A Note on Columbia Writers: 1920-1932
by Mark Van Doren
by Mark Van Doren
Mark Van Doren was an eminent Columbia scholar of literature, educator, and poet. He wrote this piece in the 1932 volume of Varsity Review. Enjoy.
The difficulty of judging an undergraduate writer arises from the deeper difficulty of knowing what to expect from him. If nothing is expected, then he is very good indeed—which is meaningless. Obviously something must be expected. But what? And how much?
Any member of the Columbia College faculty who has tried to review
a campus publication—Moringside, Varsity Review, new broom, or Androcles—has had to face the fact that he did not know how to begin. Should he patronize the literature under consideration by allowing it to be good of its kind and age?
Should he apply the prevailing professional standards, or pretend to apply them, and find nothing but badness in the pages he has read? Should he attempt a prophecy as to the kind of writers these writers will be five, ten, fifteen years hence, and judge accordingly? Should he recall certain distinguished collegians of the past and compare these with them? Should he cast an eye on other colleges at the moment, and express a wish that Columbia were like, for instance, Harvard? What to do?
As a veteran reviewer of Columbia magazines I must confess that I have taken all of these attitudes; and must confess furthermore that none of them, now that I think of it and now that 1 have no particular magazine before me to the contents of which I can skippingly allude, is the right one. I am the more convinced of this for having read the symposium in the April issue of the Varsity Review. For Mr. Hall, Mr. Harris, Mr. Waldman, Mr. Rugoff, Mr. Danysh, Messers. Ludwig and Friedman, and Mr. Wronker in various ways made it clear that there are students at Columbia today who understand the college better than any member of the faculty understands it. At least they understand themselves. They know the limits within which they may work. They are capable of analyzing the culture, or the cultures, which they find about them. In view of the very fine clarity which they have revealed in themselves it becomes an impertinence, and will henceforth seem to me an impertinence, for any mere elder to decide what they ought to be doing with their minds.
The most that he can do is to measure the amount of use to which these minds, and those which come after them, are put. It will be quite beside the point to say that this or that story, poem, essay is “good” or “bad” art. It will be better to ask: How full, or alive, or interesting, or aware, or responsible are the minds which have written these pieces? How sensitive have they been, not merely to the tastes of their teachers but to the tastes of the time? And how independent of these? How capable, that is to say, of learning from them and proceeding beyond them? At no time during the twelve years of my connection with the college has the college failed to be ready with a reassuring answer to this kind of question, though often the question was not asked. The magazines have been immature, naturally, but they have never been childish; and, considering their objective, they have hardly been immature. The poems have been pretty bad, judged as poems; yet they have shown an awareness of whatever was going on in the world of poetry, and three of their writers, Charles Wagner, Louis Zukofsky, and Ben Maddow, have been “good.” The stories have usually been distinguished by the defect of an ill-concealed ambition to accomplish more in fiction than fiction is capable of accomplishing; their mixture has been too rich—an admirable fault in a story-teller of twenty. The critical essays have seldom been merely thin and pleasant; while in frequent cases they have been less mature than their authors evidently thought them, in almost no case that I can remember have they been smug or slick.
The highest compliment, indeed, which I can pay the writers of Columbia is the compliment of denying to them the virtue of tidiness. There are colleges in the country which turn out more orderly stuff than is turned out here—neater stuff, and more final. But I have my suspicions of an artist who is perfect at nineteen. And while I am well aware that imperfection in itself is nothing to brag about, I am equally aware that the kind of imperfection which always can be found here is a sign of something good beneath the surface—of some strength for which exactly the right gestures are not yet mastered. We seem to be deficient in taste, but the deficiency is rarely depressing. Rather it is a guarantee that something strives to emerge which only time—and there is plenty of time—will polish. The students appear in other words to have discovered how many things there are to think about and how difficult it is to write something which an adult whom the writer does not know will want to read. This is all that is strictly necessary. Advancing age will do the rest. But that has nothing to do with Columbia College.