Tag: Ted Tayler

One book that I did not read during my graduate training, but maybe should have, is Moses Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed. 

Maimonides was a 12th-century Talmudic scholar and Aristotelian philosopher. His Guide is an attempt to reconcile those two sides of his own, and his culture’s, intellectual being. He struggles with the task. But “do not imagine,” Maimonides writes, “that these most difficult problems can be thoroughly understood by any one of us. This is not the case”:

“At times the truth shines so brilliantly that we perceive it as clear as day. Our nature and habit then draw a veil over our perception, and we return to a darkness almost as dense as before. We are like those who, though beholding frequent flashes of lightning, still find themselves in the thickest darkness of the night.“

As a graduate student, I think I was pretty good at just seeing the flashes. Standing open, as I would put it now, to anagnorisis: The sudden apparitions of meaning that the texts provide. This is puzzling work, because you don’t, and can’t, know how to do it. Indeed, the more you think you do—the more of a Theory you have—the worse you are likely to fare. For you have decided in advance which lightnings are worth noticing. 

I TAd, at Columbia, for the legendary prof Ted Tayler. He was legendary, that is, for his teaching, primarily in the undergraduate Core Curriculum program. His Shakespeare course, where I came in, was spoken of reverentially, and always packed.

Tayler was held in lower esteem by his colleagues, some of them anyway, and by my fellow grad students. I could see why: He had abandoned postmodernist theory, after, as he liked to put it, “reading it cheerfully for ten years”; and returned to an approach that would already have been old when he himself was a grad student (although it is still called New Criticism). In Tayler’s version (swidt), this meant just doggedly trying to explicate the difficult and beautiful thoughts that became thinkable in seventeenth-century poems and plays. And some of these were very cool; and some were very odd; but all were very difficult. Entering the classroom, Tayler was far from electric. A small grey man in a tweed jacket, he’d shuffle up to the podium, and start reading from his notes. And really reading—the original meaning of “lecturing,” as though we were back in the medieval university, when the professor was the only person in the room with a copy of the book. Tayler’s voice was deep and commanding, but his delivery was a mumble.

But then something would happen—to him, in him, and through him. He’d lurch forward, reaching toward the students as if to grab them. His voice would catch and halt. A strike had occurred. It might be a signal word or phrase that set him off; it might be a paradox; it might be a moral. Whatever the case, the little old disciple of the book was suddenly on fire. The text came alive, and the whole room was caught, in a moment of almost shocking emotional intimacy.

The students found this a bit embarrassing. It wasn’t appropriate; it wasn’t about Outcomes. And these were very bright and rich Ivy Leaguers whose parents were putting serious money toward Outcomes. So wasn’t Tayler just kind of performing, they asked me, in my discussion section? Wasn’t he doing, as we would say now, a bit? Oh no, I answered. Absolutely definitely take my word for it not. He was reaching for a moment of presence, which he wanted them to know about. He was moved, as he moved them.

One night, unusually, he called me at home. Told me that he was in the hospital. Tayler was not exactly elderly, not yet 70, but he was unrepentantly alcoholic, and on his third marriage, and, in short, not really taking care of himself. He had come down with a severe respiratory infection, on account of which he would not be able to teach for several weeks. Starting the next day. Could I please lecture in his place?

I have often thought, with regard to that phone call, about the medical dramas (Grey’s Anatomy, and the like) in which trainee surgeons get an unexpected chance to operate. Always, they leap at it. They practically run to scrub. That was me, when Tayler asked that. Yes, I answered. Holy cow for sure, yes. He was quite relieved. As for me, I was honoured and delighted. I hung up the phone, put aside my dissertation, and started writing a lecture for the following day on Twelfth Night.

This became a mark against me among my grad student peers. We were not in a union, but there was a move to move us into one (which eventually succeeded, and you will find that either pleasing or ridiculous, depending on your politics). Workload was supposed to be defined, and sacrosanct. TAing meant backing up the prof’s work—not doing it for him. Lecturing, and on short notice, at that? An absolute no-no. From this point of view, I should have told Tayler that I couldn’t possibly help him out. I should have said that it wasn’t my time to operate.

My heart, gut and mind reject this utterly. Even my body, nauseated. This isn’t primarily because I am sceptical (and was already then) about academic trade unionism. No: It’s because I am hungry, and was even more so then, for the healing light of the literary classroom. Lecturing on Shakespeare meant the possibility of leading, as did Tayler, a transfiguration. And leading it meant participating in it; otherwise, per my sceptical students’ questions, it wouldn’t be there at all. Walking up to the podium with my own handwritten notes. Finding what came out of them—not reading, but interacting, conversing. Telling the intellectual story that could only be told that way. Throwing myself into relief, via the flash of the text. And then saying, with Shakespeare’s Hippolyta: See what we did there?

That classroom moment, in my experience, is of a kind with the anagnorisis that occurs in the theatre itself. But, in some ways, better. We are less lost, more found. We are awake, so to speak, throughout the procedure. I believe that in studying literature, we come toward an understanding of what understanding is. But this comes and goes, because it is not an axiom, but a feeling: An experience of belonging, to the world, the text, and each other. I have become an addict of this feeling, I suppose, because I don’t generate enough of it in myself. But I hope that my deficiency has allowed my students to see how precious is this balm, and that they need some, too.

*

After some false starts, C found a great Manhattan job. Her false starts had included a junior executive position at NYCHA, the New York City Housing Authority; a brief spell as manager of one of the city’s innumerable and worthy non-profits (the CEO of which, however, turned out to be completely toxic and insane); and a lengthy interview process (for a position she eventually turned down) to become personal assistant to an Upper East Side beauty who had been married to one multi-billionaire and was about to marry another. But then, at 28, my wife was appointed Assistant Dean in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences—right at Columbia. Nothing to do with me; she got it by being brilliant and dedicated. And she was great at it, and loved it. Sadly, then, irony occurred.

During the false-starts period she had been unhappy. Her NYCHA position had involved inspecting community centres in places like the Bronx and Brownsville where she felt like the alien she was. Also, her office was on the move to a federal building next to the World Trade Center, and she was quite worried about terrorism, along the lines of the horrendous Oklahoma City episode of 1996, or even the truck bombing at the WTC itself, back in ’93. I thought she was being totally paranoid, lightning did not strike twice, etc., but whatever. Anyway, when she wasn’t online looking for jobs for herself, she was online looking for jobs for me, and she found one, a wow one, right back at home, in exactly my field. So even though it was way too early in my program for me to be going on the job market—and my supervisor told me that buntly, but then I landed a couple of articles in prestigious journals, so he was like, well, ok, let’s see—I applied. And I got an interview at the annual conference of the Modern Languages Association (which is where these things happen). And I got flown out to give a job talk. And I got the bloody job. And so in the spring of 2000, just a few months after Cynthia had settled in at GSAS, I was frantically frantically frantically writing a dissertation, and then before we knew it we were sending stuff home and dealing with movers and back in Vancouver.

It was a time of immense promise. I returned to New York briefly to defend my PhD that December. We then both were there for my graduation the following spring, after which we took a delayed honeymoon to Italy. Rome, Perugia, Florence, but also some much smaller locations in Lazio—Bagnaia, Caprarola, Bomarzo—because I had become very interested in their restored Renaissance gardens, which are a big deal, just take my word for it. (Pro tip: You do not need to get very far off the beaten track, in Italy, to get off the beaten track in Italy.) C was in her first trimester with our first child, which meant that I got to take lots of nice photographs of her napping in the aforementioned gardens (under the conceit, you see, that she was a nymph who had been turned into a statue, it’s an Ovid thing). In Vancouver, we bought a used car, and rented a pretty nice apartment on the 10th floor of one of the swanky Sixties towers of the West End; with a peek-a-boo view of English Bay from the balcony. Making a reasonable salary, it became quickly apparent, is something a person can get used to. Our place was all white—walls, carpets, countertops. It was like living in cream cheese. 

In many ways, I had felt like a natural New Yorker. But they were not all good ways. I had been way too keen on the dive bars; way too comfortable in the pretentious galleries. Manhattan is of course an entirely artificial place anyway, a rocky outcropping flattened and tiled by Manifest Destiny. Even Central Park, that rectangle of Paradise, is fake. Point is, belonging there is belonging to a place that barely belongs. And that I could have done, and I would have been very good at it, but at some level I wanted to be better. Anyway, Gotham would always be there, like a city in a snow globe.

I settled into my job. My first course went well, and then the next several, and I turned back to my dissertation, with the professionally requisite goal of rewriting it to make it a book. We enjoyed our first summer back home, and then I turned to the next autumn term. C was approaching her third trimester. My first week back teaching came and went, and the second began. I did not have class Mondays, so I spent that day prepping, in our soft white apartment in the sky. I would be teaching Twelfth Night, again. I was looking forward to opening up Shakespeare’s tragicomic insight that art, in the broadest sense, becomes our lens on reality—whether we like it, or not. That is why, I was going to tell my students, momentous events always “look like a movie” to us. C and I of course were starring in a Lifetime Movie of our own. We were preparing to welcome our first baby; we were looking into buying our first house. That evening, we watched the inaugural episode of a silly new show called the Amazing Race, which followed good-looking young couples on a high-octane, international scavenger hunt, all around the world. Through Africa, Mexico, Pakistan they ran, handing out little American flags as they went. It was September 10th, 2001.