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Memories, Meanderings, and Malapropisms: An Autobiography of Sorts

By Vivian de St. Vrain (Dr. Metablog)

Table of Contents

Preface

I’ve been asked—well, not quite at gunpoint, but with a degree of solicitous insistence—to set down the particulars of my existence in some kind of autobiographical format. The request strikes me as presumptuous, as if my life merits documentation. Still, as I careen toward the precipice of my ninth decade, I suppose there might be some marginal value in recording how an unremarkable Brooklyn boy of the 1940s metamorphosed into the peculiar specimen who writes these words today.

My purpose is not to inspire but rather to offer evidence that even a directionless, book-besotted youth can stumble his way into a life of modest intellectual pleasures. If you detect a whiff of the counterhuman in these pages, well, that’s to be expected. We English professors are a curious breed.

Chapter 1: The Early Years (1939-1956)

My entrance into this vale of tears occurred in Brooklyn in 1939, a year of portent and doom for the wider world but, for me, merely the beginning of a provincial childhood. I was born into a family of modest means and modest expectations, a Jewish household where education was venerated but not always understood. My father worked with his hands; my mother worked with her words, endlessly repeating instructions and reprimands that I was constitutionally disposed to ignore.

My parents, remarkably, never learned to drive an automobile and owned none. This peculiarity shaped my childhood geography—my world was circumscribed by the limits of public transportation and my battered Schwinn bicycle. In that pre-digital era, when children roamed unfettered by helicopter parents, I developed an intimate knowledge of Brooklyn’s streets, parks, and neighborhoods—albeit with a curious handicap that has persisted throughout my life: a kind of directional dyslexia that renders me perpetually lost, even in familiar territory. I could recite the kings of England in order or explain the complications of the Yorkist claim to the throne, but I could not reliably find my way home from school without misadventure.

P.S. 217 holds no particularly fond place in my memory. The classrooms were designed for forty-eight “pupils,” as we were called in those arcane days, though on high-attendance days there were always a few unenthusiastic kids lolling in improvised seats by the windows. The curriculum was as uninspiring as the architecture. My first-grade teacher, Mrs. Callery, was a diminutive, gloomy woman. I recall telling my mother, “Mrs. Callery doesn’t like me,” to which she responded, “You must be kind to her. She lost four of her boys in the war” (it was 1944). I construed “lost” to mean “misplaced” and was therefore dumbfounded by Mrs. Callery’s exceptional forgetfulness. Such is the literal mind of childhood.

Mrs. Sherwood, in third grade, left no impression except for her extreme old age (possibly 55), while Mrs. Cares (Sarah Cares!—a splendid name for a teacher) was quite kind. Mrs. Finsmith in fifth grade was a cipher, but Mrs. Donnelly, whose white hair was dyed a radiant blue, made it her business to make life as miserable as possible for me, and succeeded admirably. My favorite teacher in those early years was the extra-strict Mrs. McNulty, who insisted that we memorize fractions, decimals, and percentages, and taught us the proper format for a “friendly letter”—a genre now as extinct as the passenger pigeon.

I was not what you’d call a disciplined student. I was much more interested in punchball, the Dodgers, comic books, and radio serials than in lessons, which were unchallenging and drab. Nevertheless, I learned reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic, for which I remain grateful, and also a little Latin. I was an autodidact, not a student, right out of the gate.

I was fortunate that the Avenue J branch of the Brooklyn Public Library (though only a storefront) was within walking distance, as was the McDonald Avenue branch where, during high school, I worked for 75 cents an hour shelving books. Reading was my salvation. I was omnivorous in my literary consumption and, although I did not possess a strong understanding or much of an imagination, I had an excellent memory. Reading rescued me from the banality of my education. As someone once said (or perhaps I said it myself), “If it hadn’t been for reading, we’d have been entirely at the mercy of sex.”

At Erasmus Hall High School, the situation deteriorated. I had good instruction in Latin from old Miss Beulah Withee and even older Mr. Gabriel Cussen (who I later realized must have been an ex-priest), but bad, lazy non-teaching from Harry Wedeck, a pretentious fraud. Miss Edna Goetschius, a biology teacher, complained to me more than once that I didn’t know how to stipple. Mr. Lindlar, an ineffectual physics teacher, would mysteriously disappear between classes and return reeking of alcohol. My mathematics teachers were competent (Mr. Ebersman), angry as all hell (Mrs. Altschul), or suicidal (Mrs. Bonime).

An English teacher who was well-read and competent, Mrs. Harriet Felder, was an “Oxfordian” caught up in the conspiracy theory that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare. Walter Balletto, who whiled away our time teaching “Discussion English,” was more interested in his own theatricality than in any instruction he might have rendered. I later learned that he lived with his mother and collected Kirsten Flagstad records, information which my 1950s self could not even begin to assimilate. I remember also an art teacher, Mrs. Schauben, who kept her protruding ears in check with a thin rubber band; perhaps we weren’t supposed to notice, but I’ve never forgotten. The gym teachers were simple-minded jokesters, although I remember thinking even then that the martinet Mr. Eis would have been more at home in the SS than at EHHS.

It was, in retrospect, quite a zoo. But I know that some of my coevals, who were smart enough to choose their teachers wisely and take it all seriously, managed to get themselves a decent education. I didn’t; my only success was to get out alive and then move on.

My adolescent enthusiasms were peculiar but intense. I subscribed to Mad Magazine (and had been a devotee since Harvey Kurtzman’s comic book days)—the closest I ever came to anarchy. I read Sport Magazine, a precursor to Sports Illustrated, in which athletes were portrayed as virtuous, sober, and generous family men who had overcome venomous small-town upbringings and acute physical handicaps to rise to the top of the mound or sit astride the Derby winner.

When I went through my adolescent fantasy phase, I devoured various pulp sci-fi magazines—Astounding Science Fiction and Galaxy Science Fiction and probably others that came and went. I was enamored of their escapism, which served the same psychological function as my sports obsessions. Baseball, in particular, claimed an inordinate share of my attention. The Brooklyn Dodgers were my religion, their players my pantheon. When they decamped to Los Angeles in 1957, it was as if the Vatican had relocated to Las Vegas.

I was also, inexplicably, a Gilbert and Sullivan enthusiast. While other adolescents were discovering Elvis Presley, I was memorizing patter songs from H.M.S. Pinafore. This enthusiasm did not enhance my popularity, needless to say.

Chapter 2: The Cornell Years (1956-1960)

How I came to be admitted to Cornell University remains one of life’s enduring mysteries. I suspect a clerical error may have been involved. Nevertheless, in the autumn of 1956, I found myself gazing upon the Gothic splendors of the Arts Quad, a provincial boy thrust into an environment for which nothing in my Brooklyn upbringing had prepared me.

Before I arrived at Cornell, I was a thoroughly indifferent student, but in the Department of English (now grandly rechristened “The Department of Literatures in English”), I found an intellectual home. Inasmuch as I did not have a brain for rigorous science or for the tough analytic philosophy that was then in fashion, I was fortunate that the study of English suited my limited abilities—curiosity, patience, a good memory, and something of a feel for language.

My professors were exclusively male (the female professoriate being then as rare as passenger pigeons) and, for the most part, veterans of World War II or the Korean War. They wrote definitive scholarly articles for the Philological Quarterly or for Modern Philology; they published learned monographs on canonical poets and novelists; and they taught courses with such forthright titles as “The Seventeenth Century” and “Wordsworth and Coleridge.”

I found myself drawn to the study of literature in ways I had never anticipated. The curriculum was chronological and comprehensive, a relentless march from Beowulf to T.S. Eliot. We were expected to master the canon—a term not yet freighted with ideological baggage. In “Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama,” a course taught by the distinguished scholar and teacher David Novarr, we proceeded chronologically from Kyd and Marlowe in the 1580s right through to Ford and Massinger—the last playwrights of significance before the theaters went dark in 1642. I remember savoring delightful comedies by Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont and ferociously brilliant tragedies by Thomas Middleton—works that, I suspect, today’s English majors are not destined to encounter, despite their essential role in understanding the timeless achievements of Shakespeare.

And then there was Shakespeare himself, to whom I formed an attachment that has endured for sixty-five years. There is something about the immediacy and complexity of his language, the psychological depth of his characters, and the structural brilliance of his plots that continues to astonish me. I can truthfully say that no other writer has given me such intellectual pleasure or caused me to think so deeply about the human condition.

In those days, literary criticism had not yet succumbed to the excesses of theory. There were, to be sure, intellectual currents stirring beneath the surface: the “New Critics” who focused on close reading of texts, the fierce critics from New York (mostly Jewish) circles, and the traditionalists who studied literature as history, biography, and philology. But Cornell, isolated in its rural fastness, remained largely non-ideological. It was a stable environment that valued clarity of thought and expression—values I’ve tried, not always successfully, to maintain in my own writing.

I was not a remarkable student—certainly not in the league of those ambitious souls who went on to distinguished careers at Harvard or Yale—but I was a passionate one. I graduated in 1960 with a more capacious mind than I had arrived with, though still woefully ignorant of the world beyond books.

Chapter 3: The Middle Years (1960-1990)

The three decades following my graduation from Cornell were a period of constant, if not always coherent, evolution. The 1960s found me, like many of my generation, caught up in the political ferment of the era. I subscribed to The Reporter, The Nation, and—before it went totally and bizarrely wrong—The New Republic. My politics, then as now, were progressive but skeptical, informed by a fundamental distrust of dogma of any kind.

It was during this period that I finally learned to drive a car, having grown up in a household where automobile ownership was as exotic as yacht ownership. My first vehicle was a Nash Rambler, in which I drove to California and back in the summer of 1963—the first time I had ventured west of New York. The experience of crossing the continent was revelatory, a geography lesson writ large. I’ve since owned an Oldsmobile ‘88, a Renault Dauphine (a dog), an underpowered Dodge station wagon, an uncomfortable but sturdy Corolla, a Saab, a Camry, and a Volvo that lasted for twenty-one years and which I only surrendered because it was hard on my aching back.

Despite these automotive adventures, I’ve never felt anything like affection for a single one of my vehicles—they take you from one place to another, and I’m grateful for the mobility, but that’s the extent of our relationship. I’m a cautious driver, but I’ve made some bad mistakes behind the wheel and am lucky to have gone through life without being mangled or killed.

In the 1970s, when I had set out to study literature through a social lens, I subscribed to Local Population Studies, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, The Psychohistorical Review, and The History of Childhood Quarterly. When I became serious about Shakespeare, I was an assiduous reader and collector of the Shakespeare Quarterly and Shakespeare Survey and the Shakespeare Newsletter and Shakespeare Research and Opportunities and the Shakespeare on Film Newsletter. Closely related: English Literary Renaissance, to which I sent a number of my own contributions, and the George Herbert Journal (of which I at one time owned every issue).

My academic career was unremarkable but satisfying. I discovered that I had a genuine talent for teaching, despite—or perhaps because of—my own checkered experiences as a student. I found joy in introducing young minds to the pleasures of literature, particularly Shakespeare. There is a special delight in witnessing the moment when a student first comprehends the sublime complexity of a sonnet or the psychological acuity of a soliloquy.

Marriage and parenthood arrived, bringing with them responsibilities and rewards I had never anticipated. Children, as every parent discovers, are simultaneously the source of one’s greatest joys and most profound anxieties. They also provide an unending stream of linguistic delights, as their developing minds grapple with the peculiarities of English.

During these years, I developed what would become a lifelong interest in the specialized vocabulary of fields far removed from my own. My fascination with obscure terminology—from the esoteric language of horse-drawn vehicles (broughams, landaus, and tarpaulins) to the precise nomenclature of botanical specimens—has provided me with endless hours of pleasure and, I fear, caused more than a few eyes to glaze over at dinner parties.

Chapter 4: Shakespeare and Me

I cannot speak of my life without acknowledging the central role that Shakespeare has played in it. My relationship with the Bard has been long and peculiarly intimate. As a rule, I keep my distance from live performances of Shakespeare’s plays because I seldom enjoy the experience and regularly find it misleading. This has not always been the case. A few versions, notably the lucid Scofield Coriolanus at Stratford in 1962, remain vivid in my brain.

What happened? Somewhere along the way, I lost patience and interest in playgoing. Am I alone? I remember sitting in some theater or other in the way back when, glancing left and right in my row, noting that a significant cadre of my fellow spectators were not engrossed in the performance but were nodding off, and that others in my vicinity were clearly bored, drifting passively toward sweet sleep.

This is a phenomenon I had never encountered at a baseball game, where everyone is alert and engaged. So why were all these numb Shakespeare spectators sitting as still as stones? And why was I among them, inasmuch as I too, let me confess, was bored by the performance? I was not, as I yearned to be, lost in the words or engaged by the action.

Eventually, I came to admit to myself that to attend a Shakespeare play was not for pleasure but rather to honor an eminence, to pay dues to a cultural icon, to participate in a ritual of cultural hegemony—and that I had paid good money in order to worship at the shrine of Shakespeare. This revelation made me unhappy, as I am not by nature given to reverence. To try to bend my will to admire on-stage oratory felt inauthentic, contrary to myself as I knew myself.

Yet I am an unabashed, unapologetic lover of Shakespeare. Not of the theater, but of the book. When I sit myself down to read one of Shakespeare’s most excellent plays, the experience can be and often is utterly transcendent. It is reading that unlocks the play and puts me in touch with true genius. There’s something about the one-on-one concentration that you can give to a book in your very own hands in your very own chair that you can’t give to a performance, where you’re crammed into your space and have lost to your neighbor the battle for the armrest.

He’s endlessly fascinating, this Shakespeare guy, and intelligent, and a poet like none other. It’s all I need: a comfortable posture for my ancient limbs, a bit of silence, a book—and I’m in awe.

Performances, in my opinion, erect a barrier to understanding and obscure rather than illuminate the plays. It’s necessarily so because directors and actors interpret the play. It’s their job; it’s what they do. Interpret. And every interpretation, no matter how skillful, is an obstacle. A reader is less constrained and can keep his mind open. No one, no thing, to mediate between the eyes and the page.

My academic writing on Shakespeare has been modest in volume but, I hope, not entirely without merit. I’ve been particularly interested in his use of language—the way he deploys words both common and rare to create effects that remain startling even after four centuries. His vocabulary was enormous, his sensitivity to nuance unparalleled. When I encounter a word like “pandiculation” or “soporific” in my reading, I feel a small thrill of recognition, as if I’ve come upon an old friend in an unexpected place.

Chapter 5: My Life in Objects

The material artifacts of a life are curious things—simultaneously meaningless and freighted with significance. A few objects have accompanied me through the decades, accruing layers of memory and association.

A sugar and creamer set made by Bauhaus potter Marguerite Wildenhain at her Pond Farm studio in Guerneville, California, near the Russian River, sometime around 1972, are perhaps the only objects I own that deserve to be in a museum. They’re beautifully thrown, beautifully glazed. To eye or hand, they convey almost magical power. My charismatic, chaotic sister-in-law Phyllis brought these to us from Guerneville, where she studied pottery for three or four summers with “Marguerite.” On the bottom of the creamer, still visible next to the words “Pond Farm,” Marguerite penciled a price: $12.50. But it’s priceless.

I have been, at various points in my life, a collector of books (of course), antique maps (despite my directional challenges), and unusual paperweights. These collections have waxed and waned over the decades, expanding during periods of relative prosperity and contracting during financial exigencies. The books, however, have been constants—a personal library that reflects the intellectual journey of a lifetime.

In the last twenty years, I’ve probably spent more time on the John Deere “Lawn Tractor” than in any other vehicle. Maximum of five miles per hour, my kind of speed. It may not be glamorous, but it gets the job done. I’ve “buried” the machine a couple of times, but it’s still in one piece and still working—which is more than I can say for certain parts of my anatomy.

Chapter 6: The Later Years (1990-Present)

Age creeps up on one imperceptibly, like a cat stalking a distracted bird. One moment you’re forty, with all the vigor and optimism that implies, and the next you’re contemplating your seventy-fifth birthday—your diamond jubilee, as it were.

My 75th was coming up a few years ago, and it seemed time that family and friends gave serious thought to the celebration. When Queen Elizabeth II had her jubilee just two years prior, there was a specially commissioned anthem, a service for two thousand folks at St. Paul’s, an equestrian extravaganza (550 horses), a flotilla of schooners on the Thames, and something that involved the lighting of 4000 beacons worldwide.

Frankly, a bit much. A little over-the-top, if you know what I mean. Although who can fail to admire the hat?

In previous years, I had suggested that a good choice for my birthday might be an Irish “starter” castle. The year before that, I hinted at one or two ancient sculptures. But, disappointingly, there were no takers. Birthdays number 73 and 74 were left unacknowledged—to the shame of my fans.

But my diamond jubilee offered an opportunity for redemption. Diamonds for the diamond jubilee! I would have greatly appreciated a pair—a singleton is tacky—of those big hunking earrings that professional athletes wear. They can be easily purchased, I understand, in the $900,000 to $1,100,000 range, depending on size and color. My only reluctance was that piercing the ears would violate the integrity of my body. Also, I’m afraid of the pain. So it would have been either pressure clips or ear-piercing under general anesthesia.

I wouldn’t want to drop so precious an ornament and then lose it forever when I vacuum the rug. Gosh, I’m worried if I could afford the insurance.

But these whimsical concerns aside, my later years have been marked by a growing awareness of mortality—not in a morbid sense, but as a clarifying lens through which to view life’s experiences. The physical indignities of aging are real enough (the aching back, the creaking knees, the occasional pandiculation upon rising from a nap), but they are balanced by the compensations of perspective and, dare I say it, a modicum of wisdom.

My relationship with memory has become increasingly complex. Like many of my vintage, I find that names and dates occasionally elude me, slipping just beyond the reach of recollection. Yet other memories—particularly those from childhood—have acquired a crystalline clarity that is almost startling. I can recall with perfect precision the smell of the Avenue J branch of the Brooklyn Public Library on a rainy afternoon in 1949, but I sometimes forget where I’ve left my reading glasses.

This intermittent amnesia is not the dramatic, cinematic variety that has long fascinated me in films. In “Breaking Bad,” Walter White disappears for a few days when he is kidnapped—he escapes only by murdering his meth-addled drug dealer. In order to cover his tracks and account to his family for the missing days, he feigns amnesia. And he’s persuasive, possibly because everyone has seen so many amnesia movies. He’s so persuasive, in fact, that the doctors think that the amnesia might recur. In order to get himself released from the hospital, he confesses to the state shrink that he was only pretending. “There was no ‘fugue state,’” he admits. That’s a kind of theatrical amnesia in which I can believe—phony from start to finish.

My kind of amnesia is more prosaic—a momentary blank when reaching for a familiar word, a hesitation when trying to recall the plot of a novel I read last month. It’s the quotidian forgetfulness that accompanies the aging brain, not the dramatic rupture of identity that characterizes cinematic memory loss.

Chapter 7: Technology and Me

My relationship with technology has been, at best, ambivalent. I came of age in the era of the manual typewriter, when the word “website” would have signified a dark corner colonized by spiders. The digital revolution has occurred during my lifetime, transforming the way we communicate, learn, and entertain ourselves in ways that would have been unimaginable to my younger self.

I have adapted, after a fashion, to these technological changes. I use email (though I still harbor a fondness for the handwritten letter), I navigate the internet (though often with a sense of bewilderment), and I have even, reluctantly, established a presence on certain social media platforms (though I remain skeptical of their value).

But I am, and will always remain, a creature of the printed page. The tactile pleasure of a well-made book, the subtle scent of aging paper, the satisfying weight of a hardcover volume in one’s hands—these are sensory experiences that no digital device can replicate. When I sit down with a novel, I’m engaging in a ritual that connects me to centuries of readers who have found solace, enlightenment, and delight in the written word.

I do not begrudge younger generations their digital fluency, but I do worry that something essential may be lost in the transition from page to screen. Reading is a uniquely intimate form of communication, a direct connection between the mind of the writer and the mind of the reader. The best books create a kind of sacred space in which this communion can occur. The constant distractions of the digital environment—the pings and alerts, the hyperlinks and pop-ups—threaten to dissolve this space, to render impossible the sustained attention that serious reading demands.

This concern may simply mark me as a relic of a previous era, an old man shaking his fist at the inexorable march of progress. So be it. I have earned the right to my curmudgeonly skepticism, even as I acknowledge the genuine benefits that technology has brought.

Chapter 8: On Critics and Criticism

Having spent much of my professional life engaged in literary criticism, I feel compelled to offer some reflections on the state of the field. When I entered academia, literary criticism was undergoing a significant transformation. The New Critics, with their emphasis on close reading and the autonomy of the text, were giving way to more historically and socially oriented approaches. This shift seemed to me both necessary and productive, expanding the scope of literary analysis while retaining its essential focus on the text itself.

What followed, however, was less salutary. The rise of literary theory in the 1970s and 1980s—with its arcane vocabulary, its dense and often impenetrable prose, and its increasingly ideological orientation—struck me as a wrong turn. Theory, at its worst, seemed less interested in illuminating texts than in using them as pretexts for abstract philosophical speculation. The joy of reading, the pleasure of the text, was subordinated to the grim task of ideological critique.

I do not mean to suggest that all theoretical approaches are without value. Feminist criticism, for example, has provided genuinely new insights into works that had been read through a restrictive male lens for centuries. Post-colonial criticism has expanded our understanding of how literature both reflected and resisted imperial power. But the excesses of theory—its jargon, its obscurantism, its tendency to reduce complex works of art to simple ideological formulas—have done real harm to the study of literature.

This harm is evident in the current state of many English departments, where the study of literature has been increasingly marginalized in favor of “cultural studies” and various forms of identity-based criticism. I recently took a peek at the current website of Cornell’s English Department. (In the index-card 1950s, when the manual typewriter was the acme of technology, the word “website” would have signified a dark corner colonized by spiders.) Even at first glance, the 2025 Cornell website said to me “very very different, very ‘now’.” While an occasional word or phrase was recognizable, it was the novelty—the modernity, I guess—that flared from the electronic page and dazzled mine eyne. Time marches on, no doubt, but whether it marches boldly forward or plunges over a cliff remains to be established.

First of all, it’s no longer the Department of English. It’s now, hurrah!, the “Department of Literatures in English.” What a welcome redefinition—an assertion that English is a world language and that it houses a world literature. I respect this shift in focus and I regret that my 1950s Beowulf-to-T. S. Eliot English department was so parochial, so provincial. I can only admire the fact that the Department of Literatures in English has annexed to itself whole continents of writing—a case of academic imperialism that this time seems wholly right and just.

Among the fifty-one professors, the single expertise most commonly claimed is “cultural studies.” This preponderance set me back a bit, because “cultural studies” is not a term I recognize nor one that existed, as far as I know, in the 1950s, when the word “culture” was synonymous with “civilization”—sometimes just Western Civilization—and when “cultured” meant something equivalent to “educated” and possibly even “socially established.”

After cultural studies, it is “literary theory” that claims the largest group of adherents—thirteen, or about a quarter of the faculty. This revelation surprised me because I would have guessed that “theory” had long since gone the way of the aurochs and the mouflon. “Theory” had its herd of enthusiasts in its obscurantist heyday in the last century, yet it seems to be alive and kicking at Cornell—but only, I suspect, as a vestigial remnant of an earlier time and only among the more senior members of the Department. Not a single member of the faculty offers “Shakespeare” or “Milton” as an area of expertise.

Would my reincarnated Youthful Self elect to take a degree from such a faculty? I’m skeptical, but I can’t say for sure because I don’t know whether, in the classroom, the scrupulous examination of literature and ideas has been undermined by transitory and faddish ideologies. I must confess that the biases of the website make me feel old and wary and out of touch. And tired.

My reservations about the 2025 English curriculum have their exact parallel in the perspective of the Class of 1895 on my 1960 curriculum. It’s not hard to imagine that they—I mean the members of the class of 1895—who had been educated in elocution and Old Norse, would have been shocked and perhaps outraged by the 1950s “modern” curriculum that I found so enticing and illuminating.

And now, because I don’t want to go full curmudgeon and become the kind of superannuated guy who shakes his ebony stick at the modern world and deplores the decline of civilization, I’m going to make an effort to find out what’s really going on in 2025. I have therefore set myself the task of reading a representative sample of the books written by members of the present-day English faculty. I’ll report on my studies right here. Stay tuned.

Chapter 9: Dreams and Memories

Dreams have been a constant preoccupation of mine, both the nocturnal variety that visit us during sleep and the waking dreams that shape our aspirations and define our sense of self. The former have provided me with a rich vein of material for reflection and, occasionally, for writing. The latter have guided, for better or worse, the choices that have determined the course of my life.

My sleep dreams are often vividly cinematic, populated by both familiar figures from my past and strange composite characters who seem to embody aspects of myself or others I have known. They unfold in settings that combine the recognizable geography of my life—Brooklyn streets, Cornell’s campus, the various homes I have inhabited—with impossible architectural features and dream-logic transitions.

In one recurring dream, I find myself back at Erasmus Hall High School, late for an exam in a class I have never attended. The hallways extend endlessly, the room numbers follow no logical sequence, and my increasing panic is accompanied by the realization that I am no longer a teenager but a man in his seventies, inexplicably thrust back into an adolescent predicament. This dream, with its combination of anxiety and absurdity, seems to encapsulate something essential about the human condition—our persistent fear of being exposed as frauds, of being found wanting when measured against some external standard.

Other dreams are more benign, even transcendent. In these, I often find myself in conversation with literary figures I have studied and admired—Shakespeare explaining the intended staging of a difficult scene in Cymbeline, George Eliot discussing her decision to adopt a male pseudonym, Philip Roth expounding on the relationship between autobiography and fiction. These conversations, though invented by my sleeping mind, sometimes yield insights that seem genuine, as if some deeper part of my understanding has been temporarily granted the ability to speak.

As for waking dreams, mine have been modest but persistent. I dreamed of becoming a scholar and teacher, and that dream, at least, was realized. I dreamed of creating a home filled with books and conversation, and that too has come to pass. I dreamed of writing something of lasting value, and on that score, the verdict remains out. These pages may represent my final attempt to fulfill that particular aspiration.

Memory, of course, is intimately connected to dreaming. Both involve the mind’s mysterious ability to construct narratives from fragments of experience, to impose order on the chaos of raw sensation. Both are fundamentally creative acts, though we often mistake memory for simple recording.

My memories of childhood are particularly vivid, perhaps because they represent a world that has vanished so completely. I remember the taste of egg creams at the soda fountain on Avenue J, the sound of the trolley cars that still ran along McDonald Avenue when I was very young, the feel of a baseball glove that had been painstakingly oiled and worked into suppleness. These sensory memories seem more immediate and authentic than many more recent experiences.

Yet I am acutely aware of memory’s fallibility. Studies have demonstrated conclusively that our recollections are neither stable nor entirely reliable. Each time we recall a past event, we are effectively reconstructing it, potentially altering details in ways that better align with our current understanding of ourselves. This malleability of memory is both disturbing and, in a strange way, liberating. It suggests that our pasts, like our futures, are at least partially subject to our own authorship.

My life in books has trained me to be skeptical of unreliable narrators, and I try to apply that skepticism to my own reminiscences. I cannot be certain that the Mrs. Callery of my recollection bears any meaningful resemblance to the actual woman who taught first grade at P.S. 217 in 1944. I may have misremembered, misinterpreted, or simply invented aspects of her appearance, manner, or pedagogical approach. Yet the Mrs. Callery who exists in my memory is real in her way, a character in the narrative I have constructed of my early life.

This awareness of memory’s constructedness does not invalidate the project of autobiography. It simply acknowledges that all such projects are, at their core, works of imagination as much as works of recollection. The self that I present in these pages is not identical to the self I have been at various points in my life, but rather a character—hopefully a truthful one—created through the act of writing.

Chapter 10: The View from Here

As I approach the end of these reminiscences, I find myself gazing out from the promontory of advanced age at the landscape of a life that, while not extraordinary by any external measure, has been rich in intellectual pleasures and human connections. What conclusions, if any, can I draw from this view?

First, that literature matters. The books I have read, taught, and occasionally written about have shaped my understanding of the world and of myself in ways both profound and subtle. They have provided me with a vocabulary for experiences I might otherwise have been unable to articulate, offered me glimpses into lives vastly different from my own, and connected me to the long conversation about what it means to be human that stretches back to Homer and beyond. If I have any wisdom to impart to younger generations, it is this: read deeply, read widely, and read with attention. The rewards are incalculable.

Second, that teaching, at its best, is a form of service that benefits the teacher as much as the student. I have learned as much from my students over the decades as they have learned from me, perhaps more. Their questions have challenged my assumptions, their perspectives have broadened my own, and their enthusiasm has rekindled my own passion for literature during periods when it might otherwise have waned. The classroom, at its best, is a space of genuine intellectual exchange, not simply the unidirectional transmission of knowledge.

Third, that humor is essential to survival. The ability to laugh, particularly at oneself, is a resource not to be underestimated. The absurdities of academic life, the pretensions of literary theory, the physical indignities of aging—all are more bearable when viewed through the lens of humor. I have tried, not always successfully, to maintain a sense of the comic in my writing and in my life.

Fourth, that relationships endure. The connections we form with family, friends, colleagues, and students constitute the real substance of a life. Books and ideas matter enormously, but it is in our interactions with others that these intellectual pursuits find their fullest expression. I have been fortunate in my personal relationships, blessed with a family that has tolerated my eccentricities and friends who have shared my enthusiasms.

Finally, that aging, for all its challenges, offers unique compensations. There is a clarity of perspective that comes with having lived through successive decades, a sense of historical continuity that younger people, understandably, lack. I have witnessed the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement, and now the climate justice movement—each representing a step, however halting and incomplete, toward a more equitable society. I have seen educational institutions transform from bastions of privilege to (somewhat) more democratic spaces. I have observed the digital revolution from its earliest stirrings to its current ubiquity. This long view provides a context for understanding current developments that is simply unavailable to those with fewer years behind them.

As I write these words, I am aware that they may never find readers beyond a small circle of family and friends. I have no illusions about the broader significance of my life or thoughts. But the act of setting them down has been valuable in itself, a process of taking stock and making sense of the disparate experiences that constitute a lifetime.

In the end, this autobiography is itself a kind of fiction—a narrative constructed from selected memories, shaped by my current preoccupations and perspectives. It is, I hope, a truthful fiction, but a fiction nonetheless. And perhaps that’s appropriate for someone who has spent his life immersed in literature, in the beautiful and necessary lies that tell us essential truths about ourselves.

I began these pages with a touch of ironic self-deprecation, suggesting that my life might not merit documentation. I end them with the recognition that every life, examined thoughtfully, contains worlds within worlds—the Brooklyn of my childhood, the Cornell of my young adulthood, the various domestic and professional spheres of my middle years, and now the contemplative space of my later life. Each of these worlds has its own geography, its own cast of characters, its own conflicts and resolutions. Together, they form not a grand narrative but a modest one—the story of one reader among many, one teacher among many, one writer among many, making his way through the wonderful confusions of existence, book in hand, eyes open, attention paid.

Vivian de St. Vrain (Dr. Metablog) January 2025