Chapter 7: Taking the Down Elevator

Port Arthur, Ontario
Thunder Bay, Ontario

EDUCATION, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding. (Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary)

By June 16, 1969, I had lived 31 years, 1 month, and 18 days in the United States, and Carol and I had been married for exactly six years. We celebrated our anniversary by driving into Canada with Lianna, then five months old, and a black tomcat named Thor, even younger. Although I had lived most of my life within ten miles of the international border, it surprised me to find how many everyday differences existed in Canada—or was it just in that backwater north of Lake Superior? Who ever heard of cars pulling over to the side of the road and stopping out of respect when a funeral passed? And a few blocks from home there was a functioning public water pump. People shopped at small corner stores, and the one Safeway outlet in town was not thriving. The biggest department store chain in Canada had only a small catalogue outlet downtown, where the standard response to requests for service was the question “Where do you think we are—Toronto?”

In a town that until had recently been known only for grain elevators and paper mills, in a country still buoyed by its eroded ties to monarchy, I was treated like part of an elite intellectual corps. Shopkeepers gave me immediate credit without question. At the university, less than ten years old, faculty members were treated with deference and respect. Students and support staff would noticeably stiffen up in my presence and address me as Doctor Bodzin, often apologizing for their “English” before talking.

During our first summer, an article on homosexuality was published in a weekend magazine supplement distributed by the Port Arthur News-Chronicle (known as the News-Comical in some journalism schools, where it served as an extreme example of inept writing). Before the papers were sent out to the streets and to households, the local editors ripped the article out of every copy and proudly placed an announcement on page one to tell the community how they had preserved its purity. My American civil libertarian spirit was offended and stirred. I sent a letter to the editor saying that when I subscribe to a newspaper, I expect to get the entire issue every day; that how each household deals with particular articles should be a matter of individual choice; that I wish to be in charge of what gets read in my house, and not to be at the mercy of some censor downtown.

Two days later, the paper printed responses from three locals, attacking me for encouraging the erosion of morals in the north. The worst allegation came from one virginal citizen who speculated that I might be the kind of person who read paperbacks.

We bought a house near downtown Port Arthur (a city that, within a year, merged with nearby Fort William to become Thunder Bay). The men who delivered our refrigerator pointed out that somebody at the other end had made a mistake on the shipping bill: it said Doctor Bodzin. When I told them I was a doctor, they wanted to know what kind. A doctor of philosophy, I said. One of them dismissed me with a wave of his hand. “I figured it had to be something like that.”

The head of the English department was John Rideout, whose brother Walter was chairman at Wisconsin. In Madison, I had learned that their mother spent six months with each of them, summer in Canada and winter in Wisconsin, and I thought a person would have to be crazy to go to Madison for the winter. But, then, I had never been on the north shore of Lake Superior in the winter.

John rode his many hobby horses loud and often. He was impatient with the student sit-ins that were changing the nature of higher education all over the western world; he regarded them as a diversion from the only significant political issue worth arguing about, the Vietnam War. He seemed incapable of dealing with any subject without working some aspect of U.S. foreign policy into the discussion. He was also fond of praising Percy Bysshe Shelley as a proto-socialist and a poet who had rendered all post-Romantic poetry superfluous. The reactionaries I had fled at Berkeley, who found Milton modern, would have found him shockingly progressive.

So strident was his anti-Americanism, and so rich was his accent, that you could almost assume John was British. Typical of foreigners, he referred to all Americans as Yankees; it surprised me to find out that he was as Yankee as they come, from Maine, and that his exaggerated twang was that of a down-easterner. When, in one of our get-acquainted discussions, I suggested that a clean environment might be of some importance, he paternalistically dismissed my suggestion and sighed with chagrin that the Yankee propagandists had gotten to me. How could clean water be more important than ignorant armies clashing in Vietnam? Apparently, he was not beyond stealing a line or two from ultramodernist poets.

Few of the fifteen members of the English department at Lakehead were working toward reputations as scholars. Late one afternoon, as I was preparing an article in my office, a colleague poked his head through the doorway and reminded me that we didn’t have to do such things to succeed. Another colleague, going on sabbatical, was asked if he was going to finish his doctorate. “I’ve taught my courses for six years without it,” he replied. “What more could I learn about the material?” That attitude was common at the university, and some departments even seemed to be resolutely anti-intellectual. A Spanish professor was refused tenure, according to his dismissal letter, partly because he had “been an embarrassment” to his colleagues. English translation: during the previous year he had published more articles than everybody else in his department combined.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. (Emerson, “Self-Reliance”)

At Fort Knox, when I had sprinted across valleys with mortar shells exploding nearby, I could time them and figure out when to run. At Lakehead, and in Thunder Bay generally, there was less of a rhythm to the bursts of insanity exploding around me and I found it harder to calculate my movements. But the bursts of darkness made me start to think about what issues were worth fighting for, and that signaled the awakening of political awareness.

Lewis Smith, the man I was replacing, had taught Old English as well as American literature, and until I came along John was afraid that he himself would have to teach the history of the language. But when John read my transcript and saw that I had taken a number of graduate courses in Old and Middle English at Wisconsin, he asked me whether I wanted to teach the upper-level course in those subjects. He kept asking until I realized that no was not the right answer. I at first thought of the history of English as too stodgy a topic for me, too bereft of opportunities for the kinds of open discussion I wanted to encourage in the classroom.

I graded that course on a curve, and at the end of the first year I found that one student was so superior to the others that I submitted a grade higher than 100. She knew more about the subject than even I wanted to know, and surely more than any other student, so how could I fail to reward her? But John told me that the machine would choke on that number. Owe her something, pay her back next time, do anything, but lower that grade. In a department meeting, senior members contended that even God would have to struggle to get 90 in their courses. Eventually, I had to reduce the grade to 100 and I apologized to the student.

This was the first time I recognized that my standard, quality, was on a collision course with quantity, the god of machinery. I have made a point of bringing these values into opposition many times since, and I have lost most of the battles, but my opponents have usually had to concede that my points were better than theirs. But few people want to fight a computer.

Even after I had taught the history of the English language two or three times and became confident enough to teach a new version of the course each time, I kept arguing that I did not want to do it again. As a result, John felt he had to make it up to me in other ways. I was never asked to teach another course I did not want, and John even allowed me to fashion a new course in literary criticism.

My teaching methods were extemporaneous and instinctive. In September, the first two sessions of an evening course I was scheduled to teach fell on Jewish holidays. Instead of arranging to meet on another night or getting somebody else to stand in for me (both of which would have been logistical nightmares), I made tape recordings of the lectures and the students took notes from the disembodied, apocryphal Doctor Bodzin.

Though I taught only one introductory course in American literature that first year, the students treated me like an American ambassador, a role I embraced and fostered in Thunder Bay and beyond. The American literature courses I taught for the extension department in Fort Frances and Geraldton gave me an audience in the broad northern hinterlands. I began to study Canadian history and literature so that I could have a point of reference when I was asked to explain the differences between some aspects of life in the United States and Canada. I was so thirsty for news from the United States that I subscribed to eleven magazines. But I had a lot to learn, especially about Canada. One evening, a newspaper boy rang our bell and asked me if I wanted to subscribe to the News-Chronicle. The sale meant a lot to him: the top five salespeople would win a trip to Ottawa. “Iowa!” I bellowed. “Why would you want to go to Iowa?” Eventually, besides reading the local newspaper, I also received local papers from Toronto and Montreal by mail.

Americans are the only immigrants whose homeland is scorned here as a national pastime.… Question any Canadian about anti-Americanism and the likely response will be “Come on, Americans can take it.” Well, sure. Americans don’t have to struggle with language or geography, and they don’t have to build cultural centres as long as they can turn on the television set. The most serious trauma of adjustment Americans are likely to suffer will come as they learn how to pronounce the last letter of the alphabet.

But whether Canadians understand it or not, Americans are foreigners when they come here. They may talk of “coming home” when they cross the border into Canada, but many also have the same feeling when they go the other way. Even those who become citizens often have ambivalent feelings about both countries. . . . (G. Bodzin, letter to the Ottawa Citizen, January 1991)

Ever since Canada’s centennial year, 1967, epidemics of chauvinism had been breaking out all over the country. Quebec indépendantistes bombed mailboxes in Montreal, and only three years later the assassination of a provincial cabinet minister and the kidnapping of the British trade commissioner led to martial law. At Lakehead, a popular sociology professor gained a large following by accusing Kimberley-Clark (the company that makes Kleenex) of irreparably ruining several northern Ontario communities.

I felt echoes of Anti-Americanism as soon as I took the role of American in residence, but never more acutely than the evening I sat on a faculty panel discussing Canada–U.S. relations. The 200 students who made up the audience were all strangers to me, vocal, bellicose, and unanimous in their belief that Canada would be better off without any American influence at all. The loudest applause of the evening went to a student who claimed Americans were so obnoxious that most Canadians would even be willing to reduce their standard of living just to get the Yanks out.

The faculty members on the panel confronted the issues directly, but could not pacify the students. History professor Tom Miller, sitting directly to my left, used his coffee cup as an ashtray while continuing to suck out the soggy dregs of his witches brew of nicotine and caffeine. When his turn came to talk, he unleashed a diatribe against conspiracy theories of history in general and he invited the students to refute him with historical evidence. With their scant knowledge of history, they retreated to arguing that history was only history but that they were speaking out on behalf of the poor folk in Schreiber and Terrace Bay whose towns had been wiped out by Kleenex.

While all this was going on, I hardly knew what I could contribute to the discussion. But I need not have worried; I was only a straw man. When I told the audience how skeptical I was that Canadians would accept a decline in their standard of living for anything less than a world war, the real shouting began. What right had I, an ignorant imperialist, to come to Canada and tell the people what they think? How many Canadians had I interviewed? What did I even care about the life and death of Canadian communities?

In an apartment sparely furnished in post-Depression, lower middle class 1930s style, Ronald Reagan was sitting on a chesterfield, languidly reciting a piece of draft legislation. I walked into the living room and confronted him, saying, “You have no right to try to pass that law.” There were gasps of outrage in an invisible gallery, and a southern voice threatened me with contempt. The President began to lecture me about the marvelous legislative system that allowed ingrates like me to interrupt him with unproductive comments. I angrily replied that it was the system that deserved my respect, not a president who was using it for his own personal advantage; that for twenty years (an intentional exaggeration) I had been studying America, like an abandoned lover watching with horror from the second-story of a nearby hotel as his old lover peddled herself on the streets. There were more threats from the southern voice, but I was beyond its reach; it was like being threatened over the radio. I realized what a strange mirage had been the precious freedom I had just forfeited: it had been mine only if I did not exercise it. Now it was gone. To keep it, one would have to accept the will of any demagogue who claimed to speak for the majority. The majority itself, knowing this, would be sure to back him. Now I was a marked man, and I would have to offer my love, if at all, silently, from a distance.

(February 13, 1983)

At the end of my first year, Lewis Smith informed John Rideout that he would not be returning from Japan, certainly not next year and perhaps never. John quickly advertised his position and asked me to help Ned Moser screen applicants. We had spent most of the year putting together a curriculum for the American literature master’s program and spending as much money as we thought was necessary for primary and secondary library materials. Sifting through a deluge of hopeful applications proved to be even more interesting and equally challenging. I had recently read Bernard Malamud’s A New Life, a novel about a professor who was hired because the chairman’s wife found his picture attractive. At least this competition would be decided on academic grounds.

The most impressive résumé came from a woman at an eastern U.S. university. She had a stellar publication record and was eager to leave the United States because her husband was vulnerable to the draft. Ned and I put her letter aside and sorted the others into two piles: one from people who would never be considered and the other from possible candidates. When John came to evaluate our work, we told him that the choice seemed clear. He might even benefit from the Vietnam war.

As John read the letter, his brow began to wrinkle. Then he said, “This really fooled you, didn’t it?” Ned and I searched each other’s faces for some hint as to what John might have meant. “Be reasonable,” John said. “I would never consider somebody like this. Just think: Why would anybody who is so superior to these other applicants”—and he pointed to pile number two—“want to come to an out of the way place like this?”

He was ready with a reason. “You’ve got to be careful when somebody with qualifications as good as this applies,” he explained. “Next thing you know, that person will be after your job, and mine.” And before Ned and I could respond, John threw in the clincher: “Especially a woman.” He took the letter and we never saw it again.

In describing the ambiguity of experience, Herman Melville turns out to have been an optimist after all. John Rideout taught me that nothing in human affairs could be taken at face value, that experience always had to be viewed through a skeptical filter, with the knowledge that much of external reality is covered with a transparent overlay of paranoia and politics. The woman whose application was cavalierly dismissed in this incident went on to gain an esteemed academic reputation as a scholar and lecturer. The man who was plucked from the bloody campus at Kent State to teach American literature at Lakehead the next year is lost in the mists of obscurity.

When Leo Rockas, at Wayne State, tried to persuade me to raise my sights beyond high school teaching, he had mocked the intellectual level high school teachers. “Do you know what they talk about in the teacher’s lounge?” he asked me. “The specials at the supermarket!” I used to wish the agenda of faculty meetings at Lakehead could have had anything as interesting as A&P specials. The faculty was a gigantic trade union, for the most part interested only in higher salaries. Which kept coming—my first year’s salary was $9,500; by my fourth year, I was making almost 50 per cent more, and I always thought I was making much more money than we needed. One year, we could pay cash for a European holiday and return with a fully paid-for Volvo; after four years, we could put $12,000 down on our next home.

As for issues, the most heated faculty discussions I remember were on the subject of a lake that the university president had proposed, which would be created with the help of a dam across the river that passed through the campus. I had a hard time staying awake at faculty meetings until my third year, when provincial grants were cut and a number of university programs seemed to be in danger.

Still, I kept hearing how lucky I had been to get in on the ground floor of a growing institution. If I had taken that job at Michigan State, I would have been trapped in an eternal purgatory of freshman compositions. Here I could help fashion a master’s program—a university graduate curriculum in my own image. And teach I did. Irony of ironies, I found that at the university level I was paying more attention to the students than to the curriculum. Far from the future farmers of Canada, the students were respectful, courteous, even deferential, and, for the most part, eager to learn.

If anything, I became more American during those years, putting increasing stress on the values of individualism and skepticism about government, especially when I saw that the predominant social values in Canada defer to the mass, not to the individual. Knowing that studying the Transcendentalists could become a pivotal university experience for some students, I focused on the centrality of Emerson in American thought. Oddly, I also found myself enjoying the writings of Edgar Allan Poe less and less every time I read them. At Wisconsin, Henry Pochmann had made a valiant effort to communicate the richness of Poe, but I continued to find the Poe philosophy and esthetic as alien as Urdu phonetics. Students typically had read some of Poe’s short stories and expected an enjoyable, mindless, Gothic experience, but their appreciation had the same quality as the feeling of a man who falls for a woman before he gets to know her very well. Getting closer to her doesn’t necessarily increase his regard or appreciation for her, only his understanding of her complexity and the unpleasant realization that what attracted him to her had more to do with his need than her qualities.

I used to tell my students that I would give anything not to understand Poe again. I wanted to enjoy his stories as I had when I was younger. Adding understanding was to undermine the esthetics; it was to attach an intellectual underpinning to an experience that once been pure, unreflective joy. I was beginning to appreciate that reading was not an isolated experience. It was the accumulated experience of all the reading that had gone before. Hearing a symphony is not just listening to the notes. For the experienced listener, it is also anticipating the notes to come. Seeing Hamlet for the tenth time is seeing it ten times at once, revisiting the first time and all the times in between. Esthetic pleasures change. You never hear Brahms the same way twice--you never read a book the same way twice—because you bring something different to them every time.

Carol converted her experience as a social work intern in Madison into a full-time job on a mental ward at the local Ontario Hospital. I came into contact with her work only twice, once in Madison, when we shared Thanksgiving with a teenaged patient (he described Carol’s turkey as “the toughest chicken” he had ever eaten) and one New Year’s Eve in Thunder Bay, when we mingled with the patients on her ward and tried to entertain them. One man beat me at checkers before I even knew it was time for strategy. Then he did it again. And again. I finally asserted my pragmatic sanity and quit the field.

We again lived in a small city with an orthodox synagogue. In Thunder Bay, however, the congregation remained traditional even though the rabbi and his family seemed to be the only people in town whose daily life could be described as orthodox. The synagogue was traditional for that most traditional of reasons, because it always had been. The rabbi, a man named Kanterovitz, held the Jewish community together with all the defensiveness a besieged and homesick Israeli could muster. He and his wife were waiting for his contract to expire so that they could move to Israel, a step they recommended for us every time we complained about the isolation, the lack of real community, or anything else, including the weather. Their invariable response was yesh lecha b’rera, you have a choice. This was no life for a Jew. Israel existed for people like us.

When the Kanterovitzes fled town after our first year in Thunder Bay, we again found ourselves, as we had in Berkeley, dealing with a recently ordained rabbi assigned to his first congregation. Daniel Siegel was a most unorthodox orthodox rabbi. I had met his mentor, Zalman Schachter, at the Hillel House in Madison, where he showed students how to use the materials at hand to improvise a havdalah service to end Shabbos: Instead of the traditional multi-wick candle, he told us to use two matches; for the traditional spices, we could borrow a woman’s compact; he was certain that we would not have to find a substitute for wine.

To Zalman—and to Danny—it was better to make a sincere connection to the divine, no matter how unconventional, and to feel ourselves growing spiritually than to nonchalantly follow a well-worn pattern and to come away unaffected. Danny’s first question in Thunder Bay was where he could find the other clergy—not Father so-and-so and Reverend whoever, but truly inspired clergy, perhaps a Buddhist monk. In his quest for other searchers rather than ministers with a pat answer for every question, Danny eventually found an ashram just outside town, where he befriended the spiritual leader, a woman named Mataji.

Like Emerson, Danny believed that the human impulse toward inspiration did not die thousands of years ago, that truth and what he called the “high life” were still available to all of us. He had decided to become a rabbi while studying the writings of Martin Buber, when he realized that he would rather be Buber than read Buber. He thought many Jews disparaged tradition because even the language of prayer was obsolete. The Rosh Hashanah liturgy, for example, refers to God as king—but what could that mean in a world that had long ago lost its belief in the Divine Right of kings? And instead of having congregants turn away from God, he advocated approaching God in ways that would be meaningful for our day. He challenged us to write new prayers, in language that inspired us. Much of what he taught dealt with getting rid of ego. He did not shrink from the pain of growth because he knew that the joy of growth required intense, concentrated, almost transcendent effort.

When Steven was born, I had an opportunity to take the traditional role of the head of a Jewish home. Every Jewish father since Abraham has been responsible for circumcising his sons. I was thirsting for direct contact with tradition, and I made inquiries about a mohel. But before I could call, somebody else did it for me, and soon I was surrounded by a clucking coterie of protective elders who told me not to worry about a thing, that everything was arranged.

The occasion itself was a tragic blur. Steven had been weak at birth, and the bris was delayed for two weeks. When it finally happened, I did not know how to choose the participants and I knew that I could not affect the roles. People with experience ran the show, and I did not even feel like a participant. Hovering above myself, I observed an old man in training, a novice who years later might be level-headed and clear enough to step in to rescue some younger man’s big day but who now could play only the roles of host and banker. I had no greater satisfaction that day than to know that I had paid for somebody else’s party. It was spiritually impoverishing.

Carol and I thirsted for the kind of community represented by Danny and his wife, Chana, and we tried to spend as much time with them as our young families would allow. But they lived in the Fort William section of town, miles closer to the shul than we did, and at first we did not visit them on Shabbos, largely because the children could not walk the whole distance and Carol would not. Danny offered to tell me how conservative Jews justified driving to shul on Shabbos and holidays, but I was not interested in rationalizations. As if everything had to be justified. Besides, I was already wrestling with whether to drive to shul, and the last thing I needed was the conservative rabbinate to salve my conscience. Earlier, in the years when I refused to consider driving on Shabbos, I would have moved into a house close to the shul, as my parents always did; in a house more distant, I would simply have stayed at home.

Understanding the implications of a paradox—that we must accept the past if we are to grow as individuals, but that we must constantly re-examine traditional conclusions or stagnate as Homo sapiens—is the underlying basis of a rational, critical view of life. As thinkers we walk a line; sometimes we fall over on the side of certitude, and sometimes on the side of skepticism. . . . accepting too much of the past is just as likely to draw us into error as is rejecting too much. To develop a critical perspective is to realize this, and to avoid both errors. (E.S. Bodzin, “The Place of Science in Everyday Thought,” Lakehead University Science Newsletter, spring 1973)

Carol was ready to drive on Shabbos long before I was. One day, when Steven was still being carried around, she told me that the children were going to be able to appreciate God’s creation better at Boulevard Lake than at home, and I was free to join them. She drove off. Weeks later, wishing to be with the family on Shabbos more than to stare at the walls alone, I surrendered to rationalization and joined them. After that, I felt no conflict at all when I began to drive to shul. It was only a matter of time before I took the next step, driving everywhere.

It was an age of altered perceptions, of Aldous Huxley’s The Art of Seeing and people using unconventional methods to bend reality. I focused on music, especially when I realized that it gave as much of a glimpse of heaven as a living creature could want. I discovered Mahler and began a long process of delving into his symphonies and song cycles. After visiting the sauna, friends would join Carol and me in front of our fireplace with a box of Finnish chocolates to fill our lungs with cannabis smoke and find new joys in lush late Romantic music. Imagine lying in the semidarkness listening to the palpitating repetitiveness of Sibelius’s sixth symphony, Chana’s voice somewhere in the distance asking, “Who writes this stuff?” and me saying Sibelius. Then a short pause to absorb the information, and Chana chanting “Far out” before we fade back into the rhythm of the string section and the crackling wood.

Marijuana usually made me want to sleep (a typical denial response, one of Carol’s friends said) and I found even everyday, untreated reality weird enough. The only time I reached for a quick fix was before faculty parties; Carol and I would sit in the car and smoke up so that we could tolerate the absurd company we were about to join. But even without drugs my mind had no difficulty playing with what I saw. Driving through Kakabeka Falls on a Sunday afternoon in 1970, I conjured up an image of Jews all over the world in shul for Rosh Hashana services at that moment. I tried to transfer the aura of Rosh Hashana into my mind, to picture myself driving on that holy day.

Until then I had accepted the world’s view of itself and incorporated it in myself. My community’s customs had become my own, my family’s values had become me. Now I was turning the tables, consciously imposing my own insight onto what I saw. My imagination became a kind of one-way mirror between me and the outside world. I could acknowledge the external reality presenting itself to me if I chose, but my perception and my values could shape my world as easily as they could be shaped by what was happening around me.

The implications of this shift on my religious approach and practice were profound, though it would be a long time before they played themselves out. I had already learned that there was no limit to what could serve as the guiding principle for an individual or a community—that holiness did not depend on what any rabbi said, or on what God thought or intended. Anything could be holy if people agreed to use it as a link to the divine. Now I was about to discover how the same human will that could create holiness could also find ways to destroy links to the divine.

Danny wore the term Freak like a badge of honor; he said that Jews have always been freaks and outsiders in their communities. When he and Chana came to our seder for the first time, he almost brought some magic mushrooms as a supplement to bitter herbs to help us get into the proper mood. On Simchas Torah in our last year, most of the men in town were not willing to miss a day of work for three hours of prayer and it was not worth opening the shul, but there was an early morning service at Danny’s house, attended by a select group: Zalman was there, along with a motley assortment of people I had never seen before, and the morning prayers were a unique improvisation unlike any before or since—roughly fashioned after the holiday prayers but embellished with bells, gongs, Buddhist bowls, and impromptu flourishes of prose and poetry in many languages from a variety of sources.

We snacked after the service and went for a walk. By the time we returned, the streets, which should have been familiar, were strange and new. The conversation was disjointed (the word is not accidental) and punctuated with fits of uncontrolled laughter. By the time we got back to Danny and Chana’s place, I was aware only of clouds and disorientation. Somebody asked me about a detail in a painting that hung in the faculty lounge at the university, but before I could answer him I forgot the question. If I started a sentence, my mind would not permit me to jump ahead to think about the end, and the thought died.

By mid-afternoon, somebody became aware that the children had also eaten the brownies. Expert proclamations came from all over the house: Don’t worry about it: children are always stoned, they don’t notice the difference. But I did. Eventually, I felt threatened by the clamor and I went into the back yard. Somebody was standing next to the fence, rocking back and forth. A couple was seated facing each other on the ground, laughing uncontrollably. Others were wandering aimlessly around the yard. I thought my only friend was that big tree in the corner, and I stared at it for an hour.

Publicly, I was a popular professor (“Lecturer,” according to my first will, which was drawn up at this time) with the statistically correct family: Carol plus two children (Lianna and Steven), and two cats (Thor and Mirabeau) in a house that Carol and I were buying (43 Prospect Avenue). The public Dr. Bodzin was living in perfect, bucolic existence. The public persona had poise and stability, and life seemed conventional and predictable.

I was working in my office, when Ned rushed in. He was in the middle of teaching a class that was asking questions about the Hebrew significance of something they were reading. I went to the lectern and began to translate from the original: Who is the man who desires life, who loves days, and to see good things? Guard your tongue from evil and your lips from uttering guile. Turn from evil and do good, seek peace and pursue it. (Psalm 34)

(September 14, 1972)

It was evident to students and faculty alike that my religious beliefs underlay whatever I did. In class and out, I spoke about religious feelings and duties, formal and informal religious practices, mysticism. One colleague who soon left the university and eventually became a Greek Orthodox priest, told me I could afford to ignore formal Judaism only because it had become so much a part of me. I was like Emerson, he said, who was raised by his Calvinist aunt and influenced by fundamental Christian beliefs before going on to preach instinct, the sweetness and independence of solitude.

A student asked whether I would like to give the keynote speech at the graduation dinner of his local high school, and I welcomed the challenge. I did not know how I would talk to high school students again, especially a group in which more than half had just completed their formal education. When the evening came, I had still not written a single note. I ate the meal that was my reward for being there, thinking of myself as one of the grandest frauds ever. Even when I was introduced, I had no idea of what I would say. After the applause died down, I gazed around the gymnasium at all the expectant faces, looked left and right and even pretended to recognize somebody in the empty balcony. Finally, I began: “This occasion reminds me of something Kurt Vonnegut once said: ‘I’m amazed that I keep running into the people I didn’t like in high school’”

When the crowd stopped laughing and looking knowingly at each other, I commiserated with the large majority of students who had no idea of what they were going to do with their lives. I told them not to worry; their teachers hadn’t known what they wanted to do when they got out of high school either. This was the time to take risks, so that they could find out what they really wanted to do. But I warned them not to be taken in by the tempting advice to “do your own thing.” Everybody wants to do their own thing, but there are thousands of gurus and confidence men out there just waiting to tell you what your thing is. It may not be yours at all. It will help somebody else get rich or famous, but it will just take you off your own path. Before you follow anybody else, you should truly know what your own thing is. Be skeptical of anybody who claims to know how to live your life.

And yet, the major outside influences on my personal life were not my profession or my mortgage, but the unconventional Judaism of Daniel Siegel and the rampant individualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The question of identity became more important than ever. Dr. Eugene S. Bodzin was in danger of being supplanted. Rabbi Zadok was talking directly to me—al tifrosh min hatzibur, he advised, do not cut yourself off from the congregation (Avoth 4:7)—and I was toying with what he meant. I had heard his warning as much as any other when I was young. Even though Carol and I were building a strong sense of community with Danny and Chana, friends of ours from all over the world—Detroit, New York, Israel—were warning us not to lose touch with Judaism altogether. Wherever the congregation might have been, these friends told us it was probably not in Thunder Bay.

While sitting with about 60-80 young and old other Jews I thought about your letter very hard. Rabbi Bakst spoke about the significance of the Jew as a member of a group—of a total. He emphasized that from the beginning of our peoplehood we weren’t individualistic. The Jew, perforce, must live in a community of Jews. Then he finds occasion to be a participant in community affairs. You and your family will likewise, sooner or later, come to this conclusion. I cannot agree that you would find it so undesirable to live near other Jews, and family, too.

The success of the Jew, American or Canadian included, does not culminate with his assimilation with (or to) his majority neighbors; it lies, rather, in his ability to live comfortably with his neighbors, yet remain a true Jew in every respect wherein he differs from the Gentile.

I know, son, that your true thoughts are not much distant from these ideas; it is only that your work does carry you to places away from such Jewish centers, and your cultural background rationalizes its desirability. I am hopeful that when you change your headquarters, you will find a town where you can not only be a participant in daily or at least weekly Jewish services, but also act as one of the Jewish communal leaders. You have the background, you have the ability; your wife, happily, can be a real help, and I believe a willing helper. In brief, as any man wants to become immortal, he can achieve immortality only through his children. I am confident that in you and your family Mom and I will have reason to reach such state. Don’t, by any means, feel that you are the only one; I am hopeful that each of our descendants will always help keep our name clean and honored in the Jewish community. (Letter from Dad, September 16, 1970)

Realizing that I’ll probably be the only person in Thunder Bay fasting on Thursday has a humbling effect on me. In the past, it might have given me a perverted sense of superiority or righteous indigestion, but now I realize that Jewishness . . . grows with practice. Also—and this has depressed me from time to time—it cannot flourish in an individual, especially one who feels superiority over others for whatever reason, but it thrives when people celebrate solemn days together even if they don’t fast and regardless of what else they’ve done for a year or a dozen years. A Jew is a Jew because he does a Jewish thing at a given moment. (Letter to Mom and Dad, July 18, 1972)

Danny and a few students realized that my teaching was not theoretical or dispassionate, but full of living ideas that resounded with internal struggle. A new person was emerging. The public and private selves were contending for my future. When they diverged, what remained of the public self—the old self—would become a mask, a fiction that sat in the drawer until it was needed for show. When Carol and I applied to adopt a baby in 1971—she wanted a third child and I did not want more than two of my own, and adoption seemed a reasonable compromise—I wrote in my application that “right and wrong can be strongly felt only with reference to an external standard of behavior.” Two years later, when we left Thunder Bay, those would be mere words.

I have begun to attend a class given by the unversity extension program, on the history and culture of the Indians of Northwestern Ontario, which is another mind-opening experience, not only for the factual information it provides but for the way it teaches another attitude toward the cosmos and asks questions from another point of view, which are actually the same questions any world view would cope with: Who are we? Where do we come from? What are our duties and what are our joys and pains here? It is like learning a new language, to begin to look at the world not as an alien factor in personal existence, but as a partner; to look at every person and every animal and thing as interrelated aspects of a gigantic whole.

This is not a move in a new philosophical direction, because as Judaism implies that everything is religious, one cannot be a Jew fully and deeply until he begins to do away with the separation between religion and anything else. It is equally important not to separate religious thought from any other thought—all thought must be about Torah, or tending toward Torah, and any thought that does not aim in that direction is without substance. All must be of a piece with the entire fabric. (Letter to Mom and Dad, February 2, 1973)

But, in fact, the spiritual manna that had nourished me as a baby and comforted me as a child now appeared in my dreams as an unpalatable, even putrid, substance, incapable of sustaining me. As I moved toward the pole opposite Telshe, the old life found me—perhaps because, as Henry James suggested, it didn’t have far to look.

When I noticed Reb Mottel, I did what I could to keep him from seeing me. It wasn’t the money he was after—everybody’s after money—I just didn’t want to deal with him. On the playground when he went on the swings I climbed the rigging to stay behind or above him. When he walked, I stayed behind him so that I could see him and stay out of sight. But when I came out of the bathroom after I washed my hands, there he was, waiting. “Do you remember me?” he asked coyly, in the excellent English he never spoke in real life. “Of course I do,” I answered, perhaps with too much emphasis; but I was fighting that deep feeling whenever I try to avoid the spectres of the past that they know it intuitively and take it personally, as if I were fleeing them as people and not my past generally. “I was in town last Sunday and would have seen you then,” he went on, “but that Italian fellow was exposed selling sour milk and I had to leave town for a few days. I haven’t made a sale since.”

Then Carol and I were walking down the street. I was trying to pour some milk, but I could tell from the lumps sticking to the bottle that something was wrong. “It can’t be sour,” I protested, “I know who sold it! He promised!” And I tried to pour it back into the bottle, but the bottle couldn’t hold it and it spilled all over the street. Carol said, “You had better be more careful about your sources.”

(September 19, 1971)

Strange worlds haunted me, worlds that taunted me with the consequences of risk taking and experimentation. In my sleep, I was never far from discord. Dreaming, I witnessed all the ingredients of an anthology of fictional vignettes, the kind that Franz Kafka might have recognized:

Hemingway took his wife out to Innsbruck, and to keep her occupied he put her in a bobsled and said go. She thought it was a gas. Nobody could keep up with her once she got the hang of the thing. It went faster and faster until nobody would even think of challenging her. She became a folk hero of sorts, for whom bobsled trails were carved everywhere she wanted to go.

And Ernest, off in the jungle, was walking slowly, stalking game, explaining that the high-powered rifle was making hunters out of losers. He would never do things the easy way—rather than bag a lion by aiming for the heart, which was close to so many other vital parts, he preferred to aim for the legs. They were hard to hit, and only a real marksman could down a beast in that way before destroying it with a second shot. The code mattered.

So did pride. The man had left a nobody at the mountain and he returned to find a national idol, better known and much more highly honored than himself. It was bitter, bitter. She tried to tell him it didn’t matter, that they could return to the States, away from snow, to Florida, but he would have none of it. He returned to his beloved jungle.

The Texas Rangers were sent out to find him—a chorus of Ernie, Ernie, her saying it’s all right, I’ll come back to the old way—but the bearded, haunted man retreated still farther.

There he was, just for a second! No, man, don’t run! Come back! A Ranger lifted his machine gun: with a volley of gunfire aimed toward the ground, he crippled the fugitive. As he fell, a second volley caught him in the back.

Hemingway turned, surprised. He tried to say something, but he was coughing, choking on his own blood.

(April 14, 1971)

Outlandish vignettes played themselves out in my waking hours as well. Reckless young students sitting in my office told me when their husbands would be out of town; some who were slightly more transparent told me they could not concentrate on their reading because their husbands were sexually inept. I was still too literal a judge of human nature to hear the implicit invitation. One graduate student was explicit enough to spell out what she meant. And a language professor delivered a message that was impossible to ignore. As he conveyed his love for the seventeen languages he had studied, we became close friends on campus, at length discussed our shared attachment to music and art. When I took my bulky tape recorder to his office to listen to the Fauré requiem, I expected him to become enraptured with the music. But I did not expect him to stretch out full-length between me and the door and tell me that he had lusted after me ever since the first time he saw me walking toward him. I could not appreciate that sexual knowledge, and I was able to leave the office as his friend only after a tightwire act of supreme effort.

We were driving east, to where I did not know. Carol asked me if I had closed out our bank account, and I could not remember. I could not even remember the name of our bank. Was it the First Wisconsin National Bank or the Bank of Madison? I had no memory of Thunder Bay.

(Spring 1972)

The nearest settlement of any size was Duluth, 150 miles south. Minneapolis was 350 miles away, Winnipeg 400. We knew people who flew to Toronto once a month, just to remember what the inhabited world felt like. The place didn’t yet feel like home to us, and after two years Carol told me that if we didn’t leave Thunder Bay within a year, she would. It was a natural response to frontier life that would have occurred to anybody more accustomed to culture than the odd traveling road show. That summer, a visiting professor from Edinburgh listened to my discontent with the isolated and primitive conditions at the Lakehead and said, “Why, future generations will thank you! You’re bringing culture to this outpost.” We were not interested in being cultural pioneers.

Oddly, as soon as I developed my own approach in the classroom, I saw that much of what passes for teaching is, in fact, missionary work. Rare is the teacher who does not encourage his students to follow his particular path to salvation. . . . I sought out those few colleagues who could deal with stimulating, challenging, unfettered thinking in the classroom; those who wanted to learn from their students and who felt lucky, rather than threatened, when a student came up with a new idea. Somewhat belatedly, I discovered to my horror that most teachers acted as if only they could unlock the doors of the kingdom, and woe to the poor student who dared show that he too possessed a key. (Excerpt from a report to the energy conservation office of Energy, Mines and Resources Canada , summer 1978)

When the aged King David had a constant chill that even heavy garments could not dispel, an innovative kind of central heating was devised for him: a young woman to share the royal bed. (I Kings 1:1-4) When Queequeg, the harpooner in Moby-Dick, felt death coming on, the ship’s carpenter built him a coffin. Academia has devised prizes that combine the finality and security of a coffin-in-waiting with the lusty warmth and appealing promise of a warm bedmate: the honorary chair and the position of emeritus professor. These both were conferred on John Rideout in his latter years at Lakehead, and the English department chairmanship passed on to George Merrill, who had been my first Lakehead contact at the Modern Language Association convention.

At about the same time as George was appointed, I placed on my office wall the July 31, 1971, cover of the New Yorker, displaying a three-part drawing. At the top, the sun’s rays spelled out “I do.” Below, old barn boards and stiff clothing on a clothesline formed the words “I have.” A small television antenna was visible on the “h,” and a mattress spring sat on the middle of the “e.” Massively descending well below the bottom of the drawing, rooted blocks of sod spelled out “I am.” A weedy flower emerged from the “m.” Whenever one of my classes began to read Walt Whitman, I took the drawing to class and used it to illustrate three orientations: existentialist, materialist, transcendentalist. I was becoming more attracted to ideal values and less patient with selfishness, status-climbing, acquisitiveness.

The department that George took over was a hornet’s nest of activity, with students making inroads in university affairs so that they could have a louder voice in preparing for their own future. John Rideout had always said that student complaints were only background noise, but I found those complaints more legitimate than the economic cries of my overpaid colleagues. When a group of English majors wanted to be represented at department meetings, they asked me to present their petition. I missed the meeting when the resolution was discussed, but George assured me that the department had accepted it.

A week later, in an open departmental meeting, George announced that the petition had been quietly put to sleep. Apparently, “accepted” meant “taken in hand,” not “approved.” I had misinterpreted what he had said earlier and told a number of students that they would have a voice in our meetings. I could hear disgruntled rustling in the lecture hall, along with gnashing of teeth and accusations that the department had been duplicitous. Amid the hubbub, I raised my hand. When I was acknowledged, I stood, chose my words carefully, and said that if I had been an English major attending that meeting, I would be thinking about going home to kick the dog.

George called another meeting, ostensibly to encourage students to become English majors but ultimately so that increased enrollment in English classes would give greater prestige to the department. The discussion went nowhere. He tried—and predictably failed—to show the students that they would enrich themselves by pursuing his favorite research topic, Books and Readers of the 1590s. Finally, I asked George how many people had written him within the past year to ask about a possible position. He guessed about 150. And how many jobs were available? None. Advertised? None. “Well, then,” I asked, “with all those highly qualified and unemployed English majors out there, why should anybody want to be one of them?”

Hoots and whistles.

So many horses had been entered in the race that they had to line up at two starting gates. But those in the second rank had no riders and they were not allowed to run when the race began. Part way around the track, horses supposedly guided by jockeys kept running into each other. Horses and men separated and ran amok all over the track. One horse that knew its way around the track broke away from the chaos and came across the finish line without a rider. Nobody knew whether the result would be allowed to stand. Could a horse without a jockey be allowed to stand as winner of a race, even if all the other horses were totally out of control?

(January 27, 1974)

The entire department had supported George Merrill when the dean of arts took us out to dinner on an April evening to ask who should follow John Rideout. We thought it would be refreshing to have a chairman who was not an autocrat and was rarely opinionated. And, at first, he was all we expected. He encouraged us to talk openly about matters that bothered us, he held more staff meetings, some of them on short notice, and he sent more memos to keep us informed. But before a year had gone by, some members of the department began to wonder why they had not been notified that certain meetings would be held. There were times when members of the department known to oppose a resolution would not be told when it was to be discussed, and it squeaked by. Contrary to regulations, and in a move that could have cost the department its accreditation, he hired a student without a masters degree to teach credit courses. Finally, most members of the department could detect the smell of principles rotting.

Be careful with those in positions of authority; they do not get close to a man except to satisfy their own need. They get friendly when it is to their advantage, but they do not stand by a man in the hour of his adversity. (Avoth 2:3)

Anger within the department simmered and finally boiled over. I stormed into some meetings so obviously distraught that only the absurdly understated observations of Fayek Ishak—such as “Our colleague is not content”—could cool me. After less than a year of George Merrill, half the English department was ready to ease him out. We held a number of private meetings to discuss how to proceed, and the general consensus was that only one person stood a chance of gaining support as as interim chairman: Dr. Eugene Bodzin. We distributed a resolution calling for a vote of non-confidence in the chairman and we asked the dean of arts to help us resolve our internal problem.

When our grievance became public, George was called home suddenly or unexpectedly or conveniently, and our coup d’état was put on hold. John Rideout took advantage of the delay to pull me aside and ask me to explain my campaign to become chairman. With his unerring instinct for revisionism, he told me that it was now clear why I had always seemed to be so friendly. If he had known I wanted to be chairman, he never would have hired me. All I ever had to do, he told me, was keep my nose clean and my mouth shut and I would have been an associate professor in short order. And how could I put a knife in the back of my good friend George, who had never uttered a word about me that was not filled with admiration? What complaints could I possibly have, and could they be important enough to throw away a promising career for? And wasn’t I too young (and totally inexperienced) to be playing such serious games—such things are not done that way—just who did I think would show me the ropes if he didn’t? Did I think there was a manual for new chairmen? It was all politics, every inch of the way. And didn’t I think the only senior department member who supported us was unusually mature of years to be involved in such games? How could I be sure of his motives?

The day our meeting was finally held, I went to George’s office to assure him that this was a professional thing, not a personal one. I told him I thought my position was only a representative one just as his was, since the issue was not personalities but the implementation of procedures. But George had had almost a week to ponder the situation. During that week, our resolution had been watered down from a non-confidence motion to an acknowledgement that there was a communication problem in the department. It was a political move, to gain the support of fence-sitters. It was clear to more than half the department that George Merrill could not carry out the duties of the chairman. And George told me he supported the spirit of our motion. It was an inspired, pusillanimous, and lunatic admission: he knew as well as I that what we were doing actually was a personal thing.

Then, in a cosmic twist of fate, Dean Ryan was carted off to the hospital for what turned out to be his final change of address. The meeting was run by the vice-president of the university, who did not know us but who did know the value of stability in an institution. In the end, our cause foundered: two of George’s supporters on leave were flown in and one member of the department was summarily advised by his conscience to side with entrenched authority. Suddenly the vote was 8-8, with all but two tenured faculty voting for the status quo and all but two untenured members voting against. After all the acrimony he had just witnessed, the vice-president cast the deciding vote and, behold! the record showed that there was no communication problem in the department after all.

It should be borne in mind that from the standpoint of saintliness an act should not be judged by the first impression that it makes upon the mind. It should be considered carefully in the light of the consequences to which it may lead. An act considered by itself often appears good, yet it may result in evil consequences and, therefore, must not be done. (Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, Mesillat Yesharim, transl. Mordecai M. Kaplan, Chapter XX)

As it turned out later, we had been doomed from the start. According to university regulations, which none of us had bothered to consult, non-confidence resolutions and their equivalent (whatever that meant) required two-thirds majority. Half plus one would have done us no good, and being right was the last consideration; it did not count at all.

It didn’t take long for the conspirators to begin losing their jobs at Lakehead, and within a year all of us without tenure had been dismissed, mostly for reasons ostensibly related to the financial plight recently discovered by the university. Those with tenure who had been part of our effort then found conditions too intolerable for them to remain.

I stayed in school for 25 years, reading books and faces, studying motives and rationalizations. I have graduated to find people who want to be told answers. This is the hardest part of being a teacher. I have no answers, only methods of finding them. Sometimes I find a student who realizes that literature is not books but people talking to people, hearts reaching out for hearts, lives communicating with lives. I love ideas and find it unspeakably beautiful that the society I live in would pay me to do what I love. (From an application to adopt a baby from the Children’s Aid Society of Thunder Bay, autumn 1971)

I had been able to get in on the ground floor of an apparently growing institution and had pressed the Up button with confidence. But the longer I stayed, the more I was overcome with creeping horror, feeling the elevator plunging downward to an unknown fate. It was time to step off before I was pushed. One of the first students to complete Lakehead’s American literature graduate program was admitted to the University of Ottawa to work on his doctorate, and his wife was hired to teach at a rural high school 30 miles away. Carol and I had come to know them well ever since they took their first course with me, and we suggested buying a farm together. That summer, Carol and I drove to eastern Ontario with Jim and Jan to look at rural properties. In less than a week, we had bought a house on 100 acres. It would be our refuge from moral bankruptcy, our sane asylum.

.I’ve stepped off that elevator (I can afford to now, I guess), and it can run up and down in utter confusion for all I care. I want to work with people, real people, not administrators and departmental hustlers. The poisoning and backstabbing is universal, sure, but there’s authentic work to be done (like teaching) while the others jostle for position. I’m tired of hustling; I want to be real. Simple as that. I guess I’m lucky that I can do that without feeling forced out of academia altogether—my world is a small one, but all the more intense for its limited focus: I can’t save the department, the university, or the country, but I do have some feelings and thoughts to share with students who might consider it worth it to interrogate themselves and their worlds.

I’m sorry that you feel the need to drop out, if only for a while—but I can obviously understand and sympathize with your reasons. For very non-academic reasons, there have been a lot of times this past year that I’ve wanted to run; but, for me, there are no farms, no places to hide in (and I’ve looked, believe me), since my life in a very real sense flows through my teaching and my writing and my being-here for the students who have come to count. . . .

Gene, your letter made me sad, so I hope that you’ll reach a point of peace, when you’ll be able to write out of strength and happiness and share it with me. (Letter from former Wisconsin classmate Campbell Tatham, August 2, 1972)

How long could I stay on the elevator? Could I even wait to reach my own floor? I was still in training to be an old Jewish man. I was in a training ground for the future farmers of Canada. Yet I had already been an old Jewish man. I had gone through more than one absolute, authoritarian regime; I had already gone through the responsibility of being fifty years old before I was ready to be seventeen. Which path would now join mine? My fate would soon be in the hands of the faculty of arts tenure committee; a year earlier, it had responded to reduced provincial funding by rejecting every candidate. I decided to put the members off for a year by applying for study leave for 1973–1974. Again, I wanted to learn. But I was awakened early one winter morning by the conviction that, having already done irreversible harm to my teaching career, I had little choice but to resign.

As I recall the explosion of last May, I am amazed at the way so many people took the university so seriously at the same time in the same way. It is worlds away now: though I see the university almost every day, I cannot convince myself of its reality, certainly not of its importance. I am impatient to get to the farm and to explore better pieces of me than the U has ever called forth. And let it go to hell in its own way. (Journal, January 17, 1973)

I manipulated three of the four courses I taught in my final year at Lakehead so that they had the same theme: transcendentalism and meditation. The basis of my approach was in the writings of Emerson, who was at the heart of my graduate seminar. In the introductory American literature course, I traced the themes of individualism and self-trust more than I had previously. In Old and Middle English, I ignored the language for the first time and focused on poetry of the medieval mystics. Only in my literary criticism course did I avoid the subject of individualism. But I took an approach that confused many students. On top of that, I decided to encourage discussion in the course by neither rewarding nor penalizing anything the students said or wrote. They were graded solely on the basis of how often they came to class, how much they participated, and whether they turned in all their assignments. Of those students who stayed in the course, the weakest profited from this system but the best students were infuriated:

A grade of 72 with not even the accompanying paper to examine for critiques and remarks as to why! What an insult to Kenny’s academic intentions! You know, he is still in the university environment—is serious about it, and plans to make a life and career out of it. Your own distance from the university provides some explanation for your decision, but certainly you could have looked more honestly through the year’s separation to evaluate Kenny’s performance in your course. That course aroused many tensions and problems in all of us, you notwithstanding, but to prolong Kenny’s psychological torment with a grade of 72 is completely unwarranted. (From a student who had studied literary criticism in my class alongside her husband. Letter written September 28, 1974)

By March, the new dean of arts had not yet told me whether he would approve my application for study leave, and I sent another letter, asking him to consider granting me a leave of absence, effective April 30. It was a familiar theme, which Dad had taught me ten years earlier. Now the fugue of life was taking over—there was the same melody, but in a minor key and orchestrated for dancing druggies on untuned clarinets. But the university was playing another tune. A request for a year of absence without pay could ease me into a resignation offer more smoothly than involvement in a conspiracy, which smacked of professional suicide.

Dear Dr. Bodzin:

I regret to inform you that at the Tenure Meeting for the Faculty of Arts held on April 16th, the Committee was unable to recommend the granting of tenure in your case.

The reason given was that although your teaching performance is adequate, your attitude towards the Department and to the Lakehead in general is negative. In addition to this, your publication record, considering your age and experience, is not such as to justify tenure under the present conditions. . . . (Letter from Andrew D. Booth, President, Lakehead University, April 17, 1973)

I was effectively given one year’s notice. I could return to teach the next year, not more. But I saw how important it was to get away from another bankrupt school. The yeshiva had foundered on a matter of money; Lakehead University lacked moral capital. I could not remain a part of it. On my 35th birthday, I had to console myself with having selflessly defended a principle and saved my soul, even at the cost of my career. I took refuge in my private self and put my public self into the background.

I think you too were born to teach, and . . . you’re a real loss to the profession. But for you it may be better outside Academia than in, as it is now for me. (Letter from Merton Sealts, September 12, 1999)

Those of us who had thought we might preserve academic standards in the English department met one last time. Art Menhart, who lived in a rural area, had a lesson for Carol and me: “Your greatest friends in the country are water and fire,” he said. “You could die without them. But they are also the greatest threat to your well being, and they can kill you as easily as they can preserve you.” Art asked me how I would be able to survive without a classroom. He had another career in the wings, but he thought I needed the stimulation of students. “There are students everywhere,” I told him, “not only in classrooms.” I wasn’t worried about what would happen to me without the university. Hadn’t James Garfield once described the ideal college as Mark Hopkins at one end of a log and a student at the other?

. . . your reluctance to respond directly to my earlier request for leave . . . was an ongoing deception, totally lacking in dignity and common humanity. If students have been staying away from the university, it is just because of this general modus operandi, which puts the true interests of human beings (notably students) far down on the list of priorities. This is the root of the university’s problem’s, and a few million missing dollars cannot mask it.

I have told you that my plans for next year are deeply rooted within me, and are based on a profound conviction that I have a life to lead, regardless of the university. I have tried to teach with love and respect for my students; in my zeal to inspire humanitarian ideals, I have often found myself working at cross-purposes with much of the English department and the university as a whole, but I have never lost faith in my ideals or my students.

When I consider the calibre of people who are being released by this institution, I do not know what possible gains you anticipate . . . (Draft of letter to Andrew D. Booth,, April 20, 1973, never sent.)

To go to Telshe during the 1950s, in one of the most stable and conventional periods in modern times, I had stepped out of the stream of normal experience. The seventies, by contrast, were the years of bell-bottoms and Nehru jackets, times when even men in board rooms sported ornate sideburns. The highways were overrun with hitch-hikers from the east tripping west and those from the west looking for Nirvana in the east, The language of rebellion was not only to do your own thing but to tune in, turn on, and drop out. Everybody was an experimenter with life and nobody’s perception of reality was questioned or taken for granted. When Carol and I transplanted Lianna, Steven, and Adam to a 100-acre piece of prime farmland somewhere in a land we did not know, it was just something that people did. In those days, it was a conventional way of being unconventional. People did it for a while, and nobody ever thought about whether they would ever come back.

I do not wish to slander individuals. But slander implies defamation of character, and the characters in this scenario have transcended defamation. I taught for four years because I believed that human beings could get excited about decency and could develop the probing, questioning, indignant stance without which we could all be led down the path to 1984. But there are those in so-called higher education whose main concern is their own tenuous kingdom in the feudal academic state, and who are jealous of any who threaten their insecure balloon, floating in the hot air.

. . . Choose your own future, but don’t choose the quicksand. I think your papers are incomplete, not because of your muddleheadedness, for which you accept more credit than necessary, but because you do not strongly enough feel the pull of the magic pot of gold at the end of the fuzzy academic rainbow (which, i assure you, is not made of sunbeams, which are unsubstantial enough, but of those damned hot air balloons). (Letter to two former students, spring 1974)

“The Challenge of Pluralism in the Cause of Brotherhood”

Brotherhood Day Address
Delivered February 22, 1970

None of us can escape himself. If I am descended from Polish Jews, no amount of education or travel can change what I am. If I wanted to emphasize the elements that distinguish me from non-Polish non-Jews, and to ignore the many elements that tie me to them, I would simply be true to one part of my nature at the expense of another.

I would be taking advantage of the freedom of this land to retain the identity of my fathers instead of using it to create a new identity for my children.

I would be telling this society, “You claim that we can all be ourselves and remain Canadians—well, I am living the life of an Eastern European Jew—now you must allow me the same rights you grant the majority.”

Of course, nobody would deny me the right to pray as I wish, or to study only the Old Testament. It is such things that make pluralistic societies great.

But what if I were different because of the length of my hair? or because I lived on an Indian Reserve? or if I expressed the conviction that Quebec ought to be free and independent?

In varying degrees, these manifestations of separate identity would be enough to alienate me even from large numbers of Canadians who profess to believe in the fundamental unity and brotherhood of mankind. It would be enough to make some people doubt the ultimate benefits of pluralism.

As a matter of fact, no matter how strong our beliefs in human rights and liberties, all of us are constantly calling into question the limits of freedom and expression of others.

That is because, regardless of what we profess about pluralism, most of us believe that we actually know more than others how to act.

This seems to be the case especially in our day; for today many groups—Indian, Inuit, French, Black—prefer to assert themselves now, and to accept “brotherhood” later, if at all.

We find ourselves the heirs of injustice, intolerance, paternalism—and it is a dilemma of our time that toleration and justice alone cannot correct the abuses of the past.

No individual or group can be satisfied with tolerance—what is required is understanding and acceptance, and even—if we can spare it—a little bit of love.

The fact that we meet at all tonight is a cause for self-congratulation, but we must realize that it is neither a popular event nor a universal one. What we are doing is only a step toward a wider understanding of the common problems all humans face.

We may have come far, but we should not suppose that we have reached anything like the millennium.

We are at a way-station, and the road ahead is long and tortuous. Let us have the courage to exercise our belief in human brotherhood with all our hearts, and thereby to finally build the kingdom of God on earth.