{"id":58834,"date":"2013-09-03T13:31:21","date_gmt":"2013-09-03T17:31:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=58834"},"modified":"2013-09-03T16:05:33","modified_gmt":"2013-09-03T20:05:33","slug":"in-memoriam-john-hollander","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/09\/03\/in-memoriam-john-hollander\/","title":{"rendered":"In Memoriam: John Hollander"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"hollanderlarge\"<\/a><\/p>\n

During his five-decade career as a poet, the late John Hollander was a frequent contributor to\u00a0<\/i>The Paris Review. He was also renowned as a scholar and critic. Here he is remembered by two former students, our contributor Jeff Dolven and editor Lorin Stein.<\/i><\/p>\n

John Hollander once told me a story that served him as a kind of ur-scene of explanation. As a boy he was sitting with his father at the breakfast table, and he asked, apropos of nothing he could later recall, \u201cDad, what is a molecule?\u201d By way of an answer, his father reached into the sugar bowl and lifted out a cube.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo what is this?\u201d his father asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cSugar,\u201d said John. Next his father set the cube down on the table and rapped it sharply with a teaspoon, so that it broke into coarse crystals.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd what is it now?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSugar,\u201d said John again.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell then,\u201d said his father, \u201ca molecule is the smallest piece of sugar you can get that\u2019s still sugar.\u201d The grown-up John delivered the last sentence like a punchline, laughing and widening his eyes and spreading his hands. <\/p>\n

John was a true poet-critic, in whose work poem and essay inform one another and sometimes change places. One mark of their fellow traveling is a shared commitment to the art of explanation. The basic principles of the sugar-cube story are everywhere in his prose, especially in his perpetual delight at the precision and elegance of a good definition. His virtuoso guide to poetic form, Rhyme\u2019s Reason<\/em>, begins by telling us that \u201cThe study of rhetoric distinguishes between tropes, or figures of meaning such as metaphor and metonymy, and schemes, or surface patterns of words. Poetry is a matter of trope; and verse, of scheme or design.\u201d Could it be said in fewer words? Another Hollanderian impulse is expressed here too, his love of taxonomy, dividing a subject into molecular simples. Many of his great essays make their sense of fundamental topics\u2014like the making of refrains, or asking questions in poetry, or answering them\u2014by counting the possibilities. In \u201cPoetic Answers,\u201d an answer can be a fact, a promise, an imperative; it can bring closure, or refuse it; and on and on, with examples drawn from anywhere and everywhere in English poetry.<\/p>\n

If you read \u201cBlue Wine<\/a>,\u201d you\u2019ll see the same mind at work, or at play. (John loved to consider and confuse the two.) The poem got its start on a visit to Saul Steinberg\u2019s house, where he saw a line of curiously labeled, clear bottles arrayed on a window sill, all filled with the same blue liquid. The poem\u2019s root question is, What is that stuff? and each of its eleven sections offers a hypothesis, indeed, several hypotheses. Some \u201cwise old wine people\u201d speculate that it is red in the cask, blue in the light, the opposite of blood; or that it is no particular blue, but the cosmic blue of generality itself. Then again, it may have been made by vintners after a recipe in Plutarch\u2019s lost essay \u201cOn Blue Wine.\u201d Or again, perhaps it turned blue in the cask at the laugh of a Zen master, who posed its surprising color to his students as a koan. Or it is German, Das Rheinblau; or French, Ch\u00e2teau la Tour d\u2019Eau; or Romanian, \u201cthe funny old \/ Half-forgotten Vin Albastru.\u201d And so on: the poem is giddy with is own answers, its self-begetting explanations.<\/p>\n

Of course, as Wittgenstein reminds us, in one of John\u2019s favorite aphorisms, all explanations come to an end somewhere. It was important to how he understood his own career that somewhere along the line he turned away from \u201cessayistic speculation\u201d and began to write \u201cless discursively, more puzzlingly\u201d\u2014so he told The Paris Review<\/em> in 1985. The explanations, like many in \u201cBlue Wine,\u201d become as likely to be questions of their own. But the desire to explain\u2014almost compulsive, a motor for so many poems\u2014stayed with him, even if he sometimes chose to stop somewhere short of the final, molecular (not to say atomic) simplicity, or of the blue clarity of daylight. As generations of his students know, that compulsion animated him as a teacher too, a vocation tangled up with John the poet and John the critic just as much as they were with one another. I was one of his students, as an undergraduate learning versification (the same class that Lorin took), as a graduate student writing about Spenser, and as an occasional ephebe on the telephone ever since. I learned more than I can myself explain.<\/p>\n

Another of John\u2019s favorite definitions was to say of a joke that it was \u201ca short oral fiction with a punchline.\u201d I always assumed the definition was itself a joke, since it so egregiously postponed the answer. (So what is a punchline?) But I never tried to call him on it. We worry about explaining jokes away, as we worry about explaining poems away. John courted that danger, assiduously, and anyone who doesn\u2019t like his poetry\u2014some find it too learned, too self-conscious\u2014probably thinks it explains itself too much or too well. But he is the great modern poet of the problem of how much to say and when to stop, and what to do after that; of when to rest easy with what we think we know and when to keep going. An explanation for him was never merely an improvement in our state of acquaintance with the world. It was a jolt, a high, and it might leave something lasting behind (that would be knowledge, and he did love knowledge), but the prospect of lasting was not what made him laugh and widen his eyes and spread his hands. No: an explanation is a punchline. What a punchline is, however, we now have to ask someone else, or ourselves. All explanations come to an end somewhere. \u2014Jeff Dolven<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

At Yale, when I was an undergraduate, John Hollander was famous for knowing pretty much everything. Even the most senior faculty seemed his junior in learning: if you asked Harold Bloom a textual question, he would refer you to \u201cUncle John.\u201d Hollander\u2019s erudition was not confined to literature. He loved music, history, politics, theater, film, painting. I was told that he served one institution as a wine consultant.\u00a0I took his seminar on ekphrasis (the art of describing artworks), his seminar in verse composition, and a tutorial in American poetry. I wrote a thesis under his direction, and my first (and last) academic article. Only once did I bring an old poem to his attention. It was a juvenile sonnet by Mallarm\u00e9: I might as well have discovered a star.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hollander sent me home, the summer after my freshman year, with a simple reading list: The Oxford Anthology of British Literature<\/i>, volumes one and two. This wasn\u2019t exactly a personal recommendation, but it became personal to me, because Hollander had helped edit the anthology, and\u2014over its four thousand pages\u2014I learned to recognize his voice in the annotations, or thought I did. There\u2019s no way I understood, or really enjoyed, much of what I read, but I remember that as one of the happiest summers of my life, because I had found an adult who believed, not in me particularly, but in my education. \u201cIn September,\u201d Hollander told me, \u201ccome to my office and I\u2019ll try to keep you from wasting your time.\u201d<\/p>\n

To study with Hollander could be punishing, not because he bothered to punish his students (beyond shouting \u201cNO! NO! NO!\u201d if, for example, you misidentified a passage of Eliot as Pound\u2014he couldn\u2019t help that). The punishment was one\u2019s feeling that he lived more because he knew more, and was always learning more, so you would never catch up. Once, as a sophomore, I stumbled into a private lesson he was taking in Swahili. To get over the fact that one would never become like Professor Hollander was a lesson in itself.<\/p>\n

He was pained\u2014incredulous\u2014at the things we hadn\u2019t read or seen (\u201cYou haven\u2019t seen DUCK SOUP<\/em>?\u201d \u201cYou don\u2019t know KRAPP\u2019S LAST TAPE<\/em>?\u201d). Real confusion, though, brought out his gentle side. Once as a freshman I asked him whether unstressed line endings were inherently sad (he had just given us part of \u201cLittle Gidding\u201d to read in class, the lines beginning \u201cIn the uncertain hour before the morning\u201d), and he answered the question very carefully and respectfully. Later, when I read Saussure, I realized that he had prepared me to understand the arbitrariness of the sign.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That feeling\u2014of having been prepared<\/i>\u2014still comes to me when I read a difficult text or stand before an artwork. Jeff has mentioned Hollander\u2019s affinity for Wittgenstein; Hollander taught us to think of poems in terms of \u201cgames,\u201d \u201cjokes,\u201d \u201cmoves\u201d\u2014then said everything he\u2019d taught us about poems applied to fiction too. (And paintings, I later realized. And songs. And so on.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

When I first went to Venice, with my friend Jasmit, Hollander wrote down everything we should see and everywhere we should eat, and what we should order.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He loved to question false dichotomies\u2014between formal and free verse, for example, or close reading and deconstruction, or sincerity and wit. He said there was no necessary distinction between \u201cserious\u201d and \u201cfunny.\u201d (Their opposites were \u201cfrivolous\u201d and \u201csolemn.\u201d) He taught us that the inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty was a great poem. He included folksongs and Indian chants in his two-volume Anthology of Nineteenth-Century American Poetry<\/em>.<\/p>\n

He taught the importance of reading out loud as a tool of interpretation. I spent a semester memorizing long poems and reciting them, one per week, in his office\u2014then presenting him with a short paper on what in the poem was difficult to remember, and why.<\/p>\n

Speaking to students, he had trouble making eye contact and often looked at the floor or his hands, but when he passed a dog on the street he would bend down to say hello. He loved cats too, and collected a book of poems and stories about them. (He was a mentor to the animal trainer-philosopher Vicki Hearne.) His poems, many of them, are concerned with the philosophy of language\u2014but if you were young what you noticed were the elements of fantasy.\u00a0He wrote a satiric volume in the form of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam<\/em> and a book of erotic sonnets; he escaped into his poems as if they were the Arabian Nights. He loved to revive, in his own verse, the settings of old poems: gardens or woodlands. Many of his poems were about the locus amoenus<\/em>, the mythical \u201cgood place.\u201d<\/p>\n

(About<\/em> was a word he taught us to mistrust.)<\/p>\n

In public he could be bumptious. Sometimes I wished, after I left college, that he wouldn\u2019t pick so many fights over matters of taste. To his students, though, he preached a virtue he called \u201cintellectual tact.\u201d It meant knowing what sort<\/i> of question to ask of a difficult text. It meant playing along, imagining your way into sympathy with the invisible speaker. (Hollander on Empson: \u201cBut what would it mean\u00a0for someone to say<\/em>, \u2018Poise of my hands reminded me of yours\u2019?\u201d)<\/p>\n

Once Hollander overheard a weak student confess, with embarrassment, that he had been known as \u201cthe poet\u201d in high school. Hollander: \u201cBut there was respect in it.\u201d It was serious and funny, and none of us laughed. \u2014Lorin Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/center><\/p>\n

What can a teacher actually do to help one learn to be a poet?<\/p>\n

HOLLANDER<\/center><\/p>\n

What a teacher can do is point out to you that things you\u2019re doing when you read or listen or think about language, even though they may seem very weird to you and you may suppress them, are\u00a0not<\/i>\u00a0mistakes, are the right thing to be doing. I discover now that a lot of things I did with language and even visual things in childhood, and that I was ashamed of because grown-ups didn\u2019t do them, were a sort of primitive art.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/center><\/p>\n

For example?<\/p>\n

HOLLANDER<\/center><\/p>\n

The delight I took, for example, in Central Park\u2019s Shakespeare Garden, that was planted with all the herbs mentioned in the plays. I used to wander through that, and it was the first sense I\u2019d ever had of a complicated garden design, and I used to love to walk through it, along twisting paths, and come out on a little bridge across a tiny stream, then walk back into foliage and cross the stream again by another bridge and look at the first bridge I\u2019d crossed. The scale of this was very small, but I loved its\u00a0connections<\/i>. I knew I could never talk about this to a grown-up, who would think it ridiculous. It was only much later, when I was bowed under the weight of learning, that I realized the European nobility from the fifteenth through the late eighteenth centuries had spent vast amounts of money in order to build for their delight those structures of variegated, differentiated internal and external space\u2014something in my enlightened education I\u2019d been taught to neglect. My parents used the word \u201cmodern,\u201d when referring to art and architecture, as a caressing term. In those days one\u00a0had<\/i>\u00a0to admire clean, modern lines, no Victorian gingerbread.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/center><\/p>\n

A good teacher would have been able to relax those strictures.<\/p>\n

HOLLANDER<\/center><\/p>\n

Precisely. Good teachers in fact did that, by reminding one that the mistakes one made in childhood\u2014the idea, say, that one thought things were alike because the words that named them rhymed\u2014are part of doing something right, not something wrong.\u00a0<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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