Earl Wasserman, a lifelong student, a scholar’s scholar

I’m told that he was sometimes known as “Earl the Pearl” among the English Department grad students. Why, I don’t know. Well sure, there’s the sound of the thing, but there’s got to be more than that, no? Pearl of great price? I don’t know.

To me he was Dr. Wasserman.

A couple of years ago another Johns Hopkins graduate, Shale D. Stiller, published an article about him in the alumni magazine, “Remembering a Giant: Earl Wasserman”. Among other things Stiller talked of the discrimination Wasserman had faced as a Jew:

His first choice when he entered Johns Hop­kins was to study mathematics. But he was advised that Jewish students were not welcome in the Math Department, so he migrated to English. After two years, he was accepted into the graduate program and received his doctorate four years later in 1937.

After the war Wasserman, who had served in the Pacific, decided he wanted to return, this time to the faculty. The English Department was enthusiastic, but had to overcome the anti-Semitism of the university's president, Isaiah Bowman. He joined the faculty in 1948 and stayed until his untimely death  in 1973 at the age of 59. By the time I arrived at Hopkins in the mid-1960s things had changed considerably. There were many Jews on the faculty and in the student body.

Here’s a rather different passage from Stiller's article, one that speaks to Wasserman's character:

Wasserman was tough but fair. He was intim­idating to many people. Legendary Johns Hop­kins humanities professor Richard Macksey could not say enough about Wasserman’s “passion and fervor” while teaching. “If you really wanted your battery charged, you would go in and listen to Earl for a while.” Jerry Schnydman, former director of admissions and secretary of the board of trustees at Hopkins, took Wasserman’s course on Keats and Shelley in the mid-1960s because Wasserman was “the most revered teacher at Hopkins.” Schnydman did not receive a great mark for the course, but because Wasserman happened to be his adviser, he was constrained to meet with him to approve his schedule for the next term. Schnydman approached the meeting with great trepidation because of his low mark. Wasserman immediately put him at ease by commenting that Schnydman was an A student in lacrosse (being an All-American) and that when one averaged the marks in lacrosse and Keats-Shelley, he would do well in life. He has never forgotten Wasserman's generosity.

There was a brief note at the end of the article indicating that one could get a longer version of the article by writing directly to Stiller. While I was waiting for Hurricane Sandy to blow through, I did so, and sent my own observations about Wasserman.

* * * * *

Dear Shale, if I may,

I’ve now read your longer piece about Wasserman and enjoyed it a great deal. It was good to hear those voices. I know many, perhaps most, of the people you quoted, some better than others. And I’ve had a chance to think about my own debt to Wasserman. At the same time I was struck by the thought that the world in which Wasserman was great is, if not all but gone, fading fast. And it is by no means clear what will replace it.

So, with your indulgence, I’d like to take a little time and reflect upon matters (as I await the storm that’s coming up the coast; I live in Hoboken).

I was at Hopkins from the fall of ’65 through the spring of ’73 and got a bachelors in philosophy and a masters in humanities, with literature as the area that pulled all the others together. Dick Macksey was my main professor. I took a number of courses from him, was a TA in one of his courses, and he ultimately supervised my masters thesis, which was on “Kubla Khan.” Other professors were important as well, including Mary Ainsworth in psychology, Arthur Stinchcombe in sociology, and of course Wasserman.

As I indicated in my previous note, I took his two-semester course in Romantic Literature in 68-69, my senior year. We studied Keats, Shelley, and Austen the first semester and Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott the second. As I vaguely recall enrollment dropped from the first to the second semester, which prompted Wasserman to lead one of the second-semester discussion sessions himself, presumably to get a better handle on his students. I was in his discussion section.

I have no specific memories from that semester, but I did become interested in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and settled on that as the topic of a master’s thesis in humanities. While it was my intention to get a doctorate, this was during the Vietnam war and I had drawn a low number in the draft, making my immediate future uncertain. I’d become a conscientious objector and decided to perform my alternative service in the Chaplain’s Office at Hopkins and, while doing that, to get my masters in the Humanities Center under Macksey.

But, because “Kubla Khan” was my text, I worked fairly closely with Wasserman for a semester or two, meeting with him on a regular basis, perhaps as often as once a week. Some of our conversations were quite animated and at times it seems as through we might manage to levitate his desk. At one point I got so comfortable as to lean back in my chair and put my feet on his desk. The look he gave me, however, prompted me to remove them and to once again sit up.

There was one point where we agreed that perhaps the most important job of a scholar was to ask the right questions. Answers could always be found, but the quest must go on. At some time during this period some visiting scholar gave a lecture on Coleridge which I was unable to attend. I am told that Wasserman asked a question in my name. Or perhaps I was at the lecture, but simply kept respectfully to the rear of the room, and quiet. I don’t really recall.

All I know is that he asked a question in my name. That impressed me, not merely for the implied compliment, but more importantly, I think, for the courtesy. You quoted a passage from a letter where he talked of his intellectual life being intertwined with those of colleagues. That requires courtesy; it’s not simply that everyone’s contributions to the conversation should be acknowledged, but that keeping track of who said what is important to managing the intellectual drift of the matter. The ‘valence’ of an idea is linked to the person who thought it. To keep an intellectual community going you need to keep track of those things.

So, when Wasserman made a query in my name, I learned something about how to conduct myself in an intellectual community. And perhaps that is what I got from Wasserman. The thesis I ended up writing about “Kubla Khan” was quite different in style from Wasserman’s work. But the fact that I would devote some 70 pages to one 54-line poem, that concern about detail, that intensity, I picked up from Wasserman. That it was worth the effort; I got that from Wasserman.

In the course of working on that thesis I read everything I could find in the Hopkins library on “Kubla Khan.” That sense of thoroughness came through Wasserman. It was a matter of duty to the intellectual community.

That’s what I got from Wasserman, the feel for an intellectual community. The work itself is important, and it is work you do in a community.

I hope this is of some use to you.

Regards,

Bill Benzon