Remembering the Tough-Minded Generosity of Tom Moser

Tom Moser was one of the most important influences on the kind of scholar and teacher I’ve become, not because I adopted his particular critical methodology (I didn’t), but because of the example he provided at a bewildering if exciting time (the early 1970s) when the profession of English studies was at a turning point and I was a graduate student trying to find my way.¹ Tom is best known in the Conrad world for his now-controversial book Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline (1957), but that is not what I most remember him for. As an undergraduate at Harvard, without really knowing what I was doing, but feeling intuitively that literature mattered because of its connections to life, I had fought my New Critical teachers for permission to go beyond the formal limits of the text and to include in my readings considerations of psychological factors from the author’s biography and social and political influences from the work’s historical period. It is perhaps difficult now to recall how scandalous and controversial such an approach was, given that theory and interdisciplinarity are ubiquitous and the mantra “always historicize” is a commonplace. My honors thesis on how D. H. Lawrence’s ideology of utopian marriage in Women in Love and The Rainbow responded to conflicts in his life history and in his historical period caused a small (but to me significant) kerfuffle in the History and Literature concentration because the maverick graduate student tutors disagreed with the venerable senior faculty about its merits. The legendary Reuben Brower, whose introductory humanities course laid down the law about New Critical doctrine (I had declined to take it), began his evaluation with words that still ring in my ears: “Given what this thesis might have been, it isn’t that bad. . . .” After a contentious oral exam where I defended my heretical views, I managed to receive honors, and the scars from these battles apparently made me an attractive candidate for Stanford’s brand-new Modern Thought and Literature program (an initiative so recent that I didn’t know it existed until its founder, Tom’s teacher and friend Albert Guerard, called me and asked if I’d be willing to have my application shifted over from the English pile).

I arrived in Palo Alto thinking I’d continue asking psychological and historical questions about literature, but no longer in a hostile environment. Little did I know that the “theory wars” were then breaking out across the profession (controversies that my teachers at Harvard had kept at bay). At a conference Albert organized on “Myth, Symbol, and Culture” during my first year, I gave a lame paper on Freudian versus Jungian approaches to criticism, only to learn that structuralism (which I had never heard of) was already passé because of something called “deconstruction.” I quickly had to digest Saussure, Jakobson, and Lévi-Strauss in order to understand why they were out-dated and wrong, and in doing so I discovered there was something that Paul Ricoeur called “the conflict of interpretations” that pitted these theorists against Marxists, Freudians, and Nietzscheans. Suddenly the theoretical and methodological disputes I had begun to encounter in the psychological theories I was studying (Freudian, neo-Freudian, Jungian, but not yet Lacanian) seemed part of a larger, more complicated hermeneutic landscape, and I started reading Ricoeur and other phenomenological theorists to make sense of the epistemological stakes in these conflicts and to figure out where to position myself and why.

As my head was spinning, Tom Moser was a figure of sanity and sense. Tom was open to these new theoretical developments because he had never fully accepted New Critical doctrine about the intentional and affective fallacies or the pitfalls of extrinsic as opposed to intrinsic criticism. But he was also skeptical in a good-humored, tough-minded way that new-fangled ideas would magically deliver privileged insights, and he kept us grounded by insisting we explain what we meant in terms an outsider could understand. Resistant to the seductions of fashion and ever-pragmatic if open-minded, Tom would...