Professor Bercovitch Among the Puritans

Photo by Kris Snibbe. 

If you were an undergraduate at Columbia University a generation ago and interested in American literature, word on the street (College Walk, in this case) was that Sacvan Bercovitch was the man to see.

“Take Bercovitch’s class,” your fellow students urged. “He’s the best.” That class was “Foundations of American Literature,” semesters one and two. If you took the first, you’d be sure to take the second, because word on the Walk was true: Bercovitch, who died a year ago last December, was indeed the best, and the class he taught on the earliest American writers and their influence on the culture would not only change the way you think about literature, but how you forever thought of American society, politics, and your own still-developing self. It was one of those very rare classes that was genuinely transformative, and Sacvan Bercovitch was the seductive wizard who introduced you to the subject’s mysteries as he pulled aside the curtain to reveal what was truly going on inside.

At first blush, the material was not promising -- two thick volumes by American Puritan writers such as Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards -- poems, sermons, speeches -- were not the sexy stuff of postmodern literature. But once you were in the classroom, with Bercovitch leaning against the podium, a conjuror’s sly expression on his face, dark, saturnine eyebrows gently rising and falling as he looked down at a text and then gazed challengingly at the class, you were hooked.

Over the next several months, as fall turned to winter, Bercovitch would slowly lead you through the initially forbidding texts and make you realize that these apparently remote figures were not just talking about America in the early 17th century, they were talking about America right now; they were talking about you. Your own hopes and dreams and sense of self had been set in motion centuries before you were born. Bercovitch and his gang of Puritans were telling you who you already are.

“Literature is about myths,” he liked to tell his students. The best place to go for elaboration on this idea were his two seminal books, “The Puritan Origins of the American Self” and “The American Jeremiad.” Together, they were manuals that helped you break the code of American discourse. Whatever seemed new and cutting edge suddenly fit into a very old tradition. When Ronald Reagan spoke of America as “a city upon a hill,” he was merely repeating what John Winthrop had said back in his 1630 sermon. When a cultural prognosticator like Christopher Lasch -- whose bestselling critique of American life, “The Culture of Narcissism” had recently been published -- lamented the decline of American values, you could see he was but the latest in a long line of American Jeremiahs calling the country back to its original ideal conception of itself.

Suddenly, wherever you looked, you saw that Puritan myths were alive and well. Even your own adolescent self-interrogation, your desire for a sense of “calling,” your search for an “authentic” self -- all this had been laid down in the blueprint drawn up by the Puritans, who sprang from the brow of the Bible and Milton to land on these shores and create a new man (and woman), a new Jerusalem, the world’s “last best hope.”

Whether you were an ardent leftist, a staunch conservative (admittedly rare at Columbia) or a muddled centrist, in some way, deep inside, you believed in these ideas. And Bercovitch taught you to see that all along, you’d been thinking mythically.

Sacvan Bercovitch’s own name and life had more than a touch of myth. Though he didn't announce it, his first name was derived from Sacco and Vanzetti, two anarchists sentenced to death for murder -- unjustly, many felt -- in 1927. As a young Jew from Canada, Bercovitch had gone to Israel to work on a kibbutz -- both the rebirth of the Jewish state and the socialist ideals of the kibbutz were two mythic ideas the Puritans would have understood completely. (They regularly gave their children names drawn from the Old Testament and at one point even considered making Hebrew the language of the New World, a “second Jerusalem.”)

His intellectual drive brought him to the United States, and then to Columbia and later Harvard, where as an outsider to both American society and largely Christian culture, he explained both to generations of students, arguably better than anyone else had done before.

Bercovitch eschewed the conventional requirement for a term paper in that first class, asking instead that his students keep a journal, in the spirit of the Puritans themselves. It was a cunning pedagogical move. At first you jotted down quotations from the reading, along with Bercovitch’s sometimes cryptic comments about each selection. Then, as your confidence slowly increased, you added your own thoughts, finding comparisons between old sermons and modern arguments. Eventually, you were discovering yourself in the readings, slightly horrified that you might have a touch of the Puritan within you -- what contemporary college student wouldn't balk at the thought?

But Bercovitch urged you to be relentlessly honest, and his low-key yet intense interest in your life and intellectual development encouraged you to dig deeper and discover more than you thought was there.

“I may be a Puritan deep down after all,” I told Professor Bercovitch in his office one afternoon, after I'd asked him to become my adviser. He laughed but didn't tip his hand -- he wasn't going to affirm or deny your self-revelations, but simply encourage you to keep reading -- and keep thinking.

The second semester of his class took Puritan notions about selfhood, “election,” and America’s sense of being God’s chosen land and applied them to classic American writers from Hawthorne to Nathanael West.  Bercovitch wasn’t pushing a formula:  sometimes he’d read a passage from a novel, such as West’s “Day of the Locust,” pause, look up, and say quietly, “Now that’s good writing.”  Other times he would stop at a word and ask the class, “A ‘deadpan.’  Just what is a deadpan?”  His intent gaze at the assembled students suggested that there was a world of arcane knowledge contained in that single outdated term.

A lucky few were invited to his booklined apartment on Riverside Drive, with its expansive view of the Hudson River and all of America rolling on in the distance. Seated on his big Eames black leather wingback chair, he'd listen as a fellow scholar he had invited that evening read from a manuscript in progress. To many of us, it seemed the perfect life.

Bercovitch was one of those teachers. He made you feel that every class was a journey into the center of both American culture, past and present, and a journey into yourself. If you paid the least bit of attention, you couldn't help but have your understanding of both altered permanently.

Professor Bercovitch went on to teach at other places, write other books, and influence other students for many years; but for those of us who knew him at Columbia, it will be always be impossible to read an American novel, or even a blog entry, and not have our understanding of it influenced by memories of his teaching, his Cheshire cat’s smile, and of our own city on a hill on Morningside Heights, where many of us learned for the first time, to our great surprise, that we were, in fact, Americans.

Photo: Concordia's Records Management and Archives.

Walter Winchell Rhumba

A little musical treat for the first Friday of this new venture.  Where else can you find Xavier Cugat's rendition of the Walter Winchell Rhumba?  The bog spews up many an odd item, and perhaps few odder or more delightful than this?  Who's Xavier Cugat, you ask?  Don't ask.  But who's Walter Winchell, you persist?  The knowledgeable among you already know, but for those who don't, here's a fitting anecdote from the end of Winchell's tumultuous life, when he rode uptown to Columbia University during the student demonstrations in 1968 to observe the action firsthand.  Unfortunately an especially nasty cop rudely shoved Winchell (some say he did even worse), and said something to the effect of, "What the hell are you doing here, old timer?"  Winchell's response was characteristic.  "I'm Walter Winchell," he declared stoutly.  The cop was not only unimpressed, but his blank expression indicated he hadn't a clue who Winchell was.  Walter left the scene forlorn, later telling a friend, "What kind of a world is it where someone hasn't heard of Walter Winchell"?

This kind of world, apparently, for even more people now haven't heard of Walter Winchell.  And yet in his heyday -- the 1930s, 40s, and into the 50s -- Winchell was one of the most famous men in America.  Ostensibly he was a gossip columnist, but he was much more than that:  He was the gossip columnist, the man everyone read, the man PR flack went to with a juicy tidbit about some star or would-be star, hoping that Winchell would put it in his column.  Winchell appeared in movies (usually as himself), was the narrator of the 1958 TV series The Untouchables, had a phenomenally successful radio show (anyone of a certain age, and that doesn't include me, will remember his celebrated opening, "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea!  Flash!")  And he had a phenomenally unsuccessful TV show later on, when the famous voice was accompanied by an awkward man who "seemed to be screaming at the camera for no good reason," as one observer noted.  Winchell had thought he was King of All Media before Howard Stern claimed the title for himself, but Marshall McLuhan could have told Winchell (if he'd bothered to listen) that the medium is the message and TV just wasn't Winchell's medium.  ("It's called a medium," quipped Fred Allen, another radio man who was immensely famous in his day and nearly forgotten now, "because it's rarely well-done.)  Never mind.  For a longer time than mere mortals deserve, Winchell was read and listened to by virtually every sentient American, and even a few comatose ones as well.  Winchell had a voice that could easily raise the dead.

He'd been a stalwart supporter of FDR during the Depression and World War II, and America loved his take-no-prisoners approach to hitting the Nazis and fascists with everything he had, which was mainly his voice and his column, with its distinctive, breathless ellipses....between his...startling revelations!  But after the war Winchell turned to the new enemy, the Communist threat, and when he loudly supported Senator Joseph McCarthy (and loudly was the only tone Walter knew), he made some new enemies himself among his former fans.  Winchell red-baited with the best of them, going after reds, pinks, fellow travellers, commie dupes, and people he just didn't like.  Winchell must have known his power was fading when the brilliant 1957 film The Sweet Smell of Success was released with a blistering portrayal of a Walter Winchell-ish columnist and radio commentator named "J. J. Hunsecker," chillingly played to perfection by Burt Lancaster, backed up by one of Tony Curtis as an ambitious small-time press agent ready to lick Lancaster's hand and much worse if it would get one of his clients a mention in J. J.'s column.  Here's an exchange between Curtis's Sidney Falco and Lancaster's Hunsecker:

Sidney Falco: Sure, the columnists can't do without us, except our good and great friend J.J. forgets to mention that. You see, we furnish him with items.

J.J. Hunsecker: What, some cheap, gruesome gags?

Sidney Falco: You print 'em, don't ya?

J.J. Hunsecker: Yes, with your clients' names attached. That's the only reason the poor slobs pay you - to see their names in my column all over the world. Now, I make it out, you're doing me a favor?... The day I can't get along without a press agents' handouts, I'll close up shop and move to Alaska, lock, stock, and barrel.

The two actors were in top form, and the fact that neither they nor screenwriter Ernest (North by Northwest) Lehman from his novella, with an assist from Clifford Odets, felt the slightest fear of reprisal from the real Winchell suggests that Walter's days were numbered.  But newspapers themselves were dying out even back then -- New York City used to have at least nine dailies -- and even Winchell's own flagship paper went under in 1963.  Soon gossip columnists like Liz Smith were learning to make nice about celebrities and not be so darn mean.  The whole story is told in full detail in Neal Gabler's definitive biography, Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity, and in fictional form by Michael (Dispatches) Herr in his small but searing book, Winchell.  And you can even see the great Stanley Tucci portray Winchell in the 1998 TV movie directed by the late Paul Mazursky, titled (what else?), Winchell.  That's enough to keep you busy this weekend.

For a time, Walter Winchell was indeed King....of something.  Remember him kindly, for he fought the good fight as well as the bad one(s).  As for Xavier Cugat, that's another story.  Let's rumba.