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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] different from what we see~in this area,' I said, and I talked with friends that summer about how much I had lost by not having familiarized myself with these writers earlier. My major attention, however, was directed to the Ameri- can writers. I had never before heard of McTeague, which I found a compelling story of a miserable dentist in California, and although I had seen references to An American Tragedy, I had concluded that it was nothing more than a sensational bit of gutter probing; that it was a grand novel in the great tradition of storytelling surprised me. I also spent some time reading the short works of Edith Wharton, which pleased me enormously and led me to read three short novels of Henry James, as a result of which I concluded that 'The Aspern Papers' was just about the finest novella in the language. When I voiced this opinion in class, Professor Hasselmayer suggested that I write my term paper on the James story, but I attempted a more elaborate topic: Hen?y James and Thomas Mann: Two Novellas Based in One City. I wrote some four dozen pages analyzing 'The Aspern Papers' and Mann's 'Death in Venice' which I had read in a German course, and describing how the authors had used Venice to powerful effect. It was a city I had never seen but understood intimately, thanks to the evocation of its colors and mean- ings by the two masterpieces. What expecially caught Professor Hasselmayer's Page 93 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html attention was a long passage in which I analyzed the narcotic effect of Venice on James, Mann and their protagonists. My writing assumed a lot, made shrewd guesses and at times confused the living authors with their imaginary heroes, but it also 207 e s d y d r revealed an analytical mind. I had transformed a reading assignment into the portrait not only of two short books but also of a student's mind pole-vaulting from one level of thought and expression to an entirely new plateau. Summoning me, Hasselmayer said: 'A remarkable paper, Mr Streibert. You've seen into the heart of the literary process. I would now like you to try your hand at a more difficult subject matter. Compare The Old Wives' Tale and Point Counter Point in the same way. I mean, how do these two vastly dissimilar men utilize dissimilar locales to achieve their common purposes?' It was work on this paper, which consumed severa months, that determined my future, for whereas I could se Bennett's famous Five, Towns of industrial England a counterparts of Pennsylvania's three Dutch towns - Lancas ter, Reading and Allentown - which made comparisons an understandings fairly simple, I was astounded by the pol ished glitter of London and its inhabitants as described b Huxley. 'What kind of people are these?' I cried in frus tration as I labored to untangle their lives and motives. An when, for instruction, I delved briefly into Huxley's othe novels, I withdrew almost in horror from an amoral world could not comprehend. At the height of my bewilderment, with my paper not only unfinished but also unfinishable, a more sophisticated student told me: 'You can't understand Huxley unless you first understand Andr~ Gide.' I had never heard of the Frenchman, nor did the college library have any of his books, but the library in Reading did have two, The Counter- feiters and a brief work called The Pastoral Symphony. The first repelled me with its portrait of a decadent society, but the second enraptured me with its pristine, controlled storytell- ing. As weeks passed and I burrowed into the difficult parts of my paper, I awakened to the fact that The Counterfeiters 208 had profound meaning for me, while the shorter work seemed no better than a French version of Ethan Frome. When Professor Hasselmayer read this second paper he told me: 'Mr Streibert, you have an amazing ability for penetrating to the heart of a piece of writing and also the mind of the man who wrote it. What are your plans after graduation?' 'I have no idea.' 'I do. What foreign languages do you have?' 'German from birth, French well beyond the conver- sational level.' 'My goodness, you're well on your way.' 'To what?' 'To a doctorate. In literature.' 'What would that mean?' 'Three years at Chicago, or Columbia, or maybe best of all, Harvard.' 'Would that be very expensive?' 'Not for you. The top schools are hungry for young men of proven ability.' So before my final semester ended, I again had offers of three fellowships to the universities that Professor Hassel- mayer had named and to whose English faculties he had commended me. For a sensible reason, I chose Columbia: 'Huxley taught me that I knew nothing of London. Gide, that I was ignorant of Paris. Time I learned what a major city is.' That summer the gentle hand of Andr& Gide lay heavily upon me, for I read, in the original French, LImmoraliste and then moved on to Marcel Proust's Du CN de Chez Swann and a sampling of the later books of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. I spent the entire summer without inviting even one young woman to dinner, and when I left for New York in September I had not yet kissed a girl. But my knowledge of books, especially novels, was profound. 209 My years at Columbia were explosive, for I had excellent professors who led me into the broad boulevards of learning so much grander in design that the limited country roads I had known at Mecklenberg. I learned early that my profi- ciency in languages, especially German, made it easy for me to master the early tongues from Page 94 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html which English was derived, and my progress in pre-Chaucerian language was so rapid that two different professors suggested that I specialize in that branch of study. This I might have done had not the beacon light of my career arrived in New York from Oxford University to teach for six months, beginning with.-the fall semester of 1977. He was Professor F. X. M. Devlan, born in Dublin, educated at Cambridge and Berlin, holder of a chair at Oxford and an opinionated luminary on the English literary scene. He was a rotund little man with a puckish smile, a monk's tonsure, which left a fringe of hair above his eyes, and an ingratiating Irish brogue. A leprechaun, really. He started his six months at Columbia with a running high dive smack into the center of controversy. At a public gathering he gave a reprise of the teeth-rattling lecture he had given three years earlier at an Oxford symposium and which would now be quoted extensively in American newspapers. I had not met him prior to the lecture, but I took a front seat in the hall and gasped at his iconoclasm: 'If you desire to learn the secrets of meaningful narration, there are only four English novelists worth reading. Chronologically, by date of birth, they are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. You will notice that two of them are women while the other two are not English.' When the shocked whispering [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |