A Life of Learning: Wandering among Fields

Abstract

number of years ago, having arrived at the University of Houston to give a lecture, I was joined for lunch by a visiting scholar from France. Someone at the table asked him what his field was. With a haughtiness that I associate, perhaps unfairly, with a certain kind of French intellectual, he answered, dismissively, A peasant has a I do not have a field. I have reflected on that remark from time to time ever since, and though I don't in the least identify with the tone in which it was delivered, I have come to the conclusion that I, too, don't have a field, or that at any rate, I have chosen too many rows to hoe, going in different directions, to constitute a neatly demarcated My intellectual history has certainly been a story of wandering out of fields. I decided to do graduate work at Harvard in comparative literature rather than in a single national literature because I didn't want to be limited to a set of texts in just one national tradition. My dissertation on the picaresque novel began with the first instance of the genre, the sixteenth-century Spanish Lazarillo de Tormes and concluded with Thomas Mann's Felix Krull and Saul Bellow's Augie March, but when I started my first teaching job in the English department at Columbia, because the central chapters of my dissertation had focused on eighteenth-century novels (one in French as well as works in English), I was duly classified as an eighteenth-century specialist and found myself teaching courses that included Addison, Swift, and Pope as well as Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, and Sterne. These were teaching occasions that gave me great pleasure, and in keeping with the logic of my appointment, I began work on a critical study of Fielding, which I completed around the time I was moving on from Columbia. I suppose the book was not altogether a straight-up eighteenth-century project since I sweepingly called it Fielding and the Nature of the Novel, and under that rubric, I was able to sneak into the final chapter some discussion of Nabokov, an enthusiasm I had developed in those years and that I have maintained until now. There was another way in which I did not sit still among the English Augustan writers during my four-year teaching stint at Columbia. By my late teens, I had acquired a very good literary command of Hebrew in all its major historical phases, with a special interest in the modern period. Modern Hebrew had been one of my minor literatures at Harvard, though everything I knew about it was self-taught because there was no one on the Harvard faculty with any competence in that area. While I was teaching and writing on the eighteenth-century English novelists, I had also begun to publish articles on modern Hebrew literature--and, at the same time, on Jewish-American writers, who at that moment, in the 1960s, were at their apogee. After the fact, I suspect that my senior colleagues in the Columbia English department looked askance at this extra-curricular activity because it did not address the field for which they thought they had hired me. But this is precisely what brought me to the position at Berkeley where I have thrived for four and a half decades. Comparative literature had just been granted departmental status under the direction of Alain Renoir, a wildly energetic and at times zany man with a strong intellectual vision, who had the idea of building a department out of joint appointments with other departments that would authoritatively span the literary globe. He wanted someone in modern Hebrew literature, and at the time I may have been the only visible person capable of putting together two literate English sentences on the subject (the situation now is much improved). He made me an offer I couldn't refuse--a tenured position with a handsome increase in salary, and so I accepted sight unseen and traveled west of Chicago for the first time in my life to a place where new professional horizons were to open for me. …