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Please send these to cumlaudesociety@mac.com
I have been asked to speak today to those who graduate with the praise of this school, and I hope in so doing that I speak to those who have been welcomed up here today, and that I address also those in the audience who receive plaudits for your performances on the stage, on the playing field and courts, in your community service activities, and in our art and dance studios. I thought about what I could possibly say to you, just in the midst of your senior spring and approaching your freshman fall---looking back to last year and forward to next, with, I imagine, some trepidation and some relief, a good dose of glee, and maybe a little bit of sadness.
I thought about what must be your wide array of interests, achievements, and ambitions, some of you particularly skilled in the sciences, I'm sure, some in languages and some in lacrosse, some in music and some in mathematics, some in friendship. I thought about what, ten years ago, when I sat in this place with my own classmates, who are now lawyers, actresses, psychologists, songwriters, businesswomen, political activists, teachers, mothers-when we sat in this place, what we would have liked to know.
I thought about this ceremony-this acknowledgement of all those varied interests, achievements and ambitions; this offering up of praise for your commitments to your talents-and I thought about all the other ceremonies of the coming spring at GA. With these ceremonies, the school takes time away from the good activity of educating you, to praise you. And these ceremonies of praise set off you graduates as if the laurels bestowed here are armor to protect and help you on your next adventure. Are they? Isn't praise more a salve than a source of protection? Is this praise just a carrot, a way of compelling us, headlong, into the next challenge? A method of encouraging the Gatsby in us to run faster, stretch out our arms further, until one fine morning…. Is our praise today designed to exclude, to separate, to distinguish?
I don't think it's any of these things. You have done some outstanding things at this school: some of you started here fourteen years ago with the alphabet, and since then you have learned whole languages; you started with adding and made it through calculus; you unsludged the sludge in your sludge tests; you read some of the great literature of all time and wrote your own poems and stories …….the list goes on. And you have done these things, many of you, when there have been other distractions, appealing alternatives. You have taken seriously the fact that you are a member of a fine academic institution, and you have gotten down to the business of getting educated. You have had at your fingertips dedicated teachers as committed to your development as they were to that of students who preceded you by ten, twenty, thirty years in some cases, and as they will be also to the members of the classes of 2018, 2028, 2038. You have done what your teachers have asked you to do, and you have done it well.
But again, the school is not, and the society is not, praising you because you've followed instructions. Rather, the school and the society praise you today because, in doing these things, you have done what is right.
This is why, then, the motto of the cum laude society does not stop at mentioning that it recognizes academic achievement in secondary schools, but rather, as you heard from Mr. Fout, that it recognizes academic achievement, "for the purpose of promoting aretê excellence; dikê justice; and timê honor." And similarly, Greenwich Academy's purpose is not just to prepare us for college, but to prepare us for living, putting us through our paces here, toward the end of ingenium faciendum, building our characters, or, to parse the etymology a bit, making or shaping that which has been born inside of us. I believe that the praise that the society and the school want to bestow upon you today has a moral purpose: we want you to know, and feel, inside of yourself, as your own source of strength, that not just our laws but our lessons too can be wise restraints that set us free. When I found this out for myself, about five years ago, five years after I'd sat in your chairs, I was at Cambridge. It was the year after college, and I'd set out, partly from inertia, to pursue an academic track. I realized there that academia wasn't the right place for me-it wasn't right for my personality or my set of mind. I remember going running that year, for the first time since GA, along the gorgeous River Cam. I exhausted myself with running---I didn't know what else to do-until the day I found I was stepping in time to Robert Frost:
Until we found that it was ourselves
We were withholding from the land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
I left Cambridge that spring and I didn't start the PhD program that I was supposed to start at Princeton the following fall. But it wasn't just a poem that set me out on midtown Manhattan looking for a job, highly educated but without any relevant skills---it was my understanding, from the Emerson reading I'd done in my junior year here, that: There is a time in everyone's education when we arrive at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that we must take ourselves for better, for worse, as our portion…. The power which resides in us is new in nature, and none of us knows what that is which each of us can do, nor do any of us know it until we have tried. I'd reached that time in my education, and I had to be brave in that moment, and bold, to set out on a life and a way of living I hadn't imagined for myself before.
I went to work at a small consulting firm, first. The one other woman at the firm took me out to lunch before I started and told me, as if this were completely ordinary advice, to be careful not to show my toes, or my shoulders at any time; to make sure I walked a wide circle around the floor rather than directly past the CEO's office; and, above all, never to wear perfume or any other scents in the office. The CEO didn't like scents. But I have to say it was a good place to work. It was a busy time in the market and a small place, so I had opportunities to learn, and I had a manager who taught me the lessons in statistics and financial analysis that most of my colleagues learned in college. And that was how I learned lessons in patience that I will not soon forget.
I remember the day we finished our first project. We had been at the office through the night, my manager, another analyst named PJ, and I taking comments first from a partner in Seattle and then from one in Australia, having the production staff show us why we couldn't move those PowerPoint boxes around in the way they had wanted us to. We had a printer break down the hour before the meeting, and as my manager took the faulty cartridges apart, the other analyst and I taught ourselves to bind the books that had already printed. We hurried out to Madison Avenue and when we couldn't find a cab, I took my high heels off, and the two of us ran, with our piles of books, to that meeting. I love the memory of that day, where I learned again every lesson about teamwork, and persistence, that I'd first learned at Greenwich Academy. I enjoyed the work of my new job, and the analysis it required, but I saw then that I really enjoyed also the shared efforts, the dynamic learning from others, and the presentation of a final recommendation, which would be objectively judged against the business realities that would, over time, come to pass.
I moved to Morgan Stanley's investment banking division after some months, because I knew I would have a more thorough and rigorous training there. It was another difficult transition - I did not know if I could do the work at first, but I also knew-again remembering Emerson-that I wouldn't know whether I could, until I tried. And, as I tried, again through many long nights, I found that once I was through the raw intellectual challenge of understanding this new industry, the real difficulty was in maintaining my distance from it, and my sense of self.
I remembered what Ray Maguire, then the chairman of the mergers and acquisitions department, had said when he welcomed our assembled group of starting analysts. He told us, with the bit of bluster that is typical of the industry, that he had in his time seen a lot of analysts succeed and more analysts fail. But he thought one thing distinguished those who succeeded it was a bean of strength, a seed of separation from all the hub-bub and the busyness of what we do. For me, that bean has been comprised of the lessons I've learned in my education, at Greenwich Academy and beyond, the perspectives I'd internalized from these learnings and made my own. There was Frost and Emerson, and there is also Paul: Do not neglect the gift that is in you, which was given down with prophesies when the council of elders laid their hands upon you.
And what a council we have here. Mrs. Wasserman, Mrs. Dixon, Mrs. Cragin, Ms. Hyman, Ms. Schmidt-Fellner, Mrs. Guggenheimer, Ms Hudson (now Finch) we had so many classes together, and you gave me so many gifts. Let me recall in particular the lesson Mr. Murdock used to repeat: that it is always your choice whether you do your homework or not; and that, while girls may learn better in single-sex mathematics environments-if we do do our homework, we certainly will learn better than the boys do, and we'll show them that, by beating them in the competitions, every time. It is not that infrequently, now (in fact it happened yesterday) that I'm the only woman in a board room, and very often when I am, I remember the first year that Greenwich Academy went to Math Counts, in our kilts in the spring of 1992: though there were middle school boys laughing at us, and middle-school teachers who looked askance at Mr. Murdock: we were the ones laughing and clutching our trophies on the van ride home.
Do not neglect the gift that Mr. Schwartz gives us, every year, by spending endless hours after school, guiding us in our discussions of piles of students' poems and prose, helping us to think carefully about what the elements of these pieces are that touch us, and to decide which to share by publishing them. This spring break as I understand it, will be his twentieth, spent splicing text and PhotoShopping pictures; I fondly remember the decisions and revisions of Daedalus X, and I have enjoyed reading eleven to nineteen. Mr. Schwartz, Mrs. Tamalonis, Fay, Caity, Jordan, Caroline: I look forward to number 20. These are beautiful books and a testament to a great dedication and a great number of lessons learned.
I often remember the gift of confidence that Mrs. McKinley gave me, when I was a very shy sixth grader and very eager to avoid her public speaking classes. I am not so sure that I deserved to deliver my speech to the whole of the Middle School, but she presented this to me as an opportunity. After that, presenting to my homeroom didn't seem so bad. Mrs. Berman also gave me an important gift of confidence, after I penned a history paper that was far too ambitious for its scope, which ended up being just about the worst document I have ever written. When she took me aside after class to discuss it, the first thing she said was that, when she read this paper, she knew what paper I had tried to write. She looked me in the eye and told me that she was glad that I'd "stepped off the curb," and taken the intellectual risk I had taken. She also gave me some advice on how, the next time, I might make it across the street.
And I hope that every time we run, we'll remember the gifts of Ms. Meiklejohn. When I was a student, Ms. Meiklejohn joined the cross-country team not because was our coach but because she wanted to run. She loved to run. I think she was the first person that I knew who did. I remember hearing her come up behind us on the course, running two steps to my every one, offering words of encouragement, and then passing us by. I've started to love running too, and I'll run my first marathon later this spring. I will imagine, as I run, that I can still hear her behind me, and then ahead.
Thanks to Meredith FitzPatrick, I'll remember too the words Ms. Meiklejohn shared with Devan: "We are capable of far more than we think. Limits are discovered only by going all out with no thought of failure." Let us go all out. The gift that we have been given, which has been born inside of us, is now our character, which it is our responsibility to protect, and develop, and with which we can bring forth good in the world. This gift can be a source of strength and of courage as we set forth on our next adventures. As you set out if you'll forgive just a little more Frost-you're likely to find that the land before you is unstoried, artless, unenhanced but, if you go all out, you can, such as you are, give yourselves to it, outright. And that is how you'll find that it is not today's praise that is your armor, but the reason for the praise, which is this gift, which is something like a star and which no one can take away.
Thank you, Class of 2008, Mr. Fout, Mrs. King, Greenwich Academy, for having me here today. My good wishesto all of you.
Honor and Learning
Cum laude. I have always liked the sound of that. It is Latin, of course. And it means "with honor."
I would like to make my contribution to this important occasion by saying just a few words about honor and about its connection with learning. I do not think it is by accident that cum laude and strong learning go together, and I want to tell you why I think that.
"Honor" is a special word. The Latin&emdash;cum laude&emdash;makes it all that much fancier, but even the English word "honor" has a special character to it. We don't use it as part of everyday speech. Like a navy blue suit or our best china and silver, we drag it out only for special occasions. Why?
When we honor someone or something, we do more than just applaud it or celebrate it. Honor is not "hootin' and hollerin'." It is a quieter thing. When Abraham Lincoln finished his Gettysburg Address before the thousands gathered on that blood-soaked battlefield, the people did not erupt in cheers and fireworks because he had made a great speech. Instead, a deep, rich, respectful silence that lasted long moments was the first response. The people knew instinctively that something finer than mere impressive speech-making had taken place here. They knew that a profoundly honorable man had given voice to the deepest truths about the very meaning of our nation. He honored the dead; he honored the cause of justice; he honored the great purposes for which our nation exists.
Honor is a special word that we use only on rare occasions because it tells us not just ordinary things about who's up and who's down, about who won the lottery or the pennant, or about who got the best of somebody else. No, honor does not tell us about any of that. Honor tells us instead about what truly is of most worth. It tells us about what things have real substance, about what has lasting significance amongst us. When we are trying to speak of things that matter, that is when we call upon this special word and say cum laude, with honor.
It is no accident that honor and learning are linked. The reason is that learning is of lasting significance. Among all the things we human beings can do, learning is one of just a handful that is truly of most worth. (Among the others, I would include just a few: love and compassion, doing justice, having faith and hope.) Learning is fundamental. It is basic to our being human.
When I talk about learning this way, I have something more in mind than the simple accumulation of knowledge. That is included, of course, but it is not enough just to cram our heads full of information for long enough to score high on the exam. If we are to honor leaning, rather than only applaud and celebrate it, there must be something more to it than that. And there is.
Learning is coming into contact with reality. It involves openness to what is&emdash;to what is other than ourselves, to what exists outside of us in its own distinctiveness. Learning is "how we make community with the unavailable other, with realities that would elude us without the connective tissue of knowledge."1
In a wonderful book entitled The Courage to Teach, a friend of mine, Parker Palmer, tells the story of the Nobel prize-winning scientist, Barbara McClintock. McClintock "became fascinated early in her career with the mysteries of genetic transposition. Though her research was often dismissed as wildly unorthodox, she pursued it into discoveries that changed the map of modem genetics...."2 McClintock's biographer was fascinated by this unusual woman. She was especially eager to figure out "what enabled McClintock to see further and deeper into the mysteries of genetics than her colleagues."3 McClintock's answer was this: You must have "the patience to 'hear what the material has to say to you,' the openness to 'let it come to you.' Above all, [you] must have 'a feeling for the organism,'.... As one commentator puts it, McClintock 'gained valuable knowledge by empathizing with her corn plants, submerging herself in their world and dissolving the boundary between object and observer.'"4 The great Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, called this "experiencing the other side."5
"Experiencing the other side," gaining a "feeling for the organism"&emdash;or the equation, or the poem, or the historical event&emdash;for whatever it is you are seeking to know. That is what learning is&emdash;an activity so fundamental to being human that it makes us who we are.
How do we learn to learn in that way, at that level? That question has a very simple (but still not-so-simple) answer. We learn at that level by paying attention. What does it mean to pay attention?
The French philosopher Simone Weil once wrote: "Most often attention is confused with a kind of muscular effort. If one says to one's student: 'Now you must pay attention,' the teacher will probably see the students contracting their brows, holding their breath, stiffening their muscles. If after two minutes the teacher asks them what they have been paying attention to, they cannot reply. They have been concentrating on nothing. They have not been paying attention. They have been contracting their muscles."6
Attention is something different; it feels different. "Attention," Simone Weil says, "consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object.... [Our] thought should be waiting, ready to receive...."7 All our mistakes come from doing things too quickly; we seize upon some idea or solution too hastily without really attending to it.8
So what must be done in order to learn rightly? Simone Weil suggests two things. First, we must "work without any wish to gain good marks, to pass examinations, to win school successes; without any reference to [our) natural abilities and tastes; and by applying [ourselves] equally to all tasks, with the idea that each one will help form in [us] the habit of attention..."9
The second thing is "to take great pains to examine squarely and to contemplate attentively and slowly each school task in which we have failed, seeing how unpleasing and second rate it is, without seeking any excuse or overlooking any mistake that our teachers point out, trying to get down to the origin of each fault. There is a great temptation to do the opposite, to give a sideways glance at the corrected exercise if it is bad and to hide it immediately. Most of us do this nearly always. We have to withstand this temptation. Incidentally, nothing is more necessary for academic success, because, despite all our efforts, we work without making much progress when we refuse to give our attention to the faults we have made and our [teacher's] corrections."10
If you use your school years in this way, says Simone Weil, something will grow in you which is very precious. "Happy," she says, "are those who pass their adolescence and youth in developing this power of attention.... Whoever goes through years of study without developing this attention within him or herself has lost a great treasure."11
Learning of this kind&emdash;learning made full by attention, learning that puts us in community with realities that would elude us without the connective tissue of knowledge&emdash;is so precious a thing that it calls forth honor. That is why it is more than appropriate that we gather here today, put on a blue suit and a white dress shirt, and trot out the Latin words cum laude.
I hope that all of you&emdash;not just those who are being inducted today into The Cum Laude Society, but all of you have gotten some strong taste here at Park Tudor School of what it means to pay attention and to learn in the ways I have been trying to describe. I hope you all are experiencing a good bit of the peculiar happiness Simone Weil says comes from attentive learning. And I hope, given the taste of happiness in learning you have had, that you will pursue it all your life long.
With learning of that kind, prizes and awards may come&emdash;or they may not. Because you have learned in this way, some of you may receive applause from the gathered crowds; others will not. But whether such external rewards come or not will matter little. For in true learning, there will be honor. And that is all that really counts.
Cum laude. I have always liked the sound of that. Now you know why. Congratulations, honorees. My good wishes to you all.
James Atlas is the founding editor of the Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives Series. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker, he was an editor at The New York Times Magazine for many years. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, Vanity Fair, and many other journals. He is the author of Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, which was nominated for the National Book Award.
I have been given many instructions about how to proceed here &endash; many prohibitions and rules - so I must proceed in a gingerly fashion. The first edict was not to refer to my daughter in my remarks, for that would embarrass her; also not to refer to the fact that I wasn't referring to her. All that I was prepared to do. As Molly once put it in her customary way, when I asked if I could quote something she had said in an article I was writing, "No, Dad, that's off the record. In fact, my whole life is off the record." So, I was prepared to protect my sources, as we say in the journalism business. But when I learned that she was going to be introducing me, it all became much more complicated. Should I ignore the fact that I'm being introduced by my own daughter? That would be awkward, so let me acknowledge her, without making a big deal about it, and thank her not only for introducing me but also for being the person she is. Much as I would like to take the entire credit for this person, I think it's only fair - and anyway, it will give me great pleasure - to acknowledge the role that Nightingale has played in this process. I don't know if you realize how amazing this place is. The level of academic excellence at Nightingale, especially to a graduate of a public school, is stunning: the teachers I've gotten to know - Mr. Loughery, Mr Bikk, Ms Sand, Ms Sheerin, Dr. Murphy, Ms Schutt - are more sophisticated, more passionate about their work, probably more erudite than the teachers I had in college. The school's atmosphere, as you walk the halls, hums with scholarly intensity. The class of 2002 surpassed my level of knowledge about world history, I would estimate, by the time you were sophomores. Those in advanced Latin seem to find translating Ovid as untaxing an exercise as going to "abs and glutes." The reading list of the senior English class - Seamus Deane, Jim Crace, Elizabeth Hardwick - would prepare a child for a slot as a daily reviewer for The New York Times. But it's not a knowledge confined only to books that you imbibe at this school. It's an exposure to the world. The visit of the Tibetan monks, who came to Nightingale for a week last winter to share their culture with the students; the panel discussion on Islam after September 11th; the recent NBS Authors Night, at which you could buy books from star writers like Anna Quindlen and Ken Auletta: you may take these things for granted, but the only writer who ever came to my high school - and Evanston Township High School was once ranked as the best public high school in the nation - was a local furrier, Leonard Karas, who wrote a polemical column for The Evanstonian that he paid for as an advertisement, called "Let the Fur Fly."
But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Nightingale is the sense of community it fosters. When your child attends this school, in a sense you attend this school. The lectures and coffees for parents, the family social events, the year-end ceremonies bring us all into the fold. We live in a highly atomized society, one in which the institutions that used to provide coherence - church, family, neighborhood - have lost much of their authority; a school like Nightingale works actively to compensate for that loss. And, not to be too solemn about it, there is Fathers Who Cook, a chance for the fathers to contribute to the school's coffers. One year, I recall - though it's a little hazy, given that the owner of Patroon, Nightingale father Ken Aretsky, was supplying the wine - after some of the fathers began raucously heckling the entertainment, the normally measured and restrained Ms Hutcheson, perhaps fearing the outbreak of a food-fight, could be heard shouting over the microphone, "Now there are a lot of drunken fathers out there..."
Well, let me not dwell any longer on the splendors of this institution and get to the advice part. Flaubert, when he was a young man, complained about "the tedious crowd of grey-haired, burnt-out over-forties who constantly patronized him with the words, 'Vous changerez, vous changerez.' 'You'll change, you'll change.'" I don't want to be a member of that tedious crowd (and over-forty is generous; in my case it's way over-forty), wagging my finger and saying, "You'll see what it's like out there." But the fact is that, however exemplary this school has been in teaching you the fundamentals of world culture, the values necessary to lead a good life, the manners and morals you'll need to make your way in the world, it has perhaps been a benign environment, too warm, too nurturing, to prepare you for the challenges and inevitable setbacks that lie ahead. (In other words, you'll see what it's like out there.) As much as you have learned here, my guess is that you'll discover, as you make your way through life, how unprepared you were for it. Not in terms of your ability to identify the underlying causes of the Reformation or the structure of a molecule or other useful data of that sort - all of which you'll forget anyway - but, on a basic level, how to get a job, plan your wedding, furnish a home, assemble a crib; how to buy a car or find an investment counselor; how to dress; how to use an oyster fork. Sometimes I think of writing a book employing the title of this talk: Life: An Amateur's Guide. But then I think I still don't know enough to write it. The challenges you'll face negotiating the details of daily life, as daunting as they are, pale beside the tougher, more baffling challenges you'll face as you get older: how to deal with disappointment, failure, loss, financial crises, aging, death and, hovering in the background of all these personal and private dramas, the intrusions of history, which disrupt the best-laid plans - witness the events of 9/11, events beyond the capacity of human beings to imagine. Life - if I may hazard a generality - is like those medieval maps that inscribed in the unknown corners, "Here be dragons." You just don't know what lies beyond the borders of your own familiar world.
One of the most curious features of American life is the way it requires everyone to start from scratch, to assemble a career the way we assemble our first apartments, find a spouse and start a family: that is to say, without the benefit of guidance. No one takes us aside to offer friendly advice - No Uncle Morty put his arm around me at the country club and walked me out to a shady elm beside the first tee to murmur the suggestion that I might want to call to his business partner, who's looking to hire a young associate... I'm not sure where I got this idyllic image, maybe from my grandpa Sam, who brought his cousins and his nephews and his in-laws into his wool business whether they were qualified or not, which most of them weren't. But for most people - or most people of my generation, anyway - getting a job was a mysterious and random process, as unfathomable as the weather. I never visited the Office of Graduate and Career Planning at my college, nor do I know anyone who ever did; but that's because we knew intuitively that it wouldn't help us. There were no books on the subject, no useful family lore. You're on your own: the mantra of American life.
I was slow to grasp this fact. It wasn't until I was a few years out of college that it occurred to me - a revelation prompted by my dwindling bank account - that it was time to get a job. Also, I had the disconcerting example of the cum laude speaker two years ago, my dear friend Jonathan Galassi, father of Isabel, class of 2000, and Beatrice, class of 2004, who precedes me in every important life decision. Jon bought a briefcase and a suit, arranged interviews with publishers in New York, and became a book editor. How did he learn to do this? I wondered. Where did he get the knowledge? Was there a handbook he'd consulted? A book with some basic title like How to Get a Job? I asked him about this some years later, and he professed to be as bewildered as I was. Eventually, from hanging around with him, I realized that what he was doing all the time was noticing: if we were in a friend's garden, he would ask about each plant and flower; if you were cooking dinner, he would look over your shoulder and ask about each ingredient; if you went on a trip to Italy, he had to know exactly which churches you visited, and what frescos you saw. The world was his textbook.
Jon knew he wanted to go into the book business. I had no idea what I wanted to do, except that I wanted to be a writer. But it was hard to make a living as a writer on your own, so I got a job at Time magazine; on the masthead it listed what were called "staff writers," and that was good enough for me. When I arrived at the magazine and was assigned an office, though, no one came and explained my job. There was no "orientation." I sat at my desk for weeks, and might still be sitting there now if I hadn't finally gone and stood in the doorway of the adjacent cubicle, where a young woman sat hunched over a typewriter - we used typewriters in those days, which must sound as remote to most of you as if I'd said, "We cooked our meals over an open fire." She explained to me how the system worked. (Her name, by the way, was Michiko Kakutani, and she would go on to become a famous critic at the New York Times.) Early each week, staff writers, known as "floaters," were assigned a section of the magazine - Science, Culture, Nation - and a story topic. Our job was to write a story based on the files we got from reporters in the field; at TIME, you didn't have to know anything about a subject in order to produce a story. I wrote on Japanese lingerie tycoons and Italian judicial scandals; I wrote an article about the Nambikwara, a tribe that had just been discovered in the Amazonian rainforest. The fact that I didn't know how to write a news story was no obstacle: when my copy was returned to me by a top-editor late on the night before "close," it had been entirely rewritten. There were no by-lines at TIME in those days, so it didn't matter; but it was hard to impress my parents. "Hey, Mom and Dad," I'd say excitedly over the phone. "Turn to page 36 of this week's issue. That story about the proliferation of kangaroos in Australia? I wrote it."
I had even less experience for my next job, as an editor at The New York Times Book Review. I had never edited a line. Long after everyone had gone home at night, I would sit in front of my computer in the now-darkened office, the screen of my terminal casting an eerie green light out over the room, pruning and arranging sentences and inserting style changes; by my side was The New York Times Guide to Style, the book I'd been handed on my first day of work. That was the extent of my "job training."
My other vocation, as a biographer, also came about by accident. I had gone to Oxford after college on a fellowship and had wandered around those beautiful old buildings for a year trying to find a tutor. You didn't enroll in classes over there; you studied under the supervision of a tutor, and I had been assigned John Bayley, later to achieve fame as the husband of Iris Murdoch. (You might know him as Jim Broadbent, the Hollywood version, who won an Oscar for his performance in Iris.) Bayley had no interest in teaching, however, and would hide behind a literal wall of books whenever I ventured into his office. "You're doing fine, my boy," he would cry, his quavery voice emanating from somewhere behind that intimidating fortress of erudition. "I'll just sign your letter" - the one confirming that I had completed a term's work and was thus entitled to my stipend.
Fortunately, my second year I wandered into the office of an English professor who was from the Midwest like me, and was also perhaps the greatest literary biographer of his age: Richard Ellmann, author of a biography of James Joyce that I had read and admired. Under his tutelage, I came to understand that biography, in the right hands, could be an art form like any other, capable of telling a story, evoking a life, illuminating history - a genre as vivid and compelling as the novel. When I returned to this country - without a degree and without any idea of what to do with my life - a college friend who had gone into publishing suggested I write a biography of Delmore Schwartz, a poet who had died under tragic circumstances a few years earlier. I had always loved Delmore's work - or the handful of his poems I'd read in anthologies. I was curious about his life, or the little I knew about it - how he had squandered his early promise and died alone in a hotel in Midtown Manhattan. It sounded like a good idea. My friend Tom got me a contract and said, "Now go write a book."
In order to get access to Delmore's papers, I had to deal with Dwight Macdonald, who was perhaps the foremost critic of his day and the person in charge of the poet's estate. I have a vivid memory of the first time we met: Dwight had an office at The New Yorker, and he was wearing a Caribbean-blue tropical shirt. "What makes you think you could write his biography?"
"Well, no one else has done it," I said. Dwight laughed. I was twenty-four: I had never written a book, needless to say - and certainly not a biography. What did make me think I could do it? There was no biography school, no certified biographer's license you could apply for, no Biography for Dummies handbook. So I decided to teach myself: over the next three years, I read just about every major biography ever written, from the 18th century onwards, studying the structure, the organization, the style. I also got help; I found someone to teach me how to write: in other words, a mentor. Dwight, at that point, was near the end of his writing career: he was supposed to be writing his memoirs, which would have been a great book, but he had writer's block and he drank too much and he was lazy. So instead, he became obsessed with my book, and ended up editing the whole manuscript, page-by-page and line-by-line. The chapters I sent him came back marked up like freshman themes. His criticism - and occasional praise - defaced every page. "Why summarize what the letter will tell the reader in twenty-five seconds?" he exploded over some lame paraphrase. "You're like a museum guide who talks too much." When I glossed over a religious crisis in Delmore's life, he noted simply: "weasel." (I knew what he meant.)
He was comically sarcastic. Quoting a journal entry in which Delmore confided his anxieties, I summed up: "No more succinct or thorough evaluation of Delmore's malady is to be found in all his work" - to which Macdonald retorted: "And no more vague recapitulation of the main aspects of D's malady that have been described a dozen times. You keep wandering back to the old bone yard like a dog that's forgotten just where he buried that bone." And when, only a page later, I returned to the subject yet again, he exclaimed: "MY GOD, you're back sniffing around again for that lost bone already!?"
I subsisted on crumbs of praise. "Trust you realize that I, unlike the sundial, only record the cloudy hours," he marked at the bottom of one heavily scored page. There was an occasional "good" or "brilliant" or "masterful" (amended to the correct "masterly") to keep me going - and, once, a terse but eloquent "Ah!" The manuscript had a battle-scarred look; there were singed holes where smoldering cigarette ash had been scattered over the page, and one chapter, edited from the hospital bed where Macdonald was recovering from an operation, arrived in the mail wrapped in gauze, the pages smeared with blood.
"Be a (literary) man, not a (research) mouse," he exhorted me. In other words, write in your own voice. But the other crucial thing I learned from Dwight was: enlist others to help you find your way. It's something I still do: when I was writing my biography of the novelist Saul Bellow, a book on which I spent ten years, I was having dinner one night in a Chinese restaurant in Chicago with a professor at the University who was famous for his vicious opinions. He and Bellow had had a feud. The professor was raging on in his usual sneering manner, insulting this one and that one; and I was halfway through my pork fried rice when it occurred to me: this is the guy to read my manuscript. I asked him, and he agreed. The result was a 16,000-word memo with exactly one sentence of praise - "an interesting start, Mr. Atlas" - followed by thirty pages of brutal criticism. It was worth it: get your criticism early or you'll get it when it's too late.
My first biography was easier to write than my second, and I have an idea why. When you don't know what you're doing, you're more free. You don't worry so much about your mistakes, because you haven't made any yet. But there was another reason why I found the second book hard to write: Bellow was a big success. He won the Nobel Prize and every other prize; he gorged on praise and attention. Delmore, by contrast, died alone and broke. I doubt that will happen to me - after all, I'm done paying Nightingale tuition - but I could identify with it. "Success," declared Winston Churchill, "is the ability to go from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm." By that definition, I qualify as a success. Is this habit of dwelling on reversals just a function of my morbid temperament, or does it resonate with everyone? I wrote a piece in The New Yorker a few years ago called "The Art of Failing," in which I described some of my own most traumatic failures - an early novel that was rejected, a later novel that was published and panned - and even quoted from my despairing journals. It got a larger response than anything I've ever written, and some of the people I heard from were hardly what you would consider failures. I must name-drop to make my point: I heard from Norman Mailer, from the playwright James Lapine, from Tom Brokaw. The Nightingale father Peter Jennings called me on the phone. (I kept waiting to hear from Dan Rather.)
Why did these people, who had achieved so much worldly success, respond to a meditation on failure? My guess is that it described, not any actual experience of failure - though all of us fail on occasion - but how they felt. The missteps, the wrong turns, the stumbles - "those terrible gaffes," in the words of the writer Martin Amis, "those flops that make our hands fly to our faces, that make us stop dead on the street and babble to drown out the memory." What Amis is describing is the private sense of inadequacy that we carry within us, the sense of forever falling short. Is that a good thing to feel, or a destructive thing? To my mind, exercised in moderation, it's a good thing; it provides a corrective to our exceptionalism, our sense of being special. I'm not saying we shouldn't appreciate ourselves; a little self-appreciation is healthy. But mindfulness - a wonderful word central to Buddhist philosophy - mindfulness of the fragility and transience of all things, including our most cherished achievements, serves to keep us humble. I have, in my approaching late middle age, taken to reading up on religion. This creates certain tensions at home. My free-thinking daughter, on her housing questionnaire for college, expressed concern that roommates who were conservatives or religious fanatics would find her annoying. She's afraid I'll buy a tatami mat, shave my head - an easy job for a barber at this point - and turn our living room into a meditation center. But I can't resist quoting from a book called Ordinary Mind that I've been reading under the covers with a flashlight late at night. "Each moment, life as it is - the only teacher. Practice is nothing more than an ongoing awareness of this identity of ourselves and life. Life, if we can bear to listen, reminds us of this simple truth moment after moment. And it has an endless supply of voices at its disposal when it wishes to call out to us. Do you have an equal number with which to respond?"