Mark Van Doren: Sanity in the Classroom

By Jeffrey Hart | Sunday, April 6, 2008

Above the columns of Butler Library at Columbia, inscribed in the stone frieze, you read permanent testimony that some writers are especially important: Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Plato, Aristotle, Milton, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe, Spinoza. . . . These names are representative of importance itself, not a limiting “list.” Butler Library gazes out across a series of walks and terraces at Charles McKim’s Low Library, which dominates the scene with its ten Ionic columns and its low dome inspired by the Pantheon in Rome.

To my undergraduate gaze no professor was more in harmony with all that this represents than Mark Van Doren. I took Van Doren’s course as an undergraduate and then in 1956, coming out of Naval Intelligence, joined him as a colleague in the Columbia English Department. In many ways he was quintessentially American. He was, also, a man profoundly engaged by the great writers named on the frieze on Butler Library, and he had written that “A classic is always fresh, vernacular, sensible, and responsible.”

His principal course was called “The Narrative Art,” which extended through the entire academic year and in which we read the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Divine Comedy, Genesis and Exodus, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, The Trial and The Castle. I enrolled in the class my freshman year. As another student remarked to me rather colloquially, in Van Doren’s “Narrative Art” he was confident that he was dealing with the “first team.”

The theme that held the course together was his idea that all great narrative has somewhere in it a representation of the divine. This clearly had enormous implications, if true; and it still has those implications for me. The following passage from his 1958 Autobiography gives a sense both of the style and substance of his teaching:

My purpose was to examine the ways in which the greatest tellers had put divine and human things together. The ultimate dimension, I suggested, was given to narrative by the presence in it of gods or their equivalent. . . .The Bible became for me a boundless world of wonder, terror, wisdom and delight. Dante and Kafka, the one finishing his thought, the other unable to do so, I likewise discovered to be bottomless in meaning as well as brilliant, with ten thousand details that cannot tarnish. Homer, I need not say, remained for me ... the sovereign poet.

If the most important writers, those who had written all those books, and representing mind at its most intense and memorable, had endowed their works with the sense of a divine presence in life, does this not raise questions about a view of life that excludes it? These were the questions raised in Van Doren’s classroom.

A Van Doren lecture was not a lecture but a conversation. If, for the moment, the students were not up to joining the conversation, it turned into a dialogue with himself. He taught his class with a special relaxed casualness, as if his conversation with himself had been part of a continuing dialogue somewhere else. Then he might draw a student into it. The student thus elected could not get off the hook. Apparently simple questions had a way of turning into complicated ones. It often seemed that in this process he was able to create intelligence in a student.

Van Doren favored the greatest writers for his courses. No one in those days doubted that there were such things as great writers, nor that they could be named. Their greatness was confirmed by analysis and by consensus. Part of the classroom drama thus consisted of Van Doren’s measuring himself against such writers, and inviting the students to join him, everyone as a result trying to rise somewhere near those peaks of intelligence. Not surprisingly, such people as Dante and Shakespeare were much more intelligent than the brightest student, a recognition that was good for us.

I would like to cite another passage about Van Doren’s teaching because it establishes so well the relationship he was able to create with his students in the classroom. I have never seen anything quite like it. “If I speak of the students last,” he wrote in his Autobiography, “it is not merely that they were the crucial persons with whom I spent my time, as must be true in any College; it is also because no way exists of describing what goes on in a classroom once the door is closed. What goes on is a kind of secret between he who stands and those who sit.” He continues with an important reflection that points to the essence of his practice as a teacher:

From the beginning I assumed experience in freshmen. Perhaps the chief novelty consisted in my assumption that nothing was too difficult for students. Freshmen have had more experience than they are given credit for. They have been born, have parents, had brothers and sisters, been in love, been jealous, been angry, been ambitious, been tired, been hungry, been happy and unhappy, been aware of justice and injustice. Well, the great writers handled just such things, and they did so in basic human language men must use whenever they feel and think. The result, if no teacher prevents its happening, was that freshmen learned about themselves. And so did the teachers, at least if they read and talked like men of the world, simply and humbly, without assumptions of academic superiority.

The last time I saw him was memorable. He had retired from teaching at Columbia, had taught at Harvard and elsewhere, lectured, given poetry readings; and when last I saw him it must have been in the early 1960s. On a warm spring afternoon the window was open in my Hamilton Hall office at Columbia. It looked out on the peaceful Van Amringe Quadrangle with its surrounding rectangle of neoclassical McKim, Meade and white brick and limestone buildings. The statue of Alexander Hamilton in the foreground reinforced the sense of a classical Enlightenment.

Through my open window one of the numerous local pigeons had flown in and, trusting, now strolled on my office carpet, back and forth. Then Mark came to my door, wearing his floppy grey felt hat. He saw the pigeon and grinned, and said to me, “Saint Francis.”

That is the closest I have ever come to sainthood. And if I ever do run for sainthood, I know, because of my time and place, education and temperament, views on Eros and Agape—Eros being love for the world, which for me is powerful; and the possibility of Agape, which is love of God—I must be fundamentally Thomist and analytical rather than Franciscan and intuitive—though the latter is always a possibility. I’m sure Mark Van Doren knew that, and he has long had a special place in my memory.

Mark Van Doren: Sanity in the Classroom

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