'In the Pure Style of Grave Intelligence'

The most important service some of us can perform, especially for young readers, is simply mentioning the names of books and writers we revere and then attesting to their worth. More readers have credited me with introducing them to the novels of William Maxwell than any other. A.J. Liebling probably comes in second and Guy Davenport a distant third. 

Most schools today are profoundly provincial places, unlikely to expose students even to well-known writers who have thus far earned the literary equivalent of nihil obstat. Nor do most teachers and parents read ambitiously. Public libraries have been deeply culling their collections, reducing the chances of discovery among the shelves. Such serendipity is the soul of a library, and how when young I happened on writers as various as Franz Kafka and John Updike.

 

In 1978, David Levin published “Yvor Winters at Stanford” in the Virginia Quarterly Review. Levin joined the English department in 1952, when Winters reigned as the intimidating éminence grise, and taught there for nineteen years. Levin arrived while finishing his doctoral thesis devoted to four American historians -- Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman. At their first meeting, during a reception for new faculty members, Winters asked him, “Which one was the best?” Levin describes the ensuing conversation:

 

“I had thought very little about ranking them. They were all interesting, all valuable; what did I care about comparative judgments? I finally brought out my answer, the standard opinion: ‘I suppose Parkman was the best historian.’

 

“‘Parkman’s the worst,’ Winters replied, biting down on his pipe; ‘Motley’s the best.’ His eyes told me that he took some comic pleasure in expressing that unconventional judgment, but I knew, too, that he meant it.”

 

As a young instructor, Levin was shaken but not deterred from getting to know Winters, learning to gauge his literary judgments and ultimately respect him:

 

“Years later I saw in this first literary conversation an epitome of the most exemplary service that Winters' criticism and his personal conduct performed for me and many others. He not only provoked me to think seriously about value but repeatedly showed me the value in writers I had neglected or underestimated.”

 

Some bluntly broadcast evaluations are nothing but hot air and testosterone. Academia in my experience overflows with such behavior, most of it sheer flatulence. Levin says of Winters: “In the 15 years of our association [Winters died in January 1968], I never heard him praise a literary work in which I failed to find genuine excellence.”

 

Included in Poems in Memory of Yvor Winters on the Centenary of his Birth (edited and published by R.L. Barth, 2000), is a sonnet written by Levin, “To a Moral Navigator, Observed on His Way to Class,” written “For Yvor Winters”:

 

“Solemn as Queequeg, porting an old harpoon,

You march in sunshine, stepping forth to teach

Young navigators how to haul, to reach

The mystery of Melville, whale, typhoon.

You have not flung your quadrant at the moon,

Or thrown away your pipe, or scorned the beach,

Or, with some captains of demonic speech,

Followed dumb feeling to a blind lagoon.

 

“Yet reason must be brought to your defense.

You reach a faith too brave for dogmatists.

Unable to receive the Holy Ghost,

And knowing what your unbelief has cost,

You use dead reckoning, and meet white mists

In the pure style of grave intelligence.”

 

Levin likens Winters to Queequeg, the master harpooner, not mad Ahab. In “The Quadrant,” Chapter 118 of Moby-Dick, Ahab curses the navigational instrument and smashes it on the deck, vowing to navigate the Pequod with “the level ship's compass, and the level dead reckoning, by log and by line” -- typical self-destructive bravado. Instead, Winters shares with Queequeg “the pure style of grave intelligence.” And yes, Winters did bring a harpoon to class when teaching Moby-Dick.

[To Baceseras: Some writers have been banished from the curriculum. Others, for now, have been granted dispensation, which can be abruptly revoked.]