In this post, I’d like to share with you the story of my career as a close reader. I wonder whether your experience is anything like it. I wonder, too, whether this kind of career is possible today, in an era dominated by social media and full of suspicion and doubt about the value of the humanities.
My career started early, in Catholic middle school. I had never been to a theater before, so it was exciting for me to attend a Shakespeare play with the other students in my seventh-grade class. This was in 1964, and the production was done by a small touring company. Three plays, three Fridays in a row, the nuns packed us into a bus for the ride from Melrose, north of Boston, to Lynn, eight miles away.
The first was Macbeth, followed by Henry V and Twelfth Night. I remember details of the actors, actions, and costumes: the stringy-haired witches, clanging swordfights, yellow stockings worn by Malvolio. But it was the dramatic language that seized me. It made me eager to learn about Shakespeare and prompted me to realize (though I didn’t know what I meant by it) that I wanted to be a teacher of literature.
I tried to read Shakespeare in the big editions in the town library, and I browsed biographies and histories of the period I found on the shelves. My breakthrough came when I began Catholic high school, with Hamlet as one of the selections in the fall term. None of us in the classroom could comprehend the old-fashioned vocabulary and random-seeming combinations of words and images. But the teacher made us memorize and recite passages, and we performed scenes that made Shakespeare come alive.
I was captivated by this experience, and it was reinforced and deepened by other reading we did in my first year: Melville, Fitzgerald, Huxley, O’Neill, Orwell, Golding, and Vonnegut, among others, and especially Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms—I was swept away by the war-time romance—and Ellison’s Invisible Man, which to me was as amazing and intricate, as baffling and eloquent, as Shakespeare.
I was fortunate in high school: the literature courses in English and French were outstanding, as was an after-school Great Books program I joined, where I read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Mann, and other European writers.
Proud possessions and memories: I keep near my desk the ragged, marked-up editions of Racine, Corneille, Baudelaire, Gide, Camus, and other dramatists, poets, novelists, and essayists we read in my junior and senior year French literature courses.
I had good luck in college too, at Tufts, starting in fall 1970. I enrolled in a course on the twentieth-century American novel, and, on day one, the teacher led us through the first paragraphs of The Sun Also Rises. His name was George Dardess, my teacher then and later a dear friend. He helped us to hear the narrator Jake Barnes’s first-person voice, the mockery and embittered irony in his descriptions of Robert Cohn. This way of responding to a novel was thrilling to me, and George’s delight in the activity he was engaging in made him a wonderful role model. But it took me time to catch on and write the interpretive essays he assigned. In the margins of my essays, he blue-penned stern comments—e.g., “stop showing off—it doesn’t work.”
This annoyed me. My high school record was sterling. Why was this teacher unable or unwilling to see my obvious ability? But I was determined not to be defeated. I forced myself to grapple with George’s verdict on my writing, and I toiled from C to B+/B grades, becoming more careful and rigorous in my uses of language, more attuned to how I sounded and aware of what I was doing in organizing words into sentences. I came to realize that George’s criticisms had irritated me because on some level I had been aware all along he was right.
When I came to know George better, I learned he’d gone to Rutgers for graduate school, where his adviser was Richard Poirier. He loaned me copies of Poirier’s books, which I thought were terrific, and he pointed me toward T. S. Eliot, William Empson, F. R. Leavis, and Reuben Brower, all of whom I read zealously. The consistent feature of my response to and passion for literature was close reading, the slow-motion attentiveness to sound and sense on the page.
During my senior year, I did an independent study with George on Donne, Herbert, and Marvell. At one of our meetings, he showed me a book from the Tufts library that a friend of his, an instructor at U Cal Berkeley, had told him about, written by one of the senior professors there. The author was Stanley Fish, and the book had the perplexing title Self-Consuming Artifacts. I borrowed it and it enthralled me immediately. His emphasis on “the experience of the reader,” on “the reader’s response” to a writer’s language as it unfolded in time: this was new and fascinating, and I hurried to Harvard Square where I bought a copy of Self-Consuming Artifacts. This is another book I have nearby, an inspiring memento.
My final year of college, 1973-74, I applied to PhD programs in English. Some rejected me; others put me on the waitlist; still others accepted me but with no financial aid. One of the schools that did accept me, and the only one that offered me a fellowship, was Johns Hopkins, and in early April, I mailed my letter of my acceptance. Weeks later, I was astounded to learn from George that Stanley Fish was leaving his position at Berkeley and would be joining the Johns Hopkins faculty, the same semester I’d be getting underway as a graduate student.
I took Stanley’s courses on Milton, Spenser, and sixteenth and seventeenth century poetry. I was his research assistant, and he was the adviser for my dissertation on Ben Jonson. Like George, Stanley was, and is, a brilliant close reader, and, again like George, he took pleasure in what he was doing. He was where he wanted to be; he was doing what he loved.
Connected as I was to Stanley, I also was an enthusiast about literary theory, so in vogue at the time and controversial. Yet even as I waded through Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, everything remained for me an ongoing form of (and education in) the close reading of poems, plays, novels, and the literary nonfiction of Emerson, Thoreau, and others.
I interviewed in January 1978 for a tenure-track line at Wellesley College. Excellent candidates had interviewed before me, but they had accepted positions elsewhere. I think I was offered the Wellesley job because the 1978-79 curriculum was overdue, and someone had to be hired to staff the five courses that had no instructor’s name next to them.
I’m nearing the half-century mark as a teacher, and I’ve always done the same thing: the close reading of literature. I’m better at it now because I’ve studied and collaborated with exceptional close readers, including friends and colleagues at Wellesley. My students have played a crucial catalyzing role as well, challenging me to reexamine texts that I believed I had fully understood.
Long-term, I’m not optimistic: close reading as a skill for literature and life is fading from our technology-saturated world. But my commitment to it as an essential habit of mind and way of thinking is stronger than ever. That’s the story of my career, which began when I tried to catch Shakespeare’s words as they came fast from actors on a stage.
William E. Cain is Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley College, where he enjoys teaching courses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other American writers. His recent publications include essays on Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway.
