My Excuse

Almost 60 years ago I took a course that (possibly) shaped my life. I sometimes think of it as the reason I didn't become a writer.

The professor was a young PhD, a graduate of Princeton and Johns Hopkins. He was much admired on campus for having engaged in a bristly battle with some famous critic (possibly Lionel Trilling or Jacques Barzun, I don't remember) in the letters to the editor section of a famous literary magazine. He was to become department chairman, a well known academic poet and a translator of  Hungarian poets.

In 1956, however, he was 'the new guy' doomed to teach the Freshman class in 'creative writing'.

I don't recall the curriculum--but we wrote frequently, and what we wrote was subject to his penetrating analysis and criticism. He was a fastidious man with a way of handling a student paper by the edges, like a girl picking up a toad--as if it might jump, or release some toxic fluid.

On one occasion he commented on my short story. I don't recall it, except that it was about a young white man in love with a black girl--something well outside my experience as I had never met a black girl, or even been in love. Still, he liked it, and said some positive things about it. But he had some questions and reservations.

Why had I done such and such? (I imagine the issue was something 'symbolic'--I have never understood 'symbols'.)

I had no explanation.

"Ah," he said, a little disappointed, "Apparently it wasn't written at a very high level of consciousness."

I don't say that this comment ended my career as a writer. I hadn't contemplated such a career--and I took his remark as a simple 'observation' rather than a 'criticism'. But his comment stuck with me, and many times in the intervening 59 years I have wondered whether something I have just finished was written at 'a level of consciousness' worthy of Bruce Berlind.

In other words, did I have complete control of my material? Was it worth showing to someone with critical standards?