In
Memoriam: Lawrence J. Ross
(January 27, 1996)
Like most students in this department over the last three decades,
I
had heard about Professor Ross long before I actually met him.
Among graduate students especially, the sour grapevine is a popular
means for obtaining unofficial advice on courses to take and professors
to fear. In Professor Ross's case, the stories tended to be, to
be frank, more than a little ominous -- horrified tales of
intimidating, sometimes even insulting, classroom practices, of
ponderous reading lists and outrageous work expectations, and of
draconian, even demeaning, grading standards. Supposedly, more
than one of his graduate students had been returned papers with
melodramatically scarlet 'F's' at the bottom, while others had suffered
the ignominy of being stuck with final grades in the 'C' range.
And these were not things that had happened just in the dark ages of
the department, back before men had walked on the moon and the
ceaseless labor of untangling James's sentences had begun to turn Naomi
Lebowitz's hair prematurely gray. These stories were of recent
vintage; Professor Ross had done anything, according to the rumors, but
mellow with age. Although Shakespeare professors in general had
long carried a collective reputation for being demanding, unyielding,
and authoritative -- the Captains Ahab of our profession -- Professor
Ross, it would seem, was the original model, capable of putting the
shakes in the student's experience of Shakespeare before one had even
signed up for his course.
It would be nice, at this point, to say that I found all these rumors
patently false when I actually enrolled in E Lit 496 for the Fall
semester of 1990, but such was not the case. Some things had
certainly been exaggerated, but the general profile was closer to home
than I had hoped. Professor Ross's was certainly the most
difficult course I took at Wash. U. Graduate students were
assigned twenty-five plays to prepare during the fourteen weeks of the
semester, and undergraduates were not much luckier, having been
assigned some eighteen. In addition to the three-hour final exam
and the traditional semester-ending 20-page paper, we were to submit
shorter essays on Much Ado
and Measure for Measure --
due respectively the very day we were to begin discussing each
play. This design made for a particularly daunting double whammy:
not only did we have to read these plays in their entirety and write
papers about them while we were still discussing other works in class,
we were also forced to offer Professor Ross our glosses of key
characters and scenes before we had any inkling at all as to what his
might be. Lynnea and I and a couple others were finishing off the
Major Authors requirement that semester, so -- in what now seems some
weird Bloomian reification of the literature scholar's burden -- we
used to trudge to school with the complete works of Shakespeare and
Milton strapped ponderously to our backs. Uncoincidentally, it
was that semester that we finally gave up trying to do something
non-academic at least one night per weekend.
Then, apart from the workload, there was the considerable trial of
class-time itself. Twice a week for ninety minutes we were
treated to the imposing spectacle of Professor Ross at the podium,
expounding his fundamentalist version of the gospel of the Bard,
mopping seeming gallons of sweat off his brow no matter how many
windows he opened, which maneuver caused the rest of us to put back on
our jackets and coats as the semester descended toward December.
His questions seldom occasioned more than a two-second pause before he
would lean over the pulpit, somehow fixing the whole class
simultaneously with his defiant glare, and confront our
less-than-total-recall of the plays with, "Is the question
obscure?" This last phrase became, for us, Professor Ross's
tag-line -- the phrase we most often mimicked when we were consoling
ourselves over the unhappiness of our lot, among the last poor
infidels, as we were, who could not come to the degree but by Professor
Ross and his notorious Shakespeare course.
But if many of the rumors about his difficult personality and teaching
methods were (to at least some extent) true, they were usually
incomplete. What one did not hear nearly often enough was that
Professor Ross could be as gracious in personal conferences as he was
gruff in class, that in advising sessions, he would listen patiently to
every one of the student's often half-formed ideas before offering his
own useful suggestions, and that he would always reward sincere,
diligent, investigative effort on the part of his students.
Further, and this seems the saddest lack, we heard never a word from
those pupils who had gone before us about the enormous scholastic and
intellectual rewards of his Shakespeare course. If his was the
most difficult class I took as a graduate student, it was also -- as I
told him more than once after the fact, to his obvious pleasure -- the
single most valuable. There were other professors whose methods
and classroom personalities I enjoyed more, but there was none from
whom I learned more. The student who met Professor Ross's
considerable demands was rewarded with lesson after invaluable lesson
in the careful, responsible dissection of Shakespeare's art in all its
rich complexity. Professor Ross's methods were admittedly, even
proudly, old-fashioned, not only grounded in but largely limited to the
object itself, but if you wanted to learn the plays -- not learn about
them, but actually learn the plays themselves -- you would be very
hard-pressed to find a better mentor than Professor Ross. One of
my favorite memories from his class is the time he described his
futile, years-long search through Renaissance fencing manuals to learn
just how it might be possible for Hamlet and Laertes to have exchanged
blades in their final duel. He threw this item in as a sidebar to
his main lecture, but it nevertheless spoke volumes about his exemplary
response to the call of the liberal arts scholar.
Some of you have seen the clock Professor Ross gave Lynnea and me as a
wedding present, a token, among other things, of a friendship between
us that outlasted the class we took with him. We used to live
just a few blocks from his house and frequently spotted him working in
his yard during our walks through his neighborhood. More than
once he invited us in for a drink and a chat, regaling us with stories
of the profession and of his own days as a student teacher, among many
other things. But it is our first visit to his clock workshop
that stands out most prominently and painfully. At least a few of
you here today might recall Professor Ross's final Colloquium, when
Madeleine Brainerd gently and, as it turned out, very humanely coaxed
the straining, struggling speaker from the podium after some eighty
minutes of surprisingly unfocused but nevertheless vehement
presentation, pages and pages of manuscript left unread. What no
one but the speaker himself knew at the time was that Professor Ross
had suffered a severe cardiac episode just minutes before the reading
was to begin, and had nearly passed out several times during the
proceedings as he strove -- futilely -- to exert control over his
material and himself. I drove him home that night, and learned
firsthand just how precarious his physical situation was when he opened
the passenger door, set his feet on the curb, and proceeded to black
out for several seconds, chin slumping down to touch his chest, his
breathing frighteningly shallow.
For predictable reasons -- and certainly by his intention -- Professor
Ross brings to mind a number of obvious characters. I can no
longer re-read the first act of Hamlet without hearing Professor Ross's
charge to his students not to allow the plays to become couches for
Freudian luxury or damned postmodernist incest. Discussing the
current generation of Shakespeare critics -- or of literary critics in
general, for that matter -- he managed sometimes to conjure Lear's
injuries, betrayed and embittered by the thankless children to whom he
had prematurely bequeathed his kingdom. And who did not
anticipate that his retirement lecture on The Tempest would somehow afford
him the opportunity to stand down from the podium with deliberate,
melodramatic finality and give us his Prospero in double valediction?
The last time Lynnea and I saw him was here in Hurst Lounge last month
for Professor Morris's retirement celebration. Professor Ross was
in a pretty good mood, and our conversation in the hallway afterward
took in the usual suspects. He politely inquired about the job
market and the upcoming MLA Convention, and I politely brought up the
latest spate of Shakespeare movies. He mentioned his
forthcoming
book on Measure for Measure
once again, and reminded us (once again) that it represented only an
excerpt from what was originally a 600-page manuscript on the problem
plays, unacceptable for publication 'these days' -- a phrase he uttered
with no small scorn -- because of the 200-page prolegomenon which
described (in great detail, we can be sure) the heresies committed by
his disrespectful heirs, this current generation of Shakespeare
critics; clearly, the manuscript in its entirety was to be his attempt
to reclaim and re-map his once-sacred field.
He also, in this final conversation, mentioned that he had recently
bought a grave-plot -- a topic we were not overly comfortable
discussing with him, but which he seemed to enjoy bringing up because,
in this case, he rather liked the person who had sold it to him.
But anyone who has spent much time carrying on a conversation with
Professor Ross in recent years knows that he was especially prone to
referring to the seemingly endless signs of his encroaching
demise. As a fellow pacemaker-implantee, I was to be interested
additionally in all the fascinating discoveries he had made about his
mechanically-augmented but none-too-stable cardio-pulmonary
system. To paraphrase Bill Gass's statement on another
recently-departed member of our department, Professor Ross had been
sick so long, we thought he would never actually die. Horatio
heard fewer declarations of the moribund's impending exit than we did.
Now that the wolf has finally -- sadly -- arrived to substantiate the
boy's frequent cries, it is tempting to plunder Professor Ross's
favorite play for an obvious benediction, something on the order of the
'flights of angels' business, perhaps. But that could be
dangerous -- not for the hymnee, of course, but for the unearthly
choristers, who, if they were to pull this job off, would have to
have very thick skins, and would have to be directed by the most
precise of maestros; one false note and Professor Ross would be at the
stand, demanding the wand to whip those shameless laggards into
shape. He expected everyone to accept the responsibilities of his
or her calling as seriously as he did his, and to ground the execution
of those responsibilities in the most expansive of intellectual and
scholarly foundations. A lecture on King Lear might wander from the
stormy heath to the 20,000-year-old cave drawings recently discovered
on the Iberian peninsula or perhaps to the time that, as a student at
Princeton, in a haze of sleep-deprivation and malnutrition, he
shouldered his way through a sidewalk conversation between Albert
Einstein and Bertrand Russell in his hurry to get to class. And
these were not just topics for the classroom, of course; I once saw him
clear out the faculty lounge in something less than a minute by
announcing that scientists had recently constructed a detailed
chronology of the first nano-second after the Big Bang. As far as
Professor Ross was concerned, the accumulation of these esoterica was
just another part of being Washington University's Shakespeare
authority -- a title he wore with great pride and a position in which
he acquitted himself with considerable dignity.
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