Robert Coles's Course on Literature and Social Reflection: "Handing One Another Along"

Handling One Another Along (a phrase from Walker Percy's The Moviegoer that I do not find as felicitous as does Robert Coles) is transcribed and edited lectures from a Harvard University General Education (105) course long taught by child psychiatrist Robert Coles (1929-), James Agee Professor of Social Ethics, and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for the "Children of Crisis" series of books. Cole's course was influenced by general education courses once taught by Cole's psychoanalytic mentor, Erik Erikson, and lawyer-turned-sociologist David Riesman, both of whom were once well-known and widely read public intellectuals and are now largely forgotten-or at least missing from current high-culture discourse.

Coles majored in English as an undergraduate. His mentor from then, Perry Miller, appears several times in Handling, but Coles attributes to his parents the "preference for novels and short stories as means of moral and social (and, yes, political) reflection" and quotes his father as saying that fiction contains "reservoirs of wisdom"-to which Coles wants to direct others to drink form.

The sometimes rambling lectures that include long blocks of quoted text are more about Robert Coles and his empathy than about anything else. This is not (meant as) a slam: I find the intellectual/moral autobiography more interesting than what Coles has to say about some of the literary works he introduces to the freshmen in his class (and, now, the readers of the book). Coles has personal connections to report with physician-writer William Carlos Williams (about whom Coles wrote a senior thesis when he was a Harvard undergraduate), physician-turned-writer Walker Percy, and singer Billie Holliday. I'd say he strained for a connection to Flannery O'Connor except that her physical maladies seem important to me. The two chapters about some of the "children of crisis," the crisis being integration are for me the most compelling and insightful of the book.

Coles is fairly direct about what he sees in the paintings by Edward Hopper he discusses, but is, I think, reluctant to press his own interpretations on the literary texts he talked about. He provided biographical information, often about the problems (physical maladies and substance abuses) of the authors, quotations of passages that particularly struck him, and occasional plot summaries.

I feel a wish that I had had this course when I was a college freshman. That was in 1968, and I read most of the works Coles discusses on my own while I was an undergraduate (except for Raymond Carver stories that were not yet written, Tillie Olsen and Zora Hurston whom I read a bit later, and Simone Weil whom I have never read). The one book form his list that I was assigned to read was Dickens's Great Expectations, which I hated in 9^th grade, but liked when I reread it a few years ago. I even read Erikson and Riesman on my own.

There are a couple of inferences from this. First, I didn't need the course to discover these authors. Second, pretty much all the writings Coles considers were available when I was a freshman long ago. A third inference would be that I was drawn to the same representations of otherness as Coles, including fiction by John Cheever, Ignazio Silone, William Carlos Williams, Walker Percy, and Flannery O'Connor, memoirs by George Orwell, and Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men . (Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Elie Wiesel's Night were unavoidable in the culture of the early 1970s.)

The earnest and compassionate physician comes across as a good teacher, though not one attuned to the dark humor in some of these writers. Insofar as the book stimulates picking up the authors whom Coles talked about, I think it is a very good thing and I think that it likely broadens the horizons of the students entering the most elite US university (not just in reading about hardscrabble lives, but in exhortations such as "Pity can be an ignorant anger." Farther along the life course and reading Coles's canon, I enjoyed his stories and reflections and reminders of how good some of these writers whom I read long ago are.

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