Looking back on it, I worked with some eminent professors in my lengthy years as a college student: 1976-1989, with a couple of gaps, at the University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins, and Virginia. I played on intramural softball and basketball teams with the literary critic/theorist/gadfly Stanley Fish, who was a great teacher and a delightful conversationalist in any circumstances and, above all, had an eccentric but effective jump shot.
These professor/student relationships can be fraught, and I may not have really been mentee material in some important ways. I was always arguing with my teachers, rebelling against them as soon as they opened their mouths, which some professors receive better than others. And especially early on, I was notably arrogant and also rivalrous. I wanted to be the best student in my little cohort, even as I enacted my rebellion. And I wanted to be the best student my most admired teachers ever taught. I hesitate to admit all that, I suppose, and it feels somewhat absurd, considering where I ended up. And also, it seems useless or counterproductive, and even as the rivalries drove me to keep going, they also disabled me in certain respects.
At Maryland, I took a number of creative writing and literature seminars with the eminent poet Reed Whittemore, a DC-area literary institution, poetry editor of The New Republic, poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, friend of Ezra Pound and biographer of William Carlos Williams. I fancied myself a poet, and was the poetry editor of the campus literary magazine. Reed read all my poetry for years on end, but rather than introduce me to his publisher he looked on me askance. As I set to work on my honors thesis on the theory of poetry, he suggested I read some of the poetry and criticism of Peter Schjeldahl, who was eventually a great art critic at the Village Voice and The New Yorker. Just saying “Schjeldahl” seemed to make him happy. He'd been Whittemore's student a decade before or so. "I think he's the best mind I ever taught," he said, really pissing me off.
Whittemore liked but was not mad for my thesis, which was a "theory of poetry." He thought maybe the idea of going to grad school in philosophy made sense, because (he communicated without saying) I was never going to be a Schjeldahl, as a poet or a literary theorist. I did give up "serious" poetry after that, though I produced the occasional outburst of allegedly comic doggerel. Schjeldahl had the same problem, I guess, because he was never going to be Frank O'Hara. But then again, he ended up as the art critic at The New Yorker. Also a poet!, as his daughter's memoir (which I haven't read) puts it.
I went to graduate school in philosophy as suggested, landing at Hopkins in 1981. I gravitated toward Stanley Fish, though he wasn’t in my discipline (he was an English prof), and his prime mentee was definitely not me but definitely my close friend Michael Warner, now Seymour Knox Professor of Literature at Yale, which I’m not.
In the final stop of my mid-Atlantic college tour, I ended up at the University of Virginia in the late-1980s, working on a dissertation with one of the world's most eminent philosophers, Richard Rorty. Rorty didn’t supervise many dissertations in his career. Maybe only five, his biographers seem to think, and one of those was intellectual star and just-defeated presidential candidate Cornel West. Another was one of the most eminent living philosophers of now, the amazing genius Robert Brandom, whom Rorty had supervised at Princeton before he came to Virginia.
I've told this story a lot, but that probably shows that I can't get past it: at a meeting to discuss the 200-page second draft of my proposed dissertation, Rorty set his hand on my stack of paper, smiled, and said "Well, you're no Robert Brandom." I tried so hard not to read Brandom after that, but settled for not footnoting him much.
Let me make a few observations about these phenomena. In some ways, they are generational or periodized. Also gendered, maybe: I felt rivalries with my fellow boys and young men, many of whom didn't know I existed, for the approval of our daddy-type figures. I had complex daddy issues, I acknowledge, and I wanted to attack and refute these Major Figures even as I wanted to impress them with my own incomparable genius, far more choice than that of Peter Schjeldahl or Robert Brandom. The way young men cultivated their professor-mentors and vice versa was part of what kept academic philosophy male-dominated long after most other disciplines had effectively integrated.
Speaking of boys, I arrived in college as an egomaniac with massive self-esteem issues. I don't really know about Brandom and Schjeldahl, but maybe they did too. These fellows kicked my ass without even knowing they had and apparently went right on, but Schjeldahl, for one, never blossomed into the poet he thought he should be. Brandom's philosophy, meanwhile, has certain drawbacks, for all its massive accomplishment, and despite the fact that it brilliantly elaborates and qualifies Rorty's work in myriad respects. Well, I wish it had certain drawbacks, but Brandom has never shown any glitches at all as far as I can tell.
I wanted Reed Whittemore and Richard Rorty to beef up my ego and hence encourage my work. Whittemore and Rorty, on the other hand, may have thought that I needed to be taken down a peg. They may have thought they were doing me a favor by helping me achieve a more realistic self-assessment. And I really did need that; that's mentorship too. And I didn’t turn out to be Robert Brandom or Peter Schjeldahl, and I'm not blaming Rorty or Whittemore for that.
Instead, I blame Stanley Fish. Just joshing!
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell
