The Unbroken Continuum: Booth/Gregory on Teaching and Ethical Criticism

Wayne Booth and I were friends, and our friendship was an essential ingredient in the books we wrote together and the ideas we constantly discussed, just as our ideas and books were essential ingredients in our friendship, in the laughter we shared, and in the time we spent talking about our families, our past, our hopes, and our disappointments. In this essay, I trace the development of our friendship by attending to this mutual interaction of the personal and professional, and in so doing I hope to convey a partial but accurate description of Booth's achievements as a teacher, the value of the ideas we worked on together, and the benefits of both in my own life.

My student relationship with Booth began when I was twenty-three and he was forty-two. I was not one of those students who had been well groomed for graduate school success, particularly at the University of Chicago. The only merit I can claim for myself at this point in my life was that I had already married the right woman, a saving grace, and had either the gumption or the foolhardiness, perhaps an equal portion of each, to throw myself at life in the way one might jump off a cliff without knowing where the bottom is, even though I had no reason to believe that anyone or anything would break my fall (or would want to break my fall) if I came down hard. I left my family in Florida the day after I graduated from high school, worked all summer in a Del Monte pea canning factory in Wisconsin, went to college in Indiana with my summer earnings in my pocket, and, after four years in college, where I discovered for the first time what I thought home should feel like, I wound up at the University of Chicago feeling more like Pip on his first visit to Miss Havisham's than like a graduate student at a great university.

It was there, of course, that I first crossed paths with Booth. The occasion was a literary criticism course. I had never heard anyone speak so interestingly about ideas in my whole life as Booth. None of my college professors who were good at intellectual discourse had been especially interested in literary study, so I was initially unprepared to participate fully in Booth's expected level of discourse about ideas in literature and criticism. But the day I wound up in Booth's office to get a double-dose, office-hours explanation of Aristotle's four-part causal theory of made objects and listened to Booth illustrate these ideas by using the ballpoint pen he held in his hand, I walked out of the office hooked on the ideas, hooked on this kind of study, hooked on this kind of teaching, and hooked on the man. In the crucible of Booth's tiny office, where these four variables all came together—the confused student, the ballpoint pen, Aristotle, and Booth—a relationship was born that would grow over the years into solid, nourishing friendship.

Students seldom have language for explaining what happens in such interactions, which is why their course evaluation forms are full of such shallow and evasive language as "teaches enthusiastically" and "cares about his students," nor did I have any language at age twenty-three for what had just happened to me. But something had indeed happened, and after reaching age sixty-six and teaching for thirty-eight years, I can now describe what that something was. Booth's language, his way of handling ideas as if they were supple tools for opening up the engine of understanding in order to make it run smoother, faster, and with more horsepower; his companionable and respectful way of treating me as if I too could become a competent user of such tools and could thus achieve something like his level of understanding; his way of assuming that ideas map onto the world rather than preaching about how they do: all of the teacherly qualities and methods that Booth used in his office...