TEACHING: John Crowe Ransom

Sawyer and War and Peace. And if those novels had not supplied my needs, I might have divined a good deal one spring in New Haven, coming home with my wife from a party on the very night the Yale clubs had chosen to induct new members. There were the blindfolded postulants, robed in mortuary black, standing at well-spaced intervals, pale, mute, and submissive, occasionally moved to a new position along the street by wordless, solemn-faced members. The awe! The fatuity! And the whole soundless spectacle closely observed by a small group of black teenagers, children who would never go to Yale, much less be invited to join such an elite. I was, that evening, no more than an outside observer, certainly more like the black kids than like the members or inductees. But during one year of my life, in my early twenties, I was a sort of adjunct member of a group that was the more exclusive for having no formal shape or membership, its exclusions determined by instinct and a high destiny, like those that once characterized Calvinist New England. We few, we happy few, were English-major students of John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College. I was a special student, not a degree candidate, having already obtained my B.A. but feeling, after nearly three years in the army, by no means ready to take up graduate studies. It had been in the army, and from Robie Macauley, a fellow soldier and a Kenyon graduate who was later to take over the edi-