David Denby says he feels like a kid these days, which explains his alacrity in posing playfully at a photo shoot for this newspaper by plopping down on the bronze knee of William Shakespeare at the bard’s statue in Lincoln Park.
This is hardly standard behavior for a button-down, buttoned-up, bourgeois, 53-year-old New Yorker.
The recipe for Denby’s rejuvenation was his decision in 1991 to return to Columbia University, his alma mater, so he could spend a year studying the classic writings of Western thought, maligned by critics as the works of “dead, white European males” (whose ranks, of course, include Shakespeare), and then write about what he had learned.
Before taking these steps, his life was another story. From outward appearances, everything seemed ideal, and for the most part everything was. As movie critic for New York magazine since 1978, Denby enjoyed a national reputation as one of the best in the business. He and his wife, novelist Cathleen Schine, had a good marriage, two bright, healthy sons, Max, 8, and Tommy, 4, and a large, comfortable apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Yet he was beginning to suffer from a malady that is not uncommon to people of his age and class: a sagging of the spirit, a sense of being cut loose from sound moorings.
“I love what I do,” he said recently, “but I was feeling a little stale, unhappy, inauthentic, sick at heart. I suppose it was kind of a midlife crisis.”
The source of his discontent, he concluded, was what he calls “the modern state of living in the media,” which is something everyone knows about.
It is our never-ending exposure to the numbing noise and intrusive spectacle of popular culture, the constant distractions of television and movies and music and video games and computer screens, the furious flow of babble, data, scenes and sensations–in Denby’s view “a state of excitement needled with disgust.”
Describing the emptiness this atmosphere engendered, he would write: “I no longer knew what I knew. I felt that what I had read or understood was slipping away. I possessed information without knowledge, opinions without principles, instincts without beliefs.”
At the urging of his wife and with the approval of his bosses, he enrolled in Literary Humanities, or Lit Hum, and Contemporary Civilization, known as C.C., the same core-curriculum seminars that he had been required to take in 1961, when he was 18, and still are mandatory for Columbia undergraduates.
The result is “Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World” (Simon & Schuster), which has been greeted with great acclaim.
In a New York Times review, novelist Joyce Carol Oates praises Denby for his “energy, vigor, intellectual curiosity and what might be called an ecstasy of imaginative projection.”
In the Tribune, novelist Jane Smiley lauds Denby for an effort that is “alluring and readable throughout” and adds: “The greatest compliment I can give is that, at the end of each of his discussions of the great books, I was torn between getting out a copy of the book he had just discussed and reading it, and going on with Denby. In every case, I went with Denby.”
Purely on practical grounds, we can be grateful that rather than chase women, as similarly out-of-sorts middle-aged men have done, Denby chose to seek pleasure from some of the most preeminent minds in history.
In effect, he has produced the ultimate Cliffs Notes, an entertaining and perceptive look at our moral, political and literary heritage that spares us the grind which such a quest entails–and which almost prevented his admission to the Lit Hum section taught by James Shapiro, a professor of English 12 years his junior.
In the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Shapiro writes: “I didn’t doubt (Denby’s) sincerity, though I thought he must have forgotten how grueling the demands of the course were: four hours of class discussion a week, frequent papers and exams, a crushing amount of reading.”
`Exhilarated the whole year’
Over the year in both classes, Denby would be assigned staggering chunks of Homer, Sophocles and Virgil; Plato and Aristotle; the Bible, Augustine, Luther and Calvin; Montaigne and Descartes; Galileo and Machiavelli, Dante and Boccaccio; Hume, Kant, Hobbes and Locke; Goethe and Milton; Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud; Arendt, Beauvoir, Austen and Woolf–all the while continuing to review movies and follow his normal daily routines.
“I knew that 18-year-olds could go without sleep for days and still recall with some accuracy the finer points of, say, Achilles’ shield or Pericles’ funeral oration,” Shapiro writes. “Sizing him up, I doubted whether Mr. Denby had the physical stamina for the two-semester course.”
Denby, however, was determined to make it work. “I had troughs and depressions,” he said in an interview. “And there were texts I couldn’t read at first, but I was incredibly exhilarated the whole year.”
He was struck by the difference in reactions, for better or worse, that age brought to his reading.
“The students, for example, were very depressed by `Oedipus Rex.’ Here was this brilliant man who does these horrible things–kills his father, sleeps with his mother–because the gods had ordained it. They felt this was totally unfair, a tragedy of fate.
“I read it as a warning that as you become older and more successful, your very drive for dominance and success cuts you off from some vital part of yourself that could destroy you.
“The organizing metaphor is blindness. When Oedipus learns the truth, he puts out his eyes. As you become older, you become blinder. Blindness is necessary to the powerful. I’ve never met a successful person who really understood himself or herself. You blind yourself to the truth about yourself. How could an 18-year-old know that? That was something they’d have to learn for themselves.”
The book of Job in the Hebrew Scriptures was another matter. “The students properly read it as a story about a test of faith, whereas I read it rather materially and trivially as a story about someone who has everything and loses everything.
“If you’re a middle-class man and have children and worries and obligations, you do what Job does. You put a lot of blankets inside the tent and you accumulate a lot of sheep and goats and you build a big fire to scare away all the creatures of the night.
“Then everything is taken away from Job, and I thought about what would happen if the roof fell in on my family, if I was killed, if I lost everything.
“The students were right. It really is about facing your life with the utmost courage, and in a secular version of faith, I think, it means that you should live your life as fully as you can and accept the inevitable tragedies and mishaps as they come.
“I was reading it too personally, in a sense, too much as a middle-class, middle-aged American male. But all these texts have many meanings, which is why they have survived so long, and it’s inevitable that you’re going to read your own life into these things.
“That’s why my book is so autobiographical. Not that my life is so extraordinary; in fact, it’s not extraordinary, which is the point. An ordinary life, a relatively prosperous middle-class American life, has a lot to offer to these books, and these books have a lot to offer to it.
” `King Lear,’ for example, evoked memories of my mother’s last years, and Hobbes’ and Locke’s discourses on a civil society made me think of the time I was mugged. In other words, you don’t have to be a scholar to read great literature, and you don’t have to be a teenager either. Grown men and women can find strengths and sustenance in these books and can also bring things to them that could be special.”
In defense of the canon
In large part, “Great Books” is a passionate endorsement of the so-called Western canon that has been a bitter issue in the nation’s culture wars, attacked by the academic left for its exclusion of non-European cultures and women and extolled by conservatives as essential and inviolate.
“This debate was a major reason why I went back to Columbia,” Denby said. “I thought both left and right orthodoxies were hollow. . . I wanted the experience of actually reading these books again and discovering what the students’ reactions were.”
For some, he said, it has become an either-or question.
“It’s a distortion to pretend that either you read a Eurocentric curriculum or a more ethnically identified curriculum. Columbia, in fact, also requires a year of study of another culture.
“But the guiding notion is you have to begin somewhere and this culture is built around certain ideals. We have a market system of economics and strong beliefs in individualism, ethics and human rights, and these ideas don’t come from Japan or China, and they don’t come from Africa either.
“They come from Western Europe, from the Greeks and the Romans through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and through the Founding Fathers and into our society, where they get mixed with everything else.
“And if you don’t know about this stuff, you are, in a sense, alien to your society. You’re not really going to understand what the legal system is about, the property system is about, or any of the rest of it.”
At the book’s conclusion, Denby expresses his concerns about what he sees as the real threat–the media culture:
“By the end of my year in school, I knew that the culture-ideologues, both left and right, are largely talking nonsense. Both groups simplify and caricature the Western tradition. They ignore its ornery and difficult books; they ignore its actual students, most of whom have been dispossessed. Whether white, black, Asian or Latino, American students rarely arrive at college as habitual readers, which means that few of them have more than a nominal connection to the past.
“It is absurd to speak, as does the academic left, of classic Western texts dominating and silencing everyone but a ruling elite or white males. The vast majority of white students do not know the intellectual tradition that is allegedly theirs any better than black or brown students do. They have not read its books, and when they do read them, they may respond well, but they will not respond in the way that the academic left supposes.
“For there is only one `hegemonic discourse’ in the lives of American undergraduates, and that is the mass media. Most high schools can’t begin to compete against a torrent of imagery and sound that makes every moment except the present seem quaint, bloodless or dead.”
