Man of Letters

Regarding Release of Hemingway's Letters Casts Author in New Light:

Your fascinating Hemingway report reminds me of Joseph Epstein's rapping the knucleheads he blames for the disappearing English major. Please let a professor who escalated from a Carnegie Foundation Postdoctoral grant at Penn (1957-9) to create a new course on how to cope humanistically with Mass Culture to full professor/ English chair in 1962, but walked away from tenure in 1982 because I thought (correctly) that I could serve the Humanities better as an alternative journalist, "Hazard-at-Large" in Philly, than watch my colleagues stumble before the threats of a trivialized culture instead of building mature trends within it. I note that it wasn't an Ivy college which is marvelously revealing the real Hemingway, but Penn State, long mocked as a Cow College.

Recall that in 1927 (my birth year!) Vernon Parrington gave us the first coherent overview of our newly emerging American Lit--at Washington State, another innovative Cow College. The Ivies were still playing Matthew Arnold to pre-vernaculars. That was the era when NCTE was founded to link scholarship with our public schools, which MLAers were too snooty to stoop to.Their Great Books was the theology of the newly secular. They were striving for Biblical certainties rather than aiding flourishing virtue in the undereducated.

I was teaching for 20 years before I learned accidentally from the marvelously eloquent working class Brit Richard Hoggart that the essential final clause of Arnoldian criticism was to bring the best that was thought and said "to solve the problems of the new industrial societies." The Humanities, intimidated by the rising intellectual respectability of the sciences, at first just decided to perish while publishing tenure-needed books for their peers, followed by the disgraceful decades of trying to replace literacy with European mystiphysics. The Cassuto/Epstein spat is essentially a bumbling to extricate ourselves from those two wasted decades of trying to compete with the sciences instead of teaching mass man to think for himself. The sad outcome so far is a society of kindergartners who think Russ Limbaugh and Glenn Beck really think.

In my final years I found satisfaction in futurizing my American Lit course into International English, first adding AfroAm writers, then Appalachian whites, Caribbean writers (the BBC made that possible and productive),pairing British and American writers (Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins; Whitman and Arnold.usw.when I taught several summers in London), expanding to Canada, Australia, Nigeria, and India--whose reps met my classes there. International English Lit is future-oriented: Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe are more important than minor American writers.

And the Ph.D.must also be updated: translating to English from Chinese (or any other significant modern language) might be one required Prelim field. If not linguistic, than media oriented--mastering radio or TV in explaining the Humanities. I found doing radio and TV in Hawaii, for example, taught me very effectively how Asians regarded Americans, an understanding essential as they more and more share our global cultures. We will always cherish Shakespeare. But it's the diverse cultures interacting today we must civilize.

The wranglings of Epstein, however true his complaints often are, seem too old man grumpy for an openeyed Humanism.The past at its best is not always pertinent to our humane agenda today. Let's keep our eye on the ball:millions in Africa are dying of starvation and curable diseases. Millions of Americans, due to the fiscal shenanigans of Ivy economists who chose to side with the Cashocracy, are sinking into both fiscal and cultural poverty. How do you remain humane under such circumstance?