Caran d'ache

Sorry to read in the Times just now that John Hollander has died. He was one of my grad school professors; I still often think of various bits of his book The Figure of Echo, particularly the funny and striking observation (I am paraphrasing from memory), about the poem Marvell wrote in preface to Paradise Lost, that it is Marvell's "On First Looking Into Milton's Bible."

He could be a rambling and digressive teacher, but with a great underlying warmth and a capacious intelligence and almost perversely varied curiosity. He was one of my orals examiners, and I remember him asking the dreadful question, during the exam, "Are there any sonnets in Donne's Songs and Sonnets?" After some panicked mental examination, I answered no; "Of course not!" he exclaimed triumphantly. "Sonnet is simply the Italian word for little song!"

Also, a moment in his class on ecphrasis: JH, discussing the link between character-the-mark-on-a-page and character-the-thing-a-person-has: "What is the Russian word for pencil?" JMD (legacy of two years of college Russian taken for no particular reason): "Karandach." JH, associatively: "Thus the clever name Caran d'Ache, for the Swiss drawing company inspired by a Russian emigre." I had boxes and boxes of those pencils as a child, and I had never put the two things together....

Also, a moment when I had to tell him I was missing an upcoming class due to a doctor's appointment, and feared being greeted by an irascible tirade, but instead was given a huge beaming grin of approval: "Oh, yes. We are living in the era of managed care, these doctors' appointments cannot be rescheduled!" It fit in with one of his favored topics for tirades, and therefore triggered pleasure rather than anger.

It is the end of an era - I think of John Hollander and Kenneth Koch as two poets, critics and teachers quite unlike anything we will ever see again. There will be other wonderful kinds of combination, quite different from what were found in that generation; but nothing quite like those two.

"The habits and the aura of a student"

At the Rumpus, Jeremy Hatch provides wonderful excerpts from Sigrid Nunez's memoir about Susan Sontag. Nunez's thoughts on Sontag's contempt for teaching strike me as very perceptive (I come at it, of course, from quite a different point of view!).

(NB I was teaching Sontag's "Notes on Camp" in class this week, together with the demented style miscellany - it is truly a bravura performance...)

(Further thought: I was party to a recent discussion about Kenneth Koch that included the suggestion that he must have been one of the most influential teachers of his generation, not least though also not exclusively in terms of significant writers thinking of themselves as his students after having officially or unofficially studied with him at Columbia - it gave me cause to think about how influence passes strongly through contact inside and outside the classroom as well as through published books - I think that I have sometimes undervalued teaching as opposed to writing, but that the two are in a best-case scenario truly complementary. Of course, student-teacher relationships at Columbia or otherwise are often complex! The letter in which Trilling expresses his dislike for his former student Ginsberg's Howl was described to us very vividly last week [we were having a session for the seminar I'm teaching this semester on Richardson's Clarissa] by the Curator for Literature at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Columbia, which is what caused me to look for that piece just now....)

Thoughts on marathon training?

A poem by my late colleague Kenneth Koch, "You Want a Social Life, with Friends," courtesy of Josh Glenn:

You want a social life, with friends.
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What's true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.

There isn't time enough, my friends--
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends--
To find the time to have love, work, and friends.
Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the Ceiling
But did he go to parties at day's end?

Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his Girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But writes hardly anything at all.