I am thinking about Morris Dickstein, who died a few days ago, and who in 1968 taught a seminar on Blake at Columbia University that was so alive with the love Morris felt for the great poet of freedom and sex and with the love Morris felt for the students who came each week to watch his face light up as he spoke about Orc, Blake’s avatar of rebellion, we would never forget the feeling of being there. In 1968 you thought it would always be 1968. Everyone in the class moved toward each other. One of the students was Lennard Davis.
I think we could feel back then we’d be able to talk at a bar as the decades rolled on without feeling we were missing a beat, carrying the sense inside us of 1968. Lenny was a few year younger than me and very smart. He had a drop dead imitation of Steven Marcus, a combination of Bugs Bunny and Edward G Robinson. In the seminar, we read every word Blake wrote. We were invited to Morris’ apartment. It was a time when students and faculty mixed, and if you were a student you were in awe of everything about them. Over the years I would cross paths with Morris at screenings and events presented by the National Book Critics Circle. I would always be happy to see him. No one knows the resonances they produce when they teach a class and the class becomes a thing. No one knows these resonances can last nearly a lifetime.