Sears R. Jayne

Let us now praise Renaissance men.
(This is The Triumph of Bacchus, by Velasquez.)

As the twenty-fifth anniversary of my college graduation draws nigh, my thoughts turn daily to my professors. They were a remarkable lot, and in coming days I expect I’ll post little portraits of some of them: Barbara Monahan, my “staraya babushka,” who tried so valiantly to teach me to speak Russian; Bruce Donovan, who tried equally to teach me Ancient Greek; James O. Barnhill, who remains for me the living embodiment of the joy of theater. Yet in some respects the best of my teachers, and the one who summed up what we used to call “The Brown Experience,” was Sears R. Jayne.

His physical resemblance to my paternal grandfather, a fellow Midwesterner who died when I was 5, might have earned him my automatic affection, as might his innate kindness, another trait the two men shared. My grandfather was a preacher, and so in a sense was Sears Jayne. But my grandfather’s faith was Methodism, and Mr. Jayne’s was humanism — a concept new to me at the time, though I became at once the truest of believers. For all I know, he practiced some other faith, in his private time, but he converted me.

He taught a survey of Renaissance literature: Montaigne, Erasmus, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, Machiavelli, Quevedo, authors who delved deep in the multiplicities of experience and whose works haven’t left my side since. He taught English poetry, too, and I daresay that if he’d taught basket-weaving or a survey of medieval laundry lists, I’d have enrolled in that course, too, and learned something lasting about humanity.

In his rolling, somewhat foggy baritone, language was never more ecstatic. One of my most vivid memories is of his reading of Eliot’s “Sweeney Agonistes,” portions of which quote “If You Lakka Me,” an old song of dubious racial sensitivity but great charm. (Judy Garland and Margaret O’Brien sing it in Meet Me in St. Louis.) Hopping and shimmying, swaying and braying, Mr. Jayne attended some other melody than the original. “Under the bam, under the boo, under the bamboo tree!” he howled, until the whole campus seemed to dance along with him.

It was impossible to take any text lightly, or less than passionately, when Sears Jayne offered it to you.

His own words were even more potent. Seldom was the lecture that didn’t end with some or all of the students moved to tears, as we were the morning he spoke of the future. He saw us so worried, he said, about nuclear war and personal relationships and money, and all the rest, and turning to drugs and drink to escape. That saddened him, and he searched for comfort to offer us. Whatever mess the world was in, however beleaguered we might be, he told us, all would be made well on the day when we came home and found our children smiling up at us from the bath.

That huge voice became knotted with emotion as he spoke, and the glass of his spectacles seemed to fog over. We all saw the image of his own daughters, years before, when he was a young man like us.

“It’s going to be okay,” we thought. “Life will go on.” As indeed it has, so far.

He adored us, and it had been the unsettling surprise of the English Department, who had hired him as a star to lure in graduate students, that he preferred us undergraduates. I responded in somewhat like fashion: he taught lecture classes, with discussion sections, and although he encouraged us to attend the sections led by his teaching assistants, for the benefit of exposure to other opinions, I steadfastly attended only those that he led himself.

That may have been selfish, yet I couldn’t force myself to regret it, and it was in keeping with his methodology. He was deeply interested in our responses to literature, and whole essays might be devoted to how we felt about a poem or a book. The final exam in the Renaissance survey course asked which of the authors we’d studied we’d prefer as a father: I chose Cervantes, after lingering wistfully over Rabelais.

To have studied with a teaching assistant would have been to deny myself the full force of Mr. Jayne’s instruction — and my reaction to it.

In poetry class, we were asked to compile an anthology of poems that were meaningful to us personally. I made a point of including Kipling’s “If,” because Mr. Jayne had proclaimed that it wasn’t a poem at all, just a series of statements. But when I was a boy, my mother used to read “If” with such conviction that I believed she’d written it: “And, what is more, you’ll be a man, my son!”

Returning my anthology, Mr. Jayne thoughtfully wrote, “I apologize for insulting your mother’s poem.”

His solipsistic approach pretty much derailed any ambitions I might have harbored for a career in comparative literature, which in the Ivy League in those days (and doubtless still) was subjected to rigorous deconstructions and arcane theories. Mr. Jayne would not endorse these methods, I think, or have much patience with them, either. One of the most astonishing essays I have ever read was his almost entirely theory-free analysis of King Lear. To his eyes, the play is “the tragedy of people who fail to love each other enough.”

He retired at the end of my sophomore year, having at the last minute persuaded me to become an English major, and at the end of his last lecture, current and former students crowded into the hall to bid him farewell. There were readings and tributes, and I presented him with a three-quarter life-size portrait I’d painted (badly, of course) of him in full cry, reading from a little book marked “Sweeney Agonistes.”

I corresponded with him, briefly, after I graduated. I should have kept on writing to him — not least when I discovered The Firebrand of Florence, Kurt Weill’s adaptation of Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography, one of the pillars of the Renaissance survey course and the occasion of one of Mr. Jayne’s most unforgettable lessons.

When he was teaching at the University of Virginia, he told us, William Faulkner came as a guest professor. The great author was in his full gentleman-farmer mode in those days, and he arrived in horsey regalia, jodhpurs and boots, a red jacket and a little riding crop.

A young reporter from Life magazine had been assigned to cover Faulkner’s first class, for these were the days when the movements of great authors still made news. It’s likely that if the poor journalist had simply sat in the back of the classroom, as he intended to do, Faulkner never would have noticed him. But he made the mistake of going to Faulkner’s office to ask permission first.

Mr. Jayne’s office was on the same floor, and when the commotion began, he ran into the hallway to see Faulkner thrashing the journalist with his riding crop, chasing the fellow down the hall, down the stairs, and out the door. Faulkner returned, dusting off his jodhpurs and grinning. To the flabbergasted professors, the Nobel Prizewinner crowed, “I showed that bastard, didn’t I?”

“Now, William Faulkner wrote the greatest novel of my lifetime, which is The Sound and the Fury,” Mr. Jayne said to us. “But the question arises: Does great art excuse bad conduct? And the answer — ”

He paused, as every one of us leaned forward over the seminar table to hear.

“ — is no.”

No preacher ever made the point more indelibly. It was Mr. Jayne’s belief that Cellini halted his autobiography when he read over the manuscript and found himself disgusted by its catalogue of his own excesses.

Be that as it may, in the years since Mr. Jayne’s class, I’ve seen his lesson tested by many artists, those I knew personally and those I did not; I’ve tested it myself. Great art doesn’t excuse bad behavior. (And mediocre art doesn’t excuse even itself.) Mr. Jayne was right. As usual.

I’d like to tell him that, but I fear that I’ll be able to do so only if my grandfather was right, and we meet some day in Heaven.

UPDATE: Sears Jayne died on 11 April 2015, at the age of 94. I’m grateful to his family for making it possible for us to renew contact and to exchange a few e-mails after so many years. His daughter sent along this photo, taken some 30 years before Mr. Jayne’s last class at Brown. Strange to see that familiar face, so much younger than I knew it — younger then than I am now!