Twenty-Five Years with War and Peace

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS WITH WAR AND PEACE/Elizabeth Templeman ITOOK A COURSE IN MODERN American literature in 1975, taught by a man named Walter Slatoff. I dragged along four friends who had little interest in literature but indulged me for some reason that I forget. Among them was the young man who would become my husband , who remembers how Slatoff was about to read an excerpt from my paper in the last moments ofhis final lecture but ran out of time. My memory—of a sweet, briUiant and incredibly humble man who wouldn't have thought of holding his students back for a few moments—jibes with his. One afternoon about ten years later I was browsing in the library, where I was supposed to be engaged in research for my first graduate studies class. I spent more hours than I will confess searching for books written by professors I'd had back in university. In one such book, a lovely and utterly unpretentious volume called The Look of Distance, Slatoff debates with himself on matters relating to reading and teaching . What seems to compel him is "a disturbing gap" between how we talk about literature and Uterature itself. In his introduction, probing the dilemma of teaching literature in those troubled times (the late '70s), he speaks about "the possibilities of human connection and the curious ways people have found to remain simultaneously together and apart." He carries on to describe '"moral aerodynamics': the motions of high-fliers like Icarus, Jesus, Vittorio Mussolini and Joyce, and the impacts of all sorts of things—from boys to bombs to violets—that can fall from the sky." Slatoff claims that while we have "an astronomical number of assertions that literature is not life and should not be confused with it," we have almost nothing to say about the danger of separating the two. And likewise, while we have "recognized the values of detachment and the dangers of undue involvement," we have seemed to ignore the relationship "between detachment and coldness and between involvement and love." He asks us to remember that we study books because we like the experience of reading them. His plea: to read with the full human susceptibility of which we are each capable ; to read completely attentive to the possibilities for human connection . 150 · The Missouri Review During my first semester of university I had the good fortune to stumble into a Russian literature class. I was so very taken with the professor that I mistook her North Carolinian drawl for a Russian accent. Pat Carden impressed me so greatly that five years later, a young sub teaching in Montana, I would be reprimanded by a principal for sitting on top of my desk to teach, exactly as she had sat to deliver her morning lectures. That principal was worried, he explained, that looking so young and casual, I'd not be able to control the husky Montana farm boys and dazed hippie kids sitting in front of me. He had no idea how powerful had been the ability of that slender, brown-haired woman. And, in fact, I had been doing just fine myself. I learned lots from those high school kids about the power oftalk to hold people, to captivate and motivate them. In Carden's class we read several short stories and a few magnificently long novels, including War and Peace. At the end of the semester, Professor Carden gave us a lifetime assignment to reread War and Peace. This assignment was in the context of a lecture on rereading. I remember her accusing us, modern readers, of being consumers of literature . I suppose she meant as opposed to connoisseurs. Consuming books, as I still do, compelled by the frenzy of time and the press of unread pages, diminishes the potential power of literature, at least of those stories written to be savored, reexamined, remembered, intimately shared. Of course, being also a consumer of courses, I forgot a good deal of what Pat Carden explained to us. Yet I remember trying, back then in 1974, to be the kind of reader she envisioned. And over the years since, I have done my own small part...