What William Alfred Taught Me 

by Peter Grudin**

 

William Alfred taught me a way to remember what the pathetic fallacy was. "There was one of those little italicized blurbs in The New Yorker," he said. "It was a little poem,  called 'To the Crocuses,' and went something like this: 

Now you stick your sweet little pink heads out of the ground! And now you stick your sweet little purple heads out of the ground! But look out! Look out! The cold March wind is coming. Look out!

Then the font reverted to the standard:  

‘Yes, get back down! Get back down! You silly sons-of-bitches!’"  

 

I think he told us that story the first time he visited my section of his Anglo-Saxon  poetry course. His demeanor took me aback as much as his comment on “To the  Crocuses” had. His loping gait. The shabby green book bag. The fedora clapped to his  forehead in such total defiance of gravity that it might just as well have been floating in  mid-air. The kindness and humility in his manner. His mild eyes. 

 

We were reading The Battle of Malden. We sat at tables arranged in a square on the second floor of Sever Hall. Turning to the closest student on his left, “Please read,  starting here at the beginning,” he said, the tremor in his voice suggesting that what he  might say next might be too sad for words—or too funny. And the student began to read  the stark Anglo-Saxon lines and then stopped, relieved I thought, after his quota of ten.  “Now, please translate,” said Mr. Alfred, and the student did, and when he was done,  the teacher smiled and nodded and turned his kind eyes to the next in line. 

 

I was in my first year, amazed to be at Harvard after undergraduate study at a secondtier university.  I was overwhelmed by Harvard, sure that I was nothing more than a filing error committed by a departmental secretary and I was more than a little daunted  by all the theory I was reading in my comparative literature classes. 

 

The hour was almost over when my turn came. I read. When I had finished, Mr. Alfred  was silent long enough for me to imagine the worst kinds of rebuke for some  mispronunciation or violation of meter.   

 

“You read that beautifully,” he said.

 

Half the students in the room assumed puzzled stares. Could how one read verse aloud  really matter? I stared at my hands, simply overjoyed.  

 

I had not been that happy in a year. The memory of what Mr. Alfred said makes me  happy even now, retired after forty years of teaching and counseling and somewhat disabused of the lofty notions I once held about academic life. Never so disabused,  however, as to miss a chance to celebrate the best teacher I have known.   “Now translate,”  said Mr. Alfred. When I had finished, he nodded and smiled, and  turned to the next student. Just as she was about to begin, however, he interrupted her.  “You know,” he said, launching into the kind of non-sequitur that made his students  smile, “I had a classmate who was a German woman. She was brilliant and very  beautiful, and she married one of my other classmates, a man from Ohio, who took up  German with a vengeance and got so very good at it that you could hardly tell he wasn’t  a native. Yet he insisted, even after being corrected repeatedly, on translating ‘augenblick’  a dead metaphor that now means  ‘an instant’ as ‘the blink of an eye’”.

 

After class, I was halfway through my pastrami sandwich at Elsie’s before I realized that  this remark was not a non-sequitur at all. The realization stung. It took away half of the  joy his compliment had given me. Yet, now, 40 years later, I have to reconsider. Maybe  the very way he couched his criticism of my translation was, in fact, a second  compliment. Surely it was a kindness.  Had he recognized how much his compliment  meant to me? Well, I think he understood enough to fashion his subsequent criticism so  that I would have to translate it and then absorb it like some time-release medication. 

He taught me that a man could be fully sympathetic and discriminate, pious and yet irreverent. He taught me how to find the line between sentiment and sentimentality. He  taught me that moral seriousness without humility could repel and helped me to  develop some sense of  self-irony. He taught me never to impose meaning on a work of  literature but rather to expose that meaning. He taught me to show students all the kindness I was capable of, to look upon them kindly and remember how frightening it  is, sometimes, to be a student. He taught me how to criticize effectively but only in a  way that fostered learning. He taught me that no position justifies pretentiousness and  that the best response to success is humility. And that the very worst responses to  human suffering are self-absorption and indifference.  

 

Finally, he impressed upon me just how powerful narrative could be, not just to enchant  or amuse but to communicate important truths. He did this both through his lectures on  literature and through his mode of educating us when literature was not the subject. 

 

I think he was the greatest teacher I have known and the kindest person. I wish I had known him longer, had been able somehow to do something for him in return for what  he had done for me. 

 

Well, I am trying now.  

 

I have taught my students about William Alfred whenever I could find or create the  occasion over the last 40 years. I talk to my wife, Dana Wilson, about him, and I tell  stories about him to old friends and to my daughter, Sophia. Bear with me, and I will tell  you one more.   

 

Mr. Alfred told me a story about a tea he had attended. I guess the hostess was  fabulously wealthy. In any case, the China she brought out for the occasion was beyond  price, something sui generis, delicate and from the 18th century, and it was a perfect and  complete set, the sort of thing one might see in a major museum.   

 

One of the guests, who was somewhat clumsy, tripped on the edge of the carpet. His  teacup slipped from his fingers and shattered on the floor. For a moment there was  silence as the more sophisticated guests tallied up the cost of the event.  

The hostess was at the unhappy man’s side in an instant. “Oh please don’t give it a  thought, Mr. ___,” she said. “Things like that happen all the time with this old stuff,”  and, even as she spoke, carelessly she tossed her own cup at the stone hearth.

An example of elegance and style?  Perhaps.  I don’t know anything else about that  hostess. But for Mr. Alfred I think the story was about goodness, about generosity. It  illustrated the difference between things and people, the difference between objects and  subjects, the difference between what is like and what is unlike: it expressed the  distinction between what is not kind and what is.

 

**Peter Grudin has taught English and comparative literature at Williams College and English and creative writing at Middlebury College. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1971, after completing a dissertation (later published) under the supervision of Harry Levin.

          After publishing several articles on nineteenth century fiction and poetry, in the mid-eighties Grudin began to specialize in the teaching of writing. In 1985 he became Director of the Writing Workshop at Williams, a post he held until 2006.

          In 1992 he became Assistant Dean of the College, a position charged with coaching applicants for fellowships. During Grudin's tenure, five of his students became Rhodes Scholars and three became British Marshall Scholars. In 2004, his students won two Rhodes Scholarships and two Marshalls, giving Williams by far the highest rate of such awards (per capita) in the entire country. (Harvard was a distant second, Stanford a closer third.) He also coached ten Harry S. Truman scholars and scores of winners of Fulbrights, Goldwaters, Mellons, and other fellowships. Two of the students he coached went on to be interns at the U.S. Supreme Court, and two became clerks at the Court.

          In 2008 he was elected president of The Southern Vermont Broadband Cooperative, a volunteer service providing fast internet connections to remote areas of the state. He devotes most of his time to reading, to writing essays and fiction, and to cultivating his garden, all three acres of it. He and his wife Dana live in Stamford, VT.