Fathers And Son

In 1959, excruciatingly shy and a raw intellectual recruit newly enrolled in Columbia University's doctoral program, I applied for a place in the yearlong seminar in nineteenth-century cultural history given jointly by Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun. It was one of the few courses in the university that required an interview for admission. I knew Barzun only through his championing of Berlioz, whose music I too adored, and Trilling from his essays, most especially his interpretation of Keats's tragic awareness of human mortality in his Letters. (I was floundering at the start of my strenuous journey through "the vale of soul-making.") Feeling sure I would be exposed as an upstart and an ignoramus by these two Grand Inquisitors and then dumped unceremoniously as so much intellectual chaff, I submitted stoically to what proved to be a gentle interrogation about allegory (I had written a Master's Thesis on Hawthorne and Spenser as allegorists). The next day, when I found a post card in my mailbox inviting me to be a member of the seminar, I walked the streets like a pauper suddenly summoned by royalty to cast off the scruff of his shabby garments and don velvet robes. The seminar did not disappoint. Highly competent professors, some dull, some affable, some merely proficient, had previously guided a gauche cadet through the "chamber of maiden thought," but only one, Miriam Heffernan at Brooklyn College, had electrified me: her Irish speech could dramatize both her own grievances and an Emily Dickinson poem in a startling phrase. My parochial school education had hewed closely to didactic models, to a dogged literalness, so I was unprepared for the dazzling intellectual play of Barzun and Trilling which hastened the shift in my allegiance from Hebraic "strictness of conscience" to Hellenic "spontaneity of consciousness."