Richard Hooker with injudicious bird
Motivated by mere curiosity, the
other day I plucked from one of my shelves a fat book with a spine so faded
that I could not make out what was printed there. It was the first of two volumes of The Works of that Learned and Judicious
Divine Mr. Richard Hooker (Oxford, 1850).
These books have been in my library for more than fifty years. I bought them for a song in a second-hand
shop in one of the English coastal towns in what now seems like another
world. Yet clearly I had too long neglected
the judicious Hooker, for I had forgotten, if I ever really took it in, that
this edition included a reprinting of his charming short biography by Izaac
Walton. From an early page of Walton I
learned that the fair flower of Hooker’s genius, who sprang from an obscure
family in provincial Exeter, might well have wasted its sweetness on the desert
air had it not been for the perspicuity of a talent-scouting primary
teacher. This teacher recognized his ability,
nourished it, expanded it, and set Hooker on his road to the university and
scholarly celebrity. Walton writes thus:
“This good schoolmaster, whose name I am not able to recover, (and am sorry,
for that I would have given him a better memorial in this humble monument
dedicated to the memory of his scholar)…”
The Unknown Teacher had been a cog
in the great machine of meritocracy humming away behind the flashy front of
Tudor aristocracy, discovering the odd Dee here and the odd Shakespeare
there. The passage set me to thinking
first about my own role as a teacher. I
would estimate, conservatively, that over my career I must have personally
interacted with about twenty thousand students, and with perhaps with twenty percent
of that number in some substantial or significant way. I am
not expecting that future archaeologists will find a tombstone reading “Hic jacet So-and-so, olim pupil of the Judicious Fleming.” Yet surely there must be among so many one or
two who…. But even a moment’s reflection made me realize that this line of
thought was premature, and that before I could fantasize about my role as
teacher I had long-standing debts still unacknowledged from my days as a student. So I take the occasion to remember two
particular people, both of them public school teachers in California, probably
in different semesters of the fifth grade; and as it happens I do recall their
names. Indeed, I could never forget
them. I had a math teacher named Mr.
Schwab. He was tall, dignified, rather
formal yet friendly and accessible. He
showed us the elegance of numbers and the absolutely objective, impartial
magnificence of mathematics. He lifted
the veil from the tedious “word questions” in our work book about whether Jim,
in pursuing his unlikely profession as picker of grapefruits, should choose to be
paid at a fixed hourly rate or at a piece rate per grapefruit, given that as
the day progressed and Jim grew more tired the quantity of grapefruit picked
decreased at a rate of four percent an hour, and…Anyway, behind all this was a
large, beautiful, crystalline edifice of thought, the music of the spheres, the
universal appeal of which was irresistible even to me, a hater of
grapefruit. Mr. Schwab made me, and made
me feel, pretty good at math, though even his method could not blur the eventually
decisive distinction between pretty good and really good. This took place in a very unpleasant corner
of Contra Costa County called Richmond.
Two weeks into the second semester
my parents had dragged me to a little town called Taft in the San Juaquin
Valley. Our living conditions in Taft were
slightly more salubrious than those we left behind, though the only time I ever
heard Taft mentioned in later years was as the site of a race riot. I think this might have been in an essay
entitled “Kern County: California’s Deep South”. In Taft I was inserted in medias res into the English class of one Miss Ihrig, a plain
woman of uncertain years who wore no-nonsense shoes and, I suspect, was pretty
devoid of nonsense in other aspects of her life as well. She was less than effusively politically
correct when it came to Okies and Arkies, even those who had enjoyed brief
coastal acculturation in the cesspool at Richmond. But she knew just about everything there was
to know about English grammar and seemed possessed of the noble if absurd
notion that the children of Taft, Okies and Arkies included, might also at
least approach that blissful state.
Miss Ihrig believed that the
beginning of wisdom was a command of the eight parts of speech, which she
forced us to master with their bells-and-whistles elaborations. She was particularly big on the formal
conjunctive adverb. “Words like hence, thus, then, yet, moreover, still, and
so (when so means therefore) are
not conjunctions,” she told us, as though warning us off venereal disease. “They are formal
conjunctive adverbs.” Formal
conjunctive adverbs were practically open invitations to the semi-colon, the
most elegant of our points of punctuation, though also the one demanding the
keenest authorial judiciousness. She was
also great at diagramming sentences.
Many of my classmates chafed, but I grasped behind it all wonderful
symmetries like those that Schwab found in the Golden Section. Today you cannot count on people under thirty
even to know what a part of speech is. Brilliant
freshmen with pyrotechnical test scores show up on college campuses today unable
to link two sentences together, let alone tell you what a subordinate clause
is. What used to be called “Remedial
English,” slightly dolled up in the raiment of current cultural fads, is now a
standard introductory requirement in Ivy League institutions. But just at the point when I should be
searching out the perfectly worded periodic sentence of conclusion, you must
not get me started. I’ll go quietly,
thinking happily of Mr. Schwab and Miss Ihrig.
