A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth (19 page)

"Oh."

"Now let's rewrite it so it can mean only A."

The student would do it! They
wanted
to be taught!

Some years ago I received an honorary degree from SUNY Geneseo, one of our sixty-five New York campuses, and as I knew the president I stayed with him for a bit and got briefly to meet some of the faculty and students. I found them lively and stimulating and the campus quite as attractive as Yale's. I could not see that it lacked any advantage or opportunity that I enjoyed in New Haven, and, had I gone there, I believe I would have made interesting friends and been just as well taught, and at a small fraction of the Yale cost.

It so happened that the head of all sixty-five of the state campuses was attending the Geneseo graduation that spring, and I had the privilege of a long talk with him. When I asked him why so many families virtually impoverished themselves were paying the heavy tuition of the private college when SUNY offered the same for so much less, he replied with one word: fashion.

There was another factor in the romantic glow in which so many college graduates bathe their undergraduate years. They forget that those were the years when their souls were just awakening to the beauty and challenge of the world around them. At Yale to hear Professor Chauncey B. Tinker, in a low, half-broken voice, bewail the tragic deaths of Keats and Shelley was a moving and dramatic highlight that a few years later might have struck me as a bit hammy.

Great lecturers seldom hesitate to use dramatic tricks to enshrine their precepts in the minds of their audiences, and at Yale perhaps Chauncey B. Tinker was the most noted. To read one of his lectures was like reading a monologue of the great actress Ruth Draper—you missed the main point. You missed the drop in his voice as he approached the death in Rome of the tubercular Keats; you missed the shaking tone in which he described the poet's agony for the absent Fanny with whom his love had never been consummated; you missed the grim silence of the end.

Yet Tinker could be fussy and imperious in the classroom. You were allowed in only if you were enrolled in his course for credit. If your schedule had not allowed this, but you wished to sit in the back of his classroom and hear him lecture for your own edification—no luck. He didn't give a damn about your edification. He would start his lectures by having us write a ten-minute paper on a given theme. At the end of the hour he would collect these, all written on the same-size paper he had handed out. Once I had the misfortune to have used a larger paper that wouldn't stack neatly with the others that he collected, and he yanked it out and tossed it impatiently back at me. When I brought it back to him, recopied on the right paper, he accused me of making a mountain out of a molehill.

Though odd and crotchety he was deeply popular with the leading undergraduates: the members of the better senior societies, the signal athletes, the editors of the
Yale News.
Brendan Gill wrote a memorable story about him, where the young protagonist at Yale, snobbishly ambitious to join the "right" undergraduate circles, ignores his father's advice to cultivate an old professor and paternal friend who strikes the son as a social dead end, and wastes his time rapping on doors that remain closed. Admitting his failure as graduation nears, he calls in a fit of repentance on the paternal friend whom he has neglected and meets there all the men who have snubbed him! He has missed his golden chance.

I will leave you with that. Society matters not so much. Words are everything.