In Praise of Prickly Professors
Also: A 4,000-year-old mummy in Egypt, the history of the largest oil painting in the world, and more.
In The Wall Street Journal, Rachel Shteir reviews Priscilla Gilman’s memoir of her father, the critic Richard Gilman:
Thirty-six years later I can still recall exchanges with my teacher, the eminent, prickly critic Richard Gilman, who died, at 83, in 2006. My clearest memories are from a class known as Crit, short for Criticism, which I took while a first-year grad student at the Yale School of Drama. Each week, Gilman destroyed the short pieces we wrote for him, especially when we used adjectives that he considered hackneyed. He listed some of them in his 1961 essay “The Necessity for Destructive Criticism”: “haunting, striking, gripping, charming, powerful, stunning and refreshing.”
Could anything now be more out-of-fashion than Gilman’s ferocious precision about language? Back then, his pronouncements agitated and inspired me, and sometimes made students cry: “Your vocabulary is anemic!” But he was often right. These days, I frequently reflect on the distance between the hot-house world he inhabited and the grievance-filled, bureaucratic one I stumble through as a professor and critic.
Shteir notes that Gilman wrote with sensitivity and verve, but he is largely forgotten today because he wrote mainly about the theatre. His daughter isn’t writing a memoir of her father, however, to bring his work back into circulation—though the book, Shteir notes, contains “many choice quotes” and a short discussion of his book on his conversion to Catholicism. Rather, it is “an attempt at exorcism.” Gilman, apparently, was not the best father:
In its early pages, the book lingers on Gilman’s tender side. The father-teacher holds his 5-year-old daughter up to a window to see the wonder of the stormy night sky as well as its terror. In his attic studio, he play-acts the circus ringmaster for her and her brother and sister. But like many an artistic parent, he is also sometimes selfish, forcing the teenage Priscilla into the role of a “mature, adult caregiver” who soothed him when he exploded in rage or anomie.
As Gilman’s marriage deteriorates, the explosions become more forceful. His wife—Ms. Gilman’s mother, the super-agent Lynn Nesbit—grows impatient with his habits. When the couple separates in 1980, he falls apart. Ms. Gilman portrays her father during this period as a fragile depressive. He is also clownishly out of touch. To protect her from the spectacle of an undulating Mick Jagger, he shouts “get this jackass off the screen” during the trailer for a Rolling Stones concert film. Ms. Gilman sets a number of weepy father-daughter scenes at midcentury movies like Elia Kazan’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”
Shteir description of Gilman as a professor reminded me of my late dissertation director, the poet and critic Robert Rehder, who was a relatively kind man—he took me out to coffee to get to know me better when he was considering taking me on as a student—and a stickler for clear and interesting prose with an aversion to jargon and cant. I remember receiving several pages of an early draft of my dissertation with a large X through each page and the solitary exclamation “No!” written in large letters at the top.
I also remember speaking to him on the phone one Sunday evening—he had just finished his omelet, he told me, so, yes, now was a good time—about a particular passage in which he had taken me to task—again—for using jargon. He was right, of course, but there was one instance, one word, where he was obviously wrong, and I pointed this out to him and asked him if in fact the word I had chosen wasn’t the right one—the necessary one. I heard a long sigh on the other line (with Brahms playing in the background) followed by: “Do you have any real questions?” No, I said, and thanks very much for taking my call, and hung up in a rage.
But after I calmed down, I realized he was right to say what he did. I wasn’t asking a real question. I was tired of always being corrected and wanted to prove him wrong for once.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Prufrock to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.