Emeriti    

Former Bennett Fellow    

Briefly Noted    

Alumni/ae     

1948–Paul Pressler. The Texas Regulars: The Beginning of the Republican Party in the South. (Hannibal Books, 2001)

1952–Datus C. Proper. Running Waters. (Dimensions, 2001)

1954–Robin Magowan. Improbable Journeys. (Northwestern University Press, 2002)

1957–Carl Pickhardt. The Meaning of Masks: A Psychological Journey. (Xlibris Corporation, 2002)

1965–Richard E. Henrich Jr. [translator] Love Making Visits ("L'Amour en visites"), by Alfred Jarry. (electricUmbrella Publishers, 2002)

1969–Samuel Finn. Heartbeat. (Booklocker.com, 2002)

1974–Andrew S. Holtz. [introduction to] How to Live 365 Days A Year, by John A. Schindler. (Running Press, new and rev. ed., 2002)

1975–Evelyn M. Blewer. La Campagne d'Hernani: édition du manuscrit du souffleur. (Eurédit, 2002)

             –Secours mutuel. Victor Hugo et la crise des théâtres parisiens 1848-1849. (Eurédit 2002)

1977–James Brunner. The Brothers Twain: When They Go to Sleep. [CD] (zarohom, 2001)

Emeriti     

Rindfleisch, Norval. Standing Lessons. (Writer's Showcase, 2002)

Former Bennett Fellow     

Kaminsky, Ilya. Musica Humana. (Chapiteau Press, 2002)

Briefly Noted     

1947–Jeffrey O'Connell and Thomas O'Connell. "Global Raising and Razing of Statism: The Mirror Roles of Two Law-Trained Englishmen-William Beveridge and Keith Joseph." IN The Journal of Law & Politics. (v. XVI, no. 3, Summer 2000)

1957–C. Kirk Avent. [contributor to] Medicine for Mountaineering & Other Wilderness Activities. Edited by James A. Wilkerson. (The Mountaineers Books, 2001)

1969–Daniel J. Hoffheimer. "Specific Timing of Issuance of Certificate of Transfer of Real Estate." IN Probate Law Journal of Ohio. (v. 12, no. 5, May/June 2002)

1977–Kathleen C. Engel and Patricia A. McCoy. "The CRA Implications of Predatory Lending." IN Fordham Urban Law Journal (v. 29, no. 4, April 2002)

Kathleen C. Engel and Patricia A. McCoy. "A Tale of Three Markets: The Law and Economics of Predatory Lending." IN Texas Law Review (v. 80, no. 6, May 2002)

Gene Forrester, the narrator of A Separate Peace, acquires an astute knowledge of the world of adolescents in a private school, but that knowledge comes in "the summer session" and "the war" is on. He does not know, in fact, he does not want to know, the world of what we once referred to as the "schoolman."With Standing Lessons-the phrase is from Fielding's Joseph Andrews-Norval Rindfleisch, retired master teacher of English and Lewis Perry Professor of the Humanities Emeritus, gives us a principal character,Jack Bartley, schoolman and head of the Kensington School's history department, who realizes, as does the reader, that "one is what one does and he was a teacher."

Early in the novel, Bartley ruminates on his shortcomings as a father. His wife, Karen, shrewdly opines that their daughter Annie will find good models elsewhere:

"What will we do until then?" he shouted.

He knew that was true, but somehow that didn't seem adequate anymore. That is what he did with other people's children.

This amusing scene is a harbinger of what lies at the core of a superb novel, a novel in which style and narrative technique impressively enact its substantial themes. Bartley "shouted"-he now and then unintentionally bullies Karen, who is really his tutor in all aspects of life, but he is also discerning and sensitively aware of the ironies in his life's work. The ultimately affirmative juxtaposition of inadequacies and insights gets its final recapitulation at the end of the novel:

"In his contentment he no longer aspired to be anything but a schoolman.

HE RATIONALIZED"

The rich comic tone of Standing Lessons affords us a unique awareness of what it means to be a successful teacher in a small New England boarding school. Jack Bartley's portrait, and the portraits of his colleagues, were never attempted by Salinger and Knowles.

The novel's one-page "Prologue," is, quite simply, the epitaph of the founders of the school, and the "Epilogue," excerpts from the school catalog. These "documents" alert us, then remind us, that this novel is about an institution, in this particular case, a small private school just before it becomes coeducational-the first part is titled "On the Eve." The second part, "Ye Olde Morality," makes us powerfully aware of how the severe Puritans of New England and the perennial adolescent instinctively know that how we judge each other matters profoundly. Standing Lessons reveals that didactic pronouncements in a chapel service are not where we find the process of moral education at work; rather, we find it in how we treat each other, and so there is a complex disciplinary case set in the middle of the novel.

But it is in a student's telling Bartley of an English class on The Sun Also Rises that the moral heart of the novel is revealed. Bill Henry, the student's teacher and one of the novel's great characters, admonishes his class: "Don't any of you ever let your intellect or your moral principles get in the way of your sensitivity to suffering."

The final, the third part, is titled "The Season of Letting Go." (Rindfleisch surely sees the structure of the novel as resembling a three-act play, just as he makes the progression of the plot dramatically scenic.) One of this last part's finest moments is when a young but perceptive science teacher named Steve Barber tells Bartley on the golf course that the headmaster and virtually all the faculty at Kensington School see him as the model of what a schoolman and moral educator should be. He is, Barber asserts, conspicuously a molder of character in his coaching of a year-in, year-out losing third-form baseball team. Before Bartley addresses the golf ball, he, in spite of speaking "deliberately to himself," lets himself go: "Thus beginneth the moral education of Jack Bartley."

We know that he will continue to rationalize as well as reason, to fight outwardly and inwardly the battles of his puritanical Catholic background, of his ideological obsessions, but that he has found himself in realizing that being a "standing lesson" means that he has let the context of his life shape him: a "standing lesson" is a human example, not a formal curriculum. "One is what one does and he was a teacher."

Here is a novel reminiscent of a writer as distinguished as James Gould Cozzens, who knew that vocation molds us, and that characters speaking flawless dialogue, enriched by palpable ideas, dazzle us with their authenticity.