Robert Hollander - Jessica Levenstein, Horace Mann School
This reflection was originally presented as a talk during an online tribute to Robert Hollander (1933-2021) and John Freccero (1931-2021) presented by the Dante Society of America following its 140th annual meeting on May 7, 2022. For more information about the tribute, including a videorecording and links to the remarks given by other presenters, please see "Quel Savio Gentil: Remembering our Teachers," posted under the "Pedagogy" section of Dante Notes.
I met Bob Hollander in the fall of 1992. When I started the graduate program in Comparative Literature at Princeton, I knew I wanted to do something with the classical tradition and I knew I had enjoyed the Dante class I had taken in college, so I found my way to the only Dante class Bob was offering that fall, his legendary undergraduate Commedia class. The arrangement was going to be that I would take all the same tests and quizzes as the undergraduates, but would work on an extensive paper throughout the semester exploring a particular idea or question in the poem. By October I was hooked.
I found Bob in his office to talk about the essay on Inferno 15 that I was starting and I told him I couldn’t imagine anything more interesting than working to understand Dante’s poem. He responded: “Studying Dante is like falling in love. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
I would like to pause for a second to talk about what it was like to visit Bob in his office: he seemed never to have the lights on, and whatever light was in the room came from behind his head, through the beautiful mullion windows on the third floor of East Pyne. The result was that his face was cast mostly in shadow, his ears glowing with a faint pink light. And of course, pipe smoke filled the room. Entering his office was engaging in time travel: you walked through the wall of smoke, and it was like you had passed through the portal to the Golden Age of Academia. You had all the time in the world and only one thing to think about and that thing was Dante.
Bob loved teaching. He was equally delighted in front of a large lecture hall, magisterially guiding his undergrads through the afterworld; in a cozy seminar room, urging his grad students to lay claim to interpretations of Il Ninfale Fiesolano or the Decameron; or in the garden of a rental house in Bellosguardo, going line by line through a dissertation chapter. Bob gave his students his full attention and he made it clear that their contributions had value. Any of us who were in his famous Dante class can recall moments when during his lecture, he turned his copy of the text sideways, and read out a tiny marginal note detailing an observation or comment a student had made, years, maybe decades, earlier. (And as we know, many of these marginal notes ended up in his commentary as well). Each student hearing Bob cite the ideas of his former students learned the most important lesson he had to teach them: their ideas, too, had value. Any of us in the room could come up with something that made him pause, take out his pencil, and preserve our thoughts for future students.
I took every possible class with Bob and found, as all of his students did, that he was not only a captivating teacher, whose evident respect for his students made our learning feel truly collaborative, but an extraordinary reader of student work. Bob read all our work at least twice, usually in different color inks, responding to and editing our writing with intense attention. For me, knowing that he cared enough about my writing to correct my accents or commas, blunted any embarrassment I felt at having committed the errors to begin with. He once wrote at the back of an essay, “I’ve picked nits because that’s one of the things they pay me to do,” but he didn’t fool me. His nitpicking was support; his nitpicking was dedication. As in Simone Weil’s overquoted line: Bob’s attention was a form of generosity.
- “A bit wooden and pompous sounding”
- “Too bland a formulation”
- “Forced argument?”
- “Not my favorite term, I confess” (the term was “metaliterary”)
- “A happy verb?” (the verb was “highlights”)
- And finally: “WHOA! It’s not that easy!” (in reference to a simplistic pronouncement on the difference between Dante and Boccaccio)
Then came the comments at the end (or sometimes weirdly, on the back of a page in the middle) of a chapter or essay. He would make elaborate charts to explain a thought, or in one case write, “I just found that I have about ten pages of stuff on this that I started in 1993 on my computer. What a nice surprise!” But, of course, the best was the praise, which I may keep out of these remarks but never out of my heart.
I left academia to become a high school teacher at Horace Mann School in New York, after a couple of disappointing turns on the job market. No one was more supportive of this decision than Bob. From the first year I met him he had said more than once, “it’ll be more fun to teach at a first-rate high school than a third-rate college,” and when other colleagues or professors said, “but you’ll go to MLA again next year, right?” I would remember his faith in me and his dedication to the practice of teaching. “Nope,” I would respond. “I’m a high school teacher now!” My second year at Horace Mann I introduced a senior Dante elective and was thrilled to be able to use Bob and Jean’s newly published translation of Inferno as our text. My students got to know my teacher through the commentary, quickly growing attuned to Bob’s humor, preoccupations, and turns of phrase. It seemed only fitting that I would invite him to visit the class and on a rainy day in December of 2002, Bob traveled into the city and rode the 1 train to the end of the line, Van Cortlandt Park, to meet my students.
Bob somehow found his way from the subway to the school cafeteria on his own and settled in with a plate of coffee cake to grade exams, well before the time I was supposed to meet him. It was disorienting to encounter him calmly and productively marking up his stack of tests, oblivious to the hyperactive sixth graders in front of him and the imperious seniors behind. Grubby cafeteria table or the mullioned windows of East Pyne, it made no difference to Bob: he had his students’ work to read. We chatted for a few minutes and then I led him to class. As we approached the classroom, I could hear my students whispering, “you guys, you guys! he’s here! SSHH!” The next forty-five minutes represent one of the proudest experiences of my career. Bob was unsurprisingly gracious, incredibly knowledgeable, warm, and funny, and my students were very eager to impress him with their understanding of the poem and of his commentary. After class, the students applauded, looking thrilled and overwhelmed, and he signed each of their books, carefully transcribing their names on the cover page, and shaking their hands one by one with great ceremony. The school newspaper that Friday described Bob as “the fellow on the book jacket” and “one of the foremost experts on Dante,” reporting, “Hollander spoke of Dante as one would speak of a relative, with an intimacy . . . that most scholars lack.” Yes, exactly.
After the class, Bob and I had lunch and I remember him turning to me to ask, “are you happy? Is this life good for you?” The question was sincere, and I was touched by his concern. When I told him this life was deeply fulfilling and described the rewards and challenges, Bob listened carefully, conveying his genuine investment in my well-being in a way that went so far beyond the role of teacher or advisor that it landed squarely, permanently on friend.
The day Bob visited my class I began to understand the way that those of us who teach are also always the students of our teachers. We create a chain of learning, of study, that leads from one impassioned reader to another, binding us all in our common belief that the worlds imagined by the works we read have as much to tell us as the world around us. Back in East Pyne, Bob had told me I would not be able to resist my love affair with Dante, and he was, of course, right. But what he didn’t tell me was that, through his gracious, kind, inspiring example, I would not be able to resist my love affair with teaching either.
Bob taught me, and all his students, that the world of ideas mattered, and even more significantly, that our ideas about these ideas mattered. He provided a model for working in the humanities without losing touch with the things that make us human in the first place. For our maestro’s humanity, his generosity, his passion, humor, and warmth, I will be grateful for all my life.