I must be one of the least extensively educated subscribers to The Chronicle Review, with a mere B.A. from Cornell University and not a second’s worth of graduate school to follow. Still, I read in these pages of the precipitous decline in enrollments in the liberal arts with great sadness. In a time of economic contraction, rocketing tuitions, and techno-triumphalism, the utility value of such studies seems negligible. I certainly sympathize with today’s recession-beset students. But I can testify that my own free-range romp across the liberal arts has served me beautifully in my chosen profession as a book editor. For 33 years now, I have drawn on those intellectual riches as a resource to guide me in the glorious yet frustrating pursuit of bringing a better class of books into the marketplace.
That wasn’t the plan. (What’s a “plan”?) I arrived in Ithaca with the intention of majoring in biology, a product of the post-Sputnik era and a charismatic high-school teacher. Reading had taken care of itself, thank you. And I did well in Bio 101, the introductory course taught by the legendary William Keeton. But my scientific Waterloo came in the intro chem course. Suddenly I was plunged into a shark pool of feral premeds and spooky-smart engineers. That was unnerving, and soon, baffled as I was by the intricacies of electron states, my cognitive limits became unmistakably clear.
Meanwhile, over in Goldwin Smith Hall, “Introduction to Fiction” introduced me to the fascinating and terrifying Edgar Rosenberg. With his faintly European accent and arch Nabokovian manner, he was a classroom presence of a sort I’d never met before. We lived to answer one of his imperiously posed questions in a way that would elicit a grunt of satisfaction rather than an impatient toss of the head. Here was my first encounter with an avatar of high culture. I can still summon up the class where we unpacked, sentence by sentence, the allusions behind the opening pages of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Faced with an unfortunate student who saw “no particular reason” for a detail, Rosenberg drew himself up and declaimed: “Working from the Rosenbergian dictum that nothing is in a Thomas Mann story ‘for no particular reason,’ let us apply ourselves to discovering what this one means, shall we?” Aha! My mind made a quantum leap of the sort it could not in chem class, and suddenly I could begin (just) to understand how great fiction works.
Next semester I announced to my parents that their only son was switching majors to English. That must have been disconcerting, but they knew they had a reader on their hands, and as my father once observed in a half-compliment, “You’re a good bullshitter.” So off I went on a sort of Wanderjahr through the liberal arts.
Scott Elledge’s seminars on 17th- and 18th-century English literature exposed me to complex poetry and prose that I was the better for grappling with; he also became that crucial professor who encouraged my inchoate literary ambitions. In Werner Dannhauser’s “Introduction to Political Philosophy,” we read the essential Western texts, and because the course had been designed by Allan Bloom, I no doubt received secret infusions of Straussian thought. When, 15 years later, Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind ignited the culture wars, I was actually able to read (and finish) it with understanding.
My peak academic experience took place in Walter LaFeber’s celebrated lecture course on the history of American foreign relations. I could feel the cold-war scales falling from my eyes as he delivered his acute revisionist accounts of the uses and abuses of American power. As the syllabus reached our tragic Indochina misadventure in the spring of 1970, just as Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia, the final lectures were transformed into a thrilling universitywide teach-in.
“Masterpieces of European Literature.” “Art History of the Renaissance and Baroque.” “Survey of American Literature.” “Twentieth-Century Intellectual History” (Civilization is made possible by our discontent? Crazy people are saner than sane people? Huh?). “Major Dramatic Works of the 20th Century.” The forced march through The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Another course of Rosenbergian dicta applied to Stendhal, Dickens, and Mann. I took those classes for no reason I could articulate beyond the sense that they had something I needed. And they met in the afternoon.
When I graduated in that dismal year of 1972, I had no idea what I might do except maybe look for work as a book editor. Publishing has been called the accidental profession; I was an accident waiting to happen. I went about my search in such a half-assed fashion that I made a miserable two-year detour into advertising. So I took the GRE and was accepted at the University of Chicago in American studies.
Then a copywriting job opened up in a college-textbook department; I took a deep breath, waved the U of C goodbye, and life began. My walkabout through the college curriculum stood me in good stead as I learned the surprisingly difficult craft of writing clear, grammatical copy on all manner of subjects about which I knew little. The familiarity I gained with the adoption market came in handy when, a couple of years later, I fast-talked my way into an assistant editorship at New American Library. For three-plus decades now, I’ve conducted my continuing education on my employer’s nickel—a fair bargain, I’d like to think.
I’ve been fortunate. I’ve edited books by some of our finest novelists, by renowned scholars, by prize-winning journalists and critics, by a couple of world-famous celebrities, and even a book-length poem by A.R. Ammons that won a National Book Award. I had the privilege of publishing the translation of The Divine Comedy by Robert Hollander, perhaps the greatest Dante scholar alive, with Jean Hollander. Editing Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America was a course in American studies to die for. In a very real sense, I’ve been able to enrich my liberal-arts education, with a paycheck attached. I’ve seen in the most intimate yet practical terms how great writing and ideas live and thrive and sometimes expire.
I am reluctant to say to an entering freshman: Go forth and do as I did. The world is so much more expensive and less forgiving than the one I inhabited. My particular profession is unlikely to survive the digital revolution in anything like the form I have practiced it. If luck is the residue of planning, I have no idea where my luck came from. I offer this testimony merely as one example of how the disinterested pursuit of knowledge still afforded by a college education can pay dividends down the years in unexpected ways.
So if you are a student blessed with intellectual curiosity, consider exploring curricular roads less traveled. You might end up with a more interesting life than you imagined. You just might get away with it.
