Friends:
Thanks so much to Vicki, Beverly, and everyone else involved in organizing the Rent Party Tuesday afternoon. I enjoyed chatting with many of you and had a wonderful time. Shari's music was good entertainment. I cannot recall having such a great group of students.
It has been nice to teach the Harlem Renaissance again. I have not done so since my early (no pun intended) days as a professor when I used to regularly teach black literature courses. I have probably not taught a course to university students on the Renaissance since the early 1990s. At that time I was closely associated with it because of the Countee Cullen collection I had edited. Around the mid-1990s I did a NEH-funded institute on the Renaissance for the Alliance of Black School Educators. It was a good experience but I did not expect after that to revisit the subject. In part, I thought I had exhausted my interest in it. Or the subject had exhausted its interest in my feeble abilities to analyze it. It would keep returning to me in odd ways.
As some of you may have noted, I wrote a section of the album notes for the Rhapsody in Black box set on the Harlem Renaissance. This happened because of my work on the Cullen collection and because I had written a few other pieces on the Renaissance including an essay called "Three Notes on the Harlem Renaissance" that seemed to have a life far beyond what it deserved as a piece of writing. The guy who did Rhapsody in Black thought I was ideal to write the notes. I didn't think but the job did pay well. In any case, my section of the notes for Rhapsody in Black were nominated for a Grammy, an unexpected and unusual honor for a writer. I did not win the Grammy. (Walter Mosley won, so I lost to a famous writer which I guess is not so bad. I know Mr. Mosley, so I cannot say it that losing to him has been without compensations.) But this simply intensified my connection to the Renaissance even though it was not my area of academic interest.
I find myself incredibly stimulated to returning to the Renaissance and to some texts and events that I had not read or read about or thought about for some time. The class is remarkable sort of laboratory of a sort, a sort of scientific bench where a lot of experimentation can take place, exploration of ideas and theories. For me, teaching a class is about taking risks. My motto is one should never play tennis without a net but one should never fly on a trapeze with a net below. Teaching a class is a great deal more like flying on a trapeze than playing tennis. It is fairly audacious to try a class like this with such an interdisciplinary reach and hope that the center will hold and the elements will cohere in the end. Audacious or foolish, either is equally plausible as an assessment. I am very grateful to all of you for helping in this regard because you have given much to think about in your comments during class, more than I would have gotten from a class of undergraduates, probably because you are older and because you are teachers.
T. S. Eliot dedicated The Waste Land to Ezra Pound: il miglior fabbro (the better craftsman). It is the one thing I envy about all of you as teachers. I am certain that you are far better craftsmen than I am. And I am too old to learn new tricks.
- Gerald Early
