Among the horrors of the past week’s news, the one that really appalls me is the atrocious assault on the writer Sir Salman Rushdie as he was about to begin a public lecture in Chautauqua, New York, not far from Erie, PA. The medical reports concerning Rushdie’s condition as they have appeared in the press are encouraging. He has been gravely but not fatally wounded. It is impossible to imagine that ten forceful knife wounds to neck, throat, or abdomen could be anything other than “life threatening”.
There are many reasons to be shocked by this horrifying attack. The tangent I am choosing is a minor and eccentric one. (Speaking of eccentricity, the authorities addressing the crime profess to be puzzled as to the attacker’s motives. According to the Times, “The New York State Police said at a news conference on Friday afternoon that there was no indication of a motive, but that they were working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Two major investigative bodies between them might eventually discover a possible clue: Rushdie has been under a highly public sentence of death in a fatwa pronounced by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran since 1989.)
In my role as a literature professor, I am not among the most ardent admirers of Rushdie’s novels. That is a statement about personal literary taste. But who could fail to admire the man’s brilliance, his courage, and his embodiment of humane and humanistic virtues? Not the least of these is the willingness of a highly cerebral novelist to speak to general audiences of what are usually called “mature students”. That is exactly one of the things I myself have enjoyed most in my retirement years. So-called “adult education,” though hardly an American monopoly, has been an American specialty with origins in an earlier and more robustly democratic phase of our history.
Some years ago, in doing the research for a study of influential anti-Communist writers of the mid-twentieth century, I discovered Richard Krebs. To the degree that he is still known at all today, it is under his pen name of Jan Valtin, author of an extraordinary book entitled Out of the Night, which was the best-seller of the year in this country in 1941, just as America was about to enter the War. Krebs was born in 1905, and he had an adventurous and somewhat mysterious life. By the time he was thirty-five he had travelled the world as a sailor in the German merchant marine and been a Communist agent, a prisoner in San Quentin, a probable Gestapo informer, an illegal immigrant to the United States (twice), and an aspiring writer who supported himself by being a janitor in a yeshiva and a house painter among other things. It is not easy to stay under the radar when you are the best-selling author in the country, and his chameleon politics guaranteed him controversy, passionate enemies, and passionate friends. In what seemed at first a Mission Impossible he and some influential friends set out on a successful campaign to keep him from being deported as an illegal alien—a category soon enough upgraded by history to “enemy alien”.
A major event in this campaign was Valtin’s publication of a hugely efficacious essay in the May, 1941, issue of Readers’ Digest. It was called “American Dawn,” and surely must be one of the more successful pieces in the history of political propaganda. It is the saccharine account of the conversion of a Communist thug and hit man to the enlightenment of American democracy. Sure, he broke a few bureaucratic immigration rules and did a little time for an atrocious assault here or there, but he now recognizes the shining superiority of the American way of life! One point he made in this essay stuck in my mind. In Europe, he claimed, a university education was the exclusive privilege of the upper classes, whereas he as an incarcerated felon had been able to take extension courses at the University of California! (He also said the San Quentin cuisine was superior to that in the messes of German merchant ships.)
Furthermore, the educational claim was actually true in spirit as well as fact. America has been a leader in many different forms of “adult education,” one of the earlier manifestations of which was the Chautauqua, a kind of secular, educational tent meeting that took the name of the upstate New York town of its first appearance. These meetings could mix the atmospheres of classroom and county fair. The lecture Salman Rushdie was about to deliver was at the site of the first Chautauqua in a modern auditorium of the Chautauqua Institution built to commemorate the founding of a popular form of continuing education that, according to Teddy Roosevelt, was the most American thing in America. As a politician, he saw the Chautauqua primarily as an arena of American democratic culture in which new and differing views could be advanced in civility and civil competition. The ironies of history are more morbid than those dreamed up by novelists. The “dialogue” lecture Rushdie was about to deliver was on the subject of America as a refuge for persecuted writers!
“Continuing education” of course is as broad as education itself. In the old days, meaning before the triumph of electronic media in the later twentieth century, there were numerous “lecture agencies” whose agents brokered interesting talks by interesting people for a wide variety of eager audiences. At the height of the controversy about his book in 1941-2, Jan Valtin made a pretty good living for a while giving lectures (or rather variations on a lecture) for which he was paid $100, a princely sum in those days. There are still celebrity public speakers for hire, but in today’s cultural landscape they constitute a small part of adult education. In contrast, there must be many hundreds, and for all I know thousands, of active “adult schools,” “senior colleges,” learning tours and cruises organized by educational institutions (“alumni colleges”), general interest lecture series sponsored by civic and religious groups, Ted talks, Renaissance Weekends, and so forth. In my own town of Princeton there are at least half a dozen such enterprises. I have myself taught in four of them. In the significantly named Evergreen Forum, in three sequential years I was able to offer a course on Dante’s Comedy, teaching the three sections (Hell, Purgatory, Heaven) in their artistically incremental order. What an opportunity and privilege—and a gift of retirement!
Not all the problems we face in the world or indeed in our personal lives are the products of ignorance or misunderstanding, but a sufficient number of them are, for me to persevere in my belief that formal education and personal intellectual growth—two sides of the same coin—are primary requirements of a healthy society and a happy life. They are certainly a great solace of advancing age. That an eminent author should expose himself to a murderous attack by a fanatic for his willingness to advance the old goals of the Chautauqua is sad beyond belief.
