating defect, however, is the absence
of an index, which would make this remarkable book a more effective research
tool.
-- Teri Noel Towe '70
Teri Towe is an estates lawyer, writer, and classical record producer
and a former classical music director of WPRB.
Tenderloin district and Sail 2000
www.tndc.org
Bringing new meaning to the phrase "online community," the
site managed by Christopher Mohr '88 for San Francisco's Tenderloin Neighborhood
Development Corp (www.tndc.org) shows the old
buildings the agency renovates into affordable low-income housing, tells
the stories of the organization and the neighborhood, and gives information
about TNDC's on-site social workers, job training, and after-school programs.
Visitors can also learn how to donate or volunteer, and view photos from
the Celebrity Pool Toss fundraiser, at which actor Robin Williams and others
took a dunking for charity. The site is easy and encouraging to navigate,
though "up one level" links on the pages would be helpful. Perhaps
as the residents grow increasingly computer-savvy, the site could expand
to post community news or residents' résumés for potential
employers.
www.vividsimulations.com
At the homepage for Sail 2000 (www.vividsimulations.com),
you can buy a virtual yacht, meet some international competitors, and set
sail online. The Sail 2000 yacht racing simulator business team includes
Grant McCardell '80, Chase Caro '81, and Erica Pochaczevsky '86. According
to the site, the program for the PC simulates America's Cup boat design
and International Sailing Federation rules, and includes realistic weather
and sounds. Visitors who own the software can also get technical information
and upgrades, meet a racing buddy on the site's registry, and compete against
each other over the Internet in the online lobby. I was confused at first
and thought that I could test-drive a demo program; you can't, but you can
get previews of some bright, detailed screen captures from the game.
-- Snow Tempest '98
Clarvoe plays two in New York
Few young American playwrights can boast the distinction of having two
plays running simultaneously at theaters in New York. For that matter, not
many playwrights of any vintage -- from O'Neill to Albee -- are able to
make such a heady claim.
Anthony Clarvoe '81 saw two of his works produced this season, one a
revival of a play originally staged in 1992 and the other a premiere at
the Signature Theatre, a repertory company that encourages promising authors
in midcareer. Clarvoe is the kind of playwright Signature wants to support,
and for good reason.
The earlier piece, Let's Play Two, appeared at Altered Stages
for three weeks during February. Presented by Incite Productions, the work
is a dialogue with original backup music from a keyboard and bass. Clarvoe
uses baseball as a way of getting to the playful as well as the serious
sides of two people destined for each other from the opening scene. For
his title he goes back to an Ernie Banks comment: "It's a great day
for a ball game. Let's play two!"
Grace is the serious and responsible half who shows up for work and takes
part in the weddings of friends -- always a bridesmaid, never (at least
so far) a bride. She's haunted by the awareness that if she quits her job,
a long line of people will be waiting to take her place. Phil, on the other
hand, has little interest in holding down a serious position and regards
a 10-day friendship as a meaningful love affair. A naive charmer, he calls
himself "The Kid" while narrating his every move in the excited
tones of a baseball announcer.
What brings them together is a series of road trips in an open car. They
share a puppy love of baseball and a willingness to make mutual concessions.
It's a study in pairs: a doubleheader, the Minnesota Twins, and a couple
of attractive young people with quirky but compatible ways. "Of course
I can make a commitment," Phil says. "I'm a baseball fan!"
Walking Off the Roof is a more complicated drama that demonstrates
a maturity of purpose and technique. Working with new dramatic tension,
Clarvoe deepens his approach to the subject of commitment. But in this case,
we're talking serious deception.
Clarvoe developed the play over several months as part of Signature's
Residency II Pilot Program, a project that involves the playwright in all
aspects of the creative process including design, casting, and workshops.
The program has paid off for both author and company. An ensemble of four
actors, working with the playwright and director, have hammered out the
proper direction for a dark treatment of contemporary love, adultery, infidelity,
and the pain of living in the world.
Humor, which figured in Let's Play Two, has disappeared, and the
overriding tone in Walking Off the Roof is one of distrust and suspicion.
And none of the characters are very likeable. Of course, they don't have
to be; this is grim stuff. A suggestion of reconciliation comes when one
of the couples simply decides, after all, not to walk off the roof. In Let's
Play Two, Phil's car acts as a unifying symbol of movement and progress
in the couple's relationship. A large unmade bed becomes the central image
in Walking Off the Roof; it's a messy arena for sexual and emotional
interaction and a constant reminder of betrayal.
Clarvoe has an ear for contemporary speech. Toward the end of Walking
Off the Roof, the central character, an advertising executive named
Brett, talks about his life and work. Beginning as a straight monologue,
the speech becomes a series of staccato defenses, an outpouring of pain
and frustration. It's a horrifying piece of fury directed at both the business
world and himself.
-- Don Harrell
Short takes
The Memoirs of an Artillery Forward Observer, 1944-1945, by James
Russell Major *49 (Sunflower University Press, $18.95) -- The
late Russell Major, an emeritus professor of early modern European history
at Emory, became a historian to make sense of the war he found himself in
the middle of, more than 50 years ago. Although a graduate of the Virginia
Military Institute, Major describes his youthful self as a "bookish
recluse" who hardly fit any martial stereotype, and his lack of a sense
of direction and a tendency to daydream were serious impediments to his
job of directing precise artillery fire. Yet like thousands of other ordinary
Americans who fought across France and Germany in the final year of World
War II, he overcame his limitations and served with valor and distinction.
His sympathies lie with the line infantrymen who bore the brunt of the fighting
under appalling conditions, and he regards George Patton, in whose Third
Army he served, as "by far the best American general of the war --
one of the few things that Hitler and his generals did agree on."
-- J.I. Merritt '66
Writing for Design Professionals: A Guide to Writing Successful Proposals,
Letters, Brochures, Portfolios, Reports, Presentations, and Job Applications
for Architects, Engineers, and Interior Designers, by Stephen A. Kliment
*57 (Norton, $36.50) -- Since the title and subtitle pretty well
explain what this book is about, I can only add that its content grew out
of Kliment's many years as an architect, teacher, and consultant. This useful
book is unerring in its advice to keep all communications materials to the
point, and the many samples serve to make crystal clear Kliment's directives.
There's also a section on how to write a book review, which I consulted
as I wrote this.
-- Lolly O'Brien
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