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Wednesday, November 22, 2006
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UD Gives Thanks Google Images has two photos of him, neither of which seems right. In this one, he's far more amiable than I remember him, back in the 'seventies at Northwestern University, when for three years I took every course Erich Heller offered in the comp lit department. He was a forbidding and formal man, always in a suit, a Central European intellectual of a certain age. My age was what, nineteen, and I was your basic American barbarian. I'd never encountered anyone like him before. In this one he's too grandfatherly looking. He was irritable; he conveyed right away his firm conviction that his undergraduate students knew shit and weren't about to do any of the heavy lifting that his lectures on Kafka, Mann, Kleist, and Rilke demanded. Although it was pointless to try with us, try he did -- his presentations in class were always passionate, intense, profoundly focused on a Duino Elegy or on a paragraph in The Trial. I'd heard that he was a Jew who'd had to leave Europe; that he'd taught in Wales for awhile, and that he'd ended up here in Chicago, where he had a brother. His preoccupation with the fragmentation of Western culture prefigured by Kafka and then narrated by Thomas Mann was immediate, emotional, personal. Although his lectures never hinted at his own experience, it seemed to me he'd suffered some of the catastrophes this literature attempted to convey. I was thrilled by the force of his intellect and by the force of his pessimism. Also by the private suffering I, rightly or wrongly, intuited. This was teaching that mattered; this was a man who embodied the things he talked about. Although he was in a way everything to me, I was nothing to him. Almost nothing. We had one brief conversation, after class one day. We must have found ourselves walking in the same direction. He asked how I was, and I said I was rather unhappy, because I was still in the school of journalism even though I disliked all of my journalism courses and loved all of my literature courses. "If you're unhappy there, why don't you leave?" he asked. "Right," I replied, and walked over to the Medill School of Journalism, where I dropped out and then declared an English major. Of course I'd been thinking about doing this for some time, but had dithered and dithered, worrying about the bad job market for English majors. It took Heller's simple statement to make me do it. For that, along with all that I learned from him, I'm grateful. Heller made me a serious person. He gave me a focus and he offered a worldview. He was a wastelander; he surveyed ruins and wondered, without much hope, how poets might reconstitute them as buildings. His sensibility, utterly at odds with the pragmatic, optimistic American sensibility, was new and wonderful to me. He was not polite and cheery; he was evasive and aggrieved. This too was wonderful to me. I was at best a grotesque to him: a woman (he preferred men); an American; a teenager; a Jew who'd been tutored in Holocaust sentimentality rather than seriousness. It never did and now never will matter to him -- he died fifteen years ago -- how deep an impact he made on the dark-haired girl, third row back. Nonetheless, a good day to give thanks. |
