Myron Matlaw

As I look back over textbooks I used teaching English, from eighth grade through graduate school, one stands out as having met my standards and, indeed, as having influenced my teaching. It was Pro and Con (Houghton Mifflin, 1960), edited by Myron Matlaw and James B. Stronks).

The editors focused on issues and ideas, not on rhetorical forms and principles. The emphasis was on contrast and controversy. Readings were paired to present two perspectives on a significant topic: opposing points of view, or contrasting modes, or differing styles. The very first pair, for example, pitted H. L. Mencken, who argues that writing cannot be taught, against the preface to the well known Macmillan handbook of English. Good writers, Mencken contends, constitute about one-eighth of the human race. “The rest of God’s children are just as incapable of logical thought as they are incapable of jumping over the moon.” But the professorial editor of the rule-book counters, “A learner must be guided by rules until he knows enough about writing to be superior to rules.” Like a dancer or skater or tennis player, the writer “should submit himself to a discipline.” Well, the only thing to do with bad writers, Mencken concludes, is to “make Ph.D.’s of them, and set them to writing handbooks.” And so we were off.

Here are some of the recommended topics for essays growing out of this reading:

Why . . . is nearly every [college] freshman in the United States required to take a course in writing?

Write a criticism of . . . the handbook or “rhetoric” you are using.

What have you learned about your own writing thus far in college?

Here are a few of the other topics in the text: John Locke and John Henry Newman on “liberal arts”; H. G. Wells and E. M. Forster on the idea of progress; Genesis 1-2 and Darwin; Plato and John Milton on censorship; Edmund Burke on conservatism and John Stuart Mill on liberalism; Albert Schweitzer and Edward Teller on nuclear testing.

On the role of advertising in contemporary American society, Vance Packard took the offensive: “Advertising men are pushing us toward conformity and passivity.” Madison Avenue responded: “If [advertising] lies to [the people] or if it builds up false hopes, it can only fail, and so must . . . the advertisers who pay the bill.” But Adlai Stevenson is quoted: “The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal . . . .” The very vocabulary words demonstrate the diversity of concerns: psychological obsolescence, cultural anthropologist, hypochondriacs, status symbols, subthreshold, chic, double entendre, latent sexuality, potency.

A section near the very beginning challenges students to define education for themselves. Why do you want a college education? How do you hope it will prepare you for a better life? The combatants are Douglas Bush, then a Harvard English professor and literary critic, and James Bryant Conant, president-emeritus of Harvard and a critic of American education.

Bush: I have been insisting that the humanities are not a luxury; they are the most practical of necessities if men and women are to become fully human.

Conant: . . . foreign policy requires at least as much study [as American political and social history]. And a consideration of the foreign policy of the United States, of course, takes one automatically into the foreign policy of other nations.

Bush: I see no reason why the flood of students should be allowed into college. . . . If high school graduates are illiterate, they have no business in college.

Conant: . . . the development of our schools and colleges has been motivated by our desire to move constantly toward two goals: equality of opportunity for all youth, equality of respect for all honest citizens.

Some of the paired readings did not present opposing points of view, but rather simply different styles or approaches. For example, there were Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” and a modern poem called “Dover Beach Revisited”; the King James Version and the [at that time new] Revised Standard Version; Graham Greene and Sherwood Anderson's short stories on the fall from innocence; two ballads, “The Twa Corbies,” bitterly cynical, and “The Three Ravens,” tragically romantic; Edna St. Vincent Millay (“April / Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers”) and e. e. cummings (“in Just- / spring when the world is mud- / luscious”).

My favorite such juxtaposition was a pairing that dealt with images drawn from the starry night sky. In a perfectly ordered sonnet, “Lucifer in Starlight,” George Meredith imagines Prince Lucifer soaring over the earth, recalling his rebellion. The taut order of the sonnet presents stars as “the brain of heaven,” “the army of unalterable law.” On the other hand, Walt Whitman in his perfectly free verse, pictures the speaker, bored with the long lectures of the “learn’d astronomer,” described in increasingly long lines. The loose structure of free verse adapts itself, with appropriate changes, from the scholarly disposition of the lecture hall to the freedom to look up “in perfect silence at the stars.”

Henceforth, for me, one of the principles of good teaching was contrast, juxtaposition, the illumination of one text through association with a counterpart text. It’s easier; it’s more interesting; it provokes genuine thoughtfulness and the open negotiation of meaning. It engages students, inviting their responses, not demanding “conformity and passivity.” In their preface, the editors of Pro & Con speak compellingly, even yet, almost fifty years later.

"We are all too familiar with the person with a closed mind (often a smug and dogmatic simpleton—and a bore into the bargain) who is perfectly confident of the rightness of his opinions though he has never bothered to examine them. This book hopes to produce an open mind—one willing to entertain new ideas even when they challenge or upset cherished assumptions. When our ideas are sound, they withstand assault; when they are unsound, we should be willing to jettison them in favor of better ones; and sometimes we can discover a mature synthesis of the old and the new."… (mehr)