The structure of the class was fairly simple -- a dozen books, one a week, with two short papers through the semester and a final long paper due in December.  The reading list itself was extraordinary, ranging over the whole field of contemporary popular culture.  The first assignment was Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, which Gaddis thought a masterpiece of a kind.  There was also Buried Alive, a biography of Janis Joplin; Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle; Doris Kearns Goodwin’s psychobiography of Lyndon Johnson; and, most memorably, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which we students took care to hide from our fellow classmates lest they get the wrong idea.  (Or, given the gawky apprehensiveness of most kids our age, lest they get the right idea.)  Gaddis assigned us no readings from any of his own work, though there were great gobs of both novels he’d completed by then that would have made appropriate reading for the class.  This was the only time in my entire academic career when a teacher did not assign his own work as required reading.

The class itself was an exploration of the ideas of success and failure in American culture -- whether failures in one peculiar American sense were successes in some broader way.  Gaddis himself would ruefully punctuate our discussions on occasion with anecdotes from his own ambiguous career.  One of the ongoing anecdotal themes of the class was the interest a British television company had evinced in producing a miniseries version of JR. Week after week, Gaddis would start the class with some mordantly pessimistic comment on the continuing negotiations over the film rights.

This was however about as personal as Gaddis ever became about either his work or his life.  He conducted the class around the themes  of our study, not around himself.  The broad knowledge evidenced in The Recognitions and JR was also evident in the classroom.  We  students would show up for our Wednesday sessions with a notebook and a copy of the book we’d been assigned; Gaddis would show up with these too, but he’d also carry in his leather satchel another dozen dog-eared, worn books, which he’d pile on the seminar table in front of him.  He referred to them frequently during the discussion, reading out appropriate excerpts.

We always called him “Mr. Gaddis” -- I don’t think there was ever any question of us calling him by his first name, after the fashion of so many professors of the period -- but despite that his conversation during the classes was relaxed, full of good humor and respectful, sometimes more respectful than a callow 17-year-old deserves.  He didn’t make any effort to pretend that his own conclusions were gospel or laws from on high, and, like all good teachers in my experience, would never interrupt a student in the midst of discourse, no matter how irrelevant or sometimes sadly misinformed that discourse was.  He reserved his impatience and vitriol for those parts of the American experience he thought stupid and idiotic.  And he didn’t mince words here, either; his own growlings would often include phrases like “insanely stupid” and “completely idiotic.”

For general mass insipidity he had absolutely no patience. He was surprisingly easy to talk to, though, and often enough, after class another student and myself accompanied him as he walked back to his office, continuing the conversation we were having in class, tying up loose ends.

The fall 1979 semester was the last Gaddis spent at Bard.  By then, I think, he was able to forego whatever small honorarium Bard was dishing out to its visiting professors and to spend his time on his own work.  A few years later, though, his essay “The Rush for Second Place” appeared in Harper’s, a long piece that covered much the same material and ideas that we’d discussed in that seminar room at Bard.  I like to think that the seminar helped him form some of the ideas and conclusions that found final expression in the essay.

Gaddis was an effective, thoughtful teacher who provided new ways for us to look at the American scene and our own experience. While I’m sorry I didn’t have the chance to take another class with him, I think we’re all happier he went on to complete Carpenter’s Gothic and A Frolic of His Own instead.  

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