Nicholas Delbanco

“I’m going to begin by telling you I hear voices.”  So starts a lecture given in April 1991 at the George Edward Woodberry Poetry Room in Lamont Library, Harvard.  It was offered by my old—then still vigorous—professor, William Alfred, and I can quote it now because his voice has been preserved by an admiring cadre of students who produced a memorial CD.  Stentorian if scratchily, the poet speaks.  His “Keen for Bridget Kelly,” includes the phrase, “I am disgusted by the inadequacy of tears, the mourner’s arm-band…” and ends with the elegiac, “It is amazing you should come to die.  What in Christ’s name is there to say but this?”

William Alfred (1922-1999) was an iconic figure to those fortunate enough to study with him.  I did so as an undergraduate at Harvard in a large lecture course on The History of Drama, then a smaller series of courses on the Anglo-Saxon language and versification from which our poetry is in important part derived.  He became my informal tutor in “the writers’ trade,” an inspirational figure for me and many other students in the 1960’s, as well as the decades beyond.  Seamlessly—or so it seemed—he merged a commitment to scholarship with a readiness to act as father-confessor to those who sought him out.  His infectious love of language, his learning worn lightly and self-deprecating humor were, it seemed to us, exemplary: we wanted to know what he knew.

A poet and playwright—most notably for “Hogan’s Goat” (which, not incidentally, starred a young Faye Dunaway)—William Alfred stood with one foot in the academy and one in the professional world.  Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop counted themselves his friends.  So did the street people of Cambridge, whom he would daily bless.  A fervent Catholic, he brought the Greek playwrights and Henrik Ibsen to life, yet was also au courant with the latest doings on Broadway.  To be invited to his house or join him for a campus walk was to feel empowered; to hear him talk of childhood in Brooklyn or service in the army was to enlarge one’s horizon.  His unfailingly generous spirit, his sweet concern for the plaints and ambitions of students, his selfless dedication to the enterprise of teaching was and is a model for unnumbered acolytes.  I count myself among them.  Like Dean Morse and Elbert Lenrow, he gave us the gift of attention; in William Alfred’s presence there was never a trace of impatience; and always he contrived to make those who joined him at table feel welcome.  I have not heard his living voice for decades yet it continues to sound in my ears: a clarion call.

All this has been occasioned by an email I today received from a student (who shall remain nameless, and in truth I didn’t remember her name) to whom I once was generous in 1972.  Her claim—no doubt hyperbolic—is that my encouragement sustained her through more than forty years in the pre-publication wilderness.  Her soon-to-be-published first book, she wrote, owes much to my help way back when.  This sort of recognition delights an old professor, but I refer to it because it seems to me emblematic of the teacher-student relation when successful; we carry—every one of us—some memory of something said in class or private that made a difference once.  William Alfred, were he still alive, would feel just as surprised if not embarrassed by the paean of praise in these first three paragraphs as is his student by his own student’s letter of thanks.  To learn or read long after the fact that something you once said or wrote retains enduring currency is to feel rewarded.  There’s a “strange comfort afforded by the profession”—the title of a short story by Malcolm Lowry, as it happens—and when we acknowledge indebtedness we join a long line of adepts who once received instruction at a master’s feet.  Then, in that master’s honor, we try to do the same.

When talking of contemporary poets, William Alfred spoke of “..that terrible failure of confidence which comes when you see something new.”  In his “Keen for Bridget Kelly” he memorializes a figure long gone, but she has not “come to die” because the language lives."