Nearby on my desk is a thick textbook, 10 inches high, 7½ inches wide, battered, edges stained from sweat and dirt, with the word LITERATURE in white letters on the faded brownish-orange cover. Just above this word, in smaller letters, is the phrase An Approach to. The book’s full title, AN APPROACH TO LITERATURE, is printed horizontally in white block caps on the binding, a dark gray-green color that curls an inch onto the front and back.

This was the textbook, 1000 double-column pages, that I was required to buy for an Advanced Placement course I was enrolled in, September 1969 to May 1970, at the Catholic prep school for boys I attended. It was the fourth edition, published in 1964, and the editors were—though I didn’t know it at the time—two leading New Critics, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. I carried this heavy volume through the hallways five times a week for a year.

There are four sections: Fiction, Poetry, Discursive Prose, and Drama. The authors are canonical names, and the selections are well known and widely studied, or at least they were in the 1960s. The plays include Hedda Gabler, Oedipus Rex, Antony and Cleopatra, Saint Joan, Murder in the Cathedral, The Circle (that’s a comedy by W. Somerset Maugham), and The Skin of our Teeth. All the authors in An Approach to Literature are white, and only six are women.

The teacher was Brother Rudolph, a member of the Xaverian religious order. He was in his early sixties, short, wiry, close-cropped gray hair, piercing blue eyes. He wore the traditional black habit and shiny black penny-loafers.

Classes began promptly at 8:20 with the schoolwide sounding of a bell. There were twenty of us, and we waited for this jolting ring in our wood-topped, one-piece metal desks, watching the hands of the clock moving inexorably forward. For a solid hour, Brother Rudolph maintained a mood and atmosphere of anxiety and pressure. We wore white shirts, ties, sports jackets, dark pants, and dress shoes; we were quiet and obedient, hoping not to be noticed.

Brother Rudolph usually was at a table in the front, with his book, some papers, and a dictionary, but sometimes he stood in the rear or at the side by three large windows. He enjoyed pacing up and down the aisles as if on patrol, the only noise that of the subdued whoosh of the heat and AC unit. Each of us feared that the nervous-making silence would be broken by Brother Rudolph calling on one of us to explain, say, what Thomas Mann’s “Disorder and Early Sorrow” or P. B. Shelley’s “Hymn to Apollo” was about.

The syllabus included everything in An Approach to Literature from page one to the end. Brooks and Warren provided tips and prompts for formal analysis and included interpretive essays for many of the selections, but we didn’t explicate the text in New Critical fashion. I remember Brother Rudolph instead asking us with steely insistence, “What’s this poem about?” He demanded accurate summaries. I’d like to journey backward in time to hear how my friends and I answered this question about Herrick’s “The Night-Piece to Julia” and Dryden’s “The Secular Masque.”

Brother Rudolph also made us memorize poems, and it was a source of fear among us that he might announce our name and order us to the front for recitation. One of my moments of anguish occurred when I was told to present Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” Did I know what I was saying?

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow of human misery….

For me and my classmates, the urgent task on these occasions was to voice the words with total accuracy. Brother Rudolph was quick to interrupt: “Did Cain get that line right?” There were rivalries and factions among us, mostly connected to sports teams we were on, but we shared the same plight in this AP chamber. Even the students who didn’t like me projected sympathy and support.

We also read novels—I think six or seven of them, but I recall only On Human Bondage, The Grapes of Wrath, and All the King’s Men. Brother Rudolph assigned fifty pages per night, and each morning he’d choose one of us, and then another, and another, to take position at the front to “say what happened” in the chapters we’d been assigned. Brother Rudolph wanted an exact recounting of the story, the characters, actions, and settings. Sometimes he’d say, “you left something out.” Or, he’d turn to someone, “what did Cain forget?”

In a way, my AP course was an eight-month bootcamp in close reading. Not close reading in the New Critical sense. It was about the content, what the author was stating and describing. We had to be very attentive. If we passed over an element of the plot or neglected a significant piece of dialogue, Brother Rudolph would chastise us. And if we seemed zoned out to him, our minds wandering, he’d give us a cuff to the head. Each class session was an ordeal. Our only ally was the clock.

In later decades, when I told people about this year-long trial, they reacted with indignation—Brother Rudolph was abusive, a bully, a tyrant. They wanted to know how our parents responded, what the moms and dads said to him during visit days or conveyed in protest to the headmaster. But this was a different era. None of us said a word to parents or any other would-be rescuers. These were inflexible conditions, and we were fated to endure them on our own.

Then again, Brother Rudolph didn’t harm us much. I survived, and I read an extraordinary amount of literature with focus and concentration. Much of what I encountered was beyond my grasp. But most of the authors stimulated me, kindled my curiosity, and gave me pleasure—Hardy, Lawrence, Joyce, Hemingway, many of the poets, and Boswell, Plutarch, Ibsen, and Shaw.

Outside the AP classroom in the afternoons, my friends and I talked about literature. It energized our minds and imaginations. The school’s library was excellent, and during study periods we searched the shelves for books by authors we were studying and piled them on the tables to browse in.

That was fifty-five years ago. No Internet, cell phones, smart-watches, laptops, tablets, or social media. It was a rigorous experience of and training in close reading: Brother Rudolph, his students, some novels, and An Approach to Literature.

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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.